Random Notes

There’s a Silicon Valley technoid sort of thing called the network effect. It’s an algorithm, you know, something from math class. Now, I have to say that I don’t think about algorithms on a daily basis and I bet you don’t either, though in my distant computer networking technology life, I lived that stuff every […]

Jill and I sat down in the plush seats of the old Fullerton Hall auditorium in the Art Institute of Chicago last night, there to hear New Yorker music critic Alex Ross speak about the intersection of 20th century music and literature. Mr. Ross’ recent book–The Rest is Noise—Listening to the Twentieth Century—which very entertainingly reviewed […]

(This essay was broadcast on WUWM’s Lake Effect program on May 7, 2010.  Have a listen to it here.) It’s a little known fact that Marcel Proust—yes, that Marcel Proust—he of the monstrous early Modernist novel Remembrance of Things Past—one of those Mount Everest sort of books that some readers say they ought to tackle […]

(This essay was broadcast on WUWM’s Lake Effect program, 89.7, Milwaukee’s NPR affiliate on April 12, 2010. Listen to it here:  ) Stories—you know, fiction, actual made-up stuff—are dead. I clicked off the last scene of Jersey Shore on my 52 inch flat-screen dual-quadrasonic surround-sound 5.1 plasma TV and began flipping through my Tivo’d shows […]

(This essay was broadcast on WUWM’s Lake Effect program, Milwaukee’s NPR affiliate on March 12, 2010.) As I sat poolside, shivering in the pale cold sun, trying to make like I was really enjoying the 50 degree early March cold of southern Florida, having escaped at the last minute from grey Wisconsin on a crazy-cheap […]