April 25, 2005

The Bochco Code

When I was a child, I had a fever
My hands felt just like two balloons

I felt a little queasy when I saw the following article in the NYT Magazine: “Watching TV Makes You Smarter.” Not that it isn’t a good article; it is. It’s about the cognitive demands placed on viewers by today’s complex multi-threaded television shows: The Sopranos, Deadwood, yadda yadda yadda. Hill Street Blues gets a nod as the big innovator of multi-threaded arc-within-arc storytelling, though the structure obviously comes from soap operas and from serialized fiction before that (as Jonathan Dresner notes).

It's a fun read, and it’s flattering to be told that when I appear to be sprawled on the futon watching Lost, I’m actually getting a cognitive workout. The argument may be a little overdrawn. The lesson I take away isn’t that TV makes us smarter—that's the sort of pesky determinism that gets my historian of technology hackles up, and besides if watching a lot of TV made you smart, I ought to be a Harvard PhD or something. But I can agree that the craft of television writing is changing and advancing. And people like to feel smart, and good TV bores us marginally less than bad. The article also features some discussion of The West Wing’s characteristic questions-first answers-later trick, and it argues that reality shows like Survivor and The Apprentice are not about voyeurism so much as game theory and strategy.

Steven Johnson, the author of the Times article, is clearly my kind of geek. He goes so far as to graph out the intertwining of story threads within a few sample shows. The horizontal axes represent time, and the vertical axes represent the different storylines in each episode:

If we accept the idea of geekdom as a “third culture” that combines the creative impulses of the arts on the one hand and the rational-mechanical impulses of science and engineering on the other, this is a very characteristic geek endeavor: disassembling pieces of fiction in a mechanical way to see what makes them tick. I know it’s something I do all the time. (To, I am certain, my wife’s unwavering delight.)

The queasiness I mentioned above comes from a deviated septum operation I had when I was 17. It went pretty badly and I was on heavy-duty painkillers for a week or two, my days split by the pills into six-hour cycles of pain and psychedelic fever dreams. I had taped a Hill Street Blues marathon and was watching it during brief interludes of lucidity. I was struck by the now-familiar, then-fairly-novel phenomena Johnson describes: the way each episode of Hill Street juggled a number of plots, setting up future stories, recalling past ones, and rotating the spotlight from character to character. But under the influence of those mind-altering meds, I just about went insane one night with a feverish “figuring” dream. You know the kind where you feel an compelled to solve some meaningless problem to impose order on the crazy chaos in your mind? The form this particular fever took was an obsessive drive to reverse engineer the story structure of Hill Street. Like Causabon looking for the ur-myth in Middlemarch; like there was some mathematical formulae to decipher—Steven Bochco’s Philosopher Stone. I think (or did I just dream it?) I filled half a notebook that night with crazy threaded diagrams of Hill Street storylines, imagined and real. And the diagrams I drew looked exactly like the ones in that Times article. Except I believe I drew mine vertically rather than horizontally. And since my nose was still bleeding from the operation, they may have been lightly stippled with my blood.

The madmen of earlier eras imbued their afflictions with grandeur. They imagined the voice of Allah in their head, or black instructions from the Devil. Me, I try to discern the Fibonacci sequence connecting Frank Furillo’s alcoholism to the frequency of Mick Belker’s phone calls from his mother.

If I ever want to replace the tagline of my website, I’ve got a good one ready: “Rob MacDougall. Thinking WAAAAY too hard about television since 1989.”

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April 24, 2005

News and Jews

The New News

It's been a busy week, but a good one!

• Sunday: Lisa and I put our condo on the market.


• Monday: Lisa and I sold our condo.*


• Tuesday: I gave my end of the year talk at the Academy; it was very well received.


• Wednesday: Lisa and I drove to London to look for a house.


• Thursday: Lisa and I looked at about a dozen houses. Also, we got approved for a mortgage.


• Friday: Lisa and I looked at another half-dozen houses. Also, we bought a house.*


• Saturday: Lisa and I drove back to Boston.


• Also: Lisa got accepted with funding to the PhD. program in Education at Western.


• Also: My dissertation is one of four nominees for the Herman Krooss Prize, given by the Business History Conference to the best dissertation in business history written that year.

*Pending inspections and renegotiations and whatever else could transpire between now and closing. But you know. Offer accepted. Knock on wood.

The Old News

So like I said, it's been a busy week. To keep this blog limping along, I shall continue to cannibalize old posts from my LiveJournal. Today (last night, technically) is the start of Passover. Last year at this time, I meditated on Douglas Rushkoff's very interesting book, Nothing Sacred. Here's what I said...

Today is the first day of Passover, which seems like a good opportunity to say something about Douglas Rushkoff's book Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism.

“I desire macaroni pictures! And those little shaker things where you put beans inside of paper plates that are glued together! And let us put patterns of glue on the outside of those paper plates so we can then pour glitter on them so they look nice and sparkly!”

