Richardson proclaims Clarissa is boring before you even start the novel

January 13, 2011 By in Fiction Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Here’s what Samuel Richardson wrote about his novel Clarissa (1748) in its “Preface:”

From what has been said, considerate readers will not enter upon the perusal of the piece before them as if it were designed only to divert and amuse. It will probably be thought tedious to all such as dip into it, expecting a light novel, or transitory romance; and look upon story in it (interesting as that is generally allowed to be) as its sole end, rather than as a vehicle to the instruction.

I don’t think I’m a “considerate reader,” since novels that don’t “divert and amuse” on some level are, in fact, “tedious.” The novel is a 1,000-page deferral regarding whether and who with the title character is going to do it. Although I understand intellectually that this matter was of great import at the time it was written, I can’t quite build up the need to care. Reading about Clarissa is better than reading the novel itself.

Consider this comment, which Keith thinks in The Pregnant Widow:

It sometimes seemed to Keith that the English novel, at least in its first two or three centuries, asked only one question. Will she fall? Will she fall, this woman? What’ll they write about, he wondered, when all women fall? Well, there’ll be new ways of falling . . .

Notice that Keith doesn’t assert that the central question of the novel is will she fall: only that it “sometimes seemed to Keith,” implying that other times the central question might seem otherwise. But it also asks whether we should care: if she “falls,” that means she’s a person who makes her own decisions, and if she doesn’t—then so what? What’s at stake is a question that doesn’t matter all that much except to the extent the woman involved makes it matter. This brings up an uncomfortable point alluded to by that ellipsis: if it doesn’t matter, then the novel doesn’t matter. And this novel doesn’t matter. So why should we read it?

The “it” is deliberately ambiguous, as it could refer to Clarissa or The Pregnant Widow. Various answers arise: as a historical document; to understand shifting ways we understand sexuality; to trace how the novel developed as a genre.

A book I don't want to read: Mathias Enard's Zone

January 11, 2011 By in Books, Fiction Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

Occasionally a review or description of a book, however it attempts to be favorable, completely convinces me not to read a novel unless forced. This week’s New York Times Book Review describes Mathias Enard’s Zone this way:

[. . .] in “Zone” — aside from three excerpts from an imagined Palestinian fiction — Énard takes up the challenge of writing an endless sentence by including only one period in his long novel. This ambitious gamble won Énard considerable praise in France, and now, with Charlotte Mandell’s lucid translation, readers of English can evaluate his text and larger mythic framework.

The skeletal narrative that carries Énard’s sentence forward is slim, but the book’s implications are broad. The entire novel is trapped within the mind of Francis Servain Mirkovic as he takes a train ride from Milan to Rome.

Novels with a “slim” “skeletal narrative” sound to me tedious. A book with broad “implications” but no real engagement with anything sounds like a tedious postmodernist trick of the sort that I’ve seen before and ignored before. One reason Stephen Burn’s review of Zone caught my attention, however, is its introduction, which is dense with ideas:

Near midnight on a Friday in April 1854, Gustave Flaubert wrote one of his many letters to Louise Colet. Flaubert had spent days hidden away in his Croisset retreat, researching theories of clubfoot and discarding pages from the manuscript of “Madame Bovary,” and he told Colet that he had come to the conclusion that “the books from which entire literatures have flowed, like Homer, Rabelais, are encyclopedias of their time. They knew everything.” This conception — the novel that knows everything — would come to obsess Europe’s modernist writers, who dreamed that a narrative of infinite detail and esoteric knowledge could blur the boundaries between traditional genres, with fiction shading into nonfiction, poetry bleeding into history.

I too aspire to write and read encyclopedias of my time. Some of my favorite books—Cryptonomicon, The Name of the Rose, The Secret History—have that kind of feel. It is always a good time to blur traditional genres—to paraphrase, as James Wood said, “it is always a good time to shred formulas.” But the novel has been blurring genre since its inception: one could argue that the only way to blue genre these days is by upholding genre, whatever that might mean. Like the dream of the novel-encyclopedia, it is probably impossible, however desirable it may be. I doubt that Zone gets very close.

A book I don’t want to read: Mathias Enard’s Zone

January 11, 2011 By in Books, Fiction Tags: , , , , , , 3 Comments

Occasionally a review or description of a book, however it attempts to be favorable, completely convinces me not to read a novel unless forced. This week’s New York Times Book Review describes Mathias Enard’s Zone this way:

[. . .] in “Zone” — aside from three excerpts from an imagined Palestinian fiction — Énard takes up the challenge of writing an endless sentence by including only one period in his long novel. This ambitious gamble won Énard considerable praise in France, and now, with Charlotte Mandell’s lucid translation, readers of English can evaluate his text and larger mythic framework.

The skeletal narrative that carries Énard’s sentence forward is slim, but the book’s implications are broad. The entire novel is trapped within the mind of Francis Servain Mirkovic as he takes a train ride from Milan to Rome.

Novels with a “slim” “skeletal narrative” sound to me tedious. A book with broad “implications” but no real engagement with anything sounds like a tedious postmodernist trick of the sort that I’ve seen before and ignored before. One reason Stephen Burn’s review of Zone caught my attention, however, is its introduction, which is dense with ideas:

Near midnight on a Friday in April 1854, Gustave Flaubert wrote one of his many letters to Louise Colet. Flaubert had spent days hidden away in his Croisset retreat, researching theories of clubfoot and discarding pages from the manuscript of “Madame Bovary,” and he told Colet that he had come to the conclusion that “the books from which entire literatures have flowed, like Homer, Rabelais, are encyclopedias of their time. They knew everything.” This conception — the novel that knows everything — would come to obsess Europe’s modernist writers, who dreamed that a narrative of infinite detail and esoteric knowledge could blur the boundaries between traditional genres, with fiction shading into nonfiction, poetry bleeding into history.

