Monkeys redux

I think Slate has had its Explainer feature for quite a while, but for some reason the guy who's doing it recently (or perhaps I'm wrong, and this is new) always catches my interest. Here, Daniel Engber talks about monkeys: "A police SWAT team in Mesa, Ariz., has applied for $100,000 from the federal government to buy a capuchin monkey and train it to perform law enforcement duties. Until now, monkeys have only been on the other side of the law, but officers say a police monkey could search buildings, find bodies, and gather information with a video camera and two-way radio. The officer who wrote the application says the monkey itself would cost $15,000, with the rest of the grant going toward equipment and upkeep. Are monkeys really that expensive?"

And there's lots more...

An interesting NYT article

by Tom Zeller about employees fired for blogging, "When the Blogger Blogs, Can the Employer Intervene?":

Mark Jen, who was fired from Google in January after just two weeks, having made some ill-advised comments about the company on his blog (Google would not comment on Mr. Jen's dismissal, but confirmed that he no longer works for it), is now busy helping to draft a blogging policy for his new employer, Plaxo, an electronic address book updating service in Mountain View, Calif.

'It was a very quick education for me at Google,' Mr. Jen said. 'I learned very quickly the complexities of a corporate environment.'
With Plaxo's blessing, Mr. Jen is soliciting public comment on the new blogging policy at blog.plaxoed.com.

Most of the points are the kinds of common-sense items that employees would do well to remember, particularly if they plan on identifying themselves as employees in their blogs, or discussing office matters online: don't post material that is obscene, defamatory, profane or libelous, and make sure that you indicate that the opinions expressed are your own.

The policy also encourages employee bloggers to use their real names, rather than attempting anonymity or writing under a pseudonym.

Bad idea, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Two weeks ago, the group published a tutorial on 'how to blog safely,' which included tips on avoiding getting fired. Chief among its recommendations: Blog anonymously.

'Basically, we just want to caution people about how easy it is to find them online,' Ms. Newitz said, 'and that they are not just talking to their friends on their blogs. They're talking to everyone.'

Just finished

a crime novel I liked a lot, The Dead Sit Round in a Ring by David Lawrence. It's really good--at first I couldn't shake the feeling of how similar it is to other recent grungy London law-enforcement underworld novels (think Mark Billingham, Simon Kernick, Mo Hayder) but it's really well-written, both in terms of style and plot, and it is set apart from those others by having an appealing and persuasively characterized female detective as its main protagonist. This should be a really good series--I expect the next one must be out by now?

I reread two favorite books,

Lirael and Abhorsen by Garth Nix. I can hardly believe these books were only published a few years ago, the Sabriel trilogy is so much a part of my reading landscape. (I am excited to see that a related collection of stories, Across the Wall: A Tale of the Abhorsen and Other Stories will be published this summer. I must see if I can get an advance reading copy.) These books are the very best kind of young-adult fantasy. I find it heartening that there are such good new ones, really just as good as those favorite books of my childhood, Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence (which I ritually reread every few yeras). You expect the books you read when you're little to cast you in a magic thrall, but it is very delightful to find that new ones like Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials do exactly the same thing. For a wonderful book about childhood reading, take a look at Francis Spufford's The Child That Books Built.

Just got back

from seeing Marivaux's The False Servant at the Classic Stage Company. Bad play, good everything else.

