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.

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.)

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.

Okay, Now I Know what 'Mansplaining' Means

This is hilarious (h/t New Apps blog):

At a major conference I attended as a PhD student, I presented a paper on a fraction of my research in hybrid digital and human networks. As the panel concluded, an angry man approached me and accused me of “using” “his” work without citing him. Between the shouting and gesturing, I came to understand that he believed the only possible source of one of my presentation examples was his (unpublished) research. As a novice scholar, I was too stunned by the aggression and implicit accusation to do more than stand there. Eventually he stormed off promising to follow up. A few days later, he emailed me a citation of a forthcoming journal article he had co-written. In his email he insisted I either cease discussing the broad topic or refer to his work *whenever* I did. He also demanded I *never* return to that particular conference to engage in similar discussions. 

I also liked the post titled “Home Economics Is Roughly the Same as Electrical Engineering.”  I’ve actually had the contrary experience.  Someone on a listserv once took the time to e-mail me off-list to explain that when he thinks of engineering, what he thinks of is in fact EE, and that to him software engineering is more on a par, probably, with “domestic engineering”—which I suppose is basically home ec (rather than “social engineering” done by the NSA, as opposed to CIA, or something).  And then again it could have been a woman letting me know what the dominant male culture thinks of what I do for a living.  Really, it could have been. 

On the other hand, some people are just jerks.  I’ve heard similar behavior to some of this—a college junior saying, “if you want to know everything there is about cryptography, come see me, because I did a research paper on it last year,” announcing this to a whole room of undergraduate and graduate students, and at least 80% men.  I’m sure that in private women get a lot more of it, and unattached from any kind of friendly rivalry where the same would be expected in return.  But a lot will be new to people who haven’t thought about it before. 

Also this one.  I have to say, if I ran across that on the Internet (rather than a close friend on Facebook whose judgment I trusted in other things), I’d assume the guy was either mentally disturbed or a character in a Harry Frankfurt essay (that link only works sometimes for me, try this if it doesn't).  At least on Facebook you could ignore the guy, instead of feeling you had to defend your honor and reputation by refusing to let him get the best of you.

Another Scandal: Excessively Nice Critics (UPDATED)

I learned a lot about writing about other people’s books from Daniel Mendelsohn, especially his early essays in the New York Review of Books.  Here, in a blog at the New Yorker, he takes on the recent “niceness” scandal in literary reviewing.  Mendelsohn provides a useful overview and gives all the relevant links, but he also kind of glibly runs through a series of views that he obviously doesn’t have sympathy with.

Mendelsohn asks what is the function of criticism.  Again, he doesn’t really engage sympathetically with the other, mostly younger critics he whose views he discusses, and with which he disagrees.  One doesn’t have to think of critics as “harmful parasites” (an idea he attributes to his colleague Richard Brody, at the New Yorker) to recognize that their writing has a secondary function, while the works they discuss have the primary one.  Sure, you could come up with a theory whereby critics play the leading role, with artists existing only to give critics something to do, but you would be pretty silly to do it.  I suppose you could think of critics as engaged in exactly the same practice as, say, novelists (composers and choreographers seem to me a harder sell), only doing it in a different way.  But where do you stop?  Are science fiction writers engaging in science?  Is Ben Mezrich (author of Bringing Down the House and The Accidental Billionaires) engaging in applied mathematics research, casino security, and business administration?  Why not say readers are engaging in the same pursuit as novelists and literary critics, every time they read a novel?   (That’s a nicely Talmudic idea, in fact: reading as prayer as work.) There’s a point, it seems to me, when you have to stop doing one thing and start doing the other one, when you have to realize that there’s a limitation that applies to one pursuit that doesn’t apply to the other.  If criticism is the same as art, then a critical essay can do everything a novel does.

Dale Peck is the poster child for the harsh review; Dave Eggers—as much as his wife, Vendela Vida, and their colleague at the aptly named The Believer magazine, Heidi Julavits—is the poster child for “niceness.”  (Mendelsohn describes the Eggers who said he’d never write a bad review as “youthful,” which is true, but misleading, as Eggers was at the time the most important publisher and editor in circles that decidedly were not important only to the young.)  Dale Peck rose to broad notoriety when he published a review of Rick Moody’s memoir/essay, The Black Veil, which he began with the indelible words, “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.”  In my opinion, however over the top he was, Peck is more right about Moody than Eggers has ever been right about anything.  The Black Veil, which I read largely on the strength of Peck’s own review, was engaging and fascinating—but like so much of what Moody writes, reading it was (as Gloria Steinem said of seeing Marilyn Monroe on the big screen) like being suffocated with a Baked Alaska.

