Category Archives: Books

Summary Judgment: Confessions of a Sociopath — M. E. Thomas

August 8, 2013 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Confessions of a Sociopath came from Tyler Cowen’s recommendation, and it’s the perfect book to get from a library: I learned from it but am unlikely to want to re-read it. There isn’t enough depth to justify purchase but there is more than enough to justify reading. Like Cowen I would read this as closer to a novel or memoir—which is usually a way of saying “I make shit up but don’t want to admit it”—than a work of strict nonfiction.

Confessions of a sociopathI kept hoping for more lascivious content but the author appeared at first to have led a sedate life in that respect, perhaps due to her affiliation with the Mormon church, although there is a late chapter on this subject. Her sex life is dealt with in a way that seems decorous by modern standards, despite her affairs with women.

This passage in particular stood our as characteristic of the way people can attack the modern tendency towards explicit rules:

While she [a somewhat unattractive, insecure supervisor] regularly billed as many hours as humanly possible, I exploited our [law] firm’s non-existent vacation policy by taking three-day weekends and weeks-long vacations abroad. People were implicitly expected not to take vacations, but I had my own lifelong policy of following only explicit rules, and then only because they’re easiest to prove against me. She could sense that I flouted this and other unspoken rules with little consequence by a quick look at my time sheets and my less-than-formal office attire.

Explicit rules can often be turned against the people who aren’t following them. Working around governments and universities has given me special aptitude for figuring out what the explicit rules are and how people break them, because explicit rules are often impossible to follow completely, or following them completely is stupid in the real world, or both. Nonetheless our present bureaucratic world is rife with rules created by well-meaning bureaucrats, and those rules are ripe for exploitation by anyone who takes the time to read them.

Confessions of a Sociopath demonstrates how people acting in bad faith can activate biases and bureaucratic institutions for destructive ends; Thomas tells stories about repeatedly manipulating people and institutions through sexuality and sexual harassment claims and innuendoes, and in this she is in some ways recapitulating ideas from Francine Prose’s Blue Angel, although that novel is about a straightforward though misunderstood quid pro quo gone bad.

Thomas has an unusually direct understanding of her own apparent condition in a way that many professionals don’t; this section shows something important about professors—Thomas is a law professor—and why people (like me!) want to be them, and something important about Thomas:

People are often surprised to learn that I teach less than six hours a week, less than eight months out of the year. In many way it’s a dream job for someone inherently lazy and unable to do grunt work like me, but eventually I’m sure I’ll get bored of it too. After I do, I don’t know what, but I’m sure things will work out. They always do.

Being a law professor doesn’t appear to be a particularly challenging job from a teaching perspective, since the professor is continually repeating information mastered long ago to students with no familiarity, in an environment in which the professor has absolute power over the student but not vice-versa (sample moment from the book: “They can try to fight me, but in that classroom I am God. I write the test. I give them the grade”). The professor is part of a legal regime that prevents lawyers from existing save through credentialing from other lawyers. People who want an honest test of their skills sell to markets; people who can’t handle an honest test of their skills go to school.

To be sure school does sometimes offer honest tests of skill and imparts important skills but that appears to be the exception, not the rule, based on my experiences on both sides of the desk. It’s not clear how to make utility and intellectual interest the norm instead of the exception.

The distinction between social and personal power may be relevant here; as the authors of the linked paper say, “social power [is] power over other people and personal power [is] freedom from other people.” Sociopaths appear particularly good at the latter, since they don’t appear to care what other people think except to the extent it affects them.

I am not convinced that we aren’t seeing huge selection bias problems with sociopaths, which limits broadly applicable ideas. Note that I wrote this sentence before re-reading Cowen’s linked post above, in which he said essentially the same thing.

The editing is good and the book moves; few sentences or ideas are essential in and of themselves.There could have been more and/or better research citations, but the stories were consistently entertaining, and challenging; she describes seeing a struggling baby opossum in a pool and then, instead of helping it as most of us would have, drowning it. That’s towards the beginning of the book and the opossum story dares us to keep reading. Its placements in this blog post is not an accident, given that my overall impression of the book is positive.

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work — Mason Currey

July 18, 2013 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Daily Rituals is charming, and almost every entry feels like the right length; if anything, I would have liked each to be slightly longer, perhaps because the quirks and weirdnesses of the famous artists described provide justification for the quirks and weirdnesses of non-famous artists.

daily_ritualsThe answer to the title is “divergently,” but with some patterns. Many like walks, routines, and stimulants. Exasperation with TV is common, and even the non-writer artists tend to read. Many artists also exasperated lovers and spouses through their compulsions and tics. Given the low remunerative value of art and the low probability of success through recognition, being an artist is a compulsion for many of those described within—Currey even uses the word in his description of Patricia Highsmith: “Writing was less a source of pleasure for her than a compulsion, without which she was miserable.” Daily Rituals may be best read by anyone romantically entangled with or biologically related to artists, as well as any artists who want to justify their own weird predilections. I love it when people explain myself to me.

Currey wants to answer questions like, “are comfort and creativity incompatible, or is the opposite true: Is finding a basic level of daily comfort a prerequisite for sustained creative work?” But they don’t have answers, because artists work in all sorts of places in all sorts of ways. It’s like asking about alcoholics: people who really want to drink will drink in elegant bars like Pouring Ribbons or chug Natty Lites in a dark Chinatown alley. Most might prefer the former to the latter but will settle for the latter when necessary. Currey also writes:

“The book’s title is Daily Rituals, but my focus in writing it was really people’s routines. The word connotes ordinariness and even a lack of thought; to follow a routine is to be on autopilot. But one’s daily routine is also a choice, or a whole series of choices.

Most of the artists in here establish routines whenever they can, much like the writers in Writers on Writing. The number of people who need routine, who need defaults, speaks to its utility, among artists or anyone trying to accomplish a task with an artist’s dedication (like entrepreneurs, who might be the artists of the modern age). Distraction might also be handier than ever, giving rise to essays like “Disconnection Distraction:

Some days I’d wake up, get a cup of tea and check the news, then check email, then check the news again, then answer a few emails, then suddenly notice it was almost lunchtime and I hadn’t gotten any real work done. And this started to happen more and more often.

If you get into that habit, you’ll be well-informed on unimportant news and less likely to make the thing that becomes the news. One question you might ask is: “Are you reading or making the news?” Aim for the latter. The former isn’t wrong, exactly, and it’s worth reading a lot, but as a secondary, not a primary, activity. Reading the news on the Internet or checking e-mail are especially dangerous in this regard because they can feel like working though they’re not.

