The publication recently of the letters between Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell and their circle, entitled “The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979”, turns a reader’s attention to both their time and his poetry. What comes across from the letters is that for all their passion and spontaneity, they are extremely mannered, the two people living up to their reputations as intellectuals of the age by existing on the tetterhooks of their perceptions, ever trying to squeeze out an insight or put a point so freshly that they will be complemented by posterity for their sensitivities. This is clear, for example, in a letter to Elizabeth Hardwick from 1970 in which Lowell is just making chitchat rather than talking about their finances or about emotional relationships, and so gives away a lot about how his mind works.
Read MoreComedy and Tragedy in "Pride and Prejudice"
“Pride and Prejudice”, as well as the other Jane Austen novels, can be appreciated for their sparkling dialogue and their vivid characters and the clear narrative lines that manage to balance off multiple characters, as well as for the very detailed portrayal of the world of the country gentry in Regency England. The truth, however, is that Jane Austen accomplishes much more than that. She provides an objective appraisal of the human condition that you will find nowhere else except in Shakespeare and in some of the books of the Old Testament, notably in “Genesis” and the story of David as told in “Samuel I and II”. Among other things, Austen takes a perfectly objective approach to her characters, explaining what they are with utmost clarity, warts and all, while most novelists, including Dickens, take sides, preferring their heroes to their villains, while Jane Austen is beyond that, and that in itself is very liberating as it calls forth in a reader the ability also to be beyond judgment. People are what they are. Deal with it. Emma, for one, is less talented, and more superficial, than others in the Jane Austen repertoire. Elizabeth Bennet, for example, must have been an insufferably awkward and outspoken young woman at the beginning of "Pride and Prejudice", just as Darcy thought her to be, but she also has appeal as an extremely intelligent and firm and deeply moral person, which also appealed to Darcy, who has to be given credit for seeing her as a diamond in the rough. All of Jane Austen's heroines as flawed but not unworthy just because of that. Their flaws could have made them into tragic heroines, as in Ibsen, but instead Austen gives life to each of them so that they become precious souls instead of doomed creatures.
Read MoreThe Political Doldrums
Everyone I know is depressed about politics. Maybe it is because we are in mid-winter, and so caught up in Shakespeare “A Winter’s Tale”, where people cannot help but engage in sin for no reason at all and so, one can surmise, are cursed with original sin. Maybe it is because we are almost up to the Iowa caucuses and no Democratic candidate has caught fire, Democrats, as the axiom has it, wanting to fall in love with a candidate while Republicans only care about who is next in line. The Democratic primary candidates all seem unsuited for the role of someone who offers a new day. Warren and Sanders are too Left; Biden is too old; Buttigieg is too young; and Amy Klobuchar seems to be everybody’s idea of a perfect vice-presidential candidate: charming, left of center, a good ticket balancer-- even if Blacks may demand that place on the ticket-- but too narrow a vision in that winning every county in Minnesota is not exactly what you want to go on a bumper sticker.
Read MoreJane Austen's Conservatism
Jane Austen is a Conservative. That is not because she espouses Conservative ideology, as do Doestoevski and Tolstoy, nor as Thomas Mann endorsed Liberal ideology. It is not because she seems to have sided with the Conservative side in the Hastings trial or did not decry Sir Thomas Bertram in “Mansfield Park” for owning land in slave holding Jamaica. Rather, it is because she shares the complicated view of human nature and what we would now call the human condition that was also held by Dr. Johnson and Edmund Burke just a generation before and was carried on a generation later by Thomas Carlyle and John Henry Newman. This line of thinkers and writers were opposed to the Enlightenment, as that was practiced by the French philosophes, as well as by such writers as Wordsworth and Shelley and Hazlitt in England, all of whom favored the ideas of universal human rights and the equality of man. Jane Austen saw those ideas as hopelessly superficial and expressions of the enthusiasm she identified with Methodism. Her Conservatism is not to be confused with present day Conservatism because it was still humanitarian and progressive in that Austen and other Conservatives were in favor of mitigating the conditions of the poor and modernizing agriculture. It is just that they thought the Enlightenment and Liberalism turned the mind and heart away from the complexities of life.
