Sorta Political: An Honourable War

During the second Iraq war, I was visiting a house in the country. My host and hostess were an Anglican clergyman and a school teacher. It was a setting right of of a traditional British cozy novel. My host and hostess were, and are, as liberal as liberal can get and I spent a lot of my time dreading the inevitable moment when the war would come up. I knew they would not only condemn it but that they would do so in a fashion that implied that anyone who supported the war was a moron and a monster.

I spent the weekend preparing myself for it. My plan was to politely and quietly say that I supported the war when the moment came but that I would not enter into any argument about. In the end, I as spared. Not because the comment was not made but because the comment that was made was so outrageous all I could do was stare in silent wonder.

My host and I were watching TV when it happened. The History Channel was on and a teaser played for a show about the American Civil War and my host said, "What a stupid waste of time that war was."

He was serious. I realized, with a jolt, that I was in the presence of someone who genuinely believed that no good had ever come of war. Even the ending of slavery was not enough to justify it. There was no need for him to say what he thought of Iraq or for me to respond to it.

I didn't argue with him but I suspect I can guess how it would have gone. He would have insisted that slavery was outmoded and would have disappeared anyway. He would have argued that even if the war had brought about the end sooner than any other means that it wasn't worth the huge loss of life that was involved.

 I say all that by way of a preface to something Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote the other day:

And from the moment the first shots were fired, the black imagination conceived of the Civil War differently than the rest of the country. That difference continues up to the present day. Were I not the descendant of slaves, if I did not owe the invention of my modern self to a bloody war, perhaps I'd write differently.

That difference continues up to the present day! It does. Coates sees the Civil War as an honourable war. He believes he owes "the invention of my modern self" to war. That is the way an ancient Greek would talk about the war with Persia, the way an ancient Roman would talk about their wars of conquest. It is the way the English used to talk about defeating the Spanish Armada or Waterloo. And it is the way Americans used to talk about the Revolution and, ahem, the Civil War.

But to believe in honour is to believe in shame and we are much less inclined to do that anymore. We no longer believe in a public virtue that you can and should be shamed for.

The funny thing (funny as in tragic) is that if the Civil War had to be fought again, I'm pretty sure most liberals and even some conservatives would oppose it. Liberals mostly don't believe in shame. The only shameful thing, in the modern liberal view, is to be intolerant and unaccepting of others or to be a hypocrite. They'd condemn the racism inherent in slavery but they wouldn't go to war over it.

Another image: What is she selling?

The short answer is "salvation!".

That is Mary Magdalen, one of my favourite saints. What makes her different from a lot of other saints is that she was believed to have been a sinner.

That is more complicated than it seems. First because all the saints believed themselves to have been sinners. If there is one thing about them that distinguishes them from you and me it is that that they were far more willing to condemn themselves as sinners than we are. They condemned themselves as sinners for things most of us would let go by. But the objectively told stories of their lives makes them sound like like paragons of virtue or, more than occasionally, rather boring.

Mary Magdalen, on the other hand, was widely believed to have really, really sinned and, even better, to have sinned in a sexual way. The Bible, however, gives no clear evidence of this. To make the sexual sinner story work calls for a lot of analogy and tradition.

Or you could just look at her face above. Whoever that look was intended for felt it in his hip pocket. At first glance you might think the look is intended for you but she doesn't quite make eye contact with you. Someone else is getting that privilege.

All of which is all the more shocking when you realize the scene this picture is meant to represent. That is jar of nard she is carrying and with which she will anoint Jesus (either upon the head or the feet, depending on which Gospel you read). In the Gospel of John, Judas complains that this nard could have been sold for an amount about equal to about years wages.

Now, as I say, you have to believe that Mary Magdalen and the woman who anoints Jesus with the nard are one in order to get the narrative implied here and the Bible gives no evidence for this. If you do, though, the story gets quite rich. It isn't just that the nard is worth so much that makes it fascinating but that this woman has some. How did she come by it?  Was it a gift to her or did she (wink, wink) earn it?

If she did earn it, it's rather late in the story as all this happens just a few days before Jesus is crucified suggesting that, although the Magdalen may be a repentant sinner, she wasn't exactly a reformed sinner.

