Category Archives: Books

White covers on nonfiction books

July 2, 2009 By in Books Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

What gives with the numerous pop science nonfiction books with white covers? Both Gladwell books I own have them, as do a variety of others, as pictured here:

White book covers

Is this some bizarre trend? Does white convey authority of some kind? Is my sample size biased? These all seem like possibilities, but, judging from the shelves I’ve seen in airports too, the white cover on nonfiction seems quite popular. Only a few novels I own have white covers: Richard Russo’s Straight Man, a hardcover British edition of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep and perhaps one or two others. As for nonfiction, I have all the ones pictures as well as Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, Freakonomics, and others.

EDIT: The Los Angeles Times’ Carolyn Kellogg discusses book jackets on the blog Jacket Copy, which discusses more than just this subject.

EDIT 2: I e-mailed Tyler Cowen on the issue, noting that his first book, Discover Your Inner Economist, is white, while his forthcoming Create Your Own Economy is red. He replied: “White looks better on-line and in thumbnail form, red looks better on a table full of books…

We’ll see which one does better!”

Little Green Men — Christopher Buckley

June 28, 2009 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Little Green Men not only holds up well, but might even improve with age and the stream of stories about lunatic politicians. The novel supposes that “alien” abductions are happening at the directive of a secret government agency named MJ-12. The rationale was originally to a) scare the Russians and b) inflate the defense budget, both of which seem so plausible that I wouldn’t be surprised if such a thing had or is taking place.

MJ-12 functions well enough that “Fifty years and more after the first UFO sightings, the vote was in: a full 80 percent of Americans believed that the government knew more about aliens than it was letting on.” Yet most serious thinkers dismiss aliens as a crackpot phenomenon. A computer program maintains this tension by abducting people unlikely to be believed; as a low-level bureaucrat named Scrubbs says, “the credibility algorithm seemed to have a bias toward overweight women. It would be nice if just every once in a while it picked, well, Claudia [Schiffer—who was then a desirable model] would be nice.” Once again, Buckley knows too much about government and the boredom so many government jobs entail, getting the details of tedium so right that I almost wonder if Little Green Men wouldn’t also be at home in a political science syllabus. Little details about Scrubbs, and the ridiculousness of the situation in general, provide the efficient comic combustion fueling the novel: it mocks both government, the media, and Washington D.C. at just the right levels.

Our friendly bureaucrat Scrubbs decides not to be as feckless as we suspected him to be, and he orders the abduction of a talk show host blowhard named John Banion not just once, but twice, causing Banion to make alien abduction his main topic, much to the ire of his sponsors, friends, and others, who respond with “Slammed doors, trenchant sarcasm, dripping scorn. He wondered if this was what the disciples went through.” Middle East peace and the Russia situation never seemed so simple.

Imagining himself as part of Jesus’ retinue is perfectly appropriate for a man whose ego has so long been inflated by punditry that he probably does imagine himself leading the sheep who are his audience. And yet at the same time, a series of byzantine turns causes him to get a much lower brow, higher rated show that, as one character observes, is more interesting anyway because his followers take action instead of pondering the universe over their morning coffee.

These followers might have some trouble with the intellect, however, as Banion’s messiah-like speech to them on the subject of government secrecy indicates:

People! [Banion says.] Do you know what we are?
Tell us! We want to know! What are we, anyway?
Mushrooms!
From the sea of perplexed looks, it was clear that Banion’s metaphor was not immediately apparent.
You know what you do with mushrooms, don’t you? Stick ’em in the dark! Feed ’em a lot of shit!
Ah! Yes, now we get it! It’s a metaphor!

A lower class but a larger volume: that’s Banion’s power. But his ability to change Washington itself is suspect; a presidential election following a NASA fiasco brings new faces to Washington who claim that they’ll crack down on influence peddling. One politico observes: “They all say that when they’re running. Then they get to town and see how it works and we all become best friends.” Banion steps outside the circle. What follows is hilarious because it’s both real and surreal, and things even stranger than fake UFO abductions happen in Washington when one departs the well-worn path. No wonder so few do.

Being Written — William Conescu

June 26, 2009 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Being Written ought to be better than it is.

