"Distracted" by Maggie Jackson: Are you your own multi-taskmaster?
Friday, October 31, 2008
Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age
By Maggie Jackson
Prometheus Books
So Maggie Jackson is a columnist for the Boston Globe who—that’s mine, new ringtone, like it? Theme from Mad Men. Hi, no way, she did? Maybe, bye. So this book, which Wired Magazine really didn’t like cause—oh man, look at that score! Do you believe this? Anyway, because like multi-tasking: duh. Dude! Text from my mom—I’m like way late for, I don’t know, something. See ya.
The problem with the concept of distraction these days is having a clue about what you might be distracted from. For Maggie Jackson it’s attention and memory, which she sees as the keys to intimacy, meaning and culture. They’re threatened enough--and central enough to civilization--that she’s warning of dark ages ahead.
Actually the great Jane Jacobs’ last book, Dark Ages Ahead, is better on that scenario. But Jackson folds in a lot of reporting as well as facts to make her central argument: “Relying on multitasking as a way of life, we chop up our opportunities and abilities to make big-picture sense of the world and pursue our long-term goals. In the name of efficiency, we are diluting some of the essential qualities that make us human.”
Jackson is worried about consciousness sliced and diced by the technologies conveniently packaged in Iphone arrays, and workplaces now reconfigured because of them. She quotes a study of workers who “not only switch tasks every three minutes during their workday but that nearly half the time they interrupt themselves.” Others are tethered to their jobs 24 hours a day because of these engines of access, so they’re forced to be their own multi-taskmasters. She quotes a psychiatrist asking, “How do you know you have ADD or a severe case of modern life?”
We all know this is crazy, but is it dangerous? If we are indeed “losing skills needed to thrive in an increasingly complex world: deep learning, reasoning, and problem-solving,” then it’s worth considering.
Sure, Jackson goes over the top at times, and it’s ironic that she includes a lot that seems to distract from her central argument. But then, the sideshows of such social screeds are often entertaining (as in another new critique, Blubberland by Elizabeth Farrelly for MIT Press.) Still, when your scope is “how we live and what that means for our individual and collective futures,” you can mostly just start the discussion.
Jackson provides historical background, some deft reporting and even some counter-examples, like the attention being paid to how we pay attention, which includes new interest in forms of Buddhist meditation. Of course, who has time to read it?
By Maggie Jackson
Prometheus Books
So Maggie Jackson is a columnist for the Boston Globe who—that’s mine, new ringtone, like it? Theme from Mad Men. Hi, no way, she did? Maybe, bye. So this book, which Wired Magazine really didn’t like cause—oh man, look at that score! Do you believe this? Anyway, because like multi-tasking: duh. Dude! Text from my mom—I’m like way late for, I don’t know, something. See ya.
The problem with the concept of distraction these days is having a clue about what you might be distracted from. For Maggie Jackson it’s attention and memory, which she sees as the keys to intimacy, meaning and culture. They’re threatened enough--and central enough to civilization--that she’s warning of dark ages ahead.
Actually the great Jane Jacobs’ last book, Dark Ages Ahead, is better on that scenario. But Jackson folds in a lot of reporting as well as facts to make her central argument: “Relying on multitasking as a way of life, we chop up our opportunities and abilities to make big-picture sense of the world and pursue our long-term goals. In the name of efficiency, we are diluting some of the essential qualities that make us human.”
Jackson is worried about consciousness sliced and diced by the technologies conveniently packaged in Iphone arrays, and workplaces now reconfigured because of them. She quotes a study of workers who “not only switch tasks every three minutes during their workday but that nearly half the time they interrupt themselves.” Others are tethered to their jobs 24 hours a day because of these engines of access, so they’re forced to be their own multi-taskmasters. She quotes a psychiatrist asking, “How do you know you have ADD or a severe case of modern life?”
We all know this is crazy, but is it dangerous? If we are indeed “losing skills needed to thrive in an increasingly complex world: deep learning, reasoning, and problem-solving,” then it’s worth considering.
Sure, Jackson goes over the top at times, and it’s ironic that she includes a lot that seems to distract from her central argument. But then, the sideshows of such social screeds are often entertaining (as in another new critique, Blubberland by Elizabeth Farrelly for MIT Press.) Still, when your scope is “how we live and what that means for our individual and collective futures,” you can mostly just start the discussion.
Jackson provides historical background, some deft reporting and even some counter-examples, like the attention being paid to how we pay attention, which includes new interest in forms of Buddhist meditation. Of course, who has time to read it?
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe
Edited by K. Michael Hays and Dana Miller
Whitney Museum of American Art/Yale U. Press
I’m making a list of people who helped me ruin my life. Marshall McLuhan convinced me that in this high tech age you can live anywhere and be a successful writer. Not really: constant on-site ass-kissing in NYC or LA is still required. Buckminster Fuller convinced me to try writing about large-scale connections and trends. Bad idea: when successful books are about toothpicks or salt, such writing is harder to get published than it is to finish. On the other hand, Fuller could start talking about salt and end up with the universe, the way you’d never thought about it before.
McLuhan was briefly big-time famous, but Fuller was a quieter force for decades, with his greatest fame on college campuses in the 60s and 70s. (I heard him and observed him closer up at M.I.T. in ’73 or so.) Talks of that time were excerpted in Hugh Kenner’s still classic book, Bucky, and in Calvin Tompkins New Yorker profile, which is reprinted in this book. The Tompkins essay is as good an intro to Fuller as anything you'll find.
These days Fuller is best known for the geodesic dome, and one of the essays here is on his contribution to architecture. There are lots of illustrations and photos, since it’s basically an exhibition catalog. But Fuller also introduced the concept of “synergy,” (the whole unpredicted by the parts before they work together) long before corporate consultants pounded it into fairy dust. His ideas on computers and information were practically a blueprint for Google and Wikipedia. And he gave us “spaceship earth.”
The thing about that is he meant it literally, and on many levels. The key to Fuller is that basically he was a sailor. His spaceship earth wasn’t some airy metaphor: earth is a ship that depends on efficient design to stay afloat and keep everyone aboard alive on the food etc. it carries. Ships are designed to make the best possible use of the space within them, as well as of the basic forces of the planet and the universe. (Hence another of his influential ideas: “doing more with less.”) Most technology originated because ships used it (or wars did, or both.)
Which is why he coined the phrase, “utopia or oblivion.” The planet has to be ship-shape or it will sink. It’s an either/or choice.
Fuller was unique. He started not only with first principles, but by re-thinking first principles. He accepted nothing as axiomatic, though he developed his own axioms--and almost his own language. Reading him raw is a very different experience, but having it done it, very worthwhile. The fullest Fuller for me was his Ideas and Integrities.
Kenner makes much of Fuller's childhood experiences as a boy with very bad (and for a long while, uncorrected) vision, whose main relationship was with boats and the sea on a small island. Because he could see only shapes and he had to figure out how those shapes functioned and related to each other, he developed his kind of logic, and his intuition for basic forces and big patterns. Having grown up partly deaf, this rings true to me. Kenner also maintains that Fuller was able to mesmerize large crowds for hours at a time because he was very responsive to the mood, even to individual moods in the audience.
I hope this book helps revive interest in Fuller, particularly when computers and the Internet are providing tools that his vision could guide to profound purposes. This book provides reevaluation and solid overviews of his influence, especially in how he related to both scientists and artists, but it’s just an appetizer for the depth and breadth of his ideas. Though an essayist here writes that he “remained at heart a traditional humanist,” Fuller called himself “a comprehensive anticipatory design-science explorer.” We need more of those.
Edited by K. Michael Hays and Dana Miller
Whitney Museum of American Art/Yale U. Press
I’m making a list of people who helped me ruin my life. Marshall McLuhan convinced me that in this high tech age you can live anywhere and be a successful writer. Not really: constant on-site ass-kissing in NYC or LA is still required. Buckminster Fuller convinced me to try writing about large-scale connections and trends. Bad idea: when successful books are about toothpicks or salt, such writing is harder to get published than it is to finish. On the other hand, Fuller could start talking about salt and end up with the universe, the way you’d never thought about it before.
McLuhan was briefly big-time famous, but Fuller was a quieter force for decades, with his greatest fame on college campuses in the 60s and 70s. (I heard him and observed him closer up at M.I.T. in ’73 or so.) Talks of that time were excerpted in Hugh Kenner’s still classic book, Bucky, and in Calvin Tompkins New Yorker profile, which is reprinted in this book. The Tompkins essay is as good an intro to Fuller as anything you'll find.
These days Fuller is best known for the geodesic dome, and one of the essays here is on his contribution to architecture. There are lots of illustrations and photos, since it’s basically an exhibition catalog. But Fuller also introduced the concept of “synergy,” (the whole unpredicted by the parts before they work together) long before corporate consultants pounded it into fairy dust. His ideas on computers and information were practically a blueprint for Google and Wikipedia. And he gave us “spaceship earth.”
