Tag Archives: Nonfiction

The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House

July 24, 2009 By in Books, Reading, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , 4 Comments

I rather liked the eclectic material in Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times and its sequel; many of the short essays didn’t impart, but they fascinated because of the range of their concerns and how appropriately well written they were, whether about people who always ask authors where they get their ideas, or what kind of typewriter/computer/paper/pen they use, or the importance of avoiding cliché. The subjects stay with me even when I haven’t read the novels of the authors writing, and the collections stay with me because they’re often enough correct in their descriptions of problems if not always their conclusions that they made me evaluate writing anew. Yes, some specimens had apparently either been written for the money or because the author had nothing else to say, but at eight hundred or so words each they were easy enough to skip. Word limits also have the benefit of forcing the author to be concise, logorrhea being an occupational hazard for many.

Given that, I went into The Writer’s Notebook with sympathy in mind. Its contents have the benefits and drawbacks of length: Matthea Harvey’s “Mercurial Worlds of the Mind” is clever, but a sharp editor might have cut the section on what 2-D versus 3-D means. Her opening metaphor is clever but overly broad: “Trying to write about imaginary worlds is like breaking a thermometer in a classroom, then trying to collect the little balls of mercury that go shooting off under the desks, down the hallways.” Maybe: but I don’t get the impression that’s how Tolkien felt as he invented Middle-earth, as the myths of Lord of the Rings feel built and layered, rather than chased down. In my own world-building efforts, I don’t at all feel like I’m chasing mercury.

Despite the first sentence, Harvey’s essay works. Someone must have told many of these writers that you have to start with a bang even if its decibel level doesn’t correspond to accuracy. For example, Tom Grimes’ “There will be no Stories in Heaven” is about how fiction uses time, but his lead says, “To me, we read and write stories for a simple reason: we all die.” Good thing his first two words qualify all of what follows! Despite the off note at the beginning, his essay works, and so does Harvey’s; she shows that what one must do to build fantastic worlds is not so different from what one must do to build a “realistic” one. You need rules, size, and so forth; each of those subjects could be an essay unto themselves. When you’ve finished Harvey, Stanislaw Lem’s Microworld’s is the next logical step.

Elsewhere, Margot Livesey’s “Shakespeare for Writers” might be shallow for those who’ve read John Updike on the Bard, but it still examines Shakespeare from the structure standpoint much criticism leaves out by asking, for example, why so much of Shakespeare makes implausible leaps of character and plot yet gets away with it. As she writes:

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the drug-induced affections of the lovers seem, in depth and passion, very similar to their real feelings. Motivation is often left out and provided, or not, by the actors and, of course, by the readers and viewers.

Why? The audience doesn’t have to ask the question, but the writer must, and maybe the real lesson, for the writer that language excuses all else; Livesey quotes some of the many, many examples of where Shakespeare nails speeches through elaborate, figurative language. The idea of language excusing all else brings me back to Henry James, since I didn’t love Portrait of a Lady because its plot was empty even if its language was vacuous. Shakespeare’s plots usually charge like cavalry. But they don’t overturn feelings, and they don’t override each characters’ interiority. Livesey’s essay explains how, and if I could summarize it, I would.

The Writer’s Notebook continues a conversation about aesthetic form, meaning, and creation that’s lasted for centuries if not longer; they are a small effort to map an infinite space and discuss the fundamental choices writers must make: where to revise; whether one should organize a story around a “clock” or time period; how to use language; historical influence; and more. Some might not be finding new space so much as configuring what we already have. Anna Keesey’s “Making a Scene” uses the terms “outfolding” and “infolding” to describe how a writer can primarily move forward by dialog and action or by interior thoughts, respectively, with Hemingway and Virginia Woolf as examples. The line isn’t perfectly clear, and the point about how things happen either within or outside a character has been made in various ways before, but I’d never seen it articulated so well.

