Dancin' and Fishin'

A former student (Marjorie) convinced me that I really should read Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.  Every now and again, I’d heard a stray word or two in praise of this series, but since the series is 12 books long, it always struck me as one of those things that you really don’t want to start because then you feel compelled to read the whole thing, and a 12 volume commitment is a bit much.  Marjorie told me it was good, really good.  I trust Marjorie’s judgment on books (and paper—Marjorie is the only paper connoisseur I have ever known).  But, even still...12 volumes.  Then she wrote a review of the series in one of those webzines  (why “one of those webzines” and not just “a webzine” or even better just “a review,” location unspecified?  I have no idea—I just noticed the oddity of the praising in proofreading—surely there is Freudian interpretation of the choice of words there), and sent me a link to the review.  Reading her review, I had to finally face up to the task—these books were too good to skip.  So, I bought them.

I read Volume 1:  A Question of Upbringing.  Marjorie was right—I’m going to enjoy this series.

The series as a whole is one of those broad sweeps of time, in this case the 20^th century, in which we watch characters stumble through history.  I can’t be more specific than that because, well, I’ve only read volume 1.

A Question of Upbringing traces our narrator’s time in prep school and college.  We meet three…not really friends, and not really acquaintances…something in between.  One suspects these three are going to weave in and out of our narrator’s life throughout the work as a whole.—which makes the general conclusion of this particular book a bit odd.

Taken on its own, this book is the story of youthful attachments and their demise as one ages.  We get this right near the end:

With regret, I accepted the inevitability of circumstance.  Human relationships flourish and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.

On its own, a well-worn idea—graduation, for example, is full of people wondering if they will ever talk to their friends again.  (Last weekend, I met a pair of students who had come back for their 10 year reunion.  These two were very good friends as undergrads.  They conspired to get one’s father to marry the other’s mother.  Talking with them about these machinations provided me a great deal of amusement when they were undergrads—honestly, I was surprised when it worked.  Now they are step-sisters.  So, they still see each other regularly.  A rather innovative solution to a general fear of losing contact with one’s friend, I must say.)

But, while the idea that human relationships are fragile is well-worn, is it true?  This book itself is an odd answer—this particular volume is arguing that it is true, but since it is obvious these characters all come back into the narrator’s life, we know it really isn’t true.  Just how fragile are the ties that bind?

An example.  A student of mine who graduated in 2008 was back on campus yesterday.  She was invited by the Alumnae Association here to participate in a big Story Corps project to celebrate the 175th anniversary of Mount Holyoke.  Story Corps is a national organization that goes around recording interviews with people.  But, the interviewers are not professional interviewers; it’s regular people interviewing other people.  So, the Alumnae Association picked 10 alums to come back and each one had to pick someone to be the interviewer.  My former student asked me to do it.  It was fun.  There we were sitting in a makeshift recording studio and I got to ask her all sorts of questions and she answered them and it was just like Old Times.  I interrupted her when her answers got formulaic and told her she was just rambling.  I pressed her when she got vague.  I made her admit she was pretty good at what she does.  I asked her if she liked Upper or Lower Lake better and scoffed when she said she hated being outside in nature…city girls…ugh.

Now I have talked with her a few times in the four years since she graduated, but not all that often—an e-mail here or there.  Yet, there we were, talking as if it was the Spring of 2008 and she hadn’t yet graduated.  We talked about her boyfriend and her job and her future.  While I talk with her far less than I did when she was at Mount Holyoke, we are still friends.  Good friends. 

So, why do we think of human relationships as brittle things?  Clearly some relationships are brittle, but why?  And which ones? 

But, I digress.  (Though come to think of it, Marjorie would also appreciate this digression. But, I digress again.)  The Powell book is quite good as an exploration of the demise of childhood friendships.   I suspect one’s high school friendships are more fragile than most, not because of the nature of friendship, but because as one moves from the age of 14 to the age of 21, one changes.  It is not the death of friendship, but the death of youth we notice in this book.  Our narrator thinks of himself as the constant and everyone else around him changes.  What was charming in a 15 year old acquaintance is merely annoying in a 20 year old acquaintance.  And so, youthful attachments decay.  But, then we know they come back in future volumes.  It’s hard to know what to make of a book like this in the end—do we treat it as a stand-alone novel or simply chapter one in a 12 chapter book?  I have no idea.

