The State of First Things, May 2010

A. Must-Read Articles
1. David Hart, "Believe it or Not"
This is a short version of his recent book Atheist Delusions, which is a review of the New Atheist literature (Dawkins, Hitchens, et. al.). He starts:
"I think I am very close to concluding that this whole “New Atheism” movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County."
His analysis is quite perceptive, and one has to admire him for wading through the tiresome drivel passing for Avant Garde Atheism these days. It is quite sad that the New Atheists can't even be as good as the Old Atheists. Hart does conclude with the fact which cannot be emphasized enough--if one wants to be a serious atheist, one must first wrestle with Nietzsche, who more than anyone else willfully faced the horror of a world in which there is no God.

2. Goldman, "Quantum Leaps"
A rather interesting review of George Gilder's work, in particularly his latest book, The Israel Test. Gilder is one of those authors I want to like, but always just annoys me in the end--he is far too glib. In many ways, he is less an articulate thinker and more an enthusiast who writes well. Goldman does a great job putting Gilder's recent book in the context of his earlier books to show it is just one more example of poorly thought out enthusiasm masking as rigorous analysis. It's been a while since I read Gilder with attention; Goldman convinces me a) I haven't missed much and b) I should feel in no rush to reintroduce Gilder to my Reading Life.

B. Worth Reading
1. Weigel, "Truths Still Held"
This was interesting in that sort of way that makes you say "That's curious" before moving right along to the next article. Weigel look back at John Courtney Murray' s We Hold These Truths, and shows that it was a rather perceptive and prophetic analysis of the problems arising in American democracy starting in the 1960s. Murray identifies the inherited, foundational truths of the American Proposition: 1) God is sovereign over the nations; 2) All government exists by and with the consent of the government; 3) The state is distinct from society; and 4) Virtue is necessary for freedom. None of this is novel with Murray, but Weigel does a nice job showing the problems that arise when each of these propositions no longer is widely believed. The major limitation of this essay is that Weigel begins by noting that Murray is one of those people who has been claimed by all sorts of people, so Weigel claiming him now leaves one wondering just how true to Murray Weigel is.

2. Wyschogrod, " A King in Israel"
The general proposition that Israel should reestablish itself as a Monarchy is interesting--this is the first time I have seen an argument for Monarchy in a long time. (By the way, I became a Monarchist during Clinton's Impeachment hearings--I figured if we are going to elect buffoons as President, there isn't much harm in just having a buffoon for a King , and at least then I won't have to lament the fact that the leader was actually elected--there is something nice about the idea of blaming the incompentency of the Executive on a bad gene pool instead of on the limited judgement of the voting population. Incidentally, nothing since the Clinton Administration has caused the seductive appeal of Monarchy to lessen.) I was really annoyed at this article in the end, though, when Wyschogrod backs off arguing in favor of going and getting a new King in Israel and instead just argues for having an elected Regent to stand in for the absent King. Seriously, if you want to advocate monarchy, why not just advocate getting a new King?

3. Eastland, "O Homer, Where Art Thou?
A review of Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey: A Novel. Notable only because it made me think that Mason's book might be worth reading, emphasis on "might be." This is now on that list of books that if I keep seeing favorably mentioned, I'll pick up some day, but if I never hear of it again, it will vanish into the parts of memory dedicated to forgetting.


Generally, in this series I haven't listed all the mediocre articles or the bad ones, but this issue had one of those articles that really, really annoys me. Riechert's "Bitter Pill: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Contraception" was literally sophomoric. It was posing as rigorous economic analysis, but it was instead painful to read. The sad thing is that I don't really disagree with the conclusions, but the analysis itself is the sort of thing that gives Christian Economists a really bad name.

When is a Paternalist not a Paternalist?

On the grading front: the end is in sight.

One housekeeping item from the Spring semester is a review of Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge, which I assigned in my intro to microeconomics course. Sunstein now works in the Obama Administration in a job designed to implement the sort of polices discussed in this book, so we have here a policy-relevant book. Well, at least it would be a policy relevant book if it had any, actual, well, policies to implement. And therein lies the tale.

Nudge is a hybrid book--one part discussion of some of the behavioral economics literature, one part recommendations for how to solve all the problems in the world. The behavioral economics part is good--behavioral economists are those people who go around and run and experiment on 25 undergrads to find out what makes them happy or act in the bizarre ways that undergrads and normal humans behave. Some of the experiments in that literature are fun, and thinking about happiness always makes me happy, so I like it.

But, as a straight review of the sort of thing behavioral economists like to do, there are better books (Ariely's Predictably Irrational, for example). This book gets it's kick by reframing the question. They start by talking about Choice Architects--people who frame choices for other people. Choice Architects are everywhere, literally everywhere--every time you do something which influences other people's choices, you are a choice architect. Thus, for example, if you ask someone what they want to do, you are being a choice architect--the way you ask that question can influence the choice being made. (Do you want to go see that surely most excellent and wonderfully reviewed movie Iron Man 2, the sequel to one of the best superhero movies ever made, or some movie called something like Letters to Julia or Juliette or Julie or some such name which is like the names in Julie and Julia and which I gather is some sappy romance like lots of other sappy romances, and everybody seems to hate it or at least they probably should hate it because it is probably just some grown-up version of Twilight, but there are probably lots of good seats available in the theater?) In other words, being a Choice Architect is easy; nothing too shocking here.

So, starting with this banality, Thaler and Sunstein proceed to advocate for framing all sorts of choices--dozens and dozens and dozens of choices. Underlying all of it is an argument for, and this really is the term they use, Libertarian Paternalism.

And Libertarian Paternalism is the punchline of the book. Thaler and Sustein are paternalists--the know what is best for you. But, they don't want the government to tell you to do what is best for you. They want the government to construct your choices in such a way that you will choose what they know is best for you, which, in order for this whole thing to make any sense, must be different than what you think is best for you. So, everything is nicely libertarian because the government doesn't actually require you to do anything. And everything is nicely paternalistic because, well, Thaler and Sunstein are going to trick you into behaving properly.

So, how do you pull off this nice trick? Ah, glad you asked. I have no idea either. The whole thing comes apart when you start reading the details. Credit cards companies trick people into paying too much in interest. So, the government will nudge you into using your credit card more responsibly by making the credit card companies use a bigger font on the statements showing you what you are paying in interest. Then, with the bigger font, you will notice you are paying lots of interest and suddenly you won't use your credit card so much. Simple, right? Except, one might wonder whether the bigger font on the statement will make any difference at all, in which case the nudge may not actually do anything. Then what? Even bigger font? Red ink? (As an added bonus, if you look at your credit card statement, you'll see that there is a box with a bigger font telling you about interest payments--you can thank Sunstein for that bigger box--and if you hadn't noticed it before now, well, you should send Sunstein a note telling him that his nudge didn't work too well since you didn't even notice it.)

Ultimately the libertarian paternalism shtick is relatively harmless in itself. But, what happens when a libertarian paternalist finds that the libertarian part doesn't get people to act in the right manner? We'll find out in a year or so when Sunstein and Obama get really frustrated that you still aren't acting in the right way.

All that being said, the book is thus a mixed bag--the behavioral economics part is mildly interesting, some of the nudges are cute, but in the end, it is not a very satisfying book.

Addition by Subtraction

In Sports News:

1) I have been a Raiders fan for a long time now. I cannot remember a day when I felt such an overwhelming sense of relief. The Biggest Bust of All Time was just cut. Good riddance.

It has actually been a remarkably good past few weeks for the Raiders; my hopes for next season have skyrocketed. The Russel Saga is over; Jason Campbell is at least an average QB; their draft was fantastic; Hue Jackson sounds like the real deal as an offensive coordinator. And Davis seems to have finally seen the light--what was that about old dogs and new tricks?

Maybe, just maybe, they are a .500 team again. And .500 teams sometimes go 9-7 and make the playoffs. And sometimes 9-7 teams win Super Bowls.

Don't laugh. I can feel it.

2) Clara's team won their first softball game. She has a very good team. The coach is great--he really likes to win, and teaches the girls a lot, but he also realizes it is just a game and is supposed to be fun.

I love going to Clara's games. There is very little that is as relaxing as sitting out on a sunny day watching your daughter play softball.

3. If, given the choice between the Raiders having a good year and Clara's team having the good year, I would pick the Raiders, does that make me a bad father?


In non-sports related news, the last day of classes was yesterday. By next week, the bulk of my grading will be done. Summer is almost here.

The Man who puts Gold in Sacks

We interrupt the Show Trial of Goldman Sachs with this Special Announcement:

Sherman McCoy, a bond trader, heads into his office. The lobby is decorated in a faux English style with trappings so ornate “you could feel the expense in the tips of your fingers by just looking at them.” Immediately on leaving the reception area, Sherman hears “an ungodly roar, like the roar of a mob” and sees the sight of the trading floor: “The writhing silhouettes were the arms and torsos of young men, few of them older than forty. They had their suit jackets off. They were moving about in an agitated manner and sweating early in the morning and shouting, which created the roar. It was the sound of well educated young white men baying for money on the bond market.” Sherman heads for this sight “with relish.” He was, after all, one of the “Masters of the Universe.”

