tag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-1775624 2011-12-09T21:45:32-05:00 TypePad tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c0162fd9a27d2970d 2011-12-09T21:45:32-05:00 2011-12-10T20:47:44-05:00

Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot is not the topic of this blog post. My having finished the reading for the project I mentioned a little while back is. I did start The Marriage Plot during a break in my reading when I couldn’t get the book I needed next from the library, and I wanted something new to read during an afternoon sick in bed. I’m about halfway through it, but I put it down to finish the “project.” I had picked up the first novel for the “project” in the library on a whim. I thought it would be interesting to write about, but first I wanted to see what else the author wrote. It turned out that while the first book was interesting (and brief), and the second was long and in a genre that was really not my kind of thing but a good read, the third was simply long. The more I read it (and it took me a long time, since I could only read at most a chapter or two a day, which can’t have helped), the more I felt that (to paraphrase Wayne Booth) the implied author of this novel was someone I really did not want to spend time with. So when I finished, finally, the thought that passed through my head was, “I’m glad that’s over.” That reminded me of the lines from T.S. Eliot (in the third section of “The Waste Land,” which he gave the title, “The Fire Sermon"):...

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c0162fd0d83f8970d 2011-11-28T21:25:53-05:00 2011-12-05T17:51:57-05:00

Mari Ness at the Tor Books blog is reviewing Madeleine L'Engle's novels, in chronological order, beginning with her first young-adult book, published in 1949, And Both Were Young. (UPDATE: Actually, she's not reading all of them, they won't be in strict chronological order, and And Both Were Young isn't L'Engle's first young-adult book.) L’Engle is best known for her young-adult science fiction (somewhat in the C. S. Lewis vein), especially the Newberry Award winning A Wrinkle in Time. But in addition to her more or less anglophilic young-adult novels, she wrote a handful of more or less anglophilic “women’s novels,” as well as a series of memoirs. None of the adult novels have any science fiction elements, but the more interesting among them do verge on fantasy in the sense of depicting a real world on which things like ghosts and the occult have real effects. I’ve enjoyed many of Ness’s posts discussing young-adult novels of yesteryear. Her re-reads of Children of Morrow and Treasures of Morrow certainly brought back memories. UPDATE: Here is the list of books that Ness will re-read.

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c015393aaf1b0970b 2011-11-27T16:25:18-05:00 2011-11-27T16:28:20-05:00

The reviews are pretty well unanimous that Anonymous is a silly film. If you’ve missed seeing them, the plot involves the theory that William Shakespeare didn’t write plays, but rather acted as a front man for a nobleman, a member of Queen Elizabeth’s court, because the reputation of a nobleman would be harmed if his name had been attached to plays produced for a commercial audience. There are several different people offered as “candidates” (as those interested in the controversy call them) for the “authorship” of the “works.” Over the centuries, these have included Francis Bacon (a lawyer and scholar, one of the founders of both modern science and modern philosophy) , Christopher Marlowe (a playwright exactly William Shakespeare’s age, who was killed young under dubious, slightly sketchy circumstances), and Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who is the candidate put forward here. “Oxfordians” are said to include some prominent Shakespearean actors, including Derek Jacobi, Mark Rylance, and Michael York, as well as several North American literature professors. There seem to be two or maybe three kinds of issues that concern people who become convinced that “Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare.” (Here is a link to a discussion thread at an “Oxfordian” site, answering the question, “Why I became an Oxfordian.”) First, William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon was a middle-class boy who attended state-run schools, and stopped attending them in his early teens—while the plays are considered masterworks of the English language, worthy of study by the most learned of people,...

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c015393063dba970b 2011-11-22T10:09:49-05:00 2011-11-22T10:09:49-05:00

This, from about a week ago, probably will only be meaningful for those who already know about the roots of current “libertarian” thinking in the writings of the mid-twentieth century economists, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek (apparently non-libertarian conservatives are also influenced by them), and in fact I don’t know enough about economics myself to understand all of it, but I thought these paragraphs from economics professor Brad de Long were interesting: The point of view underlying von Mises's—and von Hayek, and Marx, and Ron Paul—complaint against Fiat money in general and monetary management of the business cycle in particular is this: that value comes from human sweat and toil, not from being clever. Thus it is fine for money to have value if it is 100% backed by gold dug from the earth by sweat and machines and muscles (even if there is no state of the possible future world in which people actually want to exchange their pieces of paper for the gold that supposedly backs it). But it is not fine for money to have value simply because it is useful for buying things. There is, von Mises—and Marx, and von Hayek, and Ron Paul—think, something profoundly wrong on an economic and on a moral level with procedures that create value that is not backed by, in Marx's case, human labor, and in von Mises's and von Hayek's case human entrepreneurial ingenuity. And in its scarier moments this train of thought slides over to: "good...

