For Further Reading after Painting By Numbers, My Latest Book

By On January 4, 2017 · Leave a Comment · In Uncategorized

Painting By Numbers is a book I’ve wanted to write for a long time. BUT, as I begin the roll-out of its promotional campaign, I first want to acknowledge the books which should serve, with Painting By Numbers, as a syllabus of sorts. These are books which inspired me to write my own, expand on the topics I raise, and address the issues of numerical uncertainty in specific industries and sectors. All of them should be on your radar if you are passionate about this topic. My hope is that, after readers get acquainted with the concepts at the elementary, anecdotal level I present them, they will move on to the deeper and broader treatments available from these experts. Links to their Amazon pages are provided for convenience.

 

The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver, Penguin Group, New York, New York, 2012.

This book should be considered a modern bible on the limitations of forecasting and prediction, but also on how prediction can be improved. I’ve recommended it to many friends and several have taken me up on it. If I ever teach a class on this subject, I will warm up the students with Painting by Numbers and then use The Signal and the Noise as the main text. The breadth of Silver’s topics and discussion points are, well, breathtaking. He tackles numerical analysis in baseball, election polling, climate change, gambling, weather forecasting (different from climate change), epidemics, financial markets, chess and much more. If my work is known for one thing, I hope it will be that it achieved more with respect to brevity and simplification. The Signal and the Noise is an investment of time and brain cells but well worth the sacrifice of both.

 

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking, Richard E. Nisbett, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, New York, 2015.

I reference Mindware in the text, because of the author’s unabashed warnings regarding the limitations of multiple regression analysis (MRA), perhaps the most prevalent numerical analysis conducted in research (especially the social sciences). Nisbett also observes that “our approach to hypothesis testing is flawed in that we’re inclined to search only for evidence that would tend to confirm a theory while failing to search for evidence that would tend to disconfirm it.” Nisbett’s book is very readable. While his focus is on reasoning in general, experiments, and the philosophy of knowledge, his central question is very similar to mine: How well do we know what we know?


The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science, Siddhartha Mukherjee, TED Books/Simon & Schuster, New York, 2015.

This slim volume, by the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies, reveals why ‘the laws of medicine are really laws of uncertainty, imprecision, and incompleteness.” They are, in fact, the ‘laws of imperfection.’ Probably the greatest piece of wisdom I got from this book is that even a perfect experiment is not necessarily generalizable. In other words, even if all of your statistics prove that your experiment ran perfectly, that doesn’t mean your results can be extrapolated to larger or different populations or even repeated for an identical sample.

In my view, the medical profession is particularly rife with arrogance and inability to face the limits of certainty. Mukherjee courteously holds the collective profession up in front of a mirror, pointing out the flaws in what he concedes is a relatively young area of science.


Willful Ignorance: The Mismeasure of Uncertainty, Herbert Weisberg, John Wiley & Sons Inc, Hoboken, NJ, 2014.

Weisberg tackles the subject of uncertainty from the perspective of the general process of scientific discovery and uses engaging stories about scientists and “thinkers” throughout history to illustrate his points. Like Nisbett, he also thinks statistical analysis has approached “a crisis” (paraphrasing the back flap copy). One of his central tenets is that “this technology for interpreting evidence and generating conclusions has come to replace expert judgment to a large extent. 

“Scientists no longer trust their own intuition and judgment enough to risk modest failure in the quest for great success.” And this corollary: “Instead of serving as a adjunct to scientific reasoning, statistical methods today area widely perceived as a corrective to the many cognitive biases that often lead us astray.” It isn’t the role of science to provide answers; it’s to refine the questions. It’s a readable text but falls squarely between an academic textbook and one attempting to popularize science concepts.

 

Automate This, Christopher Steiner, Portfolio/Penguin, New York, New York, 2012.

The book’s subtitle, “How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World,” suggests that Steiner’s focus is how human activities are being automated through bots governed by algorithms. “Algorithms,” he writes, 

“operate much like decision trees, wherein the resolution to a complex problem, requiring consideration of a large set of variables, can be broken down to a long string of binary choices.” 

Binary choices are ones computers can make. But this statement also shows that an algorithm is just another form of numerical analysis. Of all the books I recommend, Steiner’s scares me the most. Consider this: 

“Of the nearly one billion users in Facebook’s system, the company stores up to a thousand pages of data, including the type of computer you use, your political views, your love relationships, your religion, last location, credit cards…” (Remember, it was published in 2012). Think about that with respect to the privacy and national security debate.

At one time, the federal government forced AT&T to cooperate for national security in ways no one wants to remember. Now, imagine when the social media sites  of our modern world have your information wrong, when they have drawn the wrong conclusions from your digital footprints! Steiner also describes a company which has developed a bot that “sucks in box scores from sporting events, identifies the most relevant aspects, and writes a story built around those aspects of the game. Is this the end of sports journalism as we know it?

 

Models.Behaving.Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life, Emanuel Derman, Free Press/Simon & Schuster, New York, New York, 2011.

Derman is a physicist turned Wall Street “quant” and was one of a plethora of authors weighing in on the financial crisis and great recession of 2007/2008. Derman brings into the discussion the idea of models and metaphors: 

“Models stand on someone else’s feet. They are metaphors that compare the object of their attention to something else that it resembles. Resemblance is always partial, and so models necessarily simplify things and reduce the dimensions of the world.” 

But this later quote is priceless in its utility for understanding: “Once you understand that a model isn’t the thing but rather an exaggeration of one aspect of the thing, you will be less surprised at its limitations.” 

This is similar to what Nisbett is trying to convey about MRA, which limits the researcher to one aspect of the thing, and thus loses the context of all the other influences on that one thing (e.g., a measured, independent variable). Although Derman focuses (mostly) on financial models, he explains very well the limitations of models for economics, global climate, and other broad situations compared to those used in physics.


An Engine, Not a Camera, Donald Mackenzie, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2006.

If more people read and understood Mackenzie’s account of his deep research into valuation models for financial derivatives and the inner workings of financial markets, the world of investment would probably be very different. Mackenzie shines a bright light on the purpose of most models—to create a version of reality and then capitalize on that reality. In this case, Mackenzie argues persuasively that the Black-Scholes model for options pricing, which did indeed by most accounts change the field of finance, was developed to drive a market (engine) rather than reflect a market (camera). His analysis lends evidence to a broader contention, that the “invisible hand” of the market is anything but, that markets are deliberately constructed for the entities which will participate in that market. 

To my way of thinking, An Engine, Not a Camera is about uncertainty at its highest level, as it casts doubt on the entire notion of a “free market,” “Markets are not forces of nature, they are human creations,” he writes. To which I would add (as I suggest in the chapter on business models), models today are primarily used to create new markets and new realities, not expand our understanding of the human condition.

 

Useless Arithmetic, Orrin Pilkey and Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, Columbia University Press, New York, 2007. 

