Today has been a wash because of the computer problem (and other things). Tomorrow will probably be a wash as well. On a bright note, here’s a fun Digg interview with Bruno (i.e., Sascha Cohen).

The interview was full of reader-submitted questions, so Sascha had a lot of fun with them. But the interviewer himself was uncomfortable…truly one of the worst interviews in the world.

Speaking of bad interviews, here’s an interview with Maryilyn vos Savant (the woman with the highest IQ). This is a 50+ minute  interview, and one of the worst I’d ever sat through. The interviewer foolishly decided to throw out a lot of ideas — without really asking Marilyn anything of substance. Probably because of nervousness or insecurity, the interviewer  jabbered on about his question instead of  giving Marilyn enough time to  elaborate on her answers. I almost feel sorry for the interviewer; clearly he thought his chatty style was succeeding in eliciting responses from Marilyn, but he was clearly mistaken.

All he really needed to do was to give some open-ended questions and let Marilyn do the rest. Then,  he should ask a follow up question whenever he felt Marilyn hadn’t gone into detail or explained herself adequately. (One of my favorite Charlie  Rose techniques is when someone makes a bold (or unsupported remark), I simply add, “Because?” and wait for the interviewee to explain.

By the way, even though the interviewer for vos Savant was incompetent, I almost share his interviewing style. Informal, undirected, “off the record”. Sometimes if one person keeps a conversation going, the interviewee will feel inclined to jump in. I’ve taken college classes where the professor delivers a series of carefully controlled lectures (usually without anecdotes or debate). The one-sided nature of the delivery discourages students from jumping in with comments and questions.  These kinds of professors like to dogmatic;  yes, there can sometimes be value in a  one sided conversation, but the speaker must be brilliant and willing to anticipate objections. In other kinds of classes, professors are always carrying on a conversation with student.   But if such a professor is too talkative, only the most assertive student will be able to have their remarks heard.

This may not be apparent to readers of this blog, but the ability to interview and ask questions is one of  my best skills. I don’t do interviews often, but the few that I’ve done have been outstanding. Of course, written interviews and spoken interviews are different beasts.  With written interviews, you can ask wordy questions (if only to have nuance to prevent the subject from giving an easy answer).  With spoken interviews, the trick is making your subject speak as much time as possible (while still retaining control over the interview itself).

I don’t deny that Marilyn vos Savant is brainy,  but that interview was unflattering and disappointing. I really didn’t hear anything amazing come from Marilyn. I didn’t hear a lot of original thoughts or perspectives. She struck me as a very conventional thinker. Maybe that’s one of the limitations of IQ as a measurement tool; it doesn’t suggest an ability to reach interesting conclusions. Marilyn’s sentences struck me as cautious and even lacking in curiosity. Aside from the fact that she didn’t venture too far away from topics of the meaning of intelligence, IQ and education (which was partially the fault of the interviewer), she didn’t seem willing to make bold claims or try to defend them.  She didn’t really have a sense of rhetoric or how to get a point across. The breadth of her knowledge seemed evident, and I have no doubt she could solve  a math or logic problem faster than I could. She didn’t speculate; she seemed hindered by her empiricism. She seemed determined not to say anything controversial (even though it was clear she had an independent mind).

I realize that it’s impossible to judge a person’s intelligence by how they present themselves during an interview. On the other hand, a person like Marilyn needed to be asked more provocative questions. Here is my own list of questions I’d ask a person like Marilyn.

