OF A GOLDEN AGE

I’ve been thinking about my doorbell. When you gonna ring it? When you gonna ring it?
– the White Stripes

Do you listen to the radio? My friends don’t seem to listen to the radio or watch regular television in real time anymore. Podcasts and DVR are the way of things, and I do that stuff too (not DVR, but TV on demand through Comcast, Hulu, or Netflix), but real time has great appeal, especially radio. I listen to NPR every morning, and in the car, and while I wash dishes, and, and, and.

Last weekend was Liane Hansen’s last Weekend Edition Sunday. She has Will Shortz on every week to do a live word puzzle (a crossword puzzler’s dream come true, and I am one), and this week as a fantasy final interview she had Ray Davies of the Kinks. At the very end, after a nice little talk, she broached a tough topic — Davies’s potential for reconciliation with brother and fellow Kink Dave Davies — by saying that you always ask the difficult question last because, if the interviewee walks out, at least you already have a whole interview.

Davies was a total sport about it and gave an optimistic, exciting answer (if you’re a Kinks fan, and Hansen clearly is), but the whole thing reminded me of a recent New Yorker blog post on Terry Gross. Her preternatural level of preparedness is astounding, except that now I learn she’s actually not in the studio with most guests, so she gets the 30-point IQ boost. But I love this:

Tellingly, [writer David] Rakoff, who has appeared on the show twice, said that he remembers both interviews having taken place in person, though in fact neither did.

Terry Gross! Liane Hansen! Tess Vigeland! My tough-talking lady radio idols.

(There’s also Lynne Rossetto Kasper but she’s no tough-talker. She sure is smart and great, too, though.)

It’s news because it isn’t really news!

Roger Clemens was indicted for perjury last week, and I wish there were a more vibrant term for just how perjurious his perjury really was. Clemens has been accused of cheating and doping a lot of times and has denied it, fervently, in colorful terms and in a vaguely threatening way. Like if you said it to him, he’d tell you to F off, and did you wanna take it outside? Did you?

Well, no, Roger, I don’t, because I know you’re doped up and already one of the stupider public figures. On All Things Considered they re-aired some old tape of Clemens’ ridiculous denials and didn’t even have to write editorial material around it — like classic George W. Bush statements, they speak for themselves and require no embellishment. Clemens’ former teammate Andy Pettitte, who has long been a favorite player of mine for no real reason EVEN THOUGH he’s a Yankee, confessed his own drug use and made comments about Clemens’ as well. To this Clemens responded with the following soundbyte re-aired during All Things. I’d read it aloud for full effect:

CLEMENS: I think he misremembers the conversation that we had. Andy and I’s relationship was close enough to know that if I would have known that he had done HGH, which I now know, that he was knowingly knowing that I had taken HGH, we would’ve talked about the subject.

[NPR's Tom] GOLDMAN: Now, Robert, we should add that the indictment does not include charges against Roger Clemens for assaulting the English language.

[NPR's Robert] SIEGEL: Yeah, they could sentence someone to parsing that sentence.

Knowingly knowing that Clemens denied his doping for so long, I’m happy he’s in a heap of trouble.

The latest This American Life details the seemingly nefarious dealings of one investment firm before and during the bursting housing bubble and subsequent recession. Most of the way in, the show guts you with a complex capitalist issue that does not bear out an easy answer.

I love moral gray areas as a general rule, which is almost a statement not worth making: Almost all moral issues are gray in our real everyday lives. (I also love air, whiling away the hours, weather, and waking up every morning.) In this case we are asked to decide: If you are in the business of making money for your investors, and you do that by exploiting a legal weakness of the accepted system, is it wrong?

Moreover: If exploiting that weakness breaks the bubble’s back and throws our country into turmoil that will last for years, is it any more or less wrong?

I realized what this episode reminded me of while texting with my dad about the Chicago Cubs. As a White Sox family, we dislike the Cubs; as a north sider dealing with Cubs traffic and the Cubs’ awful, awful fan base, I am not sympathetic. One night last year, drunken Cubs fans crowded around the Clark bus I was riding home, like shambling zombies in a Stephen King-ocalypse. They start drinking at 9 a.m. and finish at the end of the baseball season.

