The depiction of Mark Zuckerberg, in The Social Network, as a bastard with symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome, was nonsense. But it felt true. It felt true to Facebook, if not to Zuckerberg.

— Stephen Marche
theatlantic

I am always happier when I have a book in progress. Living with a book in process is like living an alternative reality. You are out of time, it is a kind of transport, a kind of addiction.

— Susan Gubar
chronicle

Nearby, another group was being brought up: my gaze met that of a beautiful young woman, almost naked but very elegant, calm, her eyes full of an immense sadness. I moved away. When I came back she was still alive, half turned onto her back, a bullet had come out beneath her breast and she was gasping, petrified, her pretty lips trembled and seemed to want to form a word, she stared at me with her large surprised incredulous eyes, the eyes of a wounded bird, and that look stuck into me, split open my stomach and let a flood of sawdust pour out, I was a rag doll and didn’t feel anything, and at the same time I wanted with all my heart to bend over and brush the dirt and sweat off her forehead, caress her cheek and tell her that it was going to be all right, that everything would be fine, but instead I convulsively shot a bullet into her head, which after all came down to the same thing, for her in any case if not for me, since at the thought of this senseless human waste I was filled with an immense, boundless rage, I kept shooting at her and her head exploded like a fruit, then my arm detached itself from me and went off all by itself down the ravine, shooting left and right, I ran after it, waving at it to wait with my other arm, but it didn’t want to, it mocked me and shot at the wounded all by itself, without me; finally, out of breath, I stopped and started to cry. Now, I thought, it’s over, my arm will never come back, but to my great surprise it was there again, in its place, solidly attached to my shoulder, and Häfner was coming up to me and saying, “That’s enough, Obersturmführer. I’ll take over for you.”

— Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones

When Eric Althoff answered a Craigslist ad for a copy editor for a publication with adult content, he had no idea that he’d soon work for one of the most famous (or infamous) magazines in America: Hustler.

But that’s exactly what Althoff did for four years, editing copy for the pornographic magazine and doing some reporting for it as well. He met porn stars, rock stars and publisher Larry Flynt. Althoff shared his experiences at a session at the ACES conference titled “Even Porn Needs Style.”

In some ways, Althoff said, working at Hustler was like working at any other magazine, dealing with page layouts and production deadlines. Larry Flynt Publications had what he called a “conservative corporate environment.”

The content of Hustler, of course, is hardly conservative. The copy that Althoff worked with contained what he called “the saucy language and colorful terms” of porn that also popped up often during the session.

“Images of a salacious nature have always included words,” he said. Those words may appear in headlines, captions and story text. That’s why, he said, porn needs editing like anything else.

Hustler’s stylebook is similar to others, Althoff said, offering guidance to writers and editors at the magazine on word choice for its readers. Among those at Hustler:

— blow job vs. blowjob
— porno vs. porn
— phone-sex vs. phone sex
— girl next door vs. girl-next-door
— cover babe vs. coverbabe

In each of these examples, Hustler prefers the latter usage. On occasion, the magazine would update its stylebook. For example, it now uses “hos” rather than “ho’s.”

Indeed, Hustler will bend its style rules on occasion. Althoff said that the magazine prefers “come” as a verb and “cum” as a noun in references to ejaculation. But on the magazine’s cover, it would allow “cum” in either situation to get the attention of potential buyers. “‘Cum’ is going to jump out at consumers,” he said.

Althoff stressed the need for porn editors who edit such content to keep a distance between their professional work and their personal lives. He did that, he said, but after four years, he had had enough of Hustler for personal and professional reasons.

Althoff went into consulting work for a Web company and then to Brides magazine. He’s now freelancing and said that potential employers always ask about his Hustler experience.

Regardless of the type of content, Althoff said, it’s important for editors to keep in mind how language evolves. “The English language is very elastic,” Althoff said. “Change it if you need to.”

— Contributed by Andy Bechtel
nola.copydesk

In England in the sixties and seventies I was often out and about leading the literary life, and I met a surprising number of my heroes without really seeking to. The real surprise, each time, was that they were all in character. One night in Hull I was performing a cabaret act in the student bar and it turned out that the dour adult figure sitting at the back was Philip Larkin. Later on he told me that he was so deaf he hadn’t heard a word, and I was too dense to ask him why, in that case, he had come. In London I saw a lot of Kingsley Amis and he was almost never not irascible. He could talk enchantingly for hours about abuses to the language but if he caught you abusing it he would always give you what for on the spot. Robert Lowell was in London for a while and I had several opportunities for observing just what a handful he could be. I thought he was a nitwit, but strictly in the sense that he was normally something else, and turned dippy only when the wind changed.

