New Yorker listings, recently: "Cirque de Legume. Pablo Ibarluzea directs this play, involving two clowns and a box of vegetables."

From "Scumble," by Rae Armantrout:

What if I were turned on by seemingly innocent words such as "scumble," "pinky," or "extrapolate?"

What if I maneuvered conversation in the hope that others would pronounce these words?

From the New Yorker review of The Art of Fielding:

A batter dips a foot inside the batter's box, "as if testing the temperature of a pool." A man's heart feels "dangerously full, swollen and tender, like a fruit so ripe it threatens to split its skin." A moon is "as slender as an eyelash." The front gate of a house is thrown open and shut with "an angry tambourine jingle." When a ball is hit, the "clear loud peal cut through the crowd's noise." When a man unhooks a woman's bra, he "rubbed very lightly the twin peak indents where the clasp had pressed into her skin." Baseballs that end up at the foot of a fence during practice are "a harvest of dirty white fruit."

Jill Lepore makes plans to attend a Charles Dickens summer camp.

Robeson volunteered to let me room with her. When I wrote her that I wasn't sure I'd be able to make it, being reluctant to leave a houseful of pips, she wrote back, "What could be more Dickensian than abandoning your children?"

(Other great parts of the August 29 issue? Matthew Dickman's poem "Getting It Right," which makes me want to ask out the next woman I see, and Hilton Als' review of the "Uncle Vanya" I saw at the Kennedy Center. Best thing is that Als barely stops to call it good. He explains, for nearly the entire length, why it's good. A show-don't-tell review.)

Quiet afternoon as my houseguest recovers from jetlag. Catching up on New Yorkers, I liked seeing these two passages in the same issue, from a few weeks back. That writing can be so good in such different contexts at such different intents is such an under-appreciated thing.

First up: "Summer Fun for Boys," by Tim Long.

Premise: "You're gifted, you're pudgy, and you're nine. And now you have three whole months off from school! Here are just a few ways to fight boredom and enjoy your summer break…." Among possibilities:

Organize a scavenger hunt with your friends. Rapidly gather up all but the last two items: a pinecone and something French. While searching in the woods for the pinecone, notice a beautiful woman strolling next to a stream. It's the French actress Marion Cotillard! She's also on a scavenger hunt, looking for a clever American boy. Work out a deal with Ms. Cotillard: the two of you will run to your house and collect first prize in your scavenger hunt (a Popsicle), then fly to Paris and collect first prize in hers (a billion dollars' worth of rubies and emeralds). Quickly realize that the plan is unrealistic, as she's due to start filming in Canada tomorrow. As you part ways with Marion, exchange a bittersweet smile that means everything and nothing.

Then run back and discover that your friend Stevie has already won the scavenger hunt. His "something French"? A bag of frozen French-toast sticks. Fume.

Next up: "Over There," book review by Hendrik Hertzerg.

Premise: "A new history of Britain's role in the American Civil War."

Until Dickens's dark prophecy came true, the United States of America was on the sidelines of history. European elites kept tabs on the interesting republican experiment unfolding across the sea, but they took it for granted that the greatest of great events, from Caesar's wars to Napoleon's, were the prerogative of their side of the Atlantic. America was thinly populated, at once exotic and provincial, boastful and naive, politically and mechanically innovative but with little to offer in the way of art or literature, possessing formidable natural splendor but rather less of the human variety. Then came Fort Sumter — and Bull Run, and Gettysburg, and Appomattox, and Ford's Theatre.

More than our War of Independence, which we grandly styled a Revolution (France, 1789: now there was a revolution!), the American Civil War provoked awe. When the news from Antietam reached the English papers, almost two weeks after the event, readers were stunned: twenty-five thousand casualties in a single day, nearly five times the total of all the battle deaths Britain had suffered in the previous decade's Crimean War. The scale of the bloodshed, the size of the armies, the mechanized horror of the combat, the moral and spiritual weight of the underlying issue: this was a serious war, and it made the United States a serious country. It marked the end of America's childhood and cleared the way for its emergence as a global power. The world's next great war, five decades later, was the Great War, with Americans fighting on European battlefields. And the next century was the American one.

From the New Yorker profile of Microsoft's Jaron Lanier:

At the South by Southwest Interactive conference, in Austin, in March of 2010, Lanier gave a talk, before which he asked his audience not to blog, text, or tweet while he was speaking. He later wrote that his message to the crowd had been: "If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you'll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of informational, are you really there?"

I'm finding myself a moderate in the new social temperance movement, as wary of Shirky's claims as I am of Gladwell's and as encouraged by Franzen as I am by Ford. Where I part ways with all of them is in their degree of disagreement with each other. Friction between ideologies creates real energy and progress. There's middle ground to be found in the social vs. real conversation and balance to be found in our lives.

Back to the NYer.

If you have a subscription to the magazine, dig into the archives and check out the Talk of the Town conversation with Lanier in late 1993.

