Return to Oz

A little later today, I'll be off the see the Wizard -- the latest one, as portrayed by James Franco -- without especially high hopes, as the film has been widely panned for all of the reasons -- unconvincing characters, jumbled plot, over-reliance on digital effects -- that I was most concerned about when I first heard of it last year.  Still, having seen every other surviving film version of L. Frank Baum's story (along with the musical Wicked), I feel a certain obligation to check in on my old favorite fairyland, if only to reflect on how it's changed.  Of course, no film will ever be able to complete with the glorious 1939 musical version, a film I have watched more than any other, starting in the 1960's when it was hosted on television every spring by Danny Kaye, and when -- since I didn't have a color set -- the "not in Kansas anymore" line wasn't about color, but about the slow greyscale panorama of plastic plants, concealed Munchkins, and the invisible, ethereal chorus (referred to in the screenplay as "optimistic voices"). It remains, for me, the most important film of my childhood, and one that I will always love more than any other.

But as critics have lined up to disparage this latest effort, they've been painting with a rather broad brush -- and in some cases, a roller -- as with Chris Heller's piece in today's Atlantic, where he laments the "Sad, Century-Long History of Terrible 'Wizard of Oz' Movies." And, though there there sure have been a few stinkers along the way, as well as versions that I simply personally can't for some reason, stand watching (The Wiz), there have also been some remarkable films.  L. Frank Baum himself staged his Oz tales as "Radio Plays," combining puppets, full-size actors, film, and lantern slides; he also licensed them to the Oz Film Company, whose efforts -- uneven at best -- can be seen on supplemental DVD's with most sets of the 1939 film as well as on YouTube.  A 1925 silent, featuring Larry Seman as the Scarecrow and Oliver Hardy (yes, that Oliver Hardy) as a rather rotund Tin Woodsman, is marginally better, and deserves remembering for its innovation of the "dream sequence" concept, in which the Kansas farmhands are played by the same actors as Dorothy's later friends in Oz.

The 1939 film, for all its wonders, was not an immediate hit; it wasn't until it started being shown on television in the late 1950's and early 1960's that it gained the wide audience of children who took it directly into their hearts; what other televised film can count among its fans both Denzel Washington and Salman Rushdie?

For Chris Heller, the greatness of the 1939 film forms a narrative bridge -- I'll resist calling it a rainbow -- from which to disparage every other film adaptation of Oz, even those I somehow suspect he hasn't actually seen. For, among the list of films he disparages there is in fact one true gem -- an adaptation of Baum's Oz stories that is richer, darker, and more faithful to the original books than even the 1939 film: Walter Much's 1985 Return to Oz.  Murch, for whom this has been, so far, his only turn in the director's chair, is perhaps best known for his work on sound design; in the years of difficulty Francis Ford Coppola spent editing Apocalypse Now!, Murch was perhaps his closest collaborator. Murch got and kept the Oz job at the recommendation of George Lucas, whom Disney at one point had wanted to replace him -- and thank goodness they didn't. Return to Oz is gloriously, richly, darkly, deeply true to the spirit of Oz, and Fairuza Balk in her film début is brilliant as Dorothy.

Heller makes fun of the frame narrative, in which Aunt Em and Uncle Henry, desperate to find a cure for their daughter's delusional chatter about Oz, take her to an "electrical" physician for what appears to be some early form of shock therapy. It evokes the dream-residue frame narrative, and deepens it -- this film is about a child's determination not to condemn and reject her love of a place she believes in with all her heart. Her new companions -- a talking hen named Billina, a wind-up man known as Tik-Tok, and a pumpkin-headed mannikin named Jack -- are perfectly brought to life from the pages of Baum's original stories. The villains are Mombi (a conflation of two other wicked Baum witches) and the Nome King (one of Baum's most original creations, whose one great fear is eggs -- played in a career-best turn by Nicol Williamson). The ending is far more satisfying and emotionally resonant than that of the 1939 film -- for Fauruza Balk's Dorothy knows, as do we, that Oz is in fact a really, truly, live place.

I don't want to spoil the movie for those who haven't seen it -- but if somehow, like most people, you missed this film (when I saw it in a theatre in 1985, it was just me and the guy collecting for the Jimmy Fund), you simply must see it.  If Oz the Great and Powerful turns out to be as bad as some say it is, I can't think of a better antidote.

