Friday 28th

Amazon has just notified me of a new book, Duff McDonald’s Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite. I feel as if I’ve already read it.

What I have just read is Laura Kipnis’s polemic, Against Love. I remember dismissing it, on the basis of the reviews that it got in 2003, as just too cute. It’s hard now not to suspect a vast right-conspiracy of plotting to deprive Kipnis of readers. Reading Against Love now, fourteen years later, I’m fired by an unwonted revolutionary zeal. For Kipnis is not writing about love, not really; she’s writing about the economic straitjacket from which none of us can think how to escape. If you were to boil down Against Love to one priceless idea, it would be that a society instructed to work at love is being tricked into working for nothing!

Or, at any rate, for not enough. Not nearly enough.

Fourteen years, and nothing has changed. Income equality has simply gotten worse, while meaningful work has continued to evaporate. A few people are getting very rich, unimaginably rich, while the rest of us are desperately trying to maintain the status quo. At some point — will it be when the men and women who voted for Donald Trump realize that in effect they put Michael Pence in charge? — there seems certain to be some sort of outburst, some explosion, some manifestation of the betrayed voters’ rage.

I am almost certain that McDonald’s book could have been written fourteen years ago, give or take a major financial meltdown.

The failure of political imagination is astonishing, really. How can we have failed to progress beyond the squabble about capitalism versus socialism? Are these the only two economic orders that the human mind can come up with? Seriously? Another zombie polarity: government versus business. Has anyone not understood that what happened in 2008 was the inevitable consequence of what happened ten years earlier, with the repeal of Glass-Steagall? If we’re all on the same page about that, why can’t we junk the business/government argument and replace it with a competition between regulatory schemes? If the Democrats have a monopoly on regulatory proposals, then of course those proposals are going to be both stale and captured by the vested interests of current bureaucrats. Does being a Republican mean losing the ability to imagine a better way of keeping bad behavior in check?

Meanwhile, the book that will not go away: Frances Fitzgerald’s The Evangelicals. I’m nearing the end of the hundred-page chapter that covers the George W Bush administrations. There’s another hundred pages after that. It is an awful slog, let me tell you, to read about the dance of DOMA and the compulsion of right-wing politicians to splash in the Terry Schiavo case. I think that Fitzgerald ought to have done two things. Simply, she ought to have called her book The Inerrantists, because that’s what it’s about, not “evangelicals” generally; more complexly, she ought to have tried to pry loose the almost unconscious hold that free-market capitalism has had on the clerics whom she writes about. Is it because the Bible has nothing to say about capitalism (except for the parable of the talents) that conservative Christians can wallow so hypocritically in social injustice?

Anyway, I don’t know how Fitzgerald managed to spend as much time as she did with such unprepossessing and/or unattractive characters.

Bon week-end à tous!

26 & 27 April

Wednesday 26th

Via The Browser, I’ve just read a lament by one Lary Wallace, at Aeon, about his age-related loss of interest in new pop music. It’s a well-written example of a familiar type of piece, but I had to ask myself why I was reading it. The answer was clear: I was reading it because I am a very bad person, tickled with glee by the misfortunes of others, at least those others who didn’t start out properly, with Bach and Mozart — music that doesn’t mark the moment but that goes on growing. There has never been any danger of my tiring of Bach or Mozart, possibly because there are at least twenty-five other serious composers who also keep me interested, but mostly because Bach and Mozart and the others keep opening up over time. And the beauties — the beauty of Brahms’s Violin Concerto is timelessly caressing. I can remember when some pieces of music were shockingly new, but I can’t tell you when those shocks occurred; the music carries no datestamps. I am grateful that my music does not remind me of adolescence, for why would anyone want to be reminded of that? I claim no virtue; I always disliked the edge of rudeness in pop music, its insolence and insistence. Rock’s adolescence must be against it: the popularity of an antisocial art form is regrettable.

Wallace writes,

I’ve always been somewhat suspicious of those who truly do, as the overused phrase has it, listen to everything. Such schizophrenic tastes seem not so much a symptom of well-roundedness as of an unstable sense of self. Liking everything means loving nothing.

The last statement is ridiculous. Aside from shouty, monotonous garage-band rock, I like just about everything truly musical (thus excluding almost everything that passes for song on and off Broadway today, including the incomprehensible Hamilton). I have a lot of very odd recordings. But the interest of everything doesn’t get in the way of my loving the stuff that I love. I once went for a year without listening to any opera but Bellini’s I Puritani, and listening to it almost every weekend when I tidied the apartment — and I’m still crazy about it. (Unlike the Young Victoria and her suitor, I have never warmed to Norma.) At a recent concert performance of Il Segreto di Susanna, I wept with pleasure at every familiar turn. Serious music is like that old river: you never step into it twice.

I’m not trying to make a case here; I just think that I was very lucky to be granted big ears at an early age. And it’s true that music is more a matter of hearing for me than it seems to be for other people. It does not involve being anywhere; although I hear best in a quiet concert hall, I hear very well at home. I don’t much care for staged opera, because there is so much extraneous fiddle-faddle — theatre, I suppose. (Theatre is a very different, almost more puritan pleasure.) If music involves sight at all, it’s sight-reading, following scores and seeing things that I may not have heard. I adore the MP3 format because it promotes the internal voices while scrapping the ambient acoustics. Music for me is a supersaturated experience of notes expressively sounded, and nothing more.

To me, the passion for pop — taking it at all seriously — is an American disease, and that’s how I think it will be remembered in the long run.

***

Thursday 27th

Somewhere in this room there must a copy of Joseph Kerman’s Opera as Drama, which I haven’t really looked at (much less read) in decades. Ah, there it is — how handy: I didn’t even need to get out of my chair!

At the very end, one element which had not been accounted for in the form comes to its fruition: Elvira’s romantic chromatic chords are repeated and repeated twice for the finale cadence, while her own line has a new decoration, wonderfully delicate, tremulous, and warm. This brings the whole episode together in a flash; more, it brings a piercing new inflection — Elvira is no longer the same, or at least our understanding and sympathy have matured. In a single musical piece, action has been incorporated, unified, and interpreted. Resolved in itself, the little scene guides the total drama forward, for our sense of the total piece depends upon our realized impression of Elvira here.

Everything that happens in the little trio, near the beginning of Act II of Don Giovanni, happens in the score. Don Giovanni serenades Donna Elvira, who succumbs despite every resolution. Meanwhile, Leporello, dressed in Giovanni’s cloak, prepares to lead Elvira off so that his master can seduce her maid, his real target. Ever since reading Kerman’s analysis of the trio, this has been my favorite expression of sonata form. You might think that binding the vital impulses of drama to the rules of a musical form would be deadening, but what happens instead is that the form invigorates the drama with a musical vitality that changes our idea of theatre. To the extent that you hear a sonata while the three characters are singing, you are filled with the transformative enlightenment that, in the best operas, takes the place of theatre. Mozart does not decorate — I’m sorry that Kerman used that word — his librettist’s lines of verse with pretty music; rather, he articulates their meaning, with the help of changes in key that are possibly more powerful if they are not clearly understood. What any listener can hear is movement — the movement that constitutes music drama.

