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Friday Mini Book Review: The Pixar Touch

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 11:11:00 EDT

The mini book reviews of days gone by.

The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company, by David A. Price (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). For fans of animation—or anyone required to keep someone under age 12 amused in the past decade—Pixar’s importance is self-evident. The animation company whose story is told in this book has single-handedly remade the look and feel of the animated movie. (This is undeniable even if you, like me, prefer a more traditonal animated style and don't much like the general Pixar "look.") In its nine feature-length films starting with Toy Story in 1995, it has achieved a highly unusual streak of endless success, both commercially and critically, and added many fresh characters to our national mythology.

Author David Price, whose degree is in the computer science in which Pixar’s success as the king of computer animation is rooted, doesn’t deliver much for the enthusiastic fans fascinated by the Pixar crew because of their filmic imagination. This book is more for readers of Wired or Forbes than for those thrilled (and amused) by the plight of the captured clownfish Nemo (from Pixar’s 2003 Finding Nemo, the bestselling DVD in history) or cheering the culinary success of the rat-chef in Ratatouille.

The Pixar Touch is a book of popular business journalism (with a light techy edge) rather than cultural commentary or criticism. It tells the detailed story of a seeming failure of a company that bounced from purpose to purpose and owner to owner in the 1980s before becoming one of the unarguable titans of American pop culture.

As such, the book details the unpredictable contingencies that guided a gang of computer geeks with a love for animation to wild success. They fooled their corporate paymasters—no less a pair of business and culture giants than George Lucas and Steve Jobs—into thinking they were a computer software and hardware endeavor when all they really wanted to do was put on a show: make animated films using computers rather than pen and brush.

When Pixar’s masterminds finally got to do what they wanted to do all along, convincing Disney to partner with their innovative computer graphic techniques to make Toy Story, they succeeded magnificently. Somewhere in there is a lesson in executive decisionmaking that author Price does not belabor. Price doesn’t belabor any particular theme, in fact, allowing the facts and characters to speak for themselves. But some inspiring lessons arise nonetheless.

By detailing the halting, and recent, beginnings of computer animation, in five minute shorts seen only by tech conference geeks or seconds of special effects in mainstream films, and showing how quickly it evolved into the technical and storytelling marvel of Toy Story, the dizzying speed of innovation and improvement in our modern technologies and arts is convincingly hit home.

Another lesson of the Pixar story is how dynamic America’s economic class structure can be. Pixar’s founders, computer graphics pioneers Ed Catmull (a straight-laced Mormon) and Alvy Ray Smith (an erratic hippie), came from backwater colleges the University of Utah and New Mexico State University, not any recognized center of academic or cultural juice. Interesting new ideas and hard work can turn nobodies far from standard centers of power and influence into giants.

Catmull and Smith fell under the wing of eccentric financier Alexander Schure, who founded the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) and set them up there in the 1970s, buying them all the insanely expensive equipment they needed to begin experiments in computer animation, just because he thought it was interesting. The NYIT was, as Price writes, “somewhere between a third-tier university and a diploma mill,” but birthed the multi-billion dollar Pixar experiment.

In the late ‘70s, George Lucas realized he might have some use for experts in this nascent field of computer animation, and slowly siphoned off Schure’s braintrust. By the mid-‘80s, Lucas had lost interest and sold the division off to then-former Apple exec Steve Jobs. Pixar was born as an independent company—one that made and sold machines and software that helped make computer-generated images. The press release from 1986 announcing Pixar’s independent launch gives no hint of its future as a moviemaking behemoth.

Price delivers just enough of the technical details of computer animation—dropping terms such as bicubic patches, Z-buffer, and texture mapping—while staying rooted in the human and business realities of executive pissing matches, stock option shenanigans, and sweet success after a long battle. Disney passed up Pixar for $15 million in the mid-1980s, and then paid around $6.3 billion net for it in 2006. Everyone who has ever dreamed of showing doubters what they can achieve will be inspired by some element of the Pixar story.

Technogeeks Save America

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:30:00 EDT

We know what happened to our civil liberties after the terrorist atrocities on September 11th. Imagine what would happen to our civil liberties if another major terrorist attack occurred. That's the premise of the new young adult novel Little Brother by Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow.

The story opens with 17-year old Marcus Yallow, a.k.a. w1n5t0n, a senior at Cesar Chavez High School in San Francisco. Stuck in a boring social studies class, Yallow is busy checking out his favorite ARG (alternative reality game) site, Harajuku Fun Madness ("best game ever"). A new clue has just been revealed, prompting the cocky technogeek Marcus to jam his school's clunky surveillance systems so that he and his crew can ditch school and go find it. Just as his buddies Darryl, Vanessa (Van), and JoLu (Jose Luis) converge on the clue site, a terrorist attack blows up both the Bay Bridge and the BART tunnels under the bay.

As the young gamesters try to escape the crush of panicked San Franciscans, Darryl is stabbed. Marcus flags down one of the armored Hummers that suddenly appear everywhere on the streets in the hopes of getting Darryl to a hospital. Wrong place, wrong time. What turn out to be Department of Homeland Security goons roughly truss him and his friends up, and toss them into a concentration camp.

Doctorow makes what happens next chillingly plausible. Marcus and his friends are treated as potential enemy combatants. Marcus refuses to unlock his cellphone and decrypt his files as a female Homeland Security agent orders. "Honest people don't have anything to hide," warns the interrogator. She ignores his demands for an attorney and to speak with his parents. For refusing to cooperate, Marcus is locked up in solitary confinement where he is physically and psychically humiliated until he finally breaks down. Eventually his DHS questioners are satisfied that he is in fact just a smart alecky high school kid who misunderstands the real limits of his civil rights. They force him to sign a document saying that he'd been well-treated and then let him and his friends Van and JoLu go. They are warned not to tell anyone—not even their parents—what happened to them or else they'll be thrown back into internment. Darryl is still missing.

Post-attack San Francisco is now an occupied city—occupied by repressive Homeland Security thugs. Citizens' movements are continually monitored by both surveillance cameras and by means of the electronic traces left by their credit cards and transit passes. (This is disturbingly reminiscent of the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness program which involved deploying massive information aggregation and analysis technologies to create, as New York Times columnist William Safire described it, "computer dossiers on 300 million Americans.") If someone deviates from their usual activities, DHS agents drop by demanding to know what they are up to.

Fueled with fierce idealism and energy, Marcus is determined to resist the despotism of his government and to spring Darryl from the clutches of the DHS. Using his Xbox gaming console and ParanoidLinux, Marcus devises a way to create a secure network to get around Homeland Security. From there the resistance begins to spread. ParanoidLinux is described as "an operating system that assumes that its operator is under assault from the government (it was intended for use by Chinese and Syrian dissidents), and it does everything it can to keep your communications and documents a secret."

The novel depicts a genuinely thrill-packed fight for freedom. Little Brother shows how the savvy use of technologies such as RFID cloners, Bayesian analysis, and cryptography can liberate people from oppressive government. Unless you're completely oblivious, Little Brother will fuel your anger over the freedoms that we have already lost to our growing national security state. Moreover, as Little Brother shows, resistance is not futile.

