The Hunting of the Snark

A while back, I'd downloaded the free sample chapters of Bill Bryson's new book At Home: A Short History of Private Life to my Kindle app and found it quite delightful, the sort of light non-fiction brimming which the author's curiosity which is infectiously fun to read at odd moments -- yet shrunk from buying the full Kindle version because paying $10 for an ebook just rubs me the wrong way somehow. So I made my way down to the library to look for a copy. There I found that some fifty people had already done likewise and placed reservations on the book -- so rather than join the throng I picked up another of Bryson's books which happened to be in. I'd never ready anything by Bryson prior to stumbling on At Home, but the premise of The Lost Continent seemed appealing: Having lived and worked in Europe the author decides to take a road trip through small town America and write about the interesting (and odd) things he finds there.

Yet somehow the infectious curiosity which had made At Home so enjoyable to read was wholly absent here and replaced with that particularly modern mode: snark.

Now, Bryson is clearly a good writer, and he draws the reader along in an engaging way. Yet somehow the snarky tone breeds a certain frustration in a book-length work, as opposed to that child of the snark, a blog post. As the author's unremitting put downs, however creative, of everything he finds build up in chapter after chapter you want to shake the author by the shoulders and say to him, "All right, we get it. This was a lousy idea. But you're no longer a sulky kid sitting in the back of the family station wagon. You're an adult driving the car. How about if you turn around, drive to a big, cosmopolitan city, and write about something you like? Stop being professionally miserable and get a move on!"

Though really, my beef with snark is not that it's negative. It's that it's shallow. Snark, including Bryon's here, is usually of the, "Would you beeeeelieve this shit? I get into this town, which is not even a one horse town. It's a half horse town. The horse was cut in half by a semi on the main road a couple weeks ago and people haven't yet finished exclaiming, 'Would you look at that, now!' to each other and moved on to actually getting out of their chairs and moving the animal. And like all other half horse towns in Iowa, half the establishments are owned by someone named Vern. I'm not talking about Vern's Fusion Bistro or Vern's Art House Theatre, either. No, it's always Vern's Grocery. Vern's Hardware. Vern's Christian Bookstore. Vern's Tavern. So I went into Vern's Motel and asked the lady behind the counter, with her hornrimmed glasses and beehive hairdo, if there was a room available."

Now, this is in fact fun to write. I had fun parodying it just now. Snark is fun. That's why throughout the world people dash off blog posts full of snark on their lunch break for the delectation of other people on their lunch breaks who can in turn leave snarky comments, or post lolcats, or link to it on Facebook with the universal modern question, "Have you seen this? WTF?"

But I'm not at all sure it works to write a work longer than the average blogpost in snark-ese. Especially since a book lacks a comment box in which the reader can participate by making original contributions such as "LMAO". Indeed, after the first twenty pages or so, during which I kept thinking, "But he'll get down to real writing shortly, right?" I found myself reading further mainly in order to see if someone would eventually dose out a comeuppance to the author. But thus far, no.

I don't know if I'll finish it or not, but I'm disappointed.

Just everything

Cincinnati is a city of steeples. On every hill (and the hills are legion) you see a spire or a pair of towers reaching above the trees. Many of these steeples I know only by sight, but some I can identify from the highway: down in Northside, off 75 and 74, is St. Pius X, where I was confirmed. I know St. Peter in Chains, off 75 downtown. Immaculata, in Mount Adams, where the pilgrims pray the steps every Good Friday, crowning the city above the merge from 471 to 71. Fr. Al Lauer once said that the history of the Catholic Church in Cincinnati can be traced roughly along Glenway Ave: St. Lawrence, St. Teresa, Our Lady of Lourdes, and St. Jude.

Columbus, I have to say, is not Cincinnati. Ah well...

Here, have some pix: here's the kids on Halloween.



And (cross your fingers) this is what we hope might become the new Darwin manor:

Friday Quick Takes

Somehow, a fractured existence seems to lead to lots of post stubs, so I'll jump on Jen's bandwagon and do a quick takes to round out the week.

