George Orwell wrote what is arguably the best narrative essay in the English language. "Shooting an Elephant" was published in 1936, and its profundity-- both politically and psychologically-- in addition to its vivid subject matter and subtle symbolism make it something special. It's certainly the best thing ever written about an elephant.
Orwell knew all along that he didn't have to shoot the titular elephant. This recently rampaging creature had just experienced the hormonal surge of musth-- the elephant version of heat-- but was now calm. The elephant needed to sow his wild oats, but he couldn't find a female elephant to sow oats with, so he trampled a coolie and wrecked some bamboo huts. It's understandable. But shooting a working elephant is a big deal. Orwell only did it to preserve some semblance of colonial rule.
Eighty years later, Jacob Shell has updated Orwell's piece. His new book Giants of the Monsoon Forest is the definitive and comprehensive guide to "living and working with elephants." The setting is still Burma, which is now known as Myanmar. Elephants still work in tandem with mahouts, mainly in the teak industry (although elephants are also employed as transportation during the flood and monsoon season, and used by paramilitary forces deep in the forests and jungles of politically ambiguous territories).
But the mahouts have learned their lesson about musth. Working elephants are allowed to roam the forest at night, in search of fodder and possible mates. They often interact with wild herds. The working elephants have loose chains on their forelegs, so they can't run away, but they have a certain measure of freedom.
This keeps them happy enough, although they sometimes engage in high jinks to avoid coming to work on time. They double back and hide-- which is absurd for such large critters-- and they stuff their neck bells with leaves to muffle the ringing.
While the dying elephant in Orwell's essay represents the ugly end of the British Empire, the loosely chained elephant in Shell's book symbolizes the difficult and ethically tangled plight of the Asian pachyderm. It's painful to even detail it. Basically, working elephants have a somewhat rough road. The capturing and training period is brutal. The work is hard. They are generally treated well, because they are valuable, but they are not free.
There are only 40,000 Asian elephants left on the planet (there are 500,000 African elephants). Many of these Asian elephants are working elephants. If working elephants were not allowed, the population would drop to precipitous levels.
Animal rights purists would prefer for all Asian elephants to be free and wild, there doesn't seem to be enough forest left to support a thriving population. Ironically, the working elephants may actually be cooperating with humans in order to survive. These are VERY smart animals.
One of the things I realized while reading this book is probably pretty obvious, but I had never thought about it. Elephants are NOT domesticated. They're not like horses and dogs. We haven't bred the wildness out of them. When an elephant cooperates with his mahout, the elephant is doing it because it wants to cooperate. They can kill their mahouts or anyone else in the vicinity anytime they like. These are creatures who mourn their dead, have distinct personalities, do medical procedures with their trunks, show empathy towards other elephants and humans, understand up to 100 human commands, and have a language of their own.
Jacob Shell's book is a tough read. It's WAY too much for a layman to learn about Asian elephants, the history of elephant domestication, elephant and human relationships, Burmese politics, the teak industry, monsoons and floods, and political unrest. It's another world, an entirely different universe. And this is just a human perspective of a place on our planet where elephants and humans interact.
On the same day that my six year old son Alex wrote and illustrated a book called My Family (which had a page for every person in the family: Daddy, Mom, Grand-dad, Uncle Eddie, and even my brother Chris, who died several years ago in a car accident) on this very same day that he made my wife cry with this book, and on the same day that my five year old son Ian illustrated his own book-- a book full of scary monsters drawn with loving care and detail . . . on this very same day of creativity and sensitivity, on this same day my children would also-- while my wife was printing photos to put in Alex's aforementioned wonderful book-- these same wonderful boys would come across a couple of old diapers, diapers they were out of long enough to remember them humorously and reminiscently, and in a fit of depraved nostalgia, put the diapers on, simultaneously defecate and urinate in them, laugh hysterically, and then toss the evidence of this scatological prank into the bathroom waste basket, for me to discover when I went to check on them-- because they were so quiet; at the top of the stairs I smelled something awful and wondered what it could be and finally-- with no help from the giggling perpetrators-- found the soiled diapers stuffed into the bathroom waste basket . . . all on the very same day.
