The Secret of Cheers, or How to Maintain High Quality for a Really Long Time:

Beliefs about a current renaissance of TV quality notwithstanding, I have occasionally pointed out that network shows are at an extreme disadvantage compared to cable because their runs have to be longer: 22 or 24 episodes rather than 6 or 10 or 13. This is also true of the length of shows themselves: 25 minutes in the 80s for a 30 minute show, rather than 22 (or less; Archer runs just barely over 20) now. Given that, I find it remarkable that Cheers is easily and obviously a better sitcom than anything else that has aired since: more time at a higher level than anyone else. Now, like most viewers, I don't like them all equally (I could ignore most Cliff episodes and not feel much loss), but the quality is always present.

The secret, as it turns out, is in the parenthetical above: there are a few episodes each season devoted to specific characters: 25 episodes might include...

2 Norm episodes (or 3)
2 Cliffs
2 Carlas
2 Coach/Woodys
2 Frasiers (after season 3)

...a couple that introduce random characters into the mix, and a couple that focus on aspects of Sam or Diane/Rebecca's personality that have nothing to do with the main story arc. So whatever that story arc is, it only has to drive 10-15 episodes in a season, sometimes fewer: you've just managed to create a smaller prestige show inside a larger network one. Further, the rules are different in the non-arcing episodes: Norm and Cliff have to end up pretty much where they start, and to the extent anyone else gets an arc, it sets up slowly over seasons; each episode is mostly an excuse for the writers to do a funny idea. It hardly matters whether it goes anywhere or not, since that's not the viewer's expectation.

Compare this to other shows, including those that are explicitly attempting to work within the Cheers paradigm, and it's clear how hard this is to do: Parks and Rec can hardly do a story without a significant Leslie component even if it's "about" someone else (this, I think, is why the Ron and Tammy segments are so well regarded), or how much New Girl flails around with how central Nick and Jess' relationship needs to be.

The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John LeCarré

Generations of Winter, Vasily Aksyonov

I'm about a third of the way through The Luminaries, and it has one obvious problem: my final judgment of the book is going to depend entirely on how clever its central mystery is. This situation recurs with some frequency in genre writing. Generations of Winter was engagingly written--I quite enjoyed the section from the dog's perspective--but since it is intended to track onto a specific part of Russian history, and the novel announces its theme of "fortunes waxed and waned during the Soviet Union era" early on, there's no real suspense. Some people will be killed, others will not; to be engaging, at least some things must happen that the reader does not suspect, which means it is not surprising that the most ideologically correct character breaks down, etc. Escaping from one convention means escaping into another. It's hard to sustain momentum when the outcomes are known and the plots are conventional (The Magnificent Ambersons, but with a surgeon's family), but at least the writing is good.

Tinker Tailor Solider Spy: what a terrible book, and significantly more difficult in its construction than it needed to be. Most of the action is relayed in dialogue, long after the events have taken place, with a heavy helping of jargon. The suspense relies on nothing more than not telling you who is responsible for as long as possible: it's the only mystery in the book, not much of one by halfway through the book, and quite obviously being intentionally withheld.

An aside: The Brothers Karamazov is a novel with a strong genre component. Its worth is dependent on the fact that it is also many other things: it hardly matters who killed the father, because it's the reactions of Dmitri, Ivan, and Alexei that matter, and these depend in no crucial way on knowing whodunnit. Crime and Punishment seems as good an example as any that there can be no mystery at all to who committed a crime and still have the story be gripping (or, to cite an example from last night's movie watching, RoboCop).

Which brings us back to The Luminaries. The style is assured, though I am never quite certain whether the narrator's voice is supposed to be "sounds like a 21st century person sounding 19th century-ish" or actually 19th century-ish. But there's nothing else other than the central mystery to engage the reader--just shy of 300 pages, we're still in flashback to events before the novel began, and I suspect we'll be there for awhile still--and much of the tension or narrative momentum comes from the writer's decisions about how to introduce information, not from the information itself. This does not leave me confident in the overall direction of the novel, though I'd be happy to be wrong.

The thing that's funny about this:

"But surely some of the frustration with [Greta Gerwig's decision to do a CBS sitcom] is actually a projection of frustration at the medium she is (perhaps only temporarily) leaving behind, which is now so dominated by effects-driven—not to mention male-oriented—spectacles that there is no money for movies about people, emotions, and ideas—not to mention women. "

...is that all the examples of innovative TV work and movie-stars-going-to-tv are all white men. And it makes me wonder whether the relentless hyping up of Girls has at least as much to do with the fact that Lena Dunham must be present to balance out all that Great White Maleness so that tv looks more inclusive and radical.

Two interventions in the latest round of the CCOA debate. Tangential to that line of argument, and so here, not there.