The idea is clever: someone is trying to go about his life aware that he’s being written as a character in a book. Some of the writing is clever, as when one character thinks “everyone at the table appears to Monty as if they’ve dressed for different occasions.” I’ve been to those parties. But other times the prosaic invades, as when we find, on the same page, that “pinstripes complement Natalie’s pale blue silk evening dress.” Is such an adjective train really necessary?

The novel bogs down. Quickly. The second person isn’t used as skillfully as it is in, say, Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. Its self-consciousness becomes irritating, as when a chapter begins, “This doesn’t seem like the kind of book you’d want to read. There’s so much talk. You prefer books like the new Richard Corrone novel that you’ve set across the table from you as an incentive.” The truth is that Being Written does seem like the sort of book I’d want to read. But there’s too much blather about what it is to be a writer and tell story, with too little actual story.

Chapters alternate between different characters’ points of view and the second person “you” chapters, as if the writer is writing you. The former tend to be more successful but more boring and the latter more interesting but frustrating. He’s not the first writer with similar problems. About The Trick of It, Kate of Kate’s Book Blog wrote:

I found the premise of the novel irresistible: a young scholar meets and marries the novelist whose work is the primary focus of his academic career. This seemed to me a very clever way to explore the vexing interrelationship between fiction, biography, and literary criticism. And it was. But I’m not sure that the book ever transcended its premise to become something more than a clever idea.

That’s how I feel about Being Written, except I didn’t love the premise, which reminded me too much of 60s experimentation gone wrong, right down to the cover, which pictures a guy bent double with a pencil on his back. Yeah, I get the idea: we’re all in the process of being written by the stories of our lives even if we don’t necessarily hear the voice that the narrator does, but this doesn’t feel original even if I can’t immediately cite an obvious predecessor. Still, I did like it enough that I’ll keep an eye out for Conescu’s next novel, since this one shows promise, while many novels fail even that test.

Note: this novel was provided by its publisher.

Fifteen books in fifteen minutes

June 18, 2009 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , , 8 Comments

Via Terry Teachout and CAAF: “The rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.”

My list:

Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon
Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd’s The Time Paradox
Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty and Out of Sight (I count them as one book—so what?)
John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor
Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem
Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy
Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum
Robertson Davies’ The Deptford Trilogy
Robertson Davies’ The Cornish Trilogy
Alain de Botton’s On Love
Richard Russo’s Straight Man

(I purposefully didn’t read either Terry’s list or CAAF’s before writing mine. If I had to add a 16th, I’d probably take How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, which definitely doesn’t fit with the list above.)

Thy Neighbor's Wife — Gay Talese

June 13, 2009 By in Books, Essays, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

To read the new edition of Gay Talese’s Thy Neighbor’s Wife as someone who grew up in the era of American Pie and its considerably less tame Internet cousins is to step backwards into a time that, for many people, still exists. To judge from the nattering both on- and off-line, the debate goes, despite the sense of inevitability that Thy Neighbor’s Wife imparts; perhaps, as Jamais Cascio quotes William Gibson as saying in The Atlantic article “Get Smart,” “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

But it’s not at all clear that the vision implied by Talese will ever arrive for most people, or even that Thy Neighbor’s Wife is the “Timeless Classic” promised by the cover. The book is more an essay collection than book and feels the same malady as Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem: age. To me, the mores of the 1950s seem quaint, Bill O’Reilly’s silliness and faux outrage notwithstanding, and erotic hypocrisy in the media and culture at large is both well-known and documented, as it long has been. That brings one to the obvious point: what purpose does Thy Neighbor’s Wife still serve in an age of Bonk and The Book of Vice?

One can see predecessors to Thy Neighbor’s Wife in books ranging ranging from Madame Bovary upwards; in John Barth’s The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, adulterous triangles form with consequences that are serious chiefly because of the seriousness of their participants. The “other man” in The Floating Opera says that “Being intelligent people, they were able to talk about the matter frankly, and they tried hard to articulate their sentiments, and decide how they really felt about it.” The issue had already burbled toward popular consciousness when Barth’s novel was published in 1956. Many of Bellow’s novels spoke with bracing linguistic and intellectual clarity to issues around sexuality. Given that, one should try to read Thy Neighbor’s Wife not just as a chronicle of a time that now seems ancient, but as a guide to what undergirds social relations beyond the particulars of what is forbidden and why.

