Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

books

Consumption: Freakonomics

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Freakonomics is an entertaining reminder that correlation does not indicate causation, proof that not all economists are interested in the economy, and a valuable deflator of a few harmful common sense truisms. It is obsessed with subtly pointing out that the word “data” is plural. It’s commentary on apples that are really oranges is purely metaphorical.

It is easy to compare this book with the similar bestseller Blink, by dust-jacket endorser Malcolm Gladwell. Indeed, the subtitle, “A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything,” seems to jive with Gladwell’s way of carefully evaluating the world through communications-theory tinged lenses.

The subtitle is somewhat of a misnomer. Levitt is considered “rogue” because he delights in applying microeconomics to thorny subjects that are not adequately explained by statistical analysis. He has no overarching theory of anything – just an endless series of slightly counterintuitive but highly logical facts about everything.

Levitt and Dubner’s “hidden side of everything” epiphanies are highly entertaining, and educational. You will certainly be the hit of the watercooler for weeks after reading this book. However, the epiphanies are not especially portable. Knowing that a swimming pool is more dangerous to children than a handgun does nothing for comparing the dangers of a trampoline against a hunting knife collection. All the authors have to say about that is that you’ll need lots of data.

Maybe the lack of long-term impact to your way of thinking wouldn’t seem like such a shortcoming if this book was anything more than a compilation of six over-long magazine articles – the main text barely tops 200 pages. Furthermore, though the book has an extensive works cited, it features no footnotes – meaning you have to turn to the back of the book every time you read something interesting to see if it came from another source.

If any of Levitt’s assertions are valuable beyond passing amusement, clearly that assertion is the link between available, legalized abortion and lower crime rates. This bombshell is dropped in the book’s introduction, and later discussed for almost a full chapter. Though the authors repeatedly disclaim that the data are not meant to support a pro-choice position, it is hard to come away with any other conclusion. Focusing on this aspect of the book might seem like an unfair attempt to politicize a exercise in economics applied to socio-politics, but you could say the same thing about books by Marx or Durkheim. Clearly, Levitt is on to something important, and the fact that he carefully disguises it behind a cleverly non-sequitur title and cover image rather than making it the focus of his first book is insulting, and maybe tragic.

The authors are clearly trying to build a sort of narrative (from drug dealers to abortion vs crime-rate, to parenting, to children’s names), but they clearly run out of steam in the sixth and final chapter, which drones on with lists of names for poor kids, middle class kids, black kids, and white kids. For every list, the findings get less revolutionary, until Levitt is pointing out facts that would barely rate as footnotes, if he had any.

Freakonomics is a quick, lightweight read chunked into six chapters that should each probably be read in only one or two sittings in order to gain their full impact. With a hefty $26 purchase price for it’s brief length it is a book that should be borrowed from the local library, unless one of it’s common-sense-deflators is extremely valuable to one of your social or political causes, or if its cover would look especially appealing on your bookshelf.

Blink of an Eye

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I’ve tacitly decided to read a book for every week in this year, but the relationship isn’t going to be strictly one-to-one. That is to say, i plan to read books in fits and starts – two here, a handful there – with weeks off in between.

I want to talk about all of the books here because, in my eternal OCD need to track everything in my life, the thing i’ve always wanted to do the most (after tracking every song i listen to) is track all the books i’ve read in and how long it took me to read them. I finished Harry Potter four and five in about a solid 24 hours of reading, and i just finished Tori’s dense Piece by Piece in well under seven.

The problem with talking about these literary conquests is that i’m not really a book reviewer. I am too voracious of a reader, and i suspect that applying my vicious music-critic standards to books would yield extremely few positive write-ups. Plus, i don’t like immediately reacting to a book; i’m more-often-than-not wrong.

If anything, i want to wait until each book has really sunk itself into me, and then talk about the things it made me think. Harry 4/5 brought me back around to loving the intrugue of a fantasy novel. Tori changed the way i look at songwriting and my personal image, my entrenchment in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking has so far made me think every encounter i’ve hard with a person or a piece of art in the last two days. I was turned on to author Malcom Gladwell through Tom, who posted a link to Gladwell’s entrancing essay on Ketchup.

Blink is a book about the ability to (and science of) discern(ing) things in the most split of seconds. In its third chapter, it discusses the idea of implicit associations, and how scientists at Harvard are trying to measure them. Malcolm posed the question: Do i associate men or woman more with professional careers. After a brief Implicit Association test, he postulated that i probably leaned towards men. As a feminist i was a little offended, but then i remembered he was talking to the general reader, and not me. As i’m not exactly the general reader, i decided to take to the web to try some of these tests for myself.

