The only thing worse than a long manifesto is a loud sigh.
Helen Vendler's review in this month's NYRB has me pissed off. She's entitled, of course, to a modicum of critical self-confidence, but it sounds here as if the insouciance of his tone has started her tumbling down the hill to smugness and vapidity:
"I was once (not recognizing an allusion to the Finnish epic the Kalevala) dead wrong in these pages myself, in thinking that an Ashberry poem was about awaiting Death. Ashberry told me, with bemused sympathy for my misapprehension, that it was really about awaiting love. I suppose one could still say it was about awaiting, and that that was what mattered."
I have no doubt that Vendler knows whether waiting for love in Ashberry is like waiting for death. (It is, perhaps, in Eliot and ain't in Herbert or Ginsberg.) But the absence of analysis here--and as it continues throughout the piece--wears on me like a sandy swimsuit. Many of her close-readings end where I'd like them to start, or start where I'd like them to end. She mentions, for instance, Wordsworth's "I see by glimpses now...", only to adapt the word "glimpse" to refer to the brief moments of imagistic narrative in Ashberry, by mentioning that Ashberry's "glimpses" are coarse presentations of age. Very well. Glimpses of corporeality tinged with meditations on the incorporeal are occur periodically in contemporary poetry, and Vendler certainly knows one when she sees one. But, well, so do I.
Likewise, when she says that in reading the book she wrote down the names of "Stevens, Baudelaire, Emerson, Keats, Arnold, Eliot, Pater, Williams, Bishop, Shakespeare, Southey, Byron, Verlaine, Trollope, Dickinson, Lowell, Whitman, and Milton" and adds that she "may have missed many more," I learn very little about Ashberry (He is an American and writes poems) and more about Vendler (She writes "Shakespeare" in her books!). The question of how he relates to these poets, beyond his surface allusiveness, is never quite taken up.
I would be more sympathetic to Vendler's attempts to describe Ashberry's tone and gloss his themes if she didn't periodically gesture at larger questions that seem to me more basic. She notes, for instance, that "Ashberry has staked his poetic wager on our recognition of his lexical and tonal hospitality, and what it enables him to say about the circumstances--mechanical, physical, and emotional--of modern living". But rather than elaborating on what he is enabled to say, or how our recognition of "hospitality" in his verse is in someway primary, she retreats to his clear contributions to the tone of the modern lyric. In this, she may be influenced by Stevens, who remarked in one of his letters that the philosophical positions he stakes out in his verse are just "tentative ideas for the purposes of poetry," and to be more fair, she does treat his meditations on style with insight and perspective, but I can't shake the idea that she's talking around the poems itself, rather than fighting with them.
Early in the review, she announces that "Like all lyric poets, Ashberry is convinced that his musical invention can rescue, from the tinny clang of contemporary noise, those universally felt surges of emotion and flexings of language in which readers can recognize themselves." If this is true, should not any aesthetic criticism of poetry examine this space between the "flexings" and the "surge"--that is, the fine-grained ways a series of words can amount to, acknowledge, or create emotional recognition or response?
Then again, would I argue that political criticism of poetry should likewise lie between the "invention" and the "rescue"?
Showing posts with label experiments. Show all posts
Showing posts with label experiments. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Saturday, December 17, 2005
experimenting
lately, i think
happiness
is terror
and freedom
of motion
(short lines terrify me. i just can't use them. so i'm abandoning some lines from other projects to play around with them)
happiness
is terror
and freedom
of motion
(short lines terrify me. i just can't use them. so i'm abandoning some lines from other projects to play around with them)
Friday, November 18, 2005
nietzsche really disturbs me, sometimes
i was flipping through beyond good and evil as i was trying to figure out that story, and again i came upon one of the passages that really makes me uncomfortable.
he's so good at piercing my illusions. but i can't get a grip on a positive response to his arguments. so i just feel a little nauseous.
in this case it was the beginning of section 194 in "on the natural history of morals." i'm actually not comfortable posting it here; it feels too insightful and personal and painful.
