Bianca Steele

A Blast from the Past, To Cure Grumpiness

I’ve been in a bad mood for a little over a week.  I think it’s because I’ve still got a copy of Backlash in the house.  Every so often I feel compelled to give it another chance.  I pick it up and flip through it.  Oh, the Republican Party decided it wasn’t so much in favor of abortion rights, equal rights and equal pay for women, or NOW, after all.  I can see how that would be disappointing, especially since it made future legislation more difficult.  But is that evidence that US culture is now “backlash culture,” really?  Or: Oh, in the late 1980s there were very few woman attorneys.  But is that evidence that the number of woman attorneys was actually not increasing, or that by 2000 or 2010 we could still expect to see almost no more women working as attorneys than we saw in 1970?  Or: Oh, here are a small handful of self-help books, summarized at length, that tell women how to attract men who want to marry them; and the writers think being a feminist or speaking your mind won’t do it.  But are they so very different from the self-help books of any other decade?  Are they even typical of the 1980s?  Are they evidence that the feminist-inclined young woman of the 1980s is internally conflicted, demonstrating by her actions and beliefs that she’s under pressure to be less independent and more childlike than she feels is right?  And what’s this “feminist psychotherapy” that the author keeps mentioning but doesn't specify?  And: Why does she mention Moonlighting to talk about media coverage of on-set politics between the director and the stars, but doesn’t discuss the show itself, when (though it was awfully entertaining) it would be a better example of backlash culture than any she’s included?  And how could anyone draw political conclusions from the data point, “male fashion designers aren’t very sympathetic to feminist ideas about fashion”?

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system . . .  I’ll just mention that the second time I picked the book up, someone had said I should read it again, suggesting that there would be some payoff if I read it as evidence for a Marxian or quasi-Hegelian narrative.  And I’ll just say that I tried all the permutations, but none of them worked for me.

I’ve also been grumpy about the bombings at the Marathon.  I live a couple of miles from the marathon route, a couple more miles from the starting line, and like a lot of writers from Hopkinton, where the race starts, it feels irrationally like it hit especially close to home.  Friday seemed quiet, though there couldn’t have been that much of a drop-off in commuter traffic, and apparently traffic on the main roads was still pretty heavy.  Ungraciously, it occurred to me that if Boston and Newton weren’t opened up, people would have to come here to Framingham if they wanted a semblance of night life, and it would be even harder to drive anywhere or get a restaurant table.  And as with the Newtown shootings, and the rape case from India right after it, I haven’t been able to put on NPR the way I like do at lunchtime.

So here are two clips of dances by Mark Morris.  The first, “Dad’s Charts,” is of a solo performance by the choreographer from 1980.  The second, from the Met production of John Adams’ opera Nixon in China, is “The Red Detachment of Women.”  Both are pretty cool.

Faludi’s Backlash contra Carol Gilligan and Difference Feminism

In the comments section of Crooked Timber, in which I mentioned Susan Faludi’s Backlash (first published in 1991), Corey Robin (whose book I really liked) accuses me of talking about a book I’ve only skimmed.  That isn’t true, but I’m not going to argue with him on his blog about the way he teaches the book (though I think it might be useful to raise the question why a partisan contribution to a political debate that’s still going on should be treated as canonical history).

So I borrowed the book from the library for the third time and sat down with it.  Why?  Do I feel guilty for opining on a book I haven’t formed a proper opinion on yet?  No.  Am I going to finish it this time?  Probably not.  But I’m still too annoyed to put it down.  On the one hand, there’s no way in heaven or hell I’m going to be able to read this book without whining in writing about how annoying it is.  On the other hand, if it’s so easy to criticize that I have to ask myself why in the world it was published, why would I want to bother reading it at all?  But having a blog means that whining in my private notes can be transformed into something that seems almost but not quite like useful activity.  Even if nobody actually reads it.

So: one thing, at least, even if the rest of it stays in my scratch files:

(Okay, I feel bad now, because I saw that today is Susan Faludi’s birthday.  Happy Birthday!  But I’m supposed to write a thousand words and then sit on them for twenty-four hours?)

In the couple of hours I spent with the book yesterday, I was intrigued by Faludi’s treatment of Carol Gilligan and her book In a Different Voice [1].  There’s more about this discussion a little farther down, but I wanted to note a paragraph from a review of Backlash, by Jean Bethke Elshtain, in the conservative Catholic magazine, First Things:

“When I was an undergraduate in the 1960s out in the Western provinces (Colorado, it was), my instructors (Democrats to a man, no women in what was called the History and Government Department at Colorado State University in those benighted times) not only encouraged me to make the most of myself, they taught me that conspiracy theory was the hobgoblin of little minds, like those of the local John Birchers. We studied one of their texts in a Government course, unpacking the way the author crossed every t and dotted every i with his overriding paranoid theory, if it may be called that, that the Communists and their dupes ran everything, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. He had lots of facts too. It all made sense—if you shared the initial paranoid starting point. We mocked this stuff and marveled that anyone could believe it. The Birchers were pretty much defeated by this sort of humorous dismissal, as was a local group that launched a campaign against the Beatles as the instruments of Satan.”

In most of the public libraries where I’ve lived since I graduated from college, Elshtain’s books have been shelved under “feminism.”  She is a person whom Backlash does not mention.

The third section of Backlash lists a string of anti-feminist figures of the 1980s, ending with right-wing feminist Sylvia Ann Hewlett (Faludi calls her a “neofeminist”), Second Wave feminist pioneer Betty Friedan, and psychologist Carol Gilligan.  What are Friedan and Gilligan doing there?  Friedan wasn’t willing to give up the idea of traditional femininity that some of her younger colleagues in the movement wanted to reject.  Faludi accuses her of being unaware that her rhetoric is borrowed from the right; and of thinking, or at least writing, in such a muddled way that it’s impossible to tell what she really believes. 

As for Gilligan, on close inspection, the chapter is actually in praise of her.  Faludi begins the discussion by attacking difference feminism, after correctly noting that it was the preferred stance of feminist academics and theorists throughout the 1980s.  She goes on, also largely correctly, to introduce Gilligan as a participant in that same school.  She incorrectly claims that those who championed “difference” tended not to care about equality.  Then she moves on to the media discussion of Gilligan’s work.  At this point, the argument shifts to an attack on the media for taking Gilligan up as an example of their preferred narrative.  For several pages, Faludi discusses Carol Gilligan’s own statements, in which she attempted to show that the broad narrative painted by the media wasn’t an accurate representation of  her work, and a critique by another scholar, pointing out flaws in Gilligan’s research.  (This section could serve as a good illustration of some of the flaws introduced by Faludi’s writing style, which uses the journalistic, faux-objective, non-voice “voice,” in which the point of view and even apparent argument meanders from here to there and back again, following the train of thought of each major source, in turn.)  She concludes that Gilligan’s work is very important, and largely correct, but doesn’t actually make the claims most people (misled by the media) believe it does, and (as shown by Zella Luria’s scholarly critique) properly understood, only makes very modest claims in the first place.

