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Random rants on music and books
1. Bob Dylan’s latest has received rave reviews just about everywhere. Who can doubt an honest effort from the elder statesman? In reality it is little more than a repackaged version of his last two (superb) albums and thus mostly predictable and mostly boring. By the way, it is becoming clearer — against all former odds — that he was often a horrible lyricist but he remains, even in his dotage, a remarkable vocalist.
2. I loved the first half of Samuel Beckett’s Watt, but then lost the thread of the book. Beckett’s fiction remains underread, if only because we’ve yet to figure out just how good it is (or isn’t). The best parts are astonishing, but at times I feel I am listening to one of those unfunny British radio comedy shows.
3. Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children is a novel about thirty-somethings, in a pre- and post 9-11 NYC, transitioning (or not) into adulthood. That is a recipe for literary trouble. But I bought it anyway, trusting Meghan O’Rourke, and yes it deserves the sterling reviews. I kept expecting Megan McArdle to show up as a character and give them all a good talking-to about microeconomics, which is exactly what the characters need.
4. The best world music release of the last year or so remains Amadou and Mariam, Dimanche a Bamako. It is also the best pop album of the last year. The two Mali musicmakers are blind and also married to each other. I don’t see how anyone could help but love this music. After a year from its purchase, I’m still listening to it.
5. Steven Slivinki’s Buck Wild: How Republicans Broke the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government is exactly what the subtitle suggests. How did that happen? One factor is that the Republicans found Democratic rule too horrible a prospect to bear and they became more populist. Let’s hope the Democrats don’t make a comparable mistake.
6. Stephen Miller’s Conversation: The History of a Declining Art. I loved the title, hated the subtitle. Much of the book, which considers the preconditions of good conversation, is fascinating and, despite its popular level, goes beyond the muddled arguments of Habermas. It collapses when it argues that the quality of conversation is declining in the modern world. The evidence consists solely of examples of bad modern conversations.
Around the web
1. Contra Jared Diamond, on Easter Island and environmental collapse.
2. Who Pays the Corporate Income Tax?
3. Why CDs sound bad, from Bob Dylan, whose new CD is out next Tuesday.
4. Game theory and gambling in Paraguay: borrowing a page from Thomas Schelling.
5. Japanese markets in everything.
Hello, I’m Johnny Cash
I’d always thought that Sun Records and Sam Philips himself had created the most crucial, uplifting and powerful records ever made. Next to Sam’s records, all the rest sounded fruity. On Sun Records the artists were singing for their lives and sounded like they were coming from the most mysterious place on the planet. No justice for them. They were so strong, can send you up a wall. If you were walking away and looked back at them, you could be turned into stone. Johnny Cash’s records were no exception, but they weren’t what you expected. Johnny didn’t have a piercing yell, but ten thousand years of culture fell from him. He could have been a cave dweller. He sounds like he’s at the edge of the fire, or in the deep snow, or in a ghostly forest, the coolness of conscious obvious strength, full tilt and vibrant with danger. "I keep a close watch on this heart of mine." Indeed. I must have recited those lines to myself a million times. Johnny’s voice was so big, it made the world grow small, unusually low pitched – dark and booming, and he had the right band to match him, the rippling rhythm and cadence of click-clack. Words that were the rule of law and backed by the power of God.
That is from Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, volume I. And I am picking the film to win Best Picture this year, whether or not it deserves it.
I guess I still do care about this guy…
A collaboration of titans, Bob Dylan – No Direction Home, directed by Martin Scorsese. I’ve just started watching, but it is hard to recommend this too highly. The quality of the music clips — most of which are not Dylan — simply defies belief. And did you know that Dylan wanted to attend West Point and his favorite politician is Barry Goldwater? Fifteen years ago I thought this guy would go into the dustbin of musical history, but I was so so wrong. The DVD was released today, and the show will be on PBS soon. And when it comes to CDs, Entertainment Weekly outlines the essential Bob Dylan.
What I’ve been reading
Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body: The title says it all, this book is not for the squeamish.
