Stop The Spirit of Zossen 2.0

Everyone knows books and long form reading in general are in a slow fade. The Chronicle of Higher Education asks if the book will survive:

Three years ago, Weidenfeld & Nicolson launched its Compact Editions series of classics such as Vanity Fair and Moby-Dick. The publisher explained that they’d been “sympathetically edited so that most of them are under 400 pages,” but that the cuts “in no way detract from the spirit of the original.” Surgery simply rendered such classics less “elitist.” Dripping drollery in The Times of London, critic Richard Morrison opined that truth in advertising behooved the publisher to adjust titles as well, perhaps to Vanity Off-Peak Fare, and Mini-Dick.

Any wonder that last year, two cheeky University of Chicago undergrads with literary parents—Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin—published Twitterature (Penguin), boiling down classics of world lit to 140-character bone? Here’s their speed-read version of The Epic of Gilgamesh: “@UrukRockCity—Great. That’s it. I’m leaving Uruk. My best friend in the world is dead, all because the gods couldn’t handle our bromance.”

The signs of readerly surrender pop up everywhere. Princeton student Isia Jasiewicz, reviewing a book for Newsweek this summer as an intern, admits in her last paragraph that she bothered to read only the first 10 pages. Linda Nilson, director of the Office of Teaching Effectiveness at Clemson University, posts a piece titled, “Getting Students to Do the Reading” on the Web site of the National Education Association, advising: “Look for readings with graphics and pictures that reinforce the text, and pare down the required pages to the essentials. The less reading assigned, the more likely students will do it.”

Science fiction author Neal Stephenson is putting his action where his fiction is. He’s created a company to help re-invent the book for our fractured times.

[He's] been credited for inspiring today’s virtual world with his novel Snow Crash. Now he’s launching a startup himself: Subutai, where he is co-founder and chairman.

The company, based in Seattle and San Francisco, has developed what it calls the PULP platform for creating digital novels. The core of the experience is still a text novel, but authors can add additional material like background articles, images, music, and video. There are also social features that allow readers to create their own profiles, earn badges for activity on the site or in the application, and interact with other readers.

One can’t help but be encouraged that Stephenson is trying. Still, we wandered through a largely empty Barnes & Noble this evening, marveling again that the vast majority of items on display were really products, so-called ‘books’ in masquerade. As the Chronicle article cited above observed, the book’s demise is separate from the sideshow of ebooks vs. bricks and mortar/Big Box-Style Outlets. Imagine all this same ‘merch’ enriched with shouting, braying, linking, tweeting multimedia technology ala PULP and Subatai or some other approach.

Scary innit?

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Oama’s speech on slinking out of Iraq positively pulsated with weakness. Not for reasons Rightist wing nuts might rage.

His content and delivery raise alarming implications about who really will control key American foreign policy decisions ahead: his hopey changey rhetoric or David Petraeus et al. Obama reveals he himself is unsure.

We don’t fault him on Iraq or the need to go through the motions of praising the catastrophe. He’s merely following the Bush timetable.

Our critique rests on how he handled the military in this delicate moment. We saw a young man unsure of his authority over the military and overcompensating clumsily. Think the proverbial step parent with the skeptical, hostile teenager stepchild. Attempts to lay down rules are mocked and the step parent’s role denied – openly or passively. That’s his military. He missed an opportunity to correct things before a national audience.

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Here’s a hope that everyone enjoys the weekend. That you, Dear Reader, can tune out the media led fixation on the ankle biters downtown.

It’s an unholy brew. A rootless media seeks any form of self-generating narrative for lazy producing, story selection, Nielsens and click throughs. And the Movement? It follows centuries of Counter Enlightenment impulsive tradition using public theater to create false narratives and communal identity. All fodder for the 15 minute news cycle and shallow tweets.

We chose to visit Annapolis to start off the weekend. Sure, it’s long been a tourist trap. And like nearby D.C. it’s self-satisfied, bloated and keenly aware of its wealth. Still, it’s not far up Route 50. The Severn River retains echoes of boating memories many decades ago. Plus, traffic to the overcrowded (and even more overbuilt) Delaware beaches too daunting. One notable thing – young men in their twenties lounging around the Naval Academy entrance wearing the old ‘Blackwater’ paw t-shirts and Oakleys. Without irony, too.

