Paper is kindly, because it teaches this humility and opens one’s eyes to the vacuity of the ego. Someone who writes a page and, half an hour later while waiting for a bus, realizes that he understands nothing, not even what he has just written, learns to recognize his own inconsequence, and as he dwells upon the fatuity of his own page realizes that each person takes his own lucubrations to be the center of the universe. And there you have it in a nutshell — everybody does. And perhaps the writer has a fraternal feeling towards that myriad of everybodies who, like him, fancy they are souls elect as they trundle their whims towards the grave; perhaps he realizes how stupid it is, in our common, jostling rush towards nothingness, to do each other injury. Writers constitute a universal secret order, a freemasonry, a Grand Lodge of stupidity. It is no coincidence that they themselves, from Jean Paul to Musil, have been the ones to compose essays and eulogies on Stupidity. (Claudio Magris, Danube)

“In 1998, the Modern Library named To the Lighthouse No. 15, on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century…The book outsold all Woolf’s previous novels, and the proceeds enabled the Woolfs to buy a cat.”

Gyula Krúdy: Seduction and Innocence

There is a venerable tradition of being critical of nationalism and its assumptions. Nationalism proposes that a person’s freedom is justly maximized if the obligations limiting that freedom are set by the group with which he has most in common—i.e., his nation. A Frenchwoman’s freedom is best entrusted to a French government. Cosmopolitanism, by contrast, proposes that, as an ethical and therefore political matter, a person can belong only in a global community. Therefore a person’s freedom is qualified by obligations to others arising irrespective of the nationality or proximity of the other, or—nodding to the contribution of Emmanuel Levinas—l’autre.

…Writers, in order to produce something truly worthwhile, must be ruled only by their deepest impulses, which can come from anywhere and lead in a million valuable directions. But it does seem that those who internalize the new world have every chance of writing something newly interesting.

Read the whole essay here.

Or something. In any case. The folks who do the National Book Award are doing a blog countdown of their 60 77 winners over 60 years (celebrating their 60th anniversary, natch). An entry a day, on one of the biggies. Today, one of my favorites (and I realize one of the only in the list I’ve actually read), Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm:

He was obsessed by the paradoxical guilt of those who have nothing, in a postwar America where having mattered a great deal. “If you don’t have anything you’re nothing,” Mr. Dennis tells Barbara Loden in the film Wanda. “You might as well be dead.” Algren would have been moved by Wanda’s plight, though he chose, famously, Simone de Beauvoir, and a taste for women who think abstractly leaks through in The Man with the Golden Arm. The men, Frankie and Sparrow, are all action and hustle, and their thoughts are dominated by plans, constantly modified. The women—Zosh, Violet and Molly-O—are more dreamily cut off from their environment, like the limp, white curtain, a singular image of freshness, that hangs in Molly-O’s window…

IN the ravening years of the Celtic Tiger we had a dinner-party competition to define the figure most representative of the suddenly prosperous Ireland we so bafflingly found ourselves in. Someone came up with “a non-tax-paying businessman’s trophy wife.” This seemed right, and as time went on we added more and more details; at last count we had arrived at “a non-tax-paying businessman’s trophy wife driving her 14-year-old daughter to her drug rehabilitation session in an S.U.V. at 60 miles an hour down a bus lane while speaking on her cellphone, smoking a cigarette and making a rude gesture at a passing cyclist.” Over the past couple of weeks, however, the game has lost its savor. As one dinner guest murmured, “That poor little girl.”

Naturally, the question: Who was/is the States? (or, if you’re here, Germany).

Maybe uniquely, he had an ability to write with incredible empathy about emotional swamps, while making it rib-splittingly funny and moving at the same time. It’s hard for me to remember laughing as hard at any other book; and yet the same book was full of deeply sympathetic character studies and an analytic eye that dissected or prophesied about modern media culture as well as anything I’ve ever read.

His later fiction never reached that peak (though if you haven’t read his essays, go right now and buy them all). One story in particular, the Depressed Girl, annoyed me, because it seemed he’d lost or willfully abandoned the sympathetic insight he’d had into emotionally drained or clinically depressed people.

Now maybe I understand it differently. That was the side of himself that he hated and feared. And which ultimately killed him.

Charlie Rose has a few interviews posted with him from the 1990s. The one here, following the publication of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never do Again is heartbreaking, given the context.

