We Understand How Markets Work But We Read Good, Too

Advise and Consent, by Allen Drury

2009-12-10T21:18:00.004-05:00

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

2009-08-12T00:04:00.007-04:00

- 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

2009-08-06T19:40:00.002-04:00

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

2009-07-27T02:26:00.002-04:00

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

2009-07-01T00:07:00.009-04:00

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

2009-06-16T22:04:00.003-04:00

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

2009-05-30T14:17:00.002-04:00

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

2009-05-10T21:39:00.008-04:00

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

2009-05-10T15:52:00.002-04:00

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

2009-03-30T12:10:00.004-04:00

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.

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

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

2009-03-15T16:23:00.009-04:00

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

2009-02-07T22:28:00.003-05:00

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...
³As 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

2009-01-29T01:39:00.008-05:00

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

2009-01-27T11:45:00.001-05:00

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

2009-01-13T02:28:00.006-05:00

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]

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

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

2009-01-04T19:25:00.006-05:00

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."

***********

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!?

***********

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.”"

***********

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

2008-12-30T05:43:00.002-05:00

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.

2008: The Year in Review

2008-12-23T00:52:00.003-05:00

Reviewed on this blog...

Atonement
The Naked and the Dead
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Water for Elephants
The Varieties of Human Experience
How to Be Alone [Selections]
Borges [Selections]
Barbarians at the Gate

... and not reviewed. A few words on some of them ...

The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
Recommended by Tom Schopflocher. Does not involve dwarves (ask him about his passion for said mythical creatures). Devilishly twisted.

Darkness Visible, William Styron and An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison
These two go hand in hand. Powerful first-hand accounts of what it is like to have bipolar disorder.

The Rise and Fall of LTCM, Roger Lowenstein
"On account of a crisis... [the President of the New York Fed] had summoned - "invited," in the Fed's restrained idiom - the heads of every major Wall Street bank. The chiefs of Bankers Trust, Bear Stearns, Chase Manhattan, Goldman Sachs, J.P Morgan, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, and Salomon Smith Barney gathered under the oil portraits in the Fed's tenth-floor boardroom - not to bail out a Latin American nation but to consider a rescue of one of their own." Sound familiar?

Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
Highly, highly recommended. Experiencing a revival in advance of the release of an upcoming movie adaptation with Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. Scariest book I have read in a long time.

The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
Mystery set in San Francisco by the writer that essentially invented the hard-boiled detective novel.

Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Remember the Lobster [Selections], David Foster Wallace
Is it ethical to eat lobsters? Also, if you read nothing else by David Foster Wallace, read this. All other advice given in commencement speeches pales pitifully in comparison.

Books

2008-12-03T01:41:00.002-05:00

View Larger Map

On this google map, I put a red dot for bookstores that I had purchased a book at. Keep in mind that it's still a work in progress and isn't comprehensive. Also, since public libraries have been quite formative in broadening my literary horizons, I put a green dot for those that I was a member of and checked books out from.

It's fun for me to look at my bookshelf and remember where my books came from. Some are gifts from friends. Some are products of travel. Some are from high school or college and are still filled with annotations (which often now seem so... naive and amateurish). A few are from amazon.com.

Essentially, what I have on my bookshelf is a neat little representation of who I am, both in terms of the books themselves, as well as where they came from.

In terms of my favorites...
Bookstores: City Lights, Shakespeare & Co. and Housing Works. These are three places at which you can actually pick a book off the shelf, read it, maybe even sit down or take a nap - and not feel rushed. As much as I love the Strand, I feel like I'm in some sort of a mad, hectic race when I'm there.

Libraries: Pitkin County Library (they have an unparalleled classical music section, complete with listening booths), the Philosophy Faculty in Oxford (so, so quiet) and my local branch at home, the Lynnwood Public Library.

But enough about me. What about you? Favorite bookstores? Favorite libraries? Feel free to comment.

[Also, if you haven't noticed, there are some links on the right side of this blog to great, unique independent bookstores and coffee shops.]

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

2008-10-20T02:15:00.001-04:00

Hi everyone. I'm Michelle from the San Francisco office. Moses told me about this blog, and I thought it'd be fun to contribute once in awhile. So... hope you enjoy! :)

*****

In the few occasions I have taken time to sit through and read an entire book since college and high school, from cover to cover, (I have a terrible habit of reading up until the last 100 pages and then losing interest completely. I also have a terrible habit of not reading.), I've never sat down and written about it. You know. You read a line, and some part of my brain would perk up and say, "Analyze me. I'm a theme! I recur in the storyline!" or "I'm symbolic in some way! Notice me ...!!" I would note that moment, vowing to return to that passage and analyze my little heart out with the skills that I've used so sparingly since high school. Only, what really happens is that moment is replaced by other moments in the book, and at the end, your mind selectively picks out a few of the most significant moments to remember, often obscuring some subtler details of the storyline. Anyway. This is my attempt to improve on that, so please bear with me.

The novel is basically Ayn Rand pushing her philosophy of Objectivism in story form. In 700 pages. My knowledge of Objectivism prior to reading this book came from my friend, who initially explained to me the philosophy in an attempt to portray how evil her boyfriend's friends were. She said, "Objectivism is the pursuit of self-interest... no matter whom you stomp on the way. Objectivism doesn't care about altruism, and hell no does Objectivism care about your feelings." I took these statements as given before reading The Fountainhead, and I've concluded that there are nuances that my friend did not quite understand.

1) It's not that Objectivism tells you to pursue what you want, even if you have to step on others. It's just that the philosophy doesn't really advocate noticing other people. I believe there is a difference.

2) Objectivism does look down on altruism. The story puts a lot of emphasis on what a person creates and their core competencies, because this is satisfying your sense of self. Rand does not believe that a person should be giving their "self" to others and says that this process basically destroys your soul.

3) To shed some more light on the altruism concept, Rand believes that people who submit to the will and opinions of other people are "second-handers" and will often find themselves unhappy near the end of their lives. For this reason, she depicts journalism as an undesirable occupation because their funding and membership depends on their readership and following the will of their advertisers. I'm not clear what her views on service-related jobs are (e.g., a waitress or an economic consultant...), but it seems as if these jobs are all frowned upon in a Randian world. Moreover, Rand has no problem with people coming to others with requests. For example, the protoganist Howard Roark is an architect, but she accepts that he cannot simply build projects on his own. He needs clients. It's just that he refuses to subject to the will of his client for customized projects. He accepts work in the form that his client wants to build a certain building to fit a specific purpose; however, everything else is up to Roark.

The novel is produced with very black-and-white characters. The main male characters are all varying shades of gray in Rand's spectrum of the ideal man. I've heard some criticisms of this portrayal of characters, but I didn't see any serious flaws in that she was trying to present her philosophy, not a how-to guide on how to live by it. now, if the question is how to live in the real world given her philosophy, then I have a lot more problems.

To supplement this story, I wish that Rand would write another story, where the protagonist isn't a talented genius - where the protagonist might not be that smart, creative, clever, or well-spoken. Where the protagonist would break down and succumb to his or her weaknesses - to overwhelming moments of loneliness or thoughts of failure. I wish the antagonist would have conflicts of interest and were a bit more of a human being. I would be interested in what Rand would say then.

You root for Howard Roark even though you know if you met him in real life, you would think that he's an asshole too. You find yourself rooting for him even though you know that he will win and that he can't exist in real life.

Conclusion: A recommended read.

The Garden of Forking Paths, Jorge Luis Borges

2008-10-15T02:06:00.007-04:00

Is it possible to read something twice and have the same exact thoughts when reading it both times, or is each reading an experience incapable of being replicated?

