Kazuo Ishiguro is a contemporary novelist very worthy of the Nobel Prize in Literature that he was awarded in 2017. Born in Japan and raised in Great Britain, Ishiguro differs from the Modernist and late Twentieth Century novelists who preceded him. Each of the Modernists developed a distinctive style that they applied to whatever subject matter they were dealing with. So a reader can recognize Hemingway for his short and aphoristic sentences, Faulkner for his long and complex sentences, Joyce for the allusive style of his masterpiece, “Ulysses”, and Mann for his richly descriptive style. That is different from Updike and Roth, both of whom wrote straightforwardly even if their subject matter was gauche. For his part, Ishiguro crafts a different style for each of his novels. He makes it seem that arriving at the style in which a novel will be written is part of the chore of writing because the style sets up the kind of world which he is creating. So “Never Let Me Go” sounded like a research report; “The Buried Giant” sounded like a legend; and “An Artist of the Floating World” sounded like a series of apologies, everyone deferential in what is supposed to be the Japanese manner. The subject matter of those three novels, however, was the same. They were about the impact on people’s lives of the loss of or never having had a memory of pivotal events. The clones in “Never Let Me Go” did not know their ancestry and never found out, however much the reader can catch on fairly early that they were descended from dogs. The people in “The Buried Giant” seem to forget things after a few days, and the Japanese in “An Artist of the Floating World” suppress their memories of what they did during the Second World War. Moreover, all three novels explore how and why it is that people are so deferential to those around them. They are very annoying even if some of the characters, such as the dog-clones, are quite endearing.
Read MoreThe Routine Republican Convention
David Brooks said on Friday that the talking points of the Republican Convention were incoherent. That is just incorrect, perhaps because Brooks preferred to believe Republicans had a sweeter tone in years past. But even on the first night, the talking points were neither new nor particularly biting than the accusations leveled against the Democrats ever since I started watching both Republican and Democratic Conventions ever since 1952. It has always been the penchant of Republicans to attack Democrats as Socialists or worse. They were also the exponents of Main Street and then of the suburbs. Republicans and Trump are against the labor unions and in favor of the corporate job creators. Republicans and Trump emphasize the danger of public rioting and urban unrest lest it reach to social anarchy. Republicans and Trump are bellicose about foreign nations, such as Cuba and the Soviet Union then, or, now, Venezuela and China and Iran. The great dirty secret is not that Trump took over the Republican Party, but that the Republican Party, however much its misgivings about his verbal excesses, is comfortable with most of his policy positions, to the extent that Trump can say he has a set of positions rather than a reflexive instinct for the most Conserrvative caricatures of American society. Henry Kissinger once said that the Republican Party was a first rate party with a second class constituency. He was probably thinking of the able cabinets Republican Presidents assembled once they got elected. That is no longer the case. The party is just its constituency.
Read MoreA Taste for "Lost Horizon"
On the one hand, I think Frank Capra’s “Lost Horizon”, from 1937, is a great movie that explores everyone’s sentimental search for a place of peace and quiet. On the other hand, I think that Howard Hawks’ 1938 “Bringing Up Baby”, despite its excellent pacing and performances, is just mildly amusing rather than hilarious. This preference may be merely personal, and so just a matter of taste in that limited meaning of the word, some people having a taste for salami while others do not, but perhaps taste is much deeper than that, about the way in which I apprehend the universe, taste then becoming a very profound matter indeed.
Read MoreThe Dull Democratic Convention
The Democratic Convention that ended on Thursday with Joe Biden’s acceptance speech, was a dull affair. That wasn’t just because there was no live hoopla on a convention floor. It was also that the convention organizers had failed to find a visual equivalent to that by creating fanciful settings in which to set the speeches. They did have a moment when you saw the states nominate Joe Biden with their landscapes in the background, so New Mexico looked like itself, as did American Samoa. But they needed the sort of people who design the opening night spectacles at the Olympics to choreograph some pageantry for an event that looked, instead, like something out of the early days of television. You might have thought that would be unnecessary given the gravity of the issues facing the nation, and these were indeed alluded to. Barack Obama took on Trump’s character, as well he could and might, but he did not spell out why the man is unfit for office. Why was he pulling his punches? Do the polls tell the Democrats not to go after Trump personally? Various speechifiers did lambast Trump on the issues that I, for one, think important. Trump had separated toddlers from their parents and made it hard for them to be reunited. He had not criticized Putin for putting a bounty on the lives of American troops. Unmentioned, however, was Trump’s on again and off again negotiations with the Chinese that had left farmers in the lurch. The speeches tended to be flat, more like a telethon, as one wag had it, which means for me that the speeches all said the same thing, which is that we would be spiritually better off if we give money to and, in this case, vote for a good cause, one that will bring us all together. Jerry Lewis did it better.
