Category Archives: Books

Alex Tabarrok’s Launching The Innovation Renaissance and what normal people should do about interest group accretion

December 13, 2011 By in Books, Nonfiction Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In Alex Tabarrok’s Launching The Innovation Renaissance, I noticed his discussion of regulatory thickets* and patents, both of which are real but hidden problems of the kind that accumulate in democracies, like free radicals in the body. But there’s not an obvious way for random people to do anything, which led me to ask Tabarrok directly:

I have a question about Mancur Olson [if you’re interested, see The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities] and interest group accretion: what, if anything, could and/or should normal people do about it? If normal people are worried about free speech, they can put their money where their online complaints are and join the ACLU or EFF, but I don’t see any obvious parallel for the accretion of interest groups. Is there an anti-interest group interest group out there?

The ACLU / Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) model is an obvious one to me because a lot of people online complain about things like the police abuse of photographers and the patent system. Complaining online is better than doing nothing, but it’s even more helpful to support interest groups that are trying to preserve freedom in the face of growing state power. I get the sense that relatively few people move from the “complaining” to “doing” stage.

Tabarrok replied:

Excellent question. Unfortunately, Olson isn’t too helpful on this score as he says one of the few times the interest groups are cleared is after losing a terrible war! I am hopeful that as we see other countries such as China and India leaping forward that we will clean our house. Not much of any answer, I know. We have to develop a base that supports innovation even when we don’t know what innovation will bring.

It seems like a lot of large-scale, serious problems do not have simple or obvious solutions. Reading Launching the Innovation Renaissance helps at the margin—Tabarrok is after all the co-writer of Marginal Revolution—but I am also looking for space to expand that margin, which inspired the question.

* Example: “The problem is that building even a small hydro-electric project requires the approval of numerous agencies, including the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Army Corps of Engineers, State Environmental Departments and State Historic Preservation Departments. It’s simply too expensive, time-consuming and risky to build these projects when any of these agencies could veto the project at any time.”

Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men — Roy Baumeister

December 4, 2011 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I would emphasize this, from Arnold Kling, about Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men:

1. If you are a zero-tolerance reader (“I stopped reading on page 9, because he said X, which is obviously wrong, so I figured there was no point in going any further”), then don’t pick up this book. If you are going to finish it, you have to follow almost the complete opposite approach. “Even if a lot of this is wrong, what insights can I take away?”

And there are a lot of ideas per word and little wasted space, especially because Baumeister goes out of his way to avoid dogmatic thinking, which he says overtly:

This book is not about the “battle of the sexes.” I’m not trying to score points for men against women, or vice versa. I don’t think the “battle” approach is healthy. In fact, I think the idea that men and women are natural enemies who conspire deviously to exploit and oppress each other is one of the most misguided and harmful myths that is distorting our current views about men and women.

That being said, Is There Anything Good About Men? has an unfortunate title but many of those deep “insights” worth exploring—and perhaps an equally large amount of unsupported bullshit. It’s frustrating, for example, to see issues like one on page 54 of the hardcover edition, where Baumeister’s claims about sex drive differences between men and women have no citations to actual underlying research. Nonetheless, it’s hard to conclude that men don’t have, on average, a higher desire for sex more often and with more partners than women do; the very structure of dating markets points to this idea. He does cite work later in the book, but why not cite it when the issue is first raised?

But most of the ideas are implications are better; it’s hard to choose among his many observations to discuss in a short blog post, but here’s one I find intriguing; apologies for the length of the quote:

Mostly, men had recognized that dangerous jobs fall to them and, more important, that to be a man they have to accept them. Whether this will continue is not entirely clear. Today’s men are brought up on a rhetoric of equality, and at some point they may balk at letting women be exempted from certain unpleasant tasks.

Even more important, the psychological processes that enable men to do the dangerous jobs may be weakened. Men of past eras were famously out of touch with their feelings. Today’s men are brought up to be more like women, and that includes becoming more conversant with their own emotions. But might that undermine the ability to make themselves do what needs to be done?

To do the dirty or dangerous jobs, you have to put your feelings aside. Being a man in that sense meant that you focused on the task at hand. It meant others could count on you not to let your emotions interfere with getting the job done. One reason traditional societies put those jobs on men was that women might be too fearful or squeamish or tentative to do them. Traditional men weren’t supposed to admit to having such feelings. Yet nowadays we encourage young men to revel in their feelings. Having uncorked the emotional bottle, can we count on the men to stuff the feelings back inside and cork them away when we need them to do so?

The traditional male role has had definite privileges, but it also had duties and obligations. Our culture has come far along in doing away with those privileges. It has been slower about equalizing the duties and obligations. (to quote [Warren] Farrell once more, ‘Women have rights. Men have responsibilities.’) As we make men more like women and remove their traditional privileges, they may begin to object more strenuously to the duties and responsibilities. The obligations of fatherhood weigh far less on today’s man than on earlier generations, as indicated not least by the increasing numbers of men who abandon pregnant girlfriends or small children.

In other words, whatever the rhetoric that gender writers may espouse, when men and women face real problems and dangerous situations, men still tend to get the dirty and dangerous jobs. Equality is fine when it only means the good stuff, but when there’s a strange noise downstairs or coal mines to be stripped, guys still end up there. On the flipside, however, it may also be that society is evolving away from a space where men need not have feelings and toward one where men having feelings is more beneficial than it was in the past.

We may be seeing cultural evolution, live, even as people fight over whether it’s happening and, if it is, what it might mean. The “traditional male role” might be changing or evolving, and its supposed “privileges” or lack thereof too. See, for example, “Sex Is Cheap: Why young men have the upper hand in bed, even when they’re failing in life from Slate.com. Given the choice between coal mining and war or video games and babes in skirts, I suspect most men would rather get in touch with whatever their feelings might be and assume the latter.

You can see other examples of cultural evolution: I’ve been watching The Sopranos lately, and the tension between the “do what needs to be done” aspect and Tony’s supposed feelings and nostalgia for the maybe good-old-days, when men were men, makes The Sopranos intriguing: Tony continuously hearkens back to his father’s time, when men didn’t have (or at least show) feelings; by contrast, he’s being treated by a female therapist, who helps him explore repressed feelings that manifest themselves in dreams and panic attacks.

For whatever this passage might be worth, however, I don’t love the writing itself: vague mentions about “corking” and “uncorking” feelings among “the men” is too abstract for my taste: if this were a freshman’s paper, I’d write as much in the margins and encourage the writer to think about what, precisely, this means for individuals. Even if I know what it means, I can see reasons why it might help for men to uncork their feelings. Consider the experience of World War I, which shows the problems of men not being willing to express fear or tentativeness and willingly walking to their own deaths for no cause at all: that stupid, destructive, largely pointless war occurred in part because men were willing to let themselves be mass-brainwashed into walking into their own deaths for no reason, directed by ignoramuses who’d failed to realize that the nature of warfare had changed and that 19th Century infantry tactics will not merely fail, but fail spectacularly against 20th Century weaponry. So before we romanticize a lost era of male stoicism, let’s remember some of its costs, too, and the fact that turning off feelings and empathy may also allow men to do the many barbaric and cruel things men do.

