The word "pundit" is ultimately derived from the Sanskrit word "pandita" meaning "learned."
Today, however, in English the word is usually used in reference to the members of the media commentariat, particularly those more prominent members of the commentariat known to the mainstream.
Given the quality of the comment that we get from the mainstream media it seems fair to say that the word has come to denote the extreme opposite of its original meaning.
For nothing can be further from "learned" than those the conventional hail as "pundits" today.
Saturday, April 20, 2024
Writers Write About Writing
It is notorious that fiction, not least that fiction produced by Hollywood, rarely depicts work in a convincing way, even when the depiction is at the level of mere reference, never mind a much more detail-intensive dramatization. Whether the person we see is a lawyer or police officer, a journalist or a scientist--a tinker, tailor, soldier, spy--we can usually count on their job being depicted in a risibly false manner, and it is occasion for impressed comment when they do not depict it in a risibly false manner.
But it has always seemed to me that their false depiction of the writing life has been particularly egregious--because where most writers know nothing of those other jobs, they should know about the one they actually do, else their name would not ordinarily be in the credits of the movie or show we are looking at. Indeed, because they are themselves writers one would think that, like most other people, they would be irritated by how movies and TV get their job wrong--with this carrying over to how they present writers of print fiction, given that so many of those who write for TV and film have at least some experience of that endeavor.
However, they instead flog the same stale and profoundly misleading clichés.
There is the extreme simple-mindedness of their handling of the creative process--reflected in the trite references to "writer's block.
There is the way they gloss over the sheer hell that is the effort to publish what one has written.
There is the absence of any reference to revision and editing, and the wretchedness to which they so often reduce writers.
And of course, there are the endless scenes of "successful" authors smugly signing copies of their book for adoring fans.
All this should be the easier as so often the character who is a writer is that not because the plot really needs them to be one, but because writers rather lazily settle on that occupation for protagonists as simply "what they know"--allowing them to easily eschew the clichés, maybe provide a reference to the reality here and there. Alas, all this has proven far, far beyond them.
But it has always seemed to me that their false depiction of the writing life has been particularly egregious--because where most writers know nothing of those other jobs, they should know about the one they actually do, else their name would not ordinarily be in the credits of the movie or show we are looking at. Indeed, because they are themselves writers one would think that, like most other people, they would be irritated by how movies and TV get their job wrong--with this carrying over to how they present writers of print fiction, given that so many of those who write for TV and film have at least some experience of that endeavor.
However, they instead flog the same stale and profoundly misleading clichés.
There is the extreme simple-mindedness of their handling of the creative process--reflected in the trite references to "writer's block.
There is the way they gloss over the sheer hell that is the effort to publish what one has written.
There is the absence of any reference to revision and editing, and the wretchedness to which they so often reduce writers.
And of course, there are the endless scenes of "successful" authors smugly signing copies of their book for adoring fans.
All this should be the easier as so often the character who is a writer is that not because the plot really needs them to be one, but because writers rather lazily settle on that occupation for protagonists as simply "what they know"--allowing them to easily eschew the clichés, maybe provide a reference to the reality here and there. Alas, all this has proven far, far beyond them.
Those Lives in Which Chance Plays No Part
In Lost Illusions Balzac remarks that "there are lives in which chance plays no part"--such that those "despair[ing] of a life become stale and unprofitable in the present" find no relief in "outlook for the future," having as they do "nothing to look for, nothing to expect from chance."
Writing of one particular character that matter of chance comes up again and again, with that specific word "chance" coming up at least three dozen times in the text. Certainly as discussed here again and again chance means the "lucky break," the "big break," that make for high position and glorious careers of the kind that have the conventional conformist idiot most people with any sort of public platform seem to be taking mediocrities are superhumans of Renaissance Man versatility--as people who might prove themselves actual geniuses go through their lives thought idiots and treated as worthless because they were among those in whose lives chance played no part.
As Balzac made clear here, chances are not at all equally distributed--with chance overwhelmingly enjoyed by the privileged, the connected, the kind of people for whom the activity of "networking" actually has meaning, because they are in a position to network with people who have the power to do something for them, and could be induced to use it, because they in turn can do something for them.
For the rest of the world, alas, "chance" is too likely to simply mean "mischance"; mean disaster striking, and their "becoming a statistic."
Considering their lot I find myself thinking of the self-help drivel about "stepping outside your comfort zone," and "being open to new experiences." As things already are most people are pretty uncomfortable--and unprotected from life's shocks and their terrors, rather than failing to be "open to new experience." What they want, for perfectly good reason, is some comfort, and some protection; some security and some control of the kind of which they have too little, a reality to which the outside-their-comfort-zone-stepping, open-to-experience advice-purveying privileged nitwits are profoundly oblivious.
Writing of one particular character that matter of chance comes up again and again, with that specific word "chance" coming up at least three dozen times in the text. Certainly as discussed here again and again chance means the "lucky break," the "big break," that make for high position and glorious careers of the kind that have the conventional conformist idiot most people with any sort of public platform seem to be taking mediocrities are superhumans of Renaissance Man versatility--as people who might prove themselves actual geniuses go through their lives thought idiots and treated as worthless because they were among those in whose lives chance played no part.
As Balzac made clear here, chances are not at all equally distributed--with chance overwhelmingly enjoyed by the privileged, the connected, the kind of people for whom the activity of "networking" actually has meaning, because they are in a position to network with people who have the power to do something for them, and could be induced to use it, because they in turn can do something for them.
For the rest of the world, alas, "chance" is too likely to simply mean "mischance"; mean disaster striking, and their "becoming a statistic."
Considering their lot I find myself thinking of the self-help drivel about "stepping outside your comfort zone," and "being open to new experiences." As things already are most people are pretty uncomfortable--and unprotected from life's shocks and their terrors, rather than failing to be "open to new experience." What they want, for perfectly good reason, is some comfort, and some protection; some security and some control of the kind of which they have too little, a reality to which the outside-their-comfort-zone-stepping, open-to-experience advice-purveying privileged nitwits are profoundly oblivious.
