In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood

Twofer

As a follow-up to my comments last week on Glenn’s oddly kissy-kissy relationship with National Review, I found one of several comments at InstaPundit where he says “I am not a conservative”. In fact, he says he’s a “Whig”. Farther down, he says

UPDATE: Reader Tyler Boswell writes: "The Whig party, huh? So that explains your hair in the pic." Ouch. No, for better or worse, that's all mine.

Well, I’ve got to say that once I went in to a barber who, though not very coherent, kept insisting that my (real, if steadily sparser) hair was a toupee, so I’ll grant that it’s possible to err over such a call. But Glenn? Uh-uh. All I can think is that he orders his hairpieces through amazon.com.

And of course, calling himself a “Whig” is a dodge, too, although that post was from 2002. For instance, does he mean an English Whig, or a US, pre-Republican Whig? He doesn’t say, so here he’s basically being cute but meaningless. Nothing new for our boy, of course.

Earlier this year, he sorta-kinda called himself (in the context of plugging another National Review hack, Rod Dreher), a “libertarian transhumanist”, though again it’s weasel-worded in such a way that he can claim he wasn’t really calling himself one. “Libertarian transhumanists”, though, are the fringe.

Even so, soon after last week’s Instalanche of thanks to NRO for plugging his book once again, he pays back Jonah Goldberg, too. For a guy who isn’t a conservative, he sure spends a lot of time and effort keeping NRO on the reservation. This, it seems to me, says a lot both about his and NRO’s sense of integrity.

New Essay Up At New Partisan

There's a new essay by me up at New Partisan: "Hemingway -- That Shit! Reconsidering The Sun Also Rises".

Still Smarting!

Our boy is still smarting from the Rosen review of his book in The New Republic. Now he says TNR attacked both him and Kos "from the right". I simply didn't see that in the Rosen review: she mostly complained that all Reynolds brought to the party was "Heh", "Indeed", and "Read the whole thing". In his earlier whine about Rosen, he decided she did the hatchet job because she somehow has ties to Leon Kass, who has advocated policies on stem cell research that transhumanists feel are unfriendly. (However, the laws of physics are also unfriendly to transhumanists; would someone who supports Isaac Newton and disagrees with Reynolds be attacking him from the right?)

It's fascinating that the guy is so busy trying to rationalize that one bad review that he can't ignore.

Friday Train Fun

I took this photo in 1996 from the window of the Napa Valley Wine Train:

At the time, there was still a lot of opposition to the idea of tourists riding a lunch/dinner train through the Napa Valley. It's interesting that the anti-Wine Train signs were on growers' property. My wife and I visited again in 2004 and 2005, and sentiment toward the Wine Train seems to have changed: no more in-your-face signs aimed at the riders. While the anti-Wine Train signs were gone, in 2004 there were many signs supporting Republican candidates (at the state level, a largely futile gesture). The truly rich people, who live farther up on the hillsides, had no published opinion on the Wine Train (but likely hated it) and were almost certainly Democrats.

On the other hand, there's much more traffic on the parallel highway, and certainly more accidents, as inebriated tourists weave from tasting room to tasting room in their cars. The Wine Train brings money into the Napa Valley much more neatly and is certainly the most comfortable and safest way to tour it. Most residents, I suspect, have slowly come to recognize this.

The Wine Train is also my idea of a democratic tourist attraction. There are three classes of meal service, so there's a price point available to pretty much everyone, and it shows in the clientele: local people, US, and international tourists all ride. The whole operation is very well run, and it gives people their money's worth. These days, I would guess that it's only the truly wealthy up the hill who are against it, although there was a case of arson in their storage yard fairly recently, and security guys in unmarked cars escort the train on the parallel highway, just in case.

What Can Be On Their Minds At NRO?

As of yesterday, Glenn was still smarting from that almost unique, honest bad review of Army of Davids in The New Republic. But it made him feel better that National Review put his book at the top of their summer reading list.

This is puzzling, but it’s an indication of how Reynolds gets where he gets. Consider this: as Whittaker Chambers once pointed out in the very pages of National Review, in the essay I cited earlier this week, Ayn Rand wasn’t an ally of conservatives. As James Taranto has said multiple times, much more recently, libertarians, the philosophical direct successors to Ayn Rand, are basically nuts and no allies of conservatives. (To be as clear as I can, I don’t consider myself a conservative, and I’m certainly not a libertarian, so I don’t have a dog in this fight.)

Reynolds is a self-described libertarian. His views only occasionally match the editorial positions of National Review, and those are where both are pretty nutty: NR, for instance, has long favored legalizing narcotics, as has Reynolds. But NR favors pulling out of Iraq; Reynolds doesn’t. Reynolds, as a libertarian, favors legalized abortion; NR, as a nominally Catholic magazine, favors restrictions. Indeed, Reynolds, insofar as he has religious views, is a transhumanist, and he frequently endorses the views of cranks like Raymond Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey that we will soon “cure” death and old age, rendering the pieties of Catholics and others moot.

Reynolds in his book is pro-pornography, even for kids (he isn’t completely clear on what he means by this); NR favors restrictions. Reynolds, as a libertarian, favors highly limited government (and his anti-pork views aren’t fully ingenuous; any stick will do to beat the dog of taxes in any form). Buckley and NR pioneered the “big government conservative” view that, as long as taxes were high anyhow, they should be spent lavishly on defense. Reynolds is pro-gay rights; NR is quite angry about gays.

So what on earth can be on National Review’s mind in plugging Reynolds’s book as it has? (And see the earlier review there, too.) Reynolds, it seems to me, is a crank hiding beneath a cheap hairpiece and behind a mask of affability. In fact, I’ve said several times he’s a scandal waiting to happen: at some point, as it’s done with Kos already, some aspect of Reynolds’s nuttiness and poor judgment is going to come out and tar whomever’s been playing footsie with him. Yet, both in the blogosphere and the old media, there were at least a dozen fawning reviews of his book that were completely unwarranted: the intellectual vacuity, the apologia for transhumanism, the endorsement of violent video games and porno for all, the “comfy chair revolution”, weren’t exactly concealed. Other than Andrew Keen’s review in The Weekly Standard, which Reynolds completely ignored on his site, the Rosen review in The New Republic is the only one that said what sensible people should have been saying all along.

