Blayne Sucks

Last week Bruce Schneier commented on a story about a prison that let an inmate convicted of credit card fraud reprogram a prison computer. Schneier believes this sort of thing should be an “obvious” no-no, and I agree. However, it isn’t obvious to a lot of intelligent and well-intentioned people. In fact there’s consistently been debate on whether or not criminals should be hired for computer security positions. There are people who fervently believe the myth that being an excellent criminal carries over into being an excellent law enforcement officer or security adviser.

Unfortunately, pop culture continues to prop this myth up with TV shows like the USA Network’s upcoming White Collar. The show is about an FBI agent who teams up with his nemesis-turned-good-guy to solve crimes that no one else could solve. Another TV series, called Dexter, which appears on Showtime, portrays a forensics expert who secretly murders the criminals he finds through his work. Both of these shows operate on the premise that experience committing crimes is useful in preventing them.

In reality, committing crimes and preventing crime are fundamentally different activities not because of the skill sets but because of the motivation and interests involved. In fact, the skill sets may be strikingly similar in a lot of ways. Some pirates are excellent sailors, some outlaws can shoot extremely well, and some hackers know a lot about computers. Don’t focus on asking whether the skill sets overlap. Instead, focus on questions like these: Are they dependable? Can they work well with other people in your particular work environment? How do you know they are actually interested in helping your organization? How do you know they are truly reformed?

After focusing on these questions, the truth comes to light: it is very rare that an excellent criminal history translates to an excellent crime-prevention future. There is a reason that police departments do a criminal background check before hiring someone. There is a reason that day care providers don’t hire convicted child molesters. There is a reason that banks don’t hire convicted felons to do security. Why wouldn’t the same rationale carry over to information or computer-based crimes?

Now, there are instances of convicts making amends and turning their lives around. Frank Abagnale is perhaps the most famous of these reformed con men. Hollywood capitalized on his story with the highly successful movie Catch Me If You Can. I know several people who have heard him speak at security conferences, and they have told me that he continues to apologize for his life of crime at the beginning of his talks, decades after they occurred. In fact, he may be a good model of how to lead a life of contrite contribution to law enforcement after being an extremely skilled criminal. He worked long and hard to earn the trust of banks and the FBI. He was initially paid only for positive results, and used the money he earned as a security consultant to pay back his debts.

Still, as a general rule, it should be obvious that hiring anyone convicted of computer fraud to do computer security work is a bad idea. Why take the risk? There are a lot of extraordinarily talented computer security experts who do not have the baggage of a criminal record. If you find, after searching for a non-felon, that you need the particular skills or expertise of a convicted computer fraudster, then don’t put them in a position of power. Don’t trust them without oversight. Don’t get caught up in the Hollywood story. The Frank Abagnales of the world are exceedingly rare; hiring a felon to do computer security almost never ends well.

This post is a part of The Great American Novel Challenge. If you’re interested in taking part in the challenge, feel free to jump right in next month.

My original list of books to read for the Great American Novel Challenge included Ernest Hemmingway‘s The Sun Also Rises, but I chose to read For Whom the Bell Tolls because The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926 and I’ve already read two novels from the 1920s. I’m quite lucky that I made that choice because For Whom the Bell Tolls is a fantastic novel.

In the interests of full disclosure, I must confess that I have not yet completed the novel, but I am very close and sure to finish it soon. I should also note that Allison and I did not collaborate in choosing what to read this month, but we did both read For Whom the Bell Tolls. You can read her review here.

Unfortunately, Allison posted her review before me and has stolen some of my thunder. She expertly points out that the title of the book explains a great deal about the themes in the book. I’ll take a moment to briefly expand on that here. The title comes from a John Donne‘s famous poem:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

It is worth noting that these are just a few lines of the longer, complete poem which you can read here. In particular, I think the ending of the longer version is particularly relevant to the novel:

If by this consideration of another’s danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.

As you may surmise from the title and the poem, Hemingway explores two main themes in this book: the interdependence of humanity and death. It is hard to imagine a writer better suited to the this task than Hemingway, a setting better suited to this task than the Spanish Civil War, or a time period better suited for the novel’s release than 1940. For Whom the Bell Tolls is about the Spanish Civil War, which was from 1936 to 1939. The Spanish Civil War, like many civil wars, mercilessly pitted siblings and families against one another. The scars of this are still visible today. It was fought between the Republicans, who favored a republican form of government, and the Nationalists, who favored a fascist dictatorship. As a result, the Spanish Civil War became a proxy war fought as a precursor to World War 2. The Republicans were supported by the International Brigades, which were basically a long list of anti-fascist countries, including the United States. The Nationalists, who were supported by Germany and Italy, won before the novel was published.

