A Tale of Two Crossfit Totals

A Crossfit Total is a simple test of strength: three attempts to find a one-repetition max in the back squat, deadlift and press. Add up those numbers, and you have a Total.

In September 2011, after finishing an eight-week cycle of lifts that tracked (quite closely) the programming prescribed in Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength program, I completed the following lifts (weights in pounds for one repetition):

Back Squat: 265/275/285
Press: 125/130/135
Deadlift: 265/275/290

Comments: I didn’t fail any of the lifts, which would seem to suggest I could have gone a little heavier. Conversely, it also means I planned smart, and did my lifts right. In the squat and deadlift, I began with numbers that were close to the last completed workouts. In the case of the squat, I had done a 250x5x3 workout the week before, and in the case of the deadlift, I had done a 255×5 workout the week before. My back squat and deadlift numbers are too close; this is because my deadlift is my weakest lift. My weak and injured lower back requires me to be very cautious when deadlifting.

In December 2011, after returning to regular programming at Crossfit South Brooklyn, I did another Crossfit Total and this is what I completed:

Back Squat: 255/265/275(Fail)
Press: 135(Fail)/125/136(Fail)
Deadlift: 265/275/290(Fail)

Comments: Clearly my numbers fell off, which was initially disappointing, but in retrospect this was entirely understandable. A strength cycle is dedicated to squatting and pressing (bench or military) three times a week; the heavy squatting aids the deadlift numbers as well. Regular Crossfit programming doesn’t allow for such systematic, week-in, week-out, linear progressions in the lifts. It would have been surprising if I had pulled off the same numbers in the second total. In retrospect my second total numbers are actually quite good.

That said, there a few factors contributed to the lowered numbers.

First, my squatting coming into the total had been a little sporadic and to make things worse, a couple of my workouts had featured some off-color squatting (shallow reps, staggers on coming out of “the hole”). My confidence in the squat was not sky-high during the December total. I was happy enough to make the first lift I had made in the September total.

Second, in the case of the press, I planned badly. I should have started with a 125, gone for a 135 on the second if that had come off, and then tried a lift for a personal record on the third try. Lesson learned. I should know better by now, but there you have it.

Third, in the case of the deadlift, I simply lacked practice; I hadn’t deadlifted enough to be able to go for anything heavier than the 275 I did pull off.

I’ve now started another strength cycle (this past Monday). My starting squat number is 205, my starting deadlift number is 235. I hope to make it past 300 in both lifts, which should be doable if I eat right, and do enough stretching and post-lifting recovery work. A pair of tight hamstrings will sabotage both these lifts, so those need to be supple and limber. (I haven’t forgotten about the press; my starting number is 100, and for now, I’m allowing myself to dream of breaking 150; the press is extremely finicky, so who knows what will happen here, but hope springs eternal and all that.)

Megan McArdle’s Defense Of Property Rights

In the Atlantic, Megan McArdle offers a long, tilting-at-strawmen defense of (intellectual) property rights. (In what follows, I’m not going to attempt line-by-line rebuttals; McArdle rambled too much for that. I’ve simply directed my ire against the two aspects of the post that stood out the most: the attack on a strawman argument and the patronizing, sneering tone of voice.)

I get the sense that people find it intuitive that many people think property is, at its heart, a system for deciding how to allocate a limited and fixed set of stuff….I’m not sure how we settled on “it’s non-rivalrous” as the reason that file sharing is a) not stealing and b) okay….But [libertarians] haven’t, to me, advanced a theory of property–either moral or economic–to which the property “rivalrous” is really so obviously fundamental that in its absence, we’re no longer dealing with property.

McArdle takes herself to be arguing against the claim that “If non-rivalrousness obtains with respect to a good there should be no property rights with respect to it”. This, as far as I can tell, has never been the basis, of any argument against property rights in anything. It has however, in many, many, different venues been the basis of a claim that suggests that goods that are non-rival in nature require some rejiggering of legal regimes–and intuitions built on long discourses surrounding those regimes–that have been constructed with rivalrousness central to their understanding of property rights. That is all. Anyone that takes on non-rivarlousness in goods as being a sufficient reason for there being no property rights pertaining to those goods is tilting as windmills.

