1. Too Big to Fail. This a great, great book that offers a minute-to-minute, blow-by-blow account of the financial crisis: meetings, phone calls, petty rivalries, bullying, groveling, panic. It’s to be expected that the people at highest levels of any industry will be fairly well-connected to each other. It’s also a little terrifying.

2. We’ll Always Have Paris. I think I need to give up on Ray Bradbury. I really liked Something Wicked This Way Comes and loved The Illustrated Man back in the day. Dandelion Wine and The Martian Chronicles were good, too. But nothing has hit the spot since.

3. Pride and Prejudice. Quite simply one of the best books I’ve ever read. One thing I appreciated was the characterization. When a new character comes in, they usually get some description, a good bit of dialogue to get the shape of their personality, and then the rest of the story assumes you remember that. Like that windbag Mr. Collins. You see his flowery speeches early, but later it’s summarized that Collins praised this and commended that. For all the 19th-century wordiness, it’s a pretty efficient little story. And it’s got all that suspense and miscommunication and false assumptions.

4. The Big Sleep. I expected to enjoy this one a lot, and I did indeed. I didn’t expect Chandler to be such a colorful writer. But there didn’t seem to be many wasted words. It’s all of a certain mood, a certain tone, a certain tightness. Great story.

5. Self-Made Man. Author Norah Vincent spent a year dressing as a man–dating, working, socializing, etc.–and reports on here experience. It’s pretty insightful. Here’s a great bit from when she meets some new guys, on the awesomeness of handshakes:

As he extended his arm to shake my hand, I extended mine, too, in a sweeping motion. Our palms met with a soft pop, and I squeezed assertively the way I’d seen men do at parties when they gathered in someone’s living room to watch a football game. From outside, this ritual had always seemed overdone to me. Why all the macho ceremony? But from the inside it was completely different. There was something so warm and bonded in this handshake. Receiving it was a rush, an instant inclusion in a camaraderie that felt very old and practiced.

Though some of her chosen research venues (bowling team, strip joints, monastery, high-pressure sales team, male retreat) are a little fringe, it’s a pretty sensitive account.

• “If women are trapped by the whore/Madonna complex, men are equally trapped by this warrior/minstrel complex.”
• “Every man’s armor is borrowed and ten sizes too big, and beneath it, he’s naked and insecure and hoping you won’t see.”
• “After he told me the raw story, I said, ‘Ivan, how many women have you slept with?’
  ‘Seventy-four,’ he said without hesitation.
  Again, probably a giant lie, but who knew? Ivan also claimed to have an IQ of 180 and a nine-inch dick. But don’t they all, at least to each other.”

And she’s still plenty aware of the issues of sympathizing with The Man. Very thoughtful.

Obviously it’s not metal and glass, and therefore not as rigid, but I love how this thing feels. Ingredients:

• 1 copy of Ellen Lupton’s Thinking with Type, which has about the right dimensions
• 2 thin pieces of packing cardboard, cut to specs
• 30 quarters for ballast
• tape

Mine came out to 680 grams, right on par with the wifi-only model. Your results may vary, but that’s what the quarters are for.

I felt pretty torn about this one. I’d been following Gretchen Rubin’s blog about the Happiness Project for a while and wondered what extra stuff would be in the book. I got it from the library, so I’m not sure that it matters as the only cost to me was time. Luckily she’s a really fluid writer and it’s a quick read, so it’s not in the “waste of time” category. Good parts:

• One source of inspiration for her: Best is good. Better is best.
• The idea that “The days are long, but the years are short“. Love that.
• The #1 contributor to greater happiness: her resolution chart. This is basic, daily tracking on whatever goals you have. It works. See: here here here here here, etc.

If there’s a downside, it’s that I wish she’d shared more of the studies she read up on (surely a ton), and less of the personal anecdotes of how she applied them. But then again, I wonder if I’d say the opposite if the reverse were true? Either way, you can probably get the most bang for your buck by ripping through the best-of section over on her site. Tyler Cowen says “On net, Gretchen’s tips will enhance your happiness.” I suspect this is true.

I like David Byrne, but I feel really ambivalent about this book. On the one hand, there are some great gems and little thought-bits that come out of a curious mind. On the other hand, as the title so clearly points out, it’s diaristic. There’s a good amount of day-to-day humdrum “this is what I did here, this is what I did there” stuff to wade through. With that said, here are some parts I especially liked:

On the meta-ness of ringtones:

Ring tones are “signs” for “real” music. This is music not meant to be actually listened to as music, but to remind you of and refer to other, real music… A modern symphony of music that is not music but asks that you remember music.

