Bianca Steele

In This Week's Papers: Copley, March, Mehanna, Bellafante, and Roiphe

My daughter now has a tricycle, a helmet, and summer clothes that will still fit her in September.  She also has a promise that we will plant some flowers in front of the house, something I’ve never actually tried to do (I did plant some bulbs about ten years ago, but only some of them came up).  And being between landscapers, I’ve pruned one of a small number of flowering shrubs (a PJM rhododendron, which grows well in this climate, setting its buds before winter and blooming just after the forsythias do, but which isn’t in the standard plant books).  I have all the tools now, from the little snippers through the lopper and the saw, and I’ve almost become comfortable enough with the pruning to no longer fear I’m going to kill the thing, but not quite.  So finding the flowers will be next.

Copley as a British Painter

This article about John Singleton Copley in the Boston Globe is interesting, because it argues that Copley—who has numerous sites around Boston named for him, as a Revolutionary-era hero, and whose paintings, along with those of Gilbert Stuart, form the backbone of the Boston MFA’s eighteenth-century American collection (which is well worth seeing)—didn’t see himself as “American” at all.  He sided with the British Tories, the Loyalists; hated and feared the revolutionary movement; and moved to England to escape the war, spending the rest of his life painting portraits of members English aristocracy and royalty.

His American paintings, though, have an explicitly (little-r) republican, even a Puritan, air to them.  The backgrounds are simple, usually dark brown.  The men depicted wear plain clothes, the costumes of their everyday working life, and hold the implements of their work (often pens and books).  The women’s dress is also relatively plain, compared with European subjects (especially the English princesses who sat for the painters late works), and behind them Copley painted the branches of flowering trees.

It would be easy to conclude that the artist admired such simplicity.  He could have painted his subjects in the traditional style, in a more ornate fashion that might appeal to the art collectors of Europe.  Benjamin Rush—himself a solid advocate of independence and self-governance, along with the education of women—did, in fact, paint in that style, as when he depicted his wife and child using the form of a Madonna by Raphael.  The simplicity, even drabness, of Copley’s American portraits looks like a statement, but it may have only been a matter of the sitters’ own preferences.

Freedom of Speech and the Study of Other Cultures

A professor of political science at Yale, Andrew March, has an op-ed about the Tarek Mehanna case in today’s New York Times.  Mehanna was sentenced earlier this month for materially supporting a terrorist group, mostly on the basis of his online activities publishing translations of Al Qaeda propaganda and defending Al Qaeda online.  There’s no question, as this article about Mehanna’s behavior at his sentencing hearing shows, that he did intend to give Al Qaeda material support and that he did intend to support their self-declared “war” against the United States.

What concerns March is that there seems to be little difference between what he does professionally and what in Mehanna’s case is considered a crime.  Both engaged in discussion to further the knowledge of a group that the US government has declared a terrorist organization.  There is the matter of intention: March’s for pure knowledge, Mehanna’s for proselytization—and presumably the latter was more intent on insistently promoting sympathetic understanding among his correspondents than March insists on.  However, it remains the case that the case involves an unprecedented criminalization of speech.  In fact, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, in another case, himself held that material support did not encompass speech, unless there were explicit coordination from the group supported, which did not exist in Mehanna’s case.  March seems to worry that studying certain topics might become too dangerous for anyone without a kind of license to do so, in the form of a university post or similar professional position.

Even worse, however, in March’s opinion, is that the prosecutors used even Mehanna’s penchant for hiking as an example of his engaging in terrorist activities.  He had translated an Arabic text describing physical fitness as an alternate means of participating in jihad.  March argues that the intention behind the text is to deflect would be terrorists into peaceful community-building.  Yet the list of activities gave prosecutors an opening to describe Mehanna as spending nearly all his time on “jihad,” even when he was apparently innocently working out or talking about working out.  Imagining that this could happen to you—that somebody could twist all your actions around in order to cast an evil light on them, simply on the basis of an unrelated statement—would be infuriating for anyone.  But in the context of the court case, it doesn’t strike me as so worrying.  Prosecutors most likely engage in overstatement all the time.  Their job is to persuade a jury to vote to convict—not to find ultimate truth or be fair to everybody who might someday exercise.  Nobody’s criminalizing hiking.