Everything we think we know about the past is wrong
Carlo Crivelli, the painter, is, in theory, an early Renaissance painter. His style and technique, however, were a throwback in his era.

That he would have identified with Mary Magdalen is clear from his first documented appearance in history when he was imprisoned for having abducted and committed adultery with the wife of a  sailor in 1457. The "abducted" in his charge was almost certainly there to save face for the woman and her husband. Oh yeah, he painted the above picture a little more than a decade after his arrest.

As I've said before, we tend to take the middle ages and the early Renaissance as being as they wished themselves to be. There was far less unity of thought or morals during these eras than we imagine. They were also far wiser about sex than we like to pretend: Dante had a wife and mistresses in addition to Beatrice whom he is famous for not having. We tend to focus on the latter story because he wrote more about her.

The point being, those eras could give a more honest account of a repentant sinner than we can.

A little light culture: Reluctant modernists

We all get really basic things wrong from time to time. It's forgivable to use words such as "fulsome" or "scatological" incorrectly, as most people do. But what happens when we start using a word such as "hate" wrong? Nowadays, when you hear someone accuse someone else of being "full of hate" you can be sure that at least half the time the hatred is being projected on to a relatievly innocent figure by the person condemning them.

Oh well.

Here is a far humbler, perhaps, example. Here is Ta-Nehisi Coates using a word in a way that shows that he hasn't the vaguest idea what it means:

Continuing our conversation, I should point out why I even find Chandler worth grappling with, in the first place. I think plotting—keeping a story moving—is an underappreciated among those who take the novel as an art-form. 

The word he doesn't get is "plotting" which most definitely does not mean "keeping a story moving". 

It's even more embarrassing than that because plotting was something that Chandler was not very good at. He had a limited set of plots and he tended to use them over and over again. The Big Sleep was assembled from plot elements Chandler had used in his short stories for the pulps (compare it with his stories "Killer in the Rain" and "The Curtain" and you'll see what I mean.

Chandler's weakness at plotting is also evident in that one of the more notorious plotting mistakes in crime fiction occurs in this novel. Chandler piles up a lot of corpses and then forgets to explain one of them. Early in the book, the Sternwood family chauffeur, a young man named Owen Taylor, is killed but the murder is never explained. Actually, it's far worse than that, it can't be explained. There is no way you could rewrite the story so that Owen's murder is explained that wouldn't destroy the coherence of the rest of the story.

I think this weakness at plotting is a consequence of modernism. To be a modernist is to lose faith in any sort of natural arc to human life. Without this faith, plots stumble because the writer has no sense of authority: "How dare I end up with the couple happily married when so many marriages fail." Note that this did not trouble Jane Austen or Anthony Trollope even though there were plenty of bad marriages in their day. Conversely, there are lots of good marriages in our day. And yet no current author feels comfortable with the marriage plot. The facts haven't changed but our interpretation of them has.

Chandler wanted to write about a happy marriage and he was on his way with Poodle Springs, only he chickened out. I think he originally meant it to be his answer to Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man, which is about a successful marriage. But he couldn't do it. He choked.

What Ta-Nehisi Coates calls plotting and isn't is "a something else" that we use to replace our sense of there being a natural moral arc to our lives.

I suppose this is about taste, and mine gravitates to writers who can, all at once, give me great character, some philosophical meat to chew on, and keep the story moving. Chandler does the latter—and he does something more. He knows how to "hold" a scene.

And here you can see how Coates makes his mistake about "plotting". To "hold a scene" or "keep a story moving" you need to be able to keep adding things to the narrative that feel right to the reader. That can feel like plotting but they don't, as I hope I've made clear above, actually have to be right, they just have to feel right so you keep reading. Plotting actually has to be right.

In his post, Coates cites a long passage from The Big Sleep and it is telling that one detail bothers him. It occurs in these paragraphs:

Eddie Mars said gravely: "If you're not playing any more, you must let me send someone home with you."

The girl flushed. Her cheekbones stood out white in her face. Then she laughed off-key. She said bitterly: "One more play, Eddie. Everything I have on the red. I like red. It's the colour of blood."

