Crooked Timber

This post serves less as a public announcement than as a private means of self-commitment with added dollops of embarrassment should I renege, that I am not going to be blogging for the next few weeks (except perhaps one post to introduce a guest blogger), so as to get the damn book that I am writing finally done and ready. When you read me again, all going well, I should have a bouncing 350-page-or-so manuscript to announce. I reserve the right to change my mind in the case of truly dire exigencies – but they will have to be truly dire.

Doug Feith, the stupidest fucking guy on the face of the planet, has a new book out, and the back cover blurbs are … interesting. Says Jean Edward Smith

“The fact that the policy to which he contributed was flawed from the outset in no way diminishes the historical importance of this firsthand account.”

Robert Gallucci, who hired Feith as a professor of practice at my alma mater, Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, against vehement faculty opposition, is scarcely more enthusiastic.

“Douglas Feith has written what will be a controversial book. It will certainly anger many readers because it takes a different position that most other accounts on the wisdom of going to war in Iraq, on what mistakes were made, and on what made them. But Feith’s is a serious work, well-documented, that presents the best defense to date of the defining policy of the Bush presidency. It is a readable account that deserves to be read and its argument debated.”

Nor is Henry Kissinger precisely fulsome in his praises (and if you’ve lost Henry Kissinger …)

“The fullest and most thoughtful statement of the Pentagon thinking prior to and in the first stages of the Iraq war. Even those, as I, who take issue with some of its conclusions will gain a better perspective from reading this book.”

And these were the blurbs they chose to promote the book …

More generally, consider this an open thread on dubious blurbs and promotional snippets taken from book reviews. My favourite example of the latter being the Irish Times’ review of Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory. (Powells, Amazon )

It is a sick, sick world when the confidence and investment of an astute firm of publishers is justified by a work of unparallelled depravity. There is no denying the bizarre fertility of the author’s imagination: his brilliant dialogue, his cruel humour, his repellent inventiveness. The majority of the literate public, however, will be relieved that only reviewers are obliged to look at any of it.

How could you possibly, possibly refuse to buy a book with a blurb like that?

What to do on planes, apart from sleep, follow the route on the screen or go deaf trying to hear to movie soundtrack? Well read, of course. But I’ve found that Tolstoy doesn’t really do it for me there, in departure lounges or even in similar situations (buses and trains). So it is thrillers, crime, “mystery” (as they appear to call it in Powell’s bookstore) for me. My most recent indulgence is Lee Child’s Reacher series, and most recently his Bad Luck and Trouble (which I picked up in LAX on the way to Portland – I had to buy when I read the blurb: the hero is in Portland and has to rush to LA).

For those who don’t know, Reacher is a former military policeman from the US Army, with a taste for classic blues, who is spending his retirement in semi-vagrancy discovering the country of his citizenship (he grew up on military bases overseas) and gets sucked into defeating an improbable series of wicked conspiracies. Child (a Brit) writes decently and his plotting holds the attention. And whilst you wouldn’t call Reacher a liberal, he has a pretty jaundiced attitude towards the claims the American right (and indeed official America) makes for itself. There are a few weaknesses: Child makes too many plots turn on amazing coincidences and you can confidently place money on one of the apparently nice cops/FBI agents/similars turning out to be in the pockets of the bad people. So far, though, these have been forgivable flaws.

Hat tip to Steven Poole, who mentioned Child here .

I’ve been reading William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal: Fall of a Dynasty about the Indian Rebellion of 1857 with great interest. The complacent reports of the British commanders as they went about destroying the last remnants of independent Indian power are startlingly reminiscent of the “Good News from Iraq” we got so much of in 2003, and which was briefly revived during the now collapsing surge/awakening/truce. More generally, Dalrymple gives an evocative account of the Mughal court on the eve of destruction.

But I was, perhaps unfairly, amused by Dalrymple’s introduction where he extols the merits of archival research, as against the kind of “subaltern history” that pads out existing secondary sources with large dollops of theory to produce more or less interchangeable articles with titles of the general form “Othering the Imagined Construct” (feel free to permute the parts of speech to derive your own). I’ll leave it to others to decide whether this is better or worse than the old standby “Nonsensical Phrase Drawn From Primary Source: Random Word, Random Word, and the Actual Topic of this Book,” or the generic economic article of the form “Hot Current Idea, Established Field and Putative Application”.

