Tag Archives: Ideas

What Ever Happened to Modernism? — Gabriel Josipovici

June 7, 2011 By in Academia, Books, Briefly Noted Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

I’ve been meaning to write about What Ever Happened to Modernism? for a while, but this This New York Review of Books essay by Eliot Weinberger hits the major points I’d like to make better than I would’ve. It also describes the major issue I have with What Ever Happened to Modernism?: we never really find out what, if anything, happened to Modernism—or who, in Josipovici’s eyes, we should admire. Weinberger notes that “There are some unkind words about Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and Julian Barnes (“this petty-bourgeois uptightness, this terror of not being in control, this schoolboy desire to boast and to shock”) [. . .]” and that “Regardless of whether a climate can see—and Josipovici’s condescension that laureled mediocrities can’t help being what they are—the argument is undermined by the fact that he declines to name a single living author who should be praised.” Both are true. Polemics work best when we have positive and negative examples. Josipovici mostly gives us the negative.

The other thing I notice in What Ever Happened to Modernism? is the slipperiness of definition, which leads to the larger problem of Modernism and Postmodernism in general: we can get point to some works that we think embody some values of either movement, but we find deriving general principles from those specific works hard, if not impossible. Now, the real question to anyone who says anything about Modernism or Postmodernism is, “What do you mean by those words or artistic movements?” Even the phrase “artistic movements” might be wrong, since some have argued for the political value of them, and to the extent art and politics are separate one should note the binary.

How do we decide on what Modernism is? We can’t, really, as Weinberger notes:

Every general consideration of Modernism quickly crashes on the rocks of categorization: Which Modernism? Is it Rilke or Tristan Tzara? Matisse or Duchamp? Thomas Mann or Gertrude Stein? Arnold Schoenberg or Duke Ellington? Nearly anything that can be said about the one can’t be said about the other. Josipovici attempts to navigate these waters by simultaneously broadening the definition of Modernism itself, while greatly limiting the range of its concerns, its varying contexts, and its enormous cast of twentieth-century characters.

The more specific the definition, the more it leaves out; the more general, the harder the whole idea is to discuss. That doesn’t stop writers of polemics, of course, and as I read What Ever Happened to Modernism? I did think. . . something. I’m just not real sure what exactly I thought or why. I’m flipping through my much-marked copy, looking for a characteristic passage or turn of phrase, but you’d be better off reading Weinberger on Josipovici.

I suspect I’m not the only person with such a hazy reaction. Lately, I’ve been rereading novels I really admire as I start another novel of my own. Those I admire include Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Tom Perrotta’s Election, and Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind. After reading them, I almost always have a better sense of what I should be doing as a writer and what a particular book should do. This feeling isn’t limited to fiction: I get the same sense from James Wood’s How Fiction Works, or John Barth’s essays in The Friday Book. They’re all enmeshed in individuality.

Josipovici is aware of his narrativizing tendency and some of the dangers of definition; he says:

Naturally I think the story I have just finished telling is the true one. At the same time I recognise that there are many stories and that there is no such thing as the true story, only more or less plausible explanations, stories that take more or less account of the facts. I am aware too that these stories are sites of contestation; more is at stake than how we view the past.

There are many stories, and I don’t fully buy his.

Speaking of Barth, I find myself most drawn to his formulation in The Friday Book, which is cruelly out of print:

I happen to believe that just as an excellent teacher is likely to teach well no matter what pedagogical theory he suffers from, so a gifted writer is likely to rise above what he takes to be his aesthetic principles, not to mention what others take to be his aesthetic principles. Indeed, I believe that a truly splendid specimen in whatever aesthetic mode will pull critical ideology along behind it, like an ocean liner trailing seagulls. Actual artists, actual texts, are seldom more than more or less modernist, postmodernist, formalist, symbolist, realist, surrealist, politically committed, aesthetically ‘pure,’ ‘experimental,’ regionalist, internationalist, what have you. The particular work ought always to take primacy over contexts and categories.

Notice how Barth conveys his view of generality in a single word: “suffers,” as if literary categorization is a disease. In the wrong person, it is one. Discussing generalities is not much fun unless you have a lot of specifics to back them up, and I have no way to paraphrase or add to Barth’s last sentence from that quote: “The particular work ought always to take primacy over contexts and categories.” Martin Amis’ Money, regardless of how you categorize it, still stands out to me as being a) unique and b) good, which very few novels of any sort achieve. To lambast Amis in general, as Josipovici does, is to miss all those particularities that make him stand out. Of course, I’m committing the same sin here because I’m not citing specifics in Money. But I also sometimes rise to the level of the work being discussed, so perhaps that sin can be excused.

Week 33 links: The secret sex lives of teachers, B. R. Myers and A Reader's Manifesto, digital cameras, a book in the home, science fiction writers' picks, adultery and politics

May 21, 2011 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* The secret sex lives of teachers, which notes, “there is clearly something irresistible about teachers with decidedly adult extracurricular activities.”