Massively Odious Online "Courses"

Columnist Thomas Friedman of the New York Times is the latest to add his voice to the chorus in support of the wonders and glories of MOOC's -- Massively Open Online Courses -- the lecture-driven streaming video productions which many élite schools (Harvard and MIT among them) are now touting as the next big thing in education.  Just think: millions of people around the world can hear the lectures of top-flight genius professors -- for free! Of course no one will get any course credit, or a degree from any of these fine institutions, but no matter! -- Maybe we'll have quizzes, and the students who do really well on the quizzes will get some kind of scholarship.  As Jon Lovitz might say, "Yeah, that's the ticket!"

Look, university education has evolved enormously since a few teachers and students rented some rooms in Oxford in the twelfth century.  In those truly "olden" days, the seven liberal arts -- Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy -- made up the essence of the curriculum. And, since Oxford (and Cambridge, and most other medieval universities) existed to prepare people for lives in the church or government, Theology was soon added. Professors stood at lecterns, and students sat on benches, with only the most senior students allowed at the front bench, from which actual questions -- at least, after the innovations of Peter Abelard at the University of Paris -- could be directed at those professors.  There was, in general, no tuition, although the cost of room and board, along with textbooks (which in those days had to be rented, being too expensive to purchase) made the taking of a degree prohibitively expensive, unless one were wealthy, or (like Chaucer's diligent Clerk) had friends to pay one's fees, in return for which one would diligently pray for the salvation of their souls.

One thing, however, has never changed, really: the idea that "education" (the word comes from the Latin ex-ductere, which, intriguingly, can mean either "to lead forth" or "to draw out or stretch") is something which takes place when teachers and students are in the same room. The UK system has evolved considerably, and now typically consists of a course of lectures, at which one sits, examinations, which are scored by fairly standard rubrics, and tutorials, which give students invaluable one-on-one experience.  In the United States, the first few private colleges (Harvard, Yale, Darmouth, Brown, and the rest) followed the British model for the most part, while the Land Grant Universities (established by the Federal Acts of 1862 and 1890) used a similar set of introductory lectures followed by smaller and more advanced classes, and expanded the curriculum at first to the more "useful" arts and sciences (such as agriculture and engineering) as well as professional certifications (education, social work, nursing, and so forth).  Universities sometimes had urban extension classes, and the UK system was made more accessible through the Open Universities scheme, made famous in the film Educating Rita.

But how to make education more "open" -- more available to the masses -- has remained a tricky question. Systems set up, such as the City College of New York, to provide college-level training to the less-privileged, eventually started charging tuition and fees, and once again access skewed along class lines.  The "Open University" system in the UK was preceded by regional institutions, the "Red Bricks," which sought to offer comparable on-site classes to those of the ancient universities.  Somehow, though, neither of these transcended the old "open élite" model: one educated the wealthy, and those who, from among the poorer classes, could be culled and promoted by 'merit,' leading both to their success and their co-optation by the ruling classes. For those who "made the grade," a lifetime of improved prosperity and prestige awaited.

Today, a terrible idea has begun to flourish: that an education should be measured by the economic benefits it confers. This is doubly strange because so many of the institutions of opportunity which sought to elevate those who strove to better themselves had also adopted the model of a 'liberal arts' education that had its roots in the ancient schools of learning. Education has always had some sort of economic benefit, but before now this was never its reason for being. A richer life, not a richer paycheck, was once considered its highest goal.

The MOOC madness well fits this new conception. Education is not for the enrichment of life for the many, it is for awarding laurels to the victors; it is not a mechanism to improve the intellectual life of  all, but a "race to the top" where the best and brightest will receive cash prizes.  The highly exclusive institutions which are poised to offer the widest array of MOOC's may seem, at first, to be the world's great benefactors: behold, they give away education for free!  But what they give is not in fact education at all; they give only a repeated, recorded message, like the lecture of one of the many dead professors at Hogwarts School in J.K. Rowling's universe.  Those who receive these lectures are, in fact, ghosts as well: they have no student ID's, cannot use the library, will receive no in-person advising or counseling, and the work they do will not accumulate.

Of course Harvard and MIT won't keep doing this for nothing.  Eventually, the MOOC's will have to be capitalized, will have to pay.  The first few tiers may be free, and then payment, or suffering through advertisements for cruises or medicines, will have to carry the freight.  A few people will, perhaps, be identified and elevated: come on down, you're the next contestant on This Education's For You! But in fact, the old inequities will be the same as ever: personal development and satisfaction for those who excel, and a broom and a mop for those who don't. And pure MOOC's, the ones that offer exams and follow-up but no in-person component, have a terrifically high rate of attrition and failure. "Blended" or "hybrid" courses which mix online and in-person instruction, fare much better, for reasons that seem to me obvious -- but in whatever form, the MOOC bandwagon looks set to march on, as our latest educational juggernaut.