Read MoreThe Liturgy in "Revelations"
The older way to read the Bible is to take the text apart and show the various sources from which it was compiled. The Anchor Bible of the Seventies represented a kind of final step in what was known as the Higher Criticism. The editor of its edition of “The Book of Revelations” suggests that the material in the book comes largely from Jewish apocalypses although some other material is added on. That tells you that what separates “Revelations” from the rest of the New Testament is its ties to “Ezekiel”. It is not tied to the non-apocalyptic tone which pervades most of the Gospels, at least if you conceive Jesus and his followers, a few remarks to the contrary, to be in for the long haul of reconstructing mankind, which is what salvation is really about.
The newer way to read the Bible is to put the text together again by seeing it as a literary construction made up of a variety of materials whose final text, the one we have inherited for two thousand years or so, has a coherent meaning. The meanings in the New Testament are typological or allegorical. “Revelations”, by this light, can be interpreted, as it is, for one, by Bruce J. Malina in his still very useful 1983 book “The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology”, as using the visions of sky gods that are available to the Mediterranean world at the time of its composition as the basis for conceiving what a city of god would be like. What separates “Revelations” from the rest of the New Testament, in this case, is its adoption of astrological imagery.
Read MoreIncumbent and Post-Incumbency Presidential Prosecutions
Time moves quickly in an election season. There I was writing a response to Michelle Goldberg’s column in the NY Times in which she suggested that there should be prosecutions of Trump and his deputies for their illegal shenanigans in office after they had left office, however difficult that might be, she agrees, without it seeming to be just a political vendetta against the deposed party, when information came out about the President trying to interfere in the administration of an election by having his appointee as Postmaster General downsize the Post Office so that it could not handle what are likely to be the huge number of absentee ballots that are mailed in this November. So the question shifts from what to do with him after he is defeated to what to do with him now, he having confessed that he wanted to withhold money from the USPS just so that it would not be able to process the ballots. That is a real life case of election tampering, which is barred by most state laws, and certainly an impeachable offense in that Nixon was hounded out of office for illegal acts to cover up his trying to influence the election of 1972, while here we have an attempt to intrude on the administration of an election, all out there in the open. But before going on to that, let us consider the Michelle Goldberg case for going after past crimes of a President.
Read MoreNurse Jane Eyre
A Masterpiece Theatre version of “Jane Eyre” that ran some years ago was full of candelabras and castles, dark shadows, and mean faced mysterious people carrying out plans understood, if at all, only by themselves and their subconsciouses. That is fully in keeping with understanding Charlotte Bronte’s book, which was published in 1848, as of the same genre, gothic romance, as her sister Emily’s “Wuthering Heights”, which was published in 1847. Those girls sure had raging hormones.
There is another way to look at “Jane Eyre”. It is largely a realistic novel that shares the sentimentality of “Oliver Twist”, which had been published some ten years before. That is hard to believe only because the Gothic romance,in general, precedes the novel that spells out the conditions of the poor, but authors don’t just exemplify the periods of which they are a part. Literature is a vast overlap of everything that can impinge upon an author: public history, personal history, the history of genres, some impulse of genius. You have to look at the text to see what was produced by the mind of the author.