So this chapter, like the rest of the book, is an attack on the mass media for promoting anti-feminism.  It’s not an attack on Carol Gilligan or her work.  It is an attack, also, on difference feminism.  But Gilligan, the only scholar Faludi actually discusses [2], is not (as Faludi argues) a difference feminist[3], and so her work is not part of difference feminism, and so she’s fine.  She’s a victim of the media[4].  It remains unclear why Gilligan was included in the list of horribles at all.  Why not describe a more typical member of the difference-feminist crowd?  Perhaps it’s only because Faludi wanted to write a book about the state of media coverage of feminism in the late 1980s, and Carol Gilligan had gotten a lot of press.

Is it also an attack on difference feminism?  It’s hard to say.  By the end of the chapter (save for a cryptic reference to the feminist scholarly journal, Signs), the reader has forgotten that “feminist scholarship conferences [were] awash in papers on women’s special virtues [emphasis added].”  We’re back to an attack on the media, and the media’s putative invention of an anti-feminist narrative, and an unnuanced defense of “feminism” with no apparent effort to investigate what people mean by the word.  In 1991, to be sure, it could seem unclear whether difference feminism would be a flash in the pan, or whether it would endure.  I’ve never been an enormous fan of it myself.  But it seems unseemly to attack it in the same breath as Hayes Tim and Beverly LaHaye[5].  (Here, as in other places in the book, I imagine I hear Camille Paglia off in the wings, waiting for her cue.)

Moreover, there’s that huge nugget of cultural criticism clogging up the lion’s share of the book.  A commenter at CT pointed out, helpfully, that criticizing popular culture is not, by any means, the only thing Faludi does in Backlash.  But actually doing the math shows that the popular culture section makes up a whopping one-third of a nearly 500-page book.  It comes as the second section of the book, and the first substantial section, following the kind of historical survey that you might find in an academic book, and that many readers will presumably skip.  And much of it consists of the kind of movie and television criticism that is very, very closely affiliated with difference-feminist ideas.  In other words, a difference feminist would agree with what Faludi says in this section.  A difference feminist, talking to another feminist and finding that she disagrees with Faludi’s criticism of the shows she discusses, would point to theories and writings from difference feminism in support of her own views.

I’m not saying that Faludi is arguing in bad faith in either one of those sections.  Here, she appears to be in agreement with what, say, a Second Wave feminist might say: both that difference feminism is wrong and actually anti-feminist, and that those movie and television critiques are actually correct.  Feminism in the 1980s and 1990s was fraught and tangled.  But, also, this puts Faludi in much the same position as Friedan.  Whom she attacked as on a par with Allan Bloom, George Gilder, and Phyllis Schlafly.  Why were these writers included in this book in this way?  And now the reader is back at the beginning again.

 

[1] I look forward to returning this to the library, so my four year old will stop trying to convince me that it’s a book about animals.  Because people don’t have different voices.

[2] She mentions three other books, including Suzanne Gordon’s Prisoners of Men’s Dreams, in introducing the topic, by way of demonstrating that bookstores and publishers were marketing a “difference” narrative.

[3] For what it’s worth, Google Search completion begs to differ.

[4] Says Faludi, who writes for the Wall Street Journal.

[5] Who appear in the index under the name Tim Lataye.

Columbia in the 1980s

From Ginia Bellafante's Big City column in the New York Times yesterday:

If you spent any time in Manhattan during the 1980s, particularly on the Upper West Side, you are likely to recall a recurrent vignette of dissent — the presence of a thin, wiry woman with hair that made emphatic her seriousness, who colonized the sidewalks in what appeared to be a full-time avocation as a crusader against pornography and other forms of sexual degradation. To make her point, she would often have with her a blowup of a notorious Hustler cover that featured an image of a woman who had been plunged headfirst into a meat grinder. Her approach was hardly solicitous; she demanded of those who passed by, “Sign the petition!”

Even then, among my circle of largely earnest college friends in Morningside Heights during the high point of women’s studies, the phrase “sign the petition” became its own circulating laugh line. By the ’80s, and certainly culminating in the ’90s, many young feminists had abandoned the idea that what we really needed to worry about was the violent enmity that men harbored to one degree or another toward women. Misogyny as a conceptual framework through which to view the world was distinctly out of vogue.

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

I’d been putting off buying Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, D.T. Max’s biography of the recently late David Foster Wallace.  But also I was nearly obsessively returning to the Amazon page to reconsider it.  Eventually, needing something nonfiction to read, I gave in.  At one point, I’d seek out and read anything Wallace wrote, but eventually gave that up—the nonfiction first, a lot of which I haven’t read (in this, I’m the opposite of many of Wallace’s fans, especially among journalists, who really adore the nonfiction, and especially the pieces I tend to like least), and eventually the fiction, too—Oblivion doesn’t fall into the category of books I’m going to borrow from the library enough times that I really ought to buy them[1], though actually there are only three stories in the collection that I don’t already have in magazine form.  I’d gone through the same nearly obsessive process with The Pale King, which, similarly, I eventually broke down and read.

It’s not too surprising that the biography itself raises the question whether it really needed to be published, and whether anyone really needs to read it.  The book ends with what for many readers, most probably, will be the starting point from which they decided to pick it up: Wallace’s suicide and what led up to it; and what he had in mind for The Pale King, the unpublished and uncompleted manuscript that would be his final novel.  Most of this material appeared already in Max’s 2009 New Yorker piece. 

The penultimate and antepenultimate chapters, similarly, cover material that is already somewhat familiar to many readers: Wallace’s publications after his blockbuster (in literary terms), Infinite Jest, and the editing process and publicity tour for that novel.  Max actually has little to say about the many stories and magazine articles Wallace wrote after Infinite Jest.  The origin of the Harper’s pieces, which it’s known were much longer in manuscript—and as later published in collection—than as printed in the magazine, if they ever appeared at all—is described; but the editing process is not.  The origin of Wallace’s Dostoevsky piece, a review of a biography by Joseph Frank, is dealt with in some detail, but not the fact that it never appeared in print in any magazine (nor the rumors that it was included in a galley version of Wallace’s first nonfiction collection, which appeared in 1997, and circulated in quasi-samizdat form among some insider fans, but was removed before that book went to press—in fact, no rumors at all of this kind make an appearance in this book[2]).  It’s with the publication of Infinite Jest that the “accepted” biography of David Foster Wallace begins.  As far as what comes after that goes, we know all this, or think we do, and there’s not much a biographer can add.  Max recounts a lot of correspondence between author and agent, or agent and editor, all of it pretty much the same as all the rest.