-- 1 --
Last year, I was in the middle of assuming a new job within the company I worked for, and so despite an odd yearning to take National Novel Writing Month (nor NaNoWriMo) as an excuse to get back into writing, I decided, "There's no time. Next year." Well, here's this year, and I'd driving back and forth between Cincinnati and Columbus several times a week while starting a new job. Humph.

Some day...

-- 2 --
Speaking of NaNoWriMo, I'm always up for a good piece of curmudgeonry, so I had to click on this piece entitled "Better yet, DON'T write that novel". The authors contention: When many first time novels see a print run of only a few thousand and only sell a few hundred copies, it's not the production of more novels that needs to be encouraged but rather readership.

As I was reading this it was striking me that part of the problem is that the market for novels is essentially national. Novels are published nationally and all the first time writers are struggling for attention from the same limited number of reviewers at the same limited number of magazines, and hoping that people in virtually identical Borders and Barnes & Nobles across the country will happen to pick up their work. Wouldn't it be easier on authors if readership was local? If readers tended to keep up with the small pool of local novelists, and then the best novelists from outside their region?

Then it struck me this is pretty much how blogging works -- though few people blog fiction. Blogging creates virtual neighborhoods and makes it fulfilling to have a couple hundred readers interested in your own corner of the world. I know a few bloggers who post fiction, but I wonder why more writers don't take this approach. Perhaps because it's hard to monetize? (Not like novel writing leads to profit for most anyway...)

-- 3 --
It had always struck me that the single people I knew ate surprising amounts of take-out and prepared food. If there's no one jumping all over you when you get home, wouldn't you be more inclined to cook up fun dishes for your own enjoyment?

Well, trying the experiment, not so much. It's far less enticing to cook from scratch when there's no one to cook for and no one to talk to while cooking. I still mostly shun take out but I seem to have fallen into meals that work like this:

Dump frozen garlic-potato wedges and frozen green beans in a pyrex bowl. Put sausage on top. Place in oven. Open beer.

Dump frozen artichoke hearts, frozen green beans and frozen potato wedges in pyrex bowl. Put frozen battered shrimp on top. Place in oven. Open beer.

Dump half bag of salad in huge bowl. Sprinkle with dressing. Grab a piece of cheese to cut up as a "side dish". Open wine.

Open can of soup. Dump in bowl. Heat up frozen mini-baguette. Open beer.

Note the frequency of the words "dump" and "frozen" in these recipes... It's not so much that I'm short of time, nor even that baking frozen stuff like this in the oven is actually much faster to prepare than a lot of the sort of recipes we normally make at home. It's just that the idea of preparing food in solitude seems bleak rather than homey. And eating the same left-overs for the next 2-3 days looms rather darkly as well. It's hard (at least for me) too cook in small quantities.

-- 4 --
Of course, if I don't like living alone, MrsDarwin has been having the much rougher time of it all. One of the older girls explained the evening like this to me the other night.

"Jack was so bad today. He was just crazy. He got in trouble, like, twelve times. Or maybe it was fifteen. He got into markers. And he colored on himself. And he dumped a pot of peas on the floor. And he spilled lemonade. And he threw the block of cheese in the spaghetti sauce. And he would NOT take a nap."

She paused, overwhelmed by the catalog of her brother's crimes.

"Have you been a good big sister and helped Mommy keep Jack out of trouble?" I asked. "Do you stop him when you see him getting into things?"

"Welllllllllll," she drew the word out as if this would make up for lack of truth. "Sometimes I do."

-- 5 --
Watching the election results come in, I'd found myself thinking, "I sure feel validated in choosing to move to Ohio over California."

Others had, it seems, been thinking equally and oppositely. A die-hard progressive friend posted the Facebook the next day, in response to someone's post on the elections, "I sure am glad I live in Portland, OR."

I wonder to what extent this kind of ideological sorting has increased -- especially among those of the upper part of the middle class who have often go to college in parts of the country far from where they grew up and then have national options as they look for jobs. Certainly, I've felt more at home in Texas and now Ohio than I do now back in my native Los Angeles.

