2010-02-27T10:57:29+00:00

Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

February 27, 2010March 7, 2018/stevereads/Leave a comment

Close-up of a Japanese girl's face, with a purple circle overlaid on each cheek; the book's title is written in yellow on the circle on her left cheek

This is a romance novel for dudes, which is to say that it’s sensitive-dude pornography. Having read by now six Murakami novels, I’m realizing that this is something of a staple for him. By about 1/3 of the way through Norwegian Wood, I realized that this was going to be another Murakami novel in which the narrator receives a handjob for no good reason at all. In fact the reason for Unmotivated Norwegian Wood Handjob Number 1 is about the same as the reason for Unmotivated Kafka On The Shore Handjob Number 1 (I have a classification scheme set up for easy referencing later on): our narrator is acting all pent-up, and the endlessly accommodating woman asks him if he’d like a little consequence-free release, no questions asked. He says sure, and returns to bed without feeling any obligation to reciprocate, engage in future sexual activity, or be emotionally committed to his momentary partner. As Kurt Vonnegut put it in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: pornography contains “fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world.” So does Norwegian Wood.

Indeed, the main thread in Norwegian Wood features our laconic narrator, Toru, hanging out at a university in Tokyo while an incredibly cute, sexually adventurous girl with delicious legs who wears short skirts, named Midori, constantly propositions him with one utterly depraved sexual fantasy after another. But our narrator can’t commit to Midori, because he’s deeply in love with a very unstable woman named Naoko who spends the book in a sanatorium. He holds off on having sex with Midori because of his commitment to Naoko. The narrator and Midori literally sleep together, and perform various sex acts with one another, but never the One True Act; somehow this makes it all okay. It is all okay because, again, this is dude pornography. Periodically our narrator heads into the mountains to visit Naoko. One night, for reasons that are never made clear, Naoko visits our narrator at his bedside, removes her clothes, demonstrates her Platonically perfect body (described by Murakami in really wonderful detail) to him, wraps back up and heads to sleep. Was she sleepwalking? Was it deliberate? No one knows. This is one of Murakami’s trademarks: little mysterious things that add spice to the story but don’t really further it. It just happens that this bit of spice also adds sex, or a bit of a tease.

Naoko’s roommate in the sanatorium is an older lady named Reiko who has the hots for Toru, and says so to Naoko and to Toru quite openly. Since this is a work of literary pornography, Naoko never seems to become jealous over this. (Indeed, I’m half-convinced that Murakami made Naoko mentally unstable so that you wouldn’t question her utter lack of standard human emotions, such as jealousy.) It’s also a work of what you might call the “pornography of self-control,” another Murakami hallmark: Toru can visit these two attractive ladies, and can spend his days with the freewheeling Midori, without once being overtaken by desire. He has lots of sex with lots of women — sometimes in the company of his handsome college dormmate, who takes Toru with him out on the town — but those nerves of his are made of steel.

When he’s not ambling about with Midori, who describes all the naughty things she wants him to do to her, he’s drinking himself into oblivion over the mentally unstable Naoko. The man does a lot of drinking. Sometimes he’s so distraught that he becomes a hobo, wandering from town to town with a sleeping bag on his back, periodically getting booted out by the townspeople and other times getting treated to a hot meal by a friendly stranger. This is where dude porn meets Tom Waits.

But it’s sensitive-dude porn, mind you, so it can’t just be aimless sex. Toru’s dormmate, Nagasawa, is dating a spectacularly interesting, self-sacrificing woman named Hatsumi, whom our narrator loves chatting with, but whom Nagasawa takes every opportunity to cheat on. Hatsumi knows all this, and somehow manages to not be completely distraught; she intends to spend her life with Nagasawa. Hatsumi turns to Toru to help her figure out what to do; Toru counsels her to dump Nagasawa’s philandering ass. Toru is, after all, a sensitive dude.

Over the past couple years, I’ve noticed just how many novels by male authors contain large elements of the same sort of sex fantasy. At points these novels even veer into rape fantasies; Norwegian Wood has a good bit of that, as does Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal. Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence contains a thread about two beautiful women who can’t keep their hands off each other and seem open to inviting — eager to invite, even — a man into their bed; in Norwegian Wood, the reader is constantly in a similar state of erotic expectation whenever Toru is in the same room with Naoko and Reiko. It’s fundamental to the literary-dude-porn genre that women be a) mildly lesbian, or at least bi-curious; b) absolutely forward about their intentions (perhaps appealing to the books’ consumers, whom the authors assume to be quiet, shy types); c) endlessly complimentary about the size of their male partners’ members; d) liberated as to sexual technique; e) able to keep emotion and sex entirely separate. Sex, in the literary-dude-porn genre, then becomes something extracurricular and consequence-free. Our narrator can have sex and mere moments later walk off to make a sandwich; his ladies remain where they were, perhaps casually making out with one another. He may fall in love with them — in The Dying Animal, our narrator loses all control in his twilight years — but the sex can be put in its own box.