It can’t really be that people think Reynolds is on their side. Instalanches as bribes, though, cost Reynolds little and have a disproportionate effect on bloggers and old-media writers who can be flattered by the bogus “attention”. As a result, he hypnotized a wide range of reviewers, and he paid them off with Instalanches plus the implied promise of more in the future if they toe the line. This is one of the narcissistic traits that the sites I’ve mentioned discuss: narcissists develop a whole network of flunkies, patsies, enablers, useful idiots, and ventriloquists’ dummies to do their dirty work. What's happened with all the good reviews of such a bad book is an illustration of how flattery and pseudo-favors can accomplish this.

More On Blogs And Narcissism

Andrew Sullivan makes the same point I made about the Rosen review of An Army of Davids: the mainstream media is waking up over blogging and realizing God won’t strike them dead if they actually say that the bloggers are just a pack of cards.

The MSM is beginning to understand the potential of this new medium and coopt it. Nothing wrong with that. We are at the dawn of this medium. And it hasn't begun to teach us its ultimate potential yet. Sometimes we have to make mistakes and pursue blind alleys to figure it out.

He also mentions Jason Leopold, an interesting and largely unremarked case of someone who’s done bogus reporting in both the old and the new media. There’s nothing special about blogs or blog-like web sites that protects them from laziness, in-groupery, or dishonesty. Despite Reynolds’s claim that the blogosphere is self-correcting, blogs haven’t picked up on stories that reflect on the credibility of major bloggers, like Erin O’Connor’s denunciation of the tenure system (brought on largely by the attention being given to Invisible Adjunct at the time), her leave from her tenured post, and her subsequent, very quiet return to that tenured position at Penn. Nor has there been much comment on what it means that she’s become a shill for the Republican-connected Association of College Trustees and Alumni. (This, by the way, would be a violation of journalistic ethics if an old-media reporter were to do the same.)

There’s been very, very little mention, for that matter, of the Mark Steyn plagiarism case. It seems to be isolated so far as anyone can tell, but the circumstances aren’t any different from accusations brought with some success against Doris Kearns Goodwin. It’s probably moot, since Steyn appears to be burning out – but it’s interesting that so few bloggers have brought it up. The blogosphere is simply not self-correcting, and not only that, it doesn’t pick up on old-media peccadilloes if the old-media guy is a homie.

Narcissism interests me a great deal. I’ve said before that I’m not completely comfortable with the term, and I’m definitely uncomfortable with the idea that you’ve solved anything simply by calling someone a narcissist. “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” wasn’t an official disorder until 1980, and, like the related problem of psychopathy, it’s not fully understood. Before narcissism became a popular term, I was looking at people at work and in professional organizations and calling them, for want of anything better, “agenda people”. Somehow they were working their way into key positions and using the positions not so much for traditional goals like money or sex, but simply for attention, playing a self-glorifying role on a little stage and in the process wasting everyone else’s time. The ones I was identifying as “agenda people”, I now think, were what many would now call narcissists.

There are two fairly good web sites on narcissism, here and here. What I like about these sites is that, in various ways, they have what I would call both predictive and associative value. By listing narcissistic traits and discussing them with some insight, the sites do two things. They can help predict what a narcissist will do next: if I know someone who has shown several narcissistic traits, I can have some confidence that the individual will display others. Or, by looking at someone who shows certain narcissistic traits, I can go back over things they’ve done and recognize that other things that seemed puzzling to me at the time can be understood in the context of other narcissistic behavior. This is where I think you can gain something by using the term “narcissist”: it can have predictive value, and it can help you see puzzling behavior in context.

More anon.

At Last! The Emperor Wears A Cheap Hairpiece!

The Great Man is not a happy camper! A careful, non-fawning (though much belated) review of An Army of Davids by Christine Rosen in The New Republic is, by Glenn’s lights, a “hatchet job”.

[I]t's a bit hard to discern a storyline beyond her dislike of InstaPundit, me, and the prospect -- which I don't actually advance in the book, and have quite explicitly disclaimed on InstaPundit -- that professional journalists and pundits will be replaced by amateurs.

But on page 95 (I finally got a copy – a defective one, cheapest I could find) of An Army of Davids, our boy says

I don’t think that weblogs and flash media will replace Big Media any time soon. But I keep seeing evidence that they’re doing a better and better job of supplementing, and challenging, Big Media coverage. . . . Just another thing for the Old Media guys to worry about.

Glenn’s basically your normal narcissistic con artist, never quite saying something, never quite not saying it, and complaining that people who try to nail him down don’t like him. (And of course, he can’t figure out why!)

Actually, Rosen’s observations on Reynolds’s essential airheadedness are spot-on and simply haven’t been pointed out in reviews or blog posts (other than mine) to date:

After linking to an article on congressional earmarks, he'll add, "Well, that's encouraging. Sheesh." Quod erat demonstrandum. Or he'll carp, "Nancy Pelosi, on the other hand, is just dumb"--a point that may be perfectly true but probably requires some explanation or proof beyond the simple assertion. In the end, this method provides the intellectual horsepower of, say, an Andy Rooney commentary. To wit, he wrote in December, "A battery recall on the XM portables. Is it just me, or are we seeing more battery recalls lately." Well, no need for The New York Times, then.

If, as Reynolds predicts, the rise of the blogosphere comes at the expense of older institutions like newspapers and magazines, then he will shed no tears. That's because his libertarianism makes him a fervent believer in the wisdom of markets. But, in the market of opinions, can you count on talent and insight to triumph? The case of Reynolds--"Heh," "Indeed"--would suggest that the market for opinion doesn't make its judgments based on logical coherence or intellectual honesty. Reynolds's terse, almost meaningless commentary may make him the reductio ad absurdum of the blogosphere's worst tendencies. But these tendencies happen to be its ubiquitous ones.

Well, in Glenn’s view, the market is sorta-kinda the hit count, it seems to me. And he gets the hits from uncritical visitors, and certainly from the kind who click by several dozen times a day. “Heh”, I suspect, is pretty much all they can take. And Glenn just can’t figure out why Christine Rosen doesn’t like him! This is a guy who's been waved through every one of life's little obstacles: rich kid from the right family in a small town, Yale, got laid a lot in the summers, clerked for the right judge, associate in the right law firm, tenure at UTK Law School -- the same place where he grew up as a rich kid! And finally, months after it appeared, a bad, though brutally honest, review of his silly book.

