Ramblings

The problem (so far) with Flash Forward

2009-11-01T19:49:00.004-05:00

A couple of my friends recommended Flash Forward to me, and as I watched its second episode today (yay for on-demand TV!), I realized why Flash Forward had bugged me so far (the two episodes I've watched, that is). (Remember this is a strictly provisional opinion subject to change any time as I watch more.) So why am I not impressed?

(1) The almost complete absence of any danger:
So imagine this. For approximately two minutes, everyone in the world experiences a black-out for two minutes. Yes, they all become unconscious -- and if the series is to be believed, this leads to a spectacular disaster, on an unimagined scale. Airplanes crashing into buildings, cars running over people and crashing into buildings; the possibilities are endless. And yet, I get no sense from the series that anything serious has happened -- there's no destruction and everything seems to be right on track. WTF? Don't you remember the days after 9/11? Hell, I do, and I was in India and not even in the US -- it was probably what one could euphemistically call a very tense time. And this is a 100, a 1000 times worse -- and still nothing seems to have happened!

Which is why the investigation to find out how and why the flash forward happens (led by Joseph Fiennnes' character) seems to have no force at all. Why should we care really? Another flash forward happening would be just fine, it seems to me. And everyone can have even more cuddly little visions about their own future: what's not to like?

The super-success of Lost has brought on many Lost-like clones and Flash Forward is clearly one of them -- a wacky, vaguely sci-fi concept with a nice stereotypical array of characters. But if I remember anything from the beginning of Lost (the first few episodes of the first season are all I have seen of it), it's that there's a vivid sense of danger there: what's on the island? why are these people here? What's going to happen? I get no such feeling in Flash Forward -- but maybe that will change.

(2) And oh yes, the metaphysical bullshit: I mean, yes, it's fun to see the future, etc. and think what that means. Do we have free will or not? Are we in charge of our futures or are our futures in charge of us? But it's all bullshit (and absurdly pretentious) if I don't have a concrete sense of the stakes involved (see point (1) above, about Danger, lack of)

Line of the day

2009-10-30T17:15:00.000-04:00

Pedro Almodovar on the kinds of movies he likes to make:

“No biopics,” he said firmly. “No biopics, no prequels, no sequels, no hero movies, no antihero movies, and definitely no superhero movies. Anything else I can handle.”

Sentence of the Day

2009-10-21T14:11:00.000-04:00

James Wood on Richard Powers:

The fiction of Richard Powers sometimes resembles a dying satyr—above the waist is a mind full of serious thought, philosophical reflection, deep exploration of music and science; below, a pair of spindly legs strain to support the great weight of the ambitious brain.

Wood is (predictably) hard on Powers but the review is worth a read, just the same. See also this essay by William Deresiewicz.

Sigh, story of my life, part 2

2009-10-19T22:25:00.005-04:00

I was skimming through Scott Rosenberg's Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming and Why It Matters this evening and in this passage -- about the perils of using RSS to read the news, pg. 339 -- he might very well be talking about me:

The story of RSS is an illustrative case. The opportunity to subscribe to a list of bloggers whose work you wanted to follow seemed like a perfect solution to the problem of blog indigestion. Instead, users took it as an invitation to load themselves up with an unmanageable influx of reading material. Each day they found their RSS reader confronting them with an intimidating message: You have even more unread messages today than you had yesterday. You will never catch up. Kill yourself now! Dave Winer, who'd done more than anyone else to popularize RSS, urged users to stop treating RSS feeds like a pile of incoming email -- with each message representing a task you had to deal with -- but rather as a "river of news." Your feeds gave you a flow of interesting stuff; you could dip into the stream at will, and drop out of it as needed. In a video that briefly made the tech-blogosphere rounds in 2007, Robert Scoble cheerily explained how he keeps up with more than six hundred feeds -- and showed exactly how the river-of-news approach works. But few heeded the advice.

I have 118 subscriptions -- and yet as of today, I have a pile of more than 2 thousand items still to read. A year or two ago, that would have driven me nuts, today I do use the river-of-news approach and dip into it as I see fit. It isn't that I read about this approach or anything, it's just an emotional/psychological adjustment that comes to you slowly, if you want to keep using RSS and not go insane. Sort of like life, when you realize that you can only do -- and be -- so many things at the same time.

