Bianca Steele

Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant; Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants

Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot is not the topic of this blog post.  My having finished the reading for the project I mentioned a little while back is.  I did start The Marriage Plot during a break in my reading when I couldn’t get the book I needed next from the library, and I wanted something new to read during an afternoon sick in bed.  I’m about halfway through it, but I put it down to finish the “project.”

I had picked up the first novel for the “project” in the library on a whim.  I thought it would be interesting to write about, but first I wanted to see what else the author wrote.  It turned out that while the first book was interesting (and brief), and the second was long and in a genre that was really not my kind of thing but a good read, the third was simply long.  The more I read it (and it took me a long time, since I could only read at most a chapter or two a day, which can’t have helped), the more I felt that (to paraphrase Wayne Booth) the implied author of this novel was someone I really did not want to spend time with. 

So when I finished, finally, the thought that passed through my head was, “I’m glad that’s over.”  That reminded me of the lines from T.S. Eliot (in the third section of “The Waste Land,” which he gave the title, “The Fire Sermon"):

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
"Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over."

The title of the post is from the same poem, and does almost seem appropriate (surely goatees are over by now).  And while Jeffrey Eugenides and his narrators are probably as far from being the young man carbuncular as can be imagined, I don’t think the idea of the author of a book as a person who is in the room with a reader, for as long as the book’s being read, is a bad one.  The idea of an author being a seducer, much less a rapist, maybe not, though.

Again looking for something light to read, I picked up a fairly recent collection of stories by Ursula Le Guin, Changing Planes, in the children’s section.  I like this passage, from the introductory story:

On the airplane, everyone is locked into a seat with a belt and can move only during very short periods when they are allowed to stand in line waiting to empty their bladders until, just before they reach the toilet cubicle, a nagging loudspeaker harries them back to belted immobility.  In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape routes from hell.  These rushing people are watched by people who sit in plastic seats bolted to the floor and who might just as well be bolted to the seats.

The passage is a good example of how Le Guin combines fiction that’s very interested in ideas with very precise, nearly pictorial descriptions.  She can sometimes be a little too abstract for my taste when she is narrating ordinary stories, but so far the pieces in this book are brief explorations of related ideas, for which her ability to describe people and places with pinpoint accuracy is very well suited.

Re-reading Madeleine L'Engle

Mari Ness at the Tor Books blog is reviewing Madeleine L'Engle's novels, in chronological order, beginning with her first young-adult book, published in 1949, And Both Were Young.  (UPDATE: Actually, she's not reading all of them, they won't be in strict chronological order, and And Both Were Young isn't L'Engle's first young-adult book.)  L’Engle is best known for her young-adult science fiction (somewhat in the C. S. Lewis vein), especially the Newberry Award winning A Wrinkle in Time.  But in addition to her more or less anglophilic young-adult novels, she wrote a handful of more or less anglophilic “women’s novels,” as well as a series of memoirs.  None of the adult novels have any science fiction elements, but the more interesting among them do verge on fantasy in the sense of depicting a real world on which things like ghosts and the occult have real effects.

I’ve enjoyed many of Ness’s posts discussing young-adult novels of yesteryear.  Her re-reads of Children of Morrow and Treasures of Morrow certainly brought back memories.

UPDATE: Here is the list of books that Ness will re-read.

Anonymous and Oxfordianism

The reviews are pretty well unanimous that Anonymous is a silly film.  If you’ve missed seeing them, the plot involves the theory that William Shakespeare didn’t write plays, but rather acted as a front man for a nobleman, a member of Queen Elizabeth’s court, because the reputation of a nobleman would be harmed if his name had been attached to plays produced for a commercial audience.  There are several different people offered as “candidates” (as those interested in the controversy call them) for the “authorship” of the “works.”  Over the centuries, these have included Francis Bacon (a lawyer and scholar, one of the founders of both modern science and modern philosophy) , Christopher Marlowe (a playwright exactly William Shakespeare’s age, who was killed young under dubious, slightly sketchy circumstances), and Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who is the candidate put forward here.  “Oxfordians” are said to include some prominent Shakespearean actors, including Derek Jacobi, Mark Rylance, and Michael York, as well as several North American literature professors.

There seem to be two or maybe three kinds of issues that concern people who become convinced that “Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare.”  (Here is a link to a discussion thread at an “Oxfordian” site, answering the question, “Why I became an Oxfordian.”)  First, William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon was a middle-class boy who attended state-run schools, and stopped attending them in his early teens—while the plays are considered masterworks of the English language, worthy of study by the most learned of people, and with considered allusions not only to high-level political events and to the best theoretical knowledge of the times, but to ancient Greek and Roman texts, as well.  People have even found in them apparent allusions to esoteric mysteries of the sort that it’s supposed only a scholar like Bacon could be familiar with.  Second, it can appear that the connection between the standard biographies and the available source materials sometimes fail to sustain skeptical scrutiny.  Third, some readers and playgoers report that the plays opened up a deeper meaning to them, culturally and emotionally, once they began thinking of them in terms of the works of a specific human being who is emphatically not William Shakespeare.

I have some sympathy with the second of these.  It actually is not the case that there are no source materials documenting William Shakespeare’s life.  The Riverside edition of Shakespeare, for example, lists all of these and excerpts some, and so does this site (which is maintained by people who find the very idea of “alternate authorship candidates” to be pernicious and anti-intellectual).  These few facts, however, are not enough to build a 400-page biography on.  Biographies of Shakespeare, like biographies of most historical figures of the early modern period (even kings and queens), include a large portion of conjecture and literary reconstruction.  Moreover, throughout the centuries, English and American writers have interwoven their fancies with facts, often producing deeply influential portraits that by now have become part of the culture, as much as the exact words of Hamlet’s famous soliloquies.  James Shapiro (in 1599), no less than Virginia Woolf (in Orlando and A Room of One’s Own), builds literary theories on the basis of a Shakespeare who was presented at court, and even had a room at the castle in which to write.  The skeptical or scientifically-minded student, who may try to investigate the history as if it were, say, a crime still unrecognized and unknown to the police, can quickly become frustrated.

There are good histories that take account of what we know about the history of the period, often by English scholars of the history of the theatre, with full scholarly apparatus.  These even examine practices of collaboration, and of “borrowing” that today we might consider plagiarism.  They are, unfortunately, quite expensive, and they are not necessarily intended to affect the literary discourse, but they are not hard to find and they are not hard to read.  This is far from the conspiracy theory some “Oxfordians” imagine.

The first and third objections, though, are silly, and I think they are connected.  The reason people put Oxford forward as the probable author of “Shakespeare” isn’t just that their interpretation of these canonical works—unlike the accepted interpretation—is that they put forward a strongly aristocratic, Catholic, anti-Reformation point of view, which requires the playwright to have been a Catholic aristocrat who hobnobbed with the Queen’s Catholic opponents. 

It’s also that they want everything they see in the plays (and also in the poems: the sonnets, Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece) to have been available to the playwright, fully, and consciously.  The idea that someone who studied Latin in grammar school, but didn’t graduate from college, could allude, as an adult, to Terence and Virgil and Seneca, doesn’t seem possible to them.  The idea that ideas were shared among playwrights, that knowledge of politics was shared among men in coffeehouses, similarly, doesn’t seem possible.

They want to be able to attribute real knowledge to the playwright, to use him as an authority, and they can’t do it if he didn’t quite know what he was talking about, himself.  This is not the way skilled readers encounter literature.  Playwrights (like novelists and poets) write from a subjective, partial, emotional perspective—they don’t get Ph.D.-level knowledge of a subject so they can invent stories that embody scientific or theoretical truths.