Final recommendation: Help disseminate these subversive ideas. Little Brother is a wonderful Christmas, birthday, bar or bat mitzvah gift for any young adult you know. If you don't want to buy it, you can download it for free here. And any of you guys over age 25, I bet it will inspire you, too.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Friday Mini Book Review: Conservatism in America

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:18:00 EDT

The Mini Book Review is back. See many old ones.

Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right, by Paul Gottfried (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Gottfried's outlook on a topic oft-addressed by many writers (this is, in fact, his own second book assessing the American right) is at least a rare and bracing one: a paleo-rightist himself who thinks most of the popular and successful manifestations of the American right have sold out its own values--quite literally sold out, in pursuit of foundation cash and job openings controlled by neocons. This is most certainly a book for deep-insiders--you couldn't really make much sense of it if you weren't already versed in reading and thinking about, in, and among the American right--but for those types, its perspective is necessary.

The heart of Gottfried's thesis? Conservatism "has developed a talent not only for presenting takeovers as the serene march of the past into the present but also for treating a general retreat from its original positions as a progression of victories." The American right has retreated from a genuine oppositional intellectual movement to one with "a situational function, that of framing policies for the Republican Party and contributing to the administrative staff of Republican administrations."

He grants, with consummate fairness and a great deal of truth, that a conservative movement more to his liking--one that "stood where....Ron Paul...does today, might well have opposed the liberal Left even less effectively than the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute do today."

Gottfriend distinguishes the classless and unrooted, purely intellectual, American conservatism from any European roots; laments the passing of Russell Kirk (though he has his reservations about him as well) as a prime right-wing influence in favor of Jaffa and Strauss; traces the subtle shifting and occasional precarious combinations of dueling systems of "value conservatism" within the movement (while noting that nowadays it's easier for value conservatism to forgive being tolerant of gay marriage than being intolerent of endless wars for democracy); and ends with sadness that that global crusade for "democratic values" has inhabited the shell of conservative institutions, all the while tracing this more to cashflow than idea flow, and denying any modern conservative triumphalism that claims their neo-conservatism is more intellectual or ethically purer than the old variety they superseded.

In the end, noting intellectual conservatism's lack of any mass social or class base, he declares it mostly "contrived" and a "media phenomenon," and darkly suspects it functions well as an ally to left-liberals in keeping more paleo-cons, like himself, safely segregated from the public conversation. For a book undergirded to some degree by anger at what he sees as a conspiracy to subvert true conservative values, it remains dispassionate enough that even those who disagree with his thesis can do so without feeling embattled. Gottfried leaves you room to consider his thesis, even be enlightened by it, without agreeing with it, a refreshing rarity in interested assessments of political movement and theory.

Friday Quick Hits

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:32:00 EDT

* One way to beat the TSA watch list.

* A site devoted to breaking down the state-level presidential polls into a more understandable form.

* A list of "Essential Science Fiction and Fantasy for Libertarians." It is intentionally eclectic, has a left-libertarian tilt, and ought to start a bunch of arguments. Have at it.

Rainbows and Artificial Intelligence

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:38:00 EDT

reason contributor John Tierney chats with Vernor Vinge, coiner of the term The Singularity, in today's New York Times. They discuss Vinge's most recent book, Rainbows End, in which an old fogey's Alzheimer's is reversed in 2025 and a man from the age of email has to learn to cope with Internet-enabled contact lenses and GPS clothing. Vinge also offers some tips on Tierney's blog for staying on-board as our machines get smarter (and smarter than us).

Allow human/computer teams at chess tournaments. This has also been suggested by Garry Kasparov. It still seems to me that allowing such entrants in human tournaments need not be obtrusive, and would ease the general acceptance of the symbiosis idea. It would also be interesting to see if top players came to recognize that such teams displayed a new style of play, different from the styles of pure human and pure machine competitors....

Develop human/computer symbiosis in art. Of course, parts of this are being deeply exploited. However, we’re still missing a very important possibility and this is collaboration closer to the point of creativity itself. Karl Sim’s “picture breeding” was a super example of this: The program would generate a screen full of abstract art thumbnails and the user (artist) would select particular thumbnails to be the “seed stock” for the next iteration of the process. In 15 minutes, an ordinary person (such as myself) could generate abstract graphics that were as attractive (well, to me at least) as the best commercial art.

reason interviewed Vinge last year. Tierney's reason contributions here. Get some Internet-enabled contacts here.

Change Amazon.com Can Believe In?

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:16:00 EDT

GalleyCat has a great summary of the brouhaha over publishing house Chelsea Green's decision to offer Amazon.com print-on-demand coupons for its new book Obama's Challenge at the Democratic National Convention, making the book available exclusively on Amazon for a full three weeks before it hits the streets. (Full Disclosure: Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, is a donor to Reason Foundation, the nonprofit organization that publishes this website.) As Chelsea Green president Margo Baldwin put it, "This election is too important to wait around for traditional publishing lead times." Strong words, though as Publishers Weekly reports, America's long-suffering independent booksellers see things differently. PW quotes one Hut Landon, the executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, who chastises Chelsea Green for its "decision to exclude independent booksellers" and derides Amazon for its "purposeful decisions to avoid sales tax collection in most states" and for "sell[ing] books at a loss when it suits their purposes." Those blackguards!

But it isn't just the mom & pop shops that are upset with this nefarious scheme. The once powerful Barnes & Noble is feeling left out, too. As company spokeswoman Mary Ellen Keating told the Associated Press, "Our initial order was based on the book being available to all booksellers simultaneously—an even playing field." In retaliation, Barnes & Noble has refused to stock the book in stores. Times certainly have changed. Remember the salad days of 1998, when Meg Ryan's charming little bookstore was menaced by the Barnes & Noble stand-in run by Tom Hanks? How far the mighty have fallen.

In possibly related news, Billboard is quoting an unnamed source that says Guns & Roses' long-awaited epic, Chinese Democracy, may be released exclusively through either Wal-Mart or Best Buy. I don't know if that counts as a minus or as a plus for America's independent record shops, but there you go.

"The entire book is about violence and anarchy as part of the hardcore punk culture. This could antagonize and rile up the general population."

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:56:00 EDT

Feral House, the great West Coast publisher specializing in serial killers, death metal bands, occult worship, and other frequently unsavory subjects, has apparently gone too far for the Colorado Department of Corrections. As Warden Kevin L. Milyard explains in a document that Feral House helpfully posted on its blog last month, their book American Hardcore: A Tribal History (2001) has been banned from all Colorado prisons for depicting violence, substance abuse, "hatred of law enforcement and other races," and plenty more where that came from.

While I'm sure "Banned by the Colorado Department of Corrections" will look great as a blurb on the new edition, I'm a little surprised that this particular volume got the boot. Sure, there are some R-rated bits, but this is an oral history of punk music, not The Anarchist Cookbook.

Back in 2002, Senior Editor Brian Doherty sat down with Feral House founder Adam Parfrey to discuss Islamic extremism, The Satanic Bible, the free market, and much more. Check that out here.

