Nickled and Dimed in China

After The Economist gave it a good review and perhaps even put it on the magazine's best of the year list for 2025, I decided to check out Hu Anyan's I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. Mostly honestly because the book had been a bestseller in China, selling about 2 million copies.

The book narrates the author's 19 different jobs after leaving school in a tale of increasing downward mobility. He delivers parcels, he works in a bike store, he does graphic design for some weird zines, he is the proprietor of a clothing store in a mall. His compensation rarely seems to correspond with what I would have thought the work was worth. Through it all 95% of the time he's a nice guy to a fault, he doesn't assert himself, he lets himself get trampled on by bosses, coworkers, customers, just about anybody. Naturally sometimes he gets pissed off. Throughout there's a pronounced contrast between his extreme earnestness and the general shittiness of those around him.

He lives in crappy apartments. For periods he lives with his parents. He goes through punk rock periods (as one would) and periods of reading pretty heady books. Then he tries writing. Then he writes some more. Eventually he writes articles that go viral, which grow into this book. More than anything it reminds me of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, which itself didn't blow my mind when I read it back in 2014. And yet, we have to read these kinds of books, because they are not our lives.

 

 

House.os

For some time our dryer hasn't been getting our clothes as clean as it should. We've been thinking maybe we need a new dryer. Up in main Carol pointed out that it was probably our dryer vent which needed cleaning. Since I'm pretty sure that hasn't been done in some years, I'm betting she's right.

There are lots of books about home repair and maintenance but it would be very good to have something like an OS that would remind you when things need to be done and perhaps even call vendors. Hell, you could have an agentic OS that could interface with vendors and negotiate with them. You could develop standard interfaces which parameterize the services on offer (sweep chimney? Roto root? Trim hedge? Clean dryer vent?) and negotiate prices. There probably is one in development if not in production.

An interim step would be for entrepreneurs to locally run a something like an estate-manager-as-a-service business which provides to homeowner's an outsourced management of all physical plant maintenance functions. Again, this probably exists. If not, I know a couple of people who could spin one up in different locations.

The other side of this trade is already consolidating as contractors (electricians, HVAC people, painters, plumbers etc) retire and sell their businesses to private equity funds at retirement. Eventually some type of aggregation should happen from the purchaser side.

Then again, this would take away another opportunity for contact with humans from different walks of life than oneself, one of the great pleasures of commerce. And thereby deny both vendor and purchaser opportunities for growth. It would also deny parents the opportunity to teach children valuable lessons about entropy, attention, planning, work, self-reliance...

Afterglow

The caterer made little chicken and waffles thingies for our fundraiser the other night, and in the end there were all these chicken tenders leftover which have formed the basis of a number of meals since then. Yesterday's lunch and then dinner at our night-after party attended by eight. Today for lunch I explicitly opted not to eat them because I knew they'd be part of tonight's dinner. Then, around lunchtime I was walking down the hall towards the common area of our coworking space, and I espied a guy having Chik-Fil-A for lunch and instinctively yearned for some.

Jonathan and Sharon will soon be by to help us polish off the rest of the leftovers, except we have way more wine and beer than we need, probably enough for a Christmas party. Also desserts.

But because we had little to pair the chicken with I had to make a slaw. Then Mary bought some tomatoes to go with the plethora of garlic toasts that never got dressed with goat cheese and other stuff. So again we will have a surfeit of food.

D-Day

At or about 5:30 today, something like 160-180 people will descend on our house in excited anticipation of seeing our current and most recent governors at our house to help the former help the latter raise money for his US Senate run. And let there be no doubt, we need him to win.

Over the last few days I've run into a number of people who've said, "I'm looking forward to the event at your house." But then I check the RSVP list and don't find their names. Some of them may be blowing sunshine up my butt, but I suspect most of them just don't think it's important to RSVP. I even know people who like to show up and write checks because they don't want to get the emails and texts that come with handing over your contact details to the machine. All of this makes it rather difficult to predict how much food and wine to order. We set a high minimum for this event because we've demonstrated that we can fill the house with a lower minimum. Next time we may have to go higher yet.