Links for 2009-10-08 [del.icio.us]

2009-10-09T00:00:00-07:00

The Crisis of Credit Visualized on Vimeo
A nice cartoon-like graphic explanation of the credit crisis

Links for 2009-10-05 [del.icio.us]

2009-10-06T00:00:00-07:00

xkcd - A Webcomic - Estimation
The author of the windows copy dialog visits some friends

Oh, Netflix

2009-09-30T20:16:00.003-04:00

Today, Netflix gave me this:

Didn't get it? Well, it knows I like scary movies (or at least, browsing scary movies, as opposed to watching them) and recommends me a few. Among them is Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky In Our Times.

The longest point in pro-tennis and the longest match

2009-09-29T11:20:00.002-04:00

You'd think the longest match in tennis would be some kind of memorable classic, right? Well, wrong. A not-altogether-unintentionally hilarious NYT piece:

Twenty-five years ago, on Sept. 24, 1984, Nelson and Jean Hepner, who were ranked No. 93 and No. 172 in the world, engaged in a 29-minute, 643-shot rally that remains the longest point played in a professional tennis match.
For comparison, during a match last month, Andy Murray and Julien Benneteau had a rally that lasted 53 shots, and it was the longest either of them could remember playing in competition.
The rally between Nelson and Hepner occurred in the first round of the $50,000 Virginia Slims-sponsored Ginny tournament at the Raintree Swim and Racquet Club in Richmond, Va., with Nelson finally prevailing, 6-4, 7-6 (11).
The 6-hour-31-minute marathon was itself the longest match in tennis history for nearly 20 years and remains the longest match completed on a single day.

And then some great lines:

Both Nelson and Hepner seem vaguely embarrassed that their names are in the record books.

Er, yes - I would be too!

The rally that put Nelson-Dunbar and Hepner in the record books came at set point for Hepner, who was ahead, 11-10, in the second-set tie breaker, which lasted 1:47 on its own.
“There was tons of lobbing,” Nelson-Dunbar said. “I would try to come in and she’d lob me again.”
After winning the point, Nelson-Dunbar collapsed with cramps in her legs. The chair umpire, who apparently maintained consciousness throughout the 643-stroke point, actually called a time-violation warning, but Nelson-Dunbar pulled it together and got back to the baseline to begin the next point.
How does a point go on for 29 minutes before one player or the other hits a winner or makes a mistake?
“We were both pretty much standing on the baseline lobbing,” Nelson-Dunbar said.
Hepner recalled, “I was just really concentrating and was very consistent.”
Two points later, Nelson-Dunbar closed out the match and apologized to the lines officials for its length.
“I felt so bad for them,” she said. “They were sitting out there so long, and they must have been falling asleep.”

But imagine this...

Among the astonishing elements to the match was this: If Hepner had won the epic rally, she would have forced a third set, and who knows how long the match might have lasted.

Links for 2009-09-24 [del.icio.us]

2009-09-25T00:00:00-07:00

Indian ancestry revealed : Nature News
The mixing of two distinct lineages led to most modern-day Indians.
Nadir Of Western Civilization To Be Reached This Friday At 3:32 P.M. | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
An international panel of leading anthropologists, cultural critics, biologists, and social theorists announced this week that Western civilization will reach its lowest conceivable point at 3:32 p.m. Friday.

Line of the day

2009-09-24T10:56:00.000-04:00

From The Onion:

Experts predict that the penultimate catastrophe will occur at approximately 7:15 p.m. Thursday night, when the social networking tool Twitter will be used to communicate a series of ideas so banal they will instantaneously negate the three centuries of the Renaissance.

Line of the day

2009-09-21T09:58:00.002-04:00

David Edelstein on Jane Campion's Bright Star, about the doomed love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne:

Even if you set aside Schneider, Bright Star is remarkably evocative. It is our postmodern, ironic way to picture Romantic poets as lyrical fops lolling under gray English skies, their musings interrupted by bronchial spasms aimed at tastefully blood-spotted handkerchiefs.