Once upon a time, there were institutions in which many people, men and women, studied and prayed and lived a devout life which their communities believed redounded to the public good. But then one man, Henry VIII, asked cui bono? And the monasteries, abbeys, and religious foundations of England were closed at a stroke, the monks and nuns sent to fend for themselves, while the King's men rolled up the lead roofing and carried away the books.  What was left was pilfered by the local peasants, and all that remained were mere ruins.

If MOOC's become the way of the future, I fear for education in America, and the world: if no higher purpose than increased earnings can be found, then our system will, within a generation, be little more than a ruin itself.

Nam ... Rep ... Us!

The first person I ever heard about whose life made any sense to me was Superman.  He had come from an alien planet, Krypton, and wasn’t really related to Ma and Pa Kent, or anyone else on Earth for that matter.  Still, his parents were good people, and only wanted the best for him, so he had to figure out how to mingle in with Earth people, so that he wouldn’t get in trouble.  In one of the comics I had, there was a story-line where Superman had to tell the truth about everything – fortuntately, no one asked him about his secret identity.  Still, he had to tell the people around him what he really thought of them, when he could see with his superior intellect and x-ray vision that they were all in some way flawed or pathetic.  After one day of honesty, there were “down with Superman” rallies all over the country.  This was around the same time that everyone was burning their Beatles albums because John Lennon had said they were ‘more popular than Jesus.’  So much for honesty.

Another thing that fascinated was one of Superman’s lesser-known enemies, Mr. Mxyzptlk. Mr. Mxyzptlk was always trying to trick Superman into saying his name backwards, which would instantly transport him to the fifth dimension.  One time, Mr. Mxyzptlk tricked Superman into announcing the winners of a cricket race that worked like a horse race. He then bribed the cricket jockeys so that crickets named “Nam,” “Rep,” and “Us,” would be the first three winners.  Superman went ahead and announced them, but he didn’t suddenly get zapped into the fifth dimension.  Mr. Mxyzptlk was beside himself with rage, but Superman explained that it hadn’t worked because “Superman” wasn’t his real name.  His real name was Kal-el, so in order to send him to the fifth dimension, he’d have to say “Le-lak” (of course he didn’t really say those last words).  Foiled again.

Then there was the Bizarro world, where everyone looked like cubist paintings of their ordinary selves.  Not only that, but they all talked and thought backwards over there, mixing up “I” and “Me” and doing everything the opposite of the normal way.  There was even a Bizarro code: "Us do opposite of Earthly things! Us hate beauty, us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World."

Everyone who existed in the regular Superman world had a counterpart in the other: there was a Bizarro Superman, a Bizarro Lois Lane, a Bizarro Jimmy Olson, and so on.  For some reason that, even now, I can’t precisely identify, the Bizarro world made sense to me too.  The Bizarro Supermen were all married to Bizarro Lois Lanes, and their Bizarro super-kids were expected to do bad in school. If they did well, they were given Superman bad-tutors (complete with mortarboard hats) who taught them how to do it all wrong again.

Of course there was another code beside the Bizarro one, which was even more bizarre: the Comics Code, instituted after the moral panic over the evil influence of comic books on teenagers. No one could actually shoot anyone, no one could get killed, and bad guys always finished last.  Maybe it was the narrow restrictions of the Comics Code that drove writers to invent Mr. Mxyzptlk and the Bizarro World -- maybe not.  But if you could accept a guy in a blue suit and a red cape who could leap over tall buildings in a single bound, you could accept anything.

The End of the Web (not)

Self-appointed computer 'visionary' David Gelernter has news for us -- buzz buzz! -- the end of the Web is coming! Well, not exactly, but there will be no 'next' browser or web protocol; instead, we'll stop thinking spatially, in terms of 'pages,' and start thinking in a time-based manner, in terms of 'streams.' Presumably, our metaphors will change as well; we'll no longer speak of "going to" or "visiting" internet resources; neither will we 'surf' or 'browse' or 'explore.' No, we'll just swim in the stream, merge one stream with another, blend streams into a custom cappuccino of information, and search streams using exclusionary paradigms -- his example is a stream which we tell to temporarily edit itself so that it displays only those moments that mention cranberries. We won't use any of the old search language; instead we'll dynamically edit constant real-time streams. We will, however, do a heck of a lot of "scrolling."

