Maphead

Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks
Ken Jennings (2011, Scribner)

     You may remember Ken Jennings as the 2004 contestant who won the game show Jeopardy! 74 times in a row, a feat which permitted him to retire from computer programming and devote himself to his many and various interests. Happily for us, he’s willing to share, first with Brainiac, his book about trivia buffs, and now with an insider’s look at maps and the people who love them.

    Like most people so afflicted, his fascination started in childhood, and in a single flash: “You see that first map, and your mind is rewired, probably forever.”  Boys who get the bug trace rivers, memorize state and provincial capitals, and invent their own maps, frequently in solitude. When Jennings himself was eight, his family moved to South Korea, and he immersed himself in maps of the United States, plotting imaginary road trips over the exotic highways of Delaware.

    Maphead is about some of the ways that solitude is broken, or at least shared. The National Geographic Bee winnows middle schoolers from across the nation with a series of grueling tests and contests; the winners meet in Washington to answer questions about “Zimbabwean national parks, Dominican volcanoes, Italian car production statistics, Swazi life expectancy--nothing seems beyond their grasp.” It’s a chance for the kids to make friends with their peers and fellow geeks, people who can understand them as even their parents cannot.

    Those kids study more than they travel (though the winner earns a cruise to the Galápagos Islands, with Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek, no less.) Other mapheads travel obsessively, collecting destinations: the Travelers’ Century Club, in Southern California, is restricted to people who have visited over one hundred countries. The Highpointers Club unites people trying to visit the highest points in all fifty states, whether a snowy peak, or a high spot in a cornfield. Self-described roadgeeks may drive around looking for the ghost of U.S. 99, the West Coast highway that was replaced by Interstate 5, or taking pictures of every interchange sign between Seattle and Boston on I-90.

    The recent improvement in the accuracy of the Global Positioning System made possible the sport of geocaching, which sends devotees off the beaten track in search of hidden treasures. GPS coordinates lead to, typically, a waterproof container that holds a logbook and perhaps a few trinkets for swapping. Jennings takes his six-year-old out to look in the woods across the street from their house: “A $20 billion array of sophisticated military satellites is helping me find Tupperware in the woods. Truly we are living in the future.”

    It’s a future with more computers and smart gadgets, and fewer free gas station maps, (of which a staggering eight billion were printed in the twentieth century.) But it seems likely that maps will continue their hold on the imagination. Jennings thinks he knows why: “Almost every map, whether of a shopping mall, a city, or a continent, will show us two kinds of places: places where we’ve been and places we’ve never been. The nearby and the faraway exist together in the same frame, our world undeniably connected to the new and unexpected. We can understand, at a glance, our place in the universe, our potential to go and see new things, and the way to get back home afterward.”

Malled

Malled: My unintentional career in retail
Caitlin Kelly (2011, Penguin)

