Critics tend to diminish the efforts of John Updike because they think of the late writer as having been fluent rather than deep, Updike creating concoctions that are entertaining and all too tied together rather than a set of ideas that are riveting. Updike is all about sex and religion and so it might seem weighty but what critics say about these matters are unsurprising and that the forays into politics are embarrassing, especially in his later novels. John Updike’s novel “Terrorist”, one of those later ones, supposedly written after he had run out of things to say, and he just having the need to keep putting out a novel a year, received a lukewarm reception when it came out in 2006 and not because of a lack of timeliness. There were any number of reports in the newspapers of the time about aborted terrorist plots. Instead, “The New York Times Book Review” commentator Rachel Donadio wondered what novelists knew about terrorism. That is the crux of the matter. Reviewers did not see how a novelist could have plausible control of his materials, especially about such an urgent social concern as terrorism. The reviewers thereby showed their distrust of their own literary callings and, more than that, their unwillingness to come to terms with the claim that novels are an account of reality more terse and insightful than those offered by, let us say, journalists, at least when the novel is done by a major writer. Updike creates a trust in the reader (the attentive and/or swept away reader) that what he is describing is real and not just imaginary.
Read MoreA New Adventure
People are engaged in new adventures at least in part because of the coronavirus pandemic. My family resettled West in part of the fear of declining property values in New York City and because where we settled seemed so open and clean and so much more safe, which is what I think, even if the mountain and plains states are reaching new highs of illness. A friend of mine in New York City is thinking of trading to a larger condo in her apartment building because, I think, she wants to do something busy rather than sit in her chair waiting for the pandemic to pass. Another New York City friend goes to restaurants that are open and also to the Metropolitan Museum of Art which has opened but with conditions including limited entrants spaced far apart and only one bookstore. Going to visit is a kind of adventure because there may be some risk but that is a very marginal one. They are casting their vote for the city by making their presence felt. Most people don’t have adventures in that waitresses wear masks to serve patrons, those put in significantly separated tables and store clerks moving about their wares and their customers. These people are not in adventures because they are just continuing their jobs because they have to make a living.
Read MoreJubilation
Jubilation for Biden is never what I expected weeks ago much less in the past few days as Biden expects to slowly and confidently move towards a Biden very close victory. Actually, my response to the election before hand and now is relief rather than elation. There were so many things that might have gone very wrong: massive irregularities, mischievous lawsuits, violence sufficiently anticipated so that Washington and New York City have boarded up buildings. But local elections did their jobs by methodically and calmly keeping to the election system, showing that the American people, despite these four years, are a people with a genius for government, just as the British had done in the Nineteenth Century and before and after. There is something to be said for the Electoral College making the legitimate choice certain and soon and for letting local districts control their precincts by administering calm and peaceful and even handed voting. I saw Ohio being orderly even though the voting is split just about the middle.
Read MoreThe Chicago 7
I just caught up with the Andrew Sorkin movie about the Chicago 7 showing the anti-Vietnam activists at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 being prosecuted in federal court during the following year for having incited rioting. Sorkin did a good job making the plot coherent and showing the different points of view and Sorkin, as usual, punched up some telling lines, but I felt that the whole enterprise was wrongly focussed. The trial was just an anticlimax after the events that had happened in the previous year, the images of the actual riots much more profound than a trial that was so clearly a show trial that not even the prosecution didn’t want to pursue it and a judge so biased that there was no doubt about who was the bad guy. No contest on the issue of free speech versus authoritarianism. Sorkin tried to create some controversy by comparing Tom Haydn as the one who said that all the programs depend on what happens to the vote in opposition to Abbie Hoffman saying that the demonstrations were creating a cultural revolution. So the movie had a dramatic clash between the two ideologies: Haydn as a traditional political organizer and Hoffman as crafting a new way to do politics. But that wasn’t the larger issue. Sorkin showed Haydn, at the end of the movie, reading off the numbers of people who had been killed in Vietnam during the time of the Chicago 7 trial. That was what the war was about: its carnage and the attempt to stop that. That was the view all the characters in the film portrayed as the gravamen of the war. David Dellinger, one of the Chicago 7, had indeed been a conscientious objector on the grounds of being a Pacifist. Joan Baez, a fellow traveller of that time, said she was a Pacifist because she was against violence, though she demurred that non-violent resistance against Hitler would have had many casualties before the German people had blanched at the number of deaths.
