My Hero

http://news.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyID=4701134

Lynne Truss, the author of the punctuation guide Eats, Shoots and Leaves, talks about her war on the enemies of clear writing.

Truss insists that punctuation vigilantes are not nerds who should really get out more. "We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation," she said.

Amen.

Read This Instead

The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte

Instead of reading Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, read this book. It is everything that Brown wanted to write, but failed. Brown's book was entertaining, slight, and preposterous; this book is entertaining but never slight, and it is a lot smarter than Brown's. They both present convoluted mysteries involving hidden references in the canon of great art (in this case, in literature).

Lucas Corso is a rare book mercenary: he tracks down rare titles for dealers and collectors, and he's very good at it. He is hired to authenticate some pages that purport to be an early draft of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers. At the same time, he's hired to track down a genuine copy of an obscure occult book that is supposed to tell readers how to summon Satan. A convoluted series of events ensues, and Corso becomes convinced that the two manuscripts are related, as people turn up dead, a mysterious young woman appears to "protect" him, and people who seem to have sprung wholly formed from Dumas's novels haunt his steps.

It was turned into a movie directed by Roman Polanski called The Ninth Gate, which was awful. I wonder if they read the book at all? I realize that books and movies are different creatures, but they excised approximately half of the plot, which happened to be the web that tied everything together. The movie was almost entirely nonsensical. This book, on the other hand, is a wonderful gift for book lovers.

"A Film By" Gets a Deserved Overhaul

http://news.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=filmNews&storyID=4641332§ion=news

Studios have approved the Directors Guild of America's plans to overhaul the use of "A Film By" credits for directors. It's about damn time. Few directors deserve to claim that a film is "by" them in any significant sense. These directors-for-hire, like Michael Bay or Brett Ratner, are not artists, but craftsmen brought in because they understand the technical aspects well enough to produce inoffensive big-budget films.

The idea of a film being "by" the director originated with the French idea of the auteur, or author. French critics looked at directors such as Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles, who had identifiable themes and techniques that infused their films. Most directors, however, are not auteurs. If they didn't write the film, or have a large role in the project's development, they didn't author it. Film is a collaborative medium. The film is "by" the director, the writer, the editor, the cinematographer, the actors, the producers—and when you're dealing with most blockbuster films, the producer is the real author. Whether you like him or not, Jerry Bruckheimer has more to do with a finished film project than does Michael Bay, his favorite director.

There's a short list of filmmakers who I think deserve to say a film is authored by them. Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Mamet, Sofia Coppola, and others who write and direct their films deserve it. Directors who don't write but who have easily identifiable thematic elements that are found in all of their films count too, like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Spike Lee, David Fincher... I'm sure I'm missing others. The point is that a guy who used to direct music videos and is hired at the last minute to take over a film written by a committee of eighteen different writers does not deserve to say he is the author of the film.

A-Marching We Did Go

I attended an anti-war protest on Saturday. It was a beautiful, if windy, day, and I went with Rebecca to Water Tower Place for a rally and a march against the invasion and occupation of Iraq, among other Bush policies. We ended up walking nearly two miles, down Chicago to Clark, and south from there, across the river and to Federal plaza.

I was decked out in my "Re-elect Roosevelt" t-shirt, a "No War" pin, and a "Congress for Peace.com" sticker. By the end of the march, I was carrying three signs: "Defend Our Courts--Stop Bush," "Defend Our Schools--Stop Bush," and "Defend Our Rights--Stop Bush." Rebecca had on one of her FeelTank Chicago t-shirts that read "Depressed? It Might Be Political," and she had a matching sign.

Police in full riot gear lined the route, looking like lacrosse goalies in search of a net to defend. I wanted to ask one of them if it was hot underneath all that gear, but frankly I was terrified of pissing them off. At times it seemed like there were more police than protestors, but that was because we were toward the back of the march, and the police closed ranks directly behind us. They seemed tense, but some of them looked like they were enjoying the march. One guy was tapping his shield merrily in time with the chanting and drumming. When I made eye contact with them, I smiled and showed one of the signs I was carrying. Some of the cops even smiled back.

I saw my first protest violence on the way. A short distance ahead of us, some anarchists got into a shoving match with some police. We didn't see how it started, but a cop fell with a crash to the ground (the plastice gear he wore sounding like a plastic bucket thrown down the stairs) and a protestor fell next to him. I think two people were arrested, but we were too busy trying to get the hell out of the way to notice. We ran toward the sidewalk, but a cop told us we had to rejoin the march. I said "We don't want to get beat up," and he sighed and said "You're not going to get beat up" and rolled his eyes. I considered mentioning the 1968 police riot, but I'm glad I was too frazzled to actually say anything. These were Chicago cops, after all. Their wooden batons looked well-worn.