The best operas are not the most popular ones. Kerman’s book is notorious for its denunciation of Puccini’s Tosca as “that shabby little shocker” (p 254). Plays to which music has been added, whether with simple songs as in Broadway musicals or through-composed scores as in Tosca, are much easier to grasp that true music dramas. Indeed, the art of music drama is easy to miss. Mozart and Verdi, both accessible composers, developed sophisticated command of music drama as they matured, but they never let it obstruct their accessibility. (Except perhaps in the extraordinarily compressed Falstaff.) You can listen to little trio that Kerman writes about as if it were just a pretty thing, a charming moment in a dark comedy. You can listen to the king’s lament, “Ella giammai m’amò,” without noticing that the cello’s wailing is exactly what regal Philip has buttoned up. You can be unconscious of the best operas’ metamorphoses of spoken theatre, and still have a fairly good time. Most operagoers are and do.

This is by way of explaining my complaint, yesterday, that theatrical stage business too often gets in the way of the music in opera. I ought to have made the point clearly: in the best opera, the theatre is in the score, and there is no need for illustrative mime.

***

In this week’s New Yorker, there are pieces about two Americans, Elizabeth Strout and Rod Dreher, who may have very little in common but to me both emblematize the desert of intellectual pleasure that stretches from sea to shining sea — from the North Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexica, anyway. Both writers (and very different kinds of writers they are!) seem to have followed the same trajectory, putting asphyxiating rural backgrounds behind them, only to grow strong enough, in urban environments, to reconsider and even to try to re-enter the worlds from which they came. Pleasure is not much discussed in either piece; I suspect that it has had a larger place in Strout’s life than in Dreher’s, but what matters is that their seriousness is not particularly pleasant. Maybe they have lots of fun on the side, but that doesn’t matter, either, because fun is not pleasure. “Serious fun,” a term that pops up now and then, is an oxymoron that means something like “pleasure.” “Pleasure,” meanwhile, carries a great deal of carnal baggage. Non-carnal pleasure, except in the relatively recent field of gastronomy, is almost un-American.

It’s true that pleasure, especially intellectual pleasure, is not very sociable. It is best experienced by individuals in quiet rooms — and by individuals who have experienced a lot of pleasure in the past. The art of being pleased looks like a selfish skill, and the art of discrimination, of refusing everything but the very best, seems almost inhumanly mean. But turning up one’s nose is the sign of the unformed pleasure-seeker. The formed pleasure-seeker no longer needs to seek. The world abounds in occasions for pleasure. Occasions for horror and regret may be more numerous, but pleasure is our only real hope of putting an end to them.

As Madame de Pompadour’s power and influence at the court of Louis XV grew to its summit, it occurred to the lady that all she needed for complete success was a reputation for piety. She attended services and performed good works. She seems not to have understood that, so long as she continued at court as the king’s mistress (even if she no longer slept with him), she could never be regarded as pious. And it’s a failing of institutional Christianity, with its ghastly Augustinian confusion about sex, that she couldn’t. In the New Yorker piece, Joshua Rothman isolates Rod Dreher’s refusal to accept same-sex marriage as the raison-d’être of the Benedict Option. Why, oh why, is sexuality such a big deal?

More anon.

Monday 24th

Kathleen has been reading up on the old movies, and asking to see a few. The other night, we watched Jezebel, which somehow she hadn’t seen before. I hadn’t seen it in years myself. I’d forgotten almost everything about it, except the red dress, the yellow fever, and Henry Fonda’s wooden performance. Wooden! Why, the whole thing is a piece of cardboard. Fay Bainter is very good, a study in generous respectability. “Halcyon belongs to its guests” — I’d forgotten that magnificent specimen of Dixie tripe. And Bette Davis is, as usual, extraordinary. I still think, though, that The Great Lie does a better job with similar materials, especially the ole plantation trope.

What makes Jezebel pathetic is the idea that it was supposed to compete with Gone With the Wind. Gone With the Wind is a terrible picture that Jezebel easily surpasses on its own terms. Economically, it shows us the antebellum South, doing without the bellum. (It is set in 1852-3.) And instead of going on forever and a day, as the Selznick blockbuster does, so that we are as tired of Scarlett and Rhett as they are of one another, Jezebel ends without a resolution. Will Julie be able to nurse Press on Lazaret Island? Will he survive? Will she survive? Maybe Press’s wife will come down with the fever, too. But we will never know. “What a gyp!” cried Kathleen. I however was impressed and relieved — no more Southern accents.

(Frankly, my dear, Gone With the Wind is a screwball comedy that has been hastily embalmed in a military epic. There is nothing in it that isn’t done better by Carol Burnett’s famous parody, Went With the Wind. “I saw it in a window and I couldn’t resist.”)

But what about Jezebel? This is the problem with growing up Catholic — no juicy Bible stories. I had encountered Jezebel and her husband, King Ahab, in Elijah, Mendelssohn’s oratorio, but only glancingly. The Bible itself isn’t much better. Split between Kings 1 and 2, Jezebel appears only twice, although we are told that she comes from Sidon and that she persecutes the prophets of the Lord. The second and final glimpse that we have of her is while she’s getting dolled up to meet Jehu, who responds to her greeting by having her eunuchs toss her out of the window. It’s all quite summary; you don’t get much of a sense of Jezebel’s motivation. She’s just bad — and she’s also a woman with a name, which means she shouldn’t even be in Scripture at all. Women with names are almost always occasions of sin. Nice women, like the widow of Zarephath who takes care of Elijah, are known only by their positions.

This may be how the Warner Bros film came by its title. The worst thing about Jezebel in the books of Kings is that she’s an idolatress, a worshiper of Baal. But in more recent times, what with idolatry fading away and all, her name was a byword for fallen women. What was the competition, Scripture-wise? How many other painted ladies are there? She was an old lady by this time. I wonder how often, in the fifteen-odd years before she died, Elizabeth I’s courtiers had to bite their tongues. The worst thing youthful Julie Marsden does is to wear a red dress to a ball. It’s hard to believe that anybody at Warner Bros, of all the studios, believed that Southern women were delicate figurines for whom the wearing of anything but virginal white would be grounds for ostracism.

More anon.

Friday 21st

All week, I’ve been agonizing about history. What’s the point in talking about it? Everybody hates it. Nobody knows what it is. And without it, we’re lost.

History is not “what happened.” We’ll never know what happened. We can’t even say what happened yesterday. It’s too vast, too complicated, and its implications have barely begun to unfold.

Neither is history a treasure that lies buried in archives, waiting to be discovered by research. The researcher, sorting through boxes of documents, already knows what he or she is hoping to find. Within a narrow range, the researcher is prepared for surprises. Outside of that range, what might be an enlightening surprise for another researcher with other questions is for our researcher nothing but an irrelevancy.

***

History is one kind of explanation. The questions that need explaining are always, basically, the same: How did we get here? Whether what you mean by that question is (a) how did the human species invent civilization or (b) what was Rudy Giuliani doing in Ankara the other day, the historical explanation is arrived at in the same way, by a likely story. The story is likely because it is based on historical evidence. Historians, the people who come up with explanations for a living, have developed a set of criteria for evaluating raw facts and determining their value as historical evidence, and that is as far as we’re going to take this adventure in circularity. History is objective in that historians observe their professional standards. But it has no existence apart from historians. Unlike Scripture, which is another kind of explanation, history depends on no higher authority for validation. I ought to point out that journalists, the people who explain Rudy Giuliani for a living, are a kind of historian; they follow pretty much the same rules of evidence.