Narcissists, however, don't grow up or listen to feedback, so don't look for any constructive result from this experience. Still, it's good to see journalists finally showing some backbone and pointing out that blogging's highly overrated.

More Ruminations On Blogs And Narcissism

Scott Adams claims to be nothing more than a cartoonist, and it’s true that his insights into society aren’t systematic. But they’re often quite good. The other day he took up the Shoe Salesman Economic Theory:

Today’s review of the headlines informs me that a sex offender tried to acquire an ice cream truck. In unrelated news, American Idol winner Ruben Studdard successfully sued his ex-manager for stealing money and credit cards.

These stories fit neatly into my economic theory that most salesmen of women’s shoes have foot fetishes. The theory is simple: People go wherever they can most easily fulfill their needs.

Sex offenders go where the kids are: ice cream trucks and churches. Criminals go where the money is: banks, CEO jobs, convenience stores, and celebrities.

All of a sudden, it dawned on me: narcissists go where the attention is. Some of them become celebrities, some become college professors, but many, many of them have blogs. Think about it: a central factor in blogging is the worship of the hit counter, a statistically unreliable, economically vapid running total that reflects nothing more than a relative measure of how much attention the blogger gets. Yesterday I cited Glenn Reynolds’s post

THE GLENN AND HELEN SHOW has been downloaded over 10 million times now. If we got just a dollar per download. . . .

I’m not sure if Glenn thought that whole thing through. If people had to pay for what he was providing, they wouldn’t buy it. And of course, he isn’t doing it for the money: he’s clearly doing it for the hit count. In fact, as an outside observer, it’s hard for me to avoid concluding that he – like many other alpha bloggers – is spending far more time on this “hobby” than he is on his job. And he’s probably pumping quite a bit of money into it, too; I strongly suspect that, despite all the blog ads and the book sales and the clickthroughs to Amazon, he’s making far less on the blog than he’d like people to think. His traffic monitor figures are public; his income statement isn’t. And frankly, the guy is so cheesy that if he could make himself look good with a positive income statement, I'm sure he'd find a way to make it public.

And of course, there’s the Technorati total and the TTLB Ecosystem, which are also completely unreliable, since they both miss as many blog links as they catch. But, even if unreliable, they serve bloggers’ essentially feckless purposes, in that they provide another indication of who’s paying attention (and absolutely nothing else) and, in the case of Technorati, an easy way to find out what people are saying about them. I’ve noted before that many bloggers Google themselves; still more regularly check Technorati. This is probably harmless some of the time, but in other cases I think it’s a manifestation of a more serious problem – though at a distance, and knowing only the very selective information people reveal about themselves on the Internet, there’s no way anyone can know when it’s pathological and when it’s not.

I’ll have more to say on this.

If It Cost Anything, This Wouldn't Be The Case

The great man notes that The Glenn and Helen Show has been downloaded 10 million times. Bored bloggers, it appears, will download anything that's free. The one time I listened, to hear the interview of Vernor Vinge, I found Helen's voice to be irritatingly regional, and indeed Glenn didn't seem sure if he was a good ol' boy or a Yalie, so he talked both ways as it suited him. The production values were remarkably amateurish -- so bad that you couldn't even solicit pledges to fund this stuff a la NPR. The consensus after the Yearly Kos (e.g., here) is that you can stick a fork in it, blogging's done. It's only the alpha bloggers who don't know it.

I Have A Used Batman

Last week I said my views on the blogosphere aren’t fully formed, but that doesn’t stop me from saying that as far as I can see, in the marketplace of ideas, the blogosphere is a used comic book boutique. Via Cold Spring Shops, I learn first, that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have been mooting a film of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and second, that there are bloggers who think this is a good idea. As Joshua Sharf says in the link,

I am heartened to see that Miss Rand has made fans with this kind of star power even in the Heart of Darkness, er, Hollywood. At least, if the main movers and shakers have the right motivation, there's a chance that they'll make the right compromises rather than the wrong ones.

A devotion to Ayn Rand isn’t the only litmus of emotional, intellectual, and cultural immaturity, but it sure is an important one. Sharf is worried, though: “I have no idea if this can be done well, and it would be better not done at all than done poorly.” My goodness – what would we get if Atlas Shrugged were done well? As Whittaker Chambers wrote when the book came out,

The news about this book seems to me to be that any ordinarily sensible head could not possibly take it seriously, and that, apparently, a good many do. Somebody has called it: "Excruciatingly awful." I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous. It reports the final stages of a final conflict (locale: chiefly the United States, some indefinite years hence) between the harried ranks of free enterprise and the "looters." These are proponents of proscriptive taxes, government ownership, labor, etc., etc. The mischief here is that the author, dodging into fiction, nevertheless counts on your reading it as political reality. "This," she is saying in effect, "is how things really are. These are the real issues, the real sides. Only your blindness keeps you from seeing it, which, happily, I have come to rescue you from."

Chambers, a grownup whose emotional, intellectual, and cultural maturity was bought rather dearly, goes on to discuss the similarities of Rand’s materialistic ideas to the Marxism she ostensibly detests – rereading his essay, I see again how easily libertarianism – which even its supporters acknowledge is another name for Ayn Rand-ism – can coexist with quackeries like transhumanism.

That it’s so easy to scratch a blogger and come up with a John Galt or Dagny Taggart wannabe is a real problem for the blogosphere. These people are, deep down, simply not serious adults. The educational process, insofar as it exists, hasn’t had an effect. Chambers rightly likens Atlas Shrugged to patent medicine, the claims for which, in a bygone era, liberal education was said to enable its products to evaluate.

In short, Atlas Shrugged, done well, with accuracy and sensitivity, would be a close cousin of Battlefield Earth, another turgid cultist vanity project.

Now, it appears that I’ve incurred the Superintendent’s ire for having the temerity to call Rand cultist Glenn Reynolds “overrated” in a comment on his site. If that were the only thing I’d done, the implied threat of banishment would seem an overreaction. But in the same comment, I referred to the Whittaker Chambers review of the Rand magnum opus, and I suspect that was my real offense (not to mention my disrespect for the Wabash, though I think that could have been tolerated as well were it not for the Chambers issue). I think, though, that what’s happened is that we’ve scratched another blogger and found a Randian just beneath the surface, which is a little surprising, since the Super strikes me as something beyond a grownup – he’s perhaps even older than his years.