I too aspire to write and read encyclopedias of my time. Some of my favorite books—Cryptonomicon, The Name of the Rose, The Secret History—have that kind of feel. It is always a good time to blur traditional genres—to paraphrase, as James Wood said, “it is always a good time to shred formulas.” But the novel has been blurring genre since its inception: one could argue that the only way to blue genre these days is by upholding genre, whatever that might mean. Like the dream of the novel-encyclopedia, it is probably impossible, however desirable it may be. I doubt that Zone gets very close.

Fool Me Once: Hustlers, Hookers, Headliners, and How NOT to Get Screwed in Vegas — Rick Lax

January 4, 2011 By in Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The only person being fooled in Las Vegas is the one who willfully wants to be fooled. That’s not quite the lesson, to the extent there is one, of Rick Lax’s Fool Me Once, but it’s an obvious moral to take from a book about moving to Vegas after law school and being something like a flaneur observing the scene (if there are other things going on, like work, they’re not part of the story). Vegas only works on you to the extent you let it, and for all of Las Vegas’ marketing and sexual innuendo, the city is really built on getting you to believe that it’s okay or even wise for you to lie to yourself about things you should know. You know, for example, that hookers still charge; the house always wins in gambling; you can run all you want and still not leave yourself behind.

Fool Me Once describes this dynamic. The chapters are vignettes with recurring themes: The hot roommate Oxana appears; a non-relationship with a girl named Zella culminates in a three-night hookup between her other shags, much like that one weekend you had in college; being a magician appears, disappears, and reappears; quasi life lessons come from a hooker named Kiana. The major weakness of Fool Me Once is its lack of a main narrative thread, since one section has little to do with another. This doesn’t make individual moments weaker, but one does start to wonder whether the book is going in any particular direction. Although I don’t wish to spoil the end, the answer is probably obvious. Still, parts are clever and the book is pretty funny: “My fellow law school graduates went off to Europe to ‘find themselves,’ ” and an asterisk says “I’m pretty sure this is code for do drugs.”

Elsewhere, a few sentences capture what hot clubs are like, or aspire to be like, and why they’re so irritating unless you’re “Girls Only,” which I never am: “JET had four separate lines: one for nobodies, one for people on the list, one for ‘Girls Only,’ and one for VIPs. The lines snaked and weaved and did everything else lines could do except move forward.” Better to realize this and understand the system than complain about it. Later, we find that “Men can’t comprehend that when it comes to monitoring professional sporting teams, I don’t have the attention span of a Buddhist monk on Ritalin.” I like the juxtaposition of images even more than I like the idea of someone who doesn’t care much about sports, since I don’t either. I reference “You Will Suffer Humiliation When The Sports Team From My Area Defeats The Sports Team From Your Area” from The Onion when the topic arises, since becoming rapturously involved in a group of large men I’ve never met, joined contractually together only by larger salaries to chase a ball doesn’t appeal to me. I understand that sports voyeurism functions as a form of social bonding and displaced primeval small group formation, but that doesn’t make sports any more tedious to watch (as opposed to playing, which I like).

Here’s a sample of one moment from our friendly hooker, Kiana, who says, “Vegas will be good for you. [. . .] It teaches you how the world works. But until you figure things out for yourself, here’s a general rule: If you think somebody you’re interested in is sleeping with somebody else, they are.” Statements about “how the world [supposedly] works” usually say more about the people making the statement than they do about the world. The world works differently for many of us, depending on what we show we value, and for hookers who probably see a lot of married men coming through town on business, the world probably looks quite different than it does for many, but not all, of the rest of us.

Such supposed wisdom is cheap: everyone thinks they know how the world works, but no one actually does, with the possible exception of physicists, who as a group probably don’t spend huge amounts of time gaming clubs in Vegas. A chapter is titled “How I’d Gone from Studying for the Illinois Bar Exam to Cavorting with Las Vegas Prostitutes and Con Men in Such a Short Period of Time.” The answer is pretty obvious: he flew or drove, which doesn’t take very long from anywhere in the lower 48. Neither prostitutes nor con men are hard to find, as long as they think you have money.

Lax has an eye for status distinctions and how they’re constructed, although he doesn’t talk about the subject as much as he might. For example, he tells us in a footnote, “Strippers pride themselves on not sleeping with guys for money; call girls pride themselves on not getting naked before large groups of men.” I believe it: people are very good at deluding themselves into thinking they can put someone nominally “below” them, even if the “below” in this case relies on female sexual fears. Going on Lax’s interest in deception (which becomes more nominal as the book goes on), I would guess the call girls are being more honest in the service they provide.

Lax mentions the Las Vegas motto of “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas:”

[. . .] the ‘What happens’ ad campaign’s implication is crystal clear: If you come to Las Vegas and gamble away your children’s college fund and cheat on your wife with, say, two prostitutes you meet at the Palms food court [sic], the city’s tourism board will credit your bank account and fly you home in a time machine so you can un-cheat on your wife and preserve the sanctity of your marriage. That message hits home with a lot of people; every year 40 million visit Las Vegas, and do their best to hang on to their money in the process.

Does it still counts as “deception” if we know we’re going to be deceived? As the way I put it implies, the answer is “no.” Maybe Vegas helps us let out the person we want to be, but more likely it encourages a slightly different mindset than one might have otherwise (more on that later). Still, even as Vegas flouts its supposed difference, Fool Me Once punctures the bravado. There is a certain amount of ordinariness, despite how Vegas is supposed to be ludicrous; Lax dates a girl and says:

Zella seemed to really like me, but judging from what she told me about her ex-boyfriends, she also seemed to have really bad taste in men. I was careful not to discuss her most recent ex or the breakup [. . . ] We talked a lot about her and Austin [Zella’s boss at a club]. About what a strange, demanding guy he was. And the more she told me about him, the more worried I got.