* The Soul-Sucking Suckiness of B.R. Myers, which I don’t buy. I read A Reader’s Manifesto and loved it. Hallberg says, “It was hard to say which was more irritating: Myers’ scorched-earth certainties; his method, a kind of myopic travesty of New Criticism; or his own prose, a donnish pastiche of high-minded affectation and dreary cliché.” I suppose one man’s weak “method” is the opening of another’s eyes to something he’d long suspected but never quite articulated.

I remember trying to read DeLillo and Pynchon as a teenager, thinking they were incoherent, boring, or both, and putting them back down again—an opinion I haven’t managed to revised.

* Why we’ve reached the end of the camera megapixel race.

* A Book in Every Home, and Then Some.

* The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels.

* The stars of modern SF pick the best science fiction. A lot of the choices don’t look very appealing to me; I wonder if this is an example of the values of writers and reading diverging.

* Normally I think the day-to-day of politics is stupid and cruel, but some meta political commentary can be amusing, along the observation of hypocrisy. Like in this New York Times column: “What is it with Republicans lately? Is there something about being a leader of the family-values party that makes you want to go out and commit adultery?”

* The Magician King is done.

* The annoyances of eBooks, and why they will probably win anyway.

Eight years of writing and the first busted Moleskine

May 11, 2011 By in Personal, photos, Tools Tags: , , , , , , 20 Comments

Most of my writing happens on a computer, which means it’s pretty hard to depict the final product in a visually satisfying way.* But I also carry around a pretentious Moleskine™ notebook for the random ideas that strike in grocery stories or at parties. The latest notebook, however, developed a split binding:

I’ve been using Moleskines for about eight years, which means I go through about two of them per publishable novel:

Notice how none of the others have the binding split that afflicted the latest one. I haven’t consciously treated this one differently from its predecessors or used it any longer. Maybe the quality control at Moleskine central has declined, although people have made claims in that direction for a very long time.

Regardless of the reason, the latest notebook has about twelve usable pages left; I tend to write nonfiction, blog post ideas, things I need to remember, reminders about e-mails, entries from an unkept diary, and stuff like that in the back. Ideas, quotes, things people say, and other material related to fiction goes in front. When back and front meet in the middle, it’s time to get a new one.

When I start working on a new novel, I usually go back through all the old notebooks at the beginning to see what material might be usable and when I started taking ideas for that specific project. Some ideas for novels have been burbling in the back of my mind for a very long time, waiting for me to have the time and skill to move them from a couple of scrawled lines to 80,000 words of story. The oldest Moleskines I have were bought in the 2002 neighborhood. They’ve held up pretty well; the ones I started buying in the 2005 neighborhood are showing their age. Tough to say if this is an indication of falling quality control or something else altogether.

While Googling around for the complaint about Moleskine quality I linked to above, I also found a site that recommends The Guildhall Notebook. I’ve already ordered one, although apparently Guildhall doesn’t have a U.S. distributor, so I have to wait for mine to ship from the UK. I hope the improved binding is worth the wait. EDIT 1: They weren’t worth the wait, or the hassle; if that weren’t enough, Christine Nusse of Exaclair Inc. /Quo Vadis Planners, which distributes or distributed Guildhall notebooks, said in an e-mail that her understanding is that the notebooks are being discontinued. She recommends the Quo Vadis Habana instead (although I think it too big) or a Rhodia notebook (which I think just right, as I said below.

So even if you want a Guildhall pocket notebook, you probably won’t be able to find one for long; fortunately, the Rhodia Webbie is a better alternative.

EDIT 2: Someone found me by asking, “are moleskines pretentious”? Answer, in post form: “Are Moleskines pretentious? Yup. Guildhall Notebooks are worse.”

EDIT 3: I’ve settled on the Rhodia Webbie as a full-time notebook: it’s expensive but much more durable than other notebooks I’ve found. I’ll write a full review at some point.

EDIT 4: I posted an updated photo of the stack. Or you can see it here:

* Even describing it using conventional prepositions is tough: do I write “on” or “in” or “with” a computer? Good arguments exist for any of the three.

What success looks like: A link from Dave Winer of Scripting News

May 10, 2011 By in Briefly Noted, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve been reading Dave Winer’s blog Scripting News since long before I’d heard the word “blog.” Scripting News been covered in Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters and countless other profiles as one of the early examples of a blog. Imagine my delight when:

Yes, that’s a link my post on the sad and stupid demise of Flip at the hands of Cisco. I wouldn’t call Winer’s Retweet “a dream come true” or any other phrase that should be reserved for acts of extreme achievement or copulation (which can sometimes be an extreme achievement), but it’s certainly gratifying—like getting e-mails or comments from writers and critics I admire.

Now I only need a link from Marginal Revolution and my blogging life will be, if not complete, then at least substantially more satisfying than it might be otherwise.