Is Katie Roiphe Searching for a Female Midlife Judd Apatow?

There’s a new sexy novel for housewives out, by a woman in England, that is the new hot topic of conversation among feminist journalists and bloggers (or was, before Girls went on the air).  One of these, inevitably, was the ubiquitous Katie Roiphe—as Ginia Bellafante points out in the Sunday New York Times.  There’s always something to criticize in Roiphe’s “what’s the matter with women today?” pieces, and what Bellafante points out in this one is that Roiphe—once again—“suggests that career women . . . long to be sexually dominated” and to break out of the feminism-driven self-controlled, competent lives they’ve come to lead.

What I thought was interesting, and what Bellafante doesn’t ask, is, “why sex?”  She interprets Roiphe as wrongly believing that career women still (as they did in the 1990s) fear associating themselves with the label “feminism,” and she interprets sex fantasies like these as stemming from a feeling that “sexual abjection [is] the penalty the culture exacts on the average-looking woman for the offense of her averageness.”  But the novelist herself thinks the book is popular because most women actually don’t look for ultra-masculine, dominating behavior from a potential husband or boyfriend; they want someone who will help do the dishes, who will pull his own weight around the house.  She is English, of course, and they do things differently over there, but she does have a point.  As much as twelve year olds love Twilight, most twenty- and thirty-somethings are not in mourning for those fantasies, nor even for the fact that they’ve given them up.

So why does Roiphe keep returning to the subject, as Ginia Bellafante complains?  She seems to want to insert sex into every situation.  To me, this seems strange.  True, there is a cultural obsession with sexlessness and with the idea that for certain groups of people, in order to be fully adult, sexlessness is something they have to get over.  So we have bromances and we have movies by Judd Apatow—for teenage boys who apparently wouldn’t know marriage existed unless a movie showed them the world beyond the Playstation, and therefore would necessarily remain eternal children on their parents’ couch, with no interests beyond the Fritos bag and no interest in getting a job.  But why would we expect to see a parallel narrative for women?  Much less for middle-aged women near the peak of their professional careers?

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.

Brief Links

Matt Bucher has a facsimile of a marked-up student paper from one of the undergraduate classes David Foster Wallace taught in the late 1990s.  I learned something about both Cormac McCarthy and Frederic Jameson, but by the second or third page, the sight of the man’s handwriting was heartbreaking.

An excerpt from Elif Batuman’s memoir (h/t Language Log): She hated creative writing because it involved craft.  This is very strange.  She says herself that what she disliked about it is the focus on making something and perfecting it (not just on what’s often referred to as “narrow technique”).  I have never heard any literary person (much less a would-be novelist) disparage the relationship between an artist and their work in that way.  What are they teaching at Harvard nowadays?

Matthew Yglesias says Fight Club is a critique of a masculinity that’s hypertrophied to such an extent that it becomes mental illness, by way of more or less empathetically depicting people who have in fact veered into such mental illness.  Maybe.  Interpreting Fight Club as a critique depends on interpreting the (unnamed) Edward Norton character as the moral center of the film; which makes sense, as although the character is kind of a cipher, it is with him that we both begin and end the story.  On the other hand, there’s some reason to view the plot in psychohistorical terms, with Brad Pitt’s sociopathic leader Tyler Durden as merely an element of the Norton character’s psyche, in which case Yglesias’s interpretation kind of falls apart.  Then the film begins to look like a mostly sympathetic representation of Durden and his plan to (among other things) get everyone’s debts forgiven by blowing up the banks, from the point of view of a man who admires Durden but doesn’t have the guts to decide to follow him, just as Durden himself claims.  There’s nothing in the film that explicitly says all this is immoral—only the Norton character’s queasiness, which seems to be the same as the viewer’s.

The New Republic has moved a March 17 article I hadn’t seen, mentioning Bright-Sided, to the top of its online version.  The article, tagged “Marcus Aurelius, life coach,” is actually a review of books on Stoicism.  I’d recommend Martha C. Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions for those who’d like a densely written and long-winded account of the Stoic philosophy.

