Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev and The Gift of Asher Lev

January 7, 2009 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Read Chaim Potok’s strange yet compelling My Name Is Asher Lev and skip its deracinated sequel, The Gift of Asher Lev.

My Name is Asher Lev concerns a boy divided between the drive for art that possesses him and the Hasidic religion into which he is born, which is somewhat like the Jewish equivalent of fundamentalist Christians. Think of his sect like the Verbovers of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The duality inherent in mixed loyalties is hardly a new topic; the most obvious example I know of is Herman Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund. But it’s done well here, and one feels Asher’s agony as he attempts to tread the artist’s path and the Hasidim’s. Inside, however, the artist predominates, and, as is typical in American fiction, self identity trumps group identity, as it should. Maybe Asher can’t help it. As a young man, he

began to realize that something was happening to my eyes. I looked at my father and saw lines and planes I had never seen before. I could feel with my eyes. […] I could feel texture and color.

The struggle to develop his eye and practice his visual art while remaining faithful to the extreme interpretations and teachings of religion fuels the novel’s conflict. Asher doesn’t give up, and if at times the pompousness of the art talk almost overwhelms, other moments of genuine emotion make up for near bombast. In some criticism of Asher’s art within the novel, one senses the same kind of criticism that might be used against Potok: sentimentality and a rejection of trends in art hobble him. Both novels act as defenses against that charge, and they are mostly successful. In growing up, Asher makes the difficult choices growing up entails. We think he makes the correct trade-offs, but in such a milieu, those trade-offs are grave indeed.

Parts of the novel fail, like a painting askew: a mythic ancestor arrives in Asher’s dreams for no particular point, and many descriptions are flat, especially given all the discussions of how an artist sees. Ones like this appear over and over:

I got off the train and climbed the stairs to the street. It was cold and wet and gray. A bitter wind blew against the tall buildings.

or

The beds were covered with spreads. The refrigerator hummed softly. The apartment was neat and clean and faintly resonant with its own silence.

or

It was a large waiting room with white walls, a single window in the wall to my right, and a heavy wooden door in the wall across from the window. There was a desk beneath the window and chairs along the walls.

Banal description will hardly kill a novel, but if they are sufficiently banal and frequent, why include them? Why describe places that are everyplace and weather that’s as bad as the weather anywhere? There is no reason, and part of the reason I called My Name is Asher Lev strange in the first paragraph is because these descriptive problems are not so enormous that they capsize the novel.

Alas, The Gift of Asher Lev is a disappointment compared to My Name is Asher Lev. One sees no growth, little reconciliation, and no useful understanding for the state of the first two in my list. The world is ambiguous, yes, and that’s pounded into our heads. Many great novels come to no conclusions but better illuminate the confusion of the life—such as Moby Dick—but The Gift of Asher Lev is not among them. Characters like Lev’s boorish, ignorant cousins are comic book foils that contrast with the Rebbe’s wisdom. Devorah has all the character of an empty housewife, despite the references to her existence

Moment of humor are a change, but they’re too few to be a signifiant one. Asher, growing tired of his community’s ceaseless suspicion of his life—it is hard to refer to being an artist as a mere “profession”—responds to one inconsiderate inquiry by saying “That’s why I became an artist. So I wouldn’t have to worry about what other people think. You hit the nail right on the head, Kroner.”

The classroom scene in Asher’s daughter’s Yeshiva is the book’s fulcrum and chief reason for interest, and it’s reminiscent of Barth’s metaphor of the soft-shell blue crab in The Friday Book, which all interested in the definition and meaning of art should read for that essay alone. In Potok’s rendition, Asher draws a ram in three ways: once poorly, like a child, again realistically, like a photograph, and again with portions exaggerated for effect, like an artist. He asks a class of children rhetorically, “Aren’t all three different ways of seeing the same object?” and as a defense of the subjectivity merging with the individual’s perception it’s wonderful. As a short story, it would be equally good. As a scene in a novel, it’s like an island rising above an otherwise cold sea.

We find too few of those islands, and transcendent pieces of writing are too rare and disconnected from the story. Using a different metaphor, one could say that too many white spaces lack connective tissue and simple are. One other good example of the good in this novel: Asher explains his gift by saying “I don’t hope to accomplish anything. I just do it,” which is as good an artist’s credo as any, albeit one that many, many artists have espoused in various forms at various times. Asher’s wife, Devorah, says at one point that “We hear a song or read a story, and the good feelings we get don’t remain inside us. We are either anticipating them, or we’ve had them and they’re gone. We never experience them as now.” Well, maybe, and she’s describing the specious present that William James wrote about. It’s not a bad thought, but it’s underdeveloped, like most of this novel. My Name is Asher Lev is stronger and less curmudgeonly. On page 104 of The Gift of Asher Lev, he thinks that “The ordinary was king. And the courtiers were popularization, shallowness, doubt, cynicism. The century was exhausted.” Five pages later, a friend says of the art world, “There is too much ersatz work being done now, calculated gestures everywhere, cultural entertainment.” Maybe there is: but so what? And even if the evils of cultural entertainment are upon us, one isn’t obliged to indulge them. How about less complaining and faux existentialism and more work?