In the 1920s and 1930s there was a large amount of amateur scholarship being produced about Shakespeare.  Among lawyers, this sometimes took the form of displaying the depth of Shakespeare’s understanding of law, and then arguing that this meant that the author of the play in question must have been trained in the law.  Physicians, similarly, argued that he was a physician.  This scholarship doesn’t hold up well.  Others went to great lengths to find an actual historical figure who seemed to fit the idea the plays gave them of the author, and they came up with Edward de Vere: a youngish, fairly low-level member of the court, raised in a kind of orphanage run by William Cecil, Baron Burleigh, Elizabeth’s chief minister, specifically for parentless young aristocrats, married unhappily to Burleigh’s own daughter, flirting with Catholicism in the face of Elizabeth’s excommunication by Rome, always complaining about how he was treated and how much money he was being allotted by his betters.

To some extent, I think, the Oxfordian narrative embodies a particular kind of confusion about how imaginative literature is written, and it could be interesting for that reason.  There have been literary fronts in history (see The Front), and at times literature has been used politically (as Clare Asquith notes, applying her experiences with the arts of the former Soviet Union to the situation of Elizabethan England).  There is a lot of collaboration—huge teams of writers on Hollywood television shows, unnamed script doctors and collaborators on Hollywood films, novel factories that “touch up” stories drafted by the named author—that often goes unrecognized.  There are interesting new-historical questions about “social energies” that are harnessed by great writers, but not literally created by those writers ab ovo—and there are interesting cultural questions about where those social energies really do originate, and how they do.

I somehow have a feeling that Anonymous, from the creator of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, will itself say nothing particularly interesting about those questions.  But since—as more than one reviewer suggested might be necessary to make sense of the plot—I already have some sense of the differences between the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Leicester, and the Earl of Southampton—I will probably watch it anyway.  If you don’t, you may prefer reading James Shapiro’s recent book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?.  Or watch HBO’s miniseries with Helen Mirren as Elizabeth I, and learn what those differences are.

Does Economic Value Derive from Demand or Difficulty?

This, from about a week ago, probably will only be meaningful for those who already know about the roots of current “libertarian” thinking in the writings of the mid-twentieth century economists, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek (apparently non-libertarian conservatives are also influenced by them), and in fact I don’t know enough about economics myself to understand all of it, but I thought these paragraphs from economics professor Brad de Long were interesting:

The point of view underlying von Mises's—and von Hayek, and Marx, and Ron Paul—complaint against Fiat money in general and monetary management of the business cycle in particular is this: that value comes from human sweat and toil, not from being clever. Thus it is fine for money to have value if it is 100% backed by gold dug from the earth by sweat and machines and muscles (even if there is no state of the possible future world in which people actually want to exchange their pieces of paper for the gold that supposedly backs it). But it is not fine for money to have value simply because it is useful for buying things. There is, von Mises—and Marx, and von Hayek, and Ron Paul—think, something profoundly wrong on an economic and on a moral level with procedures that create value that is not backed by, in Marx's case, human labor, and in von Mises's and von Hayek's case human entrepreneurial ingenuity. And in its scarier moments this train of thought slides over to: "good German engineers (and workers); bad Jewish financiers".

Note that this does not just apply to fiat money produced by a government.

This applies to all financial market asset valuations in excess of capital cost of production (or perhaps the value of the inventions of the gigantic Krell-like brain of John Galt). They are, to von Mises, all cheats.

This (which, as de Long points out, also applies to Marx’s labor theory of value), does say that because “value comes from human sweat and toil,” the price of edible dandelion roots foraged from a meadow should always be less than the price of a big boulder that was dug out of my yard so a sewer line could be put in place.  It doesn’t, however, imply that it is somehow cheating to ask a neighbor or friend for help, even with trivial things like opening a package or fastening a necklace, which would just be silly.  Though I’m not sure why “value comes . . . not from being clever” isn’t supposed to remove the real value from “the inventions . . . of John Galt.”

But I thought of this again when I read, recently, an essay by Martha Nussbaum, a professor of philosophy, law, and religion, on the objectification and harassment of women on the Internet (in The Offensive Internet, a volume she co-edited).  She discusses

the tendency of some societies to define the ideal adult as self-sufficient, independent, lacking in deep needs with respect to others.  In many societies, such pictures are held out to young people—but far more often to males than to females.  The idea of the "real man" as someone who is never weak, never dependent, always in control, is a very common feature of developmental patterns in countless societies, but certainly in ours, which so strongly valorizes the lone cowboy who can provide for himself without the help of any others. 

Even though, even taken to an extreme, the point of view Brad de Long attributes to people like Marx and Ron Paul and Ludwig von Mises applies only to economic theory, not to the details of ordinary people’s mundane lives, it does sound as though this economic theory supports—since Ayn Rand has already been brought into the discussion—what her novels’ villains condemn as “rugged individualism,” and what Nussbaum suggests is, in some places and at some times, considered appropriate for all men but for no women.

Angels with Dirty Faces

In an episode last Tuesday, titled “Occupy Hollywood,” critic Garen Daley was interviewed by Callie Crossley on NPR about “the history of social movements through American cinema.”  I’d like to listen to the episode again, but I wonder about some of his choices.  Talking about Angels with Dirty Faces, which at one time was my absolute favorite old-time movie, Daley claims that what made the story acceptable to an audience, as a film with a good message, was the happy ending.  My recollection is that the final scene of Angels with Dirty Faces has James Cagney being executed, in the electric chair.  That doesn’t seem like a happy ending.  I suppose what he has in mind is the fact that Cagney goes out, not defying death and Society, but crying for his mother and asking whoever’s out there listening for forgiveness—not because he really repented, arguably, but because he wants the Dead End Kids listening, who look up to him, to abandon their own lives of crime.  That moment is, assuredly, a heartwarming one, which affirms the meaning of the film for the audience leaving the theater.  But to call it, not even tragic, but “happy,” to me seems peculiar.

Melancholia, a film by Lars von Trier

On Friday, after a couple of days of unseasonably warm weather, well up into the 60s, it was surprisingly cold.  Instead of getting into the high 50s, the temperature barely reached 50 degrees Fahrenheit all day.  The leaves were falling quickly, and instead of a curtain of yellow at the back of my house, by end end of the day, out my back window there was nothing longer anything to block the much too early dusk.  It reminded me of this famous poem by Emily Dickinson, which usually makes me think of the lingering February snow:

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons—
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes—

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us—
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are—

None may teach it— Any—
'Tis the Seal Despair —
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air—

When it comes, the Landscape listens—
Shadows— hold their breath—
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death—

It also made me think of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which previewed on cable the other night.  It was on a channel I didn't even think we get, and I only noticed it because I wanted something to watch while I folded laundry.  I watched it under un-ideal conditions, starting in the middle, then watching most of the first half from the start, not bothering to watch part of the middle, and not under terrific sound conditions either.  But I didn’t like it.  I did like both Dogville and Manderlay, and I could almost see the point of Europa, though I didn’t like it much.  This quasi-review could be considered to be by way of convincing my husband that he—who didn’t like any of those three films the very slightest bit, and who I’d pretty much predicted will absolutely hate Melancholia if he ever sees it—should ignore reviews like the one by Andrew O’Hehir in Salon, and not bother to rent it when it becomes available on DVD.  The post grew out of a series of IM’s along the lines of “did that Salon guy really like it? nothing happened for two and a half hours. and music was really awful. he said what about the music?”

