"I may yet get married — statistically 90% of people get married at some point."

"But I would say that love and craziness has overwhelmed my life, and I am trying to write about it, and at the same time tell the story of New York City from 1609 to the present."

So writes Elizabeth Wurtzel, as quoted and diminished by Amanda Hess. Wurtzel writes about herself — and whatever else goes into the old talking-about-me grinder, like, apparently, the history of NYC — and Hess asserts "Wurtzel’s work has veered, Cat Marnell style, into the realm of self-help," then critiques Wurtzel for not giving good self-help. Is that fair? Maybe I haven't read enough Wurzel — here's here Reddit "Ask Me Anything" — but what I hear her saying is: I'm the wild bohemian, this is something I am deep in my soul and you are not and can never be, and therefore I am the writer and you are the ones who must read me, read me, read me.

Speaking of self-help, I wish I could help myself not to Google "Cat Marnell."

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"Feminism, in short, doesn't just empower women. It empowers me."

"It allows me to take on roles that have traditionally been associated with women. It gives me more flexibility in my career. As a man, feminism has had a huge positive effect on my life. It seems like the least I can do in return is own it."

Writes Noah Berlatsky under the heading "All the Selfish Reasons to Be a Male Feminist," posted at Slate's XXfactor. He's certainly not telling us all the selfish reasons, since I can think of at least one additional reason: You can get your free-lance writing published at Slate's XXfactor.

Berlatsky talks about having a wife with a full-time job and health insurance benefits and his own role as primary caregiver for their child while he does his writing, and that catches my eye, because it's the family life I had from 1981 to 1987. He says:

There was a time not so long ago where doing any of those things would have made me the object of ridicule, and quite possibly self-loathing as well. Today, though, it's no big deal — and the reason for that is feminism.

Well, there was feminism back then too, but it didn't save men from the inner turmoil of switching traditional gender roles. We thought we were really sophisticated, advanced, hip, and evolved in the early 1980s. Does that come as a surprise to you, Noah? You say, "it's no big deal," but you're writing at XXfactor, where it's in your interest — you have a selfish reason — to say that. But these things work until they don't work, so don't be smug, and good luck. Have you really thought deeply about your masculine self-esteem? Because, to my ear, your thanks feminism sounds shallow.

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Jim S. is right, I need more nominees for Most Embarrassing Sentence in Major Media, 2013.

He says:

I think if you're looking for the most embarrassing quote in major media, you can do no better than this description of Huma Abedin that Instapundit draws attention to:

She wore bright-red lipstick, which gave her lips a 3-D look, her brown eyes were pools of empathy evolved through a thousand generations of what was good and decent in the history of the human race.

Ultra-close readers of this blog with great memories know that I defended that sentence — and some sentences around it — as "so gloriously absurd, that they must be intentional satire and not a new level of good press."

So prod me toward some other nominees.

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"Which ultimately does more good — an article or monograph that is read by 20 or 30 people in a very narrow field..."

"... or a blog post on a topic of interest to many (such as grading standards or tenure requirements) that is read by 200,000?"

What if the post spurs hundreds of comments, is debated publicly in faculty lounges and classrooms, and gets picked up by newspapers and Web sites across the country—in other words, it helps to shape the national debate over some hot-button issue? What is it worth then?

These are 2 extremes, with the emphasis on numbers. Blog posts can also get lost in the endless flood of new words onto the internet. What is the value of any of these writings? The thing about a blog post is that you've got pressure to write clearly and to get it out quickly. Some material fits that form well and some does not.

Form and function. Think about it.

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Mr. Bezos, tear down that wall.

I don't think the ownership of the WaPo has exchanged hands yet, but my first thought on hearing the news that Jeff Bezos had bought The Washington Post is: He should take down the paywall. For about a day, I imagined that maybe he'd already made that happen. I was getting to lots of articles, but it turned out it was just close enough to the beginning of the month that I hadn't maxed out on the free access yet.

This morning, I'm trying to read "Jeff Bezos, The Post's incoming owner, known for a demanding management style at Amazon" and I have to hit the "reader" button to get to the text. Bezos needs to demand that the wall go. Having more readers is what really matters. Turning all that volume into money is something that can happen later. Isn't that how Amazon works? And anyway, Bezos already has so much money that he doesn't need to use WaPo to get more money. He needs it for his personal prestige and power. More readers suits that goal better than squeezing some money out of some of them.

