Frying Franzen

B.R. Myers takes down Jonathan Franzen, and a large related literature, in his Atlantic review of Freedom. This is one of those reviews that is entertaining enough to read even if you had no plans to read the corresponding book. A taster:

One keeps waiting for something that will make these flat characters develop in some way, and finally the Nice Man is struck by a great blow of fate. But rather than write his way through it, Franzen suspends things just before the moment of impact, then resumes Walter’s story six years later—updating us with the glib aside that the event in question “had effectively ended his life.” A writer’s got to know his limitations, but this stratagem is clumsy enough to make one want to laugh for the first time in the book. It certainly beats the part where a wedding ring is retrieved from a bowl of feces.

A Mencken story

Regular readers will know I am a big fan of H.L. Mencken.

From the Good S**t blog comes a story I had not read before.

Update on Christopher Hitchens

From the Guardian, a wide-ranging interview with Christopher Hitchens.

One favorite bit:

Among his many struggles, the one waged against the tyranny of the pressed and laundered outfit should not be overlooked.

On his cancer:

"The worst days," he says, "are when you feel foggy in the head – chemo-brain they call it. It's awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned. You don't have any motive, which is bad. You don't care what's going to happen to you.

Worth reading.

Via MR.

Economics and literature

It was a very full day today, but perhaps the coolest thing I learned is that there is a character based on James Tobin in the Caine Mutiny. Here's the key bit from an old Minneapolis Fed interview with Tobin:

REGION: "A mandarin-like midshipman named Tobit, with a domed forehead, measured quiet speech, and a mind like a sponge, was ahead of the field by a spacious percentage." That's how Herman Wouk described a character-based on you-in The Caine Mutiny. How did you come to be enshrined in a Wouk novel?

TOBIN: That was said in The Caine Mutiny, in the first chapter, and, as you just read, referred to a midshipman, named Tobit, at the school. T-o-b-i-t. It wasn't a very deep disguise.. This school was the midshipman's school for what used to be called those "90 Day Wonders." They would take us for 90 days and make us naval officers. We're talking about 1942, the early days of war after Pearl Harbor. We were assembled in this "ship" in Columbia University in a dormitory. We were taught to be naval officers, supposedly in three months. We were arranged alphabetically in the dormitory. At the top were the people with my first initial T, and also U, V, W. We knew the people adjacent to us and up and down better then the rest of the group, and one of those fellows was Herman Wouk. We were acquainted and were good friends. He was famous in the school because he had been a gag writer for Fred Allen and Allen's famous radio program of the day.

Wouk wrote The Caine Mutiny later and he wanted the protagonist in the book to go to the school that both Wouk and I attended. So that's how this matter came up. That's my only appearance in the book. Wouk and I never had any contact after those 90 days-I was not in the same theater of war that he was or on the same ship or anything. That's how all that came about. The first days after the war when I was beginning my teaching career, in the late '40s and early '50s, The Caine Mutiny became a very popular book which all the students seemed to be reading. So, when the word got around that, well, your teacher was in the book, that added to my reputation among undergraduate students, and graduate students, too. Incidentally, for having the best academic record in this school, I, like Tobit, was given a gold watch by J. P. Morgan.

Full interview here.

This all came up because we covered the Tobit model today in ECON 675, my graduate applied econometrics course.

A great big hat tip to Isaac Sorkin for following up!