• Technologies: One would think that at this late stage of globalization, all developed countries would be at the same technology level. But as in a game of Civ, France is behind America in some areas and ahead in others. For example, Europe has switched over to chip-and-PIN credit cards, forcing Americans with obsolete magstripe cards to buy their Métro tickets from a surly clerk at the ticket booth instead of the vending machines. On the other hand, automatic subway door-opening technology lags behind America, with most lines requiring the rider to pull a latch to open the door when he wants to get off. (I assumed this was an energy conservation measure for the climate-controlled trains, until I noticed that they weren't actually air-conditioned and the windows were open. Maybe it's just for the winter, but then why is it that newer lines do have automatic doors?) Finally, Europeans still have yet to figure out that if they mount the shower head on the wall, they can have both hands free when showering.
• Speaking French: My 1.5 levels of Rosetta Stone turned out not to be so useful; they usually spoke too fast for me to decipher it, and when I tried to speak it they looked at me as if the sounds I made didn't even resemble human language. (Which is entirely plausible.) There was one place it was very useful, though: the opera. I've been spoiled a bit by the Met, which has individual subtitling screens on the back of each seat with a selection of languages. The Opéra Bastille has the more common setup of a single supertitling screen above the stage, in French only. Fortunately, through a combination of my meager French, my dimly-remembered Latin, knowledge of the story, and contextual clues, I was able to figure out a lot of what was going on. Otherwise I would have been very confused at the end of the opera when the female lead starts passionately kissing a severed head. Really.
• The French health care system: I have a trick for translating technical terms and proper names that don't appear in normal language dictionaries: go to the English Wikipedia page for the thing you're trying to translate, then click the link on the side for the target language and use the title of the page it links to. I normally use this to get the standard katakana spellings of Western names for my Japanese homework, but I was also able to use it in France to tell the triage nurse that I had a kidney stone: calcul rénal. I found that French hospitals were not the socialist, dystopian nightmare that I've been warned about by Fox News, but calculs are pretty annoying in any country or language. On the other hand, I definitely recommend seeing Versailles while buzzed on painkillers.
• Stairs: My friend Caroline (who lives in Paris, and whom I saw for the first time in years on Wednesday) related to me one of her rules for sightseeing: if it can be climbed, she has to climb it. I wasn't quite so thorough, and was content to enjoy the Arc de Triomphe and Notre Dame cathedral from the ground level. I did, though, climb to the second platform of the Eiffel Tower (the stairs don't go all the way to the top) and to the dome of the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur. The latter doesn't have as many steps as the Eiffel Tower, but they more than made up for it by putting it at the top of a giant hill, then putting the Métro station at the foot of the hill, then burying the train platform itself deep beneath the Earth's crust at the bottom of a long spiral staircase. Sure, there's an elevator in the station, but that would be cheating. By Friday night, after I had also traversed a number of the many, many staircases in the Louvre, my legs were informing me that they were not going to climb any more steps, and I was to pick an altitude and stick with it.
• Art: An anonymous American tourist I overheard in the Louvre expressed it more poetically than I ever could when he said, "These are some awesome-ass pictures, man!" There are too many masterpieces to properly appreciate without weeks to spend in the museum, and so I just wandered the halls slack-jawed with amazement, trying to take in as much as I could before the guards threw me out at closing time. I went to the Louvre on Friday, when it stays open until 9:30 at night, and the evening was a great time to be there: it's very quiet and peaceful and not at all crowded. I also wanted to see some modern art, but the Palais de Tokyo (which houses the modern and contemporary exhibits) was under renovation: only three rooms were open on the modern side (but admission was free) and only one room on the contemporary side. The former did have some great Picassos on view, and the latter earned its 3€ admission with a fascinating installation called The Tragedy of the Commons, basically a gigantic ant farm with various food and scent stimuli supplied to the ants to direct their trails.
• Food and drink: Excellent of course, with one exception: the andouillette. On the one hand, it's just a sausage; on the other hand, it's made entirely of coarsely ground tripe, and no amount of delicious mustard sauce is sufficient to hide this fact. I did however eat many tasty pork dishes that weren't derived from the gastrointestinal tract, and never needed to resort to that other French delicacy, the Royale with Cheese.
• Traveling solo: I picked Paris for my vacation because I expected it to be a good place to visit on my own; this worked out in practice as well as in theory. Some people did ask me if this was a romantic trip, but that's certainly not the only aspect of the city. Exploring the museums in solitude allows the visitor to set his own pace and focus on his particular interests. And the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés are ideal for taking a table for one and watching the passers-by. Since I was traveling by myself, without a backpack or giant camera, I apparently looked like a local: the hawkers of souvenirs left me alone, but attractive Parisian women would ask me in French for directions. Of course, those women moved on quickly once I revealed my true nature as a tourist, but the disguise was nice while it lasted.
• Photos: Photoset on Flickr

Comments (3)

Comments on this Entry:

(Mason Porter on Sep 26, 2011 3:48 AM) I'm surprised that you were surprised that different places are at different technology levels. Sometimes it's just the product of different choices at some point earlier, and there can certainly be major reluctance to bother to change (or it might be considered too expensive to be worth it compared to something else). By the way, let me know if you ever want to coordinate a trip to Europe. I still have only seen a few isolated cities outside the UK, and I have a long list to start ticking off.

(Mason Porter on Sep 26, 2011 3:51 AM) By the way, did you attack the Gazebo? (I'm commenting here because I either don't remember my Yahoo account or don't have one, and I'm not in the mood either to wrack my brain or sign up for a new account.)

(Shellock on Sep 26, 2011 1:16 PM) Enjoy the trip sorry to hear about the kidney stone My brother went thru that said it was extremely painful. Also if you say her again say Hi to Caroline

1. Fetchez la vache!
   
2. Garçon means "boy".
   
3. You're a good guy, mon frère. That means "brother" in French. I don't know why I know that. I took four years of Spanish!

Something I don't have a good sense for is just how much study of a language is required before it starts being useful. On the one hand, if I know nothing (as is the case here), learning just a few words has almost no value because almost all sentences I encounter will still be unintelligible. And on the other end of the spectrum, if I'd been studying French for years, there'd be diminishing returns where learning a little extra on the margin wouldn't affect the quality of my experience any. So the utility as a function of time spent studying must have an S-shape where it starts out nearly flat, takes off at some point, and ultimately levels off again. The important question for this project is how long it takes to get to that first knee in the curve: the point at which I start to understand some of what I hear in the new language. I don't really know the answer to that, so this is something of an experiment.

It's interesting to see that Rosetta Stone is basically a video game: the user proceeds through a series of levels, each of which is further subdivided down to the level of individual screens, and on each screen the user needs to click in the right places (or speak the correct sentence) to advance to the next one. At the end of each section the user gets a percentage score based on how many errors they made. You could call it "Language Hero". At the end of each level there's a speaking test called a "milestone" which is basically a boss battle. There are even achievements! (The program calls them "stamps".) It's a direct application of the Reality is Broken thesis to language learning. (I haven't actually read that book, so hopefully I'm not misstating it here.)

The only problem is that language learning takes a lot longer than mastering most video games, so that I feel as if I'm playing some game that requires a lot of grinding for each minor advancement. On top of that, it's an inherently social game in which I'll get much more out of it if I seek out partners to practice with. Fortunately, I can meet such people through the online component of the course, for which I pay a periodic subscription fee. Wait a minute, all this sounds strangely familiar: Rosetta Stone isn't just a video game, it's a MMORPG! And I thought I swore off that whole genre years ago...

Comments (5)

Comments on this Entry:

(Nick on Sep 11, 2011 2:42 PM) You have my full sympathies! Swedish is an 'easy' language for English speakers to learn, supposedly, but it's a right pain for me. Not so much for being Swedish but for being another language at all, and taking a long time to learn. At least I've found the part in my language book where they stop assuming that you're good at memorisation but terrible at grammar — I'm rather the opposite. I'm enrolled in a Swedish language and culture course at Uni, but I'm debating dropping it for favour of an at-your-own-pace night-school in the town in which I'm living. Hopefully that will conflict with classes less often, and won't require me to travel an hour each way half the term. I would be curious to hear how well you can get by in France speaking mainly English and enough French to politely apologise for not knowing French. One reason why I'm not concerned slowing my studies here is that nigh everyone speaks English. I'd still like to learn the language, though.

(Arcane Gazebo on Sep 11, 2011 11:32 PM) You're not the first person with a CS/engineering background who's mentioned that grammar comes more easily than vocabulary. It's the same for me. I wonder if it's related to one's aptitude for computer languages (which are of course almost all grammar and little vocabulary). I've been spoiled a bit by studying Japanese, where the grammar is by far the easiest part. It has no grammatical genders and doesn't distinguish singular vs. plural either, and the number of irregular verbs in the entire language is two. Two! This makes French look hideously complicated by comparison, and French seems to love irregular verbs about as much as English does. On the other hand, Japanese has the worst writing system known to man, and no common vocabulary with English outside of consumer electronics. I guess there's no free lunch when it comes to natural language acquisition.

(shellock on Sep 12, 2011 1:41 PM) I would say i am rubbish at both grammar and vocab at this point i know 100 words of hebrew and my 4 year old know much more or at least comprehend much more. good luck to both of you. At least its not Latin

(Mason Porter on Sep 18, 2011 7:07 AM) Given your several years of Spanish, you should be fine with reading French! (I have used my Spanish to read French on quite a few occasions, and if they hadn't taken away the language requirement of French, German, or Russian in grad school before I dealt with it, I was going to use my knowledge of Spanish to pass the French test. A couple of people had done that successfully before.) I have heard, by the way, that many of the denizens of France have a tendency to refuse to converse in English even when they know it. I have actually seen similar behavior in Montreal. Somebody asked me something in French that I didn't understand. I indicated in English that I didn't understand, so they asked someone else---but then it also turned out that they were fluent in English. Go figure. I would have been happy to help.

(Arcane Gazebo on Sep 25, 2011 8:27 PM) Actually, I don't know any Spanish: all the bulleted items in the post are movie or TV quotes. I did take four years of Latin, which works similarly when I can remember it.

However, labyrinth also refers to the balance organ of the inner ear. The structure contains three orthogonal fluid-filled canals (hence "labyrinth") that sense rotations, along with additional organs that sense linear accelerations. This combines with visual inputs to give us our sense of balance.

So while the word labyrinthitis could refer to an uncontrollable nostalgia-driven desire to revisit the aforementioned David Bowie flick, it is actually the name for a viral infection of the balance organ. The symptoms of this infection bring to mind another movie entirely:

The experience of labyrinthitis can be easily simulated by a healthy individual. First, get your alcoholic drink of choice. Then, consume it until it feels like the room is spinning. Now imagine that this sensation persists continuously for a week. I've been describing it as "like being drunk without the fun part." Naturally it's tempting to grab some booze and add the fun back in, but I suspect that this approach is contraindicated.