Although he praises Europe’s cultivated, park-like landscape, in particular the “manicured” blend of man and nature in Berlin, he finds it

a bit sad, I think, that my visual reference for an unmediated forest derives from images in fiction and movies. Sad too that the forest in this preserved area was once quite common, but now lives on mainly in our collective imaginations.

Early in the book he talks about a number of American cities in brief. On the town of Sweetwater, Texas:

I enjoy not being in New York. I am under no illusion that my world is in any better than this world, but still I wonder at how some of the Puritanical restrictions have lingered—the encouragement to go to bed early and the injunction against enjoying a drink with one’s meal. I suspect that drinking, even a glass of wine or two with dinner, is, like drug use, probably considered a sign of moral weakness. The assumption is that there lurks within us a secret desire for pure, sensuous, all-hell-breaking-loose pleasure, which is something to be nipped in the bud, for pragmatic reasons.

And I liked this back-of-the-envelope theory on mating and signaling in Los Angeles:

I don’t know what the male-female balance is in L.A., but I suspect that because people in that town come into close contact with one another relatively infrequently—they are usually physicall isolated at work, at home, or in their cars—they have to make an immediate and profound impression on the opposite sex and on their rivals whenever a chance presents itself. Subtlety will get you nowhere in this context.

This applies particularly in L.A. but also in much of the United States, where chances and opportunities to be seen and noticed by the oppsite sex sometimes occur not just infrequently but also at some distance—across a parking lot, as one walks from car to building, or in a crowded mall. Therefor the signal that I am sexy, powerful, and desirable has to be broadcast at a slightly “louder” volume than in other towns where people actually come into closer contact and don’t need to “shout”. In L.A. one has to be one’s own billboard.

Consequently in L.A. the women, on the face of it, must feel a greater need to get physically augmented, tanned, and have flowing manes of hair that can be seen from a considerable distance.

Summarizing a conversation he had about the creative impulse:

People tend to think that creative work is an expression of a preexisting desire or passion, a feeling made manifest, and in a way it is. As if an overwhelming anger, love, pain, or longing fills the artist or composer, as it might with any of us—the difference being that the creative artist then has no choice but to express those feelings through his or her given creative medium. I proposed that more often the work is a kind of tool that discovers and brings to light that emotional muck. Singers (and possibly listeners of music too) when they write or perform a song don’t so much bring to the work already formed emotions, ideas, and feelings as much as they use the act of singing as a device that reproduces and dredges them up.

In a later part, in the London section, he talks about a new wave of appreciation for the late artist Alice Neel, and touches on the convoluted ways we evaluate and reflect on creative works new and old:

Maybe the work looks prescient? Maybe it looks prescient every decade or so, whenever a slew of younger artists do work that is vaguely similar to hers? In that way maybe she’s being used to validate the present, and in turn the present is being used to validate the past?

And lastly, on PowerPoint:

A slide talk, the context in which this software is used, is a form of contemporary theater—a kind of ritual theater that has developed in boardrooms and academia rather than on the Broadway stage. No one can deny that a talk is a performance, but again there is a pervasive myth of objectivity and neutrality to deal with. There is an unspoken prejudice at work in those corporate and academic “performance spaces”—that performing is acting and therefore it’s not “real”. Acknowledging a talk as a performance is therefore anathema.

January

Two fantastic albums from Frank Sinatra: both Only the Lonely and the earlier In the Wee Small Hours deal with the same sort of late-night streetlight melancholy.

Rush, Permanent Waves. The Spirit of Radio is a great way to start the year, no?

From Nashville to Memphis is a great Elvis collection. It’s got most of the hits you expect, some lesser-knowns and some good covers.

And another crooner: Cool Spring collects a couple Chet Baker sessions over in Italy. When I Fall in Love is one of my favorites.

Ali Farka Touré. I listened to the Red and Green albums and the self-titled album later this year, but this month’s Niafunke was the best of all. I like the richer sound and more varied instrumentation here.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Dust to Gold. This is the only thing from him that I’ve heard. I wonder if it’s just the novelty that keeps me coming back, but I don’t regret it. Khawaja Tum Hi Ho (Master It Is Only You) is a good one.

February
My friend Kat Edmonson released Take to the Sky. w00t. Incredible voice and smart arrangements.

Eva Cassidy’s posthumous Somewhere is full of great covers. Some are folky, some are blues-rocky-y, and there’s the old ballad that just kills me every time, My Love Is Like A Red, Red Rose.

March

March was Igor Stravinsky Month around here. Thanks to Alex Ross’ tip, I picked up that 22-disc Works of Igor Stravinsky. When you’re exposed to a full life’s work, you may hear as much that’s mediocre as is brilliant, but you also get a sense of all the labor that goes into it.

