Although it was only a few weeks ago that I was first introduced to the particulars of antitrust law, I am not going to let that stop me from expressing my disappointment about the recent opinion in California v. Safeway, which I find disheartening in a bitterly familiar way.

Several of the major Southern California supermarket chains (Safeway, Ralphs, Vons, and Albertsons), together accounting for 60% - 70% of the market for groceries in that area, entered into a Mutual Strike Assistance Agreement (MSAA). This agreement included a "revenue sharing provision" according to which, in the event of a strike, any grocer earning more than their typical share of revenue would give 15% of those excess earnings to any grocers who were losing money relative to their typical share.

Let me run that by you one more time in case you missed it: the agreement provides that competing grocery stores will share profits for the duration of a strike in order to blunt its effects.

As I said above, I really only just started studying this whole antitrust deal, but this seems like a pretty blatant violation to me. Sadly, the 9th Circuit only sort of agrees. An en banc panel held that this might be an antitrust violation but that it's not per se illegal, placing a considerable burden on the state to jump through a lot of evidentiary hoops to win its case. Why? Because the agreement was not permanent (i.e. revenue would only be shared during a strike) and because the signatories only controlled some of the market -- not all of it. I have to say that I really don't understand this. Does this mean that it's OK to fix prices for one month out of the year? Or to fix the price of a single product? Can competitors who control a sizable share of the market but not the whole market effectively do whatever they want?

What I am left wondering about is whether there is a consumer protection angle here: after all, for many consumers the fact of a strike is a material aspect of their decision to purchase a particular product or patronize a particular business. (This seems similar to Kasky v. Nike -- a California Supreme Court case holding that lies Nike told about its labor practices in order to boost sales were not protected by the First Amendment.) It is certainly reasonable for a consumer to believe that the money she spends at one grocery store is being kept by that store and not being funneled to its competitors. If that isn't the case, then shouldn't there be signs in the windows -- "Up to 15% of your purchase will be donated to the store across the street for the until its workers are no longer on strike"?

As political and legal protections for labor, the environment, and general health and safety gradually erode, legislators offer us the same cold comfort over and over: that we can vote with our dollars, that by buying the right things we can become better people and make the world a better place, or, at the very least, avoid causing additional harm. This is, at best, a problematic notion -- there are all sorts of dignitary and social ills that might arise from viewing purchasing as our main form of political expression. But it seems to me that one of the biggest problems is that, when businesses are allowed to lie like this, it just isn't true.

Small Talk

The sense of betrayal San Franciscans feel at the hands of the weather heightens
with each whipping week of summer wind.
It doesn't matter that this happens every year.
Maybe it's because so many of us are from other parts
of the country where the summer heat soaks every layer
until there is nothing left to take off
and even the panes of glass in the windows warm foreheads laid in desperation against them.
Or maybe it's because we would like to believe that these words
-- June, July, August --
mean something more than the sounds of their syllables slinking together
like the thin bracelets Rose wears that clip and ring while she loads bags with the fruit I have bought
apples and peaches and mangos balanced
on top so their skin won't split on the walk home.

Mind Over Matter?

Taken together, several articles in the Ideas Issue of the Atlantic (July/August 2011) evidence a certain ambivalence about the relationship between our minds and our bodies. Or maybe ambivalence is not quite the right word -- maybe these stories only seem to contradict one another because they are starting from opposite ends of the spectrum, both trying to write the way back to a central point: mirror images about to converge.

In The Triumph of New Age Medicine, David Freedman argues that Western medicine is floundering in the face of chronic illnesses like diabetes, Alzheimer's, heart disease, and cancer because it is too focused on treating the mechanical failings of bodies in crisis and not attentive enough to teaching the minds in charge of those bodies how to best care for themselves. Mainstream medical practitioners wait until someone falls ill so that they can intervene with drugs or surgical procedures instead of sitting down early on with patients, listening to their troubles, and coming up with ways to help them improve their diet, get more exercise, and reduce their day-to-day stress.

"Medicine has long known what gets patients to make the lifestyle changes that appear to be so crucial for lowering the risk of serious disease: lavishing attention on them. That means longer, more frequent visits; more focus on what's going on in their lives; more effort spent easing anxieties, instilling healthy attitudes, and getting patients to take responsibility for their well-being; and concerted attempts to provide hope." (p. 96) In other words, the problem is that doctors see themselves as technicians or engineers rather than healers and caretakers. Freedman is not positing that positive thinking alone will cure you but instead pushing us to expand our concept of health beyond the body to include aspects of mind like awareness, patience, discipline, confidence, and self-care.

Contrast that with David Eagleman's The Brain on Trial, which argues that because biology -- especially biochemistry -- is so determinative of action and character, the criminal justice system should shift its emphasis away from blame and towards rehabilitation. The current model is premised on the idea that since free will is absolute the system can hold people absolutely accountable for their actions; Eagleman proposes a model in which we have far less control and therefore far less responsibility. I don't disagree that we need to spend more time rehabilitating those in prison -- helping them find jobs, build family connections, rejoin their communities -- and less time reviling, castigating, and excluding them. But what's surprising here is Eagleman's reasoning, skirting as it does all discussion of social issues like race, poverty, and the economy. It is more than somewhat disturbing to evoke the idea of biological determinism in the face of a prison population that is so demographically skewed.

"As we become more skilled at specifying how behavior results from the microscopic details of the brain, more defense lawyers will point to biological mitigators of guilt, and more juries will place defendants on the not-blameworthy side of the line. . . . The crux of the problem is that it no longer makes sense to ask 'To what extent was it his biology, and to what extent was it him?,' because we now understand that there is no meaningful distinction between a person's biology and his decision-making. They are inseparable."(p. 120) The gist is that we cannot locate "crime" or "criminal behavior" entirely on the mind side of the ledger -- that there is no mind side of the ledger -- and that instead we must consider how some people's physical designs may make it effectively impossible for them to accede to society's demands.

What is striking, I think, is that, placed side by side, these articles tell a larger story about how our institutions -- our laws, policies, and technologies -- divide us from ourselves and deprive us of a certain wholeness. There are books that have been and will be written about how these systems evolved (I think maybe Descartes was involved) and there are also arguments in favor of some level of reductiveness, mostly based on efficiency and administrative ease.

But perhaps the moral of this story belongs in the mouth of Christopher Hitchens who, reviewing a book about Gandhi in the same issue, says: "[Gandhi's suggestion that the British surrender their land to the Germans while rebelling in their souls] is revealing, not so much for its metaphysical amorality as for its demonstration of what was always latent in Gandhism: a highly dubious employment of the mind-body distinction. For him, the material and physical world was gross and polluting and selfish, while all that pertained to the 'soul' was axiomatically ideal and altruistic. . . . This false antithesis is the basis for all religious fundamentalism, even as its deliberate indifference permits and even encourages sharp deterioration in the world of 'real' conditions." (p. 142)

Eat, Pray, Love

This blog post is not actually about "Eat, Pray, Love" the book or the movie or the cultural phenomenon -- I have many things to say about all three and all of those things would fall under the heading of "vile invective" and all of them have been sad much more artfully by Stephen Metcalf (@ minute 7:10).

This is, instead, a pure joyrant about my city, San Francisco. If I were with it enough to tag my blog entries, I would tag this one with words like "joy," "wonder," and, yes, "love." I will attempt to cut the sweetness of the subject matter with the cold, brittleness of bullet points by simply recounting the series of interactions I have had since leaving the office at 5:00 and arriving in the Mission to run errands on my way home.

-purchased plump triangular carrots (a kind I have never tried before), arugula, and three pints of strawberries at the Mission Community Market from a pure charmer

-while looking for asparagus, ran into someone from the SF Environment organization (I think this is a city organization -- not sure what part of government it fits into) who gave me a FREE TOTEBAG MADE OUT OF SCRAP CLOTH in exchange for MY IDEAS OF HOW TO MAKE THE CITY GREENER. really. this happened. to contribute your ideas, go to www.ideas4sf.org.

-went to buy fish at the market where L buys fish every day; the man who works there asked why i wasn't getting what luke always gets and smiled -- because he knows us! this still amazes me.

-went to Mission Pie to buy bread from Josey who remembered me from when i bought bread yesterday (there are reasons i need a lot of bread, i'm not going into it) and he is ALSO a pure and total charmer

-went to Rose's market to buy asparagus; Rose told me, in confidence, that i should have a baby to keep L -- maybe not the best advice, but it came from a place of love

-in my stairway, ran into a neighbor who has lived in this building for THIRTY YEARS and had a lovely talk, really lovely, and i am going to go visit her to hear all about the history of the building

It is not about the amazing food, although, yes, the food is amazing. Food is a part of it, though, because we have to eat, every day, and so eating becomes part of our routine and eating is also about nourishment, sustenance -- one of the clearest ways to receive and express love. And so eating feeds connections between people and connected people reach out, radiate warmth, laugh with kindness, and wear the sunshine on their faces. I live somewhere, in a place, where people know me, and L, and we see them every day or every week and they make us smile. What else is there in this world other than that?

Facebook Fail

It is not unusual to complain that facebook profiles are disingenuous, boring, hip, preening, or vain. But what offends me about them is that they are wasteful -- in their current form, facebook profiles are a pure and effortful waste of clean, high-quality data. With scads of talented developers and more money than, if not God, certainly Saint Peter, why can't they take the information that we have so lovingly and trustingly offered up and do something interesting with it?

For example, why not plug people's work & school info into a timeline? The NY Times has amazing timelines with images that blow out when you scroll over them and detailed captions. Wouldn't that make it easier to understand the trajectories our friends have taken? Wouldn't that be more fun to look at?

Or, why not let people drop photos into some sort of e-scrapbook interface? Facebook has borrowed the "album" metaphor without using any of the visual benefits. Why not let people make digital collages, combining images and text?

Why not link up with the Amazon feature that lets you look inside books so that you could page through your friends' favorites? Why not play samples of people's favorite music? Why hide the quotations I have so lovingly chosen at the freaking bottom of all the other info? Why not let people put their favorites into some sort of hierarchy or flow chart or web, showing how their love of folk emerged from their love of classical guitar? Why an ugly, useless, flat, unimaginative list?

By presenting information this way, facebook deflates it. Facebook deflates us. We flatten and sadden into flat, paratactic screen-people, just collections of unaffiliated and disorganized likes and dislikes, wants and diswants, a shuffle of sheet-thin days. Facebook's cardinal sin is not sharing our information, but stripping so much of the meaning from it and taking from us the chance to make real connections.

Which Was the Son Of

One of my favorite choral text settings ever is Which Was the Son Of, an Arvo Part (pronounced pear-t) setting of the lineage of Christ. I love it for the strangeness of the words (all those names) and the brute repetition of it and the newness of it (not just another ave maria) and the stunning simplicity of the last phrase -- which was the Son of God -- that knocks the wind out of you a little bit. To be clear, this is not about faith for me, but about literature.

Although, is there anything clear at all about where one begins and the other ends?

Harsher Even

"That year a captain got bumped from the lineup...Bam Slokum, til then but a middling six-grade player, had grown four inches taller and ten times as dominant. He came off the bench of the JV B-team to play A-team on varsity as a starting point-guard, and went on to break, in the eight weeks following, three [school] and two conference scoring-records. The captain Bam replaced was called Gregory Gumm, and to get Gummed became slang that for [one clique] was fighting words harsher even than any phrase it might have euphemized."

The Instructions, Adam Levin, p. 237

The insight in this passage is slipped into a stunningly slight clause that weighs a certain kind of word -- a term of art, a piece of jargon, an inside joke -- that is to say a word tethered to the felt world only by the most accidental and anarchic bridge of shared experience -- against another kind of word, a word whose bare sounds are so brutal, so evocative of some brutal fact out in the world, that they must be sanded down somehow or cloaked in other, unrelated sounds. Euphemism is the sand-paper, the cloak.

But Levin's passage reminds us that words are not airtight containers in which we store little bits of the world, but rather soaking strips of plaster that we layer over it trying to capture its hollows and contours. A word will eventually, inevitably take on the shape of what it means. And if it means something mean enough, then over time its consonants will come to prick like pins and its vowels seep like acid.

Failure to Communicate

I knew Blue Valentine would be hard to watch but I didn't realize why. Yes, the tang of the characters' disappointment -- in themselves, in their lives, in the world -- was sour like a mid-morning coating of early morning coffee on the tongue, and their efforts to break even each month without being broken were sobering. Yes, there were a few punches thrown and a few scenes in which a woman's body was treated with utter disregard.

But what made me turn away, what made me turn to Luke and say "Let's not watch this, I think I'm done for the night," was when the two fought not with but at one another. It takes courage to show, on screen, the way that people really talk. And the way they do not listen.

I am thinking in particular of the two climactic moments, the first in the hotel room and the second in the hospital where Cindy works, and the way that the characters apply their voices to each moment in layers, tinted foils accumulating to dim the chance they might actually hear one another. When one of them risks saying something that might possibly convey what they are feeling, the threat of the truth scares the other into disengaging completely. There are no devastating quips, no dead-eyed stares that say more than a quip ever could, no punch-lines. Just two people, increasingly isolated within their moats of sound.

I recently started reading National BestSeller "The Time Traveler's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger (OK, so I'm a little late to the party...). I am up to page 280 -- specifically, right at the section break that follows their marriage (newsflash: they get married -- so not a spoiler, even for the characters). But I'm afraid I don't get it; that is, I don't feel compelled to read the second half of the book. On its own, this feeling is by no means unusual. I'm a big proponent of not finishing books that do not, of their own force, demand to be finished. There is too little life to spend any of it on dull prose. This time, though, I'm wondering if I'm missing something because it seems like everyone and their great-aunt adored this book. I did a quick search for reviews and turned up almost exclusively positive pieces (in addition to this interesting blogpost by someone who compares the covers of different editions), which actually surprised me a bit.

Part of the problem is the -- perhaps inherent -- lack of suspense: in every scene, at least one of the characters seems to know what will happen. And the usual source of tension in romantic fiction -- the petal-pulling see-sawing she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not -- is entirely absent. At least in the first half of the book, there is no doubt ever that the two main characters are in love and always will be. Although there are hints that their married life is not hitch-free, those hints do not amount to actual dramatic tension. And the scenes that I suspect are supposed to generate a little thrill of danger -- when Clare's little sister reveals that Henry looks like a naked intruder from her childhood, or when Henry disappears during the wedding -- unfold without any actual sense of risk or danger, leaving me wondering what is really at stake for these characters.

The other problem is the voicing. The novel is recounted alternately by Henry (whose age varies in non-linear fashion) and Clare, at times as if the two are in dialogue. The narrative voice, however, never changes. Sometimes I have to look to the start of a section to remember who is speaking. This seems like a major flaw -- why use different narrators if they all sound the same?

I do find somewhat poignant the way that time's passage is used to comment on the shapes and colors of romantic love. When Henry meets Clare for his first time, she already knows him (and knows she will marry him), which is a nice metaphor for getting at the feeling of instant familiarity or sudden intimacy that many people experience when falling in love (sample sentence: " 'I can reach into him and touch time...he loves me. We're married because...we're part of each other...' I falter. 'It's happened already. All at once.' "). Maybe it would be better to read the whole book as an extended reflection on the way that couples in love are always circling back to and immersing themselves in their memories of one another, so that those memories do not remain in the past but are interleaved throughout one's experience of the present and the future. And then there's the way that the time travel intersects with ideas about gender, for example that Clare is the gentle feminine force who will help coax the man she desires out of the boy she has -- not necessarily an idea that makes me want to jump up and down, but certainly a powerful social theme.

But all of that is not enough to propel me on to page 281.

So, readers, tell me -- what is it that I'm failing to see?

Lay awake this morning (Tuesday)

Listening to the pigeons fuck on the fire escape or wherever it is on the other side of the window they rendez-vous --

I've never actually seen them but once in High School Petra told me that was the sound they made,

The sound I heard this morning through the windows and the rain-soaked light and the butter colored curtains.

This is the week before I start work

The morning after the night we went to walk around Bernal Hill in the wind

Whipping so hard it knocked words out from between our teeth

And several years after I began to try and fail to write a poem called "Darwin's Pigeons"

A poem to explain what exactly was so special about those birds

That he saw within their "carunculated skin" and "elongated eyelids," their "enormously developed" crops and "short conical" beaks,

The very mechanism of life

Saw them the way we would all like to be seen

In time, in series, in slow circles elaborating a single dropped rock

Their very features evidence that even

The gestures we do not intend have meaning.

Consider This

From footnote #13 in a 2006 article by Mark Danner on the ongoing war in Iraq: "The current rate of killing of one hundred Iraqis a day would be the equivalent, adjusting for population, of 1,100 Americans a day, or 33,000 dead a month. (In the decade-long Vietnam War, about 58,000 Americans died.)"

Still Life with Sound

One of my favorite modern composers, Knut Nystedt, wrote the piece "Immortal Bach." It is a Bach chorale, sung once straight, and then the second time around in several parts all at different tempos and all radically decelerated. What I love about this piece is that it takes the quintessence -- the paradigmatic example -- of a phrase, a moving line, a living arch of sound and breaks it into a series of unmoving vistas. It's like watching a movie by taking the film out of the canister and looking at each individual frame, one by one, like witnessing the settle and seep of paint on a canvas.

The novel about the Russian spies caught in 2010 in Montclair, New Jersey, would open in the same way as practically every article about them: with a glossy still of life in a leafy suburb. The first chapter would be short, its lacquered narrative remarkable only for the impenetrability of its slick shell -- until the last paragraph of the last page when the finest fragment of the truth about what was going on would start to emerge. The back story -- how the spies were selected, hired, trained, relocated -- would unfold over the next few chapters by means of the stock exposition devices (writing in a journal, reminiscing to oneself, unjustified flashback, recounting a story to a small child, reliving the past with a friend) so by the middle of the book, the reader's knowledge would be current.

And then the second half of the book would mine the most fascinating territory in the realm of the spy novel: how do you hold onto an internal sense of who you are when it is at odds with your conduct? How do you prevent yourself from relating to or identifying with the culture that surrounds you? As the Telegraph reported after the fact, "Moscow appeared concerned that the Murphys might be embracing suburban life a little too enthusiastically. In 2009, there was a dispute over who should own their Montclair house, with the Murphys protesting that owning it was 'convenient' and a 'natural progression of our prolonged stay here' and should not be seen as any 'deviation from the original purpose of our mission.'" It is hard to argue with the idea that if you are trying to infiltrate American culture in any meaningful way, fully engaging with the ever-present trope of home ownership is a must. Consider this statement from a response piece by a NY Times editor who nearly bought the house next door to the Murphys: "We almost talked ourselves into it, but a subsequent visit convinced us that the house just wasn’t the one. We wanted a fourth bedroom for guests, the sloped backyard wasn’t fit for play and a tiny detail about the dining room that proved the last straw: the china cabinet wouldn’t fit. . . . Instead, we bought a bigger house nearby." Just who is putting on whom?

Instead of presenting the final scenes directly -- the dramatic entrance of the FBI into the dreamy neighborhood, the carefully staged hand-off on the Vienna air strip -- the last chapter would consist entirely of reaction shots. It would have to open with a string of headlines, perhaps even a full article excerpted from a local newspaper, followed by scenes of the neighbors coming together to discuss what had happened and make sense of it. Again from the Telegraph, "Mr. Fonkalsrud said: 'I'd rather have Russian spies as neighbours than a paedophile. The Murphys were true suburbanites. They seemed to genuinely love their kids and I think they probably enjoyed their American life here.'" Mr. Fonkalsrud's voice here is that of the liberal humanist, reminding us that even spies have families and the need for community and the innate god-given ability to enjoy soccer games and barbecues and deck chairs.

I guess that last sentence reveals the tension at the heart of my own view of the situation -- would my novel end on the tone of Thomas Friedman's op-ed? (Sample sentence: "Everything the Russians should want from us — the true source of our strength — doesn’t require a sleeper cell to penetrate. All it requires is a tourist guide to Washington, D.C., which you can buy for under $10.") Or would it be more like American Beauty? Would it be a celebration of American consumerist culture as infinitely irresistible? Or a satire of that culture's perpetual slide toward self-celebration?

In the last chapter, the narrative voice from the beginning would return, smooth and serene, but would likely seem sinister after such a systematic undermining of the possibility of serenity. It would be hard to fight the urge to lay the ground for a sequel, or at least to suggest that nothing is ever as it seems, but fight that urge I would because I don't think that's the moral of this story at all.

There would probably be a coda about the family's return to Russia -- brief and grim, a bluish gray departure from the golds and greens of the earlier chapters, it would contain only the barest suggestion of the many worlds that lie beyond our own.

wondering

how do you think the new nytimes paywall will affect their headlines? will they be flashier? grabbier? and how will it affect reader behavior? will people end up reading fewer than their allotted articles because they are hoarding their reads? will they read trashier pieces? more serious ones? will they forward them around less?

i would love to hear your thoughts on this evolving legal economy of reading the news.

Creativity

A few weeks ago, the WSJ (one of my new favorite publications...it's a long story) ran a piece about measuring and enhancing creativity in children (see: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704694004576019462107929014.html). Less interesting than the typical sounding of the death-knell of the American psyche are the examples of creative thinking in the form of samples and questions and answers from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking -- a standardized test that is used to measure creativity (I'll let you tease apart those contradictions on your own). Based on the sample answers provided below, it seems that the standard or non-creative responses are too literal: when presented with an image, it is too easy or obvious to assume that it directly represents something that it looks like. A creative answer instead looks at each image and considers the causes of which it might be an effect, as well as the intention behind it for example whether it is the product of error, misunderstanding, or confusion. The creative responses, in other words, build a story around each object and make sense of it in the context of a larger narrative, while the standard responses see only discrete projections of static objects.

Creativity Test

Examples of creativity-test answers from students in fourth through sixth grades

TASK ONE: List all the things this figure could represent.

COMMON IDEAS
--A tornado
--Hair
--A squiggle

ORIGINAL IDEAS
--Path of a dizzy bug
--A straight line poorly drawn

TASK TWO: List all the things this figure could represent.

COMMON IDEAS
--The letter "T"
--Blocks in a row

ORIGINAL IDEAS
--Bases in some new game
--Stones in an anti-gravity statue