I’m back from being away from the web for a week, precipitated by an exploding power adapter whose replacement I kept postponing the purchase of because my evenings were suddenly being filled with wonderful books. And Swedish televisionI do have web access at work, but my employer will be glad to know that blogging from work is not my forte..

One of the books I finally read this week was Five Points, purchased in an initial flurry of enthusiasm when Gangs of New York came out. Author Tyler Anbinder laments frequently how there are so few narratives by Five Pointers themselves — most of his primary sources were outside accounts by journalists, reformers, police and travellers.

Five Pointers certainly never thought their neighborhood was worth documenting, nor that they would be of interest to future generations. If only they had. Today, the neighborhoods of lower Manhattan boast a surfeit of personal narratives, all pre-sorted and indexed for future generations of historians to peruse in excruciating detail.

I’ve been wondering if our writing blogs changes how we perceive ourselves in the eyes of the future. I don’t think we exactly pitch our stories to the future, but it certainly has crossed my mind that what I write will probably survive in some searchable archive somewhere, and it is imperative therefore either 1) to be right and/or accurate, or 2) to be self-deprecating about matters that most likely betray assumptions the future will be disabused of. My own strategy has been to aim for (1) but settle for (2).

Will future historians bother with blogs at all? They might dismiss the whole medium on account of it containing far too many self-referential sentences such as this one. Or this one. Blogs have to compete, after all, with TV, newspapers, books, academic studies, movies, and oodles of statistics and records. Do blogs add anything to the future historian’s perspective on us?

I venture yes. Perhaps the most-loved primary source of contemporary historians is the personal journal. It gives the kind of color that official histories and bank records cannot capture. There is no reason why that should change in the future.

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Not blogging for a week does not mean that the urge to blog was quieted. Watching the Nobel prizes being handed out and then the banquet live on Swedish TV offered ample opportunity for color commentary that I did not, alas, indulge in. The highlights only, then: Princess Madeleine; Prime Minister Persson showing off his newest wife; and JM Coetzee’s odd but riveting banquet speech, delivered in clear staccato fragments that had you focus on every syllable.

The other day, suddenly, out of the blue, while we were talking about something completely different, my partner Dorothy burst out as follows: “On the other hand,” she said, “on the other hand, how proud your mother would have been! What a pity she isn’t still alive! And your father too! How proud they would have been of you!”

It certainly had me wondering what had been said on the one hand.

Who among my friends gets to win photography competitions?

Franzi, that’s who! (She’s now a Leica richer.) The photo is of Olivier and Gulzada on the roof of 233 E 4th street during one of those interminable late summer days in the latter half of the 90s. You can see more pictures by Franzi here. And pictures of Franzi here.

Why do book reviews have to be so damn descriptive? All too often, one need only choose between reading the book or reading the review, because the latter’s retelling of the plot makes for a perfectly adept Cliffs notes of the former. This complaint applies also to typical film reviews by the arbiters of upper mainstream taste, in the NYT or WSJ. Felix is prone to plot exegeses too, in a blog no less, where he could leave the tedious recounting to IMDB and focus instead on opining, but he insists on retelling plots because he is in fact auditioning for gigs writing such formulaic fare. Well, that’s my suspicion, in any case. Good writing his may be (plodding at times, perhaps in need of a few memorable phrases, but honest), though blogging it is notWhere else to put this? Felix and I bet a bottle of vintage Veuve Cliquot on Sunday in NYC over the number of countries that originally joined EMU. I said 12. Felix said 11. What’s the point of doing these wagers if they are secret, I ask you?.

Or else, book reviews barely touch upon the book they are meant to review. The reviewer might relegate the ostensible raison d’etre of the article to a mention of the book in a paragraph or three, or in the footnotes, appended to a 5,000 word rant he has been chomping at the bit to see in print but has been too lazy to research rigorously.

As I flicked through the last issue of The New York Review of Books at Felix and Michelle’s this past weekend in New York, and found articles of both persuasions, I imagined the eventual point of this post would be to lament book reviews that aren’t. Then, on my way back to the airport on Tuesday, I picked up the current edition, billed the 40th Anniversary IssueThe entire contents are online! Download everything while you can and read at your leisure, if you can’t buy.. I did not know then that its pages deliver a torrent of stunningly good pieces, or I would not then have mentally marked for blogging a tirade against bogus anniversaries. Fortieth anniversary? What makes for an anniversary worth celebrating these days? Years that are multiples of 10, or 25, or maybe 5? There are, for instance, far too many 35th anniversaries, often procured by a committee too drained of original ideas to think of anything but marking the fact their institution has limped along a further 5 years.

And to what extent is a millenial anniversary any more worthwile or instructive than an anniversary marking 1003 years? None that I can fathom, save for the satisfaction of seeing similar digits aligned prettily. And why use years at all? Why not celebrate 10,000 days a few months after one’s 27th birthday? One thousand months shortly after 83? Okay, maybe I’ll concede years are handier, but why certain multiples are more conducive to feasting baffles me.

But I’ve decided such invective would be misplaced here, for in fact any excuse that can produce such a crackling good read as the current issue will do.

An inventory of what I’ve read so far:

Luc Sante writes as if he had been commissioned preëmtively to debunk the main thesis of the New York Times Magazine a few weeks back: That everything old is new again in New YorkMy own visit this past weekend confirmed the ludicrousness of the NYT’s conceit that today’s New York is much like 70s New York; I was a kid in 70s New York and so have a good baseline for comparison.. But Sante’s piece is so much more — it’s a declaration of love for a city that has moved on, and it’s a sharp description of life in the East Village in the early 80s, a perfect companion to Please Kill Me.

Joan Didion writes a serious yet hilarious review of those rapture novels, where all good Christians go to heaven, leaving us atheists, agnostics and Muslims to implement a UN world government, a single global currency, and Satan as our leader. She then segues into an exposition of how the assumptions underpinning these books are familiar turf for a president who sees himself as doing God’s work on earth, or at least acts as if he does.

And where else but in TNYRoBs can an academic pissing match about the nature of Jesus that’s been dormant since April (when I blogged it) resume so effortlessly?

Eminem’s lyrics are dissected by Andrew O’Hagan — a real service, as I never catch lyrics — to underpin the argument that the bond between Eminem and his audience is a lot more ironic that the Tipper Gores give him credit for.

There is so much more worth reading: Pieces on Cesare Pavese, Paul Krugman, Garrison Keilor, George Orwell (yet again)… I’ve only just begun.

Which is a good thing — I will have to feast on its contents until the next issue hits Stockholm, delayed (where, at customs?) by the usual few weeks. The one I hold in my hands certainly won’t be seen in Stockholm coffeeshops this side of November. Maybe I should rent it out.

NYCulture vulture Felix Salmon reviews Dramaten‘s New York production of Ibsen’s Ghosts at BAM, directed by Ingmar Bergman. He can’t get over the fact that they’ve decided to offer simultaneous translation from Swedish á la UN instead of surtitles á la Opera.

The idea of dubbing any performance, as opposed to sur/subtitling it, is not just plain irritating, but wasteful, and unimaginative in its use of modern technology.

Irritating, for the same reason that dubbed movies are irritating. Actors’ voices are an integral part of the performance. Dubbing replaces part of the performance, while sur/subtitling complements it. And — not that Felix is in any danger of learning Swedish — it insulates the viewer from new languagesThe French, Germans and Spaniards — all notorious film dubbers — speak far worse English than the Dutch, Flemish and Swedes..

Astonishingly, I’ve actually met people here in Europe who prefer dubbed films. There is less information to process; it’s easier, they say. I wonder if Bergman — who not only likes to control every aspect of a production, but who is known to condescend — assumed Americans couldn’t handle surtitles. Too many notes, so to speakImagine applying the same logic to Opera: simultaneous translation of La Bohème into English, helpfully read out to you through a headset..

Wasteful, because the performance, whether on screen or live, is a fixed text. Having translators would make sense if the words were improvised, but having them grope for the same mot juste every performance seems silly. From Felix’s description, it seems they didn’t even have a fixed text to read from.

An unimaginative use of modern technology, and not just because the deaf have no recourse, as they do with sub- and surtitles, to text versions of the spoken wordI love Swedish DVDs of Swedish movies because they all have Swedish subtitles; perfect for learning..

I have no idea how much it would cost to buy or rent a surtitling system as with the opera. It can’t be that much — it’s glorified trainstation timetable technology. But perhaps the systems are just not portable enough for limited runs. In which case, how about setting up a little Wi-Fi network in the theatre and renting out Palms/Pocket PCs with a push technology app on it? You’d have the entire script right in front of you, with a little dot, much like with karaoke machines, running alongside it. You could even have the original Norwegian script, if you’re a devout Ibsenist, or the director’s written commentary to follow. This last feature, instead of having you walk out half-way, might have you come back for seconds.