"Come January, fifteen University of Pennsylvania creative-writing students and I will sit silently in a room with nothing more than our devices and a Wi-Fi connection..."

"... for three hours a week, in a course called 'Wasting Time on the Internet,'" writes Kenneth Goldsmith.

Although we’ll all be in the same room, our communication will happen exclusively through chat rooms and listservs, or over social media. Distraction and split attention will be mandatory. So will aimless drifting and intuitive surfing. The students will be encouraged to get lost on the Web, disappearing for three hours in a Situationist-inspired dérive, drowsily emerging from the digital haze only when class is over. We will enter a collective dreamspace, an experience out of which the students will be expected to render works of literature....

Nothing is off limits: if it is on the Internet, it is fair play. Students watching three hours of porn can use it as the basis for compelling erotica; they can troll nefarious right-wing sites, scraping hate-filled language for spy thrillers; they can render celebrity Twitter feeds into epic Dadaist poetry; they can recast Facebook feeds as novellas; or they can simply hand in their browser history at the end of a session and present it as a memoir....

Speaking of naked...

... the rich folk of New York don't mind if you look at them naked while they use the bathroom... as long as you have to look way, way up.

ADDED: The NYT should back link to its own 1990s article "Telescopes for (Sneaky) City Views." Telescopes aren't even mentioned in the new article.

"'This is Bush v. Gore all over again,' one friend said as we struggled to absorb the news last Friday afternoon."

"'No,' I replied. 'It’s worse.'"

Oh? Is that an admission from Linda Greenhouse that Bush v. Gore wasn't really all that bad? Actually, yes!

In the inconclusive aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, a growing sense of urgency, even crisis, gave rise to a plausible argument that someone had better do something soon to find out who would be the next president. True, a federal statute on the books defined the “someone” as Congress, but the Bush forces got to the Supreme Court first with a case that fell within the court’s jurisdiction. The 5-to-4 decision to stop the Florida recount had the effect of calling the election for the governor of Texas, George W. Bush. I disagreed with the decision and considered the contorted way the majority deployed the Constitution’s equal-protection guarantee to be ludicrous. But in the years since, I’ve often felt like the last progressive willing to defend the court for getting involved when it did.

That’s not the case here. There was no urgency....

"Here" = King v. Burwell. That's the new Obamacare case that's freaking people out.

This is a naked power grab by conservative justices who two years ago just missed killing the Affordable Care Act in its cradle, before it fully took effect.

Naked power grab? It's a naked power grab to grant review of a case that's been decided by a Court of Appeals panel, just because there's no split in the circuits? The Supreme Court has discretion over whether to grant certiorari, and its own rule on "Considerations Governing Review on Writ of Certiorari" refers to "compelling reasons," then lists a few things that it says are "neither controlling nor fully measuring the Court's discretion" but that "indicate the character of the reasons the Court considers." One of the things on the list is a split in what different courts have said about federal law. But another is: "a United States court of appeals has decided an important question of federal law that has not been, but should be, settled by this Court." So: It's an important question. Where's the power grab — naked or clothed?

The nakedness metaphor must have really stood out to the headline writer. The piece is called "Law in the Raw." Greenhouse doesn't like that the Supreme Court inserted itself — its naked, grabby self — into the controversy when there was going to be a rehearing by the full D.C. Court of Appeals (which had vacated the judgment of the 3-judge panel). But if it's an important question that in the end the Supreme Court is going to resolve, maybe it's also important not to drag things out. Get it resolved so we can move forward either knowing things need to be redone or freed from the cloud of possible illegality.

But Greenhouse's real complaint is that she — like many others — reads the Court's impatience as revealing the opinion on the merits: "There is simply no way to describe what the court did last Friday as a neutral act... [T]he justices have blown their own cover...." By "the justices," she means the 4 Justices she presumes voted to grant review:

Certainly Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — the four who two years ago would have invalidated not only the individual mandate but the entire law — voted to hear King v. Burwell....

