Category: books

>Immaturity and the Housing Bubble: Review of Edmund Andrews’s "Busted"

~ Clarissa ~ 8 Comments

Andrews is a long-standing reporter for the economics section of the New York Times. This is what makes the story he tells in Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown so scary. Andrews’s book presents two closely connected stories: the history of the creation of the US housing bubble that started the current economic crisis and his personal story of getting into an incredible amount of debt in the years that led to the collapse of the housing market.

This is a book that needs to be read, even though it will make you lose your faith in humanity for a long time to come. Andrews analyzes in great detail how the lending institutions gradually became more and more driven by the desire for instant profit without stopping to think for a second what will happen long term. The author also brings to light the incredible, mind-boggling stupidity of Greenspan, Bernanke, and Co. He demonstrates how corrupt and dishonest the Bush Jr. administration was.

None of this, however, is very new. At least not to me. From the moment I moved from Quebec to the US, it became obvious to me that the housing prices in this country were ridiculously over-inflated. I saw my friends and colleagues pay really insane, seven-figure prices for poky little apartments in Manhattan or run-down bungalows in Connecticut and immediately realized that this was the game I would never agree to pay. Mortgaging away your life for the next 30 years in hopes that the bubble will get even bigger and the price of your house would magically grow seemed like a genuinely stupid proposition even for someone like me, who at 27 was woefully ignorant about economy. Today, when I understand the workings of this country’s economy and politics a lot better, I am even more reluctant to participate in this insanity.

What really bothered me in Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown was not the story of the housing bubble. It was the story of a nearly fantastic immaturity. Immaturity on both sides, the lenders’ and the borrowers’. Those who handed out completely unsecured loans to people incapable of ever paying them off and those who accepted loans they could never even imagine paying off. Andrews was one of those who accepted. And accepted. And accepted some more.

The immaturity and total intellectual impotence of this man – who, once again, writes for the economics section of The New York Times – is mind-boggling. He decides to take out a loan to buy a half-million dollar house. As a result, he knows that his entire paycheck will go towards his alimony payments and the mortgage with not a dime left over for the bills. Of course, he hopes that his new wife will make enough money to cover all of their living expenses. Nothing would be all that wrong about this picture, if it weren’t for one tiny detail. His new wife has been a house-wife who hasn’t worked a day in the past 20 years. Besides, she is accustomed by her former husband to living the life of luxury. She didn’t even do any work around the house because her first husband paid for a housekeeper. On top of that, Andrews gets this woman to move to a completely different part of the country. Then, he expects her to find a well-paying job – with no skills, no connections, no experience of being an employee – and start paying all the bills: “We had both assumed she could earn enough for us to get by. We didn’t have any idea how she would do it; we were both simply sure that she could do it.” It is incredible to encounter such profound intellectual impotence from any one over the age of 12.

This is not the weirdest thing about Andrews’s relationship with Patty, the woman who eventually became his second wife. He left his first wife and proposed to Patty before Patty and he had ANY kind of a relationship. They hadn’t even as much as kissed, let alone had sex or lived together. And these are not some horny teenagers. These are people who are almost 50 at the time. During marriage counselling, Andrews and Patty discover that they do not see eye to eye on 90% of issues discussed. This, however, does not suggest to them that it might make sense to postpone the wedding until they actually get to know something about each other.

Andrews’s path to penury begins when he takes out a sub-prime mortgage on his new house. Over the next few years he gets so far into debt that you couldn’t dig him out of it with an excavator, just to keep the stupid super expensive house. And you know why? In his own words, “Even though it was all about buying a house in the suburbs, it felt vaguely exciting, edgy, and a little gangsta.” When a balding, paunchy, white gentleman in his late forties is motivated to take out an impossible loan because he wants to feel “gangsta”, of all the stupid things, you know that something is seriously wrong here. And this is supposed to be a well-educated upper-middle-class individual, who works as a journalist, for Pete’s sake!

In order to climb out of the financial hole he has dug for himself, Andrews tries every crazy borrowing practice out there. He runs up a staggering credit card debt, empties his pension account, and even hits up for money his elderly mother. There is just one thing he doesn’t do: try to cut down the costs. Andrews goes through his wedding to his second wife in throes of a panic attack over mounting bills and huge debt. After that, he proceeds to pay the caterers that were hired for the wedding. Of course, the idea that people who can’t pay the electricity bill might be able to do without a catered wedding never crosses his mind.

