Cardiff de Alejo Garcia

Obliquity

Psy-Fi Blog reviews the new book by FT columnist John Kay:

Many of the great mistakes of history, including the problems financial markets have continualy re-experienced, have been caused by a basic error of judgement – the idea that it’s possible to define, plan and control the outcomes of the world around us despite the rampant uncertainty we daily take in our strides. So instead of relying on expert judgement and feeling our way carefully towards outcomes we’ve found ourselves traduced by people with tunnel vision and a strong but unjustified confidence in their ability to navigate unerringly to a correct solution, whatever that might be. ...

At the centre of Obliquity is the idea that we mostly don’t make decisions through some careful process of analysis – maximisation, or whatever term you want to apply to it – because the world is too complex to permit of such an approach in real life. This theory of direct decision making is not just wrong, but is also at the heart of some of the worst decisions in history, invariably made by people who thought that they knew what was right for everyone else.

Instead we end up with reasonable outcomes when we approach decision making obliquely – by using judgement and skill and, frankly, muddling our way through making the best of the situation as we find it on a day by day basis. The book gives example after example of corporations that have succeeded in making their shareholders very rich by setting themselves objectives that are nothing directly to do with wealth creation – and also shows how often direct attempts to generate wealth lead to the exact opposite outcome.

Much more here.  This adds to the welcome proliferation of books in the last decade that challenge our understanding of how much control we have over outcomes in our lives. 

People are inconsistent in how they view their own lives versus the lives of others.  We tend to look upon another person's lot in life and, whether it's that of a celebrity or a destitute bum, assume it is mostly deserved.  And we treat him that way.  But when we look at the outcomes in our own lives, we're more likely to see them as a combination that, along with talent and effort, includes factors beyond our control.  I don't know if books that make us aware of these biases lead to any actual changes in behavior, but it doesn't hurt to be reminded of them now and again.

The origins of f***

Pardon the juvenile nature of this post, but I really do find this interesting:

The word fuck definitely did not originate as an acronym, as many people think.  Acronyms are extremely rare before the 1930s, and etymologies of this sort—especially for older words—are almost always false.  (The word posh does not come from "Port Outward Starboard Home," cop is not from "Constable on Patrol," and tip is not from "To Insure Promptness.") ...

In reality, fuck is a word of Germanic origin.  It is related to words in several other Germanic languages, such as Dutch, German, and Swedish, that have sexual meanings as well as meanings such as 'to strike' or 'to move back and forth'.  Ultimately these words represent a family of loosely related verbs having the structural form f + a short vowel + a stop (a consonant such as k, d, g, or t, in which the flow of air from the mouth is briefly interrumpted), often with an l or r somewhere in between.  These words have the basic meaning 'to move back and forth', and often the figurative sense 'to cheat'.  English examples of this family—all found later than fuck—are fiddle, fidget, flit, flip, flicker, and frig.

The English word was probably borrowed in the fifteenth century from Low German, Flemish, or Dutch, though the word is found earlier in English than its equivalents in these languages.  There is no way to know for sure which language is the ultimate source.

That's copied from the introduction to The F Word, by Jesse Sheidlower.  In addition to this history lesson, the book also offers many examples of the word's usefulness and versatility.  There's a new edition of the book out now, which I discovered while fucking around at Barnes & Noble.

Book giveaway

UPDATE: THE GIVEAWAY HAS ENDED.  Thanks to everyone who participated.  I sent out 47 books, and I'll be donating the rest. 

I'm clearing some much-needed space and giving away a bunch of my books, 111 to be exact.  If you find one that you want from the list below, please follow these two steps and I'll mail it to you:

1.  Leave a comment in the bottom of this post with the book's title (and at least your first name)

2.  Send an email to cardiffgarcia [at] gmail [dot] com with your preferred mailing address.  Write "book giveaway" in the subject line

To make sure you don't pick a book that somebody else has already chosen, please check the comments first.  I'll also do my best to update this post by crossing out books as they are taken.  

BESTSELLERS FROM THE LAST FEW YEARS

Animal Spirits, by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller

The Big Short, by Michael Lewis

Game Change, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlondinow

How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer

Lush Life, by Richard Price

CUBA

After Fidel: The Inside Story of Castro's Regime and Cuba's Next Leader, by Brian Latell

Bacardi and The Long Fight for Cuba, by Tom Gjelten

Cuba: A Short History, edited by Leslie Bethell

Dreaming in Cuban, by Cristina Garcia

Finding Mañana, by Mirta Ojito

Havana: Autobiography of a City, by Alfredo Jose Estrada

Havana Dreams: A Story of Cuba, by Wendy Gimbell

The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba, and Herbert L Matthews, by Anthony dePalma

Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, by Carlos Eire

ECONOMICS

Against the Flow: Reflections of an Individualist, by Samuel Brittan

The Conscience of a Liberal, by Paul Krugman

In Defense of Globalization, by Jagdish Bhagwati

One Economics, Many Recipes, by Dani Rodrik

The Next Asia, by Stephen Roach

The Numbers Game, by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot

The Myth of the Rational Market, by Justin Fox

Portfolios of the Poor, by Collins, Morduch, Rutherford, and Ruthven

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets, by John McMillan

The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, by Paul Krugman

The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki

FICTION AND LITERATURE

The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

The Coma, by Alex Garland

The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen

Charlotte's Web, by E.B. White

The Charm School, by Nelson DeMille

East, West, short stories by Salman Rushdie

Last of the Amazons, by Stephen Pressfield

For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway

The Godfather, by Mario Puzo

Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers

Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn

Life of Pi, by Yann Martel

Narcissus and Goldmund, by Herman Hesse

The Odyssey, by Homer

The Portable Milton, edited by Douglas Bush

The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene

The Power of One, by Bryce Courtenay

The Story of B, by Daniel Ishmael

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith

Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte

FINANCE

The Ascent of Money, by Niall Ferguson

Barbarians at the Gate, by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar

Capital Ideas Evolving, by Peter Bernstein

Den of Thieves, by James B. Stewart

Enough, by John C. Bogle

The Failure of Risk Management, by Douglas Hubbard

The Greatest Trade Ever, by Gregory Zuckerman

Lecturing Birds on Flying, by Pablo Triana

Liar's Poker, by Michael Lewis

Money, Markets & Sovereignty, by Benn Steil and Manuel Hinds

Money Masters of Our Time, by John Train

Pilgrimmage to Warren Buffett's Omaha, by Jeff Matthews

A Primer on Money, Banking and Gold, by Peter Bernstein

When Genius Failed, by Roger Lowenstein

HISTORY

America, a textbook by George Tindall and David Shi

A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War, by Paul Preston

Cicero, by Anthony Everitt

Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville

The Great Republic: A History of America, by Winston Churchill

A History of the Arab Peoples, by Albert Hourani

History of the English-Speaking Peoples, by Winston Churchill (one volume edition)

In Spite of the Gods, by Edward Luce

A Short History of South-East Asia, edited by Peter Church

LIBERTARIANISM

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

Capitalism and Freedom, by Milton Friedman

On Liberty and Utilitarianism, by John Stuart Mill

The Road to Serfdom, by F.A. Hayek

The Choice: A Fable of Free Trade and Protectionism, by Russell Roberts

Radicals for Capitalism: A History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, by Brian Doherty

POETRY

The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran

Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, by William Blake

WH Auden: selected poems, selected and edited by Edward Mendelson

POLITITCS

Freedom for the Thought that we Hate, by Anthony Lewis

Government's End, by Jonathan Rauch

The Portable Edmund Burke, by Isaac Kramnick

Plan of Attack, by Bob Woodward

Pity the Nation, by Robert Fisk

RANDOM NON-FICTION

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, by...come on

A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human, by Richard Wrangham

Confessions, by Saint Augustine

Killing Pablo, by Mark Bowden

god is not Great, by Christopher Hitchens

Midnight in Sicily, by Peter Robb

The Smartest Guys in the Room, by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind

TRAVEL

The Art of Travel, by Alain de Botton

A Fortune-Teller Told Me, by Tiziano Terzani

Film + Travel: North America South America (Museyon Guides)

Travels, by Michael Crichton

Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel, by Rolf Potts

WRITING AND JOURNALISM

America's Best Newspaper Writing, selected by Roy Peter Clark and Christopher Scanlan

The Economist Style Guide

The Elements of Journalism, by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel

On Writing, by Stephen King

On Writing Well, by William Zinsser, Sixth Edition

Write Clearly...Speak Effectively, by ML Stein

WRITTEN FOR THE STAGE

Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand

Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller

King Lear, by Shakespeare (New Folger Library edition)

The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, by Shakespeare (Folger Shakespeare Library edition)

A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry

Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett

Lush Life

 Lush Life is about the aftermath of a fatal shooting on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and specifically about the psychological fallout on the people affected by it: the cops, the killer, the family of the victim, and two survivors.