I don’t think I’ve ever met a girl who said she has great taste in men; all of them seem “to have really bad taste in men.” Almost all of us who date have a “most recent ex” or breakup. Very few people love their bosses, primarily because in many circumstances bosses have interests that are antithetical to the employees: bosses need or want more work out of employees and employees need or want more money out of bosses. Many of us tell similar stories because the incentives we face cause the stories to turn out like Zella’s. Women often find indifferent bad boys who exhibit social proof and have game attractive for short-term flings but find them exasperating in longer relationships, then announce their “bad taste in men” as if that’s a surprise—when it’s actually a conflict between short- and long-term desires. This dynamic appears to be common throughout the dating world; maybe Vegas amps it somewhat, but the problem again remains built into relationships.

Lax describes some of the ways deception works and how people lie to each other. But lying is partially a function of repeated interactions with people over time, and William Flesch’s excellent book Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction describes some of the ways deception, the punishment of deception, and signaling work in narrative—and in life. One of the most successful strategies that game theory describes is called “tit-for-tat,” which means that you react to others primarily based on how they present to you. I suspect that most of the world actually plays variations on the tit-for-tat game: if you are mostly honest with others, they will mostly be honest with you. If you are mostly dishonest with others, and looking for dishonesty in others, you will mostly find it, and the optimal way to avoid dishonesty is to punish those who defect from the honesty game by refusing to interact with them. This is probably the most evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS), and it ensures that authentic knowledge of real dishonesty means that most people will refuse interaction with the dishonest.

Furthermore, the “costly signals” in Flesch’s book and evolutionary biology in general are those that are hardest to fake because they’re expensive, or costly. The canonical example is the peacock’s tail, which can only be as large and beautiful as it is if the bird itself is very healthy and has excess calories to burn. An example closer to Fool Me Once might be the much reviled “bottle service:” most guys can’t really afford $500 for a $30 bottle of booze, so buying bottles is a more honest signal of wealth than, say, claiming to be wealthy.

Still, if you combine costly signaling with one-off transactions (especially those of a sexual nature), you begin to get Las Vegas. As Lax implicitly points out, tit-for-tat strategies don’t apply if you consciously seek out dishonesty, which is basically the purpose of Las Vegas: cultivated dishonesty in which you know that most people are lying to you in some form, which in turn enables you to lie to most people without normal consequences if you lie to someone who is basically operating on a normal tit-for-tat level. I think this is basically why I found Vegas more boring than not: in order to exit the market for dishonesty, I had to leave the city. I think I understood this dynamic intellectually before I went, but it’s one thing to understand it intellectually and it’s another to have it spangling you everywhere you look.

Lax notes this tendency, although he doesn’t wrap it in the language of game theory and evolutionary biology, as I do:

The city is filled with fakers, from celebrity impersonators to magicians. From casino hosts who tell high rollers that they’d ‘be happy to’ oblige their most obnoxious, demeaning requests to gambling addicts who tell their spouses they don’t have gambling problems. From strippers who, for a price, will shed their clothes and pretend that everything you say is charming and hilarious to escorts who, for a price, will pretend that everything you say is charming and hilarious and then shed their clothes and then sleep with you.

No wonder so many people hate Las Vegas.

I went to Las Vegas for the first time a few weeks ago (my brother got a lot of mileage out of telling people that I’m 27 and visiting Vegas for the first time; most responded with mock astonishment; I shrugged). If Vegas is “filled with fakers,” so is everywhere else: perhaps it has more magicians, strippers, and hookers per capita than elsewhere, but the essence of being one of those things (as well as being a novelist) remains. The major difference is that in Las Vegas, faking is institutionally encouraged in the form of casinos. But you can find gambling anywhere, if you want to seek it out. One could view going to Vegas as a form of seeking it out. And it’s never been hard to find people who will “pretend” sexual interest in you “for a price,” but something about travel makes people more willing to lie to others or themselves about what they’re doing and why. Self-deception and its cousin hypocrisy are so common that they begin to seem like part of that elusive animal, human nature, which so many commentators and philosophers chase but so few manage to shoot, let alone bring down.

“So many people hate Las Vegas” because hate is one way we punish defectors: by castigating them in vile terms, we try to convince others to stay away and activate our own repulsion system. Hate is a very expensive emotion: I went to Vegas, and although the above makes it obvious that I don’t love the place, I don’t hate it either, perhaps because I understand why it exists and that it fills a need. Lax gets some of that too: he says “I don’t hate deception and deceivers, though. In fact, in a strange way I’m drawn to them.” I’m drawn to them too, but more as an object of study and interest than anything else. Maybe the above criticism of Vegas stems in part from the fact that I’m not a particularly skilled deceiver, and whatever skills I possess are poorly suited for the Vegas / club / bar environment, where I’ve tended to do reasonably okay but not fabulously well. But if others privilege an environment where I don’t thrive, I probably should “hate” that environment as a way of discouraging others from entering it. But I would rather understand things than hate them, and I might lie to myself by saying that I understand why people fake things.

In the clubs, I think most people are dishonest, and their skill at dancing is consistently low, but there’s basically no penalty for it or reward for skilled dancing. In contrast, at salsa clubs or ballroom events, the penalty for low dancing skill and an unwillingness is a dearth of partners. The only major exception is, as in Vegas clubs, very attractive girls, who will still find partners who are often skilled dancers. A lot of the girls in Vegas weren’t good dancers. I’m not an especially good dancer, but at least I’ve learned enough to do more than grind, which was great as a 15-year-old at youth group but becomes somewhat tedious more than a decade later.

There’s this whole Vegas mythos that’s been encouraged by gangsters, writers, and corporations; the “What happens” campaign is an example. By writing this post and reading Fool Me Once, I’m partially reinforcing the mythos even as I pretend to reveal what’s beneath.

Despite all that, if someone asked me to go back again, I would.