Read MoreSports and Other Entertainments
A good way to see the difference between art and entertainment is to consider sports. Yes, there is the ballet of basketball, and a batter’s swing can be said to be beautiful. But these are stretches, metaphors parading as accurate descriptions, as when baseball is described as an American religion when it is just something that excites a feeling of loyalty about something not to be taken all that seriously. Bostonians and New Yorkers make believe they hate one another’s baseball teams, but in a crunch, as after the Patriot’s Day bombing, the police and fire departments work closely together. The conflict between Red Sox Nation and the Yankee Empire is an affectation. The same is the case with sports and art. Sports are not taken seriously as art. They do not make the same claim at the transcendental, or at originality. A batter is not rewarded for the creativity of his swing, just how dependable is his production of hits or home runs. Even very well paid players know their place. They say, at least, that what is important is providing for the economic security of their families; sports, after all, is just a game.
Read MorePolitics and Time
Politics is one of only a few social institutions that are complex in that they embody an existential paradox. On the one hand, politics is dramatic. The 1968 Democratic nominating process and the campaign that followed afterwards where Nixon went from a close to thirty percentage point lead over Humphrey to pulling out a victory by only about a half of one percent is testament to that. The same is so in any number of elections when people come from behind or, even more surprisingly, simply solidify their leads, as happened for George W. Bush in his bid for reelection, despite having led the nation into war under false pretenses, the Iraq War at its peak when the election was held. Politics provides the public with a bevy of interesting characters whose repeated exposure to the public makes the public think that it knows what these people are really like; campaign spectacles like rallies and even, up to forty years ago, the intrusion of assassinations and assassination attempts to provide dramatic reversals that keep the plots intriguing. Yet at the same time, politics is dramatic without doing what drama does, which is elide time so that the boring parts are cut out or shortened or compressed. Far from exemplifying Aristotle’s principle that there are unities of time and space in drama, politics works itself out in real time, events moving no faster than it takes them to unfold, however extended may be the longueurs between pivotal events. This fact about politics, that it is dramatic without eliding time, goes far to explain the texture of the public’s exposure to political life as well as the dynamics within politics itself.
Read MoreThe Veep Sweepstakes
The current debate over who should be Vice President Biden’s running mate this fall is likely to be settled in a week or so when Biden announces his choice. It is a remarkable feature of our ever evolving and largely unwritten constitutional system that this choice is left to him entirely alone, each of the contenders proclaiming that they will be satisfied to be spear carriers in his campaign if that is the role assigned to the. And yet the choice is likely to be very significant, given his age. His Vice President may well ascend to office either by death or because Biden does not run for a second term and his Vice President would therefore have an inside lane for the nomination in 2024. But the Vice Presidency has become something at the disposal of the nominee for over a very long time reaching back into the early Nineteenth Century and has, if anything, become even more so now that the Vice President, since Jimmy Carter was President, has significant responsibilities and so the President is likely to want someone with whom he feels comfortable and who shares his basic policy viewpoints.
Read MoreWorking for Trump
Let us commit a bit of sociology by proposing a typology, which means a systematic set of ways in which something can be accomplished. Here are the ways in which a subordinate can support their superior: the subordinate can agree or disagree or disregard or amplify the views expressed by his or her superior. All four of these options apply to one or another of the people who work for Trump, and so we can explore the dynamics of subordination as well as why Trump seems so difficult a person to work for.
Read MoreBrueghel's Novelistic Landscapes
Brueghel changed secular landscapes into historical ones by changing the moment chosen for portrayal from after the event to just the moment before the event portrayed. A further limitation imposed by the artist on himself changes his landscapes into what can be called, with hindsight, novelistic landscapes. The landscape is composed in such a way that any one of the figures in it could be the framing figure. The hunters descending the hill in “Hunters in the Snow” are not yet returned to the village and they are the focal figures of the picture but the picture can be imagined from the viewpoint of any of those who see them descend, many of the same details caught in the frame, just from a different angle.
