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Ben A. |
Ben H. |
Doug |
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What the Hell is a Family Activity?
Consider: for much of recorded history, nursing one's own baby was not considered a "core family activity" but was instead entrusted to wet nurses. What counts as a "core family activity" is pretty arbitrary. If plumbers are in short supply, unclogging the toilet may well come to seem like a "core family activity." Kant's examples are telling: clothesmaking and wood-chopping. At one point, clothesmaking went on largely in the home and woodchopping has gone from necessary ingredient to heating the home to leisure activity. The customs of family life vary from place to place and era to era. Flanagan makes no attempt at a rationally grounded definition. Ehrenreich casts about for some idea of "intimacy" as the boundary. Seeing somebody else's feces (the supposed indignity of which she dwells on with almost pornographic detail in Nickeled and Dimed) for her cannot be part of anybody's job, for it is (a priori?) just wrong to "have that sort of relationship with another human being." Of course, if applied consistently, the rule falls apart. Does she expect hospital patients to empty their own bedpans? Or maybe have a family member on hand at all times to do it? And isn't all doctoring pretty intimate? Don't you think she'd be the first to complain if the patients at a public hospital had to empty their own bedpans? (As i said before, she's basically sub-rational and it's probably best just to ignore her.) I see no better way to draw the distinction between these spheres than to leave it to individual families and individual service providers. The line between state and civil society, to me, is much brighter. However this is a line that Flanagan and Ehrenreich cross blithely, or perhaps don't recognize at all. For that reason, I find it hard to take seriously their scrupulousness about their own rather arbitrarily defined border between trade and family.
(A little aside: Flanagan would probably agree that watching, playing with, keeping your child company are more integral to family life than, say, throwing away the child's diaper, or cleaning the bathroom, or washing the child's sheets. Now, do you think she or Ehrenreich agree that it would be more appropriate to bring in a nanny to perform only those "menial" tasks and debar her from meaningful, relationship-building interaction with the child? I think you'll both agree the answer is: no way, quite the reverse! I think the contradiction shows what at bottom bothers them, which is inequality in standards of living and visible hierarchy. These are starker at home than in an office.)
As for Kant, as usual his distinction is unclear and to the extent that I can parse it makes no sense whatsoever. (Nannies shouldn't vote? People should chop their own wood? People should make clothes out of their own hair? Make wigs out of wood? Whatever.) It reassures me of my decision to pay little attention to moral philosophy and less attention to Kant, a windbag who takes a couple hundred words to contrast "goods" with "services" and to give one a completely unjustified and unjustifiable ethical superiority over the other.
Sure, if I say that we should respect people's personal agency and autonomy, maybe I am performing ethical philosophy, but only in the sense that someone who declares "God doesn't exist" is engaged in theology. There's a world of difference between "God doesn't exist" and a thousand page tome of biblical exegesis. Likewise, I think what I am saying and the enterprise of ethical philosophy as practiced are different in kind and not really two sides of a debate within ethical philosophy.
[2/26/04 06:48] |
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The Inescapability of Ethics
Bad news Ben! Everyone hates the imposition of moral values, with the exception of their own. Once you uttered the word "consensual" with implied normative force, you became an ethical philsopher against your better judgement. You might as well have invoked Dasein. May I recommend you initiate a blue ribbon panel to assess a consitutional amendment mandating better nanny treatment?
Also, I think Flanagan has the Hegelian distinction basically pegged. She worries about outsourcing core family activities, and secondarily about ensuring that nannies get treatment required by law. No obvious category errors there, or transcendental refutation of hiring a plumber. Although she exhibits an unfortunate tendency ignore the agency of domestics. As you note, workers themselves often prefer (and with reason) to duck social security.
Last, let me favor you with one the great philosophical distinctions of all time, courtesy of Immanuel Kant:
The domestic servant, the shop assistant, the labourer, or even the barber, are merely labourers, not artists (artifices, in the wider sense) or members of the state, and are thus unqualified to be citizens. And although the man to whom I give my firewood to chop and the tailor to whom I give material to make into clothes both appear to have a similar relationship towards me, the former differs from the latter in the same way as the barber from the wig-maker (to whom I may in fact have given the requisite hair) or the labourer from the artist or tradesman, who does a piece of work which belongs to him until he is paid for it. For the latter, in pursuing his trade, exchanges his property with someone else, while the former allows someone else to make use of him.
[2/26/04 02:54] |
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Insincerity
The amendment process kills controversial proposals. It's like the nuclear analog to the conventional approach of using a "Blue Ribbon Commission."
Hegel's Nanny
One of the ways in which Flanagan and Ehrenreich's rhetoric bothers me is the deliberate misconstrual of the Hegelian divide between the economic sphere and the family sphere. The real idea here is that the family is not run on purely economic grounds. Parents don't tot up a bill for all they've given to their children and expect them to pay it off to the dime when the parents grow old, for instance. Dad and Mom don't haggle over how much Dad is willing to pay Mom for sex. One might, by rather stretched analogy, try to draw on this distinction to justify a disinclination to routinely bring employees into the home. However, a person who holds such a belief would almost certainly accept, for example, paying a plumber to fix a toilet in the home (an example I think we've brought up) or having a doctor make a house call. He is forced to fall back on all sorts of niggling distinctions, distinctions which do *not* blur the stark dichotomy between, on the one hand, true family relations and, on the other, the continuum of commercial relations.
What more, it is difficult to take seriously Flanagan and Ehrenreich's reliance on the Hegelian distinction when neither of them has any problem whatsoever with breaching the much more salient divide between state and civil society. Ehrenreich, as you observe, would love to have every kid sent to state-sponsored day-care; and Flanagan's crusade is to get OSHA and the Social Security Administration in the door of every home where a nanny or cleaning-person treads!
DOug I remember once wrote a hilarious paper making fun of the whole enterprise of moral philosophy. The whining of these anti-nanny authors brings this parody to mind. There are some things people think should not be done. And so they go through great mental acrobatics to try to prove that no one should be able to do them. But other people want to do them and find no objection from the people they do them to or with. Barb, Caitlin, if you don't want a nanny or want to pay Social Security to your, or want to treat your nanny like a friend, or want to treat your nanny like an employee, or want to leave your kid in daycare, or whatever, by all means go ahead. If you think a bright line must be drawn at the jamb of your front door over which no grubby commerce may pass, I invite you to buy some plumbing tools at Sears and to have fun learning to use the toilet augur. But don't dress up your preferences as some sort of "ethical principles" to try to interefere with other people's consensual agreements.
[2/25/04 20:17] |
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Rooting For Insincerity
One of George W. Bush’s virtues is follow through. Even opponents of the President’s public rhetoric should acknowledge that it provides reliable indication of how he will, in fact, act. (maybe not on the fuel cells, but c’mon, that was practically a sight gag!)
Well, now we have the Bush resorting to what looks like the old amendment rope-a-dope. Is there a controversial social issue that your base cares about but no one else wants to think about? Call for a constitutional amendment, and then drop it! Nothing will ever happen, but you’re safe because you care so much that you wanted to amend the constitution. This was Reagan’s move on abortion, and it worked for him.
Is this what Bush is doing? Hard to say. Generally, Bush seems sincere about his moral agenda. Stem-cells, for example; he didn’t need to do that, he didn’t need to make a big deal out of it. But he did. So does this mean Bush will actually pursue the Federal Marriage Act? This is a one case where I’m rooting for insincerity. File under “why must Republicans make it so hard to support them”?
[2/25/04 19:12] |
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Phenomenology of Nannies
The nanny debate spews ‘continental’ ethical categories like an open hydrant. Alienation, autonomy, authenticity – and those are just the As. A harm principle-liberal/neoclassical economic perspective often classifies these values under the common heading “bunk,” and I sense this accounts for some of your irritation about the discussion, Ben H. Why, you ask, can’t people just see that the market makes everyone’s life better, especially its purported victims?
Well count me as a relentless defender of market capitalism. Low wage labor is the best hope the 3rd world has. I do sympathize, however, with people trying to muddle through what aspects of their life are essential to them. We can poke fun because these concerns manifest in the plaints of prosperous boomers. But then Hegel was a whiny boomer too, just immensely smarter, and able to put a sharper edge on the discussion. The idea is simple: the family (and the state?) inhabits a different sphere than does the market activity that characterizes civil society (or the “Cash Nexus”). That’s not an obviously crazy notion, right?
Also, Flanagan provides a lot of keen observation, commonsense, and hilarity to go with her nanny worries. So I incline to cut her slack on autobiographical essays about the troubles of upper-middle class.
Addendum: Riddle me this. Ehrenreich dismisses private nannies and maids because she doesn’t want that kind of relationship with another human being. Yet government sponsored day care (which will pay how much per hour?) appears in her writings as big rock candy mountain. Does money transferred through the government get washed in the blood of Christ or something?