Last night, I was reading a book that Laura Kipnis published ten years ago, The Female Thing. Kipnis is not a historian, but she has a sense of history — “a sense of history” is my subject today — and it gives her writing about feminism an uncommon ballast. I was reading the chapter on “Dirt.” Kipnis notes that, while we associate slovenliness with men these days, women used to be the dirty sex. She thinks that this changed in the Eighteenth Century — she has a wonderful way, as I hope I do, too, of accompanying such claims with the disclaimer, “Don’t hold me to it.” — and I don’t really disagree, but because I have a pet theory of my own, I would argue that the way was paved by the pious and prosperous Protestant women who, from the time of the Reformation, took up wearing black and white, reading the Bible, and, sometimes, setting the example expected of a preacher’s wife (a new role, historically); and that, furthermore, this appropriation of cleanliness, which came to be called “respectability” in English — Is Kipnis too young to have been bothered by respectability? She doesn’t mention it — lost its carnal teeth, so to speak, when women gained the political franchise. Somehow, Kipnis notes ruefully, women have gained the right to sleep around, but they’re still stuck with changing all the sheets.

How did that happen? In the blink of an eye, my pet theory produces an explanation. Women internalized the commands of respectability that governed outward appearances. They continued to scrub counters and to hoover the carpets, because everyone can see those. The commands that governed private behavior were ignored. The result, at least in the pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, is the look of an extremely well-tended hooker. Even Mme de Pompadour would not be seen in such outfits. Not even Cleopatra, I daresay. It’s quite inexplicable — until you apply your sense of history.

There, that wasn’t too bad, was it?

Bon week-end à tous!

Thursday 20th

Fred Schepisi’s Six Degrees of Separation, the 1993 film adaptation of John Guare’s play (Guare also wrote the screenplay), has long been a favorite, and so has Allison Janney, still relatively unknown, a thousand years ago, when we first saw her in Blue Window and New England at MTC. Kathleen decided that seeing the Broadway revival of the play, with Janney in the most sympathetic role, would be just the birthday treat she wanted. So she got tickets. The show opens next week; we hope that it will be a hit. Everyone at the Barrymore last night seemed to have a very good time.

The play, perhaps because it is so compressed, is less amusing than the film, but it is also more exhilarating. The twists and turns of the plot are more viscerally entwined with the dramatic problem, which is Ouisa Kittredge’s growing determination to prevent her family’s experience at the hands of a very skilled imposter from decaying into mere anecdote. She is tormented, albeit probably not for the rest of her life, by her inability to do anything for a clearly gifted young man who might well be a sociopathic con — whose very pleas for help may just be his way of passing the time. He may be unworthy of the Kittredges’ attentions, but for Ouisa the sharper possibility is that they are unworthy of his.

Ouisa’s husband, Flan, is the kind of con man that goes by the name of salesman. He is also something of a fence. When rich people want to dispose of valuable paintings without attracting public notice, they come to him. Flan can put together a syndicate of investors with the money to buy a Van Gogh or a Cézanne, which they then sell at a handsome profit. These artworks are worth millions, but they are also worth whatever Flan can mesmerize his buyers into paying. Although Flan and Ouisa manage to live on Fifth Avenue and to send their children to Groton and Harvard, cash is an issue, and money most definitely an object.

How different are they, then, from the presentable black youth who staggers into their lives one night, bleeding, turning to them because he has heard such nice things about them from their children? That the Kittredge children might say anything nice about their parents is such a delicious surprise that Flan and Ouisa — admittedly, under a great deal of stress at the moment (they are entertaining a rich South African whose largesse stands between them and “going to banks”) — forget their critical faculties altogether and take the fellow at face value. And a big value it is, for the boy is Paul Poitier, the son of the celebrated actor. Paul has come down from Cambridge the night before his father’s arrival in town, and he has been mugged — mugged and stabbed in Central Park, right there outside the Kittredges’ building. Of course they take him in. Once bandaged, Paul cooks them a delightful pasta supper and charms the South African with a précis of The Catcher in the Rye. You may recall that the protagonist of Salinger’s novel is obsessed with phoneys.

The next morning, Paul is discovered, in one of the Kittredge children’s bedrooms, with a naked hustler. After a great deal of commotion, the hustler and the young man are persuaded to leave. Almost at once, Kitty and Larkin, friends of the Kittredges and parents of their children’s classmates, knock on the door with the very interesting story of their night with Paul Poitier. They’re somewhat miffed to learn that the Kittredges have a better story. This is when the experience begins to take on the gloss of an anecdote. There is still much to learn — how did Paul, or whoever he is, acquire such rich knowledge of the lives of well-heeled New Yorkers? — but when the imposture takes a fatal turn and Paul becomes a wanted man, Ouisa discovers that she is on Paul’s side, inside the experience, not outside it, where everyone else she knows is ready to treat it as a great story. She appreciates the effort behind his skillful impersonation, and feels that it must be compensated somehow. The movie ends with Stockard Channing, pert in a spring-yellow suit, walking away from a luncheon party, perhaps for a headache-clearing stroll down Park Avenue, perhaps for a new life. The new production of the play ends with Allison Janney’s enigmatic smile.

More than once, whether because of her blondish wig or the sharp stage lighting, Janney made me think that she was Lauren Bacall, not just because she looked like the late actress but because she wielded the same authority.  Janney has a powerful voice; if she were a singer, she’d be Ethel Merman. She was also, I think, the tallest member of the cast, at least in heels. All this personal strength was put to the work of rendering Ouisa’s ambivalent discomfort with the clarity of her own moral compass. What makes the play exciting is our own ambivalence, because we want to believe that someone as smart as Ouisa might figure out a way of doing the right thing while continuing to live her enviably glamorous and witty life overlooking the park and schmoozing with millionaires. Ouisa’s smile at the end is her way of acknowledging that she knows what we expect of her. It is full of rue.

Six Degrees of Separation, directed by Trip Cullman, has a large and excellent cast. If I were being paid to write this, I might feel obligated to name a few names, but the fact is that no one stands out in a cast of standouts, and to mention any would be to slight the others. John Benjamin Hickey (Flan) and Corey Hawkins (Paul) share the headlines, and they are both very good, but their parts are merely larger than the rest. If I call attention to Mark Wendland’s excellent scenic design, I do so without knowing to what extent he was realizing the playwright’s stage directions.

Do try to see it.

More anon.

Wednesday 19th

Last week, I read J D Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a book that was much talked about when it came out last fall. Already somewhat concerned about the outcome of the presidential election, I wanted to pretend that hillbillies, among other types, didn’t exist, so I took no notice. But last week, casting about for something to read on the Kindle at bedtime (and worried about overexposing myself to Rachel Cusk), I thought, why not? By now, I had read a piece by Vance in one of the magazines, and found it literate if efficient. The hollers of Kentucky are not my cup of tea at all, but I trusted Vance’s crisp prose for the ride, and I was not disappointed.

Kentucky is really just a curtain-raiser. Most of Hillbilly Elegy describes the author’s childhood in Middletown, Ohio, a small city, once centered around Armco Steel, midway between Cincinnati and Dayton. Middletown is even less my cup of tea — not a cup of tea at all, really. What held my attention was the growth of Vance’s sense of self, sustained against a background of serious family dysfunction. The problem was Vance’s mother, a woman whose personal weakness allowed her to fall from a high point of high-school salutatorian into the bog of heroin addiction. Along the way, she provided her son with something like fifteen father substitutes, some of whom she married. His mother’s mother, Mamaw, a fierce person, saw him saw him through the worst of it, and he managed to spend the last three years of high school living with her. Then he did something really smart: he joined the Marines, and the Marines taught him how to take care of himself. Then he was ready for college, which he completed in twenty-three months. Yale Law followed; Vance distinguished himself there by editing the Law Review and completing a judicial clerkship. He now works, it seems, for a firm owned by Peter Thiel.