Apparently Amazon’s Kindle is selling well. So says their front page. I’ve always wanted an eBook reader I could really want. Continue reading “Kindled?”

Tonight’s selection goes with last night’s. Late 1860’s US SF. Ergo, for fun, another Lulu edition.

"No," said Q. bravely, "at the least it must be very substantial. It must stand fire well, very well. Iron will not answer. It must be brick; we must have a Brick Moon."

Along with The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Three Little Pigs, Edward E. Hale’s "The Brick Moon" (1869) is one of the three great brickpunk classics of world literature.

Sandemanian technopreneurs look to the bold, bricks & mortar future, with a flywheel-launched, satellite-based global positioning system; but learn valuable life lessons instead.

Brick. It’s awesome stuff.

"The Brick Moon" was originally serialized in The Atlantic Monthly. And there is an interesting thematic connection with the Steam Man, above and beyond the nigh simultaneous publication. Apparently the inspiration for the Steam Man was – the BigDog of its day – this. "However, by observing carefully the cause of failure, persevering and perfecting the man-form, and by substituting steam in place of the perpetual motion machine, the present success was attained." Words to live by.

As I was saying, in "The Brick Moon", our protagonists are likewise weaned off unreal dreams. "Like all boys, we had tried our hands at perpetual motion. For me, I was sure I could square the circle, if they would give me chalk enough." Then, having put away childish things, they are soon enough hyrodynamically flywheeling tons of bricks into the lower atmosphere.

Here’s a free PDF.

Arguably, this version of the three little pigs is even better.

If you are more old school, here’s Gilgamesh: "Go up on the wall of Uruk and walk around, examine its foundation, inspect its brickwork thoroughly. Is not (even the core of) the brick structure made of kiln-fired brick, and did not the Seven Sages themselves lay out its plans?"

Brick. Awesome.

I’ve been making books. I need your help. (Do you like my cover design?)

Allow me to quote editorial matter from my new edition (which you can download for free in a moment, keep your pants on.)

Edward Sylvester Ellis (1840-1916) was an educator and journalist, best known for his prolific authorship of over a hundred ‘dime novels’, under his own and more than a dozen noms de plume. Ellis’ The Huge Hunter or, The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868) is considered perhaps the first ‘edisonade’ (the term is John Clute’s): tales of young American inventors whose ingenuity gets them into, and out of, adversity. Ellis’ Steam Man was prodigiously knocked-off, first by Harry Enton, author of Frank Reade and His Steam Man of the Plains; which spawned a regular ‘story paper’ series. When Enton gave it up,  Luis Senarens (then aged just 14) took over. The steam man became electric; the youthful protagonist, Frank, acquired an extended family and many new inventions and adventures, populating the weekly Frank Reade Library. Known as ‘the American Jules Verne’, Senarens corresponded with the French Verne, who, inspired by American sources or not, put a ‘steam elephant’ in The Steam House (1880).

This ain’t your grandfather’s steampunk. It’s your great-grandfather’s steampunk. Isn’t that fascinating? Now my trouble starts. First, Senarens, although our focus will be Ellis. A 14-year old Cuban-American wunderkind who, apparently, wrote over 1500 ‘novels’ in his career and was admired by Verne. He’s like a cross between Daisy Ashford and Stephen King, with Latin flair. And what can I learn about him? Damned little. Wikipedia: his dates (1863-1939) and a ‘may not meet the general notability guideline’ note. That’s pitiful. And his stuff is completely unavailable. Oh, you can buy a few old issues of the Frank Reade Library on eBay. Go look. And there’s a bit around the web. But why hasn’t someone made a decent edition of the lot. (Apparently there was one in the recent past. But it’s totally unavailable.) My Frank M. Robinson Science Fiction of the 20th Century, an Illustrated History – nice book: out of print – has a few images, and not a lot of information to go with it.

I bought some Girl Scout Cookies on a street corner yesterday. The box says: “The Girl Scout Cookie Program promotes financial skills such as goal setting, decision-making, customer-service and money management.” Okay, I buy it. I mean, literally, I have bought numerous boxes this season (and the last, and the one before that, etc.).*

But there was an interesting part of the experience this time that I thought was worthy of a note. Two girls were selling the cookies (with two women who were presumably their mothers behind them), but a little boy was next to them handling the money. The boy was clearly younger, probably the little brother of one of the girls. I think it’s great that he’s learning math and dealing with money. He should learn about things of that sort. But wait, wasn’t the purpose of this program to help girls learn such skills?