Ironically, McArdle seems to imagine some consensus over the understanding of property rights (she invokes an imaginary “We” again and again that does nothing more than recapitulate some shadowy set of established intuitions that are precisely the ones up for reconfiguration in the modern debate about IP rights), and by throwing out a bunch of hypotheticals (the Barnes and Noble example she constructs is a classic), actually lands up undermining some conventional intuitions that people might have about rival goods instead. In the B&N case, I’d suggest she ends up making a good argument for why property rights should be weaker even in the case of solid, tangible, rival goods like printed books (read the example; it is entirely plausible that someone on reading her example would be tempted to respond, “Well, when you put it that way, maybe it’s better that someone walks out with a book from a store rather than that book being pulped!”). Similarly, for the trespass case; McArdle again lands up making a very good case for why some variants of non-interference squatting should not be a problem for proponents of property rights (read the example; a plausible response might be “Now that you put it that way, I think using that cabin up in the mountains while the owner isn’t there might not be such a bad thing for society after all”). I’m not sure if this was her intention but she certainly succeeds.

McArdle’s article though, for my money, commits an even greater sin than the mere commission of a fallacy. She patronizes:

[I]t occurred to me how many of the analogies seem to have been designed by and for college students. Which is to say, they are reasoning from a pretty simple version of property, appropriate to someone who doesn’t really engage in much commerce.

There is that old sneer–which seems to be almost obligatory for folks who advocate for strong (intellectual) property rights–all over again: You don’t do business; you don’t understand commerce; why participate in this discussion about an issue that bears on culture? Let folks that do “commerce” get to decide how information should be legally manipulated, controlled and regulated. No matter what kind of information it is. (What makes this sneer especially ironic in the context of the particular case is that McArdle jumped to offer her defense in the context of the JSTOR/Schwartz imbroglio, a case that has a great deal to do with the dissemination of a scholarly scientific and cultural archive.)

Update: Changed post title to “Property Rights” rather than “IP rights”

Personal Identity And Wanting To Be Jim Lovell

Personal identity is a philosophical topic made for thought experiments. The problem of persistence of identity is quite simply posed; as the Stanford Encylopedia for Philosophy entry for personal identity puts it:

What determines which past or future being is you? Suppose you point to a child in an old class photograph and say, “That’s me.” What makes you that one, rather than one of the others? What is it about the way she relates then to you as you are now that makes her you? For that matter, what makes it the case that anyone at all who existed back then is you?

The related problem of self-identity–what makes me the person I am, posed classically as the question ‘Who Am I?’–reveals itself as just as fascinating:

[O]ne’s “personal identity”…makes one the person one is. [It] consists roughly of what makes you unique as an individual and different from others. Or it is the way you see or define yourself, or the network of values and convictions that structure your life. This individual identity is a property (or set of properties).

These problems of persistence of identity and self-identity pose questions like, “If X had not happened to me would I still be who I am?” (Which set of experiences are definitive of my identity), or “If I did not possess this property/behavioral characteristic/personality feature would I still be who I am?” (roughly, Which of my properties are “essential” to my identity?) Almost anyone, including schoolboys, can be perplexed by the thought experiments that lead to these questions.

I should know, because I was a schoolboy once, and these questions managed to stump me.

My childhood attempt at raising a hypothetical situation that prompted these questions came about when I was a space-travel nerd, one that avidly read up on histories of manned space exploration, including biographies and autobiographies of astronauts. Those astronauts that had had long careers struck me as having lived particularly rich lives: they had been pilots (even better, at times they had been military pilots who had flown in combat), they had flown in a variety of spacecraft, gone to the moon, and so on. Among them, James Lovell, the commander of the abortive Apollo 13 mission, stood out just a bit. The first man to fly in space four times–Gemini7 and Gemini 12, and then later, Apollo 8 and Apollo 13–Lovell had gone to the moon twice without landing on it. He seemed to have lived the kind of life a schoolboy could only dream about. So that’s precisely what I did, letting myself dream about living the life Jim Lovell had lived, all the while idly tossing around the thought–I wish I could have been Jim Lovell.

