What question does my blog answer?

I got a tip from a blog I like to read:  Penelope Trunk's Brazen Careerist.  I'm out of the target demographic for her new social network startup (actually, I'm pretty much out of the target demographic for any networking model likely to be successful), but I love her career advice--and her rules for blogging.  One thing she said was:  a good blog should answer a question.

I like reading blogs, and I like writing my own.  But I like being read, too.  Just posting random bits of this or that just isn't getting to what I want to say, or what anyone wants to read.  This observation of Ms. Penelope's struck me particularly (thought she has a lot of other useful advice too).  What question is my blog answering?

I once had a decent career writing science fiction.  I was relatively successful, despite an absence of awards, and really liked it.  Circumstances kept me from moving that forward, and I've slipped back to obscurity.  Now I am restarting my career.  I'm middle-aged, have a family, and have a demanding day job that takes a lot of work and attention.  I also have a decent social life, like to garden, spend a lot of time in physical pursuits (it's a beautiful fall day today and once I post this I'm on my bike), spend time with my family, and love to read.  But I'm getting my writing done, have a book coming out, and am working on, and trying to sell, my next.

How am I going to do it, when I am not really all that energetic, that organized, or that smart?  That's the question I want to answer.  I may disappear again.  I may hold on by my fingernails.  Or I may actually have some success.  I'll let you know, right here.

When will we regain our lost WordPerfect technology?

Years ago I used a word processing program called WordPerfect.  I liked it, and only switched to Word when I had to.

I established a reading list in WordPerfect, and when I transferred it to Word I realized a problem:  Word has almost no sort capability.  Excel, also, has almost no sort capability.  WordPerfect could sort by word, field, line, paragraph, and it could sort from the last word, the next to last word...whatever you wanted.  A list of names could be sorted by last name, no matter if there were middle initials, multiple middle names, whatever.

That was twenty years ago.  Until recently I would port my Word document into WordPerfect, sort it, and bring it back.  But I switched computers and lost my WordPerfect (in DOS!)  I have the same problem at work whenever I have mailing lists with full names in one field.  It's a pain to get the last names sorted.  It would seem that someone would provide the capability (short of going into a database program).  Why is this?  Certainly I'm not the only person who has various sorting needs with various lists.

I'd buy a used or old WordPerfect package, but they turn out to be ridiculously expensive.

I have to say, I find this odd.  It's as if we once had nonstick cookware, but then the company that made them went out of business, and we had to go back to using a lot of oil.

Apples: the ease of misunderstanding the past

There is a farmer’s market near where I work.  I always go, and at this time of year, the stands carry a huge variety of apples.  Some are available most of the season, while some have a short harvest season.  Apples have been grown in New England for centuries, and apple cider used to be the prefered light alcoholic drink around here.

But when I look into the various apples I try, I find that most of them do not have a particularly long history.  A favorite, the Macoun, came about as a cross between two older apples, the Mcintosh and the Jersey Red, and was only named in 1923.  Even older varieties have been subtly bred to improve disease resistance, separation of the stem, disease resistance, simultaneous ripening, etc.

When we read a novel set in a previous era where people eat apples (and if it's set in New England they certainly will) our understanding of what they are eating and how they get them is incorrect.  The past is another orchard.  "Good keepers" were more important in an era without refrigeration and nitrogen-filled warehouses, even if they didn't taste particularly good.  And the trees they got the apples from weren't those comfortable dwarves you see it a pick-your-own orchard.  They were...well, they were trees.  You could fall out of them and kill yourself.

It's easy to forget how much work had to be done to get us from then to now.  Generation after generation, busy agronomists and farmers have competed to create apples that will appeal to apple eaters, and be cheap and efficient for apple growers to produce.  So raise a Macoun, or a Spencer, or a Northern Spy and, before you take a bite, and give thanks for their labors.

The Savannah Disputation

The other night I went with my playgoing friends to see The Savannah Disputation, by Evan Smith.  As I mentioned a few months ago, we have been regular attendants at one of our two large local theaters, the Huntington Theater Company, and have been dismayed by the hash of expensively produced mediocre-to-bad new plays, and respectful treatments of classics that we have been served.

