Camp Dennison, Jan. 24th, 1862

It is with pleasure that I now take this opportunity to write you a few lines in answer to your kind letter which I received yesterday. I was very glad to hear that you were all well. I am well and getting along well. The sun is shining and it is quite warm here today. I believe it is the first pleasant day we have had since we have been here, if not it is so long since we have had one that I have forgot it. I never found those cookies till yesterday that you put in my satchel. I was looking for Edies likeness, you forgot to put that in. I wish you would send it by Jim if you get this before he leaves and if not send it by Blood. As for our being disbanded, we know nothing about it yet. The Colonial has got back from Columbus but said he could not tell any thing more about it than he could before he went. I should wonder if we were armed and put in the field after awhile. Nothing more at present.

I remain as ever,

T. M. Covert.

PS:
I had not time to write more or I would. I have to go and drill.

Those are some pretty old cookies, right?

Do you think the likeness is a photograph? A drawing? A painted portrait (in a frame)?

Covert often makes some kind of distinction between "being well" and "getting along well". Perhaps one refers to physical health, the other to mood and psychology?

It's the fruit of the Numbers Quartet project I mentioned earlier, with Stephen Gaskell,
Aliette de Bodard, and Nancy Fulda.

Let me know what you think...

Camp Dennison, Jan. 14th, 1862

My Dear Wife:

I now take this opportunity of writing you a few lines to let you know that I am as well & getting along as well as could be expected. I was on gard last night & feel somewhat sleepy. The last time I wrote to you I told you that I liked this ground a good deal better than I did the ground at Warren but it is a week since than and it is the damdest muddy place I ever saw. It was all mud last night but is froze up this morning. Charles Babbock has got the measles but is getting better. He has been pretty sick. We have done away with the card playing in the Barricks. It was done by a vote of the Company. Almost every man voted to do away with it. We voted to do away with all profane language and to have dancing once a week. There is a great deal of talk about our being discharged here in camp but we do not know anything about it. The talk is that we will have to be discharged or go into the Infantry. I shall go as Cavalry or go home and not all in camp think the same way, but I dont think there is any truth in the talk of our being discharged. I have been vaccinated for the small pox and it is working well. I hardly think there is any small pox in camp, still there may be. I wrote you a letter last Monday but have not received any letter yet but have been looking for one for three or four days but it will be along before long. We are expecting our pay before long & than I will send you a letter that will make you glad & I hope it will be one or two weeks. Tell Edie I will fetch her something nice when I come home. Nothing more at present, But I remain as ever,

Thos. M. Covert

Jan 15th
PS:
I had this letter sealed up when I received your letter. I was very glad to hear from you & to hear that you were well. You must do as you think best about those shoes, for Edie forgot about it at Warren. You had better not make any payment on the place out of the first money I send you for we do not know how things will turn out yet.

Direct your letters To:

T. M. Covert
6th O.V. Cavalry,
Camp Dennison, Oh.
Care Capt. Bingham

I guess card playing and profane language are from the Devil, but dancing is divine. I wonder what kind of dancing they're going to do?

His daughter Edie is not very old at this time, I get the impression from later letters that she's no more than five or six; so the remark that she forgot about the shoes is curious. Did she go visit him at camp in Warren by herself, with a message about the shoes, which she forgot? If so, I hope it wasn't a big deal; it seems a lot to entrust a six-year-old with. Does it have anything to do with the lasts, inspets, bristles & peg flats in the first letter, the ones the Hack Driver was supposed to bring him?

So the part I've gotten up to now, is the part where various events have led to a kind of decentralized, self-directed uprising by a lot of people, which is growing exponentially and leading to a breakdown in the planet's financial system.

I wrote this part probably some time in 2007.

Do you see the problem, gentle readers?

It is pretty much impossible to read these pages in 2012 as anything other than a reimagining of the world financial crisis, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street. As I read it I am imagining people discussing what I am trying to say by inverting the order of events.

After all, in the real world, first the economy collapsed; and in response to the callous and rapacious way in which elites responded, there was an emergent, well-coordinated uprising across many parts of the world. By inverting the order -- by making the uprising at fault for the collapse -- Rosenbaum paints a reactionary caricature of recent history.

Sometimes we deceive ourselves that our writing is composed of what we wrote -- but this is, of course, terribly naive. Our writing is constituted when it is read. To my discomfiture, while I was working on other parts of the book, History has been rewriting this one.

