mim’s blog

I’ve wanted to read one of Don Delillo’s books for a while and finally got around to reading Underworld. It’s long, but I’d say it’s worth it. For a masculine, post-modern book with a backwards-flowing timeline, I found it quite easy to follow, mainly because dates are included and there’s plenty of repetition to piece the stories together.

In a sentence, it’s a story about a baseball, a guy from the bronx, America during the cold war, and waste. The first chapter is most of the story about the baseball, and it’s excellent. Either it was turned into a novella after Underworld was published or it was a novella that Underworld was built around. It describes in astonishing detail the home run hit by Bobby Thompson to win the national league pennant in 1951. I couldn’t put it down.

That first chapter exemplifies my impression of the book, that it is extremely well-constructed. The characters are interesting and deep, and the descriptions are rich if sometimes over the top. It’s a solid novel, you see where it’s going and it takes you there with the inevitability of sunrise after dusk, the methodicalness of a marathoner.

This inevitability, however, eventually became ponderousness and the backwards timeline ended up detracting from the novel. Delillo fell victim to his own writing talent. The beginning sections of the book were so well written and so engrossing, I wanted to know what happened next. But instead, I had to read 700 pages of why it happened, the backstory. There’s something of a reprieve in the epilogue, set in the present, but it’s not much of a payoff. While it is interesting to see the years of a character’s life peeled away, it certainly wasn’t as engrossing as it might have been.

I’d been eying John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man for a long time, so I decided to swallow hard and buy it new. It would have been worth it to get it used. It’s mostly an autobiography, the writing is not great, and Perkins has gone a bit new age-y since renouncing his former career. But the glimpses inside the international “aid” business and the bits of lesser-known Latin American history are the interesting parts.

As he describes it, the IMF and Wold Bank provide loans to developing countries to bring them into the US’s sphere of influence. These loans pay for infrastructure projects like dams, improvements to electrical grids, highways, etc. These projects are forecast (by an economic hit man) to spur massive, sustained GDP growth, which would allow the country to pay off a big loan. When the country gets the loan, it immediately uses it to pay American contracting firms like Bechtel to actually build the project. The local elite-run utilities get their upgrades and the growth forecast turns out to be much too optimistic, leaving the country with an unsustainable debt that must be paid back in favors. Countries and rulers amenable to such a system are termed “friendly”, rulers who resist always manage to be on the plane that crashes in the rain forest. The whole story sounds believable to me and agrees with the Latin American history he describes.

For Christmas, Joanne gave me Naomi Klein’s book No Logo. She described it as a bible for a generation of activists, and I can see why. It’s very well researched, reasoned, and written. Its one major flaw is that being about trends, the examples that it uses are a bit dated even just eight years after its publication. Discussions about the potential for the internet to empower citizens against megabrands sound very web-1.0. The book itself is put together in a very brand-savvy way, with the punchy section headings: no space, no choice, no jobs, and no logo. There’s even a picture of a toddler wearing a No Logo sweatshirt. The FAQ offers an explanation.

The book is about the creation of megabrand companies in the 80s and 90s and the lengths that they have gone to to increase their visibility while simultaneously cutting costs. While it includes powerful stories about the working conditions in the factories where these products are made, they were confined to only one of the four sections. Workers were subject to forced unpaid overtime, public humiliation, sexual harassment, a lack of security, a lack of safety, the constant threat of jobs moving away, and union busting. I expected that to take up most of the book, but the rest of the book tells the rest of the story, including analysis and arguments that were well-reasoned, thorough, and less radical than I expected.

The premise of the megabrand strategy, although not explicitly stated in the book, is that companies like the Gap, Nike, McDonalds, Starbucks, etc will apply as much marketing as it takes to propel their commodities out of the market of commodities. More precisely, since they have generally stopped manufacturing their own products, they purchase commodities, but sell them at premium branded prices. The message seems to be “raise you product above market forces, but force your suppliers to compete.” After all, free markets are only great when they happen to other people.

