A friend of mine from high school--more correctly, a Harvard-attending semi-notable journalist friend of mine--attempted to engage productively with Jon Chait's essay on microaggression (or something: I learned long ago how to sniff out and avoid that which reeks of this is not going to lead to a productive discussion) by pointing to various true and accurate facts about what it's like to be a white male heterosexual in the United States of America if one is aware that it is such a thing to be one of those, and not neutral experience. It did not go well. 

As one of those white men, here's (some of) what I've learned about interacting across boundaries. It is important, first, to recognize that not all spaces are yours. You may be interested in them, you may want to learn from them, you might see them making errors that could be corrected, but you will always and fundamentally be an outsider. That is fine. Remember that people are not always looking for allies who have disagreements with them, even if those disagreements are reasonable and limited and could be worked out in dialogue (see Tim Burke on this topic). That is also fine. There are some situations in which dialogue, even in the best of situations, will prove to be unproductive. That's fine, too. You're dealing with neither more nor less than the standard burdens of having a conversation in a world where people disagree with each other. You don't know everything, but neither does anyone else. You're not obligated to give up an argument because someone else is making a different one (even if that argument is an emotional appeal, even appeals based on life experience), but you should be careful to always be testing what you believe and trying to find potential things you may have overlooked. That is neither more nor less than the standard ethical duty of being a human. 

(There are a lot of books out there that talk about experiences far removed from your own. It's probably a good idea to read widely from them. This is true for everybody.)

If you find yourself in a position where you are not welcome in a particular space, or find yourself having an unproductive conversation, it's worthwhile to remember how much of the very important work happens when no one is arguing: in the things we teach our children, in how we treat friends and strangers, in the attitudes we demonstrate and in what we expect from others. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt ends by quoting Augustine--initium ut esset homo creatus est, "that a beginning be made, man was created"--and relying on the hope presented by every new-born person as the real vehicle for change. That seems as good a basis as any around which to work.

(There are some supplementary issues for those of us who teach, or have taught, in the obligation to create a classroom that is theoretically and in practice open to the spectrum of opinion, which requires a careful selection of texts and an authoritative hand in guiding discussion to create a space where people are allowed to disagree--to be wrong--without fear of their grade or the immediate reaction their comments may inspire. This is true for conservatives and liberals, the religious and the secular, and every socioeconomic and ethnic group. We were all once 18-22 and probably held at least some views we wouldn't agree with today; certainly we didn't know as much then as now. If people are being driven out of a classroom, as in some of the stories that have floated around, then it's an absolute failure on the part of the instructor.)

An Ur-Theory of the Internet

The internet is not cool. There is nothing cool about it.

Facebook was cool, until it was opened to everyone, thus defeating its purpose as a graphical representation of the people college students and graduates know (ie a facebook); less cool until it allowed pictures to be tagged and thus stopped people from putting photos on Facebook;* and not at all cool as the repository for people's bumper sticker-length political musings, meme images that you would have been embarrassed to receive as attachments in an email from your dad 15 years ago, and attempts to position yourself as someone who reads the news.

Twitter was never cool, as evidenced by the ease with which "Tomorrow is [whatever day tomorrow is]" trends. It has also misguidedly convinced people that their thoughts are best expressed in 140-character bursts. Being inarticulate is not cool, especially if you are articulate.**

The rest of the internet is, more or less, television in the 1980s: wildly popular, with content ranging from boring to insulting, depending on one's preferences. 'This was a mildly amusing use of five minutes' is an argument advanced in favor of well-regarded content. What matters is advertising, and thus web publishing is based around those things that drive pageviews, and increase both the length of time spent interacting and the intensity of that interaction. Thus lists, listicles, nostalgia bait, advice columns--most of which now intentionally lead off with the most sensational questions, oral histories and interviews that are barely-edited interview transcripts, and posts that flatter or outrage the biases of that site's audience.

Mgoblog is my favorite site on the internet because it runs like a bespoke outfit: they clearly have goals about when to post new content, and attempt a set schedule week-to-week, and generally fail to do either. Brian writes his game column and publishes it when it's done. Ideally, that's at noon on Mondays, but if it's done at 11:00, it goes up at 11:00. If it's not done until 2:00, it goes up at 2:00. There's very little that feels that unforced anymore, though it certainly helps if you're already the largest single-team college sports blog.

Like tv in the 1980s, there are exceptions, both of the "things that are good considering what else is out there" and "things that are objectively good" variety, but they are rare.


*I cannot be the only one whose friends have a lot of pictures from 2006-2008 or so, and very few after. Or, at least, very few until they start having babies.

