By which I mean that I’ve moved. Again; semi-permanently. I’ll be messing about with things over there, so it should be entertaining/dismaying/ugly/erratic.

Here’s what I told Goodreads on the subject:

Watchmen by Alan Moore
rating: 4 of 5 stars
Awesomely layered, awesomely referential, awesomely complex, awesomely problematic, awesomely mid-eighties, awesomely entertaining, and awesomely troubling.
(All my reviews.)

In related good news, I am currently employed at a job I like very much, in which I am learning lots about a number of things very quickly. Hurrah!

And this is where my hesitation comes in when I’m trying to answer that dang question. Real research, real problem-solving, really good scholarly or professional writing is creative, and its process can resemble the confusing, difficult, twisty-turny process of “creative” work.

Constraints and questions inform the beginning of any written work, but the best writers and researchers are those who can follow the insights they discover in their reading and preliminary writing. The most honest, trustworthy writers are those who can follow their research and its small (and large) epiphanies down dark alleyways and confusing trains of thought, trusting that the result, while less tidy or simple than intended, will be bigger, better, and more effective than they can even conceive of yet. If the process is done right—if the writer or the researcher is fully committed to their work—the results will be deeply creative.

What has me thinking of this now is a book I’m attempting to re-read, with some frustration. It seems to have creativity-as-fundamental-committment-to-researched-truth confused with creativity-as-making-your-research-say-what-you-wanted-it-to. More on that tomorrow. (Yes, tomorrow–not in three months, I promise.)

Margaret Atwood is one of those authors I vaguely respect and follow. I’ve read one or two of her novels, and hear lovely things about her, so she’s categorized in my head as a smart, interesting lady. Thus, when I saw her newest book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth while on lunch break from jury selection, I picked it up. She’s a writer and a feminist, I thought; surely her literary approach to the credit crisis can help me make sense of it and expand my ways of thinking about it.

Unfortunately, I’m about to quit less than seventy pages in. To give her the full benefit of the doubt, the chapters were originally written as part of a radio forum and presented orally; that format requires a different level and complexity of thought. I think I might find this book tolerable if I were to hear it on the radio while half-awake or driving or cleaning house, which are the things I usually do while listening to public radio.

Written, though, it falls far short of my expectations. It has a number of small flaws–and does a number of things well–but its central fallacy is a surprisingly simple one: it approaches the touchy subject of debt with a foregone conclusion. Atwood’s starting point is this: debt is inherently bad. The only questions remaining are how really awful it is and why we’re stuck in it anyways, though as far as I can see she only pays this latter question some small lip service (but I probably won’t finish, so let me know if she does better later in the book). Proving that debt is evil, for Atwood, mostly means using anecdotes to draw parallels between debt and sin, debt and death, and so forth. She draws these parallels by recounting stories or myths, abstracting them into vague generalities, then piously pointing at the obvious (because general) correlation. This quickly gets boring, and much (though not all) of the humor is kind of condescending and un-funny, hence my probable abandonment of this particular reading project.

Instead, I’d like to point out (entirely for my own amusement) how this might have been a good book, a challenging book, even an important book. Atwood could have refused to accept the cultural mystification of debt as big-scary-ebeeel and gone back to more fundamental questions: What function does debt serve in society? What is “good” or “acceptable” debt, and what is “bad” debt? Who decides the terms of debts? What shifts have gotten us to where we are now in our credit crisis and our surplus of national (and social) debts? Refusing to accept that debt is inherently bad could be productive; it could offer an opportunity to think about what makes communities work. Debt creates and sustains relationships, determines and reinforces hierarchy, and builds reputations and wealth. When does it begin to break down society instead of building it? When does it become so impersonal that it stops functioning? Might our current crisis be the result not of our fondness for debt, but of our terror of being indebted–that is, aren’t we all in debt to credit card companies and payday loans and pawnshops because our communities no longer offer the help we need to make it through? Maybe good debt could have saved us from all this bad anti-social debt.

But Atwood cheats herself out of the possibility of exploring any of these ideas by starting off with the worn conflation of crime and debt. Too bad, because there is plenty to be done here. Given such rich material to tend her ideas in, she only bothered with a few pious tufts of grass. It’s a shame.

View all my reviews.

Obviously, it was a vital moment for our country, our world, and our generation. It was a glorious moment for African-American history, civil rights, and the Democratic party.

For me and many, many of my friends (Facebook, Twitter, and tangible included), it was also deeply personal. We have grown up defined by accessibility, irony, and apathy. We’ve known too much (thanks to the internet) and been able to do too little (despite the internet). As a defense, we became cynical, vaguely hopeless. We (by which I mean “I”) stopped watching the real news or listening to the real radio, only able to swallow the doses that came with healthy doses of sarcasm: The Daily Show, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, The Colbert Report. Jon Stewart’s pained earnestness was the closest we let ourselves come to caring. We had to laugh, because otherwise we weren’t sure we’d be able to stop crying. People my age remember 2000 and were old enough to vote in 2004, but we’d never really met a politician who gave us any indication–letting aside “hope” for now–that it might someday be safe to openly care again.

The narrative of how Obama made that possible is old hat by now, but I’d like to underscore the rhetorical effect of his victory on Tuesday. When PA and NH were called…when OH went blue…when the numbers became decisive…when the West coast polls closed and the networks confidently projected the winner…when McCain gave his gracious concession speech and I called my friend Sarah who was standing in Grant Park praying, I sat down on the steps of the bar where I was watching, and I sobbed unashamedly by myself. Barack Obama’s election said to me–and, I suspect, to many of my friends–that $5 donations and our few hours of phone calling were worth something. His election communicated that good thinking and genuine earnestness could actually win out over cynical divisiveness. His victory indicated that incompetence could have negative consequences and competence might be rewarded.

Even better, though, his speech challenged us to try to sustain something that still feels new and a little stiff: caring. In his somber, realistic speech, he made clear that hope is a serious business. He made clear that we aren’t done; all those small things we did to get him elected weren’t enough, because when you actually care about the world, nothing is ever enough. His exhaustion and sobriety asked us for exhaustion and sobriety; his attention to the work ahead asked us to attend to our work, as well.

No, we can’t would have let us off the hook. We all could have gone back to our cynical, ironic selves (though I hope we wouldn’t have). Yes, we can means we’re still on the hook. When he asked that crowd at Grant Park, as well as many of us in bars and homes across the country, to repeat his creed, he implicated us. He didn’t just mean “Yes, I can.” He meant “Hey, you better.”

Third, Garcia Marquez’s phenomenally rich plots, deeply layered metaphors, and heartbreakingly human characters don’t just allow me to lose myself in his sensual, gorgeously prosaic world; they force me to lay aside my skepticism, my academic lenses, my critical questions. Unlike the nineteenth-century literature that I’m used to and the childrens literature I love to study, Garcia Marquez’s books don’t have good characters or bad characters. The protagonists do nearly unforgivable things, while the apparent antagonists become confusingly lovable.

Love in the Time of Cholera’s vision of love is so expansive, so physical and intellectual and literary and inclusive, that there is no temptation to root for one lover over another, one definition of love over another. Garcia Marquez allows for the complexity, confusion, and ambiguity of real love and the intense disorientation of aging–but by his ending you only feel more grounded, more sure, and more found than before. View all my reviews.

It didn’t stop filling with people. Half an hour later, all visible floor space was full of people, while the walls were lined with others standing awkwardly. An older woman having a hot flash inquired about opening the only outside door anyone could see, but the staff said it was locked. The temperature rose, people started to fan themselves with their pamphlets, and the PowerPoint started. Two extraordinarily young, energetic, probably really smart and engaged people began talking through their presentation.

PowerPoint should come locked. No one should be able to use PowerPoint until they have demonstrated understanding of a few best-practices: slides should not contain the text of your speech or be duplicates of handouts; slides are visual cues to help your listeners stay with you and hold visual evidence; keep the number of slides as low as possible and the text as large as possible; do not ever, ever stand in front of your presentation. That would, at least, have spared the staffers from some of the crowd’s ire.

The larger issue was that these poor presenters were giving the wrong presentation. They had a tough audience that didn’t give a monkey’s uncle about their org. chart. This group of people–ranging in age from 18 to 75, mostly professional-looking, well-educated–had shown up on a Sunday afternoon because they were panicking. Panicking because they remember the last two elections when the presenters were too young to vote, panicking because they vividly recall the political arc of the last several decades, panicking because their children and students are asking why they let the 2000 election happen. They wanted to know what they could do now and on November 4th to avoid an upset. They wanted clear instructions and direct answers about what they could legally do to help in getting out the Democratic vote.

As they asked more and more and more questions–about what organizations were coordinating the effort, what they could tell voters who had lost ballots, what they should do if they observed fraud, and far more specific worst-case scenario questions–the presenters sounded more and more lost, even as they maintained admirable patience. The temperature climbed, audible sighs increased, and some of the attendees trickled out. By the time we broke down into loosely organized, sweaty groups to ask more questions of more staff members who didn’t know the answers, we had learned the entire structure of their organizational chart, except for how we might be able to fit in, the acceptable parameters of action, or what would happen next. (NB: The Obama web site, on the other hand, will make this crystal clear. Go there.)

So what happened here? Staff members (perhaps not the ones who gave the presentation–I have no idea) created a presentation that spoke to their intra-office concerns and preoccupations: how do we organize these volunteers? who reports to whom? which title is responsible for what? Attendees came expecting an entirely different set of information: what is most useful for me to do? what is it legal for me to do? what systems will you have in place? who will contact me? what commitment is required? what resources do I need? what do I do next to help? The disconnect that resulted was only exacerbated by the volume of people, the heat, and the overlay of panic. The authors of this presentation made a classic communication mistake: they forgot to start with what their audiences’ expectations and needs might be.

As we left, I marvelled at how quickly my sense of swelling hope at the large attendance had turned into dismayed frustration at the pervading tone of overwhelmed impotence. It was not the change I needed that afternoon.

And hey, if I’m that tied in with it and all, maybe I almost have a Nobel…or maybe I should read something else until these people stop figuring quite so prominently in my dreams.

In graduate school, I realized that it wasn’t a simple reminder, but the expression of a theoretical viewpoint. This was his rebellion against Derridean uncertainty, his way of shoring up language against the onslaught of Freshman carelessness, and his plea for stability. If words have meaning, inherently, it matters how we use them; they are, however loosely, tied to truth. If words don’t have meaning, but rather make it or twist it or empty it, they have no relationship to truth. They can’t be trusted, can’t be used as the foundation for anything. They can still be used, but much less reliably. If words have meaning, language is a revolver: you cock it, aim carefully, and fire precisely. If words don’t have inherent meaning, language is a fully automatic rifle: a vague, deadly, scattershot sort of thing.

Lately, the New York Times‘ Opinion page has resembled Dr. Madsen’s emphatic plea for inherent meaning. Several of the Times‘s standard columnists have written articles in which language and its relationship to truth receive a rare kind of attention. Most of these have been in the “Most Emailed” lists lately, which I treat as a snapshot of the current anxieties and hopes of Times readers.

In this time of meaningless babble, crashing stocks, and terrifying uncertainty, this strikes me as a strangely natural response: those of us who are lettered, who are educated, who were taught that words matter, cling to words. We pick up our pencils, our computers, our pens and our voices, and we write, in all capital letters, WORDS HAVE MEANING. WORDS HAVE MEANING. WORDS MATTER. WORDS HAVE MEANING AND THAT MATTERS.

Because if they don’t, we simply don’t know what to do about it. If they don’t, we are impotent. If they don’t, we have to completely rethink how we use them.