But fan base aside, because I’m not here to get all argumentum ad hominem.

According to Forbes, the Cubs are the fifth-most valuable franchise in Major League Baseball at $726m — about 45% of the formula-busting New York Yankees at $1.6b.

Yet the Cubs have the most expensive average ticket price in baseball, despite last year’s sub-.500 season. The Yankees are only the third-most expensive average even with their $1.6b franchise value.

As the experts on This American Life pointed out about the investment firm, can you fault an organization for making money for its investors? In the case of the Cubs, when people will lay down absurd money to attend the games, buy merchandise, and carouse at the local restaurants and bars, can anyone blame the higher-ups for charging as much as possible?

Baseball is a business like any other, and if the goal is to put butts in the seats, the Cubs are a succes fou regardless of the team they put out in any given season. Foolhardily signing long-term deals with players who self-destruct as soon as the cap is back on the pen is a symptom of really, really poor judgment in the management. It also shows that the Cubs don’t value return-on-investment for fans who pay more than any other fans nationwide do to see their team.

The NYT’s “The Caucus” blog ran a post on Sarah Palin’s discomfort-inspiring endorsement of John McCain in a state primary where he is being brutalized from the right. I hate John McCain for bringing Palin to anyone’s attention in the first place and can never forgive him, but the photo of him standing beside (yet several feet away from) Palin is painful. She is, of course, wearing her scary structured black leather jacket that seems to come from the Dominatrix Lair line of Chanel. He looks as though he has been holding his breath for the last hour, or year and a half.

Anyway, this doesn’t draw out more than the typical level of outrage for me, but one of the reader comments explained my thoughts better than I’ve managed to before now:

Maybe as Republicans keep moving further and further into the past we’ll finally return to a time when the currency of argument was reason rather than emotion and symbolism.

Yesterday on Speaking of Faith, Krista Tippett hosted two Jesuit priests who are celebrated scientists: Brother Guy Consolmagno and Father George Coyne. They discussed extensively the gaps in our understanding of the universe, and how those gaps are something to celebrate, to pursue without ceasing.

They also quoted the Anne Lamott line that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. The certainty of today’s most abusive and relentless right-wingers is their most offensive trait among many.

Some enchanted evening
Someone may be laughing,
You may hear her laughing
Across a crowded room

The girl in “Some Enchanted Evening” may as well be me, because I am virtually always the loudest laugher.

Until a certain age I laughed quietly, and also never smiled with my teeth showing, because adolescence is a mental illness whose logic does not hold up to scrutiny. But things change, and in my case for the better, as related on last weekend’s Car Talk:

While exact caloric expenditure is not yet known, it is thought that 100 good laughs equals some of the physiological benefits of 10 minutes on a rowing machine, even though it doesn’t boost aerobic fitness.

When a book I like is made into a movie, I value the not-a-movie-tie-in copy all the more — it makes me feel sad and cheap to read a book that’s wearing a big “Now a Major Motion Picture!” sticker. Of course, George Clooney isn’t on my copy, and who could ever say that’s a fair trade?

Walter Kirn’s 2001 book Up in the Air followed one of my most deeply loved favorite books, Thumbsucker. Up in the Air fell on my deaf ears by necessity: I was no adult, and the corporate world held no interest for me. After his previous novel of poignant teen angst and even orthodontia, how could I relate to this new novel? I couldn’t, and my disappointment steeped for eight years.

“They’re making a movie out of that book I hate?” I said many times in 2009.

Kirn’s book faced an unusual obstacle, as far as I could see. His wonderful other novel was made into an okay movie, and now the adaptation of a book I disliked was raking in huge awards buzz. But the descriptions of the movie never matched with my memory of the book, and I had to reread it to remember one way or the other.

I haven’t seen the movie, but I can say the book is exactly as I remembered: neurotic, complex, populated with empty people. What I see now that I didn’t before is that Kirn affects this tone on purpose, draws his world with people you dislike or barely notice, populates his main character’s mind with the most bland, Michael Scott preferences masquerading as his ticket into the high-rollers’ club.