You’ll find it, but in My Name is Asher Lev. I will end reiterating the point made in the first paragraph: pretend that My Name is Asher Lev has no sequel. You’ll like it better.

Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev and The Gift of Asher Lev

January 7, 2009 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Read Chaim Potok’s strange yet compelling My Name Is Asher Lev and skip its deracinated sequel, The Gift of Asher Lev.

My Name is Asher Lev concerns a boy divided between the drive for art that possesses him and the Hasidic religion into which he is born, which is somewhat like the Jewish equivalent of fundamentalist Christians. Think of his sect like the Verbovers of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The duality inherent in mixed loyalties is hardly a new topic; the most obvious example I know of is Herman Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund. But it’s done well here, and one feels Asher’s agony as he attempts to tread the artist’s path and the Hasidim’s. Inside, however, the artist predominates, and, as is typical in American fiction, self identity trumps group identity, as it should. Maybe Asher can’t help it. As a young man, he

began to realize that something was happening to my eyes. I looked at my father and saw lines and planes I had never seen before. I could feel with my eyes. […] I could feel texture and color.

The struggle to develop his eye and practice his visual art while remaining faithful to the extreme interpretations and teachings of religion fuels the novel’s conflict. Asher doesn’t give up, and if at times the pompousness of the art talk almost overwhelms, other moments of genuine emotion make up for near bombast. In some criticism of Asher’s art within the novel, one senses the same kind of criticism that might be used against Potok: sentimentality and a rejection of trends in art hobble him. Both novels act as defenses against that charge, and they are mostly successful. In growing up, Asher makes the difficult choices growing up entails. We think he makes the correct trade-offs, but in such a milieu, those trade-offs are grave indeed.

Parts of the novel fail, like a painting askew: a mythic ancestor arrives in Asher’s dreams for no particular point, and many descriptions are flat, especially given all the discussions of how an artist sees. Ones like this appear over and over:

I got off the train and climbed the stairs to the street. It was cold and wet and gray. A bitter wind blew against the tall buildings.

or

The beds were covered with spreads. The refrigerator hummed softly. The apartment was neat and clean and faintly resonant with its own silence.

or

It was a large waiting room with white walls, a single window in the wall to my right, and a heavy wooden door in the wall across from the window. There was a desk beneath the window and chairs along the walls.

Banal description will hardly kill a novel, but if they are sufficiently banal and frequent, why include them? Why describe places that are everyplace and weather that’s as bad as the weather anywhere? There is no reason, and part of the reason I called My Name is Asher Lev strange in the first paragraph is because these descriptive problems are not so enormous that they capsize the novel.

Alas, The Gift of Asher Lev is a disappointment compared to My Name is Asher Lev. One sees no growth, little reconciliation, and no useful understanding for the state of the first two in my list. The world is ambiguous, yes, and that’s pounded into our heads. Many great novels come to no conclusions but better illuminate the confusion of the life—such as Moby Dick—but The Gift of Asher Lev is not among them. Characters like Lev’s boorish, ignorant cousins are comic book foils that contrast with the Rebbe’s wisdom. Devorah has all the character of an empty housewife, despite the references to her existence

Moment of humor are a change, but they’re too few to be a signifiant one. Asher, growing tired of his community’s ceaseless suspicion of his life—it is hard to refer to being an artist as a mere “profession”—responds to one inconsiderate inquiry by saying “That’s why I became an artist. So I wouldn’t have to worry about what other people think. You hit the nail right on the head, Kroner.”

The classroom scene in Asher’s daughter’s Yeshiva is the book’s fulcrum and chief reason for interest, and it’s reminiscent of Barth’s metaphor of the soft-shell blue crab in The Friday Book, which all interested in the definition and meaning of art should read for that essay alone. In Potok’s rendition, Asher draws a ram in three ways: once poorly, like a child, again realistically, like a photograph, and again with portions exaggerated for effect, like an artist. He asks a class of children rhetorically, “Aren’t all three different ways of seeing the same object?” and as a defense of the subjectivity merging with the individual’s perception it’s wonderful. As a short story, it would be equally good. As a scene in a novel, it’s like an island rising above an otherwise cold sea.

