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May 22, 2010

Daunting derivatives and Sleeping Beauty

Tuesday evening I boarded the flight from RDU to Dallas, and was confused at first as I looked in the coach section for my seat. 5E wasn’t there. It slowly dawned on me that I had a first class ticket, either as a result of a computer glitch or some unexpectedly generous rewards system. After I wedged my way forward through the human tide and found my seat, I tried not to look too ecstatic. Ah, such a comfy, roomy seat. And so sweet to have a flight attendant who’s attentive, and little luxuries like warm peanuts and hot towels. My neighbor was a precocious nine-year-old boy with a stuffed toy traveling to see his mom. He’d flown this route many times. He wanted to be an inventor when he grew up.

On the trip, I finished The Big Short by Michael Lewis. I picked up the book on the strength of his earlier book, Liar’s Poker, and out of concern that I probably didn’t fully understand the drama in the U.S. and world economy in the last two years. After reading the book, I’m quite sure I didn’t. I now know a little more, but my larger takeaway is that part of the cause is that the mechanisms involved are so complex that they defy conscious human understanding or control. I don’t think this is Lewis’s intended message. He tries to create some heros and villains, or at least intelligent actors and dupes. The intelligent actors had rational thoughts, and realized that subprime-mortgage-based derivative investments were much riskier than advertised. He casts some blame on clueless regulators and unscrupulous investment bankers.

Lewis implicitly suggests the slightly cheering possibility that if people were more reasonable and diligent, they might set up regulatory and other systems to avoid financial catastrophe. I found this encouraging message not very persuasive. There were surely some monsters and frauds involved in the recent debacle, and plenty of examples of unsavory pure greed and indifference to human welfare. But right now it looks to me like the big driver was the financial engineering of investment vehicles that were practically impossible to understand, even for professional investors and regulators, never mind individuals. Creating them was far from unnatural. In nature, technology, and other human systems, greater and greater levels of complexity over time is generally the rule. At some point, there’s simply too much for the human mind to deal with. Our rational systems are overwhelmed, and our fallback emotional systems have no guideposts from experience. Disaster is not necessarily inevitable, but we are less and less in control. Yes, it’s scary.

But life, amazingly, goes on. Sally and I went to the last program of the season for the Carolina Ballet last night, which was Robert Weiss’s version of Sleeping Beauty. The music is by Tchaikovsky, and as Weiss explained at the beginning, the choreography comes in significant part directly from Marius Petipa’s nineteenth-century work. For the most part, this was a very traditional, classical form of ballet. I generally prefer the more abstract athleticism of Balanchine and his school (including Weiss) with modern dance inflections. No matter. Sleeping Beauty was wonderful. Even the junior members of the corps de ballet showed considerable authority with classical technique, and the soloists were masters who communicate emotional depth within that framework. Margaret Severin-Hansen as Aurora was etherial. The costumes were also classically inspired (gowns and embroidered waistcoats and many tutus), and gorgeous.

We got a backstage tour courtesy of our friend Ginny at intermission. It turned out, the action hadn’t really stopped. On the stage behind the curtain, some of the dancers were practicing difficult passages or doing deep stretches. It was disconcerting at first to shift from observer of a carefully planned spectacle to quasi-participant in the assembling of the spectacle, but fascinating. We met Lilly Vigo, a great favorite of ours who was off for the night, and talked about her new baby, who was six months old that day. We examined up close the intricate costumes and saw the swan boat and the huge dragon puppet in the wings. A friend once told me that I was the kind of person who likes to look behind curtains and see what’s really going on, and it’s true. One of my fantasy careers is to be a stagehand.

After the show, we decided to have a drink at the Foundation, a tiny bar on Fayetteville Street that features a huge menu of American-made designer spirits. The downstairs space was crowded, so we settled on stools at street level and did some people watching. Two of our favorite soloists from the company, Lara O’Brien and Eugene Barnes, arrived shortly afterwards, and sat down next to us. They seemed pleased that we were big fans, and we really enjoyed talking with them about favorite ballets, goings on in the company, and the travails of the professional dancer’s life. This is the end of an arduous season for them, and both are looking forward to recovering from injuries over the summer. We’re looking forward to seeing them again.

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May 15, 2010

Soccer news — a non-fan’s notes

Last night Sally and I went out to see some professional soccer by our local team, the Raleigh Railhawks, who opposed the Tampa Bay Rowdies. We had excellent seats (second row, midfield), and could see how young the players were, how skilled, and also how rough.

For me, the point was some refreshment after an intense work week. In my days at the New Yorker, one of my friends who worked as a proofreader described going to the City Ballet after a hard day of catching tiny printing mistakes as a cool drink for the eyes. My work also involves close focus on details and constant decision making. I get that sort of release from ballet, and also from a close-up, live view of professional athletes. Minor league baseball by our local Bulls and Mudcats usually has this refreshing effect, too. TV sports doesn’t work the same for me.

Jocelyn was home from Colorado for a visit this week, and we all went out Thursday for some Thai food at Sawasdee. When the conversation turned to sports, I asked Jocelyn what she thought was important about big time college sports, including those at her alma mater, NC State. For her, sports and especially football were a fantastic part of the college experience. She loved tailgating, loved the drama of a come-from-behind victory. She enjoyed being part of moments when people united in support of a single cause. And for her, the Wolfpack was definitely special.

I’ve never been a deeply committed fan of a sports team, so I thought this was both sweet and interestingly strange. For me, being a part of a sports crowd involves occasional moments of transcendence, so I know generally what Jocelyn meant. But being in a crowd also usually involves stretches of wishing the people around me were better behaved. I don’t get heckling, trying to distract players, or yelling when nothing particularly exciting is happening. I always choose a team to pull for, but the choice seems basically arbitrary. It’s hard for me to believe that one team is really more virtuous than another.

So, I was excited when the Railhawks scored the first goal, glad when the goalie made a diving save, and outraged when the referee missed a flagrant foul. I was also annoyed at a young fellow who incessantly heckled the opposing coach. I was anxious when the Rowdies tied it up late in the game, and disappointed when we lost, 2-1. Then we went home, and I read for a while, and was moved by some poetry of Wallace Stevens.

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March 20, 2010

Happiness, stress, spring, and Precious

What makes us happy? Happiness studies were the subject of a piece by Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker last week . It included a comparison between the reported happiness of lottery winners and paraplegic accident victims. The lottery winners reported less pleasure in their daily activities than the victims. Studies have shown rising income levels in the US have not resulted in increased rates of reported happiness. Citizens of some low-GDP countries report that they are far happier.

It was such a stressful week at work that I found myself thinking about the stress. In the course of each day, I felt a satisfied sense of accomplishment — numerous goals met, and at least two days’ worth of work done. But I had the sensation that the queue of undone work did not at all diminish. It was the problem Sisyphus had with the rock. In many ways, my job is great: intellectually challenging, stimulating, varied, intelligent and good-humored colleagues, with a company that has a meaningful mission that’s consistent with my ethics and ideals, and I could go on. But I had a minor epiphany on the downside. My feeling of stress is not caused by the actual work I’m doing at a particular moment. I usually enjoy the challenge at hand. The stress comes from the sense of the huge pile of work yet to be done. That pile is looming, full of unknown challenges. In the pile there could be something that suddenly and violently changes things — in effect an IED. This is, obviously, in part a problem that my mind makes up for itself, and there are surely better ways to think about the pile.

Yesterday the pear trees on my way to work were suddenly covered with their white blossoms, and today the high was in the 70s. Spring has sprung. Sally and I ate out in the neighborhood last night at the Red Room, a neo-tapas place. I had a new species of drink that was delicious — blueberry sangria. My veggie paella was good, and our waitress was friendly and efficient (and, interestingly, obviously pregnant). A DJ provided a fun electronica/techno sound track which was emphatic but not too loud for us to talk. On the walk home, there were crowds of young people circulating among the various bars and restaurants, some eating outside.

During my drive to work this week, I heard the end of an interview with a British writer whose name I missed (his new book is about London and religious extremism). He recounted a dialog in his book between two people who said they liked to read. One said he read to escape, and the other said he read for the opposite reason: to dig into reality. He explained that in everyday life, people don’t ordinarily have the time to really think carefully about their perceptions and feelings, the social time with others to discuss them, and the verbal skills to articulate them. Writers of books do such things. Of course, not all do, and probably only a small minority do. But the books that interest me are exactly those the British writer described: those that tell me something meaningful about reality that couldn’t be discovered any other way.

I don’t set the bar as high for movies. I don’t mind a good 2 hour escapist movie, but I’m happy when they do more. Sally and I recently saw one that qualifies as much more — Precious. The setup sounds unbearably grim: the story of a morbidly obese, illiterate, sixteen year old, pregnant African American on welfare with one baby already (and it gets worse — I don’t want to be a spoiler) who’s detested by her mother and ridiculed by most everyone else. It takes place in Harlem in the 1980s, and it was a gritty urban environment. But the movie was exceptional in showing the teenager’s inner life — her powerful fantasies, but also her courageous grappling with her reality. It made me recognize that my assumptions about such people and situations don’t have much experiential basis, and should not be firmly fixed. It also showed an unexpected oblique angle on the beauty of everyday life.

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February 14, 2010

Olympic Victory and Luck

Sally and I went to an early Valentine’s day party at David and Kelly Beatty’s last night. It was our first visit to their North Raleigh place, which was not as far out as we expected, and sits on the edge of an old deep forest. The house is spacious and beautiful in the transitional style, and Kelly has used color and form to make it lively and personal. She also made a great lemon vodka martini and fantastic hors d’oeuvres. It was good talking with Kelly and David, and meeting a few of their friends. Because my car lease end date is in sight, I had some car questions for David, who proved, as always, a font of knowledge. Kelly said little Reid was resistant to bedtime without parental attention, and so we headed out.

The winter olympics, which we enjoy, got started this week, so after the party we picked up some food from Royal India and came back to watch. The commercials were ridiculously frequent and dumb. But the competitions drew us in to some intense drama. For years now, Sally has had a lively interest in speed-skater Apolo Anton Ohno. Though I also find him interesting, she seems to have a different kind of absorption. (I’ve noted this same absorption as to Brad Pitt.) It so happened that Ohno was featured as the American hope in the short track speed skating 1500 meter semi-finals and finals. The network showed a short documentary about him, emphasizing his extraordinary work ethic — four two-hour workouts per day. He said, at one point, that at the end of every day he asks himself whether he’s done everything he can to be his best. I was impressed.

In the 1500-meter race final, he quickly passed five or so competitors to claim the lead. In the last three laps, though, the lead changed repeatedly, with passing maneuvers that looked impossible. In the last lap, three South Koreans went to the front, and Ohno was in fourth place coming into the last turn. Then one of the Koreans lost his edge and went over, taking one of his countrymen with him. Ohno took second place, rather than nothing.

At the party I told David about The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, which I also posted about yesterday. The Ohno race illustrates it nicely. His years of effort put him in position to compete for another olympic medal. But the South Koreans were stronger. There was nothing he could do to stop them. They were unfortunate in falling at the final turn, and he was fortunate. That’s a typical success story: hard work plus amazing luck.

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February 13, 2010

Travel, randomness, and good fortune

Last week I spent a couple of days in San Jose and Palo Alto at meetings of the Linux Foundation counsel group. I did three presentations myself and heard talks on virtualization, open source license enforcement, trademarks and open source, patent troll lawsuits, and other topics of professional interest. I had a chance to socialize with some very bright and knowledgeable open source legal people and catch up on industry news and gossip. The days were lively, but long, starting with a working breakfast and ending with a working dinner, and I was ready to head home on Thursday.

The flight from San Jose took me to Dallas. As chance would have it, Dallas experienced its heaviest snowfall in history that day. Across the eastern U.S., tens of thousands of flights were cancelled in what was described as the worst travel day since 9/11. My flight into DFW landed on time, but sat on the runway for almost an hour. By the time I made it to the gate for the connecting flight, which was due to leave at 3, it was 3 sharp, and too late. The next flight was in 5 hours. I claimed a spot at stall with a bar stool and free electricity, plugged in my laptop, and got some work done.

Eventually I came to a stopping place, gave up my precious electrical connection, and looked about for coffee and something to eat. For some reason, people were more than usually chatty. I normally keep chats with strangers during air travel to a minimum, primarily because I’m trying to get other things done. Also, with a tendency toward the introvert side of the personality scale, I tend to see the cost-benefit analysis of a one-time talk as more on the cost side. But in the various lines and pauses on Thursday, I met a photographer from Dallas, a defense department weapons system specialist from Dayton, and a salesperson for highway building equipment from San Diego, all interesting and pleasant.

The snow continued to come down throughout the afternoon, and I kept expecting to hear that the Raleigh flight was cancelled. Instead, AA loaded up in a timely manner, and closed the door. My seatmate had the Wall Street Journal, and agreed to share it. Things were looking good, and then they froze. We eventually spent more than 4 hours on the runway waiting for de-icing, being de-iced, and taking off. I finally got home about 4:15 am. The total travel time was 17.5 hours. Happy as I was to be home, it took me another couple of hours to get to sleep. I was late for my 9 am interview with a prospective intern.

On the trip I finished The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow. It is an account for non-mathematicians of the history and meaning of the great ideas of probability and statistics. Mlodinow explains that without an appreciation for probability and statistics, people have an overwhelming tendency to find patterns and meaning where there is none, and greatly overestimate the amount of control they have over their own fate. This is almost certainly true, but it’s a bit depressing. It’s therefore possible that people who understand it generally don’t care to talk about it. One positive point Mlodinow makes late in the book: success and happiness are more likely if we take more chances. That is, you can’t win the coin toss if you don’t toss the coin.

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January 10, 2010

Reading the Confessions of Nat Turner

One of the rewarding things about travel is the flip side of downtime: having substantial chunks of time to read. Once I’ve made it to my gate and found a spot to stow my roll, I look forward to the part of the journey when there is nothing physical that needs to be done, no problems that immediately need to be solved, and no talking that is strictly necessary. For lovers of books, it’s an oasis. And reading makes the time valuable. I really don’t know how non-readers can stand airplanes.

During our travels over the holidays, I managed to finish William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, which gave a shot in the arm to my sometimes shaky faith in the importance of the novel. Sally read the book long ago and kept it, and it has sat on our various bookshelves as long as we’ve been together (27+ now!). During all that time, I had no idea it was such a great book. It turns out Sally always thought it was a great book, but we never got around to discussing it.

The book is based on an actual person (Turner), a slave who led a bloody revolt in Virginia in 1831. Styron explains in “afterword” essay that the historical record of Turner is slim, and that he consciously made a character different in important respects from what he believed about the historical Turner. (The real Turner was apparently a psychotic religious fanatic, whereas Styron’s is a religiously inspired poetic and practical genius.) Styron’s aim was to illuminate slavery and race relations during that period, and his own. He succeeded brilliantly in bringing to light multiple dimensions and paradoxes of the Peculiar Institution.

It is certainly a beautiful book in its details and its sweep, but also a deeply painful. There is, of course, the sickening cruelty of some individual slave owners. (The narrator Turner concedes that there was a wide range of behavior among slave owners, and some of them were thoughtful and relatively kind.) There is the pain of Turner and millions of others who endured forced servitude. There’s also the deep pain is that our forefathers with knowledge and intent supported and defended slavery for generations. The anti-black racism that continues to plague us is proof that this legacy is still with us.

The book is a powerful example of how a work of fiction can bring to light certain truths that cannot be illuminated any other way. History in its conventional form is distrustful of imagination, which means that undocumented feelings and behaviors can be completely lost. But combining historical research with imagination and literary skill, as Styron did, opens doors to the past.

Styron’s essay recounts the strange history of the book itself, which was initially a critical and popular success. It then became the target of fierce attack by a number of prominent black scholars. By Styron’s account (which is obviously self-interested), most of the attacks missed the larger points of his work. In any case, the attacks effectively marginalized the book by discouraging the attention of black readers. It is a sad irony that this great book that could easily have been an inspiration for more great historical and imaginative work and another bridge over a racial divide became a point of division.

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August 23, 2009

Slow language, and poetry

The slow language movement noted in my recent post is surely an old idea — even in living memory, people have read slowly — but the idea threatens to be submerged beneath the tide of texts that inundates us. For me, and for many, the flood of words that may be significant, that need to be taken account of, is overwhelming. I deal with hundreds of emails a day, and that’s a minor part of my personal deluge.

To survive, effective skimming is a must. But becoming a good skimmer means putting at risk skills in close, attentive reading. This is not a minor matter. Those skills are a potential source of enormous joy. The survival of great literature depends on the survival of thoughtful reading.

Today’s NY Times has an appreciation of Richard Poirier, the scholar and literary critic who died last week at age 83. Poirier taught that for the best writers, meaning cannot be pinned down, and that they use the resources of language to defeat straightforward interpretation. He was a proponent of close, hard reading, that explored the author’s struggle for self-definition and meaning.