Where were we? Oh right. The high school play downtown.

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‘They’ used to say (incorrectly) the Wehrmacht never did winter offensives. ‘They’ now could say (correctly) Democrats can’t do offensives at all.

Facebook burps and random tweets send allegedly professional politicians and paid talking heads into hissy fits. Rightists play Democrats and much of their AgitProp infrastructure like a piano. Badly, of course.

Democrats seemingly learned nothing from 2001-2008. None of them, individually, their AgitProp allies or their (moribund) institutions demonstrate any understanding of ideological politics in today’s disassociated society of ambient social connections. It’s doubtful they will learn in time to forestall Revanchism. Such congenital failure suffocates aspirations and hopes of all non-Rightists. In retrospect 2008 was indeed a fluke, made possible by economic catastrophe, a failed presidency and timely story rather than anything inherently ‘Democratic’.

A feckless Administration addicted to expediency of course undermines meme cohesion and focus. Still, it’s no excuse for others purporting to be our Thought Leaders and Meme Givers to act like it’s still 2005 and the Movement controls all branches of government. Yet that’s exactly what they do every day, hyperventilating over a random Facebook burp or tweet airball. One insignificant flick and an entire news cycle is given to the Rightists on their terms on their issues. Over time, the cumulative impact is that what began as some trivial Rightist gesture dictates framing of our simulacra of consensus reality. The hysterical overreactions cascade like a signal chain in an amplifier until what emerges is nothing but distortion.

Democrats and their AgitProp allies truly don’t understand that the Movement could never have coalesced and reformed without their essential – and hapless – complicity.

Of course the economy is in ruins. A failed war is inescapable. We’re not unmindful of the political terrain. Faith in government competence and legitimacy at historic lows. Not all Democratic AgitProp allies are addicted to victimhood. Some focus on identifying new candidates and new funding for the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. Until their time, we are presented a false choice. In the end, whether on the more gentle accomodationist curve of this current Democratic clique or with the spasmodic inchoate raging of the Rightists, we eventually arrive in essentially the same place. One just offers the scenic route.

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1. RWR: ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’

BHO: ‘Let me be clear: it would be within regulatory guidelines to update this wall with 21st century urban planning.’

[The next day]: ‘Seeking regulatory permits to enable freedom in no way should be construed as commenting on the wisdom of doing so.’

________

2. RWR: ‘America will always be that shining city on the hill, a beacon for the world.’

BHO: ‘We must create new green jobs. America will lead the way becoming a 13 watt CFL Mini Spiral Energy Star Twist Compact Fluorescent visible in Trenton.’

________

3. RWR: ‘My fellow Americans, I am pleased to announce that today I have signed legislation outlawing the Soviet Union forever. We begin bombing in 5 minutes.’

BHO: ‘My fellow Americans, I am pleased to announce that today I have turned over the most important element of American foreign policy to David Petraeus. David will begin prolonging the war in 5 minutes declaring he *reversed* the Taleeeeeban momentum by issuing a single press release.’

(Only one of these is a joke).

________

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If you remember . . . had fun this weekend with old friends.

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How some view what they do at think tanks.

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Watching MSNBC’s breathless ‘exclusive’, ‘historic’ coverage of one portion of the U.S. military slither out of Iraq, you’d never know there was a ‘Bloom Mobile’ during the yahoo! invasion. You’d never know that MSNBC fired Phil Donahue for being vocally anti-war during the run up. In fact, MSNBC and NBC collectively completely airbrushed away their own culpability peddling the lies, falsehoods and propaganda that helped launch America’s modern day Syracuse Expedition.

MSNBC, like Oceania, has always been anti-war. So we get Tweety, who only stopped fluffing Neocons, DeLay et al. and the Administration in September 2006. MSNBC’s fabricated narrative is every bit as insidious and corruptive as that peddled by the Neocons and the Bush Administration. If the MSNBC third stringers want to pose and pretend they are going to hold people accountable, how about starting with their own network? Why is is that Tim Russert was Dick Cheney’s favorite (easiest) interview as Mary Matalin let slip? How many retired generals – oops, Senior Mentors — did MSNBC put on to explain how painless it was all going to be?

