September 2009

David Leonhardt has an interesting column prompted by Bowen, Chingos and McPherson’s Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities. [1] Leonhardt is impressed by the discussion of the phenomenon of undermatching:

[Undermatching] refers to students who choose not to attend the best college they can get into. They instead go to a less selective one, perhaps one that’s closer to home or, given the torturous financial aid process, less expensive. About half of low-income students with a high school grade-point average of at least 3.5 and an SAT score of at least 1,200 do not attend the best college they could have. Many don’t even apply. Some apply but don’t enroll. “I was really astonished by the degree to which presumptively well-qualified students from poor families under-matched,” Mr. Bowen told me.

This would matter less if the students went to schools at which they nevertheless thrive. But some well-qualified students do not go at all. And the advice is to go to at least one of the most demanding schools for which you are well qualified. Schools lower down the pecking order have much lower 4- and 6- year graduation rates:

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Everyone should have a hobby. Mine is: when Top Shelf comics has one of their periodic $3 sales, I try to tell people that a couple of these recurring, sadly semi-remaindered titles, are only just about the best I’ve read from the last couple years. I wrote the same damn post – about the same damn books, practically – only last year. It’s not as though writing the same post over and over makes me appear especially clever. I must believe what I’m saying. Here, let me talk you through the procedure: you should buy, at a minimum, Scott Morse‘s The Barefoot Serpent and Lilli Carré‘s Tales of Woodsman Pete and Dan James‘ The Octopi and the Ocean and Mosquito. Check out the previews if you don’t believe me. I also feel the James Kochalka and Jeffrey Brown titles would be very solid purchases, and the price is right. And, oh, I could walk you through the best bits of the whole store, in my private opinion. (Buy Jeff Lemire.) But I want to focus on these four recommendations as sincerely heartfelt. $12 for the foursome. That’s pitiful. I feel I am robbing the artists themselves, just telling you the good news. Please buy these books so that Top Shelf runs out and I don’t have to keep writing this post. (Maybe I’m misunderstanding the economics of the situation and this will go on forever. Maybe it’s like Wall Street. It doesn’t have to make economic sense. I just don’t know.)

In other news, I’m reading Jan Tschichold‘s The Form of the Book. He’s the Wittgenstein of typography. (But that’s a different story: and I don’t mean that Tschichold was a good philosopher. It is a point about temperament. I do say so admiringly.) The next time you are at a party, see if you can humiliate your host by subjecting his or her bookshelf to this discerning treatment.

Only the book jacket offers the opportunity to let formal fantasy reign for a time. But it is no mistake to strive for an approximation between the typography of the jacket and that of the book. The jacket is first and foremost a small poster, an eye-catcher, where much is allowed that would be unseemly within the pages of the book itself. It is a pity that the cover, the true garb of a book, is so frequently neglected in favor of today’s multicolor jacket. Perhaps for this reason many people have fallen into the bad habit of placing books on the shelf while still in their jackets. I could understand this if the cover were poorly designed or even repulsive. But as a rule, book jackets belong in the waste paper basket, like empty cigarette packages.

What I like is the afterthought quality of ‘or even repulsive’. I would like to see this scene played on the stage. But I wouldn’t pay a lot of money to see it, admittedly.

So this week’s Sunday picture is a detail of the frontispiece of Darwyn Cooke’s excellent graphic novel adaptation of the first of Donald Westlake/Richard Stark’s Parker books, The Hunter (Powells,Amazon, B&N). It’s not typical of the art in the graphic novel itself (see “here”:http://www.idwpublishing.com/previews/parker/ for a preview), but it does reflect an interesting choice on the part of the artist. Like many other long series of genre novels, the Parker series gradually become unstuck in time – time advances more or less as it does in the outside world, but Parker doesn’t age nearly as he should. He should be at least in his early seventies in the final books in the series, but rather obviously isn’t. The last couple of books recognize this – the world of the Internet and money flowing backwards and forwards across electronic networks is not Parker’s world anymore, and the author says as much.

So when Cooke starts the book with a specific date (the date that _The Hunter_ first appeared) and draws the book in a style that borrows heavily from 1960s popular art, it is a deliberate choice. One could interpret Cooke’s frontispiece in at least two ways. One is as a decision to situate Parker again in his particular historical milieu. Cooke is contracted to do three more of these – if this is what he wants to do, one imagines that the successive volumes will either be the immediate sequels to _The Hunter_, or, if not will show Parker aging normally. The other possibility is that Cooke is embracing rather than rejecting the Parker series’ idiosyncratic chronology. This might see, for example, the follow ups set in different decades, with appropriate period drawing styles and an unaging (or only slightly aging) Parker. The second possibility seems a little more interesting to me than the first, but the first would have its virtues too.