The incident reminded me of an anecdote in Babcock and Leschever’s book Women Don’t Ask:

Once, when their daughter was three, Linda stopped in a drugstore for something and the child saw a stuffed animal she wanted. “Do you have enough money to buy that for me, Mommy?” she asked. “Do girls have money, or is it just boys that have money?” Linda was horrified. Their family habits had unwittingly communicated to their daughter that men control money, not women. She and her husband now make sure that their daughter sees Linda paying for things frequently; they also bought their daughter a piggy bank so that she can have money of her own.

Again, I’m all for little boys learning about money and arithmetic, but the purpose of this program is that girls learn related skills. Given all the situations in everyday life where men are the default for handling money, it would seem important to emphasize girls’ exposure to it in the context of a Girls Scouts program.

To be sure, the girls were quite active in the selling process (attracting folks to the table, offering samples) so it is not as though they were passive observers. But if anything, this suggests that they were not shy to interact with the customers and thus could have been given the responsibility of handling the money. I only recognized these dynamics after I left the table. If I’d been paying more attention, I would have just handed one of the girls the money. Next time.

[*] No worries, I don’t eat most of these cookies myself, I give them to the students in my lab. I also try to make some healthier snacks available as well, but these cookies tend to be pretty popular.

Matt Yglesias’s book Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats is nearing publication, providing further evidence that very long subtitles beginning with “How …” or “Why …”, and which explain the main thesis of the book, are now completely entrenched in the U.S. publishing industry. It’s the 21st century equivalent of the 19th century “Being a …” subtitle.

Anyway, the blurbs are up and the best one is from Ezra Klein, who wins the inaugural CT American Blurbonomics: How to Praise your Friends while Surreptitiously Taking the Piss out of your Enemies award. Klein says Heads in the Sand is “A very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care.”

My previous post has attracted some comments about the academic publishing model, why it is that academics submit to commercial journals that make (in many cases very substantial) profits from publishing their pieces and so on. This broad set of issues has been debated here and on other sites over the last few years. I’d like to throw out a more focused question, aimed primarily at the academics among our readers (although other commenters should feel free to chime in, as always). Starting from the assumption that most of you submit most or all of your work to traditional journals: what would it take for you to switch to publishing through other means (specifically, free-access online paper repositories)???

My own switching requirements (which I imagine are shared by some but not all of you) would be twofold. First – that any alternative means of dissemination provide some sort of credentialling that is acceptable for purposes of internal review. While most of us do our research because we are interested in our topics and think that they are independently worthwhile, we also do it because we would like to keep our jobs (some might also or instead want to find better jobs elsewhere). Second – that the alternative mechanism provide some analogue to the kinds of focused criticism that we get (when we are lucky) from anonymous reviewers. This not only allows for gatekeeping and quality control on the aggregate level, but also typically leads to pretty substantial improvements in individual papers when the reviewers are on target. Obviously, some bad goes along with this system (the implicit incentives of journal publication make academics less likely to take risks and write on out-in-left-field topics than they might in an ideal world), but it’s hard to see how getting rid of it altogether would be a good thing.

If there were a system that provided these two desiderata for social scientists, I’d jump ship in a heartbeat – on every other reasonable criterion I can think of (perhaps there are some that I am missing) open systems are likely to beat closed ones. Obviously there are some very important economic issues too – arXiv, which is the closest analogue to such a system that I can think of, costs a fair bit of money to keep going. But it seems to me that the basic question of what we should want (or, more precisely, what we would absolutely need; wants are potentially infinite) in such a system should be asked before we ask how it should be funded. So what are the benefits and problems of such a system from your perspective, and what would it take to get you to jump over?

No. Nothing to do with Spitzer. I’ve been reading some of the works of 18th Century right-wing blogger German counter-Enlightenment intellectual Justus Möser. (Wikipedia.) Continue reading “On the Diminished Disgrace of Whores and Their Children in Our Day”

Scott had a delightful column over at IHE last week, demonstrating to tyroes like Matt Seligman and Ezra Klein how you really show off your bookish erudition to the world (by affecting, of course not to be at all interested in what the world thinks of your erudition; see further Chris on the cultural politics of ironic gnomes) .
Continue reading “Aspirational taste”