Anyway, what is this "demanding style"? Paragraph 1 says he ends conversations that go on too long. Paragraph 2 says he has a "famously long-term approach." Interesting combination relating to time: patience in one sense and not in another. He's patient with the development of the product and the market, but wants efficiency internally. Paragraph 3 reinforces that point:

He favors a nimble, loosely organized company in which “two-pizza teams” execute important corporate tasks, because a work group requiring three pizzas over a lunch meeting is inherently too cumbersome. And he often requires employees pitching new ideas to write mock news releases for their product’s imagined launch, a way of focusing their minds on what will most excite customers.

Put it in writing. Don't blather with me for an hour, when you can crystallize your thoughts through the writing process, and I can read it all in a minute.

Reading on, there's lots about efficiency. It's one thing to hate to waste any time — many of us identify with that. What's unusual is the willingness to impose rigorous efficiency on others, to decline the comforts of being nice to the people in your immediate environment, and to do it out of regard for the customers, the people out there, out of your sight.

How will this style apply to running the newspaper?

Bezos has said that he intends to keep his focus on Amazon and keep his home in the Seattle area rather than becoming a fixture in Washington, as four generations of The Post’s outgoing owners, the Graham family, have been.

Good. Be the outsider. Be in it for us, the readers, not to be a part of some sick insider culture.

Bezos also has agreed to keep the newspaper’s top executives in place, though they may need to work without a popular corporate management tool: PowerPoint presentations.

Take away their crutches.

Bezos all but banned such presentations at Amazon around the time Edward Tufte, a computer science professor at Yale, wrote an essay saying that their bullet points encouraged lazy thinking. Amazon employees are required to write papers, known as “narratives,” that are no longer than six pages.

The idea for Bezos, former employees say, is that the act of writing forces people to focus their thoughts and think them through.

So Bezos has been about writing. Writing, marketing, efficiency... Okay. Show us the newspaper.

And stop blocking the view. Tear down that wall.

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"It is ironic that Austen, the elegant, precise satirist that she was, should provoke this crude and unsophisticated and wild meanness."

"She was no stranger to anger, to simmering resentments and harsh judgments, to taking people down a notch, but her sentences were if anything the opposite of 'a bomb was placed in front of your house.'"

Writes Katie Roiphe in Slate, about the Jane-Austen-on-the-banknote controversy we were talking about yesterday.

Why is that ironic? Isn't it more exactly what you'd expect, that an elegant, precise writer's antagonists would be crude? What's ironic is that Roiphe, championing the elegant, precise writer would misuse the word "ironic."

I checked the complete works of Jane Austen to see if old Jane had ever used the word "irony" or "ironic." The answer is no, but the search turned up the uses of "iron" as well, and I was amused by this exclamation, in "Northanger Abby," about James's gig:

"Break down! Oh! lord! Did you ever see such a little tittuppy thing in your life? There is not a sound piece of iron about it....."

Tittuppy.  Is that the adjective for the phrase "tits up"? The (unlinkable) OED marks the word as colloquial and defines it to mean: "Apt to tittup or tip up; unsteady, shaky." The first recorded usage is the "Northanger Abby" one I've quoted above. It's based on the noun "tittup," which is "apparently echoic, from the sound of the horse's feet" and means "A horse's canter; a hand-gallop." I guess we'd say "clip-clop." Now, a second meaning of "tittup" is "An impudent or forward woman or girl; a hussy, a minx." You might want to try using that!

1762   D. Garrick Farmer's Return 9   Some Tittups I saw, and they maade me to stare!

We're referred to the second meaning of "tit," which is "A girl or young woman: often qualified as little: cf. chit n.1; also applied indiscriminately to women of any age (? dial.).  (a) Usually in depreciation or disapproval: esp. one of loose character, a hussy, a minx.  (b) Sometimes in affection or admiration, or playful meiosis. (Common in 17th and 18th c.; now low slang.)" This is a very old usage, going back to 1599:

1599   T. M. Micro-cynicon ii. sig. B5v,   He hath his tyt, and she likewise her gull. Gull he, Trull she....
1886   G. M. Fenn Master of Cerem. vii,   She's a pretty little tit....
1932   S. O'Faoláin Midsummer Night Madness 62   I'm sorry for his two tits of sisters, though.