[2/25/04 17:43] |
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Aunt Nanny's Cabin
You're absolutely right that a lot of the anxiety about the relationship between employer and domestic arises from the absence of a model of interaction. However, I would draw a distinction between retainers "in service" in the pre-WWII or Victorian sense of the term and a domestic worker in the 21st century. The former served from a younger age, served the same people for longer, often lived on the premises, received more compensation in kind and less in money wages, and had fewer hopes that his or her children would occupy a different station in life, as compared to the latter. Cohabitating with a whole staff full of domestic employees surely demands a much fuller -- both in depth and breadth -- etiquette than does employing a five-day-a-week, 9-hour-a-day child-care provider or two-day-a-week housecleaner. (To put it in your terms, Ben, I submit that as regards the latter sort of domestic work, the relationship between employer and employee is not "deeply unequal.")
Bobo leftism, unfortunately, is so violently incompatible with the visible exercise of authority and so obsessively concerned with avoiding visible hierarchies that its adherents cannot deal properly with domestic workers. I don't think the problem in the patron-servant relationship is that it is inappropriately impersonalized, but the inverse. Bobo leftists would die to think of themselves as having "servants," so they lurch to the opposite extreme and attempt (ham-handedly) to treat their employees too informally, like friends. I'm sure that comes off to the domestic workers, who would not show up in the social sphere of the employer in a million years, as patronizing; and it makes it difficult to direct the worker, which leads to frustration on both sides; and it makes it conversely quite easy to pay under the table, to ask for extras as a "favor", and to fail to pay for overtime and the like. So tied in knots over the meaning of having a servant and the distastefulness of hierarchy is this type, that he fails to treat his employee with the simple, straightforward respect that a good boss shows to a good employee. It's not so surprising though: it's all about "me" and very little about the employee, which is not untypical of bobo "moral" dilemmas. And it's precisely this character who is going to bandy about with his spouse Marx remarks about "turning the family relation in a money relation." Look, it's way simpler than that. I am busy. My spouse is busy. We don't have time to clean or to change diapers during the week. We are not interesting in "turning the family relation into a money relation." We are interested in having you, a willing employee, visit our house X hours per week for Y dollars per hour plus Z benefits to do the cleaning and change the diapers we choose not to.
Now, to the extent one is talking about long-term, live-in help, then, as in any long-term relationship, the reciprocal obligations become deeper and are less susceptible to being encapsulated in purely financial terms. But that is emphatically not what Flanagan and Barbara Ehrenreich are talking about. In Nickeled and Dimed Ehrenreich's most potent bile is reserved for the customers of a cleaning service for which she worked. She rarely went back to the same houses on a regular basis. She is arguing that certain tasks should forever lie outside the realm of commercial activity not because they are too dangerous, but because they run afoul of Barbara Ehrenreich's sense of propriety. Caitlin Flanagan's experience of domestic employer-hood consisted of having a part-time nanny help with her twins. She seems to have a certain discomfort spending time in proximity to people who make less money than her husband, or having them in her home, for they awake in her an uncomfortable realization of the inconsistency of her liberal political views and her failure to bring about communistic income levelling when it is within her power to do so.
[2/24/04 14:26] |
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Nannies are Haunting Europe
I agree, Ben H, that the left should just decide, once and for all, whether they support the wretched of the earth. If so, then pricing them out of the labor market and immiserating their countries with trade barriers seem like perplexing objectives.
Likewise, we should all thank our lucky stars we were born in the 1st world, not the 3rd, but our gratitude/unease over this unmerited blessing shouldn’t blind us to obvious economics facts. One of the most obvious being that most of the world would risk bodily injury to get a US job we would sniff at. A guilty conscience, as usual, provides poor grounding for policy analysis.
You’re too quick, however, to dismiss the real difference in social relations a return to domestic service would entail. I think the relationship of customer to supplier in a free economy can have a deep and real dignity. But it doesn’t always work out that way. You’re the classicist, so I don’t need to tell you that cultures which maintain deeply unequal client-patron relationships also produce distinctive etiquette to smooth that interaction. In 21st century American, such mores are not in good repair. Like the man says:
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.
Well, perhaps it’s not as bad as all that. But there’s no doubt servants make Americans deeply uneasy, and that for this reason they prefer to impersonalize services in ways that don’t benefit client or patron. If live-in help becomes the way of the future, rediscovering some patriarchal, idyllic concepts like noblesse oblige and categories like “loyal retainer” may humanize the process.
Dishonest in Small Things, Dishonest in Large
Two great little digs here and here on vanity candidate and scamster-extraordinaire Ralph Nader. The negative check-off policy employed by the PIRGs always frosted me. If you will lie and cheat to chisel five bucks out of eighteen-year-olds, what won’t you do?
[2/24/04 13:15] |
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Flanagan Article
I read the article and the dialog. I also wasted several exasperating hours a few years ago reading Ehrenreich's Nickeled And Dimed. At the tiime, I thought about posting an angry denunciation of its utter wrong-headedness, but then I decided not to waste my time. Because pretty the whole of Ehrenreich's jeremiad are literally beneath logical rebuttal; I find Flanagan's article much the same way. Barbara Ehrenreich is rubbed emotionally raw by inequality of wage compensation. Sorry, Barb, the poor have always been with us and always will. If that bothers you, go live in a cave or a convent. You won't be swayed by the irrefutable logic of productivity rates, labor supply curves, etc, so why should I invite carpal tunnel syndrome trying? I might have to hire some miserable third-worled to act as my underpaid scrivener as a result - and to fob of the intimate work of, gasp, typing on someone lower paid than myself, why that would practically be slavery! As for Flanagan... I am so, so, so sick of these goddamned navel-gazing professionals all torn up about their parenting and housekeeping. You don't like having domestics? Then do the "shit work" yourself and don't complain about it. You don't want to do the "shit work" yourself? Hire somebody. If you want to pay more than the going rate, go ahead. It's charity and that's your choice. And if these two polar options pull at your conscience like a rack, then, hey, here's an idea: don't have any goddamned babies! Don't live in a big, old house! It's not like people can't control their fertility anymore. It's not like there aren't plenty of efficiency studios to let. To be sure, there are plenty of your sainted third-worlders who will pop out sufficient children for the propagation of the human race. If there had been no Flanagan twins, the age of Man would not have therefore drawn to a close. Life is about choices. Familiarize your sorry, spoiled ass with the concept.
Speaking of choices, I really wonder about Flanagan's experience with nannies. Everybody I know who has to deal with the nanny issue (a few here in the office and basically every female trader or salesperson I deal with) can attest to how unlike serfdom it is. Good nannies can elicit poaching attempts, counterbids, and pretty high compensation for performing services that pretty much any sane member of the human race is biologically programmed to be able to do. Some have suggested that the immigration rule that allows families who have lived abroad to bring back a long-time nanny does resemble serfdom. Except that in virtually every case I've heard of, the nanny takes about a month to run off to another employer (illegally). Do gangs of her liege's retainers hunt down this fleeing serf and drag her back? Oh, no, the INS could hardly have a lower priority.
For most of human history, there has been a brisk economy of domestic service. The unusual period has been the post-war era in the highly industrialized economies, when, possibly due to galloping productivity increases, high taxes, and a generous welfare state, it became unaffordable (due to high competitive wage, and a high reservation wage) or unnecessary (husbands made a lot and wives had option of staying home). But the fact is, that's the exception. Borders have become once again porous, productivity growth for low-skilled workers has stagnated -- the exceptional period draws to a close. People risk life and limb to come from the Third World to nanny because they choose to do so. They are not kidnapped. They are not serfs. If you think it is "charitable" to let them languish in some dirty, disease-ridden, corruption-stunted economy, then I leave you to your delusions. One sad bipedal animal more or less in no skin off my back. But the fact is, it is a delusion. As for me, I have no intention of doing "shit work," nor will I permit Bernie to do "shit work". My time and her time are of more use to ourselves and to society spent working at our respective vocations. Our housecleaner or nanny or whatever will earn (now I have the figures, because as I move into my new place, I have been searching for a cleaning person or service) somewhere between $13-$15/hr (on the books), for work that back in Trashcanistan would probably only earn her a kick in the teeth from her surly father or husband. Everybody ends up better-off.