Big Sex Little Death — Susie Bright's Memoir

March 27, 2011 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Big Sex Little Death is weirdly boring. I say “weirdly” because you’d expect a book about sexual awakening, development, politics, and exploration to be more exciting; this Slate article on Bright and being wrong convinced me to buy the book. Skip it: read the reviews instead.

Big Sex Little Death has some clever lines and individual section, but as a whole the memoir feels prosaic. There’s an obligatory section on birth, parents, sides of the family, unlikely anecdotes; we find that “My mom didn’t drink” and that “My grandpa was a butcher and ran a chicken ranch,” which is eminently respectable in a memoir and somewhat tedious too. There’s a conventionally slightly broken childhood—isn’t it a requirement that people writing memoirs focus on childhood?—that leads to an adulthood that should hold the reason we’re reading the memoir. It does explain that, sort of, and tells a story about economic sexual censorship that I didn’t realize existed as late as the 1980s. Then again, looking at Amazon and Apple’s policies towards sexually frank books, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. I also hasn’t realized that Bright’s women-run erotica magazine, On Our Backs, even existed.

In disentangling herself from the financial pit that On Our Backs turns out to be, Bright finds the only thing rarer than a hooker with a heart gold: a lawyer with a heart of gold, whom she has say, “Ms. Bright, I’m going to take care of this for you,” without making her pay. Reviews of memoirs often want to engage the question of how much is “true,” and I can believe the whole thing except perhaps for the exchange on page 310. Gun threats, underage and unwise sex, cruelty: all believable. Kind lawyers: less so.

There’s not a lot about the intellectual development that led Bright to work on On Our Backs, or that led her not just to get a lot of action but to write about getting a lot of action. Maybe it’s impossible, or nearly impossible, to describe what leads to intellectual engagement: “I read a lot, liked it, thought about it, and transformed thought in my mind” isn’t very satisfying. And it’s not easy to make actions symbolize intellectual development. If someone knows a good example of such changes shown effectively in literature, I’d love to hear them (one exception: The Adventures of Augie March. Bildungsromans might be as close as we get).

Once Bright gets past the parent bits, she describes how, as a teenager, she starts having sex with socialist, many of them older than her; she says that “lucky for me, some of them were really, really good in bed—and since everyone was down with women’s liberation and nonmonogamy, that made things extra good for me.” This continues:

I was in no one’s debt; I was no one’s property. What little I thought about school anymore involved feeling bad about how scared everyone was: scared of having sex, scared of leaving their gilded cage, scared of dreaming about anything that hadn’t been premeditated by their parents.

And they still are. It’s one of the moments in the book that translates across generations and feels right, since so many parents still treat their children as property. Elsewhere, Bright has finely observed moments, though they sometimes go slightly awry:

People always imagine there is something happening in Los Angeles because of the celebrities. They think that because they see a movie star buy a bag of marshmallows, it must be an event. They think wiping their ass with the same toilet paper that a movie star’s maid wiped her ass with is an accomplishment. This is a company town, and Hollywood is just as crushing as a Carnegie Steel mill. The vast majority of Angelenos have so much nothing in their lives that ‘celebrity nothing’ makes them feel like they have something.

This is almost true: people do imagine something is happening in L.A. But the next sentence is choppy, with all the “t” sounds and the repeated use of the word “they:” “They think that because they see. . .” Still, Bright understands the vacuousness of celebrity worship, but she’s wrong when she says L.A. is “a company town.” There are at least five major movie studios, compared to a single Carnegie Steel mill, and L.A.’s economy is much vaster and more diverse than Pittsburgh’s ever was. That’s part of the reason it was able to thrive; as Edward Glaeser describes in Triumph of the City, cities with diverse economic bases tend to thrive. L.A. is one, even if the movie studios—notice the plural—are very visible.

During that time in L.A., Bright says, “I could not take one more minute of trying to convince the people of Los Angeles that a workers’ revolution and a complete overhaul of society were a tiny bit more exciting than getting a bit role in a Burger King commercial.” I’d like to know what exactly a “workers’ revolution and a complete overhaul of society” means. Revolutions don’t have a great track record, since they tend to include a lot of mindless bloodshed and power struggles. The “workers’ revolution” in Russia that led to the Soviet Union might be the single bloodiest event in human history, according to Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands. These demands aren’t a coherent political platform; they’re teenage angst writ large and the result of a mind that would be much assisted by taking some economics classics. I’ll take the Burger King commercial and maybe a faster CPU next year, thanks.

So her politic-politics might not be great, but her sexual politics and stories sometimes make more sense. Bright says that women making porn was shocking in the 1970s and 1980s. Apparently, however, women making porn for women is still news, and people are still going, “This is still news?!” I don’t see an end to this cycle. In the personal ream, Bright’s memoir could be titled, “Getting Some Ass From Unusual Places,” since relatively few people have gotten it from such diverse places: a union organizing camp; from college dropouts after she dropped out of high school; from lesbians; from men; and probably people in between. An appropriate subtitle might be, “And Then Thinking About It Afterwards,” Like Karen Owen, Bright has taken quite a survey of her escapes; unlike Owen, Bright isn’t alienated from herself or desires. She’s also more explicitly political, which can be both annoyingly polemical and deeper. Most people don’t think of their lives in overtly political terms, even when it might help them too, and it makes someone who does unusual.