We find too few of those islands, and transcendent pieces of writing are too rare and disconnected from the story. Using a different metaphor, one could say that too many white spaces lack connective tissue and simple are. One other good example of the good in this novel: Asher explains his gift by saying “I don’t hope to accomplish anything. I just do it,” which is as good an artist’s credo as any, albeit one that many, many artists have espoused in various forms at various times. Asher’s wife, Devorah, says at one point that “We hear a song or read a story, and the good feelings we get don’t remain inside us. We are either anticipating them, or we’ve had them and they’re gone. We never experience them as now.” Well, maybe, and she’s describing the specious present that William James wrote about. It’s not a bad thought, but it’s underdeveloped, like most of this novel. My Name is Asher Lev is stronger and less curmudgeonly. On page 104 of The Gift of Asher Lev, he thinks that “The ordinary was king. And the courtiers were popularization, shallowness, doubt, cynicism. The century was exhausted.” Five pages later, a friend says of the art world, “There is too much ersatz work being done now, calculated gestures everywhere, cultural entertainment.” Maybe there is: but so what? And even if the evils of cultural entertainment are upon us, one isn’t obliged to indulge them. How about less complaining and faux existentialism and more work?

You’ll find it, but in My Name is Asher Lev. I will end reiterating the point made in the first paragraph: pretend that My Name is Asher Lev has no sequel. You’ll like it better.

Publishing Industry Gloom is Readers' Gain

January 6, 2009 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It almost perfectly describes my book habits. The major difference is that I carefully examine the used and new prices; if they are sufficiently close, especially given shipping charges, I go new. But they often aren’t. Read the article and note this:

And what of the woman who sold me the [used] book [over the Internet]? She told me via e-mail that her real name was Heather Mash and that she worked as a domestic violence case manager in a women’s shelter not too far from Berkeley. She didn’t set out to subvert the publishing and bookselling world, she said. Like most of us who sell online, Ms. Mash began because she had too many books and wanted to raise money to buy more. “I would rather sell a book for a penny and let someone enjoy it than keep it collecting dust,” she said.

Many of the scholarly books I own concerning Melville or Tolkien would once have been unavailable or, if they were available, ludicrously expensive, and reading them probably would’ve required a good university library. Now I can buy them relatively cheaply; instead of $20 for Jane Chance’s The Mythology of Power, I got it for $4 or $5, counting shipping. Once, such books probably wouldn’t even have been available in paperback; the only option would’ve been hardbacks costing $45 – $100.

Although the New York Times article implies this hurts the publishing industry, I wonder if it really helps: a decreasing reliance on old books (or the “catalog”) means that publishers will be forced to pay more attention to new books if they are to make any money. At the same time, the real question is the extent to which used books are substitutes or complements for real books. With some works—like the classics cited in the article—the answer seems to be substitutes. With others, though, I suspect that readers are more likely to buy more books because they can better afford it.

The article implies that Amazon is partially a problem, but I would observe that people use Amazon because Amazon is incredibly, extraordinarily easy and cheap. It’s also simple to learn, as if easy and cheap weren’t enough. And the selection is good; for example, I recently mentioned Norman Rush’s extraordinary novel Mating in a post on The Mind-Body Problem. At this Amazon link, a dozen hardcover copies are available for “$0.01,” although this is deceptive because the $3.99 in shipping means that you’re actually paying $4. Still, that’s incredibly cheap; in a Seattle used bookstore not long ago, I saw a hardcover copy for $11. Furthermore, you can’t even buy new hardcover copies of Mating, and a used hardcover will probably last longer than a new paperback. Is it any surprise that I react to this situation with self-interest?

What can or should publishers do? I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect it means competing with their own catalog in terms of price. Or it might mean something else; I’m reminded of Ursula K. Le Guin’s excellent piece in Harper’s, Staying awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading:

Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.

[…]

I keep hoping the corporations will wake up and realize that publishing is not, in fact, a normal business with a nice healthy relationship to capitalism. Elements of publishing are, or can be forced to be, successfully capitalistic: the textbook industry is all too clear a proof of that. How-to books and the like have some market predictability. But inevitably some of what publishers publish is, or is partly, literature—art. And the relationship of art to capitalism is, to put it mildly, vexed. It has not been a happy marriage. Amused contempt is about the pleasantest emotion either partner feels for the other. Their definitions of what profiteth a man are too different.

And one more point, this one from The Zen of Graphics Programming by way of a Slashdot comment:

Anecdote the third: A while back, I had the good fortune to have lunch down by Seattle’s waterfront with Neal Stephenson, the author of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age (one of the best SF books I’ve come across in a long time). As he talked about the nature of networked technology and what he hoped to see emerge, he mentioned that a couple of blocks down the street was the pawn shop where Jimi Hendrix bought his first guitar. His point was that if a cheap guitar hadn’t been available, Hendrix’s unique talent would never have emerged. Similarly, he views the networking of society as a way to get affordable creative tools to many people, so as much talent as possible can be unearthed and developed.

This semester, the University of Arizona bookstore charged around $400 for class books, or around $340 used. A combination of new and used books from Amazon ran to about $250. I’ll keep the $150, thanks. But I’ll probably end up spending the rest on other books.