-- 6 --
I've had a lot of time to listen to books or lectures on tape over the last few weeks, due to large amounts of time spent on I-71 between Columbus and Cincinnati. One of the things I've revisited is the original BBC radio dramatization of The Lord of the Rings

If, like me, you've come to cringe at the dialogue in Peter Jackson's movie adaptations (even though some of the visuals remain incredible) now that the first blush has worn off the movie adaptations, these are seriously worth a try. Although at ~13 hours, there is a lot of shortening in this adaptation, it keeps a lot more of Tolkien's verbal style in the dialogue and narration. And it's got some great voice actors, including Ian Holm as Frodo. (Of course, there's nostalgia in these for me as well. I listed to these again and again on cassette tape when I was a kid.)

-- 7 --
Speaking of listening to things... Anyone out there use Audible or similar subscription audio-book services? Is it in fact a cheaper way to get audiobooks? (And if it's something popular, not subject to the vicissitudes of a city library system with an addiction to reservation lines.) Feedback?

Narrative Failure

There's nothing more annoying that excessive crowing over an election, but I can't help taking just a moment to observe that there's something which doesn't quite fit about the idea that the GOP (and in a number of cases, the Tea Party wing of the GOP) did so well yesterday because the electorate was outraged that Obama and congress didn't tack harder left in the last two years. Yes, it's true that it was moderate Democrats, in many cases, who lost, but that's mainly because those moderate Democrats were elected in 2010 in districts which were to the right of them, districts which had previously been held by the GOP. But the fact that Pelosi was reelected while Driehaus lost doesn't mean that the electorate as a whole wants people on the hard left -- it's because Pelosi's district is in San Francisco while Driehaus's was in Cincinnati.

What both rightists and leftists should keep in mind after elections like this one and 2008 as well is that elections in the US are decided by a swing bloc which might charitably be described as pragmatic/a-political (or uncharitably as generally ignorant of political ideology and policy.) In 2008, that bloc looked at the landscape and said to itself, "Things aren't going so well, and Obama seems like he has exciting new ideas." This year, those same people looked around and said, "I keep hearing about 'stimulus' and debt and the health care bill, but all I can see right now is that a lot of people are out of work and insurance costs are going up. Let's throw the bums out."

Obama bet big that either he would have the magical ability to fix the economy, or it would fix itself, within two years. He lost that one. Now Republicans are betting that things will either look better in two years, or it will be possible to pin remaining problems on Obama. Only time will tell.

As someone who does have a formed political and economic philosophy, it's frustrating to me that elections are decided the way they are, though probably less so than for progressives since gridlock is not all that bad a thing according to my philosophy, while theirs require that the helping hand of statism shepherd us firmly and rapidly into the brave new world that is ahead.

The Super Secret, Mystical Recession Cure

For some reason, I found myself reading through Paul Krugman's recent NY Times material. Perhaps it was a desire for a little mental vaunting, what with the direction the elections seem to be taking, and if so I should have come away quite satisfied as Mr. Krugman is in full Chicken Little mode. A GOP takeover of congress will be a disaster, and we should all be very afraid. Stupid people are allowing their emotions to run away with them and will destroy the world economy through getting all moralistic about debt. And of course, the reason why the entire world doesn't see things Krugman's way is because macroeconomics is too hard for them to understand.

Well, I'm certainly prepared to admit that Krugman's expertise in macroeconomics is greater than my own -- and I'll even stretch and say that my understanding probably goes farther than that of the average bear. However, I can't escape the feeling that Krugman is somewhere between singing:

The intelligent lot, the intuitive lot,
The infallible lot we are.

and

The marvellous mugs, miraculous mugs,
The mystical mugs we are.

But since he's rather less exuberant than Chesterton he says it like this:

The greatness of Keynes is illustrated by the trouble people who consider themselves well informed have, to this day, in understanding the basic principles of how a depressed economy works.

It's true that most people are not very good at understanding complex systems with many, interdependent moving parts. This is why most people are confused by macroeconomics, or come to that microeconomics at the theoretical level. But then, it's also why even terribly clever people who think that they have a solid grasp of macroeconomic theory get themselves in trouble by believing that they understand all the factors in play and drawing up charts which demonstrate that unless we pass the President's recovery plan, unemployment might go as high as 9%.