I mentioned the compulsive aspect of art. That reappears again and again. Currey writes of Simone de Beauvoir that “when she took her annual two- or three-month vacations, she found herself growing bored and uncomfortable after a few weeks away from her work.” Long, pointless idleness is is boring, like binging on TV, but that’s because most artists seem to like what they do, or like it like an addict likes. Voltaire’s secretary “estimated that, all told, they worked eighteen to twenty hours a day. for Voltaire, it was a perfect arrangement. ‘I love the cell,’ he wrote.”

Such stories may be why, in Currey’s words, “Looking at the achievements of past greats is alternately inspiring and utterly discouraging.” The line made me laugh because of the juxtaposition of opposites, but also because he’s expressing a fundamental truth: if you look at the work as work, it can be “discouraging,” since so many artists do so much of it, but if you look at it as an extended form of play, it should be “encouraging.” It should also be “encouraging” because you can do it too—if you want to. Which means the limiting factor between you and art is you—which oscillates back to discouragement.

Still, Daily Rituals is at its heart a manual for dealing with and/or understanding someone with an artistic disposition, which might be described as imagination and execution. A surprisingly large number of people seem to imagine that being an artist is all about the “imagination” part and not much at all about the execution part; wandering around coffeeshops, bars, and parties, doffing a funny hat, and making enigmatic pronouncements is not the majority of what being an artist, broadly defined, is about. It’s about results, and Daily Rituals is about getting them and enabling the conditions necessary to get them. “Necessary” is the key word: a condition may be necessary but not sufficient, and it’s possible to treat a daily ritual as an empty ritual with no real output.

There are also a fairly wide range of ways to succeed. Some artists do spend a lot of time drunk or at parties. At least one prefers to work hungover, which would make me crazy. The artists appear approximately split between those who like noise and those who prefer quiet. I’m among the latter and can barely believe that anyone really gets anything done in noisy coffeeshops, tapping on laptops, but enough successful writers have testified to the contrary that I’m forced to believe them. The fundamental idea remains, however, that artists are artists because of their output. That’s it.

Some passages in Daily Rituals are funny; you wouldn’t expect this book to be a comedy and yet I laughed frequently. Two examples:

[John Cheever] had what appears to have been an unusually robust sex drive (the actress Hope Lange, who had a brief affair with Cheever, said that he was ‘the horniest man [she] ever met’) combined with frequent bouts of impotence, probably brought on by his alcoholism but no doubt made worse by his sexual guilt and a frequently rocky marriage. All of this was distracting from his work, especially since Cheever placed a high value on the salutary effects of erotic release. He thought that his constitution required at least ‘two or three orgasms a week’ and he believed that sexual stimulation improved his concentration and even his eyesight: ‘With a stiff prick I can read the small print in prayer books but with a limp prick I can barely read newspaper headlines.’

or:

The German poet, historian, philosopher, and playwright [Friedrich Schiller] kept a drawer full of rotting apples in his workroom; he said that he needed their decaying smell in order to feel the urge to write.

Counterpoint to the sex-plot post: Jenny Diski on The Sexual Life of Catherine M.

July 9, 2013 By in Books, Culture, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

It’s intellectually important to acknowledge being wrong and to look for ways you can be wrong and yet very few people do this or do it honestly. I probably don’t do it honestly either, but I will still post a long quote that somewhat contravenes my recent essay “The sex plot: a discussion for novelists and readers:”

the great open space of sexuality permits all the possibilities of abjection, power, narcissism, pleasure-seeking, dour determination, creativity and mechanisation. It would be very hard to devote such a great deal of life and thought, time and effort to it as Millet does without getting it all pretty much confused. Everyday pornography is linear in order to keep a single idea afloat in an ocean of polymorphous potential. Sexuality gets out of hand, it runs rampant with meaning unless you keep to a very firm remit. The sexual story can transform from pumpkin to princess to swan with injured wing and back again in the blink of a thought. It is a nothing, an empty arena, that might be everything. And everything is more than we can cope with. The obsessive, fetishistic, single account that pornography provides is what keeps sexuality within bounds. Here is the danger of writing the sexual life: you lose the boundaries unless you steadfastly restrict yourself to the detail. At times Millet seems to be attempting to do this, but again and again, like a painter who writes explanatory notes over her picture, she tries to explicate, to flesh out the doing with her intellect, and then the sexual life is shown up for the kaleidoscopic and random playground of ideas it is.

That’s from Jenny Diski’s 2002 review of The Sexual Life of Catherine M; if sexuality is “a great open space” that “permits all the possibilities of objection, power, narcissism” and so forth then sex plots really can or should propel a lot of fiction. Diski’s view (I believe she is speaking for herself here and not describing the memoir in question) is not necessarily incompatible with the essay but certainly it feels different, especially with the way she says that “sexuality gets out of hand, it runs rampant with meaning.”

A subject or person or feeling that “runs rampant with meaning” could be one surprisingly complete definition of art, which may also encourage “the kaleidoscopic and random playground of ideas” that nonetheless must be somehow restricted if a work of art is going to take any form at all. Art without some form does not exist, like a platonically perfect work of art that never goes further than conception. Execution is everything.

Still, I’m not sure that sexuality can really get “out of hand” and run “rampant with meaning,” at least in terms of the physical act itself, because there are a limited number of physical acts and, in practical terms, a limited number of partners and configurations. Contrast this with, say, science: there doesn’t appear to be any obvious limits to the things that people want or the weirdness of the present universe. That doesn’t mean that sexuality doesn’t usually interact with other parts of life, but in the modern Western world I’m not sure that sexuality and relationships need to be the primary focus of so many novels.

Jane Jacobs is everywhere, even when you don’t see her

July 3, 2013 By in Cities, Culture, Nonfiction Tags: , , , , , 11 Comments

In a Reddit thread someone recently asked:

Who the hell actually thinks Jane Jacobs has any influence on Seattle’s urban planning?

Through The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs has influenced urban planning in every American city at the very least and perhaps every city in the world, though I can’t speak to the experience of other countries.

Jacobs correctly observed that city planners, most notably and famously Robert Moses, were bulldozing important areas for highways and other sub-optimal uses, and that communities should have more of a say in what happens regarding development, especially development that uses eminent domain. In addition, she correctly observed that city planners were frequently disconnected from the way people actually live, which is somewhat similar to the way academic literary critics today are disconnected from the way people actually read.

