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?

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). 

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.

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.”

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.

Statistics and Homicide Rates

UPDATE: I thought I had saved my changes and posted this on Thursday, but apparently not.  I posted it Friday before noticing the errors, then took it down so I could make the corrections offline.

Boston homicide detectives’ record is below par. Only 44 percent of 2009 homicides were solved, compared to a national average of 55 percent. (Stranger killings, including gang-related homicides, have been particularly difficult to solve.) A Globe editorial Thursday suggests ways the department might be improved in order to fix the problems.

Another possibility, of course, is that Boston homicide detectives are more scrupulous than detectives elsewhere, less inclined to plant evidence and do all the other nasty things “necessary to get the job done” that we’re familiar with from TV crime dramas. It would take more data, and some kind of in-depth study, to find out for sure. But I’m sure that if the detectives in the Boston PD feel they’re being criticized unfairly, they will let their supervisors know, and loudly.

An anecdote near the beginning of The Tipping Point raises a similar question. The frequency with which homicides occurred in New York City declined dramatically between the early 1980s and mid-1990s. Malcolm Gladwell attributes the decline to gradual, global changes that for some reason that nobody has ever been able to explain, in New York City alone resulted in a sudden drastic drop in crime rates. Gladwell describes the case in such detail that he raises questions about what he is arguing. Is what he describes really plausible? Does it square with our preexisting knowledge about how human beings behave? Could the decline have been due to people giving up and failing to report crimes?

Reviewers have been extremely harsh on Gladwell’s most recent book, Outliers, while his earlier books were met with apparently unnuanced enthusiasm. One might assume that Gladwell, Tom Clancy-style, has been getting sloppy and that his editors are permitting him to get away with a lot more than they did when he was just starting out. At the same time, the flaws in Outliers were already apparent several years ago when The Tipping Point appeared. Why have they been noticed only now?

Have you ever been hugged by a registrar?

Asks beloved BU history prof and author Howard Zinn:

Writing a play is more fun than writing a history book. And when somebody decides to produce it, it's wonderful. You are taken out of the cold world of the academy and you're in a world of movies and plays where you are hugged by everybody - the director, the cast, they all hug you. Have you ever been hugged by a registrar?

Zinn's twenty-odd year-old play, Daughter of Venus, is being produced by Suffolk University and BU's Boston Playwright's Theatre.

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.

I don't think we've seen the whole cow yet, but we're getting pretty close

Sometime last night, after 11:30 PM but before 8:30 or 9:00 this morning, the sixth batch of what Framingham police are calling "mystery meat" appeared on the Framingham Town Common, under a tree.  The police issued a press release.

Some residents have expressed fears that the meat is being left out in order to poison their pets.  Otherwise, the most noteworthy aspect of the affair is the poor quality of the puns it's eliciting from the Boston Globe's readers.

The Taunton Gazette, 50 miles from Framingham, has the most in-depth coverage:

Precinct Seven Town Meeting member Chris Walsh said several people checked the common last night at 11:30 p.m. and it was meat-free.

But today, between 8:30 a.m. and 9 a.m., someone discovered the apparently rotting meat on the common, he said.

"I don't think we've seen the whole cow yet, but we're getting pretty close," Walsh said.

Unlike past weeks where the meat looked like it was recently purchased, Walsh said today's meat looked rotten and had several smaller pieces around it and a pile of gristle.

Speaking to the Globe, Walsh identified part of today's helping as a knee joint.  The Globe has pictures.

In Small Town America . . .

“For five weeks, butcher-quality cuts of red meat - it appears to be beef - have been appearing regularly beneath a tree in the historic Town Centre Common . . .”

Out of Town News Will Close

The Boston Globe reports that Out of Town News in Harvard Square is going to close, another casualty of the decline of print media. Fifteen or twenty years ago you could pick up a pamphlet containing a map of Harvard Square bookstores -- I’d guess few of those stores still exist. The Harvard Bookstore on Mass Ave found a buyer, but Wordsworth is gone. There is no more Cambridge Booksmith, and the Brattle Bookstore has moved from Brattle Square to Downtown Crossing. The Coop these days is run by Barnes and Noble.

I’m obviously not the first person to call it the end of an era. When I was in middle school and high school, every so often I’d take the bus and the El to Center City Philadelphia and walk around for a few hours. I never got lost because I stuck to the Parkway and to the eastern part of downtown where you could still tell where you were, no matter where you were, by looking for the statue of William Penn at the top of City Hall, and every trip included a visit to the multi-story B. Dalton Booksellers whether or not I bought anything there that day. The big bookstore, with a broad range of offerings, where you could pick up some specialized thing you happened to need, or just browse and discover things you hadn’t known you wanted -- it used to be included in the definition of a city, practically -- the city as an intellectual and cultural center, open to everybody.

You might ask me how often did I really shop there, and when was the last time I did? And you’d probably have a point: often enough, probably like lots of other people, I get pleasure from knowing these things are out there more than from really using them. Presumably, that’s the reason why these stores are going out of business in the first place.

But places like Out of Town News were important to me when I was growing up, and at various discrete times in my life. Their demise is not the end of the world. Something will come along to replace them. If it isn’t already here.