12 volumes; 12 months—one book a month.  That’s my project...well, one of my projects, for the next year.    

And so, take this opportunity to e-mail a friend today and emulate the end of this song.

O, how I faint when I of you do write

Mount Holyoke’s graduation was this last weekend.  Bittersweet, as always.  One of the students who went through the graduation ceremony was a student of mine who actually finished in December.  She gave me a book when she finished, and this seems like a Time Most Opportune to review it.

The book:  William Shakespeare, Sonnets

But, that’s actually the title on the back of the book.  The title on the front of the book is in letters which do not appear on my keyboard.  I suppose I could download some new fonts or something, but that seems hardly worthwhile for a blog post.

The book is a Bulgarian translation of the Sonnets.  And it was a funny experience reading it.  It has the poems in the original language on the left hand page and the Bulgarian translations on the right hand page.  So I have now read Shakespeare in the original (English, not Klingon) in a book with a Bulgarian translation.  Alas, I can offer no evaluation of the quality of the translation.  I can say with certainty that the translator did get the right number of lines, but beyond that...well, I can’t even tell if it rhymes.

Does reading Shakespeare in a book with Bulgarian translations improve the sonnets?  (This is the sort of question about which I know many Readers have been pondering for years.)  I don’t know.  (Just think—you have been waiting your whole life to know, and that is the answer you get…)  This particular volume was really fun to read; it is a very attractive little book.  Reading only the left-hand pages was also a bit of an interesting experience.  But what of the sonnets themselves? 

Confession time:  I have a really hard time reading books of sonnets.  I enjoy reading poetry, but there is something in the back of my brain that demands some variety when reading books of poetry.  When I read a series of sonnets in a row, my mind just goes numb.  Something about the repetitive cadence of the sonnet—over and over and over and over and over and over and (I was going to write it 14 times, but even typing it made my brain go numb).  Any given Shakespearian sonnet is really interesting—even the not-so-great ones are relatively amazing.  But reading 10 sonnets in a row…by the fifth one, my mind is completely elsewhere.  It’s like listening to a metronome.

So, is this a critical failing?  I like Shakespeare's sonnets.  Some of them are among the best poems ever written.  In an anthology of poetry in which the sonnets are mixed in with other types of poetry, I love reading the sonnets.  But, in a volume of just the sonnets—well, every time I have read Shakespeare’s sonnets as a whole, I have the same experience of feeling like I am driving through Nevada, just hoping to get to Wells so at least there will be some buildings to break the monotony.  (And if you have ever seen Wells, Nevada, you’ll know that this a serious sign of desperation.)

I have this nagging feeling that an inability to read 154 sonnets in a row with pleasure is a sign of cultural degeneracy.   That makes me sad.

So, from an album to which I was listening earlier today, here is a sad love song to capture the moment. 

Someone Shot Nostalgia in the Back

Shortly after I first became a professor, I read Nabokov’s novel, Pnin.  (No, sorry, I have absolutely no idea how to pronounce that name.)  I had fond memories, very fond memories, of the book.  In a fit of nostalgia at the end of the semester, I decided to reread the book.  A stunning experience.  Either I have changed a lot since I first read the book or the book has changed a lot.  (The latter possibility is tempting to embrace—imagine a world in which books really do change between readings.  You could then go back and reread your favorite books and each time they would not just seem different, they actually would be different.  Never mind—that’s a really dumb thought experiment.)  Now it isn’t really all that surprising that after 18 years of teaching, I am a bit different—I’ve read a few books since then, for example—but even still, this novel was nothing like I remembered it.  It still had (obviously) the same episodes I remembered so vividly, but then when I thought about it I realized there were only two episodes I remembered vividly.  (Pnin on a bench in the wrong city realizing he could never get to the talk he was supposed to give; Pnin utterly dismayed—indeed more dismayed than any other character in any other book ever—when he hears glass breaking in the kitchen sink.)  The entire story surrounding those two events was extraordinarily different than the story which existed in my imagination.   