The protagonist of the novel is Robert Jordan, an American fighting for the Republicans. He is tasked with the extremely dangerous mission of destroying a bridge in enemy territory just prior to a Republican attack. Robert must enlist the help of several Republican-supporting locals, many of whom have lost loved ones and share their horrifying war experiences with Robert. He cannot complete the task on his own, but some of the locals are unwilling or unable to help him with the mission. Although Robert recognizes the danger of his mission, he still finds himself falling in love with one of the locals, Maria, who had been brutally raped earlier in the war.

The intended audience of this book must have included people who were struggling to understand the political and military happenings in Europe just prior to World War 2. Hemingway, who served as an ambulance driver in World War 1, was known as a part of the “Lost Generation,” a collection of writers disillusioned with “the war to end all wars.” His disillusionment with war is communicated through some truly gruesome scenes in For Whom the Bell Tolls. For example, in chapter 10, common villagers became brutal murderers in a way that eerily foreshadows scenes described in Ordinary Men, which described how ordinary Germans were able to commit atrocities in World War 2.

Hemingway straightforwardly (his simple, direct writing style was a nice change of pace from Faulkner) displays the stark costs of involvement in a “foreign” war. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that American involvement in World War 1 was not guaranteed because the United States previously maintained an isolationist view of foreign wars. But the U.S. did get involved. And it continued to get involved in foreign wars. These wars have defined modern America: World War 2, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf war, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The world got a lot smaller in the 20th century. Indeed, it is more clear now than ever that no man is an island, but when is war a justifiable mechanism for preserving mankind? Perhaps we do have some moral responsibility as a nation, but we are still struggling with the cruel costs and exacting execution of “foreign” wars.

Four books (almost) down; nine to go!

My books in the challenge thus far are:
July 2009: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
August 2009: Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)
September 2009: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929)
October 2009: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940)

This post is a part of The Great American Novel Challenge. If you’re interested in taking part in the challenge, feel free to jump right in next month.

I had an interesting experience while reading The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. It was the first novel I’ve read that I found both almost incomprehensible and extremely deep at the same time. I will explain this momentarily, but first let me talk about some background on why I chose this book. First, I would probably be remiss if I were to not read any Faulkner during this challenge. William Faulkner is widely regarded as one of the greatest American authors in history. As I Lay Dying was required reading at my high school, and although I can’t say it was my favorite book, it was interesting enough to warrant further investigation of the author.

Second, I have always believed that the Great American Novel would have a truly great title. I am familiar with the cliche that you can’t judge a book by its cover, and I am sure that this should extend to the title. However, book titles like The Sound and the Fury, A Movable Feast, The Grapes of Wrath, and Gravity’s Rainbow all simply beg to be read. How do you move a meal large enough to qualify as a feast? How wrathful could a bunch of grapes really be?

Third, although I knew very little about this book, I did know that it was a sort of precursor to the existentialism movement. I was taught about this in high school as well, but I never really understood much of it until years later. I think there are some important problems with existentialism, but it does serve to highlight one or two deep truths about the nature of humanity. For example, I believe that if human existence is genuinely alone (i.e. if there is no God), then life ultimately carries a devastating hopelessness and meaninglessness. Life without a reason for existence is bleak, and change seems to consistently and implicitly question human reasoning in this area.

Given that rationale, I picked up the book and started reading. I did no additional research into the plot, purpose, or history of the book, which may have been a bad decision, but at least it left me somewhat unbiased. The Sound and the Fury focuses on the Compton family, a southern clan living in the early 20th century. The first two sections are extremely difficult to read. The first section is written in a stream-of-consciousness style from the perspective of a child with a mental handicap. As you might imagine, this is somewhat jarring if you didn’t know that when you started reading the book. The second section uses the form and structure of the writing to reflect the emotional state of the main character. Again, this was quite confusing. The third section is easier to read, which reflects the mental and emotional state of the main character, but it too ultimately ends up full of ‘sound and fury.’ It is also worth noting that most of the book is not written in chronological order, and much of the language (as with Uncle Tom’s Cabin) is conversational and colloquial English rather than grammatically correct or formal English.

The final section is the easiest to read and the most direct in conveying the purpose of the novel. I began to figure out much of what I failed to understand from the previous sections. Also, I became more aware of the purpose of the book. Quite honestly, this was probably too late in the book for me to get much out of it. I won’t give away then ending of the book, but I will say that after reading the fourth section, figuring out what Faulkner was trying to say, and – in particular – reading the ending of the book, I found myself wishing I had time to start over and try reading it again. There are almost certainly some fundamentally important aspects of the book that I missed completely the first time through and I suspect that I would enjoy re-reading the book to discover them.

