OF A GOLDEN AGE

This week’s New Yorker Financial Page examines the financial information gap and how it’s closing over time: Only in fairly recent decades have statistics like the GDP made it possible to quantify unemployment and consumer spending in close-to-real time. And how was it before?

In June of 1930, relying on some anecdotal evidence of an upturn, Herbert Hoover announced, “The Depression is over.” And in his State of the Union address that December he said that two and a half million Americans were unemployed. But, as Hoover acknowledged, that number was eight months old. At the time of the speech, five million people were out of work, and a hundred thousand more were losing their jobs every week.

Eight months old!! The timeframe now is about a month and even that seems rough when we’re making decisions about how to turn over a capsizing economy.

The rest of the article details a new measure called the Billion Prices Project, where computers gather price data from online retailers and process it more quickly than humans alone ever could. It’s not perfect but it’s another facet to consider, and it circumvents some of the flaws of traditional financial data-gathering.

My good friend Ed and I found ourselves at a party hosted by our friend Lindsey this weekend. Somehow the White Stripes came up. Here’s the part where I paraphrase.

Ed: I don’t know, I’m not the biggest Jack White fan.
Me: Weeellllll . . . Oh right, you hated the record inside a record thing we talked about before.
Ed: YES, THAT WAS STUPID.
Me: But what about the Third Man Recordsmobile?
Ed: Yes, that’s stupid too.
Me: It’s sweet! It reminds me of the people who sell food at the ballparks where little kids play T-ball. Except it’s records!
Ed: This is the part where I say I don’t like some things Jack White does and you say you love everything about him.

I do, it’s true. Jack White, personal hero since 2001.

The Way We, Um, Talk Sways Our Listeners describes a University of Michigan study on speech fluency, especially the sweet spot between too smooth and too rough — if we pause too much or use too much filler, people don’t trust us, but if we speak too coherently without enough pauses, people still don’t trust us.

This makes sense. Think about it: When you pick up your phone and it’s a number you don’t recognize, you know in like a second if it’s a salesperson: They’re too smooth, they’re rehearsed. Oftentimes they’re literally reading from a script and it shows, it sets off our spidey senses for when someone is attempting to pull one over.

I assume this is different from when someone gets really excited about a topic and starts to talk more quickly, because frankly that’s an adorable phenomenon. I wish it happened more often, to everyone, every day — I wish we all had the energy and space to get that excited all the time.

The article includes the phrase “the most disfluent interviewers,” which is quite a tongue twister.

At lunchtime I like to walk around the neighborhood near my office, through tree-shaded streets lined with beautiful old bungalows. One house has a single windowframe painted bright red; another has its back porch painted bright cornflower blue. There are also some weird people who constantly power-wash their backyard sidewalk, sending telltale rivers of soapy water into the alley. Once my coworker heard them screaming at each other while power-washing. I think they must have high thresholds for stress.

If you walk in the opposite direction along our street there are old factories repurposed into offices. My favorite building is this one:

Beautiful, right? Are you knocked out by that cerulean sky? LOOK CLOSER:

Uh oh. The emerging popular wisdom may be that sitting can kill, but hanging out five stories high is probablyyyy worse.

I love Pearl Jam, but, like a lot of things, I didn’t get on the bandwagon until way after its zenith: In 2001, after they released recordings of all the stops on their latest tour. I bought the giant Seattle one (three VERY full discs) while I was in Washington DC for a summer program and listened to it repeatedly during that trip and afterward.

I love Eddie Vedder in particular, because he embodies many qualities I admire and is not a tool, and he’s a Chicagoland hometown hero. For years, my dad and I bickered about Pearl Jam because my dad thought they were super overhyped, and I said that PEARL JAM felt that Pearl Jam was overhyped too, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still a good band. Vedder is a nice counterpoint to another ’90s musician whom I love but who exhibits every diva quality imaginable: Billy Corgan.

Corgan acts like a cranky, spiteful child most of the time, full of semi-crazy conspiracy theories and paranoiac reactionism, a deep-dyed control freak who will live in infamy. (Um, I still love him, let’s be clear.) Vedder is a workhorse, and is particular about what he puts his name on, but he seems more like a proud mechanic about it, like the craftsmanship and reliability is just as important as how good everything looks and seems. He respects music and the way it makes us feel. And although at times he can be demanding and controlling, he still comes off as a laid-back, kind, and conscientious guy. Eddie Vedder is a contributor to the ongoing human experience, much to our enrichment.

Vedder is releasing a new solo album of ukulele songs, and I’m hesitant, and I’ll admit it’s because I’ve known some flaky people who were into the ukulele, and I’ll even admit the overplaying of poor late Israel Kamakawiwoʻole’s ukulele version of “Over the Rainbow”/”What a Wonderful World” has ruined the ukulele for me, maybe forever. Maybe forever. Sorry, Iz.

But the Chicago Tribune ran a feature on Vedder on Sunday, and he told the story of how he bought his first ukulele. It’s charming and it involves one of my other heroes, surfing megagiant Kelly Slater:

Q. How did you start playing the ukulele?
A. It was about 13, 14 years ago. I was in Hawaii with Kelly Slater, the surfer. (Vedder himself is a dedicated surfer.)* I went to buy beer and Kelly went to buy fish. I was done first, so I was sitting there on a couple of cases of beer waiting for him when I saw this ukulele in a storefront window. I went in empty-handed and walked out five minutes later with a great-sounding ukulele, and had a chorus and a verse written a few minutes later. I was halfway through writing the bridge when a few people walked by and threw some money in the open case. I had $1.50 from playing the ukulele after owning it seven minutes.