My current personal program to avoid completely losing the capacity for thoughtful reading is to carve out a little time each day with great poetry. Lately I’ve been focusing primarily on Wallace Stevens, but I keep close at hand collections of Yeats, Frost, Tennyson, and the anthology by Harold Bloom.

This work is in many instances wonderfully compact. A lot of potential meaning and feeling is embodied in a small amount of text, so it is manageable even for a busy person. The poems demand repeated readings, but the readings can be spread out in time. This little oasis in a busy day often rewards me with a deep aesthetic shiver. I’m hoping over the longer term it will prevent halt further deterioration of the capacity for literary joy.

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August 22, 2009

Free at last of college tuition, and now for some poetry

Last week we passed a sweet milestone: writing the last college tuition check for the last child. For more than two decades, the formidable challenge of paying for college has loomed ahead, always a vague worry and gradually a bigger and bigger worry. As college costs steadily increased, it looked like a potential financial nightmare. Education of the young is a basic parental duty, and in bourgeois America it is — expensive. How sweet it is to put down that burden.

I woke up around 1:00 a.m. on Thursday and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I got up to do some reading. Not long after, I heard someone at the door, and then heard the door open. I was glad it was Jocelyn, and not an unknown intruder, who caused a a serious burst of adrenalin. She’d been out with friends at a downtown bar, and decided to spend the night with us.

Joc was in a jolly mood, and we had a great talk. I was so happy to hear that she’d fallen in love with English poetry and gotten surprisingly knowledgeable about some of my own favorites, including Wordsworth and Keats. We went over La Belle Dame Sans Merci to try, yet again, to understand what it means. I recommended some Tennyson, and she promoted some Coleridge. We shook our heads over the tragic early death of Keats, and I told her about Wilred Owen’s tragic early death in World War I. We discussed Yeats as well, and especially Adam’s Curse.

We marveled that there is such beauty and sadness in the world. I was delighted at her knowledge, sense of humor, and sophistication. She’s ready to launch. The tuition was well spent.

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July 19, 2009

Revisiting Lincoln

I finally made it to the end of A Lincoln, by Ronald White, and I’m about halfway through Lincoln by David Herbert Donald. It seems like a good time to think more about Lincoln. He’s near the heart of the American civil religion (along with Washington, the Constitution, and the flag). And like us with our times of many troubles (wars, financial crisis, global warming, extinction of many species, etc.), he faced enormous challenges. In 1860, the year of he was elected president, slavery looked like a problem that that had no imagineable tolerable solution. In 1865 it was (at least in legal terms) over.

It’s hard to spend time with a Lincoln biography without feeling awed and inspired. We used to teach our fifth graders a few bumper sticker-size Lincoln facts, which have been lodged in my head since I was a kid. The log cabin. The rail splitter. The love of reading and learning. The frontier lawyer. Honest Abe. Political opponent of slavery. Savior of the union. The kid’s version is simplified, of course, but the bumper stickers aren’t seriously misleading.

Yet many of his contemporaries thought him an uncouth backwoods fellow. Apparently he had a high, annoying voice, dressed poorly, and was considered more-than-usually ugly. His early career was a checkered effort to make ends meet in frontier towns, and he experienced job loss, unemployment, bankruptcy, and uncertain prospects. He was reasonably successful as a lawyer, but he didn’t make a lot of money. As a new president, he was in way over his head, and he made many costly mistakes. He had views on race and other subjects that seem today retrograde. He was not a saint.

Even so, he continues to inspire us. His willingness to confront long odds and to reach for the best and highest are still moving. He was a man of many virtues. There are two that I take as as exemplary — honesty and intellectual curiosity.

Lincoln made sure that the individuals he dealt with were fairly treated even when it was to his disadvantage. I believe his reputation for exceptional honesty was a critical factor to his success. He won authority because people believed he was honest, that he was not corrupt, and that he would do what he believed in good faith was the right thing.

Lincoln was also unusual in his passion for learning. As a boy growing up on homestead in the frontier, Linconln got almost no formal schooling. He attended school for less than 12 months over his lifetime. How did he get so smart? Simple: he read omniverously. (Apparently he did most of it out loud, which must have been annoying at times.) He believed it was possible to transform himself, to become better. His story reminds us of how much a single human can achieve.

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