b l o g o s

melding

Our drive back was particularly easy, in part because we got up ass early like we usually do for return drives. This means that a good portion of the drive is over before driver and passenger reach full consciousness. Though the endless NPR cycles can be rather mind-numbing. Yesterday's, for example, followed the reports of the bizarre supreme court rulings with a singing lobster. Did anyone else hear that crap? Grr.

Luckily, though, we had Jonathan Lethem's short story collection Men and Cartoons on audio, which quickly overtook NPR even as it detracted our attention from the hills in the rear view. As anyone who reads Lethem knows, he has a flair for melding outrageous and mundane. Even the superheroes his stories hover around are third-rate and short-lived. The best instance of course is "Super Goat Man," who in his short, five-issue comic life battled "dull villains" such as "Vest Man" and "False Dave," but who finds a second life as the Walt Whitman chair in the Humanities at a small New England college. I think "Super Goat Man" is my favorite in the collection, in part because it puts Lethem's other-worldly stamp on the ever-fun genre of academic fiction. Lethem's ability to capture the tragedy in mediocrity makes his plots fit perfectly with academe. You can read "Super Goat Man" for free here. (I think--unless this site is just for New Yorker subscribers; I can neither remember nor tell.)

Probably the tightest, most vivid, and even most suspenseful story in the collection is called "The Vision." A bonus for me are his descriptions of Roberta Jar, the protagonist's "giantess" neighbor who "was six two, or three . . . and with none of that hunched manner with which women apologize for great height." I'm pretty sure Jar does not appear without some mention of her towerdom--she's even at one point described as "tall in her chair." That cracked this tall woman up. USA Today printed an excerpt here.

PT cruising, leg the fourth

Not that anyone should care, but we went ahead and ran through the rest of Ghostmap on the penultimate leg of our trip, leaving only the Lethem stories and maybe (if we're really desperate) a Buffy episode. Though we'll take turns watching that with headphones I suppose.

I'm still mulling it, but the epilogue of Ghostmap takes this urbaphiliac turn that I suppose isn't surprising coming from an author who likes to write and think about cities. And while I agree with most of the things SJ says about cities--ie they enable relatively miniscule carbon footprints, and they can sustain niche marketing like nobody's business (though he phrases it more eloquently)--I still wonder about the way he writes about them: he seems to think that if something isn't a densely-packed urban center, then it's rural. Hm. Now despite the fact that I was driving through the rest of New York state, western PA, and eastern OH while listening to the last couple cds, most of which would seem to support SJ's view, I nevertheless think his urbaphilia is a little over-the-top and casts the slightest shadow over the rest of the book for me.

The epilogue also goes on a bit too long about bird flu and terrorism for my taste, reminding me of the time a group of faculty members was informed that the campus was developing an emergency plan in case the terrorists sprayed us all with bird flu. Sans epilogue, though, the book was terrific: smart as hell, etc. The change in tone from the rest of the book to the epilogue makes me wonder if SJ's editors requested the epilogue for the sake of relevance, as if the cool interconnecting histories of cholera, epidemiology, and public works isn't instructive enough.   

restriction

I read a rumor that now's the time to commit to blogging every day for one month (ie this month). I once committed to going without meat for a week and that turned in to six years, so we'll see what happens.

Here's the visual argument John and I have been obsessing over this week:

Can you guess which of the following meals is the human (ahem, 36 year old male) equivalent of the lifelong daily diet of the monkey on the left and which is the one for the right?

MEAL A:

MEAL B:

full story here

reading for pleasure Wednesday

Following Dr. Crazy's suggestion that midweek we blog about what we are reading for pleasure, and realizing that my time for pleasure reading may soon be on the downturn, I am going to dive in with the book I just finished last night, Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. John and I were both drawn to this book before it even came out thanks to a little blurb in the style section of the New York Times which focused on Gilbert's own minimal requirements for happiness. Those requirements included living where he could walk to work daily and wearing the same style and color of pants, also daily (the picture if I remember correctly showed him in front of the closet with all the pants neatly lined up). John identified with both these principles, and I with one of them (hint: it wasn't the pants), and so I dropped the book into our Amazon shopping cart and waited for its publication. 

The book itself, however, is about more than pants and commutes: it draws on thousands of cognitive studies to explain why it is that we are so bad at predicting what is going to make us happy.

What's more, it is written by an academic for nonacademics, which has its pluses and minuses. One of the pluses is that I, not a specialist in cognitive psychology, could understand it and could also dip into the rich footnotes if I wanted to find out more about the studies he cites. And yet one of the minuses, to my mind, is Gilbert's idea of what 'regular people' might find funny. This very feature prompts NYT reviewer Scott Stossel to issue a "cringe alert": "Uh-oh," writes Stossel, "an academic who cracks wise." I also strenuously object to the back cover blurb which claims "Gilbert writes like a cross between Malcolm Gladwell and David Sedaris," though I do appreciate the irony that said blurb comes from the author of All Marketers are Liars. IOW, be warned: Gilbert is no Gladwell or Sedaris; hell, he can't even write as well as David Brooks (whose columns I can't finish for other reasons). Indeed, John, whose only amendment to the happy pants uniform would be a big pocket in which to fit a book, nonethless abandoned this particular book because of the crappy prose and dumb jokes.

And yet even though both those things bugged me, I managed to finish the book, mostly because I found Gilbert's account of humans' flawed relations to their futures as riveting as it is (at times) unsurprising. Our futures, for Gilbert, necessarily rely on our imaginations, which are usually overblown and overly optimistic, and which also rely on our equally flawed memories of past experiences.

One extended example I found particularly interesting had to do with people's inability to anticipate what it would be like to make a major life change such as having children. Many have visions of the lovely, cooing infant or the successful young violinist but none are able to imagine the day-to-day experiences of childrearing, which Gilbert contends actually cause people's (especially women's) happiness to plummet. The curious thing about the data on childrearing, though (or at least the happiness data Gilbert cites), is that they show the imagined future linking up with the memories. IOW, once kids are gone from the house, people's brains recast the childrearing experience as positive and totally worth it. That's just an example, and there are so many more in this book.

Gilbert's arguments might be pretty unsatisfying for some, and they can also be awkward in certain contexts, such as when Gilbert was asked to write a short piece for Time on Father's Day. Having read the book before the article, I believe that despite what Gilbert tells himself (or the readers of Time), he probably had to work really hard to find something optimistic to say about the happiness of fathers in the face of the overwhelming data to the contrary. He ends up valorizing the resilience of parenthood in what I read as a little bit damning by faint praise, but probably also powerfully true, if our flawed sense of happiness is to be trusted.

Gilbert is also pretty good at anticipating people's objections. So for example, when it comes to the advice-giving final chapter (a demand that was clearly placed on Gilbert in the way that rhet/comp articles are usually asked to wind around to classroom practice), Gilbert argues that the best way to figure out what a particular future will be like is to (duh) ask people who are already there. As I read this final section last night, I was thinking "but those people aren't like me! They don't necessarily like what I like!" And in the next section Gilbert assaults that idea with data point after data point about how we really aren't as special as we think we are.

In the end, Gilbert's book may unwittingly perform one of its major points: the minute-by-minute experience of reading the book doesn't really match up with either my anticipation or my recollection of it, because it ultimately left me with lots to think about, and value. In keeping with data Gilbert offers elsewhere in the book about how the most recent (or temporally last) impression can take over our memories and eclipse other qualities of an experience, the last two chapters which broaden the discussion to economics, evolution, communication, and group preservation of delusional beliefs, left me thinking this book is pretty damned good.