I have an op-ed in Thursday’s Times on how the Internet is (and isn’t) like New York. An excerpt:

Is New York still worth the trip? Recessions tend to be hard on youthful dreams, but this downturn has proved especially dispiriting. Those in the print media have come to see their present fiscal woes as not merely cyclical but structural, and so their slashed workforce and diminished output seem unlikely to rebound any time soon. Galleries have closed. Foundations, their endowments devastated, have cut back on grants for the arts. Internships across the board are down by more than 20 percent. And those of us who still hold full-time jobs in creative fields are clinging to them for dear life, making it difficult for young people to pry any free for themselves.

Meanwhile, another destination beckons, a place that courses with all the raw ambition and creative energy that the hard times seem to have drained from New York. I am referring, of course, to the Internet, which over the past decade has slowly become the de facto heart of American culture: the public space in which our most influential conversations transpire, in which our new celebrities are discovered and touted, in which fans are won and careers made.

Wherever young creatives physically reside today, in their endeavors they are increasingly moving online: posting their photos, writing, videos and music, building a “presence” in the hope of winning an audience. Monetary rewards on the Internet are still scarce, it is true, but the cost of living is cheap and, more important, the opportunities for attention are plentiful. Every month more YouTube sensations emerge, more bloggers ink big book deals, more bands blow up through music Web sites and MySpace, and every day more young people seek their “big break” in the virtual megalopolis rather than in (or as well as in) the physical one.

Read on…

I contributed a short appreciation of Gay Talese’s book Thy Neighbor’s Wife to the great literary blog The Second Pass. Here’s the opening:

Of all the mass utopian notions of the twentieth century, the Sexual Revolution was both the most spectacularly successful and, in the end, the most thwarted. Whereas most political or spiritual or cultural movements, from Communism to Esperanto to est, came and went and left the Western sensibility not too far from where it started, a time traveler direct from 1959 would stare slackjawed at the sexual landscape of today, both in its deep fundamentals (the acceptance of homosexuality, the shift in gender roles) and in its showy surfaces, the frankness with which we discuss and display carnal matters in public.

And yet measured against the dreams (certainties, even) of its principled adherents — as a contemporary reader is reminded throughout Gay Talese’s stupendous 1981 book Thy Neighbor’s Wife, recently reissued by Harper Perennial — the Sexual Revolution remains unfinished and seemingly unfinishable. Shame in sex was not vanquished. Monogamy was not proved an unnatural construct. Indeed, if sexual behavior has liberalized during the past fifty years, sexual attitudes have arguably become more conservative, with belief in a single, destined “soul mate” now the moony norm. Talese’s book was seen as unforgivably sordid in its day (for its reportorial methods as well as for its subject matter), but today Thy Neighbor’s Wife is fascinating for how tragic it all seems, how unfulfilled the expectations of so many of its protagonists ultimately remained.

Read the whole thing here.

I was consumed with book tour during the dust-up a few weeks ago over Caleb Crain’s NYT review of Alain de Botton’s new book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. (After Crain posted a link to the review at his blog here, Botton commented somewhat hysterically in the thread here, and the inevitable bloggy eruption ensued.) I made a note to go back and read the review, perhaps because as a new author myself, I could relate to de Botton’s emotion, even if I couldn’t endorse his approach to expressing it.

A week or so ago I finally had a chance to read Crain’s review, and immediately I began to suspect that my sympathies lay with de Botton. Here’s a representative excerpt from the review:

To mock [a worker] for being less than perfectly free in his thoughts and actions is easy. Unfortunately, the British essayist Alain de Botton indulges in this kind of mockery in his new book, “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.” De Botton starts with noble intentions, claiming in his first chapter to have been inspired to write about work by the intense, unabashed interest taken by cargo-ship spotters, the hobbyists who track the comings and goings of the enormous oceangoing vessels that help to make globalization possible. The spotters “know what it is about the world that would detain a Martian or a child,” de Botton writes. But in his praise of their wonder, there is a note of condescension: “Admittedly, the ship spotters do not respond to the objects of their enthusiasm with particular imagination. They traffic in statistics.”

