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Fifty shades of reading
I’ve been seeing something a lot lately.
So many bloggers, especially these I’m-an-omnivore-who’s-up-on-the-latest-trends types, stress how many books they read.
Usually it’s per week. Either on their own sites, or in interviews about how Enlightenment they are: “Blogger so-and-so reads twelve/fifteen/twenty books a week, and talks about it on Twitter/Facebook/Her website. Join the conversation!”
A few times I have. I find sadly that the discussions skim the surface, like a junior high book report. Yeah, you read The Long Tail, but you didn’t do anything but sum it up and offer a few words of praise.
What’s my point? I don’t know exactly. I’m happy to see people proud that they’re reading instead of sitting in front of the TV or game console. We all know that reading is better for the mind. …Or is it? I still have a memory in eighth grade of a teacher praising reading, and a student joking with her that while he reads, it’s Mad magazine. And he held up a Don Martin book.
“At least it’s a book,” she said, quite seriously.
But I have my doubts. Really, is the medium the deciding factor,? Should it be any sort of factor at all? Or, to put it another way, I have to wonder if anyone who can read twelve (another blog said fifteen, another twenty) books a week is reading worthwhile books. Currently I’m reading an excerpt of Gibbon’s Decline And Fall of the Roman Empire—not the whole thing by a long shot, just a short excerpt—and it’s taken me three weeks. It’s dense stuff. Often I have to stop and do some side-reading about the early Christians or the backgrounds of the emperors to be able to follow the narrative.
Before that I re-read Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s biography of Mozart—which went quickly—and Bernard Bailyn’s Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, which didn’t. I can’t imagine reading a book like the latter fast enough to read eleven or fourteen or nineteen other books that week. Even if I just sat there all day and made my eyeballs make contact with every word, and I managed to “finish” the Bailyn, I still wouldn’t have absorbed it. (If you don’t believe me, just check out the book. The footnotes themselves—and yes, you really do have to read them to get the depth of the argument—could be their own book.)
But more to the point, I’m starting to think that the claim “I read xx books a week/month” is like saying, “I read a book this thick” [three inches between fingers]. So what? John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty is only this thick [quarter inch between fingers] but it’s a very important book, one you should read slowly, and think about as you do.
In short, I’m skeptical of the value of gobbling up information without chewing on it. Are we reading critically? Are we parsing what the author says, examining it carefully, or are we just nodding our heads in agreement because he’s a published author and it’s a New York Times Bestseller? (Ever notice, by the way, how so many New York Times Bestsellers are written by New York Times writers?) What do we get out of this kind of reading, other than the bragging rights of having read a lot, and what’s trendy. (Anyone read The Secret Life of Plants lately? …Didn’t think so.)
I’m also skeptical about all these bloggers who read about ten books a week and then write little digests on all of them. They rarely say anything original. Rather, they just rehash the content, something you can do by reading the flap or the Amazon product description, which is what I suspect some of these people do. That same great (though my classmates thought her annoying) eighth grade teacher (History) made us write papers, lots of papers (bless her!), and she was fond of standing in front of the class with our efforts and saying, “Where’s the original thinking?” before handing the report back, often with a not-good grade. I learned a lot from that lady.
And let’s stop acting like all books are equal. While it’s good for publishers’ bottom lines that Fifty Shades of Grey is doing so well (or for one publisher in particular, Vintage), it’s a stretch to say this marks some sort of reading renaissance or victory over “dumb Hollywood entertainments.” You can read Fifty Shades with your brain turned off (even though something else may be turned on). Which is fine, but don’t pretend it’s literature. “It’s a matter of opinion” someone opined in the comments section of a recent article. I wonder if it occurred to her that her statement was then, by definition, itself an opinion. But also, it’s instructive to look at the past. A hundred fifty years ago people weren’t toting Moby-Dick to the beach. They were reading dime novels. Sometimes you can still find these tiny books in old “antique” (sometimes just junk) shops in small towns. Look at them some time, if you do, with their gaudy covers and titles like Molly’s Rosie Romance. Read a page or two and you’ll cringe in embarrassment at the naivete. You won’t cringe at Moby-Dick. I wonder what the young woman who thinks the quality of whatever you read is all a matter of opinion would think of that. I wonder how eager she’d be to embrace Molly.
The late Carl Sagan once said, “The key is to read the right books.” He might have added you don’t have to read billions and billions.
(P.S.: Yes, that’s my tie.)
Heeeeere’s Johnny
Fifty years ago this week, this shy, low-key man from Iowa began hosting the show with which his name is synonymous. He set the standard.
Yet Johnny Carson was far from your typical celebrity. He was an introvert. Interviewers begged, and were turned down. Biographers tried, and failed. Most people, even his family, said they didn’t really know the most well-known, or at least recognized, man in America.