1. Phoebe writes, in the comments: "If the entire system were to change, and everyone just went to the nearest state school, rather than to a school tailored to needs or preferences of students like them, then maybe we could have a conversation about what College consists of, down to the specific texts."

I find it interesting that these arguments are always at elite liberal arts colleges or Ivy League schools, and never (one MOOC revolt aside) at places like Virginia, UNC, or my alma mater, Michigan. Conservatives at Michigan would complain about the University-mandated Race and Ethnicity requirement, but mine was fulfilled learning about the treatment of the Irish by the British in the early 20th century, so it was kind of a hollow complaint. The reason is, largely, that once a university passes a certain size, it becomes logistically impossible--and kind of silly--to assume the purpose of a university education is unitary. Education then requires many departments with many professors, and so by definition a large number of successful paths. The intricacy of major requirements was usually tied to the size of the department, if only because it became difficult to ensure what classes might be available the larger (and thus more irregular) the department gets; the ability to specialize increases with departmental size. (A department with 50 professors each teaching (say) a 2-1 where half of them get to teach a course based on their research is likely to produce some questionable-seeming courses even if the curriculum as a whole is conventional.) If the scenario Phoebe envisions were to come to pass, I would expect this would make a conversation about what college consists of, down to the specific texts, impossible (this, of course, supports Phoebe's overall point).

And, goodness, class size: I took exactly five classes with fewer than 40 students: two sections of Spanish (at about 30), my two senior seminars in philosophy and political science, and one We Need a 400-level Course to Get Our Philosophy Degree. Seminar-style pedagogy is barely possible with the Chicago-mandated Core course size of 19: it is impossible above 40. As a teacher, your aims and outcomes need to be radically different, not least because the students have different expectations. There were 400 people in my Intro to Political Theory, 45-60 for my course on Dante, a similar number for my course on the Russian novel, near 100 for my British history in the 20th century courses, 45-60 in every art history course I took. There's less discussion, more lecturing, more emphasis on getting students to do synthetic work in papers and exams to demonstrate they have done some learning on their own, and professors tend to be thrilled to get students in office hours who just want to talk about their subjects. Come to think of it, the perfect conservative university education may be hiding at big state schools, even right now.

2. Having taught the Core-iest of social science Core courses, and having received my education from Michigan in what was a (voluntarily chosen!) classics-oriented manner, I am willing to venture the opinion that the second is superior to the first. The reason is simple: repetition. Approximately one year of exposure to the classics and then a conventional university education in another subject will not (necessarily) leave a student in a noticeably better place. Students tend to grasp Aristotle, or Aquinas, or Marx, only at the point the course moves on to another figure, and so what remains is rarely coherent and situated in the right context. The eventual result is, depending on the level of reference you prefer, the character in Balzac's Lost Illusions who likes to quote Ciceronian maxims to prove how educated he is, though he long ago forgot the context for any of them, or Father Guido Sarducci's Five-Minute University; the persistence of people who read Aristotle long ago and are positive they remember what he said is astounding. Reading Shakespeare, or Milton, or Aristotle, or Locke only once will rarely make much of an impact: reading it a number of times in different circumstances will. So apart from an attempt to mandate not just introductory course selection, but all course options, it seems like this will fail; and even if all course options were mandated, it'd still require the will of the individual student to make it work.

Art and the Artist

(In response to Phoebe specifically, but also in general)

I tweet the following semi-periodically, and it probably deserves a longer explanation:

"A periodic reminder of how much relevance an artist's personal life has to the aesthetic evaluation of their work: none."

There are two primary reasons behind this: it is difficult, if not impossible, to know enough about an artist's personal life to make a definitive moral judgment about who they are, and the decision to let ethical questions dictate aesthetic responses has a tendency to crowd out the time one might take to enjoy art.

In order to get this argument off the ground, I have to stipulate one--hopefully uncontroversial--element: all human beings engage in a mix of good and bad behavior, and almost everyone's bad end includes some actions, opinions, and mental states they would prefer not to be made public. Nick Hornby has a riff on this in High Fidelity, where the narrator, having just admitted to having done five terrible things to an ex, asks his readers to think of the five worst things they've done to someone they were dating, and then asks them how they feel about being judgmental. People tend to want to accentuate the good things they have done and ignore the bad, or simply questionable, things. Outside observers who are not neutral tend to focus on the good or the bad. Consequently, the information that's available to us about artists from secondhand sources tends to be either good or bad, depending on whether it's a friend or an enemy speaking. But the information these people have is limited, and only the artist will ever really know.

Which is, as it happens, how it works with most of the people we meet: we just accept as a fact that their personal mix of goodness or badness remains unknown, and so we judge on those elements of their personality that are visible to us.

