Morozov, Lanier, and the intelligent reading of books and critiquing of ideas

Much ink has been spilled in recent weeks about two new books, To Save Everything, Click Here by Evgeny Morozov and Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier, taking very different approaches to criticism of our collective behavior on the Internet. Of course, I would like nothing more than to devote serious time to the reading, discussing and perhaps reviewing of serious books. Yet, life being what is it, I only make this happen on summer vacations anymore; and I’m glad a good friend, somewhat quaintly, gave me for my birthday a paper copy of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile, so that the sheer material presence of the object might get me to read it, much like a house plant gets you to water it ora a dog to walk it.

But back to Morozov and Lanier. It was only thanks to a tweet by Esther Dyson that I discovered and read this evening a thoughtful piece about the two books written by Maria Bustillos, and I decided that Lanier’s gets the higher spot on my summer reading list. Then I found that Bustillos also wrote a long and worthwhile article on Udacity and MOOCs, which I recommend you read if you liked my short and techno-optimistic blog post about online education last month. Then I had do do some work, and then I have to get some sleep – you know what I mean. If you don’t have time for the books or the debate, do read the articles.

Lanier’s book has two covers, so he gets two pictures in this post. I do prefer the UK one, with its delicate blossoms.

On elections

From Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, a few thoughts on the 2009 Indian elections.

Parliamentary elections would be held at the end of April, and middle- and upper-class people, especially young people, were registering to vote in record numbers. Affluent, educated candidates were coming forward with platforms of radical change: accountability, transparency, e-governance. While independent India had been founded by high-born, well-educated men, by the twenty-first century few such types stood for elections, or voted in them, since the wealthy had extra-democratic means of securing their social and economic interests. Across India, poor people were the ones who took the vote seriously. It was the only real power they had.

Getting past Coetzee. An essay by Hedley Twidle

In his life of VS Naipaul, Patrick French remarked that it might be “the last literary biography to be written from a complete paper archive”. I sense something similarly historical about Coetzee’s achievement, a power of pre-internet concentration and application that has now been eroded in Version 2.0 people. A mental discipline that can stay trained on things for longer than other minds, without flinching; that can push thoughts, or sentences, one step further than they would normally go.

A quality of, in a word, seriousness. Coetzee says somewhere or other that, for a certain kind of artist, seriousness is an ethical imperative. So why do I find myself wanting to be so unserious in his august presence? To dwell on all those things that cannot be related in the polite literary profile, or the rigorous academic paper. Such as: what does it mean to be obsessed, perhaps unhealthily obsessed, with an author? And: why don’t black South Africans read or talk about Coetzee? And: why am I beginning to think that his work should not be taught at the University of Cape Town – or at least that a 10-year moratorium on Coetzee studies should be declared?

While I was traveling in South Africa, I happened to read in the Financial Times the winning piece in the 2012 Bodley Head/FT Essay Prize, by South African author Hedley Twidle. It is in turn ironic (“Droves of students arrive from Wisconsin and Ohio to spend a term abroad, filling the Coetzee sign-up lists”), surprising (“Coetzee, the staff informed me, is a regularly shoplifted author”) and clever (“…a question that all literary scholars should put to themselves on a daily basis: “How can you know anything about literature if all you’ve done is read books?””). Read the full piece here: you won’t understand anything more about Coetzee than you already know, the unknowability of the subject being among the postulates underlying the essay. But you will learn a bit about literary obsessions, seriousness, unseriousness, and a country that is “as irresistible as it is unlovable”, South Africa.

The imperative for literary fiction. David Foster Wallace

… Many of out best-known C. Y. [Conspicuously Young] writers seem content merely to have reduced interpretation to whining. And what’s frustrating to me about the whiners is that precisely the state of general affairs that explains a nihilistic artistic outlook makes it imperative that art not be nihilistic.

It’s always a deep, deep pleasure to read David Foster Wallace, only colored with sadness at reading him posthumously.

The coming elections and you. The Victory Lab by Sasha Issenberg

From a LibraryThing interview with Sasha Issenberg, author of The Victory Lab. 

The most effective way of turning a non-voter into a voter—several times more effective than any other technique that’s ever been measured—is to send a citizen a copy of her vote history, the record of elections in which she cast a ballot, and her neighbors’ vote histories. Then tell her that everyone will get an updated set after the coming election. Behavioral psychologists call this “social pressure,” the idea that people adjust their behavior to conform with what they think are others’ expectations. In 2006, a few researchers ran a field experiment and found that sending such mail had a massive impact on turnout—but they also got death threats from people who accused them of blackmail.

