Category Archives: Links

Another Public Service Announcement on Clearwire

February 25, 2008 By in Culture, Life, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 19 Comments

Someone at Clearwire must be monitoring blogs, because a representative from them named Michael called me, presumably in response to this post. Since I have no idea how else he would know about my displeasure with Clearwire, I would like to say “hello!” to the Clearwire person and also warn readers about the company.

Earlier I commented on the appropriateness of Clearwire’s name: “I say “aptly,” though I mean that rather than having a “clear” meaning “free of any obstructions or unwanted” connection, you’ll have a “clear” as in “frequently does not exist” connection.” Now I at least have a stated reason: Clearwire says they will throttle your bandwidth if you download or upload enough information. My problem turned out to be BitTorrent, a relatively common protocol that is used to transfer large files across the Internet. If you use your Internet access enough enough, Clearwire will begin paring it back to the point that it’s no longer broadband. They appear to do this almost punitively, as though they perceive BitTorrent or other users as parasites. This seems odd for a company that sells, you know, Internet connectivity, but there you have it.

On the “About Clearwire” FAQ section of the company’s website, a question asks if Clearwire is as reliable as cable or dial-up. Their answer: “Yes. With Clearwire, you’ll enjoy an always-on, always-secure connection that never ties up your phone line.” They do not, however, mention that they can restrict your service without notice and without telling you about the restrictions in their advertising. Instead, they lie by omission and bury whatever restrictions exists in a long contract of adhesion. Perhaps cable companies and other Internet service providers do the same, but if so, I at least haven’t noticed. The most pernicious aspect of this is the lack of notification about what was happening or what would happen. The website Clearwiresucks.com appears to have a variety of user complaints similar to mine, many of them also centering on BitTorrent and downloading issues.

Bandwidth throttling wasn’t a noticeable problem with my last provider, Millennium Cable. Now I wish I’d stuck with them, since I’ve spent far more money in the form of time just messing around with Clearwire than I’ve saved by switching. When my contract ends, I’ll go back to cable or DSL.

To be fair, Michael, the Clearwire representative, reset the restrictions on my account. But that such restrictions exist at all sucks, as the “Clearwiresucks.com” website puts it. In short: don’t buy Clearwire’s service because they’ll restrict your bandwidth just for using the Internet. You can read more about the larger debate from this Ars Technica post on Comcast’s bandwidth throttling. The best part:

“There a single fact here that [Comcast] cannot deny,” [Columbia Law Professor Timothy] Wu explained, “which is that the Associated Press and EFF [[the Electronic Frontier Foundation]] which are users of the Internet, sought to use an application a certain way, and they were blocked… Now [the Comcast representative is] saying that they weren’t using the Internet in the ‘right way.’ They weren’t using these applications in the ‘right way.’ Well the whole problem is that Comcast shouldn’t be telling people how they’re supposed to use applications.”

I agree, and Clearwire shouldn’t be telling me how to use my Internet connection. And if they are going to tell me how, they should at least tell me in advance instead of waiting for me to discover the issue on my own.

In other news, I’ve been unusually quiet because the energies that I usually devote to writing posts are now going into an academic article. Expect more on that subject as well as the resumption of normal posting soon. The academic article has been harder to research because of the above Clearwire problems, which explains some of the vituperation I express.

More on the long-predicted demise of reading

February 21, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Steve Jobs thinks reading is dead; Timothy Egan disagrees. If it’s dying, would it just hurry up?

* In the same vein: a paean to the departed past where civilization dwells. The Wonderful Past, redux.

* Philippa Gregory watches a novel with no literary merit anyway and still gets the Hollywood treatment. Compare to Philip Pullman, whose books have literary merit.

* Terry Teachout quoting T.S. Eliot. Compare and contrast to Richard Russo in Straight Man: “Virtually everybody in the English department has a half-written novel squirreled away in a desk drawer. I know this to be a fact because before they all started filing grievances against me, I was asked to read them. Sad little vessels all. Scuffy the Tugboat, lost and scared on the open sea. All elegantly written, all with the same artistic goal—to evidence a superior disposition.”

Two public-service announcements: Charles Bock and Clearwire

February 20, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links, Tools Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

* I saw Charles Bock last night, and though I don’t have time to write in full about the experience, I will say that you should see him if you can. The rest of his tour will only take him to California, Massachusetts, and New York. As if the solid novel, Little Children, and fun Q & A aren’t enough, Bock also gives away swag, including a custom, metallic poster drawn by Chuck Sperry. Alas, I didn’t win one.