Book Review: Harold Coyle's Trial By Fire
Like the other authors who became really Big Names in the techno-thriller field, Harold Coyle made his name with Cold War stories, starting with 1987's Team Yankee, which depicts a NATO-Soviet clash in Central Europe as seen by an American tank crew. However, the end of the Cold War compelled him to shift to other themes, with his first post-Cold War book Trial by Fire, presenting a scenario based on U.S. relations with Mexico. Here, in the wake of a takeover of Mexico by a military junta--the "Council of Thirteen" intent on saving the country from corruption, crime and poverty--a Mexican crime boss driven into flight and exile by the Council's crackdown (Hector Alaman) manufactures a series of violent incidents on the U.S.-Mexico border that he intends for the U.S. to blame on the new Mexican regime, compelling the United States government to drive it from power, and giving him the opportunity to resume his old position within the country.
As might be guessed from that scenario--and for that matter, experience of post-Cold War techno-thriller writing generally--Coyle had to make a good deal more effort than before to develop the scenario that leads to the fighting (in comparison with his simply borrowing John Hackett's scenario for the armored warfare in 1987's Team Yankee, for example, or his only slightly written background to the Soviet invasion of Iran in 1988's Sword Point). What was less predictable was the level of adroitness Coyle would display in both choosing his scenario, and developing it. In envisioning a crisis of this kind with Mexico Coyle set up a situation in which the United States government may be overwhelmingly more powerful with regard to conventional military capability, such that it can destroy Mexico's armed forces with ease, but at the same time not manage to get what that government actually wants--security along its two thousand mile border with the vast and populous neighbor to its south, tasks requiring levels of military manpower far, far beyond what the U.S. has at its disposal. (In one of the more memorable scenes Coyle's military officer protagonists explain the numbers to a stupid, sarcastic politician with little apparent ability or willingness to process the obvious.) Moreover, Coyle displays some nuance in depicting how the situation unfolds--not least in an alertness to the vulnerability of governments to being manipulated by parties, foreign and domestic, for their own ends; how prejudice, media sensationalism, political hucksterism can easily combine with the demand of some to "do something" and the plain and simple happenstance that throws sparks into a tinderbox to push policymakers who are supposed to "know better" into disastrous courses (with one aspect of note how the politics of border states like Texas color national policy in this area); how as crises escalate, and missions "creep," political objects become ambitious beyond anyone's actual ability to realize them, with this particularly happening when soldiers win a conventional battle with ease only to find themselves stuck trying to hold territory and impose their political will on its inhabitants in an era of what Rupert Smith called "war amongst the people," and find that task nowhere near as easy. (Indeed, much more than is the case with most techno-thrillers, the policymakers and "pundits" in Washington would have had a chance to learn something if they picked it up--to the extent that they have the faculty to learn at all.)
Coyle's strengths here also extend to the depiction of the fighting itself, which here has the kind of grit one is unlikely to see in the more high-tech stories of aviators in super-planes--or of those writers of fighting on the ground inclined to present perfectly competent super-people rather than real human beings (for instance, one techno-thriller writer whose prose on this level was rightly compared with that of a "Victorian boy's book"). When America and Mexico do go to war here American officers do not always prove wise, strong or noble in making their decisions, or dealing with their consequences, which can and do include subordinates losing their lives. At the same time Coyle treats the Mexican characters on the opposite side of the battle from those Americans with a level of respect far from standard in the genre, the military officers of the Council sincerely acting as patriots, and intelligent ones, who have good reason to bristle at how their neighbor to the north sees them. (Where this rather nationalistic genre tends to treat foreigners' criticisms of the U.S. and its treatment of them as sanctimoniousness and worse, when Colonel Alfredo Guajardo complains that American representatives to his country lecture, threaten and dictate rather than talk to them we are getting his honest and not necessarily invalid appraisal of the relationship--while in making Guajardo the Council's "face" in America there is no sense that their view that his being of visibly European rather than indigenous descent would be advantageous for public relations with the United States government and the American public is at all an unfair assessment of racial attitudes in America on their part.)
Of course, for all that the tale has its implausibilities—and its limitations. Even as Mexico's domestic troubles--not least, its poverty--loom large as a theme within the book, Coyle does not go into any great depth in discussing these, and his vision of the Council's attempt to redress the problems can seem a bit muddled. (The Council does not breathe a word about nationalizations and the renunciation of foreign debt the way a left-wing government might, while instead planning painful austerity measures the way a right-wing government would; but also uses price controls and backs them up with drumhead justice in a manner not easily reconciled with the demands of the "Washington Consensus" to which it seems the Council means to accommodate the country.) There is, too, the way that Latin America and the Caribbean (including close, longtime U.S. allies such as Panama) line up behind Mexico against the U.S. in the crisis (a turn critical to even the very limited extent to which Mexico is able to throw up a conventional defense against the U.S. intervention).
