Studiously Uncool

A little light culture

2012-02-10T13:01:00.000-05:00

And when I say light, you'd better believe me. As the cliche has it, swallow any liquids you might spray over the keyboard before reading any further.

After pointing out that lots of music stars got onto the cover of Rolling Stone more often that Michael Jackson, the writer of the piece I'd like us all to focus on today says:

Is it really possible that Michael Jackson, arguably the most influential artist of the 20th century, merited less than half the coverage of Bono, Bruce Springsteen, and Madonna?

And, in case you are wondering if he really means it, he links to another article by another writer who gives us a list of just some of the people he feels Jackson is more important than: F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Picasso, Salvador Dali, Charlie Chaplin and Stanley Kubrick.

And the thing is not that this is ridiculous, heck, I'll give him Kubrick, the problem is that it couldn't help but be ridiculous.

So who wrote these two pieces? Here are the mini bio that appears with the articles (both published by The Atlantic):

Joseph Vogel is the author of Man in the Music: The Creative Life and Work of Michael Jackson. He is a doctoral candidate and instructor in the Department of English at the University of Rochester.

And

Hampton Stevens is a writer based in Kansas City, Missouri. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, ESPN the Magazine, Playboy, Gawker, Maxim, and many more publications.

And that probably tells you everything you need to know about music journalism in 2012.

But there is something else really fascinating that happens in these pieces that is worth noting because it tells us exactly why not just most pop music journalism but most pop music, to steal a line from Bart Simpson, manages to both suck and blow.

Vogel's piece is called "the Misunderstood power of Michael Jackson's Music". "Music"! But the thing about it is that it's not about music. The piece is about Michael Jackson's image as a popular entertainer. For example, Vogel is impressed that Micheal Jackson was the first current star to appear in the Super Bowl half time show. That's an interesting historical fact, although we might ask whether the real credit doesn't belong with the NFL for asking him. What it isn't is any sort of musical innovation.

And Jackson was a huge star when he appeared. It wasn't any risk on his part, although, again, the NFL were taking a chance.

But let's get back to the music. Look at this line that Vogel cites from a 2002 speech that Jackson made, for example,

All the forms of popular music from jazz to hip-hop, to bebop, to soul [come from black innovation].

Quick test, name one musical innovation pioneered by Michael Jackson? I'll save you the trouble, there aren't any*. But even if there were, neither Vogel nor Stevens would be qualified to tell us. They are both really fashion journalists and if you read both their pieces above, you'll see that what they talk about is Michael Jackson's personal style. They like Jackson for what he represented.

The embarrassing truth about Michael Jackson is this: when he worked with great producers such as the Motown production team or Quincy Jones he cranked out quality material but when he worked with anyone else or, especially, produced himself, he cranked out mediocre material.

That doesn't make him unique. The same could be said of lots of other pop stars: lots of style, no substance. And style is nothing to sneer at. If you think you could do better, go right ahead.

If we want to judge the man fairly, we should judge him as a style icon. He doesn't belong with great innovators such as Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Lester Young or Thelonious Monk. And even though he was a very good performer he doesn't even belong with great performers such as Jimmy Rushing, Ella Fitzgerald, Fred Astaire or Frank Sinatra. Jackson belongs with the style icons and he, unlike Vogel and Stevens, grasped this. (Astaire and Sinatra were also style icons but they were great performers first.)

That is why he was so interested in Elizabeth Taylor and Elvis Presley. He knew full well that he, like them, was famous for being something rather than doing something. He knew full well that he hadn't made any actual innovations in either his music or the way he performed it. His achievement was in style. He embodied something. The only other baby boomer to rival him in that regard is Madonna.

And both share something else in common in that they are both moral weaklings and Jackson much more so than Madonna. Although we can probably explain some of Jackson's failings in terms of his odd childhood. But explain as we might, there is no moral substance to either. In both cases, however, the really painful truth is about the audience that made them famous rather than the sad, incomplete beings that Madonna and Jackson are.

* This, by the way, is true of almost all contemporary pop music. In strictly musicological terms there is no good reason to divide rock and roll, hip hop, soul and country into different categories. Elijah Wald has a good analogy here: linguistically speaking, there is less difference between Dutch and Flemish than there is between the Arabic spoken in Egypt and Morocco and yet we think of Dutch and Flemish as different languages and the languages spoken in Egypt and Morocco as different dialects of the same language. Why? Because the people in Egypt and Morocco see themselves as part of the same larger group whereas the people who speak Dutch and Flemish see themselves as distinct groups. So while the people who listen Jay Z believe that they are part of a different group from people who listen to Taylor Swift the musical language used by the two stars is identical.

Lying to courselves

2012-02-09T10:32:00.002-05:00

Here's how it's done:

What stands out for me is [Katherine] Boo's work, now almost 20 years ago, on the impact of welfare reform. It's always interesting to think back on how the literature of your youth shapes your path. At the time policy wonkery about the potential effects of welfare reform was all the rage. But Boo's work treated the wonkery as an excuse to write about what ultimately mattered to me as a reader--the people.

The mandate, at the time in my life, appeared simple--"Tell stories." The point here isn't that narrative is superior to stats but that narrative has a different power, and one--in our current age--which is hard to capture. Stats fit into six minute debate segment in a way that stories do not.

That's Ta-Nehisi Coates. Yeah, I'm on about him again. I like his stuff, I really do, but there is a pervasive bias that runs right through everything he writes and he just can't see it and that is amazing for a writer who clearly sees himself as battling prejudice.

Think how much the good impression Boo has on Coates depends on his already agreeing with her. He praises one story about the victims of Katrina at the link. If someone who believed that the exiles from Katrina were just a bunch of lazy slackers produced a well-told, true story to back up the claim, do you think Coates would praise that?

Let's have a look at the opening of Boo's work. Here is how she describes the residents who received people fleeing the storm:

Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, is a hub of oil and fishing industries on the Gulf of Mexico. The hamlets along its waterways rise in elevation and affluence as they increase in distance from the coast. Trailers, aluminum foil in their windows to beat back the sun, give way to communities screened by oak and cypress trees. One of the loveliest neighborhoods is Bayou Black. There are thoroughbreds on lawns there, and an alligator farm. The week’s sole rush hour begins Saturday before dawn, when fathers and sons leave home to fish and hunt. Later that morning, the shell-pink great house of a nineteenth-century sugarcane plantation opens for tours. The gift shop, in what the docents call “the servants’ quarters,” sells books with such titles as “Myths of American Slavery” and “Slaves by Choice.”

And then, just a little later she tells you how the people here think:

Popular sympathy, at least outside Terrebonne Parish, was with the displaced people, now known collectively as victims; and with that concern came the opportunity (“should they choose to take it” was the standard qualifier) to turn tragedy into renewal.

And that's just the more charitable ones from "outside". If you're a New Yorker reader this is an article designed to reinforce your favourite prejudices about white southerners. Just order yourself a latté and sit down with the magazine and prepare yourself to feel superior and, at the same time, virtuous because you, unlike them, really get it.

And it's not that it isn't true. Meaning, I doubt anything was made up in the story but I get a suspicion that she went looking with a clear picture of what she was going to find and she found it because that was what she was looking for. That's the way prejudice works. But I also know, having been there, that you have to filter out one whole lot of southern Louisiana to get the picture Boo gives us here.

And you can see the filtering happening right in her language as we move down smaller and smaller until we get to neighbourhood with the plantation with the gift shop that sells the books whose titles are going to make your blood boil with hate. Maybe you think she is just "picking out the relevant details"? You could just as easily find equally disturbing books in New York City and perhaps even the exact same titles, but that wouldn't prove anything because our New Yorker reader would (correctly) see these as exceptions that didn't prove anything general about New York. This sort of anecdotal evidence only counts against people we already want to feel superior too because, again, that's how prejudice works. Ask a white supremacist to write a story about a black community and she could produce the same kinds of anecdotal evidence without making anything up.

Katherine Boo writes narratives designed to reinforce prejudice. You don't have to write or read narratives that way. People didn't used to, but that is the way intellectuals of our era read narratives. As Oakeshott said of history, we treat narratives as a place to exercise our opinions like whippets in a park.

Manly Thor's Day Special: George Darrow

2012-02-09T08:57:00.003-05:00

(To read all posts about The Reef click here.)

You don't have to read or have read The Reef to get this. It's a post about a guy in the book who is, I think, a bit off-putting for many. George is not a good guy. He isn't a hero and you certainly wouldn't pick him as a role model. But the portrait Wharton gives of him is surprisingly charitable. She doesn't want to hate him.

Not to beat around the bush, George Darrow is one of those guys you sometimes see a woman having an affair with and you scratch your head and wonder why. Or maybe you bang your head against a wall and scream, "Why! Why! Why!" Either way, you can't explain it.

And one of the things we hope for when guys like George Darrow show up in books and movies is that they will be exposed and humiliated. We want to learn that he is sexually inadequate, a coward and a swine. But if we read The Reef we get all the way to the end without every getting any of that. Worse, the two women at the centre of the novel both still appreciate him, they may even both still love him.

There is only one guy in the novel who might hate George but he, Anna's stepson, is a pitiable character.

It's as if Edith Wharton set out to rub our faces in the general unfairness of life.

So let's have a look at George. 'Cause I think we might find him a lot more intriguing if we could get over our resentment of the guy. And we just might find that he has a lot in common with that guy we see in the mirror over the bathroom sink everyday.

He's a guy who doesn't think about ends. It's not an accident that he's a diplomat. If it seems appropriate to bring two parties together, and he'll do it. Come back a day later and if, because the situation is changed, it seems a good idea to drive a wedge between them, he'll do that. Don't make too much of this just because you want to disdain him. He'd never be a concentration camp guard. But he's a guy who does stuff and not a guy who sits around thinking about the big picture or the meaning of life.
He's a manager with good people skills or, to put it less charitably, he is good at manipulating people to reach certain ends. Ends he doesn't think about.
He is an aesthete. Insofar as he has a notion of an overall goal or purpose in life it's an aesthetic vision. He sees himself working for the day when he can have a nice collection of books, meaningful hobbies, a comfortable house and so forth. He is not like Henry James' aesthetes who spend their lives desperately staving off boredom. George Darrow is genuinely satisfied as a result of his aestheticism. Part of the reason he is genuinely satisfied is, again, because he doesn't sit around questioning whether these ends are good or true.
He is a womanizer even though he is no Don Juan. He isn't a great success as a seducer and the one seduction we see him accomplish in the book he sort of blunders into. First of all, he succeeds largely because he enjoys playing the gentleman and this is taken as incredible kindness by the woman involved. Second, while the thing is unquestionably intentional on his part he is never honest with himself about seducing Sophy. It's sort of "passive aggressive" in that he floats along not really desiring her with any intensity but keeps doing what is necessary to keep the thing moving forward when it really counts. Third, never really having cared about the woman as an end in herself but only as a means, he bores of her quickly. And he doesn't tear himself up about it worrying about her or her feelings; it's just something he did and now it's over.

And boy you could hate that guy if he seduced the woman you were in love with couldn't you? Why even if he seduced her ten years ago and it was long over it would bother you because you wouldn't want to be part of any club that would allow a member like that inside. But why all the resentment? He's not really that bad a guy when all is said and done. And put yourself in her place, you can see how such a guy might become the focal point for self-assessing herself as a woman, as a sexual being.

Blogging The Reef

2012-02-08T20:24:00.001-05:00

(To read all posts about The Reef click here.)

This is based on the first three chapters.

We are introduced to two women: Anna Leath (formerly Anna Summers) and Sophy Viner. What we see comes through the eyes of George Darrow. And George is, in one sense anyway, a likely witness because he is a bit of a womanizer. We learn that he met Sophy Viner because she was working in some sort of assisting capacity to a woman who ran a bit of salon with a decidedly bohemian bent. George apparently made a bit of a fool of himself pursuing one Lady Ulrica who was a member of this circle.

Anyway, George expects his women to match what they are advertised as:

George Darrow had had a fairlyvaried experience of feminine types, but the women he had frequented hadeither been pronouncedly "ladies" or they had not. Grateful to both forministering to the more complex masculine nature, and disposed toassume that they had been evolved, if not designed, to that end, hehad instinctively kept the two groups apart in his mind, avoiding thatintermediate society which attempts to conciliate both theories of life."Bohemianism" seemed to him a cheaper convention than the other two, andhe liked, above all, people who went as far as they could in their ownline—liked his "ladies" and their rivals to be equally unashamed ofshowing for exactly what they were. He had not indeed—the fact of LadyUlrica was there to remind him—been without his experience of a thirdtype; but that experience had left him with a contemptuous distaste forthe woman who uses the privileges of one class to shelter the customs ofanother.

Anna is unquestionably a lady. That is to say she is something of a work of art. She is not "natural", which is what Sophy is and our subject for Friday. Anna is something she has created of herself with great effort. That is a very 18th century notion when, unlike today, to say something was artifice or artificial was a great complement.

It still is for George. George has a deep appreciation for Anna and I think we can safely say that he always has. Whether this deep appreciation is love or something akin to it is open for discussion.

Note, by the way, how well her maiden name is chosen. George and Anna knew one another many years ago and those years with Anna Summers are now his Anna summers. A blissful period he recalls with pleasure but also disappointment because it didn't work out.

He is, it is important to realize, more than wiling to wait for Anna.

Darrow, for his part, was content to wait if she wished it. Heremembered that once, in America, when she was a girl, and he hadgone to stay with her family in the country, she had been out when hearrived, and her mother had told him to look for her in the garden. Shewas not in the garden, but beyond it he had seen her approaching down along shady path. Without hastening her step she had smiled and signed tohim to wait; and charmed by the lights and shadows that played upon heras she moved, and by the pleasure of watching her slow advance towardhim, he had obeyed her and stood still. And so she seemed now to bewalking to him down the years, the light and shade of old memories andnew hopes playing variously on her, and each step giving him the visionof a different grace. She did not waver or turn aside; he knew she wouldcome straight to where he stood; but something in her eyes said "Wait",and again he obeyed and waited.

The problem as he sees it is that the wait has to be for something. He loves the idea of a long and romantic build up but it has to be a build up to something. And the something he is exceited to wait for is not just love but erotic love. This is a pretty common male attitude and, if you'll pardon my intruding, an entirely justifiable one. Here is how he thinks it:

As in her girlhood, hereyes had made promises which her lips were afraid to keep.

So, is the problem with what she fails to say with those lips or is it that she doesn't manage to get kissed? It is the latter, of course, but that is obviously a more complex problem than Darrow grasps. How does a girl manage to get kissed? She could, of course, initiate the kiss but, even as liberated as we are, it doesn't work that way most of the time. It's a very old problem but not a trite one. How do you get a man to kiss you?

Just something to keep in the back of our minds as we go along.

Some Catholic politics

2012-02-08T12:00:00.000-05:00

One of the crucial political skills is the ability to count heads. Before you pick a battle, any battle at all, you have to count the heads. How many people in the room are on your side? How many are dead set against you? How many can be swayed to your side with a convincing argument? And how many just don't care and probably never will?

I share the concern a lot of people have about the new policy that will oblige Catholic agencies to pay for contraceptives for their staff. I would think even a religion-hating atheist ought to be worried that governments feel they can so casually order people to act contrary to their conscience.

But here is the thing: What is the head count?

My guess is that even a ballot in which Catholics were the only people allowed to vote would be a risky thing for opponents of this measure. Even at my church, which is one of the two most conservative parishes in the city, there are a lot of people who go to church every single Sunday who'd just love to see the Church brought down a peg or two on the contraception issue. They don't just use contraception, it has become part of the way they live. They don't get worked up about this because they don't see contraception as an important matter of dogma. They see it as a peripheral issue best left to individual conscience and they wouldn't mind at all to see the church suffer a public loss on the issue.

And, much as I hate to harp on about this, they believe that Church leaders' credibility to teach on moral issues relating to sexuality was largely undermined by the sex scandals. And it's crucial to grasp that they see this as an us-versus-them issue. On matters of sexuality, they don't see this as an issue concerning them as part of the Church. They see it as an issue regarding a group of leaders who have proven themselves corrupt and untrustworthy on sexual morality.

That's why the Obama administration have done this. You can bet they did the head count. They did some very thorough polling before making this move. They know that a lot of Catholics on the left are looking for an excuse to vote for Obama and they see this as a way of giving them that excuse. Whether that is enough to save Obama is another matter, the mere fact that he is busy shoring up his base this late in the game leads me to believe that he doesn't think his chances of getting re-elected are much better than fifty-fifty.

Don't get me wrong, the Church has no choice but to oppose this measure for it directly contradicts Church teaching. That said, I wouldn't count on the battle being won because it probably won't be.

Woman Virtues Wednesday: What happens to Mimi Now?

2012-02-08T09:57:00.004-05:00

If you are at all interested in the way our culture treats women, the way the Mimi Alford book detailing her affair with John F Kennedy plays out in public will be a fascinating marker for what people really believe. And to grasp what will be behind this, we need to take a brief excursion into politics.

The Kennedy family have a powerful incentive to discredit Alford. JFK is the family gold mine and the rest of them have, for the most part, been basking in the glory flowing from it ever since. But it's not just them, there is a huge swath of the population whose entire political belief system is built around the Camelot mythology. This includes even people who don't think Kennedy is that important to them.

Don't believe me? Well consider hate. Do you worry about an atmosphere of hate and polarization that is poisoning our politics? Well, that comes from the Kennedy mythology. There is, in fact, absolutely no evidence that we live an era where there is unprecedented hatred and division that plagues our culture and politics. Racism, sexism and poverty still exist to be sure but there is probably no other time in history when these things weren't much worse than they are today.

We live in an extraordinarily blessed era. Every day we should be walking around feeling grateful to have it so good. Even now, somewhere in the midst of a giant recession, we live incredibly well. And yet there is a huge portion of our culture devoted to making you believe that everything is horrible and getting worse. There is a civic religion whose goal is to convince everyone that our culture and politics is poison.

And the Kennedy mythology is at the centre of that civic religion:

I shouted out, Who killed the Kennedys?
When after all, it was you and me.

Yeah, JFK was like Jesus man and he died for our sins. For the true believers, those sins are embodied in this mythological hatred and division that plague us. The revelation that JFK was actually a horrid and vulgar little man who richly deserves our contempt threatens to bring down not just one political dynasty but an entire civic religion.

And the only way the true believers will be able to prevent that is to defuse the Alford threat. How can they do that? Well, character assassination is a favourite approach. Another is to try and brush it off as not news: nothing to see here folks, we've heard all this before. Watch for the New York Times review of the book as they tend to set the tone. Whatever they do will be emulated by most of the press.

What's interesting about Mimi from my perspective though is how familiar her story sounds. I mean, if you keep track of stories about how girls are out of control, how the changing sexual mores have left them vulnerable and confused in recent years, then you can't help but look at Mimi and think, "This was already happening fifty years ago!" And if it was already happening fifty years ago, then maybe that is the thing that isn't news. Maybe Mimi Alford did what she did and Kennedy got away with it because that is what is a lot of girls are like. Because that is what a lot of girls have always been like.

I'm not saying she wasn't exploited by Kennedy and his attendant pimps. She was. But that exploitation was possible because of certain truths about women's sexuality that we like to hide from ourselves even now. We still treat girls like they are from some special class of innocent-yet-morally-superior beings. An awful lot of "feminism" is really about maintaining that mythology that girls are helpless victims of constant rape and abuse. But only a tiny percentage of women are raped. Far more girls are like young Mimi and are exploited not by making them do what they don't want to do but rather by assisting them to do the thing they very much do want to do.

And now we get to see just how she gets treated for daring to tell us this.

More JKF and Mimi cause it's fun

2012-02-07T17:38:00.002-05:00

There is a file from the sealed oral history that led to the revelation of Mimi's affair with JFK at The Smoking Gun. Go here and click on "view the document" and then settle in for a fascinating read. (my first post on this subject is here.)

There are a couple of really intriguing details of the chronology that the transcript doesn't fill out but it sure makes you more curious about the details. Mimi began as an intern after her freshman year at Wheaton. So she's 19 then, which means that she was, well, younger when she first met JFK while a student at Miss Porter's School. How much younger? Well, that's a good question and I hope someone from the press asks Ms. Alford and also asks her whether anything untoward happened in that earlier encounter.

And I wonder about "Priscilla". Who is Priscilla you ask? Well, I could venture a guess and you could too after a little Googling but I wouldn't want to commit in print without being absolutely sure. It's another one of those questions you can't help but think the press ought to be looking into a bit more closely. Why? Well, not just because she also appears to have had sex with the president but because she was doing other stuff that while I'm sure it wasn't, could, by someone less charitable than me, be taken to be really not nice.

Well follow the trail with me a bit.

The document at The Smoking Gun is a transcript of part of an interview by Diane Michaelis of Barbara Gamarekian, an aide working for Kennedy. "Priscilla" makes her first appearance on page eight of the seventeen page excerpt. The first "she" here is Mimi on her visit while still a high school student and, presumably, still a minor.

Now you kind of have to wonder two things:

Is this true?
If it is true, what exactly is Priscilla's role in these things?

Particularly as we soon learn that Mimi had absolutely no skills for the internship. She couldn't type. All she knew how to do was answer the phone and take messages, not a rare skill. So why would Priscilla "who was one of the younger girls" be "referring" her for the position.

And then we learn that there were a few girls doing ah, "special duties" for Kennedy. And, what is more, they seem to have gotten on rather well with one another. Back to the transcript (page 6 of 17).

I like the "marvelous example of sharing" and that the girls all had the same "world outlook". The complete lack of jealousy is fascinating. Remember that Ms. Alford's story is that she was "smitten" by the man who wouldn't even kiss her, like she was some sort of prostitute or something, and ask yourself if this account makes her claim seem more or less credible to you?

More importantly, though, is to note that that excerpt tells us that Kennedy had not just Mimi but a whole group of girls doing him favours and even that they were doing this sort of thing for several other men in the White House. Perhaps even the odd gentleman of the press was involved?

What's the right collective noun for a group of women who provide sex to men as part of some sort of clandestine professional relationship? I've heard the word "stable" used but shrink from such a thing myself.

Anyway, back to Priscilla Queen of the Night. There is another mention of her in the transcript. Let's go to page 16 of 17.

Well, well, well. And if we read on, we learn that Barbara Gamarekian is surprised that Jacqueline Kennedy would mention this to a journalist, but not all surprised at the suggestion that Priscilla is having sex with him.

So let's review the testimony. If Barbara Gamarekian is correct, Mimi stayed with Priscilla on Mimi's first visit to the White House as a teenager and, based on her assessment of Mimi, who had zero useful skills for an internship, Priscilla invited her to return. I think we can also assume that Priscilla also spoke to someone else (Mr. Powers? The President?) for it seems unlikely that she, as one of the "younger girls", had the ability to pull the strings necessary to get Mimi granted an internship that she hadn't even applied for. That sounds a lot like well ... it sounds like something the press should be killing themselves to fill out. Why the staggering lack of curiousity?

Droit de seigneur?

2012-02-07T14:50:00.002-05:00

Shall we all take a peak down the front of Mimi Alford's shirt? She has invited us all to do just that, so here goes:

Uncertain and all of 19, tall and striking Marion “Mimi” Beardsley rode the train from Trenton, N.J.., down to Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1962 to intern at the White House. The Wheaton College undergraduate was puzzled as to why she’d been chosen for the internship—she hadn’t applied. Beardsley had, however, written an article for her all-girls boarding school, Miss Porter’s School, about one of its most famous alumnae, the first lady. A trip to the White House had led to a chance meeting with the president. And a year later, there she was, on her way to one of the cushiest posts available to a young woman whose parents frequently consulted the Social Register.

I am reminded of a bit of dialogue from The Wings of the Dove.

Merton Densher: "I hope you don't allude to events at all calamitous."
Maud Lowder: "No—only horrid and vulgar."

Let's think our way the back story through here.

JFK sees a hot girl visiting the White House and says to his minions, "Get her for me." And they make it happen. David Francis Powers was "Special Assistant" to President Kennedy or, to put it in plain English, the president's pimp. Let me expand a bit so there is no mistake about the significance of being a pimp: David Francis Powers was a pimp, as in a morally worthless slimeball who exploits women sexually for personal profit. And he did well out of the deal—he later became curator of Kennedy's library and museum. I don't there is any other pimp in the 20th century who did quite so well.

And John F Kennedy was a John. I know, we're not supposed to be shocked anymore; we're supposed to be terribly blasé about it all. But get past the simple fact that a guy who was a moral icon to many did this thing and think about the way it happened. Think of Jimmy Swaggart who had to sneak away from everyone he knew and find a hooker and go to some seedy motel for his cheap thrills. Got that? Now compare that to a president asking his own staff to bend the rules so he can have some hot teen action ("barely legal" as they say in porn) and them all just lining up and saying "how high should we jump sir?"

And think how the press hunted Swaggart down and revealed all while same press not only kept JFK's secret, they kept on keeping it for a full forty years after his death.

And what about her side of the story? First of all, for those of you who don't follow these things, Miss Porter's School is as elite as elite prep schools get. You cannot get any further inside than that. So she's asked to be the president's high-class call girl and she goes with it. And yes there was quid pro quo: she cannot have been under any illusions about why she got an internship without even having to apply for it. Okay, we should cut her some slack: she's an impressionable teenager and he is the president but one would think that if an education at Miss Porter's was going to prepare her for anything, it should have prepared her not to be a call girl. Having grown up knowing girls who went to prep schools much lower in status than Miss Porter's, I think I can safely say that my expectations of what one gets from that sort of education are realistic enough that I can confidently say that is not setting the moral bar too high.

I'm sure she tells the story in such a way as to minimize her own moral agency. The question is whether we should believe her. I'm sure she didn't saunter up and offer to show him her thong and not just because thongs weren't around yet. But that makes it worse because there was a whole thicket of expected social behaviours that stood between JFK and what was inside her panties. He didn't get there without some help from her.

UPDATE: This detail from a New York Post story adds a significant detail:

She always called him “Mr. President” — not Jack. He refused to kiss her on the lips when they made love. But Mimi Alford, a White House intern from New Jersey, was smitten nonetheless.

Smitten!

That, no doubt, explains this:

... during a noon swim. Powers had rolled up his pants to cool his feet in the water. “The president swam over and whispered in my ear. ‘Mr. Powers looks a little tense,’ he said. ‘Would you take care of it?’

“It was a dare, but I knew exactly what he meant. This was a challenge to give Dave Powers oral sex. I don’t think the president thought I’d do it, but I’m ashamed to say that I did . . . The president silently watched.”

That's pretty advanced behaviour for 1962, even for a graduate of Miss Porter's. I suspect many hookers of the time would have charged extra for such a thing. And I can't help but think that if Mimi was really ashamed of something that no one else could possibly know about (Powers and Kennedy both being long dead) she wouldn't have brought it up.

Speaking of advertising

2012-02-07T10:56:00.000-05:00

That Clint Eastwood ad. It's puzzling a lot of people. For example:

I just watched the ad seconds ago, after reading about the Republican freak-out, which I have to say is bizarre. This is the exact sort of gauzy nationalism (to paraphrase Jonathan Chait) that corporations have put out for years and Republicans have, themselves, often alluded to. This is the America of their imaginations and to see them lambasting it, evidently for name-checking Detroit and softly alluding to the bail-out, really displays a party that actually isn't.

That's Ta-Nehisi Coates, yes, he is a regularly recurring subject here. And I should admit I am puzzled by Coates in similar ways. I read him regularly and I see contradictions in his claims about hip hop. Everything the guy stands for, and Coates really stands for stuff, is the opposite of hip hop. And he lets that slip now and then. But he keeps defending it. He has a sort of gauzy affection for it.

But he has perfectly good reasons for liking the stuff he does like and I can understand that being Quebecois. Particularly being a mix of pur laine French Quebecois on one side and dyed in the wool Irish on the other. There are attitudes embodied in that culture are just so self-defeating that I want to chuck it all. Except that it is my culture and there are historical reasons it is the way it is. And even when you pile up all the contradictions, those reasons are often still good reasons.

And the same is true of American conservatives and the Clint Eastwood ad. You have to understand the seeming contradictions not as simply contradictions but rather see the deeper thing they point to.

I'll say more about this next Monday but it all comes down to this line:

... but after those trails, we all rallied around what was right and acted as one ...

Yeah, that sounds like it ought to be palatable to conservatives but it isn't. There are historical reasons why conservatives reject that notion. Yeah, they think, we all rallied around and fought external threats to liberty but that isn't quite the same thing as rallying around what is right and acting as one.

Liberty is a particular word and it is used in particular ways. It means something like freedom but not exactly the same thing. It is, as many have said before me, more of a negative concept. And to say "acted as one" is not only not liberty, it can be a threat to it.

Much more come Monday.