While I grasp the implications of Vance’s title, I wonder if Hillbilly Anthem might have been better, because, for all their antics, Vance is proud of his people. There is a feeling that what was clearly dysfunctional behavior in Middletown was merely erratic or unlawful in Kentucky. Leaving home, despite short-term economic prosperity, has not been good to the hillbillies. An ethos designed to cope with harsh circumstances falls apart in softer ones. Of all the voices that I have heard raised against government interference in family affairs, Vance’s is the only one that I would trust, for it is completely devoid of the self-congratulation that spoils so much conservative thinking. Vance did not do it his way. He did it the Mamaw way, and then the Marine way, and even after all of that he learned how to do it the Yale way. Vance was never too proud to learn, or to take help when it was honorably offered. I would be willing to give his call for tough medicine a try if I believed that the American government would discipline the plutocrats who have converted our economy into a financialized bazaar populated by rentiers and their servants. Vance has nothing to say about that side of things.

For all its vicissitudes, Vance recalls his childhood lovingly. There’s more than macho pride to his affection. This was as foreign to me as his experience in the Marines. I don’t look back on my childhood with affection — or with any other strong emotion, either. So detached am I now from that world (even while living in an apartment full of inherited furniture and knick-knacks) that I worried, about ten years ago, about being “on the spectrum.” Now, I certainly don’t envy Vance his childhood, however loving. It reads like a nightmare. My own was but a grey stretch, without cuts or bruises. There may have been a dark streak running through it, a perennial worry that my adoptive parents would “take me back,” even though I knew that this “couldn’t happen.” I knew that this couldn’t happen, but I also knew that my mother was at times so out of her mind with dissatisfaction that she must have thought of calling a lawyer for advice. (Maybe she did, behind my father’s back. Maybe they both called.) I don’t want to overdo this melodramatic dread, though; it was hardly something that gnawed at me every day. Most of the time, I was a comfortable brat. But now I think of it, perhaps what drove my mother crazy even more than my misbehavior (which was almost always misdemeanorish) was my lack of pride and loyalty. I took all the comfort that Bronxville had to offer, but I was ashamed of myself for doing so.

Truman Capote once said that he and Perry Smith, his subject in In Cold Blood, had grown up in the same house, but that while Capote left it by the front door (for prosperity), Smith went out by the back (and to crime). I thought of this reading Hillbilly Elegy. It was as though J D Vance walked into the front door of a big house that I had lived in long ago. I crept out of that house, taking forever to leave. The actual house that I moved into was smaller but much more suitable, but the house that I really live in is a mansion without end.

It is history, not family. We have been here a long time.

More anon.

Tuesday 18th

On Sunday, we had a pleasant Easter dinner. Ms NOLA and her family joined us, as did Fossil Darling and Ray Soleil. The weather was sunny and warm, and the menu was simple — mushroom soup followed by ham, sweet potatoes, and haricots with almonds. Ray made his glorious chocolate mousse. We talked our heads off as usual. I had a bit of difficulty carving the ham — there seemed to be too many bones — but everything else went smoothly, and now, two days later, the only thing that remains is to put all the dishes back into the china cupboard. I did nothing yesterday but go to the dentist. I slept until noon this morning. I will be back to normal tomorrow. My mind, having been in quartermaster mode for several days, is resettling into its ruminative coils.

I did read a book yesterday — Laura Kipnis’s Men: Notes From an Ongoing Investigation. I’m intrigued by Kipnis’s façon de penser, and I plan to read more. She has a new book out, Unwanted Advances, about academic paranoia, but I want to read The Female Thing first, because I think that it will help me with my thoughts about feminism, which, like everyone else’s, are a muddle.

To try to begin to clear the air, last week, I sketched a few paragraphs about women and liberation in the form of a letter to a friend; my thoughts were nowhere near clear enough for presentation here. I began with the various liberation movements that arose around 1800, and traced the success with which women’s demands for freedom from pre-modern shackles was met, first with political enfranchisement and then with economic opportunity. Despite this, a great deal of discontent about the position of women remains. Why? That’s what I wanted to know. I surmised that it had something to do with romance, or “romance,” and I won’t be surprised if The Female Thing helps me to understand this better. Kipnis seems (on the basis of Men) to be more likely than anyone to explain how feminism, by reconstructing romance in accord with the actual desires of women, might throw everyone’s expectations of “romance” into confusion.

By far, however, the most interesting thing about my little essay, which had a few interesting things in it, was that it did not occur to me until the next day that “women’s liberation” was the name of the movement in the late Sixties and well through the Seventies. “Feminism” came later. Kathleen remembered, with a jolt, having been called a “women’s libber.” But the term had been forgotten; I could write about it without saying it. Arguably, it has been forgotten because women’s liberation has been accomplished. There’s nothing more to expect from “liberation.” Such difficulties as remain lie elsewhere.

Kipnis is a curious thinker — my favorite kind, but hard to describe. In our ever more polarized critical climate, she stands apart — she stands for candor and common sense. She has a bit of thing about épataying the bourgeoisie, and she has bitter words for capitalist plutocrats, but she doesn’t seem to have an idea of a better world. This is undoubtedly sensible, but I’d still like to know more about her hopes. The most solid piece in Men, not surprisingly, is the transcript of her debate with Harvey Mansfield, whose reactionary book about manliness got everyone stirred up a few years ago. When Mansfield remarks that men take rejection better than women do, Kipnis cocks her eyebrow and shifts the perspective.

You know, until pretty recently there were many more consequences for women when it came to sexual expression than for men. When Simone de Beauvoir, whom you discuss in your book, wrote The Second Sex, birth control was actually illegal in France — she had to go to New York to get a diaphragm. It’s been less than fifty years that women have been freed from at least some of the consequences of sexual expression. So what women are “by nature” or whether women are any more modest or equally immodest — I just think we don’t yet know. Ditto the question of what women want from men, given that economic independence from men is also a fairly recent option.

To which Mansfield replies,

As important as careers are for women, what’s been more central in feminist thinking is this obsession with sex. And that’s what so wrong about feminism, and what has caused all the difficulties we see today and all the unhappiness that women have. Because most women do want to get married, and that’s because they’re smart enough to realize that a happy marriage is the most common and easiest way for a human being to be happy.

I quote Mansfield’s response because it is so archetypally deaf to what Kipnis has just said — it’s too early to tell. And it falls back on utter fatuity: a happy marriage is the easiest way for a human being to be happy. Well, duh — if the marriage is happy already. Making a happy marriage, as Kipnis points out, is another matter. Most marriages aren’t happy. Which Mansfield would undoubtely blame on the feminist obsession with sex!

Most of Kipnis’s essays are more relaxed, or at any rate less intellectually demanding. She is funny and clever and obviously very smart, but the pieces collected in Men veer too often toward entertainment. One exception is her piece on House of Games, the kinkily wooden film about a psychiatrist and a con man that David Mamet filmed in 1987. “If I say that the storyline of House of Games involves an overly cerebral woman spying on a bunch of sleazy but sexy men and then getting her comeuppance, possibly you can see why House of Games would be a movie that makes me nervous.” Kipnis compares the movie to sex with a bad man — she has a ball while it lasts but then hates herself the next morning. Kathleen and I watched House of Games a few months ago, so it was fresh enough in memory to make Kipnis’s essay especially pleasurable.

