Arcane Gazebo

Why I'm not buying A Dance With Dragons (immediately, anyway)

2009-09-20T21:56:44Z

Jo Walton at Tor has been blogging about George R. R. Martin's fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire. The blog posts start with this one, which is a pretty good description of the series for those of you who haven't read it. I recommend the books, but I also recommend waiting until he actually finishes the series (which could be far in the future, when we're all reading it on our retinal implants while waiting for the mechanic to finish changing the oil in our jetpacks).

Indeed, these were the books that led me to adopt a general policy of not reading any fantasy (or sci-fi) series which had yet to conclude. I had already given up on Robert Jordan, but that's because his books were getting progressively worse. In Martin's case, that wasn't the problem (although A Feast for Crows was a bit disappointing), but the lack of closure at the end of each one, followed by a multi-year wait during which I'd forget important details of the complicated plot, was getting annoying. It became clear that the series would be a much better experience if I could read it all the way to completion in one go. So I'm waiting until I can do that.

Series bloat seems to be endemic in fantasy, for which I mainly blame Tolkien: everyone seems to think they need to write at least a trilogy. But some of my favorite fantasy novels are standalone: Perdido Street Station, The Lies of Locke Lamora. Lately I've been seeking out more like those and avoiding epic series unless I know it's finished. (Which has led me to read less fantasy and more sci-fi, where I tend to find less of a serial tendency.)

Again, it's not that I don't like epic series, it's just that they're more satisfying when I don't have to wait for the next volume. Books of this type, at least the good ones, compel the reader to keep turning the pages and devouring the storyline, and because there's no resolution at the end of each volume, that desire to keep reading persists but is frustrated. Jo Walton talks a bit about this quality:

Firstly, they have a very high "I-want-to-read-it" quotient. This "IWantToReadItosity" is hard to explain, is utterly subjective and is entirely separate from whether a book is actually good. Who can say why Robert Heinlein and Georgette Heyer and Zenna Henderson have it for me and Herman Hesse and Aldous Huxley don't, despite the fact that Hesse and Huxley are major world writers? I'll happily acknowledge that The Glass Bead Game is a better book than Job: A Comedy of Justice, but nevertheless, Job has that IWantToReadItosity, and if you left me in a room with both books and nothing else, it would be Job I'd start first.

Now even within genre this is something that varies a lot between people. The Wheel of Time books don't have it for me, I've read Eye of the World and I didn't care enough to pick up the others. Ditto Harry Potter, where I've read the first three. These are books that have IWantToReadItosity for millions of people, but not for me. The Song of Ice and Fire books do, though, they grab me by the throat. This isn't to say they're gripping in the conventional sense--though they are--because IWantToReadItosity isn't necessarily to do with plot or characters or any of the ways we conventionally divide up literature. It's got to do with whether and how much you want to read it. You know the question "Would you rather read your book or go out with your friends?" Books have IWantToReadItosity if you'd rather read them. There are books I enjoy that I can still happily put down to do something else. A Game of Thrones is eight hundred pages long, and I've read it six times, but even so, every time I put the bookmark in, I put it in reluctantly.

I was thinking a bit about her comment that IWantToReadItosity (we need a better name for this) is separate from whether a book is actually good. And certainly it's easy to think of really terrible books that have it (The Da Vinci Code, for example), and great books that don't (much of what we were assigned in high school). In fact, there's a strain of thought that Great Literature should be difficult and challenging, and therefore shouldn't have IWantToReadItosity. I don't think that's true, though. It's not that the two qualities are anticorrelated, they are just orthogonal. I even came up with a diagram to illustrate this:

Which is not to say that Haruki Murakami is a better writer than Melville, just that reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a different experience from reading Moby-Dick. (And Wind-Up Bird really is difficult, just not because of entire chapters dedicated to the details of the whaling industry.) However, it is to say that these guys are both better writers than Ayn Rand, because she's pretty bad.

Discussion is open: what books in the literary canon have IWantToReadItosity? And what are some standalone fantasy novels or completed series I should read?

Is Craigslist a mess?

