Purchases of the days.

From the February 19 and 20, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

(13 copies) "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" [Kindle Edition] Susan Cain (Author) (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $11.06)

(11 copies) "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" [Kindle Edition] Susan Cain (Author) (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $10.19)

... and 164 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyers — all of which convey the quiet, contemplative, good-listener message to the blogger that... shhh... shhh... shhh...

Thank you.

"And as I get older, I like [flying] less and less. I don't much like driving either. I prefer to be driven."

"And, when I'm in London, I don't even like walking on the street. I can never get used to looking the right way when I cross the street. When we're over there, I always say to my wife, 'Stay in the hotel. Don't go out there. It's too dangerous.'"

Says Christopher Walken, who'd like you to know that he's not the creepy guy he always seems to be in his movies. He's  "a regular guy. I stay home a lot, I make an effort to keep a distance from the whole social thing, the openings, the parties. I try to live in a calm way."

I can see why a fearful, avoidant sort of person could manifest as oddball on screen.

How has he survived in the cut-throat, hyper-ambitious world of Hollywood? "Well, you know, I've always found it to be an honest place. They either want you for a role or they don't. It's pretty simple. People talk about Hollywood being this place where you can never get straight answers, but my experience is the opposite. If they don't want you, it's very clear."

What's the worst thing about his job? "Learning lines, for sure. I don't know how people learn their lines quickly. It's always been a tedious, agonising chore for me. I hate it. It takes me ages to know my lines. I just wish I could do movies with cue cards. That way, it's easy. Not lazy, but easy. You know what? I wish I could live my whole life with cue cards. I really do."

Maybe what we're perceiving as odd is his struggle to recall the lines. As for cue cards: 1. Marlon Brando used cue cards, and 2. What's that quote? Life is a play for which there is no rehearsal and only one performance. Something like that. Or am I merging 2 or 3 famous quotes?

"Allow for a mix of introverted and extroverted spaces when shaping an office space."

"It is important to have areas where employees can interact and communicate. It is equally important however to have space where employees can be alone and work undisturbed...."

Creating open office spaces does not allow for areas for introverts to work alone and really center themselves for the day. Work days are now so often characterized by group collaboration and meeting that some employees can often feel overwhelmed with all the interaction.

I felt overwhelmed just reading that last sentence.

***

Dialogue at Meadhouse: "I'm taking a quiz about whether I'm an introvert or an extrovert. Leave me alone."

"Create an ‘aura of insufferable tension’ and ‘if they’re interested, they’ll make the first move.'"

The Keith Richards approach to getting women. Aura of insufferable tension. I love that. What does it even mean? Be Keith Richards, and...

Yay! Skeptoid takes on my favorite target for debunking: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test.

You can listen and also read an episode transcript here. Excerpt:

It's been found that 50% of test takers who retake it score differently the second time. This is because nobody is strictly an E or an I, for example, but somewhere in between. Many people are right on the border for some of the four dichotomies, and depending on their mood that day or other factors, may answer enough questions differently to push them over. Yet the results inaccurately pigeonhole them all the way over to one side or the other. This makes it possible for two people who are very similar to actually end up with completely opposite scores....

From the perspective of statistical analysis, the MBTI's fundamental premise is flawed. According to Myers & Briggs, each person is either an introvert or an extravert. Within each group we would expect to see a bell curve showing the distribution of extraversion within the extraverts group, and introversion within the introverts. If the MBTI approach is valid, we should expect to see two separate bell curves along the introversion/extraversion spectrum, making it valid for Myers & Briggs to decide there are two groups into which people fit. But data have shown that people do not clump into two separately identifiable curves; they clump into a single bell curve, with extreme introverts and extreme extraverts forming the long tails of the curve, and most people gathered somewhere in the middle. Jung himself said "There is no such thing as a pure extravert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum." This does not support the MBTI assumption that people naturally separate into two groups. MBTI takes a knife and cuts the bell curve right down the center, through the meatiest part, and right through most people's horizontal error bars. Moreover, this forced error is compounded four times, with each of the four dichotomies.

"I'm here on the internet and I can't find any communities for loners."

"... I'm so deeply put-off of people from my grueling experiences with extroverts and socialites. So, I'd like to get a chance to talk to my own kind a little. I know there are a lot of people who feel the same way as me... but I can't find a message board for them."

That's a new comment on a post from last August. Perhaps you'd like to respond to the commenter, whose name is Autonomous. I'll redirect him/her to this post, so use this comments section.

