1Q84 is a lot of fun – isn’t that enough?

Not, apparently, for Scott Esposito. His review demolishes the novel. He calls the characters “cardboard cutouts,” mocks the prose as leaden and cliched, and argues that Murakami hasn’t said anything new in years. All failings for any novel, to be sure, but ones that grate particularly on Scott’s nerves, because 1Q84, in his view, is so “ambitious,” meaning he and others want so much from it.

What is an “ambitious” work of fiction, anyway? I see this term used all the time, and I’m never sure. Here, I presume Scott just means “long.” Certainly Murakami isn’t trying, as he’s done in the past, to offer some new way to understand Japan’s World War II atrocities, or help anyone understand any other “big issue.” He’s doing what he’s said in interviews he meant to do: tell the story of two people who fall in love, are separated, then spend their lives searching for one another. That’s the backbone of 1Q84, and finding out what happens to them is the main reason I’ve kept reading for the 400 or so pages I’ve read so far. And I’ve done so eagerly – much more eagerly than I read After dark or Kafka on the shore, two recent Murakami works that I, like Scott, found dull.

Is it enough for a book to be highly readable – for the plot to carry it along, and make the pages fly by? Not for Scott, and I wonder if he’s fallen into the trap of equating a book’s importance with the importance, or at least the current-events-peggedness, of what the author is writing about. I hate when critics do that. Neither do I care much for books in which the author tries to make his book succeed, by writing from the headlines, and to his readers’ feelings about them. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, for example, is for me a despicably condescending book that says no more than “Hey! I’m a young’un writing about The Collapse of Communism and THE HOLOCAUST! Look at me!” Murakami’s never done anything like that, thank God. But I wonder if Scott wants this, or at least wants the fun wrapped around some big issue, as it were, lending it the perceived significance that makes him feel he’s not wasting his reading time.

Of course the fun might just not there for Scott. I can understand that. There’s no accounting for taste in fun. I can understand too if Scott’s problem is that he’s had enough of Murakami’s prose. (I don’t read Japanese, but I’ll take Murakami, a fluent English speaker, at his word when he says Jay Rubin’s English is entirely faithful to the style and feel of the original.) Calling it clunky is charitable. Murakami seems to love cliches, too, or expressions so artless they should be cliches – witness the repeated references, in 1Q84 to “the gears of the world clicking forward,” and the greeting-card reminders that “once one of the world’s gears clicks forward, it can’t be clicked back.”*

And yet… Murakami’s artlessness is an artifice, I think. Or at least it works as one. And it’s a good one. It disarms. Much of his fiction – heck, all of his fiction – only works if you read it as coming from someone with the mind and worldview of a precocious teenager. But not the Jonathan Safran Foer type, who uses words to show off – rather, the type whose thoughts far outstrip his ability to put them into words. And who doesn’t care to push on that score, because communicating with others, and gaining their respect, are way down low on the personal priority list. For me, Murakami’s prose works very well, as a device for getting his readers to identify with this way of thinking, and understand the value of the inward, contemplative life of which it seems, for him, to be an essential part.

What about the characters? Are they “cardboard cutouts”? Well, one man’s cardboard cutouts are another man’s Rhett and Scarlett. Tengo and Aomame lead lives in which contemplation plays a central role – and as a result, they relate poorly to others, and do so as infrequently as they can manage. Does this make them lifeless? Not to me. I find them and their stories compelling. Sure, there’s all the usual Murakami stuff: distant and overly stern parents, a cult here, a failure to seize love there, and everywhere, missed connections that at once screw up lives and make them meaningful. There are odd-shaped ears and pubescent breasts. O.k.. But there are no boys in wells! At least not in the first 400 pages.

And the plot? What’s to say? A boy and girl meet, fall in love, long for years to get together, then set to searching for one another. There’s some stuff about living in an alternate universe, a bisexual policewoman… But as Murakami has said, it’s a simple story. And one that’s a lot of fun to read. Maybe he “doesn’t have anything to say.” But so much of what “has something to say” is bullshit. More Murakami, I say, and less Jonathan Safran Foer, and the world would be a better place.

* – I’m paraphrasing here. The exact wording may be different. The cliches are so bad, I’m not going to bother looking them up, because that would mean I’d have to read them again.

Was Steve Jobs not an innovator?