The Song from the Hill is a set of recordings of the Wind Harp, this giant sound sculpture on a hilltop in Vermont. Spooky, droning ambient-type stuff.

The Byrds. Mr. Tambourine Man. This is one of those albums that’s just unbelievably chock full of fantastic songs. I had no idea.

April
Kind of a weak month compared to the first three, but I did enjoy Diana Krall’s Quiet Nights and a collection of Richard Strauss’ work for voice and orchestra, Four Last Songs.

May

Lady in Satin, my friends. It was one of Billie Holiday’s last albums. You’ve got her aging voice taking on all-new material, backed (atypically) with a string orchestra. It is so good. For Heaven’s Sake and I’m a Fool to Want You are the stand-outs for me.

A lot of John Coltrane’s stuff leaves me feeling “eh”, but I thought Dear Old Stockholm was really nice. Dear Lord is my pick.

This was my first exposure to Beach House. Treat yourself to their self-titled album and Devotion, and you will be in a happier place. Teen Dream will also rock you, no doubt.

June
I came across Miles Davis’ Legendary Prestige Quintet Sessions late in the month. Lots of good stuff there, collecting tracks from the same sessions that were released separately back in the mid-50s.

Back in college when I was in the orchestra, we did Ravi Shankar’s concerto featured on Sitar Concerto & Other Works. Perhaps the nostalgia influences this choice, but the other pieces are interesting in their own right.

July

Cocteau Twins were totally new to me. Heaven or Las Vegas is really excellent. See also Treasure and Garlands.

Maybe it’s not really summer music, but I finally gave Elliott Smith some attention. I think Figure 8 narrowly wins over XO and Either/Or.

I might be including Dr. Dre’s 2001 simply on the strength of its opening tune, The Watcher. Makes me wish he’d spent more time on the mic these past couple decades. Nice new take on the familiar G-funk sound.

August

A weak month, but I sat with another album it took me a while to catch up on: Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home. It’s really good, y’all.

September

Another excellent month. Another round of success with The Byrds. This time it was Younger Than Yesterday and yet again, it’s another kind of ridiculously saturated-with-goodness album.

Follow that with Intimate Voices, with the Emerson Quartet playing works by Carl Nielsen, Edvard Grieg and my beloved Jean Sibelius.

This month was also the first time I’d heard Mahler’s 9th Symphony all the way through, so I can’t really compare this recording to interpretations. This piece is exhausting. In a good way, I think.

If you only know Erik Satie for his Trois Gymnopédies, then you are cheating yourself. His other piano works deserve your attention. The Gnossiennes are great.

I learned about Symphonies of the Planets from a friend at work. It’s ambient space music based on the NASA Voyager Recordings. Great stuff, if you can track it down.

I love Joanna Newsom, but had never heard her early, self-distributed Walnut Whales EP. That early organ version of Peach Plum Pear is so good.

I closed out the month with another epic box set: Rostropovich: The Russian Years, 1950-1974. Many of the recordings are premieres. And there’s even a few recordings with the composers (e.g. Shostakovich) accompanying on piano. I think that kind of personal, of-the-moment touch adds some life to the listening experience.

October

The 1st of the month brought John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman into my life. It’s barely a half-hour, but man, it is fantastic. My One And Only Love is the clincher.

October also turned into Leonard Cohen Month. Death of a Ladies’ Man might be the favorite, but I’m Your Man is close behind. See also: every other album. They’re all good.

St. Vincent. Actor. Go get it. When I blipped Human Racing, I mentioned that the album gets stronger as it goes on. I stand by that statement and also can’t help but recommend Marry Me.

I closed out the month with some great soul. Sam Cooke’s Night Beat will make you really depressed that he died so soon after. And Marvin Gaye might have stretched himself a bit thin on Here, My Dear, but I love some of the anger and frustration there. Check out When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You.

November

November was Kraftwerk Month. I was familiar with the standard post-Autobahn Kraftwerk canon, but the early ones were nothing like I expected and also very good. Tone Float is trippy psychedelic-jam stuff from before they were Kraftwerk. And the self-titled albums are nice, but Ralf and Florian is probably my favorite from this era.

I’m not much of a Moby fan, but I was quite surprised with Wait for Me. The pace is more chill, the sound more personal. Really good.

In the same vein, a lot of Velvet Underground leaves me feeling “eh”, but Loaded, like the stuff from The Byrds earlier this year, is just packed with goodness. Though I hear it’s a somewhat divisive album…

December
It may be too early to tell, but right now I think the best has been the last three albums in Brian Eno’s Ambient series, Paul & Linda McCartney’s Ram, and, out of nowhere, Wulomei’s album Kpabi.