Wow. The oldest meaning of "tit" is a small horse. Surprising, no?

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"Well, I might write a more satisfactory book if I did this, that, or the other as you suggest."

"I daresay you're perfectly right, but this is how I like it and this is how I'm going to do it, and if other people don't like it I can't help it, and what's more, I don't care."

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"As a feminist, I find it infinitely sad to imagine a vibrant young woman sitting alone at her computer..."

"... and turning herself into a sex object for a man... she does not know — even if she is also turning him into a sex object. Twentieth-century feminism always linked the social progress of women with an expanding sense of self-worth — in the sexual as well as intellectual and professional spheres. A willingness to engage in Internet sex with strangers, however, expresses not sexual empowerment but its opposite — a loneliness and low opinion of oneself that leads to the conclusion that any sexual contact is better than no contact at all."

So writes Susan Jacoby, in the context of the Anthony Weiner story. I suspect that Jacoby was sitting alone at her computer when she wrote that. And I'm sitting alone at my computer writing this now. Is anything infinitely sad about writing at the computer? Is it sadder when you expect someone is waiting to read what you write and you expect them to write back? These days I choose, for each post, whether I want to allow comments or not, and for this one I haven't chosen yet. Is the sadness of what I'm doing right now dependent on whether I allow comments?

Or is this infinite sadness dependent on whether you are writing about sex, which I kind of am, or writing about sex while hoping that your reader finds you sexy?

As a feminist, she finds it infinitely sad, so perhaps you have to be a feminist to feel what's so terribly sad about a woman sitting at a computer, writing sexily to someone she expects will write back sexily. And perhaps the woman at the computer needs to be vibrant and young for it to be extremely sad for her to chose bodily solitude and sex in written form. Those are the words of the self-identified feminist, feeling sad about women writing alone and sexily at computers. Jacoby is 68 years old. Is she like Paul's grandfather in "Hard Day's Night," scoffing at Ringo for reading — "tormenting your eyes with that rubbish" — instead of "gettin' out there and living... Parading the streets!"?

That's not about sexting. It's timeless advice from the old to the young. Perhaps the elders in Jane Austen's life pressured her to quit writing about love relationships and get out there and fall in love.

But Jacoby seems most concerned with context:

Sex with strangers online amounts to a diminution, close to an absolute negation, of the context that gives human interaction genuine content. Erotic play without context becomes just a form of one-on-one pornography....

Deep down, what does a man really think of himself when he must feed his ego with phony gasps of erotic pleasure from strangers in a digital vastness? What does a woman think of herself in the same arid zone of sex without sensuality?

Sex without context is pornography (to Jacoby). It's arid and fake. Even the man's orgasm is fake: "phony gasps." Even the man must lack self-esteem. That's the wrong kind of equality, with the woman straying out into the "arid zone" where meager men satisfy themselves. That's "not the sort of equality envisioned by feminism," she says in the end.  Women should shun this "lowest common denominator" sexuality that "debases the passion and reason of both men and women." Jacoby claims this end for feminism, but it's the oldest task in the world for women: channeling male sexuality, taming them, civilizing them, lifting them up, pumping the phallic lever for the elevation of us all.

(I'll put the comments on to make this more sad.)

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The Most Pretentious Thing Ever Written About George Zimmerman.

This is Sasha Frere-Jones, writing about Jay Z’s new album (which is pretentiously titled "Magna Carta Holy Grail") in the (pretentious but traditionally a bit subtle in its pretentiousness) New Yorker:

But just like the politician that he occasionally texts, Jay Z is exactly who should disappoint us, unless our admiration is mute conformity and our optimism was a party smile. His friend has disappointed us by allowing a squeegee of surveillance to be dragged across America and approving the killing of foreign civilians with robots. Those civilians, in another country, see America the way Trayvon Martin saw George Zimmerman — a force they couldn’t stop physically creating a story they couldn’t fight historically. So what should Jay Z be doing instead of currying favor with critics in an art gallery? Maybe something like what his friend Kanye West thought up in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when he blurted out, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Jay Z may be our most accomplished rapper but he rarely does anything to alienate anyone the way that West continually, and valuably, does. Which is probably why Carter represents athletes now, for profit and pleasure.

