Advise and Consent, by Allen Drury

I just finished reading the novel, which I had started a pretty long time ago. I'd say the first third was a slow read, but then the story of the U.S. Senators starts to get suspenseful. The plot focuses on the Senate's confirmation hearings (you would know that already just from the title, if you're familiar with the Constitution) for a Secretary of State nominee during the Cold War. I guess it's a political thriller?

I actually enjoy watching C-SPAN now - nothing like the opportunity to watch a live senate hearing - to get to see our Senators in oratorical action, to guess at the behind-the-scenes machinations. The book was made into a motion picture, too, which I plan to watch - the better to absorb the drama. I'll let you know how that is.

Assorted Thoughts Regarding Google Reader

- During the workday, the only chunks of time that I can truly dedicate to my Reader without distraction are either 1) when I first arrive at my desk or 2) when I am on my lunch break. At no other point in the day is it really socially acceptable in the cube farm setting to be seen, well, surfing the web, rss-style.

- During the first chunk of time, I usually try to plow through as many unread items as I can (Tyler Cowen, USS Mariner) while shelving longer pieces (Nate Silver, Tim Duy, Andrew Seal) for that second chunk of time, my precious lunch break.

- When the workday is over, the most productive time for me to consume information is before I go to bed (or, when I'm suffering most from insomnia, when I can't sleep). Here are my Reader Trends for the past 30 days:

- If there was a way to rename folders, I'd do so - frankly, I don't like Highest-High and Low-Lowest, but what can you do? When three levels of priority weren't enough, I had to create two more... and the way Reader is built, you can't rename folders.



- My favorite new folder, thus far, has been the Testing folder. It keeps my info diet fresh with new ideas. In it, I'll stash new feeds I think I might be interested in committing to long term. If after a few weeks of testing it actually stinks, I will not feel guilty for laying it off and unsubscribing. If I come to trust it, I give it a priority level and place it in a folder.

- I love constantly checking the details for my folders. For example...

Highest (I read maybe 50-60% of these posts)...:



... and Lowest (I only read a small fraction of these):



- With most feeds, I alternate between expanded and list view (1 and 2 are the keyboard shortcuts [hit shift + escape]; they can make info consumption much more efficient). Some feeds are always expanded (Talking Points Memo, SFist); each post in these blogs is relatively short and it makes the most sense to scan all the items as if they were the actual blog itself. Others are always in list view (Soccer by Ives, GigaOm), because individual posts often don't entirely fit on the screen; plus, by reading the headline, I will then have the luxury of picking and choosing a small fraction of the posts to read as there's no point in reading everything the blog posts.

- My favorites? Blogs that are predictable, known, good quantities. These include photo blogs (Scott Schuman, White House Flickr, Jake Dobkin), which I often will leave in list view because it is a fun surprise to see what is unveiled when I click on the item and expand it; blogs that have a lot of bang for their buck and often make me think hard but not too hard (Felix Salmon), blogs that don't post too often but are very insightful (Chris Blattman, Ben Casnocha) and personal blogs by friends. For each of these, I will read just about everything they post, because they've gained my trust and do not destroy me by posting 20 items a day. They've also proven they are consistently good at what they do.

- When possible, I rename all my feeds to the author, or main author, of the blog. I like personalizing my feeds. Thus, Marginal Revolution = Tyler Cowen (sorry, but I care less about what Alex Tabarrok posts), FiveThirtyEight = Nate Silver (I do not read stuff by other authors except Andrew Gelman), Sartorialist = Scott Schuman, etc.

- My default is to put oldest items first. But sometimes I mix it up by putting newest items first to keep my brain working.

- In some ways, Google Reader has messed up my natural reading cadences. I wonder whether it might be worth it to lay off every blog except for my favorites because with so much noise introduced into my info diet (I try my hardest to be as ruthless with "mark all as read" as I can), the way I read sometimes turns into a kind of schizophrenic skimming. I will often read the first few paragraphs instantly, then scroll down to see when the post ends, scroll back up, start aggressively skimming, read select sentences before hitting m to mark as read and continue on. I notice this disruption most often when I pick up a newspaper and find my eyes jumping all over the place. It often takes a few minutes to get back into a natural newspaper reading mode.

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, James Gleick

I came to Genius as a fan of Gleick's Chaos, which I heartily recommend.

The test of science is its ability to predict. Had you never visited the earth, could you predict the thunderstorms, the volcanoes, the ocean waves, the auroras, and the colorful sunset?

The next great era of awakening of human intellect may well produce a method of understanding the qualitative content of equations. Today we cannot. Today we cannot see that the water-flow equations contain such things as the barber pole structure of turbulence that one sees between rotating cylinders. Today we cannot see whether Schrödinger's equation contains frogs, musical composers, or morality—or whether it does not.

Feynman's talent and personality make him a larger than life version of the fictional Will Hunting. Every physicist who approaches him is left feeling a bit like poor Gerald Lambeau: cradling the ashes of a proof it took Will seconds to devise and even less time to decide wasn't worth his time. The image Gleick develops throughout Genius is of Feynman as a physicist's physicst, dabbling in questions that would excite any curious adolescent.

What keeps the clouds up, why can't I see stars in the daytime, why do colors appear on oily water, what makes the lines on the surface of water being poured from a pitcher, why does a hanging lamp swing back and forth?

The purpose of reading books like Genius is presumably to learn something about the workings of minds greater than our own. In this respect I walked away from Genius feeling much as I did after reading Folsing's biography of Einstein: none the wiser. I'm willing to accept that a science writer can't peer into the mind of Einstein or Feynman any more than their academic contemporaries could, which is to say not at all. But it hasn't blunted my desire to keep reading similar books, so either I believe that doing so gives me a better understanding of how they think, or it's a form of intellectual superhero escapism. Gulp.

American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis

Gosh, what a disgusting book. Wetlands meets Battle Royale. American Psycho assaults and violates the reader.

One way it does so is by crisply slapping the reader in the face with brand names every chance it gets. Here is a list of drugs, exercise machines, fashion designers, furniture makers, new york bars and restaurants, people, pop icons, publications, skin care products, television shows and so forth that made up the fabric of 80's yuppie life. A few are apparently made up by Ellis, but the mass majority are real. All make their way into the first quarter of the book (I got as far as that when compiling the list below before running out of steam):

