Category Archives: Books

(500) Days of Summer with, as a bonus, Alain de Botton's On Love

January 29, 2010 By in Books, Culture, movies, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

(500) Days of Summer is about the mating habits of angsty hipsters. Said hipsters are endlessly concerned with the nature of love in a deep, romantic fashion when they should be thinking more about the mechanics of how and why someone is actually attracted to another person. To heal the anxiety that hipsters feel about attraction and love, I would prescribe Belle de Jour, Neil Strauss’ The Game, and Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which, taken together, remind one that the important thing about love is having enough game to get someone else to love you, not merely mooning over another person—which is more likely to drive them away than attract them.

In (500) Days of Summer, Tom does the mooning and Summer is indifferent and perhaps callous to his puppyish attention. Tom wants romance so bad that his 11-year-old sister says, “Easy Tom. Don’t be a pussy” at one point. We’re thinking the same thing, although perhaps not in those words, which are given to the sister chiefly, I assume, for getting a laugh out of the incongruity of hearing her say them. In the next scene, Tom asks Summer, “What are we doing?” The better question, at least for the audience, is, “Should we care?” If Tom doesn’t get with Summer—who manifests no special or particular interests, talents, abilities, thoughts, capability, or expertise—there are another thousand girls right behind her, exactly like her, who are also part of the quirk genre, as described in the linked Atlantic article:

As an aesthetic principle, quirk is an embrace of the odd against the blandly mainstream. It features mannered ingenuousness, an embrace of small moments, narrative randomness, situationally amusing but not hilarious character juxtapositions (on HBO’s recent indie-cred comedy Flight of the Conchords, the titular folk-rock duo have one fan), and unexplainable but nonetheless charming character traits. Quirk takes not mattering very seriously.

Quirk is odd, but not too odd. That would take us all the way to weird, and there someone might get hurt.

Over time, quirk gets boring and reminds you why you like the real feeling of, say, King Lear, or the plot of The Usual Suspects. The mopey plight of undifferentiated office workers is less compelling, and, once sufficiently repeated, it feels like disposable culture: another story about two modern people with no serious threats to their existence save the self-imposed ones that arise chiefly from their minds.

Love stories about the relatively pampered can work: I watched (500) Days of Summer because a bunch of students mentioned it in relation to Alain de Botton’s On Love. But the novel is better: a philosophically minded and self-aware narrator is fascinating precisely because he is aware of the ridiculousness of his own predicament and the randomness of love. He has a therapist and a philosophy professor in his mind. The dichotomy between how he should feel (she’s just another girl) and how he does (transformed through love!) fuels much of the comedy, as does the narrator’s tendency toward self-sabotage thanks to Marxism as applied to love: he would never want to be a member of any club that would have him as a member. Tom would, apparently, sign up to be a member of any club that would have him as a member. His lack of interiority makes him boring. His lack of exteriority makes the movie boring.

Whoever wrote (500) Days of Summer must have read On Love (Tom is a wannabe architect and gives Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness as a gift) and wanted to do a film version, or at least steal from it. Stealing from On Love, by the way, is a brilliant idea: the novel still leaves much territory to be explored, and it’s probably impossible to draw a complete map to represent the problems that love provide. But the interior commentary that makes the novel special can’t be effectively represented on screen. So we’re stuck with two people whose averageness is painful and unleavened by any real sense of awareness of their own situation. One of my favorite passages from On Love goes:

But there wasn’t much adventure or struggle around to be had. The world that Chloe and I lived in had largely been stripped of possibilities for epic conflict. Our parents didn’t care, the jungle had been tamed, society its disapproval behind universal tolerance, restaurants stayed open late, credit cards were accepted almost everywhere, and sex was a duty, not a crime.

On Love is acknowledging that the stuff that makes good fiction has largely been evacuated from modern love stories. In doing so, I laughed with recognition and at the narrator’s neuroticism about his own love stories. Moments like this abound in On Love and make it such a wonderful novel. Moments like this are absent in (500) Days of Summer, which make it a tedious movie.