The film has two parts, named for two sisters: Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst, and Claire, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg.  (Like Dunst, Gainsbourg is excellent, but I’m sorry to say that I haven’t seen her in anything.)  These happen to be the names of characters in two of the most important French language novels of the eighteenth century: Julie, or la Nouvelle Héloïse, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the Marquis de Sade’s sadistic response to Julie, Justine.  Claire is not the heroine of Rousseau’s novel, but the heroine’s sensible, somewhat put-upon cousin.  “Justine is a reversal of the Nouvelle Héloïse,” wrote Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony, an exceedingly important book about the Romantic movement that I read a very long time ago.  However, as far as the film is concerned, I don’t know what this means.

In a kind of prologue, we see dream sequences, some imagined and surrealistic and fitting in with the rest of the story, some very strange but from scenes that will become obvious by the second part of the film, and some depicting the time just before and just after the events that end the film.  (This is not much of a spoiler unless you are totally innocent of the film’s publicity.  In fact, if like me you saw the end before the beginning, the beginning might leave you still wondering whether what you thought had happened really did.)

(THERE ARE SPOILERS AFTER THIS.  Skip to the end to reach the more general discussion again.)

The first half of the movie is Justine’s wedding reception, at her sister’s house.  It’s almost impossible to know what’s going on here.  Justine first appears to be a free spirit, then begins to seem unstable, and finally seems—possibly—depressed—but if the word Melancholia weren’t in the title, you might never know.  Her behavior is outrageously inappropriate.  She's hours late for the reception and then leaves the guests further, for hours at a time.  It’s not only as if she doesn’t know how to behave at a wedding: it’s as if she doesn’t know she is actually at her own wedding.

Though others’ behavior is inappropriate, too.  Her boss keeps tailing her throughout the reception, trying to get her to write her daily copy for him.  (She is a copywriter whose promotion to art director, perhaps surprising enough in itself, her boss announces during the toasts.)  In fact, her behavior is just what you’d expect in a dream.  She wanders around the house and forgets what she was supposed to be doing.

There’s nothing wrong with a film that’s dreamlike, but this plot summary makes it sound much more exciting than it is.  Really, nothing happens.  People eat.  People toast the bride and groom.  The wedding cake is cut.  The bride’s nephew is put to bed.  The guests troupe outside and down the bride’s brother-in-law’s private golf course to drink champagne and set off paper balloons with good wishes written on them, like something out of La Dolce Vita.  Every shot is about five times longer than feels necessary.  We're just sitting in the audience, watching.  And what dialogue there is has no connection that I can see with Justine’s apparent depression; it feels thoroughly arbitrary.

It is possible, obviously, to dredge up a coherent storyline from surrealist storytelling like this—and O’Hehir tries—but that seems to me to flatten out what’s most interesting about it, at the same time that it absolves the artist in advance for not really bothering to depict things for himself, and I guess I just don’t see the point.

I must have found the second half more interesting, since I sat through it well past the time I’d intended to go to bed, and even watched all of the first half, in order to find the connecting link: how people realized there was a second planet hurtling more or less in the direction of our own, and how all those people were gotten out of the brother-in-law’s house, leaving only Justine, Claire, and Claire’s husband and child.  The answer to this last question is that the wedding was some time ago, and the guests went home days before.  Now, it seems, Justine is so depressed that she can barely manage to get into a taxicab that someone else has hired and has waiting by the curb.  Claire doesn’t seem especially fond of her sister, but is determined to help her. 

She is worried about the planet, barely glimpsed the night of the wedding, but now discovered and studied and named “Melancholia.  Her husband, however, who is some unspecified kind of scientist, says there’s nothing to worry about.  He chides her for “going on the Internet again,” and says “the real scientists” know that the idea the earth is in danger is simply alarmism.  Well before the end of the film, Claire is herself depressed, and mostly sits on her terrace, often asleep.  All four of them gather there daily to observe the progress of Melancholia.  Will it strike, or will it pass by and leave all of them unharmed?

I sat through the end to find out, and I was sorry I’d bothered.

(SPOILERS END HERE.)

O’Hehir has an entirely different interpretation of the characters’ motivations than mine, which he's entitled to.  He also loves the artistic aspects of Melancholia, which I agree are fine, but which I don’t think add up to anything.

He starts with the assumption that Von Trier’s film is “the ultimate cinematic expression of the German Romantic aesthetic, which was an enormous source of inspiration for Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich,” and gives the Salon reader a deep interpretation along those lines.

First, O’Hehir explains that the score is using some fairly well-known music from Wagner’s overture to Tristan und Isolde, an opera that romanticizes the wish for death.  Then he explains how the movie refers to other well regarded films, including those in which the major actors of this one—John Hurt, Charlotte Rampling, Stellan Skarsgård—have previously appeared.  So, from the point of view of someone who’s educated about film, Melancholia is very meaningful.  I won’t deny that someone who’s very educated about film will have a more worthwhile opinion, in many ways, than someone who isn’t.  But even setting aside that these particular meaningful facts are fairly specialized even for most very sophisticated filmgoers, I do want to deny that allusions are enough to make deeply meaningful art.

I didn’t recognize the Tristan theme, and without this recognition, the recurring ultra-romantic orchestral music just reads as overwrought and inappropriate.  The cold cinematography and minimalist plot felt spoiled by the inadvertent addition of schmaltz.  Every time I heard the orchestral music, I wished it was something more recent, something twentieth-century, something spare and stark like the Musica ricercata by György Ligeti that Stanley Kubrick used in Eyes Wide Shut.  By now the Tristan theme and music that sounds like it registers simply love, without the death.  Only by recalling the sentence, This is music by Richard Wagner that signifies the Liebestod or Love-Death, would the filmgoer have the experience O'Hehir describes.

Similarly, although I recognize John Hurt, Stellan Skarsgård, and Charlotte Rampling by sight, I’ve seen almost nothing that they’ve appeared in.  I’ve seen none of the films Andrew O’Hehir marks as possible influences for this one.  Yes, that’s my failing and not the filmmaker’s, but the question is, how much energy should an artist draw from other works that he or she alludes to only in the barest, most tenuous, sense?  Is a film (or a novel) that depends, so heavily as this one seems to, on allusions that are detectable only on an intellectual level, and then only at a couple of levels of (sheerly logical) remove, a deep one, or is it shallow? 

And yes, those visual shots are beautiful.  But they are static.  The same angle is shown over and over again, as if the film were instead a painting in some style suspended halfway between nineteenth century decadence and twentieth century minimalist futurism.

What O’Hehir’s insistence that Melancholia is in the tradition of German Romanticism reminds me mostly of are the twentieth century paintings from this exhibition.  One of the most striking things about that show, which divided up artists by region (England; France and Spain; Germany and Russia) was how sentimental and soft-edged the German paintings seemed—for the most part—by contrast with the French ones.  The placards all explained how much the painters had been influenced by the most shocking recent French styles.  But in that age without television, Internet, or cheap color reproductions, few of them can have actually seen the paintings they were trying to imitate.  All they saw were words.

Is Changing Rules by "Nudging" People Undemocratic?

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler wrote a well known book called Nudge (not “noodge”), arguing that various social policy should be set up in a way that “nudges” people towards doing things that policymakers thing they should do.  For example, if policymakers think more people should invest in 401K plans, employers should be required to make 401K contributions a default.  People would have to opt out of their employer’s 401K plan if they didn’t want to make contributions, rather than (as now) having to opt in if they did want it.  It does make sense to arrange defaults appropriately, both to decrease the amount of work people have to do (human resources workers as well as employees), and to encourage or discourage certain actions (modifying a thermostat to encourage energy savings, might be another example, or setting printer defaults to minimize paper use).