And then, overnight an unanticipated storm blows in. All of our porch furniture got soaked. A screen got blown off one window and all the windows along the rear of the house -- washed on Saturday -- got wet, and some got crap blown onto them. Hopefully the grass in the park out back will be dry enough by 530 that people can park on it without mucking it up.

In any case, the farmers need the rain so we just need to give thanks and suck it up  

Ending Moravia

Moravia's The Conformist isn't doing it for me so I think I will put it down, about halfway in. There are just so many books on my shelves waiting to be read that I shouldn't allocate time and attention to something that fails to energize me.

There are certainly virtues to reading the "minor literature" of a period, the stuff that was heralded at the time but didn't stand the stern reductive force that the canon imposes over time: only a few books for any given time or place tend to command attention decades or centuries later, particularly in other lands. My Major Oral exam in my PhD program, which I designed myself (as is the custom) focused on the minor prose writers of the 1820s-1830s, people like Orest Somov, Vladimir Odoevsky, Ivan Lazhechnikov and some others whose names I've forgotten. For my dissertation I read people like Panaev, Mikhailov, Askochensky and others, also largely lost to the sands of time. 

You can learn a lot about a period from these books. What were people focused on and worried about at the time? What was their concept of human nature and what -- in the author's view -- made their contemporaries the way they are? 

Moravia focuses relentlessly on fascism. How could Italy -- and individual Italians -- let themselves become Fascists. Writing in late 40s-early 50s, the palette Moravia reaches for is a mix of Proust and Faust: traumas visited on the child by fucked up parents create aberrant behaviors, guilt and a desire to be like everyone else. That's about it.

Who knows, I may go back to it. I doubt it.

Books Are Magic

In Princeton Ted recommended that we listen to the Sound Exploder podcast on our drive back to NC. Since we were indeed a little tired of our current list of podcasts and had even -- you may be shocked to hear -- squabbled a little over listening to a little too much of mine (so we listened to more of Mary's for a while), we decided to take Ted's recommendation. We listened to Lindsay Buckingham on the early days of Fleetwood Mac and the crafting of their first hit, whose words I could mumble imprecisely but right now I can't recall for the life of me what song it was. Then we listened to Lindsay and Stevie Nicks at length about the backstory of their predecessor band to Fleetwood Mac and one of the songs on their first record, which Mary had never heard and doesn't really care to hear again, but we heard about their early days and time passed as the miles of Maryland's Eastern Shore disappeared in the rearview (Google had sent us down Route 13 to Annapolis to avoid construction).

Finally all of that ended and it came time for the episode I had picked out for me: Emma Straub talking about the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs. I had assumed that Straub was a member of the band, but she was in fact not but had first been Stephen Merritt's personal assistant and then traveled with band for a decade running their merch table while they toured in support of the triple album that cemented them into cultural history. Goes to show you how music connoisseurship declines once you have kids and a job.

Anyhoo, after Straub spent a decade touring with the band she published books and opened a bookstore (Books Are Magic) in Brooklyn that has become something of a thing and now has two branches, but will apparently open no more. I like that. I will need to visit it.

Not because I need books, mind you. I have a lot of them and one of the successes of my vacation was that I got rid of a couple of them, giving one to friends and leaving another in an AirBnb. I also did not stop and peruse the shelves of any of the excellent looking used book emporia in upper New England. 

I will get more books, however, in the fullness of time.

Mild overwhelm

Back in the saddle for a day with a very full list of tasks and meetings that will persist for a couple of weeks. Towards the end of yesterday we learned that our upcoming fundraiser with two well and rightly loved governors will be probably 40% larger than any we've had and has already well exceeded its seemingly ambitious fundraising target. Sadly, not too many of the attendees will be my close friends (thanks so much, guys), so this will be really a fundraiser rather than a party with friends. Hopefully there will be some food leftover and we can invite people the next night to clean up the remains, something that has evolved into a beloved tradition. I guess I just have to embrace the true fundraising aspect of it.