Collectively, many essays from The Writer’s Notebook are also keeping an eye on one’s back, toward how history affects or should affect writers and how genre and literature aren’t as separate as they appear. None are so gauche as to come out and say either point, but it’s there, lurking beneath them, because for a writer, who cares if one is writing capital-L Literature? You’re always in pursuit of whatever works, and if works, maybe it is, or will become, Literature, which is fundamentally about stories, how we tell stories, and how we listen to them.

The strange things you learn… this time about John Kenneth Galbraith

July 6, 2009 By in Academia, Books Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

I love the astonishing, random facts and commentary one will come across in books. Since the UCLA Southland Conference in early June, I’ve continued to do research on academic novels (among many, many other tasks), which includes reading The Academic Novel: New and Classic Essays—a collection edited by Merritt Moseley that’s so esoteric Amazon doesn’t list it. In the introduction, Moseley says that famous economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a novel (and one, he adds, with “almost no literary merit”). Alas, I’ve found many a meritless academic novel, perhaps in part because, as Moseley says, “There is no end to the surprises, when one first beings to discover all the writers who have published an academic novel.”

White covers on nonfiction books

July 2, 2009 By in Books Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

What gives with the numerous pop science nonfiction books with white covers? Both Gladwell books I own have them, as do a variety of others, as pictured here:

White book covers

Is this some bizarre trend? Does white convey authority of some kind? Is my sample size biased? These all seem like possibilities, but, judging from the shelves I’ve seen in airports too, the white cover on nonfiction seems quite popular. Only a few novels I own have white covers: Richard Russo’s Straight Man, a hardcover British edition of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep and perhaps one or two others. As for nonfiction, I have all the ones pictures as well as Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, Freakonomics, and others.

EDIT: The Los Angeles Times’ Carolyn Kellogg discusses book jackets on the blog Jacket Copy, which discusses more than just this subject.

EDIT 2: I e-mailed Tyler Cowen on the issue, noting that his first book, Discover Your Inner Economist, is white, while his forthcoming Create Your Own Economy is red. He replied: “White looks better on-line and in thumbnail form, red looks better on a table full of books…

We’ll see which one does better!”

Thy Neighbor's Wife — Gay Talese

June 13, 2009 By in Books, Essays, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

To read the new edition of Gay Talese’s Thy Neighbor’s Wife as someone who grew up in the era of American Pie and its considerably less tame Internet cousins is to step backwards into a time that, for many people, still exists. To judge from the nattering both on- and off-line, the debate goes, despite the sense of inevitability that Thy Neighbor’s Wife imparts; perhaps, as Jamais Cascio quotes William Gibson as saying in The Atlantic article “Get Smart,” “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

But it’s not at all clear that the vision implied by Talese will ever arrive for most people, or even that Thy Neighbor’s Wife is the “Timeless Classic” promised by the cover. The book is more an essay collection than book and feels the same malady as Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem: age. To me, the mores of the 1950s seem quaint, Bill O’Reilly’s silliness and faux outrage notwithstanding, and erotic hypocrisy in the media and culture at large is both well-known and documented, as it long has been. That brings one to the obvious point: what purpose does Thy Neighbor’s Wife still serve in an age of Bonk and The Book of Vice?

One can see predecessors to Thy Neighbor’s Wife in books ranging ranging from Madame Bovary upwards; in John Barth’s The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, adulterous triangles form with consequences that are serious chiefly because of the seriousness of their participants. The “other man” in The Floating Opera says that “Being intelligent people, they were able to talk about the matter frankly, and they tried hard to articulate their sentiments, and decide how they really felt about it.” The issue had already burbled toward popular consciousness when Barth’s novel was published in 1956. Many of Bellow’s novels spoke with bracing linguistic and intellectual clarity to issues around sexuality. Given that, one should try to read Thy Neighbor’s Wife not just as a chronicle of a time that now seems ancient, but as a guide to what undergirds social relations beyond the particulars of what is forbidden and why.