Links for 2009-09-02 [del.icio.us]

2009-09-03T00:00:00-07:00

Telstar Logistics: 747 Supertanker Has Red Hot Firefighting Debut
Great footage of a firefighter airplane dropping "retardant" on the California wildfires. See around 3:40.

Links for 2009-09-01 [del.icio.us]

2009-09-02T00:00:00-07:00

The truth about grit - The Boston Globe
Duckworth has recently begun analyzing student resumes submitted during the college application process, as she attempts to measure grit based on the diversity of listed interests. While parents and teachers have long emphasized the importance of being well-rounded - this is why most colleges require students to take courses in all the major disciplines, from history to math - success in the real world may depend more on the development of narrow passions. “I first got interested in grit after watching how my friends fared after college,” Duckworth says. She noticed that the most successful people in her Harvard class chose a goal and stuck with it, while others just flitted from pursuit to pursuit. “Those who were less successful were often just as smart and talented,” Duckworth notes, “but they were constantly changing plans and trying something new. They never stuck with anything long enough to get really good at it.”

Nicole Kidman in Rabbit Hole

2009-09-01T14:25:00.002-04:00

May I just say that this sounds like a terrible idea to me?

Links for 2009-08-24 [del.icio.us]

2009-08-25T00:00:00-07:00

where does manufacturing fit in obama’s new foundation?

Her determination is scary

2009-08-23T22:44:00.000-04:00

Andrew Keen is one confused man

2009-08-18T17:45:00.001-04:00

Listen to Paul Duguid eviscerate Andrew Keen's arguments in this podcast. I almost fell sorry for him - he seemed so out of his league.

Links for 2009-08-17 [del.icio.us]

2009-08-18T00:00:00-07:00

Unboxed - Corporate R.& D. as the Ringmaster of Innovation - NYTimes.com
Crowdsourcing and other new, more open models of innovation are really byproducts of the low-cost communication and new networks of collaboration made possible by the Internet. So, in the Internet era, what is the continuing role and comparative advantage of the corporate R.& D. lab?

From the annals of incomprehensible academic writing

2009-08-11T13:45:00.002-04:00

Via Culture Matters:

Transforming Cultures is pleased to announce that this year the TfC Annual Lecture will be presented by:

Professor Kathleen Stewart (Dept. of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin).

Atmospheric Atunements

Thursday 20th August 2009, 6:00-8:00 pm
University of Technology in Sydney Gallery Function Centre, Level 6, UTS Tower Building.

Abstract:
Something throws itself together. Or sags, shifts tone, or fails. Invisible airs quicken around nascent forms, rinding up like the skin of an orange. Circulating forces waver and pulse, visceralizing the sheer sense of something happening. The ordinary hums with the background noise of all that takes place in moments, scenes, objects, resonances, rhythms. The atmospheric attunes to the sentience of things passing in and out of existence, to the expressivity of what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘whatever being’. This sensing out that attends is itself a labor of worlding, an effort to inhabit a flighty ground.

This writing asks what it takes to live out the worlding of forces rinding up and dissipating. But it also wonders about the significance of accretion itself. The way that an atmosphere accretes for senses in sync with it (or sort it) and the worlding that accrues partially or fully, quickly or slowly, for a time, with habit or shock, in practices or daydreams. A worlding – an attunement – that can be sloughed off, realized, imagined, brought to bear or just born.

Yeaaaaahhhhhh. It's writing like this that gives postmodernism a bad name.

Duncan Watts and Harrison White

2009-08-10T22:24:00.003-04:00

I've been reading Duncan Watts' Six Degrees and it's a very engaging book but this sentence stopped me stone cold:

Harrison is famous not only for his irascible manner and impenetrable writing but also for his profound generosity, astounding breadth of interest, and occasionally startling insight.

Occasionally startling insight? Only "occasionally"? Is this supposed to be a compliment? A backhanded compliment? An outright insult? Hmmmmm.