When supply creates demand

2012-02-07T09:53:00.000-05:00

There are people who categorically reject the notion that supply can create demand. I have one friend who is so heavily invested in the notion that it can't happen that he actually gets angry and will threaten to end friendships with anyone who insists on arguing the point.

Those whose object do so partly a matter of political economics. If supply can really create demand then Keynes and Marx were just wrong, end of story. And that would upset a lot of apple carts. But it's pretty obvious that there is a deeper problem and that it is a moral issue. People reject the notion because it upsets their understanding of what a human being should be. They want human beings to be primarily concerned with "real needs" and not subject to passing fashion. Consider, for instance, the person who gets really angry at the thought that a whole lot of people can suddenly have a craving for a product they didn't know existed until it appeared in advertising.

Note that the concern here is not lying. That goes on, of course. I had a gas vendor show up at my door last week and tried to convince me that he was a consumer advocate working to protect my interest. He really was trying to con me into renting a water heater from his company. That is a concern but it's not what upsets people here—what upsets them is the notion that advertising can create a need in me for something that I never needed before. That supply could create demand.

And to argue against such people, the important first step is to acknowledge that advertising can do just that and then consider why that might be a problem. Do they think that advertisers have secret psychological techniques that they can use to manipulate us into wanting things we don't really want? (That was what troubled Marx.) I'm perfectly willing to admit I didn't want some products until I saw them advertised but does that make my want for them false?

One of the important things to show them is that it doesn't have to be advertising to work. Pinaud's Clubman aftershave has been made since 1810 and is not advertised anywhere where I live. It's dirt cheap and is not making large amounts of money for anyone. There is far more money and advertising spent trying to create a need for the latest designer and celebrity scents and all without much success. And yet, the second I learned about Clubman from researching the history of shaving, I wanted some. I didn't just want to try it. I was predisposed to like it. And when I tried it I did like it.

But not any supply can create demand. Huge amounts of sulphur are created as a byproduct of industrial processes but nowhere is there much demand for sulphur. It's not that sulphur is useless. Human excrement also has some uses but we still pay to have it taken away. There simply isn't much demand for these things.

But there are other times when simply supplying something can create a huge demand for it. It can even happen largely by accident. One fascinating case is the ASCAP battle with radio stations that built up over the 1930s finally coming to a head at the end of the decade. It's often conflated with the musician's union battle with radio stations over recorded music but it was something else entirely.

One of the reasons it gets less attention is because it had virtually no effect at the time. That itself was a surprise. ASCAP controlled the rights to virtually all the popular music of the day. Try to imagine what would happen if suddenly no one was allowed to use any pop hit from 1950 to the present day in movies, radio or television. That was the sort of power ASCAP had.

And they figured that the everyone would just cave and give them what they wanted. They believed they were needed because there was no demand for the only alternatives: old music and weird ethnic music. They didn't even consider the possibility that their rivals supplying other kinds of music would create a demand for those sorts of music. They didn't consider that possibility because it was too ludicrous to even imagine.

Think of old traditional jazz and swing music and African music today. Both of these exist on the periphery of popular culture. There are occasional hits where this stuff breaks through. But can you imagine them suddenly breaking into the mainstream because the most popular music was suddenly banned for use and people went with what there was a supply for? Can you imagine this fundamentally changing people's taste so they actually came to prefer that other music? Can you imagine it changing the entire culture for decades to come?

Well that is exactly what happened as a result of ASCAP's banning their music from radio stations. From the moment ASCAP pulled it's big bid for power, interest began to grow in old music forms and weird ethnic music. Think of songs that are structured verse then chorus then another verse and back to the chorus and so on until you run out of verses. That's a pretty standard form of pop song today. Virtually every single Beatles song is like that. That structure had all but disappeared in 1930. There was no demand for it anywhere. People considered such songs corny and crass. But when radio stations had no choice but to supply that sort of music, they created new demand for it.

Similar things happened with hillbilly music and what was called "race" music meaning the kinds of music rural whites and rural blacks made for themselves. This stuff wasn't just unpopular, it was an embarrassment to most people. Urban blacks, in particular, associated the music produced by rural blacks with racist stereotypes they were proud of having escaped. Latin American music had similar problems as it too was associated with cultural values that people didn't mind visiting now and then but they didn't want to live there. And yet all three took off as soon as supply grew.

And that was just the beginning because elements from all three of these were combined over the next two decades to create urban blues, rhythm and blues, country, rock and roll, rock, disco, hip hop and soul music. And again, there was no demand for any of these musics until there was a supply.

That is the way human beings are. We learn what to want and how to want it from other people. There are things you are completely unaware of right now that you will crave sometime in the near future. And you will be going along with hundreds if not thousands or even millions of other people when you do.

Sort of political Monday:

2012-02-06T09:45:00.001-05:00

And yet, in another way, it's entirely understandable. How would you, Ms. Private Sector Employee, like to be told that you had to take a 25% wage cut because your government had borrowed too much money, and then cooked the books and lied about it? I would be rather miffed, I think.

And when people are angry, they are not always perfectly rational. They will hurt themselves, badly, if it means that they can also hurt other people who they feel have done them an injustice.

That's Megan McArdle. She was writing about the Greeks but what she is saying about them right now could easily be a prophesy of where Canadians are headed.

At the end of last week, our Prime Minister, whatever else you might think of him, made a mature and responsible statement about Canada's Old Age Security system. He pointed out that people are living longer and that the day will come when the payments required will be more than the country can afford. In other words, he attempted to be honest with the people about the amount of debt the government was assuming.

The anger was immediate and deeply cynical. Remembering that it was a reaction from the elderly that caused Brian Mulroney to make his first major retreat as prime minister, the other parties and many in the media jumped on the opportunity to stir up anger among the elderly in the hopes of wounding him. Worse, they promoted the understanding of this benefit as an entitlement for all Canadians. They encouraged people to think of Old Age Security as something they have a right to and woe to the politician who tries to tell them the truth.

It's a funny thing, by the way, that programs like Old Age Security, originally intended to provide security for seniors who might otherwise struggle, end up becoming entitlements for everyone. Whenever a program is set up so that those who have can help those who have not, you can be sure that just about everyone will decide they are have-nots.

What's the prospect for good coming out of this? Well, first consider how unlikely a thing it is to have a government that is willing to be responsible. Old Age Security isn't going to explode beyond the government's ability to pay on Harper's watch. He could just kick the can a little further down the road and let someone else deal with it. And that is what Greece and several other countries have done. And they are apparently going to keep doing it until they run out of road and default.

The most likely scenario is that we get some steps made in the right direction. They won't be enough to solve the problem but they might be enough to reduce it a bit. The best case scenario is that plus a growing realization among Canadians that we are not entitled to our entitlements.

The painful irony here is that many of the people who are most upset about this are people under thirty and even university students. If you find yourself with such a person and you hear them launching into a tirade about such matters, be prepared to do your bit. Listen patiently, and even respectfully, and then say,

You do realize that you probably won't see any benefits from this? I'm quite serious. The costs of pension system, the old age security system, the health care system are all growing faster than the country can afford. They can't possibly survive in their present form. And there is no way to make this work without sacrifice and that you are going to have to make that sacrifice because the baby boomers voted for politicians who told them they didn't all their lives.

Don't hope to convince them because you can't. They'll mostly whine about how it can all be saved if "the rich" can be made to pay their fair share. And to that you say,

That won't work. There aren't enough rich people to pay for it all. Even if we taxed every rich person for every penny they have, it wouldn't be enough to cover the costs. The social safety net can only work because the haves pay for the have-nots and, just in case you don't realize this, you are a have. You are the one who has to pay for the system to work.

That won't convince them either but it might just plant a seed that may grow.

Blogging The Reef

2012-02-03T08:00:00.000-05:00

Note: I am using the Everyman's Library edition of 1996.

(To read all posts about The Reef click here.)

Many of the critics who have written about this book have puzzled about the title. They point out that the word "reef" doesn't appear even once in this book. So we have a mystery and our first question is, "What is a 'Reef'?" It's a nautical term and it has two senses only one of which applies here.

In that sense a reef is something hard under the surface of the water that is a hazard to navigation that boats and ships may run into. Reefs don't move but they are hard to keep track of and hard or impossible to see. You could think of them as being like little islands that don't quite reach the surface. They are usually rock but they can be of other substances such as coral.

Now Wharton didn't do much in the way of writing by accident. That she calls this book The Reef and then never uses the word is intentional. We are faced with this mystery because she has set it for us to solve. And we get confirmation of this right from the first paragraph.

'Unexpected obstacle. Please don't come till thirtieth. Anna.'

For a reef is nothing but an unexpected obstacle. But we don't have a clue what that obstacle is nor does George Darrow who is the person Anna has sent this message to.

The other thing that ought to jump out at us about that paragraph is that the syntax is rather odd. Those aren't full sentences. The next paragraph, which consists of one long sentence, makes quite a contrast.

All the way from Charing Cross to Dover the train had hammered the words of the telegram into George Darrow's ears, ringing every change of irony on its commonplace syllables: rattling them out like a discharge of musketry, letting them, one by one, drip slowly and coldly into his brain, or shaking, tossing, transposing them like the dice in some game of the gods of malice; and now, as he emerged from his compartment at the pier, and stood facing the wind- swept platform and the angry sea beyond, they leapt out at him as if from the crest of the waves, stung and blinded him with a fresh fury of derision.

That sentence also explains why the first paragraph is written the way it is: it's a telegram. Telegrams don't exist anymore so we might miss that this is a very modern thing. Think of it as being a little like a text message. Telegrams were short because you paid for them by the word so people chopped out all the unnecessary words. Text messages are short because people get tired of typing with their thumbs.

So it's a mystery and it's a modern mystery. At least here at the beginning, this book is all about modern communications transport and cities.

At the same time there is a hint of an ancient mystery in the line:

... shaking, tossing, transposing them like the dice in some game of the gods of malice ...

Keep that in mind for the idea of classical tragedy will be a recurring theme. Not because we are to think of this story as a tragedy but rather so we will see that it is something different. Just like Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, this is a sad story and not a tragedy. The story of Lily Bart was more like a tragedy. This is a huge step forward into something new for Wharton. You could call this Wharton's version of modernism.

And the mystery is about Anna, whom we will soon know as Anna Leath. (Although we might, as I Wharton intends, see it as having something to do with all women in a modern world where the roles for them as women have changed.) She is the one who has sent this and our buddy George Darrow is wondering why. He's pretty sure there will be a perfectly good reason for the delay but he also suspects that Anna could have gotten around it if she'd pushed a bit harder. And he is wondering along these lines because this has happened before.

If I could hammer on the "modern" aspect of this a bit, consider how this scene simply could not have happened in Pride and Prejudice. This message is pretty close to instantaneous and the letters of Austen's fiction couldn't create such a conflict whereby someone was already leaving to go visit when it arrived as his train was pulling out.

Of course we should remember that we only have one side of the story. Is Anna also aware of the 'reef"? Well, yes, but we don't know that yet.

Final thought: notice how different this is from Henry James. Bang, right from the first sentence this novel is on theme. The Wings of the Dove isn't like that at all. It's theme teases out slowly over hundreds of pages. In every way, Wharton is a more focused writer. You can see why her books sold so much better than his.

Which leads me to a rather impertinent question: Why do critics prefer James to Wharton? And they do. For all the feminist readjustment whereby female artists have been reassessed versus their male contemporaries, the judgment regarding Wharton and James hasn't moved an inch in the last century. I find that really odd for I think if there is any novelist of this period who deserves the title "The Master" is is she. Whatever else you might say of the two, she is the one who is in complete control of the medium of the novel. He isn't.

Manly Thor's Day Special: Piece of paper?

2012-02-02T10:39:00.000-05:00

We don't need no piece of paper
From the city hall
Keeping us tied and true
from "My Old Man" by Joni Mitchell

Heartiste*, formerly known as Roissy, is channeling Joni Mitchell arguing that a long term relationship has just as many benefits for a man as marriage.

Sex, love and affectionate companionship don’t feel any more fulfilling when a piece of paper is signed. If you really think about it, it makes no sense that a man’s health would improve and his lifespan increase because he signed on the marital dotted line. Something else is at work here, and that something else is long-term shared love, with or without the imprimatur of a marriage license.

And the really important thing here is to acknowledge that all of that is true. As far as it goes. The problem is that it doesn't go very far.

Heartiste manages to acknowledge at least one direction he might have gone farther but does so only in a tangential way. The give away is in this line:

(In point of fact, this blog advocates learning game and the way of the alpha so that men have the freedom and the options to pursue whichever type of relationship with women they want, whether that be marriage and its attendant risks or frisky one night stands and their attendant, albeit lesser, risks.)

Those parentheses are in the original, the comment is very much parenthetical. What is he getting at here with this talk about risks? This: When you study who is happiest in our society the very happiest people tend to be married, the next group down are people who never married and the most miserable are people who are divorced. And this the greater risk that goes with marriage: the consequences of failure are huge!

If, however, the benefits of a long-term relationship are equal to those marriage then the risks will also be equivalent.

But when he's gone
Me and them lonesome blues collide
The bed's too big
The frying pan's too wide

That's Joni again and the sad truth is that all of Joni's men left her. And there were a lot of them. Yes you get most if not all of the the benefits of marriage from a long-term relationship but only as long as the relationship lasts. A split will rip you apart psychologically and financially and it's fantasy to pretend otherwise.

The question I'd ask is this: isn't a long-term relationship really just a marriage? No, it's not a legal marriage but who cares what the state thinks? The state is already overly involved in our lives as it is. I'm married because I believe in God and believe that he has designated the Church as his and it was important for me to get sanction from the church for what I was doing.

It also mattered to me to find a partner who believed that marriage is a binding commitment, as an exchange of persons wherein I gave myself to her and she gave herself to me. "No one gets out of this alive," is our line. (We stole that from Pia de Solenni.) The commitment is not that I marry you because I love you but that I will cultivate and grow my love for you because I'm married to you.

But I can't see why a non-religious person would bother with the legal contract. I can't even see why a Christian who didn't believe marriage was a sacrament would do it. (Heartiste, if he were here, would also insist, and absolutely correctly, that the civil law regarding marriage has been changed so that the game is loaded against men.)

There is a sort of "argument from legal insurance". That argument would say that it is precisely because the risks of failure are so high that you want the state-sanctioned contract in place. If it does fail, you'll be miserable but you'll have recourse to the civil law (that is you'll be able to sue one another) to limit the amount of damage the other person can do to you. The problem with that, as anyone who has watched their friends divorce will tell you, is that it only works when the two parties are able to co-operate relatively amicably. People who are really angry and hurt just destroy themselves whether they have a marriage license or not.

And you're already in trouble if you are going into the thing with an exit plan in place. Although that exit plan is also what Heartiste is doing in pushing the "freedom" of a long-term relationship on your own terms.

Here is the thing, commitment means making promises you can't break. In any relationship at all, the longer you are in it, the less excuse you have for leaving. Everyday you are together you are a little more married. The bond grows, the risk grows. At some point the logic goes the other way—if a piece of paper wouldn't give anything us that we don't already have then we are already married.

What doesn't happen is what Heartiste thinks he can make happen:

... this blog advocates learning game and the way of the alpha so that men have the freedom and the options to pursue whichever type of relationship with women they want ....

This reminds of a night years ago when I was drinking underage in a pick up bar. A woman somewhere in her mid thirties started talking to me. She'd been through a lot. She was also wearing a red dress and shoes and nothing else. You could tell. And she was trying to get me to go home with her, a prospect I wasn't adverse to at seventeen. And I would have except tat she suddenly started talking about "relationships". I was stupid at that age but I wasn't so stupid that I couldn't see that a woman sitting in a bar with a slinky red dress and no underwear talking about relationships was insane. And then she said:

What I insist upon in a relationship is complete freedom.

If your freedom really matters to you that much, you don't want a relationship in the first place.

* Oh yeah, a link, you may want a link. Okay, but a caveat: Heartiste is vulgar, blunt, insensitive and a misogynist. If you still want to read him, go here.

Lana Del Rey quickie

2012-02-01T21:20:00.001-05:00

Now there is a post heading that ought to pull in some sick Google searchers.

Anyway, the Atlantic's Spencer Kornhaber thinks that Del Rey is pushing a "regressive, beautiful, twisted fantasy". And here, he says with a flourish, is a proof:

Album closer "This Is What Makes Us Girls," lays it out: Girls "don't stick together" because they "put love first."

Except that, well, that's absolutely true. I can appreciate that Kornhaber and others wish it were not true but that is what girls are like.

Added: And why would girls stick together? The case for female solidarity had a certain merit in 1918 and 1970, but it's much harder to see what would women have in sticking together today. And, particularly, what would girls—meaning women between the ages of 15 and their early twenties have to gain from solidarity with other women?

The Wings of the Dove

2012-02-01T20:23:00.006-05:00

(To make this a blog exclusively about the Wings of the Dove click here.)

It is finished.

Somehow that seemed more appropriate than "I finished reading it." Two nights ago to be precise. I'm a slow reader but I began this baby back on October 29. Why did it take so long?

Partly because it's much harder to blog a book than simply reading it.
But mostly because there were days that I just couldn't face the thing and I'd go read something else instead.

The big problem with this book, and it is a deeply flawed novel, is Milly Theale/Minny Temple. It just dies every time she becomes the focus. There are, as it, two major female characters. One is the character of Kate Croy and she and her story are compelling and interesting. The other is the story of Milly that just doesn't work. It's hard to fault James for wanting to create a monument to a woman who hada huge influence on both him and his brother but it just doesn't work.

I think the book would have worked much better if James had simply "flattened" Milly's character such that she became important only terms of how she interacted with Merton and kate.

Anyway, as we rip through the final chapters we have three competing story lines. One is a sort of a duel Merton Densher is having with himself. He keeps trying to tell himself that he means well and then having to prove. For example (and I'll come back to this some day) when Maud Lowder finding him walking about on Christmas day asks him if he is going to church he says that he is. A few moments later, keen to prove to himself that he is not a liar, for no one else could ever learn if he had not, he goes.

And that one thing is what is going on with him overall. For a long time now he has been acting in a way towards Milly that many an objective person might interpret as fraud, and now he needs to shape his actions so to redeem that. You might call it moral retro-active context.

Kate is playing a similar game, insisting at one point that, the two have succeeded because, she claims, Milly went to her death believing that Merton really did love her. The problems with that are that 1) Merton knows that isn't true and B) he doesn't believe Kate is sincere.

And that brings us to the second story line which is a duel between Merton and Kate to see if Kate deliberately told Lord Mark the secret that she knew he would rush to Milly with and break her heart. Oddly enough, while Merton appears to confront Kate with this charge in Chapter 37, nothing comes of it. And that is because James the story James really wants to tell is the third story line.

And that third story line is one in which Milly dies but forgives Merton thereby leaving him feeling redeemed by her sacrifice. As a consequence, he feels that he and Kate should renounce everything they have gotten out of their scheming. This is not even remotely convincing.

Final verdict, for all its greatness along the way, fails in the end. This, of course, was Henry James' own verdict of the book.

And that is all I have to say except for the the Roman Catholic subtext that runs through this book. There is one, that is undeniable. What it means, if anything is another question. I may come back to that someday but now I just want to get away from the book for a while. I'm moving on to another book, The Reef by Edith Wharton, which handles some of the same themes as this only does it better.

Womanly virtues Wednesday: No real intimacy with nature

2012-02-01T13:07:00.000-05:00

January twenty-fourth just past was the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Edith Wharton's birth. Let's have a look at chapter six of The House of Mirth in her honour. This is how it begins:

THE AFTERNOON was perfect. A deeper stillness possessed the air, and the glitter of the American autumn was tempered by a haze which diffused the brightness without dulling it.
In the woody hollows of the park there was already a faint chill; but as the ground rose the air grew lighter, and ascending the long slopes beyond the high-road, Lily and her companion reached a zone of lingering summer. The path wound across a meadow with scattered trees; then it dipped into a lane plumed with asters and purpling sprays of bramble, whence, through the light quiver of ash-leaves, the country unrolled itself in pastoral distances.

Higher up, the lane showed thickening tufts of fern and of the creeping glossy verdure of shaded slopes; trees began to overhang it, and the shade deepened to the checkered dusk of a beech-grove. The boles of the trees stood well apart, with only a light feathering of undergrowth; the path wound along the edge of the wood, now and then looking out on a sunlit pasture or on an orchard spangled with fruit.

I hear an echo, two echoes really, in that text. The obvious one is the opening of Tintern Abbey. It's the wrong season, but the scene that Lily Bart here surveys sounds like the one Wordsworth does at the opening of his poem:

The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door ...

And I think Edith Wharton means for us to see the comparison in order that she may contrast her heroine with the Romantics and Romanticism. For the very next paragraph begins this way:

Lily had no real intimacy with nature ...

And Wordsworth means to suggest intimacy with nature. I think Wordsworth was fooling himself, mistaking his alienation with modern society for intimacy with nature but that is a subject for another day. The important thing here is that Wharton wants us to know that Lily Bart is not natural. She is not easy or given to naturalness but there are times when nature seems to match her moods. Here is the next paragraph in whole:

Lily had no real intimacy with nature, but she had a passion for the appropriate and could be keenly sensitive to a scene which was the fitting background of her own sensations. The landscape outspread below her seemed an enlargement of her present mood, and she found something of herself in its calmness, its breadth, its long free reaches. On the nearer slopes the sugar-maples wavered like pyres of light; lower down was a massing of grey orchards, and here and there the lingering green of an oak-grove. Two or three red farm-houses dozed under the apple-trees, and the white wooden spire of a village church showed beyond the shoulder of the hill; while far below, in a haze of dust, the high-road ran between the fields.

If she and her companion, Lawrence Selden, were to sit down we should expect them to talk of love. And they do just that.

Before I get to that discussion, however, the second echo. Edith Wharton kept a commonplace book and she wrote out long sections of Plato's Phaedrus in it and there is a very intentional echo of it here. Again, it is the wrong season but that is part of her point—it is very much the wrong season for love for Lily.

In Plato's work, Phaedrus and Socrates descend from the road they are on to a little stream and sit in the shade of a Plane tree. In this section of The House of Mirth, Lawrence and Lily leave the shade of the woods where there is also a faint chill and ascend to the open slope to find a "zone of lingering summer".

And Lily, while she may find the scene a fitting background to what she is feeling, is not noticing all that we might notice. She is not noticing that her immediate sense also matches her general place in life for her beauty is a bit like a lingering but about-to-leave summer.

Now, if this is really drawn from The Phaedrus would should expect erotic love and then cicadas to make an appearance.

Let's start with erotic love. Our two companions reach a comfortable place after their ascent and sit down:

Lily dropped down on the rock, glowing with her long climb. She sat quiet, her lips parted by the stress of the ascent, her eyes wandering peacefully over the broken ranges of the landscape. Selden stretched himself on the grass at her feet, tilting his hat against the level sun-rays, and clasping his hands behind his head, which rested against the side of the rock. He had no wish to make her talk; her quick-breathing silence seemed a part of the general hush and harmony of things. In his own mind there was only a lazy sense of pleasure, veiling the sharp edges of sensation as the September haze veiled the scene at their feet. But Lily, though her attitude was as calm as his, was throbbing inwardly with a rush of thoughts. There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears. But gradually the captive's gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed to them: the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit quivered for flight.

Yes, Wharton does want you to think what you are thinking. It's the most natural thing in the world to think of at that moment. Lily does think of it.

She could not herself have explained the sense of buoyancy which seemed to lift and swing her above the sun-suffused world at her feet. Was it love, she wondered, or a mere fortuitous combination of happy thoughts and sensations? How much of it was owing to the spell of the perfect afternoon, the scent of the fading woods, the thought of the dulness she had fled from? Lily had no definite experience by which to test the quality of her feelings.

But it isn't going to happen for these two. Which is rather a shame for the glory of woman such as Lily Bart laying back with her lips parted and breathing quickly is something to contemplate and a minor miracle for anyone lucky enough to there when it happens.

Instead, we learn that Lily has had a few fleeting feelings of love but never got past the barrier between it and her. And then our novel goes on to be about something else.

For, as with the Wordsworth echo, the point of the comparison is to draw our attention to the contrast. In the Phaedrus, Socrates convinces us that giving yourself sexually to a non-lover for pragmatic reasons is wrong. Lily is going to attempt exactly the opposite with tragic consequences.

Now on to the cicada. Here is a favourite paragraph from The Phaedrus that I have quoted before on this blog:

By Herè, a fair resting–place, full of summer sounds and scents. Here is this lofty and spreading plane–tree, and the agnus castus high and clustering, in the fullest blossom and the greatest fragrance; and the stream which flows beneath the plane–tree is deliciously cold to the feet. Judging from the ornaments and images, this must be a spot sacred to Achelous and the Nymphs. How delightful is the breeze:—so very sweet; and there is a sound in the air shrill and summerlike which makes answer to the chorus of the cicadae. But the greatest charm of all is the grass, like a pillow gently sloping to the head. My dear Phaedrus, you have been an admirable guide.

Here, courtesy of Wikipedia, is what a cicada looks like.

That black bug is somewhere between one to two inches long. It's a big black bug. It doesn't quite make an appearance in Wharton's text but the unmistakeable suggestion of one does.

They stood silent for a while after this, smiling at each other like adventurous children who have climbed to a forbidden height from which they discover a new world. The actual world at their feet was veiling itself in dimness, and across the valley a clear moon rose in the denser blue.

Suddenly they heard a remote sound, like the hum of a giant insect, and following the high-road, which wound whiter through the surrounding twilight, a black object rushed across their vision.

Lily started from her attitude of absorption; her smile faded and she began to move toward the lane.

This "cicada song" is really a car driving by. It doesn't actually disrupt anything. Lawrence and Lily have been coming close to love but there are two barriers. One is her lack of naturalness and the other is society and the expectations of a young woman like Lily who would like to remain in society.

The rest of the novel is a novel of manners about that society and Lily's rather gruesome fate in it. To be honest, I don't like the rest of that novel much. It's universally praised as one of her greatest novels but I think it would have been better to have Wharton write about the first barrier. The lack of "naturalness" in Lily and how that invisible barrier worked against her.

For isn't that is a struggle for every woman? It's not just that society, for even our supposedly liberated society, will not tolerate too much "intimacy with nature" from a woman. And yet, we have to believe her capable of it, or we will also reject her. And the fear of that failure, shall we say "inner" failure, is really just as important and far more intriguing than society.

The good news is that she did in a great book that doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves called The Reef. And I'll be blogging it here every Wednesday and Friday starting this Friday.

Branches and Rain: Why You Should Read "A Dance to the Music of Time"

2012-01-31T08:00:00.000-05:00

Late in life, I've discovered an appetite for monumental works of fiction.

That's from a blog I like to follow called Branches and Rain. I don't think many people develop an appetite for monumental works of fiction when they are young. One of my sisters did but only one.

One reason suspect some of us get more interested in longer books as we get older is that one of the really human things about people is our tendency to keep taking the bus to Cleveland.

Cleveland? It's from an expression I heard a chastity advocate use when she visited my university back in the 1980s. She said, "If you don't want to go to Cleveland you shouldn't get on the bus that goes here". I went to see her because I had zero sympathy for her views and was only looking for something to mock but that changed a little after hearing her speak. I had to admire her courage. I, as I say, had no sympathy for her views but the auditorium where she spoke that day was full of people who hated her. It was an ugly scene and the hatred clearly scared and intimidated her but she said what she believed. No one else in that room would have endured what she did for the sake of our beliefs.

And she made one very important point with that remark about the bus to Cleveland. We tend to think of morality as a matter of making choices but it's really more a matter of making a pilgimage. When we make bad moral "decisions" there is typically very little decision making involved at the moment we make the bad choice. How well we perform under pressure is a consequence of hundreds of smaller decisions that didn't feel particularly momentous but that lead up to that momentous one.

For example, there are a lot of people who remain faithful to their spouses out of timidity rather than moral conviction. As I've said before, they may feel they are doing well but all they need is a situation where the risk level drops to a point where it feels negligible and away they go. The bus to Cleveland is a local and it makes lots of stops. A lot of our moral decisions are really non-decisions to stay on the bus even though we tell ourselves and everyone else that we don't want to go to Cleveland.

And most people don't see what they are doing as getting on and staying on the bus. They don't see the things they are doing now as moral things and they don't see what they are doing now as determining what will happen later. The woman who gets involved with a series of angry, antisocial loners doesn't think the fact that she always ends up miserable as a consequence of the type of man she is attracted to. If that was all it was then all she would have to do is choose differently. It would take a massive effort on her part to be able to be attracted to guys who weren't like that. Even at the onset of puberty, she is already on the bus and by age 19 it would be very difficult for her to get off of it.

So she convinces herself that the bus that always took her to Cleveland in the past will go somewhere different this time.

Only in long fiction can we see this portrayed properly.

Brett at Branches and Rain recommends Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time and I second that. One of the best things about it is the characters that Powell creates and the way they keep getting on different buses bound for different places. Most of them end up in Cleveland again and again.