But by now the pendulum between “planners ruler” and “community veto” has swung too far in the opposite direction: today NIMBYs and People United Against Everything (PUAE) have too much power, and we’re seeing the consequences in most places anytime anyone tries to build subways, rail, or housing. In many places, with San Francisco and New York leading the pack, supply restrictions on building have led to enormous housing cost increases, but markets can’t effectively respond because a small number of incumbent property owners can block new, private developments.

I’m optimistic about cities over the medium term, but in the short term the real problem faced by cities is not too little “community” input but too much, usually represented by a relatively small number of NIMBYs and busybodies—the process privileges existing homeowners and the fact that “only socially and psychologically abnormal people want to waste their evening showing up to neighborhood hearings.”

Still, Jacobs’ influence remains, and this essay by Edward Glaeser, comparing Jacobs and Robert Moses, demonstrates how their ideas have come to define a great deal of what people think about cities. This is especially important:

Moses was also right that cities need infrastructure. People cannot just argue forever on an unpaved street corner. They need homes to live in and streets to travel along and parks for relaxation. Jacobs underestimated the value of new construction—of building up.

Jacobs didn’t understand one important part of basic economics, which is that restricting supply in the face of increasing demand raises prices. Someone like Jacobs can’t afford to live in Greenwich Village today because the housing is too expensive. Most of Manhattan and much of New York more generally has priced out the middle class, in part due to the rules and laws that stem from Jacobs’ victories; instead of living in the city, those people are now driving cars in Atlanta, Houston, and Phoenix. Places like Seattle and Portland are somewhere between Atlanta and New York, but even Seattle won’t allow sufficient development to allow for middle-class growth.

The language Jacobs uses in The Death and Life of Great American Cities is sometimes dangerous, as when she says that “streets or districts which do have good primary mixtures and are successful at generating city diversity should be treasured, rather than despised for their mixture and destroyed by attempts to sort out their components from one another.” She’s right about mixed-use areas being valuable, but the word “treasured” is a problem: a mixed-used building that is three stories tall can be equally good at being mixed-use with thirty stories. Treasuring buildings that already exist can lead to the San Francisco problem, and San Francisco itself is only the furthest along example of what happens when supply can’t meet demand.

There is one thing I think Glaeser gets wrong in his article:

Jacobs was right that cities are built for people, but they are also built around transportation systems. New York was America’s premier harbor, and the city grew up around the port. The meandering streets of lower Manhattan were laid down in a pedestrian age. Washington Square was urban sprawl in the age of the omnibus. The Upper East Side and Upper West Side were built up in the age of rail, when my great-grandfather would take the long elevated train ride downtown from Washington Heights. It was inevitable that cars would also require urban change. Either older cities would have to adapt, or the population would move entirely to the new car-based cities of the Sunbelt. [. . . ] No matter what Jacobs thought, there simply was not a car-less option for New York.

The issue with older cities is less about cars than about older cities doing what they do well: density, public interfaces, and so forth. Instead of trying to capitalize on the strengths of older cities, older cities built the massive highways and parking lots Jacobs and her acolytes eventually learned to fight. Sometimes the response to a technology shift isn’t to attempt to ape the shift but to make sure you focus on doing your core strength better—which many cities have utterly failed to do.

When the car began spreading in earnest in the 1920s, the total U.S. population was 106,021,537. In 1930 it was 122,775,046. Today it’s approximately 316,000,000. Moving to a highly car-dependent lifestyle made sense for a long time, but now a lot of urban areas are simply choked by them. This famous photo from the City of Muenster Planning Office succinctly demonstrates the problem, as does L.A. during rush hour:

Cities, buses, and bikes

Education is also part of the city puzzle, since it’s provided publicly and, usually, on a per-city basis. For much of the period from approximately 1970 – 2010, it was possible for parents to outrun well-meaning but poorly executed court degrees pertaining to school districting. It’s hard to measure the extent to which school busing and similar schemes drove many parents to the suburbs, even if they would’ve liked to stay in cities. This 2006 WSJ piece describes some of the pernicious consequences that are still reverberating in Seattle, which is a microcosm for the problems elsewhere. Schools and real estate both show the same basic principle: when principles meet self-interest, self-interest usually wins. Everyone favors low- and moderate-income housing in theory but don’t want it in their neighborhood, and everyone favors racial integration in theory unless their kid gets moved to the worse school.

Still, that’s tangential to Jacobs’s main points and how they affect contemporary decisions in cities. That I’m still citing Jacobs’ work more than 50 years later demonstrates its importance. To the extent any normal person has heard of anyone having anything to do with urban planning, they’ve heard of Jacobs and Moses. Pretty much anyone with any formal education in the subject has not only heard of them but read at least excerpts of their writing. It’s like being in English lit and wondering who this Shakespeare guy is.

The Lost Girls interview, war, and its relationship to sex

July 2, 2013 By in Books, Culture, Fiction, Nonfiction, sex Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In the Lost Girls interview I linked to recently, one thing that Alan Moore says stands out as resolutely wrong:

War, I still believe, is a complete and utter failure of the imagination. It’s when everything else has been abandoned or hasn’t worked. It’s what destroys the imagination. It set back the progress of the human imagination.

It’s true that war “set[s] back the progress of the human imagination,” but war is actually about resource control, with “resources” defined broadly. Resources may be primarily geographic (one thinks of the recent U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan) or they may be about commodities (one thinks of Japan capturing oil fields in World War II) or they may be people themselves (one thinks of innumerable pre-modern religious wars). They are also often sexual, or have a sexual tinge, which Moore and Gebbie do get right in Lost Girls and foreground, since sexual behaviors and motives tend to be glossed or ignored in most histories.

