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We’re big fans of our TiVo, but we don’t hold much stock in its ability to recommend and record shows it thinks we’ll be interested in. To be fair, we haven’t really done our part—by constantly jabbing the “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” button every time we’re watching the tube. This is a function of being fully immersed in TiVo behavior; we simply don’t channel surf at all, going instead straight to the current playlist of shows we’ve specificially asked TiVo to record. No passive TV watching, no ratings, no meaningful associations or recommendations. People we know who do not have TiVo (or any of its inferior copycats) often say they aren’t interested in digital video recorders because they don’t want to increase their TV viewing. But this is precisely the point of TiVo—it allows you to watch only the programs that you want to watch, when you want to watch them, accelerated through the commercials and the slow bits. We watch a lot less TV than we did before TiVo. (We’ve reached the point where we wish reality had that ingenious button that sends you back in time thirty seconds.)

Still, the TiVo can’t help itself from quietly recording things, apparently to keep itself occupied, and if you scroll down your playlist, you’ll notice what it’s been doing in its downtime. Last night, we noticed that TiVo had speculated that we might be intersted in a new program called “Tom Friedman Reporting,” which turned out to be a camera crew following the Times’ best columnist (and Minnesota native) around, watching him do his job. This was on the “Discovery-Times” Channel, a cable channel we’d never heard of before. Anyway, the estimable Friedman was, in this episode, sauntering around Europe trying to answer the question “Does Europe Hate America?” Well, not ten seconds into the program the answer becomes painfully clear: Yes! With gusto! But it is Friedman’s particular genius that he spends the next hour speaking with everyone from Americans at Oxford (Rhodes and Marshall scholars) to islamic high school students who claim Osama bin Laden as a personal hero. Much of this material Friedman turned into a series of columns a few months ago, but gathered into one place and one TV program, it was an artful piece of reporting. Friedman brings together a tremendous amount of material, and he’s sharp enough to debate even the most convincing Parisian peace activists (“You are against using force always, even if it means to displace a violent tyranny? How do you feel about America liberating France from Hitler?”; “The EU is shutting out American cosmetics companies for trace carcinogens—and yet, you can’t eat in a French cafe without having smoke blown in your face the entire meal?”)

Like any great acrobat, Friedman makes his job look easy. With clear, clean prose, he handles the world’s most pressing issues with a compassionate and reasonable voice, and he does enough behind-the-scenes reporting to have a firm grasp of the issues. (Behold, the rise of the EU and China, and the twilight of America.) Friedman is loyal to no party, he is merely loyal to the facts. If we could establish an award for “most trusted news analyst,” he would not only be at the top of our list, he would be the only one on our list.

We got a kick out of DC SOB’s funny item today, “Washington’s Most Loathsome.” And while the SOB pins the tail on many high profile asses—like Robert Novak, Michelle Malkin, and Charles Krauthammer—we were especially gratified to see syndicated “advice columnist” (and Washington Post typist) Carolyn Hax on the list, described thusly:

“11. Carolyn Hax: Are there any among the lovelorn who aren’t sorry after they’ve taken their plight to this Fen-Phenned harridan of hackery? Operating from the position that there’s no better medicine than woefully uncalled for ridicule, she generously peppers her advice with belittling barbs. It might yet be amusing if she wasn’t recycling the same old put downs week in and week out, but she’s too damn dim to notice she’s about eight short of playing the dozens. Of course, her own marriage was no great shakes, though to her credit, once she managed to break her ex-husband illustrator, he stayed broken. Still, it’s impossible to see her column as anything other than the bitter remodeling of her own glass house.”

We couldn’t hope to say it any better than that. Now, we have it on good authority that at least one co-worker here in the office is a serious fan of Carolyn Hax (who is included no doubt in some sort of syndication package over at the Star Tribune—you want Friedman? You gotta take Hax! No Hax no Friedman. Oh, and Family Circle stays, capiche?), which certainly beggars the imagination. One of the crosses we bear as editors is the steady trickle of writers and would-be writers who wish to write an advice column. As with every proposal that comes through the door here, we try to seriously entertain the idea. We read clips and cover letters, we skim resumes, we chew on it and sleep on it, and in the end we most likely have to say “thanks very much, but we’re not in the market for another column.” This is undoubtedly heartbreaking, but it is for the best for everyone concerned.

We have a number of standard replies, but we have not tried this one out: Be careful what you wish for. Just look at that harridan of hackery, Carolyn Hax! A column, especially an advice column, may look like a gilded throne, but the pressure of regularly producing something—anything, much less anything worth a damn—can certainly be a millstone around one’s neck. No matter what the frequency (monthly, weekly, daily),even a professional writer will often find herself in a tight spot from which no amount of prestige or artistic freedom or compensation can save her.

Well, we’ve now managed to write a lot more than we felt inspired to write about twenty minutes ago. Confidential to Reilly: You’re lucky to have the couch, bud.

Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes
by Billy Collins

First, her tippet made of tulle,
easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.

And her bonnet,
the bow undone with a light forward pull.

Then the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like a swimmer’s dividing water,
and slip inside.

