Category Archives: Links

January 2010 links: Border crossing, bestsellers, Cinderella, and more

January 16, 2010 By in Links 2 Comments

* Bestsellers of the imagined past. This is hilarious. Hat tip to Rachel at Dystel & Gooderich. Samples from the fiction side:

A Whiff of Gingham and Pecorino, by Jennifer Austin-Meyers. (Osprey, $19.95.) On a hilltop villa in Sicily, an American divorcee finds new love with a local cheesemaker involved in a blood feud.

Indict to Unnerve, by Vic Chaster. (Putnam, $24.95.) A prosecutor is the target of an investigation spawned by the daughter of an international assassin he paralyzed in a golf accident.

* I wonder if this is true: The Avatar Effect: China’s moviegoers see a story about private property, not race. Note that it comes from the WSJ’s editorial page (which isn’t very good, or interested in objective arguments) as opposed to its news page (which is).

* Terrorists hurt America most by making it close its borders. In other words, the United States is doing more harm through its reaction to terrorism than the terrorism itself has done, in part because terrorism is highly visible, reported, and immediately obvious while the effects of making border crossing more difficult are diffuse and too seldom discussed.

* The Secret of A Separate Peace.

* Prisons or colleges? California “chooses” prisons because of structural relating to prison guards’ unions, politics, and laws, all of which interact with one another. See how at the link.

* “15th Century Greenland has something in common with IBM in 1980: a belief that historically successful behavior will succeed in the future.”

* Books You Can Live Without.

* Prohibition: A Cautionary Tale.

* The e-book wars of 2010 are on.

* Cinderella in Autumn: what happens when Prince Charming’s wandering eye combines with the ravages of time we all experience?

* The top ebooks Amazon is “selling” appear to be free. Remember to take all statistics regarding Kindle sales and so forth with a mountain, rather than a grain, of salt.

* Why you should use the revolving doors.

* Why public domain works matter.

The year's best in reading, not in publishing

December 27, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Like D.G. Myers, I don’t find much interest in “year’s best” lists and the like. Most of them are, as he says, boring; maybe that has something to do with the nature of the list and the arbitrary divisions that we use to mark milestones in our lives.

That being said, I read a lot, and I’d prefer to write about what’s new to me, rather than what happens to be published in a particular 12 month period. Last year I wrote about “pointless listmaking,” and I’m reminded of a comment from Rob, the narrator of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, when he’s at a party given by an ex-girlfriend:

The difference between these people and me is that they finished college and I didn’t… as a consequence, they have smart jobs and I have a scruffy job, they are rich and I am poor, they are self-confident and I am incontinent, they do not smoke and I do, they have opinions and I have lists.

(Emphasis added. The novel’s first sentence involves a list: “My desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups, in chronological order: 1. Alison Ashworth…”)

Umberto Eco likes lists, or at least studies them. As previously mentioned, he said that “The list is the origin of culture.” Being the origin, however, is very different from being the destination, or the evolution, of culture, and so in that light the list might be a primitive device that is still nonetheless useful to consider. As such, after a great deal of meta commentary regarding the nature of the activity in which I’m about to engage, I’m going to give a non-numbered, non-ordered list of books I happened to read in the previous 12-month period that are books I now recommend to others, found moving, or otherwise think deserve special attention.

* Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel’s Game, which I keep meaning to write about and then not doing. If one were writing an ad for the novel, it could say, accurately, “Did you love The Shadow of the Wind? Then you’ll love The Angel’s Game!” The two novels are written in the same half-mocking Gothic style, are both set in Barcelona, and both deal with murder, love, and literature.

* Max Jamison, Wilifred Sheed’s improbably hilarious novel about an unhappy theater critic.

* The Magicians, Lev Grossman’s take on what magic school might seem like to those who are already aware of magic school and fantasy conventions. As with real school, nobility takes front seat to sex and power, which occupy the back. I also read (and haven’t written about) Donna Tart’s The Secret History, which features school and murder in a surprisingly pleasant literary package.

* Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness ought to be required reading for those who are alive.

* John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor.

One nice part about reading is that books are effectively inexhaustible: given constraints on time, no one can read everything worthwhile (although Harold Bloom is apparently trying). Therefore we need developed opinions, yes, but we also need pointers to books that are worth having developed opinions about, and to my mind the handful of books above meet that criterion. Apologies to those of you who have read this far and just wanted a couple books to read, and to those of you who think the whole idea of lists so noxious and boring that, even with the aforementioned meta commentary, you don’t know how you managed to get this far into the post.