Wallace’s worldview was pretty much set by that point.  What’s more interesting, or was for me, at any rate (and maybe also for the biographer, who counts The Broom of the System, written while Wallace was still in college and published before he got his MFA, as his favorite book), is what comes before.  Max devotes lots of space to the genesis of Wallace’s early stories and nonfiction articles, and to the interactions with university programs and fellow writers they grew out of, as well as to (in passing) debunking certain myths.

Maybe we really didn’t need to know these things, and so didn’t really need a biography of David Foster Wallace.  His life isn’t really history; it took place very recently, so a book about him is inevitably going to fall into the category of journalism, even of publicity hype.  Looking at it feels a little prurient, like wanting to satisfy our curiosity about any individual person, who deserves their privacy.  We don’t have to satisfy our curiosity about where the novelists writing now are coming from, what they studied at school, who mentored them, or what obstacles they encountered, any more than about their political ideas or whether they consumed illegal substances.  But then again, we really don’t need novels, either.

As far as David Foster Wallace’s early life, influences, and development go, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story is a good, basic biography that gives you all the facts (for the most part).  Wallace was born in New York State and moved to rural Illinois as a small child.  He grew up in a university town and attended public high schools where only some of the students were, like him, faculty kids.  He played competitive tennis.  He watched a lot of TV.  He read a lot.  He drank and smoked pot.  His father, a philosophy professor[3], taught him about philosophy.  He had a complicated relationship with his younger sister, his only sibling.  His mother, a teacher of college composition, really was very insistent on good grammar, and really did cough at the dinner table every time one of her children made a grammatical mistake.  He really did go to Amherst College, and considered going to Oberlin (viz. The Broom of the System, in which a girl rejects Amherst’s sister college for Oberlin after visiting her elder sister there).  He really was in recovery.  He was really hospitalized for depression.  He did take a dual summa in English literature and philosophy.  He did know Mary Karr and Elizabeth Wurtzel.  He went to Yaddo twice.  “E Unibus Pluram” was commissioned by Harper’s but not published by them.  He wrote a good number of book reviews early in his career.  Etc. 

There’s some attempt to place David Foster Wallace as a writer, but Max isn’t a literary critic, and there’s blessedly not too much of it.  There’s no attempt to diagnose him or to subject him to commentary.  Only once does the biographer allow himself to wonder whether a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, rather than depression—which would have necessitated, presumably, a drug different from the Nardil he was prescribed—had been called for, and the question whether Wallace was in therapy for most of his adult life, and if not, how he was getting his prescriptions refilled, is not considered.  The book is sympathetic to the twelve-step movement, in a vague kind of way, and respectful of Wallace’s and his friends’ privacy.

The genesis and development of each of the stories that went into Girl With Curious Hair is described to a significant level of detail.  So is the kind of work that was expected at Amherst and at the University of Arizona.  The classes Wallace took at both places are described, and the kind of work Wallace turned in for them.  His struggles with the curriculum, when it pulled against his intuitions, is described, as well.  Every one of his emotional collapses (as an earlier age would have termed them) is narrated, in its genesis, phemonenology, and eventual resolution.  All of this leads up to the completion of the magnum opus, Infinite Jest, and the apotheosis (whatever his feelings about it) of David Foster Wallace as a teaching writer, albeit an occasionally blocked one, with complex feelings about that blockedness.

Where the book is also useful is in debunking (assuming you think that kind of thing is necessary, or desirable) some of the rumors that swirled around Wallace’s persona—what he called “the statue”—while he was alive.

The “standard, accepted” biography of David Foster Wallace during the time of his greatest fame included the following “facts”: that he had never held a teaching job until after around the time Infinite Jest was published, that everything he wrote about AA was based on research and he was not himself in recovery, that he was a cradle Catholic; that the manuscript of The Broom of the System was accepted at Amherst as a thesis in the department of philosophy, as a text about Ludwig Wittgenstein.  Max’s biography shows all these “facts” to be, in fact, false, and it’s helpful for other areas, too, that simply were never very clear.  On the other hand, other questions, such as the pseudonyms mentioned above, aren’t addressed at all.

On the literary side, the following additional facts, I think, were generally largely accepted: that Wallace’s understanding of literary theory (Derrida, De Man, and so on) was one that had been inculcated in him in the standard undergraduate English literature sequence (and not in philosophy classes, which tend to take a different tack); that he had rejected philosophy for literature and that, if he hadn’t done so, he had certainly rejected technical formal logic and Anglo-American analysis in favor of a more literary and subjective philosophical style; that the beliefs held by the faculty of the University of Arizona writing program were his own (in fact he disagreed with them vehemently and was somewhat miserable there); that the best parts of his early published fiction were written by an author who despised Mark Leyner (in fact, he was a fan, and only turned against Leyner’s kind of writing a bit later).  Some might feel that knowing whether these “facts” were true or false is important for understanding what Wallace wrote.  To my mind, Max’s biography casts them in doubt (even for readers who didn’t already doubt them, as a consequence of having read the texts themselves).   To be fair, Wallace did change his mind (or at least nuance it) about, especially, the purpose of fiction and the best way of writing it; but it is not obvious that he made a complete about-face and came to fully embrace the writing preferred by the MFA program that he attended.  And to my mind, it’s an important fact that for Wallace, unlike many of his peers who came out of English-literature programs, De Man belonged to philosophy and not to literature.

It would be too much to say that this book is going to give ambivalent (or even mourning) readers closure about Wallace and the manner of his death.  It did help me come to grips with the earlier stories, again, after I’d become frustrated with his later ones and with the way he’d become given to speaking about them.  It helped me better appreciate The Broom of the System, which never was one of my favorites.  And it helped to explain why there were parts even of his best work—Infinite Jest and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, in particular—that eventually came to rub me the wrong way, and why the parts I liked best were so often the parts that Wallace himself seemed to disown.

 

[1] Now that I have an e-book reader, though, the criterion has moved from “don’t really really have to have it, but am about to borrow for the third time,” to “would consider borrowing again just for reference, because it looks pretty interesting.”

[2] This is reasonable, actually.  The book is about the writer, not about his readers.  But all except the bare facts of the publication histories of many of the stories that would be collected in Oblivion is excluded here.  And even that’s an exaggeration, unless the fact that some of them appeared under pseudonyms is excluded from the category of “bare fact.”  For instance, “Mr. Squishy,” one of the best stories in the collection, first appeared as the work of “Elizabeth Klemm,” but the name “Klemm,” like the words “pen name” and “pseudonym,” appear nowhere in the book.

