Who reads words, reads literature, or reads the world?

Jonathan Raban describes (LRB 5 Nov 09) lovingly how his mother taught him to read words: "I was a pushover for her deck of home-made flash cards and a game I found more fun than our previous sessions of Animal Snap."

As a bus conductor on a slow route in the 1950s, he read William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity: "Looking at the book now still brings back the old-bus smell of cigarettes, fish and chips, sweat, Polo mints, and ineffectual disinfectant. . . . Every piece of writing was like a pond, sunlit, overhung by willows, with clustering water lilies, and, perhaps, the rippling circle made by a fish rising to snatch a dying fly. This much could be seen and appreciated by any passing hiker. But the true life of pond lay below the surface, in deep water where only the attentive and experienced eye would detect the suspended clouds of midge larvae, the submarine shadow of the cruising pike, the exploding shoal of bug-eyed small fry."

Since then, Raban has made his living reading books and reading the world: "Trying to understand the habitat in which we live requires an ability to read it . . . Every inhabited landscape is a palimpsest, its original parchment nearly blackened with the cross-hatching of successive generations of authors, claiming the place as their own, and imposing their designs on it, as if their temporary interpretations would stand for ever. Later over-writing has obscured all but a few, incompletely erased fragments of the earliest entries, but one can still pick out a phrase here, a word there, and see how the most recently dried layer of scribble is already being partially effaced by fresh ink."

Did Vergil describe the first blogger?

Vergil introduces (Aeneid III.446-441) the Sibyl of Cumae as an introverted writer, who cares more about getting the words down than people understanding them. (Unlike most bloggers today, she later turns into a movie-ready special effect with glowing eyes and hair blowing in its own wind.) Robert Fagles' translation:

"Whatever verses the seer writes down on leaves
she puts in order, sealed in her cave, left behind.

There they stay, motionless, never slip from sequence.

But the leaves are light -- if the door turns on its hinge,

the slightest breath of air will scatter them all about

and she never cares to retrieve them, flitting through her cave,

or restore them to order, join them as verses within a vision."

I suppose, since readers don’t come to us for religion, we mortal writers should take more care to get their words in order.

If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!

Charles Dickens parodies (Hard Times 1854) the overly educated teacher who knows so many theories and facts that he cannot teach a class, naming him Mr. M'Choakumchild. "He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters, has been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs.

"He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions. Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and levelling, coral music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers. . . .

"He knew all about all the Water Sheds of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the people, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two-and-thirty points of the compass. . . .

"If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!"

Similarly, American school teachers with too many advanced degrees are too distant from their charges to teach well.

can government transparency learn from the epistemology of Islamic finance?

Jeremy Harding offers (LRB 14 May 2009) an epistemological account of transparency based on Islamic finance: "A contract for a contract, which is what many derivatives amount to, is a sign for a sign, not a sign for a thing; it introduces clutter and congestion into the realm of signs -- a realm of solemnity for practicing Muslims -- and erodes consensus on the value of underlying assets, just as riba (or interest) earned on a principal, like on like, turns money from a counter into an agent, to the detriment of authentic counters and legitimate agents."

According to a UK financier specializing in Islamic finance: "economies in which wealth transfer predominates over wealth creation are destined for poverty, because 'real' wealth -- food, medicine, bricks and mortar, high and low technology goods -- is consumed or decays and has to be renewed. Exchange on its own, however vigorous, is unable to do this renewing. A farm or a factory producing electronic parts is more desirable than a casino, even if they all put resources and people to work."

Similarly transparent governments need to show the thing itself, not a refabricated version. Post decision-making documents, not gussied up explanations; share actual decisions, not just spin; open up decision-making meetings, not just press conferences.

What would Mary do -- leave room for Jesus?

Kate Soper recalls (LRB 30 April 09) "the Oedipal injunction at my Catholic school, where we were expected to model ourselves on the Virgin Mary and advised to sleep on one side of the bed in order 'to leave room for Jesus.'"

Transparency is not transparent -- what does it mean?

W.P. Cresson credits (James Monroe 1946) early government transparency efforts to the defensiveness of elected officials. After Jackson's incursion into Spanish Florida, some questioned whether President Monroe had authorized this seeming act of war, which he had not. "Seeking public sanction of his conduct as Chief Executive, Monroe determined to place before Congress a full explanation of all that had occurred, together with all papers relevant to the affair." He also instructed his attorney general, William Wirt, to write an article for the National Intelligencer "explaining to the American people just what had happened and defending the administration."
In contrast, the transparency required under the current president's stimulus act is proactive -- tell people about your decisions as your making them, not after; explain your goals when you set out, not when you arrive; provide information in a useable, not overwhelming, way.

