Jazz's declining popularity

It's unquestionably true that the jazz audience is shrinking. Why? I have quite a few thoughts about that and may drop them here.

Right now, though, I want to focus on this comment by Ted Gioia:

This is all the more unsettling, when one considers how much jazz education has expanded during the last two decades. When I was in college, jazz studies hardly existed ... Yet jazz was very popular with the students, even if it rarely showed up in a classroom. Nowadays, jazz is accepted at virtually every institution of higher learning. Yet, judging by the NEA study, the students don't have the same level of interest as they did back when it was excluded. 

I have quite a bit of respect for Gioia  but often find myself questioning his judgment on the popular culture and how jazz does or does not fit into it. Especially when I read something like the above.

Look, it is a fallacy to argue that if B follows A than A must have caused B. True enough, but it is plain stupidity not to wonder if there might not be a link. It's something that we should investigate. Could it be that jazz education is part of the problem?

OTOH, a lack of correlation definitely implies a lack of causality. If the supposed cure correlates with the disease getting worse then it's time to question the efficacy of that cure.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures ...

This is a conditional claim, as I noted before. And that raises the interesting question: Is it? (If you came here looking for the original quote, you can find at the bottom of this post.)

I don't think so. Did Fitzgerald agree with me? Yes, I think he did. He wasn't much of a man but he could write almost as well as Edith Wharton, which is to say that conditional is no accident. Gatsby's life is tragedy but it isn't unmerited tragedy.

Betty Draper is very much like Gatsby in this sense. Her personality is just like his. Don Draper is quite the opposite; he is a sort of anti-Gatsby.

Acquiring virtue is not a matter of a unbroken series of successful gestures.

It makes me think of my neighbour Dermot. Back when he was five, Dermot never failed to be Dermot. His personality was a successful series of unbroken gestures and to have continued in this light would have been to grow up to be an adult very much like Betty Draper. Now that he is a full years older Dermot and those of us watching him have a far less clear notion of who he is. His progress is much more like that of someone trying to learn how to play a musical instrument. He makes mistakes and he has to stop and start over again and again. Now he sometimes fails to be Dermot because being Dermot is an end he is aiming for.

Virtue, unlike personality, is about trying over and over again. And that is the difference between Don and Betty Draper. His offences, his serial infidelities for example, are serious and (at this point anyway) more troubling that Betty's. But he is a man of virtue and she is a child.

And what many take to be his most serious offence—"living a lie"—is no offence at all.

If you are joining me here, this series starts here.

The next post in the series is here.

The quote is from The Great Gastby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and it is the narrator Nick talking about Jay Gatsby. Here is all of it:

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promise of life, as if he related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the 'creative temperament'—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.

How do you solve a problem like Betty?

Shoot
 One of the interesting things about Betty Draper is both those who criticize her character and those who defend her agree for the most part about her flaws. The only difference is in explaining how they got there. People who don't like her credit Betty Draper with having created her own moral character. People who do like her explain away her flaws as a product of her being a victim of the time and of Don.

If the defenders were right—fortunately they are not—we'd have a huge storytelling problem.

One of John Gardner's more notoriously bad bits of advice was that you should never write a story in which the protagonist is someone that things primarily happen to. Gardner felt that characters should do something to be interesting. There are hundreds of examples to prove Gardner wrong. However, there is a modified version of the Gardner thesis that is correct and that is that you should never create a character whose moral character is chiefly the result of what others do to her.

Fortunately, Betty Draper is very much responsible for her own moral character. And that is why we have to dislike her even if we pity her.

Betty's character
Let's start with one of the most often cited (some would say hackneyed) quotes about character.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promise of life, as if he related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the 'creative temperament'—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. 

Nick is talking about Gatsby here but he might just as easily have been discussing Betty Draper. She is very much like Gatsby and there is a scene early in this episode that recalls Gatsby. Betty is sitting around with Francine talking about the night before when a man named Jim Hobart attempting to recruit Don to work at another firm offered her his card and discussed her returning to work as a model.

Now one important thing to notice right away is that Betty is aware of all the facts. She knows, or should know, that Hobart wants to recruit Don and should be asking herself to what degree this attention is motivated by that other goal.

If she is aware of it, however, any realism is promptly washed away by romantic dreams.

And so Betty leads Francine upstairs to show her a huge collection of dresses that a designer named Giovanni made for her back when she was a model. The dresses all sit in garment bags unused. This is just like the scene where Gatsby woos Daisy Buchanan by showing her all of his shirts.

