Category: Books

Here is my Slate.com piece from today.  Excerpt:

…her work went far beyond simply mourning the victim. She showed us why repulsion cannot be avoided, why we often resemble what we hate, and why it is sometimes our best qualities that prevent us from accepting the differences of others. Her ability to both understand the outsider perspective better than others and then to invert it, places Butler above her science-fiction-writing peers. She is a disturbing and important writer who transcends the usual genre categories.

Here is a home page.  Here is Wikipedia.  The Xenogenesis series was a masterpiece.  Here are obituaries.

Knowledge may have its purposes, but guessing is always more fun than knowing.

That Auden bit is cited in the new and fun The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism, by James Geary.  While we are on the topic, here are Auden’s aphorisms on reading.  Here are his aphorisms on writing.  Here are the aphorisms Auden selected and edited into book form.

Geary also offers three aphorisms by Chateaubriand:

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

As long as the heart preserves desire, the mind preserves illusion.

Love decreases when it ceases to increase.

I had the pleasure of meeting and introducing Bill Easterly tonight.  March 16 he has a new book coming out, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done so Much Ill and So Little Good, order it here.

In 1998, a kindly grandmother living in New Jersey wrote a book
about child-rearing that created quite a stir. In "The Nurture
Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do," Judith Rich Harris
had the temerity to suggest that the most important influences on
children were not their parents but genes and peers. This was heresy,
and critics immediately attacked the book in reviews with titles such
as "Parents Don’t Count!"

Nonetheless, Mrs. Harris had made a very convincing argument, and
she stuck to her guns. Now, with "No Two Alike" (W.W. Norton &
Company, 352 pages, $26.95), she has expanded her thesis and has
attempted to formulate a new theory of personality formation – the
first, in fact, since Sigmund Freud. More specifically, she has
attempted to solve the mystery of why people are different…

Basically, Mrs. Harris believes there are three "perpetrators" at
work in the formation of the human personality, each associated with an
aspect of a modular brain. One is the "relationship system," designed
to maintain favorable relationships in society. Another is the
"Socialization System," where the goal is to be a member of a group.
The third is the "Status System," where we compete with our peers for
status.

The interplay among these systems accounts for the emergence of
differences between individuals. So it is that even identical twins
develop different personalities because the members of their community
see them as unique individuals and treat them differently. Their
individual striving for status propels them into different modes of
competing, which in turn differentiates their personalities.

Here is more information, I am excited.  See also Alex’s related posts here and here.  Have you noticed the absence of book reviews on MR lately?  It is about time for the publishing industry to awake from its seasonal business cycles slumber…

Here is a symposium, courtesy of National Review.  Do they understand any of these books, most of all the extreme perversity of Tolstoy?  Jane Austen is praised for not having a kiss in the entire book.  Maybe the Song of Solomon works as a pick.  Free to Choose wasn’t a bad selection either, or try their Two Lucky People.  Don’t they know that Rick sets up Ilsa at the end of Casablanca, just so her can reject her as an act of spite and malice?  How about Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe?  Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea?  Make your other selections in the comments, but the rapes in Atlas Shrugged rule that one out.  Thanks to www.politicaltheory.info for the pointer.

1. Faulkner.  He came close to winning.  But which novel?  Absalom, Absalom is the deepest and richest.  But you need to read it at least twice in a row, and that makes it less of a story.  Here is the first page.  As I Lay Dying is the most enjoyable.  Read it through once, without trying to understand it.  Then read it through voice-by-voice.  Then read it through again.  Sound and the Fury and Light in August (Faulkner’s easiest major work) cannot be dismissed either.

2. Henry James – The Golden Bowl.  Are you interested in Girardian doubles, the triangulation of desire, self-deception, the use of gifts to imprison, the mediation of desire through objects, and the dynamics of marriages?  This was James’s last and best novel.  For my taste Portrait of a Lady is static and stands too close to the Merchant Ivory tradition.  Interestingly, I believe not one of you mentioned James in the comments thread.

3. Huckleberry Finn.  It seems more Shakespearian each time I read it.  Right now Yana is reading it and loving it.

A few comments: Fitzgerald is not quite there.  I am tempted to count Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a novel, not a poem.  Willa Cather’s My Antonia and Nabokov’s Pale Fire are close, although my wife will not let me treat the latter as an American novel.  Philip Roth has many excellent novels but no one for me stands out.  Only the first third of Gravity’s Rainbow is wonderful.  I prefer Hemingway’s short fiction and most of all his sociological non-fiction on bullfighting.  Bellow is excellent but I wonder how much his books will mean to people one hundred years from now.  The dark horses you already have heard about.

