paul mitchinson.com

Caleb Crain, channeling Nicholson Baker, laments the rough untrimmed pages of certain hardcover books:

It’s wretched nostalgia, and it should be stopped. All binding is centralized today, and so no customer chooses deckle edges anymore, and no one can opt out of it, either, except by waiting for the paperback. Deckle edges absorb and retain dust with fantastic efficiency. But the truly demonic thing about them is that they turn a book into a trick deck of cards—the sort where if you flip the cards over one by one, you see all suits, but if you riffle along one edge, you see only clubs or only diamonds. If you riffle through the pages of a deckle-edged book, only certain pages flip open to your eye. Should you be hunting for a quote that happens to appear on a page whose width is not a local maximum, you’re out of luck. You can try putting your thumb along the clean-cut top or bottom, and you’ll get a little functionality this way. But not much. It becomes hard even to figure out what chapter you’re in.

As they say in this blog biz, “read it all.”

The American Conservative, paleoconservatism’s house organ, has continued its war against neoconservatism by launching a broadside against, wait for it, Christopher Hitchens. Well, no surprise there, I suppose. Hitchens has been called a neocon by the Left for years. And the paleos and the far Left have become chummier and chummier since the war in Iraq.

But the attack is unique in one main respect: it scolds Hitchens for being a Soviet apologist and a Communist fellow traveller. After all, Hitchens opposed the Vietnam war and the invasion of Grenada, the commie scum. There can be “no doubt where Hitchens stood during the Cold War,” writes Tom Piatak. “He was faithfully following Leon Trotsky, who wrote in 1939, “the defense of the USSR coincides for us with the preparation of world revolution.””

I confess that this left me a little mystified. That is not how I remembered Hitchens’ views at all at the time. In fact, he regularly took shots at “anti-anti-Communists” for their fatuous “yes, but” responses to human rights violations in the Soviet bloc. As late as August 1988, for instance — with perestroika in full stride — he wrote a moving account of the political nightmare of Czechoslovakia, quoting opposition writer Milan Simecka, with approval:

However adaptable socialist ideology may be, it would be hard for it to justify with any credibility the fact that the socialist state behaves like a red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalist of the last century, that it establishes blacklists, and fires employees suspected of involvement in “strikes”, not to mention those who might be a source of trouble, or those who fail to show the right degree of respect to the management, and so on. You do not need ideological reasons to be disgusted by such practices; the good old socialist gut-reaction we inherited from earlier generations tells us they are wrong.

At other times Piatak simply mischaracterizes what Hitchens wrote. Consider this passage:

And after Solidarity had been outlawed and Lech Walesa imprisoned, Hitchens participated in a Nation forum on Communism and Poland in which—to his credit—he wrote that it was legitimate to defend the “Polish workers movement,” but also fretted about “the Manichaean anti-Communism of the bad old days,” wished that Walesa had denounced Pinochet, and rebuked Susan Sontag for saying that Communism was akin to fascism and that the reliably anti-Communist Readers’ Digest had done a better job of informing its readers of the realities of Communism than had The Nation or The New Statesman—coincidentally (or not) Hitchens’s journalistic homes during the Cold War.

Let’s be clear what Hitchens actually wrote. He didn’t “fret” about Manichaean anti-Communism: he praised Sontag for steering clear of it.

“I was pleased that Susan Sontag invited the left to criticize its own record on Stalinism,” he wrote. “Surely I am not the only socialist who finds comparisons between Solidarity and the fate of PATCO [Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association] to be grotesque? The rights of highly paid Reaganite air controllers may have been violated, but the rights of Polish coal miners and ship-builders have been abolished. It is, really, casuistry to mention them in the same breath.” Some on the Left, he admitted attempt to “divert an argument about Polish self-determination into an argument about the hypocrisy of Reagan and Haig. By doing so, they devalue solidarity with Solidarity, and I think Sontag was right to say so.”

With “apologists” like Hitchens, it’s no wonder the USSR lost the Cold War.