Richard Price, the author, is a co-writer of The Wire, and fans of the show will recognize the rich colloquial dialogue.  As viewers of The Wire are expected to follow what is being said without much help beyond the context, much the same is expected from readers of Lush Life. 

And just like in The Wire, the events of Lush Life unfold chaotically, meant to approximate the daily frustrations, mistakes, and bureaucratic hassles of real life.  There isn't a clear narrative arc, because whose life has one of those?

Anyways, I liked the book, and I especially think that fellow New York media types will identify with the character of Eric Cash, the 35-year-old manager of an LES bar whose youthful dreams of artistic stardom have faded.  As the book opens, he is struggling to accept his failures.  This is how Price introduces the character:

But what really drew him to the area wasn't its full-circle irony but its nowness, its right here and nowness, which spoke to the true engine of his being, a craving for making it made many times worse by a complete ignorance as to how this "it" would manifest itself.

He had no particular skill or talent, or what was worse, he had a little talent, some skill: playing the lead in a basement-theater production of The Dybbuk sponsored by 88 Forsyth House two years ago, his third small role since college, having a short story published in a now-defunct Alphabet City literary rag last year, his fourth in a decade, neither accomplishment leading to anything; and this unsatisfied yearning for validation was starting to make it near impossible for him to sit through a movie or read a book or even case out a new restaurant, all pulled off increasingly by those his age or younger, without wanting to run face-first into a wall.

Later in the story, Cash says the following about a former lover, but it's obvious he is also describing himself:

"She's got to be in her thirties by now, mid-thirties.  I think at first she was some kind of performance-artist-barmaid.  Now she's just a barmaid.  It's like..people say they're one thing or another?  Then at some point, they just are what they are."

And still later:

"I'm so much better than anything I've ever done."

Scattered quotes and thoughts about writers vs editors

Most writers I know have tales to tell of being mangled by editors and mauled by fact-checkers, and naturally it is the flagrant instances they choose to single out -- absurdities, outright distortions of meaning, glaring errors.  But most of the damage done is a good deal less spectacular.  It consists of small changes (usually too boring to describe to anyone else) that flatten a writer's style, slow down his argument, neutralise his irony; that ruin the rhythm of a sentence or the balance of paragraph; that deaden the tone that makes the music.  I sometimes think of the process as one of "desophistication".

That is by John Gross, from the introduction to the ninth edition of the The Economist Style Guide. 

Next is a quote from this recommended essay in The Millions about the famously troubled relationship between Raymond Carver and his heavy-handed editor, Gordon Lish:

As we know now, Lish got his way by ignoring Carver’s pleas. Thus, the point of contention among the old friends: What We Talk About transformed Carver into a darling of the literary world, and despite his last-minute reservations and desperation, he didn’t deny himself the glory the book won him, and he remains one of the most revered writers of the 20th century.

Finally, from a hilarious piece by Michael Kinsley, who throughout his career has spent plenty of time as both writer and editor:

If you're lucky, your editor will have lost all interest in your article by the time you produce it, and on the way to a fancy expense-account lunch, he will pass it along unmolested to the copy editors (apprentice fiends, with intense views about semicolons). If you are not lucky, your editor will take a few minutes to ruin the piece with moronic changes and cloddish cuts before disappearing out the door.

Writers and editors will always have a complicated relationship.  Writers bitch that editors ruin their glorious prose, and editors respond that writers are a bunch of ungrateful egotists whose original drafts, always submitted ten minutes before press time, are so turgidly written they wouldn't pass a kindergarten English test.

Editors have more control over a publication's final product than most readers know.  Before I became a journalist, I was quick to condemn the writer whenever I disagreed with anything in the story or encountered an error, or if I thought an article poorly written.  By the same token, I was too quick to praise the writer for stories I loved.

Now that I've experienced the kinds of substantive changes, good and bad, that editors have made to my own articles, I know it's much harder to assign responsibility.  A great editor can save a bad writer's ass; a bad editor can massacre even the finest work. 

Of course, one motivation to start blogging again after a two-year hiatus was the lack of any filter between me and the reader (assuming anybody actually starts reading this). 

Not that I'm complaining about the editors at my day job, but it's nice to have a place of my own---where you'll know exactly whom to blame for the crappy writing.  As Kinsley writes:

On the Internet, they don't have editors. Or they don't have many. Writers rule, and a thought can go straight from your head onto the Net. That used to sound hellish. Now it sounds like heaven.