Law and Letters

Morons Mutual Mentally Masturbating... My, My, My.

2008-07-18T14:51:00.001-07:00

Some ninny, via/h/t Amber, reveals the seamy underside of the NYC literary/media scene. Some random thoughts:

I refuse to believe that a n+1 party could be that good. I went to a n+1 party in San Francisco. Admittedly, it was a more formal/official/public thing. But still, various of the n+1 people were there. And it was utterly hopeless. (Ben will vouch for me -- he was there too.) Everyone and everything was painfully boring, and it was filled with 20-something aspiring writers. Dorothy Parker would cry in shame if the snarkerati of her time threw any kind of event like that.

But n+1 is a frightfully good magazine nonetheless.

According to the poor disillusioned NYU student
Everything I had begun to suspect — that n+1 was a place where old guys who never got laid in high school finally have their pick of the fine young crop — felt wholly true in those moments leading up to entering Sebastian's house.

That's revealing. She doesn't seem to be offended at the idea that women would be forced to trade sexuality for status. Rather, she seems to be offended that it's a different kind of status. There's something almost wrong about the "old guys who never got laid in high school" getting "their pick of the fine young crop," rather than the usual football-player types. Frankly, if we must objectify women to the point that someone is getting his "pick of the fine young crop," then I'd rather it be the intellectuals (or pseudo-intellectuals: she can't seem to decide).

I agree with Amber completely: this kid is a truly horrible writer. That's ok. He's allowed to be a horrible writer. He's 17. But why on earth are publishers knocking on his door? It goes to show that media fame is, as I've said before, essentially random and full of vicious circles. I made that post only half-seriously, but perhaps it should have been 3/4 serious or more.

I must be getting old. Because I'm starting to think things like "of course these people are disasters: look how young they are!" I'm told that the 17-20 age range is the New Hot Time for All The Cool Things, if one is rich and in NYC or LA. What a horrible idea. I spent most of that period in law school, and thank heavens -- otherwise I might have been at some ghastly coke party talking about Gaddis. Oh. Wait. Nope. Not rich. Oh darn.

I can't bear William Gaddis. I got about five pages into A Frolic of His Own before collapsing into despair and utter boredom.

I've also never been invited to a party at which there was cocaine. I no longer feel like I've missed out because of that.

This definitely calls for a cross-post.

do the right thing

2008-07-18T13:33:00.001-07:00

So, my sudden inspiration to get out there and help kids is taking a little longer than I thought. My interview with 826 is on August 18. One month away, and I have some free time now. So, while I wait for that, I'm going to help out at some meal-services-for-the-homeless food preparation events, and an organization I will call GrrlQuest (for the purposes of geographic obscurity)!

Here's a description of this outdoor-adventure org:

At GrrlQuest, we are committed to helping girls sustain the clarity, voice and self-confidence that they risk losing during the difficult transition to adolescence. Our programs are designed to help each girl regain and sustain her "true self" by developing and expressing her strengths. We strive to:

Provide opportunities for girls to express thoughts and feelings, to work and play with a community of other girls and women
Facilitate a process for girls to learn about themselves through their relationships with others
Encourage leadership and self-discovery through outdoor adventure and creative arts
Help girls discover strength and talent through a range of verbal, physical and creative self-expression activities

Core to our success and unique to GrrlQuest is our commitment to bringing together girls from diverse ethnic, cultural, and socio-economic backgrounds. The rich diversity of the participants on our courses provides a rare opportunity for adolescent girls to embrace what makes each of them unique and to learn about and appreciate the differences in others.
GrrlQuest was founded on the belief that every girl has natural strengths including courage, creativity, leadership, intuition, body wisdom, and compassion that will help her develop into a healthy woman. Investing in girls—particularly in the critical pre-adolescent phase by encouraging them to stretch beyond their comfort zone and explore new physical and creative activities that nurture and exercise their strengths—can provide a lasting impact that girls carry with them throughout their teenage years. At GrrlQuest, we encourage physical and creative risk-taking in a safe and supportive environment

Through our single gender programs we explore self, community, culture, and the environment through outdoor adventure, creative arts, and group experiences. All of our programs provide our girls with opportunities to: 1) experience physical success; 2) express creativity; 3) celebrate girls' diverse identities; 4) practice group decision making and problem solving; 5) develop community responsibility; 6) engage in healthy conflict resolution; and, 7) cultivate a sense of appreciation and stewardship for nature and the environment.

Unfortunately, I can't rock climb, so I can't be a mentor. I could help out with one of the outdoor adventures, but I am sort of tied to my desk, and can't spare one week retreats to take the girls camping, hiking, etc. I am certain I could hike 10 miles roundtrip, but less certain I could do that with 50 lbs on my back, and I lack gear and money to buy that gear. Thus, I will be helping out this laudatory organization by packing lunches and supplies for the girls and greeting them warmly upon their return and helping out with "graduation" ceremonies. Pretty lame contribution, I know.

Hey, I'm doing what I can. I have very limited skills. I am a good educator, but I don't have IT skills or much physical strength. So I figure I will teach kids how to read good, pack lunches for girls with a sense of adventure, help feed the homeless at the next "A Place at the Table." Yeah I am also considering Habitat for Humanity, but I lack building skills or a sense of spatial geometry. Can anyone tell me about their experiences with HfH?

Paul Gowder Starts Own Blog: is the World About to Explode?

2008-07-18T00:22:00.001-07:00

My experience here has been sufficiently wonderful that I've decided to step a full foot into the blogosphere, in the form of my own blog: Uncommon Priors.

That doesn't mean I'm leaving here, of course! I'll stick around here as long as Belle will have me. But perhaps I'll divide up some posts for there and some for here. And do a little cross-posting.

So if you love me, you know what to read and link. If you hate me, you know where to send the distributed-denial-of-service attacks. Selah.

Making the Transition from the Law to Grad School

2008-07-18T00:21:00.000-07:00

This is the third in an N-part series, although it's meant to be something like the 6th. The series is meant to run something like this:

Some Loosely Connected Musings on Passion, Regret, Law School, and Class Privilege, with Advice to Prospective Law Students
Why You Shouldn't Go to Law School
If you Must go to Law School, How do you Prepare, and What School do you Choose? (not yet written)
So You Went to Law School. Now What? (not yet written)
Considering Grad School: Should you do it? What Program Should you Choose? (not yet written)
Making the Transition from the Law to Grad School (that is, this post)
Law School and Beyond: Paul's Story (not yet written)

I won't promise to write #7, though I'd kind of like to. The other absent ones will probably be written sooner or later. This one is a slightly modified version of an e-mail that I sent someone in response to a question about going back to grad school -- that's why it got written so "soon."

You should also see Belle's How to Go Back to Grad School post, on this topic, and the Law School Advice Wiki generally.

