Barbara Ehrenreich & friends report on the loss of economic security and personal confidence in the American middle class. It is indeed scary out there.
Was just thinking how bizarre it would be to attempt something like the Orwell Complete Works for any modern-day literary figure, however admired, however mysterious, however eloquent. I mean, Orwell's wartime BBC correspondence is boring enough, but now that people communicate so extensively and hurriedly by email, wouldn't anything analogous be worse?
I've heard of one semi-celebrity writer, a living man in mid-career, who has accepted an advance payment from a university in exchange for shipping his "papers" there for archiving and future study. I dunno if this includes his archived emails. But what if it did?
Sure, there are blog-derived books -- the one by Salam Pax, for example -- but in another couple of generations, presuming our computer technology stays viable or improves, will people be wanting to buy something like "The Complete Emails of Bob Dylan"?
Is there anyone alive today whose complete emails you would yourself be willing to buy and read?
From a linguistic perspective, poetry is deeply conservative. Older forms are retained in poetry long after they have passed into obsolescence, and even used for fresh compositions. We never say 'tis, but iambic meter forces many of us to rely on it. In some cases entire systems of sound change are undone for recitation, as when a Londoner rhotacizes the lyrics to a song, or a Parisian pronounces the otherwise-silent final e to make a line scan.
Something like that awareness of sound change happened in Medieval Germany. In this case, however, its effect was to internationalize the language across dialect boundaries, rather than to merely retain archaisms. From Waterman's History of the German Language (pp. 94-95):
Whatever its provenience and models, there did emerge for a period of perhaps fifty years a more or less "normalized" Middle High German literary language that enjoyed high prestige and wide currency among the poets. Its normalizing tendencies are most obvious in its rhymes, for the court poets of the Golden Age did not tolerate the easygoing assonance of an earlier time, insisting rather on pure rhymes. And to a remarkable degree they were able to use words, the final syllables of which would correspond when transposed into any of the major High German dialects.An example of this is provided by the works of a poet who stands at the very beginning of the Blützeit, Heinrich von Veldeke, a native o fthe province of Limburg in the Netherlands, whose Eneit ( = Aeneid, begun around 1170 but not complted until approximately 1190) determined the style, both in form and ocntent, that was to characterized the great court epics for the next fifty years. Though he probably wrote in his native dialect of Limburg (we have no manuscript in his own hand), slightly modified in favor of the neighboring Middle Dialects to the south and east, his choice of rhymes is such that, when converted into High German, the correspondences still hold. For example, he rhymes tît (Zeit) with wît (weit), but not with its homophone wît, which in High German yields weiss, incapable of rhyming wiht either Zeit or weit. In like manner he rhymes lîden (leiden) and snîden schneiden), but not lîden and rîden, for again — though they are a pure rhyme in Low German — the High German forms leiden and reiten would not so qualify.
Paul Anderson reports on the evening at his other blog. Did any of our Londoners go?
For computer programmers like me, there are only a handful of places to work: Austin, Boston, RTP, Silicon Valley, and Seattle. These are not the only places I could find work , but they offer real benefits over other cities because the software jobs are so concentrated. If one job turns sour, there are plenty more in Austin, and I've got enough friends in the same profession to advise me on salaries and working conditions. Neither would apply in Beaumont or St. Louis.
Richard Florida has an article in the October Atlantic on this phenomenon and its effects. He abandons his usual focus on how cities can attract the "creative class" for a look at what happens when they do. There's a fascinating map of college-graduate densities per county in the US, showing that although higher education has expanded from 11% to 24% in the last three decades, all of those graduates have moved to the cities. The stagnating effects on rural areas and the rustbelt are worrisome but at least predictable. On the other hand, the college-graduate meccas are being transformed:
Because the return on colocation among the ablest is so high, and because high-end incomes are rising so fast, it makes sense for these workers to continue to bid up real estate and accept other costs that traditional middle-class workers and families cannot afford. As traditional middle-class households are displaced by smaller, higher-income households, population can decline even as economic growth continues. America's most successful cities may increasingly be inhabited by a core of wealthy workers leading highly priviledged lives, catered to by an underclass of service workers living in far-off suburbs.
I'm posting you-know-where about this as well because it's just so striking: A Guardian narrative of Social Exploration discoveries today is full of the same naive nostalgia as Jack London's story "South of the Slot." I have trouble understanding why present-day culture-crossers like this Gillian Evans don't learn from their predecessors how to get beyond the grass-is-always-greener stage of thinking about social stereotypes.
(Yes, I know Jack London himself was crossing toward the "posh" side of life, not the other direction, but he had a grass-is-always-greener problem of his own. Wanted to be both in and outside the Working Class yet couldn't accept that social categories don't really fit many individual circumstances.)