26, 27 and 28 June

Tuesday 26th

How many times have I quoted a passage from one of David Brooks’s columns only to say, “Yes, but…”? It doesn’t bear counting. My reservations, my hesitations, my qualifications are usually rooted in the things that Brooks doesn’t spell out. On the face of it, I have no quarrel with this, from today’s Op-Ed piece, “Republican or Conservative, You Have to Choose.”

As Scruton put it in his bracing primer, “Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition,” “The question of which comes first, liberty or order, was to divide liberals from conservatives for the next 200 years.”

The practical upshot is that conservatives have always placed tremendous emphasis on the sacred space where individuals are formed. This space is populated by institutions like the family, religion, the local community, the local culture, the arts, the schools, literature and the manners that govern everyday life.

Agreed, but what if those institutions are mildewed, as I believe was the case when I was growing up? What if community and culture have been denatured by discrepancies too great to ignore? What if other institutions, such as the free market economy, are inimical to home and school? What if everything that a conservative treasures is actually ersatz?

When I look back on my home town, Bronxville, New York, and consider it as “the sacred space where individuals are formed,” I don’t know whether to laugh or throw up. Even today, Bronxville is largely white and Christian; when I was a child, there were absolutely no exceptions. The Jewish merchants who owned and ran the shops had to live somewhere else. For all intents and purposes, local culture was a matter of athletics, and manners were insincerely perfunctory. In school, we learned about the American Revolution and the Civil War. The American Revolution that we were taught was not the real revolution (the one that happened in 1789, when the “Founding Fathers” overthrew the ramshackle government concocted when independence from Britain was achieved earlier in that decade), and the Civil War was a civil war only along the border separating Dixie from the Union. Never was it even suggested that both misnamed conflicts were wars of secession. (In the South, at least they get the second one right.) But what difference did it make, if the only point of school was to produce successful executives and their supportive wives? At home, I was supposed to pretend that I was my adoptive parents’ child, or in other words that the weird gulf of alienated misunderstanding that separated us was my doing, and not symptomatic of the lack of shared DNA. It would take years to unlearn all the nonsense that the sacred institutions of Bronxville tried to stuff into my head. I am a born conservative, but I insist on having something worthwhile to conserve!

What seems to me to be the insoluble problem of American conservatism is the corruption of the sacred space by African enslavement. Whites naturally minimize the impact of this wickedness, while blacks are just as determined to deny the effects of persistent degradation. Every day, it becomes harder for me to believe that the Refounding that America needs can be achieved without the preliminaries of a bloody and this time genuine civil war, or perhaps an even worse collapse into paranoiac chaos, with everyone fighting everyone. It becomes difficult to get out of bed in the morning. Donald Trump’s principal contribution to public affairs has been a terrifying clarity.

Finally, I agree that order precedes liberty. But I also believe that this is the fundamental liberal premise, even if it has never been advertised as such. The English liberals of the Seventeenth Century, no matter what John Locke said, sought to replace the constant risk of feudal anarchy, which fluctuated with the character of hereditary monarchs, with a suite of regular processes, or political order, that would encourage cooperative liberty. If they accentuated property rights, that was because they believed that good fences make good neighbors. With trumpeting irony, the liberal régime became, in the course of a century, the sacred space that conservatives sought to defend, from the nightmare of the Jacobin movement.

The phrase “social justice” fills me with Terror. In the end, I’ll sign anything that David Brooks wants me to. But I wish that he were more demanding.

***

Wednesday 27th

Here’s the thing about shaming: it requires consensus. Everyone in the community, or nearly everyone, must agree that shameful behavior has been committed, and that the person who behaved shamefully ought to be isolated by the community’s expressed disapproval.

If the community is divided on the matter, then shaming is tantamount to picking a fight. The shamed person will not be isolated, but on the contrary will probably attract overt support from those who believe that nothing shameful occurred. Considerations of right and wrong give way to partisanship, or, in today’s parlance, tribalism. Shaming without consensus risks the very disturbance that consensus shaming, by isolating and ignoring the offender, makes a point of avoiding. It is also an ugly and intrusive form of protest. It is one thing to picket an office, and quite another to upset someone’s dinner.

I haven’t seen anyone make a connection to the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, as a source of provocation for the diners at the Mexican restaurant and the staff at the farm-to-table place. If nothing else, Masterpiece is a further instance of the complicated interactions of righteousness, fairness, and the law. You could say that, if it’s all right for the owners of the Masterpiece Cakeshop to turn down the order for a gay wedding cake, then it’s all right for the management of the Red Hen to ask Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her party to leave the restaurant. But that’s to argue that two wrongs make a right. It also prolongs a train of ill-conceived litigation. I would have argued against bringing the wedding-cake suit in the first place. How else to justify it except as an attempt to shame? While it might be rational to expect a public business to serve its customers without regard to personal opinions — unless, of course, objection is supported by a genuine consensus, as, for example, the general opinion that a wedding cake in the shape of a penis would be in deplorable taste, tantamount to an insult to the ceremony; but of course there could be no talk of such a consensus on the issue of same-sex marriage — it is not reasonable to take a baker to court for refusing to bake a cake. It simply isn’t. If you think that it is, then your righteousness is out of control.

Nor is it reasonable to convert a public facility, without warning, into a private club, where only the like-minded are welcome.

Made somewhat uneasy by the suspicion that I’m having my cake and eating it here, I’ll admit that I’m very sorry that the full force of social-media activism was not available in the fight against Richard Nixon, the true begetter of our presidential calamities.

***

Thursday 28th

John Lanchester, until ten years ago an interesting, even promising novelist, has been a crack, indispensable reporter on political economy ever since he realized that the notes that he was gathering for a novel on the Crash of 2008 and subsequent Great Recession would probably be more gripping if presented as fact. In the new issue of the London Review of Books, he takes stock of the prediction, made by himself and many others, that “the aftermath of the crash would dominate our economic and political lives for at least ten years.” It looks like understatement now. What he might have said is that it would take ten years for the impact of the crash to become visible.

Because I’m in the middle of Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, I saw, through every paragraph of Lanchester’s lengthy account of that aftermath, a very simple explanation for such wildly unforseeable phenomena as Donald Trump, Jeremy Corbyn, and Brexit. While finance ministers everywhere continue on the neoliberal course — autopilot, really — voters throughout the developed world have become conscious, if not of the essence of neoliberalism itself, then at least that most of them are likely to suffer collateral damage from its successes. Not without a good deal of confusion, they are trying to throw monkeywrenches into its operations.