I kept a regular journal on this recent vacation, as I did so diligently on previous long hikes and last year’s trip to Iceland. This was a lazier trip than I’d ever done, so I wrote more than ever before. I may have have more to say about travel in general and and some Nicaraguan sites I saw in later posts, but here are some things that struck me…

• Irish pubs seem to act as a sort of international safehouse for gringos/foreigners in general.
• A lot of unions give away labeled promotional goods: caps, shirts, etc. One of my taxi drivers was a member of the local taxi union in León. His union gave its members long sleeves, but without the shirt part. The purpose? Well, it’s usually hot, and a/c can be either non-existent or a waste, so you drive with the window open. You put the sleeve on your left arm so you don’t get sunburn when you have it propped on the window. Brilliant.
• I like how the environment, architecture, and community interrelate. Warm temperature year-round means that many homes feature some sort of open-air courtyard in the middle. And doors and windows often have some sort of iron fencework, so you can open your door for breezes but still keep folks from wandering in. In the afternoons, folks would throw the doors wide and pull out chairs and sit with neighbors. It reminded me of Southern front porch culture. On a similar note, lots of sunlight meant that interior lights were almost never on during the daytime. There was plenty of light coming in through the doors and reflected off tile floors, and you probably want something a bit dimmer after walking in the sun anyway.
• Food service was slow almost everywhere. I got to be okay with this.
• I’ve become less interested in trying to take “good” pictures of things. At home I take much more with my crappy cameraphone. A quick snap and move on. Whatever happens to be in the frame, no problem. For most travel landmarks I can usually google a better photo if I really need the aesthetic jolt. For “memories,” I’m better served by taking some time to draw it, or just grabbing what’s there in a snapshot. There’s something to be said for good framing, lighting, and so on, but I think it can over-sanitize the moment in a way that doesn’t really do justice to the experience. Amiright?

And a few other amusing events:

• One of those quintessential juxtapositions of old and new: a woman who hawks flowers from a basket balanced on her head takes a break to chat on her cellphone. Cliché, yes. But sense of surprise and delight in seeing it probably says something about the assumptions I’d made.
• Similar juxtaposition seen on a daily basis: carts being pulled by donkeys down 4-lane highways, narrow alleys, and everything in between.
• Seeing lizards scaling the walls and ceiling of a restaurant. To be expected when you’re seated next to an open courtyard.
• Over dinner, hearing a Spanish version of Bryan Adams’ “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” playing on the radio, followed by Kansas’ “Dust in the Wind”.
• And a Nicaraguan cover band tearing it up on a Friday night: Pink Floyd, CCR, The Beatles, etc. One of those moments you’re really glad for mass culture.

A scene from my recent vacation: Volcán Mombacho, as seen from the belltower at Iglesia La Merced. I did a bunch of journaling and drawing, so more thoughtful Nicaraguan posts are on the way…

I became impatient with the few Michael Chabon books I’ve tried, never finished one. And historically I have had little patience with memoir. So what do I do? I go pick up Michael Chabon’s new memoir, Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son. Good decision, it turns out.

On the title page there’s a spinner-type illustration like you’d see on a game board, with possible landing spots marked Hypocrisy, Sexuality, Innocence, Regret, Sincerity, Nostalgia, Experience, and Play. If I could oversimplify, it’s about the awesomeness and awkwardness of being a guy. Not “awesome” as in “cool” but “awesome” in the sense of actual awe, realizing as you grow older that you are part of a tradition that our entire half of the population all experiences. Luckily he’s not too cliché with the whole thing, in one section even going so far as to meditate on the clichédness of feeling like a cliché and turn it into something worthwhile.

Cup size, wires, padding, straps, clasps, the little flowers between the cups: You need a degree, a spec sheet. You need breasts. I don’t know what you need to truly understand brassieres, and what’s more, I don’t want to know. I’m sorry. Go ask your mother.

There you have it: the most flagrant cliché imaginable. As I utter it, I might as well reach for a trout lure, a socket wrench, the switch on my model train transformer. This may be the fundamental truth of parenthood: No matter how enlightened or well prepared you are by theory, principle, and the imperative not to repeat the mistakes of your own parents, you are no better a father or mother than the set of your own limitations permits you to be.

The essays cover things like being a brother, cooking, the man-purse, faking it when you’re in over your head, best friends, Jose Canseco, first love, failed love, fatherhood and more. Here’s a bit on marriage, from the excellent story The Hand on My Shoulder (which link takes you to Chabon reading it on NPR):

The meaning of divorce will elude us as long as we are blind to the meaning of marriage, as I think at the start we must all be. Marriage seems—at least it seemed to an absurdly young man in the summer of 1987, standing on the sun-drenched patio of an elegant house on Lake Washington—to be an activity, like chess or tennis or a rumba contest, that we embark upon in tandem while everyone who loves us stands around and hopes for the best. We have no inkling of the fervor of their hope, nor of the ways in which our marriage, that collective endeavor, will be constructed from and burdened with their love.