Rereading Nick Hornby's High Fidelity

January 25, 2010 By in Books, Reading Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

There are two really remarkable things about High Fidelity: how funny it is and how well constructed it is, especially given that the subject matter (romantic entanglements and existential dilemmas for the aging man and relationship) could easily be a plotless mess.

A novel about extended adolescence (or extended adolescence in general) can become vague, wishy-washy, and meandering. I’m trolling for specific examples of constructedness, but most aren’t as good out of context as they are in context as they are in it. Still, the novel moves: it starts with Rob’s “desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups, in chronological order,” proceeds through them, brings him back to the cause of his most recent breakup, propels him forward to his most recent hook-up, and then moves through scenes involving a funeral, a dinner party, a move-out, and a real party, each of which feels developed and connected to each other. There’s a strong sense of Rob moving, and him both acting and being acted upon that’s so often absent in similar novels, like Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero, Richard Price’s Ladies’ Man, or Kate Christensen’s Trouble, all of which ramble and drift and make you long for the cohesiveness you don’t realize you’re missing until you see something like High Fidelity, or Elmore Leonard’s caper novels, or Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.

Not that jokes are everything, but High Fidelity is filled with them, and the tremendous humor gives poignance to moments of seriousness, especially when those moments are tinged with existential fear about the future and one’s social position:

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 there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, 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?

(Not to worry: in the next paragraph, a woman asks “Have you got any soul?” and the narrator thinks, “That depends […] some days yes, some days no.”)

Rob both rationalizes and sees himself as others might:

Me, I’m unmarried—at the moment as unmarried as it’s possible to be—and I’m the owner of a failing record shop. It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the center of your being, then you can’t afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it of it the finished product. You’ve got to pick it up, keep it alive and in turmoil, you’ve got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you’re compelled to start all over again […] Maybe Al Green is directly responsible for more than I ever realized.

He knows the argument is wrong and unlikely—art comes from the most unlikely places and conditions, much like the appreciation of art—yet he still half-believes it, just as we half-believe the joking things we say to ourselves to get through the day, or to convince ourselves of our value and self-worth. The alternative is often a depressing sense of how you look in others’ eyes, a kind of objectivity that might be a cure worse than the disease of being wrong. This doubleness of Rob’s view—he’s joking, but aware that he’s half-serious, which makes the joke funnier—is one of the novel’s great pleasures.

To return to the blockquote above, it should be obvious based on the plentitude bordering on plethora of novels about marriage in all its configurations (see: the collected work of Updike and Roth), one’s love life isn’t finished until one decides it is or one dies. Rob knows this: he warns against starting “to think of it as finished,” rather than knowing it is finished. And blaming your love life on listening to pop music is a cute pop psychology theory that’s hilariously wrong and yet plausible enough for us to appreciate it.

The novel’s humor and voice combined with its structure to give it meaning where so many not dissimilar set ups fail. The TV show Californication, though mildly entertaining, is basically about the difficulties of information hiding: Hank is a frequently blocked writer who derives pleasure from sleeping with various women, which he in turn has to conceal from various women because of the potential sexual and emotional side effects of revelation. But the show trades in a narrow range: who can Hank sleep with, and who matters enough to keep it from? If the show has a larger plot, it’s not evident: Hank’s relationship with his ex-wife, whose name I can’t remember because she isn’t that important to the show, oscillates in a narrow band between reconciliation and estrangement from which it cannot escape with eliminating the show’s potential for future seasons. Although the show isn’t pornography, its limits become steadily clearer over time.

One of the few disappointing things about High Fidelity isn’t the book itself— the other output of its author. Like Robert Penn Warren, Hornby seems to have only one really, really good book in him; I’ve at least started most of the rest of his work. Some books, like A Long Way Down, aren’t bad but aren’t compelling, and they don’t have that sense of drive and purpose High Fidelity. They’re like the story about a dream your friend wants to relay in exhaustive detail. The events in those other books are exhaustive even when they’re short, and they don’t have the pep and vigor of High Fidelity, which almost has too many short and wonderful asides to mention them all.

