The only brick-and-mortar bookstore I go to anymore is the Strand in Manhattan. The shop’s website is unreliable as hell when it comes to letting you know what volumes are in stock in the store, but it has an amazing amount of really good books, and you can save some bucks if you’re a smart shopper. The Strand asks different writers to a curate a shelf (a table, actually) of their favorite works. The following is a list of George Saunders’ 56 selections. What’s the most surprising choice? Bright Lights, Big City, maybe?

• The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose by Alice Munro

• Selected Poems by Anna Akhmatova

• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

• Sakhalin Island (Alma Classics) by Anton Chekhov

• Airships by Barry Hannah

• Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus

• I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal

• Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

• Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writing of Daniil Kharms by Daniil Kharms

• Twilight of the Superheroes: Stories by Deborah Eisenberg

• The Dead Father by Donald Barthelme

• Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow

• In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway

• Johnny Tremain by Esther Hoskins Forbes

• Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor

• Stories in the Worst Way by Gary Lutz

• A Collection of Essays by George Orwell

• Edie: American Girl by Jean Stein

• The Groucho Letters: Letters from and to Groucho Marx by Groucho Marx

• The Bridegroom by Ha Jin

• Loving/Living/Party Going by Henry Green

• Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya

• 1920 Diary by Isaac Babel

• The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel by Isaac Babel

• A Sportsman’s Notebook by Ivan Turgenev

• Visions of Gerard by Jack Kerouac

• Dubliners by James Joyce 

• Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney

• Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects by Kerry Brougher

• Dos Passos: U.S.A., 42nd Parallel, 1919, Big Money by John Dos Passos

• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

• Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

• Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey

• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

• Hadji Murat (Vintage Classics) by Leo Tolstoy

• Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy

• Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

• One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko by Mike Royko

• A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov

• Dead Souls (Wordsworth Classics) by Nikolai Gogol

• Collected Tales by Nikolai Gogol

• Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century by Patrik Ourednik 

• Cathedral by Raymond Carver

• Collected Stories of Richard Yates by Richard Yates 

• All the King’s Men (Restored Edition) by Robert Penn Warren

• Children of Light by Robert Stone

• Living End by Stanley Elkin

• The Coast of Chicago by Stuart Dybek

• The Bushwhacked Piano by Thomas McGuane

• The Barracks Thief by Tobias Wolff

• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

• I Will Bear Witness, 1942-1945: A Diary of the Nazi Years by Victor Klemperer 

• Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin

• Ironweed by William Kennedy

• The Designated Mourner by Wallace Shawn

William S. Burroughs was more deeply involved in Scientology than we know according to a new book by David S. Wills. The writer just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit on the topic. A few passages follow.

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An excerpt from a blog post at the New Yorker in which George Packer, who just published The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, writes of some of the things he likes about our contemporary nation:

“Recent additions to American life that I would fight to hang onto: marriage equality, Lipitor, a black President, Google searches, airbags, novelistic TV shows, the opportunity for women to be as singlemindedly driven as their male colleagues, good coffee, safer cities, cleaner air, photographs of the kids on my phone, anti-bullying, Daniel Day Lewis, cheap communications, smoke-free airplanes, wheelchair parking, and I could go on.

In general, the things in my list fall into two categories: technological advances that make life easier, tastier, more entertaining, healthier, longer; and socio-political changes that have made the country a more tolerant, inclusive place. Over the past generation, America has opened previously inaccessible avenues to previously excluded groups, although in some cases the obstacles remain formidable, and in others (immigrant farm laborers, for example) there has hardly been any change at all. More Americans than ever before are free to win elective office or gain admission to a good college or be hired by a good company or simply be themselves in public. And they have more freedom to choose among telephones, TV shows, toothpastes, reading matter, news outlets, and nearly every other consumer item you can think of.

The bottom line in all these improvements is freedom. In America, that’s half the game.

The other half is equality.”

I think I’m out of step with the world. The things that many people value, that they pin their hopes on, just don’t interest me. (And vice versa.) I’m sure this was probably always true, but now there are physical manifestations to constantly alert me of this situation, like people tearing through their Facebook accounts on smartphones in every coffee shop and park. But I don’t think this narcissism and self-interest and illusion should pose problems for fiction writers, except if they’re trying to observe a world that doesn’t exist anymore in a way that likewise doesn’t exist anymore. But not everyone agrees. From Damien Walter at the Guardian:

“Walk in to any public space today, from a waiting room to a coffee shop, and note the disturbing absence of voices. We are there, and we are elsewhere. Our discussions are mediated via social networks, and conducted through touchscreen interfaces. Can we call them friends, this network of professional and social contacts we interact with through computers?