Here’s a link to an NPR story on Bock.

* In a rare bit of non-book related news, I have to issue a warning: if you’re thinking about saving $20 a month on Internet access through the aptly named Clearwire, don’t. I say “aptly,” though I mean that rather than having a “clear” meaning “free of any obstructions or unwanted” connection, you’ll have a “clear” as in “frequently does not exist” connection. I made the mistake of ditching cable only to find that Clearwire’s transfer rates in the middle of Seattle, where their coverage is supposed to be phenomenally good, are awful—and often border on dial-up.

NBCC Good Reads in Seattle

February 19, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The National Book Critics Circle’s Good Reads discussion hit Third Place Books in Seattle on Feb. 18, bringing together four panelists who showed through the quality of their thought just how much they really, really love books, as well as the importance of the ecosystem around books. The ecosystem problem echoes debates I’ve written about before—see, for example, here, here and here—and all four speakers offered eloquent, brilliant defenses of book criticism that will be, I suspect, ignored, as previous efforts have been. When I opened my browser last night, a New York Times headline said, “For Publisher in Los Angeles, Cuts and Worse,” and book reviewing will probably be part of the cuts. But critics, thinkers and scholars beat on, boats against the current, and that events like Good Reads happen shows the continuing vitality of the book.

As the blurb on Critical Mass states, the panelists were “Charles Johnson, Jonathan Raban, Seattle Weekly editor Brian Miller, and Seattle Times Book editor & NBCC Board Member Mary Ann Gwinn.” All four shone. Gwinn moderated and first passed the mic to Raban, who talked about the quality of book criticism when he was a younger man and now, saying we aren’t in a “great age” of book reviews. Although this might sound like an example of The Wonderful Past, I think it’s not, given how relatively little press coverage books generate—as demonstrated by the links in the first paragraph. Raban directed particular ire at the habit of “grading” novels, citing Michiko Kakutani as a prominent offender. Although I agreed with him concerning the importance of engaging books, I also think it important to consider how one should decide which books only deserve notices or grades versus which ones are worth engagement. I asked that question later, and Johnson gave my favorite answer when he said that he uses many criteria, including the quality of their writing, and above all whether a book succeeds in “showing us something we haven’t seen before.” You can hear an echo of the modernists’ credo, “Make it new.” Johnson didn’t define what that “something” is, and I can’t blame him: you don’t know what’s not there until someone shows you what should be. Furthermore, as Johnson said, you have to evaluate each book individually, which makes it difficult to generalize about what books are worth study.

None of that should detract from Raban’s main point about the importance of quality reviews. Johnson followed up by saying that a “fine review puts a book into context,” which I also try to do (see more here), and that there are fewer places to read good reviews. This practice harms both readers and writers, with the latter hurt because, as Johnson said, the “best way to learn about something is to write about it.”

They went on to give wonderful anecdotes and examples of problems in book reviewing and recommendations, which I would repeat if I didn’t think the power and humor of their stories would be lost in my reconstruction. Their delivery was that of adepts. Still, I think it important to note two things: Johnson said that reviewing is like pointing a finger at the moon, and not the moon itself–which is the book. In addition, Gwinn said 500 books hit her desk in a week. Five hundred. The number boggles me, and she said that the publishing industry seems to use the “shotgun” method for book sales, and fire a lot of pellets just to see what hits. Some books do, and she cited The Kite Runner as an example. She also said that not all is or should be doom and gloom, as last year book sales were up seven percent. That might just be a Harry Potter bounce, but I liked hearing it regardless.

Johnson also put the book reviewer, reader, and others, as being in part of a “matrix” or “web of education,” with books alluding to each other and readers building a kind of map or network. He echoed The Name of the Rose (a quote: “Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means […]” and one more: “Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then a place of long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”) Yes, and we’re constantly trying to keep up with the worthy books of the past while trying to find good ones from the present and connect those with the past. Those older ones are easier to identify: you have publishers’ special imprints as well as the benefit of teachers, professors, and others, and they have by definition withstood time. Judging those from the present is harder, and much of the conversation revolved around that difficulty. In the end, finding good criteria is impossible and, as Gwinn said, part of a lifelong education. Or, to put it in Johnson’s phrasing, we’re trying to discover what it means to be educated and civilized. I wish there were better answers to these impossible questions, but regardless of those answers, it’s great fun hearing strong minds bandy the issues.

