reading

The Closer’s Story on Foreclosure

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When a property is foreclosed, the lender that owns the property sends a guy known as “The Closer” to do some digging (find out if the house is still standing, who is occupying the property, etc.). This is an excellent account in the New York Times:

Some people have been expecting me. Some claim they never knew they were foreclosed on or tell me that they have worked something out with their lender. Some won’t tell me a thing. If nobody is home, I have to determine where they are — at work, on vacation, in the Army, in jail, in a nursing home, dead or moved away. It isn’t easy.

And the honest, heartbreaking conclusion:

If they didn’t clean out the house, I have to ask them to sign a waiver stating that everything left inside can be disposed of. Hospital beds. Hundreds of boxes of shoes. A mannequin. A second grader’s homework portfolio. A wedding album filled with pictures with one person torn out. Get-rich-quick “business plans.” Sometimes I linger as I check the basement for mold and lead. I am the final period on so many significant chapters. I feign dispassion, but I’m not fooling anybody. There is no difference between myself and these people.

And you thought your job was rough?

Law Schools: A Rip-Off?

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In a troubling New York Times piece, we learn how profitable law schools really are. They make graduate school look great by comparsion…

Legal diplomas have such allure that law schools have been able to jack up tuition four times faster than the soaring cost of college. And many law schools have added students to their incoming classes — a step that, for them, means almost pure profits — even during the worst recession in the legal profession’s history.

Whereas some departments are struggling to hire more professors, in law school it is a different story:

It is one of the academy’s open secrets: law schools toss off so much cash they are sometimes required to hand over as much as 30 percent of their revenue to universities, to subsidize less profitable fields.

In short, law schools have the power to raise prices and expand in ways that would make any company drool. And when a business has that power, it is apparently difficult to resist.

And a striking example from New York Law School (N.Y.L.S.):

N.Y.L.S. is ranked in the bottom third of all law schools in the country, but with tuition and fees now set at $47,800 a year, it charges more than Harvard. It increased the size of the class that arrived in the fall of 2009 by an astounding 30 percent, even as hiring in the legal profession imploded. It reported in the most recent US News & World Report rankings that the median starting salary of its graduates was the same as for those of the best schools in the nation — even though most of its graduates, in fact, find work at less than half that amount…

And the most damning fact in the piece:

From 1989 to 2009, when college tuition rose by 71 percent, law school tuition shot up 317 percent.

Run, don’t walk, away from law schools.

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Related: Is getting a PhD worth it?

Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of the Self-Interview

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Sarah Fay writes a fantastic piece on Vladimir Nabokov and the art of the self-interview in this month’s Paris Review.

She mentions her father, who attended Nabokov’s lectures at Cornell. This is how Nabokov taught:

My father took Nabokov’s American literature course and says he can’t remember anything about it except for the way that Nabokov, wearing a black cape, used to sweep into the lecture hall with Vera, his wife and assistant, in tow. Nabokov would then deliver his lecture from prepared notes to great affect. His dramatic performances in class drew students to him, and, according to Nabokov’s most meticulous biographer Brian Boyd, his European literature course was second in enrollment to Pete Seger’s folk-song course. As a literature teacher, Nabokov emphasized the importance of reading for detail, assigning students fewer books in order to read them slowly. He quizzed students on the pattern of Madame Bovary’s wallpaper and sketched the path that Bloom walks in Ulysses on the blackboard. According to Nabokov, this approach “‘irritated or puzzled such students of literature (and their professors) as were accustomed to ‘serious’ courses replete with ‘trends,’ and ‘schools,’ and ‘myths,’ and ‘symbols,’ and ‘social comment,’ and something unspeakably spooky called ‘climate of thought.’ Actually these ‘serious’ courses were quite easy ones with the students required to know not the books but about the books.”

In case you didn’t know, this is good trivia. Nabokov took the pen name “Sirin” in his life. But why?

To taunt the critic Georgy Adamovich, Nabokov published under the pen name Sirin. In a review of one of “Sirin’s” books, Adamovich, after having dismissed Nabokov as a writer, wrote that “Sirin” promised to be one of the world’s great talents.