• Do more intelligent people like different kinds of music?
• What is the relationship between intelligence and motivation in your own life?
• How much of the cultivation of the mind depends on initiative and curiosity? How much of it depends on circumstances?
• Can you learn a lot of things from average or uneducated people?
• What intellectual feat in life are you most proud of?
• Do you think that high intelligence means that you have a different set of values from most people?
• True or false. High intelligence makes it impossible to focus on a single task or goal.
• To what extent is the life of a highly intelligent person richer or fuller than that of an average person? To what extent is it more impoverished?
• Do brainy people have  more satisfying sex lives?
• Do you feel that high intelligence can be a handicap for mastering certain kinds of skills? Which kinds?
• Do all humans at some point have to choose one domain to master?
• What kinds of questions are better pondered without consulting what previous thinkers have written about it?
• Among other educated people, what kinds of ideas and attitudes infuriate you?
• Is self-absorption a problem for you?
• In order to pass legislation, politicians often need to boil down an issue into simpler terms. Is it possible to do this without stereotyping the opponent’s position or without ignoring crucial details?
• Looking back, do you wish that your parents played a different role in your upbringing? Should they have given you more autonomy? more guidance? More supervision?
• Is it easy for you to go back to your childhood? What is the biggest difference between the adult version of yourself and the child version of yourself?
• Do highly intelligent people have a hard time forming or maintaining successful relationships?
• Do you believe that modern psychology is needlessly reductive? Can  psychology offer explanations and treatments  while still appreciating the complexity of human behaviour?
• Have you noticed ways   in which lifestyle affects your mental acuity?
• Are there subjects that you have to tried not to learn too much about?  Why?
• Are there some areas of decision making where a cold rational approach would do more harm than good?
• What about growing older are you most curious about?
• Looking back, what kinds of things do you wish you spent more time learning about? Less time?
• What kinds of subjects interest you the least? Can you ever anticipate a time where this could change?
• Is it reasonable to think that humans are not inclined to destroy themselves? What kinds of self-destructive tendencies in humans do you worry the most about?
• Can you imagine a time where a robot or computer can possess the knowledge, experience and abilities  you possess now? If yes  (and if you were living during that time period), would you enjoy having a conversation with a robot version of yourself?
• Can an intelligent person be totally aware of the degree to which one’s background influences (and prejudices) one’s personal beliefs?
• Do the world’s religions strike you as founded in rationality? Was this rationality always present in the founder’s core ideas? Or does rationality result from the interpretation of these core ideas after acquiring more followers over the centuries?
• Are highly intelligent people less susceptible to hopelessness during times of catastrophe?
• Would you be comfortable in an egalitarian society? What kind of inequities are tolerable and what are not?
• One cause of injustice is ignorance about the suffering of others. What is the best way to teach  empathy? Should this kind of instruction be mandated?
• Assuming you were 20 and dedicated to the task, do you think it would be easy for a highly intelligent like person yourself to become amazingly wealthy? If you were to venture a guess, what percent of business success is a a result of  business acumen and what percent is a matter of dumb luck?
• In your opinion, what things do  people waste too much  time on? What things do you think you waste too much time on?
• Generalizations are dangerous because they are often unprovable and can be refuted by individual cases. Despite that, are there good reasons for making generalizations(either for argument’s sake or  as a shortcut for thought)?
• What kinds of intellectual laziness are you sometimes guilty of?
• Does human intelligence alone (apart from education or upbringing) make it easier for a person to be happy or content?
• Name a human accomplishment that you are most in awe of a single person doing?

Dear KHOU/Channel 11:

I am a Houston resident and longtime viewer of Channel 11. Last night I saw a commercial which at best could be called misleading and at worst could be called a blatant lie.

During 60 minutes you featured a TV commercial for TXU  electricity. I don’t have the ability to rewatch the commercial, but I can describe it.

It is a bright upbeat ad featuring young smiling people holding signs with various words on it. One of the signs said the word "renewable" on it.

That would imply that TXU offers a renewable energy plan to Houston consumers. In fact, that is not the case. TXU offers no such renewable  plan.  According to www.powertochoose.org (a site run by the Texas Public Utilities Commission), here are all the plans offered by TXU at the moment in my area in west Houston. 

TXU Energy MarketEdge,
2% Renewable Energy content
98% nonrenewable: 
  39% Coal and lignite
  44% Natural Gas
  13% Nuclear
  2% Other

TXU Energy Texas Choice (also TXU Energy Texas Choice 24 and TXU Energy Texas Choice 12 )
10% renewable energy content
90% Nonrenewable
   36% Coal and Lignite
   40% Natural Gas
   12% Nuclear
   2% Other

In fact, TXU is well-known for its reliance on coal power (and has been the target of  criticism by many environmental groups).  They offer only mixed plans containing a small percentage of renewable energy.  In comparison, 16 different companies offer "true" renewable plans (see the list below). For TXU to claim that it sells renewable energy is like the Monty Python sketch where the waitress tells the women who doesn’t like spam that the menu item  "SPAM EGGS SAUSAGE AND SPAM "doesn’t have much spam in it".

This may sound like the usual weasel words we typically find in advertising. In fact,  ads like this are a deliberate attempt to sow confusion in the minds of consumers. TXU knows that consumers regard climate change as an important issue (last week’s Washington Post survey shows that by a margin of 3 to 1 Americans think the feds should regulate greenhouse gases).  This ad is subtly intended to reassure nervous consumers that TXU is not emitting greenhouse gases (when in fact the opposite is true). You may say: the people in these ads are only holding signs with words on them. TXU is not claiming that it offers renewable plans. If that is the case, then the actor should not be holding up that sign at all.

I don’t know whether your local reporters have already covered this, but the most amazing thing about the Houston energy market is that many of the green/renewable energy plans are as cheap as — if not cheaper than — many of the nonrenewable plans. If only more Houstonians knew this fact!