Dale Peck swore off writing negative reviews after the controversy following his piece.  I read Daniel Mendelsohn’s review of Peck’s collection, aptly titled Hatchet Jobs, when it first appeared (Mendelsohn links to it in the post linked above, though it’s paywalled), but I honestly don’t remember it.  I liked the old Dale Peck.  I like—though I often don’t agree with—Edmond Caldwell’s Contra James Wood blog.  I almost never agree with anything printed by a Dave Eggers publication, and almost never enjoy reading them.  That’s not an argument that Peck’s and Caldwell’s styles guarantee good criticism, but it is an argument to rethink any previous automatic agreement with what Eggers says.

Laura Miller, at Salon (linked by Mendelsohn), puts forward some more practical arguments.  Her editors, she says, have statistical proof that nobody wants to read anything that isn’t entirely positive.  But that’s not a moral argument of the kind Dave Eggers made.  It’s not an argument that should apply to someone discussing a novel on BoingBoing, and it’s not an argument that should apply to the amateur blogger discussing fiction for his own amusement, with no intention of becoming a professional literary critic someday.  It's not an argument that should apply to the dedicated literary blogs like The Millions.  It’s not an argument that people should be, as Jacob Silverman put it in the post Miller’s discussing, “nice.”  Then Miller herself says something that sounds not very nice at all: "for God’s sake, take it to the classroom, workshop or specialty publication.”  This is the kind of thing I wish Mendelsohn would have engaged with.

UPDATE: Fixed the spelling of Julavits's name; and here's another link.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't Troll the Customer Service Rep!

In response to the story about Sen. Schumer’s apparently calling a flight attendant a “bitch,” Amanda Marcotte has some interesting thoughts (here) about how middle-class people treat service personnel.  This reminded me of the recent Crooked Timber post about trolls (here—it’s also worth following the link), because I think there is a kind of snide, impersonal style of interaction that people sometimes are tempted to adopt in public, and trollishness has more than a little in common with that.

I suspect this habit is a temptation to which academics, and also pedants in general (no shortage of those on the Internet!), occasionally succumb, when they are talking to a customer service person who seems less knowledgeable than maybe ought to be the case.  I have in mind primarily situations where you have asked someone for information, especially technical information, and you think you know more about the subject matter than they do.

It is not your job to take the service person to school over the issue you’re discussing with him or her.

What good could possibly result from doing so?

In the very best case, you might just possibly open up a dialogue between the service person and the more knowledgeable people in his or her organization.  The service person might become better educated, and the organization might become aware of the need for better training.  But this is very unlikely.

If you make the service person feel bad about not knowing enough, he or she may blame the knowledgeable people they interact with, for not teaching them enough, or for teaching them misleading things.  He or she may blame the people they work with for being, as you demonstrated to them, wrong.  He or she may totally misunderstand, and make up a narrative around the incomprehensible things you said to them, as best they can manage to interpret it.  (They may blame you for being a jerk, but only if they are so confident in themselves that it never occurs to them that they could be in the wrong, and it never occurs to them that their information was lacking, in any way, in the first place.)

Peeving The Dumbest Generation

I’ve been reading Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, a screed against kids today and the culture that formed them, the scapegoat being the Internet.  I’m planning a longer post on the book, and I don’t intend to make style a main object of criticism.  But I wanted to get this off my chest: I just came across the following sentences, on page 107:

“Because that glorious creation of youth intelligence hasn’t materialized.  The Web expands nonstop, absorbing everything it can, and more knowledge and beauty settle there by the hour.  But no such enhancement has touched its most creative and frequent users, the digital natives [i.e., youth who’ve grown up with the Internet].  There is no reciprocal effect.  Digital enthusiasts witness faithfully the miraculous evolution of the digital sphere, but they also assume a parallel ascent by its consumers, an assumption with no evidence behind it.” 