Read MoreUtopias
A utopia is a society that has abolished the difference between public and private life. That definition of a utopia is superior to the usual one which regards a utopia as a perfected society, whether that means everyone is equal or everyone is in their properly subordinated social positions, because the new definition reveals the mechanism by which some perfect ordering is accomplished and also because it does away with the need to distinguish between utopias and dystopias, all of whom have this same characteristic, the observer to decide whether one or another utopia is to be admired. In Plato, everyone’s character as either a soldier, an artisan or a philosopher is in keeping with their role in society. In Orwell’s “1984”, everyone is being retrained so that the only emotions that are felt internally are the ones approved of by the state, and so sex, which is personal, is a revolutionary concept. In his far more probing “Brave New World'', Aldous Huxley suggests that a person’s chemicals have been balanced and re-balanced since before birth so that the person will be an appropriate social being, only the savages who live on the fringes of society going their own way. This new definition explains the paradox of Bertrand Russell’s witty observation about Plato’s Republic, which is that it is a place where everyone is equally unhappy. It is why both North Korea and an Amish community are utopian in prospect if not in reality. The definition applies to the Christian idea of Heaven and Hell, where people get what they deserve which is what each of their nature’s require, whether that is some degree of pain for those assigned to the levels of Hell, or the equality of the ecstasy that will be achieved in Heaven. Nobody in Hell deserves to be anyplace else and there are no slackers in Heaven. So, in utopias and dystopias, there is supposedly no struggle between the internality of the individual and the person’s public function.
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Vermeer's "The Milkmaid"
A good place to start an interpretation of Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid” is to ask why he left the wall blank. That is not his usual procedure. Vermeer is inclined to fill walls with maps and other decorations that bring the outside world into the confines of the room that makes up his canvas so as to show how the two, the private and the public worlds, reflect and refract on one another, the house as a realm of the private while the public life of the Netherlanders stretched around the world. It is widely noted that Vermeer had originally painted a map on the wall in “the Milkmaid” only to paint it over. Why?
Read MoreWoody Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors"
Woody Allen was a prolific filmmaker who shared with two other prolific filmmakers, Billy Wilder and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a preference for character and plot over spectacle, which is what most American directors do instead, even though through his career he was particularly good at filming places such as New York City, Paris and Barcelona. What stands out about all three of these directors is that they were adept at tussling with moral dilemmas, Wilder was the most cynical of the three, as when he dealt with the fine points of the moral ambiguities to be found in “The Apartment”. Sure, Fred MacMurray was a louse, but was the Shirley Maclaine character any better even if Jack Lemon fell for her? Or was that just another side of his weakness as a human being? Fassbinder gives away that his movie “World on a Wire” is about the nature of identity in that most of the people at a party at the beginning of the movie seem like mannikins. So the question is what is a mannikin and what is a human being. “Crimes and Misdemeanors”, which is one of Woody Allen’s most memorable films, has a message, as do many of them. In this case, it is not the claim that there is no justice, which is what some critics at the time of the release of the film in 1989 said was the case. The thesis of the movie is that people can be forgiven for their crimes but are never forgiven for their misdemeanors. That is a morality far harsher than any other I know of, and is very carefully arrived at and so, I would suggest, Allen makes a contribution to thought far greater than film directors are usually credited with, however much Allen himself has many times said he only retails what he has read in one book or another during his career of self-education.
Read MoreThe Future of the Presidency
Gerald Ford, in his first speech in office, said that we were over our “national nightmare”. What followed from it were a series of measures to bring some control over the federal bureaucracy so that a future President could not manipulate it in the ways Nixon had. These included the Inspectors General offices in the various cabinet departments, those same offices which President Trump has vacated so that he can replace the career officials with his own supporters. What will happen when the present national nightmare is ended and Joe Biden becomes President, which assumes that state election officials will conduct honest elections and that the Russians will not very significantly influence the campaign or its results? The larger question is a very hard one to answer.
Read MoreWedding Announcements
A good way to see that social class is alive and well in the United States is to consult the wedding announcements in the Weekend Style Section of the New York Times. This is not what most sociologists would do. That is because those announcements are not a random sample of anything and, with the exception of the piece about the featured couple, largely contain only the information selected for presentation by the people making the announcements. Sociologists (and, nowadays, economists have entered this discussion) prefer to look at the various determinants of social class such as prior family wealth, education, and income to predict whether people are more likely over the generations or within a career to improve their chances of having power, prestige or position or additional wealth and income. But a consideration of what the Times chooses to notice about the lives of people tells more about how people make choices which have to do with social class or, more to the point, what beds they chose to sleep in for the long run.