The first time I read this short story, it was for my English class, Modernism, and I was a senior in high school. I did not know a single thing about Borges - I just bought the book and read the story because I had to, and soon realized I was woefully unprepared for what faced me.

If you haven't read The Garden of Forking Paths I suggest you stop reading this post now and begin reading the story instead. You can find it here. Printed out, it is only five pieces of 8 1/2 x 11 paper. Please read it! I do not want to spoil anything for you.

When reading a book, we read left-to-right, top-to-bottom. Stories have a beginning, middle and end. Time moves in a line. Why do we usually think and operate in such linear terms?

Perhaps part of the reason is that we cannot keep all that much in our small little heads at any given time. Can any of you visualize a binomial tree in your head? Can any of you, like a computer, consider all possible future moves and rank them best to worst (the best chess players do this correctly almost every single time, but it is because they cannot not do it every single time that they lose to the most powerful chess computers)? Because we have no way of grasping anything close to the infinite, we simplify... to left-to-right, top-to-bottom. We construct basic narratives to explain events. And there is a distinct past, present and future.

It can be quite powerful when somebody merely plays with these rigid constructs. Borges forcefully blows them up. He creates worlds within worlds. Characters have multiple, contradictory identities. Time is not universal and absolute. Things both are and are not, at the same time. There is even a parable, The Garden of Forking Paths, referenced within The Garden of Forking Paths. Which, makes the title take on "new meaning after the [story] is read. It's like the title contains a secret that only the [story]'s readers know."

Upon reaching the end of the story for the first time, the reader realizes that the story did not end, after all. There is a rather abrupt surprise that casts all previous events in a completely different light. [Atonement, as Erik quite articulately pointed out in his post, uses a similar tool to toy with reality. (And, "Atonement can therefore be a tough one at least for the first reading. The key, for me at least, is that during the second reading you know what's really happening.") Then, you cannot help but flip back and give sections of it another read.

When you do, you realize there is almost nothing about the opening of the story that makes it a legitimate beginning. The first words of the story are even "On page 22 of Liddell Hart's History of World War I..." - the story begins in the middle of a book. And the statement that makes up the rest of the story has "the first two pages of the document... missing". These beginnings are actually just the exposed ends of fragments with the actual beginning chopped off.

You could probably start reading this story at any point in the middle; you could connect the end with the beginning, and read it over and over in an infinite loop. A character in the story says, "I had questioned myself about the ways in which a book can be infinite. I could think of nothing other than a cyclic volume, a circular one. A book whose last page was identical with the first, a book which had the possibility of continuing indefinitely." It becomes richer and more complex each time through, as each successive read adds to your understanding.

And with a little poking around, you can find that Borges is referencing many things that actually exist. Liddell Hart actually wrote a History of World War I. There was a rather large battle in July of 1916. There is actually a town called Albert. The more one knows about what is referenced, the richer the story is. The reader becomes a detective, searching for clues and answers to flesh it all out.

I only wish I could read this story both in English and in Spanish, stripped of translation. How rich must it be to read the original? [Note: recently inspired, I purchased another edition of Borges stories with a different translation and read that, as well. The opening of the story goes, "On page 242 of Liddell Hart...". Which is correct? Page 22 or Page 242?] Speaking of translation, Borges himself not only knew but translated English, French, German, Norse and other languages into Spanish. He had also read, basically, everything. No wonder his writing is so intricately complex - he could approach it all from an astonishing number of angles, and in so doing, gives us a strong whiff of the infinite.

So - this is rather kitschy, but please read the first sentence of this post again. By now, I'm sure you've forgotten what that first sentence is, and it should mean something altogether different this time around.

Barbarians at the Gate, Bryan Burrough and John Helyar

2008-10-03T01:09:00.002-04:00

Barbarians at the Gate is about the leveraged buyout firm, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, taking over RJR Nabisco. Here's a passage I liked:

With less than three hours to go, Bason had been preparing more than a dozen major documents - bank commitment letters, debt documents, and other arcane papers - that couldn't be completed without a final number. Bason had word processors standing by at three law firms.

Bason got his number just after three. Across Manhattan, at a half-dozen banks, law offices, and accounting firms, fingers flew across calculators, totting up interest rates, payment schedules, and other key ratios. By a quarter to four the lawyer could see details of the bank letters were falling into place. But it was also clear the three-inch-thick bid package wouldn't be ready in time for the run uptown to Skadden Arps at Fifty-fifth Street and Third Avenue.

The logistics of time-sensitive midtown deliveries were familiar to all Wall Street law firms. Subways were out. A single smoky track fire could trap a courier for hours in the musty tunnels beneath Lexington Avenue, and portable phones were unreliable. Moreover, Bason knew the nearest subway station on the key Lexington line was four long blocks from Skadden Arps. He preferred taxis up the crowded parkway along the East River...

..."I hope your guy was a cross-country runner," he told Goldstone, "because there's no way he's going to make it by five o'clock."

Goldstone's eyes were glued to the clock. They weren't going to make it. Second later he had Bason call an Atkins aide, Mike Gizang. "We're faxing the bid letter," Bason said. "It's coming to you now."

As clerks began feeding the bid letter page by page into the fax machine, Goldstone listened to Truesdell's labored breathing over the portable phone.

"We're at Fifty-fifth and Second!" ...

... When Truesdell's breathless group reached Skadden Arps, their path was blocked by a throng of photographers and television cameras. The newsmen, spotting the portable phone, crowded around and began shouting questions. The lawyers plunged like fullbacks through the assembly and into the lobby.

... Darrow looked at his watch. It was 5:01. The largest takeover bid in corporate history was late. He prayed no one would notice.

Most books about business, in my mind, are just a notch or two above pulp fiction. However, I had a great time reading this one; it was kind of trashy and you get some juicy details about the lives of rich and fabulous men who run Wall Street. And, perhaps best of all, the major banks and players in the book, including Drexel Burnham Lampert, Salomon Brothers, Lazard Freres, Dillon Reed and Shearson Lehman Hutton, make late 80's Wall Street come alive.

And to think, hypothetically someday somebody from a younger generation could read a Wall Street Journal article from early 2008 and ask, who were Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns? [After all, isn't that what I must seem like for those who knew "late 80's Wall Street"?

Barbarians at the Gate is like delicious fiction and well, who is to say it isn't fiction? For example, did Burrough and Helyar know that Darrow actually "prayed no one would notice" that their bid for RJR Nabisco was late? Did Darrow say that in an interview? Or did the authors creatively narrate? I suppose, in the end, it does not matter, for what is recorded becomes history, anyways.

As for the passage I lifted from the book, it reminded me of working and having a deadline... and just barely making it. Which makes me question, for all of our advances in technology since the time of Barbarians at the Gate (pdf Factory Pro, fast computers, reliable portable phones), how much time have we actually saved?

Willing to lend: Yes (through inter-office mail?).
Purchase Price: $16.95
Purchase Location: Borders in Union Square.
Edition: Harper Collins

The Wall Street Journal

2008-09-16T00:41:00.003-04:00

I really like reading the newspaper. Not just reading the news that is printed in the paper, but the whole experience of reading the paper, as well. Like just sitting on a lazy Sunday afternoon with a cup of coffee and the paper, or figuring out how to hold the paper when reading it in a crowded space, or choosing which sections of the paper to tackle first (as a kid, I would go sports first, then the arts section for the comics and the crossword, maybe the A section next for a few articles, then local and almost never the business section. Though sometimes I reversed the order to save the best for last).