The thing about that is he meant it literally, and on many levels. The key to Fuller is that basically he was a sailor. His spaceship earth wasn’t some airy metaphor: earth is a ship that depends on efficient design to stay afloat and keep everyone aboard alive on the food etc. it carries. Ships are designed to make the best possible use of the space within them, as well as of the basic forces of the planet and the universe. (Hence another of his influential ideas: “doing more with less.”) Most technology originated because ships used it (or wars did, or both.)
Which is why he coined the phrase, “utopia or oblivion.” The planet has to be ship-shape or it will sink. It’s an either/or choice.
Fuller was unique. He started not only with first principles, but by re-thinking first principles. He accepted nothing as axiomatic, though he developed his own axioms--and almost his own language. Reading him raw is a very different experience, but having it done it, very worthwhile. The fullest Fuller for me was his Ideas and Integrities.
Kenner makes much of Fuller's childhood experiences as a boy with very bad (and for a long while, uncorrected) vision, whose main relationship was with boats and the sea on a small island. Because he could see only shapes and he had to figure out how those shapes functioned and related to each other, he developed his kind of logic, and his intuition for basic forces and big patterns. Having grown up partly deaf, this rings true to me. Kenner also maintains that Fuller was able to mesmerize large crowds for hours at a time because he was very responsive to the mood, even to individual moods in the audience.
I hope this book helps revive interest in Fuller, particularly when computers and the Internet are providing tools that his vision could guide to profound purposes. This book provides reevaluation and solid overviews of his influence, especially in how he related to both scientists and artists, but it’s just an appetizer for the depth and breadth of his ideas. Though an essayist here writes that he “remained at heart a traditional humanist,” Fuller called himself “a comprehensive anticipatory design-science explorer.” We need more of those.
Monday, October 06, 2008
From the Personal to the Political
One Family's Response to Terrorism by Susan Kerr van de Ven. Syracuse University Press.
The Warrior: A Mother's Story of a Son at War by Frances Richey. Viking.
When the political intrudes on personal lives, the response is often more than personal. That's the case with these two books, and there are many others.
When Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut, was shot and killed, his family found itself involved in the twisted politics of Lebanon and beyond. One Family's Response to Terrorism by Kerr's daughter, Susan Kerr van de Ven is more about the politics and the world, as she researched the causes of her father's death. But she presents this information in the context of her own life, and her changing perceptions of her place in the world. This is an honest, detailed memoir that gains power as it goes, all the more impressive for the hard-won commitment to the rule of law that she affirms.
Frances Richey responded to her son Ben being deployed to Iraq in an intensely personal way that could be expressed only in verse. The Warrior traces her journey as a mother and a teacher dealing with her son's military training. "It was easy to think of warrior/as a yoga posture, until my son/became a Green Beret..." When Ben is deployed, she writes about his letters home and the inevitable memories of his childhood. These verses include ruminations on the world shaped by the political , but they always return to the personal, where the effects are felt, and the consequences come home.
One Family's Response to Terrorism by Susan Kerr van de Ven. Syracuse University Press.
The Warrior: A Mother's Story of a Son at War by Frances Richey. Viking.
When the political intrudes on personal lives, the response is often more than personal. That's the case with these two books, and there are many others.
When Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut, was shot and killed, his family found itself involved in the twisted politics of Lebanon and beyond. One Family's Response to Terrorism by Kerr's daughter, Susan Kerr van de Ven is more about the politics and the world, as she researched the causes of her father's death. But she presents this information in the context of her own life, and her changing perceptions of her place in the world. This is an honest, detailed memoir that gains power as it goes, all the more impressive for the hard-won commitment to the rule of law that she affirms.
Frances Richey responded to her son Ben being deployed to Iraq in an intensely personal way that could be expressed only in verse. The Warrior traces her journey as a mother and a teacher dealing with her son's military training. "It was easy to think of warrior/as a yoga posture, until my son/became a Green Beret..." When Ben is deployed, she writes about his letters home and the inevitable memories of his childhood. These verses include ruminations on the world shaped by the political , but they always return to the personal, where the effects are felt, and the consequences come home.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
The Quantum Ten: A Story of Passion, Tragedy, Ambition and Science
By Sheilla Jones
Oxford University Press
“How can you be in two places at once, when you’re not anywhere at all?” When the Firesign Theatre performed that vaudeville parody, they expressed a central conundrum of quantum physics without really trying. A lot of mischief flows from the finding that, at least at the sub-atomic level, an object is created in a specific place by the act of observing it there. Now you see it; therefore, it is.
This might be dismissed as laughable theorizing by ludicrously loony scientists except that at least a third of the U.S. economy results from the highly dependable predictions of quantum mechanics, including DVDs, MRIs and the microchips in all the devices that run our lives.
Early in this book, author and science journalist Sheila Jones offers some very useful definitions. “Quantum mechanics” refers to the highly reliable “set of rules for how the physics and mathematics are used to make testable predictions.” “Quantum theory” delves into the “why,” while “quantum physics” most properly refers to both the how and why. It’s the theory that leads far and wide, into the relation of consciousness and reality, and feeds the speculations in that popular “What the Bleep” movie. The mechanics just work, and for a lot of physicists that’s all they care to know.
This book is about the ten scientists (all European men, including Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg) who produced the insights and formulas in the 1920s that comprise quantum mechanics as still practiced today. But they were bedeviled by the implications, because by the standards of classical physics and “common sense,” those implications were crazy. And that, as well as the high achiever pressures that rewarded the successful with prized professorships and Nobel Prizes in a very turbulent Europe between the wars, drove some of them nearly or entirely nuts.
The historical context itself is fascinating, especially among the Germans, who had to deal with super-inflation (by the time one absentminded professor remembered to pick up the cash his family sent to his bank, it would be worthless) and the rise of Nazism (among the Ten were several Jews, and one declared Nazi.)
I’m a sucker for books like this, dramatizing scientific discoveries I don’t fully understand through the process and the people that make them. Ten main characters—plus their wives, affairs, relationships with each other-- are a bit hard to keep track of, and the prose is overheated at times. But there is plenty of fascinating detail.
The author made a good decision in using a relatively unknown name—Paul Ehrenfest—to connect stories about the major players. As a physicist, Ehrenfest was a talented analyst and critic, valued by theorists and innovators for his perceptions. He was also more or less the social director for the “quantum ten,” hosting many of them at his home, and even bringing together two of the greatest—Einstein and Bohr—for time alone together to talk about their theories. They didn’t wind up agreeing on the major questions, however.
Ehrenfest was sociable and enthusiastic, so his own tragic fate is also interesting as a talisman for the pressures they all were under.
The actual science is perhaps not quite as well told (and certainly not as extensive) as in an earlier Oxford book, The Quantum Enigma by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, who teach down in Santa Cruz. But this well-researched narrative provides a fascinating window into the messy ways that science happens.
Out of this human and historical stew came ideas that have thrown physics into a tizzy ever since, resulting in a field that even its most famous practitioners admit they don’t understand, and in further explanations like string theory that nobody knows how to prove. Yet there is the tantalizing potential for eventual understanding that goes beyond physics to life, the universe and everything.
By Sheilla Jones
Oxford University Press
“How can you be in two places at once, when you’re not anywhere at all?” When the Firesign Theatre performed that vaudeville parody, they expressed a central conundrum of quantum physics without really trying. A lot of mischief flows from the finding that, at least at the sub-atomic level, an object is created in a specific place by the act of observing it there. Now you see it; therefore, it is.
This might be dismissed as laughable theorizing by ludicrously loony scientists except that at least a third of the U.S. economy results from the highly dependable predictions of quantum mechanics, including DVDs, MRIs and the microchips in all the devices that run our lives.
Early in this book, author and science journalist Sheila Jones offers some very useful definitions. “Quantum mechanics” refers to the highly reliable “set of rules for how the physics and mathematics are used to make testable predictions.” “Quantum theory” delves into the “why,” while “quantum physics” most properly refers to both the how and why. It’s the theory that leads far and wide, into the relation of consciousness and reality, and feeds the speculations in that popular “What the Bleep” movie. The mechanics just work, and for a lot of physicists that’s all they care to know.
This book is about the ten scientists (all European men, including Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg) who produced the insights and formulas in the 1920s that comprise quantum mechanics as still practiced today. But they were bedeviled by the implications, because by the standards of classical physics and “common sense,” those implications were crazy. And that, as well as the high achiever pressures that rewarded the successful with prized professorships and Nobel Prizes in a very turbulent Europe between the wars, drove some of them nearly or entirely nuts.
The historical context itself is fascinating, especially among the Germans, who had to deal with super-inflation (by the time one absentminded professor remembered to pick up the cash his family sent to his bank, it would be worthless) and the rise of Nazism (among the Ten were several Jews, and one declared Nazi.)
I’m a sucker for books like this, dramatizing scientific discoveries I don’t fully understand through the process and the people that make them. Ten main characters—plus their wives, affairs, relationships with each other-- are a bit hard to keep track of, and the prose is overheated at times. But there is plenty of fascinating detail.