I'm cross-posting this one to my new personal blog, Uncommon Priors (formal announcement forthcoming).

So You're Going to Grad School. What Can You Expect?
I'll assume here that you're a lawyer, and you've decided for whatever reason (to be explored in the post numbered 5 above) to go to grad school.

First, I have some good news for you. In terms of day-to-day life, there's just no comparison between grad school and legal practice. It's a wonderful refreshing breath of air to not have to keep track of time in six-minute increments, and to have deadlines that are manageable rather than insane -- to not be in a constant panic from crisis to crisis. (Admittedly, that might be a skewed comparison: my last law job was litigation in the federal courts in the Eastern District of Virginia -- a.k.a. the "rocket docket," so my law life had more panic than most.)

It's also great to be able to work on and study things that are interesting. There's some boring stuff in grad school, as anywhere, but the ratio of boredom to fascinating stuff is much higher, just because, well, one chooses what one studies. Some of that's the case in law school too, of course, but there are a variety of social and economic pressures in law school to, e.g., take lots of corporations and securities courses, so the same freedom to shape one's life isn't there. (I'm told in the hard sciences, in lab-based sorts of work, similar pressures exist to pursue topics based on the interest of someone other than oneself -- so be aware that my experiences may not generalize.) Relatedly, it's shocking how much you learn. At least, it was to me. I feel like I've learned as much in the last two years as in most of the rest of my life combined -- certainly far more than in law school.

I've also found the people more pleasant than either law school or the practice of law. I might have a skewed sample here: I'm in a PhD program that is very friendly, non-competitive, etc., with both wonderful faculty and talented students. It's important to be very careful in selecting your program. But my experience, at least, is completely positive interpersonally. Compare that to law school, where I know of at least one person who started a secret study group, to which he invited only the people he thought were smart, in 1L year.

Possibly the chief surprise is that it is a lot of work. I never did the big-firm thing, so I haven't had quite the hours in the law that some have, but I still worked pretty long days in the law. I was surprised to be spending similarly long days (and often longer nights) at work in grad school. That depends on your program in part, but it's rather a lot of work, especially at first, everywhere. Grad school can suck up all your time, as well as impose massive amounts of work and success-related stress. (In my cohort, for example, we had a massive wave of relationship breakups in the first year.)

Obviously, be prepared for a big financial adjustment. Long-term too -- academics get paid less than big-firm lawyers, obviously, and the job market is a lot tougher. But in the short term, even in a well-funded program (don't even think about going to a poorly-funded program), you'll see a massive income drop. This is so even for public-interest lawyers.

Also, and this is particularly relevant for us political theorists, be prepared for a big intellectual adjustment. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the law encourages some very bad intellectual habits, which I've had to struggle to break, and which you'll probably have to struggle to break too. For example, things like "arguing in the alternative" are totally verboten in serious academic work. Similarly, it's often the case in analytic fields (especially normative ones) that one's arguments fail (i.e., one discovers a devastating objection), or, on the empirical side, one's theories don't pan out. The natural lawyer's instinct, from someone who has been trained as a partisan advocate (that is, if you were in litigation), is to try and batter things together as well as possible, when what one ought to do is to abandon the doomed position. This is important.

How to deal with these big adjustments?

I don't have too much to say about the financial adjustment -- I'm no financial planner. The best advice on this score is to save while you still have a real income. The point isn't so much to permit a soft landing -- you shouldn't save with the intention of spending down your savings in grad school by living above your stipend means. That way lieth disaster, because you always spend more than you should. Rather, the idea is to save so that you have a cushion. Surprise expenses -- medical bills, car repairs, etc. -- can really hurt when you're on a fixed, low, income and have no time to do outside work (many grad programs don't even permit it). But generally, live within your means. And be prepared for a trade-off between time and money. This can be difficult. Do you grab the quick (overpriced, unhealthy) bite on campus, or do you cook your own food?

The time adjustment induces two basic approaches, in the experience of people I know: strict self-discipline and complete surrender. The former means setting working hours (like in the real world) and, in most cases, actually sticking to them. This means working during those hours -- not surfing the internet -- and it means stopping working after they're done. The latter, well, it's self-evident. Work when forced (i.e., constantly), stop working when you run out of things to do or are procrastinating. I suspect the former is much healthier, but I don't know many people who have the self-discipline to do it. I sure don't. In fact, I can think of two people who do -- and I have no idea how. I suspect it's set by one's personality.

As for the intellectual adjustment, the rules here are humility and patience. Recognize, that is, that you will screw things up when you start. Take the criticism to heart. You've gone from being the person who gives the orders to being the neophyte who needs to be corrected. Even as a junior associate somewhere, you still are The Authority to clients, support staff, etc., as well as The Competent Adviser, etc. But when you're a grad student (at least until you start teaching), you're the neophyte. This can be a hard transition -- there are several ways to mishandle it. One way is arrogance -- to reject criticism as contrary to your self-image. Annother is timidity -- to take criticism personally as a sign that you're stupid, etc. The right way is to recognize that you're a beginner, and recognize that this will pass (never completely, but relatively) -- that you'll attain competence in this stuff in due course and if you do the work.

This is a principle about big life changes generally. Everything has a learning curve, but you can mount it. Remember that learning curve when you started practicing law? (I sure do -- I vividly remember the terror the first time I was called upon to give someone -- some poor tenant facing an unfair eviction -- actual legal advice.)

In short
This is an awesome ride. I've liked it so far. So, perhaps, will you. And remember that you've gone through fires before. For my part, after being shouted at by the chief judge of a federal court of appeals, in oral argument, for having the temerity to sue a school in federal court, talks and teaching hold no terrors for me!

flip-flopping

2008-07-18T00:07:00.001-07:00

One of the reasons why I haven't written an article on bias crimes or affirmative action is that I can't make up my mind about these issues. I am ashamed to admit this. But I am struggling to find a textual basis of support backed by sound public policy concerns about effectiveness and distributive justice that is not contravened by my belief in balancing liberty concerns and other egalitarian norms.

Sigh. I hate admitting this. But hey, this is why I do very narrowly focused work nowadays. I am not as flip-floppy about pregnancy discrimination or sexual harassment. Far from it. I wonder if one needs conviction or certainty in order to stake a scholarly claim, or if by staking a scholarly claim one acquires a sense of (justificatory?) conviction.

Sigh.

blogging buffy: the beginning

2008-07-18T00:01:00.000-07:00

I'm slowly making my way through all seven seasons of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer. I say slowly, and I mean it. I borrowed these a year ago, and have only now started watching them (hey, I kind of don't watch TV or movies during the school year). Also, another reason why I'm moving so slowly is that I watch an episode, turn away or do the dishes during the slaying scenes, and then take a little while to recover from it. I know, lame.