I understand how hard it is to find ad dollars these days, and I know you can’t be expected to fact check every commercial that runs on your TV station. However, you do not have the right to run commercials with false information. Perhaps the reason why "true renewable energy companies" haven’t paid for ads on Channel 11 is that they know that TXU’s misinformation campaigns on your station is already confusing consumers.

Ironically, in late April, 60 minutes ran a  piece about coal where leading climate scientist James Hansen was quoted as saying:

"We are going to have to phase out emissions from coal within the next 20 years if we hope to prevent climate disasters..  We are going to have to have a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants within the next few years and phase out the existing ones over the next 20 years or so if we have to preserve the climate like the one that has existed  (over) the last several thousand years."

If the  ad omitted  the image of the actor holding up the "renewable" sign  were omitted,  the ad would no longer contain factual errors. I urge you to consider this edit or  not run the ad at all in its present form.

Robert Nagle

*******************************************************

Here is a list of the "real" renewable energy plans available to Houstonians right now. Note that many of the companies on this list also offer mixed plans (containing renewable and nonrenewable fuels) in addition to their renewable plans. 

Gexa Energy Green (6, 12)
100% Renewable energy content

YEP Green Earth 100%
100% Renewable energy content

Dynowatt GoGreen (6, 12)
100% Renewable energy content

Dynowatt Residential Go Green Variable Plan
100% Renewable energy content

Stream Energy Green & Clean (Variable and 12)
100% Renewable energy content

Bounce Energy Smart Green
100% Renewable energy content

Green Mountain Energy Pollution Free Smart
100% Renewable energy content

Southwest Power and Light Renewable Healthy Heart Of Texas Fixed Rate E-Plan 
100% Renewable energy content

Amigo  GoGreen 100% Renewable Energy
100% Renewable energy content

Ambit Certified Green (6, 12, variable)
100% Renewable energy content

Green Mountain Energy Company  Pollution Free Introductory Offer
100% Renewable energy content
Kinetic Energy Simply Green One-Year 
100% Renewable energy content

Texpo Energy Clear Blue Skies 100% Renewable  (12,
100% Renewable energy content

Spark Energy, L.P. Spark 100% Renewable Advantage 12 month plan
100% Renewable energy content

First Choice Power Simply Better Advantage Green
100% Renewable energy content

Reliant Energy Monthly Flex 100% Texas Wind
100% Renewable energy content

The only thing is, there is so little good on TV left to watch.

Yes, there is PBS on (and don’t doubt that I watch as much of it as I can). Also, at night I watch the monologue for Jay Leno, and that is good. Occasionally, when there is a major news story or a presidential speech or awards ceremony, I will watch that too.

(Observation: I like Charlie Rose, but I can’t stand the fact that his shows never make it easy to find out who he’s interviewing. They absolutely refuse to put subtitles underneath the guest except at the start and finish of the show. Absolutely maddening!)

But the commercials are insufferable. 8 minutes out of a typical 30 minute TV show are commercials.  Really insufferable. I can’t ignore them anymore (and I don’t have TIVO—although I guess I could hook that up). The problem is, every 3-5 minutes there is another swathe of commercials to wade  through.  Imagine if 73% of your life was dedicated to commercials. If you could recapture that time, that could add years to your life.

I love sitcoms and occasionally some reality shows and dramas. But my preferred way to watch them is on my computer (after downloading them via bit torrent). I’m a scofflaw? I dare any TV studio executive to sit through 3 hours of shows without turning the mute button on. It would drive a person crazy.

Despite the fact that my city has about 8-10 channels with actual programming, there are times during the TV schedule when every single channel seems to be featuring a commercial. How is that possible? Yet the networks have access to lots of cancelled TV shows (whose only sin apparently is not being able to attract a minimum audience threshold. When I said there were 8-10 channels, actually there is the potential to have at least 50 more channels.

Why can’t we have an all music channel (containing songs which record labels hope we will purchase)?

Why can’t we have “Only One Minute of Commercials per Hour” stations which replay old TV shows?

Why can’t we have CSPAN on the public airwaves?

Why can’t PBS buy several more channels to broadcast old educational shows?

Why can’t there be a channel for Youtube amateurs?

Why can’t our remote controls let us watch streaming channels from the Internet site  of our choice?

If you say that I am being unrealistic or that someone needs to pay the bills on these transmitters, how do the heck do those fringe TV networks find the money to bankroll their lunatic religious messages? At least they don’t have commercials!

One could say: that’s what happens when you don’t buy cable or satellite TV. But have you looked at cable recently? It’s just as bad as normal TV – with the same percentage of commercial interruptions – only it has more channels to choose from; how could anyone regard  that as better?

(Personally, I find it tedious to navigate through Comcast TV stations with my remote control).