This, people, is why you need to write books fast.

Camp Dennison, Jan. 6th, 1862

My Dear Wife:

It is with pleasure that I now take this opportunity of writing you a few lines to let you know that we have safely arrived here. We started out Saturday morning at 8 O'clock and got here about 8 Sunday. Our quarters here are a great deal better than they were at Warren. We have barricks here and two large stoves in them. The building is about one hundred feet long and about 25 or 30 wide, with a stove in each end of them. They say that there is a few cases of the Small Pox in one of the Hospitals about one mile from here. There is as near as I can find out about Seven Thousand Five Hundred men in camp now and I tell you we have got a nice camp here.

There was two deaths in camp today, I do not know what Regement they belong to. One died with the measles & the other got poisend by drinking whiskee.. I lost my cap that you liked so well out of the car window yesterday. I went to look out of the window and my cap fell off just as it was always doing. The 2nd Ohio Cavalry leave here next week for Fort Leavenworth, Cansas. They are the Regement that was at Cleveland. I sent you five dollars by Mr. Barnard the morning. We left Warren I drew Eight dollars. I tried to get it fixed so that you could draw a part of my wages before we left Warren. I spoke to the Captain about it but he said that the Colonial was so busy that he could not do it then but I could have it fixed just as well when we got here. So I will get fixed as soon as we get straightened around. The Artillery were shooting at a target from one hill to another the other day when there was a man got in the range of the cannon and had his shoulder shot off. He died of the wound. And there was one of the Zouves went to steal sheep & the farmer see him and shot him through the heart, so I guess he wont steal any more sheep. The Zouves are real thieves any way. I have not got any shirts yet but will get some before long. It was as cold this morning here as it was at Warren when we left and I think colder but it is warmer now.

Jim stayed at Warren to take care the sick. Nothing more at present, but I remain,

As Ever

Thos. M. Covert

Direct your letters to:

Thos M. C.,
Camp Dennison,
6th O.V. Cavalry Regt.,
Care of Capt. Bing.

If you see Binghams Boys tell them to fetch you 2 bushells of Apples.

Write Soon.

Along with his grumbling, Covert has flashes of wit; I like the story of the cap -- presumably riding in a railroad car was novel enough that Covert wasn't prepared for the consequences of it falling off "as it was always doing" -- and of the Zouave who won't steal any more sheep -- and they illustrate two kinds of yarns Covert likes to tell -- ones where he's made a fool of, and ones where he can make wry pokes at the expense of those who offend his moral sensibilities.

Why are his letters sent care of Captain Bingham? Is it the officer's responsibility to distribute mail to his men? Is he the same Bingham whose Boys should fetch Phoebe two bushels of apples? Is he "the Captain" in his official capacity, but "Bingham" when it comes to matters back at home?

All the stories are based on mathematical or physical constants -- this was Stephen's excellent idea -- and they will come out in the order in which those constants were, historically, defined or quantitatively determined. There are twelve stories total, three from each of us...

I am in the very funny position on this of, in principle, being, on the one hand, very skeptical of the lionizing of literature vs. demonization of computer games and believing that computers have revolutionized human life for the better, that they give us superpowers...

And, at the same time, I parent in a household that imposes pretty draconian limits on screen time; for the 7 year old, the basic standard is an hour a day max, and for the 11 year old it's 5 hours a week max (if this seems paradoxical, it's because the 5 hours is totally self-regulated, measured login-to-logoff, and she makes damn sure she gets it, while the 1 hour per day is theoretical and includes lots of "pausing the timer because I am just searching, not playing"). There's then a raft of specific exceptions: extra time for email and blogging or otherwise using the computer as a communications tool, unlimited extra time for homework (and I could be sold on including not-actually-assigned research projects in this category), and liberal exceptions tied to the level of violence in the family (in other words, when nobody is hitting anybody we are "on green" and exceptions are liberal; in the event of fisticuffs we go to yellow, orange or red and strictly enforce rules on, and then further restrict, screen time, sugar, and bedtimes).