When I thought about it, it really wasn’t hard to see why my memory of the book was so different than the book as it exists.  I remembered the book as being all about a befuddled professor wandering around an idyllic campus in the Northeast.  It was an amusing tale, capturing life at a New England college perfectly.  Why did the book seem that way?  Well imagine being a newly minted Assistant Professor, coming from a 1960s style-concrete-slab-buildings-everywhere campus in California, and arriving at one of the most gorgeous liberal arts colleges in the world, red brick buildings with ivy covered walls set amongst rolling green lawns and sparkling lakes.  Imagine wandering to a library which is gorgeous enough to be a chapel and a chapel which is magnificent enough to be a library reading room.  Imagine an office with 12 foot ceilings and wood trimmed windows.  And then imagine reading a book about an old professor pottering around such a campus, slightly bewildered by the world.  How could that novel not seem like an idyllic vision of a future life?  How could it not be utterly poignant when our professor hero had moments of doubt and pain.  How could said assistant professor not henceforth recommend that novel to I don’t know how many people as the best picture of life at a Northeastern liberal arts college ever written?

I was talking with someone not too long ago about this very problem of a book which once read at a particular moment in life was forever stamped not with the book but with the memory of a book which isn’t exactly the book which is there.  He mentioned the idea of going back to write the novel he remembered.  An intriguing idea, that.

So, what is this novel?  Curiously, it feels like I am about to desecrate the novel by describing it accurately.  That’s not a joke—I am having this terribly sick feeling right now in even thinking about writing down a review of Pnin, the book; I feel like I am about to kill Pnin, the memory. 

Pnin, the novel, starts off as the story of a befuddled Russian refugee who is living a tenuous life as a professor at a college in New England.  The first six chapters are tales designed to mock the professor, but in every case there is a twinge of pathos mixed in with the mockery.  We find out why in the seventh, and last, chapter.  The narrator, someone eerily similar to Nabokov himself, tells us the back story of his own past and his interactions with Pnin.  And somewhere in the midst of that last chapter we realize we have an unreliable narrator on our hands.  Pnin stole the love of the narrator’s life and this book is a sort of revenge fantasy, but revenge on a man who the narrator knows is fundamentally good and decent.  Indeed, that Pnin, this pathetic figure should have stolen the beautiful woman from our dashing hero seems incredible.  The narrator pretends in that final chapter than it was he who rejected the woman who went on to marry Pnin because our narrator would not have her, but there is something not quite right about that story.  Every moment in which we saw Pnin’s inner self throughout the book was necessarily pure fabrication.  Events which would have just been amusing stories are turned into lampoon by relating the inner thoughts of Pnin.  In the first six chapters, one imagines that the narrator knows all these things because he knows Pnin well.  Then we discover the narrator has never spoken to Pnin at any point after the events in the book take place.  Pure fabrication. 

The book is clever—but you knew that—it is Nabokov after all.  As a portrait of life in a New England college, it’s not exactly right—a bit too much caricature designed to make Pnin look like a fish out of water.  As a portrait of a professor, again it’s not quite right.  As a means of thinking about how we do in fact create narratives of others, it’s pretty good.  How many people exist in our mind’s eye exactly the way we really wish they were?

R.I.P. Pnin, the memory.  Cue dirge.

Carnival

The school year winds down and nostalgia creeps in.  There is a sameness to the rhythm of college.  And while the individual change, the nature of the average student doesn’t change much.  Indeed, it hasn’t changed much since at least 1920.  That was the year Fitzgerald published This Side of Paradise.  We read it in my tutorial this year.  It is one of those inter-war expression of the hopelessness of the modern age.  And after a century of unbelievable change, I was shocked at how much Amory Blaine would fit right in at MHC (well, if he were a she, of course).  Nearly a century after the book was published, college students are still chasing after the same things with the same hopes and fears and the same ennui nagging at the fringes of consciousness. 

Amory ends the novel with the declaration: “I know myself, but that is all.”  In that phrase is captured all of the angst and problems of the 21^st century undergraduate college.  Amory, of course, does not understand himself at all.  He just thinks he does.  But he does know that he knows nothing beyond himself, nothing greater than himself.  His whole life is reduced to the Self:

“I am selfish,” he thought.

“This is not a quality that will change when I ‘see human suffering’ or ‘lose my parents’ or ‘help others.’