Hunger’s Brides: A Novel of the Baroque, by Paul Anderson. I’m a sucker for 1400-page Canadian novels about Mexican nun/poetesses who are learning to speak Nahuatl and are involved in murders. The New York Times ran an article on how to deal with the book’s size and weight.
Chronicles, volume I, by Bob Dylan. No, I don’t care about him anymore either, but nonetheless this was one of the best books I read all summer. A primer on what it means to be American and why low rents are good for artistic creativity.
Healthy Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It, by Michael Cannon and Michael Tanner, published by the Cato Institute.
Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkish World, by Hugh Pope. A useful and entertaining book on modern Turkey and how it relates to Azerbaijan and the "stan" countries. Short of actual travel, this is your best hope of gaining a knowledge foothold in these areas.
My favorite book this summer remains the accessible yet deeply philosophic The Time Traveler’s Wife. More generally, Michael at www.2blowhards.com offers a comprehensive set of links on what is new in the world of books.
My favorite things French
I do one of these every time I go somewhere. I’ve held off on France out of fear of excess choice, but here goes:
French opera: Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande is ravishing, try to find the old version conducted by Roger Desormiere. Messiaen’s St. Francis wins an honorable mention; my favorite piece of French music might be Messiaen’s Vingt Regards.
French restaurant: I’ve yet to get into Pierre Gagnaire, considered the world’s greatest restaurant by many. For quick notice, I’ve done well at the Michelin two-stars Savoy and Hotel Bristol, the latter is even open for Sunday lunch, a Parisian miracle.
French novel: Proust is the only writer who makes me laugh out loud.
French pianist: Yves Nat has done my favorite set of Beethoven sonatas. These recordings are brutally frank and direct, and deep like Schnabel, albeit with fewer wrong notes. Few aficionadoes know this box, but it stands as one of my desert island discs. Note that French pianists are underrated in general.
French artist: I find much by the Impressionists sickly sweet and overexposed. I’ll opt for Poussin (this one too), Seurat’s black and whites, and Cezanne watercolors. Right now I would rather look at Chavannes and Bouguereau than Renoir or Monet. As for the most underrated French artist, how about Delacroix? A few years ago some of his small canvases were selling for as little as $60,000.
French popular music: Serge Gainsbourg is often called the "French Bob Dylan," but he is more like "the French Beck." Buy this set for a truly eclectic mix of styles.
French movies: If you don’t usually like French movies, you still should watch Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped, Jean Pierre Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur (a big influence on John Woo, also try Le Samourai), and Theodor Dreyer’s Joan of Arc.
Brood X is coming
Washington is preparing for an invasion. Several weeks from now billions and billions of insects will ascend upon the city from their hiding places under the ground to be begin two weeks or so of frenzied sex followed by egg-laying and dying. I know what your thinking – there goes Tabarrok again with his apocalyptic visions of doom and gloom.
The invaders, however, are not the biblical locusts of old but cicadas and they are going to be sex-starved because they only do this every 17 years. Why 17? No one knows for sure but 17 is prime so to meet the cicadas every time they appear a predator must lock-on to the exact frequency (while if they appeared say every 12 years then predators appearing every 2,3,4,6, or 12 years would be sure to meet them). There is another variant of periodical cicada that appears every 13 years, supporting the prime theory.
The cicadas are loud and the WashPost notes that the 1970 appearance of brood X inspired Bob Dylan to pen these lines:
And the locusts sang, well, it give me a chill,
Yeah, the locusts sang such a sweet melody.
And the locusts sang with a high whinin’ trill,
Yeah, the locusts sang and they was singing for me . . .
Addendum: Thanks to Marc Poitras for correcting me on one point. The cicadas can get plenty to eat underground so they really are coming out for the sex. Makes sense to me.
The demise of the happy two-parent family
Here is new work by Rachel Sheffield and Scott Winship, I will not impose further indentation:
“- We argue, against conventional wisdom on the right, that the decades of research on the effects of single parenthood on children amounts to fairly weak evidence that kids would do better if their actual parents got or stayed married. That is not to say that that we think single parenthood isn’t important–it’s a claim about how persuasive we ought to find the research on a question that is extremely difficult to answer persuasively. But even if it’s hard to determine whether kids would do better if their unhappy parents stay together, it is close to self-evident (and uncontroversial?) that kids do better being raised by two parents, happily married.