'I'm Sure That You Think You Don't Want Help'

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 12:45:00 EDT

Over at The American Spectator, reason contributor Shawn Macomber reviews Scott Stein's satirical novel Mean Martin Manning, which imagines a not-too-distant future in which nosy social workers are empowered to forcibly improve crotchety shut-ins:

Pitney [the social worker] is there to make Manning [the shut-in] eat his vegetables, both literally and figuratively. If Martin Manning isn't renouncing the things or behaviors she believes he should, he isn't progressing. And if he isn't progressing, he certainly isn't improving. Failure to improve clearly places him in noncompliance with the rules and regulations of a life-improvement zone, however content he may erroneously believe he is.

"I'm sure that you think you don't want help," Pitney tells the shut-in when he tries to opt out of her non-optional assistance. "That's standard. In fact, not wanting help is one of the signs of needing it. Yours is a textbook case."

Last fall in reason, I interviewed Stein about his book.

Zora Neale Hurston, Libertarian?

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:02:00 EDT

Philosophy professor Roderick Long has a fascinating post up at his Austro-Athenian Empire blog about the arguably libertarian politics of novelist and cultural anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. A snippet:

Again and again in the academic literature on Hurston, one finds some version of the puzzled question "Why does she seem so sensibly left-wing on some issues and so horrifically right-wing on others?" Libertarianism is so far off their radar that they don't even recognise that that's the best label for her. Hurston makes most sense when placed in conjunction with such other "Old Right" literary figures as H. L. Mencken, Isabel Paterson, Albert J. Nock, Rose Wilder Lane, Garet Garrett, and Ayn Rand—but their works are largely terra incognita in contemporary academia.

And from a lengthy passage Long excerpts from her autobiography, Hurston's less than flattering take on liberal icon FDR:

President Roosevelt could extend his four freedoms to some people right here in America before he takes it all aboard [sic, presumably for "abroad"], and, no doubt, he would do it too, if it would bring in the same amount of glory. ... He can call names across the ocean, but he evidently has not the courage to speak even softly at home. Take away the ocean and he simmers right down. ... Our country is so busy playing "fence" to the mobsters that the cost in human suffering cannot be considered yet. ...

Whole thing here.

Apocalypse Forever

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:30:00 EDT

Convinced America is going into the shitter? Tempted to buy into the recent rise of rise-and-fallism? Make sure you first read this great little World Affairs Journal survey by Georgetown professor Robert Lieber of retrospectively inaccurate and sometimes comical American "declinism." A sample:

It was in the 1970s that declinism began to take on its modern features, following America's buffeting by oil shocks and deep recessions, a humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam, victories by Soviet-backed regimes or insurgent movements in Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia, and revolution in Iran along with the seizure of the U.S. embassy there. A 1970 book by Andrew Hacker also announced The End of the American Era. At the end of the decade, Jimmy Carter seemed to give a presidential stamp of approval to Hacker's diagnosis when he used concerns about a flagging American economy, inflation, recession, and unemployment as talking points in his famous "malaise" speech calling for diminished national expectations.

By the early 1980s, declinism had become a form of historical chic. In 1987, David Calleo's Beyond American Hegemony summoned the U.S. to come to terms with a more pluralistic world. In the same year, Paul Kennedy published what at the time was greeted as the summa theologica of the declinist movement-The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, in which the author implied that the cycle of rise and decline experienced in the past by the empires of Spain and Great Britain could now be discerned in the "imperial overstretch" of the United States. But Kennedy had bought in at the top: within two years of his pessimistic prediction, the Cold War ended with the Soviet Union in collapse, the Japanese economic miracle entering a trough of its own, and U.S. competitiveness and job creation far outpacing its European and Asian competitors.

Link via Opinion L.A.

"Almost, Not Quite, Entirely Unlike Tea"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:48:00 EDT

This month in retro-futurist news: The sad death of David Caminer, who "found the earliest ways to use a computer for business purposes, including standardizing flavorful, cost-effective cups of tea."

Caminer worked for a huge tea-cookies-meat pies-and-other-Britishy-things company called Lyons. The company needed faster clerical work to handle the math required to figure out efficiency stats and employee wages at its growing empire. In 1951, years before similarly useful* IBM computers were a twinkle in an American eye, they had a usable business computer up and running.

To help us laymen comprehend this development, New Scientist made this comparison: “In today’s terms it would be like hearing that Pizza Hut had developed a new generation of microprocessor, or McDonald’s had invented the Internet.”

All this brings to mind the greatest instance of automated tea in all of fiction: Arthur Dent's noble, computer-handicapping struggle to get a decent cuppa after the Earth is destroyed. The ship's computer eventually manages to produce a substance "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea."

I've never tasted the fruits of Caminer's labors, but I believe he managed to do slightly better by not asking the computers to make the tea directly.

More delicious retro futurism here.

*Updated: IBM had, of course, been around forever, puttering around with big clunky mainframes.

State of Discontent

mmoses@duke.edu (Michael Valdez Moses) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Diary of a Bad Year, by J.M. Coetzee, New York: Viking, 231 pages, $24.95

The South African novelist John Michael Coetzee is celebrated for his uncompromisingly critical, ethically complex, and highly cerebral writings about the nature of power. His philosophically dense, ironic, and self-reflexive fiction has exhibited a consistent suspicion of political authority without being either didactic or propagandistic. Both his fiction and his nonfiction offer merciless portraits of the human devastation wrought by state power: South African apartheid, European imperialism, the U.S. war in Vietnam, the totalitarian violence of Nazism and communism. His newest novel, Diary of a Bad Year, contemplates—among many other things—a radical rejection of the state itself.

Coetzee’s work mixes formal elements in ways that are often unsettling. He blends memoir with fiction, academic criticism with novelistic narration. When he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, Coetzee delivered not a traditional lecture but a meditation ostensibly written by Robinson Crusoe about “his man,” the novelist Daniel Defoe. In his 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee transformed a series of academic lectures he gave over several years into a full-fledged fiction about an aging female novelist who hails from Australia, whose career at times eerily resembles Coetzee’s own, and whose life intersects with that of Coetzee’s contemporaries. Were that not strange enough, this “novel” does not end with Elizabeth Costello’s death, but follows her misadventures into an afterlife that she herself recognizes as a kind of cut-rate parody of Kafka’s parable, “Before the Law.”

Similarly, Diary of a Bad Year refuses to recognize the border that has traditionally separated political theory from fictional narrative. Indeed, Coetzee suggests that the politics of an oppressive state are only one dimension of a broader web of contention that encompasses the private struggles of his characters. In this complex work, his characters’ lives are marred by the conflicts and limitations in which the state itself originates. The search for an apolitical existence free from the evils of state power inevitably comes face to face with the dangers and discomforts of a “natural” world where the clash of personal desires is unregulated by any independent governmental authority.

The book’s narrative structure is formally innovative and technically ambitious. It is partly narrated by “Señor C” (a.k.a. “John,” “Juan,” and “J C”), a world-famous writer in his seventies suffering from Parkinson’s disease, who has recently left his native South Africa to take up residence in Sydney, Australia. (Coetzee currently resides in Adelaide, Australia.) Señor C counts among his many internationally known works of fiction and nonfiction a novel, Waiting for the Barbarians (a book actually published under Coetzee’s name in 1982), and a study of literary censorship that sounds suspiciously like Coetzee’s own 1996 book Giving Offense.