Meanwhile there are things I need to do out the wazoo at work. Clients to serve, notes to input, expenses to log. My new associate Amanda is off on vacation for a couple of weeks. 

To say nothing of the things that need doing around the house. And tennis that needs to be played. 

The doorbell just rang downstairs and I went to see who it was, since I saw no delivery van. It was a guy with long hair and a beard and a hardcover book in his right hand who said he was out advocating for peace on earth. I told him we supported his cause, but needed to get ready for work.

Home again

And so we have returned from our epic 3-week adventure in the north, which included:

• ~2500 miles of driving
• Sleeping in 9 different beds
• Meals with 13 different people or couples in 6 different states
• 2 instances of dodging World Cup games (including the final) using advanced knowledge of NJ infrastructure

All in all, a most successful trip, from which more stories may yet be gleaned. For today, I must focus on reentry to the land of the working, as my young associate Amanda heads off on her own two-week car trip extravaganza en famille tomorrow and I must make use of this single working day to synch up with her.

Also, it is Spirit Week and Alma Mater day at the office and I have to find something in school colors (CHHS, natch) to wear to the office.

More on the paragraph

As I often do, I brought some more serious books along with the espionage/mystery stuff with me on vacation. I started with the Ernaux I already mentioned, partially because I knew it was bite-sized and easily consumed in almost one sitting. Next on deck was Alberto Moravia's 1951 The Conformist, which I picked up used somewhere. Now that I poke about the internet a bit, I see that the book doesn't appear to have been received that well and isn't even considered to be Moravia's best, but probably survives in print because of attention brought to it by Bertolucci's 1970 film. But somebody translated it into English and it has survived so here I am, reading it. It's OK. I may come back to it later.

One noteworthy feature of the book is its rather lengthy paragraphs. I have railed a little on the prevalence of the one-sentence paragraph earlier on the blog. In Moravia paragraphs can easily run a page, a page and a half. My gut says that he displays a bias towards the long paragraph because it signals the high style and seriousness of modernism. Moravia's book is shot through with hints of Kafka and Proust if not Joyce, Faulkner and Broch, those other high priests of modernist interiority as signaled by paragraphs that at times strike the modern reader as veritably interminable.

I've also been dipping into the New Yorker archives here on vacation on my new tablet and have started reading the first 1961 Rachel Carson article that expanded into the 1962 book Silent Spring. Carson also prefers long paragraphs. Looking at them I can see obvious places where a modern editor would probably break them into new ones, on account of a shift in narratorial focus.

There are of course no hard and fast rules as to when paragraphs should begin and end. They are more or less supposed to contain units of focus or content. A bias towards longer paragraphs on the part of an author or (dare I say it) an era seems to indicate human subjects with greater integrative capabilities. To the extent that -- as many have said -- we live in an attention economy, the inability and/or wholesale disinclination to attend to things for longer hollows us out. When Our Robot Overlords finally arrive to conquer, they may discover there is nothing here to seize.

Laura Lippman

The thing about mysteries is, or rather are, that because many people enjoy reading them and many people secretly aspire to be writers, many try their hand at writing them. And there's a bit of a craft to it, a bunch of conventions to help one along. And so, it turns out, a pretty decent quantity of people get good at writing them, which makes the pleasant serendipity of finding one seemingly at random possible.

That's what happened to me with Laura Lippman. I picked up the first (for me -- Lady in the Lake, 2019) of her books at some kind of free location: maybe a little free library or in a coffee shop. I liked it well enough that I picked up a second one (What the Dead Know, 2007) in a used bookstore. I just finished that one and am delighted to have a new author I can look for in used bookstores or libraries, perhaps even a new bookstore, as there's no reason for me to wish to deny her revenue, though it seems like she is doing well enough so providing for her livelihood may be less important than supporting a used bookseller.

