My Rational Emotive Elephant

I wrote before on C and C about women and men and rationality. I had been long puzzled, I explained, by the fact that women were taken to be less rational, when on the face of it, women are the less impulsive, less violent, more cautious of the two genders.

What I came to think, on mulling it over, I said, was that while women may be sort of a little irrational about a lot of things, a lot of the time, men are sort of really irrational about a few things -- you know, sex, money, at certain times.

I don't know if that's right. But I was thinking about it again reading this great book by Jonathan Haidt called The Happiness Hypothesis.

Haidt says the self is like an elephant and a rider. Reason can guide your inner elephant, but only through persuasion and training, not really through force. Sometimes the rider knows what is best, but sometimes the elephant does. Haidt describes riding a horse on a scary cliff, and suddenly failing to use the reins to guide the horse at a crucial moment. He figures he's going to go over the cliff, but of course the horse doesn't want to go over the cliff either. The horse doesn't even need direction. He knows which way to go.

I like this metaphor, which seems to me to grant that neither reason nor emotion should always have the upper hand. Sometimes the rider knows what's best; sometimes the elephant does.

Now, it's tempting to say that irrationality is when the rider doesn't control the elephant. But the fact that the elephant can be right means this is too quick. Irrationality is just taking actions that don't make sense. Like steering toward the cliff. Both the rider and the elephant can have this sort of problem.

If that's right, it seems a person could be "rational" either by having a strong rider, or by just having an elephant who wants the right things.

Speaking for myself, I've never felt in much in control of my own decisions in the riderish sense. My rider is there, but he's either really weak or really gentle, as I wrote about before.

On the other hand, I think my elephant has generally good impulses. OK, sometimes he has to be guided away from overindulgence in pleasures, but other than that, he's pretty OK. I am impulsively inclined to be nice to people, to do work that is interesting and useful, to make my loved ones happy, and to keep my home tidy.

Does the fact that I am impulsively inclined to want things that are actually in my own best interest, and that I follow those impulses make me more rational or less? I don't know.

But I will say that some impulses, like the impulse to violence and rape, aren't just impulses you want to be able to control. They're impulses you don't want your elephant to have at all.

Haidt says a bit about retraining your elephant. The main thing is it takes practice. I guess this is what culture and cultural inhibitions were doing for us, before we all decided that total autonomy and chaos was the way to go.

Me, I think a little general elephant retraining might be in order for some of us.

Digital Info: Where Is The Love?

I teach at a University. University libraries offer their students and faculty various kinds of access to electronic resources. Usually, this includes digital access to past issues of journals that someone has scanned in.

I often use such articles from such journals in my teaching. Students are famously paying way too much for textbooks these days, so I want to save my students money by making use of these resources.

It's pretty easy to put a link on their course page where they can download the article. It's free. They can then print it out, or use it on their computer, or whatever. This is almost like a utopia of information accessibility.

I started this process for a new course the other day, and I found that one of the articles is in the right journal -- the library has access, in this case through "Poiesis" -- but for some reason whoever is supposed to scan in the journal never scanned in that issue. From that year there is volume 2, 3, and 4, but no volume 1, which is the one I need.

I emailed my reference librarian, who was kind and energetic, and tried to help. But basically, there is no answer. The reference librarians don't know how to get in touch with Poiesis, and all they'll tell me is that "Acquisitions" doesn't know either.

They're going to scan it in and get copyright clearance, so it's the same thing, I guess. But I couldn't help trying to ask them a few questions: wasn't there a contract between the university and someone? Doesn't that someone agree to provide certain stuff? Isn't the library paying? Can't they contact whoever they are in this contract with, to say, Hey, Guys, You are missing Volume 1?

You know if the library had paid for some book series and never received one of the volumes, nobody would be all, "Oh. Um, guess theres's nothing we can do." They'd be up in arms.

But digital info, it gets no love.

Really, I can hardly believe how slow the move to open source information is. I mean, there are two journals in my entire discipline that I know of that are open source. And what about books and essay collections?

The big thing is "gatekeeping" and CVs. You know, if you just put something online, that doesn't really show you've accomplished something important in your research. If your article is accepted by a journal, or published in a book, it does show you've accomplished something important in your research. That accomplishment shows up on your CV, which is how other people evaluate whether you're accomplishing things, or just posting rantings on the internet.

But surely it's possible to devise some analogue to the open source journal, except for publications of all kinds? You know, where it's open source, but some gatekeeper is making the "acceptance" process meaningful?

You know, the actual publishers aren't going to lead the way, 'cause it's not in their interestes. Probably it will require some initial infusion of energy and capital. No one in education has capital. They do have energy, though. So hey, rich people, if you want to help out with the spread of free information around the world, please! Please help!

Don't Look Behind The Literary Curtain

I was hit hard by the suicide of David Foster Wallace. Not because I knew him personally -- I didn't -- and not because I was a big fan of his books or anything. I've never actually read any of his books. I started Infinite Jest, and wasn't in the mood for it, and been planning to try it again soon.

I guess the suicide hit me hard because he's roughly my age, and because he seemed to have everything a thinking person could want in life.

He was a respected writer, with a good teaching job, where by all accounts his students adored him. He was married. He was obviously talented and intelligent. He had accomplished a lot.

So I guess I found it destabilizing to remember that even with all those things, life can just seem really empty and hollow if you're looking at it in a certain way.

I say "remember" because this is something I know. It's something I try not to think about too much, because it's frightening.

The short New Yorker "Postscript" about Wallace in last week's issue quotes Wallace as having said that great literature made him feel "unalone -- intellectually, emotionally, spiritually."

I was like, "Yeah! Me too! I know exactly what he means."

Indeed, reading novels is one of the main sources in my life for keeping at bay the bad feelings of emptiness and hollowness. In this I contrast reading novels to other kinds of thinking. Some kinds of thinking encourage a kind of up-from-above perspective on life, a perspective from which it's easy to get a kind of vertigo.

You look, and you think, What is the point of all this exactly?

Now, reading a novel for me is like the opposite of that feeling. There's a basic level of "Ooh! What a scoundrel! What's going to happen next?"

But there's also a more complicated set of feelings, that I hadn't really thought to articulate, but you know, Wallace pretty much sums it up. "Not alone." Right. Uh-huh.