Read MoreWendy Brown's "Neoliberalism"
Political theory in the Twenty-First Century is very old fashioned because it engages in the kind of theorizing that took place in the Nineteenth Century, when Marxism was in vogue. That means that Wendy Brown, among others, is still mired in the attempt to separate illusion from reality, the ruling classes and the working class engaged in a dialogue whereby the ruling class is trying to foist upon the workers and the poor a distorted view of their real economic condition. For Marx, that meant that religion served as an opiate of the people. Racist ideology and a moronic popular culture would also serve as ways to keep the poor, the working class, and even part of the middle class, from recognizing the true root of the evils that befell them, which was a social structure controlled, as the contemporary argot has it, by the upper one-percent of the population. Ideology and cultural superstructure keep the exploitative economic and social system in place.
Read MoreThe December Democratic Debate
The Democratic candidates have settled into their grooves. We pretty much know what each of them will sound like when they go into their spiels and so we had last night a repeat performance which lets the citizenry retaste the flavors to help them decide which one to favor. Joe Biden sounded confident and well informed and crisp on foreign policy. Unlike Warren, who said we weren’t up to the challenge, he said that the reason Obama had not closed down Guantanamo was because the Administration didn’t have the votes in Congress to do so. In answer to a question about the Administration hiding the true facts of what was going on in Afghanistan, Biden sidestepped the question of whether the Administration had mislead the public and said that he had been against the Afghan policy, including the Surge, all along, and that he, if he became President, would get out of Afghanistan as soon as possible, leaving behind only special forces to act as a counter-terrorist force rather than as a counter-insurgency force. Crisp answers. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were full of their righteous indignation about the woes that still prevail in American society and blaming it on the few who have great wealth rather than on the many who voted for Trump and his policies. Warren says the economists who disagree with her are just wrong, and some of the commentators on PBS during the breaks in the debate wondered how long she could get away with that. Steyer said once again that he had always wanted to impeach Trump, and that is certainly true, even if it was before the Ukraine revelations that made the task necessary, which is the way Pelosi and I both see it. The Republicans who claim that Democrats wanted to impeach Trump from Day One are thinking of only a few Congresspeople plus Steyer.
Read More"Luminism"
“Luminism” is a term first used by the art historian John Baur in the 1950’s to describe some of the second generation of Hudson River School landscape painters, such as John Frederick Kensett and Fitz Hugh Lane, who had a distinctive style which created, so art critics say, a serene view of nautical and seashore life by emphasizing distinctive colors, hiding their brush strokes, and highlighting the light-- “the illumination”-- of their paintings. They are supposedly influenced by Transcendentalist thought about the immanence of religion. I want to provide another category for the description of their paintings that I think better captures their essence and explains the other facets of their work and better places this modest sub species of landscape painting in the context of overall art history. That is the fact that they were dedicated to sweeping geometrical shapes and used hard edges on both human and natural objects. That made the Luminists quite different from the artists that preceded them where the power of the painting came from the richness of its darker hues and the thickness of paint that assumed an almost velvet like sheen, and where colors blended or even seemed to leech over to one another so as to create shadows and thickness and perspective. To the contrary, Luminism created a painting very much in focus and so seems remarkably realistic, almost photographic, even if its colors were fanciful or, what is the same thing, more true to life in a funny kind of way.
Read MorePopular and High Culture
Popular culture is usually regarded as merely a weaker form of high culture in that it engages a less educated audience and so goes for simpler intellectual and emotional effects than does an audience prepared to deal with the difficulties in art and literature and music. It is all a matter of degree. I want to suggest a very different relation between the two. Popular and high culture are radically different in their nature in that high culture is self contained, each work a world of its own, however much criticism and footnotes can help supply the context for the work, while works of popular culture supply their own context, cluing the audience into where the work is placed within the society and how it is to be categorized in their minds. So sports events coverage will tell you that you are getting up and personal and broadcasters will allude to the events happening around them, as when a journalist will lead off an already written column with an allusion to what happened yesterday, while a “serious” essayists will hesitate before including a reference to what will soon be considered dated, such as what is today a vertually obligatory reference to Trump. A work of popular culture, such as the movie “Love Actually”, released in 2003, bears the tell tale sign of its time by referring to the fact that telephone calls on 9/11 were about love not hate or revenge and so to prove its point that love is all about us. A reference today to 9/11 would be unnecessary but at the time it was all but obligatory and clearly came readily to mind.