Antonia Zerbisias notes that CBC workers are being asked to sign on to some bizarre clauses in their Return To Work Protocol:

10. Upon ratification, CMG [Canadian Media Guild] and CBC will remove, as much as is possible, negative references and material [related] to the work stoppage on all their websites.

11. Upon ratification, CMG will encourage CMG members to remove as much as is possible, negative references and material related to the work stoppage from web sites, podcasts, blogging etc. consistent with the CBC and CMG accepted journalistic standards.

Look, if anyone wanted proof of CBC management’s utter cluelessness, this is it. They clearly have no understanding of how the Internet works. Things that are posted in anger or haste live on, no matter how many times you press that delete button.

But folks, it ain’t 1984. It’s not “rewriting history,” or “erasing history.” There’s nothing in these clauses suggesting the need for this kind of response:

If the Guild or CBC wants something off my web site, I will gladly provide the contact information for my lawyer and would welcome the challenge in court.

Bring it.

Or this:

I think that means they are shutting us down. Some of us. They may allow blogs about pies and gnomes. But I think it’s going to be curtains for Drone. You know it is. They hate this site. They hate it more than any other.

Unless, of course, you’re the usual self-dramatizing CBC journalist.

CMG can “request” its members remove the material. CMG members can say “no.” End of story.

CBC management would probably like comments like this erased:

WE need to stamp out culture at the CBC and other Canadian public corporations. That is the culture of greed. The culture that caused the collapse of companies such Enron, Worldcom, and Nortel. What are they teaching in business school these days. Short term gains 101, Suck off the boss 102, fuck the workers 103,Steal without getting caught 104 and so on.

And no boss could tolerate a worker spouting off this crap in public — and with attribution. But there’s no getting that toothpaste back in the tube now.

One of the most odious reviews I have ever read was penned by one of my favorite critics, Carlin Romano. Back in November 1993, he reviewed Catharine MacKinnon’s book Only Words in The Nation, opening with his infamous line, “Suppose I decide to rape Catharine MacKinnon before reviewing her book.” It got worse. “Because I’m uncertain whether she understands the difference between being raped and being exposed to pornography, I consider it required research for my critique of her manifesto that pornography equals rape and should be banned.” The Romano character in this little thought experiment eventually “chickens out” (I never thought that lack of bravery would be the issue in deciding not to rape someone!) but decides instead to imagine the rape:

I’m caught off guard by her fury, her indefatigable effort to talk me out of it, her insistence that exposing her to pornography would be just as effective, the wrenching final expression of disgust and despair on her face and my own self-revulsion — even if it is just fantasy research.

That last little coy aside gives the game away. If Romano wanted to make the point that words and acts are very different things, why did he need to specify an actual person — Catharine MacKinnon — as his imagined rape victim? Why did he need to specify himself as the perpetrator? Why did he need to describe the “rape” in such exquisite detail? Why does one feel that he has a smirk on his face as he describes the sexual humiliation (imaginary, of course) of a woman? The same point could have been made less luridly, but then, he wouldn’t have have achieved his primary aim of bullying MacKinnon in one of the most demeaning ways possible.

I bring up this long-dead controversy because it reminds me of the most recent troubles of radio host and former Reagan administration Secretary of Education Bill Bennett. Addressing a caller on his radio show Bennett said this:

One of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is … that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up …. But I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.

Matthew Yglesias and Brad DeLong have come to Bennett’s defense on this particular statement, and Andrew Sullivan has applauded their fair-mindedness.

Please.

Both Bennett and Romano would suggest that their arguments are “thought experiments,” clearly intended to expose the absurdity of their opponents’ arguments. But for Bennett to make the argument that this is a reductio ad absurdum argument — as DeLong claims — then the “empirical claim,” in Yglesias’s words, must be “unambiguously true.” It is not. There is no empirical evidence to suggest that black babies born today will commit crime at a greater frequency than white babies will. The fact that black youth today commit crime at a higher rate than white youth is irrelevant to this thought experiment, unless one believes that cultures are immutable, and black youth are genetically predisposed to committing crime. What? You say you suspect that Bennett might actually believe this? Well, that might be one reason why certain individuals shouldn’t attempt certain forms of reductio ad absurdum arguments.