Slobodian’s book is a readable, even gripping history of the branch of neoliberalism known as the Geneva School, from its beginnings in the years before World War I, and mostly in the brain of Ludwig von Mises, to the Seattle riots. Unfortunately, it is also depressing. For the first time I think I understand what Friedrich Hayek and his colleagues in the Mont Pèlerin Society had in mind. And I see that what they had in mind has been brought into being: a global consumerist economy that seeks to prevent popular interference with international trade, no matter how much discomfort this imposes on national populations. Neoliberalism envisions a world in which standards of living for workers are equalized, and, as Lanchester points out, we are much closer to that “impossible dream” than we were ten years ago. The percentage of human beings living in what the UN terms “absolute poverty” has dropped from nineteen to nine since the crash, while incomes in the developed world have dropped while also becoming precarious. “Austerity” is the euphemism for this equalizing process. If nothing else, it’s dementedly single-minded. The inevitable result will be that the only shoppers at Wal-Mart will be the people who work there. What kind of business model is that?

Neoliberalism drapes itself as a defender of capitalism, but it is nothing of the kind. Capitalists absorb gains and losses as they come. Neoliberals keep the profits and offload the losses to the public. Noble as the goal of global economic equalization might be, neoliberalism imposes the very heavy tax of the so-called one-percent, the very rich getting richer, as wealth concentrates in the ever-fewer hands that control the insulated global economy. I expect that I’ll have more to say about Globalists when I’m done with it, although that may take a while, because the story that Slobodian has to tell is sickening. Neoliberal contempt for the working classes — which more and more includes everyone who is not living off investments — is so intense that it is unconscious.

Bad as political neoliberalism is, the reaction against it, which seems to be socialism, is worse. Socialism replaces heads for business with faces for beauty contests. It shorts the circuits of political economy, the challenge of which is to keep the two strands, politics and economy, intertwined but distinct. Liberal political economy, democratic by nature, seeks to erect a framework in which everyone is free to go about his business without being oppressed by the state or anyone else. Socialist democracy is a contradiction in terms, and has been ever since Marx wrote about it, postulating a framework that, in theory, dissolves into thin air, while in practice it calcifies everything it touches. We have had a century and a half’s experience to teach us the inexorability of socialism’s failure. Ironically, only twenty years have passed since that failure was universally recognized and celebrated. But that’s time enough for a generation to grow up in ignorance.

We are still so close, on the larger scale of human history, to the Industrial Revolution that we forget that a truly successful ongoing commercial enterprise simply breaks even. It does not incur losses, of course, but neither are its prices excessive. We are still so close to the age of new businesses that we unthinkingly regard managerial remuneration as drawn from profits, not from revenues. We associate not-for-profit enterprises with charity and volunteerism. We persist in the binary simple-mindedness of seeing capitalism and socialism as the only imaginable alternatives, even though capitalism, as I say, is nothing more than the necessarily risky phase of innovation. Very little of a liberal political economy requires capitalist investment.

It’s time for me to reread Jane Jacobs’s Cities and the Wealth of Nations. It persuaded me thirty years ago that global economy is a chimera, and that only a regional economy, centered on a capital city and heavily reliant on import substitution, is sustainable.

The whole idea of “the nation” is an unfortunate pipe dream of the French Revolution; “kingdoms” are built on the idea of territorial expansion (and defense). Neither nations nor kingdoms are truly capable of political economy. Socialism aspires to a global, unpolitical economy that cannot be squared with what we know about human nature — which it madly proposes to alter. Only in a well-run city-state are we free to disagree, to put our various skills to the test, and to enjoy our privacy; only there can prosperity flourish without great wealth.

Bon week-end à tous!

19 and 20 June

Tuesday 19th

I have something new, I think, to say against television. I don’t think that I’ve said it before.

Television is a dream.

Last night, as I was finishing up Thinking Without a Banister, a collection of odds and ends by Hannah Arendt, including interviews and panel discussions, I came across this, from an opening address to her students at the New School.

Plato, certainly foremost among all those whose texts have been taught and learned throughout the centuries, once said: “Every one of us is like a man who sees things in a dream and thinks he knows them perfectly, and then he awakens and finds that he knows nothing.” (513-4)

So it is, I saw at once, with watching television. Television is crafted to convey an illusion of knowledge and understanding. This illusion evaporates when put to the test, when the dreamer “awakens” and tries to contribute the new knowledge and understanding to a discussion with other people. Confusion ensues. Dreamers remember something of what they saw, but nothing about what it meant. Only vague and contradictory feelings persist.

Many viewers of television, of course, never awaken in this sense at all. They go on thinking that they know and understand everything.

In its infancy, television was regarded as a medium that would connect people to the world. Proto-MOOCs provided some of the earliest programming; Sunrise Semester debuted in 1957. By then, however, it was understood that the general audience was not interested in genuine edification. Learning is difficult, by turns tedious and scary. (Just ask any first-year law student.) People have enough real life as it is. What they want from television is entertainment and uplift.

I’ve got nothing to say against that, except that anyone with an education ought to find entertainment and uplift in superior formats. (It’s difficult to think of any that are inferior.) And to argue that presenting news as a kind of uplifting entertainment transforms it instantly into fantasy — a dream that never was and can never be. So it is with the monstrous (and partially scripted) reality shows, of which Donald Trump was a leading exponent.

For many, television is a dream of luxury and gratification in comparison to which their actual circumstances are matter for bitter resentment.

It is frightening to consider how much time and emotional investment the citizens of what is supposed to be the world’s most powerful nation spend on dreaming.

***

The other day, I concluded an entry at the other blog by quipping, “Men may make things happen, but it’s women who keep things going.” I thought that this was very clever at the time, but as soon as I repeated it to Kathleen, who did laugh, I saw how fatuous it was, because everyone has always known that it is true. What is new, what I neglected to say, is that women’s ability, or determination, to keep things going is no longer to be attributed to some mysterious female essence, inborn or hermetically inculcated, that a real man could never comprehend, much less imitate. If feminists have accomplished nothing else, they have exposed traditional women’s work as a grim regime of unattainably smooth routine pursued behind a mask of false placidity. They have traded in the model of keeping things going that men had in mind for something more humane and sustainable. And there are men who do know how to keep things going. Engineers come to mind. Now if we could only get teenaged boys to pick up their rooms.