Eddie Mars smiled faintly, then nodded and reached into his inner breast pocket. He drew out a large wallet with gold corners and tossed it carelessly along the table to the croupier. "Cover the bet in even thousands," he said, "if no one objects to this turn of the wheel being just for the lady."

No one objected. Vivian Regan leaned down and pushed all her winnings savagely with both hands on to the large red diamond in the layout.

Now there is obviously something very good about this but note what Coates does not like:

 I could have done without the remark about red being the color of blood. Often I feel like Chandler is going for the bomb, when what he really needs is first down. But the drive as a whole is pretty gripping. This is probably my favorite scene in the book—just as poetry. The details feel just right. They aren't piled on to make you believe. Chandler believes for you. 

(Before being critical, I should note that that observation about the details not being "piled on" is very astute on Coates' part. A lesser writer, or Chandler himself in weaker moments, would have piled the details on here. See Joyce Carol Oates and Bob Dylan for examples of writers who can't stop piling on. I hope to return to this.)

 

Well yes, the remark about the colour of blood is a jarring, stupid and it breaks the flow. But jarring and stupid is a big part of Vivian Regan. It's when things like that slip out that we know she's lying and she's lying here. This whole "gripping" scene is an act that she and Eddie Mars play out. She wins because the wheel is crooked.

It's not clear that Vivian herself realizes all of this. She's not quite in control. Mars, on the other hand, is very much in control, which is why the resolution of the story is worked out between the men and not the women.

There is, as I've noted previously, some misogyny behind this but, that acknowledged, if you haven't met some women who sometimes or often behave as Vivian does here, you haven't been trying, and that remark about red being the colour of blood is perfect.

To take it out would make the scene smoother but that would be a problem because it shouldn't be smooth. It should grate. If there is anything generally wrong with the sort of movies men like these days it is that they are too smooth and major moral problems that should break the flow the way Vivian's stupid remark does here get smoothed over by the narrative: when in doubt, use a montage. 

 

I could go all sorts of places here but I'll stop instead and had the floor to Chandler himself for he said what really needs to be said about the effects that Coates likes and why they were powerful. The bit cited below is from an introduction to a collection of Chandler stories from early in his career. These stories were published in pulp magazines and these were, for Chandler, a kind of writing school. Late in his career, he told us what he learned there.

I don't think this power was entirely a matter of violence, although far too many people got killed in these stories and their passing was celebrated with a rather too loving attention to detail. It certainly was not a matter of fine writing, since any attempt would have been ruthlessly blue-penciled by the editorial staff. Nor was it because of any great originality of plot or character. Most of the plots were rather ordinary and most of the characters rather primitive types of people. Possibly it was the smell of fear these stories managed to generate. Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The street were dark with something more than night. The mystery story grew hard and cynical about motive and character, but it was not cynical about the effects it tried to produce nor about its technique of producing them.

The key phrase in all of that is "long before the atom bomb". Chandler, writing in the 1950s about the 1930s, wants to be clear that he is not with the progressives who would ban the bomb or institute gun control as if it was the technology that threatened civilization. He would have been unable to forget that it was the progressives who had banned alcohol leading to the earlier lawless era (a point progressives themselves have found all to easy to forget right until the present day).

Chandler is a reluctant modernist. Like Proust and Eliot, you get a sense that he would be happier if he felt he could continue as an unreconstructed romantic but he obviously feels that isn't possible anymore. I don't think he—or Proust and Eliot—ever gets around to explaining why they don't feel it's possible anymore. They just don't and perhaps the feeling was so powerful they didn't think it needed to be explained.

Manly Thor's Day Special: Washing the bathroom floor

We have an old-fashioned tile floor wherein you have to seal the tiles every few months. We have this because we wanted it and had it installed at considerable expense. It features a kind of octagonal tile that used to be featured in every public school in the land and is now only made by one plant in Texas and we waited three months to get it.

And did I mention that it has to be sealed periodically?

The problem is that I didn't redo it this summer. And then I waited as months went by, watching the dirt getting ground in, but not doing anything about it.

Today, I finally did something about it. It's whiter than white again. It had to be washed four times to get it whiter than white again—three of those times on my knees scrubbing. WHich is why I haven't been blogging.

There are several lessons about manliness here and I think you are smart enough to figure them out for yourselves. I am off to learn about Benedictine spirituality with a book in one hand and a glass of Benedictine (what else?) in the other.