If it’s not clear, I actually found Norwegian Wood an enjoyable read. But realize what it is before you get into it. It’s sensitive-dude porn. With a few more sex scenes, just a bit less emotion, and a bit more of the classic Murakami strangeness, you’d end up with something like Nicholson Baker’s Fermata (in which our hero finds a way to freeze time for everyone but himself, and uses this newfound power to do unspeakable things to women’s immobile bodies).

Norwegian Wood is a rather large departure for Murakami. Other novels of his, particularly The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka On The Shore, are entrancingly weird — so weird that they often get casually slapped with the label ‘metaphysical.’ Norwegian Wood isn’t weird; apart from a high number of suicides and more sex than the world we’re used to, it’s a fairly common story. If you want to know who Murakami is, I’d recommend starting with Wind-Up Bird or Kafka. If you’re a sensitive literary dude and want some sensitive-literary-dude porn, give Norwegian Wood a try.

John Banville, The Sea

February 20, 2010February 6, 2023/stevereads/Leave a comment

Cover of The Sea: all soft colors of a seaside cliff; yawn

I don’t mean to be flip, but [book: The Sea] reminded me of Ray from Achewood:

Poetry IS boring and difficult. Take a look at this line by Tennyson, in his rimjob of a poem Tintern Abbey:

FIVE years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.–Once again

Sounds to me like someone was gettin paid by the word. That’s a pretty long way of saying that you’re standing by a creek. Here is how that could be written instead:

DOGG check it I am by this creek;
and I got hell of emotions…in my brain

Basically we all get annoyed when someone uses the old-fashioned Tennyson-type style because you know the writer is just copying the greats and probably wears a gaelic thumb ring. Modern poets cant do that thee, thou, wrestd from sweet Aprils bosom kind of crap cause modern people dont talk that way.

In [book: The Sea]’s case, it can be reduced as follows: “My wife died a while ago, and I am sad, and now I *think* about my *memories*.”

[book: The Sea] is the sort of paint-by-numbers exercise that you’d get if you wrote your book with a particularly boring, sensitive [newspaper: Times of London] reviewer in mind. (Not [newspaper: The Guardian]. I would never try to write for [newspaper: The Guardian], knowing that their Digested Reads series is out there, waiting.) I envision that John Banville decided he wanted a book which would be called “elegiac” and “autumnal” and would win the Booker Prize. So he wrote that book, and the reviewers called it elegiac and autumnal, and it won the Booker. Yay on him.

It is a very gray book. Our narrator is renting a room from one of your classic spinster landladies, hair all bunned up and meals all eaten from a tin. What is the story with this landlady? We certainly get that she’s spinsteresque. Anyway, our narrator is a widower. His late wife spends nearly of the book dying, and little else. It sure would be nice to learn something about the late wife, other than that she died. Anyway, so his mind wanders freely over his youth spent at the shore. He kissed a girl there. She almost took her clothes off for him once. Then she died. The clothes-removing girl is capriciously violent and kind of gross; I envision an unkempt tomboy. She and her parents are staying in their highfalutin place at the shore, which is where our narrator meets her.

The shore itself is gray. The girl’s parents are essentially nonentities. Or maybe single-entities: the mother is fat, but apparently not obscenely so; the father has a big belly and laughs a lot.

And … that’s about it. Our narrator lives in his little room, thinks about his past, and mourns the loss of his wife. What’s amazing about this mourning is that it never really sheds any light on his late wife; he’s talking about other people, but he’s really talking about himself. Perhaps this is The Point, but this is not a Point in whose company I care to spend 200 pages.

If [book: The Sea] is supposed to be read for any particular reason, I guess it must be for the language. Banville spends lots of time choosing words. The book is about the words more than it’s about what they say. Our narrator is a self-described dilettante who writes about art history, so the words often compare things to paintings. Grey things, that is; it compares grey things to paintings. Grey, grey, grey. For 200 pages.

This is a self-consciously belletristic book. It is also self-consciously trying to remind us of Nabokov’s [book: Speak, Memory]. Its self-conscious parroting only serves to remind you of the unbridgeable distance between [book: Speak, Memory] and [book: The Sea].

Richard Epstein seems like a nice guy, but I wanted to hurl Mortal Peril at the wall.

February 13, 2010May 4, 2016/stevereads/Leave a comment

The job where I’ve been working since September 1 has kept me very, very busy, in a good, exhilarating kind of way. I find that I have less wattage available for reading. In days past, I could read a dry, disagreeable book, and really take to the pleasure of a future evisceration. My pen would go flying across the page, taking notes here, crossing out entire paragraphs there, sometimes telling the author to perform anatomically impossible acts on themselves.