Also, I do not just have screen time restrictions for my kids. I have screen time restrictions for me. I do not get on the computer after 7pm (except when day-job work demands my staying late; never at home). I do not get on the computer at home if I am more than 9 chores behind on the (competitive, cumulative, me vs. my wife) chore list. I lock myself out of internet access on all portable computing equipment -- laptop, iphone -- when out of the house. We don't own a TV, and when I have a hankering for an installed client-side computer game, I rent one (every few years) from the library for a month. Although I don't restrict my kid's book time, I do restrict my own; if I'm more than 25 behind on the chore list I don't read at home. (If I'm more than 40 behind I don't play the guitar).

It's hard to know if I'm doing the right thing by my kids in restricting screen time; I go back and forth. It's much easier to tell that I'm doing the right thing by restricting screen time for me -- my life has been made immeasurably better by these rules.

It's also worth noting that our household is driven by a lot of consensus-based negotiation, and the screen time rules were worked out, in discussion, between us and the kids. They aren't purely coercively imposed by fiat; the kids have suggested and successfully argued for changes in the rules, and they'll continue to change over time. These are rules the kids said yes to; they know how to say no. That said, the kids would surely want to have way more screen time if they could simply overrule us. Consensus cuts both ways. [Actually I was wrong about this: see update at the end.]

Part of what's going on is cultural difference. I live in Switzerland. It's not so much that the Swiss relate to technology differently, as that they relate to time, and public and private spheres, differently. Offices are very high-tech; homes are very old-timey. There is a time for each kind of activity. Being online at 3 in the morning is wrong; so is shopping at 3 in the morning. I don't know if this way of life is good or bad; what it is, is, in a modern incarnation, Sabbatarian. It was one of the things I hated most about Switzerland when I first came here, twenty years ago, with my American sense of "god damn it, I want to buy it NOW." It's one of the things I've come to cherish most about life here.

Another piece of this is that while "computers are evil and totally different from books" is absurd, so is "computers are access to information; books are access to information; thus computers=books." It turns out that the shift from horses to cars does require some different traffic rules; same with the shift from painting to cameras -- it's possible to fall asleep and find that your one night-stand has painted your nude portrait, made a lithograph thereof, and posted it as flysheets all around the town, and that may be distressing, but it's not quite the same thing as the modern equivalent. Indeed, much was lost in the transition from oral narrative to text; there's something to be said, perhaps, for camping trips with few books taken along, for reawakening the spirit of storytelling.

But anyway: computers are, frankly, more engrossing than books; more even than TV. This is partly because they are better than books or TV. They are more interactive, more educating, more powerful. This is a good thing. My kids learned more world history in our month-long sprint of playing, and then discussing, Civilization IV every day, than they have in their entire academic career in school. Only because of how powerful and enthralling computers are, were we able to have such an intense period of passionate arguments, so early, about guilds and the development of gunpowder weapons.

But I suspect limited screen time was an aid, rather than an impediment, to this usage. It meant that the kids strategized about how to deploy their computer time, then used it with total focus and abandonment, and then were forced afterwards to regroup and think and talk about it, to process it in while on walks outside and while doing chores, as opposed to simply being immersed in it until their reserves of attention were exhausted.

Because here is the other thing about computers, and particularly the endless jouissance of interlinked education/entertainment/power of modern networked computers: they never get boring. Not for me anyway, and not for my kids either, by observation (and there have been some periods of relatively unlimited computer use by them to test this hypothesis, though I admit that the usual rules do distort the experiment). There is some point at which I will look up from a book, stretch, notice that I am hungry and in need of exercise. When that happens in front of the computer my impulse is to click on something else.

Being bored is actually a really critical part of childhood. I do not want my children to be robbed of being bored. I do not rush in to help them when they are bored -- or I try to suppress my tendency to do so. The moment in which you are bored is the moment in which you begin to create and own your time. Now, obviously, I do not take this theory to the extreme of locking them in lightless padded cells, however wonderful the imaginations they might have would thereby be. But nor am I required to furnish them with any entertainment they wish.

It is easy to say "it is fine to tell children to go outside and play, but what does that have to do with allowing them to websurf?" The thing is, though, that I have found that it does not work very well to issue positive injunctions -- read! play outside! talk to your friends! No one listens to this (nor should they; their time is their own). Bribery has the downside of the corruption effect; variants of "I'll pay you for every time you go play outside", or read, or draw, or whatever, do nothing but turn "playing-outside", or reading or drawing, into work, alienated labor, something done for extrinsic reasons, a game to be rules-lawyered and beaten; they breed contempt. Whereas going from the other side -- restricting, diminishing, or simply not having any of the distractions from the things you want to afford, and then allowing perfect freedom with what's left -- seems to work a lot better.