There are exceptions, however; consider, for example, this passage from Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II:

The number of sexual relationships that took place between European women and Germans during the war is quite staggering. In Norway as many as 10 per cent of women aged between fifteen and thirty had German boyfriends during the war. If the statistics on the number of children born to German soldiers are anything to go by, this was by no means unusual: the numbers of women who slept with German men across western Europe can easily be numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

Resistance movements in occupied countries came up with all kinds of excuses for the behaviour of their women and girls. They characterized women who slept with Germans as ignorant, poor, even mentally defective. They claimed that women were raped, or that they slept with Germans out of economic necessity. While this was undoubtedly the case for some, recent surveys show that women who slept with German soldiers came from all classes and all walks of life. On the whole European women slept with Germans not because they were forced to, or because their own men were absent, or because they needed money or food – but simply because they found the strong, ‘knightly’ image of German soldiers intensely attractive, especially compared to the weakened impression they had of their own menfolk. In Denmark, for example, wartime pollsters were shocked to discover that 51 per cent of Danish women openly admitted to finding German men more attractive than their own compatriots. (164–166)

That wartime behavior became a topic of community discussion and cathartic release and punishment after the war. Still, this passage and other, similar ones from Savage Continent demonstrate that a lot of men treat women like resources in the context of war. Saying that war “is a complete and utter failure of the imagination” implies a level of goodwill that often doesn’t exist. To continue with the World War II example, it’s evident that Hitler had a phenomenal imagination, to the point that most of his adversaries and victims couldn’t believe the staggering, cruel audacity of what he was attempting. In a more recent example, in the first Gulf War it was apparent that Saddam Hussein imagined himself taking over Kuwait and perhaps Saudi Arabia, although he didn’t presumably imagine that he’d provoke a world-wide counter-reaction.

Nonetheless, the rest of the Moore and Gebbie interview is excellent and unexpectedly moving, and Lost Girls itself is, from what I know, still a singular, highly unusual, and highly recommended book.

The sex plot: a discussion for novelists and readers

June 25, 2013 By in Books, Culture, Fiction, ideas, sex Tags: , , , , , , , 6 Comments

I wrote to a friend:

I wonder about the extent to which novels in general are continuing to have trouble with sexual liberalization; so many major novels in the canon deal with that topic, but it’s much harder to use those tropes in a permissive age.

He replied: “This intrigues me, but I’m not sure what you mean. Can you elaborate?”

Yes!

The novel as a genre has tended to thrive on sexual repression, and has used steadily increasing sexual liberation as fuel for plots. Leslie Fiedler wrote about this in Love and Death in the American Novel, and Tony Tanner wrote about it in Adultery and the Novel. In taking courses about the novel as a genre, I was struck by how many times I heard or read phrases like, “X pushed the limits of the sexual mores of his / her day,” where X is any number of writers ranging from Richardson to Flaubert to Dreiser to Roth and Updike. (Weirdly, however, the Marquis de Sade has always been lurking beneath the history of the novel as a genre, mostly unacknowledged and often hidden from the reading public).

But working against sexual repression as such doesn’t really work so well as a plot device anymore because the barriers are mostly down. If you’re over age 18 today, you can more or less do whoever you want as long as they’re not under 18. This may be why professor-student plots are somewhat popular: it’s one of the few forbidden-but-plausible-and-not-gross relationships left.

There are only so many sexual lines one can cross, and too many books like 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, to make the mere crossing of the few lines left all that interesting. When an entire society is set up to repress, re-channel, and control sexuality, a novel like Lady Chatterley’s Lover is shocking. In our society, it’s not. Today, if you want it, go get it—just don’t make promises you can’t keep. It’s not hard to live a life of constant sexual novelty and most parts of society won’t really censure you, provided that you don’t marry someone else, and even then lots of people divorce.

It’s much harder to get wring major consequences from affairs and what not. Don’t want to cheat? Don’t get married. It’s not impossible to use sex and romance plots—my to-be-self-published novel, Asking Anna, is a comedy about such subjects—to get material from these fields, but it’s a greater challenge than it used to be, and hard if not impossible to shock. A novel with the sexual politics of Stranger in a Strange Land wouldn’t have the same shock-value today then it did when it was published, though actually now that I think about it I still think it would raise a few eyebrows.

Some genres, like science fiction, don’t rely on sex plots as much, but even in SF sex plots are still often present. The growth of murder mysteries and thrillers may also represent some veering from sex plots, since premature death is still a big deal and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

On a separate but related note, it also seems that many “literary” writers borrow SF-ish ideas. Think of Ian McEwan’s Solar. Not a great novel, but I liked a lot of what McEwan was doing by meshing discovery, politics, social ideas, environmentalism, science, and a not-very-nice character into one bunch. It’s McEwan, so the writing is good on a sentence-by-sentence level. The technical descriptions are also interesting and too uncommon in novels. I like the idea of writing about intellectual, social, technical, or business discovery as a motive. It’s underutilized as a driver of plot.

One section of Paul Graham’s essay “The Word ‘Hacker’” addresses this point and continues to have a profound impact on me:

Hacking predates computers. When he was working on the Manhattan Project, Richard Feynman used to amuse himself by breaking into safes containing secret documents. This tradition continues today. When we were in grad school, a hacker friend of mine who spent too much time around MIT had his own lock picking kit. (He now runs a hedge fund, a not unrelated enterprise.)

It is sometimes hard to explain to authorities why one would want to do such things. Another friend of mine once got in trouble with the government for breaking into computers. This had only recently been declared a crime, and the FBI found that their usual investigative technique didn’t work. Police investigation apparently begins with a motive. The usual motives are few: drugs, money, sex, revenge. Intellectual curiosity was not one of the motives on the FBI’s list. Indeed, the whole concept seemed foreign to them.

Most novels focus on money, sex, revenge. Why don’t they focus more on intellectual curiosity: perhaps how intellectual curiosity relates to money, sex, revenge, and similar topics? That seems like a fruitful avenue, especially because we might be moving towards a world where many people’s material needs are met, making money less immediately important; though of course many people are still driven by keeping up with the Joneses, in large swaths of the industrialized world we have plenty of money and plenty of stuff.

(A relevant side note about money: Among people interested in “game” and picking up women, it has become a common observation that additional money above the amount needed to buy drinks, dress reasonably well, and live independently doesn’t do much help most guys. A guy making $50,000 a year and a guy making $200,000 a year are mostly on a level playing field, and if the guy making $200,000 has to work 60+ hours a week, he’s at a disadvantage. Personalities and tenacity count far more than incomes, all else being equal. This could be seen as a variant on one of Geoffrey Miller’s points in Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior.)

I don’t see money, sex, or revenge—and motives for revenge usually reduce to money and sex—becoming unimportant as long as humans remain humans and not brains in vats or on chips, but intellectual curiosity and a sense of wonder and discovery should be more emphasized in narrative. I think the tedium of Jonathan Franzen’s novels can in part be explained by the tedium of his characters: if those characters had a greater sense of discovery and possibility, they wouldn’t be so annoying. The other day I was listening to a friend describing single electron chain reactions in photosynthesis and how she misses research and life in the lab. It’s very interesting stuff, and the sort of thing that is rarely really discussed in novels.