On the other hand, the way Sunstein and Thaler discuss “nudging” can sound a bit nanny-state-ish.  Henry Farrell, a political science professor, and Cosma Shalizi, a professor of statistics, have written an article in the New Scientist (via Crooked Timber) criticizing their views.  I agree with their argument, but there is, I think, a problem with the “nudge” theory that I have never seen addressed.  Farrell and Shalizi write:

…[T]he key problem with “nudge” style paternalism [is] presuming that technocrats understand what ordinary people want better than the people themselves. There is no reason to think technocrats know better, especially since Thaler and Sunstein offer no means for ordinary people to comment on, let alone correct, the technocrats’ prescriptions.

Nor will they ever be able to.  “Nudging” is nonverbal.  It doesn’t give people the ability to understand their situation better.  It doesn’t give people the ability to discuss their situation better.  It doesn’t give people the ability to provide the nudgers with extra feedback.

Worse, it lessens people’s ability to deal with the real world.  Before the nudge was implemented, people were at least somewhat able to discuss policies, like compensation, on their merits.  Afterwards, everything ordinary people suggest will mess up the nudging part of the policy.

Anyone who’s worked in a reasonably large organization will recognize what’s likely to happen next: any suggestion for improvement will be met with objections along the lines of: that’s not what’s really at stake here.  But it is what’s really at stake!

It would become impossible to discuss or decide anything except at the topmost levels.  There, presumably, are personnel who know how to discuss both aspects of policy and can take account of nudging as well as ordinary practices.  But before the nudge, those people delegated a lot of that work to lower-level personnel, who afterward will have slipped out of the loop.  And the nudge, in the first place, was implemented by people outside the organization, not those within it.  So how this could possibly work is far from clear.  What’s more likely is total sclerosis, as nothing changes significantly at a policy level, and things either fall apart or rules are modified surreptitiously and unofficially, day to day.

The idea of the “nudge” seems, on paper, to presuppose that organizations work by choosing (or falling into) a set of rules that define every decision ahead of time, at a very detailed level.  If this were literally true, then, we would expect to find a group of architects, highly educated, well aware of everything that needs to be known (practically, theoretically, politically, strategically), who think about policy; and also a group of workers who don’t think about any of this at all.  For the latter group of people, presumably, it would be an exaggeration to say that they do what they’re told or that they make decisions by applying rules; they would have to make decisions unconsciously on the basis of rules they’ve somehow internalized but can’t actually articulate.  Yet their rules could be changed—by the nudge—on a fairly short timescale.  But that isn’t much like what really happens, and isn’t especially plausible.

Most people, most of the time, are a combination of the former and latter groups.  “Nudging,” as Farrell and Shalizi show, is undemocratic because it makes it more difficult for them to carry out the former functions.  But more than that, it seems to assume an extremely implausible picture of society.

(Now if I could only nudge my three year old to sleep past 6:30 AM now that we’ve moved the clocks back an hour.)

A Long Way to Go to Get to a Post about Philip Roth

Shortly after my last post here, I started a project for a longish blog post that would require a fair amount of reading, which has been taking up most of my time.  I’ve begun and abandoned a few posts to fill the gap, but first the reading turned out to take longer and be much more absorbing than I’d expected (books in genres I don’t usually read, brick-like enough to encourage a glad switch back to the Kindle), and then real-life events intervened, and then the “quick” post I had in mind turned out to need longer to write than I have right now.

(Incidentally, here are things I’d like to see available on the Kindle, or whatever the next generation of e-book reader will be:  More foreign books—it would be nice to be able to buy books from amazon.fr or amazon.de for my US-based Kindle.  And more classics of history and social science from the past fifty years.  There is already a good, though not perfect, selection of recent books on social science, politics, and history, which is probably something we can thank the hordes of tech-savvy wonks and bloggers for.)

So I could blog about the sudden breakdown of my clothes dryer with half my daughter’s wardrobe in it, and how if I’d done the laundry on Friday instead of Sunday, we would have had the whole weekend to shop for a new one—but, also, it might have broken while we were out of the house, and burned all the clothes.  And how I wasted most of a day trying to research new washers and dryers online, figuring it might be time to replace the 1975-era washing machine too (which works perfectly well except that the “warm” water is better described as “cool,” and probably isn’t very efficient, and is so old and low-tech it just plain looks silly), only to discover that the question of the modern high-efficiency washer is a highly vexed one, and give up and decide to buy the simplest dryer I could find—only to learn that the online description of its dimensions was off by just enough that it wouldn’t fit through the door. 

Or I could blog about how, at just about this time last year, and the year before, right after my daughter’s birthday party, I got sick, and how I ended up being sick almost continually last year from November until almost May—though this time I got sick two weeks before the party, and since then so far I seem okay.  Or my attempts to determine whether the sore throat I’ve been waking up with every morning is from a cold, allergies, or acid reflux.  Though it does appear to be the last of these (it can be preempted using Pepcid), and so far I’m not sick, just tired from pre-party cleaning and from swimming in my daughter’s swim class to the deep end of the pool with her, for the first time in half a year and ve-e-ery slowly.

I could write about the movie Howl, and whether it is somehow cheating to have the original Ginsberg poem’s imagery displayed for you on a screen so you can understand the metaphors without doing the thinking for yourself—and whether it is actually possible to read all the words of the Neal Cassady section of the poem without having them read for you as a voiceover to a cartoon.

But I will blog, fairly briefly, about modern literature, and women in modern literature.

One of the novels I value most these days is American Pastoral, by Philip Roth.  The plot of the novel involves a successful Jewish-American businessman whose daughter, in the political turmoil of the 1960s, joins up with the Weathermen and bombs the local post office, killing the owner of the grocery store in which the PO’s located.  She disappears, and twenty years later, he finds her living a life of squalor in a slumland squat, doing a kind of penance and renunciation through a form of Jainism (involving the refusal to do violence to any living thing) which she has worked out for herself through reading and introspection.  Most of the novel consists of her father’s tortured attempts to work out what—in America, in his own parenting, in the belief systems of the other adults who helped her over the years—possibly could have resulted in both her crime and her unacceptable religious beliefs.  He rakes over her situation with the utmost of empathy of which he’s capable, but ultimately he fails to comprehend the path she chose.  He condemns her along with the society that made her that way, even as he is too much of a conformist to stand apart from society in any real way.

It’s the painstaking and thoughtful recreation of the emotional dilemmas faced by the girl and her father, the novelist’s willingness to implicate the father’s own beliefs and his way of life in actions he repudiates, and the selection of both male and female characters to illustrate various modes of being in the society he depicts, that I find appealing.  The moral, if there is any, isn’t on the surface, any more than it is in any other novel—there are some obvious “morals,” if a reader had to have them, like don’t commit murder, or don’t trust in wealth to preserve your family from misfortune, but the question of what could have helped these characters more isn’t answered—and I don’t assume that I would agree in full with Philip Roth’s take on their lives if I knew it.  (In fact, although I’ve been tempted to see these painstaking moments of empathy with female characters as a refutation of the broadly accepted notion of Roth’s general misogyny, I’ve ultimately concluded that they’re overwhelmed by the rest of his writing, that moments is all they are.)