Yesterday I tumbled a great quote from his essay on the The Wilderness of Childhood. Here’s another:

We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could never hope to find in life.

This is a mistaken notion, in my view. People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity.

In “Cosmodemonic” he talks about being a “little shit” and basically, growing up:

We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that “our most precious resource is our children.” But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is of practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared.

Tyler Cowen said “This supposed paean to family life collapses quickly into narcissism, but that’s in fact what makes it work.” Much better than I’d expected.

This Sotsgorodok was a bare field knee-deep in snow, and for a start you’d be digging holes, knocking in fence posts, and stringing barbed wire around them to stop yourself from running away. After that—get building.

I knew I would love this book when I came across those lines, about five pages in. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes about a labor-camp worker/political prisoner named Shukhov. It’s only one full day, from just before sunrise until lights-out. I love the restraint to focus on one day, one character, one setting. That aside, I think my favorite part of the book was a sort of underlying optimism. There’s plenty of bold, revolutionary exposé-type stuff about injustice, deprivation, dehumanizing treatment, etc. (It’s probably because I grew up after this devastating period that I can write it off with an “etc”…) But more interesting to me were the little glimmers of endurance and good humor in truly awful conditions.

“Call the gang.”

Gopchik ran off.

The great news was that the gruel was good today, the very best, oatmeal gruel. You don’t often get that. It’s usually magara or grits twice a day. The mushy stuff around the grains of oatmeal is filling, it’s precious.

Shukhov had fed any amount of oats to horses as a youngster and never thought that one day he’d be breaking his heart for a handful of the stuff.

“Bowls! Bowls!” came a shout from the serving hatch.

Another favorite bit is a sort of emotional shift that I found pretty remarkable. The oppression became sort of a background feature for me. With all that given, conscious sympathy sort of fades until you get about 90% finished…

Fetyukov passed down the hut, sobbing. He was bent double. His lips were smeared with blood. He must have been beaten up again for licking out bowls. He walked past the whole team without looking at anybody, not trying to hide his tears, climbed onto his bunk, and buried his face in his mattress.

You felt sorry for him, really. He wouldn’t see his time out. He didn’t know how to look after himself.

Very much a Literary Wow Moment for me. Our hero still manages feelings of pity for his fellow slave-laborer, while the reader has gotten kind of worn out. Just when you’ve gotten numb from reading about a full day of hardship, you feel the pang again because this one guy probably won’t make it. One last cool thing, also evident in the paragraph above, is that the third-person omniscient narration is peppered with asides and reactions from Shukhov himself:

The bosses were afraid the zeks would scatter and waste time in warming sheds. A zek’s day is a long one, though, and he can find time for everything. Every man entering the compound stooped to pick up a wood chip or two. Do nicely for our stove. Then quick as a flash into their shelters.

It’s a fairly short read. Totally worth it.

I made my way inside for a better camera and a better view of its labeled glory.

The envelope, constructed of a firm cardboard, features a well-designed exhortation to avoid bending it. One can open it by pulling a strip along the top edge of the reverse side.

Inside, in between two protective boards is a plastic sleeve containing 1) a certificate of authenticity with the artist’s signature and 2) a short document with bio, statement, and information about the print and 3) the print in question.

Aforementioned print uses archival pigment inks on 100% cotton rag paper with a matte finish, and will look rather fetching when I find a frame (Austin recommends this one):

I went to New Orleans this past weekend. Great trip, my opinion of the city definitely went up (which makes sense, because there wasn’t much lower to go before). Though I’ve been a couple dozen times, this was my first trip out and about as an adult, sampling nightlife-y kinds of things. Friday we were out in the French Quarter wandering around. The Acme Oyster House is okay, nothing special. Oysters are inherently good, but the rice in my mediocre gumbo was kinda crunchy. D.B.A. is a very cool spot with a great drink list. The rest of Frenchmen Street was good, too. There was also a cool spot on a street that I don’t remember that had really nice neighborhoody people who gave us directions. I’d love to find it again. Saturday was a little time in the Warehouse District and on Magazine Street. Republic reminded me of Opera here in Atlanta, so naturally I didn’t go in. I give my highest recommendation to The Bulldog on Magazine Street, which has a great selection and a sweet, sweet patio.