1. It must reward successive rereadings and get better each time.

2. It must be canonical and grip the imagination.

3. It must be linked to American history and letters in some essential way.

4. It must span the intellectual, the emotional, the religious, and the metaphysical.

5. It must be fun.  You must be sad when the book is over, and wish it had been longer than it was.

6. It must be about a large white whale and have numerous Biblical allusions.

That leaves us with Moby Dick at the top. 

The most indicative chapter for the book’s strangeness is "A Squeeze of the Hand."  Has anyone done a better literary treatment of a homosexual ******-****, much less when writing about whale spermaceti?  Excerpt:

As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,  – literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger: while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulence, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,  – Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Here comes the best part:

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.

Get the picture?  But do read the whole (short) chapter at the link, just in case you are confused about the context…

The method of the novel, if you can call it one, is madness.  It is a collage of impressions, tales, facts about whaling, erotic interludes, and observations about social science.  Occasionally the plot resurfaces but this can involve less rather than more tension.  Moby Dick also can be read as pure commentary on the Bible or Shakespeare.  Melville knew who his competitors were. 

I’ve talked to many people who find the book offputting.  Delve right in and embrace the strangeness.  Take the ostensible masculinity and interpret it, and all the other foibles, as over-the-top.  Dig out the implicit theology.  Think of it as a new literary model.  And best of all, read only one short chapter a day.

Tomorrow you get the near runners-up.  Do feel free to offer your first place picks in the comments.

Herman Melville – Mardi.  Guess what, another obsessive quest.  Imagine Melville retelling Dante, but hating Christianity and seeking to revise it.  This is no less conceptual than Moby Dick, anthropologically more sophisticated, and utterly metaphysical.  Fans of Herodotus should pick this one up.  Typee is also much underrated, it is more than just a popular novel.

Vladimir Nabokov – Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.  I had to read the first two hundred pages twice and I still do not quite understand them.  The book is a dizzying array of puns, word plays, criss-crossing plots and voices, a treatise on the nature of time, and a catalog of erotic perversions, including incest.  This is Nabokov at the peak of his powers, much better than Lolita.  Someday I might think it is better than Pale Fire.  And yes it is fun reading, whether or not you know what is going on.

Ender’s Game trilogy, by Orson Scott Card.  These books are about virtual reality, the brutality of youth, game theory, the nature of war, and the implausibility of speciesism.  One hundred years from now the series will still be changing people’s lives.

Some fat potboiler probably belongs here but I can’t bring myself to write down any particular title.  Am I too hooked into the analytical and the symbolically complex?

Soon you will get my winner and the runner-ups.  Natasha tells me her winner is Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, although she warns she read it in Russian when she was nineteen.  Comments are open; do not yet put down your winner, but you are free to list your dark horses.

Here is my paper on novels and models, forthcoming in a University of Michigan Press book.  Here is the abstract:

I defend the relevance of fiction for social science investigation. Novels can be useful for making some economic approaches — such as behavioral economics or signaling theory — more plausible. Novels are more like models than is commonly believed. Some novels present verbal models of reality. I interpret other novels as a kind of simulation, akin to how simulations are used in economics. Economics can, and has, profited from the insights contained in novels. Nonetheless, while novels and models lie along a common spectrum, they differ in many particulars. I attempt a partial account of why we sometimes look to models for understanding, and other times look to novels.

Comments of course are welcome, either by email or on the blog.  The paper was stimulated by a) Liberty Fund conferences, and b) David Levy’s query as to how a painting differed from a model.  None of us had thought to ask about cartoons…

Princeton has set up a web page for my forthcoming book, due out March 31 or so.  Here is their summary:

Americans agree about government arts funding in the way the women in the old joke agree about the food at the wedding: it’s terrible–and such small portions! Americans typically either want to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts, or they believe that public arts funding should be dramatically increased because the arts cannot survive in the free market. It would take a lover of the arts who is also a libertarian economist to bridge such a gap. Enter Tyler Cowen. In this book he argues why the U.S. way of funding the arts, while largely indirect, results not in the terrible and the small but in Good and Plenty–and how it could result in even more and better.

Few would deny that America produces and consumes art of a quantity and quality comparable to that of any country. But is this despite or because of America’s meager direct funding of the arts relative to European countries? Overturning the conventional wisdom of this question, Cowen argues that American art thrives through an ingenious combination of small direct subsidies and immense indirect subsidies such as copyright law and tax policies that encourage nonprofits and charitable giving. This decentralized and even somewhat accidental–but decidedly not laissez-faire–system results in arts that are arguably more creative, diverse, abundant, and politically unencumbered than that of Europe.

Bringing serious attention to the neglected issue of the American way of funding the arts, Good and Plenty is essential reading for anyone concerned about the arts or their funding.

You can pre-order the book here.