Apparently that’s the contention of Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece on Jobs, according to this Silicon Valley Insider post. I’m about a decade behind in my effort to keep up with reading the New Yorkers that are stacked next to our coffee table, so I haven’t read the thing myself. But I wonder if Gladwell is using a good definition of “innovation.” Ideas are easy to come up with, and while it’s more difficult to turn new ideas into prototypes and first-gen products, neither task, it seems to me, is nearly as easy as turning new ideas into successful products. And judging by the successful of such Apple products as the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, doing this requires a whole series of innovations, albeit in somewhat less glamorous areas such as marketing, engineering, manufacturing, etc.. And of course design, in which Apple – which is to say, in recent years, the Ives-Jobs team – is certainly an innovator.

If students demand credentials, but want to
save money, why shouldn’t colleges
offer two degrees for the price of one?

You’ll often hear that grad school is the place where students actually learn things they’ll need in their jobs. So perhaps colleges will start competing for students by offering more “straight to the master’s” programs. These programs would take no or only a little more time, and cost no or only a bit more money, than traditional BA programs. Students would come out with a symbolic BA or BS, and a meaningful master’s. To get them through in four or five years, colleges would simply strip out undergraduate electives and all but a few “breadth” requirements.

“Second-tier” schools, hurting for tuition revenue, might be the first to try this system. But I can see it quickly being picked up by other schools – especially state schools under pressure from legislators who want in-state students to get more value for their tuition dollars.

Of course there would still be plenty of four-year liberal arts programs generating grads who need to go to grad school, or work for a few years, to learn job skills. But they could lose a lot of market share to “straight to the master’s” programs, because the latter would offer students both better value, and superior signaling power. Grads of both programs would emerge with the requisite pair of diplomas to hang on their office walls. But employers might well see completing a “straight to the master’s” program as a signal of greater seriousness than that shown by those with traditional BAs. Perhaps some schools would add on a paying internship at the end of the program, to make graduates even more appealing to employers.

The secret to Murakami’s fiction

I’m re-reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and while some sections are time-marking and others put over ideas that are puerile, overall I’m enjoying it at least as much as the first time I read it, which must have been ten years ago. What strikes me about it, as about so much of Murakami’s work, is that its effect is dependent on its being fantastic yet everyday, and at the same time utterly lacking both arch-ness and silliness. If he fell into arch, he’d be sophomoric; if he went for silly, he’d be… I don’t know, “junioric”? He’d be a Dadaist – “yes, the world is seemingly rational but underneath everything is nuts so let’s treat it as a big joke.” I’m exaggerating for effect, of course. But that’s it. Neither arch nor Dada-ist, and thus laying the foundation for the reader to enjoy, simply, and read in wonderment. And wonderment not so much at the particulars of his imagined worlds, as of the workings of his imagination, and – more significantly, I think – the possibilities of other worlds, hidden in our own.

And that’s the point of the Times article on Murakami that came out yesterday, right? I’m not so sure… The piece irritates me, because it treats Murakami’s ideas, and imagination, as the thing. And indeed they’re impressive – but the author makes no note, and perhaps takes no notice himself, that Murakami’s real art is in writing fiction that, yes, combines the everyday and the fantastic, but also, critically – and perhaps uniquely – does so in a very particular way. And this way opens interpretative possibilities, for ordinary readers, that are, I think, both far greater and far more interesting than those opened by other mainstream fiction.

Is the Win8 UI way-cool – or fundamentally
misconceived?

John Dvorak is a curmudgeon, so it’s no surprise that amid all the (more or less) positive buzz about the look and feel of Windows 8, he says he hates it and wants Microsoft to ditch the Metro UI. But at least in its latest version, his argument is more than the rationalization of a knee-jerk reaction. Rather, he points out that for all its visual pizzazz, Metro is, in an important respect, much less usable than the current Windows desktop. The problem, in his eyes, is the replacement of click-to-launch icons with tiles.

Choosing beauty and hipness over meaning

It’s the tiles that have gotten everyone all excited about Metro. Many think they show that Microsoft doesn’t just acknowledge the possibility of a non-PC future, but embraces it. And they’re certainly visually arresting.

But a colored tile doesn’t “say” anything to the average user, absent his or her having used it for a while. To figure out what you’ll get when you click on it, you have to done that a bunch of times already. Or you have to have customized it with content you’ve chosen and formatted. In either case, a serious time investment is needed, to get to the point where you can see, grok, and click a tile as quickly as you can, when you see, say, the Word, Excel, or Outlook icons, on the current Windows desktop. Assuming, of course, that “you” means the average user. Or John Dvorak.