This is an example of a book that focuses on a specific field of applications identified in the subtitle, “Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future.” This quote sums up what you are going to learn from the Pilkeys: “The reliance on mathematical models has done tangible damage to our society in many ways. Bureaucrats who don’t understand the limitations of modeled predictions often use them.” Even if you consider yourself an environmentalist, Useless Arithmetic is very useful for understanding how math models are used and abused.

 

Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway, Bloomsbury Press, New York, 2010.

As I note, uncertainty is something used to create doubt. In particular, the authors take aim at scientists and researchers pressed into service (and well paid) to blow up what is left of scientific uncertainty on highly charged political and cultural issues to impede progress on the issues of the day. They go as far to accuse such experts as turning doubt into a “product.” The issues they tackle include smoking and cancer, the ozone hole, global warming, acid rain, and other ecological issues. Unlike many of the other books listed, the authors in particular assess the public and political debates around these issues, not the scientific method. Health effects of smoking were turned into a great debate, funded by “big tobacco,” after the scientific evidence was rapidly drawing the conclusion, assert the authors. Among the important tenets of wisdom imparted is that balance in reporting is not giving equal weight to both sides, but to give accurate weight to both sides. Some “sides” represent deliberate disinformation spread by well-organized and well-funded vested interests, or ideological denial of the facts.

 

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, Cathy O’Neil, Crown, New York, 2016.

You’ve probably inferred from the title that this book aims to be provocative and incendiary first. It certainly accomplishes that. O’Neil tackles data and modeling through the prism of social justice and power structures. But her metaphor is precious because it reveals how models evolve into WMD. One of her best examples is the US News & World Report college ranking system. Over several decades, it became the standard for college rank and therefore the object of intense manipulation so that colleges could improve on the rank. She observes (correctly in my mind) that all of the emphasis on the rating and its following among parents doesn’t do a damn thing for the quality of education. When a school’s objective becomes figuring out how to “game the ranking,” it’s no different than my attempt to game my rankings of colleges to favor the school I had already selected, as I illustrated in the opening chapter. O”Neil applies her analysis to getting insurance, landing a job, obtaining credit, on-line advertising and other aspects of unfairness in modern life. 

 

An Introduction to Mathematical Modeling, Edward A Bender, Dover Publications, Mineola, NY,  1978. 

Here, the term “introduction” refers to very mathematics-intensive theory and applications, optimization routines, and probabilities. The first chapter, “What is Modeling?” does a good job of laying the groundwork for those who wish to skip the math. 

 

Measurements and Their Uncertainties, Ifan G. Hughes and Thomas P.A. Hase, Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 2010.

This book, focused on error in physical sciences, also gets complicated in a hurry, but again, the first chapter is well structured and offers good foundational material. It starts with the overriding point that “there will always be error associated with that value due to experimental uncertainties.” It goes on to classify uncertainties as random errors, systematic errors, and mistakes. While most discussions of uncertainty and error (mine included) focus on extrapolation, or extending a curve fit to data past the original measured data (or making inferences into the future using data from the past), this book reminds us that interpolation can be just as insidious. Interpolation refers to assuming the shape of the curve or line or graph between the measured data points. While this is a textbook, it is graphically rich rather than mathematically intensive (authors assume that computers will be doing most of the math).

 

Interpreting Data, Peter M Nardi, Pearson Education Inc, Boston, 2006.

This book keeps to the straight and narrow of how data analysis is applied in experiments. It notes in the introduction that “it is written in non-technical everyday language…” With passages like “Pearson r correlations are for interval or ratio levels of measurement…Many researchers, however, use these correlations for dichotomies and for ordinal measures, especially if there are equal-appearing intervals,” I’m not convinced of the everyday language. Nevertheless, I found it useful as a refresher on how experiments are designed, data taken, results analyzed, and conclusions drawn.

 

A Demon of Our Own Design, Richard Bookstaber, John Wiley & Sons Inc, Hoboken, NJ  2007; and Lecturing Birds on Flying, Pablo Triana, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ, 2009.

Both of these books are focused on financial engineering and were blessed in being well-timed with the collapse of financial markets and the world economy. They cover similar territory and both insinuate that financial markets are imperiled by the way modeling is applied. The subtitle for Demon is “Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation,” and the subtitle for Lecturing Birds is “Can Mathematical Theories Destroy the Financial Markets?” However, everything I read tells me that things have only gotten worse, so unless you are seeking recent historical perspective, I’d supplement these two books with some more recent titles.

 

20% Chance of Rain, Richard B Jones, Amity Works, Connecticut, 1999 

This book wants to be “Your Personal Guide to Risk,” as its subtitle urges. Written by an industry colleague in my consulting work, who spent decades in the machinery insurance business, it’s not really about modeling or uncertainties, but about risk and how we measure risk through probabilistic assessment. Jones stresses the uncertainty boundaries around any risk assessment and that “perception creates risk reality.” He also offers this bit of timeless wisdom: “Statistics do not, and cannot, prove anything. The field of statistics is incapable of this. Statistics can provide information to help us make decisions, but the decisions are still ours to make.” Today, statistics and numerical analysis in general are being used so decisions can be made for us (automation, digital algorithms, market construction, even on-line dating and hookup). We’d better all have a thorough understanding of their limitations

 

 

When a Favorite Short Story Expands to a Novel…

By On July 23, 2016 · 3 Comments · In Uncategorized

Reading the novel which I feel must have grown from one of my favorite short stories, then rereading the story, made me realize that the novel may be considered the “long form” but the short story will always be the “great form.” Novels intentionally suck everything out of your head.  A short story demands that the reader breath with it, use imagination to inflate it to its deserved size.

What I talk about when we talk about contemporary short stories are my three favorites of the last fifteen years – “Another Manhattan,” Donald Antrim; “The Spot,” David Means; and “The Cold Outside,” John Burnside. I don’t know how many times I have recited this list. Honestly, I wish it would change. I get tired of listening to it myself.

When I read David Means’ novel, Hystopia, I realized immediately that I was reading some inflated version of “The Spot.” When I say inflated, I mean from a balloon to a dirigible.

Means’ is a consummate short story writer. He’s considered one of the best in contemporary letters. His work regularly appears in The New Yorker. He has published four highly regarded and honored collections. Short Story writers can hardly do better than that. I’ve read most of his output. I am a fan.

It’s not my intent to be a critic here or convince you to buy and read Hystopia. I found it worth every page and sentence because I admire how Means’ writes. He makes me feel, feel, feel, what’s going on, rather than think, think, think too hard about it. Honestly, about two-thirds through, I might have put it down if it wasn’t a novel by one of my three favorite short story writers. But because I am familiar with his short works, I was beyond curious how he would handle the long form.