I mean, how much more clear an example of Pareto-optimal exchange does the world provide? It so fucking simple! But apparently not simple enough for those who make a profession of articulating their discomfort with this or that common, indispensable institution -- Barbara Ehrenreich, for example. She can't prove in any meaningful sense of the word why it is wrong to hire domestic help, so she falls back on sanctimonious, plangent (but ultimately vacuous) truisms, like, "I just don't want to have that kind of relationship with another human being." Since you (and all our readers) are smart enough to see this, I won't bother to rebut and reduce to absurdity each of her weak stabs at argument (stuff like: the home shouldn't be a place of business, seeing or touching people's bodily fluid is somehow inherently humiliating [tell that to physicians!!], etc). What it all boils down to, though, is that Barbara Ehrenreich is going to try to interpose herself in a free, mutually beneficial exchange between two people, because she herself would not want to be on either side of that exchange, for vague, almost aesthetic reasons. And at bottom, this is a supercilious, condescending, digusting, autocratic, and fundamentally anti-liberal position to take. You know, when I hear about these men in San Francisco who want to fuck each other up the ass, I say to myself "I just don't want to have that kind of relationship with another human being." But, you know what, those men do and I respect their right to do so, and I suspect Barbara Ehrenreich would class as a fascist anyone who disagrees. But they and Barbara are after exactly the same thing, namely moral legislation (or maybe the literal legislation -- Barb may well want to outlaw domestic work for all I know) according to whatever happens to make them queasy.
But there I go, I've shot past what Ben reads as Flanagan's main argument, namely the question of why women who've benefited from liberalism do not bestow these benefits on their nannies. I happen to think she buries this argument below a lot of the sub-logical bleating about her parental angst, liberal guilt, and woe over the unfairness of life. So I'll say it, too: treating a domestic employee well or poorly stands entirely apart from the question of whether or not to hire one (though it seems Ehrenreich chooses to avoid the distinction entirely). A decent person will not yell at an employee, nor cheat him of wages, nor force him to work unreasonably long hours. I don't do this to my employees at the fund, I won't do this to an employee who works in my house. Maybe more employers of domestics would behave the same way if they weren't beset and made to feel guilty by legions of harpies screeching about how they are betraying feminism or liberalism or the sanctified commercial-free status of the family hearth. For so many people, the relationship has become so freighted with political and personal meaning that it can no longer bear the load, and thus yelling and tears and bad behavior inevitably follow. If Flanagan wants an answer to her conundrum, maybe she should look in the mirror. I think she also mentions, briefly and in passing, the fact that many domestics strenously object to getting paid on the books. Some of the responsibility for the "grey" status of domestics lies with domestics themselves. Many come from countries where tax evasion rates reach well above 50%, and they are not eager to assimilate to American practice in this regard. In fact, one could make the case that this sort of petty dishonesty goes a long way to making their home countries places one flees in order to strike it relatively rich doing "shit work" in American homes. Every country gets the government it deserves, said Voltaire; the same is true of economies. My point here is that it is somewhat facile for Flanagan and Ehrenreich to portray domestic workers as mere passive objects in the domestic economy, rather than participants in shaping it.
As for Chesterton, I would not disagree that there are some things everyone should do for himself, but I think most of them boil down to the realm of mental activity. We could spend a bunch of time trying to find the right heuristic, and I doubt even then we would agree. However, to assert that there are some things one should do oneself is not to prove that cleaning house or dealing with juvenile faeces belong in that category. You suggest that the intimacies of childcare do belong in that category. I say, look at history, and you will see it is not the least bit obvious that people who have had the freedom to choose whether or not to outsource childrearing have preferred to do it themselves. Quite the contrary/ Through much of history, the Western wealthy and even the not-so-wealthy employed wet nurses, governesses, and sent their kids out to boarding schools post-haste. This romantic notion of childrearing as domestic bliss I think is much more the novelty than paying someone to do the "shit work."
[2/24/04 07:29] |
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Quick Takes
A friend sent me a link to this under the plaintive title “have we lost our minds?” And indeed, a high school production of ‘The Vagina Monologues” does get me thinking about home-schooling and moving to Montana. How does a person become so ensorcelled by ideals (Iconoclasm? Empowerment? Free Expression?) that the obvious badness of such an idea does not shine forth like the noonday sun?
Also, I'd call to your attention Caitlin Flanagan’s Atlantic cover story on nannies, and subsequent Slate dialog with Barbara Ehrenreich has generated interesting coverage in the bloggosphere (see here for a number of links). Flanagan is one of our more elegant stylists, and lacks the mealy-mouth so common among those who write on the family, but this artcile doesn’t show her full powers (for that, I recommend her definitive, and hilarious, article defending the Martha Stewart aesthetic, which contains my all time favorite sentence in magazine journalism “That’s because the thread count was too low, you idiot”). Nonetheless the discussion generated has been illuminating.
The interest from debate doesn’t derive from the points actually at issue between Ehrenreich (blame men too!) and Flanagan (men are less to blame because, as every mother knows, they’re basically out to lunch on most domestic management issues). Rather, I’d highlight two interesting themes. First, it’s fascinating how many of Flanagan’s critics shoot right past her argument* to bemoan the basic unfairness of life. Thus we have Flanagan chastised for hiring people to perform service labor (by Ehrenreich) and for the fact that women in El Salvador leave their own families to work in the US (by Mosle). Some countries are basket cases. Likewise some service laborers get paid less than their customers. Sorry! Damn that heartless Flanagan for not denouncing these things at the outset! (except that she does. As I say, it’s odd…)
Second, and far more interesting, is the way in which nannying serves as a great example for the concerns about alienation in a modern economy. We know the benefits of the division of labor, but certain some aspects of life we don’t want outsourced.** G.K. Chesteron puts it nicely:
“The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly.”
Chesterton’s comment contains two intuitions: there are those activities we don’t want done by anyone else (nose-blowing) and then there are those activities we want to do ourselves (love-letter writing). The first case threatens primarily our respect for other people, the second our respect for ourselves. You can distinguish the two cases with the following heuristic: would you want a machine to do this? I’d be delighted to have a nanobots that removed the need for diapering by converting waste to air. But who would purchase a machine that soothed a fevered brow, or took kids to the beach. Besides Ben H., that is?
*Flanagan’s main position is uncontroversial: shouldn’t nannies get social security? Her secondary point is slightly, but not very, controversial: Isn’t it odd how the profession that has so enabled professionalism of women has benefited so little from the other beneficial standards of liberalism. Synecdoche: Zoe Baird, center-left super-professional, enabled bad employment practice
**Again, not a new point. Here’s Adam Smith:
The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible to become for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life
[2/23/04 20:34] |
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The Fun Continues
Today's Observer files a story on Wolfgate, and yes!, Paglia features prominently, spitting venom:
"At the beginning of the 90’s, people said, ‘Oh, Naomi Wolf, this great thinker,’" said Ms. Paglia. "But what she’s managed to do in 10 years is marginalize herself as a chronicler of teenage angst. She doesn’t want to leave that magic island when she was the ripening teenager. How many times do we have to relive Naomi Wolf’s growing up? How many books, how many articles, Naomi, are you going to impose on us so we have to be dragged back to your teenage-heartbreak years? This is regressive! It’s childish! Move on! Move on! Get on to menopause next!"
[2/20/04 10:31] |
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It Is Mean to Find This Funny, But ...
... Could Naomi Wolf do more to make herself a figure of fun than by lodging a two-decades old sexual harassment claim against Harold Bloom?
This works on so many levels. Wolf exhibits her typical flakey-ness, while Bloom has become such a self-parody that seeing allegations flung at him would be enjoyable, even if they’re baseless (which I bet they aren’t, entirely). As double-dog-bonus, any attack on Bloom activates Camille Paglia, and we know how she classes everything up. Indeed, she’s already on the case, as evinced by this bitchy quote in Lloyd Grove’s (already sufficiently bitchy) column:
It really smacks of the Salem witch hunts and all the accompanying hysteria," Paglia told me. "It really grates on me that Naomi Wolf for her entire life has been batting her eyes and bobbing her boobs in the face of men, and made a profession out of courting male attention by flirting and offering her sexual allure."
Paglia recalled that when Wolf's best seller, "The Beauty Myth," launched her to fame and fortune in 1991, she did an interview at her Manhattan apartment with Philadelphia Inquirer book editor Carlin Romano. She greeted him, Romano wrote, wearing "a pair of flimsy see-through orange harem pants, scarcely obscuring black panties."
Developing...
One addendum: At what point does the goodwill Harold Bloom earned for beating on the school of resentment run out, so we can start savaging him for claiming Shakespeare invented the human soul? I say: now! [With the much more informed eye of Bernie possibly perusing this page, I suppose I should modulate that attack. Ben H., just inform me if Bloom’s actually better than he appears, OK?]