A. Testoni Absolut Acme Supreme Juicerator Agnes B. Aiwa AM/FM Alain Mikli Alan Flusser Alex Loeb Alexander Julian Allen-Edmonds American Express Andra Gabrielle Anne Klein Anne Moore Baccarat Baldwin Barcadia Barney's Basile Belinda Carlisle Bergdorf's Bill Blass Bill Robinson Black Forest Blaupunkt Bloomingdale's Bottega Veneta Brooks Brothers Bruce Springsteen Burberry Cafe Luxembourg Calvin Klein Camols Canali Milano Caswell-Massey Cepacol Cerruti 1881 Chaps Charivari Christian Dior Christian Lacroix Christine Van der Hurd Citibank Claiborne Clinique Touch-Stick Coach Leatherware Cocktail Cole-Haan Columbia Corona Cremina Cristal Cristofle Cuisinart Little Pro D.F. Sanders Dalmane David Onica Diet Coke Donald Trump Dorsia Dove Bar Drexel Burnham Lambert Duntech Sovereign 2001 Easa-Phone Ecstasy Eddie Murphy Elizabeth Arden Elmore Leonard Enrico Hidolin Eric Marcus Ermenegildo Zegna Ettore Sottsass Evian Exeter Fair Isle Ferragamo Financial Times Finlandia First Boston Fortunoff Fratelli Rossetti Funchies, Bunkers, Gaks and Gleeks Garrison Keillor Geoffrey Beene George Michael George Stubbs Georgette Klinger Gerard E. Yosca Gio Ponti Gio's Giorgio Armani Giorgio Correggiari Gitman Brothers Goldman Sachs GQ Greune Natural Revitalizing Shampoo Hackett of London Halcion Hammacher Schlemmer Harry's Hermes Hershey's Syrup Hubert des Forges Hubert's Huey Lewis Hugo Boss Hunter Ike Behar Infinity IRS V Speakers INXS Ivana Trump J.J. Vogel J&B Jami Gertz Jenny B. Goode Jeopardy! Joseph Abboud Karl Lagerfeld Keiser Kidder Peabody Koos Van Den Akker Couture Krizia Lafont Paris Late Night with David Letterman Laura Ashley Lazard Lazo Le Cirque Le Rosey Les Miserables Lithium Louis Dell'Olio Lovin' Spoonful Lubiam Lubriderm MacNeil/Lehrer Madonna Manolo Blahnik Mario Valentino Martin Dingman Neckwear Maud Sienna Merit Ultra Lights Minoxidil Missoni Uomo Money Morgan Stanley MTV Myrene de Premonville Nautilus NEC 9000 Porta Nell's Neutrogena New York Magazine New York Times Norman Prager NYU Odeon Oliver Peoples Oprah Winfrey Oscar de la Renta Page Six Palazzetti Panasonic Parnate Pastels Patrick Aubert Paul Smith Pellegrino Perrier Perrier-Jouet Perry Ellis Phil Collins Pierce & Pierce Plax Playboy Polo Porsche 911 Pottery Barn Pour Hommes Probright Radio City Rainbow Neckwear Ralph Lauren Redken Resikeio Rolex Ronaldus Shamask Rothschild Russian Tea Room Saint Bart's Saks Salton Sonata Toaster Sansui Scharffenberger Sea Island Sharp Model R-1810A Corousel II Sidonie Larizzi Smith and Wollensky Sominex Soprani Spiros Sports Illustrated St. Remy Stanford Stephen Sprouse Stoli Sunmakers Susan Bennis Warren Edwards T. Anthony Tag Heuer Talking Heads Talking Heads the Harvard Club The Patty Winters Show the Pierre the Vertical Club the Yale Club Tina Chow Tom Cruise Toshiba Trianon Tumi Tunnel Turchin UCLA USA Today Valentino Couture Valium Vanity Fair Versace Videonics VCR W. Walkman Wall Street Journal Wayfarer Wendy Gell Whitney Houston Wurlitzer Xclusive Zagat

Kind of makes me want to give away all material possessions and become an ascetic monk or something. I feel unclean.

The Box, Marc Levinson

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I loved using my binoculars and the budget family telescope to look at ships sailing in and out of Puget Sound. Washington State ferries, sailboats, tugboats towing massive log booms, the occasional battleship and massive container ships criss-crossed the waters regularly. Living in a port city with gantry cranes dotting the skyline and the Burlington Northern running along the waterfront below my house really nurtured my interest in intermodal transport.

Last year, intrigued by some work-related research involving oceanic shipping, I looked up the wikipedia entry for TEUs, the standard unit of containerization, and swiftly found myself falling down a classic Wiki Rabbit Hole, hilariously nailed by XKCD. During this search for what the TEU represented, I also looked for answers to the following questions: How many containers did the largest container ships hold? How close are major railroads to major ports? What does it look like when the cranes at ports are in operation?

wikipedia + youtube + google maps did reasonably well at first, but when using these various tools to gather information, my average level of concentration was roughly akin to that when I skim a newspaper article. Because my brain was far too uninvolved to make anything stick in my memory, I figured reading a book to help answer these questions while pausing between chapters to use the internet to digest text would lead to a much more exciting, dynamic learning experience.

And yes, believe it or not, with The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, economist Marc Levinson does manage to make big, dumb metal boxes and intermodal transport exciting (though he does have his share of dry passages). His thesis is that the containerization of cargo was one of the most important developments in the advancement of trade in the past half century. Before containerization, various random goods were loaded ad hoc on ships with other random goods, using large crews of longshoremen who physically moved these in and out of cargo ships. Labor costs were extremely high and ships spent large amounts of wasted time sitting at the dock. But with containerization, there swiftly became one standard way to move goods: put everything in boxes, move them via train and truck to the port where a ship would take them, send them across a big stretch of water, then unload the boxes where they would then travel via train and truck to the necessary destinations. The implications this had on streamlining worldwide trade were enormous. The costs of shipping large amounts of goods around the world dropped dramatically and the sheer tonnage of cargo able to cross the seas vastly aided globalization.

Generally I feel uncomfortable championing arguments that [x] itself irrevocably changed the world (it feels suspiciously like the streamlining of history, i.e. saying Reagan's Star Wars program ended the Cold War), but The Box is a fairly convincing read; plus, it's filled with entertaining sub-storylines about how shipping, major port cities, supply chain management and intermodal transport have been shaped to be in their current form.

Perhaps the best part of the experience was harnessing the power of various tools available on the internet to digest the text. Let's look at the Port of Seattle from above [click to enlarge].

Here we can see four cranes hovering over one massive ship, countless containers of various sizes on the dock and semi-trucks with containers loaded on their trailers. With varying levels of interestingness, Levinson details the evolution of various crane apparatuses, the development of the modern container ship fleet (just look at the wikis for Panamax, Malaccamax, etc. and try to comprehend how enormous these ships are), how the TEU became the standard unit and the deregulation of the trucking industry. And to think, absolutely none of this existed fifty years ago.

This is Newark, the 15th most trafficked port in the world. Just look at the sheer amount of containers on the dock. (Do go to Newark on google maps and see how many critical nodes of intermodal transport you can spot. Bonus points if you can identify the Fedex depot and the Continental wing at the airport.)

But one of the most stunning pictures, I think, is this panorama of the Port of Singapore. Stunning.

If you have an interest in ships... and planes, trains and automobiles, The Box will be right up your alley. It'll show you how we went from the days of manual labor and longshoremen to our current highly automized shipping age. My my, how far we've come.

The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño

If you haven't yet, you should read Bolaño. Now.

The plot of The Savage Detectives centers around two main characters, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima; Belano is modeled after Roberto Bolaño, Lima is modeled after Miguel Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, Bolaño's good friend. The two of them vaguely head up a literary movement. They drift from place to place, falling in love here, making love there, and generally bumming around everywhere. This vague plot aside... The Savage Detectives, more than anything else, is Bolaño lovingly writing an autobiographical portrait and scripting an ode to Mexico in the 70's. And the way in which he does so, in the words of the Harlequin in Heart of Darkness, massively enlarged my mind.

***************************

The Savage Detectives is split up into three sections:
I: Mexicans Lost in Mexico (1975), pp. 3-139
II: The Savage Detectives (1976 - 1996), pp. 143-588
III: The Sonora Desert (1976), pp. 591-648

As you can see, the bulk of the novel comes in Section II where Bolaño writes from the perspective of, by my count, 56 different narrators who give 94 separate accounts in total. Heading each narrative account, which range from less than a page to twenty or so pages at the longest, there is a name, date and geographical location giving a small dose of titular background context as to where the speaker is coming from.

And at one point midway through the second section of The Savages Detectives, I realized I was in serious danger of completely losing track of who was talking, so I began to represent the section in an aggregated, visual way.