But I really am not good with gore, violence, the supernatural, etc. Which is weird, because I love action movies. But gun violence is too quick for me to register. The awesome part about science fiction is that phasers are not even like, real. Blast and incineration! Blast and a weird black scorch mark! Something like that. But anything involving ghosts, the undead, vampires, etc.--freaks the hell out of me. And yet, I'm watching Buffy. It's just too clever, and I can't not have this conversational currency with all of my best friends. I swear, this is the show that all the smartest, smug-est kids at the annual meeting conferences watch. This, and Battlestar Galactica, which I also haven't watched.

So, I have a crush on Xander, which Amber has told me is misplaced because he ends up being a douchebag who is responsible for Angel's death. Angel dies?! I thought he had a whole spin-off show. I am sort of enjoying the Buffy-Angel smoldering, because while I never got that whole bad-boy/vampire complex some women have, I kind of have a soft spot for the tortured soul emo boy. Willow rocks, of course. Buffy is kick-ass, but why is she so dumb? I would be pretty impressed if she also rocked French in addition to slayerage. Giles at first gave me the creeps, but now he is so charming with Miss Calendar. And I vaguely recall from watching that musical episode that Spike ends up being a good vampire who falls in love with Buffy, although right now he's just a really scary asshole with the ego the size of Texas, and has just killed The Anointed One. The Anointed One creeped the hell out of me anyway, since small beautiful but evil children are just fucking scary (cough Turn of the Screw cough The Others cough Poltergeist cough).

Anyway, I'm somewhere in the middle of disc one of season two. I will blog my reflections as they become more informed, and you can then tell me how incredibly late I am on the Buffy train and hopefully not spoil too much my very slowly accumulating insights and discoveries.

links of irritation and discomfort

2008-07-17T21:19:00.000-07:00

1. Besides the abominable cover, another offensive part of this week's New Yorker is this article. WTF is the point of this asinine report? Blah blah, the "talk of the town"--in this case, Upper West Side or whatever the bourgie part is. Occasionally I am reminded of the insularity of the New York literary glitterati, and how fucking annoying it is that they all attend the same banal parties and write about each other. And then I get all sanctimonious and want to go out and keep it real, however one does that when one is a reader of The New Yorker and writes in the first person while referring to oneself in the third.

2. Ewwww. I know that my revulsion towards consensual, non-reproductive incest makes no sense if I was only worried about genetic mutations or rape--which means that my opprobrium is morality-based. I guess I will make a non-logical argument that it is just wrong, and I can't get around that.

3. Kieran Healy on yet another case of norm enforcement. See also. I always make the joke that queues are downright un-American and too Old World for a nation of instant gratification in the age of online shopping, but I stand in plenty of lines. And I do get really, really mad when people cut in the line. There shall be a reckoning; the first shall be last and the last shall be first and the cutters-in shall be shot.

4. Blah blah, there is nothing wrong with marrying well, but this is just awful. While it does say that you should be smart as well as hot in order to attract a billionaire, I wish the article would give business planning tips to female entrepreneurs trying to attract venture capital and angel investors in order to make their own billions.

5. Stop seeing T.R. through McCain's eyes! WTF! Eric Rauchway sets you, er, Matt Yglesias, straight.

826 National Rocks!

2008-07-17T00:22:00.000-07:00

I have decided to start volunteering for my local branch of 826 National. Well, I have applied, and will let you know how the interview goes, and whether they accept me. For three hours a week (or every two weeks, or whatever you can spare), I might be: 1) staffing the kitschy supply store (depending on your area: for all your superhero, spy, or ninja needs!), 2) tutoring kids in creative and expository writing, encouraging the literary arts, 3) helping with college prep, or 4) if I am lucky, they might let me help out with a workshop!

For more information on how YOU can donate to, volunteer for, or buy the products of 826 National:

826 National is a nonprofit tutoring, writing, and publishing organization with locations in seven cities across the country. Our goal is to assist students ages six to eighteen with their writing skills, and to help teachers get their classes excited about writing. Our work is based on the understanding that great leaps in learning can happen with one-on-one attention, and that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success.

After the founding of 826 Valencia, the flagship center in San Francisco, educators around the U.S. joined in to pursue the same goals in their local communities. Now 826 Valencia also serves as the headquarters of 826 National, an umbrella organization that coordinates the adaptation of 826’s tutoring and mentorship model in other cities. Already, 826 has sister centers in New York, Los Angeles, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Seattle, and Boston. Through volunteer support, each of the seven 826 chapters provides drop-in tutoring, class field trips, writing workshops, and in-schools programs—all free of charge. 826 chapters are especially committed to supporting teachers, publishing student work, and offering services for English language learners.

Because we believe the proof is in the pudding, 826 programs almost always end with a finished product, such as a newspaper, a book, or a film. This teaching model, known as project-based learning, encourages students to collaborate and to make creative decisions, and gives them ownership over the learning process. Working toward a goal, our students are inspired to revise until their work is perfect. They leave with new skills and a newfound passion for writing. And then they come back. Each 826 chapter is a warm, welcoming place where students can get things done. Maybe they’ll produce a chapbook. Maybe they’ll make a movie, or polish a college-application essay. We offer all of our services for free serving families who could not otherwise afford the level of personalized instruction their children receive from 826.

Our corps includes thousands of enthusiastic volunteers who make this all happen. Our volunteer tutors include law professors, college students, authors, retirees, and advertising copywriters. They come from all fields, but have one thing in common: they love to help students learn. The demand for 826’s services is tremendous. At many of our centers, our field trips are fully booked almost a year in advance, and the majority of our evening and weekend workshops have waiting lists. And new teacher requests for in-school tutor support continue to pour in.

Truly, this is awesome. The fact that this is associated with the slightly snide and twee McSweeney's people should not be a mark against so valuable a program. Seriously, how awesome would it be to help kids learn and read? It might not compare to the Derek Zoolander School for Kids Who Want to Read Good and Do Other Stuff Good Too, but it is pretty great. I would have loved to have had this resource as a kid. And they publish the kids' stories! Go volunteer for 826 National!

Thursday Thing: I Un-Ironically Like

2008-07-17T00:08:00.000-07:00

I think I have found my Thursday Thing! The possibilities are endless!

Today, I shall admit that I un-ironically like Phil Collins. Here's my favorite song:

It is just so gaudy and awesome. It is the perfect song for heartbreak, because it is just so fucking emo before emo was ever invented. And WTF is Phil Collins doing in a tux. Check out those drums! The bizarre vignettes of some '80s adventure/romantic drama you never saw with a surprisingly hot Jeff Bridges, and a way, way hot Rachel Ward, of 'The Thornbirds" fame. I keep insisting to people that if they liked "The Thornbirds," they'd like The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, but no one takes me up on that. Anyway, for all those reasons and more, today I admit, loudly and proudly, that I un-ironically like Phil Collins.

