G as in Good H as in Happy

"29 distinguishable meanings of the word 'validity' "

November 30, 2004

Every once in a while, Texas in the 21st century seems a long way from the vinous Cambridge evenings of one's intense, eagerly-scholarly youth.  Keith Burgess-Jackson, trained in philosophy and law and a most reliable blogger in the opinion of Good&Happy, links to a lecture by the British psychologist Liam Hudson, The Life of the Mind, discussing the virtue of boundaries in our personal and professional enterprises, and the value of having significant symbolic conversations across them.

The Life of the Mind describes both the topic of the paper, and the experience of settling down to read it. Aaaaahhh, like a hot meal well-set before a lit hearth on a snowy night with good company....And yet, I love it here in the Sun Belt. It's just good to have this world-wide access to well-tuned thought. There's something about the widely cultivated and confidently learned like Hudson, so learned that he wears his pithy learning with offhand style; so earnest that he drills long, without apology, into fine distinctions.

With gratitude for the magnificent library of Tanner Lectures at the University of Utah.

Morsels:

Not only do we undermine our own best efforts; we organise and operate our institutions in ways that ensure that these efforts are undermined.

“The world I am trying to understand,” said the economic theorist Albert Hirschman, “is one in which men think they want one thing and then upon getting it, find out to their dismay that they don’t want it nearly as much as they thought or don’t want it at all and that something else, of which they were hardly aware, is what they really want."

    ...Men are inadequate to what Stoller once called “the rigours of intimacy.”

and, most provocative,

Hardly any of us achieve what A. O. Hirschmann has recently called “Selfsubversion”: the freedom to shift our ground when reality reveals itself in an unexpected light.” It is no disaster to have a hobby-horse disappear from beneath you. On the contrary: it is a prior condition of getting somewhere worth getting that such disappearances should occur.

Vertigo

November 29, 2004

Roy Williams' Monday Morning Memo links to Douglas Rushkoff's PBS documentary, Merchants of Cool.  Cool is like chasing your shadow on a sunny day.  By definition, as soon as you catch it, it moves.

MTV, the inventor of Cool Chasing, chases the customer. It has concluded the way to sell is to push the boundaries. For young males, the testosteroned push is to the "Mook," into the taboo and scatological, and the unsubtle dynamics of professional wrestling. And the character must be redeveloped, ever broader and grosser, every six weeks. For the young woman, it is, or was, Britney Spears and, in general, "The Midriff."  Desperate to be regarded as beautiful / sexually marketable / potential advertising icons.

To earlier generations leveraging our worlds from a different fulcrum, it seems like repetitious vertiginous shifts in endless superficiality.  For marketers, and anyone else who faces up to hard reality, it cannot be evaded. In fact, marketers dismiss "putting another finger in the dam," in favor of "leaning in" to trends. Ultimately, Ruskoff concludes that the media and young tastes are a near-hermetic giant feedback loop.

Eventually, by Rushkoff's assumptions, evanescent cool and its adherents must devour themselves, becoming ever nastier and more attenuated to elude the pursuit of the commercial machine. In fact, rebellion is now directed as much against "media," as to parents and "society."

One of Dilys' offline tasks is to understand, from her decided distance, this new culture.  To sit and deplore is neither a career nor a life.  And will not interrupt the loop, on the contrary, it helps define cool by what we oppose.

A necessary paradox.  And we will not be permitted to sidestep the dilemma of cultural obsolescence vs. terminal violence-and-vulgarity. A creative Third Way will, has to, emerge.  I hope to stay awake to watch for the first rosy fingers on the horizon, not neon but dawn.

Remind You of Anybody?

Hint:  Look top right.

 

From <J-walkblog>

Calmer News on the News Front

November 28, 2004

Here's recognition that if a news outlet is telling the truth, and not slyly spinning it or withholding relevant facts, the Blogahadeen out there in the dunes are friends. As Glenn Reynolds says, it's something Big Media can exploit -- free fact checkers.  Fact-checked from every angle, and the fact-checkers themselves fact-checked.  A kind of epistemological evaporation, until the material, including the rhetoric it wears, is distilled. If the original story tries to persuade and conceal at the same time, however, behold, a swarm of pyjama'd locusts, devouring fruit and leaves to stalk and root.

Distributed intelligence, that's the watchword.

Update:  More on the blogosphere as spontaneously-ordered cosmos. Via <marginalrevolution>.

Now, if the once-impeccable New Yorker can just find a way to use us to purge the occasional typo and leap-of-faith partisan assumption...

Update: Via Instapundit, a view of news in the Brave Near Future. 2004, the year everyth.ing began. By 2014, a universal platform fabricated  from Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, cross-referred with Friendster social-network tools. Computer rhetoric that filters, orders, and delivers custom-content for each user. The New York Times has gone off-line, a newsletter for the mostly elderly and elite. 

Was there another way? Eight-minute video with dire tone, plausible scenario, no answers. Suggests that readers who dig for a breadth of perspective can find it, to an unprecedented degree. Passive readers, on the other hand, may and will merely reprise the circle tour [euphemism alert] of their pre-existing outlook and that of their social environment.

Angel on a truck

November 27, 2004

People enjoy color and design, will have beauty in our ordinary lives. We like to make our mark on our possessions, our surroundings, our inanimate companions. To treat them as beautiful, humorous, dignified, unique. At <brian'scultureblog> and his links, an art display sponsored by the French in Lahore: decorated Pakistani trucks.

One of our Good&Happy team is designing her own chrome auto-fish as gentle conversation with the battling fishies out there.

Buddhists (I remember noticing at a sacred art exhibition in San Francisco's de Young Museum) speak of "washing the elephant" to stand for maintenance of one's material surroundings. Today I cleaned out my car. It felt like an act not only of basic respectability, but of kindness.

Scrub it, paint it, decorate it, cherish it.  None of it is permanent, and it deserves our thanks and respect.

Thanks to <marginalrevolution> for the link.

Update:  A reader catalogues her own cohort of long-lived possessions. A wine carafe from Tiffany. Modigliani's print of a red lady. Dark faces drawn by her daughter, long ago, in a dark time.  Stacks of books.  Home.

US Thanksgiving, 2004

November 25, 2004

      A potpourri of phenomena that remind us of where we have been, and why gratitude today is not so much a moral response as simply an  accurate one:

      Today's review in the Wall Street Journal of The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin.   

Once, back on Jan. 12, 1888, the wind made good its angry promise, and 100 children died. Hundreds of adults as well, and thousands of horses and cows. First came the blasts of frigid air, followed quickly by the haze of ice dust that sliced the skin from the farmers caught outside. Then came the snow, and then the killing cold....Following the journals of the Norwegian and German immigrants who rushed to fill the Dakota plains in the early 1880s -- the Rolvaags, Albrechts and all their like -- The Children's Blizzard tells story after story of that grim day. Some of the children trapped at school tried to make it home. A few survived, burrowing into haystacks or forming rings in which the outer children froze to death while keeping the littlest children alive...

      And Donald Sensing's reminder of the men, especially women, and children who settled the mid-continent, inches and miles in ox wagons, 40 below in January and 105 in the summer. Boiled clothes and respectability.  Sometimes madness. Sod houses. No AC. Grit.

      Every year, the Journal publishes Nathaniel Morton's and Governor William Bradford's description of the desolate winter wilderness that met the Puritan settlers in 1620.  There could be no retreat.   

The next day they went on board, and their friends with them, where truly doleful was the sight of that sad and mournful parting, to hear what sighs and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them; what tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches pierced each other's heart, that sundry of the Dutch strangers that stood on the Key as spectators could not refrain from tears. But the tide (which stays for no man) calling them away, that were thus loath to depart, their Reverend Pastor, falling down on his knees, and they all with him, with watery cheeks commended them with the most fervent prayers unto the Lord and His blessing; and then with mutual embraces and many tears they took their leaves one of another, which proved to be the last leave to many of them.

Being now passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before them in expectations, they had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns, to repair unto to seek for succour; and for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search unknown coasts.

Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men? and what multitudes of them there were, they then knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to Heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.

If they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.

      And the songs from Protestant hymnody with an uncanny memory-hook like the fragrance of turkey and the crinkle of paper pilgrim hats. Patrick O'Hannigan points to a 1644 hymn by a bereaved German pastor near-buried by pestilence in the Thirty Years War.

      Now that we are in the MIDI files, wandering and browsing, pausing at a Dutch hymn from 1597, likewise the relief of battle's end.

      And an 1844 verse from an English scholar who, contemplating his death, declared himself "a pilgrim traveling to Jerusalem." 

      Sometimes I hear these melodies on church bells in a city on a Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, and think, in line with my mongrel and ecstatic Welsh heritage, Yes, we have come this far.

Ebenezer.

------------

Update: It is awe-inspiring to recognize that by December of 1621, expressing the impulse to share, if it were possible, a servant was writing back to England about the bounty and relative comfort enjoyed by the settlers in the colony:

by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

Marginal Revolution offers an economic footnote about the course of Gov. Bradford's great experiment. The incentive structure for activity proved to be important. Goods-in-common did not succeed, even in this small group.  So the question is, what is the size of the group, the degree of affectional affiliation, and the level of objective or subjective stress, that marks the limit of such arrangements?

A Beneficent Peter Principle, or, No More Fear of Failure

November 23, 2004

Discovered through Bob Jacobsen:

IT Conversations audio stream of recent PopTech presentations.

• Bruce Mau's talk on his "clear manifesto for design in the service of practical social change" [as readers and listeners we must always satisfy ourselves about "clear" and "practical"];
  

• Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point and the new Blink, addressing that issue so recently prominent in political polling, that people's preferences are unstable, and that we ourselves do not know or express, or comfortably explain, what we truly want. In honest conversation, it is often wise to test answers, to be an advocate on behalf of what we know or sense of the person, against their first or easy impulse. Note: this is not the same as arguing, or setting them straight.

Update:  A reader writes that this is a key skill of effective personal coaches. How politics might change if the various players had at their elbows someone charged to see and to hear "the first or easy impulse" of the candidate and to test those impulses against what they "know or sense" may be truer for that person.

What kind of honestly-held principles, and genuinely-intended platforms, might be put forth by politicians then? Is there room for improvement?  What if the true feelings of the candidate were so well considered and "cooked" that s/he could be candid at every moment? If the actual plan, except for, say, classified intelligence data, could be communicated?

It could happen.

•  Paul Saffo, Institute for the Future, The Case of the Blind Venetians:
  

It is fashionable, but premature to write off the future of the US info tech sector. The dot.bomb collapse and offshoring are quite real, but hints of the path forward are hidden in the history of Silicon Valley and the tech sector. And the secret is this: innovation advances from failure to failure, not from success to success. The time has come to understand and embrace this hidden source of the US' technological dynamism, lest we end up like Venice in its last century, trapped by old habits and sinking beneath the sea that once sustained it's economic and innovation miracle.  

Of specialized interest for some of my marketing readers:  Christopher Ireland on Organizing Principles of Design Research.  More to follow after attending Wizard Academy 's IDEAlley on December 9, since our little Good&Happy shop is designing several products:  a series of idiosyncratic lifestyle books, and Continuing Education Events for Professionals that are premium designed experiences, not just another day in a musty conference hall. We preach Laying a Foundation By Thinking It Through.  Now we must do it. And plan for a most profitable & successful & satisfying failure, in the fashion of, shall we say, a gimlet-eyed mercantile Florentine.

He's with me

November 20, 2004

     I clicked this video link to see the President, who has won my admiration over the years since his unpromising obscurity here in Texas, take proper attentive and instinctive action  in a small fracas in Chile. As I watched I became fascinated with the length of this television coverage (no limited soundbites here), the body language, the diplomatic dolors. I traveled years ago with semi-royalty in Europe, and believe me, no one is paid enough to inhabit those endless vistas of boredom!

      Revisiting those poky motorcades, what an education in the pace at which another portion of the the world lives. The temperaments on display, the kinetic interplay between the arriving high officials and their wives and their hosts, the physical types, a newscast could be the entire  centerpiece of a seminar, "What You Can Learn by Watching."

      Video courtesy of a comment at littlegreenfootballs.

News without a compass?

November 19, 2004

What do we expect?  What do we want from "the news"? Is that what we should want? These questions run deeper than the political biases and blind spots of an industry, though they are related.

Jay Rosen, Chairman of the Department of Journalism at NYU, calls the full flower of journalists' established way of doing business, The Contraption. The Contraption is becoming more and more disconnected to the rapid-fire, networked, and interactive information many of us are already habituated to.

This is the topic of the day.  I will be amplifying my own perspective throughout the weekend. Rosen's Pressthink blog is an indispensable resource.

Add intelligence to the range here. E-mail me your reflections about  conventional journalism, good_and_happy "at" yahoo.com . The further question will be, what is the contribution of journalism and publicly-available information to our happiness and effectiveness? as citizens, thinkers, participants.

Photo, opportunity

November 17, 2004

One of the headlines in today's morning paper: In pay, politics and health, women 'have a long way to go.'

A few inches above that story, a most amazing photograph of the President of the United States kissing the cheek of the new Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. {Photo from the Washington Post.] To someone like me who grew up when there were still separate Colored and White drinking fountains in downtown Orlando department stores, the recent indictment of "two Americas" is a claim to contemplate with wonder.

Following the metaphor, if there's a long way to go, there's a path and a map. Congratulations, Mme. Secretary.  Serve well. Thank you for your application and preparation. As much as can be true for one person, you've got the whole world in your hands.

Update:  Jay Nordlinger in 1999

Here is a prediction about her: If she becomes secretary of state or even something lesser, she will be big. Rock-star big. A major cultural figure, adorning the bedroom walls of innumerable kids and the covers of innumerable magazines.

Now there's a role model.

She is, all agree, an immensely appealing person: poised, gracious, humbly smart, still markedly southern after all these years in other parts. Her television appearances have prompted marriage proposals ("I haven't had many lately — maybe I'm getting old"). And she is very much a jock: a tennis player, an untiring follower of college and professional sports. (She knows an ex-Stanford student, Tiger Woods, slightly, and, what's more, "I strength-trained with his strength trainer — now there's a connection!") Her dream job, she has declared many times, is commissioner of the National Football League. On meeting her, the current commissioner, Paul Tagliabue, told her that he had heard she was angling for his job. "Not to worry," she answered; "but let me know when you're thinking of retiring."

When the time comes, I hope she has a blast.

Update: Almost 18 years ago, a "a black 'slip of a girl' "spoke up  at a foreign policy dinner at Stanford and showed "she understood power politics...where we could co-operate and where not."  A focused and disciplined talent, with a fiercely loyal and intelligent upbringing. Perhaps when cooperation is reliable and principled in our families, we learn to recognize it. The London Times, again available on-line, tells more.   

Thanks to <theanchoress>.