If you’re a Mac user, today is Snow Leopard Day—meaning that Mac OS 10.6 is out. It has few major “features” in the sense that earlier versions did but is supposed to be much refined from Leopard. My copy is due to arrive early next week.
You can also read David Pogue’s review, Joshua Topolsky’s review (which has numerous screen shots), Brian Lam’s review, and Walter Mossberg’s review if you want to know more.
If you’re a Mac user, today is Snow Leopard Day—meaning that Mac OS 10.6 is out. It has few major “features” in the sense that earlier versions did but is supposed to be much refined from Leopard. My copy is due to arrive early next week.
You can also read David Pogue’s review, Joshua Topolsky’s review (which has numerous screen shots), Brian Lam’s review, and Walter Mossberg’s review if you want to know more.
I submitted a Hacker News (HN) link to Philip Greenspun’s essay Why I’m Not a Writer, which begins:
I’m not a writer. Sometimes I write, but I don’t define myself as a career writer. And that isn’t because I couldn’t tolerate the garret lifestyle of an obscure writer. It is because I couldn’t tolerate the garret lifestyle of a successful writer.
He’s right. The garret lifestyle is one reason (there are many others too) why so many writers are now affiliated with universities, as detailed in Mark McGurl’s excellent book The Program Era. In fact, university affiliation has become so pervasive that Neal Stephenson told this hilarious story on the subject in a Slashdot interview:
[… A] while back, I went to a writers’ conference. I was making chitchat with another writer, a critically acclaimed literary novelist who taught at a university. She had never heard of me. After we’d exchanged a bit of of small talk, she asked me “And where do you teach?” just as naturally as one Slashdotter would ask another “And which distro do you use?”
I was taken aback. “I don’t teach anywhere,” I said.
Her turn to be taken aback. “Then what do you do?”
“I’m…a writer,” I said. Which admittedly was a stupid thing to say, since she already knew that.
“Yes, but what do you do?”
I couldn’t think of how to answer the question—I’d already answered it!
“You can’t make a living out of being a writer, so how do you make money?” she tried.
“From…being a writer,” I stammered.
At this point she finally got it, and her whole affect changed. She wasn’t snobbish about it. But it was obvious that, in her mind, the sort of writer who actually made a living from it was an entirely different creature from the sort she generally associated with.
And once I got over the excruciating awkwardness of this conversation, I began to think she was right in thinking so. One way to classify artists is by to whom they are accountable.
In the HN thread, another poster named Quantumhobbit linked to Orson Scott Card dealing with the same subject. As Quantumhobbit says, “Basically his advice is make sure you have another source of income, such as a rich uncle, before you decide to become a full-time writer. There is no guaranty that you will make enough to support yourself, even in genre writing.”
But the most interesting response comes from Gwern, who said, “I note that [Greenspun’s essay is] from 1996, when the bubble was getting hot; are you suggesting that the web has not panned out for writers and that they are equally screwed online as off?” In reply, I said:
I think that the date of Greenspun’s essay is indicative of how little has changed, rather than how much. Most writers didn’t make very much money then, and they still don’t, which many people don’t seem to realize; one writer friend who also teaches university classes recently wrote to me and said that a colleague had asked, in all seriousness, if he was rich now that he’d written a book. Writers often work like astronauts to achieve relatively modest financial success, which people like the poster in the original HN thread might want to know before getting started in earnest at trying to write for the book market. Take a look at these posts from a guy who works in the sales department of a major publishing house regarding current advances for most types of fiction.
“are you suggesting that the web has not panned out for writers and that they are equally screwed online as off?”
Depends on what you mean by “panned out” and “screwed”; I can’t really tell from the nature of the question. If you mean, “Do I think writers can make enough from the Internet to support themselves?” the answer is yes; if you mean, “Will many of them do so, especially relative to the number who would like to?” the answer is “no.” In fact, I even wrote a blog post at Grant Writing Confidential on the subject of how unlikely it is for people to make money from blogging.
(Note: the above is slightly edited from the original.)
Gwern replied:
But to expand on what I meant: I remember that back in the dot-com bubble, the bubble Greenspan wrote that essay in, there was a lot of enthusiasm and hype about how the future would be so much better for authors and artists than the old world of offline publishing – the Web would empower creators, cut out the middlemen, and channel tons of money to them, via the magic of 0-cost publishing, micropayments, and other things like search engines or aggregators. Greenspan’s essay seems to buy into that zeitgeist, albeit relatively modestly.