If it’s too early to tell what women want, it’s not too soon to smash the question. If you ask what men want, the answer, pretty obviously, is having their own way, which means that there are a million things than men want, or perhaps as many different things as there are men. (Most men have no real idea of the things that you can want if you have lots of money.) When Freud asked his infamous question, he was talking about a class of human beings who were defined by their common shackles. What happens when you remove those shackles is that women become as diversely purposed as men.

I’m on the verge of proposing that the body of thought called feminism ought to be broken in two. One half would concern the multiplicity of encounters that women experience as they express their newfound liberation. Many of these encounters will not be positive, and it will be important to judge them without sentimentality for a simpler, imprisoned past. The other half would concern the new relations between the sexes — or between the genders, as I’d prefer to put it, because sexual activity would not be included here. Powerism is an awful word, but it captures what I have in mind. If there is one thing that the mere liberation of women from legal and social constraints could not change, it is the constellation of male habits of mind about the manners of power. These habits are both unconscious for those who have them and obvious to others. They must change if women are to go beyond liberation and into incorporation, into running the world alongside men, encouraging — very much as courageous men encourage — us all to pay more and better attention to each other.

More anon.

Wednesday 12th

This will be brief, because I’ve just written a letter to Brian Morton, mostly about his novel, A Window Across the River. Kathleen loved this book so much that I thought I might read it again myself. Brian Morton had been on my mind anyway, since Patricia Bosworth’s recent memoir stirred up memories of Bronxville. Morton, with whom I’ve enjoyed the exchange of a couple of notes, is on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence, which Bosworth attended long before his time — before his birth, in fact — but I wonder if the profile of the Sarah Lawrence girl, always painted for me in lurid colors by my mother, who regarded it as a seminary for dissolute women (a view that nothing in Bosworth’s book would contradict), has changed much over the years. Now that dissoluteness is so mainstream and all.

A Window Across the River is about two creative people — a writer and a photographer — who try to revive an old affair. They drifted apart after the writer had an abortion; what kept the writer away was her terrible gift for writing devastating short stories about the people she loves. She can’t write any other kind of fiction, and once this is established, and the old friendship is resumed, we hold our breath waiting to find out how Isaac, the photographer, will respond to Nora’s inevitable story about him. (Our hopes that Nora might find a way to write a nice story about Isaac, who really is her favorite person in the world, are stifled at every turn.) Along the way, Nora and Isaac are distracted by the epiphenomena of art — the shows, the readings, the dinners, the panels, and, for Isaac, the alluring but more gifted students — that litter creative lives but make for entertaining reading. Here is Nora’s recollection of the literary life in college:

Kafka once said that a writer should cling to his desk as if to a life raft. Nora felt like she knew what he meant. And maybe, she thought, a woman writer has to cling to it with a special ferocity. Swarthmore had had a busy creative writing program, and every semester three or four visiting writers came in to give readings, lead daylong seminars, and be picturesquely literary in the coffee bar and the cafeteria. Nora tried to observe them closely. All of the successful male writers, she’d observed, were carried through their lives by a sort of rapture of egotism. Most of them were married, or had been — most had burned quickly through several wives — and many of them had children, but she got the feeling that none of them had ever let anything come between them and their work. The women were different. Most of them seemed nicer that the men — more modest, more approachable — but less obsessed. Nora found it easy to believe that their devotion to writing had always had to compete with the many varieties of caregiving with which women fill their lives. Some of the older women had long gaps in their writing lives, ten-year periods in which they’d published nothing. The single women were the only ones who seemed as fantastically devoted to writing as the men. “The lady poets must not marry, pal,” wrote John Berryman in one of his Dream Songs; more than forty years later, it still seemed to be true. (138-9)

I copied it out for two reasons. Not only is “rapture of egotism” so rich (rapture/raptor; the jet d’eau of the vowels; the insensibility brought on by the virtual-reality device of egotism), but its counterweight, “the many varieties of caregiving with which women fill their lives,” is so decidedly unmagical. Also, a more feminist statement might be, “with which women’s lives are filled,” because so many women feel that they don’t have a choice. But for Nora it is a choice. She accepts her womanliness as is; what bothers her is her poisoned pen.

When his rage cools down, Isaac’s understanding of Nora’s achievement expands.

She’d always said that her stories had no compassion, but that wasn’t quite accurate. Her portrait of him was a perfect rendering of the person he was afraid he might be. She’d intuited some of his worst fears about himself and written a story based on the premise that they were true. To write about him with such damning finality, as if he would never rise above his limitations — that, it was true, could be called cruel. But to go so deeply into his inner life that she could unearth his most intimate fears about himself — that was a large act of sympathetic imagination.  (286)

All we can do is what Nora does: hope for the best.

More anon.

Monday 10th

Frances Fitzgerald has published a new book that, like most of her others, quickly establishes itself as Required Reading. The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America is a brisk but rigorous survey of a movement with primeval roots in American culture. But that word, struggle, so overused in subtitles, here eloquently attests to the difficulty that Evangelicalism has had in asserting its primacy over the culture. The United States may well be the most “religious” country in the developed world, with more of its people willing to assert a belief in God. But American religiosity is ideologically ramshackle, as is clear from its wavering and unclear relations with the more disciplined Calvinist creeds from which it derives. It is also stoutly opposed by an antagonist culture, rooted in the Western secular thought of which our Constitution is a flower, of social justice.

This is an old antagonism. A threshold decision about living in the world must be made by every person in it: is the world worthy of improvement, or is it rather a bolus of wickedness that is about to meet the divine retribution that it deserves? To put the choice in terms of Scripture alone, which are the more important pages of the New Testament, the moral teachings of Jesus or the not altogether coherent predictions of Revelation? If I bet on the Rapture, do I need health insurance? If Armageddon is at hand, should I worry about racial inequality?

American Evangelicals did not invent this duality; it runs through the entire course of heresy from the earliest days of the Christian Church. Until the Sixteenth Century, much of what Evangelicals now stand for was heresy, in the eyes of the Christian establishment at Rome. No sooner was that establishment upended in Northern Europe, however, than fratricidal doctrinal squabbles sent many protestants into exile. On the other shore of the Atlantic, exile was repackaged as paradise, a new home for new religion. Not long afterward, though, it also became a mercantile power, with cities full of the virtually godless. The soldiers of Christ have no more prevailed in the New World than they did in the Old. Strange offshoots from the Nineteenth Century, such the Oneida Community and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (one of them still very much with us), gave way in the Twentieth to glitzy, vaguely disgraceful performances by such intriguing people as Aimée Semple McPherson, and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. (I’ve cheated and read ahead: Fitzgerald on the Bakkers is a feast of understatement.) Evangelicals have somehow emerged, in the Twenty-First Century, as supporters of every kind of inequality; they appear to be committed to a democracy that is limited to white heterosexual males. Whether that’s “American” or not remains, unfortunately, to be decided.

I am not a spiritual person, but I am aware of drawing great strength from a belief in “society” that has a distinctly spiritual aura, and, what’s more, is no more demonstrable, no more available to truth claims, than a belief in the Holy Trinity. I simply believe that it is there, and I should be broken if I didn’t. I believe that what’s best about human beings is their ability to cooperate and to provide mutual support — sometimes just by having fun together. What makes these achievements wonderful is their way of acknowledging the manifest inequality of born humans. At our best, we help one another out without expecting one another to share a greater likeness. (We are rarely at our best.) I am no socialist; I do not dream of making humanity harmonious. But we are mutually dependent for safety and comfort. To me, the denial of this basic proposition is clear evidence of emotional immaturity.