Oddly, I've joked twice on this blog about "the loner community": here and here.

I hope if you're a loner, you're a true loner and not a pseudo-loner.

A few weeks ago, I did a diavlog with Bella DePaulo in which I brought up the Jonathan Rauch essay "Caring for Your Introvert." She read and liked it and has this post:

The same year that Rauch's essay appeared, the witty and wonderful Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto was also published. Loners, notes author Anneli Rufus, are people who prefer to be alone. They are not sad, lonely, or deranged.

Contrary to stereotypes and TV-punditry, loners are not serial murderers and they are not school shooters, either. True, there are criminals who look like loners, in that they spend lots of time alone. Typically, though, they are just pseudo-loners, who never craved all that time to themselves. They wanted to be included but were instead rejected.

True loners do not withdraw in order to stew in misery or plot violent revenge. Instead, Rufus reminds us, loners "know better than anyone how to entertain themselves...They have a knack for imagination, concentration, inner discipline, and invention."

If you spend a lot of time alone, don't you also spend a lot of time thinking about why you are spending time alone? Rauch and Rufus and DePaulo are doing PR for solitariness, and I wonder if it's working. Rauch wrote:

How can I let the introvert in my life know that I support him and respect his choice? First, recognize that it's not a choice. It's not a lifestyle. It's an orientation.

If you have the introvert orientation, do you feel free to be out about it? Don't you have to worry that people will think you're one of the pseudo-loners?

"These patients are still people, they are still emotional and they still need love."

The story of Justice O'Connor and her husband, who, debilitated by Alzheimer's, found a new love, makes us want to think more deeply about what it means to have a relationship with someone who can no longer remember you:

Laura L. Carstensen, a psychology professor and founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, said new relationships among dementia patients can often be very hard on families....

"The emotion center of the brain tends to be relatively well preserved in dementia patients, even as their memory disappears. ... The key to understanding these relationships is that that these patients are still people, they are still emotional and they still need love," she said....

Is there any choice but to manifest acceptance of what has happened, to be generous to the person who is — after all — dying? The real pain and jealousy — if it exists — must be endured privately. But one need not tell the world about any of it, as Justice O'Connor has chosen to do. There is little point in her saying: Look what is happening to me and how well I am taking it. I'm thinking that, knowing this is common occurrence, she is offering some moral support for others who are facing what she is. It's a generosity extending outward, to strangers.

It happens that there is an excellent movie on the subject this year called "Away From Her," an adaptation of an Alice Munro story called "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" (available now as a separate book).  I watched the movie the other day, then read the story. I wanted to read the story to understand more of something I thought I saw in the movie, but what I was interested in was not part of Munro's story at all. It was introduced by the screenplay writer, the film's director, Sarah Polley.

Early in the movie, the husband, Grant, tours the nursing home where he will put his wife, Fiona. We see that there are 2 floors to the facility, the first floor, where patients are continually involved in socializing, and the second floor, where they put more "progressed" patients. Grant refuses to look at the second floor or even to think of Fiona ending up there. Later, we see that on the second floor, there are simple rooms and no socializing. 

Don't we all, always, move between the first and second floor, the life of socializing and the life of solitude? We have different preferences, and some of us are more introverted and choose to live on the second floor. I thought there was a larger concept to the movie, and I have to spoil the ending to say what I mean.

On the first floor, Fiona becomes attached to another resident, a man named Aubrey. She sits with him and watches him play bridge, and she tends to him. She's absorbed in him. Her husband tries to reach her, by bringing her books and reading to her as he had done in the past. (He was a professor of Icelandic literature, and she was of Icelandic ancestry, and the book is about Iceland.) She can't understand him, and she what she likes about Aubrey is that he doesn't confuse her. 

When Aubrey leaves the facility, Fiona declines and, consequently, they move her to the second floor. Grant does what he can to get Aubrey back, but in the end, before Aubrey's return, Grant enters the room and finds Fiona reading the book about Iceland. She seems alive again, restored by reading, and she can, to some extent, recognize and love her husband again. She isn't confused by a book or a man who is devoted to books, she's reoriented.

I thought this meant something about solitude, reading, and the life of the mind. I thought the message was something like: We fall out of touch with our humanity, we lose our grip on our own identity if our life is filled with socializing. Or: Institutions are designed by extroverts, who think there's something wrong if there isn't continual social interaction, and an introverted person, who thrives in the life of the mind, is ruined in such a place.