For a while, Andrews’s family income rises to $200,000 per year. I don’t know about you, people, but for me this is a staggering amount of money. One could live like a king on half that amount. Still, Andrews cannot make ends meet. Even though the debt is growing and his interest rates become sky-high, he keeps spending on things that cannot possily be considered necessary expenses: cable telivision, HBO, beach house, Ipods, expensive clothes, the list is endless.

Andrews criticizes the irresponsible lenders virulently. He never stops to think, though, that those who criminally handed out unsecured loans were motivated by the same basic immaturity that got him into so much trouble: have fun now and assume that things will somehow work out in the end. These people, who are so immature that it makes my hair stand on end in horror, are the ones that got us into this mess. They mortgaged away our future, and their children’s and grand-children’s future because they wanted that Ipod, that house, that vacation right now and didn’t want to pay for them. Now, we will all have to pay for their lack of responsibility and their inhuman immaturity for decades to come.

[To be continued…]

>Living Oprah by Robyn Okrant: A Review

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

>A review from an anonymous guest blogger:

I must admit I was excited when I downloaded Living Oprah on Kindle. I was anticipating one of two things: either a very easy unpretentious read with humorous anecdotes (along the lines of Confessions of a Shopaholic) or more of an investigative account analyzing the Oprah phenomenon from a critical standpoint (along the lines of Selling Sickness).

Well, a few pages in I realized that the book was neither. It was just a big yawn of predictable jokes and the author failing to explain what the point of her project actually was. Is she a crazy Oprah fan? Apparently not (at least she says she isn’t, despite her countless recounts of how admirable, wonderful and inspiring Oprah is). Is she a critic ready to discuss openly the negative impact an Oprah-type show can have on its audience? Once again, hardly. Rather, the author positions herself as an intellectual who is above dressing up (sports bras and granny panties being her underwear of choice), an avid feminist (despite feeling a sense of trepidation before asking her husband’s permission to embark on the project and going as far as doubting that her marriage will last through the endeavor. Umm, dramatic much?) and certainly not a fame seeker (after an extremely long explanation of why she wanted to remain anonymous, the author concedes to revealing her name for the sake of being interviewed). I was confused! But worst of all, certainly not entertained.

I will give you a couple of examples. Even though I could go on and on, I do not want you to experience the same sense of boredom to which I subjected myself.

The author makes fun of Oprah’s suggestion that she purchase a pair of leopard-print flats. By making fun of it, all I mean to say is that she tells us she laughed at the suggestion hysterically. Ok, funny. Yet, further on in the book she falls in love with the shoes. Umm, I kept wondering: what was the point of that story?

The author makes fun of Oprah’s fans who nearly worship her and go into a frenzy at her shows. She attends one of the tapings and stresses and underlines endlessly how different she is from all those other fans. Yet, she describes the overwhelming feeling of excitement she, too, succumbed to at the show. Ok, what was the point of this story?

She seems to criticize Oprah’s suggestions to renovate, remodel and engage in other home-improvement projects. Yet, when she follows all these suggestions, she seems happy with the result.

She seems to criticize Oprah’s constant dieting projects. Yet is really excited to have lost weight and shares several pictures of herself in a bikini to prove the point.

The author tries to show that watching every single episode of Oprah alienated her from her friends and loved ones. In order to prove the point, she tells us about her family’s Thanksgiving dinner where she had to go upstairs to watch a taped episode of Oprah while her family was downstairs laughing and enjoying the holiday. Ok, again I am confused. What was the rush of watching the episode at that particular time? It was taped anyway. Well no, I do get it. It was a far-fetched attempt at creating drama and showing how hard the project was.

I forced myself to read the book to the end. I was curious to read the author’s conclusion. After all, she spent 365 days following Oprah’s every word of advice. So, is Oprah’s show a god-send or an evil creation? Is following Oprah’s suggestions detrimental or a great idea? But no, the conclusion is not about that. Actually, it’s not about anything. It goes on and on to tell us how happy the author is living her own life and not following someone else’s advice (again, despite the author’s countless examples of her million-and-one insecurities listed throughout the book). I have one word to summarize my impression of Living Oprah: blah.

From Clarissa:

I have to confess that I was the one to recommend this book to the reviewer (without having read it.) I’m interested in this type of books (although not enough to read them myself :-)) because they represent a curious social phenomenon. One of the prime examples of this phenomenon is Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously. A blogger decided to follow Julia Child’s recipes within a year and blogged about it. The experiment was so successful that it turned into an inane book and an equally inane film based on it. Robyn Okrant decided to do something even easier and simply attached herself to the image of wildly popular Oprah Winfrey.

Many people decided to do something similar and start some kind of project that would later morph into a book over even a movie. This is the book equivalent of reality TV shows. For the most part, even when the original idea is not bad (like in Living Oprah), the authors lack even the most basic sense of humor and intelligence that are needed to make the project a success.