Of course, that vision has largely come failed to come true (spectacularly so in the case of micropayments and agents). I wondered if the point of your linking this old essay was to emphasize the contrast and make clear that writing is still a marginal business regardless of where it’s being distributed or what neat technical gadgets are involved.
That wasn’t my point, but if I’d been smarter it would’ve been. Half the 1996 equation Gwern describes has come true: the web has vastly empowered writers’ ability to reach readers (and consultants’ ability to reach clients). But it definitely hasn’t channeled vast amounts of money to most writers, and many kinds of writers—like professional journalists—are being laid off en-masse.
In the world of the web, as in the 1849 California gold rush, the people who make real money aren’t the people panning for gold, but the people selling equipment to and building infrastructure for the people panning for gold. So too with online writing: Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, which drives this blog, probably makes or will make far more than anyone writing on it.
All of this could probably be appended to advice for a very very beginning writer. I think that knowledge for its own sake is valuable, even, or maybe especially, for artists.
One major problem of $20 Per Gallon isn’t just the book itself, but its ancestors. Christopher Steiner argues that a) oil prices will rise like an Atlas rocket and b) that such a rise will result in people flocking to dense, urban cities, the return of manufacturing to the United States, and a host of cultural changes. But neither proposition is as certain as he implies, and Steiner comes from a long line of environmental doom-sayers. Books like Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb—a best-seller in the 1970s—make Malthusian arguments that have proven wrong over the last 40 years. They predicted catastrophe, not iPods and the Internet.
Still, just because someone was incorrect about a past prediction doesn’t mean that a current prediction will be wrong; there’s probably a name for this kind of bias beyond “boy-who-cried-wolf-syndrome.” But the argument that $20 Per Gallon might be wrong goes deeper, as shown in Tad Friend’s “Plugged In: Is the electric car the future?” from this week’s New Yorker. Friend’s answer is “maybe,” which isn’t much of a surprise given the technological, infrastructure, and economic challenges surrounding electric vehicles. But if oil prices spike high enough, the switch might be painful and rapid—which could drive oil prices back down as demand drops. We saw something similar happen in the summer of 2008, when oil usage plummeted in response to higher prices. And judging by the amount of investment going into electric and hybrid vehicles, it’s not impossible imagine that climbing oil prices will lead people beyond those who want to show their environmental conscientiousness to buy them, resulting in exurban sprawl and a lifestyle not so different for most people, rather than the wholesale urban changes Steiner predicts.
Predictions about the end of the world or drastic changes to it have been so popular that Simon Pearson even wrote A Brief History of the End of the World: Apocalyptic Beliefs from Revelation to UFO Cults, which covers the history of people who predict the end of the world, or at least civilization (so far, their track record isn’t so hot, but many post-apocalyptic novels are fun to read). Steiner is more upbeat, seeing higher gas prices improving the world, and that part is refreshing and makes his work different from someone like Ehrlich’s.
Still, oil prices might not climb all that high in the immediate future. Although Steiner says “We have hit what’s popularly known as peak oil, meaning that global production of crude is at a zenith that will never again be realized,” Friend says, “It troubles [Elon] Musk [founder of Tesla Motors] that while few people know that the world’s oil supply could plateau by 2020 and run out as early as 2050, nearly everyone knows that electric cars suck.” Given the two sources, I would tend to trust the New Yorker’s famously fastidious fact-checkers over Steiner. Still, the Wall Street Journal reports today that Oil Prices Hit 2009 High. Based on this flurry of recent news, is Steiner more right or wrong? It depends on what happens to the market. People who think they know what will happen and bet accordingly will win or lose big. Some will presumably end up demonstrably wrong, like Ehrlich. Steiner cites an airline consultant who says “oil […] is bound to reach [eight dollars per gallon] within three or four years.” I wonder if someone will remember to call him on it then.
So the obviousness that Steiner argues just isn’t there. I’ve come to that conclusion in part because the book doesn’t break new ground or bring enough existing information together to make a compelling and new argument. If you’re familiar with the work of economist Edward Glaeser or writer Richard Florida, both of whom have often been cited in The Atlantic, you know where Steiner’s coming from. Florida even writes for the magazine, while Glaeser contributes to the New York Times’ Economix blog. Too much of $20 Per Gallon is going to be redundant or superfluous for anyone familiar with Glaeser and Florida’s work. To be worthwhile, a book needs to have such depth and such a strong animating idea that it must have hundreds of pages to flesh out its major ideas. Lately I’ve criticized a number of nonfiction books for that failing that test, including Rapt, America’s War on Sex, and The Secret Currency of Love.