I don't think Munro's story says anything like this, but I think it is the leavening that Sarah Polley — who is only 27 — brought to the story, giving it a much broader and more universal meaning. 

Is the internet "the end of the artist as a sensitive, bohemian soul"?

Here's a big, interesting NYT Magazine article about how musicians these days use blogs to get attention and success. You can go read all that, which focuses on a guy named Jonathan Coulton:

His fans need him; he needs them. Which is why, every day, Coulton wakes up, gets coffee, cracks open his PowerBook and hunkers down for up to six hours of nonstop and frequently exhausting communion with his virtual crowd.

Key words: "up to." Come on, here's his blog. He doesn't even post every day, and the posts I've read are just little updates on what he's been doing. There's also email:

Now fans think nothing of sending an e-mail message to their favorite singer — and they actually expect a personal reply. This is not merely an illusion of intimacy. Performing artists these days, particularly new or struggling musicians, are increasingly eager, even desperate, to master the new social rules of Internet fame. They know many young fans aren’t hearing about bands from MTV or magazines anymore; fame can come instead through viral word-of-mouth, when a friend forwards a Web-site address, swaps an MP3, e-mails a link to a fan blog or posts a cellphone concert video on YouTube.

Is this a hardship, or are you thinking if only I had these tools back when I had a band?

Across the country, the CD business is in a spectacular free fall; sales are down 20 percent this year alone. People are increasingly getting their music online (whether or not they’re paying for it), and it seems likely that the artists who forge direct access to their fans have the best chance of figuring out what the new economics of the music business will be.

What a fabulous opportunity!

Remarkably, Coulton offers most of his music free on his site; when fans buy his songs, it is because they want to give him money. The Canadian folk-pop singer Jane Siberry has an even more clever system: she has a “pay what you can” policy with her downloadable songs, so fans can download them free — but her site also shows the average price her customers have paid for each track. This subtly creates a community standard, a generalized awareness of how much people think each track is really worth. The result? The average price is as much as $1.30 a track, more than her fans would pay at iTunes.

Aw, that's cool. (Note that bloggers who give their writing away and may spend "up to" 6 hours a day writing have PayPal buttons that allow for the subtle creation of community and the heightening of generalized awareness.)

“If some kid is going to take 10 minutes out of his day to figure out what he wants to say in an e-mail, and then write it and send it, for me to not take the 5 minutes to say, dude, thanks so much — for me to ignore that?” [said Tad Kubler of the rock band the Hold Steady.] “I can’t.”

You know, it actually takes much less than 5 minutes to answer email like that, especially if you only write "Dude, thanks so much, Tad." Realistically, if you got 25 messages a day from fans, you could turn them around in half an hour, and you'd be crazy not to within this web-based economic model.

Yet Kubler sometimes has second thoughts about the intimacy. Part of the allure of rock, when he was a kid, was the shadowy glamour that surrounded his favorite stars. He’d parse their lyrics to try to figure out what they were like in person. Now he wonders: Are today’s online artists ruining their own aura by blogging? Can you still idolize someone when you know what they had for breakfast this morning? “It takes a little bit of the mystery out of rock ’n’ roll,” he said.

But those unreachable idols always released some personal details in their PR. They chose what to tell, and I'm sure some of it was just made up to give us whatever intimacy they wanted.

The same is true for blogging. It's an illusion of intimacy. There are only tantalizing little impressions. You may think, for example, that you have a view into my life, but I choose what you get to see and how much of it.

Look at this post of mine from Mother's Day and tell me what you know about my relationship with my mother. A commenter wrote: "You can tell by the pictures with your mother you were a good daughter." Another wrote: "Your Mom must have been a wonderful person." Another: "It's nice to know that even when your parents aren't with you physically, that they are still with you in every other way. I can just imagine that your mother is beaming with pride right now." I let those comments stand, signifying what they do, and I don't say whether the impressions are accurate. But apparently, you feel as though you've been embraced by some maternal warmth.

It's an illusion of intimacy. Part of the illusion is the appearance of revelation and frankness I'm generating right now.

So Kubler has cultivated a skill that is unique to the age of Internet fandom, and perhaps increasingly necessary to it, as well: a nuanced ability to seem authentic and confessional without spilling over into a Britney Spears level of information overload. He doesn’t post about his home life, doesn’t mention anything about his daughter or girlfriend — and he certainly doesn’t describe any of the ill-fated come-ons he deflects from addled female fans who don’t realize he’s in a long-term relationship.

