The "Cynical" Balzac

Balzac is, like pretty much every author who has dared to say a critical word about the social order, routinely charged with the crime of "cynicism"; while like pretty much every author against whom the charge is made undeserving of the charge.

Balzac was absolutely scathing in his criticism of a world where there was "no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.'" But it was the cynicism of that world that he condemned, in part because of all those things that he happened to value--not least, human connections and human virtues. The way modern society corrupted and destroyed all that--cynically--was what he exposed and attacked, with the result that if the genteel folk of the salons regarded him as a monster, those fed up with the official lies and the hypocrisy have ever since found in his honesty, and his feeling, a breath of fresh air.

And that— was what seemed "cynical" to "respectable" opinion that did not like attention being called to such realities, of which it was defensive then and remains defensive now, such that he is less read today than he might be if he had their approval.

Indeed, it says everything that Henry James, at best an epigone of French realists like Balzac who willfully abandoned all that was best in them--indeed, while personally laying against Balzac the charge that he lacked a moral sense--became the god of Anglo-American letters.

Of Money and Obsession: Balzac's The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans

Emile Zola, in explaining his conception of the "experimental novel" (he meant "experimental" not in the sense of unreadable avant garde prose, but the novel as quasi-scientific thought-experiment based on scientific knowledge of objective reality), referred to Balzac as the "father" of the form, specifically citing his book Cousin Bette as a model of such experimental rigor in its treatment of the theme of adultery.

Striking a work as Cousin Bette is in that regard, I found Balzac's The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans, if perhaps a less satisfying work when taken as a whole, the book's first two parts are in their way a more forceful treatment of the interaction between money and "passion" of that kind as the Baron de Nucingen burns through francs by the hundreds of thousands in pursuit of a woman he scarcely glimpsed one night in the woods.

"The Rectification of Names" and George Carlin

The Analects of Confucius contain an interesting dialogue on the "rectification of names" as a priority in administration, on the grounds that language must be "in accordance with the truth of things" for the sake of carrying on "affairs . . . to success"--so much so that "the superior man requires . . . that in his words there may be nothing incorrect."

Alas, in this day and age it can seem as if, in this culture as in probably every other, language is nothing but a collection of evasions and obfuscations, by and large for the most unvirtuous purposes--a refusal to acquiesce in which makes one an incomprehensible eccentric at best to most of the others they will meet.

George Carlin refused to acquiesce in that manner. And in that, I think, one could regard him as a "superior man" who did far more the sake of contemporary culture than just about all the literati of the mainstream today put together.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 and the State of the World Today

I came relatively late to the minor pop cultural phenomenon that was Mystery Science Theater 3000 (henceforth, just MST3K for brevity's sake), catching its last three seasons on what was then still the Sci-Fi Channel.

It is not the sort of thing that would appeal to me as much today--it fundamentally comes down to three actors (two of them playing robots) mocking a bad movie as they sit through it. And even back when it had appealed to me not everything worked--especially when the film did not seem to merit the mockery the jokes tended to fall flat. Still, at its best it was hilarious--to the point that some of their quips seem to have stuck in my memory years and decades later.

At the end of the little group's viewing The Deadly Bees, when the house that was the principal setting of the film goes up in flames, Crow T. Robot quips that the house "was made of typing paper and oily rags."

I think of that line a lot.

Like after hearing each and every report about the world--about the climate and the environment generally, about the state of the economy, about the international order.

We are reminded with truly distressing frequency that the "house" we live in is likewise made of typing paper and oily rags.

What is All the "Cringe" Comedy Really About?

One of the more oft-used words to describe the kind of comedy we have tended to see on twenty-first century TV has been "cringe." Associated with shows like The Office, watching it we will see Michael Scott say something terribly offensive, and appall everyone around them, while being completely oblivious to what he did--with a good time had by, if not all, at least those who like this kind of comedy.

Why has this kind of comedy become so popular in this period?

One possibility that occurs to me is that this is a matter of twenty-first century class politics. These days it seems that "punching down" in comedy is treated as daring, even heroic. ("Look how edgy I'm being!" they say as they beat up on an oppressed group. "I'm a free speech hero!")

Especially given the prevailing attitude toward class, punching down at people who seem awkward by the "upper middle class" (to use Michael Lind's term, "overclass") standards that are thought of as society's standards--who are so much more likely to be from lower class backgrounds as to make this a form of mockery of the less affluent--is fair game.

And we see it the more insofar as comedy these days so rarely punches up.

Are People Really Self-Publishing Millions of Books Each Year?

Recently I was surprised to read that the number of "new" books self-published annually was in the millions.

