About Richard Bowker

Author of the Portal series, the Last P.I. series, and other novels

As Tears Go By

Posted on September 15, 2012 by Richard Bowker

I didn’t read Keith Richards’ Life, but my lovely wife did. She loved it, which means I had large chunks of the book narrated to me. I particularly liked the story of the Rolling Stones’ manager, Andrew Oldham, locking Richards and Mick Jagger (then both 21 years old) in the kitchen of their apartment and not letting them out until they had written their first song. He thought the Stones had to expand beyond covers, as the Beatles had done.

What they came out of the kitchen with was a sweet little pop ballad called As Time Goes By. Not Stones material. Also, turned out there was already a song called As Time Goes By. Who knew? So Oldham changed the title to As Tears Go By, and they gave the song to the incredibly young Marianne Faithfull. Here she is singing it in 1965 (aged 18). Was she told not to move an inch during the taping?

Here is the Stones version, which was released as the B-side of 19th Nervous Breakdown later that year. Jagger sings, Richards plays the guitar, and there is a string section; the rest of the Stones are nowhere to be found.

Bishops and nuns, then and now

Posted on September 15, 2012 by Richard Bowker

I recently watched Come to the Stable, a 1949 Loretta Young movie about a couple of French nuns who get it in their heads to come to New England and build a hospital for sick kids in a town called Bethlehem.

I didn’t go to the movies much as a kid, and that’s probably why I still remember seeing this movie on the big screen. I have no idea why it was playing in a movie theater–I wasn’t around in 1949, so it had to have been a special showing of some kind. I couldn’t have been very old, because I can remember being confused by the location–could there really be two places called Bethlehem? That didn’t seem right. Anyway, the movie is in the tradition of 1940s Catholic movies like Going My Way and The Bells of Saint Mary’s. The nuns (Young and Celeste Holm) are holy innocents who get their way by being holier and more innocent than everyone they encounter, including the soft-hearted mobster who owns the land they need for the hospital and the practical bishop who has to approve their harebrained scheme.

Come to the Stable was nominated for a bunch of Oscars–most of them baffling. Back then, you were apparently guaranteed of a nomination if you appeared in a habit. (Elsa Lanchester, playing a local artist, also got a nomination for looking ditzy in a few scenes. Claire Boothe Luce, the conservative Catholic playwright/politician, got a nomination for the dopey story.) Seems to me that this sort of movie must have done a lot to pave the way for the country to elect a Catholic to the presidency. The Church wasn’t this secret foreign power intent on subverting American values–it built hospitals for sick kids!

The movie seems hopelessly quaint nowadays. I don’t think the story would work on the Hallmark channeI. I was particularly struck by the way the nuns genuflected and kissed the bishop’s ring every chance they got. Does anyone still do that? It was a given that the nuns owed the bishop absolute and unquestioned obedience. It was a given that nuns would be so unworldly they wouldn’t know what a parking ticket was, even though one of them had grown up in Chicago and the other had been a tennis champion.

So here is an American bishop nowadays:

The first American bishop criminally charged in the clergy sex abuse scandal was found guilty Thursday of a misdemeanor count of failing to report suspected child abuse, a conviction that extends the struggle of Roman Catholic leaders to restore trust in the church.

Bishop Robert Finn was acquitted on a second count. He received two years of probation, but that sentence was suspended and will be wiped from his record if he adheres to a set of conditions that include mandatory abuse reporting training, setting aside $10,000 in diocese money for abuse victim counseling, and instructing all diocesan agents to report suspected criminal activity involving minors.

And here is an American nun, Sister Simone Campbell, who recently spoke at the Democratic National Convention:

And at a convention that is revolving largely around an alleged GOP-led “war on women,” Campbell is a poignant feminist symbol. She has stood up to the Vatican’s criticisms of American nuns for what the church says is their fixation on progressive advocacy at the expense of promoting socially conservative positions.

“We’re certainly oriented toward the needs of women and responding to their needs,” she told Colbert in June, defending the nuns against the Vatican. “If that’s radical, I guess we are.”

