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Ben A. |
Ben H. |
Doug |
Later |
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Throw away your books, your language tapes, your Monet posters. To understand France you need only understand this story.
Last week the French government announced a "Christmas bonus" of 150 euros to its unemployed citizens. There is no law compelling it to do so, but the Socialist government started the "bonuses" five years ago, and apparently the French constitution lets the prime minister make generous quarter-billion-dollar gestures like this when the spirit moves him.
"Oh those crazy French," you say with a knowing smile, "only they would give a Christmas bonus to the idle."
Wipe that smile off your face -- you don't even begin to understand these people. ... until you understand the public reaction the bonus caused.
"We want 500 euros" is the title of this story, and stories like it soon covered all the newspapers. Spokespeople for the unemployed spit on the government's money (though not so much as to render it un-depositable) and demanded a more than threefold increase in their Christmas bonus over last year's amount. A protest march was scheduled for today. If I hadn't had Vietnamese class today, I might have joined in with my own banner. "I tripled my pinball scores and red wine throughput this year! I deserve more!"
[12/3/02 13:26] |
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I also read, and enjoyed, Myers' Atlantic essay. I was particularly tickled to see him focus critical ire on the exact section of White Noise where I stopped reading.
As with all criticism, however, one wants to evaluate Myers based on his friends, as well as his foes. We know Myers despises De Lillo (testify!), but who does he like, and why does he like them? His essay makes this hard, although he does make a handful of predictions. My n = 1 sampling of this
group did not inspire confidence. His plug inspired me to read Caleb Williams, a dud.
If you want to hear Myers' take on how the novel got to its current state, read this interview. It contains, among other riches, the perfect summary of post-modernism: "no other literary movement in history ever spread so much boredom in the name of playfulness." He also makes the excellent suggestion that only babes like Arundhati (sp?) Roy warrant photographs on the dust jacket.
And doesn't the convention of author photographs really describe the fix we're in? These people want to be stars, Artists with a capital 'a'. It's this self-conception that drives the need for the MFA, a bogus credential of artistic aristocracy. It also helps to explain why we get such lousy books, as the novel shifts from a story meant to entertain into an occassion for self-definition.
[12/2/02 10:15] |
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Yes, I did read Mr. Myers' piece when it first came out on the web. What he says seems consistent with my limited knowledge of contemporary fiction. For those who don't want to read the long article (I found it worth reading), the gist is that the book world awards and promotes novelists who have prettified, tangled, literary styles that mask mediocrity and annoy Mr. Myers.
This article shares the standard fault of the "things were so much better back in my day" genre, which is that things weren't so much better back in your day. Bad prose is always being written. If we haven't heard about older bad prose, that's just because it's been rightfully forgotten. (Also it shares the other standard fault, mean-spiritedness. But isn't this the eternal dilemma of pundits, even part-time amateurs like us: can you be engaging while abstaining from vitriol?)
Myers does one thing better and one thing worse than the average coworker in his genre. The thing he does better is hands-on nitty-gritty dissection of his targets. He doesn't just say Don DeLillo's prose is pretentious and sloppy, he goes in with a magnifying glass and shows the needless repetition and the dangling modifiers and the mixed metaphors. This kind of thing is crucial to making better readers and better writers, and we see too little of it.
What Myers does poorly -- maybe there wasn't room in the article version? Does the book fill this gap, Ben? -- is analyze why literature is going downhill (supposing that it is). I tend to concur with the standard answer: the MFA. A.K.A. Novelist school. The writing styles Myers laments are unnatural, and to propagate anything unnatural you need some sort of institution to keep it going. I would guess that the universities, more than the publishing houses, are this institution. One of the few contemporary novels I've read is Kavalier and Clay, by that guy, what's his name, Michael Chabon. It had a good story underlying it, and I read all however many hundred pages. But the style, the style! You could virtually smell the Teen Spirit deodorant of that perky preppy kid in your English class who memorized bookfuls of SAT words and reminded the teacher that she forgot to collect the day's homework. Nothing in Chabon's world is dry that could be sere. There is no residue, only residuum. Et cetera.