Read MoreNabakov and Post-Modernism
Back at the turn into the Twentieth Century, Modernism was a movement to liberate myth and abstraction from the encrustations of history. Freud's Viennese living room, filled as it was with draperies, overstuffed furniture, pictures, knick knacks and anthropological icons, would become in twenty years, all across the "modern" or economically developed world, a set of austere white walls surrounding single and dramatically placed objects (a family portrait, a piece of distinctively wrought furniture, Prometheus in Rockefeller Plaza). Modernism would attest to the essentially primitive and primal themes that prevailed, just as was the case in art which, for the next fifty years, would allow shapes and materials to prevail over content, swatches of color and form to be seen ever since the vanguard Impressionists as representations of the real structures that informed appearances. Subject matters were superficial. The real thing, the real art, was the form rather than the matter.
Read MoreBertram Married A Witch
In “All’s Well That Ends Well”, a virtuous woman, acclaimed by all, is rejected by the suitor she has chosen because he regards her as insufficiently well born. Callow youth that he is, he runs off to war and is won back only by a stratagem whereby his true bride deceives him into going to bed with her and making her pregnant and giving her a ring his mother gave to him. The denouement consists of the revelation of this scheme and his surrender to her love. That interpretation, however, has to elide many of the problems the text provides for it. Bertram, the runaway bridegroom, must be made into a total cad if he is to give up a ring his mother gave him so that he can bed someone who is no more to him than a whore. He is so obstinate and cold to Helena, the doctor’s daughter who chooses him as a husband, that one wonders what she saw in him in the first place. Stage business has to be worked in if the two “lovers” are to reconcile. In one production, Helena puts a toy hobby horse between them after the last line of dialogue has been spoken to suggest that the child she will have will bind the two together. The interpretation also posits the notion that Shakespeare thought upward mobility was a reward for merit and that warfare was a silly calling, something not apparent in his great plays, and only a grand irony in “Troilus and Cressida”.
Read MoreThe Last Presidential Debate of 2020
What could possibly happen in the last 2020 Presidential Debate, I wondered? Everything seemed to be set and done. That first debate was informative rather than chaotic because each of the performers did what each of them did: Trump a blowhard who says the venomous things he has extolled ever since he went down the Trump Tower escalator and Joe Bidden righteous in his principles and agenda even if he sometime has garbled his words, a viewer difficult to say that his childhood stuttering is worse than it has been for many years even though his voice does seem weaker. Each of the two characters are very familiar. There are few secrets of character to a presidential candidate. They are what they are at least as I have known them back to Harry Truman. Moreover, the voters have pretty much made up their minds, weeks ago ninety percent of them saying they wouldn’t change their minds. The polls have been stable in that the battleground states are mostly pro-Biden and Joni Ernst is a little bit behind in the Iowa Senatorial race by just a few points and Susan Collins is consistently behind in Maine by five points. Biden has for months had a constant nine or ten percent lead. Might as well vote and finish it, unless there is a late October Surprise, the canard against Hunter Biden having fizzled-- unless something comes up tonight. Also, voter irregularity is not likely to make a difference. Georgia and Texas are not likely to turn Democratic even though Gov. Abbott has run scared enough to insist on the scandalous behavior of restricting the number of places to deposit ballots so that there is only one of them in Harris County, which covers four million people in that it includes Houston. I thought that the vote meant that the access to the vote was supposed to be made available as part of the right to vote, but not so for some Republicans. So there is nothing left but the nail biting because the voters are mercurial rather than firmly implanted in their demographics. We will see what we can see.
Read Morethe Heartland
My family and I visited Promentary Point where my fourth grade history told me that it was the place that the last spike was placed in1869 to connect the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific and so create a continental railroad. It was quite an accomplishment, indicated, as we drove past, by how long were the graded stone bedways so that the train would not have to rise or fall too quickly as well as all those ties and rails. A marker at the exhibit showed that the information of the event was sent by telegraph to Omaha and points East, including President Grant in Washington, D.C. I was also impressed by the arid land. It was desolate and windy and with vast vistas. Not a task without hardy people and careful planning. I also remembered in the fourth grade, where I seem to have learned a lot of things, the quick development of communications. The Pony Express had lasted for eighteen months so people could travel in 1860 and 1861 from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento. The continental telegraph system, from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., was completed in 1861 in Salt Lake City and the pinnacle of these three amazing developments in the Eighteen Sixties was the continental railway itself, which I have heard was not significantly interfered with by the Indians because by that time the Indians in the area were largely pacified.