Perhaps I am simply not ‘literary’ (the majority of my formal education has been in engineering and science) enough to have picked up the book with little prior knowledge of it and get something valuable from it. However, I believe such an experience in and of itself was valuable. I began to wonder how the context in which we read affects our understanding of what we read. In trying to figure out what it was that I read, I found that The Sound and the Fury was not immediately recognized as an important literary achievement. Was the context of the book’s initial release partly responsible for this? You can perform your own thought experiment on this by thinking about how you select a book to read. In my case, The Sound and the Fury was selected not from any understanding of the plot, purpose, or content of the book, but instead from the rules and context of the Great American Novel Challenge. This is certainly not my usual method of selecting books to read. For other books, I have a process that includes some synthesis of the plot, purpose, author, context, and probably many tacit metrics that I don’t consciously consider.

Several literary critics believe that Faulkner’s greatest achievement is The Sound and the Fury. I am not qualified to judge either of these since I have only read two of his books and since I have not yet read many other ‘great’ American authors. I can say that Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is more like an artifact to be studied than a novel to be read. Since I have only read it once, you’ll have to take my evaluation with a grain of salt. As such, the only way for me to evaluate The Sound and the Fury is to consider how “American” it is. It is certainly set in a quintessentially American location, the post-civil war south, but I can’t say that it discusses inherently American problems, dreams, or goals. It has probably affected world culture more than American culture, and I find it somewhat difficult to label it as a Great American Novel.

Three books down; ten to go!

My books in the challenge thus far are:
July 2009: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
August 2009: Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)
September 2009: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929)

This post is a part of The Great American Novel Challenge. If you’re interested in taking part in the challenge, feel free to jump right in next month.

For the second book in my search for the Great American Novel, I attempted to answer a question that lingered in my head for years: “Why is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin consistently mentioned in History classes and almost never mentioned in English classes?” The book is clearly an influential novel. It’s likely that every high school history textbook mentions this book, and they probably do so right next to the supposed quip Abraham Lincoln said upon meeting Stowe early in the Civil War: “So this is the little lady who made this big war.” In fact, I was inspired to read it because of the role it played in the first quarter of Team of Rivals, which is a history/biography of Abraham Lincoln’s rivals for the Republican nomination for President in 1860. It could have been the instructors I had or the books I’ve read, but at some point in my public education I began to wonder how this novel became a piece of history rather than a work of literature.

For those who may not be familiar with the book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, is an anti-slavery book published in 1852, eight years prior to the civil war. It sold incredibly well at the time it was published, and has shaped the course of civil rights in America straight through to the present. The book itself describes virtually every aspect of life as a slave in a strikingly graphic fashion, even to the modern reader. The book tells of slaves escaping, being sold, being cared for, and being beaten as well as masters being cruel, kind, and indifferent. The book follows the life of one slave in particular: Tom, the title character and intended hero of the book. Tom is a Christian slave, and Christianity plays an extremely important role in the novel. For example, Tom consistently expresses compassion rather than hatred for his masters, including the cruel Simon Legree. Although the book is ostensibly about Uncle Tom, many other slaves and masters feature prominently and the book paints a rather comprehensive picture of “life among the lowly” as the subtitle indicates.

The answer to my long-running question about the book was readily apparent, even on the first page. Stowe’s style simply does not meet with the traditional understanding of novels in literature. It is a strange mix of polemic essay and fictional story. For example, she refers to the reader, to herself, and sometimes ambiguously to both using the pronoun ‘we.’ She doesn’t bother to hide her plot, which is presented directly and not particularly complicated. In fact, the plot feels quite straightforward and there are few real surprises. The story reads easily and feels more like someone telling a tale in a Northern formal room of their trip to the South than a traditional novel. In short, the answer to my question is this: “Literature snobs have decided that the book doesn’t deserve to be in their quaint little club.” This is probably true of many genuinely good books that are easy to ready while still conveying a moral tale.

Women’s literature in the nineteenth century has become synonymous with authors like Austen and the Brontë sisters. They wrote about the role of women in society, and they remain undeniably influential. Unfortunately, like the American male stereotype, I find their books to be impenetrable. I consider myself to be a fairly well-educated man, but chances are that I will never actually understand books like Pride and Prejudice. Unlike the other novels by nineteenth century women writers I’ve attempted to read, Uncle Tom’s Cabin comes across clearly and perhaps a bit too directly. If I may be so bold as to quote every English teacher I’ve ever had, “If the reader doesn’t understand what you’re trying to say, then it is your fault and not theirs.” For my money, this makes Stowe the better writer when compared to Austen and the Brontës. At the least, Stowe should be considered the greatest American female author of the nineteenth century. (Quick: Can you name another?)