But of course there's just one problem with this: we won't. The metaphors of information are, and have been, spatial ones, since the era of hieroglyphics and cuneiform. Our minds are, it seems, programmed for a sort of visual/spatial thinking -- it goes back, doubtless, to our very old days as hunter/gatherers. Whereas time, that seemingly old friend of ours, is quite a recent invention, and an annoying one as well; until well into the modern era, with the invention of the bimetal strip, which led to reliable and affordable pocket-watches, no one, quite literally, knew 'what time it was.' Time, although it exists in our minds as a constant flow, is in fact made up of all kinds of disparate material that our conscious minds work to stitch together; it is a production, not an exterior condition.  And, when it comes to the past, time gets murky; studies have shown that each time we recall past events, we alter our memory of them; it's the reason eyewitness testimony is often unreliable. A "line" of time, unlike a horizon-line in an image, is very much a cultural construct. 

Beyond that, we have some very suggestive empirical evidence that Internet users don't like to interface with life this way. Facebook has tried this with their "timelines" and the result has been almost universal hatred. Gelernter points to blogs, and to Twitter, as time-stream paradigms, but in fact the vast majority of Tweets that have any lasting impact contain URL's to more 'static' web resources. Blogs do indeed self-archive, and put the newest postings first, but people rarely search through these archives; if they come upon archived pages, it's usually through lateral links such as those generated by a search engine. Who among us has read a blog from start to finish?  Who would want to?  But Gelernter goes even farther; he expects that everyone will be accessing everything through streams that constantly flow in real time.  But do we want that either?  The number of Facebook users who leave or quit, frustrated with the continual barrage of 'news' and 'likes' suggests that this paradigm isn't going to be a crowd pleaser.  And isn't the current web founded on the pleasure of crowds, whence comes their (often unpaid) labor? 

But the other reason that the spatially-metaphored web isn't going to come to an end in favor of a time-metaphored one is that, to paraphrase Sun Ra, it's after the end of the world.   We already make time for our online doings, and whatever we do online becomes, if you want it to, part of a stream.  Those who want to access it that way already have all kinds of software to do so; if you'd like to get real-time updates to all the blogs you follow as an RSS stream, you can do it.  And more: if you want to think of the internet as a creature of time and flowing data, you already can think of it that way, model it that way, study it that way.  But while you're doing that, most of the people who are using it will be using it with spatial metaphors, and software to match.

Top 10 Books of 2012: An Eclectic List

At this time of year, there's only one thing more inevitable than the Mayan Apocalypse: Top 10 lists of books.  Best Books of the Year. Best young adult fiction. Best children's books. Or (a personal favorite) the 10 Most Frequently Banned books of 2012. But somehow, most of these lists all seem drearily similar; their purpose is usually not to attract interest in the extraordinary, but to anoint the significant, and as a result most of them are filled with the usual suspects.

I'll confess here and now that I don't read a great number of new books in any year. As a professor of English, my annual reading contains much more of the familiar -- the books I'm teaching, often for the fifth, or tenth, or twentieth time. I'm not interested in following (or breaking with) literary canons as such; what I require are durable books, books that can take constant repeating and still disclose unexpected treats: Hamlet, Our Mutual Friend, Robinson Crusoe, Jane Eyre, The Haunting of Hill House, Selected Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. But of course I have every opportunity to talk about these, and to a  (relatively) captive audience.  In between teaching and grading papers and my own writing, there's only a narrow space for the new, and I tend to be picky -- I hate disappointment, and don't want to spend any more time than I must with mixed bags and mediocrities.  Why, I often wonder, would someone write at all, if not to finely hone every sentence, and tell a tale whose urgency is equal to the art?

So my list of favorites from 2012 is a rather odd one -- new editions of the classics amplified by the editor's and printer's craft, unexpected posthumous memoirs, and nonfiction which illuminates something little-known or unjustly forgotten.  That's about it in a nutshell.

And so, in no particular order (I hate ranking things as though a book's good qualities could be gauged along the lines of a "Nutrition Facts" sticker -- they can't) here are my top ten. I'll put them in pairs, because quite often it's how books speak to each other that's most vital to their virtues.