The methods by which popular culture recaptures its context and so successfully places itself in our past, are what we might call the structures of the moment, nostalgia and dramatic irony. Consider two radio broadcasts from 1938 by Paul Whiteman and his orchestra that have come to my attention recently.
Read MoreThe Impeachment Follies
The current impeachment proceedings are both a tragedy and a farce. They are a tragedy in that the nation has been brought so low by a character who has neither the grandeur of Richard III nor the fatal flaw of character that plagued Lyndon Johnson who, despite his political sophistication, thought he could negotiate with Ho Chi Minh as if the North Vietnamese leader were the head of the United Auto Workers. They are a farce because everybody is fighting against the obvious truth of the charges and defending Trump by saying that he is, at bottom, too stupid and disorganized to carry out any conspiracy. We are in the presence of a very unusual bad guy. It would take Mel Brooks to do him justice, although Alec Baldwin does a very good job.
Read More"Music for the Millions"
Although, during the Second World War, there were many films that had nothing to do with the war, that including the first of the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road movies, Hollywood did not want to admit in the films made during the war about that war that the American people were living through the worst of times and that their equilibrium had become unsettled. Sure, you could engage in gallows humor. In one of those movies set in a USO canteen, a sweet young thing answers the question of what she wants to be with the quip “Hitler’s widow!”, a remark greeted with cheers and applause. We would give our all to bring down the Fuhrer. But delving deeply into other than brave emotions was another thing and yet it happened, most notably, I think, in “Music for the Millions”, which begins as one thing and becomes something very different and very disturbing.
Read MoreCultural Mutation
Cultural mutation, which is the successive modification of a cultural item one feature at a time until it is something very different, however still recognizable, is a way to understand what is happening in a number of emotionally charged issues from race relations to epidemiology even though social scientists do not usually treat culture as something subject to spontaneous or creative change or as having much of an impact on social structure.
Culture is usually regarded by anthropologists as the continuing way of life of a people, embracing customs, laws and beliefs, and so very stable and self-perpetuating and arising for unknown reasons, while sociologists emphasize the way culture reinforces the social structure that exists because it is transmitted by institutions that are answerable to the structure, as when television transmits what its advertisers will approve of, social media proving themselves maverick in that opinions therein percolate up from the people, and so it is understandable to think government and other institutions of culture, such as the press, want to see the social media controlled so that they do not promulgate alternative opinions. Culture is also taken to be a bridge or the medium through which change takes place in that culture diffuses innovations across a population, as when it spreads knowledge of vaccination, even though it is not responsible for original ideas. These theories are contrary to the perspective of humanists, which sees culture as the source of new ideas, whether in science, as when Darwin and Newton invent new perspectives because of their own ruminations while building on precedent thinkers, Darwin a mutation on Malthus and Lyell, while Newton was contemplating Copernicus and Galileo-- and vaccination was, after all, invented by a particular doctor in England on the basis of his observation of cows and the lack of smallpox among cow maids. Ingenuity and insight count. The humanist perspective can be applied to current events and in that light a cultural mutation takes place when an image or idea is gradually altered by having only one of its features changed at a time so that it bears a family resemblance to what is already familiar but where there is a change in its meaning or connotations. Culture is alive in that such changes are going on all the time. It is difficult to recognize how a culture is changing because so many mutations are in process at any one time.
