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.

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.

Where Is Lucius Fox’s Army of Off-the-Books Engineers and Metalworkers? Or: The Geography of Gotham.

I guess he builds them all with his own hands, just like Bruce Wayne built the first batsuit.

SPOILERS FOLLOW.  Seriously, do not read further if you don’t want to know.

 

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.”

Why I’m glad I don’t subscribe to HBO (UPDATED)

Because I’d be tempted to watch the new Aaron Sorkin series, The Newsroom.  I kind of liked The West Wing, though towards the end I was watching in the hope they’d bring Mary-Louise Parker’s character back, and Josh post-Leo’s chastising/anointing of him as a successor was becoming slightly annoying.  I even enjoyed Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, though Emily Nussbaum has it about right when she calls that show “horrible and fascinating.”  And I enjoyed The Social Network, regardless of its mistakes.

But, on the other hand, the preview-reviews of Newsroom seem to be converging on the show as middlebrow and excessively self-important, and these adjectives seem all too likely to be accurate.  Are we really being treated to a rewriting of Broadcast News in which the Albert Brooks character—the real journalist—has disappeared, and we’re actually supposed to take William Hurt’s airhead of a pretty-boy anchorman seriously as a commentator on politics and world events?  I’m pretty sure that’s not how the flashforward at the end of that movie has things turning out.  On the other hand, I was talking with a friend about the movie, which I’d seen shortly after I’d graduated from college (in 1987).  When I asked him why he thought Holly Hunter’s character (Jane Craig, the newsroom producer) cried for no apparent reason, at several times throughout the show, he didn’t hesitate.  It was because she was on the wrong track and deep down she knew it.

I didn’t look up Sorkin’s Wikipedia page until after I’d finished my post on The Social Network.  That was when I found out that the people whom Eisenberg’s dialogue in that movie most reminded me of had not only gone to the same high school Sorkin did (Scarsdale), just a couple of years after he graduated, but like him, had participated in the school’s drama program.  So, for me, that dialogue didn’t register as “Asperger’s” or “computer geek” but—especially in the character’s willingness to say those things straight to a woman’s face—the kind of suedo-intellectual, pseudo-Sartrean self-described “brutal honesty” not uncommon among undergraduates of all varieties.

One of those people was the man who told me he had Jane Craig down cold.  I never actually, as it turned out, spent much time around entertainment-industry people (which might explain his uniqueness), but of all the people I’ve ever known with some pretention to know a little bit about film, theater, or television (which he’d studied in university), he had absolutely the worst taste.  Middlebrow?  That’s probably a good word for it.  He gushed over the moral sophistication of Enemy Mine.  He gushed, similarly, over The Company of Wolves.  His hero was Stephen Spielberg, who made money because he made movies people like.  I don’t know how much more middlebrow you can get than that.  Like Sorkin, apparently (see the piece by David Haglund in Slate), he thought of himself as high-minded without being high-brow—unless you can be highbrow and at the same time mouth the moral pieties that will make the majority feel good about themselves.

Anyway, now everything Sorkin touches will remind me of him, and that’s not what anyone wants.

Writing in the Atlantic, on the other hand, Alyssa Rosenberg seems to complain that Sorkin is not middlebrow enough.  (Nussbaum makes a similar complaint.)  She goes beyond my friend’s worship of the market with its razzle-dazzle valuelessness to a kind of deep populism that redefines “what will make money” as “what is really good.”  Sorkin makes fun of cable news, with its partisan polarization, but according to Rosenberg this is what most people like, and they have good reasons to do so.  Sorkin, therefore, is explicitly making fun of his own audience, insulting them to their faces.  I tend to think Rosenberg is tying herself up in knots to make her argument here, because Sorkin most likely not only isn’t making fun of the vision of the world she alludes to, but in fact has probably never actually heard of it.  If she’s right, however, then maybe Sorkin isn’t so middlebrow after all—or maybe Rosenberg has touched on the possibility of a kind of art that eludes all our categorizations so far.

In her review, Nussbaum complains, in part, that the female characters, and their interactions with the men, are stereotyped and vaguely offensive.  She has a point; the same thing over and over again would quickly become tiresome.  If the stories are good, though, it sometimes is actually possible to ignore what gender the characters are, and how they treat their significant others in the mandatory romantic subplots needed to make sure the show has enough “adult” content, and pay attention to something different for a change.

UPDATE:  HBO has decided to do an end-run around my cancellation of their service by making the first episode of the series available online for free.  Oh, well.  Anyway, this article by NPR blogger Linda Holmes is also very good (she says the first episode is easily the best of the four that have been distributed to critics).  So, shall I download the episode to my iPod Classic?

Roth, Pynchon, and Lethem as 9/11 Novelists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you feel about the word inspired?

My freshman year in college, my roommate and I both were prospective English majors and writers/journalists.  She had a lot more experience than me, however: more preparation for college-level study of literature, and a better idea about how to write.  One day she came back to the room and announced that, after having struggled to find a topic for an essay, she was inspired.  Sounded reasonable to me.  But, some time later, I tried the same thing on a guy who lived in the same dorm as us, down the hall.  It was the first snowfall of the year, my first snowfall in New York, and I had gone for a walk down Broadway to get a sandwich at Mama Joy’s, and was when I came back, I told him, “inspired.”  His reaction was scorn.  “Inspired?  What does that mean?”  I was tongue-tied; I didn’t know what inspired really meant, or why it was a good thing with reference to essay-writing.  Since then, I’ve been leery of the word.

John Holbo over at Crooked Timber isn’t afraid of it, though, apparently.  And he’s a philosophy professor, so he should know.  He’s also got a good post about why the conservative arguments against health care reform are silly.