The author made a good decision in using a relatively unknown name—Paul Ehrenfest—to connect stories about the major players. As a physicist, Ehrenfest was a talented analyst and critic, valued by theorists and innovators for his perceptions. He was also more or less the social director for the “quantum ten,” hosting many of them at his home, and even bringing together two of the greatest—Einstein and Bohr—for time alone together to talk about their theories. They didn’t wind up agreeing on the major questions, however.
Ehrenfest was sociable and enthusiastic, so his own tragic fate is also interesting as a talisman for the pressures they all were under.
The actual science is perhaps not quite as well told (and certainly not as extensive) as in an earlier Oxford book, The Quantum Enigma by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, who teach down in Santa Cruz. But this well-researched narrative provides a fascinating window into the messy ways that science happens.
Out of this human and historical stew came ideas that have thrown physics into a tizzy ever since, resulting in a field that even its most famous practitioners admit they don’t understand, and in further explanations like string theory that nobody knows how to prove. Yet there is the tantalizing potential for eventual understanding that goes beyond physics to life, the universe and everything.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative
By Thomas King
University of Minnesota Press
Thomas King is a Native writer who teaches in Canada and published most of his fiction while living there, including his novels, Medicine River (made into an obscure but amusing movie starring—who else—Graham Greene), Green Grass, Running Water and Truth and Bright Water, all of which are, among other things, pretty funny.
But he was born in Sacramento of Cherokee parentage and he’s best known locally as the author of a short story first published in the 1980s called “Joe Painter and the Deer Island Massacre,” only around here we know it as the Indian Island Massacre. This infamous moment in North Coast history was mostly only whispered about then.
As a university teacher and scholar, King is fully capable of presenting facts and analyzes in non-fictional form. But in this book he simultaneously demonstrates that the story form not only communicates fact and analysis with different subtlety and depth, but can be an essential part of the meaning itself.
“The truth about stories is that that’s all we are,” he writes. That we learn primarily by stories is widely asserted these days, but King is very skilled at telling stories, and his adaptations of a Native storytelling style helps this book treat some old subjects in a different way, producing some “aha” moments for both those familiar with these issues and those new to them.
He contrasts a Native creation story in which animals cooperate in contributing elements of a new world with the Biblical version of authoritarian hierarchies, and shows how these myths are supported by how they’re told. He explores the complexities of identity and societal expectations, and narrative strategies in some contemporary Native literature that adapt traditional honor songs. He does all this and more with a deceptively light touch.
“You know what’s wrong with this world?” asks a character in Truth and Bright Water. “Nobody has a sense of humour.” “Humour” is Canadian for “funny,” and it’s essential to King’s method and point of view. Though a number of Native writers employ humor—including irony, satire and paradox-- (some conspicuously, like Sherman Alexie) it’s been King’s trademark. He happily mentions Will Rogers, the great American humorist of the 1930s, who (like King) was born Cherokee.
But King’s main source of humor is the trickster figure of Coyote, who makes several direct appearances here, as well as inspiring a lot of his tone and narrative moves. But he leaves out my favorite of the Coyote stories he tells, in a poem called “Coyote Learns to Whistle.” Weasel tells Coyote he can whistle if he ties his tail in a tight knot, and Coyote ties his so tight the tail breaks off. The poem ends: “Elwood told that STORY to the Rotary Club/in town/ and everyone laughed and says what/a STUPID Coyote./ And that’s the problem, you know,/seeing the DIFFERENCE between stupidity/and greed.”
King also writes about his project to photograph American Indian writers, contrasting it with 19th century photos of the Vanishing Indian. It probably would complicate his point--those romantic old photos had to falsify the imagery to comport with expectations of what Indians look like, but those images have lasted, versus photographing Indian writers today, when they look pretty much like everybody else--if he noted that part of his project was photographing these writers wearing Lone Ranger masks. (Still, the Lone Ranger appears on the cover.)
With a little autobiography and some sharp observations, “The Truth About Stories” is seductive, entertaining and sneakily profound. Also a nice size—under 200 pages, in an easy-to-hold paperback.
By Thomas King
University of Minnesota Press
Thomas King is a Native writer who teaches in Canada and published most of his fiction while living there, including his novels, Medicine River (made into an obscure but amusing movie starring—who else—Graham Greene), Green Grass, Running Water and Truth and Bright Water, all of which are, among other things, pretty funny.
But he was born in Sacramento of Cherokee parentage and he’s best known locally as the author of a short story first published in the 1980s called “Joe Painter and the Deer Island Massacre,” only around here we know it as the Indian Island Massacre. This infamous moment in North Coast history was mostly only whispered about then.
As a university teacher and scholar, King is fully capable of presenting facts and analyzes in non-fictional form. But in this book he simultaneously demonstrates that the story form not only communicates fact and analysis with different subtlety and depth, but can be an essential part of the meaning itself.
“The truth about stories is that that’s all we are,” he writes. That we learn primarily by stories is widely asserted these days, but King is very skilled at telling stories, and his adaptations of a Native storytelling style helps this book treat some old subjects in a different way, producing some “aha” moments for both those familiar with these issues and those new to them.
He contrasts a Native creation story in which animals cooperate in contributing elements of a new world with the Biblical version of authoritarian hierarchies, and shows how these myths are supported by how they’re told. He explores the complexities of identity and societal expectations, and narrative strategies in some contemporary Native literature that adapt traditional honor songs. He does all this and more with a deceptively light touch.
“You know what’s wrong with this world?” asks a character in Truth and Bright Water. “Nobody has a sense of humour.” “Humour” is Canadian for “funny,” and it’s essential to King’s method and point of view. Though a number of Native writers employ humor—including irony, satire and paradox-- (some conspicuously, like Sherman Alexie) it’s been King’s trademark. He happily mentions Will Rogers, the great American humorist of the 1930s, who (like King) was born Cherokee.
But King’s main source of humor is the trickster figure of Coyote, who makes several direct appearances here, as well as inspiring a lot of his tone and narrative moves. But he leaves out my favorite of the Coyote stories he tells, in a poem called “Coyote Learns to Whistle.” Weasel tells Coyote he can whistle if he ties his tail in a tight knot, and Coyote ties his so tight the tail breaks off. The poem ends: “Elwood told that STORY to the Rotary Club/in town/ and everyone laughed and says what/a STUPID Coyote./ And that’s the problem, you know,/seeing the DIFFERENCE between stupidity/and greed.”
King also writes about his project to photograph American Indian writers, contrasting it with 19th century photos of the Vanishing Indian. It probably would complicate his point--those romantic old photos had to falsify the imagery to comport with expectations of what Indians look like, but those images have lasted, versus photographing Indian writers today, when they look pretty much like everybody else--if he noted that part of his project was photographing these writers wearing Lone Ranger masks. (Still, the Lone Ranger appears on the cover.)
With a little autobiography and some sharp observations, “The Truth About Stories” is seductive, entertaining and sneakily profound. Also a nice size—under 200 pages, in an easy-to-hold paperback.
Monday, August 25, 2008
Scandal
I wondered if anyone would join me in my alarm over what I regard as Simon & Schuster's scandalously irresponsible publication of Jerome Corsi's book of lies, Obama Nation. On the Huffington Post, Peter Dreier has found a few people in the industry willing to challenge this major publisher for its dangerous precedent.
On the Huffington Post, Dreier stated the basics: " Despite Obama Nation' s many lies and distortions, the book wasn't put out by an ideologically-driven right-wing publisher such as Regnery, but by the profit-driven Simon & Schuster, one of the country's largest and most respected publishers, now owned by CBS Corporation....The book has risen to the top of the Times best-seller list, despite indications that its sales were artificially inflated by bulk sales, most likely by right-wing anti-Obama groups."
After reiterating assertions I made earlier--that Corsi is not a credible character, that the book is full of easily debunked lies, and that Corsi is on the record as saying he wrote the book in order to defeat Obama--Dreier asks these pertinent questions concerning the threat this poses to the credibility of book publishing:
The book is filled with such factual errors. It is hard to attribute them to carelessness because all the errors distort Obama's life, views, writings, and political career in ways obviously intended to hurt the candidate's reputation. Simon & Schuster selected Obama Nation for major celebrity treatment, knowing that the book was written by an author with a well-deserved reputation for falsehoods. What, if any, responsibility do publishers have when dealing with a book and an author like this?
Given the controversy over Corsi's previous book, should Simon & Schuster have hired a fact-checker to make sure that Obama Nation, which they are promoting as "non-fiction," was reasonably accurate?
What responsibility, if any, do publishers and booksellers have in calling the book a "best-seller" when that label may be as fictitious as the information contained in the book itself?"
Drierer asked some people in the book industry for their answers.
"It isn't likely that publishers will start their own fact-checking departments," said Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly. "But whatever a book's political view, publishers have a responsibility, to the best of their ability, to make sure that what are claimed to be facts are true."