**I know many interesting people on twitter, and almost exclusively through twitter, and this is intended as no slight on them. I am just convinced that however interesting they are on twitter, they're more interesting in longer form.

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. 

Two Related Points

1. Interesting that most of the items on this list of suggested tv adaptions are genre pieces.

2. It's still interesting that the word of choice for The Wire is 'Dickensian.' Assuming it doesn't mean "has a lot of characters," it's odd that the highest-praised tv show of all time equates to the work of a middle-of-the-road 19th century author who wrote like he was getting paid by the word (as he often was). There are, I think it's safe to say, no tv series that meaningfully ape Dostoevsky, or Zola, or Kafka, nor could there be--were they to engage in it, they'd fail as tv.* (There are, of course, many tv series that have gleefully inherited the spirit of Tristam Shandy and the like, but comedy is different.)

I think we're in a golden age of tv because people have accepted the limitations of the medium and lowered expectations accordingly.

The weird thing is there's lots of good stuff on tv, but then, there usually is. It's not necessarily the best stuff ever--how would we even know?--if someone were to suggest that the best albums of all time were recorded in the last 15 years we'd recognize the problem with that--the problem is not the material, but the hyperbolic overrating of that material.


*Lost might be Kafkaesque--a deranged version of The Castle in which they believe themselves to be making a character-driven drama but are actually making a science fiction show--but it was certainly unintentionally so. Which probably makes it more Kafkaesque.

There's darkness, and there's complexity, and far too much in the aesthetic world confuses the two. I am not much interested in a grim slog through the faux-real, when the darkness is not reality but a series of choices by a writer. One might have thought Sullivan's Travels addressed this once and for all, or Stardust Memories--people who treat the comic as lower and lesser than the dramatic do not understand human beings, and are blind to their own self-indulgence. All of this to say that Mad Men lost me definitively last night.

I don't like The Lost Weekend despite liking Billy Wilder's work, nor do I like Days of Wine and Roses. Don't like, as distinct from thinking them to be bad--they may well be good. But their appeal is vice exactingly rendered, which means prurience and voyeurism are unavoidable, and constitute the appeal. They're unpleasant stories. The resolution of The Lost Weekend is the creation of a book about the struggle with alcohol, so it isn't even as though that film proposes any larger meaning to its action: it eats itself.

Mad Men has become a very, very long version of The Lost Weekend, and it's tiring. In much the same way that Betty's arc has been one 80-hour character assassination, Don's is about how low a person can be brought. But rather than bring him low once, it does so again and again--the same problems, the same vices, except portrayed even more slowly. Whether the last season has his resurrection or his damnation is irrelevant. It appears that the show doesn't do positive or affirming moments because it can't do them, that underneath the costumes and the character work there's the churning heart of a soap opera, where nothing gold can stay because there needs to be conflict and turmoil, and the people associated with this particular show cannot generate conflict except by threatening to rip characters apart.

The thesis of Sullivan's Travels, insomuch as there is one, is that people who make cinema want to make serious movies because they think the rubes out there need to be elevated, but they're wrong: the people understand themselves pretty well, and want comedy because it elevates them. And that's approximately correct: Parks and Recreation is recognizably human, Mad Men is not. Realizing this doesn't require a diet solely composed of the light and unserious, but it does require recognizing that rolling around in the pigsty is not a shower.

I am by no means a "days of yore" person, but these criticisms seem correct: if you're primarily interested in high-level reading and writing, the art of conversation, and taking leisure seriously, the golden age was from about 1500 to about 1800, give or take a few decades. Of course, these were highly restricted and there might be other reasons to prefer the present day, but the person complaining in 1880 was no less correct than the person complaining in 1915. Or 1950. Or now.

The comments here go pretty much the way you might expect them to. Perhaps it's that I'm teaching Plato and so the insufficiency of all knowledge is prominent in my mind, but I will take occasion to note how utterly strange it is to me that on both religion and politics, people seem to have no problem believing that they had it all figured out at 15, and that at such a precocious age they encountered all possible arguments so as to render follow-up on either topic a waste of time. Especially so, since it's a belief that many of these people would find damning in other fields: if one's favorite book at 30 is the same as one's favorite book at 15, then one clearly hasn't read enough, or it will be taken as a sign of immaturity of judgment. The ability to charitably and regularly take on strong articulations of a view with which you differ is a basic condition for being a serious interlocutor in any conversations at all. (I mean, goodness: this is the base-line condition for academic research.)

The first assignment that I'm giving my students this term is a straightforward one, but I also hope that it's a profoundly difficult one: give two interpretations for one ten-line-ish passage of the Republic. The idea is that it's a sign of sophistication and adult maturity to be able to put on other minds, to see from perspectives other than one's own. The point is not so much to drive them to see endless interpretive possibilities in a text (which is not a position I agree with or would argue for) so much as to get them to recognize that other possibilities exist at all.