Perhaps in time I will return there, but I have apparently lost the patience. It’s not that I’m looking for an echo chamber from my books; it’s that I think I’ve temporarily lost the ability to believe that “these are arguments which we must confront.” If I think they’re silly arguments, they’re cutting even more into precious, limited mental space.

All of this is by way of background to explain why Richard Epstein’s book [book: Mortal Peril?: Our Inalienable Right to Health Care?] sits forlornly back at home on my bed, while I ride the train up to visit my lovely girlfriend in New Hampshire. [book: Mortal Peril?] is based on libertarian axioms explaining why health care is not an inalienable right, and how it ought to be market-allocated like anything else. If this means that only the wealthy get health care, because only they can afford it, then so be it.

Perhaps this is unfair to Epstein, and is based on my not having given the book enough of a shot to have gotten far into it. In that case I blame Epstein. Whom is he trying to convince with his book? If it’s libertarians, then he has the right idea: begin the book by discoursing on the power of negative rights (freedom to contract without interference, basically). If he’s trying to convince those of us who want to raise the level of the poor, on the other hand, then he’s not speaking our language. His book is one of those dour, dryly theoretical books that declares — sadly, of course, ever so sadly, with condescension to those benighted souls who think government can help people — the futility of trying to help anyone out. This is an Axiom. Another of his Axioms is that voluntary exchange between two people is always win-win. Either there’s a lot hidden under the word “voluntary,” or I suspect drug addicts would have something to say about that. Yet if you take it as an Axiom that all exchange is win-win, it follows that even addicts benefit from the transaction; thus follows the idea of “rational addiction.” This would sound insane if it came from anyone but an economist.

Epstein has his axioms and I have mine. My first axiom would declare that the futility of a government program is an empirical question, not to be settled by theoretical arguments about negative or positive rights. My book [book: Mortal Peril] (I would drop Epstein’s question mark) would try to answer the following question: if positive rights, ensured at government gunpoint, are such a bad thing, then why has almost every advanced industrial economy instituted guaranteed health care as a right of citizenship? I would look at the relation — if there is one — between economic inequality and economic growth.

One thing I wouldn’t do is wave my hands at the economic scarcity problem — infinite wants, they tell us, and finite resources — and declare that this proves the impossibility of health care for all. I would look, for instance, at the actual cost of preventing cholera in a developing nation, or the cost of providing free lunch to every American schoolchild, or the costs and benefits of getting iodized salt into the bodies of children who would otherwise develop goiter. We’re not talking about getting a BMW into the garage of every poverty-stricken African (or giving every African a garage, for that matter).

Yet that’s exactly the sort of misrepresentation that Epstein’s book — the fraction of it I could get through, anyway — traffics in. If it descended for a moment to an empirical look at health care or aid to the poor, the whole charade would come tumbling down. Sometimes government hurts the poor; I think here of some housing projects. But not all housing projects! There are several perfectly clean, safe housing projects in Cambridge, and so far as I know they’re no more dangerous than the rest of the city. Surely there are successful housing projects all over the United States. Just as surely there are some dangerous ones that are drug havens. What makes Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia lush and loved, whereas Franklin Park in Washington D.C. is weedy, filled with the homeless at all times of day, and a place you wouldn’t want to be caught after dark? These are questions for Jane Jacobs, not for Richard Epstein. Jacobs is doggedly empirical; Epstein is unfortunately theoretical.

If, like Epstein, I insisted on the use of private charity rather than government coercion to provide health care to the poor, I’d examine the efficiency of both alternatives. I wouldn’t, as Epstein does, wave my arms feverishly about the waste of government expense. I would collect data on these things. Government wastes money, surely, but how much it wastes is an empirical question. Do the scale economies of government programs let it waste less than competing private organizations? Insurance companies count every paid claim as a loss, and spend a lot of money trying to attract only the healthiest beneficiaries; do we count their administrative overhead as “waste”? If not, why not? Shouldn’t we count an expense as “waste” if it doesn’t go toward providing health care for a beneficiary? Let’s compare insurance companies and government agencies by the same standard, not by a standard calculated to make government lose.

Probably the level of government waste varies depending upon which program we’re talking about. Why is it always social programs which conservatives insist are so wasteful? Why not, say, the Department of Defense? I would like conservatives to be self-consistent and insist on cutting waste wherever they find it. Libertarians believe that self-defense is one of the few justifiable government expenditures, but do they really believe that the massive military-industrial complex we’ve built is entirely necessary?

There was a period in American history, Epstein notes, when thousands of charity hospitals filled the United States. Those seem to have largely disappeared, or at least been overtaken by for-profit hospitals that are required to admit all comers to their emergency rooms. Why is that? Is it that the government has crowded out private investment? Or is there some other explanation?

Being empirically minded allows you to keep from going entirely off the rails. Take a step, then look around and see if you’re off in the weeds; if you are, step back and try a different path. Epstein’s theoretical orientation — and the theoretical orientation of many libertarians — makes them follow a path until they drive off a cliff.