Caitlin Kelly lost her job at the New York Daily News in the summer of 2006. A year later, finding freelance work rarer and more poorly paid than she’d seen in her thirty years in journalism, she applied for part-time work at a newly opening clothing store in a mall half an hour outside of New York City. She was unprepared for the physical and emotional rigors of retail, and has written Malled to complain about them.
There’s some good information here; the chapter on weathering the economic downturn, which put tens of thousands of white collar workers from other fields into competition for retail work, would have made a reasonably useful article. The retail industry employs fifteen million Americans, paying a median wage of less than nine dollars an hour, and offering five million of those people only part-time work; fifty per cent of the jobs turn over every three months. It’s a tough way to make a living, whether one is a student, the parent of young children, or a laid-off journalist, teacher, or business executive.
And Kelly could have gotten at least a few juicy blog posts out of the conditions at The North Face, where she worked. It’s one of the chain’s busiest stores, supplying an endless line of demanding, entitled customers with pricey equipment for skiing, camping, or walking around the city trying to look like they do these things. Kelly didn’t work on commission, but she took a competitive pride in meeting her weekly sales goals, and mostly felt good about the value of the products she was selling. But if the customers weren’t driving her batty with their foolish and annoying demands, corporate management was coming up with some new way to be stupid.
Again, that’s not an uninteresting subject, though it’s not clear that her parochial experience is the best example. You’d have to suspect that the natty perfection of the sales floor, with all the jackets sorted by size and facing the same way, required hours of somewhat mindless labor to maintain; and you’d readily believe that the store displays were all designed by one highly-paid person who went from place to place doing nothing else; and you wouldn’t be surprised that the behind-the-scenes spaces of the store were nowhere near as clean, spacious and well-lit as the sales floor; in fact, they’re often quite hazardous places.
It’s not much of a stretch from these realizations to the fact that, from the perspective of a giant corporation, an individual sales associate is really not important at all. The workers’ pay is the best place to save a buck, and if they get sick or injured, or simply burned out, there’s a stack of applications to choose another one from. And if their bodies are expendable, how much more so their minds and spirits, though a facade of expertise and cheerfulness is part of what’s demanded of the salespeople, no matter how long they’ve been standing on their tired, sore feet.
Caitlin Kelly, unfortunately, brings us this news with a large side helping of narcissism and entitlement. Her lack of self-awareness, irritating as it is, is unintentionally rather comic, too. Every chapter of Malled includes some chatter about her previous success in journalism (she interviewed the Queen of England!! On a yacht!!!); or the places she’s traveled, or how many languages she speaks, or how much money her family used to have.
All this is by contrast with her full-time co-workers, who are struggling to get through community college, or to buy toys and clothes for their small children. Her snootiness toward them is matched only by her rage when customers are snooty with her. (Those foreigners are the worst!! They’re such terrible racists!!!) In fact, she shares their contempt for the work she does. She is Awfully Glad she isn’t Really the Type of Person who works in such a job, not permanently at least. She’ll turn around and be just as demanding and obnoxious a customer, leaving a store in a rage because she can’t get a sales associate to sell her a (two-hundred-dollar! silk! designer!) blouse. The whole experience, given that she’s working just one or two shifts a week for most of the twenty-seven months she keeps the job, comes across as slumming.
Also unfortunately, the book is not much of an advertisement for what are supposed to be her real skills in journalism, writing, and editing ($150 an hour!!!). When she’s talking about or quoting other people, she’s making only the barest stab at descriptions or transitional explanations. When she’s talking about herself, she goes round and round in circles, patting herself on the back. A firmer editorial hand would have trimmed this material, but the result would have been a pretty skinny book.
Some of what’s wrong with Kelly’s work experience has obvious solutions, though the problems would require district management to acknowledge them, and throw a little money at them. Fix broken equipment, light the stockroom well enough to see the stock, hire enough workers for the Christmas rush, maybe even offer bonuses to the management and staff of the best-performing stores--how hard is that? But corporations are driven by a philosophy of neo-Taylorism, which holds that if any employees ever have a free moment on the job, you’ve hired too many of them; and if they are comfortable enough to stay a few years, you’re paying them too much. Rationally as well as morally, these attitudes are wrong, but I don’t see them changing any time soon.

Chances Are

Chances Are...: Adventures in Probability
Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan (2006, Viking.)

The dedication of Chances Are... gives a marvelously concise precis of what it’s about: “To Jane, who likes probability, Bob, who likes chance, and Felix, who likes risk.” What might that mean, exactly? What does it tell us about Jane, Bob, and Felix? Probability, chance, and risk are constant conditions of human life, but we haven’t always understood very much about them. Ellen and Michael Kaplan, mother and son, have written an elegant book both on what we need to know, and why we should care.

Though the ancient Romans had games of chance, it was not till the seventeenth century that Blaise Pascal set forth proofs of some fundamental issues in probability. Pascal, with his Wager and his triangle, is a relatively familiar figure; I didn’t know about Isaac Newton’s contemporary Abraham de Moivre, whom the Kaplans bring to life with superb economy. Of de Moivre’s parlous circumstances as a Huguenot refugee in England, they write, “This shabby man, ensconced at the window end of a greasy table in Slaughter’s Tavern, had, through the clever manipulation of abstract terms, discovered–or created–a way to describe how things happen the way they ‘ought’: how Chance scatters itself around the central pillar of Design in the shape of a bell.”

With economical clarity, we are introduced to the Marquis de Laplace, his student Poisson, Henri Lebesque, and Richard von Mises. And who could forget Andrei Nikolaevich Kolmogorov, born in 1903 on a train crossing Russia: “He remained interested in everything, from metallurgy to Pushkin, from the papacy to nude skiing.” His interests included mathematical logic, algorithmic complexity, and, “with characteristic verve, he hoicked up the tottery edifice of probability and slipped new foundations underneath.” As they’ve done with all those other singular minds, the Kaplans let us stand at the door of Kolmogorov’s work and look in.

Of course, the mathematics are only part of the story. Chances Are... is equally concerned with the human element. What’s the difference between the apparently pure hand of fate at the roulette table and the swagger and bluff of poker? Which kind of game is the stock market? In any case, it helps to start with a pile of money; even in a perfectly fair game, deeper pockets win.

Insurance is another complicated game of numbers and the human factor. Lloyds of London still operates as a series of face to face encounters between the buyers and sellers of risk. As the Kaplans say, “...each time probability leaves its cozy study full of urns and dice and descends to the marketplace of human affairs, it reveals its dependence on human capabilities–on judgement and definition. As powerful a device as it is, it remains a hand tool, not a machine.”