This is a classic case of talking in code, simultaneously asserting and denying a proposition so that one can both defend oneself against charges of racism, and wink at those who actually think black babies should be aborted.

Bigotry’s come a long way, baby.

I received a gently critical remark from a reader, and an entirely reasonable objection from Seth Roberts himself, in response to my feverish rant against Freakonomics from a couple weeks ago.

A brief response. First of all, Seth Roberts’ research is fascinating and often illuminating. But the language used by the Freakonomics authors was (typically) imprecise and misleading. Roberts, they write, “discovered” a “fix” for lifting his mood. He also “discovered two agents capable of tricking the set-point system” in his diet regime.

But this is not what Roberts was claiming in his paper.

“Scientists sometimes forget about idea generation,” he wrote in his 2004 article, “Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas: Ten examples about sleep, mood, health, and weight.” He added: “It is not easy to come up with new ideas worth testing, nor is it clear how to do so.” Roberts, in other words, wasn’t testing hypotheses — he was trying, in his own words, to “generate plausible new ideas” that might be the future object of genuine scientific research. That’s why it is so misleading for him and others to bring up the example of Barry Marshall, the Australian gastroenterologist who drank Helicobacter pylori bacteria to show that they can cause ulcers. Marshall’s self-experimentation was prepared for by years of preliminary idea generation and scientific testing. His experiment was a bold confirmation of the truth of his general hypothesis — not a way to generate a new idea that might need further testing.

I’m not convinced that Roberts fully appreciates the need for rigorous scientific testing of his hypotheses. He challenges me by asking:

how do you explain the numerous success stories posted as comments? I count ten successes and two failures as of today (24 Sep 05). [I think Roberts is referring to this -- PM]

But the sample group is utterly useless for the purposes of scientific testing. These are highly motivated people anxious to discover a successful diet regime. New diets always boast fantastic successes in their early days — there are obvious psychological reasons to explain this. People who have failed in their diets rarely like to advertise their failure — even under the cloak of Internet anonymity.

So by all means try Seth Roberts’ diet. And go live in a cave if you believe that Stone-Age man had the key to happiness. But don’t try to tell me these are scientific “discoveries,” or even “theories” that have been subjected to serious scientific testing.

Ed Whitlock is a marvel. At 74, he will be running in today’s Toronto Waterfront Marathon, attempting to shatter his own world record for 70+ runners. The time to beat? 2:54:49. As any amateur competitive runner will tell you, this is a crushingly fast pace. It will almost certainly place you in the very first corral of qualifying runners at the Boston Marathon, for instance.

I’ve raced next to Whitlock on more than a few occasions in Toronto, and–if memory serves–at the 2001 Jasper-Banff relay. Even beat him a few times, I’m pretty sure. (Hah! I’ve got proof!) Raising two children has rather put a dent into my training schedule, unfortunately. Ed Whitlock would crush me like a bug now. Oh, and did I mention? Whitlock is 74. I’m 40.

But what I really like about Whitlock is that he shines a spotlight on an increasingly rare phenomenon–the serious amateur athlete. I’m talking about those individuals who take part in sport, long past their physical prime, not primarily for “fitness” or charity, but for … competition. The National Post just ran one of those endless series on “Why They Run,” a look at the reasons why various individuals are training for marathons or local races. Of course, it was to raise money for a good cause (cancer, diabetes, etc.) , or to get in shape after a health scare had made them aware of their own mortality. All laudable reasons.

But the marathon and the 10-k are races, after all. They are competitions. And training to race a marathon is a very different monster from training to “just finish”– the unofficial slogan of Runner’s World magazine. Whitlock captures this grim reality beautifully in the National Post article (by subscription only).

“It’s mainly a drudge for me. I wouldn’t say I positively dislike it, but it’s not a particularly enjoyable experience. It’s just something that I have to do in order to run well.

“One does it for the accomplishment, I suppose.”

Why does he run? To compete, dammit. Run, Ed, run.