A couple of years ago, I read a book called The Talmud and The Internet, which seemed like a painless way for a guy like me to learn a little more about his (then future) wife's religion. There were some nifty stories in there about the Talmud and its recursive hypertextual nature. For instance, there's a tract where the Talmudic Rabbis discuss how God spends His days. They decide that, among other things, God spends three hours each day studying the Talmud. In other words, the Talmud is so vast and complicated that even God Himself must study it daily. And—how's this for freaky movie-within-a-movie action—this discussion of the Talmud is contained within the Talmud itself. Whoa. But I don't really recommend that book to you if you have any more knowledge of computers than, say, my grandmother. I had the distinct impression the author got most of his information about the internet from Parade Magazine or something similar. A lot of the book was just “Computers! Are they good for the Jews?” if you know what I mean.

Douglas Rushkoff, on the other hand, knows from cyberculture and Judaism both. And Nothing Sacred, originally subtitled “The Case for Open-Source Judaism,” is a pretty cool combination of the two:

An open source religion would work the same way as open source software development: it is not kept secret or mysterious at all. Everyone contributes to the codes we use to comprehend our place in the universe. ... An open source Judaism is not Judaism-lite, but a commitment to know the religion as deeply and profoundly as its original programmers.

Let me clarify that my own understanding of life, the universe, and everything remains basically atheistic, secular, and non-religious. (Just ignore that business a few paragraphs up about knocking on wood.) Indeed this has sparked some debate between L & I.* She's really not very religious either, but is more likely than I am to admit that organized religion may have some small redeeming qualities. What I realized when we had those arguments, though, was that when she said “religion” and thought of Judaism and I said “religion” and thought of, you know, whatchamacallit, that building with the lower case ‘t’ on it, we were starting in two rather different places.

*2005 Edit: Our theological debates have now moved from the question of God's existence to the question of what I in fact believe about God's existence. Last week, Lisa informed me, “You and I actually agree about the existence of God. If you have a loose enough definition of ‘existence’ and ‘God.’” (She is a cunning and slippery opponent, just like the new guy on Joan of Arcadia.) “And a loose enough definition of ‘agree,’” I replied. “Fair enough,” she said. Thus is marital bliss maintained.

Bart: “Rabbi, did not a great man say, and I quote, ‘The Jews are a strange bunch of people. I mean, I’ve heard of persecution but what they went through is ridiculous! But the great thing is, after thousand of years of waiting and holding on and fighting, they finally made it.’”
Rabbi Krustofsky: “Oy, I never heard the plight of my people phrased so eloquently! Who said that, Rabbi Hillel?”
Bart: “Nope.”
Rabbi Krustofsky: “Was it Judah the Pious?”
Bart: “Nope.”
Rabbi Krustofsky: “The Dead Sea Scrolls?”
Bart: “I’m afraid not, Rabbi. It’s from ‘Yes I Can’ by Sammy Davis Jr. An entertainer, like your son.”
Rabbi Krustofsky: “The Candy Man? If a performer can think that way, maybe I’m completely upside down on this whole problem.”

I'm not converting any time soon, but I gotta give Sammy Davis style props to the Jews. I've gone to High Holiday services with Lisa and I think it's fantastic that they have a question and answer session where people debate the Rabbi's sermon. I think the rule that you can't even read the Torah without ten people present to discuss it is wild—it's like a built-in inoculation against fanaticism. Think of how much less impact some idiotic TV ad has when you watch it in a group of ten or more people. Imagine a world in which it was forbidden to watch TV without at least nine friends there to discuss it.

Rushkoff basically argues that Judaism is not a religion, but rather the historical process by which humanity is evolving out of its need for religion. Which is the kind of religion I can get behind. So for him, the Exodus commemorated by Passover was not a historical event, but an allegory for the liberation of Jewish thought from the idolatrous death cults of Egypt. Each of the plagues of Egypt is a symbolic desecration of one of the old gods or religious practices of the Jews themselves. That's the Jewish gift to the world, Rushkoff says: their millenia-long exodus away from superstition. And the point of the book is to urge Jews to keep pushing along that path: to hold on to their traditions of debate and iconoclasm (Rushkoff has described Judaism as media literacy in the guise of a religion) while abandoning their tribal or possessive instincts, indeed abandoning the whole idea of being a chosen people, to create an open-source religion available to all.

Elaine: “David, I'm going to Hell! The worst place in the world! With fires and devils! Don't you have anything to say about that?”
Putty: “It's gonna be rough.”

Now, the reaction to Nothing Sacred showed that my man Dougie might have underestimated the continuing appeal of tribalism. Everywhere he went to promote the book, he got called a God-killer or a Holocaust-denier or an anti-Semite. You can almost track the deflation of his optimism by reading the blog entries from his book tour. Even Lisa didn't quite accept the whole argument of the book, though she thought parts of it were pretty cool. “God loves you best,” is a pretty durable meme, I guess. At least as powerful as “You are forgiven,” “There's a big payoff in this for you at the end,” or “You kick ass.”

But whatever your religion or lack thereof, Nothing Sacred is worth a look. Rushkoff is just such a cool and optimistic thinker. I don't always agree with him, but I almost always want what he's saying to be correct. In Rushkoff's cyberpunk Judaism, God is not a supernatural entity, but an emergent property of the religion itself. God is not to be feared or obeyed or even worshipped, but continually questioned, challenged, and revised. In fact, this very process is all that “God” is. Nothing more or less than people thinking for themselves about their duties to one another:

In a world where God is an emergent phenomenon, the entire premise of good and evil is a meaningless duality. Abstract monotheism insists that there is only one thing going on here: God. He has no antithesis, no evil twin. There is only good and the absence of good—the places where good has not yet spread. It is akin to the way a physicist understands the concept of cold. There is no such thing as cold. It is not a force of its own. Cold is not an energy. It does not exist. There is only heat. What we think of as “cold” is merely the absence of heat. Likewise, what we think of as “evil” may better be understood as the absence of good. ... Just because a candle can be blown out does not mean that darkness is an energy of its own.

Fun stuff. Masel Tov.

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April 07, 2005

Unprofessional Wrestling

I usually turn to Cliopatria to keep up to date on campus speech controversies. So I'm surprised that I beat my colleagues there to the following scoop: This past Tuesday, the College Republicans at the University of Connecticut invited Jim Hellwig, better known as face-painted pro wrestler “The Ultimate Warrior” to speak at their school. But students in attendance were shocked, shocked when, instead of comporting himself like a proper professional wrestler, the Ultimate Warrior launched into an angry, incoherent tirade.

Students started heckling Hellwig when his remarks turned (allegedly) racist and homophobic. The Ultimate Warrior (who, you may recall, bested Ravishing Rick Rude in a steel cage match at Summer Slam ’89) only got angrier, and eventually campus security had to shut the event down.

The UConn College Republicans have apologized for the incident, but Warrior (my Chicago Manual tells me it is correct to drop “the Ultimate” after second reference) appears unrepentant. In a memo “from the desk of Warrior,” he dubs the UConn Republicans “spineless,” and calls his critics the “World Class Crew of Crybabies.” (Which is ironic, because I’m pretty sure the WC3 took on the Hart Foundation in Wrestlemania 4.)

(Crossposted to Cliopatria.)

(Edit: David Noon's Axis of Evel Knievel has the story in more chair-throwing, turnbuckle-smashing, pile-driving detail.)

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April 01, 2005

Hit By A Fish

It's pretty decadent to pad out your weblog by recycling posts from your other weblog. But it's a cute story, even if it doesn't have anything to do with history, and I haven't been posting much here lately, and I'm interested in narrowing the gap in tone between this site, which can be a little stuffy, and my LiveJournal, which can be a little infantile. So, in honor of the date, my April Fish story (originally posted April 1, 2004) revisited:

In French, as you may know, April Fool's Day is called Poisson d'Avril, which literally means "April Fish."

My parents sometimes tell the story about when I was a little kid and I discovered a deck of Tarot cards. Immediately enchanted, I set about telling the fortunes of all my friends. Of course, I didn't know what any of the cards or layouts meant, so my readings were both linear and extremely literal. I'd just slap the cards down one after another like I was playing War: "You will be stabbed with ten swords! Then you will be given seven coins! Then you will become a juggler! Then you will die!"

What I lacked in symbology, I made up in oracular conviction, by bellowing all of my prophesies in a booming voice (as booming as an eight-year-old can muster). It must have worked too, because, as my Dad tells it, my little chums would finish their Tarot readings quaking in fright. All the fortunes I told ended badly. I think I thought you just kept going all the way through the deck until you got to Death or one of the other clearly fatal cards. How else would you know when to stop?

(Some parents might have stepped in after the third or fourth ashen-faced eight-year-old staggered home, each convinced of their own strangely specific yet utterly unavoidable doom. But Dad obviously thought this was all a good laugh. I love my parents and the irreligious upbringing they gave me. Ours would later be the go-to house for scary Ouija board action.)

Anyway, Dad was particularly taken by the fate I prophesied for my friend Aaron: "You will ride on a horse! You will drink from three cups! And then... you will be hit by a fish!!" I don't even know which Tarot card has a fish on it, but that is the line from this story that has stuck as family catchphrase #17,368: "You will be hit... by a fish!" (You're supposed to say it booming and loud, with just a little pregnant pause before revealing the precise instrument of your subject's frappage.)

Aaron and his family moved to Alberta, so I don't know if he ever did get hit by that fish. But the saying has stayed with me, and I've come to think of it as my own fortune rather than his. It's not a terrifying doom, but a warning against hubris, and a reminder of the general perversity of the cosmos. Don't get too full of yourself. Don't count your chickens. Just when you start thinking you're all that—an Emperor, or a Juggler, or some fancy dude on a horse with seven coins and a cup—Fwap! You too will be hit by a fish.

Happy Poisson d'Avril, everybody.

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