2009-08-27T02:42:45Z

There's a recent piece in Wired entitled, "Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess". The answer according to the article is that Craig Newmark is a pretty weird dude. But while it's an interesting profile, the real question about Craigslist isn't "why is it such a mess" but "why, given that it's a mess, is it so widely used?" And as the article mentions, people use it because (a) it's free, and (b) everyone else is using it, so it's the best place to find what you're looking for. But "Craigslist is widely used because it's widely used" isn't terribly satisfying as an answer.

What I really want to know is: how do people find anything at all on Craigslist? Because I just can't do it, but it certainly wouldn't be popular if everyone else was in the same position. And indeed, the comments on the Wired article are overwhelmingly people objecting to the title alone, protesting that Craigslist isn't a mess. So lots of people find it a useful tool.

Nevertheless, every time I've tried to use it (and I've looked at it at various times for apartments, job hunting, and dating) I've given up after encountering a spectacularly low signal-to-noise ratio. Because there's no cost to posting, and it lacks sophisticated filters, I end up with a huge and unmanageable stream of nearly-undifferentiated posts. And while there's something to be said for its free-form character, this seems to lead to listings that are either unhelpfully vague or hyper-specific.

So I feel like I'm doing it wrong. There must be some techniques out there to using Craigslist successfully (hopefully some Craigslist power users in the readership can tell me what they are). I have some guesses as to what might work:

Liberal use of the search box. I always feel like my search terms narrow the field either too little or too much. But maybe a clever selection of search terms, applied in lots of variations, would improve things.
Less reading, more skimming. Just because it doesn't filter for me doesn't mean I have to read every post. If I learn to recognize useless items and move on quickly, I could move much more quickly through the stream.
Persistence. I know that some people read Craigslist painstakingly every day, looking for the perfect bargain. (From the Wired article, this seems well suited to Craig Newmark's style.) I don't have the patience for it, though, and I generally don't believe the perfect bargain exists. (Or rather, when they do appear they get snapped up immediately.)

Any other advice? Anyone else find Craigslist unusable?

Tacky, as in sticky

2009-08-16T22:10:25Z

As you may have heard, the City of New York has decided to turn Times Square into a pedestrian plaza (on a trial basis), and closed down Broadway between 42nd and 47th Streets starting this May. (Seventh Avenue remains open to traffic.) In the newly opened space, the city intended to place some tables and chairs, but the permanent versions had yet to arrive. So instead they bought some garishly colored lawn chairs from a Brooklyn hardware store.

I thought the lawn chairs were fantastic, but not everyone agreed: apparently they were pretty controversial. I guess the objection was supposed to be that they're tacky, since tackiness was a quality unprecedented in Times Square before their arrival. Anyway, the complainants can rest easy, as the new furniture is coming in and all the lawn chairs have been removed. All, that is, except for those that were incorporated into a public art installation this weekend to commemorate the lawn chair era. The sculpture is by artist Jason Peters and looks like this:

So, this Jason Peters wouldn't happen to be four inches tall and green? Because it looks like he rolled up a big lawn chair katamari. Run, tourists! He'll be rolling you up next!

(From other angles it looks less like a katamari: it's more like a 180-degree arc of lawn chairs. Like most sculpture, it looks better in reality than in photos. But if you want to see it, you only have three hours: it's coming down at 9pm tonight.)

Danke Schoen, John Hughes

2009-08-14T03:41:14Z

I'm a little late in commenting on the death of John Hughes, but I learned today that he suffered his fatal heart attack on my very street here in New York. (There's a shrine at the spot, with candles: sixteen of them, naturally.) Anyway, this gives me an excuse to bring it up a week after the fact.

Here is where I would launch into a discussion of the John Hughes oeuvre, but I have actually only seen three of the films he directed: Ferris Bueller's Day Off; Planes, Trains & Automobiles; and Uncle Buck. I was too late for the Brat Pack age bracket: I started high school in 1993, nearly ten years after Sixteen Candles. If any of you are Hughes aficionados, you'll have to tell me which essentials I'm missing. The Breakfast Club? Weird Science?

