→ March 17, 2008
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Some economics links.

JP Morgan buys Bear Stearns for $2/share. This is fantastic news. One, JP Morgan picked up Bear’s financial obligations, so they believe they can be met, and we don’t get a default that really could trigger a broader financial panic. Two, there’s no government bailout, at least not in this case. Bear fucked up, and they’re paying for it. This is is how financial markets are supposed to work: If you take on too much risk, or evaluate risk incorrectly, you may get burned, and Bear did.

The Buck Stops Where?: If you want to be a pessimist, the way that the Fed is cheapening the dollar is the best argument that our immediate economic future is dim. We’ve seen scattered reports in the last two weeks that the recession is already abating and that economic growth should resume in the next quarter, so why is the Fed still pushing interest rates down? This would be a good time for President Bush to step in and show the sort of economic leadership he showed earlier in his tenure when he pushed for lower marginal tax rates, elimination of the dividend tax (albeit temporarily), and freer trade. The editorial argues that the Bush administration has tacitly approved of Bernanke’s rate cuts, and if that’s true, it’s a huge mistake. A weak dollar will drive investment funds out of the country at a time when we need more coming in to help ease the credit crunch. This is one example where the equity markets have it wrong. The Fed needs to start bumping rates back up, and sooner rather than later.

Filed Under: Economics Tagged With: , ,
→ March 17, 2008
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Darkness at Noon.

Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (#8 on the Modern Library 100) is Koestler’s confessional after he visited the Stalin-era Soviet Union and became disillusioned with communism. It’s powerful both as a political statement and a literary work, but the narrative starts to come apart in the third chapter (of four) and I found myself losing interest.

Darkness tells the story of Rubashov, one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution who is arrested in the opening pages and charged with plotting the demise of the Soviet government, which was a capital offense and a pretense used to execute hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens during the 1930s. Rubashov knows this is coming and there’s a slightly cathartic aspect to his arrest. The book then drifts into several key anecdotes from his career as an agent of the revolution, which come to his mind as he’s encouraged and then coerced into confessing to the trumped-up charges that will lead to his death.

As a political statement – it’s not even an allegory due to its intense realism – it’s potent. The ease with which the prison officials discharge their duties is stomach-churning. Rubashov’s own role in sending several loyal Communists to their deaths, whether in service to the party or to save his own skin, is hardly more palatable. And the relentless subjugation of the individual in the service of the masses comes off as incredibly wrong-headed to anyone raised to believe in the sanctity of life.

Koestler makes use of multiple literary symbols to enhance his arguments both about the empty promises of Marxism and about Rubashov’s own guilt and struggles with his conscience, notably through the recurring toothache that appears during periods of extreme guilt over a Party member he betrayed or simply his betrayal of the Party’s original goals. The metaphor of the empty space on the wall where the portrait of the Revolution’s fallen leaders was also clever.

But Darkness didn’t pass the interest test for me. The book is divided into three “hearings” plus a short fourth chapter describing Rubashov’s public “trial” and execution. (I’m not spoiling anything there – you know from the start that he’s going to be shot.) During the third hearing, Rubashov, previously a strong man with complete conviction in the rightness of his actions, sees those convictions weaken and devolves into a rambling, irrelevant ex-revolutionary – exactly what the Party wants him to become. It undermines the book’s essential conflict between Rubashov (the ideologically pure Communist) and the Party (the Stalinist regime, enforcing its will on the people at any cost), and it also meant that there was no admirable or sympathetic character in the story – his prosecutors may have been evil, but Rubashov was weak, and there’s no sympathy in seeing a man hoisted on a petard he helped construct.

There’s no avoiding a comparison of Darkness to the other two classic anti-communist novels of the 20th century, 1984 and Brave New World. Darkness has an insurmountable advantage of realism, both because Koestler went to Russia during the Great Purge, and because his setting is contemporary and characters very realistically drawn. But the other two books were, for my money, better reads, perhaps because their authors took one step back from reality and created environments in which they could control the action. Koestler created a scenario with an inevitable conclusion, and I imagine to a large degree that once he began writing he found the characters moved of their own accord, which created a predictable narrative that, for me, reached the “just shoot him already” stage with fifty pages to go.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 13, 2008
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Harry Potter and the two-part finale.

The final Harry Potter book will be
split into two films, with the first to be released in 2010. So at least one of the books will receive enough time for a proper film treatment.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: ,
→ March 11, 2008
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The Namesake (film).

The film version of The Namesake felt like a mediocre adaptation of a great book. I can’t speak to whether the book on which it’s based, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, is great, but the movie aspired to a scope that it wasn’t able to reach. It’s a quality movie, but one that left me feeling like it had missed its target.

