Clear explanations of complex things

As I've mentioned, in my day job I am a marketing director.  One of the things this means is that I fairly regularly have to learn about and understand a new product, a new service, or a new customer type.  This involves a lot of fairly unsystematic research, because the intersection between customer needs and product is hard to define.

It's always a pleasure to find someone who can explain the customers needs in some clear, easily understood way.  And, as it happens, finding someone like that is fairly rare.

Right now, I am planning to market a physical capital planning product to healthcare clients--hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, continuing care retirement communities, and others with complex buildings and physical systems.  Where their money comes from, where it goes, how they plan, what they worry about most--these are the issues I'm struggling with.

So I was happy to find a useful introductory document from The Access Project at the Harvard School of Public Health:  A Community Leader's Guide to Hospital Finance, Evaluating How a Hospital Gets and Spends Its Money, by Sarah Gunther Lane, Elizabeth Longstreth, and Victoria Nixon.  I certainly could have used this in my days at the Medicaid health plan, where various abstruse issues like Disproportionate Share Hospital or “DSH” payments were a constant conundrum.  Thank you, Lane, Longstreth, and Nixon.

Now, as it happens, this piece did not answer a single one of my questions about how healthcare facilities spend, plan, and budget for fixed equipment and building costs.  Not their fault, that's not what they were after.

So I'm still looking for a similar document about that unsexy and essential feature of hospital facilities:  the actual real estate.  Side point: you can't understand health care finance by looking only at the provision of actual care and reimbursement for it.  That's most important, certainly.  But look at jobs, and look at the value of the real estate, and some seemingly perverse decisions and practices will become, if not clear, at least somewhat less contradictory seeming.

But that's for another time.

Long book, great crime

A couple of days ago I mentioned lengthy titles and subtitles, a style now vanished.  I was reminded of a favorite takedown of a long-winded writer by Thomas Macaulay (no stranger to length himself), in a review of a book on Lord Burghley, Elizabeth's chief minister for decades, by the unfortunate Rev. Edward Nares.  Macaulay writes:

The work of Dr. Nares has filled us with the astonishment similar to that which Captain Lemuel Gulliver felt when he first landed in Brobdignag, and saw corn as high as the oaks in the New Forest, thimbles as large as buckets, and wrens of the bulk of turkeys.  The whole book, and every component part of it, is on a gigantic scale.  The title is as long as an ordinary preface;  the prefatory matter would furnish out an ordinary book;  and the book contains as much reading as an ordinary library.

...

Compared to the labour of reading through these volumes, all other labour, the labour of thieves on the treadmill, of children in factories, of negroes in sugar plantations, is agreeable recreation.

He goes on from there, destroying in detail once the ground is softened up with rhetoric, and Dr. Nares, no doubt, never showed his face again.

Macaulay is also irritated with Nares for his extoling of Burghley's moral virtue, and his account of a politic and wily minister amid the shifting sands of the Reformation can't be bettered:

He never deserted his friends till it was very inconvenient to stand by them, was an excellent Protestant when it was not very advantageous to be a Papist, recommended a tolerant policy to his msitress as strongly as he could recommend it without hazarding her favour, never put to the rack any person from whom it did not seem probable that useful information could be derived, and was so moderate in his desires that he left only three hundred distinct landed estates, though he might...have left much more.

For a politician, this is virtue.  The rest of the essay is a delicate anatomizing of the perils of the period, and of how the Tudors ruled, "a popular government, under the forms of despotism".  Nares is forgotten, as the ostensible reasons for Macaulay's essays so often are, except for a last smack when Macaulay says he must stop, lest his essay

...swell to a bulk exceeding that of other reviews, as much as Dr. Nares's book exceeds the bulk of all other histories."

Truth in History

A few days ago, while discussing memoirs, and whether there is any way to trust them, I mentioned the history book I was reading, Roger Crowley's Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World.

We seem to be heading back to those gigantic 18th century titles which were miniature essays in themselves.

Empires of the Sea covers the events of the huge conflict between an expanding Ottoman Empire and an aggressive, but at that point defensive, Christian south, mostly Habsburgs and Venetians.  Throughtout that period Europe was on the defensive.  North African raiders landed on the coasts with impunity and kidnapped incredible numbers of slaves.  It's not generally thought that, even as the Spanish were landing in the New World, conquering and wreaking havoc, they themselves were on the receiving end of landings and assaults.

