"The Autumn of the Multitaskers"

From "The Autumn of the Multitaskers," an essay by novelist Walter Kirn in the November 2007 Atlantic:

"Where do you want to go today?" Microsoft asked us.

Now that I no longer confuse freedom with speed, convenience, and mobility, my answer would be: "Away. Just away. Someplace where I can think."

Related posts
Multitasking makes you stupid
Multitasking: "not paying attention"
On continuous partial attention

(Thanks to L. Lee Lowe, who pointed her readers to this essay.)

[Update, 1/22/08: The Atlantic has made its archives available to non-subscribers. Anyone may now read Kirn's essay online: The Autumn of the Multitaskers.]

Campaign e-mails (again)

I have greater and greater misgivings about the e-mails that Barack Obama's campaign is sending to supporters. The problems that I see in these messages suggest the difficulty of using a relatively new means of communication effectively. From October 18, a case in point:

Michael,

I'm leaving the Tonight Show studio and I wanted to share something.

Am I expected to believe that as Barack Obama is leaving a television studio, he has stopped to fire up a laptop and e-mail me? At 3:35 AM? Yes, this message was sent at 3:35 AM, when I suspect everyone involved in the taping had long since left the studio, Senator Obama included.

A first name followed by a comma is an at least semi-plausible greeting. Sometimes the beginning is a bit too brusque:

Michael --

Last night each of the presidential campaigns reported their third-quarter fundraising numbers.

Worse still, the Obama campaign continues to use "Hey" as a greeting. If anyone from Obama '08 is reading: "Hey" is a terrible way to address someone in an e-mail. "Hey" is what college students are told not to write when they e-mail their professors. What makes campaign strategists imagine that voters and potential contributors want to be addressed in this way?

The sign-offs can be brusque as well:

I need you to make a donation to close the gap:

https://donate.barackobama.com/closethegap

Barack

Not even a "Thanks"?

A stranger development is the use of supporters' names in follow-up messages. Thus I found a message in my inbox from Earnest Primous, "RE: Hillary's money." Earnest Primous, it turns out, is a retired postalworker who's contributed to the Obama campaign and is encouraging me to do likewise. If my son had not tipped me off, I would've deleted this message unopened as spam. The last thing most e-mail users want to do is open messages from unrecognized senders.

A further problem: the Obama campaign's use of follow-up e-mails creates some awkward complications. Consider this excerpt:

Obama is relying on you and me to make this happen. If I can give again, you can give too. Help Obama close the gap with Hillary so we can change politics:

https://donate.barackobama.com/closethegap

Thank you,

Earnest
Retired from Postal Service

----------Original message----------

From: Barack Obama
Subject: Hillary's money

Hey --

Last night each of the presidential campaigns reported their third-quarter fundraising numbers.

See what's happened? Mr. Primous, it would appear, is replying to the e-mail that I quoted at the beginning of this post. But that message addressed the recipient by name. Here it begins with "Hey." Mr. Primous' message is, of course, not a reply (in the e-mail sense) at all; it's an e-mail that quotes and makes generic some of the text of the previous Obama e-mail, with "Hey" replacing the previously personalized greeting.

I've telephoned the Obama campaign to voice three suggestions about e-mail strategy:

1. Use a consistent, recognizable sender name. "Obama '08" would be a good one.

2. Use a consistent, non-cryptic subject line. "A message from Obama '08" would be a good one.

3. Use a serious tone, neither falsely informal nor brusque.

The person I spoke with asked whether I realized that Earnest Primous is a real person (of course I did) and explained that the campaign was trying something new. But novelty in e-mailing is not a good strategy, not if one wants the recipient to open, read, and act. And the false informality of these e-mails is sadly at odds with the honest eloquence that draws people to the Obama campaign.

Related post
Campaign e-mail etiquette
Obama e-mail improvement

FreeRice

FreeRice is a novel humanitarian project: for every correct definition one chooses, a participating company donates ten grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program.

(Thanks, Ben!)