I’m a little weary of Vietnam-era stories (this is one). I’m not a fan of dystopian fiction (obvious from the title). I can’t get movies like “Platoon” and “Apocalypse Now” and “Deerhunter” and all the others out of my head when I read them. I’m also not a fan of female characters who seem like they are being dragged by the hair by barbarian males (there’s at least one). But I was taken with Means’ sense of the pastoral in the setting (essentially the state of Michigan, in a state that can best be described as an extrapolation from the violence, war, and assassinations of the late 1960s and presaging the economic ravages of post-industrial America still to come). I was taken with the tight structure of the novel, an infield of major characters, and an outfield of minor characters vital to what’s going on.

I am always a sucker for stories which depict the trauma and absurdity, and the unintended consequences, of large institutional programs, in this case the government trying to collectively manage veterans post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) in its many varieties, and the consequences of the war in general on what would later come to be known as “the Homeland.”

In two words, the America of Hystopia has just gone batshit crazy. The characters are desperately trying to hold it together, maneuver through what’s left of their lives. And whether the character is on the outside fighting those on the inside, or fighting within their own tribe, or vice-versa or reversa, there ain’t much left of life for any of them. And that’s what Means’ does best in Hystopia, take the remnants of these lives, find their essence under these dire circumstances, and deliver what’s left of the human condition.

But what I really want to convey is a unique experience. I’ve read “The Spot” at least a half a dozen times, maybe a dozen, although it had been a few years since the last time. Hystopia clearly (well, clear to me) builds on the types of characters and, most importantly, the mood from “The Spot,” although who knows which came first, in print or in the author’s mind. Anyway, I reread “The Spot” a day after finishing the novel. Wow! At first, it was deflationary. The short story seemed small, like a balloon, compared to what I had just experienced. But then, I focused on the perfection of the sentences and how each one expands into the next and the next. And what I reaffirmed is that the short story is the dirigible, because, if done right, the reader is given the space, the air, to inflate it to whatever size he/she wishes. Novels are intended to suck up all the oxygen in your system. In many ways, the author does all the work for the reader. Short stories, great ones, are  an opportunity for the reader to air-dance with the story, imagine something larger from the short form.

Here’s a fragment from “The Spot”: “You see, the water is unsuspecting until it hits that spot. It has no idea it’s gonna be collected, drawn under the streets, cleaned up, and piped into homes. Not a clue. But when it touches that suck, its future vanishes. No chance of becoming a wave after that, no kissing the shore and yearning back out into the lake. Instead it ends up pooled on somebody’s lawn, or slipping down a throat, or spooned into a bowl of baby cereal. That’s the mystery of chance. One minute you’re doing one thing, the next you’re another, and choice had nothing at all to do with it.”

Choice has nothing to do with it. How much bleaker can you get? But keep thinking about it. Maybe choice is less influential than we wish to believe.

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Don DeLillo’s Zero K: Detachment Theory

By On May 19, 2016 · Leave a Comment · In Uncategorized

What does one avid reader write about the latest novel from one of, if not the, leading American author of contemporary literary fiction?

I feel like I’ve grown up with this guy through his novels. The Names was an enabler of my addiction to literary fiction when I read it in the early 1980s. Underworld is one of my all time favorite “big books.” I’ve read everything the guy’s published since Underworld, including his short stories in the The New Yorker, and gone back to read his earlier works from the 1970s, including Great Jones Street, End Zone, and White Noise.

Zero K is about a son coming to grips with his wealthy father’s impending cryogenic preservation in a personal pod at one of those remote sites where they’d have to kill you if they told you its location. About all we know about it is it is “land traveled by nomads for thousands of years.” His father wants to “own the end of the world.”

No one reads DeLillo for plot or character. You read DeLillo because he is a master at extrapolating the contemporary zeitgeist to its future state. He anticipates our future without sensationalizing it. He makes you look at it, not immerse you in it.

And you read DeLillo, or at least I do, because his writing is so exact, so precise, without ever resorting to lofty words for the sake of making the reader look them up. When he uses such a word in Zero K, he has his narrator step back and examine it, define it for you.

Zero K is a meditation on life extension, on the notion of not wanting to die, on having the means (money) to choose not to die. It probes the idea of money and science as the new religion. After all, you better have faith in the scientists who are going to restore you if you’re going to be preserved for a few decades or centuries.

Most of all, it challenges the impact of those the preserved leave behind. Isn’t that what death is all about? The dead are dead. The living have to make sense of it all. In this case, they aren’t dead, though, but a state in-between.

DeLillo uses this idea of being preserved, for later reincarnation on this planet, to explore elements of modern life, death, and everything in-between. Because being preserved for your rebirth in an enhanced physical state for whatever future society holds in store is the ultimate betwixt and between life and death, I suppose.

My observation on DeLillo is that his novels have a detachment quality which has grown over time, not linearly perhaps, but a trendline (Great Jones Street is an example of an early work with this detachment quality). This detachment hasn’t worked so well in all of his later novels. I thought Cosmopolis was kind of a dud but Point Omega was fantastic.

Detachment is extremely effective in Zero K. Maybe it works because we (the characters, us readers) are not attached to either life or death as this story unfolds. We’re observers with the narrator. It’s not the surround sound kind of effect most novels have.

The narrator is uber self conscious, almost annoyingly so at times. He ponders everything. I mean, everything. And DeLillo pauses time as part of the reading process for the narrator to ponder. Most of the time, the narrator seems detached from himself even.

The detachment of the narrator from his father, his girlfriend, his mother in law, and the death of his real mother, his girlfriend’s abandoned son, adopted from an old Soviet state, all this detachment also allows DeLillo to get away with passages which in other novels might be considered explanation getting the way of the story. We’re observing Jeffrey Lockhart, the son, ponder his father’s impending non-death.

There’s much pondering going on, but I can assure you it’s not a ponderous novel.

This is the kind of detachment which permeates this novel, from the last few pages when the narrator son is back in New York: “On public elevators, I direct a blind gaze precisely nowhere, knowing that I’m in a sealed box alone with others and that none of us is willing to offer a face open to inspection.” A nice metaphor for the preserved in pods half a planet away, but also cold hard truth for elevator riders everywhere.

Characters, narrator, elevator riders, readers – all are on the outside looking into something and away from others.

This is how pod residents are prepared: “You are completely outside the narrative of what we refer to as history. There are no horizons here. We are pledged to an inwardness, a deep probing focus on who and where we are.”

Think about this the next time you watch someone with face in iphone smack into something or someone. DeLillo is extrapolating from here to Zero K. I think. After all, the narrator Jeffrey tells us in the middle of the book, “what else was there for [my father] to acquire” but “the billionaire’s myth of immortality.” The “pod would be his final shrine of entitlement.”

Detachment fully serves what I perceive to be DeLillo’s purpose here, so the reader senses this in between space along with the characters, especially the narrator who has the obligation but no desire to witness his father’s preservation and privilege.

What is it like not to be attached to life or death? Zero K nails that one.

 

A World Premier- All Local Artists

By On November 22, 2015 · Leave a Comment · In Music

That’s the cool thing about a world premier musical performance. I may be the first to pen any interpretation at all!