Social change and perspective

The most arresting sections of Thy Neighbor’s Wife deal with larger social changes rather than the strictly sexual—for example, the sense of anomie and rootlessness that seem reflected by sexuality rather than the cause of it. For example, Talese says that “The emphasis on youth made many Americans in their thirties feel older, particularly those junior executives who, having identified with corporations and having associated wisdom with seniority, now felt suddenly uncertain and outmoded in this age of new personalities and vacillating values.” That could have emerged from a Paul Graham essay on startups or a thousand banal pop sociology books of the last several decades. Still, it is effective in reminding one of pattern of change being played out across lives.

Likewise, Talese says that “Southern California’s characteristic disregard of traditional values, its relatively rootless society, its mobility and lack of continuity […] were accepted easily by [Diane Webber’s family].” Replace “Southern California” with “Silicon Valley,” and the comparison still holds, as does the idea that the larger problem might have been the continuing undermining of seniority and “traditional values,” which seems to have begun in the Enlightenment continues at this moment, as argued by Louis Dupre in The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture. From Dupre’s vantage, the larger social changes that emphasize youth, sexuality, fluid movement, and independence have been ongoing for centuries, making Talese’s wave a small part of a larger social tide.

Diane played a still smaller role, with her place in Thy Neighbor’s Wife springs from her role as a nude model in the 1950s—a role that, later, she would come to downplay, as if the earlier Webber was completely distinct from the later Webber. Her larger symbolic function in Thy Neighbor’s Wife wasn’t obvious—Talese seems to view her as someone who didn’t go all the way, or as someone who isn’t as much a seeker as others. Books often play a prominent role in this process; in eventual free-love guru John Williamson’s apartment, “the many books he owned dealing with psychology, anthropology, and sexuality represented not only intellectual curiosity on his part but also a growing professional interest. Twenty pages later, another John, this time surnamed Bullaro, “petulantly reminded himself that he must revive and broaden his education, must read more books…” Another man who becomes a pornographer “had matured in the Army, had done considerable reading during many lonely nights in the barracks…”

Williamson gets a starring role in many mini-essays. He sought to create an island of open sexuality that now seems more mocked than practiced. This took the form of a retreat named Sandstone, where the “living room at times resembled a literary salon, [while] the floor below remained a parlor for pleasure-seekers, providing sights and sounds that many visitors, however well versed they may have been in erotic arts and letters, had never imagined they would encounter under one roof during a single evening.” That’s all very nice, but the detached and yet voyeuristic prose feels silly and stilted, even if the idea is an important one, especially since the major qualities that required to participate in the events of places like Standstone—and there I go with my euphemistic phrases—are ones that probably help with success across broader avenues of life than just sexuality, like confidence, tenacity, fortitude, and, as Talese writes approvingly of Barbara Cramer, “not [being] intimidated by the possibility of rejection.”

Weakness and Strength

In one section we learn of a rebellious girl named Sally Binford, who “…lured young men with an ease that was the envy of her female contemporaries, who regarded her as bold and shameless.” They sound unable to complete, and another reading of Thy Neighbor’s Wife might more closely examine the evolutionary, social, and economic competitive forces swirling around it. But if Binford was envied, why didn’t the other girl emulate her? When one business finds success with a particular product, one can often can on a swarm of imitators. But when one person finds social success using a particular method, others tend to downplay that person’s success. Why? It seems that there are a variety of explanations, but perhaps the most interesting is to conceive that refusal to reject convention as a weakness.

Books like Leora Tanenbaum’s Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation echo how the dominant social structures—the “Davids” if you will—use scorn against those who outcompete them. I’m reminded of Malcolm Gladwell’s recent New Yorker article, “How David Beats Goliath: When underdogs break the rules,” which says:

Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is “socially horrifying”—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought… The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider… Goliath does not simply dwarf David. He brings the full force of social convention against him; he has contempt for David.

That’s what Binford feels from her female contemporaries, and many women continue to feel that heat from their contemporaries today, as Tanenbaum shows.