That might be the biggest difference between Bright and many other writers about and havers of sex: she doesn’t regret what she’s done, has actualized her experience, and has never particularly bought into the sex-is-bad paradigm that, although weaker than it once was, still dominates culture for many people. We like everything leading up to sex—sexiness, attractiveness, revealing clothes, preening, buying expensive objects—but we still judge the people who move from signaling to action, despite or because of our own desires for action.

Bright imagines that, after the sexual revolution,

Women wouldn’t be catty. No one would bother to be jealous. Who would have the time? Sex would be friendly and kind and fun. You’d get to see what everyone was like in bed. You’d learn things in bed, and that would be the whole point. Romances would seem like candy cigarettes. You could have all the sex and friendship you wanted for free. Exclusivity would be for bores and babies.

I’m all for it. Alas, the pragmatist or realist in me sees this as so unlikely that I want to label it idealist in the worst sense of the word. Bright knows as much, however, and the eyes of experience looking backward demonstrates that she knows precisely how unlikely this is.

I wish there was more connective tissue between Bright’s experiences and better writing when she describes them. She knows the problems memoirs tend to have:

At the onset of my memoir, I thought I would bring myself up to date on the autobiography racket. I researched the current bestsellers among women authors who had contemplated their life’s journey. The results were so dispiriting: diet books. The weighty befores and afters. You look up men’s memoirs and find some guy climbing a mountain with his bare teeth—the parallel view for women are the mountains of cookies they rejected or succumbed to.

I think she gives men’s memoirs too much credit, since so many of them are equally inane and poorly written. And there are probably reasonably interesting memoirs written by women out there, but I think the bigger problem is “reasonably interesting memoirs” in general. Alas: I’m not sure Big Sex Little Death is one.

You can read more about Bright in this interview. Consider it and the other links in lieu of the book itself.

And how does this apply to writers? Steve Jobs and the idea of “Ma”

January 28, 2011 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

From “How Steve Jobs ‘out-Japanned’ Japan:”

That ability to express by omission holds a central place in Jobs’s management philosophy. As he told Fortune magazine in 2008, he’s as proud of the things Apple hasn’t done as the things it has done. “The great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products,” he said. “We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas.” . . .

Jobs’s immersion in Zen and passion for design almost certainly exposed him to the concept of ma, a central pillar of traditional Japanese aesthetics. Like many idioms relating to the intimate aspects of how a culture sees the world, it’s nearly impossible to accurately explain — it’s variously translated as “void,” “space” or “interval” — but it essentially describes how emptiness interacts with form, and how absence shapes substance. If someone were to ask you what makes a ring a meaningful object — the circle of metal it consists of, or the emptiness that that metal encompasses? — and you were to respond “both,” you’ve gotten as close to ma as the clumsy instrument of English allows.

I think of the various things I have that might have “ma:” a pretentious Moleskine notebook, a Go board, certain books. But where do objects end and the internalization of an idea begin?

And how does this apply to writers? Steve Jobs and the idea of "Ma"

January 28, 2011 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

From “How Steve Jobs ‘out-Japanned’ Japan:”

That ability to express by omission holds a central place in Jobs’s management philosophy. As he told Fortune magazine in 2008, he’s as proud of the things Apple hasn’t done as the things it has done. “The great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products,” he said. “We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas.” . . .

Jobs’s immersion in Zen and passion for design almost certainly exposed him to the concept of ma, a central pillar of traditional Japanese aesthetics. Like many idioms relating to the intimate aspects of how a culture sees the world, it’s nearly impossible to accurately explain — it’s variously translated as “void,” “space” or “interval” — but it essentially describes how emptiness interacts with form, and how absence shapes substance. If someone were to ask you what makes a ring a meaningful object — the circle of metal it consists of, or the emptiness that that metal encompasses? — and you were to respond “both,” you’ve gotten as close to ma as the clumsy instrument of English allows.

I think of the various things I have that might have “ma:” a pretentious Moleskine notebook, a Go board, certain books. But where do objects end and the internalization of an idea begin?

The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better — Tyler Cowen

January 26, 2011 By in Nonfiction, Reviews, status Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 10 Comments

Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better is, at $4.00, cheap and packed with ideas that have been circling Marginal Revolution for some time. The mix includes the trajectory of history, the current economic crisis, technology, and economics. These might sound like disparate topics, but they come together, and Cowen summarizes the current economic crisis this way: “We thought we were richer than we were” (emphasis his). The book is an attempt to explain why we, collectively, operated under this delusion and what continuing to operate under it might entail. Note that The Great Stagnation is only available on the Kindle and is blessedly short: you won’t find the kind of padding that would be necessary to make a traditional, commercial book. I wonder if he will write one or two more of these booklettes (for lack of a better term—do we really want to call them “Kindle shorts” or something like that?) and eventually publish the collection through traditional channels as well.