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c015392faf8e7970b 2011-11-15T21:40:23-05:00 2011-11-15T21:40:23-05:00

In an episode last Tuesday, titled “Occupy Hollywood,” critic Garen Daley was interviewed by Callie Crossley on NPR about “the history of social movements through American cinema.” I’d like to listen to the episode again, but I wonder about some of his choices. Talking about Angels with Dirty Faces, which at one time was my absolute favorite old-time movie, Daley claims that what made the story acceptable to an audience, as a film with a good message, was the happy ending. My recollection is that the final scene of Angels with Dirty Faces has James Cagney being executed, in the electric chair. That doesn’t seem like a happy ending. I suppose what he has in mind is the fact that Cagney goes out, not defying death and Society, but crying for his mother and asking whoever’s out there listening for forgiveness—not because he really repented, arguably, but because he wants the Dead End Kids listening, who look up to him, to abandon their own lives of crime. That moment is, assuredly, a heartwarming one, which affirms the meaning of the film for the audience leaving the theater. But to call it, not even tragic, but “happy,” to me seems peculiar.

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c0153930631e9970b 2011-11-13T21:20:29-05:00 2011-11-13T22:06:15-05:00

It also makes me think of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which previewed on cable the other night. I watched it under un-ideal conditions, starting in the middle, then watching most of the first half from the start, not bothering to watch part of the middle, and not under terrific sound conditions either. But I didn’t like it. I did like both Dogville and Manderlay, and I could almost see the point of Europa, though I didn’t like it much. This quasi-review could be considered to be by way of convincing my husband that he—who didn’t like any of those three films the very slightest bit, and who I’d pretty much predicted will absolutely hate Melancholia if he ever sees it—should ignore reviews like the one by Andrew O’Hehir in Salon, and not bother to rent it when it becomes available on DVD. The post grew out of a series of IM’s along the lines of “did that Salon guy really like it? nothing happened for two and a half hours. and music was really awful. he said what about the music?”

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c015392f0a9f9970b 2011-11-10T09:53:23-05:00 2011-11-10T12:34:11-05:00

On the other hand, the way Sunstein and Thaler discuss “nudging” can sound a bit nanny-state-ish. Henry Farrell, a political science professor, and Cosma Shalizi, a professor of statistics have written an article in the New Scientist (via Crooked Timber) criticizing their views. I agree with their argument, but there is, I think, a problem with the “nudge” theory that I have never seen addressed.... Nudging” is nonverbal. It doesn’t give people the ability to understand their situation better. It doesn’t give people the ability to discuss their situation better. It doesn’t give people the ability to provide the nudgers with extra feedback.

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c015436ad48d3970c 2011-11-06T16:01:38-05:00 2011-11-06T16:01:38-05:00

Shortly after my last post here, I started a project for a longish blog post that would require a fair amount of reading, which has been taking up most of my time. I’ve begun and abandoned a few posts to fill the gap, but first the reading turned out to take longer and be much more absorbing than I’d expected (books in genres I don’t usually read, brick-like enough to encourage a glad switch back to the Kindle), and then real-life events intervened, and then the “quick” post I had in mind turned out to need longer to write than I have right now. (Incidentally, here are things I’d like to see available on the Kindle, or whatever the next generation of e-book reader will be: More foreign books—it would be nice to be able to buy books from amazon.fr or amazon.de for my US-based Kindle. And more classics of history and social science from the past fifty years. There is already a good, though not perfect, selection of recent books on social science, politics, and history, which is probably something we can thank the hordes of tech-savvy wonks and bloggers for.) So I could blog about the sudden breakdown of my clothes dryer with half my daughter’s wardrobe in it, and how if I’d done the laundry on Friday instead of Sunday, we would have had the whole weekend to shop for a new one—but, also, it might have broken while we were out of the house, and burned...