A few years ago I bought a DVD/media center that allowed the TV to access Windows shares on my computer. I could watch lots of shows if I put them in a folder. It was clunky, and there were issues with codecs, but it usually worked. Then it broke.

Next month I will be trying Netflix’s video on demand service along with a Roku media box. The Roku costs $99, and it allows me to watch streamed Netflix videos on my TV.  Already Netflix has 12,000 titles to choose from (and that includes complete TV series like Friday Night Lights). All this for $10 per month. I’ve tried Netflix’s video on demand, and I generally haven’t experienced latency or picture quality issues, and reviewers say only positive things.

Better than the fact that I can choose the movie and TV show to download when I want it, I don’t have any commercials! Horray! Horray!

Even though the Roku-Netflix solution will make me much better off, still I will miss the routines of the primetime schedule. I am used to scheduling kitchen chores and meals to coincide with the shows I watch. Instead, I download and listen to podcasts about current events, the arts and technology. Tomorrow, instead of watching a Sunday talk show, I will be listening to a 55 minute lecture on climate change by a leading governmental scientist. That’s good, but I have to plan for it. More brain cells wasted on deciding what to watch/listen to tomorrow. Back in earlier times (way back in the last century), we had simpler lives and simpler TV routines; TV shows just came on, and the commercial interruptions were not so bad as to cause us to start flipping or turning the TV off together. Now we have a whole half century of TV programs that could make it on the air, and still we see awful reruns and oodles of commercials.

In other news, here is the current prices for used boxed sets on Amazon or half.com

• Cheers 200$ used
• Friends, $90 used
• all in the family $170
• i love lucy $100 used
• king of queens $100
• get smart complete series $69
• honeymooners 39 episodes $20
• that seventies show $130
• Seinfeld  $105
• Sex and the City $90
• Will and Grace $140
• Frasier $180
• The Wire $100
• Mash $100
• Angel $65
• Buffy $120
• West Wing $110
• Adams Family $43
• My So-called Life $30
• Six Foot Under $70
• Will and Grace $140
• Twilight Zone $127
• Prisoner $40
• Sanford and Son $33
• Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin $28
• Sports Night $30
• As Time Goes by (BBC)  $75
• Monty Python Complete $50

See also this list of the top series collections.

So to demonstrate my general cheeriness, I’ll mention some  mood picker-uppers on  youtube.

Luise Rainer sings ‘”It is delightful to be married” from the classic film Great Ziegfeld.

Or Fantastic Plastic Machines’ Dear Mr. Salesman.

See also Pregnant Women are Smug by Garfunkel and Oates.

Third, a totally bizarre stylish French mini-video (from the film Paris, Je T’aime).   The song at the end is by Faye Wong.

Fourth, here’s a literal version of the 80s video Total Eclipse of the Heart.  If you don’t know what it is, watching it will make it quickly apparent to you.

Here’s a syrupy romantic tune, Herb Albert singing This Guy’s in Love with You. This Bachelor song is one of my faves. (Yes, Albert is being introduced by the Carpenters)

Folks, that’s about as upbeat as I can get.

As with most Americans, my own ideas about love were formed not only by books — “Jane Eyre” and “Pride and Prejudice,” “Emma” and “Wuthering Heights,” yes, as well as the incestuous “Flowers in the Attic” series, “The Thorn Birds,” and the Andrew Greeley books with their fornicating priests — but by soap operas and romantic comedies: the tempestuous on-again-off-again affair of Bo and Hope on “Days of Our Lives,” the jaunty repartee of “When Harry Met Sally.” “Almost everything in modern society militates against our falling in love hard or long. It militates against love as risk, love as sacrifice, love as heroism,” writes Nehring. This is not entirely true. Even if the self-help establishment promotes romance as an “organized adult activity with safety rails on the left and right, rubber ceilings, no-skid floors, and a clear, clean destination: marriage” — and I’m not sure it does — tension exists between the domesticated romance of relationship manuals and the many depictions of outlaw love in the culture around us.

As a result, most people long to experience love, especially love of the wildest, most complicated sort. And I would venture to guess that many have — romance born of mischief, with a co-worker, perhaps, or a professor or student; obsessive love characterized by vigilant waiting for calls and e-mails, or a humiliating inability to stop calling even after the relationship is broken. Most of us have not consciously or categorically banished passionate love from our lives, we just can’t seem to make it fit. Indeed, if being in love is such a stimulating and gratifying state — and it is, of course — why would we do without it unless, in some sense, we had to? One of the reasons that we have resigned ourselves to a certain dearth of passion may be that we can’t seem to afford it economically or temporally. Here is Cathi Hanauer, editor of the bestselling anthology “The Bitch in the House,” describing her typical day: “nursing a baby at the computer while trying to make a deadline; sprinting home from my daughter’s nursery school, both kids in tow, to return phone calls; handing the children off to Dan [her husband], the instant he walked in at night so I could rush off to a coffee shop to get my work done.” And here is Loh, on her inability to cram romance into her life: “Which is to say I can work at a career and child care and joint homeownership and even platonic male-female friendship. However, in this cluttered forest of my 40s, what I cannot authentically reconjure is the ancient dream of brides, even with the Oprah fluffery of weekly ‘date nights,’ when gauzy candlelight obscures the messy house, child talk is nixed, and sexy lingerie is donned.”