This description from Reihan Salam, pointed to by Cowen, is a good one: “I’m wary of summarizing [The Great Stagnation] — I really want you to read it for yourself — but the basic idea is very straightforward: Americans have grown accustomed to painless, automatic increases in prosperity.” I think this main point leaves out the idea of technological innovation as something underlying the fact that “Americans have grown accustomed to painless, automatic increases in prosperity,” but the point is good enough to observe.

Nonetheless, one unstated idea in The Great Stagnation is that by learning about the idea of stagnating industrial economies, we might learn how to get out of them. Cowen has one answer, which is to raise the social status of scientists (this is always a good idea but seems improbable to me: admiring athletes and celebrities seems like a nearly universe behavior). Once alerted to this large-scale danger, we might be able to take small-scale steps to get out of it. One might be to combine Cowen’s description of slowing technological change, which he explains thoroughly, to Steven Berlin Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From.

Johnson says good ideas often spring from the “adjacent possible” and that the idea of pure, lone genius may in some ways be overwrought. Notice the important weasel words in that sentence: Johnson is not opposed to the idea of genius, but it is not his chief concern. If we’re going to get more people together in the dense clusters that might lead to the major innovative breakthroughs necessary to power the economy, the solution might be to find a system or systems to implement some of Johnson’s major ideas. Universities already do a reasonably good job of this, but there may be other ways. For example, I imagine that Johnson would favor the idea of cities without major height restrictions, which would allow more people to interact and exchange ideas while spending less commuting time. I don’t think it a coincidence that Salam also thinks about transportation issues; he says “Commuting and congestion should be taken much more seriously then they are at present. Long commutes are a big source of misery for individuals and families” but mentions telecommuting as a possible solution. For many kinds of jobs I think that impractical; larger cities more amenable to families (through, for example, 50 story buildings with four bedrooms in each unit) might be a better option. If gas prices get high enough, this may become necessary, and it will have the side benefit of possibly increasing the number of Johnson’s adjacent possibles.

Cowen touches on how World War II may influence current American expectations. America was protected during World War II, while Europe destroyed itself; memories of the destruction are much more alive on the continent, which may lower their expectations for material success. I would have liked more of a discussion on how World War II may have driven scientists, artists, and others to the United States and thus driven some of the applied prosperity from 1945 – 1973. Is that part of the “low-hanging fruit” that is much discussed? If so, how great a component is it? Other aspects of immigration policy may have helped the U.S. in that regard too. Did the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which, according to Oliver Wang, “created preference categories for science, math and engineering-trained immigrants to come over” lead to a substantial advantage to the United States in technology? Incidentally, the act in turn favored Asians with strong math and science backgrounds, which may be part of the reason Asians are stereotyped with strong skills in those areas.

One chapter deals with the Internet and how much it lessens the overall costs of fun while employing a relatively small number of people. Computers do an extraordinary job of leveraging the talents of a single highly skilled person; this is part of Paul Graham’s point in “How to Make Wealth” and “Inequality and Risk.” If politicians want to redistribute wealth because there won’t be as many spoils from growth, as Cowen as they are and will be tempted to do, they will largely be doing it from the kinds of people Graham is talking about. Graham is also unusual because he is putting his money and mouth where his time is through the creation of Y Combinator, a startup incubator / funder premised around the idea that a small number of people can have a disproportionately lucrative or effective tech business. So far Graham appears to be right. The very lean startups he funds probably employ relatively few people compared to large, existing companies, and they also provide the kinds of “cheap fun” Cowen writes about. If they’re not employing relatively unskilled people, who will? Possibly no one, except perhaps the Federal government; hence the zero marginal product ideas that have been discussed by Cowen and others. But if the cost of fun is cheaper, from the perspective of an individual we might be frustrated, but not as worse off as we might otherwise be.

Although Cowen doesn’t say this, the whole world might be moving toward a university model, where the people who are having ideas (professors) do not capture very much of the economic benefit of those ideas. The people who have lots of Facebook friends or who get many people to watch YouTube videos derive little income from those activities but still like to do them. Professors obviously derive some income, but most people with the tenacity and intelligence (in that order) to get through a PhD program and become a tenure-track or tenured professor could probably earn more elsewhere. But if this kind of thinking and these kinds of life choices—trading income for prestige and raw knowledge—become more pronounced throughout the economy, it may lead to lower tax revenues and make people who like traditional kinds of consumption (cars, houses, vacations) less happy than they would otherwise be. There would be less money to pay off special interest groups. People who like writing blog posts to the point of doing so for no effective payment, like your correspondent, are probably better off thanks to the Internet, which Cowen identifies as the major technological innovation of the last 30 years.

