the 'faith' of a novelist

After the early success of the Concrete Garden, I’ve always thought that Ian McEwan has gone downhill as a novelist – which seems to be a Britishy thing of his generation. Perhaps I should say, his generation of male alpha novelists, led by Martin Amis. In Amis’s case, there is a serious mismatch between his sense of what is important and his sensibility, which is at its best with what is unimportant. McEwan is another who longs to let the pundit out of the novelist’s cage. This, at least, is the upshot of his unintentionally funny piece in the Guardian about losing “faith” in novels (a piece which, to be fair, has a nice homage to The Go Between, a novel I am very fond of, appended to McEwan’s wandering and pondering beginning).  And the award for fave graf goes to!

“This is when I think I will go to my grave and not read Anna Karenina a fifth time, or Madame Bovary a fourth. I'm 64. If I'm lucky, I might have 20 good reading years left. Teach me about the world! Bring me the cosmologists on the creation of time, the annalists of the Holocaust, the philosopher who has married into neuroscience, the mathematician who can describe the beauty of numbers to the numbskull, the scholar of empires' rise and fall, the adepts of the English civil war. A few widely spaced pleasures apart, what will I have or know at the end of yet another novel beyond Henry's remorse or triumph? Will a novelist please tell me why the Industrial Revolution began, or how the Higgs boson confers mass on fundamental particles, or how morality evolved or what Salieri thought of the young Schubert in his choir. If I cared just a little about Henry's gripes, I could read a John Berryman 'Dream Song' in less than four minutes. And with the 15 hours saved, linger over some case law (real events!), as good a primer as any on the strangeness and savagery of the human heart.”

Left out of this highminded collection is anything so vulgar as Kim Kardashian’s divorce, Wall Street fraudsters, newspapers stealing emails from celebrities, fad diets, bloody murders, sex tapes, etc. – the whole gritty panoply of lowlife, which reaches out a twitching hand and pulls the chair out from under the whole question of how morality evolved, and asks how Justin Timberlake thought of the young Justin Bieber on his first Youtube tape. From the lowlife angle, the mire of banality in which the novel gambols, there is something irresistibly funny in McEwan losing faith in Pere Goriot and Leopold Bloom and wanting  to contemplate (with true Bloomian ardor!) the Higgs boson particle in the port and cheese golden years.

Faith here is being used in a strange way, as a synonym for the suspension of disbelief. But the guy who coined that phrase, Coleridge, would point out that faith is not the suspension of disbelief, but the belief in things unseen – and a ruler across your knuckles, McEwan. You have lost your privilege to read James Gleick for tonight, and must copy a hundred tag lines of Latin verse and turn it in tomorrow!

Actually, I don’t think either term characterizes the reader’s relationship to fiction. I don’t think the experience of reading changes much between reading case law (my God, McEwan does push the highbrow into the depth of absurdity!) and reading Crime and Punishment. The reader looks at words and transforms that vision into reading in both cases. Outside the reading experience, the reader may know that the Higgs Boson particle is real (or as real as the mathematics it is built on) and that Jack the Ripper shed actual blood, and Raskolnikov shed none. But that knowledge does not so much change the material out of which the experience is built as charge it differently.

However, the writer who is using the material in a different way than the reader – for the material isn’t yet given – does have to believe in a thing unseen – that is, the future text. At a certain point, of course, the thing unseen can be discarded, as the text is ended. But even here, the writer doesn’t wholly enter the reader’s zone in regard to his or her own text, any more than you can experience another person’s face – that quasi-intentional addition to the body’s physiognomy. There are writers who claim they never reread what they wrote and there are people who never look at their photographs  - both are guarding a certain painful spot in their consciousness, one that they don’t want pressed.

The reader who doesn’t like novels may well say that he or she ( it is mostly he nowadays) prefers the real to fiction, but that is unlikely. Usually one finds they want an affirmation of a belief without the messy necessity of running it through the difference which characterizes human reality. In other words, they want the social irreality you can get, as well, in a video game – where you don’t have to worry about the monster or the enemy’s feelings. Feelings, in this ontology, far from being the portals through which we receive all information about the world within the world, are somehow secondary to cold hard facts. Cold hard facts, let it be noted, are cold and hard – feeling words. Elementary contradictions surround the urge to know without the expertise to check. The latter, of course, leads blissfully onward to the moral entrepreneur’s career, until one day you wake up and you find that you have been transformed into something even more loathsome than the cockroach that was Gregor Samsa’s fate – you’ve become an op ed writer. God save you then.

