Matins

¶ A study at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy (Harvard) finds that 2004 was the year in which the four principal newspapers in this country stopped referring to waterboarding as “torture.” Kris Kotarski makes short work of the editors’ lame excuses. (Vancouver Sun; via  3 Quarks Daily)

Had journalistic ethics prevailed, Keller might have recognized that “torture” is not a “politically correct term” but a word with a long-standing linguistic, moral and legal definition which cannot be brushed aside simply because the Bush administration and its defenders claim that it is contentious. American law and international law have repeatedly recognized waterboarding as torture, and although administration officials and CIA interrogators might prefer a euphemism like “aggressive interrogation methods” or “enhanced interrogation techniques,” newspaper editors should have different priorities in mind.

Barr, who defended his newspaper’s policies on the grounds that the term was contentious, clearly lost sight of the media’s role in a free society. Had he and his colleagues been brave enough to act as the watchdog that all media outlets claim to be, he might have recognized that even if an issue is politically contentious, the legal and moral landscape should not budge an inch, especially not because accused war criminals contend that their crimes were not crimes at all.

Lauds

¶ JMW Turner’s Modern Rome — Campo Vaccino is bound for the Getty in Los Angeles, having broken the artist’s auction record at £29.7 million. Well, the Getty has pots of money but not many masterpieces. Still Modern Rome is, as you might expect from the title, the pendant to Ancient Rome, a big picture at the Tate. Our suggestion is that the Tate round up a few of its just-ordinarily-marvelous Turners and trade them for Modern Rome.

And now, a few words of disgust from the Guardian‘s Jonathan Jones:

Presumably Britain’s art guardians did not believe it was essential to save this one for the nation. Anyway, a Sotheby’s spokesman declared it a great night for the artist. Turner’s painting “has achieved a tremendous and much-deserved result”, which must delight Mr Turner (wherever he is). His picture, continued the auction house, “shows the artist at his absolute best and, for collectors, it ticked all the boxes – quality, superb condition, provenance and freshness to the market”.

Am I the only one who feels mild nausea reading those words, and this story? Apparently, it is a triumph for Turner that an art market bloated beyond sanity has decided his painting is worth something, and a marvellous day for Britain that a painting on view for decades at one of our free public museums will now be spirited away to LA.

No, this is not a heartening tale of Turner getting recognition. It is a cold, chilly way to think about and see art, this horrible obsession with price. Great art is priceless, full stop, and if your first thought in front of a painting is to wonder how much it’s worth, go and look around antique shops instead. It’s an Antiques Roadshow attitude to art, with posh experts telling us a bit about “quality” and “provenance”, before getting to the juicy punchline of the price tag, and I hate it.

Prime

¶ Is a college degree worth the financial cost? If so, what’s the financial return? These questions are taken up at The Intersection and Felix Salmon respectively. Sheril Kirschenbaum extracts a drolly hair-raising judgment from an article in Chron Higher Ed:

Colleges are taking on too many roles and doing none of them well. They are staffed by casts of thousands and dedicated to everything from esoteric research to vocational training—and have lost track of their basic mission to challenge the minds of young people. Higher education has become a colossus—a $420-billion industry—immune from scrutiny and in need of reform.

That’s from a forthcoming book by Claudia Dreifus and Andrew Hacker, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money &c &c.

¶ Meanwhile, Felix Salmon complains about a silly Business Week ranking of the ROI of over eight hundred institutions of higher education. As Felix says, “there’s a lot to dislike,” but what stands out for us, not so much because Business Week got something wrong as because it highlights the poverty of attaching price tags to everything, is the cultural inability to value a liberal arts education.

What’s more, the survey does a very bad job of quantifying the benefits of a liberal-arts degree. Let’s say you go to college and then earn $45,000 a year working in the theater, or you end up with a steady job in public administration or social services. You’re clearly better off in many different ways than a high-school graduate earning the same amount — you’re probably happier in your job, you’re doing what you want, and you have more job security. But the BW methodology would give you a negative return on your university tuition, on the grounds that you missed out on earning money while you were at college.

Tierce

¶ The more we think about Jonah Lehrer’s Frontal Cortex piece, “Will I?,” the more well-duh it seems. If you engage with a task, or any experience, really, with an inquiring mind, you are preparing yourself for details that you haven’t foreseen. If you settle down with grim determination to get the job done, in contrast, you’ve left yourself vulnerable to the unexpected. Asking “Will I?” instead of announcing “I will” is the simplest way of admitting the one thing that we know about life: that we don’t know what’s next.

Mr Lehrer’s explanation is of course rather different.

Scientists have recognized the importance of intrinsic motivation for decades. In the 1970s, Mark Lepper, David Greene and Richard Nisbett conducted a classic study on preschoolers who liked to draw. They divided the kids into three groups. The first group of kids was told that they’d get a reward – a nice blue ribbon with their name on it – if they continued to draw. The second group wasn’t told about the rewards but was given a blue ribbon after drawing. (This was the “unexpected reward” condition.) Finally, the third group was the “no award” condition. They weren’t even told about the blue ribbons.

After two weeks of reinforcement, the scientists observed the preschoolers during a typical period of free play. Here’s where the results get interesting: The kids in the “no award’ and “unexpected award” conditions kept on drawing with the same enthusiasm as before. Their behavior was unchanged. In contrast, the preschoolers in the “award” group now showed much less interest in the activity. Instead of drawing, they played with blocks, or took a nap, or went outside. The reason was that their intrinsic motivation to draw had been contaminated by blue ribbons; the extrinsic reward had diminished the pleasure of playing with crayons and paper. (Daniel Pink, in his excellent book Drive, refers to this as the “Sawyer Effect”.)