And don't laugh, but this song helped instill in me a sense of social and economic distributive justice:

And when I was little, this song helped teach me what love means, for adults:

And I always thought this was love would be like, or at least that was the thought running through my ten year old head:

But I never really understood what this song meant. I suppose I never will:

Being in a well-funded program means...

2008-07-16T10:30:00.000-07:00

that even though you're a grad student, there's still money for the important stuff. Yes, I just bought NINETEEN Woody Allen movies. For a hundred bucks! Waste of money? Yes. Wonderful? Yes. Amazon CLAIMS there's only one left...

My favorite scene from Annie Hall, for obvious academic-nerd reasons:

What "Overpaid" and "Underpaid" Might Mean.

2008-07-14T14:38:00.000-07:00

Over on Concurring Opinions, Sarah Lawsky asks what we mean when we say that judges (and others) are underpaid, or that law professors (and others) are overpaid. She asks for an explanation of how markets fail in these sorts of cases, and what kind of an argument could justify appealing to the "intrinsic value" of various kinds of services in order to ground the claim that, regardless of whether markets are functioning well or not, someone is overpaid or underpaid.

There are two ways that we can easily make sense of such a claim. The first relies on transaction costs and externalities, and suggests that there is a market failure in such cases. The second relies on the idea that there are multiple possible efficient outcomes, and that we can make normative judgments between those outcomes. I'll summarize them here. (Application of these concepts to judges and law professors will be left as an exercise for the reader. :-) )

1. Externalities and Transaction Costs.

The first way someone can be overpaid or underpaid is if their work produces uncompensated externalities. Once we recognize externalities, and the notion that there's a difference between the social value of someone's product and the value to the buyer of someone's product, this is really easy to see.

The ultimate limiting case is the case of a mafia hit man. The hit man is obviously overpaid: he causes so much harm to the victim, and to the society, that even if the market between hit men and people who want to have people killed is perfectly efficient, the inability to make the hit man internalize the externalities means that he's getting far more money than the worth of his services. This is a market failure: there are too many transaction costs to allow the rest of us to, say, pay him to do something less injurious with his time (like sit around doing nothing, even).

For a less extreme case, consider, for example, the case of a lawyer in one's least favorite side of the Tort Wars (someone who defends tobacco companies, if one is a liberal, say, or a personal injury lawyer if one is a conservative). Again, the idea is a mismatch between social value and the incentives of the people who are doing the paying. For some reason, those doing the paying have a lot of money, and they're willing to spend it to do something horrible to the rest of us, and transaction costs are such that the market can't get some Coasean solution.

Suppose, for example, that a lawyer for the tobacco companies produces one million dollars worth of benefit for the tobacco companies, and is paid precisely that (by the tobacco companies). Suppose also that the lawyer's defense of the tobacco companies causes one dollar worth of harm to each of 10 million smokers. In a world without transaction costs, collective action problems, etc., the lawyer could be paid to stop working for the tobacco companies. Such costs exist, so the market fails. The lawyer is overpaid: he's paid a million bucks to produce nine million dollars worth of social harm.

Likewise (although slightly less obvious -- and I'm a little less sure of this), suppose that someone's job produces a lot of positive externalities. An easy case here is a private school teacher (I specify the teacher as being employed by a private school to make the question of who is doing the paying nice and simple). His services might be worth $50,000/year to a school and parents, but he might be producing many times that in social gains from having an educated population, etc. We can, I think, say that the teacher is underpaid in the sense that the market fails to capture all the value that the teacher produces.

2. Division of the Gains From Cooperation

Even without market failures, we might think that people can be overpaid or underpaid relative to some coherent normative standard if there are multiple efficient divisions of the surplus from cooperation. Suppose, for example, that Sam would be willing to take an underwater basket-weaving job for $50,000/year, and that Mary, the employer, would be willing to pay $100,000/year to hire an underwater basket-weaver. Any salary in [50k, 100k] will be efficient, and consistent with a well-functioning market.

But that doesn't mean the choice from that range is exempt from normative criticism! One of the many big ideas from Rawls's Theory of Justice is the idea that what we're doing, when we consciously arrange our economic system in the interests of justice, is establishing a fair division of the gains from cooperation. And I think that's intuitive and important. Given that our transaction produces a surplus, and given that efficiency considerations don't dictate how that surplus is to be divided, why can't we say that some divisions of the surplus are unfair? That is, there may be multiple pareto-optimal distributions, such that we have to appeal to non-market values to determine what the distribution should be.

Random Roundup

2008-07-14T10:33:00.000-07:00

1. Is this satire? Does satire require a critical mass of people who get that it's satire? Is this good satire?

2. Professors: do NOT do this. This really creeps me out.

3. Tim Wu on property rights.

4. In-groupism and discourse on the internet.

5. The only Stanley Fish NYT Op-Ed column that I don't totally hate and scorn. Mainly because Fish made a name for himself as a Miltonist, before he got involved with topics in which he's not really qualified and then decided to become a "public intellectual."

6. This article is only mildly stupid and perhaps even charming for its obvious statements shrouded in economics, but the by-line just makes me think of the anti-evolution movie.

7. This is a better article. Sociology, word. See also, this.

8. Tim Burke on frames of persuasion.

not a false dichotomy, but perhaps an exaggerated one

2008-07-14T00:15:00.000-07:00

I may be a relativist in many other ways and openly revile "Objectivism," but I should never be accused of making the argument that there is no such thing as "bad" literature. Whatever you think of the books I have been reading and reviewing, I come down clearly on the line of "good" vs. "bad." And I try to discuss the merits and weaknesses of each. In some, the prose is lacking, whereas in others the characterization or plot. In each case, I try to assess whether the novel in question succeeds at what it attempts. Is this a particularly good murder mystery that keeps you constantly guessing? Is this a failure of a graphic novel in integrating picture and story? Is this a novel of masterful prose and quiet meditation of big important themes? For a novel to be "good," it has to be good at what it is trying to accomplish. There are different standards for different genres, but within that modicum of flexibility there are indeed standards.

And yet, I must take issue with this, via SEK:

In an April interview concerning the three-month lag between the publication of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and his anxious, Gnostic appreciation of it, [Harold] Bloom confessed he finds it “increasingly difficult to remain abreast of major works of late because so many of them suck balls.” Asked to clarify, Bloom refused to mince words: “When I declared this the best novel in the history of ever, I must have been asleep. It wouldn’t be the first book I’ve composed thus.”

