reading

On Listening to Audio Books

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Maggie Gram has an interesting perspective on listening to audio books. She started listening to them while she was still a grad student, but she faced hesitation about her avocation to friends and strangers. Is it considered lazy to listen to books? What does an audio book have that a printed book doesn’t? When is an audio book arguably (or definitely) better than the printed book? These are some of the questions Maggie tackles in her piece for N+1 Magazine.

Some highlights follow. First–this is something I didn’t know–the advent of listening to audio books in the United States was perhaps most triggered by those coming from the War visually impaired and/or blind:

Because so many soldiers coming home from the First World War had been blinded by chlorine gas and mustard gas, non-congenital blindness suddenly became much more common in the United States. Congress responded to its newly blind constituents by putting aside some money for books in Braille. But Braille is not for everyone; it’s very hard to learn, and in the 1930s only one in four blind adults could read it. In 1935 the Works Project Administration began a project producing a special new phonograph machine called the Talking Book. The project operated out of a converted loft on Manhattan’s Tenth Avenue, and at its height it employed three hundred previously unemployed people. A sign at the head of the room said “Every man working here is doing his part to make the blind of the country happier.” By the first months of 1937, ten thousand blind Americans were listening to WPA audio books.

I like this thought about audio books being kitsch:

So maybe we think audio books are kitsch. Maybe we like books to be an exclusive property; maybe audio books both threaten our eliteness and crowd our avant-garde. But do we really think this way anymore? The people who read this magazine, and the people with whom I go to graduate school, are not people who hate kitsch. We read Us Weekly on the beach. We think it’s funny to talk about how many KFCDouble-Downs we are going to eat, and we also think it’s funny to eat them. We Gchat our friends incessantly asking whether they have watched the YouTube video we sent six minutes ago with the baby monkey wrestling the baby dog. We listen to Lady Gaga and Jay-Z and that Beyoncé song written by The-Dream, and we like them all both because they sound really good and because they marry kitsch to the avant-garde—because they are both art about art and art about mass-produced art, art about universally accessible art, the imitation of imitating-under-capitalism. Loving kitsch makes us feel deviant, but we know it is more likely to increase our social capital than to damage it. Kitsch is sexy. We are aficionados of the avant-garde, but kitsch is also our game. 

As for me: I’ve tried listening to audio books, only to give up time and time again. I haven’t found one that has captured my attention enough to keep going. I am not a fast reader, but the slow pace of narrators of audio books is something that drives me crazy… For now, I am sticking to reading rather than listening.

What is your experience with audio books?

E-Books Can’t Burn

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Another pro-ebook argument, this time courtesy of Tim Parks at New York Review of Books:

Only the sequence of the words must remain inviolate. We can change everything about a text but the words themselves and the order they appear in. The literary experience does not lie in any one moment of perception, or any physical contact with a material object (even less in the “possession” of handsome masterpieces lined up on our bookshelves), but in the movement of the mind through a sequence of words from beginning to end. More than any other art form it is pure mental material, as close as one can get to thought itself. Memorized, a poem is as surely a piece of literature in our minds as it is on the page. If we say the words in sequence, even silently without opening our mouths, then we have had a literary experience—perhaps even a more intense one than a reading from the page. It’s true that our owning the object—War and Peace or Moby Dick—and organizing these and other classics according to chronology and nation of origin will give us an illusion of control: as if we had now “acquired” and “digested” and “placed” a piece of culture. Perhaps that is what people are attached to. But in fact we all know that once the sequence of words is over and the book closed what actually remains in our possession is very difficult, wonderfully difficult to pin down, a richness (or sometimes irritation) that has nothing to do with the heavy block of paper on our shelves.

The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.

I am not in complete agreement with the argument (especially the part I bolded above). For instance, there is something intangible that makes me want to read the classics in a hardcover versus an e-book… And what about the sense of smell? I love opening up old editions and partaking in the reading experience: sight, smell, and touch.

