"[T]he shade-tree problem"

A thoughtful take on the disadvantages of instant access:

Googling has become such a routine, comfortable, and seemingly effective part of everyday life, that it's easy to overlook its drawbacks. One of them is what [lawyer and natural-landscaping advocate] Bret Rappaport calls "the shade-tree problem." . . . Imagine, he says, a paralegal in a law firm asked to research case law relating to a Texas client's ire with a neighbor whose tree has grown to overhang the client's lawn, preventing part of the lawn from getting enough sun to survive. The paralegal would likely run to Lexis — the legal world's version of Google — and enter in the keywords tree, lawn, neighbor, and shade. A few cases pop up and are dutifully handed over, wrapping up the chore in five minutes. But thirty years ago, says Rappaport, the paralegal would have hit the Texas law books, running her finger over topic listings and indexes, perhaps intending to look up trees, but noticing there are also sublistings for tree houses, oaks, and bushes. In leafing through the book to check out some of the indicated cases, other cases leap out as interesting and possibly relevant. Perhaps it takes half an hour, but in the end the paralegal uncovers what turns out to be the most useful case in the books, one in which a vine invaded a neighbor's swimming pool, and in which the words tree and lawn never appear. What's more, this more prolonged and varied hunt has imbued the paralegal with a bit of perspective and even expertise in the subject that could come in handy in this case or another one. Over time and many such hunts, the expertise will extend to a range of topics. In other words, the very imprecision and inefficiencies of the conventional search process compared to Googling provides better results and a measure of enrichment, if at a cost in time.

Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman, A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder (New York: Back Bay Books, 2007), 237–38

A related post
Messy desk

No on 8

Andrew Sullivan, writing in Time in 2004:

When people talk about gay marriage, they miss the point. This isn't about gay marriage. It's about marriage. It's about family. It's about love. It isn't about religion. It's about civil marriage licenses. Churches can and should have the right to say no to marriage for gays in their congregations, just as Catholics say no to divorce, but divorce is still a civil option. These family values are not options for a happy and stable life. They are necessities. Putting gay relationships in some other category — civil unions, domestic partnerships, whatever — may alleviate real human needs, but by their very euphemism, by their very separateness, they actually build a wall between gay people and their families. They put back the barrier many of us have spent a lifetime trying to erase.

If I were a California voter, I'd vote No on 8.

Picking them up and laying them down

Elaine and I went walking from door to door in a midwestern city today on behalf of a certain presidential campaign. The eighty-three-year-old woman who welcomed a yard sign and told us to put it wherever we thought it looked good made our afternoon.

The depth of planning in this campaign is a wonder. I don't like being cryptic, but that's all I can say.

Paintings and Proust

A new book by painter Eric Karpeles: Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time (Thames & Hudson, $45). Amazon has it for 34% off. The New York Times has a review.

I'd also like to see (and hear) a CD or two assembling Proust-related music: likely inspirations for Vinteuil's sonata, songs by Reynaldo Hahn, all in period recordings, if possible.

Related reading
All Proust posts

2:14 a.m.

What if he loses?

The stories friends have been telling me of waking up in the middle of the night —

they're true!

Studs Terkel (1912–2008)

His books are browser's delights. In college, I read Working (1974) again and again. When I began teaching, I read from it to my classes. I still remember Dolores Dante and Joe Zmuda.

From the obituary: "'Curiosity never killed this cat' — that's what I'd like as my epitaph.”

Studs Terkel, Chronicler of the American Everyman, Is Dead at 96 (New York Times)

USA Arts

From WNET, NYC's Channel 13, streaming episodes of USA Arts: Willem de Kooning! Martha Graham! Vladimir Nabokov! Charles Olson! And many more.

*

April 8, 2014: Gone, gone. Now there’s only a trailer-like compilation.

A metaphor for painting

Barnett Newman, interviewed by Frank O'Hara for the public television show Art New York (1964):

Newman: I'm not in any way really involved in color as a love act. To me, color is an innate material, and I feel that it's — the proper description would be to call them colors, that anybody can buy and squeeze them out of tubes. And in that sense, it's my job to turn them into color. And I suppose my feeling towards colors is, well, it's more or less like the feeling that a baker has towards his material. I feel that it's like wheat, and my job is to turn the wheat into bread. If I don't have wheat, which might be blue, I use red, which is like rye.

O'Hara [laughing]: What about dough? It's white.

Well, you know, well, if you don't have rye, you use barley. But then of course, you — I suppose you can't make bread with barley, so I make whiskey. [Laughs.]

You can find the interview on the video page at frankohara.org.

Ginsbergs, Ginsburgs

A correction in the New York Times:

An article in some editions on Wednesday about Fordham University's plan to give an ethics prize to Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer misspelled the surname of another Supreme Court justice who received the award in 2001. She is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, not Ginsberg. The Times has misspelled her name at least two dozen times since 1980; this is the first correction the paper has published.

The Times has often misspelled Allen Ginsberg's last name too.

BOOBOOBOOBOOBOOBOO

Happy Halloween! Thumbtack holes and all.

[Purple marker, by Ben Leddy, from the family archives. Used with permission.]