Two visions for the future, inadvertently juxtaposed: Nell Zink and Marc Andreessen

May 18, 2015 By in Culture, Tools, Writing Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Last week’s New Yorker inadvertently offers two visions for the future: one in a profile of the writer Nell Zink and the other in a profile of the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Both profiles are excellent. One of their subjects, however, is mired in a fixed, contemporary mindset, while the other subject looks to a better future.

This is Schultz’s description of Zink: “Zink writes about the big stuff: the travesty of American apartheid; the sexual, economic, and intellectual status of women; the ephemerality of desire and its enduring consequences.” Is any of that stuff really big? Does it matter? Or is it just a list of somewhat transitory issues that obsess modern intellectuals who are talking to each other through magazines like The New Yorker? The material well-being of virtually any American is so much higher than it was in, say, 1900, as to diminish the relative importance of many of the ideas Zink or Schultz considers “big.” At one point Zink “delivered a short lecture on income stagnation: a bird ridiculing its fellow-bird for stupidity.” But global inequality is falling and, moreover, the more interesting question may be absolute material conditions, rather than relative ones. One gets the sense that Zink is a more parochial thinker than she thinks. I sense from The Wallcreeper that she writes about the motiveless and pathless.

Here, by contrast, is Andreessen as described by Tad Friend:

Andreessen is tomorrow’s advance man, routinely laying out “what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years,” as if he were glancing at his Google calendar. He views his acuity as a matter of careful observation and extrapolation, and often invokes William Gibson’s observation “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Jet packs have been around for half a century, but you still can’t buy them at Target.

and:

The game in Silicon Valley, while it remains part of California, is not ferocious intelligence or a contrarian investment thesis: everyone has that. It’s not even wealth [. . . .] It’s prescience. And then it’s removing every obstacle to the ferocious clarity of your vision: incumbents, regulations, folkways, people. Can you not just see the future but summon it?

Having a real vision counts, and it seems that too few people have a vision for the future. Andreessen is thinking not of today but of what can be made better tomorrow. I would not deny the impact of slavery on contemporary culture or the importance of desire on life, but I would ask Zink: if the U.S. is doing things poorly, who is doing them better? And if the U.S. is doing things poorly why then is Silicon Valley the center of the future?

One of these people reads as an optimist, the other as a pessimist. One reads as someone who makes things happen and the other as someone who complains about things that other people do. One reads as a person with a path. The other doesn’t.

Don’t get me wrong. I liked The Wallcreeper when I read it a couple months ago. I didn’t have much to say about it on this blog because it seems kind of interesting but left me without much feeling. But I can’t help thinking that Andreessen’s vision for the future is big, while Zink’s vision of the present is small.

As a bonus, check out “All Hail the Grumbler! Abiding Karl Kraus,” which is poorly titled but describes Jonathan Franzen’s relationship to art, technology, and other matters. He’s in the Zink school; perhaps something about studying German inculcates an anti-technology backlash among writers, since Germany and the U.S. are both among the most technophilic societies in the world (for good reasons, I would argue). From the article:

Kraus’s savage criticism of popular newspapers, suspicion of technology, and defense of art all appeal to Franzen, whose nonfiction essays strike similar notes. For instance, in the spirit of Kraus, Franzen has attacked the intrusiveness of cellphones and the loss of private space as people bark out the dreck of their lives.

But even “privacy” is a relatively new idea: being alone to read books only really got going in the 18th Century, when books got cheap enough for normal people to borrow them from libraries. The luddites of the day lamented the withdrawal from the private sphere into onanistic privacy. They asked: Why wrap yourself in some imaginary world when the big real world is out there?

As you may imagine I’m more neutral towards these developments. Like many literary types I think the world would be a better place with more reading and less reality TV, but I’ll also observe that the kind of people who share that view are likely to read this blog and the kind of people who don’t aren’t likely to give a shit about what I or anyone like me says.

Much later in the essay its author, Russell Jacoby, writes: “Denouncing capitalist technology has rarely flourished on the left, which, in general, believes in progress.” I get what he’s saying, But denouncing technology in general has always been a fool’s game because a) pretty much everyone uses it and b) to the extent one generation (or a member of a generation) refuses a given technology, the next generation takes it up entirely. Franzen may not like technology circa 2015 but he is very fond of the technology of the printing press. At what point does Franzen think “good” technology stopped?