Celebrity culture encourages everyone to think of themselves as potential celebrities, as possessing unique if unacknowledged gifts.

People readily turn away from the unhospitable reality, where achieving fame and fortune requires hard work, dedication, and sacrifice, and plunge themsmelves into the world of make-believe, where they are entitled to everything just because. As a result, the publishing market will keep saturated with insipi books like Living Oprah: My One-Year Experiment to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk.

Chris Hedges’s Empire of Illusion: A Review

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

The moment China, the oil-rich states, and other international investors stop buying U.S. Treasury Bonds, the dollar will become junk. Inflation will rocket upward. We will become Weimar Germany. A furious and sustained backlash by a betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared intellectually and psychologically for collapse, will sweep aside the Democrats and most of the Republicans. A cabal of proto-fascist misfits, from Christian demagogues to simpletons like Sarah Palin to loudmouth talk-show hosts, whom we naively dismiss as buffoons, will find a following with promises of revenge and moral renewal. . . There are powerful corporate entities, fearful of losing their influence and wealth, arrayed against us. They are waiting for a moment to strike, a national crisis that will allow them, in the name of national security and moral renewal, to take complete control. The tools are in place. These antidemocratic forces, which will seek to make an alliance with the radical Christian Right and other extremists, will use fear, chaos, the hatred for the ruling elites, and the specter of left-wing dissent and terrorism to impose draconian controls to extinguish our democracy. And while they do it, they will be waving the American flag, chanting patriotic slogans, promising law and order, and clutching the Christian cross.

–Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion

This long quote from Chris Hedges’s Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle demonstrates perfectly why I think this is a stunning piece of journalism at its very best and a book that any responsible citizen has to read. I absolutely loved this book (except Chapter 2, which seemed like it was taken from a completely different book and can be resumed as “Pornography bad, Dworkin good, sex scary, intimacy comforting.”) I suggest that this chapter be skipped altogether in favor of the brilliant political analysis of the rest of the book.

Empire of Illusion is an angry book. Hedges, one of the very few remaining journalists in the US who do actual journalism instead of regurgitating washed out mantras handed to them by their keepers, is not afraid of hurting the public’s tender sensibilities by the truth. He realizes the gravity of our current situation and is unafraid of telling the readers that our economic and political future looks bleak. The way our government tries to address the collapse of the economy, which it coyly terms “a recession”, by throwing taxpayers’ money at the problem is wrong and self-destructive:

We are vainly trying to return to a bubble economy, of the sort that once handed us the illusion of wealth, rather than confront the stark reality that lies ahead. We are told massive borrowing will create jobs and re-inflate real estate values and the stock market. We remain tempted by mirages, by the illusion that we can, still, all become rich.

None of these so-called measures are working. Endless bailouts and stimulus packages that have indebted us in an unheard of way have failed to jumpstart the economy and move the country out of this crisis. Still, nobody is proposing any alternatives to this failed system. The economy of the US operates in exactly the same manner as the unsustainable Soviet economy. Nobody, however, is willing to recognize it. People believe that if you call this perversion “capitalism” and “free market economy” often enough, it will actually turn into capitalism and free market economy. Reality has been substituted by illusion in so many areas of life, Hedges observes, that people often refuse to see and identify what is right in front of their faces. This rejection of reality in favor of illusion haunts all spheres of our lives:

Faith in ourselves, in a world of make-believe, is more important than reality. Reality, in fact, is dismissed and shunned as an impediment to success, a form of negativity. The New Age mysticism and pop psychology of television personalities, evangelical pastors, along with the array of self-help best-sellers penned by motivational speakers, psychiatrists, and business tycoons, all peddle a fantasy. Reality is condemned in these popular belief systems as the work of Satan, as defeatist, as negativity, or as inhibiting our inner essence and power. Those who question, those who doubt, those who are critical, those who are able to confront reality and who grasp the hollowness of celebrity culture are shunned and condemned for their pessimism.

The reason for this resistance to acknowledging the reality that lies right in front of us is that the very few of us possess the intellectual, psycholigical, emotional, and linguistic tools needed to perform this task. Rather than decipher the incomprehensible, confusing, and often painful reality around them, people prefer to escape into the world of cliches and make-belief. Who wants to dedicate their lives to addressing complex, important issues, if you can happily escape into the world of triviality?

Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion. We ask to be indulged and comforted by cliches, stereotypes, and inspirational messages that tell us we can be whoever we seek to be, that we live in the greatest country on earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities, and that our future will always be glorious and prosperous, either because of our own attributes or our national character or because we are blessed by God. In this world, all that matters is the consistency of our belief systems. The ability to amplify lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives lies and mythical narratives the aura of uncontested truth. We become trapped in the linguistic prison of incessant repetition.

(I’m quoting so much because the way Hedges writes is so powerful, concise, and convincing that I don’t want to deprive my readers of the enormus pleasure of seeing the way a real journalist should write. This is a rare pleasure nowadays.)

One would expect, of course, our system of higher education to help students acquire the intellectual and linguistic tools needed to analyze the failings of our poitical and economic systems. This, however, does not happen. As anybody working in the higher education system knows all too well, our universities have been undergoing the process of transforming themselves into robot-churning factories. Hedges’s understanding of the way the higer education system has been appropriated by the military-industrial complex is profound:

The bankruptcy of our economic and political systems can be traced directly to the assault against the humanities. The neglect of the humanities has allowed elites to organize education and society around predetermined answers to predetermined questions. Students are taught structures designed to produce these answers even as these structures have collapsed. But those in charge, because they are educated only in specializations designed to maintain these economic and political structures, have run out of ideas. They have been trained only to find solutions that will maintain the system.

Our universities have become nothing but “high-priced occupational training centers.” Graduates are incapable of approaching their reality in a critical way. All they are trained to do is to service the system as efficiently as possible. Now that the system itself is in dire need of a rehaul, there are very few people around who would be at least capable of recognizing this fact, let alone do something about it.

For a while now, I have been discussing with my friends and colleagues the very scenario that Hedges describes in the first quote of this post. This crisis is not going away any time soon. People will start to get scared, restless, depressed, and angry. They will turn to the Evangeical fascists for consolation. It’s good to see that there are thinkers who realize that we are going in this scary direction and are trying to do something about it.

We all remember Obama’s insightful remark about bitter people clinging to guns, religion and hatred. I still remember what a relief it was to hear a politician say something so smart and relevant for a change. If the President is smart enough to understand that we are going in the direction of religious fascism, then why is he doing all he can to push us towards this horrifying prospect?

>Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution: A Review, Part II

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

>Among other things, Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (The Terry Lectures Series) is such a joy to read because of his brilliant deconstruction of Christopher Hitchens’s obnoxious God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything: “Hitchens seems to hold the obscure Jewish sect of the second-century BC known as the Maccabees responsible not only for the emergence of Christianity but also for the advent of Islam. It is surprising that he does not pin Stalinism on them as well.” Eagleton is absolutely right when he suggests that atheistic fundamentalism is in many respects an exact copy of religious fundamentalism. It is just as intransigent, dogmatic, reductive, and obnoxious.

Everything I have said so far might produce the erroneous impression that Eagleton is trying to create a defense of Christianity. This is, of course, not true. The critic is opposed to a unilaterall dismissal of this complex and intricate worldview but he recognizes that “Apart from the signal instance of Stalinism, it is hard to think of a historical movement that has more stupidly betrayed its own revolutionary origins.” Apart from Eagleton’s unintelligent characterization of Stalinism as stupid, this statement could not be more true. Many people’s hatred of Christianity has nothing to do with Jesus’s teachings but is rather addressed to what many of the proponents of this religion have done with it: “Far from refusing to conform to the powers of this world, Christianity has become the nauseating cant of lying politicians, corrupt bankers, and fanatical neocons, as well as an immensely profitable industry in its own right.” (I swear to God in heaven, that if I ever learn to write half as good as Eagleton, I will die happy.) Are the actions of many of its followers enough, however, to discredit Christianity once and for all?, Eagleton asks. Haven’t the tenets of Liberalism, the ideals of Enlightenment, the central points of Marxism suffered the same fate? Does this mean, then, that we should abandon all of these ideological and intellectual movements in their entirety?

In his brilliant analysis, Eagleton hits upon an absolutely wonderful definition of Christianity that I have been searching for my entire life: “Any preaching of the Gospel which fails to constitute a scandal and affront to the political state is … effectively worthless.” It is amazing that a Marxist like Eagleton has been able to understand the very nature of the New Testament so much better than all the quasi-religious freaks out there put together and multiplied by five.

One of the things that make Eagleton’s philosophy especially endearing to me is his passionate defense of the values of Enlightenment. He enumerates the ways in which Enlightenment has come to defeat its own basic propositions but still maintains that the task of Enlightenment is far from over. Just like Christianity, Enlightenment has been discredited by the atrocities done in its name by its misguided, unintelligent followers. This is why so many people today fall over themselves in their rush to abandon the Enlightened philosophy as wrong, evil, and outdated. These thinkers are just as wrong as the wholesale deniers of the value of religion. Eagleton himself was guilty of Enlightenment-bashing on more than one occasion, and I am glad to see that his position on the issue seems to have shifted towards a greater degree of reason (pun intended.)

