Category Archives: Culture

Hypocrisy as enabled by wealth: a lesson from Daniel Okrent's Last Call

July 18, 2010 By in Culture Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

In Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, he writes: “As businesses came apart, as banks folded, as massive unemployment and homelessness scoured the cities and much of the countryside, any remaining ability to enforce Prohibition evaporate.”

One can extract a larger point from this passage relating the Great Depression’s effects on Prohibition: hypocrisy regarding victimless crimes is a luxury good. It can be indulged when a society has sufficient wealth that it can afford to be hypocritical, signaling that its members want to be perceived as virtuous even when many of them as individuals would prefer to indulge in alcohol, other drugs, or sex-for-money. The same basic dynamic is playing out in California with weed: the state is broke; willing buyers buy from willing sellers; the cost of enforcement and imprisonment is pointless; and the tax revenue increases the temptations of legalization.

The Economist has recently reported on this dynamic regarding California: “Another big topic in a state with a $19 billion budget hole is the fiscal impact of legalisation. Some studies have estimated savings of nearly $1.9 billion as people are no longer arrested and imprisoned because of marijuana.”

A lesson Last Call offers is that societies can afford to become more hypocritical as they become wealthier. But when we have to confront the trade-offs that pointless policing of personal behavior entails, the costs of various kinds of prohibition become relatively higher and no longer look as appealing as they once did.

Hypocrisy as enabled by wealth: a lesson from Daniel Okrent’s Last Call

July 18, 2010 By in Culture Tags: , , , , , , 9 Comments

In Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, he writes: “As businesses came apart, as banks folded, as massive unemployment and homelessness scoured the cities and much of the countryside, any remaining ability to enforce Prohibition evaporate.”

One can extract a larger point from this passage relating the Great Depression’s effects on Prohibition: hypocrisy regarding victimless crimes is a luxury good. It can be indulged when a society has sufficient wealth that it can afford to be hypocritical, signaling that its members want to be perceived as virtuous even when many of them as individuals would prefer to indulge in alcohol, other drugs, or sex-for-money. The same basic dynamic is playing out in California with weed: the state is broke; willing buyers buy from willing sellers; the cost of enforcement and imprisonment is pointless; and the tax revenue increases the temptations of legalization.

The Economist has recently reported on this dynamic regarding California: “Another big topic in a state with a $19 billion budget hole is the fiscal impact of legalisation. Some studies have estimated savings of nearly $1.9 billion as people are no longer arrested and imprisoned because of marijuana.”

Societies can afford to become more hypocritical as they become wealthier. But when we have to confront the trade-offs that pointless policing of personal behavior entails, the costs of various kinds of prohibition become relatively higher and no longer look as appealing as they once did. Drug prohibition is a salient example.

In Praise of William Deresiewicz

June 30, 2010 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , 4 Comments

I’ve read three long, fascinating essays by English professor William Deresiewicz over the last two days: Solitude and Leadership:If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts; Love on Campus: Why we should understand, and even encourage, a certain sort of erotic intensity between student and professor (and he’s not talking about the bed-shaking kind, unless one’s partner is in paper form); and The Disadvantages of an Elite Education: Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers.

I don’t agree with everything he’s written in those pieces, but their scope and unexpectedness is refreshing: in all three cases, he takes potentially tired themes (people are distracted a lot today; a great deal of film and fiction depicts randy professors sleeping with students; and elite colleges are training too many hoop jumpers instead of thinkers) and goes with them to unexpected places: how Heart of Darkness depicts bureaucracy and finding yourself; the erotic intensity of ideas and how they can be mingled with erotic intensity of the more conventional variety; and the entitlement complex that paradoxically can scare people into hewing to the narrow path. Even my summaries of a small portion of where he goes in each essay is hopelessly inadequate, which is part of what makes those essays so good.

The three are not all that separate: they all deal with conformity, individuality, college life, and the place of the university in society. Read together, they have more cohesiveness than many entire books. Most importantly, however, they go places I haven’t even thought about going, which is their most useful and unusual feature of all.