The reason Lax gives for becoming interested in deception isn’t especially convincing: a girl he’s dating falls for a con man who offers her a dubious paralegal job that obviously doesn’t exist and probably is a setup to acquire sex. After this experience, Lax says that “my innate fear multiplied” and that “I’m terrified of being conned and I don’t want to be taken advantage of [. . . .]” But the circumstance that ignites this fear is so preposterously obvious that Lax, like the reader, knows it’s a setup. This is a bit like saying I never want to fly commercial airlines again because my buddy’s homemade hang glider resulted in injury: the difference in magnitude and kind between source and reaction are so large as to make the comparison spurious. Like Las Vegas. Like many other things, if you care to look for them. Lax addresses the issue:

I don’t think I was being overly paranoid. If you stop and think about how much deception there is in the world—in business, in advertising, in media, in politics, in romance—I think you’ll agree that my fear was justified.

I don’t agree: there is a certain amount of “deception” in the world, which one can find without looking very hard (it’s probably an ESS to lightly deceive), but deception is often enough a product of people trying to shade things rather than people trying to con you outright, as happens to the girl chasing the phony paralegal job. There’s a difference in kind between her experience and someone in a law firm implying the firm is more important than it is in order to motivate employees. The passage quoted above might be implausible, but it functions as an excuse to start the book with some kind of purpose, and though that purpose is lost, it still brings up a useful point: If we’re this worried about deception, we should react by not reading Fool Me Once, which contains this disclaimer in the front matter:

While the events described in this book are essentially true, I changed the names and identifying characteristics of certain individuals. In other cases, I used character composites. I also reconstructed dialogue and altered details of certain events, including their timing and location.

“Essentially true” might be another way of saying “not true.” “Character composites,” “reconstructed dialogue,” “altered details”—these are all synonyms for “made up.” If you stop and think about how much deception there is in the world of writing, I think you’ll agree that my fear of being taken by a lying author is justified. If we apply Lax’s standards of paranoia to his own work, the logical reaction is to stop reading it and read fiction, which we at least know is “made up”—unless, of course, it uses copious detail from “real life” to make its point, in which case I guess we can’t trust it, either. The argument about fiction’s relationship with reality goes very far back, to at least Don Quixote if not earlier (see Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations On Quixote for more on that subject; for the novel in general, various theorists have discussed this, including Watt in The Rise of the Novel and others who write about the enchantment of Romance).

The basic problem is that radical skepticism leads one to think in paradoxes, like there is no truth, including this statement, which therefore invalidates itself. It leads one to question all epistemology, and it leads one towards Descartes’ seventeenth century formulation; as Tom Sorell describes it in Descartes: A Very Short Introduction, “In the First Meditation Descartes makes himself doubt that he has an idea of any really existing thing. He rejects as false all his beliefs about material objects, even his faith in the reality of simple material natures.” But that point of view leaves us essentially nowhere: it’s like philosophers who sit around, decide there is no such thing as reality, and then go to lunch. That strain of thinking led towards pragmatism, which argues that what really matters is what ideas cause us to do differently.

Most of us have a reasonably pragmatic relationship to the truth: we know that Lax’s girlfriend is being conned, as does Lax, as should his girlfriend (unless she is willfully deceiving herself, which might otherwise be called stupidity—and the optimal way to deal with people we think stupid is often to exit the market, so to speak, with them). We also know that doubting the the truth of anything is “being overly paranoid,” which is why Lax has to tell us that he “thinks [we’ll] agree” that his fear is justified. We won’t, and claiming we will points to the fear we won’t. A professor once told me (or was it to an entire class? Memory is awfully faulty) that anytime a student writes something is “obviously” or “clearly” true, he looks more closely at the proposition being argued, because something marked as obvious isn’t, otherwise it wouldn’t need to be marked. Show me what you fear and I’ll show you what you lack, as the cliche goes. Or something like that.

Fortunately, this pragmatic philosophy also means that I’m inclined to accept Lax’s caveat: the events probably are essentially true, unless he’s pulling a James Frey or really lying to us. But I have no way to tell, and if I find out he is, I’ll put a disclaimer at the top of this post saying that he’s a liar and that you shouldn’t read his book. In short, I’ll punish him for the transgression, which I would find a significant one. But unless the lie is really egregious, I’ll let him go because he can point to the disclaimer that says he might be lying to me, but only in minor ways—much like pretty much anyone in a serious relationship is accepting that their partner has probably fudged at least a little in their past, putting an orange filter over the bright white stage lights of life. Whether we decide something is a serious transgression or minor quibble is mostly a matter of pragmatism, and it varies by person. Lax argues he’s not being overly paranoid, but I think he is—and I think you’ll agree with me, based on this post, or based on reading his book yourself.

No one can agree on how to make tea

January 3, 2011 By in Culture, Personal Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Since reading “A Hacker’s Guide to Tea” (and this worthy discussion) I’ve begun drinking more of the beverage, which I rather like now that I know how to make it: tea isn’t hard to prepare. But I came from the idiotic “more is better” school of thought and figured the longer and hotter that tea is steeped, the better it must be. In reality, this just makes it tremendously bitter and vile.

In actuality, light teas—like green and white—need to be steeped at temperatures well below boiling for about a minute or two. Black teas should be steeped with boiling water for two to three minutes. Tea should be loose leaf and circulate freely with the hot water poured on it; I now use an IngenuiTEA from Adagio for one to two cups. The drink falls from the bottom of the device, rather like it’s peeing, but I find the overall effect quite amusing.