The idea of commoditization permeates these companies, not just in buying the products that they will transmute, but in their relationships with employees, and with the countries hosting their commoditized production firms. By threatening countries with the loss of factories, they earn concessions in tax abatements, lax labor laws, and negligent enforcement. By threatening manufacturers with competition from other manufacturers, they squeeze everyone else’s margins as thin as possible. By threatening employees with replacement by temps, they depress wages. Of course, the savvy employee can turn the tables and make a brand out of him or herself. If one is no longer a commodity code monkey, but the expert in a particular problem, solution, language, etc, then one can command a brand name premium. This is a great way to look out for number one, but seems less sustainable for everyone.

Although mentioned only briefly, one interesting point she raised was the difference between consumerism and citizenship. By her definition, consumers judge and criticize, knowing the minutest details that distinguish two products, yet always remaining within the bounds defined by the marketing of those products. Citizens, in her terminology, create original thoughts, processes, works, etc. I’d recommend this book to any citizen that wants to read a well researched, but slightly dated account of megabrands.

Joanne gave me Jane Jacobs’ last book for Christmas, Dark Age Ahead. It’s short and I read it very quickly but was a bit disappointed by it, especially after really loving The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The book is well structured, but the generalities it lays out are only supported by very specific examples taken from Jacobs’ area of expertise, undermining them considerably. While it does do a good job describing what a Dark Age is and also describing some specific modern day problems from the realm of zoning, public transportation, taxation, and city economics, it doesn’t connect them together very convincingly. When reading the endnotes, it turned out that most of the interesting modern examples came from Jacobs’ other books, in which they were described in much greater depth.

Jacobs’ definition of a Dark Age is a period of cultural collapse caused by the inability of institutions to adapt to new circumstances. She gives many examples of Dark Ages in addition to the European Dark Age after the fall of Rome, e.g. indigenous cultures in the Americas, the Mesopotamian culture in 115 CE and again in 1492, that caused by the Chinese isolationism beginning in the 16th century, and on and on. Jacobs transforms the question Jared Diamond asks in Guns, Germs, and Steel, “what are the advantages that enable cultural conquerors to win conflicts with losers?” into “What dooms losers?” and then answers it “losers are confronted with such radical jolts in circumstances that their institutions cannot adapt adequately, become irrelevant, and are dropped.” Such jolts include losing hunting land to a conquering culture, overfishing Cod stocks, destruction of forests for lumber and fuel, new technologies, loss of old technologies, and so forth. Perhaps these sorts of issues are discussed in Diamond’s newer book, Collapse.

The flip side of this idea is that every currently vibrant and viable society has been able to adapt to such circumstances. Jacobs argues that our society is verging on losing its viability because of rot in our various institutions. But I would like to focus on successful adaptation and consider Judaism. Various institutions in it have come and gone and we have adapted to these changes, from the losses of the temples and the priesthood in antiquity to the modern Reform discarding of kashrut. In Sunday school we were warned that we needed to stay Jewish and avoid “assimilating,”, but of course Judaism has been adapting to and absorbing pieces of many other cultures throughout its history. Just compare the Ashkenazi and Sephardic branches of the cultural family tree to see what has been added in 1000 years, even while many core ideas and practices have remained. The Sunday school teachers were really insisting that Judaism is still a viable culture.

Jacobs discusses the European Renaissance in which classical culture was resurrected, but instead of being a living culture, it was to be preserved exactly as it had been left. This idea ties in nicely to a discussion I was having with Joanne about immigrants. Her mother’s experience, as an immigrant from Italy, was that first generation immigrants strove to preserve the snapshot of their homeland culture as they left it, even as that culture evolved without them. For instance, immigrants arriving 40 years ago often have 40 year old ideas about how children should be raised, while those who never left the old country live in a way that is closer to the way of life immigrant’s adopted country, i.e. North America.

This book brought some interesting ideas to my attention, but they are probably better discussed in other books.

I recently read Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life by Annette Lareau. I found it on Aaron Schwartz’s list of recommended books, which itself was recommended to me by Neeraj. Lareau is a sociologist and the book compiles the results of a series of case studies in which she observed 10 year olds and their families at home. The book looks at the differences in child-rearing practices between middle class, working class, and poor families, both black and white, and how these practices affect the children’s preparation for high school and the working world. She found two main differences between classes, the way in which children’s time was organized and the way discipline was enforced, and no significant difference between races. The book attracted me because of the view it gives into a variety of families’ lives, in addition to its observations about the effects of race and class on people’s approaches to the world.