There are other social changes, too: notice that the state is far more willing to pick up the slack for “pregnant girlfriends and small children,” which changes incentives for men and women; in addition, women appear to be much more willing to dump men who don’t suit their needs than they once might’ve. They write long articles that get turned into books like Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough that are all about female unwilligness to compromise. It’s also become much more obvious that women do not always tell the truth about fatherhood, and it’s hard to read articles like “How DNA Testing is Changing Fatherhood” and not realize what’s at stake:

Over the last decade, the number of paternity tests taken every year jumped 64 percent, to more than 400,000. That figure counts only a subset of tests — those that are admissible in court and thus require an unbiased tester and a documented chain of possession from test site to lab. Other tests are conducted by men who, like Mike, buy kits from the Internet or at the corner Rite Aid, swab the inside of their cheeks and that of their putative child’s and mail the samples to a lab. Of course, the men who take the tests already question their paternity, and for about 30 percent of them, their hunch is right.”

It’s possible in many states for a man who signs a child’s birth certificate to be responsible for paying that child’s mother for eighteen years even if that child isn’t his. That’s not an optimal way to encourage male responsibility or eagerness to support Baumeister’s pregnant girlfriends. But Baumeister doesn’t quite this far.

Nonetheless, his central insights about the sexes facing potential trade-offs that guide median preferences is fascinating and possibly true. Notice the language in the previous sentence: “trade-offs” and “median preferences,” rather than saying all people are this way or that way. From that one can extrapolate to current cultural conditions.

I would guess that Baumeister, like me, wants equal opportunities in all parts of life, but he would also point out that equal opportunities doesn’t mean people will want the same things. Men, in his viewing, are optimized towards risk taking; DNA analyses indicate that we’re descended from 40% of the men who ever lived but 80% of the women. Which means the median man died without reproducing and the median woman did. Which means the median man has an evolutionary incentive to take risks, given that his outcome if he lost the gamble was zero but so was his outcome if he didn’t take the gamble at all. Hence the hierarchies in all parts of life that men love to set up; Baumeister eventually says: “The pyramid of success is steep and cruel. Nature dooms most of the males to fail but impels each of them to try to be the one.”

I do not think most women appreciate that. Which isn’t to say most men appreciate what it’s like to experience female incentives, costs, and desires. One of the more unusual nonfiction books I’ve read attempts to do exactly that: Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man, in which she (a lesbian in “real life,” for lack of a better term) dresses and goes about life as a man for about a year. Baumeister says:

One of the most interesting books about gender in recent years was by Norah Vincent. She was a lesbian feminist who with some expert help could pass for a man, and so she went undercover, living as a man in several different social spheres for the better part of a year. The book, Self-Made Man, is her memoir. She is quite frank that she started out thinking she was going to find out how great men have it and write a shocking feminist expose of the fine life that the enemy (men) was enjoying.

Instead, she experienced a rude awakening of how hard it is to be a man. Her readings and classes in Women’s Studies had not prepared her to realize that the ostensible advantages of the male role come at high cost. She was glad when it was over, and in fact she cut the episode short in order to go back to what she concluded was the greatly preferable life as a woman. The book she wrote was far different from the one she planned, and any woman who thinks life is better for men will find it a sobering read.

He goes on to say that men and women don’t have it “better” than each other per se; they have it different, and his book is, among other things, an attempt to explain why.

Baumeister also said something that, incidentally, reminded me of a potential weakness of the novel as a genre, and that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: “If you consider the problems facing the world today (e.g., global warming, terrorism, pandemics), you can see that they are not likely to be handled by single persons—more likely by large and complex networks of organizations.” One problem for novels is that they focus on individuals and small groups; it’s very hard for a novel to address very large-scale issues save in the context of an individual or small group. Think of how Ian McEwan’s Solar uses Michael Beard and his foibles to discuss some of the technical challenges around global warming.

This may explain why many men prefer nonfiction to fiction: nonfiction is more easily dedicated to large, abstract ideas and organizations potentially involving thousands or millions of people. Fiction is intimate, self has more than a half dozen major characters, and often focuses on a single or small number of very intimate relationships. The fiction that men prefer on average—Elmore Leonard, murder mysteries, and so forth—often involve a single protagonist who is matching wits and brawn with a single antagonist or series of antagonists, which he must confront using an array of shallow connections to many people.

The creator’s mindset and lawyers’ destructiveness in Cryptonomicon

November 29, 2011 By in Books, Fiction Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

Rereading Cryptonomicon is always an absurdly pleasurable experience that yields ideas I should’ve noticed before but didn’t. For example, hacker Randy Waterhouse undergoes a life change characteristic not only of numerous nerds I know, who often swerve from the mind-numbingly pointless activities to fantastically enriching ones even though both spring from the same drive, but that also demonstrates the difference between someone who’s just happy to make something and lawyers, who do sometimes deserve their bad rap and rep:

[Randy’s] life had changed when Charlene had come along, and now it changed more: he dropped out of the fantasy role-playing game circuit altogether, stopped going to meetings of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and began to spend all his free time either with Charlene or in front of a computer terminal. All in all, this was probably a change for the better. With Charlene, he did things he wouldn’t have done otherwise, like getting exercise, or going to see live music. And at the computer, he was learning new skills, and he was creating something. It might be something completely useless, but at least he was creating.

“Things he wouldn’t have done otherwise” probably also include showering regular and buying clothes when the old ones develop holes, if Randy is anything like the majors nerds I’ve known and, occasionally, been. Most importantly, he’s making stuff. And that’s what distinguishes Randy, whatever his other problems might be, from everyone else. Lots of people talk about doing things and relatively few do. When you find someone who does stuff, it’s notable, even if the thing “might be something completely useless.”

In Randy’s case, he writes a game based in part on information gleaned from a crazy grad student named Andrew Loeb, and, when Andrew finds out, he ends up suing Randy; when the university whose computers Randy used finds out, they sue him too. Naturally, this is only a very light gloss on how it goes down, like the difference between lipstick and car paint, but events ultimately leave Randy here:

In the end, just to cut his losses and get out of it clean, Randy had to hire a lawyer of his own. The final cost to him was a hair more than five thousand dollars. The software was never sold to anyone, and indeed could not have been; it was so legally encumbered by that point that it would have been like trying to sell someone a rusty Volkswagen that had been dismantled and its parts hidden in attack dog kennels all over the world.