For the moment, let's ignore Uncle Buck and talk about the other two I've seen: Bueller and Planes, Trains. Hughes directed the two consecutively, and they make an interesting pair. They're both basically road movies, but in Bueller the trip is an adventure taken purely for fun and escape, while in Planes it's a hellish experience and the only goal is to get home. And they're both buddy movies, with Alan Ruck and Steve Martin as the respective straight men opposite Matthew Broderick and John Candy. But the latter two are very different characters: Candy's Del Griffith is very irritating at first, but turns out to be well-intentioned and generally a nice guy. Ferris Bueller, on the other hand, is very charming but actually kind of a jerk. (The movie portrays him as a hero, but just look at how he treats his alleged best friend Cameron.) It's as if Hughes, in his attempt to move out of the teen movie genre, made the anti-Ferris with Planes, Trains.

In the end, Planes, Trains is the outlier, and while it's genuinely a classic, what he'll be remembered for are the high school comedies. Unfortunately, that's where my John Hughes knowledge ends, so those of you who have actually seen these movies will have to take over in the comments.

[Yes, two posts this month! Maybe I should have spread them out more.]

Interest: kindled.

2009-08-13T02:18:16Z

I've been debating whether to buy a Kindle, and so the famous Nicholson Baker review in The New Yorker was of interest as one of the more high-profile negative reviews of the device. Although I don't really believe him when he says that funny passages get less funny when read on a Kindle, he mentions some other downsides like the (so far) limited library and the DRM concerns. These seemed like good points.

To address his aesthetic objections to the device, he goes on to suggest downloading the Kindle app for the iPhone instead. I ignored this advice at first, but some time later my curiosity got the better of me and I got the app. It's free, after all, and would be a good way to try the format. And I was pleased to see that there are a few books available for free. Mostly the initial volumes of various long-running series, under the favorite business model of drug dealers everywhere. (I went for His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novick; a better choice from the free selection is Robin Hobb's Assassin's Apprentice, but I'd already read it.) So I was able to follow Baker's suggestion at no cost. Still, I thought, it seemed crazy. I'd much rather read on the book-sized Kindle. Who wants to read an entire novel on the tiny iPhone screen, flipping pages every paragraph?

The answer, apparently, is me. The Kindle app is completely awesome, and I feel like it's doubled the utility of my iPhone. It has one gigantic advantage over the actual Kindle that Baker doesn't even mention: if I owned a Kindle, I would probably take it with me on vacation, or on long train rides, but I wouldn't carry it around with me all the time, since it's not small enough to fit in a pocket. But the iPhone I already carry with me everywhere. Which means that now, I always have a book to read. If I find myself waiting in line, or on the subway, or at the doctor's office, I can just start reading. I even catch myself looking forward to waiting for something so I can read a few more pages. Sure, before the Kindle I could surf the net or play games on the iPhone, but for waits of longer than a few minutes, being able to dive into a book is much better.

So, I'm a convert. I finished His Majesty's Dragon tonight, and I'm shopping right now for my next book. There is one problem, though. Sometimes I've been reading, say on the subway, and I get to my stop in the middle of a chapter. I walk home from the station, and when I get home I naturally want to continue reading. But who wants to read on the tiny iPhone screen? If only I had some kind of book-sized device that would automatically sync with the page I'm on...

And that, of course, is why Amazon gives away the iPhone app for free.

Politicizing history in Texas and elsewhere

2009-07-17T02:08:34Z

Via Robert Farley, the Wall Street Journal reports on a fight over the history curriculum in Texas schools, which seems to be just a bit politically charged. For example, this proposal:

Replace references to America's "democratic" values with "republican" values

While this is the only one that's blatantly partisan, the conservatives on the board are also pushing to de-emphasize the contributions of women and minorities, and to get more religious content into the curriculum.

This is pretty unsurprising, and not just because it's Texas. Probably history curricula have been politicized everywhere, since the dawn of time. Recently I read a book in which the author visited a number of post-Civil-War monuments, and was disgusted at the respect accorded to various Confederate figures in the South. Which in turn reminded me of my experience learning Civil War history in a Virginia public school, where guys like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were described with a kind of heroic aura about them. There was a real effort to obscure the fact that they were fighting for a truly evil cause: I still remember that when we started the Civil War segment, the teacher explained that we might have heard that the war was over slavery, but this was a naive picture. Instead, we were told that the Civil War arose from a set of complex causes related to states' rights, such as disputes over congressionally-imposed tariffs. Later on in my education, there was a moment of realization that, wait a minute, it totally was about slavery!