Yes, exactly. This is what it takes to blog. Think about how little you know about my private life. And yet I'm constantly told that my blog is so personal. People who worry about blogging don't understand this distinction.

The author of the article -- Clive Thompson -- worries that the internet will "change the type of person who becomes a musician or writer":

It’s possible to see these online trends as Darwinian pressures that will inevitably produce a new breed — call it an Artist 2.0 — and mark the end of the artist as a sensitive, bohemian soul who shuns the spotlight....

It is also possible, though, that this is simply a natural transition point and that the next generation of musicians and artists — even the avowedly “sensitive” ones — will find the constant presence of their fans unremarkable.

I don't really see the problem. You control access to yourself even more on line than you do when you venture out into the physical world. I think a shy, introverted artist had more trouble in the past trying to find success when it required interacting with people in the flesh, when they were available and had a moment to give you a chance to make a good impression. It's so much easier for a sensitive artist to allow the world to see what he wants seen by using a website and interacting with people in writing.

Thinking about Professor Kingsfield again.

Writing the previous post, I ran across a couple of bloggers who talked about going back to my Kingsfield column in the NYT a few weeks ago. (TimesSelect link.) I described a talk by John Jay Osborn Jr., the author of "The Paper Chase," and wrote:

... Osborn says [law students] hate law school, and they hate it because the law professors don’t care about what the students think. “You come in here with a skull full of mush, and you leave thinking like a lawyer,” said Osborn’s sadistically Socratic professor, Charles W. Kingsfield Jr. This legal discipline deprives students of “their own narrative,” as Osborn put it, and they need to learn how to struggle, as Osborn’s protagonist Hart did, to “reclaim” it. They need to resist what law school tries to impose....

Here's Greg, a law student who actually has had Osborn as his lawprof:

Because Prof. Osborn didn't cold-call, didn't even assign people to be "up" for a particular class, it was the narrative of a few that we heard most from.

This is the #1 problem with relying on volunteers. I, myself, have used volunteers through most of my 20+ years teaching law. It is more relaxed and does give you the good feeling that you're not intruding on anyone. But of course, you are. You're intruding on the minds of everyone in the room, even if they are passive and silent. They may avoid the fear and pressure of getting put on the spot, but that doesn't mean they're having a fine time listening to the students who enjoy engaging with the professor.

Osborn wants to empower students to "reclaim" their "personal narrative" in class, but you've got to picture that in practice. Just because the opportunity is offered doesn't mean the students will respond in proportion to their need for personal empowerment or the value of their personal narrative to the classroom experience.

Most likely, the students who bring the most empowerment to class will do the most talking. These may be the extroverts or the students who came from families or great schools that got them comfortable with exposing their minds. Having to listen to these already-empowered students may very well disempower the students who are more introverted or whose families did not debate politics at the dinner table or whose high schools were substandard holding pens. It may strengthen some students over others -- perhaps males over females or white students over minorities students.

If we care about diversity, we need to worry about a teaching method that activates some and not others. Even if you rankle at "diversity" talk like that and prefer to think in terms of individuals, you should care about systematically empowering some individuals over others. Well, if you rankle at "diversity," you probably hate "empowering" too, but the point remains! If you're going to have a classroom where students do some of the talking, it's best to get the full range of students talking, especially if the students are going into a field like law, where speaking is going to be part of the work.

Here's another law student blog post, from Aaron of The Stopped Clock:

One of the best student experiences I had in law school was being taught by J.J. White, who was probably the most like Professor Kingsfield of any professor at UM. He knew his material cold, and I had the impression that he spent more time reviewing cases and preparing for each class than did most of his students....

Had every professor at UM been like him, I would have had to work a lot harder and I would have learned a lot more.

Aaron's post is pretty rambling and entails an awful lot of personal narrative. It's hard to tell what he's driving at. And then it ends with a question for me. Hey, Aaron, I'm the lawprof. I'm the one who wants a neo-Socratic revival. That is, I'm the one with the questions. No answers for you!

By the way, I love Prof. Osborn, who sent me a nice note about the NYT column, in which he cleverly pointed out that I used personal narrative and told my own story in the column. He's quite right! Here I am, leading up to a conclusion that rejects the idea of opening up the classroom to students telling their own stories:

When I was applying to law schools in 1977, I really didn't need an anti-authoritarian novel about a young guy who lets a love affair with the professor's daughter eat into his study time. I was married and -- it seemed then -- a little old for that sort of frippery.