[2/19/04 20:42] |
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A-Rod on the A Train
Ben A., what do you think about the news of the Yankees trade for A-Rod? For myself, I find myself of two minds. On the visceral level of Yankee fandom, the part that relishes wins however achieved and exults over the humiliation of opponents, the move cheers me. Clearly, the main offering the Yankees made in return for A-Rod was picking up his contract, as Alfonso "Swing-Away" Soriano and a minor league pitcher fall far short in value of a stellar MVP. Yet neither can I escape the nagging sense that next season's Yankee victories will have been too obviously bought. Steinbrenner has long attracted criticism of using his fat wallet to achieve what his baseball acumen (or lack thereof) could not; however, one could always point to the preponderance of guys who the Yankee scouted and drafted or picked up from the obscure outer orbit of professional baseball: Posada, Jeter, Rivera, Bernie Williams, and, yes, Soriano. But going out and getting A-Rod in exchange for, let's face it, mostly financial consideration puts a dent in the old defense.
Butterfly effect observation: Steinbrenner should thank Argentina's irresponsible politicians in part for his good fortune. Ranger's owner Tom Hicks (of buyout firm Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst) has wound up in somewhat straitened circumstances due to huge losses on his firm's investments in Argentina (Cablevision, for example, was something like a billion dollar whiff), which may have motivated him to unburden himself of the obligation to pay A-Rod $195mio bucks over the rest of his contract.
[2/15/04 21:31] |
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Thanks a lot for ruining a perfectly good movie, Ben A.
Today Dao and I saw In America, a lovely, effective, sentimental, generally well-acted story about family, and more particularly about coming to terms with a family member's death. So if you don't know the term "Magical Negro", which Ben A. introduced us to last September, consider yourself lucky, stop reading this post here, and enjoy the movie. But if you do recall that post, or otherwise know the term, beware: In America features the very Gandalf of Magical Negroes.
His name is Matteo. You hear him, and then glimpse him, early in the movie -- a hulking, howling, feral black man in an apartment downstairs from the immigrant Irish family who are the movie's center. No subtlety would have been lost if the screen read in big letters: "Who gets raped -- mom, dad, or their two little girls?" A question I might have pondered, had this been the revival of a '60s or '70s flick. But it's 2004, and a menacing black character in a movie written by sensitive white people will reliably turn out to be a gentle and wise man -- no, not a man, a tool by which the filmmakers make their audience reflect on their hidden prejudices. So when Matteo beckons the trick-or-treating girls into his scary apartment one Halloween, the suspense level is nil. His wisdom and gentleness will be revealed in three ... two ... one ... -- the only question is whether the filmmakers will go all the way and make him saintly, i.e. possessed of supernatural powers. Well they do. (For an infinitely better portrait of a black man as isolated and potentially violent as Matteo, check out Ghost Dog.)
On the other hand, maybe the Bandarlog and our aren't-we-clever-to-have-seen-through-these-devices attitude are to blame. I liked the movie -- and if I hadn't been aware of this and a few other cliches it employed, I might have loved it. I much prefer sentimentality to its opposite. (As you know if you've sat through our occasional screeds against the Don DeLillo/Richard Powers school of Brainy Novelism.)
A case in point, which I happened to like more than In America: the novel Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. It's so sentimental that it had me crying for much of the plane ride over from France. And I don't cry much, frankly.
I'm not a licensed literary critic and I can't really account for why I found the book so moving. Maybe it just pressed all the classic tearjerking buttons efficiently -- in the end there is even a kissing-in-the-rain scene a la "Breakfast At Tiffany's." It also has a fair amount of suicide and sadness, but sometimes that has the opposite effect on me. (Halfway through the movie The Hours I stood up and yelled "Why don't you all just cheer the fuck up?" ... or would have if Dao hadn't been there in the theater.) The best way I can formulate my guess about Murakami's success here is: his characters speak explicitly about life's value and its limitless wonder without sounding preachy. In most popular entertainment, characters avoid philosophizing altogether. In a lot of "brainy" entertainment, characters are lifeless conduits for the author's ideas (Ayn Rand being the most extreme example I can think of here.) The trick is to have regular people say profound things without seeming awkward or stilted or implausible. Or no, this is precisely what cannot be reduced to a trick. This is what separates the real novelists from the fakes. I do not recall any novel that outdoes Norwegian Wood on this score.
[2/15/04 02:17] |
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Maybe He Doesn't Just Look French...
I'm sure you're both much too intellectually high-toned to pay much attention to J.F. Kerry's bimbo eruption, so I'll limit myself to a narrow, clinical question that the affair raises. So many politicians find themselves undone by infidelity to their spouses. How can we explain it? Is it:
1) Politicians are no more prone to extramarital dalliances than anyone else. Were the general population exposed to the same relentless scrutiny, it would be shown to be no more faithful.
2) The profession of electoral politics attracts inflated egos, monstrous narcissists, and disordered personalities craving love, adulation, worship. Just such personalities subordinate any sense of loyalty or guilt of betrayal to satisfying their psychic needs.
3) The practice of politics inculcates certain habits and and predilections that predispose the practioners to infidelity. Politicians must learn to lie fluidly, to seduce constituents, to affect a glib charm, in sum to acquire the skills of your classic lothario.
4) Politicians have many more opportunities to cheat than the average person. They are not necessarily morally inferior to normal people, just exposed to more temptation. We should consider them as thrust into a similar predicament as other notoriously promiscuous types: rock stars, ball-players, etc.
Hope counsels for (2) and (3), but dismal experience, its weight always growing, argues for (1) and (4).
[2/14/04 15:19] |
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Airworld
Ben, it is indeed Walter Kirn who coined the term "Airworld," in his excellent novel Up In the Air He defines it thus:
I call it Airworld; the scene, the place, the style. My hometown papers are the USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. THe big-screen Panasonics in the club rooms broadcast all the news I need, with an emphasis on the markets and the weather. My literature -- yours, too, Isee -- is the best-seller or near-bestseller, heavy on themes of espionage, high finance, and the goodness of people in small towns. In Airworld, I've found, the passions and enthusiasms of the outlying society are concentrated and whisked to a stiff froth. When a new celebrity is minted in the movie theatres or ballparks, this is where the story breaks -- on the vast magazine racks that form a sort of trading floor for public reputations and pretty faces. I find it possible here, as nowhere else, to think of myself as part of the collective that prices the long bond and governs necktie widths. Airworld is a nation within a nation, with its own language, architecture, mood and even its own currency -- the token economy of airline bonus miles that I've come to value more than dollars. Inflation doesn't degrade them. They're not taxed. They're private property in its purest form.
Though my travels these days are more ThirdWorld than Airworld, I had my fill of the latter as a consultant, as I'm sure you did, too, Ben. IT's funny that you mention it and then follow up with a description of a journey from Kim. Airworld represents the negation of Kipling's glorious mosaic, a world designed for sameness and sterility, engineered to induce a sense of weightlessness and placelessness. Even so, I have to admit I always kind of liked it. Its designers have strived for uniformity, but that only provided a kind of fun in mastering the subtle idiosyncracies of each of Airworld's provinces.
[2/14/04 15:01] |
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Doug, thank you for lobbing the Kim softball my way, and I hope you’ll both accept my apologies for being AWOL from the blog for so long. Although there are no documents that show I missed any blog meetings, and I received an honorable discharge, my real excuse is travel. Unlike Ben H, who retains magnificent intellectual vigor while flitting from Brazillia to Abu Dhabi, I respond to travel with torpor and depression. Some author (Walter Kirn?) describes the fusion of cabs, airports, hotels, and convention center as “Airworld,” an alienating society existing in parallel to the world of houses, families, and human contact. How true. Would a murder committed in a Marriott really count as murder? Surely not. In any case, I respond to the detachment of business travel with intellectual shut-down. By day two, sports and escapist novels are about the only (solitary) diversion I can handle. Having reconnected with Sittlichkeit, I can answer you better.
The Book of My Life
What do I think of Kim? The short answer, and the easiest answer, is that it is the central book of my life. Over the course of my adolescence I read it perhaps twenty times. This is not a rare response; Kim often evokes simialr devotion. In his marvelous travelogue/detective history “Quest for Kim,” Peter Hopkirk, once chief Central Asia reporter for the London Times, confesses to carrying a copy of Kim with him for long stretches of his youth. He further notes:
I have since learned that I was far from alone in my attachment to Kim. Wilfred Thesiger tells us that he rarely traveled without a copy of it in his saddlebag, while T.S. Eliot read it aloud to his wife in the evenings for the sheer joy of its language. Mark Twain said that he read it afresh every year, while, more recently, Philip Knightly, the writer on espionage, told me that he too re-reads Kim every year, and moreover has named his son after its young hero. And I once heard Tariq Ali, that one-time scourge of the Establishment, confess that Kim was the book he loved most as a boy in Lahore where he, like Kim, was brought up.