Still, the number of people with very strong and conflicting opinions about how to make tea is astonishing. “Very strong and conflicting opinions” would also have made an excellent title for Christopher Hitchens’ memoir, but today he merely offers bilious tea making instructions—and that’s as strange a construction to write as it is to read—in How To Make a Decent Cup of Tea: Ignore Yoko Ono and John Lennon, and heed George Orwell’s tea-making advice:

It’s quite common to be served a cup or a pot of water, well off the boil, with the tea bags lying on an adjacent cold plate. Then comes the ridiculous business of pouring the tepid water, dunking the bag until some change in color occurs, and eventually finding some way of disposing of the resulting and dispiriting tampon surrogate. The drink itself is then best thrown away, though if swallowed, it will have about the same effect on morale as a reading of the memoirs of President James Earl Carter.

I love the overstated, overstuffed phrasing: “ridiculous business,” “dispiriting tampon surrogate,” “best thrown away.” But his advice is limited to black tea. He goes to to quote Orwell ” ‘[O]ne should take the teapot to the kettle, and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours.’ This isn’t hard to do, even if you are using electricity rather than gas, once you have brought all the makings to the same scene of operations right next to the kettle.” But, in The Story of Tea: A Cultural and Drinking Guide (which is not very good and reads like a travelogue), Mary Lou and Robert J. Heiss say:

While millions of avid tea drinkers around the world ‘take the teapot to the kettle’ to use water that is as hot as possible to brew ‘proper English tea,’ we find that even the stoutest black teas prefer to be brewed in water that is slightly off the boil. Any perceived reduction in strength can be made up by steeping the tea a little longer.

Here is my proposition for Hitchens and innumerable others: instead of insisting that one way is better, why not take the Coke-Pepsi challenge? Brew a large number of cups both ways, give them to a large number of people over a large number of occasions, and see which one works better? More likely than not, neither will work out. Based on the large amount of contradictory advice I’ve read regarding tea, I would guess that once one has a reasonably fresh, loose leaf and a reasonable knowledge of approximate brewing temperatures, the rest is superstition.

The analogy to wine is probably appropriate: except for people with very highly developed senses for wine, most of us probably can tell “bad” “better” and “best” but little more. So we decide what wine to drink based on price and innuendo more than anything else. By the same token, I bet that Hitchens can’t really tell the difference between tea brewed off the boil or not, but he probably derives a certain amount of status by having very strong opinions about how tea should be brewed. I leave to the reader who is familiar with Hitchens’ work to decide whether this general principle might apply beyond the realm of caffeinated beverages.

Finally, Hitchens is only writing about black tea, but he doesn’t say as much. Making green or white tea as he recommends will be terrible. Still, even there the advice is contradictory Tony at The Chicago Tea Company—quoted in the first link—says black tea should be steeped for one minute or so. “A guide to tea” by the foppish Chris Cason says that black tea should be steeped no more than five minutes, while white teas are more forgiving and could be steeped as long as seven. I am more inclined to agree with Tony, based on experiment. The issue of making tea should not, however, be one argued with the fervor of someone discussing Middle Eastern politics.

EDIT: I’m now reading Orwell’s “A Nice Cup of Tea,” in which he says:

“If you look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points.
This is curious, not only because tea is one of the mainstays of civilisation in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.
When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than 11 outstanding points. On perhaps two of them there would be pretty general agreement, but at least four others are acutely controversial” {Orwell “Essays”@990}.

To me, the most interesting part of this is his comment about how only “two” of 11 points “would be in pretty general agreement,” while “four others are acutely controversial.” This indicates that tea-making preferences have been an issue for at least sixty years (the essay was published in 1946) and are likely to continue to be controversial in the near future. So far as I know, “violent disputes” haven’t resulted from tea making, but then perhaps Americans, especially those in overheated Arizona, are not so particular about tea, or there isn’t the critical mass necessary for violent factions to form.

EDIT 2: A redditor pointed me to the ISO 3103 standard on making tea. Even the parody, however, leans toward black tea: “The method consists in extracting of soluble substances in dried tea leaf, containing in a porcelain or earthenware pot, by means of freshly boiling water [. . .]” Follow the standard regarding green tea and you’ll find a less-than-optimal cup.

As long as we’re discussing Hitchens, here’s one of the more amusing quotes from Hitch-22: “I always take it for granted that sexual moralizing by public figures is a sign of hypocrisy or worse, and most usually a desire to perform the very act that is most being condemned.”

What happens when people with partial knowledge start talking about college costs in Arizona and elsewhere

December 31, 2010 By in Links, Teaching Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

One painful thing about knowing a complex politicized subject fairly well is that most of the commentary on it looks pretty dumb because the commentators don’t really understand it. The latest edition of that malady comes from A Dismal Picture For Higher Education in Arizona, which someone forwarded to me because a) I’m a grad student at the University of Arizona and b) I write about academic novels. The problem with the link is that while some of it is somewhat accurate, some of it less so, and a lot of it is taken out of context. For example, it shows a table demonstrating that a surprisingly high number of people working in low-skill professions that don’t require a college degree nonetheless have one—but that probably says more about the graduates than it does about college.

The next item quotes the conservative Goldwater Institute saying that the number of administrators has grown:

Between 1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America’s leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research or service only grew by 18 percent. Inflation-adjusted spending on administration per student increased by 61 percent during the same period, while instructional spending per student rose 39 percent. Arizona State University, for example, increased the number of administrators per 100 students by 94 percent during this period while actually reducing the number of employees engaged in instruction, research and service by 2 percent. Nearly half of all full-time employees at Arizona State University are administrators.

(You can read more in this vein via Why So Many Administrators?, but although it asks “Why so many administrators?”, it doesn’t answer that question.)

Problem is, the Goldwater Institute study is specious for two reasons: 1) It doesn’t deal with changing definitions of “administrator” over time, and although it implies that more administrators equal more waste, it doesn’t actually talk about which administrators it wants cut. Job services offices are new and science grants often require administrators. Everyone is against bureaucracy unless it’s the bureaucracy they need. Hell, I’m against administration, bureaucracy, evil, simple carbohydrates (except for carrot cake), and the coyotes that ate my neighbor’s cat. So do we want the administrators in the beefed up jobs office cut? The ones in the disability resource centers that’ve opened widely? The ones that offer counseling to students contemplating suicides? The ones hired to manage science grants? You tell me.