Diary of a Bad Year features two diaries, each written by Señor C. The first and longer diary, commissioned by a German publisher, consists of a set of “Strong Opinions” on timely political and social subjects: “On the origin of the state,” “On anarchism,” “On Machiavelli,” “On Al Qaida,” “On Guantanamo Bay,” and so on. The second diary consists of “gentler” opinions, not intended for publication: “On the erotic life,” “On aging,” “On compassion,” “On the writing life,” “On J. S. Bach.” These are less obviously political and more personal in tone and subject.

To make matters more complicated, both diaries usually share the book’s pages with other strands of narrative. Solid horizontal lines divide the pages into sections. A top section consists of Señor C’s “strong” and “soft” opinions. A middle section includes his more intimate record of an ongoing (and “Platonic”) relationship with Anya, a sexually alluring half-Filipina twenty-something whom C meets in the laundry room of his apartment building. Finally, a bottom section offers Anya’s own narrative, in which she reflects on Señor C, who hires her to be the typist of his “Strong Opinions” manuscript (though he seems far more interested in the scantiness of her clothing than her lamentable typing skills). She also chronicles her turbulent ongoing relationship with her boyfriend, Alan, an unsavory 42-year-old investment counselor.

Coetzee adds yet one more narrative twist: C’s voice often gives way to Anya’s in the “middle” sections, while Anya’s “bottom” sections are often colonized by Alan’s voice. The result is an intricate interplay between Señor C’s pronouncements on a wide rage of political, cultural, and highly personal subjects and the emotionally resonant story of the deeply fraught romantic triangle involving Señor C, Anya, and Alan.

This complex, fugal narrative is more than a mere exercise in technical virtuosity. Diary of a Bad Year poses serious and deeply troubling questions: “Why is it so hard to say anything about politics from outside politics? Why can there be no discourse about politics that is not itself political?” Señor C’s struggle to describe a world free of state power is burdened by his realization that he lacks an adequate literary form to represent such a perfectly free existence. What, C might wonder, would the language of pure freedom, of undiluted individual autonomy sound like? What hitherto unknown literary genre or artistic form, uninflected by the sorry history of human government, might body forth such a world? It is as if we were to ask what tongue Adam spoke before the fall.

Although Alan (a not entirely convincing representative of amoral capitalism and belligerent “neo-liberalism”) describes Señor C as a sentimental socialist, C characterizes his own brand of political thought as “pessimistic anarchistic quietism.” He explains: “anarchism because experience tells me that what is wrong with politics is power itself; quietism because I have my doubts about the will to set about changing the world, a will infected with the drive to power; and pessimism because I am skeptical that, in a fundamental way, things can be changed.”

In wide-ranging remarks that wrestle with the political thought of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Etienne de la Boétie, the 16th-century philosopher of civil disobedience, Señor C finds it especially troubling that “the only ‘we’ we know—ourselves and the people close to us—are born into the state; and our forebears too were born into the state as far back as we can trace. The state is always there before we are.” For Señor C, the state originates in a criminal conspiracy: gangs of armed men employ force to extort money and obedience from their “subjects.”

C insists that the criminal activities of the state do not end with the act of its founding, but are always and everywhere present in the contemporary world. The aerial bombing of civilian populations, the detentions at Guantanamo Bay, the suspension of civil liberties and widespread increase of surveillance in the war on terror —all speak to the fact that the state establishes its absolute sovereignty through violence.

By such means the state continually demonstrates that there is no authority higher than itself, that it is the ultimate source of all law and justice, that it possesses the “right” to treat “outlaws”—that is, individuals who reject its legitimacy—with impunity. What particularly depresses Señor C is the universal powerlessness and (more worrisome still) unwillingness of individuals to throw off this criminal conspiracy that goes by the name of “the state.”

For all the passion of his opinions, Señor C senses their ineffectuality. Merely to express his outrage in print will not bring about a fundamental change in contemporary political life. In fact, it might paradoxically suggest a willingness to play by the rules set down by the political status quo. Insofar as the system tolerates C’s “strong opinions” (and even indirectly rewards him financially for giving them vent) it demonstrates that it can quite easily withstand the most vehement and radical jeremiads of its critics. C’s meeting with Anya, and his willingness to let her read and comment on his “strong opinions,” alerts him to the need to revise his opinions or offer an alternative set of reflections. The increasingly personal and intimate nature of his second, “gentle” diary, which Anya prefers to the first, marks C’s decisive turn away from public to the private affairs, from an aggressively anti-political to a more evasive apolitical mode of being in the world.

One might understand C’s second diary as an attempt to resist the power of the state by burrowing ever more deeply into the (ever shrinking and always imperiled) sphere of his private life. And just as C’s second diary corrects his first, and thereby ideally serves to delimit the sphere of politics, the more intimate narrative streams carry Coetzee’s reader that much farther away from the public realm the state claims as its own.

But if the novelistic world inhabited by C, Anya, and Alan provides a minimal and precarious refuge from the omnipotence of the state, it is not, at least as Coetzee portrays it, a utopian or prelapsarian realm. Indeed, they discover that their personal lives are blighted by the very ethical disagreements, primal struggles, and potentially dangerous forms of sexual and material competition that historically gave rise to the state itself (or, at any rate, provided a pretext for its establishment).

In an effort to steal C’s financial assets, Alan has used the unwitting Anya to plant spyware on C’s computer. He reads both of C’s diaries in manuscript without his prior consent. Though Anya objects to and Alan abandons his scheme to defraud Señor C, he nonetheless humiliates the septuagenarian author, informing him in savage fashion that he is not only a hopeless political relic but also an over-the-hill Don Juan whose sexual interest in Anya will never be reciprocated. By the end of the novel, C is left to confront his loneliness, his inexorable physical decline, and his inevitable death with only his stories, memories, and fantasies of Anya as potential sources of solace.

In Coetzee’s fiction, the story of domestic life can be nearly as cruel and merciless as the political world. But at least the misdeeds and missteps of private existence have the virtue of being freely chosen. For Coetzee’s characters, the difference between involuntary subjection to the state and a freely chosen individual path, however harsh and barren, may be the only difference that matters.

Contributing Editor Michael Valdez Moses is associate professor of English at Duke, author of The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (Oxford University Press), and co-editor of Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899-1939 (Duke University Press).

A (Not Really) Working-Class Journalist Is Something to Be

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:05:00 EDT

Try to guess the provenance of this sentence:

Weren't nobody happy when Ma got pregnant with me [...], what with her being barely seventeen and all and the father being my old man, who wasn't nobody's idea of a young go getter. Me? I can't complain -- I got borned, didn't I?

Is that some snippet of oral history from a WPA project on Appalachian life? Perhaps a selection from The Autobiography of Chicken George?

Nope! It's from a new nonfiction book by a New York Times staff writer, who grew up in, uh, New Hampshire. As Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley, who flagged this passage (and liked the book), put it, such demonstrations of "hardscrabble bona fides" sound "contrived and artifical." They also sound a lot like the round-the-clock Tim Russert tributes that have clogged the media's tubes since Friday's news. Who knew that being a fan of a professional sporting team was such a telltale indicator of regular-guy, working class heroism?

In watching bits of MSNBC's ongoing Russert telethon, Beltway elitist after Beltway elitist waxed positively proletarian about the Meet the Press host's authentic Joe Sixpackitude, his instinctive "connection" with the great unwashed lunchbuckets of (late-campaign) Hillary Clinton's Real America. It was kind of like watching Stephen Hawking sing the glories of the Yanomami tribe.

Being the son of sharecroppers myself, I tend to be allergic to the sight of monocle-wearing Kennedy Center regulars expressing wonder that a guy can really make it in this big old world without Ivy League certification. And needless to say, the bizarre ritual of resume de-padding at the top of the heap would strike me as borderline offensive if I wasn't so busy working three jobs and going to night school. But maybe there is a more charitable interpretation.

Why are baseball players the most superstitious athletes in the world? Because 1) the game is a festival of failure, where screwing up 7 times out of 10 is a much-coveted goal; and 2) they get to be bajillionaires as long as they can continue to slightly beat the odds and stay healthy. The joyride can be stopped at any time, without warning. Something similar is at play with hot young actresses − they're rich, they're famous, they're adored, they're despised ... and they can be out of work forever overnight, for reasons often out of their control.

It makes a kind of perfect sense that those lucky few who ascend the rickety throne of network TV news would pay constant, treacly tribute to the masses who make it all possible. If an army of Viagra-popping geriatrics was paying for my baseball season tickets, I too may be tempted to wax poetical about the gritty hometown I long left behind, and the ironclad Wisdom of Big Russ' Greatest American Heartland Generation of Our Fathers. Also, maybe there are worse things than an elite class that feels under constant pressure to demonstrate their jes'-folks street cred.

But still. If, as former reason editor Virgina Postrel suggested in a fascinating recent Atlantic column, rising incomes on the lower end of the economic scale are eroding the need for immigrant and minority communities to overcompensate with conspicuous consumption, maybe it's time for a mirror effect to begin taking shape at the top. It's OK, you Skull & Bones fancy-lads who will always rule the world − you no longer have to pretend to like Pabst Blue Ribbon! Besides, only Dennis Hopper ever drank that shit to begin with.

"But the really new thing is that the authorities are coming to our attention."

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:30:00 EDT

The science fiction blog io9 has a great interview up with cyber/steam/techno-punk novelist William Gibson, touching on everything from the surveillance state to Godzilla. Here's Gibson's response to being dubbed a "dystopian" writer:

None of us ever live in dystopia. That's an imaginary extreme. They just live in shitty cultures. And these societies [in my books] seem dystopian to middle class white people in North America. They don't seem dystopian if you live in Rio or anywhere in Africa. Most people in Africa would happily immigrate to the Sprawl.

Whole thing here. reason's legendary look at the upside of "zero privacy" here.

List: Revolution for Kids!

info@reason.com (Cory Doctorow) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Cory Doctorow is a one-man miniature media empire. He is co-editor of Boing Boing, one of the most popular blogs on the Internet, and he has also written Essential Blogging (2002). He has also written several science fiction books, most famously Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003), a novel about a post-scarcity society run by informal, voluntary “adhocracies.” In his spare time, he’s an activist for copyright reform.

His latest book, Little Brother (Tor), is a dystopian young adult novel set in a near-future security state put into place after terrorists attack San Francisco’s Bay Bridge. We asked Doctorow, a devout civil libertarian, to recommend three political books for young adults:

1 Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, by Daniel Pinkwater: “One of my all-time favorite books, period. A subversive novel about a kid who moves from a funky urbanized inner city neighborhood to a place where he attends Heinrich Himmler junior high and is lost among very plastinated people. He and a friend discover an occult book shop in the funky neighborhood and go spelunking.”

2 Pretties, by Scott Westerfeld: “Well paced, and wildly popular. It’s about the pressures on young people to conform, specifically to physically conform and to switch off their minds while they’re conforming. All Westerfeld’s books are good revolutionary texts.”

3 Animal Farm, by George Orwell: “It’s probably the most perfect bit of political exposition disguised as fairy tale of all time.”

I Cannot Live Without Books

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:01:00 EDT

Writing from the annual publishing industry brouhaha BookExpo America, which is being held this year in Los Angeles, New York Times reporter Edward Wyatt chronicles the fear and resentment sparked by electronic reading gadgets such as Amazon's Kindle. Have e-book buyers forsaken the physical originals? "We don't see people buying both versions," one publishing executive told Wyatt. "I think there is almost a one-to-one cannibalization."

For a more optimistic, or at least more idiosyncratic case for the printed word, the great urban historian Luc Sante offers this gem at the end of a long, discursive Wall Street Journal essay on the endless book collecting that has shaped and dominated his life:

I would very much miss books as material objects were they to disappear. The tactility of books assists my memory, for one thing. I can't remember the quote I'm searching for, or maybe even the title of the work that contains it, but I can remember that the book is green, that the margins are unusually wide, and that the quote lies two-thirds of the way down a right-hand page. If books all appear as nearly identical digital readouts, my memory will be impoverished.

Will on Healy

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 27 May 2008 09:34:00 EDT

In this week's Newsweek, George Will lets loose with some resounding praise for Gene Healy and his book The Cult of the Presidency, calling it "the year's most pertinent and sobering public affairs book." Will then gushes:

Healy's dissection of the delusions of "redemption through presidential politics" comes at a moment when liberals, for reasons of liberalism, and conservatives, because they have forgotten their raison d'être, "agree on the boundless nature of presidential responsibility." Liberals think boundless government is beneficent. Conservatives practice situational constitutionalism, favoring what Healy calls "Caesaropapism" as long as the Caesar-cum-Pope wields his anti constitutional powers in the service of things these faux conservatives favor.

Will—easily the most intellectually honest conservative pundit in the business—has been known to tease out his inner libertarian from time to time.

An ~~excerpt~~ adaptation from Healy's book ran as the cover story in our June issue.

Hogwarts Law School

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Harry Potter gets along with his fans. Some media companies fire off menacing legal threats at the first sign that someone might be doing something unauthorized with one of their characters, but J.K. Rowling and Warner—the author of the Harry Potter books and the studio behind the Harry Potter movies, respectively—have had a generally tolerant attitude toward the amateur fiction, home movies, and online guides created by the boy wizard's fan base.

So some were surprised last fall when Rowling and Warner sued to stop RDR Books from publishing Steven Vander Ark's The Harry Potter Lexicon. The Lexicon is essentially a hard-copy version of Vander Ark's website, which collates information about the Potter series; the site is filled with detailed lists of the peoples, places, spells, and creatures that inhabit Rowling's world. Much of the text was drawn directly from Rowling's books, prompting the novelist to argue that Vander Ark intends to make money by repackaging her words. It's unclear how the courts will rule, but I'm inclined to agree with Columbia Law School's Tim Wu as to how they should rule. Wu wrote in Slate that Rowling "has confused the adaptations of a work, which she does own, with discussion of her work, which she doesn't….Textually, the law gives her sway over any form in which her work may be 'recast, transformed, or adapted.' But she does not own discussion of her work—book reviews, literary criticism, or the fan guides that she's suing."