And this was a good school in not-at-all-Southern Fairfax County! I can only assume that this was part of the state curriculum. And in a way it's understandable that Virginia would want to whitewash the most shameful chapter in its history, but it's not just about that. It's about white supremacists being able to put up statues of Stonewall Jackson and fly the Confederate flag in the name of their "heritage".

Another example: after living in Virginia I briefly attended a private school in Houston whose mascot was the Rebel (as in Confederate). And while I was there, there was talk of changing the mascot of this nearly all-white school. It's amazing to me the outcry that went up among students and alums, who thought this was political correctness gone wild, and couldn't see what was so offensive about naming the football team after people who fought on behalf of slavery. And of course the vast majority of them weren't racists, they just didn't think about the Civil War in moral terms, partly because of the way the Civil War is taught in the South.

But as much as I love to bash the South, this kind of thing goes on everywhere: look at how the American Revolution is taught in the U.S. versus in Britain. Or the ongoing dispute between China and Japan over Japan's whitewashing of their own war atrocities. So what Texas is doing now is just par for the course (not that it shouldn't be opposed).

An extra story in a rare comic book

2009-06-26T02:11:35Z

Today I held in my hands a copy of the most valuable comic book issue in existence, Action Comics #1 (which contains the first appearance of Superman).

Well, actually I was holding an impermeable plastic capsule containing the book; naturally I couldn't touch it directly or leaf through it. And it was far from mint condition, so this one was worth far less than some of the other remaining copies of this famous issue. But nevertheless it was exciting to see this piece of comics history, a time capsule from 1938.

It goes without saying that the better condition a comic book is in, the more valuable it is—at least on the collector's market. And indeed this is true of most goods. But I felt like the experience of seeing this as a historical artifact was actually enhanced by the fact that it didn't look like it had come right from the printing press. The left edge was cracked from frequent reading, there was a food stain on the cover, and the name "Junior" was written in pencil in the corner. Some kid loved this book. I can imagine him reading it at the dinner table. The book itself has its own story that a mint copy wouldn't have.

Cycle of life

2009-05-09T23:05:38Z

Today I decided to test the notion that you never forget how to ride a bicycle. In my case it had been about 20 years since I last rode a bike, so it seemed plausible that I might actually have forgotten. It turned out that while I was pretty inept when I got on the bike today, I was almost certainly better than I would have been had I never learned in the first place. It took intense concentration, but I managed to avoid falling over, colliding with anything, or ending up in the Hudson River (it turns out the trail has no guardrail between about 100th and 125th streets).

Some thoughts about the re-learning process:

Turning is harder than I remembered.
Actually, just going in a straight line is harder than I remembered.
Bicycle seats are uncomfortable.
Sharing the road with the New York City taxicab fleet is a somewhat terrifying prospect. Waiting until I got to the bike trail before I attempted to ride was a very good idea.
However, the riverside trail on a warm Saturday afternoon has its own hazards: hordes of pedestrians, some of whom are not very attentive.
Being an obviously incompetent cyclist in front of those hordes of people is embarrassing, but not as much as, say, walking through Times Square in a Starfleet uniform to see the new Star Trek film. Not that I have any experience with that.

I used a rented bike today, but I'm contemplating buying one. Anyone know a good bike shop in Manhattan?

Schadenfreude Alert

2009-04-08T15:12:37Z

Every bear market has its silver lining. According to Bloomberg, Russian billionaires are being forced to cut back on their glamourous lifestyles.

The best paragraph from the article provides an insight both into behavior at the top of the cycle and the Russian system of justice:

"Mikhail Prokhorov, then CEO of OAO GMK Norilsk Nickel, embarrassed the Kremlin two years ago by flying in a planeload of women for a private party and getting arrested on suspicion of pimping. He was cleared of any wrongdoing because the judge ruled there wasn't enough evidence."

Planeload of women? What planeload of women? Case dismissed.

It turns out, with its dependence on $100 a barrel oil, Russia is sort of the new Houston where, back in the mid-1980s after product prices collapsed, one saw bumper stickers around town that said, "Lord, please send another oil boom. I promise not to piss the next one away."