One of the most fun characteristics of Eagleton’s writing is the way he pokes fun at Americans: “For some in the USA, the C-word is ‘can’t.’ Negativity is often looked upon there as a kind of thought crime. Not since the advent of socialist realism has the world witnessed such pathological upbeatness.” Eagleton defends his way of voicing his critiques that soem people may stupidly deem offensive: “Societies in which any kind of abrasive criticism constitutes ‘abuse’ clearly have a problem.“

Once again, let me reiterate that this book is fantastic. If you only read one book of philosophy this year, let it be this one You are going to have a blast reading it. It is one of those books where you feel extremely sad to turn over the last page because you want the jouissance to continue.

>Reason, Faith, and Revolution by Terry Eagleton: A Review, Part I

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

>In April of 2008, Terry Eagleton gave a series of talks at Yale University. Since I was in the process of looking for a job, I only managed to visit the last lecture in the series. Eagleton’s brilliant lecture on religion and the subsequent reception made two things very clear to me. First, Eagleton is an amazing lecturer and listening to him is one of the greatest intellectual pleasures one can experience (especially at Yale, where intellectual pleasures – or actually, pleasures of any kind – are few and far between.) Second, Eagleton’s personal life is pretty contemptible and makes one wonder how it is possible to be so brilliant and so daft at the same time.
I was very happy to discover that a book based on Eagleton’s lecture series has not only appeared in print but has also been made cheap enough for me to buy it in Kindle version. This collection of essays is written in Eagleton’s incomparably beautiful style that is funny and incisive at the same time. The theme of the essays is fascinating: Eagleton offers an approach to religion from the Left that is neither reductive nor stupid, as similar books often tend to be. The playfulness with which Eagleton talks about religion offers a beautiful contrast to the usual deathly gravitas informing the style that academics both on the Left and on the Right employ to discuss religion.

With his incomparable sense of humor, Eagleton makes fun of the entity he calls “Ditchkins.” This is his new term for referring simultaneously to Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Eagleton ridicules Ditchkins’s reductive and simplistic vision of religion that forces them to enter into an unproductive science versus religion dichotomy: “Unlike George Bush, God is not an interventionist kind of ruler. It is this autonomy of the world which makes science and Richard Dawkins possible in the first place.” Religion, says Eagleton, deserves an analysis that is at least a little bit more profound than the usual all-religion-is-bad approach taken by many Liberals. In their defense of rationalism, the critics of religion often demonstrate an irrationalism which is as strong as the one they keep denouncing: “This straw-targeting of Christianity is now drearily commonplace among academics and intellectuals – that is to say, among those who would not allow a first-year student to get away with the vulgar caricatures in which they themselves indulge with such insouciance.“

Eagleton doesn’t stop at destroying the pseudo-rationalist piety of the so-called progressive scientists. He also demonstrates – in his inimitable, hilarious way – the ridiculous nature of the US fundamentalist Evangelicals and their utter failure to understand pretty much anything about the religion they claim to hold in such a high regard.

Of course, as happens with every good book, there are things in Eagleton’s essay collection that I find unconvincing. Eagleton surmises that the resurgence of the importance of religion in the late capitalist society is a postnationalist phenomenon. I am a lot more weary than Eagleton of accepting the very existence of post-racism, post-feminism, post-nationalism, and the likes. In the US, for example, virulent nationalism and fundamentalist religiousness walk hand in hand and do not exist without each other. Evangelical fundamentalism has become the national idea of the US for the lack of any other set of beliefs or concerns that can possibly bind this country together. Whenever somebody begins to talk about post-nationalism and post-racism, I know that this is either a fan of the Oprah Show or an academic hiding deep within the ivory tower.

It is impossible to read this book by one of the greatest living philosophers and literary critics without having uproarious fun on every single page. If you want to indulge yourself by reading a philosophical treatise that is exceptionally well-written and that will make you laugh until it hurts, Eagleton’s new collection of essays is perfect for you.

>Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller: A Review

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

>I normally don’t read biographies but http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=clasblo-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&asins=0385513992 was so much fun that I finished this huge 600-pages long volume in 4 days. Heller’s biography of Ayn Rand is extremely detailed (sometimes, excessively so), but it is overall well-written and fun to read.