Publishing Industry Gloom is Readers’ Gain

January 6, 2009 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It almost perfectly describes my book habits. The major difference is that I carefully examine the used and new prices; if they are sufficiently close, especially given shipping charges, I go new. But they often aren’t. Read the article and note this:

And what of the woman who sold me the [used] book [over the Internet]? She told me via e-mail that her real name was Heather Mash and that she worked as a domestic violence case manager in a women’s shelter not too far from Berkeley. She didn’t set out to subvert the publishing and bookselling world, she said. Like most of us who sell online, Ms. Mash began because she had too many books and wanted to raise money to buy more. “I would rather sell a book for a penny and let someone enjoy it than keep it collecting dust,” she said.

Many of the scholarly books I own concerning Melville or Tolkien would once have been unavailable or, if they were available, ludicrously expensive, and reading them probably would’ve required a good university library. Now I can buy them relatively cheaply; instead of $20 for Jane Chance’s The Mythology of Power, I got it for $4 or $5, counting shipping. Once, such books probably wouldn’t even have been available in paperback; the only option would’ve been hardbacks costing $45 – $100.

Although the New York Times article implies this hurts the publishing industry, I wonder if it really helps: a decreasing reliance on old books (or the “catalog”) means that publishers will be forced to pay more attention to new books if they are to make any money. At the same time, the real question is the extent to which used books are substitutes or complements for real books. With some works—like the classics cited in the article—the answer seems to be substitutes. With others, though, I suspect that readers are more likely to buy more books because they can better afford it.

The article implies that Amazon is partially a problem, but I would observe that people use Amazon because Amazon is incredibly, extraordinarily easy and cheap. It’s also simple to learn, as if easy and cheap weren’t enough. And the selection is good; for example, I recently mentioned Norman Rush’s extraordinary novel Mating in a post on The Mind-Body Problem. At this Amazon link, a dozen hardcover copies are available for “$0.01,” although this is deceptive because the $3.99 in shipping means that you’re actually paying $4. Still, that’s incredibly cheap; in a Seattle used bookstore not long ago, I saw a hardcover copy for $11. Furthermore, you can’t even buy new hardcover copies of Mating, and a used hardcover will probably last longer than a new paperback. Is it any surprise that I react to this situation with self-interest?

What can or should publishers do? I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect it means competing with their own catalog in terms of price. Or it might mean something else; I’m reminded of Ursula K. Le Guin’s excellent piece in Harper’s, Staying awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading:

Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.

[…]

I keep hoping the corporations will wake up and realize that publishing is not, in fact, a normal business with a nice healthy relationship to capitalism. Elements of publishing are, or can be forced to be, successfully capitalistic: the textbook industry is all too clear a proof of that. How-to books and the like have some market predictability. But inevitably some of what publishers publish is, or is partly, literature—art. And the relationship of art to capitalism is, to put it mildly, vexed. It has not been a happy marriage. Amused contempt is about the pleasantest emotion either partner feels for the other. Their definitions of what profiteth a man are too different.

And one more point, this one from The Zen of Graphics Programming by way of a Slashdot comment:

Anecdote the third: A while back, I had the good fortune to have lunch down by Seattle’s waterfront with Neal Stephenson, the author of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age (one of the best SF books I’ve come across in a long time). As he talked about the nature of networked technology and what he hoped to see emerge, he mentioned that a couple of blocks down the street was the pawn shop where Jimi Hendrix bought his first guitar. His point was that if a cheap guitar hadn’t been available, Hendrix’s unique talent would never have emerged. Similarly, he views the networking of society as a way to get affordable creative tools to many people, so as much talent as possible can be unearthed and developed.

This semester, the University of Arizona bookstore charged around $400 for class books, or around $340 used. A combination of new and used books from Amazon ran to about $250. I’ll keep the $150, thanks. But I’ll probably end up spending the rest on other books.

Rereading Rebecca Goldstein's The Mind-Body Problem

January 4, 2009 By in Books, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Some novels grow in rereading while others shrink,* and Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem, first discussed here, is among the former.** It’s wry and self-aware; after modestly painful cultural experiences at elite universities that perhaps consider themselves more elite than they actually are, Renee feels mentally inferior to peers and professors and responds with the body while still contemplating why, as a creature of thought, she is also so firmly a creature. This might sound as boring as the too-extensive academic philosophy papers on the subject. But instead of futile attempts at resolution, The Mind-Body Problem explores its general ridiculousness, both for the consciousness and the social structures in which the consciousness resides:

I had gotten used to thinking of myself as an intellectual. I had assumed that certain properties of mind and body were entailed by this description and had designed myself accordingly. It’s hard to discover you’ve constructed yourself on false premises.

She hasn’t, of course, and bad feedback from her environment (both scholastic and familial) combined with her own, Woody Allen-esque neuroticism that leads her to this conclusion. Besides, we know or would like to think we know that her conclusion is false because we are, after all, reading about her, and a smarter person is usually though not always more interesting to read about. That brings up the question of intellectuals and intelligence, which might not be fully overlapping categories.

