Monthly Archives: May 2012

Life: The writer edition

May 16, 2012 By in Life Leave a comment

In speculating “as to why anyone embarks on the adventure of writing” Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL) says in Public Enemies that

you write to find out not so much who you are as who you’re becoming. I believe that what is at stake in a book is not being yourself, finding yourself, coinciding with your truth, your shadows, your eternal child within, or any of that other idiotic stuff, but rather changing, becoming other than the person you were before beginning and whom the book’s own growth has rendered obsolete and uninteresting. Do we write to retreat into ourselves or to escape; to disappear or to make an appearance; to occupy a territory or to mine it and, having, mined it, to change it and lose ourselves in the maze of an unreachable identity? For me, the answer is obvious and in itself explains why I couldn’t care less about the nonsense written about the ‘truth’ of my relations with money, media, power [. . . ]

He might even be right.

The book as a whole feels self-indulgent and pointless so far, though it isn’t stupid and could improve with time.

Product Review: The Leuchtturm 1917 notebook

May 12, 2012 By in Reviews, Tools Tags: , , , , , , , , 9 Comments

The Leuchtturm 1917 is perfectly competent. It’s slightly larger than a Moleskine, when a notebook should be, if anything, slightly smaller. This is a small point. The paper quality is, to my eye and hand, indistinguishable from Moleskine’s, which in turn is very similar to Guildhall and most of the other non-Rhodia notebooks I’ve tried. It has one other annoying feature: the last 30 or so pages are perforated; this is another way of saying, “They’ll eventually fall out.” If you’re the kind of person who wants to desecrate your notebook by tearing out pages, then the Leuchtturm 1917 is for you. To be sure, perforated pages are a minor annoyance. But if you’re not trying to avoid minor annoyances, stick with Moleskines, since they’re widely available.

The only major problem with the Leuchtturm 1917 simple: it doesn’t offer any major, obvious improvements over the Moleskine. It doesn’t offer any real disadvantages, either, other than its departure from the canonical 3.5 x 5.5 size and the perforated final pages. Unlike the Quo Vadis Habana, however, the Leuchtturm 1917 isn’t so much larger that carrying it around becomes a chore.

If this review seems slight, that’s because it is—the differences between this notebook and a Moleskine are trivial. They experience the same corner tearing, although I didn’t use the Leuchtturm long enough for the tears to develop into the cover partially coming off. If you’ve used a Moleskine, you’ve already in effect used this notebook; both are decent, but neither beats the Rhodia Webbie.

More on that soon.

The new notebook stack:

May 12, 2012 By in miscellaenous Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

In “Eight years of writing and the first busted Moleskine,” I posted a picture of the notebook stack on one of my bookshelves. It has expanded since:

The orange notebook is a Rhodia Webbie, and I discovered why notebooks should be black the hard way. The notebook was originally a lovely orange color. But riding in cargo pockets, jeans pockets, backpacks, car seats, purses (occasionally), and various other means is a sure way to attract muck. Within two weeks, the notebook simply looked dirty.

The next notebook I bought was black. Notice, however, that despite the Rhodia’s color, its corners have remained intact, unlike most of the rest.

Conversation: Typographers and fontists

May 12, 2012 By in miscellaenous Tags: , , Leave a comment

Girl: “The guy who did it was a typographer.”
Me: “Notorious perverts, certainly.”
Girl: “Exactly. You understand.”

I mean, have you seen the movie Helvetica?

The Sun Also Rises and meaning through action

May 12, 2012 By in Books, Culture, Fiction Tags: , , , , , 4 Comments

Almost none of the characters in The Sun Also Rises and have jobs. Jake Barnes works as a journalist, but during most of the novel he’s on the sort of vacation that makes one long for the office. Bill Gorton writes too, but we don’t see much evidence of his writing. Pedro Romero is a bullfighter who apparently loses his magical bullfighting essence (or “aficion” in the language of the novel, but “magical bullfighting essence” makes it sound sillier) due to Brett. The rest—Mike, Brett, Robert—don’t do much of anything beyond drink.

This might be connected to why they all seem unhappy. Not only are they unhappy, but they don’t even appear to be getting much action (with the exception of Brett), which probably compounds their problems. This may be a feature of hanging out with a large group of guys and only one woman.

When I first read the novel, I didn’t notice how dumb most of the characters are. Perhaps I was at an age when I still considered wandering around and mindlessly drinking to be romantic and logical. Perhaps I was just equally dumb. Now I mostly want to suggest to the characters that, since most of them are in their 30s, they ought to find something to do. What that “something” is isn’t very important. Writing sonnets. Working in nuclear physics (which was big at the time). Inventing a new dance. Opening a bar, instead of consuming in a bar. Just have it be something. In short, I want to them to get a job, or, if not a job, then at least a hobby beyond the bottle. Don’t get me wrong. I like the bottle as much as the next guy, especially when it contains gin, and someone has tonic and lime nearby.