One other fascinating aspect in Gladwell’s study could apply to Talese’s description:

When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time underdogs didn’t fight like David. Of the two hundred and two lopsided conflicts in Arreguín-Toft’s database, the underdog chose to go toe to toe with Goliath the conventional way a hundred and fifty-two times—and lost a hundred and nineteen times.

Gladwell refers to military conflicts. The analogy to sex and dating is not hard to grasp: most people feel like romantic underdogs, at least to judge from cultural production, but they play like Goliaths and lose. In Talese’s descriptions, many constricting social forces are abrogated or elided by discarding conventional rules as a path toward romantic success and satisfaction. Sally Binford’s story expressed that. Yet most of us don’t play like Davids, preferring to simmer in dissatisfaction rather than face the disapproval of insiders. When put that way, or in the sexual way Talese presents it, this habit of acquiescence to social forces sounds like a weakness. Put other ways, like as respect for other people, it might sound like the strength, and the temptation is to announce that a middle road exists. Grasping that middle road, however, requires understanding both extremes, as well as one’s place in larger historical and social forces.

Larger Meaning and The Atlantic

The reissue of Thy Neighbor’s Wife caught my eye after “A Nonfiction Marriage” appeared in New York Magazine, which chronicles the Talese hidden behind the story of Talese. It seems that he and his wife, Nan, had as much tension, uncertainty, and ambivalence in their marriage as the subjects about whom Gay wrote. It has no resolution.

Maybe this obsessive study of sexuality and change means something, and maybe it means maybe. Perhaps it means nothing, or that we have all the options open to us and still don’t know what we want or how to resolve the mutually incompatible desires within us. The Thy Neighbor’s Wife solution of radical openness doesn’t appear to have gained ground; as Sandra Tsing Loh writes in “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off: The Author is Ending her Marriage. Isn’t It Time You Did the Same?” for the July/August 2009 issue of The Atlantic (not yet online as of this writing): “But as we all know, the Sexually Open Marriage fizzled with the lava lamp, because it is just downright icky for most people” (it is for this kind of scintillating insight and incisive analysis that I subscribe to The Atlantic).

Nonetheless, Tsing Loh’s comment does illustrate that, for all the swapping and coupling Talese describes, social norms haven’t moved as Williamson and Hugh Hefner might have once imagined they would. We’re now free to negotiate the kinds of arrangements we want, but they don’t tend to be of the free-love style that Talese implies might have been plausible as the dominant social position. Consider as evidence both Tsing Loh’s article as well as Lori Gottlieb’s “Marry Him!” and “The XY Files.” Now, as in our jobs, we are all moving toward free agency. Judging by the timescales present in The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture, the consequences won’t be apparent for a long time yet. With that perspective, maybe the waves made by Thy Neighbor’s Wife are even smaller than they appear.

Life: Occupation and metaphysics edition courtesy of Alain de Botton

June 11, 2009 By in Life Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

“[The accountant] has a business card which she hands over in meetings and which tells other people – and, more meaningfully perhaps, reminds her – that she is a Business Unit Senior Manager, rather than a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe.”

—Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.

(The obvious question arises: can’t you be both a Business Unit Senior Manager and a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe? In any event, you can read more of his thoughts on work in his article “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Data-Entry Supervisor: It’s time for an ambitious new literature of the office.”)

Highly recommended: the perils of pop philosophy

June 1, 2009 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Julian Sanchez has a brilliant post regarding some Perils of pop philosophy, which he uses as a synecdoche for blogging, journalism, and other forms of expression/knowledge that can easily be reduced to facile dilettantism rather than genuine knowledge acquisition and, ultimately, extension.

If the first paragraph confuses you, skip to the second, although by doing so you’ll probably be committing one of the sins Sanchez discusses, some of which are implied in this paragraph, which I would consider his money shot for this post:

This brings us around to some of my longstanding ambivalence about blogging and journalism more generally. On the one hand, while it’s probably not enormously important whether most people have a handle on the mind-body problem, a democracy can’t make ethics and political philosophy the exclusive province of cloistered academics. On the other hand, I look at the online public sphere and too often tend to find myself thinking: “Discourse at this level can’t possibly accomplish anything beyond giving people some simulation of justification for what they wanted to believe in the first place.” This is, needless to say, not a problem limited to philosophy. And I think it may contribute to the fragmentation and political polarization we see online, which are generally explained in sociological terms as an “echo chamber” effect or “groupthink.”