Social change and perspective

The most arresting sections of Thy Neighbor’s Wife deal with larger social changes rather than the strictly sexual—for example, the sense of anomie and rootlessness that seem reflected by sexuality rather than the cause of it. For example, Talese says that “The emphasis on youth made many Americans in their thirties feel older, particularly those junior executives who, having identified with corporations and having associated wisdom with seniority, now felt suddenly uncertain and outmoded in this age of new personalities and vacillating values.” That could have emerged from a Paul Graham essay on startups or a thousand banal pop sociology books of the last several decades. Still, it is effective in reminding one of pattern of change being played out across lives.

Likewise, Talese says that “Southern California’s characteristic disregard of traditional values, its relatively rootless society, its mobility and lack of continuity […] were accepted easily by [Diane Webber’s family].” Replace “Southern California” with “Silicon Valley,” and the comparison still holds, as does the idea that the larger problem might have been the continuing undermining of seniority and “traditional values,” which seems to have begun in the Enlightenment continues at this moment, as argued by Louis Dupre in The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture. From Dupre’s vantage, the larger social changes that emphasize youth, sexuality, fluid movement, and independence have been ongoing for centuries, making Talese’s wave a small part of a larger social tide.

Diane played a still smaller role, with her place in Thy Neighbor’s Wife springs from her role as a nude model in the 1950s—a role that, later, she would come to downplay, as if the earlier Webber was completely distinct from the later Webber. Her larger symbolic function in Thy Neighbor’s Wife wasn’t obvious—Talese seems to view her as someone who didn’t go all the way, or as someone who isn’t as much a seeker as others. Books often play a prominent role in this process; in eventual free-love guru John Williamson’s apartment, “the many books he owned dealing with psychology, anthropology, and sexuality represented not only intellectual curiosity on his part but also a growing professional interest. Twenty pages later, another John, this time surnamed Bullaro, “petulantly reminded himself that he must revive and broaden his education, must read more books…” Another man who becomes a pornographer “had matured in the Army, had done considerable reading during many lonely nights in the barracks…”

Williamson gets a starring role in many mini-essays. He sought to create an island of open sexuality that now seems more mocked than practiced. This took the form of a retreat named Sandstone, where the “living room at times resembled a literary salon, [while] the floor below remained a parlor for pleasure-seekers, providing sights and sounds that many visitors, however well versed they may have been in erotic arts and letters, had never imagined they would encounter under one roof during a single evening.” That’s all very nice, but the detached and yet voyeuristic prose feels silly and stilted, even if the idea is an important one, especially since the major qualities that required to participate in the events of places like Standstone—and there I go with my euphemistic phrases—are ones that probably help with success across broader avenues of life than just sexuality, like confidence, tenacity, fortitude, and, as Talese writes approvingly of Barbara Cramer, “not [being] intimidated by the possibility of rejection.”

Weakness and Strength

In one section we learn of a rebellious girl named Sally Binford, who “…lured young men with an ease that was the envy of her female contemporaries, who regarded her as bold and shameless.” They sound unable to complete, and another reading of Thy Neighbor’s Wife might more closely examine the evolutionary, social, and economic competitive forces swirling around it. But if Binford was envied, why didn’t the other girl emulate her? When one business finds success with a particular product, one can often can on a swarm of imitators. But when one person finds social success using a particular method, others tend to downplay that person’s success. Why? It seems that there are a variety of explanations, but perhaps the most interesting is to conceive that refusal to reject convention as a weakness.

Books like Leora Tanenbaum’s Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation echo how the dominant social structures—the “Davids” if you will—use scorn against those who outcompete them. I’m reminded of Malcolm Gladwell’s recent New Yorker article, “How David Beats Goliath: When underdogs break the rules,” which says:

Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is “socially horrifying”—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought… The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider… Goliath does not simply dwarf David. He brings the full force of social convention against him; he has contempt for David.

That’s what Binford feels from her female contemporaries, and many women continue to feel that heat from their contemporaries today, as Tanenbaum shows.

One other fascinating aspect in Gladwell’s study could apply to Talese’s description:

When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time underdogs didn’t fight like David. Of the two hundred and two lopsided conflicts in Arreguín-Toft’s database, the underdog chose to go toe to toe with Goliath the conventional way a hundred and fifty-two times—and lost a hundred and nineteen times.