Crowley's book is good, but I have an affection for an earlier account of the same events, Jack Beeching's The Galleys at Lepanto, which is much better on bringing out the personalities of the various participants.  Crowley's characters seem, from a fiction writer's perspective, poorly realized.

Of course these battles, kidnappings, and deaths are like the dance of sand grains on a vast motor housing when you read Fernand Braudel's incredible The Mediterranean and the Meditarranean World in the Age of Philip II, and find out how the motor works.  Narrative history makes up a large percentage of my free reading, but I remember reading Braudel's deep exploration of geography, climate, technology, economics, migrations, and social relations with as much interest as any story with a plot.

Now that I've pulled it off my shelf, I may need to read it again, all 1200 pages or so of it.  Thick and square, indeed.

Braudel is, I would say, an essential for a fantasy writer, or anyone trying to create a believable world, because he really gives you an understanding of how it works.

And he has those odd, casual intellectual toss offs that I like so much.  From a footnote about the island of Djerba, site of several significant battles, a propos of its production of olive oil:

On Djerba as well as olive trees there grew palm trees, apple trees, and pear trees.  From this point of view too it was an unusual island.  And Djerba as an island conservatory harboured Jewish communities said to date from the persecutions of Titus; above all it was a small Kharijite world, like the Mzab, the repository of ancient ritual and extremely old types of architecture.

Sounds exactly like Jorge Luis Borges, actually.  But longer.

Now, complete with stories

I finally put up some of my short fiction.  These are all stories I have reason to feel proud of, and which, I think it is safe to say, are relatively obscure.

"The Fury at Colonus" is the Oresteia told as a police procedural, with a Fury as the weary detective.  "Fragments of a Painted Eggshell" is about memory as art, and the issues of good people who, for one reason or another, are just not good parents.  "Market Report" is exactly that:  why are people in this particular suburb turning to the Pleistocene for their entertainment?

The slipperiness of truth

I wrote some thoughts about truth and prevarication in personal nonfiction yesterday, and, primed for the topic, found myself on the train to work reading an essay in The New York Review of Books about the essays of George Orwell, "Such, Such Was Eric Blair", by Julian Barnes, in which he discusses the question of the truth, or lack of same, in Orwell's account in "Shooting An Elephant", about his days in Burma.

As Barnes says, of Orwell:

...he taught us that even if 100 percent truth is unobtainable, then 67 percent is and always will be better than 66 percent, and that even such a small percentage point is a morally nonnegotiable unit.

Then Barnes sets out doubts, about the elephant, about a hanging, even about the wretched school so vividly described in "Such, Such Were The Joys".  The elephant was shot, but had not killed a man, and the consequences to Orwell were negative and damaged his reputation.  The hanging was a "composite", that dreaded journalistic crime that got Janet Cooke sacked from the Washington Post back in 1981.  And the school wasn't as bad as described.

The school I won't discuss:  our experiences at school, or in a family, can be horrible and completely different from the person we sit next to at lunch, or our sibling, so different that conversation about what happened may be forever impossible, outside of novels or intimate essays.

But the other two.... According to Barnes, David Lodge (one of my favorite writers, as it happens) argues

...that the value of the two Burmese essays does not rest on their being factually true.

Except that it does.  It may not rest solely on the facts, because it also rests on prose and structure.  The facts are not sufficient.  But they are necessary.  That one percent does matter.  Even if your readers, even if they are as astute and thoughtful as David Lodge, want you to trade truth for something they think they value more.

Is there such a thing as personal nonfiction?

Nonfiction exists as a category, of course.  I'm reading Roger Crowley's Empires of the Sea, about the 16th century struggle in the Mediterranean between the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans, and have no reason to doubt Crowley's account of the siege of Malta or the fall of Cyprus.

But personal memoirs are also fall into "nonfiction".  That is starting to seem much more dubious.  Many supposed memoirs (James Frey, Holocaust memoirs of being raised by wolves or fed by girls throwing apples across the fence, J T LeRoy, etc.) have recently been shown to be partly or largely fictional.  I don't think the truth-quality of memoirs has dropped.  I think the revelation of their falseness has been made easier.