New Year's Links: Elliott Bay Books, Amanda Knox, Netherland, eBooks, and more

December 26, 2009 By in Books, Links Leave a comment

* Nobody Told Me It’s Impossible, So I Did It.

* Why does it take so long to publish a book? As the article says:

“It’s not the technology that’s the problem; it’s the humans that are the problem,” said Jonathan Karp, the publisher of Twelve, which releases one title a month.

* Elliott Bay Books is moving from its home in Pioneer Square to Capitol Hill, about three blocks from where I used to live in Seattle. I visited the soon-to-be-old place two weeks ago:

* Netherland for great-novel status:

No novel better captures the background dread of everyday life these days — terrorism jitters, credit-default swaps, mutant flu strains — than Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland”. Like “The Great Gatsby” — to which it bears obvious resemblance — “Netherland” compresses the American experience into a critical mass, and then proceeds to pick it apart. Like Fitzgerald, O’Neill works principally with two characters: Hans van den Broek, a Dutch banker living in New York whose wife has returned to London following 9/11, and Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian immigrant with countless moneymaking schemes, the grandest of which is the New York Cricket League.

Really?

* Is handwriting a hindrance to thinking?

* E-books spark battle inside the publishing industry.

* It’s an ominous sign when even the New York Times is publishing editorials like “There’s Only One Way to Stop Iran,” that one way being military attack. What’s more frightening too is that the editorial’s logic, according to my limited understanding of the situation and of geopolitics, seems correct.

* Charities Rise, Costing U.S. Billions in Tax Breaks, according to the New York Times. If we can just work for 1% of those nonprofits, we’ll consider ourselves successful.

* Terry Teachout on “Technology and the End of Trend: A Critic Looks in Vain for Sweeping Movements: Now Artists Feed an Audience of Instantly Gratified Individualists.”

Our culture was always more diverse than the media let on, and now that anyone with a laptop has near-instant access to a near-infinite array of art objects, it’s becoming harder for anyone to sculpt the tastes of millions of people into anything remotely resembling a lemming-like consensus. America is well on the way to becoming a country of cultural individualists who want what they want when they want it.

* How China wrecked the Copenhagen talks.

* Ask an Academic: Why Women Have Sex talks to Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss, who you might recognize from my mostly negative review of their book, “Why Women Have Sex.”

* Andrew Sullivan’s book The View From Your Window is attractive.

* Arizona’s completely bizarre criminal justice system, or lack thereof, has devolved into some kind of surreal play just this side of Kafka, as The Phoenix New Times describes. I’d excerpt a piece of the post, but it’s so strange as to resist summarization because of the bizarre accusations between levels of local government and law enforcement. The last line, however, is money:

By the time we reached the end of this press conference and read through the convoluted paperwork proffered by Thomas’ prosecutors, we only had one question: Where are the feds?

Another way of saying this is, “Where are the grownups?”

* Sprint fed customer GPS data to cops over 8 million times. Civil libertarians and patriots, sharpen your pitchforks and light your torches.

* Along those lines: Days of government regulation, from Philip Greenspun.

E-Readers: They’re Hot Now, But the Story Isn’t Over:

But e-reader buyers may be sinking cash into a technology that could become obsolete. While the shiny glass-and-metal reading gadgets offer some whiz-bang features like wirelessly downloading thousands of books, many also restrict the book-reading experience in ways that trusty paperbacks haven’t, such as limiting lending to a friend. E-reader technology is changing fast, and manufacturers are aiming to address the devices’ drawbacks.

“If you have the disposable income and love technology—not books—you should get a dedicated e-reader,” says Bob LiVolsi, the founder of BooksOnBoard, the largest independent e-book store. But other people might be better-off repurposing an old laptop or spending $300 on a cheap laptop known as a netbook to use for reading. “It will give you a lot more functionality, and better leverages the family income,” he says.

* The Amanda Knox case and gender politics.

James Cameron's Avatar

December 21, 2009 By in Links, SF/Fantasy Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

“Sometime in the next twenty years or so, the technology that enabled Avatar will become cheap enough to risk employing alongside a moderately intelligent script.”

—Alas: it appears that James Cameron’s Avatar is all technical achievement and no story. This is the cinematic equivalent of what I wrote about here with regards to literature.

EDIT: I saw the movie anyway and wrote about it here.

