Audiobook Review: An Object of Beauty, by Steve Martin, read by Campbell Scott

For some reason, Steve Martin's writing makes for great audiobooks. Perhaps it was all his years doing stand up, mastering timing and cadence. His writing just works being spoken aloud. His novella Shopgirl, which he read himself for the audiobook release, is an audiobook masterpiece.

Campbell Scott

Martin's new book, An Object of Beauty, is not read by the author for the audiobook release, but instead by Campbell Scott. You'll recognize his voice, he's an accomplished actor in his own right.

He's not the kind of reader to 'act out' a book for the recording (i.e. yell when the character is yelling, for example), thank God. I prefer to experience the audiobook more as I would reading a book - where it is I who adds the emphasis in my mind. Scott does an excellent job of standing back from the material and letting it work itself. Although he does add subtle nuance and occasional accent shifts for different characters, it never gets heavy-handed.

An Object of Beauty is set in the New York art world, a world Martin knows well, being a famous art collector himself. The characters are not really likable, which can often lead me to put down a book and never return. But, somehow, as morally challenged as the main characters are in An Object of Beauty, the story works to keep you in suspense of what is to come, and be just generally entertained by Martin's writing. It's also an amazing primer on art appreciation, art history and the world of art collectors.

Here's the Publisher's Weekly summary:

Martin compresses the wild and crazy end of the millennium and finds in this piercing novel a sardonic morality tale. Lacey Yeager is an ambitious young art dealer who uses everything at her disposal to advance in the world of the high-end art trade in New York City. After cutting her teeth at Sotheby's, she manipulates her way up through Barton Talley's gallery of "Very Expensive Paintings," sleeping with patrons, and dodging and indulging in questionable deals, possible felonies, and general skeeviness until she opens her own gallery in Chelsea. Narrated by Lacey's journalist friend, Daniel Franks, whose droll voice is a remarkable stand-in for Martin's own, the world is ordered and knowable, blindly barreling onward until 9/11....

Buy from Amazon
Buy from Chapters/Indigo

How to Be a Foreign Correspondent: the 2010 Dalton Camp Lecture

For those interested in journalism, CBC Ideas is serving up the 2010 Dalton Camp Lecture on journalism. This year's guest lecturer is Stephanie Nolen, award-winning journalist who's reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Loosely structured as a series of 'rules' on how to be a great foreign correspondent, it is peppered with details from her experience on the front lines covering some of the most dangerous situations in recent times.

She starts off talking about the shifting media landscape, including the rise of citizen journalism. Guys, warning, she is a bit sexist (one of the rules is "be a woman"). But, aside from the oddly dated sexism, it's a good listen.

>> Listen to the Lecture 

"The Neighborhood Mixed Tapes" - Free Download, Including a Performance by Feist

Here's a great concept: A 'mixed tape' (actually a free mp3) showcasing local Toronto musicians. Five tracks, every Sunday. You can stream it on the website or download to your Ipod. Produced by Aldrin Taroy, at blogTO, an online magazine with a Toronto bent. It's a great example of the power of the local blog format.

This week's Neighborhood Mixed Tape includes the well-known Feist, amongst others. All the tracks are good, and quite different. So, if you don't like a song, just FF>> a bit to get to the next act.

My faves on this week's mixed tape are: the first track, a duet with Feist and Kyle Field, and the last track by Steven McKay. They're a bit folkier (the middle tracks a bit more indie pop - they are good, too, just not my speed).

Bravo blogTO -- I am officially a fan of your blog and will follow!

See the full lineup on the Neighborhood Mixed Tape page

Social Impact Bonds - England's Attempt to Innovate Social Programs

I've become acutely aware that much of the media I read and listen to is coming from the U.S., a self-obsessed nation, to say the least. Even my favorite American podcasts can't seem to get out of their own context, look at how people in other places in the world do things, talk with experts who've tackled similar issues elsewhere.