The middle class parents raised their kids with what Lareau called “concerted culivation.” The kids had their free time scheduled with lots of activities that were organized by adults, e.g. music lessons, sports, play dates, etc. The kids didn’t have much initiative to play on their own, they frequently fought with siblings who got dragged to their events, and they were often tired out by their schedules. The kids frequently waited around for adults to drive them to activities and sometimes felt bored. They tended to be friends with children very close to the same age, although they also had frequent interactions with adults like coaches and other children’s parents.

The working class and poor parents raised their kids through what Lareau called “natural growth.” The children had a lot of unstructured free time in which they played with other neighborhood children of various ages and genders and cousins that lived nearby. They occasionally participated in organized activities, but generally made up or organized their own games or watched TV. As a result, they infrequently interacted with adults outside of their family or school. They tended to be less tired and bored than their middle class counterparts and sibling relationships were generally more harmonious.

Middle class parents disciplined their kids verbally, by reasoning, explaining themselves, and trying to convince them. As a result, these children had bigger vocabularies, were good at verbal reasoning, spoke back to their parents, and whined. Working-class and poor parents gave directives to their kids, who generally listened and did as they were told. These parents and children generally believed in respecting and deferring to their elders and people in power, not questioning them.

The general result of these strategies is that middle class kids tend to feel comfortable manipulating their elders and institutions to their own ends. Working class and poor kids, on the other hand, generally feel powerless, resentful, and constrained by institutions.

Most of the information in the book was summarized in the first couple of chapters and the last. The rest of the book consisted of the specific case studies, which are interesting in a voyeuristic way, although generally don’t introduce much new information. Studying 12 families clearly doesn’t give a statistically significant sample, but like reading a news article it provides evidence of what’s out there.

A long time ago now I read The Jews in the Roman World by Michael Grant, author of The Fall of the Roman Empire, which I read last year. In all my years of Hebrew school, we never really discussed an objective ancient or more modern history of the Jews. This book interested me as a way to learn about a historical period I’ve read about before, but with a focus on my ancestors.

The book was not what I had thought it would be, but was quite interesting nevertheless. It began with a chapter on the pre-Roman history of the Jews, which was substantially based on the bible, but also included verification from other sources. Basically, there isn’t much written record of that time besides the bible. Grant presents much of the later stories in the bible, of prophets, kings, etc, as historically accurate, for the most part, or at least reflecting events that probably did occur.

The first part of the book then goes on to the time of the Roman Republic and describes the interactions between the Jews and the pagan Romans. The Jews were allowed to govern and police themselves, according to their own laws, almost a sovereign nation. This special separate status meant that the Jews would be seen as outsiders, a reputation that they have maintained, not without cultivation, through modern times. This was the period of the two temples in Jerusalem and so forth.

The second part of the book describes the birth and evolution of Christianity and its eventual separation from Judaism and adoption as the official religion of the Roman Empire. One question the book asks, but doesn’t quite answer is why the Roman Empire eventually became Christian as opposed to Jewish, especially after the persecution of the Christians and more agreeable, although still rocky, relationship with the Jews. I would have liked for it to have gone into more detail on Constantine’s conversion, but that was right around where the book left off.

I had hoped that this book would shed some light on the modern day interactions between group in the middle east by describing the historical origins of the region. Instead, written history just doesn’t go back far enough. The lights come up in the written record and the scene is already set, with the Israelites over here, the Philistines over there, etc. It seems that oral history compressed the events of preceding generations into myth and the written record isn’t able to shed much light on events preceding its inception. It really brought home to me how closely the history bumps up against prehistory and the distinction between the two.

I just finished Hiruki Murakami’s nonfiction work, Underground, about the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin gas attacks. The short version is that five very senior members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin gas on five different trains in the Tokyo subway during rush hour on a Monday morning killing twelve people and injuring hundreds.

After much of the media hype had settled down, Murakami wanted to interview the victims of the attack to see how their lives had been affected. His voice is present throughout, and at points a little overdramatic, although it could have been the translation. After publishing these interviews, he was accused of only giving the victims’ side of the story and so interviewed former members of Aum, which are included as the second part of this book. The victim interviews are organized by the train they were on and each section is preceded by a description of the attackers and the attack.