Now to me, thinking about literature, rather than just reading it, can sometimes give me the bad, vertigo, feeling rather than the good, unalone feeling. It's just such a reflective activity somehow.

I want to be in front of the literary curtain, being all amazed and entranced, not behind the literary curtain, thinking about how it's all put together and what it all means.

From what I can tell, Wallace's books are the books of an novelist who spent a lot of time reflecting on how it's all put together and what it all means. Maybe all novelists have to do this; I don't know. But I could see how all that thinking would make a person prone to despair.

All this reminds me of an image (from a novel!) that I think about all the time. In Philip Roth's excellent book The Anatomy Lesson, the main character, Zuckerman, is a novelist, and he writes about how tough novel-writing is. Day after day, alone with the typewriter and your own brain, pounding your head against the wall and tap tap tapping on the keys.

Zuckerman says something like, If there were a monkey doing this, and people were looking in at him, in his cage, obsessed, day after day, with the same activity, they'd probably say, "Gee, isn't there something someone can do? Can't we at least get him a companion"?

It's one of my most favoritest things in literature. Makes me feel deeply, and totally, unalone.

Quietly

I was browsing around in the bookstore looking for something to read the other day, and I settled on this book called Adverbs. It's by Daniel Handler, who it turns out, is also the author of those Lemony Snicket books.

For some reason I've never even looked at the Lemony Snicket books. I think I became conscious of them the same time I became conscious of Harry Potter, and I didn't really like the one Harry Potter book I read, so somehow, I don't know, one of those things.

This book, Adverbs, has a lot of funny things about it, things I would have said I would really, really, not like in a book.

For one thing, all the chapter headings are adverbs. You know, Chapter 1: Immediately. Chapter 2: Obviously.

Also, the chapters don't really follow any single cohesive narrative line. They jump around, there are lots of characters, you're not sure when the stories intersect. Or even if they intersect.

Finally, the book is "about love." Right on the back, it says, "This novel is about love."

Just as I'm buying the book, I'm thinking, What am I doing? These all sound like things I will hate.

But I was a little desperate. Regular readers may remember that I'm toward the end of Volume 4 of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, so maybe you're wondering, how could you be desperate for something to read?

Well, the copies I have of Proust are big, hardcover books. Not really the sort of thing you pop into your purse to read on the subway, and not really the sort of thing you want to carry around all day. Also, you may have heard, as wonderful as those books are, Proust can be, you know, a little sad.

So I bought Adverbs. And I got totally swept up in it. I loved it. None of the qualities I thought would be annoying or peculiar were annoying or peculiar.

What I liked most was the simple calm feeling of the whole thing. This book just does its thing. When it's done right it seems effortless but writing simple sentences is very difficult, which is why you don't see it that often.

The adverb I'd use for this book is: Quietly. Even when there's drama, this is somehow a quiet book, in the nicest way.

For example, the last chapter, "judgmentally," begins this way:

"In the United States, where this love story is set, we all get to make decisions about love, even if we're not citizens or if we don't know what we're doing. If you get into a taxi and you fall in love there, no laws passed by the government of the United States will prevent you from making a fool of yourself. If you have someone in mind for the prom, you do not have to submit this person to a vote. If you want to be a lover, that is your call, no matter your mother's advice or what the song on the radio is going on about. The love's yours, for the time being.

If you'd rather be a criminal, though, we have a different system for that."

I don't know why I like this little passage so much, but I do. I love "even if we're not citizens or if we don't know what we're doing," and "we have a different system for that." These sentences are just right for me, somehow.

Maybe they'd be right for you, too. It's hard to say.

Love: always complicated and unpredictable.

Holmes Vs. Watson

Who would you rather meet, spend time with, have as a friend, Sherlock Holmes or James Watson?

I'm assuming everyone's answer is "Sherlock Holmes."

I've just been rereading the stories, and I am struck by how strongly this feeling persists in spite of the extraordinary lengths Conan-Doyle goes to to show what a cold, unfeeling, unfriendly -- actually unpleasant -- person Holmes is.

I mean, it's one thing to want to be friends with someone who is sort of distant, but also human. The feeling in that case is that maybe the friendship would be extra special, or something. You know, kind of exclusive. The person who is friends with no one, being friends with you.

But wanting to be friends with Sherlock Holmes? Weird. I mean, at every turn, we hear about how little he cares for anyone, how completely self-absorbed he is, how utterly uninterested in the little pleasures of ordinary life. A man totally unmoved by beauty, humor, sympathy.

Watson, of course, the opposite. A doctor. A man of whim and feeling. An appreciator of women. But still. Holmes is always so much more interesting.

Actually one thing Holmes does get a little emotional about is the pain of human existence, and I have to say, it's kind of moving when he does. He makes clear that he requires his intellectual puzzles to make the incredible boredom of life bearable.

I can kind of relate to that, and to wanting to drown one's boredoms in cocaine and tobacco.

Still, it's not like being with Holmes and watching him drown his boredoms would make you feel any better about life. Don't you think it would be guaranteed to make you feel worse?

This makes me think that the whole way that people are kind of drawn to people who pay less attention to them, rather than to people who pay more attention to them, is kind of a deep fact about human nature rather than some, you know, little wrinkle that applies only occasionally.

Feminism and Families

I just spent several days in bed resting my back. On the second day, I finished volume three of Proust, and I didn't have volume four in the house. My spirits needed a little light reading, so I ended up with a series of comic novels, including David Lodge's Nice Work and Alison Lurie's The War Between the Tates.

One thing these books both have in common is that they feature "housewives."

In Lodge's book, a businessman and a woman professor are thrown together; part of the story turns on the businessman's relationship with his family; the wife in the family is a stay-at-home mom and the kids are obnoxious, entitled, teenage assholes.

In Lurie's book, Mrs. Tate herself is a stay-at-home mom; and the kids are obnoxious, entitled, teenage assholes.

It's easy to forget how fast things have changed, but they really have, because family life as depicted in these books barely exists any more. These days, even when moms stay home, they have lots of things they do outside the family, the father is expected to function as a parent, and when the kids are teens, the moms are often back out in the world, doing stuff.

Not many American moms send their 15 year-olds off to school then spend the day mopping the kitchen floor.