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c01543587a925970c 2011-09-18T12:25:26-04:00 2011-09-18T12:25:26-04:00

The Social Network, a fictionalized account of how the website Facebook was founded and then turned into a social and financial sensation, primarily poses the question whether its founder and creator was a nice person. But it actually raises some much weirder questions. The film has two large problems: its creators’ inability to depict a plausible narrative of the creation of something like a website, and its creators’ inability to depict a plausible version of success that involves more than buying a nice house with a pool, throwing wild parties, and getting your name in the paper. The plot seems to be—oddly—Mark Zuckerberg becomes a Hollywood superstar, very much like the filmmakers themselves; there is almost nothing in the story to mark his success as being of a different kind than theirs. Everyone knows that the moral of the film is that Mark Zuckerberg is a bad guy who has been living a bad life, but if the story has the fictional Zuckerberg living the life of those who imagined him, what is it that’s supposed to be bad about it? This is not the story of how Mark Zuckerberg struggled and worked to overcome obstacles that arose as he tried hard to accomplish a difficult goal; this is not Apollo 13, in which people were called to go above and beyond, working extra shifts for no recognition greater than a gift of a new tie from their wives. This is the story of how Mark Zuckerberg ignored every obstacle...

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c014e8b887d31970d 2011-09-13T21:07:29-04:00 2011-09-13T21:07:29-04:00

A post by Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber threatened to turn into a debate over the facts concerning layoffs and unemployment (see comments by kidneystones and subsequent discussion), but didn’t seem like an appropriate place to have this discussion. The question arose, what does a layoff mean? There were people (I don’t know who they are, how old they are, what they do for a living, or even what country they live in, as they were using the silly sort of pseudonym) who seemed to believe some kind of implausible things—as best I could determine (they weren’t all entirely clear), they seemed to include the beliefs that being laid off always marks the end of a worker’s or professional’s career, that a person’s skills deteriorate to the zero point almost immediately after a layoff, that new skills can only be acquired in a formal degree program and at the beginning of a career. Now, it’s true that if you are an experienced auto designer or engineer or manufacturing worker at one of Detroit’s Big Three auto manufacturers, and you lost your job in the recent unpleasantness, it is unlikely you will be able to get a similar job. It isn’t impossible, because probably the Big Three will need to hire a small number of senior people over the next several years, and so will the foreign automakers who have plants in the United States, and your skills and personality and so on may well be a good match, but...

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c0153917da215970b 2011-09-10T16:43:31-04:00 2011-09-10T16:43:31-04:00

I was in New York City the week before the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. There were some police on the streets, of course, but there always are police, and nobody thought anything of it. The crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium “evacuated” the stands, and the players returned to the safety of their locker rooms, for quite some time, but that was only because of the heavy rain, and the danger of lightning, and nobody thought anything of it. Those days are over. New York has changed, and the way tourists relate to the city when they visit it has changed. D.G. Myers, now blogging for Commentary, has a long list of 9/11 novels. Emily Rooney broadcast a shorter one including nonfiction books from Boston Steve Almond (video and a link to the text version of the list). Most of them are ordinary “social novels,” about people who lived in New York in 2001 or are otherwise affected, in one way or another, by the events of that day. Adam Kirsch, in the newish Jewish magazine The Tablet, has a different list of novels. He argues, along with some of Myers’s Twitter followers, that The Plot against America should be considered among them, though Myers begs to differ. I think Kirsch has a point. What is most memorable about The Plot against America is, in part, the fear of the adults, and the way that a horrible political event seemed to license behavior that, under normal conditions, those...