Read MoreHeroism
Heroism or courage is usually thought of as a personality attribute. People are either brave or they are not when they are called on to be so, which means a hero is the opposite of the normal person who could not or would not rise to the circumstances. Achilles was brave; Audie Murphy and Sergeant York were brave; Freud was brave, in an extended sense of the term, because he was willing to challenge the conventional thoughts of his time in a major way that earned him derision at best and a suspicion that this man was preoccupied with things better left alone. Part of his success was to legitimize the connection between sex and ordinary feeling as a fit subject for communication. Most of us just keep our secrets.
There is another way to look at heroism or courage. It is to emphasize the situation rather than the person. Certain situations require a person to take an action that will be thought brave or courageous; to act otherwise is cowardly rather than ordinary. The soldier who is awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for throwing himself on a grenade to spare his comrades is brave, though, depending on the details of the circumstances, if he had acted otherwise so as to save himself when that would only have meant that all the people in his foxhole would have died, would have made him a coward, and we do not know whether there was a way he might have hunkered down and saved only himself and still have been considered honorable.
Read MoreWalter Benjamin
Literary criticism in the Thirties had a number of branches. Edmund Wilson published “Axel’s Castle” in 1931. It was a book that compared Imagist poetry to the poetry that came before. It was followed in 1941 by “The Wound and the Bow”, which was a Freudian interpretation of the Modernist literature of his time, and in 1943 he published “To the Finland Station”, which was an assessment of Marxist writers. Wilson was less driven by ideology than by the critical project itself, which was to get the hang of what an author was saying, whatever was the subject matter or the relevant theory. William Empson, on the other hand, had a consistent point of view. He published “Seven Types of Ambiguity” in 1930 and “Some Versions of Pastoral” in 1935. In the first book, he carefully took apart the idea of simile and metaphor so as to establish the resources language provided to a writer. In the second book, he reduced literature to its conventionalized genres, so that the Gothic romance was a form of the pastoral, a form that stretched back to Vergil and beyond. Literary language and literary form were what made literature work. Walter Benjamin, for his part, had a Marxist interpretation of literature that was perhaps best realized in his “The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, published in 1936. This last has remained remarkably influential. Both Susan Sontag and Rosalind Krauss took it seriously as the way to understand art. I want to look at what Benjamin proposes in this very short book of his, why I think it is so imperfect, and compare it to other works of aesthetics which seem to me to get the relation between art and modernity more correctly.
Read MoreNuclear Amnesia
The coronavirus pandemic is pretty bad as catastrophes go. It has killed more people in the United States than the number of U. S. soldiers killed in World War I. It has had a heavy economic impact and we do not know how quickly the country will recover from the economic downturn. It has had a psychological impact in that people are asked to stay home and they are rebelling against that because it disrupts their lives too much, whatever may be the dangers of contagion. It leaves everybody with the feeling of how vulnerable we are to the almost invisible world of microbes. And the situation is getting worse rather than better. What if this turns into a general panic, with people roving the streets to attack who knows what? I have been told that Periclean Athens survived a plague and life went back to normal. I am not so sure that will happen this time around. The Black Plague changed the European economy and may have been responsible for the end of feudalism.
But this pandemic, I would insist, has not been the scariest time in the past hundred years, dating back to the last pandemic, the so-called “Spanish Flu”, which was, in fact, of American origins. That “honor” is to be reserved for the Cold War which was waged between the United States and the Soviet Union from, let us say, the time of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri in 1946, which all but declared it, the President of the United States sitting behind Churchill at the time, to 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and Reagan had arrived a few years before at what amounted to a Soviet surrender arrangement with Gorbachev, the details of which have not yet been made public. During that 43 year long war, the United States also lost as many soldiers as it had in World War I, if you add together Vietnam and Korea, two wars in which the United States and its allies engaged with Soviet or Communist proxies, and also add in the dead among our allies that resulted from other proxy wars in Africa and South America (remember Chile? Remember the Bay of Pigs?). Worse than that, during the Cold War. we were under the threat of most of us dying as a result of a nuclear exchange in which both sides would destroy one another within thirty minutes of launching. “The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists” was posting how close we were to midnight on its monthly cover and, according to its editors, we came within one minute of midnight. The talk was of “Better Red than Dead” and children were taught to hide under their desks to avoid bomb blast and many of us who were children at the beginning of the Cold War dreamed about atomic attacks and their aftermath.
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