Which, apparently, is what happens when deranged, unreasonable people meet certain kinds of lawyers, or come from them. Randy eventually comes to “decide that Andrew’s life had been fractally weird. That is, you could take any small piece of it and examine it in detail and it, in and of itself, would turn out to be just as complicated and weird as the whole thing in its entirety.” But we have no society-wide immune system to people whose lives are “fractally weird” and want to makes others’ lives miserable, via abusing the legal system or some other means. The people who will make others’ lives miserable don’t really understand the mindset of creators, who’re just trying stuff out to see what happens. And they often don’t realize what other people are like, either, because they haven’t developed the intellectual immune system necessary to protect them from crazy assholes. Creators often live in a gift economy while others live in a commercial economy. So they get in situations like Randy does, having “to hire a lawyer” and cut their losses.

Reading over this post, I realize that, as usual, it’s not really possible to excerpt Cryptonomicon effectively, because the scene in question lasts four densely forested hardcover pages and delves into a level of nuance appropriate for Emacs users. And Stephenson’s novels are fractal too: you can examine almost any segment, from the sentence on up, and find that any part is as detailed and intense as the whole. I haven’t begun to dissect what comparing software, a non-tangible entity that can be infinitely copied with near zero cost, to a Volkswagen, which is quite finite and has many other characteristics separating it from software, actually says about both software and Volkswagens.

Through Randy, however, Stephenson is trying to explain hackers, or at least show one in action, since they’ve been conspicuously absent in literary fiction while probably doing more to change the world than virtually any other group over the last 30 or so years. You can’t really explain their core in a short space, which is why Stephenson devotes about a quarter of a 1,000 page book to examining one, and another quarter or so to examining one’s literal and figurative predecessor. But I could imagine an academic paper examining the construction of a hacker’s temperament, how it differs from the straw-man average man’s temperament, and how an eventual awareness of that difference forms the hacker’s outlook. Randy’s encounter with Andrew can be read as the awareness of that difference coming to the fore, rather as a comic book hero comes to realize that his special powers separate him from his classmates. The difference is that comic book heroes usually have their villains pre-selected and presented as suitably villainous, whereas in life it’s pretty unusual to come across someone as conveniently villainous as Andrew is here.

The creator's mindset and lawyers' destructiveness in Cryptonomicon

November 29, 2011 By in Books, Fiction Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

Rereading Cryptonomicon is always an absurdly pleasurable experience that yields ideas I should’ve noticed before but didn’t. For example, hacker Randy Waterhouse undergoes a life change characteristic not only of numerous nerds I know, who often swerve from the mind-numbingly pointless activities to fantastically enriching ones even though both spring from the same drive, but that also demonstrates the difference between someone who’s just happy to make something and lawyers, who do sometimes deserve their bad rap and rep:

[Randy’s] life had changed when Charlene had come along, and now it changed more: he dropped out of the fantasy role-playing game circuit altogether, stopped going to meetings of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and began to spend all his free time either with Charlene or in front of a computer terminal. All in all, this was probably a change for the better. With Charlene, he did things he wouldn’t have done otherwise, like getting exercise, or going to see live music. And at the computer, he was learning new skills, and he was creating something. It might be something completely useless, but at least he was creating.

“Things he wouldn’t have done otherwise” probably also include showering regular and buying clothes when the old ones develop holes, if Randy is anything like the majors nerds I’ve known and, occasionally, been. Most importantly, he’s making stuff. And that’s what distinguishes Randy, whatever his other problems might be, from everyone else. Lots of people talk about doing things and relatively few do. When you find someone who does stuff, it’s notable, even if the thing “might be something completely useless.”

In Randy’s case, he writes a game based in part on information gleaned from a crazy grad student named Andrew Loeb, and, when Andrew finds out, he ends up suing Randy; when the university whose computers Randy used finds out, they sue him too. Naturally, this is only a very light gloss on how it goes down, like the difference between lipstick and car paint, but events ultimately leave Randy here:

In the end, just to cut his losses and get out of it clean, Randy had to hire a lawyer of his own. The final cost to him was a hair more than five thousand dollars. The software was never sold to anyone, and indeed could not have been; it was so legally encumbered by that point that it would have been like trying to sell someone a rusty Volkswagen that had been dismantled and its parts hidden in attack dog kennels all over the world.

Which, apparently, is what happens when deranged, unreasonable people meet certain kinds of lawyers, or come from them. Randy eventually comes to “decide that Andrew’s life had been fractally weird. That is, you could take any small piece of it and examine it in detail and it, in and of itself, would turn out to be just as complicated and weird as the whole thing in its entirety.” But we have no society-wide immune system to people whose lives are “fractally weird” and want to makes others’ lives miserable, via abusing the legal system or some other means. The people who will make others’ lives miserable don’t really understand the mindset of creators, who’re just trying stuff out to see what happens. And they often don’t realize what other people are like, either, because they haven’t developed the intellectual immune system necessary to protect them from crazy assholes. Creators often live in a gift economy while others live in a commercial economy. So they get in situations like Randy does, having “to hire a lawyer” and cut their losses.

Reading over this post, I realize that, as usual, it’s not really possible to excerpt Cryptonomicon effectively, because the scene in question lasts four densely forested hardcover pages and delves into a level of nuance appropriate for Emacs users. And Stephenson’s novels are fractal too: you can examine almost any segment, from the sentence on up, and find that any part is as detailed and intense as the whole. I haven’t begun to dissect what comparing software, a non-tangible entity that can be infinitely copied with near zero cost, to a Volkswagen, which is quite finite and has many other characteristics separating it from software, actually says about both software and Volkswagens.

Through Randy, however, Stephenson is trying to explain hackers, or at least show one in action, since they’ve been conspicuously absent in literary fiction while probably doing more to change the world than virtually any other group over the last 30 or so years. You can’t really explain their core in a short space, which is why Stephenson devotes about a quarter of a 1,000 page book to examining one, and another quarter or so to examining one’s literal and figurative predecessor. But I could imagine an academic paper examining the construction of a hacker’s temperament, how it differs from the straw-man average man’s temperament, and how an eventual awareness of that difference forms the hacker’s outlook. Randy’s encounter with Andrew can be read as the awareness of that difference coming to the fore, rather as a comic book hero comes to realize that his special powers separate him from his classmates. The difference is that comic book heroes usually have their villains pre-selected and presented as suitably villainous, whereas in life it’s pretty unusual to come across someone as conveniently villainous as Andrew is here.