I hold little hope of sneaking Kimball (or Kimbellina) past Deb onto the birth certificate, but I would if I could. Many novels create advocates, but few produce disciples. What is it about Kim that inspires such devotion? Surely part of the appeal lies in the spectacle Kipling evokes: the Grand Trunk road, the Lahore Caravan Serai, or even the train platform in Lucknow, what Derbyshire calls a “rain forest of detail”, and Doug described as the kaleidoscope of Indian Life. I think that diagnosis right in part, but also mistakes the effect for the cause. Many authors detail scenes, crowds, and entire cultures as meticulously as Kipling. Perhaps sometimes Tom Wolfe does this, certainly Richard Price does in “Clockers.” You may have your own favored example. What separates Kipling, I think, is the tone – the moral tone – which invests his descriptions. Kipling does not so much record India as endorse it, hold it up as wonderful, precious, delightful, mesmerizing:
Kim will remember till he dies the long, lazy journey from Umballa, through Kalka and the Pinjore gardens near by, up to Simla. A sudden spate in the Gugger river swept down one horse (the most valuable, be sure) and nearly drowned Kim among the dancing boulders. Farther up the road the horses were stampeded by a government elephant, and being in high condition of grass food, it cost a day and a half to get them together again. Then they met Sikander Khan coming down with a few unsaleable screws, -- remnants of his string, -- and Mahbub, who has more of horse-coping in his little finger nail than Sikander Khan in all his tents, must needs buy two of the worst, and that meant eight hour’s laborious diplomacy and untold tobacco. But it was all pure delight – the wandering road, climbing, dipping, and sweeping about the growing spurs; the flush of the morning laid along the distant snows; the branched cacti, tier upon tier on the stony hillsides; the voices of a thousand water-channels; the chatter of the monkeys; the solemn deodars, climbing one after another with down-drooped branches; the vistas of the Plains rolled out far beneath them; the incessant twanging of the tonga-horns and the wild rush of the led horses when a tonga swung around a curve; the halts for prayers (Mahbub was very religious in dry-washings and bellowings when time did not press); the evening conferences by the halting places, when camels and bullocks chewed solemnly together and the stolid drivers told the news of the Road – all these things lifted Kim’s heart to song within him.
Kipling means to lift our hearts as well; he renders India as a glorious mosaic and compels us to view it as such. While Kipling writes convincingly of suffering (read “Baa Baa Black Sheep”) his vision is enormously positive. For "India," read "life." In Kim he creates a world one would weep in gratitude to inhabit, and shows us it is our own.
You write Doug, that you wish “Kipling had explored the Buddhist dilemma more deeply: should you live a merry life of skillfully fulfilled appetites, or seek a higher, freer joy by turning away from your appetites?” I don’t think that formulation captures the tension in Kim. The life Kipling reveres does not consist in skillfully fulfilling appetites – although there will be sweetmeats, to be sure – but rather in the action and spectacle of this great and terrible world. The tension is between the world and turning away, and there is little doubt which side Kipling takes. Even the lama qualifies his aestheticism, abjuring action “except to acquire merit.” And the lama’s greatest desire, if we want to describe it that way, is his love for Kim. There is no contest here: Kipling does not for a moment conceive the lama’s affection or Kim’s fierce devotion as anything but admirable. Likewise, Kipling consistently views action in the world – a job, a craft, patrolling civilization’s ramparts – as intrinsic to man’s purpose.
In one of the many apt citations in Derbyshire’s article, we find the following from Evelyn Waugh:
[Kipling] was a conservative in the sense that he believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defences fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.
This is completely correct. Kipling writes as movingly as any writer on the love and bond between generations. As counterpoint one finds in his work the recurring horror of failing the young, of defrauding them by leaving the defenses unmanned. Here’s his “Epitaph for a Dead Statesman”:
I could not dig; I dared not rob.
Therefore I lied to please the mob
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew
What tale will serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
A similar sentiment closes “The Heritage”:
Dear bought and clear, a thousand year
Our fathers’ title runs
Make we likewise their sacrifice
Defrauding not our sons
Despite this darker aspect of his vision – the possibility of tragedy that life’s preciousness entails – Kipling does not imagine we achieve any goal worth having by turning away from the world. To live is to be bound up with those precious to you, and as Kim ends, even the attainment of nirvana occurs in this context:
He crossed his hands on his lap and smiled, as a man may who has won redemption for himself and his beloved
[2/13/04 00:58] |
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Oh, the Irony!
Erbitux approved today by the FDA. Recall that Martha Stewart's alleged insider trading consisted of dumping Imclone shares just before news that FDA would reject Erbitux became public. The stock actually had some unusual activity today before the announcement. Did Martha duck away from the defense table at her trial and call her broker from the bathroom?
[2/12/04 16:06] |
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Ben H, you should certainly loan Calvin Coolidge to Doug. I knew Derbyshire from his journalism – some to my taste, some definitely not – and was astounded by the excellence of his first novel. I am mulling a longer response-to-Doug-cum-travelogue, and hope to have that on the blog by Friday. In the meantime, let me recommend this review of Kim from the 1901 Atlantic. Here’s a sample:
… [this] little book, like the country where the scene of it passes, is infinite. It contains the whole of India,--incalculably rich, unspeakably poor: with its teeming cities, barbaric, uralt; its forgotten temples crumbling to decay in the dusk of "caverns measureless to man;" its ravenous holy rivers and heart-breaking stretches of burning plain, and the overpowering grandeur of that mountain barrier upon the north, which dwarfs all the other highlands of the globe into practicable hills. It contains the human soul, also, of that Orient which we have all now become bound to study,--a cunning, piercing, elusive soul, patient and proud; stayed in supernatural quiet on the sanctions of a secular faith. All this vast vision of things material and immaterial may be discerned between two thin book covers by those who read aright, as the crystal-gazer sees past and future events in the lucid globe he can hold in the hollow of his hand. Only in the one case, as in the other,--or so the faithful say,--the eye must have been anointed beforehand and the heart prepared. He who has thus been predestined will salute in Kim a work of positive genius, as radiant all over with intellectual light as the sky of a frosty night with stars; the most truly spiritual production, in the proper sense of the term, of this or many seasons.
Addendum:
I hope you all saw the Brooks “very special interests” column.
Addendum 2: Best comment I've heard to date on "H-bomb": "If Vassar jumped off of a bridge, would you?"
[2/12/04 10:40] |
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The Kids Today!
The declinist conservative, when faced with evidence of his society's decadence, will, if he is honest and self-searching, ask himself whether it represents a true innovation in perversity or if he is merely getting older, more crotchety and more sensitive to provocations he would have ignored as a younger fellow. My first reaction to H-bomb (it turned up on Top Stories on Bloomberg, believe it or not) was a sharp anxiety about the depth of the rot in today's sensualized, sexualized America. If Harvard undergrads think producing pornography is more congenial way to get a coveted editor credit than, say, starting another cookie-cutter ethnic magazine, then our taboos have become alarmingly feeble. But quickly I realized that a decade out of school has started to make me crotchety. Back in 1993, some 'Cliffies published the rag, featuring a photograph called "the educated pussy." So I guess things haven't changed so much, except that Harvard has gone from "educated pussy" to "boobs of indeterminate erudition."
[2/11/04 18:49] |
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Odds and Ends
Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream lives up to its title. I have a copy, Ben A.'s copy now that you mention it. Ben, do I have your permission to lend it to Doug? Derbyshire writes from a conservative viewpoint that is not much in evidence these days, the pessimistic strain that dates back to Hesiod, with his declining order of ages. My saturnine temperament renders me susceptible to such a viewpoint, especially when it is expressed in prose as elegant as Derbyshire's.
Speaking of seeing stuff in a dream, I indeed suffer from the same pedagogical nightmare as Doug's, and also with a frequency I have difficulty explaining. The most frequent version of my dream involves a sudden anxiousness that I might have signed up for a required high school math class but forgotten to go all semester. I try frantically to figure out whether in fact I have signed up for it or not, root around in my locker for evidence of having at one point taken the class, and peek into the classroom to see if the set-up looks familiar. I always wake up before I can figure it out. Having awakened, it takes me a minute or two to work out the syllogism that I have graduated college, so I must have graduated high school, and if I graduated high school, I must have taken all the required classes.
And speaking of nightmares, I had to sleep over at one of the Arg ranches this weekend. Unpacking my suitcase, I startled and drove out into the open the most horrifying spider I have ever had the misfortune to lay eyes on. I cannot say that it was the biggest, for I have seen a few spiders whose long, spindly legs qualified them as longer, end-to-end, than this Argentine arachnid. This one by far counts as the biggest considering only the bulk of its head and body. A meatier spider I've never beheld. It was kind of the mafia capo of spiders: a thick, block-like trunk sprouting short limbs.
