The Realtime Genie

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The Realtime Genie

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by Steve Gillmor on April 14, 2009

The realtime lashback has been surprisingly tame given the emotional challenges it presents. FriendFeed’s decision to double down on realtime streaming of text has had several primary effects: increased usage, swarming behavior around live events, and pushback from some who fled Twitter to FriendFeed in search of more contemplative dialogue.

What happens when a realtime conversation is possible? We already know the answer: IM. We are gently queried for permission to engage, and with social contract in hand we answer questions, catch up from where we last left off, and negotiate the outline of our next meeting. Attempts at hanging around on either end are met with increased irritation masked by politeness, until finally a rapid-fire l8r kthxbye cya dance wears out any remaining welcome.

But realtime swarms have new dynamics, not readily understood or guided by agreed-upon ground rules. Where IRCs and attached video chats hew to explicit or implicit boundaries, realtime threads need their own rationale for existence to get much beyond the IM formula. For some, a debate is hung off of a blog post or podcast, with representatives of the pro and con perspectives managing the conversation flow. For others, the “post” is a statement of thesis, a challenge to engage. When oldtimers criticize these threads as nothing new, they’re usually right.

Why, then, are so many of us so energized by this frontier? First, we are tired of RSS, tired of the mediocrity of the good-enough flow of half-facts and pseudo insight. Yes, I’m tired of my own bullshit, but only of my inability to adequately describe what’s in front of us. Normally I expect the pragmatic enterprise……..

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Carnal Nation

 

Masturbation Ad From Botswana

One of the problems facing education about HIV/AIDS and other STIs in the United States is that most agencies seem to work under the assumption that the ideal way to talk about sexually-transmitted disease is not to talk about sex. To the extent that United States health campaigns do acknowledge sexuality, it's usually to emphasize that it's something you really shouldn't do.

That is why it's so fascinating to see something like the ad below, from Botswana, where approximately 23% of the adult population is HIV-positive, a rate that's second only to Swaziland. We found it via P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula. A much larger version is here. We can't really provide any context for it, or how typical it is of sex-education efforts in Botswana, but just as the reality of AIDS on that scale is unimaginable to us, so is a response this frank and realistic.  As Myers points out, we still remember what happened to Jocelyn Elders when she dared to mention masturbation. Picture after the cut.

 

Storm by Tim Minchin

The Mad Ones

 

Illustration by Ed Piskor; from “The Beats”

 THE BEATS
A Graphic History
Text by Harvey Pekar and others.
Art by Ed Piskor and others.
Edited by Paul Buhle
199 pp. Hill & Wang.
$22 By JOHN LELAND 

Published: April 10, 2009

The writers of the Beat Generation had the good fortune to give themselves a name and to write extensively about their lives, in novels like Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and William Burroughs’s “Junkie,” in poems like Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and, later, in memoirs like Joyce Johnson’s “Minor Characters” and Hettie Jones’s “How I Became Hettie Jones.” Jones once said they couldn’t be a generation because they could all fit in her living room, but in the popular imagination they were much more than the sum of their body parts or writings. They were a brand.

When the country still considered literary writers and poets important public figures, these were literary writers and poets who came with luridly colorful lives, full of sex and drugs and cars, “the best minds of my generation,” “the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live,” cultural avatars who were often linked more by lifestyle considerations than by writerly ones. If they inspired lots of bad poetry set to bongos and little poetic discipline, they have even more effectively escaped disciplined literary or historical analysis. They rocked; they posed a threat to the nation’s youth. Either you got them or you didn’t. What could matter compared with that?

“The Beats” moves this mythology into the comics realm, where it finds a nice fit. In the introduction, Harvey Pekar and the lefty historian Paul

Buhle write that the book has “no pretension to the depth of coverage and literary interpretation presented by hundreds of scholarly books in many languages,” adding that “no one claims this treatment to be definitive. But it is new, and it is vital.”

The pages that follow, mostly written by Pekar and illustrated by his frequent collaborator Ed Piskor, live up to both of those claims, while also living down to the caveats. “The Beats” is plainly celebratory. The writers and artists don’t try to untangle the Beats’ hazy history — which is often drawn from works of fiction — or to examine their writings. There are almost no quotations.

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Victor Jara: Manifiesto

Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside

Image via Wikipedia

Michael Dirda in The Washington Post:

Now widely regarded as Robert Silverberg's masterpiece, "Dying Inside," first published in 1972, has just been reissued in a handsome trade paperback with a new preface by its author, one of science fiction's most distinguished writers. Yet this book is hardly what most people think of as science fiction. As a character, Selig has more in common with Philip Roth's Portnoy than with the more typical superwarriors of, say, Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers." Instead, Silverberg's novel offers an eerily evocative picture of New York life in the late 1950s and '60s: a time of bisexual professors, swinging singles, Black Power, psychedelic drugs and all-round social and political upheaval. Given Selig's bookishness, the novel is also suffused with buried quotations from T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare and many other literary eminences.

Above all, though, "Dying Inside" is a pleasure to read, full of that dry humor so common to melancholic intellectuals. Selig's taste in music, we learn, runs to "pretty austere stuff, thorny, inaccessible: Schoenberg, late Beethoven, Mahler, Berg, the Bartok quartets, Bach passacaglias. Nothing that you'd be likely to whistle after one hearing." At one time he contemplates writing a novel about -- what else? -- alienation in modern life.

More here.

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