Desktop PCs aren’t going anywhere, despite the growth of phones and tablets, because they’re cheap

October 9, 2011 By in Computers/Apple Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Articles like “As PCs Wane, Companies Look to Tablets” are both true and bogus. PCs aren’t going anywhere because they’re cheap. You can buy them reasonably close to cost. If you want the least expensive means of computing possible, you can’t beat PCs now and won’t be able to for years, at the very earliest. Sure, “making them has not been a great business for most American companies for almost a decade,” but that’s because consumers are deriving so much surplus from PCs. PCs are close to commodities, which is great for buyers, if not sellers.

The industry, the reporters who cover the industry, bloggers, and other people with a stake in the action want you to believe “TABLETS TABLETS TABLETS ARE COOL!!!!” because they want you to buy relatively high-margin tablets (and they need something write about). Current tablets are high-margin because they combine commodity hardware with OS lock-in. The industry wants to move closer to Apple’s model, since Apple gets away with what it does because a) it has great design and b) for a long time, and maybe up to the present, OS X was more fun and in some respects better designed than Windows. Lock-in and high margins? What’s not to love from a business perspective?

It’s not very much fun for journalists and bloggers who drive these stories about PCs to write, “Area man continues to derive immense intellectual, social, and efficiency value from the PC he bought five years ago and which continues to meet his needs adequately.” I wouldn’t read that story or post either. The tech press needs to find hype and trends. Tablets and cell phones are of course genuinely big deals and their impact will continue to reverberate—but just because one sector is waxing doesn’t mean another is automatically waning. Especially when that sector offers a lot of value for the money.

So: every time you see a call for tablet computing, regardless of its source, you should remember that somewhere behind it, there’s a manufacturer who wants to sell you more stuff at higher prices. Paul Graham calls such beasts “the Submarine,” and if you want to understand how you’re being marketed to, you should read that essay. The PC manufacturer can’t really sell you more stuff in PC laptops and desktops these days because they’re too inexpensive and interchangeable. Apple can sell you design and an unusual operating system.

Maybe Lenovo can charge above-average prices because of the Thninkpad’s reputation for durability, but that’s it. Everyone else is scrambling because consumers dominate producers when it comes to PCs. So we get stories like the one above; and, if, as Tyler Cowen speculates in this example, the U.S. economic model moves closer to Japan and capital depreciates, expect to see even more calls for tablets and so forth. Anything to avoid acknowledging that an existing stock of capital is Good Enough.

And you can expect to see misleading headlines like the one above. It’s frustrating to read stuff like this:

Computer makers are expected to ship only about 4 percent more PCs this year than last year, according to IDC, a research firm. Tablets, in contrast, are flying off store shelves. Global sales are expected to more than double this year to 24.1 million, according to Forrester Research.

How does an increase in the absolute number and the percentage of PCs sold an indicating of waning? I think that means computer makers will ship over a hundred million units, compared to a quarter as many tablets. I checked out Dell’s website, and one can buy a very nice Inspiron desktop with a dual-core AMD processor, 3 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB hard drive for about $400. Get a cheapie 20″ monitor, and you’ve got a very competent machine that’ll run Windows passable well for under $600. Get a sweet 24″ IPS monitor as good or better than the one in my 2007 24″ iMac for another $500, and you’re still under $1,000. That’s why desktops aren’t going anywhere and all this blah blah blah about tablets is important but also overrated by tech sites chasing the new shiny but who also think that everyone has, if not an unlimited budget, then at least a very substantial one for technical toys. Given my work, it’s probably not surprising that I have a higher-than-average budget for technical toys and tools, since I use my computer every day and often for very long stretches, but for people who aren’t writers, hackers, day traders, pornographers, and the like, having an expensive computer and a tablet and a phone is, if not overkill, then at least overpriced.

Some people get this—here’s a Time story that’s as an example—but too many don’t, especially in the press, which follows the tech industry like a marketing arm instead of an independent evaluator.

One more point: PCs are still better for some tasks. Maybe not for browsing Facebook and YouTube, but anything that requires a keyboard isn’t just better on a computer—it’s way better. Maybe students are going to write papers on iPads or iPad-like devices, but I’m skeptical, and even if one has a couple of substantial text-writing efforts a year, it’s going to be tempting to keep a keyboard around. I could be crazy; people are apparently writing novels on cell phones in Japan and now other countries, but producing a novel on a phone doesn’t sound appetizing from the perspective of either the writer, who can’t really get in the zone over the course of a hundred words, or the reader, who has to endure writing from someone who doesn’t appear to, say, go back and edit their novel as a coherent whole. Most people don’t seem to much like 19th Century novels that were published serially, and “lack of editing” and “lack of brevity” might be two reasons. The first will probably haunt cell phone novelists.

Then again, looking at the bestseller lists, maybe there isn’t much to go but down.

PCs and other form factors are going to coexist. Coexistence is a less sexy story than death, but it’s truer. In one Hacker News comment thread “jeffreymcmanus” observed, “People don’t stop buying the old stuff just because there’s new stuff. See also: horses, bicycles, cars.” Well, people have mostly stopped buying horses, because cars offer superior functionality in virtually all circumstances, but the point remains. Another commenter, “mcantelon,” said:

Yeah, which is why the “post-PC” terminology has a propaganda tone. It’s not going to be “post-PC”: more like “pop computing” or “computing lite”.