My kids tend to use the computer as a source of inspiration. They pick their moment, soak up Little House on the Prairie or all the Ben Ten Alien Force they can, then, when it's time to get off, they are thrown back on their own devices; they go play Ben Ten Alien Force outside, concoct period costume dramas in the attic, recruit the neighborhood to design Alien Force paper airplanes. It doesn't feel to me like they are deprived of internet time; it feels like they are using it smart.

Most of my US friends restrict screen time a lot less. Sometimes (Jeremiah Winzell comes to mind... wrong about this too, see comments) their kids seem to totally flourish in a bath of internet. Other times, the parents seem stressed out by what their kids aren't spending their time doing; the internet is the default, and the parents are in a battle to try to lure their kids away from it. The parents feel that the kid, if taken away from the screen, has no other particular thought than to return to it, and the expectation that all of life will be similarly entertaining and frictionless. The kids, in dopamine withdrawl, are sort of frantic. Does this do any permanent harm? Probably not. I survived endless hours of TV. It doesn't seem as much fun, to me, for me, as the way we do it, though.

I would not have predicted my approach as a parent to screen time. It came as quite a surprise to me. This is often the case with processes that evolve organically by many iterations of trial and error and empirical
re-evaluation. I am not prescribing anything. I do not see this as The Way. I find the fact that I am doing it sort of mystifying and, from some perspective, ironically absurd. Proper optimization is highly dependent on local conditions. Differences among kids are vast and salient, as are differences among parents. This seems to work; YMMV.

That was probably a lot longer comment than you wanted. Behold: I've gotten sucked into the internet again...

An update: I showed this to my kids and they objected to the sentence "the kids would surely want to have way more screen time if they could simply overrule us." Turns out that's not true: they both find the 5-hour-a-week rule optimal.

This smorgasbord, this intellectual frenzy, was wonderful -- and shaped me intellectually, to be sure -- but also destabilizing. I learned a lot, but in some ways I was miserable. In particular, the insistence of the outside world that these were supposed to be the best years of my life, had a tendency to make me miserable. They weren't. They were important years, though.

One of the best decisions I made was that, sometime freshman year, I decided I really wanted to be fluent in a language. This wasn't something anyone was pushing at me, it wasn't a lionized skill at the time. It just really bugged me that I could only think in one language, and I wanted the experience of being able to think in another. I chose Italian almost at random -- it fit my schedule, and I had a friend from Italy and figured I could practice with her. After a year and a half of Italian classes, I was not the least bit fluent. I had learned plenty of "about" but not very much "to". Mock conversations in class were awkward, and we were happy to retreat from having to use the lived-life part of the brain into the comfortable academic part, and memorize grammar -- which is useless for communicating, at least at first.

So I decided to go to Italy. The entire academic bureaucracy wanted me to go on an American program abroad, in which I would be with Americans, trying to learn Italian. I read students' reports from these programs and they all sounded like "oh Italy was so fun, I met so many great people, the food was great, I just wished I'd learned more Italian, oh well!" There was only one student report, from a student who had enrolled directly in an Italian university -- not with Americans -- who had actually learned the language.

So, junior year, I went to the Italian department and said I wanted to do that. They fought me kicking and screaming. Why would I want to do something so unregulated and quixotic? I eventually had to drop out of Brown for a semester entirely, and simply enroll directly at the University of Siena -- Brown guaranteed me no credit, though if I came back having learned Italian they would retroactively grant credit.

I spent six months there, and I'm still fluent in Italian. But the important part was that it felt like that was the moment in which I actually started to determine my education. Up until then, though it looked like there was a bewildering variety of choice -- this course or that one? -- I had really been sliding along a well-oiled path laid out for me by others, safe and guaranteed. It was kind of a mind-altering experience, a shock, to find this spot in which my august Nobel-littered institution was simply dead wrong and I was right.