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree: Alex was reading a Fantastic Four comic book when he noticed that a character in the comic book was reading the very same comic book-- he was so excited that he called me over to see it-- and then we talked about the possibility of a guy inside the little drawing of the comic reading a tinier version of the comic book, and the even tinier guy inside the tiny comic book doing the same thing, ad nauseum; maybe this will blossom into a predilection for meta-fiction like Tristram Shandy and if on a winter's night a traveler . . . maybe he will end up just like his dad, nerdy and well versed in novels that no one else has read.
Cathy O'Neil's new book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy is a must read for anyone living in our digital age; she's uniquely qualified to write this book, as she's an academic mathematician who earned her Ph.D from Harvard, worked for a hedge fund on Wall Street, analyzed big data for marketing start-ups and then became a political activist because she realized that a number of dangerous discriminatory algorithms are opaque, affect enormous numbers of people, and do unseen damage . . . she nicknames these WMDs . . . Weapons of Math Destruction, and she explains how these black box formulas evaluate creditworthiness, college rankings, our employability, our Facebook and Twitter feeds, and-- most significant to me-- teacher evaluations . . . and she spends a good portion of the book on just how irrational, absurd, and insanely unsound the models are that assess teacher performance-- the formulas might work if teachers taught ten thousand kids at a time, but for a class of 30 students, measuring how a kid did on a standardized test from one year to the next is essentially random (all the teachers know this, of course, even those of us who do not possess a math Phd. from Harvard, but it's nice to hear an expert explain the logic of why this is so) but apparently the NJDOE hasn't figured this out, and at the start of this school year, they increased the weight of standardized test scores in the evaluation model from 10% to 30% . . . so now, if a teacher works in a tested grade-- such as my wife-- one third of a teacher's numerical assessment is random . . . even if she teaches math and and can point out the many problems with the algorithm (a sociologist would cite Campbell's Law, of course, and also present a valid argument for why this change is absolutely inane) and I can't explain (without long strings of profanity) how incensed this makes me-- how utterly stupid the people at the NJDOE must all be, to enact this increase-- but I'm hoping that this book indicates a sea change in how we view these algorithms and formulas, and that people will learn enough math to understand how screwed up this is . . . and if the NJDOE changes the algorithm and writes a personal apology to me, confessing that they were totally ignorant of all math and logic, then I'm willing to forgive them, because even Bill Gates got it wrong with his charter school funding, he ignored the Law of Large Numbers and came to the conclusion that small schools were better than large schools, when the fact of the matter is that small schools have more statistical variance than large schools, because they have less students in them . . . so more of them will be better and more of them will be worse . . . but, of course, people may learn the truth and still not do anything about it-- we know that a later start time will improve test scores in high school, but the bus schedule prohibits this, and so kids show up at 7 AM, in a building without AC, ready to learn AP Physics . . . everyone knows this is not the best way to teach kids, but no one does anything about it, instead we purchase new software platforms so we can upload all the spurious data and crunch the numbers-- and there may be enough people in the NJDOE and other administrative capacities who love this idea so much, the idea that we're generating loads of numbers from standardized tests and evaluation algorithms, and they don't care that all the numbers are bullshit, because it's fun to have loads of "evidence" to evaluate and all this data perpetuates the idea that we need to pay people to look at it . . . anyway, I could go on and on, but read the book, it's revelatory . . . and if you don't feel like reading it, you can listen to her discussing it on Slate Money.