He’s right. Which is okay: I have nothing against tablets or cell phones. Use whatever works. Just don’t pretend PCs are going away or automatically declining.

EDIT 2015: As of this edit I’m using a 27″ Retina iMac. The hardware is incredible. The best is still yet to come.

See also this post on whether you should buy a laptop or desktop and this related post on the reliability of each form factor.

Desktop PCs aren’t going anywhere, despite the growth of phones and tablets—because they’re cheap

October 9, 2011 By in Computers/Apple Tags: , , , , , , , 3 Comments

I’m tired of articles like “As PCs Wane, Companies Look to Tablets” You know why PCs aren’t going anywhere? Because they’re cheap. You can buy them reasonably close to cost. If you want the least expensive means of computing possible, you can’t beat PCs now and won’t be able to for years, at the very earliest. Sure, “making them has not been a great business for most American companies for almost a decade,” but that’s because consumers are deriving so much surplus from PCs. They’re not close to commodities. Which is great for buyers, if not sellers.

The industry, the reporters who cover the industry, bloggers, and other people with a stake in the action want you to believe “TABLETS TABLETS TABLETS ARE COOL!!!!” because they want you to buy relatively high-margin tablets. Those tablets are high-margin because they combine commodity hardware with OS lock-in. The industry wants to move closer to Apple’s model, since Apple gets away with what it does because a) it has great design and b) for a long time, and maybe up to the present, OS X was more fun and in some respects better designed than Windows. Lock-in and high margins? What’s not to love from a business perspective?

It’s also not very much fun for journalists and bloggers who drive these stories about PCs to write stories that say, “Area man continues to derive immense intellectual, social, and efficiency value from the PC he bought five years ago and which continues to meet his needs adequately.” I wouldn’t read that story or post either. The larger tech press needs to find something to hype. In this case, of course, tablets and cell phones are genuinely big deals and their impact will continue to reverberate—but just because one sector is waxing doesn’t mean another is automatically waning. Especially when that sector offers a lot of value for the money.

So: every time you see a call for tablet computing, regardless of its source, you should remember that somewhere behind it, there’s a manufacturer who wants to sell you more stuff at higher prices. Paul Graham calls such beasts “the Submarine,” and if you want to understand how you’re being marketed to, you should read that essay. The PC manufacturer can’t really sell you more stuff in PC laptops and desktops these days because they’re too inexpensive and interchangeable. Apple can sell you design and an unusual operating system. Maybe Lenovo can charge above-average prices because of the Thninkpad’s reputation for durability, but that’s it. Everyone else is scrambling because consumers dominate producers when it comes to PCs. So we get stories like the one above; and, if, as Tyler Cowen speculates in this example, the U.S. economic model moves closer to Japan and capital depreciates, expect to see even more calls for tablets and so forth. Anything to avoid acknowledging that an existing stock of capital is Good Enough.

And you can expect to see misleading headlines like the one above. It’s frustrating to read stuff like this:

Computer makers are expected to ship only about 4 percent more PCs this year than last year, according to IDC, a research firm. Tablets, in contrast, are flying off store shelves. Global sales are expected to more than double this year to 24.1 million, according to Forrester Research.

How does an increase in the absolute number and the percentage of PCs sold an indicating of waning? I think that means computer makers will ship over a hundred million units, compared to a quarter as many tablets. I checked out Dell’s website, and one can buy a very nice Inspiron desktop with a dual-core AMD processor, 3 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB hard drive for about $400. Get a cheapie 20″ monitor, and you’ve got a very competent machine that’ll run Windows passable well for under $600. Get a sweet 24″ IPS monitor as good or better than the one in my 2007 24″ iMac for another $500, and you’re still under $1,000. That’s why desktops aren’t going anywhere and all this blah blah blah about tablets is important but also overrated by tech sites chasing the new shiny but who also think that everyone has, if not an unlimited budget, then at least a very substantial one for technical toys. Given my work, it’s probably not surprising that I have a higher-than-average budget for technical toys and tools, since I use my computer every day and often for very long stretches, but for people who aren’t writers, hackers, day traders, pornographers, and the like, having an expensive computer and a tablet and a phone is, if not overkill, then at least overpriced.

Some people get this—here’s a Time story that’s as an example—but too many don’t, especially in the press, which follows the tech industry like a marketing arm instead of an independent evaluator.

One more point: PCs are still better for some tasks. Maybe not for browsing Facebook and YouTube, but anything that requires a keyboard isn’t just better on a computer—it’s way better. Maybe students are going to write papers on iPads or iPad-like devices, but I’m skeptical, and even if one has a couple of substantial text-writing efforts a year, it’s going to be tempting to keep a keyboard around. I could be crazy; people are apparently writing novels on cell phones in Japan and now other countries, but producing a novel on a phone doesn’t sound appetizing from the perspective of either the writer, who can’t really get in the zone over the course of a hundred words, or the reader, who has to endure writing from someone who doesn’t appear to, say, go back and edit their novel as a coherent whole. Most people don’t seem to much like 19th Century novels that were published serially, and I think “lack of editing” and “lack of brevity” might be two reasons, and the first will probably come back to haunt cell phone novelists.