Read MoreThe Trip West
Alister Cooke, the Englishman who had become an American citizen, was well known as the host of “Omnibus”, a fine book on the Alger Hiss case, and a long time letter on America to the BBC. Once he explained that to understand America, you had to see that America was not a nation but a continent. That quip came to my mind this week because my daughter in law drove me from Brooklyn, New York, to Salt Lake City, my daughter in law’s ancestral home and the new permanent residence for their family including me. It is the start, for me, of a great adventure, the short take of my travel showing how much its topography and agriculture certainly make America a continent. We moved from the granite rocked hills of the East, it's very filled treescapes changing with its fall colors, to a spectacular view of Iowa, flat and filled with quite clearly prosperous corn farms, their main house and farm buildings shiny and up to date, and at one point, a spectacularly sunny day having low slung clouds for a hundred miles that made the sky take up seven eights of the landscape, as if this were a Modernist painting, and then to the endless plains in Nebraska, ever more desolate and most of Wyoming unpeopled, but giving rise to spectacular and for me unfamiliar sedimentary rocks and striated hills that continued on to the Salt Lake City Basin.
Read MoreTime and Qualities
Philosophers in the Anglo-Americabn tradition during the Twentieth Century followed the idea that there is wisdom in language in that its various forms-- it tenses, its contradictions, its phrases-- reveal the fundamental ways in which reality is constructed. That is very different from the Continental philosophers in the Twentieth Century, the various Existentialists, who would go to no effort to twist around language by inventing new terms so as to plumb the depths of experience which language itself could only indicate. A good example is G. E. Moore, one of the foundational creators of what was called “ordinary language philosophy”. He proposed what is called Moore’s Paradox. Moore proposed the sentence “It is raining and I believe it is not raining”. How is that possible? It seems contradictory even so the first statement is a fact and the second is a belief. If it is obviously raining and if a person sincerely thinks that it is not raining, how can it be possible to utter that statement? There must be something in the language that would indicate that it would show that the compound statement was contradictory even though it is not. But there is no paradox at all if language does not embody wisdom but that a term such as “and'' is not a monitor of meaning, just a conjunction. Language is just a makeshift account and it often errs. Language is not up to describing what it does in ordinary as well as peculiar cases. Here are two cases that show how language leaves us tongue-tied, and so has to be unpacked. The first of these concerns the trouble language has handling time and is an easier problem to unravel than is the second case, which deals with the trouble language has handling qualities.
Read MoreJane Austen, Conservative
Contemporary literary critics tend to be advocates. They think that books are places to promote their views on various matters, such as racial injustice or Feminism, or think that the primary purpose of a novel is to declare a social problem that is to be rectified. I found piquant, for example, when the most current Feminist Movement was on the rise, Jane Smiley, in his 1991 novel “A Thousand Acres”, retold Lear and his three daughters in a midwestern contemporary farm family to discover that the three daughters had each independently and in secret had incest with the father, as if that was what “King Lear” was really all about, never mind the infinite spaces and the general iniquities of people, as if the novel was to huff and puff and declare rather than explain that some people do this particular bad thing. There are also other periods when advocacy is a primary form of artistic life, Zola a key example, but even the Victorian novelists, who were not unwilling to point out the shames of the industrial world, were not, I think, even primarily about that. Even “Oliver Twist” pushes aside the miseries of poverty and crime for the figure of Fagin, who seems so much grander than his setting. In fact, one of the shortcomings of “The Grapes of Wrath”, another advocacy novel, is that Steinbeck documents the Okies but does not make the Joad clan as anything other than stereotypes of persistence in adversity. The book is not a drama that has been put in a setting but is only an illustration of a setting.
Read MoreThe Truth of Conversation
When I was a child and went to visit relatives with my parents, I thought how fortunate I was to be a child because I could go off to play in my room of my relative’s child and use his toys as well as the ones I had brought with me while the adults spent their time in the living room just talking. That had to wait until I was slightly older when I would sit on the stoop outside my apartment building and go over with friends what we had seen on television or what we knew about girls. It is worth pondering conversation as being an essential human activity, something we very much recognize during the pandemic in that people crave to be with people to flirt and drink and talk with one another, even if doing so can incur fatal risks. We have to be free to talk. There are many explanations for this. Talking allows people to convey information and to also hector and intimidate one another and also to display relative social prestige. Putting these and other functional advantages of talk aside, one of the most miraculous and existential qualities of talk is that it is unalienated, which means that people are likely to tell the truth of what they are when they converse with one another. It isn’t just that people will unload when in stress and so unload the truth. Rather, it is that in the ordinary course of events that we say what is the truth and that we have only with great difficulty do we manage to confide the truth or avoid blaring out what is in our mind. Yes, there are turns of phrases that distract and there are exaggerations and circumlocutions. But people are, in general, like dogs in that they are also not inclined to lie. A dog gives over that he is trying to lie. He will act submissively when the bad thing he has done, such as poop on the rug, will soon be revealed. No dog is an accomplished liar, and the same is with people.