So far, going to the SpeakEasy Stage Company has been a great decision:  this play was crisply written, funny , and even profound.  Which is to say, it was not an embarrassment.  Going to the Huntington Theater was often just plain embarrassing.

The setup of The Savannah Disputation sounds kid of sitcommy, perhaps unavoidable in a world where TV has sucked up all the best talent, and has the resources to relentlessly explore every even vaguely realistic narrative form: two older Catholic sisters, one grumpy, one sweet, are visited by a perky Evangelical missionary, find themselves unable to justify their faith against her relentless talking points, and so drop a priest friend into a theological cage match without warning him.

This isn’t one of those “stories about nuns” Catholic plays (quite popular in Catholic Boston).  This is a genuinely funny examination of what we base our faith on, and how we all use facts to bolster what we already believe.  There is real loneliness, real desire for connection, and real fear of death under the humor.

I don’t know who Evan Smith is, and there is little about him online.  He doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry.  No web site.

Evan Smith is a throwback, in other words: a literate younger person (I think he’s in his 30s) who actually enjoys writing plays and, what’s more, is good at it, quite unlike the majority of new playwrights produced by the Huntington Theater Company. 

Through October 17 here in Boston, but it seems to fairly popular in various places:  a one-set four hander with two good roles for older women, one for an older man, and one for a younger woman, and so easy to put on.

Biking with lunatics in Sao Paolo

Treehugger has an interesting piece on speeds of various means of transportation in Sao Paolo (via The Infrastructurist).  It had the merit of testing various types of bicyclist (including an untrained cyclist who stayed on side streets) against buses, cars, helicopters, etc.  Most contests stack the deck by not including regular folks on regular bikes (a fast cyclist did in 26 minutes what a regular guy did in 66 minutes, so you can see what effect that has).  A delivery trained cyclist and a trained cyclist on a fixed-gear bike beat even the helicopter six plus miles across town.  Pretty much everyone with control over their speed beat the car (82 minutes).  Even a bus beat the car, so Sao Paolo must be both a commuting nightmare, and have some separated bus lanes.

I ride a fixie about six miles to work every day, so I appreciate that.  But bicyclists are annoying and smug, and everyone hates them, and I understand that.  I bike every day, all year, in Boston weather and traffic, and find it normal, and don't get why other people would like sitting in cars, but I know I am in a minority.

But even I found the bicyclist in the video scary.  He's riding through tunnels, on busy highways, at night, with no taillight or reflective gear.  Sao Paolo looks like a great place to get killed.  It's new.  Boston is old, so the deranged street patterns actually make bicycling easier.  Cars are clearly the intruders here.  But only a madman would put his butt out on a bike in Sao Paolo.  My personal opinion, anyway.

Plus, the guy in the helicopter wasn't really trying.

Learning the ropes of book marketing

Last week I took a course at Grub Street, a kind of writer’s club in downtown Boston, on how to promote your book.  There was an enthusiastic group of about 20 students, most of whom had a book of one sort or another coming out in the next year.  Given what I see as the demographics of literary production in general, it didn’t surprise me that only four of the students were men.  The book subjects, fiction and non-fiction, ranged all over, but certainly with a plurality about family relations.  One of other men had a superhero-related book, and there was me, with my AI-hunting suspense novel.  But no one made fun of us.  At least not while we were there.

The class was taught by the enthusiastic Jenna Blum, and I hope I learned something from her.  Through relentless hustling, she turned a poorly-selling hardcover into a best-selling paperback, though just listening to her activities was exhausting.  Relentless self-promotion is, above all, relentless.

For me, I have to balance not only the fact that I have a full-time job, but also the need to write the next book, and short fiction as well.  Several of the participants said they would devote most of their time to promoting their books.  Jenna is taking the next year to promote her second novel, traveling around the country, chasing storms (the book's subject), and managing a bewildering variety of tie-in activities.  That was all more inspiring than useful to me:  there is no way I could manage anything like that.  And if she finds this while Googling herself:  thanks, Jenna Blum!

My goal:  make sure that anyone who could reasonably be expected to enjoy a snarky AI-hunting novel with a lot of suspense knows about Brain Thief and gets a chance to give it a try, particularly those who would not usually try science fiction.  Of all my books, it’s probably the most accessible for those from outside the field.