Drierer also notes that while the New York Times gave the book a #1 ranking on its best seller list but with a dagger, indicating group sales, it is still possible to game the system--and it shouldn't be.
Shouldn't publications find out whether the author or interest groups are responsible for inflating a book's sales by this method, before they call a book a "best seller"?
Deborah Hofmann, who tracks book sales and assembles the best-seller list for the New York Times, did not return repeated calls seeking answers to these questions. But a staff-person at a major book review told me that while some publishers, authors and interest groups have learned how to "game the system" by orchestrating bulk orders in multiple locations, publications with best-seller lists, including the prestigious New York Times, don't make much effort to find out who is involved and how big an influence they have in inflating sales.
Nelson, of Publishers Weekly, explained that publications with best seller lists could ask bookstores to identify how much of a book's total sales are due to this practice. "This information is knowable," she said, acknowledging that her own publication does not seek this information.
So those who could fairly easily track this information don't do it, presumably because it would cost them something, and besides, they sell newspapers and magazines when a book is controversial--and advertising, when a big publisher like S & S is pushing a book.
Similarly, S & S probably has modest political intent (though they have Mary Matalin publishing this and other right wing books, but no imprint for any other political persuasion), but they want to make money. So they are willing to spend a lot to make a lot, and apparently they don't care how they make it.
And people will be mildly scandalized, but this will set a precedent, and the next time, nobody will even blink. Greed makes everything okay, eventually. That's how decadence works.
I wondered if anyone would join me in my alarm over what I regard as Simon & Schuster's scandalously irresponsible publication of Jerome Corsi's book of lies, Obama Nation. On the Huffington Post, Peter Dreier has found a few people in the industry willing to challenge this major publisher for its dangerous precedent.
On the Huffington Post, Dreier stated the basics: " Despite Obama Nation' s many lies and distortions, the book wasn't put out by an ideologically-driven right-wing publisher such as Regnery, but by the profit-driven Simon & Schuster, one of the country's largest and most respected publishers, now owned by CBS Corporation....The book has risen to the top of the Times best-seller list, despite indications that its sales were artificially inflated by bulk sales, most likely by right-wing anti-Obama groups."
After reiterating assertions I made earlier--that Corsi is not a credible character, that the book is full of easily debunked lies, and that Corsi is on the record as saying he wrote the book in order to defeat Obama--Dreier asks these pertinent questions concerning the threat this poses to the credibility of book publishing:
The book is filled with such factual errors. It is hard to attribute them to carelessness because all the errors distort Obama's life, views, writings, and political career in ways obviously intended to hurt the candidate's reputation. Simon & Schuster selected Obama Nation for major celebrity treatment, knowing that the book was written by an author with a well-deserved reputation for falsehoods. What, if any, responsibility do publishers have when dealing with a book and an author like this?
Given the controversy over Corsi's previous book, should Simon & Schuster have hired a fact-checker to make sure that Obama Nation, which they are promoting as "non-fiction," was reasonably accurate?
What responsibility, if any, do publishers and booksellers have in calling the book a "best-seller" when that label may be as fictitious as the information contained in the book itself?"
Drierer asked some people in the book industry for their answers.
"Its too bad that a publisher of Simon & Schuster's stature would call this a scholarly book," said Peter Osnos, the founder and editor of PublicAffairs Books, which publishes serious books on political topics.
I think it's more than too bad. It's utterly irresponsible, and calls into question the credibility of every book on Simon & Schuster's non-fiction list. I agree most heartily with Sara Nelson:
"It isn't likely that publishers will start their own fact-checking departments," said Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly. "But whatever a book's political view, publishers have a responsibility, to the best of their ability, to make sure that what are claimed to be facts are true."
Drierer also notes that while the New York Times gave the book a #1 ranking on its best seller list but with a dagger, indicating group sales, it is still possible to game the system--and it shouldn't be.
Shouldn't publications find out whether the author or interest groups are responsible for inflating a book's sales by this method, before they call a book a "best seller"?
Deborah Hofmann, who tracks book sales and assembles the best-seller list for the New York Times, did not return repeated calls seeking answers to these questions. But a staff-person at a major book review told me that while some publishers, authors and interest groups have learned how to "game the system" by orchestrating bulk orders in multiple locations, publications with best-seller lists, including the prestigious New York Times, don't make much effort to find out who is involved and how big an influence they have in inflating sales.
Nelson, of Publishers Weekly, explained that publications with best seller lists could ask bookstores to identify how much of a book's total sales are due to this practice. "This information is knowable," she said, acknowledging that her own publication does not seek this information.
So those who could fairly easily track this information don't do it, presumably because it would cost them something, and besides, they sell newspapers and magazines when a book is controversial--and advertising, when a big publisher like S & S is pushing a book.
Similarly, S & S probably has modest political intent (though they have Mary Matalin publishing this and other right wing books, but no imprint for any other political persuasion), but they want to make money. So they are willing to spend a lot to make a lot, and apparently they don't care how they make it.
And people will be mildly scandalized, but this will set a precedent, and the next time, nobody will even blink. Greed makes everything okay, eventually. That's how decadence works.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
The Craftsman
By Richard Sennett
Yale University Press
Carpenter, lab technician, cook, software designer, glassblower, poet, the maker of musical instruments, the conductor of the orchestra that plays them, and the composer of the music they play—sociologist Richard Sennett calls them all craftsmen (be they female or male), and by this description, the category includes a decent chunk of the working population.
In fact, as Sennett describes and analyzes the history and qualities of craft, it becomes clear that they can apply in one way or another to everything from architecture to working behind the counter at a cafe. But that doesn’t make this book meaningless—quite the opposite. This is a discursive, intellectually stimulating and often fascinating discussion that at times seems like an engaged, elevating conversation.
As the author of The Hidden Injuries of Class, The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life and other books, Sennett has written credibly about people who work. This time he writes about the work itself. What seems to distinguish craft in his view is a combination of method skillfully applied, and intuitive improvisation with not just the task but the whole in mind. It is problem-solving creativity; pragmatic artfulness for a purpose.
The problems of craft in the age of machines is a theme of several chapters, but Sennett’s premise is that craftsmanship survives in an industrial age. “Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.”
One element in common is working with materials, often with tools, and with some relationship of the hand and eye. But Sennett sees these in designing Linux code as well as weaving. Craft may mean working with limitations, resistance and ambiguity. He illuminates issues through real world examples: the problem of obsession in the design and building of two houses, or the role of frustration in digging tunnels under rivers. Even in the age of computer-assisted design (CAD), craftsmen can solve problems the computer can’t anticipate.
Craft requires attention, a fact that doesn’t get much attention in this attention-deficit age. A common touchstone in various endeavors for how long it takes to become an expert is ten thousand hours, he writes. That translates into three hours of practice a day for ten years. Repetition is therefore important, but isn’t it boring? Sennett writes that even expert craftsmen derive pleasure in it: “the emotional payoff is one’s experience of doing it again. There’s nothing strange about this experience. We all know it: it is rhythm.”
Speaking of rhythm, craft can also involve working with what others do, as in the craft of playing in a jazz ensemble, but also in building a house, “in which the relentless desire to get things right became a dialogue with circumstances beyond his control and the labor of others.” Craft can be a calling, which often begins with play.
Sennett involves history, aesthetics, psychology, physiology and philosophy in this book, which is replete with stories that are fascinating in themselves. Plato, Gregory Bateson, Mary Shelley, Chekhov and Julia Child figure in one way or another. Though he doesn’t deal with it much, Sennett acknowledges that writing is a craft. His own writing supports several of his contentions: it is structurally sound, but idiosyncratic and flexible according to its purpose. For some it may be too rigorous, for others too decorative, but it’s a Sennett all the way.
By Richard Sennett
Yale University Press
Carpenter, lab technician, cook, software designer, glassblower, poet, the maker of musical instruments, the conductor of the orchestra that plays them, and the composer of the music they play—sociologist Richard Sennett calls them all craftsmen (be they female or male), and by this description, the category includes a decent chunk of the working population.
In fact, as Sennett describes and analyzes the history and qualities of craft, it becomes clear that they can apply in one way or another to everything from architecture to working behind the counter at a cafe. But that doesn’t make this book meaningless—quite the opposite. This is a discursive, intellectually stimulating and often fascinating discussion that at times seems like an engaged, elevating conversation.
As the author of The Hidden Injuries of Class, The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life and other books, Sennett has written credibly about people who work. This time he writes about the work itself. What seems to distinguish craft in his view is a combination of method skillfully applied, and intuitive improvisation with not just the task but the whole in mind. It is problem-solving creativity; pragmatic artfulness for a purpose.
The problems of craft in the age of machines is a theme of several chapters, but Sennett’s premise is that craftsmanship survives in an industrial age. “Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.”
One element in common is working with materials, often with tools, and with some relationship of the hand and eye. But Sennett sees these in designing Linux code as well as weaving. Craft may mean working with limitations, resistance and ambiguity. He illuminates issues through real world examples: the problem of obsession in the design and building of two houses, or the role of frustration in digging tunnels under rivers. Even in the age of computer-assisted design (CAD), craftsmen can solve problems the computer can’t anticipate.