(This was never an issue for me. By the time my mother got through with me, and I was living on my own, I found the sight of an unmade bed deeply unsettling.)

If only, that is, we didn’t have to wait for men to find out that there is nothing inherently special about being male. What’s special about being male is living in a culture that believes it to be the case. In our culture, this belief is somewhat vestigial. The principal traditional manly virtues, courage and stoicism, are no longer so blankly admired. Courage turns out to be surprising. It is not something that you have, but something that you express (or don’t) in an uncontrollable, often spontaneous situation. Sometimes, it’s hard to distinguish heroism from recklessness, the reach for glory from vanity. As for stoicism, it’s a cop-out, a learned inability to feel. There is something nihilistic about playing tough. If life is a struggle, then it ought to be for the sake of improvement, not for acquiescence.

Still, courage and stoicism — and let’s throw in honor while we’re at it — are often what keeps a man, especially a young man, from behaving like a rank pig, from collapsing into a black hole of selfishness. From expecting life on earth to follow the script of a pornographic film. Simple decency would do the job just as well, but one of the hiccups of receding machismo is the idea that decency is for losers.

The very concept of losers betrays the tremendous anxiety of men who, mistaking masculinity for personhood, sense that their manliness is “under siege.” (If so, by whom? By women? Ha! By other men, that’s by whom.) Losers are traitors who let down the side. Have a look at the Ngram: it’s interesting that the surge in usage coincides with the advance of feminist policies. I don’t think that men who use the word “loser” are afraid of becoming women. I think that they’re afraid of not being, ipso facto, special. It’s painful to lose privileges, especially unearned ones.

***

Wednesday 20th

Perhaps my favorite piece in Thinking Without a Banister, the Hannah Arendt collection that I mentioned yesterday, is entitled “Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt.”

Even before I became familiar with the work of Hannah Arendt, I shared her habit of beginning by defining terms, by making distinctions, in her case often surprising ones (between “power” and “violence,” for example). I know that it imparts a potentially tedious atmosphere of the treatise, teasing the reader with a suspicion that the preliminaries are never going to come to an end, but I don’t know where I stand if the words representing ideas are untethered to clear limitations.

The key word in the following discussion is going to be capitalism.

I’ve just read a piece by Ross Douthat in which he discusses the evaporation of feminist opposition to surrogacy.

You can tell a number of stories about why this happened. Defending the legal logic of abortion rights — my body, my choice — pushed feminism in a libertarian direction. The benefits of in vitro fertilization made a lively trade in eggs and embryos seem desirable or at least inevitable. The gay rights movement created strong social pressure in favor of allowing male same-sex couples to have children as close to the old-fashioned way as possible. And biotechnology advanced to a point where most commercial surrogacy became “gestational,” meaning that the surrogate carries someone else’s child rather than her own — which reduces the particularly agonizing aspect of the Whitehead case, where it was her own biological child that she had sold and wanted back.

But perhaps the simplest way to describe what happened with the surrogacy debate is that American feminists gradually went along with the logic of capitalism rather than resisting it. This is a particularly useful description because it’s happened so consistently across the last few decades: Whenever there’s a dispute within feminism about a particular social change or technological possibility, you should bet on the side that takes a more consumerist view of human flourishing, a more market-oriented view of what it means to defend the rights and happiness of women.

The logic of capitalism? What’s that doing there? Puzzling over the statement, I conclude that Douthat is attributing to the concept of capitalism the notion that everything is for sale, that consumerism will eventually prevail. I certainly share his concern, but I don’t think that it helps his argument at all to invoke capitalism. For one thing, it obliges him to claim that “the most serious form of cultural conservatism has always offered at most two cheers for capitalism, recognizing that its great material beneficence can coexist with dehumanizing cruelty, that its individualist logic can encourage a ruthless materialism unless curbed and checked and challenged by a moralistic vision.” Not only is it confusing to hear a conservative commentator derogate capitalism, but it heaps up further attributions that aren’t really proper to capitalism.

I have said it before, but I will say it again. Capitalism is a strategy for creating new enterprises — perhaps it’s the only effective one. In order to get a new business going, investors commit a pool of money (“surplus capital”) to entrepreneurs, who use the money to buy things and pay salaries and go into business and, it is hoped, make a profit. Profits are then repaid to the investors (the “capitalists”), replenishing and perhaps even augmenting their stock of surplus capital, so that they can go and invest in other start-ups. That is all there is to it. Capitalism itself is agnostic about the morality of the enterprise and its business methods. Those are social concerns, to be decided and enforced by behavioral norms or by laws. Many conceivable enterprises ought to be discouraged, or even prohibited, but it is not up to capitalists to decide which ones, because they have no interest in making such distinctions. It is up to society at large, not to capitalists, to decide what is for sale, and what isn’t.

We happen to live in a time when money is the only medium of value that is recognized by everyone. We all agree that a dollar is a dollar. We’re nearly as unanimous on the point that it’s wrong — unacceptable, criminal, punishable — to pay a third party to kill someone. It is wrong to kidnap children for ransom. If I put my mind to it, I might be able to come up with ten or twenty nearly absolute monetized no-nos. A trivial pursuit, in light of the perfect legality of covering acres of agricultural land with shoddy ranch houses and lots of pavement. This isn’t perceived as an instance of “dehumanizing cruelty” today, but I hope that it will be, in a generation or two. But the fact that today’s capitalists can invest in a tract housing scheme does not imply that capitalism is wicked, or even that capitalists are wicked. The dehumanizing cruelties of the early phase of the Industrial Revolution had never been experienced before, but they were quickly recognized as such, and duly curbed. It really cannot be argued that the activities of capitalists have not been substantially humanized — not that there isn’t room for improvement — since 1800.

“Capitalism” and “consumerism” are not synonyms, nor does one term subsume the other. Unlike capitalism, which is neutral in this regard, consumerism actually seeks to put a price on everything, to gratify every conceivable desire. As a vernacular, consumerism has become confused with self-realization, a projection of the soul onto stuff. Advertising has replaced scripture.