Philip Kolb on Proust

Philip Kolb (1907-1992), professor of French at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, edited the 21-volume edition of Proust's correspondence. He was working on the final volume when he died. Kolb's answer to the question of how he could have spent his lifetime "working on a single man":

[T]he answer to the question is that, when the subject of one's inquiry is Proust, a lifetime would scarcely suffice to permit exploration in depth of the innumerable facets of his universe. Nothing could be more captivating than to explore the mind of such a genius — an intellect of such capacity, an artist of such prodigious sweep and power, whose ability to move us, to make us feel the beauties of nature, and the warmth of human affection was so great — or to observe how he reacted when confronted with current events, how he judged his contemporaries, how his own ideas evolved with the passage of time, or simply to observe what inspired him, how he created his characters and episodes. In editing the correspondence of such a man, one should, of course, bear in mind that so modest an endeavor cannot constitute one's sole aim, but rather it should be a means of attaining a deeper comprehension of the work of the creative artist. In Proust's case, his correspondence represents a special kind of work, since he never intended its publication. For the reader, it offers a means of gaining a better understanding of his mind, his character, and, consequently, his great work. And to the editor, delving into his writings has meant an unending enchantment, an enrichment, and a widening of horizons.

Philip Kolb, "The Making of a Proust Scholar," The American Scholar 53 (1984): 512-13

All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

Now a major American university

"In other news tonight, scandal at a major American university. . . ."

Katie Couric, doing her bit for academic inflation, as she segued to the scandal at Oral Roberts University.

Read ORU's internal report of kleptocrats amok:

Scandal Vulnerability Assessment (via CBS News)

The Wilhelm scream

"Wilhelm!"

"Yeah, I'll just fill my pipe." [Over-the-top scream follows.]

One scream on screen, from 1953 to 1999. The compilation is hilariously good.

Wilhelm: The Man and His Scream, compiled by Pablo Hidalgo (YouTube)
Does That Scream Sound Familiar? (ABC News)

(Thanks, Ben!)

Évelyne Bloch-Dano on Mme Proust

Biographer Évelyne Bloch-Dano spoke yesterday at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on Jeanne Weil Proust, Marcel's mother. Bloch-Dano is an engaging speaker; her affection for Mme Proust and her son was especially evident in the passages from family correspondence and In Search of Lost Time that served as stopping points in her talk.

Here's one such stopping point, a note in which Marcel gives his mother instructions for the next day's work on translating John Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture. I love the final sentence:

My dearest Mama,

From midnight to 12:15 I stood guard at the door, hearing papa blow his nose but not reading the paper, so I didn't dare come in.

Tomorrow morning, will you be good enough to translate for me on the large format paper I've left you, without writing on the back; without leaving any blank space, tightening up what I showed you from Seven Lamps . . .

Also, I'd appreciate it if you could copy the attached page circled in blue pencil (I started to circle the back of it in blue pencil, but that doesn't count). Start with the first word (which is: in our view), finish with the last word (which is: to find you, for) without worrying that the meaning is cut off; don't copy anything from the back. But keep your copy as well as the attached page for me, which I will need to consult.

I have the feeling I'm doing better and in any case I'm smoking a good deal less. I'm getting to sleep without taking anything. I'm the one who opened the bottle of Vichy water.

A thousand tender kisses,

Marcel

[October 1899 (?), quoted in Madame Proust: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 207-208. Translation by Alice Kaplan.]

Something that surprised me in this talk: the details of a notebook in which Jeanne Proust chronicled the deaths of her mother, father, and husband. In a 1912 letter, Marcel mentions his finding the notebook. Philip Kolb, who edited Proust's correspondence while teaching at Illinois, made reference to the notebook in 1953, and one of its pages was reproduced at some later point in the catalogue of a Proust exhibition. The notebook is now lost.

Évelyne Bloch-Dano is visiting several American cities to talk about Madame Proust. I can't find a full schedule, not even at the author's website. But via Google, I've found announcements of talks at Berkeley (October 23) , Duke (October 25), and the University of Alabama at Birmingham (October 27).