“Masters of the Universe! The roar filled Sherman’s soul with hope, confidence, esprit de corps, and righteousness. Yes, righteousness! Judy understood none of this, did she? None of it. Oh, he noticed her eyes glazing over when he talked about it. Moving the lever that moves the world was what he was doing—and all she wanted to know was why he never made it home for dinner. When he did make it home for dinner, what did she want to talk about? Her precious interior-decorating business and how she had gotten their apartment into Architectural Digest, which, frankly, to a true Wall Streeter was [an] embarrassment. Did she commend him for the hundreds of thousands of dollars that made her decorating and her lunches and whatever […] else she did possible? No, she did not. She took it for granted…and so forth and so on. Within ninety seconds, emboldened by the mighty roar of the bond trading room of Pierce & Pierce, Sherman managed to work up a good righteous head of resentment against this woman who had dared make him feel guilty.”

That's from Tom Wolfe's description of Wall Street in The Bonfire of the Vanities, published in 1987--yes, 1987. Here we are, a quarter-century later and we are Shocked (Shocked!) to discover there is Gambling (Gambling!) going on in Wall Street Investment Banks. Who knew?

And, by the way, The Bonfire of the Vanities may be the best book about Wall Street ever published.

Fed Watching

A trio of book reviews, all about the Federal Reserve.

1. Axilrod, Inside the Fed
Stephen Axilrod is the Ultimate Fed insider, having been on the staff for decades, ultimately becoming the most important member of the permanent staff. He, in other words, knows where all the bodies are buried. So, this could have been an amazing kiss-and-tell memoir, but true to Fed Fashion, it is rather light on scandalous revelations. (Yeah, central bankers are boring, but even still, surely Axilrod knows a few great stories.) The book is organized around the assorted Chairmen for whom Axilrod worked and it does do a nice job conveying the sense of the Chairmens' personalities. Volcker comes off well, Miller comes off as a disaster--but everyone already knew that. The book reads like the reminisces of a retired gentleman, which, oddly enough, is exactly what it is. So, if you care about hearing someone tell tales of monetary policy debates in the the early 1970s, it is a good book. My students were less than thrilled. I liked the book a lot more than they did, which puzzled me at first, but then I realized why. This book has all sorts of details which explained why my old money and banking professor mentioned all the things he did when I took money and banking. Why did I learn about Free Reserves? Now I know--once upon a time, they were the center of a big debate.

2. Wessel, In Fed We Trust
This book was a bit of a disappointment. Wessel is an economics editor at the Wall Street Journal and the book is about the Fed during 2007-2008. So, it could have been amazing. Instead, it stuck pretty close to the narrative one read if one read the Paper during those years. It doesn't seem that Wessel spent much time at all talking to people to get the behind the scenes story--which was really quite disappointing. I did learn a few things, but not nearly as much as I expected to learn. For example, at a minimum it would have been great to learn about the change in Fed policy from Lehman Brothers to AIG--but about why that happened so quickly on that day, we learn absolutely nothing. I suppose this book would be OK for someone who had never read anything about those years, but I can't imagine this is a book anyone will actually be looking at or referring to in 2 years.

3. Ciorciari and Taylor, eds, The Road Ahead for the Fed
This is a useful set of papers mapping out the future of monetary policy and financial regulation. That being said, it is not for the general reader--there is no context for most of the papers, so you actually have to know quite a bit to make sense of the majority of the arguments. On the other side, the book is light on technical details. In short, it is the sort of book designed for students in a class like Money and Banking. It's pretty good in that respect, but I suspect most students will find it a bit dry. The best paper is Hamilton's "Concerns about the Fed's Balance Sheet" which is full of eye-popping graphs (if one is the sort whose eyes pop at seeing Fed balance sheets (which, to be honest, is probably a rather small subset of humanity)).

So, taking all three together, what do we learn? The Fed is a mess. It was a huge mess back in the 1960s, things seemed to be getting better post-Volcker, but the last few years have burst our delusion of Fed competence. Through 2007-2008, the Fed had no idea what it was doing--literally, they did not know what they were doing; they were just trying to do something, anything. And, looking forward, there is no reason to assume they have a plan to get themselves out of the mess they made.

The next few years could be rough.

But, maybe they will get lucky.

Miranda's Utopia

I recently reread Huxley's Brave New World--it was one of the books for my tutorial this semester. It is, in case you were wondering, still a masterpiece.

Huxley's world is often labeled a dystopia, but what interests me so very much about the book is that people call it a dystopia. Consider: What exactly is wrong with Huxley's world? Everyone is happy, very very happy. If they ever aren't happy, they take soma, a pleasant drug with no ill side effects. Everyone loves his job because he has been conditioned since birth, or actually since conception, to love his job. There is no marriage, so there is no romantic jealousy. Everyone is friends with everyone else. Sure, there are a few malcontents, but they are sent off to an island with other malcontents (Iceland, for example) and then they can enjoy their lives living with others like them. Movies have advanced to the point where you not only can see and hear, but also smell and feel the action on the screen--and the plots of these feelies are all designed to make you quite happy. So, what exactly is the problem with this world? It is, after all, exactly the sort of world the Modern Age wants to design. And, yet, everyone who reads it knows instinctively it is wrong, very very wrong.

Defending the glories of the Brave New World is a very merry experiment. It is painfully easy to do. And yet, it is nearly impossible to convince someone that the society is good. Why?

I suspect that the instinctive wrongness of the society is the instinct we all feel that there is more to life than simply being happy. We know that the purpose of life must be bigger than that. Being happy for the wrong reasons is not satisfying. The implications of that statement are rather profound--once that statement is acknowledged, simply saying that something will make people happier is no longer a sufficient rationale for doing it. And that thought leads to all sorts of interesting questions about the Chief End of Man, which are of course the very sorts of questions the Modern Age, the Brave New World in the making, wants to avoid asking.

Which brings me to the most important problem raised by this book: The cover is falling off my copy of Brave New World. So, I suspect the next time I read it, I will have to buy a new copy. Or I can just never reread it and keep my old copy. I think it is probably odd that I am already thinking about the fact that a future decision about whether to reread this book has implications for whether I have to ditch the copy of it I have had for decades. My copy, by the way, is an old paperback which once was a library book, originally checked out with a due date of January 10, 1978, then re-checked out with due dates of 5/30/78; 4/21/81; 12/8/81 and finally 10/12/82. After that, it seems that nobody checked it out, and then I bought it, probably at a library book sale. Now the cover is falling off. It's not quite dead, yet, but I am afraid that if I ever read the book again it will die, and then I will be responsible for the death of my book. I don't want to kill my book, but I also don't want to imagine never rereading it. And, I know what you are thinking--why don't I get a new copy and just keep my old copy?--that just proves you don't understand books--having a book is like having a wife--I can't get a new copy of this book because it would be like getting a second wife. So, if I get a new copy, I have to get rid of the first copy. Now I can do that for other books if the new copy is an improvement over the old copy--that seems like a software upgrade. [Don't worry, my analogy isn't breaking down with dire consequences--my current wife is perfect, so there are no conceivable software upgrades for my spouse.] But, just getting a new book to replace an old, favorite with whom I have lived for decades is simply wrong. So, if I get a new book, I have to bury this one. This is getting really depressing.

Talent, lack of

Tonight, I am going to a Talent Show--one of those amateur kinds where everyone is expected to get up at some point and demonstrate a talent to amuse and instruct one and all. I gather that such an event inflicts fear of stage fright in many, but since I spend my life standing up in front of people, that part doesn't bother me at all. But, nonetheless, this Talent Show has left me seriously worried for a few weeks now.

You see, I have no talents of the sort which are amenable to display at a talent show. It's a little odd. It is not as if I am without talents in general--I can talk really fast while pacing, for example--but nobody would want to see a display of the talents I happen to have. And, I am not alone in thinking I am talentless. I asked my family what I could do--only Lily came up with an idea. Lily suggested I could explain how to make a Martini. (I gave a talk last year in which I explained this to graduating seniors, so that is where she got the idea that I might have some talent in this regard. Rest assured, Lily has never tried one of my martinis.) Now it is true that I do know about how to make a proper martini, but since the talent show is at church, and since there is a subset of the Protestant culture which frowns on alcoholic beverages, and since I certainly don't want to give offense, I am not sure that a demonstration of the making of a proper martini is an appropriate talent to demonstrate. Nobody else in my family could think if anything else I could possibly do for the talent show.

This worries me. Tonight, when I go to the talent show, if I refuse to demonstrate a talent, I am afraid that people will think that I am simply refusing to participate in the general frivolities. I don't want to be the shy guest at the feast of talents nor do I want to be the stern old man refusing to join in the fun and games. But, I really can't think of a single thing I can do other than stand in front of the room and talk, but standing in front of the room and talking is not exactly the sort of talent which a Talent Show is meant to demonstrate. I can also read very well (yes, reading is a talent--proper reading is more than basic literacy, and it is a skill which can be learned and mastered--I am not a master reader, but I am pretty good at it), but I suspect that not many people want to watch me reading. (Though, now that I think about it, if I got up to demonstrate my talent, and just started silently reading a book, Clara and Lily would be mortified, and that would be rather amusing.) Other than talking and reading, I am not sure what else I can do. I guess I can write too, if one likes rambling sentences which have no serious content which would possibly be of interest other than to the person composing the long, rambling sentence for nothing other than the perverse pleasure of seeing how long a sentence can run without violating (a least egregiously) any of the standard rules of grammar while maintaining the semblance (the form, but not the substance) of substance. But, again, such a talent (if such a thing is a talent--Janet certainly would not consider such a thing to be a talent--she seems to view my penchant for enjoying the composition of sentences of the aforementioned type as a species of mental instability) is not Talent Show worthy.