Craft requires attention, a fact that doesn’t get much attention in this attention-deficit age. A common touchstone in various endeavors for how long it takes to become an expert is ten thousand hours, he writes. That translates into three hours of practice a day for ten years. Repetition is therefore important, but isn’t it boring? Sennett writes that even expert craftsmen derive pleasure in it: “the emotional payoff is one’s experience of doing it again. There’s nothing strange about this experience. We all know it: it is rhythm.”
Speaking of rhythm, craft can also involve working with what others do, as in the craft of playing in a jazz ensemble, but also in building a house, “in which the relentless desire to get things right became a dialogue with circumstances beyond his control and the labor of others.” Craft can be a calling, which often begins with play.
Sennett involves history, aesthetics, psychology, physiology and philosophy in this book, which is replete with stories that are fascinating in themselves. Plato, Gregory Bateson, Mary Shelley, Chekhov and Julia Child figure in one way or another. Though he doesn’t deal with it much, Sennett acknowledges that writing is a craft. His own writing supports several of his contentions: it is structurally sound, but idiosyncratic and flexible according to its purpose. For some it may be too rigorous, for others too decorative, but it’s a Sennett all the way.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Number 1--with a dagger:This report
by the Obama campaign exposes the
blatant lies in the new book,"Obama Nation,"
which will be #1 on the New York Times
Best Seller List, but with a "dagger"
to indicate that it got to be a best seller
because of "bulk sales," which in this
case means right wing organizations
buying up copies, just to get an anti-Obama
book on the list, and get the resulting media
coverage.
Unfit for Publication
The Obama campaign issued a 41 page rebuttal of the many deliberate lies in the book, Obama Nation, under the highly relevant title of "Unfit for Publication." That the book, authored by a known liar who penned a similiar smear of John Kerry in 2004, is full of the most reprehensible lies and false charges, targeting the most basic fears of the uninformed, is already a matter of record. Even before the point by point refutations of the Obama document, Media Matters had debunked specific charges. Joe Klein of Time Magazine was more general but more direct--he called the book "swill," "sleaze," and "poisonous crap." Politico mentions some of the authors other whoppers.
While I am certainly concerned by the possible political effects, I am especially troubled by this book as an author and book reviewer: because it is being published by a major publishing house, Simon & Schuster, and its Threshold Editions imprint. Threshold is run by Mary Matalin, political aide to conservative Republicans, including Bush and Cheney. That she has become an editor with her own imprint is suspicious but not really the issue. What she has decided to do with that imprint, and what Simon & Schuster is allowing her to do, is to me a very basic threat to whatever is left of the integrity of American book publishing.
It's not simply that this book has not been "fact-checked," as if that means that some errors slipped in unnoticed. It is completely based on lies, from start to finish. It is, as a perceptive post called "Books That Attack and Mislead" at First Read notes, just another form of a negative political ad. After all, its author told the New York Times, “The goal is to defeat Obama,” Mr. Corsi said in a telephone interview. “I don’t want Obama to be in office.” But no political advocacy organization is paying to print this political smear, which has no basis in fact. A legitimate major publisher, that obviously wishes its nonfiction books to be taken seriously, is paying people to write, edit and promote this book.
Moreover, they are doing so with total dishonesty. Matalin told the Times the book “was not designed to be, and does not set out to be, a political book,” calling it, rather, “a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that.” She is lying, and she knows she is lying. She has no integrity whatsoever, and therefore, neither does the publisher anymore.
Yet the publisher is dressing this book up with a cover that emphasizes the author's supposed credentials (Phd), and with pages of scholarly-looking footnotes--that reportedly cite mostly right wing and hate sources, and the author's own publications or posts. Everything about this book is deceptive.Even the book's widely reported status as a #1 Best Seller is a deception. By the NY Times own admission, this book has been bought in bulk--hundreds if not thousands of copies purchased by rabid right and GOPer organizations, in a deliberate, organized attempt to make it a "Best Seller." Those copies will be given away, and will shortly begin appearing on the shelves of Salvation Army stores. I suspect that Matalin and her bosses knew this from the moment they agreed to publish this book.
We've had plagarism scandals, and scandals about fiction being falsely claimed as non-fiction--but there apparently is no scandal, just profit, in this most morally corrupt attack on the integrity of book publishing.
As Mark Murphy observed at First Read: "This is perhaps the greatest loophole for underground attacks to go mainstream. Forget blogs, the bookworld may still be the best place to push false truths about someone."If readers cannot trust the integrity of books as a general rule, and the implied promise by major publishers that their books are what they purport to be, then publishing has become a sham, and books have lost their credibility. That affects me as an author and as a book reviewer. This book is clearly unfit for publication, and Simon & Schuster should be called to account for utter disdain for integrity and the accepted standards of legitimate publishing, however minimal they have become.
The Obama campaign issued a 41 page rebuttal of the many deliberate lies in the book, Obama Nation, under the highly relevant title of "Unfit for Publication." That the book, authored by a known liar who penned a similiar smear of John Kerry in 2004, is full of the most reprehensible lies and false charges, targeting the most basic fears of the uninformed, is already a matter of record. Even before the point by point refutations of the Obama document, Media Matters had debunked specific charges. Joe Klein of Time Magazine was more general but more direct--he called the book "swill," "sleaze," and "poisonous crap." Politico mentions some of the authors other whoppers.
While I am certainly concerned by the possible political effects, I am especially troubled by this book as an author and book reviewer: because it is being published by a major publishing house, Simon & Schuster, and its Threshold Editions imprint. Threshold is run by Mary Matalin, political aide to conservative Republicans, including Bush and Cheney. That she has become an editor with her own imprint is suspicious but not really the issue. What she has decided to do with that imprint, and what Simon & Schuster is allowing her to do, is to me a very basic threat to whatever is left of the integrity of American book publishing.
It's not simply that this book has not been "fact-checked," as if that means that some errors slipped in unnoticed. It is completely based on lies, from start to finish. It is, as a perceptive post called "Books That Attack and Mislead" at First Read notes, just another form of a negative political ad. After all, its author told the New York Times, “The goal is to defeat Obama,” Mr. Corsi said in a telephone interview. “I don’t want Obama to be in office.” But no political advocacy organization is paying to print this political smear, which has no basis in fact. A legitimate major publisher, that obviously wishes its nonfiction books to be taken seriously, is paying people to write, edit and promote this book.
Moreover, they are doing so with total dishonesty. Matalin told the Times the book “was not designed to be, and does not set out to be, a political book,” calling it, rather, “a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that.” She is lying, and she knows she is lying. She has no integrity whatsoever, and therefore, neither does the publisher anymore.
Yet the publisher is dressing this book up with a cover that emphasizes the author's supposed credentials (Phd), and with pages of scholarly-looking footnotes--that reportedly cite mostly right wing and hate sources, and the author's own publications or posts. Everything about this book is deceptive.Even the book's widely reported status as a #1 Best Seller is a deception. By the NY Times own admission, this book has been bought in bulk--hundreds if not thousands of copies purchased by rabid right and GOPer organizations, in a deliberate, organized attempt to make it a "Best Seller." Those copies will be given away, and will shortly begin appearing on the shelves of Salvation Army stores. I suspect that Matalin and her bosses knew this from the moment they agreed to publish this book.
We've had plagarism scandals, and scandals about fiction being falsely claimed as non-fiction--but there apparently is no scandal, just profit, in this most morally corrupt attack on the integrity of book publishing.
As Mark Murphy observed at First Read: "This is perhaps the greatest loophole for underground attacks to go mainstream. Forget blogs, the bookworld may still be the best place to push false truths about someone."If readers cannot trust the integrity of books as a general rule, and the implied promise by major publishers that their books are what they purport to be, then publishing has become a sham, and books have lost their credibility. That affects me as an author and as a book reviewer. This book is clearly unfit for publication, and Simon & Schuster should be called to account for utter disdain for integrity and the accepted standards of legitimate publishing, however minimal they have become.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
My Summer Reading
Summer for me is more a time for writing than reading. Still, so many books, so little time. So far this site has been devoted mostly to formal book reviews but that's meant posts are few and far between. So I'm going to try to add more "notices" of new books I receive, and books that pique my interest based on what other reviewers say about them. And I'm going to experiment with these little reports on what I've been reading, which will include new books and old, and re-readings. This summer's reading so far has been such a mix.
I reviewed (below) the third volume of Kim Stanley Robinson's climate crisis trilogy, Sixty Days and Counting. In June, I went back and re-read all three volumes in order, starting with Forty Signs of Rain and Fifty Degrees Below before re-reading Sixty Days and Counting. When I finished, I had to keep myself from starting them all over again. I loved being in that world. I was especially surprised that I liked the second volume best, at least for the story, since sometimes that's a kind of bridge volume in a trilogy. Then again, wasn't The Empire Strikes Back the best of the Star Wars trilogy of movies?
