ProfessorBainbridge.com

Bloated Fantasy

Via SF Signal, I found a link to a great critique of modern fantasy, in which Sean Harnett opines:

Heroic fantasy used to be slim, once. Goddamn but it used to be lean and muscular, like the heroes and swordsmen it celebrated. It used to be dangerous. It used to tell us stories about ourselves that never appeared in the pages of respectable literary journals (with their stories of divorcees and martinis and quiet, stately dysfunction) but were nevertheless more truly a reflection of the times in which we lived, and the yearnings that impelled us.

No longer: heroic fantasy has grown fat. Bloated. We're not talking a few extra pound around the waist, here: we're talking serious glandular problems, shopping at special stores for the larger individual. We're talking about Robert Jordan and George R. R. Martin and David Eddings, with their three or five or ten book series, each volume in the series containing seven or eight or nine hundred pages of plodding prose, dull exposition, unresolved plot threads and attempts to conjure up a sense of wonder so badly executed as to signal the final, lingering demise of the genre

Hear, hear! (Candidly, I even got bogged down for a while about midway through the widely - and appropriately - praised Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I'm very glad I eventually finished it, but a good editor could have lopped a few hundred pages off it without hurting the book one bit.)

Interestingly, Harnett absolves the usual suspect of blame:

Tolkien is no more to blame for modern fantasy writing than Jane Austen is to blame for Mills and Boons novels.

Instead, Harnett provocatively argues that Michael Moorcock is the true villain of the story:

Moorcock has convinced a generation of writers that the key to success is to marry his rate of output with Tolkien's bulk.

Ouch. Anyway, if you're looking for high quality fantasy of manageable length, might I suggest Charles Stross' contemporary fantasy The Family Trade, which clocks in at a relatively svelte 304 pages? (Be warned, however, that Stross apparently plans The Family Trade to be just the first in a multi-volume series of the sort Harnett damns.)

John Paul

CNN is reporting that the Holy Father received the "last rites," more properly known as the "Sacrament of the Annointing of the Sick."

Bloated Fantasy

Via SF Signal, I found a link to a great critique of modern fantasy, in which Sean Harnett opines:

Heroic fantasy used to be slim, once. Goddamn but it used to be lean and muscular, like the heroes and swordsmen it celebrated. It used to be dangerous. It used to tell us stories about ourselves that never appeared in the pages of respectable literary journals (with their stories of divorcees and martinis and quiet, stately dysfunction) but were nevertheless more truly a reflection of the times in which we lived, and the yearnings that impelled us.

No longer: heroic fantasy has grown fat. Bloated. We're not talking a few extra pound around the waist, here: we're talking serious glandular problems, shopping at special stores for the larger individual. We're talking about Robert Jordan and George R. R. Martin and David Eddings, with their three or five or ten book series, each volume in the series containing seven or eight or nine hundred pages of plodding prose, dull exposition, unresolved plot threads and attempts to conjure up a sense of wonder so badly executed as to signal the final, lingering demise of the genre

Hear, hear! (Candidly, I even got bogged down for a while about midway through the widely - and appropriately - praised Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I'm very glad I eventually finished it, but a good editor could have lopped a few hundred pages off it without hurting the book one bit.)

Interestingly, Harnett absolves the usual suspect of blame:

Tolkien is no more to blame for modern fantasy writing than Jane Austen is to blame for Mills and Boons novels.

Instead, Harnett provocatively argues that Michael Moorcock is the true villain of the story:

Moorcock has convinced a generation of writers that the key to success is to marry his rate of output with Tolkien's bulk.

Ouch. Anyway, if you're looking for high quality fantasy of manageable length, might I suggest Charles Stross' contemporary fantasy The Family Trade, which clocks in at a relatively svelte 304 pages? (Be warned, however, that Stross apparently plans The Family Trade to be just the first in a multi-volume series of the sort Harnett damns.)

More on Buffett

Reader and law professor Larry Cunningham sent along a copy of the Berkshire Hathaway press release that responds to the NY Times hatchet job s tory on Warren Buffet from the other day. Berkshire asserts:

Berkshire Hathaway does not expect any restatement of its financial reports. Berkshire Hathaway and Gen Re have been actively cooperating with the ongoing reinsurance investigation. In connection therewith, a number of Berkshire/Gen Re representatives have voluntarily given interviews to the investigating authorities, and Mr. Buffett will shortly do so as well.

The release also identifies a number of factual inaccuracies in the press accounts.

I'm no fan of Warren Buffett's politics, as long-time readers know, but I hate to see the MSM smearing the guy by innuendos. Maybe there is a problem that the SEC and Spitzer will turn up, but at this point the press is just speculating.

Larry Cunningham, by the way, is editor of The Essays of Warren Buffett : Lessons for Corporate America, a very fine collection of the famous letters Buffet includes in Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder reports, and Introductory Accounting, Finance, And Auditing For Lawyers, which I regard as the best introduction to the legal and accounting aspects of corporate disclosures in the post-Sarbanes-Oxley world.