It’s lot different from the post-war fantasy world of Come to the Stable. And I think that’s all to the good. We shouldn’t be afraid to arrest bishops who don’t protect the children in their diocese. And we should listen to nuns who have something important to say.

In which Wikipedia gets annoyed with my friend Jeff

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Richard Bowker

In response to the Philip Roth brouhaha, my friend Jeff fixed an error in my brief, uninteresting Wikipedia entry. The fix is still there, but it clearly annoyed Wikipedia, which has now added this statement:

This article relies on references to primary sources or sources affiliated with the subject. Please add citations from reliable and independent sources.

So there. I guess I could add some references to secondary sources about the publication date for Marlborough Street, but learning their editing model will take more time than I care to give it just now. WYSIWYG it isn’t.

Does a real living breathing human being look at all these changes and pass judgment on them? This is either very impressive or very depressing. Probably both.

“Hope Springs” and the most exciting football game ever played

Posted on September 10, 2012 by Richard Bowker

I went to watch Hope Springs the other day. Meh. It has three A-list stars (Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, and Steve Carrell) doing the best they can with a C-list script. Maybe B-minus. But it, and the beginning of the football season, reminded me of the most exciting football game ever played.

The game took place on November 23, 1968. Harvard and Yale were playing for the Ivy League title at a standing-room-only Harvard Stadium. Both teams were undefeated, but Yale, featuring players like Calvin Hill (who later played for the Dallas Cowboys) was a big favorite. Yale raced to a 22-0 lead, and led 29-13 with 42 seconds left. Then Harvard scored a touchdown, and of course went for the two-point conversion. They made it — down by eight. As expected, an on-side kick. Harvard recovered. Another touchdown with no time remaining. A two-point conversion — a pass to the tight end, Pete Varney (number 80)! Final score: Harvard 29, Yale 29.

The Harvard Crimson immortalized the game with this headline:

I was at that game along with my lovely girlfriend (now my lovely wife), standing at the top of the stadium overlooking the end zone at the closed end of the stadium, where all the action took place at the end of the game. It doesn’t get any better than that/

Tommy Lee Jones was there too, playing on Harvard’s offensive line.

Four years ago Kevin Rafferty released a documentary about that game, fittingly titled Harvard Beats Yale 29-29. It is fabulous (the New York Times reviewer called it “preposterously entertaining”). When the movie first came out I it at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square with a friend who had watched the game from the Yale side of the field; that was the right place to see it, but you can, and should, stream it from Netflix.

The movie goes back and forth between the broadcast video of the game (a local production featuring the beloved Boston sportscaster Don Gillis) and interviews with players on both teams. You start by thinking it’s just going to be an exercise in nostalgia, but by the end it has become way more than that, as all these successful men reflect, with a mixture of humor and regret and wonder, on those unforgettable hours in their lives so long ago. Some of them (uniformly on the Yale side) turn out to have been pricks back then, and they’re still pricks now. Others seem are funny and, yeah, lovable.

Jones is interviewed, and he is terribly serious as he reflects on what it was like to be out there on the field as the tension mounted at the end of the game, and you realized how critical it was not to make a mistake. One Yale player sheepishly reflects on his one claim to fame back then–for a while he dated a Vassar undergraduate named Meryl Streep. (And that’s where I made the connection between Hope Springs and The Game.)

There are other connections with famous people. A Yale player had been George W. Bush’s roommate (the filmmaker himself is Bush’s cousin). Famously, Jones’s roommate at Harvard was Al Gore. The Yale quarterback, Brian Dowling, was the prototype for the character B.D. in Doonesbury; Gary Trudeau started a version of the comic strip when he was at Yale.

But the connections aren’t what matter. What matters are the people. And The Game.

Wikipedia standards and the Roth affair

Posted on September 9, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Here we discuss Philip Roth’s open letter to The New Yorker to get Wikipedia to change the “Inspiration” section of its article on his novel The Human Stain. For those of you who just can’t get enough of this story, here is a deep dive into the back and forth in the revision history of the article, where we see the editors actually adding more detail to the incorrect discussion of Anatole Broyard possibly being the basis for the novel’s main character.