Why?

My conjecture (it is hard to get beyond that given the paucity of data and analysis out there) the self-publishing boom we saw circa 2010 (when e-book readers arrived on the market, when publishing services like Amazon's came into the business) prompted a Great Drawer Clearing. Meanwhile, deceived by our "success story"-addicted media, a great many people who never had a chance of becoming authors the traditional way fancied that maybe they could make a career this way.

Still, much as agents and editors and anti-populist critical snobs snivel about "everyone" thinking they are a writer, there was only so much stuff in those drawers, with the most likely candidates probably putting out the most likely stuff first. At the same time those who had been gulled into believing that some revolution was here, the power in the hands of the authors, quickly learned otherwise. It was not a case of "Publish it, and they will come." Rather you published it and it just sat there, very few self-published writers selling anything to people who were not friends and family (I dare say, more than usually supportive friends and family). There was thus less apparent incentive to bring out old stuff, let alone write new stuff--less and less all the time as the market grew ever more cluttered while people read and read less, supply and demand moving in opposite directions, with the limitation of the e-books so critical for the self-published to a relatively small part of the market, and the unrelenting hostility of the gatekeepers toward the self-published not helping in the least, among much, much else that made the road steeper rather than easier.

It seemed to me the case, too, that young people have been less inclined to dabble in long-form writing than their forebears (with, indeed, the "decline" of the English major seeming to me to reflect decreasing interest), while people of all ages seem to have been devoting time and energy to activities very different from writing books or anything at all, to a much greater degree than even a few years ago. (Wanting to express themselves they "micro-blog" on Twitter, or vlog on YouTube, rather than "blog" in the old way.)

Nothing I have yet seen has convinced me that this picture of the situation is inaccurate--while the aforementioned figure can conceal a lot of ambiguity, given that it is less than clear just what counts as a "book" (a lot of self-published work not even purporting to be that--short stories sold individually probably lumped into the figure), let alone a new one (given the ambiguities of reissue with self-published work the author can edit any time). The result is that I can easily picture, for example, the number of items that resemble what most think of as books hitting the market for the first time in this way in any given year as rather smaller--with the kind of decline I have talked about not ruled out.

Do They Really Publish a Million Books a Year?

Recently I have seen it estimated that, excluding self-published titles, between 500,000 and 1 million new titles are published in the U.S. each and every year.

I have tried digging into the figure but do not know how it was arrived at--and strongly suspect that it is misleading.

After all, when you collect statistics you have to define your terms clearly, and I have seen no such definition in connection with these figures. My guess is that they refer to any published item distributed in a discrete unit, excluding periodicals--which could easily include many things we do not think of as books, especially if commercial distribution is not required for inclusion in the category, such as pamphlets handed out by political or religious organizations. Even when we define the term "book" more exclusively there is the question of how we define "new." Does a barely touched "new" edition of an older book count--like a reissue of a classic with a couple of pages of "foreword?"

One can go on and on like this, but I think this makes the point--those things most of us think of when we hear the word "book," in length and formatting and manner of presentation to the public (and certainly expectation that they will find a new audience), and certainly "new book," actually hitting the market in any given year, probably number a good deal less than that. Certainly the number of, for example, new, first-edition novels published annually through the traditional channels would seem far fewer--and we do well to remember that when attempting to consider the shape of the market.

Remembering The Last Action Hero

Arnold Schwarzenegger's career as an action hero is probably most associated with the '80s and the films he made in it--The Terminator (1984), Commando (1985), Predator (1987) and others. But, unlike the career of his contemporary Sylvester Stallone, whose career really did peak then (arguably in 1985, when Rambo: First Blood, Part II and Rocky IV were the second and third-biggest hits of the year), his biggest success came in the early '90s--the years of Total Recall (1990), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and True Lies (1994), as well as the comedy Kindergarten Cop (1990). Still, if this patch gave him his biggest films (big enough that the remakes, sequels, spin-offs continue to this day, with a show based on True Lies on CBS), it was not unmarred by disappointments--like the comedy Junior (1994), and of course, The Last Action Hero (1993).

Made on a then-massive budget of $85 million (how times have changed!) it was one of the biggest disappointments of the year, pleasing few as action movie, or as comedic "meta" take on the genre. Still, it seems to have endured in the popular memory rather more successfully than that same summer's flop Super Mario Bros. (again, how times have changed!), and even if time does not seem to have improved its reputation it still had its moments, like Charles Dance trying to explain to Anthony Quinn the difference between a turn of one-eighty and one of three-sixty, and of course, the reason why Schwarzenegger's going after the bad guys this time was "personal."