This is an instance where the knowledge was shared, and, in fact, the study was published in a political science journal. (It’s proven to be one of the discipline’s ballsier experiments to date.) But political campaigns and parties have been wary of using it for fear of being labeled bullies by voters. Over the following years, political operatives and academics found ways to soften the language, while still exerting subtle social pressure and impacting voter turnout—and these results are likely to hit millions of mailboxes before Election Day.

I had thoughts about election analytics back in 2007, but I thought Google would be a more visible player. Here is my old post with two rather wrong predictions.

Sasha Issenberg is the author of The Sushi Economy; his next project is a book on gay marriage, titled The Engagement.

Dark summer reading

I was not blown away by the book I read this summer. I need to plan better next time.

I ended up mostly engaged by crime fiction, even if it’s a genre I am not an expert in. The most satisfying read was The Whisperer by Donato Carrisi, an intricately constructed novel with some truly haunting moments. I also enjoyed two novels by Glenn Cooper, Secret of the Seventh Son (aka Library of the Dead) and Book of Souls. Secret of the Seventh Son starts out as a serial killer novel, but then branches out into something else, on a metaphysically bizarre premise that is further pursued in the second book of the trilogy (the third one, The Librarians, is forthcoming; you can see from the titles alone why I would dig this sort of stuff). The author is quite an interesting character: he majored in archaeology in college, then went to medical school specializing in infectious diseases, then became a pharmaceutical CEO. And now he writes metaphysically bizarre books.

I read two surf crime novels by Don Winslow, but they did not have the epic scope of what I think is his masterpiece, Power of the Dog, which I recommend you read right away if you haven’t yet.

Last summer, I was enthralled by Stephen King’s 11/22/63. Many people don’t read King because they think he writes in the horror genre. Even when he does, there is so much more to it; I’ve always loved his ear for the spoken language (if you are a foreign student of American English, you can hardly do better than read Stephen King for practicing your idioms). 11/22/63 is a novel about time travel – a topic very few writers have tackled successfully – transporting us in the United States of the late ’50s and early ’60s, revived in painstaking detail, to follow a protagonist who sets himself the task of undoing the Kennedy assassination. It is a marvel, and it is what I missed this summer, when there was no new big Stephen King novel, and nothing else as juicy as this.

Things that happen to you

You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else. [...]

It is an incontestable fact that you are no longer young. [...] This is one example of the various things that could never happen, but which, in fact, have happened. [...]

Physical pleasures and physical pains. [...] Innumerable instances, not a day gone by without some moment or moments of physical pleasure, and yet pains are no doubt more persistent and intractable, and at one time or another nearly every part of your body has been subjected to assault. Eyes and ears, head and neck, shoulders and back, arms and legs, throat and stomach, ankles and feet [...]

Paul Auster’s Winter Journal is a memoir, a largely non-chronological catalogue – narrated in the second person – of places he has been to, women he has loved, apartments and houses he has inhabited, and various bodily indignities he has suffered, most notably panic attacks. Its opening – and this may not please the author – echoes, or is echoed by, the title story in another book published this month, When It Happens to You by Molly Ringwald:

When it happens to you, you will be surprised. That thing they say about how you knew all the time but just weren’t facing it? That might be the case, but nevertheless, there you will be. You will feel like you have been kicked in the stomach, that your insides have just separated to make room for something big.
You may not cry at first. You may wonder why you don’t cry, and you may even feel like there is something seriously wrong with you. You might look at yourself as though you were a character in a book or a movie and you might think to yourself ‘Why isn’t that woman crying? What’s wrong with her?’

Ringwald’s book  - “a novel in stories” – is the surprise literary find of the season, a set of interlocking stories not unlike a Los Angeles Olive Kitteridge. The “it” here, of course, is the discovery of your partner’s marital infidelity. Auster, too, writes about his inability to cry: in his case, to mourn his mother’s – or anybody else’s – death:

[...] and still no impulse to cry, to break down and mourn your mother with an earnest display of sorrow and regret. Perhaps you are afraid of what will happen to you if you you let yourself go, that once you allow yourself to cry you will not be able to stop yourself, that the pain will be too crushing and you will fall to pieces, and because you don’t want to risk losing control of yourself, you hold on to the pain, swallow it, bury it in your heart. [...] Your eyes water up when you watch certain movies, you have dropped tears onto the pages of numerous books, you have cried at moments of immense personal sorrow, but death freezes you and shuts you down, robbing you of all emotion, all affect, all connection to your own heart.