Now I will wrinkle the page a bit by positing two forms of capitalism, or rather a sequence of capitalist phases. The first, which is what I have been discussing, is risk capitalism: money invested in new enterprises. When I said that “profits are then repaid to the investors,” I was being idealistic, because that is what ought to happen. When a start-up is successful, and especially when a business stabilizes, the investors ought to sever their connections and move on to other gambles. This is pretty much what venture capitalists do. They sell the new operation to another class of investors: rentiers. I have nothing against those who spend their days clipping coupons and eating bon bons (pardon my dated image!), but I should prefer them to be creditors, not owners.

I raise this distinction between gamblers and rentiers simply to underline my belief that genuine capitalism is exclusively a matter of short-term ventures, and that mature business operations ought to generate and consume their own revenues without the distraction of passive shareholders. In other words: no profits, no surplus capital. Mature businesses, in my view, owe too much to the communities in which they flourish to entertain the concerns of profit-seeking investors. I hope it will be seen that I am by the same token opposed to government interference or ownership. The idea that, between them, rentier capitalism and socialism exhaust the possibilities of business operations is unintelligent.

Bon week-end à tous!

12, 13 and 15 June

Tuesday 12th

Looking for a book, a few weeks ago, I emptied a triple-decked shelf that I have not yet catalogued. I found what I was looking for, but I left the books that I’d pulled out in stacks all over the room, as a way of forcing myself to note what was where in the course of putting them back. That hasn’t happened yet, and the book room is a mess. But I’ve been doing some unexpected reading. That’s what the books are for, I suppose.

The shelf was at the top of the breakfront bookcase, and in theory it was shared by books on music and on film. (For some reason, most of these books are as hefty as, or even heftier than, history books.) Among the titles disturbed by my search for the score of Mahler’s Third Symphony was David Thomson’s The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. It came out at the end of 2004, right when I was beginning to keep a Web log. Is that why I didn’t get very far? (A bookmark was stuck between pages in the first chapter.) Or was it just not what I was expecting — a history of Hollywood. For it isn’t, not really. An historical meditation, perhaps. The Whole Equation assumes a familiarity with the nuts and bolts of movie history that I didn’t have fifteen years ago; even in those days, like most moviegoers, I knew what I liked, which was a lot, but that was about it. I wasn’t much interested in the business of making movies, which seemed to me to be so unlike, so almost at odds with, the movies themselves. That’s part of Thomson’s point, but I wasn’t ready to ponder it.

The title comes from the book that F Scott Fitzgerald hadn’t finished when he died, in 1940, The Last Tycoon. The narrator, a bright young woman roughly modeled on Irene Mayer Selznick, tosses it off as something that maybe only three or four men in Hollywood really understand. David Thomson doesn’t claim to know precisely what the whole equation is, but it seems to connect the many variables of gambling (with a view to winning big) to the psyches of millions of viewers sitting in dark halls, overpowered by colossal images — heads thirty feet high. Both sides of the equation are clouded by dreaming; there is a great deal of slippage between what the parties think they are doing and what they are actually doing. This distributed dreaming has the effect of absolving everyone of responsibility for the movies. No one is responsible for the box-office success or failure of a film. Nobody is responsible for the insidious effects of moviegoing on moral character. No one is responsible for the transformation of an audience into a mob. “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

From the start, “no one in the race could see where it was going.” (44) The two leaders in the race were Thomas Edison and William Dickson in America and the Lumière brothers in France. Edison foresaw a profusion of kinetoscopes, each one controlled by a solitary viewer. The Frenchmen foresaw what we call the movies, with a crowd of people sitting the dark while the images fly before them, inexorably projected by an invisible power. Thomson allows that, in the end, Edison may have proved right, but it is unlikely that anything like the material in my large collection of DVDs would have been produced for a market of kinetoscopes. Right there is a point worth mulling over.

I never cared much for movie theatres. I hated crowded ones, always, especially when the crowds were diverse — which they certainly weren’t at the movie theatre on Kraft Avenue in Bronxville, or in the Engineering Auditorium at Notre Dame. In the former, I saw The King and I twice, the first repeat in my long life with the movies; in the latter, I saw a great many of the prestigious and sophisticated European films that buffs were supposed to have seen. In these venues, audiences behaved politely. Settling in Manhattan, I came to prefer sparsely-attended afternoon shows (with the result that Kathleen and I hardly ever went to the movies together), but even then I had to put up with the occasional whiner. I greeted videotapes with immense and immediate enthusiasm, for I had already learned from Million Dollar Movie that there were pictures that I wanted to see again and again. That I could also see them at will and at home seemed too good to be true, but it wasn’t. I am now content to wait for films to be released on DVD, no matter how loud the roar of approval. The last movie that I saw in the theatre was Get Out, last year — a movie that I quite agree is wasted on a solitary viewer.

By the time I began writing about movies here and at my other, earlier sites, it was fairly clear to my mind that movies were a kind of literature — which is to say that I gave no thought to movies without such literary values as structure and implication — just as serious music is another. Like books, movies and symphonies can be collected and organized and experienced in private. I find that this notional arcade that I have imagined does not accommodate the multi-year series that has become so popular. I collected the first two seasons of Mad Men, for example, but I let them ago, having lost interest in watching the show at about the beginning for the fourth season. While there are a few items in my video library that exceed by a considerable margin the conventional two-hour running time of most movies, almost everything that I have tells its story in the standard frame, a dramatic pulse to which my body as well as my mind have become thoroughly acclimated. When I sit down to watch a video, I know that, in a couple of hours, I’ll be doing something else. Thinking about the video that I’ve just seen will certainly be one of them.

The Whole Equation is like one of those advanced courses that are stamped with “prerequisites” — less-advanced courses that the student must complete first. Thomson’s take on Hollywood history is extremely impressionistic; he omits whatever doesn’t forcibly illuminate his search for the elements of the equation. Alfred Hitchcock, for example,was

a world unto himself in so many ways. Indeed, he hardly seems to have noticed the experience of being in America, beyond enjoying the more sophisticated facilities of the Hollywood studios. He was engaged in his own equation of film and suspense, as if it were a private mathematics.