My Friend Dahmer and Harvey Pekar's Cleveland. Yes, I'm from Cleveland -- and therefore I am entitled to love it and grouse about it at the same time. And, I like to point out, it's the home of two darkly brilliant figures: Pekar and Derf. Pekar's posthumous production, brilliantly brought to life by Joseph Remnant, aims to do for Cleveland what Joyce did for Dublin. Of course, being Pekar, he never quite gets there, and you realize somewhere along the way that one story will just always lead to another, blotting out the larger picture like a blizzard's worth of 'lake effect' snow. And that's, so very -- well, so very Cleveland. Derf, always a personal favorite, first told the tale of his high-school acquaintance with Dahmer n a 20-page B&W comic format book in 2002; I still love that version, though it's wonderfully extended and complicated by this new, far more substantial meditation on the origins of Dahmer's madness, and the mad mix of naiveté, angst, and long-haired buzzards that was the 1970's in northeast Ohio.

Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure and The Annotated Frankenstein That Arthur Conan Doyle's first experience abroad was as a ship's surgeon on an Arctic whaling voyage would seem at first to be as fantastical as one of his wilder tales, but here we have the facts in the case: a beautifully produced facsimile of the diary he wrote and illustrated on the voyage (I've reviewed this book more fully in The Arctic Book Review). And, remarkably, this diary, which opens with drafts of letters home, is particularly reminiscent of that of the fictional Captain Walton of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, now made available in a gorgeous new annotated edition from Harvard University Press. Remarkably reasonable in price ($29.95, but around $20 at many online sites), this handsome volume puts Frankenstein back in the rich historical contexts of its origins, from Arctic sea-voyages to half-abandoned Swiss chateaux, to the intense and fiery relationship between Mary and Percy, and includes numerous fine-reproduced full-color illustrations.

Col. William N. Selig, The Man Who Invented Hollywood and John Walker's Passage These two books stand at opposite ends of film history, but are complementary nevertheless. Erish's study of Selig is, in my view, the most significant and exciting new book on early US film history in many years. Selig was the first to move his studios to Hollywood, the first to create his own stable of animals for use in films, the producer of the first multi-reel blockbuster (The Spoilers), and the man who managed to convince the Pope himself to lift the church's ban on movies. He also shot the first all-Inuit-cast, Inuit-written film ever made, 1910's "The Way of the Eskimo."  Ninety-eight years later, Canadian filmmaker John Walker travelled to the Arctic to shoot his fascinating part-documentary, part-dramatic film Passage, highlighting the efforts of Dr. John Rae in bringing the difficult Inuit testimony of cannibalism among the last survivors of Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 expedition to England; Varga's study gives an succinct account of Walker's career, as well as illuminating the details of the production and reception of his film.

Cairns: Messengers in Stone and In Search of the South Pole David Williams's remarkable little book, which I've reviewed in full here, was the best surprise of the year for me: a book about little piles of stones that managed at once to be philosophically engaging and historically detailed, quite literally reading in those stones histories untold anywhere else. And, in a season of books about Amundsen and Scott, there was no better and more visually engaging treatment than Lewis-Jones and Herbert's sturdy volume, which combines beautifully-reproduced photographs of the expeditions and their gear (as well as illustrated ephemera from the era) with  compelling blend or original testimony and engaging historical commentary.

The Last Holiday and Waging Heavy Peace I've been a fan of Mr. Gil Scott-Heron since I saw him perform "Johannesberg"on Saturday Night Live in 1975. His strident but always elegant political messages and personal tales were muted in the 1990's and early 2000's due to personal problems of many kinds, but when he surfaced, as in 1994's Spirits and 2010's I'm New Here, he still had all the verve and sharpness of old.  Both these qualities are richly displayed in his posthumous memoir, The Last Holiday, most of which details a national tour he was on with Stevie Wonder, with tantalizing snippets of what came before and after.  It's a shame he didn't live to complete a fuller and more continuous story, but I'm grateful for what he managed and only wish there were more. And then, from another eclectic soul, we have Neil Young's Waging Heavy Peace -- Young, of course, was around to look over the final version of this volume, though you might not know it -- it's a rambling, scrambling, twisting, turning series of hideaways in which the author always seems to have moved on before you get there -- but immensely entertaining and fun along the way.

A Better Light Bulb

I'm going to miss the old incandescent bulb.  After all, it was the invention that started young Tom Edison on his way to becoming Wizard of Menlo Park, the bulb that appeared in a bubble when a character in a comic had a great idea, the kind of bulb that epitomized the old slogan that General Electric "brings good things to light."