Years ago, I was looking for something different for weekend entertainment, something chamber music oriented, as I was beginning to favor smaller ensembles over my lifelong penchant for orchestras. I came across an obscure announcement about Chamber Project Saint Louis. I ended up attending what apparently must have been one of their first or early performances at Meramec Community College (if memory serves) and was captivated not only by their music but the entrepreneurial spirit of these lady performers. I’ve been an avid supporter since.

Yesterday evening, for the Project’s 8th birthday, they performed a world premier of “Chamber Etudes” by Washington University Assistant Professor of Music Composition, Christopher Stark. The composer, present for the performance, challenged the audience to identify images that come to mind as these etudes are played. Apparently, a well-known New York illustrator is collaborating with Stark to create images which will accompany a future performance.

At the risk of a Charlie Brown moment*, here are the names given to the etudes, and my images (I had not looked at the titles before listening):

  • Trinket – water droplets, the poetry of water.
  • Clouds – empty spaces, radio waves traveling through the universe, astronomers coded messages to anyone out there who may be listening, and Twilight Zone
  • March – walking alone in an unknown environment, when you hear every sound crystal clearly, including your heart beating, fear.
  • Landscape with Pulse and Triads – Busy intersection, urban setting, emergence from the amniotic fluid, Times Square (this was the most beautiful of the pieces, beautiful chords “emerge” from the piano through the percussive-like quiet chaos of the winds)
  • Dancing Clouds – destination, having to get somewhere, a pedestrian in a hurry.

I don’t know, water droplet has some vague connection to trinket, clouds move in large empty spaces, a march is a fast walk, a busy intersection is an urban landscape, and well, if a pedestrian is in a real hurry, nervous, and apprehensive, maybe dance is invoked. Well, that may be a stretch.

But that’s the cool thing about a world premier. I may be the first to pen any interpretation at all!

The program included Francis Poulenc’s Sextet for Winds and Piano and Mozart’s Quintet in E flat Major. No string instruments this performance, just winds and piano, also a little different. As a serial entrepreneur, it’s been a treat hearing this talented group of performers mature as a creative endeavour, non-profit business, and musical ensemble.

* “I thought I saw a horsey and a duckey,” Charlie Brown says, when Lucy asked him what he and Linus see in the clouds/sky, and Linus of course responds with something abstract and philosophical.

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City On Fire- An Edifice, Though Not Necessarily Edifying

By On October 17, 2015 · Leave a Comment · In Uncategorized

I had been anticipating Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire for over a year, ever since I caught wind of its existence and the author’s celebrated six-figure contract with a big five New York City publishing house. It’s billed as a book about 1970s New York City, and the July 14, 1977 blackout is the temporal focal point of the events in the novel.

At eighteen years old, I landed in Manhattan in September 1974 for college and ended up staying (except for one year) until 1987, after which I still commuted to Manhattan and lived in the metro area (two states away in Bucks County PA).

Mercifully, during the blackout, I was living in a trailer working as an engineering intern (well-paid, not like today’s interns) at a power plant in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee. After I left that job, I returned to Manhattan with an office in World Trade Tower 1 (95th floor) from 1979-1981, though I spent much of that time reverse-commuting to a refinery in Elizabeth, NJ), and lucked into an apartment on the Upper East Side (400 sq. ft., street side!, third floor of a five floor walkup, with three locks on the door, and boasting a metal shower on top of an 18-in cement pedestal in the kitchen, one sink for dishes and toiletries, and a water closet). After the engineering job, I ended up working for almost two decades for McGraw-Hill, a major New York publisher (though not known for its literary fiction).

More recently, I co-launched an indie publishing company, and I fashion myself a writer of fiction, so I am well-versed in the vagaries of the lords of New York publishing, and the tens of thousands of writers in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and beyond (can you see that famous New Yorker map cover or what?) seeking to jump the ditch between these two worlds. Incidentally, many of these writers and their agents are now querying our little publishing house in St. Louis (Blank Slate Press, now part of Amphorae Publishing Group).

So, I came to City on Fire with an all-consuming desire to read a “big book” about a seminal period in my life and a desire to understand how this relatively young author and his debut (debut, mind you!) novel manuscript were anointed by the all-consuming New York publishing community to be the 927-page cause celebre of lit fiction in the middle part of the second decade of the twenty first century.

When my wife (who now runs the publishing company) went to New York in May for Book Expo America, I politely told her not come back without one of the 700 free advance reader editions of City on Fire Knopf (the publisher) was going to hand out.

Others in the blogosphere (and the envy wing of struggling authors everywhere) had already asked the obvious questions, what’s a guy (Garth Risk Hallberg) from the American South born around 1980 have to say about 1970s New York? How did he get this amazing contract as an unknown (in part, apparently, because he was assigned a seat next to a big deal New York agent at the wedding of a mutual friend, according to an article in Publishers Weekly, May 4, 2015)? How could a major house risk so much on a 930-page debut from a complete unknown?

I would also add a few of my own. Why are all the back flap blurbs from people who sell books for a living, and the seven in the front written by the editors at Knopf and Vintage? Could they not find any better from the lit fiction “blurbosphere”?

A bipolar reaction

I read this book over four months. I travel a lot and it was just too weighty to take on trips (I do my serious reading in paper). For me, a “book I can’t put down” is one I do put down frequently just to catch my breath, savor the language, and prolong the joy. This wasn’t that kind of book.

Without giving too much away, here are the primary characters and plot elements:

  • A rag tag group of punk kids and young adults are plotting and executing domestic terrorist-like events (against property mostly)
  • A corporation, The Hamilton Sweeney Company, is doing corrupt development and “making money from money”; its corporate headquarters becomes a target for the rag tag bunch above (and the climax of the novel).
  • Mercer Goodman, a young African American gay writer type guy from Georgia trying to “make it” in the city, takes up with William Hamilton Sweeney III, a rebellious Richie Rich artiste, in the early stages of the novel, but soon the two go their separate ways.
  • Sam (Samantha), a Long Island girl whose dad is the pre-eminent manufacturer of fireworks serves as a conveyor belt among these worlds; she is shot on New Year’s Eve prior to the July 14 blackout.
  • Charlie, a very confused Long Island kid and best friend to Sam, is much like Sam, but he’s not shot; instead, he (and earlier Sam) ends up attached to the nihilist punks seeking meaning through subversion, rock n roll, drugs, and explosives.
  • A retired cop (Larry Pulaski) and a newspaper guy (Richard Groskoph) are running around trying to piece all of this stuff together; the newspaper guy gets taken out early.
  • Regan Hamilton Sweeney (sister to William III) and her ne’er-do-well husband Keith Lamplighter experience family and marital problems suitable for any day or nighttime soap.

What I mean by bipolar is that I have two strong opposing reactions about City on Fire. Think barbell.