Here is a representation of the narrators of the first two subsections of Section II:

Each row represents a separate narrative account and each column, or indent, represents the introduction of a new narrator. When narrators repeat, their account gets a new line, but the entry appears in the same column in which they first appeared. As you can see, the first narrative is by Amadeo Salvatierra, in January 1976; the next is Laura Jauregui; both of these narrators give accounts in the second subsections, as well. The narratives are dated roughly in chronological fashion, from 1976 through 1996, though they often recount events that had happened years ago.

Make sense? Please say yes.

Here are the first 8 or so subsections of Section II (i.e. a partially expanded version of the first image above):




... and the visual aggregation for the entirety of Section II (zoomed out the whole way):













I loved this structural technique. Belano and Lima never give their own accounts of themselves - instead, their multi-faceted portraits are painted by countless others. This technique also got me thinking about the general trajectory of a given person's relationships with people. If you could map out your life and your interactions with friends and acquaintances, would it look roughly look like this? A slowly, constantly expanding map, with some relationships maintained properly and some lost? With a number of short, intense periods spent with individuals, then never seeing them again? With years elapsing between meetings?

And in the end, you have to wonder whether any one person would be able to paint a complete portrait of you, or perhaps whether such completeness is only possible through aggregating the accounts of... everybody who knew you.

*Update: Click here for a full pdf. A few of the cells have been cut in half for some reason - sorry about that. Of course, if you spot any errors in the spreadsheet (I hope nobody is OCD enough to spot them), please let me know!*

How Proust Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton has quite the occupation: he chooses a topic he wishes to really focus on, immerses himself in it, then writes a book about his experience that becomes a bestseller. An autodidact's fantasy, I'd say. With How Proust Can Change Your Life, de Botton chose the famous French invalid as his topic and wrote a book with the following table of contents, each containing a Proustian lesson:

1. How To Love Life Today
2. How To Read For Yourself
3. How To Take Your Time
4. How To Suffer Successfully
5. How To Express Your Emotions
6. How To Be A Good Friend
7. How To Open Your Eyes
8. How To Be Happy In Love
9. How To Put Books Down

This work isn't really supposed to be taken too seriously (look at item 9 on the list, a gentle reminder to the reader to, well, live a little and set aside Proust and de Botton), but all the same... allow me a mini-rant. Pop philosophy has always made me a bit nauseous. And witty pop philosophy or a witty exercise in literary criticism that delves into pop philosophy is little better. Questions about life and how we should best live it need not be answered by dumbed-down platitudes - if anything, they are best left incompletely answered.

The idea that you can generalize some message to the masses by dumbing down a handful of platitudes so that they appeal to a wide audience is slightly insulting to anybody who prides themselves on individuality. So, my biggest problem of How Proust Can Change Your Life can be best expressed by a passage from the chapter, "How to Express Your Emotions":

"We may ask why Proust objected to phrases that had been used too often. After all, doesn't the moon shine discreetly? Don't sunsets look as if they were on fire? Aren't cliches just good ideas that have been proved popular?

The problem with cliches is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or a moon, we will end up believing that this is the last rather than the first word to be said on the subject. Cliches are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface. And if this matters, it is because the way we speak is ultimately linked to the way we feel, because how we describe the world must at some level reflect how we first experience it."

And any book purporting to offers explicit life lessons could be said to suffer from this same flaw: it's a fat, morbidly obese cliche.

I feel guilty skewering de Botton's work because he does write with originality and a dry sense of humor with a tongue-in-cheekness (does anybody really think that somebody who is reading Proust in the first place will read a book about Proust changing their life and actually expect it to actually teach them lessons on how Proust will change their life) that is sometimes endearing, so perhaps take this as a stand against pop philosophy on the whole. See, I don't entirely dislike de Botton's work. It probably helps pave the way for actually finishing Swann's Way. And like a decently written introduction, it provides some helpful context and funny anecdotal tidbits on the eccentricities of Proust while lightly introducing themes that underlie his massive seven-volume tome.

Maybe it's just that I have issues with some branches of non-fiction. The issues center around a common concern: I am not maximizing precious time set aside for reading. When reading de Botton's work, it was annoying to have a constant, nagging feeling that much of what I was going to remember about the piece, or learn from it, was going to be a rather small collection of rather small nuggets of unimportant factual knowledge about Proust's life that did not expand my personal world in a particularly lasting way.

Apologies for being a grumpy sourpuss.

Animal Spirits

The opprobrium directed at economics in recent months has had the fortunate side effect of opening a window of opportunity for fresh ideas to percolate into the mainstream understanding of how the economy actually works. Akerlof and Shiller identify several of these inflection points throughout history: the Revolution, the elections of Jackson and Lincoln, Reconstruction, the Great Depression, and the election of Reagan. They assert, and I agree, that we're at such a point now.

As ripe as the time may be for a new mainstream economic construct, however, the precise nature of the one that will emerge is unlikely to be determined by economics alone. In the 80s, advocates of supply-side economics, before they were called that, were in search of an economic framework to undergird their political philosophy; Arthur Laffer supplied it, Jack Kemp ran with it, and Reagan enshrined it in a portmanteau that's still with us today, Reaganomics. (A warning to future presidents who think they've struck political-economic gold: better to hang your name on something with a longer shelf life.)

Discrediting the old framework is a necessary but insufficient condition for coming up with the new one, and the past year has made great strides toward this already. The target for Akerlof and Shiller is to weave the narrative of behavioral economics, their prescribed palliative for the illness plaguing macroeconomics, with a political story as effective and captivating as the one conservatives a generation ago devised to make market fundamentalism as American as apple pie. In this regard they fall short. Perhaps it is unfair to set the bar so high; after all, the authors are professors of economics, not politicians. But if anyone could carry the banner effectively, a Nobel laureate and the author of a best-seller on the last bubble to burst would be likely picks.

The book's shortcomings stem from its structure: a handful of behavioral prisms (confidence, fairness, corruption, money illusion, stories) are used throughout to illustrate the failings of mainstream economics. This delivery mechanism is ideally suited to highlighting the authors' individual prior research rather than portraying a unified theory of behavioral macroeconomics. By pointing out facts that are incongruous with or poorly explained by the mainstream literature, such as downward wage rigidity or the persistence of minority poverty, Animal Spirits falls in line with other pop behavioral economics books, except that those books don't offer to be anything more than thought-provoking collections of anecdotes or focused studies of particular issues. The subtitle to Animal Spirits, "How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism," promises something grander than what it can deliver.

Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri

Being a decade late in reading Interpreter of Maladies (it won the Pulitzer back in 2000) and wondering how far behind the curve I was, I checked Blographia Literaria to see when Andrew Seal had read it. For those of you who don't follow his blog, I've linked to it before; Seal reads voraciously, blogs prolifically, and makes you envy his piercing insight. I've come to trust his opinion and he's quite the well-read chap. And he graduated college in '07.

He reviewed Lahiri for his blog in March 2008 (phew, I'm not that far behind). If you've read any of Lahiri's work, his post, here, is well worth a read.

This relates to a question I've perpetually grappled with: how much of my reading diet should be current fiction? The timeline for critical assessment and sifting out what is indeed worth reading is, for me, very nebulous, much more so than with the timelines for film or music. This makes reading contemporary fiction the least "efficient" out of the trio of artistic media I referenced; with reading, you'll spend the greatest percentage of time consuming merely above-average stuff. And because of this, I'm usually not too concerned about missing out on books when they first come out. Waiting a few years (or a whole decade) generally helps the cream rise to the top.