The end of High Fidelity trends toward sentimentality, but it’s saved by a continuing self-awareness that its concerns are silly. By making them serious while retaining its essential lightness, the novel works. And, the ending implies, life trends toward sentimentality: if you never indulge in any sort of authentic feeling, then you’re left alone and an agglomeration of preferences in music, books, or movies, dangling before a world that will, more likely than not, be mostly indifferent to your existence. But that’s an awfully heavy premise: I’d rather hear about Rob’s top five breakups and the linguistic implications of “I haven’t slept with him yet” as compared to “I haven’t seen Evil Dead 2 yet.”

Problems in the Academy: Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University

January 21, 2010 By in Academia, Books, Culture, Nonfiction, Publishing Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

The problems in American universities are mostly structural and economic, and the biggest are occurring on the faculty side of the liberal arts and social sciences: since around 1975, too many professors (or at least people earning PhDs) vie for faculty slots relative to the number of undergraduates. Menand says (twice) that “Between 1945 and 1975, the number of American undergraduates increased by 500 percent, but the number of graduate students increased by nearly 900.” Undergraduates clear out of the system in four to six years; graduate students who get PhDs (presumably) stay or wish to stay for whole careers. Since 1975, college enrollments have grown much more modestly than they did from 1945 – 1975, and the department that’s grown most is business, since so many undergraduates now major in it. But grad programs haven’t scaled back, leaving humanities types to fight for scarce jobs and write polemics about how much it sucks to fight for scarce jobs.

Menand doesn’t identify the supply/demand problems as the major root cause of the other issues around political/social conformity, time to degree for academic grad students, and so forth, but it’s hard not to trace “the humanities revolution,” “interdisiplinarity and anxiety,” and why all professors think alike to supply and demand. Each of those topics are each covered in a long chapter, and Menand’s first, on “The Problem of General Education,” seems least related to the others because it is mostly inside baseball: how we ended up requiring undergrads to take a certain number of courses in a certain number of fields, and what academia should be like. But the others make up for it.

The Marketplace of Ideas is worth reading for knowledge and style: the book has the feeling of a long New Yorker article—Menand is a staff writer there—and if he occasionally pays for it with the generalization that gets coldly stamped out of peer-reviewed writing, the trade-off is worthwhile. Menand is also unusually good at thinking institutionally, in terms of incentives, and about systems: those systems tend to evolve over time, but they also tend to harden in place unless some catastrophic failure eventually occurs. Such failures are often more evident in business than in public life, since businesses that fail catastrophically go bankrupt and are much more susceptible to competitors and regulators than governments. The academic system is, as Menand points out, something out of the 19th Century in its modes of tenure, promotion, displinarity, and so forth. But it’s unlikely to go anywhere in an immediate and obvious way because public universities are supported by taxpayers and even private ones are most often nonprofit. Furthermore, whatever problems exist, universities do well enough, especially from the perspective of students, and having a glut of PhDs to choose from doesn’t harm universities themselves. Consequently, I don’t see as great an impetus for change as Menand implies, very loosely, that there is.

Take, for example, the PhD production problems from earlier in this post. The logical conclusion would be for fewer people to enter PhD programs, for universities to close some programs, for degrees to take less time (the natural sciences often end up requiring five years from entering to conferring degrees, while humanities programs creeping above ten years), and so on. But there’s no real incentive for that on the part of an individual university: having graduate programs is impressive, grad students are cheap teachers, and people keep applying—even though they know the odds (this basically describes me).

Thus supply and demand stay out-of-whack. University departments can remain perhaps more insular than they should be. Publishing requirements increase as publishing becomes more difficult. But there’s little need to change so long as enough students enter PhD programs. Menand suggests shortening the time to graduate degrees, making them more immediately relevant, and closing some programs—none of which seem likely in the near future unless students stop enrolling. But they don’t because, once again like me, they see professors and think, “that looks like fun. I’ll take a flyer and see what happens.” Nonetheless, the professoriate is already changing in some ways: about half of students, as Menand observes and the Chronicle of Higher Education does too, are now taught by part-timers. With as many choices among instructors as universities have, that trend seems ripe for further acceleration.