At one point this week I thought the vertigo had become so severe that it felt like I was in an earthquake. Then I realized it was an actual earthquake. The various natural disasters striking the East Coast this week are not helping my condition any, but maybe if Hurricane Irene is spinning in the same direction as my head I won't even notice it.

Years ago, in an eerie bit of foreshadowing, I contemplated in dinosaur comic form the possibility of being stuck with a constant spinning sensation. At the time I thought it merely a theological hypothesis, but now I know that labyrinthitis truly is... rotating hell.

Comments (1)

Comments on this Entry:

(Mason Porter on Aug 27, 2011 7:53 PM) I remember the Rotating Hell exchange! That was the best thesis title ever. And I very much appreciated the Magic Dance and Dead or Alive references. I hope you feel better soon!

I'm very, very pessimistic about the political outlook for the next few years. The traditional norms that allowed Congress to function in the past have totally broken down: the Senate now requires a 60-vote supermajority for anything due to routine use of the filibuster, and as we've recently seen the Republican congress is willing to put a gun to the head of the national economy by demanding concessions before raising the debt ceiling.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is willing to use its executive authority to launch a new war in Libya, but not to unilaterally take action on the economy. Since the only stimulus the Republicans will accept is more tax cuts for the rich, we can expect that unemployment will continue to remain sky-high through 2012.

Then, Obama will lose re-election to whomever the Republicans nominate. It might be Rick Perry or Michelle Bachmann. If we're lucky (!) we'll get Mitt Romney, who might be unprincipled but at least appears to be sane. The economy is by far the strongest predictor of presidential election results, and with unemployment as high as it is, the independent voters will go for the Republicans in droves. A very harmful political dynamic has taken hold whereby a minority can wholly obstruct the legislative agenda in the Senate, use this to prevent any measures that might help the economy, and take advantage of anti-incumbent sentiment to regain the majority.

So, basically, we're doomed. At the very least the next Congress needs to change the rules of the Senate to eliminate the filibuster. It could be one upside of a Republican Senate: it would not be out of character for them to remove the obstructionist tools they relied on when they were in the minority. Maybe they'd get rid of the debt ceiling as well once they were the ones spending (or more likely, cutting taxes). It would result in a lot of policies I don't like, but in the long run getting rid of both of those things would be good for the country.

If I had the power to rewrite the Constitution I'd get rid of the Senate entirely, and maybe just institute a parliamentary system, but obviously neither of those things are going to happen. Instead I'll just watch old episodes of The West Wing and imagine what it would be like to have a functional government.

Comments (6)

Comments on this Entry:

(Mason Porter on Aug 21, 2011 6:58 PM) The UK government is parliamentary but also broken. :) As far as I can tell, the US empire seems to be getting deeper into its decline phase, so maybe we should just who the next big power is going to be? Sorry for the pessimism, but frankly I've pretty much given up on the US.

(Mason Porter on Aug 21, 2011 7:01 PM) On a related note, there is a new variant of the "Small World" game out. :)

(Chris Langland on Aug 22, 2011 8:28 AM) Sadly, I can't fault what you're saying about the GOP. If they behave anything like they did when W was president, we're going to keep going down this road. So far, we have been behaving like an empire and we are in decline. The only solution as I see it is to massively reduce the size and scope of the federal government and reduce our military until it defends our shores and that's it. However, this would cause a lot of short-term pain, and no politician apart from Ron Paul would be willing to do that, so yep, we're pretty much screwed.

(wolfgang on Sep 5, 2011 9:58 AM) >> this used to be primarily a political blog Do you think working on Wall St. has changed your views in any way?

(Arcane Gazebo on Sep 5, 2011 2:21 PM) I'm sure it has changed my views in some subtle ways but it's not obvious to me at the moment what they are. Maybe if I go back through my old posts I'll see where I disagree with my past self. :) I think I have a slightly better understanding of economic policy than I did before, but I still find myself agreeing with the Krugman/DeLong style neo-Keynsian arguments. (I'm encountering a lot more people than I used to who support hard money and austerity policies, but I don't find them convincing.) And although my tax status has changed I still think we should allow the Bush tax cuts to expire, uncap the payroll tax, and impose a carbon tax. (That last one probably affects me less since I've sold my car and moved to Manhattan.)

(shellock on Sep 12, 2011 1:50 PM) sit back and enjoy the ride it going to be a rough one... I wish i knew a fix aside from outlawing the republican party in its current incarnation

It's been a while since I've seen any uproar over violent video games. I'm sure there's some background level of complaint about it, but I guess with three actual wars going on and a terrible economy, most people have other things on their minds.

Nevertheless, I'd been thinking lately about one of the (many) ways in which objections to such games are misplaced. The most socially objectionable games are generally taken to be those in the Grand Theft Auto vein that allow players to run around committing heinous crimes against innocent people. (Of course, even in the GTA games one is more typically attacking "bad guys", i.e. other criminals, but the sandbox game style gives the player the free will to go on random killing sprees.) However, if the immorality of the in-game acts of violence is the measure by which they are judged, it seems to me that there's a category of game that's literally orders of magnitude worse.

After all, when we think of history's greatest monsters, we don't think of gangsters or even serial killers. No, we think of Jimmy Carter, because of The Simpsons. But after that we think of guys like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, who killed millions and caused the suffering of millions more. What if there were a video game that put the player in a role like that, allowing them to institute a fascist police state, launch wars of aggression, and even wipe out entire nations of people?

Indeed there is such a game, and the ESRB rated it "E for Everyone". I refer, of course, to the Civilization series. In Civ IV it was even literally possible to play as Stalin or Mao; the bounds of good taste (and the German video game market) kept Hitler himself off the roster. So why is it that we never hear about Civ from the video game moralists? Why is it bad to let children play with a single simulated machine gun, but not an entire army of machine gunners? Why restrict access to virtual rocket launchers, but not virtual ICBMs?

It's clear that the issue is somehow graphic violence. But again, why is that? It's certainly true that violence in Civ is depicted in a manner closer to pieces moving on a chessboard than the gorefests of Mortal Kombat. But this must be if anything even worse. What is more desensitizing than viewing millions of people's lives as a number on a screen to be erased at the push of a button? That ESRB badge hilariously lists only "mild violence" for a game in which entire cities are routinely sacked, pillaged, and burned to the ground with no survivors.

One could argue that children can more easily pick up a gun and emulate the antisocial behavior of a GTA installment than they can seize control of a country and try for world domination. But clearly some children do grow up to be crazed dictators. And even if only one kid in ten million is a potential Hitler, isn't it important to keep him from turning out that way?

Now, anyone who's looked at my Steam stats knows that I'm actually a big Civ fan. And if I had kids, I'd totally let them play too. So all I'm arguing here is that there's something strange about a moral intuition which says we need to prevent kids from playing GTA, but that playing Civ is fine. As for the potential Hitlers out there, I'm just hoping they develop a crippling addiction to "one more turn" and stay away from the actual levers of power.

Comments (8)

Comments on this Entry:

(Mason Porter on Aug 14, 2011 9:20 PM) I have three reaction: 1) Pillage, then burn. 2) I'm not prepared to refute your argument, but I'm not so sure that I buy it either. The literal fact that things are playing pieces in the Civ series is a much different statement of the psychological effects of Civ versus GTA. Are there any relevant psychological studies that apply to either of these? (This lack is also why I am not prepared to refute your argument!) Relevant studies should be done to see of what effects can be discerned. But without evidence, I don't think it's clear what the moral intuition actually should be---but I see no reason why intuition can't be developed by evidence here just as it is in other contexts. 3) When are we going to play?!? (I just got to Montreal, but I return to Oxford on Monday. So how about next week?)

(Tim Elling on Aug 21, 2011 4:59 PM) That quotation is surprisingly relevant for an additional reason: in games like Civ, a million deaths really is just a statistic --- the population is modeled as an aggregate, and there are no individuals. In GTA, that hooker you just ran over was treated, at least in part, as an individual in the game world (more precisely, one of many instances of same). When Tycho is old enough to start playing games, I will be more comfortable with games like Civ than GTA, though I plan on (eventually) letting him play both --- though I also plan on being involved with said play, talking to him about it, etc etc etc. Does anyone dare say what their own darkest gameplay experiences were? GTA, Civ, or others? I'd say my own worst behavior ever came while playing... The Sims. That's by my own standards, though, and the fact that each individual is simulated with so much detail is partially responsible for that. Oddly, as I've gotten older, I find my gameplay choices more and more restricted by my own morality. It gets harder and harder to play the bad guy (in the choose good or evil games).

(Arcane Gazebo on Aug 21, 2011 5:56 PM) Mason: Yes, we should play at some point! I'm not sure when I'll have time; all of September is likely to be too busy, but I might be able to get in a game before then. Tim: In the spirit of the original post, my objectively worst behavior was destroying entire planets and species in Master of Orion 2. But in terms of what squicked me out the most, I would say it was selling people into slavery in Fallout 3. I had otherwise played a good-karma character, but did that quest to get the achievement. It definitely made me feel dirty. I feel the same way as you about playing the bad guy, and it's particularly acute in the Fallout games (maybe because they almost always present you with an unambiguously good option).

(Mason Porter on Aug 21, 2011 7:04 PM) I'll have to think about my worst video game moment. I think I just didn't play a lot of the games where one could do some really nasty stuff (though that was because of genre preferences and not for any other reason). I'll get back to you on the question --- which is a very interesting one --- after I have had time to ponder. I am about to fly from Montreal to London, so maybe during the flight? And on a related note, how about this week for some Civ V given that September is out for you?

(Josh on Sep 2, 2011 4:33 PM) Civ needs parental controls to lock out the Domination route as a means of victory... I say that as a joke but it would definitely be interesting to see a no-armies, no-aggression version that required you to think in terms solely of proper balance in peaceful expansion and cultural/research accomplishment... not so much a battle as a race. I myself have no problem making morally ill choices for the sake that they are morally ill. I really got a kick at devouring the Little Sisters in Bioshock, I guess would be the closest example. What makes my gut churn a bit is when I make a decision that doesn't follow the story in what I consider to be a loyal way. Though they're trying to expand video game stories in "choose your own adventure" style modes, usually there are very clear indicators of the "good" path and that the good path is the one to follow (with a few exceptions, the choice at the end of Blood Omen followed story as the "evil" choice when they expanded the world in order to accommodate a greater good), when you're defying the story's progression, and sometimes for me it feels like screwing with the story's intended direction just for the sake of screwing with it. I have a real problem whenever I come to a crossroads and go outside the bounds just to prove I can... This is why I admire and resent the Bioware games to a large degree, as well, IMHO. They're doing promising things in exploring the openness of storytelling but the consequence seems to be a weakening of the story or rather making the specifics as generic as possible in order to accommodate the most options with the least divergence. I think once that ground starts getting covered we'll see the "next level" of gaming reveal stories that progress down specific paths that all have strong and individual narratives, rather than being other ways to explore a quest or two. Of course, when I make this critique, I'm just referring to "choose-your-own-adventure" games as those with a narrative, such as the Bioware games. Civ is certainly "choose-your-own-adventure" in its own right but the playing field not focusing on a narrative goal and rather the board-game style goal of simple victory means it doesn't suffer these weaknesses... at least in my book. I went off on a tangent there!