Medical science calls for judgement, too, complicated by ethics, and by the fact that bodies, and diseases, are often more different than they are alike. Science is based on repeatable events, and statistics on aggregated events, but we get sick as individuals. Doctors are pretty poor at guessing where in a range of outcomes our case will fall, which is, of course, the only thing we really want to know. Our peculiar psychology complicates the case further: “Red sugar pills stimulate; blue ones depress–brand name placebos work better than generic. And higher dosages are usually more effective.” It’s a wonder that clinical trials give any useful information; indeed, the truly informative trial often comes only after a new treatment is released for general use.

Often, in medicine, we’d benefit from an understanding of the likelihood of false positive results, as in tests for rare conditions. Courts of law suffer under the same deficiency, because crimes are such rare acts that we don’t have a strong intuitive background. Unfortunately, we’re not usually offered a strong statistical background to compensate for that lack; judges may be suspicious of statistical reasoning because they aren’t equipped to tell good reasoning from rhetorical hokum, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be helpful.

Chances Are... combines such utility with great pleasure. It’s very clear on the math, but also on a vast swath of biography, history, and science. At heart, it’s a deeply humanist endeavor: the philosophical strands lightly flavor the whole. Like this gem: “The formal calculation of probabilities will always feel artificial to us because it slows and makes conscious our leap from perception to conclusion. It forces us to acknowledge the gulf of uncertainty and randomness that gapes below--and leaps are never easy if you look down.”

Factual certainty is elusive and contingent; if that’s the case, we are wise, and brave, to acknowledge it. Here’s to the courage for the leap.

The Cello Suites

The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece
Eric Siblin (2009, Grove Press)

   In 2000, Eric Siblin was away from home and at loose ends, when he decided to go to a concert of music he didn’t know, by a performer he’d never heard of. He had worked as a popular music critic for a Montreal paper, a job, he says, “that had filled my head with vast amounts of music, much of which I didn’t want to be there.” Three of the Bach Cello Suites, in a concert by Laurence Lesser at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music, were a different story altogether. Not only was the music appealingly complex, but Lesser’s program notes hinted that there was a story behind it that might bear looking into.

   Look into it he did, or, you might say, he fell into it head over heels. Though he had no classical music background to speak of, Siblin became a certified Bach geek, and the result is delightful. He delves deeply into Bach’s life and times, as far as they can be known; he also looks into the career of Pablo Casals, whose performances and recordings brought the Suites forth from deep obscurity. For both men, Siblin gives us a fascinating view of how their musical and domestic fates were affected by money, politics, and war.

   Consider the question of why the suites were written for cello in the first place. The viola da gamba was generally considered the melodic or virtuosic instrument, while “the cello was a background instrument in 1720, expected to hug the shoreline of a tune’s progression, not an adventurous solo vessel.” At that time, when he composed the Brandenburg Concertos, and probably the Cello Suites, Bach was employed at the court of Prince Leopold of Cöthen. Prince Leopold was an ardent amateur player of the viola da gamba, and the sixth Brandenburg Concerto has a part for that instrument that he might have been able to play, while the cello part is written for a more skilled professional player.
Such a player was available for the relatively minor court of Cöthen because Prussia’s King Frederick William, preferring the austere arts of war over the creative (and frequently decadent) pursuits of his father’s regime, had disbanded the court orchestra in Berlin. Prince Leopold made the most of the chance to improve his own Capelle: he hired as many of the fired musicians as he could afford, which left Bach well-positioned to write some of his most brilliant instrumental works. This golden era ended when Leopold married a woman who was not particularly musical, and Bach left for what he hoped were the greater opportunities of Leipzig.

   Siblin’s tales of Pablo Casals have similarly to do with matters of patronage and opportunity, complicated immensely by the political and military convulsions of Republican and Fascist Spain. As a boy, Casals enjoyed the favor of Queen Maria Cristina, who sponsored some of his training on the cello. In 1931, when Spain’s Second Republic spelled the end of the monarchy, Casals was named president of the Council of Music, but within five years, Fascist rebels gained the upper hand. Casals “buried papers and burned his letters from the royal family. He was a leftist in conservative eyes, but extreme leftists saw him as a well-connected monarchist.” His epoch-making recordings of the Cello Suites took place in 1938, as all of Europe was getting caught up in the conflagration. He never again lived in Spain.

  The Cello Suites ingeniously follows the general structure of the suites themselves, comprising six sets of six chapters. Siblin gives roughly the first half of each set to Bach, followed by a couple of chapters on Casals. Then, in the final position, which is occupied in the suites by the lighthearted Gigue, he talks about his own immersion in Bach’s musical world. In addition to reading widely in the voluminous literature on Bach, and listening to innumerable recordings, he follows Casals to Catalonia and Puerto Rico, and Bach to Leipzig. He talks at length with various fine cellists about their association with the suites, and with Casals. He even tries to play the cello, progressing as far as a couple of Bach’s easiest tunes. On his own instrument, the guitar, he gets a little closer, mastering one movement of the suites. Not surprisingly, he learns that this stuff is hard, which is to say that, like all the best things, it repays a lifetime of study, and leaves you wanting more.

