Big News

American Conservative readers who’ve received the latest issue – out here in the People’s Republic we tend for some reason* to run about two weeks late – may already have noticed that, in addition to having averted the threat of suspending publication and switched from a biweekly to a monthly format, the magazine that gave me my first big break has got another bit of news tucked away at the bottom of page 4:

… we’ll soon be welcoming John Schwenkler and J.L. Wall’s highly regarded “Upturned Earth,” the first of several upcoming additions.

Well. I just thought I’d note that, yes, this is for real – there are still a few little things to iron out, but the switch should be completed very soon. Many thanks to all of you for, uh, regarding us so highly. (Or not.) Stay tuned for the details, and here’s to the future …

Oh, and check out the redesigned main page, now crawling with enough uncompromised conservatism to make you wish it could come each week!

* Possible theories: Leftie postal employees trying to mess with us; crypto-conservative postal employees unable to resist a good read; tired carrier pigeons dozing off somewhere over the Great Plains; a city that prides itself on similarities to Western European economics ending up with postal workers with French-style work ethic. Further guesses, especially at the expense of the French worker, are always welcome.

Filed under: media/culture, personal

“It’s only logical that if we can prevent advertisements from being run, we can prevent all kinds of speech.”

I’d really love to see what defenders of campaign finance reform can find to say in their defense after watching this:

Filed under: civil liberties, media/culture, politics

The Google-Brain and the Future of Memory

by JL Wall

Working to reframe the question of whether Google makes us Stoopid, Peter Suderman (not without his own hesitations, I should add) ends his post over at The Scene:

Why memorize the content of a single book when you could be using your brain to hold a quick guide to an entire library? Rather than memorize information, we now store it digitally and just remember what we stored — resulting in what David Brooks called “the outsourced brain.” We won’t become books, we’ll become their indexes and reference guides, permanently holding on to rather little deep knowledge, preferring instead to know what’s known, by ourselves and others, and where that knowledge is stored.

While I like being able to rattle off statistics about baseball teams that played before I was born, maybe it is a better thing that I can’t do that for any team since the entry into my life of, well, the internet – more space for other things. I’m not quite as concerned about this in terms of statistics and data as I am with – what did you expect? – the experience of story and literature.

The experience, yes – even after the fact, even while merely remembering the encounter. Literature, story, poetry – whatever you choose to call it/them – are (or ought to be) experientially timeless. To have listened to Homer recited as he must once have been, to give oneself wholly to the music of an orchestra, to sit reading Keats (silently or aloud), to immerse oneself in say, the worlds of Dostoevsky (or even, I’d say, of a Clancy or Crichton – as far as this particular point is concerned, there is no necessary limit to “high” literature) is to experience time in a way removed from that of our day-to-day lives. When we say that we “lose ourselves” in a book, or a piece of music, or a work of art, this, partly, is what we mean – it is what has occurred when, reading, one looks up and suddenly realizes – realizes! – that one is, in fact, sitting on the living room sofa, holding a book in their hands.

But the experience and the meaning cannot be divorced, at least not wholly. We cannot, as Virginia Woolf declared, ever truly and fully know the Greeks because we cannot know what we have to know them through – their poetry, their music, their performance – as they knew them.

There are two ways to encounter a work: directly, in that initial experience of reading or listening or observing; and later, indirectly, through memory and consideration and reflection. To learn from a work – for a work to affect you and for you to be affected by the work – both are necessary. Somehow, it is less the direct than the indirect that I would say is at risk of being lost on account of the Googlized index-memory – though the encounter, too is certainly threatened by the fact that we are now (or so we’re told, and have witnessed) increasingly likely to index rather than remember. It becomes harder to achieve that atemporality of the encounter with art if our attention spans are severed and shortened. Giving oneself over to a work is, in its own way, a skill, and must be practiced and honed to be kept sharp. If I go too long without reading a long piece – especially a work of fiction – it can take me several days to remember how to (this is one of the reasons why I’ve forced myself to carve out time to read something as often as possible that has nothing to do with school, and nothing to do with the world of the internet).

But my concern is more for the indirect, as I said earlier. That is, for the memory, the recollection, the other angle(s) from which one looks at something in order to see what is there. For example: the difference between thinking of Book 22 of the Iliadand knowing that it contains the death of Hektor, and thinking of Book 22 of the Iliadand recalling the death of Hektor. Or, to zoom out, of thinking of the Iliadand knowing only: Akhilles, Hektor, Agamemnon, Helen, Paris, war, fate, glory; or thinking of the Iliad and seeing all of those (and more), but in (something of, at least) the complex web of their relationships and interactions in all its glory.