Ryan Bingham works as a “transitions” man: he comes in after a firing to do recognizance and triage. At the book’s beginning, he believes he’s approaching a juncture in his career between his previous job and a new, mysterious role at a smoke-and-mirrors business consulting house. He is also attempting to break the one-million-mile mark as a frequent flier and has a then-unheard-of “digital assistant” device to coordinate his entire schedule.

For his flakiest sister’s upcoming wedding, he spends exorbitantly and begins a stock portfolio for her. When his sisters call they ask where he is and he frequently lies; he isn’t sure why it matters where he’s calling from, and chooses a city to assuage a worry whose origins he doesn’t understand. At some points he gobbles pills by the handful, at others he wantonly mistreats the few people who like and recognize him; but again, a suspended-animation manchild is no different from an adolescent when it comes to likable behaviors.

Bingham’s eagerness and absolute devotion to the corporate “Airworld” in which he lives make it hard to resist him, and the way he comments inwardly about all the people he remembers, all the ways he tries to make a good impression, it all made me root for him despite myself. He knows what clout fakingstance and posturing hold in his chosen field, watches others as they behave affectedly:

His painful, frostbitten feet explained the slippers, but the bubbles he blew were the purest affectation, intended to show that he plays by his own Hoyles. He knows, as all the cleverest ones do, that no human being is so interesting that he can’t make himself more interesting still by acting retarded at random intervals.

The book is a roast of corporate zeitgeist, of the talking heads whose shortest thoughts make up entire books, and of what we each lose by taking one step too far into that hype and altered reality. I also got a warm, anti-busyness feeling as Bingham’s completely planned journeys and meetings began falling apart, although he has great adaptability and takes the obstacles in stride. The obstacles themselves form an interesting subplot, and it speaks to Bingham’s nature that his greatest adversary is the same corporate culture responsible for his success. When he suspects someone is out to get him, it isn’t a someone at all. It’s a whole company without a face.

A lady appears in the book, but is not significant except in the red flags sent up by Bingham’s treatment of her. There is also no junior colleague, no plans to change corporate M.O. — in fact, Bingham states at the beginning that he’s leaving his job and has submitted a resignation. The idea of sending a colleague he must rely on for a new way of doing business is contradictory to the book’s message and makes me wary of the movie. Kirn explained it this way on All Things Considered:

In this case, a whole new character had to be introduced. A sort of sidekick had to be given to a lonely hero who spends most of the time in the novel observing and thinking about his world. But now we had to give him a chance to talk about his world.

If you work in the corporate world, I suspect you will like or at least relate to this book. If you’re interested in comeuppance by proxy, some karmic punishment for an ascetic corporate life, then step into Ryan Bingham’s office. It isn’t an office at all, and yet houses his many, many issues.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

This weekend, Speaking of Faith reran a 2008 interview with John O’Donohue, Irish poet, former priest, and Hegelian (What an array of descriptors!), done shortly before his death. This moment took me aback:

Yeah, I feel like in the book I wrote on beauty, I was trying to say that one of the huge confusions in our times is to mistake glamour for beauty. And we do live in a culture which is very addicted to the image, and I think that there is always an uncanny symmetry between the way you are inward with yourself and the way you are outward. And I feel that there is an evacuation of interiority going on in our times. And that we need to draw back inside ourselves and that we’ll find immense resources there.

We have largely evacuated interiority, at least in my portion of the Western world, and I can’t think of a better way to phrase the situation. One of history’s favorite literary zingers is from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

We are all large and should contain multitudes, which is, I think, why O’Donohue suggests we “draw back inside ourselves” — plus, a nice Hegelish note there when Whitman expresses himself as the combination and synthesis of his own contradictions and dualities.

Stanley Fish really stirred up some murk last week with his column advocating a limit on curiosity. Fish himself is a source of controversy and I find it hilarious and awkward that anyone accuse this bastion of individual thought and intellect as a curiosity-hater — seriously? Someone widely revered or reviled as the best or worst kind of rhetorician or theorist, who makes his living in the world of higher education?