Many of the faults identified by critics of Uncle Tom’s Cabin may be due to its own popularity. For example, critics say that it created lasting stereotypes of African Americans. These stereotypes appear in the novel, and they certainly made me uncomfortable while reading them, but assigning the blame for the creation or even the popularization of these stereotypes to Harriet Beecher Stowe seems unwarranted. Correlation does not imply causation. Something did popularize these stereotypes, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very easy target, but I would need more convincing evidence to start assigning blame. Stowe was certainly not the only person writing about slavery at the time.

Another concern with Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the modern use of the name ‘Uncle Tom’ as an insult deriding someone who is at best too willing to go along with an oppressor and at worst complicit in the acts of the oppressor. Tom was intended to be a noble Christian slave, and the compassion Tom shows for his captors flows from this role. Consider this Biblical passage:

Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the unjust.

1 Peter 2:18 (ESV)

This could be interpreted as ‘pro-slavery’ or as condoning slavery and some further argue that the Bible as a whole views slavery as acceptable though I’m not sure how anyone could read the Old Testament and miss all the parts about God freeing slaves. I would argue that this passage is rightly interpreted as the correct individual response to slavery as a slave because violence begets violence. Here are a few more modern quotes along similar lines:

Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.

Gandhi

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The key to understanding Tom’s actions is to recognize that he is acting as Christian individual should and not as a Christian society as a whole should. Tom recognizes that violence is not the answer. He knows that he is responsible for his actions and not responsible for those of Simon Legree. Further, he recognizes that Simon Legree is responsible for Simon’s actions, and Tom knows the consequences of those actions will be truly severe in God’s eyes. In the final chapter, Stowe addresses the readers directly and describes how she believes a Christian society should respond, but she does not contrast this Tom’s actions. It is perhaps the only thing in the book not presented in the most direct fashion possible. As a result, modern Americans recognize the truth in the words of twentieth century civil rights advocates like Gandhi and Dr. King, and yet they use ‘Uncle Tom’ as a form of derision. I must lay the blame at the foot of the writer.

Although I enjoyed reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I would not say that it is the Great American Novel if only because it is too laden with the depressing truth of human nature: we are more than capable of great evil. The novel is certainly an American one, if only because of the subject matter and the ensuing controversy surrounding the novel. (Americans are nothing if not fans of controversy.) To me, the Great American Novel might well uncover uncomfortable truths, but it would also inspire us to overcome them. Uncle Tom’s Cabin doesn’t inspire the imagination so much as serve as an in-your-face moral compass.

Two books down; eleven to go!

My books in the challenge thus far are:
July 2009: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
August 2009: Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)

The Internet is universally recognized as being the perfect medium for inciting flamewars, but I have personally never seen a flamewar about Children’s Museums. In this post, I intend to pull out my tinder box and do my level best to start one. Why? In short, I had a visceral, gut-level reaction upon reading Wired.com’s list of 100 Geeky Places to Take Your Kids this Summer. I got the the end of the list and found myself stunned. They left the premier Children’s Museum in the world off their list: The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis.

One special summer exhibit at the Children’s Museum is Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs. The King Tut exhibit includes tons of artifacts never seen before in the United States. They even have the little organ-preserving jars used to preserve King Tut’s organs! How cool is that? If you’ve ever seen a show on ancient Egypt, it’s likely that you’ve seen Dr. Zahi Hawass. He’s coming to Indianapolis to speak at Butler University on August 7th in conjunction with this exhibit. WISH TV, an Indy-area station, has produced a muti-part, detailed documentary in conjunction with the King Tut special exhibit. This documentary includes a segment on how Egypt is building their own Children’s Museum and specifically sought the advice and help of the leaders of the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis for help in their efforts. In short, this is a major, major exhibit for kids this summer.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars is another special summer exhibit at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. The Star Wars exhibit talks about building and animating the Star Wars world and has lots of technical geekery. It includes scale models, digital prints, and a life-size Jedi starfighter. At this point my last rational explanation as to why they folks at Wired.com would have left the Indy Children’s Museum off their list was, “Well, maybe they just didn’t think it was geeky enough…” It’s freaking Star Wars!! That’s almost the definition of geeky!