Yet we, as Americans, are expected to take libertarian ideas seriously, because this country’s deepest ideologies speak to the perfection of free markets. (Free markets are perfect. They also don’t exist.) So we’re expected to kowtow in the direction of the Epsteins and the Hayeks, rather than toward the Elsters or the Noves. Daniel Davies notes the timorousness of the American Left in this regard:

They’re [the Chicago school and friends are] always hacks, Brad. Always. Yes even Milton Friedman. The more independent-minded ones will occasionally come up with a liberalish or fair-minded idea or two, but this is purely for display, not for ever doing anything about if to do so would run the risk of a higher rate of capital gains tax. The ideological core of Chicago-style libertarianism has two planks.

Vote Republican.

That’s it.

Why are American liberals so damnably obsessed with extending intellectual charity to right wing hacks which is never reciprocated? It reaches parodic form in the case of those tiresome “centrists” who left wing American bloggers are always playing the Lucy-holds-the-football game with. Oh, but their politics are sooo centrist! They’re practically 50% of the way between Republicans and Democrats! Yeah, specifically they’re right-wing Democrats in non-election years and party line Republicans any time it might conceivably matter (note that here, two years after the White House ceremony at which Friedman apparently “spent most of his 90th birthday lunch telling Bush that his fiscal policy was a disaster”, here he is signing a letter in support of more of the same).

I wouldn’t mind, but it’s clearly not intellectual honesty that makes American liberals act pretend that Milton Friedman wasn’t a party line Republican hack (which he was; he was also an excellent economist, which is why he won the Nobel Prize for Economics, not the Nobel Prize for Making A Sincere and Productive Contribution To The National Political Debate, which he would not have won if there was one). If it was just pure scholarly decency that made Yank liberals so keen on recognising the good qualities even in their political opponents, then you’d expect that they would also be quick to recognise the good qualities, analytical insights and so on in prominent Communist intellectuals. And do they? Do they fuck. I won’t link to the Paul Sweezy obituary, because I think everyone involved agrees that this wasn’t Brad’s finest hour, but it certainly wasn’t atypical.

Of course the explanation’s quite sensible. American liberals kiss up to Friedmanites and kick down on Reds because they’re still, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, scared of being red-baited. One of the enduring reasons why I regard JK Galbraith as a hero is that practically alone among mainstream commentators of the era, he by and large refused to play this game.

Restaurant reviewers, anonymity, and the (non-?)wisdom of crowds

February 8, 2010/stevereads/Leave a comment

A great Boston restaurant reviewer who goes by the handle “MC Slim JB” links (via Twitter) to a [mag: Columbia Journalism Review] history of food reviewing. The review is essentially divided into three themes:

* how food reviewing tracked the expanding universe of ethnic foods available in New York City
* reviewers’ perspectives on anonymity — specifically, whether they felt obliged to remain anonymous to prevent favorable treatment by the chef
* the questionable ethical guidelines followed by today’s amateur food reviewers.

The first bullet is interesting. The second is as well, and for the record I think reviewers should always be anonymous; there’s no question in my mind on this point.

To the extent that Internet reviewers make a name for themselves and drop anonymity to get special dishes at restaurants, that’s obviously bad. The [mag: CJR] piece focuses on a few amateur reviewers who prostitute themselves in this way. For what it’s worth, I’ve never heard of any of these reviewers.

What the [mag: CJR] piece doesn’t bother to examine is what happens when *everyone is a reviewer*. When chefs only need to be on the lookout for Ruth Reichl, they can post her photo up in the kitchen and keep an eye out. But when every one of us could go on Chowhound and tear a restaurant to shreds, presumably the culinary standard always has to stay high.

Of course there are caveats here. First is that, when everyone can talk, everyone’s voice is correspondingly diminished: why should someone listen to me when there are thousands — millions? — of other people on the Internet just like me? But that just changes the point a little: chefs now have to make nice not only with the Reichls of the world, but with *the entire Internet*.

The Internet speaks with many voices, of course. What you’ll find on Chowhound is that one man’s pigsty is another man’s foodie bliss. Sometimes this reflects the quirks of the particular day the reviewer went. Other times it means that the reviewer has no taste. You have to judge on your own. Certain Internet reviewers get rated highly by their peers; MC Slim JB gets that honor on Chowhound. Does that rating mean anything? Maybe their peers are all dolts; this is certainly how I feel about highly-rated Slashdot posts (whose quality, from my once-yearly checks, has declined from even its already piss-poor station).

So you just have to decide how you like the reviewer and how you like the venue where he posts. I find that if a number of Chowhound reviewers have good things to say about a restaurant, if their tastes match up with mine, and if the reviewers sound intelligent, then I should probably check out the restaurant. Over time, who knows whether this will remain true: maybe the world at large will discover Chowhound, will fill it with “EAT THE FRIED SHRIMP AT TGI FRIDAYS IT IS TO DIE FOR LOL”-type reviews, and will therefore kill its allure. As more idiots fill up the forums, they’ll tend to promote reviews that they themselves like. And so on down the drain we’ll go. All I’m really entitled to say is that as of this moment, Chowhound is my place to go for good restaurant reviews.