So using the Internet may take the place of other kinds of (expensive) consumption. Still, how satisfying is the Internet “fun” compared to other kinds? I would guess more satisfying than TV but perhaps not as satisfying as other kinds, which books like Hamlet’s Blackberry or Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows discuss. Does checking Facebook or e-mail 20 times a day make most of us better off, or do we have some kind of quasi-information addiction going on that leaves us hollow, like a conventional addiction of the coke / alcohol kind? I lean towards the Cowen large net benefit view but think the Hamlet’s Blackberry and “Disconnecting Distraction” view merit attention.

One other thing is worth noting: Cowen is more positive than normative. This is refreshing, since many people are primarily trying to write unsatisfying or simplifying polemics or argue about how a pie should be distributed instead of how to increase the pie’s size or why the pie looks like it does. Distribution makes some better off at the expense of others and may worsen status inequalities that often make people unhappy. Growth makes everyone better off. He is not overtly political, as when he describes how modern bureaucracies are enabled by record keeping and dissemination technologies. Such technologies can be deployed to great much larger organizations:

Despite the anticorporate bias of some left-wing thinkers, the New Deal and Progressive era initiatives were a direct result of the growth of big business and the rise of a consumer society. Big government and big business have long marched together in American history. You can call one good and the other bad (depending on your point of view), but that’s missing their common origin and ongoing alliance

He also observes:

Given that bubbles have popped in just about every asset market, and in many different countries, we can only understand the financial crisis by looking at some pretty fundamental and pretty general factors. It’s not about a single set of bad decisions or a single group of evil or misguided people It’s not Republicans or Democrats or farmers or bankers or old people or young people or stupid people or Christians or Muslims.

There are no boogeymen. There is (or was) a flawed system or set of system premised on false belief. Cowen explains some ways this happened and some ways we might react. The details of his ideas are too fine to continue discussing here.

Overall, The Great Stagnation does an impressive job of thinking at the margin, which very few people do, and in this respects may expand what we know and how we should think about the direction of the world. Still, it is hard for me to see it changing the overall shape of the debate in the U.S. There may not be an efficient way for individuals or small groups to change the debate, much as it is hard for a random person on their own to affect global climate change.

I still wonder how a particular individual should respond to The Great Stagnation, beyond working to raise the relative status of scientists and perhaps lowering the status of athletes and celebrities, approving of school reform efforts, and recognizing that high rates of growth may not return in the immediate future. If you’re trying to maximize income, you may want to think about learning more math and programming, since many jobs in growth fields now require them (I majored in English and am in English grad school but think I’ve picked up enough technical acumen to be slightly more dangerous than others in my field). You should also know that The Great Stagnation is non-technical and easy to read. Density of ideas in this case does not lead to impenetrable or overwrought prose.

A personal note: I’m pretty sure this is the first time I have reviewed a “book” that exists only in electronic form as I would another book. This may be a harbinger of things to come. In addition, based on how many other people are writing about The Great Stagnation, I suspect the eBook has spread to the chattering classes.

Why we need the third way: "What Are You Going to Do With That" and the need for imagination

January 18, 2011 By in Academia, Essays, Personal Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

In “What Are You Going to Do With That?,” William Deresiewicz tells the freshmen class at Stanford:

In the journey toward the success that you all hope to achieve, you have completed, by getting into Stanford, only the first of many legs. Three more years of college, three or four or five years of law school or medical school or a Ph.D. program, then residencies or postdocs or years as a junior associate. In short, an ever-narrowing funnel of specialization. You go from being a political-science major to being a lawyer to being a corporate attorney to being a corporate attorney focusing on taxation issues in the consumer-products industry. You go from being a biochemistry major to being a doctor to being a cardiologist to being a cardiac surgeon who performs heart-valve replacements.

But he goes on to point out why and how these kinds of defined professional paths—the ones high school and college students students are so often told constitute “success”—might not be optimal, for either the person on the path or society in general. If you “simply go with the flow,” you can end up merely being defined by what someone else has laid out. Perhaps not surprisingly, Deresiewicz goes on to say, “There is an alternative.” He calls it “moral imagination” and defines it this way: “Moral imagination means the capacity to envision new ways to live your life.” I would call it something else: the “third way.”

Deresiewicz’s essay shows why we need more talk about the third way: there are more options out there than further advanced schooling. Stanford in particular is a good place to be reminded of this. Obviously, Deresiewicz doesn’t say you must choose grad school or the professions, but the absence of any acknowledgement about starting your own company implies that those are the two primary choices.

I’ve similar talk. In my interview with him, Tucker Max describes the primary speech he gives at colleges:

[. . . W]hen you’re an undergrad, generally you think you can do two things. You’re gonna have to get a job after you graduate or you gotta go do more school. Because everyone who’s giving you advice or telling you how to live your life are people who’ve done one of those two things.