And I gotta say, reading those books make you feel, Thank God For That.

It's awful. The men are bored with their wives, because their wives are boring. Because they don't do anything. The men regard their children as interlopers, ruined by their mothers' spoiling them, external to their own provenance and care in life. The women, of course, are at the mercy of the men, because they're home all day and not making any money.

When you think about it, it's amazing that model worked as well as it did.

Isn't what we have better? I mean, I know it's kind of too bad that women often "have to" work now, economically. But you know, because a standard of living is a relative thing, the reason this is true is that, well, most women work. And that just seems so much better than the earlier alternative.

Fathers these days, even when they're really busy at work, tend to regard their kids upbringing as partly their responsibility. Mothers these days, even when they're earning less and doing more child- and house-care, regard their own autonomous lives as really important. It's a big improvement.

And you know, even teenagers don't seem as crazy as they used to -- or at least, not in the same way. Maybe I'm naive. But the stereotype these days is of the kid who can't get off the phone with his parents, who talks to them all the time, who is pretty comfortable being part of the family, who isn't spending every minute longing for escape.

I started to wonder if this was maybe related to the feminism business. You know, if your mom picks up your room, washes your gym clothes, then flies off the handle about your taste in music, that's like a recipe for disaffection.

But if your mom, like your dad, is out working for the money to buy you stuff, and asks you to help with the dinner dishes because she's busy, and is too tired to complain about your taste in music, well, that's like a recipe for family involvement.

This is one way I believe feminism has been good for families.

The Long View Of Life

I've been a little under the weather the past few days, so I'm not up to regular standards of originality and so on. Nothing serious: just a few aches, pains, upset stomach, whatever.

After I wrote this post about being a culture snob, and about reading Proust, I thought to myself, "You know, you last read those books over ten years ago. Wouldn't they be worth reading again?" So I started in with Volume 1.

I'm just getting toward the end of Volume 2. And honestly, what I'm struck by is how deeply sad these books are. Even when the story is happy, the reflections are really fucking sad.

Or, at least, they're making me sad. I don't remember feeling quite this way the first time, so maybe I'm just getting old.

One reason they may have this effect on me is that Proust often takes the long view of life: he sees the arc of a human life, and humans, as if from a long way off. Here's Proust talking about some girls he meets as an adolescent. These are girls he worships from afar and is finally is introduced to. He can't help but think of their future selves, and of the future selves of all of us, and of how little we know ourselves:

"I knew that, as deep, as ineluctable as Jewish patriotism or Christian atavism in those who imagine themselves to be the most emancipated of their race, there dwelt beneath the rosy inflorescence of Albertine, Rosemonde, Andree, unknown to themselves, held in reserve until the occasion should arise, a coarse nose, a protruding jaw, a paunch which would create a sensation when it appeared, but which was actually in the wings, ready to come on, unforeseen, inevitable, just as it might be a burst of Dreyfusianism or clericalism or patriotic, feudal heroism, emergins suddenly in answer to the call of circumstance from a nature anterior to the individual himself, through which he thinks, lives, evolves, gains strength or dies, without ever being able to distinguish that nature from the particular motives he mistakes for it."

The truth of these kinds of observations makes me feel really unhappy. So much so that I wonder if my aches and pains and upset stomach aren't somehow a symptom of reading. Isn't that what melancholy is like? The long view of life is tough.

People like to say that there's a kind of moral responsibility to believe the truth. And it's cases like this that always make me wonder how far that's supposed to go. If I believe the truth about my own decay and my own ignorance about myself, I might not have the force of life required for getting up and going about the day. So can I just pretend that today is forever? Or is that irresponsible somehow?

I contemplated giving up the Proust re-reading project, but as that passage shows, even though these books are sad they're also really funny. Just typing out "would create a sensation when it appeared," when applied to a someone's paunch, made me laugh. So in addition to the obvious reasons (greatness etc.), there's that.

Maybe I'll take the books with a couple of advil. I'll let you know how that goes.

No "General System Of Mendacity"?

For various reasons I've been thinking about what happens when people act, or judge, in ways that fail to fit a coherent or systematic pattern. It's tempting to say that there's something funny, or wrong, when someone who always acts or judges in accordance with a policy or system then acts or judges against that policy.

If someone goes around denouncing various behaviors, and gets all high and mighty about it, and then engages in the very same behavior herself, or approves of it in her friends, well, it's really annoying.

Sometimes such a person is judging, or acting, in a way that is hypocritical, or morally creepy. To judge according to one set of standards for person A and another for person B just because you like B better violates the demands of fairness. So there can be a moral condemnation.

But some people have the intuition that it's more than "unfair" to do this -- that it is somehow a violation of reason. It's "irrational" not to judge like cases alike. To which one always wants to say, "what on earth makes one case like another"?

I don't buy this irrationality move, myself. But in thinking about why it's wrong, I was struck by how hard it is to even say what is going on when someone judges in a way that seems "arbitrary," or non-systematic.

Because there are actually several things that can produce the effect, and they're all different.

Of course, a person may just be judging non-systematically and letting their emotions run away with them. That's the ordinary case.

But it could also be that a person has a kind of fucked-up policy in the first place. If someone's policy or system is to judge their friends according to one standard and strangers according to another policy, then they haven't violated their policy when they judge their friends differently. They just have an odd sense of priorities in the first place.

Then, too, a person might be in the process of changing his mind. If I have a policy of judging that something is bad, but then my friend gets involved, I may decide that I was dumb to judge so harshly in the first place, and I might change my policy.

The kicker with the last thing is that not only can I change my policy, I can change it back. How much of this can go on before you start to think the person doesn't really have a policy at all?

In the second and third case, what's irrational?

Imagine R is very harsh in judging drug use: he thinks it is immoral and that the people who use drugs are evil. Then R's nephew gets addicted to drugs and R becomes compassionate and says his nephew is a good kid.

On my three readings, R might be simply allowing his love to get in the way of his judgment, or he may have a set of priorities under which love for family members generally trumps judging them harshly, or he may find that interaction with his nephew changes his mind about drug use.

It's tempting to think we can distinguish the cases by looking at someone's future behavior, but it's not so clear. After all, if R judges a stranger harshly next time, we still don't know whether it's part of a policy or he's just changed his mind back.

