“Most observers see Dave Eggers and his fans as existing outside politics. But Eggers’ literary superstardom is prompting an alternative culture that has grown up around him over the last five years. It is a San Francisco- and Brooklyn-based community of writers, artists, designers and, increasingly, children – with a growing national following. They are the readers, contributors and designers of the literary journal-cum-Web site McSweeney’s (first published in 1998) and McSweeney’s Books. They are, especially in the last year, the audiences at McSweeney’s-sponsored conferences, readings and concerts across the country. They are idealistic about education, sentimental about children and impatient with the homogeneous culture that corporations produce.”
Tag: 02.03
Poetry In Times Square
A young poet goes to Times Square to read poetry on the street. And people stop to listen. “The American public’s relationship to poetry is complicated. At best, poetry seems to be perceived as a rare salve to be applied in the wake of national tragedy; at worst it’s an elite parlor game. Much of the blame for such perceptions can be placed squarely on American poetry itself, which has privileged difficulty over clarity—in the process taking itself right out of public view. I don’t exactly fault modern American poetry for being difficult. The sensory experience of Times Square is as difficult as any poem and still we live within it. The power of great modern poetry is that it takes the monstrosity of Times Square and locates the human being at its heart.”
Beethoven Is Best – But Why?
“Beethoven’s audience is so all-encompassing as to include those whose familiarity with his work is limited at best. Indeed, he is the only classical composer whose name is generally known to people who do not listen to classical music. It is as revealing that the cartoonist Charles Schulz chose Beethoven as the favorite composer of one of the characters in Peanuts as it is that Lorin Maazel chose the Ninth Symphony to perform last fall at his inaugural concerts as music director of the New York Philharmonic. What is striking about this mass popularity, though, is that it has not diminished in the slightest the respect in which Beethoven is held by musicians.”
Ideas That Exceed Our Abilities
“Sometime in the next 20 or 30 years, we’re going to have, because of Moore’s law, machines that will have the computational power and memory of humans.” Even now, many of today’s new engineering achievements are so complex, they can’t really be designed by people – they’re invented by sophisticated computers that exceed our own abilities. “But we don’t know how to program them yet to interact naturally with people. So it’s all a software problem.”