Nuts: The Barnes and Noble Nook isn't very good

December 10, 2009 By in Computers/Apple, Links, Tools Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

The Barnes and Noble Nook isn’t ready for prime time, according to David Pogue of the New York Times. Walter Mossberg of the WSJ agrees. Too bad: I was thinking about buying one, mostly for the .pdf capabilities, but I think I’ll wait—maybe for Kindle 3. I don’t think the Kindle’s current and potential dominance of the eBook market is good for books or consumers, and part of the reason that the Nook attracted me is precisely because it represents a real competitor to the Kindle. But these reviews indicate that the Nook was either rushed to market or poorly tested.

The .pdf issue is important to me because I’m a grad student in English and have to read a steadily larger number of articles and book chapters. Most get printed, but I no longer have the physical capacity to store, organize, and carry all of them, which makes something like the Kindle or Nook appealing, despite my reservations concerning the Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). By the way, you might want to check out the comments section on my post “New Kindle, same problems,” as Jason Fisher and Maggie Brookes have been talking books, ebooks, and culture in that space.

Ian McEwan and "The Use of Poetry"

December 6, 2009 By in Essays, Links, Short Stories Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

The main use poetry in “The Use of Poetry” is seduction: specifically, the seduction of the liberal artist Maisie (recalling shades of Henry James: What did Maisie know?) by the scientist Michael Beard in the late 60s. Michael learns enough Milton to impress Maisie, with her artistic tendencies, a feat that I doubt I’d have the discipline for despite being another liberal artist; they go out, Michael realizes his disdain for what seems the foppish laziness of the liberal arts, and he reinforces the inferiority complex many English majors feel in the face of hard science.

Or maybe not: when we think we see Michael’s perspective on how easy it is to read “four of the best essays on Milton,” McEwan drops this in by airmail:

Many years later, Beard told this story and his conclusions to an English professor in Hong Kong, who said, “But, Michael, you’ve missed the point. If you had seduced ninety girls with ninety poets, one a week in a course of three academic years, and remembered them all at the end—the poets, I mean—and synthesized your reading into some kind of aesthetic overview, then you would have earned yourself a degree in English literature. But don’t pretend that it’s easy.”

That’s the only mention of the “English professor in Hong Kong,” who appears, nameless, only long enough to correct us. He or she disappears: there is no wrapping up, no coming together of the English professor and some deeper meaning. He or she is there to tell us, and “The Use of Poetry” seems like a rebuke to the “Show, don’t tell” school of writing: it is all telling, or nearly all, and it teasingly plays with real world correspondences. “The Use of Poetry” says:

This understanding was the mental equivalent of lifting very heavy weights—not possible at first attempt. He and his lot were at lectures and lab work nine till five every day, attempting to grasp some of the hardest things ever thought. The arts people fell out of bed at midday for their two tutorials a week.

A February 2009 profile of McEwan, also in the New Yorker, says:

McEwan enjoyed studying calculus—“It was like trying to lift a weight that was a little too heavy”—but he settled on literature, and showed enough promise that he was urged to apply for a scholarship at Cambridge.

Maybe McEwan fears the limits of our cognition, or his own cognition. Or maybe I am engaging the intentional fallacy. Surely the editors of The New Yorker noticed this correspondence in their earlier nonfiction piece and this later work of fiction. What, if anything, did they make of it? Were they as uncertain as me?

Finally, what to make of the title: “The Use of Poetry,” rather than “uses?” Apparently poetry has only one use, seduction, as I unfairly said in the first line of this post. But maybe it is not asking, “What is poetry used for?” but rather, “how and why is poetry used by a particular person—Michael—or people in general?” The title probably has other meanings too, like most poems, with their rascally habit of evading a single interpretation.

For some reason, I am reminded of Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being: both that novel and this story are highly directive, allusive, focusing on what love means in a modern context, using love to examine ideas and ideas to examine love. They both end, not with a statement or feeling of wholeness, but with a feeling of new sight but perpetual incompleteness, like that is our fate, no matter the math we learn or the poems we study. Could “The Use of Poetry” be to remind us of what we can never fully grasp, like Michael trying to understand the liberal arts, or Milton, who was in turn trying to understand us? Hard to say. But then, a lot in life is hard to say. The best we can do with it is try. Maybe with a poem.

Or a story.

EDIT: If you’re here because you’ve been assigned a paper on McEwan, you might find this post to be of great interest.