While I've been pondering this, I've been rereading Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Proust describes Odette as someone who acts and judges in a way that fails to be systematic: Odette lies, to her lover Swann, when she finds it useful to do so.

Swann appeals to her sense of coquettry: "can't you see how much of your attraction you throw away when you stoop to lying?"

But it doesn't work, because Odette has no policy of lying:

"In vain, however, did Swann expound to her thus all the reasons that she had for not lying; they might have succeeded in overthrowing a general system of mendacity, but Odette had no such system; she was simply content whenever she wished Swann to remain in ignorance of anything she had done, not to tell him of it. So that lying for her was an expedient of a specific order, and the only thing that could make her decide whether she should avail herself of it or confess the truth was a reason that was also of a specific or contingent order, namely the chance of Swann's discovering that she had not told him the truth."

Even with all these details, I'm not totally sure. Is Odette someone with a policy of not lying, who gets carried away by self-interest? Or is she someone with a policy of telling the truth, except in certain circumstances, which in turn rest on self-interest? Or is she someone with a policy of self-interest only: she only tells the truth when it's in her own interest to do so?

I'm inclined to think it's the second one myself: she has a policy of telling the truth except in certain circumstances, which in turn rest on self-interest. In that case, Odette's lying isn't really an exception, at all. It's just part of the program.

We can say that there's something morally fishy about such a life program. But irrational? Not so much.

Not Reading About Not Reading

I just got back from a car trip and even though I had almost no time for the internet and didn't buy the Sunday Times, I couldn't avoid hearing about the, um, news:

"OH NOES no one READS anymore and everyone just looks at the INTERNETS all day and what about WAR AND PEACE and what kind of moron spends her whole day SOCIAL NETWORKING!"

The story is here, but um, to be honest, I didn't read it.

I tried, but I got bored. Isn't this debate getting old? I mean, I love books as much as anyone, and I want them to survive, and I value and treasure the mode of reading associated with books, and so on and so forth.

But there are actual interesting questions about the future we could be discussing instead.

For example. I teach Philosophy. I used to assign some reading, from Hume, or Plato, or whatever, and students would have to go read it and try to puzzle out what it meant. OK, they didn't HAVE TO, but figuring out how not to was hard.

Now, there are a million websites laying out all the basics. Hume said X, he meant Y, in simple language this means Z. Recently, most people think W, though some also think Q.

Now, you could say, "No looking at the internets when doing philosophy homework!"

But that would be dumb. I know this, because I do the same thing my students do. Or, rather, I do the scholarly equivalent. When I'm reading about something, I google a few phrases; I see what comes up; I check out homepages of authors; I read encyclopedia entries.

Of course, that's not all I do. Duh. That's the starting point. But it's incredible useful, it's easy, and it's pretty fun. Not doing it would be stupid.

So what I want is to get my students to do the same thing: use the internet sources on a subject as a starting point for research on some topic, and then have them do work that brings them from there to somewhere else.

It's not totally obvious to me how to make this work. Assignments will have to be structured differently. Probably different readings will have to be assigned. Even class time may be used differently.

I admit that doing things this way, something will be lost. Students will spend less time reading Hume and more time thinking about Hume-related topics, or reading secondary sources on Hume's philosophy.

That is something lost.

But there are great gains. A student who not only is responsible for learning not only the basics, but who also has to learn what's new about some subject, and has to understand what people are thinking about it now, and who has to sort through various kinds of texts and points of view to figure out what is right, is learning a ton.

Obviously this is critical thinking.

To me, the interesting question is, how are we going to restructure learning so that googling something is not generally cheating, but is rather a way of learning stuff?

'Cause really, trying to get students not to use the internet to learn things is really, really, really, just not going to happen.

I Am An Unreliable Narrator

No, no, not that kind of unreliable narrator. In fact, when it comes to objective truth, I'm in there with the rest of them.

No, I'm talking about being "unreliable" in a different way.

I wrote recently about how much I loved Rivka Galchen's novel Atmospheric Disturbances.

But not everyone, you know, loved the book. OK. Fine. I can deal with that.

Mostly some people seem to find it cold. The New Yorker review, by James Wood, describes the book as "original and sometimes affecting."

Since I found the book an emotional wind-tunnel, tornado, and roller-coaster, the fact that someone else found it "sometimes affecting" raises, well, let's just say it raises some questions.

Wood also says in his review that Galchen's novel is best understood as being in the "tradition of tragicomic first-person unreliability." An "unreliable narrator" tells a story that is ostensibly about his perceptions of what happened, but is really revealing to the reader the narrator's own perceptual and psychological oddities.

Wood puts another of my favorite books into this category: The Confessions of Zeno, by Italo Svevo. At first I kind of balked at this classification, because I'd been thinking of the unreliable narrator as somehow alienated from the author, and Svevo makes it clear that he loves his narrator Zeno, and identifies with him, no matter how crazy Zeno is.

When Zeno asks three different sisters to marry him in one evening (sequentially), and settles for his third choice, and then discovers that he is delightfully happy being married to her, I feel Svevo is saying not so much, "See how crazy Zeno is?" as "See how funny and unpredictable human life is?"

I love it when Zeno expresses his amazement to the third choice sister, and she says something like "But didn't you know it would be like this? How can you be surprised?"

Zeno's nuttiness seems in a different category from the alienated kind I associate with the novels of Robert Plunkett. Plunkett's My Search For Warren Harding, and Love Junky both present narrators who are really peculiar, not so much in the universal way of Zeno, but in their own individual craziness.

When the hero of My Search for Warren Harding tells us, with a straight face, that he is a fanatic for Morris dancing, this is not, it seems to me, a way of saying, Oh, we all have our goofy obsessions, but rather a way for the author to wink at us about the character without saying anything about him at all.

So I realized that an unreliable narrator can be alienated, but he doesn't have to be. And Galchen's and Svevo's novels are both unreliable but non-alienated narrators.

And then I had my answer about why I love Atmospheric Disturbances (and Confessions of Zeno) so much:

I am an unreliable narrator.

I am acutely aware of the ways in which my first-person experience of the world just fails to add up to the coherent story I use to get around in it.

I find that while I think I know the reason for some feeling, I then discover I don't. I have my "reasons" I tell myself for the things I do, but I know they're probably not the real reasons, which are just unknown to me.