Yet even if the courts end up agreeing with Wu, Vander Ark has lost a more important battle. The Harry Potter fan community has overwhelmingly sided with Rowling, shunning Vander Ark and denouncing him with such phrases as "arrogant, egotistical, self-absorbed jerk." The reasons for this reaction are complex. In part it reflects the difference between a book sold for profit and a website offered for free. In part it reflects allegations that Vander Ark misled potential contributors into believing his book had Rowling's blessing. In part it simply reflects the fact that fans are predisposed to agree with their favorite authors. The case hasn't been decided yet, but in the court of his peers Vander Ark will be punished—is being punished—either way.

Speaking at the OnCopyright conference in Manhattan on May 1, Wu pointed out just how sharply this cuts against most people's expectations. Ordinarily we assume that the fan norms surrounding intellectual property will be looser than the letter of the law. This time, the law may be more permissive than the fans.

The conference was sponsored by the Copyright Clearance Center, a company that helps guide businesses, universities, and others through the thicket of licenses and permissions required by intellectual property law. There were four panels over the course of the day: one on copyright's collision with technology, one on copyright and society, one on copyright and the arts, and one on copyright and the law. The speakers ranged from industry figures eager to strengthen intellectual property controls to radicals ready to dump some rules into the harbor.

But the most important division on display wasn't the split between the conservatives and the reformers. It was the line that divided the law panel from all the others. The former featured three intelligent attorneys debating how the law should be interpreted and what the law should say. The latter featured artists, journalists, entrepreneurs, activists, and academics grappling with a world where people's behavior is governed much more by tools and norms than by statute books.

Kevin O'Kane, for example, is the man behind redlasso, a service that makes it easier to search for ongoing and recent TV and radio broadcasts, extract the parts you want, and drop them into the context of your choice. You could, for example, find all the references to the word "Myanmar" in the last 12 hours of TV news, pull out the appropriate clips, and add them to an online news commentary. The result, O'Kane hopes, will be an "online media center for bloggers."

There may come a day that CNN or Fox or a local broadcaster in Iowa City decides that this useful tool is a machine for piracy and takes redlasso to court. But you need only visit YouTube, Crooks and Liars, or any video-heavy blog to see that the Web already welcomes such efforts to recycle what used to be perishable content, that this enriches our ability to discuss the issues of the day, and that people across the political spectrum engage in this behavior without pause. If the law thinks they're wrong, then our norms may know something that our laws do not.

Nor did this informal borrowing begin with the Internet. On the arts panel, the novelist Jonathan Lethem spoke about the imitation and appropriation that has always been embedded in creative activities. Every artist begins by copying, he said, and some of the best—he singled out William Shakespeare and Bob Dylan—keep borrowing until the end of their life. This is part of the creative process, he argued, and it should be welcomed rather than banished.

Lethem has covered this territory before. Last year he contributed an article to Harper's called "The Ecstacy of Influence: A Plagiarism"; it not only touted the virtues of quoting and appropriating other people's work, but was itself largely stitched together from other writer's words, a fact revealed at the end of the essay when he listed the texts he had pilfered. It was a clever stunt, but it highlighted something important about creativity: not just the fact that writers draw on other people's work, but the fact that the best writers transmute those influences into something of their own. Lethem's novel Gun, With Occasional Music carries a critic's quote on the cover declaring that it "Marries Chandler's style and Philip K. Dick's vision." It's a good description: The book, a murder mystery that features talking apes and kangaroos, feels like a mash-up of Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled crime writing and Philip K. Dick's surreal science fiction. But it's impossible to imagine either Chandler or Dick producing this particular story. It's part Chandler, part Dick, and all Lethem.

The book also says something about what the world would be like without that free-flowing creative exchange. Where other dystopian novels imagine states that force individuals into a suffocating collective, the totalitarian society in Gun keeps people apart, by limiting the questions they can ask and the memories their minds can contain. The result is a world without communication and a world without a past—a world where every thought is an orphan work.

Not even the most militant copyright maximalists would consider that desirable. But even if they tried to impose such a restrictive regime, they'd be helpless in the face of technologies that make it easy to defy antiquated copyright rules, and in the face of norms that put more gentle restrictions on our behavior. The OnCopyright conference didn't give me the impression that the lawyers were on the verge of fixing America's intellectual property laws. But it did bolster my faith that we'll manage to muddle through anyway.

Jesse Walker is reason's managing editor.

Attn: SoCal Reasonoids -- McCainapalooza Tour!

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 02 May 2008 10:19:00 EDT

This Sunday, May 4, I will be at the Palm Springs Book Festival, hawking McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, and appearing on two panel discussions: 1) "The Presidential Race," at 1:00 p.m., featuring Hugh "A Mormon in the White House?" Hewitt, Robert "The Pornography of Power" Scheer, Greg "Armed Madhouse" Palast, and John "Pure Goldwater" Dean. And 2) "American Imperialism and its Consequences," at 4:30 p.m., with Chalmers "Nemesis" Johnson. Between those sessions there will be an interesting-sounding discussion on Barry Goldwater.

Can't make it to the land of shag carpets and fabulous waiters? There will be other opportunities to hurl pricey foodstuffs in my general direction. On Saturday, May 10, I'll be speaking at a meeting of the Rancho Palos Verdes Democrats (both of them?), details to come. On Wednesday, May 14 at 7:00 p.m., I'm apparently delivering a lecture at the Pasadena Public Library.

And on Thursday, May 15 at 7:00 p.m. comes the big enchilada -- "Deconstructing McCain," a Zocalo L.A. event at the gorgeous Los Angeles Central Library.

Each and every one of thse will feature plenty of time for cross-examination, semi-hostile discussion, and book signing. Most will involve (please Jeebus) some post-game libations.

Speaking of John Dean, he's got a new piece out today about the testy relationship between McCain and the maverick senator he replaced, Barry Goldwater; something you can basically read about in our two books, and nowhere else. Here's an excerpt:

Although Goldwater initially supported McCain's run for the Senate, Goldwater knew an opportunist when he saw one, and did not like any of them. We chose not to dwell on the McCain/Goldwater relationship in Pure Goldwater, but we did report how, after assisting McCain win his Senate seat, Goldwater was forced to pull McCain up short for using his good name for fundraising, when McCain had tarnished his own name because of his involvement with the Keating Five. We also included correspondence to shows that McCain is not very good at keeping his word.
To know Goldwater -- as we believe those who read his unpublished private journal will -- is to understand how different these men are, and to see that McCain is cut from very different cloth than Goldwater. Goldwater considered public service a high calling, not an ego trip or power play. McCain was fortunate that Goldwater never publicly exposed him, but Goldwater was too good a Republican to do that and he thought too highly of McCain's father to sink his successor in the Senate.
Had Goldwater publicized what I believe to be his true feelings about John McCain, I doubt McCain would be the presumptive nominee of the GOP in 2008. Goldwater's political perceptions of others have proven extraordinarily prescient, so his reaction toward McCain is telling.

Look for Daniel McCarthy's review of Pure Goldwater in our June issue. And check out Nick Gillespie's 2006 review of Dean's Conservatives Without Conscience.

I Am Curious (Wiki)

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:53:00 EDT

I'm pro-Wikipedia. I think it's an inspiring example of bottom-up collaborative creation. Knock it for its inaccuracies, and I'll reel off the usual defenses: Sure, it isn't completely reliable, but there are thousands of eyes monitoring it. When someone makes an obviously inaccurate edit, someone else will usually pounce to fix it. In the meantime, the uncertainty encourages a different, more skeptical sort of reading.