On standard English, African American Vernacular English (AAVE), dialects, and efficiency

December 4, 2009 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

A recent Hacker News thread links to a paper by Arnold Zwicky arguing that African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with mistakes. Its purpose is to explore a large controversy over the possible exploration of AAVE in Oakland schools, and the discussion around the paper on Hacker News heated up when Paul Graham said, “The argument here is in effect that no vernacular variant of any language could possibly embody a mistake. Which is true for some definitions of mistake, and false for others.” In response, “grandalf 9” said, “AAVE is no more “improper” Standard English than Spanish is improper Standard English.” Graham didn’t disagree with that statement, but would rather prefer to change the ideas behind it: whether AAVE is “proper” or not depends on the context, and in another reply grandalf 9 said, “Well, I think the burden of proof is on you to show why language mistakes matter at all.”

I took him up on the challenge. The big challenge with language “mistakes” (or whatever) is that they can inhibit efficient communication among parties. The lesser problem is that they might signal low educational status and/or incompetence: I know there is no such thing as “standard English,” but you can get pretty close to it through guides like Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers or my favorite work, Write Right! The further you get from this thing that’s close to standard English, the more likely you are to sound incompetent or incomprehensible.

If someone comes into a job interview—or Y Combinator interview—speaking AAVE, or some wildly non-standard form of English, they’re probably signaling that they haven’t figured out how to speak, if not “proper” English, then a form of English that will allow them to communicate with high-level technical workers. They’re not likely to get the job or the funding or the lawsuit won or whatever it is that they’re trying to accomplish. That’s the problem, rather than some abstract problem about language purity.

There isn’t a central authority language because there doesn’t need to be: as Foucault might argue, there are merely different loci of power or force that tend to create webs of what is acceptable or not in a given situation.

“The fact is, language changes over time like any other fashion. If you don’t like a particular grammar or a particular fashion that is a matter of taste.”

Which is all very interesting until you’re applying for a job or writing a research paper and you can’t write something very close to standard English, at which point you’re not going to be able to achieve what you want to. A friend of mine actually wrote a very interesting paper (which is, to my knowledge, still unpublished and shouldn’t be) on the use of AAVE in Walter Mosley’s books, and she argues persuasively that Mosley’s deployment of AAVE is central to his being able to perform his job as a detective and navigate the “white” and “African American” worlds.

“You can make the argument that using Standard English (and wearing a suit) are useful social conventions to adopt when going to a job interview, but I think the usefulness of either judgment ends there.”

I don’t. The fundamental issue is what you signal and how efficiently you communicate. Whether you wear a suit or not has little to do with how you communicate verbally or in writing; whether you can speak something akin to standard English matters enormously. If you speak AAVE at home, it’s vital to be able to speak standard English for most purposes that are generally associated with success in the United States (academic advancement, business contacts, legal and medical contexts, etc.).

Another commenter named “aristus” says: “A standard joke about that: a dialect is an ideolect with a history and body of literature. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Language is an instrument of politics like any other.” He’s right, but I would say “power” instead of politics.

For more on standard (or not) English, see Speaking good from Language Log (“The obvious thing to do was to teach VBE speakers how to add Standard English to their repertoires and to use it in socially appropriate and expected contexts but NOT to wipe out their vernacular…”) and How safer is America today? (“Now some background about the system of standard English…”)

Tyler Cowen's political (and general) wisdom

December 1, 2009 By in Links, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“[…] we are accustomed to judging the truth of a claim by the moral status of the group making the claim.”

That’s Tyler Cowen speaking of “Climategate” in his post “The limits of good vs. evil thinking.” Normally I would put something like this in a links post, but “The limits of good vs. evil thinking” is so good that I’m emphasizing it with an independent post.

The major problem is that sometimes people we perceive as morally palatable can make untruthful or not optimally useful claims, while the opposite—people we perceive as morally unpalatable can make truthful or optimally useful claims—can also occur. Notice that I’m intentionally not providing examples of either phenomenon. As Paul Graham says in the notes to “What You Can’t Say:”

The most extreme of the things you can’t say would be very shocking to most readers. If you doubt that, imagine what people in 1830 would think of our default educated east coast beliefs about, say, premarital sex, homosexuality, or the literal truth of the Bible. We would seem depraved to them. So we should expect that someone who similarly violated our taboos would seem depraved to us.

If I said this kind of thing, it would be like someone doing a cannonball into a swimming pool. Immediately, the essay would be about that, and not about the more general and ultimately more important point.

The more important point is about avoiding ad hominem attacks and being able to consider claims independently of the person making the claims in some circumstances. As Cowen says, this is really hard.