Quentin Tarantino's Recent Thoughts on the Bond Series

Quentin Tarantino name has come up before in relation to the Bond films.

Back in the '90s he actually aspired to make a film adaptation of Casino Royale.

That ship sailed a very long time ago--as the Casino Royale that actually kicked off the reboot made clear. But he did recently discuss the Bond film series in the Deadline interview from a little while back, during which he suggested that EON go back to the books and actually adapt the books.

The idea has the virtue that, in contrast with most remakes, which bring nothing new to the table, those movies would be genuinely different from what was made before, and from anything out there today.

However, "different" does not mean an audience would necessarily exist for them.

Let us, for the moment, not belabor the well-known, much-chewed over matter of the social sentiments of the books. We all know how absolutely intolerable they would be to respectable opinion--and the fact that, while the more overt racism may be removable without damaging anything essential, the gender politics could not be altered without making a mockery of any pretense to faithfulness. The idea has at least three other strikes against it:

1. Filmed as they are the novels would be period pieces--a tough sell to American audiences these days. (Indeed, I recently remarked the anomalousness of Indiana Jones as a popular success given this trait of theirs--and counted it as one of the factors working against that film's box office success.)

2. The narrative structure of the books--which are less the stuff of action movies than "slow burn" thrillers unlikely to be very exciting to today's readers. (Indeed, as Raymond Benson's stuff makes clear even readers of Bond novels expect something different these days, never mind viewers of Bond films.)

3. Much of what made the books interesting to readers when they came out is simply not going to reach today's audience. What was glamorous by the standard of '50s Britain is less impressive today in an era in which working people may be struggling to keep themselves in modest shelter and adequate food, but the level of luxury presented by pop cultural fantasy has exploded right along with the fortunes of the richest. Meanwhile the agonies over the place of Britain and its elite in the world that seems to have been so bound up with the books' reception are also unlikely to resonate with a wide audience (and none at all outside Britain).

There therefore seems no question of any such thing being blockbuster material--while the kind of mid-range movie such productions could have been is simply not getting made anymore, certainly not for theatrical release, while streaming is becoming ever more penurious. One might imagine as an alternative the adventures of James Bond being adapted as a TV series--with, perhaps, a few novels squeezed into a particular season. (I could see, for instance, Casino Royale through From Russia with Love as a season, ending with the cliffhanger of Bond's poisoning; Dr. No and Goldfinger and the For Your Eyes Only short story sequence the basis of a season two; and the books between Thunderball and The Man with the Golden Gun as the basis for one long arc, maybe wrapping up the sequence with another two seasons.) Yet I am doubtful that very many would be persuaded to stick with Bond through it all (again, period pieces are tough sells, and even if I rejected belaboring them there are those politics), while I have seen little evidence of either Everything Or Nothing productions, or Amazon, being up for it, making it much more a provocative notion than a serious proposition.

Social Withdrawal, or Social Rejection?

When those who attend to the matter of those who have withdrawn from society write about them their tendency has been to emphasize the actions of those who have withdrawn, and identify these actions with choices they have made. They gave up on the job market. They dropped out of the "dating pool." They refused to come out of their bedroom, or their parent's basement.

I suppose this is intuitive for those who take the conventional view of things (individualistic, squeamish about the existence of society and its inequalities, not least in the area of power). But, here as in so many other areas of life, that view can be limiting and misleading--overlooking the extent to which those who act in such ways may be coping with choices others made, and in which they could not do much more than acquiesce, which may have them not so much withdrawing as accepting others' rejections. The rejection of potential employers. Rejection in "the dating market" and social life generally. Even rejection by their own families.

After all, it does not seem to be those positioned to "succeed" that take that course, but those who have the most frustration, to go by what the anecdotes and even the statistics tell us. Not the privileged kid with all the advantages who got all the breaks and is now on the "fast track to success" but the kid who never got a college degree is likely to end up playing games in their parents' basement. Not the "eligible bachelor" who walks away from dating, but those whose prospects were much less good. And not the popular kids but the victims of those vigilante enforcers of social life, bullies, who end up hikikomori.

Considering all this one can plausibly see all these persons as having been "shut out" before they became "shut-in." And that seems to me to confirm yet again the value of the sociological approach to the issue on the part of those who want to understand, and help, rather than wring hands and moralize in that way that the real-life Ron Burgundys of the mainstream media love so much.