Meanwhile, getting away from the construction of the scenario that is on the whole one of the book's strengths there is much that is less than ideal. Like many an author a few books into their career an initial tendency toward spare prose gives way to prolixity--and not always to good effect. In contrast with a Clancy Coyle, if hardly likely to offer a warts-and-all view of life in uniform, is still at least prepared to acknowledge its more human side, with its moments of silliness and pettiness--an officer's awkward fumbling after a dropped uniform clip, arguments among units about the order of precedence at a ceremonial parade, an officer's foul mood after he is bested by a colleague in a training exercise, the disrespect that personnel of different ranks and specialties often feel for each other--all of which lends the story even more verisimilitude than the greatest exactness in describing the fire control systems of armored vehicles, and matters the more in a tale where attention to character is more than an authorial piety. Still, Coyle is only so successful in mining the quotidian for interest (a feat few writers ever really pull off), the more in as there is so much of it this time around--extended considerably by the prominent subplot about the then-fashionable topic of whether women should be allowed to serve in the armed forces' combat units by making a major character the first assigned to command an infantry platoon as part of an experimental program which proves plodding and predictable. (Did anyone picking this up in the '90s ever doubt that Lieutenant Nancy Kozak would prove herself as a combat officer and show up the naysayers?) Indeed, the only real spark of human interest this side of the book had to offer was in a very minor character--a harassed trucker called back to National Guard duty whose time in the story is concluded within a mere forty pages of his first appearance. Meanwhile what we see outside of uniform--the depictions of the media's coverage of the crisis by way of the adventures of Dixon's lover, reporter Jan Fields, and the inevitable inside-the-Beltway stuff--fall as flat as these things usually do in books like this one. (Fields seems to operate in a very different media business than the one we know, where reporters are free to follow stories without regard for pressures or interference from commercially- and politically-minded higher-ups, with the sensationalization of the crisis that helps escalate it somehow having nothing to do with her, never confronting her with a single dilemma; while the D.C. goings-on have the same sanitized quality.)
All of this contributed to the book's feeling cluttered and overlong in that way that gives one the impression that the author in this case was not "cutting to the chase" because there really was just not much "chase," the political scenario, after all, still used as the basis not of a political thriller but a military techno-thriller which ends up with few military techno-thrills. The 446 page book, in which not the Mexican Council but the criminal Alaman is the real villain, gives the heroes what is in military terms a very small-time opponent indeed by the genre's standards, while the action is also "small-time," consisting mainly of a few episodes of small unit-level violence on the border functioning mainly as dramatizations of Alaman's plot, and a few glimpses of the principal "set piece" of the novel, the "Battle of Monterey" following from U.S. forces' attempt to establish a security zone along the southern side of the Mexican border (the mortaring of a truck convoy, an anti-armor ambush against a tank battalion)--a Lilliputian affair next to the battles in Coyle's earlier Sword Point, in between two very limited-scale air assaults. Meanwhile, just as Jack Ryan quickly became too senior to get into the action very much, his "Coyleverse" counterpart Army officer Scott Dixon, now a Lieutenant Colonel on a divisional staff, is a non-participant (rather realistically denied permission when personal motives impel him to try and play action hero near the end), denying the fighting some of what personal edge it may have had. The result is that, even if the book is a much more than usually intelligent treatment of its principal theme, its particular dramas lent themselves less well to the constraints and demands of the techno-thriller form than those of a few years earlier--and in fact I can imagine that a more satisfying novel might have come had there not been an attempt to accommodate it to the genre and its requirements.
As might be guessed from that scenario--and for that matter, experience of post-Cold War techno-thriller writing generally--Coyle had to make a good deal more effort than before to develop the scenario that leads to the fighting (in comparison with his simply borrowing John Hackett's scenario for the armored warfare in 1987's Team Yankee, for example, or his only slightly written background to the Soviet invasion of Iran in 1988's Sword Point). What was less predictable was the level of adroitness Coyle would display in both choosing his scenario, and developing it. In envisioning a crisis of this kind with Mexico Coyle set up a situation in which the United States government may be overwhelmingly more powerful with regard to conventional military capability, such that it can destroy Mexico's armed forces with ease, but at the same time not manage to get what that government actually wants--security along its two thousand mile border with the vast and populous neighbor to its south, tasks requiring levels of military manpower far, far beyond what the U.S. has at its disposal. (In one of the more memorable scenes Coyle's military officer protagonists explain the numbers to a stupid, sarcastic politician with little apparent ability or willingness to process the obvious.) Moreover, Coyle displays some nuance in depicting how the situation unfolds--not least in an alertness to the vulnerability of governments to being manipulated by parties, foreign and domestic, for their own ends; how prejudice, media sensationalism, political hucksterism can easily combine with the demand of some to "do something" and the plain and simple happenstance that throws sparks into a tinderbox to push policymakers who are supposed to "know better" into disastrous courses (with one aspect of note how the politics of border states like Texas color national policy in this area); how as crises escalate, and missions "creep," political objects become ambitious beyond anyone's actual ability to realize them, with this particularly happening when soldiers win a conventional battle with ease only to find themselves stuck trying to hold territory and impose their political will on its inhabitants in an era of what Rupert Smith called "war amongst the people," and find that task nowhere near as easy. (Indeed, much more than is the case with most techno-thrillers, the policymakers and "pundits" in Washington would have had a chance to learn something if they picked it up--to the extent that they have the faculty to learn at all.)
Coyle's strengths here also extend to the depiction of the fighting itself, which here has the kind of grit one is unlikely to see in the more high-tech stories of aviators in super-planes--or of those writers of fighting on the ground inclined to present perfectly competent super-people rather than real human beings (for instance, one techno-thriller writer whose prose on this level was rightly compared with that of a "Victorian boy's book"). When America and Mexico do go to war here American officers do not always prove wise, strong or noble in making their decisions, or dealing with their consequences, which can and do include subordinates losing their lives. At the same time Coyle treats the Mexican characters on the opposite side of the battle from those Americans with a level of respect far from standard in the genre, the military officers of the Council sincerely acting as patriots, and intelligent ones, who have good reason to bristle at how their neighbor to the north sees them. (Where this rather nationalistic genre tends to treat foreigners' criticisms of the U.S. and its treatment of them as sanctimoniousness and worse, when Colonel Alfredo Guajardo complains that American representatives to his country lecture, threaten and dictate rather than talk to them we are getting his honest and not necessarily invalid appraisal of the relationship--while in making Guajardo the Council's "face" in America there is no sense that their view that his being of visibly European rather than indigenous descent would be advantageous for public relations with the United States government and the American public is at all an unfair assessment of racial attitudes in America on their part.)