Plus, Brett is overrated. By the time I hit 23 or thereabouts, the allure of the manipulative, dissolute beauty had faded—not, mind you, the allure of beauty, or beauty distributed across a number of women, but of the attention-seeking and thoughtlessly cruel kind, who might be worth going to San Sebastian with, but not worth working one’s self up over when she floats to her next lily pad.

That sentence is convoluted, but I’m pretty sure it makes sense and expresses what Brett does to the inner states of the men around her, who really ought to know better. If one doesn’t want to come around, look for another. Note that this strategy or principle also applies to men. If a rival comes along, there’s a decent shot the wishy-washy person will leap to defend her territory. If she doesn’t, you never had a shot in the first place, and you still have someone to keep you warm at night and do other fun things with. (Change the gender pronouns in this paragraph to suit your own sexual temperament.)

When you’re young, long-winded, elusive chases are kind of appealing. But you really ought to learn to know better by the time you’re, say, 22.

I still admire Hemingway’s use of language and style, but I wonder if one reason high school and college students are drawn to The Sun Also Rises is because school mimics the no-stakes, no-purpose world in which characters live. Once you get into the larger world, where things have real effects, the pleasures of wandering aimlessly, drinking randomly, and chasing mentally unstable girls who mostly want attention becomes much lower. Again: wandering, drinking, and chasing sex can still be quite fun for any and all genders, but they require purpose beyond the mere doing of those activities themselves. In The Sun Also Rises, Jake says, “The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta. Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences. It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta.” Everything is “quite unreal” throughout the novel as a whole. It seems “out of place to think of consequences” for any of the characters, ever. They might be Americans in Europe, but their travels do not appear to have enlarged them.

Tina Fey's Bossypants and its relationship to James Fallows' Breaking the News

May 9, 2012 By in Books, Culture, Nonfiction Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

This passage appears in Tina Fey’s memoir / how-to guide Bossypants:

And Oh, the Cable News Reportage! The great thing about cable news is that they have to have something to talk about twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes it’s Anderson Cooper giggling with one of the Real Housewives of Atlanta. Sometimes it’s Rick Sanchez screaming about corn syrup. They have endless time to filler, but viewers get kind of ‘bummed out’ if they supply actual information about wars and stuff, so ‘Media Portrayal of Sarah Palin’ and SNL and I became the carrageenan in America’s news nuggets for several weeks. I was a cable news star, like a shark or a missing white child!

The downside of being a cable news star is that nay ass-hair with a clip-on tie can come on an as ‘expert’ to talk about you. One day, by accident, I caught this tool Tom something on MSNBC saying that he thought I had not ‘conducted myself well’ during all this. In his opinion, Mrs. Palin had conducted herself with dignity and I had not. (I’m pretty sure Tom’s only claim to expertise is that he oversees a website where people guess incorrectly about who might win show biz awards.) There was a patronizing attitude behind Tom’s comments that I certainly don’t think he would have applied to a male comedian. Chris Rock was touring at the time and he was literally calling George W. Bush ‘retarded’ in his act. I don’t think Tom something would have expressed disappointment that Chris was not conducting himself sweetly. I learned how incredibly frustrating it is to watch someone talk smack about you and not be able to respond.

I love the word “reportage,” which sounds like “personage,” and bears the same relationships to real news or reports that McDonald’s does to real food with real nutritional value. And the phrase “wars and stuff” lets Fey drop into the mindset of a network executive, perhaps just a few years out from his or her MBA, who is trying to decide what might maximize revenue this quarter. Answer: sharks, missing white girls, and fake controversy. We don’t need any stuff about wars, tough compromises, or deep trends! Let’s dazzle them with superficial bullshit, which a subset of them really like, and hope no one notices what we’re not covering!

(Unfortunately, this works because we, collectively, don’t demand better. But that’s a subject for another time.)

Fey’s critique is close to James Fallows’ in Breaking The News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy. Fey is being funny and Fallows serious, and Fey is dealing with a media environment a decade and change later than the one Fallows describes, but on a basic level the environment has barely changed. If anything, the explosion in cable news has made it worse in many ways, with only a handful of exceptions (The Daily Show, which fights against the dumbest parts of the contemporary media, or coverage of Trayvon Martin’s murder). The net result of this is Americans losing confidence in the institutions that are supposed to serve us. The responsibility is partially ours, but it’s also partially that of the people who nominally serve us.

Everyone who pays attention to the media knows it’s broken, and that the brokenness seems to have seeped into the larger culture as a form of blanket cynicism and condemnation. I don’t have a strong sense of how to reverse this dynamic, save perhaps on an individual level.