The age of organic reproduction

It is easy to forget that the age of mechanical reproduction is a mere speck in the eye of the age of organic reproduction. Organic reproduction is much on my mind, since I’ve come back to Atlanta in order to apply for my carte de longue sejour at the French consulate in Atlanta. Whenever I return to the Atlanta area, the landscape, the suburban streets, the lawns, the houses, and above all the particular slant of sunshine or lack of it always start up that peculiar form of organic reproduction called memory. Involuntary memory, Bergson called it – not the intentional kind, when I cast my mind back to recall exactly where I put the wallet and the keys, or the last time we changed Adam. Although I’ve been through the routine of remembering – through the medium of travelling down, say, Lavaca Road, past the I-285 exit, in the day’s mix of weather – every time I come back to Atlanta, still, it is not something I can control, nor can I predict the outcome of the mood it induces. Yesterday, we went to see my nephew Whit, and show him Adam, who, uncharacteristically, was a bit fussy there in the Java Monkey in Decatur, and needed to be fed. And then we returned to where we are staying, where we stayed the magic summer two years ago when we got married in the backyard – my brother Dan’s bungalow in Conyers. When I used to come to Atlanta from Austin, where I biked all the time, I was always impressed by the automobile induced discomfort of things – what is the deal with driving ten miles to go to a coffee shop? And now that I am coming from Paris, where two blocks in any direction will take me to a bakery, a butcher shop, a fruit market, a grocery store, a delicatessen, a museum, a Subway sandwich shop, a Lebanese sandwich shop, a Greek delicatessen, about twenty cafes – I have, even more, a sense of how exhausting it is to transport your skinny ass from A to B in America.

But casting aside those catcalls evoked by the American dream – there is another dream that comes up via organic routes deeplaid within me. This was the dream of being grown up, a dream I harbored between the third grade (in Indian Creek Elementary) up to the twelfth grade (in Clarkston High School). It was a dream nourished by pictures in story books, and movies, but most of all by – windows. Windows in classrooms. I remember little to nothing of, say, math class in the seventh grade (Jolly Elementary), but I remember looking out the window and longing to be free in that sunshine, going about my destiny in some tucked in adult life where – you could just suddenly get into your car and drive wherever you wanted to. Where you could camp out in the mountains, or at least climb Stone Mountain, preferably with a book under your arm. Perhaps one about owls. The weather in Atlanta comes to me coupled with the window – the front and rear windows of the car, the heavily draped window of the living room in the house I lived in, the windows in the metal doors leading out to the back fields where we did P.E. at Clarkston high.

To me, this is what longing is all about – it is an equation: a window + weather. And so it will ever be.

Tesla vs. Broder

I am loving the fight between Tesla and John M. Broder, the NYT hack. Broder's story about not being able to drive a Tesla Model S to Boston was responded to with a blizzard of data by Musk, the CEO of Tesla. In turn, Broder's story has turned from - I'm a normal guy on a normal drive and the model S failed me -  to I'm a clueless guy calling Tesla personnel every five minutes and they told me nasty lies which made me screw up my drive. 
Some tech writer on the web wrote that the response to this dispute differs between the automobile fans and the tech fans - the former are, predictably, all pro-Broder, the latter find him laughable. Polls show that the Ute, or Youth as they are also known, don't like cars. They like computers. I think this is a shot in that war. The automobilists cling to the gas powered car as though their whole lifestyle were at stake. And they aren't wrong. That lifestyle is at stake, and it is in its last stages. The automobile went from a liberating technology to a chain around our necks. I'm not sure Tesla's car is the solution to that, but it is different. And that unsettles the old hacks. Broder's account reads, after his corrections, more like trying to teach grandpa how to use email than a savvy consumer in a hyped up failure. I am amused how the press, in defense of one of their clueless own, is springing to Broder's defense. There is a priceless article in Slate which relies on the famous "objectivity" of the NYT to defend Broder - which is the kind of argument that can only be made by those so far in the tank that, like those sea snails you buy for acquariums, they are at the bottom, cleaning up the excrement.