 

Hub on Wheels

This morning I got up before six AM and headed down to Government Center, in downtown Boston, to participate in Hub on Wheels, a ride all the way through the city, on closed-off roads.  It was drizzly, and the forecast was for heavier rain, but we were lucky, and the rain stopped partway through.  Storrow Drive (along the Charles River) was closed off in both directions, and formed the 10-mile route.

It's been a while since I did it.  It was fun and relaxed, and went through the Arboretum and Forest Hills Cemetery, as well as on a variety of bike paths I'd never been on.  Down in Mattapan the route went on a bike path paralleling the stretch of the Red Line that still runs old PCC cars (over 60 years old by this point), and one went by going in the other direction.  Also in Mattapan, a couple was having a screaming fight in the street, ignoring the steady stream of bicyclists going by.

A nice 50 miles.  If you're in Boston next year, I recommend you give it a try.

Understanding history (or failing to)

Something has been puzzling sociologists and criminologists over the past decade or so:  why are crime rates dropping so dramatically?  A couple of days ago Free Exchange, over at Economist.com, had yet another explanation: the advent of antidepressants and anti-ADHD meds.

This one seems weaker than most (as time goes by, the efficacy of both these drug types seems to be dropping:  it's possible that their action is completely misunderstood), but that's not what I'm interested in.  It's this:

This social change is going on, right now, in front of our eyes.  We have more statistical, analytical, and data-gathering power than anyone ever has, and we still can't understand what's causing it.  So why do we think we can explain anything about (say) how Goths, Alans, and Vandals overwhelmed the western Roman Empire?  Or how Western Europe managed to dominate the global economy in the 19th and 20th centuries?  Or anything at all?

Don't get me wrong.  I love history, and will continue to read it.  I just don't know that I can ever believe any historian's statement that "this happened because of that".

Or a politician's statement about the same.  If we'd passed dramatic gun-control legislation in the early 90s, many people would be saying that, clearly, the drop in crime rate was due to those restrictions.  And how could anyone argue?  It would be absolutely obvious.

Disclosure:  I favored gun-control legislation back then, and would certainly have reached that (completely incorrect) conclusion.  I no longer think guns are a particular social problem (partially because crime rate is clearly not correlated with them), and think that we should take the Bill of Rights seriously, even though I do not own a gun, and never plan to.

The urge to nerd

The comments on my reaction to Anathem highlight my anomalous location in the science-fiction universe.  Both responses (thanks Jim Cambias and oldhousegeek!), indicate that, while they understand my position, they are sucked into Stephenson's intellectual machinery anyway.  Why was I able to resist the seductions of nerd world?

In large part, science fiction is about thought and rationality.  Victory goes, not to the most passionate, committed, or lucky, but to the smartest and most process perceiving.  A science fiction character develops by Learning How.

I always wanted to learn how. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a nerd.  This was odd then—the cultural niche didn’t have the validity it does now.

Only one problem.  Aside from not really thinking like a nerd, I’m not actually smart enough to be one, either.  And I tried, believe me.  I tried through a Masters in Engineering from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth.  I tried through a number of professional engineering positions.  I tried until I just couldn’t try any more.

That’s just crazy, a colossal waste of time.  I try to be proud of it, but it made no sense, then or now.  I should have studied Byzantine history, like Harry Turtledove, or economics.  Or gardening.

I’ve wandered off the point here.  Neil Stephenson!  Smart enough to be a nerd, even too smart to be one.  Maybe I’m just jealous.  You’d think I could think vicariously through his writing, like learning to dance from those foot diagrams that now survive only in cartoons.

But I can’t.  I don’t think that way.  That’s a problem—I write science fiction.  What do you call a science fiction writer who can’t think like a nerd, or even truly appreciate someone else who writes like a nerd?

Remaindered.

But there might be a solution.  Over the next few months maybe we can find it.  After all, my book comes out in January.  We have to figure it out before then.

 

How to read Anathem

I’m a big fan of Neil Stephenson, and enjoyed much of his massive Baroque Cycle.  And I read it.  If you don't know, that's pretty high praise from me:  I am easily irritated and give up on a lot of books.

But I didn’t read all of it.  And that is the secret to reading Stephenson, and, particularly, his latest, Anathem: when things get tedious or confusing, just skip them. 

