Alan Jacobs

A while back the Atlantic Tech Channel’s Megan Garber was entertaining us with adventures in Google’s search-autocompletion features: what she called Google Psyche. (Google gives their own explanation of the feature here, but essentially it makes suggestions for you based on the frequency of previous searches.

Again, all this is pretty funny – but it may even be useful, at least to some of us. Maybe even academics like me.

Recently I was looking for some poems by the late Michael Donaghy, and saw this:

(The “mbta” Michael Donaghy is not the poet.) These results tell me that the two most searched-for poems by Donaghy are “The Present” and “Machines”: the former, presumably, because it might plausibly be read at a wedding, but the latter because – well, because it’s just utterly beautiful, a fabulously intricate yet accessible poetic construction. “Machines” is my favorite poem by Donaghy, but Google’s algorithm suggests that it is beloved by others as well, something I didn’t suspect until I ran that search.

When I searched the name of another poet, Jane Kenyon, here’s what I saw:

It surprised me to bit to find “Otherwise” listed before what I always think of as the definitive Jane Kenyon poem, the simple but perfectly graceful “Let Evening Come”, but actually running the search for “Otherwise” revealed to me that it is often taught in American high schools.

Clearly high-school literature classes contribute heavily to Google’s algorithm, as witnessed by a search for “John Cheever,” whose most anthologized story is clearly “The Swimmer”:

Or E. B. White, whose fine (but in my view somewhat overrated) essay “Once More to the Lake” is taught so frequently that it jumps right to the top of a list from which Charlotte’s Web is completely absent:

But other factors play a role as well. If you do a search for David Foster Wallace, you’ll see that the only work of his that shows up is his Oberlin Kenyon College commencement address “This is Water” – no Infinite Jest, no Pale King – but if you add “story” to your search string you get this:

Clearly the chief interest is in “The Depressed Person,” a 1998 story thought to be revelatory of Wallace’s own experiences with depression.

A search for W. H. Auden shows that the first poem of his people want to know about is “Funeral Blues”, a poem that hardly anyone knew until it showed up in the 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral.

It seems to me that this information is not trivial: anyone interested in a particular author or topic could, with sufficient discipline and knowledge of how to make a screen cap, track shifts in public interest and knowledge over time. It would be like Ngrams for searches instead of published material.

Google is of course already providing us with its own accounts of its most searched-for terms, in the Google Zeitgeist; but I’m suggesting the value of tracking searches that don’t rise so high in the public consciousness, but significant to scholars and other researchers who focus on particular topics. Because I’m a literature teacher, I focused here on literature, but this kind of tracking could be done in almost any field. Digital humanists – and social scientists, and historians of science, and Lord knows who else – take note!

davidjphooker:

(via Chicago Architecture Blog - Architecture Tours of Chicago)

If one listens to academics, one might make the mistake of thinking they would like their complaints to be remedied; but in fact the complaints of academics are their treasures, and were you to remove them, you would find either that they had been instantly replenished or that you were now their object. The reason that academics want and need their complaints is that it is important for them to feel oppressed, for in the psychic economy of the academy, oppression is a sign of virtue.

The mystery book sculptor of Scotland strikes again!

‘As a non-Christian, indeed a committed atheist, I was worried about how I’d feel about this book but it pulled off a rare feat: making Christianity seem appealing to those who have no interest in ever being Christians.’ - Alain De Botton, choosing Unapologetic as his Book of the Year in the New Statesman

You can find him in the café down the street, the one that serves fair-trade coffee and takes a dollar off if you donate a canned good at Christmas. Look for him at the school fundraiser, the Obama rally, the gay pride parade, the ethnic arts festival. He’s the one championing—sometimes fashionably, often genuinely—a just, diverse, and open-minded America.

And he’s the ones who passes a misspelled sign on the florist’s door and spends the next 10 minutes hating the world and every last moron in it. He is the liberal grammar fanatic (LGF), and he is, at least in my circles, ubiquitous….

The LGF judges the contents of his neighbors’ shopping cart: Spam, Coors, and white bread—nary an organic vegetable in sight! But the sight doesn’t cause him actual pain. God help us all, however, if the meat counter advertises that “theirs a special” on drumsticks.

Jacobs thinks we'’re stuck with mediocre Bible translations because the divorce between belletrist and philologist will remain, given our ever-increasing specialization, even within the humanities. A major part of the problem is the way students are taught biblical languages. Prior to the Second World War, scholars would have learned their Greek by mastering Homer, Hesiod, Aeschelus, and Sophocles before moving to the New Testament. Now they are taught to master the grammar and vocabulary of the New Testament.

This leads to a raw substitutionary plug-and-play of “dynamic equivalence” as we encourage them to try and stick abstract content into English words. In short, we’’re still structuralists (perhaps unwittingly) who forget we’re living in a post-structuralist age, and for good reason. Structuralists reduce human phenomena — —language, art, literature, music, indeed all of culture— — to the presumed structural relations of a few basic non-linguistic building blocks behind the phenomena, running roughshod over the dynamics of the biblical texts as we try to extract a few basic ideas we can stick into simple English. No wonder our Bible translations are often brutal and banal.

I’’m more sanguine than Jacobs, however, for a few reasons. I see younger scholars and theologians reacting against the centrifugal forces of specialization and compartmentalization and engaging in interdisciplinary endeavors in English and literature. I see a renewed concern for beauty in all things, including language. I see an increasing rejection of the now-naive linguistic theories of the sixties. I see a large Christian body, the Anglophone wing of the Catholic Church, revising its liturgical texts and Bibles in the converging directions of fidelity and beauty.

thingsmagazine:

Found in this hefty steampunk portfolio, a compilation of (mostly imagined) cityscapes

I was scheduled to fly to Bahrain on Saturday, Dec. 1st, 2012. We received our official itinerary from the State Dept. at 5:58am, on Monday, November 26th, 2012. Less than six hours later, we received an urgent telephone call informing us that the entire trip had been canceled, due to some higher level controversy. We couldn’t get any more information or answers as to why this was suddenly canceled at the last minute. When I was originally invited by our contact, it seemed everyone was aware of what I stand for with my positive attitude. They were aware of how I look and my high-energy rock music. They were excited to bring my message of living life to the fullest to the people in the Middle East. I was thrilled at the opportunity to represent my country and the spirit of inclusive and open-minded freedom that makes our nation so special and inspiring. So, for a Department of State representative to say Andrew W.K. ‘doesn’t meet their standards’ after they invited me and planned my trip for a year… well, that doesn’t meet my standards either. You can’t judge a book by its cover. I would’ve done a great job and represented our nation with dignity and pride. Despite all these challenges, I still would love to go and I vow to continue partying, and working everyday to to unite our human race through the power of positive partying.

For the beautiful in Mozart seems to stand apart, untouched by human hands. Which is to say that Mozart’s music often seems effortless, an aes-thetic judgment often ratified by what we know of the circumstances of its composition. Human strain, or even overt human manipulation, the tooling of a product, would seem to have left little mark here. The music seems somehow pre-made, and it glows with a self-sufficiency that has less to do with “unity” and more with apartness: untouched, untouchable. It is often heard as a kind of alabaster that flows without perturbation—this effect has nothing to do with a lack of dramatic events in the music but rather with the bearing of the music, for even the most electrifyingly dissonant passages never cloy; the psychic envelope of the music never threatens to tear; nothing is going to burst. Yet even so, the effect is not that of some distant Olympian but is often as moving as Schubert. What musical features account for this particular kind of beauty? Why do we tend to hear Mozart’s music as both untouchable and touching?