The post clears up one point for me. Roth couldn’t have just posted his “open letter” on his own blog and claimed it was a secondary source. Wikipedia is wise to that one:

Anyone can create a website or pay to have a book published, then claim to be an expert in a certain field. For that reason self-published media—whether books, newsletters, personal websites, open wikis, blogs, personal pages on social networking sites, Internet forum postings, or tweets—are largely not acceptable. This includes any website whose content is largely user-generated, including the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), Cracked.com, CBDB.com, collaboratively created websites such as wikis, and so forth, with the exception of material on such sites that is labeled as originating from credentialed members of the sites’ editorial staff, rather than users.

So Roth had to transform himself into his own secondary source by getting his letter published in The New Yorker. That worked. (We’ll probably never know why Roth felt the need to go to these lengths to correct the article. Presumably he didn’t write letters to the editor complaining when all those reviews raised the possibility that the novel was based on Broyard. And the fact that the reviews did raise the possibility is sort of noteworthy in its own right–perhaps not about the novel itself, but about the context in which the novel was written. That’s a point that the Lawyers, Guns & Money blogger raises at the end of his post.)

I’m OK with Wikipedia’s policy on secondary sources, although I haven’t thought deeply about it. Crowd-sourcing content obviously has its limits, and Wikipedia obviously has had to figure out a way to avoid complete anarchy. I’m not sure I could come up with a better solution than they have.

So where are we with my little Wikipedia problem? Jeff has kindly fixed the error in the publication date for Marlborough Street, and the fix is still there a day later. The article uses this site as its source, which also has the date wrong, so that’s the problem. But then there are any number of other sites offering used copies for sale and listing the publication date as 1987. Do they count, I wonder?

Philip Roth writes a letter to Wikipedia, and we should all read it

Posted on September 8, 2012 by Richard Bowker

This is pretty funny, and a little sad. Philip Roth came across an inaccuracy in the Wikipedia article about his novel The Human Stain. The article stated that the novel was “allegedly based on the life of the writer Anatole Broyard.” But it wasn’t. Roth informed Wikipedia of the error, but the Wikipedia refused to make a change:

Yet when, through an official interlocutor, I recently petitioned Wikipedia to delete this misstatement, along with two others, my interlocutor was told by the “English Wikipedia Administrator”—in a letter dated August 25th and addressed to my interlocutor—that I, Roth, was not a credible source: “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,” writes the Wikipedia Administrator—“but we require secondary sources.”

So he wrote an open letter to The New Yorker instead, giving the background of the novel, which is about a college professor who gets caught up in a political correctness scandal.

Anatole Broyard was a literary critic who never acknowledged that he was of African-American ancestry. The main character of The Human Stain is a professor who never acknowledged his African-American ancestry. So that’s where reviewers made the connection. But Roth goes to great lengths to make the case that this connection isn’t correct. “Novel writing is for the novelist a game of let’s pretend,” he says. He took a germ of an idea–a muddle-headed remark made in class by a friend of his at Princeton, and its consequences–and populated a novel from it.

The Human Stain is great, but I particularly admire the shorter novels he been writing lately. The Humbling was too over-the-top with the standard Roth sexual fantasies for my taste (and that of most critics, I think). But Nemesis, about an imagined polio outbreak in Newark in 1944, was powerful and moving.

But back to Wikipedia. Its article about The Human Stain is now up to date, citing Roth’s explanation of the novel’s genesis. They don’t waste any time! And now I may be inspired to tackle an error in my brief and uninteresting Wikipedia writeup: it says Marlborough Street was published in 1975, but it was actually published in 1987; I still hadn’t learned how to write in 1975. They’ve got secondary sources that also list the book as being published in 1975, so apparently they’re not going to take my word for it. I have no idea where that date came from. I wonder if they’ll accept this blog post as a source? I suppose I could post a photo of the copyright page . . .