The book jacket says he got his MFA at Irvine.
[12/2/02 05:25] |
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My friend John has provided the following invaluable translation of that disturbing thing Ben A. posted.
Good boys and girls, when watching please turn the lights on in the room and do not sit too close to the screen.
(Sash says Kikkoman)
Title Screen: Soy Sauce Warrior Kikkoman. Fight Kikkoman!
He comes from the Soy Bean planet
The envoy of justice, Kikkoman
[Let me explain... Kikkopunch is Kikkoman's . This punch repeatedly pouring out of his ridiculously developed body has power beyond your imagination. By the way, because he always uses his gloves to make soy sauce, as an added bonus the places where enemies are struck become itchy.]
If you pour soy sauce suddenly [Scroll reads Beautiful Taste Club]
Food gets really delicious. [Ultimate! Supreme!]
Knock off eating out [Sauceman and Vinegarman appear]
Death blast Kikkopunch [How dare he? To Vinegarman? I will not forgive him!!!]
[Cat ponders "Which should I use"]
On fried eggs... It's soy sauce!
Thank you Kikkoman!
Show me, Show you [shoyu is soy sauce in Japanese]
Kikkoman, Kikkoman
Show me, Show you ["Good boys and girls, don't imitate this" message as he rides the soy fish.]
Kikkoman.
He comes from the Soy Bean planet
The cool dude, Kikkoman.
Soy sauce is good for you [as smokes cigarette]
It disinfects too!
Sauces? Ketchup? They can't hold his jock.
Death blast Kikkobeam!
[Cat faces eggs again]
I said on fried eggs it's soy sauce!!!
[Hangs cat] That's not right Kikkoman.
Show me, Show you
Kikkoman, Kikkoman
Show me, Show you ["Good boys and girls, don't imitate this" message as he lies naked with Dragongirl.]
Kikkoman, Alright.
[11/26/02 17:52] |
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Back from long weekend in Nice. Dao has this theory where if it's winter at point A, and point B is farther south than point A, then at point B it is sunny and 75 degrees. This theory led to January's disastrous Seville trip (I freely admit my bad attitude's role in the disaster) and contributed to this Nice weekend, where except for Friday it was as rainy and cold and nasty as Paris. However, we still enjoyed it because we got to hang out with friends. Zoe came down from Turin with her new Italian boyfriend who was great and drove us to all these ancient mountain villages whose sea views would be spectacular if you could see more than five feet through the rain and clouds. The rain plus the seasonal closure of the arts-and-crap stores left few options besides enormous three-hour meals, of which we had a couple. After these meals you're so stuffed you can't do anything except go see a movie or something. We went to see the latest Bond flick where he battles the monsters of a lisping Jesuit paleo-geneticist: Dinothaur Dei.
Also hung out with our Polish friend (naturalized French as of Friday) whose mom and stepfather housed us. Her stepfather is pure French, by which I mean not only not Polish, but actually right out of Flaubert or Victor Hugo. If my limited knowledge of French literature does not deceive me, the French Country Doctor is an important stock figure. He's enthusiastic, progressive, charming, talkative, respectable, up on all the newspapers, full of opinions that he loves to share and debate, an author of numerous books and articles, a champion of Progress, happy to bring Progress to the provinces, but occasionally wistful that he's not at Progress's Parisian heart. Well, that's our friend's stepfather. He's seventy and retired and maybe one of the last incarnations of this type. It was very enjoyable having dinner at their place, and very instructive when he launched into another typical behavior of Frenchmen of a certain age. "I'm not a racist, but ... " he began (really!), and then went off on les juifs. I think what prompted him to start was our discussion of Le Monde, whose editorial policy he found too pro-Israel. That this is comparable to calling Pravda pro-business is a good indication of how radically weird this sort of French antisemitism is (it's not to be confused with the synagogue-burning antisemitism of unassimilated Arab youths here). It's a good indication of how it seems to come out of nowhere and plop down paradoxically in otherwise intelligent minds. If he had just said the Jews care too much about money, okay, maybe you could chalk it up to run-of-the-mill resentment. But he seemed to have less of this resentment than most French people. And when I pressed him (not to scold, which as a guest in his home I wouldn't do, but just to look for some answer to this puzzling psychological phenomenon) to specify what really displeased him about Jews, he didn't say anything so ordinary as "greed". He started talking about the wonderful human spririt of Western art masterpieces like the Mona Lisa and how the Jews in the twentieth century somehow squelched this tradition. Wow! Dredging up the Degenerate Art charge at this late date is like raising the Monitor -- or the Merrimack, I guess. To witness it is spooky yet thrilling.