What, indeed, are we to make of the exhibit below? The Superintendent appears to have adopted it for use in his Atlas Shrugged post with considerable enthusiasm. It’s another of those cheesy paintings from the Cordair gallery that the overrated Reynolds used to plug on his blog ads. This one is a Bryan Larsen painting that purports to be of Ms. Taggart herself:

The Superintendent, normally quite the authoritarian in the matter of railroad rules observance, is silent on basic questions like what on earth is Dagny Taggart doing in that peculiar pose? I hate to say it, but is she peeing on the track? As far as I can see, this piece of “art” depicts several violations of basic railroad rules, including

1.20 Alert to Train Movement

Employees must expect the movement of trains, engines, cars, or other movable equipment at any time, on any track, and in either direction.

Employees must not stand on the track in front of an approaching engine, car, or other moving equipment.

1.24 Clean Property

Railroad property must be kept in a clean, orderly, and safe condition. Railroad buildings, facilities, or equipment must not be damaged or defaced.

1.29 Avoiding Delays

Crew members must operate trains and engines safely and efficiently. All employees must avoid unnecessary delays.

Whoever wrote the General Code of Operating Rules likely did not foresee the Vice President of Operations on the John Galt Line squatting on the track. Ms. Taggart, as far as I can see, may have stopped the train so she can walk out in front of it simply to strike a pose, or perhaps even to pee. This is the sort of thing that usually brings on a reaction resembling a hysterical Donald Duck on the part of the Superintendent – not here. It’s an image inspired by the sainted Ayn Rand, apparently. I make this point partly from lightheartedness, of course, but it's also worthwhile to point out that in the real world, things don't -- or at least ought not to -- come to a halt simply because someone thinks they'll look good right here. This is something that the artist, and a good many other people, seem to gloss over.

All this, it seems to me, is part of what one blogger has called academic imperialism, a mindset to which he feels economists are particularly susceptible. In the case of the Superintendent, it manifests itself in the view that I’m a professor of Economics, thus I know everything, not just about supply and demand, say, but about literature. Prof. Karlson won’t agree, but I think outside observers will liken his views on Ayn Rand to the average English professor’s views on welfare economics.

Friday Train Post

The Superintendent hasn't exactly been punctilious about making his own Friday train posts, so as I've threatened to do from time to time, I'm going to start taking up the slack.

Here's Microtoss Train Spotting Simulator, which

brings the power and excitement of one of the world's most favorite hobbies to your PC, placing you in the role of a trainspotter with unprecedented realism, exciting real-world challenges, and the tools to recreate almost any trainspotting experience in the world.

A sample screen shot on the site gives an idea of what it's all about!

John Updike On Writing And The Web

Daniel Henninger reports on a pretty unimportant dispute between John Updike, whom he styles “one of the reigning wordsmiths of American letters”, and Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine over, of all things, a Microsoft-sponsored project to scan as many out-of-copyright books from the Berkeley and Stanford libraries as it can.

John Updike is, at best, a one-century later counterpart of Henry St. George, the disappointing elder statesman of novelists in Henry James’s tale “The Lesson of the Master”. Updike, if he reigns over anything, reigns in default: the only figures available with whom he can be ranked are the likes of Norman Mailer and Philip Roth. We’ve been through a very, very bad literary patch since the death of Flannery O’Connor (who, as a short story writer, is far better than Updike).

Updike is apparently upset that anyone would put a book anywhere but on a printed-and-bound paper page (he delivered his remarks at a booksellers’ convention – hardly a coincidence, comrades). As a writer and sometime scholar, this to me is a telling self-revelation on Updike’s part. I’ve got to say that having the writings of, say, James, Swift, Melville, Milton – these come just off the top of my head from having grabbed quotes on line for my blog – on the web is enormously convenient. Otherwise, unless I have a pretty much full-time assistant to replace my paper books once I take them off the shelves, I simply can’t locate the printed texts in a reasonable time. And I have an OK home library, stocked with standard literary texts from my own and my wife’s college and grad school careers, but like any such library, once you get past the hundred or so standard titles, things get very spotty indeed.

If I lived, say, in Hanover, New Hampshire and had a major college library handy, that would make things easier. Sort of. I’d take a brisk constitutional over to the libe and pull out, say, “Tenure of Kings and Magistrates”, not having a copy handy at home. But give this some thought. If I lived in Hanover, or any other such town, my home would be priced in the million dollar-plus range. Making that nut would be part of my costs. If I were neither student nor faculty member, I’d have to pay a substantial fee to use the library. And to quote it in a piece of my own writing, I’d have to retype it, a pain in the butt, and I’d most likely introduce errors of my own in doing so. (If I had an assistant, of course, I wouldn’t need to worry; I’d just yell at him or her for leaving out that comma.)

But I live in a major US city, where there are world-class libraries, too – accessible via a commute of 30 to 90 minutes, a fair amount spent on gas and parking, The same issues of paying for a library card in a non-public library apply. I could, of course, go to my local LA City Library branch and go through the hassle of inter-library loan – but if I want to follow up on a hunch or a reference today, or post something now, or finish something and send it off while it's fresh, it’s not an option. Borders, even with comfy chairs and latte, won't help either. Likely they won't have anything I want in stock, and I'd have to to order it at an exorbitant price. The web, in short, makes a broad interest in literature and the ability to write about it economically feasible.

As an antidote to this, here’s what Updike says:

Mr. Updike continued his reverie at BookExpo: "The world seemed to be in part a world of books. Physical, handsome, nice-smelling books." Mr. Updike defended the physicality of books, their "edges," and wondered "in the electronic anthill, where are the edges?" He ended on a defensive note: "Book readers and writers are approaching the condition of holdouts, surly hermits refusing to come out and play in the electronic sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village." He urged the booksellers to "defend your lonely forts."