Eschew utilization of obfuscatory verbiage, and other obvious rules everyone should follow

Posted on September 8, 2012 by Richard Bowker

I’ve been reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. It’s great! Kahneman is not quite as funny and entertaining as Dan Gilbert, but he makes a huge amount of fascinating research understandable. And the guy won a Nobel Prize, so you’ve got to give him props for that.

He has a brief section about how to write a persuasive message. It’s related to the concept of “cognitive ease” vs. “cognitive strain”. Cognitive strain makes your brain work harder, forcing you to move from System 1 to System 2, in his terminology. If you want people to believe you, you want to minimize their cognitive strain. He says:

The general principle is that anything you can do to reduce cognitive strain will help, so you should first maximize legibility.

This seems undeniably true. I read a lot of rèsumés, and if I had one piece of advice for job seekers, it would be: Don’t use 10-point Times New Roman! It’s hard to read! Especially for people over 40! The harder I have to work to get through your life story, the less I’m interested.

Here’s another obvious rule:

If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.

And he cites a Princeton study showing that “couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility.” The study’s amusing title is “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly.”

Why don’t people understand this? The rèsumés I review are usually from writers, and I can’t tell you how many of them say “utilize” instead of “use,” and use “author” as a verb instead of “write.” And of course there is the endless repetition of buzzwords like “leverage” and “synergy.” How does that help their cause?

Here are a couple of other, less interesting rules Kahneman cites from research:

In addition to making your message simple, try to make it memorable. A study showed that aphorisms that rhymed were more likely to be taken as insightful than when they did not.
If you quote a source, choose one with a name that is easy to pronounce.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that people will believe something nonsensical just because it rhymes, or is written in a nice font. But it helps. There is also probably something of a halo effect in play, which Kahneman doesn’t talk about in this section but brings up elsewhere in the book. If something is beautifully written, your admiration for the writing will probably leak over into a stronger willingness to believe what the writing is about. That’s something I worry about; see my post on Ayn Rand and Malcolm Gladwell.

Here come the ebook price cuts

Posted on September 6, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Apparently we were waiting for a federal judge to sign off on the settlement between the DOJ and the three publishers — Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins — before we got them. Here‘s the story in the Times.

The settlement approved on Thursday called for the publishers to end their contracts with Apple within one week. The publishers must also terminate contracts with e-book retailers that contain restrictions on the retailer’s ability to set the price of an e-book or contain a so-called “most favored nation” clause, which says that no other retailer is allowed to sell e-books for a lower price.

For the next two years, the settling publishers may not agree to contracts with e-book retailers that restrict the retailer’s “discretion over e-book pricing,” the court said. For five years, the publishers are not allowed to make contracts with retailers that includes a most favored nation clause.

In other news, Amazon announced a new generation of Kindle Fires, probably putting them in direction competition with iPads. (And who knows what Apple has up its sleeve at its announcement next week?)

So, clearly Amazon is going to cut ebook prices, presumably to help Kindle sales and freeze out other vendors:

Amazon, which in April called the settlement “a big win for Kindle owners,” has vowed to drop prices on its e-books, probably to the $9.99 point that it once preferred for most bestsellers and newly released e-books.

Then what? Presumably some or all of the following:

Barnes & Noble and other ebook vendors will try to cut prices to match. Maybe they won’t be able to, and they will lose their reason for existing. Apple will obviously continue to exist, but they’re not gonna be happy about having to compete with Amazon.
There will be increasing pressure on the other three publishers in the suit to settle, as their ebook prices start looking ridiculously high next to those of the competition.
Brick & mortar bookstores will also come under increasing pressure, as lower ebook prices and better devices on which to read them cut into their business model.
Publishers will therefore need to reevaluate their own current business models, which rely on ebooks to be priced high enough not to cannibalize sales from print books. With less ability to sell print books, some of them may lose their reason for existing.
New online ebook vendors will pop up that can figure out a way to compete with Amazon. (Buy ten ebooks and get one free, 40% off all fantasy novels this week only, etc.)

What did I miss? Whatever happens, the publishing world will start looking a lot different over the next couple of years.