An intriguing question is whether there was a fifth vote as well, from the chief justice. I have no idea, although I can’t imagine why he would think that taking this case was either in the court’s interest or in his own; just two months ago, at a public appearance at the University of Nebraska, he expressed concern that the “partisan rancor” of Washington could spill over onto the court.

Wait! Taking cases based on self-interest actually would be naked power-grabbing. I love the way Greenhouse signals to Roberts what he needs to do to win the respect of the legal elite, not that he can ever really have it. He can have a little, and, you know, sometimes a little love, with true love withheld, is just what keeps a love-seeker pursuing love... nakedly grabbing.

That's 27-and-a-third million dollars per Elvis.

Andy Warhol's "Triple Elvis" sells for $82 million.

That makes me want to do a search in one of my favorite books, "The Andy Warhol Diaries":

Sunday, May 18, 1980 

John Powers called and told me the prices at the art auctions, and the Triple Elvis went for $ 75,000 and he said he thought that was a fair price so I felt okay, but then he told me that the Lichtenstein went for $ 250,000 so I felt bad. Oh, and the three Jackies went for only $ 8,000, so that was a bargain.

Hey. Did Andy Warhol invent the "Oh, and..." locution that has infected American writing?

How does Jonathan Gruber feel?

Contemplate the possibility that he feels good.

He didn't lie. He experienced discomfort with the lying nature of others and his own implication in it. Consider the possibility that he didn't get caught telling the truth: He felt a drive to tell the truth and he is immensely, awesomely satisfied that his truth-telling has burst out and is dominating the American consciousness.

This is just a theory. I don't know how the man really feels, and I acknowledge that my theory may conflict with what I presume is his policy preference — the success of Obamacare. This is simply a line of thought that occurred to me the moment I said: "I wonder how Jonathan Gruber feels."

Sudden fame is an interesting phenomenon. I was just reading this NYT article "Alex From Target: The Other Side of Fame," about a 16-year-old boy who got famous suddenly one day when a picture of him that had been taken without his notice got tweeted by a girl with the one word caption "YOOOOOOOOOOO." It can be surreal and upsetting to get a fame surprise.

But Gruber is not a teenager. And he wasn't just minding his own business. He's a professor who thrust himself into the political policy sphere. He got his work — Architect of Obamacare! — and he had his effect, but he had his outsider observations too, and he felt distanced and above it all, and he wanted to disclose his perspective to others. He spoke openly, in an academic setting, to others who feel distanced and above it all.* And now the whole world is listening in. Gruber didn't say it directly to us, which would have been rude. He confided to like-minded confidantes, and we overheard. The American people are the distanced observers of his sphere of activity — the professors. And I want to suggest that he's energized and alive and joyous to get his message across to the vast classroom that is all of America.

______________________

* I think Barack Obama himself is that sort of person, but he's taken that manner and repurposed it for general consumption. The manner often works for him, perhaps because it plays against a racial stereotype that Americans don't like to believe they harbor. But it doesn't always work, and it must be a very strange experience for Obama, if he has the time and disposition to notice his feelings and reflect upon them. And I think he does. That's the Obama memoir I want to read. And I bet he's writing it, and we will read it some day.

ADDED: And then there's Rich Weinstein, the "nobody... the guy who lives in his mom’s basement wearing a tinfoil hat." How does he feel?

"It’s terrifying that the guy in his mom’s basement is finding his stuff, and nobody else is," he says. "I really do find this disturbing."

Reading about U.S. Presidents.

From "41: A Portrait of My Father," by George W. Bush:

IN THE SUMMER of 1948, George H.W. Bush had two immediate tasks: start his job, and find a place for Mother and me to live. While he scouted for housing in Odessa, Texas, we stayed with my great-grandfather G.H. Walker at his summer house in Kennebunkport, Maine. Life was a lot more comfortable on Walker’s Point than in West Texas. In those days, Odessa was a town of under thirty thousand people located twenty miles from its sister city of Midland and more than three hundred fifty miles from the nearest major airport in Dallas...