The world is more complicated now. I think it’s unquestionably better. Previously, you had two or three professional voices to rely upon, and the voices of your friends; if your tastes weren’t in line with the reviewers, tough luck. Now you can find people who share your tastes and follow their recommendations. It’s a happy world.

I’ve thought of this in other contexts, too. Lots of people venerate the wine reviewer Robert Parker, the man with the million-dollar nose. He certainly knows more about wine than I ever will, and he may even be better equipped, biologically speaking, to do that job than I am. Precisely because he’s such a different a wine consumer than I am, why should I necessarily base my wine-purchasing decisions off what he says? Is it at all clear that I’ll enjoy a complicated wine as much as Parker does? I certainly don’t agree with Dave Barry’s joke, probably 20 years old at this point, that no one can tell the difference between wine and melted popsicles. At the same time, I can’t detect many of the flavors that Parker can. What he considers a superb bottle of wine may turn out to be a waste of money for me.

Another way to view Parker’s job is as a *teacher*. Here I think the possibilities are more hopeful. I may not be able to taste, as Parker did during his road-to-Damascus moment, the “main components of a Riesling.” (Or maybe I can. Not sure.) But if Parker tells me that a wine contains such-and-such flavors, I can start looking for things that I wouldn’t have thought to look for before. Drinking a wine with Parker by your side may be akin to staring at an abstract painting in a museum with an art historian by your side. It looks like a jumble until someone puts together the pieces for you.

When reading Parker on wine, or Anthony Lane on film, or Michiko Kakutani on books, the question I think we’ve always asked is whether the reviewer is similar to us. If Lane says he dislikes a film for some particular reason, we have to decide whether that reason is something we care about. If it’s not, we should find another reviewer who focuses on other things. One reviewer may not like [film: Avatar] because he thinks the story is silly; another may love it for the visuals. If you’re into visuals, maybe you should listen to the second reviewer.

None of this is rocket science, of course. But it’s worth thinking a bit about why and how we read reviewers in the first place, before we decide that the Internet is the death of professionalism.

Way behind on book reviews; here are some capsules

January 22, 2010/stevereads/Leave a comment

I think owing to busyness at work, limited sleep, lack of exercise and similar things, I’ve been way behind on writing book reviews. Rather than wait until I have the time to handle each of them properly, I’m going to summarize as many as I can right here.

* __Doug Henwood, [book: After the New Economy]__
(With thanks to Henry Farrell for recommending this.) The new economy — everyone blessed with thousands of (as it turns out, worthless) stock options, everyone making money off senseless business ventures, everyone a “web designer” — is over, and we’re back to the old economy. Henwood argues convincingly that the new economy was only really lucrative for the small handful of people on top, and that most of us just continued to get screwed: the American economy got a lot better for the rich and not all that much better for the rest of us. This all avoids being a tirade, because the author combines the prose of the pamphleteer with most of the erudition of a scholar. (“Most of” here is a compliment: most people don’t read scholars, and people should read Henwood.)

* __Ken Auletta, [book: Googled: The End of the World As We Know It]__

I’d say there are three parts to this book, woven all around one another: first, and most sizably, lots of Ken Auletta being a Google fanboy (see his onstage interview with Google’s Eric Schmidt if you want to see a man keeping just on the respectable side of fawning); second, a rather powerful chunk reminding us of just how completely the Internet has changed the world; and third, some nonsense, of the sort that drives engineers nuts, about how Google’s focus on rationalizing markets means that they may fundamentally lack wisdom.

The fanboy part I’ll ignore; I should have expected, in any book about popular technologists, that it would coo over its subject. When Auletta steps back and describes just what the Internet has wrought in only about a decade and a half, on the other hand, it’s astonishing. Craigslist killed newspaper classified ads and thereby a large chunk of newspapers’ revenue. Google is in the process of overthrowing traditional advertising. YouTube is how many of us consume television shows now, and Netflix is how we consume movies. Amazon changes how we buy books. iTunes (Napster, really) turned music digital. Google is moving into the cell-phone industry. Their acquisition of YouTube looked at the time like they were purchasing a known massive copyright-infringement platform with the intent of directly challenging intellectual-property law. And on and on. It’s breathtaking.

Now, part of what makes Google Google in all of this — part of what all of us love watching — is the rationality driving it all. We perceive — and Auletta confirms — that Google approaches any new market, asks “What *should* this market look like?” and immediately moves to drive out irrationalities. Advertising could be done better, so Google is doing it better. Cell-phone software sucks and doesn’t reflect the computer revolution of the 1980s; Google is building Android to fix that. They see a problem and have the resources to fix it, so they fix it.