Questions for the Hive Mind

2009-07-25T17:41:00.003-04:00

I have been preparing for the GRE the past few days. The new analytical writing section does present problems for evaluation: how does one know one is doing an ok job? It just struck me today that perhaps I could use the hive mind to see how I am doing. So I'm going to paste below the two essays I wrote today. Could you, gentle readers, give me feedback about my language? Examples: too long! Cut out the dross! Make your sentences shorter and less pompous! Cut to the chase! Etc. Feedback on my writing style would be much appreciated (feedback on the content would be great too).

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Issues topic. 45 minutes. Both the development of technological tools and the uses to which humanity has put them have created modern civilizations in which loneliness is ever increasing.

Answer:

In this essay, I am going to offer a historical narrative to back up the claim that our modern technological innovations, along with the way of life they helped usher (or in other words, the way we used them), have made us lonelier than we were before. To do this, I will sketch briefly how life was before, and immediately after, the Industrial Revolution. I will then sketch how modern life is today and bring out the trade-offs that this change in the way we live has entailed.

Two hundred years ago, before the Industrial Revolution began in Europe, most of the world’s population lived in villages, in what can be described as closely-knit communities. The number of occupations were limited: one could be a farmer or an artisian of some sort (like a carpenter, or a blacksmith) or a trader who sold certain goods. Families were bigger and extended families lived closer together. Occupations were, more often than not, heriditary. A carpenter's son was most likely to first be an apprentice to his father, and then become a carpenter himself, staying on in the same village and becoming a part of the same community where he grew up. (He could not, for instance, opt to become a blacksmith.) Women probably helped in the occupations as well but officially did not work at all. They also performed all the housework, which was much more back-breaking then and presumably got married into one or the other of the local families in the community. There were hardly any new arrivals in the community which meant that a community tended to be static: as older people died, their descendents succeeded them.

Most importantly, there was no difference between one's work life and one's personal life, as there is in the modern world. One's "colleagues" at work were also one's family and friends. The customers were also people one knew, perhaps even by name. There was, in other words, an overlap into what today one could call the private sphere and the work sphere. Transactions were social rather than market-based. Life was less impersonal than it is now. This society had a lot less freedom when it came to choosing occupations or in doing something different from one's family - and yet, there was also a concrete sense of belonging, of being rooted in the present and in tradition. One knew exactly what one's place in the community was. There was less loneliness.

The Industrial Revolution changed all that. The establishment of factories meant that rural populations moved away from rural areas into the now-burgeoning urban areas. They did this because this offered them a way of avoiding the poverty and the number of limited jobs in rural areas. To be sure, the conditions in rural areas were not the best: overcrowding, bad sanitation, and pollution was rampant, the conditions in factories were horrible and often dangerous -- yet it was a marginal improvement.

Yet the new arrivals in the cities found themselves ungrounded -- they lived in impersonal communities where they did not know many people. There was hardly any family around. When they bought things, it was often from people they did not know. They changed jobs often and so their work "colleagues" changed often too. All of this contributed to a sense of dislocation -- a sense that one did not know what one was doing, what one's place in this world was, or in other words, loneliness.

Things are not so much different today. In the West, conditions in factories are now much better and the number of white collar or "services" jobs have increased. Pollution has gone down. Yet the conditions that the Industrial Revolution gave birth to have only intensified. We maintain a strict separation between our work life and our personal life. Our transactions are impersonal, market-based. We buy our daily groceries at an impersonal supermarket rather than from soemone we're friends with. We rarely talk to our neighbors, many times because we spend most of our time working and the rest, catching up with our family. The size of the family has decreased; the connection to one's extended family -- cousins, aunts, uncles -- have decreased too. We may be more free today in terms of the occupations we choose, or the rights we enjoy - but we lack the grounding that our ancestors enjoyed, their sense of rootedness and place.

To conclude, all major social changes involve trade-offs. The technological innovations of the past two hundred-odd years have improved our lives substantially. In the West, at least, the number of people who live in back-breaking poverty are few. New technologies have made us efficient at work and made many new things possible: air travel, space travel, satellites, television, the internet. They've also increased an individual's freedom and today an individual is free to choose his occupation, his mate, his faith or his place of residence. But in doing all this, they've cut us off from the rootedness and the sense of place that our ancestors had. We're more lonely today, we search more for our place in this world. Most of us would also argue though that this is only a fair trade-off.

