Too Much a Modern? A Few More Thoughts

After having written of my preference for the nineteenth and early twentieth century in capital L literature recently it seems to me that there is a little bit more to say regarding those preferences.

There is the fact that I have been little inclined to go along with authority--and its prejudice--in favor of the superiority of the old to the new, the ancients or the Elizabethans to, for instance, the moderns, and so ready to believe that the moderns are just as worthy, and perhaps more so (that, however much some may reject it, there can be such a thing as progress in the world of the arts.

There is the fact that I care more about what writers say and how they say it--in fact, preferring their saying something important and interesting without much in the way of graces to their elegantly saying something banal, and been interested in the big wide world out there and looking at it and picturing it to us rather than the hazy imaginings of, for example, a Medieval mind as Johan Huizinga described it (which, certainly going by Ian Watt, seems a very modern, post-Scientific Revolution preference).

There is, where how a thing is said, my preference for clarity and efficiency in the conveyance of the content to ostentatious decoration (with this, too, a rather modern, post-Scientific Revolution view apparently).

There is my impatience of the bowing and scraping before power and authority and patron we got so much of in older literature, bowing and scraping before tradition and piety--my sympathies instead consistently lying with the defiant, and the impious, and the iconoclastic; those who rebelled, who satirized, who offered truth rather than what the powerful wanted to hear.

There is, alongside my aforementioned appreciation for the "discovery of society," what went along with it, the discovery of history, too--the discovery of past, and present, and future, as we have known them only in modern times.

All this has left me reading a good deal of old work with interest in its historical significance and admiration for its pioneering new forms or its technical accomplishment rather than real enjoyment--an experience that, I think, is more common than those who read older works let on. Being frank about that has, I think, been useful to me in studying literature. But it is probably not very helpful to one pursuing a career of studying literature, the literary priesthood not caring to look at things so closely, or caring much for those who think for themselves rather than accept the judgments of Tradition, the prestige of the Postmodern, and the longstanding distaste of the critical elite for much of what I have described here.

Of Literature's Priesthood

Where literary classics are concerned I have always thought, and still think, that the reader with any real interest should try and form their own judgments. They should do so with as open and informed a mind as possible, and be ready to consider views other than their own, but all the same, the most careful such process of judgment is a very different thing from the sort of mindless deference to received opinion that defines the middlebrow in the term's only really useful sense.

Of course, endeavoring to do that myself I have from the start found myself disagreeing with the received judgments all the time--and noticing how little others try to do what I did. Rather the scholars of literature have tended to act as a priesthood of literature, upholding tradition, respecting authority, telling others what to think just as they are themselves told what to think rather than thinking for themselves and encouraging others to do the same, and accordingly preaching on behalf of respect for some things and disrespect for others (which, frankly, played its part in driving me toward a more questioning attitude in the first place).

Considering the last part, how the priests deal with the "laity," one can see this as a matter of the professional generally to take a condescending view of everyone else in the world as incapable of understanding a really meaningful explanation. However, it seems to me that this is also a matter of the priests not having sought explanation themselves. Critics of art, who have often been practicing artists, and even more often at least been aspiring artists, tend to share the artist's outlook--which tends to be unconscious, intuitive, impressionable, and moved to awe and deference rather than consider what is put before them critically (they become Bardolators because they so easily become idolators), leaving them unequipped to answer those who look at the world a different way, as I did in trying to figure these things out for myself.

The Varieties of Literary Appreciation

In considering how we look at works of literature it seems to me worth talking about the different ways to enjoy a work. This seems to me to go beyond the mere existence of the different literary standards that have existed across time and across cultures--for instance, the differences between a play by Sophocles, and a play by Shakespeare, and a play by Eugene O'Neill, all the products of very different thought-worlds for very different audiences offering very different sorts of experience.

What I refer to instead is the fact that when most people pick up a work of literature, as with the novels we are apt to see on the bestseller list, they expect an entertainment which will hold their interest, give them particular pleasures, and leave them emotionally satisfied at the end, a work's giving them which is what they refer to when they say that a book is "good" (as they are often hard-pressed to offer any more explanation than that it is "good," or not).

However, anyone who sticks with a course of literary study for long is likely to find that even books which do not please that way can have their interest. They may find the book engaging because of, for instance, technical aspects that may not give much entertainment. They may look upon it as a historical relic, the way an archaeologist might a piece of pottery from a past era. They may even take an interest in it as a puzzle (an approach that, I think, has a lot to do with the propensity of literary scholars to offer exceedingly abstruse explanations of literary works). And so on and so forth, the work interesting even when it is not interesting in the more usual, commonplace way.