I started this blog post hoping it would decease my worry. Now I am even more worried. I should probably go develop a talent.

Tinker Taylor Scolds or Cries?

When is a book a book? John Taylor's Getting off Track is bound like a book (in hard cover, no less) and sells for the price of a book (a hard-cover, naturally), but the book is really just a long article, with a couple of afterwards thrown in. On the other hand, Taylor's argument is important, and well worth reading for people who want to read this sort of thing.

What sort of thing? Well, the subtitle in true 17th century fashion, says it all:
How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis.

Taylor means that, but it isn't just government in general--mostly it was the Federal Reserve. For those liking details: in the late Greenspan years, the Federal Funds Rate was kept well below the level suggested by the Taylor Rule, causing the housing boom. With no housing boom, no housing bust. With no housing bust, no recession. The recession was prolonged because the Fed thought there was a liquidity crisis when there was none. The recession was worsened because nobody had any idea what the government was doing.

It's a provocative thesis, and I think Taylor really means it and is not overstating his case for dramatic effect. It's clear that Taylor thinks the Fed made some big mistakes; what isn't clear is whether he thinks they were deliberately following bad policies or simply the victims of ignorance about the real state of things.

In the end, it's not entirely convincing. On the one hand, I think what Taylor identifies is probably entirely correct. On the other hand, though, I think there was more to the crisis than this. At a minimum, I think it is hard to dismiss other things which were contributing causes, e.g., the mortgage loan structure post-savings and loan meltdown, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac and the Community Reinvestment Act (the impulse behind it, if not the Act itself), the tremendous leverage ratios at the investment banks, moral hazard resulting from the Long-Term Capital Management episode. Sorting out which of these things are primary and which are secondary will take some time.

Oddly, Taylor's book is both good and hard to recommend--if this is the sort of book you will enjoy, you've probably already read it or have it on your bookshelf waiting to be read.

A Good Deed for the Day

In contemplating how long I could live in my blog, post-demise of actually bodily self, I started thinking of posts I could write--the obvious starting place was all the books I have finished in the last few weeks, plus assorted sundry topics which have arisen in that time. I stopped when I came up with over 10 items without really thinking at all. I am seriously behind in recording the events of my life.

I finished John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy. (The last volume was The Big Money.) As I may have mentioned, I wanted to read this book as a part of my tutorial this semester because it was famous and I had seen it mentioned as "The Great American Novel."
After finishing the trilogy, I feel safe in saying:
1) It is not the Great American Novel, and
2) It is not a Great Book.

It's an OK book--Dos Passos can write well when he is at the top of his form, and the book just moves along without ever becoming a painful experience. He has some talent. Sadly, he put his talent at the disposal of the Great Hope of Marxists everywhere--the coming Socialist Revolution in America. I noted after the first part of the trilogy that the book seem like a tract arguing that Socialists are good, but it was a bit ambiguous. By the end of the trilogy, the ambiguity was gone.

The closest comparison for this trilogy is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. The Jungle is famous for it's gruesome scenes of the meat packing industry, but only about half the novel is about the meat industry, the rest is a generalized argument for the glory of the Socialist Revolution. Dos Passos' book is much, much better than Sinclair's, so if one wanted to read a tract explaining why capitalism is bad and socialists are good, Dos Passos is the one to read out of two. But, then again, Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is even better if one wanted to read something in that genre. (The Grapes of Wrath is my least favorite of Steinbeck's major novels, though.)

The problem with Dos Passos' book is that it is too ham-handed. Every character in the book meets a miserable end, and since there are a lot of characters in a 1400 page trilogy, it is a lot of miserable ends. Nobody is happy. The socialists are unhappy because they are losing, but at least they are doing something noble. The non-socialists are unhappy and lousy human beings on top of that. Would it have killed Dos Passos to have had just one character marry, have kids, and lead a pleasant life? Does it really seem impossible for him to believe that anyone was actually having a decent life in early 20th century America?

One curiosity--the Library of America (my favorite publisher, by the way--I love the way Library of America volumes feel and look when I read them) has an edition of the U.S.A. trilogy, which means it will still be published in a century and it is now on a list of the Great American books. Yet, it is hard to imagine that anyone would want to read this book in a 100 years--the literary style simply isn't all that great, and the message already seems like a period piece. So, someday a poor unsuspecting reader is going to start this book, thinking it must be a Great Book, be thoroughly disappointed, and abandon the reading of Great Books. I feel very sorry for that person. And so, for the first time, I hope my blog lives on for 100 years, that said person in despair Googles the phrase "Why would anyone consider U.S.A. a Great Book?" and finds this post saying:
It isn't. Once upon a time, as hard as it is to believe, some people liked this sort of thing. But, do not despair. Read something else and renew your faith in the wonders of literature.

Now that I have done a good deed for the day, helping out some person 100 years from now, I don't feel so bad about skipping all the other work I should have been doing right now.

Stayin' Alive

1. Yes, I am alive.

2. The observation in Item 1 was prompted by the remark of one of my students (Hannah) that she had been wondering about my possible demise by the lack of blog posts of late. Now, this presents a bit of a curious puzzle. I knew I was alive. But, if the proof of my existence is in fact a blog post here, then is it possible for me to fake my own life in the event that my actual life were to summarily terminate? People have tried to fake their own death--there was a really interesting article about this in WIRED magazine a few months ago (I got some good tips)--but, is it possible to do the reverse, to die and fake one's own life? I think all I would need to do is write up a series of observations on life, book reviews and other such material. If I had a program that would post said musings on a semi-regular basis, for how long could I fake my own life before someone realized I was, in actual fact, dead?

3. Now that I have raised the possibility in Item 2, is there any evidence that this isn't simply my first post-mortem blog post?

4. On a less morbid note, the last couple weeks have been busy, and I am still trying to figure out when it is OK to indulge in the luxury of writing diverting ruminations and thereby avoiding work which is less diverting but probably more essential.

5. For example, one of the activities alluded to in item 4 was the Philadelphia Society meetings this last weekend in, mirabile dictu, Philadelphia. It was a pretty good conference--not great, just pretty good. Michael Barone was the most interesting speaker. Barone has been studying US elections forever, and writes the Almanac of American Politics. It is safe to say he knows as much about the 1st Iowa district and the 32nd California district and the 14th Texas district and so on, as anyone. His take on the current state: much to his surprise, the Democrats are in serious trouble, very serious trouble, this November. He thinks the Health care bill may turn out to be the biggest electoral disaster for Democrats since the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. He seemed genuinely surprised by this development--the country seems to have turned on the Democrats with a vengeance. He also seemed genuinely surprised by the Tea Party folks, which is really interesting--since he studies such things all the time, it is pretty amazing that a movement that large could emerge with no evidence of its Coming to Be being apparent before it thrust itself into the National Conscience.

6. It is really hard to believe that the song in the title of this post spent 4 weeks at the top of the Billboard charts.

7. And, yes, I owned the album. I don't think I owned the single, but I did own the album.

The State of First Things, April 2010

Next in a continuing series

I. Must Read

1) Armond White, "Do Movie Critics Matter?
White is the chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle, and this was a speech he gave at their annual awards banquet, at which, as the author's note states, "With movie luminaries such as Meryl Streep, George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Mo'Nique, Kathyrn Bigelow, and others in the audience, White's remarks were met with stony silence." That description alone made the article worth reading. The article is an argument for the importance of movie criticism, which is interesting because it answers an important question--why bother having movie critics? Most movie criticism, as White notes, is simply a poor substitute for film advertising. There is not much movie criticism for sophisticated thinkers. (And no, what passes for film criticism in the Academy doesn't count.) Good movie criticism would require art appreciation, not the fan-boy enthusiasm for movies, yet few movie critics are well-versed enough in the liberal arts to offer thoughtful criticism. I really noticed this when I read a year or so ago, the Library of America's volume American Movie Criticism, which was a best of movie criticism from the earliest 20th century until today. It was really pretty interesting--some of the critics in that volume were literate, thoughtful and generally quite perceptive. It was possible to imagine a substantive intellectual disagreement with those authors--something beyond "I liked that movie more or less than the critic did." I assume thoughtful movie critics still exist out there, but they don't regularly show up in any forum I generally read--though I do like Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal. (James Bowman also reviews movies and puts the reviews on his web page--and I do like James Bowman, but I don't regularly visit his page to read the reviews--maybe I should. Come to think of it, maybe he has an e-mail service where he e-mails the reviews when they are posted--I'll have to check sometime.)

2. David Novak, "Why are Jews Chosen?"
Easily the best article I have ever read arguing for the importance of preserving a Jewish identity. The purpose of the Jews is to preserve the Torah; if the Jews died out, the keepers of the Torah die out. Since God clearly wants the Torah to be preserved, it is vitally important that Jews maintain their identity. Now, I disagree with the premise of that, of course--the Torah has been completed in the work of Jesus--but if you do not accept that Christ was the Messiah, then the logic of Novak's argument is very good.


II. Worth Reading

1. John Lamont, "The Prophet Motive"
This is a decent review of the economics of religion literature. I had read most of the material the article discusses before, but the article has a good survey of that literature. The punch line--churches that have a rigorous theology and high expectations are thriving; churches that have watered down the theology and expectations are dying. Why? People who attend church want something; the watered down churches aren't actually offering anything at all.