Sore as our unresolved inequalities of race and gender remain, we appear to be on the verge of confronting a new inequality of employability. It will be interesting to see how Evangelicals fare among the new jobless, and vice versa. The nub of the equality problem is the secular dream (shared by Jesus) of treating different people equally. It is not to say that difference is unimportant or easy to overlook; on the contrary: difference is unignorable. It is only when difference is recognized and accepted that equality can be granted. The difference that I’m talking about is not the difference of other people. It is the difference of me, the lonely uniqueness of my particular chaos in the universe. Only when I set aside imaginary groupings to which I might pretend to belong do I ache for equality, simply that I may be treated equally myself.

More anon.

Friday 7th

At lunch with my friend Eric, I was talking about the latest buzzword, “the Benedict option.” Eric knew more about it than I did. He knew, for example, about Rod Dreher, whose book of the same title has just come out. The cover is illustrated with a photograph of Mont-Saint-Michel, of course. What could be cosier than a rock-bound tower that, in the middle of a bay, is accessible only at low tide? Why don’t we all just go there and live the pure life, while cities plunge into every kind of sexual irregularity? We never liked cities anyway.

What is it about sex, that everybody thinks that it’s so important?

Animals, from what we can tell, do not, however driven, actually enjoy sexual congress. It seems to me than an ethos of generosity, such as Christianity is at its Scriptural core, would not be very interested in the carnal itch. But early Christianity was distinguished by the devotion of propertied women, widows mostly, who were attracted by the promise of first-class citizenship that, for a short time only, the new religion seemed to offer. These ladies were hardly sexual wantons; their rebellion stood for virginity. By St Augustine’s day, it was all but settled that true Christians renounced sex.

But why make everybody else renounce it? Why make it all such a big deal? I can only conclude that human beings, like animals, don’t like sex, either — especially when they’re not having any.

As for retiring to monasteries, Ron Dreher ought to be writing about Cassiodorus, the noble roman who gave monasteries their real raison d’être, which was to copy manuscripts on as large a scale as possible. Transcribing important texts is no longer as arduous as it was then, but actually reading and understanding them is more important than ever. From the quiet of the bookroom of my Upper East Side apartment, I see no need to fuss about monasteries. No need to bring sex into it!

Bon weekend à tous!

Thursday 6th

Although the weather is still generally lousy, spring seems determined to prevail, and, any day now, I may receive a box from White Flower Farm containing some unusual coleus plants that do well on the balcony. This year, I shall open it right away, no matter how rainy or chilly it is, and get the plants into pots, instead of letting them wither, as I did last year, waiting for the skies to clear. I have already strewn the ivy pot with morning glory seeds. Neither ivy nor morning glories have ever really thrived on my balconies, but I don’t know what else to do with the gigantic pot. Throwing it away would require filling many garbage bags with dirt first. Much easier to toss in some seeds and complain.

Meanwhile, I am learning that there is always more to cleaning the bathroom than I thought. When I started doing it myself, at holiday time, it seemed enough to soak the bath mat in a very mild bleach solution while scrubbing the tub and polishing the fixtures. After a few weeks, though, I could feel that the walls above the tub were getting scummy. How did the woman who used to do the cleaning take care of that, without getting wet? And how did she manage without bleach? (For she never asked me to stock up, although this might have been because I always have it on hand.) And how did she mop the floors? I know that she didn’t use vinegar, which is the only solvent that I can get to work for me. Everything else leaves a streaky mess.

We had chicken Tetrazzini for dinner last night. It was tasty, but making the sauce was a botheration, because, instead of consulting the recipe — my perfectly reliable recipe — I’d concocted it off the top of my head, and there wasn’t enough thickening flour in the roux — as I concluded later. When I set it over low heat to reduce, it didn’t burble gently in the saucepan, but popped and plumed, because, if I hadn’t used enough flour, I had used too much butter. I had also stirred in an egg yolk far too soon. It’s horrifying to find myself still vulnerable to that adolescent resentment about “following orders,” even if they’re my own. Saying “I’ll do it my way” settles nothing.

I have taken to dictating the shopping list to the iPhone. I open the shopping list note, bring up the keyboard, hit “return” and then the little microphone icon, and say “mayonnaise.” After a slight second, “Mayonnaise” appears on the screen, correctly spelled. It is true that I am (among other things) a trained radio announcer, but I’m still impressed. And yet even dictation is far from perfect. It occurred to me to put mayonnaise on the list when I was spooning a cupful of the stuff into a mini-processor, to make my version of Russian/Thousand Island dressing. Both hands were full, and I forgot to update the shopping list until Kathleen came home, and I said, “Hey, I’ve been dictating the shopping list to the iPhone.” I managed to turn the screen in her direction during that split second between my speech and the appearance of the word. She was impressed, too.

Now it’s time to change the sheets. Also, the blanket and the bedspread. I change the blanket and the bedspread when the time changes. This year’s time change, in the middle of March, took me by surprise, and then the next time that I changed the sheets, I found that when I had made the bed I had forgotten to change the blanket and the bedspread, and I was not about to undo all that work. I shall not forgot today. Also, it’s time to turn over the quilt on top of the bedspread. We had it made when we moved to this apartment. One side is predominately green, but with a multicolored pattern of half-opened fans. The other side is mostly red, in a very irregular plaid. Last fall, Kathleen noticed that I always had the plaid side facing down. It’s true that I much prefer the green. But I made a deal, to show the warm red during the cold season. Now it’s time for the breezy fans.

If the world is going to hell in a handbasket, thanks to millennia of poor decisions made by powerful men, it’s because powerful men have never had to grapple with the real problems of life.

More anon.

Tuesday 4th

Ever since climbing aboard the Internet, it seems, I’ve been trying to figure out Tyler Cowen. He is certainly not a sympathetic figure, but neither is he altogether antipathetic. I can’t seem to get a grip on his economic ideas, mostly because I have no training but also because I think that most economic training is nonsense, productive of nothing but words sprayed on a page. The only thing that I really know about Cowen is that he travels a lot and is always in search of good local restaurants.

In a recent Vox interview with Ezra Klein, in fact, Cowen is shown holding chopsticks, with seven dishes of various sizes on the table behind him. Despite the chopsticks, despite the Chinese cuisine, the image is adamantly masculine. Cowen’s manliness is a thick thread that runs through everything he writes — his voice is bright with the impatience that comes of having to explain things over and over again — and I do not think that there is anything compensatory about it. Nor misogynist. If Cowen’s positions might be unhelpful to women and to others traditionally unwelcome at the high tables of power, that is incidental. Cowen would probably be the first man to stand up and welcome a woman who demonstrated the capacity to act with his manly assurance.

In the interview, Klein asked Cowen for quick comments about a slew of issues. NATO, guaranteed income, the war on drugs. I can’t say that I disagreed with much of what he said. My objections were all tonal, because I, of course, am not a manly man — I’m too skeptical about the status quo, but also too optimistic about improving on it. Early on, Cowen quipped, “I feel we need to put up a big sign on this country that says, ‘We’re for immigrants who really want to work and create’.” I shuddered with irritation, because putting “work” and “create” in the same clause makes hash of both. I wonder why he did not simply say, “… who really want to compete.”

Later, there was an even more abrasive passage.

I do believe America is an exceptional nation and should think of itself as such. And this norm weakening is one of my great worries about this current time. If you ask what makes America exceptional, it’s the embedded mix of religiosity and the high status we’re willing to give to businessmen. Our belief that our way of life is best, which of course it isn’t, but we believe it, and that’s overall a good thing. And this Puritan notion that there are individual life projects and it’s your highest calling to pursue them. And we both live by this, even though neither of us is Protestant. And I think that combination is just fantastic, though dangerous too.