500 Days

I’ve started reading Eichenwald’s 500 Days, which is about the reign of error and terror that characterized the first half of the Bush administration. The preface contains an abbreviated countdown to 9/11, citing this or that FBI man or reporter who stumbled on the fact that something big was being planned. As is usual in the establishment press, we go easy here on the obvious: the massive incompetence of the Bush administration. If Al Gore had managed to pass through the coup designed by the court and the Bush handlers and actually assume the office of president to which he was elected, I’m pretty confident that Mohammed Atta and his merry crew would have ended up crashing a private plane into a tower in Portland Maine – if they managed to get on board a plane at all. Americans have a hard time facing up to the fact that the elite that they pay so much to is basically as dumb as any elite in history. These aren’t the smartest guys in the room, unless they have rented the room and put a bodyguard up to keep smart guys out.

Eichenwald has, unfortunately, imbibed the NYT anecdote heavy style of reporting. Thus we move between a disparate group of people as though we were in some badly directed episode of Homeland. Here’s a reporter three months before 9/11 interviewing Osama the B. Here’s a customs official two months before 9/11 deporting a mysterious Saudi. These events are covered in a minimal fashion, without any attempt to place them in a context. What would have made for a much more fascinating intro is a much denser stringing together of anticipatory events, because if ever there was an attack foretold, it was 9/11. The only people who didn’t know it was coming worked for the Bush administration in high offices. Just as they didn’t know that occupying Iraq was an expensive, long process, just as they didn’t know how to cope with Katrina, just as they allowed the economy to blow up in 2008 when, after Bear Stearns fell, the merest babe could have told them that they better move fast or the whole system would blow  - so it was with 9/11. But because the U.S. media has long taken its job to be one of providing fluff stories to disguise the awful and criminal incompetence of the powerful, we were treated to an imperial fan dance, and – incredibly – the man most responsible for allowing an amateur group of 19 to take down the WTC – George W. – became, for a while, the most popular president since the other George W – Washington, that is.

Now, there are many dimensions of bad. In one respect, surely, our worst president was Dwight Eisenhower, who presided over the era of above ground nuclear tests which resulted in – according to a study commissioned by Congress – around 200,000 extra cases of thyroid cancer, due to the release of the iodine isotope in the fallout. Of course, that is a conservative estimate, since the group was not allowed to investigate all the elements in the fallout that effected most of the country from these tests. Eisenhower also, as we now know from declassified NSA documents, played a Doctor Strangelove game with SAC, ordering our nuclear armed jets to penetrate Soviet Airspace on numerous occasions just to check on the Soviet response. If I were to nominate the most dangerous of all U.S. prezes, I’d have to go for Eisenhower.

But Bush is still in the running for greatest bad president, in that he stamped, or his spirit stamped, not only the first decade of the 21^st century in these here states, but the second as well. Obama’s administration has so far been but a variable in the Bush paradigm of plutocratic incompetence. You could take Obama’s Defense, Justice and Treasury departments and comfortably plug them into the Bush administration. In this sense, Eichenwald’s book, minus the corny prose – Eichenwald can’t write about the hijacking without calling it a “murderous” hijacking, just in case the reader doesn’t know that people died – is a timely reminder that we are ruled by a meritocracy of shitheads.