How true this is! I often think of Hitchcock as a one-man studio, a master of every aspect of filmmaking who outdid the studio factories for sheer control over output. The mathematics was not entirely private, however. Rear Window, Vertigo, and North by Northwest, which Thomson considers to be Hitchcock’s masterpieces, are

reflections on the very art or mathematics that obsesses Hitch. They are about looking, fantasizing, and what happens when the reality and the fantasy clash. Vertigo above all is a morbid analysis of fantasy involvement, and its resolution is not pretty or comforting. These films are something new and more disturbing than even Psycho. For they begin to ask the question: What have movies done to us? (303)

But the paragraph from which I have snipped these passages is the only one, in a book of nearly four hundred pages, in which Hitchcock is more than mentioned. Clearly, the book will be opaque to anyone who hasn’t seen a great many movies. After that, a history such as Thomas Schatz’s The Genius of the System — not that I can think of any “such as” — would be a helpful preliminary.

What have movies done to us? Thomson is pretty sure that they have increased the divorce rate. Not just because actors notoriously marry and remarry — their actual full-time occupation, my mother always insisted — but because every new movie promises a fresh start, a different course of action. And it seems clear to me that intelligent people learn protect themselves from flightiness by weighting the experience of seeing movies with knowledge about how they’re made, how they used to be made, changes in taste over the decades as well as a grasp of developing technology, so as to prevent the surface lightness from kiting them off to the crash of fantasy into reality. Studying film acts as a vaccine. (It can also render unusually powerful movies that rely heavily on cliché rather pathetic and ridiculous, and ultimately painful in an unintended way — I’m thinking of Titanic.) It can also act as fertilizer. Going to Woody Allen’s movies for the jokes is pretty dim; for every spoken line that’s funny there is at least one purely visual gag, often a reference to the sheer magic of the movies (in the Méliès sense), but you won’t catch it if you don’t know your movies. You can’t be dreaming if you want to feel the dream.

Many years ago, on a snowy afternoon in New York, a young woman who was my nephew’s girlfriend at the time and I left the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where we had seen a big Diane Arbus show, and headed east along 82nd Street. I lapsed into a bloviation about the bourgeoisie, which so captivated that I had to be pinched by my companion in the middle of Park Avenue. “Did you see?” she whispered. “That was Woody Allen who just passed us!” Of course I hadn’t seen, but what I did see right away was that we were re-enacting a scene played out in several Allen films, in which an older man purports to instruct a younger woman. Of course, there is usually the hint that the older man harbors other designs, my utter innocence of which meant that we weren’t getting the scene quite right, but all the same, for a brief moment, Park Avenue, complete with snow, filled the interior of a sound stage.

***

Wednesday 13th

The plan was, to take some time off after the New Year, and then to get to work on an overhaul of the writing project. Instead, I relaunched the old Daily Blague, with a new focus (“the incidental housekeeper”). That’s going fairly well — yes, we’ll leave it at that: fairly well. Now, for the writing project.

There were to be three readers. One was an old friend from law school. She liked it, as I expected she would. The two others were former colleagues of Kathleen’s. I never heard back from one of them. The other spent an afternoon with me, going through the MS page by page, rigorously exposing the confusion in the text. I was grateful for his severity, really, but it wasn’t as constructive as I pretended. I wasn’t devastated, but the writing project was. Its shaky foundations gave way under my friend’s criticism. I had always sensed that he regarded me as something of a dilettante and now, without any malice, he effectively wielded the writing project as proof. I thought to myself: Well, it was awfully easy to write.

Of course, I hadn’t known, when I began the writing project, what it was supposed to be about. I complain all the time about that phrase, what the book is about. It’s — vulgar. Is Sigrid Nunez’s new novel, The Friend, “about” her taking a very large dog into her very small apartment, in a building that does not allow dogs, and running the risk of eviction? Of course not. But the dog story is an armature, on which Nunez erects overlapping meditations on men and love and men and art and men and age. Plus, of course, women having to deal with all of the foregoing. The dog story provides occasions for Nunez to come up for air, as it were, with an everyday situation that people who do not teach writing for a living can relate to. But the book is about the former lover, a suicide, whom the narrator addresses throughout The Friend.

I had created an armature for my story, but, like the tale of Apollo in The Friend, it wasn’t inherently interesting. The armature was a series of thematic chapters: schooling, working, growing up in Bronxville, sojourning in Houston, and, finally, settling in Manhattan. For many years, I had thought of writing a book with adoption at the center, as the big deal, but even before I began the writing project, two summers ago, I knew that it wasn’t the big deal. I couldn’t believe for a minute that adoption had wounded or deformed me. Quite aside from its placement in my childhood — at the beginning of the story — it wasn’t any kind of climax. So what was the point of this — this intellectual memoir, I took to calling it; but was it even that? My rigorous critic didn’t think so. I remember his saying at one point, this isn’t thinking, this is blogging. Ouch!

On most days in 2018, I have tended to think that my writing project is a dead thing. But I have never surrendered to this conclusion. If nothing else, the writing project taught me a lot about myself, or at least it raised a lot of questions. Why has it taken me so long to feel that I understand human life, and what does that understanding amount to? I won’t dilate on those issues in this entry, because so many others at this site are devoted to them. I’ll just ask one more question: is there anything specific to the life that I have lived that has predisposed me to reach the particular understanding of the human condition (the human condition of the moment, let me add) that I have settled on? And if the answer to that question is yes: I have become a housekeeper who reads and writes a lot, then so what?

Especially so what when you bear in mind my conviction that intimate personal matters are not revealing.

***

In the immediate aftermath of the writing project’s apparent collapse, I hit on the idea of beginning the rewrite with the portrait of my parents’ marriage. This would be a matter of shifting material that I had already written to the front, and I would set it up as something of a stunt, for it would only be at the end of the portrait that the presence of children would be introduced. I would show, what I had only told, that my parents had a great marriage, or at least a successful partnership, in which children were only so much distracting, unsatisfactory furniture. They would have been better without us — my younger sister and me. They would have been better without us but for the awkwardness of childlessness, very much a black mark in their world. Children were important, nay vital, accessories for an ambitious corporate executive couple. They were necessary handicaps, without which the game of Executive Suite might be too easy to play.

I did say stunt. My parents were not cynical people. But they did not understand human life very well. My father simply wasn’t curious, and my mother not only didn’t see but actively fought against seeing that her view of life was nothing but a heap of sentiment, hardly more substantial than Life According to Hallmark. She was ready and willing to do and to feel all the right things. And I don’t think that she ever felt let down by her ideals. She felt — she often said so — let down by me.