For the past year or so, I'd been following the financial sector much closer than I ever had before, almost solely because I was working in the Securities practice at NERA. After work was over, I'd swing by the reception desk and get the Wall Street Journal. Newspapers, to me, are a very elastic good. If they're free, I'll read them. As soon as somebody charges me $1, I stop reading them. So, I have gone through a couple newspaper-reading phases in my life when the paper has been "free", and during these times I have read them daily for stretches of time:

Growing up: The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer [subscriptions paid for by my parents]
In college: The New York Times [Columbia had a number of free copies for the student body of the Times from sophomore year on]
Post-college: The Wall Street Journal [NERA reception]

... this was the first time I actually "read" the Journal properly because, well, for the first time, it actually kind of made sense (also see Finance section, the Economist). It became fun to track stories day by day - and to see where they appeared on the page of the paper itself.

After a little while, you recognize the patterns. Of course, there are dedicated sections, or spaces of the paper, which are for particular news stories. There are sections of the paper that are dedicated for certain ads (just like in magazines, where you can purchase space on the back cover, the first page inside the front cover, etc.) For example, in the A section, front page, below the fold, in a small section sandwiched between "What's News" and an advertisement on the bottom right, is generally a quirky, often entertaining business-related story.

Today, September 15, 2008, there was a story about astrologists in Thailand. In that same section, I have read about Icelandic crazy trucks, a secretive currency maker that has printed money for Zimbabwe today and Nazi Germany in the past, Santa Claus civil wars, and meat-judging competitions as a feeder of executives into the meat industry.

I think having knowledge of the workings and format of any news publication helps you understand the lens through which you are examining a news story - and that is critical, because objectivity in news is impossible.

Once you've read a publication enough to "get it", you notice when there is something that breaks with this standard format... and you know it means something. The first time I really noticed this was on April 20, 1995. I picked up the Seattle P-I in the morning and there was a huge picture that took up all the space above the fold with a building that looked blown up and completely gutted out. I'd never seen a story this physically big.

It was the Oklahoma City bombing. For the first time, I saw a news story that was so big that it grabbed your attention in part because... it was bigger than anything that had happened since I'd been reading the paper.

So, this morning, I woke up early. If you know me, you probably know that it takes either a) an early flight or b) the smell of cooking bacon to get me out of bed. Otherwise, I'll stay asleep. Well, now, you can add c) a Wall Street meltdown to this. I'd followed the fall of Bear Stearns with fascination and so by the time Lehman and Merrill had vultures circling around them last week, I was greedily consuming everything I could read on it. I mentioned to a contributor to this blog that it was like "warnography", except this was "bank-ography".

And I wanted to see Monday's market reaction to the weekend's developments in real-time on Yahoo! Finance. So, sure enough, at 6:30am PST while all of you were at work, the markets opened... and boom goes the dynamite, as the saying goes. And as I witnessed the carnage, I wondered how the Journal would spin it (and the New York Post, which would probably have some stupid wordplay frontpage headline like "FULD FOLDS" or something, I thought [it was actually "BANK SHOT"]).

Huge news, right? I mean, I was riveted by the storylines with Lehman, Merrill-BofA and AIG. And you can see that the Journal broke with their usual format by having the "What's News" bit pushed down to make room for a headline that stretched the width of the page. I'd never seen this before with the Journal. Of course, the Wall Street Journal would care because, after all, this is... Wall Street.

How did the San Francisco Chronicle put it? It was sitting right under the Journal on the NERA SF reception table.

Apparently, people in San Francisco care a lot about the state budget.

And if you care about comparing perspectives, there is this wonderful website: http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/

In the archives sections, you'll find September 12, 2001, as well as the day after Tim Russert passed away, Michael Phelps winning his 8th gold medal, etc. And you can get a good idea of what pulses people in different parts of the country have their fingers on.

The Cranbury Bookworm

2008-09-06T15:03:00.012-04:00

Welcome.

Weathered and worn.

It's a family affair. (Hi, Mom.)

$3.50 still buys a lot of LBJ these days.

I went to the Bookworm today hoping to pick up Caro's Master of the Senate. I couldn't find it in the overstuffed Presidential biography section or on any of the nearby shelves that routinely get cross-pollinated. My eyes adjusted to scanning titles. Some were unable to eschew their tabloid origins (Clintonian drama! Nixonian scandal!); others were sober, attesting to a history of being oft-overlooked. It took three passes before I found any of the books I ended up buying.

Amazon has perfected the process of picking up a book; it has a long way to go before you can put one back and pick up another.

http://www.cranburybookworm.com/

How to Be Alone, Jonathan Franzen

2008-07-28T21:39:00.000-04:00

Let me first say, thus far I have only read one essay, "Why Bother?", in this collection. I've yet to read the others, but this one was rich enough and, as will probably be evident from this post, forced and stimulated some introspection.

In 1996, when Franzen wrote the essay, he certainly had a lot of complaints about contemporary culture. He bemoaned the relative obscurity of the writer, the dangers of technology to the arts and the general decline of reading's importance in culture. He also does point out the risk that "in publishing circles, confessions of doubt are widely referred to as 'whining' -- the idea being that cultural complaint is pathetic and self-serving in writers who don't sell, ungracious in writers who do." Keep in mind this essay was written before The Corrections came out and before Jonathan Franzen had essentially "made it". He'd already written two books at this point but had remained in relative obscurity. So it's clear why he might seem a little whiny. I've written two critically acclaimed books, Franzen moans, so why is it still the case that nobody knows who I am? It must be because culture is dying and technology has made people stupider.

And to warn you, this next bit could very well sound selfishly whiny, as well. Let me summarize some of it for you. Good god, I say in the following paragraphs, in New York, I can't be by myself. But when I am by myself, I am hardly happy with my solitude. And because of this, I can't read. My life is difficult, woe is me. And because it is difficult, I'm leaving this city for greener pastures where life will be less difficult and I can read a book. So before I go any further I'd like to stress that the problems I bring up are, in fact, rather minor in the grand scheme of things - and I am well aware of this.

So. I'd argue that New York is a very difficult city to be alone - when you desire solitude. There are a number of paradoxical forces at play that make this true.

1] You are surrounded by millions of people. But you just want to be alone. Yet when you are finally alone, you cannot shake feelings of loneliness... because you are surrounded by millions of people.

2] There is so much to do in the city. Much of that involves what are inherently social activities - going to bars, restaurants, concerts, shows, the park on a sunny day, etc. But you cannot be happy being by yourself because that generally involves not taking advantage of huge amounts of what the city has to offer, and thus you know there are so many other things you could be doing with people rather than by yourself.

At the heart of the philosophy behind this blog is the idea of a) encouraging reading and a free-flowing discussion of ideas and b) encouraging writing about that reading, which is introspective and reflective thinking about the reading one just did. But both of these require solitude.

After all, what is reading, but a purely solitary activity? It is just you and the book, and the two-way relationship that is building between you and it. Yes, the world of the book exists in printed words on pages, but ultimately it is up to you to construct it. By reading and using your imagination, you build it, piece by piece. You build glittering cities, mythical creatures, characters you fall in love with, philosophical ideas, whatever appears on the page... in your mind.

This is a reason why I almost always dislike films that are based on novels I enjoyed reading. By projecting images and sound, the films have already constructed much of that alternate reality for me and for the most part, what was in my head was so much richer and ambiguous and mysterious than what is on the screen, which I can no longer get out of my head. For example, Jack Nicholson is R.P. McMurphy, Elijah Wood is Frodo Baggins and Colin Firth is Fitzwilliam Darcy. And they portrayed the characters well, but now I can't dissociate them from what I had originally thought about each fictional character.