There is one fascinating exception and that is Frederica Tolland who is, for my money, the most interesting and attractive character in the Dance. She hardly get mentioned as most people are more interested in others but if you really wanted to learn about virtue, you couldn't pick a more worthwhile study.

Essential reading

2012-01-31T07:51:00.003-05:00

Get Religion has a great post up on the issue of "honour killings" and Islam:

But some of the analyses have fallen short and in a few cases come across as special pleading that there is only one legitimate view in Islam on these issues, when experience tells us that there is not a single view on the morality of honor killings in Islam — just as there is no single Islam.

You'll want to read the whole thing.

Stereotype watch

2012-01-30T10:55:00.000-05:00

So House of Lies is a new show portraying a world of rich and powerful people in a cutthroat struggle for status and power. These people live in a world dominated by illusion and hypocrisy but regularly surprise us with their humanity underneath it all.

And in this world, there is a willful and determined woman who balances the occasional insanity of others by her stability and clear sight. She's blond, she's hot and she has a Dutch name: Jeannie Van Der Hooven.

Good thing no one ever thought of that before.

Sort of political Monday: Are you willing to destroy a way of life to make the world a better place?

2012-01-30T10:26:00.001-05:00

The other day I asked: Would our era would be willing to fight a war like the civil war to end slavery? Obviously, the people with "War is not the answer" on their rear bumpers wouldn't. But what about the rest of us. Is there a cause we'd be willing to fight such a war in support of?

But it isn't just the heavy cost in human life that is the issue. The other thing about the civil war is that it was fought by people who were willing to destroy a way of life in order to win. That is what the war required. I don't think Lincoln or anyone else realized that going in. But then Lincoln doesn't seem to have realized that emancipation was a necessary requirement of preserving the union until that was forced on him either. There was a deep dark night of the soul for the North when they realized part way through just what the real costs were going to be. And, when faced with those questions, they pushed through.

Would we?

Here in Canada this morning, we are all abuzz about a guilty verdict in a recent "honour killing" trial. A lot of people don't like that term: honour killing. There are a lot of arguments, most of them disingenuous, being put forward against using the term. "There is no honour in murder" is a favourite. Yeah, I suppose. I could also argue that we shouldn't use the term "slave" because "human beings aren't property". But that is dodging the central issue which is that there was (and still are) ways of life in which human beings can be and sometimes are property. And solving the problem meant being willing to destroy that way of life if required.

There are ways of life wherein killing women who refuse to subject their sexuality to a male relative can be a matter of honour and there are people who follow that way of life moving to Canada everyday.

We don't want to face that or to think seriously about what confronting that might require. We blanch at the person who will even stand up and say some ways of life are worse than others or that some ways of life are evil. But go read that link, it's an article written by Canada's very best crime reporter and ask yourself if this is really just the acts of a few individuals or a clash of ways of life.

Anxious to avoid the second interpretation is James C Morton. Morton is not just any guy but a past president of the Ontario Bar Association. He is also a good guy to start with because he recognizes that the term "honour killing" is not what the debate is really about. Here is his conclusion:

In the end, this was just a sordid case of a tyrannical father, who convinced a second wife and a deluded son to help murder his first wife and some disobedient daughters. Nasty yes. But not very different (except in scale) from spousal murders across Canada.

Just a sordid case of a tyrannical father? Yeah, just like that meanie up the street when you were growing up who wouldn't let his daughter go out on dates of wear lipstick. Except for the killing part. And except that the tyrannical father in this case comes from a culture where honour killing is widely supported. Again, read the Christie Blatchford piece and note how relatives back in Pakistan responded when told of the murdered girls' behaviour.

Does motive matter?
On his way to the conclusion I cited above, Morton makes a number of dubious moves. The first is when he says this:

Broadly put, the motivation for murder is irrelevant. The question is not 'why' but 'if'?

That is nonsense on three levels.

It's nonsense because establishing motive is often a key element in establishing guilt.
It's nonsense because motive makes a difference at sentencing time. There was a case a few years ago in Ontario where a guy ran down a cyclist and the lack of skid marks or evidence of any attempt to steer away was taken by the courts as evidence that the guy did just for the thrill of killing someone and that ended up mattering a whole lot at his sentencing.
It's nonsense because it would have mattered a whole lot if the victim had been a gay teenager or a member of a visible minority group killed out of hatred.

As Aquinas noted a long, long time ago, a big part of the spectacle of criminal justice is to force socially sanctioned values on people. That motorist who ran down the cyclist, like the famous Leopold and Loeb, stir a particular horror in us because we recognize that these people held beliefs that would be detrimental to our way of life. Likewise the special sanctions against hate crimes.

Which brings me to an interesting hypocrisy here. It jumps right out at us if we cite just one paragraph from a Montreal Gazette story that Morton links to:

It’s rare for a coverage of a crime to fixate so strongly on motive, she added, citing the example of Marc Lépine’s 1989 shooting spree at École polytechnique in Montreal.

“We did pay a bit of attention to (Lépine’s motive), but in the end ... we focused on the deaths of those women.

She in this case is Alia Hogben, executive director of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women. And she is speaking nonsense. Every year in Canada there are commemorations of the Montreal massacre and every year those commemorations are used as an opportunity to speak about the supposed motives of men to hurt women. The imputed motive* for their deaths is absolutely central to the way they are remembered. If the fourteen women killed that day had been in a building that collapsed they'd be long forgotten by now.

The Kingston police chief interestingly referred to the case as one of "domestic violence" and that it certainly is. But I have yet to see a single spokesperson from a group fighting domestic violence step forward to condemn it as an example of domestic violence.

Why not? I'd say because there is a way of life involved.

* I say imputed motive for the media figures and other people who have commented on the Marc Lepine case have shown very little interest in the actual Marc Lepine or his likely motives for doing what he did. He has just been taken as proof of a widespread hatred for women that is supposed to exist in men. The known facts of Lepine's life and beliefs don't support this.

The Wings of the Dove

2012-01-28T14:14:00.000-05:00

Chapter 33

(To make this a blog exclusively about the Wings of the Dove click here.)

People have been saying how much this novel resembles film noir for decades before I got to it. It's fascinating that many of the standard conventions and scenes and even character types show up here. William Gass has suggested, and I think he is right, that James is concerned with what happens when people abandon moral realism. When that happens, all distinction between moral argument and moral manipulation disappears and people become, as Gass puts it, "consumers of persons".

That is certainly what Merton Densher and Kate Croy have become. But so has Lord Mark who cared nothing for the risks he took by revealing Merton and Kate's secret to Milly. And I'm not sure that Susan Stringham would fare much better if we examined her closely.

How much influence did Henry James have on film noir? Well, with the caveat that Lillian Hellman is not always a reliable source, she reports that Dashiell Hammett told her that he figured out how to write mystery stories by reading Henry James. And I'm inclined to believe her in this case as Hellman tended to lie out of vanity and there is nothing to prop up her vanity in that story.

In any case, this chapter opens with a brilliant scene in which the two partners in crime meet after Merton has returned. Not immediately afterwards for Merton has tarried in re-establishing contact. And we have a classic noir scene in which the male lead is meeting the femme fatale and neither can be sure what or how much the other knows and neither is sure they can trust the other.

"Then it has been--what do you say? a whole fortnight?--without your making a sign?"

Kate put that to him distinctly, in the December dusk of Lancaster Gate and on the matter of the time he had been back; but he saw with it straightway that she was as admirably true as ever to her instinct--which was a system as well--of not admitting the possibility between them of small resentments, of trifles to trip up their general trust. That by itself, the renewed beauty of it, would at this fresh sight of her have stirred him to his depths if something else, something no less vivid but quite separate, hadn't stirred him still more.

And in those two sentences describing Merton's response to Kate's remark is everything. Kate is impressive and this sort of thing has always inspired Merton in the past. But now he has another vision that troubles him. We don't know exactly what that is for the crucial meeting between Merton and Milly after Lord Mark's bombshell took place off stage.

Here is what Merton knows:

He knows that stupid Lord Mark rushed to Venice with the awful secret in an attempt to win Milly for himself. (By the way, what pathetic, horrid excuse for a man Lord Mark is. )
He knows that he didn't tell anyone the secret so the only source for Lord Mark's knowledge of it is Kate Croy.

But then there is a whole lot he doesn't know. It may be, for example,

That Lord Mark, thinking his chances with Milly ruined, proposed marriage and, because of the tenor of her refusal, he has guessed what was up.
Or, it may be that he guessed what was up and accused Kate directly and she fessed up.
Then again, maybe Kate was so careless of Milly's interest that she simply confessed the facts to Lord Mark.
But in the darkest places of his soul, he must also be wondering if Kate, tired of waiting for Milly to die didn't tell Lord Mark knowing full well that he would do the stupid thing he did do and thereby hasten Milly's death.

And we have a whole chapter in which the two feel one another out. It's brilliant, brilliant writing so just go read it.

Wisdom

2012-01-28T09:44:00.001-05:00

Today is the memorial for Saint Thomas Aquinas and that got me thinking.

Sometimes when I talk to people in their twenties about some great figure from the past—typically the 19th century, 1920s, 1950s—they will summarily dismiss him of her by saying that this person was racist. I think they "teach" them this stuff at university. I always try to point out that their observation is trite and pointless because everyone was racist back then.

I was thinking about that reading another blogger who is trying to understand how slavery was possible.

That seems the wrong question to me. I find hatred, torture and enslavement too easy to understand. We all have the instincts to do these horrible things. What needs explaining is how we ever managed to move beyond them. That's the really amazing thing. We aren't better people than they were "back then".

Ron Paul, for example, is getting much criticism for suggesting that the civil war was unnecessary and he is wrong about that but I wonder if anyone in our era would have the intestinal fortitude to fight such a war. Slavery still exists in some places after all. And if it existed here I suspect a lot of those who casually condemn Ron Paul would suddenly be using claims that would sound a lot like his to argue why such a war would be unnecessary.

It's amazing that we ever got to where we are.

The Wings of the Dove

2012-01-27T08:30:00.000-05:00

(To make this a blog exclusively about the Wings of the Dove click here.)

Chapters 31 and 32
This is the chapter in which everything falls apart for Merton. That is not surprising. But the first thing we learn is that things are falling apart for Milly. Susan comes to see Merton.

They came to it almost immediately; he was to wonder afterwards at the fewness of their steps. "She has turned her face to the wall."

"You mean she's worse?"

Well yes, but there is more to it than that Mr. Densher. For the sake of dramatic irony, James has to pretend that he can reasonably expect all of his readers to spot the Biblical allusion here while Merton Densher himself misses it. And he will continue to miss it even though the phrase "turned her face to the wall" gets repeated several times over the next few chapters.

Just so we're all on the same page, here is the way chapter 38 of the book of the prophet Isaiah opens:

In those days Hezekiah became sick and was at the point of death. The prophet Isaiah son of Amoz came to him, and said to him, "Thus says the LORD: Set your house in order, for you shall die; you shall not recover." Then Hezekiah turned his face to the wall ...

And the significance of that is pretty obvious. The thing not to do is what Merton and a number of web sites and critics I have read do and assume the challenge here is to figure out what the fact that she has turned her face to the wall tells us about what Milly is thinking. The important thing is to remind ourselves what happens to Hezekiah after he turns his face to the wall to pray and weep bitterly.

Then the word of the LORD came to Isaiah: "Go and say to Hezekiah, Thus says the LORD, the God of your ancestor David: I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears; I will add fifteen years to your life. I will deliver you and this city out of the hand of the king of Assyria, and defend this city.

That sounds good but there is a problem. Our buddy Hezekiah invites the Babylonians round and shows them all the treasure of the kingdom. He does this on the (faulty) logic that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And Isaiah tells him, prophesying correctly, that all this treasure will be carried away to Babylonia. And then, well let's just say all sorts of stuff happens.

Now Milly is not going to get 15 more years but she is in a fix not unlike that of Hezekiah. She has no real friends (even Susan is in this for mixed motives). And she has Lord Mark who hates Merton and Merton who returns the favour. So which is the best to expose her treasure to? There is no right answer.

By the way, can we talk about names? For we have two people who come to visit Milly in Venice:

Lord Mark in chapter 31 and
Sir Luke Strett in chapter 32

Is it just a coincidence that these two have the same names as the authors of two of the Gospels? And Sir Luke is a physician!

Saint Mark is traditionally associated with death. As is Venice. Certainly, within the logic of the novel so far it seems like what Lord Mark tells Milly must kill her. Except that Sir Luke brings something that feels like hope again. Will be only to have Milly expose her treasure to Babylonia?

With Sir Luke's arrival, the weather gets better and Milly asks to see Merton.

The Wings of the Dove

2012-01-26T13:07:00.000-05:00

Chapters 29 and 30

(To make this a blog exclusively about the Wings of the Dove click here.)

Chapter 29
I've read that James wanted the character of Milly to be a sort of a monument to his dead cousin Minny Temple. Knowing that, it is my sad duty to report that this novel just dies when Kate Croy isn't in the scene. You can't quite bring yourself to admire her. On the other hand, you can't help not admiring her. Milly, on the other hand, is a vague character most of the time and when she isn't vague she is insipid.

Okay, let's go back to the Veronese in chapter 28. Susan Stringham tells Merton that he too has a place in the picture:

You'll be the grand young man who surpasses the others and holds up his head and the wine-cup.

There is, as I noted before, no young man holding his head and cup up in Christ at the House of Levi. I've since learned that some people identify the painting as the Wedding Feast at Cana. Perhaps because of this guy:

The problem is that that guy isn't surpassing the others and while he is holding up a wine cup; and he isn't holding up his head particularly either. And there is no dwarf in the foreground of this painting.

I can see a logic to it. Susan might have two paintings in mind. The first might be to describe the moment when she speaks with Densher by comparing it to Christ in the House of Levi. The second might be the Wedding at Cana to define her hopes for the later moment when Sir Luke and the musicians show up. It would also describe what Susan (and presumably Milly) is hoping for.

But that stretches the point and there is a person in the first painting who surpasses all the others and holds up his head and the wine cup. That person is Jesus. Obscene comparison? Well yes, but that would be the point. Christ at the House of Levi is a travesty of the Last Supper.

And looks what happens on page 405 of my edition (emphasis added):

"You'll want"--Milly had thrown herself into it--"the best part of your days."

He thought a moment: he did what he could to wreathe it in smiles. "Oh I shall make shift with the worst part. The best will be for YOU." And he wished Kate could hear him. It didn't help him moreover that he visibly, even pathetically, imaged to her by such touches his quest for comfort against discipline. He was to bury Kate's so signal snub, and also the hard law she had now laid on him, under a high intellectual effort. This at least was his crucifixion—that Milly was so interested.

That's obscene. That Merton who, however good Kate is at manipulating him, might see the fact that his victim really loves him as his suffering and, much worse, that he should mentally liken it to the crucifixion, is obscene. And James, of course, means for it to be.

There is a brilliant psychological touch in the opening of this chapter. Merton is rather quietly accepting of Milly's death while she struggles. I wouldn't mention it at all except that we see this played out the opposite way in so many movies nowadays. How often do we see the dying person being in full acceptance while the living are in denial and unable to get over it. In real life, we get over other people's deaths so quickly it's chilling.

Chapter 30
I mentioned a while ago that Merton is the one character in the book who is an insufferable snob. And we see more of it here where he is tortured by the fact that Milly's servant visibly doesn't approve of what he is doing:

One had come to a queer pass when a servant's opinion so mattered.

Part of the problem for Densher is that everyone else, including Milly herself, is encouraging him to do the wrong thing. Except that isn't such a rare moral quandary is it?

The big thing that happens in this chapter is that Lord Mark shows up and speaks with Milly. We don't know what he says as that all happens offstage. Not yet anyway. But Densher seems to. How?

His guilty conscience projecting? Perhaps but it would be weird if that conscience should be correct about what other people are really doing and thinking.

More telling, and what ought to be more important to our understanding is a comparison Densher makes toward the end of the Chapter. Because Merton imagines Lord Mark as having said something to discredit him to Milly, he thinks of himself as separated from both women. First Milly:

He thought of the two women, in their silence, at last--he at all events thought of Milly--as probably, for her reasons, now intensely wishing him to go. The cold breath of her reasons was, with everything else, in the air; but he didn't care for them any more than for her wish itself, and he would stay in spite of her, stay in spite of odium, stay in spite perhaps of some final experience that would be, for the pain of it, all but unbearable. That would be his one way, purified though he was, to mark his virtue beyond any mistake. It would be accepting the disagreeable, and the disagreeable would be a proof; a proof of his not having stayed for the thing--the agreeable, as it were--that Kate had named.

Does it bother you as much as it bothers me that Merton seems to see himself as some sort of noble victim here?

Now on to his thoughts about Kate (emphasis added):

The thing Kate had named was not to have been the odium of staying in spite of hints. It was part of the odium as actual too that Kate was, for her comfort, just now well aloof. These were the first hours since her flight in which his sense of what she had done for him on the eve of that event was to incur a qualification. It was strange, it was perhaps base, to be thinking such things so soon; but one of the intimations of his solitude was that she had provided for herself. She was out of it all, by her act, as much as he was in it; and this difference grew, positively, as his own intensity increased.

These two excerpts follow immediately upon one another by the way ( on p. 422 my edition). Which brings me back, as you knew I would come back, to that final visit to Merton in his rooms just before she left. What did she do/ Well, I think she had sex with him. And notice how he now qualifying that. he sees her as doing this partly in her own interest. Okay, but he really pushed for this. She didn't.

No I'm not blind to the huge problem with Kate's behaviour we are probably about to discover next chapter. (Actually, we'll definitely discover but I'll maintain the polite fiction that I haven't yet read it here.) But Merton doesn't know that yet and he is already sliding away from her. The two thieves are already at odds with one another and each is as bad as the other. And Kate is least every inch a woman. Merton isn't much of a man.

Manly Thor's Day Special: Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist

2012-01-26T08:00:00.000-05:00

"We learned more from a three minute record than we ever learned in school." Bruce Springsteen

"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonderI can think at all." Paul Simon

"This [jazz] was something we had found for ourselves, that wasn't taught at school (what a prerequisite that is of nearly everything worthwhile) ..." Philip Larkin

"Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." Ralph Waldo Emerson

Those quotes tell you something about boys and young men. They tell you something that isn't completely good.

There was a kid on the bus going back to campus with a case of beer last Saturday. He was talking to his buddies and he said, "I went to the Heineken brewery in Amsterdam and afterwards they gave us free tastings and I stole every glass they handed me." He was a wimpy little boy and my I thought, not seriously, about getting off at his stop and taking his case of beer away from him and then asking him why, given that he'd just bragged about stealing stuff from people who'd given him hospitality, I shouldn't feel completely justified in doing so.

But who would I be kidding? I'm sure the Heineken people calculated for guys like him when they budgeted for their tastings and my own record on this front is far from perfect. It's probably a lot worse than I remember. And if anyone had treated me that way back in the day, the only lesson I would have learned was how to be angry and resentful, which was hardly anything I needed more help with.

And this aggressive rejection of social norms is something guys just do. More than a few girls do it too but it's more a guy thing. I know a few professors and they always complain about how increasingly docile and compliant students have become in recent decades and I think, "Does this really surprise you given that the proportion of women has gone up?" Sometimes I even say it out loud.

It's a guy thing to react to authority. And there isn't enough sensitivity training or Ritalin in the entire university to stop us, so get used to it.

Emerson tried to formalize it all. He tried to give it a fancy name of "self reliance" but that's nonsense. We aren't self reliant and Messrs Springsteen, Simon and Larkin would all have ended up begging on street corners if they'd had to get through life solely on what they'd learned from records. We are all dependent on others. The obnoxious little turd on the bus I complain of above can only be what he is because he is protected by the very property laws he brags of flouting. (And while I could take his beer without much effort, there are lots of other guys out there who could take my beer just as easily, especially so now that I'm not so young as I used to be.)

The notion that we can be nonconformists is an illusion but it is a healthy illusion. Try it and you'll find that you simply jump from one sort of conformism to another. And there is no form of conformism more rigid and unforgiving than the conformism of the self-declared rebel.

But even if ya gotta serve somebody, a moment of thinking you don't is good for you because it matters a whole helluva lot who and what you serve.

Back in university during the eighties, I saw a guy spraying graffiti on a wall and took his paint away from him and spray-painted his leather jacket and Nike runners for him. He was very unhappy about it. I'm pretty sure he learned nothing at all from the experience but it sure felt good doing it to him. If I took a time machine back to talk to my twenty year old self that night, I'd pat myself on the back.

And if I met that guy I'd spray painted again, I'd laugh in his face.

Was what I did nonconformist? Depends how you define such things. A lot of my fellow students, and the guy himself was one of them, would have insisted that he was expressing legitimate free speech rights and that property rights didn't matter. I certainly wasn't conforming to their values. Others would have agreed the guy was doing something wrong but insisted that two wrongs don't make a right. I would have told them I didn't care. Others would have argued that no matter how justified I felt, what I did was a serious go-to-jail crime. I'd admit that was true but that it didn't matter. I mean the guy was hardly going to call the police.

Yeah, it was nonconformist. I wouldn't do it now though.

Even more Lana Del Rey

2012-01-25T13:46:00.000-05:00

Someone has leaked the new CD and now the battle begins again.

Ta-Nehisi Coates blunders into the truth:

I've gotta say, I've never quite understood the hate Lana Del Rey gets. OK, it's not cool to lie about being poor. But "Video Games"--an OK song, I guess--always struck me as kiddie music. It strikes me as something a young lady might play in those angsty years before she gets her driver's license and is imagining what adulthood is like.

Or you could put the thought more charitably as I did:

Like the Ode to Billy Joe, there is an experience here that speaks to millions of teenage girls. And that is what makes it pop music: if it doesn't speak to girls from 15 to 19 years old, it isn't pop music.

Pop music is defined by young girls and there is no point resenting that fact. Girls are just as entitled to a culture that speaks to them as anyone else is. (And if you are more than 25 years old you really should have started to look outside pop culture by now.)

The deeper problem here, as I argued in many previous posts on the subject, is that people don't like what pop culture is telling them about young girls. I mean, how they dare like all this princess stuff? It's supposed to be a brave new world for girls and they, damnit, haven't gotten the memo and insist on behaving like ... , well, like girls.

The last few years we've seen a relentless attack on boys and young men for being boys and young men. Apparently it's now the turn of girls and young women to get the same abuse.

By the way, if you read only one book on the history of pop music, it should be How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll by Elijah Wald.

Womanly virtues Wednesday: Complaining about your Ex

2012-01-25T08:00:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure how I feel about Newt Gingrich. He doesn't strike me as a dependable, solid guy and his marriage history is an embarrassment. But no matter how you feel about him, you can't deny that his ex-wife's recent appearance on ABC news has had no impact on his popularity.

No negative impact that is. For if there has been any change, the man is more popular than he was before she made her charges.

It's actually the second time she has gone public with her complaints. The last time was for magazine interview a few years ago. That time no one paid attention. She must now be wishing they had done so again.

Here's the thing: Don't bad mouth your ex. Men make this mistake less often. Not because we are better people but because no one puts up with it from us. When women do it, we all clench our teeth and nod sympathetically, "Gee, how awful for you."

But that is just outside. Inside we're thinking, "Isn't this the same guy she was gaga about and bragging about how good it was with him just a while ago?"

And if there is one thing worse than complaining about your ex, it's still complaining about him years later. "What? You're not over this yet? What's wrong with you?" Again, very few people will say this to the woman complaining but we're thinking it. And we'll certainly say it behind her back. And then we'll make an effort to be nice to her ex the next time we see him.

And if there is one thing worse than still complaining to your friends about your ex years after the fact, it's going public with your complaints as the ex-Ms. Gingrich has done. "What a mean, vindictive, spiteful ____ she is," we all say to just about anyone who happens to be willing to listen.

(As I've said before, another reason you really, really, really don't want to tell all your best girlfriends what a horrible bastard your ex was and how glad you are to be rid of him is that one of them will almost certainly see this as justifying her having an affair with him now that you're out of the way. I'll spare you the details but trust me, I know whereof I speak here.)

In addition to all the above, eventually your complaints will sound hollow even to you. After all, you once chose this person. The worse you make them sound, the worse your judgment looks. And, crazy as this may sound now, you don't want to convince yourself that you wasted part of your life with this guy. You need to find something good in this to take forward.

Here's the trick: Say nothing but nice things about your ex. It can be done. I did it, you can too. You don't have to mean them at first because everyone knows you don't. But they will credit you for behaving in a generous, noble and dignified way and it will make your ex look even worse than they already do if he or she chooses to bad mouth you.

Don't go overboard in your praise. The less said the better but what you do say should be positive.

The first and most important thing to do is to admit that you regret the break up. Don't suggest you want the guy back even if you do. Just say you had a lot invested in this and you hoped it would work and now that it's over, you're suffering. "I really liked the guy and when it was good it was very good."

Practice your responses. Walk around your place saying them out loud. You'll be able to pick out the things that sound hollow.

Practice behaving like someone who is over it now when you aren't.

How the Brits are ruining the C-word* for everyone

2012-01-24T10:30:00.000-05:00

Earlier today I was writing about the crass and vulgar way the Brits treat sex. A really good example of this, if you'll pardon me, is how the Brits have ruined the C-word for everyone. For them it is just a term of anger and hatred. Jarvis Cocker has a song called "C___ts are still running the world" and, contrary to what you might guess, it's a song about politics. For him all the C-word means is an evil or stupid person. Anywhere else that title would be taken as an expression of women's sexual power. That the word now means nothing more to him than what we in North America mean when we say "asshole" tells you how little the Brits value sex; for them, it is just another crude bodily function.

Ironically enough, it's part of the British national mythology to think of themselves as terribly uptight about sex: "No sex please we're British". But the truth is they aren't uptight enough about it. Whether they are restricted or unrestricted about sex, the Brits always think of it as a crude bodily function and not as something exalted. You cannot even begin to appreciate sex unless you acknowledge the power and sacredness of women's sexuality. That is why the Brits always have to turn to either Americans or the French to get their ideas of what is sexy.

The reason that Jarvis Cocker wrote a song as crass and awful as "C__ts are still ruling the world" is because they do not, in fact, rule his world.

*No I won't spell it out. I think the word has it's place but this blog isn't it. And I already get enough people finding this site by entering search strings that creep me out into Google as it is thank you.

The Wings of the Dove

2012-01-24T09:30:00.000-05:00

(To make this a blog exclusively about the Wings of the Dove click here.)

The title of this book refers to Psalm 55 so the image of a dove that we find there is what first occurs to us when Milly is compared to a dove:

My heart is sore pained within me:
and the terrors of death are fallen upon me.

Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me,
and horror hath overwhelmed me.

And I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove!

For then would I fly away, and be at rest.

That is not the only image of the dove that we find in the Bible. For example, Psalm 68 came up in Matins today:

At home the women already share the spoil.
They are covered with silver as the wings of a dove,
its feathers brilliant with shining gold
and jewels flashing like snow on Mount Zalmon.

By the way, although we think of the dove as a white bird, the bird referred to here is the common rock dove, or rock pigeon, which is to say the bird we all call a pigeon. And take the time to study them carefully and you'll notice they are beautiful birds.

"She's a dove," Kate went on, "and one somehow doesn't think of doves as bejewelled. Yet they suit her down to the ground."

If we don't it's because we are blind.

Keeping you up to date about the really important stuff

2012-01-24T08:30:00.000-05:00

Britsih lingerie vendor Agent Provocateur are changing their approach:

Creative director Sarah Shotton reveals she is a huge fan of "the glowing scenes from the gently erotic films such as Emmanuelle and The Story of O", and that her collection of vintage Playboy Magazines made her "want to re-introduce the sensuality and flirtation of the 70's into our campaigns."

Last year's approach, in case you didn't know, was inspired by actresses flashing people with cameras accidentally on purpose. So now they're going introduce "sensuality and flirtation". Why is this happening? I'd guess that it's mostly because that is what men want.

Sitting on the bus with a bunch of college girls last night I was struck at how astonishingly servile these women are towards men. I see these women a lot and it seems to me that they'll do almost anything to get men's attention. I suspect that they've tried flash and trash and found that while that will get them laid, it isn't getting them love. So now we move to "sensuality and flirtation".

Next step on this path is soft, romantic and, dare I say it, feminine.

One hilarious side note, the Telegraph article at that link blames "flash trash" on Hollywood and there is something to that. But coming from the English, who have done more to vulgarize sex than any other nation on earth, it's hilarious.

The Wings of the Dove

2012-01-23T21:20:00.002-05:00

(To make this a blog exclusively about the Wings of the Dove click here.)

Chapter 28 begins with Merton Densher musing after a conversation with Susan about Milly not joining the group downstairs at her place that there is a sort of unspoken agreement that no one will bring up Milly's illness. Of course, only a spoken agreement can really be an agreement so this thought very gently slides into an exploration of the reasons Densher himself might refrain from bringing it up:

... this passage with Mrs. Stringham offered him his first licence to open his eyes. He had gladly enough held them closed; all the more that his doing so performed for his own spirit a useful function. If he positively wanted not to be brought up with his nose against Milly's facts, what better proof could he have that his conduct was marked by straightness?

And the important discovery here is that Densher apparently needs to reassure himself about his own integrity in this matter. If you have to ask ...

Later in their conversation, Susan Stringham compares the gathering at Milly's to a Veronese:

It's a Veronese picture, as near as can be--with me as the inevitable dwarf, the small blackamoor, put into a corner of the foreground for effect. If I only had a hawk or a hound or something of that sort I should do the scene more honour. (P. 377)

She has something like this (Courtesy of Wikipedia) in mind:

And here is a dwarf for from just in front of the rail to the left her to be:

And Densher worries because he doesn't see any place for himself in this picture. Susan assures him there is even though he never asks her:

"You'll be the grand young man who surpasses the others and holds up his head and the wine-cup. What we hope," Mrs. Stringham pursued, "is that you'll be faithful to us—that you've not come for a mere foolish few days." (p. 377)

What can that mean? The painting above is Christ at the House of Levi and I think it is likely the one James had in mind because it's in Venice. But, as near as In can tell there is no man holding up his head and the wine cup unless ...

Because, as we all know, the painting above was originally meant to be a Last Supper and Veronese retitled it after offending the church (and little wonder, it is offensive). So is this all meant to be a travesty of the Last Supper? With Densher the travesty Christ to whom Milly looks to for a resurrection? (Keep that thought in mind as I'll come back to it next chapter.)

Susan, however, is Mily's disciple:

"Oh the daily task and the daily wage, the golden guerdon or reward? No one knows better than I how they haunt one in the flight of the precious deceiving days. Aren't they just what I myself have given up? I've given up all to follow HER. (p. 379)

And that has to refer to the story of Jesus and the Rich young man:

Peter began to say to him, “See, we have left everything and followed you.”

That's from the Gospel of Mark. The story appears in all three synoptic Gospels but with different emphasis. In Mark, Jesus cuts Peter off when he tries to say he has given up everything implying that Peter misses the point.

Later, Kate joins Densher at the gathering at Milly's and two fascinating things happen. In the first, Milly is compared to a dove:

"She's a dove," Kate went on, "and one somehow doesn't think of doves as bejewelled. Yet they suit her down to the ground."

"Yes--down to the ground is the word." Densher saw now how they suited her, but was perhaps still more aware of something intense in his companion's feeling about them. Milly was indeed a dove; this was the figure, though it most applied to her spirit. Yet he knew in a moment that Kate was just now, for reasons hidden from him, exceptionally under the impression of that element of wealth in her which was a power, which was a great power, and which was dove-like only so far as one remembered that doves have wings and wondrous flights, have them as well as tender tints and soft sounds. It even came to him dimly that such wings could in a given case--HAD, truly, in the case with which he was concerned--spread themselves for protection. Hadn't they, for that matter, lately taken an inordinate reach, and weren't Kate and Mrs. Lowder, weren't Susan Shepherd and he, wasn't HE in particular, nestling under them to a great increase of immediate ease? All this was a brighter blur in the general light, out of which he heard Kate presently going on.

That's chilling. We might just remember that while doves are associated with the Holy Spirit and with liberation in the Bible they are also sacrificial victims.

Then there follows a fascinating scene that I won't say too much about because I wouldn't ruin it. Suffice to say, Densher gets a fuller notion of what Kate has in mind but he doesn't think about his integrity because he is wrapped up in a struggle to make her come to visit him at his rooms. (In the course of this discussion, there is a fascinating biblical allusion in which Kate talks about Densher possibly "Washing his hands" of her.)

This duel to get her to come to his rooms, of course, goes back to chapter 17 in which Densher thinks about the reasons she would never do such a thing:

She would have to stop there, wouldn't come in with him, couldn't possibly; and he shouldn't be able to ask her, would feel he couldn't without betraying a deficiency of what would be called, even at their advanced stage, respect for her: that again was all that was clear except the further fact that it was maddening. Compressed and concentrated, confined to a single sharp pang or two, but none the less in wait for him there on the Euston platform and lifting its head as that of a snake in the garden, was the disconcerting sense that "respect," in their game, seemed somehow--he scarce knew what to call it--a fifth wheel to the coach. It was properly an inside thing, not an outside, a thing to make love greater, not to make happiness less.

Rather wrapped in this idea that she should do something for her, he continues that here. And she agrees.

What does she do when she is there? Her merely being there would be scandal enough at the time.

We don't find out as by the next chapter he is thinking of it in retrospect as something momentous but he doesn't say what. As I say, she doesn't need to have done anything more than to have visited to commit a major social transgression in Aunt Maud's eyes. That said, the thing is so momentous to Densher that I think she puts out. (I know, how utterly typical of me to think of it that way and to put it that way.)

Colour me skeptical

2012-01-23T12:34:00.000-05:00

Ta Nehisi Coates cites Yale University professor David Blight:

In 1860 slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America's manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together. Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy. The only thing worth more than the slaves in the American economy of the 1850s was the land itself...

I suspect that there is a factual sense to that claim. But it's also nonsense.

To get a hint of why it's nonsense consider the first line of The Wealth of Nations:

The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations.

The real wealth of a nation is not the net value of its assets but it's capacity to produce. Why is that important? Because on that measure there is simply no doubt that the North's ability to generate wealth greatly exceeded the South's. On that measure, the manufacturing capacity of the North was worth much, much more than the slaves. That more than anything else explains why the North beat the South. The North was not just wealthier than the South, it was much, much wealthier.

Okay then, you say, so why is the good professor able to cite figures establishing so much more value to the slaves as an asset than to all the factories of the north? (And let's take it as given that his numbers are good.)

Well, consider marijuana prices. Marijuana is a weed that will grow pretty much anywhere a weed will grow. It should have no significant value and it wouldn't except that it is so closely regulated by governments. This regulation drives the cost of the asset way up. Jason the Stoner pays top dollar for his weed because most of that price is to cover overhead costs created by laws restricting the growth, transport, sale and possession of marijuana.

Now it's obscene to talk about human beings in terms of market value but that is the way the world was in 1860 and slaves were a heavily regulated market. Considerable efforts had been made, for example, to make it difficult to import more slaves. This added a lot of overhead cost to the market. And all that was needed for that value to collapse was for conditions to change radically. And there are few things that will alter conditions quite so radically as a civil war.

Now that does not, as I am sure Coates would correctly insist, change the psychology of the issue any. The market price reflects what people were willing to pay and the cited price for slaves really was the market price for that era. And that tells us something about the reasons the South went to war. However, a huge component of that price derives from there not being many slaves on the market in the first place. And that should lead us to doubt the aggregate number cite by Professor Blight. You can't really compare the combined value of slaves with other assets.

In the end, the South was fighting to defend a way of life. The very high price of slaves was a reflection of their determination to do so.

Consider how you might feel if you bought something at a flea market for fifty cents and later discovered it was worth many times what you paid for it? Would you turn around and sell it immediately for the profit? You might not. You might decide that owning this valuable thing was worth more to you than it asset price even though it had no real value to you when you bought it. When I keep my Moorcroft vase and put it on my shelf that tells you much more about the way of life I treasure than it tells you about the asset price.

And my Moorcroft only has value because other people also want to hold onto theirs. If a plurality of Moorcroft owners noticed the going price on eBay and sold them all at the same time, the price would collapse. Again, it's obscene to think of human beings in these terms but if Southerners had decided to assess value that slaves represented to them purely in terms of their ability to generate wealth, there probably wouldn't have been a civil war.

It would be nice, by the way, to say that the North saw more value in the slaves in human rather than economic terms as compared to the South but I don't think we can do that. I suspect opposition to slavery was driven more by what white Northerners wanted to believe about themselves than what they believed about black Americans.

Sort of political Monday: Compassion

2012-01-23T11:17:00.000-05:00

What's wrong with compassion? Well, in one sense, nothing. Like sincerity it's got its place in human life.

But it's not a virtue. Sincerity sounds like a virtue until you consider the sincere racist. Compassion, like sincerity, is an emotion. It can be misguided and wrong. It also can exist without doing any real work. Joe felt so bad about the injustice he'd seen that he sat in his room and cried all day.

The other thing about emotions is that you can't be wrong about them. You can reasonably dispute whether I should be sad but you can't convince that I am not sad.

Of course I can lie to you about my emotions. I can say I'm compassionate when I couldn't give a fig. And lies often work.

So what possible use could compassion possible have? Mostly it's a way of finding people like us. Compassion for the poor does little or nothing for the actual poor but it's a very good way for people who have similar attitudes about poverty to identify one another.

Don't sneer at that. I don't. You arrive at a dinner party and your host has invited a bunch of other people you don't know. So you all sit around sipping your drinks before dinner trying to feel one another out. Nobody sits around discussing their life philosophy at moments like that. What we can do though is indicate our emotional responses and compassion is a good one.

Of course, as we saw with the Salvation Army ad, that compassion doesn't have to have anything to do with anything real in the world. This isn't unique to compassion. When I was in my late teens and early twenties I used to fall madly, passionately in love with women I didn't know anything about. And that was just fine so long as I never actually interacted with them.

Of course, we'd never try to talk anyone in the first place if we weren't capable of that emotion. I still remember the day The Serpentine One walked into my office and the way she looked in her skirt, white blouse and sweater and the way I couldn't breath I was so in love. And I barely knew her. But the fact that we have been together for more than twenty years had nothing to do with that initial overwhelming feeling of love but rather with the slow discovery of the shared values and interests that was slowly worked out over a long time after that.

All of which was only possible because we could actually talk to one another. And all of which is impossible when interacting with politicians.

And that is why Santorum can't get past first base.

Saint Agnes Eve — ah better chill it was!

2012-01-20T22:23:00.001-05:00

Minus 22 tonight. That's seven and half degrees below zero on the Fahrenheit scale.

That is bitter chill. No owls have been spotted. Did see a fox though. Went right up the road bold as brass and sooo beautiful.

Sweet dreams all.

Sex "addiction"

2012-01-20T14:33:00.001-05:00

It's one of those topics that is apparently irresistible. I have said before that I doubt such a thing exists. Never say never but ... I have very strong doubts.

There was a piece last week that reminded me why I have such doubt. Before I cite the bit that made me wonder, think about someone addicted to cigarettes. Think of how they light up after sex, for example. Why do they do that and how does it make them feel?

Now read this description of what sex addicts supposedly seek:

Like a drug addict or alcoholic, the sex addict relentlessly seeks satisfaction from an external source to palliate an internal pain. Modern technology, such as the internet, provides a new external source that sex addicts use in their quest for sex partners.

So what is withdrawal then? Or, to put it another way, why do addicts feel pain when they are denied the thing they are addicted to? And why do they calm down when they get it.

Substance addiction seems to be closely connected to the firing of key brain chemistry that allow us to feel rewarded or comfortable. Hard core alcoholics who manage to stop drinking report that life loses all its glow. They can't get any feeling of satisfaction from beauty in the world.

Now consider our smoker who lights up after sex again. Why does she do it then? Because that is the way she can get the afterglow that normally comes at such a moment. That is what addiction does to you. It has nothing to do with any of the following:

Although sex addicts are enslaved to sex, it is far from their goal. Rather, the pursuit of sex is in service of a different goal — to dispel feelings of inadequacy, depression, anxiety, rage or other feelings that the sex addict experiences as unbearable.

All those "feelings of inadequacy, depression, anxiety, rage or other feelings" are consequences of addiction and not causes of it. There isn't any searching to "palliate an inner pain" here. The only inner pain is withdrawal symptoms. (The whole notion of "inner" pain is incoherent by the way. As opposed to what; the pain I feel two feet in front of my face?)

We don't know all that much about addictions but there is one thing we definitely do know and that is that addiction is not a coping mechanism. Alcoholics don't drink because they are unhappy, they drink because they are addicted to alcohol. They tend to be depressed in turn because not being able to stop drinking tends to mess up your life.

That said, you'd be surprised how long some people can be functioning alcoholics. I knew a woman who was a functioning alcoholic for virtually all her adult life and had fooled, among other people, her doctor. That was her downfall for her doctor prescribed her a painkiller at one point that significantly magnified the effects of the alcohol she consumed every day. Her marriage, her life fell apart in just a few months after that.

What is being called sexual addiction here sounds like something else to me. Or, to be more precise, it sounds like several something elses. And I worry, along with many others, that "sex addiction" is just a cover story for people who cannot master themselves. On the other end of the scale, I also worry that "sex addiction" might also be used to marginalize some people who have a stronger-than-normal sex drive. Some people, particularly some men people, just have very strong sex drives and they should not be treated as mental cases as a consequence.

Slept in ...

2012-01-20T07:20:00.001-05:00

... and today is the day I visit shut ins so no posting until this afternoon some time.

The race card: Requiescat in pace

2012-01-19T14:18:00.003-05:00

James Fallows and Ta-Nehisi Coates have had a rather rude awakening the last couple of days as they have both been forced to confront that the race card has lost its power to make people stand up and salute. It began with Fallows saying that Newt Gingrich's calling Obama the food stamp president" was a dog whistle signal to racists. One of Fallows' reader quite rightly called him on this.

Fallows is standing by his guns:

You could call him the "pink slip president," the "foreclosure president," the "Walmart president," the "Wall Street president," the "Citibank president," the "bailout president," or any of a dozen other images that convey distress. You decide to go with "the food stamp president," and you're doing it on purpose.

Yes, you're doing it on purpose but to imply, on no evidence, that that purpose is racism is a vile ad hominem argument from someone who ought to know better.

And it is clearly obvious what Gingrich's actual purpose is here. He isn't talking about economic distress in general. He is talking specifically about the distress faced by students ill-served by the education system and who consequently will have a hard time getting a job and therefore run a great likelihood of ending up collecting food stamps. None of Fallows' alternative expressions applies to this case.

But what really interests me here is the Jane Austen point. Coates has a second response in which he quotes Jane Austen but misses her meaning entirely. Here is the Austen quote he cites:

The power of disappointing them, it was true, must always be hers. But that was not enough: for when people are determined on a mode of conduct which they know to be wrong, they feel injured by the expectation of anything better from them.

"Her", in this case, is Mrs. John Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. And it's important if you want to understand the significance of the passage, which Coates does not, that you know that Mrs. John Dashwood has been doing everything she can to exclude her two sisters in law from her society. And the bit Coates quotes comes immediatley after her efforts to do so have been undermined by an innocent action of one of her friends. Here is a bit more context:

I come now to the relation of a misfortune, which about this time befell Mrs. John Dashwood. It so happened that while her two sisters with Mrs. Jennings were first calling on her in Harley Street, another of her acquaintance had dropt in—a circumstance in itself not apparently likely to produce evil to her. But while the imaginations of other people will carry them away to form wrong judgments of our conduct, and to decide on it by slight appearances, one's happiness must in some measure be always at the mercy of chance. In the present instance, this last-arrived lady allowed her fancy so far to outrun truth and probability, that on merely hearing the name of the Miss Dashwoods, and understanding them to be Mr. Dashwood's sisters, she immediately concluded them to be staying in Harley Street; and this misconstruction produced within a day or two afterwards, cards of invitation for them as well as for their brother and sister, to a small musical party at her house. The consequence of which was, that Mrs. John Dashwood was obliged to submit not only to the exceedingly great inconvenience of sending her carriage for the Miss Dashwoods, but, what was still worse, must be subject to all the unpleasantness of appearing to treat them with attention: and who could tell that they might not expect to go out with her a second time? The power of disappointing them, it was true, must always be hers. But that was not enough; for when people are determined on a mode of conduct which they know to be wrong, they feel injured by the expectation of anything better from them.

So, as you is clear here, Mrs. John Dashwood has been shown up because a friend of hers showed up and acted without prejudice towards the two girls. Note the irony here:

In the present instance, this last-arrived lady allowed her fancy so far to outrun truth and probability, that on merely hearing the name of the Miss Dashwoods, and understanding them to be Mr. Dashwood's sisters, she immediately concluded them to be staying in Harley Street ...

That is the indirect free speech Austen is famous for and the point here is not that the friend really did allow her fancy to outrun "truth and probability" but rather that she interpreted the situation the way the sort of person who doesn't make evil assumptions about others would. She simply assumed that Mrs. John Dashwood was treating her sisters in law fairly. In fact, to say she assumed anything is to say too much. Only someone as twisted as Mrs. John Dashwood would see it that way. She imagines a mistake in this other woman's perception because she cannot admit even to herself that her own assessment of Elinor and Marianne as unworthy of her society is driven by evil purpose. Elinor and Marianne really are her sisters in law! They aren't impostors.

And you can test this for yourself by asking yourself a simple question: Who in the above passage expects better of Mrs. John Dashwood? No one. There is no specific person who has charged her with anything here. It's all the price of her own hypocrisy. And the same is true of Coates who is the one behaving like Mrs. John Dashwood.

Look at his explanation of how the Austen quote is supposed to apply and you can see the resentment of someone who has been injured at the expectation that something better might be required of them:

People who are regularly complicit in wrong, are not in the habit of admitting such things. The unwillingness to admit wrong, the greedy claim upon the powers of disappointment, the deep sense of injury is not coincidental--it is a necessary fact of wrong-doing. The charge that the NAACP are the actual racist [sic] is the descendant of the notion that abolitionists wanted to reduce Southern whites to "slavery," that the goal of civil rights was the rape of white women. That Barack Obama would have a "deep-seated hatred of white people" is not a new concept.

Wow, how did we get from "food stamps" to "raping white women"? This a crude, unfair caricature, Unfair to the point of being hatred pure and simple. This racism is in the eye of the beholder.

Manly Thor's Day Special: Of Italian sea captains

2012-01-19T09:33:00.002-05:00

It's easy to mock. But let's consider what it was like to be this guy and ask what it would take to behave honourably as opposed to behaving as shamefully as this guy did.

To do that we have consider this: this man had failed irredeemably as of the second the ship touched bottom. I know, you're thinking, "Tell me something that isn't obvious Sherlock."

But put yourself in his head. He's taken a stupid chance. You've taken stupid chances right? So he's taken a stupid chance and it's gone wrong. The second the ship hit ground—before he or anyone else knew how bad it was—our Italian sea captain knew his career was over. Running a ship aground is not like backing your car into someone else or sailing your own boat onto the rocks. They take away your license to do your job if you steer off course and then run aground.

If he'd just run aground near the channel he was supposed to have been in he could have blamed it on the steering mechanism. Ships rudders are driven by chain mechanisms not unlike a bicycle only on a much larger scale and they can skip. When ships coming up the Saint Lawrence Seaway just south of me run aground the captain always blames it on the steering mechanism skipping because there is no way of verifying that.

But such a pilot would have to be near the channel for the excuse to wash. If he was deliberately sailing outside the approved route to indulge in some whim, it wouldn't count as an excuse.

So that's the first thing to grasp. Even if nothing as serious as what did transpire had followed, his career was over. If he'd only scratched the paint, there would have been an inquiry and the board of inquiry would have taken away his license.

Okay, the obvious lesson is, don't take the stupid chance in the first place, but he's already done that. And we've all taken stupid chances. And the thing is, this can't have been the first time he did this; that's not the way it works with stupid chances. You can break the speed the limit, and break it by a lot, for years before getting a speeding ticket. You can speed all your life without ever having the woman and her child step out in front of you when it's too late to stop.

I think the really important thing to grasp here is that the guy no longer has any professional motive to behave honourably. And he has very little personal motive. He'll be fired, probably sued for negligent performance of his duties. Best case scenario, he'll lose his job, his savings, his house. And that's what happens if nothing else bad happens. From that moment on, nothing could go right for this guy.

And then it got worse. Much, much worse. He's already on the edge emotionally and it gets worse and worse. And at every stage, he has no professional motive and very little personal motive to do the right thing.

I'll tell you the worst part from a sailor's perspective: that he abandoned the ship. For starters—if I could insert a minor safety lesson here—you never abandon a ship or boat until you are certain it's going to sink. You're always better off on board than in the lifeboat and your infinitely better off on the boat than in the water. And, as you can check for yourself, a lot of that ship is still above water. Every single soul on board could have remained on board until the next day and still been evacuated safely. His life was never in danger. Never. There was never a moment in the operation when he was in danger of drowning or being hurt (barring the possibility of an angry passenger or crew member beating him up).

But who knows how he felt at that moment?

And that is the question. How would you behave if you got into such a fix? How could you know?

And here your imagination is useless. I could tell myself endlessly that I wouldn't do what that guy did but I don't really know that.

By the way, do you want to read a really great book? A really manly book? Then you want to read Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad. It deals with a situation not unlike this one.

Womanly virtues Wednesday: In defence of the makeover

2012-01-18T09:08:00.002-05:00

I was reading Cracked online. I know, that confirms your worst suspicions about me. But there is some good stuff there. It's spectacularly uneven and they have mastered the knack of pitching you with titles that make you click such as , "Six sex toys seemingly designed to ruin sex". No doubt you're a better person than me but I clicked on that.

Anyway, I also clicked on "Five horrible life lessons learned from teen movies". And I immediately found myself disagreeing with the first one which was "Undergoing a Physical and Mental Transformation is the Way to Lasting Happiness". Because I think that it is the way to lasting happiness. It's not all of it but it's a huge part of it.

Women instinctively get this. Men don't and it's a lesson we could learn from women. And once upon a time everyone knew it. It was a staple of old movies that men learned to be civilized from women and that we became civilized by undergoing physical and mental transformations for women. Even when this became a bit of a joke in the early 1960s it still followed the form. Frankie Avalon's character always figured out that he had to change if he really wanted Annette Funicello's character to love him. But already it was becoming a joke.

Women also get that undergoing a physical and mental transformation is a damned difficult thing to do. To paraphrase the old line, people give up on it not because it doesn't work but because it's hard. You can't just buy the clothes, you have to train yourself to behave differently.

(And, for the benefit of the writers at Cracked, Grease was a parody.)

Anyway, the problem we moderns are supposed to have with the idea of changing yourself "outside" is that the real you is supposed to be "inside". As the editors at Cracked helpfully explain:

Can't get a date? The person you love doesn't love you back? Well, according to teen movies, it's probably because you dress in clothing that reflects your individuality, background and personal style. The solution couldn't be any simpler: Just completely erase any external evidence of your personality, and physically transform yourself into whatever you think your crush will like.

Teens dress to reflect their "individuality, background and personal style"? I wonder where that is. Oh, we have an example in the piece. In The Breakfast Club where "mysterious, silent Allison gets a makeover that transforms her from standard "cute goth" to "hip and sexy". The question here is not whether the new Allison is better than the old one. The question is whether the old Allison dressed in a way that reflects her individuality, background and personal style. Here's a picture:

Because you've never seen that look before. Wow, a leather jacket how terribly individualistic. And that haircut why in 1985, when this movie came out, you only saw that haircut twenty times a day. (And you only saw it that often because it was a left-over that anyone alive in 1985 would have recognized as a late 1970s style cut.)

(Again, I hate to have to explain basic plot points but, for the benefit of the editors at Cracked, Allison does not change in The Breakfast Club because she has a crush on "popular jock Andrew". She hates him as well as all the other popular kids. She thinks they hate her back but the truth is they laugh at her when they notice her at all. She is the narcissist in the story. The point of the transformation in the movie is that when Allison relaxes her anger at the world around her and adopts some of the then-prevailing standards, the world returns the favour by being interested in her. Does that bother you? Well, I have bad news for you 'cause that's the way people are. Don't believe me? Try dressing up like Mitt Romney and going to a Goth club; just make sure your affairs are in order and your will is up to date is up to date before you go.)

The problem with individuality is that no matter where you go to get it there is already a market waiting for you. Want to go Goth? There are movies to show you how, bands waiting to sell you the lifestyle and vendors willing to sell you the clothes and tattoo and piercing parlours waiting to mutilate you. It's probably a billion dollar per annum market.

No matter what you do, you're joining a club. So the question is: Which club do you want to be a part of? Think carefully because there are a lot of bad choices out there. Strange as this may seem, sullen people who wear leather jackets, skimp on personal hygiene tend to be difficult get along with, lack empathy and are sometimes even dangerous and violent rather than being people who are reflecting their "individuality, background and personal style".

And the club you want to join will be determined by whose in it.

Or it might not. A lot of people rebel against the idea of having to earn their way into a club. "If they won't take me as I am then screw them!" You can say that if you want but the truth is that they won't take you as you are and nothing is going to change that. Ever.

The Wings of the Dove

2012-01-17T21:31:00.001-05:00

(To make this a blog exclusively about the Wings of the Dove click here.)

Chapter 27
There was a moment when I had a rather disloyal thought that perhaps the reason that the writing is so brilliant these last few chapters is simply because the fuse has been lit and that has given focus to the story. To put it bluntly, I wondered if James really deserved the praise I have been heaping on him or whether it was just the momentum that came from the plot kicking into a familiar pattern. Forw e will get a certain frisson from simply wondering whether Kate and Merton can pull the trick off or whether someone or something wil trip them up.

But no, James is brilliant and nowhere is that more obvious than at the opening of this chapter. Milly is at home, and Kate and Merton are alone on the Piazza San Marco because the rest of the party are in a shop. And they are dueling with one another although neither really understands why.

Merton, without really knowing why it is so important to him or even what the "it" he wants is, wants something from Kate. He is talking to her of others' motives for they all seem to furthering the plan even though they could not possibly be in conspiracy. Except he doesn't really know that. He doesn't even know what is being conspired about. And he is one of only two conspirators!

Kate, for her part, is confronted with a young man who is very concerned about his honour. He is willing to play along so far without getting it because he loves her. She needs to lead him in further but must worry that, at any moment, he may pull up and simply refuse, or go home to London or go tell Milly everything.

Merton, of course, knows something is up. So neither really knows how game or howmercenary the other is willing to be. And thus we get this beautiful description:

Such was to-day, in its freshness, the moral air, as we may say, that hung about our young friends; these had been the small accidents and quiet forces to which they owed the advantage we have seen them in some sort enjoying. It seemed in fact fairly to deepen for them as they stayed their course again; the splendid Square, which had so notoriously, in all the years, witnessed more of the joy of life than any equal area in Europe, furnished them, in their remoteness from earshot, with solitude and security. It was as if, being in possession, they could say what they liked; and it was also as if, in consequence of that, each had an apprehension of what the other wanted to say.

And the thought I think we should keep in mind is this: this is what it's like for any couple falling in love. The plot regarding Milly heightens the emotion but any young couple slowly working their way into love is in a conspiracy and they are alone and free to say anything they want they will also be scared of what the other might say. And "the other" can screw it up in two ways: 2) they can not be ready to "go on" or 2) they could blurt out something to the effect of "going on" too quickly.

But these two are plotting. Let me give you a dialogue out of context here just for fun:

"We've gone too far," she none the less pulled herself together to reply. "Do you want to kill her?"

He had an hesitation that wasn't all candid. "Kill, you mean, Aunt Maud?"

"You know whom I mean. We've told too many lies."

Oh at this his head went up. "I, my dear, have told none!"

He had brought it out with a sharpness that did him good, but he had naturally, none the less, to take the look it made her give him. "Thank you very much."

Her expression, however, failed to check the words that had already risen to his lips. "Rather than lay myself open to the least appearance of it I'll go this very night."

"Then go," said Kate Croy.

How did they get there? Let em assure that none of that "means" what the literal sense of the words would have you conclude.

You really need to read this novel.

Choice?

2012-01-17T10:30:00.000-05:00

Can I ask you to do something difficult? Try to forget how you feel about issues of freedom of choice in various contexts for a moment. What I'd like to do is to consider the logical implications of the following two stories.

The first is from a guy I went to university with named André Picard. He writes about a provocative essay that appeared in the Huffington Post and asked whether breast augmentation surgery was a form of mutilation.

Sure, conditions are far more sanitary at Western plastic-surgery clinics where women’s breasts are sliced and “enhanced” than in dirt-poor villages in the developing world where girls and young women have their clitorises and labia excised ritualistically.

Yes, the breast augmentation is done voluntarily, but then so too is much female genital mutilation. But both practices are driven by ingrained notions of a woman’s place in society, the quest for an ideal of beauty/sexuality and social/religious norms.

The consequence of believing this, it is important to remember, would be to suggest that we might take this choice away from women.

Okay but how is this different from getting a tattoo? Or, to make it really challenging, how is the woman who goes under the knife to get her breasts "enhanced" different from the woman who goes under the knife because she wants to "live as a man"?

Well there is an implied answer to that in the excerpt above. For the objection here is not really to the mutilation but for the reasons it is done. It's not really the mutilation that is objected to but the "ingrained notions of a woman’s place in society" and that is further specified as "the quest for an ideal of beauty/sexuality and social/religious norms".

Hey guys, did you know that you were attracted to large breasts because of social/religious norms? It's funny because when I was fourteen I got the distinct feeling that every social/religious norm out there was chastising me for being so interested in breasts.

And the expression "an ideal of" is doing a lot of work in the phrase "the quest for an ideal of beauty/sexuality". To see how much work, consider the phrase that we get if we take it out:

the quest forbeauty/sexuality

No one would question a woman's pursuit of that. By suggesting that it's just "an ideal of", André delegitimizes the woman's choice.

In other words, you are free to choose what you want so long as you choose the right thing.

Here is the second story:

An editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal is calling for doctors performing prenatal ultrasounds to conceal the sex of the baby for the first 30 weeks, to curb a trend toward "female feticide" in the Asian community.

While reaction to the idea of withholding such information from parents has been mixed, there appears to be broad agreement that the practice of female feticide should be eliminated.

As above, set aside your beliefs about the issue of abortion for a while and think about the logical implications of this.

For starters, note that it is apparently just fine to single out certain ethnic communities because you find behaviour patterns in these communities troubling. That's a rather big move if you think about it. Ask yourself, for example, if you'd accept a similar line of argument about crime in the black community?

And, again, ask yourself about the freedom of choice issue. If I have a right to do something that means I don't have to justify my reasons for doing it to you or anybody else. My rights cannot be limited simply because others believe I have bad reasons for exercising them or else they would cease to be rights.

A right can be limited if it risks hurting others. But who is hurt in this case? It can't be the fetus or else that would restrict the right to abortion generally. the whole pro-choice argument is founded on the assumption that the fetus has no separate status from its mother. And yet that claim vanishes like steam in this case.

Interim editor-in-chief of the CMAJ Dr. Rajendra Kale writes.

"A woman has the right to medical information about herself . . . (but) the sex of the fetus is medically irrelevant information — except when managing rare sex-linked illnesses — and does not affect care."

But care of whom? If a woman has control over her own body then the only relevant care issue is what she wants for her body.

Of course we all know that there is a feminist concern here and I'd add that the concern is entirely legitimate. But again, let's consider the logical implications. There has been quite a trend towards feticide in general these last few decades. in fact, if some pro-life group started calling abortion "feticide" you can bet pro-choicers would scream blue murder about how this label was freighting what ought to be an argument about rights with emotion. Why is something that is generally supposed to be a right become wrong when a woman chooses abortion based on the sex of the fetus?

And what about consistency? If we take the pursuit of male children through selective abortion of female fetuses as effecting the rights of women generally then don't we have to take the pursuit of healthy children through the selective abortion of fetuses with a high risk of Down's Syndrome as affecting the rights of those with disabilities generally? Do some identities matter more than others?

Again, the message here is that you have the right to choose so long as you do so for the right reasons.

What are they selling: Another image

2012-01-17T08:00:00.000-05:00

So what do you think when you see the following.

I shot this in a bus shelter so it's not the best image but I think we can see enough here to draw some conclusions. Such as, for example, that she's an exceptionally beautiful young woman with large breasts. That's not surprising as she is a model. Oh that poor Vermeer never got to paint her! (And yes, sharp-eyed readers can spot my accidental self portrait dressed for minus 20 degree weather in the reflection off to the left.)

What is surprising is that she seems to have been chosen to represent poverty and I put it to you that no one—especially the people who put this campaign together—ever seriously entertained the thought that her face was the face of poverty for even a nano-second.

Are you prepared to be shocked? Apparently this woman who obviously can afford cool retro-80s clothing, obviously can afford make up and obviously can afford a gym membership cannot afford, wait for it, a loaf of bread!

This is yet another ad that isn't about what it says it's about. It is an ad asking you to make a donation but the reason for doing so is not to help someone else regain the dignity that living in poverty has taken away from them. No one knows better than the Salvation Army what modern urban poverty looks like and that ain't it.

Here's a hint as to what it does look like from the report the Salvation Army prepared when they launched the Dignity Project in Canada about a year ago:

Many individuals that are living in poverty experience difficulty retaining stable employment, due to challenges such as mental health issues and addiction that inhibit their success ...

We could say a lot about that and I will next Monday in a post called "What's wrong with compassion?" For now, suffice to say, organizations like the Salvation Army no longer have any interest in associating realistic images of modern urban poverty with their appeals. And before we get too hard on them, we should consider that this campaign probably works and that is why they use it. Here is the image that went with that report a year ago:

Same general concept and yet different. I walk by the Salvation Army shelter every Friday morning, by the way, and vast majority of those I see are men. The few women most definitely do not wear make-up nor wear clothing anything like the young woman above.

But the man above isn't right either. He isn't smoking for starters. And he looks familiar doesn't he. Well, he'll look familiar to anyone old enough to have seen Peter Falk play Columbo. And while a Columbo lookalike probably doesn't pull in as much as the hot babe does, he does share something with her that I'll get to below.

What I'd like to suggest is that the ad works because it unintentionally succeeds on a different level from what it appears to be doing. To get that second sense, let's crop it just a smidge following the dividing line the creators have helpfully provided for us:

Now we can see that the picture is really aspirational. For even if we were to convince ourselves, against all odds, that she really was poor it would still be painfully clear that she doesn't need any help achieving dignity. She is a hip urban woman who embodies dignity and you, the unconscious suggestion goes, can also achieve dignity by donating to the Salvation Army. There is our potential donor at the bus stop in between her hot yoga session and the fair trade tea she is going to treat herself to when she gets home and her good friends at the Sally Ann feed her the perfect image of what she hopes she can be and associates that image with giving and something else.

The something else is religion. For cropping the picture like this also emphasizes the worshipful quality of it. The woman is reaching up. It's a content-free religion which isn't surprising in this day and age nor is it surprising from the Salvation Army which, while it definitely has a doctrine of belief, has long abandoned promoting that doctrine publicly. But it's perfect for someone who has found her yoga class meaningful but might wonder about the complete lack of any moral uplift associated with it. A problem that can me made to go away with a single donation ... "we accept all major credit cards; our operators are waiting".

The project manifesto gives it away:

I believe that:

Everyone should have access to life’s basic necessities
Poverty is a scourge on society that puts dignity out of reach
People’s lives change when they are treated with dignity
Everyone has a right to a sense of dignity
The fight against poverty deserves my personal attention

Think about point #4 for a while: "Everyone has a right to a sense of dignity". That's one of those claims that means less the more you think about it. What is "a sense of dignity"? Why not say "Everyone has the right to dignity?" Well, to say that would kinda give it away wouldn't it? Charlie Sheen clearly as a sense of dignity but he doesn't actually have much dignity. The way it's put above hides the fact that dignity is a human achievement and there cannot, as a consequence, be a right to it. At most their might be a right to the pursuit of dignity (a point Jefferson fully grasped 236 years ago).

But a sense of dignity well that's something else. To believe in that doesn't require that we think even a second about what modern urban poverty—a phenomenon caused mostly by single-parent families, addiction and mental illness—is really like or about whether a loaf of bread would really make any difference. No, all this ad wants to make you think about is yourself and who you want to be.

Sort of political Monday: The limits of feminism

2012-01-16T11:12:00.000-05:00

My favourite argument for treating women and men equally was advanced by John Stuart Mill. His response to claims that women were not suited to hold certain jobs or to own property was effectively this: "Then we shouldn't need laws to maintain this." If, for example, the claim is that women really are happier in the domestic sphere, then allowing them full access to the working world should only confirm this.

It's an argument that calls the other side's bluff.

The problem is that I can't call someone else's bluff without risking calling my own at the same time. What do I say if decades after most of the barriers have been taken away, there are still far more men than women in the very elite areas of science, mathematics, corporate management and politics?

I can't say that women are not capable of achieving success in these fields for some women have achieved amazing success in this fields. It still would be monstrously unjust to restrict women's access to these fields. But what we see here is a statistical phenomenon about women as a group that is looking more and more like it will never change.

Why are men more successful in these fields? Sexism is almost certainly part of the explanation but it is getting harder and harder to maintain that it is all of the explanation. I think it is also very clear that innate ability is NOT the explanation. These areas don't seem to be like athletics where most men are simply better than most women. If anything, most female students display greater aptitude for science, mathematics, management and politics than most male students do. But it also seems that if you make a field competitive enough, the women start to drop out. They choose to drop out.

And so do most of the men.

In the end, however, you end up with more men than women at the top.

I used to see this back when I was a young athlete and later when I coached young athletes. In a group who had already clearly distinguished themselves as elite performers girls simply chose to drop out of competition more often than boys did. And this was true even though the girls were only competing against other girls. I could get ten boys who didn't particularly like one another to continue to train with one another simply by convincing them that the training was going to make them better athletes. Put ten girls in the same situation and seven or eight of them would lose interest and drop out. (One of the ways you can tell a girl is really determined to make it in a sport is that she will be paying close attention to the way elite boys train and compete for she will determine that she has more to learn from them than most of her female competitors.)

One approach to this has been to paint high-achieving men and. as a consequence, high-achieving women, as deeply flawed. I don't think even the people who do this think they are fooling anyone.

One way or another, we are going to have to accept that any truly meritocratic society is going to have more men than women at the top of science, mathematics, corporate management and politics.

The girls are not alright part 378

2012-01-16T09:11:00.000-05:00

As the title suggests, the theme that girls and young women are not doing terribly well in their new "empowered" state is a favourite theme of mine—that the need that some seem to have to insist in louder and louder terms that girls are taking over and that boys are in trouble is actually masking something very nasty indeed that is really happening to girls. Well, check out this movie review in the New York Times.

The Wings of the Dove

2012-01-13T12:19:00.002-05:00

(To make this a blog exclusively about the Wings of the Dove click here.)

Chapter 26
This is another brilliantly written and wonderful to read chapter.

A good friend of ours, lives up the street in fact, was hired a few years ago to edit Jane Austen. You may have heard about it. A publisher, taking advantage of Austen's books being in the public domain, had them "tightened up" for people who just wanted the action. I know, a travesty and all that but I have had the unkind thought that James might actually have benefited from an editor.

And, heh, Edith Wharton thought so too so don't call me a Philistine.

James could have easily begun the story in Venice and filled in all the back-story we need as he went along. This section of the book is the reason to read it. (A good movie version could be made by start it here.)

The opening is magnificent because it starts with Densher being a snob. Not about poor locals, he quite likes them. No it is tourists at his hotel that he is a snob about. And note the term he uses to characterize them:

The establishment, choked at that season with the polyglot herd, cockneys of all climes, mainly German, mainly American, mainly English, it appeared as the corresponding sensitive nerve was touched, sounded loud and not sweet, sounded anything and everything but Italian, but Venetian.

"Cockney's of all climes". Others may claim that the "wogs begin at Calais" but for Densher they are everywhere. And that is a perfect bit of characterization because it is like that. The snob is often someone like Densher; the snob is often someone who feels they are entitled to a pass for it because their tastes for the plain and simple folk are so refined.

So he's here at Aunt Maud's invitation and Milly is falling for him. It's a funny thing about Henry James that women given the freedom to make up their own choices do seem to make bad ones when it comes to love. ANd this in a book thatw as meant to pay tribute to the personality of his cousin Minny.

Who seems very close to us in this chapter:

"... he suggested a clever cousin calling on a cousin afflicted ..."

That is a literal description of Henry's relation with Minny. William's as well. I wonder if there was any bad blood between them as a result of their rivalry for her affection?

An interesting fact about many of the great novels is that, if you strip them down to the action, as my friend was paid to do with Austen, they have what are essentially potboiler plots. This one is no different. However, the details are significant. If Hollywood were doing this story, they'd create tension here by having Merton begin to fall in love with Milly. Not James, he has distrust begin to grow between Merton and Kate while having Merton treat Milly like, well, an afflicted cousin.

I don't want to say more because I wouldn't want to deprive anyone of the pleasure of reading this for the first time. A magnificent chapter.

The Wings of the Dove

2012-01-12T20:43:00.000-05:00

(To make this a blog exclusively about the Wings of the Dove click here.)

I started this thread to note examples of religious language used by James in this book so I'm going to go back and note a couple of examples that have come up inthe last few chapters before getting onto Chapter 25.

At the end of Chapter 21, Milly is once again compared to a priestess. Significantly, this ecocation occurs just before Merton tells the lie that signifies that he has passed the moment and entered into teh conspiracy against Milly:

Milly, three minutes after Kate had gone, returned in her array--her big black hat, so little superstitiously in the fashion, her fine black garments throughout, the swathing of her throat, which Densher vaguely took for an infinite number of yards of priceless lace, and which, its folded fabric kept in place by heavy rows of pearls, hung down to her feet like the stole of a priestess. He spoke to her at once of their friend's visit and flight. "She hadn't known she'd find me," he said--and said at present without difficulty. He had so rounded his corner that it wasn't a question of a word more or less. (Page 295 in my edition)

We've seen this before and it will come back below.

If we jump ahead to chapter 24, Milly thinks of the palazzo she has rented as "consecrated" by its owners:

They had preserved and consecrated, and she now--her part of it was shameless--appropriated and enjoyed. (P 325)

Immediately after this comes the priestess comparison again:

Palazzo Leporelli held its history still in its great lap, even like a painted idol, a solemn puppet hung about with decorations. Hung about with pictures and relics, the rich Venetian past, the ineffaceable character, was here the presence revered and served: which brings us back to our truth of a moment ago--the fact that, more than ever, this October morning, awkward novice though she might be, Milly moved slowly to and fro as the priestess of the worship. Certainly it came from the sweet taste of solitude, caught again and cherished for the hour; always a need of her nature, moreover, when things spoke to her with penetration. It was mostly in stillness they spoke to her best; amid voices she lost the sense. (P. 325)

Chapter 25
And when we go to the next chapter we get a couple more right away.

Lord Mark shows up and once again and wow, this is a scene. There is almost no action, just Lord Mark making his appeal and Milly considering but it is gripping reading. as I've said before, it is like James spent too much time tying up details that, while possibly interesting, brought the flow of the story to a halt and now that he has moved to Venice he can move along nicely.

There are two bits of religious language that I noted here. First Milly evokes the 23 psalm. It comes up in interesting circumstances for she admits a big secret to Lord Mark (I won't say what it is). It's a secret she has kept from others she feels closer to, most notably Kate. Then comes this:

She would have made the question itself impossible to others--impossible for example to such a man as Merton Densher; and she could wonder even on the spot what it was a sign of in her feeling for Lord Mark that from his lips it almost tempted her to break down. This was doubtless really because she cared for him so little; to let herself go with him thus, suffer his touch to make her cup overflow, would be the relief--since it was actually, for her nerves, a question of relief--that would cost her least.

Oddly enough, given that this is a psalm famous for the comfort it brings, if we put Milly's quote back in context it seems quite sinister:

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:
thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.

After this it only remains for Lord Mark asks Milly to believe in him, a Christ-like request that several characters have made now:

"Is it inconceivable to you that you might try?"

"To be so favourably affected by you--?"

"To believe in me. To believe in me," Lord Mark repeated.

She elects not to and that doesn't feel like a good thing to me.

Manly Thor's Day Special: Marketing Canadian Whisky to men

2012-01-12T11:55:00.001-05:00

A while ago, I wrote about marketing alcohol to women. Let's look at the flip side. Here's a question: Why has Canadian whisky become the alcoholic beverage most closely associated with uncompromising maleness? We saw it first with the ads for Canadian Club from a few years ago and now Wiser's is pushing the same line.

I should confess right upfront that the Canadian Club ads worked for me. I saw them and immediately got the point that these ads were speaking to me. With the Wiser's ads, my friends figured out they would appeal to me even before I saw them. So I speak not as a objective observer here but as someone who holds many of the same values promoted.

There are two guys of note in the ads below. The guy you are scared of becoming is the first guy to appear and the older role model you wish you'd had growing up appears at 0.19 seconds and is sitting in a chair:

I've been trying to pick out the fabric on that sports jacket. I think it's ultra-suede. You have to wonder where they got it as I don't think anyone has made a jacket like that since the 1979. That's not an accident.

It's also not an accident that a whole lot of people look at that guy in the chair and hate him. It's not an accident that these ads have produced the same lame parodies from the same angry wimps who so hated the Canadian Club ads. One of the principal differences between men and women is that men choose our values not only because they appeal to us but also because they are an affront to the people we want to be affronted.

As I said in the post about marketing alcohol to women, the power of these commercials stems not from wish fulfillment but nightmare avoidance. That power comes from its ability to reassure us that we are not becoming what we are scared we are settling into. The ads for women traded on the fears of single women in their late twenties and thirties that they are out with the girls because they can't make a long-term relationship work with a man. The Canadian whisky commercials trade on the fear of men in their thirties and forties that they are turning into a bunch of pussy-whipped boys. (And yes there is a grim biological truth for women hiding in the difference between those age ranges.)

For what it's worth, the Urban Dictionary says:

Pussy-whipped
(1) adj - situation whereupon a male is undeniably at the mercy of his high-maintinence girlfriend & answers to her every beck and call, usually followed by the reprioritizing of girlfriend over friends, family, school, food, water, and air.
(2) adj - making decisions based on the incentive of sex

The ad works because it plays on our fear of being this guy:

But it doesn't say a lot about who we want to be. No, it's not the guy in the chair. That guy isn't the guy you wish you were but the guy you wish you'd had for a role model. Maybe you knew that guy once upon a time and he was a bit of a role model but you wish you'd known him a lot better and learned the lessons you could have from him. Or maybe you just got him second hand through books and old movies.

Here's the math. If you are between 35 to 45 today, you were a boy in the 1980s when the last examples of chair-man still existed in the wild in significant numbers. Chair-man is old enough to remember when Esquire was the best magazine on the rack; old enough to remember when Detroit still made great cars; old enough to remember when you could wear after shave that cost less than $10 a bottle without shame; old enough to remember when men read Playboy fully clothed in a comfortable arm chair with the magazine in one hand and a whisky in the other instead of sitting half-undressed in front of a computer screen pathetically masturbating to "porn".

A lot of it depends on vague memories. Canadian whisky, for example, used to be sold by associating it with class of the "Esquire" type. "Esquire" was a courtesy title awarded to a man with gentlemanly ways but who wasn't actually a gentle man in the (very) old sense of the word because that meant someone who didn't have to engage in trade or work for a salary because he was a member of the nobility. It worked perfectly for the magazine and the men who read it, however, because it implied something you had earned as opposed to inheriting and because this status was determined entirely by your behaviour and not inherited.

There is just enough memory of that ideal that a lot of us know we want it.

No, you can't buy the status by the bottle. But who said you could? Like it or not, values go in clusters and whisky and whiskey both go with uncompromising manliness.

The WIngs of the Dove

2012-01-11T20:37:00.000-05:00

(To make this a blog exclusively about the Wings of the Dove click here.)

Chapter 24 is like a release. After a ll this thrashing out of nuance and qualifying remarks, it feels like the story actually get's moving again. Henry James himself seemed to feel it as his writing gets noticeably better here. There area some joyfully wonderful metaphors. This description of Eugenio, the man Milly hires to manage her household in Venice for example:

Gracefully, respectfully, consummately enough--always with hands in position and the look, in his thick neat white hair, smooth fat face and black professional, almost theatrical eyes, as of some famous tenor grown too old to make love, but with an art still to make money ...

And then there is the discussion of figurative masks that Kayte and Milly seem to let down in one another's presence. What's so wonderful about that? Well two things, the first is that james has set up the whole notion of role playing earlier with his description of Merton's meeting with Maud after his return from the States. And now we have the intoxicating suggestion that Milly thinks these roles are being dropped. The second wonderful thing is that all this happens in Venice a city where mask-wearing has all sorts of overtones.

I suspect poor Milly is misleading herself on this.

Other high points of note include the opening sentence:

Not yet so much as this morning had she felt herself sink into possession; gratefully glad that the warmth of the Southern summer was still in the high florid rooms, palatial chambers where hard cool pavements took reflexions in their lifelong polish, and where the sun on the stirred sea-water, flickering up through open windows, played over the painted "subjects" in the splendid ceilings--medallions of purple and brown, of brave old melancholy colour, medals as of old reddened gold, embossed and beribboned, all toned with time and all flourished and scolloped and gilded about, set in their great moulded and figured concavity (a nest of white cherubs, friendly creatures of the air) and appreciated by the aid of that second tier of smaller lights, straight openings to the front, which did everything, even with the Baedekers and photographs of Milly's party dreadfully meeting the eye, to make of the place an apartment of state.

That is 155 words. That is 155 wonderfully written words. That is the art of the long sentence at its best.

And then there is Lord Mark re-appearing. You can't decide whether you trust him or not. Milly can't either. A lot of talk about the novel gets bogged down about free indirect speech but here James has accomplished an amazing thing: reading this you tend to have the same reactions to Lord Mark as Milly does. After a while I found myself thing, "Did I think that or did she?"

Contrary to my observations from last time, I can see the point of telling Milly's story again. I still think the novel lacks a strong sense of a central thread running through it but Milly's story suddenly became more compelling with her arrival in Venice.

Final thought, here is some of what Milly thinks about Lord Mark:

He had waited then, Lord Mark, he was waiting--oh unmistakeably; never before had he so much struck her as the man to do that on occasion with patience, to do it indeed almost as with gratitude for the chance, though at the same time with a sort of notifying firmness.

It's impossible to read that and not think of the opening sentence of the novel and Kate Croy's contrasting experience:

She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him.

The novel is full of people waiting for something to happen so their lives can really start.

Womanly Virtues Wednesday: Another Anti-rape campaign that isn't about rape

2012-01-11T10:10:00.003-05:00

Courtesy of The Fourth Checkraise, I learned about a new "anti-rape" campaign. Here is a sample poster:

"Men can stop rape" can we. By doing what I wonder? Beating up rapists perhaps? Guarding women every second of the day and night? Stupid question because the assumption behind this campaign is that every man is a rapist and we need to be "educated" so we'll stop being rapists. It's probably pointless to explain why this campaign will have no effect because it was never intended to have any effect. Just do a thought experiment and imagine how a real rapist such as a Russell Williams or Paul Bernardo would respond to such a poster. (Notice by the way, that in the poster above the man's eyes are held captive by our gaze and that the woman is free: the visual message is that their relative power status vis-à-vis the viewer is exactly the opposite of what the written message tells us. Any time you see that in a poster you can be sure the motives behind it are dishonest.)

As others have pointed out before me, we don't treat any other crime like this. No one thinks that a campaign explaining property rights would deter burglars and no one thinks that a campaign promoting the dignity of human life would stop murderers.

No, the real point of this campaign is to paint men as a problem. No one behind this campaign spent even a moment contemplating the available research on the psychology of real rapists. Worse, it doesn't seem to have crossed their minds that branding all men as potential rapists is an act of hatred. The only appropriate response to "What part of 'no' do you not understand?' is and always will be "What part of 'F___ Off!' do you not understand?"

But, that said, there is a real issue hiding here and it's worth discussing.

Note that the poster shows us a couple. This isn't about some guy following a woman down a dark street and it isn't even about date rape. It's about how men in relationships should treat women.

So let's consider a couple. I'll call them Jason and Paula. They meet at university. They don't know anything about one another's sexual histories so we we won't either. They get along well and pretty soon they are on their way to being a couple. And they kiss. Then they do more than kiss but, at some point, she stops him.

They go on.

At some later time, they kiss and do more than kiss and again, at some point she stops him.

They go on.

This happens enough that the question of why Paula won't go any further becomes unavoidable. Maybe Jason asks or maybe he doesn't but Paula feels it is incumbent on her to explain. She says, "I'm not ready."

They go on.

Jason steels himself up to ask a question. "I don't want to put any pressure on you, but could you explain to me where you are and why you feel you're not ready.'

And she says, "I don't know."

As Jason knew, the question Paula answers is not what he asked her but rather: "When are you going to be ready?" That's why he told her doesn't want to pressure on her. Because he is putting pressure on her and he wants to be as decent as he can about it.

The key thing is that they aren't talking about sex. If they could talk about sex, their lives would be simple. Jason's question was not about sex but about their future as a couple. That is where it gets tricky. Jason knows that it would be wrong to issue an ultimatum to the effect of "put out or I leave". Being a decent guy, he is making sure he doesn't do such a thing even by accident.

I'd go further and say that for Jason there are only two right choices and host of bad choices. He can either

suck it up and stick with Paula and allow her to either get used to the idea of sex or not or
he can leave and take all the blame on himself.

You may or may not like those rules. But the thing is that they are rules. Like all rules they have an arbitrary quality about them. No set of rules will ever match up exactly with a satisfying morality. If the sign says "yield" then I yield to the other driver whether or not she is behaving reasonably.

But rules are what we miss. That is what this campaign is really about. "So when I wasn't sure how she felt, I asked". There is an implied rule here: If you aren't sure, ask. It's a good rule as far as it goes but it needs context: How do you know not to be sure? There is a whole lot of back-story missing from the example. The woman has to have been sending the guy some mixed messages and that is what led him to wonder, "How does she really feel?"

With the sexual revolution we threw away the rules and a lot of women have discovered that rules are good for them and they want new rules. But if we are to have rules they can't be rules that pull all the responsibility on one side. And that is what these rules do. They place no onus whatsoever on women to communicate clearly. The people behind these campaigns want rules for men and lots of them but they don't want rules for women.

Take Paula's answer above. Is "I don't know," a good enough answer? No it isn't. It might be true. She may be saying "I don't know," because she really doesn't know. It might also be a lie. She may know full well that she isn't going to be ready for sex any time soon and is saying this because she doesn't want Jason to leave. But it's a bad answer not because it is or isn't true but because it isn't enough. There is another human being involved and she owes him more. She needs to sit down and think is it fair to string this guy along like this. She knows full well what his expectations and hopes for the relationship are and she should end it and take the blame if she knows they aren't on the same page about this.

Under the old rules, men were expected to be gentlemen. We've quite rightly thrown away the rules that used to govern women but this campaign tells us that still makes sense to expect men to be gentlemen: "My strength is not for hurting". But that will only work if women have a code of honour too.

The Wings of the Dove

2012-01-10T20:06:00.000-05:00

(To make this a blog exclusively about the Wings of the Dove click here.)

Chapter 23 is short and that is a good thing because it is utterly unconvincing. It used to be said of the Ancient Greek philosophers that they had a propensity not to miss nuance but to see nuance that just wasn't there. You might make a similar observation of Henry James.

We get two conversations in this chapter the first is between Milly and Susan and in it James seems to be exploring nuance that strikes me as pointless. His sort of realism reminds me of Joyce Carol Oates in that it is driven not by a desire to really show us anything "real" so much as a desire to prevent the reader from using their own imagination or reaching their own conclusions. All possibilities will be nailed down.

But that is a trifle compared to the reappearance of Sir Luke Strett. I appreciate that medicine has changed in the 110 years since this book was written and I know little about medicine or the history of medicine. But, even at that, I am confident that no physician ever had a professional conversation like this a patient in 1902.

The sole point of the conversation seems to be to allow Milly to expand a bit and therefore give us insight into her character and story. But, and I'm sure that the ghosts of both Henry and his brother William will cry at this suggestion: Milly is not that interesting. The story is around her. Some character development is of use but the important moral aspects of the story concern Merton and Kate and that is what we need to be reading about.

The Wings of the Dove

2012-01-10T16:48:00.000-05:00

Dance with me Henry: or Chapter 22 in which Henry gets a little naughty, well, by his standards anyway.

(To make this a blog exclusively about the Wings of the Dove click here.)

You can see Henry James the aspiring dramatist in this chapter note this funny exchange that begins with Susie recounting her response to the physician Luke Strett and his visit to talk about Milly:

"I asked nothing," said poor Susie--"I only took what he gave me. He gave me no more than he had to--he was beautiful," she went on. "He is, thank God, interested."

"He must have been interested in you, dear," Maud Manningham observed with kindness.

Her visitor met it with candour. "Yes, love, I think he is. I mean that he sees what he can do with me."

Mrs. Lowder took it rightly. "For her."

Chuckle, chuckle.What terribly adult women they both are all of a sudden. But they are not adult in the sense of responsible

I think the point of Maud being referred to as both Maude Manningham and then later Mrs. Lowder is to suggest that the two women are slipping back into the sort of rapport they both had when young friends and being a little naughty and then coming back to earth. There is more of the same sort of stuff in the chapter including Maud suggesting that she'd be happy keeping Merton Densher for herself even though she regards him as unsuitable for Kate.

The key thing here though is that this scene is meant to operate the same way the scene with Juliet's nurse does in Romeo and Juliet. When the nurse makes her appalling joke when young Juliet falls on her face that she'd have more wit to fall on her back we are meant to think what an appalling upbringing the girl has had without a responsible adult anywhere around her. Here Henry James shows us these two women making plans for Milly. If they were forthright enough to decide to just get her laid it would be better than this. Under the guise of doing the best for Milly, both women stick hard and fast in their own interest.

The problem is that scene doesn't work in Romeo and Juliet and I don't think its close relative works here. People go to see R&J meaning to find a great love story so that is what they do find even though there is no evidence in the play to back this up and they never pick up the hints Shakespeare gives us with the nurse. What do we expect to find in The Wings of the Dove? Well, we have the choice of several kinds of stories and that is looking more and more like a problem. Determined to give us complex insights into so many characters, James has at least four narratives going on at the same time.

And how much of this complexity is justified? I think a big part of the problem here is that James wanted to make more of Milly than he really needed to for the sake of the story. What we have is, in a sense, a retelling of Portrait of a Lady only we get a more sympathetic pair in Kate Croy and Merton Densher than we had in Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond. But their story is the interesting one and Milly needs to be a subordinate character in it instead of always threatening to become the main stream herself.

James reportedly thought this book inadequate because Milly was not a well drawn character and, therefore, not worthy of the memory of his cousin Minny Temple, on whom she was based. I'd say, rather, that Milly needs to be a little flatter as a character so that we can focus on the more compelling story of Kate and Merton.

Hip hop isn't as popular as you think it is

2012-01-10T11:15:00.002-05:00

Despite hip-hop's effects on the pop charts, we've yet to see the big networks really attempt to integrate rapping into their pop star competition shows, as Alyssa Rosenberg points out:

That's Ta-Nehisi Coates. What I think is most interesting about that comment is the presumption that the big networks would integrate rapping into their pop-star competition shows. No doubt someone out there is already bristling at my use of the word "presumption" and is ready to argue that I am racist for doing so. But it is an apt use for the word means "an act or instance of presuming something to be the case" and Coates does just that in assuming that the big networks will ultimately, ah, "integrate" (speaking of words that come freighted with racial politics) hip hop into these shows.

The big networks might, of course, feature more people using this performance style. I have no special knowledge here but there is a simple reason why they have not and that is that hip hop is not pop music in the most natural use of the word pop for it isn't very popular. That might seem nonsensical for there is a big enough market for hip hop that some of its stars get to be fairly wealthy, although they tend to be less wealthy than they seem.They also lose their wealth and fame pretty quickly. The principle point, however, is that in the highly fragmented market we have today, there isn't anything you could reasonably call the music of popular culture. That makes our era very different from past eras when, for example, a song like Home on the Range was common currency throughout popular culture.

Coates and Alyssa Rosenberg would like to see hip hop integrated primarily for reasons of racial politics. They believe this would be a good thing morally and socially speaking and not because either of them believes in all honsty that this music is just sooo darned good that everyone ought to listen to it. This is a common enough attitude and is a perfectly reasonable position to hold but I doubt very much it is the case for the simple reason that very little hip hop worth listening to. I have friends who used to argue that disliking hip hop and rap was proof that someone was racist. They kept that pose up through the 1990s until they, like just about everyone else, including, in some moods, Ta-Nehisi Coates, got bored of hip hop.

For the truth is that hip hop isn't very good or interesting music.

It's important to remember that the black music of the past was as good as it was largely because of racism. If it wasn't for racism, Charles Mingus would have spent his life playing cello in a symphony orchestra. It is only because he was excluded from that career on racist grounds that he went into jazz. The reason so many brilliant young black men and women went into popular music of various forms in the past was because other career paths were blocked to them. The racist belief that black people were entertaining meant that industry was more open to them than others.

Paradoxical as it may seem, the fact that most of the very little interesting new music is produced primarily by Indie bands made up of spoiled upper-middle-class whites who are comfortably enough situated that they can afford to throw years of their life away at being in a band is actually a result of our living in a less racist society than what prevailed in the glory days of black music in America.

Bad homilies

2012-01-10T08:15:00.000-05:00

The inimitable Father Z has a typically good answer to a reader who asks what lay Catholics should do about bad homilies. I would add only two thoughts: 1) homilies aren't very terribly important and 2) because of the invitation to vanity that comes with the homily, it isn't much wonder that there would be bad ones. But, really, of all the parts of the mass, the homily is the least important. The sign of the cross that begins the mass is more important than the homily. I would cheerfully sit through a thousand bad homilies as the price for having a priest who doesn't rip through the sign of the cross like it was some meaningless formality that has to be gotten over to get to the real stuff. Ditto for a priest who would say the Nicene Creed slow enough that we can all follow what it is that we are professing rather than rushing through it because the homily was too long again.

The Wings of the Dove

2012-01-09T20:01:00.000-05:00

(To make this a blog exclusively about the Wings of the Dove click here.)

Okay, it's time to move along. I've been going through this thing far too slowly. No one could possible be following this as it would be painful to do so at the pace I'm moving.

Chapter 21.

The people who made the movie version were attracted to the film noir elements in the book—which is to say the femme fatale (Kate Croy) who leads the hapless man (Merton Densher) into the awful act against the innocent victim (Milly Theale). And that, in their view anyway, justified disregarding much of the plot and sense of the novel as well as altering characters circumstances. Despite that, it's a good movie although it isn't a good movie of the novel, if you know what I mean. That granted, however, Henry Jame understands film noir better than they do and this chapter proves it. If the film makers had paid closer attention to what James does in this chapter and been faithful to that, they would have made a much better movie than they did, possibly even a great movie.*

The key thing in this chapter is that Merton goes to see Milly because Kate wants him to. He doesn't know, yet, what Kate's plans are. He has to suspect something but he may be excused for not guessing just what and just how mercenary Kate means to be.

At first he is tempted to just break the thing with Milly off.

He had talked with Kate of this young woman's being "sacrificed," and that would have been one way, so far as he was concerned, to sacrifice her.

But he does not as he gets along easily with her and every just slides along. And that is how we make bad moral decisions isn't it? It's easy to just slide along.

But there is a moment that I have called the "And then it was night" moment. This is a moment that occurs in many tragedies when the plotters of evil could just stop. They could pretend it was all a lark and then go home and nothing bad would happen. But if they go past it, they are in all the way. This is the moment where in great film noir—see Double Indemnity or Body Heat—when the man gets on the trolley ride the woman has been preparing him for with her and after that he must ride all the way to the end.

James, doing a much better job than the film, shows us in this chapter how Merton gets on the trolley. And here is how he reasons part of his fall through.

The sharp point was, however, in the difference between acting and not acting: this difference in fact it was that made the case of conscience. He saw it with a certain alarm rise before him that everything was acting that was not speaking the particular word. "If you like me because you think she doesn't, it isn't a bit true: she does like me awfully!"--that would have been the particular word; which there were at the same time but too palpably such difficulties about his uttering. Wouldn't it be virtually as indelicate to challenge her as to leave her deluded?--and this quite apart from the exposure, so to speak, of Kate, as to whom it would constitute a kind of betrayal. Kate's design was something so extraordinarily special to Kate that he felt himself shrink from the complications involved in judging it. Not to give away the woman one loved, but to back her up in her mistakes--once they had gone a certain length--that was perhaps chief among the inevitabilities of the abjection of love. Loyalty was of course supremely prescribed in presence of any design on her part, however roundabout, to do one nothing but good.

*The best filmed version of Mansfield Park is a movie called Metropolitan. It changes the plot significantly—moving it to 1980s New York—but, for all that, is much true to the spirit of the book. It's a shame the makers of The Wings of the Dove didn't think of doing likewise.

Sort of political Monday: Sunlight

2012-01-09T09:24:00.001-05:00

The Sunlight Foundation, a left-wing organization that calls itself "nonpartisan', has looked at the one percent of the one percent of political donors. The results have not been given as much attention as they ought have gotten.

That this is the case is entirely the fault of the Sunlight Foundation itself which puts everyone off the scent right off the bat with this highly misleading paragraph:

Unlike the other 99.99% of Americans who do not make these contributions, these elite donors have unique access. In a world of increasingly expensive campaigns, The One Percent of the One Percent effectively play the role of political gatekeepers. Prospective candidates need to be able to tap into these networks if they want to be taken seriously. And party leaders on both sides are keenly aware that more than 80% of party committee money now comes from these elite donors.

That this is not true, however, becomes apparent if we skim down and look at the top recipients of this money. If we go down to the chart in which they present the house members most reliant on the one percent of the one percent, for example, this is whom we get Pete Stark (D-CA), Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), Jerry Lewis (R-CA), George Miller (D-CA), Gregory Meeks (D-NY), Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL), Doris Matsui (D-CA), Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and John Kline (R-MN). The Sunlight Foundation notes, as it could hardly avoid doing so, that most are Democrats. The same is true of the Senators who receive the most from the wealthiest donors. But there are a couple of other details that jump out at you aren't there?

Perhaps the most important of these is that these people all have very safe seats. If Gregory Meeks is ever defeated it will be by another Democrat not a Republican. He has already established beyond a reasonable doubt that you can be stupid, dishonest and crass and that won't bother the voters of NY's 6th congressional district so long as you're a Democrat. Doris Matsui's sole qualification for her position is that she was married to the former holder of the seat. And this tells us something very important about the way big donors select recipients: they want to fund proven winners.

The Sunlight Foundation gets the problem exactly backwards. You don't need big money to win, the big money seeks out proven winners. If you want to buy anything at all, you have to buy it from someone who has it; if you want to buy political access, you're going to buy from someone who already has it.

Anyone who really wanted to make our politics somewhat cleaner tan it is would promote changes that make it harder for incumbents to remain in power. They, and not big donors, are the real gatekeepers.

Mary Wolstencraft

2012-01-06T11:27:00.000-05:00

Reading about her last night it struck me that a lot of Wollstonecraft's behaviour suggests something like fetal alcohol syndrome.

"Putting yourself in the other person's shoes"

2012-01-05T11:09:00.002-05:00

This is a highly over-rated bit of advice and Robert Wright inadvertantly proves it:

[Ron] Paul is making one contribution to the foreign policy debate that could have enduring value. It doesn't lie in the substance of his foreign policy views (which I'm largely but not wholly in sympathy with) but in the way he explains them. Paul routinely performs a simple thought experiment: He tries to imagine how the world looks to people other than Americans.

This is such a radical departure from the prevailing American mindset that some of Paul's critics see it as more evidence of his weirdness. A video montage meant to discredit him shows him taking the perspective of Iran. After observing that Israel and America and China have nukes, he asks about Iranians, "Why wouldn't it be natural that they'd want a weapon? Internationally they'd be given more respect."

Can somebody explain to me why this is such a crazy conjecture about Iranian motivation? Wouldn't it be reasonable for Iranian leaders, having seen what happened to nukeless Saddam Hussein and nukeless Muammar Qaddafi, to conclude that maybe having a nuclear weapon would get them more respectful treatment?

Well yeah. But the key thing here is that you can only make this move if you begin by unconsciously assuming that the other person's or nation's perspective is legitimate. As in, "Why shouldn't criminals want guns when they can see that the police already have them?"

This argument has often been used to justify terrorism. "Well, of course the Palestinians resort to terrorism because they keep losing otherwise." And built into that is an assumption—whether the person making the argument realizes it or not—that the Palestinians are supposed to win.

Here's a different thought experiment. Imagine that the United States and Israel didn't have nuclear weapons. Do you think that Iran would be trying to develop them then? Of course they would and probably with even greater determination knowing that this would allow them to strike harder than anyone could strike back against them.

Manly Thor's Day Special: How to enjoy coffee

2012-01-05T09:39:00.000-05:00

From Esquire's 1949 Handbook for Hosts:

When coffee was introduced to Europe in the 16th century, people thought it rendered women frigid and even barren; a law was promptly passes in Constantinople giving husbands the right to prevent the use of coffee by their wives. Maybe that's why the average woman, to this day, can't make a good cup of coffee. It must be that, basically, coffee is a man's drink. When subjected to the economies of drugstore waitresses or the casual inattention of wives, the cup that cheers but does not inebriate is apt to become a mean, thin liquid with almost unlimited capacities for discouraging real coffee lovers.

It's a shame we have lost this sort of gentle mockery between the sexes. And, old-fashioned as it may seem, there is something to it; to this day the average woman still makes and then cheerfully drinks a lousy cup of coffee. It is a sad sign of how badly male society has been degraded that many average men don't do much better.

I'll tell you why most women can't make good coffee: because they think of it as a drug. If you avoid making that mistake you can set your feet on the road to enlightenment.

Watch a woman in action and you will see what I mean. For the average female coffee drinker or feminized male, caffeine is either a morning jolt or the cause of insomnia. When she-he puts a cup of strong-tasting coffee to her lips, she thinks "Oh-oh powerful drug". She-he doesn't notice the taste as taste but rather she notices it as a warning the same way she might notice the smell of smoke and worry that her house is on fire.

On the other hand, when she-he is looking for a jolt, they want to get the stuff into their bloodstream in large quantities as that can be easily swallowed as quickly as possible. So they go to their drip coffee maker and pour the results into a really big mug. Or they belly up to the bar and ask for "Venti™"!

That's a problem because, while not all strong coffee is good coffee, all good coffee is strong coffee. (If you prefer a subtle coffee taste, dilute it with cream or hot milk. Do not brew weak coffee; "Café Americano" is an Italian term that means "serve this crap to the tourists because it is a sin to throw pearls before swine".)

So your first important tip is this: don't drink coffee every day. If you met someone at a party who said, "I love rum so much I drink a mickey of it everyday", you'd have no trouble figuring out what was really going on. The person who has four or five cups of coffee a day or orders a "Venti™" when they go to Starbucks is addicted to a drug and is no better qualified to judge good coffee than a crack addict.

The second important thing to know is that the best part of any drink is the first few sips. The returns diminish after that. This is true of many things; the greatest moment is when she first ... . So make something of that first moment. Sit down and anticipate. Pick the cup up gently and reverently and smell it. Take the time to enjoy it. Then take a taste. Miss this moment and you can't get it back.

An important tip for drinking coffee, whisky and brandy given me when I was a boy is to avoid the tip. Get the drink over the tip of your tongue onto the middle of your tongue. Then cradle it there. Wash it around your the middle of your tongue and only then, when it is slightly cooled and mixed with your own juices, let it slide forward over your tongue. As you do so, savour the tastes of coffee, for it has many tastes.

There is lots of good advice out there about buying and making good coffee but it will all be useless to you if you don't know how to enjoy good coffee.

"Neutral" application of the law and racism 2

2012-01-04T10:00:00.000-05:00

In Saint John, New Brunswick—one of the two mill towns I grew up in*—there is an historic courthouse. The main reason for visiting it is a self-supporting spiral staircase. Once you have marveled at that, there are a few historic exhibits.

One of the historic displays is a book with the arrest records from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth and early twentieth century. If you flip to any page from the last half of the nineteenth century forward, a curious fact will become obvious: for any given period there were many more Irish Catholics arrested than any other group. The number arrested far exceeds their proportion of the population of Saint John.

Some of this can be explained by bigotry. But in Saint John, as we find in most eastern cities, the police force became a route out of poverty for Irish Catholics and by middle of the twentieth century the majority of police officers in town were Irish Catholics and yet the majority of people arrested, charged and convicted of crimes remained Irish Catholics for as long as records were kept. Some other group has probably supplanted them at the top of this particularly hit parade by now but records are no longer kept to ascertain this. I'd guess that Irish Catholics were still at the top of the charts in the early 1970s when my family moved away.

The point being that while there was unquestionably discrimination against Irish Catholics when the city government and business was dominated by WASPs, there was also something seriously amiss with the Irish Catholic subculture that those fleeing the potato famine brought to eastern North America. And we can see evidence of this in all the major cities of the east coast where the Irish Catholics played a disproportionate part in crime, violent crime, criminal gangs and organized crime. The law had a disproportionate effect on the Irish Catholics of Saint John partly because of discrimination but also partly because the Irish Catholics were simply more likely to be criminals. Even if the law had been administered perfectly neutrally, there would have been more Irish Catholics arrested.

The same remains true for some of the minority subcultures today.

In Saint John, things began to improve when members of a nascent Irish Catholic middle class took a long hard look at the subculture that they were raised in and began to be critical of it. They used their position of influence in Irish-Catholic institutions to change attitudes. My godfather spearheaded the movement to merge the Catholic Youth Organization or CYO with the larger YMCA because he believed that the isolationist attitudes promoted by the CYO were hurting young Irish Catholics who would benefit from more exposure to the more successful moral culture promoted at the YMCA.

Yes, there remains racism in North America, but one of the primary obstacles confronting young black, Hispanic and aboriginal youth (among others) are the pathologies of their own subcultures.

* the other being Gatineau, Quebec

The well-educated phenomenon

2012-01-04T09:26:00.002-05:00

People from well-educated families are almost twice as likely to suffer from some dangerous food allergies as others — possibly because their bodies’ natural defences have been lowered by rigorous hygiene and infection control, suggests a new Canadian study.

Maybe. It could also be that doctors are less likely to contradict well-educated parents who insist that their kid has a food allergy. Meanwhile the parent with less education cowers before the doctor's authority when she tells them that little Johnny's reaction is perfectly normal and nothing to worry about.

Womanly Virtues Wednesday

2012-01-04T07:53:00.000-05:00

This advertisement has upset a lot of people.

My favourite uncle used to say, if something is making someone sensitive, make an issue of it. So here goes.

Agender NZ president Cherise Witehira, said many in the transgender community were outraged at the ads which were "blatantly transphobic".

"It's extremely offensive because it's pretty much saying the only way you can be a woman is to get your period.

"That's where a lot of the anger in the community is coming from - it's saying you are not a woman unless you can get your period.

"Obviously we can't menstruate. However, we identify as female."

Actually, the really notable thing about this advertisement is the complete lack of phobia. There is no fear or hatred present and those are the qualities that make a phobia. The young woman in this video is completely accepting of the transgendered person. She doesn't say, "What the hell are you doing in the women's washroom", nor does she turn and walk out because she feels uncomfortable.

The ultimate proof that the biological woman accepts the transgender woman is that she enters into the rivalry with her. Sexual status games are played out between women all the time. There is a great video of Queen Elizabeth meeting Marilyn Monroe the year they were both thirty years old. Go watch it and pay close attention to the Queen's eyes and you can see her glance down at Marilyn's body as she assesses her as a sexual rival.

Anything you can do, I can do better
The thing is that the ad makes narrative sense and that is what troubles the people who are troubled by it. Whether you laughed, were offended or, like me, did neither, you can follow the narrative. And if we look at that narrative something important may jump out at us. And that something becomes clear if we consider some counterfactual examples.

Imagine that we are in the washroom at a dance club and two hot young women come to stand in front of the mirrors at the sinks. Emily and Pippa both know one another but not well. What they both know is that they are rivals and a certain amount of posturing takes place. Okay, here is the thing that is different: Pippa would not win that duel by whipping out a tampon! To the contrary, she'd lose because she and Emily are having a duel for sexual status and acknowledging that she is having her period would put Pippa at a temporary disadvantage in that struggle.

Okay, now imagine another scenario. Emily was born Martin but now identifies as a woman and she enters into the same struggle with Pippa but Emily is so convincing that neither Pippa nor we know that she is not a biological woman. Does Pippa pull out her tampon to win that battle? Of course not because that rivalry is not about who is a "real woman" but rather about who is more of a woman.

Okay, now imagine you are watching an advertisement in which Emily-born-Martin-but-identifying-as-a-woman is playing the trans person only she is so convincing that you can't tell. Does that ad make any narrative sense? No it doesn't. The ad above makes sense because everyone knows that the transgendered person in the video isn't really a woman! Love it or hate it, you know that. You couldn't know enough to be offended if you didn't know that.

The biological woman doesn't prove she is really a woman by whipping out a tampon. She and we already know that. You can see it in her skin, the shape of her body, the way she moves. She accepts the transgendered person as a transgendered person and that is why the rivalry is possible. But the transgendered person is not a woman but (literally) a parody of a woman. We all know that she isn't "really" a woman. You can start a long argument about what "really" means here if you want but the mere fact that you can start the argument means you have already lost. If transgendered persons really became women by "identifying" as women there would be nothing to argue about.

The struggle here is not about what these two people are. That is clear. What the ad really does is to tell girls that they are special. "Libra gets girls."

And girls are special. Nothing is going to change that.

Final thought, just think about the expression "transphobic tampon ad".

Addendum

2012-01-03T13:42:00.002-05:00

The most appalling things about that Atlantic article I wrote about earlier today is the fact that Stephen Bloom is a journalism professor. He doesn't just have this diseased, hate-filled mind, he gets paid to teach other people his biases.

Here is an interesting video that suggests that maybe journalists just don't like it that ordinary people have a good time and that they have thought this way for a long time now. The commentator's name is Ben Grauer and boy does it bug him that people are celebrating New Year's Even instead of worrying about all the stuff he wishes they would worry about.

The Last Psychiatrist, courtesy of whom I found this, has transcribed some of the patter:

On the side of the Allied Chemical Tower, you have it spelled out in big letters– didn’t know about that, 1966– So there’s the end of the year which was featured with the escalation of the war in Vietnam, and The Dow Jones hitting a new high, just 30 points shy of 1000 just today; gloom at the homefront; increasing war overseas– maybe this crowd senses that besides the warm weather we’re having, the sense of hope as Harriman and Kohler and Goldberg scurry about the world on the peace offensive…and an increase in social security tax for Medicare. So take it or leave it, you’ve got the new year of 1966.
And the traditional crowd which had been building to maybe 700000, one of the biggest we’ve seen in years, just like the lemmings of Norway, is scurrying off to their homes and parties. They may have a transit strike, some of them may be weary, we don’t know the story on that yet, nor does New York’s newest Republican Mayor, first in 20 years, John Lindsay….

Yeah, 'cause the reason they write the year in big letters is because people need to be told. No doubt Ben also thought that the reason people put the birthday boy or girl's name on the cake was in case people didn't know. Cheap cynicism doesn't get any cheaper than "you have it spelled out in big letters– didn’t know about that, 1966". I also like the non sequitur whereby the news that the Dow has set a new record high is followed immediately by our reporter saying "gloom at the homefront". Our reporter doesn't seem to like capitalism much. And then the comparison of the crowd to rodents. This is who we have trusted to give us news for decades!

Speaking of hate and bigotry

2012-01-03T12:29:00.000-05:00

I'm late to this but check out this gem at Get Religion about an astounding piece of hate-journalism at The Atlantic.

I can't add much to the brilliant criticism at Get Religion but there are three things I'd like to highlight. The first is this gem of bigory:

The reason everyone seems related in small-town Iowa is because, if you go back far enough, many are, either by marriage or birth. In Iowa, names like Yoder, Snitker, Schroeder, and Slabach are as common as Garcia, Lee, Romero, Johnson, and Chen are in big cities.

And there is something wrong with those names? Try to imagine how writers at The Atlantic would respond to a piece written about New York that said, "Boy there sure are a lot of people with Hispanic and African American names in the phone book!"

The second is the sheer delusion behind this claim by writer Stephen Bloom:

About the only possible bright spot in the rural Iowa economy is wind energy.

Finally, note the cultural bludgeoning going on in this long passage that Get Religion also excerpts:

Rules peculiar to rural Iowa that I've learned are hard and fast, seldom broken: Backdoors are how you always go into someone's house. Bar fights might not be weekly occurrences, but neither are they infrequent activities. Collecting is big -- whether it's postcards, lamps, figurines, tractors, or engines. NASCAR is a spectator sport that folks can't get enough of. Old-timers answer their phones not with "hello," but with last names, a throwback to party-lines. Everyone's phone number in town starts with the same three-digit prefix.

Hats are essential. Men over 50 don't leave home without a penknife in their pocket. Old Spice is the aftershave of choice. Everyone knows someone who has had an unfortunate and costly accident with a deer (always fatal for the deer, sometimes for the human). Farming is a dangerous occupation; if farmers don't die from a mishap (getting a hand in an auger, clearing a stuck combine), they live with missing digits or limbs.

Comfort food reigns supreme. Meatloaf and pork chops are king. Casseroles (canned tuna or Tatertots) and Jell-O molds (cottage cheese with canned pears or pineapple) are what to bring to wedding receptions and funerals. Everyone loves Red Waldorf cake. Deer (killed with a rifle is good, with bow-and-arrow better) and handpicked morels are delicacies families cherish.

Religion is the glue that binds everyone, whether they're Catholic, Lutheran, or Presbyterian.

Hey, I'm not from Iowa but that sure sounds like where I come from. There is nothing about these rules that is peculiar to Iowa. Millions of people all across North America live in places where similar if not identical conditions apply. Upper New York State for example. These paragraphs just show how provincial and small-minded Stephen Bloom is.

This is a target rich environment but let's go through them anyway:

That you can come in the back door is an honour. It means you are a friend welcome without an invitation. One of the wonderful things about a place like Iowa is how readily people grant you that status. On the other hand, on my street here in the city there are two people who have lived on the same block for more than a decade but never met until this summer.
In most big, blue-state cities, bar fights are daily if not hourly occurrences.
Answering your phone with a family name is a throwback to an era when people were more formal and not to party lines. When I was boy, I was taught to answer the phone "Aimé residence, Jules speaking".
What's wrong with hats?
Old Spice is good.
Anywhere you have lots of white-tailed deer (see Westchester county for example) you are going to have a lot of car-deer collisions.
Farming is a dangerous occupation. Got any solutions for that smart boy?
What used to be called "soul food" is also comfort food. Would you feel comfortable making generalizations about African Americans based on that Mr. Bloom?
Red Waldorf cake sounds yummy to me.
Any time I meet someone who has killed a deer or turkey with a bow, I take the hat I find essential off to them because that is damned impressive feat. Try it sometime yourself if you don't believe me.
Hand-picked Morels are also delicacies families cherish in Southern France. I suggest you never go to Provence Mr. Bloom. You'd hate it.
"Religion is the glue that binds everyone, whether they're Catholic, Lutheran, or Presbyterian." That's true. Kind of impressive that it can do that don't you think?

"Neutral" application of the law and racism 1

2012-01-03T11:01:00.004-05:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a challenging piece up that he calls The Banality of Racism. He has a good point: that racism is rarely the sort of direct attack on a person that first comes to mind. A lot of racism is hidden in process. It's a good point and if Coates goes astray, it is because he doesn't apply it generally enough.

Consider, for example, the case of gun control. The ostensible purpose of gun laws is to stop guns from being used in crimes and from getting into the hands of those who are unable to appreciate the dangers and handle them carefully. In fact, however, the brunt of gun laws comes to bear not on criminals but on legal gun owners who tend to be more law abiding than the public at large. And if you read the opinions of the most vociferous supporters of measures such as the recently abolished Long-gun Registry here in Canada, it quickly becomes obvious that these people tend to be opposed to guns in general and not the specific issues of guns used in crimes and careless handling of firearms. And they push, sometimes successfully, for laws whose real purpose is to make gun ownership difficult or impossible under the guise of preventing criminal or careless use of firearms.

This sort of abuse is possible in virtually any area of the law. A while ago we had a city councilor here who hated dogs. She didn't pass any new bylaws but merely used her influence with the city administration to have existing bylaws enforced in a way that was tantamount to hassling dog owners. Bylaw officers who had better things to do spent hours sitting outside city parks looking for dog owners who leashed their dog ten feet on the wrong side of the sign that designated where the off leash area ended.

It will always be possible to abuse use seemingly neutral laws or groups of laws to serve discriminatory purposes. The challenge is to determine how to limit this effect while achieving something as close to neutral application as is possible.

One possible solution is the rationalist approach. In this approach, well-drafted laws or additional laws, regulations and precedents can be made to cover every possibility. That, however, is never enough. No text can be self-interpreting and supplying a second text to interpret the first always reaches a limit. Ultimately, we rely on the good faith of the executive arm of government and here there will always be failures.

And there, I think, is the core of Coates' mistake, this being the case, his move to suggest that power be taken away from one level of government and given to a higher level. He wants to regard every single case of neutral laws intended to stop voting fraud as discrimination. He is not alone in this, rationalists always seem to push for more government and more central government (the reductio ad absurdum of which is world government).

Of course, this response is conditioned by history: states rights was used to justify racism. But that is a contingent fact. It could just as easily have happened the other way. A powerful central government combined with a plurality of voters who either support racist measures or don't care enough to do away with them could impose racist laws on local governments eager to do away with same.

The solution is to be less rationalistic and have more faith in rationality.

More to come tomorrow.

The Wings of the Dove

2012-01-02T20:47:00.004-05:00

(To make this a blog exclusively about the Wings of the Dove click here.)

A bit of a potpourri this time.

Aunt Maud meets Densher when his return becomes known and we get this sentence from JAmes:

Shewelcomed him genially back from the States, as tohis view of which her few questions, though not coherent,were comprehensive, and he had the amusementof seeing in her, as through a clear glass, the outbreakof a plan and the sudden consciousness of acuriosity. (p 248 my edition)

The reference here to Paul's first letter to the Corinthians is obvious:

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

The meaning is not so clear. James has reversed the reference—made Merton get it wrong as Shakespeare does with Bottom in Midsummer Night's Dream. Merton Densher may feel he is now seeing this clearly but he is hardly in heaven. A point hammered home a few lines later when Kate enters the room and Merton read the asssessment in her Aunt's facial expression:

It took her in fromhead to foot, and in doing so it told a story that madepoor Densher again the least bit sick: it marked sosomething with which Kate habitually and consummatelyreckoned.

That was the story—that she was always, for herbeneficent dragon, under arms; living up, every hour,but especially at festal hours, to the "value" Mrs.Lowder had attached to her. High and fixed, this estimateruled on each occasion at Lancaster Gate thesocial scene; so that he now recognised in it somethinglike the artistic idea, the plastic substance, imposedby tradition, by genius, by criticism, in respectto a given character, on a distinguished actress. Assuch a person was to dress the part, to walk, to look,to speak, in every way to express, the part, so all thiswas what Kate was to do for the character she hadundertaken, under her aunt's roof, to represent. Itwas made up, the character, of definite elements andtouches—things all perfectly ponderable to criticism;and the way for her to meet criticism was evidently atthe start to be sure her make-up had had the lasttouch and that she looked at least no worse than usual.Aunt Maud's appreciation of that to-night was indeedmanagerial, and the performer's own contributionfairly that of the faultless soldier on parade.(pp 248-249 my edition)

This is really great stuff. You can't help but think of the discussion of role-playing in Alasdair MacIntyre and wonder just how much MacIntyre owes to Henry James. MacIntyre has never, to be clear, hidden his debt to James but it seems pretty extensive.

Anyway, there is the old virtue. To be virtuous you must fill a certain role and your inner life matters little except for how it might get in the way.

We get the flip side, the modern moral predicament, about twenty pages later. Kate and Merton are considering Milly and her illness and wealth and Kate appears to think this:

She looked at him now a moment as for the selfish gladness of their young immunities. It was all they had together, but they had it at least without a flaw--each had the beauty, the physical felicity, the personal virtue, love and desire of the other. Yet it was as if that very consciousness threw them back the next moment into pity for the poor girl who had everything else in the world, the great genial good they, alas, didn't have, but failed on the other hand of this.

In modern terms what they have is all you need to marry:"each had the beauty, the physical felicity, the personal virtue, love and desire of the other". In a society driven more by a sense of appropriate roles based on status and honour, they would need what Milly has to be happy and the qualities listed for themselves might seem not to matter. Here we have the old and the new morality confronting one another.

Here's an interesting touch. When Maud, Kate and Merton are discussing Milly over dinner Susan finds herself feeling a little uneasy about the way Milly is being talked about.

... Milly's anxious companion sat and looked--looked very much as some spectator in an old-time circus might have watched the oddity of a Christian maiden, in the arena, mildly, caressingly, martyred. It was the nosing and fumbling not of lions and tigers but of domestic animals let loose as for the joke. (p 255)

And we, knowing more than Milly's anxious companion, must begin to fear that it is not such a joke, especially as we know that the book has been full of references to various people being sacrificed.

More to come

Sort of political Monday: Authority now!

2012-01-02T09:03:00.000-05:00

I was downtown on the weekend and noticed the following sign posted:

You're not pulling your weight
Shape up or
Ship out

Notice the incredible sense of authority behind this. The person or persons who put up this sign has no doubt whatsoever about their ability to declare judgment on others. The signs, by the way, were around the group of office buildings where the largest investment firms, banks and chartered accountancy firms have their local offices.

The small print at the bottom of the sheet said it was put there by the local Occupy movement.

That alone is funny because who has the right to put up signs on behalf of a movement that has no leadership, no organization, no spokesperson. And yet there is this need for authority that is intense. That is the thing that most worries me as we head into 2012.

We live in a society that craves authority. You can see this in the cult of Obama. Not Obama himself who is just another politician but in the crazy cult of hope and change that built up around him. And you can see it in the Occupy movement that didn't seek to change anything itself so much as it demands that others do so. I see it in the way that Bill Gates was treated as a brilliant visionary a few years ago and Steve Jobs is now even though neither man made even a single significant contribution to the development of the new technology that made them both so rich—their genius was in marketing not technology.

But "marketing" doesn't have the power and authority that so many seem to need. No one asks the head of marketing for his views on world peace or personal fulfillment. A great creator of new technology who reshaped the way we live and behave, on the other hand hand, is just the ticket so we imagine that that is what Gates and Jobs were.

That we would desire authority is, in one sense, not surprising. We have been demolishing authorities for several decades now. And yet the destruction of authority and the deep need for it in our time seem even more closely related than that. In Britain, for example, we see a generation whose only collective achievement so far is the ability to pass out, face down in their own vomit and yet feel incredibly comfortable attacking and hating authority while, at the very same time, embracing the leadership of celebrities. The rest of us are not far behind.

The similarity between this sort of thing and the Weimar Republic or France in the dying days of the Third Republic is chilling.

By the way: Blogger's built in spell check doesn't know "Weimar". That is also scary.

The Wings of the Dove

2011-12-31T00:00:00.000-05:00

(To make this a blog exclusively about the Wings of the Dove click here.)

My edition is 522 pages long and at page 261-262 Kate tells Merton Densher of Milly's illness and her plans.

That is the exact centre of the book.

That is not a coincidence.

Curmudgeonly musing

2011-12-30T12:38:00.000-05:00

Everywhere I have gone this holiday season I have seen young people smoking. This ought to strike us as odd for the last four or five decades have been characterized by successive crusades to eliminate smoking, especially in the young.

Could I be so base as to suggest that the anti-smoking campaigns have been set up so as to favour the elite. For if there is one thing that you notice about the many people who still smoke it is that they are not among the educated elite. And this is not surprising if we consider that the primary weapon to discourage smoking has been education. Given that what divides the elite from the underclass in our society is the ability to get the most from the education system, it would seem to follow that any and all efforts to educate the public will favour the elite.
And not just in the sense that the elite are more successful at being educated but also because they know what parts of education to ignore. Much of what the school system teaches kids is nonsense as are many public health crusades. It takes a particular class of person to know enough to actually not start smoking whole ignoring campaigns against salt.

Manly Thor's Day special

2011-12-29T11:07:00.003-05:00

A couple of days ago I put up a post criticizing the New York Times for having a double standard that praised "aggressive lesbians" who behaved in ways that the paper would find blameworthy in men.

I'd like to return a bit to the concept of "aggressive lesbians". I've been researching around a bit and find that here are lots of attempts to explain aggressive lesbians. That isn't so surprising as the issue clearly makes people uncomfortable and has done so for a long time. When the feminist crusade against pornography began back in the 1970s, for example, there was immediate and strong opposition from the lesbian feminist community. It's funny to go back and read how anti-porn feminists responded for they were clearly left squirming by this opposition from lesbians.

The basic problem here is a pretty simple one: "If problems such as violence in relationships, wage disparity and pornography are supposed to be exclusively the result of male oppression then how can it be that something that mirrors male-female relationships tends to spring up in a world that is exclusively female?" Getting men out of the picture should make all this stuff go away if men are, indeed, the cause.

The willful blindness this produces rapidly becomes evident as you read the explanations of why some women become "aggressive lesbians" for those explanations are always individualistic. The argument is that, deep down inside, some women really want or need to be this way to become self-realized. That formation is tautological and that should give us pause. Not because it is tautological but because the circle is so tight: Why does Frances want to be that way? Answer: Because she wants to be that way.

A more interesting question would be to look at the social development of the phenomenon. Here the question would be how do some lesbians develop this way. What is the interaction that produces it? You can almost create a Hegelian dialectic here. Two girls have a same sex encounter. One is more aggressive than the other. They both carry away memories and trained reflexes from the experience. Lather, rinse, repeat and eventually you have roles.

It would be more surprising if it weren't that way.

Imagine what it would be like to be an aggressive lesbian in a world where no women at all responded to aggressive sexuality. Her entire sexual experience would be based on fantasy. Could such a thing even happen?

The flip side of the issue, the effeminate gay man, is also worth considering. As I've mentioned before, no one, not even other effeminate gay men consider effeminate gay men particularly appealing. The personal ads always make the appeal for straight-looking and straight-acting men. So why would any man wanting to attract partners be anything but manly?

Well, consider the plight of the straight-looking, straight acting gay man in a world where every gay man was straight-looking and straight-acting. How does anyone know he's gay? That puts a bit of a crimp into your chances of finding partners doesn't it? Being visibly gay, whatever its downsides, lets every other gay man you meet know that you are a potential partner.

Most of our sexual behaviours develop based on success. Aggressive lesbians and effeminate gay men both exist because both types get partners. The existence of the two types carries lessons for men and women respectively. When we look for role models, men need a role model who not only succeeded as a human being but one who succeeded as a man. When women look for role models, men need a role model who not only succeeded as a human being but one who succeeded as a woman.

Living up to the roles expected of you increases your chance of success in life.

What she said

2011-12-29T08:43:00.000-05:00

Ann Althouse is brilliant this morning in her analysis of this New York Times story. The article is about people dropping out of the workforce and how most of these people are women. The whole thing is so good it's better your just going there than my saying anything further.

Althouse: "Workers are dropping out of the labor force in dr...: "In fact, many are young women. But they are not dropping out forever; instead, these young women seem to be postponing their working lives ...

The Wings of the Dove

2011-12-28T21:10:00.000-05:00

(To make this a blog exclusively about the Wings of the Dove click here.)

It's getting harder to write about this book because I'm reaching more and more stuff that I really shouldn't talk about so as not to spoil the pleasure of anyone who has not read the book yet.

As others have pointed out, one of the fascinating things about The Wings of The Dove, is that a lot of the action takes place off stage. We read the novel not knowing about these events and unaware that some people know things that we an other characters do not. And then we find out what was known and who knew it and that changes everything. Without saying who, one of the really electrifying moments as we reach the middle of the novel and the top of the narrative arc is the discovery that one of our characters has been aware of far more than we suspected him or her of being aware.

It's damn good stuff. It adds, a subject for future discussion, a real film noir feel to the story.

Chapter 17 is sine qua non for readers of our era hoping to get the book for it gives us something or Merton's attitude to Kate that we might have a hard time grasping. Any of our contemporaries might reasonably wonder why Merton and Kate don't simply have an illicit affair. When a movie version was made in 1997, the screenwriter simply inserted such an affair. But such a thing was unthinkable when the book was written. Not because secret affairs didn't happen but because a woman in Kate's position couldn't be part of one without risking social disaster.

In chapter 17, Merton contemplates not an affair but the possibilities for simply being with Kate. He imagines the cab pulling up in front of his place and his inviting her in. This is impossible. For Kate, not only is the invitation impossible, the simple fact of it being possible is and she directs the cab so that no such possibility could arise. This is the water our two principals must navigate.

And in the midst of this we get a fascinating Biblical allusion:

She would have to stop there, wouldn't come in with him, couldn't possibly; and he shouldn't be able to ask her, would feel he couldn't without betraying a deficiency of what would be called, even at their advanced stage, respect for her: that again was all that was clear except the further fact that it was maddening. Compressed and concentrated, confined to a single sharp pang or two, but none the less in wait for him there on the Euston platform and lifting its head as that of a snake in the garden, was the disconcerting sense that "respect," in their game, seemed somehow--he scarce knew what to call it--a fifth wheel to the coach. It was properly an inside thing, not an outside, a thing to make love greater, not to make happiness less.

The source, the serpent in the Garden of Eden, is obvious. But what does it do to bring it up here? Why is respect for Kate that makes the serpent raise its head? Well, because it is respect for Kate that gives Merton the knowledge of good and evil. To understand what it is to respect her necessarily entails the knowledge of what it would be to do the opposite. But it is puzzling knowledge for the things he wants to do with and to Kate out of love are precisely the things that respect forbids him. (A plight any man will grasp immediately.)

For now, Kate can only offer future promise and she makes that promise in plainly religious terms. When Merton challenges her by asking her if she would take him as he is:

She turned a little pale for the tone of truth in it--which qualified to his sense delightfully the strength of her will; and the pleasure he found in this was not the less for her breaking out after an instant into a strain that stirred him more than any she had ever used with him. "Ah do let me try myself! I assure you I see my way--so don't spoil it: wait for me and give me time. Dear man," Kate said, "only believe in me, and it will be beautiful."

Hmmm.

Womanly Virtues Wednesday

2011-12-28T11:50:00.000-05:00

There is a piece up at The Atlantic about the disappearance of pubic hair in our lives. It's an interesting question. When I was an undergrad, girls without pubic hair were only available in the weirdest porn and it was tacitly assumed that men who bought the stuff were pedophiles looking for something just this side of illegal. Things have changed. A few years ago the Serpentine One and I overheard a conversation in which two sixteen year old girls were questioned by a group of younger girls about waxing and all of them clearly assumed this painful ordeal was a necessary rite of passage in their lives. It was pretty obvious from the rest of the conversation that all the girls involved were virgins.

As with so many things sexual, what were weird forbidden things that even porn stars refused to do a generation ago are now done by upper-middle class college and college-bound girls without anyone even asking them to do it. The Atlantic piece underlines this:

Less than two decades ago, the idea of "taking it all off" seemed painful, unnecessary, and even vaguely fetishistic; As recently as 1996, one harrowing, particularly memorable vignette from Eve Ensler's groundbreaking play The Vagina Monologues effectively turned the idea of removing pubic hair at the request of a sexual partner into something cringe-worthy and perverted. Trimming away a few strays during swimsuit season was one thing, but removing all the hair from one's genitals, effectively turning back the clock on puberty? Traumatizing. Selfish. Inhumane, even.

The irrelevance of feminists chapter 5674. And note the way that an older generation of women were trained to blame everything on men.

So what is driving this? That's the really interesting thing for the author of The Atlantic piece, Ashley Fetters (which would make a great porn-star name by the way) can't quite bring herself to simply blame men. And she cannot for there is simply too much evidence that suggests that girls themselves are a major source of the trend. Although not much research s available, Ms. Fetters informs us that,

What surveys have been conducted, however, tend to support what most of America already suspects: that Brazilian waxing is largely practiced among the young, white, heterosexual Sex And The City and Gossip Girl demographics.

So why is it happening? Well, like most social phenomena, it is probably over-determined. That's a highfalutin way of saying there is a lot of stuff going on at the same time. I have three possibilities to add to the mix.

A) Competition with other girls is driving this. I'd vote this the most likely cause. Fetters almost blunders into the truth when she writes about college girls:

Herbenick and Fitzpatrick both believe one demographic group has embraced the hairless-cat look more fervently than others: college students.

In theory, this should come as no surprise; The average U.S. state university actually has all the right features to act as a veritable incubator for anti-pube sentiments. Where else do youth, skimpy clothing, rampantly available pornography, and non-monogamous sexual habits all converge so gloriously?

That's all good but Fetters leaves a key data point out here and that is that there are now more women than men in undergrad programs. The more competitive the environment, the further women are willing to push to outdo other women.

Fetters may not know this, but in the 1970s and early 1980s, college girls generally dressed much more conservatively than high school girls did. In an environment where there were more men than women, there was less pressure to compete with other women.

B) Young women are more susceptible to peer pressure than any other group in our culture. In other words, this is a well-established phenomenon. Get in a time machine and go back to the 1990s when women were wearing low-cut pants that were designed to make their thongs show and wave around the skin-tight leggings women wear today and most of those thong-wearing 1990s girls would refuse on grounds of modesty. But let a few super-competitive high status girls start wearing them and the rest of young womanhood will follow like so many sheep.

C) I have suggested before that the princess phenomenon is driven by girls reacting to a feminist-driven push to eliminate what feminists consider gender stereotypes and the rest of us consider normal girlish behaviour traits. Removing their pubic hair is a way of drawing a solid line between themselves and the group of older women who, in the opinion of younger women, are unfeminine, uninspiring role models.

"It's different when we do it"

2011-12-28T08:43:00.000-05:00

Here is the opening of a New York Times movie review:

EARLY in Dee Rees’s film “Pariah” it journeys into a Brooklyn strip club where scantily clad young black women gyrate to a sexy, foul-mouthed rap song. Lascivious customers leer, toss money and revel in their own unbridled lust.

Okay, so where do you think this is going? Do you think the New York Times is going to treat this as a good thing? You can sort of see how a liberal publication like the NYT could get behind "unbridled lust" but it's hard to see the paper treating the exploitation of young black women for the benefit of others' unbridled lust as a good thing. And yet the paper does just that.

What makes it okay for the NYT is who is doing the lusting:

But in “Pariah” the gaze of desire doesn’t emanate from predatory males but A.G.’s, that is aggressive lesbians, who, in a safe space where they enjoy the fellowship of peers, can be true to themselves.

You can tell they are full of crap by the linguistic trick the writer pulls here:

lesbian = aggressive
male = predatory

I suppose only males can be predatory in the same way that only white people can be racist. That's crap. One of the big unreported stories of our times is black-on-black racism. I think you could almost justify not reporting it on the grounds that reporting black-on-black racism might make whites feel that racism is okay. I think that's also crap but I mention it here to note that the NYT's attitude in the case of this movie is the exact opposite. Any male seeing this could reasonably conclude that because New-York-Times-approved black lesbians are doing it then it must be okay for me too.

The other big hint that this is a huge steaming heap of it, is the authenticity card played with the phrase "be true to themselves". With those two tricks, the paper makes what would be deplorable in any other context seem like a good thing.

An ordinary strip club, after all, is also a "safe place" where men can go to enjoy the fellowship of their peers and be true to themselves. I can go to one and be a disgusting pig towards women in ways I would never dare to in public. Why is that suddenly okay because it's black lesbians doing it?

Except when applied to artifacts, "authenticity" is always just an excuse for questionable if not outright vile behaviour.

The Wings of the Dove

2011-12-27T20:33:00.001-05:00

(To make this a blog exclusively about the Wings of the Dove click here.)

Yes, it has been forever. I've been reading but not blogging.

One thing that jumped out at me is that when Milly is with Aunt Maud there is no religious or Biblical language That I could detect. At the same time, Milly seems to realize that she does not really belong in these circumstances. When, for example, she tries to play Aunt Maud on the subject of Merton and Kate, she finds she gives away more than she learns. This is not a social environment for Milly.

As soon as Milly is back with Kate, however, we get talk of "consecrating" their friendship (p. 204) and then the significance of the title is raised again. There is a little tension between the two and Milly is coming close to fulfilling Aunt Maud's wishes that she keep tabs on Kate when she challenges Kate and the following happens (P. 210):

This unexpectedly had acted, by a sudden turn of Kate's attitude, as a happy speech. She had risen as she spoke, and Kate had stopped before her, shining at her instantly with a softer brightness. Poor Milly hereby enjoyed one of her views of how people, wincing oddly, were often touched by her. "Because you're a dove." With which she felt herself ever so delicately, so considerately, embraced; not with familiarity or as a liberty taken, but almost ceremonially and in the manner of an accolade; partly as if, though a dove who could perch on a finger, one were also a princess with whom forms were to be observed. It even came to her, through the touch of her companion's lips, that this form, this cool pressure, fairly sealed the sense of what Kate had just said. It was moreover, for the girl, like an inspiration: she found herself accepting as the right one, while she caught her breath with relief, the name so given her. She met it on the instant as she would have met revealed truth; it lighted up the strange dusk in which she lately had walked. THAT was what was the matter with her. She was a dove. Oh WASN'T she?--it echoed within her as she became aware of the sound, outside, of the return of their friends.

Because you're a dove. Well, what are we to make of this?

Reason for despair

2011-12-27T13:34:00.000-05:00

H/T Ann Althouse, I learn that Amazon keeps track of the sentences most often highlighted by Kindle users. You can see the list here. It's a pretty sad list with the masters of trite self-improvement advice such as Suzanne Collins, David Platt and Malcolm Gladwell dominating. Sadly, both Jane uasten and Oscar Wilde make the list too and the quotes selected suggest that for the most part they too are treated as dispensers of wisdom rather than s the masters of irony they actually were. Apparently there is something of an appetite for empty platitudes and painfully obvious moral advice.

But the real heartbreaker is seeing Jane Austen at number three. Why is that a cause for despair? Because this is the third most highlighted sentence by Kindle users:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Yup. I mean it's not just that it is the most famous sentence in the book and everyone already knows it, it's also the first %^&*ing sentence in the book! Why would anyone highlight the first sentence of a book? Are they worried they won't be able to find it again?

The real reason it gets highlighted, I suspect, is precisely that everyone does know it and lots of people highlight it just to pat themselves on the back for spotting it, the same way they applaud a song when they recognize it at a concert.

Austen makes the list againat number five with this:

Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.

Again, I suspect the reason is recognition. "Hey, the book is called Pride and Prejudice and here as sentence talking about pride, so this may be what it's all about." The problem is that that line is spoken by Mary who is given to spouting obvious platitudes. Austen is making fun of contemporary moralists here and not making any deep observation about pride. This is the sort of remark that might have been made by the Suzanne Colinnses of Austen's day.

The stupidest quote of the lot, and this is quite an honour in this field, belongs to Abraham Verghese in a book I won't be reading called Cutting for Stone and it reads:

As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.

Words fail me ... something I have in common with Abraham Verghese.

I had to read all the way to number ninety before I found a genuinely profound observation highlighted. It's one of several fro The Picture of Dorian Gray:

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

That's really good. As I was saying in the comments someone else's blog recently, it's very easy to list the things necessary for contrition but something else altogether to determine what would be sufficient for contrition.

UPDATE: There is a real treasure at number 121. This is from Jane Eyre:

Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.

What's remarkable about that? It was written by a Brontë! Having a Brontë telling us not to spend our life nursing animosity or registering wrongs is like having Hitler tell us not to be anti-Semitic.

What madness is this?

2011-12-27T10:30:00.002-05:00

Towards the top of today's Bleat, James Lileks writes:

I had my coat and sunglasses and car keys and was all set to head off to the Mall to return things, until I realized: okay, I’m not sane anymore. Why would I want to stand in a long line today when I could stand in a short line tomorrow? What madness is this?

Good question. But there is more that is crazy here than willingly standing in long lines. Put it this way, two days ago, on Christmas, we celebrated the coming of our saviour with gifts and fellowship and today we are talking about returning those gifts so we can spend the money on what we really want!

I don't mean to pick on Lileks in particular, he writes this about this stuff in a public forum but lots of people do this. An ex-girlfriend of mine once told me that she usually returns most of the the things she is given.

Think about that for a while. These are gifts. This is stuff we didn't have up until two days ago, stuff that other people put money and effort and, perhaps, even a great deal of thought into and now I'm rushing off to exchange them for something else.

I mean, we could all just keep our money and buy ourselves presents that way. We could sit around the tree and show off what we'd bought ourselves and everyone could congratulate me on my good taste in picking such a darling sweater for myself. That would be meaningful.

Yes, lots of gifts are badly chosen. Many gifts even come with an agenda,

when we think someone should be dressing better we give them the sort of clothes we think they should be wearing;
when we think someone should be losing weight, we give them athletic gear;
when we think someone should be reading more and playing video games less, we give them a book;
when we think someone reads trashy books, we give them the kind of book we think they should be reading;
when our brothers and sisters grow up and change, we give them gifts that remind them of the person they used to be and that we wish they would return to being;

and there are countless other examples. Much of what is wrong with Christmas begins with the way we give gifts; we spend far too much money and think far too little about this and we give too often out of a sense of obligation rather than any real love and devotion. But, for all that, this remains a gift from another human being and it comes from them with all their faults and failings. To refuse the gift is to refuse them and it being a bad gift poorly chosen does not change that.

Above and beyond that there is what I call the virtue lesson. These gifts, perhaps even especially the badly chosen ones, can tell us a lot about what other people see in us. They tell us what other people think we are good at and what other people think we are better at. This really is the way others see us! We don't have accept that judgment as final, but we should be thankful for this opportunity to consider it awhile.

The virtues of gentle misogyny

2011-12-26T13:21:00.003-05:00

But there'll be times (your bartender should have told you) when you must steel yourself up to mix up one of those fluffy, multi-colored abominations which, for some mysterious reason related to iron insides and paralyzed palates, the "ladies" insist upon downing.

That's from the 1949 Hand Book for Hosts from Esquire. It, along with four vintage fly reels, was a gift from the Serpentine One this Christmas. I don't post this merely so others will feel like they have been cheated by life.

Here we can see the decline in our culture. It's inconceivable that anyone writing in today's Esquire could construct such an elegant compound sentence as that.

That didn't surprise me.

What surprised me was how easy to swallow the gentle misogyny that permeates the classic Esquire period is. I started to think that maybe this misogyny wasn't just tolerable but that there might be, unpalatable as this might seem to our time, something right about it. I know, I konw, but bear with me.

Let me start with an example of intolerable gentle misogyny (any non-gentle misogyny is intolerable). When I was a kid, adult males used to make jokes about women's driving skills. This was probably a left-over from their youth when women driving was a rare thing. What makes this intolerable? It's not just that it is factually nonsensical—statistics establish beyond any reasonable doubt that, as a group, women are better drivers than men. No, the real problem is that this attitude was meant to exclude women from driving or, at the very least, make them feel like intruders when they did.

The good kind is the kind that encourages rivalry. For rivalry between the sexes is an indispensable thing.

It also reminds men that they are supposed to be men, that we have specific set of roles to play. That remains as true today as it was in 1949.

Uncool quote of the day

2011-12-25T08:46:00.000-05:00

No other fact, no other influence in human experience has compared with the birth and life of Christ.

Calvin Coolidge

This (apparently) is not a joke

2011-12-23T14:54:00.000-05:00

John Dos Passos looking back on his early life as a socialist concluded that socialists blew it by ignoring situations they really ought to have responded to and needlessly pushing their noses into things best left alone.

Feminism is following in the same path. The following is the best unintentionally funny thing I have seen this entire season.

It's hard to imagine how you could pack more clueless, self-righteous tripe into less than ten minutes. The worst thing about it—and there are sooo many things wrong here—is the way it trivializes date rape. Anyone who seriously believes that "Baby It's Cold Outside" suggests date rape would have to believe that just about anything is date rape. That is an appalling insult to the women who really are victims of this awful crime.

There is really only one appropriate response. Call someone you know and suggest a date followed by a night cap back home where you will role play with the man flirting insistently and the woman playing coy and hard to get. Enjoy it while you can, 'cause it may be a crime next year.

Note: I should add that I think one of her picks really is creepy and that is "I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus". But in that painfully literal, irony-impaired approach that is apparently required to be a feminist, our analyst misses the real problem. That Mommy is kissing "Santa Claus" is not a problem because it's pretty clear to us that Santa is really Dad dressed up in a Santa Suit. Yes, I know, but our feminist analyst didn't get it and it is entirely possible that someone else somewhere out there is as clueless as she is. But the real problem is that the whole song is sung by a child who doesn't get it—this being dramatic irony—and the child thinks that this is cute and funny that Mommy is cheating on Dad.

No doubt that will get me sent to re-education for having such quaint patriarchal notions that it is wrong for Mommy to cheat on Daddy.

By the way, it's much more fun to kiss under the mistletoe if the woman is dressed up in the Santa suit, although I have to admit that my preferred Santa suit for women is for indoor use only.

A final thought: if you do try this role playing game this Christmas, I suspect that most men and most women will discover the respective roles suggested above come remarkably easily to them. I'd suggest reasons why this might be but I have a sneaking suspicion most readers can figure it out without my help.

Manly Thor's Day special

2011-12-22T11:55:00.001-05:00

I read trash when traveling and that is why I bought the December issue of Men's Health. This issue features Ashton Kutcher on the cover so you know it has got to be trash.And boy does it deliver.

Page 33 features a photo of a woman wearing just a bra and with her jeans pushed down to her thighs. Her hand is just outside the frame but she is reaching down and it's hard not to think maybe she has her fingers in the cake.

A regular feature of the magazine is photographs of women in lingerie on their hands and knees as if crawling towards you. I wonder what we are supposed to think? I know what I think.

And then there are all the various studies they quote. This one on particular from page 46 jumped out at me:

Penn State scientists found that arrogant men may give women less satisfying orgasms. Women in the study were less likely to climax first—a sign of intense pleasure—if their partners rated themselves as highly masculine or dominant. Self-satisfied men may be less attentive lovers says study author David Puts.

As I've written before, here they go looking for the cloud in the silver lining again. I can already see how a certain type of whining boy would get all heated up about the unfairness of it all reading this. All you need to do is to couple this with other studies showing that men who rate themselves as highly masculine or dominant get more partners and the familiar "nice guys finish last" refrain comes raining out.

In any case, I suspect there is a lot less to this than meets the eye. First, "there is a study that says", well, practically anything you want. Second, David Puts is an anthropologist and while I respect the work anthropologists do, calling him a "scientist" as opposed to "social scientist" gives a false impression because social science is considerably less scientific than real science.