Of course, for all that the tale has its implausibilities—and its limitations. Even as Mexico's domestic troubles--not least, its poverty--loom large as a theme within the book, Coyle does not go into any great depth in discussing these, and his vision of the Council's attempt to redress the problems can seem a bit muddled. (The Council does not breathe a word about nationalizations and the renunciation of foreign debt the way a left-wing government might, while instead planning painful austerity measures the way a right-wing government would; but also uses price controls and backs them up with drumhead justice in a manner not easily reconciled with the demands of the "Washington Consensus" to which it seems the Council means to accommodate the country.) There is, too, the way that Latin America and the Caribbean (including close, longtime U.S. allies such as Panama) line up behind Mexico against the U.S. in the crisis (a turn critical to even the very limited extent to which Mexico is able to throw up a conventional defense against the U.S. intervention).
Meanwhile, getting away from the construction of the scenario that is on the whole one of the book's strengths there is much that is less than ideal. Like many an author a few books into their career an initial tendency toward spare prose gives way to prolixity--and not always to good effect. In contrast with a Clancy Coyle, if hardly likely to offer a warts-and-all view of life in uniform, is still at least prepared to acknowledge its more human side, with its moments of silliness and pettiness--an officer's awkward fumbling after a dropped uniform clip, arguments among units about the order of precedence at a ceremonial parade, an officer's foul mood after he is bested by a colleague in a training exercise, the disrespect that personnel of different ranks and specialties often feel for each other--all of which lends the story even more verisimilitude than the greatest exactness in describing the fire control systems of armored vehicles, and matters the more in a tale where attention to character is more than an authorial piety. Still, Coyle is only so successful in mining the quotidian for interest (a feat few writers ever really pull off), the more in as there is so much of it this time around--extended considerably by the prominent subplot about the then-fashionable topic of whether women should be allowed to serve in the armed forces' combat units by making a major character the first assigned to command an infantry platoon as part of an experimental program which proves plodding and predictable. (Did anyone picking this up in the '90s ever doubt that Lieutenant Nancy Kozak would prove herself as a combat officer and show up the naysayers?) Indeed, the only real spark of human interest this side of the book had to offer was in a very minor character--a harassed trucker called back to National Guard duty whose time in the story is concluded within a mere forty pages of his first appearance. Meanwhile what we see outside of uniform--the depictions of the media's coverage of the crisis by way of the adventures of Dixon's lover, reporter Jan Fields, and the inevitable inside-the-Beltway stuff--fall as flat as these things usually do in books like this one. (Fields seems to operate in a very different media business than the one we know, where reporters are free to follow stories without regard for pressures or interference from commercially- and politically-minded higher-ups, with the sensationalization of the crisis that helps escalate it somehow having nothing to do with her, never confronting her with a single dilemma; while the D.C. goings-on have the same sanitized quality.)
All of this contributed to the book's feeling cluttered and overlong in that way that gives one the impression that the author in this case was not "cutting to the chase" because there really was just not much "chase," the political scenario, after all, still used as the basis not of a political thriller but a military techno-thriller which ends up with few military techno-thrills. The 446 page book, in which not the Mexican Council but the criminal Alaman is the real villain, gives the heroes what is in military terms a very small-time opponent indeed by the genre's standards, while the action is also "small-time," consisting mainly of a few episodes of small unit-level violence on the border functioning mainly as dramatizations of Alaman's plot, and a few glimpses of the principal "set piece" of the novel, the "Battle of Monterey" following from U.S. forces' attempt to establish a security zone along the southern side of the Mexican border (the mortaring of a truck convoy, an anti-armor ambush against a tank battalion)--a Lilliputian affair next to the battles in Coyle's earlier Sword Point, in between two very limited-scale air assaults. Meanwhile, just as Jack Ryan quickly became too senior to get into the action very much, his "Coyleverse" counterpart Army officer Scott Dixon, now a Lieutenant Colonel on a divisional staff, is a non-participant (rather realistically denied permission when personal motives impel him to try and play action hero near the end), denying the fighting some of what personal edge it may have had. The result is that, even if the book is a much more than usually intelligent treatment of its principal theme, its particular dramas lent themselves less well to the constraints and demands of the techno-thriller form than those of a few years earlier--and in fact I can imagine that a more satisfying novel might have come had there not been an attempt to accommodate it to the genre and its requirements.
William Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon: A Few Reflections
Today, I suppose, Thackeray's reputation rests above all on his novel Vanity Fair. Still, if his earlier The Luck of Barry Lyndon is less well-known, it comes right after it in renown.
Reading the two one finds Lyndon quite the contrast with Vanity Fair--that earlier book a picaresque recalling an earlier, less genteel, era of literature in its account of Lyndon's adventures as soldier and gambler and fortune-hunter. Indeed, with about half the book set in early modern Germany amidst a major war, and an exceedingly vain, clueless and unreliable first-person narrator describing the proceedings to us, it had me thinking far less of that writer to whom Thackeray is so often compared, Balzac, than Grimmelshausen.
Personally speaking, Lyndon suited me better than Vanity--the tale livelier and brisker, while it was more fun to laugh at Lyndon's blatantly stupid narrator than laugh with Vanity Fair's rather self-satisfied one.
Reading the two one finds Lyndon quite the contrast with Vanity Fair--that earlier book a picaresque recalling an earlier, less genteel, era of literature in its account of Lyndon's adventures as soldier and gambler and fortune-hunter. Indeed, with about half the book set in early modern Germany amidst a major war, and an exceedingly vain, clueless and unreliable first-person narrator describing the proceedings to us, it had me thinking far less of that writer to whom Thackeray is so often compared, Balzac, than Grimmelshausen.
Personally speaking, Lyndon suited me better than Vanity--the tale livelier and brisker, while it was more fun to laugh at Lyndon's blatantly stupid narrator than laugh with Vanity Fair's rather self-satisfied one.
