Top fifty.

Oblique thoughts on a controversy too silly to link to.

I have been reading some poems lately, never mind by whom, and I've been a little sad to notice how strongly I react to the gender of the author. A man writes well about women, and I ask: "Would I say that about someone?" A woman writes well about men, and I ask, "Would she say that about me?" See when I identify with the speaker? So you ask me to make a list of the albums that have meant the most to me, and I have to admit, it's probably going to have a lot of men on it. More often than I'd like to admit, I've gotten into a book or an album or a movie because its perspective on the world was mostly similar to mine.

It's a sign of cultural privilege, I think, that I wasn't more often made (or even asked) to reckon with perspectives different from my own. It would be a sign of maturity to more deliberately seek out such perspectives. To the extent I've done this, it actually hasn't been so bad.

All this is to say that a list of my favorite music, it would reflect a lot of things about the culture I come from, in ways that even self-awareness can't efface.

(If you must know the context, I can provide this link without feeling irresponsible.)

Civility.

Brandon Watson expresses it well:

Civility is the practice of maintaining civic good relations, where civic good relations are those relations that make society 'work' in some sense. (The old Aristotelian name for them would be civic friendships.) Society is a way in which we live together, and civic good relations are those relations among the people in society which make living together possible and viable, either because they are pleasant, or because they are useful, or because they are good for us. In this sense you can have civic good relations with people you don't really like at all; in such cases you simply recognize that, whatever problems you have with them, you have to live with them to achieve certain good things, and you act accordingly. 

[...] 

All the mechanisms of democratic politics depend for their success on reliable venues for rhetorical communication; good rhetorical communication will often require argument. But you can have a pretty successful democratic politics based less on argument than on human sympathy, and one finds in fact in democratic politics that resolution of serious disputes is very often resolved not by argument but by compromise or by mutual sympathy or by a live-and-let-live approach. We should certainly be thankful for that; otherwise our societies would have failed long ago.

Of course it's election season again, and there have been a few uncomfortable culture-war flare-ups already. I'd lament the intensity of the polarization, but I'm actually not convinced that we're anywhere near a high-tide of civic division. On the other hand, social networks do give us new modes of engagement, and it's not clear that the old practices that sustain a civil society transfer easily to the highly performative world of social media.

UPDATE: Read the good comment.

Joys of used books.

Two characters discuss a scholar:

"'He has got no good red blood in his body,' said Sir James.

"'No. Somebody put a drop under magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs Cadwallader."

-from Chapter 8 of Middlemarch

In the margins of the copy I got from a used book store, written in pencil:

Gha!
Sickle-
cell

Vibrant.

Thomas Frank tackles vibrancy:

Every city is either vibrant these days or is working on a plan to attain vibrancy soon. The reason is simple: a city isn’t successful— isn’t even a city, really—unless it can lay claim to being “vibrant.” Vibrancy is so universally desirable, so totemic in its powers, that even though we aren’t sure what the word means, we know the quality it designates must be cultivated. The vibrant, we believe, is what makes certain cities flourish. The absence of vibrancy, by contrast, is what allows the diseases of depopulation and blight to set in.

This formulation sounded ridiculous to me when I first encountered it. Whatever the word meant, “vibrancy” was surely an outcome of civic prosperity, not its cause. Putting it the other way round was like reasoning that, since sidewalks get wet when it rains, we can encourage rainfall by wetting the sidewalks. But to others, the vibrancy mantra is profoundly persuasive. [...] Specifically, vibrancy transforms communities by making them more prosperous.

-Thomas Frank, "Dead End on Shakin' Street"

Some thoughts:

1. Well, now that I've read this, "vibrant" has gone into the category with "quirky" as words I can only use with implicit reference to marketing campaigns.
2. This is of course an attack on city- and corporation-subsidized vibrancy, not actual urban life. Baltimore has a big foundation-funded street fair called Artscape ("America's largest free arts festival," whatever that means). For five years or so, a local artists' collective ran an independent DIY festival called Whartscape as explicit counterprogramming. It's the nation's Artscapes that are under consideration, not our Whartscapes.
3. How much money is actually going towards vibrancy efforts? Frank talks about "blowing millions setting up gallery districts and street fairs": at a representative event, where does the money come from? How much does the Station North Arts District in Baltimore actually cost the city? Probably the answer varies a bit from city to city.
4. Even if vibrancy as a whole can't be measured, particular events are perfect fodder for pie charts and presentations. It's way easier to report "we got two new galleries" or "festival attendence was up 11%" than it is to tackle the problem of public schools or build consensus for a bigger policy change. Which doesn't excuse going for the easy path.
5. If foundations are trying to solicit donations from corporations and rich businesspeople, wouldn't you expect them to lean pretty hard on the idea of attracting a big base of yuppies for corporations to hire? Whereas if in practice a lot of money gets put toward smaller-scale community efforts, they wouldn't make that the main part of the pitch, would they? It'd help to see some numbers on where arts funding goes.
6. Throughout the article there's an assumption that cities are using vibrancy efforts to compete with each other. What if they're actually trying to compete with their own suburbs?

Too good for Twitter.

I know I'm going to want to remember the wording of this at some point in the future and I'll never recover it from Twitter:

christ, weakened by scandal and floundering in the political fight of his life, ignores advisors' advice and plays the grace card

-@markleidner

Mark Leidner, if you're wondering, is a poet who's written, among other things, a great little book of aphorisms. I'm not sure if he's just after the "grace" pun or means something more serious. That dissonance of meaning is probably the point, but what do I know.