In This Weekend’s Review, Feb 12-13

Asia’s New Arms Race

God at the Grammy’s: The Chosen Ones, by Neil Strauss

The Forties Footwear Fashionista, by Cecelie Rohwedder

and more….

At the End of the Day: 02/11/11

Endnotes:

• Live stream of the celebrations in Egypt
• Publishing in the era of screens
• Sauerkraut, bananas lead to false positives on alcohol tests
• Home-library porn
• A state-of-the-art debate about crime and incarceration (video)

Lowlights of the Mubarak Regime

Goodbye to all that. (Or so we hope.)

Mitt Romney Edits Himself

Washington Wire has a dispatch on Mitt Romney’s speech at CPAC, the conservative gathering in D.C.—which may or may not foreshadow a 2012 presidential run by the former Massachusetts governor.

“It is going to take a lot more than new rhetoric to put Americans back to work,” Mr. Romney said, teasingly, after taking copious shots at President Obama. “It’s going to take a new president.”

And speaking of new rhetoric! A writer for the Boston Phoenix happened to notice that Mr. Romney silently edited several passages in his book, “No Apology,” before its recent appearance in paperback. One sentence, for example, read, in the original hardcover:

Professor Forced to Remove Camera From Head

The NYU professor and artist Wafaa Bilal had a grand, techno-visionary plan: As a way to record his day-to-day experiences, and, moreover, as a commentary on the ephemeral nature of memory, he would have a camera implanted into his scalp that would automatically transmit photographs, at regular intervals, to a website.

He called the system the “3rdi,” and described it in terms that drew heavily on contemporary humanities theory:

The 3rdi arises from a need to objectively capture my past as it slips behind me from a non-confrontational point of view. It is anti-photography, decoded, and will capture images that are denoted rather than connoted, a technological-biological image. This will be accomplished by the complete removal of my hand and eye from the photographic process, circumventing the traditional conventions of traditional photography or a disruption in the photographic program. Barthes has said, “…from an aesthetic point of view the denoted image can appear as a kind of Edenic state of the image; cleared utopianically of its connotations, the image would become radically objective, or, in the last analysis, innocent.” It is this ‘innocent’ image that I wish to capture …

Unfortunately for Bilal, his immune system did not consider the three anchoring devices implanted under his skin entirely innocent. …

Chosen by God… to be a Grammy-Winner

What do musicians Lady Gaga, Snoop Dog and Christina Aguilera have in common?

They’re hugely famous.

They’re fabulously wealthy.

And they think they’re chosen.

The full story is here.

Mubarak Channels the Clash

Mubarak’s speech yesterday was far less clear-cut than anyone, including the CIA director, had predicted, as a belated viewing confirms:

Fund the Arts? ‘Let Them Watch YouTube’

Tyler Cowen, the libertarian-leaning economist, is mostly against government support for the arts, with some exceptions:

The case for state-level support for the arts is strongest, by far, for the state of New York for reasons related to tourism and New York City. But Manhattan, Kansas? Let them watch YouTube.

At the End of the Day: 02/10/11

Endnotes:

• Marc Lynch: Mubarak’s was the “the worst speech ever”
• Need an instant mission statement?
• It’s Sin Week at BPS’s Research Digest Blog
• “Rage-inducing chemical” sends squid into frenzy
• Technology bites back: man mistakenly records himself murdering wife

When Editing Goes Too Far

Writers never like it when editors, ahem, mess with their copy, but Mima Simic seems to have an unusually strong case against the people who massaged her text.

Simic’s story “My Girlfriend” appears in the anthology Best European Fiction 2011, published by the Dalkey Archive Press. Simic writes in Croatian, but did her own English translation. And, she says, she had it vetted by other English speakers.

Yet when the story appeared in the anthology, she found that her narrator, whose gender had purposely been unspecified, was now a man. And the narrator’s girlfriend, whose sexual preference had also not been made clear, was suddenly flirting with men….