The note is soon revealed to be an ostinato…. In the book’s most promising passage, a career counselor invites de Botton into his home office in South London to observe sessions with a client, a 37-year-old tax lawyer. … But just as revelation seems under way, de Botton’s narrative drifts, and he frets for pages about self-­esteem-boosting bromides that he hears the career counselor dispense at a seminar, worrying that in feeling superior to them he may be depriving himself of a psychological advantage. In the end, anxiety about social status undermines the chapter completely. The counselor’s office, de Botton has noticed, smells “powerfully of freshly boiled cabbage or swede,” one of several signs that the enterprise doesn’t securely rank as upper-middle class… If a disinterested writer won’t try to distinguish the efficacy of an endeavor from its trappings, who will? What else was the counselor hoping for, when he agreed to share his experiences with de Botton?

Basically the whole review goes on like this, with Crain pulling out some jaundiced bit of narrative color from one of de Botton’s scenes and then wringing his hands about the terrible mockery implied. Since all context has been stripped from this color, it’s impossible to tell from the review why de Botton had gone to the trouble to leave his comfy essayist’s chair and go write about work, or workers, at all.

I’ve now had the opportunity to read The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work in its entirety, and can now say that my sympathies lie squarely, emphatically with de Botton. It’s a marvelous little book, and I encourage everyone to run out and buy it. I’ve hesitated to read much de Botton in the past, because his previous books have struck me (on a cursory bookstore browse, at least) as a bit too precious, but on the strength of this one I’m certain to go back and read a few of them.

Pleasures and Sorrows is, first and foremost, a lovely bit of narrative journalism.  De Botton makes no bones about the cerebral awkwardness with which he approaches the reportorial endeavor, and so naturally all sorts of odd observations intrude—some at the mild expense of his subjects, like those which Crain seems so horrified to encounter, but just as many at his own expense. Watching a tuna clubbed to death on a boat deck prompts in de Botton the thought “that we too are never more than one hard slam away from a definitive end to our carefully arranged ideas and copious involvement with ourselves.” (Almost every page yields up a sentence like that.)

All the storytelling is animated by a particular pose that de Botton takes towards his subjects, an elegant remove that reinforces formally the very ideas about work that he’s unobtrusively but definitively sketching around the edges. He’s always taking a hundred-year (or many-hundred-year) perspective on what he’s seeing, imagining what about the inner workings of (say) industrial biscuit manufacture might impress an educated individual of the 18th century or the 23rd.  And so he focuses entirely on questions of human meaning, both individual and shared, as he watches various people in their daily tasks. He is not “mocking” anyone for their lack of freedom; he is rather  attempting to assess with clear eyes what different types of jobs mean today—to those who do them, yes, but even more so to the wider society and to history.

Crain is usually a very smart critic, in my opinion, but I think he has simply misread de Botton’s book from the beginning. In his first chapter, de Botton does cite cargo-ship spotters as inspiration for his project. But at the very end of the chapter (in that classic “nut graf” spot where an experienced skimmer knows to look), he quite succinctly describes what he intends for his book to resemble:

[T]he author hopes [the book] might
function a little like one of those eighteenth-century cityscapes which show us people at work from the quayside to the temple, the parliament to the counting house, panoramas like those of Canaletto in which, within a single giant frame, one can witness dockers unloading crates, merchants bargaining in the main square, bakers before their ovens, women sewing at their windows and councils of ministers assembled in a palace—inclusive scenes which serve to remind us of the place which work accords each of us within the human hive.