Another

outrageously excellent crime novel by Peter Temple, The Iron Rose. (Curiously, this one was in the Columbia library, though none of his other Australian-printed ones seem to have been bought either by Columbia or by the other libraries in the BorrowDirect consortium. My main thought on finding it on the shelf is that it's amazing what a small stretch of shelving is devoted here to Australian fiction. Hmm...) This one even more than the others I've read made me think of a Dick Francis novel died & gone to heaven & transmuted into something that is pretty much my dream light reading. Funny, violent, sexy. My favorite part is a game in the middle that I'm about 90% sure is rugby, sports being one of my huger pockets of ignorance. The characters, the plot (hinging on the trauma of a job fucked up and the satisfaction of a job well done, plus betrayal and loyalty and all that stuff as they carry over from a life in one line of work to life in another, or from childhood to adulthood), the immensely appealing first-person narrator (drug cop turned blacksmith), most of all the amazing prose style... seriously, if I were an editor at a big publishing house, I would sign this guy up as the new Dick Francis and make sure that millions of people were reading his novels... (And if you only know the not-so-good recent Francis novels, it's well worth checking out some of the older ones. There are lots that I particularly love, but two especially good ones that also have an Australian connection are In the Frame, which I see you can buy used for twenty-five cents, and For Kicks.) I'm going to go ahead and order Temple's other Jack Irish novels from Amazon in Australia. I hear he's writing a new one, too. Which makes me very happy.

Fred Vargas is great

I just read Have Mercy on Us All, which might be described as a thriller about the black plague; I liked it even more than Seeking Whom He May Devour, though that was very good too. Strengths/commonalities of both books: an attractive detective character, a sort of anti-Sherlock Holmes because he works intuitively but with the Holmes-style ability to see things everyone else can't; excellent writing style (slightly marred in the translations by the occasional very-English weird Anglicism, but that's OK; I imagine the American editions will be newly translated, or at least revised?); cluster of working-class characters from widely divergent backgrounds, persuasively characterized; interest in the dynamic of a small society under threat from superstition as much as from violence, and in what makes certain people resist superstitious belief and group mentalities rather than succumbing to mass panic. Also, plague and werewolves; who wouldn't like them? I will look forward to reading the others, though I'm too lazy to read them in French: I'll wait for the translations.

There's a quite agonizing

piece up at the Chronicle, by a writer called Nicholas Hengen who got an MA degree in English and comments on the nature of the MA "racket." Here's some of it:

Two years earlier, when one of my rejection letters from doctoral programs arrived with a kindly worded offer to join the master's program, it seemed like a good idea. I was weak on theory and pretty much the entire 18th century. The program would groom me, I thought, into a great candidate for any university's doctoral program.

Sitting at the bar with Jake, I don't feel groomed. I feel bruised. Since arriving on the campus, my life has been a race to keep up. In my first year, I worked 20 hours a week. I was a secretary, I tutored in the department's writing center, and I did some grading for a professor's course. I also took three classes a term and wrote a conference paper.

I read tons of theory, but much of it was gulped while making photocopies. Between collating someone's tenure packet, fielding departmental phone calls, and grading undergraduate essays about Allen Ginsberg, I would hurry through Kant and Adorno and Herbert. I would run to class feeling underprepared, get the frisson of academic engagement for an hour or two, then rush off to tutor. By the time I got home most nights it was dark. I'd kick back with Ibsen -- the lightest reading I had all year.

By May, I was embittered, exhausted, and much more qualified to discuss poststructuralism. The few hours I spent in the classroom reminded me of why I was living this life, but once I stepped outside of those doors, I was back into a rush, running to my next job, dragging my bag of library books behind me.

Although I was never paddled or forced to drink more than I should have, the parallel with hazing floated into my mind frequently. If I was willing to take on this colossal debt, run myself ragged with nonacademic work, then stay up all night to perform academically, I would be allowed to join -- after I reapplied witwith the new writing samples and the letters of recommendation I had worked so hard for.

Life would still be busy and stressful, but at least it wouldn't cost as much. I would get my Ph.D. from a good university, get a tenure-track job in a place I wanted to live, and help students understand and enjoy literature. I just had to keep working, keep reading, keep writing. Everything would be fine.

Rejection letters from graduate programs have become a reality for an increasing number of would-be scholars -- especially in the humanities. Consider my own university. This year, my English department accepted 62 students: 18 Ph.D. candidates and 44 M.A. candidates. More than half of the M.A.'s had applied to the Ph.D. program and been denied.

For those students, a terminal master's program at a prestigious university was a beacon, a way of buying entree into academe.