Jeff Sypeck pointed me to one and Robert Nagle to another; I only know both through e-mail, which is a very small but real demonstration of the Internet’s true power to make connections. All three essays might play into my eventual dissertation; at the very least, they’ve changed the way I think about many of the issues discussed, which to me is more valuable still.

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains — Nicholas Carr

June 28, 2010 By in Books, Culture, Essays, Nonfiction, Reading, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 10 Comments

One irony of this post is that you’re reading a piece on the Internet about a book that is in part about how the Internet is usurping the place of books. In The Shallows, Carr argues that the Internet encourages short attention spans, skimming, shallow knowledge, and distraction, and that this is a bad thing.

He might be right, but his argument misses one essential component: the absolute link between the Internet and distraction. He cites suggestive research but never quite crosses the causal bridge from the Internet as inherently distracting, both because of links and because of the overwhelming potential amount of material out there, and that we as a society and as a people are now endlessly distracted. Along the way, there are many soaring sentiments (“Our rich literary tradition is unthinkable without the intimate exchanges that take place between reader and writer within the crucible of a book”) and clever quotes (Nietzsche as quoted by Carr: “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts”), but that causal link is still weak.

I liked many of the points Carr made; that one about Nietzsche is something I’ve meditated over before, as shown here and here (I’ve now distracted you and you’re probably less likely to finish this post than you would be otherwise; if I offered you $20 for repeating the penultimate sentence in the comments section, I’d probably get no takers); I think our tools do cause us to think differently in some way, which might explain why I pay more attention to them than some bloggers do. And posts on tools and computer set ups and so forth seem to generate a lot of hits; Tools of the Trade—What a Grant Writer Should Have is among the more popular Grant Writing Confidential posts.

I use Devonthink Pro as described by Steven Berlin Johnson, which supplements my memory and acts as research tool, commonplace book, and quote database, and probably weakens my memory while allowing me to write deeper blog posts and papers. Maybe I remember less in my mind and more in my computer, but it still takes my mind to give context to the material copied into the database.

In fact, Devonthink Pro helped me figure out a potential contradiction in Carr’s writing. On page 209, he says:

Even as our technologies become extensions of ourselves, we become extensions of our technologies […] every tool imposes limitations even as it opens possibilities. The more we use it, the more we mold ourselves to its form and function.

But on page 47 he says: “Sometimes our tools do what we tell them to. Other times, we adapt ourselves to our tools’ requirements.” So if “sometimes our tools do what we tell them to,” then is it true that “The more we use it, the more we mold ourselves to its form and function?” The two statements aren’t quite mutually exclusive, but they’re close. Maybe reading Heidegger’s Being and Time and Graham Harman’s Tool-Being will clear up or deepen whatever confusion exists, since he a) went deep but b) like many philosophers, is hard to read and is closer to a machine for generating multiple interpretations than an illuminator and simplifier of problems. This could apply to philosophy in general as seen from the outside.

This post mirrors some of Carr’s tendencies, like the detour in the preceding paragraph. I’ll get back to the main point for a moment: Carr’s examples don’t necessarily add up to proving his argument, and some of them feel awfully tenuous. Some are also inaccurate; on page 74 he mentions a study that used brain scans to “examine what happens inside people’s heads as they read fiction” and cites Nicole K. Speer’s journal article “Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Visual and Motor Experiences,” which doesn’t mention fiction and uses a memoir from 1951 as its sample text.

Oops.

That’s a relatively minor issue, however, and one that I only discovered because I found the study interesting enough to look up.

Along the way in The Shallows we get lots of digressions, and many of them are well-trod ones: the history of the printing press; the origins of the commonplace books; the early artificial intelligence program ELIZA; Frederick Winslow Taylor and his efficiency interest; the plasticity of the brain; technologies that’ve been used for various purposes, including metaphor.

Those digressions almost add up to one of my common criticisms of nonfiction books, which is that they’d be better as long magazine articles. The Shallows started as one, and one I’ve mentioned before: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The answer: maybe. The answer now, two years and 200 pages later: maybe. Is the book a substantial improvement on the article? Maybe. You’ll probably get 80% of the book’s content from the article, which makes me think you’d be better off following the link to the article and printing it—the better not to be distracted by the rest of The Atlantic. This might tie into the irony that I mentioned in the first line of this post, which you’ve probably forgotten by now because you’re used to skimming works on the Internet, especially moderately long ones that make somewhat subtle arguments.