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Analysis of argument essay (30 minutes). Six months ago the region of Forestville increased the speed limit for vehicles traveling on the region's highways by ten miles per hour. Since that change took effect, the number of automobile accidents in that region has increased by 15 percent. But the speed limit in Elmsford, a region neighboring Forestville, remained unchanged, and automobile accidents declined slightly during the same six-month period. Therefore, if the citizens of Forestville want to reduce the number of automobile accidents on the region's highways, they should campaign to reduce Forestville's speed limit to what it was before the increase.

Answer:

In the passage, the author makes the argument that the increased rate of accidents in Forestville is caused by the increase in speed limit that the town enacted six months ago. The claim is closely argued but could be considerably strengthened if the author provided more data. In the essay that follows, I will outline some of the deficiencies in the argument and also what the author could do to fix them.

First, let us consider the merits of the argument. The author compares the accident rate of Forestville to that of the neighboring town of Elmsford and finds that the rate in Elmsford decreased slightly over the same time period that the rate in Forrestville increased by 15%. This is a good point. Forestville and Elmsford are reasonably close which means that their traffic is roughly similar (the same cars pass through both towns) and they presumably have many similarities in terms of climate and road conditions. It is certainly possible that the accident rate in Forrestville increased while that in Elmsford fell because the speed limits in Forrestville were raised six months ago.

That said, this is hardly a water-tight argument. First the six month window is too small to reach any definitive conclusions. It is possible that this jump in the accident rate is just statistical noise and that the accident rate will fall back to where it was before and stay there. Or it is possible that that the with the speed limit raised, drivers had a problem adjusting to the limit. Once they are used to it, the accident rate could fall to the same level as before the speed limit was raised.

Secondly, the author seems to have ignored other factors that could have been responsible for the increase in the accident rate in Forestville. For instance, is it not possible that certain roads passing through Forestville were closed in those six months, leading to increased traffic on certain other roads and hence an increased accident rate? Or could it be that the snowstorms that occured in the last 6 months could be the cause of the the increased accident rate? Could it be that the roads passing through Forestville are more winding and curved (reflecting perhaps that it is situated at a higher altitude) that is responsible for the accidents? To some extent, the fact that Elmsford did not experience an increase in its accident rate mitigates these points. But a more thorough investigation is needed on this score to eliminate other factors that could have been responsible for the increase.

To summarize, the author's argument definitely has a certain plausibility. But he needs to eliminate other possibilities and provide more data before a categorical case can be made that Forestville's rising accident rate is caused by its recently-increased speed limits.

Equus

2009-07-17T17:07:00.003-04:00

This line from Christopher Durang (via David Edelstein) is probably the finest, most concise dissection of Equus:

“You’re afraid of feeling, of emotion. That’s wrong, Prudence, because then you have no passion. Did you see Equus? The Doctor felt it was better to blind eight horses in a stable with a metal spike than to have no passion. In my life I’m not going to be afraid to blind the horses, Prudence.”

Ha. Now, unlike the plodding movie starring Richard Burton, I should mention that reading Equus was a thrilling experience although I missed watching the one that played in New York recently (and yes, starred Harry Potter).

A. O. Scott on Bruno

2009-07-09T15:28:00.003-04:00

I've always thought that the Sacha Baron-Cohen brand of humor, in which we get to both, laugh at his antics (which we know, are exaggerated) and at the people who get taken in by them (to whom, of course, we also feel superior to) was not as funny as people seemed to think it was*. But read A. O. Scott on Bruno since he expresses these thoughts so much more elegantly.

* And no, I never did get to see Borat, but don't really think I missed much by seeing it.

inamorata, anyone?