In a linked article, Bloom blusters on:

What's happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.
But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?
It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children on to Kipling's "Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's "Alice."
Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I'm 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I've seen the study of literature debased. There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.
I began as a scholar of the romantic poets. In the 1950s and early 1960s, it was understood that the great English romantic poets were Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But today they are Felicia Hemans, Charlotte Smith, Mary Tighe, Laetitia Landon, and others who just can't write. A fourth-rate playwright like Aphra Behn is being taught instead of Shakespeare in many curriculums across the country.
Today there are four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise. Thomas Pynchon is still writing. My friend Philip Roth, who will now share this "distinguished contribution" award with Stephen King, is a great comedian and would no doubt find something funny to say about it. There's Cormac McCarthy, whose novel "Blood Meridian" is worthy of Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick," and Don DeLillo, whose "Underworld" is a great book.
Instead, this year's award goes to [Stephen] King. It's a terrible mistake.

Now, I will be the first to say that there is an extraordinary amount of shit out there, and on occasion I accidentally read it because some yet-to-be-retracted review in the NYT. The Emperor's Children, I'm looking at you. Next will be All the Sad Young Literary Men. Bloom certainly has a point, even if he gets it wrong about Aphra Behn. I hate Behn--but she's arguably one of the first novelists, and why shouldn't she be taught? She's one of the few women novelists, and the very first, and Oronoko is an important excavation of slavery and colonialism. And I simply cannot agree that those are the only living novelists deserving of praise. How about Alice Munro? Joyce Carol Oates? Annie Proulx? I am about to say something that would make Bloom smack me in the jaw: I hate that every "good" writer he cites is male, and most of the bad authors he cites are female. Bloom has always been exceedingly pompous and vaguely misognynist. Calling him "Eurocentric" is not quite enough; and silly considering he wrote the very excellent The Western Canon. But such a charge was leveled at him by my Harlem Renaissance literature professor back at UC Irvine, and it's one that's stuck with me. It's not a damning charge in and of itself, but it does speak of Bloom's myopia: good literature isn't good by any set of objective standards or genre-specific standard--it's what's good by Bloom's standards. The problem is that his words carry so much weight.

In any case, his remarks remind me of the storied conflict between novels and histories, and male and female writers (and the devaluation of the latter):

Historians and novelists are kin, in other words, but they’re more like brothers who throw food at each other than like sisters who borrow each other’s clothes. The literary genre that became known as “the novel” was born in the eighteenth century. History, the empirical sort based on archival research and practiced in universities, anyway, was born at much the same time. Its novelty is not as often remembered, though, not least because it wasn’t called “novel.” In a way, history is the anti-novel, the novel’s twin, though which is Cain and which is Abel depends on your point of view.

The transformation of history into an empirical science began as early as the sixteenth century and became entrenched only in the nineteenth century. By the time the American Historical Association was founded, in 1884, the “cult of the fact” (as the intellectual historian Peter Novick has called it) had achieved ascendancy. Ever since, generations of historians have defined themselves by a set of standards that rest on the distinction between truth and invention, even when that has meant scorning everyone who came before them.

In an 1806 essay called “Historical Characters Are False Representations of Nature,” Brown suggested that the historian’s grossest deception is promoting the idea that only the great are good: “Popular prejudice assists the illusion, and because we are accustomed to behold public characters occupy a situation in life that few can experience, we are induced to believe that their capacities are more enlarged, their passions more refined, and, in a word, that nature has bestowed on them faculties denied to obscurer men.” But great characters are not superior to obscure men, who are, alas, condemned to obscurity by history itself. “If it were possible to read the histories of those who are doomed to have no historian, and to glance into domestic journals as well as into national archives,” Brown speculated, “we should then perceive the unjust prodigality of our sympathy to those few names, which eloquence has adorned with all the seduction of her graces.”

Fiction, in other words, can do what history doesn’t but should: it can tell the story of ordinary people. The eighteenth century’s fictive history (not to be confused with what we call “historical fiction”) is the history of private life; the history of what passes in a man’s own mind; true to the Book of Nature; and written in plain, simple style, exhibiting both judgment and invention. And it is the history of obscure men. Who are these obscure men? Well, a lot of them are women.

For every Tom Jones and Robinson Crusoe, there were a dozen Clarissas, Pamelas, and Charlotte Temples. If eighteenth-century novels are history, they’re women’s history. And they were adored, above all, by women readers. “Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity” was the revealing title of an essay published in England in 1797 and in Boston five years later. Everyone from preachers to politicians damned novels as corrupting of both public and private virtue and, above all, of women’s virtue. “Novels not only pollute the imaginations of young women,” one American magazine writer insisted in 1798; they give them “false ideas of life.”
What, pray, was the remedy for this grave social ill? Reading history. “There is nothing which I would recommend more earnestly to my female readers than the study of history,” Hume wrote in “Of the Study of History” (which is why he gave his lady friend Plutarch’s Lives, and told her it was a novel). But, on the whole, women were not particularly interested in reading history. Hume attributed this to the fair sex’s “aversion to matter of fact” and its “appetite for falsehood.” Men “allow us Poetry, Plays, and Romances,” Mary Astell wrote in 1705, “and when they would express a particular Esteem for a Woman’s Sense, they recommend History.” But why read it? “For tho’ it may be of Use to Men who govern Affairs, to know how their Fore-fathers Acted, yet what is this to us?” Much as writers of history tried to woo women readers, they made very little headway. Near the end of the century, Mary Wollstonecraft was left to ask of women: “Is it surprising that they find the reading of history a very dry task?” (After publishing her “Vindication of the Rights of Woman,”* in 1792, Wollstonecraft started writing a novel, “Maria; or, the Wrongs of Women,” to make sure that her arguments would reach women readers. Her husband, William Godwin, had it published in 1798, after she died, in childbirth.)

Women were not only not interested in history; they didn’t trust it. In “Northanger Abbey” (completed by 1803), Jane Austen’s comic heroine, who adores novels, confesses that she finds history both boring and impossible to credit: “It tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.” Austen saw fit to echo this exchange in “Persuasion” (1818). “All histories are against you,” Captain Harville insists, when Austen’s levelheaded heroine, Anne Elliot, argues that women are more constant than men. “But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men,” Harville guesses, and Anne agrees. “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story,” she observes, saying, “I will not allow books to prove any thing.”

By the end of the eighteenth century, not just novel readers but most novel writers were women, too. And most historians, along with their readers, were men. As the discipline of history, the anti-novel, emerged, and especially as it professionalized, it defined itself as the domain of men. (Women might write biography, or dabble in genealogy.) Eighteenth-century observers, in other words, understood the distinction between history and fiction not merely and maybe not even predominantly as a distinction between truth and invention but as a distinction between stories by, about, and of interest to men and stories by, about, and of interest to women. Women read novels, women wrote novels, women were the heroines of novels. Men read history, men wrote history, men were the heroes of history. (When men wrote novels, Godwin suggested, this was regarded as “a symptom of effeminacy.”)
Is “history at risk”? If women barely read it at all, and if men mostly read books with titles like “Guts and Guns,” it just might be. “A History of Histories” and “The Purpose of the Past” offer a useful reminder that history is a long and endlessly interesting argument, where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else. But, as for telling stories, maybe historians still have a few things to learn from novelists. Reading Jane Austen being I think very excusable in an Historian.