Francine asks, and who could blame her, just how platonic this relationship was. Even if we do believe Betty that it was, what was Giovanni's motive for this extraordinary generosity.

We get more of Betty's character when she talks to doctor Wayne about the incident. Fascinatingly, her real interest seems more motivated by the freedom that comes from the recent death of her mother. This is not, of course, an uncommon reaction—lots of people find their grief at the death of a parent tempered by a sudden freedom to assess that parent honestly for the first time. Unfortunately, Betty isn't quite willing to follow her own thoughts through to their obvious conclusion.

 My mother was always very concerned about looks and weight. And I've always eaten a lot. And I like hot dogs. Mother used to say, "You're going to get stout." And then I became a model. And she hated it. Even though Suzy Parker made a hundred thousand dollars that year. My mother hated it. Manhattan. She called me a prostitute.

You have to love the Suzy Parker reference  and the quaint belief that being paid a whole lot of money makes prostitution more acceptable. I also have to agree with Betty's mother. "Prostitute" may be hyperbole but there is something pathetic about a woman like Betty with a degree in anthropology aspiring to some fairytale existence as a model.

The Suzy Parker reference, BTW, is apropos as Parker only got hired in the first place because the agency was hoping to woo her older sister.

When Dr. Wayne suggests that she is angry at her mother, Betty responds by getting angry at him. She accuses him of not listening to her and then provoking her. But read the paragraph above for yourself—she is angry with her mother.

The interview with Dr. Wayne ends with Betty saying, "I don't care why he gave me his card." This does not suggest a lot of emotional maturity.

Roger Sterling Esq.
Roger makes an appearance to try and dissuade Don from succumbing to Jim Hobart's advances. It's interesting to compare the style of the two men—Hobart and Sterling—and also that of Betty Draper. Hobart offered glamour and big accounts. Sterling's pitch is to ask Don to consider what he has and to ask if he wants to risk losing it. He then says he is taking it personally. This is not a matter of just business, he values the relationship.

Again, the important thing here is that Don has real value to Sterling Cooper. What is Betty's real value? She certainly wants to have real value but what does she offer?

At this moment all she wants is recognition and she doesn't particularly care why she is getting it. As the Giovanni dresses also suggest, she does not seem to have ever cared much why she was getting recognition.

Living a lie
In any case, Betty gets the job and she is so happy that Don gets to have sex with the light on.

Don promises that he won't spoil it for her.

Okay, I have previously claimed that this series is unintentionally subversive. That is to say it ends up proving the opposite of what it intends. If we take the show seriously, Don's greatest offence against Betty—his greatest failing as a human being—is in living a lie by not being the person he truly is. He is hiding his real self from her.

But here is the (rhetorical) question. Who is really living the lie here? Episode after episode, we see Don Draper successfully being Don Draper. He doesn't need to be Dick Whitman.

But who is Betty Draper successfully being? She isn't good at anything and she isn't mature enough to be self critical. At the same time, she takes it for granted that others will take her seriously. (This is not an attractive personality but no one could honestly claim it is a product of her times. There are plenty of women and men just like her today.)


In the end it is Jim Hobart who spoils it for her by making it a little too obvious that he hired Betty only to get Don.

What actually happens?
That is my favourite question and one that will become even more relevant  in upcoming episodes. In this episode, we have an interesting example of a character providing moral advice to Draper that he follows while they do precisely the sort of thing they warn him not to do.

The Draper family dog injures one of the neighbour's homing pgeons. he threatens to shoot the dog if it happens again. The kids are terrified. When Don and Betty find out what happened, Don wants to confront the neighbour right away. Betty, says, "He's our neighbour, he'll only make it worse." Don follows this good advice. Betty, meanwhile, ends the episode out with her son's BB gun shooting at the birds. Not exactly the way to make good neighbours.

And she lies to Don. She doesn't lie about who she was in the past, she lies about who she is right now to everyone including herself.

Oh yeah, Gatsby
Although lots of people quote Fitzgerald, very few seem to notice that the whole thing starts with a conditional phrase:

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him ...

But if there is more to his personality, stuff that isn't so gorgeous. Gatsby has his past involvements with gangsters, Betty has Giovanni. Gatsby is blind about Daisy. Betty is blind about Betty.

If Hamlet was his own Falstaff, Betty Draper is her own Daisy Buchanan. She lives a lie everyday because she is so heavily invested in a fairytale understanding of herself just as Gatsby was so invested in a  fairytale image of Daisy. Will Betty ever grow up? If she does, will she manage it before we all stop caring and give up on her?