But when I declared, on Internet discussion forums, that American Pastoral, along with The Ghost Writer and Zuckerman Unbound, were my favorites among all Roth’s novels, I was told, by male participants, in no uncertain terms, that I was wrong.  Roth’s best novels are those, like Sabbath’s Theater, they said, that foreground the male id and the issues (in our society and given the realities of aging) that surround exuberant male sexuality.  There was no discussion, there was no admission that a preference for one novel over another may largely involve subjective factors, there was only a flat statement that I was wrong.  There was no explanation.  The idea may have been that those novels are more characteristic of Roth’s writing—maybe given the long view of his work as a whole, maybe given the idea of Roth as essentially a novelist of exuberantly aggressive sexuality and rebellion—and maybe because they took those apparently more characteristic novels as a condemnation of the author, or maybe because they equated characteristic with best.  The idea may have been that those themes always make for better literature, or the idea may have been that those novels are better because they are less political.  The idea may have been that those novels spoke well for the men making the claim, a subjective claim, if surreptitiously so.  Whatever the underlying reasons, if I tried to give reasons for my preference, their response was to insist that no possible reason could cause them to change their minds.

It seemed as if they were claiming that they could speak for the entire literary world, and that no alternative was possible.  They did not seem to envision the possibility of discussion about the merits of one novel over another, or of one way of writing novels over another.  They seemed, on the contrary, thoroughly invested in the concept of modern literature as the self-expression of a callow young man whose interests are eternally opposed to the needs of “the community”—entire shelves of novels the reader could take or leave depending on whether that character’s interests aligned with her own, but with which she could not dispute.

Maybe they were right.  Or maybe they just didn’t understand.

The Social Network: Baby, You're a Rich Man, Too

The Social Network, a fictionalized account of how the website Facebook was founded and then turned into a social and financial sensation, primarily poses the question whether its founder and creator was a nice person.  But it actually raises some much weirder questions.  The film has two large problems: its creators’ inability to depict a plausible narrative of the creation of something like a website, and its creators’ inability to depict a plausible version of success that involves more than buying a nice house with a pool, throwing wild parties, and getting your name in the paper.  The plot seems to be—oddly—Mark Zuckerberg becomes a Hollywood superstar, very much like the filmmakers themselves; there is almost nothing in the story to mark his success as being of a different kind than theirs.  Everyone knows that the moral of the film is that Mark Zuckerberg is a bad guy who has been living a bad life, but if the story has the fictional Zuckerberg living the life of those who imagined him, what is it that’s supposed to be bad about it?

This is not the story of how Mark Zuckerberg struggled and worked to overcome obstacles that arose as he tried hard to accomplish a difficult goal; this is not Apollo 13, in which people were called to go above and beyond, working extra shifts for no recognition greater than a gift of a new tie from their wives.  This is the story of how Mark Zuckerberg ignored every obstacle that put itself in its path: and all of those obstacles arose from the will of others’ opposing themselves to him (usually by telling him there’s something he should pay closer attention to).  Actually, there are no real obstacles.  He and his friends tell a few friends about “The Facebook,” and they tell a few friends, and so on and so on and so on.  On campus after campus, within a couple of weeks of students’ getting access to the site, it is the biggest thing since pitchers of beer.  The coding goes smoothly, and everything just falls into place.  There are no technical challenges that require hard work and thinking even from a programming genius.  There are no unforeseen hardware failures, no power outages that make prearranged deadlines impossible.  There is nothing Mark Zuckerberg got wrong—except the rule that one should never stomp on the little people on his way up the ladder.

The only problem Zuckerberg has is that he doesn’t know an algorithm to create an absolute ranking of a large group of competitors on the basis of a limited number of real competitions between selected pairs of them.  He has to ask his friend Eduardo Saverin for that information.  We do see him in an Operating Systems class, in which he solves a complex calculation, involving addressing theory, on the spur of the moment (Zuckerberg’s actual Harvard OS professor has written up some of his reminiscences, with reference to The Social Network, here and here).  But there is no sense, in the film, that memorizing theory and doing quick mental math is not enough to create a successful computer application, much less a distributed application.  Admittedly, a focus on technical issues would be boring.  But the filmmakers suggest that Zuckerberg’s accomplishment lay in finding an opportunity and making sure he was the only one who profited from it: the near equivalent of climbing onto a speeding train and pushing those already riding it over the side.

It was not necessary, moreover, to hinge the film on the bizarre personality (as portrayed in the film) of Sean Parker.  (He is described in the film as the founder of Napster, though according to Wikipedia his real involvement is questionable.[1])  Parker, as depicted, and presumably as can be shown through publicly available documentation, is a flake.  He has a history, not only of being unable to work with colleagues, but of fallouts with police, over cocaine use and underage girls.  He appears to be paranoid and (in the words of Saverin in the film) delusional—which is not so surprising if the allegations about cocaine are true.  He does have contacts in the business world that Zuckerberg and Saverin lack.  His intuition that Facebook could have an even bigger impact—on something—than Napster had, on music sales, turned out to be right.  Saverin’s apparent feeling that what they had was just an ordinary dot-com business success turned out to be wrong.  Yet the narrative is set up as Zuckerberg’s choice—between remaining on the East Coast, finishing college, and being ordinary—and breaking into the big time in California, turning himself into a superstar.  Saverin remains committed to the first of those choices, while Parker tempts Zuckerberg towards the second one.

The problem is that the film does not successfully distinguish Parker’s way of life from his business and technical ability.  There is a relentless focus on the way having lots of money gives men the wherewithal to form private all-male clubs and party, to stay out all night drinking and taking drugs and getting hot women to take off their clothes and dance with one another.  At Harvard, this is the province of the final clubs, like the Porcellian, to which Zuckerberg’s nemeses the Winklevoss twins belong.  Mundane fraternities like AEP[2] only have lame-looking mixers, and people like Mark Zuckerberg—because of their aggressively ambitious personalities, the film suggests—will never be accepted into those people’s clubs.  In California, on the contrary, a smart guy with lots of ambition has the chance to become Sean Parker.  You can write code in your rented house and party with college girls at the same time.[3]  You can get hot women who wouldn’t have looked at you twice before you were rich.[4]  There is no real sense of irony in the film’s idea, expressed by the Beatles’ song that plays over the film’s final shot, that Mark Zuckerberg is now “one of the beautiful people.”

And Parker’s personality is certainly typical California.  The drugs, the partying, the contempt for the East Coast as old and stodgy, the idea that nothing of any importance is going on anyplace else.  The identification of expertise with knowing the right people and being willing to play them, of creativity and intelligence with business sense and aggression.  Parker is Zuckerberg’s Paul Simon to Saverin’s Woody Allen (with Mark Zuckerberg, then, as Annie Hall, if rather more successful than she will ever be).  And he behaves, and talks, in a manner more frequently associated with Simon’s and Allen’s generation (or with Sorkin’s) than with that of today’s young people.  There is no apparent irony in this, either.  The idea seems to be that California tech executives and Hollywood stars are the same—and better than everybody else—and, not least, just because they are free enough and rich enough to party.  At least the filmmakers don’t seem to have cared to do some research and find out whether they and their subjects are different.

Which raises the question: Are the filmmakers capable of understanding success as anything deeper than money, fame, and personality, as anything more important than the ability to gain access to a kind of secret society where drugs and free love are the rule?  Is joining a men’s club (a gentlemen’s club in the real meaning of the phrase) what “making it” means?  Are rich people better than the rest of us, really, only because they know how to party?[5]  It’s as strange as if “the music of the night,” promised by the phantom of the opera in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical of that name, were only what could be heard from a ladies’ room stall at Studio 54.

(For more, here is an interesting story about Mark Zuckerberg and the origins of Facebook, by Zuckerberg’s Harvard classmate Rebecca Davis O’Brien.)

[1] It’s interesting that the MP3 format used by Napster is, technically, a very poor format.  Its great advantage is its simplicity.  It is easy to program to.  I’ve wondered whether this is an example of technical lock-in as a result of nontechnical path dependence, something that is far from rare (Sony Betamax is widely regarded as superior to VHS), but in this case arose because the only broadly available application for downloadable audio files was created not only by amateurs, but by student amateurs.