Then he said, “F*** you, man.” I kept walking as he continued to rant, but I could still hear it and eventually I was so pissed I turned and said something not very nice, and then went on my way, now fuming to myself about what a jerk he was. Then I went into a store and perused shelves of high-end imported Belgian ales to bring to a dinner party. And now we’re firmly in “Man Struggles With Affluence/Guilt” territory. But it’s more complicated than that, right?

I left the store and started to look for this guy. I spiraled out and did loops around town, trying to track him down. After a while, when I’d pretty much given up and was headed home, I saw him again. I walked up, told him I was sorry about our last exchange and I handed him a bill. He gave me a handshake. He explained his story again in more detail, but I mostly didn’t listen this time, either. I told him I had some family back in Louisiana near him. He told me he understood why it’s so hard to trust someone asking for a handout. We shared a fist bump and we went our separate ways. It was hot and I wanted to go home. I realized walking back that I hoped I didn’t see him again. I’m not sure how to feel about that. And I’m not sure, never been sure, whether I should give or just move on. If I gave to every beggar that asked me, worst case scenario? We’re talking like $100/year, maybe. But still you wonder if it does any good, but then again does it really matter because it doesn’t affect me that much, anyway, and then you start spiraling out again. There’s never an easy answer, which is both depressing and a kind of relief. It’s nice to have something unsettle you every now and then.

By now it should be clear that you’ll be most comfortable with my arguments if you fully accept yourself as a fitness-flaunting consumer narcissist who has been deluded, throughout your whole life, into irrational spending habits by advertising euphemisms and peer pressure. In other words, you’ll probably feel uneasy for much of the time you’re reading it.

That line comes about 100 pages into the book. I stumbled on it when I was flipping through and it’s the passage that convinced me to take it from the library. Geoffrey Miller’s book, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior turned out to be very good. If I could just block-quote the entire thing right here, I probably would.

You get a sense of the tone from the quote above. It’s fairly conversational. There’s a counter-cultural bent to it that comes across as more detached and bemused, rather than left-wing-ish panic or conservative haughtiness. He picks on both perspectives fairly evenly. Some of it I found genuinely funny, some was awkward funny (“Mobile phones are already becoming too Lilliputian for adult males to use without feeling like a palsy-pawed giant ground sloth.”). Most of it offered plenty of brain-tweaking “I hadn’t thought of it that way” moments. The book got quite a collection of dog-ears by the time I got through with it.

He starts out with a discussion of the “Big Five” personality traits, explaining what they are and how he’ll be using them to guide the discussion. The discussion at hand hinges around the idea of signaling: basically, how we inform others (and exaggerate) our worthy traits and minimize the appearance of less worthy traits. We signal in really primitive ways based on evolutionary learning (e.g. nice, white teeth = healthy) and in really modern ways, such as conspicuous consumption (e.g. nice, white teeth covered with a grill = wealthy).

Anyway, as you make it to page 75, he lists a few reasonable assumptions for the rest of the book:

• We are social primates who survive and reproduce largely through attracting practical support from kin, friends, and mates.
• We get that support insofar as others view us as offering desirable traits that fit their needs.
• Over the past few million years, we have evolved many mental and moral capacities to display those desirable traits.
• Over the past few thousand years, we have learned that these desirable traits can also be displayed through buying and displaying various goods and services in market economies.

And a few pages later, he brings the connection with consumerism and marketing, and hints and hints at the anti-consumerist arguments that he’ll get into later in the book:

Consumerism depends on forgetting a truth and believing a falsehood. The truth that must be forgotten is that we humans have already spent millions of years evolving awesomely effective ways to display our mental and moral traits to one another through natural social behaviors such as language, art, music, generosity, creativity, and ideology. We can all do so without credentials, careers, credit ratings, or crateloads of product.

The next bit ranges into a really interesting discussion on the three basic ways we signal: conspicuous waste, conspicuous precision, or conspicuous reputation. Conspicuous waste is fairly self-explanatory: gigantic cars, 30oz steaks, liquid-cooled gaming PCs. Conspicuously precise products rely on refinement, intricacy, low tolerances for error: luxury cars, fine sushi, Apple products. Conspicuous reputation is about envy or facade. Miller mentions BMWs and well-regarded postal codes in this category. Those aren’t perfect examples, and the categories can bleed, but you get the idea.

In one great leveling passage, he writes:

Each signaling principle has its distinctive pros and cons from the viewpoint of the signaler, the audience, and the population and ecology at large. These distinctions are significant but often overlooked. For example, socialist and environmentalist critiques of runaway consumerism apply most forcibly to cruder forms of conspicuous waste, which sequester matter and energy for the rich at the expense of the poor, and which impose the largest ecological footprint (resource and energy requirements). It is much harder to raise socioecological objections to an iPod nano than to an H1 Hummer. Aristocrats differ from the nouveaux riches not in their freedom from consumerism, but in their preference for conspicuous precision and reputation (“the finer things in life”) over conspicuous waste (“the crass and the vulgar”).

