facts or factoid, it doesn't make any difference to Frank Bruni

I find the whole GOP presidential frosh tryouts great fun. One of the things they bring out is how bad, how completely and hopelessly bad, our political reporters and commenters are. Case in point: Frank Bruni's column intoday's NYT.   Bruni, and the NYT, have been doing their best to blow on the flames, dim as they are, of Fiorina's popularity - thinking that this will certainly countercheck that Trump! So this is the kind of thing you get: 

But here comes Carly Fiorina, and her brand is aced-it-already and know-it-all. I’ve seen this firsthand.

For a magazine story in 2010, I followed her around and interviewed her over several days. Someone would mention a flower; she’d rattle off a factoid about it. I’d ask her about a foreign language that she’d studied; she’d make clear that she’d dabbled in two others as well. Her husband would tell a story; she’d rush to correct him and fill in the details.

Now, as a reporter, it was Bruni’s job, apparently, to accept at face value any bullshit he was presented with. The flower and its factoids, that is bizarre: what, did Fiorina discuss the evolution of the Sago palm? And what is it with fact and factoids, or are they (oh, I know this answer teacher! I know it!) approximately the same thing for the NYT’s ace reporter? And what foreign language was it, exactly. And how did she “dabble” in two others. Could she actually speak, converse, in a language other than English? Did Bruni talk to her in that language?

Yes, Bruni’s bizarre anecdotes, offered to reinforce the point that here is a woman who is all policy paper, seem exactly the kind of thing that a candidate would do to impress that most gullible of species, the Timesman. But gullibility, as any conman knows, depends upon the subject’s unconscious vanity. In this case, of course, the vanity is institution wide: it is the vanity that the reporter’s are also all policy paper. It is an odd thing that after decades of press fiascos, from the swallowing of every bit of ratbait put out by the Bushies about Iraq’s “threat” to the US to the notion that the economy was rock solid in 2007 and 2008, which was the grand narrative of the NYT business pages at the time, people like Bruni still think the general public is in awe of them – that they are authorities, no less. The reason they aren’t authorities has something to do with the inability to distinguish between facts and factoids, and the inability to either name a flower or a language or to judge competence in either biology or Spanish – presumably the foreign language under discussion – or French, or Chinese, or any other language.

Bruni’s column was about what a dolt Governor Walker is. But what it proves is what a gull Bruni is.  

on the incredible luck of the Bushes

I expect as few surprises from the GOP as from a plugged in digital clock. So last week, I was as miffed at the evident sinking of Jeb Bush as the standard bearer as I would be if my alarm clock suddenly switched from telling time to throwing the I ching. This article, by Adam Nagourney and Jonathan Martin, has convinced me that I underestimated how deeply, deeply incompetent the GOP is. The mechanics of the race are such that if Trump wins both NH and SC, which I think he has every likelihood of doing, it will be hard, maybe impossible, to stop him. Not that I care outside of my position as amateur handicapper about it at all. Trump is no more racist or sexist than the lot of the others. And as a man who uses bankruptcy the way another person would shower after a hard game of touch football - washing off the dirt - I have no doubt that, in the slim case he was elected, he'd soon forget his fascist - or should I call it Jacksonian? - promise to deport 11 million immigrants. Right now, as a person well and truly burned, I am simply enjoying the pundit class desperately trying to cry up any indication that the "Trump bubble" has burst. Hence, the obsessive focus on polls that show Trump down, and the blind eye turned to larger polls - for instance, the recent NBC one - that shows him solidifying his lead in the race. Trump makes me dream a bit. If the Dems had only nominated someone, in 2004, who would have gone after Bush's masculinity the way Trump has gelded Jeb, who knows? We might have had a one term junta blip.The Bushes are awful easy to knock down. They depend on the kindness of strangers - of a fawning press and a solid Wall Street backfield. Otherwise, they go bump.

the casualties of utilitarianism

“ I could write the history of every mark and scratch in my room…” Virginia Woolf

Both John Stuart Mill and Virginia Woolf were products of families prominent in the history of utilitarianism. In fact, Woolf’s uncle, James Fitzjames Stephen, wrote a book against what he took to be  Mill’s apostosy from utilitarianism, which you can’t be more ultra than that, while her father, Leslie, whose eminence in the Victorian world was as unimpeachable as the Queen's, made time from during his vast labors to write the canonical history of the English utilitarians.

Famously, John Stuart Mill, educated according to his father’s, James Mill’s, notions, suffered a great breakdown in his youth, which he attributes, in a way, to the creed in his autobiography:

“For though my dejection, honestly looked at, could not be called other than egotistical, produced by the ruin, as I thought, of my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of mankind in general was ever in my thoughts, and could not be separated from my own. I felt that the flaw in my life, must be a flaw in life itself; that the question was, whether, if the reformers of society and government could succeed in their objects, and every person in the community were free and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life, being no longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures. And I felt that unless I could see my way to some better hope than this for human happiness in general, my dejection must continue; but that if I could see such an outlet, I should then look on the world with pleasure; content, as far as I was myself concerned, with any fair share of the general lot.

This state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my reading Wordsworth for the first time (in the autumn of 1828), an important event of my life.”

Woolf’s breakdowns, at the end of the century, are well known as well, although less often connected to the Stephen family’s place in English thought. In Virginia Woolf’s memoir of moving to Bloomsbury from her father’s house in Hyde Park in 1904, the year her father died, she uses the move as a way of symbolizing the end of the Victorian era – the “shadows of Hyde Park” – and the beginning of a new era. During the transition, she was mad. It was the second time she was mad.

“While I had lain in bed at the Dickinsons’ house at Welwyn thinking that the birds were singing Greek choruses and that King Edward was using the foulest possible language among Ozzie Dickinson’s azaleas, Vanessa had wound up Hyde Park Gate once and for all. She had sold; she had burnt; she had sorted; she had torn up. Sometimes I believe she had actually to get men with hammers to batter down – so wedged into each other had the walls and the cabinets become. But now all the rooms stood empty. Furniture vans had carted off all the different belongings. For not only had the furniture been dispersed. The family which had seemed equally wedged together had broken apart too.” –Old Bloomsbury.