As for writing, well, what is writing, but a purely solitary activity? It is just you and the words you are spitting out, and the two-way relationship that is building between you and it.

So, with these activities that require solitude, where can you find it? I both read Franzen's essay and wrote this in a coffee shop. I chose a coffee shop because solitude does not necessarily mean pure objective solitude. I did not want to just be alone. The aloneness in my room in my apartment, at the time, was too much. I had no contact with the outside world, so in order to feel comfortable with my aloneness, I moved to a place where it was socially acceptable to by one's self. Again, another paradox, albeit a more personal one, related to the first two I mentioned, of wanting to be alone.

I've now talked about the problem of not being able to find comfort in solitude in the city. But there is, at least, one other problem for me. In short, I'm spending less and less time reading. While the first problem is perhaps more due to surroundings than anything else, this other one feels more within my realm of control: when I do have solitude, I just can't concentrate on reading, so I stop trying. It seems to be more a matter of willpower.

There's a quote by Thoreau which I remember liking back in high school: "Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all." With this in mind, I set about tackling the greats and the classics. Sure, every now and then I'd mix things up with some pulpy trash because I was tired of thinking. But for a long stretch in my reading career, if the novel wasn't supposedly a classic, great work, I wouldn't read it. I was in a race against time.

Franzen complains about his own lack of ability to read, and as he does so he mentions performing some basic calculations to see how many books he will read in his lifetime. So, I did some of these rather morbid calculations myself. Since this blog began, I have, not including this current one, posted five times. That's five books, plus three books that I have read but not posted about. So let's do a little rough extrapolation. I'm going at about 8 books every half year, or 16 books a year. Assuming I've got a healthy 60 years to go before I go to the great beyond, I'll read close to 1,000 more books in my life. Do I want to waste my time reading crap? All the more reason to pick the novels carefully.

But a more fundamental worry is that time spent reading, which is so important to me, a devoted lifelong reader, will decrease. In short, I'm scared I'll read less and less as it shifts down in my list of priorities. What if my current paltry rate of 16 books a year shrinks to 10 books a year, and then will bottom out at 5 by the time I have a family and children, a career and other obligations? That 1,000 has quickly dropped to a number a lot smaller than 1,000.

And I can see this happening because, if there's anything I miss dearly from my pre-real world college days, it's my attention span. In the workplace, I can hardly concentrate on anything uninterrupted for more than a few minutes before I get an instant message, a coworker says something or stops by, I receive an email, my work telephone rings or my cell phone buzzes. And with the death of my attention span goes my ability to focus for prolonged periods of time. I previously had visions of finishing War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Now, I just want to be able to get through a novel. I've detailed some of this in an earlier post, where I talked about the problem (whined?) of a crippling reader's block and my struggle to find an effective antidote.

Drenching all of these thoughts is a certain amount of nostalgia for some sort of mythical golden age of the arts, where people still cared about classical music and opera and listened to the radio and full albums... and novels changed lives. I recently got asked, what is the book that has changed your life the most? And I struggled mightily to answer the question. How about Atonement, The Naked and the Dead, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Water For Elephants or The Varieties of Human Experience (the books I have posted about here)? No, none of them, not in the slightest. So, what the hell have I been reading for the past half year? If I care so much about reading, what am I getting out of these books?

And this is when Franzen's essay reenters the picture. He cites an interview with a sociologist who has studied the effects of reading on people, and the first paragraph of the following quote is from her:

""There's the social isolate - the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him. This is very, very difficult to uncover in an interview. People don't like to admit that they were social isolates as children. What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can't share with the people around you - because it's imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read. Though they aren't present, they become your community."

Pride compels me, here, to draw a distinction between young fiction readers and young nerds. The classic nerd, who finds a home in facts or technology or numbers, is marked not by a displaced sociability but by an antisociability. Reading does resemble more nerdy pursuits in that it's a habit that both feeds on a sense of isolation and aggravates it. Simply being a "social isolate" as a child does not, however, doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It's just that at some point you'll begin to feel a gnawing, almost resourceful need to be alone and do some reading--to reconnect that community."

Well, that's me, both when I was young as well as now.

It's unfair to ask what novel has most changed my life. But reading has indeed changed my life immensely. For the mass majority of books, it's not the works themselves, individually, that have been of prime importance. The best books I have ever read have perhaps changed my life indeed, but each did so only incrementally. So, instead, what I prize so dearly about reading books is just that - the mere process of reading. It's a way for me to be both by myself and not by myself, to be completely alone but also in a world of my imagination surrounded by countless others.

And that's what I'm craving most of the time, anyways - to have my cake and eat it to. So if you ask why I'm moving to the West Coast, I think productive "alone time" will come more easily. And because there is indeed less unavoidable densely packed civilization screaming for my attention, I'll be able to be more comfortably at peace with my solitude.

Maybe that will be a more lasting cure to my reader's block.

Willing to lend: Yes.
Purchase Price: $1
Purchase Location: Sidewalk sale on Underhill Street.
Edition: Picador

The Varieties of Human Experience, Carl Sagan

2008-06-26T22:11:00.000-04:00

Living in New York and looking up at the sky in the late evening, I can hardly make out the most basic constellations. Even when I can, they are pretty disappointing - the sky is just so light polluted.

Growing up in a house that was on the outskirts of a small town 35 minutes outside downtown Seattle, it was much easier to develop a fascination with the night sky (that is, when clouds weren't obscuring it). At a certain point in my youth, I realized that the sky was a big mystery to me... so many indistinguishable bright pinpoints of light! Time to learn how to distinguish them. I bought an astronomy guide and began to learn the constellations.

I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid. I had this LEGO space shuttle. My favorite book was Countdown to Glory. I owned Apollo 13 (both the movie... and the book). I went and saw Contact in theaters with my dad (... I owned that book, authored by Carl Sagan, as well).

So it's no surprise that I, on a whim, bought Carl Sagan's collection of nine lectures, given in 1985 at the University of Glasgow. The lectures encompass topics about, among other things, the existence of God, the probability of extraterrestrial intelligence, the use of searching for it and the compatibility of science and religion. Is it anything special? Did I acquire vast amounts of new knowledge? Not really. Is it semi-standard philosophical fare? Partly (though, one should credit Sagan for having an admirably solid grasp of not only scientific history but also philosophical and theological arguments).

But, taken as a whole, Sagan's true talent with this book is showing the inherent beauty in the order in the universe - the birth and death of stars and galaxies, the gravitational interplay between bodies. Through invoking the cosmos, he inspires awe. Most of all, however, he brings out the human psychological desire to believe that there is meaning. By showing how amazing the cosmos can be, one can't help but wonder at how amazing it is that it all works.

The closest star, Alpha Centauri, is 4.4 light years away. I've always loved trying to picture the distance of a light year (and my mind can never really visualize how large a distance this is). Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 365 days in a year. Multiple all of those seconds by 186,000, and you get over 5,800,000,000,000 miles in a year.

Imagine you're staring at Alpha Centauri. Now, one little photon, which is in front of your nose in this instance, has to wait an entire year to go just one light year. And three years later, it will finally begin to approach Alpha Centauri. What a trip! Over 23 trillion miles. And that's just the nearest star. Damn. We're small.

I started this post off by saying that, well, it's not easy to see stars here; a look up into the night sky in New York generally reveals a soupy hazy darkness. So we never even really try. And I think that's a small reason why it's very easy for people living in New York to slip into having an unhealthily microscopic perspective on life. It's easy to forget that there's a whole wide world out there outside of this city. And we all focus our energies inward.