No one talked much about recommended reads, but the alternate discussion about art, reviewing, and life more than made up for the lack of recommendations. Some came up anyway: The Geography of Thought by Richard Nisbett, which Johnson liked, Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers, which Raban said every boat should have onboard, and several from Miller that he spoke too fast for me to catch. None were on bestseller lists but all sounded worthy, and that’s the point of the NBCC’s effort: to find books that are likely to matter but that aren’t at the grocery store and deserve more attention than they get.

Reading, anyone?

February 13, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Critical Mass quotes Randall Jarrell:

One of our universities recently made a survey of the reading habits of the American public; it decided that forty-eight percent of all Americans read, during a year, no book at all. I picture to myself that reader — non-reader, rather; one man out of every two — and I reflect, with shame: ‘Our poems are too hard for him.’ But so, too, are Treasure Island, Peter Rabbit, pornographic novels — any book whatsoever. The authors of the world have been engaged in a sort of conspiracy to drive this American away from books; have in 77 million out of 160 million cases, succeeded. A sort of dream situation often occurs to me in which I call to this imaginary figure, ‘Why don’t you read books?’ — and he always answers, after looking at me steadily for a long time:

‘Huh?’

Jarrell wrote that in 1972, and posting it now alludes to the National Endowment for the Arts’ “To Read or Not to Read,” which I mentioned previously (skip the first paragraph, as it discusses movies, and make sure you follow the link to “Twilight of the Books” from The New Yorker. I like it so much that I’m linking to it again).

It’s also worth turning to Orwell, who wrote in 1936: “It hardly needs pointing out that at this moment the prestige of the novel is extremely low, so low that the words ‘I never read novels,’ which even a dozen years ago were generally uttered with a hint of apology are now always uttered in a tone of conscious pride.” Reading has been going out of fashion for far longer than I’ve been alive. Perhaps this is another example of The Wonderful Past, when literature was respected and the public debated the finer points of meter and rhyme, although if someone could cite a year when that was the case I would much appreciate it.

Even the Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory, 4th edition, has a snide comment about the vitality of novels, and this staid volume does not joke readily: “No other literary form has attracted more writers (or more people who are not writers), and it continues to do so despite the oft-repeated cry (seldom raised by novelists themselves) that the novel is dead. If proliferation is a sign of incipient death then the demise of the novel must be imminent.”

Portfolio magazine is bad news

February 12, 2008 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , 1 Comment

For reasons not clear to me, I’ve been receiving issues of Portfolio magazine as though I’m a subscriber. They’ve been uniformly awful and read like a third-tier college newspaper’s take on The New Yorker. This is a public service announcement: do not buy Portfolio magazine under any circumstances or for any reason. Megan McArdle agrees:

I keep waiting for Portfolio not to be a terrible, terrible magazine, and I keep being disappointed. It’s supposed to be aimed at the high-end financier, but it reads more like it was written for women who want to date high-end financiers, and need a little cocktail party chat to keep things going until they can invite him back for some cognac.

The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The Economist are all out there. There is no reason for Portfolio to be as well.

The Wonderful Past

February 12, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve mentioned Grant Writing Confidential several times recently and will do so once more again, this time because I wrote a post that my father and co-writer there, Isaac Seliger, suggested would be well-suited here as well. He saw the many literary references in The Wonderful Past—to The Name of the Rose, My Name is Red, Plato, and traditional Romance. To be sure, the post focuses on grant writing, but it also illustrates a tendency in literature and culture: idealizing the past or recalling a golden time that may or may not have ever been. Novels like The Name of the Rose wink at this, especially because Adso of Melk lived in 1321 and “wrote” from the perspective of sometime around 1380 – 1400, and the eras he recalled appear ridiculous to modern readers and are distorted by the limits of knowledge then. Nonetheless, this theme is developed seriously in many novels, it’s one that The Lord of the Rings deals with explicitly: the passing of the Elves and their works of great beauty at the end of the Third Age are a time of necessary sorrow. There are many references to fading, passing, and parting, as much of what was fair is subject to one of those fates, but the strength of The Lord of the Rings comes from its mingled sense of hopefulness, necessity, and remembrance, which keep it from becoming morose or sentimental. Its tone is tempered and balanced, with hope present even as the past fades.