Related post
Madame Proust

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

The Met's shark

From a New York Times article on a shark in formaldehyde, on display for the next three years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

How does it look? Weird.

Will the shark attract a new audience to the Met? Maybe.

Is it worth the trip? Definitely.

Is the article worth reading? Kinda. But thinking about this sculpture makes me recall what someone in The World of Henry Orient asks: If this is music, what's that stuff Cole Porter writes?

Just When You Thought It Was Safe (New York Times)

Madame Proust

From Evelyne Bloch-Dano's biography of Jeanne Weil Proust, Marcel's mother:

For the young mother Jeanne, the stages in her sons' upbringing were well laid out. Children had their place in the life of a bourgeois family, but their situation was governed by rules and customs that went unquestioned. Indeed, the children's development could be measured by codified benchmarks: swaddling clothes for the infants, then a gown that made changing diapers easier; bottles, then pureed baby food; around age seven, a boy began to wear short pants instead of dresses, as if to differentiate him from babies and little girls. Before that, his curls would have been cut, another important rite of passage. A boy acquired his individuality by distinguishing himself from all that was feminine. Jeanne saw these stages as progress. Yet her optimism was occasionally mixed with the feeling that she was somehow losing her babies, that in growing older her sons were growing away from her. And while Robert went through his first stages energetically, hastening, like many younger brothers, to catch up with an older male sibling, things were very different for Marcel.

Madame Proust: A Biography, translated by Alice Kaplan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 69-70

Madame Proust is a meticulously documented portrait of its subject and of Proustian family life. The relationship of mother and son is both touching and frightening in its mutual dependence. Evelyne Bloch-Dano visits the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign tomorrow to talk about Madame Proust:

Author to lecture about Proust's mother (UIUC)
Madame Proust: A Biography (Amazon)
All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

(Thanks, Odette!)

Bill and Virginia Youngren's house

Skimming a book this morning, with the television on for "warmth," I glanced up at This Old House to see a house that was instantly recognizable. The color, dark green, looked right. The size and shape looked right. The driveway was in its proper place. Seeing the kitchen's windows and cabinets and wallpaper confirmed my intuition: this old house was a house I once knew.

The house is in West Newton, Massachusetts, and once belonged to William and Virginia Youngren. Bill was a professor of mine when I was a graduate student at Boston College in the early 1980s. ("It's Bill!" he once wrote, replying to a deferential note I had addressed to "Dr. Youngren.") Like every professor I've ever admired, Bill negotiated university life on his own terms, refusing to limit his horizons, intellectual or social, to "the department." He was as knowledgeable about music (classical and early jazz) as he was about 18th-century literature and aesthetics. And he seemed to know, or have known, everyone, not as a collector and dropper of names, but as one who pursued his interests with such dedication that they inevitably led him to the appropriate people.

I spent many hours at Bill and Virginia's house when I was a graduate student. My visits would begin on a practical note — picking up a paper from a previous semester (Bill never graded work in a timely manner), dropping off a chunk of my dissertation. But conversation always took over, sometimes on the house's enormous porch, sometimes in the kitchen or a front sitting room. There would be Earl Grey tea (Twinings, loose) and ice cream (Breyers, vanilla). And often there'd be music, on reel-to-reel transfers of 78s. I remember sitting and listening to "After You've Gone" (James P. Johnson's Blue Note Jazzmen, 1944) and realizing that when you owned a house, you could play records as loudly as you wanted. Who would stop you?

Bill died in 2006, of an undiagnosed neurological disease, and with children grown, Virginia must have decided to sell the house. So here it is on television, a ceiling pulled down, a floor pulled up, a wall — in front of which the kitchen table once stood — knocked out. The difficulties of later life can be read in a detail on the screen: a handrail along the length of the front walk, which must have made it easier for Bill to get around. "It does nothing for the house," the landscaper is saying.

Newton Shingle-Style House Project (This Old House)

Related post
P.S. 131