William Bowen, Matthew Chingos, and Michael McPherson have just published Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities. [1] I’ll be posting about it at some length in the coming week (it seems to be the book that everyone is reading, so if you’re not, you can learn why everyone is, and if you are you can discuss. Anyway, highly recommended). Here is a (free-to-non-subscribers) op-ed they did last week in the Chronicle to give you a sense of what the book is about (you might want to avoid the less than brilliant comments the op-ed attracts). I’ll be focusing on their discussions of undermatching (point 5) and the predictive powers of high school GPAs (point 6):

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I hardly ever buy newspapers these days, I just read their websites. The gains are probably greater than the losses: I used to take the Guardian and hardly ever see the others, now I get to read a range of British and foreign papers. The one exception I make is the weekend edition of the Financial Times. In fact, the FT, in its Saturday version is my nomination for the best English-language paper in the world. I love it, as every copy brings pleasurable reading. Today’s was a special treat as it contains “a conversation”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/cb8506f6-9e60-11de-b0aa-00144feabdc0.html between one of my favourite journalists (Lucy Kellaway) and Nick Hornby (about whom it is hard to avoid having warm, friendly feelings, even if he is an Arsenal fan). Also, check out “Simone Baribeau’s account”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/f64a9e36-9da3-11de-9f4a-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=a712eb94-dc2b-11da-890d-0000779e2340.html of working to sell overpriced houses to poor people during the bubble, whilst knowing that you are doing wrong but feeling unable to quit because of the need to fund dental treatment. I think I could post half a dozen more links to today’s edition, but just go and buy it (if in the UK) or browse away (especially the Arts and Leisure section).

The Economist’s Brussels correspondent “muses on the difference between German and American campaigning”:http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2009/09/campaigning_in_germany_and_ame.cfm.

bq. The Bavarian event was genuine, in a way that stage-managed American politics cannot match. There is a lot that is creepy about an American campaign event. Arriving early at Bush rallies, I would watch aggressive and chilly young Republican aides in smart suits kneeling on gymnasium floors with fistfuls of different felt tip marker pens, and large rectangles of white card. Frowning with concentration, they would then write things like “South Dakota Loves W” in deliberately babyish writing, or pick out the words “Hello Mr President” in red, white and blue lettering. The styles and slogans would be carefully varied, and the end results were impressive: a stack of signs that looked as though supporters of all ages had lovingly written them out on homely kitchen tables. Then, when the crowd arrived (all of them invited and vetted as bona fide Bush supporters) any of them who had forgotten instructions not to bring signs of their own would have them politely confiscated. Then they would be handed one of the ersatz home-made signs by one of the chilly, bossy young munchkins from campaign HQ. On television, it all looked very sweet.

‘Chilly, bossy young munchkins’ is pretty good, I thought.

Chris de Burgh, you are a legend. Yes, you are completely MOR and haven’t changed your music or hairstyle in 30+ years. And yes, many people who are too cool for school are probably embarrassed to admit how much they like you. Not me.

Kids, Chris de Burgh was never the hippest cat, but he has sold a gazillion records in a bucketload of countries. And he makes people happy – crazy happy, in fact, jumping up and down dancing and singing on a Monday night in Dublin where the economy has gone down the toilet, flushed away by a wet and dreary summer. The Irish Times critic was emphatically not happy, however, and wrote a sharp, witty and just a tad ungenerous review of the gig.

In return, the singer/songwriter of Lady in Red (I liked his earlier stuff much better) wrote a letter to the editor with the most good-temperedly vitriolic comeback to a critic I’ve seen in a long old time. It has all the essential elements.

First off, de Burgh gets in a dig against the Irish Times’ former music critic (Joe Breen, who’s actually pretty good – you just wouldn’t want to be Chris de Burgh, is all I’m saying). Then humorously points out how shitty it must have been for the critic to be the only person at a knickerstastically cult-like gig who by definition DOESN’T WANT TO BE THERE.

It’s all very parochial and petty, with the current and previous Irish Times music critics getting the classic small-country put down: ‘my friends know you and they say you’re crap’. But then de Burgh bangs this on the head, asking the critic if his career plan is to continue “to be an occasional critic in a country with the population of Greater Manchester”.