The oddness of this remark soon became clear to me. I had said I wanted to be Jim Lovell because, presumably, I found the descriptions of the experiences he had had exciting, and wanted to have the same ones. But how could I, Samir Chopra, have Jim Lovell’s experiences without being Jim Lovell himself? It seemed me to me that my experiences made me into who I am; Lovell’s experiences made him into who he was. But if it wasn’t me having those Lovell-experiences, what would be the point? Jim Lovell had already had his experiences. If I had them, I wouldn’t be Samir Chopra any more. Rather I would be someone else having those experiences. What would be the point of that? It had soon become clear to me that the person who wanted to have those Jim Lovell-experiences could not experience them in any other way than wistfully; I could perhaps watch a movie or read a book about them but I couldn’t have Jim Lovell-experiences without being someone else and changing the point of wanting those experiences for myself. To actually have them would be to be someone else, and that wouldn’t do anything to satisfy the person who had expressed the wish in the first place. At best, it seemed to me, as I thought about it further, I could have said, “I wish I had lived a life that included the kinds of experiences Jim Lovell had.”

I’m not sure how old I was, and I don’t know how clearly I have managed to recapitulate my line of thought at the time. But I’ve remembered its rough details well enough to recount this little anecdote to many classes I’ve taught over the years. I think my students find it a little wacky that I went so far with that line of speculation, but they still find it an engaging point of entry for talking about personal identity.

Things You Could Find On A Professor’s Office Door: Cavafy’s City

Professors put the darndest things on their office doors: I’ll-be-back-in-five-minutes notices, announcements of conferences, descriptions of new classes, suitably anonymized student grades, political posters, stickers. And then it gets wierd: vacation photos, children’s drawings, cartoons (a perennial faculty favorite in New York appears to be New Yorker cartoons), and of course, jokes culled from the ‘Net.

I’ve been looking at faculty doors for too long now: first as graduate student, then as post-doc, and now, as faculty member myself. My door in my new office in the Philosophy department is relatively pristine compared to the messy, overworked shambles of my last office door, which included everything detailed on the list above other than vacation photos. My new office door showcases two pieces of self-promotion: a flyer for my 2007 book Decoding Liberation, and a flyer for a book-release event for A Legal Theory of Autonomous Artificial Agents. (Note how mention of self-promotion works as a piece of self-promotion itself; it is only the rare talent that can artfully exploit modesty for aggrandizement).

The occasional gem that turns up on an office door can make this sort of stand-outside-someone’s-office voyeurism worthwhile. For me, that moment came some fifteen years ago, when I was embroiled in coursework for my doctorate, and found myself taking classes at New York University (through the New York City Consortium; my doctorate was based at the CUNY Graduate Center). I spent most of my time at the Bobst and Courant Institute Libraries, cut off from my cohort at CUNY, and afflicted by those most common of graduate student afflictions: loneliness, boredom, disenchantment, and anxiety. Being stuck in a rut seemed like a rather mild description of my waking hours.

One rather aimless, if typical, night, I wandered through the corridors of the Courant Institute, seeking distraction and relief. By reading the billboards of office doors, of course; in the days before a full-blown ‘Net provide instantaneous escape, reading was quite a common method of procastination. On one door, I spotted the following:

The City

You said, “I will go to another land, I will go to another sea.
Another city will be found, better than this.
Every effort of mine is condemned by fate;
and my heart is — like a corpse — buried.
How long in this wasteland will my mind remain.
Wherever I turn my eyes, wherever I may look
I see the black ruins of my life here,
where I spent so many years, and ruined and wasted.”

New lands you will not find, you will not find other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same
streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods;
in these same houses you will grow gray.
Always you will arrive in this city. To another land — do not hope —
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have ruined your life here
in this little corner, you have destroyed it in the whole world.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1910)

I don’t think anything I’ve ever put up on my office door (yet) has been as instructive as that poem was for that graduate student that night (it was the first I had heard of Cavafy). But it is something to aspire to when I find myself standing in front of the blank canvas of my office door, seeking something that will simultaneously entertain and edify. (And occasionally self-aggrandize.)

