Literary Preferences

One of conflicts that arise for me occasionally on the Internet is disagreement over the merits of a particular author. Everyone seems to have favorites, and I can never find a way of convincing them that their pet author is seriously lacking in some important quality. In my case, there are a few novelists whom I think are better than most, but even then I see their limitations. Sometimes the defects are related to the historical epoch and the state of the novel when they wrote. Thus, while Emily Brontë is a supremely talented novelist of the romantic period, she wrote before realism or modernism had become prominent, and therefore those elements are beyond her purview. One also might say that more recent novelists are trapped by the fact that they are writing after realism reached a peak in the nineteenth century, and if they are adventurous - and wish to sell their work - they may be reluctant to dredge up that style again.  Since realism is my favorite form, I have more or less given up on reading contemporary novels, which I usually find lacking.

Because I prefer realism, I place a lot of emphasis on how penetrating the author's gaze is and how he or she sizes up the state of affairs. Very few novelists of any style do this well. Middlemarch was written before modern psychology had entered popular fiction, but in other respects it is a nearly perfect synthesis of life in the English Midlands of the 1830's. I attribute much of the success of the novel to the fact that George Eliot knew her subject intimately from firsthand experience. Of course, she also had a fine mind and had been at the forefront of the English literary world as the editor of The Westminster Review.

I've had disagreements about Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady wasn't bad, though it seemed derivative, and I thought The Aspern Papers was pretty good, perhaps because it was based on real people who had interesting lives. Everything he wrote that I read is tedious to read, and The Wings of the Dove put me to sleep. There is a plodding, unobservant, internalized quality to the work of Henry James that has been recast by some literary critics as masterful. My guess is that James had an inherent inability to excel at realism because he never lived. If he was heterosexual, he never married; if he was gay, so far as we know, he never had homosexual relationships. A writer without life experiences is of little value to me. He came from an eccentric wealthy American family, and by my standards he never figured anything out.

Another writer who irritates me is Lorrie Moore. In this case what bothers me is the professionalization of literary fiction, and the underlying delusion bordering on dishonesty that pervades the field. To be sure, I think she exhibited a talent at the beginning of her career, but what followed is of greater interest sociologically than literarily. She received an M.F.A. degree from Cornell, got a job at the University of Wisconsin in 1984, and published the short story collection, Self-Help, comprised mostly of her M.F.A. work, in 1985. Self-Help, I think, contains one good short story, and the rest is at best precocious adolescent writing, but the book was enough to launch her career. She became a darling of M.F.A. students, some of whom refer to her as a "goddess."  Through the 1990's she used a formula in which the protagonist was an unhappy, introverted woman who had a relationship problem. The nature of the problem was never explored, and the stories usually ended on a down note, with the protagonist depressed and sometimes suicidal. Then, perhaps based in part on a real-life experience with her adoptive son, she wrote a popular story about child cancer that won her the O. Henry Award in 1998. On the whole I have found her short stories formulaic and unperceptive. Her novels are poorly constructed, badly edited and of little interest to serious readers. Her work is issued in the tiniest of trickles, and even then seems injudiciously released.

What irks me is that, although Lorrie Moore is ostensibly a failed writer, she is at the top of her game in the alternate reality of contemporary American literary fiction, and there is nothing that anyone can do about it. She is basking in adoration and doors are opening to her everywhere, when by all rights she should have given up and found another job in a different field. If I bring up any criticisms of her on the Internet, I am instantly rebuffed by people who are incapable of articulating why I should change my mind. I must be silenced immediately.

These and similar experiences incline me to refrain from discussing literature on the Internet. Unless you happen to be communicating with a like-minded person, discussion is invariably a waste of time. You can write it off as human nature, but on some topics I simply conclude that I have better taste than many others do. In the case of Lorrie Moore, it's obvious to me that her admirers are brainwashed literary fiction junkies or an undiscerning general readership that has been sold a bill of goods. You can't talk to people like that.

Conventional Wisdom

The painting at the masthead of the blog, in case you're unfamiliar with it, is The Parable of the Blind, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which references the Bible. As the title of the blog also suggests, I am skeptical of the beliefs that many people hold. This may have originated with a slightly contrarian attitude that I've had ever since childhood, but it is also related to facts such as my parents' different ethnic backgrounds and nationalities and my history of living in the U.K. and culturally diverse parts of the U.S. Because of these experiences I did not develop an identity in conjunction with the norms of any one place, and I tend to be an outside observer wherever I go.

Seeing the world in this way has both disadvantages and advantages. On the negative side, I don't fit in well anywhere, people can be suspicious of me without cause, and it is difficult for locals to understand me. Internally, I often experience a certain cognitive dissonance because of differences in the ways other people process information in relation to the way I do. On the positive side, I am unimpeded by local prejudices and habits, and, with a broader range of experience than many, I am rarely surprised or upset by turns of events. Above all, I am free to theorize about the world without the constraints of received wisdom.

Living my life this way, and now retired and facing no obligation to please employers or anyone, I increasingly find what might be called "consensus reality" quite odd. As I mentioned in an earlier post, everyone is essentially winging it. I think the way human society is organized is somewhat arbitrary now and could be quite different if people only thought differently. Something like this occurred to me after I graduated from college. For about a year I lived with my dysfunctional family - all five of us under one roof for the last time. My father was then making little money and consuming vast quantities of alcohol, but everyone else was working and our household income was more than adequate. We lived in a large Victorian rental house in a tree-filled neighborhood in Connecticut overlooking a river and not far from Long Island Sound. Although there were several forces in play that caused this state of affairs to end, with a slightly different model the situation could have become stable and pleasant. As a family we could have saved money, made daily living more desirable, dried out my father, etc. Of course, that never happened, and before long I moved away and my father was dead.

I mention this because it is often the case that people are trapped by the paradigms under which they operate. This has been examined by Thomas Kuhn, the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he coined the now famous phrase "paradigm shift." The change from a geocentric to a heliocentric view of the solar system is a prime example. I find that paradigms are adopted by all people, and they are usually defended and clung to even when there is evidence that better paradigms exist.

It is possible that we are in the very early stages of a broad paradigm shift now. Whatever anyone thinks of Piketty's book, Capital, it has triggered a great deal of discussion. There was already a lot of rumbling and discontent before Piketty came along, but he seems to some extent to have become a lightning rod. The financial crisis of 2008, the weak U.S. recovery, America's failure in world leadership, etc., along with Piketty's book, have helped elevate inequality as a major issue at the U.S. policy level. Of course, I am delighted, because people, though currently only a minority, are also beginning to raise the question of whether capitalism and democracy are suitable models for mankind. I don't think they are, as will also be evident from previous posts.

Often, when people think of democracy, they conjure images of Thomas Jefferson, the visionary who freed Americans from British tyranny. In fact, Jefferson's vision is now obsolete. He sought to free America from commercial oppression by England and religious oppression by churches. But he also relished living the life of a country squire supported by slaves, who, along with women, had no voting rights. While for his time he may have accurately assessed the dangers of extended voting privileges, he apparently believed that equality pertained only to white male landowners. The Founding Fathers cannot have thought deeply about inequality. Contemporary Americans, other than bigoted conservatives with a pro-slavery mentality, are deluding themselves if they think of the Constitution as a document that reflects timeless wisdom.

I consider capitalism even more insidious than democracy, because it has a greater effect on how people think about their lives and how in fact they end up living their lives. Especially in the U.S., personal worth is closely tied to both the status level of one's job and the associated level of pay. This is a hard road to travel for hunter-gatherers, myself included. It channels people's behavior according to the requirements of commercial ventures, often making liars out of them. These days, even what passes for art has become a lie. As Mary McCarthy once said of Lillian Hellman, "Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the."

Thomas Piketty III

I am now about halfway through Capital, and, though economics is hard to get excited about (or read at all), I have to applaud Piketty for, at a minimum, opening the economic dialogue far more effectively than any American economist has been able to for at least thirty years. Conservative economists are lining up to take potshots at him, but, historically speaking, they've already lost the battle in that they have been forced to address his arguments: without him they would have been left to restate their distorted version of reality ad nauseum.

Since at least one of my readers is literary, today I'll write about Balzac. As it happens, I've read Le Pere Goriot, which Piketty uses extensively to make his point about economic life in developed countries during the early nineteenth century. I don't consider Balzac to be one of the greatest writers, because there is a comic book quality to many of his characters. This was particularly apparent in La Cousine Bette, but I didn't notice it as much in Le Pere Goriot. As a reader who enjoys realism, Le Pere Goriot is one of my favorites by Balzac. I should also mention that Balzac clearly was a major influence on Dostoevsky, who was similarly long-winded but is reasonably credited with introducing the inner life of characters to novels.