We're about to enter, kicking and screaming of course, the post-incandescent era.  And that's as it should be -- it's an era that my Dad, Dr. Ralph M. Potter, who spent his career in the lighting research department at GE, saw coming a long time ago.  After all, as he was fond of pointing out, most of the energy from such bulbs was thrown away as heat.  Back when he worked for the company Edison helped found, there really truly was a constant search for a better light bulb.

My dad worked on new kinds of illumination whose efficiency and durability would eventually far surpass that of any incandescent light of its day, such as the light-emitting diode or LED.  In the laboratory furnaces at GE's Nela Park facility in East Cleveland, he oversaw the forging of immaculate crystals of gallium arsenide, crystals which -- encased in plastic -- would emit light in the visible spectrum.  Red was easily obtained, and he and his laboratory colleagues were among the first to develop yellow, green, and color-changing LED's.  They also worked on a new sort of lamp for large outdoor lighting, the "Lucalox" high pressure sodium arc lamp whose coppery golden color was remarkably close to the Sun's natural spectrum.  This kind of lamp is now so common that, when you fly over any large city from Boston to London to Tokyo, the cityscape below you is outlined in their pinkish glow.

LED’s and high pressure sodium arc lamps are also, as it turns out, extremely efficient, although General Electric wasn't initially interested in efficiency. It wasn’t until the energy crisis of 1973 that the demand for a more efficient light gained ground, and not until 1975 that GE management asked their researchers at Nela Park to quickly come up with a more efficient light that could replace the traditional incandescent bulb.

My dad was one of the key people on this team, and I vividly remember the prototype lamps, which we had in our living room.  They used both a low-wattage coil and a series of tiny arcs coated with different metallic halides that -- eventually -- produced a lovely warm white light.  The only trouble was that the halides were triggered in sequence as the light got warmer; when you turned on one of the test bulbs, a glass of milk placed beneath it would first turn blue, then pink, before assuming its proper white coloration.  These lights also required an electronic ballast, which back in the 1970's was thought to be ungainly and a sure loser with consumers -- which shows you how little anyone anticipated the compact flourescents of the future.

Still, despite all these issues, GE pressed ahead with the new bulbs, setting up a plant to manufacture them and putting together a marketing campaign to convince home consumers to use them.  The bulb finally debuted in 1981, but by then the energy crisis had passed, and no amount of marketing was going to convince your typical American to replace their 69 cent incandescent bulbs with newfangled $15 ones, even if they had been ten times as efficient.  And there was the blue milk to consider as well.

This past fall, my daughter and I went to a special exhibit on the history of lighting at the Smithsonian.  I was thrilled to see a mention of the Lucalox light, and I searched for my dad in the photos of the GE researchers that were included in the exhibit.  And then, quite by surprise, I saw my dad’s bulb -- under the heading “The Halarc Adventure: When Promotion Fails.” There was a quote from a GE engineer at Nela Park, Gilbert Reiling, who though he believed in the principle of the new bulb, regarded the results as “a disaster.”  At the end, a placard reminded the museum-goer, “as Edison often said, failure is part of the learning process.”

What GE learned, apparently, was that it wasn’t worth their while to keep a laboratory full of high-paid scientists dedicated to making a better light bulb. They decided that it would be cheaper to close the old lab and outsource the work to a bunch of low-paid Hungarian Ph.D.'s; my dad was among the first to take the "golden parachute" and retire.  The ivy-covered brick walls of the "campus" at NELA Park turned into a mausoleum of sorts, and GE even moved the making of its trademark bulbs overseas.  They could, had they wanted, have made more efficient bulbs much sooner -- but they had started too late, rushed the process, and ended up with a product that nobody wanted.

My dad died twenty years after the Halarc debacle, the victim of a variety of Parkinson's disease that he came to believe might have been triggered by some of the chemicals he worked with.  And now, seeing the last small displays of incandescent bulbs dwindling away in the corner of my local Home Depot, I almost feel like crying -- once for the better bulbs that lived in my father's thought-bubbles, and once for the departure of our old and warmly incandescent friend. But after all, most of its energy was thrown away in the form of heat -- it was past time for it to go.

Every Day I Hype the Book

I have to confess, I'd reached the point where I actually had started feeling sympathetic with Barnes & Noble. Haunted by the ghosts of Borders past -- it's hard to drive past any mid-size American shopping plaza without seeing the faceless hulk of one of their stores -- and realizing that, compared with the evil Amazon empire, B&N's market share was small. I'd become persuaded -- in part by a recent article from the New York Times --that perhaps yesterday's big-box Goliath was today's David, and might in fact be -- gulp! -- the "Bookstore's Last Stand."