Parsing “factual shortcuts”

Posted on September 4, 2012 by Richard Bowker

“Factual shortcuts” was the phrase of the day after Paul Ryan’s speech at the Republican convention last week. It was how AP characterized statements he made about the Medicare cuts, the closing of a GM plants, etc. Many other outlets reprinted the story and the characterization, so it received huge play in the media.

It’s an interesting phrase. Clearly someone at AP had to think hard to come up with something that was softer than “lies” but stronger than “misstatement” or “inaccuracy” or “questionable claims”. It drove Andrew Sullivan nuts:

“Factual shortcuts” are newspeak for lies. Zack Beauchamp goes nuts at the media euphemisms for lies. I think they should call them “enhanced campaigning techniques.”

Daily Kos snarked:

What is a “factual shortcut”? Does that mean that you were on your way towards a fact, but then decided to hop a fence and cut through Cow Patty Fields?

It really does seem to be a neologism. Google only gives hits related to the AP usage. Google Ngram Viewer doesn’t show any occurrences through 2008. So somebody just added an idiom to the language!

But why bother? We already have a perfectly good phrase that says pretty much the same thing. You could say “Ryan’s speech played fast and loose with the facts” and people would understand you perfectly. And Kos is right–the phrase doesn’t really make any sense. It seems to rely on an implied negative connotation to the word “shortcut”, as in “there are no shortcuts to success” or similar phrases. But where is the shortcut in factual shortcuts? Where are you heading when you take a factual shortcut? It sounds like a quick and perhaps morally dubious way of reaching a fact. But of course its meaning is exactly the opposite — it’s a way of avoiding a fact.

I suppose the phrase was formed by analogy with “ethical shortcut,” which is a morally dubious way of resolving an ethical challenge. So, a “factual shortcut” is a morally dubious way of dealing with a fact–by twisting it in some way so that it means something different from what ordinary people would recognize as the truth. In this interpretation, Ryan didn’t say anything that you could directly point to as a lie, but if people had all the facts, instead of the ones he twisted, a different reality would emerge.

OK, that’s the best I can do. Ultimately an idiom doesn’t have to make sense. I don’t really know what the literal meaning of “play fast and loose” is, but I understand it well enough.

Still, it would be helpful if the mainstream media could bring itself to utter the word lies.

More on the Harvard Cheating Scandal

Posted on September 3, 2012 by Richard Bowker

See here for my previous post on the scandal. One of the writers at the great Lawyers, Guns, & Money blog has another post about it. The New York Times article giving the students’ side of the case doesn’t make the writer more sympathetic.

In other words, a substantial number of students at one of America’s elite educational institutions expected a gut course, and were appalled when they were expected to learn something and given exams where there was some risk of bad performance.

I can easily imagine that there was some of that going on, but the situation really does sound different to me. Here is a quote from a Harvard Crimson article the writer links to:

Another student wrote that he or she joined about 15 other students at a teaching fellow’s office hours on the morning of May 3, just hours before the final take-home exam’s 5 p.m. deadline.

“Almost all of [the students at office hours] had been awake the entire night, and none of us could figure out what an entire question (worth 20% of the grade) was asking,” the student wrote. “On top of this, one of the questions asked us about a term that had never been defined in any of our readings and had not been properly defined in class, so the TF had to give us a definition to use for the question.”

That same student also expressed frustration that Platt [the professor] had canceled his office hours the morning before the exam was due. In a brief email to the class just after 10 a.m. on May 3, Platt apologized for having to cancel his office hours on short notice that day due to an appointment.

The Lawyers, Guns, & Money writer talks about the students’ “pathetic sense of entitlement,” but this quote doesn’t sound like students who were annoyed that they were actually being asked to study for a course where they had expected an easy A. It sounds more like students who were in a panic when they realized the course hadn’t prepared them for the final.

I’m still inclined to view this more as a case of educational malpractice than of organized cheating by a bunch of entitled elite students. And I’m still convinced that the Harvard administration is going to have a tough time making any charges stick against these kids. I have a reunion coming up at Harvard in a few weeks that I was making plans to not attend. It might be worth going just to find out how Faust and company are handling this thing.