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There’s a Convention for Everyone, and Other News

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On the Shelf

petconvention

H.H. Backer’s Total Pet Expo. Photo: Yvette Marie Dostatni, via Slate

  • On the rise of the medical humanities: Can poetry’s therapeutic effects earn it a place on the doctor’s bookshelf? “Poetry can tell us about human experience, but it does this in its own language and not the more straightforward language of prose. It works by suggestion, but this doesn’t mean that it cannot console, teach, amuse, enlighten, mimic, disconcert and so much more. It can capture—or cause us to reconstruct—experiences and feelings that we might otherwise not be conscious of … Poetry’s use of language is at the furthest extreme from the self-help book, which is often dogmatic, insistent, reductive, bullying even.”
  • How to cheer yourself up when you’re feeling misunderstood: read scathing early reviews of canonical novels, such as this one, by H. L. Mencken, for a certain 1925 classic: “Scott Fitzgerald’s new novel, The Great Gatsby, is in form no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that … This story is obviously unimportant … What ails it, fundamentally, is the plain fact that it is simply a story—that Fitzgerald seems to be far more interested in maintaining its suspense than in getting under the skins of its people.”
  • Yvette Marie Dostatni’s new series of photographs documents the rise of the convention in America: the obsessive subcultures, the hotel conference rooms, the sprawling trade shows. “That’s just the culture of the United States: People are looking for places they can fit in for two to three days, a pass to get out of their daily lives. They’re looking for people who are like them.”
  • Is there any hope of preserving or archiving the Internet? “The Web dwells in a never-ending present. It is—elementally—ethereal, ephemeral, unstable, and unreliable … In providing evidence, legal scholars, lawyers, and judges often cite Web pages in their footnotes … but a 2013 survey of law- and policy-related publications found that, at the end of six years, nearly fifty per cent of the URLs cited in those publications no longer worked.”
  • Among a certain kind of “creative” Silicon Valley set, the word maker has taken on a grating ubiquity—you’re not truly innovating if you’re not making something. Does this mean that, say, teaching is not a fundamentally creative pursuit? “I am not a maker. In a framing and value system is about creating artifacts, specifically ones you can sell, I am a less valuable human. As an educator, the work I do is superficially the same, year on year … To characterize what I do as ‘making’ is to mistake the methods—courses, workshops, editorials—for the effects. Or, worse, if you say that I ‘make’ other people, you are diminishing their agency and role in sense-making, as if their learning is something I do to them.”