Here's a question

Some will argue that you can’t have it both ways: how can a woman say she is fully in charge of her body and her destiny, and then call herself a victim when, having given a man her heart of her own volition, he crushes it? How can a consensual relationship, as Salinger’s unquestionably were, constitute a form of abuse?

That's Joyce Maynard reflecting on the relationship she had with JD Salinger when she was a teenager and he was some thirty-five years older.

It strikes me that she would not have needed to justify herself before feminism.

It also strikes me that she—and, it appears, many others—was a groupie.

There is a great moment in Heart of Darkness  when a badly abused native man tentatively pushes his spear at one of the Europeans who had oppressed him and, to his shock, finds that it goes into the man's body quite easily. I sometimes wonder if impressionable young women don't sometimes attach themselves to older men because it feels safer than bonding with a man their own age. And then, to their shock, they discover that it goes in quite easily.

The state of the coffee culture Pt 2

Do you want to be a coffee connoisseur?

Why?

I mean that quite seriously. How and why would your life be better?

Before you answer, you might want to include this in your considerations: Your first step to becoming a coffee connoisseur would almost certainly be to start drinking a lot less than you are now.

The reason for this is something Billy Carmichael mentioned in the comments yesterday: the law of diminishing returns. The best tasting mouthful of coffee you will have today is the first. The second will be a little less satisfying, the third even less so and so on .... Drinking large amounts of coffee will only dull your ability to savor really good coffee.

Nobody would pretend that the man who drinks a half-bottle of whisky every day, always the same brand, is a whisky connoisseur. And yet people who get out of bed and start every single day with a cup of coffee and then go on to drink six more cups before the end of their workday are allowed to call themselves coffee lovers.

If you really want to do it, by the way, you'd start by developing your taste buds. You'd do that by drinking a lot less. A good first step would be to visit various coffee bars and sampling small servings of espresso. You'd sit down quietly and sip carefully and really concentrate on the flavor. The next step would be to set up taste tests where you sampled different kinds of espresso one after another to pick out the subtleties. The key point would be to develop your palate and not to acquire equipment and attitudes.

But all that is, as I say, an aside. The main question is: Why do you want to do this?

Here is a related question: Do you like to think of yourself as a critical thinker? Do you think you are clever enough to see through marketing ploys? I ask this because the people who work hard every day to get you to buy stuff want you to want to be a coffee connoisseur. They want that because they can then get you to buy a bunch of stuff that you associate with being the sort of fine discerning person who really knows about a good cup of coffee.

Of course, it's not just a good cup of coffee that they want you to want. They want you to buy into a whole concept of the good life.

In the Confessions Augustine compares himself at one point to a beggar. He says that the beggar at least got what he wanted; which is to say, the beggar got enough money to buy wine and get drunk. Augustine, on the other hand, spent a whole lot of time chasing shadows. His sin was worse than the man who spent his whole life in pursuit of drunkeness.

I'm a lot cruder than Augustine. Compare the coffee connoisseur to a man who devotes his life to being a seduction artist. Outwardly, they have a lot in common. The man after sex spends money on clothes and cars and affects to know have attained the good life in order that women will find him attractive. The coffee connoisseur does much the same sort of thing. The pay off for the seduction artist is that he gets laid. The pay off for the coffee connoisseur is ... well, what is it exactly.

The state of the coffee culture Pt 1

There was a review of coffee grinders in Wired last April that I have long meant to blog.

First a digression. About fifteen years ago now, I read a lot of articles about water features for gardens in order to prepare to build my own. Several of the articles I found featured a line about how you didn't want the finished product to sound like a running toilet. When I first read that line, I panicked. I pictured the garden atmosphere ruined because the sound was like a running toilet. I thought, "Maybe I shouldn't try this myself."

Which was exactly what the writers had been striving for.

Expert journalism—whether it's the op-ed page of the Washington Post or a review of coffee grinders in Wired—aims to make you feel helpless. This for a simple reason: If you didn't feel helpless, you might realize how little you need experts.

In this case, our writer, Lauren Crabbe, gets to work at making you feel like a loser right off the bat.

A great bag of coffee beans is the final product of a lot of hard work and a series of small miracles. From water quality at the farm, to the method used to process the cherries, to bean storage and shipment, and on to the final roasting, blending and bagging, those coffee beans have traveled a great distance and endured a lot of fondling before landing on your kitchen counter.

And then she slips in the first shot at undermining your confidence.

Now, it's up to you to brew it without messing everything up.

Now stop and ask yourself a  question: How much difference do you think the water quality at the farm really makes? Obviously it makes some difference that the water not be laced with diesel but do fine gradations in water quality make  a difference?