Living life as an unreliable narrator is lonely. Pretty much everyone else -- including me -- knows only the constructed, presentable version.

It's hard to even explain, or describe, the sensation, never mind the underlying phenomena.

So in addition to whatever else, I read these books with a deep feeling of identification. And the suggestion that somehow the crazinesses are universal -- are a matter of degree, rather than of kind, in the unreliability -- I love it.

It's reassuring, not to be alone in the world. And glimpsing the inner self of the unreliable narrator, it's very moving.

The fact that other readers take these books with analytical distance -- "sometimes affecting! -- makes me wonder:

Are other people not unreliable narrators?
Are other people unreliable narrators but they don't know it?
Do other people know they are unreliable narrators but they just don't care?

I don't know. My best guess is that people would be happy to admit they're unreliable narrators of their inner lives, but that they just don't find this fact very interesting, except in a kind of silly, intellectual house-of-mirrors kind of way.

And I guess that's what leads people to feel that books like Galchen's are "sometimes affecting." Cute, intellectually vivid, but only mildly moving. Hmph.

But. Since this is the logic that ends in people writing letters to novelists and inviting them to lunch, I think I'll just stop these reflections here.

If This Were A Different Kind of Book. . .

OK, so I wrote before about how I don't like to read reviews of novels I'm actually going to read, about how in my view the only thing to say about a book you think is great is: it's good, go read it.

So I read a book last week that was like the most amazing book EVER, and so I'm here to tell you to read it. It's called Atmospheric Disturbances.

Nominally it is the story of a man, a psychiatrist, who is convinced his wife has been replaced by someone who is not her: a simulacrum. I could go on an on about how great this book, and how multidimensional its greatness is, but I want everybody to be able to encounter the book without any distracting thoughts about what someone else said about the book.

I didn't have that opportunity myself. I was reading The New Yorker on the bus, and there was a review of this book, and I read the first paragraph, and I felt myself being drawn in, and there I was, reading, and thinking to myself, "Ack! Don't read! You want to read this book! Don't read the review! Noko Marie, put the magazine down!!"

Because I was bored and tired I didn't have the power to resist, and I read the whole review, and let's just say, understatedly, that it did "affect my reading experience in a negative way."

Having read the book I felt it was safe to read today's review in The New York Times, and of course I was annoyed by it -- of course, because, if you love a book, how can you want to read what someone else -- a stranger no less!! -- thought to say about it in a newspaper? You're setting yourself up for doom.

I won't be revealing anything if I say that part of what annoyed me about the Times review was that twice the reviewer said something like, "If this were a different kind of book . . ." Meaning, a book with the same basic plot but told in a completely different way.

Why would you even ask such a hypothetical question in a book review? Um, it's the book it is; it's not an entirely different kind of book.

I also won't be revealing anything if I quote this brief passage from the book, one that I thought was wonderful:

"Indecisiveness, capriciousness -- these qualities in Rema never irritated me. I've always thought of my own mind as an unruly parliament, with a feeble leader, with crazy extremist factions, and so I don't look down on others for being the same."

Maybe like sea shells, these sentences don't seem so great when they're separated from their fellows. I don't know; I can't separate them out in my mind.

So don't judge for yourself, just trust me. Read the book.

Oh yeah, and don't judge the book by its cover either, 'cause you won't make any correct inferences. I didn't, anyway.

Creative Self-Promoting Nomads

Paul Krugman wrote recently in his Times column about the "Grateful Dead Economy" we're all heading toward.

In the era of cheap and easy digital copying, he says, it's going to become impossible to charge more than a nominal free for anything that can be digitized. In music this is already happening, but books loom on the horizon.

As we all know, The Dead allowed free copying for years, choosing to make their money by touring, performing, and selling stuff. It worked well.

Krugman says that's where we're all headed. As soon as we've all got our digital book readers, writers will have to write just to create buzz for other, lucrative activities, like "giving readings."


(The Amazon Kindle. Um, not a very attractive object, is it?)

He writes, "Books may end up serving mainly as promotional material for authors’ other activities, such as live readings with paid admission. Well, if it was good enough for Charles Dickens, I guess it’s good enough for me."

He may be right about the inevitability part. I mean, I'm all for easing copyright, and I think it's true that the crazed impulse to protect all works at all times is dumb. There's no question that some of the greatest things out there are mixtures of other things, and that trying to model intellectual property in the old "one work, one author, one owner" kind of way is no longer going to work.

But still, Krugman's column seems overly sanguine about the whole thing. I can see some immediate and appalling aspects to the future he is describing.

To make money from live performance requires an insane amount of traveling around. You're telling me anyone who wants to be a novelist or essay writer or scholar is going to have to get one of those tour buses and go from town to town?

A) An environmental disaster.

B) What about the children?

Also, I kind of doubt people are actually going to pony up cash in the necessary amounts to hear readings. I mean, I love novels probably more than anyone I know, and I read a ton, and I wouldn't pay anything to go hear a reading. Indeed, I wouldn't go to a reading if it was free.

I like to read. What do I care about the writer's voice, or presence, or whatever? I've been to one author appearance in my life, and it was Erica Jong, and as much as I love Fear of Flying, it was a total waste of time. The people in the audience asked moronic questions, and she tried to answer them, and she plugged her next book, and signed some copies, and we all left. I was like, "I wasted an afternoon for that?"

Of course, there's also the babe factor. If authors make money from readings, we all know who's going to survive: the tall, blond cleavage-y female writing a book about sex.

Is this really a future to accept with equanimity? No. We may have to accept it, but can't we go kicking and screaming instead?

The True Fantasies Of Young Men

A week or two ago I read this graphic novel, Lily. The picture is above.

It's about a girl who is visited by four of her other selves: three future selves and one past self. They all have things to work out, issues, whatever.

I couldn't help but notice it's written by a guy. And illustrated by a guy.

That's fine. It's a good book, mostly, with interesting characters and a nice drawing style.

But I found myself noticing something about the story, guy-wise.

****Spoiler Alert*****

What happens in the book is that the girl is in high school, and she has a major crush on her dreamboat theater teacher. She's friends with a well-meaning but awkward guy her own age, who is in love with her. It's obvious to everyone that he is in love, but the girl doesn't notice. She's wrapped up in Mister Drama.