The knowing – the memory – of a work is not re-experiencing the encounter. The encounter is outside of time; the memory places it within time and so is able to examine it. The index has two dimensions to the memory’s three: when you hold it up and tilt it, you may still be able to notice something new in the way the light hits it, but it becomes far more difficult.

There is good and bad in the way that Google (to use it as shorthand for all that is new) makes us think differently – the access to information that we otherwise might not have been able to remember is certainly good, as is the freedom to spend more time on those things which are of greater importance to ourselves. But the danger is in the loss of depth of consideration: of Buber’s Du; of the delight of Oakeshott’s Poetical Mode; of Heschel’s allusive timelessness.

Filed under: media/culture, science/tech

Leonard Cohen’s Song of Songs

by JL Wall

Last night, I saw Leonard Cohen perform at the Chicago Theatre. Those brave gracious few who took the time to read what I had to say at phaidimoi logoi may already be familiar with my affinity for the man’s work – and my insistence that he’s not just singing about love and sex, even when he’s singing about love and sex.

I used to phrase it (at least to myself) that he was a little like John Donne: when he’s talking about romance, he’s talking about G-d; when he’s talking about G-d, he’s talking about romance. But it struck me in the middle of a song last night—and I forget which song, other than that it wasn’t “Hallelujah” because that song came in the second half of the show—that yes, it’s like Donne, and that line of Faulkner about Keats (“He’s talking about a girl.” “Well, he had to talk about something.”), but, more importantly to the purpose, it’s like the Song of Songs: the relationship between the human and the divine—the striving for each other—embodied in the imagery of a human romance.

This isn’t a quality found throughout Cohen’s work. His earlier writing has an arrogance to it—and is itself aware of (and not entirely comfortable with, I think) that arrogance. But something changes about mid-career—he becomes more reverent about the world, one might say—and it’s most prominent on Various Positions. Cohen himself described “If It Be Your Will” as “more a prayer than a song” than stemmed from “dark times” which eventually led him into that retreat from the world into Zen and “a rigorous study of religion.”

But back to the Song of Songs. Songs on Various Positions that are ostensibly about human romance begin to make more sense. In “Dance Me to the End of Love,” the addressed is leading the dance, and the one playing the music itself—and the title is rephrased as a request to “Show me slowly what I only / know the limits of”: with the wedding imagery, it feels strikingly like the songs of the Kabbalat Shabbat service. “If It Be Your Will” is undeniably a prayer (undeniably beautiful and deserves a lengthy essay of its own. The Shekhinah can be found in “Night Comes On” (or else I’m very, very guilty of the sin of over-reading). “Coming Back to You”: it’s bizarre as just a love song; add in a dash of t’shuvah, and it makes more sense: why is he looking for his former lover “in everyone”? How can the act of coming back occur while he’s alone in his room? And the fourth verse: this ideal lover has many loves, why is the beloved “choos[ing] the precious few” and why the need (and willingness!) for all of them to leave and move beyond pride and themselves?

(In relation to that last question, David Goldman at the First Things “Spengler” blog: “God’s love is what is terrifying, for it consumes the individual ego and annihilates the human sense of self.” – which is, he says, channeling the late Rabbi Soloveitchik, why the lovers elude each other – and must– in the Song of Songs.)

And “Hallelujah.” Writing for the Trib, Greg Kot completely misses the point:

The song about sex, temptation, adultery and religion spirals even further inward and becomes a meditation on the meaning — or perhaps the meaninglessness — of life. The shout of devotion morphs into an ecstatic cry and then a defeated moan. The interjection that means “Praise ye the Lord” turns hollow. In the end, “It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.”

“Maybe there’s a God above/And all I ever learned from love/Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.”

What’s wrong here is that this isn’t the final verse. It’s simply not the emotionally and spiritual moment at which the song ends. While he himself is perfectly willing to shuffle the order of the verses, Cohen – in every version I’ve heard (and thanks to Youtube, this is many) – ends with the declaration: “And even though it all went wrong, / I’ll stand before the Lord of Song / with nothing on my lips but Hallelujah!” It all goes wrong, but he’s still proclaiming Hallelujah!, despite it. Defeated, nihilist moan it is not.  Rather, like the proclamations of love in the Song of Songs, it is the declaration of a spurned lover, still in search of the beloved.