At the University of Siena, too, I realized that Brown's emphatic insistence on its own diversity was kind of a crock. It was "diverse" on very well-considered, safe, comfortable lines. Like race, sure; there was an effort to be racially diverse.That meant there was an effort to find people with different external somatic phenotypes who could log the same number of volunteer hours, violin recitals, and gymnastics meets, give the same answers on the same tests so as to get the same GPAs and SAT scores, and write the same sorts of gushy inspiring noble entrace essays as the rest of the students. It was a pretty brittle kind of diversity. At the University of Siena I was with Japanese academic tourists, career-minded proto-technocrats from Brussels, and guys from Chad who used to race camels across the Sahara for fun -- middle class guys from Chad, in other words; because the Unversity of Siena, unlike Brown, actually paid the way of non-jet-set foreign students (the international jet set, particularly the ones who can answer all the questions on those tests the right way, is a pretty homogenous institution).

Anyway, I don't say this to trash Brown. In some ways, returning from Siena, I actually liked Brown better and felt more comfortable there. Rather than seeing it as the apex of intellectual achievement, the one true path, embodying all of human diversity and the species' highest aspirations etc etc, I could see it for what it was: kind of a quirky, bizarre, uniquely Anglo-American institution (an entire walled city where everyone is a scholar between 18 and 25, or else their paid servants?), highly specialized rather than diverse in any real sense, but nonetheless a lovely idea -- a little world of partying scholar-kids dedicated to immersion in a particular ritualized game of semester-long sprints of learning, modest debauchery, activism-in-training, and "gentlemanly pursuits".

It's a beautiful thing, and to be enjoyed. Enjoy it, suck the juice out of it. But where it doesn't fit you, where you and College disagree, you should know that you might actually be right, and that life keeps getting bigger afterwards.

Rereading this, one thing that strikes me -- I touch on it above, but not in detail -- is the way that preprogrammed nostalgia is designed in as part of the product known as the Undergraduate Experience. Going to college I was acutely aware of the nostalgia which was awaiting me, in my future, for the time I was about to have. Indeed I was about to undergo something which was in a sense defined by the nostalgia I would have for it later -- that was somehow almost its core or its organizing principle. There's something very alienating about this aspect of the ritual that we Americans impose upon most of our middle- and owning-class young adults.

My Dear Wife:

It is with pleasure that I sit down to let you know that I received your letter last night. I was glad to hear that you was all well, but sorry that you do not get along any better. I shall try to have a part of my wages paid to you monthly. The Captain has promised me the Saddlers place & if I get it, it will be a good thing for me & I hope that I shall get it. We have got our overcoats & boots & will have the rest of our cloths today & tomorrow. I can't come home till after then, but do not look for me till I come, for I don't know when they will send me. I do not feel verry well to day, but I hope that I shall feel better by tomorrow. I was on gard Sunday and cought cold & have a hard pain in my right lung, but I think I shall be well in a day or two. Tell Edie that I take her picture and look at it every day, and that I will come as soon as I can. I send you in this letter one dollar. It is all I have to send. You must excuse me for not writing more as I do not feel very well.

Yours As Ever,

T. M. Covert.

Dictated by Aviva to me on a Saturday morning in Basel, one hundred and fifty years, to the day, after Thomas Covert sent it.

Edie was his daughter. The themes in this letter -- homesickness, health problems, struggles to support the family financially while off at war -- will recur.

Thomas Covert is my great-great-great-grandfather. His daughter Katie's son Harry Freeman's daughter Jeanne was my grandmother. Covert ended his days in the town of Kinsman, Ohio, where my grandmother knew him. (In an odd bit of trivia for my little corner of the speculative fiction universe, Kinsman is the home town of Chris Barzak, whose wonderful first novel One for Sorrow is set in its fictional analog.)

I'm not sure what town Thomas and Katie called home in 1861, when he left to join the 6th Ohio Cavalry and fight for the Union. Covert was some kind of artisan -- maybe a cobbler; he talks about working as a Saddler, and in the Military Register (which I'll have to scan -- its iconography is fascinating) he's listed as Company A's Artificer. (I believe I've played that class...)

The letters tell a pretty fascinating story, which is one reason I'm posting them. They raise a lot of issues of history and politics and character. It's probably also some small public service to digitize them (what I have access to are Xeroxes of typescripts made from the originals sometime in the 1980s; the originals are at the Western Reserve Historical Society, according to this footnote). And perhaps I'll end up doing something fictionally with them? As Jed observed, "Thomas Covert, who lived in Kinsman. It sounds like the sort of story where everyone has a name that means something."