Willing to lend: Yes
Purchase Price: $16 [you can get it for $5.99 on Amazon]
Purchase Location: Barnes & Noble
Edition: Penguin

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

2008-06-10T23:37:00.009-04:00

I needed something to read. The book was there on the shelf.

I had read an excerpt of the work, published before the book's release, in the NY Times Magazine. It is the author's dissection of her grief after her husband died. It had piqued my interest then. Having the book in its entirety before me now, it felt a little unnecessary to immerse myself in a book about grief, but I was out of reading material, so I took it up. People I've spoken to who have read the book, and reviews I've read, agree, that although a depressing subject, the book is uplifting. It truly is. Didion writes about her reactions to the grief, and her reactions to people's reactions, and it's all very engrossing.

It made me think of when my grandmother's mother passed away, and I remember not knowing how to feel, for her sake; I felt bereft from seeing her pain. Not that one learns how to react in these situations from the book, but it is almost refreshing to read a detailed account of the surviving person's reaction.

What is better, really, than a good writer's musings on life? - that is, on death, or rather, on Life After a loved one's death. In Didion's case, I think the memoir beats her fiction (there's an excerpt in the book, and it didn't hold my interest as much as the straight-forward writing-style of the memoir). I recommend reading the book in one sitting; I almost managed to, and it's more powerful that way, probably because of the stream-of-consciousness nature of the writing. (The details recounted did make me think, gosh how do memoirist remember these things?...fact vs. memory...)

A note about the title: I love a title that takes on new meaning after the book is read. It's like the title contains a secret that only the book's readers know. Not cryptic, but nuanced. I won't tell, since it's only for readers to know ; ), all I'll say is that it has to do with the word magical.

Adapted excerpt: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/magazine/25didion.html, but the whole memoir is better. I'm willing to lend.

The Power Broker

2008-05-11T23:04:00.005-04:00

Author: Robert A. Caro

The subtitle of Caro's book reads: "Robert Moses and the Fall of New York." Many who have read or will read it won't take Caro's view. They will say, as Eliot Spitzer did in a 2006 speech to the Regional Plan Association, a group that voiced harsh criticism of Moses, that a biography written today might be called At Least He Got It Built. The refrain Caro employs to encapsulate the Moses philosophy has a similar ring but is steeped in sarcasm and bullheadedness: "Get Things Done."

I read most of The Power Broker standing upright on the subway. Balancing its heft in one hand is difficult under ideal circumstances; I was forced to do it with acrobatic dexterity, jammed so close to other riders that it was hard to tell where I ended and they began. The irony of reading the biography of a man who spent thirty years neglecting public transportation when he had the power to modernize it while being crammed in a cattle car lurching under the East River was never lost on me. Each morning I grin and bear the things he didn't get done.

Today Robert Moses is an anachronism. In his formative years, when parks were enjoyed from the passenger seat of a car, people would have scoffed at the idea of a billionaire Mayor riding the subway to City Hall. Moses's ideals thankfully didn't outlive Moses, but his decisions did. Every park, playground, highway, public housing complex, bridge, and tunnel in New York City was shaped by his hand. His vision extended to and transformed the landscape of Long Island and the state. The theories he espoused are enshrined in the sprawling interstate highway system, the ailing national railways, and a suburban sprawl on which the sun never sets.

As I was getting off the subway one night, a girl approached me and asked whether I had just been reading The Power Broker and whether I was a student at Columbia Journalism School. She explained that the entire class was assigned the book, a notion that struck me at first as odd but that now makes complete sense. Caro's book created a biographical subgenre, characterized by a depth and thoroughness of research that had previously been exclusively the domain of investigative journalism. The zealousness with which today's reporters go after officials' improprieties owes itself in part to Caro.

Not only is it a supreme book about one man--indeed, the book is in its realm as much of an accomplishment (or, to borrow a word from primary politics parlance, a "game-changer") as Moses was in his--it is possibly the longest love letter ever written to a city. Reading The Power Broker is by turns enlightening and upsetting; examples of the injustices Moses wrought upon the city are littered across its pages. No one will ever escape to unspoiled Inwood Hill Park because there is no longer an unspoiled Inwood Hill Park. Others, like the Lower Manhattan Expressway that would have cut an eight-lane swath of elevated highway through SoHo, luckily never materialized.

The question on Moses's lips at the sunset of his career and the words Caro uses to end his opus--"Why aren't they grateful?"--describe the two groups most New Yorkers belong to: those who've never heard of Robert Moses, and those who see him everywhere they look. The Power Broker is a ticket to the latter.

Water For Elephants, Sara Gruen

2008-05-05T23:00:00.002-04:00

I first heard about this book from my friend's mother this past November, back in Seattle. A number of us who had gone to elementary, middle, and/or high school together had gathered for dinner on the day after Thanksgiving and were having our first full reunion at home, complete with almost all of our parents, since high school graduation.

And in conversation with my friend's mom, I was bemoaning the fact that I could hardly read anymore and that I'd actually perhaps spent more time writing or complaining about my inability to read... than actually reading. (This, as you know, is a problem that persisted for some time).

We were in the foyer of my friend's house - she was sitting on the piano bench and I was facing her in a chair. We were talking after dinner. In response to my complaint about literary impotence, she said that she, in contrast, had been on a spree - sparked in part by mild insomnia - and had read a whole host of books, the latest of which was Water for Elephants.

What is that about, I said. Well, it was written from the perspective of an aged old man, who was now remembering his times as part of a traveling circus in the 30's, she said. And with a slight smile, she described some of the stories about the elephant, the menagerie, the performers, the train...

And after she was done with her descriptions, I remember saying that I thought writers are good when they are able to essentially remove you from the real world and place you in whatever land, fantasy or otherwise, that they are helping you construct. And when they are good at that, you easily lose track of time when reading. You stop noticing the page numbers printed on the page.

For a lot of people, writing about what they know best (their own lives?) comes easiest. But to write about what they know the least? Traveling circuses during the Depression? That takes a lot of research and homework, of course, but it also must take talent and a ripe, vivid imagination.

And to add another layer to this, I said, it's talent when a person, as a storyteller, can relay this world so effectively that the hearer of the story gets removed from the actual conversation at hand... and begins to enter a fantasy world as well, held under the spell of the storyteller. Which is what just happened now as you described the circus and the book, I said.

[And perhaps I've added another meta layer to all this by relaying it here? Hm. Depends on how effectively I've relayed it, I suppose]

In any case, with these high expectations in the back of my mind, I went out and bought the book, brand new. Now, I generally don't like to give anything away or even say much that will color a reader's expectations with my posts - I'd rather let people explore it all on their own. But I will say this, that: it was a fun, lightning fast read. I started on Saturday night. I was done this morning on the subway. I thoroughly enjoyed the ride.

[It's pretty unfair of me to expect every new book I read to revise my perspective on life in some way. This book certainly didn't do that, but that is rather too much to ask of it...]

Willing to lend: Yes
Purchase Price: $14
Purchase Location: Community Bookstore in Park Slope. Highly recommended. The black dog who lounges around the store is very friendly and is named Priscilla.
Edition: Algonquin

Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach

2008-04-29T00:12:00.004-04:00

I have reader's block. It's horrible. The last book I succeeded in completing? The Naked and the Dead! That was months ago.