It isn’t just about G-d, and by no means are all his writings. (Ignoring the other sides and aspects of his lyrics is also to cheapen them.) But to secularize his work can be to lose the depth and beauty of the words themselves.

Filed under: media/culture, religion

Arts Czars, Ctd.

by JL Wall

H.C. Johns at The Other Right details the complicated concern that would be the suggested “Arts Czar.”  I suppose that in the end the matter depends a good deal on what, exactly, this post would aim to do: merely more centrally coordinate present federal programs (not so unreasonable, when you think about it), or to be the Department of Agriculture of the “arts industry” (and yes, I shiver when I type that in a way I imagine is related to how Wendell Berry shivers when writing “agribusiness”).

In fact, that concern is probably of greater importance than whether we’d be running the risk of a Cabinet-level meltdown over whether we should be teaching Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye (those arguments, at least, would have the virtue of amusing me — and it’s not like they don’t already happen elsewhere).  In short:

The second issue is the balance between things gained by a department level post, i.e. greater representation and organizational coherrence, and things lost, i.e. local autonomy, the risk of bureaucratic incompetence, monied interests coming to dominance, etc. To someone who follows the really atrocious behavior of the Department of Agriculture, those concerns must be the central question, particularly given the scale of the art market these days. (How many billion, exactly?) Though there is no art-world equivalent of Monsanto, its not out of the question that an art Czar could become a puppet organization for some concerns over others.

That is to say, I look at the risk of doing to the artistic aspect of culture what we’ve already done, more or less, to that aspect defined by place, and want to run away screaming.  Maybe I’m being less than rational in that, but nature abhors a monoculture, after all.

But if we’re looking purely at the arts, innovation and oftentimes what we’d define as “genius” are tied to the subversion of the established.  (Not that every great artist has been subversive, or the first to use a form, but this is the tension that keeps things alive.)  Such subversion  is, by nature, hard to do — and it should be.  But the arts, without such innovation and requisite subversion grow still.  And art, I’d propose, can’t stay still and stay alive.  If the model for such a post is anything like our cabinet-level Department of Agriculture, I think we’d likely see more power given to the established than there ought to be: more weapons, that is, with which to keep the arts standing more still than usual.  Not enough to kill art, of course, but possibly enough to harm it.

Setting all of those worries aside, I think the proposal (and even what I just wrote, then) very likely misses the forest for the trees.  Quincy Jones is worried because American schoolchildren don’t know much about their artistic and cultural history — that’s a valid concern.  But my school did all it could for me, and I’m still musically illiterate: two to three “music” classes a week from second through eighth grades, and all I learned was how to look like I could play the recorder and how to pass our notation quizzes without ever learning to read music.  I didn’t learn anything about music because I didn’t want to learn anything about music, and I can’t be the only one.  (In my defense, I’m furious at myself today for failing to learn anything back then.)  What I learned about art and music history first came in high school history, by the simple luck of having the same fantastic teacher freshman and senior years.  I pick things up from my friends (I have musically talented and literate friends who make me feel inferior by accident), and by reading.  But my school didn’t fail me; I failed to take advantage of what was presented.  And I was the nerdy one who actually sat still!

I imagine that not every school/school system even presents that much in the way of music, but the point is: even if you force the kids to sit through classes on music and music history from the time they’re able to read, that doesn’t mean that they’re going to listen.  I share with Mr. Jones a general overriding concern about cultural illiteracy, but I don’t think this proposal is in any way an actual solution to it.  Something more than just resources is needed, and it’s not a cabinet post or an Arts Czar.  I don’t have any solutions to offer, short of expelling every trace of vocationalism from education.  And that ain’t gonna happen anytime soon.

If we’re truly becoming more culturally illiterate, then that, in its way, has become part of our present-day culture and very much related to why it is such a difficult problem to do anything more than diagnose.  Culture — even just the arts — is too big to be wrestled into line by a government program.

Filed under: government/law, media/culture

Above the Government’s Pay-Grade

by JL Wall

“Secretary” or “Minister of Culture,” or “Arts Czar” (or Tsar, for good measure) — whatever you want to call it, this strikes me as an immensely bad idea. But it’s a complicated matter: the Sistine Chapel, after all, was Vatican-sponsored; Mozart a court composer; and Vergil’s patron none other than Augustus. (Aha! I hear you say, But the Medici family merely paid people to produce artwork for them, not to coordinate a nation’s attitude toward art itself!)