Occasionally on the literary blogs there will erupt a debate about "masculinist" vs. "feminist" literature. Why don't female readers respond to Philip Roth or Chuck Palahniuk as positively as male readers? Why didn't some women "get" Into the Wild? These debates annoy me. Fiction shouldn't essentially be limited to one gender or another, but it does speak volumes if an author's misogyny undermines his artistic endeavor. But what makes me uncomfortable about such debates is that they also track the discussion of what is good literature, and why it must be "universally" appreciated. I am guilty of it myself, but the devaluation of "chick lit" (a charge against Austen in her time) is extremely condescending. But at the same time, I wish I could shout to Harold Bloom that it is not only "masculine" prose that is great--there are plenty of excellent female writers! It seems that the "good literature" is only written by men, as are the standards for greatness, and as are the arbiters of that quality. Not too long ago, fiction wasn't even considered worthy of male attention. The literary playing field is still as gendered as it was a century ago.

yes, all in one conversation

2008-07-13T15:31:00.000-07:00

(NB: Garth Brooks looks like he is possessed by the devil here, so watch with caution)

(I am paraphrasing and embellishing, despite having a perfectly accurate record on Google Chat)

Eminent Sociologist Person: If you have any music recommendations, let me know.
Me: OMG. I have to make you a mix CD.
ESP: Why haven't you done this already?
Me: Because I am lame and it is a lot of work being emo. It takes up many hours of the day. In addition to my real work, imagine spending a couple more hours a day listening to '90s music and looking at the liner notes. There just aren't enough hours in the day.
ESP: It is a lot of work being emo, I know.

ESP: Should I just start with the songs that have the highest popularity on Itunes?
Me: It is hard to say. Itunes people love them some Mariah Carey. I do too, but you may not.

Me: What kind of music was popular in your day in Extremely Small Rural Hometown in the U.S? Country? Although now it is fashionable to say that you like country so long as you qualify it with "but you know, only the old school stuff."
ESP: It was amazing! It was all heavy metal in high school. All heavy metal. And then I come back and all of a sudden all the guys just want to listen to "I've Got Friends In Low Places" over and over again.
Me: That song is about having friends who are dumb fucks.
ESP: Indeed. And yet they were obsessed with it. Despite themselves being clearly in low places. I think that irony was lost on them.

Me: Do you you like Aimee Mann?
ESP: Is she still alive?
Me: Yes! And touring!
ESP: I only have "Voices Carry." That's all I know.
Me: Those are her 'Til Tuesday years. She's done great work since then. She last had popular acclaim in 1999 with the Magnolia soundtrack. Never saw it though. Tom Cruise scared me, even then.
ESP: He scares me too. Why can't other people see it????
ME: They are beginning to. There's an unmistakable look of Stockholm Syndrome in Katie Holmes' eyes.

Me: You say you like Death Cab for Cutie. Do you have all the albums?
ESP: No.
Me: Dude.
ESP: I know. It is hard being old.
ME: But you have money.
ESP: I know, but I spend it all at Whole Foods. Otherwise, it just piles up uncomfortably.

Hipster Faire Report

2008-07-13T13:33:00.000-07:00

The day began with a series of jokes about hipsters, as all days must. The Journalist and I have no sense of direction, despite inescapable natural landmarks to indicate certain compass points, so we accidentally got on the wrong bus, that is, one heading away from the place we intended. Fortunately, some girl heard us talk anxiously about whether we were heading either to or away from Obvious Natural Landmark Indicating West, and we only traveled two blocks before yanking on the chain and hopping back to our original meeting place, this time on the other side of the street. When in doubt, follow the hipsters. The problem is that in an up-and-coming trendy-ish neighborhood, they are everywhere. So we did not know which group of muss-haired, skinny-jeaned, Bedazzlered group to follow.

But we ended up following the right group of hipsters to big indoor pavilion on the edge of city, and The Journalist remarked that the teeming masses of young hip people was "Like Children of the Corn. Except they're not scary. And they're not children. And they're not killing anyone. Actually, this is nothing like Children of the Corn." I was like, "This is like a RenFaire, but with skinny people in just as weird clothes. Instead of gigantic turkey legs, we're eating roasted eggplant on foccacia, carrot-ginger soup, and a goat cheese and kale pizzaleta from a Zagat rated vegetarian restaurant." I could have also said "Actually this is a mob advert for American Apparel and Urban Outfitters." All statements were true, but none particularly astute. But anyway, if you make stuff, hipsters will come. And driving by their neighborhoods, you will notice some pretty attractive people assembling a table made from a plank of wood atop a base of two chairs. Hmm.

Hipster Faire was pretty awesome. I picked up a lot of letterpress stationary and some awesome birthday cards for HPL and TC, and a set of too-clever-by-half any occasion (literally) correspondence cards. I also bought a bird-in-flight ghetto gold (brass) necklace, although apparently the NYT has decreed that sparrows and owls, icons of the Hipster Revolutionary Movement, have been "out" for over a year now. Whev. They were everywhere. I could have bought my weight in avian/ornithological-themed things. And my necklace is quite attractive, in an insouciant way.

Later, I went back to the same trendy neighborhood with The Wolfman and we had six fancy schmancy drinks for the price of four. Friendly bartender. And by schmancy, I mean "plymouth gin, canton ginger liqueur, basil, orange" and "buffalo trace bourbon, creme de violette, blueberries, angostura bitters, lemon." Darn tasty, and I am shockingly not hungover. Also, there are two types of crepes places: awesome and bad. Only the awesome need apply, and we went to an awesome place.

So, all in all, my day of observing hipsters in their natural habitat for my new ethnography/cultural studies book (forthcoming, Williamsburg Press) "The Relatively Attractive and the Darned: Hipsters as the New Lost Generation" went well.

50 Book Challenge #13: Curses by Kevin Huizenga

2008-07-12T00:42:00.001-07:00

Yet more depressing comics set in the Midwest! I have a strange penchant for them. Jimmy Corrigan and Chris Ware in general remain my favorite, but I rather liked this collection of short graphic stories by Huizenga. The art is exquisite, which is not something you can really say about some (I am not a fan of Julie Doucet or Aline Crumb, sorry).

There's a story based on a Victorian horror story by J. SHeridan Le Fanu that is incredibly evocative with its use of shadow. There's yet another supernatural story that I didn't really get. There's a beautifully drawn story, in the style of ukiyo-e, set to a sad narrative told by adoption papers. There's another one about theology and the competing theories of hell: punishment or mere annihilation. And yet another on the otherworldly efforts some couples must go through to get a baby. Most of the stories are in black and white, and a couple are in color. I cannot decide which has more impact. Most of the stories concern Glenn Ganges, whom I presume is fictional.