Rise (and kneeling) of the machines

2009-04-07T00:59:49Z

Via Tyler Cowen, this looks like a good way to scam people who subscribe to a very odd theology:

Information Age Prayer is a site that charges you a monthly fee to say prayers for you. A typical charge is $4.95 per month to say three prayers specified by you each day.

"We use state of the art text to speech synthesizers to voice each prayer at a volume and speed equivalent to typical person praying," the company states. "Each prayer is voiced individually, with the name of the subscriber displayed on screen."

Prices, however, are dictated by the length of the prayer. As noted in the Information Age Prayer FAQ, "A discounted prayer will cost less than other prayers of similar length."

The scam is not that they don't provide any value: presumably they supply some kind of peace of mind to the sort of person who goes for this, although I'm not sure it's $4.95/mo worth of peace of mind. The actual potential for scamming here is there's no way of verifying that they've performed the promised service at all, short of visiting their physical location (if it even exists). Then again, verifiability is unlikely to be a dealbreaker for someone credulous enough to find this idea attractive. It seems to hinge on some unusual assumptions about prayer, specifically that it's a kind of magic spell that needs to be vocalized, but having a machine vocalize it is a valid alternative to doing it yourself. (On the other hand, to hear Fred Clark tell it, the notion of prayer-as-magic-spell is a prevalent feature in the bestselling Left Behind series, so maybe this isn't such an unusual assumption after all.)

Entertainingly, the Yahoo News article goes from reporting on this service to cataloging occurrences of praying robots in science fiction, naturally including the Cylon religion in the recent Battlestar Galactica. However, Information Age Prayer seems to be less akin to the frakkin' toasters than it is to, well, ordinary toasters.

A Scalping, Not a Haircut

2009-03-31T22:30:00Z

In an auction that took less than two minutes, the best office building in New England, Boston's John Hancock Tower, traded today for $640 million, or roughly half of what Broadway Partners paid for it in 2006. The building traded before that, in 2003, for $935 million.

But even those numbers don't tell the whole story. The CMBS desk of one highly regarded Wall Street firm calculates that if you reduce the stated purchase price to reflect the value of the assumed debt (97% loan-to-value, 5.6% rate), the value of the building by itself is closer to $470 million, which would be 67% below peak pricing and half of its 2003 value.

No one in the commercial real estate business that I know of thinks that values have fallen that much. But when not much is trading, it's hard to say for sure. To the extent that this trade is at all reflective of the market in general, things could get really, really ugly before it's all said and done.

P-PIP for Dummies

2009-03-29T12:49:50Z

The Financial Times website has a cool animated explanation of the Public-Private Investment Partnership program here. It takes about three minutes to watch and is narrated by a guy with a terrific English accent. Things always seems more understandable when they're explained by the English, for some reason.

Although having seen "Quantum of Solace" for the second time last night, I'm still not sure I understand that, even though it was quite obviously the product of an English imagination.

The chase scenes were fun, though.

Mama Always Said I'd Be the Chosen One

2009-03-28T22:31:54Z

Carl: Welcome to this edition of Squawk Box. I'm joined this morning by Joe Kernen. Becky Quick has taken the day off to work on applications to law school.

Joe: In the studio with us today is one of the giants of the Jersey waste-hauling business, Tony Soprano. Thanks for joining us today, Mr. Soprano.

Tony: Don't mention it.

Carl: Tell us what's new in waste-hauling these days.

Tony: We're settin' up to do a big business in dese toxics.

Joe: You mean, nuclear waste, that sort of thing?

Tony: Naw. I'm talkin' about the toxic assets, all dese banks need to get rid of right away. Uncle Sugar is stakin' us himself, and there's some sweet deals. Me and the boys at the Bada-Bing, we're gettin' in on it, this P-PIP thing.

Carl: You mean the Public-Private Investment Partnerships that Secretary Geithner announced last week?

Tony: Yeah, dat's it. You heard of leveraged buy-outs, right? Well, this is more like a leveraged give-away. The government puts up 93 cents on th' dollar, you put up the other 7. You buy dese toxics and hope for the best. It don't work out, you walk away, raise the rates on your shy business to cover your lost 7. And if it works? Well, you wouldn't believe the vig. I'll be able to afford whatever Carmela wants to buy plus an extra Russian girl or two. Maybe get a new boat. All on account of buying dese toxics on the cheap.