Piketty describes in detail the plot of Le Pere Goriot in order to show how becoming wealthy was far easier through marriage or inheritance than through hard work. The criminal Vautrin explains to the young Rastignac that he would be more successful at obtaining a good life by marrying into wealth than by becoming a lawyer and working diligently for many years:
By the age of thirty, you will be a judge making 1,200 francs a year, if you haven't yet tossed away your robes. When you reach forty, you will marry a miller's daughter with an income of around 6,000 livres. Thank you very much. If you're lucky enough to find a patron, you will become a royal prosecutor at thirty, with compensation of a thousand ecus [5,000 francs], and you will marry the mayor's daughter. If you're willing to do a little political dirty work, you will be a prosecutor-general by the time you're forty....It is my privilege to point out to you, however, that there are only twenty prosecutors-general in France, while 20,000 of you aspire to the position, and among them are a few clowns who would sell their families to move up a rung. If this profession disgusts you, consider another. Would Baron de Rastignac like to be a lawyer? Very well then! You will need to suffer ten years of misery, spend a thousand francs a month, acquire a library and an office, frequent society, kiss the hem of a clerk to get cases, and lick the courthouse floor with your tongue. If the profession led anywhere, I wouldn't advise you against it. But can you name five lawyers in Paris who earn more than 50,000 francs a year at age fifty?

Vautrin then goes on to suggest that Rastignac marry into money in order to obtain an income of 50,000 francs at age twenty. He has a candidate lined up and will assist Rastignac by killing her brother in order to expedite her inheritance.

Although the point of Piketty's reference is to make his ideas intelligible in a non-technical way, I find Vautrin's calculations interesting in their own right. His schemes are hardly any different from those made by people everywhere, if only more extreme, but they are rarely discussed with such candor. Literature like this has given rise to a prejudice within English-speaking countries suggesting that the French are morally bankrupt. However, I see the same phenomenon in America, with the thoughts hidden, sometimes by self-delusion. Thus, American businessmen crave vast wealth and rationalize their behavior by thinking that they are "job creators" or that they are "creating value" or that they are engaging in the "creative destruction" of inefficient companies. Or they are reinforcing America's economic and military might in order to withstand the evils of terrorism, communism, totalitarianism or whatever. One of the most bizarre aspects of American ideology has been its convoluted linkage of Christian values to the virtues of the wealthy. In my view, today's ruling class contains a hidden element of Vautrin, and many wealthy people in the U.S., the U.K. and elsewhere are sociopaths in disguise.

Literature is not a Profession

In a review of The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession, by Richard Salmon, Rosemary Ashton writes in The Times Literary Supplement, "Literature was once the pursuit of rich amateurs, writers with aristocratic patrons, and scurrilous penny-a-liners scraping a living in 'Grub Street'. How did that situation change, as experts generally agree it did, in the early-to-mid nineteenth century?" Thomas Carlyle hoped to provide financial assistance to struggling writers comparable to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Johnson and Robert Burns, and he suggested an "Organization of the Literary Guild" similar to medieval craft guilds. Taking Carlyle to heart, Charles Dickens formed one with Bulwer Lytton in 1851. Their "Guild of Literature and Art" built retirement homes for literary people in 1865, but the homes were not well-received, and the Guild disbanded in 1897.

To a certain extent, the ambiguity surrounding the literary profession hasn't changed much since Carlyle's lectures of 1840. Many of today's journalists are reminiscent of Grub Street writers, paid by the article. The authors of bestsellers operate more like independent businesses than members of a guild. What is new is literature as an academic subject, along with writing programs and writers' workshops. As far as I am able to tell, these recent developments have done little to improve the quality of writing or the lot of good writers.

In the nineteenth century, not many people wrote for a living or wanted to. That would have made sifting through budding writers far easier than it is today.  Now, every year millions of students take courses in literature and creative writing, and regardless of their talent many of them come to define themselves as writers, if only because the creation of literature is seen as high-status work. Increasingly, universities have become degree mills, not unlike manufacturing plants, but selling diplomas instead of cars. It is difficult to imagine Thomas Carlyle or Charles Dickens condoning the writing produced by the students in M.F.A. programs and writers' workshops. What they referred to as literature has largely been co-opted by universities and publishers.

In my view, though there is usually good reason to transform practical vocations such as medicine, law and engineering into professions, because standardization and competency levels improve them, the same cannot be said of the arts. Thus, in the case of writing, the public is force-fed whatever the writing programs and literary publishers put forward, even when there is a blatant conflict of interest. The income of writing programs and publishers depends on the success of their authors. This partially explains why literary fiction has become a niche product that is of little appeal to most readers.

Although in theory I would want to support a talented writer like Rousseau, I doubt that he could have written as well as he did if he had arrived at being a writer by means of a comfortable education followed by formal university certification of his writing skills. In a capitalist economy no less than in a communist economy, the arts, with few exceptions, don't lend themselves to professionalization.

The Singularity

I'm about a third of the way through Capital and will eventually make at least one more post on it. Today I'll write about the singularity.

In earlier posts I suggested that government could be automated and that capitalism could be brought to an end if the right technology existed and were put into effect. This view generally fits within a gradualist framework under which new technology becomes incorporated into our lives without any major shocks, setbacks or unexpected turns of events. Alternatively, there are scenarios in which technological developments could suddenly cause radical shifts either for better or for worse.

The singularity, if you haven't heard of it, is the theoretical moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, with unpredictable effects that could change Homo sapiens forever. Some proponents, such as inventor Ray Kurzweil, take this seriously and are planning their lives accordingly. Kurzweil is hoping to remain healthy and live as long as possible in order to benefit from coming technology that will make him immortal. Some experts think that Kurzweil is unrealistic regarding the biology of human longevity and the capabilities of technology. Others, such as physicist Max Tegmark, are more cautious regarding the singularity. His approach is that we don't know for certain that it will occur or what would happen if it did. Tegmark suggests that we discuss it ahead of time rather than wait and see.

I am not well-informed on artificial intelligence or biology, but I think a singularity is likely to occur, though I'm not sure when or what the results will be. Since I don't believe that there is anything special about human intelligence, I see no reason why supercomputers couldn't dramatically outthink humans in the not-too-distant future. They are already better at chess and Jeopardy. Certainly computers could have much larger memories and far greater processing capabilities than any human. Once they can be taught to learn, which does not seem to be an insurmountable task and already goes on at a rudimentary level, why couldn't they outperform us?

Among the positive potential outcomes, humans might live much as they do now, but without having to work, and with increased longevity. There could be a benign merger between humans and machines that would create a new species without eradicating what we now think of as human nature. Conflicts might be resolved peaceably, the ecosystem could be managed better, and in theory everyone could be happy.

One negative outcome would be an uncontrolled rampage by supercomputers that don't act in the interests of humans. This has been a subject of science fiction for many years. It could probably be prevented but would require advance planning.

Another negative outcome, and perhaps more likely, would be the use of supercomputers to benefit one group of people but not others. Under this scenario, a small group of wealthy technocrats might rule the world, neutralizing or eliminating their opponents and accelerating their own evolution while excluding others. Or this could occur at a national level, in which case the supercomputers would simply represent the most advanced weaponry.

At present this may all appear too speculative, but I think one of these outcomes is possible. Keep in mind that the type of supercomputer I'm talking about here might be capable of making improved versions of itself, anticipating all human behavior, developing new energy sources that we have been unable to, designing and making weapons beyond our comprehension and obviating the need for human labor of any description. It might even write better novels, short stories, poems - and blog posts - than humans.

Films

Since our main form of entertainment during the evening is watching films on Netflix, I thought I'd say something about films for a change. Actually, I got burnt out on them, because when you watch several per week they become a blur. The fact is that in any given year there are only going to be a couple of new films that I consider to be of any value beyond simple entertainment. The better films become less memorable when crammed in between others. In some ways films were more effective when you only went out to see them a few times a year.

Two that we watched recently were Nebraska and August: Osage County. You could probably classify both of them as black comedies, though they are not as black or as imaginative as Dr. Strangelove, my all-time favorite. Nebraska is about an old drunk living in Montana who, based on junk mail he received, thinks he won a sweepstakes for a million dollars and wants to go to Lincoln, Nebraska to pick it up. To a casual observer, this would be the less interesting of the two films, because the characters are ordinary and unglamorous. However, the characters and dialogue, plain as they are, are perfect, and this may well be Bruce Dern's best acting performance ever. August: Osage County started as a play and is about a dysfunctional family living in Oklahoma. The mother is a pill addict with oral cancer and the father is an alcoholic poet. Things end badly. It reminded me a little of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which I found to have more interesting dialogue. The family dynamics are explored, but predictably, as you would expect in an American theatrical production. The only revelation of any value that I noticed was that the women were stronger than the men: Meryl Streep, in one of her better performances as the mother, and Julia Roberts, as the eldest daughter, in perhaps her best performance ever. The alcoholic father is played by Sam Shepard, whose brief appearance is good, but I have to say that his involvement in any production is a warning sign to me because of his relentless pursuit of false Americana.

Nebraska is more faithful to the way Americans think and feel, and it captures how they live in the Great Plains and Midwest without satirizing or sentimentalizing them. There is little of the distortion and condescension and none of the surrealism that one might expect in a Coen brothers film. The screenplay is unadorned and straightforward, but uncannily precise. The same cannot be said of August: Osage County, in which everything feels derivative. Overall, I didn't find that the characters added up. They were an intelligent group of people who for unknown reasons elected to live in a cultural backwater with high temperatures and no air conditioning. The men were weak and the women were strong: so what. I think the constraints that are placed on American theatrical productions significantly narrow the scope of their subject matter. I sense a formula here: family dysfunction is in; snarky dialogue is in; failed poet is in; down-home country living is out. August: Osage County, in sum, is a product contrived to suit the tastes of well-heeled urban American theatergoers.