Growing up in Michigan and Pennsylvania I basically never saw any antisemitism, and figured it was just some kooky old European disease, like rheumatism, that you could be sent to Karlsbad to mineral-water away. The only people I heard talk bitterly about The Jews were a handful of Lithuanian-Americans. Thankfully nobody in my mom's family, which came over from Lithuania, is among them. But I'm still revolted and staggered by it when it happens. By and large the Lithuanians are a cheerful, friendly, energetic, practical people. There's a Lithuanian-American character in David Sedaris's Naked who has all these positive traits and is perhaps the most sympathetic character in the book ... until she starts going off on The Jews. How can this hatred possibly be so strong as to survive the decades and the generations and thousands of miles of separation from the Old World?
I sometimes speculate that human nature has a measure of hatred in constant need of a target, some victimizable Other, and then go on to argue why The Jews are particularly well-suited for this role. In the Mid-Michigan of my youth, the Out groups to be scorned and mocked were Wolverine fans (or Spartan fans, depending on where you were sitting) and Republicans (or Democrats, again depending). Often the dislike was visceral, irrational. So sometimes I let this analogical explanation put my mind at ease: I understand irrational hate; I've seen it myself. But then I think: No. If a Mid-Michigan family moved to England, their grandchildren would not still be seething decades later about those MSU fans or those slimy Republicans.
By an amazing coincidence I find (now Tuesday morning) that Lileks' post today is on exactly the same topic (but from a Minnesotan rather than French perspective). He comes to the same conclusion about antisemites as me, namely incomprehension, but of course he puts it better: "It?s like discovering your brilliant neurosurgeon is a flat-earther. Huh?"
[11/26/02 05:06] |
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Ok, Ben, I know it's been a while, but I want to take a bit of your weblog bait. On the front page of the New York Times is another of their occasional journalistic threnodies about "the health care crisis." And within one paragraph, the Times revealed how this crisis may have more to do the personal choices than cruel economic forces.
The Times spins a tale of woe about the MacPherson family, whose materfamilias lost her job and with it "free" health insurance. According to the Times, this stroke of bad luck dumped them into the Limbo of the Uninsured. But read on:
"Although her husband earns about $75,000 a year, construction work is seasonal and they could not be assured of enough income every month to pay for health insurance." To insure only their daughter would cost $270 per month, but apparently subtracted from $75,000 they would be left too poor to feed themselves. I mean, come on. Let's get real. Do you think the MacPherson's have cable TV? Two cars?
But let's not lose sight of the MacPhersons' painful plight. Explains the Times of our suffering heroine: 'Then their daughter came down with strep throat. "That was rather humiliating, being in the doctor's office without insurance," Ms. MacPherson said. "You become very obvious to everyone."' The lack of health insurance did not bar them from access to the doctor's office, apparently. (Maybe Mrs. MacPherson actually shopped around, or asked the doctor to prescribe generics, for shame!) But what is access compared with the loss of status from not having health insurance?
Let's face it, in a very real sense, a lot of people are choosing cable television over health insurance. That's their right, since each of us has his own set of indifference curves. It may even be a rational calculation, given the underwriting margins of health insurers, a buyer's insider knowledge of his health status, one's level of savings.