(Tim Elling on Sep 7, 2011 12:45 PM) I just don't think it's as easy as all that. It's just impractical to have both freedom of choice and a well-fleshed-out story. The amount of work involved in doing so makes it not at all worthwhile (from a developer's perspective). They typical good/evil cheeseball moral choices we see a lot of in games these days are typically a single story with a bit of flavor thrown in along the way. Sometimes small side branches have 2 (or, gasp, 3!) solutions, but the amount of writing involved doesn't go far beyond what a strictly linear plot would entail (there are exceptions). Part of what makes this possible is that most choices aren't far-reaching. Once you get to the next town, there's typically very little that carries over from your choices beyond just how good/evil the game has judged you to be. Now, there's the whole possibility of emergent gameplay, etc, but weaving that into a pre-written story gets really complicated. Look at it from the perspective of an imaginary DM, asked to give the players a significant amount of freedom, but also to never improvise (stick only to things prepared beforehand).

(Arcane Gazebo on Sep 7, 2011 9:11 PM) We need machine learning technology to get to the point where we can feed an AI some appropriate source material plus the contents of tvtropes.org and it will create a narrative in real time in response to the player's actions...

(Mason Porter on Sep 18, 2011 7:11 AM) The machine-learning technology as it currently stands would likely produce gibberish along the lines of the automatically-generated essays one sometimes sees. :)

More generally, Reynolds often gives technical and plausible-sounding justifications for the various advanced technologies that appear in the books, which is a nice bonus for the reader who knows enough physics to make sense of it (but probably impenetrable to others). The problem with this is when I have enough expertise to know why it doesn't work in reality (i.e. the few references to condensed matter physics), I can see behind the curtain and the illusion is ruined. But most of the time it works, and it's a nice way of extending the sense of wonder that can be found in physics.

Unfortunately, this attention to plausible justification in the scientific realm isn't matched in Reynolds' characterization. I'm finding that the biggest flaw in his writing is that his characters' actions often seem insufficiently motivated. Certainly reasons are provided, but they often just don't ring true.

It's appropriate that both his strengths and his weaknesses are in the realm of explanation and justification, because most of his books center around some grand mystery, and much of the urge to keep reading derives from the desire for an explanation. The real climax of the book tends to be the big reveal, although there's usually a nice space battle afterwards. Reynolds has used various devices across his novels to keep the mystery under wraps, some more successful than others. In particular, what he does in the first book in the series (itself called Revelation Space) is so frustrating it feels like being cheated.

Revelation Space alternates between three viewpoint characters who start out in separate places but come together over the course of the novel. And the big mystery (the titular revelation) is actually explained to one of those characters early on. But to keep the reader in the dark, the narrative cuts away right as the explanation starts. Later on, this character's thoughts on this topic are only related in vague terms to keep the secret (and at the same time remind the reader that there is a big secret). Then, when she finally tells the second viewpoint character about it, the story cuts away again! Only when the third character finds out, late in the novel, does the reader get to learn the secret as well.

So why do I say this feels like cheating? There are similar devices that seem legitimate: for instance if a mystery novel briefly takes the viewpoint of the killer during the murder without revealing his identity. I think the problem here, though, is that these are persistent viewpoint characters throughout the book. That gives them a special status, where the reader's immersion in the fictional world is directly connected to the reader's immersion in those characters' minds. To keep the reader out at these critical moments in the story sets up a distance between the character and the reader, and sets the author up as censor rather than storyteller.

That said, I think one could do something interesting with this device in a first-person narration in which the narrator was deliberately keeping secrets from the reader, but in third-person limited mode it was jarring and frustrating. Luckily, Reynolds must have seen the error of his ways, because after his first novel this particular trick hasn't shown up again.

]]> http://www.arcanegazebo.net/2011/08/revelation_space_and_how_not_t.html http://www.arcanegazebo.net/2011/08/revelation_space_and_how_not_t.html Books Sun, 07 Aug 2011 23:03:55 -0500 Arcane Gazebo Recently I watched the Takashi Miike film 13 Assassins. I definitely recommend it for those of you who are fans of samurai movies. It's structured something like a heist movie, where the first half consists of assembling a team (the eponymous assassins) for a big job, and the second half is one big action set piece. (It occurs to me that Seven Samurai had a similar structure. This is actually a remake of a much older film, and it makes me wonder if the original was actually a shameless knockoff of Seven Samurai that Miike decided to rescue from the dustbin of history. I can't find much information on the original though, maybe it was actually a great movie in its own right.)

There's a clear parallel between samurai movies in Japan and Western movies in the U.S. So clear, in fact, that some of the most famous Westerns are adaptations of jidaigeki films: e.g. The Magnificent Seven, A Fistful of Dollars. Beyond that, in both genres you have a romanticization of an earlier period in history. And in response there are films which push back against the romantic view, whether it's Unforgiven taking apart the myth of the heroic gunfighter, or Blazing Saddles foregrounding the racism of the period.

13 Assassins is clearly in the latter tradition, using the format of the samurai movie to reject nostalgia for the samurai era. The plot follows an attempt to assassinate a corrupt samurai lord, but metaphorically represents an attack on the corruption inherent in the feudal social order. (Alternate title: "Now you see the violence inherent in the system!") Although the main characters are (almost) all samurai themselves, it's clear that they represent different aspects:

• Lord Naritsugu is the sadistic villain of the piece, who tortures and kills for pleasure and with impunity (since he's the shogun's brother). Not coincidentally, he's also the movie's advocate for the samurai way of life, explicitly justifying his random violence as necessary to maintain order. He expresses nostalgia for the "age of war" (presumably the Sengoku period, a popular setting for samurai movies), and vows to bring it back.
  
• Hanbei is Naritsugu's lieutenant, and a model samurai: he sees Naritsugu's evil for what it is, but is nevertheless completely loyal. His adherence to the bushido code applies in combat as well, where he's shown to play by the rules. Hanbei's role is to show how a flawed system can lead good men astray.
  
• Shinzaemon is the hero, the leader of the team of assassins, and a former classmate of Hanbei. The clear difference between him and Hanbei is that Shinzaemon is willing to go outside the system when moral principles demand it. Early in the film he is reluctant to carry out the assassination plot, until he hears testimony of Naritsugu's atrocities. Like Hanbei, his attitude is reflected in his combat tactics: he instructs his team that there are no rules in a fight to the death.

Continue reading 13 Assassins: An anti-samurai movie...

Comments (1)

Comments on this Entry:

(Tim Elling on Aug 1, 2011 3:50 PM) I appreciate the review --- I've been contemplating seeing it, actually.

But I didn't buy much at either sale. These days if I'm going to read a book I buy an electronic copy, because I always have it with me and it doesn't take up any space. I saw a hardcover copy of A Dance with Dragons at Borders and almost laughed. Why carry around such an inconveniently huge tome? I imagined struggling to hold it in one hand on a rush hour subway while hanging on to a pole. (I'll probably see someone doing this before the summer is over, but still...) If I buy physical books it's because they have diagrams or maps that won't render well on a Kindle, or because I'll want to page through them quickly. At Borders today I bought a travel guide for an upcoming vacation, and a kanji dictionary.

I suspect that e-reader adoption isn't widespread enough nationwide to account for the collapse of the chain bookstores. (The Upper West Side may be a different story--I see a lot of Kindles on the 1 train.) There's the fact that books have a lot more competition for attention in the age of DVR, Netflix Instant, MMORPGs, and endless other digital diversions. And when people do buy physical books, they can still go to Amazon and save the sales tax.

I have fond memories of the Borders I used to frequent in Connecticut growing up. When I was young "the bookstore" often just meant the crappy Waldenbooks at the mall, so the huge, well-stocked Borders was a definite improvement. It wasn't until I got to Berkeley that I gained an appreciation for the kind of expertly-curated specialty bookstore whose loss people lamented with the arrival of the chains. The Barnes and Noble in Berkeley closed while I was there; I'd like to say it was because of the vibrant independent bookstore culture, but several of the indie shops were closing too. (Anyone know if The Other Change of Hobbit is still open?)

Meanwhile, here on the Upper West Side we still have the 82nd St Barnes and Noble. If it closes too, I'll definitely miss it, but that's mostly nostalgia. I still shop there on occasion, but even if I find something I might want to read, I usually won't take it to the checkout line. Instead I just pull up the title in the Kindle Store using my phone and send myself the sample chapter. The big bookstores might be going away, but I feel like I've already left them behind.

Comments (1)

Comments on this Entry:

(Mason Porter on Jul 24, 2011 11:16 PM) In the case of Borders, it was the entire chain that died. All of the UK Borders closed a couple of years ago, and the bell unofficially tolled for Borders a few years ago (well before electronic readers took hold; indeed, when they hardly existed). People have basically been counting the days until they died the way people once camped outside of Liberace's house in the days before his death---it was inevitable, and it was just a matter of when things would become official. Certainly, electronic readers are continuing, but the big chains were running into big trouble well before then, and Borders in particular was having more trouble than many. (That's one mystery I haven't figured out: What did others do that Borders did not or was it just bad luck? One explanation that I have been given is that the others also had accompanying vibrant online stores.) I still am kicking it old-school for my reading. However, I could never read on the metro, etc. My motion sickness and ease of being distracted by what is around me is a double killing blow for that. I actually considered making an RIP Borders blog entry, but after not noticing the news until a few days after it came out, I figured I wouldn't bother. Anyway, it's good that you've brought it up, as then I get to make these comments. :)

Last week, the book finally came out. The reviews are reporting that it's terrific, and (importantly) gets the story going again after the narrative sprawl of A Feast for Crows. And so I find myself wanting to read it after all! But how can I repudiate my earlier position without looking like a Romney-esque unprincipled flip-flopper?

The answer will be revealed... below the fold:

Continue reading A Feast of Crow...

Comments (4)

Comments on this Entry:

(Chris Langland on Jul 17, 2011 7:57 PM) It's even better - remember, A Dance with Dragons runs mostly concurrently with A Feast for Crows, so you actually need to know what happened through book 3 in order to understand what the hell is going on. I was tempted to go with option #3, but eventually just said "Screw it" and went #1. Now I'm thinking of #2. In fact, I think I'll go look up those summaries now. Toodles!