Offline, Carr says, you’re used to linear reading—from start to finish. Online, you’re used to… something else. But we’re not sure what, or how to label the reading that leads away from the ideal we’ve been living in: “Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better.”

Again, maybe, which is the definitive word for analyzing The Shallows: but we don’t actually have a name for this kind of mind, and it’s not apparent that the change is as major as Carr describes: haven’t we always made disparate connections among many things? Haven’t we always skimmed until we’ve found what we’re looking for, and then decided to dive in? His point is that we no longer do dive in, and he might be right—for some people; but for me, online surfing, skimming, and reading coexists with long-form book reading. Otherwise I wouldn’t have had the fortitude to get through The Shallows.

Still, I don’t like reading on my Kindle very much because I’ve discovered that I often tend to hop back and forth between pages. In addition, grad school requires citations that favor conventional books. And for all my carping about the lack of causal certainty regarding Carr’s argument, I do think he’s on to something because of my own experience. He says:

Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly when I’m reading. I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article. My mind would get caught up in the twists of the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel like I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For well over a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.

He says friends have reported similar experiences. I feel the same way as him and his friends: the best thing I’ve found for improving my productivity and making reading and writing easier is a program called Freedom, which prevents me from getting online unless I reboot my iMac. It throws enough of a barrier between me and the Internet that I can’t easily distract myself through e-mail or Hacker News (Freedom has also made writing this post slightly harder, because during the first draft, I haven’t been able to add links to various appropriate places, but I think it worth the trade-off, and I didn’t realize I was going to write this post when I turned it on). Paul Graham has enough money that he uses another computer for the same purpose, as he describes in the linked essay, which is titled, appropriately enough, “Disconnecting Distraction” (sample: “After years of carefully avoiding classic time sinks like TV, games, and Usenet, I still managed to fall prey to distraction, because I didn’t realize that it evolves.” Guess what distraction evolved into: the Internet).

Another grad student in English Lit expressed shock when I told him that I check my e-mail at most once a day and shook for every two days, primarily in an effort not to distract myself with electronic kibble or kipple. Carr himself had to do the same thing: he moves to Colorado and jettisons much of his electronic life, and he “throttled back my e-mail application […] I reset it to check only once an hour, and when that still created too much of a distraction, I began to keeping the program closed much of the day.” I work better that way. And I think I read better, or deeper, offline.

For me, reading a book is a very different experience from searching the web, in part because most of the websites I visit are exhaustible much faster than books. I have a great pile of them from the library waiting to be read, and an even greater number bought or gifted over the years. Books worth reading seem to go on forever. Websites don’t.

But if I don’t have that spark of discipline to stay off the Internet for a few hours at a time, I’m tempted to do the RSS round-robin and triple check the New York Times for hours, at which point I look up and say, “What did I do with my time?” If I read a book—like The Shallows, or Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, which I’m most of the way through now—I look up in a couple of hours and know I’ve done something. This is particularly helpful for me because, as previously mentioned, I’m in grad school, which means I have to be a perpetual reader (if I didn’t want to be, I’d find another occupation).

To my mind, getting offline can become a comparative advantage because, like Carr, “I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain,” and that someone is me and that someone is the Internet. But I can’t claim this is true for all people in all places, even as I tell my students to try turning off their Internet access and cell phones when they write their papers. Most of them no doubt don’t. But the few who do learn how to turn off the electronic carnival are probably getting something very useful out of that advice. The ones who don’t probably would benefit from reading The Shallows because they’d at least become aware of the possibility that the Internet is rewiring our brains in ways that might not be beneficial to us, however tenuous the evidence (notice my hedging language: “at least,” “the possibility” “might not”).

Alas: they’re probably the ones least likely to read it.