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, adds nothing new to the apocalypse trope-- in fact, I think she keeps it simple on purpose: a killer virus wipes out the bulk of humanity-- but the book is deserving of all the accolades (National Book Award Finalist, Amazon Sci-fi Book of the Year) and then some . . . it's vivid and completely gripping from page one, it's beautifully written, and there are scenes of great violence and decay-- of course-- but unlike Cormac McCarthy's The Road, there are also moments of beauty and poetry and hope . . . it's The Walking Dead if the zombies were replaced by actors, musicians, and prophets; while it's not a super-idealistic noble-savage view of humanity, it's also not an illustration of Hobbes Leviathan . . . it's somewhere in between: more "literary" than hard sci-fi, but still a perfectly imagined world and I highly recommend it (especially, as an English teacher and a musician, because this book gives me hope that I might have some small but valuable role in a post-apocalyptic environment . . . "survival is insufficient").
I'm now in summer beach mode-- which means reading whatever the fuck I want-- and I've just polished off back-to-back novels that differ so vastly in content and style that they may not have been written by the same species of animal . . . I highly recommend both books, read in juxtaposition:
1) Tainaron: Mail from Another City by Finnish sci-fi writer Leena Krohn is a hypnotic series of thirty letters written by a nameless woman that has traveled across the sea in a white ship to reside in a city populated by giant, anthropomorphic insects; the book is precisely observed, philosophical, and slim, and tackles the cycles of life and death, and the dynamic metamorphosis of character and being, with memorable moments that aptly describe the smallest moments of consciousness, which are brought into sharp contrast by the existence of the giant insects, which are slightly empathetic but mainly alien . . . it's a weird, weird trip with an oddly satisfying ending to a mainly plotless ramble and it's up there with Karel Capek's War with the Newts;
2) Off Season: The Unexpurgated Editionby Jack Ketchum is the story of six tourists who visit the Maine woods in the off-season and are beset by a family of feral cannibals, mainly comprised of a horde of flesh-eating children . . . the book is so obscenely graphic, so realistic, so vivid, and so tightly plotted that you will read the entire thing without taking a breath, occasionally contemplating your own heinous aesthetic taste, occasionally laughing at the gruesomely pragmatic descriptions of cannibalism (the book is a bit of a how-to) and occasionally wondering if the local police department would really handle a case this abhorrently repugnant, or if they would immediately call in for the National Guard . . . but it doesn't matter, Ketchum doesn't give you much time to think logically, nor should you, because if a horde of flesh-hungry children are chasing you through the woods, your book-learnin' will get you nowhere . . . this was Ketchum's first novel, and there is an essay at the end of the book about his battles with the editor that led to the tamer first edition of the novel and how pleased Ketchum is with the unexpurgated edition that is now available . . . read this in the dark, late at night on your Kindle (because it's only $3.99!) but heed the warning on Amazon:
This novel contains graphic content and is recommended for regular readers of horror novels.
A relatively fun book cover design Creative Writing lesson (inspired by this rather annoying TED Talk) was nearly thwarted by a magic-marker-mystery . . . this morning I went to school dog-tired because last night, instead of sleeping, my wife endured what she described as "the worst pain I've ever felt"-- and she's pushed two children out of her vagina-- but this was some of sort of post-operative nerve pain in her foot and it just wracked her with monumental shooting, fiery agony-- so I didn't get much sleep either (and this sentence is going to reflect that) and when I went to grab my bin of markers and my bin of crayons, off the cabinet, so-- after perusing som excellent book covers and some downright awful book covers-- the kids could draw their own book covers for their current narratives-- to my dismay, my markers and crayons were missing!-- so I ran upstairs and asked the English teachers if they had seen them and I went down to the supply room but they were out of markers, so I borrowed some from Stacey-- and then I used my patented interrogation techniques on my first period class and my homeroom, to ascertain information-- but I highly doubted that a student would steal a bin of markers-- they'd have to carry it around the school!-- so I assumed it was a teacher, perhaps during detention-- and then when I went across the hall to ask the students in there if they had seen them, I saw both bins on the psychology teacher's desk, and I was like "my markers" and he was like "I wondered what these things were doing here" and his answer seemed very sincere-- and he's not the kind of guy to filch some markers without asking, he's as by-the-book as they come-- so while the mystery was half solved, there still some intrigue as to how the bins got across the hall-- janitors?-- who knows . . . I'm too tired to speculate.
