Overheard

In a bank in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a mother talking to her young daughter:

It's a bank, but it's a very cold bank. It's the Bank of America.

Meme

From Merriam-Webster's Word-of-the-Day service:

The Word of the Day for August 18 is:

meme \MEEM\ noun
: an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture

Example sentence:
"Blogs are an interesting way... of seeing which ideas, memes, trends and news events are getting the most comment." (Clive Thompson, quoted in the Sunday Tribune, February 6, 2005)

Did you know?
In 1976, British scientist Richard Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene, and in his book he defended his new creation, the word "meme." Having first considered, then rejected, "mimeme," he wrote: "'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene.' I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate 'mimeme' to 'meme.'" The suitable Greek root was "mim-," meaning "mime" or "mimic." Dawkins's "mimeme" was formed from "mim-" plus "-eme," an English noun suffix that indicates a distinctive unit of language structure (as in "grapheme," "lexeme," and "phoneme"). "Meme" itself, like a good meme, caught on pretty quickly, spreading from person to person as it established itself in the language.

Attention

From an Ellen Goodman column, "A snail mail tale":

How do you describe the times we live in, so connected and yet fractured? Linda Stone, a former Microsoft techie, characterizes ours as an era of ''continuous partial attention." At the extreme end are teenagers instant-messaging while they are talking on the cell phone, downloading music, and doing homework. But adults too live with all systems go, interrupted and distracted, scanning everything, multi-technological-tasking everywhere.

We suffer from the illusion, says Stone, that we can expand our personal bandwidth, connecting to more and more. Instead, we end up overstimulated, overwhelmed and, she adds, unfulfilled. Continuous partial attention inevitably feels like a lack of full attention.

But now there are signs of people searching for ways to slow down and listen up. We are told that experienced e-mail users are taking longer to answer, freeing themselves from the tyranny of the reply button. Caller ID is used to find out who we don't have to talk to. And the next ''killer ap," they say, will be software that can triage the important from the trivial e-mail.

Meanwhile, at companies where technology interrupts creativity and online contact prevents face-to-face contact, there are now e-mail-free Fridays. At others, there are bosses who require that you check your BlackBerry at the meeting door.

If a ringing cell phone once signaled your importance to a client, now that client is impressed when you turn off the cell phone. People who stayed connected 10 ways, 24/7, now pride themselves on ''going dark."

''People hunger for more attention," says Stone, whose message has been welcomed even at a conference of bloggers. ''Full attention will be the aphrodisiac of the future."

These thoughts remind me of the words from Simone Weil taped to my office door: "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."

The language of stamps

From tomorrow's New York Times:

Every other day, when Janie Bielefeldt writes to her husband, who is deployed in Afghanistan, she places her stamps upside down and diagonally on the letters as a way to say "I miss you." Susan Haggerty says "I love you" by putting her stamps upside down on letters to her son, stationed in Iraq.

Noma Byng does the same thing with the letters she sends to her husband when he is serving abroad as a way of trying to convey what words cannot. "You do everything you can to make the letters seem like more than a piece of paper," Mrs. Byng said.

For most people, the front of an envelope is simply a place for addresses and postage, and a crooked stamp indicates little more than that the sender was in a hurry. But for others, this tiny sliver of real estate is home to a coded language, hidden in plain sight, that has been passed down through the generations for more than a century.

You can read "From Love to Longing to Protest, It's All in the Tilt of the Postage" by clicking here.

[Use mediajunkie as your name and password to read the Times online.]

Barbara Bel Geddes

From Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958):

[Scottie has been balancing a cane on his fingertip. It falls and he bends forward to retrieve it.]

Scottie: Ouch! Ouch.

Midge: I thought you said no more aches or pains.

Scottie: It's this darned corset. It binds.

Midge: No three-way stretch? How very un-chic.

Scottie: Ah, you know those police department doctors. No sense of style. Well, anyway, tomorrow'll be the day.

Midge: Why? What's tomorrow?

Scottie: Tomorrow--the corset comes off tomorrow. I'll be able to scratch myself like anybody else tomorrow. I'll throw this miserable thing [the cane] out the window. I'll be a free--a free man. Midge, do you suppose many men wear corsets?

Midge: Mmm, more than you think.

Scottie: Really? Well, do you know that from personal experience, or--

Midge: Please.

Barbara Bel Geddes, who played Midge, died this week at the age of 82.

Link to the New York Times obituary.

[To read New York Times articles online, use mediajunkie as your name and password.]

Dorris Bowdon

From John Ford's film The Grapes of Wrath (1940):

Rose of Sharon: It seems like we wasn't never doin' nothin' but movin'. I'm tired.

Connie: Women is always tired.

Rose of Sharon: You ain't--you ain't sorry, are ya, honey?

Connie: No, but--but you seen that advertisement in the Spicy Western Stories magazine. Don't pay nothin'. Just send 'em the coupon and you're a radio expert. Nice clean work.

Rose of Sharon: But we can still do it, honey.

Connie: I ought to a done it then, not come on any trip like this.

Dorris Bowdon, who played Rose of Sharon in The Grapes of Wrath, died this week at the age of 90.

Link to the New York Times obituary.

[To read New York Times articles online, use mediajunkie as your name and password.]

Some have gone and some remain

I wrote a few weeks ago about the consolation of knowing that places from one's past are still as they were. On vacation with my family last week, I was happy to see the schoolyard fence at P.S. 131, same as it ever was. But other things were different.