My portrait of the marriage would begin with the wedding album, with a book of photographs taken on Valentine’s Day, 1942. I would treat the album as documentary evidence, from which to extrapolate comments about the newlyweds’ families, expectations, ways of life. (I would make oblique use of the fact that no children appear in any of the pictures.) This was a simple thought at the time, last autumn, when I was still shaking a little from the reckoning and planning to set the project aside for a few months. I didn’t have to write anything down; it was easy to remember.

Gradually, however, as the year has ground on, I have come to see that, no matter how eagerly I would read such a portrait, I have no desire to write it — not again. What I’d much rather do is just describe the photographs. I have always liked looking at them, and in fact this was one of the things about me that let my mother down. It was odd. For her, the album was a keepsake, the covers a sort of box that she did not need to open. That the pictures were there, that the day had been memorialized, that was enough. Actual viewing evoked the awkward contingencies of ageing and death, not to mention the outmoded modes. That, of course, is precisely what I liked about the pictures. My uncle, always so boyish even in old age, really was a boy, barely twenty years old. My favorite aunts were so chic! And the flashbulbs revealed my mother’s mother’s bursting corsets, although I was nearly middle-aged before I figured that out. The setting was the only familiar element: the dining room and the ballroom at Siwanoy Country Club had always been familiar to me. And the loot. The last photograph in the album is of my grandmother’s dining table, loaded with wedding presents. I still have a few of the goodies. I used to have more, but it has been years since I stopped holding on to things just because they fell into my lap.

So the upshot is that my parents’ wedding album is not a souvenir. Although it is beginning to fall apart, it belongs to the present, because that is where I am when I look at it. It doesn’t take me back, even if does remind me of long-gone people having a fine old time more than 75 years ago. They don’t seem so strange — I’m 70 myself. What I see is the world I was born into. Now that I have fought my way out of it — but is fighting the right word? — I can see what I was up against. Not the least of which was how appealing it all looked, at least on a good day.

***

Friday 15th

In today’s Times, David Brooks introduces a term that’s new to me, personalism. It’s pretty much what I mean by humanism: a belief in the importance of according to everyone you encounter a life of complex, autonomous dignity. Whether you can behave accordingly is an endless challenge, but at least you have the right idea.

Personalism is a philosophic tendency built on the infinite uniqueness and depth of each person. Over the years people like Walt Whitman, Martin Luther King, William James, Peter Maurin and Wojtyla (who went on to become Pope John Paul II) have called themselves personalists, but the movement is still something of a philosophic nub. It’s not exactly famous.

As the label for a “philosophic nub,” “personalism” has pros and cons. It makes an important point that “humanism” misses, which is that we are all different. All different, but all, as human beings, worthy of the same absolute regard. It does not carry humanism’s train of contradictory religious/anti-religious baggage. In order to preach personalism, however, a bit of antiquarian etymology might be required. Rooted in persona, it is difficult to pin down. And the vulgar notion of personality threatens to cloud the understanding.

But Brooks is certainly right to say that this is what we need right now. Whether you call yourself a humanist or a personalist, calling someone else a “loser” is wrong.

***

Before going to bed last night, I read a New Yorker piece by D T Max about a new Facebook phenomenon called “SKAM Austin.” Skam is the Norwegian word for “shame,” and it is also the name of a public television show whose creator, Julie Andem, was brought to the US by Simon Powell, of American Idol fame, to collaborate with Facebook — Facebook Watch, to be precise, although I have no idea what that is beyond what Max tells me — in presenting a seemingly real-time high school drama, complete with comments and Instagram accounts. The characters in this drama do what high-school students do: they try to bury the fact that they are in school with clods of adolescent personality formation. (Let’s try to remember that “adolescent” means “becoming adult.” It is unhelpful — although I do this all the time — to use the word to describe behavior that is resolutely hostile to the idea of growing up.) According to Max, the show, which materializes in “dropped” episodes — that’s as in “dropped into the timeline” — is addictive, partly because of multiplying interactive ramifications. (Both characters and actual Facebook users post comments.) “SKAM Austin” sounds to me like a jigsaw puzzle. Once you fit two pieces together, you’re hooked. But working on a jigsaw puzzle is quiet, almost meditative. “SKAM Austin” sounds very, very noisy.

Just as I question the virtues of high school as a place for adolescents to spend time in, so I raise my eyebrows at the proposal that adolescence is interesting, or worthy of any kind of attention, especially from adolescents themselves. Until very recently, adolescent eyes were fixed firmly on the future that had been mapped out by fate; even for the privileged, options were not conspicuous. Ever since Enlightenment thinking was addressed to the circumstances of education, in the late Nineteenth Century, the best minds have been curious to find out what young people will do when given a free hand with the widest range of opportunities — only to find that the boys go in for organized brutality while the girls fiddle with eye-liner. Given choices, young people begin at home; instead of learning about the world, they study personal accessories. Before getting to the question of what you would do if you could do anything, the adolescent wants to decide on what kind of a person to be — and I’m not talking about moral fiber. Perhaps it would be better to say that the young person finds it essential to settle on a way of expressing given characteristics — sexual preference, for example. The problem with high school is that it is a cage of adolescents, an artificial hell. One of the reasons for putting adolescents to work in community service is the increased exposure to fully adult possibilities. This is a good thing about the bad old days that we ought to think about reinstating.

So long as genuinely learning about the world, and not just going through the motions, were regarded as a form of community service, as it certainly ought to be, I should have had a much better time in those awful years, with none but the other genuinely curious students in the classroom.

Bon week-end à tous!

6, 7 and 8 June

Wednesday 6th

More about the meritocracy: in today’s Times, a review of Steven Brill’s Tailspin: The People and Forces &c. According to Jennifer Szilai’s review, Brill charges the meritocracy with having recreated itself as an aristocracy more entrenched than the old-money class that it replaced. “This argument isn’t new,” Szalai points out, going on to mention Chris Hayes 2012 Twilight of the Elites. Both of these authors make use of the image of ladders being pulled up behind the rising new élites, foreclosing opportunity to others. It’s a nasty and depressing picture. I think it’s incomplete at best.