[My father] didn’t know a single person when he arrived. People he met were more like the folks in the Navy than those he knew back home. Odessa was a blue-collar town, home to oil field laborers: mechanics who fixed the equipment and roughnecks who worked on the rigs. One of my father’s coworkers once asked him whether he’d gone to college. As a matter of fact, Dad replied, he had just graduated from Yale. The fellow thought for a second and said, “Never heard of it.” The fashion in West Texas was different too. Dad once walked out of the house wearing Bermuda shorts. After several truck drivers honked at him, he went back home and packed away the Bermuda shorts for good. Even the food was unfamiliar. My father always remembered the first time he saw someone order a West Texas delicacy: chicken-fried steak.

Dad found a house on East Seventh Street. The good news was that it had a bathroom, unlike most residences on the street, which had outhouses. The bad news was that we had to share the bathroom with two women who lived on the other side of the duplex— a mother-daughter pair who made their living by entertaining male clients throughout the night....

I'm reading the whole book, but I had to tell you about that men-in-shorts business. And sharing a bathroom with prostitutes is quite something.

I saw that this book is #1 on the Amazon list of books about U.S. Presidents,so I wanted to see what else was on that list. Who are the Presidents that people are reading books about these days? The top 20 is dominated by Bush (this book, in various, versions as well as "Decision Points"), Theodore Roosevelt, and JFK. There's also one book about Lincoln and one about — was he really a U.S. President? — Jefferson Davis. I was going to say JFK seems to be the only Democrat of interest, but one of the Teddy Roosevelt books is "The Roosevelts: An Intimate History," and that includes FDR. And let's be fair: Jefferson Davis was a Democrat.

Moving onto the next 20 — and wondering how far I need to go to get to Barack Obama — we get a book about George Washington and 6 books about Lincoln and 4 more about Teddy Roosevelt. There are those old David McCullough books about John Adams and Harry Truman. There's a book about the assassination of James Garfield! There's a book about LBJ and Ronald Reagan, "Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America." Who reads that? Reagan people or LBJ people? Are there LBJ people? There's a book about Reagan and another book about Bush I.

Finally, on the third set of 20, at #49, there's a book about Obama, and — why does this seem so sad? — it's "Dreams From My Father." I'm reading Bush II's book about his father, and now here's Obama's book about his father, and it's not really a book about his father. It's a book about himself. And it's not a book about a President. It's a book by a man who didn't know that some day he'd be President. And it's as if he's become small and little known all over again, even as he is still President.

I keep searching for another book about Obama. I have to go all the way to the last page on this list that ends at 100. There, at #85, it's "The Audacity of Hope." This symbolism of isolation and apathy is painful. Is Obama the only one who cares about Obama?

And what about Bill Clinton? Not a single book about Bill Clinton in the top 100 books about U.S. Presidents? Isn't he the hero of the Democrats? Isn't he on a heroic quest to retake the White House in a clever end run around the 22nd Amendment? Doesn't anyone care?

Now, these are historical biographies and memoirs. Maybe that genre doesn't jibe with the liberal/progressive mentality. Maybe there's something conservative about reading history. Checking the overall bestseller list at Amazon, I'm not finding anything oriented to liberal politics. I see that Bush's "41" is #2. #1 is a children's book, as is much of the top-selling reading material. Isn't it funny how we love to "raise a reader"? But do they read later? Maybe just not books. We grownups mainly want to read the internet. (I started reading the internet, and I just couldn't put it down.)

What about Chuck Todd's book about Obama, "The Stranger: Barack Obama in the White House"? That's gotten some good publicity. You might think Democrats would read that. But it's #1,629 in Books.  At least that's better than Hillary Clinton's "Hard Choices." I guess it was an easy choice not to read that book. "Hard Choices" languishes at #1,778.

Whatever happened to SiteMeter?

I've enjoyed SiteMeter over the years. It's the traffic counter I've used since beginning this blog in 2004. It's where I watched this blog reach various milestones (like the millionth visitor) and where I have looked daily to get a picture of who was linking and what search terms were bringing people here. It's so much a part of my blogworld. Yes, I have a "stats" page within Blogger, but it's not the same presentation and it's not as much information.

But right now, I'm not getting any service. SiteMeter has been down for days. A click on the "Who's on your site?" page gets: "The statistics for visitors from the last 2968 minutes are not yet available." I've emailed for help and got no answer.