One of my favorite blogs, prairiemary, recently mentioned something that has been out for a few years that, I will admit, did disturb me.  On Thursday she mentioned that the opening of Annie Dillard's memoir, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, where her tomcat comes through her window at night with bloody feet and leaves bloody pawprints on the bare skin of her chest didn't happen to her, but to a male student of hers, who gave her permission to use it as her own.

That book is wonderfully written, but I'd always doubted the "some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood".  My body?  Covered?  Some mornings?  I'd buy some blood on a nightgown once, and some dead animals (as Mary mentions) at other times.  The most common way memoirists distort events is to take the occasional or unique and make it habitual and characteristic of a period.

So:  did I "always doubt" it?  Or did it just occur to me, thinking back?  Here's the real problem of truth-in-memoir.  Even I can't quite be sure.

Now I know it didn't happen to Dillard.  And, most likely, it didn't happen to her student either, at least not exactly as described.  And how voluntary was the transfer of the story from student to teacher?

Whenever something like this comes out, there are those who say it doesn't matter, that they responded to the quality of the prose, or the psychological truth.  I can never figure out what these people are talking about.

I tell lies.  That's what my books are.  They are not true.  They didn't happen, and, in fact, could not happen.  I like to think that there is quality prose and psychological truth in what I write.

But it matters if something happened, or if it didn't.  The Turkish fleet really was repulsed at Malta, and really did conquer Cyprus.  Discovering that the dramatic defense of the fortress of St. Elmo at Malta was a fictional creation intended to boost the spirit of a beleaguered Europe would meaningfully change our perception of 16th century history.

Maybe that doesn't matter to some people.  It does to me.

Actors and Their Histories

I'm part of the aging cohort of subscribers to the Huntington Theater, one of our local theater companies.  Huntington productions are often worthy, and occasionally appalling--but not in a good way (newer playwrights sometimes give the impression of never having actually seen a play--but I'll have to deal with those experiences at a later time).  Last night was Emlyn Williams's The Corn is Green, a self-congratulatory autobiographical play of literary education that managed to be both earnest and creepy.  It dates from the 1930s, when there were a lot of stages to fill, and a lot of plays written to fill them, and a lot of people who took them seriously.

It starred Kate Burton (Richard Burton's daughter), and her son.  Richard Burton was Welsh, the play is set in Wales, so Kate and her son spoke of their Welsh heritage, their visits to Wales, etc.

Last time I saw Kate Burton on the Huntington stage, she was in an excellent production of Hedda Gabler.  I don't recall her mentioning her Norwegian heritage then.

I would love to see an actor in one of these things not mention the heritage, the teacher, the experience in youth, or the neighbor that connects them to the play, but admit that they are actors, and that their personal background is completely irrelevant to their performance.  It is their skill and talent that makes them successful, and it is the author's words that connect them, and us, to the play.

But then what would the busy graduate students who probably write these things do with their time?  And what would I be doing while waiting for scene changes?

Edge Urban -- Why I Live Where I Do

Sometimes I wonder why I live where I do.  It's crowded and expensive.  And there are no sophisticated boutiques or elegant watering holes near me.  My local bar, where I meet my friends to drink, is Joe Sent Me, half sports bar, half college hangout.  It does have a mural of Bogey and Elisha Cook Jr. on the wall (though, for a long time, I wondered if Elisha Cook Jr. was Richard Widmark, though I couldn't imagine what movie that was from).  I live in suburban Cambridge.  I have a driveway and a yard.

But I have a half hour bike ride to work.  I work in a curvy building in the Financial District building in 1873, and the bike messengers get high in the little park in front of my building, beneath an incongruously rustic statue of Robert Burns and his dog--don't ask why that is in Winthrop Square.  When the temperature gets below 10 degrees or there is ice and snow on the ground, I take the subway.