In $20 Per Gallon, there’s also a troublesome undercurrent of snobbery that runs through, and a sense that Steiner looks down on the proles who like kitsch and SUVs for reasons other than economics, but those views are cloaked in economic arguments. In an aesthetic sense I’m more or less with Steiner, but he makes poorly supported arguments like this one:
According to some of American automakers’ own market researchers, the type of people who tend to buy SUVs are insecure and vain. They’re people who frequently are nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about having become parents. They have little confidence in their skills as drivers.
The source for this? Two writers who also have a strong enough point of view to make me doubt their own research: Brian Hicks and Chris Nelder, who wrote Profit from the Peak: The End of Oil and the Greatest Investment Event of the Century. As I tell freshmen: you have to go back and find the primary research material if you’re going to cite extravagant or unusual claims. I want to believe Steiner’s argument about people who drive SUVs in part because I don’t, and his argument flatters my own prejudices, which is nice. But the analytic side of my mind doesn’t buy it. He also says that the vast McMansions that were in vogue until February 2009 “will be an entrapment, an entrapment to giant utility bills and the attachment to a dwelling unit that will, with time, become a kind of pariah.” His financial argument is probably sound: spending vast quantities of money on a signaling device like a distant house isn’t playing smart financial defense. I don’t want to live in one. But because of the hybrid and electric car argument above, Steiner might be wrong on the basic affordability of McMansions, even if he remains right in his unstated view that they’re gaudy, ugly, and likely to fall apart.
The basic problem with $20 Per Gallon is that if you’ve read this post and followed most of the links, you now know more about the issue that the book describes than the book itself tells you. Someone would probably be better off subscribing to The Atlantic and The New Yorker than they would reading $20 Per Gallon, since those magazines do a better job of dealing with issues surrounding oil prices and their consequences than Steiner does here. A lot of that work is online. Go find it there. Once you have a map to finding it, you don’t Steiner to do the work for you.
Literary agent Janet Reid is asking for advice. Or, more specifically, she’s asking writers for advice about advice:
When you were starting out, what advice did you get that REALLY helped you? And I mean both helped you improve as a writer, and helped you deal with the sense of failure and frustration when you wanted to do something so bad you could taste it, and it wasn’t working.
I left a comment, but after 90 of them, I’m guessing she probably got all the advice she wanted. That being said, I wish that a) all of the following books had been written, b) someone pointed me to them, and c) I was smart enough to find and read them:
—James Wood’s How Fiction Works
—Francine Prose’s Reading like a Writer
—The two collected volumes from the New York Times, Writers on Writing.
—Renni Browne and Dave King’s Self Editing for Fiction Writers
Those five are the major ones. A few others that might be worth leaving off at first because they could be overwhelming:
—The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House
—William Zissner’s On Writing Well
—Martin Amis’ The War Against Cliche
—Steven King’s On Writing
It’s somehow popular to argue that writing can’t be taught, but the more experience I accumulate, the more I begin to doubt that advice. Mark McGurl tackles it to some extent in his book The Program Era, which is also probably worth reading for anyone pondering a career in writing fiction, since so many of those careers today run through teaching at some point or another.
Someone else in Reid’s comments section gave similar advice to mine but in different words: “Go to your local library and read every book in the “How to write” 808 section.” Good call. If the writer takes this advice, they’ll learn more than they ever could in 10 or 15 minutes with Reid. The writer might disagree with some or most of what’d dispensed in the books I listed, or the books listed in the 808 section—which is a good thing, because otherwise fiction would droop into being formulaic. That being said, I still think that at least knowing such guidance exists is a positive: it gives you something to work with, or something to work against. Either way, I think the knowledge imparted will beat beating one’s way around blindly in the dark.
EDIT: A friend has been telling me to read Robert Olen Butler’s From Where you Dreamfor months, and I’m now getting around to it (this kind of lag between meaning to read something and actually reading it isn’t unusual for me: the number of books I’d like to read expands faster than the amount of time I have to read, and the list is continually being reshuffled based on needs and idiosyncrasies). With that long preamble, I’d like to point to this passage:
If I had me to talk to me back when, I might not have had to write a million dreadful words. If I’d caught me at the right moment—and in the right spirit—I might have had to write only a quarter of a million—maybe not so many as that if I’d really listened. You might ask, why did he write five terrible novels? How many terrible novels can you write? The answer is that I had no idea how badly I was writing. None. And my ability to continue working through a million words was so rooted in self-deception that I might not have been able to hear this message. So those are the things you may have to sort through, too.