--
polanyi--the epistemologist/chemist i'm reading--raises some information-theory based objections to evolution. i'm not actually to the chapter where he really engages with them, so i don't know if he believes them or not, but they remind me a lot of one of the big mathematical arguments against it recently:
dembski and others argue that the no-free-lunch theorem (""[...] all algorithms that search for an extremum of a cost function perform exactly the same, when averaged over all possible cost functions.""--from Wikipedia, from somewhere else) applies to evolution. that is to say that fitness is clearly some sort of functions (or set of functions) and so arguments for a search strategy that consistently gets to better fitness faster than random (like evolution) are inherently spurious.
the most interesting explanation of why this isn't true that i read that Dhruv linked to from Lawrence's wiki: imagine a topographical map the surface of which is higher for mountains and lower for valleys. If I understand correctly, the no-free-lunch theorems argue that you can't define a function f(x,y) that iterated on a set of coordinates gets you to the highest point faster than random, across all possible such maps. Why? Because every time you try to build a function that's better than random you build information into the function as assumptions that is wrong for some maps.
The argument that I can't remember the author of says that this ain't a great model of evolution. Because most evolution is co-evolution--flowers becoming scented and bees learning to smell those scents--your function actually deforms the map. Fitness isn't really a pre-determined extremum; the organism changes the environment for all the other organisms trying to maximize their fitness and vice versa, with accurate assumptions becoming steadily more accurate and inaccurate ones being dropped.
I keep imagining a similar graph of social behavior. The only ways to become a "better person": change behavior to better match the environment or change the environment to better match the behavior. Reminds me of the role of ritual I kept writing about when I was reading Wieseltier and Aristotle: I was caught up in the image of wearing ruts into the soil that one could follow until one understood again which directions to go. It's the same image (albeit topographically reversed) as with this map, in which by climbing I can make the mountain higher and see out over a more distant view.
he's so good at piercing my illusions. but i can't get a grip on a positive response to his arguments. so i just feel a little nauseous.
in this case it was the beginning of section 194 in "on the natural history of morals." i'm actually not comfortable posting it here; it feels too insightful and personal and painful.
--
polanyi--the epistemologist/chemist i'm reading--raises some information-theory based objections to evolution. i'm not actually to the chapter where he really engages with them, so i don't know if he believes them or not, but they remind me a lot of one of the big mathematical arguments against it recently:
dembski and others argue that the no-free-lunch theorem (""[...] all algorithms that search for an extremum of a cost function perform exactly the same, when averaged over all possible cost functions.""--from Wikipedia, from somewhere else) applies to evolution. that is to say that fitness is clearly some sort of functions (or set of functions) and so arguments for a search strategy that consistently gets to better fitness faster than random (like evolution) are inherently spurious.
the most interesting explanation of why this isn't true that i read that Dhruv linked to from Lawrence's wiki: imagine a topographical map the surface of which is higher for mountains and lower for valleys. If I understand correctly, the no-free-lunch theorems argue that you can't define a function f(x,y) that iterated on a set of coordinates gets you to the highest point faster than random, across all possible such maps. Why? Because every time you try to build a function that's better than random you build information into the function as assumptions that is wrong for some maps.
The argument that I can't remember the author of says that this ain't a great model of evolution. Because most evolution is co-evolution--flowers becoming scented and bees learning to smell those scents--your function actually deforms the map. Fitness isn't really a pre-determined extremum; the organism changes the environment for all the other organisms trying to maximize their fitness and vice versa, with accurate assumptions becoming steadily more accurate and inaccurate ones being dropped.
I keep imagining a similar graph of social behavior. The only ways to become a "better person": change behavior to better match the environment or change the environment to better match the behavior. Reminds me of the role of ritual I kept writing about when I was reading Wieseltier and Aristotle: I was caught up in the image of wearing ruts into the soil that one could follow until one understood again which directions to go. It's the same image (albeit topographically reversed) as with this map, in which by climbing I can make the mountain higher and see out over a more distant view.