I'm not all that concerned about catching movies in theaters or listening to music albums when they are first released either, though there are exceptions when the work is something that must be consumed at the moment, because the work itself is inseparable from the experience of consuming it (Star Wars Episode I, the latest Harry Potter, or In Rainbows). Aside from these cultural phenomena, I usually content myself knowing that at some point, I will get around to it after some of the initial hype has worn away - if it indeed has been deemed worth it.

And is Interpreter of Maladies worth it? I quote Seal:

The "Immigrant Experience" is likewise characterized almost uniformly by a sense of duality, and its origins are obvious and unsurprising: to experience many and sometimes most moments both in their particularity and in their difference from other particular moments, real or imagined, is to live life partially in parallel with oneself. Every adjustment to a new culture exposes a retention of other ways, other thoughts, other things.

I would suggest, therefore, that insofar as literature, film, or theater about Black Americans or immigrants foregrounds this "two-ness," mainstream white American culture will consume it avidly precisely because it reflects the experience they/we have created for ourselves and in which we continue to live, placidly and rather soporifically. And I would even go so far as to say that, in the past decade's absence of very many "genteel" white American authors (or at any rate very many good upper-middlebrow ones), immigrant narratives—Jhumpa Lahiri, Khalid Hosseini, Julia Álvarez, Amy Tan, Isabel Allende, Ha Jin, Chang-Rae Lee, Sandra Cisneros, Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, Michael Chabon's Adventures of Kavalier and Clay—have become a new Genteel Tradition.

... Lahiri's stories lay their juxtapositions before you so gently, prepare their metaphors so meticulously, fashion their character arcs so cleanly that when shocks come (as in the first, beautiful story, "A Temporary Matter") they are absorbed without residue into the events, the pace, and the words that came before. Which is not to say that you turn the page and lose the characters, the plot or the effects of the story, that Lahiri's neatness in storytelling results in an emotionally sterility. Quite the opposite; her stories are alive and stay well with you. Yet their life is a different kind from a work like Melville's Bartleby, say, or Henry James's Aspern Papers, both of which stood (as did most of their authors' work) directly athwart the Genteel Tradition.

This is not a complaint, an accusation that Lahiri or the others I mentioned are a part of a moribund tradition. What may be moribund—and I think quite likely is—is the white culture of consumption that appreciates these books and lauds them with Pulitzers and sales. Santayana's critique was directed at the artistic culture of his time; that was a tactical mistake and was repeated quite often throughout the 20th century. What he should have loaded his guns for was the bigger game—the affluent, languidly moderate consumer culture of well-intentioned white liberals that continuously fed the lukewarm flames of the Genteel Tradition with fame and money. That culture continues apace today, and is just as worthy of critique and disdain.

Immigrant stories about foreigner immersion into American society as Stuff White People Like? Ouch. Strip away the caucasian plaudits, though, and the stories are still quite good.

Sidenote: in October of 2008, I had a conversation with a fellow contributor:

MK: at the housing works book sale, i finally picked up a copy of interpreter of maladies. i'd lost my copy a year ago.
MN: by?
MK: jhumpa lahiri. it's her first work, short stories, similar to the namesake in theme. won a pulitzer, pen/hemingway. it's fantastic, a book i've gone back to a lot and i went back to it immediately after getting it. rereading the last story was like collapsing into a well-worn leather chair. pick up a copy, it's really a fantastic debut work.

Collapsing into a well-worn leather chair. Love that metaphor.

As for what else I've read since end of 1Q09 - it's a mix of sci-fi and books I received for my birthday:

The Day I Became An Autodidact, Kendall Hailey
Hailey chose not to go to college after graduating from high school (she found the boundaries of school restricting) and instead went about writing plays and reading everything she could lay her hands on. A little naively written but oh-so-endearingly innocent, it's a good, swift read for anybody who also enjoys learning through introspection. For more about the stifling qualities of formal eduction, see this essay.

Wetlands, Charlotte Roche
Dirtiest, raunchiest book I have ever read, no question (thanks to our fellow contributor). Controversial, panned by the NY Times (though the review completely misses the boat, I think; nobody's mistaking this for a serious feminist tract). There's value in anything that pushes boundaries, which Wetlands definitely does. The mere fact that it has gone as mainstream as it has is significant.

The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
You may have noticed I'm a mild fan of science fiction (I recently read Starship Troopers and Neuromancer). This particular list helped spark my recent revival of latent interest in sci-fi and helped me identify gaps in my reading history. Very funny.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
If you haven't read this yet, first read Hemingway's The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (it's only 20 pages). Then go read Diaz now. Beautiful.

With their stories, both authors give their answer to the question of: what is a happy life? The answer parallels Herodotus' Solon: "Count no man happy until he be dead." Hope that wasn't too much of a spoiler.

Foundation, Isaac Asimov
Hadn't even heard of this until Paul Krugman won the Nobel and cited it as triggering his first intellectual love, history, in an autobiographical essay he linked to on his blog. Some call it the greatest sci-fi novel ever. I still love Ender's Game more than anything, though.

And okay, Asimov (and many a sci-fi writer) wasn't exactly known for beautiful prose. His writing is direct, but the power of his work lies in his complex, intricate plots.

1Q09: The Quarter in Review

Here's a summary of what I have read in 1Q09, with a few brief words on each:

Smilla's Sense of Snow, Peter Hoeg
The biggest takeaway of this novel, which is partially set in Copenhagen (I began reading Smilla several years ago in a library there), is Hoeg's exploration of the dynamic between Denmark and Greenland. This exponentially increased my knowledge of Greenland, which, before reading this, consisted of one fact: it, not Iceland, is full ice.

The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
Saw The Innocents at the Glasgow Film Theatre, a black and white film with Deborah Kerr based on Henry James' work. Stifling, claustrophobic. Shudder.

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
For anybody who has gone to church on Sunday, heard a pastor give a sermon and thought about the experience and the message given afterward, Gilead has the potential to be quite powerful. One of the most beautiful books I have read in years. Uplifting and redemptive.

Piano, James Barrons

Conversations with Glenn Gould, Jonathan Cott

The Colossus of New York, Colson Whitehead

The Dance of Legislation, Eric Redman

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Finally! Phew.

Here's a passage from Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature that I particularly like:

One peculiar feature of Tolstoy's style is what I shall term the "groping purist." In describing a meditation, emotion, or tangible object, Tolstoy follows the contours of the thought, the emotion, or the object until he is perfectly satisfied with his re-creation, his rendering. This involves what we might call creative repetitions, a compact series of repetitive statements, coming one immediately after the other, each more expressive, each closer to Tolstoy's meaning. He gropes, he unwraps the verbal parcel for its inner sense, he peels the apple of the phrase, he tries to say it one way, then a better way, he gropes, he stalls, he toys, he Tolstoys with words.

Winter's Tale, Mark Helprin
First heard about this from the NYTimes "What is the Best Work of American Fiction in the Last 25 Years?" list. Fantastic-y, cotton-candy, fluffy stuff... wasn't the hugest fan in the world, considering I didn't think the book really made all that much sense in the end, but here are two passages from the perspective of the two main lovers in the story, mirroring each other in their starry loveliness:

At night she lay on her bed in the open, or in the tent with some of the canvas rolled back so that she could see the sky, she watched the stars, not for ten minutes or a quarter-hour as most people did, but for hour after hour after hour. Even astronomers did not take in the sky with such devotion, for they were constantly occupied with charting, measurements, the fallibilities of their earthbound instruments, and concentration upon one or another celestial problem... The abandoned stars were hers for the many rich hours of sparkling winter nights, and, unattended, she took them in like lovers. ... In a delirium of comets, suns, and pulsating stars, she let her eyes fill with the humming, crackling, hissing light of the galaxy's edge, a perpetual twilight, a gray dawn in one of heaven's many galleries.