That said: Boy, but some weird crap manages to slip through the cracks there. From the entry on Curious George:

As stated in an interview, the book Curious George Takes a Job was inspired by a true story. A boy, whose name is not known today, was born in Hamburg in 1909 with Down's Syndrome. He was institutionalized by his parents, condemned to a life at the facility.

When the boy was 15, he escaped from the institution and fled into the city streets. Hungry and in search of food, he found the briefly unattended kitchen of a restaurant, where a cook found him playing with the food and eating it. The cook, intrigued, put him to work to clean dishes, and took him home that evening. Within the following days, the cook arranged with a friend to have the boy wash windows at an office building.

The boy's work went well at first. But in one office, he found colored paints. He used them to paint a mural on the wall of the office. The tenant returned to his office after a lunch break to find the boy busy painting, and he started to chase after him. The boy jumped out a third-story window, breaking some bones.

The story made local headlines. After several weeks of hospitalization, the boy was formally adopted by the cook, and he later became the star of an amateur movie. He was recognized in the coming years as a talented artist. Some of his artwork was sold by the renowned bookseller, A.S.W. Rosenbach.

Tragically, his identity, art, and other details of his life were lost in the ravages of World War II, and he is believed to have been put to death by the government of Nazi Germany.

That passage has been part of the article for over a year. During that time, the page has not suffered from an absence of attention. There has been a long-running battle about whether George is an ape or a monkey. There have been arguments over the political subtexts of the stories. There have been efforts to add obviously phony info to the entry, prompting editors to leave comments like this one:

I seriously doubt "Curious George Gets AIDS" was one of the books. I don't want to change it myself since last time I made a minor edit I was banned from making any further ones by Wikipedia.

Yet that shaggy-dog story about Curious George Takes a Job is still there. No one has even suggested that it be sourced with a citation stronger than the vague "As stated in an interview."

It is my power as a Wikipedia reader to make the necessary changes myself. But a bizarre and funny passage like that one deserves to be immortalized, so I'm blogging it instead.

Bonus links: A communiqué from the Curious George Brigade.

Fr. Archimedes Aloysius Anarchy's Curious George fan fiction, including such unforgettable tales as Curious George Goes to Jail and Curious George Does LSD.

A Curious George true crime story.

Curious George meets rave culture:

How Do You Know When a Kid's Interest in Sex Is Prurient?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:37:00 EDT

Indiana booksellers are worried about a new state law that requires anyone who sells "sexually explicit materials" to pay a $250 fee and register with the secretary of state so he can be tracked by local officials. In addition to books, magazines, and videos intended for "the stimulation of the human genital organs," the targeted material includes anything deemed "harmful to minors." The latter category is nebulous and potentially wide, defined elsewhere in the Indiana code as material that "describes or represents, in any form, nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or sado-masochistic abuse"; "appeals to the prurient interest in sex of minors"; "is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable matter for... minors"; and "lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors."

An Indiana bookstore owner suggests that definition, depending on whom you ask, could cover "just about any coming-of-age novel and books on health, hygiene, and human sexuality." Chris Finan, president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, agrees that the law sweeps more broadly than its authors and supporters (who had in mind businesses that specialize in pornography) anticipated:

The way we read this bill, if you stock a single book with sexual content, even a novel or a book about sex education, you will have to register as a business that sells sexually explicit material....This is just outrageous from our standpoint, and we believe it is a violation of the First Amendment.

A co-sponsor of the law, state Sen. Brent Steele (R-Bedford), tells the Indianapolis Star the booksellers are overreacting. He notes that the law does not cover "a person who sells sexually explicit materials on June 30, 2008," so existing booksellers need not register as smut peddlers. Unless they move to a new location. Or change their inventory.

[Thanks to Nicolas Martin for the tip.]

Keith Richards Must Be Rolling Over in His Coffin

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 08:49:00 EDT

Can loud-mouthed British performance artists be barred from entering the United States on grounds of "moral turpitude," due to tales of licentious drug use and staged crucifictions from a new tell-all memoir? Even though they claim to be sober for several years now? Yes they can!

reason on the increasingly oxymoronic Visa Waiver program here.

44 Years of 3-Minute Poems

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Ray Davies: Not Like Everybody Else, by Thomas M. Kitts, New York: Routledge, 302 pages, $19.95

When the Kinks recorded The Village Green Preservation Society in 1968, the north London quartet was not trying to create a commercial failure. Quite the opposite. But surely they must have realized that the year of the street riot was not a propitious time to greet the rock world with couplets like "We are the Office Block Persecution Affinity/God save little shops, china cups, and virginity." They sang those lines with genuine enthusiasm, even if it's a sure bet that no one in the band was a virgin at the time.

The song—the sprightly, catchy title track of a nearly perfect album—had been composed by Ray Davies, one of rock's greatest lyricists. It was not a tribute to virginity so much as a tribute to the idea of virginity and of everything else praised in this romantic English anthem: village greens, the George Cross, strawberry jam, draught beer, "the old ways." The record recalls a more rooted existence, but its list of artifacts worth saving draws on pop culture as much as pastoral life: "We are the Sherlock Holmes English Speaking Vernacular/Help save Fu Manchu, Moriarty, and Dracula." There is even a shout-out to Donald Duck, who's about as English as Donald Trump.

The album sold less than 500,000 copies. Four years earlier, the Kinks had been one of the most popular bands in the West, climbing the American and British charts with two brash, loud rock songs, "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night." Indeed, as Thomas M. Kitts points out in this intelligent study, The Kinks "were ranked with the Rolling Stones, both only second to the Beatles." There was an enormous stylistic gap between the quiet nostalgia of Village Green and the Kinks' earlier, noisier explosions of adolescent lust and frustration—and that contrast only begins to hint at the band's range. In their first decade as a recording unit, the Kinks experimented with trad jazz, musical theater, Indian raga, and New Orleans funk. Above all, they delved into the English music-hall tradition, with its vaudevillian showmanship, singalong melodies, working-class sympathies, and epicene moments of burlesque.

The constant thread was a willful refusal to follow pop fashions. The Kinks were happy to set trends: The early singles paved the way for punk rock, heavy metal, and grunge, while the band's later, quieter character studies ("Rosie Won't You Please Come Home," "Two Sisters," "Autumn Almanac") and satires of modern British life ("A Well Respected Man," "Dedicated Follower of Fashion," "Sunny Afternoon") would have a strong impact on other English artists. Yet even when no one was imitating them, the Kinks kept doing their own thing, recording well-crafted but poor-selling LPs like Village Green and, in 1971, Muswell Hillbillies, a jazz and country-flavored concept album about the injustice of urban renewal programs. By the mid-'70s, the band had evolved into a touring troupe that staged Brechtian rock musicals. There were plenty of rock operas in that era, but there was a big gulf between the bombast of Tommy or Jesus Christ, Superstar and Kinksian efforts like Preservation, a witty if tangled three-disc story about a socialist revolution that becomes a puritanical, totalitarian nightmare.