“This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.

“It is by somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life.

“There is no virtue of unselfishness that I cannot use. I can make sacrifices, be charitable, give to a friend, endure for a friend, lay down my life for a friend — all because these things may be the best possible expression of myself; yet I have not one drop of the milk of human kindness.”

That is, of course exactly what the modern college teaches students.  Live for the Greater Good because then you will fully express yourself.  Study hard because then you will be able to do great things and feel self-fulfillment.

What about all those classes and things?  Knowledge is dead.  As Eliot put it in 1934:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

So, what does the modern college student learn?  We talk about teaching critical thinking and life skills, but never wisdom.

So, what is the modern college?  It’s just like the frenzy of social activity described by Fitzgerald in a subchapter entitled “Carnival.” It’s also just like the Carnival (Karn Evil) Emerson, Lake and Palmer described in 1973.  It doesn’t have to be like that, of course.  But, the fact that the college Fitzgerald describes and the college my students attend are more alike than it is comfortable to admit, must give one reason to pause in hoping for a dramatic change in the culture of higher education.

Treasure in an Earthen Vessel

“If we can more and more free ourselves from values other than spiritual, I believe we are going in the right direction.”  Anni Albers said that; Christopher Benfey repeats it in an extended…what’s the word?  Meditation?  Reflection?  Creation?...let’s just call it a Book for now…Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay.  I’d read a few reviews of this book before buying a copy; I don’t think I have ever seen a case where the reviewers so completely missed the point. 

To read the reviews, one would get the impression that this is one part Benfey’s family history, one part history of Black Mountain College, and one part discussion of pottery.  The reviews make it sound like it is a simple hodgepodge, a well-written hodgepodge to be sure, but nothing more than, at best, a wonderfully eclectic romp through history and art.

That description isn’t even close to what his book actually is.  The book is actually better described by the remark above made by Anni Albers (a 20^th century artist well known among those who know much about such things (and Benfey’s aunt)).  There’s an even better blurb for the book in the book itself.  A reviewer writes: “This is not a Book of Travels, properly speaking, but a series of poems, chiefly descriptive, occasioned by the Objects which the Traveler observed—It is a delicious book; & like all delicious things, you must take but a little of it at a time.”  Coleridge (yes, that Coleridge) wrote that review.  Benfey throws in the quotation in an offhand manner in a chapter about William Bartram.  Coleridge thought he was describing Bartram’s book, but I daresay that Coleridge’s description is far better used on Benfey’s book than Bartram’s. 

In the Coleridge quotation lies the real description of this book:  it is a series of poems, chiefly descriptive.  It looks like a tale of, for example, the discovery of white clay in the Carolinas or a trip to Berlin or a visit to a Japanese village known for making pottery.  But the real story here has nothing to do with the superficial.  The book is an act of taking a lump of clay, spinning it on a wheel, firing and glazing it, turning that lump into something unexpectedly beautiful.  All the stories and side notes are just so much salt, thrown into the furnace to add an interesting texture to the life being crafted, bit by bit, story by story.

So, what is going on here?  A curious book, to put it mildly.  Joyce wrote A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, a novel telling about how a poet (who is, of course, Joyce) was born.  Benfey is going Joyce one better; in this book he is not telling about how the artist was born, he is creating the artist who is none other than himself.  It reminds me of nothing so much as an old joke about baseball umpires:

First Umpire:  I call them like I see them.

Second Umpire: I call them like they are.

Third Umpire: They aren’t anything until I call them.

Traditional autobiography tries to be one of the first two umpires.  This book is the third umpire.  We are watching the author make himself here in exactly the same way we would watch a potter make a jug or a bowl or a jar.  The author is both potter and clay.  The tales of his ancestors are really just so many flicks of the wrist to add shape here or there; the historical tidbits are there to add color. 

To see it another way (which is exactly what this book does endlessly), consider an anecdote from the book.  Benfey is relating his trip to find Cherokee Clay when he finds himself talking to Jerry, the owner of the Great Smoky Mountain Fish Camp & Safari.