To me, the problem with the meritocracy is that nobody knows anybody. Oh, sure, people know their classmates from Harvard and Princeton, you can be sure of that. But connections within the meritocracy are not the problem, or, rather, they wouldn’t be the problem if there weren’t such a dearth of connections between the meritocracy and the rest of America. That statement needs refining, too. The connections that we need aren’t between a monolithic élite and the American population, but between individual meritocrats and the people whose lives they affect. What’s missing is local connection.

At lunch yesterday, a friend talked about various plans to subdivide the United States into more homogenous, governable regions. Like the meritocracy (toot, toot), this is something that I’ve discussed in the past. But I find that I have moved past such proposals, although I don’t dismiss them. When I look back on the old aristocracy, I see that it was rooted in hometowns. Young men from the better families went off to school and then returned, to take over from their fathers. There was an interdependency of economy, local tradition, even plain old gossip. I don’t mean to idealize some golden past. There was a great deal of atrophy in the old dispensation. But the community’s health was protected by a degree of human accountability that is difficult even to express in today’s globalist rhetoric. The local manufacturer might have the power to sell his firm to a conglomerate, or to shift his operations abroad, but the freedom to do so would be constrained by loyalty to the town, at least so long as he and his family wished to remain in it. And, where conditions were at least moderately harmonious, townsmen took pride in local prosperity.

The meritocracy that replaced this old local aristocracy was not itself local. It operated, and still operates, only at the higher, more abstract organizational levels. Local politics has been left to dubious figures, either developers or their creatures. Or to ambitious lawyers who intend to leave the locale behind. The talented young person who settles down on and to a local scale is either not making the best use of talent or maybe not all that talented. Meritocrats go far.

Mobility, like growth, is generally thought to be an inherently good thing. I agree that everyone ought to be able to make a home in a congenial environment. But I think that making more than two long-distance moves in the course of a career is a sign of the exotic instability that used to characterize the entertainment business (where movement is now too institutionalized to be either exotic or unstable). Rather than divide the United States into constituencies that are easier to manage from the top down, I prefer to encourage communities — and, in rural settings, counties — that manage themselves from the bottom up, with business organizations scaled to match. Maybe it’s time to learn from the food revolution: build economies of local sustainable commerce.

***

Thursday 7th

In the current, fiction issue of The New Yorker, Roz Chast has a three-panel cartoon entitled “Manspreading in Art.” I don’t expect anything to happen right away, but I can hear the canons caving as the triumphs of Western imagination are interrogated for the assumption that, because I am a passionate man, what I have to say is interesting, and not only interesting but true, and you have nothing better to do than to listen to me.

The film entitled 2001: A Space Odyssey is now fifty years old. If that weren’t bewildering enough, I can remember seeing the roadshow Cinerama presentation in Houston during the summer of 1968 as if I just walked out of the theatre. There are a few nerve endings somewhere in my body that have never quite recovered from the two boulders that hurtle toward the audience in the middle of the “Mission to Jupiter” sequence. And I can remember the quasi-religious feeling that 2001 was not “just a movie.” At twenty, I was just young enough to imagine, if not quite to believe, that Kubrick’s fable might be the gateway to a radically new kind of life on Earth. I can remember being very, very impressed by the movie’s fidelity to the silence of what we used to call “outer space.”

But because I was so young, and so forth, I did not appreciate the extent to which 2001 is a silent movie, or the extent to which, when it is not silent, it derogates language by refusing to make use of a single line of interesting text. There was something reassuring, I suppose, about the polite nothings that burbled from the mouth of bureaucrat Heywood Floyd on the Space Station and at the Clavius Base. He sounded just like my father. Nor did I make much of the nearly complete lack of women. That wasn’t abnormal in a space movie, and there was something about Kubrick’s austerity that reminded us, then, that the women who did appear in space movies were usually sluts. All he gives us is a handful of suitably-Stepford stewardesses and the estimable Margaret Tyzack, playing a Russian scientist. Oh, and the filmmaker’s little daughter, Vivian, who plays Floyd’s child on the picture phone. What was extraordinary about 2001 was how gracefully Kubrick pushed utter normality into awesome incomprehensibility. We young fans did not object to that incomprehensibility at all. It was the guarantee of quality.

Not the least of the explanations for why it feels only yesterday that I saw 2001 for the first time is that I have not watched it very often since. Perhaps four times between 1968 and the other night. (I saw it at least three times during its first year.) It is as though the original viewing planted a monolith in my brain that could slumber for half a century, to be awakened by the great anniversary, or at any rate, by Michael Benson’s Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece.

As books about the making of particular films go, Benson’s is good enough. Benson wisely avoids the film’s metaphysical projections and settles firmly on the material terms of its production. His account is somewhat skewed by the availability of surviving crew members, who recreate the atmosphere of a primitive village in which anxious tribesman try to conciliate a capricious god. Or, I should say, a mean god, a very mean god, as stingy with credit as he is with compensation; it’s his very occasional generosity that’s capricious. The bad habits of manspreading are usually critiqued in the context of mixed company, especially by women, but Benson’s book reminds us that full-blown manspreading is something reserved by the Kubricks of this world for the control and belittlement of other men. Kubrick not only routinely makes “impossible” demands of his costume designer and special-effects technicians but goes on to take credit for their work, so that it is he who takes home the film’s one Oscar. And yet, smoulder as they will, the crew worship him. He is the greatest filmmaker of all time, &c &c. Space Odyssey ought to be required reading for students of the psychopathology of project management in male groups.

In short, I couldn’t wait to finish the book.

I did, as I say, watch the DVD in the middle of reading it. I had thought to wait until I’d read it all, but there was so much talk of scenes that didn’t make it into the original film or were later cut before wide release that I needed to refresh my awareness of what actually happens in 2001. The film stands up very well. It does not seem dated at all; it seems period, rather. The difference is that datedness results when a style of moviemaking, including its conventions, has staled or fallen out of use. In this regard, 2001 is not so much pioneering as genre-setting. Its conventions, say, for representing landing pads, remain standard. The “period” of 2001 is a beguilingly split one, between a future that has yet to develop and a past, the filmmaker’s present, in which Pan Am was the world’s premier airline and the bell logo marked all public telephones. (Hilton — crediting with operating the hotel on Space Station 5 — is still with us.) I was especially impressed by the Dawn of Man sequence, which I had found tiresome as a youth. It used to seem very long; now, probably because I am better at watching film, it was brisk and lean. But the “Stargate” business still annoys me; I would later discover that acid trips are just as boring. What really surprised me was how fast the penultimate scene plays out. I was fascinated by the strange floorlit set when the movie was new, because I had never suspected that a decorating style that I admired could be perverted into a hellscape. For me, Dave Bowman’s final scenes were the most astounding.