William Empson was well-known to have been wildly eccentric from the beginning. It would have been a tough reputation to live up to at a first meeting, but when I finally did bump into him in Cambridge one night he effortlessly soared off the scale of weirdness into a realm I had not previously encountered. He was giving a reading in the Cambridge Union and I—still a graduate student, so it was a great honor—was one of the support readers. A few lines into his first poem he started explaining it, and his explanation became so abstruse that he shifted from side to side. He was on the point of walking in circles when I offered to help. As I remember things now, I would read a stanza of the poem and then he would start explaining again. It all took forever and gave the audience plenty of opportunity to study his beard, which was at that time in a phase when it all occurred below the level of the chin, as if he had stuck his head through a rug. We support readers were cut down to about five minutes each but he was very kind about a poem of mine, and started explaining it to me.

Since I thought the world of his work, I took this as a high compliment. But he wasn’t yet through with his largesse. From a side pocket of his jacket he produced a crumpled plastic sack which had obviously been in there for some time. The contents were well crushed, but with typical precision he identified them. “Would you like a crisp?” I took a few fragments and chewed. They tasted very old, like flakes from the wall of an ancient Egyptian tomb. I was beginning to get the idea that the verbal titans might not necessarily be models of sanity. Later on this perception came in handy for the vital and continuing task of not setting unreal standards of normality for yourself when you are engaged in an activity quite so strange as pushing words together into patterns and expecting people to listen to them.

I have never met the greatest of my heroes, Richard Wilbur. Everything I have ever read about him contributes to the picture of a man who can start his career staring German Panzer divisions in the face and yet still achieve work that is a miracle for its clean, sane poise. Once, in London, not long after I arrived there, he gave a reading at the American embassy and he was so preppy, so perfectly Phi Beta Kappa, that he glowed like an icon. As I write this he is getting old but in his latest photographs he still looks like a film star: one of the sane film stars, like James Stewart. Yet knowing what I know about all my other heroes, I won’t be surprised to hear that when they clean out his attic they will find it full of plastic bath toys.

There again, Empson’s principal advantage had been that there was nothing to discover. Quite early in his adult life he had established it as standard practice that he would make sexual advances to people of either gender as long as they never washed, for example. Nothing came as a surprise except, on the night I met him, one thing: the batty, hair-framed face was fully concentrated on you as if you yourself were one of the scientific phenomena in one of his marvelous poems. If you were still at the stage of doubting your own identity, it could be unsettling to meet someone who seemed not to doubt it at all. He was really tremendously interested in what I thought of the crisps, so I chewed my mouthful with a show of connoisseurship, thinking: Try to say something interesting, this guy is a genius.

— Clive James
poetryfoundation

“It was yesterday, five hours later than now,
That the twelve hundred and sixty-sixth year fell

Since the road here was ruined. I’m sending a crew
Out of my company in that direction
To see if sinners are taking the air. You go

With them, for they’ll not harm you in any fashion.
Come, Alichino and Calcabrina,” he cried,
“And you, Cagnazzo; and to be the captain

Of all ten, Barbariccia. And in the squad,
Take Libicocco and Draghignazzo too,
And Ciriatto with his tusky head,

And also Graffiacane and Farfarello,
And crazy Rubicante. Seach all around
The pools of boiling tar. And see these two

Get safely over to where the dens are spanned
By the next bridge, whose arc is undestroyed.”
“O me! O master, what do I see,” I groaned;

“We need no escort if you know the road —
And as for me, I want none. If you are cautious,
As is your custom, then how can you avoid

Seeing them grind their teeth and with ferocious
Brows threaten to do us harm?” And he returned,
“I tell you, have no fear: it is the wretches

Who boil here that they menace — so let them grind
As fiercely as they like, and scowl their worst.”
And then the company of devils turned,

Wheeling along the left-hand bank. But first
Each signaled their leader with the same grimace:
Baring their teeth, through which the tongue was pressed;

And the leader made a trumpet of his ass.

— The Inferno of Dante
tr. Robert Pinsky

ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.

You say just ice cream, I say justice cream.

–Kevin T. Keith
comments

By Pamela Paul
nytimes

With no small amount of trepidation, I lay open here the first page of my diary — high-­schoolish stabs at intellectualism, fleeting girlish obsessions, deliberately obscure annotations and all. After many failed adolescent attempts at keeping a journal, the summer after my junior year in high school, I finally found a format I could adhere to: Never mind describing the back-and-lack-of-forths of unrequited crushes and falling-outs with friends. I decided to list the books I read instead.