Then again, looking at the bestseller lists, maybe there isn’t much to go but down.

PCs and other form factors are going to coexist. Again, it’s not as sexy a story, but it’s also a more true one. In one Hacker News comment thread “jeffreymcmanus” observed, “People don’t stop buying the old stuff just because there’s new stuff. See also: horses, bicycles, cars.” Well, people have mostly stopped buying horses, because cars offer superior functionality in virtually all circumstances, but the point remains. Another commenter, “mcantelon,” said:

Yeah, which is why the “post-PC” terminology has a propaganda tone. It’s not going to be “post-PC”: more like “pop computing” or “computing lite”.

He’s right. Which is okay: I have nothing against tablets, cell phones, and so forth. Use whatever works. Just don’t pretend PCs are going away or automatically declining.

See also this post on whether you should buy a laptop or desktop and this related post on the reliability of each form factor.

Steve Jobs passes and the Internet speaks

October 7, 2011 By in Computers/Apple Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

I’ve never felt sad at the death of a famous person or someone I didn’t know. The recent news, however, does make me sad—probably because it seems like Steve Jobs’s personality infused everything Apple made. Maybe that’s just Apple’s marketing magic working on me, but if so, I’m still impressed, and I’m still not sure how to analyze a feeling of sadness about a person I never met, or how to go beyond what others have said about the loss of someone whose work and life’s work is so insanely great.

Like so many people writing about Jobs, I feel compelled to mention the hardware on which I’m doing it: a 27″ iMac with an impressively fast SSD and incredibly small footprint given the monitor’s size. Since getting an aluminum PowerBook in 2004, each subsequent Mac has been more amazing than the one preceding it—especially because I didn’t think it was possible to be more amazed than the one preceding it. There’s an iPhone sitting nearby, and in the near future that might become an iPhone 4S. So few devices feel so right, and I think people respond to Apple because it understands the link between technological function and feelings as few others do or few others can.

I look around to see what else I use and think about whether I know anything about the people behind those things: certainly not the Honda Civic I drive. Not the tea kettle I use to boil water. Not the Dell secondary monitor, whose badge could be stripped and another appended with absolutely no one noticing. I know a little about the Jeff Weber, who designed the Embody with Bill Stumpf, but that’s mostly because of wonky interest on my par. Try as I might, I can’t think of anyone else remotely like Jobs in achievement, fame, importance, and ubiquity. That person might be out there, but I don’t know who he is. His work is anonymous in a way Jobs’s has never been. He makes stuff with character in a world where so much stuff utterly lacks it.

Take the Apple logo off the iMac, and you’ll still have a machine that makes one stop and take account. And those improvements! Jobs offers lessons to the ambitious: Good is never good enough; you can always go further; done is never done enough; and, even if those things aren’t true, time will make them true. I wouldn’t be surprised if, 200 years from now, Jobs is still taken to be one of the pillars of his age, known to some extent by non-specialists, like Edison or Ford.

The Internet is saying a lot about Jobs. People are linking to the text version of his 2005 Stanford graduation speech. The Atlantic is explaining Why We Mourn Steve Jobs. Here’s someone almost as obscure as me writing Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011: “Today marked the end of an era. Each of the quotes below is linked to a eulogy or collection of reflections on the passing of Steve Jobs.” Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica and A New Kind of Science fame remembers Jobs and Jobs’s encouragement too. There are probably more tributes and commentaries than anyone could read, even if they had the inclination. Let me add to the pile, and to the pile of people saying they feel a strange connection to the man, however ridiculous that feeling might be. It’s ridiculous, but it’s real, like that connection between person and tool, user and computer. The connection is real in part because Jobs helped make it real.

EDIT: See also Megan McArdle on the Jobs speech:

The problem is, the people who give these sorts of speeches are the outliers: the folks who have made a name for themselves in some very challenging, competitive, and high-status field. No one ever brings in the regional sales manager for a medical supplies firm to say, “Yeah, I didn’t get to be CEO. But I wake up happy most mornings, my kids are great, and my golf game gets better every year.”

In addition, I usually hate watching videos on the Internet because most are overrated, but Colbert on Jobs is not. Also available in the funny / genuine vein: “Last American Who Knew What The Fuck He Was Doing Dies,” courtesy of the Onion.

Heres’t the tech columnist Walt Mossberg on Jobs.

Student choice, employment skills, and grade inflation

October 7, 2011 By in Academia Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

Edward Tenner’s Atlantic post asks, “Should We Blame the Colleges for High Unemployment?” and mostly doesn’t answer the question, instead focusing on employer hiring behavior. But I’m interested in the title question and would note that the original story says, “Fundamentally, students aren’t learning [in college] what they need to compete for the jobs that do exist.”

That may be true. But colleges and universities, whatever their rhetoric, aren’t bastions of pure idealistic knowledge; they’re also businesses, and they respond to customer demand. In other words, student demand. Students choose their own major, and it isn’t exactly news that engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians, and the like tend to make much more money than other majors, or that people in those disciplines are much more likely to find jobs. Students, however, by and large don’t choose them: they choose business, communications (“comm” for the university set), and sociology—all majors that, in most forms in most places, aren’t terribly demanding. I’ve yet to hear an electrical engineering major say that comm was just too hard, so she switched to engineering instead. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa show in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, those majors aren’t, on average, very hard either, and they don’t impart much improvement in verbal or math skills. So what gives?