On the one end of the axis, this novel is precisely constructed, tightly woven, as sturdy as a brick shithouse (at least until the very end, which I address later). This is quite an accomplishment for 927 pages. In those four months of picking up and putting down this book, I rarely lost track of the characters, was always grounded in place and time, and could follow everything page to page, chapter to chapter. This is unusual for me. There are lots of big books out there I love, but I spend a lot of time confused and have to keep retracing my steps.

There are five principal loci of the action – the Hamilton Sweeney corporate building (and family residence), the lower east side hovel serving as the base of operations for the post-punk rock musician/junkie/nihilist/domestic terrorist kids/young adults, the apartment where William Hamilton Sweeney III (later known as Billy three sticks) and his gay lover Mercer Goodman live (For me, Mercer is  at least in part a stand in for the author, he’s from Georgia, he’s writing a novel, he’s moved to New York, he teaches high school English, he’s poor, etc), the residence in Brooklyn where the Hamilton Sweeney daughter Regan lives with her husband Keith and their two kids, and a somewhat peripheral Long Island location where Sam and Charlie migrate from.

Hallberg does an exceptional job of keeping these sub-worlds together. In this department, he’s got mojo on the order of gravity and objects in a solar system. I would have loved to see his plot diagram, his white board, his apartment wall where all of this was hatched, stitched, taped, and glued.

It all holds together, that is, until the ending (foreshadow number two).

But here’s the problem at the other end of this axis. This world, as I “felt” it reading this novel, is an amalgamation of post 9/11 NYC and 1970s NYC. I suppose you can say that’s where the fiction comes in, but still, it didn’t authentically reflect and enlighten my experience or, for that matter, that depicted in the dozens of NYC novels and short stories I have read (I am a sucker for NYC stories) or movies I’ve seen.

I mean, I wasn’t looking for Taxi Driver, or Death Wish, The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3, Bright Lights, Big City (Jay McInerny, another author who cut teeth with a NYC debut novel), Lush Life, or Great Jones Street grimness, grit, and gore. But it’s 1977, for crying out loud. The Yankees are going to win the World Series, Miss Subways and Jacoby and Meyers posters line the subway cars, graffiti covers every surface, Curtis Sliwa and the Guardian Angels are patrolling the underground, half the city openly smokes pot waiting in line at the movies and at the ball parks, Times Square is a cesspool of pornography, ghetto youth act out once the subway car empties and you’re the only rider left, the Port Authority could win the prize for skankiest city block sized enclosure in America, “Headless Body Found In Topless Bar” graces the New York Post front page, and a spread photograph of a bullet-riddled mafia boss in a restaurant in Little Italy is the only thing the daily papers will sacrifice the back-page front page of the Sports Section. Where’s WNEW and WPLJ, the pre-eminent rock radio stations of the era, in a novel with anarchist rock musicians terrorizing the city?

No one sane in 1970s New York City goes into the parks after dark, and yet the incident around which much of the story spins involves two white Long Island teenagers meeting in Central Park on New Year’s Eve 1976.

Sure, some of these details are included here and there, but they didn’t feel woven into the fabric of scene setting. And some details are so obscure, I wondered if they were placed as deep inside triggers for true New Yorkers. On page 908, the cop Larry Pulaski drives across a bridge in New Jersey “that for once merits his name.” I know this bridge only because I drove across it for more than a year reverse commuting to that refinery. It’s the Pulaski skyway. Talk about obscure references (and that air of superiority privileged only to current and ex-New Yorkers). The “West Side Angels” make an appearance on pp 804-805. I don’t recall Mayor Abe Beame making an appearance, or any politician for that matter.

In reaching the end of City on Fire, I was reminded of the World Trade Center buildings. They are so precisely constructed. The symmetry of all those windows in the sky is like an optical illusion. They rise majestically from the lower Manhattan skyline. No question, they are purpose-built towers, solid, functional, practical, everything a Hamilton Sweeney Board of Directors would want from an office building.

They are also ugly. Or at least they are not beautiful. They are tall shoeboxes from an architectural perspective. They were the tallest buildings in the world at that time. Though they have been mythologized and eulogized since 9/11, when they were built did they serve, beyond the practical, any function besides bragging rights for New York City?

Given the hype, I expected this novel to be like the view of NYC from inside those towers with binoculars, telescope even, not the view of those towers from the outside.

And so with City on Fire, I missed that 1970s feel, that cruel-to-be-kind urban landscape? If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere … well, if you could make it during that decade, you probably really could make it anywhere and anytime.

This book, in short, felt more like an edifice than edifying.

And the edifice begins to sway dangerously by the end. The attempted killing of the girl around which the story spins essentially disappears (the girl and her father appear but the crime dissipates like a New York minute), as does the whole sub-plot about the fireworks. One secondary character (the Asian woman, Jenny Nguyen, who lives in the same building as the offed-early journalist) and one tertiary character (the duplicitous executive partner at Hamilton Sweeney) rendezvous at the L.A. airport for no reason whatsoever other than to say that this box has been checked, yes, we’ve reminded the reader about them and they need to do something.

Jenny, incidentally, is a darling in the sense of another oft-stated admonition to writers, “kill your darlings.” In other words, get rid of characters which are a drag on the story. But let’s be real: These rules don’t apply when you’ve been anointed.

There’s an epilogue that seems to have nothing to do with the price of real estate on the Upper East Side (there’s also a prologue, so all you budding authors, don’t listen to agents who say, never have a prologue or an epilogue). The two gay lovers Mercer and Billy three sticks meet up after about a billion pages for no apparent reason, other than, I suppose, two lovers so important early on had to face off at the end.

Then on page 881 comes a long paragraph about Mercer’s novel, described much like, can you guess?, City on Fire: “In his head the book kept growing and growing in length and complexity, almost as if it had taken on the burden of supplanting real life, rather than evoking it.” And get this line at the end of that paragraph: “And clearly, he [Mercer] was no Homer. Was not even an Erica Jong.” The reading public will probably wait the same length of time that spans the lives of these two before such disparate authors are ever uttered in the same breath.

And an errant claim that “Elton John begat Queen, and Queen begat Frampton” surely alters my notions of 1970s rock n roll. It continues later with “Frampton begat Kiss who begat Alice Cooper, who begat Bowie…” Now maybe these statements are only through the eyes of the mixed up Charlie Weisbarger, but they took me right out of the decade this novel was supposed to be about.

In the middle of the box-checking march through the finale, Mercer encounters a “quartet of skinheads” looting the school Mercer taught at. Memory what it is, I still don’t recall skinheads being a “thing” anywhere but Germany in the 1970s. Bizarrely enough, these skinheads (who could be “off-duty Marines or alopeciacs”) take time off from looting to engage Mercer in conversation. And alopeciacs? Really?

I don’t mind so much the ending buckling. It is terribly difficult for even the best authors to craft an ending that doesn’t feel pretentious, rushed, tidy, or insipid. I don’t mind that City on Fire lacks lyrical prose. It’s muscular prose. It’s dense prose. It’s dense enough to keep me grounded at all times. And it’s consistent, also a stunning achievement.