Needless to say, I wanted to bash Benson’s head in every time he referred to that decorating style as Louis XIV. But, hey, it’s guys.

***

Friday 8th

Anthony Lane has reviewed The President Is Missing for The New Yorker. The review won’t appear in print until next week, but I’ve read it online — well, some of it; I couldn’t care less, really, about this silly collaboration. Wondering exactly how literary partnership works, Lane comments,

Bill Clinton, who can write, has hooked up with James Patterson, who can’t, but whose works have sold more than three hundred and seventy-five million copies, most of them to happy and contented customers for whom good writing would only get in the way.

It’s a great crack. But what is good writing?

Getting about as far away from James Patterson as it is possible to go while remaining intelligible, we find Helen DeWitt, who occasionally lurches into impenetrable mathematical discussions that can be parsed if not understood. Most of what she has to say is comprehensible, but it is loaded with references and elisions that many readers, I fear, will have difficulty catching and filling. Reading Some Trick, DeWitt’s collection of thirteen stories, I was often reminded of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s rarefied manifesto, Ways of Curating. One story, “The Climbers,” a send-up of literary hipsters, seemed to send up Obrist’s idea of what constitutes an interesting aesthetic experience, but by the very fact that it breathed the same very cool air, the story seemed to be making fun of itself. Well, having fun. I was certainly laughing.

At the center of a particular cluster of hipsters is Gil, and at the center of Gil’s attention is Peter Dijkstra, a Dutch writer, currently in Vienna, who has just emerged from five years in a mental hospital. On a visit to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam — honoring another disturbed Nederlander — Gil impetuously purchased all of the Dijkstra books that had not yet been translated into English. These now stand on a shelf in his Tribeca loft, taking up thirteen of the eighteen inches of Gil’s collection of the author’s work. The remaining five inches are taken up by the translations that Gil is actually capable of reading. As interest in Dijkstra heats up, and Ralph, an agent who has made contact with Dijkstra, is proposing to bring Dijkstra to New York, Gil fears exposure as someone not hip enough to read Nederlands. In a meltdown, he retires to a local bar.

Ralph has learned that, although Dijkstra does not have a “book” in the works, he has filled fifty notebooks with texts in English, and written interesting words on a pile of file cards. He has sent a sample notebook and collection of file cards to Ralph, and Ralph has shown them to Gil. At a booth in the bar, Gil devises schemes for keeping Dijkstra in Vienna.

What if the normal rate for a room at this underground hotel [where one of Gil’s satellites met Dijkstra, who is living there] cost $79 a night. BUT, you could get a room with notebooks & file cards on loan from Peter Dijkstra for $299 a night, and the $220 goes to Peter Dijkstra. So he can keep his room indefinitely because it is paid out of lending out his notebooks &c. AND, there are SEPARATE ENTRANCES. So you NEVER SEE Peter Dijkstra. He uses one entrance and you use another, so he can go on working without interruption, and you can sit in your room with the notebooks. This would Be. So. Great.

It would be great if you knew Peter Dijkstra’s favorite restaurant. People go to the restaurant and they can just order a meal. Or, they can order a meal plus notebook and file cards for the cost of an extra meal, which is left on account for Peter Dijkstra. Who can turn up whenever he wants and finds his meal is already paid for!

Gil could totally see himself going to a restaurant and ordering a meal and a notebook and paying extra for the notebook. It would be better than going to a restaurant and having a meal with Peter Dijkstra and paying for the meal because there was no reason to think words from the mouth would have the intensity of the ink on the grid. (101)

As she demonstrated in her second novel, Lightning Rods, Helen DeWitt has a fertile imagination for schemes of this kind. Schemes that appear to serve grand purposes while appeasing craven desires. Schemes that seem, for the moment, quite plausible, as clear as soap bubbles.

Most of Some Trick, though, isn’t funny. Oddly, the two really sad stories are the ones written in laddish patois, both of them involving disaffected rock musicians. Beneath their antic stories, “Stolen Luck” and “In Which Nick Buys a Harley for 16k Having Once Been Young” drag a bottomless melancholy. The first ends with suicide, and we do not find Nick buying a Harley in the second. At least, I don’t think we do. I am not sure that I followed that narrative, although I did grasp that DeWitt was ventriloquizing complains that she has made elsewhere about being in it for more than fame and money. Pete, the true artist in the band, recalls his misery with a dumb eloquence.

You know, just before our US tour we were in Gibraltar and I went over to Africa ’cause I didn’t think it would take that long to get back. It was just after our second album had come out, and Steve had changed a lot of shit to make it like the first album. And that album was really popular, the fans didn’t notice, so I felt the fans were total wankers. I felt betrayed, and Steve had booked us for a whole year of gigs, just playing the same shit the same way every time.

So I walked along the beach, and I didn’t know what to do. I thought it would be better just to walk into the water and die than go through the year, and I couldn’t understand how they could do it. They turned my life into something worse than nothing, into this torture, for the sake of extra sales, well couldn’t we just have enough sales and something in it for me? And how could they just decide like that that my life didn’t matter, it didn’t matter if I was in, like, agony. But the thing is they didn’t know they were doing it. They didn’t know what they were taking away because they never had anything real to know what it was like when everything was a fake. They could get a lot of money and blag about the business. The money was the only thing there could be for them, and they’d never have anything else. (164)

In the current issue of The New Yorker, James Wood ends his review of Some Trick with a very clever turn. He is writing about “Famous Last Words,” in which a man and a woman discuss the Death of the Author in the context of the deaths of authors Voltaire and Hume. At the same time, the man puts the moves on the woman. “What is woman?” he asks. “Is this the mark of woman?” The woman comments, “[He] puts a hand on my breast, cannily pursuing sous-texte sous prétexte.” Wood can’t resist. “He’s de man. But she’s de wit.” Forgive me for my presumption, but I can’t help but see DeWitt frowning over that.

Bon week-end à tous!