At Project Implicit i immediately went for a gender-identity test that measured my associations of men and women with science and art. I predicted that i would come up even, or even preferring girls in relation to science; i was, after all, raised a feminist.

I was right! My Gender/Science rating was “little or no association between science and Female relative to Male.” Upbringing aside, it’s not exactly a surprising result, seeing as my best friend is a female chemist and i’m a liberal arts kind of guy.

Next, i chose a test whose result i was honestly quite interested in: the White/Black test. Though i’ve claimed to be completely racially indiscriminate my entire life, i haven’t had a close African American friend since fifth grade, and do not show much affinity for black musical artists. I predicted that i would show slight racial bias on this test. However, i once again discovered that i have little or no preference, this time regarding “African Americans relative to White Americans.”

With two neutral results under my belt, i started to become suspicious of my ability to break even on the tests (i also scored neutral on Kerry v Bush, but that’s like asking me this week how much i like the Eagles). Finally, i settled on two tests that i would surely weigh heavily on: fat vs thin and sexuality.

Rather than confirming my ability to game the test results, these two tests proved to me that the Harvard scientists have a great methodology that may suffer slightly from poor execution. The images on the sexuality test were a lame man-on-man wedding cake topper, its straight counterpart, restroom style semiotic genders standing in male/female and male/male pairs, plus the words straight, gay, homosexual, and heterosexual.

Can you spot the possible flaws? Primary in my mind is that the test lacks anything having to do with lesbians, though it professes that its “gay” designation encompasses both men and women. A second issue is that both of the visual cues were ambiguous at best; why not feature a picture of a straight couple kissing, or a gay couple holding hands? Their graphics and words for homosexuality had no connection to what i instinctively recognize about it (like the word “queer” or a rainbow flag), which left me hopelessly confused the entire time; I scored a moderately positive implicitly “straight,” but i suspect that it was due to my utter confusion.

The fat/thin test drove this major problem home with a specific example: one of the five thin-faced people looked fat to me. I consciously thought she was fat, and i instinctively drilled the “fat” key every time she appeared. Sometimes i’d catch myself just before making the mistake, but i consistently erred on her face. At the end of the test, i was told that i had no preference between thin and fat. I’ll let you, the longtime reader, decide if that statement is true.

Based on this scientific foray, some of the following statements may be true:


a) I am facile enough at computer tests that some natural biases are obscured,

b) The test has a sampling error that could be overcome by discarding words and images the user cannot identify correctly, or allowing the user to self-identify words or images that they recognize as being associated with the given categories,

c) The test measures implicit (unconscious) cultural associations, which should not necessarily be expected to match implicit personal associations, which may not be the same,

d) The test is perfectly functional, though its results are occasionally surprising,

e) After all this time being an equal opportunity feminist, it turns out that i don’t despise G.W., i really don’t prefer being thin, and i much prefer one of the grooms in a commitment ceremony to wear a wedding dress.

To the tests’ collective credit, i wasn’t able to overwhelm the tacit “societal” bias on any of them – neutral is as far as i go. Back in Blink, Malcolm subsequently informs me that over 80% of people make pro-white associations, even after repeated testing.

Maybe it’s not broken; maybe they just should screen out the communications majors after the opening survey. More thoughts on Blink et al in upcoming posts.

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She let just a dash of irony enter into it. “It’s his, you know.” As if she would keep such a well read copy of Lolita on her bookshelf entirely for the show of it. Even if i had forgotten, it was an easy path to retread: now an English major, then he was fixated on Stanley Kubrick — whose choice in novels turns her stomach in an entirely routine fashion. She’s seen most of them, courtesy of him, parts of which were presumably glimpsed from between fingers pressed over her eyes at the end of the first vignette of Jacket or at any point during the absolute horror of Clockwork (which i refuse to acknowledge as having ever been entered onto film).