Today’s New York Times has a graphic illustrating recent wargaming at the Brookings Institution of a possible sneak attack by Israel against Iranian nuclear sites.  The write-up is by Kenneth Pollack, whose similar wargaming about Iraq was covered by the Atlantic Monthly a few years ago.

Also in the Times, the Museum of Modern Art announced its acquisition of the @ sign.  From now on, presumably, art books wishing to include representations of the symbol will need to obtain permissions.  They ought to be free, given that MOMA paid nothing for the right to control them, but can MOMA hold up publication of works they deem to interpret the symbol wrongly?

Di Chirico and Art History

At The Wisdom of the West, Jim H. has a painting by Di Chirico up.  I think a lot of people could identify Di Chirico’s style—it’s kind of Escher-like, a little more filled out—and have probably seen a few of the paintings he did.  Fewer, I’d guess, could place him in his historical context.  I’ve been thinking about this since I saw an exhibit a few years ago at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.  The museum has been expanding and renovating, and in the process of doing that they decided to display their entire collection of art from the first half of the twentieth century, some of which was already on permanent display, and some of which had been in storage.

Since the choice of works to display was already made, there could be no imposition of some curatorial vision that manipulated the viewer into believing some modern, fashionable idea that in the end might turn out to be only the idiosyncratic opinion of the probably youngish curator and their circle of friends.  Only the division of the paintings into groups (by geography: England; France, Spain, and Italy; Central and Eastern Europe), and the order in which they were placed (Picasso’s mythology-inspired paintings interspersed with the more run-of-the-mill mythology-inspired paintings done by his contemporaries, later Picasso’s cubism-inspired paintings ditto, and so forth), imposed any narrative at all.  It was impossible by the rules self-imposed on the curators to exclude a painting that didn’t fit what they wanted to say, or to add a painting that made their pet theories more plausible.  They included what they had and excluded everything else.  This meant that no real narrative emerged.

I’m not trying to make a distinction between “traditional” and “fashionable” ways of thinking about art.  There are people who do make that distinction; they complain that, as they think, too many people these days try to impose new, false, probably politically-inspired ideas on art to which these ideas are actually totally foreign.  I’m just pointing out that ideas about art do change over time, and that it is really possible to make a specious argument that isn’t really supported by the evidence (the evidence, in this case, being the paintings).  But people who think of themselves as “traditional” can make specious arguments too.  A specious argument is an imposition no matter what point of view the person making it has.  Even a good argument can be an imposition, for one thing because it usually has to exclude a lot in order to get made in a reasonable amount of time.  The exhibit was interesting in part because it had so much stuff in it: way too much stuff for any theory to be convincing.

Columbia College's Core Curriculum

President Obama, like me, is a graduate of Columbia College, the 350 year old Ivy League undergraduate college in New York City. (When he attended the College, it admitted only men. Columbia was the last school in the Ivy League to go co-ed. It began admitting women to the freshman class only in 1983. However, women were permitted to cross-register for classes if they were enrolled at Barnard, across the street, or at the graduate schools and affiliated schools in the neighborhood such as the Manhattan School of Music and the Jewish Theological Seminary. Barnard and Columbia also shared most non-first year dorms, but as a transfer student, Obama would have had almost no chance of getting into oncampus housing.)

Therefore, he would have been required to enroll in the College’s famed Core Curriculum, established in the wake of World War I in order to provide students with a background in Western values. The Core was one of the College’s best selling points -- for those who were interested in that kind of thing -- for others, especially science students (it was relatively easy to place out of the one-year science requirement, at the time, if you had taken AP courses at your high school, but the Core was absolutely mandatory), it was an unpleasant opportunity to read lots of boring books and write a lot of essays. (Barnard women and engineering school students were permitted to enroll in a limited number of Core courses, though the latter found it extremely difficult to find a slot in their class schedules for a liberal arts elective.)