(Mason Porter on Jul 18, 2011 7:57 PM) Hey, Travis has blogged for the first time in almost 2 years! A few weeks ago, I was actually pondering what the updating threshold should be before I decide that I should just remove a blog from the blogroll. I guess 1.75 years is now a lower bound, but is that the right threshold? Welcome back to the blogosphere! Hopefully, you won't wait 1.75 years for the next post...

(Arcane Gazebo on Jul 19, 2011 9:11 PM) Yep, the urge to post returned this week after a long absence. We'll see if it becomes a habit again...

(Tim Elling on Jul 19, 2011 11:21 PM) I certainly wouldn't mind if you got back into the swing of it. It's a nice way to feel like I'm keeping in touch, without actually having to expend any effort. Oh, and I guess I like reading it, too.

Indeed, these were the books that led me to adopt a general policy of not reading any fantasy (or sci-fi) series which had yet to conclude. I had already given up on Robert Jordan, but that's because his books were getting progressively worse. In Martin's case, that wasn't the problem (although A Feast for Crows was a bit disappointing), but the lack of closure at the end of each one, followed by a multi-year wait during which I'd forget important details of the complicated plot, was getting annoying. It became clear that the series would be a much better experience if I could read it all the way to completion in one go. So I'm waiting until I can do that.

Series bloat seems to be endemic in fantasy, for which I mainly blame Tolkien: everyone seems to think they need to write at least a trilogy. But some of my favorite fantasy novels are standalone: Perdido Street Station, The Lies of Locke Lamora. Lately I've been seeking out more like those and avoiding epic series unless I know it's finished. (Which has led me to read less fantasy and more sci-fi, where I tend to find less of a serial tendency.)

Again, it's not that I don't like epic series, it's just that they're more satisfying when I don't have to wait for the next volume. Books of this type, at least the good ones, compel the reader to keep turning the pages and devouring the storyline, and because there's no resolution at the end of each volume, that desire to keep reading persists but is frustrated. Jo Walton talks a bit about this quality:

Firstly, they have a very high "I-want-to-read-it" quotient. This "IWantToReadItosity" is hard to explain, is utterly subjective and is entirely separate from whether a book is actually good. Who can say why Robert Heinlein and Georgette Heyer and Zenna Henderson have it for me and Herman Hesse and Aldous Huxley don't, despite the fact that Hesse and Huxley are major world writers? I'll happily acknowledge that The Glass Bead Game is a better book than Job: A Comedy of Justice, but nevertheless, Job has that IWantToReadItosity, and if you left me in a room with both books and nothing else, it would be Job I'd start first.

Now even within genre this is something that varies a lot between people. The Wheel of Time books don't have it for me, I've read Eye of the World and I didn't care enough to pick up the others. Ditto Harry Potter, where I've read the first three. These are books that have IWantToReadItosity for millions of people, but not for me. The Song of Ice and Fire books do, though, they grab me by the throat. This isn't to say they're gripping in the conventional sense--though they are--because IWantToReadItosity isn't necessarily to do with plot or characters or any of the ways we conventionally divide up literature. It's got to do with whether and how much you want to read it. You know the question "Would you rather read your book or go out with your friends?" Books have IWantToReadItosity if you'd rather read them. There are books I enjoy that I can still happily put down to do something else. A Game of Thrones is eight hundred pages long, and I've read it six times, but even so, every time I put the bookmark in, I put it in reluctantly.

I was thinking a bit about her comment that IWantToReadItosity (we need a better name for this) is separate from whether a book is actually good. And certainly it's easy to think of really terrible books that have it (The Da Vinci Code, for example), and great books that don't (much of what we were assigned in high school). In fact, there's a strain of thought that Great Literature should be difficult and challenging, and therefore shouldn't have IWantToReadItosity. I don't think that's true, though. It's not that the two qualities are anticorrelated, they are just orthogonal. I even came up with a diagram to illustrate this:

Which is not to say that Haruki Murakami is a better writer than Melville, just that reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a different experience from reading Moby-Dick. (And Wind-Up Bird really is difficult, just not because of entire chapters dedicated to the details of the whaling industry.) However, it is to say that these guys are both better writers than Ayn Rand, because she's pretty bad.

Discussion is open: what books in the literary canon have IWantToReadItosity? And what are some standalone fantasy novels or completed series I should read?

Comments (14)

Comments on this Entry:

(JSpur on Sep 20, 2009 7:30 PM) This is an incredibly tough nut to crack. For openers, to earn a place in the "literary canon" (the definition of which is itself open to debate), a book has to have been around long enough to be considered enduring and to have been subjected to substantial scholarly criticism and analysis. So almost by definition it (and its structure and prose) belongs to an era that modern readers find hard to access and relate to. This detracts from its IWTRI value for most people. And yet there is astoundingly well written literature that is hard to put down and compelling- DEPENDING ON INDIVIDUAL TASTE. I've read BLOOD MERIDIAN and ALL THE PRETTY HORSES probably half a dozen times each, just for the beauty of the prose. (I've read all of McCarthy at least twice for that same reason.) And yet I know people who would abandon the enterprise before the end of the first chapter. It is all so very subjective. Still, I would list FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS (Hemingway), THE SOUND AND THE FURY (Faulkner), THE POWER AND THE GLORY (Greene), and, more recently, THE MAGUS (Fowles), THE OLD GRINGO (Fuentes) and THE ENGLISH PATIENT (Ondaatje) as having IWTRI despite the superior quality of the writing and the treatment of more advanced themes. There are doubtless others and I reserve the right to add to the list. (And thank you SO MUCH for not placing me anywhere in your frickin' chart.)

(JSpur on Sep 20, 2009 7:34 PM) Here is one stab at a sort of literary canon, although it is biased in favor of recent literature. Try not to throw up over the "Reader's List." http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html There are other versions of the "literary canon" available online that stretch back to Plato, etc., but from the standpoint of IWTRI you can pretty much forget them, for the reasons noted in the first paragraph of my initial post.

(Josh on Sep 20, 2009 10:18 PM) For me, the classic works that I haven't yet read (or have read and therefore place in this category) that top my IWantToReadItosity would be Catch-22, Orwell, Vonnegut, and Salinger. Which is very illustrative of me as a person, I think.

(Josh on Sep 20, 2009 10:27 PM) Also I'd like to read some Upton Sinclair sometime, but I keep forgetting to look into it.

(Wren on Sep 21, 2009 3:01 AM) There's a sequel to _Lies of Locke Lamora_---_Red Seas Under Red Skies_. I believe it's supposed to be a series of 7.

(Arcane Gazebo on Sep 21, 2009 10:38 AM) Wren: I've read Red Seas Under Red Skies. What I mean by "standalone" is that the conflicts in the book were largely resolved in the end, so that one doesn't need to read the sequel just to continue the story. Instead, the sequel was new adventures with the same characters.

(Stephanie on Sep 21, 2009 10:53 AM) Like you, I can't get into much epic-series-fantasy anymore because it's all the same. I don't mind a multi-volume book. I mind a multi-volume book that's like The Seeker-- a mind-numbingly awful tromp through the same re-hashed plots, tropes, with arch-types so obvious they might as well call them "The Helper Agent" instead of the unpronounceable name that the author stuck them with. I'm now turning more toward steampunk, which at least is something new and has a gritty edge to it that I like. I'm also still a fan of zombies. I can recommend Monster Island by David Wellington (which you can read online for free-- I found it via Wil Wheaton's blog), but found some parts of it less than excellent. I'll try anything by Guy Gavriel Kay, but especially Tigana, but I couldn't get through Sailing to Sarantium. Jonathan Strange and Dr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke-- wonderful, standalone novel about our world, with magic. It's huge, but I listened to the audiobook. The Bartameus series, which is about our world, with magic, and demons. It's a young adult series, so I give it some slack (that's the trick to enjoying Harry Potter, too-- there's much to love in HP, but you have to remember that it's a series for children and teens). Also YA, Garth Nix's Abhorsen series is absolutely marvelous. I listened to the audiobooks, which are read by Tim Curry, and they rock. Naomi Novik's Tremeraire series. It's a series (up to the 4th book now), but each book stands on its own. About a navy captain and his dragon, during the Napoleonic wars. It's what I wish Eregon could have been like. Also, I really LOVE Brandon Sanderson, who is also completing Robert Jordan's series. He writes series fantasy (notably the Mistborn series, which vaguely reminded me of Locke Lamora when I read it), but has also written stand-alone stuff. Highly recommended: Elantris. Stephen King's Dark Tower series (which is complete). 7 books, epic world, epic journey. All tropes are taken, turned sideways, and beaten until they scream. Follow up with Lisey's Story and Duma Key (which aren't part of the DT canon, but feel like it)-- in these 9 books is an intense view of what it means to be a creator and storyteller like King. I'd add The Stand if you want another meaty book to envelope you. If you haven't read it yet, Life of Pi by Yann Martel is a lovely and wonderful book-- it's my "desert island" novel (the one book I'd want with me if I were stranded on a deserted island). It's not fantasy, except in the questions it asks. One of the things I do when I go to sci fi conventions is ask the booksellers what the good new author/series/title is to buy. That's how I found Naomi Novik, who really blew me away with her originality.

(Justin on Sep 21, 2009 2:55 PM) Mistborn and Temeraire - heartily seconded, excellent stuff! I'm glad Tor picked Sanderson to finish Jordan's series, otherwise I might never have read Mistborn. I've been picking up recommendations by reading Tor (especially Walton's posts, though I strongly disagree with her and your fondness for Martin's series) and Scalzi's Big Idea posts. Daniel Abraham's Long Price quartet (Shadow in Summer is book 1) is quite nice so far. I've only read the first three, but the fourth is out, it's just been checked out every time I go to the library. Very original setting and magic system, and as Walton observed in her blog posts about it book three (An Autumn War) is fantastic for shades of gray and making both sides of a really nasty conflict look like plausible good guys and villains at once. Another one I liked is C. C. Finlay's Patriot Witch. He has two sequels out, so I think it may be a complete trilogy. The library doesn't even seem to have books two and three so I'll grab those next time I place an Amazon order. It's sort of Temeraire-ish in the sense of taking early modern history (American Revolution in this case) and adding a fantasy twist. Unlike Novik's dragons, Finlay keeps the fantasy elements subtle so that the historical results actually occur. Butcher's Codex Alera is arguably the best new fantasy I've read in years (right up there with Temeraire and Mistborn). The series will be complete with the next book, I'm guessing next year sometime. And then there's the whole urban fantasy can of worms that's so big these days... On classic IWTRI: Dumas tends to be pretty good for that. I got bogged down in Twenty Years After, but that may have been because I kept comparing it to Brust's Five Hundred Years After. Dim high school memories suggest that Ivanhoe and Catch-22 are decent for IWTRI as well. But nothing can compete with the IWTRI of mind candy books like David Weber, etc. Goodbye sleep, hello exploding spaceships!

