People from most classes, when they are young, are out to find a vocation and try to do well at it. The people I knew when I was young were all out to be doctors or lawyers or professors (noone I knew wanted to go into business, because the working class and the petit bourgeois were the classes we were all rising out of) and most of the young men did just that, becoming what they wanted to be. That applied to women as well, who also became doctors and lawyers and professors although one young woman I knew didn’t think she could become what she wanted, which was a Rabbi, not possible at the time, and so she became a law professor instead. The same was true of people who did not expect to do better than the working or middle class. They too wanted to take up a place where they could have an occupation that filled up their time with purpose even as it supplied the living that enabled them to support their families and so made of them successful people, coming home after work to the house or apartment that they paid for and to a dinner with their children and a few hours of television before retiring to bed and arising the next day for another long session of work. That is the round of life for most people of most classes.
Read MoreStorytelling at Oscar Time
Hollywood has always been the preserve of middle brow sensitivities. Charlie Chaplin was sentimental; the very talky dramas of the Thirties and Forties testified to the sanctity of middle class life (think of “The Best Years of Our Lives”); the Seventies, given their taste for epics, translated the gangster film into a family tragedy (think of “The Godfather” trio of movies). And so it goes on, people without much education treating Hollywood as their canon of great literature, quoting “Casablanca” or”The Wizard of Oz” as part of the collective wisdom they have absorbed into their own heads, using those stories and phrases to capture events in their own fantasy and actual lives, just as Shakespeare or Dickens serve that function for a more educated audience. And so it is fair to ask a deep aesthetic question after this year’s Oscars, which made Koreans the latest group to move into the spotlight, just as in the past Hollywood acceptance marked the passage of Jews, Italians and African Americans into the assimilated parts of the nation, even if women, one such group vieing for inclusion, still consider themselves as having a way to go, however much the women’s point of view has driven story lines from at least the Thirties Warner Brothers’ musicals to the Nora Ephron romantic comedies of the Nineties.
Read MoreThree Kinds of Knowledge
I used to tell my students that I would carefully label the three kinds of knowledge I would offer them so that they could make up their own minds about how much they could trust to what I said. The first kind of knowledge I would offer would be consensus knowledge, which is what all experts in a field would attest to. An example of that in sociology is the general belief among sociologists that immigrant groups assimilate into American society within two to five generations of arriving on these shores. That is different from what happens in Indonesia, for example, where three separate groups-- the original Polynesians, the Muslims and the Chinese-- have coexisted in a three tiered caste system for hundreds and hundreds of years. The second kind of knowledge I would offer is where there is a strong difference of opinion, contending sides, in an intellectual debate. That kind of knowledge is represented by the debate over what are the causes of continued poverty in the Black community. There is one school of thought that poverty is the result of cultural forces. Poor people got that way because of historical conditions but by this time have internalized dysfunctional relationships and so poor people are overcome by anger, poor child raising habits, inadequate family life, and other cultural forces that make it difficult for people to compete in a market economy or simply to hold down jobs. The alternative hypothesis is that the continuing social structures which engulf people are the forces that keep people from prospering. There are not enough men in Black urban areas to go around so as to provide young women with partners to set up stable families. That is because young men who might otherwise settle down are either dead or in prison. The two theories converge in that one can be a precursor of the other but they are still distinct in that the causal factors are independent of one another. The third kind of knowledge, I offered, was my own educated judgment, something not shared by other sociologists, but a point for which I thought I could make a good case. An example of that was when I argued that the reason Black poverty from the Sixties on was not better dealt with was that LBJ’s War on Poverty did not deal with male unemployment but rather with providing benefits for women who had to raise children without the benefit of a spouse. During the New Deal, there had been work programs for Appalachian white youth. There were no such programs for Black male youth a generation later. Some sociologists have caught up with this view in recent years.
Read MoreThe Iowa Caucuses
One week before the Iowa Caucuses, one poll showed Biden ahead, another showed Sanders ahead, and a third showed the race to be a dead heat. At that point, forty percent of Iowans said they were still undecided about their final choice. What do these Iowan prima donnas want? A third or fourth or fifth encounter with a candidate at a coffee shop so they can make up their minds? They have had since last summer to look these candidates over: to evaluate their programs and savor their characters. The main influence of a Bloomberg candidacy, which is already, by one poll, at double digits, may be to rid us of the influence of the “ethanol” state on national politics. Other candidates have already caught that message in that they were scheduled to spend less time in Iowa than in past presidential years because they are aware that Nevada and South Carolina and then Super Tuesday will quickly diminish whatever victory Iowa seems to provide.
Read MoreThe National Gallery of Ireland
The National Gallery of Ireland, in Dublin, has holdings from many places, some of them quite good, like the collection of paintings from the Lowlands, and also the very good “The Dublin Volunteers on College Green, 4th November 1779” wherein Francis Wheatley, a recently arrived Britisher, painted a public and historic scene. The painting flatteringly captures Irish sunshine bathing a busy urban square, people gawking out of Georgian windows at the moment that an honorary gun salute has sent clouds of smoke into the air around a statue of King William III, the smoke billowing like Rubens’ clouds. So the picture may be taken as signifying the connection of Ireland to Britain as a long time thing. Wheatley’s painting also has the slightly higher than eye-level, straight on point of view that since Poussin has given seriousness to paintings by portraying the mythic as historical. The painting was not well appreciated at the time because of what I will consider an Irish aversion to overt political paintings.
All museums answer queries that are asked and some that go unasked. The question I have is this: what is the relationship of the Irish as a people to Ireland as a nation? Ireland is a geographical entity that became an ethnic group long before that term became fashionable as well as long before Ireland struggled for national independence, which was 300 years, or more, depending on when you start the count, before it succeeded in wrestling itself from Great Britain. Ireland had been the off-shore thinking house for all of Christendom when Christendom was relatively young. The struggles with the British conquest that make up what is known as Modern Irish history created that other struggle about whether to be Irish is to be a resident of Ireland or a resident of Catholic Ireland or just connected to Irish nationalism. It is to be remembered that De Valera was an American citizen. Or else Irish ethnicity can be defined as a comic garrulousness founded in a deep sorrow which an anthropologist might trace the distinctiveness of the Irish to the lack of primogeniture or to infant swaddling practices or child rearing practices which tend towards tough love, all of these post hoc explanations in that any difference in an antecedent can be treated as the cause of a cultural difference. Whatever the explanation, the fact of the matter is that the Irish, as Kennelly has said, have moved around the world and not only made an impact on it but retained their identity, whatever became of their nation, which is now independent but had its rebellion too late to save its language or, later, its family structure and distinctive class and family structure, from Westernization.
Read MoreThe Textual Density of "Emma"
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,
Read MoreThe Dershowitz Argument
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.
Read MoreSargent's Experiments
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,
Read MoreWar Photography
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.
Read MoreThe January Democratic Debate
Not much has changed since the December debate. The Iran crisis dissipated quickly because Trump got cold feet about following up on the assassination of an Iranian general and the Iranians gave him no excuse to take further action. The impeachment process continues, very slowly, and will fizzle out unless Mitch is somehow convinced to have witnesses even though all that they can say is that Trump did indeed hold up aid to Ukraine, which is what the Republicans have always been willing to accept. The polls have remained remarkably steady: Biden is ahead in national polls, and tied or close to tied in New Hampshire and Iowa. Bernie is steady at about twenty percent, but not moving up. So it is time for people to vote. They know what the Democratic candidates stand for and are familiar with their personalities. And voting is, in fact, three weeks away.
Read MoreWar Movies
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.
Read More"For the Union Dead"
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.
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