I was 26. What I needed was to get serious after years of underemployment inspired by books and movies about defying authority. I had to set aside that obsolescent hippie balkiness and adopt a pragmatic attitude for the task ahead. ''One L'' -- which was new then -- laid out the facts about law school and got you just scared enough to fire you up for the challenge.

And of course, "One L" is a personal narrative too. (And where's my letter from Scott Turow?!)

I'm not against personal narrative. As a blogger, could I be against personal narrative? Actually, I could. A blog could be much more personal than this, and it could also be utterly impersonal. Like a law school class, you've got to choose where you want to pitch it. Unlike a law school class, you've got a full range of choice. I think it would be downright abusive to make my law school class as personal as this blog... and to make this blog as personal as it could be... well, that would be crazy, wouldn't it? Or are you just waiting for the day when I lay my inhibitions aside and tell you what I really think... and what I really do?

"Even as Google tries to hire more people faster, it wants to make sure that its employees will fit into its freewheeling culture."

Here's an article about Google's new approach to hiring:

[Google] has created an automated way to search for talent among the more than 100,000 job applications it receives each month. It is starting to ask job applicants to fill out an elaborate online survey that explores their attitudes, behavior, personality and biographical details going back to high school....

The answers are fed into a series of formulas created by Google’s mathematicians that calculate a score — from zero to 100 — meant to predict how well a person will fit into its chaotic and competitive culture....

What Googlish methods were used to come up with the questions and the formula for weighting them? They surveyed the employees they already had with various questions like "Is your work space messy or neat?" and "Are you an extrovert or an introvert?" and connected the answers to the 25 different measurements they had about each survey-taker's job performance. This gave them 2 million data points to analyze.

What did they figure out? Nothing, really, as far as I can tell. High grades in school don't guarantee success at work. Who is surprised? You can tell if a person was once both smart, goal-oriented, and hard-working. But how they're going to behave once they land the job is a different matter altogether.

The "vice president for people operations" is quoted saying: "Interviews are a terrible predictor of performance." That's not surprising either, is it? And it's a good thing too. How awful it would be if an interviewer could see into your soul.

I suppose I like the idea of a long survey that is individualized to the conditions and requirements of a particular workplace. It lets different people rise to the top and crack through the layer normally occupied by the applicants with the highest grades. But it seems as though people who want jobs will figure out ways to ace the survey, won't they? And some people are just good at surveys. Why would that make them good workers?

But maybe you think that Google has such brilliant ways of coordinating vast numbers of data points, and whatever they do will somehow -- amazingly, magically -- work.

"Copies of isolated books, bound between inert covers, soon won't mean much."

Read this article, by Kevin Kelly of Wired. It's long, but well worth the read. Key passage:

What is the technology telling us? That copies don't count any more. Copies of isolated books, bound between inert covers, soon won't mean much. Copies of their texts, however, will gain in meaning as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed and copied again. What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, annotated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media and sewn together into the universal library. Soon a book outside the library will be like a Web page outside the Web, gasping for air. Indeed, the only way for books to retain their waning authority in our culture is to wire their texts into the universal library.

Kelly takes the extreme position that copyright holders will have to give up on the outmoded practice of making money from selling copies. No matter how much they've been able to get their needs served by legislators, the sheer force of technology will defeat them in the end.

[T]he economic model built on [copies] is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies lose value. They are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connection and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer and engage a work. Authors and artists can make (and have made) their livings selling aspects of their works other than inexpensive copies of them. They can sell performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information, the scarcity of attention (via ads), sponsorship, periodic subscriptions — in short, all the many values that cannot be copied. The cheap copy becomes the "discovery tool" that markets these other intangible valuables.

How painful it must be to the average author -- an introvert -- to hear that the new way of making money will be selling personal access to you.

Kelly is very good at getting us excited about how great it will be to have all of humanity's writing in position for infinite linking, but way too blithe about the burden to be inflicted on writers. In his technology triumphalism, he goes so far as to say:

Having searchable works is good for culture. It is so good, in fact, that we can now state a new covenant: Copyrights must be counterbalanced by copyduties. In exchange for public protection of a work's copies (what we call copyright), a creator has an obligation to allow that work to be searched. No search, no copyright.

So Kelly would not even permit the author with a highly saleable book to opt out of being scanned into the system. That's harsh. Maybe it's a bargaining chip for the legal dealing that is going on. But he's very convincing when he talks about the benefits to most authors, whose works go out of print and lose economic potential. For them, moving from oblivion into a lively system of linkage is a great benefit.

"On the Internet, no one knows you're an introvert."

