January 2006 Archives

The non-fiction winter break has been completed with a mad rush to finish "The Tipping Point." My first literature seminar of the semester is tomorrow night and I will therefore need to return to the hallowed halls of the novel.

This book, while interesting, ultimately disappointed me. The premise of the tipping point is to discuss and analyze how trends/epidemics happen. The book says it pretty much comes down to three types of people (Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen) and three basic rules (The Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and The Power of Context). Then there are a bunch of examples, all of which are interesting. But I had two major problems with the book:

1) While I believed that most of these examples of trends/epidemics were influenced by the stated types or people and rules, I was not convinced that these people and rules were the only ways to spread trends/epidemics. Sure, all those examples were nice, but what about other trends/epidemics that have spread through the nation. Gladwell talks about how mass advertising isn't really effective if it doesn't follow at least some of the Tipping Point rules. But what about board-room developed, mass-marketed boy bands that sweep the nation. Am I to believe that they're success was really the work of some well connected teenage girls and not simply the pop-culture marketing machine? I'm sure Gladwell could point to different things for each boy band's rise to stardom and explain how there is the Tipping Point rule that clinched it for them. Which brings me to my second concern...

2) The laws are too easy to apply to any situation. Find me an epidemic and I can come up with some way of claiming the tipping point rules played a major part. Not because they really did but because the rules are vague enough that you can bullshit enough to get it to work. Frankly, the entire last case study about teen smoking, while very interesting, seems totally unconnected to the tipping point rules. Gladwell talks about how it is really just tiny things that make teen smoking tip into an epidemic, things like smoking being linked to depression and how chemicals lacking in some brains are reproduced by the effects of nicotine, and by just changing those tiny things we can curb teen smoking. But (and this important) THOSE AREN'T TINY THINGS. If we're going to describe ANY effect that causes addiction or "stickiness" as a "tiny thing," then, sure, the Tipping Point applies to every possible situation.

Anyway, now that my winter non-fiction break is over I can look back on it and see what I have learned. Did I get any good material for my fiction writing? At the moment no ideas are jumping out at me, but perhaps with time to sink in I will craft an amazing story about economics, split second decisions, and epidemics.

As some readers know, I'm coming off a 5+ year stint as an insurance industry tycoon (give or take a a year depending on what you consider insurance and give or take five years depending on what you consider industry tycoon). Insurance often gets a bad rap, with salesmen portrayed as doddering leeches and executives painted as heartless villians reaping riches at the expense of others. And though I've left the business and sworn never to go back (well, sworn never to go back aside from the part time insurance job that is putting me through grad school) I do still get slightly defensive about the topic. I know I make fun of it all the time, but that doesn't mean others are allowed to. It's like New Jersey. I don't live in New Jersey anymore, but I'm still from New Jersey. And if you're from New Jersey you can make fun of it all you want. But if you're not, don't be talking your trash in front of me!

The Coalition Against Insurance Fraud recently released the 2005 Insurance Hall of Shame. It tells the story of particularly egregious offenders, people who burnt down populated apartment buildings in order to collect the insurance money, people who faked their own deaths to collect benefits, and a woman who pretended to be a princess, built up 500K in debt buying diamonds, and then pretended it had all been stolen so she could get reimbursed and pay off her bills.

The point is: We in the insurance industry wouldn't have to be so untrusting if you people stopped burning down your own buildings, faking your own death, and calling yourself Princess (I mean you, Sidey 2.0).

My winter non-fiction break continues with "Naked Economics" by Charles Wheelan. It's pretty much a straight out Econ 101 book except without use of graphs or formulas, it's good old fashioned explanation. The author has done a good job keeping the information interesting, though I admit you probably have to WANT to read about economics if you're going to enjoy it.

I learned a lot from this book but almost more importantly I also had a lot of my somewhat hazy concepts of global economics solidified. I knew (or, rather, thought I knew) a lot of the material in the book but didn't have the terminology to explain it or the facts to back it up.

Anyway, if you want a good broad review of global econ, this is the book.

Next in my non-fiction series is "The Tipping Point" and "Numeric Linear Algebra." But school starts on Monday so I don't know if I'll have the chance to finish them.

I've been debating whether to read this book since it came out... well, actually, I've known I'd eventually get around to reading it it was really just a question of when. Then two days ago I saw that David Foster Wallace was reading at Strand Books in NYC which is a few blocks from my apartment, so I figured I ought to read it before I went to see him talk.

For those who know my strange reading preferences, DFW is one of my favorite authors and while I don't go around recommending it to other people (for reasons that become abundantly clear if you see the immense length and density of the tome) "Infinite Jest" is one of my favorite novels. Not only do I think it's fantastic, I think he is one of the few authors today who is really doing something to change fiction, to move it in new directions. My bet would be he gets studied (or at least referred to) in college classrooms in the future.