And I’ve stuck with this Book of Books, or Bob, as I’ve come to call it, ever since. Were my house to burst suddenly into flames, I would bypass the laptop and photo albums and even, God forgive me, my children’s artwork in order to rescue Bob, the record of every book I’ve read or didn’t finish reading since the summer of 1988.

The impetus for starting my book of books had less to do with recording my life than with documenting what my embarrassingly faulty memory failed to hold on to. I often can’t remember if I’ve read a book or not, nor do I remember the barest substance of those I have. A former beau once demanded to know the hero’s name in “Of Human Bondage” six months after I’d read it. “His object of desire’s name was Mildred,” I answered miserably. Though I’d spent more than 600 pages and nearly a month with the character, I couldn’t for the life of me remember his name. (It’s Philip, if you must know.)

Bob may not reveal the identities of individual characters — all that sort of thing is still lost — but it does show how one book led to another or prompted a total shift in genre. It records whether I’ve read an author before, and if so, when. Why had I left him, and what drew me back? Over the years, it’s become in certain ways even more of a personal record than a diary might be, not about what happened but about how what happened made me think, drove my interests, shaped my ideas.

It’s also become an itinerary of where I’ve been and where I really was while I was there. During my 20s, when I lived abroad and traveled frequently, I would annotate Bob with my location at the time, recording the serendipity of reading a particular book in a particular place. I remember how, lying in a dormitory in Mauriac, an unspectacular hamlet in central France where I was staying on an American Field Service program, I read the subject of the first entry, inspired by Baryshnikov’s performance in “Metamorphosis” on Broadway: “The Trial” (fittingly, an unfinished work).

Location often dictated content. When I backpacked through western China in the early 1990s, I picked up whatever discards I could get from passing travelers — Donna Tartt’s “Secret History”; a middling Tom Sharpe satire; “Ethan Frome.” I remember reading “Moby-Dick” during a lonely holiday on Ko Phi Phi, while most vacationers more reasonably nursed hangovers with potboilers and romance. And reading “A Distant Mirror” in northern France, where I could visit the nearby Château de Coucy.

I admitted to Bob when I read self-help or reread old favorites or tossed aside “Interview With the Vampire” after one chapter, mystified by its raging popularity. Bob knew that I was perennially behind on pop-cultural phenomena, that I read “A Civil Action” and “The Bonfire of the Vanities” years after the cocktail-party chatter faded. That I never finished “Paradise Lost” for freshman English. With 24 years of data, Bob reveals as much about my literary foibles, passing curiosities and guilty pleasures as any other diary.

For these reasons, I don’t generally share Bob with others. Whether it stems from envy or disappointment or genuine outrage, other people’s reactions to Bob are almost universally negative. “You’re tallying up books like the ticking off of accomplishments,” one ex-boyfriend accused me, as if I’d admitted to quantifying parental love or indexing my inner beauty. “Hurry, go note it in Bob,” he’d gibe every time I closed a book.

“What does this tell you if you don’t remember anything about the book?” another asked, suggesting an expanded Bob with a page of my impressions of each book in its stead. (That lasted one book; the relationship didn’t last much longer.) “You’re not seriously going to allow books on tape, are you?” demanded a third.

Quite a few people just can’t get past the numbers. I didn’t even think to enumerate my entries until I was somewhere in the 300s, at which point I went back and counted. But I will admit to satisfaction in the growing tally, if also an element of danger: Have I read as many books this March as I did last? What’s my yearly average? What of the long books that slow me down: “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” “The Power Broker,” “The Pickwick Papers”? There’s also the inexorable decline over time, my rate dropping in response to accumulated responsibilities, children to care for, piled-up magazines competing for my attention.

Bob is otherwise showing his age. At some point, I spilled coffee on him; the gray cover is mottled, and one corner is woody and bare. Truly hopeless, I occasionally forget to enter a book I’ve just read. But I always eventually go back, ever faithful, and note the missing volumes.

Shortly after we met, my husband met Bob and came up with his own variation, the Blob (Big List of Books), which he enters into his computer. An upgrade, I ­decided.

If a child is dosed with psychotropic drugs throughout the process of growing up,  what does that mean for their sense of agency? For their ability to achieve mastery over their emotions and behavior? Who would they be if not for their pill?

— Casey Schwartz
thedailybeast

By Eric Liu
theatlantic

In a recent episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones, a treacherous courtier tells the queen regent he knows the true identity of the young king’s father. “Information is power,” he hisses. Immediately, she orders her guards to seize him, shutter his business, and kill him — and then, just as quickly, she makes a show of casually changing her mind. As her men release the shaken courtier she retorts, “Power is power.”