Don't get me wrong, macroeconomics is indeed different from everyday business experience, as Krugman touches on:

Businesses are open systems; the world economy is a closed system, with feedback effects that are crucial but play no role in ordinary business experience. In particular, an individual businessman, no matter how brilliant, never has to worry about the fact that total income equals total spending, so that if some people spend less, either someone else must spend more, or aggregate income must fall.

But when the explanations become too mystical, I can't help (perhaps because it's just my simplistic, middle brow, self) cocking an eyebrow:

The years leading up to the 2008 crisis were indeed marked by unsustainable borrowing, going far beyond the subprime loans many people still believe, wrongly, were at the heart of the problem. Real estate speculation ran wild in Florida and Nevada, but also in Spain, Ireland and Latvia. And all of it was paid for with borrowed money.

This borrowing made the world as a whole neither richer nor poorer: one person’s debt is another person’s asset. But it made the world vulnerable. When lenders suddenly decided that they had lent too much, that debt levels were excessive, debtors were forced to slash spending. This pushed the world into the deepest recession since the 1930s. And recovery, such as it is, has been weak and uncertain — which is exactly what we should have expected, given the overhang of debt.

The key thing to bear in mind is that for the world as a whole, spending equals income. If one group of people — those with excessive debts — is forced to cut spending to pay down its debts, one of two things must happen: either someone else must spend more, or world income will fall.

Yet those parts of the private sector not burdened by high levels of debt see little reason to increase spending. Corporations are flush with cash — but why expand when so much of the capacity they already have is sitting idle? Consumers who didn’t overborrow can get loans at low rates — but that incentive to spend is more than outweighed by worries about a weak job market. Nobody in the private sector is willing to fill the hole created by the debt overhang.

Now, as a stand-alone economic model, this makes a great deal of mathematical sense -- and that's hardly a surprise as Krugman is a smart guy with an ability to understand complex mathematical models. Yet it's a model, it's not the real world. And as such, it's only as useful as its resemblance to the real world.

Mathematically speaking, if demand is not coming from one source (businesses and individuals spending money which they have or which they have borrowed) then you can make up for that demand from another source (the government spending money it has borrowed) and the effect will be the same. The two main problems I see, however, have nothing to do with the mathematics of the model -- they have to do with the relation of the model to reality.

First off, however much it clearly annoys Krugman that this is the case, voters simply do not like the idea of the government spending endless amounts of borrowed money on projects which might not otherwise be funded because it's important to "prime the pump" of the economy. People can't escape the idea that this is their money, as taxpayers, which is being spent, and that they're going to have to pay it back. During a recession, people are particularly troubled by their own debts and bills -- and since one of the bills that they see every so often is a tax bill, they don't like thinking about the government racking up endless debts which they are going to have to pay back later. So while in theory government spending could make up for a private demand shortfall and keep the economy up, it seems to me that in practice it's simply not sustainable in a situation where that public spending would have to be financed through massive borrowing, because since people would be thinking "that's borrowed money" they would continue to be afflicted by economic anxiety and to sit tight on their savings. Knowing that the public money being used to "prime the pump" was "fake" demand would keep people from recovering their confidence and prolong the lack of private demand.

The second big issue that comes up, it seems to me, it the question of what the government should spend its money on in order to stimulate demand. This was comparatively easy during the New Deal programs of the Great Depression -- a significant percentage of the country was employed in manual labor, and many major public works projects required large numbers of manual laborers, so it was easy to start up a big project, pay the workers, and expect that money to filter out into the economy. Today's workforce is much more heavily focused on skilled/specialized labor, and so even if we assume that the government could use deficit spending to employ lots of people through public spending, this brings up the question of what the government should spend on which wouldn't cause mal-investment in capital and labor training.

Say, for instance, the government were to announce a major project of putting up wind farms. Huge amounts of money are spent, lots of new wind turbine making factories are built and wind turbine makers and installers are trained. All this spending helps get the economy back on track, as those wind turbine installers head down to Wal-Mart and spend their paychecks. After two years the program is a success, and so the wind turbine program ends. Now what happens to those workers and the capital investments in those factories? How easily are they turned to other work, and how long are they unemployed in the interim? Do we simply end up with another economic slowdown as a result of massive unemployment in the windfarm industry?