I said something intelligent about him once. Kubrick, not the ex. Something about him choosing material that rendered his characters as objects… everything objectified. Lolita is exactly that, so far, and is entirely engrossing in its droll way — though i keep inserting graphic pictures for Humbert’s coy phrases. Slowly the story unfolds as the pitiful nymphophile is slipped into the world of the succulent young Lolita, and suddenly each page grips you as the narrator tries his best to stay satisfied by her charm alone. The tension is dense and sinewed as your literary mind sides with an otherwise likable narrator by force of habit while some other part of you is retching at the outcome that seems to be drawing inexorably near. What author could get so tangled up in the thread that his character drew along behind him like a clever spider that he could weave it so effectively, so that you are rooting for that old bitch of a mother to die and for those tiny sleeping pills to take their inexorable hold on the unsuspecting child sooner rather than later?


Rather than spoil the midpoint of the book for you, i’ll only foreshadow by saying that while you don’t always get what you want, sometimes getting what you thought you thought you needed is in fact not in your best interests… especially because it extinguishes any concept of want at all.

I don’t think it’s a very good book. Yet. Though, i have some hopes of escaping the especially dull clutches of the middle section any minute now. Maybe i won’t like it, though… maybe that’s why she’s dating me instead of him.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/11/85698865/

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Asking an adventurous pesco-vegetarian, a finicky omnivore, and the master of Lipton side dishes and grilled cheese to decide amongst themselves what meal they can collectively cook and eat is somewhere between comedy and challenge. Last Tuesday Laurel came over to make dinner with Kat and I, and after a limited amount of fussing we wound up taking a stab at a spinach quiche recipe that my mother and i have been making for years now. The quiche met all of our pre-requisites … meatless, cheesy, and relatively basic in preparation. We added a side order of perogies and suddenly we had a healthy (and rather yummy) meal assembled within the span of an hour. While serving up the food i lamented that i wanted a cookbook that was “Vegetarian, but with meat. You know, like, a cookbook for lapsed and reformed vegetarians.”


We all got a laugh out of my meandering description of the perfect cookbook, and yesterday while wandering in and out of used book stores in New Hope with Elise i actually found what i was looking for. Almost Vegetarian is a smartly compiled book that veers between rare herbivore delicacies and more modest meaty fare, peppered throughout with tips on advanced preparation and vegetable shopping in green ink. I bought it immediately, for a surprising eight dollars, considering it’s in absolutely perfect condition.


I love those coincidental moments that life offers up, as though a bookstore was fated to carry a particular book on a certain day just because i was too inarticulate after baking for nearly an hour to describe what my ideal cookbook would really feature. Chalk one up for serendipity, i suppose.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/03/75036195/

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But, i miss it. I miss going to sleep with the huge book splayed open somewhere in the middle on the pillow next to me. I miss sneaking a peak forward to see how long i had to wait for another Pemulis appearance. Infinite Jest became a placeholder in my life for the dependency that it reviles … on entertainment, on liquor, on drugs, on other people … watching the characters in their endless dance of all of the above and even more left me free to do what i needed to do in my life without feeling the elastic pull of any of my various addictive tendencies in one direction or another.

As soon as i finished the last seven pages my grandmother was in the room, chirping like a bird. I had somehow managed to stave her off by showing her how close to finished i was, but i found myself without a defense and my first thought was “i need a drink.” I’ve never needed a drink before; in fact, i haven’t been drinking especially often lately. Suddenly, it became the focal point of my day: coming home to my empty apartment and getting blitzed enough so that everything was fuzzy around the edges like a peach and i could simmer quietly down into silence and sleep. Imagining the slippery slope to unconsciousness i might take later was enough to save me from the endless bickering of my septuagenarian family-members, and to get my on the plane.


When i left the hospital i wanted, more than anything else, to be somewhere other than in my own head. Yes, i wanted to go home. Yes, i was hungry. Most of all, though, i was craving an opportunity to poke at my perceptions and rattle my reasons. I wanted to feel disconnected in a wholly opposite way from how i felt in the hospital. And, i did. It was perhaps the most excruciatingly stupid single night of my life, but i woke up the next morning with that binge-stupidity as a tangible buffer between my sick and confined self and my well self — the two never saw an intersection because i made sure to remove myself from where they might’ve met.

This has become the function of substance to me, suddenly … separation. I’ve always thought that anything potentially addictive would be dangerous when it stopped just being fun and started being useful and i was entirely right, but i managed to forget about the entire situation while i had that thick book on my pillow filled with its own endless fucked up addicts to draw my escapism from. Now it’s gone, and i am set back to my continuing reality.


And, importantly: alone — no more characters to keep me up at night. So, maybe it wasn’t a reaction to the novel, but to the mental company it provided.

I’m not sure. I’m going to sleep on it.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/8138240/