A big part of the story is that the 80-year-old self lets on to the teen self that she spent her life alone and lonely, and kicking herself for not pursuing the Nice Teen Guy. The older woman basically re-engineers the main character's life so that she recognizes Teen Guy for the gem he is, and goes out with him.

Um, OK. But I couldn't help but think this was kind of a guy's view of things. . . That girl who won't give you the time of day? Wouldn't it be awesome if she ends up alone and sad because she wouldn't date you? Wouldn't it be awesomer if she could know, now, that she'll end up alone and sad without out, and change her ways?

It also has that element of, you know, the only reason she's not dating the Teen Guy is that she's got her eye on Drama Teacher. You know, like she's just distracted. Sure, show her a good thing, she'll just, change her mind. "Oh, Johnny, now I love you! I wasn't paying attention!"

I know women are often attracted to bad guys and often not attracted to nice guys, especially when they're in high school, but I don't think just pointing out the error, or even threatening girls with life-long loneliness, is really going to change anything. So this book? Maybe kind of a Guy Fantasy. And not in a good way.

How To Read Books Like An Idiot

I was wandering around the bookstore the other day looking for something to read. I had just finished a book by Jay McInerney about September 11 and middle-aged love (The Good Life, it turns out, though I couldn't for the life of me remember the name.

I chose that one because I missed seeing the topic on the cover, and because I had just finished another book by him about models that I really liked (Model Behavior. I couldn't remember that one either. What's happening to me?). I didn't really enjoy The Good Life very much, though I'm not really sure why. The love part didn't really speak to me.

In the bookstore I saw something called "How to Read Literature Like a Professor." I thought, Wow. Wow. Seldom have I ever seen a how-to book for something I have less interest in doing. I don't want to learn to fly-fish; I don't want to day-trade; and I don't care to make high end Japanese food in my kitchen from scratch. But, you know, I can imagine wanting to do those things.

I can't really imaging preferring to read literature like a professor. Literature professors have their thing they're doing, about using literature to understand people, and life, and the world, and so on, but it seems to me that even if using literature this way is profitable and interesting, it's not really fun or pleasant.

Or, let me rephrase that: it's not fun or pleasant for me. Dorky as it may be, I just want to freakin' read and enjoy books. In the old, regular way.

It's getting harder and harder to do. Books are now part of the whole book-club industrial complex, and it's like the publishers are dying to make us all into little literary analyzers. Do. Not. Want.

It's annoying enough when the blurb engages in literary comparisons and "thought provoking" questions. It's worse, of course, when there are actual book-club questions at the end of a book.

This isn't quite the same but the very very worst trend in fiction publishing is acknowledgements at the end of the book. Can we please, please, please stop that? You're there at the end of the book, your mind is all engaged by this fictional world, in a kind of warm bath, when BAM-- the cold water of acknowledgements hits. "The author would like to thank the Zenith foundation . . . for . . . and also his girlfriend . . . and parents. . . and maybe his cat for being cute."

I'm not denying anyone's need to give thanks. The place for this is obviously at the front of the book, where all normal books have the acknowledgements. Before you start reading, who cares? It's at the end that it sucks. It really ruins the whole post-coital reading feeling for me. "OK! All done? We're done! Time to get back to real life! Hop to it sweetie!"

Please. No. Give me a few more minutes under the covers, dude. I'll get up eventually.

Good Books Are Good

I don't have any firm tastes when it comes to genres of novels. Any kind of book, it seems to me, can be a good book.

So when I read Janet Malcolm in The New Yorker saying that the "Gossip Girl" books were good books, I immediately made plans to go out and buy one. OK, books for ninth-graders about high school seniors aren't usually my thing, but hey, any book can be a good book.

I was especially taken by Malcolm's suggestion that the books were simultaneously engaging with, and poking fun at, the narcissism and self-involvement of adolesence. I have kind of a soft spot in my heart for teenagers and teenager-dom. Their over-the-top obsessions strike me as more interesting and admirable than they're usually made out to be. At the same time, those obsessions often creep into the realm of ridiculous. So I was intrigued by the double-sidedness.

I read the first book. It's all about kids who go to some fancy school for rich kids in Manhattan; there's a sort of "perfect" girl, a "striver" girl, some cute boys, an "artsy" outsider girl, and various satellite people. The main action is in the friendship between the perfect girl and the striver girl.

That aspect of the book is good.

(The cover. Wouldn't a drawing or something have been better?)


Maybe I'm a prude, but other things about the books creeped me out -- I couldn't stop imagining what it would be like to read these books as an actual ninth-grader.

There's very little actual sex. There is, of course, lots of discussion about sex, and lots of almost-sex. But that didn't isn't what creeped me out.

So what was it? Here are three things. One: various scenes of the striver girl stuffing her face and vomiting it all up right after. The mood of these sessions is very much "oh yes, business as usual." Indeed, one of the perfect girl and the striver girl's most relaxed moments together come while the striver girl is throwing up. It's familiar territory for them.

Two: the perfect girl comes back from boarding school and everyone's been gossiping about why she had to leave. In what seems to me a very realistic portrayal, the kids decide that she's had so much sex with so many guys in school that she contracted some super-STD and had to be kicked out. As a former reader of The Superficial, I can attest that the having of super STDs is a huge trope for dissing girls these days.

Three: one the gang is a rich boy who wants to fuck everything that moves, and who pushes a tipsy ninth-grader into a bathroom stall and takes off her clothes, and it's only because her hero brother responds to her panicked cell phone call and arrives in time that she is rescued.

OK. I know that eating disorders, misogyny, and date-rape are huge elements of the adolescent experience in 2008. And I know that reading about stuff is a way of understanding it. Sure. And there's always, always the problem of whether evil is there for titillation or there because evil is real.

Still. There's something weird about it here. Sure, the girls' lives are being examined, and sure, the girls all suffer from problems. But the overall effect is of glamour. You know how some problems people have can seem very real and very painful but still kind of cooler and more interesting than life's ordinary problems? That's what it's like.

I mean, the overall effect for me was glamour, and I'm a middle-aged professor. How could a ninth-grader experience them as anything but? So overall it seems to me any critical message is drowned out by the more obvious, "This, this is what the good life is." That's what creeped me out. Especially, I gotta say, the throwing up. What the fuck?