I will muse my way through this later, once I regain the ability to construct coherent paragraphs and worthwhile prose (worst, longest bout of writer’s block yet in my still-young life these past few weeks). Unless someone’s already beat me to it by then, that is. Until then, read the piece if it so interests you, but remember: Quincy Jones may be promoting a bad proposal, but his work with Sinatra earns him forgiveness for most (if not all) political sins.

Filed under: government/law, media/culture

A Star Is Born

So it may be that he’s about my age and I kinda-sorta know him, but is it just me or is Ross’s debut column really, really good?

Filed under: media/culture

Cavafy’s Time Machine

by JL Wall

Eric Ormsby reviews Daniel Mendelsohn’s translations of C.P. Cavafy’s poems — “Collected” and “Unfinished” alike — in this month’s New Criterion (the poetry issue!  How can you not want to read the poetry issue of any magazine?).  In addition to tempting me to spend money I shouldn’t on translations of poems I already own translations of, he writes a paragraph that I think gets at the true greatness of Cavafy’s work.  I’m by no means unbiased — if I’m going anywhere for more than about a week, my copy of his Collected Poems goes with me.  Ormsby writes, referring to the previously unpublished “And Above All Cynegirus”:

The fidgety student and the booming sophist have been dead and gone for two millenia.  In Cavafy’s lines, they come back to life as though glimpsed in the light of a flame struck in the darkness of a tomb.  Illumined thus, their thoughts, their gestures, take on a strangely monumental cast.  The wool-gathering student’s musings come to seem, in their rambling way, as momentous as the battle of Marathon.  The intervening centuries have conferred an inestimable value on the passing instant which it did not possess at the time.

They are real, but can only be glimpsed for an instant, like the beauty of the “Morning Sea”: “I really did see it for a second when I first stopped” before “the usual daydreams” take over.  He looks to the past with that matchlight and lights upon what is enduring in the human spirit: and reveals it.

As a long-time partisan of Cicero, Cavafy’s fascination with Antony has fascinated me.  At times (as in “The God Abandons Antony”) his Antony seems more like Hektor than Caesar’s Master of the Horse.  But if there were a Roman, I suppose, capable of being a Hektor or any of the others from that Heroic Age world war – capable of serving to reveal that man’s and those men’s best qualities; capable of showing them enhanced, almost, by their flaws — it would be Antony.  None of the others has the necessary romance, necessary spirit, necessary potential for greatness.  If Caesar was a failed Alexander, Antony, withdrawn from the city’s political life because of love, raging because of damaged honor, failed at being Heroic.  How else could it have been that “his Italian blood was disgusted” and forced him to issue the edict that he be remembered as nothing but “a Roman vanquished by a Roman”? (“Antony’s Ending”)

But then there is this poem, which has always fascinated me, “In Alexandria, 31 B.C.E.”  For once, Antony is distant: gone to the front, to disaster at Actium.  His Alexandria, as always, is doomed, but no one knows it:

From his little village near the outskirts,
still dusty from the journey,

came the traveling salesman. And “Incense!” and “Gum!”
“Best Olive Oil!” and “Perfume for Hair!”

he cries out in the streets. But with the great hubbub
and the music and parades, how can he be heard?

The mob pushes him, drags him, hits him.
And when, totally dazed, he asks, “What is this madness?”

someone hurls at him the gigantic lie
from the palace — Antony triumphed in Greece.    (Barnstone translation)

They — their city as they know it, at least — are doomed and do not know it.  The portrait is pitiful; the “music and parades” evoking the hidden troupe of Dionysus which Antony hears below his window in “The God Abandons Antony.”  But Antony, here, is the villain; it is his palace’s lie.  He does not learn until faced with certain death how it is that he should be alive: he cannot know until faced with it.  Those moments of realization are where Cavafy tranforms Antony — even for me, to whom Antony is first of all the vomiting drunkard of Cicero’s second Philippic — into something beautiful.  But they are also what guarantee his fate.  So here, in 31 (in 1924, the year of composition) we have Antony thinking he can avoid defeat by proclaiming victory until he can achieve a true one — a relationship to the nature of truth strikingly similar to what Arendt will later notice in the totalitarian regimes which will rise in the decades following the poem’s composition.  Antony goes too far, is forsaken by his patron god, hears himself mourned before he dies — and, in all this, because of all this, is able to recover some piece of his honor.

It’s the wisdom of Homer, recaptured at the start of the 20th century and transformed into didactic lyric.  And, in the end, it is enduring ancient wisdom onto which Cavafy settles his matchlight, and which he uses his pen to sketch.