The story … well, that’s the problem. The story lacks a coherent center. It is the story of a family, or perhaps the story of a culture clash, but either way it suffers without a central character to anchor the plot. The movie’s first half or first two-thirds or so focus on Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, the husband and wife and eventually the parents of Gogol Ganguli (the namesake of the film’s title), who takes over as the movie’s center through its finish. We start with Ashoke nearly dying in a train wreck in India, then we’re presented with the arrangement of his marriage to Ashima, and then they’re married and arrive in the U.S., where he’s lived for a few years since the accident. The movie settles in to a sweet sequence on the early years of the Gangulis’ marriage, then suddenly their two children are teenagers, at which point Gogol’s unusual name becomes a key plot element.

The movie jumps too quickly to achieve the epic scope of a novel that is attempting to tell the story of the clash between Indian and American cultures through the example of a single family. At one point, the scene changes and we see Ashima talking to a co-worker. She utters two sentences, around fifteen words. The scene ends, we’re taken somewhere else, and we never return to the previous point. This can work in a movie that’s trying to evoke a frenetic feeling in the audience, but a movie of deep emotions and big themes shouldn’t be rushing from one plot point to the next.

As another example, take the film’s last third, where Gogol wants to change his name, has a white girlfriend (the worst-drawn character in the film – about as three-dimensional as a piece of paper), then marries a Bengali girl in a 180-degree reversion to his roots, and then sees that marriage end in one of the less believable relationship-ending conversations you’ll see. (At the risk of spoiling something, let’s just say that Gogol must be telepathic to figure out his wife’s secret from the one verbal slip.) Gogol’s life alone, including his journey from assimilated American teen to proud son of Indian immigrants to one-foot-in-each-world yuppie to his uncertain future would fill a two-hour movie without any trouble. Squeezed into forty minutes, it feels cursory and unsatisfying.

I’m underselling the movie by focusing on this treatment of a rich plot. Ambition in a movie plot is a good thing, and the fact that they couldn’t fulfill the story’s promise is a minor criticism as opposed to the criticism I have of most movies, which is that their plots couldn’t fill a thimble to the halfway mark. The acting by all three of the leads in The Namesake is outstanding; Kal Penn’s performance will add yet another nail in the coffin that House is very slowly building itself, as I’ll have a hard time taking him seriously as a goofball. (Yes, I know he played Kumar, but that’s not exactly in my Netflix queue.) Some of the scenes shot in India are gorgeous; the costume design in the two Indian weddings is outstanding; and I thought the (almost) wordless scene between Gogol and his bride on their wedding night was really well done, a strong piece of writing that took its cue from how people actually interact with each other. The Namesake is absolutely worth renting; I’m just lamenting the movie it could have been instead.

Filed Under: DVDs Tagged With: , , ,
→ March 10, 2008
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The Pickwick Papers.

My wife has long told me that I am afraid of long books. I think she’s right. Since college, I’ve only read a few books that were as long as 600 pages (not counting Harry Potter books – I’m just talking literature here), and I’ve been pretty selective about starting any book of more than around 400 pages. This does limit one’s options, especially in the realm of serious literature.

The flip side, however, is that I get great satisfaction from actually reading a book of that length. I’ve built reading long books up so much in my mind that completing one – especially doing so in a relatively short length of time – feels like a great achievement. As a result, I was very pleased to find Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers to be a great read, and, with some help from a too-long travel day and a stomach virus, managed to knock it off in just two weeks.

The Pickwick Papers (#76 on the The Novel 100) was Dickens’ first novel and is unique in his canon as both a comedy and a picaresque novel, making it much more readable than that scourge of all of our high school years, Great Expectations. Pickwick follows the four members of the “Pickwick Club,” a sort of traveling social group of four men, led by the elder Samuel Pickwick, and his three followers. Like most picaresque novels, the book is structured around a series of stories, and was in fact sold in monthly installments as it was written, but the stories last longer and are more interconnected in Pickwick than in other classics of the genre, like The Adventures of Roderick Random. The central storyline, emblematic of Dickens’ later subject matter, is a lawsuit, allowing Dickens to satirize the justice system, crooked lawyers, and greedy people, but threaded through it are the romantic follies of his followers and his loyal servant, Samuel Weller, as well as the Pickwick Club’s run-ins with the fraudster Alfred Jingle.

The novel is a masterpiece of plot construction and comic invention. Dickens weaves the subplots together and deftly paces the stories to keep them fresh in the reader’s mind without revealing too much of any one subplot at once. Although the story relies heavily on coincidences – mostly characters running into each other – it was a common plot device of the time. And the wit in his prose is tremendous, from Dickens’ descriptions of some of his fringe characters (“his forehead was narrow, his face wide, his head large, and his nose all on one side, as if Nature, indignant with the propensities she observed in him in his birth, had given it an angry tweak which it had never recovered”) to satires large and small on all manner of persons.

If you’re up for the 840-page read, I recommend the 2004 Signet Classics edition (linked above) because of the presence of a short afterword by Jasper Fforde, who sings the novel’s praises and also mentions the fate of some of the landmark buildings mentioned in the book, a few of which survive to this day. And if you’re not up for it, I suggest that you hop over to Project Gutenberg, download the free e-text, and read Chapter 49. It’s a self-contained story that is just brilliantly delivered, and a good taste of what the best parts of The Pickwick Papers have to offer.