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Commuters and passers-through crossed the prairielike floor much as they had always done, In a silence that invited the eye to rise and view the vaulted sky above. It was as if the building itself had been skillfully constructed to mirror life on earth and its ultimate consequences, and to reflect the way in which men went about their business mostly without looking up, unaware that they were gliding about on the bottom of a vast sea. ... in back of the sky, he threw a familiar switch, and all the stars lit up... it was winter, the stars were on, and he was safely in the back of the sky. Down below, on the cream-colored marble floor, people still glided silently by without ever looking up. But had they done so they now would have seen stars shining brightly in a sea-green sky.

For the New Yorkers in the audience, guess which transportation hub Helprin has described in the latter passage.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Yukio Mishima
Mishima's works are always really creepy - in part because you partially empathize with his crazy, twisted protagonists and then, as a consequence, briefly question your own sanity.

Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein
More a political tract than anything else, Starship Troopers actually involves very little... Starship Trooper-ing. Not many bugs, not many guns. Perhaps I should have read Stranger in a Strange Land instead...

Neuromancer, William Gibson
According to Wiki, "The novel has had significant linguistic influence, popularizing such terms as cyberspace and ICE." It's like a sci-fi, punked-up version of the hard-boiled detective novel, a la Chandler or Hammett. Routinely makes the list of "Best [X number] Sci-Fi Novels".

"A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide

Author: Samantha Power


Call it an addiction to pessimism porn or just plain negativity. Whatever it is, bad news is enthralling to me. (And I know I'm not the only one.) This book, however, isn't about that. It would be a minor tragedy to regard the enjoyment one gets from reading it as a fetish. It would also be untrue, because the material in it is not something you're likely to dig up, compulsively, on your own. Not unless you're Samantha Power.

I've never met Power, though I imagine she's personable and funny, with an intellect that grabs you by the lapels and shakes you until your apathy is dislodged. While I get a thrill devouring details of the latest economic woes, Power absorbs the particulars of genocide with alarming precision and clarity. I take as evidence of this contrast the fact that my knowledge of the history making up the bulk of Power's tract is appallingly superficial, despite it having occurred in my lifetime. I was present, with varying degrees of alertness, during Iraq, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo. I'm ashamed to say that even with the wide access to information I'm privy to now, my grasp of the conflict in Darfur (I'll leave it to experts like Power to make the linguistic/legal determination of whether it's genocide) is flimsy at best.

The book is full of precisely the grisly, unpleasant information that, due to what Power terms a "failure of imagination," we improperly classify or avoid altogether. There is no hiding from it here. Power deftly cuts through the fog of past wars, producing a sequenced, footnoted storyline that would make Robert Caro blush. Every page is a mirror held up not only to the monsters committing genocide, but to the diplomats, lawmakers, and generals hiding behind excuses while sitting on their hands.

---

I encountered a Sarajevo rose almost two years ago. The city's sidewalks were swollen with people marching to the Olympic stadium; Bosnia would upset Turkey, 3-2, in a Euro 2008 qualifier. I had barely noticed the indecipherable street art beneath my feet until a Danish girl I met on the bus ride from Croatia explained the deconstructed flower to me. Since then, the image of the rose, the bullet-riddled Holiday Inn on Sarajevo's main drag, the mined ruins of a building in Mostar, or the larger story they all represent have not crossed my mind more than a dozen times. I know I could do better.

The Dance of Legislation, Eric Redman

On February 4, 2009, Tyler Cowen¹ asked, "Did the stimulus bill just fail?"

Economists have been discussing the need for a large fiscal stimulus package for a long time. Ever since the economic world catastrophically imploded five months ago, I figured Obama's economic team was diligently working night and day hashing out plans to resurrect us from the dead. And surely, I thought, they would create a good stimulus package that would be ready to sail through Congress with flying colors during the opening days of the new administration.

So when I read Cowen's blog post, I nearly choked on my spoonful of granola cereal. Failure to pass a stimulus package, in my mind, was the equivalent of nuking our own economy - not to mention the world's. How could this fail!? And it is during times like these that my own knowledge gaps are blatantly exposed: I had little idea how the legislative process worked. So I went to my public library and got a book on it.

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Just as James Barron follows the life of one Steinway concert grand, from the choice of timber for the case to its first performance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Eric Redman² follows the life of one Senate bill, from the initial theoretical conception to the climactic signing of the bill by President Nixon. And just as Piano helped me understand the elegant, tightly choreographed process that wood workers, tuners, technicians, and quality checkers participate in to produce one single concert grand piano, The Dance of Legislation helped me understand the sometimes chaotic, often frustrating, emotionally taxing mission to get a bill passed.

As a legislative aide to the powerful Senator Warren Magnuson³ in 1970, Redman was tasked with managing a bill that would create the National Health Services Corps. The Corps would enlist doctors who would be paid salaries by the federal government to practice medicine in underdeveloped, poor areas of the United States, parts that doctors tended to avoid, for obvious reasons. And because Redman was the key player in terms of drafting the legislation and meeting and negotiating with the endless number of bureaucrats, Senators and Representatives, aides, lobbyists, congressional hearing witnesses, journalists and presidential aides necessary to help make the NHSC come to life, his account of the dance is absolutely fascinating.

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Since Cowen's post, I began to pay much closer attention to the Senate debates and hearings on the stimulus bill. I watched C-SPAN and listened to Senator after Senator propose long-winded Senatorial amendment after long-winded Senatorial amendment. During this process, a friend emailed me a partial list of proposed amendments⁴ to the current stimulus package, including the following:

Sponsor: Sen. Murray (D-WA) / Sen. Feinstein (D-CA)
Description: Would boost highway funding from $27 billion to $40 billion, transit funding from $8.4 billion to $13.4 billion, and water and sewer funding from $6 billion to $13 billion.
Vote: Defeated 58-39 in motion to waive the budget act.

Sponsor: Sen. McCain (R-AZ)
Description: Would replace the entire stimulus bill with new $240 billion plan, which includes multiple tax cuts.
Vote: Defeated 40-57 in motion to waive the budget act.

What I was watching on C-SPAN suddenly made that much more sense. These amendments to the stimulus package were, of course, anything but arbitrary. Senator Murray, from Washington State, is Chair of the Transportation and HUD Appropriations Subcommittee and she does much in the way of lobbying for federal transportation funds for the state; there are already many large infrastructure projects underway which are either in the planning stages or actually under construction in Washington State⁵. Senator McCain's amendment was very different, and I'm sure he had no visions of it actually passing, but it held symbolic significance. Earlier this week, as a subscriber of McCain's (and Obama's) email list throughout the presidential campaign, I received the following message from the Senator:

I cannot and do not support the package on the table from the Democrats and the Obama Administration. Our country does not need just another spending bill, particularly not one that will load future generations with the burden of massive debt. We need a short term stimulus bill that will directly help people, create jobs, and provide a jolt to our economy.

Just as the intent of the McCain amendment was not surprising - tax cuts, not government spending - nor was the vote of 40 for, 57 against, strictly down party lines.