“As we sipped long-necked bottles of beer at Jerry’s bar, he dragged out a bucket of Cherokee pottery shards.  They were brown or gray, unglazed; whatever color they retained had come from the smoke of the kiln.  Each carried a pattern of some kind, scored with a pointed tool: zigzags in parallel or an array of tight spirals, like Van Gogh’s Starry Night.  I was fingering one gray fragment in my hand like a magical talisman. ‘Take it,’ Jerry said. “No one will ever care for it more than you do.’”

One way of looking at this book is that it is a collection of those fragments.  And at times, Benfey is encouraging us to see the isolated parts here as nothing more than interesting broken shards, like a scrap from a Van Gogh painting.  But, look again and note that parts are really just fragments when they are in others’ hands; when Benfey picks up the fragment it becomes a magical talisman.  And here again, we find the secret of the book.  It looks like a fragment to you, but Benfey is using it for another, magical, purpose. 

Benfey ends the book with this:

“And every once in a while, a restless genius came along—a Bartram, a Wedgewood, a Coleridge—who wandered from the familiar trail, risking falls and failures, and fused the new possibilities in unexpected ways, leaving lasting art for posterity.”

Exactly so.  This book is a gigantic gamble on the future.  Will it merit rereading in a decade?  How well do the asides and stray notes cohere when one begins to take apart the book?  Or can the book even be dissected at all?  The closest parallel to this book I have ever read is Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, but this book is much more crafted that Nabokov’s.  This book has an intentionality not only in the chapters themselves, but in the book as a whole.  So, I suppose I really can’t think of a comparison.

This is a book to be read in the same way one reads a book of poetry.  Nothing is stated directly, but as the ideas sift in memory, a pattern emerges.  I suspect, like all great poetry, as one reads it over and over, the picture takes on new hues.  Highly recommended for those who like to let their minds wander while reading.

Roundup at the Financial Crisis Corral

Books about the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 continue to dribble out.  (This is the sort of shocking insight which keeps people coming back to this here blog.)  I continue to assign such books to undergraduates.  (This is the sort of useless information which makes the aforementioned people think, “Why do I bother reading this blog?”)  I then proceed to write up ruminations about these books on this blog.  Every now and then I pause and think, “What about the poor Reader?”  Such concern for the Reader is, to be sure, atypical.  However, I assigned four books about the financial crisis last semester, I never got around to writing up a review of any of them, so now I am faced with spending four consecutive posts on the same topic or lumping all the reviews into one post.  Prudence dictates the latter.  The Reader can now express heartfelt thanks.

1. Lewis, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

If you are a normal person, and if you are curious about Matters Economic, this is the top choice from this list.  But, putting here is cheating a bit.  It’s not really clear that it belongs on this list.  The New Third World in the subtitle is the former first world.  There are chapters on Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany and the US.  As with all of Michael Lewis’ books, it is clever, amusing, and offers some genuine insight.  It is, in short, a crowd pleaser—though it probably won’t generate a mega-movie deal (cf. Moneyball, The Blind Side).  The Iceland story was the most fascinating.  How did a tiny fishing outpost turn into the most spectacular rise and crash in the financial crisis?  This is a whole country which went all in on activities which makes the US housing bubble look like Child’s Play.  Then the whole country went bankrupt.  It’s really incredible when you think about it.  The heart of the book is a nice tour of why the European situation is hopeless.  And then, the coup de grace—if you think the US has weathered the worst crisis of your lifetime, think again.  The big problem is still looming, and nobody is paying attention.  City after city, state after state, and ultimately the federal government itself, are heading for a massive fiscal problem for which there is no easy solution.  Cities, states and the federal government all have huge (as in worthy of Gargantua and Pantagruel) pension obligations and there is literally no money to make those payments.  If these government were private operations, they would be bankrupt.  We are starting to see the beginnings of this problem.  Lewis talks to the former governor of California, moves onto San Jose (my old home town) and then to Vallejo (Vallejo!) documenting the process of bankruptcy.  Vallejo is the future.  It’s not pretty.