But by the end I felt like I was wearing cement shoes.

The grand finale doesn’t so much resolve the plot points or character conflicts as it drifts towards the something terrible that is about to happen to the Hamilton Sweeney building. Then all these characters from the previous 850 pages re-appear in order for the author to check the requisite boxes.

And it has other elements which lack purpose, for one, a thirty page interlude that appears at page 498 (a little more than halfway through), excerpts from Sam’s diary/rebellious youth graphic ‘zine. I mean, it was a nice break in the action, but it didn’t, as we say incessantly in writers groups, “advance the story.” A second 32-page interlude appears between pages 761 and 782 (no, the numbers don’t add up) that, for some in explicable reason, explains most of the plot. On page 254, there is a reference to fireworks being directed by computer. Well, I leave room for technology advances I may have ignored on the inner pages of The New York Times during those years.

I do mind the use of obscure words that serve the same purpose as a composer who writes unplayable music. Look at me! Ambuscading, inveigle (I think I had to memorized this on in high school), perverdid, declivity, occiput, ailanthus, cormorant, unguent, ontic, pellucid, ratiocination, lapidary are a few I marked just for grins. I also mind a chapter (34 in this edition) that, out of the blue, switches to second person lecture mode. These may be the inevitable requisites of lit fiction to satisfy the academically oriented, and who knows, maybe there is deep meaning that only study in a graduate literature course will ferret out.

Don’t get me wrong, I was glad I read it. I’m happy to put City on Fire in the context of all the other NYC books I referred to earlier (and many, many more which line my shelves). If City on Fire sells well and earns the big literature prizes, I suppose the publisher can claim bragging rights. We built this! But in the end, the questions, for me, remain: why this author, why this book? Does it all come down to carefully arranged seating cards at a wedding reception?

I suppose it’s only natural to compare this novel to a similar one, Infinite Jest, from the middle of the last decade of the last millenium. After three attempts, I still haven’t made it past page 250 in that block of reconstituted wood. But I’ve spent countless hours discussing Infinite Jest with people who have read it and love it (two different reading groups, writing groups, my daughter, other aspiring fiction writers) that I feel I understand the essence of the book. I think one difference between the two tomes is that David Foster Wallace was clearly intent on telling a story in a unique way, through a new structure and use of hyperactive prose.

And back another two decades, there was Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. I almost got to the end of that one (but I was much younger then), but was so annoyed I decided not to give the author the benefit of my completing it. (I was big on personal and silent protest). I finished Hallberg’s City on Fire. And I was glad I did.

In sum, I admire the scale and ambition. I admire the construction. But I don’t read anything in City of Fire that advances the art of novel writing, of telling a big story in a big way. And I didn’t feel 1970s New York come alive in ways I had expected.

 

 

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So Vast the Prison: Takes No Prisoners Regarding the Universal Plight of Women

By On August 2, 2015 · 2 Comments · In Uncategorized

Assia Djebar, a highly acclaimed Algerian author, died earlier this year. I just finished her novel So Vast the Prison (1995). It does not read like a novel (certainly not a conventional or even non-conventional one). Judging from the brief bio info I’ve read, it is as much, or more, memoir and autobiography laced with historical fiction. The language is beautiful. It is perfectly titled. The way the universal plight of women is addressed takes no prisoners. Like some paintings I love, it is amorphous and fluid, and even confusing at times. But I stayed with it and realized my own limited perspective was getting in the way.

The novel covers a hundred years, or at least several generations, across France and Algeria. At times I was completely confused. Was this fiction? Was it a memoir? Some of the passages seemed to come straight from a journal. Or was it simply an epic poem? The narration starts with a long sequence about a lover, really an infatuation, never to return to this seemingly critical individual. It hops from generation to generation. Suddenly, it is all about making a film about a woman’s life, or the life for women, in Algeria. There are brothers and mothers (including in laws) and cousins and and aunts and uncles and sisters and friends appearing on stage, usually briefly. Men, as you may guess, don’t fare well. Husbands are brutal. Leaders are oppressive and dictatorial and battle-wagers.

But I had to go back to the title to “get it.” So Vast the Prison. That is the theme. That is what ties all of this together…tightly, unambiguously, unabashedly. Excepting perhaps a lucky few, the women of the world live in various forms of prison. Their bodies and child-bearing, prison. Their men keep them in prison. These same men maintain the cultural norms which perpetuate these life sentences. Other women, clinging to the traditional ways, fortify these prisons. Across generations, continents, and time, so vast is the prison.

Once again, this theme I’ve written about before (http://jasonmakansi.com/the-global-american-footprint-in-fiction/) emerges. Novels which are “big” outside America (and often highly acclaimed) address sobering issues, issues of life and death, survival, war, oppression, the human condition; meanwhile, the big American novels seem frivolous by comparison, dealing with the minutiae of life in the suburbs, the vagaries of popular culture, privilege, entitlement, or, as I often see it referred to these days, “first world problems.” More to the point, novels like So Vast the Prison deal with the impact of the first world’s footprint on the rest of the people living on this planet, in this case the colonization of Algeria by the French and the ensuring war for independence, as well as internal conflicts. But that’s just a backdrop for the Godzilla footprints of men all over women all across the ages.

So Vast the Prison is beautiful, lyrical writing. It may not have fit my notion of what a novel should be, but through it, I “felt” what a great deal of feminist literature has been trying to tell me for decades.

 

 

 

A Bridge to Somewhere (mostly unpleasant)

By On May 25, 2015 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction

Here’s a unique novel structure. Evan Connell, Jr., wrote two novels, Mrs. Bridge (1959) and Mr. Bridge (1969), set in 1930s Kansas City, the same family, the same marriage, the same events, but from the two different point of views, apparently to much acclaim at the time. As a unique novel reading experience, I read both of them simultaneously as overlapping waves, fifty pages nominally in one, and fifty in the other. What fun! Apparently, as a learned at a Memorial Day back yard dinner at the neighbors, movies have been based on the novels.

I’m not sure I could stomach the movies. If you take Ward and June Cleaver, and stiffen them for a generation or two prior, you’d approximate Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. Like most novels worthy of their readers, you can’t help but eagerly turn the pages of Connell’s books, even though you know it’s not going to end badly or well. Clearly, there’s going to be no end at all to the narrow, early suburban lives of these affluent, politically, and socially conservative Americans. Every page is a turn of the torture machine crank, the ring of an old grandfather clock marking off yet another interminable hour in the silent, suffering,pathetic destiny for this stripe of America.

In some ways, it’s a different form of muckraking journalism in novel form – I’m thinking of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle – showing us how the American “free market” caste system works, but in this case from the top down, not the bottom up.