The Trifecta

Today I accomplished my summer vacation trifecta. On this trip I have

1. Eaten fried clams
2. Eaten a lobster roll
3. Swum in very cold mountain river water. In fact, not once but thrice in the same day

As of now I can pretty much go home now and/or devote the rest of vacation to delivering Mary to suitable photo locations and then walking back and forth getting in extra steps while Mary photographs things. Which is substantially what vacation is anyway.

But it is rare to accomplish all three in one trip.

Up in the holler, South Duxbury, VT

After a bunch of automotive adventures, some of which I may in the fullness of time recount, we find ourselves up a holler near the "town" of South Duxbury, Vermont in a little cabin. Maybe 450 square feet, all super-efficiently laid out. Really the stationary equivalent of a Winnebago/RV. As if to demonstrate this, we've already had one minor squabble about washing dishes. She was wrong, I was right.

Anyhoo, yesterday evening as we were sitting at the compact dinner table eating ravioli and an arugula salad with slivered almonds and strawberries when we heard a little bustling activity outside our window. Someone, it seemed, was trying to get into the shed in the back which holds the garbage cans and various other sundries. When I investigated it yesterday evening, the shed's doors were fasted by not one but three different latches, which clearly implied there were bears in the area.

And so, a bear. I thought I saw a black shape out there. We turned off all the lights so we could see better outside. The pathetic little flashlights on our phones were no help, but I did hear a growl.

A little chat with the AirBnb host confirmed that bears had been known the bustle about back there (hence the three locks) but that none had ever tried to get into the cabin.

Having spent a lot of time in Alaska, Mary has done an awful lot of internet research about bear attacks. She did some more. For my part, I got all traces of food out of the car out in the driveway, blasting first a little Hendrix and then (when I recalled the snacks in my tennis bag) Gang of Fours "Love like Anthrax" through our little portable speaker to keep the bears away. I returned safely.

Happening

In between mystery novels I just read through Annie Ernaux's Happening, a 2000 memoir of her 1963 abortion. 

One wouldn't think Ernaux would be as distinctive as she is. Maybe plenty of women have written unsparing narratives of their own abortions and I just haven't come across them because I'm a guy. Maybe there are others who are gimlet-eyed observers of the simple of time, changes in mores and how a storyteller can refract and embody it all.

But I don't know them. All too often the quest for distinctiveness forces authors and artists to reach for some kind of quirk instead of just being themselves on the page, canvas or whatever. Ernaux skips all that and just does what she has to do. She feels, thinks and remembers deeply and lays it out for the reader. I'll keep reading her.

If only her books were a little longer.  

Bye bye Neymar

Seeing Neymar shit-talking with the Norwegian goalkeeper before an absolutely meaningless penalty kick yesterday in the 100th minute as Brazil prepared to crash out of the World Cup was an appropriate coda to an ultimately undistinguished career. Yes he scored a lot of goals. Yes he was very talented and sometimes fun to watch. But ultimately Neymar will go down as a footnote to history, maybe the soccer version of Dominique Wilkins or Russell Westbrook: someone who was fun to watch but never really won anything.

What's worse, Neymar was the one who really popularized the weak-assed tippy toe stalling penalty kick. To my mind it's just wrong and emblematic of someone who lacks commitment. The penalty kick is for the most part an unfair contest between shooter and keeper. It should more or less always result in a goal or a sense of failure for the shooter. Neymar's PK is a net loss to the game.

His retirement from soccer is a net gain for the sport. Ponder last night. Why not let some young kid take the PK? Why not, for example, Endrick? Having a new face get the last goal would have been net prospective to Brazilian soccer. Neymar was retrospective, and going out like that tells us a lot about Brazilian soccer as a whole. They have a lot of talent -- plenty of the players out there were familiar -- but are a pale shadow of their glory days. It's a shame. But the great Brazilian teams of the 60s were kind of like the Celtics or UCLA Bruins of their day. The competition wasn't as great yet.