Any ideas? Are you out there SiteMeter?

IN THE COMMENTS: People are giving me reasons to break my dependent relationship with SiteMeter, so maybe I should see this malfunction in a positive light. Finally, I will let go. I must. But I'll be better off. 

"First, straights came for the smooth, pretty gay look recustomized as 'the metrosexual,' and now you have come for our hairier brethren. "

"What else would you like? What else can we give you? You’ve taken it all. All our cutting asides and repartee, design expertise, gym dedication, fitted shirts, food knowledge, high and low culture snarking, gift-buying nous, and our smarts ('She’s such a drama queen')—straight culture has gobbled gay culture as ravenously as Cookie Monster atomizes baked dough. It’s fine, we’ll take the compliment, even if we are baffled that you’re now wanting a slice of performing and playing with masculinity, given the amount of homophobia and legislative discrimination you have put in our way. All that gay fear you’ve labored under and battered us with, all that crap about what men should be, and now, with the lumbersexual, the metrosexual, the use of camp, and so much more, you’ve not only come over to our side, you want in on the joke. And lumberjacks, well, you should have really trademarked your look. The lumbersexual is beards and flannel shirts, the opposite of the waxed chest, sculpted muscles, empathetic male cyborg of a few years ago: the straight man who was 'gay' apart from where he chose to place his penis. "

From a Daily Beast article by Tim Teeman subtitled "Have you met the lumbersexual: all beards, flannel shirts, and work boots? It’s the latest gay ‘look’ co-opted by straights. Have it. We have nothing left to give you."

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade quotes Teeman's "We have nothing left to give you" and writes:

And after a long time the conflicted homophobic boy came back again.

"I am sorry, Conflicted Homophobic Boy," said the lumbersexual tree, "but I have nothing left to give you — My fashionable apples are gone."

"My teeth are too weak for apples," said the conflicted homophobic boy.

"My fitted branches are gone," said the lumbersexual tree. "You cannot swing on them —"

"I am too old to swing on branches," said the conflicted homophobic boy.

"My gym-toned trunk is gone," said the lumbersexual tree. "You cannot climb —"

"I am too tired to climb," said the conflicted homophobic boy.

"I am sorry," sighed the lumbersexual tree.

"I wish that I could give you something... but I have nothing left. I am just an old lumbersexual stump. I am sorry..."

"I don't need very much now," said the conflicted homophobic boy, "just a quiet place to sit and rest. I am very tired."

"Well," said the lumbersexual tree, straightening [himself] up as much as [he] could, "Well, an old lumbersexual stump is good for sitting and resting. Come, Conflicted Homophobic Boy, sit down. Sit down and rest."

And the conflicted homophobic boy did.

And the lumbersexual tree was happy.

― Hugh Goldenburger, The Lumbersexual Tree 

"And I realized almost immediately that I knew nothing about today’s birthing or parenting issues."

"I hadn’t tracked this stuff. I hadn’t wanted to presume that it would be relevant to my daughters.... So what good is my wealth of knowledge to her? What can I give her now, when our experiences are so unshared?"

My colleague Nina Camic has a column in the NYT "Motherlode" section titled: "A Soon-to-Be Grandma, Ready to Learn."

At the Caution Café...

... be very careful.

"We’re there and Philae is talking to us. We are on the comet."

Touchdown on Comet 67/P, 317 million miles away.

"Moves by some U.S. states to legalize marijuana are not in line with international drugs conventions..."

"... the U.N. anti-narcotics chief said on Wednesday...."

Residents of Oregon, Alaska, and the U.S. capital voted this month to allow the use of marijuana, boosting the legalization movement as cannabis usage is increasingly recognized by the American mainstream.

"I don't see how (the new laws) can be compatible with existing conventions," Yury Fedotov, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), told reporters.

The dark side of "an apple a day keeps the doctor away."