I've tried pretty hard to get around it but have failed miserably. Books have been attempted and subsequently discarded: Underworld, Sometimes a Great Notion, History of Love, Gravity's Rainbow (hah, ya right, fat chance), Paradise Lost, Slaughterhouse-Five, Gilead... I couldn't even finish rereading Macbeth before I saw it at BAM. I couldn't even get past page 40 of Blood Meridian, which Erik had lent me. Shouldn't these have been motivation enough to snap me out of my funk? Seeing a play soon and only having temporary custody of a book? Apparently not. Apparently I'm severely to moderately illiterate.

It's horribly frustrating. I just can't seem to focus. The process of graduating college seems to have shrunk my attention span to that of a dumb goldfish. Now, during this time I have read some chunks of old philosophy texts, sections of Brealey Myers (don't judge me), a whole lot of Wall Street Journal and a chess book. A rather pitiful pile of reading material, right? And in the meantime, everybody else around me is plowing through literature. I recently saw a NERA researcher more than halfway through War and Peace. Yes. War and Peace. [If you remember from my last post, I failed that, too.]

Well, today, I finally read a book. It actually, uh, had a lot of pictures and wasn't even really 100 pages... and I'd read it before, but whatever. It counts.

Tonight, as I was sprawled out on my bed in my room, my roommate passed by and saw me:
- Oh man, is that Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
- Yes...
- Oh god.
- What? Have you read it?
- No, but my parents have and... [something something] hippies... [something something] 70's... [something something] freedom.
- Hey, I like this book...

True, there's a whole mish mash of meaning in the book, including, as my roommate vaguely pointed out, a semi-hippies/70's/freedom message (plus, potentially, some Christianity, eastern philosophy, anarchy, etc.)... but really, you can pretty much construct whatever meaning you want out of it. So I say read it slow, but most importantly of all, go into it with an open mind.

If all you're left with is even just a little more inspiration than you started with, I'll be happy.

Hopefully this book has freed me from the shackles of my condition?

Willing to lend: No (it's a gift for a friend)... but you can find it for free here. Or here.
Purchase Price: $10
Purchase Location: Union Square, Barnes and Noble. Note: other than in the cafe, there are almost no chairs in this B&N, which effectively makes it a really crappy bookstore.
Edition: Scribner

Soy, Not Oi! peanut butter chocolate chip cookies

2008-04-28T10:24:00.002-04:00

In early February, I posted on my new cookbook, Soy, Not Oi!
by the Hippycore Krew, an anarchist punk rock vegan collective.

Last Saturday I made the chocolate chip peanut butter cookies I wrote about, and you’re all welcome to come have some in my office. The recipe made around 50 cookies, which is waaaaaayyyy more than I can eat on my own! I’ll wait until the end of the day before I put them in the kitchen to share with everyone. I had leftover tahini from my little experiment with homemade beet hummus (hot tip: homemade hummus, not worth the effort) so I actually went half and half on peanut butter and tahini, but really the peanut butter flavor pretty much overwhelms the tahini. They’re actually not vegan cookies, because I used regular butter.

Ingredients (I am pretty sure everything had kosher symbols, first 5 definitely did):
peanut butter
organic tahini
butter
semi sweet chocolate chips
soy milk
salt
vanilla
corn starch
potato starch

I think that's it. I hope you will come and enjoy some!

-Stephanie

Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut

2008-03-19T06:21:00.008-04:00

Anyone read this/him? Let's discuss.
I took up this book a couple of years ago but couldn't get started. This time I relished it. This may hint to my current state of mind (cynical? third and fourth definition in American Heritage Dict.: 3. Negative or pessimistic, as from world-weariness. 4. Expressing jaded or scornful skepticism or negativity). Do you think "world-weariness" is an apt term for the book? Comments with the gist of 'I stopped thinking of how the world should be and focused on how it is' (the I is obviously the fictional character, not me). It reminds me that books can hit or miss sometimes because they have to work with the mood/mindset of the reader. I wasn't able to read Joseph Heller's Catch 22, either. Maybe I wasn't sarcastic enough for that when I tried; I should pick it up again.

Discussion points:
How about those "leaks"? Term is really odd at first, but when the self-identified author sits behind 'leaky' shades (i.e. reflective), and describes how someone would see her/himself when looking at him, that's when I got a feeling for 'leak' as applied to a mirror in terms of how the author might have meant it. Also, from a primitive state of mind, how do images end up 'in' mirrors? They leak.
The author suddenly pops into the story, reminds you of his control by actually placing himself in the scene. He breaks down that fourth wall referred to in theater. The way the author does it here, well really he's just as fictional, right? (An author writing about an author who is writing a book about an author..)
Any insights into the title?

No Ordinary Time

2008-03-07T22:57:00.003-05:00

Author: Doris Kearns Goodwin

I came to this book by way of another, much-loved item on my shelf: Team of Rivals, The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, also written by Goodwin. (If you, like me, never much cared about the Civil War when studying it in school nor knew much about Lincoln aside from his sartorial preferences, then definitely read Team of Rivals.)

My goal in reading No Ordinary Time was to understand a fact that always seemed remarkable to me: how America could kick its isolationism habit and become the greatest arms supplier in history in less than five years. I did not expect as thorough an analysis of the evolving social climate as the one I received. Here, Goodwin is like an overgenerous lunch-lady, dishing out tater-tots of wisdom with reckless abandon. I got to know, better than I ever wished to, Eleanor Roosevelt ("ER" in an era apparently fond of acronyms) and her incessant needling of FDR to take up her social agenda. ER gets equal billing in this book, something that might have changed my decision to read it had I known ahead of time. Goodwin's scrupulous detailing of the Roosevelts adds little but the comforting knowledge that they would have made terrible sitcom fodder.

There's a lesson here: know what kind of historical narrative you're getting yourself into. Goodwin wrote an amazing book, but it wasn't the book I wanted to read. However, if it happens to be the book you want to read, all 600+ pages of it will be here waiting.

Willing to lend: Yes
Purchase Price: $5.95
Purchase Location: The Strand
Publisher/Edition: Simon & Schuster, Paperback (1995)

Soy, Not Oi!

2008-02-06T10:10:00.000-05:00

One of my New Year's resolutions this year (yeah, there's more than one) is to cook more. To avoid cooking burnout (ha!), I decided to shoot for one recipe a week. This week is mushroom-cashew pate (with rice crackers) (hoping to recreate some of the Angelika Kitchen magic). I also have a new awesome homemade salad dressing recipe, which I'll happily share with you (it has maybe 4 ingredients and two steps in the recipe= perfect)

Soy, Not Oi!
by the Hippycore Krew, an anarchist punk rock vegan collective.

Over the last couple years I've read about a lot of meat eaters getting up close and personal with their food - Michael Pollan and the Omnivore's Dilemna, the locavore movement, Manny Howard (featured in New York Magazine) only ate food from his Brooklyn backyard for a month, etc. And, you might ask, what about us vegetarians and vegans? We want to know our food too! Not to worry, this sweet little cookbook has from-scratch recipes for both soy milk and tofu (Soy Milk Like Mom Used to Make if You Were Lucky, by Christy, and Tofu, by Christy, "of course"). Also right below the tofu recipe is a little drawing of two blocks of tofu high-fiving each other - way more fun than Julia Child.

Some of the recipes are paired with music suggestions. For example, if you're making "Beans, Beans, the Musical Fruit by joel" [refried beans from scratch] you could listen to Crucifix "Dehumanization" or Bad Religion- anything.

Essays on veganism, discussing why the authors went vegan, are sprinkled throughout.