See also David Brin on how an idea has, over the last twenty years, become “fundamental dogma to millions of Americans:” “The notion that assertions can trump facts.” I wonder if the Western world’s enormous wealth insulates people from the potential consequences of their beliefs; very people die or are seriously injured as a result of dumb beliefs based on erroneous or completely absent information. In other words, it’s now much cheaper to believe nonsense.

On a separate, and more pleasant note, Fallows’ new book, China Airborne, will be published on May 15. In addition, Bossypants itself is funny throughout. Samples:

* “Politics and prostitution have to be the only jobs where inexperience is considered a virtue. In what other profession would you brag about not knowing stuff? ‘I’m not one of those fancy Harvard heart surgeons. I’m just an unlicensed plumber with a dream and I’d like to cut your chest open.’ The crowd cheers.”

* “In 1997 I flew to New York from Chicago to interview for a writing position at Saturday Night Live. It seemed promising because I’d heard the show was looking to diversify. Only in comedy, by the way, does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity.”

* “I feel about Photoshop the way some people feel about abortion. It is appalling and a tragic reflection on the moral decay of our society . . . unless I need it, in which case, everybody be cool.”

* “If you are a woman and you bought this book for practical tips on how to make it in a male-dominated workplace, here they are. No pigtails, no tube tops. Cry sparingly. (Some people say ‘Never let them see you cry.’ I say, if you’re so mad you could just cry, then cry. It terrifies everyone.) When choosing sexual partners, remember: Talent is not sexually transmittable. Also, don’t eat diet foods in meetings.”

Links: Chairs, publishing, Game of Thrones, midlists, and vocational education

May 9, 2012 By in Links Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

* Against chairs. Yes! Way against! I might buy a Geekdesk soon, in part because I can’t get this Herman Miller Embody adjusted right. See also my thoughts on the movie Objectified and designers’ obsession with chairs. EDIT: I bought a Geekdesk.

* Bertrand Russell’s 10 Commandments for Teachers; I try to follow them, especially the one about arguing via authority.

* The Real E-Publishing Story: It’s Not the Millionaires, It’s the Midlist.

* Why publishers hate the midlist: taxes and depreciation.

* How Thor Power Hammered Publishing.

* J. A. Konrath: Harlequin Fail. Interestingly, I’ve begun contemplating whether it would be possible for me to sell 10,000 ebooks per book, and the answer might be “yes.”

* What’s HBO Go’s Problem? There is no word for “cord cutter” in Dothraki. The linked cartoon basically describes me; I’ve tried to buy HBO Go, only to find that I have to have a cable subscription, which I don’t have because I don’t have a TV. I’ve tried Amazon and iTunes. Nothing. However, although I’m an inveterate respecter of copyright, I have discovered certain alternate means that allow me (and sometimes friends in my position) to watch the show, and then allow me to write posts like this one.

* Learning that works: rethinking vocational education. This is positive step, and I’m noticing more and more people making these kinds of arguments. Worthless mentions this too.

How much of university life is about education? Gladwell, Bissinger, and the football-on-campus debate

May 9, 2012 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In “College Football Should Be Banned: How Malcolm Gladwell and Buzz Bissinger won the Slate/Intelligence Squared live debate,” Katy Waldman writes that “Bissinger [who is most famous for writing Friday Night Lights . . .] reserved his ire for what he called ‘the distracted university’: the campus so awash in fun and fandom that it neglects learning. The United States faces the most competitive global economy in recent memory, he warned. An unhealthy obsession with sports handicaps our intellectual class.” This might be true, but most students don’t seem to care very much: In Beer and Circus: How Big-Time Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education, Murray Sperber says relatively few students attend college for primarily intellectual reasons. Most appear to view it as party time or a way to signal other characteristics.

Colleges have noticed this and responded, in the main, by inflating grades and reducing work. Campuses aren’t “awash in fun and fandom” because of some nefarious conspiracy: they’re awash in fun and fandom because most people appear to like those things more than they like discussing sonnets or the finer points of hash tables. There are obviously individual exceptions to this—like me, and most professors or would-be professors—but the overall trend is clear.

If students demand more serious classes, you’ll be able to tell by the number who stop taking weak business classes, comm, and sociology, and start taking hard core classes in the liberal arts and sciences. The overall trend, however, appears to be in the opposite direction in most disciplines and at most universities. This trend looks like it’s being driven more by students and their choices than by any other force. Until the chattering classes acknowledge that, we’re going to get hand-waving or evil-administrator explanations.