Thomas Piketty II

I'm slowly working my way through Capital and will make a few more comments. What has interested me the most so far is Piketty's account of the economic conditions under which people have lived over very long historical periods. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, wealth was based mainly on land ownership, there was little economic growth or inflation, and people lived to about age forty. Since 1700, the value of agricultural land has plummeted as a percent of national income. Foreign capital owned by Britain and France peaked around 1900 and crashed starting around 1914. Domestic capital, i.e. financial assets and the value of businesses, declined up to World War I but was offset by increases in foreign capital. Then the two World Wars devastated the world economy. From that time onward, foreign capital and agricultural land have been insignificant in value, domestic capital (as a percent of national income) has returned to 1700's levels, and housing has skyrocketed to become the largest component of national wealth in Britain and France.

Piketty's analysis is highly detailed, and the above is just one small part of it. He seems to be moving in a direction that will show that the Industrial Revolution was a one-time event that is unlikely to be replicated, and that a peak of wealth inequality occurred just before World War I, corresponding with the Belle Epoque in France. This seems like an appropriate benchmark to me, because I have long seen that period in France as a flowering in the arts that could never have occurred without phenomenal wealth. Somehow the Eiffel Tower, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, modern art, Proust, Debussy and countless other artists emerged during that period. Reading Proust, it is obvious that his contemporaries were swimming in money.

One of Piketty's theses is that wealth would have continued to accumulate at the top, and inequality would have continued to increase were it not for the World Wars, which inadvertently reduced wealth inequality. He thinks that, even though the world economy has been significantly restructured since the wars, wealth has resumed accumulation at the top, returning us to a state of increasing inequality. Furthermore, although he has not gone into detail as far as I have read, most of the economic growth since the wars was a natural rebound that occurred regardless of economic strategy. Europe, for example, recovered with strong central governments, while the U.S. thinks it recovered by emphasizing entrepreneurial activity in the private sector. Thus, Piketty seems to have an underlying theme saying that America's free enterprise dogma has little support in economic history. I believe that later in the book his recommendation will be to address this problem by instituting higher taxation on wealth.

I find it refreshing to read Piketty, because he is not a one-dimensional economist. For example, he cites the novels of Balzac and Jane Austen to show how differently people thought about meeting their living expenses in the early 19th century compared to now. To some extent, the variation in income from land was negligible and inflation did not exist, so it was much simpler to judge a person's financial status in those days. The economic structure of society was far more stable. Piketty seems to have a breadth of knowledge that makes most American economists look like narrow academic specialists and a far cry from genuine public intellectuals. Over the last few years I have come to dislike Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz for their inability to create an economic narrative that would effectively demolish the absurd and self-serving narrative that has been successfully advanced by American conservatives for more than thirty years.

Thomas Piketty I

For many years I've had an interest in investing, which sprang from my desire to retire. I would have retired at age 30 if I could have afforded to, because I never much liked any of my jobs or considered them a meaningful use of time. Investing is related to economics, which did not interest me until recently. As an undergraduate, it seemed to me that the people who studied economics were conventional, unimaginative and materialistic: they were conforming to their parents' expectations and only wanted high-paying jobs when they graduated.

My academic path provided little intersection with economics majors. By nature I'm an empiricist, but I am also interested in aesthetic matters, which meant that I was not a perfect fit for either science or the arts. I ended up majoring in Philosophy, which in many ways is a compromise field that lies somewhere between art and science. Looking back, Philosophy was not a particularly good fit for me either. Part of that may have had to do with the fact that the course offerings at my college were limited. The relevant department was the Department of Philosophy and Religion, and several of its members had received divinity degrees prior to receiving their PhDs. The coverage of continental philosophy in the department was weakened when the one professor specializing in it left for an administrative position elsewhere. In hindsight, I was in a state of ignorance and denial as to my fit with Philosophy. I was exposed to British and American analytic philosophy, which I didn't enjoy much, find relevant to anything or consider to be of much intellectual importance. These days, philosophy departments are fighting to avoid being labeled obsolete, and, given their syllabuses, I'm not surprised.

When I later entered business school (an even worse fit, though I liked some of the courses and completed an MBA), I took two semesters of economics. It was hard for me to relate to the subject, because from the start I noticed that economists made assumptions about the world and proceeded from there even though the assumptions seemed highly dubious. My attention to economics increased in 2004, when I began to manage my mother's assets because of her Alzheimer's disease. For investors, some knowledge of market cycles has become crucial in recent years. My interest heightened after the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers and the start of the Great Recession. I followed Paul Krugman closely and read This Time is Different, by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, which is the first major empirical study of financial crises. The fact that This Time is Different was published in 2009, after the crisis had begun, and that no comparable studies had ever been made, confirmed to me that economics as practiced in academia has an agenda that is largely disconnected from reality in a manner not entirely unlike that of academic philosophy.

Over the last few years, there has been a constant battle between liberals and conservatives over the causes of the 2008 financial crisis and the appropriate governmental response. I have found this disappointing, because the economists involved rarely cite any convincing studies, and the two camps go on their merry ways without addressing any fundamental issues. Finally we have a significant study, which has just been published in the U.S. It is Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty. I believe this book has the potential to change the debate for the better by infusing it with empirical data and a theoretical approach that exceeds the limited scope of American economics.

Piketty is a precocious French economist who completed his PhD at age 22 and then taught at M.I.T. However, he became frustrated with the way economics is studied in the U.S. and returned to France after two years:
To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences. Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in.

The central thesis of Capital is that the rate of return from wealth usually surpasses the rate of return from labor, meaning that the rich usually become richer, gaining ground over the ordinary workers who make up most of the labor force. Simply put, investments provide a higher return than employees can obtain in the form of wages. We are seeing this today especially in the U.S., where the wealthy are becoming exceedingly wealthy and the middle class is just treading water. As obvious as this may be even to a casual observer, it is not a view accepted by many economists, policy makers or politicians. Piketty documents his claims with carefully compiled data covering longer historical periods than have been studied by other economists.

At a glance, this may not sound particularly exciting, but I think it may prove to be the most important publication on policy issues in several decades. Moreover, it seems doubtful that conservatives will be able to quickly whip up a counter-study, since this one took many years to complete and is unlikely to contain serious flaws. My hope, then, is that it will have a positive influence on political discussion and put to rest some of the myths that have been lingering from the Reagan-Thatcher era.

I've only just started to read the book and will probably have more to say about it later.

Frankenstein

I finally got around to finishing Frankenstein and can't recommend it. The main interest for me was in comparing the novel to the 1931 film starring Boris Karloff, which is how everyone thinks of the Frankenstein monster. The plot is changed dramatically in the film, making the original monster unrecognizable. In the film, the monster is accidentally given a criminal's brain, but not so in the novel. Rather, the monster is curious and intelligent and learns to speak articulately, imploring Frankenstein to help him:
I am thy creature, and I will even be mild and docile to my natural lord and king, if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me. Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other, and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember, that I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather a fallen angel, whom thy drivest from joy for no misdeed. Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy and I shall again be virtuous.

In the novel, Frankenstein makes the monster for no particular reason and immediately abandons it, taking no responsibility for its existence. The first victim of the monster is killed accidentally, Frankenstein continues to rebuff it, and it then becomes vengeful because of Frankenstein's intransigence. I suppose one might argue that this is a parable about man's abandonment by God, but that seems like a stretch. Alternatively, there may be a conscious or unconscious allusion to Mary's half-sister, Fanny, who was abandoned by her American father, Gilbert Imlay. Fanny committed suicide just as Frankenstein was being written. At the end of the novel, the monster plans his suicide. Fanny's suicide note says:
I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavouring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death will give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as.... 

Mary Shelley was under a lot of pressure to write. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was an important figure of the Enlightenment, her father, William Godwin, was a well-known journalist and thinker, and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, was one of the best poets ever in the English language. From Mary Shelley's account, this novel was never intended to be great literature, and it should not be treated as such.

Reality is Stranger than Fiction

I'm back from my trip, which involved 2700 miles of driving on the Southern route through western Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky and Indiana to southern Missouri, and would like to record some of my thoughts. There was snow in the yard here when I left, while the redbuds were blooming down south. The lakes in Vermont were still ice-covered when I returned.

One of my interests has always been to know and understand the people and dynamics of families over multiple generations. This is a far more challenging subject than you might expect, because not only do most people not discuss their families in depth, but they also don't know or understand their families as well as you might like. However, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, families have been going through dramatic changes, and I find them to be of greater interest in understanding changing human lives than the individuals of which they are comprised. Without actually making a study of it in which you go out and formally interview people, the only information you get is likely to accrue slowly over many years as you come to learn about your own family and at most the families of a handful of friends.

I have known Greg since college. At the time we weren't friends at all, because he was so obviously dysfunctional. He didn't want to be there, but his parents had forced him to go, partly because they knew that he would need a college education and partly because that was where they had met. He didn't take studying seriously and became a hell-raiser in the dorm where he lived. He became known for his "hawker-catching" contests, in which someone would spit from high up in a stairwell and someone below would attempt to catch it in his mouth. Besides his rowdy behavior and unkempt appearance, he was born without a thumb on his left hand. Somehow, with a lot of pleading, he managed to graduate, and he soon after became a professional baby photographer.