This isn’t even a mixed metaphor, because there is no metaphor here.  There’s just words.  All the words apply to “[t]he Web.”  The Web expands, the Web absorbs things, and it’s possible for good things to settle on the Web.  (We don’t have to suppose the subject should be replaced.  We can just redefine the predicates to make them fit.)  Like God according to some medieval philosophies, the Web can have any and all attributes applied to it.  But the Web isn’t really any more like God (or a god, or a divine-like kind of something or other) than anything else is.  When people write in the style Bauerlein has chosen, it’s just that words can be used any way that seems convenient.  Again, this isn’t zany creativity, which would imply there are limits being pushed up against—rather, everything just kind of seeps around everywhere.

The Realist Novel and Possible Worlds Theory

Those who have been following such things know that an excessive taste for “realism” (in the literary sense) is one of the clubs James Wood’s critics have been bopping him on the head with. D.G. Myers, on his new “A Commonplace Blog,” is taking up the question.

D.G. Myers is one of the pioneers of Internet presence for the humanities, as a moderator of the “Philosophy and Literature” listserv and a founder of Arts & Letters Daily, so it’s somewhat ironic that he’s set up a blog only in the past year. (I subscribed to PHIL-LIT for a while, then unsubscribed; when I tried to subscribe again I found the server wasn’t working properly and gave up trying.)

He writes:

Realism can now be seen as the genre of fiction that increases its resemblance to the actual world in its concrete details, its buzzing and humming, its biddy-biddy-bumming, for the sake of improving its chances to shame the devil.

This is beautiful. Myers expands the limits of what English grammar can do. The reader, pushing herself into Myers’ head (into which he has invited her -- another delight), concentrates more and more intensely on his meaning until it becomes perspicuous. She slips into a different world, one in which thought rather than matter is the master. “How can a novel increase its resemblance to something,” she asks -- “oh, yes, I see, now.” That “Aha!” moment -- the moment when the reader realizes something is true which she could not have reached by any conceivable process of rational thought -- when the reader first realizes that such is possible -- is what the writer is trying to achieve.

Is this -- a world in which matter does not matter -- a helpful description of realism in the novel? I don’t think so. But maybe if I keep reading Myers I’ll learn more about what he means and will be convinced.

Myers’ use of David Lewis’s philosophy is, to my mind, less admirable. Myers appears to think that Lewis invented the problem of whether and in what sense fictional characters really exist, and that Lewis came up (on his own) with a perfect theory concerning that problem. In fact, there is a huge literature about the problem and Lewis is only one contributor to it among very many. His essay may be a good introduction to the problem and to the way philosophers think about it, but it is not a factual statement providing English majors with the only correct way to think about literature -- as Myers appears to suggest.

I’d be willing to give Myers the benefit of the doubt and assume he is lightly referring to this entire body of literature if I could imagine an ordinary reader who would interpret him that way. But I can’t.

Shakespeare's Sugared Sonnets Among His Friends

For anyone who is interested:

There is a one-per-week discussion of Shakespeare’s sonnets at the Google Group “Forest of Arden.” They are currently doing number sixteen.

It seems they got the idea from the Usenet group “humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare”, where these discussions used to take place. “Forest of Arden” was founded by the combined disaffected forces of hlas and the Shakespeare Fellowship, who wanted a moderated forum where they could discuss “alternate Shakespeare authorship” without being, as they felt, harassed by people who care about the historical truth.

This Blog Has Unquiesced

Mark Liberman at Language Log wonders about the origin of the unusual verb "quiesce," and gets some reasonable sounding feedback.

I suspect Liberman's colleague Arnold Zwicky is right -- in a sense -- that it's a backformation from the noun "quiescent," but I'm not sure this kind of formation is as unusual as he makes it sound.  I'd speculate the invention of the word could have happened something like this: the state machine for the protocol being used had a state for "quiescent"; it had a state transition to "quiescent" from some other states; a descriptive label was needed for the state transition; and the obvious label was then "quiesce."

A few commenters on the original post suggest this is somehow really, really weird.  One likens the invention of something useful by a computer scientist to an out and out miracle.  Another guesses that the invention of new technical terms is practically unique to only one corporation on the planet.  You get the sense that in the view of most people who read the blog, the way computer scientists normally work, think, and use language is psychologically extremely peculiar and probably even horribly ungrammatical (after all, everybody knows computer science is as far from "warm and fuzzy" fields like English as you can get).

How many people have to do a thing, and for how long, before it's not seen as pathological?