At two points, Cowen undercuts himself, first when he says that our way of life isn’t the best, and then when he finds the “combination” — of what, I’m not exactly sure — dangerous. What does he really mean? That it’s a good thing to believe in an illusion — if the illusion is the particular one that we believe in? But what dispirits me far more is Cowen’s explicit belief that religiosity and businessmen are what make America exceptional. I wonder how many women, especially educated women, would agree. How many women would jump out of bed every morning with enthusiasm for prioritizing catechism and the cash register?

My own view is that America is exceptional because there used to be so much room in its thinly-populated wilderness for anti-social European misfits. I believe that American exceptionalism is a disorder from which the nation is far from recovering.

***

Thinking very hard, for various reasons, about feminism, I more and more want to bury the term in scare quotes and declare that we simply don’t know what it refers to. It seems more profitable to consider what feminism isn’t, what its constellation of ideas does not include. The first thing that comes to mind is competition.

In other entries, I’ve argued that pure capitalism is very important to a healthy economic life, but only in small doses and special cases. There is a vital interlacing between capitalism and innovation that keeps the economic edge sharp. But only the edge. Mature businesses do not thrive in capitalist excitement. That’s why I argue for more not-for-profit business organizations. Please tell me what is competitive, in a good way, about the supply of electric power. You can’t. The competition — the innovation, funded by capitalist speculation — was settled long ago, while Thomas Edison was still alive. Quick readers will note that I have folded “competition” into the captialist-innovation matrix. And that is indeed where I think it belongs.

The worst thing about prioritizing competition is the laziness that it encourages. I’m not being paradoxical. Competition, with its markers and its metrics, reduces the complications of personal performance to a few standard measurements. Did the tenor hit the high notes? That’s a much easier criterion to agree on than the far more important issue of a singer’s musicality. But the high notes are exceptional; most of the time, the singer is concerned not with freakish display but with tying ordinary notes together either tightly or loosely, as taste dictates. Similarly, there is nothing in genuine scholastic achievement that can be measured. Testing creates a wholly bogus region of accomplishment. Judgments of academic excellence are subject to dispute, a necessary inconvenience. Examinations sidestep the problem, but to no truly constructive purpose.

And as to commerce, it is no longer doubtable that the objective of every successful business is to narrow the field of competition to the vanishing point.

The humanist objection to the excessive emphasis on competition is that most people are insulted by it. Most people are not competitors. Most people are, by definition, close to mediocre. Most people need some kind of help from other people. Most of all, they need respect for their ordinariness. I can see that Tyler Cowen wants an America that, like Lake Wobegon, is above-average.

What this exercise teaches me is that feminism is not so much about allowing women to compete and excel as it is about creating a thriving society of dignified individuals.

More anon.

3 April

Monday 3rd

At the Museum yesterday, Fossil Darling and Ray Soleil and I passed a gallery that has been there for decades but that is now marked with the name of Leonard Lauder, not, as it was for decades, that of Lila Acheson Wallace. Quite aside from the faithlessness with which the Museum, as well as other cultural institutions, treats the names of former benefactors, there is the gossipy question, raised in a recent Vanity Fair article, of the extent to which Lauder’s promise of important Cubist paintings led the Museum’s leaders astray, namely in the acquisition of a long-term lease on the old Whitney Museum, now known as the Breuer Building (after its architect — a far better criterion for naming than moneybags). Another dubious project, the demolition and replacement of the old Wallace galleries, was halted before it began. These contretemps invite fair questions about the role of curating recent art that the Metropolitan ought to play. But they also spark tittle-tattle about the outgoing Director, Thomas Campbell.

The Times appears to be following this story with a view not to heaping disgrace on Campbell but to inspiring a reform of the Museum’s board of directors, which currently consists of a small band of executive overseers floating in a puddle of ill-informed socialites. This morning, the paper reported an amorous imbroglio involving Campbell and an employee, her name withheld to protect her (quoth the Times). It reported that the precise nature of the amour was unknown — perhaps Campbell and the lady, who have been friends since before his great elevation from the ranks of assistant curators, are just friends. But that was neither here nor there, because the problem was that, with her pal as Director, the lady, working in the digital media department, was exercising power far beyond her pay grade. She had became “hard to manage.” A new director of digital media, “lured” from the Getty, found it impossible to do her job, and, after a formal complaint, left with a handsome lagniappe.

All of this is more or less off the record. Also out of focus is the ghostly legacy of Philippe de Montebello, who ran the Museum for more than thirty years before retiring on the eve of the financial meltdown. What great timing! Because what brought his successor down, at least so far as the record is concerned, was the Museum’s finances, which have not only not recovered from the meltdown but worsened for reasons having nothing to do with it. You could say that Montebello was better at fiscal responsibility than Campbell, or you could say that Montebello ran his board. More cautious than Campbell, Montebello may have imposed his caution on the trustees. It was an arrangement that worked, but it was not a suitable arrangement, because it depended on the self-respect of the Director, not the probity of the board.

It’s hard to list all the changes wrought during Thomas Campbell’s directorship — almost all of them real improvements. I’m thinking especially of the new galleries of American painting and Islamic art, respectively. The new plaza on the Museum’s Fifth Avenue front is most welcome. These three things alone would constitute memorable signatures for any Director — and they were all achieved within ten years. But there’s more — perhaps too much. In addition to the Breuer Building lease, a rebranding campaign proved to be very unpopular. (It turns out that everybody loved the little metal buttons.) When the new logo was introduced, the price paid to develop it was an unattractive part of the picture, and it was then that a susurrus of criticism began to hum. Insiders began to talk — off the record. Gradually a new portrait of the Director unfolded. Whereas before he had been presented as a top-notch arts man, gifted with encyclopedic knowledge and elegant taste, he now became an unskilled executive, with little or no managerial experience. What didn’t change was the impassivity of the Board of Directors, which continued to behave as though Campbell and others had taken advantage of its good faith.

In the past decade, New York’s cultural life has suffered more from the negligence (and worse) of its institutional fiduciaries than from any other cause. From City Opera to Cooper Union and NYU, trustees have betrayed their public obligations by succumbing to the lure of expensive but unnecessary projects. Their personal wealth has enabled them, in the absence of reflective checks, to indulge grandiose schemes with childish thoughtlessness, usually at no personal expense. I can only hope that the Times will increase its attentiveness to such idle chicanery.

More anon.

3 and 4 April

Monday 3rd: Fiduciary

At the Museum yesterday, Fossil Darling and Ray Soleil and I passed a gallery that has been there for decades but that is now marked with the name of Leonard Lauder, not, as it was for decades, that of Lila Acheson Wallace. Quite aside from the faithlessness with which the Museum, as well as other cultural institutions, treats the names of former benefactors, there is the gossipy question, raised in a recent Vanity Fair article, of the extent to which Lauder’s promise of important Cubist paintings led the Museum’s leaders astray, namely in the acquisition of a long-term lease on the old Whitney Museum, now known as the Breuer Building (after its architect — a far better criterion for naming than moneybags). Another dubious project, the demolition and replacement of the old Wallace galleries, was halted before it began. These contretemps invite fair questions about the role of curating recent art that the Metropolitan ought to play. But they also spark tittle-tattle about the outgoing Director, Thomas Campbell.