"Consider the Lobster" is a collection of non-fiction essays which continues to demonstrate not only his uniquely funny and engaging writing style but also his obvious brilliance. He knows (or is able to research and write with authority) about seemingly every imaginable topic. It depresses me a bit because I know I will never be as smart as DFW. There's just no way. Lobsters, professional tennis, Kafka, John Updike, politics, PETA, grammar, and more. Note that last point (not the "and more," the point before that one). As any reader of my blog knows, I love mundane discussions on random grammar topics. DFW has a ~50 page essay (in theory a review of a new English language usage dictionary) where he goes into great detail about the historical and very political language usage debate. It's fascinating stuff. Seriously fascinating stuff, even if (I think) one doesn't love talking about grammar as much as I do.

The reading was okay. He chose a shorter piece from his non-fiction collection to read, one written in three days for a magazine doing a "where were you during 9/11" thing. It wasn't really as funny as his normal stuff (how can you write something funny about 9/11?) and it wasn't as well-researched and intellectually complex as his normal stuff (how can you do that in only three days?) so I was only mildly engaged. However, the Q&A session after the reading was great, and while nothing stood out as important enough to repeat here, he was funny and rambling and even when he's speaking off the top of his head you can hear the footnotes.

I didn't stick around to get my copy autographed because it would have been an extra hour of waiting. I was kind of amazed by all the people with multiple copies of hard-back versions of "Infinite Jest." Obviously people buy up original copies and bring them to get signed so they can resell them for more money. Kind of depressing, though I guess it's cool that DFW's autograph is so sought after. I really wanted to stay and get my book signed just so I could tell him how much I love his writing and how it's really inspired me as a writer but somehow I convinced myself that I shouldn't really waste my time and that he didn't care about hearing that and I'd just embarrass myself and it was too hot and why don't I just leave instead of standing around with all these people trying to make money from his autograph. I do that to myself sometimes. I start feeling awkward about something because somehow it's like I don't know the proper etiquette of a book signing as if it's particularly difficult. Oh well.

I'm going to stray from my typical incoherent rambling to discuss something I consider of great importance. Recently some news has come out suggesting that not everything in James Frey's memoir "A Million Little Pieces" is completely true. It was an Oprah Book Club choice and has sold over a million copies so you can imagine people are furrowing their eyebrows. (This will teach Oprah to resume recommending books by living authors.) To add some more absurdity to the story, Random House is now offering refunds to anyone who bought the book and is so upset about the potentially fabricated or exaggerated details that they can no longer stand to see the book on their bookshelf. The only condition for return is you have to have the enjoyment you felt while reading the book wiped from your memory.

Here's my opinion about the potentially fabricated or exaggerated content: WHO CARES? Have the 1.77 million people who have read the book been retroactively robbed of the pleasure they had while reading it? No. If you had a great meal at a restaurant and found out later you were actually eating people, would you want your money back? Of course not! Well, wait, maybe that's a bad example. But there's a big difference between being tricked into eating human flesh and reading a slightly fictionalized memoir. All memoirs contain potentially fabricated or exaggerated details. Show me a memoir with no fabricated or exaggerated details and I'll show you a very boring book. There's a dirty little secret in the writing world where novelists who can't get their first-person novels published actually change the title page to say "A Memoir" instead of "A Novel" and suddenly find takers. And, once again, who cares?

There's a difference between a biography/autobiography and a literary memoir. The biography is an educational process, the reader is attempting to learn something about a public or historically relevant figure. The reader has a vested interest in the content of a biography being true, the reader is attempting to learn something about the world. But a literary memoir is different, the reader is not attempting to learn something about the world, the reader is just trying to learn something about a person and about humanity. A literary memoir is really just a novel about a person the reader doesn't know who happens to be real. But the fact of the matter is that the events in an exaggerated memoir still could have happened. So what if they didn't? You're still reading a story that COULD be true, so all the content about drugs and law enforcement is still representative of potential experiences you might want to learn more about. And you're still learning about a person and about humanity. Does finding out later that some of the events were not entirely true lessen the enjoyment you had while reading the memoir and thinking the events actually happened? Does it mean you didn't learn something? No, because that would take a philosophically suspect time-traveling cause and effect argument I am not willing to accept at this time.

Yes, I'll admit it's kind of dishonest. Would the book have been as successful had it been labeled "a novel" instead? Maybe not. Probably not. Would it have been any different than it is now? No, of course not. Except for those two words on the cover it would be exactly the same. If it's good reading it's good reading.

I haven't read the book myself, but I'm hereby throwing in my support for James Frey, alleged fabricator of memoirs. Let's here it for fiction!

Before I write this post I want to state that I debunked myself before I even began writing it. Disappointing, but I'm going to write it anyway.

And also before I write this post, I want to point out that the previous paragraph is paradoxical, since I can't write in the post that I'm writing something in the post before writing the post.

That being said, let's start by reviewing a snippet of a conversation I had with a friend last week:

* * * * *

Friend: It took a split second.

Me: A split second?

Friend: Yes, a split second.

Me: What do you mean by a split second?

Friend: Uh... A second.

Me: So why didn't you just say a second?

* * * * *

This revealed two things to me:
1) Somebody, somewhere potentially misused the phrase "split second." And, as you know, if a single person in the entire world potentially misuses a phrase one time I need to say something about it.
2) I'm an annoying friend.