(JSpur on Sep 21, 2009 5:42 PM) As to Dan Brown and literary merit, please see: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/6194031/The-Lost-Symbol-and-The-Da-Vinci-Code-author-Dan-Browns-20-worst-sentences.html

(Mason Porter on Sep 21, 2009 5:46 PM) We definitely need to come up with a (or remember the) word for “IWantToReadItosity”. It makes me think of all the baseball announcers who like to talk about "StickToItiveness" instead of "perseverance". Yuck. Several of the Weis/Hickman books have done this for me. (By the way, I highly recommend their 7-part Death Gate Cycle. The first book is very hard to slog through, though it's necessary to set things up. Things really pick up and become awesome starting with book 2.) Back in the day (7th grade), I remember reading Shogun in a week. By my standards, that is lightning fast, and I just couldn't put it down. Noble House, too. Those are single books that are just epic.

(Susan Schaeffer on Sep 21, 2009 10:44 PM) I like "IWantToReadItosity" -- it has a nice ring to it. In this category, for me, is Connie Willis -- I have not yet been disappointed in any of her books. Admittedly, I don't read much fantasy or sci-fi. One relatively recent book I enjoyed, that is sort of a fantasy and has tremendous IWTRI, is The Yiddish Policeman's Union, by Michael Chabon. I actually listened to that in CD, and the guy who reads it is amazing. I am looking forward to reading more of Chabon's works. An author I never grow tired of is Nevil Shute. His books are pretty much over 50 years old, well-written, mostly straight fiction, though In the Wet was a little more fantasical. For me, always lots of IWTRI. I agree with JSpur, though, that tastes can vary so much!

(Zifnab on Sep 22, 2009 3:47 AM) Here's some recent reads I found very compelling, though note that I'm pretty bad as far as picking literary canon, being essentially canon-deaf. The City & The City - China Mieville. I expect you've read this already, but if not... it's a story with a wonderful setting that's strange enough to make my eyes cross trying to track the language needed to explain it, but I couldn't put it down - and then it all started to make sense (eyes uncrossed) and it was excellent. _The Atrocity Archives_ and _The Jennifer Morgue_ - Charles Stross. Cthulu meets Office Space, in a wacky action comedy blockbuster! Or maybe it should be Cthulu meets the IT sector. I'm not sure. Regardless, after reading most of Stross I realized I hadn't read these books. Big Mistake! I have now fixed that problem, and you (AG) should definitely try these if you haven't yet. :) Consider Phlebas - Iain M. Banks. I only recently started reading books by this author, and it's a real joy to find he's got over 20 years worth of books I can pick up, all of which have been excellent. This one is considered the first of many with the same general galactic setting, but I found them easy to read out of order. My favorite of the four I've read is _The Player of Games_. His books have intriguing plots and well developed characters - though be warned, he is not afraid to kill them off if it helps move the story along. (Also, if you read _Matter_, be aware that the Epilogue occurs /after/ the Appendix. I was about to kill someone because of the way that story ended.) WWW: Wake - Robert J. Sawyer. Takes a simple question - "what if while trying to give sight to a blind girl, she actually got the ability to visualize the WWW instead?" and then runs with it to places I'd never have guessed. Very well written characters. Fractions + Divisions - Ken Macleod (MacLeod? it's not distinguishable by his book covers). These are two books, each containing two stories (the four stories as a whole are called the Fall Revolution series)... they're all in the same setting with vastly different time frames and ideas, about revolutions, anarchy and communities. I also second the recommendation for Tor's website, and Scalzi's Big Ideas posts. I've been picking up most of the Big Ideas books if they sounded interesting and they have all been worth it.

(Arcane Gazebo on Sep 22, 2009 9:03 AM) Zifnab: You and I are clearly on the same wavelength, the last two books I read are Use of Weapons by Banks (one of the best things I've read in a while), and The Jennifer Morgue (loved it). Use of Weapons is the only Banks novel I've read, but having done so the rest of the Culture books are now on my list.

(Mason Porter on Sep 22, 2009 11:47 AM) I bought The Atrocity Archives on recommendation from Justin (I think it was Justin?), but it's currently sitting in my bookshelf. I'll read it eventually. :) The WWW sounds like an interesting premise. Right now, I started reading a collection of Borges fiction and essays, though I think I will just read a couple of stories before starting another novel. Then I'll gradually read some of these things in between novels.

What I really want to know is: how do people find anything at all on Craigslist? Because I just can't do it, but it certainly wouldn't be popular if everyone else was in the same position. And indeed, the comments on the Wired article are overwhelmingly people objecting to the title alone, protesting that Craigslist isn't a mess. So lots of people find it a useful tool.

Nevertheless, every time I've tried to use it (and I've looked at it at various times for apartments, job hunting, and dating) I've given up after encountering a spectacularly low signal-to-noise ratio. Because there's no cost to posting, and it lacks sophisticated filters, I end up with a huge and unmanageable stream of nearly-undifferentiated posts. And while there's something to be said for its free-form character, this seems to lead to listings that are either unhelpfully vague or hyper-specific.

So I feel like I'm doing it wrong. There must be some techniques out there to using Craigslist successfully (hopefully some Craigslist power users in the readership can tell me what they are). I have some guesses as to what might work:

1. Liberal use of the search box. I always feel like my search terms narrow the field either too little or too much. But maybe a clever selection of search terms, applied in lots of variations, would improve things.
   
2. Less reading, more skimming. Just because it doesn't filter for me doesn't mean I have to read every post. If I learn to recognize useless items and move on quickly, I could move much more quickly through the stream.
   
3. Persistence. I know that some people read Craigslist painstakingly every day, looking for the perfect bargain. (From the Wired article, this seems well suited to Craig Newmark's style.) I don't have the patience for it, though, and I generally don't believe the perfect bargain exists. (Or rather, when they do appear they get snapped up immediately.)

Comments (3)

Comments on this Entry:

(Mason Porter on Aug 27, 2009 5:35 AM) I have comments on a couple of different fronts: 1. I think that "Craigslist is widely used because it's widely used" actually is part of the explanation but not all of it. Such phenomena, sometimes called "preferential attachment" in certain contexts, apply widely---many papers are cited a lot in part because they have been cited a lot, many movies are watched a lot in part because a many other users have watched them. This is rarely the full story, but once something does get established, such effects can be present at highly nontrivial levels. (Determining the extent of such effects is, naturally, a nontrivial problem.) 2. The one time I used craigslist was to find my Pasadena apartment. I noticed the signal/noise issue and my solution was to do the skimming routine to see what things were sufficiently viable to investigate further. I used it that time because that is what the Caltech people had recommended I use to help find an apartment, as the waiting list for the Caltech apartments was way too long.

(Zifnab on Aug 27, 2009 12:30 PM) For me, a combination of those options 1-3 worked well to buy my current drum kit. I used a pretty narrow search term to only get Roland drum kits in my local area, and then looked for specific types within that set (the initial search only got maybe 20 hits, and the type I was actually looking for was maybe 30% of those). Then it took persistence, because some of the ads were for stuff that was already sold, and so on. It took about a week of checking when I found one that was recently posted, what I wanted, and hadn't been sold yet. So yeah, sorta intensive to use, but it worked, and I got a great deal.

(Kaleberg on Aug 31, 2009 12:20 AM) I think you are expecting too much. Craigslist is full of one shots, so you don't get user reviews, recommendations or reputations. It's a lot like the old Buylines. You remember the fat little books printed on cheap paper sold at the supermarket checkout. Buylines ads were cheaper than newspaper ads, and covered a broader region, so they had more ads. My dad swore by Buylines and bought and sold all his cars through it. As for your three problems: 1) Search terms are tricky and that's all there is to it. Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Bookfinder, and eBay all have the same problem. 2) Yes, you have to look at the search results. That's why skimming is a useful skill. The best way to learn how to skim better is to skim more often. 3) If you want a bargain, you have to be willing to walk away. That means you have to be persistent and keep watching. Yes, bargains disappear quickly, but that means someone has gotten a good deal, not that it is impossible to get good deals. (Persistence is the secret sauce for Bookfinder).

I thought the lawn chairs were fantastic, but not everyone agreed: apparently they were pretty controversial. I guess the objection was supposed to be that they're tacky, since tackiness was a quality unprecedented in Times Square before their arrival. Anyway, the complainants can rest easy, as the new furniture is coming in and all the lawn chairs have been removed. All, that is, except for those that were incorporated into a public art installation this weekend to commemorate the lawn chair era. The sculpture is by artist Jason Peters and looks like this:

So, this Jason Peters wouldn't happen to be four inches tall and green? Because it looks like he rolled up a big lawn chair katamari. Run, tourists! He'll be rolling you up next!

(From other angles it looks less like a katamari: it's more like a 180-degree arc of lawn chairs. Like most sculpture, it looks better in reality than in photos. But if you want to see it, you only have three hours: it's coming down at 9pm tonight.)

Comments (1)

Comments on this Entry:

(Mason Porter on Aug 16, 2009 8:31 PM) Nice! :)

Here is where I would launch into a discussion of the John Hughes oeuvre, but I have actually only seen three of the films he directed: Ferris Bueller's Day Off; Planes, Trains & Automobiles; and Uncle Buck. I was too late for the Brat Pack age bracket: I started high school in 1993, nearly ten years after Sixteen Candles. If any of you are Hughes aficionados, you'll have to tell me which essentials I'm missing. The Breakfast Club? Weird Science?

For the moment, let's ignore Uncle Buck and talk about the other two I've seen: Bueller and Planes, Trains. Hughes directed the two consecutively, and they make an interesting pair. They're both basically road movies, but in Bueller the trip is an adventure taken purely for fun and escape, while in Planes it's a hellish experience and the only goal is to get home. And they're both buddy movies, with Alan Ruck and Steve Martin as the respective straight men opposite Matthew Broderick and John Candy. But the latter two are very different characters: Candy's Del Griffith is very irritating at first, but turns out to be well-intentioned and generally a nice guy. Ferris Bueller, on the other hand, is very charming but actually kind of a jerk. (The movie portrays him as a hero, but just look at how he treats his alleged best friend Cameron.) It's as if Hughes, in his attempt to move out of the teen movie genre, made the anti-Ferris with Planes, Trains.

In the end, Planes, Trains is the outlier, and while it's genuinely a classic, what he'll be remembered for are the high school comedies. Unfortunately, that's where my John Hughes knowledge ends, so those of you who have actually seen these movies will have to take over in the comments.

[Yes, two posts this month! Maybe I should have spread them out more.]