For the most part, Heller sticks to relating the facts and doesn’t attempt to offer her own interpretation of anything. This is a very good decision for this author because on the few occasions that she does venture an opinion, she almost often commits some annoying gaffe. Attempting to analyze (unsuccessfully, I might add) Rand’s personality, Heller comes up with the following weird statement: “Rand was Russian by both birth and temperament. Born into a bourgeois Jewish family…” Evidently, Heller doesn’t seem to realize that if you are born into a Jewish family, you can hardly be Russian at the same time. Later on, Heller shows her complete lack of knowledge about the Soviet Union when she claims that “not much economic or technological progress has been made during Communism’s 75 year reign.” This is a glaring lack of understanding of her subject matter, and I wish Heller abstained from talking about things she knows absolutely nothing about.

I am very grateful to Heller for offering her opinions very rarely throughout the book because wherever she does, her point of view strikes me as profoundly uninformed. She goes as far as saying that the American use of nuclear weapons against Japan “saved hundreds of thousands of American lives, and possibly as many Japanese lives.” Overall, however, she sticks to the facts and spares her readers the painful necessity to confront her profound ignorance of world politics.

One of the most unfortunate characteristics of this otherwise good and informative volume is the author’s excessive reliance on the information provided by Rand’s longtime gigolo Nathaniel Branden. This talentless individual attached himself to the writer at the early age of 19 and spent his entire life mooching off of her talent and accomplishments. After her death, his earnings and importance obviously diminished, so Branden decided to keep milking his affair with Rand by sharing with the world every single detail about their sexual relationship. For some unknown reason, Heller doesn’t realize that a person, whose only way to make his living is by exploiting a sexual relationship he had with someone famous, cannot be trusted as a reliable source of information. Branden’s insistence (once again, after the woman who helped him make a fortune was already dead) that he never wanted a sexual relationship with Rand and was practically bullied into it by a 5″2′ slender woman characterizes him as a vile little twerp. It is to the detriment of this otherwise good biography that he and his embittered wife should be given so much credence by Heller.

Another thing about the book that I didn’t enjoy is the excessive, in my view, amount of detail as to Ayn Rand’s friends and acquaintances. We do not really need to know the exact date and circumstances of her encounter with every single person she ever knew.

In spite of all these faults, the book is very good and I’m glad I read it. I discovered many interesting things that I didn’t know about Ayn Rand. Her political convictions were actually closer to mine than I ever imagined. Ayn Rand was a long-time passionate proponent of women’s right to an abortion. The idea of an embryo having “rights” was as disgusting to her as it is to me. In her final address in 1981 she rallied against “family values” and the growing religious bent of the 80ies Republicans. Something tells me that she would be just as annoyed by Palin as I am. She rejected the Libertarians on numerous occasions and made fun of them.

I highly recommend this informative biography to any one who is interested in learning more about Ayn Rand’s life and work.

>Ayn Rand

~ Clarissa ~ 17 Comments

>The last M/MLA conference where I spoke the day after getting married was good in all respects except one: the book-fair. Normally, I love book-fairs at conferences, but this one looked more like a parody of a regular fair. It was held in the same room where banquets were served to the participants. The abundance of food presented a disturbing contrast to the paucity of actual books available for purchase. It were as if the conference organizers were trying to suggest that food for our stomachs is way more important than food for our minds. The only book there that attracted my attention was Anne C. Heller’s biography of Ayn Rand titled Ayn Rand and the World She Made. I couldn’t have afforded to buy this book (especially in the light of the threats by the governor of Illinois to stop paying our salaries) if it weren’t for a much cheaper Kindle version. I have only just begun reading this dense 600-page book and I will write a detailed review of it when I finish it. For now, however, I just wanted to write about Ayn Rand and the reasons why I find her work fascinating.

Ayn Rand, the author of the immensely popular The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, is the inspiration of Libertarians (whom I dislike profoundly) and is often grouped together with people like Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan (whom I despise and consider to be disgusting individuals.) I hate Ayn Rand’s deep-seated mysoginy and her profound self-hatred as a woman and as a Jew. I find her gushing descriptions of enormous dollar signs made of gold to be vulgar and pathetic. I consider her admiration of “progressive capitalists” to be childish and silly. I find many of the things she wrote to be deeply offensive. But still I believe that she is a great writer and I love her books.

I know it is hard to get past all the offensive stuff in Rand’s writing. Once you do, however, you might encounter a veritable treasure, just the way I did and continue doing every time I reread her two most famous novels**.