I wholeheartedly agree with this Slate piece arguing that book criticism, especially online reviews of books, have become too positive. But this is likely nothing more than a reflection of contemporary reading experiences: who wants to waste their time on something they might not like, or might require a lot of effort? Again, (and I mention this because of my experience with it) the tendency of contemporary conservatives to prefer infinitely lesser but 'safe' works from the 20th century over classics is a prime example--why bother with, say, Goethe*, when Evelyn Waugh will confirm the essential correctness of one's view of the world? The result is confirmation bias masking as objective judgment--"I love this book I selected because I was pretty sure I was going to love it!"--and yet another source of impoverished critical discourse.


(This is related to, but separable from, the tendency to misread books so that they flatter one's own prejudices, of which there are many examples.)


*Not that you have to like Goethe; I'm rather indifferent. But it might still be important to read him.

On the one hand, I like the new Frank Ocean album. It's the rare R&B album that has zero tracks I want to skip. On the other, it's most notable feature is that it breaks absolutely no new ground: the best songs (and parts of songs) are derivative of Prince, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Kanye. The lyrical subject matter is repetitive, and lacks any fresh perspective--the bad relationship songs, for example, lack the kind of lacerating honesty of Kanye's (in Ocean's unrequited love songs, the problem is always with the other person). But it's a good album in spite of this, if not groundbreaking. There's about as much shame in liking it as liking any other intentionally retro nostalgia act. It's the Silversun Pickups with much better execution.

What drives me up a wall, here as everywhere else, is the critical praise, which occasionally seems disconnected from reality. I have no problem with Ocean's decision to come out, but it does seem to have warped the judgment of critics. Thus the AV Club review, which ends with "It’s a testament to how assured Ocean’s debut album is that it makes even the groundbreaking coming-out story surrounding it feel like a mere footnote," but only after making that coming-out story the opening peg of the review, and the thing discussed at greatest length in it. Or the New Yorker, which compared Ocean's songwriting technique to the writing of... Lena Dunham. On which I would probably agree, though not in the way intended by Sasha Frere-Jones.

A long block-quote and an attempt to revisit some of these arguments about contemporary aesthetics I seem to be returning to...


Emphatic co-sign:

I find Christopher Nolan films to be like big-budget art films that a very clever teenager has been allowed to make who has read a lot of existentialism.

They lack for me an emotional resonance, and not in a Kubrickian way that is deliberate; they just feel hollow. Fleshed-out character relationships are a very distant second or third to how cool the film looks or how twist-laden the plot is. Like, The Prestige: "Ah ha! The trick was that you didn't notice this film made almost no sense because WOW this twist and look at that dog with a fluffy tail!" There are vast tracts of The Dark Knight that make no sense; there feels like a whole reel is missing from the section where Commissioner Gordon disappears from the narrative, for instance.

My issue with all these big Hollywood action/sci-fi films that are supposedly "brainy" is that they are not. The Dark Knight, Inception, Prometheus, none of these make any narrative sense, but apparently they bamboozle us with their sheer cleverness and the crazy metaness of their concepts and set pieces that we aren't meant to notice? We aren't meant to catch that they say nothing thematically, but rather dangle a bunch of sorta-cool but mainly ponderous ideas in front of the audience and then do nothing whatsoever to explore them meaningfully?

Aside from the unjustified swipe at existentialism (Kierkegaard could eat Christopher Nolan's lunch several times over), I agree. The defense that's offered in the dialogue as well as in the comments is that there is a significant depth to the themes which Nolan explores in his movies. Except no one specifies what these depths are supposed to be; or we are told that, e.g., Memento is quite profound about identity. The substance of this profundity is, at all events, left unstated. For the doubters, myself included, this is assumed to be because there is no depth to them. However, I have begun to think the actual reason for both the cursory treatment of themes in contemporary aesthetics and the inability to recognize that treatment are both symptoms of a collapsed critical vocabulary: 'art films' now are those that simply recognize the importance of deeper content, regardless of whether they can deliver that content (this is how the 'arty' comic-book movie can come into existence); the remainder hardly even try.

In writing this I found myself thinking of Wild Strawberries, which gives over much of its middle third to a discussion between two young men about the existence of God. Leaving aside that it would be strange to see a movie today in which two people discussed ideas, any ideas, they held with conviction, the conversation manages to thematically mirror the central journey of the movie, and indicate the way in which the old man has transcended the petty arguments of youth but also suggest that their argument is conducted in no small part through their desires, and that the absence of desires which makes his old age comparatively peaceful does not give him any answers to the questions the young men are asking; and those questions must be answered. And are, by the end of the film.

