Chrononautic Log

April 30, 2005

• Portland was wet.
• Chicago is smaller in real life. Or seems that way. Maybe because it’s so flat.
• Christopher Rowe’s mime version of this and this is the funniest thing I’ve seen all year.
• I thought I hated the 70s mainly for aesthetic but basically progressive reasons. Apparently I was wrong: hating the 70s is code for hating feminism. (Okay, I’m exaggerating. But.)
• Belated capsule review of Steamboy: Otomo may be twice the animator that Miyazaki is, but he’s quite a bit less than half the storyteller. (Still better than Oshii, though.)

Oh, and:

• Twenty Epics is going to be a good book.

Comments (22)

April 20, 2005

Talking about economics, Brad deLong hits on exactly the problem that’s been bothering me for the last several months about not just everyone from Karl Marx to Ayn Rand, but Proust, Derrida, Dave Sim and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, too.

Just what a "Galbraithian" economist would do, however, is not clear. For Galbraith, there is no single market failure, no single serpent in the Eden of perfect competition. He starts from the ground and works up: What are the major forces and institutions in a given economy, and how do they interact? A graduate student cannot be taught to follow in Galbraith's footsteps. The only advice: Be supremely witty. Write very well. Read very widely. And master a terrifying amount of institutional detail.

Harry Johnson, in his superb but not entirely fair critique of Milton Friedman's Monetarists, said that in order to carry out an intellectual revolution in economics, one must propound a doctrine that has three qualities: it can be summarized in a single sentence, it provides the young with an excuse for ignoring the work of their elders, and it tells the young what they can do to further the revolution. John Maynard Keynes and Friedman both offered such doctrines. They said, respectively, that "aggregate demand determines supply" and that "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon"; they dismissed their predecessors as obsolete; and they set hundreds of young to the task of estimating consumption, investment, and money-demand functions.

Galbraith propounded no such easily summarized doctrine. The closest we can get is: "the world is complicated, and both right-wing ideology and the conventional wisdom that is this age's self-image are terribly wrong." He offered critiques that required you to read and understand old theories, not new theories that allowed you to dismiss everything prior as irrelevant.

The result? Nearly all economists today are Paul Samuelson's children. Many are Keynes' children. Friedman, Robert Lucas, Robert Solow, and James Tobin all have plenty of descendants. But there are few Galbraithians on the ground. Would economics as a discipline be stronger if the 50-year-old and 30-year-old economists had a better appreciation of Galbraith? Almost surely. Will the winds of economic fashion shift and cause economists to appreciate Galbraith once again? For that to happen, an astute young economist would have to devote himself to "mathing up" chapters of The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State and publishing them in journals-not a likely prospect in today's risk-adverse academic environment.

Brad deLong, reviewing Richard Parker’s John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics.

Here’s my position: “the young” are not wrong in failing to be moved by thinkers whose doctrines cannot be easily summarized.

Life is too short to read The Complete Works of Everybody.

Comments (8)

Seán Harnett is wrong in absolving Tolkien of all blame (influentially-speaking, historically-speaking) for the modern Brick-Thick Fantasy Novel. He’s certainly wrong in describing classic heroic fantasy as “more truly a reflection of the times in which we lived” than “stories of divorcees and martinis and quiet, stately dysfunction,” unless perhaps he spent the glory years of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser running guns in Indochina, or hunting Mau-Mau for bounty in British Kenya. He doesn’t seem to understand that there is a market for slow immersive worldbuilding as well as for the “short, sharp shocks” of pulp and the shallow secondary creations that he says he prefers. And anyone who complains that China Miéville is being “squeezed off the shelves” by David Eddings is not writing from, como se dicen, the reality-based community.

But he may not be wrong in shifting some of the blame for the Brick-Thick Fantasy Novel to the Anti-Inkling himself, Michael Moorcock.

Comments (4)

April 19, 2005

How long did Ratzi have his Pope Name picked out? And how many of the other papabili are sulking under their zucchetti and thinking “But I wanted to be Sixtus VI!”

Comments (1)

. . . did I totally lose touch with (or interest in) the idea that artists have a moral right to control what’s done with their works?