For artists, whose personalities tend to be in larger view, intentionally or not, the judgments appear to be trickier. How do we feel about Roman Polanski, or, assuming the charges are true, Woody Allen? I liked Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union, but I also read the book of essays where he gets very judgmental about his single mother's dating habits, and humblebrags that even though he wasn't cool, he definitely slept with at least one of her friends, and many other women he found desirable. What do I do with that? Jonathan Franzen appears to want to be the world's worst posthumous friend to David Foster Wallace, and seems to have some issues with anger and women. Dan Harmon appears to be obsessive and alienating to a number of people he works with, and the Hollywood grist mill provides more examples than I could even list here.

(I also note that the routine excess of popular musicians never generates the same ire, or certainly doesn't now. The last things I can think of are David Bowie's saying England was ready for a fascist leader, and Eric Clapton's effusive praise of Enoch Powell, both of which have obviously harmed their careers. (It's also, I believe, not entirely clear that Clapton does not still agree with Powell))

The issues multiply with past artists: what are we to do with Hitchcock's misogyny (especially as it is mostly absent from his earlier British films)? Should we lend credence to the rumors about Grace Kelly's active personal life? The grubby details of Barbara Stanwyck's rise to fame? Spencer Tracy's multi-decade affair combined with a refusal to divorce his wife? How should we react to the more sordid details of W.H. Auden's personal life, or T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism and crypto-fascism? Ernest Hemingway leaving his wife and young child for his mistress? Scott Fitzgerald's drinking, and treatment of his wife? How about Jean-Jacques Rousseau sending his children to the orphanage? And what of the people whose morality we can discern nothing at all: Homer, for example?

At this point, there are two options: one is to define a standard of those shortcomings which are morally relevant to consider, both present-day standards and those which are appropriate for the time. Failure to do the latter would require excluding large swaths of culture for insupportable stereotyping by race and gender. The former is also revealing, in that there are a number of indiscretions which are not considered to be reasons to boycott an artist's work. Even so, one can define an acceptable standard, assess the information available, determine what in it is reliable and does not come from a source that might be compromised, and come to a conclusion about whether the artist's work can be supported. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of work, and fully engaging in this process would eat up more time than the average book or movie would be worth.

The other is to conclude, perhaps even reluctantly, that ethical questions are separate for aesthetic ones, and aesthetic reasons should guide our decisions about what to consume. Works of art can get away from their creators, after all: even the staunchest defender of the view that Mark Twain was a racist has to acknowledge that Jim is the human and moral core of Huckleberry Finn, and Woody Allen can say something important about the need for moral standards in Manhattan even if he's a lout. If Roman Polanski makes a good movie, it is good because it is in some important way human, or truthful, or beautiful, or excellent, even if its director is none of those things. The capacity to create something unexpectedly great is one of the formative reasons for reading and watching and listening. And, moreover, the capacity to recognize in the thing one has done wrong its meaning is the redemptive possibility of art, and not to be taken lightly; Fitzgerald's late-in-life stories are his failures realized, someone who understands the depths of what he has done wrong. The emotional core of Annie Hall is those final scenes in which the character understands exactly how and why he was wrong, and creates something to fix it, which leads him to fix himself.

All that being said, I am fine with moral reasons working on the margin of aesthetic choices: vita brevis, longa ars after all. I've seen a couple of the 'good' Polanski movies and did not much care for them, so my uninterest and the additional moral reasons provide an incentive not to attempt a new film that garners good reviews. This is not incidental, since I consider periodically revisiting things I have disliked in the past to be one of my responsibilities as a consumer of culture. The moral judgments themselves I am also comfortable with: if Woody Allen did what is alleged, he deserves a mark against him. 

(A theological aside: I am uncomfortable with this even as I acknowledge my attitude about it. I think I am bound to hope for his redemption and to believe in its possibility, so even while maintaining my moral judgment I think I must also accept that one day I might need to transcend it, and let it go. And accept the possibility that this might come about without my ever being aware of it.)

There are also relevant economic angles and authorship questions along the lines of "A Woody Allen film or one he co-wrote and directed and which a bunch of other people made critical aesthetic contributions to?" and "Scott Fitzgerald or Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins?", but this post is too long as it is. 

This Is Not a Metaphor for Anything

25 years ago, let's say, you couldn't get good coffee in America: only Folger's, Maxwell House, or instant. Hipster college towns and European imports notwithstanding (International Coffees, anyone?), the average cup was bad; so bad, in fact, that people didn't really know what they were drinking was substandard.

Then came Starbucks, and the return of coffee culture (Cheers being replaced by Cafe Nervosa in Frasier and Central Perk in Friends would be representative), and it was possible to have good-to-great coffee almost anywhere.