Blazing away, Belfast, Maine

We're at the tail end of this heat dome in Maine. We had come up here to beat the heat, which we'll be able to do starting tomorrow. It's 89 outside now and falling, but it was touching 100 as I hustled up here from Cambridge on Thursday to pick Mary up at Portland. Not so hot for NC, more than plenty hot for ME. Thankfully, our place has AC, a window unit just big enough to cool the 600 or so square feet here.

David and I played tennis in the park today. Hard courts. My feet and calves are killing me, my knee may follow suit.

Afterwards, we popped by the snack bar to survey its bill of fare, expecting hot dogs and the like. Instead, it turns out they feature such things as lobster empanadas. I had lunch for today, but we may well be back tomorrow or the next day.

77th and Amsterdam, 8:30 pm

On a blistering Tuesday evening in Manhattan Natalie and I enjoyed ice cream after a nice Omakase on Columbus. Sitting by a blacktop watching mixed gender 3X3 soccer, two other younger boys kicking ball through the older kids game. Everyone around, it seemed, had football on their mind, with France having just dispatched Sweden 3-0 in the Meadowlands earlier that evening. We were killing time while NJ Transit got done ferrying the hordes of spectators from the stadium back to Manhattan or wherever they were staying. 

Then there was an incident. An hispanic guy in his 20s(?) was laying on the ground leaning against the fence around the blacktop growling. We didn't know why. A silver-haired woman, whom I christed "the mayor" has been watching everything. She goes over and talks to him. He comes back and sits with her.

Slowly, some affluent white kids who were playing basketball or had some other incident with the hispanic guy trickle over and apologize to him. They praise his basketball skills. At last the tallest of them, a guy, also jeunesse doree, comes over and apologizes. They hug.

Amazing.

Natalie and I were primed for wonder at this moment of urban transcendence, having seen an amazing short documentary on the history of NYC, animated by Stanley Tucci, in the basement of the Museum of the City of New York. It made each of us proud to be present or past New Yorkers. Go and watch it. 

Just my luck

Headed into Manhattan on NJ Transit to see Natalie. Turns out today is one of maybe 8 days when a World Cup game is being played in the Meadowlands: France vs. Sweden in the Round of 32. NJ Transit is running a special service to get fans to and from the stadium which basically blacks out normal service before and after the match for a few hours -- or you have to pay an extra $100. To heck with that.

Thankfully Frank alerted me to this last night and I've been able to get on train before the blackout window starts. But I may have to stay out in the city for some extra time afterwards until normal service is resumed. Or take a PATH train to Newark and hope to be able to squeeze onto a train there to get back out to Princeton.

I am generally not a huge Mbappe supporter, not because he's not a great player but because he has a bad attitude and failed to carry himself well after France lost to Argentina in 2022. Moping when he should have been congratulating his teammate Messi for getting a monkey off his back, at long last.

But tonight I hope that Mbappe et al dispatch Sweden in regular time so that train service will be restored at a reasonable hour. Or that they go down in flames. But honestly France is fun to watch so I don't even mind if they win the whole thing. Great team.

Forgetting the tip

On Friday I had breakfast at the Carolina Coffee Shop with Brad. I grabbed the check since he paid it last time, but in the excitement of all the stuff we were discussing I forgot to sign it, which I realized when I was over by the Paul Green Theater because I realized I didn't have a mental image of what I had tipped. Fortunately, it being summer, I was able to pull a uey, go back and park in the middle of campus, and sidle in the back way to the Coffee Shop to fix my goof.

The server found the ticket and discovered that I had indeed not signed nor calculated a tip. I asked if it would have gone through without a signature and she said it would have, she just wouldn't have gotten a tip.* 

I have pontificated on the importance of tipping before, but the ever closer march of Our Robot Overlords (henceforth ORO) and the societal wealth dispersion they exacerbate only heightens the need for tipping.