Some of it was because, well, Carson had some skeletons in his closet. There were affairs. There were lawsuits. He was married four times.
But there’s more to it than that, because he was remote and low-key even before these scandals materialized. Johnny Carson apparently was just a very shy individual who didn’t need attention and validation 24/7. He said what he did on the show spoke for itself and he had nothing extra to add through interviews. His life was compartmentalized, unlike today’s “celebrities” who never seem to give us down-time, who blur their public and private lives so much that I don’t even think the concept has meaning anymore. Does Ashton Kutcher ever have a private thought?
I have wondered, many times while writing Welsey Shaw, why we feel we must know the “secrets” of the people who come to us on television screens but not, say, the plumber who unclogs our sink, or the airline pilot who flies us to our destination. Even internet celebrities generally get more space—Steve Jobs is one of the very few I can think of who has been scrutinized as closely as a Carson or a Liz Taylor. Even with the impending Facebook IPO, we know little about Mark Zukerberg (most of what they told you in The Social Network is untrue or so partially-true as to be virtually meaningless) beyond the fact that he lives, supposedly simply, with his girlfriend and his dog, and has a wardrobe of about a billion T-shirts. He eats lunch in the neighborhood and as far as I know doesn’t own a home with a twelve foot wall around it. Why can’t we let TV and movie people off this easily?
Away from the camera, Johnny Carson wanted to disappear, to blend in. He liked to go back to his quiet midwest roots. He spent a lot of time alone, reading, walking on the beach in Malibu, listening to jazz, drinking wine, avoiding parties and other celebrities. His cohort Ed MacMahon says he rarely spoke to his boss outside the show.
This week, PBS’ American Masters is airing a documentary about Carson. (High time!) But even they admit there aren’t a lot of revelations in store. Carson left his fingerprints on very little.
Yet somehow it seems fitting that this man who lit up late night for thirty years became as private a citizen as possible when the show was over. More celebrities should try this trick. Mr. Carson, a master of timing, knew it was always best to leave the audience wanting more. Here’s to you, Johnny.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, either
“When he starts a novel, it works like this. First he writes a sentence. Then he rewrites it again and again, examining each word, making sure of its perfection, finely honing each phrase until it reverberates with the subtle texture of the infinite. Sometimes it takes hours. Sometimes an entire day is devoted to one sentence, which gets marked on and expanded upon in every possible direction until he is satisfied. Then, and only then, does he add a period.” —Michael Dare on Tom Robbins
“”I hate writing, I love having written.”
Thus spake Dorothy Parker.
Stephen Sondheim is quoted as saying, “My idea of heaven is not writing.”
This lady and this gentleman are so opposite me. I love the writing part. Even more so, I love getting the idea. The Eureka moment! There are few things in life more satisfying. Maybe just one.
I am struck by an idea that excites me, then I go and write it, go to sleep, and the next morning when the laughing gas has worn off, I reread it and hate every word. Usually I still like the idea, however, and that’s what drives me to go back and try again. It’s a form of masochism: someday I’ll get the flagellation just right, and there won’t be any tell-tale marks.
So I go back happily and naively writing again, and when I’m done…it’s a little better.
And then it’s back to the drawing board to make it better still. Or try. That’s why I’m on draft five.
Sometimes I wonder why. Most readers don’t notice the little finesses that make great writing. They just don’t. No sin there. I wouldn’t know a magnificently grown and pruned prize-winning rose from a generic FTD bud. I can’t tell a 1982 Chateau Mouton Rothschild from the wine I bought for $12 at BevMo. (Sometimes I think neither can they.)
But not so with words. Which is why reading back my own stuff can be painful. I don’t love having written. It’s like waking up after the alcohol of the act. I’m amazed someone like Dorothy didn’t feel the same way.
Claire Danes says she can’t bear to watch her own movies. Claudio Arrau, one of my favorite pianists, was once, in an interview, asked to listen to one of his own recordings and comment on it. After a few minutes, the mild-mannered, ultra-polite Chilean said, “Please take the recording off.”
I can sympathize.
Nothing is worse than lying in bed at 2am and thinking of something you wrote that night (I write a lot at night) and saying, “That was awful,” or “I should have mentioned this too,” and having to crawl out of bed to fix it because you know you won’t remember it in the morning and the piece won’t be any good without this correction.
I wonder if Dorothy ever did that.
I wish I could love having written. But maybe if I did, my satisfaction would cause me to stop. But at least I’d get more sleep. It’s tempting.
A new way to waste my time!
Recently I decided to order a computer chess program to play on my Mac.
Bad idea.