Scanning the list of amendments, I realized how remarkably naive it was to assume that a President, even with sky-high approval ratings and political capital aplenty, would be able to get a stimulus bill through Congress without hiccups. There are hundreds of bills that are passed every year, but there are few, if any, that will receive as much public scrutiny as this one.

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For the average citizen, my guess is that the takeaway (if they indeed take anything away at all) upon hearing about a prospective legislative bill is probably a combination of three things:

1. The name of the bill. [Example: TARP.]
2. If there is one, a price tag. [$700 billion.]
3. The theoretical purpose of the bill. [Save banks.]

Absent from this list is anything related to the actual nitty gritty details - when it will be enacted, how it will be enacted, and what it is exactly composed of. The public is almost never exposed to these bits and usually, all it gets is a somewhat tightly marketed message. We, as a public, are approached by legislators who are trying to sell us a product.

As I said before, Redman met and negotiated with bureaucrats, Senators and Representatives, aides, lobbyists, congressional hearing witnesses, journalists and presidential aides; this is no simple task. A massive amount of compromise and concessions had to be made to satisfy all necessary partners for the NHSC - and this was for a bill that, in 1970 dollars, was allocated a few tens of millions, and was a few pages long.

So, it must have been fascinating to watch the chaotic dance of compromise and concession for a bill that, in 2009 dollars, is close to a trillion dollars, and is over 600 pages... but because Redman turns a small amount of finished legislative product inside out and shows us the innards, I can begin to imagine what that dance looked like.

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¹ Tyler Cowen is an economist at George Mason University and a blogger at Marginal Revolution, an excellent blog. NERA's own Jonathan Falk seems to be a regular reader.
² The back of the book jacket of my library copy lists Redman's ridiculous resume: "Eric Redman grew up in Seattle. He received his education at Andover, Harvard, and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He spent two years as an aide to Senator Warren G. Magnuson (D-WA), the third-ranking member of the U.S. Senate. He also worked as a logger and a longshoreman. Currently, he is a student at Harvard Law School and teaches writing at Harvard College." He published this book at the tender age at the age of 25. Where is he now? Apparently he used to work at the now-defunct Heller Ehrman...
³ As a fixture in Washington state politics for decades, Magnuson's name dots the Seattle landscape. For example, I used to play pick-up basketball at public courts at Magnuson Park. Also, he really brought in the pork; "by 1962... one out of every six Federal public-works dollars was flowing into Washington State."
⁴ Here's a nice graph of a partial list of stimulus bill amendments, and who voted for them, courtesy of Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight. The Senators that needed coaxing, to whom concessions and compromises were offered, to make this bill filibuster-proof? Those squarely in the middle of Silver's graph: Nelson, Snowe, Lieberman and Specter.
⁵ These projects include the replacing of the earthquake-vulnerable Alaskan Way Viaduct. It was damaged in the 2001 "Rattle in Seattle" Nisqually earthquake, which registered 6.8 on the Richter scale. And we, just now, decided to build a tunnel to replace the viaduct. Yep, still working on this one.

Last note, I promise. A contributor to this blog once pointed out to me that the Capitol had a subway system, and Redman references it multiple times, i.e. "[Magnuson] invited us to join him on the Senate subway for the brief ride to the Old Senate Office Building." Senators actually ride this crappy-looking thing!

Piano, James Barron and Conversations with Glenn Gould, Jonathan Cott

During my childhood, I cherished reading the comics every morning. Following the lives of characters and plotlines throughout the week, a few panels at a time, was a ritualistic activity. And the Sunday comics were always glorious for two reasons: the Sunday strip was that much longer and it was in delicious color.

The success of comics goes hand in hand with the success of newspapers and with the advent of the internet and the swift decline of paper media, comics will not be able to reside in serialized print for much longer; because of this, I feel lucky that my generation just barely caught the tail end of the relevance of comics in mainstream culture. One of my favorite strips was Peanuts. Charles M. Schulz began drawing Peanuts years before I was born, but I distinctly remember catching the final strip in the Sunday paper (I also remember the end of the Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes; all of these strips ended with devastating finality when I was in middle school).

Of all the Peanuts characters, I always had a special fondness for Schroeder, the blond musician perpetually hunched over his toy instrument. He played piano - I played piano. So as a lover of classical music and a lover of Peanuts, I was pleasantly surprised to see a New York Times article on an exhibition at the Charles M. Schulz museum in Santa Rosa. Here is an excerpt from the article:

When Schroeder pounded on his piano, his eyes clenched in a trance, the notes floating above his head were no random ink spots dropped into the key of G. Schulz carefully chose each snatch of music he drew and transcribed the notes from the score. More than an illustration, the music was a soundtrack to the strip, introducing the characters’ state of emotion, prompting one of them to ask a question or punctuating an interaction.

As I discovered, Santa Rosa was about an hour north of San Francisco, so that weekend, I hopped in the car and drove up the 101. Although the rest of the museum was a bit depressing (... Charlie Brown never kicked the football or kissed the little red-haired girl, so this was not unexpected), the exhibition was excellent in pulling together references to Beethoven's life and musical works in the comic strip.

Here, Schroeder plays the opening to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.

Soon after, at City Lights, I purchased Piano by James Barron. The book follows the life of one Steinway concert grand, from the time the timber for it is chosen, to its artistic debut in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The book actually is an expansion of a 2003/2004 New York Times series, available here for free, which might be better than the book.

The piano is a curious instrument. Unlike violinists, drummers, singers, flutists – anybody who can transport their instrument – pianists have to play on what is in front of them. When they go to concert halls, practice rooms, rehearsals, bars… they adapt to the piano in the room. Almost all other musicians have the luxury of developing an intimate, monogamous relationship with their instrument.

Every piano is unique. I can distinctly recall the feel of my upright and Steinway baby grand at home as well as the pianos of all three of my main teachers (each had two grands in their studios, one that students played on and one that they sat at, so that they themselves could play passages or accompany). Since the best pianos are made by hand, how could any two be the same?

Looks like a Rube Goldberg contraption. I still haven't figured out how exactly the piano action works.

If anything, Barron’s book quite clearly makes the point: a piano is a hideously impractical thing. The amount of raw materials and work that goes into making one is ridiculous, as is the effort required to transport it (and as for selling it… boy, did my experience selling my upright last year teach me a thing or two about illiquid assets). It made me reconsider the piano: what, exactly, is it made of, and how does it all work? And only then did I realize that pianos, underneath the shiny polished black lacquer, are made out of wood, and wood comes from trees. It was a shock to me that I had neglected to remember this.

On the same trip to City Lights, I purchased Conversations with Glenn Gould, by Jonathan Cott. Other than the fact that he had made some very unique recordings, especially of Bach and Beethoven's works, and he died early at the age of 50, I knew little about Gould. And so, this unique set of interviews with Gould helped reveal one more thing to me: the vast artistic gulf that existed between pianists such as myself and the musical demi-gods. Take this passage, for example:

I tended to learn the score away from the piano. I would learn it completely by memory first, and then go to the piano with afterwards. [Regarding Beethoven’s Sonata No. 30, Opus 109,] about two or three weeks before I was to play the thing for the first time, I started to study the score, and about a week ahead of time I started to practice it (which sounds suicidal, but that’s the way I always operate).

Madness! The man memorized works in his head, and then played them. It must be a beautiful thing to have this talent. For me, memorization was never really a problem, but it came through sheer repetition and practice – in short, it was muscle memory, not conceptual.