Anathem is set in a subculture on an alien world settled by something indistinguishable from human beings.  This subculture is a cross between monasteries and research universities, with some element of Classical philosophical schools thrown in.  But as an Avout, you live your entire life within these Concents (there is a lot of technical terminology, all cleverly defined).

The book starts unpromisingly:  a detailed description of winding a gigantic clock.  Then there is a fair amount of background exposition, until something like a plot starts developing about 150 pages in.  I almost threw in the towel, but the fact that it was Stephenson kept me going.  Eventually things started to happen.

But while the massive Baroque Cycle had reasons for its heft, there is absolutely no excuse for the length here.  The book is grotesquely too long.

It took me half the book to figure out the solution, so I’m going to save you quite a few hours by telling you what to skip.  The best part of the book is near the end, and you want to get there while you still have all your teeth and can still stand up unaided.

So here’s what you do:

Whenever a bunch of intellectualoid characters are gathered in a room, or a vehicle, or some other defined space and start talking about something, skip it.  Just start flipping pages, until someone does something.  You can tell from whether there are a lot of quotation marks.  Sure, there are a couple of occasions where you might miss something plot-related, but not very often, and you can pick up what’s going on pretty quickly.  Grit your teeth and do it.  You’ll thank me, unless you're one of the people who think that's the best part, in which case you're not going to listen to me anyway.

Here’s what you will miss if you do that:

• A lot of intra-and-inter-concent politics, none of which prove to have anything to do with what happens.  It feels a bit like Stephenson thought that was what the book was about, found something more interesting for it to be about, but couldn't bear to give up on all his work.
• A lot of Platonic/Aristotelian cognitive style discussions which aren’t any clearer when described as Procians and Halikaarnians.
• Some discussions of religion by characters who never seem particularly religious.
• Many other somewhat relevant intellectual notions, like the quantum mechanical basis of thought, many worlds hypotheses, etc. etc.

The encyclopedia definitions incorporate most of what you need to know.

Here’s what you won’t miss:

• Characters.  There really aren’t any, and they certainly aren’t developed in these philosophical dialogues.  Reading more won’t let you know them any better.  Even in the first few hundred pages, which is set in the school, you don’t get a sense of any of them.  Don’t worry about it.
• Plot development.  Most stuff in the book just happens.  Knowing more doesn’t make the events make much more sense.
• Any notion of how this world actually works.  I certainly never figured it out.  It doesn’t really matter, because Stephenson dumps all that Avout/Concent stuff partway through, brings everyone together for a gigantic meeting, and after that it’s just a bunch of ubergeeks figuring things out, organized by some superbrilliant council whose authority everyone accepts, and all the smart kids get assigned to the Big Mission.  You’ve been here before, lots of times.

When you’ve jettisoned the overhead, you actually have a pretty good First Contact novel, involving some academic plotting, a trip across the ice cap, an erupting volcano, and a fun journey into space with a well-realized set of decoy operations.  Not worth 1000 pages, but certainly OK at 500, using my method.

The next best thing to an editor is a guide like this one.  Don’t let my sacrifice be in vain!

 

Rome's cultural survival

I suppose one reason Rome resonated for long after its fall was the survival of various of its cultural products.  Latin is pretty obvious.  Until the Renaissance, Western medicine was Galenic medicine (though it vanished and got reintroduced from Byzantium and the Arabs).  And astronomy was Ptolemaic astronomy.  Both were products of the late Principate.  It's a bit as if, having lost the political unity, Europeans held on to the intellectual unity, far beyond where it made sense.  Would these ideas have had the same staying power if they had not emerged in association with that dream of unity?  Ptolemaic astronomy itself seems almost like a crude metaphor for political rule from the center, having nothing to do with physical reality at all.

Rome Falls Again

As I mentioned, there has been a flurry of new books about the end of the Roman Empire.  It’s an interesting puzzle, with resonance for any empire:  how does something so solid and functional come apart?  Could anything have been done to prevent it?

