Recent Reading: Nonfiction

I’ve been reading a lot less fiction these days. Books about reality have gotten more interesting. Or maybe my tastes have changed as I’ve gotten older. Or maybe the world has gotten scary enough that we don’t need horror novels to give us a thrill any more. In fact, the sorts of fiction that always fascinated me in the past have, today, come true. 

Today’s Internet, with its MMORPGs and virtual economies and cyber-warfare, is more strange and fascinating than anything William Gibson predicted in the 1980s. If you disagree, you know nothing about piloting predator drones from halfway around the world.

Likewise, the heroes and villains of cyberspace show complexities and transformations that a novelist would be hard-pressed to invent. It’s strange to find yourself rooting for an identity fraudster even as he’s draining your accounts.

Let’s think about the other side of the speculative-fiction spectrum: Fantasy. You’ve got knights, you’ve got pirates, you’ve got wizards. All right, fine. But how many of those pooftas could actually found a colony in a nation of “savages?” And how many novels could convey the desperate tragedy involved in such a triumph?

The Wordy Shipmates does a nice job, too, of treating with the complex and gloomy world-view of Massachusetts Bay Colony’s Puritans. And for such gloomy subjects, they’re treated with a great deal of humor.

Here’s something that gets at the darker side of one of our newly beloved (or loathed—pick your side) folk-heroes:

Julian Assange—who knew he could be a real dick to his friends? Well, his friends know, apparently. But that hair, that style, that reckless abandon…I’m still inclined to like him, even if I wouldn’t invite him to my house.

All right, let’s finish this survey off with an optimist who thinks the future is going to be indistinguishable from magic.

No, not Arthur Clarke, who actually coined that term, but a real live physicist who starts his book by saying we can find hints about the future by talking to real scientists instead of science fiction writers, and then cites Vernor Vinge regarding artificial intelligence and Isaac Asimov on robots, and winds it all up with potential doorways into parallel universes.

All of this has me wondering. Do we really need  to escape into fantasy and the supernatural to tell meaningful stories and to entertain? Is there not enough wonder in the real world to enchant the reader? Or is it, perhaps, that the real world is so overwhelmingly wondrous (not to mention monstrous) that "nonfiction" fulfills the role even better? Wired and Scientific American seem to contain more miracles than the average mind can comprehend, and the newsstand prints more drama and conflict than you can get out of a season of high-octane TV. 

Wallace and the Tyranny of Irony

I so wish that David Foster Wallace had stuck around a bit longer. What a waste of a fantastically perceptive mind.

I know that the tyranny of irony was getting him down. I don't think he understood that the age of irony was coming to a close.

We're not going to have time for irony when energy becomes expensive. We're going to be too busy working, and hopefully working together, in earnest, to be looking for snide little ways to put each other down. When we say something, it’s going to be what we mean, because we won’t have time for anything else. Good manners and well-defined roles will come back into style when, after a hard day in the fields, we want to settle down to good food and pleasant conversation. If we manage the transition without killing each other, life is going to start to seem very hokey by 20th century standards. And there’s lots of ways in which that could be a good thing.

But maybe that was just it. DFW was invested in the age of irony, as much as he lamented it. He excelled at it, even as his characters longed for stability and meaning. The ironic age was the only age he knew.  It may have been too much for him, to watch it start to crumble in 2008.

Or maybe he was just really, really depressed.

Damn, but I bet he’d have some interesting things to say about the next few years.

Mixed Reaction to Evernote Software

As a devotee of writing tools—let’s face it, I spend more time messing about with typewriters and computers and operating systems than I actually spend writing anything—it’s hard not to get excited about this free Evernote software. 

On the one hand, it seems to do just about everything I've ever wanted a note and information gathering piece of software to do. Screenshots? No problem. One-click gathering of content from the web? Easy. Drag and drop image collecting? Even easier. It’ll sync up your notebooks among as many devices as you install Evernote on.  If you think of something on the go, you can just email it to your Evernote address and it’ll be waiting in your notebook when you get to it later.

On the other hand, it pushes all of my paranoia buttons.