Those are real enough, but there’s also the problem that the general glut of information and opinion makes it disconcertingly easy to kid yourself about how well you understand a particular topic.

As should be obvious, the whole post is highly recommended. If you haven’t read it by now, do so.

Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics — George Johnson

May 25, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum is both more fun to read and more informative than George Johnson’s Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics, which promises an in-depth explanation of conspiracy theories and theorists but doesn’t really deliver.

Johnson’s central claim is that conspiracy theorists see sinister links between a variety of unrelated or barely related occurrences while simultaneously lacking the ability to deal with ambiguity and change. They lack the critical rigor necessarily to separate cause and effect, correlation and causation, coincidence and connection. It’s an intriguing idea that he should have explored more, at the expense of vapid histories of mostly right-wing conspiracy theorists. The John Birch Society and Lyndon LaRouche both get prominent billing, but both now seem dated; the pinnacle of their ideas’ power came with the Oklahoma City Bombing, after which conspiracy theorists of that style receded very low-level background cultural noise—especially after 9/11 revealed real problems, as opposed to the invented ones Johnson chronicles.

Still, Architects of Fear is amusing for its depiction of bogus reasoning used by conspiracy theorists. For example, Adam Weishaupt was a Bavarian university professor who “wanted to bring the spirit of rationalism and the philosophical Age of Enlightenment to his benighted land.” To do so, he founded a group he called the Illuminati, who have provided fodder for lousy Dan Brown-style novels ever since (along with the aforementioned Foucault’s Pendulum, which is excellent, showing that cultural flowers do sometimes spring forth from the most unusual places). In turn, conspiracy theorists have cited the Illuminati, the Knights Templar, and others as possessing secret, hermeneutical knowledge, which is proven in a variety of absurd ways. For example, one section from Architects of Fear says:

As conspiracy theorists are fond of pointing out, Weishaupt structured [the Illuminati] like a pyramid […] Eventually, thirteen ranks were established. Thirteen levels, as on the dollar-bill pyramid. As initiates learned new powers and secrets, they ascended the step of the pyramid, coming increasingly closer to the light.

But virtually all organizations are structured as pyramids, with a relatively small number of leaders at the top and a larger number of functionaries below them. The United States itself functions like this, with a President as the leader, and most corporations have a CEO who is blamed, fairly or not, for what goes well or poorly in an organization, despite the amount of control she might or might not have.

Alas: Johnson didn’t point this out, and it’s one of the many examples of where his analysis is flat or inadequate. He does sometimes hit useful points, as when he says, “Many of the founding fathers were Freemasons and sympathized with Masonic aims of universal brotherhood, but sharing symbols and ideas is different from participating in a plot.” It is, and I would’ve liked to hear more on the subject.

Thin research might prevent Johnson from saying more; most of the research he does have comes from newspaper articles, and most of the chapters consist of rehashes of those articles rather than original observations built on substantial knowledge. Architects of Fear could have been a better book, but it shows the weakness of journalists-turned-book-writers, as opposed to something like Dave Cullen’s Columbine, which shows the strengths. Along those lines, in another section Johnson says that:

Modern historians […] believe the Antichrist predicted in Revelation refers to Roman emperor Nero. The book apparently was written after Christ’s death to comfort Christians persecuted by Nero’s “one-world government,” the Roman empire.