That is particularly true for anything political. Rome is all of a sudden seeming awfully provincial. The rhetoric in American politics has spiraled to the lowest common denominator. So over the next while, I'm going to be making an extra effort to highlight content from other parts of the world. Today, it's BBC Radio's Analysis show, an episode entitled "Criminal rehabilitation: a sub-prime investment?".

Seventy percent of short-term prisoners in England re-offend and get put back in the system. It's a notoriously sticky issue. The penal system is there for two things: punishment and rehabilitation. But the second part of that equation is not working - it's a costly cycle of crime.

There's a pilot project right now that is attempting to change all that and lower rates of re-offense. A big part of what makes the pilot program innovative is the financing.

The government pays only if the program actually reduces the rates of re-imprisonment. Investors put up the money and if the project succeeds, then the government rewards the investors with a return. The structure is called Social Impact Bonds. Payment by results.

It's not without its detractors, who point out that adding a level of profit-making could have its problems. Also those who question the very possibilty and efficacy of reform.

KIRBY: But will it really work? How many Radio 4 programmes
have you heard over the years about sending Michaels on landscape gardening courses or on bird watching camps to try to break their criminal behaviour pattern? If those schemes are so effective, why did the Ministry of Justice only last week announce that in 14 prisons across England and Wales the re-offending rate for short sentence prisoners has risen to 70%? Have we all become so attached to the rhetoric of redemption that we daren’t see the truth?

It's a well produced, and decidedly un-American, episode.

Listen Now >> "Criminal rehabilitation: a sub-prime investment?".
You can even read the transcript ! >> http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/programmes/analysis/transcripts/08_11_10.txt

The Deserving and Undeserving Poor

I discovered another BBC Radio Podcast that is worth subscribing to: BBC4's Analysis, a show about public policy. This week's podcast is a discussion entitled, "The Deserving and Undeserving Poor" about the current debates raging in England over Welfare.

Like many places England is experiencing a resurgence in "right wing" types of ideas (after listening to Jon Stewart rail about the problems with dividing the world into left/right, I am putting it in quotation marks).

Welfare and social programs are common targets. But, now, it seems that people from both sides of the spectrum are discussing things like the morality of social programs ("why should I work hard and pay taxes while some slacker watches telly all day?").

People are looking for answers and don't want to be closed-minded. Maybe it's time to revisit questions about the legitimacy of welfare? I fear that this plays into the hands of the cynical. I would have thought intellectuals would be more immune to this type of crap after the years of failed conservative experiments around the world. Instead of trying to figure out who's naughty or nice, they should be talking about something like the cheap and easy to administer Guaranteed Annual Income.

Which Experts Should You Trust? The Foxes or the Hedgehogs?

In a famous essay Isaiah Berlin playfully identified two broad types of people, based on the way they think: 

hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust)

and foxes who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Herodotus, Aristotle, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce, Anderson). (from Wikipedia)

It is roughly this distinction that writer Dan Gardner makes in an interview with Steve Paikin on TVO's The Agenda: "Predicting the Unpredictable" [video, 14mins].

Gardner cites an interesting study where this researcher tracks the predictions of experts over a long period of time. The result: experts predict things pretty much as well as monkeys. You might as well toss a coin. Their success rates are that horrible.

Question is, why then do we continue to go to experts? Gardner says that people basically can't stand uncertainty, but that the world is fundamentally unpredictable. Take weather. We can predict a few days ahead, but that's about it. The systems are so complex as to be chaotic. He actually mentions chaos theory, which, I don't know, seems so 1989.

Anyway, he cites another study where they have two groups of people: one group gets 20 strong electrical shocks in a row, the other 17 light shocks and 3 strong ones, but, they don't know when the strong ones are coming. Tracking their physiological responses, it is the group the experienced fewer (but unpredictable) strong shocks that had the most stress. We would rather have 20 strong shocks than have 3 strong ones not knowing when they are coming.

Back to the hedgehogs. So, in times of uncertainty (like now), we look to hedgehogs to give us answers. They have them, they are confident, they have bravado, they have this one big idea that they are organizing the world around! Yay! Oh, but they are going to fail terribly at providing useful guidance about what to do and plan for.