I’m reminded, unfairly perhaps, of the many noisy environmentalists I’ve known who do things like bring reusable bags to grocery but then fly on planes at least a couple times a year. Buy flying pollutes more than pretty much anything anyone else does. A lot of SUV-drivers living in exurbs actually create less pollution than urban cosmopolitans who fly every two months. By the same token, the same people who denounce one set of technical innovations are often dependent on or love some other set of technical innovations.

Almost no one wants to really, really go backwards, technologically speaking, in time. Look at behaviors rather than words. I do believe that Franzen doesn’t use Facebook or write a blog or whatever, but he probably uses other stuff, and, if he has kids, they probably want smart phones and video games because all their friends have smart phones and video games.

I’m not saying smart phones and video games are good—quite the opposite, really—and I’m sympathetic to Zimbardo’s claim that “video games and porn are destroying men.” But I am saying that the claims about modern technology doing terrible things to people or culture goes back centuries and has rarely if ever proven true, and the people making such claims are usually, when viewed in the correct light, hypocrites on some level. Jacoby does hit a related point: “Presumably, if enough people like SUVs, reality TV, and over-priced athletic footwear, little more may be said. The majority has spoken.” But I want to emphasize the point and say more about not the banal cultural stuff like bad TV (and obviously there is interesting TV) but the deeper stuff, like technology.

The Andreessens of the world are right. There is no way back. The only way is forward, whether we want to admit it or not. The real problem with our cultural relationship to technology—and this is a Peter Thielian point—is that we’re in denial about dependence, need, and the need to build the future.

Links: Tesla, women and dating, streets for humans, messy truth, Penelope Trunk, reading, and more!

May 13, 2015 By in Links 2 Comments

* “Tesla Battery Economics: On the Path to Disruption,” one of these incredibly, shockingly important points that’s easy to miss.

* Why women lose the dating game at 30: Bettina Arndt listens to the other voices in this debate: the men. Maybe.

* Building streets for humans rather than cars could help solve the affordable housing crisis.

* Social Liberalism as Class Warfare—or, points that are too infrequently made.

* “Where Did Penelope Trunk Go Wrong?“, an excellent question though not well explored at the link. I unsubscribed from Trunk’s blog a while ago, though some of her older posts, like “Don’t go to grad school” and “How much money do you need to be happy? Hint: Your sex life matters more” are still excellent. She went from being contrarian and brilliant and willing to say shit other people won’t say to cruel. There is a fine line between speaking the messy truth and being an asshole.

* Why can’t we ready anymore? Long attention spans are one of my competitive advantages in consulting: see also “One of the Open Secrets of Grant Writing and Grant Writers: Reading.” I think attention control is an increasingly valuable job market skill; most of the programmers I know speak of it reverently too.

* Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi review – the global war on terror has found its true witness. We have seen the monsters and many are already inside the castle.

* “For the love of God, rich people, stop giving Ivy League colleges money.” The words “diminishing returns” aren’t used explicitly but are implied throughout.

* Adjunct teaching: “Treadmill to Oblivion.” Short version: Don’t go to grad school. But if you read this blog you should already know that.

Briefly noted: Men: Notes From an Ongoing Investigation — Laura Kipnis

May 12, 2015 By in Books, Briefly Noted, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , 3 Comments

Men is charming but inessential; like many essay collections it is better taken from a library than bought, though I bought and resold my copy. That being said the essays within were detailed, thoughtful, good on a sentence-by-sentence level, and made me re-evaluate almost of all of the subjects (like Larry Flynt or a movie I’d never heard of: House of Games.

The Flynt essay shows Kipnis being thoughtful and non-dogmatic:

[Hustler] was also far less entrenched in misogyny than I’d assumed. What it’s against isn’t women so much as sexual repression, which includes conventional uptight femininity, though within its pages, not everyone who’s sexually repressed, uptight and feminine is necessarily female: prissy men were frequently in the crosshairs too. In fact, Hustler was often surprisingly dubious about the status of men, not to mention their power and potency […]

men_kipnisThe ending of the essay is also excellent for reasons I’d rather not spoil: if John McPhee read this sort of thing, I could imagine him smile.

House of Games is not as visually compelling as it should be; the movie is ripe for a remaking because Kipnis is right about the script, and, as she says (perhaps without fully appreciating it):

Every woman adores a con man—to steal a page from Sylvia Plath. Especially one who knows you better than you know yourself, who looks into your eyes and reads your dirty secret desires, who knows what a bad girl you really are under the prim professional facade, and then takes you for everything.