The correct answer is, "No!"The real point of that paragraph is to build up a whole of mystique about coffee. The truth is that coffee is produced in third world countries under conditions that are not only poorly controlled but under conditions which would be impossible to control. In the end, it really doesn't matter because you can produce good coffee under a fairly wide set of conditions. No, you couldn't grow good coffee in Montana but once you get into the right general territory, you can do it. The proof of this being that very good coffee is produced by unskilled labourers using crude equipment all over the world.

Now that she has you on the ropes, Crabbe goes in for the kill:

The biggest mistake home brewers make is in the grind. Most consumers are happy to buy pre-ground or (gasp) instant coffee, but if you're serious about your daily cup, you need to grind your own.

When coffee is ground, the surface area increases drastically, exposing the oils and dissolvable particles. The results -- and the taste -- will vary based on which method your grinder uses to pulverize the beans. There are the super-consistent conical burr grinders that have been around since the mortar and pestle went out of style. There are flat burr grinders which have a nasty habit of heating the coffee as they grind it. And there's the lowly blade grinders that will chop your coffee into a mix of huge chunks and super-fine powder. Seriously, if you're using a blade grinder, you'd be better off junking it and reverting to the aforementioned mortar and pestle.

There is some truth to this. Grinding coffee really does drastically increases the surface area exposing more of the oils and dissolvable particles  (grinding anything at all does). It's a good idea not to grind your coffee until just before you make it because the increased surface area is exposed to the air and leaving it like that will cause it to degrade in ways that will affect the flavour.

There is also a huge untruth here (but not necessarily a lie as Crabbe may actually believe what she is writing). That untruth is the claim that the coffee all needs to be ground to the same size.

The best grinder is the one that gives you the best particle consistency. 

That's roughly true. You want larger grounds for a French press than you do for espresso. But you don't need to be able to make gradations finer than you can see with your eyes and you definitely don't need to be any more consistent about the ground size than a quick visual appraisal will allow you to determine. (And if anyone tells you that you do need more, challenge them to a blind taste test.)

On the other hand, if you can be convinced you do, you can be convinced to spend a couple of hundred bucks on a machine that will use up a huge amount of counter space.

By the way, there is a fascinating reversal of attitude that happens as soon as Crabbe has you sufficiently paranoid.

But let's face it, grinding coffee should be as easy as drinking it. You're operating this machine before you've had your morning caffeine fix, so a good grinder needs to be quick, quiet, and easy to operate.

What you are being sold here is a sense of being elite with the minimum effort possible. Crabbe assumes that you don't have the time or inclination to really learn about coffee (and if you go to Wired for your expertise, she's probably right).

For your consideration

There is a great post up by the always worth reading Phillip Jenkins. Here is a bit ofa teaser:

... for most Protestants (and some Catholics), the ideas I am describing – the whole Marian lore – is so bizarre, so outré, so sentimental, and so blatantly superstitious that it just does not belong within the proper study of Christianity. If anything, it’s actively anti-Christian. Even scholars prepared to wrestle with the intricacies of Gnostic cosmic mythology throw up their hands at what they consider a farrago of medieval nonsense.

As I’ll argue in a forthcoming post, that response is profoundly mistaken. If we don’t understand devotion to Mary, together with such specifics as the Assumption, we are missing a very large portion of the Christian experience throughout history. It’s not “just medieval,” any more than it is a trivial or superstitious accretion.

This Catholic cheerfully admit to  having trouble with some Marian doctrines, and even more so with some of the interpretations of these doctrines I have heard from Rosary-wielding Catholics I have met. I look forward to reading what Mr. Jenkins has to say on the subject.

BTW: One thing I have always wondered about is the issue of Mary's death. Here again, is Jenkins,

This literature had an enormous impact in giving pseudo-scriptural foundation to the very widely held church doctrine of Mary’s Assumption or Dormition. Assumption is the Western and Catholic term, suggesting that she was taken to heaven prior to death; the Orthodox accept Dormition, namely that after her bodily death, her body was raised as the first sign of the general Resurrection.

"Assumption" suggests she was taken prior to death? I've had this suggested to me by starry-eyed Marians who, like Jenkins, take it to be the Catholic church's view that she was taken to heaven without dying. I think he's just wrong about that. What church authorities I have heard talking on the subject have tended to fudge the issue by saying that we don't know and that assumption doesn't necessarily imply that she didn't die. On the other hand, they are very, very, very careful not to offend the many devout Catholics who believe she did not die.

So which is it?

This is Caravaggio's famous paining of the death of the Virgin. There is a significant dog that didn't bark hiding here.