One subtler observation: what distinguishes intellectuals from most people isn’t the size of their pomposity, but their ability to question assumptions (including their own) and perceive the world from different perspectives, while most people seem are stuck—frozen, really—in their own, unable to make impressive cognitive leaps into another’s imagination. They haven’t thawed sufficiently to mentally leap from person to person; this, I would argue, is the great cognitive change in Noam at the end of the novel, when he can or will no longer see the world from the perspective of math and instead tries to see it from the perspective of people. Renee, meanwhile, does so almost instinctively, and her assessments of herself and others are some of The Mind-Body Problem‘s funniest moments.

The Mind-Body Problem is like—or maybe just is—philosophy done really, really well in the sense that it can see the larger, abstract picture based on specific events and vice-versa, and it’s intelligible in seeing those events. Few novels or philosophy tracts have both sides, and most of those philosophy tracts have forgotten how to express themselves comprehensibly. (Quick Studies: The Best of Lingua Franca has an excellent piece on this subject, which compares Orwell and Theodore Adorno.) The narrator’s skill is part of this effect, since Renee is aware of herself and aware of how ridiculous she is, much like the unnamed protagonist in Norman Rush’s Mating. Recursive self-awareness begets cerebral humor, especially dirty cerebral humor. What’s not to like? Renee is muddling through choices that aren’t appealing, and her compromises look less like betrayals of fundamental beliefs and more like adult compromises the closer she gets to them:

My first year [at the Princeton Philosophy department] had been disastrous, and my second, just beginning, gave every indication of being worse. In short, I was floundering, and thus quite prepared to follow the venerably old feminine tradition of being saved by marriage.

But she can still laugh about it. When Noam arrives at his epiphanies—though they feel contrived—we’re relieved, and he, like Renee, grows along with the novel. I could ask for little more.

* Robert Heinlein, I’m looking at you, and in particular Stranger in a Strange Land, a novel that, while still not bad, is too philosophically simplistic and, by the end, silly. Every person in the novel but Mike is completely flat, and Mike only avoids that fate by being a symbolic repository for the feelings of all the flat characters. Even then, he’s not fully developed. It is possible to a symbolic repository and developed—think of Ahab in Moby Dick—but Mike isn’t even close. Nonetheless, I still retain a great deal of fondness for Stranger in a Strange Land, and it’s still enormously fun even when you’re rolling your eyes. 

** Much like Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys.

Rereading Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem

January 4, 2009 By in Books, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Some novels grow in rereading while others shrink,* and Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem, first discussed here, is among the former.** It’s wry and self-aware; after modestly painful cultural experiences at elite universities that perhaps consider themselves more elite than they actually are, Renee feels mentally inferior to peers and professors and responds with the body while still contemplating why, as a creature of thought, she is also so firmly a creature. This might sound as boring as the too-extensive academic philosophy papers on the subject. But instead of futile attempts at resolution, The Mind-Body Problem explores its general ridiculousness, both for the consciousness and the social structures in which the consciousness resides:

I had gotten used to thinking of myself as an intellectual. I had assumed that certain properties of mind and body were entailed by this description and had designed myself accordingly. It’s hard to discover you’ve constructed yourself on false premises.

She hasn’t, of course, and bad feedback from her environment (both scholastic and familial) combined with her own, Woody Allen-esque neuroticism that leads her to this conclusion. Besides, we know or would like to think we know that her conclusion is false because we are, after all, reading about her, and a smarter person is usually though not always more interesting to read about. That brings up the question of intellectuals and intelligence, which might not be fully overlapping categories.

One subtler observation: what distinguishes intellectuals from most people isn’t the size of their pomposity, but their ability to question assumptions (including their own) and perceive the world from different perspectives, while most people seem are stuck—frozen, really—in their own, unable to make impressive cognitive leaps into another’s imagination. They haven’t thawed sufficiently to mentally leap from person to person; this, I would argue, is the great cognitive change in Noam at the end of the novel, when he can or will no longer see the world from the perspective of math and instead tries to see it from the perspective of people. Renee, meanwhile, does so almost instinctively, and her assessments of herself and others are some of The Mind-Body Problem‘s funniest moments.

The Mind-Body Problem is like—or maybe just is—philosophy done really, really well in the sense that it can see the larger, abstract picture based on specific events and vice-versa, and it’s intelligible in seeing those events. Few novels or philosophy tracts have both sides, and most of those philosophy tracts have forgotten how to express themselves comprehensibly. (Quick Studies: The Best of Lingua Franca has an excellent piece on this subject, which compares Orwell and Theodore Adorno.) The narrator’s skill is part of this effect, since Renee is aware of herself and aware of how ridiculous she is, much like the unnamed protagonist in Norman Rush’s Mating. Recursive self-awareness begets cerebral humor, especially dirty cerebral humor. What’s not to like? Renee is muddling through choices that aren’t appealing, and her compromises look less like betrayals of fundamental beliefs and more like adult compromises the closer she gets to them:

My first year [at the Princeton Philosophy department] had been disastrous, and my second, just beginning, gave every indication of being worse. In short, I was floundering, and thus quite prepared to follow the venerably old feminine tradition of being saved by marriage.