Gladwell refers to military conflicts. The analogy to sex and dating is not hard to grasp: most people feel like romantic underdogs, at least to judge from cultural production, but they play like Goliaths and lose. In Talese’s descriptions, many constricting social forces are abrogated or elided by discarding conventional rules as a path toward romantic success and satisfaction. Sally Binford’s story expressed that. Yet most of us don’t play like Davids, preferring to simmer in dissatisfaction rather than face the disapproval of insiders. When put that way, or in the sexual way Talese presents it, this habit of acquiescence to social forces sounds like a weakness. Put other ways, like as respect for other people, it might sound like the strength, and the temptation is to announce that a middle road exists. Grasping that middle road, however, requires understanding both extremes, as well as one’s place in larger historical and social forces.

Larger Meaning and The Atlantic

The reissue of Thy Neighbor’s Wife caught my eye after “A Nonfiction Marriage” appeared in New York Magazine, which chronicles the Talese hidden behind the story of Talese. It seems that he and his wife, Nan, had as much tension, uncertainty, and ambivalence in their marriage as the subjects about whom Gay wrote. It has no resolution.

Maybe this obsessive study of sexuality and change means something, and maybe it means maybe. Perhaps it means nothing, or that we have all the options open to us and still don’t know what we want or how to resolve the mutually incompatible desires within us. The Thy Neighbor’s Wife solution of radical openness doesn’t appear to have gained ground; as Sandra Tsing Loh writes in “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off: The Author is Ending her Marriage. Isn’t It Time You Did the Same?” for the July/August 2009 issue of The Atlantic (not yet online as of this writing): “But as we all know, the Sexually Open Marriage fizzled with the lava lamp, because it is just downright icky for most people” (it is for this kind of scintillating insight and incisive analysis that I subscribe to The Atlantic).

Nonetheless, Tsing Loh’s comment does illustrate that, for all the swapping and coupling Talese describes, social norms haven’t moved as Williamson and Hugh Hefner might have once imagined they would. We’re now free to negotiate the kinds of arrangements we want, but they don’t tend to be of the free-love style that Talese implies might have been plausible as the dominant social position. Consider as evidence both Tsing Loh’s article as well as Lori Gottlieb’s “Marry Him!” and “The XY Files.” Now, as in our jobs, we are all moving toward free agency. Judging by the timescales present in The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture, the consequences won’t be apparent for a long time yet. With that perspective, maybe the waves made by Thy Neighbor’s Wife are even smaller than they appear.

More words of advice for the writer of a negative review

May 31, 2009 By in Books, Critics, Culture, Essays Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Nigel Beale quotes Helen Gardner:

“Critics are wise to leave alone those works which they feel a crusading itch to attack and writers whose reputations they feel a call to deflate. Only too often it is not the writer who suffers ultimately but the critic…”

Beale asks: “Which is great and poetic and all, however, is silence enough?”

To me, the chief function of the critic ought to be explore a work as honestly as possible and to illuminate to the best of her abilities. This means openness and it means being willing to say that a work is weak (and why), as well as showing how it is weak. In other words, you should be able to answer the who, what, where, when, why, and how on it, with an emphasis on the last two.

One should squelch “a crusading itch to attack and writers whose reputations they feel a call to deflate,” if you’re attacking merely to attack, or merely because someone’s balloon is overinflated. For example, Tom Wolfe seems a frequent and, to my mind, unfair object of ridicule among critics. But if you’re rendering a knowledge opinion that happens to be negative, you’re doing what you should be, and what I strive to. Often this means writing about why a book fails—perhaps too frequently.

Good reviews and Updike

Every attempt at review and criticism ought to be good—but that doesn’t mean positive. A review should be “good” in the sense of well-done and engaging might be a negative one. In an ideal world, the book should decide that as much as the critic.

John Updike’s rules for reviewing are worth following to the extent possible. I would emphasize three of them:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation–at least one extended passage–of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

In the end, I think such rules are designed to keep the reviewer as honest as the reviewer can be. I keep coming back to the word “honesty” because it so well encapsulates the issues raised by Beale, Updike, Orwell, and others.

I especially like the “direct quotation” comment because there are no artificial word limits on web servers, meaning that you should give the reader a chance to disagree with your assessment through direct experience. Quoting of a sufficient amount of material will give others a chance to make their own judgments. Merit can be argued but not proven: thus, a critic can avoid silence and unfair attack.