But this morning, when I checked my e-mail and found yet another of the almost-daily promotional missives from B&N, I fell out of all sympathy. Under the dual headings of "Our Picks" and "The Books Readers are Talking About," I was treated to a virtual version of the same old Barnes & Noble bestsellers-first front table. Ken Follett, a name that always appears in 'all caps,' topped their list with Winter of the World, hyped as "a brilliant, page-turning epic from a master of the form." Fair enough, I thought at first, B&N has to make a living -- it's a business after all -- and scrolled downward. After a second "shelf" of bestsellers -- Sandra Brown, Joel Osteen, Salman Rushdie (I suppose he gets a pass), and the immortal 17 Day Plan to Stop Aging, there followed a few themed categories -- "New in Fiction," "Reads for Teens," "Best New Kids Books" (Lego Batman? Really?) The one that stuck out for me was "Discover Great New Writers" -- under which they offered Zadie Smith (why White Teeth and not NW?), Junot Diaz, Sherman Alexie, and Mark Danielewski. All I can say is, if you haven't "discovered" these authors by now -- they've been writing for a collective 48 years -- I'm not sure you're actually much of a reader.  And, dismally, that's still who Barnes and Noble has in their sights -- people who are not actually, well, readers.  Maybe it's because their new CEO, William J. Lynch Jr., by his own account in the NYT article cited above, never sold a book in his life until 2009.  But I think it runs deeper than that.  Lynch is just the latest in a long line of bookstore chain management who don't, primarily, come from a book background, or realize that selling books isn't at all like selling shoes, cellphones, or sportswear.  Lynch, in the same article, happily declares that B&N is, in fact a "technology company." Ouch.

I began my post-college career as a bookseller, working the floor in the late great Yale Co-Op in New Haven, which we called, accurately, the "largest independent bookstore between New York and Boston." We carried 80,000 titles, more or less, and in those heady pre-internet days we did our own homework: we knew who'd just been on Oprah, which was the most anticipated cookbook of the season, and who'd just died.  And we had their books, or if we didn't, we'd nip over to the microfiche reader, check the Baker & Taylor inventory, and get it to you in three days. We sold books, as a manager at San Francisco's Books Inc. described it to me recently, "by hand." Of course, we also sold our share of bestsellers, but we didn't make the mistake of thinking that they were why most of our customers were there.

And then it started.  I'd moved on to grad school, but my friends in the bookstore trade -- Borders, as it happened -- saw the writing on the wall: those who really knew and loved books were passed over for promotion, while managers were hired from outside -- from TJ Maxx, PayLess Shoes, or Pier I Imports -- or trained in programs run by the chain's home office. Books, the gospel ran, were just like other retail products: have a lot of 'em, have the top brands and new products everyone is excited about, and they'll sell.  What matter if you misspell "Louise Erdrich" as "Erdich" and wrongly tell a customer you don't have any books by that author?  They probably really wanted Ken Follett, anyway.

So I'm officially out of sympathy with Barnes & Noble.  They haven't learned from the mistakes of the past, they're just repeating them frantically in hopes of a different outcome.  And, like most vendettas, mine has a personal element -- the old Yale Co-Op bookstore closed some time ago, and is now -- you guessed it -- a Barnes & Noble.

UPDATE JULY 9th 2013: Lynch is out. Many have blamed him for mismanaging the very part of B&N that he supposedly was best at managing: its Nook reader and digital products. But in the meantime, the retail stores are in free-fall ...

A Day in the Life of a Meme

What a difference a day makes -- in the life of a meme, that is.  Meme (coined from the Greek mimesis, or "imitation"), was a term within aesthetics and evolutionary biology long before it was appropriated by the Internet; some credit its use in Richard Dawkins' widely-read The Selfish Gene as its most immediate source. In this context, it carries multiple meanings -- to imitate, surely, but also to mimic, and finally to mutate into a thousand variations, each competing alongside the other for resources -- in the case of the Internet, attention.  And while Warhol's prediction that in the future everyone will have "15 minutes of fame" may now seem too generous an allotment, Internet memes do seem to have a sort of life cycle of their own.