Asif Kapadia’s Senna Takes Pole Position

Asif Kapadia’s Senna, based on the life of the late Ayrton Senna, succeeds as documentary, a sports movie, and a movie. It works as biography, as a morally-instructive fairy-tale about an improbably good-looking, intelligent, sensitive, and articulate sportsman (in a sport made singular by its technologically-enforced impersonal distance from its spectators), and finally, as a tragedy, because Senna is no longer with us. It captures the most salient aspects of Senna’s all-too-brief life, and situates them within the broader context of the sport of car racing; it works as documentary in the best way possible because it makes the non-fictional dramatic and compelling; and lastly, it works as a sports film because it makes the central contests of the sport it documents enthralling human encounters (it helps that Senna highlights the long-running and at times, bitter, rivalry between Alain Prost and Senna).

The brilliant Senna, three-time World champion, and the last Formula One driver to die at the wheels of his car, always stood out during his brief decade-long career, and not just because he was dazzlingly fast and skillful on racing courses, whether dry or wet. He was politically and socially sensitive and informed; he did not shy away from confrontation with the managers of his sport; he was concerned about keeping driving safe; and he was also not shy about exposing his moments of introspection, self-doubt and fears.

The archival footage Senna draws upon is astonishing in its detail, richness, intimacy and dynamism; Kapadia’s especial skill, in making this movie, lies in having put together a story, which at its tragic and inevitable conclusion, leaves us richer in knowledge about Senna, the driver and the human being, and feeling considerably poorer as we absorb the facts of his premature and tragic death in the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. This last section of the movie is among the most wrenching segments of cinema that I’ve experienced in recent times; the sense of tragedy foretold, hovering gloomily over the heads of its protagonists, is almost unbearable at times.

The car-mounted camera stock footage we are privileged to witness in Senna makes clear Ayrton’s dazzling driving skills (to truly comprehend the frightening speeds and turns of F1 racing, the car-mounted camera is essential), but for my money, the best parts of Senna are the personal, intimate glimpses. And among all of those, one stands out in particular: a little segment in which Senna suggests that growth as a human being is harder than proficiency at Formula One driving. Senna notes that his skills as a driver have grown and reached a level which have made him possible to win a world championship; but he has many more years to live as a man, and there are, he feels, many more truths he needs to discover about himself and the world before his personal growth will be complete. It is a startling moment of frankness and wisdom from a sportsman who has not made the cardinal mistake of conflating a very particular talent with a broader, richer intelligence.

Senna’s death was a loss for his family, his country, and car racing fans; as this documentary shows, it was a loss for all of us who seek, in sports and sportsmen, answers to broader questions about our relationship to human striving and capacities.

Goin’ to the Movies

Last December, I found myself stumped by a simple enough question: When was the last time you went to see a movie in a theater? Some ten hours later, I remembered: Terence Maillick’s _Tree of Life_ at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (I cannot remember the exact date). A few days later, I returned to BAM to see David Cronenberg’s _A Dangerous Method_. And yet again, I was reminded of what a strange bargain I have struck by my quasi-abstinence from the movie-in-the-cinema experience (over the past seven years, after years of obsessive movie-watching in theaters, I turned almost exclusively to DVDs, streaming, and Blu-Rays).

The immersion in the cinema can be complete in a way that the home theater experience cannot replicate, of course, but as the intruding head of the gentleman in front of me reminded me, it can be interrupted rather easily. And as the murmurs and whispers of my fellow movie-goers also reminded me, I have company. At home too, of course, I have both company and interruptions: sometimes my wife, sometimes the schoolchildren on the street outside, sometimes my neighbors stopping by to pick up spare chairs for children’s parties, sometimes the building superintendent with a notice about an upcoming repair job. But my resentment of the company of those who watch the movies with me and occasionally interrupt me is particularly pronounced in the theater: We are here to watch a movie, are we not? Why then, the need to indulge in real-time analysis and appreciation of the movie’s plot planning or cinematographic pyrotechnics? At home, I’m almost grateful for the solitude I enjoy between interruptions (including those induced by myself as when I decide bladder control is an overrated art and and head for relief).