Updike is long since removed from the world of writers who want to follow up a quote or find an obscure story without asking Armando to lift it off the shelves, at home or elsewhere. Somehow I’m reminded of Paul Fussell’s remarks about archaism in Class (my copy of which I can’t locate because I don’t have an assistant, and which of course is not on line). It’s a mark of being upper-class that you can afford antique writing desks and electrified oil lamps and live in a restored colonial house (or, on the other coast, a restored Victorian, having hired a consultant to tell you what color to paint it so you can get the historical-district board to approve the project). Updike in his remarks clearly sees writing and reading as extensions of this mindset: literature is part of all this cute and cuddly (and horrendously expensive) upper-class archaism.

Indeed, those who think the web could make it possible to produce good and intelligent writing now, in a reasonable time and with reasonable effort, are simply parvenus and mountebanks. This is one reason we’re in a literary bad patch.

The Blogosphere’s Dirty Little Secret

From a piece by Dean Barnett at The Weekly Standard:

The conventional wisdom is that blogs are a growing force with unlimited potential. But there is a dirty little secret: The blogosphere's growth has flat-lined, and in many cases shrunk. Last October, the Daily Kos had approximately 23 million visitors. By last month, the number had sunk to 16 million. The decline was gradual and sustained. Kos's virtual progressive ranks, at least, are not growing.

The same trend is in evidence nearly everywhere else in the blogosphere, too. The second most influential left-wing website, Atrios, now averages fewer visitors than it did eight months ago and there is no data indicating the readership of conservative blogs is growing, either.

This suggests that the blogosphere is already a mature medium and that its rapid growth phase is now past. And there is nothing to indicate that this relatively young dog is about to learn any new tricks.

CERTAINLY, THE BLOGOSPHERE is adept at many things. It can ignite a campaign; it can elevate obscure figures (such as Howard Dean or Cindy Sheehan) or overlooked issues (such as the Swift Boat veterans or the 60 Minutes scandal) to national prominence. It can also be a force in intra-party skirmishes; the smaller the skirmish, the greater the relative power of the blogosphere. But the blogosphere developed these abilities years ago. The notion that its power is still nascent is grounded in media hype, not reality.

Instapundit’s numbers seem to have been declining over the past year, too, though it’s not precipitous. Still, it’s worth pointing out that the decline continued through Reynolds’s book event. Looks like he was right to get it out when he did, still arguably riding the crest of the wave, something fresh and new. Right, with a cheap toupee.

My own views of the blogosphere are still not fully formed, though it became clear to me pretty quickly that it wasn’t going to a way for unrecognized writers to gain prominence. Blog visitors aren’t a high-quality audience, as I see it, though there are exceptions. For one thing, they’re getting something “free”, for the cost of their own ISP fee, or they’re hitchhiking on their employers’ time and web access. That’s one big difference between a blog’s hit count and a newspaper’s circulation or a book’s sales: the numbers in the last two cases come from people willing to spend real money.

Blog visitors also tend to be single-subject fanatics, Ayn Rand cultists, transhumanists, conspiracy theorists, nut-case leftists, and so forth. When the mainstream media, through laziness and in-groupery, fails to cover stories fully and leaves gaps that even hobbyists can exploit, it simply encourages the crazies in the blogosphere who are predisposed to look for big-media conspiracies. This goes for guys like Reynolds, who appears to be sane and sensible 70 or 80 percent of the time, but then he’ll go off on one or another libertarian jag or plug yet another transhumanist crank. I certainly won’t disagree that the novelty is wearing off.

Riddle Me This

My current reading project is Henry James's The Tragic Muse (this Wikipedia link is good on plot summary and critical reaction). Over the past year I've read or re-read The Spoils of Poynton, The Princess Casamassima, The Sacred Fount, and quite a number of his tales, too. It occurs to me that there's a Henry James as English writer that's mostly neglected. All the novels I mention, and many tales, are set entirely in the UK (or on the Continent with UK characters) with no American characters. I've been finding these novels and tales remarkably good, and in fact much, much better than the critical discussions of James led me to expect.

So Joseph Conrad, born in Poland, is considered an English novelist and included in whatever applicable surveys and seminars are taught from the Victorian or 20th century Eng Lit specialty. James, born in the US but an expatriate from his early adulthood, is treated as an American novelist, though his body of work covering English life and culture is extensive and underrated. At the end of his life, for that matter, he became a UK citizen. And frankly, as an English novelist, I hate to say it, he probably outranks all but the absolute top Victorians -- and of the top rank, he's a peer, not a subordinate. Why haven't the Eng Lit profs ever said anything about this? This goes, among other things to the silly poll at Power Line that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, in which the best James novel our midwest Republican Ivy League attorneys could come up with was The Portrait of a Lady. The view of James's oeuvre we get in Prof. Throckmorton's Eng Lit class is pinched and pusillanimous.

Slow Blogging Day, But. . .

If you're looking for something weird, check out this post from a few days ago at Hell in a Handbasket. I ran into this phenomenon several years ago in an article in one of the LA throwaway papers, which in turn referred to this piece in Vanity Fair. In the 21st century, some people like to dress up as animals or cartoon characters and in the process, um, hook up.

Somehow there's a new Tom Wolfe essay in all this, a follow up to "The Me Decade". One of Wolfe's points in that piece was that this is where American prosperity has brought us: everyone can now cultivate the self the way only leisured aristocrats of past ages could. But there was a next step: "'If I've only one life, let me live it as a _________!' (You have only to fill in the blank.)" The point of the Vanity Fair article is in some ways that furries open this opportunity up to the nerdiest and most unsociable individuals yet, those who'd so far been unreached by hippiedom, singles bars, est, Scientology, and all the other outlets. Never mind your awful personality and your acne scars, you can have casual sex dressed as Donald Duck!

Transhumanism is part of this, too -- If I've only one life, it doesn't matter. I can be Donald Duck until I get tired of it, and then I can be someone else, forever.

Somebody Help Me Out Here

Scott Adams is, for all practical purposes, rich. Even if he spends some amount of time doing the Dilbert comic strip and attending to his other business enterprises, I strongly suspect that if he were to retire now, he and his new family would be quite comfortable. In any case, he must certainly be in a position to control his own time, much more so than any ordinary working stiff of the sort who appears in his comic strip.

So what do we make of how he runs his Dilbert blog? He moderates every comment. And typical posts, which he makes pretty much every day, get 250 to 350 comments. (That, of course, is the number that he approves. How many does he have to delete?) I frankly don't want to think about how much time this must take -- to open, read, and give thumbs-up or thumbs-down to every comment must take a couple of hours.