Seen from the outside, M.A. and Ph.D. candidates look a lot alike. But from the inside, the two are quite different. M.A.'s are departmental cash cows. Outside of federal loans, the only financial aid that most master's students get comes in the form of work-study jobs. I was granted the maximum allowance: 20 hours a week. Work-study grad students are, I soon learned, a boon to the department.

I have devoted much energy this year to making the MA program (I'm currently "director," for what it's worth) in my department as valuable as possible for the students enrolled in the MA-only option, but I fear that some of them will go away feeling rather like this guy about the whole enterprise.

Just got back

from the really excellent Wooster Group House/Lights. It's demented and quite gripping to watch. Kate Valk is an extraordinarily good actress--seriously, she should be a household name, she is both very beautiful and perhaps the best actress I've ever seen perform (well, I'm also remembering Marian Seldes last year in that Beckett-Albee thing, which was the other best in recent years). I was particularly there to see my old friend Tanya Selvaratnam--I'm amazed to think of the days when Tanya and I used to act together (esp. one memorable production of No Exit--Tanya was Estelle of course, I was Inez and Sean Gullette was Garcin, with David Gammons directing). I do have a pang for the theater days, but it wasn't where my talent specially lay I'm afraid. But sometime I am going to write a play...

I read a quite OK

British crime novel by Jim Kelly, The Water Clock (my only comment is that the protagonist has extremely peculiar taste in drinks); more enthrallingly, I'm halfway through a crazy great book I'm reviewing for the Village Voice. I won't say more now, except that it's WELL worth reading: The Origin of the World: A History of the Vagina, by a Dutch sexologist called Jelto Drenth....

I have had

extraordinary good fortune for next year--I've got two fellowships that I will hold jointly and that will let me finish my new academic book, barring unforeseen calamity. One's in the Visiting Scholars Program at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Mass. (I'm looking for a sublet, Sept.-May; if you're reading this and you know of anything promising, drop me a line at jmd204 at columbia dot edu? My aspirational sublet is a furnished studio or one-bedroom in an apartment building not more than 25 minutes walk from the American Academy, costing not more than $1200/mo.; but I'm flexible on details. Cheap and sort of horrible but with a reasonable location is preferable to lovely & lavish & expensive. A furnished apartment, of course, is capable of being horrible in ways that even a quite unattractive unfurnished apartment can't match. And since it's Cambridge and not NY, it is about a hundred times more likely that an apartment will be in a house than a building. But you get the idea.) And the other is this, which I can still hardly believe....

And also

I just finished Peter Temple's Black Tide, which I read most of before going to Las Vegas but couldn't justify bringing to read on the plane given that I'd read most of it already. And then it had sort of vanished in the heaps of other books and magazines and unread newspapers when I got back...

It's great. Why, oh why are all these Jack Irish novels not published in the US? Temple writes angelically good prose; I find it almost painful to read because of my conviction that though I would like to, I am never going to be able to write something like this myself. Here's a taste, though I am not sure it will seem quite as alluring in excerpt as it is in the context of the extraordinarily appealing narrative voice. (And I have an obsession with expert knowledge/terminology and also a perverse, powerful but wholly theoretical interest in carpentry.) But check out this amazing prose. In his spare time, to calm himself down, the narrator works for a genius woodworker called Charlie:

Against the righthand wall were the clamp racks: at the bottom, the monster sash clamps; above them, the lesser sizes; in the next rack, the bar clamps, the infantry of joinery, dozens of them in every size; then the frame clamps, the spring clamps, the G-clamps, the ancient wooden screw clamps that Charlie loved best, and flexible wooden go-bars arranged by length. Finally, an assortment of weird clamps, many of them invented by Charlie to solve particular clamping problems.