What kept me reading these 600+ pages over a three-day weekend? Always hard to capture, but here’s what I think:

You can read the Bridge novels as a diatribe against prejudice and racism (the poor, blacks, Jews, Italians, gays, women, are all victims), a portrayal of capitalism vs socialism and the New Deal, the vices of classism, and lots of other -isms. You can read the Bridge novels as an indictment of the institution of traditional marriage with traditional gender roles. You can even read the Bridge novels as a damning inability of a couple to recognize, communicate about, and resolve their issues. You can probably guess that all issues faced by this couple are swept under the rug, which in a figurative sense, is the only thing “left standing” by the end.

I think what kept me going, although I hadn’t realized it until I was close to finished, is how all of us (certainly all Americans, maybe everyone), if we are able and willing to listen to the tape recorder in our heads (the one that no one can hear), suffer from/with all of the afflictions and ailments presented through this couple. Even if we think we “aren’t like that,” we are victims of parents, teachers, community leaders, and significant others who “are like that,” or were. I don’t mean just the negative (and what may come across today as stereotypical) traits of the Bridges’ (e.g., prejudice, stubbornness) but the positive ones too (work ethic,  loyalty, ambition). Society as a whole has a rate of change but we as individuals have our own rate of change. We aren’t always as enlightened as we wish to believe.

It’s fascinating that Mrs. Bridge came first. I think it’s easy to see it was a bit more difficult for the author to let Mrs. Bridge become her own character, than Mr. Bridge. The “Missus” gets one hundred fewer pages, too. I also wonder if Connell was projecting the rebellious nature of the 1960s onto his 1930s characters (especially the children), but then I realized that the large social trends often begin with the the affluent, leisure classes.

One thing’s for sure: Mrs. Bridge ends with the most heartbreaking scene imaginable. I can’t think of an ending that so embodies not only the character portrayed but indeed the oppression of the social “system” as a whole over the individual.

These are novels well worth reading, even if the experience resembles taking medicine that’s tastes awful but is good for you.

 

Us Conductors: A Potent Blend of Love, Music, Russia, New York, Physics, Espionage, and Gulags

By On March 24, 2015 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Music

I’d much rather read a debut novel that aims high and falls short than one that aims low, or like much commercial fiction, doesn’t need to aim at all. When said novel combines a few of my favorite themes – New York City, Russia, music, technology, and a earnest love story – and the publicity machine behind the novel is silent and rusted, I’m in.

Sean Michaels’ Us Conductors centers on the invention of a very strange instrument, the Theremin, which makes sound by the conductance of electric current through the human body. (You make sounds/notes by waving your arms around, much like an orchestra conductor or band leader). Around this invention, at the beginning of the last century, Michaels builds an elaborate decades-spanning tale of U.S. – Russian espionage, fierce competition among U.S. corporations for new gadgets and devices, other more nefarious applications of the scientific (physics) principles behind the theremin (e.g., bugging devices), American prosperity and depression, birth of Lenin’s communism and its growth into oppressive regimes under Stalin and later rulers, musical composition and performance, and more.

But what clearly challenges Michaels’ imagination is the love story between  Clara, the violinist in Manhattan who becomes his star pupil/player of his instrument, and Dr. Termen, the often naive, self-absorbed behavior obsessive compulsive inventor, if not genius. From early in the story to near the end, Termen is a prisoner, first as a corporate/state spy for Russia in America (how he enters the country), then as an accused traitor who betrayed his country. Without the love story, the beauty of the musical interludes, some human dignity passages in the gulag, and Termen’s will to survive, the reader would suffocate breathing in the tragedy of this man’s life, especially in the second half of the novel.

Fortunately, for a novel with more moving and stationary pieces and parts than a Steinway piano, Michaels’ use of mostly short, choppy sentences, brisk dialogue, lots of white space, and a first-person narration keeps the story from getting mired in the mud. There were moments when I feared the story would fall into melodrama. At one point, I thought, Michaels must have just watched The Shawshank Redemption. At another, I thought he must have just listened to Quartet for the End of Time composed by Messiaen (or read the story behind its birth, a tale of musicians in prison during WWII).

Frequently, Michaels use of similes and analogies seemed out of step. “The sound of the snow was like pepper crushed in a mortar.” I kept trying to square these two sounds and couldn’t. Or this: “Now, in a bare room across the world, I leave commas on the page…like eyelashes.” And this: “The wind howled like an abandoned child.” This is the kind of writing that sounds lovely, until I think about whether it actually works. I can also see where other readers would disagree. How about this: “Slowly you raised your bow and began to saw low notes like a comet at low velocity.” Has anyone heard a comet at low velocity? I suppose it’s a legitimate observation from the character’s mind (a physicist) but for us readers, not so sure.

But then this will appear on a the page: “The sum of all those years draining away, meaningless, before the empty fact of the present.” What a brilliant description of the exact point between his life in America and his emerging one as a traitor/prisoner back in Russia! There is a lengthy scene where Termen sneaks into a building (to steal corporate files) and kills a man, which I had trouble visualizing. However, I will say the last lines are a brilliant, nerdy, soul-crushing summation of his love for Clara.

I suppose this qualifies as historical fiction as much of the story is based on Termen’s life. The author acknowledges his debt to Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage, Albert Glinsky, but adds that his account is full of distortions, omissions, and lies.

Best of all, I stumbled into this novel browsing one of our local independent bookstores. I hadn’t even heard of the title or the author (and I spend a great deal of time searching for offbeat novels like this one). In the world of fiction (or music for that matter), nothing is more satisfying than discovering a new artist who pushes all your buttons and getting acquainted without any introductions or pre-conceived notions from others. I prefer not to be “played” by the constant drone of publicity (though how realistic is that?)

I certainly don’t wish for Michaels to toil in obscurity, though. I hope this blog post will turn other readers on to Us Conductors. It aims high – very high – but only falls a bit short.

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Solitude becomes the end

By On March 11, 2015 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature

I just finished two of the most depressing novels ever. One was great. One was not. Both are, at base, about solitude. It’s not a happy place.

Stoner, John Williams, published in 1965, doesn’t rest on the tip of the collective tongue when it comes to great novels or novelists. Several times the past few years it appeared on my radar. Finally I bought it, and the bookstore clerk raved when I brought it to the cashier. Still, it took me a while to get to it.

In some ways it’s a recast of the biblical story of Job. Shit rains on this guy, William Stoner, son of a Missouri dirt farmer, who becomes a professor of English at the University of Missouri. That’s about where the positivity ends.

The timeline spans pre WWI to after WWII. Stoner’s father sends him off to college to become an agricultural engineer. He returns (briefly) as an English major, then leaves for good to pursue a graduate degree.

Two institutions which can nurture you as an adult, your family and your workplace, don’t for Stoner. His wife should be on meds if they had the right ones back then. His academic department has it in for him. His two buddies, if you can call them that, go to war (WWI) and Stoner does not. One comes home in a box. The other becomes head of the English department. He tries to do right by Stoner but he is contradicted by the larger powers of the academic institution.

The life of the mind becomes the only aspect of life where Stoner finds relief. But it is solitary relief. Even his daughter, with the help of her mother, becomes distant.