Filed under: media/culture

Without a Trace of Irony

Writes Andrew Sullivan:

One thing we know about the Palins is how they love personal vendettas.

Insert pot and kettle meta-joke here.

Filed under: media/culture, politics

Strunk’d

So Edinburgh linguist Geoffrey Pullum does not like William Strunk and E.B. White’s Elements of Style:

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

As someone who was assigned and tested on the Elements in one of my very first undergraduate classes and still harbors a near-religious devotion to conjoining my infinitives and keeping my “however”s tucked safely in the middles of my sentences, my initial reaction when I started reading this piece was to get, well, a bit defensive – but there’s no denying that Pullum makes a strong case. For example, consider Strunk and White’s notorious “however” rule:

However. Avoid starting a sentence with ‘however’ when the meaning is “nevertheless.” The word usually serves better when not in first position. (Elements, p. 48)

Comments Pullum:

Searching for “however” at the beginnings of sentences and “however” elsewhere reveals that good authors alternate between placing the adverb first and placing it after the subject. The ratios vary. Mark Liberman, of the University of Pennsylvania, checked half a dozen of Mark Twain’s books and found roughly seven instances of “however” at the beginning of a sentence for each three placed after the subject, whereas in five selected books by Henry James, the ratio was one to 15. In Dracula I found a ratio of about one to five. The evidence cannot possibly support a claim that “however” at the beginning of a sentence should be eschewed. Strunk and White are just wrong about the facts of English syntax.

It goes on like that, with the textbook takes on “that” and “which” (“There was never a period in the history of English when ‘which’ at the beginning of a restrictive relative clause was an error.”), the number of a verb following “none” (”… the stipulation in Elements is totally at variance not just with modern conversational English but also with literary usage back when Strunk was teaching and White was a boy.”), and even those famous strictures against using the passive voice (“Strunk and White are denigrating the passive by presenting an invented example of it deliberately designed to sound inept.”) coming under similar fire. Indeed, argues Pullum, the real problem seems to be that Strunk and White, though both perfectly good writers who had the good sense not to write in the ways that they told others to, didn’t know anything about grammar at all:

The book’s contempt for its own grammatical dictates seems almost willful, as if the authors were flaunting the fact that the rules don’t apply to them. But I don’t think they are. Given the evidence that they can’t even tell actives from passives, my guess would be that it is sheer ignorance. They know a few terms, like “subject” and “verb” and “phrase,” but they do not control them well enough to monitor and analyze the structure of what they write.

Pullum should know, of course: he’s the author of this big fat book, which having read this essay I’d gladly assign to my intro students in place of Strunk & White if not for the fact that it costs over $160 and runs to nearly 2,000 pages long. (Anyone have some alternative suggestions?) It’s hard, though, not to feel like his criticism sometimes goes a bit beyond its proper bounds, as for example when he seems to blame MS Word’s nasty habit of underlining EVERY SINGLE PASSIVE-VOICE CONSTRUCTION in one of those bothersome green lines on our national love-affair with the Elements (“That overinterpretation is part of the damage that Strunk and White have unintentionally done.”); this may be accurate for all I know, but I’d need to see a bit more evidence.

Similarly, consider that charge I began with, that the “enormous influence” of the Elements “has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it”: I can think of quite a lot of things that have done great damage to the grammatical competence of our nation’s student population, ultimately driving things to a point where college upperclassmen at an institution like UC Berkeley turn in essays riddled with sentence fragments and marked by what seems to be an utter inability to differentiate, say, “one self” from “oneself”, let alone “its” from “it’s”. But blaming it on Strunk and White? Sure, an overly slavish devotion to the grammatical principles of Elements – or of any such handbook, for that matter – is going to make for some unpleasantly stilted prose, but I’m certainly not alone in wishing that more of my students ever showed evidence of “grammatical angst” when it came time to put words on a page (or, worse, an e-mail). Perhaps, since no one teaches grammar anyway, those of us in the humanistic disciplines with other material to get to would do better just to pass out copies of “Politics and the English Language”, run off a few of White’s old New Yorker essays, and tell our sophomores, “Here: write like this“. Given what we’re facing, though, turning to a slim and appropriately bossy text like the Elements seems an obviously understandable reaction.

“The land of the free in the grip of The Elements of Style“, Pullum calls us. If only.

(Cross-posted.)

Filed under: education, media/culture