As the above shows, I like Beale’s answer—”no”—which seems so obvious as to barely need stating. I’d rephrase Gardner’s assertion to this: “beware of relentlessly and thoughtlessly attacking.”

The Aeron, The Rite of Spring, and Critics

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, he quotes Bill Dowell, who was the lead researcher for Herman Miller during the development and release of the now-famous Aeron in the early 1990s; I’m sitting in one as I type this. The Aeron eventually sold fantastically well and became a symbol of boom-era excess, aesthetic taste, ergonomic control, excessive time at computers, and probably other things as well. But Dowell says that the initial users hated the chair and expressed their displeasure in focus groups and testing sites. According to him, “Maybe the word ‘ugly’ was just a proxy for ‘different.’ ”

That’s a long wind-up for an analogy that explains how Helen Gardner might be telling us that when we instinctively dislike, we might be reacting against novelty rather than its real merit, as critics and listeners notoriously did during Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. She’s wise to warn us about that danger, because it’s how people who pride themselves on taste and knowledge become conservative, stuffy critics. If we’re saying something is “bad” merely because it’s “different,” then we’ve already effectively died aesthetically because we’re no longer able to expand what “good” means. One thing I like about Terry Teachout’s criticism and his blog, About Last Night, is that he has strong opinions but still very much seems to have aesthetic suppleness.

But the Aerons and Ulysses of the world are exceedingly rare. Dune and Harry Potter aren’t among them. Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland at least might be, which I concede obliquely in my post about it.

Most works of art are, by definition, average.

The question is: to what extent is that a bad thing? Maybe none at all: an average novel doesn’t cause the death or disfigurement of children, or propagate social inequality, or do any number of other pernicious things. Its chief ill is that it wastes time for the person who reads it and perceives it as average (as opposed to the person who reads it and judges it extraordinary, which many Harry Potter readers have evidently done).

Milan Kundera thinks otherwise—in The Curtain, he writes, “… a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produces books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional—thus not useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious—is contemptible.” He gives himself a key out here: the word “consciously.” I doubt many writers consciously set out to produce commonplace books, or do so with that intent, and so may be rescued from the burden of Kundera’s scorn. Like the criminal justice system, Kundera separates those who knowingly commit a crime from those who do so accidentally.

You need to have read widely, however, to be capable of knowing the average from the incredible, and those whose effusive praise for Harry Potter and Dan Brown splatters the web show they haven’t. Hence, perhaps, the hesitance many Amazon reviewers show toward low scores, which one of Beale’s commenters observes.

The Aerons of Art

I now look at the Aeron as beautiful, and to me the over-stuffed office chairs that used to symbolize lawyerly and corporate status look as quaint as black and white photos of Harvard graduation classes without women or minorities. If we’re open to seeing the new, I think we’ll be safe enough in condemning the indifferent and pointing towards the genuinely astonishing works that are very much out there.

Edit: The Virginia Quarterly Review weighs in.

Life: New Yorker edition

May 29, 2009 By in Books, Life Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

“… to emigrate is to become a foreigner in two places at once.”

—”Briefly Noted”, the New Yorker, 1 June 2009

Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics — George Johnson

May 25, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum is both more fun to read and more informative than George Johnson’s Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics, which promises an in-depth explanation of conspiracy theories and theorists but doesn’t really deliver.

Johnson’s central claim is that conspiracy theorists see sinister links between a variety of unrelated or barely related occurrences while simultaneously lacking the ability to deal with ambiguity and change. They lack the critical rigor necessarily to separate cause and effect, correlation and causation, coincidence and connection. It’s an intriguing idea that he should have explored more, at the expense of vapid histories of mostly right-wing conspiracy theorists. The John Birch Society and Lyndon LaRouche both get prominent billing, but both now seem dated; the pinnacle of their ideas’ power came with the Oklahoma City Bombing, after which conspiracy theorists of that style receded very low-level background cultural noise—especially after 9/11 revealed real problems, as opposed to the invented ones Johnson chronicles.