But he cited no sources for this claim in the bibliography. I have no idea whether it’s actually true because I know little about historical scholarship surrounding the Bible. He also gave no citation for his “one-world government” quote, meaning that it might have come from somewhere or merely be offset to show how conspiracy adherents might observe the Roman Empire. As far as I can tell, however, no one has come along to do it better; books like Jane Parish and Martin Parker’s The Age of Anxiety: Conspiracy Theory and the Human Sciences sound too narrow, while Daniel Pipes’ Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From is more promising but still reminiscent of an amorphous genre. Nonetheless, they seem better alternatives than Architects of Fear.

Worth keeping? No.
Worth buying? No.
Worth reading? No.

Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior — Geoffrey Miller

May 20, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 9 Comments

Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior is worth reading, but only with a skeptical eye that will keep you from passively imbibe ideas like, “In a complex, media-rich society, perhaps only people with very good mental health can tolerate a high degree of openness without losing their equilibrium” (emphasis added). I suspect many if not most people would ignore “perhaps” and take away the larger message without questioning whether it has real backing. Like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Spent should be read but read with a doubter’s wariness of the false or ridiculous. Both Outliers and Spent tend to overstate their cases and exaggerate the power of the ideas they impart, and knowing that makes the books a better (and less misleading) read.

If I were in marketing or public relations, I would make sure to read Spent, if for no other reason than its unusual erudition relative to other pop science books and its delivery of a widely ignored framework for understanding products, branding and the like—including how individuals are turned off by branding and advertising as a reaction to it. I would like to imagine myself in the latter category but probably am not to the extent I would prefer. Spent might make me more so by acting as an inoculation against marketing.

One other structure note: Spent is probably three books: one about marketing, one about evolutionary mating theory, and one about consumerism. They’re not always integrated, but three good discrete books jumbled together definitely beat one indifferent standalone book.

I’ll begin with some of Spent’s problems:

1) Ignore the hokey dialog in Spent’s opening pages.

If I had read the first few pages of Spent in a book store, that might have turned me off it. The gimmick is annoying, yes, but don’t discard the book for that reason.

2) Miller puts too much stock into IQ testing and ignores or belittles the vast (and justifiably so) controversy around it.

In All Brains Are the Same Color, Richard E. Nisbett discusses some knowledge regarding the mutability of IQ tests in a racial context, but that context can be generalized to a broader domain. Malcolm Gladwell wrote about similar issues in None of the above: What I.Q. doesn’t tell you about race in The New Yorker, where he discusses the many problems of tests used to ascertain intelligence. He also wrote Outliers, which popularizes the “10,000 hours to mastery” idea. If the path to mastery is practice, people who conscientiously work toward improving IQ-like skills through schooling will in turn improve their scores. That most people don’t might more indicative of motivation or of institutional problems than of genetic intelligence, especially since we still can’t get much beyond correlation in measurements of it. If you want more support for Miller’s perspective, William Saletan’s Created Equal offers some in Slate. Miller says:

Human intelligence has two aspects that make it a bit confusing at first. There is a universal aspect: intelligence as a set of psychological adaptations common to all normal humans… Then there is an individual-differences aspect: intelligence as a set of correlated differences in the speed and efficiency of those natural human capacities…

But he again leaves out intelligence as a function of skill and training.

In any event, this post isn’t meant to be a rehashing or literature review of knowledge on intelligence testing; to perceive the arguments in full is practically a Ph.D. in itself given the history, breadth, and depth of such arguments. The evidence for absolute IQ heritability and genetic intelligence is far weaker than Miller presents it, and it’s frustrating that he doesn’t recognize this.

3) Some statements are vacuous (if interesting).

Miller writes:

Like most reasonable people, I feel deep ambivalence about marketing and consumerism. Their power is awe-inspiring. Like gods, they inspire both worshipful submission and mortal terror

That’s more than a little contrived, and whatever power marketing and consumerism have is power that we give them. Most people probably never or seldom consider either, at least not in the academic terms Miller uses. Still, he uses the section to comic effect, as when he notes the things “exciting and appalling” about consumerism and marketing, including “frappuccinos, business schools, In Style magazine, Glock handguns, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, Dubai airport duty-free shops… the contemporary art market, and Bangkok.”