• Forcing me to register before first use. Why should I need to give out my personal information before I even know I like you?
• Encouraging me to "sync" all of my notes to the cloud, so that I can access them from other machines. Yeah, I understand this is a benefit, but it’s one I’m not entirely comfortable with. I’d rather the program default to not syncing. Consider: are these servers secured? Do I need to assume that anything I save in Evernote will be accessible to their staff? Or aggressive government investigators? Granted, I know that once I've registered I can set certain notebooks to not sync, but given the share-happy nature of the program I'm not optimistic that this wouldn't be easily switched by accident at some time in the future. And it’s creepy that anyone who guesses my email and password has instant access to all the notes I’ve collected.
• Loading the interface with features that can only be used by upgrading to a "Premium" account. The free version is plenty functional, but there’s plenty of buttons cluttering up the interface which you can’t remove. When you click on them, you get a pop-up asking you to upgrade. I'd almost be willing to do this, except for
• The monthly payment model. Sorry, but I'd be much happier to purchase your software all at once, rather than a little bit every month. (Yes, I know I’ll save money if I pay for the year in advance. That’s still a period. That ends.) Say I come upon hard times? Do the notes and content I've created under Evernote's premium functions become inaccessible if I don’t pay?  
• The use of ads on the interface. They're small and tucked in the dead space at the bottom left. They even provide you with a little "x" to click on, to close this part of the window. But clicking on that “x” brings up the offer for the premium package again. This feels like a bit of a slap in the face. Does the ad come back if my subscription expires?

This is why I never get anything done. Nice tools come along, and instead of using them to make anything, I work myself into a paranoid frenzy.  

Think I might make an exception this time, though. For gathering web-clips and doing any kind of journalistic work or blogging, this program is hard to beat. It’s one of the few cases where I’ve found something new and shiny to use on my computer that’s better than the software we had fifteen or twenty years ago.

It difficult to begrudge the software engineers’ their business model. I guess I’ll just bite my tongue and use the free version for a month or two and see if it becomes indispensible, doing my best to ignore my privacy concerns.

After all, I’m just not that interesting. What snoop is going to care what I think about ■■■■ ■■■ or ■■■■■■’■ role in ■■■■■■ anyway?

TMI as a Meal Ticket

I heard something on the radio the other day about employers demanding that job applicants sit down at a computer during an interview and log in to their Facebook pages and their blogs.

Needless to say this was another one of those what is the world coming to moments for me. Are you obligated to “friend” your boss? Do they get to read your email, too? Or tap into your Skype conversations? Or paw through your dirty laundry?

Good grief. We used to get worried about big brother installing cameras in our homes to spy on us. Now we purchase web-cams and strap them on top of our computers.

But it has me wondering. Can someone who is unemployed use their unfortunate blogging practices as a way to continue receiving unemployment benefits? Why yes, Uncle Sam, they could argue, I have been looking for work. But nobody will hire me because of some compromising photographs I put up on MySpace in 2004.

Self-embarrassment on social media could be to generation-Y what drug and alcohol habits were to Gen-X and the Baby Boomers: that “handicap” you inflicted on yourself that means you no longer have to take care of yourself. It’s a healthier way of staying on the dole than, say, developing a heroin problem. Eats up a smaller portion of your unemployment benefits too.

Lord, it’s almost self sustaining!

The Quiet of the Future

[Note: the grandchildren referenced in the following story are unlikely to be mine. Perhaps they will be yours?]

Grandchildren, clamoring for a story? How strange. I would that we had clamored for the same. The advice we got from our grandparents might have been better than anything I can provide for you.

Still. I think I'll begin with the roaring in the ears. With the sound that was everywhere, inescapable, whether you had asked to hear it, or not.

Just another one of those things which are kind of amazing to think about, now.

Sure, many of us chose to listen to music. Or noise. Video games, movies. We had speakers in our homes, our cars, our businesses, and our pockets. If what we were listening to was not what our neighbors or roommates wanted to listen to, we had headphones--personalized speakers that we strapped on to the sides of our heads. And then later on, these were not loud enough for us. If we turned them up loud enough to satisfy, the people around us could still hear.

We were always trying to get away from each other, those days.

So we made the speakers smaller and stuffed them up into our ear-canals, so we could have it roaring loud and personal, just for ourselves. And these little ear-canal speakers were cheap. We could buy a pair for around ten dollars, which most of us could earn in an hour or two, working even the most menial of jobs.

But putting the music aside for a second, consider what the rest of the world sounded like, in America, at the turn of the century. We had a little house that had stood for 300 years. It was built along a main highway, in its day. Its timbers were hewn and raised to the sound of foot-falls and horse-hooves. But when it finally crumbled it was to the whisper of electric cars, the constant rumble of gas burning engines, the throaty growl of diesel trucks. It was a loud place to live. When the traffic backed up out front, it was like a pride of lions purring, all at once. When the traffic flowed smoothly, conversations would have to stop and resume to the whim of the vehicles flying past, vehicles that moved more miles in an hour than you or I could ride in a single day.