There are recipes for shampoo, beer, Metaphysical Macaroni Casserole, and one really yummy sounding one for J@ck's highly requested peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. I'll give you a little flavor:

A TYPICAL PEANUT BUTTER CHOCOLATE CHIP DIALOGUE
(words in parentheses to be read whispered as if subliminally)

jo: What's up j@ck?
j@: Nothin much
jo: What are you doing tonight (peanuebutterchocolatechipcookies)
j@: Probably sit at home, listen to Black Sabbath Volume IV, write some poetry, I dunno why?
jo: I was just wondering (peanuebutterchocolatechipcookies)
j@: Why, what are you doing?
jo: I'll probably listen to my Carcass live tape someone recorded on a mini cassette recorder in mono from another building while the concert was going on and do some HC mail (peanuebutterchocolatechipcookies)
j@: Maybe I'll make some peanut butter chocolate chip cookies
jo: Good idea.

So, yeah, it's a little weird that you can buy this from Amazon.com ($7), but if it'll make you feel better you can just photocopy mine.
Over 100 Recipes Designed to Destroy the Government (Did you know that the price of milk in the US is not set in a free market? I learned that when my group got an alleged cheese (futures) manipulation project.)
www.akpress.org

You know, I just read in the NYTimes that if an average-American-someone ate 20% less meat, that would have the same environmental impact as switching from an SUV to a Prius. And you know y'all should eat more fruits and vegetables anyway.

The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer

2008-02-04T22:37:00.000-05:00

This was a bit of an impulse buy at The Strand - as I picked it up off the counter, my decision-making thought process went something like: hmmm, Norman Mailer => he died relatively recently so that's probably why this book is out here => on the book cover it says this is perhaps one of the best books written about WWII => I haven't read a thing by him => didn't he get in a pretty spectacular argument with Gore Vidal and Dick Cavett* => ok fine I'll buy it.

*if you have the patience, click on the link, wait for clip to fully load (it's from the Charlie Rose show and the hour-long interview in full is pretty entertaining) and then fast-forward to the 29 minute mark for some Mailer fireworks. Or just read this, which is a NYTimes column by Dick Cavett on the event.

Tangent: I get intimidated by fat books. I mean, I'm forever stuck on page 900-something of War and Peace and have been for about six years. Now, with that, I blame two things: 1) a high-school era OCD anal retentiveness with regards to not wanting to break the spine of my books and 2) Signet Classics editions. In conjunction, the two are a deathly combo. Why?

Well, Signet Classics [like this one, my copy] are short and fat... the more pages the book has, the fatter it is (duh). So when reading a long-ish novel you have to carefully use two hands to keep the spine unbent- you can't, say, hold it in one hand and eat your sandwich with the other. And when reading, I usually like to read in the car/subway, in bed before going to sleep, at the dinner table. Now, I was reduced to one single and usually uncomfortable two-handed reading position...

...so when I would try to read the 1400 pager, I was trying desperately hard not to break the spine due to my aforementioned eccentricity, which meant I would only be able to partially crack the book open. By page 600/700, it was really difficult to read the text on the inside of the book, close to the spine, because... I had the book only partially open. And at a certain point, I gave up, because it was too much of a chore to read. [Dreadfully stupid, isn't it? I've since changed my young, foolish ways, and have come to accept book spine creases, cover dings, rips, etc. as signs of loving wear and tear.]

All this means the book has been sitting on my shelf for years, and I don't know what to do. Re-tackle it? If so, then what, do I skim the first 900? Read it from the very beginning? Just jump right in again, and spend a good amount of time reorienting myself?

Ah, that was a prettttty long tangent, wasn't it? Now, where was I? Oh yes, the Naked and the Dead. Um, this relates, I swear.

Ok, you see, the book is 700 pages long, and I was worried I wasn't going to finish it, and it would suffer the same fate as a whole host of other fat books I'd tried to tackle in the past.

But Tolstoy does relate to Mailer in a more substantial way than just sheer length. Yes, I only got through 900 pages of W+P (sadly, I'm also stuck on page 500-something of Anna Karenina). But I'd read enough to get a good sense of Tolstoy's style... and enough to be reminded of him when reading Mailer.

There's a section in A Moveable Feast where Hemingway talks about spending whole afternoons dedicated to writing, trying to perfect single passages. If he labored and sweated away and got it right, then the afternoon was a success. And contrast this with Tolstoy, he says. Now there, there was a man who was not concerned with le mot juste, as Hemingway pain-stakingly was.

In The Naked and the Dead, the action focuses on one platoon on a fictional island in the South Pacific. And you really get to know the soldiers in the platoon. The greatness of the novel, to me, lies in the characters - Mailer gives each his own personal voice - and the way he constructs the plot of the novel to build your attachments to them. You know them, what drives them, their life stories, their place in this war. You feel for them. You're shocked when some of them are disposed of in a single sentence, and then you're shocked that you can so quickly feel nothing afterwards, which I guess is perhaps part of the point of death during war - it comes, it is sudden, and then it passes.

You get all this through slow and sheer force. You don't read every word, knowing that Mailer spent hours poring over whether they were the correct, or most apt ones. True, at times, it feels as if you are reading raw and semi-unedited product. There are plenty of flaws with the novel. The grating misogyny can be tiresome and annoying (the soldiers are always griping about their wives cheating on them while they're in battle). Some of the plot elements are a bit far-fetched. Perhaps most damning of all, however, is the fact that at the end, when describing the book, the way I think of describing it is by invoking similarities to other authors and authors' themes - Tolstoy's depictions of war and his ability to evoke compassion from the reader, Melville's quest for the white whale - rather than by invoking whatever it is within Mailer, the author himself, that makes his work unique. But set aside these flaws, and you have some raw genius.

And he wrote this all as a 26 year old? Geez. I've got some work to do.

Willing to lend: Yes, just don't break the spine (I joke, I joke)
Purchase Price: $12.95
Purchase Location: The Strand
Edition: Picador

Atonement

2008-01-27T21:21:00.000-05:00

I did my best to write my review without including plot spoilers, but found that I was skirting the main points that I wanted to make. So if you don't know what I'm referring to when I say 'plot spoilers' then save this for after you do read the book (or see the movie), and take my word and do read it. Not since 'Lolita' has the formula of "13-year-old girl + too much imagination = trouble" been used to such effect.

When discussing Atonement I often feel like I'm defending it as much as speaking of it affirmatively. Many people who devour novels equally serious and twice as long tend to have trouble with it - not in understanding it but in feeling engaged by it. The first half is seen as boring, the subsequent parts feel somehow incomplete, and the book overall is seen as pretentious. Certain plot elements can at first come off as remarkably uncreative - the moment the young candy bar magnate shows up and starts giving chocolate to the children you know exactly where that's heading, and the book also gets the award for being the millionth British novel to require a mis-delivered letter to get the action going. McEwen's writing is very elegant and beautiful but can also feel somewhat removed. He can alternate between dropping you in free-fall into the most immediate thoughts and feelings of a character and then pulling back to speak of days (or much longer) passing with a single paragraph. Taken together, all these things can make for a difficult beginning in the reading experience.