UCLA Rules Tax Law

Paul Caron has extracted the data on tax professors from the SSRN top authors database. Interestingly, UCLA School of Law has 6 of the top 25 tax authors on its faculty, which is twice the number of the next highest ranked school (Stanford). Curiously, however, my friend and famed law school ranking guru Brian Leiter omitted UCLA from his list of schools that have improved of late in "the broad 'Business Law' area." Of course, perhaps Brian did so because he knows UCLA already was a business law powerhouse?

Tarring Buffett

File this one under Another Reason Not to Trust the MSM. Today's NYT runs a story about an ongoing investigation of some subsidiaries of famed investor Warren Buffett's Berkshire hathaway under the following headline:

Investigation of Insurance Puts Buffett in a Spotlight

You have to wade through the piece to the 5th paragraph before learning that nobody has brought any charges against Buffett. Indeed, the piece doesn't present a single fact that would lead any reasonable person to suspect that Buffett had anything to do with the alleged improprieties at an Irish subsidiay. Yet, the headline and opening paragraphs create the contrary impression. To be sure, maybe the investigation will eventually show he's involved, but at this point NY Times reporter Timothy L. O'Brien's piece is nothing but a hatchet job.

Curiously, the usually measured Orrin Judd seems to assume Buffett is guilty until proven innocent.

The Savings Rate

In today's WSJ($), economist David Malpass explains something that's always bugged me; namely, why the US national savings rate is so low.

This may not seem all that significant, but I'm sure all of us at some point have channel surfed past some MSM account of how the sky is falling because Americans don't save enough:

With each hike in interest rates, those predicting a bad ending to the 40-month U.S. expansion look expectantly for consumer spending to flag. One of their main worries is the premise that we will run out of savings, especially if foreigners pull the plug or asset prices fall. ...

... We apologize for our "low savings rate" and "dependence on foreigners," turn our foreign economic policy over to the International Monetary Fund's economic gurus, and contemplate consumption tax increases, forced saving, protectionism, and a weaker dollar (with the consequent increase in inflation).

As I understand Malpass' column, however, the problem isn't that Americans save too little; it's that the government is measuring the wrong things:

The personal savings rate doesn't really measure saving in the real sense. It subtracts a broad measure of consumption, $8.5 trillion in 2004, from "disposable personal income," a subset of household cash flow, and labels the difference "personal savings." It was recorded at only 1.1% of disposable income in 2004, or $101 billion. It would have been even worse if not for the $25 billion Microsoft dividend in December, which counted as income in 2004. Without it, the personal savings rate would have been only 0.9%, nowhere near enough to finance a fast-growing economy if it were a true measure of saving.

So it looks like the "personal savings rate" is at least one thing I can cross of my list of big picture problems to worry about late at night. (But I wonder what the boys at Marginal Revolution made of it.)

US News Short-changes UCLA

Brian Leiter uses the US News' law school rankings' shocking mistreatment of UCLA (tied at 15th with Texas) to illustrate a rather fundamental problem with the rankings' methodology:

The most worrisome aspect of the new US News data ... is that it is now clear that the academic reputation survey component of the ranking is completely unhinged from any actual change in either faculty or student quality at the law schools in question. (A stunning example: UCLA, which made several significant faculty appointments last year, saw no change in its academic reputation score. Other schools in similar situations even saw their academic reputation scores decline! In general, the pattern is clear: the "peer reputation" scores among academics are basically gravitating towards the typical overall US News rank of the school, i.e., the "reputation" is being determined by the typical US News ranking which, itself, purports to be based in significant part (25%) on reputation. ...)

Dissent and Catholic Scholarship

Over at MoJ, Rob Vischer raises some tough questions about the extent to which Catholic scholars may properly dissent from the magisterial teaching of the Church in their scholarly work. As I acknowleged in a post over there, I have mostly finessed the problem in my own work.

Sounding a Cautionary Note for Us Ambivalent Types

I remain woefully ambivalent about the merits of US foreign policy under the Bush administration, although I realize that proper blogospheric triumphalism requires that every opinion I hold be (a) expressed on the blog, (b) expressed in a fashion that is firm and unwavering, and (c) either relentlessly pro- or anti-Bush. Sorry, but on this issue I can see both sides .. and I don't particularly like what I see.

The WSJ($) op-ed page today offers up a very well-done column by David Rieff, which makes a solidly conservative case against the Bush agenda (non-WSJ subscribers will be able to access it here for the next few days). I'm not endorsing it, but thought it a sufficicently important contribution to my own still- evolving thinking to be worth passing along for the benefit of those among you who may also be of two (or more) minds on this difficult question.

Here's a particularly telling passage:

? both the "hard Wilsonians" of the Bush administration, to use the name coined by the Council on Foreign Relations' Max Boot, and their liberal interventionist interlocutors are suffering from a terrible hubris, a terrible utopianism about not just the use of force, but about the promise of democracy itself. The right at least used to scorn utopianism, as a folly of liberalism and the left.* Communism, it was said, taught one where utopianism led. And yet, what has the administration's policy been if not utopian?