He closes with the classic rejoinder to critics everywhere, fake sympathy for a professional life spent “in the shadows, riffling through the garbage bins of despair and avoiding those who think that you are an irrelevance, an irritation to be ignored and laughed about.”

As fans of Chris de Burgh might agree, the good stuff never gets old.

Now why did my previous post garner scarcely a comment?

The Plain People of the Internet: It hadn’t any McArdle in it!

I: Surely, my good man, we have not come to such a pretty pass as that.

The Plain People of the Internet: But here we are, and here you are.

I: I prefer to think it was due to modesty. False modesty, perhaps. But if it weren’t for false modesty, some people would have no modesty at all. Or so I like to flatter myself.

The Plain People of the Internet: What are you babbling about, you great baby, and bottomless bag of blog posts!

I: In my post, I quoted John Kricfalusi on the baneful influence of cool. “Why do young artists say they like UPA? Because it makes ‘em cool. Hipster Emo time. (It’s also easy to fake) It’s like when teenagers discover communism. They think it’s real cool to go against common sense and experience. But then when they meet the real world head on later, they realize it was youthful folly. You’re supposed to grow out of it. I too fell under the UPA spell for the 3 weeks I wanted to be cool.” But what is it, of which he speaks? A contrarian herd instinct, thus a bleating contradition in terms? An emo knee-jerk? What is the common denominator of Gerald McBoingBoing and the dream of One World Government? In short, what’s cool? Or if you prefer, what does ‘cool’ mean? Compared to this question, the trouble with McArdle’s opposition to health care is but a bagatelle.

The Plain People of the Internet: Blast your eyes!

I: I have been doing some research on the subject. Here is a passage from Charles Dickens, Great Expectations. Joe Gargery – honest soul, who wears his heart on his rolled up sleeve, as he works an honest day at the open flame of the forge – reports on what has become of Miss Havisham’s fortune: [click to continue…]

A little bit I plan to include in the chapter on the Great Moderation, linking on to a critique of post-70s macroeconomics. As always, comments and criticism gratefully (and, mostly, I hope, gracefully) accepted

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But you knew about that already. More to the point: I’ve finally got some NON-free Plato for you! Plato you can pay for! And receive some Plato in exchange! My book is finally honest to gosh in stock at Amazon! After almost two months of not being in stock, despite occasionally shipping, this strikes me as a commercial step up. I trust my friends, mom, and the select, lofty rationalists who ordered and awaited initial copies with familial-Parmenidean serenity have, in due course, received and been pleased. But what about the appetitive masses, unable to regulate their desires and make them friendly to one another, etc? It will never be four weeks from now, the desires think to themselves. But soon it will be two days from now. Soon enough. I could wait two days. That is how desire for a book thinks. Well, now you hasty masses can get my book in, like, two days! So buy it already. Assuming you want it. (And Belle’s! Don’t forget it’s Belle’s book, too. She’s not so shameless about flogging it, mind you. But that doesn’t mean she’s without feeling in the matter.)

But I don’t feel like talking about philosophy tonight. I already did that for hours today. I just got a big stack of art and design and cartoon books. Let’s talk about that. Oh, and I did a bit of research. In my last post, I failed to give Faith Hubley half credit for “Moonbird”, so I went and read the little bit there is about her in Amid Amidi’s Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in 1950s Animation [amazon]. Fun fact: when she got married to John, one of their marriage vows was ‘to make one non-commercial film a year.’ Faith was apparently more determined in that regard than her husband. One of their first collaborations was “A Date With Dizzy” (YouTube – but no credit for Faith!), in which Gillespie’s band fails to come up with a plausible way to advertise ‘instant rope ladder’. It’s a weird clip, all I can say. (But I’ll say a bit more anyway in a moment.) [click to continue…]

Following the successful wingnut attack on Van Jones, the Washington Independent reports that Glenn Beck’s next target is Cass Sunstein, with the pretext being his discussion of organ donation in Nudge, his book with Thaler on how small framing effects can have big effects on outcomes (. I see this as a positive development in all sorts of ways.