The way it plays out in the business of prediction is that by the time the prediction fails, people have forgotten what the initial prediction was. Over a 5-year period things change enough that the original prediction is forgotten. It's win-win for the expert. He wins if he/she is right, and the prediction is forgotten if he/she is wrong.

Turns out the most successful experts at prediction in this study are the foxes. They think in nuanced ways. They give us complex answers and multiple scenarios, they say things like, "I'm not sure". Yuck. Who wants to hear an equivocating politician or economist? Makes for horrible TV or radio. But, according to Gardner, we need to accept uncertainty in the world, and start listening to the foxes.

Agenda: "Predicting the Unpredictable" [video].

New York Literary Establishment "Unlikes" Facebook

Another scathing, and humorous critique of Facebook has come out of the New York literary establishment. Zadie Smith, in her New York Review of Books article, "Generation Why?", has a go at Zuckerberg, (the creator of Facebook), along with the whole Facebook phenomenon.

This, following Malcolm Gladwell's much talked-of New Yorker piece, "Small Change: Why the Revolution will not be Tweeted" in which he argues that social media creates 'weak links' and what you need for actual social change are 'strong links' that only happen with real relationships, with real people in physical space. When Gladwell describes it, it sounds more convincing -- really. 

After reviewing the film The Social Network (which she liked with qualification), Zadie Smith starts to get into some deeper questioning of Facebook and Zuckerberg:

World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: How can I do it? Zuckerberg solved that one in about three weeks. The other question, the ethical question, he came to later: Why? Why Facebook? Why this format? Why do it like that? Why not do it another way? The striking thing about the real Zuckerberg, in video and in print, is the relative banality of his ideas concerning the “Why” of Facebook. He uses the word “connect” as believers use the word “Jesus,” as if it were sacred in and of itself: “So the idea is really that, um, the site helps everyone connect with people and share information with the people they want to stay connected with….” Connection is the goal. The quality of that connection, the quality of the information that passes through it, the quality of the relationship that connection permits—none of this is important. That a lot of social networking software explicitly encourages people to make weak, superficial connections with each other (as Malcolm Gladwell has recently argued), and that this might not be an entirely positive thing, seem to never have occurred to him.

It's good that people are asking questions like this. It is just a bit curious the tenor with which it is done by the literati. They seem to harbor a true animosity towards social media. Is it a backlash against the trumpet-sounding of social media evangelists, like Clay Shirky, who see social media as a panacea for all the world's ills? Or is it just the observation: much of what goes on in the Facebook universe is vapid and trivial, particularly for the intelligentsia.

Perhaps they are much like Shirky, reading into social media more than they need to. At the very least, tools like Facebook and Twitter are just that -- tools. I'm thinking of some of the functionality which has emerged, free, for everyone to use: things like Facebook 'groups' which provide the ability to organize and share information on a topic or cause. It is powerful software. It's also true that most people who use Facebook are only interested in rather superficial things about their friends and acquaintances. But the tools are there and can be used, when needed.

Are social media technologies affecting us negatively? As Marshall McLuhan famously observed, The Medium is the Message. Is the message that we are gadgets? Zadie Smith goes on to describe the work of Jaron Lanier a computer guru who's just written a book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto:

Lanier is interested in the ways in which people “reduce themselves” in order to make a computer’s description of them appear more accurate. “Information systems,” he writes, “need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality” (my italics). In Lanier’s view, there is no perfect computer analogue for what we call a “person.”

Personally, the thing I fear most about Facebook is the time wasting nature of it. I can easily lose a half-hour when I get a notification that someone has commented on my 'Wall'. I'm currently devising strategies to take time away from all intrusive media, old-school-email included.

From the Outside, Looking In -- Understanding Tea Party Politics

I have to admit to a fascination with Tea Party politics. The way that I might want to peek at a roadside accident, or a train wreck. I am on the sidelines up here in Canada, (making me glad I'm in Canada). I keep trying to find the thread, the logic of the 'movement'.