Umberto Eco's web of lists and The Name of the Rose

November 30, 2009 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

In an interview with the German newspaper SPIEGEL, Umberto Eco says that ‘We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die.’ His first answer goes:

The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

One can see the intellectual footprints of Eco’s work at the Louvre—he’s curating an exhibit about lists—in Reflections on The Name of the Rose, where he discusses the composition and ideas behind The Name of the Rose: “I dug out a huge amount of material (file cards, photocopies, notebooks), accumulated since 1952 and originally intended for other, still-vague purposes: a history of monsters, or an analysis of the medieval encyclopedias, or a theory of lists. . . .” (emphasis added). On page 24, he says that he made “Lists of names and personal data for many characters [….]”

Alas: the interviewer didn’t know about these obscure references and missed the chance to ask about them. Does he perceive his books as an effort to order chaos? Do books bring a certain amount of chaos (intellectual, social) of their own? He describes The Name of the Rose as a text composed of other texts, as all books are to some extent, but how does this metaphor of the web fit with our conception of lists? I could try to answer some of these questions, and do in my mind, but I would like to see the master’s thoughts too.

Granted, maybe my curiosity simply implies I should see the exhibit, but the Louvre is a long way from Tucson. Eco, however, still firmly resides in my mind, and implicitly on the minds of others; over at The Atlantic Andrew Sullivan says that “It’s staggering really that modern American Christianism supports wealth while Jesus demanded total poverty [….]” Maybe Jesus demanded poverty and maybe he didn’t: as Eco says in both Reflections and The Name of the Rose, the “poverty debate” dominated learned circles in 1321, masking a larger debate about power and its deployment. The arguments Eco recounts in The Name of the Rose shows that, if the answer were as simple as Sullivan describes, there would be no debate. But where there is money, and by extension power, there is sure to be a multiplicity of interpretations based on who stands to materially gain—and lose.

As so often becomes the case after one becomes familiar with his work, Eco has already been there.

Late November Links: Academia, artistic dangers, reading, and more

November 28, 2009 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The Ph.D. Problem: On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy’s self-renewal.

* A Little-Known Occupational Hazard Affecting Writers: writing (or wanting to write) outside your field.

* When Great Artists Dry Up.

* Cellphones, Texts, and Lovers, on how technology is or is not reshaping romance in the digital age. I don’t really buy the argument, but I find it suggestive nonetheless.

* James Fallows has a typically nuanced, brilliant series on Obama’s trip to Asia, and especially its Chinese implications.

* Das Keyboard is sponsoring the Ultimate Typing Championship. Do you have the “fiercest typing skills around?” Me neither. But those who do can win $2,000 at the SXSW festival in Austin. The e-mail I got says, “Oh, and don’t forget to sign-up yourself to compete! At a minimum, it’s an opportunity for bragging rights among your friends and co-workers. :)”

Alas: I’m a relatively slow typist at 50-ish WPM. Usually the problem isn’t typing speed—it’s thinking speed, and I haven’t found a hardware solution for that yet.

* Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization. Like me, Clay Shirky finds it more than a little difficult to believe that cheap hardcover books are bad for readers, even if they might be bad for publishers as they currently exist.

* What the iPod tells us about Britain’s economic future.

* Secret copyright treaty leaks, and it’s bad. Very bad.

* Sunday afternoon at the Shenzhen Public Library. As James Fallows says at the link, “No wonder Shenzhen is on the rise.”

* Gossip Girl might be worth watching again.

* Are too many students going to college?

* Learn your damn homophones.

* No one wants America to be the sole global superpower, but no one wants to share the load.

* I love it: the bookstore Lorem Ipsum is having an “anti-sale.” As they say: “Everyone like’s a sale, right? But does anyone like an anti-sale? We hope so!

What’s an anti-sale, you ask? It’s when nothing in the store is on sale. We’re proud to announce that none of our items are on sale, instead they are for purchase for regular price. We think it’s ground-breaking.”

* Inculcating a Love for Reading: Children’s books that might help repel the armies of electronic distraction.

* From Oxford to Wall Street: what the rising number of Rhodes Scholars in business and finance means. Or, according to actual Rhodes scholar, maybe not.

* Are U.S. Wages Too High?

* Why are some cities more entrepreneurial than others?

* The Writing Habits of Great Authors.

* Hilarious search query of the day that brought someone to The Story’s Story: “bookworms sex.”