Joe: Just for information, they're not called toxic assets anymore, you know. The word is "legacy." Say, you can't smoke in here.

Tony: (Lighting up a cigar) Who cares what they're called. All I know is, we are bellying up to the trough, along with the big hedge fund players. Was dem that designed the whole thing anyway, dese hedge fund guys, then they just give the plan to little Timmy and said, here. Dis is what you're gonna do if you wants the likes of us to get you some liquidity back in the system. Where's the ash tray?

Carl: There's a trash can right-

Joe: But do you guys have any real experience in working out bad credits?

Tony: (Laughing until he chokes) Sorry. Dat was a good one. We got an entire collections department. Reports to Paulie Walnuts. We have a high recovery rate. One hundred percent from the deadbeats who are still breathing.

Carl: You think the banks are really going to sell at prices that will look attractive?

Tony: Whadda you t'ink? The buyer is owned and largely controlled by the government. It so happens the government regulates and in many cases also owns the banks that are the sellers. How the banks gonna say no, with the government holdin' a gun to their heads? They don't play ball, they might find themselves in receivership. The fix is in, see. This is sweeter than anything we ever thought up in the business. I mean the waste haulin' business.

Joe: But aren't you worried about populist rage and Congress maybe taxing away your winnings some place down the line?

Tony: I take it you don't know too much about how political campaigns are financed.

Carl: Well, thanks for spending part of the morning with us, Mr. Soprano. Please join us tomorrow when we will interview Christopher Moltisanti about making it as a screenwriter in Hollywood.

Tony: Umm, you might want to think about bookin' someone else. Just in case.

Notional Value of Derivatives

2009-03-26T20:55:58Z

I was in the audience at the Spring meeting of the Pension Real Estate Association in Washington, DC, when Tim Ryan, CEO of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, addressed us about the current situation in the financial markets and the governmental response. He was modestly positive that the new Public-Private Investment Partnership and TALF programs will work, so the general message was reassuring.

In response to one question from the audience, he said that the book value of derivative positions tend to be the "notional value" of those positions. This set up a little alarm bell in my head, so when I got back to Houston I looked this up here.

As I understand it from this explanation, the $1.6 trillion book value of AIG's derivatives overstates substantially its total credit risk exposure, which is some small fraction of that number- so my Tuesday morning post about the amount at risk if the book is mismanaged by new and less competent staff clearly exaggerated the potential size of the risk. Actually to calculate the risk would require a level of understanding of each position that only those involved in the trades could possibly have.

As to this flawed analysis, apologies, and mea culpa. I was erroneously applying the accounting we use in commercial real estate to derivatives. My bad.

I think the main point does remain the same, however- as seen by the mad scramble in the AIG Paris office today to replace the two guys who resigned there, thus potentially triggering defaults in their derivatives contracts. The question of whether the taxpayers will be called upon to prop this company up to the tune of even more billions rides in large measure on whether the current book gets unwound as competently as possible. Whether the replacements Banque AIG finds for its two resigning executives will be good enough to satisfy the French banking regulators and thus avoid a default, and who knows what additional damage to this company, is a risk we, as 80% owners of the company, wouldn't be running but for all this whole bonus anger.

Get a Grip

2009-03-26T16:02:04Z

This morning's edition of The Wall Street Journal reports that AIG's Paris unit is scrambling to find replacements for two executives who have tendered their resignations in the wake of the bonus "outrage." Apparently, something like $264 billion in derivatives contracts will be declared in default if the two men are not replaced to the satisfaction of French bank regulators. This is because such contracts typically contain "key man" or "change of control" clauses that are triggered if certain important personnel leave and aren't satisfactorily replaced.

Here is one example- among many- why it was more than just stupidity or greed for AIG to pay retention bonuses. Losing some of the people it currently has puts billions of dollars at risk.

So, listen up people. Your outrage about these bonuses may be "justified." But by indulging yourself in it, instead of controlling it, you are potentially costing yourself (and me, and every other taxpayer) money.