The easiest answer seems like the most right one: students aren’t going to universities primarily to get job skills. They’re going for other reasons: signaling; credentialing; a four-year party; to have fun; choose your reason here. And universities, eager for tuition dollars, will cater to those students—and to students who demand intellectual rigor. The former get business degrees and comm, while the latter get the harder parts of the humanities (like philosophy), the social sciences (like econ), or the hard sciences. It’s much easier to bash universities, with the implication of elaborately educated dons letting their product being watered down or failing, than it is to realize that universities are reacting to incentives, just as it’s much easier to bash weak politicians than it is to acknowledge that politicians give voters what they want—and voters want higher services and lower taxes, without wanting to pay for them. Then people paying attention to universities or politics notice, write articles and posts pointing out the contradiction, but fail to realize the contradiction exists.

You may also notice that most people don’t appear to choose schools based on academics. They choose schools based on proximity, or because their sports teams are popular. Indeed, another Atlantic blogger points out that “Teenagers [. . .] are apt to assemble lists of favored colleges through highly non-scientific methods involving innuendo, the results of televised football games, and what their friend’s older brother’s girlfriend said that one time at the mall.” Murray Sperber especially emphasizes sports in his book Beer and Circus: How Big-Time Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education.

By the way, this does bother me at least somewhat, and I’d like to imagine that universities are going to nobly hold the line against grade and credential inflation, against the desires of the people attending them. But I can also recognize the gap between my ideal world and the real world. I’m especially cognizant of the issue because student demand for English literature courses has held constant for decades, as Louis Menand says in The Marketplace of Ideas:

In 1970–71, English departments awarded 64,342 bachelor’s degrees; that represented 7.6 percent of all bachelor’s degrees, including those awarded in non-liberal arts fields, such as business. The only liberal arts category that awarded more degrees than English was history and social science, a category that combines several disciplines. Thirty years later, in 2000–01, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in all fields was 50 percent higher than in 1970–71, but the number of degrees in English was down both in absolute numbers—from 64,342 to 51,419—and as a percentage of all bachelor’s degrees, from 7.6 percent to around 4 percent.

Damn. Students, for whatever reason, don’t want English degrees as much as they once did. As a person engaged in English Literature grad school, this might make me unhappy, and I might argue for the importance of English lit. Still, I can’t deny that more people apparently want business degrees than English degrees, even if Academically Adrift demonstrates that humanities degrees actually impart critical thinking and other kinds of skills. I could blame “colleges” for this, as Tenner does; or I could acknowledge that colleges are reflecting demand, and the real issue isn’t with colleges—it’s with the students themselves.

U and I: A True Story — Nicholson Baker

October 2, 2011 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

U and IThere’s something weirdly winsome about U and I, but it’s definitely an acquired taste; much as you wouldn’t recommend a friend who’d never eaten fish start off by trying raw eel, I wouldn’t recommend a friend read U and I unless I already knew they were a) quirky, b) at least moderately well-read and c) interested in the process of writing. U and I is like—I keep resorting to similes because, really, I don’t know what else to do—the best written, longest blog post you’ve ever read.

It’s a meditation on memory that shouldn’t be taken too seriously (sample: Nabokov “detailed his three-by-five method of fictional composition so comprehensively that Gore Vidal said in some essay that he was sick of hearing about it”). And Baker has a sense of the absurd, which I find absurd and love; he gets academia too well: “I count myself fortunate in being able to extract all the pretend-scholarly pleasure I want out of my method without urging it on anyone else.” Actual scholars appear to get real pleasure by inflicting their method on others. “Urging” is too light a word for the things I’ve seen. Baker is very polite to use “urging,” and he’s polite in general, for all his opinions.

If he’s retained that politeness, House of Holes ought to be a rather unusual book given its reputedly pornographic and hallucinatory premise (a copy is sitting on my table, waiting for me to get around to it, while I slog through The Condition of Postmodernity—which is a definitive infliction of an academic system and the kind of book that ought to be paired with Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius so that one will at least come out the other side knowing where many problems in the first book lie. Sorry for the preceding paragraph. U and I makes me more digressive than usual. If you read it, you’ll understand. It’s an acquired taste, as I said, one that sometimes needs a bit more sugar and olive oil, but one I rather liked, though I can’t recommend it except to book obsessives, writers, bibliophiles, or the people foolish enough to want to understand them. Which probably covers a fair number of readers of this blog, but still. The warning is part of being polite.

He must not be an academic at heart: academics love to apply their theories to others, with as much intellectual violence as necessary to make it stick. It turns out that Baker hadn’t read all of Updike’s books, and, with many of them, he’d only read parts, which he doesn’t remember entirely. In fact, the book isn’t really about Updike all that much at all: it’s more about artistic neuroses, learning how to write, and playing with that fickle memory beast. For example: “Once you decide on a profession, you riffle back through your past to find early random indications of a learning toward your chosen interest and you nurture them into a false prominence: so it was naturally very important to me, as a writer on the make, to have this sixth-grade vocabularistic memory in its complete form.” Baker wants us to know that we create a narrative of success and set up retrospective wayposts that make success seem foreordained, when it probably isn’t. Even the less successful among us might think so: I remember my parents being astonished that I was going to major in English. They told me they expected business or econ. Now I better understand why. But in the long run, I’m not sure it matters. There were other possibilities one could’ve guessed based on my past. But I picked one and rolled with it. This is an example of me trying not to do intellectual violence to an idea: instead of saying, “Everyone works this way!” I posit some possibilities and move on from there.