You might. But if you stumble on this post, or Olen Butler’s book, or some of the other books listed above, in time, you might still come out with fewer terrible stories and novels than you would otherwise.
EDIT 2: This post concerning Philip Greenspun’s “Why I’m Not a Writer” is also germane. If you’re rich enough, you don’t have to worry about food and rent. Everyone else does. If you want to be a professional writer, one useful way to go about it is by starting off with a fat inheritance so you don’t need a day job. And if you want to be a writer, you’ll probably have a day job for life.
The science fiction movie District 9 intrigues but disappoints. The movie is actually two movies: the first half is a subtle, eerie, complex, portrait of how bureaucrats work, what ground-level refugee camp politics are like, and an alternative take on the traditionally super-powerful alien species that contact humanity in most science fiction. The second half is cops’n’robbers and pointless MacGuffin chasing. The aliens turn out to be… exactly like humans in their personalities, needs, and dispositions. At the same time, most of what made the first half haunting disappears amid car crashes and convenient alien weaponry. The moral sophistication that comes with difficult choices and scarce resources morphs into a psychotic, malicious white colonel and an ignorant black warlord, both of whom provide reasons to blow stuff up.
Cloverfield is an example of a movie that retains its deeper meanings throughout action scenes; District 9 loses them parts way through, then picks up again in the last five minutes. It’s better than most movies but still not as skillfully done as it could have been.
“He’s also a complete sell-out, unlike the rest of you, which gives him a certain kind of integrity.”
—Wilfrid Sheed, Max Jamison
“He’s also a complete sell-out, unlike the rest of you, which gives him a certain kind of integrity.”
—Wilfrid Sheed, Max Jamison
I’m selling an iPod that came free with a MacBook Pro on Craigslist Tucson, which has so far proven itself weirder, if possible, than Craigslist Seattle. For example, this morning someone wrote to ask, “would u trade your ipod touch for a crossbow?”
Alas, no, although I hope he’s an XKCD reader (see here, here, and here for relevant examples) rather than someone who would logically assume a large number of people would need a crossbow.
* Makers’ versus Managers’ Schedules:
Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.
* Rands’ The Book Stalker: Where is it? Everyone has one could well describe me.
* From the department of unintended consequences: “The New Book Banning: Children’s books burn, courtesy of the federal government.” This is because the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA) stops the selling of used children’s good produced before 1985, when lead was banned, unless those products conform to the post-1985 standards. Although lead in children’s books hasn’t been shown to be harmful, the books don’t pass muster anyway.
I am generally not an organized political person who writes angry letters to Congresspersons and such, but this might be worth an exception.
* A “teach naked” proponent challenges us to stop using computers while we teach:
Mr. Bowen is part of a group of college leaders who haven’t given up on that dream of shaking up college instruction. Even though he is taking computers out of classrooms, he’s not anti-technology. He just thinks they should be used differently—upending the traditional lecture model in the process.
Here’s the kicker, though: The biggest resistance to Mr. Bowen’s ideas has come from students, some of whom have groused about taking a more active role during those 50-minute class periods. The lecture model is pretty comfortable for both students and professors, after all, and so fundamental change may be even harder than it initially seems, whether or not laptops, iPods, or other cool gadgets are thrown into the mix.
This is what I generally shoot for; in classrooms without computers, I never use one, and even when they come with classrooms, I generally use them very little, and mostly as a whiteboard substitute.
* What goes into book jackets: sometimes the answer is “facile stereotypes” or “very little.”