But, cheer up.  At least the government is on the job

2. Morgenson and Rosner, Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption led to Economic Armageddon

Never mind about that cheering up bit.  This is a book all about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  The book suffers from typical journalistic sensationalism—the subtitle alone makes one cringe.  That being said, I knew that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were corrupt, but even still, I was surprised (well actually shocked) to discover just how corrupt they actually were (are?).  This is a really ugly story of a quasi-governmental organization gone terribly wrong.  And all in the name of the public good.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were set up to help poor people get mortgages so they could buy homes.  That sounds like a really nice thing to do.  Then the directors realized they could make large amounts of money and pay themselves large salaries simply by making large donations to the politicians who were ostensibly regulating them.  Houses for the poor and everyone involved got rich.  Win-win.  Well, except for the taxpayers who got to foot the bill in the end.

But, cheer up. At least Economists have figured out how to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

3. A book with 15 authors, The Squam Lake Report: Fixing the Financial System

I’m not joking about the 15 authors—this book has that many listed authors.  And it isn’t a collection of essays by 15 different people—it is one book with 15 authors.  So, with 15 authors, a veritable Who’s Who of the Monetary Economics world, it must be pretty impressive, right?  Sigh.  Forget about that cheer up line in the previous paragraph.  What a tedious book.  It reads like…a committee report.  Safe, dull, over-worked recommendations based on safe, dull detail-light explanations.  That’s what happens, I suppose, when 15 people co-author a book.  Who is the audience for this book?   I have no idea.  I assigned it in Money and Banking.  The chief virtue according to my students:  it’s short.  Hardly a ringing endorsement.  If this is the state of the art in thinking about how to find our way past the financial crisis, it’s time to despair.

But, cheer up.  At least there are technical economists working on detailed technical proposals which could clear up everything.

4. Acharaya, Cooley, Richardson, Walter, eds. Regulating Wall Street: The Dodd-Frank Act and the New Architecture of Global Finance

It’s pretty funny when you see a book with four editors and think, that’s not so bad compared to a book with 15 authors.  This book is economics for economists.  Technical economists.  Eighteen chapters with detailed analyses of the problems in the financial sector and detailed suggestions on what can be done. For example, one of the chapters describes an important idea thus: “Contingent capital (often referred to as reverse contingent convertible bonds or Coco bonds) constitutes a form of uninsured debt that converts automatically into equity when certain prespecified triggers are hit….Contingent capital is designed to facilitate a transfer of losses when a firms’ equity is being depleted by converting some debt into equity, thereby ensuring that the bank still maintains a sufficient level of capitalization.”  (Acharaya, Kulkarni and Richardson authored those sentences—a mere three authors!)  That’s an example of the sort of clever ideas which are being floated these days.  And if you liked those two sentences, then this book is for you.  If you skipped them, then walk on by, but while strolling past those guys in the white lab coats:

Cheer up!  With economists working hard at solving the big problems in the big, bad world, there is every reason to be happy.

Wanna Be Just Like an Economist?

Can the history of economic thought be interesting to a normal person? 

The development of, say, Physics is quite interesting to many people.  Even Einstein got into the act and wrote a History of Physics.  (A good book, by the way—I read it years ago and enjoyed it tremendously (The Evolution of Physics by Einstein and Infeld).)  There are also many books about the history of political thought or philosophical thought.  Indeed, histories of ideas can also be quite good.

In another vein, books about economics can be very popular.  People like learning more about economics (for obvious reasons).  Freakonomics was big, really big. 

But, what happens when you combine the two?  Would anyone want to read a history of the development of thinking about economics?  The market (that noble arbitrator) would suggest not.  Until recently the best history of economic thought for the general reader was Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers.  It’s breezy.  Many economists read it once.  I doubt many non-economists ever did.

(The copy I own was the very first book I was ever given by a student.  I was in grad school, a Teaching Assistant for one of those giant lecture classes.  At the end of the semester, JoAnna handed me this book—she had read it for another class, and decided she would give me her copy.  So, while I know she’ll never read this blog post—thanks, JoAnna.  A quarter-century later, I still really appreciate it.) 

Now, along comes Sylvia Nasar, of A Beautiful Mind fame, with her latest offering:

Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius.

I assigned it last semester.  Coincidentally, one of my colleagues also assigned it in his class last semester.  Students who happened to be taking both our classes were at some sort of cosmic still point.