It’s hard to believe that any review would glide this by, and outright strange for a negative review to do so: if one wants to accuse de Botton of failing, it’s odd not to consider the aesthetic terms on which he was hoping to succeed. But those aesthetic terms are precisely what Crain seems oblivious to. He writes as if there were no middle ground, in narrative journalism, between sympathy and mockery; as if journalistic subjects, in exchange for access, were entitled to have their stories told just as they wanted. Crain, it seems, would hold Canaletto accountable to each docker, each seamstress and baker, and to their conception of how they might fit into the swirling whole.

To his credit, de Botton flies far too high for that. I mean it as a compliment to say that he never troubles himself overmuch with what his subjects think about themselves. This isn’t to say Pleasures and Sorrows is a perfect book; there are some cringe-worthy moments, but usually these happen when, in trying to poke fun at himself, de Botton spins out semi-ironic erudition that manages to be arrogant and self-defeating at the same time. (The worst of these is to be found in the final chapter, where he offers a nearly page-long speech referencing Goethe and Gibbon that he allegedly gave to the profane watchman of an airplane graveyard; it comes off as the worst sort of Brit-prig BBC comedy, and one wishes it could be excised from every copy.) But all in all, it’s a superlative piece of work and I’m glad that de Botton’s juvenile online outburst caused his very mature book to be brought to my attention.

is today!  Went through Seattle, Mountain View, Santa Cruz, New York, Washington, and today Philadelphia.  Here’s the real video (David Rees’s Rickrolling notwithstanding) from the event in Santa Cruz, which actually was one of the most enjoyable I did.  (I don’t think I made any sour faces.)

If, seventy minutes later, you’re still hungering to hear me talk more about the book, you can listen to this stint on Talk of the Nation (click “Listen Now” near the top).

OK, no posting any more videos of myself for a very long time.

I read this Father’s Day op-ed and I have a couple of questions. They relate to the following passage:

[T]his Father’s Day, like every Father’s Day, I’ll relive the last time I saw him. My mother was in the hospital recovering from surgery. And Dad was on the kitchen floor having sex with another woman. I found them. He went for his heart. I thought he was faking. By the time I realized he was dying and tried to help him, it was too late.

At the end, I remember a tear rolling slowly across his cheek. His eyes opened wide. I bent forward and whispered, “I love you.” He slowly reached for my hand just as he had done years ago on that ride home from Little League tryouts. And at that instant, we both experienced the pain and madness of love. Then he was gone.

That night, I shot my first bag of heroin.

Far be it from me to suggest that this sequence did not happen exactly as described. I do, however, have some questions.

(1) During the death scene, what was happening with the other woman? Are we to understand that father and son both experienced the “pain and madness of love” while father was still on top of mistress? (And what was she experiencing?)

(2) Where did the writer get his first bag of heroin so quickly?  Because if he shot it that very night, he would have had to hustle, for someone who had never shot heroin before, and whose father had just died, on top of another woman, who would have had to get a ride home first, probably.

Sorry for the lack of posting — am out on the West Coast on book tour. When I get back, I’ll post some of what’s available online of my various appearances etc. I bet you can’t wait!

I did want to say that, if anyone out there is planning to come see me in Santa Cruz tonight, the event starts at 6pm, not 7pm.

(Which raises the question: Who goes to a book event at 6pm? I guess I’ll find out!)

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently asked whether there is a college bubble about to burst:

With tuitions, fees, and room and board at dozens of colleges now reaching $50,000 a year, the ability to sustain private higher education for all but the very well-heeled is questionable. According to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, over the past 25 years, average college tuition and fees have risen by 440 percent — more than four times the rate of inflation and almost twice the rate of medical care.