– We spend some time exploring the question of whether men have become less “marriageable” over time. We argue that the case they have is also weak. The pay of young men fell over the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. But it has fully recovered since. You can come up with other criteria for marriageability–and we show several trends using different criteria–but the story has to be more complicated to work. Plus, if cultural change has caused men to feel less pressure to provide for their kids, then we’d expect that to CAUSE worse outcomes in the labor market for men over time. The direction of causality could go the other way.
– Rather than economic problems causing the increase in family instability, we argue that rising affluence is a better explanation. Our story is about declining co-dependence, increasing individualism and self-fulfillment, technological advances, expanded opportunities, and the loosening of moral constraints. We discuss the paradox that associational and family life has been more resilient among the more affluent. It’s an argument we advance admittedly speculatively, but it has the virtue of being a consistent explanation for broader associational declines too. We hope it inspires research hypotheses that will garner the kind of attention that marriageability has received.
– The explanation section closes with a look at whether the expansion of the federal safety net has affected family instability. We acknowledge that the research on select safety net program generosity doesn’t really support a link. But we also show that focusing on this or that program (typically AFDC or TANF) misses the forest. We present new estimates showing that the increase in safety net generosity has been on the same order of magnitude as the increase in nonmarital birth rates.
– Finally, we describe a variety of policy approaches to address the increase in family stability. These fall into four broad buckets: messaging, social programs, financial incentives, and other approaches. We discuss 16 and Pregnant, marriage promotion programs, marriage penalties, safety net reforms, child support enforcement, Career Academies, and other ideas. We try to be hard-headed about the evidence for these proposals, which often is not encouraging. But the issue is so important that policymakers should keep trying to find effective solutions.”
Tuesday assorted links
1. Dylan Matthews on a Give Directly UBI experiment in Kenya.
2. Mackerels are a medium of exchange in some U.S. prisons (short video).
3. Yuval Levin reviews The Complacent Class: “Cowen’s book is rich in thought-provoking insights and is a testament to his own voracious curiosity and open-minded intelligence. There is more to it than any summary could hope to capture.”
4. Bob Luddy reviews The Complacent Class in American Spectator: “The Complacent Class defines the daunting challenges of our times.”
5. Facts about blue-footed boobies (NYT).
Monday assorted links
1. Arnold Kling on Cass Sunstein and books to change people’s minds.
2. “Methodological terrorism“? With a significant cameo by Andrew Gelman.
4. “A 2015 analysis published in The BMJ found 727 potential references to Dylan songs in a search of the Medline biomedical journals database; the authors ultimately concluded that 213 of the references could be “classified as unequivocally citing Dylan.”” Link here.
My favorite things Minnesota
I am here for but a short time, speaking at the university, but here is what comes to mind:
1. Folk singer: Is that what he is? Bringing it All Back Home remains my favorite Dylan album, of many candidates.
2. Rock music: The Replacements were pretty awesome for a short while. The Artist Formerly Known as Prince has an impressive body of work, with Sign of the Times as my favorite or maybe Dirty Mind, though when viewed as a whole I find the corpus of work rather numbing and even somewhat off-putting. Bob Mould I like but do not love, the peaks are too low.
3. Jazz: The Bad Plus come to mind.
4. Writer: Must I go with F. Scott Fitzgerald? I don’t like his work very much, so Ole Rolvaag is my choice.
5. Coen Brothers movie: Raising Arizona or Fargo. The more serious ones strike me as too grim.
6. Director: George Roy Hill, how about A Little Romance?
7. Columnist: The underrated Thomas Friedman, who ought to be considered one of the world’s leading conservative columnists but is not.
8. Scientist: Norman Borlaug. I hope you all know who he is by now.
9. Advice columnist: Ann Landers, most of the time she was right, much better and sharper than her sister Dear Abby, plus she coined better phrases.