Comments (16)

Comments on this Entry:

(JSpur on Aug 14, 2009 12:20 AM) For a road rat, Planes, Trains is without peer as a study in the ultimate bad business travel experience, the comic precursor to "A Perfect Storm," just with a different, less howling but more fragrant wind. The client, sighing over the presentation, the fight over the cab on Park Avenue, Ben Stein tapping delicately on the mic prior to making some totally inane and infuriating airline announcement, the completely scary cab driver who is running them up, the woman at the rental car counter who is wrapped up in the conversation with her sister about ambrosia while Neil gets increasingly angrier and more frustrated followed by his hilarious teeth-gritting delivery of the F-bomb over and over, the living pits when he has to give his watch to the motel keeper to get a room and ends up doing an LBO of the mini-bar with Del and learns the guy's got some depth to him, right to the end with the sappy Paul Young song. A work of art, this movie. John Hughes will be long remembered and revered by us road rats.

(Josh on Aug 14, 2009 6:06 AM) Those are some interesting comparisons between Ferris Bueller and Del Griffith as characters. But I have to disagree entirely that Ferris is, in the end, kind of a jerk. Though there are lots of likable jerk main characters in story, whether it's a Cartman, The Man with No Name (Well, really every anti-hero out there), or the blonde boy from the Karate Kid (okay, maybe he's not so likable*), Ferris definitively does not fall into the category of jerks, and were he interpreted as such, by the audience, by the actor, by Hughes himself, the story would not nearly have had the resonance it did. I may be making an assumption here that we both have the same definition of jerk in mind. To me, a jerk is a cruel person who does hurtful things because having any empathy for another person's suffering is a worthless pursuit in their paradigm. Whereas I think the reason Ferris Bueller's story works on film, and what John Hughes' ultimate focus was that gave all his characters such humanity in those three movies, is the sad way in which we judge people to be jerks without taking the steps to understand their humanity and their paradigm. And on the surface, Ferris seems like a jerk. He's impulsive, he feels like he's above the rules, he acts in ways that have potentially far more severe consequences than he's possibly thought through and yet he always seems to get away with it. No matter his amount of charm, such an infuriatingly easy life would be hard to like on screen especially as a hero character. But where John Hughes scores, and where Matthew Broderick's work shines so brilliantly, is the amount of heart and love that Ferris has for the world. It's not that he feels like he's above the rules: it's that he feels like the rules are beneath all of us. There's not, in fact, a spiteful bone in his body, though the Ed Rooneys and the Jeannes and even Cameron at times see him as someone who is acting just to spite them. In fact, Ferris makes key remarks throughout the story that show his love particularly for Cameron. Ferris's actions do torment Cameron to a large degree, but much of Ferris's own problem is having to see his best friend suffering as much as Cameron does. It's easy to judge him as a selfish child saying "I'm not doing this for me, I'm doing it for you." over the phone to his bedridden friend, but I'd be hard-pressed to find any element of the story that proves this line is at all dishonest. He sees Cameron as we do: a perpetually sad, sick, suffering depressive with severe anger issues all coming from his inability to deal with his father. In the end, Ferris sees his role pretty clearly as a mentor figure who will teach Cameron to relax, have a little fun, and stop taking life so seriously, because he truly does sees Cameron's suffering and Cameron's inability to crawl out of that hole. And though the surface plot of the movie points the finger as the cause of that suffering, the inner life of the story shows he's not. Ferris's monologue in the bathroom of the French Restaurant and his monologue after Cameron goes catatonic are good examples of this off the top of my head. Does he do seemingly cruel things? Yes. But so does Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid. Both are seen though the lens of our interpretation: as an audience we see that Mr. Miyagi is not simply a cruel old man getting free manual labor, he's pushing Daniel LaRusso to earn the goal he wants, and teach him even if Daniel does not know, and resents the teaching. Such is how Ferris sees himself, and he outright tells the audience so. And in the midst of all the consequences, there are successes, though Cameron does make the final decision himself at the end. It would be hard to deny that Cameron would have confronted the issues he had to confront had Ferris not pushed him to the brink. I think the best example I could give why having Ferris being simply a selfish jerk would absolutely have ruined the story is in the scene where Cameron falls into the pool. Ferris quite naturally freaks out over his friend as he and Sloan try to revive Cameron. Now, if Ferris was a definitive jerk, his concern would have been for his own welfare: what would happen to him were Cameron dead. I think the tone of the scene clearly shows his concern for Cameron, and were the movie a simple tale about the glory of people who get everything they want and the consequences of their actions to others, the film would have had a much darker tone in the end. That went on way longer than I had intended! I'll cut myself off here, but I would definitely urge anyone thinking Ferris is a jerk to watch the movie again and see which story the movie is telling: if Ferris is a callous, unfeeling individual who uses his friends to get what he wants and will eventually be successful because of the gift of a silver tongue, or if he's a capricious teenager with an insane imagination and willingness to learn and explore, a boy with a hatred of rules because his best friend suffers from them. *Though Neal Patrick Harris did have a particularly brilliant take on him in an episode of How I Met Your Mother: “Hey, The Karate Kid is a great movie. It’s the story of a hopeful, young karate enthusiast whose dreams and moxie take him all the way to the All Valley Karate Championship. Of course, sadly he loses in the final round to that nerd kid. But, he learns an important lesson about gracefully accepting defeat.” - Barney “Wait, when you watch The Karate Kid you actually root for that mean blonde boy?” - Lily “No, I root for the scrawny loser from New Jersey who barely even knows karate. When I watch The Karate Kid I root for the karate kid, Johnny Lawrence from the Cobra Kai dojo. Get your head out of your ass Lily.” - Barney

(Stephanie on Aug 14, 2009 12:22 PM) Weird Science. Dear lord, if you haven't seen this movie, you absolutely must! It's one of the core classic nerd movies, along with Revenge of the Nerds and Real Genius! Also Breakfast Club, because it's funny and shot in my high school's rival, and because you miss so very much if you watch it only in its edited for TV version. Also, it's a teen ensemble movie which takes place in the span of 1 day (Aristotle would be proud), and in which almost nothing happens (Seinfeld would be proud, too!)

(shellock on Aug 14, 2009 1:16 PM) I am only 5 month older then you and saw all of john hughes films so the 1993 entering High School is no excuse (ok i have sibling who grew up in the 80s). See breakfast club it is one of his best. The see wierd science it is as a geek it is must see cinema. Also check out the list of film he was a writer on not jsut director that is a longer must be list

(Arcane Gazebo on Aug 14, 2009 7:18 PM) Josh: I will admit that I was trying to gin up a bit of controversy when I made the "Ferris is a jerk" comment. I think you're quite right that the actor, director, and most of the movie's fans see Ferris the way you do. So your reading of the character is absolutely valid, but I think it's a credit to John Hughes' ability to create an interesting and complex movie that it easily admits to a darker interpretation. I would describe it like this: We know that Cameron has a bad relationship with his father, but we never see it: certainly John Hughes isn't going to show it in what is supposed to be an upbeat movie. But we don't need to look very far to get a sense of what it's like. There's a character right in front of us who sets himself up as a mentor to Cameron, but constantly pushes him around and even hits him, all the while claiming it's for his own good: Ferris Bueller. Ferris browbeats Cameron into coming along for two reasons: he needs an accomplice to get his girlfriend out of school, and he wants the car, which he appropriates just as shamelessly as the parking attendants do later. And when it comes to the monologues, Ferris has to be considered an unreliable narrator. Maybe he knows his treatment of Cameron is appalling, and is trying to con the audience the way he cons everyone else. More likely, he's simply managed to convince himself that his abuse of his friend is actually helpful. That's what makes the scene at the pool so important: it's where Ferris realizes that he really does care about Cameron, and the things he claims to have been doing for him really aren't helpful. But Cameron has also realized that being around Ferris isn't going to help him. That's the revelation he explains afterward: rather than take the escape from everyday life offered by Ferris, he's going to stand up for himself and face the grim reality. And then he destroys the car, which throughout the movie has symbolized Ferris' flashy and adventurous style. It's a rejection of Ferris, not his dad, and when Ferris offers him one last scheme to evade punishment, he turns down the chance at escape. Now, I like this interpretation but I don't think it's exactly right either. Not to be all Hegelian about it, but I think the right answer is a synthesis of the two: Ferris Bueller is an inspiring figure who can teach us a lot about how to have more fun in our lives. But he's not a saint: he's still a teenager, and like all teenagers he's sometimes immature, self-absorbed, or full of himself. Part of John Hughes' appeal was that he understood the teenage experience better than most Hollywood directors, and knew how to write plausible teenage characters. And Ferris is a great example. (So, yes, I was a little unfair in calling him a jerk.)

(Josh on Aug 14, 2009 8:03 PM) It's an interesting thought-experiment, to be sure, but I find very little evidence in the film to support the theory. John Hughes being as smart a storyteller as he is, he would certainly have left specific tells to give credence to that theory were that the story being told, and if he were telling that story, he certainly would not have shied away from those tells just because it is an upbeat movie. Planes Trains is also an upbeat movie but Hughes has no shame in bringing the darkness of the characters to light in that film. The structure of the story seems to prove in its own storytelling that Ferris's intentions are for more than just an accomplice and a car. Were that the case, why is Cameron even along for the ride for the rest of the film? Wouldn't Ferris want to spend a day with his girlfriend without the annoying downer of an alleged friend hanging around? Why do we not see the story from Ferris and Sloan's perspectives, rather than Ferris and Cameron? Where are the tells? Looking at the film through this perspective seems to be a denial of not only Ferris's narrative but the story itself, which makes no attempt to give that perspective or substantiate it in any way. Looking at John Hughes other works, both in writing and in directing, I see no evidence that he would have looked at the story through that perspective and left it out so plainly... Hughes has incredible subtlety and specificity in his art but his voice is always very clear. In none of his films do we find ourselves left with the disturbing ambiguity of, say, a Coen Brothers movie. However, if the Coens had directed Ferris Bueller's Day Off, in spite of their often catering to the slapstick situational comedy, I would be more inclined to think the film could have such a grim undercurrent. But I think the darkness that the film does have, with Cameron's non-present forces as parents and of authority figures in general, speaks for itself. So I do think that the thought process behind the "Ferris could just be a manipulative bastard" idea is entirely, 100% wrong. I actually do agree with your opinion in the last paragraph, however. Though Ferris is clearly well-intentioned in the story, he is no saint. He's a teenager, he goes after what he wants, he believes he deserves what he can take, and his capriciousness can be even a little dangerous at times. Even to himself... he breaks his thumb catching a fly ball with his bare hand! Having said that, back to why I feel like the thought-experiment on "what would this story have been like?" is humbug: it doesn't take into account the world of the story. As you worded it: Ferris "constantly pushes [Cameron] around and even hits him." Sure, but let's take that in the context of the world: they're teenage boys, practically brothers. I think you can understand clearly how brothers or close friends can vie for superiority and even resort to petty violence when they don't get their way. Sometimes well into their old age. Now, at the same time I'm not saying that male socializations and power-plays and physical fights aren't damaging or abusive on some level... that would be silly. It's a hard world. But looking at Ferris kicking Cameron and saying "That's outright cruelty!" is like calling The Merchant of Venice a purely racist play. Well, yes, but there's much more to it than that. It's a play in a racist time and calling it racist is totally overlooking the point of the story, which is about forgiveness, tolerance, and man's inhumanity to man.