Most of us didn't live so close to major roads, of course. But the highways were everywhere. The most remote and isolated of us would still hear them, like a constant, distant sigh. I remember hiking in the mountains, once, and descending after a long day's walk into the crater occupied by an alpine lake. I think the hours we sat there were the only hours in my life where I could not hear any traffic. A single jet passed overhead, trailing it's contrail, too high up even to be heard.

That kind of silence was a treat, a symphony. I remember thinking, a person could become a connoisseur of such silences. The silence of the mountains, the silence of the desert, the silence of the forest. That kind of silence was precious and rare.

What a shock it was, then, when the oil ran out and the engines stopped running, and today’s silence descended, gradually, everywhere. What a surprise to hear it every day, and not even have to travel for it. But it was a cruel consolation, given the hardships we faced.

I say gradual, of course, because the gunfire went on for a bit after the cars stopped. But that was sporadic and eventually it, too, would cease—to make room for quieter violence.

How strange this must sound to you, with your carefully preserved, hand-cranked record players, as you dance at the hall to music my grandparents danced to. Anything as loud as a car or a plane is an alarm, a surprise. And music, music is a treat. There are no digital recordings of the best singers to ever sing—or rather there are, but we haven’t the machines to play them. Pianos only as good as the people who play them, guitars only sing at the hands of their players.

For the most part, that’s enough. I understand our county has a symphony again. Over eighty musicians, playing at once, well practiced and in tune. If you can afford to hear them, do. I doubt you will ever forget it.

And to think, for a hundred years there, we could listen to that sound any time we wanted to. We could turn it up and play it again and again, until we went deaf from it. Even now, I wish that I had listened to more.

But you will forgive an old man his regrets, I hope.

Nymex, Insider Trading, and Peak Oil

It would be hard to find a more readable account of the financial aspect of our present oil crisis than The Asylum by Leah Goodman.  It’s especially interesting (and a little surreal) to read this while sitting in front of newspaper headlines about the unfolding crises in the Middle East, Oil Prices spiking over $100 a barrel again, and a stock market that’s starting to shudder in what, we can only hope, won’t be a repeat of the financial earthquakes of 2008.

Futures trading has long seemed so obscure as to be almost magical to me. Why would the producers of goods allow their stuff to be traded so wildly and unpredictably? Why not just slap a price tag on their oil, their corn, their pork-bellies—whatever—and sell it to a willing buyer, charging what the market will bear?

Goodman does a good job explaining the basic concepts here. Sellers use a futures market because it guarantees them a price for their goods at a future date, and consumers (be they individuals or businesses) can plan their future operations knowing what they’re going to be paying as well. And then if there are changes to the value of stuff in the mean-time, the traders are there to absorb the risk—taking the hit or pocketing the profit depending on what happens during that time.

There’s a conflict here between the producers/consumers who want stability to plan their business, and the traders who want volatility so they can take their cut. This conflict is a good thing. It’s supposed to keep the system in balance. That’s why there’s federal regulations (supposedly provided by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC) that are supposed to limit volatility, placing caps on price swings and the like.

What Goodman shows is how little the CFTC has done in performance of their role. Regulatory chairmen leave their positions within the government to head the very exchange they were supposed to be regulating, calling up their old cronies when opportunities to profit present themselves. The conflicts of interest are staggering, and they led to the Enron loophole (which I’d vaguely heard about) and the London and Dubai loopholes (which were new to me) and which played a huge part in the downfall of Lehman Brothers, the troubles with other major bangs which we all ended up bailing out, and the financial bubbles that seem to keep popping with increasing frequency in the 21st century.

There’s a colorful cast of characters here, and more action than you’d expect from such a dry subject. Cross-dressing, hookers, fist-fights, drugs and booze on the trading floor; class warfare among millionaires; politicking and intimidation and death threats. Goodman also does a nice job tracing the history Nymex, the New York Mercantile exchange from its roots in agriculture (mostly potatoes) into the powerhouse that controlled the most important resource ever traded on our planet, all the way to its purchase by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and the changes that hit its players as they went from trading in the pits of the trading floor to the computer screen.