But she can still laugh about it. When Noam arrives at his epiphanies—though they feel contrived—we’re relieved, and he, like Renee, grows along with the novel. I could ask for little more.

* Robert Heinlein, I’m looking at you, and in particular Stranger in a Strange Land, a novel that, while still not bad, is too philosophically simplistic and, by the end, silly. Every person in the novel but Mike is completely flat, and Mike only avoids that fate by being a symbolic repository for the feelings of all the flat characters. Even then, he’s not fully developed. It is possible to a symbolic repository and developed—think of Ahab in Moby Dick—but Mike isn’t even close. Nonetheless, I still retain a great deal of fondness for Stranger in a Strange Land, and it’s still enormously fun even when you’re rolling your eyes. 

** Much like Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys.

Life: Art edition

January 2, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Life Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

“Only one who has mastered a tradition has a right to attempt to add to it or rebel against it.”

—Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev

The Reader — Bernhard Schlink

December 29, 2008 By in Books Tags: , , , , , , 3 Comments

Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader is sensual and philosophical, moving from the former, which predominates in the beginning, toward the latter in a manner “both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile,” as Michael describes the journeys in the Odyssey. “What is else is the history of the law?” he asks, and one might ask the same of history, full stop, or of love; The Reader implies that there is no answer save that the law, history, or love have whatever purpose we graft onto it, just as one could argue for a sensual reading of the novel, especially in the first part, or a philosophic, especially as Michael grows older. A young man with an older woman named Hanna feels the sensual as well as their, and its, doom, while the second, comes from an older lawyer who finds that his first love, if one can call it that, is being tried for crimes that would seem astonishing if not for the time period and location. There is a third part I will demure from speaking much of; to do so would give too much away in a novel that often feels like it gives too little away, especially of its feelings. Chapters end with no sense of ending beyond the beginning of the next chapter. Chapters of Michael’s life end with a similar lack of fanfare, and The Reader is, at its base, a novel that almost demands readings as analytic as its protagonist is inclined to give.

Some descriptions in The Reader are simple and true enough not to need elaboration, and those who have undergone extensive trials will recognize what happens when Michael’s bout with hepatitis renders him hospitalized for months: “although friends still came to see me, I had been sick for so long that their visits could no longer bridge the gap between their daily lives and mine, and became shorter and shorter.” Then again, Michael does not make friends easily, and his eventual wife is a ghostly presence who seems to affect him less than the hepatitis, or, for that matter, the weather. Perhaps this event combined with natural temperament and his liaisons with Hanna make Michael himself. Or maybe he was always this way, and that’s what brought him to Hanna and her secrets. Alas: those apt sentences like the one describing Michael’s illness tantalize us for more, and yet they are not forthcoming.

This novel is hardly alone in its remote, abstract mode. What is it about these Europeans—Schlink, Milan Kundera, and Mario Vargas Llosa*—who write short, sheer novels in which scenes are described and then left, like shards of a pot or torn pages from a book, for us to construct, or reconstruct? The length of the mostly rhetorical question probably indicates how little of an answer I can give. It’s almost as if the denial of a character’s interpretation, or the uncertain certainty they display when they do give interpretations, are or should be a statement of what we won’t know. Although this is overly abstract, perhaps I’m given to say it by having just finished The Reader, which challenges us to read the unreadable, and my chief response to it has to be a level above the action itself. The book just ends with a statement so devoid of interpretation that the feeling it must submerge becomes enhanced all the more because of its hiddenness. Like a great novel, we are left to wonder.

But I purposefully say “like a great novel,” rather than calling the novel itself great.

* I know: Llosa was born in Peru. But he feels European and lives part-time in European countries, so I count him as one here.

Laptops, students, distraction: hardly a surprise

December 28, 2008 By in Culture, Essays Tags: , , , , , , , 7 Comments

This post grew out of a comment responding to the question, “What Restrictions Should Student Laptops Have?” I’m a graduate student who teaches English 101/102/109h and takes classes at the University of Arizona.

The short version: leave restrictions or lack thereof to the teachers or instructors.

For background, read “Why I ban laptops in my classroom,” “I Don’t Multitask,” “professor vs laptop,” Paul Graham’s “Disconnecting Distraction“and finally “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” This is not a new issue. If Paul Graham and other writers and hackers find the Internet ceaselessly distracting, what hope do freshmen have? I hear friends and other grad students say they feel like they can’t go more than a half hour without poking around the Internet, which hurts their writing time. Laptops in general and Internet connectivity in particular might cause greater problems than those they’re designed to solve.*

While I sympathize with some pro-laptop comments, I will point out that paternalism is not always bad; sometimes it’s a necessary component of developing discipline, fortitude, or tenacity. Banning laptops could help students develop the ability to focus for a sustained period of time and not get lost in class, particularly during discussions about complex material. In classrooms I’ve been in—including graduate classrooms—where virtually everyone had laptops, they were used for taking notes, yes. But they were also used for Facebook, and checking out happy hour, messaging, and messaging about the incompetence of the person speaking, checking the score, and a variety of other things that promote continuous partial attention.