That, as the Times mournfully reports, a "surprisingly" large fraction of uninsured people have incomes in excess of $75,000 should lead them to question their own ready model of a health care "crisis" provoked by "unaffordable" health insurance. I'm sure the typical $75K-income household has plenty of discretionary expenditure that could be cut in favor of health insurance. But these families choose otherwise. We may not view the choice as wise, but isn't it their right?
Now, it becomes a problem if we find that those families are "free-riding" on the rest of us. Do they show up at emergency rooms and wangle care without paying? Well, on the evidence of the MacPherson example, I should say not, at least with respect to non-catastrophic care. It may be the case, though, that the taxpayer picks up the cost of their catastrophic care. I'd be curious to see the statistics on the cost of catastrophic care for people outside Medicare (i.e. not oldsters) and outside Medicaid (not poor enough to suffer from all the povery pathologies). I suspect we are talking about fairly trivial amounts of money, though one can't be sure without running the numbers.
Ultimately, a voluntary health insurance scheme will serve two broad functions. First, it allows consumption-smoothing: if you unpredictably get very ill and require expensive treatment, you don't pay any more than if you were well. You don't need to cut back on consumption to pay for medical care. Second, it serves as a savings vehicle. Predictably, as we get older, we'll get sicker, and some sort of lifelong plan of level(ish) premiums would enable the accumulation of assets to cover our sicker later life. However, for the second function to work, you need to have a very long-term relationship with the insurer, not unlike in the case of life-insurance. So yes, to the extent health insurance is job-tied, our system is going to have a hard time providing this second function. However, we've dealt with that problem by instituting a payroll-tax-funded Medicare system, which in addition to the two functions of a voluntary system, also embodies the ubiquitious principal of income redistribution as well. So here's, the deal: if voluntary health insurance in this country really just serves as a consumption-smoothing device, well, some people may be willing to live with a little more volatility. Where's the crisis? Maybe among the working poor, who really can't afford insurance and have jobs that don't provide it; but the truly abject have Medicaid.
Look, i make substantially more than $75K. If i had a choice (and ignoring for a moment the tax-favored status of health benefits, which is a legitimate issue that needs addressing), I would ask my company to cancel my very generous insurance plan (which has bought me about $200 of care in the last five years) and give me the money instead. I'd spend a little of it to buy excess coverage (maybe anything above $20K a year in expenses -- which would cost very, very little). There is a strong economic rational-agent argument for believing that the wealthy would shun traditional health insurance. Getting someone else to bear volatility for you is expensive, not to mention all the administrative costs of insurance (claims processing, underwriting, fraud, etc). If you have a lot of wealth, underwriting a certain $ amount of volatility does not entail much utility loss. You also probably have other, higher-return savings vehicles available to you (speaking of the savings function of insurance).
So why is the Times harping on the $75K -income cases? It's pure advocacy. They want a single-payer system. And they know that the fastest way to build support is to frighten their readership, which happens to be relatively affluent.
[11/25/02 07:38] |
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On CGI
I spent last night watching another CGI-drenched enterprise: the new Harry Potter. I found the computer assistance most effective in the quieter, more deliberative cinematography -- the swooping journey through a computer-augmented castle, and the panoramic shots of an invented landscape. The blue screen action scenes, by contrast, were duds. I couldn't connect with any of the action. Harry chased by spiders, Harry vs. the giant snake. Ho hum. And reading your post, I recalled responding in a similar way to the last Star Wars: enthralled by the computer-generated scenary, numbed by the action scenes. (of CGI-generated characters, it is best to say nothing).
Bascially, CGI creates great visuals. When it's employted to recreate the glory that was Rome, or a floating city, I adore it. But an action scene shouldn't exist as mere spectacle -- it needs to have some kind of tactical logic, and instill a real sense of tension. Thus, I'd argue that CGI damages movies not by removing limitations, but by seducing directors into focusing on the wrong kind of excellence.
[11/23/02 22:26] |
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The New York Times calls Die Another Day, "perhaps the most satisfying Bond movie since The Spy Who Loved Me." I blew $10 on it last night and am sad to report that it was rather the most wretched Bond movie since "Moonraker." I think it is not merely coincidental that Die Another Day represents the first movie in the series to take advantage of CGI technology. Untrammeled by the limitations of physical depiction of special effects and stunts, the Bondmachers have strayed from the familiar territory of the wildy but cleverly implausible to the stupidly and tritely impossible.