4) Elitism runs through the book, even when it’s disguised.

This is in part a continuation of the second point. Take, for example, this:

If we do choose to ignore the marketing revolution, we do so because we are terrified of a world in which our elite ideals lose their power to control the fruits of technology. (If you have the leisure time, education, and inclination to read this book, you are obviously a member of the elite.)

The marketing revolution is only as important as we let it be. Much of marketing comes to us through TV and the Internet, but not owning a TV (preferably without being this guy) and Firefox’s Adblock Plus plugin go a long way toward neutering marketing.

I am reminded of a comment from Asher Lev’s uncle in My Name is Asher Lev: “I read. A watchmaker does not necessarily have to be an ignoramus.” So too with people in general.

Sometimes I’m susceptible to nodding through the elitist comments when they flatter my preconceived ideas, as with this statement:

People indoctrinated in hedonistic individualism, religious fundamentalism, or patriarchal nationalism—that is, 99 percent of humanity—are not accustomed to thinking imaginatively about how to change society through changing its behavioral norms and institutional habits.

That might be true, but might there also be a less snide way of stating it?

5) Maybe, maybe not.

I’m not convinced that “Marketing is central to culture,” which is the title of Spent’s third chapter, or at least not unless we’re to stretch marketing beyond a useful definition. I do like the way Miller calls marketing “… ideally, a systematic attempt to fulfill human desires by producing goods and services that people will buy.” Not that the actual marketing often lives up to that, but it’s impressive that Miller is willing to concede that given his ambivalence about the subject and his knowledge of how prone marketing and consumerism are to abuse.

Nations aren’t exactly marketing or signaling in all the examples Miller gives in his chapter “Flaunting Fitness,” like when he says that they “compete to show off their socioeconomic strength through wasteful public ‘investments’ in Olympic facilities, aircraft carriers, manned space flight, or skyscrapers.” Some of that is their for humorous effect, but aircraft carriers and manned space flight both improve their associated technologies enormously, giving us modern day marvels like GPS and massive cruise ships, while skyscrapers allow denser human interactions of the sort that my perhaps favorite economist, Edward Glaeser, describes in his many papers on the subject.

Strengths

The book is filled with ideas, which ought to be evident even from the weaknesses. Brilliant summations occur in places, as when Miller writes, “… plausible deniability and adaptive self-deception allow human social life to zip along like a maglev monorail above the ravines and crevasses of tactical selfishness, by allowing the most important things to go unsaid—but not unimagined.” The metaphor is overwrought, yes, but the sentiment reinforces the “Games People Play” chapter of Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought. One can see ideas from his book reaching into others and vice-versa, which I consider a strength.

Humor

In talking about “Narcissism and Capitalism,” Miller says that the “core symptoms” of narcissism “lead narcissists to view themselves as stars in their own life stories, protagonists in their own epics, with everyone else a minor character. (They’re like bloggers in that way.)” The dig about bloggers too frequently rings true, even when given in jest.

Some of the funny parts of Spent might not be intended as such, as when Miller deadpans, “The typical Vogue magazine ad shows just two things: a brand name, and an attractive person.” Someone must think this is effective, and I wonder if those ads are part of the fifty percent of one’s advertising budget that’s wasted.

Another Brick

Nonfiction books like this one, most of Gladwell’s (questionable) work, Pinker’s, Ariely’s, and Zimbardo’s, along with the other recent pop professor books, are bricks in the road to greater understanding. They remind us of and help us correct our foibles, and even those of us who consider ourselves virtuous would do well to remember that “the renouncers [of materialism] remain awesomely self-deceived in believing that they have left behind the whole castle of self-display just by escaping the dungeon of runaway consumerism.” Instead, they take to other displays of taste, of artistic creation, of intellectual prowess, and the like, perhaps by writing book/literary blogs. Nonetheless, those activities are probably more socially productive than, say, McMansions, yachts, and SUVs. Spent helps us engage and grapple with those phenomena and our society as a whole, and even some of the weaknesses I enumerate above aren’t as weak as I imply, or else I wouldn’t spend as much time as I do.