A Few Thoughts on Stendhal's The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century
Reading that book it is easy to see why. Stendhal's novel is not just "realistic" in the sense of adhering to tenets of realism (in its intensively detailed, supernatural-excluding and fairly cold-eyed portrayal of what for the author and his audience were everyday reality) but its fierce anti-Romanticism. The protagonist of the book, Julian Sorel--a carpenter's son from provincial France--in the wake of the Revolution and all it brought (contrary to the sneer of the historically illiterate yet historical epic-addicted Ridley Scott, a genuine transformation of the structure of French society), envisions himself as having a grand "career" ahead of him, and stops at nothing to realize that vision. Unlikely as it seems, the profoundly deluded and foolish Sorel actually does in his fumbling way end up on the cusp of achieving everything he had ever desired (marriage to the daughter of a rich and powerful Parisian nobleman, property of his own, a military commission, and even a fake aristocratic lineage to round out his new image) when the revelation of a skeleton in his closet turns it all to dust, leading to a murder attempt against the former lover who exposed him--and leading Sorel to the gallows in the extreme opposite of where his journey was "supposed" to take him.
This combination of delusion and denouement is pretty standard in French realist literature of this era, with Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary perhaps the most famous example, and parallels quite easy to see in the tales of Balzac's "Human Comedy." (Here Eugene Rastignac may indeed make it to the top--but it seems significant that he has no romantic illusions about himself as he pursues his advancement, whereas that all too impressionable youth who did have illusions, Lucien du Rubempre of Lost Illusions and its sequel, alas, comes to an end even more poignantly tragic than Sorel.)
For my part, I would rate those other authors and works more highly from the standpoint of storytelling and literary craftsmanship. In contrast with Stendhal's "chronicle" we have much more tightly constructed plots and flowing narratives, as well as displays of that acme of narrative skill that is "dramatization" (what crude doctrinaires champion as "Show, don't tell"). There is also, in Balzac's case, his breadth and depth of attention to what Henry James called the "machinery of civilization"--all as the time Stendhal spent in Sorel's endlessly scheming mind got a bit wearing in a way that those other authors' intense attentiveness to the goings-on in their own protagonists' thoughts never did. Nevertheless, as is so often the case, if others told this sort of tale more impressively, Stendhal gets the laurels for doing it first, paving the way for these later titans who did so much to make French literature, and modern world literature, what it has become.
The Degeneration of Classical Education
The "Classical" education is, of course, largely a thing of the past, certainly in its more substantive forms--and not at all surprisingly.
There was a time when, for example, the study of Latin was eminently practical. In a period when the vernacular languages of the present were localized and unstandardized Latin had the virtue of being a highly standardized language that was internationally known by the educated elite of the Western world. It lent thus itself better to use when precision was called for, and when people were trying to communicate with others from outside their country, or even their village, than their native languages--and thus was the language of law, administration, diplomacy, science, scholarship, religion, higher culture across the culture region, the more in as the Roman legacy loomed so large in all these areas. (Thus, as late as 1687, did Newton write his Principia in that language.)
Of course, even by early modern times this was beginning to change, with the vernacular languages increasingly liable to precise and wide use--to national use, and even international use, and get used as such, with the fifteenth century seeing English come into its own, for example, and the sixteenth giving the English language the Tyndale Bible and Shakespeare, with all this proceeding through subsequent centuries there and everywhere else. The role of Latin in daily life shrank, and its prominence in education was increasingly a legacy of the past, surviving on inertia and, in the case of those discomfited by liberal and radical currents in the present day, rejection of the modern (preferring as they did the conservatism of what survived of the Ancients to the Enlightenment of their own time).
That made it a more strained, artificial, thing, and unsurprisingly a less successful thing, such that a Coleridge was to quip that a youth was no longer to be assumed capable of thinking in Latin--and increasingly, a Classical education's principal "benefit" the ability to superciliously toss about Latin tags, to the bewilderment and embarrassment of peers who had not had the "benefit" of an upbringing such as theirs. (Indeed, in such a manner did Percy Sillitoe in a now notorious tale find himself snubbed by the overgrown public school students of whom he found himself in charge--as head of Britain's Security Service!) By that point the fondness for the Classical languages as centerpieces of elite education was harder than ever to deny as plain and simple snobbery, with such episodes showing it.
There was a time when, for example, the study of Latin was eminently practical. In a period when the vernacular languages of the present were localized and unstandardized Latin had the virtue of being a highly standardized language that was internationally known by the educated elite of the Western world. It lent thus itself better to use when precision was called for, and when people were trying to communicate with others from outside their country, or even their village, than their native languages--and thus was the language of law, administration, diplomacy, science, scholarship, religion, higher culture across the culture region, the more in as the Roman legacy loomed so large in all these areas. (Thus, as late as 1687, did Newton write his Principia in that language.)
Of course, even by early modern times this was beginning to change, with the vernacular languages increasingly liable to precise and wide use--to national use, and even international use, and get used as such, with the fifteenth century seeing English come into its own, for example, and the sixteenth giving the English language the Tyndale Bible and Shakespeare, with all this proceeding through subsequent centuries there and everywhere else. The role of Latin in daily life shrank, and its prominence in education was increasingly a legacy of the past, surviving on inertia and, in the case of those discomfited by liberal and radical currents in the present day, rejection of the modern (preferring as they did the conservatism of what survived of the Ancients to the Enlightenment of their own time).
That made it a more strained, artificial, thing, and unsurprisingly a less successful thing, such that a Coleridge was to quip that a youth was no longer to be assumed capable of thinking in Latin--and increasingly, a Classical education's principal "benefit" the ability to superciliously toss about Latin tags, to the bewilderment and embarrassment of peers who had not had the "benefit" of an upbringing such as theirs. (Indeed, in such a manner did Percy Sillitoe in a now notorious tale find himself snubbed by the overgrown public school students of whom he found himself in charge--as head of Britain's Security Service!) By that point the fondness for the Classical languages as centerpieces of elite education was harder than ever to deny as plain and simple snobbery, with such episodes showing it.