When the bureaucratic nightmare that is everyday life has become so intrusive, when both parents work out of the home, the circumstances that allow for intimacy and passion are imperiled. (Sandra Tsing-Loh tells us that her musician-husband traveled 20 weeks a year.) When are we to form deep connections? How and where is this hot sex supposed to happen? You can’t stay up all night when you have to wake up and go to work the next day; no one is going to grant you a leave of absence for passion. (In an interview with the Telegraph, Arianna Huffingon once discussed sleep deprivation as a negative byproduct of love affairs. “So I’ve gotten to be a good breaker-upper,” said Huffington.) We have, you might say, been forced to adapt to a world that is hostile to romance, our lives full of ever-clamoring responsibilities: bills to pay, BlackBerrys to monitor, e-mails to answer. Talk to almost any therapist, and he or she will tell you that the primary reason people don’t have sex is that they’re too tired, or have built up a little mountain of resentments over the difficulty of running a household together. If you want an intense, consuming passion, you’re probably not going to be as productive…

Linked to from the above article, a great article by Don Gillmor about the evolution of the Harlequin romance genre:

It is the vast, barren landscape between these two fantasies that has given rise to separate empires: romance for women and pornography for men. That there is so little intersection between the two helps explain why each has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry. Male fantasies remain inherently adolescent (the paper boy growing into a plumber, the housewife more desperate and inventive), but the underlying premise remains wild sex without responsibility. The Harlequin fantasy is meaningful sex that symbolizes a lasting emotional connection, and often an end to financial responsibilities. The heroine’s only real responsibility is to her man and to love itself, whereas the loveless world of porn is driven by submission and anonymity.

Nevertheless, critics have highlighted similarities between the two worlds. In the Guardian, Julie Bindel recalled the romances of the British publisher Mills & Boon — which celebrated its centenary last year and was an early partner of Harlequin — with alarm. “In every book, there was a scene where the heroine is ‘broken in,’ both emotionally and physically, by the hero,” she wrote. “My loathing of m&b novels has nothing to do with snobbery. I could not care less if the books are trashy, formulaic, or pulp fiction…But I do care about the type of propaganda perpetuated by m&b. I would go so far as to say it is misogynistic hate speech… This is what heterosexual romantic fiction promotes — the sexual submission of women to men.”

Whether it was technically porn or not, Bindel was saying, men came out on top. The late feminist writer Andrea Dworkin, for her part, once wrote that romance literature was “rape embellished with meaningful looks.” But if the romance genre is a form of porn, is it as psychologically enslaving? Certainly the fourteen-year-old paper boy staring glassily at the Drunken Moms website knows, in his dark, pimpled heart, that he isn’t holding the moral high ground.

He ends with a profound question about the role of romance in our society:

You might think the passivity of the women and the Bond-like qualities of the men would work as male fantasy. Yet they don’t. That’s likely because Harlequin narratives are driven by misunderstandings and foggy interior monologues that express, more than any other feeling, doubt. “Why did she want him so? Why? Her brain told her to walk away. To walk away and not look back. But her body whispered something else.” And all this uncertainty is wearing.

How is it, then, that these quaint, patriarchal tropes work so well on a female audience? In 1984, Janice Radway published Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, at the time the most comprehensive study of romance novels and their readers. When she interviewed women for her book, it wasn’t the content of the novels they talked about, but the act of reading them. She argued that though the books may be meticulously unsubversive, reading them can be a subversive act. When the reader picks up a romance novel, she is spending time on herself, escaping the very thing that may be giving her her social identity. For those few hours, she is getting rid of her children, and ditching her husband for a masculine icon who loves her deeply (though he may have difficulty expressing it).

Radway’s study was conducted twenty-five years ago, in the pseudonymous Midwestern American town of Smithton, presumably a fairly traditional society. A majority of North American women were married then, and still worked in the home. So the fantasy offered was essentially quantitative; readers were presented with a fictional husband who was richer and sexier than the one they had. But now most women work outside the home, and a smaller percentage are married. The stated target market for Harlequin Romances is someone in her forties with a college education and a career. What’s in it for her?