And keep in mind that blog comments by and large aren't worthwhile. As soon as you mention certain subjects, the heavy-breathers get involved, and often unpredictably. I had the guy who was convinced all the characters in Henry James's The Sacred Fount (except the bachelor narrator) were gay, for instance, and he wouldn't leave it alone until I agreed with him. I had the transhumanists. I finally got fed up, banned a lot of those guys, and stopped blogging about it.

Apparently Scott Adams gets lots of Mormons and others who tell him about God speaking directly to them. They won't give up until they've saved his soul. This, to me, is not amusing. The idea of having to read every word these guys put in their comments -- which Adams must be doing if he's moderating them -- is ridiculous. And consider that Adams, more than 99.99 percent of mortals, has control of his own time. He doesn't need to do this.

In fact, the idea of moderating 250-350 comments a day almost sounds like something the pointy-haired boss would think of and try to force on Dilbert, Wally, and the others. The guy has total control of his time, so he's got to create busy work for himself. Can someone explain to me the logic behind this?

Life Isn’t So Bad In California

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned Jonah Goldberg’s peculiar view that the Progressive-era reforms of the recall and the ballot initiative are degenerate figments of the strange California imagination. It’s a shame the late Jude Wanniski went ga-ga for Islam just in time to have his ideas seriously discredited by 9/11, because in many other areas, he was right. In particular, he talked in his book The Way The World Works about the ballot initiative and how voters always seem to make intelligent choices when confronted with them.

The most recent example of this is the defeat in Tuesday’s primary of Proposition 82, a ballot initiative that would have added a surtax on high-income earners to pay for preschool programs. I think the guys who proposed this measure were basically thinking that since only a tiny fraction of the population would pay the tax, the voters would say fine, it’s not my money, and vote it in. Instead, it lost by a 61% no vote.

Beyond that, the public agency that was advocating the expanded pre-school had been running feel-good commercials for many months almost but not quite advocating a yes vote on the proposition. That was stopped when someone pointed out that the agency was using public money to influence an election. Even so, pro-82 commercials in my area, some featuring Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a politician with genuine star quality who now and then actually does worthwhile things, were very well done.

The downside of the proposition, besides the likelihood that it would drive more wealthy taxpayers over to Nevada, was that it would require that all existing pre-schools conform to highly bureaucratic state standards, including a requirement that all pre-school teachers be credentialed. This would put lower-cost mom and pop pre-schools out of business and likely also kill off job opportunities for part-time pre-school instructors. The result would likely have been to drive up the cost of all pre-school, well beyond the supposed ability of the new tax to fund the increase. It would also have put pre-school under the aegis of the part-of-the-problem club, something the voters must certainly have recognized.

The voters by and large aren’t dummies.

Why People Shop On Line

Just before lunch on Saturday, the tip on my soldering iron gave out. I looked all over the place for a spare and established that I didn't have one. To be able to keep on with what I was doing, I would need to run out to the local Radio Shack to get a new tip, a $2 purchase and a five-minute trip. Theoretically.

I got into the store and found half a dozen people waiting in line for the one clerk. Well, maybe that would clear up once I got the soldering iron tip. Since Radio Shack periodically rearranges everything in the store, it would take me a while to find it, I reasoned. It did, but once I found it, there was no change at the counter -- still half a dozen people waiting.

One lady asked, "Don't you usually have more people working here?"

"Yeah," the guy said. "But the other guy had to go home and eat." We stood around patiently for a couple more minutes. Then I started to wonder what was taking so long -- shouldn't a checkout, even with a debit card and the customer fumbling with the PIN, not take this long?

I tried to peer past the people in line and figure out what was happening. The person being served at the counter was a female, a babe, in fact, dressed kinda like Ann Coulter on a hot day. She had at least two cell phones, one of them pink. The guy at the counter, your standard-issue Radio Shack jerk, was fiddling with one of them. He didn't seem to be making much progress.

Finally I asked, from my position well back in line, "Do you maybe have an estimate of when you might be able to serve some customers?" The guy didn't like that. He sort of hunched his shoulders and looked mad. He shook his head no. The babe got even madder. She sighed angrily to indicate that some people were just too crude. "He's helping ME," she snarled.

Suddenly the jerk behind the counter woke up. I don't know what happened. He looked at me, the squeaky wheel, and saw I had a $2 soldering iron tip in my hand. Apparently all I wanted to do was buy a $2 soldering iron tip and get out, and if I stayed there another ten minutes, I might get mad and maybe complain to someone up on Radio Shack Olympus. I looked like the type who would.

"Oh," he said. He went over to another cash register and beckoned to me. Ka-ching! "That'll be $2.15," he said. "You shoulda told me you just wanted to pay for that."

I gave him the exact change and said not to bother with a receipt. I was out of there. I told my wife I was sorry I was late for lunch.

More On Boobs And Religion

Ann Coulter has a new book out, Godless, on what she calls the liberal version of religion. What interests me mainly is the cover photo, in which Ms. Coulter seems to be showing several inches of cleavage. A Google search indicates that more than a few bloggers and commentators have already pointed out that her schtick is to make outrageous observations while wearing skimpy clothes, and in light of the remarks I made last month on Mark Steyn and Jonah Goldberg doing gay comedy for a straight audience, it’s plain that there’s an element of old-time vaudeville in the right-wing appeal. Whether the family-values types fully understand what’s going on is a different question.

This reminds me a little of a film I saw once – it may even have been Gone With The Wind -- where one female character observes to another that one doesn’t show cleavage before sunset. I don’t know if that’s a good rule or not. It seems to allow for cleavage to be shown, but it makes it plain that it’s only one part of life. On the other hand, as the author of How To Dress For Success said of his own sartorial rules, they apply everywhere but in California, so even if there were rules about this kind of thing somewhere else, they wouldn’t apply here. Even so, it still seems a little strange for someone to be discussing religion, in however tangentially serious a way, dressed only a little less revealingly than a Playboy bunny. Take it for what it’s worth.