I’ve only mentioned two special exhibits showing this summer, but, in the words of every late night TV infomercial, that’s not all! The Indy Children’s Museum has 11 major galleries including a 130-seat planetarium, the world’s largest water clock, a multi-floor dinosaur exhibit, and a biotech learning center in their ScienceWorks wing. It’s difficult to convey the size of this museum. At 472,900 square feet, it is the world’s largest Children’s Museum with the largest museum collection for kids in the world. Parents.com has rated it as the best Children’s Museum in the United States. Over 1 million people visit it every year. The numbers are just staggering.

When I was a kid growing up in the Indianapolis area, I took part in their Museum Apprentice Program (called MAP), which is just one of the many ways to volunteer at the Museum. I participated during the summer after 8th grade, and I went to the Children’s Museum 1 to 3 days (roughly 8 hours with a 30 minute lunch break) per week over the course of the summer. I probably was there about 25 times in total. MAP kids worked as apprentices in one of the main galleries, and I got to work in the Science Spectrum (now ScienceWorks) area. I setup props for science shows, and I did demos of cool science experiments about things like angular momentum or water surface tension. I got special access to some of their storage areas and I used my lunch breaks to explore the areas where I wasn’t working. In all that time, I think I may have finally seen everything they had. And the Children’s Museum has had three major expansions since then (1996, 2004, and 2009)!

It’s not as though they didn’t include any Children’s Museums on the Wired.com list. The Austin Children’s Museum (#6 on the list) is only 12,000 square feet of exhibit space and has an embroidery workshop this summer. Uhm, yay? The San Jose Children’s Discovery Museum (#12 on the list) is only 28,000 square feet of exhibit space and features a 1950s Post Office. Nothing excites children like post offices from the 1950s. The EdVenture Children’s Museum in Columbia, South Carolina (#25 on the list) is only 67,000 square feet of exhibit space and features an exhibit entitled, (I can’t make this up) “The World of Work.” The Omaha Children’s Museum (#65 on the list) is only 60,000 square feet of exhibit space and features a traveling Sesame Street exhibit this summer, which at least sounds like it might not completely suck. The Stepping Stones Museum for Children in Norwalk, CT (#91 on the list) is in the middle of a 22,000 square foot expansion and has an exhibit on Rainforest Adventures, which also sounds decent.

Now, let’s think like a child and imagine if we combined all five of these geeky Children’s Museums from all over the United States into one Children’s Museum worthy of five spots on the list of 100 Geeky places to take your kids this summer. We would have something less than half the size of the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis with exhibits on Embroidery, a 1950s Post Office, “The World of Work,” Sesame Street, and Rainforest Adventures. That’s not exactly leaping out to me as better than Nintendo. Of course, it’s all imaginary because that museum is actually five separate museums located in Texas, Califorina, South Carolina, Nebraska, and Connecticut. For the sake of argument though, let’s compare our imaginary museum to the real-world Children’s Museum of Indianapolis: Would your kids rather see mummies, dinosaurs, a giant water clock, a planetarium, and Star Wars or go to embroidery workshops, 1950s post offices, and “The World of Work”? Seriously, I don’t think this is much of a contest, and I dare the folks at Wired.com to justify their omission.

This post is a part of The Great American Novel Challenge. If you’re interested in taking part in the challenge, feel free to jump right in next month.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is classic required reading for high school students across the country. However, I somehow managed to avoid reading this book until a time of my own choosing. (Though I was required to read Like Water for Chocolate which no one outside of my high school seems to have read.) The Great Gatsby is also considered universally to be a masterpiece of American literature. It was chosen by editors from Random House as the second best novel published in the English language since 1900. Radcliffe Publishing chose it as the best novel in their rival list. It is consistently mentioned as a Great American Novel, and it is only about 180 pages long, so it’s a perfect way to start investigating all those things that you should have read when they were assigned.

I have to confess that this was one of the books that led me to create the Great American Novel Challenge. I chose to spend part of my summer improving my writing, and in this effort, I found Susan Bell’s analysis of how editing improved The Great Gatsby. I felt convicted for not having read the book. Now that I have read it, I feel like I need to read it again. Almost as soon as I finished I knew that Susan was right: this book was meticulously crafted. The book has not become outdated; it has become more elegant with age. This is where all that careful editing pays off. There are several sentences, particularly later in the novel, that are packed with meaning.

One could say that The Great Gatsby is another book about materialism or debauchery, but that sells it short. One could also say that it is about one man’s attempt to recapture the past, but that too sells the novel short. It is about the nature of authentic love, but again, labeling it as such sells it short. It is about the culture war between the midwest and the east coast, but in some ways it is about every culture war. It is about achieving the American Dream, or maybe defining your own American Dream, but this too seems to be incomplete.