Status and sex: On women in bands never getting laid and Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man

November 20, 2011 By in Books, Culture, Links, Nonfiction Tags: , , , , , 3 Comments

Ellen Campesinos wrote “Female Musicians Never Get Laid: The bassist from Los Campesinos! gives us the awful truth about the sex lives of touring bands,” which is a brief study in gender differences among musicians. Campesinos says, apropos of a Tweet from Neko Case, “‘Ladies in bands don’t get ANY action,’ and as a female musician with a frustrated libido, I can sympathize.” Notice the keyword: “don’t” rather than “can’t.” Female musicians almost certainly can get as much action as they want, if they’re willing to get over the various neuroses and disqualifications that Campesinos brings up in her piece. She starts disqualifying potential guys right away, getting to here:

Having eliminated fans and support-band members, we’re left with the guy hanging out at the bar whose friend has dragged him along to the gig. In a lot of ways, he’s the most appealing choice. I want to hear that someone is not fussed about us. The thing is, this hypothetical guy normally throws me some glances, and I shoot some back, but he still won’t talk to me. And I don’t want to reduce it to status anxiety or a power issue, because obviously it’s intimidating to talk to any stranger, let alone someone who was just performing.

If “this hypothetical guy normally throws me some glances” and you “shoot some back,” the solution is simple: talk to him. Why doesn’t she? I’d like to rhetorically say, “I have no idea,” but I do: she’s been conditioned to want to make the guy make the first move, and she probably wants, on some level, to be chased. She closes off the possibility: “Maybe I could grow a pair and actually talk to that bar-hugging guy myself. But he might think I was making a weird face while I played.” This sounds like a psychological defense she’s using to avoid rejection.

So if she’s not getting laid, it’s in part because she’s not making any moves. Welcome to being a guy.

The bigger issue could be that Campesinos isn’t interested in any guy who’s interested in her. Notice how she says of fans, which male musicians often call groupies: “(And in truth, some male fans actually are slightly creepy)”, which might also transfer to “the guy hanging out at the bar” if he were to do something radical, like, say, open his mouth.

“Creepy” is one of these all-purpose words women use to indicate sexual undesirability for unformed reasons; it doesn’t really mean anything except to the woman using the term. Although I’m sure she’s right about some male fans, the word “creepy” itself also indicates that she’s closing herself off to forms of sexual expression from guys she doesn’t consider eligible—which is another way of saying that she doesn’t perceive those guys to be sufficient alpha for her.

Over the course of her essay, she describes herself as living the anxiety-ridden life of beta males who haven’t read The Game. The start of her last paragraph shows how Campesinos’s view differs from a typical guy’s: “Bottom line: attempting to have sex on tour is an awkward and messy experience with little sense of eroticism.” The bottom line for a guy is that attempting to have or having sex on tour with random hot girls is an awesome experience to be repeated every night, if possible. Campesinos isn’t driven to get laid:

I think Neko should have Tweeted, “Ladies in bands don’t get any action, but that’s okay, because you can make some nice friends and meet some really cool people instead, and worst come to worst, you can always have a wunk — a wank in a bunk. Or not. That’s disgusting.” Probably more than 140 characters, but it’s the truth.

Would most men write that they’d rather make nice friends and meet some really cool people in lieu of getting laid? Campesinos seems satisfied to make the trade-off and would rather live in a paradox where the only men she perceives as being available or interesting are ones she won’t approach.

The approach issue reminds me of Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man. Vincent, who is a lesbian in “real life,” dresses, acts, and lives like a man for about a year. In her first attempt to approach women at a bar, she (as a “he”) is basically rejected and finds that “it didn’t feel good to be on the receiving end of their suspicion” regarding motives. After, she asks a friend, “How do you handle all this fucking rejection?” He answers  in parable:

Let me tell you a story [. . .] When I was in college, there was this guy Dean, who got laid all the time. I mean the guy had different women coming out of his room every weekend and most weeknights, and he wasn’t particularly good looking. He was fat and kind of a slob. Nice guy, though, but nothing special. I couldn’t figure out how he did it, so one time I just asked him. ‘How do you get so many girls to go out with you?’ He was a man of few words, kind of Coolidge-esque, if you know what I mean. So all he said was: ‘I get rejected ninety percent of the time. But it’s that ten percent.’

Campesinos won’t make the first move, apparently doesn’t like the guys who do make the first move, and doesn’t like several general classes of guy available to her as a woman in a band. She’s willing to “make some nice friends and meet some really cool people instead,” which is okay, I guess, but her willingness to substitute nice friends and really cool people for getting laid may explain why she isn’t.

Here’s another theory: she “knows” (in an evolutionary sense, if not a conscious one) she doesn’t really need to get laid at a particular time in order maximize her reproductive success. If or when she wants to find a guy to have a children with, she’ll probably have no trouble finding many candidates; her only real trouble might being too picky.

In the meantime, people who really want to get laid, get laid. (I’m thinking of some of the women I know who are incredible, expert flirts while also not being irrationally picky about guys; watching them do their thing versus normal women is like listening the NY Phil and then a high school orchestra, and it appears that most women don’t care enough to really up their game). I don’t think a lot of women really understand how much rejection men go through, or what the trade-offs involved in masculinity entail. Here’s Roy Baumeister’s description of Self-Made Man in his book Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men:

One of the most interesting books about gender in recent years was by Norah Vincent. She was a lesbian feminist who with some expert help could pass for a man, and so she went undercover, living as a man in several different social spheres for the better part of a year. The book, Self-Made Man, is her memoir. She is quite frank that she started out thinking she was going to find out how great men have it and write a shocking feminist expose of the fine life that the enemy (men) was enjoying.

Instead, she experienced a rude awakening of how hard it is to be a man. Her readings and classes in Women’s Studies had not prepared her to realize that the ostensible advantages of the male role come at high cost. She was glad when it was over, and in fact she cut the episode short in order to go back to what she concluded was the greatly preferable life as a woman. The book she wrote was far different from the one she planned, and any woman who thinks life is better for men will find it a sobering read.

I don’t buy everything Baumeister says, but he’s lucid and skilled at explaining his ideas in terms of medians, averages, and trade-offs, which most polemics and professional gender people don’t or don’t want to address.

He seems open to revision, provided that the revision is based on data and not just belief. But you can take a lot of what he says, a lot of what Vincent says, a little evolutionary psychology, a lot of band culture, and read Campesinos’s piece not as Campesinos herself does, as a means of throwing up her hands and wondering “why?”, but has having a clear theoretical framework explaining why her self-made situation came about.

Randall Munroe also recommends Self-Made Man. This New York Times review is descriptive and reasonably okay.