Greg's talents gradually emerged. He got a state job in Missouri and, because of his innate talent at organization, he rose through the ranks and eventually was placed in charge of the state Medicaid program, which had the largest budget in the state. He went on to study at Harvard to enhance his skills. The same talent was demonstrated in his organization of events at his family's farm, where I came to know him better starting in 1977.

The farm is a tract of about 200 acres that was settled in the 1800's and at its peak included at least two houses, a barn and a schoolhouse. Greg's father's father was a mechanic at Coca-Cola in St. Louis and bought it many years ago. He used the property to hold large parties for the union drivers who delivered Coke. He built a dance floor and bused in people to the site. He also seems to have used the farm as a dumping site for various Coke refuse. The grounds have old trailers full of rusted Coke signs, pipes and all sorts of things. Over the years, the farm has been a family retreat for Greg's family. It is mostly overgrown with trees, and all but one building and two outhouses have collapsed.

Greg is the oldest of four children and has three sisters. He seems to be a throwback to his two grandfathers, who both kept shotguns at their bedsides. Greg's father chose to become bookish and took no interest in mechanical objects or hunting, which caused a large, permanent rift between himself and his father. Greg took up the slack by becoming his grandfather's student on all matters related to the farm. As a boy he learned how to do roof repairs and all kinds of maintenance chores. The oldest sister, Chris, is a tomboy in the extreme. She was deeply impressed by her early experiences at the farm and now loves to operate heavy equipment and take care of three horses. When the company that she worked for in Iowa was bought out and she was fired, she moved to the farm and married her Iowa boyfriend, who sells funeral insurance. Chris is a lot like Greg, only she is louder and rowdier and a fanatic about everything she does. In private, Greg bemoans her lack of actual mechanical skill. The next sister, Andrea, also has many masculine characteristics, but, unlike Chris, is gay. Despite being loud and enthusiastic at times, Andrea has a less obvious sensitive side. Her main vocation is that of a visual artist, and she supports herself by delivering mail as a postal worker. Her recent partner, who is ten years older, was diagnosed with dementia and now lives in assisted living. The youngest sister, Hilary, by all appearances comes from a different family. She lives in Philadelphia, takes no interest in the farm and always looks and acts polished. Comparatively speaking, she is an East Coast snob, and her siblings are country bumpkins who just fell off a turnip truck.

There are many paradoxes to be found in Greg's family. Chief among them is their opposing political views. Greg is a solid Democrat and once even considered running for office. Chris and her husband are solid Republicans, and for many years Chris avoided going to the farm when Greg and his friends were there because she perceived them to be too leftist. Andrea, whom you might think of as an obvious Democrat, because she is a gay artist, voted for George W. Bush. Apparently she liked his decisiveness. As for Hilary, I don't know.

Although I'm not at all like Greg or anyone in his family, I do find them interesting. I think that their family provides both a broad panorama of American life and a microscopic look into some of its oddities. In a rather oblique way, this relates to my interest, or lack thereof, in fiction. I think many writers try unsuccessfully to capture the nature of the American experience, and they usually fail miserably. A few years ago, following a recommendation, I read Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, which had won several awards. I found nothing compelling about the novel and am surprised that it was popular. It is about a dull minister in Iowa and life in his dull town. Presumably the protagonist's theological musings add a depth for readers who care about such things, but I don't find them to be of any value except as an exercise in seeing how confused people go about solving problems without understanding anything. In contrast, Greg's family story could easily be transformed into a good novel. Fiction writing has the advantage of allowing the author to fill in the gaps of unknowns by making things up that are plausible yet suit the author's whims. I am struck by how bad American fiction must be if there are so few authors writing compelling stories at least as interesting as Greg's family.

The Brutality of Life

I recently watched Life in the Undergrowth with David Attenborough (excerpt here) and Darwin in the City with Carl Zimmer here. The former, as always with Attenborough, contains beautiful cinematography and interesting information that is spooned out slowly. The latter provides an articulate and stunning presentation of how we directly cause real-time evolution in the animals and plants around us. I found Zimmer more striking, because he shows that Darwinism refers not to remote processes that emerge over long periods, but to nearby processes that are occurring right now. For this post, however, I will concentrate on Attenborough's presentation of the social insects, because it is germane to many aspects of human behavior that interest me.

The social insects, which include wasps, bees, termites and ants, at one time operated as independent individuals. By chance, some adult females began to form collective nests, and this provided an evolutionary advantage which allowed them to leave the nest in search of food while others remained at the nest to fend off intruders that endangered their offspring. This is the basic structure of eusocial behavior: cooperation makes life easier for everyone. Homo sapiens arrived at eusocial behavior through an entirely different path, but the same logic is there, and it can be instructive to examine social insects in search of human parallels.

One thing that I learned is that there are tensions within the nests of social insects, and life there isn't always harmonious. The example I liked best was that of the bumblebee. Every spring, a fertilized queen sets out to start a nest. She finds a site, often a hole in the ground, and begins to lay eggs. The queen emits chemicals that cause all of the eggs to become females that do not reach maturity. The nest then becomes a factory where the queen continues to lay eggs and her daughters tend to the eggs, find food and defend the nest. Toward the end of summer, the queen stops emitting the chemicals that control the development of her eggs and offspring. Some of her daughters mature to adulthood, and some males are born. The daughters start to lay their own eggs. Initially, the queen attempts to eat all of the eggs laid by her daughters, but eventually, her mature daughters attack and kill her. The mature daughters that have been fertilized leave the nest seeking shelter for the winter. In the spring, the process starts again.

In some of my posts I've discussed dysfunctional families. My family was dysfunctional while I was growing up, but I think it may have followed a pattern that isn't uncommon. My mother makes a good case study, because she was very much an instinctive and spontaneous person. Moreover, she was uprooted from her original family setting at age 21 when she moved from Greece to England, and then again at age 31 when she moved from England to the U.S., so she did not have the continuous immersion in one culture that would make cultural explanations for her behavior more plausible. As mentioned earlier, she was on the whole a competent parent about until the time that her children reached puberty. From that point onward, she was of little help to any of us, and in fact was often spitefully competitive with my older sister. One might say that her attitude, at an instinctive level, was that she was ready for us to leave the nest and spontaneously lost her interest in child-rearing. As stated on a previous post, I was not close to her during my adulthood, and my sisters were often in conflict with her.

When you look at fathers from a eusocial perspective, their interest in raising their offspring can range anywhere from never existing at all to starting strong and declining or ending later. In the case of bumblebees and many insects, the only important role the father plays is in the fertilizing of the eggs. I think that you can say that human couples, when they are young, are generally obsessed with mating, and the dominant culture carefully prescribes acceptable conduct in that domain. Culture plays a decisive role in defining how strong instincts that could potentially disrupt society are to be expressed. However, once children reach adulthood, the relationships between parents and children are usually less critical biologically, and cultures often allow greater flexibility from that point onward. If the children are in fact capable of fending for themselves, depending on cultural expectations, a father may push them out of the door, support them through college, or expect them to start taking care of him. There may also be a genetic predisposition encouraging parents to assume the role of grandparents, but I think there is also cultural variation here. Perhaps there is a parallel between male social insects that have performed their function and die and dissolute fathers who take to drinking and die prematurely.

In the context of my blog ramblings, there are a couple of connections that I've made. First, many children feel betrayed by one or more of their parents because they behaved in a manner that did not optimize the children's outcomes or even worsened the outcomes through negligence of one kind or another. I am an advocate of forgiving parents in most cases, especially when the perceived deficiencies can be explained by ingrained biological processes over which we have limited control. Second, this relates to what I feel is the inadequacy of current literature that intentionally excludes advances in science. Fiction that explores human relationships only within the narrow literary framework that conceptually predates contemporary scientific understanding of our behavior is relegating itself to an antiquated form of mannerism. Some may argue that, as an art, literature has no responsibility to reflect scientific knowledge, but in my view, when there is an explosion of research that provides new insights, its omission tends to make literature artificial and pointless. We know more about ourselves than we did a hundred years ago, and pretending that we don't seems delusional to me.

Aesthetic Merit

One of the spheres of conflict that I run into on the Internet from time to time is the relative merit of an artist, usually in literature, and occasionally in painting. This occurred recently in a post on willful ignorance, in which the example was given of an actor who thought very little of Shakespeare and was dismissive of him as a playwright. The author of the article claimed that it was obvious that Shakespeare is one of the greatest writers in English, and that the actor was intentionally and defiantly ignorant on the subject. Some of the commenters, myself included, argued that, while Shakespeare is clearly one of the most important writers in English, and certainly he was highly skilled in what he wrote, one can dislike his work and make a case that other authors are better writers in some respect. I mentioned Flaubert, who, I believe, wrote a more skillful depiction of a person, Emma Bovary, than any characters that I know of in Shakespeare. In fact, some of Shakespeare's comedies are so ridiculous that I'd rather watch cartoons. This is not to say that Shakespeare wasn't a great writer. Rather, he must be looked at within the context of his time and place, and the media with which he had to work. There is nothing wrong with disliking Shakespeare as long as one can make a plausible case, which in fact isn't all that difficult.