[3] If it were my book, I’d have mentioned the fact that one of James D. Wallace’s books (on open stacks in the Boston Public Library in Copley Square) is about the philosophical implications of fiction.  Maybe also the fact that another of his books is on virtue ethics. But it’s not.

Morozov v. Johnson

In the past I’ve found it hard to follow the internal arguments about whether “faith in the Internet” has been somehow inflated.  Besides reviews in magazines, there was Tom Slee’s three-part discussion of Evgeny Morozov’s attempted takedown of enthusiasts, The Net Delusion.  More recently, Morozov wrote a scathing review of Steven Johnson’s book, Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age.  Johnson replied, and Morozov replied to the reply: Johnson “doesn’t understand my critique.”  I don’t think Morozov shows anything of the kind.  What he shows is that Johnson doesn’t accept the assumptions that Evgeny Morozov claims underlie Johnson’s own argument.  Johnson and others describe a more or less loose collection of progressive tendencies that can be enabled either by the Internet or by institutions that are like the Internet in certain relevant ways: he describes what those ways are.  But that isn’t enough for Evgeny Morozov.   He wants to push the idea that there’s a thing called “Internet-centrism,” a real thing, the nature and so on of which he thinks people ought to understand before they dare to talk about its effects publicly.  Yet he himself can’t or won’t explain what he means by it.  Equally, he can’t or won’t find any public, human representative of it who accepts the label for himself.  He uses the word “Internet-centric” like the name of a disease; you wouldn’t expect a sociopath to accept the label for himself, either. 

Some questions about why Morozov comes down so hard on Johnson:

Does Morozov really think Johnson should not have been allowed to write a popular, journalistic book about a contemporary social trend without having first written a Ph.D. dissertation on all the college professors who had imagined and written about the characteristics of not-yet existing social trends, in articles they expected only other college professors to read?  Presumably he would have had to incorporate the dissertation directly into each of his books, as well, or Morozov and other reviewers would have no way of telling whether he’d “done his homework” (in Morozov’s words), or not.

Does Morozov really think it’s unreasonable to write a book on the Internet as a tool, without examining other tools in the same book, and presumably allowing those other tools to come out ahead a proportional number of times?  Does he really think it’s irrational for Johnson to “start with his preferred solution—the ‘Internet’” (what’s with those scare quotes, by the way?), as if the Internet didn’t exist yet and Johnson were proposing it to readers as something they might want to ask their governments to produce?  Someone writes a book that says, “Here’s this great new tool, here are some progressive ways to use it,” and Morozov replies, “Why do you think progressive ways to use this tool will arise without any thought?  Why are you looking at this tool at all?  And ‘great new tool’ is a ridiculously utopian turn of phrase.”

It’s possible to wish someone’s books were a little deeper (why I’ve never gotten around to reading Johnson’s books, or other popular “progressive” books, like Chris Mooney’s, or Chris Hayes’s), and to wish there were a little more available at a level between the absolutely journalistic, book that’s really an article with a lot of filler, and the academic journal article available only to college professors on campuses with enough money in their budgets to spring for free access for everyone to the best academic publishers, without needing to jump to attack an author for not being what he’s not.  This is not going to get us better books.  It’s not going to instigate people like Steve Johnson to “step up his game,” in Evgeny Morozov’s opinion.  It’s going to do the opposite: intimidate writers and suggest they ought to lower their sights, lest they be accused, by the likes of Morozov, of pretending to know what they can’t.

P.S.: I didn’t look up his bio until after I had written the above: Evgeny Morozov is not, as I had assumed from his articles, a grumpy Soviet-trained engineer in his late fifties.  He was born in the same year that I graduated from high school, and graduated from Stanford.  Should that change what I think about what he says?  (Certainly, if his ideas about a thing that exists and is called “Internet-centrism” derive from what he learned from studying cutting-edge research in one of the best universities in the world, that’s very different from whether his ideas about it derive from a half-remembered compulsory study of historical materialism, combined with after-hours bull sessions with fellow engineers on Usenet.)

Antiprise and the Internet

(What’s antiprise?  It’s the opposite of expertise.)

If you’ve been on the Internet in the last couple of weeks, you’ve probably run across playwright David Mamet’s weird screed against gun control and Obama.  Now Andrew Sullivan (late of England’s blessed shores) has weighed in (via LGM and Ta-Nahesi Coates).  As Coates notes, Sullivan presents himself as the Voice of Reason as usual.  He characterizes Mamet’s blather quite correctly: “This is a sentence only a teenage anarchist could write.”  Harsh.

And yet Andrew Sullivan goes on to write nearly 650 words, plus a graph that he apparently has spent the time to work out himself (though maybe he’s had his research assistant do it for him), explaining the actual data that would have to be used in order to support Mamet’s factual claims, and explaining how they actually show Mamet’s factual claims are false rather than true.

So I guess Mamet’s essay wasn’t such a waste of dead trees after all.  It’s served an educational function of its own.  And maybe Sullivan’s attack on Mamet, accusing him of being as sheltered and ignorant as “a teenage anarchist,” isn’t as harsh as it seemed at my first, superficial glance.  Maybe it wasn’t an “attack” at all.  A more charitable reading, one that takes Mamet’s importance in the world of thought into account (and the fact that they're both largely on the same side, politically, and neither gains from making the other really look bad), is that Sullivan is recognizing the fact that obviously Mamet was really covertly dramatizing the thought processes of “a teenage anarchist” with whom he obviously disagrees.  Thus, Sullivan is telling readers what Mamet really intended to convey by the piece: “This is a sentence only a teenage anarchist could write.”  Mamet’s piece is clearly the product of an author who believes the opposite of what he says in the Newsweek piece.  He’s just engaging in division of labor.  The American Prospect is right: Mamet isn’t a political analyst.  What he is, clearly, is a prophet.  He’s harsh, scolding, and factually incorrect so that responsible journalists can be bland and informative.  But he’s the prophet and he gets to claim the moral high ground.

Apparently, the information economy of the Internet is that prophets propose, and crowdsource to bloggers to dispose.

(Irony off.)

Should Framingham Still Be a Town? There's Time to Sign the Petition.

The town I live in Framingham, Massachusetts, is incorporated as a town.  This means it's governed by an elected Board of Selectmen and a Town Meeting (as well as a Town Manager, hired by the Selectmen, and various elected and appointed boards, such as the Board of Health and the School Committee).  While many smaller towns in the area still have a Town Meeting that's literally open to anyone who wants to show up and speak, Framingham (with a population of close to 70,000) has an elected town meeting, in which each precinct elects a slate of meeting members.