This brings about another thought: our profound meditations, wherever they come from, are often praised, but rarely is the question asked: profound compared to what?

The first time I saw Do the Right Thing was when I was in high school; perhaps it was in college, but even if so no later than the summer after my freshmen year, when Cornel West had introduced me, unknowingly and accidentally, to the world of African-American thought: W.E.B. DuBois, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, and many others. I knew about the vast differences between MLK and Malcolm X, and that and the end of their lives each began to converge with the positions the other had held. This is not much of an education, as educations go, but it was enough that I could grasp what the film was trying to do, and what it did, not least its central and remarkably evenhanded central idea about the state of race in America. It is, I think, the only film on race that stands, without qualifications, as an equal to the other great statements on race in America--Invisible Man and all the rest.

It is perhaps then needless to say that I make a point of watching it every year, when possible on the hottest day of the year, all the better to appreciate the setting. The ending, in particular, is a unique example of how to use violence without exploiting violence for its spectacle: no one wants to be Sal, or Mookie, or Radio Raheem, or the police. Everyone brutalizes and is brutalized in turn, and no one attempts to calm the situation except The Mayor.

I had always had what might well be the traditional white person response to the end: Mookie's frustration is comprehensible but his decision to turn his anger at the police on Sal's is unjustifiable. I was surprised on my viewing last year to do some research and discover that Spike Lee thinks Mookie absolutely did the right thing in doing so; I could not conceive of how that might work. The essay written by Roger Ebert for the Criterion edition of the film make it clearer: to think that the destruction of Sal's is a tragedy or unjustifiable is to confuse the value of a place and a possession for that of a human life. It might be a tragedy but it is immeasurably less of one.

The justification for this interpretation became clearer on this viewing from a few lines given to Mister Señor Love Daddy at the end: the mayor of New York is coming to the block and is commissioning an investigation, vowing that the needless destruction of property will not be allowed to continue. Radio Raheem is already forgotten, already disappeared from the view of the wider world. That's the tragedy; that's the essence of violence: it makes the victims angry and resentful, and it makes the perpetrators cruel and brutal, and more than any of these things, it strips away individual identity and reduces people, at best, to instances of groups, and at worst, it reduces them to things. Everyone is caught up in a web of forces they can't always control, and that can disassemble quickly that which it takes a long time to build. The genius of this movie is that it is built around this idea, but it never tells you that idea: it's left as an exercise for the viewer. Most movies are about no idea at all, and those that are appear so anxious you might miss the idea that they will explain it or underline it as many times as they can, but this one really is different.

Two loose ends in search of a theory:

1. What does it mean that when we search for an adjective to describe what is generally considered to be the greatest television program of all time, the term that appears most often is Dickensian? Especially when Dickens is widely regarded in the literary world, even amongst believers in the canon, as something of a second-rate author (or a first-rate author with an inability to maintain a consistent level of quality, a sort of literary Johnny Cash)? Dickens created memorable characters and at least a few notable plots, but wrote like a man being paid by the word, a fact not lost on anyone who reads David Copperfield or Bleak House.

2. Borges notes in one of his essays that the greatness of Don Quixote lies in its ability to survive--and succeed--even when poorly translated. He contrasts this to "the perfect page," a work--of quality--which is dependent on the precise ordering of thoughts and words, from which any deviation notably reduces the quality of the work. I wonder how much of the great today can survive this process of translation--I suspect it would be close to none. (But perhaps this is just to say that most aesthetic work, properly situated, is mediocre--even that which we at the moment perceive to be great)

Adventures in Cultural Consumption:

The Hunger Games: Somewhere, Michel Foucault is saying "I told you so!"

Went to see the movie this weekend, and had what can fairly be described as an "intensely negative" reaction to it. Call me old-fashioned, but watching a bunch of kids get killed is not my idea of a good cinematic experience.

What interested me the most was that it was a pretty clear example of a type that's been of concern to me for awhile, the movie that attempts to decry the violence that drives the narrative and provides the spectacle. I've previously noted this phenomenon in The Dark Knight and No Country for Old Men, both films whose most important characters are also the worst, and whose violence is both the central part of their appeal and the thing which is formally, if ambiguously, condemned at the end. There's an undeniable fascination in watching a crazy person at work, and this is no doubt part of it, but the glory of violence is too central to the plot of both.

