The New Yorker: Pretentious, Yet Fact-Free

I've enjoyed two books by Malcolm Gladwell (while recognizing their deficiencies), so when I saw that he had written an article "The Enron Enigma" for The New Yorker I bought the 7 January issue to read on a recent train ride.

Wow, it isn't what I want to read.

The Enron article can be boiled down to this: "The financial mischief at the heart of the Enron scandal was so complicated, nobody except an expert can understand it. Therefore we can't be sure it was criminal." This is so fatuous and excusatory it's offensive.

What I found astonishingly irritating was Milan Kundera's article "Die Weltliteratur" (not online). Kundera's points are that national literatures differ depending on whether their nation is powerful or weak, and the idea of national literature is and always was foolish and impossible. The thing is, I come from a science background. Kundera supports his arguments with at most two examples of writers from each nation in question. (Exception: more than two French writers are mentioned.) That is, to use the literary device of litotes, a very small statistical sample and just vitiates his whole argument. Also, as a student of history, I'd have liked to see an analysis of a nation's literature changing as its role in the world did, for instance Prussia going from minor to world power, or France degenerating from Napoleon's Europe-spanning empire to its present second-rate power status. Never seems to have occurred to Kundera.

One passage stands out as indicating Kundera's almost bizarrely elitist stance. Referring to the Icelandic sagas, he says, "I don't mean to say that the sagas have been forgotten—after centuries of indifference they are now being studied in universities throughout the world—but they belong to the 'archeology of letters,' they do not influence living literature." I have personally read over one dozen novels written in the past five years influenced by the Icelandic sagas. What Kundera means, without even knowing it, is "do not influence the type of literature Milan Kundera reads." "Living" literature is much more the sort of genre fiction he disdains than his own work, but of course admitting that would be ego-fatal.

It's all like that. David Denby's "Big Pictures" analyzes the problems of Hollywood in remarkably trite and obvious ways. I never go to the movies and don't care much, but even I know that DVDs represent a challenge to theaters, that funding anything innovative is hard because the studios are owned by large companies that want guaranteed return, and that targeted marketing is ending the era of movies for everyone, in favor of movies aimed at under-30 males, or married couples, or whatever. There isn't a single new thing in the entire very long essay. And again, Denby tries to support huge points by interviewing one person and citing no facts.

Exception: the article by Joan Acocella on Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's best-known librettist, was fascinating even though I hate opera. Factual, well-researched, and without huge doses of Acocella's own opinions. I enjoyed it.

But in general, I don't recommend The New Yorker.

Arisia

I'll be at Arisia, 12-14 January. Come by the I-CON party and say "Hi".

How to lose my eyeballs

Hey, advertisers! You know how the conventional wisdom is, your ad has to flash, buzz, move around, and generally be as obstreperous and distracting as a toddler on speed?

If your ad does that, I will see it once. And I'll never see another one of your ads, ever again. You see, I use a FireFox extension called Adblock. If I find an ad irritating, I block not only the ad itself, but all ads from that server.

Don't even think about Adobe Flash-based ads, either. I use Flashblock. I used to be a Flash developer myself, but unstoppable dancing, mutating ads still irritate me mightily—so I never see them.

So here's the rule if you want my eyeballs to ever focus on your ads: simple, static, restrained. Like Google ads, for instance. Ever notice how much money Google makes on ads?