There's been agitation for a few years to turn Framingham into a city, with an elected mayor and full-time city council.  I don't know all the arguments the advocates are giving, though I've heard suggestions that it would improve efficiency and accountability.  Marlboro, with slightly over half Framingham's size, has always been a city.  I don't know whether it's felt to work well there or not.

But anyway, I think it's worth airing the issues, and the advocates of charter reform have been trying to get signatures to put the question on the ballot this April.  If it passed (the ballot question, not the petition), a charter reform committee would study the question.  According to this article in the Metrowest Daily News, they have until Feb. 5 to get 5,544 signatures, a little over ten times as many as they already have.  If you want to sign and haven't yet, I suppose, you can contact them, or go find the guy who stands in front of Stop & Shop.

Thomas Friedman thinks corporations are people.

In today’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman’s op-ed calls for real collaboration in Washington, like there is in Silicon Valley.  He quotes “an expert on networks who has been involved in several successful startups,” who notes the need for “collaboration both within and between firms,” where “’collaboration’ is defined as something you do with another colleague or company.”  Then Friedman goes on to contrast this with Washington, where it’s known that “collaboration” means always and only working with the enemy.  Silicon Valley gets things done, and Washington (especially nowadays) doesn’t.  So Friedman calls for Washington types to learn from Silicon Valley . . .

. . . but he doesn’t mention people collaborating anywhere in the essay.  Instead he talks about corporations collaborating with one another.  It seems that the idea of individuals, employees, being important, is something he actually can’t begin to imagine.  The people he mentions are: a corporate vice president, the founder of an energy company, a co-founder of LinkedIn, and the current CEO of the same company.  CEO’s and heads of marketing, in the world of the New York Times Business Section (written largely for people who aren’t themselves in business, but want to feel culturally au courant about the economy, as well as the theatre), are the only individuals who matter.

I could go all critical-theoretical, and claim that Friedman is telling us a little bit about The Truth about how the economy works, who is really important in Society right now, and so on and so forth.  But why would you want me to?  Does Thomas Friedman know anything about this world that he hasn’t read in the New York Times, himself?  Why should you, or I, believe that what he says has a basis in anything except his own head?

Finally, two paragraphs before the end of his essay, he mentions developers, the people who do the collaborating.  He refers to a corporation’s “developer community,” people who aren’t formally affiliated with the corporation, and who (if they get paid at all) aren’t paid by the corporation.  They use the software developed inside the corporation—by employee developers—who do, Virginia, exist—in order to produce consumer tools, or the kinds of tools they themselves would like to use, and they’re motivated by enthusiasm for the platform software, and by the wish to create something cool.  But this is not the only model for a company.  It isn’t even the concept Friedman started out with, about five paragraphs back.  Again, I could ask what Friedman may be trying to tell us, by saying this thing that I think is wrong (or, he could argue, that I didn’t already know, that had never occurred to me before).  But why?  What is it that’s supposed to have earned a reader’s trust?

The fact that he doesn’t seem to know this, that it isn’t at all obvious that he knows anything at all about the subject he’s writing on, beyond what a handful of sources, cabdrivers, and people at cocktail parties have mumbled in his presence, has already put me off.  Just in this same paragraph, he seems not even to know that “the developer community” and “headhunters” are different groups of people.  I suppose that a New York Times op-ed writer may be assumed to know the difference.  But the fact remains he wrote a confusing paragraph that doesn’t sufficiently distinguish between them.  No composition teacher would permit this degree of confusion.  Again, why is he supposed to have earned the readers’ trust?

I can only suppose that he really does think corporations are people, and that he understood the quote at the beginning of his essay in precisely that sense.

The Cookbook Collector, by Allegra Goodman

Here is the final installment of “Summer Boston Books,” a semi-review of The Cookbook Collector, by Allegra Goodman.  I’ve already written a little about The Cookbook Collector here and here.

As I mentioned in those posts, The Cookbook Collector is an overstuffed novel of a type that could be called a “social novel” (though see below), or, about equally well, a “women’s novel.”  The central plot strands revolve around two sisters, now living in Berkeley and Silicon Valley, but originally from Massachusetts.  Jessamine, or Jess, is a graduate student in philosophy, struggling to keep on top of her school work, her relationships, and her job at an antiquarian bookshop.  Emily, her older sister, is the CEO of a software startup.  Both women are marked by the death of their mother, so early that Jess has hardly any memories of her.

Emily’s fiancé is also a software executive, at a company in Cambridge, founded by friends of his from graduate school at MIT, on the basis of a project they began there.  They’re tenuously carrying on a long-distance relationship.  Jess has recently begun dating a celebrity in the world of environmentalism, and trying to fit into his way of life.  Her boss, George, doesn’t approve of him—or of her, much of the time, though he finds her paradoxically charming.  George was once a sort of hippie, then a graduate student and ultimately Ph.D. in physics, then a Microsoft employee and ultimately millionaire, and now an independently wealthy bachelor with eighteenth-century tastes.  (The reader might be reminded of Douglas Coupland’s novel, Microserfs, in which a similar life arc is taken by much younger characters.)  In politics, he tends libertarian.  In culture, he prefers the tried and true, especially the eighteenth century.  In lifestyle, he prefers the expensive.

The plot’s set in motion when Jess needs a few thousand dollars to invest in the “sure thing” represented by the Friends and Family program for the impending public stock offering of her sister’s company.  She ends up going to her neighbor’s rabbi for a loan.  The Bialystokers are an outside-looking group apparently modeled on the Lubavitch.  Eventually, unable to pay the money back, she’ll feel compelled to keep visiting the Bialystokers, if only out of politeness.  At about the same time, George is approached by a woman with a large collection of antique books on cookery.  He’s initially wary, but eventually is drawn in.

If you’ve guessed the ending already, you’re probably right.  But the journey there is enjoyable and the included side trips are worth the fare.

The software-startup strands of the plot are forward-looking.  George, on the other hand—computer guy that he is—is entirely backward looking.  He has renovated his house, which is an architecturally significant example of the Arts and Crafts style, so that everything but the kitchen is appropriate to the time at which it was built.  He collects old books and counts himself a connoisseur of the best things of the past.  He’s a recognizable type: someone who’s made a lot of money in technology and uses it to finance a lifestyle that’s as close as possible as he could come to a fairly traditional one (a privileged version of a traditional lifestyle, that is).

(There are MINOR SPOILERS below this point.)