2. Eric Cohen, "The God-Seeking Animal"
This is a review of Leon Kass' work. Leon Kass is interesting, so reviewing his work is inherently interesting, but the article is only OK. The main issue for discussion is how humans alone of all the animals can use their bodies in thoughtfully purposeful ways. That quick summary sounds pretty obvious and lame, but the article, insofar as it is summarizing Kass, has some interesting observations. For example:

"When we see an outstanding athlete in action, we do not see—as we do in horse racing—a rational agent riding or whipping a separate animal body. . . . So attuned is the body, and so harmonious is it with the heart and mind, that—in the best instance—the whole activity of the athlete appears effortlessly to flow from a unified and undivided being. At such moments the athlete experiences and displays something like the unity of doer and deed one observes in other animals, but with this difference: For humans, such a unity is an achievement. A great sprinter may run like a gazelle and a great boxer may fight like a tiger, but one would never mistake their harmony of body and soul for the brute instinct that spurs an animal toward flight or fight."

3. Robert Chase, "Science Friction"
This is a review of the history of religion in science fiction. A friend of mine, Al, once gave a talk about the same thing, and Al's conclusions were much the same as Chase's. Religion is making some interesting inroads into the science fiction genre. While it would seem that science fiction as a genre is antithetical to religion, there is actually a surprising amount of religious insight and respect for religious devotion throughout the genre. In this realm, it is pretty obvious that science and religion can interact quite well. Now, if only we could drop the presumption that they clash outside of literature.

4. Jill Colvin, "Down for the Count"
A report on the 2010 Census, which is shaping up to be a disaster. The 2010 Census may get nowhere close to being and actual count of the population--and that presents some very interesting Constitutional questions. Should representation be based on the Census results (which is constitutionally mandated) even if we know the results are inaccurate?


Oh, and just to register the normal state: Joseph Bottom's end of the issue remarks were solid, as always. In particular, he has a nice explanation of the decision to include poetry in First Things when it started--the general reader was no longer encountering modern poetry anywhere, so First Things decided to fight against the tide by regularly including poetry.

Flogging Molly

Years ago in one of my tutorials, the group Flogging Molly was mentioned constantly--I can still hear Erin saying "I love Flogging Molly." Now I had never heard of them before that year, but I mentally lumped them in with Toad the Wet Sprocket and Harry and the Potters as a dull college band and I never bothered to find out who they actually were. A couple of weeks ago, Amazon's MP3 Download of the day was Flogging Molly's album Drunken Lullabies.

(Insert commercial announcement: If you don't know about Amazon's Download of the day, you should immediately start looking at it. Every day, Amazon offers an MP3 album at a steep discount--usually $2.99 for the whole album--they change the album every day, and there is no way anyone would want every single album they feature, but if you look often enough, you are sure to find a ready supply of cheap music.)

So, for $2.99 I figured I might as well listen to a band I once heard mentioned all the time.

Wow! It is a truly great album. I listen to it all the time now--of course my kids all hate it (Oh, Dad, Not that Irish music again...) But, since you, the Hypothetical Reader, obviously have better taste than my Children, here you go.

Speaking of albums (by the way, Clara seems to be under the impression that using the word "album" signifies that one is quite old--I tried to explain to her that the term still applies even to an MP3 downloaded song list, but she didn't buy it), Janet also got me a great album for Christmas: Rodrigo y Gabriela's 11:11; it's a pair of guitarists and what they can do on guitars is utterly amazing. But you don't have to take my word for it: Have a listen. Then buy the album. It's all that good.

As long as I am reviewing recently acquired albums of note: Trans-Siberian Orchestra's Night Castle is good. Not their best album, but it is still pretty good. I also bought Savatage's Dead Winter Dead for Emma for Christmas--Savatage is the band from which TSO sprung--they are basically redoing a lot of Savatage songs with an orchestral back-up. The orchestra makes a big difference, and so the TSO versions of songs are much better.

Speechless

Faculty Show 2010 has now ended. Once again, I have no voice. My classes tomorrow could be quite short. My friend, Dave, the music teacher, recommended hot water with lemon and honey--that involved getting the honey out of this giant plastic container that Janet bought at Whole Foods once upon a time--I think it was a lifetime supply of honey (it looked like a 16 oz bottle)--I also think the container was designed to make it so annoying to get out the honey that one would be induced to simply throw it out and buy another bottle. Instead, I got a pair of scissors, cut up the bottle and put the honey into a shorter glass jar. I am not sure that Janet will approve. But, I figure since I needed the honey for medicinal purposes, she can't complain too much. Right?

By the way, hot water with lemon and honey doesn't taste very good. But, maybe I have the wrong ratios or something.

Faculty Show has been an interesting phenomenon--this is the fourth time I have been in it. Students clearly love the idea of their professors getting on stage and making fun of the college, students and themselves. Most faculty, however, refuse to participate. It is yet another sign that lots of faculty take themselves way too seriously.

In other news, my NCAA bracket is still alive as of this morning--if Baylor wins out, I come in first place. I have never watched a college basketball game in my life, by the way, and I pay absolutely no attention to basketball at either the professional or collegiate level. So, it is with a great deal of amusement that I contemplate the prospects of winning in a league full of people who actually care about this sport.

Basketball is marginally better than soccer, though. Both games are terribly dull, but if you are going to watch a silly game, it might as well be one where the two teams combined score 200 points than one where the two teams each try to be so boring that other team falls asleep and a point can be scored.

I miss football.

At least baseball season starts next week. Something to fill the time until football season starts.

My fantasy baseball draft is Saturday--fortunately faculty show is done, so I have time to figure out if there are any good shortstops who will be available in the 15th round of the draft. If anyone has a tip on sleepers at any position, I am, of course, quite interested. After narrowly losing in the championship game last year, I am determined to win this year.

Then again, I am determined to win every year. When it comes to games, I am terribly competitive. I know, for example, that good parents are supposed to let their small children beat them at mindless games like CandyLand, but I never once let them win--I always just played by the rules, so of course they won half the time (in case you didn't know--CandyLand is purely a game of luck; there is absolutely no skill required to play since you never actually have to make a choice--why didn't I figure that out when I was 4?), but I never rearranged the cards to make sure my kids won.

I've liked competitive games since I was very young. Once when I was about 8 or 9, I saw a book of games at one of those cheap discount knock-off stores entitled (the book, not the store) Beyond Competition. I was very excited--something beyond competition--what could be better than something even more competitive than competitive? So, I bought it. When I got home and stared reading the rules of the games, I was puzzled--it wasn't clear how anyone could win. I kept rereading the rules and it just didn't make sense. Then it dawned on me--"beyond competition" meant "cooperative"--in these "games" everyone was working together for a common goal. I don't think I have ever been as disappointed with a purchase in my life. I could not figure out who would design games in which the goal wasn't to win. Now that I am older I know it was undoubtedly some hippies, and even worse--it was hippies who took money away from little kids on false pretenses.

Year of the Comic Book

1986 was a landmark year in the history of comic books. In one year, three of the most important comic books ever were published. I have never seen an explanation of why such a thing would have happened in a single year.

1. Art Spiegelman, Maus
I just finished this one, which is the reason for this post now. It is brilliant, absolutely brilliant. It is the story of the Holocaust, which, to be honest, does not seem like the most promising subject matter for a comic book. But the conception, art and writing are undoubtedly top-notch. Indeed, this book is better, much better, that the now standard Holocaust tale, Night. If this weren't a comic book, it would be the staple reading for every high school class.

One of the brilliant details is that the story is all being told second-hand. There is a surrounding story of our narrator hearing the tale from his father, who survived the Holocaust. (This is a true story, by the way--Art is telling the story of his own life and the lives of his parents.) The surrounding story is fascinating in its own right--the father is, to put it mildly, rather difficult. Indeed, as the narrator laments at one point in the story, by writing his father in this manner, isn't he just confirming every stereotype of an elderly Jewish man? Yet, one can't help but like the father, and when the father resumes telling his life story, one can't help but feel an enormous amount of sympathy for him.

If you have never read a comic book, in your life, this is the one that is worth reading. No superheroes. Just mice representing all the Jews, cats for the Germans, Pigs for the Poles, frogs for the French, and so on. The art doesn't look impressive, but as you read the story, you'll notice the art is perfect for the story being told.

As I said, this is the best Holocaust tale I have read. It isn't as great as the best Soviet Gulag tale (Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago) or the best tales of the Rwandan genocide (Hatzfeld's Machete Season and Life Laid Bare), but it is still well worth reading.

2. Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns
This story is the best re-imagining of a stock superhero ever. Batman has aged, he must be in his 50s--when the story starts he has retired. But, a wave of violence starts sweeping through Gotham and Batman returns; older, not nearly as physically imposing, but wiser. Jim Gordon is retiring; a new police chief who does not approve of Batman's vigilante ways is coming in. Two-face and the Joker return. So all the stock pieces for a Batman tale are in place.

What elevates this far above the standard superhero story, though, is the the whole book becomes a reflection on the Idea of Batman. Is a masked vigilante a good thing? Is Batman sane? Is he a cult leader? Are the criminals of Gotham arising as a response to the existence of Batman or is Batman a response to the criminals? Great writing throughout, and the moral questions are never quite resolved.

This is the book that spawned the recent two Batman movies, by the way--so, if the sort of questions being asked seemed familiar, it is because you saw the movies. So, if you liked the movies (and who didn't?), read the book. (It's a different plot, by the way, so you don't already know what happens.)

