A blog is not a book. Julie and Julia, the blog-based book by Julie Powell, the food writer who faced her "secretarial ennui" by blogging, has come out. In today's NY Times review, David Kamp praises Powell as a blogger, saying that the Julie/Julia Project was "one of the best ideas yet hatched in the still-young history of blogging." He says:

Powell proved to be a natural as a blogger: sharp, articulate, self-effacing and possessed of the tirade-prone, damn-you-world irritability endemic to the form.

In other words, he sees bloggish genre traits that might or might not translate so well to the page:

[The book] has too much blog in its DNA: it has a messy, whatever's-on-my-mind incontinence to it, taking us places we'd rather not go, such as into Powell's girlfriends' uninteresting sex lives, into her gynecologist's office (Julie sold off some of her ova to pay off credit card debt, you know), into Eric's occasional bouts of some mystery ailment . . . .

For Kamp, the moment in the book that finally distinguishes good book from good blog is Powell's bloggishly informal but bookishly uninformative observation about how much butter and gelatin was used in Child's cooking:

"Nineteen-sixty-one was a different country, no doubt about it," Powell writes. Alas, that's as far as she goes with the thought. Julie Powell willed herself out of that secreterial pool by thinking big; I wish that, for her print publishing debut, she hadn't thought so small.

Kamp wants more product, more authority, more ambition, from the book; he wants it to more fully outgrow the process-oriented blog that was its source. For Kamp, at least, the two genres cannot finally do quite the same work. He's probably right, and it's good to know.

"The Servantless American Cook," New York Times Book Review, page 22. [0 & P]

Feynman on blogging. Not really, of course. But in the October 20th issue of the NYROB Freeman Dyson reviews the new volume of letters written by the late Richard Feynman. Dyson mentions an account by Feynman of modern Greek education. There is, says Dyson, an "overwhelming emphasis on the glories of classical Greece, [giving] children a bad start in life [by] teaching them that nothing they do can equal the achievements of their ancestors." A system of education, then, that subordinates children to a source of knowledge that is and will remain beyond them.

Next Dyson quotes Feynman about one path out of this cultural trap, and notice that an unnamed "they" resist the clue he offers that such a trap is of any significance:

They were very upset when I said that the thing of greatest importance to mathematics in Europe was the discovery by Tartaglia that you can solve a cubic equation -- which, altho it is very little used, must have been psychologically wonderful because it showed a modern man could do something no ancient Greek could do, and therefore helped in the renaissance which was the freeing of man from the intimidation of the ancients -- what they are learning in school is to be intimidated into thinking they have fallen so far below their super ancestors. (6)

Feynman wants to build up or restore confidence and agency in new settings -- primary elements of a little theory of knowledge implied by the passage. Each community should deserve the same confidence, the same knowledge-making agency, and each act of local knowledge-making serves as a precedent for others, as in the story of Tartaglia.

I'm tempted to read this story as a call for colleges and schools to collaborate with their communities to make knowledge that serves their region. It's a bit of a stretch, but I think the principle is lurking there -- the collaboration is psychologically healthy, builds agency, recovers a center of understanding located at home instead of in a distant authority. Good schools would be less generic, more situated in the region, more tied to the people they serve. It's the active spirit of blogging, as well.

In the Wikipedia article I find this quotation from Feynman: "What I cannot create, I do not understand." If he was right about that, then we have another reason why schools must be about creating and using knowledge. The alternative would be not to understand how knowledge works.

From "Wise Man" by Freeman Dyson, a review of Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman, edited and with an introduction by Michelle Feynman. Foreword by Timothy Ferris. [0 & P]

Graffiti and optimism. [This week's radio essay.]

We had done nothing to earn it, but the Saturday after Hurricane Katrina was a beautiful day around here. I talked one of my children into running an errand with me. As we drove up the block we came upon a lemonade stand where a couple of kids were raising money for the hurricane survivors. I stopped the car and asked for two drinks and a giant cookie we could share. We were the first customers, so when I paid the kids with a five dollar bill the father of these young humanitarian-entrepreneurs started digging in his pockets for change. As fortunate as my family was on that safe and sunny day, how could I ask for money back? I waved away the change and we drove on. If the traffic’s not bad, you can easily count your blessings as you drive through our little city.

Or you can talk yourself into a pessimistic attitude toward Michiana – it’s not hard to do. On my regular walk I see the work of two graffiti writers. One of them uses blue spray paint down by the river. He signs himself as “Risk” but he spells it with a Z – R I Z K. I picture the writer as a classic American, a young man who wants some excitement, who wants to make a mark on the world, and I admire that. But he has found no role model to help him do it right, so all he has is his nickname, Rizk, written furtively here and there across the city and painted over by street department crews when they spot it. Rizk travels with a friend sometimes, a shorter fellow. His messages are a few inches lower on the wall, and they’re always obscene. So when Rizk takes his midnight walks, he’s got this very troubled companion by his side. Will Rizk’s better self, with that hint of American individualism, be swept away? Will the other America, the crude and midnight America, take him down?

On my walks I pass chain restaurants and gas stations and other small businesses. The people who start small businesses are a special kind of American dreamer. They risk so much of their hard-earned savings, carefully-raised capital, and sweat equity, knowing the whole time that the odds are against them. What bold, hard-working visionaries and optimists they are! And what terrible decisions some of them make. You see a small business open, sometimes, and because of what it sells or where it’s located you know instantly that it has no chance. A year later, all the money and all the sweat and dreams are gone.

In spite of that, I have to say that if you are a pessimist, you’re not paying attention part of the time. The same goes for optimists. There is plenty of evidence that for Michiana these are, and they are not, the good old days. It depends what evidence you point to. Today I’ll point to this:

I have heard on good authority that the biegnet served at downtown South Bend’s new Chickory Café are among the best you’ll ever find outside of Louisiana. Biegnet are the signature hot pastry dish of the French Quarter. They are what glazed doughnuts wish they could be. The batter cooks up into an airy rectangle, and instead of the heavy glaze of a donut shop you have a brilliance of powdered sugar mounded over the top. At my café table on Wednesday, we finished eating and delayed there over red mugs of chickory coffee. We interrupted our conversation about New Orleans for a moment to congratulate the proprietor, the hard-working visionary who has brought the perfect biegnet to Michiana. Then the topic shifted to race in America – our experiences, our questions, our hopes. My companion and I have different shades of skin. The pessimist in me points out how rarely people cross the color line to have what can be, admittedly, a difficult dialogue about race. The optimist in me proclaims that just two days ago, at the café in downtown South Bend, we enjoyed dishes of warm biegnet and good conversation about one of America’s most challenging subjects. [0 & P]