[2] At Columbia, for what it’s worth, AEP renamed itself as TEP when it decided to become coed and admit women, not just as “little sisters.”  Does Harvard have any coeducational fraternities?

[3] Was the racist garbage about how perfect Asian women are for Jewish men really necessary?  And while the male characters were cast to resemble more or less plausible college students (as opposed to, say, characters on The Practice), the women looked like Victoria Secret models more than like Boston undergraduates.  There are plenty of good-looking women in Harvard Yard.  Couldn’t a little effort have been made to find out how they dress? 

And what was up with the BU girlfriend, Erica’s, beret?  Did dating Zuckerberg upset her so much she decided to become Orthodox?

[4] Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue, as usual, goes by too quickly, but especially in the first scene, he definitely nails a certain sort of man and the way he talks to women.  Believe me, they are not all geniuses.

[5] Do they think poor people don’t party?

P.S.: It's been pointed out to me--by my husband, who has a Facebook account, which he signed up for initially for distributing baby pictures--that it's ironic I would be writing a post about The Social Network when I don't use Facebook myself (except when he shows me his account, so I can see my relatives' pictures, or updates from female acquaintances of his who cook much fancier than I do). 

What Does It Mean to Be Laid Off?

A post by Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber threatened to turn into a debate over the facts concerning layoffs and unemployment (see comments by kidneystones and subsequent discussion), but didn’t seem like an appropriate place to have this discussion.

The question arose, what does a layoff mean?  There were people (I don’t know who they are, how old they are, what they do for a living, or even what country they live in, as they were using the silly sort of pseudonym) who seemed to believe some kind of implausible things—as best I could determine (they weren’t all entirely clear), they seemed to include the beliefs that being laid off always marks the end of a worker’s or professional’s career, that a person’s skills deteriorate to the zero point almost immediately after a layoff, that new skills can only be acquired in a formal degree program and at the beginning of a career. 

Now, it’s true that if you are an experienced auto designer or engineer or manufacturing worker at one of Detroit’s Big Three auto manufacturers, and you lost your job in the recent unpleasantness, it is unlikely you will be able to get a similar job.  It isn’t impossible, because probably the Big Three will need to hire a small number of senior people over the next several years, and so will the foreign automakers who have plants in the United States, and your skills and personality and so on may well be a good match, but there will be so few of these jobs, especially if you don’t want to relocate, that this is not likely.  But the United States’ automobile industry has been stagnant for decades and is not likely to rejuvenate itself.  There are many other industries that taken together employ more people than the Big Three.  Firms in those industries have layoffs for all sorts of reasons: poor cash flow that requires expenses to be reduced, poor numbers generally that require quick action to restore confidence from the stock market, decisions to cancel products or get out of attempted lines of business that can most readily be taken by letting go all the people who worked on them, decisions to outsource that are accomplished in the same way.

The first company I worked for had layoffs almost every year for more than a decade, starting before I worked there and continuing after I voluntarily left.  The second-to-last company I worked at, before leaving to have a baby, laid off everyone involved with the product line I worked on, in a process taking nearly a year.  I survived the first round of layoffs, presumably because I was fairly new and my pay was lower than most of my colleagues’, then was let go three months later.  A small number of people were kept on for another six months, with a retention bonus if they stayed until their scheduled termination date.  The industry press for the next couple of years indicated that the layoffs there were continuing.  The first of those companies hung on for almost a decade after I left (that is, approximately fifteen years after the first layoffs), to be bought out by another big corporation.  The second is still around, having shifted out of a market in which it was in last place, with sales declining toward zero, and into a market where it had some hope of grabbing a toehold and the kind of market share that would permit it to survive (long enough, probably, to bought out by one of the big firms).  These were small-to-medium sized corporations, employing from several hundred people, in the latter case, to well over ten thousand (down to a few thousand by the end), in the former.

In between, there was at least one downturn (the one beginning, for the high tech industry, in early 2001) that lasted long enough that there were people out of work longer than they could afford to wait.  And that was before the mortgage crisis, so lots of people would probably not be able to wait as long as they might have before, if there were to be another downturn in this industry.  (BTW, I knew at the time that people were getting bid out of their price range on deals they felt they couldn’t turn down, but five percent or less down?  On a first house?)  But layoffs are a fairly normal thing for tech professionals, as they are for many other industries.  They aren’t desirable, and hopefully they don’t occur too many times in a person’s career, but they don’t necessarily signal the end of the world.  Layoffs are how firms shed workers they no longer need, releasing them, in a fairly inefficient way, back into the workforce.  Layoffs are also what happens when firms close locations, end lines of business, or fold altogether.  And in high tech, these things happen with some frequency.

One of the commenters at the Crooked Timber thread said s/he hoped s/he would know things were getting bad so s/he could get out before a layoff occurred.  But what if things were getting bad only a year after s/he had started a new job?  What if s/he had real responsibilities on a project and would face the question, “Why aren’t you staying to see things through?”  S/he says s/he would not take unemployment insurance (though it sounds like s/he might not understand the difference between UI and welfare), no matter what, because taking government money is a sign of shiftlessness.  S/he sounds like someone who would see excessive job-hopping as equally a sign of shiftlessness, so I’m not sure s/he would really be able to follow through if such a thing happened to him or her.

There may well be inefficiencies in the labor market, but given that there is in fact a labor market, and given the fairly widely understood facts about unemployment and hiring, expecting there to be zero unemployment in everybody’s history is pretty unrealistic.

Things are probably different in an economy or a market that is dominated by one, or maybe two or three, 800-pound gorillas, in every subset of the market—as opposed to being divided into several sub-markets, each with a handful of players.  In a one-firm economy, unlike with what we have now, rather than laying people off, they can be moved around—but leaving that one firm would be the equivalent of leaving the field entirely.  In that case, being laid off is less like belonging to a chess club and losing one game, and more like being expelled once and for all from a large building with only one entrance.  Of course, there are other differences, and there is a reason that innovation comes from smaller firms more often than from the giant conglomerates.

Feel free to add your experience or opinions in comments, about high tech or any other industry.

Roth, Pynchon, and Lethem as 9/11 Novelists

I was in New York City the week before the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.  There were some police on the streets, of course, but there always are police, and nobody thought anything of it.  The crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium “evacuated” the stands, and the players returned to the safety of their locker rooms, for quite some time, but that was only because of the heavy rain, and the danger of lightning, and nobody thought anything of it.  Those days are over.  New York has changed, and the way tourists relate to the city when they visit it has changed.

D.G. Myers, now blogging for Commentary, has a long list of 9/11 novels.  Emily Rooney broadcast a shorter one including nonfiction books from Boston Steve Almond (video and a link to the text version of the list).  Most of them are ordinary “social novels,” about people who lived in New York in 2001 or are otherwise affected, in one way or another, by the events of that day.  Adam Kirsch, in the newish Jewish magazine The Tablet, has a different list of novels.  He argues, along with some of Myers’s Twitter followers, that The Plot against America should be considered among them, though Myers begs to differ.

I think Kirsch has a point.  What is most memorable about The Plot against America is, in part, the fear of the adults, and the way that a horrible political event seemed to license behavior that, under normal conditions, those adults would barely consider acceptable even from their children: the panic that event inspired.  And the fascist elements of the alternate society Roth imagines—which so scare the adult characters in the book—are, arguably, only an extension of the armed soldiers that appeared in airports and on city streets, and of the vigilance (and lessened concern for civil liberties) that seemed threatened by the emphasis on security implied by the words “after 9/11, everything is different.”  The novel just isn’t a plausible one in a world where 9/11 has not taken place.