The group took another turn in 1976, when they signed with a new label, Arista, and tried to work within the genres that happened to be popular at the moment, from new wave to metallic hard rock. Davies even dabbled in disco. He was still drawn to the theater, but he generally expressed this interest outside the Kinks (co-writing the musicals Chorus Girls and 80 Days) or channeled it into directing music videos. The band became enormously popular in America again, though not in the UK. For the most part, the Kinks' new records succeeded artistically as well as commercially, at least until they left Arista for MCA in the mid-'80s. In the '90s they finally disbanded. Ray and his brother Dave—the group's lead guitarist and an important architect of its sound—have since enjoyed low-profile but impressive solo careers.

Muswell Hillbillies is my favorite Kinks record, but The Village Green Preservation Society stands out for being so tenaciously removed from its time. Inspired by Dylan Thomas's play Under Milk Wood, the album describes the colorful inhabitants of an unnamed English town. The title track, that toe-tapping ode to Donald Duck and virgins, presents itself as a love letter to the past, but the singer knew very well that the place he was romanticizing wasn't lost so much as imaginary. Kitts quotes Davies' description of the village as "a fantasy world that I can retreat to. ... It was my own Wizard of Oz land."

Davies' other retreat was a very real place: Muswell Hill, the London suburb where he was raised. The heart of the young Davies' world was the front room of his family home. "After the pubs closed at 11:00 pm," Kitts writes, Davies' father "would invite his drinking cronies to join his extended family and children's friends for an after-hours party in what would be the family's overcrowded front room, which, in those largely pre-television days, held the family's old upright piano, the most important piece of furniture in the Davies's home, and a 78 r.p.m. wind-up gramophone." The parties featured rowdy performances of pop hits and music-hall standards, with Davies's father doing a drunken impersonation of Cab Calloway. As Kitts notes, "The influence of these parties on the Kinks, particularly the campy Kinks of the early to mid-1970s, is remarkable. Whether consciously or not, it seemed as if Ray was trying to recreate the Saturday night parties of his family's home—complete with chaos, beer, and singalongs."

In theory, there is a wide gap between the camp aesthetic, with its love of artifice and role-playing, and the traditionalist outlook, with its focus on the permanent things. Yet the Kinks at their campiest were the Kinks at their most rooted. Susan Sontag famously wrote that the camp worldview "sees everything in quotation marks." Davies does too: "Everybody's a dreamer, and everybody's a star/And everybody's in showbiz, it doesn't matter who you are," he sang in "Celluloid Heroes." But usually he's yelling for someone to tear those quotation marks down, even as he suspects that life as a quotation might have its own numb pleasures ("I wish my life was a nonstop Hollywood movie show/A fantasy world of celluloid villains and heroes/Because celluloid heroes never feel any pain/And celluloid heroes never really die").

Davies—one of the few pop figures with a strong cult following among both gays and conservatives—does not simply combine camp with traditionalism. He is at once the alienated individualist and the communitarian populist, a man who praises both the misfit and the ordinary rituals that everybody enjoys ("I like my football on a Saturday/Roast beef on Sundays, all right/I go to Blackpool for my holidays/Sit in the open sunlight"). Village Green, like Under Milk Wood, wove those strands together by populating Davies's village with eccentrics; by celebrating their individuality, he celebrated their small community as well. Muswell Hillbillies is a darker album, but it takes the same approach, mixing songs about the bizarre characters on Muswell Hill with angry jeremiads at the authorities that bulldoze homes and neighborhoods.

Politically, this outlook translates into an intense distrust both for large corporations and for the state. Like many rock stars, Davies has written songs attacking venal Big Business. Unlike most rock stars, he has written songs attacking domestic government bureaucracies ("I was born in a welfare state/Ruled by bureaucracy/Controlled by civil servants/And people dressed in gray"). And he may, depending on how you interpret Neil Young's "Union Man," be the only rocker ever to devote a song to attacking unions. Davies doesn't dislike organized labor per se, but he had a bad experience with a printers' union in his teens, and in the mid-'60s his band was barred from touring America for several years because the musicians' union refused to issue the required work permits. He retaliated with 1970's "Get Back in Line": "But that union man's got such a hold on me/He's the man who decides if I live or I die, if I starve or I eat/Then he walks up to me and the sun begins to shine/And he walks right back and I know that I've got to get back in the line."

There are several books about the Kinks already, but these are mostly written by rock journalists. Kitts, by contrast, is a professor of literature at St. John's University in New York. He gives Davies's lyrics serious scrutiny without neglecting to consider the ways they are amplified, undercut, or elaborated by the music. He also looks beyond Davies's recorded output to consider the singer's experiments in film, fiction, and theater. I have my occasional disagreements with his conclusions, but that is inevitable. The depth and breadth of the study are worlds away from the typical pop-star biography and more in line with the other academic work Routledge publishes.

That said, one strength of Davies' best work is that it is pop, even when it's resolutely ignoring the rest of the pop universe. "The Village Green Preservation Society" may be the most un-1968 song of 1968. It is also one of the most infectious recordings of the last 40 years. Davies could have been a full-time filmmaker, poet, or novelist; we should be grateful that he chose to do most of his work within the confines of the three-minute pop song instead.

Managing Editor Jesse Walker is the author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU Press). This article originally appeared in The American Conservative.

Arthur C. Clarke, RIP

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:51:00 EDT

The novelist Arthur C. Clarke has died at age 90. It's been a couple decades since I last read any of his books, but I enjoyed several of them in my teens, especially 2001 and the wonderfully ambiguous Childhood's End.

And then there was his larger cultural influence, which stretched all the way from here...

...to here:

Rest in peace.

Who's Reading What Where?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:28:00 EDT

In case you thought that globalization/the Internet/media conglomerates/The Man had finally succeeded in homogenizing people's tastes and consumption habits, think again.

Among Amazon's many curated features is a fascinating Best of the Month list, where they've just started offering regional breakdowns. Here's some trend analysis from Amazon's bloggers at Omnivoracious:

in the early March returns a few interesting things pop out: Stephenie Meyer is much more popular in the West and the South. Jodi Picoult and Valerie Bertinelli are popular in the East; Jonah Goldberg is not. Richard Price and Tori Spelling are doing well on the coasts; James Patterson's latest Maximum Ride and Mary Kay Andrews's new cooking mystery are big in the South. And African American bishop E. Bernard Jordan's The Laws of Thinking, not in the top 10 in any other region, is #2 in the South.
That's only based on a limited data set so far, though, since March just started, so I went back and filled in the data for February too, which you can see on our Best of February page. What jumps out there? Well, FairTax: The Truth, by radio host Neal Boortz, is a regional blockbuster: #2 among all books in the South but not in the top 10 for any other region. Among February releases it does make the top 10s in the Midwest and the West (barely), but in the East it wasn't even close: #122! On the other hand, Greg Mortenson's paperback hit about building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Three Cups of Tea, and Susan Jacoby's modern jeremiad, The Age of American Unreason, both did much better in the West than anywhere else. Baseball fans (or at least Baseball Prospectus statheads) appear to be grouped, as you might expect, in the East and Midwest, and, even less surprisingly, the only part of the country where the Sports Illustrated New York Giants Super Bowl Commemorative Edition made the top 10 was, yes, the East (it didn't even make the top 500 in the West or the Midwest).

To see the whole current list, go to their Best of the Month and scroll down toward the bottom of the page to "Most of the Month."