And perhaps the most relevant part of the piece: doing the self interview. According to Sarah Fay, Nabokov is the only author in the world to conduct an interview by requiring the interviewer to send questions in advance:

Although Nabokov is one of the many practitioners of the self-interview, a tradition which includes Oscar Wilde, James Barrie, Evelyn Waugh, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Glenn Gould, Milan Kundera, and Philip Roth, he was the only writer who always conducted his own interviews. Nabokov—to my knowledge—never conducted an interview without having received and answered the questions in advance.

Read the full piece in Paris Review, and don’t miss the embedded video.

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Related and highly recommended: Nabokov’s Invitation to an Interview. See also my book review of Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading.

Amazon Reveals Most Well-Read Cities in America

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Amazon.com came out with an interesting press release today, touting the most “well-read” cities in the United States.

Just in time for the summer reading season, Amazon.com announced its list of the Top 20 Most Well-Read Cities in America. After compiling sales data of all book, magazine and newspaper sales in both print and Kindle format since Jan. 1, 2011, on a per capita basis in cities with more than 100,000 residents, the Top 20 Most Well-Read Cities are:

1. Cambridge, Massachusetts

2. Alexandria, Virginia

3. Berkeley, California

4. Ann Arbor, Michigan

5. Boulder, Colorado

6. Miami, Florida

7. Salt Lake City, Utah

8. Gainesville, Florida

9. Seattle, Washington

10. Arlington, Virginia

11. Knoxville, Tennessee

12. Orlando, Florida

13. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

14. Washington, D.C.

15. Bellevue, Washington

16. Columbia, South Carolina

17. St. Louis, Missouri

18. Cincinnati, Ohio

19. Portland, Oregon

20. Atlanta, Georgia

This is an interesting list. Most likely, Cambridge is number one on the list because of the dense concentration of universities in the area (Harvard and MIT). I am glad my hometown of Atlanta made the cut.

However, the list bothers me because it’s an indirect measure of reading, as the gauge here is sales of books rather than consumption (i.e., reading of books). I can imagine the statistics are skewed toward college towns where students are buying textbooks in bulk in preparation for the start of their semesters/quarters at college.

I myself purchase books on Amazon in bulk — typically five to ten at a time, once I’ve added these books to my shopping cart over a span of a few days (or weeks). However, if I purchase ten books today, when will I have actually read them? Perhaps well into next year. This confounding factor certainly plays a (major) role in interpreting this list.

Of course, I don’t know of a good way to measure actual reading of books (versus sales of books). What about you?

The Longevity Project: Happiness and Unhappiness

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According to a new book, The Longevity Project, authored by Howard Friedman and and Leslie Martin, the basic premise behind happiness is this: sadness does not make you sick any more than happiness makes you well…

The Longevity Project is based on the results of a longitudinal study started by psychologist Lewis Terman (which became known as the “Terman Study”). The Terman study followed a group of 1,500 Californians over eighty years, beginning in 1921. All of the children selected for this study were judged to be of high IQ  (presumably because with high IQ are more predisposed to live longer, happier, and more successful lives). A snippet from The Atlantic provides the findings (I’ve bolded the two most interesting/important points):

All three researchers concluded that one of the biggest factors in both a happy life and a long life was having strong and healthy social connections. Beyond that, the people who tended to have “happy-well” outcomes were conscientious, emotionally healthy individuals who set and actively pursued goals; who incorporated strong social networks, exercise and “healthy” eating/drinking habits organically into their everyday lives; who were optimistic but not to the point of being careless or reckless; social enough to form strong networks, but not so social as to pursue unhealthy habits for peer approval; and who felt engaged and satisfied in their careers, marriages, and friendships.

According to Friedman and Martin, however, there’s one area where unhappiness does seem to play a causal role. It may not directly sicken or shorten the life of the person experiencing the unhappiness. But it [unhappiness] apparently can be toxic for people who have to live with that unhappy person. Unlike the Grant Study, which interviewed only the Harvard men, the Terman study also interviewed the spouses of the people in the study, to gauge their impact on study participants’ lives. And in the Terman study, women married to unhappy men tended to be unhealthier, and live shorter lives, than women married to happy men. Oddly, the reverse was not true. The happiness of the woman had very little effect on the lifespan or happiness of her husband.