Menand says that “For most of the book, I write as a historian.” He also says that he’s “not a prescriptivist” and implies pragmatism, rather than polemic. That’s wise: identifying the problems are probably easier than finding those pragmatic solutions to them. He uses English as an example of what’s going on more broadly, and he is an English professor at Harvard. Part of the crisis is within English departments—what exactly does it mean to study “English?”—and part of it is external. The part outside English departments has to do with rationale and economics—as Menand says, “People feel, out of ignorance or not, that there is a good return on investment in physics departments. In the 1980s, people began wondering what the return on investment was in the humanities.” Note his “people feel” formulation, which is unsourced but occurs throughout; most of the time, speaking of a common culture feels right because Menand has his finger on the intellectual zeitgeist enough to pull off such comments, and elsewhere he has the numbers to back those comments up, especially regarding the flatlining and even decline in the absolute and relative percentages of English majors on campus.

The other interesting thing is the word “crisis,” which I’ve used several times. The Oxford American Dictionary included with OS X says that crisis is “a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger.” The word “time” implies that crises should pass; but in English, the one or ones Menand identifies has lasted for more than a generation of academics. According to “The Opening of the Academic Mind” in Slate, “The state of higher education in America is one of those things, like the airline industry or publishing, that’s always in crisis.” In Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem, the protagonist, Renee, thinks:

In the great boom of the late fifties and early sixties, graduate departments, particularly at state universities, had expanded and conferred degrees in great abundance. But then the funds, from both government and private foundations, had dried up, and departments shrunk, resulting in diminishing need. Suddenly there was a large superfluity of Ph.D.s, compounded by demographic changes […] The result has been a severe depression, in both the economic and psychological senses, in the academic community.

That was published in 1983. People are still publishing the same basic argument today, only now they often do it online. Perhaps the real lesson is that academics are great at learning many things, but supply/demand curves and opportunity costs are not among them, except for economists.

The problems are exacerbated in the humanities and social sciences because grad students in those fields don’t have industry to fall back on, but the natural sciences are not immune either. As Philip Greenspun points out in “Women in Science,” America seems more than willing to source its science graduate students from developing countries, which takes care of supply from that angle (if you read his essay, ignore the borderline or outright sexist commentary regarding women, even if his point is that women are too smart to go to grad school in the sciences; pay attention to the institutional and systematic focus, especially when he points out that “Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States”).

Of course, even as I make myself aware of works like The Marketplace of Ideas, I continue working toward that PhD, convinced that I’ll be the one who beats the odds that are still better than Vegas, though not by a lot. But I’m also part of the imbalance: too many people seeking PhDs for few too jobs, particularly too few jobs of the sort we’re being trained to do. Yet academics still provide a vital function to society in the form of knowledge, and in particular knowledge that’s undergone peer review, however difficult or abstruse peer review may have become in the humanities (for more, see Careers—and careerism—in academia and criticism).

The question of what academia should be like is to some extent driven by what professors think it should be like, but it’s also driven by what students think it should be like. Students ultimately drive academia by choosing where to go to school. An increasing number of them are choosing community and online higher education. It’s not clear what this shift means either. Still, professors have blame as well: as the aforementioned Slate article suggests, “[…] Professors, the people most visibly responsible for the creation of new ideas, have, over the last century, become all too consummate professionals, initiates in a system committed to its own protection and perpetuation.” True. But given that they have tenure, control departments, and confer the PhDs necessary to become professors, it seems unlikely that major change will come from that quarter.

Buying a Kindle: Why Didn't I Think of This Last Semester?

January 18, 2010 By in Books, Computers/Apple, Tools Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Despite my extensive carping about the Digital Restrictions Management on the Amazon Kindle, I ordered one earlier today and now wish I’d been smart enough to do so last semester.

Why? I’m a graduate student in English Lit, and I looked at my reading requirements for this semester and found that the vast majority of the assigned books are out-of-copyright (meaning they were published before 1923), and I can download them free; most are also famous enough to make them easily accessible online. In other words, buying all my books for the semester will cost $200. Buying a Kindle will cost $259, plus another $30 for a case. The Kindle + free books effectively makes the Kindle $59. If I’d realized this last semester, it already would’ve paid for itself. In addition, I won’t have to lug around nearly as many .pdfs as I do now.