3. Alan Moore, The Watchmen
First off, if you have seen the movie, I am really sorry. That movie was an utter disaster, and I am not sure that the book will be enjoyed by anyone who has first seen what must be one of the worst superhero movies ever made.

For those who haven't seen the movie, this book is amazing. This a different world than the standard Superhero world--all the superheros here are normal people who wear masks and run around beating up bad guys. No superpowers at all, until Dr Manhattan is formed due to a freak nuclear accident. Dr. Manhattan is omnipotent and omniscient. The rest of the superheros are obsolete once Dr. Manhattan is on the scene and nobody liked the old superheroes anyway. So, when the story starts, we have some aging superheroes who don't know what to do in retirement, another one who is an industrial titan, and one, Rorschach, who is still wandering around fighting crime. Rorschach is brilliantly conceived; easily one of the best superheroes ever, and this is the only book in which he appears.

The story is pretty interesting in its own right, but the book itself is brilliant. There are all sorts of stories being woven in and out. After each installment, there is a narrative passage which is designed as a book from this world of the Watchmen--e.g., there is the autobiography of one of the retired superheros, there is the technical report on Dr. Manhattan, and so on. There is also another comic book within this one; a kid on the street is reading a pirate tale, which has some interesting similarities to the larger story in The Watchmen.

After reading The Watchmen it is really hard to believe that this is the only book in this world--it feels like you have known these characters forever.


So: in 1986 all three of those were published. There hasn't been a year like it before or after.

The State of First Things, March 2010

Reviewing the March 2010 issue feels like cheating. It is the 20th Anniversary issue, and they decided to do a Best of First Things issue. The format was interesting--they have around a half-dozen short paragraphs from assorted issues from each of the 20 years plus reprints of seven full-length articles.

The summary--First Things used to be very, very good. Determining whether it still is that good is the whole point of this series of reviews.

There is a real need for a magazine like First Things; there simply aren't any other places which have a serious discussion of the place of religion in the Public Square. On the whole, the magazine has done a great job putting religious thought back into the center of the political discussion. The one mistake was the issue they ran about the End of Democracy, in which they wondered when it was time to remove support for the American Government, with some vague hints about armed resistance. A serious mistake, that--but I suspect Neuhaus was happy about all the attention it drew to the magazine. The general point of the essays was entirely correct, however--increasingly, democracy is dying in America as Americans now look to an unelected Supreme Court to decide all matters of right and wrong.

The other interesting feature of First Things is that it is funny. Indeed, conservative publications tend to be funnier than liberal publications. Reprinted in this issue, for example, is the essay in which Alan Jacobs absolutely destroys Kahlil Gibran's collected works by mocking them in style and substance for three pages--it is funny, brilliant and devastating. You can read it here.


Also, consider this, written by Robert George in "Killing Abortionists: A Symposium" from 1994:

"I am personally opposed to killing abortionists. However, inasmuch as my personal opposition to this practice is rooted in a sectarian (Catholic) religious belief in the sanctity of human life, I am unwilling to impose it on others who may, as a matter of conscience, take a different view. Of course, I am entirely in favor of policies aimed at removing the root causes of violence against abortionists. Indeed, I would go so far as to support mandatory one-week waiting periods, and even nonjudgmental counseling, for people who are contemplating the choice of killing an abortionist. I believe in policies that reduce the urgent need some people feel to kill abortionists while, at the same time, respecting the rights of conscience of my fellow citizens who believe that the killing of abortionists is sometimes a tragic necessity--not a good, but a lesser evil. In short, I am moderately pro-choice."

That's why I keep reading First Things.

Amazing Grace played on a Musical Saw

Who's Afraid of Postmodernism by James K. A. Smith was a Christmas gift. (I think it probably says something about me that this is the sort of book I receive as a gift for Christmas.) The subtitle paints an amusing picture: Taking Derrida, Lyotard and Foucault to Church--imagine those three guys in a church...I just can't do it.

Smith's thesis in the book is that it is possible to be believe in both postmodernism and Christian theology. It's an odd thesis. At one level, it is perfectly trite--there is nothing in the Nicene Creed, for example, which is contradicted by postmodern thought. So, at one level, the obvious answer to Smith is, "Well, of course one can be both."

But, the more intriguing experiment is imagining what a postmodern scholar would make of the book. I think they would barely recognize their thoughts in Smith's descriptions of postmodern thought. Smith does his best to tame the whole enterprise--but, postmodern scholars have a reputation for being intellectual nihilists for a reason. I suspect that the average postmodern scholar would simply scoff at Smith's attempts to show that what they believe is really a natural entry point to Christan theology.

On the other side, sure a Christian can be a postmodernist, but why would anyone want to be? Smith never gets around to explaining why I should junk my old modernist beliefs in things like Truth and Reason.

Now, the book is good for the most part. Each chapter starts in a very silly way with a plot summary of some movie which is theoretically going to help illuminate the chapter, but which really should just be skipped altogether. However, the argument is somewhat interesting and Smith does a great job of avoiding all the standard jargon in describing postmodernists.

But, his view of a great church service at the very end of the book is an example of my living nightmare of church--lots of video screens and U2 songs and "surrealist stained glass" and the "scent of good Sumatran (fair-trade) coffee" and a "jazz combo" including a guy playing a "musical saw" (no, I am not making this up) and theater in the round (literally, there will be dramatic reenactments of Bible stories in the middle of the audience, which sits in concentric circles--around a communion table, so I am not sure where the actors do their play, but then again, there are those video screens all over the place, so maybe you aren't supposed to be watching the actors anyway), and readings from a wide array of inspirational works (e.g., the Bible (obviously) and Anne Sexton and "one of the congregation's gifted poets")--it is like some sort of Postmodern Hell with the gospel preached in the midst of it.

In the end, this is the sort of book which is akin to something Paul talked about: "The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice." Now I am fairly certain after reading this book that Smith's motives are true, so the middle clause would need to be rewritten as "whether from absurd postmodern viewpoints or sensible modernist ones."

Sense and Census

I just got our 2010 Census form. It asks some basic questions about each member of the household--over half the space is devoted to asking questions designed to pinpoint each person's race. Now, why is that *so* important?

My favorite part is the categories. There is a special category for "Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish Origin" in which you need to indicate if that is "Mexican, Mexican Am., Chicano" or "Puerto Rican" or "Cuban" or "Other, for example, Argentinean, Colombian, Domincan, Nicaraguan, Salvadorian, Spaniard, and so on." [Pity the poor Peruvians and Chileans and Bolivians, who are so blatantly ignored as to be lumped into "and so on."]

There are also categories for "Asian Indian" "Native Hawaiian" "Japanese" "Chinese" "Korean" "Filipino" "Vietnamese" "Guamanian or Chamorro" "Samoan" and the "Other Asian, for example Hmong, Thai, Pakistani, Cambodian, and so on" [Pakistani, but not Indian!!! and what about the poor Tibetans, are they Chinese or Other Asian?] also "Other Pacific Islander, for example, Fijian, Tongan, and so on"

The "American Indian or Alaska Native" get a space to list their particular tribe.

But, the "Black, African Am., or Negro" races get no line or special way to pick their country of origin. So, while the Census is vitally interested in knowing if one is Vietnamese or Cambodian, whether one is Liberian or Ghanaian doesn't matter and Tutsis and Hutus are all the same "Black, African Am. or Negro" in America (in Rwanda, things are a little different).

Then there is the "White" category. Not "White or European American" of course, and no line to specify country of origin. Germans and French and Greeks are all the same, but Spanish, well that gets into the earlier category, but Portuguese I think is in the general "White" category, and Turks are either in the "White" category" or the "Other Asian" category, but it isn't clear which.

Fortunately, the category I use in all these forms is still there: "Some other race"
I check that and in the space provided write "American"

Did Sinatra like Warm Coffee?

1. Clara has to do a Science report for school. She could pick the topic, so she decided to write about how a greenhouse works. She figures she can get some great pictures of the one sitting right next to her house, that Janet can tell her everything she needs to know, and since she works in Janet's greenhouse now, she is naturally wondering what the thing is supposed to be doing. Step two in the School-Mandated Paper-Writing Process was the requirement that Clara write down three questions she was going to answer in her paper. Her teacher crossed out all three of Clara's questions and wrote in a different set of questions. Now this is puzzling enough--I am not sure why Clara's questions were bad. Not only that, but Clara's first question was "Why is the greenhouse covered in plastic?--which is a pretty good questions one would think. The teacher crossed it out and wrote something else. Odd, I thought. Odder still was that Clara's third question was crossed out and the question the teacher wrote in was "What are greenhouses made of?" Great question, of course, but it sure looks like Clara's Question 1 to me--but what do I know?

That's not the funny part, though. The second question the teacher decided Clara needs to answer in her Science report on how a greenhouse works is:
What is the relationship between greenhouses and the greenhouse effect?
Egads! The charitable explanation of this is that the teacher is really trying to encourage Clara to write a paper about the earth's climate instead of the stated topic of how does a greenhouse work. The uncharitable explanation is that the teacher is terribly clueless. I, naturally enough, opted for the latter and was ready to encourage Clara to protest the teacher's anti-scientific bias. Janet thinks we should just make Clara write about the Greenhouse Effect even though it has absolutely nothing to do with explaining how a greenhouse works.

I could spend my whole life writing long letters to my kid's teachers about the errors of their ways.