I think Frere-Jones fancies himself some sort of genius rapper of the print medium, cramming together disparate references and conveying a tone of outrage over... oh, who know what? What's Frere-Jones's problem here? Jay Z shouldn't work for profit? He shouldn't aspire to an art gallery audience?

Jay Z’s performance at the Pace Gallery, a transparent rewrite of Marina Abramović’s “The Artist Is Present,” took place three days before the Zimmerman verdict, so what could he have done to leverage his influence? He could have ditched the idea of lip-synching to “Picasso Baby” (a weak retread of “99 Problems”) and recreated the Zimmerman-Martin showdown with everyone in the room, following them around the perimeter of the gallery and scaring the shit out of them, eventually pulling a gun. And though that would have been the aggressive vision of a different artist, Jay Z is exactly the kind of figure who could weather the ensuing controversy, retaining all of his homes and maybe even his Samsung deal.

Speaking of failing to scare the shit out of people, for whom is this New Yorker shit writ?

What emotions were felt by the target audience for Frere-Jones's article?
	Agitation about the latest doings in art and politics.
	Relief and assurance that one is both hip and politically correct.
	Superiority to anyone who is insufficiently race conscious, such as Jay Z.
	Sensuous luxuriating in words that presumably have deep meaning.
pollcode.com free polls

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"That's not a plot hole. Allow me to explain."

Scott Ney explains the movie device of having the characters themselves take note of the plot hole you the audience member are going to notice so there can be dialogue bullshitting about why it actually should not be viewed as a plot hole. This device, once you start noticing it, is much more irritating than the plot holes you might have been able to ignore.

I first noticed this tactic being employed in... "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" [which goes into] underworld to rescue Jack Sparrow, following his death at the climax of "Dead Man's Chest." Since that film ended with Captain Barbossa's resurrection, courtesy of voodoo priestess Tia Dalma, two comic relief sidekicks can't help but inquire, as anyone in the audience who's even kept track of the plot might as well, why she didn't apply the same treatment to Captain Jack? Ah, she answers, but Barbossa was only dead in spirit, his body still earthbound, while Jack has gone to the other side body and soul....

Via Metafilter, where somebody says:

God, this drives me nuts. The last Star Trek film was full of it. Like ten minutes in, when Scotty was freaking out about how being underwater would wreck the Enterprise, I leaned over to my husband and said, "Pointing out how stupid this is doesn't excuse how stupid this is."

And here's every question Ellen Page asks in "Inception":

Inception Supercut : Every Ellen Page Question - watch more funny videos

To paraphrase one of Page's questions: Who'd want to be stuck in a movie for 2 hours?

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"I have been giving your new no-comments policy a lot of thought since it was implemented."

Emails a long-time reader:

Like most people, I don't respond well to change, and when I found that my favorite online haunt was no longer the nouveau salon that I had come to love, I was taken aback.

The problem for me, first, is that so many of your posts literally invite comments. You write, presenting an event or a situation, and then you comment, and then you question.  You write to provoke thought, and I love that about your blog. But now that comments are turned off, I am much less inclined to take the time to think, because there is no place for me to respond. I still read every post, but I don't think about them as much.

Second, I miss the opportunity to say thank you for posts like one today with Meade giving advice about the mower. I know, I can send an email, but I think it's nice to be appreciative (and appreciated) publicly, and email is private.

My experience of Althouse blog is sadly diminished.

I still read every post, but I don't think about them as much. Here's something to think about, even though you won't think as much. Why don't you think as much? In the old days, when you read books — imagine the greatest books you ever read — did you say to yourself This is all very thought provoking, but unless I can immediately jot down the thoughts it provokes in me, in a place where the author and other readers can see it, I'm really not inclined to pursue those thoughts?

There is a place for your thoughts. It's really the only place for your thoughts: Your head. Do you think What's the point of that, thoughts just in my head, not immediately strewn under the writings of the author who made me think of something just now?

Human connection is valuable, but why must it come — why is it considered better — in the form of immediate expression in response to whatever provoked a thought? I understand the love of spontaneous interaction (and I maintained the "nouveau salon" for 9 years). But there are other time-lines to relationships. There is slowness and gestation. There is the thought as it exists in the purely intimate space of your own head. There is turning to your own writing, in your own place (not the author's). And there is finding another human being to talk to... perhaps about a blog post you read somewhere this morning.

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"Actually, I'm finding that, when I click over [to] the other site where your commenters have migrated, the things they have to say aren't really very interesting..."

"... (and I never did understand what the name-calling directed towards 'Inga' was all about), and when I think back, the comment sections were something of a trap -- I'd hope to have, or read, some interesting dialog about the topic, but it never really happened very much. The 'create your own blog' approach is challenging, but imaginary readers are tough to write for.  In any case, in the same way as I seldom buy treats from the grocery store, because I have a hard time eating them in moderation (I tell the kids: if I buy the chocolate ice cream, you'll have a bowl now, and I'll eat the rest tonight after you're in bed -- so let's just go to the ice cream place instead), please keep the comments off."

That's from Jane the Actuary, who actually did start her own blog, Jane the Actuary. If you go over there and read it, will it save her from the fate of writing for "imaginary readers"? She'll still have to imagine you to write for you. From the beginning on this blog, I wrote for myself. I wrote about what I was reading and I wrote to see what I thought. It was a way of thinking. Since Meade moved in, I also write for him, often saying "New post alert" and then hearing what he thinks, often as he reads it aloud (and helps me find typos and hard-to-grasp phrases).

That reminds me of something Vladimir Nabokov said in 1966, in answer to the question "What is your greatest pleasure in writing?"

There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper; after many, many false tries... The next pleasure is of reading it to your wife. She and I are my best audience, you see. I should say my main audience. After that, when the thing is published, I do imagine a number of people whom I like, whom I admire, with whom I feel close kinship. It is nice to think that those people are reading that, perhaps at this very instant. But that's about all. I don't care about the general public.

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"It's very appealing, the idea of writing under a pseudonym."

"Realistically... I have to pay [journalists] the tribute of saying that my chances of getting away with that are incredibly remote... now."

The book she got away with writing under a pseudonym — long enough, at least, to get excellent reviews — is "The Cuckoo's Calling."

MORE: Here:

There is a long history of authors changing their names. In 1984, Doris Lessing said she wanted to escape "from the cage of my literary reputation" when she began writing under the pen name Jane Somers. She did not reveal Somers's true identity to her British publisher, who rejected the manuscript. The book did find a publisher, but sold only 2,000 hardback copies.

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On the wings of giant ants, high above the 9th-floor rough-hewn floorboards, the first shall be last in order to be first again and other contra-Jesus notions.

"Rodriguez and the other bug mongers of San Juan offer their wares as 'pre-Hispanic' foods, a nod to the Aztecs, Mixtecs and other civilizations that flourished for millennia here on diets rich in grubs, grasshoppers and other edible invertebrates."

Insect-eating was long regarded with shame and disgust by elite Mexicans who viewed the practice as a vestige of rural backwardness. But bugs have crawled onto the menus of some of the country’s most celebrated eateries in recent years, as top chefs seek out esoteric regional ingredients for cuisine known as “alta mexicana” (high-end Mexican).

“These are foods that were eaten in pre-Hispanic times because there wasn’t meat, but now they’re seen as luxurious,” said Lesley Tellez, a food writer who leads tours of Mexico's markets and kitchens....

What is lowly will become lofty. What is lofty lowly. When the common people have beef and pork, the high-class people will pay $225 a pound for giant winged ants (chicatanas). When the masses of workers are sitting at desks, reading and writing, the literary writers will angst and relocate their elite enterprise onto the floor, back in that corner:

In Colum McCann’s apartment, on the ninth floor of an elegant building just off Central Park, there’s a room where he writes that looks as if it were airlifted in from the woods. It’s all rough-hewed floorboards and shelves made of unvarnished pine and two-by-fours and a long, thick cedar slab for a desk. At one end of that desk there’s a space that used to be a closet, but at McCann’s request, the friend who built the office took off the door and put a platform in there, and this is where McCann writes, “in the cupboard,” as he put it. “It concentrates my vision. No windows, two very tight walls.”

Rough-hewn floorboards and unvarnished pine? Is he inspired by splinters? What's for lunch? Termites? Bookshelf-grown West-Side-apartment termites with fresh-toasted splinter sprinkles.

When the lowly becomes lofty, how will the once-lofty become lofty again? Jesus said: "So the last shall be first, and the first last..." But the question is once the last make it to first, how do the old firsties refirstify themselves? We're seeing this idea of embracing the attributes of the erstwhile lasties, eating insects, working on the floor. Can these last become first again? Is there some sort of endless cycle to this ranking and reranking? Obviously, Jesus kept it simple. The order of things on earth would remain stable — "you always have the poor with you" — and there will be a one-time reordering upon death.

In America — I'm including Mexico — we're constantly redefining what is high or low. To quote John "Bigger than Jesus" Lennon: "No one I think is in my tree/I mean it must be high or low/That is you can't, you know, tune in/But it's all right."

No one I think is my tree... But check for ants, termites, and other bugs, because there may be someone else in your tree, quite possibly multitudes. Or, as Jesus might put it, "The least of these my brethren." Alternatively, what's for dinner?

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"Screw Your Standing Desk!"

Hey, that felt personal! Because I've been conspicuous with all the "Look at me at my standing desk."

So here's Ben Crair in The New Republic with his "sitter's manifesto." But he's not saying "screw your standing desk" to people like me who like our own standing desks. He's talking to the health engineers and government nannies who would take away other people's chairs and declare that henceforth all must work standing up. He says:

It worries me because I like to sit. It feels fantastic. If I wrote The Giving Tree, I would have chopped the tree down on the first page and had the boy sit on the stump for the rest of the book. And I would definitely have written it while seated myself, because sitting, for me, is one of the true rewards of writing.

Crair talks about various writers — notably Philip Roth — who work at standing desks, then says:

[It] isn’t nearly as novel as its evangelists make it sound: Nietzsche denounced Flaubert for his “sedentary life” way back in 1888, and Virginia Woolf and Lewis Carroll were standing writers, according to an entertaining article by George Pendle (who writes, he tells us, while standing).

What’s new is the entry of the medical establishment into the debate on the side of the standers, lending their preference an annoying air of moral superiority. The years the standers gain in longevity, though, are offset by lost pride: Is there a better symbol of corporate obeisance than the standing desk?

There's maybe an annoying air of moral superiority to saying that these workers who are not literary writers are horning in on the elegant posings of the storied scribes — after writing that phrase, I motorized my desk into the standing position — and now that corporations are installing standing desks, they're not cool anymore.

ADDED: Here's one of my favorite books: "The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design." I read it years ago, and what I remember is that sitting in a chair was not a normal thing for people do to until fairly recently, that there was a time when the chair was more of a throne (a special seat for the leader), and that an English colonialist in India tried to get workers out of the squatting position that was normal for them in a world without chairs.

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Some writer over at The Atlantic intrudes on my "Gatsby project" territory.

You remember the old Gatsby project, where I'd isolate one sentence from "The Great Gatsby" and deal with it as complete in itself — a narrative arc, a container of meaning enough, a jumping off point for wild ideation. Some of us got so wrapped up in it that we find it hard to leave a room without yelling "Ewing!"

So here comes The Atlantic isolating a "Great Gatsby" paragraph and proclaiming it "The Most Dazzling Paragraph of The Great Gatsby" — on the authority of a writer named Susan Choi. One sentence isn't sufficient. She has to go with a whole paragraph. And it's not enough just to look deeply at that one thing. There has to be a proclamation that it is the best of all the paragraphs, and that just makes me want to open my hulking cabinets full of Gatsby sentences and begin throwing them, one by one, before you — sentences of little pig sausages and hot whips of panic and warm human magic, until a tray of cocktails floats at us through the twilight, and suddenly, the eyes of the editors at The Atlantic leak isolated and unpunctual tears.

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