The writing style is elegant, but fairly dry (a welcome change from the British novels I’ve been reading, which tend toward the extreme of the strictures set out by writing-instruction books, heavy on concrete images and shy of the more leisurely kinds of prose).  Thus, in so far as there’s a love story embedded in this novel, there end up being two ways of reading that love story.  In other words, some readers will feel that the characters who get together are pretty amazing, that they’re essentially made for each other, and that it’s totally understandable why they fell; but others may feel that they’re acting on a whim or another irrational emotion, and that things will never work out.  In this way, The Cookbook Collector is like the Jane Austen novels that George loves.  Can a modern reader really believe that Mr. Darcy (in Pride and Prejudice) or Mr. Knightley (in Emma) is such a good catch?  Are we simply used to thinking of a marriage as the happy ending to this kind of story, or can we show that Darcy and Knightley are, as depicted by their author, really good?  (There’s an interesting connection here to Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, which begins with Madeleine’s student preoccupation with this traditional novel form, which she’s been taught is nowadays impossible.)

The novel builds to the economic problems that began, in high-tech industries, in 2000.  Some characters get out of that crisis okay, some more than okay.  Some end up in something close to dire straits.  Whether or not this was the novelist’s intention, it’s difficult not to see the causes of these different ultimate fates in their differing individual choices.  The Cookbook Collector is not a “social” novel in the sense of telling us about society.  Goodman doesn’t detail elements of the software industry that link it up with the wider society (with minor exceptions like the East Coast MIT-venture capital link), or the elements in that wider society that impact on the people who work in the industry (again with exceptions like global terrorism and yuppiedom).  The novelist is concerned, rather, with the human factors—virtues and vices, greed, pride, lust—that affect their ability to cope, to work together, and generally to live their lives, without unbearable angst.

I would have liked to see the business elements of the novel placed in some kind of context, though.  We start the book in medias res, with two of the major characters already highly placed in different software startups on different coasts, in 1999.  We end it in 2002, when the principals’ dreams of outrageous fortunes have become a little less rosy.  What we don’t see is the recession.  Noticing that the rest of the economy is missing brings to the foreground the fact that the rest of the high-tech industry is missing too.  The novel focuses on what’s interesting or “sexy.”  That means the rich and fabulous, on the one hand, and what’s in the news, on the other.  Goodman seems to want to make large statements about what it’s like to work in that economy, however, and the missing pieces make for a misleading whole.

The overall effect is to connect the characters’ reversals of fortune to their personal failings alone.  A focus on individuals and their personal growth into (or out of) the environment that surrounds them is appropriate to the traditional social novel.  On the other hand, the attempt to convey a larger message, which is also present here, is undercut.  And there were plenty of people who were also in dire straits by 2002, merely because they had associated themselves with companies that later failed, and not through any vices of their own.  Those people are missing, and to the extent one assumes that they’re present implicitly, the implications are more than a little insulting to them.

Nor does Goodman manage to avoid—entirely—the literary cliché by means of which science and engineering types (or those who inadvisedly associate themselves with such) are rescued from the commercial world, either through art or through their recognition of the horror that world seems to them to entail.

At first, Goodman’s novel seemed to make a refreshing change from books like Diane Johnson’s L’Affaire or Ellen Ullman’s The Bug (the latter by a former programmer herself, the former by a literature professor).  Both of those are framed as events that have already happened, to a protagonist who has already abandoned the field for less specialized pursuits.  Johnson sets her character’s newly found (American) wealth against the context of the mostly European, mostly leisure-based society in which she’s beginning to move.  In Ullman’s novel, the pressures of the commercial-industrial world compel the narrator’s break with that world, to preserve her own sanity.  The Cookbook Collector, a little more novelistically, externalizes that kind of conflict by displacing it from within the protagonists’ psyches to inter-sibling conflict within a family.  Yet by the end of the novel, more than one of the characters (pretty much all the sympathetic ones) has similarly left in disgust.

I like this novel and would recommend it without reservation.  I think the questions Gabriel Brownstein raised about why The Cookbook Collector was not generally discussed as on a level with Freedom and The Marriage Plot are valid.  That it left me wishing for more is not necessarily a bad thing.

September DVDs

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.  About half of this was pretty good, not amazing but better than I'd expected from the reviews, though with a long stretch in the middle that was frankly kind of boring.  Wall Street was one of the first movies I saw after I graduated from college, and I had forgotten some things.  I don’t know whether Stone was as into the paranoid style as he later became, but if he was, at the time I didn’t notice it.  He’s really playing with the idea of leverage and self-dealing and so on.  Lots of Oedipal drama.  Is it accidental how much Josh Brolin resembles Oliver Stone?  The film tries to load a lot of significance on the financial shenanigans themselves (i.e., not just the characters’ motivations, like greed and ambition), which I wasn’t convinced by.  But there were the beautiful, beautiful shots of New York architecture.

Inside Job: a documentary about the 2008 financial crisis and the takeover of the US (and world) economy by finance: This was better than I expected, less sleep-inducing by far than the middle swath of Money Never Sleeps.  At one point towards the end, it came down a little too hard on the Obama administration for my taste.  “It’s a Wall Street government” is a severe exaggeration.  While the logic behind the administration’s selection of Geithner, Summers, et al., for high-ranking positions, seems inexplicable, it also isn’t obvious what the alternative is supposed to be.  The harshness of the rest I agreed about.  There was a clear explanation of derivatives, and of credit-default swaps.  I thought to myself, finally, I’ll understand how credit-default swaps make sense.  That isn’t quite how it turned out.  Much focus in the film on how it was claimed that they were reducing risk, by increasing risk, which is obviously impossible.

I chose both IJ and MNS because Netflix suggested one to me after I’d selected the other, and I never went back and groomed my list.  I learned a lot from IJ, but to be honest, I’m tired of all financial crisis, all the time.  Surely there’s something else to be politically engaged about. 

Unstoppable: A pretty good train movie.  One of the last films by the late Tony Scott, one of several films he made with Denzel Washington.  And almost exactly the same movie as The Taking of Pelham 123, which he remade immediately before he filmed Unstoppable.  As I said, not bad—but the human-interest elements struck me as a little odd.  Did I hear correctly when one of the older engineers complained that the new, very young conductor was “union” and had gotten his job because he belonged to a family that was very, very influential in the company?  That the older guys were non-union, and were angry that the corporation was pushing them out in favor of guys who were younger, because those younger guys belonged to the union?  And why would the engineers be in a rivalry with the conductors, anyway?  But I liked the ponytailed cracker technician who saved the day, pretty much.  I assume this was, if anything, a comment on the efficiency of pencil-necks vis-à-vis enormous, beer-guzzling doofuses, rather than something having to do with generational or geographical difference.