Recommended.

Yeah, I'm getting tired of me blogging about books too. I'd rather be reading them. Hence the backlog of books, the whole me rather reading than writing thing. And I'm not including any that are directly related to my work! That would push me to 50 right now, but I'm only including fiction, graphic novels, poetry collection, and non-FMLA/sexual harassment non-fiction. But I had to get this one in, before I have dinner with The Wolfman tomorrow and pass it along.

50 Book Challenge #12: Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

2008-07-11T11:58:00.000-07:00

This book is also hard to describe. From the back of the book, we learn that the narrator has "neither name nor gender." Thanks a lot, Vintage International, for making me conscious of gender constructions and not letting me figure out on my own which gender I ascribed to the narrator. It made me too conscious of the project, and thus, a little gimmicky. Better to have the reader pause, mid-novel, and realize "hey, I don't know if this is a woman or a man, and their bisexuality adds further complexity to the discussion of gender and sexuality." Anyway, yes, the narrator is ambiguous. We learn that the beloved is a married woman. They have an all-consuming affair.

The prose is deliciously, sickeningly visceral: love is skin and sinew and teeth and hair, all different textures and tastes. It is erotic and sexy, but so emotionally raw that one cannot call it tawdry. It is also incredibly intelligent and original and well-written. From this, we learn what it means to have a self-immolating kind of love, and that giving up on someone "for their own good" is an act of hate as much as it is an act of love. You cannot make that choice for someone, not even to save their life. You only think that you are saving them, but really, are you saving yourself from the all consuming love? Only to find that once abandoned, that love still consumes you in their absence. The narrator lets the beloved go, and it is a daily agony and s/he is always waiting in the face of diminishing hope that the beloved will return. Read the book to find out if she does.

Recommended.

50 Book Challenge #11: Young Adults by Daniel M. Pinkwater

2008-07-11T00:10:00.000-07:00

This came recommended, and was a loan. It is very, very weird. Hard to describe, really. Totally absurdist. Dada-esque. Funny, but like, in a "just roll with it" way. One chapter is just repeated pictures of a cartoon pig. Another, office products.

Recommended? I don't know quite what to make of it, other than I admit that I really did laugh out loud at the escapades of the Wild Dada Ducks.

Proceed with caution, or at least, an extreme sense of absurdity.

revelations

2008-07-10T23:35:00.000-07:00

Because of the comments thread to this post, I made rice pudding for the first time, and holy moly, it is delicious. My people eat savory rice porridge (congee/chao), and so at first I couldn't wrap my head around the idea of a milky sweet porridge. Sweet sticky rice yes, with coconut milk poured on top. But that's an entirely different process and texture. Anyway. Rice pudding is delicious! And so easy to make! Especially if you make it with super fatty milk and cream and add an extra tablespoon of sugar and a dash of nutmeg.
Despite the heat, I now want to make rice porridge.
When a bunch of people tell you to do/don't do something, you sort of begrudgingly listen and think of cheating. When Jeremy "Bothering" Freese tells you to do/don't do something and then promise to do/don't do it, holy bother, OK, OK, then, sheesh. That man has power.
Star lilies come in all sorts of colors. Seriously, did not know that. I used to think the stargazer was my very favorite, but you know, pale yellow star lilies are really pretty and fragrant too.
The only thing that's stopping me from reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is the fact that I bought a very heavy hardcover edition, and I can't read it while lying on my back at night without tiring my arms or accepting the danger that I might fall asleep and whack myself in the face with it. I really should just suck it up and buy a paperback and donate this one to the library
Plane tickets are almost prohibitively expensive unless I buy them during sales with far advanced knowledge of my travel dates. Damn it all to heck.
I feel a little sad that I no longer have the time to make hand-made cards and presents, and thus outsource that to cute little stationary lines (Eloquent Ink, Snow & Graham, Dolphine) and by going to craft fairs where hipsters with time on their hands do it for me and then I use my sell out capitalist power in expectation of future tenure-track income to buy their handiwork. This Saturday! Will report back what I see and buy. I am hoping to find the most beautiful card in the world for TC. That's pretty much all I can buy, but someone has to support the local crafty hipster economy and I'm just doing my part.

50 Book Challenge #10: About Alice by Calvin Trillin

2008-07-10T17:33:00.000-07:00

This is a slightly expanded version of a very moving tribute essay by the author to his wife, originally published in the New Yorker. If you read the article, as I did, you don't really need the book. But you might want to own it anyway. You might not want to read it and look at your partner and ask "but will he love me like Calvin loved Alice?" as one young woman who wrote Trillin to console him on the loss of his wife. We did not know the real Alice, but we certainly knew what Trillin felt about her.

I never read Trillin's books, most of which are fun gastronomical adventures as he traveled the nation in search of the perfect barbeque. But now I want to, if only to get a glimpse at the life he had with his beloved wife, her straight-laced George to his wacky Gracie, while they were still living it together. How much one can learn by reading the lives of others! Even if we are not meant to glean any particular insight, to read a biography of John Adams and his wife Abigail and their lifelong partnership--how can we not learn something about love? Externalizing the study of the human condition--here, we read a novel, there, we read a poem--will necessarily bring us back to ourselves if we reflect upon it. Such lessons can be learned anywhere, but particularly by studying the lives of others. Your approach may be historical, sociological, anthropological, or literary, but in examining the actions and motives of others, you turn a mirror unto yourself. There are many ways to learn about love. The first, obviously, is to experience love--the full gamut of pain to pleasure, to give and receive, to have and lose. The second, and no less importantly, is to think about love. What it means for you to have love, and what it means for you to give love--completely. This is a book about love, and there's plenty of lessons in it.

This book is tremendously moving, funny, and sad. Recommended.

50 Book Challenge #9: Faceles Killers by Henning Mankell

2008-07-10T17:07:00.000-07:00

I borrowed this on recommendation. I hated it. It's like a boring criminal procedural, but Sweden is so behind CSI: Miami in terms of forensic techniques and thus the mechanistic details are tiresome. Also, the cops don't carry guns, which puzzles me. Their interview and investigative techniques are bewildering. Coming from an American criminal justice orientation as driven through my skull daily by all of the cop shows, it's hard to get the appeal of this book, since it focuses less on the crime than on the internal life of the one cop, who is not that interesting and vaguely misogynist. Contrast this with the Zodiac movie, in which nothing happens re the murder mystery (which is still urgent! just prolonged!) but the focus on the internal obsessions of the characters and the cost to their personal lives is at least sympathetic and interesting. I did not care about him, about his recent separation or his estranged relationship with his daughter or his lust for the married prosecutor (which was kind of creepily described) or his fantasies about an unnamed Black woman. This may be the least sympathetic detective ever. Since the plot surged forth at a glacial pace, a lot of time was spent focusing on the detective, whose name escapes me, but without the psychological insight of a really good author. Limp plot, weak characterization, flat prose, and the only interesting aspect--anti-immigrant xenophobia in Europe and the specter of terrorism--is totally wasted. If I'm going to read a mystery, I want it to be heavy on the plot or psychological excavation of character, or both! The town names remind you insidiously of Ikea furniture, though, so globalization is the most terrifying aspect of the novel.