Jonathan Franzen on E-Books

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Jonathan Franzen, author of Freedom and The Corrections, expresses his thoughts on e-books:

The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it’s pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model.

I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change.

Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball.

But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.

I understand where Franzen is coming from, and I used to be in the same camp as he is now (i.e., I wouldn’t read any e-books). But ever since I finished reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs on my iPhone, I’ve become more warm toward reading books on digital devices (I have still yet to get a Kindle, however).

Franzen goes on:

Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that’s reassuring.

Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.

Yes, the concept of being reassured that the text hasn’t changed is wonderful. But he neglects dynamic titles that can be updated over the years (think introductions and forewords to texts). My feeling is that Franzen’s thoughts on e-books will become more malleable (i.e., sympathetic) in the next few years. It certainly takes time, as was the case with me.

The Case Against Private Equity Firms

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James Surowiecki has a brief but illuminating post about private-equity firms. He explains that while some private-equity firms do make the companies that they purchase better off, they do so by gaming the system:

Given the weak job market, it makes sense that the attacks have focussed on layoffs. But the real problem with leveraged-buyout firms isn’t their impact on jobs, which studies suggest isn’t that substantial one way or the other. A 2008 study of companies bought by private-equity firms found that their job growth was only about one per cent slower than at similar, public companies; there was more job destruction but also more job creation. And, while private-equity firms are not great employers in terms of wage growth, there’s not much evidence that they’re significantly worse than the rest of corporate America, which has been treating workers more stingily for about three decades.

The real reason that we should be concerned about private equity’s expanding power lies in the way these firms have become increasingly adept at using financial gimmicks to line their pockets, deriving enormous wealth not from management or investing skills but, rather, from the way the U.S. tax system works. Indeed, for an industry that’s often held up as an exemplar of free-market capitalism, private equity is surprisingly dependent on government subsidies for its profits. Financial engineering has always been central to leveraged buyouts. In a typical deal, a private-equity firm buys a company, using some of its own money and some borrowed money. It then tries to improve the performance of the acquired company, with an eye toward cashing out by selling it or taking it public. The key to this strategy is debt: the model encourages firms to borrow as much as possible, since, just as with a mortgage, the less money you put down, the bigger your potential return on investment. The rewards can be extraordinary: when Romney was at Bain, it supposedly earned eighty-eight per cent a year for its investors. But piles of debt also increase the risk that companies will go bust.

This approach has one obvious virtue: if a private-equity firm wants to make money, it has to improve the value of the companies it buys. Sometimes the improvement may be more cosmetic than real, but historically private-equity firms have in principle had a powerful incentive to make companies perform better. In the past decade, though, that calculus changed. Having already piled companies high with debt in order to buy them, many private-equity funds had their companies borrow even more, and then used that money to pay themselves huge “special dividends.” This allowed them to recoup their initial investment while keeping the same ownership stake. Before 2000, big special dividends were not that common. But between 2003 and 2007 private-equity funds took more than seventy billion dollars out of their companies. These dividends created no economic value—they just redistributed money from the company to the private-equity investors.

As a result, private-equity firms are increasingly able to profit even if the companies they run go under—an outcome made much likelier by all the extra borrowing—and many companies have been getting picked clean.

I also highly recommend reading venture capitalist Fred Wilson’s post “Why Taxing Carried Interest as Ordinary Income Is Good Policy.”

The Lottery in Babylon by Jorge Luis Borges

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“The Lottery in Babylon” is a fantastic short story written by Jorge Luis Borges. In the story, an unnamed narrator recounts how a so-called lottery (run by “The Company”) influenced the society in which he lived. He begins his tale:

My father would tell how once, long ago–centuries? years?–the lottery in Babylon was a game played by commoners. He would tell (though whether this is true or not, I cannot say) how barbers would take a man’s copper coins and give back rectangles made of bone or parchment and adorned with symbols. Then, in broad daylight, a drawing would be held; those smiled upon by fate would, with no further corroboration by chance, win coins minted of silver. The procedure, as you can see, was rudimentary.

