The Textual Density of "Emma"

January 27, 2020

Novels are distinctive among the forms of literature in that, among other reasons, they have a thick texture because they offer up narrative prose rather than just descriptive prose, and so allow the author, whether or not assuming an authorial voice, to create a distinctive universe, every novel being its own kind of thing, a creation on its own, because of the way the author decides to tell his or her story, that including the coincidental things he or she cares to notice, whether he uses short or long phrases, as that may influence, for example, the sense of time as it passes in the novel, whether there are foreshadowings or flashbacks, whether there is more or less dialogue amidst the descriptions of place, atmosphere and events, whether and to what extent the language employed is poetic, and so seems terse or to provide metaphors for contemplation, and so forth, the texture of the language providing the medium through which the novelist does his work,

The Dershowitz Argument

January 23, 2020

Alan Dershowitz, the retired Harvard Professor of Law and well known defense attorney, has offered up a very interesting defense of Trump that deserves to be taken seriously, although I think it displays the limits of legal reasoning rather than the inadvisability of the impeachment proceedings. Dershowitz argues that an impeachment must be based on a violation of criminal law or something close to that, something that can be identified as a crime whether or not in the statutes, rather than on the rejection of a policy of the President where he is doing something of which the Congress may disapprove but is not outside his authority. Dershowitz argues that the Congress had in effect confessed to having engaged in this impropriety when they charged the President with “abuse of power” and “obstruction of Congress” because these charges are too vague to be impeachable offenses. They could have charged him with bribery or extortion, but did not, notwithstanding assertions that have been made by supporters of impeachment that a charge of bribery would run afoul of the way that crime is defined by statute as requiring a monetary transaction, which is not what happened in the case of Ukraine, where what Trump was asking for was an exchange of favors. Dershowitz cites Supreme Court Justice Curtis as his authority. At the time of the Johnson Impeachment, Curtis had argued that impeachment was not appropriate for this same reason. There was no crime, only the violation of the Tenure of Office Act, which had been passed only in order for Johnson to run afoul of it while carrying out his legitimate powers to pick his own cabinet. No real crime; no impeachment.

Sargent's Experiments

January 20, 2020

Every once in awhile Sargent did something different than paint portraits of women fully adorned and expressed in their clothing and of men who look rather craggy and whose clothes cover them rather than individuate them, a distinction that still holds, at least when women dress up for gala events like the Oscars. Sargent always went back to his true calling of realistic portraiture even when it had become a burden, his portrait of Woodrow Wilson capturing at least as much of the man as the photographs made of him at the time. It was a last gasp of the realistic eye in portraiture. Sargent’s experiments are interesting because they point out the roads not taken and because they show Sargent’s profound understanding of the art movements that were swirling around him in the course of his career, and so give reason to think that his art was chosen rather than the only thing he could have done,

War Photography

January 17, 2020

War photographers like to say that they do their dangerous work so that the people back home can be kept informed about what is going on in one war zone or another. That means they see themselves as reporters, providing information more than interpretation. I think, rather that they are more like artists who convey aesthetic experiences as well as, occasionally, information about what is going on. They take lightly their aesthetic role for the same reason that people who explore the aboriginal forests or track the path of sharks or manatees prefer to cast themselves as scientists, because they have titles associated with their names, rather than as outdoors people who love the wild and the sea. Academic publications are just an excuse for doing what they love. I guess war photographers just don’t want to admit that they are artists, even if the photography editors at major newspapers have an eye for whether their photographers are imitating the shadings and compositional styles of the Old Masters.

War Movies

January 11, 2020

History is what happens when the generations are dead that lived events or lived through them or heard about them from their parents. That means history begins two generations after the events in question. The Gospels were written two generations after Jesus was crucified. Writing an account before that would have had to deal too much with the facts of experience and rumor available to everyone rather than the act of reinterpretation that all historians provide, whether in their selection of facts or even in the tone of the times that they impart which may be quite askew from the tone that prevailed when the events took place. Why do we think of Victorians as prudish? They didn’t think themselves so, only circumspect.

"For the Union Dead"

January 8, 2020

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.

Comedy and Tragedy in "Pride and Prejudice"

January 3, 2020

“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.

The Political Doldrums

December 31, 2019

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.

Jane Austen's Conservatism

December 28, 2019

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.

The December Democratic Debate

December 20, 2019

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.

"Luminism"

December 18, 2019

“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.

Popular and High Culture

December 15, 2019

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.

The Impeachment Follies

December 11, 2019

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.

"Music for the Millions"

December 7, 2019

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.

Cultural Mutation

December 5, 2019

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.

How The Arts Evolve

December 3, 2019

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.

Non-Modernist American Artists

November 29, 2019

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.

The High Victorian and The Late Victorian

November 25, 2019

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”.

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