Tournament set. (Click to enlarge)
I wanted some distraction to have going on in the background when I was writing. I need brain breaks every so often, and Facebook has gotten boring. I used to work on PCs and there’s a wealth of chess software for them. We Mac owners have fewer options. One of the few was Chessmaster, ceased making Mac-compatible versions a few years back—ironically, just as the Mac began its new rise in popularity. Go figger.
But Chessmaster 9000 is still available for Mac. It’s a few years old, but still strong enough to beat anyone except the very, very top grandmasters. Of course, it can also be set to play at any level. In fact, it’s a great teaching tool for children. I ordered it.
Like I said, bad idea. Really bad bad bad.
Computer chess programs have become amazingly sophisticated. They can now play at all sorts of levels, and the real joy of Chessmaster for me is how it offers a gallery of virtual opponents with their own playing styles and quirky characteristics.It’s like an assemblage of club players of all levels of skill, with favorite openings, gambits and defenses. Most other chess software allows some tweaking of the “engine”—the thing that does the thinking—but nothing like this. Chessmaster is the most versatile in that department, and using it is uncannily like playing the nervous guy who moves fast, or the shy woman who’s excessively defensive, or the showboat who can’t resist a sacrifice. (Chess dictionary: that’s giving up a superior piece for a lesser one to gain some other advantage, such as a better position or a quicker road to checkmate.)
It also simulates grandmaster personalities, playing in the style of champions past and present. Thus if you choose “Tal,” it executes wild sacrifices. If you select Nimzowitsch, it plays hypermodern. If you click on “Fischer,” it starts the game late, complains about the board you chose, and calls you anti-Semitic names if you win.
The other main advantage to Chessmaster is the graphics. While chess programs aren’t as graphic-reliant as the latest version of Grand Theft Auto, it’s true that rendering a chessboard on a computer screen is a little tricky. For years there were just basic flat graphics, and rather ugly at that.
But then they started adding 3D boards. Now it really feels like chess.
Decorative set. (Click to enlarge)
The customization this program allows is mind-boggling, bordering on silly. There are all sorts of chess sets, boards, and backgrounds available for your virtual world. Most programs only have a few options for the look and feel of the pieces and board. Chessmaster may actually have too many. The board can be viewed from just about any angle. The types of pieces and boards range from the elegant to the ridiculous. There are actually only a small number of piece and board combos that are really playable. The rest are just novelties, intended, as someone in the software industry once told me, to sell the product, make the box pop on store shelves. I have to admit though, the one that resembles a newspaper chess diagram is ingenious.
Newspaper-style flat set. (Click to enlarge)
There are free downloadable programs for the Mac that are extremely strong, such as Sigma Chess. But the display is small and hard to stare at for hours. The Macintosh OS itself comes loaded with an app that is very hard to beat and features big 3D pieces. But it’s not very flexible, doesn’t analyze your games for you, or tutor you or give you the functionality of good instruction software. Chessmaster features a library of games verbally annotated (he talks as the pieces move on the screen) by Josh Waitzkin, the subject of the book and movie Searching For Bobby Fischer. (A good film, by the way, and no, you don’t have to be a chess nut or even understand chess to enjoy it.) Some of the games are edge-of-your-seat thrilling.
So now I have the program open as I’m writing Entertaining Welsey Shaw, and I play against my club opponents while writing. Today I whipped Roxy’s butt. Yesterday she whipped mine.
So what’s the blog connection? Well, I feature a chess-playing scene in the Starbucks, where two guys battle each other while half the place watches. Such chess scenes used to be common in coffee houses and cafes, but thanks to other diversions like Twitter and Facebook, are much less so today, at least in the U.S. These folks usualy tote around roll-up boards made of vinyl, sort of like those oilclothes we had to have in art classes. The pieces are usually made of very hard plastic, so that they don’t crack when they hit the floor, which in the haste of blitzkrieg coffeehouse competition happens a lot. And chess has featured in almost all other fiction I’ve written to some extent. I find it a fascinating and dramatic way to depict social interaction, just like Ingmar Bergman did.
I’ve been fascinated by computer chess ever since I got my first Boris. (Hoo-boy, does that date me.) Scientists originally wanted to study artificial intelligence, and they thought they’d glean a lot about how the human brain works if they could build a good chess computer. But AI and computer chess long ago parted company when it was discovered that what’s called the “brute force” method—simply using faster and faster processors to crunch the numbers—worked better than anything having to do with simulating the various complex facets of human intelligence. There is some AI going on—many programs actually learn from their mistakes and change their strategies based on how they win and lose—but for the most part chess computing has taught us little about what we call, for want of a better term, “intelligence.”