Now, a philosophy by itself doesn’t often cause people to hear birds singing Sophocles. But I would claim that there was something in utilitarianism that was connected to both of these breakdowns. It was, in part, the contradiction at the heart of the utilitarian synthesis of 18^th century hedonism and the calculation of self-interest. While that hedonism was the starting point, the massive industrial structure of the calculation of self-interest that was flung across the 19^th century rather buried it. At the very least, in the dialectic, the douceur de la vie was distorted beyond recovery. There was, of course, a line of Victorian intellectuals who recognized this very well – and mostly they fell on the right. Mostly, reactionaries. From Carlyle to Dickens to Ruskin, there was a great, screaming sense of the sacrifice made to the calculus of rational self interest. And yet, it had the effect that it became hard, if not impossible, to recapture what the 18^th century meant by hedonism. Dickens, for one could only, at the furthest reach, imagine happiness as owning a house free and clear with a pretty housewife to occupy it (and sneaking around with one’s mistress to make it tolerable). Carlyle imagined fascism, and Ruskin a return to the era of the Gothic.

Interestingly, at the time that Woolf was having her second attack of madness, she’d been reading one writer who was very much on the quest for a more 18^th century version of happiness: Walter Pater.

I’ve been reading Jacob’s Room, and thinking about these things,  which I think converge in that novel. But I’ve also been thinking about what it meant for Woolf to move out of Hyde Park – out of the Victorian era – and into the modern era. In Jacob’s Room, at least, I think the complexities of the end of utilitarianism as a creed are taken into an opposition that runs through the narrative between the room and the wave.  

I think I’ll pick at this thread tomorrow.

the politics of the headline: corbyn mythologized

Using Barthes’ sensibility to analyze the myths circulated during the recent Labour leader campaign, I think I can safely say that charting the way Jeremy Corbyn was turned into a threat means understanding the work of one particular tool: the headline.

Two days ago, the headline actually burst into the content of the news itself when an editor at the Daily Telegraph, which presents itself as a non-tabloid conservative paper, had to back down over his headline for Corbyn’s appointment of John Mcdonnell to his shadow cabinet: Corbyn has just appointed a nutjob as his shadow chancellor.  Today’s foxhunting set don’t go for that chav stuff, which is so much for the maid, so the editor eventualy changed the headline.  

In the process, though, he briefly lit up the politics of headlines.

As writers know, and readers, for the most part, don’t, the headline is not composed by the writer of the story or the review or column. Headlines are thus, peculiar things, true relics of, if not the death of the author, at least his or her continued subservience to the institution or patron for whom they write. On the one hand, the headline must tip the reader into the story in some way, while on the other, they must also operate to show how the reader is to read the story. In this second function, headlines are more akin to the answer to riddles, or the punchline to jokes, or the moral of fables, than they are to the entry in a dictionary or encyclopedia. That is, headlines are less indexical, or denotative, than oracular, or connotative.

They also exist systematically, which means that headlines can be treated as a genre, with certain conventions. The Telegraph editor’s mistake was one of misunderstanding the headline convention that is given by the paper.

Tabloids, of course, are famous for exploiting certain conventions of the headline – transmuting the typographical excess of the headline into a more general rhetorical excess. Readers of the NY Post or the Sun know that the game is all in the headline, and that the rest is, for the most part, filler – thus neatly reversing the “normal” relationship between text and title. Non-tabloid papers also transmute the excess of the headline, but in a different way: here, the libidinal possibilities of the headline are sublimated. It is the quintessential bourgeouis act, act least in the classic Weberian sense – like the capital that is accumulated by the bourgeois and spent prudently, the headline’s typographic independence is made subservient, for the most part, to a more nuanced interpretation of the text that follows. One might say that the non-tabloid paper understands itself to have an indexical responsibility.  Thus, the print is normally smaller, the use of slang lesser, the spirit of gleefulness, when released, turned into giggliness rather than sadistic display, and so on. Of course, just as the answer to a riddle is different than the answer to a mathematical problem (the riddle both solves a cognitive disjunction and exploit the shock of it, for one thing; for another thing, a riddle limits its systematic effect), so, too, is a headline different from merely a paraphrase. It is in this difference that a certain politics ranges.

One noticed – readers noticed and commented on – the sudden appropriation of tabloid like headlines by the Guardian and the Telegraph as Jeremy Corbyn moved from being a political eccentric to the leader of Britain’s second largest political party. Here, one feels, the headline, in all its implication, started driving the news. Private eye made a funny comparison of what Corbyn said and what he was reported to have said – underlining the systematic bias of the newspapers. The abridgement and distortion of Corbyn’s comments – whether about Hamas and Hezbollah or about Osama bin Laden or about segregating trains at rush hour between men and women – is not something I’m going to go over one more time. Rather, I want to point out that the spirit of the headline, with its capacity to seemingly contain a whole truth while actually operating a fiction-making abridgment, infected, as it were, the reporting itself.

This does not exhaust the meaning of headline politics in this instance, though. For passing beyond the effects of the text, there is also the total effect of the headline in the newspaper context to consider. A headline, after all, announces something new. In the case of Corbyn, much of what was reported wasn’t new at all – he has been a remarkably busy speaker over time. But the effect of the headlines was to make it seem as though new information was being dug up about Corbyn – or, to put this inversely, that Corbyn was hiding his past. This is of course an especially important maneuver in modern image management, so much so that we have a name for it now: gotcha journalism. It is not just that the figure who is “gotten” is exposed, but the exposure implies that the figure has been busy hiding. It makes the newspaper’s research, which is not actually very much work, nowadays, what with Google, seem like an “investigation.”