Progress, extra time, efficiency, and consumer goods

June 26, 2010 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Robin Hanson, typically insightful:

The most recent survey by the Consumer Reports National Research Center found that five-year-old vehicles had about one-third fewer problems than the five-year-old vehicles we studied in April 2005. In fact, owners of about two-thirds of those vehicles reported no problems. And serious repairs, such as engine or transmission replacement, were quite rare. (p.15, June ‘10, Consumer Reports)

Car problem rates falling 1/3 in five years is change you might not notice, but if you think about it, its a pretty big deal. Most people are surprised to hear that the world economy doubles roughly every fifteen years; when they think back fifteen years, the world doesn’t seem that different. Besides a few big changes, most things seem not pretty similar. But this is illusory – most change happens behind the scenes.

We don’t notice the (relatively) small, cumulative changes that add up to major improvements in life unless we’re paying attention to them, which Hanson is drawing attention to here. If we don’t have our cars repaired as often, we have more time to think about and do other things. This means we have more time to think about art, technology, life, and so forth, although most of that surplus is probably used watching TV, searching for pornography, and so on.

But computers have improved too, just like cars: around 2002 or 2003, a typical computer became more than fast enough for most typical activities aside from high-end gaming and video editing; by now, the developed world is awash in computers that are “good enough.” Some relatively small percentage of us will use those computers to help us think, help us make things, and help others learn.

Of course, most people spend that extra time watching TV; according to the Los Angeles Times:

“The Nielsen Co.’s ‘Three Screen Report — referring to televisions, computers and cellphones — for the fourth quarter said the average American now watches more than 151 hours of TV a month. That’s about five hours a day and an all-time high, up 3.6% from the 145 or so hours Americans reportedly watched in the same period last year.”

But fewer are doing so now than once did, which is a large part of Clay Shirky’s point in Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, a book worth checking out from the library but probably not worth buying. He says:

Today people have new freedom to act in concert and in public. In terms of personal satisfaction, this good is fairly uncomplicated—even the banal uses of our creative capacity (posting YouTube videos of kittens on treadmills or writing bloviating blog posts) are still more creative and generous than watching TV. We don’t really care how individuals create and share; it’s enough that they exercise this kind of freedom.

The “freedom to act in concert” is significant because the costs of doing so are low. Still, we don’t just have more time because the cost of doing things other than watching TV have fallen, although that’s important, as Shirky discusses elsewhere in his book—we have more time because things like cars, as Hanson points out, don’t demand as much time as they did. And that change is fairly recent; as John Scalzi wrote a few months ago:

You have to get to about 1997 before there’s a car I would willingly get into these days. As opposed to today, when even the cheap boxy cars meant for first-time buyers have decent mileage, will protect you if you’re hit by a semi, and have more gizmos and better living conditions than my first couple of apartments.

The question still is: what are we going to do with all that spare time, spare computing power, and spare mental capacity? The answers (so far) look positive, but I don’t have the foresight (and neither does Shirky—he points out that we have it, but can’t really say what will happen) to predict specific changes rather than the scale of those changes. In a very small way, I’m part of the answer, since I wouldn’t have been able to do what I’m doing right now 20 years ago. About 10 years ago, it would’ve been much harder because blogging software hadn’t matured. Now it’s incredibly easy. That’s progress, even if most blog posts don’t look much like progress because they concern cats, celebrity scans, and so on.

The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700 – 1850 — Joel Mokyr

June 5, 2010 By in Academia, Books, Culture, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

Ideas matter. So does the ability to execute those ideas. Britain had both, in the form of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, both of which were important but neither of which has been fully considered as twinned phenomena. Nows they have been, and have been impressively.

The Enlightened Economy sounds boring but isn’t, and it ties together two trends that Mokyr argues should be appreciated more: the dovetailing of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, both of which are entangled and driven by ideas to a greater extent than previously appreciated. Both were concerned with ideas; both occurred around the same time; and many participants in one also participated in the other. Furthermore, ideas motivated both; as Mokyr says, “Ideas, in the eighteenth century as much as the twentieth, competed in a market for ideas.” But the idea of a marketplace of ideas was new and relied on a lessening of religious control and a greater willingness to challenge existing ideas and beliefs. Ideas had to be “contestable,” as well as cumulative and consensual, to become useful and lead toward exponential growth. The strange thing is still that the Industrial Revolution didn’t happen earlier or in some other place. The other strange thing is how many ideas that played out across the eighteenth century continue to play out today, as reading The Enlightened Economy or Louis Dupré’s excellent The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture shows.