After Gossip Girl I read this book called The Death of Vishnu which takes place in India and is written by a guy who grew up in India and now lives in the US. It was almost unclassifiable to me: a quiet story about the families who live in an apartment building, but also a meditation on death and the nature of rationality and spirituality, but also a kind of cinematic soap opera shot through with Bollywood references. Unclassifiable. Just very good.

The Nature Of Femininity: Two Photos

I've never been into "chick flicks." In fact, romantic comedies of any kind make me squirm, and historical dramas bore me unless they're really great. I'm really more of an action movie sort of girl -- though I have to say that action movies have been declining lately. For instance: I was a big fan of the Die Hard series (especially of the Jeremy Irons villian!) but the Mission Impossible movies I didn't even bother with.

I do read a lot of novels, which may or may not be a girly thing to do. I tend to think of myself as someone who does not have girly tastes in literature, but surveying the last two months of reading suggests a more complicated picture.

Roughly in order, since Jan 1, we have: A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, by Ken Kalfus, Blue Pills, by Frederik Peeters, Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn, How the Light Gets In, by M. J. Hyland (which I blogged about before), Him, Her, Him Again, The End of Him, by Patricia Marx, The Dissident, by Nell Freudenberger, Whatever, by Michel Houellebecq, When the World was Steady, by Claire Messud, Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris (which I blogged about before), and The Futurist, by James Othmer.

Five of these ten books are by female authors, and looking at the list and remembering the books, I'm actually struck by the extent to which those five authors engage themes we associate with femininity: family, female adolescence, love, social worlds, the absence of love.

Not that those are only feminine themes, and many of them are addressed in the men's books. But it's also true that there are some guy-oriented themes in the male authors books that aren't so much in the women's books: work, rage, the state of the world.

All this just to say I was amused by this display at the bookstore last weekend, which didn't reflect my own tastes at all:



All that history! All those clothes! All that, uh, Victorianism! Do women long for the past?

After I left the bookstore I went to shop for a bag -- not a handbag, exactly, but I'm looking for something to carry my laptop in that's cooler than a backpack. I went to a department store, and saw this:


So shiny! So cool! So, uh, robotic! Do women long for the future?

I'm thinking maybe the answer to both of these questions is "Yes."

Take An Ungrateful Whiner To Work Day

Last week I read this really good novel called "Then We Came to the End" by a young guy, Joshua Ferris, who I'd never heard of. I just picked it up wandering around the bookstore.

I don't know for sure, but I think the "we" in the title may be meant to refer partly to the "we" we all were during the late 90's and early 00s. The best thing about the book, I think, is its feeling of immersion in that post dot-com, "downturn," time. Not an easy mood to capture, but definitely a funny one to contemplate.

The dumber blurbs on the book cover describe it as a book about "work," since it describes a bunch of co-workers at an ad agency. Naturally there are some reflections in the book about the nature of work, and about the strange absurdity of "creative" people who fancy themselves original working in an industry that is basically about getting people to become conformists.

Naturally, too, some of the characters decide to quit and do something else. I'm always interested to read about people quitting their careers to take up new ones because 1) I think about doing this all the time and 2) I have the kind of job people usually quit their careers for.

I mean, it's funny: I'm a philosophy professor. It's just the kind of job people fantasize about when they fantasize about quitting their meaningless jobs: I know, I'll quit this, go back to graduate school, and study philosophy! That'll be meaningful and interesting!

It's hard for me to compare since I've never had any other comparable job -- I just worked at stuff like "waitress" and "camp counselor" before I became an academic. So I don't know. But being a philosopher professor sure can be boring, and it sure can seem pointless.

Enough so that, as I said, I often day dream about changing jobs altogether. I know other philosophy professors who do too. So, what jobs do we daydream about?

Lawyer probably tops my own list. After a day of thinking hard and working on some paper that, like, no people will ever read, I crave the effectiveness of lawyering. I mean, lawyers get things done, actual things. Money moves around; custody assignments get made.

Then, too, restaurant and cafe worker are up there. When I am feeling anxiety about teaching, about being constantly evaluated and criticized, I sometimes gaze longingly behind the Starbucks counter. So, you make coffee! Chat with customers! Fun!! Maybe I could own a cafe?

It's not implausible to think there are lawyers and cafe owners daydreaming about becoming philosophy professors, too. There used to be a show on TV where people got to try out other jobs temporarily: I remember one where some finance guy wanted to become a cheese maker. Shocker! It was hard work!

But wouldn't this kind of show be improved if it were more like an actual swap? They could pair people up. You: make the espresso; and you: grade those papers. Like Wife Swap only better.

I realize switching work would be complicated, but you could have a kind of shadow concept. Sort of like "take your daughter to work" day, except it would be like "take an ungrateful whiner to work" day. Here's Joe: even though he has a nice comfy well-paying job, he fantasizes about doing lawn care! He's an ungrateful whiner. Watch as he learns the finer points of mowing, weed-whacking, and leaf blowing!

What We Are Teaching The Children

So this year I've found myself in a surprising number of conversations about Into The Wild, which I've never read (in book form) or seen (in movie form) but because I am fully prepared to have conversations without any background whatsoever I have no problem discussing the finer points of the morality of somebody wandering into the woods in a half-assed way while breaking the hearts of those who loved him.

I am, however, hampered in this endeavor by the fact that one of my favorite children's books was always My Side of The Mountain, where a young kid runs away from home and holes up in some property technically owned by his family and lives off the land. He has a hollow tree and he tames a falcon and he makes his own clothes out of deer hide. It's presented as touch and go, sure, and when, at the end, his family shows up they seem to have been a little upset by his absence, but basically it's presented as a good thing to do. He learns to live off the land. He exercises his ingenuity. He gets in touch with the things that matter. There are, it turns out from bringing this up in conversation, quite a few books along these lines -- I'd like to single out Swiss Family Robinson which doesn't really have anything to do with the point I'm trying to make here (the way in which our most loved children's books are at odds with our cultural mandates) because it's not the family's fault that they're cast ashore. Still, for sheer dreaminess about the potentialities of leaving civilization behind, you could do a lot worse than Swiss Family Robinson, and when someone mentioned it to me in a recent Into The Wild conversation a whole host of things that I had totally forgotten crossed my mind, like them sleeping in a super-elaborate tree house.