This morning at my hotel in DC the sole server (all orders had to be placed at the bar) was momentarily terse with me and my hackles got raised for an instant. Then I recalibrated and realized there was just one of her, likely beset with many of me in the course of just about any morning. She was, moreover, a relative newcomer to our fair shores, working in a service role early in the morning. On the other side of the wealth divide. I tipped her 20% and moved on with my day.  

*As with physical checks, the signature protects the delivering financial institution against challenges.

Ode to Gioia

Right now I am making my way through Ted Gioia's piece on authenticity in music. A quick check reveals that last year at about this time I referenced him and accused him of writing the one-sentence paragraphs that litter LinkedIn and too much of Substack. That ain't happening in this piece, nor do I honestly recall why I levelled that critique of him at the time. Probably I'm just jealous.

Gioia has impressive range and has really dedicated himself to his project. I commend him for it, as if he gives a fuck. He portrays his father movingly in this piece and transitions from that into an earnest reflection on the topic of irony and authenticity, the Goofus and Gallant of contemporary discourse. I'll tell you more when I finish it.

Right now I'm gearing up to drive north for a few weeks. DC, Princeton, New York and an exurb thereof, Cambridge, Maine and Vermont. A little business on the way up, then Mary flies up for vacation. We don't even have a date fixed for our return. Really it's optimal empty-nested free wheeling. I will report from the road.

Crowd averse

Watching the pictures of the Canes parade, it just occurred to me that one of the reasons I am a bit crowd averse (I've never gone to a stadium rock show, for instance, and don't really go far out of my way to see live sports though I watch sports highlights at home probably 350-360 nights a year) and am rubbed the wrong way by crowds (at UNC basketball games, all the choreographed crowd response stuff reminds me of Riefenstahl and Nuremberg) is that when we were boys I was all too often the focus of group aggression at the bus stop and around the neighborhood. I just distrust groups of people and the things we do as groups. 

Yeah I can get into it too, but it's hard to really let myself go if I'm not being ironic, since I'm never drunk anymore. Though my irony may not always be apparent to outside viewers.

Scofflaw in a Subaru

Out here on the porch this morning as I am most mornings, trying to enjoy the cool air while it remains and listen to the birds and whatnot. Somewhere in there I start to hear this weird droning noise, some kind of compressor. It keeps going.

Is it in our basement? Is it Caroline and Jamie's HVAC? After a while I have to investigate, so I go and change into outdoor flipflops and head out with my cup of coffee. It seems to be coming from the other side of the park, maybe Scott and Olga's, which would be problematic because they're in France for a  month or so. So I start walking that way. As I get out into the lake parking lot it seems to be coming from a little Subaru and as I come to the other side of it I discover that the culprit is a guy inflating a stand-up paddleboard. 

I'm sorry, but to my mind running a compressor for 15 minutes to inflate your little toy falls squarely within the broad prohibition on running small machines on Sunday morning: lawn mowers, leaf blowers, all of that. This is the South. It's not done. I like to had kicked the guy's ass but I was only in flip flops and carrying my coffee. Next time.

Nb. 10 minutes later someone else is doing the same thing down closer to the lake.

Atrophy

For a few years now biking has pretty much entirely replaced swimming as my non-impact summer exercise, partially because I just got into biking, partially because I kept having an allergic reaction (at least once a summer) to something in the lake water and would have at least one night of shitty sleep from being all stuffed up. And you know there's no way I'm swimming laps in a pool with this lake right here.

So I almost entirely neglected the lake. The other day I decided that enough was enough and went in. By the time I breast-stroked out to the second float, a mere 100 yards or so, I could feel it in my dorsal lats, or teres minor, something around there. Not just a little soreness, mind you, it felt like they were going to cramp up.

Another little surprise from the aging process. Obviously I need to reintegrate a little more swimming into my exercise routine before it gets too late to do so.