The Times appears to be following this story with a view not to heaping disgrace on Campbell but to inspiring a reform of the Museum’s board of directors, which currently consists of a small band of executive overseers floating in a puddle of ill-informed socialites. This morning, the paper reported an amorous imbroglio involving Campbell and an employee, her name withheld to protect her (quoth the Times). It reported that the precise nature of the amour was unknown — perhaps Campbell and the lady, who have been friends since before his great elevation from the ranks of assistant curators, are just friends. But that was neither here nor there, because the problem was that, with her pal as Director, the lady, working in the digital media department, was exercising power far beyond her pay grade. She had became “hard to manage.” A new director of digital media, “lured” from the Getty, found it impossible to do her job, and, after a formal complaint, left with a handsome lagniappe.

All of this is more or less off the record. Also out of focus is the ghostly legacy of Philippe de Montebello, who ran the Museum for more than thirty years before retiring on the eve of the financial meltdown. What great timing! Because what brought his successor down, at least so far as the record is concerned, was the Museum’s finances, which have not only not recovered from the meltdown but worsened for reasons having nothing to do with it. You could say that Montebello was better at fiscal responsibility than Campbell, or you could say that Montebello ran his board. More cautious than Campbell, Montebello may have imposed his caution on the trustees. It was an arrangement that worked, but it was not a suitable arrangement, because it depended on the self-respect of the Director, not the probity of the board.

It’s hard to list all the changes wrought during Thomas Campbell’s directorship — almost all of them real improvements. I’m thinking especially of the new galleries of American painting and Islamic art, respectively. The new plaza on the Museum’s Fifth Avenue front is most welcome. These three things alone would constitute memorable signatures for any Director — and they were all achieved within ten years. But there’s more — perhaps too much. In addition to the Breuer Building lease, a rebranding campaign proved to be very unpopular. (It turns out that everybody loved the little metal buttons.) When the new logo was introduced, the price paid to develop it was an unattractive part of the picture, and it was then that a susurrus of criticism began to hum. Insiders began to talk — off the record. Gradually a new portrait of the Director unfolded. Whereas before he had been presented as a top-notch arts man, gifted with encyclopedic knowledge and elegant taste, he now became an unskilled executive, with little or no managerial experience. What didn’t change was the impassivity of the Board of Directors, which continued to behave as though Campbell and others had taken advantage of its good faith.

In the past decade, New York’s cultural life has suffered more from the negligence (and worse) of its institutional fiduciaries than from any other cause. From City Opera to Cooper Union and NYU, trustees have betrayed their public obligations by succumbing to the lure of expensive but unnecessary projects. Their personal wealth has enabled them, in the absence of reflective checks, to indulge grandiose schemes with childish thoughtlessness, usually at no personal expense. I can only hope that the Times will increase its attentiveness to such idle chicanery.

***

Tuesday 4th: Above Average

Ever since climbing aboard the Internet, it seems, I’ve been trying to figure out Tyler Cowen. He is certainly not a sympathetic figure, but neither is he altogether antipathetic. I can’t seem to get a grip on his economic ideas, mostly because I have no training but also because I think that most economic training is nonsense, productive of nothing but words sprayed on a page. The only thing that I really know about Cowen is that he travels a lot and is always in search of good local restaurants.

In a recent Vox interview with Ezra Klein, in fact, Cowen is shown holding chopsticks, with seven dishes of various sizes on the table behind him. Despite the chopsticks, despite the Chinese cuisine, the image is adamantly masculine. Cowen’s manliness is a thick thread that runs through everything he writes — his voice is bright with the impatience that comes of having to explain things over and over again — and I do not think that there is anything compensatory about it. Nor misogynist. If Cowen’s positions might be unhelpful to women and to others traditionally unwelcome at the high tables of power, that is incidental. Cowen would probably be the first man to stand up and welcome a woman who demonstrated the capacity to act with his manly assurance.

In the interview, Klein asked Cowen for quick comments about a slew of issues. NATO, guaranteed income, the war on drugs. I can’t say that I disagreed with much of what he said. My objections were all tonal, because I, of course, am not a manly man — I’m too skeptical about the status quo, but also too optimistic about improving on it. Early on, Cowen quipped, “I feel we need to put up a big sign on this country that says, ‘We’re for immigrants who really want to work and create’.” I shuddered with irritation, because putting “work” and “create” in the same clause makes hash of both. I wonder why he did not simply say, “… who really want to compete.”

Later, there was an even more abrasive passage.

I do believe America is an exceptional nation and should think of itself as such. And this norm weakening is one of my great worries about this current time. If you ask what makes America exceptional, it’s the embedded mix of religiosity and the high status we’re willing to give to businessmen. Our belief that our way of life is best, which of course it isn’t, but we believe it, and that’s overall a good thing. And this Puritan notion that there are individual life projects and it’s your highest calling to pursue them. And we both live by this, even though neither of us is Protestant. And I think that combination is just fantastic, though dangerous too.

At two points, Cowen undercuts himself, first when he says that our way of life isn’t the best, and then when he finds the “combination” — of what, I’m not exactly sure — dangerous. What does he really mean? That it’s a good thing to believe in an illusion — if the illusion is the particular one that we believe in? But what dispirits me far more is Cowen’s explicit belief that religiosity and businessmen are what make America exceptional. I wonder how many women, especially educated women, would agree. How many women would jump out of bed every morning with enthusiasm for prioritizing catechism and the cash register?

My own view is that America is exceptional because there used to be so much room in its thinly-populated wilderness for anti-social European misfits. I believe that American exceptionalism is a disorder from which the nation is far from recovering.

***

Thinking very hard, for various reasons, about feminism, I more and more want to bury the term in scare quotes and declare that we simply don’t know what it refers to. It seems more profitable to consider what feminism isn’t, what its constellation of ideas does not include. The first thing that comes to mind is competition.

In other entries, I’ve argued that pure capitalism is very important to a healthy economic life, but only in small doses and special cases. There is a vital interlacing between capitalism and innovation that keeps the economic edge sharp. But only the edge. Mature businesses do not thrive in capitalist excitement. That’s why I argue for more not-for-profit business organizations. Please tell me what is competitive, in a good way, about the supply of electric power. You can’t. The competition — the innovation, funded by capitalist speculation — was settled long ago, while Thomas Edison was still alive. Quick readers will note that I have folded “competition” into the captialist-innovation matrix. And that is indeed where I think it belongs.

The worst thing about prioritizing competition is the laziness that it encourages. I’m not being paradoxical. Competition, with its markers and its metrics, reduces the complications of personal performance to a few standard measurements. Did the tenor hit the high notes? That’s a much easier criterion to agree on than the far more important issue of a singer’s musicality. But the high notes are exceptional; most of the time, the singer is concerned not with freakish display but with tying ordinary notes together either tightly or loosely, as taste dictates. Similarly, there is nothing in genuine scholastic achievement that can be measured. Testing creates a wholly bogus region of accomplishment. Judgments of academic excellence are subject to dispute, a necessary inconvenience. Examinations sidestep the problem, but to no truly constructive purpose.

And as to commerce, it is no longer doubtable that the objective of every successful business is to narrow the field of competition to the vanishing point.

The humanist objection to the excessive emphasis on competition is that most people are insulted by it. Most people are not competitors. Most people are, by definition, close to mediocre. Most people need some kind of help from other people. Most of all, they need respect for their ordinariness. I can see that Tyler Cowen wants an America that, like Lake Wobegon, is above-average.

What this exercise teaches me is that feminism is not so much about allowing women to compete and excel as it is about creating a thriving society of dignified individuals.

More anon.