The Hunger Games seems problematic in a worse way: I'm not sure how one watches that movie and develops the necessary attachment to Katniss without having the same reaction as the fictional characters in the movie's world. To want Katniss to win is to want the others to die: some of those deaths will be sad and played up for the narrative quality of their sadness, and some of them will be deserved and so, when the bad kid (kid, not 'guy') gets eaten by dogs, that's a deserved comeuppance rather than a tragic end.

Now, I'm clear that the Games themselves are supposed to stand in analogically for something, which, in the descriptions I've read, is usually something like our own interest in the spectacle of reality television, taken to an extreme end. (I'm leaving aside the politics for the moment). So we're supposed to recognize the cruelty and lack of humanity within the Games themselves; the tragedy comes from those who are forced to play it. And so we're supposed to think the Games are bad, and be glad that Katniss emerges relatively uncorrupted from the whole process.

But it also seems like the movie is forced to re-inscribe all the human reactions the Games are there to critique: the whole thing only works by developing rooting interests, etc. Without accepting the narrative, constructed no less than the various storylines of the Games, that Katniss is good and so should survive, the narrative frisson is gone. And if it's gone, there's nothing left of the movie. I don't intend this to be a critique of movie violence per se, though it seems important that in, say, Die Hard all of Bruce Willis' violence is as a reaction to violence first done to others, nor do I mean it to be a critique of violent movies with political messages: Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead are both good examples of violent movies with political themes that avoid this problem: you can appreciate the analogies being drawn and the context of a zombie movie in which to draw those analogies, or you can simply enjoy them as zombie movies. If you strip the level of critique out of The Hunger Games, all that's left is a pretty horrifying plot.

And it's the second level that I'm not sure exists in the movie itself: the argument of the thing would be strengthened if the viewer was supposed to recognize in their own reactions as perverse and the sort of thing that would make the fictional world possible. But I'm not sure that's the intended reaction, and I'm much more sure it's not the reaction of at least the people I saw the movie with. Which, it seems, leaves one in the awkward position of just having rooted for children to die.

But, as the girlfriend pointed out, I haven't read the book, so there's a definite upward limit on my knowledge of the story. Does the book handle the problem of spectacle and the reader's reaction in a way that anticipates or responds to some of this?

White Teeth, Zadie Smith
Your Face Tomorrow Vol. 1: Fever and Spear
Your Face Tomorrow Vol. 2: Dance and Dream, Javier Marías
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter
Varamo, César Aira
Comedy in a Minor Key, Hans Kielsen
The Invention of Morel, Bioy Casares
Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste, Lester Bangs
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon
The Museum of Eterna's Novel, Macedonio Fernandez

"Invention can assume the form of a documentary record of reality, and vice versa, because both have essentially the same appearance... While the conventional work of art thematizes cause and effect and thereby gives the hallucinatory impression of sealing itself off, the avant-garde work remains open to the conditions of its existence." -Varamo

Without a doubt, the thing my freshmen prove most resistant to is the suggestion that they don't know how to read. It's possible to go far in life believing that the skill one picked up at four or five is the same skill they practice now, with slightly longer sentences and a few more words. My freshmen are tasked with providing concise five-minute introductions to discussion twice over the course of the semester, and to see their preparation for it makes evident that I am failing to communicate this point to them: articles with four different colors of highlighter applied throughout the whole text of 30 pages, four or five pages of notes on one piece of writing of similar length. That writing comes in modes and styles, written with different emphases and for different audiences, and that therefore reading each first requires an act of recognition and subsequent alteration of the reading method is only now beginning to dawn on them. Reading (and writing) are skills, and the failure to continue developing them can only mean they will atrophy.

The adult who is seriously committed to a program of reading fiction has three primary options: genre, realism or experimentalism. I've written before about the genre fiction-v-literary fiction divide, and don't propose to say much more about it here. Genre fiction isn't for me, for the most part, though I think it's a perfectly fine place to go looking for material. (Interestingly, I may have made some progress on why I don't like genre fiction: I was discussing Tolkein with some friends this weekend, and suggested to them that I don't much care for Lord of the Rings because Fellowship of the Ring begins with 50 pages of background historical material, at which point four of my companions admitted that they, for the most part, tend to skip expository or descriptive material in favor of dialogue or action. Do other people do this?) The debate I'm interested in is experimental fiction versus realism.