I'm glad I re-read Sixty Days, too. The first time through I focused on the characters and story. The second time, I found more provocative and useful information and ideas about the climate crisis. If I happen to run into Barack Obama (which is really unlikely, since I live in California) I would recommend reading these books for a good sense of the issues, challenges and possibilities in dealing with the climate crisis.
Science fiction is my preferred genre reading, although selectively: of what I call the science fiction of consciousness. Also last month I read Greg Bear's Moving Mars, an excellent work of sci-fi storytelling. Intelligent about the future, too. His Darwin's Radio is one of the most remarkable s/f novels I've read; a contemporary classic in many ways. And now I'm reading a volume of George Zebrowski's short stories, Swift Thoughts. It doesn't seem to have the story that started me searching out and reading his work, though, which was about Jesus Christ appearing on the Tonight Show. So right there I've named three of my favorite contemporary s/f of consciousness authors: Robinson, Bear and Zebrowski.
I also re-read three classics from the original s/f of consciousness author, H.G. Wells: The Invisible Man, The First Men In the Moon, and In the Days of the Comet. "Invisible" and "Moon" are wittier than I remembered, and "Comet" is mostly a realistic novel about Wells' own youth, kind of transition out of his scientific fantasy phase. It's easy to see why at the time Wells was taken seriously simply as a novelist who happened to write about these unusual subjects, like Joseph Conrad wrote about ships and Africa. He describes the practical difficulties of being invisible--he had to be naked, people who can't see him keep stepping on his feet, etc. (James Whale's movie version follows the story more faithfully than I remembered, though adding the love interest, but his emphasis is more on the adventure of it.) "Moon" offers its social critique, but it's an absorbing story, with enough physical detail to see it. Same goes for "Comet." I enjoyed these.
Before I leave genreland, I should report that several years ago my partner Margaret and I started reading the Harry Potter books aloud to each other. We eventually did it for all 7 volumes, and in between we tried some other books but somehow nothing else took. Then we were alerted to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy (we heard about both series' from different friends in the university drama department.) We finished the third volume in early June. This triology deserves all the praise it's gotten. Some of the writing is so gorgeous I laughed out loud as I read it. We also saw the film made of the first volume, The Golden Compass, and enjoyed that. Why wasn't it more popular? It will be interesting to see if the second two are made into movies as well.
Speaking of drama, I also read plays. Most recently a lesser known one by Noel Coward called Quadrille. Like Wilde and the early Stoppard, Coward is fun to read for the verbal wit. I enjoyed it.
In the department of old books read mostly for pleasure, a library discard of The Living Novel, a series of essays by novelists edited by Granville Hicks and published in 1957. It was in response to the "death of the novel" which preceded the death of the author as a popular topic. The contemporary novelists include some now forgotten, but also Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Wright Morris, Flannery O'Connor and Herbert Gold. It's a fascinating volume. Though the problems faced by novelists and contemporary novels that these essays discuss are still familiar, and arguably are worse, I couldn't help thinking as I read of the novels and novelists that were about to burst on the scene anyway.
The best essays for my interests were by Bellow and Ellison. Bellow's analysis was often astute, and his observations epigrammatic. For instance, "A novel is written by a man who thinks of himself as a novelist. Unless he makes such an assumption about himself he simply can't do it." "By refusing to write about anything with which he is not thoroughly familiar, the American writer confesses the powerlessness of the imagination and accepts its relegation to an inferior place." He suggests the impulse, the questions behind novels and the compulsion to write them: "Why were we born? What are we doing here? Where are we going?"
Ellison's essay is impressively scholarly, especially on the American novel. Since the novel reflects change, "..if the novel had not existed at the time the United States started becoming conscious of itself as a nation...it would have been necessary for Americans to invent it." He also suggests questions that the novel addresses: "What is worth having and what worth holding? Where and in what pattern of conduct does true value, at a given moment, lie?"
Summer is also a time to assuage a guilty conscience and catch up with at least a few books that arrived new and sat patiently waiting past their season. For instance, Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal by Rob Reimen (Yale.) I liked the theme, I enjoyed entertaining ideas from Whitman, Thomas Mann and others, and I felt the book's narrative strategy succeeded in terms of keeping you reading, although in the end I'm not sure what the central ideas are. It begins with a personal narrative of a dinner the author had with a daughter of Thomas Mann, Elisabeth Mann Borgese, who was his longtime friend, and Joe Goodman, an old friend of hers who also escaped from Germany in 1938. (Oddly they--and Thomas Mann-- came to the U.S. on the same ship without realizing it in advance, the New Amsterdam, which was also the name of the ship my grandfather came over on from Italy in the early 1920s, but it could not have been the same ship, as his was broken up in 1932.)
In New York, Joe was an eccentric composer and Whitman devotee who worked in bookstores. He arrives at the New York restaurant in November 2001 with his Cantata on the theme of the Nobility of the Spirit. Later we learn of intriguing elements of it, but also that he never finished it, and indeed burned all his notes before he died. When Elisabeth tells Reimen of Joe's death, he says that Joe was a great man. Elisabeth disagrees-- he was not truly great because he did not have the endurance to finish his great work. That's an interesting point of view, but then, Thomas Mann was her father. Nevertheless, Joe is a haunting character.
The rest of the book deals with philosophical and political ideas through dramatic dialogues, some among characters in Mann's novels and other works, some imagined or partly imagined among historical characters. The ideas are provocative and the dialogues are absorbing, and I wanted to remain sympathetic to his central championing of nobility of spirit, but Reimen's arguments against intellectual caricature falter when he ignores political and social history in his dogmatic statements about 9-11, and he oversimplifies the concept of utopia only as the absolutely perfect society envisioned by Hitler and Lenin. None of this is disqualifying, but there remains a feeling of dogmatism and yet vagueness, although there are many interesting passages.
Then it seems like the wheels come off in the final dialogue in the book, which to me came off as just inexplicable. Perhaps the Nazi priest's harsh indictment represents all that threatens nobility of spirit today, and the tortured dissident has that spirit. (A bit ironic, given that torture has most recently been inflicted and championed by the government based on the same black and white view as the author.) This last dialogue is also troubling because it's not clear what it is supposed to be--a fictional account of a possible nightmare, or what. That and other aspects of it aren't sourced, and because of it, the general lack of sufficient sourcing calls into question the accuracy of all previous dialogues, including the events in the restaurant. So if it is a work of fiction--postmodern or not--it is often an absorbing read, but possibly a diabolical book.
Summer for me is more a time for writing than reading. Still, so many books, so little time. So far this site has been devoted mostly to formal book reviews but that's meant posts are few and far between. So I'm going to try to add more "notices" of new books I receive, and books that pique my interest based on what other reviewers say about them. And I'm going to experiment with these little reports on what I've been reading, which will include new books and old, and re-readings. This summer's reading so far has been such a mix.
I reviewed (below) the third volume of Kim Stanley Robinson's climate crisis trilogy, Sixty Days and Counting. In June, I went back and re-read all three volumes in order, starting with Forty Signs of Rain and Fifty Degrees Below before re-reading Sixty Days and Counting. When I finished, I had to keep myself from starting them all over again. I loved being in that world. I was especially surprised that I liked the second volume best, at least for the story, since sometimes that's a kind of bridge volume in a trilogy. Then again, wasn't The Empire Strikes Back the best of the Star Wars trilogy of movies?
I'm glad I re-read Sixty Days, too. The first time through I focused on the characters and story. The second time, I found more provocative and useful information and ideas about the climate crisis. If I happen to run into Barack Obama (which is really unlikely, since I live in California) I would recommend reading these books for a good sense of the issues, challenges and possibilities in dealing with the climate crisis.
Science fiction is my preferred genre reading, although selectively: of what I call the science fiction of consciousness. Also last month I read Greg Bear's Moving Mars, an excellent work of sci-fi storytelling. Intelligent about the future, too. His Darwin's Radio is one of the most remarkable s/f novels I've read; a contemporary classic in many ways. And now I'm reading a volume of George Zebrowski's short stories, Swift Thoughts. It doesn't seem to have the story that started me searching out and reading his work, though, which was about Jesus Christ appearing on the Tonight Show. So right there I've named three of my favorite contemporary s/f of consciousness authors: Robinson, Bear and Zebrowski.
I also re-read three classics from the original s/f of consciousness author, H.G. Wells: The Invisible Man, The First Men In the Moon, and In the Days of the Comet. "Invisible" and "Moon" are wittier than I remembered, and "Comet" is mostly a realistic novel about Wells' own youth, kind of transition out of his scientific fantasy phase. It's easy to see why at the time Wells was taken seriously simply as a novelist who happened to write about these unusual subjects, like Joseph Conrad wrote about ships and Africa. He describes the practical difficulties of being invisible--he had to be naked, people who can't see him keep stepping on his feet, etc. (James Whale's movie version follows the story more faithfully than I remembered, though adding the love interest, but his emphasis is more on the adventure of it.) "Moon" offers its social critique, but it's an absorbing story, with enough physical detail to see it. Same goes for "Comet." I enjoyed these.