Is it true? Maybe, for some values of “truth.” That said, not all of the sentences are true: “As we know, modern market societies require ambition, because they’re premised on social mobility, which is essential to a flourishing democracy.” All of those clauses are untrue: we don’t know what the sentence says we know; market societies don’t require ambition (they may sometimes reward the unambitious with a quasi-basic income, allowing them to do other things) and are based on giving people what they want, and democracy doesn’t necessarily mandate market societies, at least in theory. Most people, however, want More (defining “More” broadly), and democracies attempt on some level to give people what they want.

Like so many culture writers Kipnis is missing evolutionary biology, and the addition of it would make her even less politically palatable to the chattering set (already her essay “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe,” at the link and included in the collection, is accurate and contrary to Right Thinking and therefore all the more despised).

Kipnis complains about clichés, which is a good sign, but she’s still willing to use the word “problematic” (5), which is a bad sign. But the rest of the book is fun enough to make the bad sign ignorable.

Novelty, art, business

May 2, 2015 By in Culture, Writing Tags: , , , 2 Comments

“[T]he most important task in business—the creation of new value—cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals,” as Thiel says in Zero to One, which, if you haven’t read it, you should stop reading this post and go read it instead. Read properly it’s about art as much as business. The most important task in art may also explain why art schools bother us (sample: “Why Writers Love to Hate the M.F.A.?“): they take what might be successful master-apprentice relationships and make them professional—that is, more like consultants than like artists. Maybe the best consultants are artists.

There’s more evidence for this: Genre writers often bother literary writers, perhaps because genre writers tend to execute a formula rather than innovate (the word “tend” is key here). If genre writers do come up with a new formula, they tend to iterate on that formula rather than seeking to discover a whole new one; while this might be admired in science and to some extent business it rarely is by artists, who often value noble, large-scale failure over commercial success. It’s easier to scorn what people want than it is to give them what they want, or make what they want.

Many writers of literary fiction are attempting to be novel, though I would argue that most attempts, even those that are highly praised, are actually bad. They may be bad in a way likely to provide tenure for future English professors, but the badness remains, and it isn’t clear that MFA and related programs help inculcate the idea that the most important task is the creation of new value, which by definition can’t be foreseen ahead of time. If someone foresaw it, they would execute, and the value would be there. Unpredictability may also be why so many artistic careers are difficult: you don’t know if you’re really creating value until it’s too late. Efforts at standardization are futile. Value may not even be recognized in your lifetime. You really are Sisyphus. When I first read the core part of The Myth of Sisphyus, in high school, I thought it stupid, yet it remains with me because it touches something at the core of not just art but life.

As Jonah Lehrer wrote, “although we are always surrounded by our creations, there is something profoundly mysterious about the creative process.” That mystery exists across fields.

Life: The life of the artist edition

April 26, 2015 By in Books, Life, Nonfiction Tags: , Leave a comment

I lived for a considerable time with an older, extremely talented actress. She scorned my cleanliness theory and maintained that theatre is shit, lust, rage and wickedness. ‘The only boring thing about you, Ingmar Bergman,’ she said, ‘is your passion for the wholesome. You should abandon that passion. It’s false and suspect. It sets limits you daren’t exceed. Like Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, you should seek out your syphilitic whore.

Perhaps she was right, perhaps it was all romantic drivel in the wash of pop art and shady drug scenes. I don’t know. All I know is that this beautiful and brilliant actress lost her memory and her teeth and died at fifty in a mental hospital. That’s what she got for expressing her feelings. (35)

—Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern, which should be bad but isn’t. Consider it recommended. I think like the actress yet live closer to Bergman.

How many actresses have lived like the actress but not got what she got “for expressing her feelings?” Be reluctant to generalize from anecdote!

From 2015 many things stand out, among them corporal punishment, the prevalence of disease, the need to make music when it cannot be effectively recorded and played back at will, and relentless reading in a land without TV.

Links: Child support and debtors’ prison, broken colleges, the meaning of life, and more

April 21, 2015 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* “Skip Child Support. Go to Jail. Lose Job. Repeat.” To call this system “insane” is an understatement. Even calling it a “system” might be overly kind.

* “Thinking too highly of higher ed;” if you read nothing else this month read this.

* Jeff offers perspective on the mattress industry and writers more generally.

* “Thinking too highly of higher ed,” by Peter Thiel, who also wrote Zero to One (which you, like everyone, should read).