You didn’t think Auster would make this much use of the word “heart”, did you?

Back to Molly Ringwald:

When it happens, to you, you think that you might die. You won’t. This isn’t the kind of thing that you die from, but at night when you can’t sleep from all of these details that keep you from resting and you’re gasping for air, you’ll wish that you would die. You’ll wish that it would happen by accident so that your children won’t have to live wondering why you would ever do such a thing. During the worst nights, you will find yourself plotting.

And then one day, you’ll stop. [...]

And then then you will cry. And then you won’t stop crying.

Towards the end of bookstores. That terrible sense of finality

When I was a student, I browsed though bookstores in awe at the world revealing itself to me within those walls. Two days ago, on the escalators at the Barnes and Noble bookstore in Union Square, New York, I was hit by the terrible sense of finality that comes with visiting a place for what might very well be the last time. I made it a point to visit all four floors of the bookstore, café and magazine racks included, because I thought: I may never see a four-floor bookstore again. The next time I am in New York, there may very well be a clothing store here. And any other bookstore with four floors I may encounter in my travels is doomed. I am sorry but I want to be factual: the large cathedral of the non-specialized bookstore is over.

The writing has been on the walls, of course, for years. I have browsed through many fewer bookstores since Jeff Bezos started international shipping. I have watched museum bookstores convert into design and gift stores. Even airport bookstores, once the refuge of the bored traveler, have become much less necessary. It obviously isn’t true yet, but the other day at Barnes and Noble’s I felt like I could choose any book on any of the four floors and have it downloaded onto one of the devices in my backpack in less than fifteen seconds. (I also felt tempted to add a Nook to my gadget collection, but didn’t. I left the store without making any purchases.)

It is pointless to bemoan the disappearance of the trusted bookseller, supplanted by the faceless algorithm. It is just a fact. The other day, as I prepared to leave the store, I felt as if I were standing in an emptied house that I knew I was never going to return to. Or kissing a loved one for the last time.

The Hunger Games, from dystopian novel to Hollywood movie

I have a friend who is seriously into the fantasy book genre, and I usually take her book recommendations with a pinch of salt. But I am seriously into what I call the end-of-civilization genre, and critics refer to as the “post-apocalyptic” or “dystopian” novel. So, when my friend recommended the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins – supposedly, a “young adult” work, no matter how bleak -, I read it and enjoyed it as shamelessly as Harry Potter fans have enjoyed the J. K. Rowling series.

I learned today that the first book of the Hunger Games trilogy is now a movie. And the actress in the lead role, Jennifer Lawrence, comes with serious credentials as teenage heroine from the gritty, dark Winter’s Bone, which led her to an Academy Award nomination for Best leading actress (who won that year? Oh yeah. Natalie Portman won), and which you should watch by all means if you haven’t yet. District 12 is, after all, a fictional version of the Ozarks. Enjoy.

Junot Diaz on writing, on luck and on women

I tore off a page from the South China Morning Post’s Post Magazine when I was in transit in Hong Kong, because it carried an interview with Junot Diaz, the author of one of the best novels ever written about the long shadows of dictatorship, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

On writing:

When I was 26, I published one story in one magazine which was seen by one agent, and I hit the literary jackpot. [...] When I sold my first book [the short story collection Drown], in 1995, I was working at a job making photocopies and living in an unheated apartment in Brooklyn. I quit my job right there. I just walked out. [...] My novel took 11 years to write and it was hell. There are people who come under hardship and do everything possible to make their lives easier. I came under hardship and decided to make my life, and those of the people around me, harder. [...] Basically, I bit off a story that required me to become a different person to finish it. The guy who conceived of Oscar Wao is not the guy who would have been capable of finishing it.

On luck:

I look at my childhood and nothing proves to me more the utter randomness and arbitrariness of what we call success. I hear that word and in my mind I flash to every single person who was better than me and who, through a complete accident, wasn’t served what I was served. I’m here because of an incredible amount of luck. You’ve got to work hard and you have to turn everything you’ve experienced into some kind of vision, but none of that is enough. 

On women:

I would never have been a writer if I hadn’t gone to college and met feminists. The feminist project is absolutely essential to writing good literature. A large part of the planet is encouraged to view women as partial human beings. You can always tell a good writer because, whether they’re male or female, they effortfully resist that idea.