When it was finished in 1606, this painting was harshly condemned by authorities. They objected to the undignified way Mary is presented, that you can see her bare feet, that her stomach is bloated .... No one, however, objected to the fact that she is presented as dead. They didn't for the simple reason that they couldn't; her death had been represented in art many times before.

There are, of course, many hard-core Marians who would like to have the church adopt the position that she did not die. Happily, John Paul II was not among them.

The Widmerpools and the fall of Anthony Powell

I'm on the 11th of the twelve books in The Dance to the Music of Time. I picked it up as soon as I finished Proust.

Powell was a lot better than he gets credit for. That said, something goes wrong in the final season of the novel. (Dance is a novel made up of twelve volumes which are further organized into four seasons of three books each.) It's brilliant up until the end of book 9, The Military Philosophers. Book 10, Books Do Furnish a Room, falls off the standard Powell had maintained to that point but not so much that you don't hope Powell can pull it back together. Book 11, Temporary Kings, proves that hope groundless but remains a pleasant read even if not up to Powell's earlier standards. And then, disaster; Book 12, Hearing Secret Harmonies, is just awful.

An acquaintance of mine who has taught courses on, published articles and supervised theses written about Powell and Dance is of the opinion that Powell "went crazy" just before writing the final volume. Part of his anger is simply disappointment and part of it no doubt stems from having invested some of his academic career in what seemed a promising work only to have it not pay off.

It could be argued that it doesn't matter that much that the series lets down towards the end. As with Proust, you don't have to read the whole work to get a lot of good reading. You can stop after Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (my favourite) or The Military Philosophers and have a pretty satisfactory experience. Powell had also done very valuable work in influencing Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin and English anti-modernism generally, which alone is enough for us to remain forever grateful to him.

I suspect Powell's reputation would stand far higher today of he had managed, like Proust, to die before finishing. If he had left nothing but a sketch of the final two or three books, thereby inadvertently creating conceptual art, we would no doubt convince ourselves that a satisfying conclusion was possible (something that I think does happen with Proust) much the way we can look at a faded picture or listen to a beat up Edison cylinder and imagine how good it would be if only we had "the real thing".

So what goes wrong? There are a number of things.

1. The Lemon Girl has long been of the opinion that Pamela Widmerpool is one of the big problems with the later novels. I think that is right. She is a very real character. So real that all Powell's contemporaries had no trouble identifying Barbara Skelton as the model for Pamela Widmerpool. Ms. Skelton herself saw the similarity and took it with far more good humour than anyone familiar only with the character based on her would guess. The point of all that seeming digression being that, whatever is wrong with Pamela Widmerpool it isn't that she isn't a convincing character.

What I think is wrong with her is that Barbara/Pamela, however intriguing she might have been in real life, wasn't a good model for a character in a novel. And I think I know why because I was once in a long relationship with a fantastically promiscuous, careless and often cruel woman not unlike Pamela Widmerpool. Several times I've thought of using her in fiction—on the grounds that after all the suffering the bitch put me through, I should be able to make a little art and maybe money out of her with an easy conscience. I've always ended up giving up and this because a character like hers can't really go anywhere. She just is what she is and that is the end of the story. Any redemption would require her to betray her very being and to have her face some sort of downfall would be devoid of feeling because no one could feel much fear or pity at the fate of such a woman.

2. Which brings to Kenneth Widmerpool, whom Pamela marries. Widmerpool is unquestionably the greatest strength of the novel. Take him out of it and it would be a vastly diminished; so much so as to be not worth reading. That is quite a trick in that he is never a likeable character. But Widmerpool loses his "charm" towards the end.

I put the word in scare quotes because Widmerpool is not easy to like. From the beginning, one of the defining characteristics of Widmerpool is precisely that he isn't liked. And I think most people know someone like him at school—a boy or girl who is disliked for not-very-good reasons and yet somehow seems to be shaped by this unwarranted dislike into becoming genuinely difficult to like. (In Widmerpool's case, he came to school with the "wrong" type of overcoat.) And it is a lingering sense that maybe he might redeem himself that comes from this makes Widmerpool so intriguing. Right up until the war's end, you hope that he might change. After that there is no hope.

At which point, Powell saddles him with Barbara Skelton/Pamela.

3.  A related problem with the final volume is that it ends in 1971. Why is that a problem? Because it was written in 1975. Compare that with the opening volume, published in 1951 and concerned with an era some thirty years previous and you'll begin to see the problem. Powell simply didn't have enough distance and time to adequately assess the 1960s before writing about it.

He, like some lame NPR documentary on the 1960s, gets bogged down with a lot of stuff that seemed important at the time but proved to be much less so in the long run. In retrospect, the perspective we see in Mad Men—mostly focused on the world of business and family rather than rock and roll, drugs and the counterculture—gives a much better account of what the 1960s were really about than Powell's to-much-caught-up-with-the-fads-of-the-era account.