The verdict?  I liked it.  Actually, I really liked it.  I learned all sorts of things.  But, here is the problem:  I learned nothing about, you know, economics.  Indeed, I find it hard to believe that anyone would learn anything about economics in this book.  It’s a book about economists, not economics.  If you want a quick intro to Keynes’ romantic life, it’s here.  If you want to know about Beatrice Webb's marriage, it’s here.  If you want to know about Irving Fisher’s invention of the Rolodex, it’s here.  If you want to know about the Marginal Revolution in economics, the single biggest intellectual moment in the development of economics as a discipline…well, look elsewhere.  Don't get me wrong—there are some mentions of economic theory in passing here and there, but only in passing.  There is also discussion of economic activity—the stock market crash and so on.  But about theory?  Shockingly little.  Curiously, this is exactly the problem with Heilbroner’s book.

If one reads a history of physics, one expects to see some Physics.  If one reads a history of economic thought, then shouldn’t there be some, you know, equations or graphs or something? 

Grand Pursuit will undoubtedly live long on the assigned reading lists of classes taught by professors who like this sort of book.  If you want to read about a bunch a famous economists, this book is great—seriously, I think anyone looking for that sort of thing will find it as enthralling as I did.  Sadly, I think the set of people who fit that category is small.

And so, since this here is a review of good book I despair of convincing anyone to read, here is a good song from a great band which I also despair I will convince anyone to love.

Back From the Dead

What is the fascination with resurrecting the dead?  I finished up my reading for the semester (and I am in the process of finishing my grading for the semester—summer is nigh), and in that wonderful moment, poised between two worlds—the world of School-Year, when books are chosen to be read because I assigned them in a class, and the world of Break, when books are chosen haphazardly purely for self-edification and enjoyment—at that precise moment when I must choose how to break from the first world and enter the second, at that moment in which everything seems to hinge on how to start a summer, for reasons I cannot explain, indeed as if by some odd mystical force dragging me into the pit (and while that seems a bit melodramatic (well, while it is, in fact, melodramatic), I cannot explain this choice in any other, more rational way), I pulled from my shelf, the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft and read The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

Why did I read this book?  And even more importantly, why of all the books with which I could have started my summer reading, why instead of one of the books on the list I made a month ago of books I was looking forward to reading this summer, why would I pick this book to mark the onset of summer?  I have no idea.  Some chthonic force, perhaps?  The Call of Cthulhu?  One shudders.

Was it good?  Here’s Lovecraft’s own evaluation:  “cumbrous, creaking bit of self-conscious antiquarianism.”  (Ah Wikipedia, thou art so fair.)  In fact, it was only published posthumously.  In this case, the author’s evaluation wasn’t far off the mark.  Yet, oddly, it was still worth reading as a curiosity.

The book reads like a government report, detailing the strange disappearance of the titular character.  Said character dabbled in the Black Arts, following the footsteps of his ancestor, whose story is also retold.  And so, we move from New England in 1662  to New England in 1928 (with a detour into a demonic underworld thrown in for effect) tracing out the attempts to delve into Dark Secrets.  To what end?  It’s never entirely clear, and therein lies the hanging question which opened these ruminations.

Suppose you had the power to resurrect the dead.  Would you use it?  I have a hard time imagining anyone I would wish to call back from the Dead for a chat.  Imagine sitting down to talk with a resurrected H.L. Mencken.  Why?  What in the world would I have to say to Jonathan Edwards come back from the Dead?  Perhaps I have no imagination, but what would I want to know?  “Was it really cold at Valley Forge, Mr. Washington?”  “Would you like another drink, Mr. Faulkner?”

Would I really want to pretend that dear old Ben Franklin and I were BFFs simply because we had tea one dark night when I brought him back from the dead?  Do I really care if Sacco was innocent or not?  Would my life be better if I knew whether Shakespeare thought Gertrude knew about the activities of Claudius?

So, here we have a tale about a young man who gets sucked into a dark, dark world  in pursuit of a knowledge of things which really, when one thinks about it, wouldn’t be all that interesting to know.   Maybe I am in the minority here (hardly a novelty, to be sure).  Maybe everyone else really wants to swap gossip with Mark Twain. 

Or maybe the allure of bringing back the Dead is simply the allure of having Power.  And if so, remember these wise words from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, indeed the words which elevate this book into something other than the pedestrian, the words which should be engraved over the mantle of ever home:

Doe not call up Any that you can not put downe