Comments (7)

April 18, 2005

Your Linguistic Profile:

60% General American English

20% Yankee

10% Dixie

10% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

Comments (16)

April 16, 2005

In these remote pages it is written that the good books are divided into those:

1. sold in Foyle’s
2. slightly foxed
3. in revised editions
4. non-fictional
5. disturbing
6. unpublished
7. mass-market
8. included in this classification
9. with ugly covers
10. unread
11. written in distinctive and poetic styles
12. et cetera
13. recently thrown across the room
14. that, in magazine reviews, are indistinguishable from one another

Comments (6)

April 15, 2005

But, what the hell, I’d never be this good at it.

Comments (0)

Xeni Jardin, “Snapshots of volunteer ‘Minutemen’ on US/Mexico border”:

Y para nuestros estimados lectores hispanohablantes: aquí les presento unas imagenes de los pendejos racistas en Arizona que se creen soldados. El fenómeno me preocupa mucho. No puedo ver ninguna diferencia entre esto y los “lynch mobs” de antaño en el sur en mi país. Ojal´ que el resultado no sea tan sangriento, pero si ellos tienen el apoyo del gobierno y del ambiente político del momento — pues, yo no creo que puede ser una cosa buena para los derechos civiles de la gente en cualquier lado de la frontera.

(Free translation: And for our esteemed Spanish-speaking readers: here we present some images of those racist assholes in Arizona who think they’re soldiers. This phenomenon worries me greatly. I can’t see any difference between this and the ‘lynch mobs’ of the Old South. Hopefully, the results will not be as bloody, but if they have the support of the government and the ambient politics of the moment — then, I do not think this can be a good thing for the civil rights of people on either side of the border.)

Check out the pictures. Scary stuff. I thought it was fucked up enough when these clowns were just hanging around the San Diego airport harassing people. Now they’re hanging around the border, with guns. How long before someone gets killed?

Comments (3)

April 14, 2005

Taxes are done, cold’s on the mend, no more excuses. By May 15th, via Jenn:

1. Finish revising “Finisterra” for F&SF.
2. Write a pirate story to read at WisCon.
3. Post at least two “Irrational Histories.“

After all, it’s not like I don’t have to get this stuff done anyway.

Comments (1)

April 11, 2005

Apparently this is not as easy as it looks.

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Still sick. No takers yet on my offer.

Comments (0)

I have taken my vows and from now on I will be addressed as Brother Gatling Gun of Seeing All Sides of The Question. Fear our calm, well-reasoned discussions of the issues! Prepare to shake hands with strangers! Glory to the Unitarian Jihad!

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Also, I will, without reservation, make one act of worship, gratis, to the first celestial being who can cure this absolute bastard of a head cold I picked up this weekend.

Comments (4)

April 8, 2005

Has anyone looked at whether there’s a relationship between the last couple of decades’ mysterious US labor productivity growth and the last couple of decades’ not at all mysterious increase in risk and income volatility for the US middle class?

I’m not enough of an economist to even posit a model here, but all that productivity’s got to be coming from somewhere, and the shift of risk from institutions onto individuals seems as likely a factor as any.

Comments (2)

The first rule of Book Club . . . you get the idea. (It goes on from there.)

Comments (1)

April 6, 2005

 . . . whoever he his. The man himself (via Amardeep Singh quoting Saul Bellow quoting Grillet):

Fifty years of disease, the death notice signed many times over by the serious essayists . . . yet nothing has managed to knock [character] off the pedestal on which the 19th century had placed it. It is a mummy now, but one still enthroned with the same phony majesty, among the values revered by traditional criticism.

Somebody talking about the man on Bookforum:

In a book of critical essays, For a New Novel (1963), and by the example of his own now canonical novels The Voyeur (1955), Jealousy (1957), and In the Labyrinth (1959), Robbe-Grillet pointed the way toward a fiction that eschewed psychological motivation in favor of pure, almost analytical description of physical reality. [Emphasis added.]

Now who does that sound like? Well, I don’t have anyone in particular in mind, to tell you the truth, but somebody should find ’em and put ’em in a jar with Robbe-Grillet and shake it to make ’em fight.

Comments (2)

April 5, 2005

On the Pope’s death and/or legacy: I have no position.

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Update: But I will say that papabile is a cool word.

Especially if you make it an English word and pronounce it pape-able. (Rhymes with capable.)

(As for the suggested English equivalent, pope-able: I wave my paw and say “Bah.”)

Comments (4)

April 1, 2005

Seems unaccountably to have been left off of Mr. Vedfamner’s list.

(In all seriousness, that’s a damned funny list, at least for anyone who pays attention to this stuff. I only wish I’d thought to mock up a cover for ASYBAS.)

Comments (1)