And think for a second about a woman's motives in having sex with a highly masculine or dominant man. Is she thinking of only her pleasure when she does this? Or does she maybe want the satisfaction that comes from having her desirability validated by having him pursue her? And the further satisfaction that comes from seeing the effects her sexual power has on him?

And what about the man's motives in this situation. Are guys who always want a woman to come first really as giving and generous as is being claimed here? And we might ask ourselves whether the claim by the authors that her coming first is always a sign of intense pleasure. Sometimes it must be but there are plenty of times when a woman's pleasure delayed is her pleasure intensified. I'm too much of a gentleman to say more but the stories I could tell ... .

To get back to the man's motives, and without getting to detailed about it, it's a major source of male pleasure and satisfaction to watch a woman as she has an orgasm and it's more exciting to watch that if you haven't yet come yourself.

And the reverse holds for her too. She will sometimes want to watch you while reach orgasm and she is still very aroused. She will also do what is necessary to get you there with more enthusiasm when highly aroused which can be better for both of you.

Most important of all, she wants you to be masculine and strong and, let's not kid ourselves, she probably would warm to a little dominance too. I'm not saying all women like to be at least a little submissive in bed at least some of the time but women who do are about as rare as men who like sports.

Female infidelity as Hollywood sees it

2011-12-21T08:09:00.000-05:00

One of the many things I am grateful for is that my occasional commenter Gaius put me onto The Last Psychiatrist. Like me, TLP is inconsistent: sometimes you moan, sometimes he hits something really good. Unlike me, sometimes he has insights that really shake us out. Case in point, his polemic against The Descendants.

I'm not knocking these movies for existing or for casting these hairless nymphomaniacs, I'm simply posing the general question: since the audience has learned nothing from their own parents, and they don't read 19th century Russian literature, what is their model for love in the 2nd decade of marriage? They don't have one. Which is why when this demo finds themselves in the 2nd decade of marriage they feel unfulfilled, anxious, depressed, is this all there is? They have nothing to guide them except The Discovery Channel and mommy blogs, and they lack the courage to analyze their ennui, so these movies serve the important function of pretending that it's normal. "Oh, yeah, that's exactly what I'm feeling." Fine, but don't you also want to know why you feel that way?

And, of the two, the mommy blogs are the bigger problem. Read the whole thing, it's well worth your time. That said, there is a weakness here that you need to grasp to really get it. TLP handles men and women unevenly and that is a flaw he shares with the movie he is discussing.

The set up paragraph from TLP is below. I'm going to chop it into two. Here is part one:

Here's a bit of human nature for you and you are most certainly not going to like it. Fat George Clooney discovers his wife has been cheating on him-- and he never suspected. That's a profound insult, a narcissistic injury, and no, people who complain I talk about it too much but haven't actually learned the lessons, you don't have to be a narcissist to experience a narcissistic injury, it's built into the way we relate to other people. It's jealousy AND an existential beat down: look at the limits of your power, look at the limits of your reach, she is able to have a whole other existence that had so little to do with you you didn't even notice, nor did she feel any need to tell you.

Clooney's character discovers all this, by the way, while his wife is dying and in a coma. That's important because it completely closes any possible response from her and, therefore, any moral assessment we might make of her. So how is a guy to respond?

Before we get to that, let me emphasize the formula here: jealousy + an existential beat down = narcissistic injury. Jealousy by itself is a perfectly natural and, more importantly, an absolutely unavoidable emotion. No love is ever so secure that you won't feel twinges of jealousy sometimes. Jealousy can tear your love down or it can build it up depending on how you respond. But there is one sort of situation where you always lose and that is when jealousy is combined with a threat to your sense of who you are. Finding out you have been cheated on will almost always be an existential beat down.

Okay, now for part two:

At least if she had done it to hurt you you'd still suffer the jealousy but your place as main character in your own movie would be secure. Maybe you're only supporting cast in hers? "Screw that. I'm changing the script."

This is one of my own favourite points: she didn't cheat to hurt you because she planned to get away with it. Her guilt here is analogous to the person who decides to drive themselves home anyway after a few drinks. She never thought about the pain she might cause by running you down because she focused on getting away with it. You weren't even on the radar screen when she did this. That hurts much more than even than the thought that another guy got to ... .

So what do you do? Well, assuming you don't go on a destructive rampage or kill yourself, the irresistible temptation is to make it about yourself.

Increase your pain to save your ego. That's the path the movie chooses: she cheated not because she fell in love, or lust, but because he neglected her, he was a bad husband, he didn't take her on shopping sprees. "As long as you don't ask me to change, I'm accepting some blame for her cheating on me." You'll feel right as rain.

But here TLP, in my opinion, goes astray because he isn't willing to confront the crucial question directly enough. Notice how he seems to contradict himself in the very next paragraph for he immediately turns around and tells us that the audience don't understand Clooney's character's motives:

They are (thanks, VO) starting from a false premise: that he actually really loved his wife in the first place. He didn't. That's why she was cheating.

Uhhhh whattt??? But isn't that the narcissistic defense mechanism? You know, making it about myself by saying that she cheated because I didn't love her well enough? Well, it actually all makes a sort of sense because the movie itself embraces the narcissistic impulse along with its lead character and that is what TLP wants to highlight: if this movie really speaks to you, then there is something wrong with you. But even if we allow that, I think TLP is missing a key detail here.

To understand what is really wrong here you have to turn this scenario around and imagine it the other way. Imagine the husband is in the bed in a coma about to die and the wife dutifully sitting at the bedside holding his hand discovers that he has been having an affair and had planned to divorce her before he got sick. Okay, got that picture? Okay, it's easy to picture part of this playing out the same. You can imagine the wife suffering the narcissistic injury and coping by blaming herself for being a poor wife, boring lover, letting herself go or whatever but any Hollywood movie would ultimately assure us that she was mistakenly blaming herself. It wouldn't be her fault.

When a man is the cheater, our culture blames him.

It would be easy, perhaps too easy, to show us that the husband was, in fact, a selfish jerk in such a movie. That is the real hollow moral core in our culture: it is unwilling to acknowledge that women are just as capable of being selfish jerks as men are. That is the missing step that George Clooney's character needs to make here. He needs to see that his wife behaved like a selfish jerk and now that evil will outlive her.

And that is what women need to see if they are going to be really liberated. Moral freedom comes from confronting the truth that you yourself are a sinner. And that will never happen so long as our culture keeps honouring movies like this. For in this movie, as TLP nicely draws out, the narcissistic response is made to look like moral maturity and love. What he misses is that the reason it does this is because it cannot bring itself to treat women as moral adults.

Note: I used to write about women and womanly virtues on Friday but I'm moving that to Wednesday with this post.

Pity poor Stanley Crouch

2011-12-20T10:35:00.001-05:00

He so wants to believe.

One of the best reasons for happiness during this holiday season is that the nation is making a slow comeback from a terrible state. I mean the spiritual, cultural and moral recession driven by decadent extremes.

Well, I wouldn't mind seeing that myself. But Crouch doesn't really mean the whole nation. He means the black nation and its culture:

Just a few years ago, the black women of Spelman College of Atlanta raised audible resentment against hip hop figure Nelly about his lewd “Tip Drill” and scared him from appearing on campus.

Little happened after that. There were a few books written about “blackness,” but they did not create real questions about the material that supposedly defined a new level of black “authenticity.” That authenticity expressed itself in low-grade terms and inspired a disturbing number of young people to look like minstrels, especially those men who walk the streets with their underwear showing as they shout ethnic slurs at each other just about anywhere that they can.

And you can see why he suffers, the new "authenticity" is quite a come down from, to pick only one sublime example, Thelonius Monk.

"Blackness" has become an excuse for all manner of degradation and the impetus for this comes from whites. Eager to ditch their own culture, whites and particularly young whites, have embraced the most appalling stereotypes. Young black men like Nelly, eager to get rich, have played the part expected of them. But the problem starts with white criticism of white culture. Post-imperialism, anti-capitalism, post-modernism and some forms of feminism have fed this beast by telling young blacks and other ethnics that white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture is worthless. And that is a lie. It's a long way from perfect but it is one of if not the greatest culture in the history of humanity.

Those of us who come from outside it and find ourselves sometimes demeaned by this culture do ourselves no favours by trying to pretend otherwise.

Unicorn Sweat Part 3

2011-12-19T09:05:00.000-05:00

Is Bob Rae cynical or naive? What else can explain his going to Attawapiskat and demanding that the feds immediately pour more money into the place and forget about figuring out what has happened to the huge amount of money that has already been poured into the place.

The government’s attempt to “turn the political tables” by trying to put the spotlight on how the band has managed its funds is “disgraceful,” Mr. Rae said.

Bob Rae isn't stupid, he knows the band council has mismanaged the funds. The only outstanding question is whether this mismanagement is due to incompetence or corruption. He doesn't think it would be any use to find out. He says this even though he knows that any additional money sent will have to be funneled through the same flawed and unaccountable local government.

And consider the long term. Even if some successful band aid is applied, the community will then go back to normal and "normal" is a rolling disaster.

This should sound familiar. It's the politics of magical unicorn sweat again. The thing is to care. But what possible difference could caring make here? Attawapiskat is in the middle of nowhere. There is nothing to base an economy on. The band council is clearly incompetent if not corrupt. The standard joke is to say "What could go wrong?" but the deeper question is "What could possibly go right?" And the answer to that is nothing could or will ever go right in Attawapiskat. That's the thing that it would take real political courage to say.

And it's not just Attawapiskat. There are hundreds of Aboriginal bands across Canada that are potential Attawapiskats waiting to spin out of control. And there are a whole line of cynical politicians and journalists waiting to exploit the situation by making other politicians prove they care. That "caring" in this case means condemning another generation of Aboriginal youth to poverty and suffering doesn't matter.

And note that the media, who brag about their ability to hold governments accountable, are doing everything they can to keep the band council here and at other reserves from being held accountable.

Isolated communities built on failed cultures cannot succeed, It doesn't matter how much magical unicorn sweat is poured over them. And there is the problem. We're not allowed to say anymore that some cultures are better than others. Well, you can go die in a sweatlodge ceremony run by some fraud because aboriginal cultures are supposedly better but you can't point out that the most successful form of liberal democracy was produced by WASP culture.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, my Irish ancestors from Saint John and my Quebecois ancestors didn't like the WASPs who lorded it over them one tiny bit but they were smart enough to recognize that the moral and political culture the WASPs had was better than their own. They climbed from poverty to success by doing WASP culture better than the WASPs did.

Bogus emotion and mass credulity

2011-12-17T11:12:00.002-05:00

If Marxism is the opiate of the intellectuals, then Christopher Hitchens has become their Princess Diana. Dial it back people—this is way over the top. It's sad that he is dead but he just wasn't that important.

Strength is a virtue

2011-12-16T11:42:00.001-05:00

Two years ago, this blog began like this:

I was rereading Alasdair MacIntyre the other day and something that had never seemed terribly significant or controversial jumped out at me. This:

At least some of the items in a homeric list of the aretai would clearly not be counted by most of us as virtues at all, physical strength being the most obvious example. (After Virtue p181)
I should preface this by saying that MacIntyre is surpassed by only Jane Austen in my personal pantheon of moral thinkers.

That said, I still think he is wrong. Physical strength isn't the most significant virtue but I think it is a virtue and I think we all know it is.

And that still seems right to me.

I'd go so far to say that if strength isn't a virtue then nothing is. Physical strength is the paradigm virtue. It isn't impossible to be virtuous if you are physically weak but it is much, much harder.

I've been especially aware of this this last two weeks as I have a lingering virus that has physically weakened me and made me less of a man in the process. To be a man we have to be physically strong. It's that simple.

What best-selling romance novels tell us about women

2011-12-15T11:39:00.000-05:00

1. That women are not in control of their lives

Here is the opening of the trashy novel I got to read on the train:

Maddie drove the narrow, curvy highway with her past still nipping at her heels after fourteen hundred miles. Not even her dependable Honda had been able to out run her demons.

Or her failings.

Good thing, then, that she was done with failing. Please be done with failing, she thought.

That's from Simply Irresistible by Jill Shalvis. Shalvis cranks them out and her offerings sell well. She knows her audience.

And you get a picture of her readership from that opening. And every female character is a loser like this. Even, if not especially, the ones who seem to really have it together from the outside. At some point the hollow sham that is their outer life is pulled away to reveal turmoil. Women who read these things really, really want to believe this is true of other women.

2. That women cannot control their impulses to eat and have sex. Yeah, I know, it sure doesn't feel that way from the outside but none of Shalvis's characters are capable of making intelligent choices in this area. They always want sex and a hot fudge sundae. Now!!!

They sometimes say no to sex but they always, and I mean always, want it. A typical character will tell some guy she can't have sex because she is "not ready for it" but be unable to stand up and leave for fear this will reveal that there is a puddle on her chair.

BTW: If a frat boy at any university were overhead portraying women the way a lot of women's fiction does, he and his frat would be banned from campus and sent to re-education camps in Siberia.

3. That women want to be loved for who they are but want men who are perfect physically and emotionally. They also want contradictions: the ideal man is apparently emotionally solid as Gibraltar but has a deep emotional troubles that, while they don't effect his ability to function successfully in the world even a tiny bit, including rescuing the heroine from her countless screw ups, do give the heroine an opportunity to get angry at him for not being open with her. Not open so that she can help mind you—she is a helpless feeb and can't help herself—just 'cause.

Meanwhile, women are utterly incapable of doing the simplest task without screwing up because of their emotional pasts.

4. That women want a father figure who give them great orgasms.

The father figure is the key part of it. In Simply Irresistible our heroine and her sisters are ostensibly brought together by their deceased mother who leaves them a dilapidated hotel. This gets stated over and over again even though all the evidence is that said mother was a drugged out hippie incapable of boiling water. The male hero actually solves all the problems and acts as a father figure picking up our heroine after he repeated failures and sitting her on a couch with a blanket and feeding her hot chocolate while listening sympathetically, always taking her side and then giving terribly good advice that the heroine never follows.

And then he give them great sex that they can't resist but they still get angry at him because, well, because they have contradictory needs that are somehow his fault.

5. That the heroine's only real problem is that she doesn't have the courage to allow herself to take the things that she really wants. She realizes with a jolt that all her failings have been because she hasn't been selfish enough. Of course, it's not called selfishness in the novel: there it is described as not having the courage to grasp at the things she really wants. This "problem" gets solved on the last page.

Poetic justice

2011-12-14T10:30:00.000-05:00

H/T Ann Althouse. The horrid Anton Chekov visited an ailing Tolstoy who asked him to bend his hear close and said:

"You know, I hate your plays. Shakespeare was a bad writer, and I consider your plays even worse than his."

If only someone had done the same for Ibsen.

I know what you're thinking: But Shakespeare was great? Sure, but consider the power of the insult. Suppose you wanted to really tear someone down but offer them nothing they could use to better themselves? That would be the way to put it.

Travel Day

2011-12-14T08:43:00.002-05:00

I'm staying at the Captain's Inn in Alma, New Brunswick. I recommend it.

I was going to post a bunch of photos but it took fifteen minutes to upload one so just the one teaser shot below. More when I get home.

Alma is one of the last perfect fishing villages left on the east coast. It also has some of the most beautiful fogs and, including the adjoining Fundy National Park, some of the best scenery you'll see anywhere.

It's so perfect that there isn't any mobile phone service here. It's so perfect that, in the off season, the restaurant in town closes at five so staff can go home and be with their families. All the hotels but one are closed up for the season. This is the only place I know of where you can still be like Mrs. Muir and fall in love with the ghost of a Sea Captain. (That novel, a minor masterpiece, isn't in print anymore, which is tragic.)

Here is the view from the top of the hill as you come down into town.

More on Lana Del Rey

2011-12-13T08:18:00.000-05:00

Just 'cause I want to, here is some more on "Video Games".

I'll start by taking you way back to a song that I think has a lot in common with Video Games (this association may make people who already hate Lana Del Rey hate her more).

That is not a song about Billy Joe. He and all the Southern Gothic stuff that goes with him is just symbolism. Billy Joe and his fate are a projection by a girl coming to terms with her sexuality just like the creature in The Creature from the Black Lagoon is really about a boy coming to terms with his. What really makes Billy Joe so haunting is not what might or might not have happened to him but that this girl is coming apart at the dinner table and no one is noticing.

If we pay close attention while we listen to and watch Video Games watch we will see that it too features a lot of Gothic enhancement but underneath it all is really the story of a girl coming apart and nobody's noticing, least of all her boyfriend playing video games.

In this song and video the symbolism comes in the form of a whole lot of David Lynch style neo-noir touches. But, at base, the song is about exactly what its lyrics tell you its about: a girl has invested everything in the idea of love and getting a boy and now he's ignoring her to play video games. Like the Ode to Billy Joe, there is an experience here that speaks to millions of teenage girls. And that is what makes it pop music: if it doesn't speak to girls from 15 to 19 years old, it isn't pop music.

Notice the bit in the footage where the security guy tells the drunken "Lana" "I can't let you in". In where? It doesn't matter because it's just symbolism. The fantasy noir stuff merely adds an overtone to the real life stuff:

in real life the girl's boyfriend shuts her out by playing video games
in the fantasy video, security guy shuts her glamorous alter-ego out of the guy's life.

Get past the symbolism and we have a pretty ordinary predicament.

But ordinary doesn't mean it isn't horrible for the girls it happens to. Let's look at some of the lyrics:

It's you, it's you, it's all for you
Everything I do

"Love" is her goal. And there she is all depiliated, trussed up in her push-up bra and scanty panties and dressed in his favourite dress and perfume. All of this was supposed to be empowering. It was supposed to make her confident in her sexuality. Unless, of course, the real reason she did it all was just to get a guy to love her. Because if that is what is really driving girls, then they are just making themselves vulnerable to boys.

Continue on with the lyrics and you can see why some people hate Lana Del Rey so, she's blowing the cover on the whole "girl power" mythology here:

I tell you all the time
Heaven is a place on earth with you
Tell me all the things you want to do
I heard that you like the bad girls
Honey, is that true?

Yup, the whole girl power thing of "I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want" has gone from that to girls telling boys, "tell me what you want, what you really, really want". Well, actually, it always was that. Was the success of the Spice Girls really about girl power or was it about things such as Scary Spice bouncing her braless breasts for our entertainment in their first video?

Actual girls trying to live the girl-power fantasy ended up saying to boys, "Hey honey, want me to be a bad girl? Anything that turns you on." You know this girl, she lives on your street, maybe she's your daughter ... or your girlfriend. There are a lot just like her. Go read the articles and the comments over at The Frisky and you can see hundreds of examples. And that is why this song caught on like wildfire. Millions of girls and young women heard it and recognized their predicament in it. This is hell in little boxes where they live.

It's better than I ever even knew
They say that the world was built for two
Only worth living if somebody is loving you

There's the mythology. That's the thing that never changes. Girls who watched Gidget movies fifty years ago believed that and now girls who listen to hip, indie music believe it. It's hard wired into girls to think this way.

And now the most important line in the song:

Baby now you do

That comes after the line about life only being worth living "if someone is loving you" and it seems to say he does except the entire context of the song says he's busy pulling a power trip on her by playing video games to shut her out. She's put on this whole sexual persona just for him and he's ignoring her. And because he is ignoring her, she will try even harder to impress him.

And yes, that is the way it works in real life. That's how assholes play girls. And it works. It really does. It always has and it always will.

So let's go a step deeper and ask about her motives. He's cutting her down with these tactics but what about hers? Is she honest with herself? Well, there is nothing in the song to tell us so we have to supply that part up for ourselves. Irony shouldn't have to tell us it's irony after all.

And this song is dripping with irony. "I heard you like bad girls". There is nothing terribly wrong with that but if you tell yourself that all you want is the power of self realization that comes from making someone want you while secretly craving to be Cinderella in love, well that's a problem.

But it's a problem all girls have now because the whole culture tells them it's all about empowerment. "Be sex positive and you'll feel better about yourself." But girls haven't changed: they still go for all the romance of true love. All this sex positive stuff has done is to make them more vulnerable to manipulative bastards who know that if they ignore her she'll try harder and harder to win their attention by putting out in new and creative ways she's read about somewhere.

I'm in his favorite sun dress
Watching me get undressed
Take that body downtown

In The Guardian reviewer Sam Leith notices all his and says it disturbs him. He asks:

I find myself wanting to shout: "Hel-LO! Any feminists in the house?" As it is, you watch the video for this bruised and beautiful song – and it's almost as if the Spice Girls never existed.

But what could a feminist say? Feminism is all about how women are oppressed by men. That women might be living out silly girl-power fantasies that only lead to dead ends isn't something feminists can attack because that would make it, you know, kinda women's fault. And that is the really disturbing thing about Lana Del Rey; she dares to say that maybe there is something going wrong with girls themselves.

And you have to wonder how obtuse a critic can be when you read Leith saying this:

The lyrics are somewhat impressionistic, but if you had to guess who's playing the titular videogames, you wouldn't be putting your money on our Lana.

Sam baby, here's a hint, you're watching the creation of a persona for a character named "Lana Del Rey" who doesn't really exist any more than "Ziggy Stardust" did and that character is being created by splicing together a whole lot of video found on the internet. Can you see the "video games" yet? If you can't, you need to resign your position at the paper and get a job you're more qualified for like brick laying.

UPDATE: This long and rambling post has attracted a significant amount of traffic. In order to lessen the pain of readers a mite, I have tightened it a bit here and there on December 28, 2011. It remains a long and rambling post only maybe just a little bit less so.

The girls are not alright: the politics of Lana Del Rey

2011-12-12T07:52:00.000-05:00

Leah McLaren thinks Lana Del Ray lacks substance.

Normally, I'd say someone was lucky if they told me they'd never read McLaren. In this case, however, it is a little sad if you haven't because you cannot begin to grasp how funny it is that she would accuse someone else of lacking in substance. Fluffiness just doesn't get any more fluffy than Leah.

But back to Lana Del Rey the new indie pop sensation whom a whole lot of people seem to hate because she may be "inauthentic". I know, as opposed to all those completely real popstars. And what, pray tell, does "authenticity" mean in an era where girls have their pubic hair ripped out by the roots in order to impress boys.

So what upsets people so much about Lana Del Ray? It's hard to tell, really, as the arguments are not exactly clear. They mostly involve imposing narratives onto her video and then shooting holes in the imagined narrative. Rather than dwell on what has been said, could I suggest that the real problem is that she has inadvertently blurted out the truth: the kids are not alright that things aren't going well for girls in this brave new world.

I'm going to post her break out video below and I'd recommend watching it full screen. Watch it several times over. It has a nice neo-noir feel about it but, and this is important, there is no narrative to the video. It does not, contrary to what a lot of people want to believe tell a story. Instead it's an impressionistic portrait of unhappiness: this is what hell in little boxes is like in 2011. This is a video that dares tell us that girls are unhappy. That, far from taking over the world, they are confused and lost.

Do you believe me? Well, watch the video then walk around looking at girls. Do they look they happy or do they look more like the girl in the video? If Lana is right, there is a big problem that no one wants to talk about out there.

Why is everyone trying so hard to get girls laid?

2011-12-09T09:42:00.001-05:00

Womanly virtues Friday
Update: An important qualification. I think it is perfectly understandable that any individual might really want to have sex with a particular girl, provided the girl is old enough and the boy is not too much older than her. What's different now is that we have a powerful wave within our culture pushing girls to have sex. It's as if a huge segment of our culture have turned into prurient voyeurs encouraging girls to be more and more sexual.

Ann Althouse spots something fascinating about a New York Times story about the morning-after pill. The story quotes President Obama:

“And as I understand it, the reason Kathleen made this decision was she could not be confident that a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old going into a drugstore should be able — alongside bubble gum or batteries — be able to buy a medication that potentially, if not used properly, could end up having an adverse effect. And I think most parents would probably feel the same way.”

As Althouse points out, that is a reasonable enough concern but what about the legal issues. What the hell is a ten or eleven year old doing having sex? And who is doing this too her? Yes, I write "doing this too her" for sex is something that happens to women and all the moral posturing in the world isn't going to change this. Even if we allow for a little hyperbole here and the girls in question are actually thirteen to sixteen years old, the question still remains.

And note this quote from the NYT piece:

“Where is an 11-year-old going to get the $50 to buy this product?” asked James Trussell, director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. “Why would they want to? It’s all nonsense.”

Well, one possibility is that she might get the $50 from an older man who has had sex with her and is hoping to avoid the jail time that would follow if she got pregnant and revealed his involvement. If she is a little older, a man might give her the money simply so that he doesn't have to deal with the shame and other consequences of it coming out that he has been having sex with a girl who is so much younger than him.

The term "unwanted pregnancy" has long been used to provide cover for a larger notion that sex should be without consequences. That it should be "just sex" the way, I suppose, cutting the lawn is just cutting the lawn. Except, of course, it isn't. Activists and governments intrude on cutting the lawn all the time. Cut it too often or with a gas-powered mower and issues of environmental responsibility will be raised.

Only sex with girls and young women is different. Greater and greater lengths are being gone to to make it easier and easier for sex with girls and young to happen and to be without consequences. A similar sort of thrust applies to sex with young gay men.

It's not hard to wonder if the real beneficiaries of this aren't men who want to have sex with young women or young men. Not just any man, you understand. No, the real beneficiaries seem to be men of a certain political class. Men who know certain rules and who fully understand how to navigate the thicket of laws about date rape and so forth. Even as government invades more and more of our lives such that very little remains that can be said to be really personal, it is loading the dice in favour of a certain subset of men sexually.

But what do girls and young women want? Some, no doubt, convince themselves that consequence free sex is exactly what they want. And most sexual fantasies involve consequence free sex for the simple reason that they are, after all, fantasies. But most young women go exactly the opposite direction when they imagine someone having actually sex with them. They picture something momentous and important. They picture the person doing it as having great care for them precisley because it is something of tremendous consequence for them.

Why are we trying so hard to undo this?

Studiously Uncool

A little light culture

Lying to courselves

Manly Thor's Day Special: George Darrow

Blogging The Reef

Some Catholic politics

Woman Virtues Wednesday: What happens to Mimi Now?

More JKF and Mimi cause it's fun

Droit de seigneur?

Speaking of advertising

When supply creates demand

Sort of political Monday:

Blogging The Reef

Manly Thor's Day Special: Piece of paper?

Lana Del Rey quickie

The Wings of the Dove

Womanly virtues Wednesday: No real intimacy with nature

Top ten posts for January 2012

Branches and Rain: Why You Should Read "A Dance to the Music of Time"

Essential reading

Stereotype watch

Sort of political Monday: Are you willing to destroy a way of life to make the world a better place?

The Wings of the Dove

Wisdom

The Wings of the Dove

The Wings of the Dove

Manly Thor's Day Special: Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist

Even more Lana Del Rey

Womanly virtues Wednesday: Complaining about your Ex

How the Brits are ruining the C-word* for everyone

The Wings of the Dove

Keeping you up to date about the really important stuff

The Wings of the Dove

Colour me skeptical

Sort of political Monday: Compassion

Saint Agnes Eve — ah better chill it was!

Sex "addiction"

Slept in ...

The race card: Requiescat in pace

Manly Thor's Day Special: Of Italian sea captains

Womanly virtues Wednesday: In defence of the makeover

The Wings of the Dove

Choice?

What are they selling: Another image

I believe that:

Everyone should have access to life’s basic necessities Poverty is a scourge on society that puts dignity out of reach People’s lives change when they are treated with dignity Everyone has a right to a sense of dignity The fight against poverty deserves my personal attention

Sort of political Monday: The limits of feminism

The girls are not alright part 378

The Wings of the Dove

The Wings of the Dove

Manly Thor's Day Special: Marketing Canadian Whisky to men

The WIngs of the Dove

Womanly Virtues Wednesday: Another Anti-rape campaign that isn't about rape

The Wings of the Dove

The Wings of the Dove

Hip hop isn't as popular as you think it is

Bad homilies

The Wings of the Dove

Sort of political Monday: Sunlight

Mary Wolstencraft

"Putting yourself in the other person's shoes"

Manly Thor's Day Special: How to enjoy coffee

"Neutral" application of the law and racism 2

The well-educated phenomenon

Womanly Virtues Wednesday

Addendum

Speaking of hate and bigotry

"Neutral" application of the law and racism 1

The Wings of the Dove

Sort of political Monday: Authority now!

The Wings of the Dove

Curmudgeonly musing

Manly Thor's Day special

What she said

The Wings of the Dove

Womanly Virtues Wednesday

"It's different when we do it"

The Wings of the Dove

Reason for despair

What madness is this?

Everyone should have access to life’s basic necessities
Poverty is a scourge on society that puts dignity out of reach
People’s lives change when they are treated with dignity
Everyone has a right to a sense of dignity
The fight against poverty deserves my personal attention