It may be that as society drifts further from the norm of a happy, stable marriage, the books have more currency as fantasy. The idea of surrendering to a gravely rich man whose forearms ripple sexily every time he picks up a spatula has appeal in part because it is so far removed from actual aspirations (getting a raise, a promotion), and from the actual middle-aged men women know (paunchy, anniversary-forgetting toads for whom a handful of condoms is a year’s supply). Women can even read the books with a sense of irony, dismissing the stock characters and plots while still indulging in the emotional jolt. Harlequins succeed, in this light, because they are brilliantly forgettable one-night stands that blur, slim 178-page companions that vanish by the next day. Each morning, you wake up a virgin.

(By the way, sorry about the long quote; I just wanted to convey the full thought here).

Here’s an interesting commencement address  by a novelist/philosopher David Foster Wallace:

The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

David Foster Wallace killed himself last September at the age of 46, and the commencement speech he gave at the age of 43. I am somewhat familiar with his fiction (in fact I remember reading his first published short story in 1988 or 1989 anthologized somewhere, which he won in the Playboy fiction contest for college students).

DFW had a wildly successful literary career, received a MacArthur Genius Grant in 1997 and had a tenured position at Pomona. These are accolades  wildly beyond my reach; in fact, so few kinds of writers  have these awards thrown in their laps. Ironically, a big break for him came in 1992 when literary editor Steve Moore got him a teaching position at Illinois State University (this was at the same time I was communicating semi-regularly with Steve Moore to do freelance book reviews–which I did for a while). By this time, the Playboy award had already gotten him his first book deal and a good agent.

To call my reaction “professional jealousy” would be insufficient. Wallace took for granted a lot of successes that many writers struggle for years, even decades for. In this speech he talks about the boredom and routine of living, and yet the genius grant gave him substantial free  time not to have to suffer the drudgeries of full time work. I hate to use the man’s suicide act to criticize his fiction or his life, but his critiques of modern life seem unusually brutal; so all we’re supposed to do is to use our brain to entertain ourselves.

Still, we need to separate the person’s life from the imaginary worlds of his fiction. Maybe I will judge Mr. Wallace severely, but I am perfectly willing to give his novels a try. See also D.T. Max’s New Yorker article about DWF after the suicide.

While cleaning up my apartment, I was half-listening to a talk show where  a 23 year old actress/fashion star is bubbling with cute anecdotes and humor about general Hollywood stuff. Right before the show went to commercial, the talk show host plugged the woman’s new book. Ok, I could live with that. Star of a hit MTV show, ghost written book…these things happen. Then the host mentions casually that the woman had signed a 3 book deal with Harper Collins . 3 book deal! Holy shmike! Do the two of us inhabit the same cultural universe?

Naturally it would be easy to poke fun at Lauren Conrad’s book. But look. At the age of 22 (when she must have finished the rough draft), I was still a fledgling writer and probably couldn’t write a decent novel if my life depended on it. And this girl published a substantial novel (of 380 pages). Granted,  it was probably flabby and needed a lot of editorial massaging. But still it was a novel…and certainly not ghost written (as I had previously thought). She must have worked hard on it – even if she wasn’t well schooled in American literature or Shakespeare. The book has been out  for two days and already has received reviews (sort of) from People magazine and US Magazine . It helps of course that she’s been on the cover of Cosmopolitan and Seventeen and Entertainment Weekly and that she has 309,781 Myspace friends.  Of course, I’m jealous, but it’s more than that. Everyone is running a different race; everyone has  a different motive for writing and  brings a different set of talents and challenges to the table.  Lauren is basing her novel on her Hollywood life adventure. Even though that is an easy and obvious subject, there is certainly no shame in writing about  what you know. I have no idea what this TV show The Hills is about, but I’m sure the experience must have given her a sense of how to make a story and how to grab a viewer’s interest. Perhaps this kind of experience  sounds cheesy, but it’s  invaluable to have access to so much feedback from fans. 

At the age of 22, I had started a small literary magazine at my college and had gotten accepted into a graduate creative writing program. At the time, I thought my writing was outstanding (only to learn in grad school that this was not the case). I thought writing was everything (and I still do). Especially now, I think that writing is all I have – maybe the only thing I have.