Still, Architects of Fear is amusing for its depiction of bogus reasoning used by conspiracy theorists. For example, Adam Weishaupt was a Bavarian university professor who “wanted to bring the spirit of rationalism and the philosophical Age of Enlightenment to his benighted land.” To do so, he founded a group he called the Illuminati, who have provided fodder for lousy Dan Brown-style novels ever since (along with the aforementioned Foucault’s Pendulum, which is excellent, showing that cultural flowers do sometimes spring forth from the most unusual places). In turn, conspiracy theorists have cited the Illuminati, the Knights Templar, and others as possessing secret, hermeneutical knowledge, which is proven in a variety of absurd ways. For example, one section from Architects of Fear says:

As conspiracy theorists are fond of pointing out, Weishaupt structured [the Illuminati] like a pyramid […] Eventually, thirteen ranks were established. Thirteen levels, as on the dollar-bill pyramid. As initiates learned new powers and secrets, they ascended the step of the pyramid, coming increasingly closer to the light.

But virtually all organizations are structured as pyramids, with a relatively small number of leaders at the top and a larger number of functionaries below them. The United States itself functions like this, with a President as the leader, and most corporations have a CEO who is blamed, fairly or not, for what goes well or poorly in an organization, despite the amount of control she might or might not have.

Alas: Johnson didn’t point this out, and it’s one of the many examples of where his analysis is flat or inadequate. He does sometimes hit useful points, as when he says, “Many of the founding fathers were Freemasons and sympathized with Masonic aims of universal brotherhood, but sharing symbols and ideas is different from participating in a plot.” It is, and I would’ve liked to hear more on the subject.

Thin research might prevent Johnson from saying more; most of the research he does have comes from newspaper articles, and most of the chapters consist of rehashes of those articles rather than original observations built on substantial knowledge. Architects of Fear could have been a better book, but it shows the weakness of journalists-turned-book-writers, as opposed to something like Dave Cullen’s Columbine, which shows the strengths. Along those lines, in another section Johnson says that:

Modern historians […] believe the Antichrist predicted in Revelation refers to Roman emperor Nero. The book apparently was written after Christ’s death to comfort Christians persecuted by Nero’s “one-world government,” the Roman empire.

But he cited no sources for this claim in the bibliography. I have no idea whether it’s actually true because I know little about historical scholarship surrounding the Bible. He also gave no citation for his “one-world government” quote, meaning that it might have come from somewhere or merely be offset to show how conspiracy adherents might observe the Roman Empire. As far as I can tell, however, no one has come along to do it better; books like Jane Parish and Martin Parker’s The Age of Anxiety: Conspiracy Theory and the Human Sciences sound too narrow, while Daniel Pipes’ Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From is more promising but still reminiscent of an amorphous genre. Nonetheless, they seem better alternatives than Architects of Fear.

Worth keeping? No.
Worth buying? No.
Worth reading? No.

Dune and its laughable honor code relative to Beowulf and Fast & Furious

May 23, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Note: this is an addendum to an earlier post on Dune.

In Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents ,* Elaine Showalter quotes a letter that Kingsley Amis wrote as a student regarding the Old English requirement at Oxford: “The warriors and broken-down retainers who strut bawling across its pages repel by their childish fits of self-glorification and self-pity. The cheapest contemporary novel has more to teach us than those painful reminders of what we have long outgrown.” Although I think Old English has more merit than Amis gives it here, the sentiment regarding the sentiment of that time is one I can get behind, and one of my major criticisms of Frank Herbert’s Dune is essentially that it is guilty of the same sins: childish warriors, ceaseless strutting, and the acceptance/embrace of retrograde cultural ideals regarding the roles of women and the need for killing.

You can see the worship of honor in Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, when the eponymous warrior’s death is occasion for twelve warriors to ride around the king and for them to “extoll… his heroic nature and exploits / and [give] thanks for his greatness; which was the proper / thing.” This scene wouldn’t be out of place in Dune, which is a problem for a novel written in 1965 rather than, say, the tenth century.