But it should be!

Plus, the progression of science, technology, economics, and the attitudes that go along with them have ameliorated a lot of the money-revenge resource-distribution fights that used to define every aspect of human existence, instead of most aspects of human existence. To the extent major societal problems in the future are going to be solved—most obviously involving energy, but certainly involving other topics too—the solutions are going to come from intellectual curiosity and the intellectually curious. Maybe we, collectively, should be thinking about art that cultivates and glorifies those traits, instead of art that cultivates or glorifies simple status domination, or the ability to be cooler than the other guy or girl.

Another Paul Graham quote, from “How To Make Wealth:”

Making wealth is not the only way to get rich. For most of human history it has not even been the most common. Until a few centuries ago, the main sources of wealth were mines, slaves and serfs, land, and cattle, and the only ways to acquire these rapidly were by inheritance, marriage, conquest, or confiscation. Naturally wealth had a bad reputation.

Two things changed. The first was the rule of law. For most of the world’s history, if you did somehow accumulate a fortune, the ruler or his henchmen would find a way to steal it. But in medieval Europe something new happened. A new class of merchants and manufacturers began to collect in towns. Together they were able to withstand the local feudal lord. So for the first time in our history, the bullies stopped stealing the nerds’ lunch money. This was naturally a great incentive, and possibly indeed the main cause of the second big change, industrialization.

A great deal has been written about the causes of the Industrial Revolution. But surely a necessary, if not sufficient, condition was that people who made fortunes be able to enjoy them in peace. One piece of evidence is what happened to countries that tried to return to the old model, like the Soviet Union, and to a lesser extent Britain under the labor governments of the 1960s and early 1970s. Take away the incentive of wealth, and technical innovation grinds to a halt.

People still steal to get rich, and even more people make many movies and write many books about stealing, along with efforts to thwart thieves. Making stuff people want is, again, an under-explored avenue. It’s also harder to represent dramatically. The movie The Social Network does this successfully, albeit at the expense of accuracy; most of the important parts of Facebook actually happened in the heads of Zuckerberg and other programmers, not in interpersonal drama.

Still, The Social Network works as a movie, and it does something very different than yet another version of Fast & Furious, which is about sex, power, tribal loyalty, and blowing shit up—like most movies (sample from the link: “Like any reasonable person, I watch the Fast and the Furious film franchise primarily for its insights into moral philosophy and political economy. At a fundamental level, the franchise is about what Harvard philosopher Christine Korsgaard identifies in The Sources of Normativity as the ‘intractable conflicts” that arise from our conflicting practical identities'”). I like Solar despite its flaws in part because the protagonist, Michael, makes his money and gains status by discovering something that may turn out to be essential in solar panels.

Solar and The Social Network don’t deploy straightforward sex / family plots, and that’s refreshing. They’re part of an answer to the question of what happens in a world where you can, if you have sufficient skill or are sufficiently desirable, sleep with anyone who’ll have you? Because that’s the world most people above the age of 18 or 19 find themselves in. Marriage rates are dropping. Arguably the most interesting parts about marriage and children right now are economic: what’s happening with alimony and child support, and how those issues affect behavior and emotions.

Moreover, for the highly sexually experienced—people who’ve had their share of three-ways, sex work, group sex, etc.—the sex plot is going to be dull. Juvenile. If you’ve slept with five people in a week, agonizing over who you’re going to sleep with for the rest of your life isn’t going to seem that important. It’s going to be more important that you find someone who loves you but who also has an sufficient level of adventure compatibility. Arguably a more interesting question is what it takes to be a highly desirable person, which a lot of romance novels appear to be exploring (strangely enough) and how to become that desirable person if you aren’t already. Becoming the sort of person who can get the man / woman / men / women of your dreams is often more interesting than the immediate process of getting him / her / them.

Sex plots need a sense of the sacred attached to sex, along with the dangers of pregnancy that can be ameliorated by IUDs and other forms of birth control. Danger used to generate sacredness. Most people today still don’t want their significant others to sleep with random people, even though many obviously do anyway, but taking away or reducing the risk of pregnancy also reduces the fear and risk of affairs or multiple partners. One reason Vow: A Memoir of Marriage (and Other Affairs) got written is not just because of the affairs Plump and her husband have, but because he knocks up the other woman, or the other woman deliberately gets knocked up by him. Women tend to fear that their man will impregnate another woman and thus split his resources / time / affection, and men tend to fear that their woman will be impregnated by another man and thus stick them with the costs of raising another man’s child. While these fears can obviously be alleviated by the judicious use of birth control, not everyone is diligent about birth control and deeply seated fears aren’t always allayed by modern technologies laid over atavistic drives.

The highly adventurous and experienced probably don’t represent a hugely overwhelming portion of the general population, but they probably represent a portion that is either growing or coming out of the closet. Through divorce and other means, many people are already leading a serially monogamous and/or hypocritically adventurous life, though perhaps because they are bad at anticipating what temptation and desire feel like in the moment and good at rationalizing. The only thing missing is intellectual honesty, which may itself be rarer than fidelity.

There will probably always be challenges in admitting to fantasies or taboo desires, and it will probably always be difficult to find another person with roughly similar tastes, predilections, and preferences, but I’m not sure how easy it is to build a novel around those ideas. That question might be best answered in novel form.

Once you get away from the sex plot, where do novels go? Martha McPhee’s Dear Money is one successful recent example. Cryptonomicon is another. Solar, which I mentioned before, is a third. Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder is a fourth. More writers need to get this memo, and more readers need to use their attention to direct writers towards topics that matter instead of those that have been exhausted by the tradition.

Further discussion:

* Sexting and society: How do writers respond? Sample:

Questions like “What happens when people do things sexually that they’re not supposed to? How does the community respond? How do they respond?” are the stuff novelists feed on. They motivate innumerable plots, ranging from the beginnings of the English novel at Pamela and Clarissa all the way to the present.

Pamela and Clarissa are interesting as historical documents, but it’s not easy to project the modern mind backward into the dilemmas of someone with a very different set of social and intellectual concerns.