* “The global secular savings stagnation glut,” the sort of link I rarely post here and yet:

What this discussion should make clear is that secular stagnation isn’t much of a puzzle. Rather, it is a dilemma. The ageing societies of the rich world want rapid income growth and low inflation and a decent return on safe investments and limited redistribution and low levels of immigration. Well you can’t have all of that. And what they have decided is that what they’re prepared to sacrifice is the rapid income growth. In aggregate that decision looks somewhat reasonable if not entirely right. But it is a choice with pretty significant distributional consequences. And the second era of secular stagnation will come to an end when political and demographic shifts allow the losers from this arrangement to say: enough.

* “If We Dig Out All Our Fossil Fuels, Here’s How Hot We Can Expect It to Get.”

* “Walter Scott, child support defendant murdered by cop, earned about $800/month.”

* “Nutritional Science Isn’t Very Scientific: The research behind dietary recommendations is a lot less certain than you think.” Just about the only obvious thing is “Don’t eat refined carbohydrates,” like sugar and white rice, and eat vegetables and nuts.

* “What If We Admitted to Children That Sex Is Primarily About Pleasure?”

* The Steady Rise of Bike Ridership in New York”

* “Is Capitalism Making Us Stupid?“, a brilliant article with a stupid title.

Jerry Seinfeld intends to die standing up, searching for another breakthrough

April 16, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , 2 Comments

Someone sent me “Jerry Seinfeld Intends to Die Standing Up” and I see why. The article is a gem of its kind, but the really good parts are all about process, and so many good people’s processes are similar, and time-intensive: “Developing jokes as glacially as he does, Seinfeld says, allows for breakthroughs he wouldn’t reach otherwise.” That’s also a point of Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Perhaps not surprisingly Seinfeld cites the Japanese as an influence:

Seinfeld will nurse a single joke for years, amending, abridging and reworking it incrementally, to get the thing just so. “It’s similar to calligraphy or samurai,” he says. “I want to make cricket cages. You know those Japanese cricket cages? Tiny, with the doors? That’s it for me: solitude and precision, refining a tiny thing for the sake of it.”

The writer, Jonah Weiner, also makes the article a pleasure when he writes, “There is a contemporary vogue for turning over an entire act rapidly: tossing out jokes wholesale, starting again from zero to avoid creative stasis. Louis C.K. has made this practice nearly synonymous with black-belt stand-up.” “Black-belt stand-up:” was he consciously referencing himself referencing Seinfeld’s Japanese cricket cages, since black belts are associated with Asian martial arts? I don’t know. I do know based on the article that Seinfeld works for his breakthroughs, as I suppose everyone who does anything significant does.

One senses he’d get along with or hate Jonathan Ive. Love and hate are closer to each other than they are to indifference.

The best writers have a sense of monomania, often disguised as proportion, in them, and written sentences invite the editing and reworking Seinfeld gives to jokes.

This detail is merely true: “A sleek Pinarello racing bicycle, which Seinfeld rides around town, stood against a wall. ‘It’s very addictive, that feeling of gliding through the city,’ he said.” I don’t have a “Pinarello racing bicycle,” and according to Google’s fetching of the bike’s price I probably won’t, ever, but something about biking catches my attention, especially in New York, which may be becoming the world’s best place for riding. I do have a bike that feels right, though, and the addictiveness is real. Five miles in Manhattan feels like more progress than 200 in Arizona. The why still evades me, as the “why?” of humor evades us all while still seeming essential to intelligence.

The gym, otherwise known as The Temple of Iron:

April 9, 2015 By in Books, Links, Nonfiction Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

[I]f we compare the practices of organized religion and the gym, we can identify many similarities: the faithful of both church and gym travel to a separate building, wear special clothes, eat special food and take part in shared rituals that are performed with complete absorption and dedication. For those for whom religion is no longer a marker of identity, and who do not take part in the social aspects of religious observance, going to the gym fulfils many of the same individual and social needs. The major difference is, of course, that churchgoers polish their eternal souls with a view to attaining happiness everlasting, while gym-goers train their bodies for rewards in the here and now.

That’s from The Temple of Perfection: A History of the Gym, which so far oscillates between thoughtful (as in the quoted paragraph) and exceedingly annoying (“The body, how it is interpreted, represented, used, shaped, and presented in private and public, plays a central role in the transformation of abstract social discourses into lived actions and identities”—which could say, “People interpret other people based on their bodies,” but why use eight words when eighty are available?). Always be wary of writers who use the word “discourse,” because it’s so often a marker of bogosity, and a sign that the writer should read Paglia’s “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf.”

under_armourI go to the gym or run most days, and I have a fascination with articles about the saints of apparel industry—like “Skin in the Game: Under Armour knows athletes. Can it sell to everyone else?” (notice the eroticized accompanying photo, shot by someone who knows his business) or “Chip Wilson, Lululemon Guru, Is Moving On.” One does not have to be a writer for Mad Men to see that these companies are trying, perhaps successfully, to tap into mythic associations and aspirations; both articles could fit into Virginia Postrel’s book The Power of Glamour. Glamour is sometimes its own reward.