Before I leave genreland, I should report that several years ago my partner Margaret and I started reading the Harry Potter books aloud to each other. We eventually did it for all 7 volumes, and in between we tried some other books but somehow nothing else took. Then we were alerted to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy (we heard about both series' from different friends in the university drama department.) We finished the third volume in early June. This triology deserves all the praise it's gotten. Some of the writing is so gorgeous I laughed out loud as I read it. We also saw the film made of the first volume, The Golden Compass, and enjoyed that. Why wasn't it more popular? It will be interesting to see if the second two are made into movies as well.
Speaking of drama, I also read plays. Most recently a lesser known one by Noel Coward called Quadrille. Like Wilde and the early Stoppard, Coward is fun to read for the verbal wit. I enjoyed it.
In the department of old books read mostly for pleasure, a library discard of The Living Novel, a series of essays by novelists edited by Granville Hicks and published in 1957. It was in response to the "death of the novel" which preceded the death of the author as a popular topic. The contemporary novelists include some now forgotten, but also Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Wright Morris, Flannery O'Connor and Herbert Gold. It's a fascinating volume. Though the problems faced by novelists and contemporary novels that these essays discuss are still familiar, and arguably are worse, I couldn't help thinking as I read of the novels and novelists that were about to burst on the scene anyway.
The best essays for my interests were by Bellow and Ellison. Bellow's analysis was often astute, and his observations epigrammatic. For instance, "A novel is written by a man who thinks of himself as a novelist. Unless he makes such an assumption about himself he simply can't do it." "By refusing to write about anything with which he is not thoroughly familiar, the American writer confesses the powerlessness of the imagination and accepts its relegation to an inferior place." He suggests the impulse, the questions behind novels and the compulsion to write them: "Why were we born? What are we doing here? Where are we going?"
Ellison's essay is impressively scholarly, especially on the American novel. Since the novel reflects change, "..if the novel had not existed at the time the United States started becoming conscious of itself as a nation...it would have been necessary for Americans to invent it." He also suggests questions that the novel addresses: "What is worth having and what worth holding? Where and in what pattern of conduct does true value, at a given moment, lie?"
Summer is also a time to assuage a guilty conscience and catch up with at least a few books that arrived new and sat patiently waiting past their season. For instance, Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal by Rob Reimen (Yale.) I liked the theme, I enjoyed entertaining ideas from Whitman, Thomas Mann and others, and I felt the book's narrative strategy succeeded in terms of keeping you reading, although in the end I'm not sure what the central ideas are. It begins with a personal narrative of a dinner the author had with a daughter of Thomas Mann, Elisabeth Mann Borgese, who was his longtime friend, and Joe Goodman, an old friend of hers who also escaped from Germany in 1938. (Oddly they--and Thomas Mann-- came to the U.S. on the same ship without realizing it in advance, the New Amsterdam, which was also the name of the ship my grandfather came over on from Italy in the early 1920s, but it could not have been the same ship, as his was broken up in 1932.)
In New York, Joe was an eccentric composer and Whitman devotee who worked in bookstores. He arrives at the New York restaurant in November 2001 with his Cantata on the theme of the Nobility of the Spirit. Later we learn of intriguing elements of it, but also that he never finished it, and indeed burned all his notes before he died. When Elisabeth tells Reimen of Joe's death, he says that Joe was a great man. Elisabeth disagrees-- he was not truly great because he did not have the endurance to finish his great work. That's an interesting point of view, but then, Thomas Mann was her father. Nevertheless, Joe is a haunting character.
The rest of the book deals with philosophical and political ideas through dramatic dialogues, some among characters in Mann's novels and other works, some imagined or partly imagined among historical characters. The ideas are provocative and the dialogues are absorbing, and I wanted to remain sympathetic to his central championing of nobility of spirit, but Reimen's arguments against intellectual caricature falter when he ignores political and social history in his dogmatic statements about 9-11, and he oversimplifies the concept of utopia only as the absolutely perfect society envisioned by Hitler and Lenin. None of this is disqualifying, but there remains a feeling of dogmatism and yet vagueness, although there are many interesting passages.
Then it seems like the wheels come off in the final dialogue in the book, which to me came off as just inexplicable. Perhaps the Nazi priest's harsh indictment represents all that threatens nobility of spirit today, and the tortured dissident has that spirit. (A bit ironic, given that torture has most recently been inflicted and championed by the government based on the same black and white view as the author.) This last dialogue is also troubling because it's not clear what it is supposed to be--a fictional account of a possible nightmare, or what. That and other aspects of it aren't sourced, and because of it, the general lack of sufficient sourcing calls into question the accuracy of all previous dialogues, including the events in the restaurant. So if it is a work of fiction--postmodern or not--it is often an absorbing read, but possibly a diabolical book.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
The Story of a Marriage
By Andrew Sean Greer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
We’re in a strange time in the history of the novel. Though it would eventually cannibalize all previous literary forms, in England the novel began as almost satire, a playful burlesque of sermons, letters and travel narratives. It started as a popular form and prospered as such for a century: in his time, Dickens was a rock star. When H.G. Wells published The Time Machine in 1895, it was reviewed not as science fiction but as a novel with an unusual subject.
But then came “genre”: penny dreadfuls, dime novel detectives, sci-fi pulps. But those weren’t novels—Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf wrote novels. Today the old virtues and quality of novels are found in popular fantasy (J.K. Rowling, Philip Pullman, etc.), crime (K.C. Constantine, etc.) and science fiction (George Zebrowski, Kim Stanley Robinson, etc.) Now there’s a new genre: the literary novel.
If you are unacquainted with this form, grown in the hothouses of university writing programs, you may find the beginning of The Story of a Marriage a bit slow and cloying, a bit too choked with poetic detail, elegant similes and domestic metaphor. But once you are used to its particular cadences and the story unfolds, you can experience in this compact but powerful story (195 pages) what the contemporary literary novel at its best can do.
Andrew Sean Greer is a Bay Area novelist whose previous book, The Confessions of Max Tivoli was a best seller there. This novel takes place in the Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco, but back in the early 1950s when homes were built there, so far from the city proper that it had been called the Outside Lands. The narrator is Pearlie Cook, a small town southern girl, married to the boy she had adored in her hometown, but whose life since then—principally in World War II—is a portentous mystery. Then one day, a stranger arrives.
At first we learn realities of those early 50s that transcend pop culture clichés, and realize that Pearlie is remembering all this years later, which gives some historical context. But soon the basic narrative strategy is apparent: one surprise after another, each changing everything.
Which is why telling any more of the story would violate the experience of reading it. That the surprises are so skillfully done is kind of the first surprise. That a novel so focused on relationships (as literary novels often are) turns out to imply and even state a greater significance is maybe the best surprise.
Greer excels at the literary novel virtues, such as revelatory details that build character and place, and metaphors that are both apt and believable in this narrator’s voice. He places the story in historical time very well (even finding a different metaphorical take on the 1953 execution of the Rosenbergs—husband and wife convicted of spying---than other novelists have, at least as far back as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.) In defining differences of men and women, husbands and wives in this period, the novel implies questions about how much has changed since.
As a further hint of larger significance, these sentences: “This is a war story. It was not meant to be. It started as a love story, the story of a marriage, but the war has stuck to it everywhere like shattered glass.”
I wouldn’t say this novel rises to the status of The Great Gatsby. But it stretches the form, suggesting personal consequences of societal contexts and events in new ways. Besides, once under its spell, it’s an absorbing read. Which is not something that can be said of every example of this genre.
By Andrew Sean Greer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
We’re in a strange time in the history of the novel. Though it would eventually cannibalize all previous literary forms, in England the novel began as almost satire, a playful burlesque of sermons, letters and travel narratives. It started as a popular form and prospered as such for a century: in his time, Dickens was a rock star. When H.G. Wells published The Time Machine in 1895, it was reviewed not as science fiction but as a novel with an unusual subject.
But then came “genre”: penny dreadfuls, dime novel detectives, sci-fi pulps. But those weren’t novels—Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf wrote novels. Today the old virtues and quality of novels are found in popular fantasy (J.K. Rowling, Philip Pullman, etc.), crime (K.C. Constantine, etc.) and science fiction (George Zebrowski, Kim Stanley Robinson, etc.) Now there’s a new genre: the literary novel.
If you are unacquainted with this form, grown in the hothouses of university writing programs, you may find the beginning of The Story of a Marriage a bit slow and cloying, a bit too choked with poetic detail, elegant similes and domestic metaphor. But once you are used to its particular cadences and the story unfolds, you can experience in this compact but powerful story (195 pages) what the contemporary literary novel at its best can do.
Andrew Sean Greer is a Bay Area novelist whose previous book, The Confessions of Max Tivoli was a best seller there. This novel takes place in the Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco, but back in the early 1950s when homes were built there, so far from the city proper that it had been called the Outside Lands. The narrator is Pearlie Cook, a small town southern girl, married to the boy she had adored in her hometown, but whose life since then—principally in World War II—is a portentous mystery. Then one day, a stranger arrives.