Rereading Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity

June 16, 2013 By in Books, Fiction, Reading, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , 4 Comments

I still laughed aloud many times at High Fidelity, although the jokes are almost all context-dependent and so can’t be quoted without causing a quizzical look that says, “You really think that’s funny?” Flipping through it doesn’t yield anything obvious, but I kept smiling at many moments. This is the closest I can get:

There were some nights with Laura when I’d kind of nestle into her back in bed when she was asleep, and I’d be filled with this enormous, nameless terror, except now I have a name for it: Brian. Ha, ha. OK, not really a name, but I can see where it came from, and why I wanted to sleep with Rosie the pain-in-the-arse simultaneous orgasm woman, and if that sounds feeble and self-serving at the same time—oh, right! He sleeps with other women because he has a fear of death!—well, I’m sorry, but that’s the way things are.

Rob’s voice and attitude carry the book, as does the writing, which is largely about nothing yet still moves rapidly from incident to incident, creating plot, which is easily overlooked in novels like this, such as Wilson’s Flatscreen. The continuous happening in the plot contrasts with the non-happening in many of the characters’ lives.

There are moments of astute observation too, as when Laura says “sometimes you need someone to lob into the middle of a bad relationship like a hand grenade and blow it all apart.” Which is true, even if the hand grenade is often made out to be the bad guy (or girl) in the relationship. Often the grenade is the bad guy. But sometimes he (or she) is the catalyst for doing what should have been done long before. When big, life-changing transitions stop happening on a regular basis, (from high school to college, college to grad school and/or work), it becomes distressingly easy to slip into a single path and lose the willingness necessary to make radical changes, whether in work, the mind, or love.

Rob basically knows as much:

None of us is young anymore, but what has just taken place could have happened when I was sixteen, or twenty, or twenty-five. We got to adolescence and just stopped dead; we drew up the map then and left the boundaries exactly as they were.

Life changes even if you don’t. This should be obvious. It takes Laura to tell him what he should already know; when Rob asks “So what should I be doing?”, she replies:

I don’t know. Something. Working. Seeing people. Running a scout troop, or running a club even. Something more than waiting for life to change and keeping your options open. You’d keep your options open for the rest of your life, if you could. You’d be lying on your deathbed, dying of some smoking-related disease, and you’ll be thinking, ‘Well, at least I’ve kept my options open.’

She’s right. Whatever else you’re doing, you should be doing something. But Rob doesn’t, mostly, and as a result his problems are largely self-imposed. He says:

It’s only beginning to occur to me that it’s important to have something going on somewhere, at work or at home, otherwise you’re just clinging on. [. . .] You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and it’s just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who’d believe in this character then?

Rob lacks that intellectual ballast. He only listens to music and doesn’t play; at his level of obsession, connoisseurship and taste should pale compared to making (Rob hooks up with an American singer named Marie and says of her place, “thrillingly, there are two guitars leaning against the wall.” He could have two guitars leaning against his wall, although I think one would suffice). Still, I am struck by the extent to which many YouTube videos can be reduced to “one block on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do,” except talk to an audience that isn’t present. Jenna Marbles is a useful approximation of this idea.

There are moments of poignance and useful articulations of the obvious, as when Rob says:

You run the risk of losing anyone who is worth spending time with, unless you are so paranoid about loss that you choose someone unlosable, somebody who could not possibly appeal to anyone else at all.

Being overly fearful of loss increases the likelihood of loss, and Rob is disproportionately anxious. As a college student dating Charlie Rob is “fretful about my abilities as a lover,” and fifteen or so years later he is still fretful about his abilities as a lover. Eventually shouldn’t he just let the anxiety go and figure out what he’s doing? Though he apparently hasn’t in his economic life so perhaps his love and economic lives reflect each other. Rob is a sort of what-not-to-do when it comes to women. He even says, “There are still enough of the old-style, big-mouthed, self-opinionated egomaniacs around to make someone like me appear refreshingly different.” That might work for him, but the big-mouthed egomaniacs are the way they are because what they do tends to work (link is text but potentially NSFW).

For a guy who thinks a lot about his love life, and pop songs that are almost entirely about love, sex, and romance, Rob appears to know very little about actual women. Most pop culture, however, appears to be highly misleading on this score, which may explain why a pop-culture junkie like Rob is or has been highly misled. People who don’t make a concerted effort to learn about actual women. But this is true of much narrative art, especially American narrative art.

In my reading over the last few days, I’m struck by how much more pathetic Rob seems: as I said before, his problems are largely self-imposed, or imposed by his personality, and the solutions also must come from within. Rob fears the women he’s attracted to, like a fifteen-year-old; he goes to a small gig where Marie plays and afterwords she sells CDs: “We all buy one from her, and to our horror she speaks to us.” Most guys are happy to be talking to the people they’re attracted to, and the same obviously applies to women.

In addition, High Fidelity feels like a period piece: Rob owns a record store in an era when CDs and records are mainstream, and people who want to hear a particular song must track down a physical copy of it. Though I was born into that era it feels very long ago and foreign. So does the difficulty of getting ahold of people through the phone. The default state of more people as “alone” then. Computers are almost totally absent. It also feels highly PC, as when Rob recounts “a terribly unsound joke” that is only mildly funny and not really offensive. Why qualify it by saying that it’s “terribly unsound” when it’s not and when interesting humor by its nature is “unsound,” using Rob’s definition?

Lisa Levy, Alain de Botton and the meaning of intellectuals and their relationship to sex

June 7, 2013 By in Books, Culture, ideas, Nonfiction, sex Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Lisa Levy’s How to Be a Pseudo-Intellectual (actual title: “How To Think More (But Not Better): Alain de Botton’s School of Life”) isn’t really about de Botton’s How To Think More About Sex so much as it is about throwing rocks at de Botton’s intellectual middle road from the high road where most supposed scholars are unread, unloved, and unsexed.* It’s true that How To Think More About Sex is de Botton’s weakest book, to the point that I didn’t bother reviewing it because it’s so bad; any pop evolutionary psychology book from the last ten years offers more and better information, and sex is arguably the field least informed by the philosophy and philosophers most often in de Botton’s purview.

But his other books are fun and informative. Levy writes that “he often seems like a grad student who shows up to seminar having done just enough of the reading to participate by jumping on other people’s comments, but who never makes an original observation of his own.” Maybe “an original observation” is overrated in philosophy, especially compared to accessibility. Levy writes that “he tends to meander and summarize after a quotation rather than using it to drive his own argument forward,” but if de Botton meanders in an interesting way—which he usually does, in books like The Architecture of Happiness and his novel On Love, which is charming (a word that never appears among academics trying to prosecute dubiously original arguments)—then he’s at least doing one thing better than 90% of those allegedly being original. For one thing, he’s writing clearly enough to make a judgment about originality; how many doctoral dissertations and tenure books are written in impenetrable, deliberately misleading jargon, such that it’s difficult or impossible to tell whether an argument is original?

Most people trying to make “an original observation of [their] own” don’t seem to make actual original contributions but do bloviate quite a bit. If more people admitted to synthesizing and fewer had to pretend to originality, we’d probably live in a better original world. Levy says that “he’s not exactly Michel Foucault,” and I’d call that a very good thing.

That being said, however, Levy is right that “This might in fact be the most boring book ever written about sex.” Sex might also be the field that, of all that de Botton has addressed, philosophy is the least well-equipped to handle, especially compared to current psychology and biology.

Still, the funniest bits of The Consolations of Philosophy concern the number of aged philosophers in their twilight years who fall for vapid but hot teenage girls and adult women, which could arguably tell us more about the nature of life than all of their books combined; actions speak louder than words, as the cliché goes, and what one wants in the midst of composing a monumental manuscript may be different from what one wants when confronted with real people. De Botton describes how the 43-year-old Schopenhauer “turns his attentions to Flora Weiss, a spirited girl who has turned seventeen,” and feels “revolted” by his gift of white grapes. Nietzsche, similarly, faced rejection from “a twenty-three-year old, green-eyed blonde” named Mathilde Trampedach. From there, “a succession of similar rejections took their toll” in his marriage proposals, caused in part, perhaps, by “his extraordinarily large walrus mustache” and “his shyness.” Later still, he chased around a twenty-one-year-old hottie (my word), who “was more interested in Nietzsche as a philosopher than a husband.”

Perhaps we should consider philosophers’ work in light of their lives, and the lessons we should take are not necessarily those entombed in The World as Will and Representation or On the Genealogy of Morality. Alas, however, that de Botton might have instead worked to write original observations that go unread in a university library somewhere instead.

* Hannah Arendt and a few others famously excepted.

Vow: A Memoir of Marriage (and Other Affairs) — Wendy Plump

May 19, 2013 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews, sex Tags: , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Vow is about adultery, and two people married to each other who both routinely commit it, and yet the most obvious question isn’t addressed until page 245 of 258:

People have asked me why Bill and I didn’t just have an open marriage. The answer is simple. We didn’t want an open marriage. If an open marriage is the route both spouses choose to go, that is one choice. It’s very cosmopolitan. I know a local couple who tried this for years, and it worked out to some degree. They had a lax attitude toward sleeping around. [. . .] But the idea doesn’t have much appeal to me. If we were able to do it, we would all do it. Almost no one I know could do it.

For a practice that “doesn’t have much appeal to me,” Plump sure did a lot of it; most people who don’t like Pilates don’t keep going to the classes. She effectively had an open marriage without labeling it as such, or getting the benefits, like hot threesomes. Not addressing the open marriage until the end is bizarre. Plumps and her husband appear to like the drama of lies more than the simplicity of truth.

A book like Never the Face (my essay about it is at the link) is about fundamentally more honest people: on its fifth page, David says to the narrator of his wife Maria, “She knows about it, and she’s okay with it.” The paragraph breaks: “What?“, the narrator thinks. Then: “For the next two days, my mind argued with itself.” Even if the narrator can’t conceptualize or accept the possibility of uncommon arrangements, her partner can. That’s what Plump and her husband are missing. Instead they get recriminations, and the problem of simultaneously wanting the other person to be monogamous while they don’t have to be. Cognitive dissonance is a bitch, and so is hypocrisy.

The overall effect yields the strangeness of art, from the level of the sentence to the level of the whole, which is why I feel compelled to write about Vow amid other projects and other purposes.

Still, Vow is spectacularly well written and yet spectacularly frustrating, because the simple, obvious solution to the problems between Plump and her husband is simply off the negotiating table. They don’t even try events like this one, slightly NSFW, described in Time Out New York.

Plump says that “I assume Bill approached the altar with every intention of doing the right thing. Don’t we all? I’m not sure that I did. Even as I took my vows, I was aware of some mocking little voice in my head, particularly when I got to that part about forsaking all others” (120). Then. . . don’t get married? Again, it’s the obvious solution to a book that’s about looking at the obvious and then doing something else.

Consequently, on some level Vow is one long yowl of cognitive dissonance and “I want.” Plump cheats, basically, because she feels like it: “So I was thrown off balance when I first met Tommy and felt an attraction so compelling I no longer cared that I was married” (8). That’s it, and at bottom it’s the reason most cheaters cheat. In Plump’s universe, feelings trump emotion; I’m not sure about the extent we should extrapolate her comments to all women, or all people, but there’s definitely a temptation to do so, though I’m going to refrain.

At one moment Plump writes:

I have tried many times to deconstruct allure. It is the least romantic of tasks, but it is marginally useful, if only to prove a point. When you take attraction apart, when you look back on what developed and how, you find that it is a physical impulse for about eight seconds before it moves on to something bigger. (50)

Many people, mostly guys, have worked to take attraction apart and to learn how to build it up. Neil Strauss is the most famous, but many others, like Roosh, have also field-tested what works in attraction, in allure. Women are now also producing their own material on overt allure. Note that I’m not necessarily endorsing Strauss, Roosh, or the linked Female Pickup Artists, but I am saying that they are attempting, through observation, trial, error, and research, to develop methods for attracting women or men—in other words, “to deconstruct allure.” Chances are that the peculiar alchemy involved in attraction will never be completely standardized, but pretending that there’s no way to “deconstruct allure” is just pointless and incorrect romantic mystification.

Plump says that “Immediately on standing next to Steven I felt a frisson snapping between us. Some neuron in my brain knocked itself loose and began rapping on my awareness, saying, Yo, are you still in there? Pay attention. You’re doing it again.” Chances are good that Steven was doing something, consciously or unconsciously, to make that attraction happen. Maybe he was just really hot. But maybe he’d begun systematically learning about what to do around women. Plenty of guys do.

Why does she sleep with these guys instead of some other guys? She doesn’t really say. What do they do? How do they behave? It’s lost to Plump, who isn’t asking why she likes what she likes: she’s just liking it. It’s the triumph of feeling and the reason so many guys, and some number of women, read The Game.