Which leads to this point. Reading this article on the growing branch of “neuroeconomics” (economists that actually look inside the brain, with MRIs and such, to see what’s happening in the course of an economic decision). It strikes me that a pretty simple evolutionary argument exposes a serious flaw in much of classical liberal (or conservative, in modern parlance) economics.

There’s an exercise called the “ultimatum game,” which behavioral economists use to study people’s preferences. Two people. A set sum of money, say $100, to be split between the two. Person A is given the right to set the distribution split, without any limits. She can say 50-50, for example, or 90-10. The only limit is that B has to agree. If B in fact agrees, they both get whatever cash A has doled out. If B disagrees, both get nothing.

A perfectly rational B, (classical economics’ rational actor) should in theory accept even a radically uneven (90-10) split, because he is getting a free $10. The fact that A is getting $90 shouldn’t matter, all other things being even (another big assumption, but skip that for a little while). In fact, studies show that B rejects a very large proportion of uneven splits, apparently because they seem unfair.

Irrational by “rational actor” standards, sure. But it strikes me that an evolutionary analysis shows why this is perfectly rational, even inevitable, from a genetic perspective. As Richard Dawkins (“The Selfish Gene“) describe, genes themselves clearly don’t have conscious preferences. However, behavior can evolve, as in the case of genetic-driven behavior which successfully allows an individual to accumulate more resources, which translates into greater ability to reproduce (more nuts gathered, for example, means that a larger number of offspring can be supported), and thus a wider propagation of that particular gene or genetic pattern.

Clearly, in a world of limited resources, there is competition for resources. Every individual would be best served by being in the position of the game’s A, getting more resources than her rival. In a strictly economic perspective, B’s getting a free $10 is a good thing, and should be accepted regardless of the unfair split. But in an evolutionary perspective, a gene (or gene-driven behavior) which happily accepted the 10 percent split while a rival took 90 percent, wouldn’t last. The A group, with more resources, would propagate at a much higher rate, and ultimately drive the B’s out.

It’s a bit more complicated than that, of course. A rise in the proportion of As probably wouldn’t be stable itself. But what might be stable is the rise of B’s who had evolved a sense of being cheated — who would reject the 90-10 split, leaving both parties with nothing, leaving them both poor but equal. From B’s perspective of evolutionary survival, equal at zero is better than being a little bit better off absolutely, but having less resources than A.

I’m sure evolutionary-minded economists have puzzled this all out before. But it has interesting consequences for thinking about our consumption decisionns, and our preferences for a fair vs. unequal society. The conservative argument that it is OK if the rich get very rich, as long as the poor get a little better off in absolute terms, probably violates a kind of internal fairness system we’ve developed over the years in order to keep ourselves alive. So much for “rational actor.”

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

So, fellow writers, fellow readers, throw up your hands in defeat, the iPod generation has triumphed. Burning books is so twentieth century, we will simply declare reading to be a waste of time, a marketplace irrelevance, and move on.

What a prick.

(via Appalachian Geek, who has much smarter things than I to say about it)

I read this with an initial twinge of irritation and sadness. I love hardback books, what reader or writer doesn’t? They’re beautiful, solid, lasting, and look good on a shelf. Sometimes they even have resale value.

And yet. About ten seconds later, I realized this could be some of the best news to hit the publishing industry in some time.  Here’s why, nicely wrapped up in one rival publisher’s comment:

Rival publishers described it as “a seismic change”. “Hardback then paperback has been the model for 60 years,” said Dan Franklin, the veteran publisher at Jonathan Cape.

What kind of business model doesn’t change for 60 years? I’m as book-y as they come; and yet I scour used bookstores for paperbacks, the same way everyone I know does. Hardback books aren’t serving the mass market, and they aren’t serving the writers who produce them.

When my co-author and I did our first (and as yet only, but wait…) book, it was hardback only. We were shocked at the discounts, shocked at the haphazard marketing dollars spent, shocked that our publishers had no interest in moving it to paperback, despite the fact that our core audience was mostly unlikely to shell out for hardback. We’re still trying to get the rights back so we can publish an updated version ourselves.

Publishers simply haven’t adapted to a market that has changed very, very radically in 60 years, and probably most in the last five. This is a step in the right direction, even if it’s a little sad. So be it. If my next book (fingers crossed) comes out only in paperback and digital form, I won’t shed any tears.