It looks like I'm going to have to do this whole thing all over again, in the correct order-- which is highly appropriate for the content, as . . . like most of us (except for the stalkers, of course) I made my trip into the Zone unprepared, with little or no information, and came about it the wrong way, from the wrong direction, as a blithe intellectual, moving too quickly, with too much alacrity-- and I thank myself lucky that I was not ground into pulp, or that my legs weren't turned to gelatinous rubber, but what I should have done, instead of trying to read a book about a movie I had never seen, what I should have done-- because I'm no cinephile-- what I should have done was read the original book first, I should have read Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's novel Roadside Picniclong before I watched Stalker and I should have read Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room long after consuming both the original novel and the movie inspired by the novel, and while Tarkovsky's film is regarded as one of the best of the 20th century, it's also rather interminable, especially when you don't understand what's going on, and Roadside Picnic explains all that and more, in fact, if you're not a cinephile, then you can skip the movie and the Geoff Dyer book and just read the novel, and if you're not into Russian sci-fi, then you can skip the book entirely, and head to the Afterword, and simply read the notes the Strugatsky Brothers took on their very first discussion about the story, long before they sat down to write it . . . as these notes are so elegant and poetic, so ominous and enigmatic, and so pointed and precise, that they almost replace the novel itself: "a monkey and a tin can . . . thirty years after the alien visit, the remains of the junk they left behind are at the center of quests and adventures, investigations and misfortunes . . . the growth of superstition, a department attempting to assume power through owning the junk, an organization seeking to destroy it (knowledge fallen from the sky is useless and pernicious; any discovery could only lead to evil applications) . . . prospectors revered as wizards . . . a decline in the status of science . . . abandoned ecosystems (an almost dead battery), reanimated corpses from a variety of time periods."
After finishing George Packer's extremely depressing book The Unwinding, I decided to read something lighter, and so I turned to a book a student recommended called The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World's Greatest Reptile Smugglers . . . and while I couldn't put the book down, as I wanted to find out if Special Agent Chip Bepler of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife could finally take down Mike Van Nostrand, the brash and blatant kingpin of American reptile smuggling, this book is definitely not light reading: Bryan Christy tells a tale of drugs, crime, corruption boa constrictors full of cocaine melting in a van, environmental devastation, obsessive herpetologists, crooked zookeepers, and a completely overwhelmed Miami division of Fish and Wildlife, with just three agents to cover South Florida, the Keys, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands . . . three agents to "investigate every illegal plant or animal that came through the port of Miami, by plane or by boat . . . three agents to police the waterways against manatee abusers . . . three agents to wade into the marshes before dawn to await duck poachers . . . three agents to watch over the Florida panther, three to stop Mexican restaurants from serving up sea turtle eggs, three to force beachside hotels to dim their lights so that the sea turtles that did hatch could follow the reflected light of the moon to the Atlantic Ocean instead of finding death in the artificial illumination of a well-lit parking lot" and not only that, the book ends with a funeral, but I won't spoil it since Sunswept Entertainment is making a movie based on the story (and it seems they've turned Chip Bepler into a woman).