Status and sex: On women in bands never getting laid and Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man

November 20, 2011 By in Books, Culture, Links, Nonfiction Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

Ellen Campesinos wrote “Female Musicians Never Get Laid: The bassist from Los Campesinos! gives us the awful truth about the sex lives of touring bands,” which is a brief study in gender differences among musicians. Campesinos says, apropos of a Tweet from Neko Case, “‘Ladies in bands don’t get ANY action,’ and as a female musician with a frustrated libido, I can sympathize.” Notice the keyword: “don’t” rather than “can’t.” Female musicians almost certainly can get as much action as they want, if they’re willing to get over the various neuroses and disqualifications that Campesinos brings up in her piece. She starts disqualifying potential guys right away, getting to here:

Having eliminated fans and support-band members, we’re left with the guy hanging out at the bar whose friend has dragged him along to the gig. In a lot of ways, he’s the most appealing choice. I want to hear that someone is not fussed about us. The thing is, this hypothetical guy normally throws me some glances, and I shoot some back, but he still won’t talk to me. And I don’t want to reduce it to status anxiety or a power issue, because obviously it’s intimidating to talk to any stranger, let alone someone who was just performing.

If “this hypothetical guy normally throws me some glances” and you “shoot some back,” the solution is pretty damn simple: talk to him. Why doesn’t she? I’d like to say, “I have no idea,” but I do: she’s been conditioned to want to make the guy make the first move, and she probably wants, on some level, to be chased. She knows this on some level but closes off the possibility: “Maybe I could grow a pair and actually talk to that bar-hugging guy myself. But he might think I was making a weird face while I played.” This sounds like a psychological defense she’s using to avoid rejection. So if she’s not getting laid, it’s in part because she’s not making any moves. Welcome to being a guy, honey.

The bigger issue might be simple: Campesinos might not be interested in any guy who’s interested in her. Notice how she says of fans, which male musicians often call groupies: “(And in truth, some male fans actually are slightly creepy)”, which might also transfer to “the guy hanging out at the bar” if he were to do something radical, like, say, open his mouth. “Creepy” is one of these all-purpose words women use to indicate unformed sexual undesirability; it doesn’t really mean anything except to the woman using the term. Although I’m sure she’s right about some male fans, the word “creepy” itself also indicates that she’s closing herself off to forms of sexual expression from guys she doesn’t consider eligible—which is another way of saying that she doesn’t perceive those guys to be sufficient alpha males for her.

Over the course of her essay, she’s basically describing herself as living the anxiety-ridden life of beta males who haven’t read The Game. You can get a sense of how Campesinos’s view differs from a typical guy’s by the start of her last paragraph: “Bottom line: attempting to have sex on tour is an awkward and messy experience with little sense of eroticism.” The bottom line for a guy is that attempting to have or having sex on tour with random hot girls is an awesome experience to be repeated every night. It appears she’s just not driven to get laid that much:

I think Neko should have Tweeted, “Ladies in bands don’t get any action, but that’s okay, because you can make some nice friends and meet some really cool people instead, and worst come to worst, you can always have a wunk — a wank in a bunk. Or not. That’s disgusting.” Probably more than 140 characters, but it’s the truth.

It’s hard to imagine most men writing that they’d rather make nice friends and meet some really cool people in lieu of getting laid, but she seems satisfied to make the trade-off and would rather live in a paradox where the only men she perceives as being available or interesting are ones she won’t approach.

The approach issue reminds me of Norah Vincent’s experience in Self-Made Man. Vincent, who is a lesbian in “real life,” dresses, acts, and lives like a man for about a year. In her first attempt to approach women at a bar, she (as a “he”) is basically rejected and finds that “it didn’t feel good to be on the receiving end of their suspicion” regarding motives. After, she asks a friend, “How do you handle all this fucking rejection?” He has an answer of sorts in parable form:

Let me tell you a story [. . .] When I was in college, there was this guy Dean, who got laid all the time. I mean the guy had different women coming out of his room every weekend and most weeknights, and he wasn’t particularly good looking. He was fat and kind of a slob. Nice guy, though, but nothing special. I couldn’t figure out how he did it, so one time I just asked him. ‘How do you get so many girls to go out with you?’ He was a man of few words, kind of Coolidge-esque, if you know what I mean. So all he said was: ‘I get rejected ninety percent of the time. But it’s that ten percent.’

Campesinos won’t make the first move, apparently doesn’t like the guys who do make the first move, and doesn’t like several general classes of guy available to her as a woman in a band. She’s willing to “make some nice friends and meet some really cool people instead,” which is okay, I guess, but her willingness to substitute nice friends and really cool people for getting laid may explain why she isn’t.

So she fears rejection on some level. Here’s another theory: she just doesn’t want to get laid that badly, and she “knows” (in an evolutionary sense, if not a conscious one) she doesn’t really need to get laid at a particular time in order maximize her reproductive success. If or when she wants to find a guy to have a children with, she’ll probably have no trouble finding many candidates; her only real trouble might being too picky.

In the meantime, people who really want to get laid, get laid. (I’m thinking of some of the women I know who are incredible, expert flirts while also not being irrationally picky about guys; watching them do their thing versus normal women is like listening the NY Phil and then a high school orchestra, and it appears that most women don’t care enough to really up their game). I don’t think a lot of women really understand how much rejection men go through, or what the trade-offs involved in masculinity entail. Here’s Roy Baumeister’s description of Self-Made Man in his book Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men:

One of the most interesting books about gender in recent years was by Norah Vincent. She was a lesbian feminist who with some expert help could pass for a man, and so she went undercover, living as a man in several different social spheres for the better part of a year. The book, Self-Made Man, is her memoir. She is quite frank that she started out thinking she was going to find out how great men have it and write a shocking feminist expose of the fine life that the enemy (men) was enjoying.

Instead, she experienced a rude awakening of how hard it is to be a man. Her readings and classes in Women’s Studies had not prepared her to realize that the ostensible advantages of the male role come at high cost. She was glad when it was over, and in fact she cut the episode short in order to go back to what she concluded was the greatly preferable life as a woman. The book she wrote was far different from the one she planned, and any woman who thinks life is better for men will find it a sobering read.

I don’t buy everything Baumeister says, but he’s lucid and skilled at explaining his ideas in terms of medians, averages, and trade-offs, which most polemics and professional gender people don’t or don’t want to address. And he seems open to revision, provided that the revision is based on data and not just belief. But you can take a lot of what he says, a lot of what Vincent says, a little evolutionary psychology, a lot of band culture, and read Campesinos’s piece not as Campesinos herself does, as a means of throwing up her hands and wondering “why?”, but has having a clear theoretical framework explaining why her self-made situation came about.

Randall Munroe also recommends Self-Made Man. This New York Times review is descriptive and reasonably okay.