The victims that were interviewed were very normal and all very different from one another. Their responses varied greatly from those who just wanted to ignore the delays on the train and get to work, to those who realized something serious was happening and tried to help the injured. Without any useful communication or advice from the central subway authority, station workers’ responses varied along the same axis. Very few people had any idea of what was actually going on even though there had been a similar, but smaller scale sarin attack months earlier. Not only were the subway authorities unprepared, but emergency response was also unprepared, sending all of their ambulances to the site that first reported anything without having any available for later sites. Hospitals had little idea that there had been an attack or of its scale and were slow to adopt treatment strategies.

After learning about the attacks and seeing how different victims had dealt with it, I found it interesting just to peek into these people’s lives, to compare their experiences, and to consider the decisions that those people made under duress and in their lives in general. I would like to think that, had I been in a similar situation, I would have helped people get out of the station and would have acknowledged the magnitude of the event instead of attempting to stick to my normal morning routine.

Once I got the basic idea of what happened, and the fact that many of the attackers were very smart scientists, I wanted to know why they had done it. The second, shorter part of the book was made up of interviews with former members of Aum, which answered this question to some extent. The organization began as a school of ascetic yoga, a place to support people’s renunciation of the modern world. People were attracted to it generally because they were unhappy with their lives and reading material published by Aum struck a chord with them, or they tried out some of the exercises and practices and felt significantly better. It did have some substance, although it’s not clear how different that substance is from mainstream Buddhism or yoga.

The organization’s funding was much more cult-like than religious. They collected membership fees, training fees, and the lifes’ savings of the members who lived at the facilities full-time as “renunciates.” For an organization that presented itself as static and above the quotidian, it needed to attract new members to stay financially viable and to interact with the real world to keep its members isolated. Being able to withdraw from society doesn’t seem very realistic, but monks have been doing it for millennia and people from all social strata and occupations joined Aum, lending it some hope of success. Eventually, however, the eschatological aspect of widthdrawal from society overtook the spiritual focus of the group and the leadership took it upon itself to speed the destruction of this world with the subway attack.

I found Aum’s relationship with science very disturbing. Contradicting the stasis of escaping this world, they funded their own research in areas such as seismology, astronomy, and of course chemistry. Many of the upper echelon members were graduates of elite universities and graduate schools, one of the men who released the gas on a train was even a doctor. Most disturbing was that none of them sounded like evil genius types, just normal scientists. For such smart people, they clearly lacked any notion of the consequences of their actions. I imagine a person can’t think of consequence too much to kill indiscrimnantly, but another facet of the attacks illustrates the same point: the attackers made sure to take their sarin antidotes when they noticed any poisoning symptoms, even though they were later arrested and sentenced to death.

The book reveals an interesting cross-section of the (subway-riding) Japanese society of the mid 1990s. I would have liked Murakami to have analyzed events, people, and organizations a bit more, but that wasn’t the point of the book and what he presented held my interest. He tantalizingly describes the gas attacks as revealing rotten parts of modern Japanese society, but avoids actually discussing these faults in detail. I suppose that’s what his fiction is about.

After telling my parents I feel like I’m not really a “herd” kind of person, they got me The Art of Mingling by socialite Jeanne Martinet. While this book solves a slightly different problem, it’s also an area I’d like to improve in, so I started reading it, a bit warily at first. I ended up getting into it, it’s a very fast read. I think that I actually learn this sort of thing best when it’s laid out like this in a book, especially as a starting place for asking more specific questions of people whose skills I admire.

I was afraid it would be cheesy, but the author surprised me with her cleverness, I guess that’s why she’s a professional mingler. The book was helpful in laying out the rules of mingling and cocktail party-style interactions, which I’ve never really understood. In fact, I never really realized there was anything to be understood until reading this book. The things I found most interesting were methods for entering groups of people, strategies for eye contact, and methods for leaving groups. In discussing entering groups of people, it became clear that it’s easy enough just to barge in an introduce yourself, something i never thought of before. It always seemed like something more complicated was required, but having thought about it, I see people do it all the time.