He describes a “third way,” with his two normal paths defined a lot like Deresiewicz’s, but in a lower register:

You don’t generally have anyone in your life who has gone out on their own and done something entrepreneurial or done something artistic or truly risky or truly taken the path less traveled, because those people [. . .] don’t work in academics. And don’t become cubicle monkeys. So what I try and explain in my speeches is that there’s a third way. Because a lot of people—I think most people—want to do something besides those two things.

A lot of people want to do something else, but that something else is, in some ways, harder to do than the normal path. Yet the people who go the third way often talk about it as being more satisfying, and the people who go the “two paths” often speak wistfully of the third—despite the difficulty one is likely to encounter. A friend wrote this to me: “I know for a fact that I’d hate [Tucker] Max’s writing, but he’s dead right about how few students are aware that they can do something artistic or creative or entrepreneurial.” Too few students are aware of this—and too few people in general are. You can consider this post a very small step in the direction of increasing awareness.

So far I’ve noted two examples. Paul Graham talks about the problem of standard paths too, in “A Student’s Guide to Startups:” “Till recently graduating seniors had two choices: get a job or go to grad school. I think there will increasingly be a third option: to start your own startup.” His answer is more defined than Deresiewicz’s or Max’s, but the very language he uses is similar. But he’s also got a way of generating the “third way” by funding startups. Instead of merely telling people to find one, he’s creating a third way for people to flow, which might be the most valuable contribution of all, at least for the technically inclined.

I think all three of these disparate writers—Deresiewicz, Max, and Graham—are pointing to a more fundamental need for the imagination necessary to exit the obvious paths that so often end up going nowhere. Of the three, Graham has done the most to institutionalize this process and make it available for others by starting Y Combinator. Max has probably done the most to be a living embodiment of an unusual third way. Deresiewicz is pointing to the possibility from within the way of a well-defined path (and the same one I’m one) from undergrad to graduate school to being a professor. Taken together, they diagnose and offer treatment for the same malady that can’t quite be identified yet comes from so many sources and has so many symptoms: Dilbert, cubicles, malaise, ennui, florescent lights, midlife crises, 20-somethings with advanced degrees working as baristas, waiters, or bartenders, essay writers.

Artistic or creative activities don’t usually come prepackaged in convenient jobs that get handed to college graduates. They get created by people who are artistic and creative, who find a way to turn what they want to do, or their inchoate ideas, into something greater than the idea itself. The “inchoate idea” is important: I suspect most people don’t entirely know what they’re doing when they find a third way. Steven Berlin Johnson has a term for this in his book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation: the slow hunch. This happens when something that you’ve been gnawing on slowly develops over time. Johnson describes it much more fully, of course, but a lot of my ideas in writing novels or academic work comes from slow hunches. Writing fiction isn’t an activity that really comes packaged in convenient job form: it is made by each practitioner individually. People who succeed as writers sometimes do so not through conventional publishing, but through alternate ways—as Max did with his website, or as J.A. Konrath apparently does with his blog, “A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.”

Like Deresiewicz and Max, I don’t really have a solution to the problem other than to encourage you to think imaginatively. But who’s against thinking imaginatively? Partners are probably telling their third-year associates the same thing, even as the associates put in soul-killing seventy hours weeks under those menacing florescent lights. The other part of my solution is to be aware of the problem. I’ll also channel Graham in “What You’ll Wish You’d Known” and encourage you to stay upwind:

In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don’t commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.

It’s not so important what you work on, so long as you’re not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you’ll take.

Suppose you’re a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.

Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn’t have an engine, you can’t fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind.

“Work on things that interest you and increase your options:” the target of Graham’s essay is nominally high school students, but it’s applicable to a much broader swath of people. Maybe you’re one. If so, however, you’ll probably read this and then go back to filling out those TPS reports. Or maybe you’ll be one of the very rare people who realize there is no speed limit and react appropriately. At least you can’t say that no one told you. At least three people have: Deresiewicz, Max, and Graham. Four if you count me, writing a meta essay.

Why we need the third way: “What Are You Going to Do With That” and the need for imagination

January 18, 2011 By in Academia, Essays, Personal Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

In “What Are You Going to Do With That?,” William Deresiewicz tells the freshmen class at Stanford:

In the journey toward the success that you all hope to achieve, you have completed, by getting into Stanford, only the first of many legs. Three more years of college, three or four or five years of law school or medical school or a Ph.D. program, then residencies or postdocs or years as a junior associate. In short, an ever-narrowing funnel of specialization. You go from being a political-science major to being a lawyer to being a corporate attorney to being a corporate attorney focusing on taxation issues in the consumer-products industry. You go from being a biochemistry major to being a doctor to being a cardiologist to being a cardiac surgeon who performs heart-valve replacements.