Perhaps the most obvious example of an entire book devoted to idealizing the past, especially in comparison to a lessened future, is John Banville in The Sea. I began my commentary on it by noting: “It is not clear what we should take from The Sea.” Almost a year later I’m still not sure what we should take, but its sense of wistfulness over the past is the primary feeling I’ve taken away. As such, I have no good explanation about it, though for a novel that I didn’t love it is often in my thoughts, and I perceive similar themes to lesser or, rarely, greater degrees in so many novels. Yet any explanation I give for it will, I feel, be uncertain or overly speculative at best, but such thoughts about the past remain, and remain noticeable.

Orhan Pamuk interview

February 10, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Orahn Pamuk gives a fantastic interview at the Brooklyn Rail. A sample:

The novel, beginning in the 18th century, began to take over all the previous literary forms. In fact, we can even say it was the early form of globalization. The world, in so many ways, is so culturally globalized that our ways of seeing it are very similar to the post-Renaissance, let’s say from the invention of perspective in Italian and Dutch painting to the invention of photography and thereafter; we still see the world in a similar manner. We are likewise all globalized in our literary imagination, in the forms that we use, and I would say the literary globalization of the world had been completed years ago, when nobody was talking about globalization.

This resonates with Milan Kundera’s The Curtain, a book that deals much with the inherent internationalism in literature. I’m especially prone to such arguments because I’ve been reading so much in translation lately: a post on The Name of the Rose is due tomorrow, I finished Pamuk’s My Name is Red not long ago, right after that I finished Madame Bovary, The Curtain itself was originally written in French by a Czech author, and I’ve even finished books I didn’t especially like translated from Spanish: The Bad Girl and The Savage Detectives. And I began Doctor Faustus a few days ago, though I fear I will have to put it aside for a time so I can work on an academic project. Nonetheless, given the above, what Pamuk says about the globalization of literature is well-taken.

(Link stolen, as usual, from TEV.)

The Logic of Life and Tim Harford in Seattle

February 6, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , 7 Comments

Tim Harford’s The Logic of Life is another book intended at least in part to capitalize on the success of Freakonomics, which has sold a bazillion copies and been translated into numerous languages (I saw its distinctive cover in Hebrew). Economics are at work: one thing sells, people realize that previously unrealized demand exists, and then rush into the market. “Rush” is a relative term for the publishing industry, as Freakonomics came out in 2005. Since then, you’ve heard the steady beat: Tyler Cowen’s Discover Your Inner Economist hit a few months ago, and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions is due February 19. I’m sure more will follow. The same thing happened with Da Vinci Code clones, and the fantasy section of the bookstore has novels like The Name of the Wind and worse lining itself shelves. Those comparisons aren’t entirely fair: there’ve been poorly executed books about conspiratorial secret societies for a long time, and if I recall correctly Edmund Wilson mocked one in a essay. Although Tolkien has inspired hundreds of thousands of lousy novels about Elves who speak as if coming straight from King Arthur’s Court, he is also partly responsible for His Dark Materials and The Earthsea Trilogy.

Maybe it’s unfair to describe so much of the apparatus around Harford’s book prior to the book itself, but all that digression sets up a point, which is that The Undercover Economist is interesting enough on its merits to check out from the library but not so interesting that it’s worth buying. The largest problem is that much of its content is already available online in one form or another: you can read Harford on his blog, or get similar stories from Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen, its author, also wrote Discover Your Inner Economist), or go back to Freakonomics or its blog. Plus there’s Steven Landsburg’s More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics and Robert Frank’s The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas. So we have three blogs and five books with overlapping content. The blog components are free: you don’t have to be an economist to begin asking the question, “If I’m interested in the subject, why am I buying the book?” A few days ago, Slate posted a Harford article called Amazing Racism that covers similar ground to “Chapter Six: The Dangers of Rational Racism.” Marginal Revolution is hosting a discussion on The Logic of Life, which you can read about here and here, for example. The combination of Harford’s website, Marginal Revolution, and Freakonomics don’t complement The Logic of Life—they substitute for it.