And today I drove 15 minutes to Lincoln, and went cross-country skiing through fresh snow for a couple of hours.  My favorite trail goes past Walden Pond.  That landscape is certainly not wilderness--I was in the Sawtooth Range of Idaho a few months ago, and I know the difference.  It is, instead, a humanized landscape.  You cross roads here and there, sometimes the trail goes across farm fields that have to be kept operational by severe land-use restrictions, and you're never very far from a house, but it is silent and elegant.

Some of Massachusetts, like everywhere, is thoughtless and ugly.  But a lot of it is thoughtful, and lived-in, and gives the distinct impression that there may be more to things than getting and spending.  And I like it fine.

The Ultimate Critic

I'm currently reading Rodric Braithwaite's excellent Moscow 1941, an account of the German invasion of the Soviet Union with a focus of the life of the city itself.

Russia had been in the grips of the Terror since the start of the big purges in 1937:

In the four years before the war more than thirty-two thousand people died at the hands of the secret police in Moscow and the surrounding Region.

Two corpse disposal zones had been set up outside the city, one at Butovo, the other at Kommunarka.  Most of the elite, including artists and writers, were killed at the NKVD dacha at Kommunarka.  And it's here that I learned of a figure I had not heard of before, but about whom I intend to learn more, Vasili Blokhin:

Many of these executions were carried out by a squad under the command of Vasili Blokhin, a specialist in such matters.  Blokhin is said to have personally killed the theatre director Meyerhold, the writer Isaak Babel and Mikhail Koltsov, the journalist and hero of the Spanish Civil War.

Blokhin also took a key role in the 1940 Katyn Massacre of the Polish officer corps, "wearing a leather apron and cap and long leather gloves":  he apparently carried out many of the killings of the Polish POWs personally, with a German Walther pistol he favored because it didn't jam when hot, at Mednoe, north of Moscow.

How is it that Blokhin is not better known?  The winnowing of writers in those years was brutal:  first silenced, then tortured and killed.  And if Blokhin did indeed carry out the killings personally, he was probably the last person to see them before they died.  Whether they saw him, I don't know.

Stealing Characters

I recently watched "The Letter", a 1940 William Wyler movie starring Bette Davis.  I picked it up because the culture guide Terry Teachout, who blogs at About Last Night, has written the libretto to an opera based on it (or, rather, on the original Maugham story).

It's about murder, betrayal of ideals, and corruption in pre-war Malaya.  That "pre-war" is interesting.  This was filmed a little more than a year before Japanese forces conquered the entire country, besieged Singapore, and destroyed this entire society. So, no matter what long-term guilts or pains the characters expected to have, they were completely overcome by events.

I get story ideas from movies, more more so than from books.  This happens in several ways.  I always try to predict what will happen next, and if I'm completely wrong, my prediction can serve as the basis for a story.  And I'm often more interested in minor characters than the movie, with its limited airtime, can be.  In this case, it was the lawyer Howard Joyce's legal assistant Ong Chi Seng.  Ong is the one who presents Joyce with his occasion of sin, by offering him something he desperately needs.  It's played pretty straightforwardly in the movie.  Aside from a cute bit with Ong's tiny little car, he's just a device.

But he can be a device because he's linked into a complex society the ruling Brits do not have real access to.  Who is he?  Has he helped the lawyer before in this way?  Does he have motivations aside from money for doing it?  None of this is the point of the movie, and so none of these questions are answered.  He serves as the guide to a crucial confrontation in the Asian part of town, but again, solely as a device.  Fixers and liminal characters like Ong are interesting, and he could easily have been a major character, with the murder and trial just as background to his own activities.

I have not yet read the original story.  I'm curious to see what role he plays there.  If it is similarly minor, I can claim him, or a version of him, for myself.

The Crimes of Literature

Writers lie to you. You know this.  They lie to you, but you know it and take it into account, so you are not damaged, and can perceive reality clearly anyway.  Maybe this is actually true.

But is there really any reason why we have to tell so many lies?  When you think of it, it's odd, and a little pathetic. I think the lies fiction tells are actually cognitive errors--mistakes inherent to narrative that misinterpret the state of reality.

I'll deal with some of these in more detail later, but for now, I'll just list some of the things we tell you regularly that are completely untrue.