Read MoreDown to Essentials
I have had the opportunity to downsize my home twice. I left a very large West End Avenue apartment where I had lived for forty-five years to move into a small apartment in South Brooklyn after my wife died and now I am pruning again to move with my son’s family to a Mountain state, thinking of this as a new adventure for an old man and therefore blessed, even though it is not exactly a great trek in that the national chains of banks and pharmacies have all the same records and so there is not much to change in my life as to commercial matters. What I have found out about pruning is that it is not all that jarring however much I am sentimental. Memories are more real than things. If there is a lesson in this adventure it is, as might be expected given my presumptions, getting rid of things is not like that very vivid scene in “2001” where the file books empty out of HAL’s computer until there is nothing left, his voice getting ever more base and then nothing. Rather, every person parrs down to an essence, which is their consciousness. Spinoza would say it more exactly. The essence is the complexity of a person’s experiences and ideas and that is irreducible and intact so long as the person lives. In that sense, every person, however reduced, has a “free will”, though Spinoza did not use the term as being irrelevant or redundant. What does having “free will” add to saying a person’s consciousness is more or less complex?. Ideas and emotions modify each other and themselves. That’s called “thinking”.
Read MoreHow Black Lives Can Matter
The past three weeks have moved quickly because there have been rapid and very different shifts of public attention. First, there was Bob Woodward’s book “Rage” which showed that Trump had lied by denying just how bad the coronavirus would be, he said, not so as to create panic, as if the only alternative to avoid panic is to lie. But as is the case with many of Trump’s outrages, people just move on, as when he said he would not accept the election if he lost, other Republican politicians pooh-poohing the matter, the succession to be intact as it has been since 1792. Republicans treat Trump much less seriously than Democrats do. Then there was the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, someone whom I much admired though I thought the accolades were a bit much, praise heaping over praise, perhaps because she is a model of probity as that is every moment implicitly contrasted to the current President. And then returned the public to an incident that awakens the issue of Blacks being unfairly killed by the police. There were no charges for the killing of Breonna Taylor, which led to public outrage and to the MSNBC regulars, who are sure that there should have been high criminal charges for the Louisville police officers. I am going to say something controversial about this last particular matter, even though it may give many people offense, that being the coin of the common realm. People are more concerned about whether they are rankled is more important than whether people are accurate or analytic, so deeply are deeply incurred to the solipsistic cliches of our times. Look carefully at the ways the choices of words spin the issues.
Read MoreThe Stratification of Disability
The disabled, which include the blind and the crippled and other infirmities, are usually understood as deviant in that they are more or less distasteful to ordinary society because they are not part of those who are able bodied, and so the disabled are a scourge to society just because they are unfamiliar with normal society. That also happens to criminals and drug addicts and sex perverts, who also are all degrees of deviance. Normal people just feel various degrees of apprehension and disgust for the deviants, rather than there being distinct differences in kind, as if there were different feelings to people who are, let us say, of low caste rather than disfigured. People look away at disabilities of the disfigured just as they abhor associating with loudmouths. President Trump thinks it depressing to see wounded war veterans on display. The various kinds of the disabled share the fact that they are “master statuses” in that disability is a constant companion that must be managed along with a person’s other roles. You can forget to lock your front door but, if you are using braces and crutches, you cannot forget to lock your knees when you rush to get to your cab.
Read MorePietro Mascagni
Pietro Mascagni’s second opera, “L’amico Fritz”, is nowhere as popular as his first, “Cavalleria Rusticana”, and is thought far inferior, a light romantic comedy, whereas the first was the founding work of the “verismo” style. “L’amico Fritz”, though, is in fact much darker. The prior opera was a straightforward revenge story lifted into the permanent international repertoire by the lyricism of long orchestral passages which supply “background music” for the stage evocation of a peasant culture. That foreshadowed a life long operatic style in which Mascagni primarily used music as a way to provide a setting for and comment on dramatic action rather than as a way to provide musical enhancement for dialogue.