Overall, The Logic of Life is enjoyable enough but never mind-blowing, as something like A Farewell to Alms was—it reoriented the way I perceive aspects of the world. The Logic of Life just piled on the econ-for-dummies stack. Harford is a good writer but his style—pithy, and scattered, yoking together concepts like metaphysical poets but without their artistry—is better suited for the magazines and newspapers he usually publishes in than he is for a book. The magazine and newspaper articles are naturally short, pithy, and to the point, and Hardford is often very funny when he doesn’t have to extend humor that works well in 800 words to a book of more than 40,000. The book feels more like a series of blog posts than a book, which is yet another reason to read the econ blogs, because its chapters are held together only by the tenuous thread of finding something that appears “irrational” and then showing how it makes more sense than it might first appear. As an introduction to some aspects of game theory it’s okay, but the feeling of disjointedness persists even within sections: in Chapter Two: Las Vegas: The Edge of Reason, the narrative skips from a Las Vegas hotel dateline to a discussion of the history of math and game theory to Camp David in September 1961 to Thomas Schelling more generally. Yet those individuals threads aren’t fully developed and don’t come together well.

The two great heroes of this book are Thomas Schelling and Gary Becker. The latter has a blog whose general tone is modeled on the Congressional Budget Office annual report and both are Nobel Laureates. They both also blurb the book, as does Tyler Cowen and Stephen Dubner who co-wrote Freakonomics. Suddenly I find myself commenting on the material around the book more than the book itself yet again, but that’s because 1) I can’t escape the feeling of being pulled into a marketing ploy and 2) find the book largely made redundant by other available material. Consequently, I will reiterate that this isn’t a bad book, and it’s lively enough to keep the reader moving from one idea to the next, but it’s also not terribly original in content or in packaging. I mention “packaging” because that’s what the book essentially is: repackaging of academic work for a non-specialist audience. This is undoubtedly a useful service for those who, like me, are unlikely to read economics journals, but it’s not as useful for those who, like me, are likely to read economics blogs for laypeople. In fact, I must have read too many blog entries because I just used the term “laypeople.” Sorry for that, I’ll try not to let it happen again. It’s the sort of thing Harford avoids, but at the cost of depth—and the cost seems too high. The Logic of Life is too simple and the kinds of material it contains too readily available elsewhere to make it a good purchase.

If The Logic of Life does anything really well, it’s in Harford being a cheerleader for an important and too-often-overlooked field. He was a professor, cheerleader, and pub friend at the University Bookstore in Seattle on Jan. 30, where he told stories, acknowledged the weaknesses in trying to see a rational world when ours isn’t always, and questioned his own metaphors. As a speaker he was fun and also speculated that the the econ-for-dummies books I generally like have done well because “people feel like they’re learning something about the world without having to know hard maths.” Note the “s” on “maths”—Harford is British, and made a joke about how he’s been studying America since being here. I asked what he noticed, and he launched into a short and thoughtful response about how our presidential election system is more rational than he first thought because early voters in Iowa and New Hampshire have a great incentive to learn about the candidates, who in turn advise the rest of the country. I wonder if Harford has read The Myth of the Rational Voter. Its content hasn’t been replicated online.

What’s that about technophobic English professors?

February 3, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

* I graduated from Clark University in the not-too-distant past, though back then we read by candlelight and there was no department blog. The blog issue being resolved—as the preceding link demonstrates—also helps kill what a common enough conception that a poster at Rate Your Students summarized:

Unfortunately, the business world stereotypes English profs as probably the least useful among all academics: tweed-clad, bookish anachronisms who, if they’re interesting at all, drive 1960’s English sports cars (but can’t find the gas cap) and make witty chit-chat at parties (but are flummoxed by modern fads like telephones, ball-point pens, and air travel).

Not at Clark! But witty chit-chat is still vogue. Whether this former student’s blog is a testament to the department or a mark of shame has yet to be decided.

* In other news, The New York Times published “Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work,” about the nature of sudden realizations and creativity:

Epiphany has little to do with either creativity or innovation. Instead, innovation is a slow process of accretion, building small insight upon interesting fact upon tried-and-true process. Just as an oyster wraps layer upon layer of nacre atop an offending piece of sand, ultimately yielding a pearl, innovation percolates within hard work over time.

The same is true of literature and criticism: the great novel always comes after long reading and effort, and the great insight about the great novel doesn’t usually come from the first reading, even if the germ of it can.

* Finally, in still other New York Times news, an essay discusses—yet again—the supposed divide between highbrow / lowbrow literature. My dream? That one day we can just discuss what’s good and bad, rather than what section of Barnes & Noble a book appears in.