(See also my earlier post about Spent and vacuous movies.)

(The New York Times also has a vacuous article about the book in the Times’ Science section. If I were one of those irritating triumphalist bloggers, I might point to this as an example of the superiority of Internet reporting.)

On marketing, movies, and Geoffrey Miller's Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior and more

May 14, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In “Why are so many movies awful?“, I quoted the fascinating New Yorker story “The Cobra: Inside a movie marketer’s playbook,” which says:

One of the oldest jokes in the business is that when a studio head takes over he’s given three envelopes, the first of which contains the advice “Fire the head of marketing.” Nowadays, though, former marketers, such as Oren Aviv, at Disney, and Marc Shmuger, at Universal, often run the studios. “Studios now are pimples on the ass of giant conglomerates,” one studio’s president of production says. “So at green-light meetings it’s a bunch of marketing and sales guys giving you educated guesses about what a property might gross. No one is saying, ‘This director was born to make this movie.’ ”

Geoffrey Miller’s book Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior says:

That a company should produce what people desire, instead of trying to convince people to buy what the company happens to make, was a radical idea that seems obvious only in retrospect.

But maybe that theory works better in consumer goods purchases than in artistic or aesthetic fields, which movies are nominally supposed to be. The book so far intrigues even if its claims seem overstated; you can read more about it courtesy of Marginal Revolution here and here, which inspired me to get the book.

My guess so far at 40 pages in is that Spent will have lots of new ideas that don’t extend as far as Miller wants them to, but that it’s still a nice way to avoid mindless materialism (for more, see Paul Graham’s “Stuff” or Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy) without resorting to overwrought pieces like Marx’s “Commodity Fetishism” or Horkheimer and Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment. As Miller says on page 16, “Evolutionary psychology can offer a deeper, more radical critique of consumerist culture than anything developed by Marx, Nietzsche, Veblen, Adorno, Marcuse, or Baudrillard,” as if rattling off the humanities’ intellectual grad school dream team. I’m not fully convinced but will happily hear the case.

EDIT: I wrote a full post about Spent here.

On marketing, movies, and Geoffrey Miller’s Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior and more

May 14, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

In “Why are so many movies awful?“, I quoted the fascinating New Yorker story “The Cobra: Inside a movie marketer’s playbook:”

One of the oldest jokes in the business is that when a studio head takes over he’s given three envelopes, the first of which contains the advice “Fire the head of marketing.” Nowadays, though, former marketers, such as Oren Aviv, at Disney, and Marc Shmuger, at Universal, often run the studios. “Studios now are pimples on the ass of giant conglomerates,” one studio’s president of production says. “So at green-light meetings it’s a bunch of marketing and sales guys giving you educated guesses about what a property might gross. No one is saying, ‘This director was born to make this movie.’ ”

Geoffrey Miller’s book Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior says:

That a company should produce what people desire, instead of trying to convince people to buy what the company happens to make, was a radical idea that seems obvious only in retrospect.

But maybe that theory works better in consumer goods purchases than in artistic or aesthetic fields, which movies are nominally supposed to be. The book so far intrigues even if its claims seem overstated; you can read more about it courtesy of Marginal Revolution here and here, which inspired me to get the book.

My guess so far at 40 pages in is that Spent will have lots of new ideas that don’t extend as far as Miller wants them to, but that it’s still a nice way to avoid mindless materialism (for more, see Paul Graham’s “Stuff” or Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy) without resorting to overwrought pieces like Marx’s “Commodity Fetishism” or Horkheimer and Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment. As Miller says on page 16, “Evolutionary psychology can offer a deeper, more radical critique of consumerist culture than anything developed by Marx, Nietzsche, Veblen, Adorno, Marcuse, or Baudrillard,” as if rattling off the humanities’ intellectual grad school dream team. I’m not fully convinced but will happily hear the case.

EDIT: I wrote a full post about Spent here.