Along the march route, I counted a total of four pro-Bush protestors. They looked really lonely, behind the wall of black and pale blue-clad cops. One guy followed us for most of the route, holding aloft a sign that said something like "Support Our Troops, Support Our President." The protestors chanted "Bush Lied" at him enthusiastically, but perhaps a better message would have been "Support our troops, bring them home." Toward the end of the march were three people from the Free Republicans, a happily conservative group that thinks Bush and company are too liberal. They had a few signs, from "Welcome Al Qaeda Groupies" to things like "Remember 9/11," apparently still oblivious to the fact that Iraq didn't have anything to do with 9/11.

At the end, there was a rally featuring Jesse Jackson. However, by this time we were both so tired and hungry that we simply had to leave to find somewhere to sit down and eat. I've been to two protest marches, and I still have not ever heard anything said at the actual rallies associated with them. At the first one, I was too far away to hear; that was the case at the short rally at the beginning of this march too.

I'm really glad I went. I don't think it is actually going to convince Bush to resign and stop being such a reactionary lunatic. I think people who look at rallies and say they're useless because they don't accomplish actual policy changes are missing the point. Rallies are to show solidarity with other people, to tell the world and each other that we aren't just a few malcontents who can be ignored. They're for networking, to figure out what other groups are doing (I collected dozens of fliers and websites that I have to look through). Finally, they're a way of exorcising the feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness that come from watching your country's leaders drag you merrily into hell. You come away feeling like maybe, just maybe, there's hope for the future. It's better than sitting at home in despair.

Quote

"He acted as though everything he did were to be repeated endlessly, to return eternally, without the slightest doubt about his actions. He was convinced he was right, and for him that was a sign not of narrowmindedness but of virtue. Yes, that man lived in a history different from Tomas’s: a history that was not (or did not realize it was) a sketch."

from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

The Da Vinci Craze

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

I wonder what it's like to write a pulp novel and have it become an irrationally huge bestseller? I am amazed at how popular this book is. It is everywhere. I got onto the train once and saw seven people in the same car reading it. And keep in mind that this is a hardcover edition they're all reading. I cannot fathom how big it will be when the paperback is released. I figured I should read it, just to see what the big deal is.

I am pleased to say that I enjoyed it. It's not great literature; it's pretty good pulp. It's like a Bruce Willis movie: completely preposterous and relentlessly entertaining. It's designed for commuters. It features 115 short chapters, so you can finish the current one quickly before your stop comes up. It demands that you keep reading, because each chapter ends in a cliffhanger. This became somewhat annoying, because some of the cliffhangers were pretty contrived. Oh well. It did its job pretty darned well.

What it is not is history. At the beginning of the novel, Brown says "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." Hmm. That's a pretty big statement. What Brown excels at is taking disparate factoids and mashing them together. Factoid A is true, and factoid B is true, but the way Brown conflates them is entirely fictional. It's a nice technique, because it gives the illusion of truth, or at least plausibility, that good historical fiction needs (or good conspiracy fiction, in this case). This has not stopped readers from assuming it's all true. My girlfriend the art historian tells me of a colleague teaching a class on Da Vinci who is being inundated with student questions about things from this book. I suppose Brown did his work too well.

Do I recommend it? Sure. It's a fun read, and I've read worse. I'd wait for paperback, though.

Death of a Perfectly Fine Fallacy

Begging the question (petitio principii) is a logical fallacy in which the truth of the conclusion is assumed by the premises. In this fallacy, there's a debatable point that's being presented as if it were fact. Some examples include "You should believe me because I always tell the truth" (it's arguable whether you always tell the truth) and "Since all liberals want to destroy our country, they don't deserve Constitutional protection" (I'm a liberal, and I don't want to destroy the country). It's very useful to understand this fallacy, because it's so common, but I'm afraid that we've lost its name to misuse.

Most people who use "begging the question" actually mean "prompting the question." They say "this begs the question," and then they ask a question. An example is this: "Clay Aiken was originally a wild-card selection on American Idol, which begs the question: Were fans right to overlook Aiken the first time around, or did they get it right only after a second try?" That's not correct. A Google News search returned over 300 instances of "begs the question," and of the first 50 or so, only two used it correctly.

According to my sources, this might stem from an archaic translation of the Latin petitio principii. A modern, and less misleading, translation would be "appealing to the underlying principles or assumptions." But it's too late. It's entered "the parlance," and there's no possibility that people will stop misusing it now. I do my part: if I find an article that misuses it more than once, I email the author, but that's a pretty useless gesture. Maybe that author will change his or her ways, but not likely.

While I've given up on begging the question, I won't lie down and let our remaining fallacies die. I will protect post hoc, ergo propter hoc until my dying breath.

Smoking = Profanity

http://www.salon.com/ent/wire/2004/03/09/smokers/index.html

A new study recommends that movies featuring characters smoking be slapped with an R rating. "What we're simply asking for is that smoking be treated by Hollywood as seriously as it treats offensive language," says the coauthor of the study. Um, yeah, right. The ratings system is messed up enough as it is. I doubt they're going to start counting cigarettes the way they count nipples.