Perhaps it is best to label The Great Gatsby as the first book to explore the quarter-life crisis. Although the term itself is relatively new, Fitzgerald shows that the concept is not. Virtually all the characters are in their late twenties and early thirties. They are all frustrated with their relationships, struggling to form meaningful long-term plans, and most of them are nostalgic for some earlier time in their lives when things seemed to make sense. F. Scott Fitzgerald was in his late 20′s himself when the book was published. It seems that Generation X and Generation Y are not the first to wonder about their place in the world. Even before America was a world superpower, Americans have struggled with trying to find a way to live meaningfully, contribute to the world, and in so doing become the “greatest” images of ourselves. In many ways, we are still living in the Jazz Age.

I promised myself that regardless of the books I chose to read as a part of the Great American Novel Challenge, I would offer some critique rather than simple-minded, endless affection. It’s easy to praise the things that worked because everyone likes to hear about what works. In addition, most reviewers don’t want to believe that they read something generally not worth reading. However, no book is perfect, and for me the part of the book that was least effective was the role of Nick Carraway as both participant in the novel and narrator of the novel. Weaving between these two literary roles would be challenging for any author, but Fitzgerald doesn’t do it well enough to avoid all confusion about whether Nick was a ‘real’ character. Nick’s character development seems stunted, particularly in the early parts of the book. I suppose this bothered me less by the end either because Nick was more of a participant or because I had grown accustomed to it.

Nick’s character development aside, The Great Gatsby is a fantastic book. It’s a short read, and if you haven’t read it you can easily finish it in an afternoon. Since much of the book actually takes place around the fourth of July and throughout the summer, I would urge you to consider reading it on a lazy summer Saturday afternoon. It’s not as stuffy or “intellectual” as you might think. There’s drugs, sex, controversy, murder, and all the things that would get it an R rating if Michael Bay turned it into a movie.

Now that I’ve posted this review, I have officially accepted the Great American Novel Challenge. One book down, twelve to go. I will update this post on Monday with a list of the links to other participating blogs. If you are interested in participating, feel free to start at any time.

[Update: At this point in the challenge, there are two other participating bloggers. Allison posted her review of Absalom, Absalom! (William Faulkner, 1936) on the morning of the 4th, and Carl posted his review of The Last of the Mohicans (James Fenimore Cooper, 1826) just under the wire on the evening of the 4th. I'd encourage you to take a look at their thoughts on these books. If you're interested in participating, grab a book and post a review on August 4th.]

I have seen the new Star Trek movie twice, once on opening weekend and once, in IMAX, the following weekend. In short, I thought it was fantastic, and I would encourage everyone to see it. In this post, I will provide a rambling postmortem / braindump on what I thought worked, what I thought didn’t work, and a bit of the big picture. If you are interested in a more traditional review, you can find some aggregated reviews here, and I think this one most accurately reflects my feelings. Before I go any further though, I want to start with this short disclaimer:

This post contains spoilers. Do not read further if you have not seen the new Star Trek movie and you are planning on doing so (though at this point I have to ask: why are you waiting?).

Read the rest of this entry »

The notion of the Great American Novel is deeply ingrained in American culture. The term “Great American Novel” simultaneously describes historic novels from American authors that accurately captured a time period of American culture and idealizes the goal of producing or discovering such a work oneself. Authors want to write it. Readers want to discover it. (Copyeditors want to copyedit it.)

Ironically, the books that might be labeled as the Great American Novel are typically books that many Americans have never read. If you consider yourself an avid reader (as I consider myself), and you reflexively felt a little bit of painful truth in that statement, then you may be interested in my proposed solution to this problem called “The Great American Novel Challenge.”

In short, the goal of this challenge is to read and review 13 novels you have previously not read. The novels must qualify as candidates for the title of the Great American Novel. After completing this challenge, you can claim with confidence that you have attempted to read the Great American Novel. There are 13 official rules for anyone wishing to participate in The Great American Novel Challenge:

1. Seek out the 13 novels you consider to be contenders for the title of the Great American Novel. This rule is intended to allow for a broad range of books while also picking a number with some significance for American culture: There were 13 original colonies that eventually became American states.
2. The authors of these books must be American. Because immigration is a huge part of American culture, this can include authors who immigrated to America and were American citizens for much of their lives.
3. Pick at most two books from any decade. Most lists of this sort will have serious clumping in the 1930′s or the 1960′s. This rule is intended to subvert that, at least partially. We’re seeking diversity!
4. Choose only one book per author. This rule is also intended to improve the diversity of the experience because America is a pretty darn diverse place.
5. Select only fictional novels. Do not pick histories, abriged summaries, biographies, poetry, manifestos, etc.
6. Choose only books you have not previously read. You can pick books that you were supposed to have read in high school, but you didn’t actually read or you can’t remember reading. (My own high school English teachers are probably flabbergasted at the thought of me starting a challenge like this.) The point here is to broaden your own experiences. Besides, the Great American Novel is really more of a search or a journey than a book or a thing.
7. Post a review on your blog on the 4th of every month from July 4, 2009 up to and including July 4, 2010. Thus, your first book review would be posted July 4, 2009. It would be followed by your second book review on August 4, 2009, your third book review on September 4, 2009, and so on. It seems like an appropriate timeline for finding the Great American Novel.
8. Do not disclose your list publicly; each book must be a surprise announced no more than one month ahead of time. Plus, this will give you the ability to allow your early selections to influence your later selections. Keep the goal in mind as you progress through the challenge and remember that you’ve only got thirteen selections to make.
9. Your posted review must explain how you feel the novel has contributed to American literature and culture. There are no length or formatting requirements for these reviews. In fact, this is the only real content requirement. I believe the Great American Novel is one that captures and explains a weird little piece of the American experience that all Americans notice, even if it is so tacit that we never speak about it. You may have your own definition or understanding of the Great American Novel, and that’s perfectly fine as long as you explain what it is and how you feel the book you chose fits or doesn’t fit it.
10. You must actually read the novel you choose. This is a pretty basic rule, and it is implied by the other rules. However, sometimes rules like this are stronger when you actually write them out. This is not high school. There is no test; there is no grade. If you choose to accept this challenge, then the only thing you have at stake is pride. Of course, Americans are a proud people from time to time.
11. Post a final review of your thirteen month experience searching for the Great American Novel no earlier than July 5, 2010 and no later than August 4, 2010. As a part of this review, try include a list of the books you wished you could have read during the challenge and why. Talk about what you learned and which books you would re-read. You may also wish to pick a single novel that you thinks is *the* Great American Novel.
12. If you post a book review on your blog on July 4, 2009, then you have formally accepted this challenge. Everyone will know if you don’t live up to it. If you accept this challenge, then your pride is on the line. Can you actually read thirteen candidate Great American Novels in thirteen months?
13. In one of the thirteen months of this challenge, you must break these rules. What can I say? Americans like to break rules. You get to pick which month and which rules, so be creative in how you choose to do it. Don’t forget to explain how you broke the rules and why.

Do not take this challenge lightly. Reading and reviewing 13 books in 13 months is not easy. Only 37% of Americans read more than 10 books per year. It may even be the case that one in four Americans don’t read at all. Do not be discouraged by these numbers! Take the challenge seriously, but set your goals high and see what happens! I believe the challenge will be extremely rewarding even if we all fail halfway through. If you leave a comment on this post or link to it with a trackback or pingback, then I will post a summary of all the participating blogs. Our posts will also encourage one another to keep reading, writing, and posting.

Finally, I would urge those of you wishing to participate in this challenge to spread the word. There’s more than a month before the challenge begins, so you have plenty of time to pick your first book, read it, and post a review on the 4th of July. The more people participating, the more likely we will all be able to complete the challenge.

Ah yes, summer. You know it’s arrived when you’re walking out to get the mail one sunny afternoon and you’re greeted by this:

Summer is here, and it’s time to breed more snakes!

I don’t consider myself all that afraid of snakes, bugs, and rodents. I tend to be rather surprised to see them, but they aren’t exactly terrifying. As a result, I thought I would go back to my apartment and get my camera to take some pictures of it. I also did what any good little caveman would do: I poked it with a stick to see what it would do.

Now, I know that virtually all species of snakes will leave you alone if you leave them alone, but this one didn’t have the coloring of a coral snake and I didn’t see a rattle on the end of its tail. (These two facts alone eliminate most of the dangerous snakes in North America.) So I thought, why not investigate?

Turns out the investigation was pretty boring. It let me poke it. It didn’t really move much. (Many snakes play dead when threatened.) I figured I should leave it be since it probably does more good than harm by eating various critters around my apartment. Besides, it’s a beautiful day outside! I’m sure the snake wants to enjoy the sunshine.

Of course, as soon as I got back inside I started trying to figure out what kind of snake it is. This led me to the North Carolina Online Snake Identification System. I put in everything I knew about it and got back the Eastern Hognose Snake as a result. Unfortunately, the pictures didn’t really match up well. I kept searching. Apparently, it could have also been a Mole Kingsnake, but once again, the pictures were just a little bit off.