Similarly, I would argue that Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day is a 9/11 novel, at least in one chapter (the one that begins on page 149): in which the boy adventurers of the zeppelin Inconvenience fail to prevent a dangerous monster-enfolding meteorite from being brought into an unnamed city.  The details are different, but the reader’s knowledge of what’s being described will derive from the news stories about that day.

“This city, even on the best of days, had always been known for its background rumble of anxiety.  Anyone who wittingly dwelt here gambled daily that whatever was to happen would proceed slowly enough to allow at least one consultation with somebody—that ‘there would always be time,’ as citizens liked to put it.  But that quarterless nightfall, events were moving too fast even to take in, forget about examine, or analyze, or in fact do much of anything but run from, and hope you could avoid getting killed.  That’s about as closely as anybody was thinking it through—everyone in town, most inconveniently at the same time, suffering that Panic fear. . . .

“On the night in question, Hunter Penhallow had been on his way out of town but, feeling something at his back, had turned to witness the tragedy unfolding along the horizon, stricken into remembering a nightmare too ancient to be his alone, eyeballs ashine with mercilessly sharp images in flame tones, so overbright that his orbits and cheekbones gathered some of the fiery excess.”

Pynchon’s vision here is a kind of anti-9/11: what could have been and maybe should have been, in a Manhattan of the imagination, a nightmare worst case, differing in idiosyncratic but important particulars from reality.  And if there's a sense in which Against the Day might be a 9/11 novel, Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem, surely is.  In Lethem’s novel, all of downtown is enveloped by a mysterious dark fog, which simply appeared one day and never left; and later, one of the characters becomes unreachable after his apartment building collapses, with no warning, leaving behind it only a deep pit and a police cordon.  Both Lethem and Pynchon foreground the emotionality and weirdness of living under a threat that is nearly incomprehensible, not only in its vastness and in the unforeseenness of what motivated it, but in its vagueness, though neither of them says anything that might unambiguously refer to a real historical event.

Hurricane Irene

We were lucky and lost power only for a few hours on Sunday, plus maybe five short outages of only a couple of minutes each.  Two or three big branches down in the backyard (attracting at least three cardinals to hop among them on Monday morning), a couple of smaller ones in the front, lots of twigs and leaves on the ground.  Some damage to the fence.  We put everything away except the barbecue, but neighbors who left things stacked by the side of their house, or left chairs and tables (I guess fairly heavy) outside, only had a couple things blow over.  The yellowjackets’ nest, unfortunately, wasn’t drowned.

The playground nearest our house was cleaned up very quickly; by Tuesday morning it was free of branches, there was fresh bark under all the play equipment, and even the annoying staircase that's impossible to walk on, unless there is fresh gravel between the railroad ties, had fresh gravel.  And the equipment was very clean.

Around the corner from our house, however, until this morning, the street was closed.  A tree had gone down, taking down some power lines, and knocking out the power.  A local online paper reported that the shopping center just off that road was affected and that the supermarket was running on generator power for a while.  The streets that were closed are pretty heavily used—around here there tend not to be that many streets that aren’t local-only—and traffic was being rerouted all the way to the other end of town and back.  At least some of the houses in the affected area got power back yesterday.  The road farther along is still closed.

In the north part of town, some people don’t expect their electricity to be back on until Saturday.  I was told a tree had gone down and caught fire in the street.  Schools are open, but at least one is on generator power.

The next town over, and there are very many people with no electricity.  It seems to depend in part on which company supplies your power.

At the supermarket, which evidently has power now, but the frozen-food section of which—between renovations and, I guess, people restocking—is a little depleted, I saw a car with two [1] stickers on it: One read “Remember when sex was safe and motorcycles were dangerous?”  Sure.  Must have been back before penicillin.  Curing syphilis by mercury poisoning—oh, the good old days.  The other read “Scott Brown Republican.”

[1] Actually there were many, many stickers on it.

Rebecca Traister: "Ladies, We Have a Problem"

In a piece in today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine, Salon regular Rebecca Traister considers the wisdom of the SlutWalk movement in the context of recent rape scandals like those involving Lara Logan and Dominique Strauss-Kahn.  She begins by attacking the triviality, the futility, and the vulgarity, of “stripping down to skivvies and calling ourselves sluts,” as a means to changing the terms of the political discourse concerning rape—given how much of the culture does still, twenty years after Anita Hill testified before Congress, blame victims for provoking their attacks by dressing or behaving improperly.

The style Traister disparages is a style that was more prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s than it is now.  Then, during marches protesters often adopted a provocative appearance, particularly an appearance that was personally—as opposed to politically—provocative.  Groups like ACT UP were criticized by outsiders to the movement, and also from those within the movement who preferred to remain socially respectable.  The movement’s successes, however, which include increasing numbers of states legalizing same-sex marriage, and the end of the military’s policy prohibiting service by homosexuals, arguably was the work of the activist groups more than that of conservatives who distanced themselves from the movement because they couldn’t abide the nonconformism of some of its members.

I don’t think “slut” is a word that can be reappropriated by feminists the way “queer” was reappropriated in past decades by activists in some LGBT movements.  For this to work, for me, “slut” would have to be a word that was regularly applied to a much larger range of styles and behavior than I think it is.  But maybe there are women who feel otherwise.  Maybe they feel comfortable calling themselves “sluts,” maybe even when they are dressed in ways I (and probably Traister) would consider totally appropriate.  I don’t see any reason to think that’s the case here, though.  The point of the protest is not to encourage young girls to see themselves as “sluts.”  The point is to show up people who overuse the word “slut” as ridiculous.

Rebecca Traister does not think women should parade around in public in their underwear.  She is happy to agree that a woman who dresses like that looks like a slut.  She does admit, at the end of her essay, that extreme measures might be necessary if we want to “upend” the assumptions so frequently implicit in press accounts of rapes like those she cites.  The essay does end with four paragraphs—beginning, “None of us can know the veracity of any of these women’s claims.  But the standard response . . . is still [as David Brock wrote of Anita Hill] that she is a little but nutty and a little bit slutty”—in which the author wonders whether her own argument will be convincing.

But she really seems not to understand why the protesters are dressing like that.  It isn’t because they think going around out of doors in only underwear should be normal.  It isn’t because they think the category “slutty” shouldn’t exist—even if they don’t like the word “slutty” itself, they recognize that some ways of dressing are sexual, and some are excessively sexual (whether just according to social, situational norms, or because they are literally too provocative).  It isn’t because they want to change people’s opinions about what it’s normal to wear.  They are being—politically—provocative.  They want to draw attention to an issue: women do not deserve to be raped no matter what they wear.  Really, this should be obvious.  When a woman is said to be dressed “like a slut,” the chances that she is wearing only Wonderbra and Spanx is pretty low.

It is unfortunate that Traister feels the need to turn this around.  She seems to be willing to approach this topic from only one point of view.  She makes sure to reassert both her belief that there are proper ways to dress, and also her willingness to condemn women who do otherwise.  She makes the centerpiece of her essay the argument that women who dress “sluttily,” in the name of feminist issues, are doing harm to their own interests.  She makes this argument from within feminism, advising the presumably younger women in these protests for their own good.  She doesn’t say where she herself would draw the line.  She does imply, though—by her focus on the term “slut” and the inadvisability of trying to reappropriate it—that there are younger women who she would say look like “sluts,” who defend their style with feminist arguments, who she thinks should behave differently.  And this has the effect of suggesting that feminists, especially, should be more concerned about obeying even rather conservative social norms than with methods of gaining political success that might require them to appear undignified.