Anyway, here are the first two letters (I'll offer variant readings of possible typos in square brackets):

Warren, Nov. 8th, 1861

My Dear Wife:

It is with pleasure that I now take this opportunity to inform you that I am well & hope these few lines will find you all in the same state of health. We get along first rate in camp. Our Company is the best Company in camp. This is part of 4 Companys in now. Tell James to send me from 5 to 9 of them old lasts and my tow large insteps & you send those Bristtes & Peg flote[flats?] with them. Tell him to put them in a small bag & send them by the Hack Driver.
Nothing more, but write & let me know how you get along.

T. M. Covert

I would write more but I have to go to be in Camp at 8 O'Clock and it is most that now.

You can see why I think he's a cobbler, right? I find his immediate boosterism for A Company, upon arrival, to be rather sweet, typical of his boyish optimism (I don't know how old he is when the war begins; he's been married for 4 years, though).

Warren, Nov. 13th, 1861

My Dear Wife:

It is with pleasure that I now take this opportunity of writing you a few lines to let you know how we get along. Our Company are all so as to be a round now. James Joiner got hurt a few days ago but is getting along now. I was swinging him and some one came up and twitched the rope and then run so we do not know who it was. Those night caps go first rait. We have a first rate place to sleep. I sleep with Orange Ball & Hoarche Drew. We have Pork Bread and Potatoes and Coffee to eat. I have not time to write now but I think I will be home next Saturday.

Yours As Ever,

Thos. M. Covert

How do you think they were swinging? And doesn't it sound like fun, aside from the jerk who wandered by and "twitched the rope"?

This was in ancient days, o my best beloved, and there were as yet no interwebs. We wrote the things in ink in spiralbound notebooks and we showed them to each other hand to hand, like combat before gunpowder. Or bows. Or something.

Time passed, things changed, and now I scatter words to the wind, and you have read them there. I have sort of got used to this.

Now a dear one from the spiral notebook times is about to publish a First Thing in a Long While, and somewhat belatedly realizing that the publishing-it bit meant that, in fact, people would read it (aargh!), she asked me, "how in the world do you deal with the showing it to people part?"

She said I should blog my answer:

I think partly I have evolved a second self? Or a layering of selves, like an onion. And the stories themselves need to be emancipated, too. The more attention they get, the farther away they move, so that while the unpublished ones ever feel like secret private things, like suckling infants within the shadowy soft concealment of one's clothes, the just-published ones are independent-minded little things making forays out, and one is crossing one's fingers that the first day of school will go well, and the better-known ones begin to have lives of their own, and something like The Orange, now, feels all grown up, its own thing entirely, someone I have some admiration for, but no responsibility any more, hardly anything to do with me. It is hard to remember that I wrote it. I am not sure I entirely believe that I did. It's just something that's out there, part of the world.

I think this is a learned skill, because when I started getting award nominations it was overwhelming, toxic, because I felt like people were talking about me, not about the stories, and that, of course, would be too much to bear.

It's difficult keeping a little mom-and-pop shop like this open in a deserted wintry East Coast beach town. Social media has its tentacles in everything, there is even a facebook in your facebook, much as an earlier era brought us nested Starbuckses, and so I am going to have to rig up some contraption to automatically post links to the entries here into Facebook, Twitter, G+, and hUBBUB, for it to be worthwhile to go on. Let me know if you feel like helping with this little software project, or have seen the right tool that I should be using (keeping in mind that this here blog is on my self-hacked variant of an ancient version of Movable Type, practically cuneiform at this point).

But I have some plans brewing, worry not. First, I'm going to post the old crap that's hung around in my Drafts folder, even if it's not perfectly relevant to the moment, because as we know I tend to overthink this blogging thing. And then I am going to post a series of letters home, written by my ancestor Thomas Covert, each one exactly 150 years after it was originally mailed. And I have another plot or two.

Watch this space!

I'm cleaning them out, but this has the side effect of my revisiting old entries. I just reread my advice on Kiva vs Grameen from 2007 and realized it's somewhat inaccurate, and I've become a bit more skeptical over time.

It's true that Kiva lenders don't get interest, and that Kiva lives on explicitly marked donations from those lenders. So all the money does flow to the NGOs. Also, I think the fact that the "give money directly to this guy" look & feel is more or less an illusion, and that the money actually funds NGOs (with a loose accounting connection between the NGO's books, your loan, and that guy), is a feature, not a bug.