* DID NOT KNOW, ADDS TO HERO FIRES

I love that Slater and Vedder are friends, I love that Eddie Vedder surfs, and I love that at that pace he’d be making $12.86 an hour. Tax-free!

I spent most of the weekend dusting, most recently standing on my bed to clear heavy dust off the arms of my ceiling fan. Uh oh: My love of old books means my apartment is a tornado of dust bunnies at all times.

I DIGRESS. Dick Van Dyke is one of my favorite favorites when it comes to classic television, and yesterday’s Sun-Times had a little feature on Van Dyke in honor of a freshly released memoir. (Does it seem to anyone else like we’re swimming in an ocean of memoirs lately? Are they the reality TV of books, is this here to stay?)

He talks about the Dick Van Dyke Show, a sitcom which has aged beautifully and costars the very young, very beautiful, and equally witty Mary Tyler Moore; Van Dyke says he had a crush on her while they made the show together. I learned he underwent treatment for alcoholism and chose to be a public face of something considered, at the time, to be the territory of vagrants and bums.

Plus he has a 39-year-old girlfriend (!!!) and four children who are probably all older than the girlfriend is. “They all turned out great,” he says of his children. “Not a horse thief in the bunch.”

I recently told a smart and well read friend of mine that I don’t like the Beats* — we’d been talking about On the Road and I felt a flood of residual frustration from when I had to read it in college. For me, there’s a spectrum of the orderliness of fiction, anchored on one end by impossibly fussy Nathaniel Hawthorne and the other end by Kerouac’s freewheeling rambles. And there’s a sweet spot, and there’s plenty of agreeable-enough middle ground around that sweet spot.

When I said I didn’t like Kerouac, my friend said, “Who cares if you liked it? The point is to read it and experience it.” Even if I hate a book, it reminds me of what I do love about other work — and whatever I don’t like about the book says something about my taste, about what literature means to me.

Heavy stuff, explained more elegantly by a bit of Northrop Frye‘s The Educated Imagination:

The critic’s function is to interpret every work of literature in the light of all the literature he knows, to keep constantly struggling to understand what literature as a whole is about. Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell. Literature is a human apocalypse, man’s revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgment of mankind.

* When I said this, Nathan, who was standing nearby, asked how I could hate the band from Doug.

Oh, no! Mark L. Schiller, president of the Duncan Hines grocery division:

“When we talk to people who bake with mixes, they consider themselves every bit the scratch baker as someone who doesn’t use a mix,” Mr. Schiller said. “We have hundreds and hundreds of professional bakers and professional bakeries that use Duncan Hines.”

This casts the $2.50 bakery cupcake in a new light, I reckon.

I love to bake, and the funny thing about a cake mix is how little time it really does save — maybe five to ten minutes of measuring and stirring. Maybe. This weekend I found a wealth of spring-themed Funfetti cake mix and frosting on sale at my favorite Jewel, so I bought enough to bring cupcakes for my about fifty coworkers. By far the most laborious part is scooping batter into cupcake cups, baking them, cooling them, then frosting, and I even used a pastry bag to speed up the frosting. My wee oven can only handle about 12 cupcakes at a time.

But I think Mr. Schiller is wrong — people who bake mixes are NOT “scratch bakers” any more than people who can heat up a frozen skillet meal are home cooks. It’s a different game altogether.

Ancient Greek rhetorician Gorgias’s name reminds me of this George Costanza gem, when he’s hiring a secretary:

Well, Miss Coggins, you’re obviously qualified for the job. You have all the necessary skills and experience. But you’re extremely attractive. You’re gorgeous. I’m looking at you, I can’t even remember my name. So I’m afraid this is not going to work out.

He hires a nerd (glasses + updo) and then is inexplicably, powerfully attracted to her until he stupidly acts on it.

In the spirit of compulsion, Gorgias’ arguably most famous work is a defense (Encomium) of Helen of Troy, whose half-divine beauty started the Trojan War and who was getting beaten up in the poetry of the day. Gorgias wonders why: If the gods compelled her, or she were abducted, she couldn’t have stopped that. If she were persuaded by speech, she couldn’t have stopped that either, he claims:

For persuasion expelled her thought . . . A speech persuaded a soul that was persuaded, and forced it to be persuaded by what was said and to consent to what was done. The persuader, then, is the wrongdoer, because he compelled her, while she who was persuaded is wrongly blamed, because she was compelled by the speech.

The mind boggles. But there’s a fourth possibility: That Helen was compelled by love.

If love is a god with the divine power of gods, how could a weaker person refuse and reject him? But if love is a human sickness and a mental weakness, it must not be blamed as mistake, but claimed as misfortune.

Yikes, Gorgias, chin up, buddy. I know Love Hurts, but you can persuade a new love with some of your persuasive persuading!

Weekend before last, I noticed a small patch of housing on the pretty far northwest side made up of nigh identical houses block after block, so I pulled over and took a few pictures and drove around befuddled for a few minutes.

I showed it to some friends and someone said it’s likely a remnant from World War II, when industrial areas souped up production and hired a ton of workers and had to build a place for all of them to live.

The little neighborhood was full of families, groups of kids walking around, Little League teams in uniform. I said it was Twilight Zone-ish and someone brought up A Stop at Willoughby. I found out it’s idyllic North Mayfair, home to some of the city’s most beautiful old houses.

It was the second time this last week that I ended up talking about the Twilight Zone. The first was when a coworker was describing a harrowing flight in a tiny plane (one of my top five worst nightmares probably) when, naturally, the only worse thing would be to look out and see an airplane-eating gremlin on the wing.