In terms of economic structure and organizations, consider that Mokyr writes that “More than anything else, the reduction in [the power of British trade guilds] was hastened by mobility; many of the activities that urban craft guilds controlled could and did move out of their geographic sphere to the countryside or to towns free from guild control.” Later on the same page, he says that “The London guilds, known as ‘livery companies’ saw their powers erode when economic activity moved to the suburbs such as Whitechapel and Spitalfields.” You can see the same issues with union or government control versus the private sector, which is still widely debated.

The same basic dynamic has been occurring in the United States for decades: heavy manufacturing in the Northeast and Midwest has become more mobile, both abroad to places like China and Mexico as well as to union-unfriendly Southern states like Alabama. Recent wrangling around car company bailouts showed that political logic follows economic logic: senators representing states with BMW, Toyota, Honda, and Audi plants fulminated against bailouts, while northern states where unions still have some power favored bailouts. In the meantime, however, union power has been waning in the private sector for years, even as it has grown in the public sector, where the inability of cities, towns, school districts, and the like to go bankrupt thanks to immediate competition allows unions to exist. Still, the overall direction of the world is obvious to current observers, even if it wasn’t to many eighteenth Century ones. The power of individual and capital mobility lessens the power of rent seekers (Mokyr: “In the second half of the eighteenth century, most important intellectuals became increasingly hostile to what modern economists would call rent-seeking, namely the use of political power to redistribute rather than create wealth”).

As mentioned previously, one major issue and still unresolved issue is why the Industrial Revolution happened when and where it did. Almost no one knows. The discovery process itself became systematized:

The pre-modern economies were at times capable of creating radical inventions, but such advances tended to settle down rather quickly into new dominant design largely because most inventions were arrived at through trial and error and hit-and-miss procedures. Systematic research and development based on something we would recognize today as scientific rigor was still highly uncommon.

And those techniques are only more common because we pass them down and forget less successful techniques.

Of course, Mokyr is in part writing about the current economy: he writes about workers, locations, idea transmission, and more. Today, Richard Florida relies heavily on concept of “the creative class” (I wonder if I’m a member) in his writing and “highly qualified personnel” (HPQs), as Alex Usher calls them in an academic context. The most interesting thing is how (relatively) few of such people, networked together, can make an enormous difference in not just the quality of their own lives but the productivity of everyone around them. As Paul Graham says in “Taste for Makers“, “Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems. Genes count for little by comparison […]” I’ve been looking for more formal studies of the general ideas around talent clustering but haven’t been able to find any. Nonetheless, such people are likely to be the ones who push society forward through thinking or finding new ideas, becoming repositories of ideas, or seeking new methods of doing things. As Mokyr says:

[… I]t is important to realize that an economy in which there are innovators is not one in which all or even most people are inclined to experiment or to take risks, much less express their disrespect for the wisdom of their teachers and ancestors by declaring the new to be better.

We still see elements of this kind of thinking in the education system, although the system seems better at critiquing itself than it once might have been in the past. Self-modification is relatively rare. The absolute number of people willing to be innovators might now be higher, the percentage might be the same. The comparisons between the eighteenth century and now, which Mokyr sometimes makes and sometimes leaves to the reader, might be the most radical and unusual parts of this book.

It is a book about ideas that on its own contains many ideas that illuminate how the world was changing—and how it is today, as we live in a society that is saturated with ideas—provided that we are willing to find and follow those ideas. And think about them on a meta level—in other words, deal with ideas about ideas. This is relatively hard and requires a lot of training to accomplish. Mokyr reminds us of why it is important.

A final note about the materiality of the book in question: The Enlightened Economy is scholarly and concomitantly expensive. It’s also very nicely bound and easy to read. It feels like it will last a very long time, which is good, because I haven’t digested it yet and doubt many could in a first reading.