Monday, October 10, 2005
Subway notes
(An experiment: how willl it change my writing if I blog from the subway for half an hour each day on my way home?)
The cliche "Honesty is the best policy" relies on an older meaning of the word "policy": cunning manipulation, trickery, and statescraft. It means only that telling the truth is often the best way of manipulating people to act against their interests.
'sprobably true. But that makes me less sure that my sometime bluntness isn't more often bad for the people I'm being blunt to than it is good.
(Writing on this thing makes it much harder for me to take a second pass at sentences, so I take on this fatuous, sophomoric tone.)
/Herzog/ is amazing. Bellow writes these short, tight sentences that let him get away with practically anything. I had to throw away my copy of the book--I ripped the cover off carrying it around--but I want to buy another and study how he does things. Man.
I'm a little disturbed by all the electronics I'm carrying around. I'm practically a cyborg.
--------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld
Friday, October 07, 2005
the soul in paraphrase
(just playing with words. i'm lousy at this right now, but no day without a lion.)
What strange collision? What newborn
mannequin, what echo of wind, of rumble,
of something and collapse? can you recall
how these two fit again?
What strange collision? What newborn
mannequin, what echo of wind, of rumble,
of something and collapse? can you recall
how these two fit again?
Thursday, July 14, 2005
more pretention (will talk about work soon)
I really like the subway program that puts musicians in the subway. There’s something about hearing 30-40 seconds of music in every train station that breaks me out of my morning-thoughts and puts the world a little more in its place. I used to feel fairly uncomfortable in airports—from the stress, the rush, the weight of bags, my own tiredness, and so on--until I started listening to “So What?” on infinite repeat whenever I was walking through one. I didn’t expect it to work, but it makes me so much calmer. (and now “So What?” gets in my head whenever I think about airports.)
Freshman and sophomore year I spent a lot of time thinking about why I went to jazz concerts when I fell asleep in most of them. The best answer that I could come up with was that they gave me a chance to break out of cycles of negative thoughts. It was almost like I could daydream when I felt angry or sad or guilty or sorry for myself (which was a lot of freshman and sophomore year) rather than spiral through negativity.
So I keep thinking about the opening of twelfth night:
Duke : If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
It’s a totally different fuction for music. It’s wallowing music. I know that feeling, too—occasionally I’ll go listen to loud, bangy music or to love songs or to whatever else, but these two functions for music seem vaguely opposed to me. It keeps you from dwelling on thoughts but allows you to wallow in them?
Perhaps what’s happening is that the music breaks the repetitive pattern of your own thoughts precisely by generating feelings of its own. (Doesn’t it feel a little artificial when you /make/ yourself sad or happy or whatever by listening to the right kind of song?) That makes sense given another metaphor for music’s effects: if a song transports you, it takes you from the mental state you’re in to a new and different one.
A comparison to writing: in that passage of “Lucrece” that I can’t stop talking about, Lucrece uses the letter she’s writing to shape her own thinking about her rape and her ability to act in response. I’m almost certainly reading too much into that passage by saying this, but I’m convinced that Shakespeare is talking about the ways in which writing is a way of structuring thought, of breaking emotions and feelings and concerns into units that can be considered, reproduced, analyzed, and discarded.
I’m sorta half working on a poem now that’s rapidly becoming different from most things I write. Usually in the past I’ve written about internal confusion and excitement and love and so forth and about the fragmentation of one’s internal world in response to another. (I know that’s an unbelievably pretentious sentence; four people know about this journal, and all of them can deal with my pretention.) I’ve been able to use various kinds of puns and rhythms and nonsense to create reasonable objective correlatives for that confusion. But more recently, all I seem to be able to write about is a stable-I getting banged around by a world that doesn’t make sense. I feel incredibly narcissistic writing like this, but it’s what I can do right now, so I’m doing it.