Gould certainly also had an eccentric style to accompany his prodigious talent. He always performed on a chair that he brought with him everywhere and when he sat on it, he was nauseatingly close to the floor:

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I simultaneously mourn the fact that, like newspapers and comics, classical music faces a decline [it can never be a good thing when there are books written today with titles such as Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall, or Who Killed Classical Music], and also rejoice in the fact that I am currently able to experience it. It would be nice if more people my age cared about it, though.

Here is strip of Schroeder playing a section from Beethoven’s Pathetique piano sonata.


The Pathetique piano sonata, played here by Glenn Gould, is quite full of intense emotion, and is one that works well with a statement that says Beethoven is the answer to life.

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If you have a moment, watch just a few minutes of this performance.





In it, you can see the chair, a Steinway concert grand and Glenn Gould himself, and also hear Beethoven’s most-loved Piano concerto. It is quite good.

The Colossus of New York, Colson Whitehead

I’m here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don’t know about you. Maybe you’re from here, too, and sooner or later it will come out that we used to live a block away from each other and didn’t even know it. Or maybe you moved here a couple years ago for a job. Maybe you came here for school. Maybe you saw the brochure. The city has spent a considerable amount of time and money putting the brochure together, what with all the movies, TV shows and songs – the whole If You Can Make It There business. The city also puts a lot of effort into making your hometown look really drab and tiny, just in case you were wondering why it’s such a drag to go back sometimes.

No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, that used to be Munsey’s or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge. That before the internet café plugged itself in, you got your shoes resoled in the mom-and-pop operation that used to be there. You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

There are eight million naked cities in this naked city – they dispute and disagree. The New York City you live in is not my New York City; how could it be? This place multiplies when you’re not looking. We move over here, we move over there. Over a lifetime, that adds up to a lot of neighborhoods, the motley construction material of your jerry-built metropolis. Your favorite newsstands, restaurants, movie theaters, subway stations and barbershops are replaced by your next neighborhood’s favorites. It gets to be quite a sum. Before you know it, you have your own personal skyline.

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This excerpt from the opening pages of The Colossus of New York includes a line I especially like - the striking “eight million naked cities in this naked city”. This is a Manhattan-tinted version of the idea that each of us is a unique, individual world. Here are a few examples that come to mind that play with this idea.

Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart:

And then it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead:

In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful land what is acceptable – which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.

And as a counter to these first two, John Donne, Meditation XVII:

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated... As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness.... No man is an island, entire of itself... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Cities within a city, satellites within the universe, civilizations and islands within the world - to varying degrees, each of these passages romanticize the slightly lonely uniqueness of human experience.

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The table of contents of The Colossus of New York is as follows:

The Port Authority
Morning
Central Park
Subway
Rain
Broadway
Coney Island
Brooklyn Bridge
Rush Hour
Downtown
Times Square
JFK

Whitehead, in poetic prose, recounts his own experience with each subject item. It's clear he loves this city and he professes it in short, terse sentences. [As contrast, if you have the willpower and want to read "possibly the longest love letter ever written to a city", there's always the Power Broker.] The best sections are those that make you nod your head and smile while reading and say, yes, yes, that is so true, he’s nailed it. For example, in Subway:

There’s a culture for platforms and a culture for between stations. On the platform there are strategies of where seats will appear when the doors open, of where you want to be when you get off, of how to outmaneuver these impromptu nemeses. So many variables, everyone’s a mathematician with an advanced degree. Wait. Those elephantine ears of hers. Does she know something he doesn’t, she’s moving closer to the edge, and then he hears the roar, too. The herd trembles, the lion approaches, instincts awaken. The jaws slide apart and the people step inside. Various sounds of gorging.

As Whitehead says in the excerpt at the top of this post, “You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now”. I wouldn't say that this is a complete description of what it means to be a New Yorker, but it does get part of the way there; it is only after you have developed enough of a relationship with something, like the subway, that you can begin to constructively think about it.

So perhaps it is a sign that you are becoming a New Yorker when you are able to read passages in The Colossus of New York and you nod your head and smile and say yes, yes, that is so true. By living in a particular place, you are constructing your own personal city, and the borders of yours will inevitably begin to overlap with the borders of another person's. And there is something terribly exciting when you realize it is possible to share in these common experiences.

Lyra's Oxford, Philip Pullman

As much as I had been itching to know what had happened to Lyra after the conclusion of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, I didn't buy Lyra's Oxford for the story - I basically bought it for this map, which was enclosed [click to enlarge]:


Lyra, the main female character, lives in an alternate but parallel universe. Now, just about everything on the map actually exists in real life, though it sometimes has alternate names. For example, Lyra was a resident of the fictional Jordan College, which is labelled H on the map and is Exeter College in real life. I spent my junior year of college abroad at Pembroke College, which, in Lyra's world, is the fictional Broadgates Hall (which is actually a real hall on the campus), and is labelled B.

Note: Oxford is composed of a bunch of separate colleges that each have their own distinct campus, faculty and student body.

Seeing the map instantly triggered memories of that year abroad. Ultimate frisbee practice and games were at University Parks. The philosophy faculty and library was on Merton Street. The crappy clubs and post-pub nightlife (regular drinking establishments shut down at 10 or 11pm) were on Hythe Bridge Street. And the last time I was there, I finally visited the Botanic Gardens. If you've read the trilogy, you know there's a particular bench that means a lot to both Lyra, who belongs to the parallel universe, and Will, the main male character, who belongs in the real universe:

Lyra led him almost to the end of the garden, over a little bridge, to a wooden seat under a spreading, low-branched tree.

"Yes!" she said. "I hoped so much, and here it is, just the same... Will, I used to come here in my Oxford and sit on this exact same bench whenever I wanted to be alone, just me and Pan. What I thought was that if you - maybe just once a year - if we could come here at the same time, just for an hour or something, then we could pretend we were close again - because we would be close, if you sat here and I sat just here in my world - "

"Yes," he said, "as long as I live, I'll come back. Wherever I am in the world, I'll come back here -"

"On Midsummer Day," she said. "At midday. As long as I live. As long as I live..." [From The Amber Spyglass]

After asking a worker at the Botanic Gardens, I was guided to the little bridge, and then the wooden seat.

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As magical a place as Oxford is, this exercise in imagination - the resurrection of fictional events in real-life cities - is possible to recreate anywhere. For example...

New York: go to the lagoon in Central Park, and imagine Holden Caulfield standing there and thinking...

"Well, you know the ducks that swim around in it? In the springtime and all? Do you happen to know where they go in the wintertime by any chance? … I mean, does someone come around in a truck or something and take them away, or do they fly away by themselves–go south or something?" [From Catcher in the Rye]

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San Francisco: as Detective Sam Spade, investigating a murder...

Where Bush Street roofed Stockton before slipping downhill to Chinatown, Spade paid his fare and left the taxicab. San Francisco's night-fog, thin, clammy, and penetrant, blurred the street... Spade crossed the sidewalk between iron-railed hatchways that opened above bare ugly stairs, went to the parapet and resting his hands on the damp coping, looked down into Stockton Street. An automobile popped out of the tunnel beneath him with a roaring swish, as if it had been blown out, and ran away. [From The Maltese Falcon]

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Fifteen minutes later, breathless, she sat down to dinner in the hall, trying to keep her grubby hands from view. It was the way in that college not to use the high table every day; instead, the Scholars were encouraged to sit among the students, and the teachers and older pupils from the school, of whom Lyra was one, did the same. [From Lyra's Oxford]

New Year's Resolutions

One unique way of measuring a year, which I sort of posted about previously, is with books - and the literature blogosphere has no shortage of thought-provoking new year's resolutions regarding them [emphasis added below]:

1. The Benefits of Blogging

"The dawning of a new year does seem like an opportune moment to try out something new. In fact, The Millions was the offspring of a New Years resolution in 2003.