Read MoreHow The Arts Evolve
At least in the history of the modern world, high brow forms of art and culture evolved out of popular forms of entertainment. Every genre came to provide deep feelings and insights into the nature of life, those experiences presented in a beguiling way: with suspense, or local color, or characters worth noticing. The modern drama from Shakespeare through Genet, for example, was propelled out of the biblical plays performed in the English countryside and in churches, those allegorical and simplified dramas showing their abiding presence in the tragic comedies of the theatre of the absurd and, in America, in the moralizing of O’Neill and Williams who, in spite of the depth of character they also provided, constructed dramatic arcs through which people got their just deserts, just as had been true in ”Everyman”. But that process of high culture growing from popular culture, and not just in the theatre, had not been apparent during the two cultural periods known as “Modernism” (circa 1895-1938) and “The Age of Anxiety” (circa 1938-1968) because of the predominance of the elitist or experimental novel, like those of Joyce and Kafka, and the paintings of, for example, Picasso and Rothko, the literature and art inaccessible to the popular reader and viewer, and so we are likely to still think that the present cultural period, known as “Contemporary” or “Postmodern” is, like its two predecessor periods, elitist in origin, when in fact all of these periods were ones in which culture had its roots in the popular culture rather than in top down culture.
Read MoreNon-Modernist American Artists
American art in the Twenties and Thirties was not largely influenced by the Modernist artists who worked in Europe. There are no hints of Picasso or Matisse or Chagall or Mondrian or Braque, no departures in the meaning or purposes of representation, whether that means Picasso’s distortions of what is visible and invisible about a figure, superimposing parts of bodies so that a number of moments can be appreciated as simultaneous, nor of Chagall’s fanciful use of legend with no great respect for what would have been considered what is appropriate to a single composition, nor Matisse’s use of color and alteration of perspective so as to create very psychologically intense pictures of spaces and viewpoints, nor the geometry of Mondrian and Braque replacing subject matter entirely. Rather, what the American artists of the Twenties and Thirties try to do, I think, is to counter or adapt to the other visual art that had intruded into the cultural spotlight, and that was photography. This thesis is an application of what I call “The Laocoon Principle”, in honor of Gottfried Lessing, the eighteenth century aesthetician who focussed on the way the nature of a medium impacts on what an artist presents. The American artists did not face up to Modernism because of their preoccupation with distinguishing themselves from or imitating or adapting to photography, an art form taking up ever more room, especially ever since photographs rather than engravings had become a main feature of Twenties newspapers, what with their visual coverage of the slum poor, perp walks and urban construction.
Read MoreThe High Victorian and The Late Victorian
The Victorian period shares the characteristics that mark other cultural periods. It lasts about fifty years, in its case from the accession of Victoria to the throne in 1840 to the performance in London in 1893 of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome”, so different in texture from the melodrama and sanctimonious morality of Pinero’s “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray”, which had appeared earlier in the year, and so illustrates another characteristic of periods, which is that periods come to abrupt ends and beginnings. (Queen Victoria herself lingered on until 1901.) A cultural period also has a set of themes that are unifying among the various arts of literature and painting and drama, which in the case of the Victorian means the fate of the individual in the complex world of the city and in the midst of an industrialized landscape, every person both ambitious to make their own way and also alienated from what seems emotionally unsatisfying about generally accepted customs and overly rigorous laws, as that is exemplified by both Oliver Twist and Jean Valjean. A cultural period is also international in scope in that all the nations of Europe and North America are part of it even if it is known in France as the era of Pre-Impressionism and Impressionism in honor of the central role of painting in French culture during those years. A cultural period is also dominated by certain cultural forms, and in the Victorian that means the novel and grand opera, both of which are sprawling affairs, employing plots and subplots wherein often outrageously individual characters play out their lives against the background of a richly imagined society. Think of “Great Expectations”, “The Count of Monte Cristo”, and “Rigoletto”.
Read MoreThe November Democratic Primary Debate
It isn’t easy to run for President, or so my reading and what I have observed on television informs me. The primary candidates are in a grind that will get even worse when one of them gets the nomination. Each of them attend four of five meetings a day at civic auditoriums, as well as in living rooms and in diners, marching in local parades, chatting with as many voters as they can, Elizabeth Warren famous for taking selfies with all comers. And, at the same time, the candidates are getting briefed on the news of the day, which means, at the moment, what is being said at the House impeachment hearings, so that they can provide instant judgments on unfolding events, those required by the journalists who trail them, the candidates knowing that any word out of place will be interpreted in the worst possible way. Also, at the same time, the candidates have to keep in touch with their donors, their staff back at headquarters and, for their own sanity, with their own families. How to manage that? It takes a lot of determination as well as a bank of stamina which few healthy people in their younger years would lay claim to, much less septuagenarians, Maybe the staff of the candidates schedule time for a snooze just so the candidate from tiredness will not lapse into a gaffe. (I remember when the Republican candidate for Vice President in 1960, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. was criticized for changing into pajamas for his naps). Maybe it is just that the candidates have been at campaigns for so long that the rigors of campaigning are second nature to them.