…

Consumers who have questioned whether it is worth spending $1,000 a square foot for a home are now asking whether it is worth spending $1,000 a week to send their kids to college. There is a growing sense among the public that higher education might be overpriced and under-delivering.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this question as it pertains to — or, specifically, compares to — the current state of print journalism. It’s become generally accepted wisdom that whereas the business model of making content is in jeopardy, the business model of teaching students to make content (that they’ll never, ever get paid for) is largely secure. Intuitively, this seems plausible to me: we have an university system whereby wealthy parents pay ungodly sums for their children to study the liberal arts and generally hone their self-expression, and only after that do the children surrender those dreams to get broken on the the capitalist wheel as lawyers or businesspeople or what have you. (Jeff Howe sketches this same basic idea, less polemically than I just did, in an early chapter of his book Crowdsourcing.)

But what I find irritating is when people use this shift to claim that some intrinsic failing exists in the old journalistic business model. Clay Shirky, for example, in a Q&A with the Columbia Journalism Review a few months back, basically blamed journalists for being naive about where their money was coming from:

A lot of working journalists, and especially print journalists, are in the position of being sort of kept women. They don’t really understand where the money comes from but, you know, their particular sugar daddy seems pretty flush, so they just never gave it much thought. And then one day the market crashes and they suddenly discover, “Wait a minute, we were a business? And our revenues had to exceed our expenses every year? Why wasn’t I informed?” And I think one of the reasons that journalists, in particular, are so stunned by this is not that they just didn’t happen to think about the previous business model, right? Like, why is it that the guy sitting in Mosul in a flak jacket is being subsidized by Bonwit Teller? You wouldn’t make this up from scratch, it just doesn’t make much sense.

I.e., in Shirky’s view, a model where overseas war reporters get subsidized by department-store ads is inherently unsustainable, irrational, even insane. But advertising supported print periodicals handsomely for over a century! Meanwhile, Shirky (who I generally admire, by the way) seems to make his own money from (a) being a professor at NYU and (b) riding the tech-lecture circuit — two business models that are far younger and seem every bit as insane, if not more so. Charging parents $50K/year in exchange for only marginal economic benefits down the line? Charging companies thousands of dollars a head to attend conventions where hardly any meaningful business gets done? If you were “making it up from scratch,” you wouldn’t count on any of these business models.

Of course, these are all cases of prestige economies, where individuals and companies are spending their money for reasons that are indirectly economic or entirely uneconomic. For public-image reasons, it mattered to Bonwit Teller, or Bergdorf Goodman, or Tiffany, to be in the pages of the New York Times, and so they paid for it.  It matters to plutocrat parents to send their kids to NYU instead of CUNY, so they pay for it. It matters to Microsoft to strut Paul and Ringo across the stage at E3 and so they do it, at god knows what shareholder expense. I won’t deny that these prestige business models “make sense” in that they sometimes work, and can even continue to work for quite a while. Just don’t try to pretend post hoc that the failing ones never made sense.

Elizabeth Wurtzel in Elle, plying another terrible genre that is essentially the personal-life equivalent of this one:

I don’t know what it is—I don’t have wrinkles or age spots or any of the telltale signs that the years have gone by. Thank God for La Mer and Retin-A and Pilates—and, yes, hot sex, which is good fun and may be no more than a Maginot Line against the inevitable, but that’s not nothing. And my hair, honey-highlighted for years now, has the swank length of mermaid youth—which is how I plan to keep it no matter what proper pageboy is age-appropriate. No question, there are physical facts about my age that are undeniably delightful. I am much sexier now than I used to be—I suddenly have this voluptuous body where I used to just be skinny and lithe. Really oddly, a couple of years ago I got serious breasts, to the point where people think I’ve had them surgically enhanced, which I certainly have not. Still, I think, the honest truth is that I’m just not as pretty as I used to be. Something has abandoned me. I don’t know what that thing is—they’ve been trying to jar it and bottle it for centuries—but it’s left, another merciless lover. My hips are thicker, my skin is thinner, my eyes shine less brightly—will I ever again glow as if all the stars are out at night just to greet me?

Blech. As with the money-woes genre, you writers out there, just don’t do it. Tell your friends all about it but leave the poor reader be.