It's not just in the realm of "flight into nature" that our children's books take up somewhat odd positions. I mean, consider just how much literature for that age group is told from the point of view of the mouse.

Mice, I am going to come out and say, are gross. Growing up on the West Coast I never had mice in my apartment, but one day in New York at 3 a.m. on a rotten day a mouse came racing across my floor and I realized in an instant how disgusting it is to have something little and furry worming its way around your living quarters. I would not have thought that a mouse would freak me out, but it did, in an atavistic kind of way.

I am not, I think, alone in this. So why do we have so many books (The Rats of Nimh, of course, being the best) designed to convey to us the loneliness and terror of the mouse's view, designed to make us dread the plot-mandated call to the exterminator or, worse, the cat (cats, by contrast, being in real life an animal we often feel affection for).

The simple explanation would be that these books are designed to change the way we look at mice. But I don't think that's true -- I don't think that the author of My Side of The Mountain actually hoped to encourage a bevy of schoolchildren making for the hills. More likely it has something to do with how marginal and small children feel themselves -- that these books are about giving them a sense of possible agency. They are the mice of the universe, smaller than everybody else, and it's a way of giving them a hero to identify with without actually inciting revolt. Or, from a more hardline position, you could think of it as the incorporation of rebellious impulses into a safe space. Let your child read about mice and running away rather than doing it; you read about the same things and it did not actually, when you grew up, cause you to treat all mice as your brothers or to live in a hollow tree.

I don't know -- it just seems strange. On the other hand, the books that do live up to societal norms are usually pretty rotten.

A Female Holden Caulfield, My Ass

I just finished reading this book about a teenage girl called How the Light Gets In. Lou, a poor girl from Australia with a loutish family, comes to mid-western America as an exchange student, dreaming of starting over with a new life and new personality.

It was good. The end of the book was a little weird -- weird in that way that sometimes when you're reading along, caught up in something, your attention is suddenly drawn to the book as a book -- you start thinking about the novelist making choices. That's not usually a good experience. I guess there's no real reason it should be a bad one, but I don't really go for it.

I bought the book based on the cover:


And also based on the fact that it had won some awards, and so on etc.

Two of the blurbs on the back of the book described the heroine as a "female Holden Caulfield," and the summary part grabbed onto that in describing what the book is like. I have to say, I bought the book despite this, and not because of it. That kind of thing is always a turn-off to me in a book blurb.

Of course, once I finished the book I couldn't help reflecting on the comparison. And, really, there's no similarity at all. Lou is needy -- needy on the surface, not just "crying out for help." Lou writes obsequious notes to her host family hoping to earn a little affection and smooth over being a nervous weirdo. Lou pretends to sleep while her host brother puts his hand down her pants. Lou gets drunk, but partly in order to get over her intense nervousness about auditioning for the school musical.

That last detail alone should have stopped these people in their tracks. Isn't it of the essence of Holden Caulfield that he would not be caught dead auditioning for a fucking school musical? Come on, people.

About the most you could say, I think, about the similarities between Lou and Holden are: they're teenagers; they want to have sex; they're unhappy; they drink. They misbehave.

It's not a long list. I mean, really, "they're teenagers" just about covers all the others, right? What -- "Oh, they're unhappy teenagers who act out want to have sex?! Oh, what a coincidence! A female Holden Caulfield! It's almost plagiarism."

In a generous mood, I think, well, OK, maybe there's something about the internal passive-aggressiveness that reminded people of Salinger.

In a paranoid mood, I think something more like, hey, it's only because we sexistly think that girls don't act out their manias that when we see Lou doing so, we have to compare her to that actor-outer-of-all-time, good old Holden Caulfield. It's true: instead of dieting herself into anorexia, or becoming a "mean girl," or belittling her friends, Lou drinks, occasionally loses her temper, goes for unauthorized walks alone outside, and rolls her eyes a lot.

But really: walking outside the neighborhood alone? Holden Caulfield my ass.

Now, I actually would like to read a book about a female Holden Caulfield: a fearless girl who has money, illusions of total independence, an ability to ignore the pain of others, impatience with the entire stupid world, a taste for totally reckless behavior, and crazy mood swings.

Let me know when it comes out, OK?

My Childless Self

I don't have kids. I'm about the age at which, if I don't have biological children now, I'm almost certainly never going to have them.

When I think about that, mostly it seems fine. I mean, I like my life; I'm involved with lots of young people in my life as a professor; although I like children I've never had any special desire to have any of my own. And I know that if the desire should strike, there are plenty of non-infant children waiting for adoption.

It's a sign, though, I think, of the power of cultural women-children whatever, that still, I worry.

1) I worry that I'll wake up one morning, desperate to have children, and in despair that I never did. Isn't that what happened to Wendy Wasserstein?

2) I worry that I'm missing out on one of "life's great things."

3) I worry I'm trying too hard to just have a good time with life.

4) And of course, I worry about who's going to take care of me when I get old.

But then I think, 1) is just borrowing trouble. Who knows what's going to happen? 2) and 3) are both vague and hard to think about specifically, especially since I have no emotive inclinations. 4) is not really a good reason -- all alone anyway -- to bring new people into the world.

So you see I'm basically happy but I fret a bit.

Yesterday I finished rereading The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood. I was ambivalent about it the first time I read it, and I'm ambivalent about it now. It's so, I don't know, straightforward. There's not enough confusion. The types are all so identifiable, and the good and the bad are so basically good and bad.

What's good about the book is its description of the inner narration of the characters. And there was an inner narration in there that suddenly made me feel much less worried and conflicted about not having kids.

Roz is a middle-aged woman with various desires and disappointments. Roz has two wise-cracking teenage girl twins. Reflecting on her dreams of grandmotherhood, Roz thinks, "What grandchildren? Dream on Roz. The twins are too young and will anyway probably grow up to be stock-car racers or women who go off to live among the gorillas, something fearless and non-progenitive."

"Something fearless and non-progenitive." Ha! That made me feel good. That's my new model for adulthood. Stock-car racer and woman living among the gorillas. Indeed.

Sign me up.