4. That feeds into the final, and I think most important, problem with the series. Powell simply never had an adequate philosophical framework to build the novel around. This seems quite forgivable to me: after all who could? Proust didn't either and anyone who really believes that time is in any sense regained is just shallow. The notion, entertained by both Powell and Proust, that a novelist has something useful to say about life in general as opposed to one particular era they happened to experience is about as perfect an example of hubris as you will ever find. Widmerpool's end is unsatisfying because too much depends on it.

What could he have done? The Dance, like British literature generally, struggles as soon as it begins to deal with events after the close of the second world war. British writers had grown up in a powerful and influential nation that dominated the English speaking world culturally, especially in high culture. This was suddenly all over. The election of the Labour Crapweasels after the war was an act of desecration of a once great culture comparable to what would have happened to Mother Theresa's legacy had her successors offered one of her hospices for use a season of Jersey Shore.

Writers who lived through this transition tended either to become bitter (Graham Greene, John le Carré,  Harold Pinter) or a comic to the point of being a little surreal (Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Tom Stoppard). Powell attempts to be cool and objective and does a better job than anyone else I can think of in doing so but bits off a big chunk in doing so. The problem isn't that he wasn't capable of it but that he should have focused much more time and effort on it. That falling of a great nation should have been the central theme. I think he might have done a much better job of it had he focused the final three novels on the period from 1945-1963 and wrapped the story up around something tragicomic like the Profumo Affair instead of trying to say something about the 1960s too.

A little light culture: Twerking the blurred lines

I suspect that from goldfish swallowing in the 1930s to planking in the 2000s, most fads tend to happen more in media coverage than they do in real life. And, as I've said before, ask a young person about any outrageous new behaviour you can make up and he or she will insist that they personally don't do it but they know lots of others that do.

Given that, I was a little surprised to be at a wedding a few days ago and see young women actually twerking. Apparently this one's real. To twerk, you plant your feet a little wider than shoulder width, squat and wiggle around in a sexually suggestive manner. You can really only do it if you're a woman and a relatively fit woman at that.

It's a lot easier to understand the phenomenon when you see it in person. It's much sexier in real life than it is in video. This is largely because it's done in a more restrained manner. It's really just a  dance move that a girl can slip into for a few moments. In real life it's not done by the sort of pathetic exhibitionists who put You Tube videos and that makes it much sexier.

That's generally true, by the way. Overt sluttiness may work on television but it doesn't in real life.

Anyway, to get back to the point, it makes a whole lot of sense and is much less shocking than you might be led to believe by media reports when you see it for real.

Oh! ....

I'm in town for the day and Ms. Althouse issued a challenge:

What songs do you have in your iTunes that begin with "Oh"? Don't add or subtract anything.

Her list is here.


Now for mine:

1. Oh Baby Mine (I Get So Lonely) by Guy Lombardo (featuring Bing Crosby) 
2. Oh I Baby by Bud Freeman
3. Oh Peter! (You're So Nice) Billy Banks/Jack Bland
4. Oh Susanna by Wendell Hall
5. Oh You Crazy Moon by Mel Tormé
6. Oh, Lady Be Good by Count Basie and his orchestra
7. Oh, Lady Be Good by The Gordons, Dizzy Gillespie & Stuff Smith
8. Oh, Lady Be Good by the New York Philharmonic & Zubin Mehta
9. Oh, Lady Be Good! by Fred Astaire
10. Oh, Look At Me Now! by Lee Wiley 
11. Oh, Miss Hannah by The Paul Whiteman Orchestra (featuring Bix Beiderbecke & Bing Crosby)
12. Oh, You Crazy Moon by Billy Eckstine & Russ Case Orchestra
13. Oh! Don't The Winds Blow Cold by George Formby
14. Oh! Red by Count Basie and his orchestra
15. Oh! Susanna by James Hill & Anne Davison 
16.  Oh! What It Seemed To Be by Jackie Gleason (featuring Bobby Hackett)
17. Oh! You Sweet Thing by Billy Banks/Jack Bland

Ms. Althouse was born at the beginning of 1950s and I was born at the end. I find it interesting that only two of my Oh-songs were recorded after I was born, and both are new versions of older songs. Ms. Althouse's list features only one song recorded before she was born.  And that is significant why? I don't know, I just found it striking.

If pushed, I'd say it might suggest something about the difference in tendencies of those born towards the beginning and those born towards the end of the baby boom. I might expand on that someday.

I'm driving back out of internet and cell phone range tomorrow.