In part, this is because of Jonathan Franzen's ongoing war against anyone who does not write exactly like him.* His definition of realism has seemed blinkered to me for as long as I've had occasion to think about it: realism implies writing about more or less ordinary people to whom more or less ordinary things happen, in clear and muscular sentences that provide little challenge for the reader (documented at some length by Ben Marcus in his Harpers essay "WHY EXPERIMENTAL FICTION THREATENS TO DESTROY PUBLISHING, JONATHAN FRANZEN, AND LIFE AS WE KNOW IT"). Which is fine, except that, so far as I can see, this requires throwing out several of the notable forbears of literary realism. Dostoevsky certainly didn't care about style, or organization, or the occasional intervention of the supernatural; see also Zola in The Dream and The Sin of Father Mouret, whose commitment to providing a realistic picture of his characters led him to assume as true their decidedly non-realistic beliefs about the world.

So, on the one hand, you have works of literature that are committed to explaining something real and difficult, like White Teeth. On the other, you have, say, Marías, who has been the subject of a running joke on Facebook because I'm ~600 pages into Your Face Tomorrow and I could not tell you what genre, if any, the book is intended to be. There are the experiments of Casares and Fernandez, which are not always and on the whole successful (I don't doubt for a moment that Jorge Luis Borges thought The Invention of Morel was a perfect novel; he did not think to say "a perfect novel for me"), but fail or fall apart in interesting and useful ways, and these make the return to conventional literary realism, like in Chabon, a welcome respite from books that make you work. Even if that work is salutary and worthwhile, making possible other books down the road. (And, goodness: the Chabon was a really excellent book, that managed to avoid the 600+ page novel problem of having slow and boring parts)

So, César Aira: these brilliant and hallucinatory short novels (always around 90 pages), which are committed to that most signal of literary achievements won by Spanish-language writers: works so well-constructed that it seems impossible to find not just the unrealistic element, but the fictional element: the whole might be made up, but the fissures are otherwise not evident, and at all events mixed in with so many verifiable historical facts as to be maddening. If I've become more partial to experimental and quasi-experimental fiction in the last few years--and I have--it's because those works seems to repay close and sustained attention in a way yet another book about a married couple where one of them has an affair simply cannot.


*In part, it's because a commitment to literary realism seems to require a move from major works of literature to minor works, and in particular those British-y mid-20th century novels in which nothing interesting ever happens. All of which is fine--I like Elizabeth Taylor quite well--except readers in this mode tend to forget that the works they're reading are minor and not that much of a challenge. The existence of greater, harder genre or experimental works escapes them entirely.

A good appreciation of The Descendants, which, while definitely not as profound as Tree of Life, was still a very well-constructed film. I've been watching more movies lately, for a variety of reasons, and I think there's not nearly enough regard for the "good enough" film. On the one hand, there are avant-garde artistic films which can be enjoyable and of which there should be many, and on the other, there are tired genre exercises and multiplex crowd-pleasers. But I think it's enough that a film should do something interesting, even if in concept or execution it falls short of greatness: The Descendants, Moneyball, The Ides of March, even something like The King's Speech.

Pure bunk about the value of reading:

Hence reading is self-mastery, because the self (and its affirmations) are held in check while the author (and his structures of thought) are fully attended to. ...

If reading is the key to self-mastery, fiction is the master key. Those like Hanson and Hitchens, who invite disagreement, are good too. But fiction demands that you either identify with the characters’ decisions or distance yourself from them, and this has a powerful effect. In doing so you shape your own moral experience. Although it may seem to be far removed from the center of the culture right now, fiction remains the best form of reading — the single best way to achieve all of reading’s goods.

In this there are at least three major problems. First, it presumes that 'reading fiction' is identical to 'close reading of a text.' Not all texts benefit from or are capable of receiving this type of close reading, nor do readers always approach texts in this way (nor is it always smart to do so--Dickens may have been paid by the word, but that doesn't mean you should read them all). The hidden intervening term in this discussion, as in so many others about reading, is that of course the texts involved a Classics or Great Books and so worthy of close attention.

The second is with this idea that the purpose of reading fiction is to provide ethical education, that the point of a novel is the decisions made by the characters which one must react to. And the great books do pose important, relevant ethical questions to us all, for example: What do I do if the nominal leader of my war party attempts to take the female prisoner I would like to rape so he can rape her instead? How do I best react when the woman I was in love with sends a famous poet to guide me through hell? What are the proper ways to act if I would like to be a knight even though there's no knighting activity for me to take part in? etc. This is not to deny that the ethical aspect of any of these works or others might not be worthwhile, but it's a strangely utilitarian view of the importance of literature. In this sense, it's not unlike the view that the value of the food one eats is not in how it tastes, but in its ability to provide the correct balance of nutrients.