Over the years, I've had arguments about Henry James, Proust and Lorrie Moore, in which their defenders behave as if it is received wisdom that their pet author is God incarnate. To be sure, there is something good to be found in each of these authors, but one must look further than conventional wisdom if one advocates their deification. It seems as if fanhood makes people blind to the limitations of their gods, which represent, to them, a belief system that reflects their own self-worth. So, if you make a case that Henry James was a long-winded buffoon who couldn't observe his way out of a paper bag, that Proust should have gone back to school and taken a course in concision, or that Lorrie Moore needs to be kidnapped and taken to an undisclosed location where she will be deprogrammed from her delusional fixation on failed relationships and the unhappiness of life, they are far more likely to demonize you than to give the matter any serious thought.

Perhaps it is easier for me than others to find fault with icons, because I myself have never been indoctrinated by academic instruction in the arts. Moreover, there has been nothing in my experience to prevent me from thinking that the U.S. throughout most of its existence has been a cultural backwater compared to Europe, and that it is still catching up. I have questioned much of the wisdom that is fed to American students all the way through college. From a sociological standpoint, it is easy to see how conformity is molding people's thoughts.

For these reasons among others, I have become disappointed with contemporary American literature and its criticism. Literary fiction seems to be published only within the parameters set by universities and publishers. More disturbingly, the parameters for its criticism are controlled by the same universities and publishers, creating a closed loop that excludes free speech. The literary community resembles an oligopoly that is only tangentially related to art, and in which everyone is on the payroll except the consumer.

Ultimately, aesthetic merit depends on irreducible subjective judgments, but that doesn't mean that discussion is unnecessary. I get the sense that the educational and corporate systems in the U.S. have improperly relegated the arts to a private positive experience that lies beyond the purview of critical scrutiny. However, when open criticism is excluded, you are left with a system that can only be called thought control.

Retirement

My mother died on August 17, 2007, and had accumulated more money than expected. I had been managing all of her assets since 2004, ever since she went into assisted living, and knew exactly what she had and that I would eventually receive one third of it. That plus my own savings, pension, and future Social Security were enough for me to retire. At the time I particularly disliked my job at R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co., and, from a career standpoint, at age 57 in a dying industry, there was little point in continuing to work. After thinking it over, I abruptly retired on September 9, 2007, giving no notice.

I am interested in investing and spent much of my time on that for the first few years. As it happened, the stock market peaked on October 9, 2007, declined throughout 2008, and then crashed precipitously starting in September, 2008, with the collapse of Lehman Brothers. At the lowest point I had lost about 40% of my holdings, but they have more than recovered as of today, and my total assets after almost seven years of retirement haven't changed much. I elected to start receiving Social Security in 2012 at age 62. Though this is negative in that it will reduce the total payments that I'm likely to receive, it provides a significant portion of my annual cash needs and allows me to keep all of my assets permanently invested. If my investments do well, I may even come out better than I would have by taking Social Security later. Either way, I am unlikely to run out of money. I haven't spent much so far, except on telescopes.

Another thing that I did initially was look up old friends. I found and visited an artist friend who became a Hindu monk and lives in Ganges, Michigan. I contacted a former college roommate who is now a lawyer living in Portland, Oregon. I contacted and later was visited by a former college acquaintance who was then a computer science professor at Clemson University and has since retired to Asheville, North Carolina. I contacted an Iranian acquaintance from college who was in Tehran during the 1979 revolution and has lived in England ever since. Also, 2008 was the fortieth anniversary of my high school graduation, and I was in touch with several people from Pelham, New York. One of them got me thinking about Vermont, because she has lived here since the 1970's. She and her husband are like old hippies. They live in Bristol, Vermont, where he is a potter and she spins and weaves wool from sheep that they keep. We visited them when we first came to explore the area but haven't seen much of them since. In case you're interested, here is their website: http://www.robertcomptonpottery.com/.

On the whole, I have found it unrewarding to contact old acquaintances, and probably won't do it any more. At best, you may catch up on a few things, and in my experience not much comes from it. People move on with their lives, and after forty years they're not about to change their habits. Although I have very few friends, I find that I am more interested in people generally than most people are.

Another time consumer for me has been Internet discussion. I put a fair amount of effort into comments that I made at The New York Review of Books, but, as mentioned earlier, I now find that to be an unacceptable organization. I still am looking at other sites and make posts occasionally, but with much lower expectations than previously. I like to write down what I'm thinking mainly as an exercise in clarity, and now have almost given up on the idea that meaningful communication might occur during Internet discussion between strangers.

In full disclosure, I also have to admit that I waste time playing games on my computer. I like bridge, and have been playing a very good computer program, which I think has significantly improved my bridge skills. Recently I tried playing online hearts, which I liked, but I was put off by some of the bad Internet behavior exhibited. It was not uncommon for people to get a losing hand and drop out of a game immediately and disrupt it for everyone else. Some people were rude and insulting, especially when they were losing. I also play off-line games such as chess, which I'm not particularly good at.

I like being outside and doing things outside. The winter limits what you can do here, unless you want to ski, and I don't. During the warmer months I spend time on lawn mowing and gardening. I have done a lot of tree removal, because we had many dead trees blocking views and near power lines when we moved in. I had hoped to do a lot of hiking here, but so far haven't much. The better hikes require ascents of at least a thousand feet and take several hours, and I'm more interested in that than my partner is. We do go on walks together on the dirt road by our house. It dead ends to the south at a farm near our house, and runs to the north for several miles, with good views of the Adirondacks, which are about 30 miles away. The sky conditions have been poor for stargazing over most of the winter, though I left out the telescope all winter and viewed even when it was near zero.  Currently my telescope is in storage until I return from Missouri.

My partner is in charge of our social life, and we are gradually getting to know a few people here. As mentioned earlier, I'm not very interested in routine socializing.

My Mother

One of the reasons why I don't enjoy most fiction is that few writers are able to portray characters in a manner that captures the actual complexity and subtlety that exists in people. More often than not, characters are framed by a few examples of their behavior, and they become trapped in simple stereotypes. As someone who is always trying to understand the dynamics behind the exteriors of others, I find most fictional characters either unconvincing or lacking in interest sufficient to warrant a position of prominence in a work of fiction.

To some extent this failure may be the result of fashion. Post-modernism has popularized stylized writing at the cost of realism. From a writing and publishing standpoint, it is easier to produce and sell stylized fiction than realism, because it takes no more effort to write than comic books and imparts an unearned aura of the cutting edge on lazy or ignorant readers. Even so, most writing before post-modernism wasn't penetrating either. I have been reading Proust intermittently for a few years and find him psychologically uninformed. The narrator's early interests in Gilberte and Albertine, for example, are never examined, nor is Charles Swann's infatuation with Odette explained. I think Proust's skill does not extend beyond the providing of detailed descriptions of his milieu and how he reacts to it. He was lucky to have lived in such a rich culture and to have had the leisure to describe it in a manner that suited him, but the impression I often get is that neither he nor his readers are any the wiser beyond a sort of historical record-keeping, while thousands of pages accrue. Although he writes in the tradition of realism, his faithful exploration of surfaces almost makes him a stylist.

In this context, I thought I would try to describe my mother, in an attempt to see whether I myself am up to the task of doing what I find lacking in most fiction. This will be a short version of what I consider to be an adequate description of a person, and I think any protagonist, in the course of a work of fiction, ought to be portrayed this well at a minimum.

* * *

My mother was born into a prosperous Armenian family in Athens in 1925. She had an older sister and a younger brother. Her parents spoke French at home, and she attended a German school. Their life took a turn for the worse during World War II under the German occupation. Food was scarce. Her mother became seriously ill, and her father nursed her back to health by feeding her what was available: onions. During the worst times people would die of starvation on the street and a cart would come by to pick them up.

My father was a British officer stationed in Greece after the German retreat, and the British were supporting the government against communism during the Greek civil war. They met at a dance and fell in love. They had an elaborate wedding in Greece, for which my father's parents traveled from England in December, 1946. In March, 1947 they sailed to England, and on that voyage my mother became pregnant with my older sister.

In England they initially lived with my father's parents, and she and her mother-in-law didn't get along. She had led a sheltered life and considered my English grandmother crude because she made vulgar jokes. One morning, my grandmother confided to my mother "Bill was good last night." There must have been a rivalry. It was probably then that my mother began a technique that she used throughout her life. She probably buttered up my grandfather and disparaged my grandmother to him. He was no fool though, and when she became too theatrical and animated he said "Can we have a modicum of decorum?" Later, my mother never had anything nice to say about my grandmother, though she was a relatively pleasant and harmless person as far as I can tell.

My parents soon bought their own house, which was modest. I was born in 1950, and my younger sister, possibly an "accident," was born in 1954. Even though my father's career wasn't going well, he always wanted to make a good impression, and he somehow managed to use my grandfather's credit to buy a better house in Purley while my grandfather was away on a trip. Then in about 1956 my father traveled to the U.S. and became enchanted by Manhattan. He was particularly impressed by the fact that there was "music in the elevators." That phrase came to haunt him a few years later when my mother used it sarcastically in reference to his lack of success in America. We moved here in March, 1957.

At first we lived in a rented house in a middle class neighborhood in Pelham Manor, New York. Being English there at that time bestowed on us a certain social benefit, and we were popular. My mother joined women's groups, and my parents socialized a lot. In about 1960, the rental house was sold to someone else, and we moved into an apartment in another part of town next to the country club. We belonged to the club, but not the golf portion. My parents played tennis, and we spent our summers at the pool. During the winter my father bowled, and I played ice hockey on the pond next to the 18th green. Living in an apartment somewhat diminished our social rank, and my father's lack of success in business and increasing alcoholism didn't help either. Up to about age 12, my identity was attached to my mother, and I listened carefully to everything she said. Our apartment was near Interstate 95, which was then under construction, and, after walking high up along its elevated walls, I knew she would disapprove and dutifully reported it to her. However, after that I began to grow up, and she rapidly receded in importance in my life. She had done her basic mothering and thereafter had little of value to say. She was spontaneous and unintellectual, and I had no use for that during my period of mental development.

By the mid-1960's my father's income was proving insufficient, and my mother began to work. She first worked at a jewelry store called Ciro's on Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. I think Paul McCartney or some other pop star came in once looking for a wedding band. She would occasionally meet my father at the St. Regis Hotel after work for a drink. One day, Salvador Dali, who lived there, was coming out while she was going in, and he thought he recognized her. He gave her a deep, extravagant bow.

My mother was short, small-boned and very attractive. She had long, black hair, but her skin was lighter than that of her sister, and she did not resemble an ethnic Armenian. She looks stunningly beautiful in her wedding photos at age 21. She was also meticulous about her appearance. Although she grew up in Greece, she understood German and French, and English was her fourth language. She had an accent, but, unlike Arianna Huffington, whose family came from the same part of Athens, Kifissia, she was perfectly intelligible. She was sociable and charmed people easily. Before she began working she met, probably through my father, a man named Dick Smith. Dick was so awed by her that he took photographs of her and socialized with my family for some time.

When she left Ciro's she worked for many years as a receptionist at 225 Fifth Avenue, which was an office building housing the headquarters of several wholesale gift companies. Chief among those was Waterford Crystal. At some point - I'm not sure when - she had an affair with her boss, the president. I don't know much about it, but apparently his wife put a stop to it. I think this had a devastating effect on my father and accelerated his decline. During this period, my mother was exposed to more financially successful men than my father, and she became merciless in her berating of him. They began with fights that involved throwing objects and spitting, but by the time I left for college, they grew worse. One day my father shoved my mother to the ground and kicked her, breaking a rib.

My parents had a grueling commute to and from work every day. This involved driving to the last subway stop, Dyre Avene, in the Bronx, and then taking the IRT subway line all the way through the Bronx to midtown Manhattan. In 1969, with only one child left at home, they moved to 320 East 58th Street in Manhattan. However, my younger sister apparently developed some problems while living in the city, and they decided to move to Connecticut in 1971.

In Connecticut, my father continued to decline. I think he may have been further demoralized when the family attended my wedding in Richmond, Indiana, on February 2, 1974. My father-in-law was relatively wealthy and hosted the kind of event that would have been beyond my father's means. A few weeks later, on March 15, he dropped off my younger sister at her job at a restaurant and said cryptically "You contributed." Later that day he picked up my mother, who was returning from work, at the train station. On the way home from the station he intentionally rammed a Volkswagen and continued on without stopping. At home he went down to the basement and shot himself in the head with a rifle that he had purchased at a local discount store. Luckily he didn't shoot anyone else.

My mother's life changed after that. She stayed in Connecticut initially but then moved back to Manhattan, where she lived in an apartment at 7 Park Avenue until she entered assisted living with Alzheimer's disease years later. During that period she took a course in word processing and subsequently worked for many years at the Sumitomo Bank. She was working in their office at the World Trade Center in 1993 when it was bombed but wasn't injured.

She maintained a few friendships from Pelham, Connecticut and Manhattan, but, as far as I know, had only one boyfriend during the remainder of her life. He was a wealthy Harvard graduate who had started his own market research firm and owned a brownstone on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and a summer house in Southampton, Long Island. When they met, his wife was still alive but was dying from cancer. His wife, I think, was an American who grew up in France. My mother was a good fit for him, because he liked European culture, and she was very attentive in a way that American women generally are not. He loved going to Paris and visiting the museums, and she often accompanied him. They were both extreme cheapskates, which added further to their compatibility.

My mother's most negative characteristics became pronounced toward the end of her life. Some of this may have had to do with the adoption of New York City behavior. She had always been a vocal critic, and "bastard" was one of her favorite words. When she went on a rant, she took no prisoners. It is difficult to say now how much of an effect she had on my father, but there is little doubt that she demoralized him significantly. He killed himself because he thought he was a failure. After my father's death, she did not play any role as the family leader. Rather than act as a unifying force, she used a divide and conquer tactic repeatedly. She always went behind people's backs and defamed them in a misguided attempt to strengthen her position. I think she got carried away drawing on her innate skill as a confidante. She never organized any family events, and when she called one child she always criticized the other two. The only family gatherings after 1974 were at my sisters' weddings in 1982 and 1994 and at my older sister's house after her marriage. I saw very little of her after 1974. I visited her in 1986 and 2003, and she visited me in 1981, 1987, 1992, 1993 and 2002. The 1992 and 1993 visits were probably because she had been excluded from her boyfriend's family and had nowhere else to go for Christmas. My younger sister arranged the 2002 visit. We spoke on the phone, but it was always her monologue. I don't think she understood me at all as an adult, nor was she genuinely interested.

Her invective was the most destructive I have ever heard, and she spared no one. When she had it in for me, she made clear that I had wasted my life, chosen a stupid career in printing and was stuck living in a godforsaken hick town where I didn't belong at all. She had little education, no understanding of business, no intellectual inclinations, and little to offer. The only career advice that she ever gave me was that I should become an engineer, and that was just because her brother was an electrical engineer. I became immunized to this over the years, and I think it has made me much stronger psychologically than most people. However, there was a cost to her, because she unnecessarily alienated a lot of people who thereafter became hostile toward her. Chief among them was her boyfriend's family, which effectively banned her as a potential spouse for their father. Because of this, instead of becoming a housewife with a successful businessman for a husband, she was treated more like a mistress and continued working in an uninteresting job until she was 75. It must be added, though, that this arrangement suited both of them. He paid her bills and she accumulated a large sum of money, and he was free to do whatever he liked most of the time. After my mother died, her boyfriend's attitude may have been revealed when, in 2010, at age 95, he was conned by an apparent Gypsy woman who disappeared with $350,000 of his money.

Although my mother was effervescent socially, and in that context most people loved her, she always had a miserly dark side. We didn't realize it at the time but, when my younger sister was married in 1994, Alzheimer's symptoms were starting to appear. My mother was livid about spending money on the wedding and went through an episode of unexplained crying. Later on there were major confrontations with my older sister, in which my mother would first offer to let my sister keep her silverware at her house, and then, for no reason, retract the offer and demand the silver back immediately. The last time I saw her was in 2003, when we visited her at her apartment. She had left her apartment door open and had become quite thin, apparently because she didn't buy groceries or cook. I think she must have eaten occasionally at restaurants, or perhaps someone gave her food, but she had forgotten her way around her neighborhood and didn't know where anything was. In 2004, she was sent fighting, screaming and cursing into assisted living, where she went into a rapid decline and died in 2007.

My view of my mother is neither negative nor positive. Many children have unrealistic expectations of their parents, whom they unreasonably expect to be omniscient, conscientious and caring at all times. At the instinctive level, my mother was fine: she raised three children who have met life's challenges satisfactorily. She was not at all intellectual and never read much, which limited how closely we could relate to each other when I reached adulthood. Living in the emotionally repressed Midwest for 40 years, I came to appreciate my mother's expressiveness and passion, which is something that I rarely encountered there. I also think that my mother was much stronger and more practical than my father, and she may have kept the family from disintegrating up until my father's death.

My sisters take a less charitable view of her, perhaps because they had more exposure to her as adults than I did, and they were more involved with her than I was during her Alzheimer's period. Moreover, there was a rivalry between my older sister and my mother that predated the later problems. I think both of my parents were pampered and immature when they married and neither was fully prepared for adult life, but then who is?

* * *

I hope the foregoing provides some sense of what my mother was like. Summarizing her life is much simpler than writing page after page of dialogue and developing a detailed plot, but it may be more difficult to relate to her in this pre-digested characterization. Besides simply writing a sketch about my mother, I am hoping to show something that seems missing to me in most literature.

Friends

In a few weeks I'll be visiting friends in Missouri, so I thought I'd write a little about the role of friends in my life. Although female friendships have been of much greater significance to me than male friendships, I'll concentrate on the males, since they won't be reading this. Male-female relationships are far more problematic than male-male relationships, if only because males and females are very different. In this respect, I found Timothy Treadwell's monologue in Grizzly Man amusing. He claims that, despite being heterosexual, he has encountered so many problems in his relationships with women that he has often wished he were gay.