I would like to point out, for the record, that I finished Christina Dalcher's dystopian feminist novel Vox in a laundromat . . . because the first half of this book seems designed to make women really angry at white men, for oppressing and subjugating them-- so I found it both ironic and appropriate that I was doing the kind of work that men in the novel freed themselves from when they shackled their women's voice boxes . . . women in this Fundamentalist Christian/Extra-Trumpian near future of this novel are forced to wear word counters on their wrists, which only allow them 100 words a day-- if they speak over the limit, then they get shocks of increasing severity . . . this book is the opposite of The Power in scope, quality, and theme; The Power is true sci-fi, the world is the main character and it is comprehensively evoked by Naomi Alderman, while Vox is a bit half-baked, the Pure movement version of Christianity and the surrounding corrupt politicians more of a caricature than a possibility-- although perhaps that's what people said about the Taliabn when they were just getting started-- and the larger themes of the book get lost in the plot, big ideas about how society can make children become monsters, how communication is the cornerstone of our society, and how Socratic dialogue between all people propels knowledge and civilization forward are pushed to the wayside as the story becomes a laser-focused, plot driven thriller (where, ironically, in the end, a bunch of men come to the rescue . . . it's a bit out of nowhere) and the science-fiction is lost in a world of chivralic fantasy . . . I finished because I wanted to know what happened-- which isn't saying much-- and while the premise had some potential, if you're looking for a dystopian feminist manifesto, try the aforementioned book The Power or the classic The Handmaid's Tale . . . or even the wacky Charlotte Perkins Gilman fin de siecle utopian novel Herland(I'd also like to point out that out of the several dozen people I saw come through the laundromat, I was the only one with a book . . . everyone else was either watching the weather on the TV or poking at their phones).
I recently finished Sudhir Venkatesh's new book The Tomorrow Game: Rival Teenagers, Their Race for a Gun, and a Community United to Save Them-- and, like his other stuff, this is required reading; you may know Venkatesh from the first Freakonomics book-- he details the crack cocaine economy in South Chicago from a close and personal perspective (and he turns this sociological adventure into an entire book . . . Gang Leader for a Day) and his new book is equal to the detailed, anecdotal, and economic reporting of his first-- but this is a tighter story and perhaps more relatable to anyone who has or works with teenage children-- it's a typical high school story of bullying, honor, friendship, and money-- but with the added shadow that is always looming South Chicago: gangs, drugs, and guns . . . and all the revelations about these elements of the inner city will surprise you; my latest episode of We Defy Auguryis devoted to thoughts about this book . . . and Cobra Kai . . . check it out (and give it a good rating an Apple music if you have time, that makes a big difference . . . thanks!)
At our first department meeting, Liz told a story about a "miracle" where she was stranded at an airport with her baby, and she was stressed out and lonely, and for some reason she was thinking about a certain wonderful person named Audrey and-- miraculously-- there Audrey was, sent by God to relieve her loneliness and to give her a much needed break from caring for her baby . . . but this sounds more like a coincidence than a miracle, unlike what happened in my class on Monday: I was making the kids think analogously about how having romantic relationship with a human is similar to having a relationship with a book . . . the students had written down questions they might ask themselves before they decided to "get busy with" a romantic interest and we were assessing the continuum of queries, which started light (do they make me laugh?) and ranged to the profound (would I die for him?) and it was easy enough to wax metaphorically about liking a book that had some humor, or being monogamous with a book, or liking a book with a cute cover, relatable subject matter, an attractive font, and that new book smell . . . but when it came to speaking of art you would die for, I hit a brick wall-- my only example was if one was a complete fanatic for the author or piece of art, and then I made the natural leap to Mr. C., my friend who loves the TV show Battlestar Galactica, loves it so much that he has purchased many, many props from the show-- including a chair from the military conference room, several uniforms, and loads of other bric-a-brac that appeared on camera in the various starships and planets of the Galactica universe-- and moments after I explained this (and my classroom door was closed) and remember, I wasn't thinking about Mr. C., I was talking about him in front of many other witnesses-- so moments after this analogous example, Mr. C. himself walked through my classroom door, and if that wasn't coincidence enough, he was holding a funky microphone covered in blood . . . and he immediately explained that he had made a "new acquisition" and that he had just purchased the microphone that was used just before the "slaughter in the Quorum" in the episode "Blood on the Scales" and so I was able to point to this man and say, "Here is the man that might die for a work of art" and Mr. C. acknowledged that he would take a "heavy wound" for Battlestar Galactica and if Liz is going to call meeting up with Audrey in a strange airport a miracle, when she was only thinking about her, then I am calling this a bona fide super-miracle, because I was actually talking about Mr. C. just before he walked in, and he was holding just the prop necessary to complete my analogy.