2009-07-02T09:05:00.002-04:00

A. O. Scott shows off his vocabulary today. Inamorata, anyone?

As in the previous installment (also directed by Carlos Saldanha), one element of “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” manages to be authentically charming, and also to make moderately ingenious use of the 3-D techniques that otherwise just add to the jostle and noise. I’m referring, of course, to the dialogue-free sequences, unrelated to the main plot, that involve a plucky proto-squirrel known as Scrat and his quixotic pursuit of an acorn. This time Scrat is distracted by love, and he and his inamorata, who is also his rival for possession of that acorn, breath whimsical, inventive life into the movie.

Quote of the day

2009-06-25T18:50:00.001-04:00

Matt Yglesias:

Nobody will ever be able to tell friends he’s hiking on the Appalachian Trail again.

That's right.

Sigh, the story of my life

2009-06-11T11:40:00.002-04:00

The story of my life, via Noah Millman (suitably modified, of course, for my life, but I'll let you fill in the gaps):

When I got out of school, my ambition was to write. And I started a novel, as yet unfinished.

I worked on the book for a number of years, but increasingly my “day job” – that is to say, my career – got in the way. But that’s not really a fair way to put it: it’s fairer to say that my career was an escape, a kind of grand procrastination scheme.

Then, as my career advanced, my writer’s itch returned. I started blogging, in part to scratch that itch, but also as a way of procrastinating from the responsibilities of my career.

Now, lately, I’ve been finding it harder and harder to blog. Sometimes I really want to write about A, and wind up blogging about B as a way of procrastinating from writing about what I want to write about. Sometimes I just kill time.

And when I take the next step, and find ways of procrastinating from killing time to avoid blogging to escape my job to forget my novelistic ambitions . . .

(But perhaps I’ve just done it?)

Life Imitating Art or Vice Versa

2009-05-31T07:06:00.000-04:00

Question: Does this not remind you of something?

Court Eases Rules on Questioning Suspects - NYTimes.com: "The ruling Tuesday was in the case of Jesse Montejo, who was sentenced to death for the murder and robbery of Louis Ferrari in September 2002. Mr. Montejo was arrested a day after Mr. Ferrari was found dead in his home in Slidell, La. Suspicion focused on Mr. Montejo because he was known to associate with a disgruntled former employee of Mr. Ferrari’s dry-cleaning business.

Mr. Montejo was read his Miranda rights, arising from the landmark 1966 Supreme Court ruling that a defendant must be told of his right to remain silent and to have a lawyer present virtually from the moment he is taken into custody. Under questioning, Mr. Montejo repeatedly changed his story, at first blaming the former employee, then admitting that he had shot the victim during a botched burglary.

At a preliminary hearing, a judge ordered that a public defender be appointed. The timing is in dispute, but at some point Mr. Montejo was read his Miranda rights again and agreed to accompany detectives to locate the murder weapon, which he had indicated that he had thrown into a lake.

During the trip, he wrote a letter of apology to the victim’s widow, using paper and pen provided by the detectives. Only upon his return did Mr. Montejo meet with his lawyer, who was furious that his client had been questioned in his absence, and was further incensed when the letter was admitted as evidence at trial.

Mr. Montejo’s conviction was upheld by the Louisiana Supreme Court, which reasoned in part that the protections of the 1986 Michigan case should not apply to him because, in Louisiana as in many other states, lawyers are assigned automatically to indigent defendants, removing any question of whether Mr. Montejo specifically “requested” counsel at his arraignment."

Answer: The second episode of The Wire where Bunk and McNulty pressurize D'Angelo Barksdale:

Meanwhile, McNulty and Bunk show up at the low rise projects to intimidate D'Angelo. They take him downtown to interview him but first Daniels insists that Greggs participate. McNulty resists, but slowly realizes she is a smart cop. They play to D'Angelo's vulnerabilities, convincing him that the dead witness Gant was a church-going family man whose wife is dead and whose three children — showings him a picture of Bunk's three kids to corroborate this — now have no parents. D'Angelo is clearly moved, and agrees to write a letter to the three kids, telling them he is sorry their father was murdered. As he finishes the letter, his uncle's attorney Maurice Levy shows up and berates him for writing or saying anything at all.