Update Sunstein’s appointment was approved by the Senate on a near party line vote 57-40. Six Republicans (Bennett, Collins, Hatch, Lugar, Snowe,Voinovich) voted Yes. The No votes included Bernie Sanders who opposed Sunstein for much the same reasons I would and some Blue Dogs notably including Ben Nelson, who followed the Beck line (all of the Dems voted for cloture). Obama’s only real chance of achieving anything is to dump both the filibuster rule and the Blue Dogs. End update

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Thanks to the continued tyranny of distance as regards the transport of books, my copy of George Scialabba’s book, What are Intellectuals Good For arrived about the time the CT seminar on the topic went live. I had a variety of thoughts on reading the book, but in a lot of ways they reinforced the point made by the transportation delay: the public intellectual business, even now, is quite nationally specific. This is not to say that Scialabba is in any way parochial: on the contrary, his cosmopolitan outlook is a striking contrast with the insularism that characterises many metropolitan intellectuals, not to mention their eponymically provincial counterparts.

Still, reading his discussion of the New York intellectual scene is rather reminiscent of looking at a map of the NYC subway system. It’s fascinating, I’ve visited some of the stops and heard a lot about others, and there are some big achievements to admire, but as regards getting around Brisbane, it doesn’t have a lot of immediate use to me.

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YouTube provides:

John [and Faith!] Hubley’s 1959, Academy Award-Winning “Moonbird”. I don’t know much about it, except that they obviously constructed an ingenious and charming piece of animation on top of an audio recording of their two young sons, talking and singing.

Here’s a surprisingly progressive, “Brotherhood of Man” (part 1, part 2) educational cartoon from 1946, directed by Robert Cannon. (Scripted by Ring Lardner [jr.!], apparently.)

And another Hubley. “Soothing, instant money” – a classic Bank of America ad. Ironically, I take it this was done just a few years after Hubley was blacklisted for refusing to testify to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. So he had been forced to leave UPA and take work making commercials.

Hubley and Cannon, if you don’t know, are probably best known for their work together at UPA on such classics as “Gerald McBoingBoing” and “Mr. Magoo”.

Here’s a fun, if somewhat uncertainly-sourced story about how Hubley and co-creator Millard Kaufman invented Magoo, from Wikipedia:

The Magoo character was originally conceived as a mean-spirited McCarthy-like reactionary whose mumbling would include as much outrageous misanthropic ranting as the animators could get away with. Kaufman had actually been blacklisted, and Magoo was a form of protest. Hubley was an ex-communist who had participated in the 1941 [Disney] strike. Both he and Kaufman had participated in the blacklist front and perhaps due to the risk of coming under more scrutiny with a hit character, John Hubley, who had created Magoo, handed the series completely over to creative director, Pete Burness. Under Burness, Magoo would win two Oscars for the studio with When Magoo Flew (1955) and Magoo’s Puddle Jumper (1956). Burness scrubbed Magoo of his politicized mean-ness and left only a few strange unempathic comments that made him appear senile or somewhat mad. This however was not entirely out of line with the way McCarthy came to be perceived over that same era.

“David Broder 2009”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/02/AR2009090202857_pf.html

Looming beyond the publicized cases of these relatively low-level operatives is the fundamental accountability question: What about those who approved of their actions? If accountability is the standard, then it should apply to the policymakers and not just to the underlings. Ultimately, do we want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock? I think it is that kind of prospect that led President Obama to state that he was opposed to invoking the criminal justice system, even as he gave Holder the authority to decide the question for himself. Obama’s argument has been that he has made the decision to change policy and bring the practices clearly within constitutional bounds — and that should be sufficient. In times like these, the understandable desire to enforce individual accountability must be weighed against the consequences. This country is facing so many huge challenges at home and abroad that the president cannot afford to be drawn into what would undoubtedly be a major, bitter partisan battle over prosecution of Bush-era officials. The cost to the country would simply be too great.

Lord Justice Denning, on the “Birmingham Six”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Six stitch up

Just consider the course of events if their [the Six’s] action were to proceed to trial … If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous. That would mean that the Home Secretary would have either to recommend that they be pardoned or to remit the case to the Court of Appeal. That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further.’ They should be struck out either on the ground that the men are estopped from challenging the decision of Mr. Justice Bridge, or alternatively that it is an abuse of the process of the court. Whichever it is, the actions should be stopped.

Funnily enough, not only did the British political and justice system manage to keep stumbling on after the Birmingham Six were released, but most reasonable observers would agree that it was the better for finally admitting that it had locked up six men for sixteen years on trumped-up evidence. Similarly, one might imagine that the US justice system would be the better for examining the _prima facie_ evidence that the Vice President of this country engaged in illegal acts, rather than pretending that it didn’t because of the risk of partisan upheaval. But not if one were David Broder.