Productivity among universities isn’t increasing—see College Costs: The Sequel for more on why:

College cost, and cost in the other similar industries, is rising for three broad reasons. First, over time we have found ways to reduce the number of labor hours and kilowatts of power needed to produce most manufactured goods and agricultural products. By contrast, many services remain artisan-like. The time of the service provider is the service itself, and labor-saving productivity gains are very hard to achieve. As a result, the cost of a year of college or an hour of a lawyer’s time must rise compared to the price of a ton of steel or a bushel of wheat.

This is “cost disease,” which is sometimes called Baumol’s disease, and a comment by Al zeroed in on it quite accurately. Rising productivity elsewhere in the economy generates this “disease,” while creating the growth that pays the costs for these more artisan-like services. The college-centric view of the world does not accord this argument the central place the data say it deserves.

[. . .]

A number of our critics noted that distance learning has the potential to revolutionize higher education. We wish we were as sanguine as the distance-learning optimists. The best evidence suggests that course work that blends face-to-face instruction with distance components yields the best outcome. The best courses for this are introductory classes with relatively static knowledge. Many universities already are well down the path of incorporating these approaches.

In short, we haven’t really found an effective way to increase the productivity of education because we can’t find good ways of educating mass numbers of people save through having them sit together with more experienced people who are supposed to be experts in their fields and having those “experts” (who we call “teachers” or “professors”) impart some of what they know. This doesn’t scale easily because the prof / teacher : student ratio remains approximately even. Although digital utopians want the Internet to replace teachers / profs, it appears that the vast majority of the population prefers watching porn and computer games to figuring out what the hell Hegel is talking about or how mitochondrial DNA works.

Then there are comments like this: “Arizona State University’s four-year graduation rate is a shocking 28 percent. Low standards and easy loans are a recipe for disaster.” There are two obvious ways to raise the graduation rate: raise the admissions bar so better students get in or make it easier to graduate. Grade inflation has already done the latter to some extent. ASU and UA will effectively take almost anyone, which they apparently need or want to for budgetary reasons.

An aside about grade inflation: one of the most useful efforts I’ve read about recently comes from A Quest to Explain What Grades Really Mean, which discusses UNC Chapel Hill’s effort “to add extra information — probably median grades, and perhaps more — to transcripts. In addition, they expect to post further statistics providing context online and give instructors data on how their grading compares with their colleagues’.” This would be incredibly welcomed, because at the moment there’s a strong incentive for professors to give higher grades, which lead to higher evaluations, but don’t have any immediate cost for the profs involved.

The harder way to raise the college graduation rate is to make classes smaller, track each student more carefully, increase the number of advisors, and so forth. All this will decrease “productivity” (it’s very “productive” by simple measures of productivity to have one prof lecture 1,000 students). In short, big schools would need to become more like Clark University, where I went to undergrad, only with tens of thousands of students, and this would raise costs, ceteris paribus.

The biggest problem with this article is that it acts like college administrators and professors aren’t aware of the kinds of issues raised. They are, and there’ve been endless books written about them. A recent winner: Why Does College Cost So Much?.

There may be a “A Dismal Picture For Higher Education in Arizona,” but it isn’t for the reasons stated or implied in this article.

A meta point: most big, complex social systems (think healthcare, education, government, military, companies) don’t exist as they do because they’re the theoretical best. They exist the way they do because they’ve evolved thanks to reactions from social, financial, and other pressures into the beasts they look like today. Most people don’t have the historical knowledge necessary to understand why and how they evolved they way they have.

My overall political feelings are usually captured by The Onion, mostly because so much day-to-day political discourse looks like parody. Two examples from America’s Finest News Source: “Barack Obama – Either Doing His Best In One of The Most Difficult Times In American History, Or Hitler,” since we all know politicians must be one or the other, and “Jan Brewer – Not Afraid To Do What The Federal Government Won’t And Shouldn’t,” which basically describes what Arizona politics are like:

By demanding that police check any suspicious- looking individual’s immigration status, Brewer stood up for the kind of racial profiling that other politicians wouldn’t, and under any circumstances shouldn’t, have the guts to support. Refusing to bow down to sense or reason, Brewer also made it possible for citizens to sue police officers who fail to carry out the troublingly vague terms of the new law, no matter how much it might tie up the state’s court system—a bold stance the federal government simply couldn’t be bothered with.

Efforts to solve big, institutional problems tend to suffer from unintended consequences. They tend not to respond well to ideologically driven solutions, whether those preferred by the left or right. They tend to to require a lot of strenuous effort if you’re even going to understand them, let alone propose to fix them, and the problems are much easier to identify than possible solutions to those problems, which might be worse than the problems themselves. Note one such example above: a simple way to improve the graduation rate at Arizona universities is to raise the admissions bar. But doing so means that some deserving though marginal students won’t get a shot at college at all. They’ll be more likely to steal the car of the people who write “A Dismal Picture For Higher Education in Arizona.” And so on.

This is the place where I’m supposed to propose solutions to the kinds of problems universities have, but I don’t have any that are short and easily digestible. Beware people who say they do.

Late December Links: Robertson Davies' stock falls, science fiction, typing speed, Jane Austen meets pornography, censorship, and more

December 27, 2010 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Does Typing Speed Really Matter For Programmers? Answer: probably not, once you reach a relatively low level of speed. I suspect the same is true for writers: I tend to be more limited by my brain than my fingers.

* Steampunk and the origins of science fiction, which go in directions different than the ones you’re probably imagining.

* Anarcho-Monarchism, Tolkien and Dalí.

* A great comment on blogging:

I think there are two ways to blog: altruistically or narcissistically. If you’re blogging altruistically you’re blogging for others primarily and yourself secondarily. If you’re blogging narcissistically you’re mostly blogging for yourself.