There is probably much more to say about this rich topic, but now I have to pick my son up from school. So that is it.

barthes on myth

In “Myth today,” Barthes’ methodological supplement to his series of decoding essays on quotidien life in 1950s France, Barthes tells us that he the “myths” he analyzes are products of language – of what he calls a peculiar “theft” of language – and are not contents. Unlike the usual study of myth, which proceeds from fictions like the God of the Sea or unicorns, Barthes view is that myth names a procedure. “Myth is not defined by the object of its method, but by the fashion with which it offers it.”

This linguistic fashion or mode leads Barthes to make some great generalizing remarks, in order to establish the semiotic norm within which myth is found. Myth, according to Barthes, always operates on the level of tokens (valant pour) rather than types. Within the system of tokens, “myth is a particular system in that it constructs itself in deriving itself from a semiological chain that pre-exists it.” To understand how this works, Barthes borrows an example from Paul Valery. Suppose that you, like Valery, are a fifth grader and you are learning Latin. You open your Latin book and you find an illustration of a lion and under it the phrase, quia ego nominor leo. This means, For me, I am called a lion. What is the real meaning of this? It is not that you are meant to think, this lion is saying he is called a lion. Rather, you are meant to think, this is how a subject accords with its object grammatically. Though the presence of the signified – the lion being called a lion – exists, haunts, the example, that primary meaning is subsumed in the larger meaning, which is implied in the entire situation that involves Latin class, the student, the book, and the illustration.

“On the plane of language, I will call the final term of the first system, the signifier, the sense… on the plane of myth, I will call it the form.”

This distinction doesn’t specify what is special about myth, but simply puts it in the set of such exemplifying gestures. Myth does have a property that distinguishes it, which is the way it empties or deforms the sense – in this way, it performs a “theft of language”. The theft of language – or the theft of the signifier – is what myth does. Although it can’t do without the signifier, which operates as a constant variable, it can also not do with returning to the signifier – for that means demythifying. This is the second of the three different types of reading of myth. The first does make the logical move from the sense to the example. This, for Barthes, is a cynical moment in the rational production and use of myth – it is the p.r. man’s gig. The third reading is simply to fall for the whole thing, to respond to its dynamic, to understand its non-presence as presence.

This semiological reading of myth, in Barthes, is associated with, but not entirely implicated by, his ideological reading. In this reading, what characterises all myth is that “the mission of myth is to ground a historic intention in nature, a contingency in eternity. For this gesture is that of bourgeois ideology itself.”   

This is Barthes great theme, however much he turns to different ways of wrestling with it.

self-consciousness: notes

We were walking down the street the other day, Adam and me, and we passed a woman who stopped and smiled and said to me, you have the Coppertone baby there. Referring to Adam’s blonde curls and his tan, the result of our visit to the beach over Labor Day weekend.
I smiled back at her. We walked on and Adam said to me, I’m not a baby.
I’m not a baby. Adam has begun to use this phrase quite often. And it has made me think about … well, about the origin of self-consciousness.
We all know, consciousness has a fatal tendency to doubling, to finding itself in front of mirrors, or even, in many cases, fun house mirrors, a mirror effect that is even reflected in the possibility of there being a first person subject in Indo European languages, at least, which leads to the grammatical possibility of that first person taking itself as a predicate. Every cowboy, structuralism teaches, is eventually caught in his own lasso. But we have a tendency to freeze this moment, this mirror stage, outside of the history of our experience, as though self-consciousness were enacted in some lunar zone outside our biology. 
Which is a fancy windup to saying that the stage of “I’m not a baby” is full of unteased out sense, I think. For not being a baby means, I think, I’m not a baby any more. This of course means that I was a baby once. In fact, in the very near past. Adam, like any little boy in the age of digital photography, can, if he chooses, wander through galleries of pics of himself being very much a baby. A year ago he was one and three fourths, and two years ago he wasn’t even one – and yet he was, here on a bouncy bounce, there with Momma, there with a toy giraffe. He certainly recognizes himself in these pics – in a way that is more implicating for him, now, than it is for, say, me, looking at a baby pic of myself (is there one? I don’t have a lot of pics of myself as a child – or, actually any). 
I often ask Adam if he remembers things. Do you remember Grandma’s Dog? Do you remember Atlanta? Etc. Many times he says yes, and sometimes he begins the game with me: Dad, remember the swimming pool? For us, his babyhood is something that has, somehow, slipped beyond our grasp – is he already almost three? Oh Jesus. Oh I loved it when he was asleep in his cradle. Oh, I remember him learning to walk. Etc. All of those moments, and yet he grew up when I was absent minded, when I was thinking of something else, it always seems. But for him, there is the bio-temperal fact that he is not a baby, and that he was a baby, and that the baby he used to be is an object he has left behind, with the object’s properties: a certain size, a certain capacity to make shrieky sounds, a certain inability to do what big boys like him do. So, he left the baby behind, and yet he is, or was, that baby. 
Part of the weirdness of Western culture is the high value it puts on youth. I have a complex theory about this which has to do with early capitalism, the demographic changes in the composition of the household which accompanied or were implicated in the rise of the capitalist mode of production.  The ideal of age has been thoroughly overthrown, now,  but  the conditions that determine the mortality rate allow us now to live, en masse, to unheard of ages, which means that there are more old people than ever before, This age overhang is, itself, a sort of accident, and one that probably has a future, just as the youth had a future in the accident that changed the household norms of the seventeenth century. Youth was created in the vacuum of waiting for marriage by choice, that necessary period of accumulation before a man could hope to marry or a woman could consider marriage.  At the moment, though, old age, advancing age, is curiously lacking in a culture of its own. It looks backwards to its youth for the culture that it has, a reflex conditioned, massively, by the semiosphere. I don’t want to read this cultural phenomenon back into Adam’s own looking backwards – a backward look marked, in proper Lacanian style, by a negation. However, I do think this moment helps us break our theoretical trance before the mirror stage and bring back history. I’ll have to tell Adam next time he says it: Adam, you are such a Marxist!