* Edifying editing, from a journal reviewer. Contrast this with my recent post, “Careers—and careerism—in academia and criticism“. Notice this bit from “Edifying editing:”
Ellison finds that the profession has slowed down, doubling the “submission to print” time at major journals. What was unexpected for me was the finding that most of the
slowdown is the number of revisions, not the ‘within round cycle time.’ I hadn’t realized that the interminable wait for a response was common twenty-five years ago. What has changed, Ellison shows, is that we have about doubled the number of rounds. I had thought it was merely deficiencies in my own papers that caused me to revise three, four, even five times. But no, it is a profession-wide phenomenon.Like most economists, I am personally obsessed with efficiency, and wasted resources offend me in an irrational way. The way economists operate journals is perhaps the most inefficient operation I encounter on a regular basis. It is a fabulous irony that a profession obsessed with efficiency operates its core business in such an inefficient manner. How long do you spend refereeing a paper? Many hours are devoted to reviewing papers. This would be socially efficient if the paper improved in a way commensurate with the time spent, but in fact revising papers using blind referees often makes papers worse. Referees offer specific advice that push papers away from the author’s intent. It is one thing for a referee to say “I do not find this paper compelling because of X” and another thing entirely to say that the referee would rather see a different paper on the same general topic and try to get the author to write it.
Does anyone have data about paper efficiency and the humanities? Searching through Project MUSE, JSTOR, and Google Scholar yields nothing through the criteria I tried.
* I very much like the poem “Playboy’s Guide to Lingering” by Joseph J. Capista, although I can’t decide why; normally the Slate poems leave me high and dry, like the New Yorker’s.
* A review of Thy Neighbor’s Wife from Bill Wasik at The Second Pass; compare to my comments here. I’m not sure I buy this: “Of all the mass utopian notions of the twentieth century, the sexual revolution was both the most spectacularly successful and, in the end, the most thwarted” because it would seem that the “success” part has dominated the “failure” part.
* Hilarious if silly: Vampires Suck. Actually, they don’t. And that’s the problem:
Just as America’s young men are being given deeply erroneous ideas about sex by what they watch on the Web, so, too, are America’s young women receiving troubling misinformation about the male of the species from Twilight. These women are going to be shocked when the sensitive, emotionally available, poetry-writing boys of their dreams expect a bit more from a sleepover than dew-eyed gazes and chaste hugs. The young man, having been schooled in love online, will be expecting extreme bondage and a lesbian three-way.
* State governments are behaving with even less foresight than usual; according to a Salon post quoting the San Jose Mercury News, “In 1980, 17 percent of the state budget went to higher education. By 2007, that had fallen to 10 percent — the same as prisons and parole.” And 2007 predated the current crisis, showing that the trend away from higher education funding is accelerating.
* A variety of research shows that driving while distracted leads to more accidents, and I wouldn’t be surprised if thinking while distracted leads to an inability to consider deep thoughts and inhibits creativity. This is part of the reason I’m suspicious of Tyler Cowen’s argument in Create Your Own Economy that the ceaseless flow of bite-sized information bits is a net positive.
* Fascinating: Japan and Korea’s hidden protectionist measures prevented U.S. car companies from competing in their home markets, and the English-language press largely ignored the story. Compare this to the argument in David Halberstam’s The Reckoning. Maybe the widely held story regarding Detroit’s utter incompetence needs to be substantially revised.
* Why 2024 Will Be Like Nineteen Eighty-Four from Slate’s Farhad Manjoo observes, “The worst thing about this story [of Amazon remotely deleting copies of Orwell’s 1984] isn’t Amazon’s conduct; it’s the company’s technical capabilities.” Indeed. But the main thing he forgets is that our future, like our toilets, is unlikely to be completely paperless: to the extent readers and publishers want to continue distributing books via print, they’ll still be able to. The situation probably isn’t as dire as Manjoo implies, but his warning is very much worth remembering: you don’t want the means of knowledge dissemination in a single company’s hands. It used to be that writers feared churches more than anything else; then it was governments; now it might be companies. Perhaps that’s a microcosm of the overall development of power in our world.
* Speaking of electronic books, Barnes & Noble has demonstrated its capacity to totally miss the boat with its recently announced eBook Reader. Problems: 1) It’s late to the game, with Sony and Amazon having preempted it by years; 2) No e-ink paper—who wants to read books on crappy computer and iPod screens? 3) Lousy device name. “Kindle” and “iPod” are evocative and unique; eBook Reader is not. If a Kindle-like device is coming, maybe Barnes & Noble could stage a dramatic comeback, but I’m not optimistic.
(Also see the WSJ’s article here.)
* Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around? The article argues it’s not evolution; compare this to Geoffrey Miller’s arguments.
* IKEA is not the social or environmental paragon its corporate image makes it out to be.
* The wisdom of Megan McArdle regarding bike commuting.
* Finally, for some foreign affairs: Is Burma attempting to build nuclear weapons?