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them — Elif Batuman

June 4, 2010 By in Academia, Books, Culture, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I’ve been trying and failing to satisfactorily describe The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them to friends and failing to get across the book’s humor, which is unusually rich and deep. Whoever wrote the back cover blurb, with its weird melange of subject matters like a demented person’s shopping list, outdoes me:

If you’re going to read just one book about conference planning, Isaac Babel, Leo Tolstoy, boys’ leg contests, giant apes, Uzbek poetry, the life of the mind, and the resignation of the soul—seek no farther: this is the book for you!!!

It’s funnier still in Roz Chast’s handwriting. The humor, taken out of context, falls flat without the build up from earlier material, as Batuman describes situations that become jokes absurd academic setups involving the relatives of Isaac Babel or the relationship traumas experienced by our plucky, self-aware narrator. Actually, plucky isn’t a fair word: Batuman is deep, and not just because she reads a lot and lives a lot and finds ways to combine living and not living, as when she sees Don Quixote:

Don Quixote, I realized, had broken the binary of life and literature. He had lived life and read books; he lived life through books, generating an even better book. Foucault, meanwhile, broke my idea of literary theory: instead of reducing complexity and beauty, he had produced it. My interest in truth came only later, but beauty had already begun to draw me into the study of literature.

Except that Don Quixote pays for his broken binary with social opprobrium that he, wisely or not, doesn’t realize (or chooses not to realize), and his end on a deathbed leads to his famous renunciation of books of chivalry.

The life lived through books is, to some extent, the only kind of life we can have—or, alternately, we learn to lead our own lives through the narrative examples that others set for us, whether through their being or their stories. And we understand the stories of a single other person better by understanding the stories told by cultures better.

That last sentence is somewhat vague. Let me cite a comic example of someone utterly failing to do so:

While it’s true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone on planet Earth, vale of tears that it is, is certainly entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering, one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can’t do that, what’s it good for? On those grounds I once became impatient with a colleague at a conference, who was trying to convince me that the Red Cavalry cycle would never be totally accessible to me because of Lyutov’s ‘specifically Jewish alienation.’
‘Right,’ I finally said. ‘As a six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman growing up in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew.’
He nodded: ‘So you see the problem.’

We moved from the high brow, about the power of literature and the reference to the “vale of tears,” to the very low brow, which entails virtually anything having to do with New Jersey, to the middle brow of self absorption. This is good stuff.

And if literature can’t render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness, maybe it’s still good for passing the time until death, or at least idle cocktail party chatter, or at least impressing potential sexual partners with literary repartee, assuming you find the right sort of partner. For Batuman, grad school is that sort of place, although she also dates a banker (it doesn’t work out), and one or two others I’ve forgotten.

There are other grad school jokes, which I have a special appreciate for because I’m in it, and those sometimes combine jokes about Russia (which are also common): “The title of this book is borrowed from Dostoevsky’s weirdest novel, The Demons, formerly translated as The Possessed, which narrates the descent into madness of a circle of intellectuals in a remote Russian province: a situation analogous, in certain ways to my own experiences in graduate school.”

Batuman actually ends up in a remote, former Russian province, in the form of Uzbekistan, where a series of bureaucratic and financial snafus combined with questionable decision making lead her. During a tedious bit of orientation in preparation for going to Uzbekistan, Batuman leaves to find a hat. Despite the risk of death, maybe Batuman is better off in the Caucuses, thinking:

Somehow I ended up in an Urban Outfitters. All around me, girls were buying absolutely unwearable-looking clothes: sheer dresses with V-necks down to the navel; jeans measuring literally two inches from waist to crotch; rhinestone encrusted G-strings with no elasticity whatsoever. I found a hideous white ill-fitting sun hat, bought it, and fled to Barnes & Noble.