Lest you think I stumble upon all the great books that I review here, or, as I have been accused, simply give a fantastic review to every book I read, let me explain to you how hard I work to find something good to read . . . and I realize this "hard work" is probably easier than changing over the children's clothing, or putting up the Christmas lights, or painting an "accent wall" in the living room-- all of which I neglected to lend a hand with because I was "working hard" on finding a good book to read, but we all have our special skills . . . but before I raced through The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith, which I will a perfect give ten scuttled boats out of ten-- this thriller from 1955 is a hundred times more thrilling than the ubiquitously popular The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and you get to travel to places more scenic than Hedeby and Stockholm . . . Ripley is a combination of Richard III and Dexter-- before reading this masterpiece, I read hundreds of pages in other books, all of which were pretty good but none of which completely captured my imagination and to prove this to you, I offer you a list of Recent Books I Bailed On:1) Following the Water: A Hydromancer's Notebook (beautifully written but too many dead turtles); 2) Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search For the Origin of Species (excellent mix of science and the adventurers who made it possible, but too much biographical minutia for my taste); 3) Inferno, The World at War, 1939-1945 (I wanted to read an overview of WWII but this book is for the WWII buff, a massive tome beyond my scope); 4) The Beauty and The Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War (a great concept, tell the story of the war through common people, but again, I need to read a clear overview before I read this one); 5) The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined(I always love Steven Pinker and this one is no exception, but the font is small and the book is huge, and some of it is a review for me, so I doubt I'll finish it before it's due back to the library); 6) The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations (extremely insightful classic from the seventies, but I'm afraid if I finish all 250 depressing pages, and truly understand the book, then that I'll have to stop writing this blog).
As an adult, at some point while reading a sci-fi series, you ask yourself:
"Am I really the kind of person who reads an entire sci-fi series?"
and I'm at that point with Cibola Burn, the fourth book in the Expanse series by James S.A. Corey-- this was my favorite season of the TV show and the book fills in a lot of gaps-- a LOT of gaps . . . it's a bit interminable in spots, but there's also so much good stuff: the protomolecule built a ring gate that gives humans access to thousands of worlds across the galaxy, and this book is mainly set on New Terra, a planet that seems habitable and rich in lithium and other resources . . . but it's not habitable at all- there are conflicts between colonists/squatters and official security, there are poisonous slime worms and blindness inducing bacteria, there is ancient technology built by the protomolecule which is starting to awake, there are volcanoes and storms and technologically crippling defense systems . . . so it was a lot of fun, but also LONG, long enough that I wanted to get back to some quality non-fiction or something . . . I will say it's a better fourth book than the fourth one in the Game of Thrones series-- and I was asking myself the same question-- am I really this kind of guy?-- but I forged on and the fifth book was better (I think there are a couple more books slated to come out soon, I'm going to need a recap) and so I might continue on with this Expanse series, I love the characters and all the hard sci-fi stuff, though I think the action scenes could be pared down and so, despite the fact that I'm a grown-ass man, I might be the kind of grown-ass man that finishes an epic sci-fi series.
Andrew Solomon's book Far From the Tree explores astonishingly difficult ethical dilemmas, such as:
1) should parents have the rights to genetically choose a child with a disability? . . . essentially insure that their child is deaf like them, or a dwarf like them . . . a process which might be regarded as the reverse of having a "designer baby"
2) when should a parent abort a child? . . . is a disability a burden? something to be dreaded? or is it something unique that should be celebrated?