Third, it is improperly dismissive of the value of postmodern ways of reading. As I have found, and as Zadie Smith suggests in her essay "Rereading Barthes and Nabokov" (where, n.b., she comes out on Nabokov's side in the end), the ideal combination for a reader is somewhere in the middle--a text that has stability and permanence in its form, but one which does not lean too heavily on the all-seeing, all-knowing Author. If there's one thing I have always found implausible about Strauss' "Persecution and the Art of Writing," it's the idea that the author can control his meaning so well that all the 'mistakes' are intentional and there are no other mistakes. Postmodern ways of reading are a useful reminder that language is a tool, and like any other tool it can be used better or worse.

Disagree with the point quoted here:

Aren’t Oscarbatory films like The Artist, Hugo, and Midnight in Paris the high brow equivalent of the Transformers, easing the viewer into the same warm nostalgia bath, just with the particulars adjusted to reflect a different audience’s adolescent fixations? Might they even be even more meretricious because they rely on the borrowed auras from the canonical works/figures they reference (Méliès rather than Mégatron) to activate feelings of barely-earned recognition, which somehow invokes in the audience the false spirit of learning, or at very least, the smug satisfaction of the pub trivia warrior?

I've only seen Midnight in Paris, so I can't say about the others. But this makes some uninformed projections about the audience for these movies. On Woody Allen's movie, I've read a significant chunk of Fitzgerald (one might even say 'most' of his writing) and also of Hemingway, I've seen three or four Buñuel films, and I am passingly familiar with the work of all the painters who appear. Gertrude Stein is the only one whose work I don't know. Consequently I appreciated the movie as a middle-brow reworking on A Moveable Feast with a little additional commentary about the dangers of nostalgia. Not Woody Allen's best movie--probably not in the top ten--but still good. At all events, definitely not activating "feelings of barely-earned recognition," nor invoking in me a "false spirit of learning" (hint: they're fictional characters, not the actual real people whose names they have), nor still passing off "the smug satisfaction of the pub trivia warrior."


Instead, there really is a difference between lowbrow and middlebrow fare. The typical Oscar-nominated movie is not going to be great, in part because of the realities of what kind of movies can attract a lot of votes, and in part because very few films ever are going to be great. But they do aim and attempt at something more than simply entertaining, which is noble even when it fails (n.b.: 'noble even when it fails' does not equate to 'good'). Midnight in Paris and Transformers do not bear the relation to each other of Frasier and Two and a Half Men, in which the latter has the trappings of sophistication but the same general plot and joke structure. One of them actually is aiming at something more.

Though I'm sympathetic to the point raised here, it does seem to fly past the obvious counter-argument:

If I were able to actually have a conversation with Santorum in which the historical reality of sanctioned polygamy in most human societies was made impossible for him to ignore or soundbite into oblivion, I’m willing to bet that the likely way out of the trap would be to argue that contemporary life has overcome that old evil, that we’ve progressed. Santorum and other American Christian conservatives would likely put the origin of that progress somewhere other than secular liberals would. They’d probably ascribe it to the rise of Christianity, all the way back to the early Church, whereas a more secular (or at least not religiously conservative) view would probably be than contemporary companionate, monogamous marriage (or any companionate, monogamous relationship, really) is a direct consequence of the working out of liberal individualism and rights-based personhood after 1750.

But it really doesn’t matter which claim you turn to. If you think that the relative eclipse of polygamy (still practiced and legally as well as morally sanctioned in many parts of the world) is a good thing, as I presume Santorum does given his suggestion that legally sanctioning gay marriage would open the door to polygamy, you believe in progress, that some aspects of the human condition have improved over time through the deliberate efforts of human beings to reform or change their social structures. And the moment you believe in that, saying, “It’s natural for people to live a certain way, all societies have done it that way” is off the table as a justification of contemporary policy whether or not your claim about the naturalness of living that way is true or not.

Breaking out of this trap is no more complicated than acknowledging the reality of social construction and continuing to assert a nature that lies underneath this. Following on Aquinas and all those people, human beings have a nature which, but for sin and free will, would express itself in the manner prescribed in, e.g., those infallible truths about faith and morals as expressed in the teaching of the Magisterium, which is and only can be consistent throughout time. But we have both the reality of sin and also of free will, therefore we have the construction of behaviors contrary or orthogonal to human nature. These do not accrue or decay over time in any necessary pattern--they simply change. That progress may have been made is no guarantee that it will always do so, or even probably do so. That things may get worse is no guarantee they always will. The trap into which Burke wants Santorum to fall is an easy one to avoid for someone with Santorum's beliefs.

