One of my favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell, has begun posting on a blog of his very own. Like the Steves at Freakonomics, he’s smartly using it as a platform to expound upon and correct elements of his writing in books and in the New Yorker.
Looking at the comments, I noticed a rather effusive comment from Dave Sifry, founder of popular blog-search site Technorati, proving that even heroes have heroes.
There were a great many other anomalies which did not fit into Hobson-Lenin. Why, in Latin America, did the phase of capitalist investment follow, rather than precede or accompany, Spanish colonialism? Why, in this vast area, were the capitalists in league with the political liberators? Then again, some of the ‘exploited’ or colonized countries were themselves residual empires. China was the creation of 3 whole series of imperial dynasties, without benefit of ‘finance-capital’. India was a product of Mughal imperialism. Turkey had been expanded from Ottoman Anatolia. Egypt was an old imperial power which, after its breakaway from Turkey, sought to be one again in the Sudan. There were half a dozen native empires south of the Sahara run by groups and movements such as the Ashanti, Fulani, Bornu, Al-Haji Umar, Futa Toro. Ethiopia was an empire competing with the European empires in the Horn of Africa, before succumbing to one of them in 1935. Burma was a kind of empire. Persia, like China, was an imperial survivor from antiquity. Colonialism itself created empires of this anomalous type. The Congo (later Zaire) was put together by the Berlin Conference of 1884—5, and survived decolonization without benefit of any of the factors which theory said created empires. So did Indonesia, a product of Dutch tidy-mindedness, assembled from scores of quite different territories. Conspiracy theory shed no light on any of these cases.58
I tend to think of national and ethnic identities as fairly inelastic, changing imperceptibly over time, but of course that’s wrong. I’m an American and a Texan, two identities that were scarcely formed 200 years ago, much less defined to any significant degree. The common, well at least my own, view of imperialism is that it is doomed to failure, something we learn more from watching Braveheart than from studying history. Johnson’s point is that imperialism is often successful, yet over time we forget the former entities and come to regard the new creation as legitimate and even natural or inevitable. The means used to achieve those ends are often swept under the rug of assimilation or paved over by a collective sense of history that prefers to forget events that don’t cohere with our accepted identity or reinforce the legitimacy of our perceived status in our societies. This process of selectively forgetting is itself a form of culture-making critical to the formulation of a stable state, paving over old alliances and forming new ones.
I’ve just started reading Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, The World from the Twenties to the Nineties. I think I have a comparatively good grasp of history, but it’s amazing to realize how much I don’t know about the world I’m living in, particularly about events in the last century. If I had money to burn I would hire Johnson to sit next to me while I read the paper each morning and explain the historical context and significance of the day’s events. Or maybe he could just do a podcast. There are some rather obvious reasons why historians concern themselves mostly with the past, but I wish news organizations were a little more historically-minded.
How many controversies are floating aimlessly these days, untethered from their historical context, creating a whole industry in blather and self-righteous indignation? As a Christian, I suppose I should be outraged at the separation of church and state. As it turns out I’m rather pleased that the state has so little to do with my church. When Jefferson wrote coined the phrase in a letter to the Danbury Baptists, England’s King George III was still the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Nothing against Anglicans, but I’m not so big on vestments. Though I suppose it would be somewhat romantic to be known as a persecuted dissenter.
Stepping down from the soapbox…
A comment Johnson made about imperialism got me started on all of this, but I’ll save it for a later post.
When the test was last administered, in 1992, 40 percent of the nation’s college graduates scored at the proficient level, meaning that they were able to read lengthy, complex English texts and draw complicated inferences. But on the 2003 test, only 31 percent of the graduates demonstrated those high-level skills. There were 26.4 million college graduates.
Shocking, yet it’s not really all that surprising is it? It would be pretty easy to blame television or video games, but these are college graduates. I blame the way we teach English, a mix creative writing and watery literary criticism, which has deified self-expression and the validation of cultural identities. In today’s English courses, in both high school and college, it is sufficient to have an idea or two, regardless of whether or not you can explain it, defend it, and if it even makes sense.
Despite nature’s attempt to keep me from buying the books I deserve (either a really bad cold or my biannual bronchitis), I made a wonderful haul, due on no small part to Albuquerque’s Book Stop, which is quite possibly the best book store I have ever been in, with the exception, perhaps, of the Strand.
In unpacking the bags we have a first edition of Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm, also an excellent movie, Diana Klemin’s The Art of Art for Children’s Books, wonderfully illustrated and set in Bembo, H.L. Mencken’s The American Language, which I bought primarily because Mencken wrote it and for it’s discussion of proper names and American slang, Frederick Crews’ the Pooh Perplex which the innocent children’s series to a variety of Freudian and Marxist literary criticisms, Stewart Roddie’s Peace Patrol, which I now regret buying, and a gorgeously embossed copy of Theodore Roosevelt’s (yes, that Teddy) A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open in which he recounts his hunting expeditions.