It would be nice to say that I am the “true writer,” but who am I to say?  The ability to write a good novel depends a little on god given talent, but mainly on  perseverance and drive (and financial support). My prediction  is that she will fulfill her 3 book contract admirably ( with the requisite decline in sales for each additional volume) but  later  focus on TV projects. For her a book may simply be a calling card to get you TV interviews in between  TV gigs; I doubt it will make her enough money by itself, and that ultimately is why she will probably abandon the role of novelist.  On the other hand, think of the opportunity! If she wanted, she could use the time and money actually to perfect her writer’s craft, maybe even to write scripts and screenplays.  Even if she ends up wasting this opportunity, it is still reassuring to know that these kinds of opportunities still exist (for those lucky to be caught in the right time and place). I wonder: should the writer devote himself to the craft of writing or to promoting past or future projects?  Fortunately for Ms. Conrad, her telegenic presence makes it easier to gain attention and visibility in a crowded media ecosystem. By now,  promoting creative projects (which actually  is an important skill to have) must seem like second nature to her.

Young women have a builtin advantage of being able to attract public attention (and even adoration).  Let’s not dwell on the inequities; instead let’s focus on how people harness this  advantage to  pursue their personal dreams.  Conrad’s secret dream might actually be to become  the next Edith Wharton or Jane Austen… using MTV as a  stepping stone towards becoming a tenured academic in an MFA program.   I know;  this suggestion sounds  ludicrous, but if I  were in Ms. Conrad’s shoes,  I would certainly  have used my  celebritydom to pursue my dreams.

Receiving extra attention used to happen only to females, but the Internet makes it easy for some young males to do something to attract a lot of attention. If a baseball star or CEO of Twitter wants to write a sci fi level, by all means let them. Maybe something good will come of it.

The real question: how much time and energy  should artsy types spend on self-promotion? Let’s say you’re fat and old and ugly; what do you do? Cultivate a charming persona?  Try even harder to promote yourself at book fairs?  Curry favor with literary bloggers in the hope of receiving positive coverage?  For the celebrity or athlete, fame already happened – writing a book was simply a way to capitalize on it. So they didn’t have to work really hard to acquire it. The unknown author has to work twice as hard to achieve 1/10 of the fame of these celebrity authors; why bother? Yes, there is a difference between avoiding the limelight and living like a hermit; some authors cultivate this isolation as a good in and of itself, but that is just silly.

Many respectable authors spend time writing how-to pieces or rants about the publishing industry or copyright reform or political issues.  They are simply using pet issues as a way to get their name out there; no shame in that. Over the last few years I’ve written many a piece for TeleRead. I enjoy writing these pieces, but every time I finish one, I decide it’s a total waste of my writing time and energy. Even now, as I conclude this blogpost, I think,  I should be writing Story X; why am I instead blowing my energy on this blogpost instead? Time is a-wasting.

I notice that Ms. Conrad’s book tour brings her to Houston on June 26. Amazingly, the bookstore where she will be speaking is only a few miles from my house. I could ride my bike there. I’m not inclined to attend, but I will extend an open invitation: if during her brief visit to Houston, Ms. Conrad wishes to meet at some cafe to discuss the craft of writing, I would consider it (she would have to contact me by  emailing me).   Ms. Conrad  could  tell me what she has learned about storytelling, and I could tell her what I’ve learned.  It would be fun and instructive. The old can teach the young, and the young can teach  the old.  The well-known can teach the unknown many things (and vice-versa).  Any decent writer can learn something useful from everybody. 

If Ms. Conrad has other things to do with her time, I certainly will understand.  But I will leave June 26 open on my calendar.

