This Little Light

I've been on unintentional hiatus for more than two months now, but I wanted to do the prairie dog thing for just a moment to mention Christa Brown's new book on abusive ministers:

1. Eileen Flynn comments on her weblog
2. Eileen Flynn's column at the Austin American-Statesman about Brown's book

This is Flynn's coverage of Christa Brown's book This Little Light: Beyond a Baptist Preacher Predator and His Gang.

I haven't read this book, but I will probably pick it up when I can find it at a good price and have the time to read it. There really is no dispassionate discussion about abusive preachers, but I'm hoping that Brown takes a more measured tone in her book than she does at her weblog.

See also the promise of a review here and points beyond.

things we think are brilliant

Thornburg Mortgage RIP

Our condolences to employees of local mortgage securitization company Thornburg Mortgage, which announced plans to cease operations a couple of weeks ago.

• Thornburg Mortgage Announces Additional Forbearance Agreements, Sale of Its Remaining Assets and Discontinuance of Operations
• Thornburg Mortgage Drops Other Shoe (Updated)
• The House Thornburg Lost

No analysis. I just plumbed the third article to find out what went wrong: according to the article they were borrowing over the short term, secured by packages of AAA-rated mortgages; when their lenders lost faith in the ratings of the mortgages (that's the discussion of "Alt-A," etc.) the fact that they were moderately leveraged (12.5:1) caused their funding formula to suddenly not make sense.

All the other stuff, about taxes, etc. is just sound and fury as far as I can tell; if Thornburg were still in business nobody would be talking about whether they're paying enough taxes.

on the cusp of a post-literate society

Here on the cusp of a post-literate society, pictures used to compliment text.

• From the Telegraph, the world's best passenger complaint letter.
• From Yahoo UK, the same letter, with a followup.

Look at this Richard. Just look at it.

back in the USA

I am finally back sleeping in my own bed after three weeks away: two weeks in Singapore and most of one in Tokyo. I'm on a tight, somewhat difficult schedule for a project at work, so I will be gophering only occasionally over the next few weeks.

This was a fascinating trip and months from now I will probably still be trying to understand what I saw. Singapore is run by a dictator, but the people seem happy. Tokyo, on the other hand, is in principle a democracy but seems moribund at best, and people spend their entire lives at work but a lot of them just seem to be going through the motions.

I didn't realize it, but Alex Kerr (of Lost Japan fame) resurfaced in 2001 with a book called Dogs and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan in which he says essentially that Japan is a mess and getting worse and for deeply-embedded reasons: because their culture is so inward-looking and so much dependent on reaching consensus it's very difficult for them to change course. This manifests in two ways: when they have a good idea they tend to run it into the ground, and when they have a bad idea there's no shifting it.

I really have no idea if he's right or wrong: I read the book somewhat skeptically, suspecting that if he were talking about a culture I am part of I would have been inclined to marginalize a lot of the particulars he cites as being symptoms of a sick society: e.g. some nuclear plant had contamination because it was poorly run, not because Japan has a cover-up culture. And as a foreigner who doesn't speak Japanese I really have no access to information.

Regardless, Dogs and Demons is a fascinating book, and one of the strangest I've ever read. I highly recommend it if you can read it at the right price. Some of what he says hasn't stood the test of time: the economy here in the States is no longer the model of health it was (relative to Japan anyway) in 2001, so some of his comparisons don't have the force they had then. Nevertheless it's still an interesting read.

I also got to change planes in Kuala Lumpur on this trip. I had been somewhat concerned flying a Malaysian airline, and I have to admit the leg from Kuala Lumpur to Tokyo was long and not especially pleasant, but on balance it was probably better than flying Delta.

I think Kuala Lumpur is the furthest I've been going west; I'm looking forward to finding an excuse to get back there again, and this time to visit the city itself. Patience patience.

in Singapore

I've been really busy since the new year, and now I'm in Singapore on business, probably headed to Tokyo late this week or over the weekend.

In the meantime, there's this:


Oh if only life were this simple. Why does this remind me of most of the Laffer Curve pictures I've seen?

Christine Wicker: Not In Kansas Anymore

Cover of Not in Kansas AnymoreIt's the end of the year, and I'm somewhat inspired to follow the outgoing President's example and make next year a big list of books read, etc. But first:

I picked up Christine Wicker's Not In Kansas Anymore: A Curious Tale of How Magic Is Transforming America because it was the only book by Wicker I could find apart from her The Fall of the Evangelical Nation. I was puzzled by her approach in that book (a little hard analysis, a little fudging, then a road trip) and I wanted to see if that's just her style, or if perhaps I was reading her incorrectly.

I think it's her style: Not In Kansas Anymore suffers from the same problem.

I think there's a formula these sort of long-form small stories are supposed to follow: they're part first-person narrative, part received wisdom (historical narrative, expert opinion, what have you), but the two are supposed to be separate: a chapter of first-person narrative, a chapter of perspective, repeat. See for example Bill Bryson's book about the Appalachian Trail, A Walk In the Woods, or Tony Horwitz's Civil War book Confederates In The Attic: Bryson sticks more or less to the chapter-at-a-time formula; Horwitz picks topics per chapter and then breaks up the chapter to add expert opinion.

Wicker doesn't do this, and as a result what could be a fairly interesting story about hoodoo and magical culture in America (for lack of a better term) is a mess: the chapters have cutsie titles that only make sense once the chapter's been read. The story doesn't have an arc, per se. And after a while the vampires mix in with the witches and the hoodoo practitioners and the Otherkind. It's hard to tell who's going through a phase and who's a lifer, who's getting results and who's playing dress-up.

I wish Wicker well with her next book, and I'm grateful for Fall of the Evangelical Nation, which I will eventually write up here. But I have to humbly suggest that Wicker hadn't yet mastered her craft when she wrote this one.

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