Alas, I think the literary priesthood--to the extent that they are willing or able to explain their standards to the public at all--think all this too subtle for the laity, or maybe just too much at odds with their desire to cultivate a mystique around the works whose cults they tend and by extension themselves, so that they commend to the public a simple-minded awe at what they place on their pedestals, often so high it can scarcely be seen from the floor on which the mere mortals stand.

The Biggest "Platform of Envy" of All

In Sonya Sarayia's ten year retrospective on David Fincher's The Social Network she recalled her own early experience of Facebook as increasingly one of a "toxic . . . platform of envy . . . that turned all of [her] anger and frustration inward, corroding my self-esteem and sending me into a sustained depression" by way of its subjection of her to her acquaintances' boasting.

Considering that my thought is that while this is certainly how many experience Facebook, it isn't just Facebook that functions as a "platform of envy." That term can be used to describe the whole mainstream media--a media which has always been staffed by courtiers of the rich and powerful whose services to them include endless flattery of them before the eyes of the world; which invented and exploited to the full the cult of "celebrity" in all its foolishness; and that in the digital age all this has got a whole lot worse because of its extreme pervasiveness (and, perhaps, more people "finding themselves desperate to escape an increasingly wretched workaday lot by becoming celebrities themselves").

In the face of all this idiocy anyone who does not have an army of claqueurs applauding them nonstop the way the billionaires and Fortune 500 CEOs and entertainment industry A-listers and politicians do is likely to feel pretty worthless if they let it reach them, all as, I imagine, few are truly immune to it--which seems to me a good reason to be very careful of where we venture online, curate what news we really think we need very carefully, and probably more often than we are doing, simply turn off the screen and look at something else, anything else, before we let the scum of the media-industrial complex drive us insane.

The Facebook Movie We Should Have Got Instead of The Social Network

One of the more interesting bits of Sonya Sarayia's ten year retrospective on David Fincher's The Social Network was her recollection of her own early experience of the Facebook social media site, which was as an increasingly "toxic . . . platform of envy . . . that turned all of [her] anger and frustration inward, corroding my self-esteem and sending me into a sustained depression" as upon graduation she was subjected to the ceaseless boasting of acquaintances about how wonderfully they were doing. She also mentions that when she first heard that there would be a movie about Facebook she thought it would be about the experience of using the web site, as with "that peculiar sense of isolation in the midst of purported connectedness" or "the minor agonies of wanting people to like you on the internet."

In short, a movie that would actually look at the human experience of real people.

Of course what she and everyone else got instead was "Mark Zuckerberg, Tech God Totally Unlike You Lowly Proletarian Trash, but Maybe Not a Perfect Person."

As for a movie that would deal seriously and intelligently with what social media has meant for humans the way Ms. Soraiya had in mind . . . I think we're still waiting on that one. And barring some extraordinary change in how Hollywood works, we'll go on waiting a long time, probably so long that by then social media as we know it will have ceased to exist and made any such effort a piece of historiography about the past, rather than a movie about the here and now.

The "Mix of Elitism and Banality" and the Chattering Classes

Some years ago The New Republic, offering its list of "DC's most over-rated thinkers," named Fareed Zakaria for his "mix of elitism and banality."

Still, if as Zakaria proved again and again in the Newsweek columns through which I first came into contact with what he passes off as "thought" that he ca n be described that way he is far from alone in being so. At most he epitomizes what is in fact the norm among the "experts" that the centrist media platforms, with this not a bug but a feature--centrist ideology, after all, being above all concerned with safely bounding political discussion with any concern for the links between one issues and another, any interest in root causes, any desire to actually solve a problem, out of bounds, all as it expects everyone to defer to the Establishment by way of deference to its "savants, lawyers, doctors . . . their so-called men of talent," for whom and whom alone recognition as "expert" is reserved, tell the public to think (rather than helping it make educated judgments). The result is that much as we hear about "both sidesism," this is the exception as what we usually get is "one sidesism" with at best slight variations (on the really big questions the media speaks with one voice, very loudly), as what may be a very large part of the spectrum of opinion on a subject is shut out of the discourse altogether, making for a discussion as emotionally unengaging as it is intellectually stultifying, and leaving the elitists in which the centrist has such great faith inevitably presiding over exchanges of banalities, with their pretense of doing anything else actually making what they are doing more obvious, rather than less.