But, the facts are the facts, and here we are. What is going on with this phrase "split second?" What does it really mean? How is it supposed to be used? Is "split second" simply a strange synonym for "a second?" Does it mean, as many people seem to use it to mean, "an instant?" Or (and here's the BIG AND ALREADY PROVED FALSE HYPOTHESIS) does it mean HALF A SECOND?

I thought to myself, if you split a second, you get half a second. Brilliant, I thought to myself, I have deconstructed the term and can write about it. Then I took the brilliant step of looking it up in the dictionary...

"An instant, a fraction of a second. This expression alludes to a stop watch that has two second hands, one above the other, for timing more than one athlete or intervals of a race by a single athlete. Each hand can be stopped independently of the other, so a second can be "split" when one second hand stops a fraction of a second after the other. [c. 1880]"

Here are things I have learned from this experience:
1) The term "split second" has been around since the 1880s and it has a perfectly logical meaning that 99% of the world is using correctly.
2) I have nothing of interest to say anymore on this blog.

This was my first J. M. Coetzee novel and it is, undoubtably, a good one. It follows a white South African university professor who refuses to publically apologize for sleeping with a student and is forced to leave his post. He goes to stay with his daughter who has taken up simple farm living and there he lives a simple life and works in an animal shelter - that is, until they are attacked and robbed by three black men.

It's both a short, simple story as well as a complex tale of emotion, disgrace, history, and politics. It's also very tiring to read... not tiring, but saddening (depressing would be the wrong word). I felt very drained when done, the protagonist is so distant and the subject matter is so gray. I couldn't go to sleep after reading it so I had to go online and read "The Onion" first to cheer up a bit. I'm a tiny bit tired of ultra-distant narrators who move slowly through life and seem unable to control the events around them. That's the literary high-brow equivilant of independent films starring Philip Seymour Hoffman going through a alcohol/drug/gambling/other addiction downward spiral. It's usually really, really good but it gets kind of wearying.

Anyway, I'm not really complaining about this particular novel, because, if anything, this is the best of that kind out there, or at least one of the best. Definitely deserving praises. I just feel the desire to read something slightly more uplifting, or, at least something where the narrator is a bit closer and my emotions aren't deadened by the experience.

I decided to use my break to delve into a little non-fiction reading and breezed through the bestselling psychology primer by Malcolm Gladwell, "Blink." It's about how our subconscious mind makes decisions in the first two seconds or so of processing. This includes both brilliant observations on art and people and surviving desperate situations as well as biased judgments about people or things.

While the examples and research is interesting, it doesn't seem particularly filled with content. You learn some cool things about how your mind works, but it's mostly just that: learning some cool things about how your mind works. Since I'm not actually in this field I probably wouldn't enjoy reading a dense text book on the subject, but I expected it to have a little bit more technical information.

The book has an interesting quirk of repeating itself every couple of pages. Once Gladwell has referenced an example story, he brings up that story again in little summary sections the next time he tells a story. Of course, as the book goes on and he's told more stories this means he's repeating more and more stories each time. For example, let's say he's telling story D, when he's finishing it up he'll say something like, "And now, in story D, just like the man in story A and the woman in story B and the two women in story C, the three men in story D did this..." Towards the end of the book each section has at least a full page or two of listing out the previous stories. Seriously. You'd think I'm exaggerating but I'm not. At first it's an annoying quirk but then, actually, it gets pretty funny, it's so predictable.

I decided to read this book because it has occurred to me that, at least in my own opinion I'm decently skilled at weaving technical subjects (insurance mathematics, database programming, etc.) into my fiction such that the theme of the technical concept also resonates with the literary theme. Well, instead of saying "decently skilled" let's say I enjoy trying and probably failing to do such a thing. For example, in a story about a database analyst, the character is going through a personal situation where she needs to look at the "data" from her life and reevaluate... hopefully that doesn't seem as banal in the story itself. Anyway, both "Blink" and "The Tipping Point" seemed liked interesting topics that I could later take on in fiction. "Blink," unfortunately, has not provided a ton of story ideas. It's certainly an interesting concept but, frankly, the book just isn't that substantial. I'm still going to read "The Tipping Point" and hope for more material. I've been told it's a little bit weightier and, also, I've already got ideas for a story based on "Tipping Point" concepts. "Blink" is a very internal-only kind of thing, but "The Tipping Point" works (I think) on both an internal/personal and external/social level.

In what will probably become a MFA-break tradition for me, I read one of the novels of my upcoming workshop instructor, "Jernigan," by David Gates. It's a dark tale about the downward spiral of Peter Jernigan, who drinks himself into stupors, fails to connect with his son, ponders the deaths of his father and wife, shoots a hole in his hand, and seems to continually almost die himself. I'm not sure exactly what moral to take away from the novel, though I think taking away a moral would be missing the point. Peter Jernigan is a hyper-intelligent failure with lots of wit and self-destructive analysis, and its hard not to care about him as he wrecks his life.

I took David Gates' literature seminar last semester and I'm really looking forward to his creative writing workshop this coming semester. He dissected and discussed books and stories in the literature seminar with intelligence and wit, breathing new ideas even into novels I had read and discussed before. I'm hoping he's able to do the same thing with student-written works.