Of "Caveat Emptor"
The Latin tag "caveat emptor" is commonly rendered in English as "Buyer beware."
The term is usually taken to indicate that the buyer bears "personal responsibility" for making sure the seller does not cheat them.
Given the respect with which the words "personal responsibility" are treated in this culture few dare criticize the principle.
Still, in spite of the pieties about the market that few are brave enough to challenge in the mainstream (James Galbraith's remark about being expected to "bend a knee and make the sign of the cross" when publicly using the word "market" is all too accurate), one imagines many have quite other feelings about the matter. The relation between buyer and seller is by no means consistently an equal one. Quite the contrary, it is often extremely unequal, especially in an age of complex products, and Big Business--such that the buyer, especially one of limited means, who can little afford to lose out in any market transaction and for whom any such transaction is full of fear and trepidation, is apt to feel themselves thrown to the wolves in such a situation by those in power who say "Caveat emptor," especially when they understand fully that in the contest between seller and buyer Authority is on the other party's side against the lowly consumer.
The term is usually taken to indicate that the buyer bears "personal responsibility" for making sure the seller does not cheat them.
Given the respect with which the words "personal responsibility" are treated in this culture few dare criticize the principle.
Still, in spite of the pieties about the market that few are brave enough to challenge in the mainstream (James Galbraith's remark about being expected to "bend a knee and make the sign of the cross" when publicly using the word "market" is all too accurate), one imagines many have quite other feelings about the matter. The relation between buyer and seller is by no means consistently an equal one. Quite the contrary, it is often extremely unequal, especially in an age of complex products, and Big Business--such that the buyer, especially one of limited means, who can little afford to lose out in any market transaction and for whom any such transaction is full of fear and trepidation, is apt to feel themselves thrown to the wolves in such a situation by those in power who say "Caveat emptor," especially when they understand fully that in the contest between seller and buyer Authority is on the other party's side against the lowly consumer.
An Education Befitting a Fourteenth Century Gentleman
Told that a student has attended an expensive private school--let us make it an expensive private school in continental Europe--and there had a curriculum that included Latin, fencing and horse-riding different people react in different ways.
The person of conventional mind will be awed by the combination of upper classness with unfamiliarity (Latin, fencing, riding remote from their daily life), and, believing the rich superior and their educations superior and being impressed by anything associated with other, will feel themselves inferior.
By contrast the person of really practical mind will not be awed, but rather dubious about the training a person of the twenty-first century for the demands of the fourteenth century, when Latin, the sword, horsemanship, were genuinely important to the career of a man of gentle birth. They might take an ironic attitude toward it, but alternatively they might be anxious at the implications for the larger world--which will have an elite whose incapacities to fulfill its tasks will thus include a thoroughly out of date preparation for life. (Thus did George Orwell speak of politicians who could quote Horace but had never heard of algebra.)
Those inclined to the left's view of where the wealth for such educations come from could be expected to react more strongly still. That the great wealth underwriting these educational absurdities is not a "meritocratic" reward for "hard work" and talent but the proceeds of "primitive accumulation," "surplus labor," and "financial parasitism," makes such usage of their money all the more grotesque--while seeming to them yet another discredit of the elite the conventional so respect.
Persons who think that way should be unintimidated by the presumed superiority of those with elite educations, the poses they strike, and the Oohs and Ahhs of the credulous at the thought that here is someone who was taught to handle a foil in school. Still, open contempt is a rarity, with few displaying it quite like an Upton Sinclair as he lamented that Woodrow Wilson, from whom so many expected so much in the years of the First World War and after, had been studying ancient languages and "imbecile" theology instead of getting the training--in economics, in sociology, in geography--to grapple with the real problems of that moment, with consequences that Sinclair was far from alone in deeming disastrous for the world.
The person of conventional mind will be awed by the combination of upper classness with unfamiliarity (Latin, fencing, riding remote from their daily life), and, believing the rich superior and their educations superior and being impressed by anything associated with other, will feel themselves inferior.
By contrast the person of really practical mind will not be awed, but rather dubious about the training a person of the twenty-first century for the demands of the fourteenth century, when Latin, the sword, horsemanship, were genuinely important to the career of a man of gentle birth. They might take an ironic attitude toward it, but alternatively they might be anxious at the implications for the larger world--which will have an elite whose incapacities to fulfill its tasks will thus include a thoroughly out of date preparation for life. (Thus did George Orwell speak of politicians who could quote Horace but had never heard of algebra.)
Those inclined to the left's view of where the wealth for such educations come from could be expected to react more strongly still. That the great wealth underwriting these educational absurdities is not a "meritocratic" reward for "hard work" and talent but the proceeds of "primitive accumulation," "surplus labor," and "financial parasitism," makes such usage of their money all the more grotesque--while seeming to them yet another discredit of the elite the conventional so respect.
Persons who think that way should be unintimidated by the presumed superiority of those with elite educations, the poses they strike, and the Oohs and Ahhs of the credulous at the thought that here is someone who was taught to handle a foil in school. Still, open contempt is a rarity, with few displaying it quite like an Upton Sinclair as he lamented that Woodrow Wilson, from whom so many expected so much in the years of the First World War and after, had been studying ancient languages and "imbecile" theology instead of getting the training--in economics, in sociology, in geography--to grapple with the real problems of that moment, with consequences that Sinclair was far from alone in deeming disastrous for the world.
Of Bitterness
When spoken in reference to a person the word "bitterness" denotes an individual's anger or disappointment over some aspect of their life, especially an enduring and likely personal outlook-defining anger and disappointment over an aspect likely to have been unimportant.
A person's being bitter is commonly considered a failing on that person's part.
Of course, I will not deny that bitterness can be toxic. But were that merely the issue I do not think that there would be so much opprobrium toward persons who give evidences of being bitter.
