Friday in July Links: Bad girls, de Botton, Mormons, Kindles, and more
* A history of bad girls looks at The Illusionist by Françoise Mallet-Joris and Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan.
* New York remains rich in the ultimate resource: human capital. But the high cost of housing and high taxation levels remain threats. This is by one of my favorite economists, Edward Glaeser.
* Robin Hanson looks at academia’s function(s) and argues that paper/book writing is rewarded chiefly because it’s a form of prestige. I argue in his comments section that he’s missing two important reasons: 1) that academics write papers because that’s part of a centuries old academic tradition, and nothing radical and pervasive enough has come along to disrupt that on a wide scale, and 2) papers are much, much easier to measure than, say, teaching, as Mark Oppenheimer writes in Judgment Day. Granted, this is like the old joke about a man who is searching for his keys under a street lamp, and when a cop asks where he lost them, he says that he lost them over in the dark but the light is better here. Being able to disentangle which issues are more important for which institutions and which people probably isn’t easy.
He also argues that ignorance and other factors can’t explain away the predilection for publishing professors, but I don’t think that’s enough; books like Murray Sperber’s Beer and Circus make me think otherwise.
* In the Atlantic’s “Ideas” blog, a post asks: Okay, here’s a puzzle for you: I’m going to put some television shows into Group A and others into Group B. See if you can figure out what metric I used to split them into their respective groups.
* Amazon remotely deletes already purchased copies of 1984. This is another entry in a long-running series on the Kindle’s Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) drawbacks.
* A kerfuffle between Alain de Botton and NYT critic Caleb Crain. I’d not read the review in question till now but, as my post on The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work demonstrates, I disagree with Crain’s assessment. (And not out of fear of de Botton, either.)
* On Nabokov’s unfinished manuscript, The Original of Laura. I’ll no doubt read as much of it as I can.
* I can get behind many, but not all, of these candidates to be kicked out of the canon. I’m not sure Dos Passos or Jonathan Franzen are actually in the canon, but still. A number of the books included conform to what James Wood discussed in Human, All Too Inhuman and what B.R. Myers discusses in A Reader’s Manifesto.
* Thanks to this post from The Atlantic, Food, Inc., is the rare documentary I’ll actually make a point of seeing.
* If Amazon is about to get some real competition courtesy of a UK outfit named “The Book Depository,” count me among their first customers.
* Where is The Great Mormon Novel?
* Chicks can’t write sex? Wait, what?
* Ed Glaeser encourages us to put trains where the people are. Good call!
* The strange thing is that I like John Irving, with all his long, intricate novels, even as I often don’t care much for 19th Century novels. See more at Jacket Copy.
* Why do novelists tend to be older?
* A book briefly noted: For some reason I thought Daniel Pennac’s book Better Than Life would be worth reading. Now I know that judgment to be utterly wrong: the book is about where readers come from, how reading is a gift, how reading is necessary, and a “Reader’s Bill of Rights” with obvious choices like the right to reread and to quit books halfway through. Could be interesting: but the passages are disjointed, the ideas underdeveloped, and the overall effect one of a disjointed blog post. He’s shooting for Jose Ortega y Gasset and hitting the “random button” blogger on WordPress.
* Jonathan Galassi, FSG publisher, by way of TEV:
but in the end it’s like the brilliant thing that Helen Vendler said about poets. She was asked, “What’s the canon?” and she said something like, “The poets are going to decide what the canon is. The poets who poets read are the canon.” I think that, in the end, that’s true about all literature. The books that people read over time, and keep reading, are the books that matter. We can huff and puff and pay money and advertise and everything else, but in the end, if the readers don’t come, we can’t do anything about it.
Still, I think a fair amount of overlap exists between what lit professors and other professional teachers read and what people in general read: if your 10th grade teacher had you read 1984 and you loved it, you’re probably more likely to give it to your own kids, and so on. Mark McGurl’s The Program Era discusses this relationship between the canon and the profession in greater detail.
* The New York Times says that The Culture Wars Take a Break thanks to economic and other problems. I would argue that the so-called “culture wars” never existed in the first place, except in the febrile minds of media companies and editors.
