Bukowski on writing

I came across this poem by Charles Bukowski which expresses something important about integrity in writing. I wouldn't take it literally as good advice about how to write a scientific book, but there is something about the spirit of the thing that is relevant for aspiring academics. I see too many doctoral students in my discipline who don't really have anything they passionately want to know who then wonder why they struggle to write something that anyone else cares about. If you don't know what you want to know or someone else has to tell you, don't do it. If all you want is 'DPhil (Oxon)' after your name, don't do it...

so you want to be a writer? by Charles Bukowski

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.
if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.
don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.
when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.
there is no other way.
and there never was.

Look what they did to my graph Ma!

This is a follow up to my previous post. Browsing through the Milburn report my eye was drawn to the first graph above apparently based on something from one of my own publications. They have succeeded in creating a great example of how not to present statistical information in graphical form. In fact I have rarely seen so many bad practices represented in one simple figure. Compare it with my original figure below it which appeared in: John H. Goldthorpe and Colin Mills (2008) 'Trends in Intergenerational Class Mobility in Modern Britain: Evidence from National Surveys, 1972-2005', National Institute Economic Review, 5, July, 83-100. See how many foolish errors you can spot. Here is a starter for 10. The points on the lower graph labelled BHPS7 and EUSILC7 are, as is explained in the article, not derived on the same basis as all the other points and therefore comparisons of levels between these and the other points is meaningless.

Fair Access to the Professions

The final report of the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions chaired by Alan Milburn is released today. I can't pretend I have read all of it but my impression is that it doesn't contain much that is new. It does though reinforce some unhelpful confusions. Pace the report, doing better than your parents because of general economic growth doesn't have any necessary implications for equalizing relative mobility chances and equalizing relative mobility chances does imply - even if politicos don't like it - that the less meritorious sons and daughters of the middle classes are less likely to attain occupational positions as good - in relative terms - as those of their parents. Just because the pie is bigger and therefore everone's slice is bigger in absolute terms doesn't change the fact that some people's slice is twice, three times, four times...bigger than other's. And claiming that equalization of access to desirable positions implies no downward mobility is like pretending that it never rains in Britain during the Summer because you would prefer it to be sunny all the time.

Having said that, the central message of the report is broadly correct. Social background does matter for economic success in ways that are unjust and economically inefficient and whatever progress there has been towards equalizing opportunities in the last 40 years or so has been small compared to the magnitude of the inequality in life chances for children from different social class backgrounds. While the report probably exaggerates (negatively) Britain's comparative position in the world social mobility league it is true that despite our rhetoric we are a middle of the table team. If we were a schoolchild our end of term report would read: 'Could do better if she tried harder'. The report can be read at:

http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/227102/fair-access.pdf

One thing the report makes something of is the lack of good quality survey data on the social class origins of people in the workforce. It then baulks at the cost of collecting data by monitoring recruitment to professional positions. Why not simply add a couple of questions on parental social background to just one of the quarters of the Quarterly Labour Force Survey? Response rates to the QLFS are high, the sample size is large - allowing EO monitoring at quite a detailed level - and the marginal cost of a couple of extra questions must be comparatively small. Some of us have been calling for this for years. Why is nobody in the Cabinet Office listening? If you really want to know the answers then you have to ask the questions.

Journey Without Maps

I am reading Graham Greene's Journey Without Maps, an account of his trek through Liberia in the mid 1930s and came across the following passage:

Legend belongs naturally to primitive communities where minds are so little differentiated, by work or play or education, that a story can move quickly from brain to brain uncriticized. But sometimes these conditions arise artificially. A common danger, purpose or way of life can very nearly destroy differences of intellect and class; then you get the angels of Mons and the miracles at a shrine.

Could he have been reading Durkheim?

John Martyn

I must be working too hard because I failed to notice that John Martyn had died at the end of January. It feels strangely personal and judging by the vast amount of tributes on the web I'm not the only one to take it that way. His music was the soundtrack to my student years in London and when I hear one of his songs I feel that those days are only yesterday. I can almost smell them, can almost reach out and touch the bittersweetness of experiencing everything of importance for the first time.

My flatmate was a great fan and gave me a tape with some of the songs from Inside Out on it. I had never heard anything like it. It was the music of confession, everything on display, the agony and the ecstasy. I rushed out to the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street and bought Solid Air and Grace and Danger. The latter I can hardly bear to listen to, the musicianship is stunning, but it seems indecent to consume so much of another's pain. More recently I bought One World and was blown away. Here was trip-hop 20 years ahead of its time. With music as good as this you don't need illicit smoking substances to appreciate it.