I am a very solitary person, partly because I'm introverted and like being alone, which makes me want to limit the number of people I'm with, and partly because I'm different from most of the people I know and don't have much in common with them. I have noticed that people are willing to make large compromises in order to maintain a certain level of social activity, whereas I, because I have less need for it, am less willing to compromise. I usually consider socializing a waste of time.

Male friendships tend to be extremely superficial and revolve around activities such as games and sports. I have always liked games and occasional participation in sports, but by the time I graduated from high school and ever since, I have found professional sports incredibly stupid. I thought people would outgrow them, but they didn't. Presumably they satisfy deep tribal instincts.

None of my male friends are close to me. Although I've had various male friends over the years, there was never enough commonality or motivation to perpetuate the friendships over time. The group I'm visiting consists of residual friends from college who were not close to me while I was there. After college, I lived in Indiana on and off for ten years and came into contact with them then. The critical feature for me has always been the primary meeting place: Grubville, Missouri. The family of the leader of this group has owned a former farm there for four generations and uses it for recreation. It consists of about 200 acres southwest of St. Louis in the foothills of the Ozarks. This was originally a nature experience for me, and I usually camped out by the creek. The house was once two log cabins, and they were later joined together. There was no plumbing when I started going, and water came from a cistern. It has been modernized since then.

My major non-family social events starting in 1977 were Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends in Grubville. At first a few of us were married, some had small children and some were single. The main activities were volleyball, badminton, croquet, bridge, beer-drinking and cookouts. By the mid-1980's it got pretty crowded because of all the kids.  Eventually the kids grew up and most of the adults got out of shape. The first death occurred last year from lung cancer. The gatherings are very small and infrequent now.

Going to Grubville meant a lot to me when I had no social life and was living in a hick town. I also liked taking my kids there, and they enjoyed it. The discussion wasn't usually very high quality, though. The married men were too uxorious for my taste, and frankly I never thought their wives merited it. But I was always able to meet my easily-satisfied male bonding needs and catch up on news, and I never held high expectations that might have been dashed.

My closest friend from this group was named Jay. Jay didn't always go, because the leader in Grubville is a classic alpha male who calls all the shots, except when his wife disagrees. The primary pattern for males was one of a dominant, extroverted male and several introverted males. Jay was too extroverted to pass the test.

I had a few things in common with Jay, because we both grew up in New York, went to college in Indiana and majored in Philosophy. Jay was energetic, talkative and intelligent, but a little flaky and lacking in self-confidence. Like me, he came from a dysfunctional family. His mother was from the Midwest, and his father was from New York. His father's family made one of the best-selling beers in the U.S. and once operated a large brewery in what is now midtown Manhattan. However, his father developed adult-onset schizophrenia and his parents separated when he was young. His father's family, though extremely wealthy, offered his mother little support, and she raised three children on her own, living in Brooklyn. His father moved to a farm in Pennsylvania and became a recluse.

When I knew him, Jay was a loyal friend. I don't think I had my best talks with him, but he was better than the other Grubville people. In any case, it all came to naught because his life resembles a downward spiral. He always worried that he would become schizophrenic, and perhaps he did. He seems to have been unable to make changes in his life. When I moved to Oregon, he said he would but never did. He spent his entire career in the Indianapolis area. Most of that time was in fast food, and he became an area manager for Church's Chicken. This put him in some dangerous neighborhoods, and he used to take a gun to work. Over the years he had several decent girlfriends, but he ended up marrying one of his employees, who divorced him after a brief period.

Just before my divorce, I was living in Terre Haute and commuting to a job in Indianapolis. In 1984 we sold the house in Terre Haute and moved to an apartment in Indianapolis. It was a three-bedroom apartment facing woods and next to a large reservoir. My wife and kids moved out in 1985 and we got divorced in October. Jay had been looking for a new apartment and moved in with me. I moved to Louisville at the end of 1985, and Jay has lived in that apartment ever since - 28 years.

I have had very little contact with Jay for several years. He stopped going to Grubville and became born-again. I think he must have received a sizable inheritance when his father died, and he probably quit his most recent job at FedEx. I get friendly e-mails from him once in a while, but he doesn't respond to my replies.

Springtime in Vermont

We have had a long, cold winter here. This morning the temperature is twelve degrees Fahrenheit, and a few days ago it was below zero. The snow is still about a foot deep in the yard. The maple syrup hasn't started to flow yet because of the low temperatures, but it should be a lot warmer by the end of the week. And then the dreaded mud season will begin.

It takes a little toughness and resolve to live in Vermont during the winter, which lasts for about six months. Some Vermonters are proud about this. One of our neighbor boys walks about half a mile each way to catch the school bus wearing only shorts and a T-shirt, even when the temperature is below zero. I asked him about it, and he said "I guess I'm just a Vermonter." He does wear a hat sometimes, though.

You have to plan your heating carefully, because it's expensive. It looks as if we're going to make it with four cords of firewood and three hundred gallons of heating oil for a total cost of about $2500 for the season. That may sound like a lot, but it could have been three times that if we had only used oil and set our thermostats at 68 degrees. We set them at 60 degrees during the day and 50 degrees at night. Of course, it's warmer by the wood burning stove, where I'm sitting right now. We also wear woolen long underwear all winter, and I wear a wool hat and wool gloves with open fingers around the house. You get used to it, and the cold doesn't bother me at all. We buy kiln dried wood, which is expensive, but this way we don't have to dry unseasoned wood. I have also burned tree limbs and dead tress that I cut down on the property.

Getting around during the winter isn't difficult, because they take good care of the roads. They also use a lot of road salt, which causes cars to rust prematurely compared to other parts of the country. The roads are usually bad only during a snow storm. We drove over the mountains right after a storm in December and had no trouble, thanks to snow tires.

You do get cabin fever if you don't go out much. I like to hike, which is difficult when the trails have three feet of snow on them. Some people use snowshoes. A lot of people ski. As a diversion, I drove to St. Johnsbury, across the state near the Connecticut River, a few weeks ago. The only time I had been there previously was in 1974 on my honeymoon during the Arab Oil Embargo, when gasoline was being rationed. Little has changed in St. Johnsbury. Not everyone sticks around here all winter. Some of our neighbors left for warmer parts. Robert Frost, who supposedly was a quintessential New Englander and has a mountain nearby named after him, used to winter in Florida.

Even though it is still wintry here, the birds are returning. The robins manage to find food where the snow has melted. Our bird feeders have been busy all winter with goldfinches, chickadees, tufted titmice, mourning doves, nuthatches, downy woodpeckers and hairy woodpeckers, and they are now being joined by redwing blackbirds and crows that can't find enough food elsewhere. I just saw my first grackle of the year.

Voting

Partly because I did not become a U.S. citizen until age 27, voting has always been a problematic experience for me. You get indoctrinated with the idea that all responsible citizens must vote, yet I am rarely able to muster much enthusiasm for any candidates, and, more significantly, I have little idea what, if anything, they would do in office or whether it would in fact be good for society.

There are exceptions, though, such as Bernie Sanders, and he presents a different set of problems. As a socialist, he comes closer to my political beliefs than most, but in reality he seems to be an ineffectual political leader in Washington, because he is so far out of the mainstream that he has no power base there. Thus, if you only want to hear pointed speeches that you agree with, he's fine, but don't expect any positive changes to come out of it.

Part of my cognitive dissonance is related to the fact that I have moved around quite a bit over my life and have never had a sense that I belong to any particular community. I don't feel very English, nor do I have an American identity after living here for 57 years. I didn't say the pledge of allegiance in high school, and I have always found phrases like "the American dream" slightly repugnant. Besides this, I am an ideas person, and politics is a messy process where emotion plays a greater part than reason.. Politics doesn't attract people who interest me.

The only political candidates that I've ever spent much time assessing have been the presidential ones. In hindsight, that was a waste of time. I voted for John Anderson in 1980, Ronald Reagan in 1984, skipped in 1988 because I disliked both George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, Barack Obama in 2008 and Jill Stein in 2012. In any case, I don't think that any of the presidents elected in my lifetime were good presidents. That isn't entirely their fault, though, since the political system itself has many shortcomings.

What I am trying to decide now is whether to continue voting. There is a lot weighing against it. Unless a much stronger candidate than any who has emerged since Franklin D. Roosevelt runs, I may skip voting for president. On the other hand, I may make a token vote for Bernie Sanders if he runs for president, though he could never win and would probably be a disaster if he did win. I will continue to vote in Vermont elections, because they are more palpable, and I tend to agree with Vermont politicians more than the politicians elsewhere.

I will definitely vote in all Middlebury elections, because there is a real community here with which I'm vaguely connected. We recently had a classic town and gown tussle over the ceding of land to Middlebury College in exchange for funding for a new town hall. The local anti-intellectual farmers had signs up on our street encouraging people to vote against it, but we voted for it, and it passed, though it is still being challenged. When the deciding vote is 955 to 731, you can make a difference as a voter. And the results will be visible.

As noted in earlier posts, I don't think that democracy in the U.S. works. That has a lot to do with the fact that it was designed as an alternative to monarchies and despotic systems in which people are oppressed. In the developed world, democracy has evolved into a problematic system because of its incorporation of capitalistic principles that have taken on the characteristics of a virus. Try as they might, the Founding Fathers were unable to write a constitution assuring a permanent balance between democratic governance and economic gain. The virus has mutated and now seems to have a stranglehold on the political body. In this regard, Vermont is faring better than most states.