After all, consider what we associate bitterness with--a sense on the part of person feeling that way that others have treated them less than justly. Implicit in this is an indictment of those others, and perhaps of society itself, and this is a thing that people of conventional mind cannot countenance, and accordingly dismiss or attack anyone whose speech or action even hits at such indictment. The fault must not be with society, but with the individual, making their feeling illegitimate. And even if they really were unjustly treated in a way that cannot be denied, they think the person who suffered the injustice at others' hands should simply "Whatever. Get over it!"
As an attitude toward another individual is concerned it is not empathetic or sympathetic, respectful or tolerant. As an attitude toward society it is, at best, complacent in the extreme--and for those whose opinions generally count, which is to say the privileged and elite, the authority-holding and the comfortable, selfish and self-serving in the extreme, with all that tends to flow from that, including the ready demand of "convenient social virtue" on the part of others as they brush off any and every problem in a manner not only callous toward others, but inimical to any enlightened conception of their own self-interest.
Considering all that the very least one should do is stop and think before they rush to condemn others merely for feeling something less than convenient to the comfortable. Indeed, they should recall that if people have any right to a subjectivity whatsoever that includes the right to be bitter, the more in as bitterness may well be a valid response to life experience--and that denying those already mistreated that right too can scarcely be expected to do anything but add to their bitterness.
A person's being bitter is commonly considered a failing on that person's part.
Of course, I will not deny that bitterness can be toxic. But were that merely the issue I do not think that there would be so much opprobrium toward persons who give evidences of being bitter.
After all, consider what we associate bitterness with--a sense on the part of person feeling that way that others have treated them less than justly. Implicit in this is an indictment of those others, and perhaps of society itself, and this is a thing that people of conventional mind cannot countenance, and accordingly dismiss or attack anyone whose speech or action even hits at such indictment. The fault must not be with society, but with the individual, making their feeling illegitimate. And even if they really were unjustly treated in a way that cannot be denied, they think the person who suffered the injustice at others' hands should simply "Whatever. Get over it!"
As an attitude toward another individual is concerned it is not empathetic or sympathetic, respectful or tolerant. As an attitude toward society it is, at best, complacent in the extreme--and for those whose opinions generally count, which is to say the privileged and elite, the authority-holding and the comfortable, selfish and self-serving in the extreme, with all that tends to flow from that, including the ready demand of "convenient social virtue" on the part of others as they brush off any and every problem in a manner not only callous toward others, but inimical to any enlightened conception of their own self-interest.
Considering all that the very least one should do is stop and think before they rush to condemn others merely for feeling something less than convenient to the comfortable. Indeed, they should recall that if people have any right to a subjectivity whatsoever that includes the right to be bitter, the more in as bitterness may well be a valid response to life experience--and that denying those already mistreated that right too can scarcely be expected to do anything but add to their bitterness.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Mystery Science Theater 3000
Not long ago I happened across the story of Mystery Science Theater 3000 writer and performer Kevin Murphy (the guy who was Tom Servo) meeting Kurt Vonnegut Jr..
It seems that Vonnegut did not care for the show's concept.
Given Vonnegut's reputation as a satirist this may seem surprising--but then I find myself remembering Vonnegut's creation Kilgore Trout, and how, in a way very rare for fiction of its generation, Trout's tale showed how lonely and sad and bleak the odyssey of an artist can be. How little appreciated, to the point that they may not even think of themselves as artists, because no one else does, and in spite of all the cheap "Believe in yourself" self-help dross and "artists don't need other people's support" crap people of feeble and conventional mind love to peddle, this matters.
A show that is literally all about punching down at makers of "bad movies" via an hour and a half of heckling is a far cry from the outlook on life that produced a Kilgore Trout, and it is in that spirit that I take Vonnegut's answer to Murphy that "every artist deserves respect."
Indeed, I have to admit that while back when the show was on the air I was a fan I find myself sympathizing with Vonnegut's stance more and more all the time.
It seems that Vonnegut did not care for the show's concept.
Given Vonnegut's reputation as a satirist this may seem surprising--but then I find myself remembering Vonnegut's creation Kilgore Trout, and how, in a way very rare for fiction of its generation, Trout's tale showed how lonely and sad and bleak the odyssey of an artist can be. How little appreciated, to the point that they may not even think of themselves as artists, because no one else does, and in spite of all the cheap "Believe in yourself" self-help dross and "artists don't need other people's support" crap people of feeble and conventional mind love to peddle, this matters.
A show that is literally all about punching down at makers of "bad movies" via an hour and a half of heckling is a far cry from the outlook on life that produced a Kilgore Trout, and it is in that spirit that I take Vonnegut's answer to Murphy that "every artist deserves respect."
Indeed, I have to admit that while back when the show was on the air I was a fan I find myself sympathizing with Vonnegut's stance more and more all the time.
The False Image of the Professoriat's Gentility
Fiction, especially that kind of contemporary fiction which reaches the broader public, overwhelmingly deals with those leading lives of relative comfort and privilege--like the more affluent professionals. So it goes with our depiction of college. Yes, we had a sitcom about a community college not so long ago, but now as before the college we are most likely to see pop culture depict is a four year research institution with graduate programs and sports teams and dorms and campus life, staffed by professors living a cloistered but essentially genteel existence.
Of course, it may seem that in spite of that the popular view today is a bit more nuanced. The lot of the adjunct professor of whom American higher education has made ever more, and ever more exploitative, use, has been increasingly discussed, for example. Still, even those who know of such things think it a recent novelty. By contrast, those who read Upton Sinclair's The Goose-Step learn that even if the extreme, semester-to-semester insecurity of the professor is a new and unwelcome change, a poverty that makes even a shabby gentility out of the question has been the lot of a very large part of the American professoriat for a very long time.
