In re: Dick Cheney

I get most of the sentiment here, I really do. The world is vast and people are small, and there are just not that many people of whom you can say the world is a worse place because of them, but yeah, Dick Cheney's on that list. He's not Bill Kristol, whose moral standards and ethics have always been clear, but those standards lead to good or bad outcomes depending on the rest of the world; nor is he George W. Bush, who could have been a good man but was, fatally, weak.

But this brings me back to a question and a concern I've had since the good old days when I was on the inside of some conservative circles: do people on the right actually believe the things they say? So you have, among things I've seen, on the one hand, Bill Kristol in a conservatives-only conference defending no-fault divorce and gay rights. Pretty clear that he believes that one. 

But I have also seen prominent conservative intellectuals joking before a talk about how they're going to put on a performance to meet the crowd's expectation, which didn't seem to be consistent with their reflective judgment--i.e., they were going to complain about an academic work that they actually thought was either good or acceptable within academic standards. Pretty clear he didn't believe that one, or not entirely. However, I was in the room when the same person endorsed, unprompted and at some length, the "homosexuals infiltrated Catholic seminaries in the 60s and 70s to bring down the church" theory. 

And there are some more cases like that, in my experience: sometimes it's putting on a show for a "conservative" view to a mixed or liberal-leaning audience; sometimes it's kayfabe for a supportive audience, in the "we gotta pretend like every Republican candidate is a good one" sense; sometimes it's a deeply held belief. I think all of the people I've known in this category know whether they believe the things they're saying or not, but it can be terrifyingly unclear.

And look, I'm no longer an academic, I don't need to keep to a neutral pose. I'll save my interpretive energy for things along the lines of "why do Herta Müller's books all have great, exciting premises and terrible execution?" I've come around to the view that it's the words out of your mouth that matter, and your actions, and it's not worth the energy to figure out if you mean it or not. 

This is of course reductive and opens me up to exploitation, but here's another thing I've learned in my time as an HR person: the racist who wishes to act on it will eventually tell you they're racist. You might think that's an insane thing to do in front of your HR rep, and it is, so much the worse for those people, but the people who think they're being clever and putting one over on you will eventually need to make sure someone knows what clever people they are. So the odds are pretty good over a long enough period of time that someone will reveal their real thoughts and beliefs. Especially now, when there seem to be so few sanctions for being an awful person with awful beliefs.

Just Out Here Making Friends

I was out at the end of my driveway, to keep the trick-or-treaters from having to climb up to our house, and to keep the dogs from barking at everyone. I was also reading because it was still light out. A group of adults was assembling on my street (we are apparently now a destination neighborhood) and one of them, looking at me, says "are you just, like, reading Beowulf for fun?" Indeed I am, friend.

Beowulf, tr. Heaney
I read this in 10th grade or so, when I started in on the classics but before I made it to Dante and subsequently turned in the first of many particular directions. There are apparently a lot of arguments about it, since there's only one source manuscript. It reads to me as purely Roman with Christian elements added as an afterthought. I say Roman rather than Greek (or European) because the violence is vivid and detailed, not unlike the Aeneid, and the interpersonal relations are something of an afterthought. The Christian lines are pretty basic and reveal little or no theological content, nor are they woven into the text. As for Heaney, it's pretty clear he's not attempting anything like a direct translation. Unlike a lot of critics when the translation first came out, I don't really mind the clear anachronisms and Irish-isms; I've read too many translations that do this to mind, and I do follow Borges in the idea that a strong enough story should be able to withstand and overcome any number of errors by a translator.

Metamorphoses, Ovid
Ovid's reputation as an explicit or crass poet made its way down to me, but gotta say, I don't see it at all. There's no shortage of moments that verge on the carnal--hard to talk about Jove without it--but it's mostly golden lights and implications of what happens with the cow or bull, but very direct detailed accounts of, say, Pentheus being ripped to pieces by the Bacchae, or what happens when Jove is not allowed to tone in down when he's with a human woman. Lurid violence and very little actual sex for all the sex that's supposedly happening--very 21st century.
On a larger level, the famous stories are all famous if you know anything about mythology; my childhood book of "Greek myths" was almost entirely from Ovid. The obscure ones are obscure for a reason.