But these environmental issues are, quite honestly, peripheral. For when it comes to the actual business of the visual and aural experience afforded by the theater, my homebound movie experiences run a distant second. I might own a large-screen HD television and run the audio output through an amplifier and pair of powerful speakers, but it will be a very long time before this arrangement can compete with the theater screen and its powerful audio accompaniment. And no set of trailers included on a DVD will ever quite be able to summon up the encoded-by-childhood-memory frisson of the movie-preceding trailer viewed in a theater either. (And no thrill of making it on time, finding a good seat, or most intangibly, snuggling and settling into the one procured.)

When, some seven or so years ago, I gradually began to gravitate toward home-bound movie watching, I was making both an economic decision and an aesthetic one. I needed to save money; ten-or-eleven dollar tickets presented themselves as an easy target; and I was also tired as too many people around me seemed to be, of the aggravations caused by those who watched the movies with us, the cellphone user being the most prominent one. The allure of the high-end home-theater seemed irresistible; all that technical power placed in our hands, promising to render the the public spectacle irrelevant. Well, it certainly exerted a strong enough pull to make me abandon the movie-house, for long enough for me to lose contact with it as an integral part of the movie-watching experience. And the tickets aren’t cheaper, and the audience isn’t any quieter. But yet, even when aware of that, I’m still struck by the melancholy of what I seem to have traded away, and by the loss of an experience that seems destined to not be ever replicated again.

Hiking The El Toro Trail in El Yunque

The problem with a rainforest is that, well, it rains. And when you are hiking the El Toro trail in the El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico, you are reminded of that quasi-tautological fact quite often. You are also reminded of the remarkable effect that moisture has on damp earth as it renders its consistency a texture most appropriately described as “muddy.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself. And I’m being reductive.

The El Toro trail constitutes an alternative to El Yunque’s more accessible, busier trails; it gets you to the top of the highest point in El Yunque, and delivers its payoff in the form of stunning views (when they are not being obscured by thick clouds and rain). But even the partial mix of sun and cloud make for some stunning interplays of light and the lush, freshly-washed foliage of the upper reaches. The trail is especially worth doing in the company of someone that knows the local flora and fauna; alternatively, one should sufficiently educate oneself so as to be able to have an engaged response to the tremendous biodiversity–four different forest systems–that can be experienced on the trail. (The linked post above describes the hike from the “other side;” we hiked up from the southern section of Route 191 to the Trade Winds Trail; other guides can be found here and here; in general, the El Toro trail, because not as frequently used, is not as well-maintained as the other, more mainstream ones.) Our guide was Robin Phillips, who also provided us with lodging (a simple cabin, with no electricity, but wonderful contact with the forest at night). Robin has led an interesting life; he knows the forest well; and he is kind and generous to a fault. An ideal companion for an El Yunque hike.

We began at 8 in the morning, parking our car a kilometer or so away from the trailhead. The initial parts of the trail–to the first river crossing–are relatively straightforward. The second section of the trail is easily the muddiest; the third is the steepest. Razor grass is a constant accompaniment; I made the mistake of not wearing a long-sleeved shirt; my wife made the mistake on wearing pants that did not cover her legs adequately. We both came back with many scratches and scrapes; I’d have to say I got off lightly compared to her. Toward the end of the ascent, the rain got worse, making our non-poncho covered sections progressively wetter. When we did get to the top of the trail, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the point of intersection with the Trade Winds Trail was the conclusion at the summit as opposed to being the starting point of another segment. This was a a bit of relief; the muddy, wet slogging was wearing thin by then. We were treated to a few minutes of mixed cloud and sun at the top before the rain closed in again, and forced us back down the hill after our quickly-devoured lunch. Descent was obviously quicker even if muddier thanks to the rain in the intervening time, and we found ourselves heading back for showers and a Christmas Day dinner with Robin’s wonderful family by 530PM.