  The Cello Suites whetted my appetite for the regions of Bach’s universe I haven’t spent much time in. It reminded me of how many treasures await, and how very fortunate we are that so much of his work survived the decades after his death when it was considered painfully dry and old-fashioned. A friend recently said to me, “I need more Bach in my life,” and, though I generally hear more Bach in a week than many people hear in a year, I know exactly what he means.


February 1, 2012

Reason, Faith, and Revolution

Any Good Books

Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
Terry Eagleton (2009, Yale University Press)

I’m late to the party--Terry Eagleton delivered the lectures on which Reason, Faith, and Revolution is based in 2008, when Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens were making headlines with the so-called God Debate. Most prominently among a handful of high-powered scientists and social critics, they had published books (The God Delusion and God is not Great, respectively) proclaiming the imminent triumph of Reason and Science over Religion, which they characterized as necessarily superstitious and evil, something of which no good could possibly come.
Eagleton is not a believer himself, but he knows enough about what the Gospels say to vigorously contest that assessment. Mixed as the history of religious belief may be, it surely includes some good, and it’s only fair to acknowledge it. “Insofar as the faith I have described is neither stupid nor vicious, then I believe it is worth putting in a word for it against the enormous condescension of those like Ditchkins, who in a fine equipoise of arrogance and ignorance assert that all religious belief is repulsive. That a great deal of it is indeed repulsive, not to speak of nonsensical, is not a bone of contention between us.” (Conflating Dawkins and Hitchins as ‘Ditchkins’ is a rhetorical convenience. Eagleton does make distinctions, such as considering Hitchins the better writer, but heinously wrong in his support of the Iraq war.)
Eagleton easily makes his case that the militant atheists are arguing the wrong questions: “Science and theology are for the most part not talking about the same kind of things, any more than orthodontics and literary criticism are. This is one reason for the grotesque misunderstandings that arise between them.” Orthodox faith would actually agree with Ditchkins that God is not an entity to be looked for in the world, and hence the question ‘Does God exist?’ is the wrong question; but Ditchkins has not looked into the matter seriously enough to see what’s wrong with it.
In the real world, some people of faith are mindlessly dogmatic and others are not, and this is true whether what they are faithful to is God, science, or reason itself. The zealots, of whatever stripe, tend to resemble each other: “Hitchens dislikes people who ‘know they are right’ but most of the time he sounds very much like one of them himself.”
Eagleton himself is commendably willing to entertain exceptions to his arguments, and he gives due credit to dogma, in its place. “The liberal principles of freedom and tolerance are dogmas, and are none the worse for that. It is simply a liberal paradox that there must be something close-minded about open-mindedness and something inflexible about tolerance.” Whatever positions we hold, whatever dogmas we embrace, it behooves us to remember that we can’t prove them all: there’s no logical reason to suppose that logical reasoning can make sense of everything in the world. Nor is there any reason to suppose, with Ditchkins, that human beings are growing in moral stature faster than we’re developing the means to commit mayhem.
Eagleton’s own quarrel with Christianity is, all in spite of himself, a more passionate matter. In his reading, the gospel story is about a world turned upside down, where justice prevails and the hungry are fed. God’s presence on earth is presented as “homeless, propertyless, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinfolk, ...and a scourge of the rich and powerful.” A religious culture that pays obsessive attention to sexual purity and personal salvation has, in his view, gone sadly off the rails.
The notion of Christianity as the putative standard of the capitalist Free World is, if anything, even more of a travesty. “Apart from the signal instance of Stalinism, it is hard to think of a historical movement that has more squalidly betrayed its own revolutionary origins. Christianity long ago shifted from the side of the poor and dispossessed to that of the rich and aggressive.” In fact, says Eagleton, “Advanced capitalism is inherently agnostic.” But we don’t like to admit it. We don’t want to live as though the bottom line were the last word; dogmatic religiosity is one natural reaction.
But we are living in a time when our hope lies in facing our situation authentically. It’s more than possible that we will not be able to solve our problems by more aggressiveness on the one hand, or more cogitation on the other. “In the end, only love (of which faith is a particular form) can achieve the well-nigh impossible goal of seeing a situation as it really is, shorn of both the brittle enchantments of romance and the disheveled fantasies of desire.”
This book is a feast; there is far more richness its 170 pages than I have room to tell you about. The author of some forty books, Eagleton is as erudite and witty as he is prolific. If I’m ever tempted to try to read about literary theory, or Marxism, I’ll be sure to start with him; he brings valuable insights to the subjects I already like.




Email January 2012