This is Fish’s thesis in the column, an idea originally situated in the Garden:

The provocation was to go beyond the boundaries God had established and thereby set himself up a rival deity, a being with no limits on what he can conceive, a being whose intellect could, in time, comprehend anything and everything.

I think that Fish views destructive curiosity as the end of wonder and humbled awe, the kind of smug quest for “understanding” that characterizes literary examples Faust and Frankenstein, among others whom Fish does not cite. It is the product of two competing but parallel forces: First, that we are not grounded enough by our families, communities, or otherwise to ever have reason to stop the quest for new knowledge; and second, that we arrogantly assume this quest will lead us to something better, bigger, greater.

But more importantly, as Fish’s weekly column is aptly titled, he simply encourages us to Think Again, to not evacuate our interiority.

This week’s This American Life rerun is brilliant. It might even be listed on their “Best Of” page, I’m not sure.

In it, a former professional medical test subject, a self-described guinea pig, explains why he never did psychiatric-drug studies:

“The phrase is ‘brain sluts.’ It’s more harsh than most guinea pigs would use, but I think it’s disgusting because they’re becoming retarded for money. I’m just very sensitive about the mind. I personally don’t lay it out for rent.”

Download the episode from this page.

About a month ago I started playing Scrabble with an informal Chicago group. Today a tournament player (who issued two sound beatdowns) told me that in official play you aren’t allowed to discuss the definitions of words — only whether or not they’re legal plays in the context of the game. The reason for this is strategic and psychological: if you’re good enough at bullshitting, you can psych an opponent into believing a word AND playing erroneously on it.

Here’s an example: let’s say I invent a word or use something incorrect, say “omoo.” Omoo is a Herman Melville novel, but it looks wordy enough that I might get it past someone. My opponent asks what it means and I say, without missing a beat, “It’s a wild cat.” Subsequently, my opponent pluralizes it and makes another word, and now I get to challenge it and take back his or her play.

Anyway, that’s the rationale, protecting players from your bullshit AND your psychouts all in one fell swoop.

I thought about this again just now while listening to To the Best of Our Knowledge, where the host interviewed Ward Cunningham, the developer of the original wiki. The host asked Cunningham if he didn’t fear the inevitable failure of Wikipedia, precisely because its accessibility is also its greatest vulnerability. Cunningham said he feared that no more than he feared a house fire. He said, though, that Wikipedia has the power to change history through the manipulation of “truth,” for better or worse, emphasizing how malleable facts can be in hindsight. (This is the reason that, for instance, the Holocaust denial movement will probably pick up steam as the number of eyewitnesses is whittled down. Not that these eyewitnesses have done much to deter those committed to the delusion.)

Always, always, these confusions about what’s the truth and what’s just said convincingly. Even nature does it — fish with artificial lures to draw prey, butterflies with mock eyes on their wings to frighten predators.

• The other day my roommate Nathan and I rode the Blue Line L train downtown to see the new Indiana Jones and meet an out-of-town friend for dinner. On the trainride I was thinking about different styles of trains, most obviously evidenced by different door styles on the Blue Line. When I asked Nathan if he knew when the trains were manufactured, he pointed me toward a sort of dedication seal near the car’s back door. Apparently our train was put into commission in 1969, when my parents were 16 and 17 years old. I knew I rode the same line my dad did when he was in law school in the ’70s but I did not realize some of these were literally the same trains.

• Martin alerted me to Budget Hero, a surprisingly compelling financial Flash game from the radio show Marketplace. You choose objectives — ecology, fiscally responsible government, national security, healthcare, and so on — and choose budget moves that promote your goals. The game keeps you posted on how your decisions affect the national debt and size of the U.S. government. All theoretically, of course. (Hint: the unsurprising conclusion is that borderline socialism extends the life of our nation’s budget. TAX THE RICH!)

• My brother, it turns out, works for the largest company in the world according to the Forbes Global 2000. This is HSBC’s first year as ummmmmber ooooone*, after climbing the ranks from #5 in 2006 and #3 in 2007.

* a reference to Stephen King’s Misery, during whose opening scene a kidnapped author awakens to the sound of his “number one fan” proclaiming her love and devotion