No respect

What’s odd about Microsoft’s move to tiles isn’t just that it brings a phone UI to the desktop. It’s also counter to Microsoft’s tradition of respecting users’ existing habits. Many features, of many Microsoft UIs, seem to exist only because people are used to them.

There’s a good reason for Microsoft to go this route. It shows respect for users, and acknowledges that learning to use applications and their features is difficult and time-consuming. If people have already spent a lot of time and effort learning one way to do something, Microsoft generally doesn’t force them to learn a new way. Even if, in the abstract, the new way is clearly “better.”

A hybrid approach

Desktop icons are the quintessential example a feature you’d think Microsoft would want to keep, for just this reason. Yet they’re gone in Windows 8. What’s odd is that they could easily have been preserved as part of a very phone-like UI. Android phones and the iPhone, after all, use icons arrayed on a field, or rather a set of fields, that we might, in another context, call a “desktop.” Why weren’t those UIs the model here?

The bubble, or the iron fist

It seems unlikely that at a place like Microsoft, artists – or rather, designers – got the upper hand over programmers, as Dvorak suggests. Perhaps the Windows team lives in a bubble where no one uses anything but Win7 phones. Or perhaps someone powerful decided that Windows needs to be roped into an all-hands-on-deck effort to establish the Win7 phone UI as the new standard for every device. As Dvorak suggested earlier this year, the latter seems likely, given Microsoft’s longstanding commitment to the goal of maintaining UI consistency across devices.

Microsoft has done something like this before – recall its jump from DOS to Windows. That move too was driven by opportunism and a willingness to borrow (or steal) rather than innovate. But back then, it chose the right model – the Mac OS. Not following Android or iOS is, at best, an odd decision. And one that, as Dvorak points out, may well be a big mistake.

Writing isn’t really about writing

Tyler Cowen notes that the Argentine government is considering giving subsidies to writers, because their work is important, yet they’re so often so poor.

This prompted me to wonder not “Who’ll be the first to game this system?” but rather, “What will be the criteria by which the government will decide whom to subsidize?” That is, “Who is a writer?”

Writing isn’t really about writing. “Writing” is, in the received definition, about shaping a society’s thoughts, by providing some interesting mix of three elements: good analysis of a topic, situation, or cast of characters; a compelling dramatization thereof; and.some interesting descriptions. Writers seemed so special, for so long, because the written word was long the main means of delivering this mix, and first the time and the tools to write, and then access to the means of disseminating writing, were so hard, or expensive, to get.

But now this mix can be delivered in many more forms, which many, many more people have the time and tools both to create, and to disseminate. So writers don’t seem so special. And while writing – indeed good writing – is now everywhere and very cheap to get, book sales and the number of paying writing jobs, traditionally the means of judging the health of “writing,” are way down.

Should we subsidize writers? Because we traditionally equate the state of ‘writing” with the state of culture, many would say we should. But the answer to this question should be the same as the answer to the question, “Did you pay to read a blog such as Marginal Revolution, which contains much excellent writing, and does so much to shape our society’s thoughts?” Or the answer to the question, “Did you pay to read the great fiction and poetry, that you find on sites such as failbetter.com?”

Would drug legalization really
end Mexico’s crime problems?

A number of people have made this argument and on its face it makes sense. Criminalization makes any activity much more dangerous, by stripping legal guarantees, and law enforcement protection, from those who engage in it. So they hire their own guns and often end up using them, to resolve disputes that could otherwise be resolved by lawyers or cops. The history of US prohibition bears out the idea that by legalizing a banned but popular activity, government can reduce crime around it. And if the US legalizes weed, Mexico could legalize weed production – theoretically undercutting the crime wave whose locus is the Mexican drug industry.

But would Mexico really turn into a giant, tranquil weed farm? I wonder. Mexico’s problems strike me as having more to do with effects of the protracted, agonizingly slow collapse of an authoritarian regime. That regime – like Russia’s now, or Japan’s, postwar – maintained power in part by coopting, and taking a cut from the work of those economic enterprises it could control, and muscling the rest out of business. And look at the nationalization of the Mexican petroleum and banking sectors for examples of what happened when businesses were too big and powerful to be easily controlled. Look too at the long, entrenched tradition of corruption, with officials shaking down anyone and everyone, by threatening to use broad, if often vaguely defined powers to shut down businesses, either directly or by bringing businesspeople in front of courts with little power.

This can all happen because in Mexico, as in contemporary Russia and postwar Japan, there is an absence of a strong tradition of powerful private propertyholders being independent of traditional political authority. Also, critically, there is a longstanding and deep suspicion of the idea – commonly accepted in the first world – that economic power should be translatable, to some meaningful degree, into political power.