You will want to know
that she was standing
by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,
motionless, a little wide-eyed,
looking out at the orchard below,
the white dress puddled at her feet
on the wide-board, hardwood floor.

The complexity of women’s undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything –
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.

What I can tell you is
it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that reason is a plank,
that life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

Wow, who hasn’t wanted to do this? God, I hope someone did.

Here is Miss Emily’s poem, Death, from which we get the tulle tippet:

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

Or rather, be passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.

We paused before house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then ’tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.

According to her biographers, she always wore a white dress, even while gardening.

We have not had a chance to read Jon Gertner’s entire article from yesterday’s Times Magazine on the Nielsens, Arbitrons, and other media-measuring devices—but we’ve enjoyed what we’ve read so far. It comports with some of the bones we’ve been gnawing on around here in recent days.

In two very important ways, these sorts of industrial devices for measuring how people use media can never really be adequate—and for one very big reason. First, even the “People Meter” described by Gertner, now in use by Arbitron in some markets, merely measures a person’s exposure to certain media—it cannot make any qualitative measurement of that person’s reaction to her exposure other than simple duration. You keep watching or listening, presumably you are not irritated enough to change the channel. But you may not be ~able~ to. In other words, if I am in a bar trying to have a conversation with a friend while Brit Hume natters self-righteously in the background, my PPM may tell Headquarters that I watched Fox News Channel for an hour, whereas I spent most of that hour highly irritated by the twelve overhead televisions and their constant lap dance distracting me from a meaningful conversation.

Second, it cannot meaningfully measure what a person’s reaction is to the ~advertising~ she is exposed to in the course of her media day. Thus the advertiser and the media that sold that advertising are inextricably linked—maybe more closely than ever before. Here in the wretched world of print, we are frequently considered the “lowest rung” in the ad world, because we are doing front-line work, trying to educate small business owners about what advertising is and does. Most intelligent people who are potential buyers of advertising want to know what kind of return they will get on their investment—if they sell widgets, they’d like to believe that advertising will increase their widget sales, and presumably they will, if everything falls into place as it should. But there is frequently not as direct a relationship as advertisers would like to see. The only answer seems to be a certain kind of co-branding reasoning: You buy ads with us, you tie your fortunes to us. As the water rises, both of our boats rise with it.

There is an important shadow-dance going on which we’ve described before. In an attention economy, you charge your advertisers for raw exposure, but the more they want to know and the more you can tell them about ~how well~ their ad may (or may not) be working, the more nervous everyone gets. Their are billions and billions of dollars at stake in the media and advertising business, all tied up in ~passive~ consumption of media, with the advertising piggybacking along for the ride. If we suddenly converted to an on-demand attention economy (like, say, the public radio model; in print, it would mean inverting the modern circulation model and charging real money for subscriptions, rather than giving away a lot of deeply discounted inert gas), lots of people would lose lots of money. The only way to prop up a passive-measurement industry is to spend more money, not less.

Even the next-generation technology called “Apollo” has its limitations. This cutting edge measuring device is supposed to close the circuit entirely—first measure the media and advertisments a person is passively exposed to, and then measure her active buying habits. But one can certainly hear both the advertisining and the media industries holding their breath. What happens when we find out that there is actually a complicated, unpredictable agent—a living, breathing person with her own history, self-image, brand loyalties, bad hair days—standing between an advertisment and a purchase?

There is still only a small, frail man behind that curtain—but what a curtain it is!

Marginalia
by Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive –
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” –
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have manage to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

Who hasn’t picked up another’s book, or even your own from college, and wondered “Why the hell did I write that?” or “Was I really so lame as to to have to make a note ‘Man vs. Nature’?” I have, and I did…although I was pretty sure I didn’t have to make a note to myself that A Modest Proposal was ironic.

Thank you to my friend Elizabeth for suggesting this one. It’s good.

Catullus 51
translated by James Michie

To me he seems godlike, in my eyes even
More than Divine (if that’s not sacriligious),
The man who sits beside you all day gazing,
Hearing all day

Your musical laughter. Dazed by love, he loses
The use of all his senses. Oh, the moment,
I see you, Lesbia, my voice, throat-strangled,
Withers away.

My tongue lies paralysed, subtle sensations
Of fire snake through my limbs, my ears are deafened
By thier own noise, and, as for eyes, dense darkness
Blindfolds them both.

Sloth is your enemy, your disease, Catullus;
You revel in it, crave it, and adore it.
By what else were great kings and flourishing cities
Ruined but sloth?

Ille mi par esse deo videtur,
ille, si fas est, superare divos,
qui sedens adversus identidem te
spectat et audit
dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis
eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te,
Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi
vocis in ore,
lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
tintinant aures, gemina et teguntur
lumina nocte.
Otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est:
otio exsultas nimiumque gestis:
otium et reges prius et beatas
perdidit urbes.

This one suggested by our wine critic and noted linguist Oliver Nicholson. After this, we promise no more Latin. Ok, maybe one more on April 30 which will be a fitting commentary on the reason we love poetry.