How Do You Know:  Wow.  In anticipation, an airplane movie; in retrospect, not even.  This was almost interesting, in an abstract history-of-film kind of way, for two reasons:  First, the dialogue at times seemed to strain for a kind of Nora Ephron-like quality that the film couldn’t sustain.  It’s not fair to put this on the actors (though this is probably what most people think when they watch actors who’ve been put into this kind of situation).  Someone should have thought these things through (and it’s the director’s responsibility, in the end).  You need some kind of serious set-up before an audience will believe a woman taking an hour-long bus ride to the apartment of a near stranger, just so she can charge her phone.  You need some kind of set-up to explain why she takes her not-yet-charged cell phone off of the power cord when it rings, so she can humorously lose the connection.  You really can’t convince an audience that a National League pitcher is allowed to have bangs that fall into his eyes.  Second: These characters were so shallow, and their lives were so privileged, that it almost seemed to be an intentional satire, taking to extremes the unsaid realities behind many films that try to make their characters seem, as much as possible, to be ordinary.  They lived in fabulous apartments in fabulous buildings.  They hung out with fabulous people at fabulous restaurants.  They didn’t do much with their days (at least that we see).  All they seemed to do was make plans to go out at night.  I can’t think of any movie where the characters were so strenuously shallow (granted that my movie-viewing isn’t exhaustive), since Less Than Zero.  And that was based explicitly on a Bret Easton Ellis novel.  I don’t think this was the intention here.

Two Stories About Property Rights

First, David Koch (the Koch brothers’ other brother) has asked the government for a land swap that would grant him some lands that are currently public.  The swap would apparently take a corridor of land that has been used as a path into the mountains for more than a hundred years, making the land the path lies along into private property.  Some locals are trying to have the swap blocked.  I’m not a lawyer, but I would have thought that rights-of-way would have some influence in this case.  Yet these aren’t mentioned in the Times story.  Maybe things haven’t gotten to that stage yet.  The controversy seems to revolve solely over ownership. 

The second case, on the other hand, in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, appears to involve deeded rights of access to the beach.  Some neighbors whose land is attached to such rights have built walls that block access for the others.  (In one case, according to the Globe’s reporting, a new deed appears to have been filed that includes more access to the beach than the seller had the right to transfer.)  People who bought beach houses believed they had acquired, with those houses, rights of access to a particular shared section of the beach.  These rights were enumerated in their deeds.  Now, a few of the people who bought houses in the same area seem to have decided they should be able to build on, and to block off from their neighbors as if it were individually owned private property, the part of the beach that was next to their own land. 

From a Really, Really Big Picture point of view, this case might seem to be very similar to the various historical enclosures of various commons, mostly in England.  These took land which all people had a right to use in common, for instance to graze livestock, fenced it, and made it private property.  This process represented an enormous change in the way the economy of England (and the whole of the West) would end up operating.  I suppose it’s arguable that there was no stopping it.  So, from this Really, Really Big Picture point of view, perhaps the Falmouth case is the same.  A rich person took some land that used to be held in common by a group of people, and now it belongs to the rich person: that’s the end of that. 

On the other hand, it doesn’t seem quite legal.  The neighbors, presumably, wouldn’t themselves own Falmouth beach houses unless they were also fairly well off (and judging from what the Globe has reported happening so far, they seem to have the resources to fight this thing).  They’re not exactly peasants, with no written-down property rights and no formal connection to the government, who by virtue of the solely oral nature of their connection to society can have taken away what little they’re—temporarily, an opponent might argue—currently making use of.  It might be difficult for farmers in Colorado, for example, to see themselves making common cause with a bunch of people who are trying to regain beach rights (and I don’t know whether they are also fighting for public rights, such as between the lines of low and high tide, if those were traditionally granted in the area in question either).  But it seems to me that the issues are the same. 

At Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram has written a couple of times about John Rawls’ idea of a property-owning democracy.  Obviously, a property-owning democracy only works if each property owner can defend his own rights against encroachment by their fellow members of the society.  If the society operates under the rule of law, in other words.  A few years ago, a discussion at the same blog of a book by Steven Teles, called The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, was eye-opening, for me, about the difference between what I supposed was the openness of the law to use by ordinary people, and what is now the case.  This seems to be relevant too.  

Also relevant is the status of the common law.  Somehow—probably largely from watching The Paper Chase—I’d gotten the idea that the common law was very important in the United States.  But checking more recently, for example, in reference books, I read lots of things that suggested I’d been under a misapprehension.  And regardless of the status of the common law in, for example, federal law, I don’t know how Colorado ranchers would view it.  Is the common law, for them, a bulwark against the tyranny of government?  Or, is it “federal” interference with their local rights?

Scandals

If you follow these kinds of things, you know that there have been a number of plagiarism scandals in journalism recently, particularly in the zone where journalism intersects with book publishing, punditry, and celebrity.  The most notorious of these might be the case of Jonah Lehrer, who was discovered to have been reusing passages from his books in writing for magazine publishers that he represented as new, and to have also both fabricated quotations and used someone else’s work without acknowledgement (ironically, he had just written a book arguing that there is little difference between creativity and borrowing from others).  The most recent of these have involved Fareed Zakaria, a foreign policy analyst and journalist who’s made a bigger name for himself discussing the issues surrounding the War on Terror, and Niall Ferguson, a British and now American historian who to a non-academic’s eyes seems to have moved very quickly from writing a popular book on history to pronouncing on US domestic policies (weighing in heavily on the side of the GOP).

Not surprisingly, the scandals have raised the question of “the blogosphere” or “the Internet” as the putative cause of everything that’s wrong with our public culture.  Henry Farrell, at Crooked Timber, instead questions the culture of paid speeches, but his links focus more conventionally on the state of journalism and its infiltration from below by amateurs without academic or journalistic credentials, and without editors keeping them in line.  (This is going to be much longer than I thought it would be when I started it, and I may have to cut it short to keep it from expanding so broadly that I’ll never be able to finish it.)

Even from the outside, it looks like this has been building for a long time.  It had been building even before Jonah Lehrer was forced to resign from the New Yorker and had his book pulled from the stores by his publisher.  There seems to be an increasing intolerance of what many people realize is, in most cases, considered unacceptable—but which, in some cases, the people in charge seem often to ignore.  Arguments like “this is how it’s always done” aren’t persuading, and the issue doesn't seem to be fading.  Instead, each successive case is worse than the one before, and more and more pressure is being brought to bear, earlier and earlier.