I haven’t read The Longevity Project, but it does look quite interesting. The best book I’ve read on the topic of happiness is Eric Weiner’s The Geography of Bliss — it’s about one man’s search for the happiest countries on Earth.

The University of Twitter: Alain de Botton’s Course in Political Philosophy

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Today on Twitter, Alain de Botton sent eight tweets, in reverse chronological order. The topic? A short course in political philosophy. Here are the tweets:

The University of Twitter: a short course in Political Philosophy in 7 parts:

1: Plato: We should be ruled not by leaders chosen by a majority, but by those who are most intelligent.

2. St Augustine: We should not try to build paradise on earth. Aim for tolerable government, true government only possible in the next life.

3. Machiavelli: Politician must choose between serving the interests of country and the interests of Christian morality. Can’t have both.

4. Hobbes: Rulers not appointed by God, but by people and if they can’t guarantee their security, they can be legitimately kicked out.

5. Smith: The market cannot alone create a moral community. Civil society must nudge capitalists to be good through emulation and honours.

6. Karl Marx: The ‘profit’ of a capitalist is in essence theft, the stolen life and labour of the proletariat.

7. J.S. Mill: Governments should not tell people how to live, they should give them the preconditions to make their own choices.

So if you wanted to brush up on your political philosophy but didn’t want to read a textbook (or lengthy Wikipedia entries, for that matter), enjoy the above.

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You may also like the quotable Alain de Botton, from his The Art of Travel.

Book Review: Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark (a Memoir on Venice)

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I felt I’d stepped into my own self-portrait in the cold air… The backdrop was all in dark silhouettes of church cupolas and rooftops; a bridge arching over a body of water’s black curve, both ends of which were clipped off by infinity. At night, infinity in foreign realms arrives with the last lamppost, and here it was twenty meters away. It was very quiet. A few dimly lit boats now and then prowled about, disturbing with their propellers the reflection of a large neon Cinzano trying to settle on the black oilcloth of the water’s surface. Long before it succeeded, the silence would be restored.

The above quote is how Joseph Brodsky describes the city of Venice in his brilliant collection of essays titled Watermark. I needed to take a fictional break recently, and I wanted to read something short, and Watermark turned out to be a wonderful (actually: an incredible) selection. The book is only one hundred thirty pages, comprised of forty-eight chapters, each recalling a specific episode from Joseph Brodsky’s many visits to this ephemeral city. But what this book lacked in length, it more than made up for in poignancy and enchantment. Watermark is a beautiful, confessional meditation on the relation between water and land, between light and dark, between past and present, between the living and the inanimate, dreams and achievements.

It’s hard to compare Watermark to other books, because I think it should stand as a classic on its own. But if I had to make a connection: it is the lyricism of The Great Gatsby, the mystique of Invisible Cities, and the confessional of the Notes from the Underground.

In the passages I highlight below, pay special attention to the adjectives and the vigor of the punctuation (the comma, the semicolon, and especially the em dash). If you’re short on time, the parts that I bold are especially worth reading.

Continue reading →

On Reading Fiction

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All forms of desire have their natural enemies and I find that nothing saps my desire to read fiction like the Internet does.

I just finished reading Kevin Hartnett’s essay “When I’m in the Mood for Fiction,” and it has definitely got me thinking (the quote above is from that essay). Are there times or circumstances when I prefer to read fiction over non-fiction? In general, I read both fiction and non-fiction, and my response to the question would be something mundane: after I read a few non-fiction books in a row, I want to experience something more imaginative. But that almost seems like a cop-out, and I don’t really have a good answer. Hartnett’s essay hits the nail on the head:

The more I’m engaged with life—and particularly with other people—the more I want to read fiction.  At the peak of a wedding reception or in the throes of a night out when the crowd has given itself over to celebration, I often want to sneak off and read a novel. It’s a contradictory impulse, to want to retreat into a book at the precise moment I am most enthralled with life, but such are the circumstances we live by.  What I’m after, I think, is a kind of synergy that can only happen when I approach a novel while my body is still charged with the feeling of being present and alive.