Umberto Eco at the New York Public Library for The Prague Cemetery

November 9, 2011 By in Books, Culture, Fiction Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

In a talk with Paul Holdengräber, Umberto Eco said that “I have no particular interest in psychoanalysis,” but the interviewer kept pressing. Eco said, “My problem with psychoanalysis is due to my pride.” He’d be too eager to “trick” the analyst. It’s a writerly comment, and I get the impression that he’s playing tricks with and on readers (and listeners) too, continually pulling himself back from definitive statements and teasing one with the power of narrative (did you guess the murderer and his reasons in The Name of the Rose? Can you reconstruct the weirdly chopped narrative in The Prague Cemetery? For me the answers are no.)

In addition: Eco said he’s not tempted by psychoanalysis because it’s too expensive, which is rather hilarious given his obvious wealth and the relative lowness of monetary concerns compared with the abstract, aesthetic or intellectual concerns around intellectual power and honesty. I identify with Eco, and if I were in psychoanalysis I’d want to trick the therapist too, which might defeat some of the purpose. Besides, Eco says he “doesn’t offer cures,” which is good: novelists should offer stories. Eco’s are tall, and he has the glint of a precocious child caught in a lie but still amused and chuckling at his ability to trick you, and he has that childlike sense of the very intelligent and curious, akin to your favorite professor in college; I’m trying to cultivate the same attitude, but it’s a bit like trying to grow tomatoes in Seattle.

Eco revealed other things: he loves the English words “discombobulation” and “flabbergasted,” both of which I also admire, though not as much as “specious” and “callipygian.” He says “stupidity is fascinating,” which is true, especially because stupidity can often be harder to define, and one can go from feeling pleased with one’s own intelligence to feeling quite the fool with astonishing quickness—which is one of the delights in The Name of the Rose, when William realizes that his vaunted mind has created connections where none exist and that he has been led astray by his own certainty. In The Prague Cemetery, Simonini the forger preys on the trust and paranoia of others. Eco calls him a character without any kind of morality. I would add that he has no epistemological foundation, which lets him ply his trade; Eco says “the world is full of Simoninis,” which also implies we should watch for them and the conditions, like war and paranoia, that allow them to prosper.

The Prague Cemetery is set in the 19th Century, but, like all novels set in a time not our own, it invariably comments on our own. Eco cited the imagined Iraqi weapons that gave a pretext for the second Iraq War in 2003 as an example of Simoninis at work. We tend to have too much credulity. Generalization is a scourge and specifics beautiful—except, of course, for this generalization.

Hearing and reading Eco shows a powerful and finely calibrated mind at work, which is a great and too rare pleasure. Listening to the talk and reading Eco’s work makes me want to be a better writer—and a better reader, since the two can’t be separated from each other. Another point: I can’t convey most of Eco’s hilarity. It’s too dependent on delivery and comic timing. Eco uses timing effectively, and he’s willing to let agonizing silence hang.

In Reflections on The Name of the Rose, Eco said that novels are born of a single, seminal idea; in the case of that novel, the desire to see a monk murdered (he originally wrote that he wanted to poison a monk, but he has since made the subtle but important change to take some of the agency out of his hands). So Holdengräber asked about the seminal idea in The Prague Cemetery. Eco said he didn’t have one. Things change. It might be futile to ask a writer about their methods, since writers, like lovers, might be motivated by all sorts of things at different times and places.

Eco said in the talk that “The novel is always a way of discovering something,” but I wonder if novels are really means of discovering how little we know and how strange things really are if we look closely enough. We really are strangers to ourselves, but we often don’t recognize it. Eco, I sense, does, and that may explain his uninterest in psychoanalysis. He’s essentially wary of the mind’s associative tendencies, which he associates with conspiracy theorists. The idea of conspiracy enters those of his novels I’ve read: The Name of the Rose, where William imagines a possible conspiracy, Foucault’s Pendulum, where Casaubon and the editors make up a conspiracy for their own amusement, The Prague Cemetery, which, so far, is overrun with characters whose dubious ability to infer causal relationships where none exist enables Simonini to flourish.

The end of the talk was disappointing: Holdengräber asked about the role of the Internet in changing research and the role of libraries in the age of the Internet, Eco offered platitudes long familiar to New York Review of Books readers, and, besides, no one really knows what’s going to happen over time.

I haven’t deeply discussed The Prague Cemetery in this post because he didn’t speak much about it. In addition, I’m about halfway through the novel and continue to dislike it—not because of its protagonist, a man as close to wicked, evil deception (as opposed to the humorous kind Eco practices) as Eco can probably make, but because of is narrative structure. The novel is divided between three major narratives, two of which may be multiple personalities from the same person, and much of it is told in diary form. It’s hard to track who is doing what and why he’s doing it.

Narrative games are a long-standing interest of Eco’s; to return to Reflections on the Name of the Rose:

Another problem: the encasement of the voices, or, rather, of the narrative points of view. I knew that I was narrative a story with the words of another person, having declared in the preface that this person’s words had been filtered through at least two other narrative points of view, that of Mabillon and that of the Abbé Vallet, even if they had supposedly operated only as philologists (but who believes that?). The problem arose again, however, within Adso’s first-person narration. Adso, at the age of eighty, is telling about what he saw at the age of eighteen. Who is speaking, the eighteen-year-old Adso or the eighty-year-old? Both, obviously; and this is deliberate. The trick was to make the old Adso constantly present as he ponders what he remembers having seen and felt as the young Adso.

But “the encasement of the voices” is easily followed in The Name of the Rose, and the various voices in Foucault’s Pendulum are anchored by Casaubon. One can follow what someone is doing and, more or less, why they are doing it. That’s not especially true in The Prague Cemetery, where the protagonist, Simonini is mostly writing a “diary,” while other voices track what he’s doing.

Does this sound confusing? I’ve reread the last couple paragraphs a couple times and find no way to simplify my explanation. The novel begins to feel more like an exploration of narrative games, along the lines of late Henry James, Herman Hesse, or Philip K. Dick, and less like a story. In Reflections, Eco writes that “Unquestionably, the modern novel has sought to diminish the amusement resulting from the plot in order to enhance other kinds of amusement. As a great admirer of Aristotle’s Poetics, I have always thought that, no matter what, a novel must also—especially—amuse through its plot.” Maybe he is no longer convinced “a novel must also [. . .] amuse through its plot,” or he has expanded his definition of “amuse,” or Eco has changed his mind, as he has about the need for a novel to come from a seminal image.

I keep reading Eco because I hope for a novel as powerful as The Name of the Rose or Foucault’s Pendulum. I hope to get one.