3) what is a disability? should we be able to screen our children for being gay or on the autism spectrum? and then be able to terminate them?
but despite these heavy questions, the final message of the book is a positive one: most parents do not want any other children than their own (though Shakespeare's Henry IV does wonder if some "night tripping fairy" has swapped his ne'er-do-well son with the heroic Hotspur . . . but in the end, he learns that Hal is the son for him) and parents will undergo mental gymnastics and passionate displays of emotion to love and enjoy and connect to whatever offspring they bear . . . Solomon ends saying "sometimes, I had thought the heroic parents in this book were fools, enslaving themselves to a life's journey with their alien children, trying to breed identity out of misery," but then he comes to the conclusion that all parents do this, they all seek some connection with their children, but also celebrate their individuality, and somehow see their children as different from all other children -- and so the tree that the proverbial apple doesn't fall far from is like an Ent, it may move closer to the apple if necessary, as the miraculous parents in this book did -- in figuring out how to care for deaf kids and the schizophrenic kids, kids with autism and severe disabilities, kids that commit crimes or are the product of rape, transgender kids, astounding prodigies, and kids with Down syndrome -- this is an intelligent and inspirational book and it will change the way you view the world, but it's super long, so you may have to read it in sections or choose the chapters that interest you; still, give it a shot, it is ground-breaking and heart-breaking, and it keeps things very real.
Charlie Jane Ander's novel genre-mash-up novel All the Birds in the Sky uses the love affair between a witch and a techno-geek as a metaphor to pit science against magic . . . and while the book has its moments, it's ponderous at times-- the writing is vivid, but I didn't particularly care for the characters; the book does portray earth at an interesting T Junction: the scientists are abandoning ship while the more mystical folks are trying to find a way to save what's left of everything on earth-- not just the humans-- and this portion of the metaphor rings very true, with the presidential election looming and two roads diverging in the yellow wood for our country and the world to travel . . . a slightly less vivid and rather technical (but sort of readable) economic explanation of this is presented by Mohamed A. El-Erian in his book The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse . . . he believes that central banks functioned as critical policy actors, and while they fell asleep at the wheel before 2008, they actually steered us away from total financial collapse . . . but they can't keep it up, and if we don't change political and institutional policies we could be headed down a path of "lost generations, worsening inequality, spreading poverty and political extremism" but if political and financial policy follows some simple guidelines, and there is stronger "multilateral policy coordination" then the "second road of the T junction" leads to much better economic and social outcomes . . . I'm not going to pretend I understood everything in the book, but I did like his ending analogy that incorporated the Ali/Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle" fight and the two possible outcomes predicted by the Ali camp and subsequent training strategies . . . this I understood; rather than read the book, if I were you, I would listen to El-Erian discuss the premise on Slate Money . . . he gives a clear synopsis and you might get hooked on the show, which is generally a lot of fun.
I didn't think I was interested in the new Malcolm Gladwell book The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War until my friend Cunningham recommended it and i started reading it-- and then I was like: how does this guy do it?-- Gladwell claims he's not the greatest writer, but he's the greatest rewriter, and it shows-- he really knows how to take his material and revise it into something perfectly organized, juxtaposed and memorable-- in this one it's the battle of a moral idea in WWII-- let's bomb precisely so we can take out important wartime industries and avoid civilian casualties-- and a pragmatic approach to war: the shorter the duration the better it is for all nations involved . . . and you know what happened: the firebombing of Tokyo and the nuclear bombs Little Boy and Fat Man-- Curtis LeMay's barbaric practicality won out over General Haywood Hansell's faith in the accuracy of the Norden bombsight . . . the book is just the right length for a history book (I couldn't make it through Thomas Asbridge's definitive history of the crusades, though it's an excellent book, because it's just too damn long) and it lays bare the human error in tactics, strategy, and information during wartime . . . for a longer version of this, read Mark Bowden's book Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam . . . the moral of the story is, you had to be there, you had to be brave, you had to be flexible, and you might as well throw out all your convictions because you're involved in humanity's stupidest method of solving national problems.