Another Take on the Cult of Celebrity

My usual first thought regarding the cult of celebrity is its foolishness--and the second, its essential backwardness, reflecting as it does a hierarchical outlook more befitting barbarians than civilized people (the more in as it is so much taken for granted). However, one alternative treatment of the theme that impressed me was David Walsh's discussion of the issue way back when Michael Jordan retired. Certainly he remarks the essentially inegalitarian character of a society where celebrity exists in such a manner. ("Excessive celebrity must be . . . a rationale for inequality and reinforces it." After all, "[t]he heaping of fame and wealth upon a single individual . . . is only possible and meaningful if the vast majority have no access to those rewards.") He noted, too, that the status of celebrities from the world of entertainment was partly a matter of the repellent, toxic quality of the public figures seen to be elsewhere. ("It was impossible for a sports star to swell" to such a "monumental size in the American popular consciousness" as Jordan did "as long as there were figures . . . respected, rightly or wrongly, for their accomplishments on behalf of society as a whole." In the era of the Clinton impeachment that was ongoing as Walsh wrote those words, he asked, "Who deserves such admiration?")

However, he also argued for the fascination with celebrity being a function of what one might (to use a different writer's famous phrase to which Walsh alludes), so many people's "leading lives of quiet desperation." The "millions" doing so,

going about their daily lives without any sense of a greater purpose to their existence than the struggle to make ends meet . . . denied richness and pleasure and variety and meaning . . . turn hungrily to the media-chronicled lives of celebrities--who apparently have everything they don't . . . who are "real" while they are, to themselves, non-existent--in search of a life with content.

He adds that "[t]his vicarious existence stands in for real existence, except because it is not real or substantial . . . can never fill them up, and so they are always desperate for more, something, anything to fill up the gaping hole."

In short, the celebrities "live the fantasy," or at least seem to be doing so, and other people find vicarious satisfaction in it, however faint or limited or tenuous--the more in as they are incessantly told that they too could be doing this, may someday be doing this. ("The media . . . encourages many young people to believe that they can escape their difficult conditions of life by following the basketball star's path. For ninety-nine point nine percent of them this is an illusion, and a bitter one.")

They may as well be the people in Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, where off-world drug-trippers rely on "virtual" experience of a cushier life; at playing at "being" Perky Pat (ominously, as the atmosphere warms, endangering the survival of life on Earth . . .).

All this, of course, is very sad--but sad as it is it still strikes me as staggering in its stupidity, with stupider still those who exalt people's following celebrity in this way as some sort of need, when really it is at best a way of avoiding looking at their real needs and trying to satisfy those. If we indeed live in a world where quiet desperation is the lot of the mass, after all, they ought to be looking for more than vicarious living through mediated images of people acting the part of those to whom life has given everything as they try to get on after life has given them nothing, or next to it.

Remembering Spin City

Recently considering the politically "safe" character of the '90s-era sitcom I found myself recalling the sitcom Spin City, precisely because it was so blatant an example. Here we have a sitcom with, for a protagonist, the Deputy Mayor of New York, and the Mayor and his staff for supporting characters--but, from what I saw of it (which I thought was a lot in reruns on FX), it was pretty much your standard workplace comedy, full of wacky characters who do not actually do anything but get on each others' nerves and have "Will they/Won't they" romantic tension under the nose of a silly, incompetent, oblivious boss.* A little "identity politics" apart, I have the impression that the "China" episode of the not wholly dissimilar The Office all by itself spent more time on a political issue than anything in Spin City's six seasons did--to say nothing of how it looks in comparison with Michael J. Fox's previous long-running sitcom, Family Ties (to which there is a tiny allusion at the end of Fox's character's departure, when he goes on to a job in Washington D.C. and mentions meeting a Senator Alex P. Keaton from Ohio, of whom his opinion is none too flattering).

In all that, as in a great deal else (yes, a good part of the humor would probably be off-limits today), it was quintessentially of its time.

* Indeed, his Mayor Randall Winston being the first impression Barry Bostwick made on me the thought that he was Thodin in Lexx was quite a shock.

Nineteen Eighty-Nine and the Way the Summer Box Office Used to Be

Recently I remembered here the year 1989 at the box office--both the hype that surrounded it, and the ways in which that year did anticipate the box office as we now know it (in particular, how superhero movies and animated family films, not very big genres prior to that point, would come to dominate the theaters).

Still, it seems worth noting that alongside those anticipations--whose significance is far clearer in hindsight than it was at the time--looking at the year's, and even the summer's, roster of hits reminds us of how different (in some ways, more diverse) "the movies" used to be. Certainly the summer season saw plenty of action movies, which that year were the biggest moneymakers (with Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Lethal Weapon 2 raking it in). However, they dominated it less completely than they do now. The top hits of that summer, after all, also included Turner & Hooch, When Harry Met Sally, Parenthood and Dead Poet's Society--comedy, romance, dramedy, even drama oriented to people who were at least nominally adults selling a lot of tickets.