However, it's also true that the NGOs in some cases charge (what seem in the rich world to be) insanely high rates of interest to the actual borrowers. It may be that in order to make this sort of thing sustainable, given various conditions in poor countries -- difficulties of travel and administration, currency and inflation risks, etc -- these rates make some kind of economic sense. But they change the picture drastically. You are not now talking about giving people in the poor world access to the same kind of credit arrangements that people in the rich world have. You are talking about backing them on a high-risk gamble.

The various NGOs Kiva funds vary widely in how much interest they charge. Kiva does expose this information, but you have to dig for it -- which I consider a serious flaw in their UI.

I still have a bunch of money parked at Kiva and am adding to it, because I like to use Kiva as a "third alternative" between banking and donation -- money I want to put in the service of doing good, and am willing to temporarily forgo interest on, but am not sure I can actually afford to part with in the long term -- I am now very picky about which Field Partners I lend through. I collect those with what appears to be relatively low Portfolio Yield (which equates directly to how much they charge borrowers, I believe) for their geographic region, and reasonable risk.

For those playing along at home, here's my current list:

Loans from CREDIT (Cambodia, 28% Portfolio Yield)
Loans from Imon (Tajikistan, 37.7% Portfolio Yield)
Loans from Kadet (Kenya, 27.1% Portfolio Yield)
Loans from Maxima (Cambodia, 29% Portfolio Yield)
Loans from Ryada (Palestine, 17.1% Portfolio Yield, delinquency issues but progress on them)

Loans from Cooperativa San Jose (Ecuador, 15.2% Portfolio Yield)
Loans from Ameen s.a.l. (Lebanon, 18.72% Portfolio Yield, delinquency 7.52%, loans at risk 15%, default 0%)
Loans from XacBank (Mongolia, 21.2% Portfolio Yield, delinquency 0.07%, loans at risk 0.30%, default 0.11%)

Feel free to let me know if you spot one that should be added here!

Middlemarch is set in the 1820s. I am reading it in the 2010s.

Middlemarch is a well-written Novel of the Human Condition. In the 2010s, reading a well-written Novel of the Human Condition is a high-status activity. It is considered edifying. It displays one's educational prowess and sophistication. It is slightly old-fashioned in some quarters, perhaps, but all the more seen as rigorous and worthy for that. It is the sort of activity that do-gooders wish to encourage in the children of the less fortunate classes, for their elevation.

In the 1820s, of course, it was no such thing. In the 1820s it was a flashy, trashy, layabout activity:

"But I shall leave you to your studies, my dear[," said Mrs. Vincy,"] for I must go and do some shopping."

"Fred's studies are not very deep," said Rosamond, rising with her mamma; "he is only reading a novel."

"Well, by and by he'll go to his Latin and things," said Mrs. Vincy soothingly, stroking her son's head.

-- Middlemarch, Ch. XI

This scene might play out today, to be sure, but in a sense the categories "Latin" and "novel" would be arranged almost arbitrarily. Sure, if Fred is reading a novel which is not assigned for class, and skipping Latin which is, his sister may nag. But it is not the case today that the very fact of reading a novel is a sign, as Eliot employs it, for hedonistic slackerism; and few indeed are the curmudgeons today who rail against the tomfoolery of college classes where mere novels are assigned, as base distractions from the true objects of a gentleman's study, viz., Greek and Latin.

In the scene above, however, the sign of The Novel is deployed to illustrate Fred's gay dissolution, his mother's over-indulgence, and his sister's aspirational seriousness. Indeed, the ironic kick of the line "Fred's studies are not very deep" arises from the absurdity of the idea that reading a novel could be considered "one's studies" -- and the fact that Mrs. Vincy is being either over-delicate, or oblivious, in confusing the two.

Reading a novel in Middlemarch occupies the same social position, then, as playing a video game does today. Surely, some radical, progressive apologists might argue in 1820 for the edifying benefit of the better class of novels, just as some apologists today may treat of video games in the same manner; but they will be met with furrowed brows or polite smiles in their less novophilic contemporaries.

Let me ask you this, then: what, in 2100, will be derided as the low, hedonistic, addictive, mindless pursuit which concerned citizens will hope that the callow youth of the day will desist from (or indulge in with the greatest of moderation), so as to turn their attention to the uplifting, edifying, ennobling pursuit of playing video games?