As 2002 drew to a close, I bought myself a Moleskine notebook and resolved, as I had many times in the past, to begin keeping a journal. It started off reasonably well, but it was soon clear that this resolution was taking the trajectory of so many others: strict adherence to the plan at the outset followed by swiftly plummeting interest. One thing I did keep up with, in this little journal of mine, was making note of the books I'd been reading.

I eventually switched from writing in the journal to writing for the blog to see if that would motivate me (after fits and starts, it did). But it was the idea of keeping track of and reflecting on what I read that helped inspire The Millions and gave purpose to what I read. It also made me a much better reader.

... It all goes back to the notion that we can only read a finite number of good books in our lifetime, so we may as well make the most of them, even if that means just keeping a list so you can jog your memory and recall the experience of reading this or that book. At its best, reflecting on what you read better enables you to take what is essentially a solitary pastime and use it to build a library of knowledge to mull over and share."

2. Expanding Boundaries

"I've had this in mind for a few weeks, but I think I now have a better reason or set of reasons for its implementation: I would like to resolve to read no novels or poetry by white American men for the next year. Wow! Isn't that crazy!

... Frankly, I'm terrified of becoming one of these narrow readers—one of the men who call themselves "common readers" and pride themselves on the "capacity for ignoring the tribalism and exclusivity endemic to the world of books," all of which washes out to mean that they never bother themselves with questions about what kinds of books they're not reading. Instead, they obsess over the "quality" or "worth" of the books they've already read, as if the notches on their bookcase represent the whole universe of books and what that universe really requires is a good ranking system. I don't ever want to be like that. I might as well go back to collecting baseball cards."

3. Shouldn't Somebody Read 95 Books In a Year AFTER They're Done Being POTUS?

"It all started on New Year's Eve in 2005...

By coincidence, we were both reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals."... The competition soon spun out of control. We kept track not just of books read, but also the number of pages and later the combined size of each book's pages -- its "Total Lateral Area."

We recommended volumes to each other (for example, he encouraged me to read a Mao biography; I suggested a book on Reconstruction's unhappy end). We discussed the books and wrote thank-you notes to some authors.

At year's end, I defeated the president, 110 books to 95. My trophy looks suspiciously like those given out at junior bowling finals."

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Notes and Sources:
1. The Millions is a great book blog. Lots of good links.
2. This is the blog of Andrew Seal, an acquaintance of Max Kapustin. He composes his thoughts well and writes with admirable lucidity.
3. Yes, this is Karl Rove talking about George W. Bush. The 43rd President of the United States. Now, all of this begs the question - just how much time did this guy have!?

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Update: Obviously, I've changed the template. A new year calls for a new look.

Also, Frank Rich calls bullsh*t on the Karl Rove piece:

"Though no one is listening, he has given more exit interviews than either Clinton or Reagan did. Along with old cronies like Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, he has also embarked on a Bush “legacy project,” as Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard described it on CNN.

To this end, Rove has repeated a stunt he first fed to the press two years ago: he is once again claiming that he and Bush have an annual book-reading contest, with Bush chalking up as many as 95 books a year, by authors as hifalutin as Camus. This hagiographic portrait of Bush the Egghead might be easier to buy were the former national security official Richard Clarke not quoted in the new Vanity Fair saying that both Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had instructed him early on to keep his memos short because the president is “not a big reader.”"

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2nd Update: Steve Benen called bullsh*t on this back in 2006:

In January 2005, George W. Bush sat down with C-SPAN's Brian Lamb, longtime host of Booknotes. When Lamb asked the president how much reading he does on a given day, Bush replied, “I read, oh, gosh, I'd say, 10, maybe, different memoranda prepared by staff.” When Lamb clarified that he was asking specifically about books, the president explained, “I'm reading, I think on a good night, maybe 20 to 30 pages,” before segueing into an explanation about his rigorous exercise schedule.

Given the history, it came as something of a surprise this month when the White House began a not-so-subtle public-relations campaign suggesting that the president not only has a great fondness for books, but has actually become a voracious reader who finishes challenging texts at a stunning clip.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Before I describe my actual experience with this novel, I'd like to note a couple of things.

I read it based solely on my enjoyment of Kubrick's film rendition of this novel. I watched the movie with no expectations (usually my favorite movies are seen this way), and as disgusting as the premise of the story is, it's just so sexy and wrong and interesting. I was really fascinated that I was able to watch the movie without completely condemning Humbert Humbert (main character with a great name). With that thought in mind, I decided to read the book.

And now that I've prefaced it, here are my thoughts. It was a struggle getting through this book for me. Nabokov writes prose very skillfully and his words have a very lyrical quality; it's almost as if he read every page aloud and then added clever puns and mnemonics. A lot of these flew right over my head and when I re-read passages, I would usually find references or jokes I originally missed. However, that's when I did re-read the passages. Going through Lolita for the first time was difficult because first, you don't always catch the sheer ingenuity of his words and sentence structures, and second, what actually is happening in the book is often masked by his poetry. His word selection also surpasses the vocabulary of the average reader (if I consider myself the average reader), and since I read this mainly while sitting on the bus, I couldn't look up any words and would just simply move to the next passage. Finally, he throws a lot of French in there, and it looked like, well, French to me.

[Side note: Do you ever do that? You don't know a word, and yes, the smart thing to do would be to look it up and repeat it 7 times that day in a sentence so that you integrate it into your active vocabulary. Easy right? Yeah, so I don't do that. A lot of times I'll just infer what the word means, usually based on the context of the sentence, but I realized that sometimes my brain will give that unknown word a definition, based on what a similar-looking word looks like. Example: [...] ]

Anyway, the point is that though I recognize Nabokov's skill as a writer, the book itself just wasn't as enjoyable for me. I guess it's kinda like watching the Simpsons and not understanding the cultural references. What made it especially different from the movie (I later realized after reading reviews) was that Kubrick omitted a good amount of the novel, particularly long monologues from HumHum where he obsessively details his infatuation with nymphets (believe me-- detail by PAINSTAKING detail) and then other long passages where BertBert wishes to show the reader that he understood how society would condemn these desires and as a result, he constantly restrains himself. Through the 300 pages, much of it is H.H.'s inner monologue and there is very little that actually happens in the book.

The book should be read as a verbal confession by H.H. and not as a novel by Nabokov. Then, it is clear as the story progresses that H.H. delves into sheer insanity upon losing his Lo, and the reader begins to question good ol' H's sense of self and reality. He typically describes himself as dashing, dark, handsome, and it is true that there are women that fall for him, but you can't help but wonder what Humbert^2's sense of reality is, especially as you realize how his lust blindsides him when it comes to others' concerns and feelings. He is unfazed when Charlotte (mother of Lolita) dies and his want for Lolita by far overrides any protests she has over his unwavering control and disruption of a normal childhood. Hum also pays little attention to Lolita's mourning of her mother's death, seeing only her outwardly aloof attitude and brushing aside thoughts that she is heavily internalizing her mourning. I think it's interesting when you don't know how an author actually perceives the reality within the world of that book.

This novel can be great if you are:
- prepared to read it again
- carry a dictionary or are sitting next to a computer
- the type that enjoys long descriptive text

Otherwise, I would recommend the movie instead.