What else? Garrison Keillor belongs somewhere, even though he isn’t funny. Thorstein Veblen is often unreadable but on status competition, and its Darwinian roots, he was way ahead of his time.
Overall this is a very strong state, and on top of that I feel I am missing some significant contributors with this list. Are there painters or sculptors of note from Minnesota? I can’t think of any.
*Confessions of a Sociopath*
I suspect nothing in this book can be trusted. Still, it is one of the more stimulating reads of the year, though I have to be careful not to draw serious inferences from it. Does its possible fictionality make it easier to create so many interesting passages?:
I can seem amazingly prescient and insightful, to the point that people proclaim that no one else has ever understood them as well as I do. But the truth is far more complex and hinges on the meaning of understanding. In a way, I don’t understand them at all. I can only make predictions based on the past behavior they’ve exhibited to me, the same way computers determine whether you’re a bad credit risk based on millions of data points. I am the ultimate empiricist, and not by choice.
The author argues that sociopaths are often very smart, have a lot of natural cognitive advantages in manipulating data, and are frequently sought out as friends for their ability to appeal to others. It is claimed that, ceteris paribus, we will stick with the sociopath buddies, as we are quite ready to use sociopaths to suit our own ends, justly or not. It is claimed that for all of their flaws, many but not all sociopaths are capable of understanding what is in essence the contractarian case for being moral — rational self-interest — and sticking with it. Citing some research in the area (pdf), the author speculates that sociopaths may have an “attention bottleneck,” so they do not receive the cognitive emotional and moral feedback which others do, unless they decide very consciously to focus on a potential emotion. For sociopaths, top down processing of emotions is not automatic.
We even learn that (supposedly) sociopaths are often infovores. It seems many but not all sociopaths are relatively conscientious, and the author of this book (supposedly) teaches Sunday school and tithes ten percent to the church. It just so happens sociopaths sometimes think about killing or destroying other people, without feeling much in the way of remorse.
I can also recommend this book as an absorbing memoir of a law professor and also of a Mormon outlier. It is written at a high level of intelligence, and it details how to get good legal teaching evaluations, how to please colleagues, how to evade Mormon proscriptions on sex before marriage, and it offers an interesting hypothesis as to why sociopaths tend to be more sexually flexible than the average person (hint: think more systematically about what abnormal or weakened top-down processing of emotions might mean in other spheres of life).
The author argues that sociopaths can do what two generations of econometricians have only barely managed, namely to defeat the efficient markets hypothesis and earn systematically super-normal returns. What does it say about me that I find this the least plausible claim in the entire book?
Here is a useful New York Times review. Here is the author’s blog, which is about being a sociopath, or about pretending to be a sociopath, or perhaps both. Here is the book on Amazon and note how many readers hated it. I say they just don’t like sociopaths.
One hypothesis is that this book is a stunt, designed as an experiment in one’s ability to erase or conceal an on-line identity, although I would think a major publisher (Crown) is not up for such tricks these days. An alternative is that a sociopath — not the one portrayed in the book — is trying to frame an innocent person as the author of the book (some trackable identity clues are left), noting that the book itself discusses at length plans to destroy others for various (non-justified) reasons. Or is it a Straussian critique of the Mormon Church for (supposedly) encouraging sociopathic-related character traits in its non-sociopath members? Or all of the above?
You will note that the book’s opening diagnosis comes from an actual clinical psychologist in the area, and the Crown legal department would have no interest in misrepresenting him in this manner. So the default hypothesis has to be that this book represents some version of the truth, at least as seen through the author’s eyes.
Some version of the author, wearing a blonde wig it seems, appeared on the Dr. Phil show, to the scorn of Phil I might add.
I cannot evaluate the scientific claims in this book, and would I trust the literature on sociopaths anyway, given that the author claims it is subject to the severe selection bias of having more access to the sociopathic losers and criminals? (I buy this argument, by the way.) It did occur to me however, that for the rehabilitation of sociopaths, whether through books or other means, perhaps they should consider…a rebranding exercise? But wait, “Sorry, I could not find synonyms for ‘sociopath’.”