Goodman herself seems to be awfully chummy with some of the story’s players. Even as she reveals their most salacious and rapacious dealings, she shows them a great deal of respect—even affection. She’s reported on these guys for years, attended their conferences and functions and dinners. And in the acknowledgements she thanks them for sharing details that had to be uncomfortable. “To know you was a privilege….Your humor and sagacity transcend your extreme-capitalist alter egos,” she writes. All this after spending 400 pages detailing how they stole from their customers, taxpayers, consumers, and their own market. The assumption being, I suppose, that any one of us might have behaved the same way, if given the same opportunities.

I suppose she wouldn’t have gotten such a good story if she hadn’t been friends with these guys. But her admiration tastes a little funny at the end of a book about insider trading.

Some Good News About Books

McSweeny’s has a series of articles up on why the rumors about the death of books have been over-exaggerated, with pages about the state of libraries, publishing, and global literacy.

This is nice to hear. I’ve been having, for the past couple of years, mixed feelings about the trajectory of the printed word. Electronic readers finally seduced me with their siren song. I’ve got a Barnes and Noble Nook and spend at least an hour with it each day.  Before that, I’d turned my little Asus 701 into an e-reader for catching up on free classics from Project Gutenberg and Manybooks. What times we live in, that the whole of the Western Canon is available for download in seconds, for free.

The old assertion that “People aren’t going to read books from a screen,” fell by the wayside as soon as screens got portable and crisp enough. And then it’s amazing how quickly books change from an object of desire—something we want to handle and collect and accumulate—to something bulky and inconvenient. I’ll find myself looking at a beautiful hardcover in the bargain bin, a book I actually intend to read, sitting there available for just six dollars. And I’ll check my Nook and see that the e-book version is $11.99. This should be an easy decision. On the one hand, an elegant physical product, something I can write in and loan out or pass on or even sell. On the other, and for twice as much: the license to an ephemeral digital file that winks out when the power goes off. But I’m struck by how damn heavy the book is, and how much space it’s going to take up in my house, and how much energy it’ll take to pack up and move it the next time we re-locate.

It’s a bit hypocritical, I suppose, to bemoan the loss of our independent bookstores and the shrinking inventories of our chains, and then refuse to pay even six dollars for an object that, one year ago, retailed for five times that. And it’s petty of me, perhaps, to get irritated with publishers who don’t make the stories I want to read available in electronic form. (I’m looking at you, Europa Editions. I get that you use lovely cover art and high quality paper. But I want to read your stuff, not hang it on my wall. And what’s with you, Haikasoru? Kindle and Apple Bookstore versions only? I’m eager to exchange my pretend electronic money for your pretend electronic content. Japanese culture is supposed to feel cutting edge. So get cutting, already!)

In fact, as I look around at the books that I do have, it’s with designs of selling them, or giving them to friends, or donating them to the library. I realize that I have bought, perhaps, six new books in the past five years. (The Boston Public Library was my favorite place for a couple years, there, and then along came the electronic readers.) The last three times we moved, our library shrunk with each trip.

And then, sometimes, it hits me. Ten, twenty years down the line, I’m really going to miss books. Especially once the effects of Peak Oil set in, and cheap electronic gadgets and the power to run them are a thing of the past.

It’s a matter of both common sense and experience that hard drives and digital storage will fail. That’s fine, when storage is cheap. We backup our data, and copy information from old storage to new. I just bought a one terabyte hard drive for seventy dollars, popped it into a computer that came from the dump, loaded it with everything digital I’ve done during my entire life, and used less than a quarter of the space. When it fills up and wears out in a couple of years, I’ll buy a four terabyte drive and backup onto that.

A few years after that, who knows? Chinese factories might be producing petabyte drives by then, if the minerals and the energy needed to extract them are available. That in itself is a big if. Then, will our dollars be strong enough to pay for them? But will they be shipped around the world on 400 meter long diesel powered container ships that burn 1,660 gallons of heavy fuel oil per hour? Will they be doing this when oil costs $200 or $300 a barrel?

What, in short, is going to happen to our digitized culture when the machines that display and share it become precious and irreplaceable? What is going to happen to culture in general if so much of it is digitized right at the end of the era of cheap energy?

This is what keeps me from unloading my paper library—or at least those volumes which are worth saving and reading again. And it’s what makes me happy to know that 752 million books were sold in 2010, just a little off from the 2009 peak of 777 million. It’s nice to know that those books are still out there, getting printed and purchased. We might have a use for them again.

Even if it’s not me who’s buying them.