Hiking in a rainforest means fewer soaring vistas of the kind experienced on high-altitude hikes; the foliage is in your face; the light is dappled and often weak; the muddy, slippery trails require a different sort of attention. Its most gratifying reward is the chance to experience a diverse set of ecosystems in close proximity to each other, intertwined in dazzlingly complex ways. The muddiness and lack of maintenance of the El Toro trail is well worth dealing with when these bargains are kept in mind.

The Tyranny of the Tourism Poster

On December 26th, as I waited for a ferry to take me from Fajardo to Culebra, I noticed a poster for the Luis Pena Nature Reserve (more accurately, for the Cayo Luis Pena, part of the Culebra National Wildlife Refuge). As I gazed at the dazzling blue waters, the painfully-white glistening sands, bewitched by the promise of the colorful aquatic creatures that surely played and frolicked below the waters of that oceanic snorkeling and scuba-diving paradise, I felt myself succumb, yet again, to that tyranny of the poster and the guidebook. And yet again, I felt the terror of that most fearful of things: the inadequate, not properly-realized, not fully-to-be-treasured, the missed-opportunity vacation. For if there is one mode of oppression that the tourist poster and the guidebook have the market cornered on, it is in making us feel like failures even when we manage to put down the laptop, take our fingers off the keyboard, dock the smartphone and head, bravely putting away our calendars, for the wilderness.

The artfully put-together tourist poster–like the illustrations of those improbably delicious-looking concoctions in cookbooks–promises us a glimpse of the impossible, the seemingly inaccessible. The photograph of the attraction in question will undeniably be of “postcard” or “coffee-table book” quality; fit to be mailed to friends, but somehow always felt to not be possible to actually visit (surely the photographer was granted special access to that Shangri-La, which beams at us from the poster?).

The poster, or the guidebook, assure us with a devastating two-fer, that this place has been visited, and even more damagingly, that if we do not visit it, we have somehow failed. The guidebook does this especially acutely with its listing of the “essential,” the “must-see,” the “ten things any visitor to X must do” and so on. These can be resisted perhaps by rhetorical devices like “Well, that’s what the editors of that guidebook think, but what do they know?” But such rhetorical bluster is just that; under the weight of the prescription, even our resolve crumbles; we become acutely conscious of the need to play by the guidebook’s (and the poster’s) playbook: Visit this place! Have these experiences! Or else!

The tyranny of the poster is perhaps more benign: one can console ourselves that even if we were not treated to precisely the same image as that currently visible, we might have seen a variant of it. But there is the rub. For the gloss and the finish of the poster assures us we didn’t see the advertised excellence, we merely saw the weaker, insipid version made available for our plebeian viewing. So we seek in our vacations to make sure we visit those places recommended by the guidebook, perhaps even in the order suggested, and we might even squirm ourselves into precisely those locations that will facilitate the takings of those photographs that will approximate the tourist poster with the greatest fidelity possible. How else would we assure ourselves of the authenticity of our experiences if not by total adherence to a template provided for us?

Katha Pollitt, George Orwell, Essayists and Posterity

For a couple of days now, Katha Pollitt’s obit/remembrance of Christopher Hitchens has been making the rounds to near-universal adulation. For good reasons; the piece is well worth a read, especially as it highlights aspects of Hitchens’ writing and personality that few have seen fit to focus on (especially not by his drinking buddies, whose cliche-ridden remembrances will be chuckled over by many for years to come).

But toward the end of the article, Pollitt throws in the following:

Posterity isn’t kind to columnists and essayists and book reviewers, even the best ones. I doubt we’d be reading much of Orwell’s nonfiction now had he not written the indelible novels 1984 and Animal Farm.

Pollitt seems to be trying to establish the following thesis (roughly): Even the best non-fiction writers only get read by future generations if they are lucky enough to have written some quality best-selling fiction. I disagree. (Notice, incidentally, that Pollitt has thrown “essayists” into a group that includes “columnists” and “book reviewers”; I do agree that “columnists” and “book reviewers” are more inclined to be creatures of their age who risk rapid obscurity unless they write more substantive and possibly popular work. I’m also aware that “non-fiction” is too broad a category in my purported thesis above but I think it is clear what Pollitt and I are aiming at.)