Baker mentions “early Updike, whose boy-heroes are sometimes more sensitive and queasier-stomached than one wants them to be.” But he doesn’t go on to explain. He doesn’t really explain anything. He leaves the explaining to the reader; you get what he’s doing, or you don’t. In this respect, he’s the least academic of all: instead of wanting to elaborate us to death, he wants to let us be. I know what he means about boy-heroes; sometimes you want a giant animal to attack Rabbit and see what he’s made of, or for aliens to invade in Couples, offering Piet an opportunity to do something more than carpentry and cuckoldry. Not that there’s anything wrong with those things, precisely, but, well, you hope for a bit more at times. Baker also gives good sentence, but they are often long sentences, like this one:

[. . .] many of the novels that I’ve liked lately (The Beautiful Room is Empty, The Swimming-Pool Library, A Single Man) have been so directly premised on gaiety: you feel their creators’ exultation at having so much that wasn’t sayable finally available for analysis, and you feel that the sudden unrestrained scope given to the truth-telling urge in the Eastern homosphere has lent energy and accuracy to these artists’ nonsexual observations as well [. . .]

Notice the ellipses on either end. Notice too Baker’s use of the funny word “homosphere” with the funnier adjective “Eastern.” Is there a “Western” homosphere? If so, how is it different? More tans, fewer references to ascots? And what is an ascot anyway? I’ve never known it save for the butt of a joke, and the word “butt” should be funny here in the context of the “homosphere.” Kind of, anyway. Like I was saying—Baker does go on. But that’s the pleasure in him. With him. Through him. Whatever. Still, this is enough quote for now.

No, actually, I change my mind. Writing about Updike’s book Of the Farm, Baker says that “A photographer would not so directly use his professional equipment in the metaphors he applied to his immediate surroundings—he would use it sometimes, but not in the first paragraph of the story he told. Film and f-stops are huge real presences to him, and can’t be so easily manipulated as tokens of comparison.” Not necessarily. Consider all the writers who use book and writing metaphors; I think our profession does get into our minds deeply enough that we might reach to professions for our first metaphors. Paul Graham’s writing is full of metaphors involved software and computers. That’s part of what makes it so rich.

It bugs me when I read books about doctors or lawyers or hookers or whatever and find characters who don’t think in the world in terms of their profession. I mean, a hooker probably doesn’t need to see every interaction as like something with a John, and a lawyer doesn’t need to view every interaction as adversarial or use terms like “estoppel” on every page, but once in a while, you know, it’d be nice. It’d work. I haven’t read Of the Farm, however, so I can’t comment on it. The problem with being a reader is that you’ll never have enough time to read everything you should. So you rely on memory, that uncertain beast, more than you should, and you end up be a scholarly pedant or a scatterbrained essayist. A false binary, but roll with it. On average, the latter seem funnier, and, in my own view, when in doubt, go funny.

For all U and I’s weirdness, I’m keeping the book instead of giving it away or reselling it. Maybe in a couple years it’ll say something new to me. I only worry that, instead of seeing it as weird, I’ll see it as normal.

Life: The writer and reality

September 30, 2011 By in Life Tags: , , Leave a comment

“[. . .] for me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.”

—Nicholson Baker, U and I: A True Story, although I find the subhead rather hard to believe for most values of “true.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Midnight Palace and The Prince of Mist show moments of promise, and yet. . .

September 27, 2011 By in Books, Fiction, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I bought Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Midnight Palace and The Prince of Mist because I loved The Angel’s Game and The Shadow of the Wind so much. But The Midnight Palace and The Prince of Mist are disappointing. The most fascinating thing isn’t their generally low quality, however. It’s the moments when the later Zafón pokes through, showing what’s to come. I left The Prince of Mist and The Midnight Palace at my parents’ house, and when my Dad started reading one, he stopped and mentioned how awful they were. But they have moments where Zafón shows what he’ll later become—where he describes places, engages and rewrites cliches, talks about shocking family secrets, reveals the semi-supernatural villain. Unfortunately, cliches dominate, the writing is flat, and characters hold the interest of small-town human interest stories. But his later work gets those things right.

I wrote a whole post describing why the young adult novels are bad and pointing out the germs that later sprouted into his stronger, later work. But you know what? All those examples don’t matter. The books are weak for all kinds of reasons that are obvious on a first reading. I deleted all my earlier commentary because I realized that Zafón is an example of an experimental artist, as defined by David Galenson in his fascinating book Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity. Zafón’s books are important only because they also show the danger of assessing an author based on a single work: Zafón’s young adult novels came out before his later, better novels. If I’d read them first, I doubt I would’ve read what came next. Fortunately, however, those books weren’t translated until after Zafón became successful.