It’s a bit astounding to see Laurence O’Donnell – who, if you didn’t know, once was a staff director on a senate committee – repeatedly interrupt Jack Jacob’s military critique not just of the occupation but the half-assed and almost calamitous Rumsfeld/Franks invasion plan itself. (We’ve talked about the operational and logistical near disasters at length elsewhere). MSNBC is comfortable with that distinction – the ‘war’ went great (as all the then media cheerleaders still broadcasting need to believe) but the occupation was a bungle. Jacobs wasn’t having any of it but was cut off. Instead, we get a former Senate staffer babbling about how Americans vacation in Vietnam today, and wouldn’t it be nice if that happened too in a future Iraq. (By the way, Jacobs went to Vietnam after combat troops were withdrawn and saw combat every day; he is also is the first to underscore Vietnam is not Iraq re above).

The entire night was stunt journalism pornography at its worst, devoid almost entirely of real insight. No effort at all to put in context if this is the sad, pathetic end to the Warlord’s Operation Iraqi Excellent Adventure, what was MSNBC’s role in getting it going? Who did they put on air? Repeatedly? If MSNBC wants to be the Obama Administration’s version of Fox that’s their business and ethical call. The American people, however, rightly should and must remember MSNBC and those who so lustily shouted down doubt and criticism during the run-up.

We’re just going to say it a bluntly as we can: MSNBC, you, too, have blood on your hands. You’re just too mindless and irresponsible to notice.

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Lame joke deleted. Strange how something can seem so entertaining until one clicks ‘post’.

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Apropos recent comments . . .

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John Richardson’s Esquire piece ‘Newt Gingrich: The Indispensable Republican’ gets it right. We liked Marianne when she was there intimately engaged during Newt’s rise. A sharp, quick mind and personality of her own, she was easily at home with policy thrust and parry dinner conversations. And provided a social grace very much in need.

Esquire’s quotes and details all ring true. Will it make a difference? Esquire hints at but doesn’t delve into the larger question. What of the weird state of Republican positioning Summer 2010? Those who loathe Palin flock to any signs of another Newt tease. Odd, because they mock Palin for being an air headed Neocon sock puppet while applauding Newt’s far more radical and dangerously incoherent ‘Camus’ blather at AEI.

He’s the walking University of Phoenix, sure. But his dilettantism at least comes with a faux degree in seriousity that Joe Klein accepts. In these de-stabilized times, Newt poses a far graver danger as either a pretend or actual presidential candidate than Palin ever could. His revels in expediency, destruction and irresponsibility are gasoline seeking a fire.

He wears the tight smile of a man who has very little room to move. He is known for his rhetorical napalm and is not accustomed to acknowledging that he often deploys it for its own sake, facts and gross exaggeration be damned. You don’t build a movement by playing fair. He didn’t single-handedly topple forty years of Democratic rule in the House by strictly keeping Marquess of Queensberry rules. And so in Newt’s world, putting Barack Obama in the company of Neville Chamberlain to win a news cycle is just the way it’s done. The grimace on his face says, What part of this game don’t you understand? His assistant looks at his watch. “We have three minutes.”

He will not relax, will not let down his guard, not this time around. He did that once when he was younger, spent three days with a reporter who got his staff to complain of his sexual adventurism and saw him yelling at an assistant. Afterward, he mentioned the episode to Robert Novak, who said, “What the fuck were you thinking?” . . .

After that, Gingrich started to deteriorate. There were times, Marianne says, when he wasn’t functioning. He started yelling at people, which he’d never done before, and he’d get weirdly “overfocused” on getting things done — manic, as if he was running out of time. He took to taking meetings while eating, slurping his food, as if he wasn’t aware or didn’t care how strange it looked. The staff responded with gallows humor: “He’s a sociopath, but he’s our sociopath.”

And this:

There’s a large part of me that’s four years old,” he tells you. “I wake up in the morning and I know that somewhere there’s a cookie. I don’t know where it is but I know it’s mine and I have to go find it. That’s how I live my life. My life is amazingly filled with fun . . . It doesn’t matter what I do,” he answered. “People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.”

Worth reading the whole thing.

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