If you’re from one side of C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures,” and you’re a writer who needs to provoke controversy in a book about Google, you will wag the disciplinary finger at Google here and bemoan their “cold, logical rationality.” It’s a staple of the genre, and I can’t really fault Auletta for it: in writing a book about a tech company, you’re either going to fall into fanboydom or into These Guys Really Should Have Got A Degree In Anthropology So That They Could Understand How Humans Really Are territory; Auletta does both, and does both rather mildly, so I have little to complain about. But in any case, he has to get in his digs: Google’s founders are confused when EPIC objects to algorithmic monitoring of Gmail, according to Auletta because the founders view the world through hyper-rational blinders. This part of the book isn’t really believable, probably because I’m a geek. Humankind has not created very many men who both are prose stylists and who can talk to geeks in their language.

(Little sidebar from an earlier part of my life. I used to work for a startup that was all about openness when it could afford to be: that is, when the venture-capital funding hadn’t yet dried up. Every month, they’d show the company’s engineers the raw numbers and the bottom line. Then there came a point when maybe they didn’t want to share quite as many numbers with us. When pressed by the engineers in the room, this company’s founder explained, not convincingly, that we geeks would just take those numbers, overreact to them, and get scared. So this was for our own good, you see.

Turned out that the numbers were really just bad in an objective sense. By the time the company was acquired — because it had a lot of intellectual property, a lot of smart developers, and a world-famous founder — the acquirer bought it by just paying off its substantial debts.

I’ve taken some lessons from this: 1) that when openness disappears, it’s time to polish off your résumé; 2) that transparency is something that companies keep so long as it’s convenient; and 3) that geeks really do have a great built-in bullshit meter, which entirely derives from that cold, rational, objective viewpoint that Auletta scorns.)

* __E.L. Doctorow, [book: Ragtime]__

The only novel I’ve ever encountered that has a detectable meter. On quite a few pages I read it while snapping my fingers. Check out Ta-Nehisi Coates’s excerpt to see what I mean.

The story centers on one New York family and the intense, exploding world that surrounded them: Harry Houdini escaping from damn near everything; Emma Goldman (whose [book: Living My Life] awaits me on my bookshelf) singing the virtues of anarchy and inviting policemen’s truncheons; obsessive men falling prey to the charms of glamorous film actresses; murders happening on the roof of the original Madison Square Garden; and black men resisting abuse and getting torn to shreds as punishment. In its literary skill at combining many historical personages into one fluid story, it’s like [film: Forrest Gump] for smart people. This is an exciting, captivating, rhythmic book. My only suggestion would be that you read it in one sitting: the excitement is hypnotic, but only if you’ve let yourself settle into the trance that Doctorow has built for you.

([book: Ragtime] confirms a pattern I only started to notice when I got into Philip Roth: books by men very often feature completely unexplainable sex by their male protagonists with beautiful women. The men are often awkward nebbishes, yet they end up with curvy, sexually unslakable women. It never makes any sense, but hey: if I get into the position to write a novel, I’ll probably put my fantasies down on paper too. “Maria Romero’s raven-black locks fell around her as she collapsed breathless on the silk-covered pillow. She’d spent the previous six hours engaged in her favorite activity: ecstatic sexual congress combined with a lecture on Löwenheim-Skolem.” Get ready for it, because nerd porn is coming.)

* __Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, [book: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams]__

There’s a lot to recommend this book, and lot to recommend avoiding it. On the plus side, the authors really are on the right of the battle to make companies enjoyable for their workers. Give all your employees windows, they say; it’s nonsense to claim that this is impossible, and hotel rooms — every last one of which has a window — supply the existence proof. And more: don’t push your employees to push crap out the door; let them know that you respect quality, and they will rise to the challenge. And still more: your teams need to “gel” (DeMarco and Lister may spell it “jell,” but I refuse). To make them gel, they need managers, but they don’t need managers to sit watching their every move. Your employees *want* to create great work; people want to enjoy coming to work every day, and they want to produce something that they’re proud of. Make that kind of job available to them, and the quality product will flow out of them naturally. Hence the quasi-paradoxical line: Quality is free, but you have to pay for it. [book: Peopleware] is loaded with good bits like this.

At the same time, it suffers from some annoyances. The authors seem out to sell their own consultancy, so much of the book feels like hucksterism. Just adopt practices A, B, and C, and you’ll end up with a great company. There’s certainly a selection bias: those companies that enlist DeMarco and Lister’s consulting services probably differ systematically from those that don’t — either in the negative sense that more’s broken at D&L’s clients, or in the positive sense that those clients are the more adaptable ones. D&L insist that they’ve distilled decades of experience into this book, which just makes me crave more evidence that they’ve fomented real, positive change for their clients. Then there’s the inevitable question: if you guys are so good, why haven’t you started a software company?

