Month: December 2009

Malkin Award Nominee

by Chris Bodenner

"He’s saying, implicitly, the true meaning of Christmas is that you don’t destroy babies. You don’t destroy children. And that the federal government should not be part and parcel of that in terms of funding it," Fox analyst Peter Johnson, Jr., on Senator Ben Nelson's holdout on the healthcare bill. And just when I thought I had all my Christmas shopping done.

Brain Drain to the City of London, circa 1988

by Andrew Sprung

Mulling over Martin Wolf's portrayal of the U.K. as a monocrop economy, overly dependent on its financial industry, it occurred to me that I'd witnessed the transition, years ago, — in a novel. That would be David Lodge's devilishly clever Nice Work — published in 1988, and so probably written in the wake of the U.K.'s "Big Bang" banking deregulation of 1986.

A send-up of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), which chronicles the rise of Britain's industrial north, Nice Work tracks industrial decline in a fictional Manchester. It splits scenes between a rundown red-brick university in financial crisis and a beleaguered auto parts factory. The protagonists' brief escape to a machine tool trade show in Frankfurt makes West Germany seem like a kind of of industrial Candyland by contrast.

But the City of London also makes a cameo. The heroine's boyfriend, like the heroine, is a young left-wing literary theorist teaching romantic poetry, who boasts that he's snagged "the last new job in romanticism in this century."  The heroine's brother works in the City, which her academic family regards as a disreputable shame. To make matters worse, his girlfriend is a tough working class girl who's proved to be a gifted trader. 

In novelistic fashion, the effete professor of romantic poetry starts disappearing nights into the home of the gritty trader.  Our heroine then receives this news by letter:

But I've finished with thesis topics. What I have to tell you is that I have determined upon a change of career. I'm going to become a merchant banker.

"Have you done laughing?" as Alton Locke says to his readers. I am of course rather old to be making such a change, but I feel quite confident that I can make a success of it and I'm very excited by the challenge. I think it's the first risky thing I've ever done in my life [2009 footnote: not the last], and I feel a new man in consequence. I've got to undergo a period of training, of course, but even so I shall start at a higher salary than my present one, and after that, well, the sky's the limit.

He goes on to assert that as leftist academics, he and the heroine have been "stranded on the mudflats of an obsolete ideology," a played-out statism. Then:

Its' no use blaming Thatcher, as if she was some kind of witch who has enchanted the nation. She is riding the Zeitgeist. When trade unions offer their members discount subscriptions to BUPA, the writing is on the wall for old-style socialism. What the new style will be, I don't know, but I believe there is more chance of identifying it from the vantage-point of the City than from the University of Suffolk. The first thing that struck me about the City when I started observing Debbie at work was the sheer energy of the place, and the second was its democracy.  A working-class girl like Debbie pulling down thirty-thousand-odd a year is by no means an anomalous figure. Contrary to the stereotype of the ex-public-school stockbroker, it doesn't matter what your social background is in the City these days, as long as you're good at your job. Money is a great leveller, upwards.

The novel repudiates and (lightly) punishes this move. But then, part of the extended joke of the novel is that it replays the "ideological bad faith" that its heroine likes to expose in nineteenth century industrial novels like North and South.  So, in the end, a bequest settles all; a benevolent capitalist and a revitalized scholar get new leases on professional life.  But Lodge might take some satisfaction today that beneath the narrative contraption, the novel leaves behind a clean snapshot of the lure of brains to the City.

Depressing Christmas Songs, Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

Two readers submitted Stan Rogers' "First Christmas" within just one minute of each other.  Lyrics after the jump:

This day a year ago, he was rolling in the snow
With a younger brother in his father's yard
Christmas break, a time for touching home,
the heart of all he'd known
And leaving was so hard

Three thousand miles away,
now he's working Christmas Day
Making double time for the minding of the store
Well he always said, he'd make it on his own
He's spending Christmas Eve alone
First Christmas away from home

She's standing by the train station,
pan-handling for change
Four more dollars buys a decent meal and a room
Looks like the Sally Ann place after all,
in a crowded sleeping hall
That echoes like a tomb

But it's warm and clean and free,
and there are worse places to be
And at least it means no beating from her Dad
And if she cries because it's Christmas Day
She hopes that it won't show
First Christmas away from home

In the apartment stands a tree,
and it looks so small and bare
Not like it was meant to be,
Golden angel on the top
It's not that same old silver star,
you wanted for your own
First Christmas away from home

In the morning, they get prayers,
then it's crafts and tea downstairs
Then another meal back in his little room
Hoping maybe that "the boys" will think to phone
before the day is gone
Well, it's best they do it soon

When the "old girl" passed away,
he fell apart more every day
Each had always kept the other pretty well
But the kids all said the nursing home was best
Cause he couldn't live alone
First Christmas away from home

In the common room they've got the biggest tree
And it's huge and cold and lifeless
Not like it ought to be,
and the lit-up flashing Santa Claus on top
It's not that same old silver star,
you once made for your own
First Christmas away from home

Dissent Of The Day

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I was one of the first 2000 to pledge to buy the book, which I did.  The book is "nice" but it's not the greatest thing since sliced bread.  First, the book and the photos are disappointingly small–about the size of a large coaster or a small trivet.  And the lack of a hard cover make it a less-than-ideal coffee table book.  I'm sure you posted the specs where you plug the book, but I must have not paid attention.  (I do agree with your readers that the book is well-introduced and well-organized–the chronological feature is a very nice touch.)