corbyn and conditions

Another day, another prediction in the British press that Corbyn will lead to the end of labour, or massive losses in 2020, or tory heaven. Whatever.
It is an amazing spectacle. Three months ago, not one of the people who are gifting us with their predictions of what is going to happen in five months was able to predict what was going to happen in three months. Back in those rosy days, the press pundits in the Guardian, the Independent, the Telegraph, etc. were all busy wondering whether Kendall was going to carry the day. Maybe it would be exciting Andy Burnham, New Labour's plastic man!
But ignoring past failure is a prerequisite for future prediction among the press set.
So polls that are more like focus groups are wheeled out, from the usual suspects. And the pundits have settled down to learn nothing from their experience, as is their wont.
What is to be learned from their experience for the rest of us? Let's take a grab at the obvious.
All the establishment actually believes that current conditions will continue indefinitely. They have not only bought the idea of austerity as one that can be sold to the people, they believe it will actually bring about economic security to their own type, The "poor" will be disadvantaged, and the press establishment that pretends to pinkish tendencies often cries crocodile tears over the fact that Labour, disempowered under the British Fidel Corbyn Castro, will make Labour unable to achieve the power to help the disadvantaged. The pinkish tinge, nowadays, means entirely forgetting how the middle class was built, as well as the fact that the "poor" are actually working class, part of the machine that produces surplus labour value that drifts to the capitalist. Instead, being pinkish means asserting a sort of charitable impulse in the busy elite, while allowing them to get on with producing a more and more glorious speculative sector.
Well, in five years, perhaps the austerity of the Tories will bring prosperity to the average British household. But perhaps, in five years, Britain will have to pay the price for having fed a swollen financial sector while neglecting everything else except arms sales. Here's a scenario: China and India stumble. The business cycle god does not suspend history even for such upward strivers. This spreads alarm in the financial sectors, such that there is another financially caused recession. The tories continue, as they almost must, their insande austerity fetishism. The UK unemployment rate, which is currently a cool 5.5 percent, nearly doubles to 10 percent. Corbyn, who has adopted a tone of opposition such that the Tories have publicized it, now stands as the man who said austerity would ultimately make things worse - and as the man warning against an economy that is supported by a swollen financial sector.
Labour might still lose, but the Tories would be in pretty bad shape under this not so fantastic scenario.
The press establishment is still living in the 90s, still thinking there is no alternative when the alternative they have chosen has already led to disaster in 2008. Of course, they neither predicted that disaster nor actually experienced it, as is their wont.
I would not put too much trust in whatever they write. They live in shells, like oysters, but unlike oysters, they rarely produce a pearl.

Israel, Denmark, Hungary:the axis of shits

Denmark joins Hungary and Israel among the nations of non-refuge. All have in common governments of the extreme right. Netanyahu, Viktor Orban, Lars Lokki Rasmussen - the axis of shits. Ironically, the plucky Danes joined the coalition of the illing way back when. At that time, I don't remember Iraqis posting notices on Copenhagen's fascist Jyllands Posten newspaper anything like: Danish soldiers not speaking Arabic will immediately be expelled. But colonialism is nothing if it isn't a turn about is not fair play kinda bully routine. According to Le Monde, the Danish government has posted ads in the lebanese papers over the last few days that advise: In order to remain in Denmark, it is necessary to speak and understand Danish, and those who do not obtain a permit of residence will be expelled rapidly from the country.
Meanwhile, on a helpful note, most Western nations are agreed that more bombing and much much more weaponry should be sold and distributed in the Middle East, do to its marvelous effects on the health of the inhabitants. They can smell freedom with every drone directed hit!

Notes on posterity

For some reason, whenever I run across the popular literary game of predicting which writers will “endure”, I get quite bugged. When it is a slow news day or a site wants click bait, they will play this old game, and are assured of responses and heated arguments, and statements like, the works of Stephan King will be recognized one hundred years from now as the greatest American fiction of our time. Or the works of X – put in your favorite writer.
Nobody seems to predict that a writer that they don’t like will be recognized in one hundred years. Nor does anybody ask what are the institutions that preserve for posterity the reputation of a writer. Instead, these predictions rely on a sort of amorphous popular will, with powers beyond any dreamt up by Rousseau. The general will will judge the quick and the dead. That’s the sense.
There are two issues here, actually. One is that the posterity of a work is a form of credentialling – that time awards a good quality seal to the lucky genius. It is interesting that the locus here is on the work – it used to be that the poet, assuming his or her undying fame, would assure the beloved of immortality through the poem – now the poet simply assures him or her own self that fame fairydust. Auden, beautifully, captures this, in my opinion, specious idea:

Time, that is intolerant
of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week,
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

Auden, In Memory of W.B.Yeats

Auden wrote that in 1939, and part of him knew that time and the Nazis were definitely not pardoning those who lived by language, but condemning them: hence the aborted careers of scores of poets, novelists, dramatists, essayists and the lot. Time may well condemn to very long, or even perpetual, obscurity those writings that have not stuck, in some way, to the usual institutions, or that emanated from condemned ethnicities or genders.
The other issue is projecting one’s own taste and time on the future. Here, we do have historical evidence, although it is never used by any of those who play the game.
So, how should one go about making predictions about the endurance of written work?

Over the long term, my feeling is that the chance of a prediction being fulfilled, at least for the reasons one says it will be fulfilled, is vanishingly small. Remember, for the medievals, the important Latin poet after Virgil was Statius. Statius. Who even recognizes the name? Ovid, Lucretius, or Catullus just werent in the running. Lucretius did not have a very great posterity in the Roman world, and only came into European culture, really, when a manuscript of the Nature of Things was discovered in 1417 in Florence, according to Stephan Greenblatt. So over time, posterity is swallowed up in such unexpected events that we can’t guess. We need a more manageable time sequence to answer the question – we need relatively short term posterity. There needs to be at least certain structures that are generally continuous, as, for instance, an economic structure that is generally the same over time, and a structure of religious belief that is also coherent over time. Even so, there are unpredictable contingencies. The Library of Alexandria burned; Franz Kafka’s manuscripts didn’t, despite his dying request. So it goes.