Our Mutual Friend 
There are *at least* two different traps being set right now, where a character is attempting to hold out on information they have to gain an advantage over people who are trying to hurt them. I cannot decide whether this violates my rule of "read no book where the central mystery goes away if the main character just directly talk to each other". I have a real problem with John Rokesmith/Harmon's plot to pretend to be poor, get fired, marry a woman who he was concerned was a gold-digger, and put her through her paces before revealing that he's actually rich. If I were that woman, I'd be pretty mad about this whole thing.

Musil, The Man Without Qualities, vol 2
I did not anticipate so much abstract theorizing about the roles of men and women being carried on by a brother and sister who appear to be kinda into each other? I knew that last bit, but didn't expect it to be so explicit. That's on me, I guess. Only 1000 pages to go!

Benjamin, Arcades Project
"Boredom" is an excellent convulute, every entry a banger. 

Joni Mitchell in brief-ish review

Joni Mitchell, Ladies of the Canyon
Blue
For the Roses
Court and Spark
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
Hejira

Joni Mitchell has always existed on the edges of the music I listen to. Court and Spark was commonly played as I finished my dissertation; I liked Blue sometimes very much. But that was 15 years ago when my life was very different. In the spirit of giving things that have fallen out of my favor another chance, and in the grad school spirit of ingesting a lot to get the arc of a career or a mind, I've listened to all of the classic-ish Joni Mitchell albums in order over the last couple of days.

We should take as a starting point and a given that the musicianship is excellent and the compositions intricate. It also is a world unto itself--a Joni Mitchell song announces itself immediately and could be nothing else. You can listen to a lot of modern shoegaze or hip-hop producers in the vein of The Alchemist and think, not unfairly, that it all kind of runs together after awhile. (A standard I have long had for a Good Album is that each of the songs should be independently identifiable very early in your listening history; a song being a discrete unit with an identity is a sign of a higher level of artistry.) 

And as something of a recovering contrarian, it's important to note that her best known songs are known best for a reason: they are all very good, if not always an emotionally easy listen. You'll get no argument from me on "Big Yellow Taxi", "Woodstock", "River", "Both Sides Now", "A Case of You" etc. 

There's a directness to the lyricism whose appeal is pretty clear and meant a lot more to me when my own feelings were less readily available to me, but now it reads to me as a precision of observation that excludes as much as it opens up. "The Last Time I Saw Richard" is exactly what a song named that would lead you to believe it is. Like reading a short story, in a way: if it is for you, then it's a world; if it's not for you, the specificity ruins the ability for it to mean much.

On the music, one can say that the most important thing is the reminder that an acoustic guitar is as much a percussion instrument as anything else: other instrumentation comes and goes, but the songs have an internal structure that doesn't require anything else to move, and in this it separates itself out from a lot of other singer-songwriter albums that have trouble maintaining a pulse.

In the end, these days, I require a little more heft and variation. The most intriguing song on any of these albums, by a lot, is "The Jungle Line", where the synthesizer creates a more dynamic world than the rest of her music allows. It has no sequel. Hejira also rang in an interesting way, the songs being longer than normal and with more presence of bass and groove than in some of the other albums. 

Time passes, things change: I could not find in Court and Spark whatever I once did, and Joni Mitchell's music as a whole feels flatter than it has in the past. Whether that's a phase or not, I don't know. I don't think it's a "female singer-songwriter" thing, since Allegra Krieger's Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine and Faye Webster's Underdressed at the Symphony have gotten plenty of play in the last year.

Currently Reading, Oops All Germans! Edition

Lion Feuchtwanger, The Oppermanns
I have some precise rules about the amount of misery I'll put up with in a book. Endless misery is not personally improving. It does not make you more conscious or serious to be willing to put up with it. If your imagination is vivid and your empathy is engaged, to read about the torture of others is to in some measure imagine it happening to yourself; a smaller terror, but a real one. I do not need a fictionalized account to know that genocide is bad. My imagination gets me there just fine.