Reality is a bit overwhelming these days with Houston awash in the hurricane refugees, gas prices over $3 a gallon, and my Cougars losing ugly to a team with a freaking duck for a mascot. Time for something escapist, at least for a lit geek. I curled up in the courtyard with John Hollander’sRhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse this morning. As a guide to English Verse, it’s more specifically a manual of poetic form, which I think tends to be one of those subjects, like grammar, that in American universities is seldom taught (and almost never taught well) but of which you are assumed to have an intimate working knowledge. Hollander’s guide is remarkably bearable, even fun, at least if a deeper understanding of anapests and iambs happens to turn you on. Hollander, an accomplished poet in his own right, mixes explication with poems that themselves demonstrate their inner workings:
In couplets, one line often makes a point
Which hinges on its bending, like a joint;
The sentence makes that line break into two.
Here’s a caesura: see what it can do.
(And here’s a gentler one, whose pause, more slight,
Waves its two hands, makes what’s left sound right.)
I picked up Reading the Classics with C.S. Lewis at Half Price Books the other day. Quite good. A lot of people are familiar with Lewis from The Chronicles of Narnia series of children’s books. Others know his popular books on Christianity such as Mere Christianity and if they haven’t actually read it themselves they may think they have from hearing it quoted so often.
Lewis, however, was first and foremost a scholar of medieval literature, which he taught at Cambridge and Oxford, something he had in common with his close friend and fellow Inkling, Tolkien (you know, hobbitses, Lord of the Ring, &tc &tc.). In college I promptly gave up any idea of writing a paper on Milton’s Paradise Lost after reading Lewis’ epic preface simply because I couldn’t think of anything I could possibly add to his analysis and was fairly stunned by how much of the poem I had missed.
In particular, Maria Kuteeva’s chapter on Myth was fascinating. Lewis had a lifelong fascination with mythology which, far from being relegated by his conversion to Christianity, became an integral part of Lewis’ understanding of the role of imagination and the creative impulse of humanity. For Lewis using one’s imagination was a divinely inspired impulse and an emulation of God’s ultimate creative power.
The New Yorker’s Henry Alford expounds on the venerable practice of encyclopedia and dictionary publishers including a fake entry in their tomes in order to catch poachers with their hands in the lexicographic cookie jar.
Turn to page 1,850 of the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia and you’ll find an entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fountain designer turned photographer who was celebrated for a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes titled “Flags Up!” Mountweazel, the encyclopedia indicates, was born in Bangs, Ohio, in 1942, only to die “at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.”
Apparently the Oxford English Dictionary has paid homage and baited the trap with a word of it’s own design. Alford set out with a crack team of linguists to bag the culprit.
The word has since been spotted on Dictionary.com, which cites Webster’s New Millennium as its source. “It’s interesting for us that we can see their methodology,” McKean said. “Or lack thereof. It’s like tagging and releasing giant turtles.”
Patrick Wright writes on the contribution of artists to advancing the practice of camouflage in World War I:
‘I well remember at the beginning of the war,’ Gertrude Stein wrote in 1938, ‘being with Picasso on the Boulevard Raspail when the first camouflaged truck passed. It was at night, we had heard of camouflage but we had not seen it and Picasso, amazed, looked at it and then cried out, yes it is we who made it, that is Cubism.’ Stein went on to suggest that the entire First World War had been an exercise in Cubism. Hailing Picasso as the first to register an epoch-making change in the ‘composition’ of the world, she concluded that a great convulsion had been necessary to awaken the masses to his discovery: ‘Wars are only a means of publicising the thing already accomplished.’
Now it seems hard to imagine the military without camouflage, but before WWI, such tactics were derided by military commanders as dishonorable. Wright outlines the debate and early experiments, some ludicrous, such as Thayer’s attempt to paint tanks to match the pink sunsets he imagined them blending with. Interesting read.
Houston traffic being what it is, I spend a lot of time trapped in the car. This is all the more intensely annoying since I used to be able to read the entire Times or Journal or 30 to 40 pages of book on each leg of my commute in Boston. Enough is enough. Time to reclaim the time lost to traffic tyranny.
Then oddly enough, I realized, I don’t really need Audible, even though that’s what got me started. I don’t really need a huge collection of audio books and I’d like to be able to loan what I listen to to my friends if I wanted to. Amazon sells new and used audiobooks on CD, why not “rent” an audiobook by buying it and then selling it to someone else when I’m done? I can’t do anything but listen to the mp3 file from Audible, but I can do whatever I want with my well-packaged CD - give it to a friend, resell it, whatever. Moreover, the I can copy CDs to my computer and onto my ipod, generally in more user-friendly format since it’s divided into chapters on the CD and comes in one hulking file from Audible. Audible executives take note. There are chinks in your business plan.
Hal Varian of the NY Times has written an excellent analysis on the effect of Amazon’s used-book sales on the general market for books.
While Amazon is best known for selling new products, an estimated 23 percent of its sales are from used goods, many of them secondhand books. Used bookstores have been around for centuries, but the Internet has allowed such markets to become larger and more efficient. And that has upset a number of publishers and authors.