Read MoreFrom Whence Contemporary Authority Flows
Max Weber defined “authority” as the ability to convince people to follow your lead, which was different from its companion concept, ”power”, which is the ability to get people to do what you want even if they don’t want to. One of the main and perhaps original sources of that thing he called “power” was what Weber labelled as “charisma”, which meant the ability of a person to be so compelling a figure that people would do what he said, they somehow mesmerized because of that person’s personal appeal. And so Hitler was charismatic, even while FDR, however charming, was also the bearer of the TR-Wilsonian ideology, somewhat modified, that the purpose of government was to make the lives of people better and so to expand the role of government to accomplish that end, a principle Democrats come back to even if not in so many words, it certainly different from the alternative principle, which is that the purpose of government is not to make things better but to put as many brakes as possible on progressive impulses so as to further feather the nests of already rich people.
Read MoreRothko, Pollock and Elsworth Kelly
Abstract Expressionism is an art movement that prided itself on its lack of meaning, that its large canvases were displayed for themselves, for their own sake, for what they were. A canvas need have no meaning, representational or otherwise, which is what Jackson Pollock said when he gave one of his many interviews about his art. He parried the question about the meaning of his art with the question: you don’t ask a field of flowers what they mean, do you? Actually, it is possible to give an even more radical characterization of what came to be called Abstract Expressionism, the movement first called “action painting”, in that it was a set of actions perpetrated by the painters and also because the paintings were so kinetic, which is not really true either, because that is only true of Pollock, because Rothkos, for their part, just sit there, taking you inside them as you contemplate them some more.
Read MoreLanguage and Reason
There are two extreme ways by which to understand the relation of language to reality. One is to think of language as a representation of reality and in that case, as Bertram Russell put it, a well formed, which means grammatical, proposition is always either true or false because it cannot but be an assertion about reality. That allows for a lot of badly formed propositions, those to be regarded as not much more than nonsense, of no use to the speakers. A professor of mine, a pragmatist, took this view, when he held that what most literary critics were doing when they talked about symbols or what sociologists were doing when they spoke about norms, was just mumbo-jumbo, sounds without meaning, because they could not give clear definitions of their basic terms. Most exercises in language should simply be dismissed as nonsense, however sincere the speakers. It should be remembered that even Aristotle, who supposed that most argument was rhetorical in that it was aimed at winning over people to a leader by persuading them in ways that would appeal to them, still imagined that those forms of persuasion were made up mostly of deformed or short circuited logic, a leap of inference required to get from one place to another. Even tyrants sounded somewhat logical.
Read MoreGeneralizations about Cultural Periods
A cultural period is a span of years during which the themes and forms of expression are similar and, in fact, unique, and so a cultural period can be said to exhibit the spirit of its age, which is certainly the way that William Hazlitt, that wonderful English Romantic critic, looked at the matter. Alterations in themes and genres provide a definition for a period, and so the long Elizabethan Age, which lasts from the Silver Poets of the 1570’s through John Donne, who died in 1631, is unified by its emphasis on drama and on the idea of the conceit, an image exploited for its various meanings. Any of the periods since the time of Chaucer and before and right up to the present can be considered in this light.
Read MoreTrump and Decorum
Now that events are moving quickly and Trump may not be in charge for much longer, it is time to consider what it was that made him such a galvanizing figure and why that ran out of steam so quickly. It is important to answer these questions in part to create a historical record while the flavor of him is still with us and also because the way he exits office, whether in chains or on a gurney, as opposed to in a Nixonian display of bravado, may lie in his character, and the clue to that character is why people were drawn to support him in the first place as well as in the three years of his Presidency.
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