Do not read.

50 Book Challenge #8: Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem

2008-07-10T16:33:00.000-07:00

I almost forgot that I had read this last month. Not to say that the stories aren't memorable, just that by now it's blurring in my head what books I have read this year that I have still not blogged reviews for. And now I can't find my copy. Maybe I lent it out. I was reminded that I read this when I saw a stack of Lethem books on my daily walk to the same bookstore (they must get sick of seeing me, but the sale stock changes often, it's exactly a mile away and thus a good leg stretch to go to and fro, and I can pick up a free local newspaper to check out concerts and events). I was also reminded that I have not read anything else by Lethem, although his work seems to be highly regarded. Any thoughts about what other Lethem books I should read?

I must admit that I picked this up because of the title. I like cartoons, comic strips, comics, and graphic novels. A lot. I didn't mind so much the "Men and," even though it seems to imply that women can't also like the same, because I thought maybe it was a slightly self-deprecating jab at the stereotype that only men are so emotionally stunted and trapped in adolescence.

It's a good collection. Although weird, slightly absurdist fiction can become tiresome, I usually find it enjoyable--particularly if the absurdity is not merely a gimmick, but a way to convey something of literary value and emotional resonance. Yeah, this sounds like some contemporary lit fic excuse. But I did enjoy Amy Bender's first collection of stories (The Girl in the Flammable Skirt), or at least I did in college. There's something about absurdist short fiction that seems squarely aimed at the young adult, not quite willing to let go of fairy tales, but desiring something of greater subtance. Of course, I was one of those weird precocious kids reading Tolstoy by ten, but that doesn't mean that I wasn't also reading comics. So there's a pleasing suspension of disbelief and arrested development that comes with reading such stories.

In short, the stories run the gamut from the improbable to the impossible, but usually with good insight into human relationships and motivations. There's a weird magical spray. There's a goat-man superhero. There's a little boy who wore a superhero costume who grew up to be a manipulative professor at Columbia. There's bad relationships, complex friendships, petty jealousies, and a lot of failure, because not even super powers or the belief in the supernatural can save you from yourself, or the small injuries inflicted by others.

Recommended.

Thursday Thing: Lessons Learned Too Late

2008-07-10T00:36:00.000-07:00

I figure I'd just cycle through different things until I found one I liked well enough to repeat, and that Thursday would be as good a day as any other. But the alliteration of "Thursday Thing" pleases me, as the "th" sound is one that I never stuttered over as a kid, unlike "R" sounds (not an Asian thing, a Belle's lispy thing), such that to this day I avoid saying "rural" and substitute "bucolic," "countryside," or "agrarian."

Anyway, lessons learned too late:

Friends is a fucking terrible show. I feel like a bad person for having ever been into it or laughed at it, and sometimes to this day I still can't help watching it on syndication. Like, you know, how you just can't not watch awful movies from your childhood, like Crocodile Dundee. It reminds me of being 14, when it was like the show I had to watch, every week. WTF was Ross doing with that monkey. Weird! Also, he was so whiny. Why is Phoebe so damned cartoonish with her "Smelly Cat" song? Could Chandler be any more annoying? Monica was so much better when she was Alex P. Keaton's girlfriend and an extra in Dancing in the Dark. Also, I am kind of embarrassed that right now, my hair looks rather like The Rachel, the most vapid character in TV history. My hair had better grow back, and I will never chop it off in a fit of Felicity-induced frenzy again. Even if it does look good.
Homemade bittersweet chocolate pudding does not keep more than two, three days max, one person cannot eat 4 liquid measure cups of pudding in three days on low appetite, and thus, wow, what a waste.
Ayn Rand is awful. Terrible philosophy, shit writing, perversely misogynist. I learned this around 17. Some people never learn, and so this is a public service announcement. No voting-age adult should be into Ayn Rand. Avoid, avoid.
Little wild blueberries bake better than regular ones. Frozen bakes the same as fresh for cheaper, as long as you gently fold the berries and mix the berries with 1 tbsp. flour before folding.
Double breasted coats and jackets look awful on me. Ditto, full skirts. Damn.
Radiohead is kind of overrated. Mariah Carey is kind of awesome, actually, even if she is wack.

blog things

2008-07-10T00:11:00.000-07:00

I wish I had a thing. You know, like Tuesday Hate. Here's the full list. That's a pretty cool thing, and one of my favorite parts about Kotsko's blog. The Saturday Poet series was going well, until I lost steam and started doing stuff on Saturday, and then it became the Sunday Poet series, and now it's just post-poetry-when-I'm-feeling-emo, and you know, that's lame. So yeah, I wish this blog had a thing it was known for.

Anyway, onwards with experimenting with different blog things.

50 Book Challenge #7: The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver

2008-07-09T12:29:00.000-07:00

I actually read this book before On Chesil Beach. See, the backlog of books. Anyway, this book is like Sliding Doors. Remember that movie from the late '90s, before Gwyn became the ex-pat latter day Yoko even though Coldplay sucked hard without her help? Yeah. Anyway, that movie was also about betrayal and alternate realities, only everything hinged on missing a train. It was kind of ridiculous.

This book is less willing to ascribe such different fates to, well, fate. It's about choice. We choose to betray, but we do not choose to be betrayed. Thus, our "fates" are less about happenstance and serendipity (a concept I hate), and more about choices, good and bad, and the choices of others that we can't control. And once you choose, you have to keep on choosing. If you choose to leave a person, you choose to live with the consequences. If you choose to stay with another, you must make that a daily choice, constantly reaffirmed. Unfortunately, your choosing to stay with them does not mean that they choose to stay with you. Life isn't exactly "choose your own adventure," but it is better than surrendering yourself to chance.

This book seemed suspiciously chick lit-y, but it came well-recommended from a beloved friend who has only my best interests at heart. It's really quite well-written, and is acute and insightful about relationships and love. It's also kind of sad. It made me feel vaguely unsettled, but in keeping with my belief in Bertrand Russell's maxim that an unexamined life is not worth living, it is not a bad thing to think about these things. What can you live with? What can't you live without? Replace that "what" with "who." Rather painful questions. But good to think about. And the novel is a pleasure to read, full of interesting plot twists. Recommended.