Read MoreTrump and Other Verbal Confusions
I am continually astonished that Donald Trump supporters do not diminish their enthusiasm for him no matter how outrageous he says things. You might think that treating military deaths as “suckers” and “losers” would give people pause. Even if reports of this are regarded as lies, Trump did say on the record that McCain that he was not a hero because he had been captured would seem to patriotic citizens to regard as an affront. But I heard one Trump supporter say that the antagonism between Trump and McCain was just politics and so just dismissed the matter, as if politicians say and do just anything and so are to be discounted, though for some reason what is said or attributed about Clinton or Biden will not be discounted. So there is an attempt to make sense of whatever is the point of view of the Trump supporters, even though they are not, as a matter of fact, socially or economically disadvantaged, nor because they are poorly educated, in that since the uneducated clearly enough supported FDR because they clearly enough saw what was in their interests. The Trump supporters remain a puzzlement. Are they angry for no reason? Are they disturbed at the way society is changing? Part of the explanation, I suggest, for Trump supporters are partly the verbal confusions that occur in political discourse so as to evade or obfuscate issues. Verbal ju-jitsu allows people to support them for whatever other are the real reasons of a preference, whether that is racism or Covid denial or whatever other are the Trump concerns.The verbal gymnastics are longstanding and are currently on parade. But they also have to do with the particular kind of rhetoric in which Trump is involved, ways in which he cannot help himself, and that help along his obfuscations and so have made quite an appeal for him for five years now. I will try to parse out some of his peculiar verbal constructions.
Read MoreBruegel's Secularism
The Lowlands, or Lotharingia, as Henri Pirenne insisted on calling it, because it was a distinct cultural place that for a variety of reasons never became a great nation on its own the way France and Germany did, was nevertheless a central place for the creation of European history because it was the meeting place of the Roman and the Germanic cultures, never mind that John Motley, in his Nineteenth Century nationalist way, thought the distinctiveness of the Lowlands could be attributed to a native people living in a swampland that made them both ingenious and cooperative.
The Lowlands was the setting for a world empire that for a while rivaled those of Spain and England. It produced unsurpassed art and some of the most important scientific breakthroughs: the invention of the microscope and the discovery of the cell. Though the Lowlands never created a great vernacular literature, their literary and philosophical accomplishments are marked by Erasmus, Spinoza and Grotius, all of whom wrote in Latin. But most important, the Lowlands is where both political and philosophical liberalism began.
Read MoreBiden's First Hundred Days Or So
The Biden and Harris campaign is excoriating Trump as a sleaszy, racist, mean spirited person who has also been derelict in his duty in that the President has neither a plan to deal with the coronavirus pandemic or to deal with the continuing economic crisis. It is more than understandable that there would be a focus on this singular figure. Just about everything that might go bad has gone bad. We should be thankful that there is no major war. The focus groups may also conclude that the demeaning of Trump is likely to earn a few points in Biden learners and with those who are disenchanted with the President. That campaign decision is not to spend much time or attention on the plans Biden will roll out when he might become elected, even though the general wisdom is that elections are about hope and promises for the future rather than failures of the past. We will see. But interviews with Biden and Harris have made clear that there is a clear program of action should Biden become President, and so we are sometimes not emphasizing enough what Biden will do on Day 0ne. I want to cobble together what is said or implied about what his plan is, even if Biden does not want to make his plan front and center.
Read MoreThe Incomplete Status Sequence
Social theorists have connected social structures to what literary or philosophical people regard as the existential situation, which means the universal and fundamental experience of being in the world. That ties together social scientific objectivity with the realm of humanistic experience. Karl Marx connected some of the divisions of labor with alienation, which is a deeply and ubiquitous experience that it is difficult to pin down. Emile Durkheim connected the idea of norm with the experience of anxiety, everyone concerned to achieve conformity. Georg Simmel connected multiple lives and roles with the experience of metropolitan life, people now alive with choice and variety. Here is another connection between structure and experience, one that is a variation of Robert Merton”s role theory. The purely formal structure of what I will call an incomplete status sequence explains the sense of every person in life as caught between the present and the future and, as well, an experience as life always changing and surprising, which is different from the Durkheimian view, that everything is in a permanent present so that whatever is the norm is what that seems to be as it always has been and will be. A sociological concept therefore is able to unravel what might seem the always squishy and uncertain of what is the philosophical view.
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