The problem is that most of the things I want to write about are only important to me. Or rather, I can’t get the density or intensity that I need in the lines. So I search for personal feelings that are communicable to stand in for ones that only mean something very personally, and end up sitting there trying to make myself shudder and then writing down the things that make me do it, to see if I can get them to work as stand-ins for my own feelings. It’s terrible work. I hate doing it. It reminds me of all the times I’ve felt awful over the past few years.
It’s like that study that showed that simply making various faces—smiling, frowning, laughing, sneering—produces those emotions in your mind. I try to make myself smile now, when I’m most upset. It works. (Have you ever repaired a broken six-year-old by ordering him not to smile? “Don’t you smile now. Don’t smile. I see you about to smile there. Don’t. Hey. Hey, stop. Ohhh kay. You can smile a little….”)
All of these things are sorta ways that we program our brains, to do what we need them to do. What’s amazing about it is that not only has my brain learned how not to be sad in airports—by listening to Miles Davis—it has learned how to program itself not to be sad. And that level of learning will soon acquire a symbolic significance of its own. I don’t know how to better explain this thought, but it’s a current obsession of mine:
The brain is exactly like a dog’s brain, with incredibly powerful abilities of abstraction.
Repeated rewards lead us to learn behaviors. But our powers of association make the rewards get steadily more abstract and the behaviors get more and more complicated in ways that produce ridiculously complicated results. Emergence, anyone?
Freshman and sophomore year I spent a lot of time thinking about why I went to jazz concerts when I fell asleep in most of them. The best answer that I could come up with was that they gave me a chance to break out of cycles of negative thoughts. It was almost like I could daydream when I felt angry or sad or guilty or sorry for myself (which was a lot of freshman and sophomore year) rather than spiral through negativity.
So I keep thinking about the opening of twelfth night:
Duke : If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
It’s a totally different fuction for music. It’s wallowing music. I know that feeling, too—occasionally I’ll go listen to loud, bangy music or to love songs or to whatever else, but these two functions for music seem vaguely opposed to me. It keeps you from dwelling on thoughts but allows you to wallow in them?
Perhaps what’s happening is that the music breaks the repetitive pattern of your own thoughts precisely by generating feelings of its own. (Doesn’t it feel a little artificial when you /make/ yourself sad or happy or whatever by listening to the right kind of song?) That makes sense given another metaphor for music’s effects: if a song transports you, it takes you from the mental state you’re in to a new and different one.
A comparison to writing: in that passage of “Lucrece” that I can’t stop talking about, Lucrece uses the letter she’s writing to shape her own thinking about her rape and her ability to act in response. I’m almost certainly reading too much into that passage by saying this, but I’m convinced that Shakespeare is talking about the ways in which writing is a way of structuring thought, of breaking emotions and feelings and concerns into units that can be considered, reproduced, analyzed, and discarded.
I’m sorta half working on a poem now that’s rapidly becoming different from most things I write. Usually in the past I’ve written about internal confusion and excitement and love and so forth and about the fragmentation of one’s internal world in response to another. (I know that’s an unbelievably pretentious sentence; four people know about this journal, and all of them can deal with my pretention.) I’ve been able to use various kinds of puns and rhythms and nonsense to create reasonable objective correlatives for that confusion. But more recently, all I seem to be able to write about is a stable-I getting banged around by a world that doesn’t make sense. I feel incredibly narcissistic writing like this, but it’s what I can do right now, so I’m doing it.
The problem is that most of the things I want to write about are only important to me. Or rather, I can’t get the density or intensity that I need in the lines. So I search for personal feelings that are communicable to stand in for ones that only mean something very personally, and end up sitting there trying to make myself shudder and then writing down the things that make me do it, to see if I can get them to work as stand-ins for my own feelings. It’s terrible work. I hate doing it. It reminds me of all the times I’ve felt awful over the past few years.