But that is only one of the interesting questions raised by the Roman Empire.  The other, probably even more interesting, is how such an empire was created in the first place, and how, once created, it stayed together for so long.  This enterprise ruled the entire Mediterranean basin, and additional territories as far north as Britain, for many centuries. It built roads, administered justice, and kept down pirates and brigands.  It maintained cult temples, built arenas where prisoners and animals were slaughtered for entertainment, and fed urban populations from the produce of vast factory farms worked by slaves.  All at a level of technology no higher than anywhere else.

And how did they ever run it?  As Peter Heather observes, in The Fall of the Roman Empire (#2 in my Fall of Rome reading series), in a useful chapter called "The Limits of Empire":

Looking at the map with modern eyes, we perceive the Roman Empire as impressive enough:  looked at in fourth-century terms, it is staggering.  Furthermore, measuring it in the real currency of how long it took human beings to cover the distances involved, you could say it was five times larger than it appears on the map.  To put it another way, running the Roman Empire with the communications then available was akin to running, in the modern day, an entity somewhere between five and ten times the size of the European Union.

And keep in mind that the European Union has 27 member states.

Somehow, a mid-Italian city state had successfully emulsified all the old long-standing political and cultural entities of the Mediterranean basin and beyond.  And that emulsion didn't crack for nearly five hundred years.

Warlords with powerful regional bases tore the Late Republic apart, but it stayed together.  One emperor after another succeeded Nero, but it stayed together.  The ludicrous Commodus couldn't destroy it, neither could the deranged Caracalla or the bizarre Elagabalus.  The fifty years of constant civil war following the death of Alexander Severus, with dozens of emperors and usurpers, should have finally taken it down, but didn't.  Diocletian and Constantine's military/bureaucratic Dominate made the whole thing much less fun, but it stayed together.  By that point, it wasn't even ruled from Rome, but from regional strongpoints like Trier and Antioch.  And when the Western regions were finally torn from this system (including the original capital, Rome), the East kept together, like a smoke ring blown through history, for hundreds of years more.

The Fall is only noticable because it stood for so long without falling.  And the Rise was certainly not inevitable.  What would Western history have looked like if there never had been a Roman Empire in the first place?

The Fall of Rome: a lately popular topic

In the past few years, there has been an interesting cluster of history books focused on the end of the Roman Empire:  its fall, its decline, its transition into other forms (part of the point is the disagreement on what to call what happened).  I don’t know if this sudden supply of popular scholarship is coincidence, a sign of some general mood, or simply the result of enough new information to force a reevaluation.

I’ve read one (Bryan Ward-Perkins’s The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization) and am in the process of reading another (Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire).  Then there is Goldsworthy and Wickham.  News on those when and if I get to them.

Ward-Perkins’s book is in three sections.  The first is a impressionistic account of how various tribes moved into the Roman Empire and how they related to the people they now ruled.  The last is a bit of a rant about recent historiographic trends that have repositioned the Fall of the Roman Empire as Late Antiquity, even as Ward-Perkins states that Late Antiquity is a pretty good term for that period (roughtly 400-800 CE).  He is quite entertaining on why northern European members of the EU might wish to come up with a kinder and gentler Fall of Rome.

The best section is the middle one, where he analyzes physical evidence for an understanding of the economic complexity of the Roman Empire.  He shows that, no matter what its flaws, there was one big advantage to living under the rule of the Caesars:  the extended peace and trading networks raised the economy to a high level for a pre-industrial society.  Everyone had tiled roofs, good pottery, and other implements of daily life—and Ward-Perkins is at pains to point out that the daily life of poor and middling people was actually relatively decent.  Having access to trading networks allowed farmers to rise above subsistence and specialize in the crops best suited to their local soils and climates.

All of this disappeared after collapse of unified Roman rule in the West.  Ward-Perkins is persuasive that, no matter how innovative the relations between Germanic rulers and native ruled, their lives had become materially much poorer.

Ward-Perkins goes directly at the point that comfort, safety, and material wealth are important measures of human happiness, and of civilizational complexity.  Those who didn’t have to live it can praise spiritual values or other aspects of nonmaterial culture.  As he points out, near the end of the book:

We have no wish to emulate the asceticism of a saint like Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, who spent solitary nights immersed in the North Sea praising God.  But, viewed from a suitable distance, he is deeply attractive, in touch with both God and nature:  after his vigils a pair of otters would come out of the sea to dry him with their fur and warm his feet with their breath.  This is a much more beguiling vision of the past than mine, with its distribution maps of peasant settlements, and its discussion of good- and bad-quality pottery.