zombies and totems in economics

The Efficient Markets Hypothesis is one of John Quiggins Zombie ideas – intellectually discredited, yet still alive. And yet, this doesn’t mean that Quiggins is right about EMH, because he deals with it as though it were a model developed in a laboratory, which is the way economists regularly see themselves. I would state the case much differently. EMH – the idea that at any moment, the market collectively embodies more information than any one subject within it could have, and so is ultimately unriggable by any one subject – or, as it is more commonly put, the market can’t be beat -  is actually the belated justification for the speculative structure that sprang up in the financial community after the progressive wave at the beginning of the twentieth century ebbed. The ebbing of that wave was too bad. Roosevelt Republicans - partly just to bedevil Taft, but partly driven by the brain trust that had helped design the income tax and the laws governing interstate commerce - put up an agenda that would have: centralized the incorporation of interstate companies with the Commerce Department (still a vital reform - one of the great drivers of regulatory laxity in the U.S. is the ability of corporations to, in effect, choose their jurisdictions and rules, thus carving out practical 'offshore' havens in the U.S. (notoriously, Delaware); and put strict controls on stock trading by making it impossible to water stocks (a phrase that has now become antique, since it describes our entire speculative structure nowadays), again giving the Commerce department the power to order companies to reduce exaggerated market valuation - in essence, the market valuation should be at parity with the Commerce Department determined real value of the company. The best account that I know of is given in Lawrence Mitchel's The Speculation Economy, in the chapter entitled Transcendental Value. Modern speculation began as a commercial practice, not an economic model - and when models were finally found to 'explain' and justify it, it was already established, on the foundation of the defeat of the progressive movement. As is mostly the case, an economic model is not a prescription for how to do things, but an adjunct to the struggle between practices already in play. Whether you accept EMH or behaviorialist accounts, it doesn't really matter. The model is an epiphenomena. If economists had existed in pharaonic times, they would surely have produced efficiency and behavioral models of pyramid building. Putting to death EMH is like striking the totem resemblence of an animal instead of the animal itself. It doesn't really matter until you buy into the system of magic of which it is a part

Liberated by robots

At the beginning of capitalism stands the beast – as in all social orders – and at its limit stands the robot. The robot is one of those fascinating border objects. Generated within capitalism as a commodity to produce commodities, the robot – even more than the proletariat – digs the grave of capitalism, to use Marx’s phrase. 

Paul Krugman is quoted  in a recent New Yorker piece on our dark robotic future  as saying: “Smart machines may make higher G.D.P. possible, but also reduce the demand for people—including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.”  Which gives us a definition of us mortals that transcends biology and mechanics – it is ownership that lords it over things and people. Robots can’t own, in this scenario – just as the computers that are now programmed to plunge into the market and out of the market in microseconds, seeking micro-point differences on which to make profits, generously allow their owners to take all the spoils. And yet, in a society of robot provided abundance,  the justification for owning is – behind the backs of the owners = practically abolished. Each dollar we hold is, in part, staked on scarcity. And scarcity is the mother of capital  – out of its belly capital bursts, greedy little ringer, to make the system of exchange work. But the system of exchange, as economists always forget, is not the purpose of the economic system. That purpose is to serve the  needs of humanity. With the ultimate robot world, we can cast the system behind us, slough it off, bury it. The system would finally have generated its own obsolescence. Economists, however, work for the man, and the obsolescence of the man is outside of their program. Better a nation of slaves than a nation without the wealthy.

Gary Marcus, the man who wrote the New Yorker piece, mentions Oscar Wilde, butnot Karl Marx. However, both Wilde and Marx had their eyes on the prize, as far as what the economy was ultimately for. Marcus even daringly explores an aspect of automation that is rarely mentioned: substituting the computer for white collar jobs.

Secretaries have been replaced by word processors and accountants by QuickBooks. As John Markoff explained last year, in an article entitled “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software,” blue-collar and white-collar jobs are both threatened. Even new-fangled information-economy jobs like I.T. departments are now endangered by systems like Amazon’s back-end A.W.S. infrastructure, which provides one-stop cloud-based solutions where a team of on-site computer wizards were once needed. With advances in both hardware and software, the time between the invention of a job and its automated replacement is getting shorter.

Marcus doesn’t mention management. Upper management. CEO level management. But of course those jobs are also easy to routinize and automate. And yet, the literature on this is sparse. The reason, of course, is the strong streak of servility in our current American culture that dare not dream of knocking the boss off his pedestal. The boss, after all, is a genius!

Everyman's Marx on the Internet Archive

I've put the Everyman's Marx book up at this link on the Internet Archive.
And I've put an account of this fiasco up at Amazon.com as a review of this always forthcoming and never to be published book. Hey, I have to have my fun.