What does this all have to do with drugs? Even if Mexico legalizes pot production and distribution, wouldn’t “legal” pot growers and sellers still have difficulties protecting and expanding their businesses, safeguarding their earnings, and their workers? Look, again, at the examples I noted above. In both cases, an authoritarian regime’s collapse did not lead to the collapse of anti-private property attitudes, or the tradition of the shakedown. Mexico’s newly legal pot business would still have to deal with these problems. If it stays as lucrative as it is now, these problems would continue to be severe. And would lead, necessarily, to pot work continuing to be militarized to a real degree.

There is one factor that would mitigate against this: recent years have seen more political competition and freer speech in Mexico than was the case under the PRI old regime. This development would lessen legal pot businesses’ problems with big-ticket shakedowns and fixed court cases. Large-scale corruption can no longer easily be hidden. Nor can elections be easily fixed, as before, to ensure that corrupt officials aren’t punished at the ballot box. Also unlikely is the creation of some state pot monopoly, a la Pemex – this wouldn’t go over in the new Mexico.

Over time, private economic activity, and its being turned into political power, seems likely to become more acceptable in Mexico – otherwise there would have been no Vicente Fox. But formal legal changes won’t make this happen. A change in attitudes, not formal legal protections, will make pot business more secure, and end Mexico’s crime wave.

The key will be the emergence of a new, broadly accepted equilibrium, between a changed business sector and a changed political sector. That’s how Japan settled down, after a postwar period of rampant, business-related crime and corruption. Businesspeople and politicians found a new ways to work with one another, in a fashion that was both non-violent, and broadly acceptable within a culture that had changed significantly from the pre-war period, but was still recognizably of a piece with it, including as regards attitudes toward economic activity and its relationship to politics. The same too will happen in Russia, and indeed has already begun to happen.

* – Another example of how culture, not law, is the key to a lucrative business not being crimeridden: Humboldt County. Hello! I can’t believe I just thought of this one. Pot is illegal, yet there’s no ongoing Humboldt’s huge pot industry hasn’t led to any chronic crime wave – or any crime wave a all. Growing and using pot is accepted, and so is the idea of resolving business disputes through non-violent means. Even if the business is nominally illegal. Culture rules, there and elsewhere.

Do literary writers now constitute a guild?

I have been wondering about this, in the wake of reading the “MFA vs NYC” article from Slate, and this fascinating Walter Russell Mead piece on contemporary intellectuals. As MFA programs hire an ever greater percentage of literary writers, and work together to draw up and enforce more uniform hiring standards, including, critically, central peer-review criteria, the supply side, as it were, is being brought under control in a way, and by a group, that makes clear that group’s ambition to lawyer- and doctor-like guild status. But what about the demand side? That’s where their effort comes up short, and, I assume, will continue to do so. New York publishers may well lend a hand by paying more and more attention to quasi-guild membership criteria, in deciding what to publish. But many readers will continue to ignore those criteria, in deciding what to read. And, of course, they have other leisure-time options. I think the end result will be the cocooning, and shrinking, of traditional literary writing as both an endeavor and a community, with its members steadily losing influence even as they shrink further into the embrace of the university. Much like traditional journalists, if you’re looking for an easy parallel – another would-be guild that never managed to close the deal with those who use its products.

The continued decline of the Times, or…

That’s one possible takeaway from this story, reporting that the Times company’s market cap is down so much, it’s now the smallest corporation in the S+P 500. And certainly, as I’ve noted, the Times is having a lot of problem, like every other big media company, adapting to the ongoing electronicization of publishing. But I think that this might not be the best takeaway. Rather, we should see this development as evidence that media is becoming so fragmented that even the best, traditionally most influential media organizations can no longer dominate the field – either as a business, or as an opinion-shaper. And whatever we think of the Times, that can’t possibly be bad.

Does Brian Sabean have a plan?

Rob Neyer thinks not. Neyer’s had it out for Sabean for a long time, like a lot of sabermetrically inclined analysts. But is Neyer right in implying that dumb luck, and before that, Barry Bonds, whom Sabean didn’t sign, have been enough to make him look good? Maybe. True, these Giants also have four quite good starters, Buster Posey, and a great bullpen, including a closer who doesn’t give up homeruns… And while Huff and Burrell have worked out, other “proven veteran”-type signings haven’t done so in the past. Also there is the fact that the Giants play in a crummy division, and faced the barely-good Braves in the first round. So maybe Neyer is right.