[2/11/04 18:34] |
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Live from B.A., It's Sunday Night
Doug, you've given us so much to chew on. Perhaps I can use some of the tedious flight back to NY to respond with proper thoughfulness. For now, I just got back to B.A. from a whirlwind tour of a ranch in Corrientes (330 sq kilometers, which is about as big as Manhattan), two farms in Santa Fe, and a huge grain terminal in Rosario. Quite an experience, one that's left me ready to collapse into bed. First time I've been on a plane that's landed on a grass landing strip (3 times in 2 days). First time I've ridden in a bullet-proof car, though search me, I'm not sure if it was to protect the occupants from outside assailants or to protect innocent bystanders from the occupants, the guy riding shotgun actually toting a shotgun (well, not really shotgun, but rather a Glock automatic). Let's just say this was a pretty unusual due diligence tour. So far, all that I've ascertained is that I ain't no gaucho. I've seen enough soybeans to keep me off $10-a-serving edamame in NY Japanese restaurants. I have only one observation (i won't presume to call it interesting) about the soy plant. Other crops look like, well, crops, stuff you would grow on purpose. Corn, tall and erect, crowned with golden stalks looks like it took great effort to raise. THe soy plant, on the other hand, is an unremarkable, short, leafy plant: basically, a weed. I found it rather difficult to get excited over a vast field of soy when it looks kind of like a giant abandoned lot.
[2/8/04 22:11] |
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Follow That Pronoun!
Grover G. Norquist, a conservative strategist, quoted on the front page of the New York Times: "We know how to beat standard-issue national Democrats ... When you stand up and say here's a Massachusetts liberal whose voting record is nearly identical to Ted Kennedy's, you just lost 45 percent of the electorate — and that's the starting point."
But maybe it's a bad sign for the Democrats when a supporter is reduced to captious grammatical point-scoring on their behalf ...
I Have a Dream ... Repeatedly
I think I've compared notes with Ben H and we both have the same recurring dream: the high-school or college test we've forgotten to prepare for. The frequency of this dream seems totally out of proportion with the level of conscious anguish I recall having in school. Maybe there's something about late adolescence that fixes dream themes permanently.
In any case I had the dream this morning. It was a math test half of whose questions made no sense to me. Worse, I couldn't tell what order the xeroxed test sheets were suppoesd to be in, or even if I had all the sheets. My classmates finished quickly and were talking contentedly to each other; I frantically shushed them in order to concentrate on figuring out the order of the questions. When the time was up, I pulled myself together and brought my pathetic scribblings up to the professor, who was Maciej Zworski, I think, except that for some reason he looked black. Indeed he was wearing a kente cloth. Why would Maciej Zworski become, or pretend to be, black?
It was not until I awoke that I thought: Hey, you do what you gotta do to get tenure.
Theater
Last night I went to the opening of a musical version of Orwell's "Animal Farm" on East 4th Street. It was pretty good and maybe I'll say more about it if I have time. I will say this now: Some cultural corner has been turned (or some cultural looking glass traversed) when people are staging anti-communist plays in the East Village. Of course, the company strained clumsily to make it apply to George W. Bush. Thank God they did so in the playbill rather than onstage. What does apply, I think, is the rulers' attempt to rewrite history, and to sway intelligence estimates. Beyond that the analogy is quite a stretch.
[2/8/04 18:42] |
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Good Article on Kipling
John Derbyshire in The New Criterion, writing in early 2000. He seems to have had a similar reaction to Kim but he expresses it much better than I:
The novel is a rain forest of detail, with a thousand species of detail jostling together—the fold of a robe, the girth of a leg, the cut of a Marathi’s turban, the handling of food and exchanging of courtesies both false and true, the taste of the air in the hills, and the color of twilight on the Grand Trunk Road. That is what makes the novel so unforgettable.
Derbyshire hits the nail on the head with respect to Kipling's infamous political incorrectness:
There is no doubt that Kipling looked down on the colored races, but “racism” is not the proper word for his attitude. He did not think them biologically inferior, only incapable of self-government at the time he found them.
Plus he hits Edward Said on the head with rhetorical numchucks a few times.
I'd read some of the Kipling poems that Derbyshire recommends if it weren't so late.
Oh, also, Ben H -- do you still have a copy of Derbyshire's Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream? I've decided I'd like to read it (once I get through a few other books I've got lined up). When I first saw it I thought there was no way it could live up to its brilliant title. I'm no longer so sure.
[2/8/04 02:26] |
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Safire's On Language column today is about "imminent," which, he says, comes from the Latin for "to overhang" (as a precipice). He doesn't mention my favorite synonym for this, "beetle." Nowadays this word is only used in "beetle-browed", which is a shame (and is no doubt starting to give that phrase an entomological folk-etymology).
The other night on WNYC the announcer said, "The moon is waxing gibbous, and I'm very excited to be able to say the word 'gibbous' on the radio." I was very excited to hear the word on the radio; as you guys probably know, it's one of my favorites. BTW David Garland, the announcer in question, is excellent, and deserves to be praised in print (virtual print anyway). He's knowledgable without being pretentious, and relaxed without being annoyingly chummy. WQXR's announcers tend to have one or both of these faults (I think Margarent Juntwait is okay though. I just had to look up the spelling of her name on the web ... from her own pronunciation of it, it'd have written "Junkthwait.") John Schaefer, who does his new-music show after David Garland on WNYC, is good too, but he talks too damn much. Think of all the young composers who would be thrilled to be played on a major radio station, during the time now occupied by John Schaefer saying "Fascinating! And how exactly does your instrument differ from a standard Theremin?" as he does on just about every show.
But speaking of overdiscussed musical topics, I suppose I'm calling the kettle-drum black. I did fear that the Bandarlog might get a little parochial with two Manhattanites ... luckily, this problem will disappear soon: Ben H is moving to Brooklyn next month. A whole nother world! And maybe he'll favor us with some real-time posts from Argentina.
In the meantime I'll throw Ben A a softball: what's your take on Kipling's Kim? I just read it. It reminded me of Tintin -- the main impression I'm left with is of the crazy kaleidoscope of everyday life in India. The spying element was outshined by comparison. (Kipling wrote before Le Carré and Clancy turned spy-suspense into an exact science.) Also, I Kipling handles the religious themes admirably, and I agree that the lama is a fantastic character -- you, Ben, called him your favorite in all of literature. I just wish Kipling had explored the Buddhist dilemma more deeply: should you live a merry life of skillfully fulfilled appetites, or seek a higher, freer joy by turning away from your appetites? The ending seemed a little pat.
Of course, if you read Edward Said's introduction to the book, you'll think Kim is a treatise on imperialism. He hardly mentions religion once in the 40 pages he allows himself. Never has a polymath been so monomaniacal.
At a friend's house a few weeks ago I saw a novel called "Hungry Ghost." I asked him if it was the Buddhist term, and he said it was: the novel is about the dilemma I mentioned. I was excited to borrow it; its setting, the contemporary East Village, is as kaleidoscopic as Victorian India, and it promised more details on "skillfully fulfilled appetites" than Kipling could muster. (Kim's scene with his Tibetan temptress was far too short, and Kipling must bear some blame, even if he seems to cast it onto Victorian morality: "'It is my loss,' Kim began [to the woman he's leaving without having shagged]. 'Even now I had planned desirable things in my heart which' -- there is no need to go through the complements proper to these occasions. He sighed deeply ...")
Anyway, this "Hungy Ghost" book's first line was "Greta was naked again." And on the first page Greta's hair is described as "Pre-Raphaelite". Speaking of sighing deeply. "'Every literaryism," Ezra Pound once wrote, "every book word, fritters away a scrap of the reader's patience" -- or, in this case, all of it. I decided not to borrow the book.
[2/7/04 19:46] |
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Internet Update
You may have heard of Friendster. Joel (college roommate of me and Ben H) got me to sign up for it a few years ago; I never got into it. Now a NYC-based friend has urged me to try it again. Usage seems to be way up, to the point that server response can be slow. The big drawback for me and Friendster is that I'm not single. My aforementioned friend is single, and in his shoes I would probably spend hours on the site, because it overcomes a big problem of internet dating: the impression that all its users are lonely and isolated and hence weird. In Friendster, by contrast, each potential date is surrounded by "testimonial" providers who prove that he/she is in a functional social network. For example:
hot stuff like her doesn't stay too long on the market ;) ya ngga? :D mwahahaha... prisil is really pretty and stylish abiiis... dia bilangnya sih dia ndut, buset daaaaah... apanya yang mo dikurusin lagi sil? :P body udah yahud gitu :D mwahahaha...
Which brings me to my other point: even I, married, enjoy seeing concretely that, even restricted to three degrees of separation, my recursive friends span the globe and just about any conceptual space you might want to plot humans in.
[2/6/04 00:15] |
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Afreaka
This is just wrong on so many levels. Maybe the antiglobos have a point. Increased cross-border, uh, intercourse can have damaging consequences. The spanish-language press has a slighty more lurid version. Most precious is the image of decrepit old Bongo pressing a button to reveal a hidden bed, like in some early 70s Bond flick. The superannuated technology of sub-saharan Africa extends even to the shagadelic bedrooms of its dictators.
[2/5/04 07:56] |
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So Sue Me
Scheisse! I just figured out why Safire's ruling on the word "actionable" made such an impression on me. I wasn't just proud to have just used it in the sense he deemed correct, "furnishing grounds for a lawsuit." It's that the title bar on the website I work for says "Assessments That Deliver Actionable Insight." We seem, then, to be selling automated advice so awful that you can sue us for damages. Let me say for the record that this is not the case: our assessments are pretty cool. We should probably, however, take our copy-editing to the next level in terms of buzzword removal.
[2/3/04 16:06] |
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Right now I'm leaning towards a George W. Bush quote for my page. Unlike most of our readers (probably) I am not yet inured to his inanities. Consequently I've been laughing to the point of crying while looking at some web compilations. Front-runners:
"One of the interesting initiatives we've taken in Washington, D.C., is we've got these vampire-busting devices. A vampire is a -- a cell deal you can plug in the wall to charge your cell phone."—Denver, CO. Aug. 14, 2001
"We spent a lot of time talking about Africa, as we should. Africa is a nation that suffers from incredible disease."--After meeting with the leaders of the European Union, Gothenburg, Sweden, June 14, 2001
"It's very important for folks to understand that when there's more trade, there's more commerce."--Quebec City, Canada, April 21, 2001
"I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully."-Saginaw, Mich., Sept. 29, 2000
[2/3/04 13:51] |
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A Moral Crusade Worth Fighting
Our friend Gui (having seen the map of the imaginary island I once made by cutting up an atlas) gave us as a welcome-back gift a whole book of similar works, called "You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination". My favorite is by some anonymous religious revivalist of 1895. It shows the mountain of Heaven rising from the Holiness Heights, which lie above the Plains of Regenerations and the Impenetrable Hedge of Sin. Beyond this hedge is a great swamp which drains, via the River of Death, into the Falls of Eternal Despair, a.k.a. Hell. This River has nine tributaries, each named for the transgression of a commandment, each arising out of ponds named for immoralities like "cheating," "passion," "neglect." What sold this map for me is that one of the ponds is named "Sunday Papers."
[Bonus points if you can tell me which of the ten commandments Sunday papers violate.]
[My favorite spiritual teacher Thich Nhat Hanh once spoke to an audience about being dumbstruck by the sheer waste of the Sunday New York Times. He said something along the lines of: one page of real wisdom, read week after week, would be worth more than this sequence of tomes forklifted to your door every weekend, and would kill far fewer trees. What courage it took for him to say that, given that so much of his most appreciative demographic, right-thinking open-minded East-coast liberals, regard the Sunday NY Times as a sacrament!]
[2/2/04 23:49] |
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One ought naturally to regard with some skepticism anything which confirms one's prejudices so neatly, but I do think this report about payoffs from Saddam to prominent foreigners is worth noting. It would fit what we know about human nature that some of the critics most loudly crowing that U.S. intervention was "all about oil" adopted their own position for oil lucre: classic projection.
One notable name on the list is the "head of Russian Presidential Administration." At the time of the payoffs, this would have been the shadowy Mr. Voloshin. Conveniently, Putin surprised observers and dumped him this summer. Did Putin know that Voloshin's Saddam connection might come out and hence cut him off?
[1/30/04 10:56] |
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MoveOn
Much as I loath the organization (for professional reasons, I can't say anything about its main sponsor just now), I found the ad mordantly amusing. On the other hand, for the lefties at MoveOn to bewail fiscal profligacy seems more than a little disingenuous. Also, I highly doubt that it will be, say, tomorrow's janitors paying the accumulated debt. Rather, if debt accumulation gets out of hand, a Dem administration will probably come in and soak high-earners. It's simply too hard politically to move tax rates upwards on anybody else; as for cutting spending, well, need I really go into that? As you've mentioned Doug, if premium cable television has become a basic human right, I doubt austerity is going to come from the spending side!
[1/27/04 12:43] |
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Return of the Too-Sexy Hotel
I made it back from the big D last night. For once, I was sorry to go, but then who would desire to abandon sunny 70-degree weather for freezing temperatures and an impending blizzard? In an earlier post, I wrote about the Dallas version of a hipster hotel that I usually stay at when visiting headquarters. For the first time, I got a full-on glimpse of the Saturday night scene. Having been abandoned by my partners, who have family or close friends in Dallas (the only person I know well is Joel, and he was away on vacation), I went out to get myself some dinner. I had to roam the streets around the office for some time before I found a place where a single person wouldn't feel awkward dining, so I didn't make it back to the hotel for a while. In the interim, somebody had fired the starting gun on weekend night-life. Upon my return, a line of cars, including two (very classy!) Hummer limos stretched down the block, and a familiar rhythmic thumping leaked from the bar. As I went to enter the lobby, a haughty clipboard-wielding girl barred my way. I tried to explain that I was staying at the hotel, but as I did so it occurred to me that I probably looked a little unusual in my schlumpy weekend attire, and as such did not fit the mold of the typical Hotel Zaza hipster guest. The girl asked me to produce some special card that the hotel issues weekend guests and which, undoubtedly, I had thrown away. My room key strangely did not count. While I might have physically muscled her aside, Texas's permissive concealed carry gun laws argued for a more polite approach. I was rescued from sleeping at the office by the timely arrival of our London partner, returning from dinner with his in-laws, in possession of his special card. In the end, I might have gotten a better night's sleep at the office, given the insistent "doosh-doosh-doosh" vibrating through the floor, and the waves of jolly guests giggling and tramping their way back to their rooms from the club at various hours.
[1/26/04 10:12] |
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Those Long-Range Thinkers at the New York Times...
...wonder in today's edition whether the China boom is a bubble. Once again, the newspaper of record impresses with its originality, its unerring ability to look beyond today's news and consider the stories people aren't yet thinking about. Ugh! They're talking about a China bubble now? After the H-share index has shot to the moon? After a crappy Chinese oil company like Petrochina traded at a higher valuation than Royal Dutch/Shell? After Chinese renminbi offshore interest rates have traded at nearly double-digit negative interest rates as every two-bit "macro fund" punter has placed outsized bets on a step-appreciation of the currency? If "Is China a Bubble?" is the above-the-fold story today, what's below the fold? "General Franco is Still Dead"? What a joke.
To the extent you guys care about the question of the China bubble, the easy way to answer the question is to look at China's investment rate. It runs in excess of 40% of GDP. No country, not even a country with a well-developed system of financial intermediation, is going to be able to successfully deploy those kinds of resources in positive return projects. Especially not a country where the banking system is rotten, where loan officers are guys who dole out money to the borrower willing to pay the highest kickback, and where the stock market is treated more like video poker than a true bourse. You don't need to know much else. That's not to say that China is somehow doomed. Bubbles, when they pop, can leave a lot of unhappy people, but the consequences of bubbles are not all deleterious. Our internet/telcom bubble has left us with wonderful mobile telephony and data transmission infrastructure, for example. China, though many of its depositors and investors will surely be crying, will end up with a much higher-quality physical capital stock than it started out with, much more efficient skilled labor, and ultimately thousands upon thousands of financial types who will have learned the kind of valuable lessons that only a bubble teaches. And, hey, what are those depositors going to do about it, anyway? China's a repressive state.
[1/18/04 14:10] |
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Eroticized Hotels
Doug, I take your point about the eroticization of America. Matsuri's bathroom mural illustrates an interesting facet of this process, namely the eroticization of public spaces. Certain neighborhoods have always flaunted an image of sexual license: take, for example, the old Times Square, or Boston's old Combat Zone. On the whole, eroticized public spaces were seedy, low-class, and louche. The sexualization had direct and sexual instrumental ends, for example the sale of pornography. Now, however, the erotic has invaded heretofore pristine kinds of public space. A respectable, upscale hotel restaurant believes it can attract a well-heeled clientele with an atmosphere that includes Japanese pornographic murals. On my most recent visits to Dallas, I have stayed at a new hotel just down the block from HQ, the rather risibly named Hotel Zaza. In addition to the ubiquious techno music, it's "hip vibe" includes jarringly racy hallway art: photos of half-or-three-quarters naked languorous women, some transvestite-themed paintings, etc. During one stay, they put me up in the "Chinoiserie Suite," the decorative theme of which I can only describe as "Shanghai bordello." The hotel Zaza is not in a red-light district. It does not, so far as I know, cater to the hot-sheets trade. It is located smack in the middle of an office district. What gives?