Given these conditions, we can still see patterns in, say, the last three hundred years. Starting in the 18th century, the literary nexus of publishers, the writers, and the audience started to take a modern shape. Writers could come from anywhere, but readers, and publishers, came mostly from the middle class. There was certainly room for the working class and the upper class, but writers that appealed to a working class audience had to eventually appeal to a middle class audience to endure. Aleida Assmann wrote an essay about this for Representations in 1996: Texts, Traces, Trash: The Changing Media of Cultural Memory . She points out that the mythology of glory, which Burckhardt traces to Dante, and the city state culture of Italy in the fourteenth century, was, for the writer, shaped by the idea of a group who would preserve it, and upon this group was projected contemporary attitudes: true posterity would consist of people like the friends of the poet, gentle people, highborn, with swift minds. It was an almost tactile sense of posterity, posterity with a face. The posterity of the poem was the posterity of the people who read and understood the poem, the educated audience. But in the eighteenth century, the semantic markers shifted. Assman quotes Swift’s preface to the Tale of the Tub to show that the circle was replaced by the seller -- the face by the invisible hand, to be slightly anachronistic about it.

The new factor in the manufacture of posterity, in the twentieth century, has been the rise of educational institutions as transmitters of literature. One has to take that into account, as well as the relatively rapid changes that tend to traverse the academy, which is very much a product of capitalism and has been, for the most part, absorbed in the mechanism of vocationalisation. Education for its own sake, culture for its own sake, it is fair to say, is no longer the major part of the academic mission.

So here’s a concrete question. Given these circumstances, what chance does, say, Stephen King have to be remembered to future generations? And what chance do the brilliant mandarins, the literary novelists, have? To pose the question wholly in one category of literature – in poetry, I suppose, the same question could counterpoise Jorie Graham and, say, Li’l Kim, or Ashberry and Bob Dylan.

On the evidence of genre alone, gothic and horror writers have a pretty good survival rate. At least three or four writers of gothic novels in the eighteenth century are still in print, and still found on the shelves of medium sized public libraries, as well as being assigned in classes and being made into films (the addition of media technologies has a major impact on posterity, I should note: printing did everything for, say, Lucretius, while it did little for Statius). Books by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Monk Lewis, and William Beckworth are still in print, as are those by Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and Sheridan La Fanu from the nineteeth century. That is just in English culture - there is also, of course, Theodore Gautier (author of the original Mummy story) and Gaston Leroux; there is ETA Hoffman and Meyrink.

One strong driver of reputation is that a book generates a character. Frankenstein, or Dracula, or, the Mummy, or – going towards another genre – a Sherlock Holmes overshadows the works in which they were represented. King has not, I believe, created that kind of character, unlike, say, Ann Rice. Furthermore, King is proudest of his thousand page works. One thing about gothic and mystery fiction is that it is generally either small or medium sized. As it gets more literary, however, the larger size helps. Hugo’s Notre Dame with the hunchback is a Stephen King sized novel.

Again, though, one can’t just bet on this recipe. Film, which now plays a major role in the posterity management of fiction, is very stagily centered around character; yet that is simply to say that it is stagily centered about the star. Hector Lector is a famous character who, I feel, may be fading into obscurity, but is still remembered as a character, and he is taken from a Thomas Harris novel that nobody predicts a long posterity for (although who knows?). In that sense, Hector Lector might well outlive his bookish source entirely. Who remembers a single book by George Du Maurier? And yet his mesmerist, Svengali, entered popular lore. On the other hand, the process goes into reverse with films, too. Who remembers the name of the character played by Jack Nicholson in The Shining? Rather, one remembers Jack Nicholson. Or at least that’s what I do.

Posterity for a mandarin depends a lot on networking, on circle-making. It isnt necessary to be part of the establishment, but it is helpful, if one is on the outs with the establishment, to create a counter-establishment. Compare, for instance, the posthumous fates of D.H. Lawrence and John Cowper Powys - both writers of big novels, both of a philosophical bent, both obsessed with sex. Powys has his fans - Steiner called the Glastonbury Romance one of the three great books of the twentieth century. But really, Powys never made a counter-establishment. He became quaint - that is, he was on the outs with the conventions of the modern novel, but he never had a following that theorized that extra-territoriality. Lawrence, however, was the establishment rebel par excellence. There’s nothing like breaking decisively with Bertrand Russell to show that 1, you are a rebel, and 2, you know Bertrand Russell.

Now, my comments so far have not been about the quality of these writers at all. My notes have been about posterity as an effect not of the popular will, nor of quality, but of social forces.

Certain American novelists I like best - Gaddis, for instance, and McCarthy – are, I think, not destined for a long posterity. Gaddis is like George Meredith - he is eccentric enough as a writer that he attracts only a passionate few. But Meredith was able to produce one or two conventional novels, like the Ordeal of Richard Feveral. Gaddis only produced prodigies: The Recognitions, J.R. One hundred years from now, I have my doubts these novels will be much read. But that says nothing, to me, about their intrinsic quality. As for McCarthy, Cormac McCarthy, the case is trickier. I can see his later novels, which to me are much worse than his earlier ones, enduring. But his difficult works, Suttree, Blood Meridien, are more chancey, because they are too long to assign and too non-cinematic. Of course, this is where the educational institutions come in, creating the substructure of posterity. Joyce seems to be the limit case for these institutions, but it could well be that McCarthy would join Faulkner on the curriculum. I wonder.

There is an enlightenment moment in the posterity imago - it consists in assuming that the world will not end. This was quite a radical thing in the thirteenth century. I wonder if it isn’t still a radical thing. Ive recently talked to two people, from opposite sides of the political spectrum, both of whom assured me that the world was going to undergo a disaster in the next one hundred years. In fact, the expectation that the world is going to end seems so deeply etched in the Western template that it might be impossible to erase. In this sense, though the prediction of the posterity of one’s favorite author is generally made without any attention to how posterity works, It is, in other words, a combination of incredible optimism and a severely narrow viewpoint. .
Myself, I just want to know: who will the people of the future socialist utopia look back upon as predicting their groovy solutions to all the problems of capitalism.
I'm raising my hand here. Pick me!.

immigration: what is to be done?