That’s not to say that these problems are limited to Dune, or to novels. Take the recent movie Fast & Furious, which is is astonishingly good when measured by decibel. In it, Paul Walker is compared unfavorably to Vin Diesel when a character implies, with a completely straight face, that Walker has no “code.” It was one of many unintentionally funny moments because the creators of the movie apparently missed, say, the last two hundred years of cultural development away from the idea of rigid masculinity codes and towards a great sense of irony and fluidity. If your code of honor forces you to kill someone because they’ve disrespected your MacGuffin, or whatever, your most likely destination is jail, which is appropriate, and your code is likely to prevent or hamper you from adapting to new social or environmental situations. But Dune and Fast & Furious both present having codes and what not as positive. In that respect they resemble Beowulf

I would like to imagine that at some point the culture as a whole will move beyond its silly obsession with tit-for-tat internecine identity fighting that causes people, usually of the male persuasion, to behave like moose who ceaselessly charge against one another because it’s mating season. Still, given the deep cultural, and maybe even biological, roots of this disorder, I’m not counting on this happening anytime soon, but maybe recognizing malady, as Amis did, is a step towards dialectically surpassing it.

* Which I’m reading in preparation for a conference. More perhaps on that later.

Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior — Geoffrey Miller

May 20, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 9 Comments

Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior is worth reading, but only with a skeptical eye that will keep you from passively imbibe ideas like, “In a complex, media-rich society, perhaps only people with very good mental health can tolerate a high degree of openness without losing their equilibrium” (emphasis added). I suspect many if not most people would ignore “perhaps” and take away the larger message without questioning whether it has real backing. Like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Spent should be read but read with a doubter’s wariness of the false or ridiculous. Both Outliers and Spent tend to overstate their cases and exaggerate the power of the ideas they impart, and knowing that makes the books a better (and less misleading) read.

If I were in marketing or public relations, I would make sure to read Spent, if for no other reason than its unusual erudition relative to other pop science books and its delivery of a widely ignored framework for understanding products, branding and the like—including how individuals are turned off by branding and advertising as a reaction to it. I would like to imagine myself in the latter category but probably am not to the extent I would prefer. Spent might make me more so by acting as an inoculation against marketing.

One other structure note: Spent is probably three books: one about marketing, one about evolutionary mating theory, and one about consumerism. They’re not always integrated, but three good discrete books jumbled together definitely beat one indifferent standalone book.

I’ll begin with some of Spent’s problems:

1) Ignore the hokey dialog in Spent’s opening pages.

If I had read the first few pages of Spent in a book store, that might have turned me off it. The gimmick is annoying, yes, but don’t discard the book for that reason.

2) Miller puts too much stock into IQ testing and ignores or belittles the vast (and justifiably so) controversy around it.

In All Brains Are the Same Color, Richard E. Nisbett discusses some knowledge regarding the mutability of IQ tests in a racial context, but that context can be generalized to a broader domain. Malcolm Gladwell wrote about similar issues in None of the above: What I.Q. doesn’t tell you about race in The New Yorker, where he discusses the many problems of tests used to ascertain intelligence. He also wrote Outliers, which popularizes the “10,000 hours to mastery” idea. If the path to mastery is practice, people who conscientiously work toward improving IQ-like skills through schooling will in turn improve their scores. That most people don’t might more indicative of motivation or of institutional problems than of genetic intelligence, especially since we still can’t get much beyond correlation in measurements of it. If you want more support for Miller’s perspective, William Saletan’s Created Equal offers some in Slate. Miller says:

Human intelligence has two aspects that make it a bit confusing at first. There is a universal aspect: intelligence as a set of psychological adaptations common to all normal humans… Then there is an individual-differences aspect: intelligence as a set of correlated differences in the speed and efficiency of those natural human capacities…

But he again leaves out intelligence as a function of skill and training.

In any event, this post isn’t meant to be a rehashing or literature review of knowledge on intelligence testing; to perceive the arguments in full is practically a Ph.D. in itself given the history, breadth, and depth of such arguments. The evidence for absolute IQ heritability and genetic intelligence is far weaker than Miller presents it, and it’s frustrating that he doesn’t recognize this.

3) Some statements are vacuous (if interesting).

Miller writes:

Like most reasonable people, I feel deep ambivalence about marketing and consumerism. Their power is awe-inspiring. Like gods, they inspire both worshipful submission and mortal terror

That’s more than a little contrived, and whatever power marketing and consumerism have is power that we give them. Most people probably never or seldom consider either, at least not in the academic terms Miller uses. Still, he uses the section to comic effect, as when he notes the things “exciting and appalling” about consumerism and marketing, including “frappuccinos, business schools, In Style magazine, Glock handguns, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, Dubai airport duty-free shops… the contemporary art market, and Bangkok.”