Of course, it may seem that in spite of that the popular view today is a bit more nuanced. The lot of the adjunct professor of whom American higher education has made ever more, and ever more exploitative, use, has been increasingly discussed, for example. Still, even those who know of such things think it a recent novelty. By contrast, those who read Upton Sinclair's The Goose-Step learn that even if the extreme, semester-to-semester insecurity of the professor is a new and unwelcome change, a poverty that makes even a shabby gentility out of the question has been the lot of a very large part of the American professoriat for a very long time.
A Few Words on Keisuke Kinoshita's Army
I was unfamiliar with even the name of Keisuke Kinoshita until early one morning I happened upon his 1944 film Army on TCM.
What overwhelmed everything else for me while watching the film was the official value system the movie presented as prevailing in the Japan of the movie's day. The world over people are told that it is right that the state draft the children they spent their adult lives raising to fight and possibly die in the state's wars--and that they ought to be proud of their children doing so.
However, here it went further--parents told they should not merely be willing to have their children drafted and fight and die, and proud of those who fight and lay down their lives, but that they should be ashamed for caring whether those children are alive or dead, whether they will ever see them return home, instead of being content that they are "serving the Emperor" (and not simply by pompous authority figures, but supposedly "right-thinking" peers). And indeed the film is above all remembered for infuriating the censors with its final scene in which a mother seeing her son off to war, shows herself unable to let go of the child she raised.
I was aghast at the propaganda line this film was intended to promote, and which (as I later learned) at least some of the makers of the film bravely defied in that final scene, and that reaction has stayed with me ever since. In fact it has been much on my mind in these years as the Japanese people protest the rehabilitation of wartime militarism by the nationalist right in their country. This was what they lived through--and they have no desire to repeat the experience.
What overwhelmed everything else for me while watching the film was the official value system the movie presented as prevailing in the Japan of the movie's day. The world over people are told that it is right that the state draft the children they spent their adult lives raising to fight and possibly die in the state's wars--and that they ought to be proud of their children doing so.
However, here it went further--parents told they should not merely be willing to have their children drafted and fight and die, and proud of those who fight and lay down their lives, but that they should be ashamed for caring whether those children are alive or dead, whether they will ever see them return home, instead of being content that they are "serving the Emperor" (and not simply by pompous authority figures, but supposedly "right-thinking" peers). And indeed the film is above all remembered for infuriating the censors with its final scene in which a mother seeing her son off to war, shows herself unable to let go of the child she raised.
I was aghast at the propaganda line this film was intended to promote, and which (as I later learned) at least some of the makers of the film bravely defied in that final scene, and that reaction has stayed with me ever since. In fact it has been much on my mind in these years as the Japanese people protest the rehabilitation of wartime militarism by the nationalist right in their country. This was what they lived through--and they have no desire to repeat the experience.
"It's Only a Movie": Further Thoughts
Considering the dismissal of a movie's content with the remark that "It's only a movie" it seems to me that, aside from the essential flippancy of the remark toward the other person who committed the crime of speaking there is a particular dismissal of anything resembling artistic aspiration and critical standards as we know them--especially when it is the answer to somebody's pointing out a movie's lack of realism.
The plain and simple truth is that as is generally the case with modern art forms those making movies endeavor to achieve the illusion of reality, in part because audiences have to be made to "believe" in what they are seeing to become emotionally involved in it in that conventional "dramatic" way most storytelling, and most movies, aim for, all as the same effect matters even in light entertainment. ("It's funny because it's true!" goes the common explanation of something that the person in question finds funny.)
Of course, there is such a thing as artistic license--in part because transforming the stuff of life into a 90-minute or 2-hour or 3-hour dramatic presentation requires a good deal of selection and compression and combination and distillation. (Hence such innovations as the montage.) Yet their makers generally do not aspire to get things wrong, and their doing so is not generally thought to their credit. It is therefore far from illegitimate to point the fact out--no matter what the idiots who blow off any observation with "It's only a movie!" say.
Of course, there is such a thing as artistic license--in part because transforming the stuff of life into a 90-minute or 2-hour or 3-hour dramatic presentation requires a good deal of selection and compression and combination and distillation. (Hence such innovations as the montage.) Yet their makers generally do not aspire to get things wrong, and their doing so is not generally thought to their credit. It is therefore far from illegitimate to point the fact out--no matter what the idiots who blow off any observation with "It's only a movie!" say.
"It's Only a Movie"
When someone raises the faults of a movie's depiction of its subject a certain sort of person responds with the retort "It's only a movie!"--or words to that effect.
Their meaning seems to be that as the movie is "only a movie" what the movie presented was not to be taken seriously and that the person who said something about it suggesting that it was at all to be taken seriously is a fool to do so, making what was merely flippant actually insulting.
This is all the more the case in that the response is so lazy and dishonest as to be an insult to the intelligence of anyone to whom they are responding. After all, does the person who says "It's only a movie" themselves abide by their own standard--never, ever taking any aspect of any movie seriously? And even if they do so do they actually understand the implications of that position, that no one can legitimately do so? That movies mean nothing as art? That they have no impact on perceptions?
Are they really ready to stand by all that?
Almost certainly not. Rather their intent was to shut down the other party, and (perhaps unintentionally, but very likely intentionally) do it in this pointedly disrespectful way.
Consider, then, how much respect someone who does that deserves in return.
Their meaning seems to be that as the movie is "only a movie" what the movie presented was not to be taken seriously and that the person who said something about it suggesting that it was at all to be taken seriously is a fool to do so, making what was merely flippant actually insulting.
This is all the more the case in that the response is so lazy and dishonest as to be an insult to the intelligence of anyone to whom they are responding. After all, does the person who says "It's only a movie" themselves abide by their own standard--never, ever taking any aspect of any movie seriously? And even if they do so do they actually understand the implications of that position, that no one can legitimately do so? That movies mean nothing as art? That they have no impact on perceptions?
Are they really ready to stand by all that?
Almost certainly not. Rather their intent was to shut down the other party, and (perhaps unintentionally, but very likely intentionally) do it in this pointedly disrespectful way.
Consider, then, how much respect someone who does that deserves in return.
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