A budget is a quantification of plan

Ryan Lizza describes (New Yorker 4 May 09) President Barack Obama's budget process, which Peter Orszag (Princeton '91) is running: "The initial discussions were highly abstract. The first Obama budget . . . 'was being designed with an eye toward what do we need to do to put the economy back on a more sustainable path? What do we need for economic growth? And what do we need to do in order to transform the country? Those were our overarching principles.' The budgeteers took a hyper-rational approach, attempting to determine policy and leave the politics and spin for later. He went on, 'One of the things that would probably surprise people is that this wasn't an effort where anybody created a top-line budget number and said, "This is the number that we have to hit, and that's just that, and we'll fit everything else in." Or, "We can't go higher than x on revenue," or, "We can’t go higher than y on spending." It was more of a functional budget than anything else: "This is what we need to do. These are our principles. These are our core beliefs. And as a result this is what our budget looks like."'"
This is the approach I learned from Jim Croft at The Field Museum: a budget is a quantification of a plan. I've tried to apply it in each position since. At the Hypocrites, we're currently part way through this -- we've identified artisitic and business goals, we're quantifying those, and the next few weeks, we'll see how the numbers match up. It seems the best way to meet your goals -- your goals, not your invoices, determine your spending.

Would it be more interesting to live on a street named after someone more interesting?

W.P. Cresson offers (James Monroe 1946) a backhanded compliment to his subject: "In this struggle, Monroe was suddenly to find himself the key figure, playing a role that put to the most severe test those qualities of his character -- more ruggedly honest than impressively brilliant -- that won him his place in the history of his country." I wonder whether it would be more interesting to live on a street named after someone more interesting?

the unexamined life is not worth living

Margaret Talbot interviews (New Yorker 27 Apr 09) several users and researchers of "steroids for your brain" like Ritalin and speed and others with fancier names.

A recent Ivy League grad (millennial?) said, "One of the most impressive features of being a student is how aware you are of a twenty-four-hour work cycle. When you conceive of what you have to do for school, it's not in terms of nine to five but in terms of what you can physically do in a week while still achieving a variety of goals in a variety of realms -- social, romantic, sexual, extracurricular, resume-building, academic commitments." While he's spot on about the blurring boundaries of the work day and the play day, sadly, he's taking speed just to work more, not better: he boasts of getting a B on papers he wrote on speed. Aren't 80% of Ivy League grades B or better?

A competitive poker player (Gen Y?) said, "In a competitive field -- if suddenly a quarter of the people are more equipped, but you don' want to take the risks with your body -- it could begin to seem terribly unfair. I don't think we need to be turning up the crank another notch on how hard we work,. But the fact is, the baseline competitive level is going to reorient around what those drugs make possible, and you can choose to compete or not." If shear amount of work were what counts, maybe he would have a point. But quality matters more. Brain gain with drugs might seem easier, but more effective is reflecting on what you do -- choosing where to put your effort, thinking about the best way to do it, and above all considering the impact you want to have on the world. As the oracle told Socrates, "Know thyself." As he explained, "The unexamined life is not worth living."

If the world were healthy, would there be daily news?

James Wood comes (New Yorker 13 Apr 09) across in the social criticism of George Orwell, born Eric Blair, a wonderful example of the how the world has changed -- since 1914 and the Great War, "the sound of the radio is more normal than the sound of birds." In Orwell's words, "in a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned foods, aspirins, gramophones, gaspipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc. etc." The daily newspapers are failing -- maybe our world is getting better?

Everyone wants to live downtown -- just like me

Alan Ehrenhalt cites (Governing March 2009) a poll by Lesser & Co.: 80 million Americans were born since 1980; 77% of these millennials want to live in the urban core. There are 65 million baby boomers, of whom 71% say walking to work is their most important criterion in choosing a home. Ehrenhalt's response to this demand is to "urbanize suburbia," because building all the houses downtown would take just too many skyscrapers. Blurring the lines of city and suburbs recalls Breugmann's book, Sprawl: There is no longer a clear distinction at the city line, or at least between city and near-in suburbs. One of Breugmann's counterintuitive conclusions is that Los Angeles is the densest city in the country. While NYC is denser downtown, NYC is sparse in the suburbs; LA is consistently across the metro area.

Dante in space

Jamie McKendrick claims (LRB 26 Mar 09) that the view of Earth from space -- iconic of serene transcendence -- originates in Dante's Paradiso. Canto 22 finds Dante and Beatrice on Saturn, looking at Earth small in the distance: "L'aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci" "That little threshing floor that makes men fierce" (as in the new translation by Robin Kirkpatrick, which apparently echoes the Bible). Chaucer echoed the image (making Troilus look down from "the eighth sphere . . . [at] this little spot of earth that with the sea / Embraced is") as have writers, cinematographers, and astronauts since.

the subjunctive tense

Timothy Barnard of Montreal complains (LRB 26 Mar 09) about grammar: "The LRB and its authors continue to have problems grasping the use of the subjunctive tense in English. Henry Siegman writes: 'Even so, it offered to extend the truce, but only on the condition that Israel ended is blockage.' Does one have to be of a certain age for this to grate on one's ears? Israel never ended its blockade. Hamas offered to extend the truce on condition that Israel end its blockade, which it refused to do." To which the editor responded: "If Timothy Barnard hadn't called the subjunctive a tense we would have been more ashamed of ourselves."