A hotel or a restaurant does no choose a certain decorative theme purely because its proprietors think it will give the diners the most satisfying aesthetic experience. These are businesses, not museums, and neither purports to fully dedicate itself to visual art. The decor serves to flatter the patrons. It whispers (or maybe shouts) to them something about themselves: you are the sort of person who fits in a place like this. It can tell us something about the shift in people's aspirations. A few decades ago, an impressive bathroom in a restaurant of the moment would be antiseptic, gleaming marble, superintended by a quiet fellow in a white uniform who turned on the faucets and handed the patrons washcloths. Obsequious waiters in tuxedos hovered by the table. Likewise, a grand hotel offered a profusion of gilt, ridiculously ornate carpets, gigantic chandeliers. Busboys and other minor functionaries decked out in brocaded livery attended to the guests' every whim. Message: "you are the sort of person who has servants, who is waited on hand and foot; you deserve baronial splendor." It suggests vaguely aristocratic aspirations. What does Matsuri or Hotel Zaza's interior scheme attempt to communicate? "You're a sexy, sensual person; you may be eating at an expensive restaurant or staying at an expensive hotel, but you're no stuffed-shirt, no prig. You're vibrant and young." And I suppose for many people today, that's the greatest compliment that they can be paid.
[1/16/04 20:09] |
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Milkshake-inspired thoughts
[I wrote a few things off-line at home a propos of "milkshake". I was delighted to see that Ben H. pre-empted my first one: "I invite Ben H. to submit his rant on Starbucks' Frappuccinos. One of the Bandarlog's mandates was to preserve his oral rants for posterity, and this is a good occasion."]
-- I was no more successful trying to figure out the hip-hop definition of "juice," back in the day, than Ben A. was with "milkshake." Its usages all suggested a correlate of manhood. Rappers bragged how much they had ("I got more juice than Picasso got paint") or else bragged that they were above such bragging ("I haven't come to tell you I got juice / I just produce, create, innovate on a higher level ..."). But when I asked the one black kid in my Spanish class exactly what it was, he just looked at me incredulously and said, "You know, it's juice." To compound the mysteries: if a rapper with enough juice gets a milkshake, is that a smoothie?
-- The other night I had an eroticized food experience of my own. It may or may not be related to a nationwide trend, the rise in sensualism, but more on that later. Anyway, I now work for a great company where expense accounts are used liberally. As part of our "onboarding," I and another recent hire were taken out to dinner by our managers/colleagues. (When I'm fired, will there be a "gangplanking"?) One of these colleagues is in fact H.K.; if you know her, you won't be surprised that she picked the restaurant, or that she picked the restaurant with the hottest reputation for aesthetic ingenuity. It's called "Matsuri"; it's in a hotel called the "Maritime" (or something). The building itself is a hideous white box of postwar modernism with circular windows. Like that monstrosity on the south side of Columbus Circle. Back when Dao and I lived in the neighborhood (Chelsea) it was a home for ill or disturbed people. At some point, possibly during the boom, some people thought it would be a good idea to take over the place and remake it as -- well, as I said, I'm not sure I remember the name, but it really ought to be called The Hotel Lileks. It's straight out of his site -- a recreation of 40s-50s kitsch interior design. Sure, 40s-50s design has enjoyed retro popularity for many years now, but it's mostly jet-set/Rat-Pack nostalgia, not nostalgia for Middle America's enthusiasms of the era. Hotel Lileks alone has the turquoise tiles, the metal frustum fireplace, the South Pacific accoutrements. (The lobby, anyway -- it's all I really saw.)
Then there's the Japanese restaurant downstairs. The entry is kind of hidden, but once you get in, it's this enormous and meticulously designed space that seems somehow to be evenly firelit -- that's what struck me first, the mood lighting -- and is hung with giant balls of Japanese paper that seem to be melting a la Dali. And is crammed with advertising executives ranging in age from 32 to 48, wearing obviously expensive clothes and checking each other out, discreetly or not. Actually I have to recant what I just said; the mood lighting was the third thing I noticed, after two things that had seeped into the hotel lobby I'd been inspecting, namely the inevitable world-lounge-electronica music, and the Asian waitresses/hostesses in black miniskirts and black leather knee-boots. The latter were extremely, well, friendly, and H.K. said she saw some middle-aged diner putting his arm around one of them. Their fare was about what you'd expect -- their food, I mean! -- Kobe beef, 6,285 types of sake, yada yada yada. Not to affect world-weariness; I did really enjoy the food. But let's face it, if you know anything about New York restaurants of this type, you know that the really important thing is the bathrooms. Will they have one long onyx slab to be pissed upon? Will there be co-ed stalls with one-way mirrors where you can see everybody as you excrete your fifteen-dollar cocktail? Not here, but I think Matsuri's bathrooms passed muster anyway: the urinals were housed in individual baskets tiled in green jadite or celadon, and were flanked by a mural enlargement of an ancient Japanese painting, showing two women, one sucking the other's nipple.
America seems more eroticized than I remember. I guess everyone upon reaching a certain age says that morality is going to hell in a handbasket ... "Kids these days!" etc. But I'm not talking about morality; I don't particularly view sex as immoral. I'm just remarking that sex seems to be starting younger (the blowjob apparently has the same status in junior high that French-kissing did when we were there), ending later (thanks to Viagra), and serving as just another source of fun in the meantime (e.g. "Sex and the City", ubiquitous internet porn, recent pop lyrics you guys have cited). I offer no ideas about What This Means for the Future of Our Country, just the thought that it must mean something.
Maybe (okay, I lied, I will throw out a thought about what it means) we're on the same curve as France, a few decades behind. I've mentioned one of my favorite French words, "banaliser", to make banal, to make pedestrian, to empty of mystique. Sex in America is halfway banalisé -- it's "out there", "in your face" -- but it's not yet boring. People seem pretty excited about it still. It's like Paris in the 1920s. In Paris today, however, sex is totally banalisé. Not that I have any personal experience of this, of course, but the composite image I'm left with of Parisian sex, from all the movies, TV, conversations, and people-watching, is this: some bored-looking man comes up to some bored-looking woman and says "Excuse me, let's have sex," she agrees, and they do so in one of their apartments, and never see each other again. Is this America's future? Likely: after sex has saturated TV, school, music, and the internet for a decade or two, how could it not turn into something of a yawn?
(N.B. I've made no attempt to account for the distorting effects of the media -- maybe I've subconsciously given "Sex and the City" and "La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M" too much weight because everybody jabbers about them so much.)
Food is another area where America seems to be on the French Curve, a few decades back. Let me finish my post about this French cookbook we got as a gift and I'll get back to you.
[1/16/04 11:11] |
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Speaking of Milkshakes...
Jose Bove, call your office! Starbucks has arrived in France to pollute pristine French cafe culture. Quel horreur!
Jose shouldn't worry too much. After all, Starbucks does not really thrive by serving coffee. Many recent converts will tell you that they weren't really "coffee people" until they discovered Starbucks. News flash, guys: you still aren't coffee people. Check out that mocachino: whole milk, sugar, chocolate, whipped cream, and, oh yeah, a little bit of espresso. We have a word for this in English: milkshake. Starbucks is McDonald's for the sophisticated. A mocachino has about the same caloric content as a Big Mac, but the typical Starbucks customer thinks he's drinking just a harmless cup of coffee. No doubt, he would shudder at the though of passing beneath the Golden Arches, or heading over to Baskin Robbins for a genuine milkshake.
Howard Schultz's milkshakes bring all the boys (and girls) to the yard, but unlike Kelis he has no compunction about charging...
[1/16/04 08:55] |
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In Boston, We Call it a "Frappe"
The #1 song in the nation, "Milkshake" by Kelis, contains the following (irritatingly catchy) chorus:
My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard
And they're like: "it's better than yours."
Damn right, it's better than yours
I could teach you, but I'd have to charge
After hearing this blared from every radio, I knew that I had become tragically unhip. In particular, I had no idea what filthy, filthy, act "milkshake" refers to. I do so hate being out of touch with younger generation. Also, one never knows when one's milk hasn't been appropriately shaken, so Deb and I went on a journey of mature, sociological exploration to find out what the devil it meant.
Actually, it turns out no one knows what it means, and an exhausting ten minutes of web searching left us largely unenlightened. We did find a site “Urban Dictionary” which, unclear on the concept of reference work allows anonymous internet ignoramuses to write their own definitions. No one knew for sure, and while suggestions were appropriately dirty-minded, none rung completely true.
Finally, we located an interview with Kelis herself, who defined milkshake as “just that thing that makes a woman stand out from everyone else. It's a thing that makes you sensual and warm and maternal." Give the woman points for endorsing girl power!™, but this answer obviously doesn't wash. Maternal warmth never brought any boys to any yard. So I'm guessing that "milkshake" refers to that thing with the cup.
On the up side, I did uncover this while searching.
[1/13/04 19:46] |
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Ben A. |
Ben H. |
Doug |
Earlier |
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