The Steve Jobs Biography

October 24, 2011 By in Books, Briefly Noted, Nonfiction Tags: , , , , , , 3 Comments

Like everyone else, I started Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography today. It’s wonderful. In the first pages, Isaacson gives a sense of how Jobs both viewed himself and was viewed in his place at Apple: “When he was restored to the throne at Apple [. . . .]” How many companies could see their CEOs as occupying thrones? Almost no one has or had the medieval level of control Jobs did over Apple. But he didn’t exercise that control capriciously: he used it to make things people want. Lower on the same page, Isaacson describes his unwillingness to write on Jobs at first, but he says that he “found myself gathering string on the subject” of Apple’s early history. “Gathering string:” it’s something I do all the time, using the methods Steven Berlin Johnson describes in this essay about DevonThink Pro. One imagines the string eventually being knit into a sweater, but first one has to have the material.

A page later, Isaacson says “The creativity that can occur when a feel for both the humanities and the sciences combine in one strong personality was the topic that most interested me in my biographies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that it will be a key to creating innovative economies in the twenty-first century.” By now, such an assertion is almost banal, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t right and doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be asserted. Whenever you hear someone creating the false binary C. P. Snow discusses deconstructs in Two Cultures, point them to Jobs, who is merely the most salient example of why there aren’t two or more cultures—there’s one. You can call it creative, innovative, human-centered, discovery-oriented, bound by makers, or any number of other descriptions, but it’s there. It’s not just “a key to creating innovative economies in the twenty-first century,” either. It’s a key to being.

One more impression: while discussing the Apple II and the role of marketing guy Mike Markkula, Isaac describes the three principles Markkula adopts: “empathy,” “focus,” and, most interesting to this discussion, the “awkwardly named [. . .] impute.” The last principle “emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. ‘People DO judge a book by its cover,’ he wrote.” He’s right, and that brings up this book as a physical object: it’s beautiful. A single black and white picture of Jobs as an older man, still look vaguely like a rapscallion, dominates the cover. Another picture of him, this time as a younger man, dominates the back. The pages themselves are very white, and the paper quality is high; ink doesn’t bleed through easily, and the paper resists feathering. Jobs agreed not to meddle with the text; Isaacson says “He didn’t seek any control over what I wrote.” But he did meddle around the text, however: “His only involvement came when my publisher was choosing the cover art. When he saw an early version of a proposed covert treatment, he disliked it so much that he asked to have input in designing a new version. I was both amused and willing, so I readily assented.”

Good. I wonder if Jobs had “input” in the paper quality too. Sometimes I wonder if publishers are themselves trying to encourage people to adopt eBooks through the use of lousy paper stock and spines in books, especially hardcovers. Take Steven Berlin Johnson’s excellent book, Where Good Ideas Come From. The cover is black, with yellow text shaped like a lightbulb. Excellent design. But the pages themselves are a brownish gray, like newsprint, and the glued binding feels flimsy. The paperback is probably worse. It’s not the kind of book one would imagine Steve Jobs allowing, but the state of Johnson’s book as a physical object indicates what publishers value: cutting corners, making things cheap, and subtly conveying to readers that the publisher doesn’t care enough to make it good.

Publishers, in other words, are ruled by accountants who probably say that you can save $.15 per book by using worse paper. Apple was ruled by a megalomaniac with a persnickety attention to detail. People love Apple. No one, not even authors, love publishers. The reasons are legion, but when I think about what a lot of recent books “impute” to the reader, I think about how Steve Jobs would make them do it differently if he could. If you’re reading this in the distant future, the idea of reading words printed on dead trees is probably as strange to you as riding a carriage would be to me, but for now it matters. And, more importantly, I think books will continue to exist as physical art objects as well as repositories for knowledge as long as the Jobs and Isaacsons of the world make them.

I’m not far into the biography and feel the call of other responsibilities. But I leave Steve Jobs reluctantly, which happens to too few books of any genre. And I have a feeling that thirty years from now I’ll be reading an interview with some inventor or captain of industry who cites Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs as inspirations in whatever that inventor accomplishes.

Follow-up to the eBook and publishing post

October 23, 2011 By in Books, Publishing Tags: , , , , , 3 Comments

See the original post here, and pay special attention to the thoughtful and informed comments (which are a pleasant change from the usual Internet fare). They also bring up some points I’d like to address:

1) I don’t think publishers will go away altogether, even if they persist in some as mere quality signals or brands. Among the millions of self-published books coursing through the Internet, making informed decisions as a reader gets even harder than it is now. In the previous post, I mentioned the problem of false negatives—books that should’ve been published but are rejected—without reiterating that most negatives are true negatives—that is, books that are rejected because they’re bad. Readers are having and will continue to have problems in this regard. As Laura Miller says in “When anyone can be a published author: How do you find something good to read in a brave new self-published world?“:

You’ve either experienced slush or you haven’t, and the difference is not trivial. People who have never had the job of reading through the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts sent to anyone even remotely connected with publishing typically have no inkling of two awful facts: 1) just how much slush is out there, and 2) how really, really, really, really terrible the vast majority of it is.

2) As a result of 1), I wouldn’t be surprised if “publishing” morphs into a much smaller, broader-based business in which editor-agent hybrids take on promising writers in a somewhat traditional manner but don’t offer advances or some of the conventional “perks.” Instead, they’ll work with writers to improve the writers’ writing, structure, and so forth, in exchange for somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 – 20% of the book’s profits.

Be very wary of writers who say they don’t need editors. Maybe Nabokov didn’t need an editor, but pretty much every other writer did and does. And editors are expensive—I know because I’ve looked into what hiring one would cost—and writers, especially young, untested writers, don’t have a lot of money. So I don’t think lump-sum upfront payments will work for most writers, particularly fiction writers. Editors might judge who is worth investment based on signals like, say, blog posts.

Laments like this one by Kristine Kathryn Rusch make me wonder about what function editors are performing now; I can’t excerpt it effectively, but it observes the extent to which junior editors at publishing houses treat her like an idiot. If the experience described in her post is routine or commonplace, I think it bodes ill for conventional publishing houses (assuming, of course, there’s not some mitigating factor she’s not describing in the post).

A lot of writers say publishers aren’t doing that much to promote their book as it is, which may be true, but they do at least send a quality signal. I wonder, though, about the cost of books—especially hardcovers, and still think this cost is going to fall. Which leads me to. . .

3) I think self-published writers are, over time, going to put pricing pressure on conventionally published books. If you’re a random mystery reader and don’t have especially high quality standards for prose quality or prose originality and consume a very large number of mysteries, self-published ones that aren’t as polished as commercially published fiction might be just as good. If you’re buying books for $2.99 on a Nook instead of $5.99 – $9.99 via Nook or mass-market paperback, then you get a lot more word for your buck. This is especially true, it seems to me, in genre publishing, where series are common and so are relatively rapid and similar books.

Being the kind of “informed” reader discussed in # 1 doesn’t stop most people from being not very discriminating.