Given that the English curriculums appear to focus on pre-1923 texts, I’d be surprised if more English majors and grad students don’t take this path. At the moment, it’s possible to read class books either on a computer screen or print them out, but neither solution works all that well. I suspect this one will, though, as always, we shall see.

The Glass Room — Simon Mawer

January 16, 2010 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

The Glass Room is filled with portents, which, given its setting in 1920s Europe relative to its composition in more recent times, might seem unsurprising. But those portents become portentous, as defined by the Oxford American Dictionary built into OS X: “done in a pompously or overly solemn manner so as to impress.” The novel is ceaselessly concerned with tension between old and new, ancient and modern, the way of progress and the way of regression, but it tends to be delivered with the subtlety of a brick through a window:

* “Beneath the calm surface of the new country Viktor felt the tremors of uncertainty.”

* “It’ll be a revolution […] a casting off of the past. A new way of living.” Maybe, but I wouldn’t count on it: there is no such thing as a genuine casting off of the past.

* “I have laboured day and night, to the disadvantage of my current work. But the demands of true love are more powerful than mere artistic patronage.”

* “I’m certainly not going to tell you what I am letting him do. Some things are sacred.”
“My darling, these days nothing is sacred” (emphasis in original).

* “This is the artistic future of our country […] Vitulka and people like her. A young country with so much energy and so much talent.” Until the Nazis and then Soviets roll through, anyway.

And these are only a few obvious moments from the first 80 pages. I counted zero jokes in the same territory.

Have I not mentioned characters yet? There may be a reason for that. Viktor and Liesel Landauer are religiously mismatched (Jew, Gentile—or is it the other way around? Confusion would be easy) and eventually become erotically mismatched, with somewhat predictable affairs sprouting between a couple who cannot yet have read The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Rainer von Abt is the German architect who designs their “upside down” house/metaphor, where the bottom is made of glass, and is fond of pompous pronouncements like the one above regarding true love versus artistic patronage. There is also a pianist, who allows allusions to Dr. Faustus, and other minor characters of artistic bent who positively breathe meaning until they become suffocating.

The Glass Room isn’t a bad novel, but it’s one that I couldn’t get into. Why is it that some short books feel long (Ethan Frome), some long books feel short (Cryptonomicon, The Name of the Rose) and some mid-length to longish books feel longer than they are, like The Glass Room? I doubt I can find a consistent, unified theory regarding objective length and metaphysical length, but books that don’t have enough grab to feel short despite their length often get dropped before they’re finished. The Glass Room might fall into this category because it’s a novel that has aspirations towards being a novel of ideas, but it’s told chiefly through characters whose endless banal observations and cares don’t seem leavened with the promised ideas, and the narrator doesn’t provide them either. So I start skipping pages, waiting, waiting, hoping, hoping, and never finding until, eventually, I wander back toward the congenial fields of Alain de Botton and Francine Prose.

Preview: Nick Hornby and High Fidelity

January 15, 2010 By in Books Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

I’m working on a post about Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, a novel that continues to impress. Last time, I read it chiefly for pleasure, but this time I’m also trying to figure how and why it works so well; I think the first line of my post will be: “There are two really remarkable things about High Fidelity: how funny it is and how well constructed it is, especially given that the subject matter (romantic entanglements and existential dilemmas for the aging man and relationship) could easily be a plotless mess.”

More to follow, obviously.

Oh, Zuckerman…

January 7, 2010 By in Books, Briefly Noted, Life Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

“I gave myself to him and he’ll never forgive me for it. He’s not merely a monster, he’s a great moralist too.”

—That’s from Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound, although the edition I have is called Zuckerman Bound. It’s funnier still in context. I’m reading Zuckerman because I was inspired by a quote in Katie Roiphe’s much-discussed essay, “The Naked and the Conflicted:”

“The sight of the Zipper King’s daughter sitting on the edge of the bathtub with her legs flung apart, wantonly surrendering all 5 feet 9 inches of herself to a vegetable, was as mysterious and compelling a vision as any Zuckerman had ever seen.” I can’t decide what’s so compelling—I think it’s the middle, with the adverb adjective duo of “wantonly surrendering,” which seem like they should be pornographic but are mostly comic, or vice-versa. “Vice-versa” seems like a useful pair of words when dealing with Roth, because he’s constantly got me wondering exactly where in the circuit I stand: at the bottom, the top, the sides, somewhere else? It’s complexity that isn’t complex to read or enjoy.

Or maybe it’s something else about the sentence, like how incongruous or outrageous it is: the Zipper King has a sense of pathos, the idea of the daughter of the Zipper King is vaguely medieval despite the American seen, and the mystery that Zuckerman feels is almost religious in a very much not religious context. It’s got a lot of ingredients in the stew, and trying to pick them out isn’t easily accomplished, even if we appreciate the taste.

Books I've started and stopped lately

January 7, 2010 By in Books, Briefly Noted Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* John Irving’s Last Night in Twisted River. His newest book is better, at least in its first 50 pages, than the abysmal Until I Find You, but still doesn’t that umph that animates The Hotel New Hampshire, Garp, and A Prayer for Owen Meany, which seem to me his best books, although I still haven’t read The Cider House Rules. Yet.

* Nicola Keegan’s Swimming, which has an interesting premise about a rising Olympic swimmer and her obsession with the pool and, presumably, how that does and doesn’t translate to dry land. Only the dialog is rendered in annoying italics (a minor point, but still), and, at least in the early sections, too many parts say things like, “The window sits still, boring a hole in the flat sky. Why are you mean to me all the time?” Overall, Swimming is tough to get into and awakens a strong, almost irrepressible urge to read Lolita instead, which is perhaps the ultimate novel dealing with obsession (among other things). Really, why resist?

* Robert Kaplan, Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts. An up-close look at the parts of the military that work, and probably a useful corrective to hit’n’run media coverage of foreign places (Yemen is in the news again! Give me a 30-second soundbite!). As with Imperial Grunts, Kaplan delves deep, but stretches read like the spec sheets in Tom Clancy, and I’m looking for more… what? Synthesis? Something like that? Tough to say. The book isn’t bad, but it doesn’t feel essential, as something like Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience does, although that covers a wholly different subject.

I’d write more, but I just can’t summon the energy for it. As Orwell said:

[…] the chances are that eleven out of the twelve books will fail to rouse in [the reviewer] the faintest spark of interest. They are not more than ordinarily bad, they are merely neutral, lifeless, and pointless. If he were not paid to do so he would never read a line of any of them, and in nearly every care the only truthful review he could write would be: “This book inspires in me no thoughts whatever.”

I don’t think of myself as a reviewer—I prefer to imagine myself someone who happens to like to write about books—but the truth is that the works above inspired few thoughts in me whatsoever. None is outright bad. They just leave me… unfeeling. Too many books leave me feeling, or at least knowledgeable, to spend a lot of time on those that don’t.

Books I’ve started and finished lately:

* Francine Prose’s Touch and Goldengrove. Why didn’t I read these earlier?

* Most of Alain de Botton’s oeuvre, including On Love, The Architecture of Happiness, and The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. This is half pleasure—everything de Botton has written, except The Romantic Movement, is enormously pleasurable—and half for a project I’m working on.

* A.S. Byatt’s Possession, as discussed at the link.

Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate — Diego Gambetta

January 7, 2010 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Criminals use nicknames both to separate insiders from outsiders and to stymie potential investigations into their activities (which is itself a form of stonewalling outsiders). They use violence strategically rather than randomly, and prefer to send hard-to-fake signals about their badness and their inability to fit in any part of the larger world: hence the tendency toward showing incompetence at tasks other than criminality, as seen on The Sopranos, the tendency toward extreme tattoos, and the tendency toward group participation in criminal events. The last binds the participants together. You can see some of the same behavior in almost any group of people; for example, a group of teenagers might decide they’re poor math students, they like to wear black, and they prefer to smoke weed with one another, the last being necessary to ensure group culpability—”they try to force each other to participate and torment or ostracize those who refuse.”

This comes from Codes of the Underworld, a clever book that is actually about signaling, semiotics, and economics more than any other subjects, despite my introduction. Its conclusions feel obvious after reading, but I doubt I could’ve articulated them prior. It has an impressive range of detailed examples supporting its general observations.

For example, criminals are good at finding liminal spaces where criminality might be implied, but not completely; Gambetta cites drivers who would nominally “forget” cash when handing over their license to police:

A quick-witted and corrupt policeman could choose to pocket the banknote (or bargain for more); if not corrupt, he was unable to treat the display of the ostensibly “forgotten” banknote as sufficient evidence of attempted bribery.

Steven Pinker makes similar claims about linguistic issues in The Stuff of Thought, where he describes the verbal tango people in crimes, love affairs, and other situations undergo. In both crime and love affairs, very good reasons often exist for evading overt, blunt language: being caught by police in the former and being unambiguously rejected in the latter.

As the above issue regarding bribes perhaps shows, criminals are more rational than they’re often made out to be: “Far from being driven by a feudal or monarchic mentality, mafiosi display a surprisingly modern mind-set in managing their organization, at odds with much of the Italian nepotistic and corrupt style.” I like the sentence itself as well as the thought behind it: the sentence compacts a lot of material into a short space (“monarchic mentality,” “Italian nepotistic”), which alludes to allegedly common knowledge while also correcting that knowledge. Some parts are wonderfully academic in their obtuse cleverness, as when Gambetta says, “This sort of usage seems a jocular custom, a form of bantering, and it would be a stretch to attribute it to an instrumental motive.” In other words, friends sometimes greet each other affectionately and informally. But those moments are few, especially relative to the easy density in Codes of the Underworld and the fact that it also nearly functions “semiotics for dummies,” with a fair amount of the theory one might otherwise find in Umberto Eco or Roland Barthes. In short, it’s multidisciplinary and academic in the best sense of both words.

A blurb from Thomas Schelling on the back says that “[…] the book’s interpretations will carry well beyond the field of conventional crime.” He’s right, and one major strength is that, as with the best nonfiction books, Gambetta uses a particular field or example from a particular field (in this case, criminality) to comment simultaneously on a much larger issue (how people communicate and form social bonds) without straining too far to either side, which would destroy the whole.

(Here is Tyler Cowen’s take, or rather citation. I don’t know of any other interesting posts about the books.)

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong — Terry Teachout

December 28, 2009 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

I meant to write a long review of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, but enough very competent sources have that I have little I contribute beyond generic praise. I know virtually nothing about Armstrong and read few biographies; therefore I’m little able to comment on how Pops deals with the genre. But those who presumably know more than I do are impressed: The Atlantic speaks here, for example, and you can read more here, here, or here, at The Second Pass.

Teachout argues that Armstrong was more complex than his jovial public persona demonstrated. To me, the more interesting part of Pops is its subtler meditation on the relationship of the artist to society—in Armstrong’s case, race was an abiding the issue—and the virtuosity of the writing of both subject and object. Two samples will have to suffice: one of my favorite lines Teachout wrote comes early, on page 23, when he says of Louisiana, “Rarely does [the Northerner] linger long enough to pierce the veneer of local color with which the natives shield themselves from the tourist trade.” I suspect that applies to many places, and it echoes Samuel Johnson’s apt, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” That could apply any vibrant, culturally ambitious, and expanding city, just I might Teachout’s comment reveals more about place than many stories of travel.

As for Armstrong, he saw through much that not all do, judging from shows like Entourage or the laments of other celebrities:

I can’t go no place they don’t roll up the drum, you have to stand up and take a bow, get up on the stage. And sitting in an audience, I’m signing programs for hours all through the show. And you got to sign them to be in good faith. And afterwards all those hangers-on get you crowded in at the table—and you know you’re going to pay the check.

It’s that last bit—”and you know you’re going to pay the check”—that resonates most, the little indignant detail that is nonetheless part of what Armstrong implies one has to do to succeed in the music and show business. Other businesses have their little indignities, and it’s one of Teachout’s considerable strengths that he never leaves the grounding of his subject yet offers many roads from his subject to the wider world. I point to just one, but there are many other available if you’re willing to walk through 400 short pages in Louis Armstrong’s shoes.