Turning the Pages

I remember before I moved to Toronto, I had a friend who lived there who was (and is) a great enthusiast of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. He'd swing by Pages bookshop on Queen West with astonishing regularity to see if new Deleuze stock had arrived. Pages is where such intellectual capital could disperse itself beyond the dusty halls of academia. He would take note that, say, three copies of Capitalism and Schizophrenia had arrived and, a few days later, note with equal or greater joy that one had been sold.

He successfully passed on the Deleuze meme to me. When I came to live in Toronto, I would also monitor the Pages' Deleuze collection as something of a guide to the rise and fall of his popularity, of a way to feel that there were other people out there who shared my interest. I would also browse the art books, first looking for naughty bits, then architectural porn, which I'm not sure is any more wholesome. I'd also track the books of people I knew. And end up buying a few magazines or remainders. Or the occasional splurge.

So it was a sad moment when I swung Pages by on closing day. I must admit my motivation was predatory. I felt a moment of personal disappointment; I was hoping for a better discount than the 35 percent off they were offering. Then I took a look at the empty shelves, the oddball handful of remaining stock and I was a little choked up. The bookstore at the beating heart of the city is no more. It makes it much harder, and much less fun, to take our collective cultural pulse.

Botton deprived of an 'undo' button

As petty and embarrassing as Alain de Botton's web post was, dressing down Caleb Cain for his teeth-baring review of de Botton's new book, you have to admit that it takes a big man to own it. What he might have lost in a bad review, he might very well have gained in publicity (of the "no such thing as bad" sort).

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work sits on my bookshelf right now. The topic makes me less eager to get to it than de Botton's previous efforts; I do think the further he strays from matters of the heart and one's inner life, the more difficulty he has framing his subject. I must also say that the Canadian and British editions come wrapped in are the weakest book jackets he's ever been subjected to (not that I'm judging). The U.S. cover is more compelling, conjuring de Botton's twee persona more aptly than the jet-setting internationalist photos.

Kindness and hope: not worth the bother

I was immediately intrigued when I heard Adam Phillips, one of the authors of On Kindness (with Barbara Taylor), talk about his book on BBC Radio 4's Start The Week. Phillips suggested that we might actually limit our kindness to each other to make it more valuable and to keep our lives more manageable--being kind to everybody implies an intimate connection to everyone that would be impossible to maintain. But it became a perfect radio moment when Phillips put a question to Vikas Swarup, who wrote the book C&A upon which the current phenom film Slumdog Millionaire is based. The story, as you probably know by now, is flashbacked biography of a boy from the slums who, through his life's adventures, comes to know the answers to the questions on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

"It is optimistic," said Swarup of the book/film. "What it shows is is that there is light at the end of the tunnel, that hope and love can even take you across the most difficult barriers and that a flower can survive, even in a slum."

Phillips jumped in with: "Do you think that hope can be poisonous?...It offers people something to look forward to that can only turn into cynicism and bitterness. Hope is like cocaine. It lasts a very very short time and the very very long time afterwards is truly terrible."

Swarup stuck by hope.

There are two kinds of economists in the world

Having loved Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, I had an "if you like this, you'll like this" feeling when I saw Steven E. Landsburg's More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics in a remainder bin. Three chapters in, it's as irritating a book of nonfiction as I've ever read, a reminder that economics, while it finds itself sticking its nose into all sorts of human affairs, is a rough tool.

The title essay is particularly vexing because the thesis is so endearing: If more people had sex, the spread of AIDS would be reduced. But of course, by "more people" he means one of two kinds of people: sexually conservative ones. If sexually conservative people increased their quantity of sexual partners, there would be more competition for partners and promiscuous people would have less sex. (More pure water in the stream dilutes the polluted.) He even gives these types names: shy Martin and sluttish Maxwell.

If only the two were so easy to tell apart! At what point does a sexually conservative person become a promiscuous one? Three partners a year? 50? What about people who are serially monogamous or go in and out of periods of promiscuity? What about luck--yes, promiscuous people are statistically more likely to become infected with a sexually transmitted disease, but, as individuals, they get infected by carriers. Carriers are impossible to detect unless everyone is regular tested, honest and upfront about their status.

Lansburg falls into the labelling trap: All his arguments rest on the accuracy of his labels and when you're talking about pure/impure, only a small percentage of the population fits cleanly into one label or the other. There's counter intuitive thinking and there's pretending that people are so easily categorized.

The "Be Fruitful And Multiply" chapter, which advocates that more people are better for the planet because it means more geniuses is equally troublesome. First, it presumes that geniuses are born, not made--a larger population living at greater disadvantage is going to produce fewer geniuses than a small one where people are presented with greater opportunities for learning and achievements. He also suggests that more people gives us more opportunity to choose a suitable partner, overlooking the problem of distribution and the crippling effect of too much choice.

UPDATE: This book continues to drive me crazy. With his jaunty tone and can-do attitude, Lansburg is a master at defining problems and forces as narrowly as he has to to be counterintuitive. Judges forbid juries to gather extra-trial information for fear they'll lose their jobs? Pul-leez. This ridiculous claims in this book are a testament to the small part rational thought plays in our behavioural patterns.