Anyone who would say anything interesting, relevant, true, can thus expect to not be invited to the news show, not appear on the panel, not get the column, with only very rare exception.

"The Cinema of Pseudomaturity": Summing Up '90s Indie Film

In the wake of the '90s-era fuss over independent film David Walsh raised the question of what exactly the term "independent" is supposed to signify in a filmmaker--and concluded on the basis of the movies they actually made that an independent filmmaker is no more than a "commercial filmmaker whose films have not yet made anyone a great deal of money--a hack commercial filmmaker in training."

It seemed to me then and still seems to me now that there is a good deal of insight in that understanding of the phenomenon, but it did not include what seemed to me a distinctive something that seemed to me characteristic of the films of figures like Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino. I have raised it from time to time over the years, discussing various of its characteristics--the pretentiousness, the edgelordism and the rest, and saw in it a certain sort of youthful attitude, namely that of the college graduate who spends his nights drinking Yoo-hoo as he plays video games in his mother's basement pretending he instead spends them downing shots of whiskey as he plays poker with his equally cool friends in his smoke-filled bachelor pad.

So do they remain now, even with the gray hair and the wrinkles still giving us just the "Cinema of Pseudomaturity."

The Supply Side-Mentality and the STEM Cult

"STEM!"

"STEM!"

"STEM!"

"STEM!"

The chant is loud, and strident, and unceasing.

It seems plausible that the chant is so loud and so strident and so unceasing precisely because the thinking behind it is so vacuous in so many, many ways--not least the fact that, in spite of the deference of their courtiers to the endless whining of employers who think labor can never be abundant enough or cheap enough, there really is no hard evidence of some desperate shortage of the engineers who are the real object of the concern (certainly to go by the actual underemployment of recent graduates in engineering and related fields), the more in as more and more young people are going into those fields all the time.

The tendency to overlook that reality reflects something all too rarely spelled out about the chant, which is its essentially supply-side nature. The thinking seems to be that the country gets more people to study STEM--and then somehow its manufacturing base is supposed to flourish, just like that. Where the long-term investment in the relevant sectors and plant to put the STEM-trained to work is supposed to come from does not arise--in spite of the fact that, as examination of the statistics shows, for a half century now American investors have, in spite of the union-breaking and tax cuts and deregulation that Reagan promised would mean an American manufacturing renaissance, and the consistent hewing of his successors to such policies, been little interested in manufacturing, preferring speculation in real estate and financial instruments and so on (with the country's deindustrialization, of course, confirming this in detail). The idea that having some more engineering majors looking for jobs is supposed to all by itself make investors' money flood into manufacturing is a piety of the market fundamentalism still prevailing--and as piety so often is, a diversion from actualities that elites regard as best unconsidered by the general public.

What's Thomas Frank Been Up to Lately?

Since 2000 Thomas Frank has had a major book out every presidential election year--One Market Under God (his study of '90s-era market populism), What's the Matter With Kansas? (probably still his most famous work, about the use of the culture wars to sell an elite economic agenda), The Wrecking Crew (a study of "government by people who hate government" from the Reagan era forward), Pity the Billionaire (about how, even though the 2007 financial crisis and Great Recession looked like the end of the line for the neoliberals, they rallied to triumph yet again), Listen, Liberal (which had for its subject how American "liberalism" and the Democratic Party supposed to be its standard-bearers went astray), and finally The People, No (a history of "anti-populism" in America).

It being 2024 one would have expected to see his latest months ago--and perhaps done so the more eagerly in as his last (The People, No) was more a work of fairly distant history than contemporary affairs, more background to analyzing the present than analysis of the present than his other works, and in that, at least in his interview with Seymour Hersh, he did indicate that he was working on a new book. Alas, he has had nothing out so far as I can tell, any details on when or even if something will be out are elusive--and, once again, Frank's general media profile is a lot lower than it used to be, all of which seems to me to bear out the impression that the scope the mainstream is willing to afford his analyses has only gone on shrinking through this century.

Why Does Cedar Leiter Have a Mid-Atlantic Accent?