4) Desperation is underrated as an inspiration to change. Jeff observes in a comment: “As an author just barely at the bottom of the midlist, if my choice is between self-publishing and not publishing and all, I’ll choose the former.” Me too, although, like him, I’d choose conventional publishing at this point in time, given the choice. But writers without a “choice” will increasingly lean towards self-publishing.

5) Blogs and other non-publisher signals of quality may become more important over time. If readers are debating an author’s merits, looking at their blog or other online writing may be a useful way to decide whether a writer is worth the time it takes to begin a novel. I suspect most non-established writers know or suspect this by now, but it’s worth reiterating anyway. These days, when people say things like, “I want to be a writer” to me, I ask if they have a blog. If the answer is “no,” that signals they’re probably not very serious about writing. Even if the blog only has one post a month, if that post is a substantial or interesting one I take it as a positive sign.

6) If you’re interested in how the publishing industry works now and why, despite the media portrayals, it works better than it’s sometimes depicted, take a look at Charlie Stross’s series of posts Common Misconceptions About Publishing, which were last updated in May 2010 but are still required reading for anyone interested in the subject.

7) I don’t think most of my analysis is terribly original, and you could find similar analyses elsewhere. Nonetheless, I find the changing business interesting both as a reader and writer / would-be writer.

8) I’m not sure much, if any of this, matters to readers, but it should matter a lot to writers who care at all about making some money from their work.

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly — Anthony Bourdain

October 21, 2011 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly is as good as a lot of people say it is, which is pretty uncommon. It moves quickly and cleverly: as a young man, Bourdain observes an older cook’s hands, which “looked like the claws of some monstrous science-fiction crustacean, knobby and calloused under wounds old and new.” Notice that word, “crustacean,” and how well it fits, especially since the kitchen is making seafood. The memoir is filled with evocative and expressive moments like that. I’m tempted to start listing them. But that would spoil the surprising pleasure they offer on the page.

There’s a moment when Bourdain points out one of the problems with writing about something as sensual as food, since you can never taste the food through words:

. . . the events described are somehow diminished in the telling. A perfect bowl of bouillabaisse, that first, all-important oyster, plucked from the Bassin d’Arcachon, both are made cheaper, less distinct in my memory, once I’ve written about them.

But the problem of something becoming “somehow diminishing in the telling” or “cheaper, less distinct in my memory” are perils not only of the food writer, although he might be particularly sensitive to them, but to the writer of almost any genre. Tactile sensations like food, sex, water, and the like might be especially susceptible, but even our descriptions of our thoughts are probably different once we’ve “written about them.” But writing about them is the only effective way we have of communicating them to others. And Bourdain is very, very good at that communication. I never thought I cared about what it was like to work in a kitchen, or about the tribulations of the chef. I didn’t realize just how dramatic being a chief could be. Now I understand, and am slightly closer to understanding the fascination with cooking TV shows. I say “closer,” however because I’d still rather be in the kitchen with knife and spatula at hand than watching someone else in the kitchen, much as I’d rather be on the field with a soccer ball at my feet than playing the FIFA soccer video game.

I come out of Kitchen Confidential with a sense that I’ve read a religious story, in which the wayward one day finds God. Except most of us moderns don’t really find God, but we find something abstract to serve, and that something is greater than ourselves. For Bourdain it’s food, despite the many problems that come with it. For others it might be art, science, math, business, the ideal of the family. The things you can choose to admire proliferate. But most of us only choose one or maybe two things. Or the thing chooses us.

You have to love the thing, as Bourdain does cooking, but you can’t love it only for itself. I’ve read the unfortunate prose of plenty of people who say they love “writing” but don’t love it enough to learn basic grammar, expand their vocabularies, or think about the reader more than themselves (Bourdain holds chefs who cook attractive dishes that don’t taste very good in low regard, which is approximately how I feel about people who publish essays in novel format). Love might be necessary if you’re going to go to the distance, but a lot of people have this silly, romantic idea that love is all about the moment, dying for each other, crashing emotional waves, love-at-first-sight, tussles-in-the-bedroom.

And it is about that—we learn about Bourdain’s apprenticeship—but the part is relatively small: a lot of love is about persevering during the tedious, boring parts of life, learning one’s craft, and learning how to get along with others. People who cook because they think they love to cook, without having considered that cooking professionally might mean doing it six to seven days a week for years on end, haven’t realized that no, maybe love isn’t enough. Here’s Michael Idov in “Bitter Brew: I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life,” which every aspiring coffee artist should read:

Looking back, we (incredibly) should have heeded the advice of bad-boy chef Anthony Bourdain, who wrote our epitaph in Kitchen Confidential: “The most dangerous species of owner … is the one who gets into the business for love.”

Advice like this by its nature goes unheeded because most people probably can’t project themselves imaginatively into the mind of the advice giver. The advice is “diminished in the telling,” since we don’t have the sensory information and deep background that went into the person giving the advice. We’re bad at thinking about what doing something over and over for months or years at a time is like. We’ll probably never be good at it, but that’s not going to stop us from giving and taking it.

I like to cook and cook for myself and friends with what I imagine to be reasonable skill. If, for some unknown reason, Bourdain showed up at my apartment for dinner, I think I could make something he’d find passable, especially because he likes food you can eat better than food that’s designed to show off the chef’s smarts. But I probably don’t love cooking enough to do it as a pro. I don’t like it enough to put forth my best effort when I’m not in the mood. Maybe I once thought I liked cooking enough, because who hasn’t imagined themselves as a chef somewhere as they grease their pan with olive oil, knowing that an hour later perfect penne a la vodka and tender green beans with garlic will be served? We’ve all probably briefly imagined ourselves giving Nobel and Oscar acceptance speeches too.

But the gap between current skills and the social admiration can only be bridged by the long honing of skill that requires incredibly internal and psychological fortitude (or, possibly, dumb luck and not having anywhere else to go). Even if we do keep trying, the plaudits may never come. I know of Bourdain not because of his work as a chef, but because he’s so skilled a writer that I’ve seen him mentioned often enough to read his book. Which I will now recommend that you do too, because it’s fabulous. He probably could’ve amped up the sex part, though he does say that he doesn’t want the reader “to think that everything up to this point was about fornication, free booze, and ready access to drugs.” But for Bourdain it is, more than anything else, about the food. I think it would be extraordinarily difficult to fake his level of enthusiasm for food. And when you have an enthusiasm that you probably can’t fake, you’ve probably also got a shot at being the best.

I also wrote about Bourdain in “So you wanna be a writer: What Anthony Bourdain can tell you even when he’s not talking about writing.” I like that he views cooking as a craft. “Craft” sounds intellectually honest, as opposed to an art that can fall prey to pretension, and even though all arts require some level of craftsmanship. He raises cooking to an art form without overdramatizing it.