Scott Haltzman, a psychiatrist and Brown University professor, has been studying marriages good and bad for a long time, both in his clinical work and via his Web site, http://www.secretsofmarriedmen.com/ . His new book, "The Secrets of Happily Married Men" collects what he says are the guy behaviors that lead to happy marriage…

Haltzman believes conventional marital therapy often tries to make men more like women — you know, getting in touch with their feelings, talking about their feelings, feeling their wives’ feelings, etc. But this approach is doomed to failure, he says, largely because men and women are equipped with such different hardware from the neck up…

Use the male habits and male skills that serve him well at work, at play, in competition, in the field and in other venues where he thrives. View marriage as your most important task, Haltzman urges men, and pursue success as you would anything else that matters. The assumption is it’s a lot more pleasant, and the payoffs far greater, to live with a woman who is satisfied, secure and feeling loved compared to one who is none of the above. Make this your job, he says.

Here is the full article, noting that some of the specific recommendations ("gather data" on your wife) are excessively mechanical. 

The key question: if a man at times undervalues a happy marriage and happy wife, how can he act to undercut or avoid this weakness of character?  If you think male infidelity is the main potential problem, "taking pride in your instrumental rationality" is not going to do the trick.  Alternatively, you might think that male emotional withdrawal is the main problem, in which case instrumental rationality, and subsequent attention, might be an acceptable (partial) substitute for many women.

Under another scenario, the problem is that men stop trying because they feel their wives expect too much.  If you are damned anyway, at the margin why bother?  This book is useful for telling men their efforts can matter, even if they can’t.  The very act of trying confers a positive externality upon your wife.

The recommendations of this book assume that you screw up the means-ends relationship with your wife, rather than undervaluing the end of a happy marriage (or overvaluing some other competing end).  Misesians, Beckerians, and other partisans of rational economic man shouldn’t bite.  Behavioral economists, step on board.

Comments are open…and you can buy the book here.

How to Hide Things in Public Places, a book by Dennis Fiery.  The teaser:

Did you ever want to hide something from prying eyes, yet were afraid to do so in your home? Now you can secrete your valuables away from home, by following Dennis Fiery’s eye-opening instructions in How to Hide Things in Public Places. The world around us is filled with cubbyholes and niches that can be safely employed… and this book identifies them…Many [sic] books have been written about hiding. But they all focus on privately hiding things in your own home, car, or on your person.

Here is more information, and for other unusual books look here and here.   You can buy it there but hurry the book service is going out of business.  Thanks to www.Jacquelinepassey.com for the pointer.

As a student at New York University in the late ’90s, she [Maria Dahvana Headley] applied that advice to her love life, turning down most men who asked her out and dating only intellectual, literary types. Frustrated by those guys, she reversed course, resolving to spend one year responding positively to all flirting and saying yes to literally anyone who asked her out. The ensuing 150 dates included a homeless man, several non-English speakers, 10 taxi drivers, two lesbians and a mime.

Headley’s memoir of the experience, "The Year of Yes," is now in bookstores, and Hollywood’s already calling. She urges other people to say yes more often, despite some horrible dates. (One guy took her to a bar that, it became clear, was a strip club–and that’s a tame example.) "Lots of women are pretty set in what they think they have to have in order to be happy, but it doesn’t hurt to date people who are not that," she says. It worked for her: during her dating spree, she met a playwright who was divorced and 25 years older and had two children–baggage that would have ordinarily nixed his chances. They married in 2003; now 28, Headley lives in Seattle with two teenage stepchildren. "It’s something I never would have picked, but it’s turned out to be this kind of amazing experience," she says.

Here is the link, courtesy of http://kottke.org. 

In general I favor approaches which shake us up, and force us to overcome our preconceptions and status quo biases.  If you are at a very good restaurant, you often do best by ordering the course you think you are least likely to enjoy.  I do not, however, recommend going to the restaurant you think you are least likely to enjoy.  The trick is to keep part of your filter steady and strong, while, at the same time, inverting some portions of your expectations.  I’ve never gardened, or wanted to garden, but the best book on gardening in Borders still might be worth my while.  Or pick a genre of music you dislike — the more rabidly the better — and go buy what is supposed to be the best CD from that genre.

Here is a skeptical take on Maria’s decision.  Might this surfeit of choice make a suboptimal candidate look better than he ought to?  If nothing else, marriage would allow you to bring the oppressive experiment to an end.  Here is an informal interview with the author.

Microeconomists are encouraged to ponder what model is required to generate "don’t ask anyone out but say yes to all who ask you" as optimum search behavior.  And does Maria’s decision impose negative or positive externalities on men?  (On other women?)  Imagine if all women always said "yes" to all proposed dates…