4) Elitism runs through the book, even when it’s disguised.

This is in part a continuation of the second point. Take, for example, this:

If we do choose to ignore the marketing revolution, we do so because we are terrified of a world in which our elite ideals lose their power to control the fruits of technology. (If you have the leisure time, education, and inclination to read this book, you are obviously a member of the elite.)

The marketing revolution is only as important as we let it be. Much of marketing comes to us through TV and the Internet, but not owning a TV (preferably without being this guy) and Firefox’s Adblock Plus plugin go a long way toward neutering marketing.

I am reminded of a comment from Asher Lev’s uncle in My Name is Asher Lev: “I read. A watchmaker does not necessarily have to be an ignoramus.” So too with people in general.

Sometimes I’m susceptible to nodding through the elitist comments when they flatter my preconceived ideas, as with this statement:

People indoctrinated in hedonistic individualism, religious fundamentalism, or patriarchal nationalism—that is, 99 percent of humanity—are not accustomed to thinking imaginatively about how to change society through changing its behavioral norms and institutional habits.

That might be true, but might there also be a less snide way of stating it?

5) Maybe, maybe not.

I’m not convinced that “Marketing is central to culture,” which is the title of Spent’s third chapter, or at least not unless we’re to stretch marketing beyond a useful definition. I do like the way Miller calls marketing “… ideally, a systematic attempt to fulfill human desires by producing goods and services that people will buy.” Not that the actual marketing often lives up to that, but it’s impressive that Miller is willing to concede that given his ambivalence about the subject and his knowledge of how prone marketing and consumerism are to abuse.

Nations aren’t exactly marketing or signaling in all the examples Miller gives in his chapter “Flaunting Fitness,” like when he says that they “compete to show off their socioeconomic strength through wasteful public ‘investments’ in Olympic facilities, aircraft carriers, manned space flight, or skyscrapers.” Some of that is their for humorous effect, but aircraft carriers and manned space flight both improve their associated technologies enormously, giving us modern day marvels like GPS and massive cruise ships, while skyscrapers allow denser human interactions of the sort that my perhaps favorite economist, Edward Glaeser, describes in his many papers on the subject.

Strengths

The book is filled with ideas, which ought to be evident even from the weaknesses. Brilliant summations occur in places, as when Miller writes, “… plausible deniability and adaptive self-deception allow human social life to zip along like a maglev monorail above the ravines and crevasses of tactical selfishness, by allowing the most important things to go unsaid—but not unimagined.” The metaphor is overwrought, yes, but the sentiment reinforces the “Games People Play” chapter of Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought. One can see ideas from his book reaching into others and vice-versa, which I consider a strength.

Humor

In talking about “Narcissism and Capitalism,” Miller says that the “core symptoms” of narcissism “lead narcissists to view themselves as stars in their own life stories, protagonists in their own epics, with everyone else a minor character. (They’re like bloggers in that way.)” The dig about bloggers too frequently rings true, even when given in jest.

Some of the funny parts of Spent might not be intended as such, as when Miller deadpans, “The typical Vogue magazine ad shows just two things: a brand name, and an attractive person.” Someone must think this is effective, and I wonder if those ads are part of the fifty percent of one’s advertising budget that’s wasted.

Another Brick

Nonfiction books like this one, most of Gladwell’s (questionable) work, Pinker’s, Ariely’s, and Zimbardo’s, along with the other recent pop professor books, are bricks in the road to greater understanding. They remind us of and help us correct our foibles, and even those of us who consider ourselves virtuous would do well to remember that “the renouncers [of materialism] remain awesomely self-deceived in believing that they have left behind the whole castle of self-display just by escaping the dungeon of runaway consumerism.” Instead, they take to other displays of taste, of artistic creation, of intellectual prowess, and the like, perhaps by writing book/literary blogs. Nonetheless, those activities are probably more socially productive than, say, McMansions, yachts, and SUVs. Spent helps us engage and grapple with those phenomena and our society as a whole, and even some of the weaknesses I enumerate above aren’t as weak as I imply, or else I wouldn’t spend as much time as I do.

(See also my earlier post about Spent and vacuous movies.)

(The New York Times also has a vacuous article about the book in the Times’ Science section. If I were one of those irritating triumphalist bloggers, I might point to this as an example of the superiority of Internet reporting.)