In his James Bond continuation novel For Special Services John Gardner described Cedar Leiter as having a "Mid-Atlantic accent." Characterizing this accent as "without a hint of what the British think of as an American accent," not having had "what the British think of as an American accent" clarified for me I initially thought he meant that Britons did not think of the accent of the Mid-Atlantic states as American-sounding. However, I later realized that he referred not to the regional accent of the middle of the Eastern seaboard but rather the mix of Northeastern U.S. and British Received Pronunciation that America's elites fostered in their prep schools and the media and tried, unsuccessfully, to turn into a U.S. equivalent of Britain's RP.

Looking back it seems an odd detail given Cedar's background. She was, after all, the daughter of Texan Felix Leiter--while if she had been to an upper-class private school (as seemed probable) a woman as young as herself in 1982 was of a generation unlikely to get that training. Perhaps Gardner was simply behind the times on this point--or, in a novel in which Gardner, in contrast with his inclination in the preceding Licence Renewed to make James Bond's new adventures seem as '80s as possible, had decided on giving us a "throwback" in this detail as in so many others in this book in which (even while he could not resist parodying and subverting the Bond formula and image) he was drenching the reader in the '50s-era series' past, and quite prone to metafictional evocations of the cinema of yesteryear.

The Failed Attempt to Give America its Own "Received Pronunciation"

The reader may have heard of something called "the mid-Atlantic accent." First coming across the term (it may have been when I was reading John Gardner's For Special Services; Gardner describes Felix Leiter's daughter Cedar as having a "mid-Atlantic accent") my thought was of the "mid-Atlantic states" on America's eastern seaboard, and took it for a regional accent belonging to the people of Maryland and its close neighbors, perhaps.

However, in this case the term "mid-Atlantic" referred to not the middle of the Atlantic seaboard but the middle of the Atlantic ocean--halfway between America and Britain--in a figurative sense, the accent being a compound of both the accent of the Northeastern United States and the English Received Pronunciation that, by the late nineteenth century, had emerged as the accent of Britain's elite. Some of the relevant history seems obscure, but it appears that there was deliberate copying of Britain's "RP," with, just as in Britain, much of this going on in the private schools of the country's elite, and in the emergent mass media--on the radio, in movies.

In the United States, however, the effort to develop a distinct elite accent was a comparative bust in the long run, taken almost for an individual eccentricity in the case of a George Plimpton rather than a badge of Authority, and today an anachronism. ("Why does Audrey Hepburn talk like that?" one might wonder watching one of her movies. "Is that Cary Grant guy English or American or what?" Watching Charade they can wonder these things about both of the movie's leads.)

Did this failure do anything to make America a more egalitarian place than it would have been otherwise? Diminish its social divides? It seems to me that the situation is so bad that way that one would have a hard time proving that--but for all that I suspect that it is probably for the best that the United States does not have this added bit of cultural baggage to cope with as well.

William Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Balzac's Human Comedy: Some Thoughts

As I remarked when discussing William Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon a while back it was the comparison of William Makepeace Thackeray with Balzac that made me think Thackeray worthwhile. While I did indeed find it worthwhile, Barry Lyndon made quite a different impression on me than Balzac--Grimmelshausen the writer I constantly found myself in mind of as I read that book.

Reading Vanity Fair one might think of Balzac because of that novel's greater proximity to Balzac's post-Revolutionary France in that period, and the role played by financial operations and inheritance in the plot. In fairness the book does, as is the case with Balzac, depict a society where all that was solid was melting into air in the cash nexus, but very differently. The copy on the back of my volume describes the story's pace as "leisurely"--and the book is indeed too much so to feel properly Balzacian, Thackeray never quite conveying that desperate intensity of his characters in the pursuit of their objects that Balzac so often did, exemplified by how as the story approaches its finish he does not check in on one of his two principals, Becky Sharp, for over a hundred pages (!). Rather than a mad chase their path through the story feels like a lackadaisical stroll, all within a story that, compared with Balzac, or even Thackeray's earlier Barry Lyndon, is far more domestic (even the portion about the Battle of Waterloo giving us more about the wives and other hangers-on back in Brussels than the events on the battlefield!) and genteel (Thackeray himself remarking his "wish . . . deferentially to submit to the fashion at present prevailing, and only to hint at the existence of wickedness in a light, easy, and agreeable manner, so that nobody's fine feelings may be offended").

At the same time Thackeray never seems quite so invested in the goings-on as the often cold-eyed Balzac could be in the stories of characters for which he often seemed to feel more, and I think, made the reader feel more than Thackeray does.