In middle age, Stoner has an affair with a young graduate student. She leaves so that they both avoid the inevitable scandal.  He publishes a scholarly book that “was forgotten and that served no use.” He dies of cancer at the end.

Yet, his plight is riveting. His will to survive, to be someone other than a dirt farmer, to progress from physical toil to life of the mind and educate others, to rise above the anguish and his station in life, gripped me. Stoner truly is about shoveling shit against the tide and believing at death that you somehow beat the odds. “…we have our pretenses in order to survive. And we shall survive – because we have to.” (p. 32). ”

And of that useless book, his thoughts in the moments before life is extinguished: “He did not have the illusion that he would find himself there, in that fading print; and yet, he knew, a small part of him that he could not deny was there, and would be there.” The novel and his life end while he his fondling the book.

This isn’t a spoiler because the plot will have nothing to do with your enjoyment. It’s all in the language, the economy, the precision, how haunting it is in its portrayal of a “normal” life. And it is a normal life. We will all find ourselves here, with Stoner, not forever, and maybe not for very long, but at some point(s), for no one lives without doubt about what it all means and why we have to suffer so.

In the end, Stoner is about the reality of life, the pain of the soul exposed by the erosion of almost all things that might protect it with meaning, the things we might have left behind, the connections with others which might live on, but will also end, and how we must rise above it all to keep on, because we must.

“A sense of his own identity came upon him with a sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been.”

[I have to add here that the lyrics at the end of the Moody Blues song, “The Balance” (from A Question of Balance), appeared as I read the ending two weeks ago and those words have not left my head since. “Just open your mind, and realize…the way it’s al–ways been, just open your heart…”]

And so maybe it is because I live in Missouri now, but lived in NYC for many years, and read The Transcriptionist back to back with Stoner, that I pair them in a single blog post. It’s probably not fair. This is Amy Rowland’d debut novel. It also is about the solitary life, in similar ways to Stoner, the discarded life.

Lena, the protagonist, transcribes stories for a major New York Newspaper (assumed to be the Times because Rowland herself was a transcriptionist for the paper). She’s the only one transcriptionist left and occupies an old room once filled with many toiling at the same function.

She lives the life you’ve read about, heard about, seen movies about, the single female in Manhattan -poor, lonely, creeping towards middle age, on the edge. Mercifully, through a pigeon on the ledge of her office and a woman more on the edge than Lena, whom Lena encounters briefly on a bus, Rowland leads Lena to salvation, away from the edge (and more accurately, the ledge) and exposes for us her new-found dignity as a member of the human race, a member who no longer needs the newspaper.

The woman, Arlene Lebow, is a blind court reporter (get the connection to Lena?) who takes her own life swimming in the moat at the lion’s den in the zoo.

Lena’s colleagues at the newspaper don’t fare well. They serve as stereotypes solely to heighten Lena’s sensitivity to what’s happening around her (the aftermath of 9/11, for one thing). There’s just something off about all these characters. They are too one-dimensional. As an example, a speech by Ralph, the paper’s head honcho, goes like this: “…we are gathered here today to issue escape hoods to our valued staff. It is true that our country is at war. And we, the voice of the people, the voice for the people, we are under attack as well. As I’m sure you know, one of our most esteemed colleagues, Katheryn Keel, received personal threats this week, along with an envelope containing white powder…”

Banal is probably being kind here.

I noted at the top that it wasn’t a great book. It’s not a bad novel either. I am a sucker for novels about NYC, any time period. But this was a rare case when my understanding of, and experience with, the city got in the way of my enjoyment of the story. The ending doesn’t work. Just doesn’t. But I have sympathy. Endings are so difficult. But I could see what the author was striving for: How the craziest things, wanting to save a pigeon (a pigeon?? this ex-New Yorker asks) and demanding an obituary in the “paper of record” for Arlene (Lena essentially holds the paper hostage to achieve this), help you find the meaning in your own life and give you the strength to disrupt it for the better. Depressing, yes. Poignant? Almost. But there’s a lilt to Rowland’s style, a naivete to her protagonist, a minimalist sensibility, and a genuine desire to lampoon modern journalism. These elements work well together.

I’m going to bet Rowland’s second will be worth reading.

 

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Avant Garde Beethoven, and a whole lot more

By On March 7, 2015 · Leave a Comment · In Music

It’s not everyday that you go to hear chamber music and Beethoven happens to be the most avant garde composer you hear.

Okay, that’s not strictly the truth. The second String Quartet by Sofia Gubaidulina, composed in 1987, and performed by the Arianna String Quartet last night at the Touhill Performing Arts Center in St. Louis, was way more “out there.” In a relative sense, though, the Beethoven Grosse Fuge, was the more experimental, given that it was composed more than 150 years prior. I had not read the liner notes before hearing, but I had pondered that this had to be late Beethoven, maybe even close to the last composition he ever penned. It had a complexity that belied its composer (based on what most of us have heard before, anyway), dissonance, syncopation, and atonality.

If the composer hadn’t been named, I would have guessed, except for a few passages which were dead Beethoven giveaways, that the piece came from the late 1800s, maybe even the early part of the twentieth century. I was vindicated upon reading the program notes. Stravinsky, described as “one of the great artistic innovators of the twentieth century,” said of it, “this absolutely contemporary piece of music will remain contemporary forever.” It appeared to require a huge amount of energy from the players, who seemed only too willing and able to oblige to the fullest.

As interesting, the work was originally the sixth and last movement of the Opus 130 string quartet. Six movements! But it overwhelmed the audience apparently, so Beethoven wrote a more acceptable one and the Grosse Fuge was issued as a stand-alone composition. While we consider him the master of master composers today, even he had to cow-tow to his audience and patrons.

I’m not even close to a critic or even steeped enough in contemporary chamber music to say much about the Gubaidulina piece, except that it reminded me of Xenakis and a few others I have heard who, best as I can describe it, play with ribbons of sound. Their compositions are characterized by, not so much whole, half, quarter, or any other of the conventional discrete notes, but by streams tossed, thrown, pitched, stretched, compressed, or simply floated into the air. These compositions are a real contrast to the contemporary minimalist composers who go in the opposite direction and take discrete notes and repetition and patterns and rhythms, and subtle changes to them over time, to logical extremes.

The evening closed with Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet (Opus 44), for which the guest pianist, Einav Yarden, joined the strings. Lush and lovely, of course, but what struck me was the second movement. While described as a “funeral march with two interesting interludes,” I found it to be ethereal, dream-like, hallucinogenic even. Of course, being an amateur viola player, I was captivated by violist Joanna Mendoza’s presentation of the strong solo towards the end of the movement. Apparently, there are only a few “monumental” piano quintets from the Romantic era, Brahms and Dvorak penning the others.

I appreciated the liner notes by Kurt Baldwin, Cellist. They seemed more digestible than most program information I read at these types of events.

Learn more about this wonderful staple of St. Louis’ classical music scene: www.ariannaquartet.com

 

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