So expect about half this book to make you pound the desk with enthusiasm. Expect the other half to make you roll your eyes.

* __Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., [book: The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering]__

Everyone in software knows this book by now. It’s most famous for Brooks’s Law: “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” Brooks presided over a number of massive projects at IBM in the 60s and 70s. He writes from a whole different world: the technical specs for a new operating system would fill 10 or more feet of bookshelf space; contrary to my expectations, Brooks actually seems *happy* about that. You just have to get the right documentation guy to write clear docs.

In some ways, Brooks’s writing sounds really antiquated; it’s written for people putting together massive software projects that take years to complete. All the rage nowadays is “agile”: get something out the door within a few weeks or months, then improve it bit by bit over time. In part this is to control customer expectations: put something concrete and limited before your users; now they have a specific reference point against which they can specify their needs, rather than building a dream world in their minds that you’ll never be able to meet. Brooks’s Law certainly applies as much in this new world as it did in the old. As do Brooks’s other maxims: software still needs a designer to impose architectural harmony on the whole.

I found his “No Silver Bullet” idea the most compelling of all: that no improvement in software technology or process would improve programmer productivity by 10x over the next decade. Brooks held out some hope for object-oriented programming, but I think his hopes — feeble as they were — have been dashed. The promise and the peril in organizations comes from, and has always come from, the people in those organizations. No amount of technology is going to solve that problem. Brooks summarizes one part of this as Conway’s Law: “Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce systems which are copies of the communications structures of these organizations.” That’s still the truest thing I’ve ever read on software-organization design.

For how much it’s discussed, I’m amazed that I still got so much out of Brooks. [book: The Mythical Man-Month] remains a must-own.

* __Siri Hustvedt, [book: What I Loved]__

This is another book that has to be read in few sittings, I think. It’s really an unending series of heartbreaks and frozen daggers to the gut (metaphorically speaking) for the poor narrator. Having read it over many sittings and scattered sessions on the elliptical at the gym, I lost a lot of its rhythm and its beauty. The narrator is a professor at some New York university (possibly NYU, possibly Columbia — I don’t know that the book ever says), his best friend is a mixed-media artist, his best friend’s first wife is a strange, cold woman, and he’s surrounded by a cast of literal misfits. People die suddenly, others get involved in drugs, and the world just keeps dragging him along. His voice has an exhaustion to it, which Hustvedt conveys skillfully: he’s at the end of his life, looking back on one disaster after another.

Obviously I can’t really suggest such a book for what it will do to your spirits, but it’s an engaging read.

* __Diego Gambetta, [book: Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate]__

Fascinating from start to finish. You can think of many reasons offhand why such a book would be endlessly captivating, but Gambetta will continually surprise you with the twists and turns in his subject.

Start with the obvious question: you’re a criminal, and you want to communicate with your fellow-bad guys. How do you do it? That’s intriguing on its own. If you know the other bad guy, you can vouch for him (or think you can — see “Brasco, Donnie”). If you don’t know him, you need to much more carefully apply the vetting that we use in the legit world: find someone you know who knows him, ask around about him, and so forth.

Obviously your big concern as an underworld fellow is the police. They’re constantly trying to listen in on your communications, get fellow bad guys to turn state’s evidence, and plant undercover cops in your midst.

When your organization reaches a certain level of success and infamy — think of the Mafia here — you now have a brand to protect. Rival organizations start claiming your name to strike fear into their enemies’ hearts. To avoid brand dilution, you need to make sure that only those people who are actually in the Mafia say they’re in the Mafia. Trademark law isn’t going to protect you here, so you need to enforce your own brand.

And how do your establish your bona fides as a bad guy? One intensely fascinating thread in [book: Codes to the Underworld] has to do with commitment strategies: imposing some heavy cost on yourself — some cost that absolutely no one outside the Mafia (or whichever group) would ever think of fakin. Henry Farrell, over at Crooked Timber, excerpts one amazing bit on this score:

> Erefaans face is covered in tattoos. Spit on my grave is tattooed across his forehead; I hate you, Mum etched on his left cheek. The tattoos are an expression of loyalty. The men cut the emblems of their allegiance into their skin. The Number [the name of the hierarchical system in Pollsmoor prison] demands not only that you pledge your oath verbally, but that you are marked, indelibly, for life. Facial tattoos are the ultimate abandonment of all hope for a life outside.

Gambetta has spent decades studying the Italian mafia. He’s a brilliant economic naturalist, with story upon story from the world out there. He’s a gripping writer, to boot. [book: Codes of the Underworld] is one of the few works of economics that you’ll be unable to put down. This may be because it’s not recognizable, at first glance, as a work of economics. But its economic cred is pristine; it’s filled with references to the great Thomas Schelling. Highly recommended, both for those who love economics and those who love [film: The Godfather].

(I’d be remiss here if I didn’t mention, by the way, Schelling’s [book: Micromotives and Macrobehavior]. It’s an boundlessly interesting piece of work.)