• James Fallows does some extraordinary (and entertaining) reporting about living in Beijing. Unfortunately, this reporting is about to end, but he will still be blogging.
• Climate Progress is an influential blog about the science of global warming.  Less wonky but more into political and social issues is Grist.
• For general liberal commentary I check Think Progress’s Wonk Room. (I would call this my main news source these days). I also follow Matt Yglesias pretty closely. I also follow Washington Monthly blog , but not as often because it covers much of the same ground as Think Progress (even though it’s extremely well written).
• Tiny Revolution is a political satire blog. Very funny sometimes.
• Robert Reich is a liberal economist who has always been ahead of the curve on policy issues. (For conservative dissent, I check Cafe Hayek) .
• The Business Desk with Paul Solman. Solman is a great PBS News Hour reporter about economics. He started a recent blog answering one question a day from readers. A lot of great things come up.
• Houston Chronicle blogs. One reason I hate Chronicle blogs is that they don’t have full RSS feeds. But I end up reading Techblog with Dwight Silverman,  Loren Steffy, Lisa Falkenberg, Eric Berger (aka Science Guy). Only senior columnist Leon Hale seems to have a full feed these days. Update: Techblog does have a full RSS feed—horray!
• Marginal Revolution is an economics blog run by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok.  I find a lot of off-the-wall social science stuff from there.
• Sex & Relationships: Roissy has a NSFW blog about picking up women. It’s mildly offensive,  but insightful and well written. I just discovered Savage love blog and expect to be reading this a lot more often. (Dan Savage’s well written dating columns are frank and not to be missed).  For the woman’s perspective on dating, I check out divas on a date .
• 2blowhards is a general arts blog (with a nonfunctioning RSS feed as well). Focus on movies, sexy links and light-hearted conservatism. Ray Sawhill (the uberblogger behind 2blowhards) has a NSFW cultural blog with personal touches  (with lots of risque pictures—warning).
• Oddly, I follow  few literary blogs. The reason is simple. I almost never read literary stuff on the computer! (Instead I download longer literary things onto my PDA RSS Reader so I can read it at the supermarket). But I follow Literary License (a Houston literary blog with brief reviews), Fictionaut blog (run by editors of the always-in-beta literary community) and Complete Review/Literary Saloon (outstanding litblog with unfortunately defective RSS feed). On my PDA I always follow Conversational Reading, Mumpsimus, Reading Experience, Useless Tree , Virginia Quarterly Review, Critical Mass National Book Critics Circle blog, The Guardian’s Book Blog , Joy Castro as well as a few dozen by writer friends.
• Amyshealth. One of the best friends from college developed breast cancer and is describing her experience via blog. It’s harrowing to read, but Amy writes with an almost ghoulish sense of humor. Amy is one of the most upbeat people I know, and it shows.
• David Hudson’s IFC The Daily is probably the most distinguished film blog I’ve found, marred only by the fact that I can only get partial feeds. House Next Door delivers  in that department. It’s a group blog about cinema, comics and the arts.
• Bigpicture (gigantic photos about a single topic) and Postsecrets (people send their most private secrets via postcard)  are 2 fascinating. Less known but still fascinating is Mardecortesbaja, a site about public domain art, old Hollywood and comics.
• Tom Johnson’s I’d Rather be Writing covers tech writing and blogging. Daily blog tips covers useful info for bloggers. Sometimes the lists  begins to seem tiresome (“10 Ways to Make your Blog more fruity” etc).  I still look at the Content Wrangler’s RSS feed though the site itself is unusable.
• I get a lot of recommendations for downloading free music from Jamendo’s blog.
• Brad Ideas is a blog of the EFF chairman Brad Templeton. Lots of musings about innovation and government policy.
• Get Rich Slowly and Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist are two practical blogs about finances and careers.
• Thenonsequitur analyzes political rhetoric and uncovers the logical fallacies in them. Written by 2 philosophy professors. Even though they sometimes choose easy targets, they also identify many subtle errors in logic which has only made me more careful about what I read.  A similar blog which analyzes fallacies from the point of view of empirical science is the Denialism blog.
• Ebooks: I am deeply involved in ebook publishing. I used to write/run Teleread (even though now I catch it only on RSS, and not on the blog itself (too much under the fold). Mike Cane’s Ebook Test site covers technical issues as does Threepress blog and Tools for Change Oreilly blog. Finding free ebooks is about what you’d think it’s about.

Blogs I no longer follow religiously for various reasons:

• Boingboing – still well written and lots of original finds, but too trendy for my liking.
• New York Times blogs. I read a lot of entries from them, but they have no full RSS feeds and their comment moderation policy for blogs seem inconsistent. (Besides, NYT features individual blog posts on its main site, so I keep up).
• Oreilly Radar – very well written and cutting edge, but I don’t have time for it.
• Easter Lemming Liberal is a Texas liberal blog run by Gary Denton. Recently, after he vowed to post less this year, he has been turning his energy to Facebook posts instead.
• Off the Kuff. Chuck (a college friend) is the place to go for the inside scoop about Houston and Texas politics. I check it when I’m doing research about a political or local issue.
• Photomatt is still interesting and full of the latest about blog technology, but probably too esoteric for me by now. I’ve kind of veering  out of  software blogs recently.
• How to learn Swedish in 100 Difficult Lessons. Funny blog by gay American living in Stockholm. I don’t read it often, but generally enjoy it thoroughly every time I do.

Podcasts I follow. By the way, I am extremely picky about the podcasts I follow. I download lots of stuff, but don’t listen to as much as I should. I have several other podcasts I download and listen to, but not reliably, or more selectively. The ones below are ones I listen to almost every episode of.

• Alex Saunders Philosopher’s Zone is a a great Australian podcast about highbrow philosophy topics.
• From our own Correspondent. First person accounts by BBC reporters.
• Escapepod. Scifi ezine on podcast. Creative Commons, all right!
• Washington Week in Review podcast has inside the Beltway reporters commenting on news. I also download Bill Moyers’ podcast if I miss the Friday show.
• Miette’s Bedtime Podcast is one of my alltime faves. A british lady reads her favorite stories aloud. Damn, I’ve been neglecting this podcast. Need to catch up. One of my alltime faves.