The study would like to see PG-13 rated films such as Chicago, Matchstick Men, and Seabiscuit given R ratings. Hmm. A movie about Jazz Age Chicago, when literally everybody smoked; a movie about small-time con men; and a movie about the Depression, when everybody smoked. Because they realistically show people smoking, they deserve R ratings. Don't these people have better things to do with their grant money?

Oilers 4, Blackhawks 3

Steve and I went to watch the hapless Blackhawks, mostly because I had never been to a game when a Canadian team was in town—I wanted to hear "O Canada." We stuck around after the anthems, and we got to see a pretty decent game. It was pretty high scoring, which is nice when you're watching a bad team. Two goals a period is enough to make me happy. I figured they would get to overtime and then lose, which was a pretty safe bet.

We had fun. Steve screamed "Belarus" at Oilers goalie Tommy Salo, in reference to his historic meltdown against Belarus as the starting goalie for Sweden in the 2002 Olympics. Meanwhile, every once in a while I would shout "Who are you people?" at the Hawks, in reference to the fact that they have traded away just about everyone worth remembering, and they're fielding a bunch of people nobody has ever heard of. Their starting goalie tonight was signed last week; perhaps he wandered in asking directions, and they found out he could play goal. He was pretty darned good, too. His name was Underhill, so Steve made several hobbit references.

I am happy to report that we didn't encounter any drunken buffoons or abusive fans. The "I hate Karpovtsev" crowd was in hearing distance, but barely. The crowd was mostly Cub Scouts—over a dozen covens or whatever they call themselves were in attendance. There was even one called "Rainbow Troop" or something, which provided some laughs.

Kerry and Conformity

http://slate.msn.com/id/2095993

This article by Duncan Watts analyzes the weird John Kerry triumph from the perspective of 1950s social psychologist Solomon Asch, who studied conformity in a series of really interesting studies. In one study, he showed subjects lines of varying length and asked which pair of lines were the same length. The trick was that everyone in the study group was a plant except one person, who was the real subject. The assistants were instructed to give incorrect answers, and in 1/3 of the cases, the subject agreed with them despite the evidence before his own eyes. Asch said "The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black."

This helps explain a lot of things, like fads, mass suicide, and Democratic primaries. Your mother always asked "If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?" The answer is apparently yes, at least a third of the time.

It makes me wonder about a lot of things, like juries. In 1935, Muzafir Sherif devised an experiment about how people reach consensus. He put subjects in a dark room and shined a pinpoint of light on the wall. He asked the subjects individually how far the light moved, and then he asked them collectively to come to a consensus answer. They quickly came up with an answer, but in reality the light didn't move at all. If you can get a lone dissenter to agree that the evidence provided by his senses is in fact incorrect (Asch's studies), and you can get a group of people to agree that something that didn't happen in fact happened, what does a "fair trial" mean?

This has made me think a lot about my own life. How often do I cave in to things I wouldn't do if not surrounded by people already doing them? I like to think of myself as fiercely independent; we all do, don't we? I wonder how true that is. We are social creatures, and we aren't aware of a lot of the pressures to make us conform. Like me: I'm sitting at my desk at work, being rebellious by writing this instead of working... but I'm still here at my desk, and in a minute I'll go back to work. I guess you have to pick your battles.

Oscar Night

Oscar night was pretty fun. I went to an Oscar party hosted by my overprepared friend Keisha. She baked Oscar-shaped cookies, made everyone an "Oscar's Greatest Hits" CD, and provided pizza among other delicious food. She also won my Oscar pool for the second year in a row. She missed only five categories. I'll have to copy her ballot next year.

There weren't any surprises this year: Lord of the Rings won everything it was up for; Charlize Theron, Tim Robbins, and Renee Zellweger won; Keisha fretted about everyone having enough to eat; the speeches went on way too long; the ceremony went on way too long.

The only big surprise was during the pre-show extravaganza on E!. What happened to Joan Rivers's face? More accurately, whose face did Joan Rivers steal and graft onto her own skull? She looked like an angry sock puppet. She was frightening. I hope there were no children watching.

Billy Crystal has got to go. It was so nice to have someone else the past two years. I hate his songs, I hate the part where they insert him into nominated films, and I hate the endless bad jokes. How many gay jokes can you make in a three-hour presentation? Plenty, as evidenced by Mr. Crystal. And the part where he shared the stage with Robin Williams was clearly the low point of the evening. Someone needs to muzzle those two.

My suggestion for a host is Chris Rock, after they get him to sign several promises not to swear. He would bring some much-needed life to the proceedings, and his edgy brand of humor is still funny, as opposed to Crystal's, whose jokes stopped being funny in 1985. Sammy Davis Jr. impersonations? Give me a break.

The high point of the ceremony was the duet between Jack Black and Will Ferrell. Hell, let one of them host next year.