In Galenson’s distinction, experimental artists tend to grow slowly; their early work is very seldom considered their important work. By contrast, Galenson describes conceptual artists who tend to do important early work that totally redefines their field; their later work tends not to have the punch it might otherwise have. Experimental artists often don’t have a single defining work, but rather a large body of production that often feels like a unified whole. Conceptual artists often have one or a small number of significant works. The theory is much elaborated from this unfortunate sketch, which naturally loses many of the details that make Galenson good. But you can graft his analysis directly onto Zafón. If I thought the earlier books were worth the effort, I would take your time and mine to do a major compare and contrast between them. They’re not, however. What is important is the lesson one can draw about not prematurely judging a writer based on premature work that might not show the late emergence of talent based on experience and extensive effort in a field.

I’m not going to read Zafón’s other young adult novels; he wrote four prior to The Shadow of the Wind. But when his next novel in the Shadow of the Wind and Angel’s Game sequence emerges, I’ll gladly clear the decks to read it.

Why these assignment sheets: The world isn't going to be a routine place, and writing projects shouldn't be either

September 27, 2011 By in Teaching, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Phil Bowermaster writes:

Increasingly, perhaps, a job is something that we each have to create. We can’t count on someone else to create one for us. That model is disappearing. We have to carve something out for ourselves, something that the machines won’t immediately grab.

Bowermaster is describing on a macro scale what I try to do a micro scale with the papers I assign to students. The important part of my assignment sheets for freshman composition papers are only two paragraphs long, and students sometimes find them frustrating, but I do them this way because the world is headed in a direction that offers less direction and more power to do the right or wrong thing. Here’s an example of an assignment sheet:

Purpose: To explain and interpret a possible message or messages suggested by a) a text or texts we have read for class, b) a text or texts in Writing as Revision, or c) a book of your own choosing. If you write on a book of your own, you must clear your selection with me first. Your goal should be persuade readers of your interpretation using the texts studied and outside reading material.

You should construct a thesis that is specific and defensible and then explicate it through points, illustrations, and explanation. See Chapters 8 and 9 of A Student’s Guide To First-Year Writing for more information on the nature of textual analysis.

That’s it. Students can read more about the assignment if they want to, and they have a lot of freedom in picking a topic. Students often want more direction, which I give to some extent, but I don’t give step-by-step instructions because a) step-by-step instructions yield boring papers and b) in their real-life writing, the real challenge isn’t the writing. It’s the deciding what to write about and how to write once you’ve decided to start. The writing assignment often isn’t given; the writing assignment is made.

It’s a big leap to go from “write-a-good-paper” assignment sheets to conceptualizing “a job [as] something that we each have to create.” Maybe too big a leap. But the thinking and rationale behind my decision is clear: jobs that can be easily codified and described as a series of steps—jobs that are easily explained, in other words—are increasingly going away, either to off-shoring or automation. The ones that persist will be the ones that don’t exist now because no one has thought to do them. But a lot of school still appears to consists of a person in front of the room saying, “Follow these steps,” having the students follow the steps, and then moving on.

That model isn’t totally wrong—you can’t create something from nothing—but maybe we should more often be saying, “Here’s the kind of thing you should be doing. What steps should you take? How should you take them? Do something and then come talk to me about it.” That kind of model might be more time consuming and less easily planned, and I wouldn’t want to use it in every hour of every day. Many basic skills still need to be taught along the lines or “This is how you use a comma,” or “this is how an array works.” But we should be collectively moving towards saying, “Here are some constraints. Show me you can think. Show me you can make something from this.” And class isn’t totally devoid of support: unlike the real world, class has mandatory drafts due, lots of discussion about what makes strong writing strong, and the chance to see other people’s work. The imposed, artificial deadlines are particularly important. It’s not like I hand out assignment sheets and shove students out to sea, to flounder or float completely on their own.

Still, from what I can see, the world is increasingly rewarding adaptability and flexibility. I don’t see that trend changing; if anything, it seems likely to accelerate. If schools are going to (collectively) do a better job, they probably need to work on learning how to teach adaptability in the process of teaching subject-specific material. Offering the kinds of assignments I do is a microscopically small step in that direct, but big changes usually consist of a series of small steps. The assignments are one such step. This post is another.

In “A Welcome Call to Greatness,” John Hagel discusses That Used to Be Us, a book by Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum that discusses what Hagel calls “creative creators” – “people who do their nonroutine work in distinctively nonroutine ways.” And that’s what I’m trying to do above: train students into being able to do nonroutine writing of a sort that will be distinctive, interesting, and well-done, but without a great deal of obvious managerial oversight from someone else. Great writing seldom springs from someone micromanaging: it springs from discussions, ideas, unexpected metaphors, connections, seeing old things in new ways, and form a plenitude of other places that can’t be easily described.

In “The Age of the Essay,” Paul Graham says:

Anyone can publish an essay on the Web, and it gets judged, as any writing should, by what it says, not who wrote it. Who are you to write about x? You are whatever you wrote.

Popular magazines made the period between the spread of literacy and the arrival of TV the golden age of the short story. The Web may well make this the golden age of the essay. And that’s certainly not something I realized when I started writing this.