Of the "Apologists and Admirers of Injustice, Misery, and Brutality"

In the course of his novel Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray referred to the "apologists and admirers of injustice, misery, and brutality." Thackeray specifically had in mind those who approve injustice, misery, and brutality in the rearing of children, thinking that bullying plays a salutary part in all this for bully and bullied alike, but while this attitude is particularly disgusting here one finds it just about everywhere in society--with the "apologists and admirers" no rarer these days than in his own.

Considering the apology and admiration it seems worth saying that such persons are more prone to apologize for and admire injustice, misery and brutality when they are suffered by others and not themselves--especially when those suffering them are what would be "unworthy victims" in their book.

This is all the more the case as, when they are on the receiving end of injustice, misery and brutality they howl for justice, relief, gentleness louder than anyone else--in a manner redolent of the self-pity of which their kind so love to accuse everyone else when they dare protest the kind of treatment they dole out to them.

Of "Chickenshit"

The term "chickenshit" is by no means new but would seem to have seen its usage surge again and again to new heights over the years.

Famously associated with the period of the Second World War, it seems that, according to Google's Ngram viewer, usage of the term surged tenfold between 1939 and 1945. According to historian Paul Fussell's 1990 book Wartime the term denoted "behavior that makes military life worse than it need be," not least "petty harassment of the weak by the strong . . . sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline . . . insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances."

The person of what may be called "conventional" mind--respectful of power and disrespectful of those who have none, unquestioning of received wisdom and contemptuous of those who do question it, ever ready to suck up and punch down and thus do their part in facilitating bullies--tends to dismiss charges that such a thing exists, but that is not because this particular evil is absent, but because they are of conventional mind, while I would hasten to add this is hardly unique to military institutions. Quite the contrary, it would seem to pervade any hierarchical institution where scope exists for the exercise of petty power and authority--while I suspect that in just about every one of them such practice, contrary to what its defenders may feebly attempt to argue, gets in the way of that institution's ability to perform its essential task. If those who have authority and power and responsibility have time for "petty harassment," "sadism," "insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances" they are not attending to whatever useful functions they may have had--while those on the receiving end, subjected to the harassment, sadism and the rest, start seeing everything to which they are subjected as that, and give it exactly the consideration that such things deserve, which becomes a problem when a matter actually is not chickenshit. But of course those mentally of a kind so as to defend this behavior--those whom William Thackeray memorably termed the "apologists and admirers of injustice, misery and brutality"--will never admit to that and it may not be much good arguing with them to any such end, for after all, YOU CAN'T WIN AN ARGUMENT WITH AN IDIOT.

Thackeray and Balzac: A Few More Thoughts

Recently considering the comparison of Thackeray with Balzac I found it overdrawn on the basis of the novels by Thackeray I had read, particularly his most famous, Vanity Fair. I previously remarked how domestic and genteel the work was by comparison with Balzac's, but I don't think this exhausts the matter, with one aspect of this how things ended up with Becky. In his "delicate" telling (how far are we from a work like Cousin Bette, or The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans!) Becky neither attains the success of a Eugene de Rastignac, nor suffers the catastrophe of a Lucien de Rubempre, but just ends up somewhere in the middle at the end of a rather meandering narrative, with much relegated to a postscript. It is all rather lacking in intensity rather at odds with Emily Brontë's comparison of Thackeray with an Old Testament prophet, and it may well be that this is a matter of a faintness of social vision that tells us that, yes, the actors do behave selfishly and at times disgracefully, but in such a way that rather than it all seeming to be a matter of people responding to the crushing force of circumstances it can seem like the kind of thing a certain kind of mediocre mind delights in calling "human nature," and certainly gives no sense of being bound up with a society's being in a state of great transformation (in Karl Polanyi's view, the great transformation). It may be relevant here that Thackeray has not Balzac's interest in all strata of society (when Thackeray writes of people without money in Chapter 36 it is those who manage to live luxuriously on nothing at all, for a time anyway, that he concerns himself with, rather than the great majority who have nothing and truly suffer deprivation as a result), and that he also has not that author's interest in the "machinery of civilization" as Henry James called it (what would Balzac have done with the financial affairs which brought down John Sedley?), and what may be cause or reflection of all this, Thackeray's tendency toward an attitude of self-satisfied irony toward all he surveys (down to the very last page).

For all that I do not feel as if I wasted my time in reading Vanity Fair. But I do think that given what I personally look for in my fiction these days the book was definitely oversold.