The actual problem for which there is no good response is similar to the point Burke raises: what changes over time is not socially-constructed human behavior, but the definition of what constitutes natural. My favored example of this comes from John Finnis' Natural Law and Natural Rights. In the original edition of the book, Finnis makes a great show of his list of 'basic goods.' Other lists of human goods, he says, are general, or specific but not exhaustive. He will differentiate himself by providing the full list--and so he does. However, in the 10-15 years after the book comes out, he finds himself beginning to get into arguments about gay marriage, and happens to discover that he has omitted a basic good from his list: marriage, defined as the union for procreation of one man and one woman. I know (and have great respect for) many adherents of Finnis' New Natural Law view, but I know of no one who will defend that particular move. (Some will argue it should have been on the list in the first place, but everyone recognizes it as a bad scholarly response to political pressure) If there's an argument to be had along the lines Burke wants, with the recognition of frission required for a certain kind of social conservative view, it will have to be of that form.

Long-time blog-friend Joe Carter has a truly excellent evisceration of the Front Porch Republic phenomenon. He does a good job of isolating the problems of localism as it pertains to food:

For example, one professor (they were almost all professors) presented his localist bona fides by explaining how he bought his vegetables from a local food co-op. He was very proud of the fact that he paid a higher price to support a local farmer—despite the fact that the same vegetables from the same local farmer could be bought at Whole Foods. For most agrarians throughout history, food was considered fuel for survival and cheap food has made it possible for populations to grow and thrive. For the tenured agrarians, though, food is a totem, a symbol of how they are not only making the “right” consumption choices but how they are supporting the environment and the community in the process (a debatable assumption). The professor’s underlying message—though admittedly presented rather winsomely—was that if you bought bananas at Wegmans rather than whatever was in season from your local farmer, you were part of the problem.

During the question and answer session that followed, an earnest student stood up and asked how people like him—poor kids on the college’s meal plan—were expected to partake in the “luxury of buying local.” The professor’s rather dismissive and surprisingly smug answer was that the student should buy what he could afford and make his meals in his dorm room. And if the student couldn’t afford the higher prices charged by local farmers, then the right thing to do, said the professor, was to eat less food. Hunger was the price one pays for philosophic consistency. Can’t afford organic arugula? Let them eat leeks.

Here's where I disagree: "They respect freedom—they just want you to use it to make the right choices." If this were the case, I'd have no real problem with the FPR argument. I think the actual argument is different--something like "freedom only obtains when the right choices are made." The person who buys their bananas at Wegmans is not free, or is laboring under a delusion about their freedom, or (most confusing of all) somehow wasting their freedom by making the wrong choice. If freedom is only making the right choices about how to live, and the program of how to live is intricate (to put it nicely), freedom begins to look like its opposite.

This is where the libertarians have a serious advantage--the willingness to admit plural conceptions of the good. Modern city life and "authentic" rural life are neither better nor worse than each other, they're just different. One can live with integrity in either environment; one can live without in both. The behaviors, beliefs, and dispositions that actually matter can be fostered or prevented in either: country folk turned bad are no more incredible a possibility than good city folk. Making the worth of one's moral character hang on where one's food is bought, or where one lives, is just madness.*

Also, unrelatedly, except it's in the post: monarchism is to real conservatism what defenses of the antebellum south are to libertarianism: immature, politically and historically naive, and the sort of thing that (rightly) keeps each to the margins of American political life.


* Not least because it automatically disqualifies some from virtue because they were born in the wrong place. Rod Dreher will always have the proper bona fides no matter how much of his adult life he lived in major U.S. cities; someone born in Manhattan can stay there, and be authentic but contrary to the full spirit of liberty, or can move out to someplace rural, and be an interloper who has forsaken their roots.

This week in incredibly obvious cultural commentary: rappers kind of have a problem with misogyny and homophobia. Film at 11:00.

Gil Scott-Heron in 1993:

But I think the young folks need to know, that things don't go both ways
You can't talk respect on every other song or just every other day
What I'm speakin' on now is the raps about the women folks
On one song she's your African Queen on the next one she's a joke
And you ain't said no words that I haven't heard, but that ain't no compliment
It only insults eight people out of ten and questions your intelligence
Four letter words or four syllable words won't make you important
It'll only magnify how shallow you are and let everybody know it

To be clear, I think it's a valid critique of a lot of rap music and hip-hop: even the nice-guy D.A.I.S.Y.-age stuff primarily considers women's value to be as something to have sex with. But I'm also not entirely certain that it has any bearing on the quality of the work being produced. It's that perennial tension that I have been trying to isolate my particular view on: I'm not sure someone's politics, sexual or otherwise, are sufficient to wipe out an impartial consideration of the quality of their work, but I'm also confident that it has to have some bearing on our judgment. If Childish Gambino really is no good, then it seems like the easiest thing to do is just ignore him, rather than providing the additional attention of another blog post.

Play 'em out, Gil: