May 21, 2021

Etcetera #16: Criticism, Asterisks, Brassicas

Matthew Culnane

Hello. Here are this week’s picks. A minor change in format this week as I had a lot to include—let me know if you prefer it this way. If you’re new, you can subscribe here. There’ll be no issue next Friday, so I’ll see you in June.

How a Review Changed Both Sarah Silverman and Our Critic

In 2005 A.O. Scott was very critical of Sarah Silverman’s Jesus Is Magic for its reliance on ironic, deliberately offensive jokes about topics such as race and gender. The unexpected result is that the criticism deeply affected both parties.

Silverman, while rightly pushing back on several of Scott’s points, underwent a period of self-reflection that brought about a fundamental change in approach:

But the thing you wrote that kind of changed me on a molecular level, which is what, I think, you were kind of onto at the time was completely what I was abusing — and you saw that before anyone else, and you made me see it — which is I’m liberal, so I’m not racist, so I can say the N-word, because I’m illuminating racism.

Scott acknowledges the projection on to Silverman of his wider complaints about a specific type of comedy, popular at the time, and his own involvement in his criticism:

Of course, and I think when you said I was projecting, you were right in a few different ways. For one thing, probably projecting my own comic tastes and ambivalence. I also like Steve Martin. I think the first comedy record I ever bought was “Let’s Get Small.” But I think one reason I wrote about the show the way I did was that I recognized a problem that I had, too. One of the things I would change or take back about the review is not implicating myself, judging you but not making it clear that also there was a self-critique in it: that is, I think that the problem you just described as “I’m liberal, so what I say is OK,” I’m saying it in quotation marks. I have these oven mitts of irony on that, so no one’s here going to get burned, and also not just [me], but everyone in this room. We all know.

It’s unusual for a piece of criticism to have such an effect on both critic and subject and for both to come out all the better for it.

www.nytimes.com

See also: back in Etcetera #12 I linked to Emily Pothast’s piece on Gen X comedy and irony, one of the most useful lenses through which to view many of these conversations and reflections. This week’s discourse purports to make me a geriatric millennial—I do not know if this is better or worse than ‘xennial’ or any of the other marketing generation variations—but the more times I read Emily’s piece the more insight I have into the comedians a few years older than me. I like Silverman’s reaction to this as much as I disliked her ‘I can joke about anything I want’ approach that I too carried with me for many years. Let’s blame Bill Hicks.

Asterisk

In recent issues we’ve had links looking at various aspects and usage of typography, from the grawlix to signposts to watches. Here’s a nicely thorough piece on the history and use of the asterisk in typography and mathematics as well as a signifier of further detail.

cormullion.github.io

Fun fact: three asterisks in a row as a section break in a text is called a dinkus.

Greens: why we eat the leaves that we do

Back in the mid 2010s I took a secondment within the university I was working in, moving from an academic-focused unit to a more comms-focused one. In an early meeting my new team were discussing how one of them didn’t like the taste of broccoli, cabbage or cauliflower. I off-handedly mentioned that they were all part of the same family and was met with a reaction that fell somewhere between indifference and sympathy that I would know this appallingly useless information, let alone volunteer it to others. I think it was then that I knew I’d made a mistake in moving. In my previous office the delivery of such a fascinating fact would have gone down like a stoppage-time winner and I’d have been carried out of the office on my adoring colleagues’ shoulders. The secondment was transformative in other ways. Later, one of my new team, generally suspicious me, introduced me to a beautiful girl as “Matthew? Well, he knows a lot about kale.” The joke’s on him because she and I had a baby together! A baby that I feed various kinds of Brassica oleracea to!

As is customary, I digress. This article looks at which branches of the evolutionary tree of plants bear edible leaves and speculates about the reasons why. It’s very interesting—but then, I do know a lot about kale.

botanistinthekitchen.blog

The Etymological Week

Mark Forsyth on the surprisingly slippery concept of the week—when we started using it as a period of time, why it is seven days, and where the names of the days come from.

blog.inkyfool.com

See also: more everyday etymology in how the letters of the alphabet got their names.

What’s the healthiest news diet? Probably traditional media, but don’t gorge yourself: Too much can leave you less informed

Josh Benton on a new study of nearly 30,000 Europeans that produced some counter-intuitive results:

The International Journal of Press/Politics, looking at news usage in 17 European countries, finds that good ol’ traditional media is probably best for your political IQ — including high-quality public media, if you can find it. A vigorous online news regimen can also be good for knowledge, mostly. But ironically, gorging on all the news you can find might leave you less informed than someone who’s more selective.

Tag yourself: News minimalist, Social media news user, Traditionalist, Online news seeker, Hyper news consumer.

www.niemanlab.org

‘The Flavor Equation’ by Nik Sharma is all about sugar, spice and a pinch of science

Nik Sharma is a cook and writer who seeks to understand why food tastes the way it does. He’s regularly compared to Heston Blumenthal, but I think a more apt similarity in approach is with that of Kenji Lopez-Alt or even Felicity Cloake—cooks whose science-influenced recipes are achievable in a home kitchen. Sharma shares appealing, accessible dishes that acknowledge their origin and focus on why the ingredients and methods work as they do, allowing for informed experimentation on the part of the cook. Here’s an interview with Julie Merin Varughese about his book The Flavour Equation.

www.thehindu.com

See also: Niki Segnit’s The Flavour Thesaurus treads similar ground. A huge number of flavour pairings are considered, from the well-known to the never-considered.

Narrative Napalm

Noah Kulwin on Malcolm Gladwell. A masterclass in evisceration:

Malcolm Gladwell’s decades-long shtick has been to launder contrarian thought and corporate banalities through his positions as a staff writer at The New Yorker and author at Little, Brown and Company. These institutions’ disciplining effect on Gladwell’s prose, getting his rambling mind to conform to clipped sentences and staccato revelations, has belied his sly maliciousness and explosive vacuity: the two primary qualities of Gladwell’s oeuvre.

thebaffler.com

Etc.

In Etcetera #13 I wrote briefly about nested identities in the context of being British. Here’s a piece on how Scots are less likely to identify as European than others in the UK.
Cory Doctorow on blogging, note-taking and commonplace books.
The Italian dialects in South Philadelphia. Useful for understanding how Sopranos-esque variations like ‘gabagool’ and ‘mozzarell’ originated.
On speedrunning Celeste.
Anglo-Norman eleventh-century cathedrals are the biggest in the world, not those in France as is commonly thought.
Scientists discover why Roman concrete gets stronger over time. It’s due to seawater dissolving volcanic ash and forming aluminous tobermorite, a rare crystal. Practical applications include the engineering of nuclear power plants.
I finally got round to finishing David Epstein’s Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World and was a bit non-plussed after all the fanfare. It was interesting, but a bit like an extended blog post full of loosely connected anecdotes. Here’s a decent review about a different aspect that I mostly go along with.
I’ve listened to more episodes of Settling The Score since linking to the Terminator 2 one a few issues ago. Here’s a good exploration of the Back To The Future score’s ‘crazy cartoon energy’. I love this podcast.
Sheryl Crow’s ‘All I Wanna Do’ is taken wholesale from a poem by Wyn Cooper.
On ‘platform football’ and Spotify chief kleptomania officer Daniel Ek’s attempt to buy Arsenal.
My friend Heather is in a band called Krush Puppies. Here’s their latest single, Slay The Dragon, which mixes 60s British psych with 90s American indie.

Max Gowan (Full Set) - WKNC's The Lounge

Here’s another pal, Max Gowan, playing 3 of his songs with Travis Harrington on drums. The thing I like the most about Max’s music is that the first time you hear it, you can almost predict and hum along with a decent part of the melody before it goes in a completely unexpected and better direction. I expect this is something he’s absorbed from the likes of Elliott Smith, Built To Spill and Alex G. (Related: play any 3 diatonic chords from a given key and add a fourth out of left-field. You just wrote a new Nirvana song.)

Artificial Intelligence converts Spice Girls "Wannabe" into a Nine Inch Nails song [OpenAI Jukebox]

Using OpenAI Jukebox to produce a NIN cover of ‘Wannabe’ by the Spice Girls.

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Matthew Culnane @coldbrain

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