In the early 00s, Starbucks switches over from barista-led espresso machines to automatic ones. The caramel machiatto is a runaway success.

Now: a divide between coffee snobs and everyone else. The rise in popularity of single-cup coffee makers, whose most notable feature is the willingness to pump increasing amounts of water through the same amount of grounds, and whose flavor profiles range from "bold" to "extra bold" because otherwise you can't taste the coffee,* concurrent with the rise in 'coffee' drinks as milk-and-sugar delivery vehicles. You can get a good cup of coffee, but you probably have to make it yourself, or seek out a niche coffee location.

Are we better off now than we were? By how much, exactly?


*The only exception I've found are the Starbucks k-cups, which taste exactly like Starbucks coffee. Whether this is a good thing is left as an exercise for the reader.

It seems fitting and appropriate that Norm Geras' last blog post was one in which he recommended books he'd loved. He was a reliably great presence on the internet, and an excellent recommender of worthwhile things (Art Blakey's "Moanin'" played at my wedding reception, an album I bought because Norm once recommended it).

What else to say, really, except that it was "The Contract of Mutual Indifference" that set the course for everything that interested me in grad school and since, and it remains engaging and provocative?

I am less inclined than most to be concerned about kids only watching what's on nexflix these days, despite a great amount of hand-wringing on the subject. The reason is simple: I used to be one of those people. Approximately ten years after I recognized this as a potential issue, I've seen 76 of AFI's top 100, and 53 of Sight & Sound's top 110. There are a few issues being conflated:

1. Access: part of the reason my film education was so poor prior to 2003 is that movie distribution was poor. The movies I had seen were for the usual reasons: a smattering of classics available at the local video store, a few VHS tapes my parents had bought or would rent from the library (the latter of which skewed towards Merchant-Ivory and Jane Austen adaptations for obvious reasons), and the requisite freshman year friend who was taking a film class and invited me along to the screenings that taught me the value of foreign films (The 400 Blows, Red Sorghum) and hate Robert Altman. It was hard to get a hold of very many movies at all, much less high-quality copies, so even if I'd had the money and the inclination, my options would have been sorely limited.

There's precious little appreciation that the introduction and acceptance of DVDs in the early 2000s had the same democratizing effect as the introduction of CDs in the late 80s: everyone converted their catalogues to the new format, which meant cheap, high(ish)-quality editions of almost all movies. My interest in music was sustained because I could go into, say, Best Buy in 1996 and get five cds for $25, because they were bands no one had ever heard of, and the store just wanted to get rid of the inventory. I bought Woody Allen movies and foreign films for the same reasons: I had no idea if it was good, but it was $10. This move is also what makes Netflix possible as a business.

It's worth circling back to this: if someone isn't interested in movies now, it's a question of will. But will can be changed, if it's not a question of berating people for their poor choices, worrying about the future, etc.

2. Canon: If there's a logic behind the AFI list, I've never been able to find it. "These are good movies that were made in America" is not going to ease anyone's transition into watching film. Nor Sight & Sound's "these are foreign films that usually have good cinematography." For their to be a "new Netflix canon" there must be an "old non-Netflix canon" it's replacing, except there isn't one. Film has lists, but no narrative: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Gone With the Wind, Annie Hall and, oh, Up are all quite good films, but good in different ways and different genres for quite disparate reasons. A generation of filmmakers might be working in sync with what came before (the Cahiers du Cinema people drawing from noir and westerns), or in opposition to it (the 70s Auteurs versus the studio system); careers are significantly longer and credit is given for doing the unexpected (Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success; Billy Wilder writing Stalag 17), so the fact that Fritz Lang directed it or Marlon Brando starred in it doesn't tell you much. College students looking for an exhaustive-if-limited selection of films they need to watch (something on the stature of Pitchfork's best of lists) have no real options.

3. Points of ingress: The most fortunate coincidence in my years of movie-watching was having Woody Allen be the first figure I was interested in: he constantly makes reference to other films and is not particularly shy about doing so. From him, I found Bergman and Fellini, and thus New Wave and Neorealism, the 70s movies to which his best works were a contrast, and on from there. It takes a lot of time: I watched many westerns until I figured out I didn't particularly like them, and spent a lot of time figuring out I will never care for Kurosawa (Dursu Uzala, maybe). Along the way, there were surprises: Powell/Pressburger, say, or Buñuel, who I didn't expect to like, but did.

4. Let me again state a general opinion that one of the problems with American culture is the idea that all one's tastes have to be set at age 18, if not sooner. I prefer different things at 31 than I did at 21, and would suggest that the process of aging itself has allowed me to like things I would have previously dismissed. That students arrive at college--or leave!--not having sampled widely from world cinema is not a problem. There's a whole life to make that happen.