2. On a similar note, Emma and Lily have the same Environmental Activist posing as a Science Teacher this year. One day this week, Emma's class was discussing Global Warming, and Emma expressed her skepticism about the whole matter. The teacher was not pleased. Later that day, Lily's class was discussing the same topic (different class, mind you--but when one is an environmental activist, all science is about environmental activism). Lily expressed her skepticism about the whole matter. The teacher then exclaimed, "I don't understand why my students are skeptical about this." Pity poor Janet, who is afraid that the Hartley girls are causing people to think their parents must be some sort of Right-Wing Wackos.

Last week, someone in another one of Emma's classes mentioned global warming, and a different kid in her class exclaimed "Global Warming is sooo 2008."

3. My friend Aimee told me last night that she is glad there are time stamps on these posts so she can tell how much caffeine I have had when I write because I sound different when I am on caffeine. I was glad to hear that the beneficial effects of caffeine are evidenced in my inimitable Prose Style--sometimes I worry that I have built up a tolerance to caffeine and that I am thus losing the wonderful effects that the substance has on brain-wave activities. As I tell everyone who will listen--caffeine makes you smarter. So drink more coffee. But not too much--if you drink 100 pots of coffee at a sitting, you will die. And we wouldn't want that. If someone died from a coffee overdose, who knows what the FDA would do?

4. Why don't my kids like Frank Sinatra? I am not a big fan of the whole Crooner genre of music, but Frank...well, Frank is amazing. But, every time I put him on, my kids exclaim, "No, not Frank."

5. Then again, I think they like listening to Frank more than they like listening to T.S. Eliot read "The Waste Land".

Year of the Black Sox

The second part of John Dos Passos, U.S.A. trilogy, 1919, is better than the first part. Even still, I am not sure whether I really like it or not. There is no doubt that Dos Passos can write well. This book, like the first part, consists of the stories of a few different people, some of whom meet, some of whom never meet. Some of the characters in this book meet some of the characters from the first part. In other words, this feels like a sprawling epic of intersecting stories. What makes the book so hard to love is that just about the time you have settled down into enjoying the story of a particular character, there is a break in the action and we are off to some other character's story. Sometimes we return to the character we just left, sometimes not. Joe Williams--did he died or was he just knocked out in that bar fight? Maybe we'll find out in the third part of the trilogy, maybe not. That's the sort of book it is--people wander in and out, and there is no way to tell who is going to be relevant later on. That resembles life, of course, which is presumably the point.

This part of the trilogy mostly takes pace during World War I. But, oddly for a book taking place during a war, there are remarkably few parts involving actual fighting. I am not sure why not--it would seem to have been a simple matter to have introduced a character who died in the trenches.

The Socialists-are-good angle is getting more pronounced in the second part of the trilogy--I suspect that it will be the grand conclusion of the trilogy. But, I'll find out next month.

A story that amuses me more than it should: One of the Chinese students in my tutorial was telling her friends back home that she was reading this book, and now there are a whole bunch of Chinese students reading the Chinese translation of Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy. I think I am surprised that there is a Chinese translation of this book, but I know I am amused that this book, of all the great American books, is one that Chinese students would pick to read.

To Wiki or not

My Dilemma of the Day:

Like all those non-academics on earth (you know who you are), I love Wikipedia. There is a certain academic snobbery about Wikipedia which always baffles me. Yes, it is a lousy reference for an academic paper--students who use it as a reference in a term paper are always students who write a lousy term paper (but the causality undoubtedly runs the other way), and I would never even think to cite it in a paper to be published. But, if I want to find out something quickly when being roughly correct is good enough, Wikipedia can't be beat. And there is no better place for quick answers to "Who was X?" or pop-culture references.

So here is my dilemma. I know all sorts of useless information. (Insert shocked gasp.) Sometimes when I am reading a Wikipedia entry, I notice a) there is something I know that isn't in the entry, or b) the entry isn't quite correct. To date, I have never corrected or added to a Wikipedia entry. But, I keep thinking--I am an academic; part of my job is to teach; so shouldn't I be editing Wikipedia entries when I notice something can be improved?

So, why don't I do it? I am afraid it is a bit of Hamlet:

Now whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th' event—
A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward—

Should I watch a movie tonight?

For a few weeks now, I have been puzzling over whether to add movie reviews to the blog. On the one hand it might be interesting to force myself to actually think of something to say about a movie after I watch it. On the other hand, once I start writing up movie reviews, I know it will turn into a compulsion, and I'll feel the psychic need to actually think of something to say after every movie. So, my puzzle is whether starting it to find out how interesting it would be is worth the risk of discovering it is tedious and then feeling the need to do it anyway.

Now, I know what you are thinking, because I am thinking it too. Why not start writing up movie reviews and then if it is tedious, just stop? A perfectly reasonable suggestion, but I know myself too well. You see, watching movies for me is both enjoyable and an academic exercise. It's the latter than needs some explanation.

I like movies--which in some ways is odd because I don't like to watch TV, and I am not sure why there is such a big difference in my mind between watching a movie and watching TV. For some reason, I don't mind at all the prospect of spending 2 hours watching a movie that isn't particularly good, but I can't stand the idea of watching television programs for 2 hours. I cannot honestly say that this is because there is some inherent quality difference between movies and TV shows--the worst movies are pretty bad and the best TV shows are excellent. I wonder if it is the commercials that really bother me about TV--for example, watching old TV shows on DVD doesn't bother me as much--but then commercials really aren't that much of an intrusion--on the other hand, I would never watch a movie being shown on network television. So, if it is just commercials, why does the prospect of commercial interruptions annoy my subconscious so much?

The other possible explanation for the reason I think movies are so different than TV may be related to the fact that I hate not finishing things. I hate not finishing books. Every now and then I don't finish a book I start, but the book has to be really, really bad and really long for me to stop. Movies all end in short order. But TV shows? Well, they keep going week after week. So, they never feel done and then I feel the need to see the next episode. I notice this when I watch TV shows on DVD--I am reluctant to start watching a series because I know once I start, I'll feel obligated to watch the whole run of the show. And if the show is bad, then I'll feel this lingering sense of vague guilt for not finishing watching all the episodes of the show. Years ago, for example, I started watching the first season of 24 on DVD--I kept hearing how good it was--I hated it, really really hated it. I stopped halfway through season 1. I still feel bad about this. Also, years ago, Janet talked me into starting Lost. We got Season 1. I made it through three episodes. I still feel bad about this too. Every now and then, I think I should go back and watch the rest of each of those shows. So, if you ever want to make me feel bad, ask me what I thought of 24 or Lost, and when I start to tell you, ask, "Well, did you watch it all the way through?"

So, to return to the point (yeah, I know), I'm afraid that if I start to write movie reviews, I'll feel a compulsion to watch enough movies to make writing reviews of them worthwhile. But, when I watch a movie, I am not reading a book, and I always feel a vague sort of guilt when I am not reading a book (this is a serious psychological problem, by the way). But, I like movies, so I watch them anyway. I also like playing Madden, and I feel guilty about that too. (By the way, it is absurd that Brady Quinn--Brady Quinn!!--completed 16 straight passes in the second half leading the Brows to victory last night--I hate when Madden cheats.) (And, yes, yesterday was Janet's birthday, but I didn't play Madden until after she was asleep, so it is OK. Oh, I had read for an hour before I played Madden, so that is OK too.)

Euripides on the Financial Crisis

As noted earlier, the first wave of books about the financial crisis of 2007-2008 are now out and I have assigned a bunch of them in my money and banking class. We just finished Sorkin, Too Big to Fail. The review in a word: Outstanding.

Sorkin is a journalist for the NY Times (but the book is good despite that fact). He seems to have interviewed everyone working on Wall Street, and this book is a blow-by-blow story of the back rooms of Wall Street throughout 2008 (from Bear Stearns to TARP). An absolutely riveting read.

Here are my quick conclusions:
1. The whole story of 2008 is exactly like a Greek tragedy. The CEOs at the top are so full of pride that they resemble the captain of a ship which is slowly sinking who refuses to acknowledge that there is a serious problem here. This was not a fast moving crisis at all--there were months, literally months, between Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, everyone knew the trouble, but nobody could just take the steps necessary, painful steps to be sure, to avert a crisis.

2. A big part of the problem was the government's staggering indecision in all of this. After bailing out Bear Stearns, the other troubled institutions kept waiting for the government to bail them out too. The government kept saying it wouldn't bail them out, but then it kept calling up everyone trying to arrange assorted deals. Because the government was constantly in the middle of the discussion, everyone kept waiting for the bail-out details. The government responded by continuing to say there wasn't going to be a bailout, but then they kept playing along. It was a grand game of Chicken, but the government's promise not to bail out anyone simply wasn't credible enough for anyone to take the government seriously. Then Lehman Brothers failed and the government did not bail them out. However, the next day, the government suddenly bailed out AIG. In other words, the government blinked.

But here was the fascinating part--when Lehman Brothers failed, everyone knew AIG was also going to fail within the week. There was no doubt about this in anyone's mind. So, the government could have decided to bail out both firms or neither firm, but instead they panicked in the middle of the inevitable chain of events.

This problem of the government panic was pretty serious all year long. It most certainly added to the problem.

3. TARP was a joke even before it passed. Between the time the legislation was proposed and the time it was voted on, the Treasury had decided it wasn't going to buy troubled assets after all; but rather than announce that they had no intention of doing what the legislation authorized them to do, they realized that the wording was broad enough that they could use the TARP funds for other purposes after the legislation had passed.