It’s like that study that showed that simply making various faces—smiling, frowning, laughing, sneering—produces those emotions in your mind. I try to make myself smile now, when I’m most upset. It works. (Have you ever repaired a broken six-year-old by ordering him not to smile? “Don’t you smile now. Don’t smile. I see you about to smile there. Don’t. Hey. Hey, stop. Ohhh kay. You can smile a little….”)
All of these things are sorta ways that we program our brains, to do what we need them to do. What’s amazing about it is that not only has my brain learned how not to be sad in airports—by listening to Miles Davis—it has learned how to program itself not to be sad. And that level of learning will soon acquire a symbolic significance of its own. I don’t know how to better explain this thought, but it’s a current obsession of mine:
The brain is exactly like a dog’s brain, with incredibly powerful abilities of abstraction.
Repeated rewards lead us to learn behaviors. But our powers of association make the rewards get steadily more abstract and the behaviors get more and more complicated in ways that produce ridiculously complicated results. Emergence, anyone?
Friday, July 08, 2005
hmm.
so at work I'm doing web development and i've found that i can really only think about things by using a legal pad, drawing things out, and then moving to the computer.
and at home, i've started trying to write again. that i can't write down on paper at all. there's something about the way chunking-on-the-fly works in a text editor that feels incredibly natural to me when i'm writing a poem.
i'm trying to figure out what that means. are there really two different kinds of thought processes going on in my head? or have i just learned to associate success with certain tools? (when i write papers, i've started thinking on sheets and sheets of legal paper before writing.)
note: when i say web development, i should clarify that i'm using a front-end program that does all the heavy-lifting. i'm really just setting up content. i've entirely lost any ability i had to hack html and that wasn't much in the first place.
but i've realized that my boss doesn't really know html any more than i do. the computer programs seem to do most of the work and all the random-access knowledge he needs is stored on a bookshelf. it's an incredibly efficient system and one that is steadily getting me out of the computers-are-scary mood i've been in for the past few years.
so i've started to think about the attributes of a work environment that would be designed to help me write poems. kinda like those coding environments that ship with programming languages now, so you can have a language and scripting tools and various other things all open at once.
so what the Matthew-Writes software environment would look like:
to start with, a description of what i use now. i tend to have three or four text files open with lines and ideas and parts of lines. one of these is a main-poem file, that has the text of the thing i'm building, and the rest are gibberish files, with loose lines and stanzas and things.
i work by writing down little snippets, expanding on snippets, and accreting things into the main file. fairly regularly, i'll junk a main-file, move it to the side, start a new main-poem file based on some other snippet(s), and raid the old file for ideas. so at any given point i have something like the following files open: junk.html, junk2.html, index(old).html, index.html, and maybe an index(new).html which may turn into something, but may also turn into another junk file.
So my software environment might have the following "areas":
a workspace: such that i could click on the screen and type in a word or group of words, so that i would be able to write down loose lines as i thought of them.
a tablet: where i would be actively working. that'd be the latest version of the poem/stanza in question. by highlighting a group of lines and then clicking a button, i could push them to the archive (next) where they would be saved.
an archive: where bigger chunks could be kept. sometimes this would hold stanzas that didn't fit in the poem i was working on. sometimes this would hold multiple versions of the same idea, so that i could keep playing with it. the key is to keep my tablet relatively clear. right now i just put things at the bottoms of documents, but then they're hard to find.
a stable version: my current best version of the poem, pulled staticly from the tablet when i decide to keep something, would be accessible at the right.
in addition, i'd want easy look-ups for the bible, shakespeare, oed (etymology), dictionary.com (spelling), and a rhyming dictionary (willful perversity).
all right. enough willful self-indulgence.
current idea obsession: how the tools we use change the job we do.
and at home, i've started trying to write again. that i can't write down on paper at all. there's something about the way chunking-on-the-fly works in a text editor that feels incredibly natural to me when i'm writing a poem.