Of course, part of my interest in Rand has to do with the fact that I identify with her on many levels. She emigrated from a Russian-speaking country to North America almost at the same age as I did. She was Jewish by ethnic origin but not by virtue of religious belief. From what little I have been able to read from Heller’s biography, it has already become clear to me that Rand must have had an exceptionally strong form of Asperger’s. (Many of the things that seem to baffle her biographers become perfectly understandable once you think of them in terms of Asperger’s.)

If you think about it, Ayn Rand’s achievement as a writer is truly unique. She only started to learn English at the age of 21 and managed to achieve the level of language skill that allowed her to write extremely long, complex, and beautiful novels. I cannot think of any other writer who achieved a similar linguistic feat. (Please do not bring up Nabokov. He spoke English from his early chilldhood and spent a lot of time in England and surrounded by English-speaking people starting from infancy.) I started learning Spanish more or less at the same age Ayn Rand started learning English, and even though today, when I’m 33, my Spanish is really great, I could never hope to write a work of fiction in this language. And my complete lack of literary talent is not the only reason. The amount of effort it would require to achieve such a level is simply beyond me.

I’m going to share some of my favorite quotes by Ayn Rand, which hopefully will make it clearer why I enjoy her work.

This quote, for example, sounds like a veritable Aspie manifesto: “Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” If you don’t find this beautiful, Asperger’s is probably not a part of your existence. 🙂

In spite of Ayn Rand’s declared homophobia, the following quote can be addressed to the idiots who keep voting against gay marriage rights: “Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).”

Today, I find the following to be especially relevant. The state is threatening us with withholding our salaries and we are fed the constant exhortations to service and sacrifice: “It only stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.”
 
As a teacher and a researcher, I absolutely have to agree with the following: “The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.”
 
This is so profoundly true: “The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.”
 
If only the Democrats in general and our current President in particular remembered this, how different would this country be: “There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.”
 
Come on, don’t tell me you don’t like the following: “To say “I love you” one must first be able to say the “I.””
 
I wish the people in charge of the US foreign policy for the last century and a half thought about this: “An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes.”
 
Nothing could be truer than this: “People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked.”
 
And this: “No one’s happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or destroy.”
And this is just simply beautiful: “The only man never to be redeemed is the man without passion.”
 
** I want to reiterate that my praise is solely for Rand’s novels. Her essays and treatises are nothing other than silly and outdated, in my view.

>Zoe Heller’s The Believers: A Review

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

>Zoe Heller keeps producing books that could have been great if she had only managed to stick to her original purpose without getting distracted. Her novel What Was She Thinking? : Notes on a Scandal: A Novel was not bad at all, and if you think otherwise, it is probably because you were put off by the pretty weak film version http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=00FFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=clasblo-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&asins=B000NIVJFY. I have just finished Heller’s new novel http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=DDDD00&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=clasblo-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&asins=B002SB8P5G and at first I really liked it. The beginning of The Believers is simply hilarious, and it’s no wonder that the book made the Best Books of 2009 list by Publishers Weekly. Heller ridicules – often in a pretty vicious way – a certain type of self-righteous leftists whose holier-than-thou attitude sometimes conceals pettiness and unenviable nastiness. You can get a pretty good idea about the first part of the novel from the following quote: “Karla always spoke of Mike’s job as a union organizer with the reverence of a missionary wife describing her husband’s evangelical work in Borneo.“

Unfortunately, somewhere after the first third of the novel, Heller decided to abandon this line of her story and turned to creating a trite, boring, and repetitive melodrama. The children of the above-mentioned self-righteous leftists are understandably disillusioned by their parents’ political agenda and start looking for the meaning of life in drugs, affairs and Orthodox Judaism. Among these three solutions as they are described by Heller, the drug addiction is presented as pretty much the most innocuous one.

In one of my previous reviews, I wrote about the lamentable tendency of female writers to feel scared of writing an actual work of literature. These talented authors escape from the task of writing good novels by turning to secondary genres. Gillian Flynn retreats into the realm of the mystery genre, while Heller falls into the cheap tear-jerking melodrama. The same as with Flynn, we see in The Believers a gifted writer who is somehow too afraid of her own gift to let it flourish. In our patriarchal society, even very talented women obviously have a very hard time believing that they can dedicate their lives to anything other than trivialities. Trivial literature, trivial lives, trivial occupations; women still often see themselves as secondary human beings, secondary writers, and secondary artists.