The bogus-business-“philosophy” reading project

January 2, 2010/stevereads/Leave a comment

Those of us who have been reading or watching the various purported “revolutions” in business for a while should have noticed a few patterns:

* Whatever decade we’re in, it’s purported to be entirely different from all decades that preceded it.
* The companies purported to be the revolutionaries all ostensibly treat their employees in novel ways.
* The employees themselves are purported to want more time with their families, want freedom to set their own schedules, etc.
* All companies eventually become authoritarian.

Does everyone remember when Microsoft was the new hotness? That was back in the 80s and 90s, when they were the anti-IBM. Microsoft eventually became — at least in the public eye — everything against which it had previously revolted. I have precisely zero doubt that Google will go the same way. Eventually the exponential-growth phase will end and Google will have to start looking like a traditional company.

I’ve been convinced for a long while that there is nothing new under the sun in how corporate “revolutions” are purported to happen. I am convinced that none of the descriptions of corporations from the start of the computer revolution through the dot-com era to now would have been out of place in a business book from the 1950s. Back then the dichotomy they presented was between “20th-century companies” and “19th-century companies”. Apparently we’re far enough into the 21st century that we can now talk about “21st-century businesses” and how they differ “fundamentally” from “20th-century businesses.” Plus ça change…

So I’ve decided to start a reading project that will approach this from a few angles:

* business-“revolution” books from the 1950s and before. I’ve got a couple Peter Drucker books from the ’60s on their way to me.
* computer/dot-com “revolution” books from the ’80s and ’90s. I’m going to reread [book: Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire], as well as [book: Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date] waiting for me at home in this vein. I remember lapping these books up when I was a wee tot, dreaming that I — who also could not get a date — would one day be a billionaire tech mogul. I read a book about Google recently that is isomorphic to any of the computer-revolution-porn books of my youth. I should reread [book: The Soul of a New Machine] to see whether Tracy Kidder describes early-’80s DEC in the same way.
* [book: False Prophets: The Gurus Who Created Modern Management and Why Their Ideas Are Bad for Business Today], recommended by a friend. As the [mag: Publishers Weekly] blurb puts it, “management gurus, by nature idealistic and utopian, are uncomfortable addressing the fundamental discrepancy in American culture between [authoritarian] corporate power and [democratic] political ideals.”
* As I read Drucker and friends (Tom Peters leaps to mind), I’m going to try to work my way backwards to business books of the late 19th century.

Of course, the story wasn’t always that those companies were best which treated their employees like individuals. That may partly be a conceit arising from the notion of the “knowledge worker,” a term coined by Peter Drucker. Knowledge workers are supposed to confront vague, ill-specified problems and translate them into concrete products — unlike the mythical industrial worker, lashed to his machine and stamping out identical product after identical product until the day he dies. I strongly suspect that this is a mischaracterization in two directions. First, I doubt that industrial workers were as close to automata as the story makes them out to be; the Taylorist time-and-motion ideal exists alongside the work-to-rule strike, in which workers demonstrate how poorly a company would actually function if they followed processes to the letter. So I suspect the stereotype understates the role of creativity in “19th-century” industrial companies. At the same time, I suspect that it *overstates* the role of creativity in “21st-century” companies. Yes, projects often start with vague specifications from the customer, but there’s an awful lot of mechanical work to be done between there and the end product. We’re not all knowledge workers, and we’ve not always been automata. In part, I think this story reflects the [foreign: soi-disant] masters of the universe to whom these books are directed: “Maybe all *those* people are automata, but not I; I’m *creative.*”

Even if we *were* all knowledge workers, and had previously all been automata, my strong suspicion is that we’ve been telling this same story over and over again for at least a century. At time T, goes the story, we were automata; but now, at time T+k, for some k, we are all creative, working in “flat hierarchies” (ahh, remember that other fantastic buzzword?). If this story has always been told, then it’s reasonable to suspect that it has never been true.

Finally, there’s another part of the story, which is actually the opposite of the above. People like John Kenneth Galbraith and Alfred Chandler believed that “the market” would eventually give way to a GM- and IBM-shaped economy driven by bureaucracies indistinguishable from a government. I will need to address this strand as well; reality has not been kind to it.

My frustration with unending business sloganeering has finally boiled over. It’s time to read and eviscerate.

__P.S.__: This Bruce Sterling piece (via Cosma Shalizi) seems oddly appropriate — at least for the 21st-century globo-info-twittersphere-mega-virtual economy that all us knowledge workers are now part of.

__P.P.S.__: By the way, everyone in the ’90s was a “web designer.” Now everyone is a “social-media marketing” expert. I think 3/4 of my followers on Twitter are marketing drones whom I’ve never met and will never meet. They’re hoping that I’ll follow them back, I guess. And when everyone has tens of thousands of followers … well, something awesome will surely happen.

Steve Reads

Category: Books