Still, I agree with Bissinger: college football should be ended or at least radically changed. But my reasons are different: it’s obvious that colleges should be paying the people who are professional athletes in all but name, and it’s unethical to pay coaches hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars while the effectively professional athletes receive only dubious “scholarships.” It’s also obvious by now that repeated sub-concussive blows to the head can cause CTE, and that football is inherently dangerous in the same way smoking is inherently dangerous. If adults want to take up inherently dangerous activities, they should be able to in most circumstances, and football is one of those circumstances. But they should at the very least be paid for the risks they choose to take.

That being said, if college sports are reduced to their proper scope, it’s not obvious what will replace them as a large-scale, collective ritual. Jonathan Haidt writes about the value of such rituals and the group experiences they inspire in The Righteous Mind, and American life has systematically removed such rituals from most people’s lives. Religion or military service once provided them, but now the former has waned for most people and the latter is a specialist occupation. Sports are one domain that expanded to fulfill the need many people have for arbitrary tribal affiliation and collective action. That might be one reason a lot of people react viscerally against the deserved criticism of college sports: such criticism feels like an attack on identity, not merely a discussion about economics and exploitation. I don’t really have a good method for negating or altering such feelings.

In the case of football, however, I wouldn’t be surprised if a scenario like the one Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier lay out in “What Would the End of Football Look Like? An economic perspective on CTE and the concussion crisis” occurs. Notice especially this line: “More and more modern parents will keep their kids out of playing football, and there tends to be a ‘contagion effect’ with such decisions; once some parents have second thoughts, many others follow suit.” Based on the CTE data I’ve seen, there’s absolutely no way I’d let one of my (currently hypothetical) children play football, and if my friends let their kids play, I’d be tempted to forward some of the CTE and football literature. Just as very few modern parents want their children to smoke, even if they do or did, I would not be surprised if, in a short period of time, very few modern parents want their children to play football.

The kind of e-mail you like getting from a student:

May 5, 2012 By in Teaching Tags: , , , Leave a comment

What I wanted to tell you was that as I walked to my car triumphantly, I was taken aback by a distinct but powerful desire to explain my new decision to you. Why? I felt so good about my choice that I think I wanted to be interrogated by you and your often-obnoxiously probing questions (that’s a compliment). I imagined how the conversation would go and the way you might challenge my choice to provoke critical thinking. Then I thought about how well I’d be able to handle the scrutiny and cackled. So thank you for unwittingly validating my big decisions.

Although I like getting this kind of e-mail, I wonder what it says about me that I can be characterized, accurately—or so friends tell me—as asking “often-obnoxiously probing questions.” Furthermore, I wonder what it says that I’ve caused that habit to be internalized in others, too.

Discuss in the comments section. Bonus points to answers that include obnoxious, probing questions.

(I asked the student in question if she minded me posting this excerpt, and she wrote back: “please DO use my comments in a blog post. I’m actually kind of regretting that I didn’t send you the first draft. I waited a good half hour or so and then tuned the language down before sending it because I didn’t want to risk offending you. :P The theme was the same (and still intended as complimentary).” Fortunately, I’m notably hard to offend.)

On King Joffrey in Game of Thrones

May 5, 2012 By in Links Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

In “TV’s best villain,” Willa Paskin writes: “‘Game [of Thrones]’ is not interested in sympathy when it comes to Joffrey, doing nothing to redeem him. He is just a villain, served straight up.” She’s right, and this is useful because in real life there are outright villains; many turn out to be psychopaths, as John Seabrook describes in “Suffering Souls: The search for the roots of psychopathy” for The New Yorker. We shouldn’t necessarily focus on such people in our narrative art forms, but we also shouldn’t forget they exist. More importantly, we should be asking—as Game of Thrones implicitly does—how they can maintain power in the face of frequently self-defeating cruelty.

In the show and the books, virtually everyone except Joffrey’s his mother hates him, including those on his own side, but we can also see why the people on his “side” stand by and support him nonetheless (while waiting for one of them to break and finish him—which eventually happens, in book three or four; I don’t think I give anything away with this, since it’s not possible to survive in a world like Westeros when you alienate everyone). When Joffrey’s behavior is so awful that even his family, or at least a certain member of his family, turns on him, he can’t maintain power. People are only as powerful as the coalitions around them.

Part of Joffrey’s other problem is his age and power. I suspect that most contemporary teenagers would not handle near-infinite power over others especially well, because they haven’t had the life experiences to temper their egos and increase their empathy and understanding of others.

This analysis only works because, as Paskin points out, virtually all the other characters on the show and in the books are nuanced and neither purely good nor purely evil. In most forms of narrative art, cartoonishly good and evil characters aren’t all that interesting because they’re not real. But placing a single evil character in a morally ambiguous matrix makes the single evil character work out better, especially when “evil” isn’t really evil in some objective, Sauron-like sense, but a product of ego and nearly unlimited power run amok.