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn: A Review

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

>A patriarchal system invests men with the duty to talk and think about serious issues, while women are expected to dedicate their lives to trivialities. We can still see this set of expectations at work on a daily basis. During parties, men talk about politics, philosophy, and the meaning of life, while women are huddled together on the other side of the room, swapping muffin recipes. In class, female students rarely dare to offer their opinions on big-picture questions. They leave such questions to men and dedicate themselves to answering questions  that are detail-oriented. I always know that when I ask “Is Hugo Chavez good for Venezuela?”, I will get no female responses. But if I ask “When did Chavez come to power?”, many female students will offer an answer. This doesn’t happen because women are less capable of or less interested in analyzing serious issues. For the longest time, any woman who attempted to leave the realm of muffin-baking and affirm herself in the public sphere was castigated. This is why it is still difficult for women to believe that the sphere of great endeavors and important issues is just as much theirs as men’s.

The saddest thing to observe is when this happens in the realm of creative activities. Often, incredibly talented women seem not to dare to enter the world of art and assert themselves there. They prefer to limit themselves to secondary genres and pretty much waste their creative gift on producing works of art that manage to entertain but are never taken seriously.

Gillian Flynn is a perfect example of such a female writer. From the first paragraphs of her novel  Dark Places, it is obvious that she is an extremely talented author. Flynn writes with incredible poignancy about life on a small Kansas farm nearing bankruptcy, about the tragedy of being a teenager in rural America, about the horrible burden of childhood trauma, about the damage caused by the purity movement. Her mastery of the English language is breathtaking. Dark Places: A Novel could be a great work of literature but for one thing.

As many other female writers, Flynn unfortunately shies away from creating art. She follows in the footsteps of such talented writers as Ruth Rendell and PD James and confines herself to the realm of mystery novel. She takes what could have been a great novel and adds some mystery genre devices that are boring, conventional, and that feel completely alien to the main body of  Dark Places: A Novel. She still doesn’t manage to kill the novel completely. Everything but the last couple of chapters is truly fantastic. I would even recommend stopping reading the book 20-25 pages before it ends to avoid spoiling your experience of the novel.

Flynn is a great writer in the making. I truly hope that she will lose her fear of competing in the big leagues and will allow her creative gift to unfold without being fettered by these conventional limitations that plague so meny female writers.

>Another Disappointment from Barbara Ehrenreich: A Review of "Bright-sided", Part II

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

>I also believe that all of my health problems (not anybody else’s, just mine) are psychosomatic in nature. I don’t impose my beliefs on anybody and don’t think anybody is stupid for taking care of their health in a different way. Ehrenreich’s argument that one’s state of mind doesn’t influence one’s health doesn’t convince me not because I have been brainwashed by anybody (as Ehrenreich suggests), but simply because that is what my entire life experience has taught me. When I was finishing my dissertation and looking for a job, for example, I was constantly sick. I kept falling from one disease into another all the time. I had the weirdest, completely unexplainable symptoms. And then I found a job and all those health problems went away as if by magic. I don’t really care whether there are enough studies proving the causation because nobody will be able to convince me that living in a state of constant terror of unemployment had nothing to do with my health issues.
Ehrenreich’s argument that the current economic crisis was caused by the “gullibility and optimism of ordinary individuals” is at best uninsightful and at worst represents a nasty instance of victim-blaming. We all know, however, that the real problem didn’t lie with the middle-class or aspiring middle-class Americans. The bunch of Bush’s cronies received a free pass on robbing us all blind and that’s exactly what they did. It is also kind of disturbing that Ehrenreich would talk about the people duped by the Wall Street crooks as “ordinary.” Evidently, you have to work for Goldman Sachs (and not as a janitor) for this author to consider you extraordinary.

The author’s hatred of motivational speakers is so profound that she is even willing to present the most notorious Wall Street criminals as poor unwitting victims of the “positive thinking” movement. According to Ehrenreich, Joe Gregory, the former president of Lehman’s Brothers, is not really guilty of his company’s collapse. It’s the bad, mean, positive-thinking ideology that makes people believe they can achieve anything they want that is to blame for his actions and the company’s demise. It is very surprising to see a hard-core liberal like Ehrenreich giving an absolution to a bunch of greedy individuals like Gregory, but there it is.

It seems that Ehrenreich read too many self-help books in the process of doing research for Bright-sided and couldn’t help but borrow some of their tricks. She decides to end her book with a piece of advice on how we should conduct our lives: “The alternative to both [positive thinking and depression] is to try to get outside of ourselves and see things ‘as they are,’ or as uncolored as possible by our own feelings and fantasies.” At least, Ehrenreich has the good sense of putting “as they are” in quotation marks. This demonstrates that the author herself is a little ashamed of her childishly naive way of offering advice to people whose worldview might be a little bit more complicated than her reductive materialism.

To summarize: the book is boring, uninsightful, poorly constructed, unconvincing, and intellectually barren.