She’s not one of them; she’s one of us, which I can say merely because she agrees with me about airports and airplanes (“Air travel is like death: everything is taken from you.”) Compare that to one of my recent ruminations:

As I write this, I sit in a Tucson airpot bar. Airports have everything wrong with them: they are transitional, one-off spaces filled with strangers, the “restaurants” they offer consist of pre-made food with character slightly above a TV dinner, and for some reason we as a society have decided that Constitution rights and privacy don’t apply here. People I don’t know can stop me at will, and merely flying requires that I submit to security theater that is simultaneously ineffective and invasive. Everything is exorbitantly expensive but not of particularly high quality. Menus don’t have beer prices on them.

The airport, in short, is designed to extract money from a captive audience; this might be in part why I don’t care much for sports stadiums, Disneyland, and other areas where I feel vaguely captive.

But I’m less funny than Batuman, which is a good reason to read her, despite the improbability of her subject matter. Batuman’s language is wonderful too: she says that she’s going to Tashkent with “Dan… who was indescribably average in both appearance and demeanor, like some kind of composite sketch.” The comparison is fresh, describes Dan without describing him, and, more importantly, shows exactly how Batuman thinks of him, even if he has some kind of vibrant inner life not apparent on the surface. If so, alas, we get little indication of that inner life, which might be part of his problem, and the problem of many of those who don’t have adventures in Russian books—or any kind at all.

(Here’s a comment on The Possessed from the Literary Saloon.)

Harold Bloom's hero-poets

May 10, 2010 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

For reasons not obvious to me I’ve been reading and re-reading a lot of Harold Bloom’s work lately, and in The Anxiety of Influence I came across this passage:

But poets, or at least the strongest among them, do not read necessarily as even the strongest of critics read. Poets are neither ideal nor common readers, neither Arnoldian nor Johnsonian. They tend not to think, as they read: “This is dead, this is living, this is the poetry of X.” Poets, by the time they have grown strong, do not read the poetry of X, for really strong poets can read only themselves. For them, to be judicious is to be weak, and to compare, exactly and fairly, is to be not elect.

There’s something pleasing and ridiculous about the “strongest” poets being described in the same language one would use for a discus hurler or hockey player. Instead of being writers trying to put words on the page, the poet is made into a Blakean figure who strides the landscape of the mind. If you misread this passage, you might skim and find that poets “tend not to think, as they read,” which would be a challenge, since reading seems to be by definition a form of reading.

But if poets aren’t reading other poets since they can only read themselves, what are they reading when they read, say, Shakespeare? Themselves into Shakespeare? If so, I would guess that either everyone or no one does this, and I can’t say which is more likely.

And what does that odd phrase, “to be not elect” mean? Apparently there are at least three classes: the elect, who the strong poets are, the plebeians somewhere down below, and maybe some people pressing their faces against the glass face of the elect. I would guess myself to be way down there, relative to poets, assuming one buys this model of the poetic universe, which I’m not sure I do.

Anyway, one sees the ranking technique, the knowing allusions (“neither Arnoldian nor Johnsonian”) and the mystical throughout the Bloom I’ve read. In Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human, Bloom argues that Shakespeare invented the way we feel, think about feeling, and be. I can mostly respond: maybe. The book is overly pervasive, as I find it hard to believe that we wouldn’t have developed modern consciousness without Shakespeare, which is reading against Bloom, but I like the ideas nonetheless. I feel like I’m playing again, instead of working, and that I should have a glass of wine or maybe sherry while I’m reading Bloom. It’s also fun to find a modern critic who isn’t afraid to say something, to make judgments, to acknowledge that some writers are better than others, and not to apologize for it, even when Bloom effectively parodies himself by saying things like “to be judicious is to be weak.” In that case, count me among the weak, or among those who would ask, “what do you mean by judicious?” and then launch into a Wittgensteinian argument.

Harold Bloom’s hero-poets

May 10, 2010 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

For reasons not obvious to me I’ve been reading and re-reading a lot of Harold Bloom’s work lately, and in The Anxiety of Influence I came across this passage:

But poets, or at least the strongest among them, do not read necessarily as even the strongest of critics read. Poets are neither ideal nor common readers, neither Arnoldian nor Johnsonian. They tend not to think, as they read: “This is dead, this is living, this is the poetry of X.” Poets, by the time they have grown strong, do not read the poetry of X, for really strong poets can read only themselves. For them, to be judicious is to be weak, and to compare, exactly and fairly, is to be not elect.