Then I found this:

That’s right it’s a Northern Copperhead Snake! I was playing around with one of only six species of venomous snakes in North Carolina.

That probably makes it sound much more horrifying than it should though. Copperheads rarely bite, and they seem to go out of their way to avoid confrontations with humans. They will even “fire a warning shot” by striking at you without biting if you really start to piss them off. They pose more of a threat to pets than to humans, which is good news for me and really bad news for all of my neighbors.

Although I don’t wish this particular snake harm, I did notify my apartment complex about the snake because there are a bunch of dogs in this area that would investigate it with their mouths. I have a feeling this sort of encounter would not end well. I’m not entirely sure what they will do about it. A single 1.5 to 2 foot long copperhead isn’t exactly an infestation.

Besides, sometimes nature just happens. Welcome to summer everyone!

Outliers: The Story of Success is the latest best-selling book by Malcom Gladwell, author of Blink. It describes the impact of culture, opportunity, and environment on the extraordinarily successful. For example, it provides an explanation for the success of Bill Gates, the Beatles, and Joe Flom. It also provides an explanation for the lack of extraordinary success of some for whom extraordinary success seemed likely. If you are interested, here’s a New Yorker article with a similar premise.

The premise of Outliers is that extreme success is driven more by opportunity than talent. This means that our cultural background can give us small advantages that accumulate almost like compound interest over the course of our lives. Gladwell argues that the typical understanding of outliers in society is wrong. He claims it is easier to believe that the Hollywood hero is heroic based on some inherent quality rather than hard work, seized opportunity, and a little bit of luck. He believes that inherent talent is emphatically not the real story of success.

In a very broad sense, I agree with Gladwell’s assessment of extreme success. Success looks more like Batman than Superman. For those who haven’t kept up on their comics, Batman was a human like everyone else on the planet, but he was wealthy (opportunity) and had a random tragic event shape the course of his life (luck). Then he dedicated himself to his craft (hard work) and became a superhero crime fighter. On the other hand, Superman was an alien from another planet who, quite simply, was more powerful than everyone else. Now, Superman clearly had to choose to be a superhero and he had to make sacrifices along the way, but his overpowering natural gifts represent the typical way people view those who have achieved extraordinary success.

Aside from this broad agreement, I take issue with the way that Gladwell defines success throughout the book. ‘Success’ is described as everything from making the championship game in a junior hockey league to being one of the 75 wealthiest humans to ever walk the face of the Earth. Sure, if you want to be a founding partner in one of the world’s top five law firms, you’re going to have to have a few lucky breaks along the way, but what if your definition of success is living the upper middle class American dream? It’s never clear just how far ‘beyond normal’ Gladwell believes his premise holds.

One great example that stretches the ‘beyond normal’ limit is Gladwell’s discussion of the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) in the context opportunity over talent. KIPP schools are open-enrollment public schools for traditionally under-resourced urban areas. They are intense. Students at KIPP schools spend far more time working, learning, and doing homework than in traditional public schools. They have also had dramatically better results. Imagine that: If you work harder, you achieve more.

Gladwell argues that we can manufacture ‘success’ by paying attention to cultural legacies and understanding the importance of providing opportunity. This is where the book becomes transparently political. The thesis seems to evolve into a rainbow wonderland where we are all capable of extreme success. Of course, this all depends on what he really means by ‘success.’ It’s idiotic to think that we can all be professional athletes or one of the 75 wealthiest people ever. (Hint: there are more than 75 of us.) Not everyone will be lucky enough to fit all the background criteria and cultural landmarks necessary to have tons of opportunity staring them in the face. Some things cannot be controlled; some things, such as hard work and discipline, can be.

What the book really needs is a clarification of what Gladwell means by ‘success.’ Without this clarification, the book loses cohesion and it becomes unclear how broadly applicable the ideas described really are. In some stories, he clearly shows that hard work and discipline are necessary, but not sufficient, for extreme success (Bill Gates, Joe Flom). In other stories, he advocates that we can all achieve extreme success by simply manipulating our cultural environment (Korean Air, KIPP). In one story, he tells the story of Christopher Langan as someone who is apparently unsuccessful (or at least as someone who hasn’t lived up to his potential). These disparate stories make the book feel like more of a collection of anecdotes about different types of success than a single “story of success.”

All in all, it’s a very entertaining book, but I recommend reading it with a critical eye. It’s important to understand the definition of success for each story and to separate things that can be controlled from those that cannot be controlled.