I can't quite explain why I love this so much, but it's something to do with the dashing repetition & the light touch of the humor & the affection that comes through from the narrator. The language is just gripping. And the plot is difficult to follow in just the right way, there's horse-racing stuff and former-CIA-drug-arms-money-laundering-type intrigue and it's all sort of confusing in the way that REAL intrigues are confusing (the reason that white-collar crime's so hard to prosecute and that even very good journalism has a hard time narrating the details of drugs-for-arms CIA-type deals, because they are full of redundancy and too many different villains to make up a proper list of dramatis personae and all that). This is an exceptionally intelligent and appealing book.

Just saw

On Golden Pond, with James Earl Jones and various others. Not my kind of play at all, but it's very funny and JEJ is superb.

Light reading: two very enjoyable novels by Victoria Clayton, Past Mischief and Dance With Me (the second is particularly delightful; I like the weird gothic touches in these otherwise very frivolous books; not quite as much to my taste as Eva Ibbotson's novels, but in a rather similar vein and very stylish in the writing); and the long-awaited Magic or Madness, by Justine Larbalestier. I enjoyed the last very much--she's got a great prose style--the only frustration was the inevitable one of reading the first volume in a trilogy and finishing it & being extremely disappointed that it will be a long wait till the next one's out. It rather reminded me of a particular favorite book of mine that I must get and read again, Margaret Mahy's The Changeover.

Check out

my friend Marco's fun but harrowing essay "On Torture and Parenting" (about training your six-month-old to fall asleep without parents in attendance) at n+1. Here's a taste: "If parenting, even responsible parenting, made me feel like a torturer, it wasn't exactly because I'm melodramatic or overwrought, but because the official torturers now conceive of themselves in the same terms as the parenting manuals. They, too, are technicians of the naked human personality. The 'Human Resource Exploitation Manual,' a formerly classified government document used to instruct 'anti-communist' Latin American security forces in the bad old 1980s, puts the theory of torture in terms that any reader of the 'Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child' can easily understand."

I got home last night

at 5am after a super-delayed flight kept me in the Las Vegas airport on the way back from this eighteenth-century studies conference, held at this "premiere all suite non gaming resort"--my word would have been "down-at-heel." It was a surprisingly relaxing trip, all told, and I am thankful to have done temporarily with the attractive-but-insane Maupertuis so that I can take care of everything else that's piled up in the meantime. I read a few novels while I was away: the new Elizabeth George (I don't know why I still read these, I sort of hate them but some nostalgia makes me pick them up and of course it's convenient for a long plane ride. An excessively long, humorless book); an OK crime novel by Marcos Villatoro called Home Killings; and a work of pure genius, A. L. Kennedy's Paradise. This is the one of the most beautifully written novels I've read for ages--each sentence is perfect, and the whole thing adds up to something unbelievably sad and bleak and moving. And often very funny, too. My favorite sequence in the novel begins with this set of paragraphs:

You are now approaching forty and have already spent far too long washing underwear in a theatre, stacking shelves, cleaning rental power tools--which are, I would mention, often returned in revolting states. You have slotted together grids of doubtful purpose, you have folded free knitting and/or sewing patterns into women's magazines, you have sorted potatoes (for three grotesque hours), you have telephoned telephone owners to tell them about their telephones and you have spent one extremely long weekend in a hotel conference suite, asking people what they found most pleasing about bags of crisps. Every prior experience proves it--there is no point to you.

At least at the end of the crisps job, I got to take some home. But selling cardboard was a godsend: flexible and satisfying in a way that involved no pressure at any stage, because--after all--what sane person could possibly care about who might be buying how many of which kind of box. The job actually managed to be more trivial than me, which seemed to produce this Zen glow across my better days and enabled me to lie my head off in a consistent, promotional manner with hardly a trace of nauseous side effects.

At the moment, though, there's nothing doing: not in cardboard. Nobody wants me any more and yet, for the usual reasons, I continue to want cash. So, on a sodden Tuesday lunchtime, I'm forced to admit I've been driven to make the drinker's most conventional mistake. I've started working in a bar.

The scene that follows is hilarious and also incredibly depressing. This is an exceptional novel.