At first we learn realities of those early 50s that transcend pop culture clichés, and realize that Pearlie is remembering all this years later, which gives some historical context. But soon the basic narrative strategy is apparent: one surprise after another, each changing everything.
Which is why telling any more of the story would violate the experience of reading it. That the surprises are so skillfully done is kind of the first surprise. That a novel so focused on relationships (as literary novels often are) turns out to imply and even state a greater significance is maybe the best surprise.
Greer excels at the literary novel virtues, such as revelatory details that build character and place, and metaphors that are both apt and believable in this narrator’s voice. He places the story in historical time very well (even finding a different metaphorical take on the 1953 execution of the Rosenbergs—husband and wife convicted of spying---than other novelists have, at least as far back as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.) In defining differences of men and women, husbands and wives in this period, the novel implies questions about how much has changed since.
As a further hint of larger significance, these sentences: “This is a war story. It was not meant to be. It started as a love story, the story of a marriage, but the war has stuck to it everywhere like shattered glass.”
I wouldn’t say this novel rises to the status of The Great Gatsby. But it stretches the form, suggesting personal consequences of societal contexts and events in new ways. Besides, once under its spell, it’s an absorbing read. Which is not something that can be said of every example of this genre.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Sixty Days and Counting
By Kim Stanley Robinson
Bantam Dell paperback
This is the third and concluding volume of Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy about an alternate present or near future when the world is forced to face a catastrophic climate crisis. But this isn’t another apocalyptic dread-feast. Extraordinary events shape and bend the everyday, but they don’t break it.
Robinson is known as a science fiction writer (his Red/Green/Blue Mars triology, etc.) and a futuristic California writer (the Three Californias series). In this volume in particular, he is also an evocative nature writer, describing the wilds of the California Sierras, Maine and Washington, D.C. That he finds wilds in Washington is part of the story.
This trilogy is centered in Washington and follows a group of scientists and politicians as the climate crisis gets real: Antarctic melting leads to massive flooding in Washington and elsewhere, inundating whole island nations. Plus a threatening “Day After Tomorrow” scenario of rapid climate change resulting in the paradox of a monster winter, with worse to come. In the midst of all this, there’s a presidential election.
Forty Signs of Rain introduces scientist Anna and politico Charlie Quibler, and their children. Through them and other characters, Robinson writes realistically of the various responses to the growing knowledge that the world is in deep climate trouble.
Fifty Degrees Below shows the climate crap hitting the fan. It’s told mostly through scientist Frank Vanderwal (a close friend of the Quiblers), and juxtaposes the big picture with the effects on his life, as he loses his home to the floods, and experiments with living off the urban land. His interest in primate behavior suggests he’s partly a tribute to real scientist Frans B.M. De Waal, a contemporary pioneer in the study of primates, especially their peaceful conflict resolution.
Vanderwal gets involved with the Buddhists who live on the fictional island of Khembalung, becoming inhabitable because of flooding. He’s also has a romance with a woman at work (National Science Foundation), and falls for a strange woman he meets on an elevator, who gets him involved in foiling a plot to fix the presidential election.
By the time this third novel begins, the Bush clone candidate has been defeated, and the U.S. has a new President committed to confronting the climate crisis: California Senator Phil Chase, a looser West Coast version of Al Gore, but with Obama’s communication skills. The story follows his efforts and thoughts (he has his own presidential blog called “Cut to the Chase”), and those of the scientists in the actions they propose and begin to take.
But except for the fallout of the failed attempt to fix the election in a not very distinguished but still apropos Washington paranoia-thriller plot (surveillance, proliferating intelligence agencies spying on each other etc.), this novel flows with the lives of those characters. Frank is at the front lines of the scientific efforts, but also living on the grounds of the Khembalung embassy with an elderly Buddhist monk as his roommate. He continues to monitor his friends “living feral” in Washington’s parks and abandoned buildings, as well as the animals flooded out of the zoo, also living feral in the extensive parklands in the D.C. area.
In many ways this is the opposite of the conventional science fiction dominated by technology, even if scientists are the heroes. On his computer, Frank subscribes to “Emerson for the Day,” and both Emerson and Thoreau are guiding spirits. So is Buddhism—in fact, the Dalai Lama appears as a character.
Even President Phil Chase is a philosophical blogger (he gets five million responses to his first post.) By the end he’s musing about reclaiming imagination as the human tool to create a dynamic culture that can be permanently sustained, a culture “in which no one is without a job, or shelter, or health care, or education, or the rights to their own life. Taking care of the Earth and its miraculous biological splendor will then become the long-term work of our species. We’ll share the world with all the other creatures. It will be an ongoing project that will never end.”
This is a very smart novel—on politics, economics, science and those underlying matters of soul. Things happen, that it wouldn’t be fair to reveal. But perhaps most surprisingly, it feels like a kind of pastoral: valuing the real Earth and real life that makes keeping humankind from destroying the planet worthwhile. In a technical Shakespearian sense it’s even a comedy, because it ends like As You Like It: good people restoring the state, gathered in nature, for weddings.
A slightly different version of this reviews appears in the North Coast Journal.
By Kim Stanley Robinson
Bantam Dell paperback
This is the third and concluding volume of Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy about an alternate present or near future when the world is forced to face a catastrophic climate crisis. But this isn’t another apocalyptic dread-feast. Extraordinary events shape and bend the everyday, but they don’t break it.
Robinson is known as a science fiction writer (his Red/Green/Blue Mars triology, etc.) and a futuristic California writer (the Three Californias series). In this volume in particular, he is also an evocative nature writer, describing the wilds of the California Sierras, Maine and Washington, D.C. That he finds wilds in Washington is part of the story.
This trilogy is centered in Washington and follows a group of scientists and politicians as the climate crisis gets real: Antarctic melting leads to massive flooding in Washington and elsewhere, inundating whole island nations. Plus a threatening “Day After Tomorrow” scenario of rapid climate change resulting in the paradox of a monster winter, with worse to come. In the midst of all this, there’s a presidential election.
Forty Signs of Rain introduces scientist Anna and politico Charlie Quibler, and their children. Through them and other characters, Robinson writes realistically of the various responses to the growing knowledge that the world is in deep climate trouble.
Fifty Degrees Below shows the climate crap hitting the fan. It’s told mostly through scientist Frank Vanderwal (a close friend of the Quiblers), and juxtaposes the big picture with the effects on his life, as he loses his home to the floods, and experiments with living off the urban land. His interest in primate behavior suggests he’s partly a tribute to real scientist Frans B.M. De Waal, a contemporary pioneer in the study of primates, especially their peaceful conflict resolution.
Vanderwal gets involved with the Buddhists who live on the fictional island of Khembalung, becoming inhabitable because of flooding. He’s also has a romance with a woman at work (National Science Foundation), and falls for a strange woman he meets on an elevator, who gets him involved in foiling a plot to fix the presidential election.
By the time this third novel begins, the Bush clone candidate has been defeated, and the U.S. has a new President committed to confronting the climate crisis: California Senator Phil Chase, a looser West Coast version of Al Gore, but with Obama’s communication skills. The story follows his efforts and thoughts (he has his own presidential blog called “Cut to the Chase”), and those of the scientists in the actions they propose and begin to take.
But except for the fallout of the failed attempt to fix the election in a not very distinguished but still apropos Washington paranoia-thriller plot (surveillance, proliferating intelligence agencies spying on each other etc.), this novel flows with the lives of those characters. Frank is at the front lines of the scientific efforts, but also living on the grounds of the Khembalung embassy with an elderly Buddhist monk as his roommate. He continues to monitor his friends “living feral” in Washington’s parks and abandoned buildings, as well as the animals flooded out of the zoo, also living feral in the extensive parklands in the D.C. area.
In many ways this is the opposite of the conventional science fiction dominated by technology, even if scientists are the heroes. On his computer, Frank subscribes to “Emerson for the Day,” and both Emerson and Thoreau are guiding spirits. So is Buddhism—in fact, the Dalai Lama appears as a character.
Even President Phil Chase is a philosophical blogger (he gets five million responses to his first post.) By the end he’s musing about reclaiming imagination as the human tool to create a dynamic culture that can be permanently sustained, a culture “in which no one is without a job, or shelter, or health care, or education, or the rights to their own life. Taking care of the Earth and its miraculous biological splendor will then become the long-term work of our species. We’ll share the world with all the other creatures. It will be an ongoing project that will never end.”
This is a very smart novel—on politics, economics, science and those underlying matters of soul. Things happen, that it wouldn’t be fair to reveal. But perhaps most surprisingly, it feels like a kind of pastoral: valuing the real Earth and real life that makes keeping humankind from destroying the planet worthwhile. In a technical Shakespearian sense it’s even a comedy, because it ends like As You Like It: good people restoring the state, gathered in nature, for weddings.
A slightly different version of this reviews appears in the North Coast Journal.
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