If you are joining me here, this series starts here.

The next post in the series is here.

Terrorist mentality

There is a typically insightful but rather odd post up by Megan McCardle.

The odd part first. How weird is it that an American journalist took the trouble to set out in a public forum her thoughts about how Islamic terrorists could operate against her country in ways that are more effective? Think about that one for a while.

The insightful bit that most interested me, meanwhile, was something McCardle said after listing all the "better" targets and then wondering why Islamic terrorists didn't hit those. She writes,

In part, I expect, because they don't really know that much about America. 

I expect she is right about that. It's always seemed to me that one of the prime reasons that the World Trade Center was hit is because it was called the "World Trade Center". Fantastically ignorant about America, the terrorists assumed the thing was what its label told them it was. It was a bit of typical American marketing language that made the buildings such an attractive target.

And where do Islamic terrorists get their odd ideas about America? They get these ideas from the American entertainment and journalism industries. It is one of the central conceits of both that there are certain nerve centers vital to functuioning of free society.

Looking back as the tenth anniversary of that horrible event approaches, it seems to me that one thing that was made clear that day was just how untrue that was. The idiots who use terrorism generally attempt to justify their actions on the grounds that they cannot win in conventional ways. But the worst sort of conflict they could possibly face is one in which Americans fought back not in a centralized way but a decentralized one. If a whole bunch of independent operators decided that the central institutions  of their country had been incapacitated and that the only way to defend their security was direct action, the consequences of such a moment would be so horrible for the causes Islamic terrorists care to claim about that their entire culture would be at risk.

More sincerity

Wittgenstein at one point challenges a classic sci-fi notion. You can, of course, imagine a world in which everyone is but you is an automaton but try walking down the street imagining that everyone you see is actually an automaton. You can't do it.

We had a reminder of this yesterday afternoon when we walked Montmorency down by the waterfront here in Barrie. As we walked along he boardwalk, Montmorency walked up to people expecting to be loved as he always is. One guy, however, reached forward and pushed him away. It was odd because Montmorency had already figured out there was no love forthcoming and was walking past him.

Everything about the guy was creepy. He didn't say a word and couldn't even make eye contact. Just another creepy loser as I say and you just hope his creepiness is confined to the kinds that doesn't involve hurting people.

But you see right away that something, sincere human feeling, is missing in the guy.

Where is the sin in sincere?

I'm on the road—sitting in a discount hotel by the highway in Barrie, Ontario as I type this. Besides the highway, you can see several other discount hotels.

Anyway, the long overdue Jane Austen entry. The Serpentine One and I listened to Sense and Sensibility in the car driving over. It got me thinking about sincerity. Sincerity gets a lot of abuse. If we are to trust Lionel Trilling and Alasdair MacIntyre, it isn't much of a virtue at all.

Trilling would have us believe that authenticity is the real virtue. Further, both men would have us believe that Jane Austen is one of the people who first deconstructs sincerity.

And it isn't hard to see why they might think this reading this book and Mansfield Park. In both the man who can read with great feeling is revealed to be a cad and the men who can only be themselves seem better. This reading of Austen is reminiscent of the old show business joke: "Sincerity is the key, once you can fake that ..."

But that is clearly too simple a reading. When Brandon and Elinor discuss Marianne, Brandon says he wouldn't like to see Marianne disabused of her romantic ideals at all. He worries they would be replaced by something baser.

Sincerity arises because we want to know if ourselves and others are really what we say we are. Am I in love? Well, do I really mean it when I say I am? This is a question about feelings.

And that does matter. It matters a whole lot whether or not I am sincere. Take away sincerity from my love and all that is left is animal instincts. That is Brandon's point and it is a good one.

I know what you're thinking:

As Coroner I must aver, I thoroughly examined her, and she's not only merely dead, she's really most sincerely dead.

But that is a joke. Likewise, it is only as a joke that we would say that a rapist is sincere. Sincere does not mean simply that I really want to do X. It doesn't mean it as in "I must sincerely say I really hate you."

Marianne is right about feelings.

Tax night dinner

I finally got our dinner on the table at ten PM last night. I thought I'd be eating alone but a taxi pulled up in front bringing the Serpentine One home from work just as I finished cooking.

Here it is (with less than ideal contrast on account of the white plate against everything else dark).

That's pork tenderloin fried in olive oil and then cut into medallions and served with black cherry, peppercorn sauce accompanied by steamed new potatoes and asparagus with lemon mayonnaise. The wine was a Rosé selected because of its name alone—"Beach House". It went very well with the pork.