Recently, there were a couple of stand-out pieces on the Tea Party phenomenon, which have helped me penetrate the fuzzy logic. One a podcast, and one a long magazine article. These fine media establishments try to be 'fair' to Tea Partygoers, to take their claims seriously enough to do a long piece. That's got to be hard. Best way to do it is the profile. Letting the people involved in the 'movement' talk for themselves.

This American Life's episode, "This Party Sucks", has two acts. It's the first act that is about the Tea Party:

"Two best friends in Michigan, both political novices, get tired of yelling at their TVs and take matters into their own hands. They form a Tea Party chapter to effect political change. But when push comes to shove and they have to choose a candidate, their ideologies, their principles and their friendship explode"

The Atlantic Monthly did a long profile piece on Ron Paul, one of the key thinkers in America's rightward political swing, "The Tea Party's Brain". Great piece -- Long and detailed and quite fair, considering Paul is a nut job. In the piece I learned about the Austrian School of Economics and its sudden resurgence in right-wing circles:

"During medical school, he had happened upon a copy of The Road to Serfdom, the ringing defense of laissez-faire capitalism by the Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek. Written in 1944 against the backdrop of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, it argues that state control of the economy leads inexorably to tyranny. (After Glenn Beck endorsed it, Hayek’s book unexpectedly hit the best-seller list last summer.) 

To Paul, this was an epiphany, and it launched him on a quest to read anything he could find about the Austrian school of economics. The work of Hayek’s mentor, Ludwig von Mises, came to command his singular esteem. Mises’s faith in free-market capitalism was nearly absolute. He thought any market interference dangerously distorted the value of money. This led him to reject central banking, by which governments adjust the supply of money to influence the economy. Mises thought that “printing money” was unsound and inevitably touched off a cycle of foolish investments that ended in disaster. What economists call the business cycle—the ebb and flow of boom and recession that most of them believe to be inevitable and outside government’s full control—Mises thought was the result of government interference, of the unfettered expansion of central-bank credit. To prevent governments from debasing the currency, he favored a gold standard."

Video: Interview with Joe Bageant

Update March 31, 2011. Joe Bageant passed away last week. He was a unique voice and will be greatly missed. This video is a nice example of his way of talking about politics.

Just in the middle of reading Deer Hunting with Jesus, by Joe Bageant, on my Kindle. In this 7min interview, Joe talks a bit about his book, the bailout and the American dream. He even sings a ditty at the end.

Joe Bageant - Redneck Agitator

"The Tea Party is a media spectacle to make working people believe they have power" -- Joe Bageant.

The question for a lot of liberal-minded thinkers in America is, why do the poor vote against their best interests at election time? They vote, instead, for politicians and parties that are service to a class that they'll never be a part of, and vote against things that would actually help them, such as proper health care, housing and a fair share of the economic pie.

Joe Bageant has been sitting with this question for a long time, and has taken to writing about it: books with titles such as, Deer Hunting with Jesus (Dispatches from America's Class War), and Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir. He also has a blog: www.joebageant.com

Few people can sell the down-home authentic redneck wisdom the way that Joe Bageant can. He frames his life story like this: born and raised as white trash, he managed to cross the class line and work as a journalist, all the while thinking about class and about where he came from. "Then back to hometown of Winchester VA to settle some scores with the bigoted, murderous redneck town I grew up in. I love'em but they need a good ass kicking."

Bageant identifies with (and cares deeply about) poor whites. He offers a perspective that is unique in the left: an insider's take on a culture that from the outside defies logic. Bageant is often critical of liberal intellectuals who have no idea about the working poor, and who don't fully comprehend that "The middle class, as advertised" is enjoyed by a small percentage of Americans. 

Having read the introduction to his book, and listened to him speak, I think Bageant is an even better speaker than he is a writer (and he's a good writer - his book is full of observation and humour). In person, he's witty, charming, insightful, highly quotable and has a lot of interesting things to say about class and the history of class struggle in America.

The talk he did at Brisbane Writers Festival (available at ABC's Big Ideas as audio podcast) is an excellent place to start. You'll be entertained and enlightened.