(Arcane Gazebo on Aug 14, 2009 8:14 PM) Well, like I said, I absolutely don't believe that the interpretation I advanced is how John Hughes thought about the story. I think it really is clear from the way the movie is filmed that Hughes thought of Ferris just as you described in your first comment, so we agree completely on that. But I also don't believe that an author's interpretation is the definitive and final word on his works. The real world can legitimately be viewed from multiple perspectives, and a good writer's work is the same way.

(Josh on Aug 14, 2009 8:26 PM) Agreed on all counts!

(Josh on Aug 14, 2009 8:27 PM) Can we have an Uncle Buck discussion now?

(Arcane Gazebo on Aug 14, 2009 8:49 PM) I would come up with a contrarian interpretation of Uncle Buck now, but I'm afraid it's been too long since I've seen it... :) Regarding shellock's comment about Hughes' writing credits, most of his post-80's screenplays look pretty terrible. I didn't know he wrote Home Alone, which lends a double meaning to the line about it in Dogma (a movie which explicitly references Hughes elsewhere)... I also hadn't known he wrote National Lampoon's Vacation until I watched it again recently and saw his name in the credits. Another discussion topic I meant to put in the main post: who is making the John Hughes movies of today, that capture the high school experience? Ten years ago it was probably Joss Whedon with the first few seasons of Buffy, but I don't know if anyone has that title at present. Hopefully not the Twilight lady.

(Josh on Aug 14, 2009 10:17 PM) Good question on that... I certainly hope that the Gossip Girl type shows also don't qualify... While the high school experience is left out of the mix, I'd find it hard to define teenagers of the aughts better with any show than South Park. Immature adult humor coming from still-children kind of sums up the American teenager, and they bring with them all the bitter snark and confused petulance of the Information Age generation...

(Mason Porter on Aug 16, 2009 8:04 AM) I'll second (third?) the comments about seeing Breakfast Club and Weird Science. I still need to see Sixteen Candles... By the way, if you want to see a nod to a bunch of this stuff, then I highly recommend Not Another Teen Movie, which even has a cameo from Molly Ringwald as a rather bitter middle-aged woman. :) I approve! While it had its moments---one of the classic scenes was already mentioned above---I found Planes, Trains, and Automobiles to be annoying much of the time. It was ok overall because of some redeeming moments, but I'm definitely not a fan. The question about who is doing a good job depicting the modern teen (of the 00s) is interesting. I thankfully don't have enough contact with them to say much about the accuracy of Josh's comment, though I can at least hope that he's wrong. :)

(Josh on Aug 16, 2009 4:58 PM) My own big worry has to do with the fact that Hughes's death has come at a very bad time... a time when remakes are an assured Hollywood cash-cow. And with the remake craze, Hughes' death,and a lack of a proper force out there giving us the high school experience on-screen... that just seems like a trifecta for pursuing a vain attempt to revive some more 80's classics. That they are remaking The Karate Kid is bad enough... I don't know how I could stand the thought of a Ferris Bueller remake!

(Mason Porter on Aug 16, 2009 6:05 PM) I am fine with remakes as long as they're done well (not that most of them are). The Bad News Bears remake was excellent.

(Arcane Gazebo on Aug 16, 2009 6:27 PM) THIS SUMMER (an engine revs; the curves of a Ferrari are seen) GET READY FOR THE RIDE OF YOUR LIFE (tires screech and the Ferrari comes roaring out of the garage) ALL HE WANTED WAS A DAY OFF (Ferris Bueller puts on sunglasses) BUT ONE MAN WILL STOP AT NOTHING TO BRING HIM BACK (Shot of Rooney in shadow) FROM THE DIRECTOR OF "TRANSFORMERS" (Ferris, Sloan, and Cameron flee through the Von Steuben Day parade. A float explodes) AND THE STAR OF "TRANSFORMERS" (The Ferrari speeds ahead of a swarm of police cars, lights flashing) FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF (Rooney pulls alongside the Ferrari and cocks a shotgun) Rooney: BUELLER! (Shotgun fires. Show title card.) Ferris Bueller's Day Off Starring Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox and featuring Robert Pattinson as Cameron Directed by Michael Bay.

(shellock on Aug 16, 2009 9:38 PM) 80s were definalty him at his best. Though i enjoyed maid in manhatan. good chick flick. Also i second Masons choice not another teen movie was parady at its best. as for john hugh of today not sure. but a bad remake of his film would be a true shame.

To address his aesthetic objections to the device, he goes on to suggest downloading the Kindle app for the iPhone instead. I ignored this advice at first, but some time later my curiosity got the better of me and I got the app. It's free, after all, and would be a good way to try the format. And I was pleased to see that there are a few books available for free. Mostly the initial volumes of various long-running series, under the favorite business model of drug dealers everywhere. (I went for His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novick; a better choice from the free selection is Robin Hobb's Assassin's Apprentice, but I'd already read it.) So I was able to follow Baker's suggestion at no cost. Still, I thought, it seemed crazy. I'd much rather read on the book-sized Kindle. Who wants to read an entire novel on the tiny iPhone screen, flipping pages every paragraph?

The answer, apparently, is me. The Kindle app is completely awesome, and I feel like it's doubled the utility of my iPhone. It has one gigantic advantage over the actual Kindle that Baker doesn't even mention: if I owned a Kindle, I would probably take it with me on vacation, or on long train rides, but I wouldn't carry it around with me all the time, since it's not small enough to fit in a pocket. But the iPhone I already carry with me everywhere. Which means that now, I always have a book to read. If I find myself waiting in line, or on the subway, or at the doctor's office, I can just start reading. I even catch myself looking forward to waiting for something so I can read a few more pages. Sure, before the Kindle I could surf the net or play games on the iPhone, but for waits of longer than a few minutes, being able to dive into a book is much better.

So, I'm a convert. I finished His Majesty's Dragon tonight, and I'm shopping right now for my next book. There is one problem, though. Sometimes I've been reading, say on the subway, and I get to my stop in the middle of a chapter. I walk home from the station, and when I get home I naturally want to continue reading. But who wants to read on the tiny iPhone screen? If only I had some kind of book-sized device that would automatically sync with the page I'm on...

And that, of course, is why Amazon gives away the iPhone app for free.

Comments (7)

Comments on this Entry:

(JSpur on Aug 13, 2009 7:05 AM) Other Kindle advantages: - fits nicely onto the little ledge they build onto elliptical trainers; - the Times costs half the newsstand price; - Kindle in left hand, drink in right hand; try that with the hard bound MOBY-DICK; - you can make the font size bigger with the touch of a button; - you can download every word Shakespeare ever wrote for $2 and carry it with you everywhere you go; - I finished my book and want to start another one but I'm not dressed and it's pouring outside or it's 1:00 in the morning or I'm in some strange city- NO PROBLEM; - you can email yourself your latest manuscript and read it without printing out 400 pages (but it is difficult to edit that way). I for one think it is the future of reading.

(Mason Porter on Aug 16, 2009 8:21 AM) I'm old-fashioned on this, I think. One of my favorite things about books is that they are a break from screens, and I definitely spend way too much time looking at screens of various sorts. I think my eyes get tired at a much slower pace when reading text on paper as opposed to text on screens. Um, was the Moby Dick example chosen on purpose? There are comments I want to make, but I feel like I should hold them in because it's just too easy... Is this the manuscript in which my namesake dies in chapter 1? Whatever happened to that one?

(JSpur on Aug 16, 2009 2:44 PM) That book is in inventory and no doubt will see the light of day eventually.....

(JSpur on Aug 16, 2009 2:45 PM) And if for some reason it doesn't- I'll name a different victim for you. In fact, I'll just go ahead and to that.

(Arcane Gazebo on Aug 16, 2009 6:15 PM) I'm told the eInk technology used in the Kindle screen makes it more like looking at a printed page; the Kindle owners here can confirm or deny this. Obviously, with the iPhone app you certainly are looking at a screen, and that was one reason I was skeptical myself. But after a few minutes of reading I get sufficiently immersed in the book that I don't notice the format anymore.

(Mason Porter on Aug 16, 2009 8:33 PM) It's really hard not to notice when my eyes get really tired at a much faster rate. :) Granted, if the book is good enough, I'll push myself.

(Kaleberg on Aug 24, 2009 7:41 PM) I've been reading novels on my old Palm PDA since the late 90s. The tiny screen is less of a problem than one might think. My source for material? Mainly archive.org, but there are a few other free etexts out there. The iPhone is an obvious successor. Like a Palm PDA, it fits in one's pocket. Kindles just seem so big and bulky. I might as well carry my laptop with me.

• Replace references to America's "democratic" values with "republican" values

This is pretty unsurprising, and not just because it's Texas. Probably history curricula have been politicized everywhere, since the dawn of time. Recently I read a book in which the author visited a number of post-Civil-War monuments, and was disgusted at the respect accorded to various Confederate figures in the South. Which in turn reminded me of my experience learning Civil War history in a Virginia public school, where guys like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were described with a kind of heroic aura about them. There was a real effort to obscure the fact that they were fighting for a truly evil cause: I still remember that when we started the Civil War segment, the teacher explained that we might have heard that the war was over slavery, but this was a naive picture. Instead, we were told that the Civil War arose from a set of complex causes related to states' rights, such as disputes over congressionally-imposed tariffs. Later on in my education, there was a moment of realization that, wait a minute, it totally was about slavery!

And this was a good school in not-at-all-Southern Fairfax County! I can only assume that this was part of the state curriculum. And in a way it's understandable that Virginia would want to whitewash the most shameful chapter in its history, but it's not just about that. It's about white supremacists being able to put up statues of Stonewall Jackson and fly the Confederate flag in the name of their "heritage".

Another example: after living in Virginia I briefly attended a private school in Houston whose mascot was the Rebel (as in Confederate). And while I was there, there was talk of changing the mascot of this nearly all-white school. It's amazing to me the outcry that went up among students and alums, who thought this was political correctness gone wild, and couldn't see what was so offensive about naming the football team after people who fought on behalf of slavery. And of course the vast majority of them weren't racists, they just didn't think about the Civil War in moral terms, partly because of the way the Civil War is taught in the South.

But as much as I love to bash the South, this kind of thing goes on everywhere: look at how the American Revolution is taught in the U.S. versus in Britain. Or the ongoing dispute between China and Japan over Japan's whitewashing of their own war atrocities. So what Texas is doing now is just par for the course (not that it shouldn't be opposed).