Journalist and chronicler of hacker culture Quinn Norton describes an aesthetic crisis in writing ‘(H)ow do we write emotionally of scenes involving computers? How do we make concrete, or at least reconstructable in the minds of our readers, the terrible, true passions that cross telephony lines?’ In a digital world do falling in love, going to war and filling out tax forms all look the same? Do they all look like typing?”

Bret Easton Ellis, who fucked Blair who fucked Trent before they all fucked Clay, just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. He’s a godawful writer but if you want to look at his works as presaging the overt violence and sexuality of our virtual world, you can. Of course, that would be giving him far too much credit. A few exchanges from the AMA follow.

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I read in a German magazine you once were so drunk (or stoned) you confused texting and tweeting and asked for drugs on Twitter. Is that a true story?

Bret Easton Ellis:

Yeah. That’s a true story. I still left the drunken tweet on my Twitter feed, hoping one day it becomes a catch phrase.

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A lot of people were deeply shocked by the comments you made about David Foster Wallace, even after he had tragically committed suicide, particularly when you said he was “the most tedious, overrated, tortured, pretentious writer of my generation.”

What happened to create this feud? Were you surprised at the backlash your comments received?

Bret Easton Ellis:

There wasn’t a feud. David and I had never met. But I never responded to his work. Simple as that. I was reading the new bio and it was pissing me off–the kid gloves approach. And that I thought he had a literary fraudulence about him that manifested itself in his fiction. You could say the same about me. I was not surprised by the backlash to those tweets. There are a lot of little snowflakes who somehow really respond to this faux-earnestness of DFW that I just don’t think is realistic.

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Gustave Flaubert: Also fucked Blair and Trent.

At present, there are 13 used copies of Eric Walker’s oddly titled, out-of-print 1982 baseball-themed paperback, The Sinister First Baseman & Other Observations, on sale from Amazon sellers, and the cheapest one, in merely “Acceptable” condition, goes for $104.96. Who, exactly, is Eric Walker and why does he have so much value for so few people?

There were always those who suspected that baseball’s conventional wisdom was not so wise, but in the 1970s, Walker, a Bay Area baseball fan birthed the idea of Moneyball before Sandy Alderson or Billy Beane had entered the game. Even he, however, had an important precursor. From “The Forgotten Man of Moneyball,” Walker’s 2009 Deadspin article, a passage about his inspiration:

“But who am I, and why would I be considered some sort of expert on moneyball? Perhaps you recognized my name; more likely, though, you didn’t. Though it is hard to say this without an appearance of personal petulance, I find it sad that the popular history of what can only be called a revolution in the game leaves out quite a few of the people, the outsiders, who actually drove that revolution. 

Anyway, the short-form answer to the question is that I am the fellow who first taught Billy Beane the principles that Lewis later dubbed ‘moneyball.’ For the long-form answer, we ripple-dissolve back in time …

. . . to San Francisco in 1975, where the news media are reporting, often and at length, on the supposed near-certainty that the Giants will be sold and moved. There sit I, a man no longer young but not yet middle-aged, a man who has not been to a baseball game — or followed the sport — for probably over two decades, but a man who in childhood used to paste New York Giants box scores into a scrapbook, and who remembers, dimly but fondly, such folk as Whitey Lockman and Wes Westrum.

Carpe diem, I think.

With my lady, also a baseball fan of old, I go to a game. We have a great time; we go to more games, have more great times. I am becoming enthused. But I am considering and wondering — wondering about the mechanisms of run scoring, things like the relative value of average versus power. Originally an engineer by trade, I am right there with Lord Kelvin: ‘When you cannot measure it and express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a very meagre and unsatisfactory kind.’ I fiddle with some numbers; but I vaguely remember Branch Rickey’s work, the cover story in Life magazine for Aug. 2, 1950, [ed. note: it was actually 1954 and not a cover story] and think that I may not need to reinvent the wheel. I go to the San Francisco main library, looking for books that in some way actually analyze baseball. I find one. One. But what a one. 

If this were instead Reader’s Digest, my opening of that book would be ‘The Moment That Changed My Life!’ The book was Percentage Baseball, by one Earnshaw Cook, a Johns Hopkins professor who had consulted on the development of the atomic bomb. Today, when numerical analysis of baseball performance is a commonplace, it is hard to grasp how revolutionary, even shocking, were the concepts Cook was developing (Rickey’s work, which had quickly dropped off everyone’s radar, notwithstanding). The book was, and remains, awe-inspiring.”

]]> http://afflictor.com/2013/05/14/who-am-i-and-why-would-i-be-considered-some-sort-of-expert-on-moneyball/feed/ 0 http://afflictor.com/2013/05/12/when-machines-get-incredibly-cheap-to-run-people-seem-correspondingly-expensive/ http://afflictor.com/2013/05/12/when-machines-get-incredibly-cheap-to-run-people-seem-correspondingly-expensive/#comments Sun, 12 May 2013 22:16:47 +0000 Aff. http://afflictor.com/?p=76175

The opening of Jaron Lanier’s piece in Wired about Moore’s Law, which is excerpted from his new book, Who Owns the Future?:

“Moore’s Law is Silicon Valley’s guiding principle, like all ten commandments wrapped into one.