From the working class perspective, then, what is to be done about immigration?

There’s amnesty. There’s changing the focus of enforcement of immigration laws from the immigrant to the employer. There’s increasing the minimum wage.

All of these are partial ways of attacking what is at the heart of the problem of immigration in the US – the stagnation and decline of low income wages. I have a more total solution in mind.

I would require all employees at whatever level to belong to a union of some kind.

This of course is not an idea that anybody important in public life is, at the moment, advocating. Yet it does attack the problem not only of immigration as a tool by which capital lowers the wages of labor, but, even more radically, the division between skilled and unskilled labor.

American unions are, famously, declining. Membership from the glory days of the fifties is down by almost half. Yet, this only tells part of the story. As unions have declined, guilds, defined as means of credentialling that limit labor competition, have become more and more a common part of American life. From air conditioning repair to barbering to doctoring and lawyering, more and more professions require a licence from the government.

The justification for this practice is that the consumer – of hair cuts, cool air, surgery, or legal casuistry – has to be protected. But this justification ignores the fact that guild protection also cuts down on the labor supply and, consequently, raises the price of the cost of these services. For economists, generally, this is a sad. For me, it is one of the most potent ways the American middle class has maintained its status.

Of course, the older guilds were lateral organizations, where the onus was on the relationship between members, while many of the new guilds simply create a relationship between the state and the credentialled person.

It is my simple suggestion that labor unions of one type or another be extended all the way down and all the way up, building on the guild form that Americans have developed. There should not be a single nanny, grass cutter, or roof layer who does not have a membership card in some union. This lays the groundwork for attacking the whole problem of low wages and unemployment in a new way, in which the difference wrought by immigration would simply be dissolved.  

immigration: what is to be done?

Recently, the NYT has been running the occasional article about how bad the low paid sector in the American economy is doing. Without fail, the comments sections will fill up asking, pointedly, why said article doesn’t consider immigration.

Of course, partly this is the Trump effect. But I am suspicious of the good liberal response that leaves it at that – those rednecks and racists out there, the end. After all, the immigration thesis seems kin to the Marxist thesis about the reserve army of the unemployed. And it also seems to hook up to a recurring pattern in American history, in which racism is used to undermine labor solidarity and lower wages. In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, mining companies would often recruit african americans to break up strikes.The unions were, at the time, extremely white nationalist. Thus, they would fall for the bait, and instead of recruiting among black laborers, they would battle with them. In the thirties, the “communist dominated” CIO unions tried to break out of this vicious circle. It was one of the reasons they became the special target of both the FBI and the AFL. In Texas, for instance, the CIO union led a successful strike of pecan shellers, who were mostly Hispanic, in San Antonio – and the leadership was mercilessly red baited.

Etc. Such is the historic background. But what is the current foreground? We know that, particularly among African Americans who have no high school degree, there’s been a collapse of earning power and high levels of unemployment. The article to go to here is Patrick Mason’s 2014 “Immigration and African American Wages and Employment: Critically Appraising the Empirical Evidence” in the Review of Black Political Economy. Mason goes over the neo-classical theory of immigration, unemployment and wages which is, I think, behind the liberal response: yes, there may be a short term downturn among “native” laborers in regard to wages and higher unemployment, but immigrants don’t simply swallow their wages, they spend them. Thus, over time, not only will the holders of native capital benefit from lower wages and higher demand, but native employment will adjust as well in an expanded economy.

Mason shows that, at least in the short term, this theory is flawed as regards African American laborers”

“If immigrants and native African Americans are substitutes, the canonical neoclassical model of immigration predicts a negative relationship between native wages and increases in immigration in the short-run, as well as a negative relationship between native participation and employment and increases in immigration in the short-run.

However, African American malewages, employment, and participation did not decline in the 1990s as the immigration share of the labor force increased. Instead, the African Americanmale employment-population ratio rose from 64%to 71%during 1993–1999, while mean weekly workhours increased by 2 h from 30.6 to 32.6 during the same period—a 6.5%increase in weekly workhours. Mean wages of African American males

rose from about $702 in 1993 to $866 percent in 2002.”

…

“The labor market outcomes of African American males did decrease during the 2000s, but this was a period of much slower immigration than during the 1990s. Rather than immigration, the recessions of 2001–2002 and 2007–2009 appear to the primary factors pulling down the employment, participation, and wages of African American males.”

However, these correlations don’t exactly give us our solution. Perhaps immigration in the 90s was a clog on the even further rise in African American wages and employment, and similarly wei ghed on same in the terrible Bush years. As for the post 2008 years, the climb upward has been extremely slow. Low skilled black male laborers have in effect lost 12 years, more than a decade, of economic gains.

As I said above, we can’t really take unskilled black laborers as proxies for the unskilled native labor market, because there has always been a racist quotient – the difference between white and black wages.

An overview paper by Harry Holzer at the Migration Policy Institute attempts to mediate among various conflicting studies. On the one hand, we have George Borjas, a Harvard economist who claims that there are substantial costs to low income native workers that accrue from the availabilty of immigrant labor. On the other, there is the work of David Card, at Berkeley, who disputes that conclusion. Interestingly enough, a study by Patricia Cortes takes the question and turns it upside down: who benefits most from the lower prices and wages that are the effect of immigrant labor?

“She argues that highly educated or high-income consumers benefit more because they use more ‘immigrant intensive’ products (like child care, restaruant foood, landscaping, and the like) than do lower income consumers. Furthermore, Cortes calculates that since immigrants also lower the wwages of less educated US workers (with much bigger negative effects on earlier immigrants than on the native-born), the net effects of immigration overall are positive for the highly educated and negative for the less educated, though both magnitudes are modest.”