Comments (12)

Comments on this Entry:

(JSpur on Jul 17, 2009 8:15 AM) Well said, by the great-great-great grandson of Private Nelson Foreman of the 33rd Wisconsin Infantry, who saw action in the War of the Rebellion under Generals Grant and Sherman at Jackson and Meridian, Mississippi, in the Red River Expedition, the Battle of Tupelo, the Battle of Nashville, the Siege of Spanish Fort, Alabama and who was mustered out on August 4th, 1865 in Vicksburg, owing the United States 70 cents for tobacco.

(Nick on Jul 17, 2009 8:36 AM) I was a bit astounded a few years back when a friend had me read some of the declarations of secession proclaimed by southern states at the start of the civil war. I've only read a few of them, but those are unequivocal in their assertion that slavery is the foremost issue that is driving their secession. South Carolina dedicates the middle third of it's declaration to slavery, Georgia's cites slavery in the second sentence, Mississippi starts their second paragraph with, "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery," Texas describes itself as, "was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery." If anyone is ever uncertain as to whether slavery was the driving issue of the civil war, they only need to view some of the declarations of secession in a web browser and search for the words 'slave' and 'slavery'; the documents are peppered with them. From a quick search: http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html I grew up in the north and was given the impression that the war was about slavery, but also about state's rights. I really feel it's a travesty that my eduction was not more explicit: the civil was was about slavery; at best, it could be phrased as 'a state right to slavery.' (I never realized I was quite so fired up about this)

(Nick on Jul 17, 2009 8:40 AM) Oh, I should add that I do recognize that all history gets warped and coloured in its retelling. That's one thing that I find so delightful about declarations; they're one of the few things that are concrete. People can offer varying interpretations of the meaning of the words, or of which parts to emphasize, but the words themselves are indisputable (assuming the original source is available and legible).

(Mason Porter on Jul 17, 2009 1:04 PM) I know I've told this story, but one of my eye-opening experiences at Georgia Tech was when I walked in the math department lounge and overheard two of my colleagues discussing "The Wars of Northern Aggression". Essentially, my feeling at that moment was one of living in an entirely different world from the one in which I was born.

(Katie on Jul 17, 2009 10:58 PM) Sadly, whatever changes Texas makes will have an impact on what the rest of the nation reads. Since Texas mandates that all public schools use textbooks off of a particular list, publishers create books to try to get or stay on Texas' list. As a rule they do not change much if anything in their national editions.

(Chris L-S on Jul 18, 2009 11:30 AM) I would say that both sides - it was all states rights vs it was all slavery - are both simplistic. It was about the rights of states under the Constitution, and the main point of conflict about those rights was slavery. However, there was nearly a civil war fought earlier (under Jackson) that wasn't about slavery but about tariffs. If you really want to pick one cause for the war, it was economics - the North's economic interests relied upon blocking foreign trade and developing domestic resources while using cheap immigrant labor, while the South's relied on the export of cotton to Europe and slave labor. These issues brought the North and South into conflict almost from the beginning of the Republic. I'd also note that "democratic" (little D, not referring to the party) values have only been important to this country since the turn of the 20th Century and the progressive movement of that time. The Constitution doesn't guarantee a democratic form of government - it guarantees a republican form of government (again, little R). The founding fathers actively distrusted democracy, and until the progressive movement, most US senators weren't popularly elected, but nominated by their state governors as the representatives of their states to the federal government. Anyway, I've got to go to breakfast.

(Arcane Gazebo on Jul 18, 2009 1:20 PM) Chris: I'm sure the other economic issues were exacerbating factors, but as Nick says the overwhelming reason cited by the Confederates themselves, the cause that they were willing to commit treason for and die for, was slavery. It's true, as you say, that the South's ideological commitment to slavery was ultimately about economics: the Southern elites relied upon it for their wealth and power. As for your second point, modern Canada and the UK both have an unelected upper house in their respective legislatures: are you suggesting that democratic values aren't important to them? You are construing "democratic" very narrowly to try to exclude the early U.S., but in fact "republic" in the sense you're using it is just a synonym for representative democracy. To talk about the democratic values of the early Republic is to emphasize that we felt the government should be accountable to the people. After all, the Founders didn't start off the Constitution with "We the representatives."

(Chris L-S on Jul 18, 2009 7:42 PM) You make some good points about how we've come to understand the term "democratic", but I don't think you understand the history of that term as used in the United States. First off, remember that the franchise was initially only held by white male property owners. While their racial and gender bias was apparent, there was a very clear thought process behind only allowing property owners to vote. They held that people who owned property had the most to lose in government's actions and would be around the longest to feel the effects of government's actions. Someone who didn't own property had nothing to hold them down, so they could vote and move (mobility at that time was far, far less than today). There was also some elitism at work - if you hadn't been successful enough to own property, then you couldn't be trusted to make decisions that affected those who were. The party that would eventually become the Democratic Party began life as the Republican Party - so named because of its beliefs in the values of the republican revolution of France. After Thomas Jefferson's election to the presidency and the implosion of the Federalist Party, everyone in government pretty much belonged to the same Republican Party, which gradually devolved into regional factions. This lasted until Andrew Jackson was defeated after the really squirrelly election of 1824, in which John Quincy Adams managed to get the contested election thrown his way in the House of Representatives. Jackson, who had won a plurality of the popular vote, accused everyone of stealing the election from him, and his supporters called themselves Democrats, and sought to include the common (ie non-property owning) people into the electorate. After the Civil War, the North tried to reshape the South through disenfranchising former Confederates and extending the franchise to free blacks. The progressive movement supported the women's suffrage movement as a way to break the power of corrupt party officials and big city political machines. The irony, as I see it, is that democracy has been expanded in this country as a way for one side to impose their will upon another side - one of the very fears that the founding fathers had in crafting the Constitution. That giving these people rights which there was no legitimate basis to withhold was used as a cynical means to an end doesn't invalidate the fact that they SHOULD have those rights, just that "democracy" in itself was not the goal. In a way, you can see some of the problems we're facing right now in light of allowing anyone and everyone to have a say in the government. In California, no one wants to pay more taxes, yet we have elected a majority of lawmakers who increase the size of government every year. Politicians in Washington decry big bonuses and salaries given in financial firms just long enough to stop firms that do stupid things from collapsing - keeping big donors afloat while placating the mass of people who think it isn't fair for a company to pay people agreed upon compensation. Lots of old people vote, so let's extend Medicare benefits to include expensive pharmaceuticals. Lots of people fear and distrust Muslims after 9/11, so the government harasses them at airports, spies on them, and throws them into secret prisons. Let's face it, most people are more interested in celebrities and sports than politics or national affairs, yet their vote counts just as much as yours or mine. I would love to come up with a way of figuring out who SHOULD get the franchise, but barring that I want the power of government to be as limited as possible to stop it from hurting us. As far as Canada and the UK go, both of their upper houses are feeble and ineffectual, with real power being wielded by the Houses of Commons. Both countries are also welfare states where the rights of the people have been reduced in favor of "protection" from the government.

(Arcane Gazebo on Jul 18, 2009 9:03 PM) It's certainly true that we are more democratic in practice now than we were at the founding. But classical Athens also limited the vote to male property-owners, and it would be crazy to say that they didn't have democratic values: they invented it! In the events you describe, the franchise was extended to more and more people in a series of events starting at the American Revolution (in which we went from nobody having a say in government to having at least one class of people with the right to vote). That sounds like democratic values to me. And at each step in this process, whatever their internal motives, the people advocating change used rhetoric that recalled the words of the Founders, "all men are created equal" and so forth. In other words, they appealed to the long-standing democratic values of the country to push for a better implementation of those values. In California, I don't see the problem being one of uninformed voters being allowed to vote; rather, it's what they're voting on. Because of ballot initiatives, most of the state's expenditures are locked in and only a small fraction is subject to the discretion of the legislature. At the same time, the initiative process has produced a rule that makes it almost impossible for the legislature to raise taxes. It's a great argument for representative democracy: most people don't have the expertise to make policy directly. But I don't think it's an argument for not letting uninformed voters vote at all. Remember Condorcet's jury theorem: uninformed voters aren't as much of a problem as you might think.

(Chris L-S on Jul 18, 2009 9:30 PM) The problem, as I see it, is much more one of a tyranny of the majority. Athens is a great example - during the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians won a crucial naval battle over Sparta and her allies, Arginusae. However, a storm resulted in the deaths of many Athenians, and the polis held their generals accountable by trying them and executing them as traitors. This literally cut off the head of the Athenian war effort, and later generals became much more cautious, even choosing not to return to Athens after expeditions to avoid a similarly unjust trial. An example of democracy running over people's rights is right here in California - Proposition 8. Because we democratically voted, a class of people that the CA Supreme Court had declared has the right to marry lost that right. So I'd say that emphasizing the "republican" nature of our government over the "democratic" nature is a good one - we should hold our leaders accountable, but we are NOT a democracy in the purest sense. An emphasis on democracy also allows foreign governments who rely on rigged elections or ethnic majority elections a level of legitimacy they really shouldn't have. In my mind, the legitimacy of a government lies in how well it protects its people's rights, not just that people cast a vote.

(Arcane Gazebo on Jul 18, 2009 10:19 PM) Of course tyranny of the majority should be avoided, and only a straw man version of "democratic values" doesn't acknowledge this. We can value democracy while at the same time recognizing that we don't need to be the most extreme form of democracy. And nothing in the definition of a republic ensures individual rights either: it just refers to a specific implementation of democracy. The notion that rigged elections are a problem only because we care too much about democracy is new to me. I would say that both protecting the rights of the people and being accountable to the people are necessary conditions for legitimacy. They're not mutually exclusive. And it's not as if autocratic states don't try to appeal to republican values for legitimacy: just look at their names. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, People's Republic of China, Islamic Republic of Iran. And states like these usually have the trappings of republican government, such as a legislative assembly (that perhaps can't be voted out of office).

(Chris L-S on Jul 18, 2009 10:47 PM) Fair enough - I guess it just boils down to semantics of what those words mean to us. I would maintain that in this country we are losing sight of WHY this country was founded. From my own primary school education this was left out, instead going with the simplistic discussion of "democracy" and majority rule. At least if you put in "republican" values instead of "democratic" values, you have to talk about representation and the purpose of government. I didn't mean to imply that being accountable to the people isn't important. Looking at Locke's ideas, the Declaration of Independence, and the Federalist papers, the fundamental right of the people is to reform their government. What the government DOESN'T exist to do is to meet the people's needs or to provide them services, particularly at the expense of other people's rights. I read somewhere that democracies only exist until the people realize they can vote themselves generous benefits from the public treasury and make someone else pay for it. That is the problem I have with "democratic values".