June 2009

I’m a long-time supporter of US soccer and a big football (soccer) fan in general, so today’s big Confederation’s Cup match between Brazil and the US was very big for me. In the end, it was a huge letdown when the US lost it in the final minutes. But I can’t really blame the US team. They were playing over their heads for 70 minutes and only lost because the Brazil players were, quite simply, better athletes than the US players (save Donovan and Howard) and had more “in the tank” at the end than the tired US team did. As a result, they were able to capitalize on a few mistakes in defense to get the needed goals to secure victory.

How can you fault a team that wasn’t supposed to even reach the semi-final game with Spain, much less beat Spain soundly before narrowly losing to Brazil? The US were phenomenal and deserve all the credit. They played hard and they played well.

At least everyone knows that the US team has the talent to compete against the best teams in the world. People (rightly) dismissed the US after the 2006 World Cup, but I don’t think anyone will be overlooking them come next year’s tournament–which will, I’ll add, be played in South Africa, just like the Confederation’s Cup.

And a tip of my hat to Landon Donovan, the local boy (from Redlands, CA, where my wife was born and where we lived for the first seven years of our marriage) who proved that he is every bit the leader that the US needs heading into 2010. He was always there, always making plays, always making passes. He just needs to realize (as so many point guards do) that the best pass is often not a pass but a shot.

Last night on the annoying show Real Time with Bill Maher, Billy Bob Thornton said something that bugged me immediately and then forced me to think about for a whole day before responding.  He was relaying a discussion about music that he had with a PA on one of his movies.  He challenged her to come up with a list of musicians from 1980 to the present who would be remembered 100 years from now.  He gave her two names: REM and U2.  And, he said, that was about it–compared to the hundred plus names he could come up with for the music from 1955 to 1979.  Now, Thornton is right that there are tons of great artists from that earlier period who have already stood the test of time.  He’s an idiot, however, because he assumes that any music created after his time sucks.  Here’s just a sprinkling of artists who emerged after 1980 who could compete with the people on his list (and I’m even going to leave out the punk and post-punk artists like The Clash and Joy Division who created their music on the cusp of this era):

• Radiohead
• Nirvana
• The Minutemen
• Meat Puppets
• My Bloody Valentine
• Neutral Milk Hotel
• Robyn Hitchcock
• Sigur Ros
• The White Stripes
• Massive Attack
• Tricky
• Portishead
• Tim Hecker
• Chris Watson
• Public Enemy
• Beastie Boys
• Run DMC
• De La Soul
• NWA
• Dr. Dre
• Eminem
• Pan Sonic
• Fennesz
• Random Inc.
• Taylor Deupree
• Autechre
• Boards of Canada
• Depeche Mode
• Aphex Twin
• Nine Inch Nails
• Kode9
• William Basinski
• The Caretaker
• Stars of the Lid
• Primal Scream

And that’s based solely on my iTunes collection right now.  If I spent more time thinking about this, I can easily come up with 200 or 300 names whose music rivals anything created in 1965.  The problem with people like Thornton is that they assume that, because everyone listened to the same music when they were growing up, that music today is inferior because there’s more of it and (hence) people’s listening tastes are way more eclectic than they used to be.  He’s assuming that uniformity equals quality, in other words.  Or perhaps he just thinks that his taste in music is the be all and end all of music, period.  Either way, he’s way off.  But at least he got me thinking.

So, please, tell me: what names have I forgotten here?

So Leopold Bloom used Twitter, at least in the theoretical sense. The stream-of-consciousness thoughts that are sent out to us in the page of Joyce’s Ulysses contain the same fast-paced, random gems of wisdom and obsession and banality as the typical tweet.

Paltry funeral: coach and three carriages.  It’s all the same.  Pallbearers, gold reins, requiem mass, firing a volley.  Pomp of death. (Joyce 83)

Granted, not all of Bloom’s thoughts would fit in a 140-character message (though the one above does perfectly at 135). But the syntax Bloom uses–very short, choppy sentences, lots of punctuation–is quite suitable to the Twitterverse. Yes, some of the sentences are connected to one another, but there’s enough jumping from one topic to another (or one strain of a topic to another strain of a topic) to make it quite easy to cut up those streams into smaller bites.  [Moreover, as the word "twitterverse" suggests,the need for compressed language in tweets has led to the creation of many "portmanteau" words, the dominant characteristic of Joyce's other great novel, Finnegans Wake.  But that's a different post.]

Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys.  Memories beset his brooding brain.  Her glass of water from the kitchen tap when she had approached the sacrament.  A cored apple, filled with brown sugar, roasting for her at the hob on a dark autumn evening.  Her shapely fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the children’s shirts. (Joyce 9)

Unlike Bloom, Stephen Dedalus’s streams (like the one above) are often precise analyses of observed events or epistemological conundrums.  The one above, early in the novel, contains Stephen’s thoughts as he remembers back to his mother on his deathbed.  His thoughts attempt to analyze her own mind in the final moments of life.  Now, a reader doesn’t necessarily need to know this context in order to understand and appreciate the ideas.  And even if the context were necessary (as it is on many occasions in Joyce’s novel), the thoughts would still make “sense” in the Twitterverse, for Tweeters often throw in random, decontextualized thoughts for public consumption.  Some get it and some don’t, but the “getting” isn’t as important as the sending.  Further, the syntax of twitter is evident in Stephen’s streams.  Again, they are short, fragmented sentences mostly.  But the paragraph above (and most other Stephenstreams) could not be Tweets for one important reason:  the ideas are too complex to fit into 140 characters.  Cutting the above paragraph into three wouldn’t work.  It’s all one idea.

Sense of smell must be stronger too.  Smell on all sides, bunched together.  Each street different smell.  Each person too.  Then the spring, the summer: smells.  Tastes?  They say you can’t taste wines with your eyes shut or a cold in the head.  Also smoke in the dark they say get no pleasure. (Joyce 149)

Bloom, on the other hand, never stays on one subject for very long–or, if he does, he includes enough randomness into the stream to allow a long one (like the one above) to be broken up nicely into many parts, like this:

Sense of smell must be stronger too.  Smell on all sides, bunched together.  Each street different smell.  Each person too.

Then the spring, the summer: smells.  Tastes?

They say you can’t taste wines with your eyes shut or a cold in the head.  Also smoke in the dark they say get no pleasure.

So there are really three ideas in the sentence, and I’ve gone ahead and broken up those ideas into tweets.  The first talks about blind people and their enhanced sense of smell, as you can probably already guess (though you’d be forgiven if you thought he was referring to animals).  The second follows from the first (smelling things differently at different times of the year), but even here, all by itself, it does make sense (though, granted, not as much sense as the two together).  The final really is a nugget all on its own, needing no context or explanation, and it is a perfect example of a Bloom tweet.  If Bloom did have a Twitter account, I’m guessing he wouldn’t have written up the first two posts but he would have no trouble sending out the third to the world to read.  In fact, just to test out my theory, I “tweeted” it myself just to see how it fit into the larger stream of messages.  Does it fit?  You tell me.  Here are some random tweets sent out around the same time I sent Bloom’s:

As their mouths succombed to desire, he ripped off her corset!  “Whoa Stableboy!” she moaned.  “My garments are more costly than yours.”

“Shouldn’t all gremlins die of dehydration?” The great comedy mind of Ben Schwartz.

steak coming on.

I would really like to rock this look at #nerdprom2 tonight.  http://tr.im/p588

http://twitpic.com/7tffi – I thought it would be good to buy a copy of the North County Times (San Diego) before I met with their Editor …

They say you can’t taste wines with your eyes shut or a cold in the head. Also smoke in the dark they say get no pleasure.

spent all night at hospital,got 40 stitches, finally left at 5am this morning, have $100 prescription and my arms HURT from all the shots

아아 @.@ 이래가지구서야 음주모바일 트윗 하겠어요 ^^;;; 술마시고 천지인 타자는 힘들어요 -_-;;;

Okay, two of those had URL links, which isn’t fair, and one is in Korean (I think), but you get the idea.  Yes, Bloom’s idle thoughts make just as much sense as everyone else’s.

that was a relief wherever you be let your wind go free who knows if that pork I took with my cup of tea after was quite good with the head I couldnt smell anything off it Im sure that queerlooking man in the porkbutchers is a great rogue I hope that lamp is not smoking fill my nose up with smuts better than having him leaving the gas on all night (Joyce 628)

And Molly?  Earlier I said that Molly Bloom would HATE Twitter.  The more I think about it, however, the more I am not so sure.  Yes, her sentences in the final section of Ulysses are each several pages long, but that’s largely a lack of punctuation.  Within each sentence are unpunctuated sentences and as much randomness as you’d find in Bloom’s thoughts or any Twitterer’s thoughts.  Take the above, which can be broken down like this:

that was a relief

wherever you be let your wind go free

who knows if that pork I took with my cup of tea after was quite good with the head I couldnt smell anything off it

Im sure that queerlooking man in the porkbutchers is a great rogue

I hope that lamp is not smoking

fill my nose up with smuts better than having him leaving the gas on all night

In some ways, all Joyce did with Molly’s streams was remove the punctuation and put them into one chapter.  Otherwise, they are just like any other tweets you’d find floating around (minus the tinyurls, of course).  In some ways, the randomness of Molly is far more intense and more intuitive than Leopold’s–and in this way, makes Molly the true “twitter elite” of her day.