• Physicians, even physicians in premodern times, actually know what's wrong with you and cure you.  That is, unless they are malign and greedy quacks, in which case they don't understand anything and will probably kill you.
• Physicians are good, the healthcare system they work in, and which pays them, is bad and out to deny needed care to sick people.
• If you dream something, that dream means something.
• Prophesies say something about the future.  And if a character comes to fulfill a prophecy, that's actual an honor rather than something particularly horrible.
• Generals who win battles are also loved by their troops.  Good commanders are not narcissistic, brutal, or lazy.
• If the main character creates an artwork of great quality, that artwork will also be incredibly popular.
• Obsessives and cranks are interesting people.
• If you are a good person, people will love you.

Many of these stem from the fact that the writer knows the future of the characters and can't help but let this bleed through.  As the inked note next to the underlined words in the secondhand book you bought always says:  foreshadowing.

I'm not really giving anything away here.  But I have many kennels full of desperately barking pet peeves, and I plan to unleash them on you, one by one.

On Rereading

In my early years as a reader (through high school, say), I reread constantly.  There were books I read over a dozen times--not on any regular schedule, like annually, but whenever I was in the mood.  Robert Heinlein was a particular favorite.  His rationality and structure served as a calming influence on my poorly organized mind.  For all I know, Door Into Summer served to send me into my career as an engineer.  I'll just have to forgive Heinlein for that.

But, in my older years, I had a greater goal orientation in my reading, as if I had to get through some chunk of the literature.  Rereading seemed like it was retarding my progress in comprehensive understanding.

I've recently found myself rereading more.  That's partially because I've been disappointed in a number of the books I've picked up, particularly novels. OK, particularly science fiction novels, my supposed field.  So much so that I was beginning to worry that I had lost my taste for reading.

So I decided to reread a book that I'd liked in the past.  Now, this can be dangerous, if you pick the wrong one.  My tastes have definitely changed since my adolescence, so Heinlein just wasn't going to cut it.

I pulled out an old paperback of Death of an Expert Witness, by P. D. James and took it on a weekend in Maine.  In the morning and in the evening, I was back in reader heaven.

I really don't remember what I've read that well, so rereading a book is pretty much like reading it for the first time--except that I'm sure I'll like what I'm reading. I won't find myself choking on the prose or getting irritated when a promising plot falls apart halfway through.

Dalgliesh and his team:  rationality and structure.  Architecture, the 39 Articles, a good claret.  My poor overheated brain is thanking me.  It's a relief to realize that I still like reading after all.

The Weight of Literature

Some hikers think it’s stupid to bring a book on a long hike. You’re there to connect with nature, they say. Once you’ve set up camp, you should observe, feel, and relate with the wonders around you.

I can’t argue with that. But I like to read, and reading in the sun by the side of a mountain lake is, for me, as good as it gets.

These hikers also point out, with more justice, that the damn things are heavy. Aren’t we all ultralight hikers now?

So the whole thing comes down to an unfamiliar literary calculus: reading value per ounce. Good books that are too heavy are out, as are less than good books at any weight.

But sometimes a heavier book can save your life. When caught by a sleet storm up near the divide in Jasper and forced to hole up for twenty four hours, I read Neil Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and didn’t even notice the hours go by. At home, I’d had trouble with the book partway through (I had young kids at the time, and thus a reduced attention span—and the man could sure use a more assertive editor), but confined to a tent with nothing but sodden morrass outside, I followed the escape from New Guinea with total attention. A bit heavy and bulky, but that time it was the right choice.

On another Canadian Rockies hike I’d hauled Bed Gadd’s magnificent Handbook of the Canadian Rockies. Make no mistake, this is one of the best guide books to a wilderness area you’re going to find. But the thing is printed on coated paper and weighs over two pounds. That was just a symptom of greater overloading, and I was miserable that whole hike.

I read Stephen Jay Gould’s Panda’s Thumb in Dark Canyon, and Orwell’s essays in Bandelier.

I’m just back from the Sawtooths, where, after some internal debate (15 oz!) I brought Dorothy Dunnett’s Niccolo Rising, and didn’t regret it for a moment.

I presume the Kindle and its descendants will eliminate this entire critical metric—you can carry hundreds of books weighing only a few ounces. I won’t be able to resist for long.