I’d say this a book for the enthusiast, not someone coming to this period for the first time—though I’m not sure what else I would recommend as an introduction.  I might actually recommend Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity—although Brown is, in fact, the dark genius who pioneered the concept of Late Antiquity, and Ward-Perkins spends some time cautiously taking potshots at him.  I think once I get through Heather, at least, I’ll return to Brown to remind myself of what these revisionists are going on about.

But if you are an enthusiast, Ward-Perkins’s book is well worth reading, and refreshingly short and brisk.

Harakiri: individual honor vs. institutional corruption

The valor and honor of warriors is a given in fiction.  Otherwise what you have is a bunch of violent thugs acting for immediate interest:  sometimes entertaining, but not genuinely moving.

Honor requires that others are aware of your honor.  Fiction would have it that this is automatic, that honorable acts are clearly visible to all, dishonorable acts likewise.  Most works involving honor posit that honor transmits itself without barrier, like gravity.  But, of course, this isn’t true at all.  PR is always important, and often absolutely necessary.  Without a Homer, an Achilles is nothing.

Harakiri is a savage story of private honor and institutional corruption, with a clear-eyed view of the requirements of running an enterprise that has honor as an important balance-sheet line.  It was made in 1960, coincidentally the same year as the action of yesterday’s movie, In the Mood for Love, and takes place in 1630, the era when the Tokugawa Shogunate was tightening its grip on Japanese life, and beginning the process of turning the islands into the samurai theme park they remained until Commodore Perry kicked over their carefully balanced house of cards.

The movie, directed by Masaki Koboyashi and written by Shinobu Hashimoto, the writer of the better-known Rashomon, among others, is an impressive work, and must have hit its postwar audience, anxious to remind themselves of their past glories, like a katana blow.  This is no slice-‘em-up samurai movie (though it does have some great fight scenes, one an atmospheric duel, the other a many-against-one fight that is as realistic-seeming as any such unequal contest I’ve ever seen).  This is an almost mathematical analysis of honor and responsibility, and highly recommended.

Hairy, basso profundo, and sardonic, Tsugumo arrives at the gate of the Iyi palace and announces that he wants to use their courtyard to commit ritual suicide.  He is an unemployed samurai, who came of age in a high-demand civil war environment, and is now excess to requirements with a central power that needs enforcers more than it needs warriors.  He turns out to be the second masterless samurai to show up at Iyi Palace—and the samurai managing the palace in his master’s absence, a politic man who clearly knows all about honor and its limitations, tells Tsugumo the story of the earlier suicide, which we see in brutal flashback.  Then Tsugumo tells his own story, seen in flashbacks alternating between rising stress in the courtyard as various events are seen to be intimately connected.

Sharp, well-structured, without a wasted move, this movie was previously unknown to me.  Highly recommended, particularly for anyone wanting to write more adult fantasy, as this manages to mix exciting local color and dramatic action, the daily life of people just trying to get by, and sharp ethical conflict, all in one tight package.

In the Mood for Love: a homeopathic dose of narrative

The family's away for a week, so I'm reading and watching movies.  It's an Asian weekend, for some reason, and first off was Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood For Love (2001).

What's it about?  Primarily, Maggie Cheung's hips.  Also cigarettes and stairways, but mostly the hips, displayed in a kind of dress called a cheongsam, sometimes going down and up stairways, and sometimes while Tony Leung smokes to a romantic melody heard many times during the film.

And that's OK.  I'm totally sold on the dress, and willing to move to Hong Kong, circa 1960, even if I have to listen to Nat King Cole sing in phonetically learned Spanish (the oddly charming popular music heard over several scenes), if only I can watch Maggie go out to get noodles.  Why she doesn't cause a riot every time she does it is beyond me.