Which am I?

* Possibly NSFW but hilarious: Porn and Penetration, an adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.

* Literary reputations, with Melville falling and Tolkien gaining. Sadly, Robertson Davies is “falling off a cliff,” which I find distressing because I think he might be the most underrated writer I know, and most people I’ve recommended The Deptford Trilogy to love it; they ask why he isn’t better known, but I have no answer I wish to share publicly.

* The [Unjust] war against cameras:

Police across the country are using decades-old wiretapping statutes that did not anticipate iPhones or Droids, combined with broadly written laws against obstructing or interfering with law enforcement, to arrest people who point microphones or video cameras at them. Even in the wake of gross injustices, state legislatures have largely neglected the issue.

* New York Magazine’s Chris Rovzar speciously asks of Taylor Swift and Jake Gyllenhaal, Why Must We Pretend It Is Not Strange When Adult Celebrities Date Underage Celebrities? There are a couple obvious answers:

1) Taylor Swift, at 20, is nowhere near underage; the fact that she “isn’t old enough to legally drink alcohol” (emphasis in original) says more about U.S. law than what it means to be an adult.

2) Most women appear to want to date men of higher status than themselves. If you’re a celebrity, the only way you can effectively do this is by dating another celebrity.

This assumes the post is serious, which it might not be, or that it’s not merely trolling, which it might be.

* Eminent domain now effectively has no limits, and that’s definitely a bad thing.

* Arizona State makes 30 Rock.

* Amazon’s Kindle censorship. This is a great danger, since we’re moving toward a world in which a handful of companies (Amazon and Apple, most probably) may effectively control the vast majority of electronic books.

(See too the Ars Technica take.)

* Shortage of Engineers or a Glut: No Simple Answer. The real answer: there is always a shortage of smart, motivated people at the top of their field and a glut of people at the bottom of any field.

* Not Really ‘Made in China’: The iPhone’s Complex Supply Chain Highlights Problems With Trade Statistics. The short version: beware trade statistics, especially those related to manufacturing.

Late December Links: Robertson Davies’ stock falls, science fiction, typing speed, Jane Austen meets pornography, censorship, and more

December 27, 2010 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Does Typing Speed Really Matter For Programmers? Answer: probably not, once you reach a relatively low level of speed. I suspect the same is true for writers: I tend to be more limited by my brain than my fingers.

* Steampunk and the origins of science fiction, which go in directions different than the ones you’re probably imagining.

* Anarcho-Monarchism, Tolkien and Dalí.

* A great comment on blogging:

I think there are two ways to blog: altruistically or narcissistically. If you’re blogging altruistically you’re blogging for others primarily and yourself secondarily. If you’re blogging narcissistically you’re mostly blogging for yourself.

Which am I?

* Possibly NSFW but hilarious: Porn and Penetration, an adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.

* Literary reputations, with Melville falling and Tolkien gaining. Sadly, Robertson Davies is “falling off a cliff,” which I find distressing because I think he might be the most underrated writer I know, and most people I’ve recommended The Deptford Trilogy to love it; they ask why he isn’t better known, but I have no answer I wish to share publicly.

* The [Unjust] war against cameras:

Police across the country are using decades-old wiretapping statutes that did not anticipate iPhones or Droids, combined with broadly written laws against obstructing or interfering with law enforcement, to arrest people who point microphones or video cameras at them. Even in the wake of gross injustices, state legislatures have largely neglected the issue.

* New York Magazine’s Chris Rovzar speciously asks of Taylor Swift and Jake Gyllenhaal, Why Must We Pretend It Is Not Strange When Adult Celebrities Date Underage Celebrities? There are a couple obvious answers:

1) Taylor Swift, at 20, is nowhere near underage; the fact that she “isn’t old enough to legally drink alcohol” (emphasis in original) says more about U.S. law than what it means to be an adult.

2) Most women appear to want to date men of higher status than themselves. If you’re a celebrity, the only way you can effectively do this is by dating another celebrity.

This assumes the post is serious, which it might not be, or that it’s not merely trolling, which it might be.

* Eminent domain now effectively has no limits, and that’s definitely a bad thing.

* Arizona State makes 30 Rock.

* Amazon’s Kindle censorship. This is a great danger, since we’re moving toward a world in which a handful of companies (Amazon and Apple, most probably) may effectively control the vast majority of electronic books.

(See too the Ars Technica take.)

* Shortage of Engineers or a Glut: No Simple Answer. The real answer: there is always a shortage of smart, motivated people at the top of their field and a glut of people at the bottom of any field.

* Not Really ‘Made in China’: The iPhone’s Complex Supply Chain Highlights Problems With Trade Statistics. The short version: beware trade statistics, especially those related to manufacturing.

Noticing the detail in James Wood’s How Fiction Works

December 26, 2010 By in Briefly Noted, Fiction, Writing Tags: , , , , , 3 Comments

 

Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practise on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life. And so on and on. You have only to teach literature to realise that most young readers are poor noticers. I know from my own old books, wantonly annotated twenty years ago when I was a student, that I routinely underlined for approval details and images and metaphors that strike me now as commonplace, while serenely missing things which now seem wonderful. We grow, as readers, and twenty-year-olds are relative virgins. They have not yet read enough literature to be taught by it how to read it. 

You only have to read How Fiction Works to realize you haven’t been as a good a noticer in life or in literature as you once thought you were. This is why I’ve reread it once a year or so since it came out in 2007, and each time I notice different things about it—like in this passage, where the adverb “serenely” is so appropriate despite the many admonishes to avoid adverbs whenever possible. We know precisely what the twenty-year-old is like, mostly like because we’ve met him and her, perhaps been him or her.