The law states that chips get better at an accelerating rate. They don’t just accumulate improvements, in the way that a pile of rocks gets higher when you add more rocks. Instead of being added, the improvements multiply. The technology seems to always get twice as good every two years or so. That means after forty years of improvements, microprocessors have become millions of times better.

No one knows how long this can continue. We don’t agree on exactly why Moore’s Law or other similar patterns exist. Is it a human-driven, self-fulfilling prophecy or an intrinsic, inevitable quality of technology?

Whatever is going on, the exhilaration of accelerating change leads to a religious emotion in some of the most influential tech circles. It provides a meaning and context.

Moore’s Law means that more and more things can be done practically for free, if only it weren’t for those people who want to be paid. People are the flies in Moore’s Law’s ointment. When machines get incredibly cheap to run, people seem correspondingly expensive.

It used to be that printing presses were expensive, so paying newspaper reporters seemed like a natural expense to fill the pages. When the news became free, that anyone would want to be paid at all started to seem unreasonable.

Moore’s Law can make salaries — and social safety nets — seem like unjustifiable luxuries.”

Two recent George Saunders TV appearances if you missed them, with Stephen Colbert and George Stephanopoulos. Ayn Rand, interestingly, is mentioned in both interviews, as a punchline for Colbert and in a serious vein with Stephanopoulos, as Saunders cops to being a right-winger as a youth.

The opening of a really good Jim Holt New York Review of Books piece about the posthumously published memoir by Benoit Mandelbrot, father of the fractal, who saw the mathematics of roughness not only in clouds and cauliflower but in financial markets as well:

“Benoit Mandelbrot, the brilliant Polish-French-American mathematician who died in 2010, had a poet’s taste for complexity and strangeness. His genius for noticing deep links among far-flung phenomena led him to create a new branch of geometry, one that has deepened our understanding of both natural forms and patterns of human behavior. The key to it is a simple yet elusive idea, that of self-similarity.

To see what self-similarity means, consider a homely example: the cauliflower. Take a head of this vegetable and observe its form—the way it is composed of florets. Pull off one of those florets. What does it look like? It looks like a little head of cauliflower, with its own subflorets. Now pull off one of those subflorets. What does that look like? A still tinier cauliflower. If you continue this process—and you may soon need a magnifying glass—you’ll find that the smaller and smaller pieces all resemble the head you started with. The cauliflower is thus said to be self-similar. Each of its parts echoes the whole.

Other self-similar phenomena, each with its distinctive form, include clouds, coastlines, bolts of lightning, clusters of galaxies, the network of blood vessels in our bodies, and, quite possibly, the pattern of ups and downs in financial markets. The closer you look at a coastline, the more you find it is jagged, not smooth, and each jagged segment contains smaller, similarly jagged segments that can be described by Mandelbrot’s methods. Because of the essential roughness of self-similar forms, classical mathematics is ill-equipped to deal with them. Its methods, from the Greeks on down to the last century, have been better suited to smooth forms, like circles. (Note that a circle is not self-similar: if you cut it up into smaller and smaller segments, those segments become nearly straight.)

Only in the last few decades has a mathematics of roughness emerged, one that can get a grip on self-similarity and kindred matters like turbulence, noise, clustering, and chaos. And Mandelbrot was the prime mover behind it. He had a peripatetic career, but he spent much of it as a researcher for IBM in upstate New York. In the late 1970s he became famous for popularizing the idea of self-similarity, and for coining the word ‘fractal’ (from the Latin fractus, meaning broken) to designate self-similar forms. In 1980 he discovered the ‘Mandelbrot set,’ whose shape—it looks a bit like a warty snowman or beetle—came to represent the newly fashionable science of chaos. What is perhaps less well known about Mandelbrot is the subversive work he did in economics. The financial models he created, based on his fractal ideas, implied that stock and currency markets were far riskier than the reigning consensus in business schools and investment banks supposed, and that wild gyrations—like the 777-point plunge in the Dow on September 29, 2008—were inevitable.”

According to Jonathan Alter’s forthcoming book on the 2012 Presidential election, Steve Jobs, who loathed Fox News, personally ordered all Apple advertising from the truth-challenged cable station. From Paul McNamara at Network World:

“As relates to his previously documented loathing of Fox News, it’s now known that the late Steve Jobs backed up his harsh words by wisely withholding Apple’s advertising dollars, according to an upcoming book about the 2012 presidential campaign.