Presume, for a moment, that we don't have the wisdom to transform foreign societies. Suddenly, the world looks very different and our actions -- even presuming the most idealistic motivation for them -- have a very different, much more dangerous, and certainly much less exalting resonance. President Bush has said that, in order to protect freedom at home, we must, in effect, go abroad to create freedom. That is, and doubtless will remain, American policy for the foreseeable future. But if it goes wrong, as I desperately fear that it will, perhaps John Quincy Adams's words in his Independence Day speech of 1821 will resonate once more. "Once enlisting under other banners, were they even the banners of foreign independence, America would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assumes the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force."**

* True. Russell Kirk?s Ninth Principle of Conservatism states:

? the conservative is suspicious of all utopian schemes. He does not believe that, by power of positive law, we can solve all the problems of humanity. We can hope to make our world tolerable, but we cannot make it perfect.

(Excerpted from The Politcs of Prudence.)

** I suspect Kirk would agree. Kirk?s Eighth Principle states:

In the affairs of nations, the American conservative feels that his country ought to set an example to the world, but ought not to try to remake the world in its image. ? The conservative does not aspire to domination of the world, nor does he relish the prospect of a world reduced to a single pattern of government and civilization.

SSRN Ranks Law Professors

SSRN ranks yours truly 4th out of the "Top 1000 Law Authors," based on downloads of m y scholarly papers posted to the SSRN database in the last 12 months (and 6th based on all-time downloads). As with law school rankings, you have to register with SSRN to access the law professor rankings. My most downloaded paper? Inside r Trading: An Overview.

The End of Democracy?

A reader who is a lawyer at a bog Wall Street law firm and a practicing Catholic sent along a very thoughtful email that captures very much of the mood I'm in these days:

... having gone through law school and paid close attention to politics, I have never had much faith in the courts.  It was painfully obvious in law school that Supreme Court decisions had no basis in reason, and were just masks for getting a justice's personal policy preferences.  Lawrence and subsequent decisions have verified that to me.  I read Scalia's speech regarding the recent death penalty case and thought it was a warning over the future of American democracy.  When was the last time a justice gave such a speech before?  And what does it portend?  ...

Terri's case has, for me, sealed the deal on the morality and also the rule of the judiciary in American life. ...

I've been around long enough and read enough cases to see judges twist the meaning of words far enough to suit their own personal desires. ...

I have no faith in the courts at all. None. ... If men were more strongly committed to their own sovereignty, as they were in earlier ages, these judicial acts of callousness would inspire a Revolution.

It's bad enough that I'm sad over what's happening to Terri. But compounding that is the fact that I now consider 1/3rd of our government, the unelected, permanent system of the courts, to be hostile to the good ....

Yeah. What could I say? I had no words of comfort to offer. About the best I could do was suggest that he take a look at The End of Democracy, which remains for me the seminal work on judicial activism for folks like us.

Atrocity Archives

I don't particularly want to like Charles Stross' novels. Charlie, after all, is sort of a Trotskyite commie pinko neo-pagan or maybe something even worse. But, lord, can the boy write. I just finished Atrocity Archive. And it's even better than The Family Trade. (I reviewed the latter here.)

How to summarize it? James Bond meets Cthulhu? The Atrocity Archive is a melding of three genres - science fiction, horror, and spy thrillers - that is a homage to people like Len Deighton and Lovecraft, with a little touch of Dilbert at Work thrown in, but out of which emerges something new and original. Sheer, freaking genius. In short, it's the best novel I've read since Old Man's War, which in my book (pardon the pun) is high praise indeed.

Atrocity Archives

I don't particularly want to like Charles Stross' novels. Charlie, after all, is sort of a Trotskyite commie pinko neo-pagan or maybe something even worse. But, lord, can the boy write. I just finished Atrocity Archive. And it's even better than The Family Trade. (I reviewed the latter here.)

How to summarize it? James Bond meets Cthulhu? The Atrocity Archive is a melding of three genres - science fiction, horror, and spy thrillers - that is a homage to people like Len Deighton and Lovecraft, with a little touch of Dilbert at Work thrown in, but out of which emerges something new and original. Sheer, freaking genius. In short, it's the best novel I've read since Old Man's War, which in my book (pardon the pun) is high praise indeed.

UCLA Law is # 5

SSRN is now ranking law schools by, inter alia, the number of papers members of each school's faculty that have been downloaded from SSRN's website. UCLA ranks 5th out of 200 worldwide law schools. We've got 49 authors who have contributed 243 papers to SSRN's database, which have been downloaded 58,021 times as of about 1:20 PM local time today. (You need to register with SSRN to view the rankings, but registration is free and gives you access to all the amenities on this important legal and economics research site.)

I like to think that I have done more than my share to boost UCLA to its present ranking: As of today, I'm the 37th mos t frequently downloaded author in the SSRN data base (out of 47,362 authors in the database) with 47 papers that have been downloaded 20,904 times. (In other words, my papers make up 36% of UCLA's total downloads.

No brag, just fact, as Will Sonnett used to say.