It brings home again the idea that art -- even schlocky pop culture art -- requires limits to thrive. If Bond is restricted to performing only those stunts a living, breathing stuntman can perform, or using gadgets whose functioning can be simulated on film by real physical phenomena, then the writers need to think carefully about what predicaments the super-spy finds himself in and how he can get out of them. Drunk with the power of CGI, the script consists of one preposterous can-you-top-this peril after another, from which Bond escapes in one obviously and insultingly transgression against the laws of physics after another. Creativity shines through in the surmounting of limitations. Think about video games -- I know i've had this discussion with you guys many times. The art of Atari combat, the simplicity, purity and elegance of the game play is grounded in the formal limitations of Atari. Today's video game designers can indulge in all sorts of striking graphical richness, but also tend to rely on it to obscure the dreary familiarity of the underlying game play. Oh, goody, another game with protagonist POV where one m oves through a maze-like space blasting opponents apart! Well, at least this time, you can distinguish different organs in the exploding viscera of shot-up enemies!
[11/23/02 11:40] |
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These Flash videos demonstrate something deeply, deeply screwed up about modern Japanese culture. I can't put it into words, though, because the evidence is so bizarre as to defy description.
Do you remember when the media "cicadas" all buzzed in unison that Japan was poised to take over America? That we had won the War but lost the Peace? That one national treasure after another was falling into acquisitive Japanese hands? A few years later those some acquisitive hands were dumping the trophy properties like hot potatoes, at a fraction of their purchase prices. As a matter of BOP accounting, the American consumer got all sort of neat VCRs, TVs, and cars from the Japanese and paid for them by inflicting realized investment losses on the Japanese providers of those goods.
Now that Japan is flat on its back, the media monotone drones on about the country's deep flaws, and clucks its tongue over its twisted cultural idiosynchracies. No comment, of course, about the monitory, scolding reports of Japan Inc's inherent superiority they used to beat us over the head with.
[11/20/02 12:08] |
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I think the economists' term of art is "costly signaling." A tremendous efficiency gain could be realized if the admissions departments of all the big B-schools (and maybe colleges, too) were to split off and might ply their craft independently. Instead of granting admission, they could grant certification, saving the successful applicants the bother of spending two years learning about the Five Forces, the Experience Curve and other such worthless tripe.
What I think bears emphasis, though, is the symbiotic nature of these arbitrary status displays. It doesn't only boost Jack Grubman's ego to have his daughters at the ultra-exclusive pre-school; but the pointless exclusivity lends a certain unearned dignity to the business of pre-school education. Likewise with "exclusive" hair-dressers, personal trainers, interior decorators, publicists, etc. They derive status from their wealthy or powerful clients, by forcing them to compete for access. Of course, the only reason the clients compete is because it is through constant empty competition that they renew their own status.
[11/16/02 10:24] |
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Economists, I know, regard elite degrees primarily as signalling mechanisms. The ne plus ultra in this regard, must, I am sure, be Business School. A degree from HBS or Wharton indicates first and foremost a person driven and capable enough to get in. Only the most deluded employer could imagine an MBA curriculum instills $120k of skills.
One can argue about the larger utility of MBAs and elite colleges, but in competitive pre-schools, I believe we've reached market failure. A fund manager taking a week to write essays (essays!) represents dead-weight loss at its most basic.
Adendum:
The case you mention, Ben, defies parody. If Tom Wolfe put it in a novel, it would seem contrived.
Adendum on previous topic:
Deb adds: otolaryngolygist = ENT (ear, nose, & throat)
[11/16/02 00:00] |
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A friend on the board of the American Library in Paris has asked me and Dao to help tune up their web site. So, wishing to take a peek at its current version, I tried "alp.org". Nope. This turns out to be a "Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit and Transgender People of Color Communities". Stick that in your pipe and parse it. Ben, Ben, help me out here ... what could "Two Spirit" be?