Having said that, I am happy to support the site and even happier to participate in the community experiment around crowd-sourced publishing.  That was cool, and my econ professor would have been proud.  But if I saw this book in a store, I would not purchase it….especially not for $30.  (Which would also make my econ professor proud!)

Initially we wanted to do a more traditionally-sized coffee table book, but the file size of the amateur photos we receive are simply too small to print in a larger format and maintain quality. (And, in my opinion, too large of a size would differ too much from the window views we publish daily.)  We also intended to have a hardcover option, but we really liked the flip-book feel of the softcover version and wanted to have uniformity with the books we sold. Plus, we would have had to print separate offset runs for a hard- and softcover version, thus greatly increasing our financial risk.

But most of all, a hardcover book larger than our seven inch format would simply be too pricey for most of our readers. Since our goal for the project was not to make any money, but rather get the book to as many readers as possible and prove we could create a new model of publishing, the smaller softcover size was the only feasible option.

Still, $29.95 is a decent price for a bookstore quality, 200-page, four-color photo book, especially if you or a loved one is a fan of the Window View feature. (And we may yet do another offset run for another batch of books at $16.25 each.) Keep in mind that the Dish is not the typical Blurb customer; 99% of the people who create and buy books through Blurb are individuals using their own personal photos. Thus, 30 bucks is a bargain for someone making a high-end scrapbook containing their own stories and memories (in fact, I'm in the process of doing two myself: a book of autobiographical vignettes written by my grandfather and an illustrated account of my dad's tour in Vietnam).

If, like the reader, you are not a big fan of the Window View book, we have many different projects coming down the line.  And the vast majority of our books will be text only, so their prices will be dramatically lower. Stay tuned!

Reader Jokes #5

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

Young Chuck moved to Texas and bought a donkey from a farmer for $100. The farmer agreed to deliver the donkey the next day. The next day the farmer drove up and said, 'Sorry Chuck, but I have some bad news, the donkey died.'

Chuck replied, 'Well, then just give me my money back.'

The farmer said, 'Can't do that. I went and spent it already.'

Chuck said, 'OK, then, just bring me the dead donkey.'

The farmer asked, 'What ya gonna do with a dead donkey?'

Chuck said, 'I'm going to raffle him off.'

The farmer said 'You can't raffle off a dead donkey!'

Chuck said, 'Sure I can. Watch me. I just won't tell anybody he's dead.'

A month later, the farmer met up with Chuck and asked, 'What happened with that dead donkey?'

Chuck said, 'I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at two dollars apiece and made a profit of $898.00.'

The farmer said, 'Didn't anyone complain?'

Chuck said, 'Just the guy who won. So I gave him his two dollars back.'

Chuck now works for JP Morgan.

In Defense of Pretty Lies

by Conor Friedersdorf

When all of life becomes transparent, and it's a natural human tendency to observe the most salacious parts of life, it's a very different moral environment in which to grow up.

— Robert Wright

That is so true.

In some future year, when I am watching the Lakers with my son or daughter, I am going to do my utmost to make it clear that athletes aren't people whose personalities we know just because it seems that way on television. But it's inevitable that kids feel some admiration for sports stars or other public figures who achieve success in a particular realm.

It is for that reason that I want celebrities to be duplicitous with their fans. Unless humans stop sinning entirely, a welcome but unlikely prospect, public figures are going to do bad things sometimes — cheat on their wives, get addicted to heroine, leave profane voice messages for their kid, etc. It is important that society learn about one category of sin: behavior that directly bears on the ability of a public official to do his or her job.

Otherwise, a celebrity who cultivates an upstanding image won't ever upset me by obscuring his or her depravities. I may object to their behavior. But if they're going to sin, as most people do at some time or another in their lives, I'll thank them for doing their utmost to keep up appearances. In a way, that duplicity signals their understanding that they've transgressed, and it certainly does more to protect my hypothetical kids than the alternative — a society where more people forthrightly say "yeah, I do heroin" or "in case my commercials have caused you to think otherwise, I've had sex with ten mistresses these last several years," because a misguided public outrage permits anything so long as lies or hypocrisy aren't involved. Listening to the folks who are angry that Tiger Woods cultivated a public image that contrasted with his private behavior, I wonder if they realize that forthrightness among professional athletes would consign us to a parade of folks like Dennis Rodman bearing their sad dysfunction on endless reality television shows.

Celebrity culture isn't capable of rendering people whole, though the folks who purvey it do their utmost to create an illusion to the contrary — "so and so is just like us." There are so many of these characters in our lives these days: Oprah, Tiger, Britney, Brad, Jennifer, Kobe, and should their stars fade, new ones are always there to take their place. Bad enough to allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking we can know these people. We've done that as long as there have been celebrities.

What's different is this newly transparent culture that Mr. Wright mentions. Far from helping us access the truth about a person — or to form judgments about society as a whole based on the various people we've observed — it causes us to obsess about the most salacious parts of life.

The consequence is that salacious behavior is normalized beyond what facts justify, and we're all more pessimistic than we'd be given an accurate picture of our world. To cite one example, the divorce rate in the middle class and up is far less dire than what one imagines observing the Hollywood marriages that are the ones we're most frequently told about, but hearing the stories, how could it be otherwise that divorce looms in middle class minds as a marginally more normal occurrence among "people like us"? As the parade of adulterous politicians and politicos are splashed on front pages, anchoring society's conversation about infidelity, the same phenomenon is happening with cheating.