American politics is not a game of thrones. But it is an arena for the exercise and pursuit of power. Indeed, our constitutional democratic market republic is far more complex, with far more permutations of potency than any king’s court ever had. To understand civic life and history in the United States is to understand power, public and private, in its fullest possible expression.

Why, then, doesn’t anyone teach it like that?

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who has devoted her post-Supreme Court career to reviving civics, points out that the point of free, compulsory public schooling was to make citizens. But over recent decades, the quality and availability of civic education in our schools has been in serious decline.

This is partly because the left has pushed schools away from an Americanizing mission, while the right has made any interesting substantive debate about American history or society subject to toxic controversy (see the Arizona law banning ethnic studies). These and other forces — like the push to promote STEM subjects — have left civics neglected, underfunded, and decidedly unsexy.

The results are distressing, if not surprising. Nearly two-thirds of our students today are below proficiency in national tests of civic knowledge. Less than a third of eighth graders can identify the purpose of the Declaration of Independence.

A few encouraging innovations have arisen in response. O’Connor has launched iCivics.org, an online platform that uses video games to teach civics to over a million middle schoolers. Participant Media’s TakePart.com will debut a series next week called 60-Second Civics, explaining things like the Electoral College with lively animated videos tuned to Gen Y sensibilities. Rock the Vote has created a pop-infused “Democracy Class” program for high school students.

But in most classrooms where civics is still being taught today, something central is missing. Students get facts and explanations of process. Sometimes they get a real encounter with an issue like poverty or sustainability. What they almost never get is this: a systematic understanding of how to get what they want.

I propose to revive civics by making it squarely about the thing people are too often afraid to talk about in schools: power, and the ways it is won and wielded in a democracy.

Imagine a curriculum that taught students how to be powerful — not only to feel empowered but to be fluent in the language of power and facile in its exercise.

It would teach them that civic power — the capacity to effect desired outcomes in common life – can derive from ideas, wealth, status, charisma, collective voice, and control of violence. It would show how power throughout our country’s history has been exercised and justified, for good and for ill.

A power civics curriculum would focus on a host of hard skills often ignored in procedural or fact-centered civics lessons:

• How to see the underlying power dynamics beneath every public controversy.
• How to read the power map of any community.
• How to organize and mobilize people to achieve an objective.
• How to force certain issues into public discussion.
• How to challenge entrenched interests.
• How to apply pressure on elected officials.

These kinds of how-to’s would make historical set-pieces like the Ratification or the Missouri Compromise suddenly much more vivid. They would illuminate contemporary fights over health care. They could be used to shed light on the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street or the antecedents of both.

This approach — a pedagogy of the self-governing — would best be learned and taught by doing. A power civics curriculum should be hands-on and project-based, giving students the chance to move people and catalyze action.

There do exist excellent experiential civics curricula where students create community projects and advocate for policy. The Civic Action Project developed by the Constitutional Rights Foundation is one promising example. But “lab” approaches like these are the exception today, not the rule. Every classroom should be teaching youth the strategies and laws of civic power.

Does all this seem unseemly? Perhaps one reason why so few civics courses go this route is that the whole topic feels so Machiavellian–which is to say European, medieval, calculating. It’s too Game of Thrones.

But pick up any book by, say, Robert Caro — whether about Robert Moses and the making of modern New York or young Lyndon Johnson and the path he took from Texas Hill Country to the White House. Take a look at why your city council chose one development proposal over another. Ask why Congress can’t bring itself to disfavor its donors. You will quickly recognize what you weren’t ever taught as a kid: There is a secret curriculum that explains how stuff actually gets done in America. In a democracy, that knowledge should be democratized.

Could power civics be abused to create amoral tacticians who use their skills for evil? Sure. Such a risk, though, is inherent in the revelation of any knowledge, from microbiology to law. This just underscores the need for ethical context — for the why that comes with the how — and some civiccharacter education.

In the end, teaching civics while avoiding the topic of power is like teaching physics while avoiding thermodynamics. It’s a bland pretense, demotivating to teacher and pupil alike.

All young people want to understand how to be more powerful and effective, individually and in groups. Give them that understanding — teach them power — and they will be highly motivated to keep learning. They will be curious about the origins of today’s social and economic arrangements. They will develop an eye for ways to reform those arrangements. They will cultivate an appreciation for what is exceptional about the system we’ve inherited. They will feel more responsible for combating rot and sclerosis in that system.

They will, in short, become a generation of great citizens. That would be powerful. And it just might save the republic.

I have already thought about it before, where does fascism begin. It does not begin with the first bombs that are thrown, it does not begin with the terror one can write about, in every newspaper. It begins in the relationships between people. Fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman.

— Ingeborg Bachmann, in a 1973 interview
(via tumblr)