What a different cinematic world that was than the one we live in now.

Is the World Already Crawling With Artificial Super-Intelligences?

Amid the present furor over progress in the area of chatbot development many a commentator is raising the tired old specter of inhuman intelligences, perhaps super-intelligences, emerging and escaping human control, perhaps to wreak havoc of a kind that will threaten human freedom and even survival.

Arguably the world has long seen its life dominated by such super-intelligences--the "artificial men" of Thomas Hobbes, the "corporate persons" brought into modern jurisprudence by a nineteenth century argument over railway fences. These entities, with their resources of surveillance, data-processing, decision and action far, far beyond that of any one human, at once everywhere and nowhere, and theoretically capable of living forever, are just as artificial as anything contained within the casing of a computer--and for many a hapless individual just as incomprehensible, intractable, threatening. Indeed, were the world to actually ever be dominated by robot overlords one may wonder if those individuals would feel that their life is any different for it.

H.G. Wells' "Bookish Illiteracy"

In his Experiment in Autobiography there is a point at which H.G. Wells suggests that the "caricature-individualities" of his realist novels might not seem very relevant for long, that civilization would simply have moved on.

Of course, as with so much else in Wells, his creations remain relevant precisely because civilization did not move on in the way in which he imagined. The problems with which the world was wrestling in his time remain the ones which bedevil it now--the organization of human economic and social life in line with not just the possibilities presented but the necessities imposed by the advance of technology and of knowledge broadly. Economic life, war, "sanity"--considering the situation we are in now it can feel as if society has made little to no progress at all, the past century a waste or worse that has left people scarcely trying even as the challenge has got bigger and the stakes higher.

For the moment, though, I have in mind something rather lighter than those problems, like the "bookish illiteracy" of one of those caricature-individualities he specifically raised as likely to have lost its interest before very long, Alfred Polly (of his 1910 novel The History of Mr. Polly). Mr. Polly, Wells tells us, "specialised in," as he put it, "the disuse of English." This was because, while he was fascinated by "words rich in suggestion" and "loved] a novel and striking phrase," his limited formal education left him with "little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English"--with this getting worse the more exotic the material got. To him Boccacio is "Bocashieu," Rabelais "Rabooloose."

Still, in spite of his familiarity with such figures his reading was less a matter of middlebrow chasing after classics than of omnivorousness for anything in print, at least insofar as it promised to satisfy a taste for manly adventure, which was what got him into reading in the first place. "Penny dreadfuls" were a big part of his reading diet in those early adolescent years when he was bitten by the bug, with their Haggardesque tales of tropical exploration and dives into the mysteries beneath the sea and battles where young Polly vicariously "led stormers against well-nigh impregnable forts," and "rammed and torpedoed ships, one against ten." And the habit stuck, such that later he liked "Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne."*

Considering all this it seems to me that this is all very far from being irrelevant. Indeed, those of us who have ever been bookish have likely been that before we became "literate" (How do you get to be good at reading if you don't do much of it? And who has not mispronounced words they read but did not hear?); or our taste in that reading (as we are unlikely to become enthusiastic readers if it is all a matter of "eating your vegetables"). Certainly looking back at what--and how--I read at his age I do not think I was so different. If I now bore the readers of this blog by writing about people like Balzac--and Wells' realist novels--the author favored back then was Clive Cussler, a teller of adventure stories where exploration and the sea and battles all figure very prominently (if with rather less of the Victorian sensibility that so colored Polly's consumption), while I might add that even today Dumas' Vicomte appeals to me less than does his preceding tales of Athos, Aramis, Porthos and D'Artagnan.

Of course, it may be the case that Wells did not imagine this ceasing to be the case so much as he imagined it not being the case for anyone in adulthood--that complete literacy would be universalized, and certainly that anyone bookish in inclination would not, through the premature end of a poorly conducted formal education, pronounce "Boccacio" as "Bocashieu." In that case one could give him some credit for being right about Polly-like "bookish illiteracy" becoming less relevant--though not in the way he expected or hoped. In our time it is not illiteracy that appears to be on the wane, but rather bookishness, particularly the kind associated with plain and simple literary pleasure.

* Vicomte is the third novel in Dumas' cycle about the Musketeers, after the original The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After--and not just to Polly but anyone expecting a swashbuckler in the style of the prior two apt to be a disappointment, one reason why film adaptations of Vicomte de Bragelonne are very rare next to the others. (Still, they do take part of the book--specifically the portion now remembered as The Man with the Iron Mask, where we do get some "blood and swash.")