I also notice Wood’s phrase “relative virgins,” which is funny because virginity is supposed to be a binary thing: you are one or you aren’t. But in a post-Bill-Clinton age when nominal “abstinence pledges” make the parsing of the relation of act to word important to a surprisingly large number of people, virginity feels a lot more relative than it used to. Maybe I wouldn’t be as aware of this if I hadn’t read Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher, which in turn cues me into the kinds of things I hear from undergrads at the University of Arizona—which may in turn feed my own fiction, in the kind of virtuous cycle Wood describes here. And since I have taught literature, I know precisely what he means about “poor noticers,” except that he should probably add that relatively few people become the kinds of dramatically good noticers who really love literary fiction as they get older: hence some of the popularity of the Dan Browns of the world.

Finally, because How Fiction Works is so delightful, one more quote: “The novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it.”

What people want and what they are: religious edition

December 23, 2010 By in Culture, Life, Philosophy, status Tags: , , , , 4 Comments

Shankar Vedantam’s “Why do Americans claim to be more religious than they are?” dovetails with my theory of why so much political discourse is so unsatisfying: a lot of it is actually about signaling values:

Beyond the polls, social scientists have conducted more rigorous analyses of religious behavior. Rather than ask people how often they attend church, the better studies measure what people actually do. The results are surprising. Americans are hardly more religious than people living in other industrialized countries. Yet they consistently—and more or less uniquely—want others to believe they are more religious than they really are.
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Religion in America seems tied up with questions of identity in ways that are not the case in other industrialized countries. When you ask Americans about their religious beliefs, it’s like asking them whether they are good people, or asking whether they are patriots. They’ll say yes, even if they cheated on their taxes, bilked Medicare for unnecessary services, and evaded the draft. Asking people how often they attend church elicits answers about their identity—who people think they are or feel they ought to be, rather than what they actually believe and do.

And if you ask Americans about their sexual habits, you also find that straight women consistently report fewer partners than men; the most fascinating study on this subject, “Truth and Consequences: Using the Bogus Pipeline to Examine Sex Differences in Self-Reported Sexuality,” finds that women who believe their answers about sexual histories will be observed report the fewest partners, while those who believe they are hooked up a lie-detector (which actually does nothing) report the most—a number that puts them on par with the men in the study. The men’s answers do not change much. In both the case of religion and sexuality, “questions of identity” may be at stake. In the case of religion, as I note above, I suspect that religion becomes closer to a political question for many people, and political questions often aren’t really about the costs or benefits or desirability of the policy at hand. They’re about what the person espousing an opinion believes about themselves.

Or, as Julian Sanchez puts it, “a lot of our current politics has less to do with actual policy disagreements than with resolving status anxieties.” I think his overall post is right, but I suspect that people pick their preferred policies (beyond patriotism, which is his example) to signal what they’re really like or want people to believe they’re really like.

Take my favorite example, gun control: the pro-gun types want other to think of them as capable, fierce, tough, and independent. And who isn’t in favor of those things? The anti-gun types want others to think of them as community-oriented, valuing health and welfare, and caring. And who isn’t in favor of those things?

You could extend this to other fields too (tax cuts, health care, whatever the issue du jour is), and they don’t always map to a neat left/right axis. Anyone can have an opinion that signals values on complex political topics in a way they can’t about, say, theoretical physics, mostly because complex political topics often don’t have correct answers. So they can be easily used to signal values that are often divorced from whatever real conditions on the ground look like. Almost no one uses their opinions on vector calculus to signify what they most believe.

Richard Feynman noted this tendency in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!. A princess says to Feynman that “[. . .] nobody knows anything about [physics], so I guess we can’t talk about it.” He replies: “On the contrary [. . .] It’s because somebody knows something about it that we can’t talk about physics. It’s the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance—gold transfers we can’t talk about, because those are understood—so it’s the subjects that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!”

That was the end of his discussion with the princess. But I think Feynman is on to something, and that something has to do with how people use political issues as means to show their values. Since very few people will change their fundamental values over a short period of time (if they ever will), arguing with most people about Republicans and Democrats (or whatever) is usually not about policy, but about belief.

Since picking up on this idea, I’ve become far less interested in political arguments, which are often cover for values arguments, and it’s very hard to change people’s fundamental values. Unless people acknowledge that political and religious debates are often about values, instead of the surface phenomena being discussed, you won’t get good conversation. This is probably one reason why so much political discourse is so unsatisfying: no one will even acknowledge what it’s actually about!

And maybe Americans adopted religious status, as Vedantam has it, because we don’t have as many inborn status markers, as Andrew Potter notes in The Authenticity Hoax:

When most people think of status, they think of the rigid class structures of old Europe. In contrast, North America is considered to be a relatively classless society. Sure, we have various forms of inequality, income being the most obvious and socially pernicious, but we have no entrenched class structure, no aristocracy that enjoys its privileges explicitly by virtue of birth, not merit. Nevertheless, urban North Americans live in what is probably the most status-conscious culture on the face of the Earth. The reason we don’t recognized this fact is that most of us are stuck in a model derived from the old aristo/bourgeois/prole hierarchy, where status is linear and vertical, a ladder on which one may (or may not, depending on the status markers that are in play) be able to move either up or down.

Now, in contrast, Potter sees that hierarchy as “obsolete,” since we now focus more on being “cool” or alternative, not driven solely by money, and known more for what we like than what we have. Forms of status change, but status doesn’t. The “rigid class structures of old Europe” might not apply, but the somewhat rigid ideals of religion might still, even if we’re still shifting towards consumption and opinions as status markers. Religion often functions basically as an opinion—or an “identity.” And people will not readily alter their identity—except for me, of course, because my identity is built around being able to alter my identity.

I’m still not sure why people glom onto politics and religion to signal their identities, but I think Feynman is on the right track: we like things that are large and complex enough that only a very small number of experts can really afford to even understand the domain but that nonetheless lend themselves to sloganeering and the like.