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c014e8b22c2e1970d 2011-08-31T16:02:44-04:00 2011-08-31T16:10:28-04:00

We were lucky and lost power only for a few hours on Sunday, plus maybe five short outages of only a couple of minutes each. Two or three big branches down in the backyard (attracting at least three cardinals to hop among them on Monday morning), a couple of smaller ones in the front, lots of twigs and leaves on the ground. Some damage to the fence. We put everything away except the barbecue, but neighbors who left things stacked by the side of their house, or left chairs and tables (I guess fairly heavy) outside, only had a couple things blow over. The yellowjackets’ nest, unfortunately, wasn’t drowned. The playground nearest our house was cleaned up very quickly; by Tuesday morning it was free of branches, there was fresh bark under all the play equipment, and even the annoying staircase that's impossible to walk on, unless there is fresh gravel between the railroad ties, had fresh gravel. And the equipment was very clean. Around the corner from our house, however, until this morning, the street was closed. A tree had gone down, taking down some power lines, and knocking out the power. A local online paper reported that the shopping center just off that road was affected and that the supermarket was running on generator power for a while. The streets that were closed are pretty heavily used—around here there tend not to be that many streets that aren’t local-only—and traffic was being rerouted all the way to the...

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c0153902484c3970b 2011-07-24T15:39:18-04:00 2011-07-24T15:39:40-04:00

In a piece in today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine, Salon regular Rebecca Traister considers the wisdom of the SlutWalk movement in the context of recent rape scandals like those involving Lara Logan and Dominique Strauss-Kahn. She begins by attacking the triviality, the futility, and the vulgarity, of “stripping down to skivvies and calling ourselves sluts,” as a means to changing the terms of the political discourse concerning rape—given how much of the culture does still, twenty years after Anita Hill testified before Congress, blame victims for provoking their attacks by dressing or behaving improperly. The style Traister disparages is a style that was more prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s than it is now. Then, during marches protesters often adopted a provocative appearance, particularly an appearance that was personally—as opposed to politically—provocative. Groups like ACT UP were criticized by outsiders to the movement, and also from those within the movement who preferred to remain socially respectable. The movement’s successes, however, which include increasing numbers of states legalizing same-sex marriage, and the end of the military’s policy prohibiting service by homosexuals, arguably was the work of the activist groups more than that of conservatives who distanced themselves from the movement because they couldn’t abide the nonconformism of some of its members. I don’t think “slut” is a word that can be reappropriated by feminists the way “queer” was reappropriated in past decades by activists in some LGBT movements. For this to work, for me, “slut” would have to be a...

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c01538fb4b1c3970b 2011-07-06T21:44:39-04:00 2011-07-06T21:44:03-04:00

My daughter is two and doesn’t really understand lying yet, but she is enjoying this book by Marjorie Dennis Murray (illustrated by Kevin O’Malley) that illustrates the danger of rumor and jumping to conclusions. Hippo wakes up with a toothache and crashes around wordlessly, causing minor havoc and waking up Cuckoo Bird. Cuckoo Bird tells Monkey, in the process vastly overstating the extent of the damage. Each animal in turn adds something to the story, accumulating “This Is the House that Jack Built”-style. In the end, they end up curing Hippo’s toothache, but they also nearly risk causing the very environmental damage they’d baselessly imagined Hippo would have caused if they didn’t intervene: Hippo did not throw anything into the river, flooding the savanna, but that’s just what they do to him. Another cool thing about the story is that surprisingly, it seems to be a variant on the Trolley Problem! Instead of tipping a Fat Man over a bridge onto a railroad track, so as to save the lives of the people on a different siding, the animals tip Hippo over a cliff into a river, so as to prevent the spread of his supposed case of “skeeter fever.” (Compare the illustration of their pushing him over to the illustration at the third of three links, above.) Were their actions, in bumping Hippo down a cliff (illustrated in comic-book format), justifiable? Was it okay to give Hippo a knock on the head and consequent headache in order to preserve...

bianca steele tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0105361967de970c014e884bf41b970d 2011-05-07T15:55:17-04:00 2011-05-08T19:09:13-04:00

The film shows Chamberlain surrounded by his staff as they react to the command. They all are stunned by what seems a foolhardy charge, nearly unprotected, into certain death. Chamberlain himself appears to be perfectly aware of the unusual nature of his own order. His mood, as much as his decision, seems to illustrate something dangerous in his character. In the book, however, it is different. In the novel, Chamberlain is described as making the obvious choice. His options are limited. His men are out of ammunition, and his requests for more bullets haven’t been answered. If he retreats—as he has been ordered not to do, under any circumstances—shifting to the right, towards the rest of the Union line, the enemy will not only take the hill, but will sweep behind the Union line and attack them from behind.

bianca steele