This thinking does seem contradictory, but I think it makes sense. When you’re on a roll or on an emotional high, you want to keep it going. Fiction provides this outlet, or in this case, extends it. When you’ve been reading news or get sucked into politics, perhaps it’s more difficult to get “into” fiction. Then again, the critic in me knows there are others who will chime in as follows: after a long day of reading the boring on the Internet (see Hartnett’s quote at the top which began this post), the first thing you may want to do is unwind with fiction. Interesting how I turned that around, right?

I don’t think there’s a black-and-white answer for me, but I do agree with this point:

At the same time, several of my most memorable encounters with fiction have taken place when I’ve been my most alone.

I should mention that at the moment I’m reading Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which is what the Washington Post Book World cited as Japan stuffed “into a single fictional edifice.” Which begs this extracurricular question: are there degrees to fiction? Can something be more fictional than something else?

I don’t have all the answers, but I’d like to close with this (I say it because it’s true for me): non-fiction stirs the mind, but fiction—well, it stirs the soul.

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Questions for the reader: what do you think of Hartnett’s take on reading fiction? Do you agree with him? When do you prefer reading fiction over non-fiction? Can you even pinpoint your mood or a set of circumstances, or is the answer something vague (like my answer is)?

Readings: Skydiving from Space, Beethoven in Kinshasa, Google in Antarctica

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Here are some interesting articles I’ve read over the last few days:

1) “Skydiving from the Edge of Space” [The Guardian] – this is a fantastic profile of two daredevils, Felix Baumgartner and Michel Fournier, who’ve long had plans to travel to the edge of space, skydive from there, in order to try to break the sound barrier. The introduction of the piece sets a thrilling pace:

At around 120,000 feet, on the fringes of space, the air is so thin that a falling human body would travel fast enough to exceed the speed of sound. A skydiver, properly equipped with pressurised suit and a supply of oxygen to protect against the hostile elements, could feasibly jump from that height and, about 30 seconds later, punch through the sound barrier – becoming the first person ever to go “supersonic” without the aid of an aircraft or space shuttle.

The two daredevils have been plotting their jumps for years:

Baumgartner has been plotting his space jump for four years, Fournier for 20, and this autumn both projects are coming to a head – 50 years exactly since anyone even came close to leaping from such heights or plummeting at such speeds. That was Colonel Joseph Kittinger, a test pilot, who completed a series of high-altitude jumps from a helium balloon in August 1960, part of an equipment-testing project for the agency that would become NASA.

The jumps cannot take place from an airplane and must be done via a balloon:

It can’t be done from an aeroplane (even a spy plane can only ascend to about 80,000 feet), nor from a rocket (any hopeful parachutist opening the hatch to jump out would be torn to pieces). Ballooning directly up is the only realistic option, but an option still fraught with difficulties. A helium balloon launched into the stratosphere needs continually to enlarge because of the changes in atmospheric pressure, and so must be made of a special expandable material that is less than a 1,000th of an inch thin; clingfilm thin. It also needs to be huge, about the size of an office block.

2) “Playing Beethoven in Kinshasa” [Der Spiegel] – this is actually a two part series (part one | part two) on a story about central Africa’s only orchestra. A new German documentary film, “Kinshasa Symphony,” tells the story of the orchestra’s most recent major performance and how it came to be. I want to see this film. A trailer below:

3) “Explore the World with Street View, Now on All Seven Continents” [Official Google Blog] – Google is making its presence felt, once again. This time, they sent an expedition to Antarctica and came back with views like this. The question: how much do penguins care about privacy?