4. There is a large disconnect on Wall Street between what the senior management knows and what the guys in the trenches are doing.

5. Nobody comes out looking good in this book, but on the other hand, there are no real villains here either. It was an old-fashioned financial crisis.

Great book--I'd highly recommend it to anyone who likes a good story, well-told.

Proud to Perpetuate the Patriarchal Kinship System

One of the many pleasures of teaching at Mount Holyoke is hearing from students about the sorts of things being taught in other classes around campus. Today's amusing tale comes from the required reading for a class:

"Female heterosexuality is not a biological drive of an individual woman's erotic attraction or attachment to another human animal who happens to be male. Female heterosexuality is a set of social institutions and practices defined and regulated by patriarchal kinship systems, by both civil and religious law, and by strenuously enforced mores and deeply entrenched values and taboos. Those definitions, regulations, values, and taboos are about male fraternity and the oppression and exploitation of women. They are not about love, human warmth, solace, fun, pleasure, or deep knowledge between people."

Now if you didn't laugh out loud when you read that, then you just weren't paying attention. I suppose we should all be thankful for that evil male fraternity, though, because if it weren't for that artificially created female heterosexuality, then we would be....what's the word?...Oh, yes....extinct.

If only women hadn't been so oppressed and they had been able to avoid the curse of female heterosexuality, then we wouldn't be here to complain about it, and think how nice the world would be if we weren't here to think about how nice the world would be.

But wait, there is more:

"Female heterosexuality joins females in racial and/or class solidarity to dominating males and offers for their compliance the bribe of a share of the benefits their men extort from other groups. Female heterosexuality, whether literally sexual or not, is profoundly implicated in the racism of white women in our present time and place."

Ah, yes. Of course. To be a female heterosexual is to be complicit in racism. I suppose I must concede the point--if females would just stop being heterosexual, within a generation, there would be no more racists.

By the way, the student who passed along those quotations to me also noted that the Mount Holyoke library had not managed to purchase a copy of John Paul II's Theology of the Body--we wouldn't want the writings of such an insignificant person as the Pope to clutter up the shelves full of the more enlightened reading like that assigned in classes here at Mount Holyoke.

Dem Bones

I recently finished the Bone series by Jeff Smith. It was fun, very fun. Clara and Emma both read the whole series too. I read the color versions of the comic book put out by Scholastic. There is also a one-volume black-and-white edition, but I suspect it is more fun to see the pictures in color.

It is a bit surprising to me that Bone is not more widely known--the ending was a bit weak, but other than that, the whole thing is as good a Tolkien clone as anything else out there--it is probably not up to Harry Potter standards, but it is close. Once you read it, there is no way you will ever forget Phoney Bone or Smiley Bone as character types; the rat creatures are perfect; the villains are nicely evil, the humor is excellent--some parts are laugh-out-loud funny, and there are jokes that build for a long time before the punch line comes along. With a slightly better resolution, the fantasy-tale would be great. And talking about Quiche is now a joke unto itself. A nice Quiche made with a small mammal...

The State of First Things, February 2010

Next in a Continuing Series.

A. Must Read articles
1. Reno, "Brain Food"
A very interesting meditation on the nature of knowledge, using Griffiths' Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar as the launching pad. Reno concludes by arguing that the modern obsession toward intellectual and academic specialization comes from the same root as the obsession of man with the personal lives of celebrities--it masquerades as knowledge, thus letting us avoid the realization that there is a whole realm of Truth out there that is scary. I think Reno it right.

B. Flawed, But Worth Reading
1. Anderson, "The Bible, Rated R"
A review of R. Crumb's new comic-book version of the Book of Genesis. When I first heard about the book (Crumb's version, not the old Hebrew one--I'd heard about the latter quite some time ago), I figured it was just a gimmick for Crumb to draw some more of his tired semi-pornographic pictures. But, the review convinced me that Crumb's book was not without merit. I still doubt I'll ever actually read Crumb's version, but after reading Anderson's review, I understand why someone might want to read it.

2. Anderson, "Some Like it Warm"
Another shot in the Climate Wars. I think we may be seeing the end of the Global Warming Crusade.

3, White, "Filmmaking by Numbers"
Compares the new movie Nine to the Fellini movie 8 1/2 it imitates and convinces me that the latter is worth watching (and the former is not). I saw La Dolce Vita and was underwhelmed--it was good and all, but too repetitive to be the masterpiece many seem to want it to be.

4. Wieder, "Fast and Furioso"
A review of a new translation of Orlando Furioso. The new translation sounds wretched. But the review convinced me that some other translation should be added to my list of books to read.

5. Bottum, "The Papal Difference"
I mention this mostly because I never know whether to list Bottum's articles in "The Pubic Square" here--suffice it to say, that I think he is always interesting and worth reading, but I always discount him because Neuhaus did this section so much better--that is a terribly unfair comparison, but it is the curse of following the Great One every time.

Special Mention:
Nuechterlien reviews George Nash' new book, Reappraising the Right. I mention this only because George is a friend of mine and his book deserved a better review. The review is positive, very positive in fact. But, the bulk of the review is simply Neuchterlien's cursory history of Conservatism--the review as a whole reads like some canned speech he gave bookended by some nice remarks about George's book. Lee Edwards has a great review of George's book in National Review.

Sooo Tricky

The other night, Clara and I were reading in the family room. Clara was reading How You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. She was clearly enjoying her book. (I was moderately enjoying mine, but I haven't finished it yet, so the review will have to wait. (Life is full of disappointments, I know.)) When she finished, she walked over to me, stuck the book in front of my face and said, "You have to read this."
I said, "But, I am reading my book."
"No, you have to read this. It's sooo tricky."
"Hmmm."
She threw the book in my lap. "It's short, you can read it in a night. You have to read it."
She was right--it was short--200 pages, big kid-book style font.
So, I read it.
Clara wanted to tell me the end before I finished it. She was really excited about the book. It was, you see, sooo tricky. Make that SOOOOOOO TRICKY!

My review: It was a pretty good kid's book. It just won the Newbury, which is how Clara heard about it. Well, actually, she called me up at work and asked me to get the book from the Mount Holyoke library and she was sure they would have it because it just won the Nobel Prize. I told her it couldn't have just won the Nobel Prize because they give out the prize in October. She patiently explained that in that case, it must have won it in October. I told her it didn't win in October because last October the Nobel Prize in Literature was given to some woman who doesn't write in English. She was a bit troubled by that news. But, when I mentioned that it must have won some award for children's literature, she brightened back up.

Anyway, it may well have deserved its award. (I haven't read the other contestants, so I really don't have any basis for judging.)

The tricky, make that the SOOOO TRICKY, part was a basic time-travel story which has a character coming back into his own time line to change the outcome of his life. It has the usual array of continuity problems which such stories inherently have. It was well-written and charming--though I think most of my enjoyment from the book was really just knowing that my daughter liked it so much.

I don't think I would ever travel back into my own past to alter the outcome of my life. I am far too risk averse. Though, come to think of it, maybe I would overcome my risk aversion if something really terrible happened in my life--I suppose if the event was bad enough, there would be no downside risk, but, then again, things can always get worse, so perhaps there is no such thing as an event for which altering it presents no downside risk. I'll have to think about that.

Life after the Slave Revolt

For my tutorial this week, we read Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. I've read it before, but as anyone who has ever read a Nietzsche book knows, it is impossible, literally impossible to completely figure out what Nietzsche means in his books, and as a result he is well worth rereading. I like Nietzsche--he amuses me. This isn't the best starting place for Nietzsche--I think The Genealogy of Morals is much more comprehensible for a first book (it is the one I assign in my Western Civilization class). But, this book has a wide array of topics--and a middle section full of short pithy aphorisms, which is the best part of the book. You could spend a long time ruminating about his aphorisms, which is the point of the section.

As for his philosophy, what I really like about Nietzsche is that he faces squarely what the world would be like if there was no God. In this sense, I think he is completely correct--either there is a God or Nietzsche is right. If there were no God, then the moral code we all use would be strange and would seem calculated to help weak, inferior people rise to the top while suppressing the naturally strong and noble.

And, I suppose I should also admit that Nietzsche is fun to talk about with Mount Holyoke students because his views on women are...well, nobody ever called Nietzsche a feminist. Consider:
"Comparing man and woman on the whole, one may say: woman would not have the genius for finery if she did not have an instinct for a secondary role."
or
"Where neither love nor hatred is in the game, a woman's game is mediocre."

But, Nietzsche is fun for other reasons too, so ending on a different note:
"In the end one loves one's desire and not what is desired"
and
"The familiarity of those who are superior embitters because it may not be returned.--"
and
"A matter that becomes clear ceases to concern us.--What was on the mind of that god who counseled: 'Know thyself!' Did he mean: 'Cease to concern yourself! Become objective!'--And Socrates?--And 'scientific men'?--"

Deja Vu all over again

One of the most frequent things people said to me in 2008 was that I was surely needing to rewrite my entire money and banking syllabus in light of the financial crisis. I always said that actually I didn't have to rewrite a thing, that nothing that was occurring was any different than things we have seen over and over again. Every time I said this, I was told, sometimes more politely than not, that I didn't know what I was talking about because the events in 2008 were different than anything we had ever seen before. Everyone knew this (well, apparently everyone except me knew this) because all those talking heads on TV said so.