Looking at early recordings of his performances - there are some superb Old Grey Whistle Test sets - you see a man with the good looks of a Greek god and the voice of an angel. You also see the seeds of self-destructive tragedy. I only saw him live once, in the mid-nineties at the Festival Hall. He played a mostly electric set, ear splittingly loud, punctuated by the obligatory and perfunctory accoustic rendition of May you Never. It was a magical performance without any of the drink and drug fueled incoherence that his live act was notorious for. He could have sat back on his laurels and just played the standards from his back catalogue, but he was still pushing out in new musical directions.

May you Never is one of those songs whose success partly depends on the fact that you can read into it more or less what you like without it being so full of holes that it becomes completely vacuous. I think I read somewhere that it is actually addressed to his baby step-son which makes perfect lyrical sense. It's not my favourite Martyn song but I do like the fine version with Danny Thompson and Kathy Mattea from the BBC's Transatlantic Sessions. I think the performance epitomises musical intelligence. You can judge for yourself at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBPTuAl2Qyk

Brian Barry

Brian Barry, who died earlier this week, was a political theorist I admired. I can't claim to be an aficianado of the genre but I enjoyed the clarity of his thought and the abrasive style with which he expressed himself. It also helped that I more or less always tended to agree with him. Culture and Equality which provoked howls of outrage from the multiculturalism lobby seemed to me to be as good a statement of the liberal egalitarian position as anyone has managed. If you are a liberal egalitarian you want, amongst other things, the same substantive rights for everybody (including the opportunities to realise those rights), not special deals for some. Though we overlapped at the LSE for several years I barely exchanged a word with him, but colleagues in the Government Department would often tell me what a good job he did as Departmental Chair. He sorted out some people that badly needed sorting out and encouraged fresh young talent.

I have a particularly fond memory of once attending the salon seminar that he held in his basement flat in Bloomsbury, just round the corner from the British Museum. The topic was, I believe, something like rational choice theory and sociology. A group of youngish men and women from half a dozen universities - some far beyond the M25 - sat around his front room, drinking red wine and discussing a paper. Brian was quiet for most of the discussion but suddenly came to life when somebody or other's latest book was mentioned. Then he interjected and said that he had read it in manuscript and it would have been rather better if it had been half the length. In itself, nothing special, but I can still remember the feeling that somehow I was participating in a significant event amongst people who thought that ideas actually mattered and were worth arguing about, even falling out over. As I get older and more cynical it is good to be reminded of the value of serious honest thought free of pose and sad that it took the death of an intellectual giant to do it.

For tributes from people who knew him, his work, or both well see:

http://crookedtimber.org/2009/03/11/brian-barry-is-dead/

Writing a Master's Thesis

It's that time of year when my MSc students are starting to seriously worry about choosing a dissertation topic. With that in mind here are my top tips:

1. You should choose something that is challenging enough to be worth doing, but not so difficult that you can't make any real progress with it. Significant difficulties will be: lack of data; poor quality data; so much data that you exceed the computational capacity of your hardware; data whose structure requires the application of sophisticated techniques that you don't know or can't easily acquire on your own. If any of these difficulties seem likely, think again.

2. Choose a topic that relates to something you have studied this year. That makes it so much more likely that your dissertation will be rooted in an ongoing scientific research programme that somebody around here cares about rather than looking like a 'puzzle' that fell out of the sky.

3. Have a question, preferably one that you don't already know the answer to. If you can't formulate what you are doing as a question then you probably haven't got a suitable dissertation topic. If you know the answer already then it probably isn't worth doing.

4. The English critic F. R. Leavis had some good advice on choosing a dissertation topic : choose one that gives you something practical to do on Monday morning. That way you get a sense of making progress .

5. Have realistic expectations about what your supervisor can do for you and how long it will take them to do it. If they are a specialist in the area you choose you will get more out of them than if you choose to work in an area they know little about. The choice is yours and, as in life, there are trade offs to be made that have to be lived with.

6. If you think you want to collect your own data, be realistic about how long that is likely to take, how relevant it is and how good the quality will be. Listen carefully to your supervisor's advice. A dissertation in which all your time is eaten up in data collection is unlikely to be terribly successful.

7. If you plan to leave Oxford during the Summer to collect data or for other reasons be realistic about the consequences. In principle supervision by email is possible, but it is rarely entirely satisfactory and if you choose this way of doing things then: caveat emptor!

If you are completely clueless about what to do then you could do worse than read the following paper by Gary King. It's not exactly about writing a dissertation, but a lot of the advice is transferrable as indeed is the strategy of starting off by trying to replicate a published study.

http://gking.harvard.edu/papers/