The reviews of Godless I’ve seen so far suggest it makes some points that are worthwhile and others that are frivolous. The biggest problem I see is that she’s suggesting that absurd religious ideas are the property only of the left. Transhumanism, which is a new religion of the libertarian right, ought to be enough to refute that position. I think there’s a very good book that could be written on the contemporary public, nondenominational quasi-religion, in which it’s OK to ask people to “meditate” but not OK to have someone lead them in prayer, too. But this crosses the whole political spectrum as well.

The other day I was reading the first chapter of a novel that was on a web-based literary magazine. It was all about people in New Mexico dealing with coyotes. The heroine is a single mom whose daughter, in an early scene, is waiting in front of the house for the school bus. A coyote comes along and sits down next to her. The mom sees this from the window and is gripped with panic. So what does she do? She goes and sits on her yoga mat and practices breathing. Apparently this will get her centered, and she’ll be able to figure out exactly what to do about coyotes. As far as I can see, there’s no irony in this scene. (Would any equivalent scene in a Flannery O’Connor story have fewer than half a dozen layers of irony?)

This, it seems to me, is one problem with the public non-denominational (but sorta-kinda Buddhist) religion out there: there’s no sense of unintended consequences. A Christian, lay or cleric, will be seen as misguided, hypocritical, or worse, but someone confronted with a moral issue regarding coyotes who chooses to do yoga about it is completely sincere. All I can say is, if you think this is how literature should handle topics like this, you yourself are misguided, hypocritical, or worse. There’s a book here, or maybe several, but it doesn’t look like Ann Coulter has written it.

Graduate Student Parties -- XII

Todd, as far as I can see, enjoyed periodically picking off the most naïve of the TAs. He was, of course, doing them a favor: the sooner they left the freshman comp business and found something else to do with their lives, the better. And whether they were fired or not, many left due to various forms of attrition. One guy, in some ways the smartest of the whole bunch, got hired as a TA in the English Department, but since being a TA meant you could get free tuition in any course at the university, he also applied to the MBA program and took business courses. By the time his four years of funding as a TA were up, he’d gotten an MBA and a six-figure job offer in private industry. That was the other end of the TA bell curve.

The great mass, though, were in the middle: they didn’t have powerful protectors on the faculty to further their careers, but on the other hand, they had just enough ability do the work and just enough political savvy to keep from blurting inconvenient things in Todd’s office. Whether they finished their PhDs or not, they were likely to stay on the same career treadmill, teaching little besides freshman comp. They’d start out as adjuncts and part-timers at local junior colleges, putting together enough work at different places to live a marginal existence from semester to semester. Eventually, if they avoided saying the wrong things, stayed out of pissing matches with students, impressed the right people as reliable but not brilliant, and, where applicable, slept with those most in a position to help them, after ten or 20 years they could get hired into permanent jobs and even get tenure at the junior colleges, where even so they’d still be teaching bonehead English for the rest of their lives.

Graduate Student Parties -- XI

Todd Weatherbee came from rural Utah and made no secret of his Mormon background, though he was a jack Mormon, which is to say a Mormon who smoked and drank. In fact, he kept a bottle of sherry in his bottom desk drawer, from which he tippled frequently during meetings with his teaching assistants. When Todd first took over as freshman comp chair, he gave the standard speech to the assembled TAs -- he was on their side, he wanted them to succeed, he understood their problems, the whole routine -- and concluded, "By the way, remember that my office door is open. Anyone who wants to come in and talk about any problem -- not just related to your teaching or your grad school career, but any problem at all -- just come on in and do it. I want to listen."

Some of them may have thought Todd was sincere because, in the meetings, he often gave out bizarre details of his personal life. He had male pattern baldness, and what hair he had was cut short -- but one day he explained how he got his hair cut. His wife, a spindly woman well above Todd in height who dyed her hair an unnatural orange and wore harlequin glasses, would cut his hair at home -- but she'd always take off her clothes before she did it. This was something I could never quite visualize, though it was so strange it had to be true.

Poor Ronn Faulkner. I think, even for a TA in his early twenties, he was especially naive, and I think people knew it, so nobody was terribly surprised when he actually did go in to talk to Todd about a problem. Ronn had gotten into an affair with a married lady on campus, and it was causing him a lot of torment. "I'm in love with a married woman," said Ronn when he went in to see Todd.

Todd was normally full of sherry-soaked smiles -- usually he was a bright, joking guy, and he didn't screw you until later. But Todd's latent Mormonism and love of respectability came through right away this time. "I'm in love with a married woman, too," roared Todd. "My wife!"

He fired Ronn on the spot. Someone else took his classes. The odd thing was that there was no protest, from either faculty or the other TAs. We learned about it only because someone ran into Ronn while he was cleaning out his desk.

So What's Wrong With Nursing A Baby In Church?

I had a comment to my post the other day where I said I thought a mom who pulled her boob out in the middle of a sermon and nursed her baby was tacky, even if she had a little modesty shield. The commenter seemed to think I was being oversensitive. The word I used was "tacky", though, not "indecent". I've given this some more thought.

If you do a Google search on "breastfeeding public", you get about 12 million hits. Clearly people have opinions on this subject. In fact, browsing the first couple of pages in the results, it's safe to say it's controversial. One lady, who "absent mindedly" (according to her account) started nursing her baby on a tourist ride, was confronted by an angry woman who objected to her immodesty in a family environment. Her answer was to declaim that Federal law protected her right to breastfeed anywhere she chose, etc. etc., and beyond that, something like 18 states make specific exemptions to the indecent exposure statutes for nursing moms, etc. etc.

I'm not going to disagree that pulling out your boob wherever you please to nurse an infant is probably completely legal. I'm not aware of any statute, for that matter, that requires a person to shower at any particular interval, though even if you don't mind feeling grubby and itchy after several days unbathed yourself, it's a matter of consideration to those around you to take a shower with some frequency. And I imagine that only a very few churches would turn away someone who showed up for the 10:30 service unshaven, wearing greasy jeans, a torn Budweiser T-shirt, and a plastic baseball cap with the legend "Give Me Head/Till I'm Dead" on the front (left on, of course, after entering the building).