He’s right. The most challenging writing most of my students will do isn’t even going to have the opportunity for someone else to micromanage it. The writing will increasingly be online. It will increasingly be their own decision to write or not write. As Penelope Trunk says, it will increasingly be essential for a good career. It won’t be routine. As I said above, routine work that can be codified and described in a series of steps will be exported to the lowest bidder. Valuable work will be the work nobody has dreamt up. Jobs will be “something that we each have to create.” I’m sure a lot of people will be unhappy with the change, but the secular forces moving in this direction look too great to be overcome by any individual. You surf the waves life and society throws at you, or you fall off the board and struggle. The worst cases never get back on the board and drown. I want students to have the best possible shot at staying on the board, and that means learning they can’t assume someone else is going to create a job—or an assignment—for them. They have to learn to do it themselves. They need to be creative. As Hagel quotes Mandelbaum and Friedman as saying, “Continuous innovation is not a luxury anymore – it is becoming a necessity.” I worry that too few students are getting the message.

I think of some of my friends who are unemployed, and when I ask them what they do all day, they say they spend time searching for a job, hanging out, watching TV. To me, this is crazy. If I were unemployed, I’d be writing, or learning Python, or posting on Craigslist with offers to work doing whatever I can imagine doing. The last thing I’d be doing is watching TV. In other words, I’d be doing something similar to what I’m doing now, even when I am employed: building skills, trying new things, and not merely sitting around waiting for good things to come to me. They won’t. Good things are the things one makes. Most of my employed friends seem to get this on some level, or have found their way into protected niches like teaching or nursing. I wonder if my unemployed friends had teachers and professors who forced them to think for themselves, or if they had teachers and professors who were content to hand them well-defined assignments that didn’t require much thinking about the “how” instead of the “what.”

"Free Agents," the TV show, proves itself dumb in the first three minutes through the "slut" debate

September 23, 2011 By in Culture, ideas, movies Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Free Agents, the TV show, begins with two characters in bed, and one opens a full condom drawer. The guy sees and says something like, “What are you—a slut?” The woman replies, and they have an excruciating discussion whose underlying content is a typical rehash of an ancient calumny about female sexuality. The scene is neither funny nor genuine, and the two problems are related.

If your characters are old enough to have a B.A., they’re old enough not to care about the idea of the “slut.” Younger characters, especially ones in high school, might still be interested in whether someone is a “slut,” but that’s mostly because a) teenagers are projecting uncertainty and fear regarding their own sexuality on others, b) many have parents who engage in various forms of daughter-guarding and other forms of shame internalization, and c) girls, especially, will use social approbation and shaming as a form of mate guarding behavior. If older characters like those in Free Agents are still concerned about the same problems as high school students, they’ve not matured enough to even be interesting. Even a show like Californication, whatever its other flaws, has moved beyond the “slut” question.

Like Free Agents, it’s also about someone with a stunted emotional life, but at least Californication is intellectually honest enough not to go for the “slut” question. Rather, it assumes that people who want to do it, do it, and people who don’t, don’t, which seems like the way the world is heading. Besides, by college graduation or thereabouts, most people will never really know about their partners’ past, and, again, by the time one graduates from college or reaches the age at which college graduation occurs, everyone is someone’s sloppy seconds. The median age for first sex in the United Sates is somewhere in the neighborhood of 17 (see Google for more); by the time a person hits their 30s, asking number questions becomes pointless if potentially amusing.

I’m not annoyed only because the concept behind word “slut” does, as Mark Liberman put it, “project bad associations based on a framework of ideas that I don’t endorse.” Even if you do do endorse that framework, endorsing it with someone you’re about to have sex with probably isn’t the optimal place to engage the issue. It only makes you look like a hypocrite and a fool, but, from what I can tell, that wasn’t what Free Agents was going for. It played the issue straight. To go back to Liberman—who is himself also writing about a TV show, albeit Sex and the City—”The word slut itself clearly retains strong negative connotations, quite apart from one’s opinions about sexual morality, but such things can change if enough people want them to.” TV shows aren’t necessarily a medium that promotes social and intellectual

I can see why TV show writers might go for the “slut”: they think it can create dramatic tension. But it’s a false dramatic tension, which is why I said the issue isn’t “genuine,” and false dramatic tension leads to jokes that aren’t funny either, because such jokes don’t engage any substantive ideas; really funny jokes often or usually do. Pretty much every single person with the proverbial half a brain has condoms around. Their presence doesn’t mean anything more than, “I’m prepared for the best,” which is a refreshing change compared to people who are prepared for the worst. It would be stranger if the woman in the show was single and didn’t have condoms.

So the “slut” problem reduces to one of two issues: the writers are lazy, so they introduce being a “slut” or not to create artificial tension; or the writers are dumb because they deal with a dead issue. Neither bodes well for the show. But it does hold an important lesson for narrative writers, whether visual or written: don’t focus on dead or dying issues. Focus on live ones. Feminists have been arguing against the “slut” framework of ideas since at least the 1960s if not earlier; Leora Tanenbaum wrote whole book on the subject, subtitled “Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation.” People’s behavior, if not their rhetoric, shows the issue to be dead. So instead of using it, why not skate to where the puck is going, instead of where it’s been?