Later parts brought to mind the idea of social objects: “As a self-display strategy, it is very inefficient to buy new, branded, mass-produced products from stores at the full manufacturer’s suggested retail price. The product comes into one’s life naked and mute, without any social context, memorable circumstances, or narrative value.” It’s not just what you have, but how you earned it and how it brings you closer to those you love.

And I just love this one bit, about 3/4 through the book. He’s spent a couple sentences talking about buying a Toyota Camry or a comparable Lexus. Both are made by the same mother company to similar quality levels:

If you must have the Lexus, that’s OK, as long as you consciously accept two things: (1) apart from its higher mass, you are paying an extra $40,000 for the Lexus badge, and (2) everyone who sees you driving the Lexus, and who has read this book, will assume that you could think of nothing in the world more creative, kind, or conscientious to do with $40,000.

Zing! Boom! That’s something to think on.

The last 10% or so of the book wasn’t as good the beginning. It got more prescriptive than descriptive, and it just wasn’t as interesting. But man, that first 90% was so worth it.

More elsewhere:

• Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias is obsessed with signaling, and he has a nice series of posts about the book.
• Bryan Caplan at EconLog has a couple posts and criticism of the book.
• A couple bits from Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.
• Steve Sailer quotes Geoffrey Miller’s long passage on IQ and hypocrisy in academia

I was looking back through the RSS file for our episodes and realized I’d been doing recordings for a half-year-ish now. The first couple (dozen) episodes I was in were pretty rough. But I always listen every week and it’s nice to hear (what I think somewhat resembles) progress. It’s certainly feels more comfortable in front of the microphones. It’s not nearly as strange to listen to my own voice anymore.

It’s nice that we get a lot of freedom to be the curious people that we are, exploring topics as we get fascinated by them or as listeners request them. Favorite episodes? I’m partial to the ones in which we talk about:

• Musicians who use alter egos (including a discussion about the post-modern meta-cultural qualities of Hannah Montana and Eminem)
• How to decipher classical music titles
• The 1980s cassette version of iTunes
• Guilty pleasures and what makes music “cool”
• Brian Eno’s Music for Airports
• Narcocorridos
• The life and times of Billie Holiday
• Terry Riley’s In C
• Wizard Rock
• Leonard Cohen
• The West Coast/East Coast rivalry
• The Dies Irae melody
• Etc.

Also, I’d be silly not to mention that I’ve got smarter, even more well-spoken colleagues that do many other podcasts [iTunes] that are even better.

If you like love and/or music, I think you will like Love Is a Mixtape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time. Rob Sheffield wrote the book after the unexpected death of his wife of five years, Reneee. He didn’t write it right away—the story came welling up again as he was moving to a new apartment, unpacking some old tapes of theirs. The book’s 15 chapters each touch on a different mixtape and a different time. It explores the music and life and love they shared. It captures part of the Charlottesville music scene (they were both DJs) and the bigger stuff in the ’90s: Nirvana, Pavement, R.E.M., etc.

I liked Sheffield’s writing. The passage of time helps to bring out this sort of humorous self-awareness, like when he describes a moment shortly after they were married:

Now we were alone with each other.

Which meant we had all these neighbors to deal with. The old lady next door dropped by with a plate of muffins one Sunday afternoon, right in the middle of Studs. Renee explained that in the South, this is normal—you just drop in on your married neighbors. I was aghast. I was a husband in the South now. We had married into this alien landscape with its strange customs.

Or when he talks about his love as a supporting role, after a moment when he was driving and singing back-up on “Midnight Train to Georgia”:

When we got to the final fade-out with Gladys on board the train and the Pips choo-chooing their goodbyes, Reneee cocked an eyebrow and said, ‘You make a good Pip.’ That’s all I ever wanted to hear a girl tell me. That’s all I ever dreamed of being. Some of us are born Gladys Knights, and some of us are born Pips. I marveled unto my Pip soul how lucky I was to choo-choo and woo-woo behind a real Gladys girl.

And everywhere it’s saturated with pop-culture references, so the time comes alive. And that’s what makes it (and other good memoirs?) special: that the story is so specific. It’s not just a love story, but a story about what it’s like to be a music-lover in love with a music-lover mostly in Charlottesville in the early and mid-’90s. And when you read his enthusiasm (“how lucky I was to choo-choo”), you can’t help be a bit jealous/understanding of what he has, and you feel the loss more acutely than in a story that seems like it could be set anywhere (The Notebook, maybe, or how about Romeo and Juliet?). I think you should read it.