That most people will be too polite to object if you do something is hardly an indication that it's OK to do it. Those who write in favor of breastfeeding on impulse, wherever and whenever the mom chooses, though, seem to feel they're fighting a battle based on principle. When we reach the New Jerusalem, in this view, breastfeeding moms will go about their business without fear or censure, and the forces of darkness will have been defeated. That some measure of discretion might be advisable if the circumstances suggest that some people would find certain conduct objectionable just doesn't fit into this view. It's hard for me to square the idea of in-your-face promotion of bodily functions, though, with the idea that going to church at least ought to imply some sense of concern for one's neighbor, and indeed the idea that a church is a consecrated, or in other words a special, place. (I recognize that not all denominations go along with this last provision.)

What I find most objectionable about breastfeeding without borders is the implication that all public space is an extension of the nursery. We find this on holiday plane flights, irrespective of whether moms nurse on them (and actually, I don't think I've ever seen it done on a plane). The kids are entitled to race up and down the aisle, scream, fight, kick the strangers in the seats ahead, throw up, and generally behave as though the whole cabin is their private space -- and the moms agree! Any objection by any passenger unencumbered by kids to any enormity perpetrated by the little brats will bring an instant appeal by the brats' mom to the flight attendant, who will sternly threaten the passenger who wishes only decorum with being turned over to the appropriate authorities when the plane lands. In fact, in my own experience, complaining to the moms of especially ill-behaved children about things like having their kids kick me, grab my hair, climb over me, and so forth, brings a reaction very close to "I'm gonna tell Mommy on you!!!"

The infinite extension of the nursery is simply another way of furthering the feminization of society. This is what Huck Finn perpetually escaped.

Graduate Student Parties -- X

Nor could I figure out what Todd had in mind when he hired Bobby French. Bobby had been to Viet Nam as an NCO, though in a clerical job, and he never got anywhere near combat. He’d had no experience in Viet Nam that led him to forming any particular opinion on the war, for or against. One day was no different from the next. It was the Army. Bobby was in many ways an ideal soldier, at least for that time, and his biggest mistake was to leave the Army, because he needed a regular life, and above all, he needed to be looked after.

Todd Weatherbee, for that matter, was something similar but on the other side, an ideal academic bureaucrat with no particular opinions on the university, for or against, except insofar as it paid him a salary and gave him an office. And, of course, regular promotions. On even that basis, though, he should have been able to tell that Bobby wouldn’t make a good TA, but he hired him anyhow, and in fact he tolerated him for a couple of years, despite regular complaints from his students – not for any position Bobby had on the war, since they were passive on that subject themselves – but instead, even his students could tell that he didn’t quite have the intellectual horsepower to make the grade.

This finally got to Todd’s desk in a way he couldn't ignore it after Bobby had his wallet stolen. One night Bobby left the door to his apartment not just unlocked, but ajar, while he took a shower, and he’d left his wallet in clear view on his desk. Bobby was truly puzzled that someone would steal his wallet in this situation – “I just didn’t think about it,” he said, “I just left the door ajar when I came home, because I thought I was going to go right out again, but I didn’t, and then later someone came in and stole my wallet while I was taking a shower. But I mean, the door wasn’t wide open. I didn’t leave it wide open. It was just a little ajar.”

Todd had to deal with this because Bobby couldn’t cash his paycheck without his driver’s license, which had disappeared with the wallet, and getting a new license was just a little more than Bobby could handle without help. Todd, while he prided himself on what he thought was a fatherly relationship with all the TAs, decided having to hold Bobby’s hand while he got a replacement was too much.

The result was a summary meeting of the Graduate Studies Committee, which called Bobby in to tell him he was fired as a TA, and just to make sure he wouldn’t stick around, he was thrown out of the PhD program, too. The problem for Bobby was that he’d been making As and Bs in his graduate courses, like all the other graduate students, and he’d passed the screening exam. Either the profs hadn’t noticed if Bobby had any particular problems with the course work, or they hadn’t cared. And for that matter, nobody’d told him about the complaints from the students until that final meeting.

“All of a sudden they decided I wasn’t cutting it,” Bobby said. “They never said anything about it to me before. That’s what I told them in the meeting. ‘My GPA isn’t any different from anyone else’s,’ I said. All they answered was ‘We still don’t think you’re doing well enough to continue in the program, and anyhow, there have been complaints from the students.’ I finally figured it out. They can do anything they like, and they just make up reasons to explain it afterward.”

I think Bobby might have gone back into the Army. If he did, it was a smart move.

Does This Prove My Point?

I got a visit record on my traffic monitor yesterday from a Chicago PR firm, brought here by a reference to Paul Mirengoff on technorati. Now, why would someone from a PR firm be doing a technorati search on a big-deal blogger? Do you think Mirengoff pays someone to find out what people are saying about him? Looks that way to me.

I wonder what kind of fancy-schmancy report they send him, and how often.

Whoops, I got another visit from the same place, and I stand corrected: Winston & Strawn is a law firm, not a PR firm. But it isn't Mirengoff's firm, which is Akin, Gump. Someone else must be doing this, though I don't know why. Mr. or Ms. Visitor, why are you tracking blog mentions of Mirengoff? These are so numerous, by the way, that technorati provides a bar chart of the numbers for each day!

Graduate Student Parties – IX

The last group of graduate students that I talked about comprised the superstars, the ones who, even from a second-rate PhD program, were going to get good, tenure track jobs. The next group, though, is very different: these are the people who, for whatever reason, were never going to make it, even as TAs. I’ll probably never know what was on Todd Weatherbee’s mind when he hired some of them. The best TAs tended to come into the program with some minimal experience in the outside world. Maybe it was as a public school teacher, maybe as a stockbroker or a merchant seaman.

On that basis, Todd should have thought twice about Debbie Stenwall. She came straight from one of those East Coast intellectual hothouses, maybe it was Bard, and you could tell, because she wore mostly turtlenecks and black tights. She had a fixed, intense expression on her face, wore no makeup, and gathered her long, straight black hair behind her ears.

He should have predicted what her reaction would be when she found herself facing a classroom full of upper-middle-class California kids who not only didn’t share her values – they had, from her viewpoint, no values at all. She didn’t last more than a few weeks before she went home to her parents in New York, where she had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized. Todd had all the other TAs sign a get-well card, but she never came back. And while Todd wrote warmly encouraging things on the card about how she'd always have a place there, that was just the sort of stuff he always said to make people feel good before he stuck in the knife. He'd already written her out of the next semester's budget.