Readings: Titanic Sinking, The Freedom World, Zuckerberg’s Generosity

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Some interesting reads this week:

1) “The Truth about the Sinking of the Titanic” [The Telegraph] – we’ve all seen the movie, but this article suggests that the reason for sinking of The Titanic is because of a “schoolboy” steering error. Louise Patten, who is coming out with a novel, Good as Gold, reveals the truth about her grandfather:

‘My grandfather was the Second Officer on the Titanic,’ Patten explains. ‘He was in his cabin when it struck the iceberg. Afterwards, he refused a direct order to go in a lifeboat, but by a fluke he was saved.’ Astonishingly, he jumped into the ocean as the boat sank, was being sucked down into the depths – but was then carried back to the surface by the force of an explosion beneath the waves and was rescued by a passing lifeboat.

So why did the steering error happen? After the First Officer, William Murdoch spotted the iceberg, he gave a “hard a-starboard” order, which was misinterpreted by Robert Hitchins, the steersman:

‘Titanic was launched at a time when the world was moving from sailing ships to steam ships. My grandfather, like the other senior officers on Titanic, had started out on sailing ships. And on sailing ships, they steered by what is known as “Tiller Orders” which means that if you want to go one way, you push the tiller the other way. [So if you want to go left, you push right.] It sounds counter-intuitive now, but that is what Tiller Orders were. Whereas with “Rudder Orders’ which is what steam ships used, it is like driving a car. You steer the way you want to go. It gets more confusing because, even though Titanic was a steam ship, at that time on the North Atlantic they were still using Tiller Orders. Therefore Murdoch [First Officer] gave the command in Tiller Orders but Hitchins [the steersman], in a panic, reverted to the Rudder Orders he had been trained in. They only had four minutes to change course and by the time Murdoch spotted Hitchins’ mistake and then tried to rectify it, it was too late.’

If you’re still confused, check out a simplified explanation at Discovery News.

2) “The Freedom World” [The Smart Set] – in my previous post, I titled my post as a must-read. Jessa Crispin has come out with a timely post regarding must-reads, and she bases her argument on Jonathan Franzen’s latest book, Freedom (which I haven’t read). This is an interesting argument:

The idea that as a literary person there are a certain set of books you must read because they are important parts of the literary conversation is constantly implied, yet quite ridiculous. Once you get done with the Musts — the Franzens, Mitchells, Vollmanns, Roths, Shteyngarts — and then get through the Booker long list, and the same half-dozen memoirs everyone else is reading this year (crack addiction and face blindness seem incredibly important this year), you have time for maybe two quirky choices, if you are a hardcore reader. Or a critic. And then congratulations, you have had the same conversations as everyone else in the literary world.

And what of the must-read books?

Of course there is no such thing as a must-read book. Maybe you should read some Tolstoy, but then again maybe not, if overly long descriptions of fields don’t really do anything for you, or if you have some problems with the whole woman-has-a-desire-and-so-must-die thing. Maybe you should check out some Jane Austen, but then again, Jane Austen is pretty boring and the whole marriage-as-life thing, I mean who really cares. There is Shakespeare, but you could spend a day arguing Hamlet versus King Lear versus Julius Caesar and never have a clear winner.

I may come back to this argument later, as I do think there are must-read books out there. Until I read Jessa Crispin’s essay, I had no idea some critics were labeling Freedom as the book of the century:

“Best book of the century” is the statement of someone who has given up. That is an incredibly pessimistic viewpoint to have, don’t you think? That 10 years into the century, this is the best we can possibly do? Or perhaps he means the last hundred years. Maybe the guy really didn’t like Ulysses; it’s hard to tell.

It’s not that the guy didn’t like Ulysses; it’s that he never actually read it.

3) “Facebook Founder to Donate $100 Million to Help Remake Newark’s Schools” [New York Times] – Zuckerberg, who recently opened up to The New Yorker, is opening up in a different way: through a very generous contribution:

The $100 million for Newark is the initial gift to start a foundation for education financed by Mr. Zuckerberg. This would be by far the largest publicly known gift by Mr. Zuckerberg, whose fortune Forbes magazine estimated last year at $2 billion.

The gift is many times larger than any the system has received, officials said — an extraordinary sum not only for a district with an $800 million annual operating budget, but also for any publicly financed government agency. It is not yet clear how the money would be used, or over what period.

This is Zuckerberg’s first major act of philanthropy, and no doubt it’s huge. He would have made the headlines had he contributed even a tenth of his $100m pledge.