Lots of novelty. (Click to enlarge)
It wasn’t always thought to be this way. In his 1974 book The World of Chess, Anthony Saidy opined: The notion of a machine ruling the chess world…has, in the opinion of most experts, a very long way to go before it even comes close to approaching reality…In the ultimate showdown of machine vs. man, we place our money unflinchingly and without hesitation on man…If the day ever comes when a machine turns upon its maker, when the Botvinnik† computer beats Botvinnik at chess, it may prove to be a sad one for the human race. For the present, we may fond consolation in the thought that no computer yet invented can even remotely compare in complexity and creativity with the mind and nervous system, the heart and, if we may revive the ancient word, the soul of man. Lofty sentiments. Too bad they proved dead wrong. The strongest players in the world have been bested by silicon, although strictly speaking the competitions aren’t always fair. (For one thing, human players study the past games of their opponents; the “thinking” of computer programs are kept secret by their creators). Does that mean computers are “smarter”? No, just that our conception of “intelligence” has changed. Or, while we need at least a certain type of intelligence to solve chess problems, algorithms can be devised that accomplish the same thing without “intelligence,” whatever that is. I imagine it’s similar to savants who can do advanced math but don’t know how to put their socks on.
Roll-up board. Computer coach analyzes game. (Click to enlarge)
For a game that’s supposed to be all about logic, though, it’s interesting to plug the same position into different chess engines and get very different views on the best move or the lead one side has over another. Chess engines express the advantage of one side over another in terms of points and fractions of a point, one point equalling the value of a pawn. So if White has a score in a particular position of +1.00, it means the engine feels White has the advantage over Black of one pawn. If both sides have the same number of pieces, however, the advantage is in some other element of the game—positional, usually. In other words, two sides can have the same pieces on the board, which theoretically would be 0.00, but White has a better position—more space, maybe, or the better opportunity for an attack, so the engine gives the position a +1.00. However, plug the same position into another engine and it may disagree. It may say -0.50, meaning it likes Black’s chances better, by the advantage of roughly half a pawn’s power. Another engine may give White the edge, but only a very slight, almost imperceptible edge, say +0.12. Sometimes the differences are larger, and a move that might be considered very good by one engine will raise the “blunder alert” feature on another. How can they disagree so? Isn’t Chess knowledge objective? In every situation, theoretically, there should be one best move. That’s the theory. Practice is different. In fact, older books will rave about a certain line of attack that newer books (and better chess software) has discovered will lead to disaster. Chess is infinitely deep, at least so far. Despite the belief of a famous early 20th century champion, José Raúl Capablanca, that chess would soon reach a “draw death,” because everything that could be understood about the game would soon be understood, we’re still finding new things.
Champagne and Burgundy pieces, Mahogany board. (Click to enlarge)
Remember that famous scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where an astronaut is playing chess with HAL the computer. I love the moment when the computer tells him he “missed it,” and then goes on to recite a list of moves that end in mate. The astronaut then says he “sees it now” in a tone of voice that indicates he wouldn’t see it if he stared for three weeks.
"What the heck is HAL talking about?"
What most people don’t know is this is a real game, one played about a hundred years ago by two obscure wood-pushers named Roesch and Schlage. Furthermore, the analysis HAL gives is wrong! The game was not lost. Was this a mistake on Stanley Kubrick’s part? Hard to believe, because he was a stickler for correctness in his films and a very avid chess-player himself. This has led film buffs to conclude that the mistake is an early clue HAL is going mad. To me what’s more interesting about this scene is that it’s set in 2001 and chess computers, and computers in general, are still enormous, room-filling affairs. Little could anyone imagine in 1967 that before the beginning of the next millennium chess software would live in small laptops people could tote around like books. (These apps don’t, to the best of my experience, go mad and try to murder people, either.)
In a way I feel guilty about being so enamored with computer chess software. I should get my ass to a chess club. The nation’s oldest is nearby in San Francisco, and I’ve never been to it. While chess clubs all over are struggling to survive (New York now boasts just one major club, the Marshall), more people than ever are playing chess—they’re just playing it online, or against computers. (Chessmaster has a “play online” feature, but I’ve never tried it.) Part of Entertaining Welsey Shaw is about how we’re no longer going out and meeting people, how even in public spaces we sit, with our heads down in our machines, alone in a crowd. I’m as guilty as the tweeters I’m disdainful of. I haven’t set foot in a chess club in over a decade, and never belonged to one for very long. Used to be it was because there wasn’t one convenient to where I was living, but with the Mechanics Institute, that’s no longer true. I should get my game into the real world. I might even make a friend or two. (And in case you’re unaware, chess is no longer a game for geeks with pocket protectors. Young [and dare I say often very sexy] women are a major presence in the sport now.)
So let’s feel good about the future of chess, and end this post by watching the climactic scene from the movie Searching For Bobby Fischer while I search online for a chess Twelve-Step program.
†Russian chess whiz and computer programmer.
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