The problem is, even a wonderfully complex economic model dreamed up by an intelligent lot, and intuitive lot, and infallible lot of marvelous, mystical mugs will end up being simpler than the actual world. And as a result, it's not always as easy to get the real world to do what you want as it is to get a model to do so.

Choice and Information

One of the persistant worries of pro-abortion advocates is that pro-life crisis pregnancy centers may maliciously trick women into not having abortions. How, after all, could one be so wicked as to call oneself a "pregnancy center" without offering the where-with-all to end a pregnancy?

Pentimento has a thoughtful and moving post up, spurred by an NY Times article reporting on CPCs versus Planned Parenthood vacilities in light of an upcoming New York City Council vote on whether or not to require pregnancy centers to disclose on all advertising what services they do (and do not) offer:

The bill was triggered by a recent study undertaken by NARAL, which aims to show that the pregnancy centers use deceptive advertising to lure young women in crisis and . . . not give them abortions. Chris Slattery, a member of my old parish in the Bronx and the director of Expectant Mother Care, which runs pregnancy centers in some of New York's poorest neighborhoods, believes that this proposed legislation is an attack on the work that the centers do, because, while technically it doesn't seem like a bad idea to require businesses to be specific about what they do and don't offer, in the case of the emergency pregnancy centers, this forced disclosure could very likely lead to loss of life. If an abortion-minded woman in a crisis pregnancy goes to an EMC center without knowing that abortion is not on the menu, it's easier for the staff to persuade her to change her mind. This, NARAL says, is a very bad thing indeed. The fact that a woman may be talked out of having an abortion apparently does grievous harm to her freedom of choice.

I was fascinated today to read this article in the New York Times, in which a pregnant newspaper reporter took herself on an investigative-journalistic tour of two crisis pregnancy centers and one Planned Parenthood clinic. She went first to one of Chris Slattery's centers, and was overwhelmed by what she freely calls the love with which she was welcomed. She also admits that Planned Parenthood was the only one of the three places that had "a financial stake" in the choice she made vis-à-vis her (in real life, non-crisis) pregnancy.

But most salient for me in this story were the reader comments -- or, I should say, one of the reader comments, which twisted my heart (most of the other comments were just what you might expect): [continue reading]

Story Material

I find myself oddly yet powerfully drawn in by Betty Duffy and Ross Douthat's reviews of Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom -- oddly because it seems utterly plain to me from their reviews that I would not only fail to enjoy the novel but be actively annoyed by it, but powerfully because it tugs at one of my persistant questions about non-genre writing in this day and age: Is there anything worth writing about?

Douthat remarks:

What if Jane Austen’s Bennet sisters had been bright young graduates of Bowdoin or Colgate or Dartmouth, with protective parents, impressive résumés, and no pressure to wed for anything save love? What if Theodore Dreiser’s Clyde Griffiths had been an ambitious young investment banker, with no need to marry money (or murder his mistress!) to secure his place in the sun? What if Anna Karenina had simply divorced her husband when she tired of him? What if Mr. Rochester had dumped his deranged wife and married the au pair, consigning the first Mrs. Rochester to the care of a generous welfare state instead of his attic?

They might have been no happier. Consider the musings of Patty Berglund, a privileged, prosperous, and liberated daughter of today’s liberal gentry, whose marital difficulties supply much of what drama there is in Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom:

Where did the self-pity come from? The inordinate volume of it? By almost any standard, she led a luxurious life. She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable.

No happier, indeed, but possibly less interesting than a Lizzie Bennet or a Rochester, no? A bit more self-indulgent, irritating, and entitled? And thus a little bit harder for a reader to care about, in the absence of the external obstacles and pressures—class and wealth, cultural convention and social stigma, to say nothing of religious and ethical taboos—that generate most of the conflict, and most of the sympathy, in the novels of an Austen or a Brontë, a George Eliot or an Anthony Trollope?

And yet the sprawling, tangled, tragic, comic, trivial and inspiring canvas of experience which make up intergenerational family life across a swath of time seem like the one thing which, even in our own time, should be completely fascinating. Franzen's book does not sound like one I want to read, and yet just reading the description of his failure makes me very much want to read someone who has succeeded at the project. I wish I thought I knew how (and had the time) to write such a thing.