There's not a lot of plot, by a narrative addict's standards anyway.  Maggie and Tony (not their character names) each rent a room in adjoining apartments.  Each also has a spouse (never seen), who take up with each other, leaving Maggie and Tony to look longingly at each other.  Tony wants to write narrative--martial arts serials.  He may or may not be trying to lay out some narrative in this relationship (he has them act out possible scenes from their spouses' adulterous relationship), but if so, he fails, what might be a Signal From Fred to the director/writer.  Maggie also has something going on that never makes it to my consciousness, at least:  as one character says, "She dresses that way to get noodles?" What is she trying to do?  She aids and abets her boss's affair, like a good PA should, so does she do the same for her husband?

Kar-Wai is a bit elliptical for me.  The spouses are only caught in glances, and he likes showing only one side of a conversation.  I'd prefer just a couple of grab bars to let me save myself from narrative confusion:  if I hadn't read some reviews, I might have been at sea for much longer.  Did the spouses meet when they moved next to each other by chance, or did they know each other before?  And does Maggie really travel to all the way to Singapore to smoke one of Tony's cigarettes?  And what in the world does Charles DeGaulle have to do with anything?

Worth seeing big screen, I think.  I saw it on DVD, and the scenes are so textured I felt I was missing out.  Plus, the hips would be much clearer.

This excerpt will tell you all you need to know about whether you'll like seeing it.  This isn't an interlude between more narratively active parts of the movie, though there is real dialogue elsewhere, this is the movie:  hips, stairs, noodles, music.  No cigarette smoke here, you'll have to rent it for that.

Next up, the somewhat less elliptical and dreamily romantic Harakiri.

Book response: Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

I picked up Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil, by Rafael Yglesias, on a recommendation I read from Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution, and enjoyed it a good deal.

I don’t usually like books about therapy and therapeutic cures, but this one held me, and, I think, educated me a bit about therapy, its uses, and its limitations. Written in a straightforward, almost deadpan style, I read it with a pleasure I don’t get as often from novels as I used to. It’s long because it has a lot to say, not because the author can’t bear to edit his own work. The various sections of the book have strong narrative lines, and build suspense in a way that isn’t as typical of literary fiction as it should be.  I recommend it also.

And it certainly should have gotten more attention from people who like fun books with ideas, as Mr. Cowen says.  That said, I think Yglesias flubs a lot of the issues the book has put in play when he reaches his third section.

And the book is sectional. The first is a psychological biography of Dr. Neruda, explaining his personal issues and behaviors. The second is about Dr. Neruda’s professional career, centered on the analysis of one particular patient, but also dealing with the issues of the 80s mass child abuse trials and the introduction of psychoactive drugs like Prozac (the book was written in the mid-90s and much of its action takes place a few years before). This section ends with a crisis that propels Dr. Neruda into becoming something like a corporate trainer. He works for a computer design company and solves the psychological problems of its employees.

This section manages to drop all the interesting issues raised in the middle third, and additionally has things like a long technical description of a doubles tennis game, showing Neruda’s control of all things psychological.

I’m not sure why Yglesias made this choice. Neruda drops his life to counsel the various people at this company (two in particular), and drops all the issues he had worked so carefully and subtly to raise for investigation.  What we get in return is nowhere near as significant.  And it's interesting, because writers usually flub the middle third, between setup and denouement.

It might be because Yglesias picked an odd emotional progression:  in the first third, Neruda is deeply involved (it's his own childhood), in the second almost as deeply involved (it's his adult life, and a patient that he cares a lot about), while in the third he's as involved as any committed corporate trainer would be (OK, maybe a bit more than that).  Tension drops.

Now, if someone had rained on the last part of Dr. Neruda’s parade like this before I read the book, I might not have started it—which would have been a mistake. There aren’t enough good books out there to miss this one.  And even the third section suffers mostly by being in contrast to the first two.  Find it, read it, and tell me what you think.

District 9: The epiphany of the everyday Eichmann

I don’t usually like science fiction movies—an odd prejudice, not shared by most other readers in the genre.

I do have a teenage son though, so we went together to see District 9 this week.

As usual, I liked it better for what it might have been than what it was. It had a good vomitcam/found-media look to it, and the scenes were well structured, timed, and acted. The special effects weren’t ludicrous. The landscape and setting were solid.

But, looked at as a whole, the movie was incredibly creepy--and not in the way I think the director and writer intended.

I’m sure you know the story by now. Backstory: refugee aliens get dumped in Johannesburg and everyone hates these lowlife scum but doesn’t know what to do with them.

Story: Eichmann-like resettlement bureaucrat (played with entirely inappropriate charm by Shartlo Copley) who loves his wife and petit-bourgeouis life has something terrible happen to him and, in trying to escape what has happened to him, inadvertently helps someone else. The movie sets him in a hero position, but he is an awful human being.  First he lies and manipulates uneducated aliens to move them to an unpleasant camp out in the desert, eliminating their unhatched eggs in the process. Then, when the bad thing happens to him and his organization turns against him, he murders dozens of his former friends and colleagues without a whimper or sign of grief, and then betrays a friend and tries to kidnap his friend’s child in order to cravenly save himself. Only when that attempt fails does he return and kill many more of his former colleagues so that there can be some kind of hopeful ending (the basic “put the battery into the flashlight” or “attach the gardening hose” denouement that makes up a good chunk of both SF and fantasy).

I’m not even going to go into the it’s-a-dessert-topping-it’s-a-floorwax black ichor that can changes a human into an alien and power a spaceship, all at the same time, or the alien weaponry that litters the landscape that the aliens never use, even against each other.

How do we end up rooting for this guy at all? We marketers know to offer you an unpalatable product, or one clearly too expensive, before we offer you the product we want you to buy, which then seems quite reasonable by contrast. This is known as the “irrelevant alternative”. Character sets in fiction can serve the same purpose. Just as Eichmann might seem better compared to Himmler or Heydrich, so this guy seems better compared to his shaven-headed irrelevant alternatives (one a sinister supervisor, the other an overarmed thug).  And one of them practices a terrible betrayal of his own.

The more I think about it, the more startling the whole thing is.  Do we pay attention to anything anymore?

Military informational graphics I could use

Yesterday, I discussed an interesting informational graphic I cam across in the course of my work.

I read a lot of history.  Unlike some people, I don't focus on military history, but certainly read a fair amount of it. The first rule of any military history book is that there are never enough maps.  Sometimes there are ridiculously few, but even when there are a fair number, they are insufficient.

Partially that's because, no matter what, what you finally have are unit designations moving around on a surface somehow coded for terrain.  I am not an expert in tactic, weaponry, or logistics.  Just looking at those rectangles doesn't tell me much.

I don't even know the range of their weapons (if we're in the modern era).  How far do their arms fire?  What units are in range, which ones are not?

I don't know the effects of terrain.  Can this unit actually see that one, or not?  How long would it take for this unit to move toward the enemy?

I don't know what the various commanders perceived.  What did they think the battlefield looked like?  How adequate were the maps they had?  What did they see?

This may all seem vaguely sissy to real military readers, but, as I said, that's not me.  And this would be impractical for all maps.  That can be expensive, and I doubt the publisher provides a lot of money for that.

Still, it would be fun to see a campaign seen, not only from the empyrean post-game wrap up POV, but also from ground level, so you can follow the decisions as they get made from the information available.

The day job: great informational graphic on a subject you're not interested in

In my day job, I'm marketing director for a financial services firm specializing in multifamily housing.  Yesterday, my boss passed around a great graphic on property values this decade, showing that we've dropped back to the values of early 2004, and that the $2.2 trillion of properties acquired or refinanced since that point have lost value.  Four graphs, locked together in time, with crisp annotations, give you the story (though I could have used the years at the top, as well as at the bottom, to orient me).  Bravo to Real Capital Analytics for creating it.  And using it to market their expertise and services, which I can only admire.

The subject might be of interest to you or not, but I'm asking you to admire the way the information is presented.

I think good informational graphics are getting more common, with, for example, a lot of comment about the work of Megan Jaegerman, here as presented by Edward Tufte, for a long time the best-known proponent of improved informational graphics.  He has made a great living going around the country presenting his observations and recommendations.

The books are good, though not great.  He tends to be unsystematic, so you don't really learn any techniques to create your own.  People who have taken his class tend to find it unsatisfying, because there is no content that is not already in the books.  But, as pretty much a text person, I've learned a lot about what's possible, and what not to do, from him.

I'm putting a piece together to promote a new product (a green capital needs assessment for existing multifamily buildings) and am trying to work out graphics that show its benefits.  I'll let you know how I do.