I don’t like the practice of reading people out of a movement for being “incorrect,” or insufficiently radical, or taking the wrong position on arbitrary litmus-test concerns.  In my opinion, Rebecca Traister has the right to call herself a feminist, and to criticize other feminists, as she likes and thinks best.  But using a political movement, the ultimate goals of which she appears to support, as a hook on which to hang an argument about how women like herself (non-activists) ought to dress if they want to defend themselves from sexual and verbal violence, doesn’t seem to have the purpose of advancing the cause.

Picture Books: Hippo Goes Bananas

My daughter is two and doesn’t really understand lying yet, but she is enjoying this book by Marjorie Dennis Murray (illustrated by Kevin O’Malley) that illustrates the danger of rumor and jumping to conclusions.  Hippo wakes up with a toothache and crashes around wordlessly, causing minor havoc and waking up Cuckoo Bird.  Cuckoo Bird tells Monkey, in the process vastly overstating the extent of the damage.  Each animal in turn adds something to the story, accumulating “This Is the House that Jack Built”-style.  In the end, they end up curing Hippo’s toothache, but they also nearly risk causing the very environmental damage they’d baselessly imagined Hippo would have caused if they didn’t intervene: Hippo did not throw anything into the river, flooding the savanna, but that’s just what they do to him.

Another cool thing about the story is that surprisingly, it seems to be a variant on the Trolley Problem!  Instead of tipping a Fat Man over a bridge onto a railroad track, so as to save the lives of the people on a different siding, the animals tip Hippo over a cliff into a river, so as to prevent the spread of his supposed case of “skeeter fever.”  (Compare the illustration of their pushing him over to the illustration at the third of three links, above.)  Were their actions, in bumping Hippo down a cliff (illustrated in comic-book format), justifiable?  Was it okay to give Hippo a knock on the head and consequent headache in order to preserve the rest of them from the risk of catching skeeter fever?  If so, what if he had been big enough, or the river had been small enough, for him to have blocked its flow entirely—would it then still have been okay to dam the river and flood the savanna, so as to save themselves?  Or am I just thinking too much?

Framingham Reads The Killer Angels and Three Cups of Tea

The Killer Angels, the subject of my last post but one (with a few others begun in the interim but this not done) and the main subject of this one, was my town’s “One Book” selection for 2011.  Three Cups of Tea, which I’m going to mention briefly, has been in the news lately because it turns out not to be true—how much is false is, as yet, unknown, though it seems pretty certain that on top of the book’s being false there are a few financial improprieties involving the charity the book’s author, Greg Mortenson, founded and described (and promoted) in his memoir.  Aaron Bady has useful roundups here and here.

(Side point: Is there a comma missing in this title?  In other words, did I mean to say “This post is about the program, ‘Framingham Reads The Killer Angels,’ and also about Three Cups of Tea”—which is true?  It is true, but as it happens Three Cups of Tea was the Framingham Reads selection a few years back.  Children’s versions and even picture books broadened the scope of the “One Book” project to the high schools and elementary schools, and there were cross-cultural programs, as well.  Improving understanding of other cultures can’t hurt, so I hope the book is not inaccurate in that regard, too.  For example, the title of the book, Mortenson says in interviews, comes from an Afghan custom of making a stranger almost a part of the family, though he has to drink three cups of tea with them, and the process takes time.  Something to think about.)

More on The Killer Angels: Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, in an otherwise unexplained post titled “Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain,” linked a little while ago to a scene from Gettysburg, the not very well reviewed movie that was based on The Killer Angels.  The scene is of the point at which Chamberlain (played Jeff Bridges) tells his officers, “Fix bayonets.”  He has been ordered to hold the left flank, maintaining the Union Army’s position on the series of hills called Cemetery Ridge, and not under any circumstances to withdraw.  Now his men are entirely out of ammunition, and the enemy is still coming.  If they fix bayonets and charge downhill, they may at least prevent the enemy from circling around behind the Union line.

The film shows Chamberlain surrounded by his staff as they react to the command.  They all are stunned by what seems a foolhardy charge, nearly unprotected, into certain death.  Chamberlain himself appears to be perfectly aware of the unusual nature of his own order.  His mood, as much as his decision, seems to illustrate something dangerous in his character.  In the book, however, it is different.

In the novel, Chamberlain is described as making the obvious choice.  His options are limited.  His men are out of ammunition, and his requests for more bullets haven’t been answered.  If he retreats—as he has been ordered not to do, under any circumstances—shifting to the right, towards the rest of the Union line, the enemy will not only take the hill, but will sweep behind the Union line and attack them from behind.  If he stands pat, he and his men will likely be slaughtered.

His only option is to tell the men to fix bayonets.  They will be armed only with those, against an infantry armed with guns (and possibly also a cavalry armed with swords), but this would be their situation in any event.  What he does that is unusual is order them to take the offensive (unplanned by his own superiors), and charge down the hill.  He tells them to sweep to the right, pushing the enemy across the front of the remaining Union guns.  He has heard of the maneuver in his training to be an officer but has never seen it done.  His troops end up sweeping well across the front of the line, taking large numbers prisoners.  They may well have startled the enemy as much as they did their own side. 

It’s only after the battle is over that Chamberlain realizes that what he did was unusual.  He knew the battle could not be won unless he ordered his men to charge downhill, so he ordered his men to charge downhill.  Most experienced officers, though, as he discovers, would probably not have done the same.  His reason for acting as he did, in giving such a risky order, is not so much that he was a college professor as that he was inexperienced.  He probably acted more as a young man would, just out of officer training school, than as a professor of military science (which wasn’t his field in the first place).  Of course, in most wars, twenty-somethings have not been given command of so many men as Chamberlain was given.  He happened to combine the confidence of an experienced professional with the inadequate, untried school-learning of a recently graduated student.  That doesn’t have much to do with his being a professor—it wasn’t Chamberlain’s thinking like a professor that led him to take such a foolhardy action—so much as with his being an older, respected professional man whose high position in society was seen as transferring easily to another sphere.  As it happens, that worked out well at Gettysburg, but it might have been otherwise.

And Shaara illustrates well that, though social hierarchies operated slightly differently in the South than they do in the North, every social interaction that happens in the Army is necessarily hierarchical.  The visible double-takes the characters allow themselves in the film version of Gettysburg are unthinkable in the world of Shaara’s novel.  Nearly everything in the novel is described from the point of view of a high-ranking officer: in most cases, the highest-ranking officer possible, given the situation as prescribed by the plot.  There are few exceptions.  The book starts off in the point of view of a sometime-Shakespearean actor turned Rebel spy who is well aware of the fact that the real Army is more than a little suspicious of him.  The second section begins with the point of view of John Buford, a cavalry officer who has never really reacclimated to life in the East, and who stakes out a Union position in Gettysburg, not entirely trusting that additional troops will arrive in time for his efforts to do any good, and—again—well aware that he will get little credit from history or from Washington.  After that, however, the novel shifts to the regular Army officers who have taken over the battlefield.  The only conflict we see between officers in which the commander is not always the one in the right is that between Longstreet and Lee, the former arguing that they are sure to lose the battle if they engage again the following day.

The scene from the movie is damning for Chamberlain’s case.  At this point, in Chamberlain’s chapters of the book, the reader seems to be humming under his breath, “Another victory like that and we are done for.”  In Longstreet’s chapters, however, what we hear is most likely worse: “We were hip deep in the Big Muddy, the big fool said to move on.”