Selfish?

Eddie Vedder is living proof that someone can have a magnificent voice and be a lousy singer. He, as Dorothy Parker famously said of Katherine Hepburn, runs the gamut of emotions from A to B, he cannot enunciate to save his life, he is incapable of singing anything requiring any suppleness and he manages to make everything sound the same.

And yet he has a magnificent and powerful voice.

He also thinks Christians are selfish. He expresses this thought at the opening, ironically enough, of a song called "I am mine".

Before we read the lyric, let's look at a dictionary definition of "selfish": concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure at the expense of consideration for others. That's from the Oxford Concise Dictionary.  Note the two elements that it takes to make selfish: 1) you have to be chiefly concerned with your own pleasure and profit and 2) you have to be so at the expense of a concern for others.

So let's look at the opening stanza:

The selfish, they're all standing in line
Faithing and hoping to buy themselves time
Me, I figure as each breath goes by
I only own my mind

The song was reportedly written in response to an accident where nine men who were crowd-surfing during one of the band's shows were crushed and suffocated to death by the crowd.  That in itself is interesting. Here is how Wikipedia describes it:

"I Am Mine" was written by vocalist Eddie Vedder in a hotel room near Virginia Beach, Virginia before the band's first show after the Roskilde tragedy in 2000. Vedder said that he wrote the song to "reassure myself that this is going to be all right."

Well, you can understand the sentiment. A horrible thing happened the last time the band performed and Vedder needs to think about what happened and morally analyze it before he can go out and give another show. He's not the most eloquent man in the world with his remark that he wanted to "reassure myself" but I think he deserves some slack here.

Where he doesn't deserve any is the opening couplet. How does he go from facing this emotionaly and morally charged situation to slagging others who had nothing to do with it?

The selfish, they're all standing in line
Faithing and hoping to buy themselves time

 It's not hard to see how he got there. He's confronted with nine senseless deaths and the the possibility that he may be at least partially responsible for them. So he's thinking about these things and Christianity comes up because it has a lot to say about what death is and why and what morality has to do with death. But then he lashes out and calls these people selfish? Where the hell does that come from?

And note the stolen bases. Vedder goes from the fact that Christians pray because they are concerned with their own fate after death (store up treasure in heaven) to concluding that they are selfish. Looking after yourself is not selfish. Looking after yourself to the exclusion of any concern for others is. No doubt some Christians do that but it's not as if there are aren't enough Christian acts of charity for it to be plainly obvious that one hell of a lot of Christians aren't selfish.

So why is it so important for him to slag Christians?  Because there is a part of him that worries that we're right. And that makes him feel guilty.

Down time

I've been without Internet since about eleven last night, hence no posting.

Just a short thought today, torn from today's headlines:

Emmy-winning TV news producer William “Howie” Masters III — son of the famous Masters and Johnson sex researcher — glumly pleaded guilty yesterday to masturbating in front of parkgoers last May.

Let's flash it back to September:

William H. Masters III — son of the Masters and Johnson sex researcher — who was busted Saturday for allegedly exposing himself to two female undercover cops while kayaking in Michigan, was also arrested last May on charges of masturbating in Central Park, The Post has learned.

Michigan authorities said they plan on showing photos of the Emmy-winning TV news producer, who’s known as “Howie,” to other women to see if he’s the same flasher who whipped it out in prior incidents near his family’s ritzy vacation home on Lake Huron.

There is something especially pathetic about this one. This guy had it all and he threw it away for what must be the tawdriest, most humiliating crime imaginable. And even getting arrested once was not enough to stop him. Five months later he was caught again. And there are almost certainly other incidents where he got away with it. Probably a whole lot of such incidents.

The first question to cross my mind was, Did his upbringing have anything to do with it?

The second question is, "Did he have no self control at all?"  He's married to a beautiful woman. He's rich enough that he could have affairs and get away with it. What possessed him to do the sprt of thing that, I'll be blunt, complete losers with no social skills and who often have mental problems do?

Or could it be that the incredible freedoms and power and access he had is what assisted his downfall. Perhaps he lived his entire life never being told that he couldn't do somethings because it was simply wrong to do those things.