The publishers and authors may be unduly upset, he points out, due to the countervailing effects of the used-book market
When used books are substituted for new ones, the seller faces competition from the secondhand market, reducing the price it can set for new books. But there’s another effect: the presence of a market for used books makes consumers more willing to buy new books, because they can easily dispose of them later.
Applying the authors’ estimate of the displaced sales effect to Amazon’s sales, it appears that only about 16 percent of the used book sales directly cannibalized new book sales, suggesting that Amazon’s used-book market added $63.2 million to its profits.
Apparently not everyonoe shares my enthusiasm about this article, judging by the dazed look I got from the co-worker I just accosted outside the bathroom. That may suggest either high boredom-elasticity among heterogeneous consumers of the article or a poor choice of venue.
Incidentally, the Times article links to an SSRN paper with empirical research. My spidey-sense is telling me that there’s been a bit of an about-face on the part of editors who some months ago would never allow an article to link to another source on a 3rd party’s website. Tech rags such as Wired have done that for a while, but it seems the Grey Lady has finally (and only recently) started wising up to the tao of the internet.
Oh and since we’re talking about books and this is a helluva long post any way, why not read my lonely little essay Hot Wet Book Love. I promise I’ll get around to writing another <fingerscrossed>one any day now</fingerscrossed>…
The New York Review of Books just published what is ostensibly a review of Thomas Friedman’s paean to globalization The World is Flat. It’s quite possibly the most bizarre bit of economic journalism I’ve come across, which doesn’t so much review Friedman’s book as use it as an excuse to revisit the ghost of Karl Marx. As far as I can tell, Gray asserts that Friedman was specifically inspired by Marxism but consistently gets most of it wrong, leaving us with statements like this:
The centrally planned economies that were constructed to embody Marx’s vision of communism have nearly all been swept away, and the mass political movements that Marxism once inspired are no more. Yet Marx’s view of globalization lives on, and nowhere more vigorously than in the writings of Thomas Friedman. Like Marx, Friedman believes that globalization is in the end compatible with only one economic system; and like Marx he believes that this system enables humanity to leave war, tyranny, and poverty behind.
followed by statements like this:
It is an irony of history that a view of the world falsified by the Communist collapse should have been adopted, in some of its most misleading aspects, by the victors in the cold war. Neoliberals, such as Friedman, have reproduced the weakest features of Marx’s thought—its consistent underestimation of nationalist and religious movements and its unidirectional view of history. They have failed to absorb Marx’s insights into the anarchic and self-destructive qualities of capitalism.
I’ve more to say about the piece, but frankly I’m dazzled by having to confront so many bizarre notions at once, as well as its many ambiguities and tautologies. We’ll see if some of the other blogging economists pick up the thread. In the meantime, read “The World is Round” for yourself. If nothing else, it will introduce you to the rather fascinating character that is John Gray.
I just finished reading Donald Miller’s secondthird relatively recent book, Searching for God Knows What and liked it even better than Blue Like Jazz. Miller tends to be somewhat polarizing. You either love him or you hate him, which to me is the mark of any good writer that’s still living (everybody loves the dead ones; though who reads them). Miller’s deceptively simple prose belies a savvy curiosity that renders some tricky theological issues approachable, engaging and thought-provoking, though I suspect many armchair theologians would find them lacking the intellectual rigor they are used to seeing them dressed up in. Easily more rewarding and enjoyable than the twaddle that typically passes for insight in the Christian book market.
My favorite part though, something I will shamelessly copy if when I get around to writing something of my own, is in the acknowledgements where he lists the mood music, the many musicians under whose influence the book was written — “Patty Griffin, Lou Reed, The Shins, The Smiths, Derek Web, Robert Keen, Steve Earle, Andrew Peterson, The Indigo Girls, Beck, Sinead O’Connor, David Wilcox, Joseph Arthur, Bebo Norman, Pedro the Lion, Soundgarden, The Trash Can Sinatras, Pat Green, The Rolling Stones, Nickel Creek, Climber, Damien Rice, The Frames and The Be Good Tanyas.” It took me a little while to realize he mean Robert Earl Keen, but all in all, a damn fine list. Every good bit of fiction needs a set list. Thanks Jessie for letting me borrow it. Sorry Don I’ll get around to buying a copy for myself one of these days. So many books; such little paycheck.
I finally got around to posting an essay, a work in progress that releases (hopefully) all the pent up anxiety over my Freudian (if not slightly Oedipal) relationship with books. [this is what happens when you’re the only child of a psychologist - everything you do has an explanation based in a neurosis] With that, I present Hot Wet Book Love a tawdry, salacious tale of the most pathetic kind.
. It’s quite possibly the most bizarre bit of economic journalism I’ve come across, which doesn’t so much review Friedman’s book as use it as an excuse to revisit the ghost of Karl Marx. As far as I can tell, Gray asserts that Friedman was specifically inspired by Marxism but consistently gets most of it wrong, leaving us with statements like this: