Some thoughts on suburbia and its merits or lack thereof

 Matt Yglesias had an interesting bit in his newsletter this morning:

"If it were allowed, this same logic would carry over to houses built for middle class people. All else being equal, a $400,000 detached house should have fewer square feet of house than a $400,000 townhouse which in turn has fewer than a $400,000 unit in a small condo. So you ought to see the urban/suburban calculus driven by preference for outdoor vs indoor space rather by preference for space per se. You could have a big house in a missing middle neighborhood and need to go to the neighborhood park, or you could have a yard and need to deal with a smaller house."

2020 has been an interesting test of this theory, or at least revealed some implications of it, because our family did decide to trade off traditional suburban home amenities for a neighborhood with a number of trails and a dedicated playground (and pool), most of which have been unavailable or severely constricted for the vast majority of the year. From our perspective, that tradeoff is looking like a bad one, though that view may be revised should 2020 ever end.

Along the same lines, we ran an unintended natural experiment earlier this year. One of the things that made my own childhood possible was the knowledge that there were neighbors, parents, and other kids out and about pretty much all the time, which ensured that if you just sent your kids out the door, you could loosely attempt to keep an eye on them and they'd be fine. Well, once quarantine hit, we recreated those eyes-in-the-neighborhood conditions, and no one sent their kids out at all. That shift seems to be final and definitive.

A couple of Morisots, why not

I spent more years than I care to remember with the kind of crippling writer's block that is so common to academics and aspiring culture writers. Oddly, it's been years now since I've had that feeling, though I write and present at a similar volume, just for mostly private audiences. 

The thing about art, I've found, is that even when I'm just copying someone else's work, I seem to be able to get into a mentality--"well, this is probably not going to go as well as I want it to, but I'll do it anyway"--that I could never manage before. Is this what getting older is like?

In which we attempt to be Van Gogh

A funny thing I've learned while painting: if you're looking at a painting for color and order of composition--as opposed to form or iconography, like they teach you in art history--you notice that there are fiddly little problems that recur across artists and have sometimes funny solutions. "How does Van Gogh leave no gaps between the objects in his painting?" was last week's question, the answer to which was "he goes in at the end and outlines everything on the horizon in a slightly lighter blue than the rest of the sky, same as you wanted to do but thought was too amateurish." (thinking a solution is amateurish is probably a pretty good sign of being at the beginning of learning something)

Today's: "how do you accurately represent the horizon where foreground and sky meet?" Answer: "You don't. Tiny-ish little things on the horizon will take care of that for you."

Remember me, the one you got your idea from?

Wishing you a day filled with the insouciance of a young Flavor Flav dancing in the background of this video for no particular reason:

Just some thoughts on diversity, equity, and inclusion, as an HR person now

"It's my job to know, but it's not anyone's job to tell me"

That’s been my mantra for twenty years now. It was not exactly a conscious decision, and after it became a conscious decision, there were still a number of years before it took that precise form. Now that focus has come to diversity, equity and inclusion, it’s still the work: learning about other concepts, thoughts, experiences than my own without forcing that growth and development out of anyone else.

I had some advantages, relative to my peers: parents who grew up in the south and moved north, who could see—and told me about—the endless variations in how white people chose to mistreat black people, and many others (a pattern so well-established and known that Tocqueville wrote about it 200 years ago). My freshman year of college, I went to hear Cornel West give a lecture on the Holocaust, was spellbound, and followed the trails of influences he so generously bestowed. I was fortunate, most of all, that the first trail I followed was W.E.B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk.

And then twenty more years of reading, and listening, and watching. Things that are about race in America; things about what it’s like to be in America; things about what it’s like to be a person. Some I agree with entirely, some I agree with in part, some where agreement isn’t really the point. Black Reconstruction in America. Feminist Theory from Margin to Center. God of the Oppressed. Sing, Unburied, Sing. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The Beautiful Struggle. “Everybody’s Protest Novel” and “Equal In Paris”. “What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July?”. Blowout Comb. Fear of a Black Planet.  Black Star. Small Talk on 125th and Lenox. There’s a Riot Going On. Do the Right Thing. To Sleep With Anger. Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.

(That list is meant to be evocative, not exclusive. There’s something for everyone and many places to get started.)

To my colleagues, some suggestions:

1. A lifetime of listening and learning can’t happen overnight. Focus on taking one good step, and another.
2. The moment of intensity seems like a good time to push for as much as we can—and it is indeed a good moment for that. But we also need institution-builders, who can think about what companies will be doing in six months, in a year, in ten years. Lasting progress comes from consolidating gains once they’ve been won. We’ve all seen change initiatives die out from indifference or sliding back into old habits. Don’t let it happen here.
3. Bring the whole of yourself to listening, to the absolute peak of your abilities as a coach and a business partner. Listen for understanding, listen until you can reconstruct the whole of someone else’s picture of the world entirely in their words. Then apply your own thinking and understanding, where you agree, where you disagree, where you can’t quite envision it and where you need to sit on it for longer. Wait and think. Read and listen more. Ask yourself whether you’re the right person to say what needs to be said, or whether someone else should say it. Back them up when they do.

Recalled to Life

Adventures in Cultural Consumption, Reading in Progress Edition

Kristin Lavransdatter: There have been two notable effects that have come from the part of my life I spent reading and writing about human rights and their violation. The first is that it definitively ended my interest in the depiction of violence. I was never much of a horror movie person to begin with--or comic-book-violence, or "this is art and not spectacle, no, really"--but I have very little patience for it now. The benefit of this has been missing out on a really large part of the TV renaissance, since "he comes out of the room, and half his face is blown off, but he lights a cigarette before he dies and it's SO COOL" is not appealing, and, apart from being convinced that it has redeeming aesthetic value, is in fact, and objectively, a really weird thing to think is cool.

The other has been a decline in interest in a certain type of narrative, approximately "let me show you the resilience/baseness of the human spirit by having terrible things happen to my main character for a long time." It's taken down a strangely large number of reading projects--Vanity Fair, for one; it's the problem I still have with The Mill on the Floss even though it is quite clear things will end up tolerably well. This is not a requirement that narratives have happy endings, or that nothing bad ever happen to main characters--it's just that the line between "depiction of reality" and "sadism" is remarkably thin. Kristin Lavransdatter was going along just fine--well, even--until the Beautiful Man with a Shady Past shows up, and... the momentum has been lost. I'm sure 800 pages of her learning to reconcile her past mistakes with her faith will be riveting, as will The Trials She Will Inevitably Face, which will lead to Personal Integrity In A Fallen World (word on the street is that there will be a Love Triangle with Beautiful Man and Good Man Who Was Spurned But Still Loves Her). I'm just not sure I'm willing to keep reading along.

The Bostonians: Fine, so far, which is not yet very far.

Biographia Literaria: A 400-page book best known for a famously hard-to-parse structure? Sign me up!

Cut out from a long post on leaving academia and deciding not to be a freelance writer,* best left uncompleted:


This is probably also a decent time to mention my belief that the reason we should divorce judgments of personal behavior from quality of work produced in aesthetic and academic realms is that success appears to correspond to developing unattractive personal qualities. Not that regular people are likely to withstand scrutiny, either--I'm Reformed for a reason--but success requires a kind of Look Out For Number One approach that is not compatible with being an entirely ethical person. You can make your peace with it, and many do, or sacrifice a few rungs of success for being more noticeably a good person, but "everyone is smart, distinguish yourself by being kind" is one of those statements (like "only the even-numbered Star Trek movies are good") that carries its own insult: you can distinguish yourself by being kind because most people are not.


*I have a lot of thoughts on What's Wrong With Academia, which can be perhaps best summarized by the list of "demeaning things that have happened to me at various positions" that I keep mostly for its humor value (the accidental items are, in their own way, worse than the intentional ones). But I'm not sharing that. The short version of not freelance writing is that I could never see a way to make money from it in anything like the short term, and it seemed to involve compromising on certain important features of my interior personal life, such as 'not having to have a take on everything that happens.'

Bull Durham: I hold onto this opinion, rendered two years ago. But note a few other meaningful details: the presence of a grizzled old (actually 32) Kevin Costner falling for a (nine years older) Susan Sarandon, who convincingly play as equals. Note that everyone gets a happy-ish ending, which is less about handing them everything they want than giving them some measure of dignity (Millie getting married, Nuke learning to behave like an adult and realize he doesn't know everything). Note also--very unusual for a comedy these days--the profusion of jokes and humorous moments, which go from runners to dialogue to wordplay to physical comedy. I like its vision of North Carolina, and of Durham, which plays less as "run-down old place nobody wants to be" and more as "the timelessness of these things in the midst of a very specific time functions as a metaphor for baseball itself"; it's definitely the 80s, but you'd never know it.