There’s something pleasing and ridiculous about the “strongest” poets being described in the same language one would use for a discus hurler or hockey player. Instead of being writers trying to put words on the page, the poet is made into a Blakean figure who strides the landscape of the mind. If you misread this passage, you might skim and find that poets “tend not to think, as they read,” which would be a challenge, since reading seems to be by definition a form of reading.

But if poets aren’t reading other poets since they can only read themselves, what are they reading when they read, say, Shakespeare? Themselves into Shakespeare? If so, I would guess that either everyone or no one does this, and I can’t say which is more likely.

And what does that odd phrase, “to be not elect” mean? Apparently there are at least three classes: the elect, who the strong poets are, the plebeians somewhere down below, and maybe some people pressing their faces against the glass face of the elect. I would guess myself to be way down there, relative to poets, assuming one buys this model of the poetic universe, which I’m not sure I do.

Anyway, one sees the ranking technique, the knowing allusions (“neither Arnoldian nor Johnsonian”) and the mystical throughout the Bloom I’ve read. In Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human, Bloom argues that Shakespeare invented the way we feel, think about feeling, and be. I can mostly respond: maybe. The book is overly pervasive, as I find it hard to believe that we wouldn’t have developed modern consciousness without Shakespeare, which is reading against Bloom, but I like the ideas nonetheless. I feel like I’m playing again, instead of working, and that I should have a glass of wine or maybe sherry while I’m reading Bloom. It’s also fun to find a modern critic who isn’t afraid to say something, to make judgments, to acknowledge that some writers are better than others, and not to apologize for it, even when Bloom effectively parodies himself by saying things like “to be judicious is to be weak.” In that case, count me among the weak, or among those who would ask, “what do you mean by judicious?” and then launch into a Wittgensteinian argument.

The Atlantic, Fiction 2010, and How to Write in 700 Easy Lessons

April 19, 2010 By in Books, Culture, Short Stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The Atlantic‘s fiction issue showed up this weekend and has, as usual, some fascinating material—most notably How to Write in 700 Easy Lessons: The case against writing manuals, which argues that books that teach you how to write like writing is an exercise in carpentry aren’t a good way to actually learn how to write. As he says:

The trouble of course is that a good book is not something you can put together like a model airplane. It does not lend itself to that kind of instruction. Every day books are published that contain no real artfulness in the lines, books made up of clichés and limp prose, stupid stories offering nothing but high concept and plot—or supra-literary books that shut out even a serious reader in the name of assertions about the right of an author to be dull for a good cause. (No matter how serious a book is, if it is not entertaining, it is a failure.)

The real solution for writers? Reading:

My advice? Put the manuals and the how-to books away. Read the writers themselves, whose work and example are all you really need if you want to write. And wanting to write is so much more than a pose.

Note that he makes a distinction between books that deal with the craft of writing or the aesthetics of writing (“we have several very fine volumes in that vein (Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House and John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction come to mind”), but rather the books that act like you’re merely laying down two by fours (think of the old wheels that allegedly helped writers by things like “heroine declares her love”).

The books I offered in The very very beginning writer are geared toward the craft/aesthetic approach, not the model airplane approach, although I admit that I’ve ready some of the ones using the model airplane approach and promptly gone back to studying characterization with Robertson Davies, plot with Elmore Leonard, and depth with Francine Prose. D.G. Myers said, “I do not believe that anyone can learn to write fiction from a guidebook […]”, and he’s right. But I think that many if not most artists benefit from reflecting on their craft, especially when they’re learning it, and there’s a difference between guidebooks and ones that help shape fundamental skills, rather than merely giving a formula or recipe.

Some of the fiction in the issue is excellent too: The Landscape of Pleasure is fascinating for its half-knowledgeable narrator in the late adolescent mold, and T.C. Boyle’s The Silence almost ends with “And what was its message? It had no message, he saw that now,” a statement that feels deserved in the context.