From the working class perspective, then, what is to be done?

the matthew effect candidate

I'm starting to resent Trump. I had it all figured out. The establishment in the GOP always wins, almost. So, Bush would be their candidate. Nobody would stop Clinton. It would be Bush versus Clinton, with the victory going to Clinton by about 2 percentage points. But I had misunderstimated Jeb Bush. I thought he was sposed to be the smart one! He has run a rotten, no good campaign, and he himself makes his brother look like a genius. This must panic the establishment. Emotionally, they probably do think they are going to win, as they thought with Romney, but I can't believe they can't read the numbers like anybody else - on the national level, the GOP faces a very uphill struggle. But at least with Bush they could have a decorous loss and maybe pick up some seats somewhere, as the Dems hugely suck at state and local elections. Now I am starting to doubt. I still think the odds are with Bush, but how is he going to do it? If as looks very possible he loses Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, he is going to look like a loser. The only thing he really has going for him is that he looks like the inevitable winner. He's the Matthew effect candidate (hey, you read it here first! That's a great phrase, surely somebody more important than me needs to steal it). If he isn't propelled into inevitability by April of next year, I have no idea who will pick up the establishment banner.

On the sliming of Corbyn

The runup to the invasion of Iraq was, as is well know, accompanied by a complicit and cowardly press that rolled out every lie as though it were golden and adhered strictly to the Bush administration guidelines. I think it was the moment when the liberal readership, which is really the core newspaper readership for the majors, became disenchanted – and have never returned. Though the right entertains itself with a narrative about a timelessly liberal press, in reality, that liberal moment endured for around 3 decades in the U.S., and was spotty, at best, in criticizing the Cold War foreign policies it reported on.

However, the level of distortion in the British press coverage of Jeremy Corbyn’s bid for the Labour leadership is, to my mind, unprecedented. I’ve never seen anything like it. While Britain, famously, has a suck press culture that mostly entertains itself by hounding celebrities to death on the tabloid level, and bloviating with Oxbridge pomposity about the wonders of neo-liberalism, on the other, it mostly adheres to a code of at least ersatz neutrality when reporting the news. Corbyn, however, has the effect on editors at the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Independent, the Telegraph, and the Times of very bad acid. Remarkably, Corbyn seems to have the hide of an elephant. Normally, a politician subject to abuse like this would get so tied up with denials and explanations in response to these bogus slings that he ends up looking like Laocoon. Corbyn, though, doesn’t really seem to care. Which truly eggs on the press hysteria. The reports of his antisemitism, of his sympathy for Osama bin Laden, of his advocacy of segregating women in trains because of his inherent sexism, etc. – which all are childish distortions of things he has said – have had no effect on his popularity. They have had an effect on the press however. Unable to accept the fact that their circle jerk is not working, they now bemoan the end of the Labour party and the inevitable thousand year Reich of George Osbourne.

Well, the election is in five fucking years. And my guess is that a lefty anti-austerity program is going to look pretty good under two scenarios: a., Britain’s economy continues to generate benefits for the richest and stagnation for the medium income set, or b., Britain is caught, like the rest of the world, in a downturn emanating this time from China, which will make the British bet on the finance as their leading economic sector seem extremely stupid.

Surely I am not the only person who suspects the business cycle might not be too kind to the Tories. This is another driver, I suspect, of the establishment hysteria. They really hate Corbyn’s policies because they suspect they might seem pretty attractive under these scenarios.

I am prejudiced. I think most of what Corbyn supports should be pretty standard. Including revamping the foreign policy to emphasize peace rather than war, which, so far has the century traveled into insane violence, seems radically pacifistic to New Labour ears.    

Those much laughed at demos of 2003? I’m hearing an echo in this race. Maybe ignoring a million people wasn’t the greatest idea after all.

The backwards oarsman

It was, I think, about six months after Adam learned to walk that he began to experiment with walking backwards. Walking backwards goes against our social bodily image, which aligns our face with our motion. For just that reason, it ends up, for a child, in the realm of play. Since learning to walk backwards, Adam indulges in it not so frequently, but always with a giggle and a sideglance at his parents, because he feels he is doing something a bit naughty.

The image of the oarsman that I’ve excavated from Montaigne and from Pliny exerts, to my mind,  a marvelous poetic power as a model that tells us something about the course of a life or a history partly because it stands in suprising contrast to  our rooted association of facial direction and forward motion. Of course, the sightless oarsman is looking, but only at what recedes behind him.