This is a cute little detail, thanks to the wonders of YouTube, you can watch Mr. Masters and family members and guests walking on the beach back in 2007. I won't post it here but you shouldn't have any trouble finding it if you want to see it.

Checking her out

I dedicate this post to Lynn and Anna-Maria who were roommates of mine back in college. Seven women and men shared the house we lived in and I don't think a single week went by in which Lynn or Anna-Maria didn't make some snide comment about how men never cleaned up. This was much discussed among us because no one else in that house, male or female, ever saw either of the two do so much as rinse out a coffee cup in all the time we lived together. They may well have been the biggest slobs in the history of college students, and that isn't hyperbole.

What made the women interesting was that neither was lying. They really believed what they were saying. I think of them when I stuff like this:

When it comes to checking out competition women should not worry about men checking them out - but women instead.

The story concerns a study that used new computer technology that follows eye movements to see how men looked at women and how women looked at other women. The conclusion, apparently meant to be surprising, is that when men meet a woman they mostly look into her eyes whereas women, upon meeting another woman, scan her all up and down looking at her body and especially breasts more than looking at her face.


I don't how this could be news to anyone who ever was in high school. As I've said many times before on this blog, women dress and behave the way they do because they are in competition with other women, You can't compete without checking out the competition.

Again, as I've noted before, put a bunch of women in a room together and all the women will steal glances at the woman with the best breasts in the room (and she, as all women know, is often not the woman with the largest breasts). There is an instant pissing match about these things. Furthermore, if the woman with the best breasts makes a thing of showing off her dominance you can be sure the others will react like a bunch of whipped puppies. (Which is why women collectively act so as to prevent such a thing happen. They are usually successful at this too.)

One of the most blatantly decisive such matches I ever saw was among a group of Christian women meeting in a church group. None of them would ever admit to caring about such things. Not even the woman who demonstrated dominance. And, like Lynn and Anna-Maria, it may be that they honestly didn't believe they cared about such things but you sure could see it from outside. It may even be that the supposedly "pure" church function actually made a form of cutthroat competition that normally wouldn't be seen anywhere, save perhaps backstage before a wet t-shirt contest, possible.

To get back to the main point, if this is so obvious, and it is to anyone who takes the trouble to actually look, why do men still get the blame?

Well, most men don't notice because they look at women. I'm leaving here in a few moments to take part ion a class with about five gorgeous women. It will be very easy for me to notice those women and very hard to notice how they look at one another. No man needs any incentive to glance at Christina's  body but it takes a deliberate and unnatural effort to make a point of watching how other women look at Christina.

Another big part of the answer is intentionality. You look at a woman's breasts in a far different way when you are doing so for pleasure than when you are checking out the competition. I remember being in a room with a bunch of stand-up comics back in the 1980s while they were watching a tape of another comic in action. When they thought his material was good, they'd nod grimly and say, "That's funny". That's how women look at other women's bodies, especially their breasts.

My experience is that women are much better at assessing other women. Often when out with the other women I will be forced to see this. A while ago at a choral concert, for example, I commented about a woman who was there in a far sexier dress than any other women in attendance. Nothing so wild as we often see on the street, just more revealing than any other woman in the room. I, in an almost knee-jerk fashion, made a disparaging comment. I didn't think the Lemon Girl was even aware of this other woman's presence in the room as she was reading the music programme but she calmly said, without even looking up, "What's wrong with that, she has an amazing body."

I looked again and realized that she was right. At no time could The Lemon Girl have done more than a quickly glance at this other woman but she had managed a far more thorough and balanced appraisal than I did.

My appraisal was primarily moral: who was she and what kind of person was she. Who is she and what is she, or could she be, to me.

And that is why men's attention to women's breasts gets a different type of attention. If a man and woman meet for lunch and she sees him glance at her breasts when he thinks she isn't looking, she can be sure that he is thinking how much he would like to caress them and remove her shirt and bra and then ... And that is a rather intimate and invasive thought far different from what other women do.

Competition from other women is threatening, of course, but, if you think about it, an awful lot of what we call civilization consists of conventions meant to limit what women can do by way of competing. A point that becomes painfully obvious when someone fools women into fighting for the "right" to go topless.