Remember that great old essay in The Atlantic by Jonathan Rauch, "Caring for Your Introvert"? We talked about it recently here. The new issue of The Atlantic has an interview with Rauch about his enduringly popular essay:

It seems as though, given the dramatic response to this article, there must be a lot of people out there who are just now realizing that they're introverts and that the dominant culture doesn't really take their characteristics into account in terms of what it expects of them.

Well, that's exactly right. Part of the thrill of this article is that it seems to be helping introverts discover each other. It never occurred to me when I wrote it that there would be so many other people out there with whom this would resonate so strongly. But one of the main points I see over and over again in the mail I've been getting is, "I'm not alone! There are others like me." This sense of empowerment because of not being alone is very important to people. That in itself, to the extent that that takes hold, would be a very important part of correcting the introvert/extrovert imbalance.

Your article has also been one of the most popular pages on our Web site. We posted it three years ago, and it still gets more hits than practically anything else on the site.

Yes. The Internet is the perfect medium for introverts. You could almost call it the Intronet. You know the old New Yorker cartoon with a dog sitting at a computer saying to another dog, "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog." Well, on the Internet, no one knows you're an introvert. So it's kind of a natural that when The Atlantic put this piece online, introverts beat a path to it; it's the ideal distribution mechanism by which introverts can reach other introverts and spread the word.

So are you folks all introverts? Is that what you're doing on line? Is that what all these bloggers are?

"Recognize that it's not a choice. It's not a lifestyle. It's an orientation."

Jonathan Rauch’s 2003 article “How to Care for Your Introvert” was the most-read article at The Atlantic’s website this past week (according to the email they just sent me). It’s interesting to see that this older article is still so popular. It should be! It’s memorable – I’ve always remembered it since originally reading it. It starts like this:

Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice?

If so, do you tell this person he is "too serious," or ask if he is okay? Regard him as aloof, arrogant, rude? Redouble your efforts to draw him out?

If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that you have an introvert on your hands—and that you aren't caring for him properly.

Are you taking care of your introvert? Are you an introvert that is not getting proper care?

[E]xtroverts have no idea of the torment they put us through. Sometimes, as we gasp for air amid the fog of their 98-percent-content-free talk, we wonder if extroverts even bother to listen to themselves. Still, we endure stoically, because the etiquette books—written, no doubt, by extroverts—regard declining to banter as rude and gaps in conversation as awkward. We can only dream that someday, when our condition is more widely understood, when perhaps an Introverts' Rights movement has blossomed and borne fruit, it will not be impolite to say "I'm an introvert. You are a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush."

UPDATE: Thanks to Kevin Drum for linking. Althouse readers -- who generally seem to think Kevin's is the best of the "rational, intelligent liberal blogs -- should check out the comments over there.

Dylan's "Chronicles": Chapter 5.

Finally, I got around to finishing the last chapter of Dylan's autobiography. I was blogging at the blistering pace of a chapter a day for a while. Chapter 1 is here (and here's the text of Chapter 1 on the publisher's website (via Metafilter)). Chapter 2 is here, and Chapter 3 is here. I kept up at a post a day but not a chapter a day with the first part of Chapter 4 here, and the second part of Chapter 4 here. Now, I've let four days go by, only reading a few pages a day. But this post covers all of Chapter 5.



Why Dylan liked Neil Sedaka more than other big New York songwriters: he performed his own songs. P. 227.



Dylan seems to have gotten some ideas from Harry Truman, whom his parents took him to see when he was a kid: "Truman was gray hatted, a slight figure, spoke in the same kind of nasal twang and tone like a country singer. I was mesmerized by his slow drawl and sense of seriousness and how people hung on every word he was saying." Pp. 230-231.



Dylan and guns: "As kids, we shot air guns, BB guns and the real thing--.22s--shot at tin cans, bottles or overfed rats in the town garbage dump." P. 232. He explains "rubberguns" and how the introduction of synthetic rubber ruined all the fun. Pp. 232-233.



Description of folk music: "It was life magnified." P. 236.



What Woody Guthrie's voice was like: "a stiletto." P. 244.



How Woody Guthrie writes: "like the whirlwind." P. 245.



Goal Dylan set: "to be Guthrie's greatest disciple." 246.



How the goal was thwarted: he found out Jack Elliot had already done it. P. 250.



What Dylan thought of asking John Wayne when he met him, but didn't because it "would have been crazy": "why some of his cowboy films were better than others." P. 250.



Description of Joan Baez: "Both Scot and Mex, she looked like a religious icon, like somebody you'd sacrifice yourself for and she sang in a voice straight to God ..." P. 255.



Interesting talent possessed by Noel Stookey: "He could imitate just about anything--clogged water pipes and toilets flushing, steamships and sawmills, traffic, violins and trombones. He could imitate singers imitating other singers ... [for example] Dean Martin imitating Little Richard." P. 259.



How Wavy Gravy dressed when he was still Hugh Romney: "he was the straightest looking cat you'd ever seen--always smartly dressed, usually in Brooks Brothers light gray suits." P. 259.



What Dave Van Ronk's wife Terri talked about: "highfalutin' theological ideas behind political systems. Nietzschean politics. Politics with a hanging heaviness." P. 263.



What Terri couldn't believe anyone would be stupid enough to buy: an electric can opener. P. 263.



What Dylan drank between sets in his early days in New York City: "shooters of Wild Turkey and iced Schlitz." P. 264.



How Dylan felt when he met Suze Rotolo: "The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves." P. 265.



Why Suze was just his type: "She reminded me of a libertine heroine." P. 265.



Movies Dylan went to see to try to get Suze off his mind for a while: "Atlantis, Lost Continent" and "King of Kings." P. 265.



Song name I wrote in the margin of page 266, where Dylan describes Suze's mother and sister: "Ballad in Plain D."



What Suze's mother said to Dylan: "Do me a favor, don't think when I'm around." P. 267.



Suze's age: 17.



How Dylan furnished his first apartment in NY: he borrowed tools and built furniture. He even made his own mirrors with plate glass, mercury and tin foil. P. 267-268.



What Suze taught Dylan about: artists! Pp. 268-269.



Favorite artist that seemed to express what folk music expresses: Red Grooms. P. 269-270.



Anti-fallout shelter song he wrote early on at his handmade table: "Let Me Die in My Footsteps." P. 270-272. That reminds me, obvious as it is now, when I was an adolescent in the early 60s, I couldn't understand why my parents weren't building a fallout shelter.



How people felt about Communists in northern Minnesota: "People weren't scared of them, seemed to be a big to-do over nothing." P. 271.



Kurt Weill/Bertholt Brecht song that made Dylan think of Duluth: "Pirate Jenny." P. 273-276.



Dylan's description of himself as a child in Duluth, listening to foghorns: "slight, introverted and asthma stricken." P. 274.



Dylan song I'm reminded of by his description of trying to learn a lot about songwriting from "Pirate Jenny": "When the Ship Comes In."



Singer Dylan thought was great--he was right--but couldn't get other folksingers--like Dave Van Ronk--to care about: Robert Johnson. Pp. 282-283.



Dylan's favorite politician: Barry Goldwater. P. 283.



Why: "[he] reminded me of Tom Mix."



Bob Dylan song that mentions Goldwater: "I Shall Be Free, No. 10."

Now, I'm liberal, but to a degree

I want ev'rybody to be free

But if you think that I'll let Barry Goldwater

Move in next door and marry my daughter

You must think I'm crazy!

I wouldn't let him do it for all the farms in Cuba.

A Bob Dylan political opinion: "I wasn't that comfortable with all the psycho polemic babble. It wasn't my particular feast of food. Even the current news made me nervous. I liked the old news better." P. 283.



Description of Robert Johnson's lyrics that shows what Dylan learned about songwriting from him: "old style lines and ... free-association ... sparkling allegories, big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction." P. 285.



What the second to the last paragraph of the book is devoted to: Minnesotans.

"Diary of a Political Tourist."

Having thoroughly enjoyed "Journeys with George," I was looking forward to seeing Alexandra Pelosi's new HBO documentary, "Diary of a Political Tourist." Alessandra Staley's review of it in yesterday's NYT succeeded in lowering my expectations:

Once again she wields her hand-held camera throughout the Democratic primary with the cheeky presumption of an heiress who thinks people laugh at her jokes because they find her funny. As Joe Lieberman and other candidates make fools of themselves dancing to her tune, Mr. Kerry remains unfailingly courteous and in control. Like William Powell in the 30's screwball comedy "Our Man Godfrey," he is the butler who outwits and outclasses his employers at every turn.

Oh, I think somebody's for Kerry. Staley goes on to devote most of her column to pushing an alternative to the Pelosi film:

"Frontline" presents side-by-side résumés of Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry, which is, of course, hideously unfair to Mr. Bush. ... "Frontline" does not cut the president any breaks. ... "The Choice 2004" makes the case that a cynical ruthlessness lies beneath Mr. Bush's piety and campaign trail bonhomie. ... [The director Nicholas] Lemann concludes that for all Mr. Kerry's hard work and determination, it is actually Mr. Bush who is the most ambitious of the two.

Thanks, Alessandra, but I watched Alexandra. Pelosi followed the Democratic candidates around during the primaries, and it was fun and nostalgic to see them all again. I would have voted for Joe Lieberman if he had stayed in the race until the Wisconsin primary--I voted for John Edwards--and it was nice seeing him again. He'd go right up to the camera and fool around with Pelosi in a relaxed way. So would Howard Dean, though Dean never really seems relaxed. A Kerry supporter like Alessandra Staley might have a problem with the film--though Lord knows Pelosi is a Democrat--because Kerry is very stiff in front of the camera. The man is an introvert: it just doesn't work as well in Alexandra's home video style. Pelosi doesn't really present any political issues and arguments. She just shows what it's like behind the scenes, eating bad food and traveling around to obscure places. Kerry is a man who likes to preserve a dignified space around himself, and you can see that in Pelosi's film. Lieberman is a guy who will let Pelosi get right up next to him while he wolfs down a fried Twinkie and who will just go ahead and burst into singing "My Way" on camera. It has virtually nothing to do with which man would make the better President, but it's funny on camera. It's funny to see most of the candidates fooling around, and it's funny--perhaps painfully--to see Kerry trying to stay out of the film. At one point, he tries to go for a walk by himself, but he has nowhere he can walk to and Pelosi shows us the people with cameras who are hanging back, but still filming the Senator's awkward meditative walk.



P.S. Bush fans will find things in the beginning of the film to enjoy, as Pelosi sneaks her video camera into the White House Christmas party, then has to aim it at the floor when she's near the President. We hear him talking as Pelosi tries to get him to let her film him again. "I already made you famous once," he says, with charming good humor.

About Al Gore.

Sixteen interesting things about Al Gore, from David Remnick's article in The New Yorker.



1. Leon Russell is one of his neighbors—in the Belle Meade section of Nashville.



2. Tipper Gore keeps a drum set in the living room.



3. They keep bugs out of their yard with a "system that sprays a fine mist of ground chrysanthemums from various discreet sources."



4. Gore is “having a blast.”



5. Gore has an eccentric artist friend who is "a crazy kinda guy” who's got a band called Monkey Bowl that's "a cross between the Fugs and Ali G."



6. Gore thinks the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas is "a ve-rrry interesting guy."



7. Gore has a problem with television: “There is just nothing on the dendrite level about watching television."



8. Gore is interested in "flow." Me too!



9. Gore has been avoiding “Fahrenheit 9/11." Me too!



10. Politics was a bad career choice for Gore because as an introvert, he's drained after an event. Clinton, an extrovert, is invigorated.



11. Gore didn't use Clinton in the 2000 campaign because he loves Tipper so much and cares about marital fidelity.



12. Gore thinks Bush is "a very weak man" who let other people push him around. He says Bush "was rolled in the immediate aftermath of 9/11." Gore doesn't think Bush is dumb, just "incurious." (Who started that "incurious" meme? It must have originally been a play on "Curious George.")



13. Gore doesn't seem to like Kerry very much. The two co-senators did not have much of a relationship, even though they had something in common: "aloofness." But, per Gore, Kerry "took the initiative to reach out to me and to identify the fact that he felt the relationship was not what it could be and should be and asked to sit down and talk about it and jointly create a basis for a much better working relationship. " That must have been one hell of a polysyllabic conversation.



14. Gore keeps an Apple G4 on the table when he eats a meal in front of the New Yorker reporter, who peeks at his bookmarks: the Times, the Washington Post, Google News, mediawhoresonline.com, truthout.com.



15. Gore seems a bit obsessed by a memo Lewis F. Powell, Jr. wrote just before he went on the Supreme Court. The memo argues that conservatives should strongly defend free enterprise because it is “'under broad attack' by well-funded leftists, who dominate the media, academia, and even some corners of the political world. " As if Justice Powell is at the root of a vast, right-wing conspiracy.



16. Gore doesn't like Bush's Christian fundamentalism because it doesn't have enough of the Sermon on the Mount in it—not enough about helping the poor. He and Tipper can't even find a church to attend in Nashville: “The influx of fundamentalist preachers have pretty much chased us out with their right-wing politics."