Next up: Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 9, 2008
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Alive…

Just a quick note that I am still alive, out in Arizona now and recovering from a wicked stomach virus that hit my daughter and then me. If any of you should find yourselves in Phoenix and in need of urgent medical care for your child, I can recommend Phoenix Children’s Hospital. I’m hoping to have a regular post up later today.

Also, there have been some questions regarding how comments work here. If you’ve had an approved comment here before, then your future comments are posted without moderation, although I do see them as they come in. The exception is comments with links – any comment with external links in it is held for moderation, so on Thursday, when I was traveling all day, a few comments were held for over 24 hours while I was offline. I also use a spam filter on comments and for whatever reason, it takes a dislike to certain users, so if you’ve posted legitimate comments and haven’t seen them on the site, that may be the reason why. Just keep trying.

Thanks…

Filed Under: Uncategorized
→ March 5, 2008
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Howl’s Moving Castle.

I’m a big fan of the movies of film director Hayao Miyazaki, but just got around to seeing his last release, Howl’s Moving Castle. After the triumph of his previous film, Spirited Away, it was a disappointment, although it’s still a strong film when compared to the rest of the field – animated or otherwise.

Sophie is a 19-year-old girl working in her family’s hat shop, but after an odd encounter with a handsome young wizard in the streets of her town, she’s visited by the Witch of the Waste (voiced by Lauren Bacall), who casts a spell that turns her into an elderly woman. She sets out in search of the wizard Howl and his “moving castle,” a building that walks on mechanical legs, powered by the fire demon Calcifer (Billy Crystal). Her hope is that Howl can reverse the aging spell cast on her, but it turns out that Howl and Calcifer both have spell problems of their own.

Howl’s moves along well until its final quarter, at which point the plot becomes needlessly complex and ends up in a horribly clichéd and quick resolution. It’s a shame, because the first three-fourths of the movie is strong and the writers were unafraid to deviate from the normal paths of animated films. (The movie was adapted from a young-adult novel by Diana Wynne Jones.) Howl’s starts out as an action film, then settles into a more deliberate pace to try to explore the psychological drama behind the characters’ various curses, but never fulfills that promise before returning to action-film pacing and rushing to the finish.

As with all Miyazaki films, Howl’s has more than its share of arresting imagery and sheer inventiveness. The design of the moving castle is phenomenal, and it threatens in some ways to become a character in its own right (and perhaps it should have). The landscape scenes are gorgeous and rich, with layers and textures that are more associated with CG on these shores. The folks at Pixar who oversaw the English dubbing made a pair of inspired choices of voice actors in Crystal, who does a sort of poor man’s Robin Williams/Genie with Calcifer, and Lauren Bacall, whose voice is perfect for the evil witch who turns out to be something a bit deeper than that.

If you’re not already a Miyazaki fan, the place to start is with his masterwork, Spirited Away, probably the best non-CG animated movie ever made. I also highly recommend My Neighbor Totoro, which is a little more of a children’s story than most Miyazaki films but makes the application of the word “charming” to any other film seem fraudulent. I also recommend Castle in the Sky and Princess Mononoke, as well as Whisper of the Heart, a romantic film for which Miyazaki wrote the screenplay but which was directed by a colleague of his, Yoshifumi Kondo, who died just three years after its release.

Filed Under: DVDs Tagged With: , ,
→ March 4, 2008
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Gary Gygax dies at 69.

AP story on Gygax’ death

How many times will we see this referenced in sports columnist rants against statistical analysis over the next week?

Filed Under: Media, Sports Tagged With:
→ March 4, 2008
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Peak Oil.

With oil prices seeming to settle in around $100 a barrel – an alarming number, but not all that surprising when you consider the dollar’s weakness – perhaps it’s time for some contrarian thinking on the arrival of the so-called “Peak Oil” state.

“The World Has Plenty of Oil.” Mr. Saleri’s conclusion:

Sufficient liquid crude supplies do exist to sustain production rates at or near 100 million barrels per day almost to the end of this century.

His strongest point, beyond the straight recitation of statistics on what we know is in the ground and how much we actually consume, is that high oil prices will tend to create incentives for alternatives, both alternative fuel/energy sources, but also alternative extraction techniques. Oil that was not profitable to extract at $50 a barrel may be quite profitable at $100 barrel, and if oil prices remain high, previously untapped sources of oil will come on line. (A 2005 study by the RAND corporation said that a “surface retorting complex” for extracting oil from shale “is unlikely to be profitable unless real crude oil
prices are at least $70 to $95 per barrel (2005 dollars).”)

All in all it’s a rather different message than what you might read in your daily fishwrap or what you’ll hear from any environmental group. Oil will run out eventually, but it’s not likely to happen in our lifetimes.

Filed Under: Economics Tagged With:
→ March 3, 2008
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ESPNEWS today.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS at 4:20 pm EST today.

Filed Under: Appearances