Glee

2009-05-28T13:49:00.007-04:00

I've been hearing on and off about Glee in the past few days -- the new Fox series that had its premiere recently. Nothing that made me go watch it, of course. But today, as I was surfing the web, I was inspired to Google it (click here, then here for why, if you can figure it out -- a perfect example of how surfing the web takes you off in all kinds of tangents) which led me to this EW page, where I discovered that the lovely Lea Michele stars in Glee (A quick check confirmed that this was indeed the case).

As some of you may know, I thought that Michele's Wendla Bergman was the best thing in the lovely Spring Awakening (and I loved the play and thought most of the actors were spot-on but she still stood out). I think I am going to watch that episode of Glee when I go home tonight.

UPDATE: I am watching it, I should note, not because I expect great things from it (far from it) but because I am curious to see how Michele's soulful stage singing and performance translate on television.

UPDATE 2: Watched it. Sigh, what on earth was I expecting? Stale dialogue that the actors try to redeem as much as they can. Stereotypes. More stereotypes. A few funny moments. A tone that jumps between knowing smirky humor ("chicks don't have prostates") and sickly sweet earnestness ("I want to lead a life of passion"). I suppose the only reason for the show's existence are the songs -- and I should admit that the songs were fun.

Claire Messud on Colm Toibin

2009-05-07T22:17:00.001-04:00

I loved Claire Messud's review of Colm Toibin's Brooklyn in the latest New York Review of Books although, because of some kink of the NYRB's website I can't seem to be able to link to it on here.

Plato-lite

2009-04-13T17:27:00.003-04:00

Brad Delong writes by way of Plato:

Agathon: "Under appropriate conditions of perfect competition, non-increasing returns, and the absence of externalities the market's decisions about the production and allocation of goods and services attain a point on the Pareto frontier. Every point on the Pareto frontier maximizes some social welfare function."

Glaukon: "Yes, of course."

Agathon: "Therefore the market, considered as a collective mechanism for making social decisions, chooses to maximize a particular social welfare function. It is instructive to consider what that social welfare function is."

Glaukon: "I resent the tone in which you are talking down to me."

Agathon: "You do not. This part of this conversation never took place in even approximate form in the real world. It is interpolated in order to bring readers of this weblog up to speed. Since I never said my last speech to you, you could not have resented it."

Glaukon: "And I want readers of this weblog to know that I am considerably smarter and more clued-in than he is letting me appear to be."

Agathon: "Are you quite finished?"

Glaukon: "Plato at least worked harder to make his information dumps fit more gracefully into the conversation. I want a better author.

Agathon: "Are you quite finished?"

Glaukon: "Yes."

Read the whole thing!

Good Critic, Bad Critic

2009-04-12T01:03:00.001-04:00

I am often asked why I like to read book reviews, and what it is that they really do. I mean: why not read the original book, for God's sake? It's a hard question and the best answer is, as it often is , the pragmatic one. With non-fiction, book reviews often serve as a substitute for the book itself. With fiction, it is harder to justify. But life is short, so is time and when one has a pile of books to read, it only makes sense to be judicious when adding to it.

I bring this up because I read three reviews of a book recently and taken together, they all bring out the fine line between book reviews that function as, well, just book reviews and book reviews that manage to be works of genuine criticism.

The book in question is the latest sensation from France: Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones.

For a book review that is truly nothing more than book review, see Michiko Kakutani's review in the New York Times.

For a review that rises to the level of criticism, see Daniel Mendelsohn's fine, searching analysis in the New York Review of Books.

And for a review that is written in the spirit of criticism but doesn't quite make it primarily because it follows the fairly predictable arc of the New Republic takedown, see Ruth Franklin's review for the New Republic. (I knew what she was going to say even before I started reading the first paragraph and true to form, she didn't disappoint.)

(Interestingly, both Franklin and Mendelsohn make some of the same points, but they both take them in different directions. In Kakutani's defence, she has to summarize the book and evaluate it in just 2 pages so she really doesn't have that much space to produce genuine criticism.)

[X-posted at Crack a Book.]

Old Joy

2009-04-07T15:58:00.002-04:00

A line from Jon Raymond's Livability that has been playing in my mind since I finished reading the story:

What is sorrow? I thought. What is sorrow but old, worn-out joy?