The simplest way to refute Pollitt’s assertion is to dredge up examples of essayists whose place in posterity is secure without their being famous through the fiction they wrote: Michel Montaigne, Edmund Burke, Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, Samuel Johnson, Matthew Arnold, Susan Sontag, Jacques Barzun; the list goes on. (Standard caveat: to really settle this dispute check back in a couple of hundred years). We can disagree plentifully about how well posterity is treating every single member on the list we would generate, and about its definitive membership, but when the smoke would clear, we would still list many essayists to whom posterity has been “kind” without requiring that they have written a best-selling novel or two. Indeed, in some cases, it would be clear their literary fame has been achieved not because of the fiction they wrote but in spite of it (I think this is especially true of Sontag, whose fiction I simply could not stand).

But there is another problem in Pollitt’s assertion given its reliance on the case of Orwell. Would Orwell simply have slipped into obscurity had he not written those “indelible” novels? Well, fiction is always more likely to reach a broader market than the non-fiction a writer puts out. And popularity in that genre can have the salutary effect of attracting a broader readership to the rest of a writer’s corpus. And yes, Orwell’s writings became famous only after he wrote his best-selling novels (I’m inclined to think that 1984, incidentally, is a not-very-good novel whose fame was ensured by a particular set of historical contingencies). But is a large readership what Pollitt means by being treated kindly by posterity? Or would posterity still be kind to a writer if critical acclaim for the writer’s non-fiction corpus were to endure through the ages? If the latter, then since Pollitt is trading in hypotheticals, let me do so too. I think anyone that wrote Homage to Catalonia, The Road to Wigan Pier, Decline of the English Murder, How the Poor Die, Shooting An Elephant, Why I Write, or Politics and The English Language would have found enduring critical, even if not popular, fame.

Lastly, slipping a mention of Orwell into a remembrance of Hitchens shows that Pollitt has succumbed to the temptation to lump the two together. Please. Cease and Desist.

Dragon Tattoos And Flirting With Pointlessness

Right. So David Fincher’s remake of Neils Arden Oplev’s _The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo_ is out, and even the normally-hard-to-please Andrew O’Hehir isn’t entirely displeased with the product. For myriad reasons: Fincher’s cast adds “emotional depth;” the movie is “beautifully engineered;” it possesses a “depth and subtlety” that was perhaps absent in the Stieg Larsson’s novel; all resulting in “an ingenious and engrossing work of pop cinema.” Still, all these encomiums are powerless to prevent “a wave of ennui” from washing over our critic. Two more remakes? Is this is the best way for Fincher to spend his time?

I feel similarly drenched by ennui, and I haven’t even seen the movie yet. This induced lassitude finds its springs not just, however, in the thought that a beloved auteur might be wasting his time when he could be turning his film-making attentions elsewhere. Rather, I am struck, in general, by the pointlessness of remakes that hew so closely to the original’s plot, setting and visual grammar. For all the differences noted by O’Hehir in his review, it is pretty clear–from the trailer and various clips I’ve seen–that Fincher’s remake aspires to the Scandinavian setting and aura of the original, that the plot is, twist-for-twist, turn-for-turn (till the end) the same, and that many frames are replicants of the Swedish-language version. This high degree of fidelity to the original in the copy seems to be a waste of possibilities galore.

Why not, for instance, set the action elsewhere? In Argentina following the Dirty War? Or in South Africa during the apartheid days? Change the hacking to other forms of system-cracking and surveillance? All the while retaining the central themes of political and moral corruption, misogyny, unlikely alliances, and social violence? The richness of the cinematic medium and the palette of tools it affords the talented movie-maker cry out for more ingenious reconceptions of the written word than the mere path-following involved in remakes such as Fincher’s.

Fincher should take O’Hehir’s concern for how he spends his time seriously; if he does feel compelled to remake the remaining parts of Larsson’s trilogy, he should consider Oplev to have “been there, done that” and turn his not-inconsiderable talents to more imaginative reworkings than this sort of mimicry.

Update: replaced “hue” with “hew”; classic, embarrassing typo.