Last weekend was a little road trip out to Birmingham. So nice to catch up with a friend that I hadn’t seen for an absurd amount of time, and also make some new ones. I ate at Cantina, where the fishburgers and garlic fries get my hearty recommendation. Also saw Bon Iver (good performance) and Elvis Perkins (really, really good performance) in concert at Workplay. Workplay is a nice open venue that’ll fit a couple hundred comfortably. Wallflowers and concert snobs will enjoy the options: an elevated perimeter of tables that surrounds the main floor and the stage, and then above that there’s an upper deck with more tables and chairs and waiters at your beck and call. Nice. We also stumbled upon the McWane Science Center downtown whilst in search of a bathroom. Looked like there was a “Night at the Imax” sort of event going on for the kids.

I drove over to Charleston, SC for Memorial Day weekend. It was Spoleto Festival season, I finally got to see the Alvin Ailey Dance Company (after a mad dash from the parking deck to arrive in our seats *just* before it started). My favorite piece was Suite Otis, a tribute to the awesome (Georgia-born!) Otis Redding. Later the same day we stumbled upon Theatre 99, where we saw a good improv show by a group whose name I can’t recall. Moving on to food…

There’s good pizza at Social. But the drink (read: beer) list was uninspired (I’m spoiled by living a few steps away from Brick Store) and I didn’t quite fit with the crowd. Ditto Rooftop Bar at the Vendue Inn, but the views are nice. I did like the vibe and the jukebox at Recovery Room. The people at Joe Pasta were very kind and I also liked Monza.

We went to the renowned Hominy Grill but the Sunday brunch line was absurd so we went across the street to Fuel, which has great plantains and an enormous serving of chicken & waffles. If I’m ever there again, I’d like to check out Pano e Vino.

Out on Folly Beach, I recommend Taco Boy and maybe Lil’ Mama’s if you don’t mind a little waiting.

Low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.

When I was reading it, it reminded me of some ideas that have been around for in economics for a couple centuries or so: time preference and intertemporal choice. Someone with high time preference will tend to consume sooner rather than later. People with low time preference are the savers—the ones who can hold out. The same applies to social groups or societies. For example, married folks or people who have children (or expect them) tend to have lower time preference and set aside more for the future. And they tend to display fewer risky behaviors, so they can actually see the eventual benefits of their saving. It’s the opposite for the single, childless, young. This relates to why single males in their 20s tend to have high car insurance, lots of cool electronics stuff, and little in their IRAs. Consume more now, have less later.

The tumblr will be a nice place to gather bits of influence and inspiration—hopefully both more frequent for you and less time-consuming for me; I’ll reserve the home page here for personal stuff and bigger projects TBD. I might clean up the tumblr styling later, and will probably break things in the process, but it’s up and running and good enough for now. Enjoy.

I love songs about horses, railroads, land, judgment day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak, and love. And Mother. And God.

I’ll be spending the weekend in Baltimore. No big plans except for a visit to Fort McHenry and catching the Sunday afternoon game at Camden Yards.

Someone recently was showing me a book that this person was writing and she said, do you have any advice? I said, Yes, my advice is: Don’t stop working before the book is finished. And I quickly added: Because it’s in the last moments of the work that the quality appears. It doesn’t happen at the beginning; it happens at the end.

No matter how much we mock those we consider beneath us, it’s much more satisfying to be reminded that everyone has dignity…

Eventually, we’ll all feel like outcasts, and none of us wants to be laughed at. The Susan Boyle Story suggests we won’t be…

Whether or not that moral is true in the real world, it’s alluringly true in the Susan Boyle Story. By participating in the narrative that television has constructed for her, by cheering her on and watching her video over and over, we can not only feel good about graciously welcoming an outsider, but also feel relief for helping create a world that will someday welcome us.

[via marginal revolution]

Restlessness, you will say. Whatever it is, it is always driving me, and I cannot help it. I have rested nine or ten weeks, and sometimes feel as if it had been a year—though I had the strangest nervous miseries before I stopped. If I couldn’t walk fast and far I should just explode and perish.

Anyway, two cool things this brings to mind. One, I like this idea of bubbles in culture. Reminds me of the vast difference in New York Times coverage of conflicts in Darfur vs. the Congo, though one area has been about 10 times as deadly. There are all kinds of interesting feedback loops that affect how we perceive and respond to our world. And two, realizing that there’s so much rough-and-ready data out there that we’ve unwittingly created, just waiting to be mined.

The AJC has some really nice photos from the premiere of Gone with the Wind. I never knew there was a motorcade, teeming crowds, etc. Even has a nice playbill.