And now comes the first wave of books written after the financial crisis of 2008--I have assigned a bunch of them in my money and banking course. The first one was:

This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Reinhart and Rogoff. The title comes from a comment made by an unnamed trader: "More money has been lost because of four words than at the point of a gun. The words are, 'This time is different.'" It turns out that the financial crises for the last 800 years all look pretty much the same--and the events of 2007-2008 are no different. Who knew? Well, everyone who was paying attention knew--all you had to do was spend a little time reading what economists who weren't on TV were saying at the time. But, those economists don't make TV because "Well, actually, there is nothing new in this crisis" is not nearly as compelling TV as "The economy is falling apart and everyone is going to become unemployed and there will soon be people starving in the street and fighting with dogs for food scraps in the trash."

As for the book--it is for serious economic nerds only. The book came out a year too early--the authors have put together a really interesting data set, but rather than spend a year working with it, they rushed a book to print with only a cursory look at the data. Even the cursory look is enough, though, to show how financial crises are both quite common and quite similar to one another.

Last year I assigned another book with the same conclusion but a different approach. Michael Lewis' Panic is just a series of journalistic reports from the last 4 financial crisis--it was uncanny how identical the journalistic reports during, say, the Long-Term Capital Management meltdown sounded exactly like those written in 2007-2008.

The one thing that made the recent crisis different from some of the others in the recent US past was the breakout from the financial crisis to the rest of the economy. We have seen that before too, of course. I suspect, when the story is done being written, we will discover that a large part of the reason the financial crisis spilled out to the rest of the economy was because the crisis was unfolding in an election year, and the candidates (both of them) decided to ramp up the anxiety for political gain. That's speculation at this point, though.

And on a lighter note: Yogi Berra

Le Freak

After Levitt and Dubner's best-selling and generally good Freakonomics, a sequel was inevitable, I suppose.

Superfreakonomics was the result. It is...OK. Freakonomics had the advantage that it was based on Levitt's long career of interesting, offbeat research. But, all the good stuff went into that. So, nothing was left for this book. As a result, they had to drum up some new material, which ends up being a) research other people have done, 2) cursory research Levitt and Dubner have done in the last two years, or c) wild speculation about research that might actually be done in the future. The book is well-written, some of the material is fun to think about, but there isn't much in here that has the feel of Levitt's research showing that school teachers in Chicago were systematically changing their student's answers on state mandated exams to make it look like the students did better than they actually did.

The global warming chapters have received the most attention--if you have been paying attention to the details of the global warming science instead of the press about them, there isn't anything surprising here. But, it will be a good introduction for people who have only seen the headlines. People like the kids in Janet's girl scout troop. Janet's greenhouse is now up and there are plants in it. Last week, her girl scout troop was over, so she showed them the greenhouse. Some of the kids were a be nervous going in. She found out why. When they were leaving the greenhouse, one of the kids left the door open. Several kids became immediately alarmed because the Greenhouse Gases were escaping.

The first chapter of Superfreakonomics has me a bit worried. I assigned the book in my introduction to microeconomics class. I hadn't read it when I assigned it, so I wasn't sure what it contained. Chapter 1 is all about prostitution. It is a combination of some research into lower class prostitutes and the prices they charge and then a nice puff piece about a high-end prostitute who gets $500 per hour from rich clients. The tone of the chapter is that it is good to be a high-end prostitute--high wages, easy work. So, here is my troubling thought--if some of the 18 year olds in my class decide after reading that chapter that this prostitution thing looks like a good career move, am I responsible?

The title of the blog post is a reference to a song that was very popular when I was in Junior High. You can relive it here.

The Camera Eye

I told Janet about the Gettysburg's Address PowerPoint slideshow. She looked at me and deadpanned, "Is that an example of Professor Humor?" Sigh.

I am seriously behind in the book review department here. I am still trying to figure out where writing up book reviews falls on the priority list--more or less important than writing letters of recommendation? finishing a paper I promised to have done by the 28th? reading a new book? contemplating the universe while drinking a cup of coffee in silence? sorting out the Town of Granby's finances?

Last week's book for my tutorial was John Dos Passos's The 42nd Parallel. This is the first book in his trilogy U.S.A. Not too long ago, I saw that trilogy labeled as The Great American Novel (which is, of course, the Questing Book of Scholars). I enjoyed volume 1 of the trilogy, though I now suspect whomever it was who called it The Great American Novel did so because if its scope and not its quality. It reads like a series of short novellas about different characters--but the novellas are interwoven. Some of the people meet toward the end, but their interactions aren't really the point. Interspersed throughout the narrative are: 1) biographies of real people written in a stylistic manner, 2) Newsreels, which are a jumble of newspaper headlines and song lyrics, 3) the Camera Eye, which are first-person stream of conscious entries--sort of like a proto-blog. The biographies of real people were my favorite parts of the book. The newsreels were a mess, but did convey a sense of history and furious pace, which I assume was the intention. The Camera Eye bits--well, I didn't pay much attention to them--they were OK, but they started mid-thought and ended mid-thought and I couldn't figure out if it was worth the bother to decipher them. The volume ends just as WWI is starting. I am not sure if there was a theme--if anything it is that socialists are good, but that doesn't really fit perfectly with the book. I assume by the end of volume 3, there will be some larger message.

Abe's Great Talk

Ah, at long last, something that captures the Curse of the Powerpoint Presentation:

http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm

Seriously, how did Powerpoint become the crutch of choice for bad speakers? When was the last time you were at an event where the Powerpoint presentation actually enhanced the talk?

Another Super Sunday

Great game last night--then again, the Super Bowl is always a great game, easily the finest moment in sports. Indeed, Super Sunday may be second to only Christmas in terms of being one of the greatest days of the year.

It was nice to see the Saints win--for those with no sense of football history, not only have the Saints never been to the Super Bowl before, the last two years are the first time in Saints' history when they have even been relevant.

My only disappointment--after last night, making the case that Peyton Manning is the Greatest Quarterback of All Time just got a bit harder. I still think he is, but last night really took the edge off that claim.

Now, the long dry time commences--training camp doesn't start for months, and between now and then, there is only the draft. But, given the Raiders drafting of late, I look at draft day with more trepidation than expectation. Of course the Raiders win it all next year, though--somehow, someway, they win it all. You heard it here first. In fact, this may be the only place you hear it.

The next few months are particularly bad sports-wise--baseball doesn't start until April, and there is nothing of interest in the meantime. Well, I guess I can start working on my fantasy baseball draft rankings now...

Shaw and the Cross

I finally finished plowing through George Bernard Shaw's Androcles and the Lion. Generally, I like Shaw's plays, and his prefaces are also usually quite fun to read. (For those who have never read Shaw, the published versions of his plays usually include a long preface he wrote in which he expounds upon his philosophy of life and how the play illustrates that.)

This play was short, very short--41 pages in my edition.
This preface was long, very long--100 pages in my edition.

The play was just silly. A number of Christians are about to be fed to the lions and within 41 pages, we find out every one of the Christians was merely shamming and that none of them actually believe any Christian doctrine at all.

The preface set out to prove just one point:

Jesus, properly understood, is exactly like George Bernard Shaw. Before Peter started going around telling Jesus he was the Christ, Jesus was just a proto-George Bernard Shaw. But, when Jesus started being told he was divine, he let it go to his head and he started getting absurd and then went and committed suicide on the cross because he really did believe he was God.

Fortunately, Shaw never let his fame go to his head.

Translating Irish

Over the last few weeks I have been perusing Seamus Heaney's volume of poetry, Death of a Naturalist. Until now, the only Heaney I have read was his translation of Beowulf, which is, incidentally, a marvelous translation--in terms of translations, it is on the level of the Hollanders' Dante, Fagles' Homer/Virgil and Pevear/Volokhonsky's Dostoevsky (and presumably Tolstoy--reading their Tolstoy translations is on my list of books to read).

The present volume was really quite good. I had no expectations going in. He reminds me a lot of Robert Frost--transplant Frost to Ireland, add a half-century, and I think this is the sort of thing you would get; in fact, so great is the similarity, that I would be rather shocked if that comparison hasn't been made hundreds of times before. His verse is good; it reads well and you aren't tripping on unnatural lines. What he does best is evoke a scene--after reading this, it isn't hard to imagine that there is some charm in growing up on an Irish potato farm.

Well, not too much charm--I don't think I would enjoy living on an Irish potato farm, because a) I don't really want to live in Ireland, and b) I don't really want to live on a farm. Though, come to think of it again, the home in which I do live and which I enjoy living in a tremendous amount, is growing more and more farm-like all the time. Today, in an odd coincidence, Janet is off to Boston to go to a giant Agricultural convention where she will spend the next three days talking to people about growing plants, which is somewhat farm-like. So, maybe the farm thing wouldn't be so bad. I suppose I should work on my Irish accent, now, to see if I would like the Ireland bit too.

And by the way, when I talk in an Irish accent, it really annoys Lily and Clara. Especially when I do so in public. Of course, I don't really have an Irish accent, and I suspect nobody who heard it would ever think I was Irish--they might think I was a bit strange, but I doubt they would think I was Irish. But, as I try to tell Lily and Clara--how would a complete stranger know, really know, that that wasn't the way I always talked? If you heard someone with some odd accent, would you automatically assume, he must be someone who grew up in California talking in some oddly accented voice because it amuses him to do so? Imagine being a Californian and thus growing up without an accent--wouldn't you like to try one out every now and then?