So, yes, I should have seen this coming. Feuchtwanger is in the thick of German pre-war literary life, one who barely makes it out of Europe. This novel is about the rise of the Nazi regime, with a mixed reception simply because it is so close to The Events themselves. It does not have the room to breathe of Anna Seghers' The Seventh Cross, nor the conviction of that book that there is more and better on the other side, whenever we get there. All of this is fine--the rise of Nazism and the decline of a German family are venerable literary topics for a reason--but it seemed clear that things would be going especially badly for the young son of the family, and sure enough, Wikipedia confirms a suicide coming. I have a very hard line about not being interested in accounts of teenage suicide, so I'm done with the book.

 

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
A book I have been constantly warned not to read front-to-back, so I am reading it front-to-back. It's very funny, in the section on fashion, to see how differently fashions play out on either side of the Atlantic. In France, crinolines and petticoats (and bicycles!) are all associated with modernity and exposed feminine sexuality; in the US they appear to be all associated with the exact opposite--in Gone With the Wind and Lost Cause-ism they're the sign of women who know how to be women when men were gallant and women were demure.

A Disney/Universal Summary

We spent a bit over a week at Disneyworld and Universal Studios (all of the Kingdoms, Disney Springs, all of the Universal parks and CityWalk) during intersession from year-round school. We are friends with some Disney Adults (and their kids) who will want my processed thoughts. They were skeptical I would enjoy myself at all. But even given time, my thoughts refuse to be turned into one unifying idea, which is perhaps only makes clear that I will not, myself, become a Disney Adult. Scattered thoughts follow:

• Did I like the experience? A question I rarely ask myself about anything; there are a lot of reasons to, say, read a book and find the experience fulfilling apart from liking it. Everyone had fun, and I'm glad we did it, though it was nine days away and everyone sharing the same hotel rooms. Plusses and minuses, but like all trips, the minuses fade over time.

• I am not a rides person, though I did several. Whatever thrill people get from them is not an active set of brain chemicals in my head; the best I went on were tolerable. So there is a real upwards cap in terms of my personal enjoyment of any of the theme parks.

• The shows were good, and better at Universal than Disney. But none of them can be more than 20 minutes, which means all of the plot arcs are very compressed. 

• The food at Disney was occasionally exceptional, and in general it was possible to eat pretty well there. Universal was... much more like a giant state fair in terms of food.

• I can understand some parts of the Disney Adult thing: we probably would've gone on for longer, and with a slightly different mix of things, if not for the kids. (I would do the on-foot safari hike in Animal Kingdom without hesitation, but I'd be the only one in my family who would.) Epcot in particular seems like it'd be a rewarding experience.

• In the weeks since we returned, I've been playing a game, which is "what outrageous vacation could we have had for approximately as much as this trip cost?" The current champion is: fly to Madrid, stay at the literal Ritz that is right next to the Prado, take a daytrip to Bilbao or San Sebastian for tapas, take an overnight trip to Barcelona. Slightly more expensive, but not by much.

And that's sort of what it comes down to for me: it was a good trip, I'm glad we did it, I can see how you could squeeze some more adult enjoyment out of it, but I'd rather go somewhere I'd want to go in the future. 

A Few Horror Movies in Review

The Exorcist
The Omen
Children of the Corn
Rosemary's Baby
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

One must first give up the idea that horror movies are scary. The lights get dark, the soundtrack fades back, perhaps the camera is framed wide or goes seemingly out of focus: a jump scare is sure to come. The real monsters are almost always regular humans. Horror moves in contemporary genre conventions, and if you know the decade the movie was made, you can predict a lot of the beats. (The Omen shares a lot with The Last Wave, and no wonder.) Evil children seem a lot less scary when you know actual children. If you accept the idea that there are nonphysical forces that sometimes might have malicious intent but also that the world is full of strange and random things that happen for no reason, there's really nothing too unusual or to be frightened of. (I do not discount the possibility of malevolent things, but I also don't believe Babylonian demons are doing possession of random people or that Satanic cults are trying to bring about the antichrist for some reason; these scary dimensions just kind of fall flat).