Dan Drezner points out that the dynamic is different from what it might otherwise be because there’s a reliance on bloggers like Evgeny Morozov (whom he mentions) and Ed Champion (whom he doesn’t).  Many (including Drezner, in a passage he quotes by another writer) have pointed out that some of the pressure is coming from reporters who are lower on the food chain, doing what reporters do and holding powerful people to account for what they say, but at the same time (in part because the lowest tier of reporters are often associated with online entities these days) there’s an appearance that the only ones complaining are the ones whose career—probably self-proclaimed and unremunerated—exists only in the digisphere.  Morozov and Champion are guys who fit into the online culture, and who do a lot of good work.  It’s true that they are, at times, very aggressive by academic or ordinary journalistic standards.  At the same time, though, their failure to meet those standards isn’t entirely obvious.  My sense as regards Champion’s Reluctant Habits blog, which I’ve read more than I’ve read Morozov, is that he’s perfectly able to do serious criticism and interviews without taking a bite out of someone.  When he goes on the attack, he seems to give as good as he gets, and he looks like he’s trying (in the same way as Morozov) to uphold certain standards that others aren’t in a position to defend so assiduously.  The guys at the top of the food chain are frequently just as aggressive as they are.  As Drezner points out, the whole “I blame the Internet” meme is practically mooted solely by Ferguson’s treatment of Paul Krugman—who as a New York Times columnist, Princeton University professor, and winner of the Nobel Prize is not exactly a liberal blogger ranting about the news in his pajamas, as Niall Ferguson knows perfectly well—yet even if criticism from the blogosphere is of lesser value, somehow, than criticism from anywhere else, it’s hard to see why aggressiveness ought to be the criterion by which they’re condemned.

Anyway, the cases of Zakaria and Ferguson seem very different.  Zakaria, it seems, although he earned a Ph.D., went straight into journalism and used his expertise to inform his work in producing reporting for the general public.  He never produced an academic book.  All his work with editors and readers came while he was working as a magazine writer.  Ferguson, on the other hand, worked for decades as a professor in academia, and developed habits and expertise related to academia, very specifically.  It was only afterward that he began writing books for a popular audience and working with non-academic editors and with general-interest magazines.  Even if the kinds of differences each ran up against, between how academic and journalistic research and writing regards the use and acknowledgement of sources, were the same, it would be surprising if the ways they each encountered those differences—and the errors they made as a result—were identical in each case.

Zakaria has always written on the same kind of thing, for the most part.  That’s not true of Ferguson.  Zakaria had a very specific take on current events (specifically, US relations with the Islamic world), which was clearly disputed by many educated people, but which was equally clearly informed by Zakaria’s knowledge of the scholarly literature.  Ferguson, on the other hand, has moved back and forth between a narrowly academic subject matter (the history of economics and banking, particularly with reference to the outbreak of war in 1914) and more popular works on everything that might be said about the twentieth century as a whole and what led up to it.  The War of the World, his book on World War II (which I haven’t finished, and which I only found out just now, from Wikipedia, was also a BBC television production) seems to be cut from two different kinds of cloth.  There are the sections that draw very broad conclusions about the world in general, and the course of history, and there are the in-depth accounts of very specific aspects of the war.  To me, the latter are more interesting, but as far as I know books like this one aren’t peer-reviewed, and as a student of history, I wouldn’t take them as gospel.  I would expect to find that the jury is still out on any issue raised by those sections that are even the slightest bit controversial.  I feel less comfortable (though this might be a very personal feeling) assuming what Ferguson says is a reliable statement of any kind of academic consensus than I do with Zakaria.

In comments at Crooked Timber, Ferguson was compared to Christopher Hitchens, which I think is rather telling.  It seems to me that Hitchens can’t really exist in a world in which Ferguson can write an article like the one in Newsweek (which, if you haven’t been following the story, and didn’t look it up already, seems indisputably to cross well over the line that divides “contentious description of disputed fact” from “blatant misrepresentation for which no excuse is given beyond the right of a partisan to break the rules of grammar in order to make the worse argument appear to be the better one”).  Hitchens’ aggressiveness is linked to his not being an academic.  It also depends on his assurance that people like Ferguson will tell the truth in an objective, academic and nonpartisan way, that he will not shade the truth to fit some agenda or other.  Hitchens did not do what Wikipedia would term “original research” (at least in the pieces I read by him, most of which I enjoyed and learned from); he analyzed and reported on what other people (researchers and critics) wrote, drawing on his general knowledge of the world and the places those other people occupied within it.  He doesn’t seem ever to have tried to do both.  He doesn’t seem to have believed both were possible.

Also: I don’t know if Drezner has gotten the target audience of Esquire quite right.  The 1%?  Really?

Two Excuses

In the city section of the New York Times this past Sunday, Ginia Bellafante had a column on the recent child sex abuse scandals involving two prominent private high schools, Horace Mann in the Bronx and Poly Prep in Brooklyn.  She writes, in part, concerning the defense made to the papers by some of those now accused of having had sexual relations with underage students over the past several decades:

“In this strain of exoneration, the rhetoric of the sexual revolution confused things. All sex was liberating. If you lived in Fairfield County, Conn., in 1975, you expressed your autonomy by sleeping with your husband’s tennis partner. As Estelle Freedman, a Stanford University historian who has written about sexual violence, put it, the danger is that ‘a deregulatory impulse could mask the question of consent.’

One problem with an argument like Mr. Lin’s is the extent to which it belies the secrecy surrounding the kind of encounters he describes. If things had, in fact, been as open, freewheeling and inoculated from reproof as he and others might have chosen to believe, then the sex that transpired between teachers and students would not have happened so clandestinely, with wrenching admissions and discussions arriving only 20 and 30 years later.”

But she alludes to two different—contradictory—explanations for what happened.  On the one hand, supposedly, everyone was sexually restrained, even puritanical, until the 1960s came along.  According to this explanation, the children who were abused in the Horace Mann and Poly Prep cases were victimized by the predictable, natural consequences of their elders’ sins; the Baby Boomers threw off the restraints cultivated over the previous centuries, and while they often paid a price themselves at the time, their children paid a severer one in the succeeding decades.  (This seems to be a common theme in some parts of contemporary literature.  Michael Houllebecq, for example, has explained his own relationship difficulties and his artistic preoccupation with them as blowback from the changes inflicted on his generation by his parents’.)

On the other hand, there is the argument that in the old days—before feminism, one supposes—it was expected that teenage girls (and, in some cases, boys) would be as available to older people, for sexual purposes or at least for flirting, as those in their twenties.  An viewpoint like this one seems to be held by the lawyer who, as quoted in Bellafante’s column, “said in an interview that ‘people had very different understandings of what sexual abuse was in the ’60s and ’70s and what a pedophile was.’”  From such a point of view, presumably it might be considered odd or unusual for a sixteen year old girl to fail to respond sexually to the advances of a man ten or even thirty years her senior.  What comes to mind is Freud’s refusal to believe that a girl who had attracted the attention of one of her father’s friends could actually not want him sexually, his insistence that her problem was not the friend’s persistent abuse, but her refusal to acknowledge emotions that he believed she ought to feel.  Those who make this argument usually imply that the practice goes back decades, if not centuries—and this is probably true—in some circles.

For some reason this makes me think of the joke called “The Aristocrats.”

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?

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.