The sense of an ending

Today reading Julian Barnes, Sense of an ending had several thoughts:

1: the central character and his friends have a set up similar to Gatsby or the other English novels of school chums....The narrator is intentionally dull as a brick, and opaque to a fault.....If he really were this slow witted he'd be a muggle, and if he isn't that slow, the author isn't coming clean.....I have the sense that the author is working very hard at avoiding any mitigating qualities, but in so doing leaves with a why bother issue.

Adrian we get approx 20 sentences about, and trying to relate to him is either emphatically not the authors intention, or not very good  character development.

The three women are the interesting characters in the book ( I feel it is a short story pretending to be a novel) but they don't get but a few pages in the whole thing.....That leaves us with 100 pages of filler, like a movie where one sees a lot of the cars moving and airplanes flying....

The ending isn't worthy of any of the principals, with the possible exception of the narrator, who isn't a worthy type...

The finding one's way in the transition from pre adolescence to the first stages of adulthood.....settled for better or worse,  rightly or wrongly, is of intense interest to me,  and the fact that the narrator (and i think the author) are of same age with the same set of constraints as myself is a great place to start, and so to with the looking back narrative, since again the age is the same......but this vision is so colorless, that any random person from that era would be more interesting....I had a class mate in high school who had managed to find a girl friend and have a shared intimacy that was enviable. This narrator has a potentially closer relationship, and a most self possessed girl griend....so that they couldn't get any further defies reaAON...The classmate i referred to  was a more solid, slightly stolid, quiet person, but I know he was finding out a lot more about relationships than I, and it wasn't because I had higher things on my plate, it was the barriers  created by one form of shyness blocked moving to that level of sharing This narrator and the author leave us again with why are we bothering

....one of our friends from that era said of one of her male companions that he felt you couldn't really know someone unless you had slept with them...and I think she said she bought that reasoning to some extent...ie that revealing oneself is easier if you know someone that well..

In any event.....This is not his finest book, and it feels contrived in an intellectual way too much..at least for my taste

Year of the Dragon

Ok, all Foxes: Today is the first day of the Year of the Dragon. We are in Albuquerque , at this instant in a cloud of new snow....According to Eastern folk tale, and the most beautiful of Hirosinge's wood cuts, on New Year's Eve (and I presume he was talking about Chinese New Year, even though he was Japanese, The Foxes all gather . For some reason they each have a flame over their heads, sort of like the Apostles when they learned to speak in many tongues....I'm waiting for my orders, like waiting for Godot, and while the waiting is not particularly frustrating, I also forget why.....but I'll never forget this carrot.

My two recommended readings for this New Year are both stunning, not necessarily in the sense of beauty, but pointing in directions that, like a video game, I hope there is an exit not yet visible from this point in the game, but hopefully there if We can just garner some super powers....the hope is for the generations coming on some of us are close enough to the finish line we can fall or stagger across, but these two pieces encapsulate a game that feels more like musical chairs rather than the video game with progressively less possible winners as the chairs are removed

....I remember a profesor at ND discussing this with me 50+ years ago, the industrial age per se being over, and the new worlds of work being service industries. That proposition held up fairly well for the last five decades, but the going for everyone but the 1 % (probably more like15%) seems to be getting rougher..Now the question is not how we get there so much as who is left by the side of the road.

The piece about the Iphone points out the magnitude of the manufacturing forces available, basically at a days notice, to do something like reengineer and produce the IPhone in a fraction of a year......Adam Davidson in the Planet money piece describes the bottom endge workers, and their tenuous hold (if they are lucky enough to have a hold at all) on a laborers job, and the contrast across town (as opposed to the Detroit vs Silicon valley juxtaposition) in greenville where a group of super high tech workers, few and highly skilled, crank out autoparts....he pointss out that US and China produce about the same amount of manufactured goods, but that despite growth in US, number of jobs in manufacturing has govne from 18 mil to 12 mil in a decade or so.....

If you get a chance listen and read, and especially those with experience in the world of econ/busines, tell me that it will all work out!

The first reading is the article in the NYTimes, Sunday last, about IPhones.....and Steven Jobs and jobs and the scale necessary to achieve it and the reality that at present only China....the second was a broadcast, 15 minutes, on Planet Money, which is an NPR Podcast on the Industrial Revolution as mirrored in Greenville NC, epicenter of the Textile industry, now dead, and New manufacturing....and who is left standing.