But he goes on to point out why and how these kinds of defined professional paths—the ones high school and college students students are so often told constitute “success”—might not be optimal, for either the person on the path or society in general. If you “simply go with the flow,” you can end up merely being defined by what someone else has laid out. Perhaps not surprisingly, Deresiewicz goes on to say, “There is an alternative.” He calls it “moral imagination” and defines it this way: “Moral imagination means the capacity to envision new ways to live your life.” I would call it something else: the “third way.”

Deresiewicz’s essay shows why we need more talk about the third way: there are more options out there than further advanced schooling. Stanford in particular is a good place to be reminded of this. Obviously, Deresiewicz doesn’t say you must choose grad school or the professions, but the absence of any acknowledgement about starting your own company implies that those are the two primary choices.

I’ve had similar talk. In my interview with him, Tucker Max describes the primary speech he gives at colleges:

[. . . W]hen you’re an undergrad, generally you think you can do two things. You’re gonna have to get a job after you graduate or you gotta go do more school. Because everyone who’s giving you advice or telling you how to live your life are people who’ve done one of those two things.

He describes a “third way,” with his two normal paths defined a lot like Deresiewicz’s, but in a lower register:

You don’t generally have anyone in your life who has gone out on their own and done something entrepreneurial or done something artistic or truly risky or truly taken the path less traveled, because those people [. . .] don’t work in academics. And don’t become cubicle monkeys. So what I try and explain in my speeches is that there’s a third way. Because a lot of people—I think most people—want to do something besides those two things.

A lot of people want to do something else, but that something else is, in some ways, harder to do than the normal path. Yet the people who go the third way often talk about it as being more satisfying, and the people who go the “two paths” often speak wistfully of the third—despite the difficulty one is likely to encounter. A friend wrote this to me: “I know for a fact that I’d hate [Tucker] Max’s writing, but he’s dead right about how few students are aware that they can do something artistic or creative or entrepreneurial.” Too few students are aware of this—and too few people in general are. You can consider this post a very small step in the direction of increasing awareness.

So far I’ve noted two examples. Paul Graham talks about the problem of standard paths too, in “A Student’s Guide to Startups:” “Till recently graduating seniors had two choices: get a job or go to grad school. I think there will increasingly be a third option: to start your own startup.” His answer is more defined than Deresiewicz’s or Max’s, but the very language he uses is similar. But he’s also got a way of generating the “third way” by funding startups. Instead of merely telling people to find one, he’s creating a third way for people to flow, which might be the most valuable contribution of all, at least for the technically inclined.

I think all three of these disparate writers—Deresiewicz, Max, and Graham—are pointing to a more fundamental need for the imagination necessary to exit the obvious paths that so often end up going nowhere. Of the three, Graham has done the most to institutionalize this process and make it available for others by starting Y Combinator. Max has probably done the most to be a living embodiment of an unusual third way. Deresiewicz is pointing to the possibility from within the way of a well-defined path (and the same one I’m one) from undergrad to graduate school to being a professor. Taken together, they diagnose and offer treatment for the same malady that can’t quite be identified yet comes from so many sources and has so many symptoms: Dilbert, cubicles, malaise, ennui, florescent lights, midlife crises, 20-somethings with advanced degrees working as baristas, waiters, or bartenders, essay writers.

Artistic or creative activities don’t usually come prepackaged in convenient jobs that get handed to college graduates. They get created by people who are artistic and creative, who find a way to turn what they want to do, or their inchoate ideas, into something greater than the idea itself. The “inchoate idea” is important: I suspect most people don’t entirely know what they’re doing when they find a third way. Steven Berlin Johnson has a term for this in his book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation: the slow hunch. This happens when something that you’ve been gnawing on slowly develops over time. Johnson describes it much more fully, of course, but a lot of my ideas in writing novels or academic work comes from slow hunches. Writing fiction isn’t an activity that really comes packaged in convenient job form: it is made by each practitioner individually. People who succeed as writers sometimes do so not through conventional publishing, but through alternate ways—as Max did with his website, or as J.A. Konrath apparently does with his blog, “A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.”

Like Deresiewicz and Max, I don’t really have a solution to the problem other than to encourage you to think imaginatively. But who’s against thinking imaginatively? Partners are probably telling their third-year associates the same thing, even as the associates put in soul-killing seventy hours weeks under those menacing florescent lights. The other part of my solution is to be aware of the problem. I’ll also channel Graham in “What You’ll Wish You’d Known” and encourage you to stay upwind:

In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don’t commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.

It’s not so important what you work on, so long as you’re not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you’ll take.

Suppose you’re a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.

Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn’t have an engine, you can’t fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind.

“Work on things that interest you and increase your options:” the target of Graham’s essay is nominally high school students, but it’s applicable to a much broader swath of people. Maybe you’re one. If so, however, you’ll probably read this and then go back to filling out those TPS reports. Or maybe you’ll be one of the very rare people who realize there is no speed limit and react appropriately. At least you can’t say that no one told you. At least three people have: Deresiewicz, Max, and Graham. Four if you count me, writing a meta essay.