"John Chapman died in 1845, and many of his orchards and apple varieties didn't survive much longer. During Prohibition, apple trees that produced sour, bitter apples used for cider were often chopped down by FBI agents, effectively erasing cider, along with Chapman's true history, from American life. 'Apple growers were forced to celebrate the fruit not for its intoxicating values, but for its nutritional benefits,' Means writes, 'its ability, taken once a day, to keep the doctor away...' In a way, this aphorism — so benign by modern standards—was nothing less than an attack on a typically American libation."

From a Smithsonian article titled "The Real Johnny Appleseed Brought Apples—and Booze—to the American Frontier/The apples John Chapman brought to the frontier were very different than today's apples—and they weren't meant to be eaten."

Means is Howard Means, who wrote a book called "Johnny Appleseed: The Man, the Myth, the American Story."

Lately, Meadhouse has been ciderhouse. Meade recommends:

"The sensation of an otherworldly presence... actually derives from garbled sensorimotor brain signals..."

"... in which a person's self awareness of their own body is projected into a seemingly disconnected space. In such cases... the brain mis-assigns its own life signals as belonging to someone or something else."

In other words: It's not a ghost. It's not an angel. It's just you.

"I don’t believe you should stay on stage until people are begging you to get off."

"I like the idea of leaving them wanting a bit more. I do think directing is a young man’s game and I like the idea of an umbilical-cord connection from my first to my last movie. I’m not trying to ridicule anyone who thinks differently, but I want to go out while I’m still hard...."

Said Quentin Tarantino.

"Are they relationships with no future, ones that will end in a similar manner, with the man remaining married and me single?"

"Yes, but what of it? What if I don’t want to embark on a long journey, one with changing scenery and a companion who remains the same? What if I want to cruise the cul-de-sac?... Affairs with married men offer controlled companionship — there’s warmth and there’s space, there’s intimacy and there’s distance. I can’t control growing older. But as the other woman, I’ll always have an element of mystery, an invitation to a different narrative...."

From a squalid Salon essay by Heather L. Hughes titled "Why I date married men."

Weekly Standard bellyaches...

... about the Creedence song "Fortunate Son" getting played at the "Concert for Valor" (a televised Veterans Day event on the National Mall). The song is termed a "famously anti-war anthem," "an anti-war screed," and "an anti-draft song." The latter is most accurate, but the Weekly Standard author says that makes it "a particularly terrible choice," since the concert was "was largely organized to honor" those who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and these people were all volunteers.

It seems to me that an anti-draft song is a good choice to honor the volunteers. Read the lyrics here. The singer complains that he has to do the fighting because the sons of the men who decide when wars will be fought manage to evade the draft. I don't see how that's generically anti-war. What it's against is a particular political dysfunction that has been corrected. So it's a complaint that doesn't hold up anymore. You don't have to be a "fortunate son" to avoid the military. You can do what you want. Every single person who serves chose to serve.

Now, some people think that's also a dysfunction, and they'd like to correct that by bringing back the draft so people in general would have more of a stake in avoiding unnecessary war. But I don't know any songs about that.

I couldn't watch the clip at the first link. I can't stand Bruce Springsteen, and much as I dislike the Weekly Standard's bellyaching, it's not as bad as listening to Bruce straining histrionically. I have to concede that it's possible that Bruce thinks — and somehow conveyed — that those who volunteer today are doing so because it's their best option in the limited array of choices they have because they are not rich or well-connected. If that's the message, then it really is a rotten thing to say to our American volunteers.

Was the Kel-from-Good-Burger correction the greatest NYT correction of all time?

Or was it something else?

(I'm partial to: "An article last Sunday about the documentary maker Morgan Spurlock, who has a new film out on the boy band One Direction, misstated the subject of his 2012 movie 'Mansome.' It is about male grooming, not Charles Manson. The article also misspelled the name of the production company of Simon Cowell, on whose 'X Factor' talent competition show One Direction was created. The company is Syco, not Psycho.")

"(should we cite the crappy Gabor paper here?)"

Embarrassing artifact of crappy editing.

"9 Things Drivers Need to Stop Saying in the Bikes vs. Cars Debate."

I don't like the "Need to Stop Saying" phraseology, but this does elaborate on 9 things that get said a lot... obviously for good reasons.