But there was no excitement in this kind of lottery. Some would win for the cost of coin. But they were ultimately unsuccessful. So what happened next? Someone suggested the introduction of unlucky draws. At first, the penalty was a fine. But as you read the story, you’ll understand that those who didn’t or couldn’t pay up for being unlucky were sent to jail. And then:

Some time after this, the announcements of the numbers drawn began to leave out the lists of fines and simply print the days of prison assigned to each losing number. 

And the depravity of the Lottery escalates further. If people can be made to pay fines, why can’t they be sentenced to death? But the narrator provides the following introspective:

If the Lottery is an intensification of chance, a periodic infusion of chaos into the cosmos, then is it not appropriate that chance intervene inevery aspect of the drawing, not just one? Is it not ludicrous that chance should dictate a person’s death while the circumstances of that death–whether private or public, whether drawn out for an hour or a century–shouldnot be subject to chance? Those perfectly reasonable objections finally prompted sweeping reform…

You should read the story to find out what happens at the end. The narrator’s admission leaves you deep in thought…

This short story by Jorge Luis Borges is one of the best I’ve read in a long time. 

George Orwell’s 1984 by Any Other Name

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What if George Orwell’s novel 1984 was titled differently? According to a letter he wrote to his publisher, Frederic Warburg, in 1948, Orwell was considering two names for his novel: 1984 and The Last Man in Europe:

You will have had my wire by now, and if anything crossed your mind I dare say I shall have had a return wire from you by the time this goes off. I shall finish the book, D.V., early in November, and I am rather flinching from the job of typing it, because it is a very awkward thing to do in bed, where I still have to spend half the time. Also There will have to be carbon copies, a thing which always fidgets me, and the book is fearfully long, I should think well over 100,000 words, possibly 125,000. I can’t send it away because it is an unbelievably bad MS and no one could make head or tail of it without explanation. On the other hand a skilled typist under my eye could do it easily enough. If you can think of anybody who would be willing to come, I will send money for the journey and full instructions. I think we could make her quite comfortable. There is always plenty to eat and I will see that she has a comfortable warm place to work in.

I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied. I first thought of it in 1943. I think it is a good idea but the execution would have been better if I had not written it under the influence of TB. I haven’t definitely fixed on the title but I am hesitating between NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR and THE LAST MAN IN EUROPE.

So who knows how things would have turned out differently if we came to know 1984 by another title. Certainly, we wouldn’t ever see the premise behind this Apple commercial, which introduced the Apple Macintosh personal computer for the first time:

Write More in 2012

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David Tate has as good a resolution as any for 2012: to write more. He explains:

In writing you create something from nothing.  Most of us don’t think that we can draw or sing or dance or freestyle rap but any literate person can write.  You don’t have to be fancy; you can write a story about anything to please yourself and create a thing. Creating changes you in many positive ways and writing is the most accessible of those ways.  One of my takeaways this year was how often I came up with something new while writing.

Writing helps you learn to focus

Writing is a very intensive focus-based activity.  You can switch over to a web browser while writing but the structure of words and sentences means you probably won’t do so in the middle of typing out the word “encyclopedia”.  In this way writing is a good way to bootstrap your focus muscles – letter by letter, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, book by book, obscenity by obscenity.

One of the points David makes is that what you write need necessarily be published (online or otherwise). In David’s words, writing for oneself “is a language of communication in which the sender is the present me and the receiver is future me.” Beautiful.

Combine David’s advice to write more with my advice of reading more in 2012, and you’ll be on your way to a more fulfilling year.

Date a Girl Who Reads

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I can’t remember where I saw it first, but this is lovely:

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee. Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow. Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

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(via Rosemarie Urquico)

China to Cancel College Majors That Don’t Pay

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It appears China, like the United States, is struggling with an increasing population of students who graduate but cannot find jobs. But China’s solution? Slash those majors. Reports the WSJ:

China’s Ministry of Education announced this week plans to phase out majors producing unemployable graduates, according to state-run media Xinhua. The government will soon start evaluating college majors by their employment rates, downsizing or cutting those studies in which less than 60% of graduates fail for two consecutive years to find work.