The jokes are coming: you must’ve been a dumb student, gone to a bad school, had bad professors, be weak minded, etc. Maybe: but I think the bigger problem is that letting one’s attention temporarily wander is made so much easier by having a laptop and Internet connection is almost overwhelming. Sure, you can stay on a diet with a chocolate cake in your kitchen. Sure, you’d never lie on that mortgage application about your income—but, you know, you really want that McMansion, and no one is going to check it, and you just have to inflate it a little… The problem is that laptops made distraction so easy. They make it harder to separate the bad professor from the difficult material. And so on.

Students in universities succumb to the Beer and Circus mentality, and if they do, what luck will middle- and high-school students have? I teach freshmen English now at the University of Arizona and ban laptops. I’m aware of the counter-arguments and alluded to them above: if you’re not a compelling enough teacher to keep their attention, they deserve to use laptops to get around you. But what if you can’t get their attention in the first place? What if you’re trying to impart something important but that doesn’t have the immediacy of Perez Hilton? Then give them the Cs they deserve when they write bad papers. And then they whine to you about the grades they got. The Slashdot commenter would be such a strong writer or coder or mathematician that he could get by anyway: congratulations. But the other 24 people in the classroom probably can’t.

All this is to say that laptops can very easily and quickly become more a burden than benefit. For some classes they may be necessary or helpful, like programming classes. Still, not every lesson will call for them and not every teacher will want to use them.

“Here’s the dilemma — how much freedom do you give to students?” you ask. The answer depends too much on the instructor to give a firm answer, but I give the answer above in part because so many of the initial responses tend towards “let them do whatever they want.” Sure: and throw someone into an ocean a mile from shore and see what happens. If the teacher wants them to conduct a textual analysis of a Facebook profile, let them. If the teacher doesn’t want them to have Internet access, let the teacher have a kill switch for the room’s wireless router. That way, you’ll be allowing as much flexibility as the situation calls for.

Outside the school, students’ autonomy should be complete, and schools shouldn’t impinge on students’ rights to conduct themselves how they will. Many students will use computers in ways that seem wasteful, but a few will also hack them, use them for self-expression, and let the computers become assistants rather than crutches for thought.

Did you see what Randy Pausch calls the headfake in this essay? It’s partially about students, yes, but it’s really about how to create and learn. Computers can help those processes, but too often they seem to hinder. And when they hinder, they should be discarded. The real scarce resource in modern life is sustained attention.

EDIT 2015: Vox reports on a study that says “you should take notes by hand — not on a laptop.” The study claims that participants who wrote by hand had better recall, especially of complex concepts. Don’t take one study as definitive but in this case anecdote and research match.

Cal Newport’s book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World discusses similar topics. Distraction and defeating it will be an ongoing saga for many decades.

* I haven’t gone as far as Paul Graham, who describes his solution:

I now leave wifi turned off on my main computer except when I need to transfer a file or edit a web page, and I have a separate laptop on the other side of the room that I use to check mail or browse the web. (Irony of ironies, it’s the computer Steve Huffman wrote Reddit on. When Steve and Alexis auctioned off their old laptops for charity, I bought them for the Y Combinator museum.)

My rule is that I can spend as much time online as I want, as long as I do it on that computer. And this turns out to be enough. When I have to sit on the other side of the room to check email or browse the web, I become much more aware of it. Sufficiently aware, in my case at least, that it’s hard to spend more than about an hour a day online.

And my main computer is now freed for work. If you try this trick, you’ll probably be struck by how different it feels when your computer is disconnected from the Internet. It was alarming to me how foreign it felt to sit in front of a computer that could only be used for work, because that showed how much time I must have been wasting.

Computer post: desktop or laptop/notebook?

December 26, 2008 By in Computers/Apple, Tools Tags: , , , , , , 5 Comments

Ars Technica reports that Global notebook shipments [have] finally overtake[n] desktops, making the issue all the more salient (Slashdot’s coverage is here). Of course, many of those notebooks are probably netbooks that supplement rather than supplant desktops, and the inflated notebook total is probably in part due to the disposable nature and limited longevity of notebooks. Still, the legitimate question remains, and my short answer for most people in most circumstances in “desktop.”

My work demands sustained concentration (see, for example, “Disconnecting Distraction”) and being in spot for a time helps that; I sold my PowerBook and used the proceeds for a 24″ aluminum iMac. It’s a vastly faster machine that’ll probably last longer than an equivalent laptop will and cost less. Those who want mobility pay for it, and I suspect most people overestimate their mobility and underestimate the benefits of a desktop.