Further along in the reading process, the book is a tough one to speak of because it is itself a meditation on the shortcomings and the redemptive powers of the novel. Aftermath pervades Atonement and can leave a feeling of uncertainty and lack of payoff among a lot of those who read it, especially during the first reading. You never see the battles that led to the disastrous evacuation at Dunkirk ("It was a rout and this was its terminus"), you never see the men that Briony as a nurse has to care for until they're already dying, and likewise Briony's entire life is the aftermath of the few hours that take up the entire first half of the book. In contrast to that, the aftermath of Cecilia and Robby's love is that of emptiness; they had just enough time to say "I love you" and then Briony and WWII intervened. The question that the novel then poses is what can fiction offer in the face of aftermath so unbearable, and the answer given is: not necessarily all that much. There are two endings to the book - one being right before Briony is going to start writing it and the other being after she has finally finished it (half a century later). The part that we don't see is what was important to her, and the finished product itself then becomes simply what's left over. The book is not the aftermath to its own writing, but it is the residual, though that may be too harsh a term. See Briony's statement towards the end, for example, on how it's the effort that counts.

In Chesil Beach, McEwen's dwells on the metaphor of the storms that arrange the pebbles along the beach by size so well that sailors can tell where on the beach they are just by the size of the rocks. For McEwen, that's the writing process - the emotional and psychological storm that arranges the messes into something that makes sense and provides guidance. Hence the almost 'glassy' quality that his fiction can often take - very smooth, clear, transparent, sometimes perhaps to a fault. While much is made of the nonlinear aspects of Atonement, the style itself is very straight-forward and attempts to portray the thoughts and events in a clear and elegant way. The 'twist' at the end is really not all that different from plenty other instances in fiction where it's revealed at the end (or stated right from the beginning) that some or all of it was really in the protagonist's head. The difference is that in most cases the protagonist turns out have been untrustworthy (or for instance in the case of Lolita, attempting to immortalize his own dementia), but with Atonement the protagonist is trying to finally get it right. (Except for one detail, of course, which she admits to in the end.)

Atonement can therefore be a tough one at least for the first reading. The key, for me at least, is that during the second reading you know what's really happening. The text assumes a new dimension to show how much Briony as the writer is trying to show compassion and understanding to the people whose lives she believes she destroyed and to resurrect them on the page. To do so is to be caught between the simultaneous helpless inability to go back and change the past and her own omnipotence in the context of her writing ("How does the novelist atone when the novelist is God.") You catch glimpses, however quick and imperfect, of the process of atonement that had to lay behind the writing of the novel and the fifty years that spans its two endings, and you get a sense of how devestating but critical it had to be for her. There is no clean and uplifting ending; McEwan never seems to be a fan of those, but you can tell that the storm is over and the pieces have been arranged. The many ways in which the book is a failure and can make such a difficult first reading end up being the same things that make it so powerful and heartbreaking the second time. So if you don't necessarily care for it too much the first time, I'd say put it away a while and then try it again later on. Or don't. There isn't enough time to read all the good books out there once; that this one demands two readings perhaps gives the final laugh to those who accuse it of pretentiousness.

ES
NYC 2008

In Retrospect

2008-01-25T00:02:00.000-05:00

Author: Robert S. McNamara

Robert McNamara's prose can be a joyless read. If a review of forgotten lessons like In Retrospect was not so badly needed today, the book would come off at times sounding excessively detailed, nearly anal. But what McNamara forged, in light of present circumstances, is a thorough account of how unchecked errors in judgment can snowball into policy disasters.

Though written in 1995, it is impossible to read this book and not compare Vietnam to the present war in Iraq, or McNamara to Paul Wolfowitz. Both conflicts suffered from an inability by their architects to question basic assumptions prior to escalation. For the current administration this is especially damning. Having had the luxury of time spent studying Iraq prior to waging war (as Wolfowitz had since at least the 70s), their actions are even less forgivable than those of the Kennedy and LBJ administrations, which occurred at a time when expertise on Southeast Asian politics was scarce and the prevailing "domino theory" remained young and untested.

There is more to In Retrospect, however, than a lens through which to interpret current events. There are valuable anecdotes about the inner-workings of two administrations, insights into how diplomacy is conducted at the highest levels, and chilling reminders of the zeal with which certain people embraced nuclear war as acceptable military strategy. Above all, there are lessons from America's darkest time since the Civil War, many of which we have yet to learn.

Willing to lend: Yes
Purchase Price: $4
Purchase Location: The Cranbury Bookworm
Publisher/Edition: Times Books, Hardcover (1995)

Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del colera)

2008-01-13T12:45:00.000-05:00

Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Translator: Edith Grossman

"He was desperate to find the hidden road in the past that would bring him relief. For that was what he needed: to let his soul escape through his mouth."

It would be meaningless to label Márquez a gifted writer. His specific gift is, not unlike Kundera's, the ability to run a knowing finger along the contours of emotion, awakening phantom experiences that we may never have felt but that are no less a part of ourselves. You could not imagine unrequited love, without having it define your life for seventy years, feeling any way other than it does to Florentino Ariza. You could not imagine the terror of a first love as pure and innocent as the one imprinted upon Fermina Daza. I cannot imagine how this all flowed from the pen of a single man but to conclude that he has lived several lives within his lifetime.

Willing to lend: Yes
Purchase Price: $5
Purchase Location: The Cranbury Bookworm
Publisher/Edition: Knopf, Hardcover (1998)

Under the Banner of Heaven

2008-01-11T15:20:00.001-05:00

Author: Jon Krakauer

Opinion: I highly recommend this book as a great nonfiction, even if you don't really like nonfiction all that much. It explores organized religions and how they become popular through an examination of Joseph Smith and the Church of Latter-Day Saints. He also discusses (in a very non-judgemental fashion) extremist religious sects through Mormon fundamentalist groups.

This is a really engaging read for a non-fiction. It normally takes me months to finish a nonfiction book because I can never really quite get into it. As much as I'm interested in the subject, there's only so much I can read about it. But, Krakauer's book is really easy to read, and it really kept my attention. Probably because he explores religion and Mormonism through understanding the psychology of two Mormon Fundamentalist brothers who committed an extremely gruesome murder because God told them to do it.

I borrowed the book from someone, so I don't have it to lend out to anyone.

If anyone does end up reading, let me know because I'd really like to talk about it.

Native Speaker

2008-01-08T00:40:00.000-05:00

Author: Chang Rae Lee
Borrowed from: Moses

My first read of an Asian American author; my first novel in quite some time. Lately I hadn't had the patience to stick to fictional plots. Lee's writing style got me - neat, concise, yet evocative, no pandering to the reader with wordy explanations. There were definitely sentences/descriptions/ideas to reread. In fact - notice how I haven't mentioned the story line - the prose could have been about anything, for me. Still, the storyline - the immersion in immigrant after-life, is interesting.

Recommendation: Ask Moses for the book

Thoughts?

Atonement, Ian McEwan

2008-01-07T17:38:00.000-05:00

Opinion: I bought this in the airport while waiting for my delayed flight from Dublin back to London in March of 2006. The book is in three parts and I devoured the first, then hit an absolute wall with the second, when I became quite disinterested. And it wasn't until I was home over this past Christmas that I worked up enough energy (in part, spurred on by the movie release) to finish the book off, and when I finally did, there was a bit of a feeling of... that... that was it?

I guess I found myself primarily concerned with the unfolding of the plot - and in the end the payoff didn't quite match my rather high expectations. And while the plot didn't satisfy, I also rarely, if ever, paused to stop and reread turns of phrases or paragraphs that I thought were particularly thought-provoking or beautiful... Perhaps I can blame my nearly 2 year long layoff for my lukewarm feelings towards my first McEwan experience.

Willing/able to lend out: Yes

Purchase Price: 11.95 euros
Purchase Location: Dublin Airport
Edition: Vintage (UK). [Note: You know, Vintage (UK) books have a really dinky feel to me. They weigh something like .001 pounds and the pages feel like they are made of cheap construction paper...]