For a long time I've heard people talk about how terrifying The Exorcist is, which left me unprepared for a movie that is almost entirely people talking about problems occurring offscreen. My wife immediately found the feminist angle--young girl going through physical and emotional changes treated by others as a hostile threat--whereas for me it was more about the ability to carry on in faith despite doubts. Contra a common reading of the film, the victory is not hollow but manages to the end of a disaster as well as possible.

Rosemary's Baby, well, I can't believe that guy turned out to be a creep who sexually assaulted powerless women and girls. It's sort of like horror Godard--all that attention to lived female experience, perceptively drawn, but in service of degrading women just because. Still a good film.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers has a somewhat incoherent metaphor at its center--don't think too carefully about what the pods are doing or why, it makes no sense--but really does emphasize how having capital-A Actors and directors committed to a stylish vision and People Who Know How To Make A Movie Look Like A Movie gets you almost the entire way to greatness.

A thought on parenting

I spent a lot of my life hiding, or at least obscuring, my political opinions. It didn't do to share them much in grad school, where it might have limited my career options. Nor was it a good idea to share them when teaching, because students often had the (incorrect) idea that if they simply repeated my opinions back to me they'd get an A. Nor also as an HR professional, for reasons I hope are obvious. 

A related skill I picked up in grad school is the tendency to be protective of my opinions, to hold them a little contingently, to be aware of ways they might be attacked and prepare against those, to allow graciously for people of good will to differ.

It was sometime around 2020 that I realized I could not do any of this with my family, and especially my kids. They will learn their values from somewhere, it may as well be from me, and I owe it to them to say what I actually believe without qualification or fear of the consequences of saying it. 

(Thus a summer study of WWII with my eldest child, which had many aims, but above all to instill "it is never morally acceptable to kill another human being" as a core tenet of morality.)

Adventures in Reading: Still Not Sure About Dickens edition

Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
Lem famously hated both film adaptations of Solaris. Reading the book, it's not hard to see why: the book is about the inability to communicate that would have to form the core of interaction with an alien species, and neither movie is about that. It's difficult to see how any movie could be about that (the final conversation scene in My Dinner With Andre excepted), and like any good science fiction property, there's enough other good material in the premise to make Tarkovsky's movie work. 

The most provocative idea in the book is that the search for alien life has nothing at all to do with what might be out there, but is rather entirely about holding up a mirror to our own humanity to find out what makes us special. It makes sense, on a level: we'd like to learn something about ourselves and don't mind using someone or something else to do it. In this way we can make sense of why there was a Space Age, which lasted into my childhood, but now there is not: the hope that there might be something out there curdles, gradually, into the reality that there's probably nothing, and the limits physics imposes on us--the vast distances of space, hostile conditions, the omnipresent radiation that would more likely sooner than later kill anyone who could overcome the first two--and the only thing this particular mirror can reflect back to us is our smallness and fragility.

 

Goethe, Elective Affinities
Now here's a really weird one. A Romantic-age nonmonogamus dream constantly and thoroughly undermined, from the German genius who (I discovered) kept a wife and a mistress and many other lovers besides. Mannered and stylistically romanticist and so very much not for everyone, but interesting.

 

Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Svjek
The novel has begun to suggest the possibility that Svjek might not actually be a little slow, but intentionally trying to prevent himself from ever having to fight. An unfinished novel, alas, so we'll never know.

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
400+ pages in and still not certain whether I'm going to finish it, a real step down from the top David Copperfield-Oliver Twist-A Tale of Two Cities-Bleak House top tier.

Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah
If I never encounter another 100+ page party scene again in my reading life, I'd be fine with it. The section on how car travel works compared to walking or traveling by train was interesting, because it's pretty much a complete inversion of how we think about it now (for Proust it's the car that allows you to see things spontaneously as they are and connect together what would otherwise seem disparate, which I think is how no one experiences it these day).