Take the image above, for instance.  At first, it looks as though DaVinci's "Last Supper" has been taken over by a bunch of clones of "Alice the Goon" (a figure invented by E.C. Segar, creator of Popeye).  But of course, as with most online memes, there is an antecedent image, one you'd have to have seen to 'get the joke': the image of a fresco of Christ in a church in Borja, Spain, "Ecce Homo," which had been "restored" -- that is, "ruined" -- by the apparently well-intentioned efforts of an elderly parishioner, Cecilia Giménez.  It seems that Giménez had already, with the priest's permission, been retouching Christ's tunic on the fresco; the trouble started when she tried her hand at his face.  The meme got underway quickly, given the grotesque awfulness of the effort; some early efforts pasted the face of (respectively) the Pink Panther, Alf, and Michael Jackson.  This was only the beginning: soon the goonish face appeared on a piece of toast, a reference to the "Christ on Toast" apparition (here as reported by the BBC in 2004); as the face of DaVinci's Mona Lisa, superimposed on a DEVO record cover, and painted over the screamer in Edvard Münch's "The Scream."  Then came the texts: "Viva La Restoration!" (in Che Guevara-like high contrast black on a red tee), "Paint me like one of your French girls" (a nod to Kate Winslet's line in James Cameron's Titanic), "A Star is Born," "It's Cool. I Fixed it," and the somewhat cryptic "I Pray to Potato."  But it wasn't until I saw "The Last Supper" version that I laughed.  And then I couldn't stop laughing.

Why?  Because of the artful symmetry: Cecilia Giménez had been trying to fix a damaged fresco; DaVinci's Last Supper survives only in a damaged state; the Goon head is funny on Jesus and thus, perhaps, it's 12 times funnier on all the apostles.  Actually, it is.

As one would expect, there are already several websites -- Memebase and  Know Your Meme among them, that do nothing but track and evaluate memes -- the Spanish Fresco is still a bit new for them ("currently being evaluated") but already well over 600 variations have been tracked, and groups on Pinterest and Facebook formed. Want to make a meme of your own? Drop by the Meme Generator. Some of the more impressive sites, such as memetracker.org, are geared toward verbal memes only, but offer vivid visualizations of their rising and falling trends.

But why?  And why do we care? When I think of this phenomenon, I think of the word cliché, which originated with the "clicking" sound made by a pre-cast piece of type containing a common set of words.  Of course we always had clichés, but we didn't know what they were until the printing press, and then the linotype machine, made them so readily visible to all of us.  Before that point, in oral traditional terms, one might be forgiven for thinking that an oft-repeated phrase was somehow truer or richer for its frequent repetition.  But the printed page showed us: what was common was cheap.

Now the Internet is performing the same miracle, only multi-media style.  After all, simple visual editing tools are readily accessible; all of us can cut and paste and some of us have Photoshop and Illustrator at our command. And we can quote -- that is -- repeat -- these images and texts on our own, using any of many social media platforms.  The path from originality to dead letter has never been faster.

A few months ago, I stumbled on one meme -- a text, but graphically represented as though on a poster: "BEWARE OF ARTISTS," the text declared, "THEY MIX WITH ALL CLASSES OF SOCIETY AND ARE THEREFORE THE MOST DANGEROUS."  Nearly 90% of these images had a text attached to them, claiming that this was an "actual poster" (always a suspicious way to make such a claim -- one might call it an "authenticity cliché") issued by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.  Needless to say, most of the people who liked this image the most were self-identified as artists.  After all, they need to feel that people care enough to be suspicious of them.

But the words rang false to me.  I tracked them using Google Books and other tools, and found that, in the age of printed memes on paper, this same phrase had often been attributed to Queen Victoria.  That sounded, if anything, even wronger (as Blackadder might say), but I gave a Google e-Book edition of the Letters of Queen Victoria a try.  And there, I found the meme's source -- a letter from Victoria's cousin, King Leopold of Belgium, written not by but to Her Majesty:

Dealings with artists, for instance, require great prudence; they are acquainted with all classes of society, and for that reason dangerous; they are hardly ever satisfied, and when you have too much to do with them, you are sure to have des ennuis — Leopold to Victoria, 10 October 1845

Delighted with my find, I eagerly posted a mimetic "correction," and a few sites, such as this one, picked up on this.

But really, I needn't have bothered; no one who shared the original version really cared; they had all moved on after the purported poster had done its all-too-brief work.  And that's the way it goes, with memes, at any rate.  Their power isn't in their truth, but in their infinite replicability.  One might as well criticize a piece of DNA.