In the end, though, why is any of this important?  Yes, stream-of-consciousness in Joyce’s great novel fits into the mechanisms of the Twitter world (with varying degrees of success)

Joyce’s novel is loved today (and was revolutionary when it came out) in part because he was able to find a way to render into language the randomness and complexity of human minds as they go about their daily business.  Twitter brings this same concept to the masses by allowing anyone to post their random thoughts at will.  Granted, there’s a lot of self-censorship that goes into a Twitter post: people editing their stray thoughts down to those that would be best suited to a general audience.  But there certainly was plenty of censorship on Joyce’s part when he wrote the book (otherwise, it would have taken only a day, rather than a decade, to write).  Twitter and Ulysses also share in common things like advertising, references to pop culture, jokes, random stories, flame wars, hallucinations, parody, eyewitness events, and anything else you’ll find in the everyday conversations of human beings.  In the end, then, that’s what matters: that just as Joyce’s novel is a snapshot of the lives of Dubliners on a June day in 1904, so too is Twitter a snapshot of how individuals (both famous and unknown) live and breathe and think and work in our own time.

Photo of my copy of Joyce's Ulysses, opened to page 45

Yes, Bloom was indeed a product of social networking.  Here, verbatim, are Leopold Bloom’s “tweets” from page 45 of James Joyce’s Ulysses:

Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right.  She didn’t like her plate full.  Right.

Cup of tea soon.  Good.  Mouth dry.

Just how she stalks over my writingtable.  Prr.  Scratch my head.  Prr.

Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes.

They call them stupid.  They understand what we say better than we understand them.  She understands all she wants to.

Vindictive too.  Cruel.  Her nature.

Curious mice never squeal.  Seem to like it.  Wonder what I look like to her.  Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.

[One note: Yes, I cheated on the last three; they're part of the same stream, but I figured Lbloom (or whatever his handle would have been) would have cut it up into three tweets as well.]

Yes, this is the new Inkbottle, now hosted by Wordpress (that is, by me, since Wordpress runs on my own server).  Take a look around and tell me what you think!

Joyce playing piano

I’m working on the assumption that Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses was the inspiration for Twitter (if not in reality at least in theory). Read Ulysses, read the stream of consciousness rambles that Bloom spews out in that novel, and you’ll notice that his thought are short and compact yet very complex–just like twitter messages.

Tweets, as they are called, are limited to 140 characters in length. Why 140? This is the explanation at the Twitter website:

It also just so happens that 140 characters is the perfect length for sending status updates via text message. The standard text message length in most places is 160 characters per message. We reserve 20 characters for people’s names, and the other 140 are all yours!

Bloom’s thoughts seem to follow along these rules. Bloom was also really into the latest technologies of his time and would, no doubt, be a regular rambler on twitter if he were walking around Dublin circa 2009 (a regular Stephen Fry or Ashton Kutcher). So it makes sense to see Bloom as a big twitter fan.

I’ll say more about this once I go back into my copy of Ulysses and dig around for good “tweets.” Who knows–perhaps there’s an essay here.

Final thought: Molly Bloom, unlike Leopold, would HATE Twitter. She’d need her own blog.

Top Ten

1. Water
2. The Beta Band’s The 3 EP’s
3. The Vaselines
4. Planning trip to London in January
5. New Squidbillies
6. Feedly
7. Top Gear (and I’m not even a car person)
8. JG Ballard’s Vermillion Sands
9. Touch
10. Flickr

Bottom Three

1. Grading essays
2. Eating too much junk food
3. Heat

One picture wasn’t enough, so here’s the whole story.

Originally published 5/30/09

House Painting ALL DONE, originally uploaded by Commodius.

We spent 3 months getting out house repainted. It was costly and stressful, but it’s nearly done. Here’s some proof. The cat on the lawn is Steve. He loves the lawn and the fact that the guys painting the house are now out of his back yard.

Originally published 5/27/09

Top 10

1. 30 Rock
2. Easy Star All-Stars, Radiodread
3. Jeremy Davies on Lost
4. Kode9 & the Spaceape, Memories of the Future
5. Venture Brothers 3rd Season on DVD
6. JG Thirlwell, The Music of JG Thirlwell, Vol. 1 (Original Soundtrack)
7. King’s Hawaiian Sweet Rolls
8. Ableton’s Live 8
9. Dub Echoes
10. JG Ballard’s Vermillion Sands

Bottom 3

1. Republicans
2. Hysteria over Swine Flu
3. Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (sorry, guys)

Originally published 5/2/09