There’s also a lot of “I” in Vow: a lot of “I loved not only the way I felt with Steven, I loved who he was with me, as well.” There’s not a lot of thinking about what other people are thinking or feeling. That may explain the quality of Plump’s marriage, which demands “we” and “you” as much or more than “I.”

One also wonders why her husband, Bill, can’t or chooses not to understand presumed shifts in his relationship with his wife: “Sex with Bill became unwanted by comparison, through no fault of his. It changes utterly from an act of love and passion to an act of crushing obligation” (41). Perhaps she shouldn’t be married, then? Perhaps he should recognize what’s going on and leave? The obvious questions pile up, and Plump is telling us that she has no answers. Maybe there are none. There are only contradictions. She says that “Through it all, again, I was certain of one thing. I did not want our marriage to end. I was crushed but not finished.” For someone who doesn’t want her marriage to end, Plump behaves in strange ways.

Some niggling intellectual points bother; Plump, for example, must not have read much evolutionary biology: she writes that “They [friends] think I must have been aware that Bill was having an affair, as if suspicion were linked to some primal instinct we all have. I have no idea what imperative suspicion would serve Neanderthals such that it would repeat upward through the species to find its expression in us” (4). Leaving aside the question of mistaking Neanderthals for a major modern human ancestor, I can very easily imagine “what imperative suspicion would serve:” for men, suspicion is one way of ascertaining paternity. If you check a woman’s fidelity, her offspring are more likely to be yours. For women, jealousy is a form of resource guarding: if you want your mate’s resource capacity to be primarily devoted to you, and not to the hussy a few huts over, you want to make sure he’s not knocking her up (The Evolution Biology of Human Female Sexuality discusses these issues and empirical findings around them).

These obviously aren’t absolute, and the anthropological literature is filled with alloparenting, group sex, and other arrangements, but the basic utility of jealousy as an adaptation remains. Plump does note that her husband’s child with another woman “moved us into a whole new circle of deceit, into that tortured fraternity of women and men [ . . .] who are heaved by their loving spouses into the dirtiest of vortices—women who find out their husbands have fathered children elsewhere; men who find out their children are not biologically their own” (31). Right. It’s the “dirtiest of vortices” because of the tremendous resources invested in children. To have someone who is supposed to be investing your children investing in someone else’s is the cruel problem that jealousy is there, in part, to address.

I’m keeping Vow, though it’s the sort I would normally sell.

The past is no fun and self-publishing is the worst: Ted Heller and solipsism

May 6, 2013 By in Culture, Nonfiction, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Those of you who are thinking about publishing your own books or already have—and I know you’re out there—should read Ted Heller’s “The future is no fun: Self-publishing is the worst” for a couple reasons, the most important being that it highlights the way self-publishing is probably not a path to fame and fortune for most of us. But Heller should also highlight that, for most of us, conventional publishing wasn’t a path to fame and fortune either.

He writes that he conventionally published three books between 2001 and 2011, then found that he couldn’t get a publisher for his fourth, West of Babylon. If he’d begun publishing in 1991 and had the same experience in 2001, that would’ve been it: self-publishing didn’t exist in a practical form, and now it does, which means his book at least has a chance.

It’s also clear that Heller is doing it wrong. He writes about sending review copies to newspapers and magazines (“I do everything I possibly can in about four or five paragraphs to inspire interest in whomever the email is sent to”), but that’s like me wanting to become a gigolo for female clients: the world just doesn’t work that way. Me wanting the world to work that way isn’t going to make the world work that way either. Newspapers and magazines barely review conventionally published books any more, and self-published books are explicitly forbidden by most of them; to the extent newspapers and magazines write about such books, it’s after they’ve become best-sellers (like 50 Shades of Grey).

Heller appears to have few personal connections with anyone at newspapers or magazines (“When I finally found contact information for someone at the show I’d been on, they did email me back [. . .] to politely tell me that they would not be having me back onto their show”), which means he’s wasting his time by sending out random P.R. e-mails. I know this. Why doesn’t he?

Heller doesn’t have a blog, as far as I can tell. He doesn’t say that he scraped the e-mails of everyone he’s ever corresponded with and sent a quick e-mail blast about his book. He apparently hasn’t been collecting the e-mail addresses of his readers. The price for West of Babylon —$8—is too high. It should be $3 – $5. The book sounds at best mildly appealing. Though the topic–has-been, 60-year-old rockers—makes me want to look elsewhere, it could be pulled off. Still, based on the description, I wonder: what’s at stake? Do I care about whether these guys can “pull the tour off?”

The Salon piece also makes Heller sounds like. . . I’m look for a euphemism but none come to mind. . . an asshole:

If there is one positive thing about this self-publishing business it is this: You separate the wheat from the chaff among your friends and acquaintances. Who is willing to lend a hand and who cannot wait to abandon you? Who will nudge someone they know and get your book to them and who just won’t even acknowledge your desperation or is laughing at you behind your back? Some people have been remarkable, others’ names are now forever etched onto my Eternal Personal Shit List.

Look, if your friend doesn’t like your book, it doesn’t mean shit, other than that your friend doesn’t like your book. I’m neutral towards 60% of the books I read, actively dislike 30%, and find 10% magical. Playing the straight odds, when a friend publishes a book, there’s a 90% shot that I’ll be neutral towards or dislike their book. The probability of me liking their book is probably lower, because the vast majority of books I read are books I choose.

When I start self-publishing, I doubt all my friends will like what I write. Which is okay. Having cancer and seeing who supports you and who doesn’t separates “the wheat from the chaff among your friends and acquaintances.” Publishing a book that you friends don’t love is hardly a reason to be “forever etched onto my Eternal Personal Shit List.”

Let’s examine the upside for a moment. Heller has a real chance to get his book in front of readers, which he wouldn’t have had ten years ago. He’s playing a game with low odds of success. Thousands of other writers, and maybe hundreds of thousands, are in the same game. But he’s living in a time when it’s possible to get in the game, and that itself is still something to celebrate.

EDIT: I should add that, based on what I’ve read, most writers at most major publishing houses get very little real marketing / PR help. The ones who do are the lucky exceptions. Throwing a stone into the ocean of literature and having it sink to the bottom is normal. Throwing a stone into the ocean of literature and having it turn into a cruise ship is not.