i'm trying to figure out what that means. are there really two different kinds of thought processes going on in my head? or have i just learned to associate success with certain tools? (when i write papers, i've started thinking on sheets and sheets of legal paper before writing.)
note: when i say web development, i should clarify that i'm using a front-end program that does all the heavy-lifting. i'm really just setting up content. i've entirely lost any ability i had to hack html and that wasn't much in the first place.
but i've realized that my boss doesn't really know html any more than i do. the computer programs seem to do most of the work and all the random-access knowledge he needs is stored on a bookshelf. it's an incredibly efficient system and one that is steadily getting me out of the computers-are-scary mood i've been in for the past few years.
so i've started to think about the attributes of a work environment that would be designed to help me write poems. kinda like those coding environments that ship with programming languages now, so you can have a language and scripting tools and various other things all open at once.
so what the Matthew-Writes software environment would look like:
to start with, a description of what i use now. i tend to have three or four text files open with lines and ideas and parts of lines. one of these is a main-poem file, that has the text of the thing i'm building, and the rest are gibberish files, with loose lines and stanzas and things.
i work by writing down little snippets, expanding on snippets, and accreting things into the main file. fairly regularly, i'll junk a main-file, move it to the side, start a new main-poem file based on some other snippet(s), and raid the old file for ideas. so at any given point i have something like the following files open: junk.html, junk2.html, index(old).html, index.html, and maybe an index(new).html which may turn into something, but may also turn into another junk file.
So my software environment might have the following "areas":
a workspace: such that i could click on the screen and type in a word or group of words, so that i would be able to write down loose lines as i thought of them.
a tablet: where i would be actively working. that'd be the latest version of the poem/stanza in question. by highlighting a group of lines and then clicking a button, i could push them to the archive (next) where they would be saved.
an archive: where bigger chunks could be kept. sometimes this would hold stanzas that didn't fit in the poem i was working on. sometimes this would hold multiple versions of the same idea, so that i could keep playing with it. the key is to keep my tablet relatively clear. right now i just put things at the bottoms of documents, but then they're hard to find.
a stable version: my current best version of the poem, pulled staticly from the tablet when i decide to keep something, would be accessible at the right.
in addition, i'd want easy look-ups for the bible, shakespeare, oed (etymology), dictionary.com (spelling), and a rhyming dictionary (willful perversity).
all right. enough willful self-indulgence.
current idea obsession: how the tools we use change the job we do.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Matthew Googles
"Doyle has no solid statistics on injuries caused by our hassles with packaging, but they do exist in England. One study there shows that "wrap rage," as it is called by the Brits, has been the cause of more than 60,000 injuries. These often occur when consumers resort to knives and scissors to deal with stubborn packages, according to a 2003 report in the Daily Telegraph."
--Joyce Gemperlein, The Washington Post, But the Dang Thing Won't Open
A little Google work turned up this BBC Business link. 71% of the 2000 readers of Your Magazine (aimed at the over-50 set) surveyed reported having gotten injured by packaging: "In the survey, the most common injury from trying to open packets was a cut finger, followed by cut hand, sprained wrist, bruised hand and strained shoulder muscle."
What I found more interesting was that 99% thought that packaging had gotten harder to open in the past 10 years. This seems like a startling result, until you realize that for people my age, 99% of packaging has probably gotten easier to open over the past ten years. Remember how hard it was to open jars when you were 11? Makes me realize how much the world may change as the people my parents' age keep getting older.
To return to my original point: the original statistic seemed questionable, so I kept digging. this CBS News article claims that 67,000 people suffered from injuries related to packaging in a single year. This seems to me to be suspiciously similar to the 60,000 WaPo statistic, but it's still unsourced. (In 2003, the population of Britain was 59.6 million, so this number suggests that (very roughly) 1 in 1000 Britains has been injured from trying to open a package. It just sounds like a made-up number.)