The gym, at least the one I go to, is more multiethnic than most of my friend circles or the parties I go to. The net of people caught by the squat cage is wider. There are also interesting gender divisions: men do more free weights and women do more cardio (though they’d probably be better served by free weights). Modesty in the gym is however not a virtue, and in most gyms I’ve seen a lot of eye-fucking goes on, for perhaps obvious reasons. If people once met and mated through religious organizations and now do while pressing, one could add this example to Chaline’s book.

 

 

Apply this also to academics, writers, and artists:

April 4, 2015 By in Academia, ideas, Links Tags: , Leave a comment

Many years ago, my wife and I were on vacation on Vancouver Island, looking for a place to stay. We found an attractive but deserted motel on a little-traveled road in the middle of a forest. The owners were a charming young couple who needed little prompting to tell us their story. They had been schoolteachers in the province of Alberta; they had decided to change their life and used their life savings to buy this motel, which had been built a dozen years earlier. They told us without irony or self-consciousness that they had been able to buy it cheap, ‘because six or seven previous owners had failed to make a go of it.’ They also told us about plans to seek a loan to make the establishment more attractive by building a restaurant next to it. They felt no need to explain why they expected to succeed where six or seven others had failed. A common thread of boldness and optimism links businesspeople, from motel owners to superstar CEOs. (258–9)

That’s from Daniel Kahneman’s highly recommended book Thinking, Fast and Slow. How many times have you read some artists say that they succeeded because they believed totally in themselves and worked demonically to make their careers happen? If you’re like me you’ve heard this narrative many times. But you haven’t mostly heard the narrative about artists who believed totally in themselves and worked demonically only to fail, because they don’t get interviewed and their views don’t hit the media.

The quote is from chapter  24 of Thinking, Fast and Slow, which ought to be required reading for anyone thinking about getting a grad degree in the humanities. People giving advice on this topic tend to have succeeded; those who haven’t succeeded are mute (though less mute than they once were).

Links: Mattresses, kids, keyboards, bikes, perfection, and Broki (and a plea)

April 3, 2015 By in Links Tags: , 2 Comments

* “Slumber Party! Casper leads a new crowd of startups in the $14 billion mattress industry, trying to turn the most utilitarian of purchases into a quirky, shareable adventure. Wake up to the new world of selling the fundane.” Of these companies Tuft & Needle may be my favorite. This is a very sad sentence, though perhaps it isn’t intended as such: “David Perry, an editor at Furniture Today … has covered the mattress industry for 20 years.” Has Perry waited decades for his moment in the startup sun?

* A new study says it doesn’t matter how much time you spend with your kids. Anxious and neurotic upper-middle-class parents, consider yourself relieved. I don’t (particularly) recall wanting to wanting extensively to interact with my parents when I was a kid, though maybe my memory is flawed.

* Rashid Nassar on Unicomp’s amazing customer service.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA* “Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost“—in financial, equality, and other terms.

* “Why I keep fixing my bike,” which is shockingly beautiful and about more than just the bike.

* “The Temple of Perfection: A History of the Gym, by Eric Chaline.” I ordered a copy:

Eric Chaline, author of this history, suggests that, in the modern world, the gym functions as a “quasi-religious space” where devotees gather together to “wear special clothes, eat special food and take part in shared rituals that are performed with complete absorption and dedication”. For the ancient Greeks, the gymnasium was an important institution (the word derives from gymnazein, ‘to exercise naked’, and they did).

though I am apprehensive: “His analysis of the theme, and of sexuality in general, relies heavily on Michel Foucault.” That is never a sign of a good writer or thinker. I wonder if Chaline has seen Reddit’s Swole Acceptance page, which is amazingly hilarious.

* Book news is weak this week; what am I missing? The new Ishiguro is okay but in my view there are others doing similar things better. I just finished The Possibility of an Island and can’t decide if it warrants an individual post. Emma Sayle’s book Behind the Mask: Enter a World Where Women Make – and Break – the Rules is straight up pornography-memoir (the writing is better than average but still worse than good novels; Never the Face is a good comparison) and I don’t want to write about it in more detail until it’s more easily available in the U.S. What is beautiful but plotful that I need to read? I’m tempted, as often happens, to re-read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.