The question is supposed to be rhetorical, but I’m going to answer it anyway: knowing the puck’s present location is easy. Knowing where it’s going is much, much harder, and a lot of the big media businesses, including TV, are too big and too expensive to take major risks on the unknown. Better to leave those big risks to dingy writers living in their parents’ basements or hiding from the real world in graduate school. That solution probably worked pretty well in a pre-Internet era. By now, however, people who want to take intellectual, social, and artistic risks can coalesce on the Internet. While Hollywood dithers and debates about sluts, the innovators are moving or have moved online. Don’t be surprised if the audience follows. And if you’re the kind of person who wants to be in the vanguard, don’t watch so much TV. Check out the bookstores and libraries instead. You’ll find it there. TV used to be the medium of the future, but in some ways it feels like the medium of the past.

EDIT: It appears Free Agents is heading towards cancellation. I’m tempted to say something like puerile like “good riddance,” but the problems described above transcend this show and will no doubt be repeated by successors, in more or less subtle guises.

“Free Agents,” the TV show, proves itself dumb in the first three minutes through the “slut” debate

September 23, 2011 By in Culture, ideas, movies Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Free Agents, the TV show, begins with two characters in bed, and one opens a full condom drawer. The guy sees and says something like, “What are you—a slut?” The woman replies, and they have an excruciating discussion whose underlying content is a typical rehash of an ancient calumny about female sexuality. The scene is neither funny nor genuine, and the two problems are related.

If your characters are old enough to have a B.A., they’re old enough not to care about the idea of the “slut.” Younger characters, especially ones in high school, might still be interested in whether someone is a “slut,” but that’s mostly because a) teenagers are projecting uncertainty and fear regarding their own sexuality on others, b) many have parents who engage in various forms of daughter-guarding and other forms of shame internalization, and c) girls, especially, will use social approbation and shaming as a form of mate guarding behavior. If older characters like those in Free Agents are still concerned about the same problems as high school students, they’ve not matured enough to even be interesting. Even a show like Californication, whatever its other flaws, has moved beyond the “slut” question.

Like Free Agents, it’s also about someone with a stunted emotional life, but at least Californication is intellectually honest enough not to go for the “slut” question. Rather, it assumes that people who want to do it, do it, and people who don’t, don’t, which seems like the way the world is heading. Besides, by college graduation or thereabouts, most people will never really know about their partners’ past, and, again, by the time one graduates from college or reaches the age at which college graduation occurs, everyone is someone’s sloppy seconds. The median age for first sex in the United Sates is somewhere in the neighborhood of 17 (see Google for more); by the time a person hits their 30s, asking number questions becomes pointless if potentially amusing.

I’m not annoyed only because the concept behind word “slut” does, as Mark Liberman put it, “project bad associations based on a framework of ideas that I don’t endorse.” Even if you do do endorse that framework, endorsing it with someone you’re about to have sex with probably isn’t the optimal place to engage the issue. It only makes you look like a hypocrite and a fool, but, from what I can tell, that wasn’t what Free Agents was going for. It played the issue straight. To go back to Liberman—who is himself also writing about a TV show, albeit Sex and the City—”The word slut itself clearly retains strong negative connotations, quite apart from one’s opinions about sexual morality, but such things can change if enough people want them to.” TV shows aren’t necessarily a medium that promotes social and intellectual

I can see why TV show writers might go for the “slut”: they think it can create dramatic tension. But it’s a false dramatic tension, which is why I said the issue isn’t “genuine,” and false dramatic tension leads to jokes that aren’t funny either, because such jokes don’t engage any substantive ideas; really funny jokes often or usually do. Pretty much every single person with the proverbial half a brain has condoms around. Their presence doesn’t mean anything more than, “I’m prepared for the best,” which is a refreshing change compared to people who are prepared for the worst. It would be stranger if the woman in the show was single and didn’t have condoms.

So the “slut” problem reduces to one of two issues: the writers are lazy, so they introduce being a “slut” or not to create artificial tension; or the writers are dumb because they deal with a dead issue. Neither bodes well for the show. But it does hold an important lesson for narrative writers, whether visual or written: don’t focus on dead or dying issues. Focus on live ones. Feminists have been arguing against the “slut” framework of ideas since at least the 1960s if not earlier; Leora Tanenbaum wrote whole book on the subject, subtitled “Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation.” People’s behavior, if not their rhetoric, shows the issue to be dead. So instead of using it, why not skate to where the puck is going, instead of where it’s been?

The question is supposed to be rhetorical, but I’m going to answer it anyway: knowing the puck’s present location is easy. Knowing where it’s going is much, much harder, and a lot of the big media businesses, including TV, are too big and too expensive to take major risks on the unknown. Better to leave those big risks to dingy writers living in their parents’ basements or hiding from the real world in graduate school. That solution probably worked pretty well in a pre-Internet era. By now, however, people who want to take intellectual, social, and artistic risks can coalesce on the Internet. While Hollywood dithers and debates about sluts, the innovators are moving or have moved online. Don’t be surprised if the audience follows. And if you’re the kind of person who wants to be in the vanguard, don’t watch so much TV. Check out the bookstores and libraries instead. You’ll find it there. TV used to be the medium of the future, but in some ways it feels like the medium of the past.

EDIT: It appears Free Agents is heading towards cancellation. I’m tempted to say something like puerile like “good riddance,” but the problems described above transcend this show and will no doubt be repeated by successors, in more or less subtle guises.