If nothing else, this book will wake you up as to how little you (probably) know about sociopaths.
Obama’s iPod
Thank you all for your contributions, here is my new insight into Obama, it won’t be new for long:
Obama
said that, growing up, he listened to Elton John and Earth, Wind &
Fire but that Stevie Wonder was his ultimate musical hero during the
70s. The Stones’ track Gimme Shelter topped his favourite songs from the band. His
selection also contained 30 songs from Dylan. "One of my favourites
[for] the political season is [Dylan’s] Maggie’s Farm. It speaks to me
as I listen to some of the political rhetoric."…The jazz legends Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Charlie Parker were also included…
The worship of Dylan and Wonder and be-bop jazz is consistent with my view of him as a detached, universalist cosmopolitan.
What is the best country music?
That is a request from Bill Russell, a loyal MR reader, and yes I will get soon to more of your requests. I’m no expert, but my picks are as follows:
1. Hank Williams Sr., get both discs and don’t look back.
2. The Byrds, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, The Flying Burrito Brothers (the first two albums), plus Gram Parsons’s Grievous Angel.
George Jones and Bob Willis and Merle Haggard are all in my view somewhat overrated.
3. Louvin Brothers, Tragic Songs of Life (some call it bluegrass), Dolly Parton, Dock Boggs, Patsy Cline, the essential Johnny Cash (there’s lots of it), and the country/gospel of Elvis Presley. Dylan’s country music is good but is not his strongest suit.
Arguably the best songs of Ryan Adams (alas they are scattered but "Amy" and "La Cienega Just Smiled" are two places to start; does anyone know a more general sourcing?) are as good as anything in the genre. I like Lucinda Williams as well plus Shelby Lynne, most of all I Am Shelby Lynne.
Alternatively, the best collections from the 20s and 30s are mind-blowingly good; for instance try American Primitive on John Fahey’s Revenant label, or the Harry Smith collections. That’s some of the best American music period though in some ways the blues shouts are closer to rock and roll than to country.
I might add the whole list comes from someone who was initially allergic to country music, so if that is you give some of these recommendations a try. Just think of it as White Man’s Blues.
My favorite things Minnesota
No, I am not there, but this is atonement for my unintended slight of the state on Saturday.
Music: Dylan, Dylan, and Dylan. Bringing it All Back Home is his best album, and don’t forget Blood on the Tracks and Love and Theft, among many others. Did I mention the guy is a first-rate author, an amazing DJ, and a passable actor as well? I’ve found that relatively few intelligent people appreciate Dylan as a vocalist (don’t forget the Bing Crosby influence) and guitarist (one of the best of his time, though not technically), don’t be distracted by the lyrics.
But yes there is more. My favorite Prince songs include "Starfish and Coffee," "Glam Slam," the Purple Rain "medley" on side one, and "Seven," most of all the acoustic CD single version. My favorite Replacements songs are "I Will Dare" and "Skyway."
Film: The Coen brothers have many good films, most of all Fargo, Raising Arizona, and Brother, Where Art Thou? Much of Fargo is set in Minnesota.
Literature: F. Scott Fitzgerald is an obvious first, Sinclair Lewis I don’t enjoy much. Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato is a neglected classic. Ole Rolvaag isn’t bad. I believe Anne Tyler is from the state, Breathing Lessons is worth reading for a tale of dysfunctional families.
Artist: Duane Hanson — the guy who makes the sculptures that look like people — is the obvious pick. Any painters other than (ugh) Leroy Nieman?
Small town: "Small" isn’t quite the right word, but Duluth is a beauty, and yes Highway 61 runs up there.
Museum: The Walker Art Center is one of the most dynamic arts institutions in the United States. Here is a good article on the arts scene in Minneapolis.
I won’t call them "best", but Winona Ryder, Charles Shulze, and Garrison Keillor count for something.
The bottom line: Education and intellect kick in here in a big way. Minnesota is one of the best states.