On my old block in Brooklyn, the two-family house where my grandparents lived has been torn down, replaced by a brick multi-family fortress. On the other side of the street, rowhouses are being torn down to make way for further behemoths.

In my parents' town in New Jersey, tidy one-family houses are being replaced by enormous villas. As in Brooklyn, the plots are small, so the new structures look ridiculously out of place. Think of an outsized SUV, barely wedged within the yellow lines of its parking space, making life miserable for anyone parked on either side.

And on Cambridge's John F. Kennedy Street (formerly Boylston Street), the great basement nightclub Jonathan Swift's is gone, replaced (at least for now) by a non-profit thrift store called Planet Aid. Looking through Planet Aid's open door and down the stairs, I thought that I must have hit upon the location of Jonathan Swift's (which I only vaguely remembered). The twentyish employee wasn't familiar with the club, which apparently folded some years back. But he pointed out that there was still a stage at one end of the room. And as I turned to look, the shape of the place came back to me--the low ceiling, the bar along one wall, the small step up to the stage, the door to the backstage area off to one side.

The stage now holds racks of coats and dresses and a sofa. I stepped up and thought of the musicians I'd seen at Jonathan Swift's, almost twenty-five years ago, and where they'd stood. Koko Taylor, front and center, her lead guitarist to her right, just behind her. Son Seals (now dead) singing "How Blue Can You Get" and bringing down the house by adding twenty to the familiar seven: "I gave you twenty-seven children, and now you wanna give 'em back!" And two or three times, the Art Ensemble of Chicago: Famoudou Don Moye in one corner, surrounded by his "sun percussion." Bassist Malachi Favors Maghostut (now dead) in the other corner, a tray of the AEC's "little instruments" next to him. Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell at opposite ends of the stage, vibes and whole saxophone families to their sides. And Lester Bowie (now dead) sitting in the center, trumpet in hand, head tilted, Perrier on the floor within easy reach.

Related posts
P.S. 131
P.S. 131, 44th Street, Brooklyn

P.S. 131 class photographs
1962–1963 1963–1964 1964–1965 1965–1966 1966–1967

Little people

Lunch yesterday at a Chinese restaurant where my wife Elaine and I have been going since 1985. Mae, the owner, was happy to see us. "You're such a cute couple," she said. "So little."

Little?

I immediately thought of what Elaine and I used to call "potato love"--our characterization of the tiny old people you see in a city, rocking slightly from side to side as they walk, arm in arm, to do their shopping.

Then Mae added, "You always look the same," and I realized that little meant young. Phew. Thanks, Mae!

Woebegone

A really revealing piece in Inside Higher Ed, "Woebegone About Grade Inflation," on professorial attitudes toward grade inflation. Authors Janice McCabe and Brian Powell draw four conclusions:

First, most professors believe grade inflation occurs at their university, but few believe it occurs in their department, and even fewer in their own classes. . . .

Second, most professors view student pressure as a key factor fueling other professors' grading practices and grade inflation, but few admit they experience this pressure, and fewer acknowledge they are influenced by it. . . .

Third, most professors assert a link between grades and student evaluations, but they also express faith in their students and their evaluations' ability to distinguish between the best and worst teachers. . . .

Fourth, most professors believe average grades should be lower on campus, but would like to see a higher grade distribution in their own classes. . . .

What do these deep contradictions mean? McCabe and Powell offer a compelling explanation:

These four seeming contradictions provide another illustration of what social psychologists refer to as self-enhancing tendencies: that individuals believe they are better than average and that their situation is distinct from others. This is the social psychological equivalent of the Lake Wobegon Effect, "where all the children are above average." The Lake Wobegon Effect is referred to repeatedly in the public discourse over grade inflation, although in that discourse, students, not professors, are being rated as above average.

The self-enhancing tendency helps explain why professors believe that grade inflation exists but their grades do not contribute to it, why student pressure and student evaluations influence others' grading but not their own, and why grades in their classes should be higher but grades at the university level (and other universities) should be lower.

The entire piece is well worth reading for what it says about grade inflation and for what it says about the self-enhancing (and self-deluding) professorial mind. (Click on the title of the article above.)

Les yeux sans visage

From a New York Times article, "A New Face: A Bold Surgeon, an Untried Surgery":

A team led by Dr. [Maria] Siemionow is planning to undertake what may be the most shocking medical procedure to occur in decades: a face transplant. . . .

From the moment Dr. Siemionow first proposed this surgery, she has been hearing about "Face/Off," the 1997 movie starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage as an F.B.I. agent and a criminal mastermind whose mugs are surgically swapped.

One night, before the first review of her proposal by colleagues at the Cleveland Clinic, she rented the movie to gauge the public's potential reaction to the operation.

"It was O.K., if you like Travolta," she shrugged. "But it was just science fiction."

An earlier movie is relevant too: Les yeux sans visage [Eyes without a face], a 1959 film by Georges Franju about a doctor who seeks to give his daughter a face transplant. (He was driving "like a madman," and the accident that ruined her face was his fault.)

Les yeux sans visage is one of the most gruesome and stylish horror movies I've seen. (Yes, it depicts the surgery.) It's equal in fascination to Carnival of Souls (the 1962 film made in Lawrence, Kansas). Both films are available on DVD from the Criterion Collection in beautifully restored prints.