Groupthink

As a wandering Armenian and a perennial outsider, I have often reflected on how other people form their allegiances, opinions and worldviews. Thus, when I was first exposed to the concept of groupthink in business school in the early 1980's, I greeted it enthusiastically. In case you don't know, "groupthink" is a term coined by the Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis, who said "I use the term groupthink as a quick and easy way to refer to the mode of thinking that persons engage in when concurrence-seeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive ingroup that it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternate courses of action." Janis applied the term to classic bad decisions that were made by otherwise competent people, as in the case of the Kennedy administration's decision to invade the Bay of Pigs. Broadly it refers to a common type of mistake made by the decision-making bodies of organizations.

Having had this idea seeded in me for many years now, I see it as a key element of human behavior and associate it with ideas ranging from social psychology to group psychosis. If you look closely, you will see that virtually all groups tend to be somewhat ghettoized and cut off from the world, and they often organize reality in ways incompatible with those of other groups. In the U.S., this is quite obvious in demographics. Rural Americans tend to be socially uniform, religious Republicans. Urban Americans tend to be diverse, nonreligious Democrats.

Recently I have been thinking about the phenomenon in academic departments. I have been corresponding with a former philosophy professor of mine who has been engaged in analytic philosophy for most of his life. He and his peers within the philosophy establishment believe that they have made headway in philosophy, whereas I think they have wasted their lives applying techniques that will become historical artifacts within a few decades. I get a similar feeling about creative writing programs within English departments. What is thought of as crucial and brilliant in one group may be seen as misguided and irrelevant by another group and may soon be forgotten.

Of greatest interest to me is how people become trapped by the prevailing beliefs in their environment. Very few who live continuously within a homogeneous environment are able to extract themselves from its received wisdom. If they grow up religious, they remain religious. If they grow up in a military family, they remain patriotic. In most cases, the outcome is positive for the individual, and whether any broader truth is violated seems irrelevant. However, when a more objective outsider looks at the historical and conceptual foundations of, say, Mormonism, he will be aghast. As a thought experiment in objectivity, I like to hypothesize an immortal intelligent being who lives on a planet orbiting a different star. I think such a being could potentially possess greater objectivity than anyone on Earth in assessing the behavior of humans.

If you have been reading my posts, you won't be surprised that I extend my skepticism of prevailing beliefs to what many would consider to be the foundations of American society. That includes the economic system, the government, nationalism and organized religion. The popular ideas circulating now that are considered essential could be replaced with better ones, and perhaps one day they will be. There is nothing eternal about "American values."

Monologues

I was brought up in a household that retained vestiges of Victorian ideas about child-rearing. The phrase "children are to be seen and not heard" came up periodically. I didn't realize it at the time, but when we moved to the U.S. in 1957, my older sister was shocked by the change because the loud and rambunctious American children scared her. The dialogue at home was always unidirectional, with the adults imparting wisdom or instructions to the children. In school, it was more of the same, with teachers replacing parents.

For whatever reason, I have always preferred a more participatory mode of interaction, particularly the one-on-one discussion. Unfortunately, society allows little space for that. When I arrived at college in 1968 my first reaction was that I was in a utopia. Essentially, everyone had free time to discuss things and did so. Even the classes were an improvement over high school, because some had few students. The smallest classes were like tutorials, and the seminars emphasized discussion. Perhaps this was the first time in my life that anyone paid attention to what I had to say.

However, the environment that I experienced in college turned out to be an aberration. When you have a job, no one cares what you think about anything, and you are only there to execute someone else's instructions. All of your friends and acquaintances are busy and become philistine in their habits. "Meaning of life" discussions are no longer of any interest to them.

For most adults, sustained thought exists only in books. You can read someone else's monologue or you can write your own monologue. Most academic books are filled with obfuscation and cannot be satisfying except to specialists. Fiction is a time-killer for most readers, and popular fiction by design makes no demands on those who merely seek entertainment. I'm not sure that a genre such as serious fiction even exists. If you think books involve interaction between the author and the reader, you are deluding yourself. Writing a considered letter to an author typically results in no reply, and even in the best of circumstances rarely precipitates any discussion.

As mentioned in an earlier post, I had hoped that the Internet might provide a new option. There is much to be found on it, but it usually isn't the actual place where the discussion occurs. I've come across videos of good discussions. Occasionally there are good formal, written discussions where invited experts make posts on a specific question. But most of the kind of discussion that I like is restricted either to forums or to the comments sections after articles, and there are significant limitations to both. Originally I thought that these limitations exist only because the right Internet formats for ad hoc discussion hadn't been developed. I now think that they may never develop for two reasons. First, people who set up websites are usually doing so for a profit. Providing an open-ended platform for random people to participate in high-quality discussion doesn't look like a promising business model. In order to work well, such a site would require full-time moderators and would offer little prospect of sufficient revenues. In my experience, the moderation at most forums is barely enough to remove basic infractions, and it doesn't protect them from low quality. The second reason is that, as described above, most adults are not actually interested in discussion. If they read at all, they are reading mainly for entertainment. Interest in the kind of discussion that I like seems to be low, and that discussion becomes invisible on the Internet, where it is often inundated by the words of thoughtless people who suffer from logorrhea.

The upshot of the above is that there is a change in the conception of this blog. Originally I was hoping to attract some discussion on subjects such as the strengths and weaknesses of The New York Review of Books. I now think that, while there are people who are interested in such topics, very few are interested in discussing them online. If they have anything to say about it, they are more likely to write an essay than find a blog that mentions it. Therefore, by popular demand, this blog is officially moving to the monologue model, with little expectation of participation. I am still encouraging you to comment, but less so than previously.

I might add that I appreciated John's editing of the Wikipedia entry on Lorrie Moore. That makes this feel more like a participative endeavor. If I ever come to see this blog as a solipsistic enterprise in which I am writing only for myself, I will be inclined to abandon the entire project on the basis of narcissism.

Inequality

Last night we watched Robert Reich's film Inequality for All. Inequality has recently become a buzzword in Washington, and I'll discuss this today.

Reich is probably the most effective communicator in the liberal camp, and he makes a convincing case, comparing the Great Recession to the Great Depression. When taxes on the rich go down, they become excessively wealthy and create financial bubbles, while the income of ordinary workers stagnates or falls. Since 70% of economic activity is consumer spending, when the middle class stops spending, economic growth slows. The rich perpetuate this cycle by manipulating the political system in order to maintain their wealth. The explanation isn't causal, but it does show the elements of a repeating pattern. The presentation is simple, like An Inconvenient Truth, in order to give it broad appeal.

There were two things in the film that I particularly liked. Reich recruited liberal billionaire Nick Hanauer to bolster some of his points. To counter the popular Republican myth that the rich should not be taxed heavily because they are "wealth creators," and taxing them more would entail "class warfare," Hanauer says that it is impossible for him to simulate consumer spending proportionately to his income because he could never spend that much on personal consumption. He has more money than he knows what to do with and lets hedge funds handle it with investments all over the world. He advocates higher taxes on the rich so that their money can be put to better use in the economy. The other thing I liked was Reich's appearance at an anti-union meeting. There is nothing special about it, but I think it shows an example of how American workers vote against their own best interests by supporting Republican policies that hurt them. Many low income pro-Republican voters appear to be victims of brainwashing.

In the context of my earlier posts, I have issues with some of Reich's views. At heart he is a traditional liberal who accepts the economic system we have and only wants to restore balance to it. I think at some point this system will have to be abandoned. I believe that the key concept is equality, and this takes precedence over capitalism and democracy, because of the three it is the one most deeply rooted in our evolutionary past as eusocial creatures. We are not essentially capitalistic or democratic creatures, and these are relatively new inventions in our history. Reich comes from a traditional background and does not question its assumptions.

Almost all economists, including Reich, think that the current model, with economic growth through consumer spending, can continue indefinitely. That seems unlikely to me. The model doesn't work unless a country is continuously infused with young, energetic workers who are seeking to advance financially. Countries with older populations face a disadvantage because they can't generate enough economic activity. Furthermore, it seems that equilibrium can never be reached if there must always be more poor people seeking to become wealthier. The model ignores the possibility of overpopulation and environmental damage. There is no consideration of the scenario in which all of society is wealthy and economic growth is unnecessary. As a practical matter, perhaps the greatest threat to this model is corporate efficiency. Technology and outsourcing to other countries have been eliminating jobs for decades and will continue to do so. This model cannot possibly work if there are no jobs, and it looks as if at some point even the best educated won't be able to find them. Robotics and artificial intelligence are in their infancy.

I am also critical of democracy because in practice it doesn't work. You can blame it on campaign finance, talk radio, Citizens United, a poorly educated electorate, or anything you like, but the fact is that people vote irrationally all the time. This ties in with what I wrote earlier about an automated system of government that would remove politics as a factor and eliminate poor voting choices.

Notwithstanding these criticisms, I think Reich is one of the best things going in American public awareness, and my favorite senator, Bernie Sanders, is sponsoring a free public showing of the film throughout Vermont.