But the question is one that an individual is better suited to answer, as it depends on that person’s needs, and I can only enumerate the trade-offs inherent in the laptop/desktop decision. The question becomes almost philosophical concerning the nature of the person you are: more peripatetic or less? Working for longer at a computer or not as long? Used to a large screen or not (becoming accustomed to space and then having it removed it difficult)? Annoyed by cable creep or not? To be sure, some groups of people are well-suited to notebooks: people who move often, have to travel frequently, and students scurrying between dorm and home all probably fit that category. I suspect there are fewer of them than the laptop numbers indicate and that many people don’t consider the detriments, especially ergonomically. I’ve heard the complaint too many times: my wrists hurt, or my back hurts, or my eyes are tired, and they almost always come from laptop users. I recently gave a friend an a Griffin iCurve for her laptop, which seemed to improve the problem. ICurves are no longer made, but the new version is called an Elevator.

An Elevator, external keyboard, monitor, and mouse improves the laptop, but they’re expensive. Comparing Mac equipment makes this delta particularly obvious—even if one buys third-party monitors—as various pricing specials and what not don’t obscure the underlying prices. One person in an Ars thread said, “I’ve found that if you don’t need mobility, paying for it is a bad idea.” Indeed: and the question becomes “need,” which I can’t answer. A Slashdot commenter said that “the lack of replaceable parts is one other reason why laptop sales are ‘higher’ than desktop sales.” Combined with a) the inherent jostling laptops experience and b) the compactness of the parts, raising the temperature inside the machine and increasing the likelihood that subtle manufacturing flaws will do things like pinch video cords or dislodge logic boards, this means laptops are likely to need to be replaced more often, in addition to their higher upfront costs.

I have an iMac, which has some of a laptop’s drawbacks, including no user-serviceable parts aside from RAM. But it’s also relatively easy to move and more likely to last than a ceaselessly mobile laptop. It remains in one place, making it easier to get in the zone, as described by Rands in Repose at the link. Books, mostly fiction but still a few technical ones too, surround my desk, and, like Malcolm Gladwell, I’m more likely to turn to them for quotes, inspiration, and sounding in many circumstances than to the much-scattered Internet:

[Gladwell ….] still prefers to do most of his research at the NYU library. Google is something of a personal hobbyhorse: “Google is the answer to the problem we didn’t have. It doesn’t tell you what’s interesting or what’s important. There’s still more in the library than there is on Google.”

He’s overstating his case but I take his point. Then again, the article also says that Gladwell likes to work in coffeeshops, which is anathema to me: I look every time someone walks by or the espresso machine goes off like a whistle, and at the end of three hours I’ve written as many sentences. There’s even a picture of him sitting at a laptop, perhaps contradicting some of my overall point.

Nonetheless, like most philosophy problems, this one has no perfect answer and is more an expression of underlying value than anything else. Granted, this decision has a greater economic aspect given the continued cost disparity between laptops and desktops, which seems unlikely to disappear in the immediate future. But I think that, if most people weigh what they value, the money and advantages of a desktop more often than not make them better machines. If you’re writing, or coding, or editing movies, or doing any number of other things for a sustained period of time on a somewhat regular basis, a desktop or laptop + external peripherals seems an improvement over a laptop. If you’re chiefly using a computer to read e-mail, check Facebook, and the like, the computer choice probably doesn’t matter. Either way, I’d rather the save money, although many others obviously prefer the mobility. To me, and presumably many others who like to write and to read, and the “deep thought” stage is, to my mind, more important than shallower activities that demand less cognitive attention. That’s not to say you can’t get in the zone or produce useful work on a laptop—millions of people obviously do—but I still think a desktop a more satisfying overall choice.

I can guarantee nothing, of course, and Lord of the Rings speaks to this issue, as it does to so many:

“… The choice is yours: to go or wait.” [Gildor said.]
“And it is also said,” answered Frodo, “Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.”
“Is it indeed?” laughed Gildor. “Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill. But what would you? You have not told me all concerning yourself; how should I choose better than you? But if you demand advice, I will for friendship’s sake give it.”

EDIT: A recent NPD survey on netbooks found that “60 percent of buyers said they never even took their netbooks out of the house” (hat tip Salon.com). If your laptop never travels, why bother having one?

EDIT 2: I posted a follow-up regarding the relative reliability of desktops versus laptops. The former win according to the best data I’ve seen.

EDIT 3: Marco Arment has a post on why he’s now using a MacBook Pro instead of a Mac Pro. The reason: Solid State Drives (SSDs). The limiting factor on laptop performance for most people used to be the hard drive. With an SSD, it’s not. If you have enough money for a large-capacity SSD and are willing to put a conventional hard drive in the CD / DVD bay, you’re not giving up any substantial performance in day-to-day tasks. More than anything else, the growing power of SSDs make me think the days of desktop computers are limited.