The book also also made me realize that my less formal social interactions could be more free and fun instead of just honest. Martinet provides some ambiguous questions one can use to get some idea of someone’s personality like, “so how did you get here?” When asked such questions in the past, I’ve always been quite literal, but there’s really no need to be. In the future I’ll be more creative with my answers. This all goes back to my thoughts on honesty, apropos this blog.

As embarrassing as it is to admit that I’ve improved my social skills from a book, it was helpful, interesting, and well written.

Back before I got busy with the end of the semester and the beginning of the summer, I attended a talk Oliver Sacks gave at Columbia. His book An Anthropologist On Mars shaped the way I think about the human brain and its abilities. Before reading the book, I knew that psychologists and neuroscientists and neurologists studied the average behavior of average people in order to build models of the mind and the brain. Sacks’ approach, however, is to study the abilities and concomitant limitations of individuals with unique neurology, due to a disease, condition, or injury, exploring the boundaries of neurological possibility. The idea that the examination of a single individual could illuminate so much about the brain packed quite a punch. It seems to be related to what I think the core of philosophy might be, the study of the possible, or the extension of a set of premises to their logical completion, where a single example can define swaths of boundary between the possible and impossible.

Hearing him speak was fun and interesting, but it couldn’t top the excitement you feel when you learn something really new. He’s on the speaking circuit pushing his new book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, studies of neurologically interesting cases involving musical abilities, right up my alley. Columbia invited him to give the talk because, as Eric Kandell described in his introduction, Columbia is trying to attract “public intellectuals”, scholars gifted in spreading their message to the lay public. The idea seems to be that they are recruiting professors with their best work already behind them, and the idea didn’t seem very tempting to Sacks. I’d never heard Kandell before, and his wit impressed me, re-stating the audience’s questions in condensed and humorous ways when Sacks couldn’t hear them.

Sacks’ talk was good, but he interested me more as a person. He came off as extremely thoughtful, kind, caring, understanding, and insightful. After Kandell’s lengthy introduction of Sacks, Sacks spent almost as much time introducing him right back. When you hear someone talk in person, you realize things like, “hey, he has a British accent.” I’ll check out his new book when it comes out, but now I’m more interested in his autobiography, Uncle Tungsten.

I just finished reading Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, which I really liked. I liked the fact that Yurii Andreivich (Zhivago) was both an artist and a scientist. I enjoyed the depth of the philosophical discussions. I felt like I really got to know many of the characters in great depth and could forgive them for their shortcomings. This is especially true for the title character, whose persistence, and depth of both feeling and thought I really admired, despite his entangled relationships with multiple wives. His descriptions of love and his feelings for his two loves were particularly moving.

It was nice for a change to be able to admire characters in a book. In books I’ve read recently by more contemporary authors like Philip Roth, Haruki Murakami, James Baldwin, etc. the characters have few redeeming qualities. Maybe all of the books about admirable people have already been written, maybe it’s too hard for a modern person to be as admirable as a character in a traditional novel, maybe the characters aren’t all that admirable, but just appear to be. Finding such characters appeals to my own search for fictional role models.

Another very interesting part of the book was the look it gave into the Russian revolution. The various characters we meet as children growing up together follow such different trajectories and end up on opposing sides of the conflict. I don’t know how accurate the description is, since the CIA was so enthusiastic about it, but it is quite believable. After the revolution began, but before the new government could figure out how to run the country, people lives stopped. The chaos included the selling of heirlooms illegally for food or firewood and the collapse of the currency. Power moved from the inscrutable aristocracy to the equally inscrutable party elite, who always happened to have plenty of luxury items like butter, sugar, and kerosene.

The changes the Russian people had to make to their daily lives were rather stunning to a modern reader seated in a comfortable and generally stable and safe location. At one point in the book, Zhivago is forcefully conscripted into the revolutionary army. For over a year, he cannot contact his family in any way, and everyone generally goes on with their lives. I get upset if my routine is disturbed for a day, let alone a year and a half. The revolution upset people’ lives for decades, if not forever, I can not imagine what that is like. Well, I imagine it’s like what’s going on in Iraq or the West Bank. Zhivago floated around for years in and out of a medical practice, in and out of his writing and thinking, in and mostly out of his family. It turned out that it didn’t really matter much, he survived, for the most part.

A though provoking book, I hope the movie measures up to it.