Update: Ed’s opened up a significant–though far from insurmountable–1 minute and 48 second lead on his Dutch arch-rival, the 72-year-old youngster Joop Ruter. This was measured at the halfway point, so it doesn’t look like a world record day. But another sub-3 hour marathon is still well within his grasp.

Final Update: Final result: Whitlock finishes with a time of 3:02:40, with Joop Ruter having a very bad time of it, coming in at 3:45:37.

I hesitate to call Alex Ross wrong on anything. But upon closer examination, it appears that he has seriously erred in his description of the “presidential chord,” which I referred to below. Perhaps he was misled by the otherwise excellent posting of J.D. Considine.

But consider the image at your left, which has been cropped, blown up, and enhanced. (Click for a larger image.)

Bush’s fingers are not placed on the lower E and A strings, as someone attempting to play a G-major chord might do, but rather on the A and D strings. Thus, he seems to be playing the notes E (unless his thumb is touching the low E string, perhaps making a buzzing G-sharp), C#, F, G, B, G#.

This has monumental implications, as Ross will surely agree. Bush’s pitch series does not have a Forte number of 6-Z11, but rather the very different 6-Z49. Instead of “a hauntingly ambiguous chord that brushes against the ghost of a now defunct tonality even as it stares ahead remorselessly into the chromatic future,” it seems to be suggesting something rather different.

Turns out Bush really was just being a jackass.

The always essential Alex Ross decodes the mysterious presidential chord. It seems we were all wrong in assuming that Bush was simply being a jackass, cluelessly strumming a guitar while New Orleans descended into chaos.

It seems to be a strongly dissonant sonority consisting of the notes G, G#, A, B, C, and D . . . . Here he plays the pitch-class set named 6-Z11 in the Allen Forte system — a hauntingly ambiguous chord that brushes against the ghost of a now defunct tonality even as it stares ahead remorselessly into the chromatic future.

Am I the only one who found Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt’s Freakonomics the most ridiculously overhyped book in years?

For a small book with big margins, Freakonomics certainly got a lot of exposure. It tells cute, entertaining stories more likely to be overheard in your local pub than in a faculty lounge. Why do so many drug dealers live with their mothers? Are blacks handicapping their children’s future by giving them distinctive names? But the research basis for most of these tiny stories ranged from the sketchy to the irrelevant.

In one chapter Freakonomics examines why some children develop good reading skills and others do not. Does it depend on whether a parent reads to her child? No. According to the authors, a far more significant factor is whether a child’s parents bequeath their children a good genetic base for learning. Proof? Adopted children fare worse in literacy, intelligence, and wealth (when they reach adulthood) than do their non-adopted siblings. You might ask: how many of these adopted children received optimal pre-natal care? Or even more significantly, how many were adopted as infants? You might ask these obvious questions, but Dubner and Levitt didn’t bother. The book is littered with many such gaping research holes.

Which is why it’s a little bewildering to see the New York Times Magazine offering them a regular soapbox for their half-baked ideas. Today’s column tells the story of Seth Roberts, a Berkeley Psychology Professor who has managed to lose weight (by drinking canola oil and sugar water between meals) and improve his mood (by watching morning television). Evidence? Um … well .. it worked for him. And after all, the public might just buy it: “With the Atkins diet company filing for bankruptcy,” the authors explain, “America is eager for its next diet craze.”

Seth Roberts’ methodology sounds disturbingly familiar. A contempt for scientific rigor. An aptitude for generating a good story based on little more than groundless speculation and junk science. A desire to profit handsomely from selling zany theories to a credulous public. In other words, Freakonomics.

Blogging has been nonexistent the past week as I tinkered with the site’s inner workings. Small jobs — such as getting text to wrap around an image, or getting paragraphs to show up in my pages — turned into Herculean labours. Such is the fate of slow learners. I won’t bore you with the details, though you will notice a few things, such as the random selection of C’s photos along the sidebar.

I’m working on a few things, including a post on Dr. Seuss’s music, and a piece or two on the upcoming centenary of the birth of Dmitri Shostakovich. More soon.