The move is meant to solve a problem that has surfaced as the number of China’s university educated have jumped to 8,930 people per every 100,000 in 2010, up nearly 150% from 2000, according to China’s 2010 Census. The surge of collge grads, while an accomplishment for the country, has contributed to an overflow of workers whose skillsets don’t match with the needs of the export-led, manufacturing-based economy.

Yet the government’s decision to curb majors is facing resistance. Many university professors in China are unhappy with the Ministry of Education’s move, as it will likely shrink the talent pool needed for various subjects, such as biology, that are critical to the country’s aim of becoming a leader in science and technology but do not currently have a strong market demand, a report in the state-run China Daily report said.

I doubt the move will actually bring about the desired changes. In fact, the opposite effect may emerge: those majors that are currently at the threshold of demand will become the new undesired majors. Of course, one can imagine how institutions will try to pad their numbers with regard to graduation rates, salary levels, etc. It’s all ripe for corruption.

Ernest Hemingway: The Finest Life

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Ernest Hemingway is one of my favourite novelists. I’ve read all his major works, though I have yet to read Green Hills of Africa and Death in the Afternoon. And so it was with great pleasure that I’ve read this James Salter review of Paul Hendrickson’s Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961.

A brief glimpse into Hemingway’s personality. If you got along with him, great. But if you didn’t, he said some mean things (that bit about F. Scott Fitzgerald is especially caustic):

Hemingway was generous with affection and money, but he had a mean streak. “I’m tearing those bastards apart,” he told Kitty Cannell. He was fine if he liked you but murder if he didn’t. Michael Arlen was “some little Armenian sucker after London names”; Archibald MacLeish, once his close friend and champion, was a nose-picking poet and a coward. As for Scott Fitzgerald, who was a couple of years older, successful before Hemingway, and had recommended him to Scribner’s, Hemingway said he wrote “Christmas tree novels,” was “a rummy and a liar and dishonest about money.”

I’ve never encountered this criticism of Hemingway, provided in the column by the critic Edmund Wilson:

For reasons which I cannot attempt to explain, something frightful seems to happen to Hemingway as soon as he begins to write in the first person. In his fiction, the conflicting elements of his personality, the emotional situations which obsess him, are externalized and objectified; and the result is an art which is severe, intense and deeply serious. But as soon as he talks in his own person, he seems to lose all his capacity for self-criticism and is likely to become fatuous or maudlin…. In his own character of Ernest Hemingway, the Old Master of Key West, he has a way of sounding silly. Perhaps he is beginning to be imposed on by the American publicity legend which has been created about him.

Ernest Hemingway loved fishing and his boat. A great description of him going after the marlin:

The deep, primal fears, the great fish fighting ferociously against the steel hook in its mouth, hour after hour, sounding, bursting from the water, struggling to be free and being slowly exhausted, the fisherman pumping and reeling in until the fish is gaffed alongside or even in the boat. In his first two years Hemingway caught ninety-one of them. One had jumped three times toward the boat and then thirty-three times against the current. That fish or another, gotten on board alive, had jumped twenty times or more in the cockpit.

On Hemingway’s diligence:

He had worked hard all his life. He had been to three wars, he had always showed up. “When you have loved three things all your life,” he wrote, “from the earliest you can remember; to fish, to shoot and, later, to read; and when all your life the necessity to write has been your master, you learn to remember.” 

If you remember my earlier post this year, Hemingway thought he was being followed by the FBI. There is a mention of that in this profile as well.

But what of this conclusion? I guess I need to read Hendrickson’s book to have a stronger opinion about Hemingway’s suicide:

The suicide could be seen as an act of weakness, even moral weakness, a sudden revelation of it in a man whose image was of boldness and courage, but Hendrickson’s book is testimony that it was not a failure of courage but a last display of it.