So the next time you’re faced with a difficult task, don’t look at a Nike ad, and don’t think about the extrinsic rewards of success. Instead, ask yourself a simple question: Will I do this? I think I will.

Sext

¶ Plus ça change… At the LRB, Jenny Diski writes about that quaint but deadly powder, arsenic. Reviewing James Whorton’s The Arsenic Century, she notes that liberal economics were far more murderous than desperate spouses. [P]

The dogged resistance to laws against the adulteration of products and food with dangerous and unknown substances was as great as the present day corporate and political reluctance to deal with environmental and banking hazards. In the name of the free market and the blessed principle of laissez-faire, manufacturers lobbied successfully against any laws to restrict their practices. In 1831 the Lancet complained: ‘in England alone is it that the principles of popular liberty are so sagely maintained that the people are allowed … to be suffocated in the asphyxiating vapours of manufactories, without the slightest concern being manifested by the rulers of the land.’ In the forefront of resistance to this Victorian version of political-correctness-gone-mad and the nanny state, was the great socialist and leader of the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris, who decades after the Lancet article, announced in 1885 that the arsenic scare was nonsense. As Whorton notes, he laughed that ‘doctors had been “bitten” by a kind of “witch fever” … blaming wallpaper when they were unable to come up with any other cause for their patients’ problems (it was his own belief that “the source of all illness” was the water closet).’ The free artistic spirit, the British Empire, or, more recently, the human race, hadn’t got where it was by running scared of a bit of environmental poisoning when there were important matters of profit and power at stake.

Ms Diski ends her piece exactly where she ought: in the well-meant but poisoned wells of Bangladesh.

Nones

¶ The Swiss decision not to extradite filmmaker Roman Polanski to the United States appears, in Time‘s Bruce Crumley’s view, to stem from the Americans’ determiantion to withhold testimony by the prosecutor in the case, Roger Gunson. 

So why did Swiss officials decide to take the word of a man who plea-bargained an initial rape charge filed by a 13-year-old girl in 1977 — he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of engaging in unlawful sex with a minor — over that of California legal authorities? The answer appears to be the confidential testimony given Jan. 26 by the original prosecutor in the case, Roger Gunson, that the U.S. last month said it would not hand over to Bern. Swiss officials seem convinced that there may be something in Gunson’s statement that would vindicate Polanski’s claim that either Gunson or the judge in the case — or both — had gone back on a plea agreement that the filmmaker would be sentenced to 42 days in detention.

Surely the refusal to share Mr Gunson’s testimony is not an act of good faith.  

Vespers

¶ Bill Morris reads John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor fifty years on, and writes a beautiful appreciation. (The Millions)

It was only after finishing the novel that I went back and read Barth’s foreword, which he wrote in 1987 for the release of a new, slightly shortened Anchor Books edition.  From the foreword I learned that The Sot-Weed Factor was originally published in the summer of 1960, when Barth was just 30, exactly 50 years before I finally came to it.  I also learned that the novel sprang from an actual satirical poem of the same title published in 1706 by an actual man named Ebenezer Cooke.  Much more interesting, I learned that this was Barth’s third novel, and he originally envisioned it as the final piece of a “nihilist trilogy.”  But the act of writing the novel taught the novelist something: “I came to understand that innocence, not nihilism, was my real theme, and had been all along, though I’d been too innocent myself to realize that fact.”

This realization led Barth to a far richer one: “I came better to appreciate what I have called the ‘tragic view’ of innocence: that it is, or can become, dangerous, even culpable; that where it is prolonged or artificially sustained, it becomes arrested development, potentially disastrous to the innocent himself and to bystanders innocent and otherwise; that what is to be valued, in nations as well as in individuals, is not innocence but wise experience.”

The dangers of innocence versus the value of wise experience.  Here, surely, is a rich theme for any American novelist trying to capture the impulses and foibles and follies of a nation convinced of its own righteousness – in love with its own virtue and virginity, if you will – a nation that historically has had little use for history and therefore has spent several centuries blundering its way, usually uninvited and ill-informed, into the affairs of other nations, beginning with the settlements of native Americans and moving on to the Philippines, Mexico, Guatemala, Iran, Cuba, Chile, Vietnam, Cambodia and, now, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Compline

¶ Also at The Millions, Conor Dillon rhapsodizes about the “jumper colon.” Not Lynn Truss’s cup of tea: the jumper colon starts you off with a little taste of the dish to come.

For grammarians, it’s a dependent clause + colon + just about anything, incorporating any and all elements of the other four colons, yet differing crucially in that its pre-colon segment is always a dependent clause.

(Yikes.)

For everyone else: its usefulness lies in that it lifts you up and into a sentence you never thought you’d be reading by giving you a compact little nugget of information prior to the colon and leaving you on the hook for whatever comes thereafter, often rambling on until the reader has exhausted his/her theoretical lung capacity and can continue to read no longer.

(Breathe.)

See how fast that goes? The jumper colon is a paragraphical Red Bull, a rocket-launch of a punctuator, the Usain Bolt of literature. It’s punchy as hell. To believers of short first sentences–Hemingway?–it couldn’t get any better. To believers of long-winded sentences that leave you gasping and slightly confused–Faulkner?–it also couldn’t get any better. By itself this colon is neither a period nor a non-period… or rather it is a period and it is also a non-period. You choose.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 13th, 2010 at 10:22 am.