As for the Jew-hating bard that Harvard stiffed (sorry I'm skipping Ben A.'s very useful checklist of political faults; maybe I'll have time to reply this weekend), I think Ben H. has showed a real tin ear for the power of verse. Its power is to concentrate language into nuggets of wisdom, to knock speech out of its customary ruts, to grab you by the brain and shake you. Any two-bit commentator, and web log blowhard like us, can compare his least favorite group to Nazis. But to say that West Bank settlers are "worse than Nazis" ... that, my friend, is poetry.
[11/15/02 12:44] |
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A Pox on Both Their Houses!
Or, weblog bait. A summary of what each side gets wrong...
Education
Right
Drain monies
Resist revenue sharing between rich/poor districts
Willing to cede elements of curricula to organized (kooky) interests
Left
Captured by teacher’s unions, unwilling to subject educator performance to scrutiny
Endorse pernicious educational fads (self-esteem, etc)
Willing to politicize classroom instruction
Poverty
Right
Lack of obvious interest in making the life of the poor better
General stinginess
Left
Architects of responsibility-free welfare sub-culture
Reluctance to make distinctions among the needy, command behavior in exchange for support
Not generally aware that interests of working poor and non-working poor usually at odds (and that these groups despise each other)
Health Care
Right
Needed to be dragged kicking and screaming into the debate
Largely present negative rather than positive proposals
Again, don’t get the sense they care much about poor people
Left
Will bust the budget to pander to the elderly
Very hostile to market solutions, and members of the market (Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Big Crutches)
Unwilling to focus on core areas of need (the poor)
Social Security
Right
Lots of dishonesty about transition costs, likely returns of private accounts
Not willing to cut benefits, raise retirement age, or increase payroll tax
Left
Lots of dishonesty about solvency of the system, dangers of private accounts
Not willing to cut benefits, raise retirement age, or increase payroll tax
Crime
Right
Not the source of exposes into failures in the justice system
Generally reluctant to believe brutality/corruption exists
Left
Not really on the whole law-and-order bandwagon
Often soppy about criminals
Defense
Right
Not always discriminating about spending
Left
Make mock of uniforms that guard them when they sleep
Foreign affairs
Right
Prone to isolationist binges
Needlessly insult allies, non-aligned countries
Dismissive of humanitarian intervention
Willing to prop up thuggish allies
Left
Hostile to the exercise of American power
Enamored of corrupt international institutions, willing to erode American sovereignty
Generally indecisive, reactive, and whiny
Willing to tolerate/placate thuggish enemies
[11/12/02 18:12] |
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Greetings from the dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica, Argentina. I flew down to Buenos Aires for some business, and after 11 hours of and several thousand miles of flight, I arrived at my hotel only to find a salesman who covers me standing outside. I take this as an indication either that I know too many people or that the world has become too small.
While my meetings don’t start in earnest until Monday, I decided to come down today to do some “on the ground” research. The fund is looking at lending to a big property company down here – they own several of the largest shopping malls in B.A. – and to a meat and leather exporter which also operates hypermarkets. I spent the whole day running around from mall to mall and hypermarket to hypermarket.
As I walked into the first hypermarket, I saw a storehouse of data about relative prices. Milk, meat, fish, toilet paper, cleaning products, weed-whackers (lots of these, perhaps weeds are a particularly vexing problem down here). But suddenly a dismaying thought struck me. I haven’t shopped in an American supermarket in years. I don’t even allow food in my apartment. I can’t tell within an order of magnitude what a pound of meat or fish costs, what the average American (or even New Yorker) pays for a quart of milk. Don’t even get me started on weed-whackers. While my ignorance is total, Bernie cooks and takes care of the associated provisioning out in California. Alas, in the vastness of the hypermarket, my cellphone could not get reception. The world is too small, but the hypermarket is too big….
[11/9/02 17:48] |
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Ben A. |
Ben H. |
Doug |
Earlier |