Heidi Bond gets pushed a long way out along that gra­di­ent I was just talk­ing about.

It makes me melan­choly, you know. I’d best have a box of kleenices nearby, in case it over­whelms me.

No seri­ously, if you think about it, this abbre­vi­ated slangy crap peo­ple use online (espe­cially ESL writ­ers) might be taken as evi­dence for the fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence between read­ing and writ­ing — these are folks read­ing Rowl­ing (and lots and lots and lots of words she wrote), but who on the face of it haven’t inte­grated her lan­guage very well, though they can clearly parse it. Imi­ta­tion does not fol­low from exposure.

Either that, or you’ve gotta buy into that whole Eng­lish is a Liv­ing Tongue bull­dada. And you know, we need to decide. It’s gotta be one or the other.…

It also makes me think about the dynam­ics of cul­tural mix­ing brought about by large wide-​​ranging shocks to the sys­tem. Now where’d that meme come from?

A fas­ci­nat­ing (and very famil­iar) post and com­ments thread on the impor­tance and like­li­hood of RSS­ing eBay and other cat­a­logs, as “Cat­ablogs”.

(Via Ed Viel­metti, whence this other fas­ci­nat­ing note, which makes me like the town we live in even more.)

Tim Burke at Eas­ily Dis­tracted gives warn­ing that The Muse Has Left the Building:

“Me? Well, see, when I was about eleven we had this dog. It was the dumb­est dog we ever owned, and unfor­tu­nately was also a con­stant barker, with a very irri­tat­ing bark. I got dis­patched to obe­di­ence school (two of them!) with the dog. Both train­ers pro­nounced the dog untrain­able, and both of them appeared to be relent­lessly cheery opti­mists oth­er­wise. One finally in des­per­a­tion sug­gested this spe­cial col­lar that would give the dog a mild shock when the dog barked.

That didn’t work either. My par­ents had some acquain­tances who lived out on the high desert with lots and lots of land. They liked the dog and the breed and agreed to take her. Good thing too since our neigh­bor was about to sue us.

I bring this up because I’d fit Tim Bur­ton (t) with a shock col­lar like that one, designed to go off when­ever he starts to do some­thing ter­rif­i­cally stu­pid or mis­cal­cu­lated in a film that’s oth­er­wise hum­ming along just fine. Only I don’t think it would help him any more than it helped that dog.

I’m with Burke. Sev­eral times Bur­ton has pre­sented us with works of inspired genius. Once, with luck, we can all man­age some genius, so right there he pulled ahead of the pack. But seems to now be falling back.

That said, even a bad movie can make you think: Surely some (pos­si­bly very small) pro­por­tion of kids will pre­fer this new thing, the way some demo­graphic group prob­a­bly loves the De Lau­ren­tiis King King, and will thus remem­ber it fondly forever­more. How do we inter­pret that, besides “there’s no account­ing for taste”? When talk­ing about pop­u­lar cul­ture, should we worry that when a new work pro­vokes a gut-​​twisting neg­a­tive reac­tion because it side­steps our sen­si­bil­i­ties about plot or matu­rity or humor, it might be a gen­er­a­tional thing? As in “kids these days”? Or “those people”?

Some­where in this is a kind of gra­di­ent, start­ing from the uncon­scious famil­iar­ity of fit­ting in that lets us review, and extend­ing towards the sense of being weirded out by the cul­ture of the folks around you, to the point of need­ing to bring the tools of cul­tural anthro­pol­ogy to bear when you really want to under­stand them. And dilu­tion and attri­tion inevitably shove us all out towards that far end as we get older.

Not that this applies to this case. After all, Burton’s sup­pos­edly along for the ride on that gra­di­ent, so he’s not off the hook.

So I’m not say­ing Burke’s get­tin old or nuthin. No sir­ree. Just thinkin. After all, he’s younger’n me. Though — pro­por­tion­ally — less so all the time.…