On a Lexis search, I found a Melbourne Herald-Sun story (can't figure out how to link to Lexis) that cites the BBC News article and the Your magazine article in February of 2004. Before that, there's a Daily Telegraph story from November of 2003 that finally identifies the source of the statistic. A quote:
"CORNHILL Direct has identified "wrap rage" as the latest irritant in modern life to drive Britain's more unstable citizens crazy.
Spokesman Allan Truman says every year more than 60,000 people need hospital treatment for injuries caused by grappling with food packaging. 'About 2,000 accidents happen while people are trying to separate items of frozen food, usually with a knife.'"
Cornhill Direct, it turns out, according to this market research report, is one of the leading advertisers in the over-60 insurance segment. Which leads me to suspect that they're a major advertiser for the aforementioned Your Magazine.
So an insurance company releases a number and then a magazine does a survey. (Obviously, the people who return survey cards about packaging injuries are more likely than the average person to have packaging injuries.) This information is then picked up by the BBC as business news, gets turned into a 'study' by CBS, and is reported by the Washington Post.
Someone has a good PR firm.
(This great Paul Graham essay turned me on to the way PR firms propagate and validate statistics. Thanks Krischelle for linking to "Hiring is Obsolete" on the same site. Most of his articles are addicting. One of my favorites, which I read a long time ago off AL Daily, is this , on essay-writing, why it's associated with literature, the history of writing, how to write, and several other things.)
--Joyce Gemperlein, The Washington Post, But the Dang Thing Won't Open
A little Google work turned up this BBC Business link. 71% of the 2000 readers of Your Magazine (aimed at the over-50 set) surveyed reported having gotten injured by packaging: "In the survey, the most common injury from trying to open packets was a cut finger, followed by cut hand, sprained wrist, bruised hand and strained shoulder muscle."
What I found more interesting was that 99% thought that packaging had gotten harder to open in the past 10 years. This seems like a startling result, until you realize that for people my age, 99% of packaging has probably gotten easier to open over the past ten years. Remember how hard it was to open jars when you were 11? Makes me realize how much the world may change as the people my parents' age keep getting older.
To return to my original point: the original statistic seemed questionable, so I kept digging. this CBS News article claims that 67,000 people suffered from injuries related to packaging in a single year. This seems to me to be suspiciously similar to the 60,000 WaPo statistic, but it's still unsourced. (In 2003, the population of Britain was 59.6 million, so this number suggests that (very roughly) 1 in 1000 Britains has been injured from trying to open a package. It just sounds like a made-up number.)
On a Lexis search, I found a Melbourne Herald-Sun story (can't figure out how to link to Lexis) that cites the BBC News article and the Your magazine article in February of 2004. Before that, there's a Daily Telegraph story from November of 2003 that finally identifies the source of the statistic. A quote:
"CORNHILL Direct has identified "wrap rage" as the latest irritant in modern life to drive Britain's more unstable citizens crazy.
Spokesman Allan Truman says every year more than 60,000 people need hospital treatment for injuries caused by grappling with food packaging. 'About 2,000 accidents happen while people are trying to separate items of frozen food, usually with a knife.'"
Cornhill Direct, it turns out, according to this market research report, is one of the leading advertisers in the over-60 insurance segment. Which leads me to suspect that they're a major advertiser for the aforementioned Your Magazine.
So an insurance company releases a number and then a magazine does a survey. (Obviously, the people who return survey cards about packaging injuries are more likely than the average person to have packaging injuries.) This information is then picked up by the BBC as business news, gets turned into a 'study' by CBS, and is reported by the Washington Post.
Someone has a good PR firm.
(This great Paul Graham essay turned me on to the way PR firms propagate and validate statistics. Thanks Krischelle for linking to "Hiring is Obsolete" on the same site. Most of his articles are addicting. One of my favorites, which I read a long time ago off AL Daily, is this , on essay-writing, why it's associated with literature, the history of writing, how to write, and several other things.)
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