Tuesday morning, I got to the East Brunswick Library at 9:40 AM and it wasn't open yet, though the website claimed they opened at 9 AM, but the sign on the door said 10 AM -- summer hours?-- and so I grabbed my book and walked across the parking lot to a bench by the little pond and sat down and started reading; two minutes later a heavyset woman with crazy hair pushing a stroller with a toddler in it sat down on the same bench as me . . . there were other benches available but this was the closest one to the library and, I quickly surmised that she too thought the library opened at 9 AM and I surmised this not because I possess a highly attuned sixth sense that enables me to read people's thoughts-- in fact, I was trying my best to ignore this woman (and her thoughts) but not only was she encroaching on my physical space, she was also encroaching on my auditory space: divulging all her innermost thoughts via a running monologue . . . or I suppose it was a one-sided dialogue with the non-verbal toddler, an apostrophic vomit of words: we thought the library was open, but it wasn't open was it? so we just have to wait here a few minutes . . . maybe awe can have a snack? okay but we're going to stay in the stroller, we'll stay put and eat a snack . . . not that, here you go, and look . . . there are the ducks, those are ducks, and those are the geese, no we're not going to go by the geese, we're going to stay in the stroller and have a snack while we wait for the library to open, we thought it was open but it's not open yet . . . and this prompted me to get up and move, but then I decided that not only would that look rude, but this was my bench and I was obviously trying to quietly read and I was in the right-- she should have taken a look at the context and found another bench-- so I wasn't going to move and i wasn't going to chat with her about how the website claimed the library opened at 9 AM but it actually didn't open until 10 AM, so I buried my head into my book, which was not easy reading (Authority by Jeff VanderMeer, book two in the Southern Reach trilogy) and tried my best to concentrate and then a dozen geese starting walking out of the pond, up the bank towards our bench, and she said, "We're out of here" and got up and pushed the stroller away and I celebrated (internally) because I wasn't afraid of a bunch of geese, in fact, these geese were my saviors . . . and so I settled back into my reading, certain that I would be able to focus now that the woman and the toddler were gone, but the geese kept coming, closer and closer, and eventually the geese got so close to me-- people must feed them-- that I couldn't concentrate on my book and so I had to get up and let the universe have it's way . . . because (ironically) the universe obviously didn't want me to kill the time waiting for the library to open reading a book, though that would have made perfect sense . . . and the universe told me this with three uniquely annoying and encroaching entities-- harbingers always come in sets of three: a rambling mom, a hungry toddler, and a rather aggressive flock of geese.
Nicholas Carr's new book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brainis well argued and frightening, and the opposition from some corners is simply because there's not much we can do about the ubiquity of the internet-- and near the start of the book he uses the Wallace Stevens poem "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" to remind us of the value of deep reading, but if you read the poem here, then I feel like his point is proven . . . that reading on the internet is nothing like reading a book (look at the size and color of the font of the poem vs. everything else on that page) and Carr uses plenty of established research to prove his thesis that reading an actual book is an excellent way to take ideas and information from short term memory and enter them into long-term memory . . . that the only way to do this is laborious and information enters our brain "thimbleful by thimbleful," and if things happen too fast, because of hyper-links, F shaped skimming, Twitter and e-mail interruptions, etc. then there will be "cognitive overload" and we can't translate new knowledge into memories or schemas . . . and he also refutes the idea that storing knowledge on the internet means we can free out brains for other uses; in fact, paradoxically, the opposite is true, the more you have in your brain, the easier it is to remember other things and the easier it is to read and think (our brains are not computers and the ROM analogy does not work) . . . but the internet is difficult to escape, so all I can recommend is that you shut it down once in a while, kick your kids out of the house-- armed with knives and matches so they don't return for a long while, and then crack open a book (made of paper-- as the Kindle is aiming towards the same interruption-laden style of reading, with hyper-links, discussions on passages, Facebook style commenting, etc.)
Using my magnificent powers of clairvoyance and divination, I am going to make a stunningly useless prediction: in the near future, my wife's book club will select Cheryl Strayed's memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail as their book of the month . . . Karen Long called it a "tougher, more feral" version of Eat, Pray Love and it's already got a long request queue at the library . . . I am planning on reading this book-- if I ever finish Cryptonomicon-- but I will in no way recommend it to any members of her book club (and hopefully they won't read this sentence) so that we can see if my prophetic acumen is accurate.