The Core consists of four courses (at least it did in the mid-eighties when I attended): two year-long courses, Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization, and two half-year courses, Arts Humanities and Music Humanities. The year-long classes were small and taught by professors from various departments. (You can find the current reading lists here.)

However, transfer students (of which Barack Obama was one) were required to take only half of the Core, one each of the full-year and half-year courses. It seems amusing to wonder which half of the Core Obama elected to take. But it doesn’t seem too difficult to guess. Surely he would have enrolled in CC and Music Hum. Those would have been my choices, if I had had to pick at the age of seventeen. I’m glad I didn’t have to. I enjoyed Music Hum a lot, and learned a lot too, but I probably would have picked up most of it over the years even without taking the course. If I hadn’t taken Lit Hum, I would not have the following books on my shelf now: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides (pants I break-a your leg), Aristophanes; Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Inferno; Gargantua and Pantagruel -- but, again, I might have found many of the same books, and read them in the same way, after I had graduated. The one core course I would never have taken the equivalent of unless I had been forced to do so was Art Humanities.

My mother had a handful of art books in the house, but I’d never really gotten much out of them. I don’t think I got much out of school art, either, except that I knew who Leonardo da Vinci was (he was a multifaceted genius, unlike us Penn- and Drexel-bound sixth-graders, who couldn’t even do one thing poorly). In Art Hum, I learned that painting, sculpture and architecture were traditions that each successive artist learns to emulate and to excel. I spent time at the Met, in class groups and by myself, taking the crosstown bus through Harlem, in order to write essays about an eighteenth-century oil painting or a Baroque sculpture of Bacchus. I learned that one of my classmates thought it was either interesting or funny to ask -- of each and every painting we looked at as a class -- how much it had cost. I learned words like “painterly” and “atmospheric perspective.” I learned enough to know that Dan Brown is full of it, and so are whatever people persuaded him of the art-historical “facts” he writes about.

There are a couple of arguments people use to defend the liberal arts from the accusation that studying them is useless; one of them is that when you are old or middle-aged, you will be glad that you know about them, and glad you had learned to read them. That argument is usually made about reading, though, not about art. But at age forty-two, I am glad of the ability to spend an hour or two at an art museum and enjoy it.

Modern Architecture

Say what you will about neoconservatives (I won’t contradict you), they provide employment to plenty of arts critics.  Christopher Caldwell has a thoughtful piece, at the Weekly Standard, on Robert Venturi’s antimodernist postmodern manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas.  Caldwell agrees with the first part of that epithet:

Josep Lluís Sert's ghastly Holyoke Center still occupies the spot in Harvard Square where Massachusetts Avenue's beautiful line of Victorian brick was ripped apart to make way for it in the 1960s. Gerhard Kallmann's Boston City Hall still sits like a Stalinist mausoleum on an empty, windswept plaza, for which dozens of ancient city blocks were razed.

No one will defend the new City Hall (though I’m not sure the Holyoke Center is really that bad), but I’m actually a fan of modernist architecture and always have been.  Those stark, internally monotonous broad towers and sprawling glass boxes can be terribly beautiful.

Yes, it‘s true, “terribly” is appropriate here; their beauty is the sublimity of an enormous object that provokes just a little irrational fear: there is nothing pretty about them.  They possess beauty in the same way that the smokestacks of a nuclear power plant do, seen from a few miles away.  Or one of those fifty-foot Buddha statues.  Or San Diego’s Mount Soledad cross.  Their aesthetic power stems precisely from the sense of a small thing enlarged hundreds of times the appropriate size without a corresponding increase in detail.

The example of the Mount Soledad cross in particular suggests that the beauty of these structures depends on their exposure to the weather.  It’s not just the building itself, but the contrast between it and the sky, the mountains, or the desert.  Which means they do best when they stand isolated from others like themselves.  There are few places where large conglomerations of them work truly well.

Postmodern buildings can look silly, with their overcolored stone veneers and their seventh-story portholes.  However, probably mostly because the area was built up only in the past twenty or so years, the stretch along Boston's Central Artery has a bunch of glass-and-steel postmodernist towers that, as a group, are really very pretty.