"My, my," he replied. "Well, we've all observed this phenomenon that there's not a style currently. All there is is a collage of old styles. And you can either view this as a sort of dismal end of Western civilization or there's a very positive way to view it, which is that our culture is fragmenting in order to turn what used to be finished thoughts and texts into the raw stuff of vocabulary — which will be useful to have when a new means of communication between people develops, which will happen as everything goes interactive. One way of looking at our present media culture is that everyone simply receives these whole products — whole movies, whole TV shows, and so on. The new culture is going to be an interactive culture, in which everyone creates, in a sense, his or her own products. And so, as we set out on this great adventure, it's not surprising that we are more interested in the fragments, the pieces."

I love the acknowledgement of the culture fragmenting before digital's true arrival. We tend to tie the two so closely, and digital is obviously primarily responsible for the fragmentation and creation of new culture.

But the fragmentation prior to the tools is worth discussing. The tools are just the tools. We like technology advancing to the point where we can begin tying it back to our kinetic lives, but we're not as comfortable barreling through in those lives. Our humanity takes the city route as digital takes the high-speed beltway. We worry about splitting away, even though we're pretty sure the tech will meet us on the far side.

What I'm saying is I don't mind alternating routes. It's allowed. Every day, we get to choose whichever way helps us live as best we can.

Adam Gopnik meets a drawing instructor and takes lessons.

We stopped for coffee afterward, and I asked Jacob why, given his skill at seeing and showing the world as it was, he never wanted to draw the particulars of this world as it is, the world that we found ourselves in, where people met at endless dinner parties. He drew his kids, beautifully, but without their iPods and Game Boys and VitaminWaters. Why not draw as a novelist might write, with the appurtenances and accessories of this time?

He looked at me and seemed almost angry. "No, that's — you've so absorbed the premises of modern realism into your head that you can't see past it. Why didn't Michelangelo draw people buying fish, instead of nudes and gods? He was looking for some idea of beauty, rooted in this world" — he made a gesture around the coffee shop, taking in everything, light and time and the human forms seated there — "that didn't need an iPod to justify it. He really had an idea of timeless beauty. Why is beauty less interesting to you than journalism?"

1. The first full-length trailer for the new Muppet movie.

2. Stephen Colbert's Northwestern commencement speech.

3. The New Yorker: A Visit with the Talk of the Town.

Ian Frazier gives me a double shot of my baby's love by writing Gatsby parody in The New Yorker, the culmination of a season seemingly full of were-they-owned-by-the-real-Gatsby homes in jeopardy or destroyed.

Retyped a paragraph here. Too bad the full piece is behind a paywall.

"A large yellow steam shovel with the name of a Japanese family painted in black letters on its long hinged, arm was picking up concrete fragments and piling them into heaps. The machine made a repetitive and monotonous sound. On what had been the mansion's seaward side, a white, pillared swimming cabana had been left standing, perhaps in deference to the Piping Plovers and other mentioned on the signs. Next to the cabana, a swimming pool — the one where Gatsby had been found? — held a foot or so of dirty water in which a shoe with an intricately patterned sole bobbed, heel upward. Beside it floated a filmy piece of something that bore, in blue script, the name Famous Amos — probably another of Gatsby's distinguished former guests whom I could not recall. There had been so many visitors that summer, but none except me had returned to see the old place pulled down.

… and Atul Gawande's Harvard Medical commencement address gives good recommendations for how your team — especially if you work in digital media — should be running. Play along here. I found Gawande's address inspiring, and subtracting the doctor parts helps explain why.

Ready?

Segment one

"We are at a cusp point in [profession] generations. The [practitioners] of former generations lament what [profession] has become. If they could start over, the surveys tell us, they wouldn't choose the profession today. They recall a simpler past without [profession's issues], not to mention [practitioners] bearing tattoos and talking of wanting 'balance' in their lives. These are not the cause of their unease, however. They are symptoms of a deeper condition — which is the reality that [profession's] complexity has exceeded our individual capabilities as [practitioners].

"The core structure of [profession] — how [field] is organized and practiced — emerged in an era when [practitioners] could hold all the key information [customers] needed in their heads and manage everything required themselves. One needed only an ethic of hard work, a [utensil], [an office staff], and a [place of business] willing to serve as one’s workshop, loaning [necessary goods] for a [customer's care], maybe [a special workspace] with a few basic tools. We were craftsmen. We could [do basic but cool tasks]. The nature of the knowledge lent itself to prizing autonomy, independence, and self-sufficiency among our highest values, and to designing [profession] accordingly. But you can't hold all the information in your head any longer, and you can’t master all the skills. No one person can [do complex, numerous, cool tasks]. I don’t even know what it means to [specific high-tech task]."

(more…)

Sasha Frere-Jones ledes a recent brief in the magazine this way, and I like it when music takes a position: "Sincerity in rock is tricky business, as the form favors doubters and refuseniks. (Punk begins with 'no' — the rest is simply holding the line.)"