In considering this image, one has to recall, as well, the socio-economic system in which the slave oarsmen in Pliny’s time, or the oarsmen plying their gabare in Bordeaux in Montaigne’s time, were placed. Bordeaux, in Montaigne’s time, was the scene of a economic expansion in trade as the port infrastructure was put in place and the gabare who brought down dyes and wine and timber in their flat bottomed boats were found in several places in the logistical chain, either bringing in materials to be made into manufactures to sell or taking those products, the wine and the dyes out to ships who disembarked them in other areas of europe, most notably Great Britain and the Netherlands. The blind oarsmen were, in this sense, at the base of the fortune of Montaigne’s own extended family, much more than any invisible hand, in as much as his extended family was involved in finance and trade. The historian who has most profoundly studied the merchant marine culture in Bordeaux in the 16th century, Jacques Bernard, has noted the absense of a professional corporation for the gens de mer, although this does not preclude a tight professional culture of sailors and oarsmen – the kind of community that recent historians have discovered, or suppose they have discovered, among pirates. The oarsmen themselves were all contract laborers. Whether facing towards the port or away from it, their share of the proceeds was minimal.
John Florio’s translation of the word “l’utile” in Montaigne’s title is “profit” – on profit and honesty.  The recent interpretations of the essay are a battle ground over the question of whether Montaigne, like Machiavelli and certain humanists, puts profit – the public good – over honesty – or honor, the moral code. It has been read in this way by certain influential scholars, such as Quentin Skinner and Jean Starobinski. They have been criticised for abridging and distorting the arguments in the text by Robert J.Collins, whose essay on the text is a very close reading. Myself, I find the text interesting for developing a sort of anthropology of violence, in which the violation of norms is caught in a certain ritual that both allows the violation and pays for it with a sacrifice – the kind of thing dear to the heart of Rene Girand. Thus, the essay is chock full of the usual Montaigne anecdotes from ancient and contemporary history, which are used to vary the entitling theme – that of profit and honesty. Of course, Montaigne is notorious for the way the variations in his themes sometimes seem to escape them altogether. But I think Collins is right to suppose that Montaigne was using, here, as elsewhere, a conversational form (“I speak to the paper like I speak to the first person who comes along”) that, like all good conversations, loses itself in order to carry out the task of bringing to light the unconscious as well as conscious aspects of a theme. Pertinence is not lost, but enriched, in the process. And so it is here, where the violation of truthtelling, of fairness, of justice, of kindness, of friendship, of family loyalties, which are all countenanced by the reference to what profits the state – what is necessary for the public good – are instanced only from the viewpoint that they unleash a countering moment of sacrifice that engulfs those who have been the mechanics of injustice. In the secret police state, the secret policeman has every reason to believe he is next – that at least was Stalin’s policy, and it was, as well, the policy of various Roman tyrants and French kings.
Of course, to attend to the sacrifice instead of to the “progress” made by a state that has successfully profited from these instances of atrocity might be thought to be an inversion of the oarsman’s duty – which is only to keep looking backwards and moving us forwards. The image, I think, is inseperable from these historical dilemmas, which is why I think the most interesting heirs of the motif are those who are most anxious about the whole notion of progress.

backwards progress. Montaigne's image

Comparisons, it was anciently thought, were among the royal tools of thought, along with logic. One of the interesting thing about comparisons is how, buried beneath them, we find coincidences, intersections on the plane of concept or image. And the comparison is all the more powerful in that, like a coincidence, it produces a cognitive shock, a crossroads surprise. The shock, if the comparison goes off well, will be transmitted to the object we began with. It will seem not only as if we have given an explanation, but we have given a surplus of explanation.

It is here that comparison runs into trouble, for, like coincidence, it seems tangled in superstition. Enlightenment begins, perhaps, with a suspicion of the surplus of explanatory value. Ancient  enlightenment – the sceptics and epicurians who came after Aristotle – recognized that comparison did too much work. It is as if an occult power, a dark force, planned that meeting of concepts or images or situations. The enlightenment state of mind is always allergic to occult forces. These are, after all, things that plunge us into taking a magical view of history. And yet, if the Enlightenment wants to have a history itself, if it works towards “progress”, it is always itself subject to a self-subverting contradiction, the projection of some force that makes for history as a progress. Which is just to say that enlightenment itself often does not resist the temptation to seek out destinies and fates, and tarries with an image of history as a sort of white magic.

This is one side of comparison. Another side is its absorption, over time, into the literal, the long march from connotation to denotation. Coincidence, here, is routinized, or overlooked so often as to seem no coincidence at all.

I want to look at a brilliant comparison in Montaigne’s essay, “On the useful and the honorable” – which Florio translates as the Profitable and the Honest. This essay begins the third book, which was published four years before Montaigne’s death, in 1592. The third book has a certain retrospective splendour, rather in the manner of Shakespeare’s The Tempest – one feels that Montaigne, like Prospero, is about to break his rod and drown his books, as the last voyage approaches. On the useful and the honorable (de l’utile et l’honnête) mingles memories or summings up from Montaigne’s public career with a reflection on the division between what it is useful to do for the state – what profits the prince, or one’s ambitions - and what it is honest, moral, honorable to do from the perspective of the private individual.

The image and comparison I have in mind arises in the context of a characteristic moment of self-accounting, with its to-and-fro motion:

“What was required by my position, I furnished, but in the most private way possible. As a child I was plunged into it up to my ears. And I succeeded well enough, but I have often, in good time, disengaged myself from it. I have since avoided meddling in public affairs, rarely accepting to do so and never requesting it. Holding my back turned to ambition. If not like rowers who advance, thus, backwards. Nevertheless, being embarked, I find myself less obliged to my resolution than to my good fortune. There are, indeed, paths less inimicable to my taste, and more adapted to my temperament, by which, if my fortune had called me in the past to public service and advancement in the opinion of the world, I know I would have bypassed all the arguments of my reason and followed it.”

The to and fro is held together here, I think, by that discrete glimpse of rowers advancing with their back turned. It is an image of progress that surely has a double root in Montaigne’s own experience and in the classical authors.

For a man who saw the world as constantly dissolving one hard element into another, Montaigne was very phobic about water, much prefering solid land, and even the bumpiness of coaches, to the waves. Nevertheless, he did travel, sometimes, by water. In a gabare, a flat bottomed boat that was poled or rowed. There was one that went from Bordeaux to Blaye, a village on the Garonne that was a point of contention in the guerilla war between the Catholics and the Protestants when Montaigne was mayor of Bordeaux. Indeed, advance has an emphatic military meaning as well as one that indicates a certain directed movement. The symbolism of the rower who, facing backwards, advances the boat must have suggested itself to Montaigne hundreds of times. But perhaps he was also inspired by an essay of Plutarch’s which was thematically akin to this essay: If it is true that we should live a hidden life.

“The oarsmen, turned towards the stern, chase after the catch by the action that they impress on the oars in a sense contrary to the direction of the vessel. Something similar happens to those who give us such precepts: they hurry after fame in pretending to turn their back on it.”

I have been revolving this image in my head, and it grows more interesting the more I think about it. Here fate, fame, progress, and a strange reversal of how we think of human progress all come together. I think there is a long European history of this image, and I, being in an Auerbachian mood, am going to chase after it a bit more.

  

coincidence and crime 2

To return to my last coincidence post:

Nabokov played around with the coincidence device himself, in his novel, Despair. There, the hero, a prosperous businessman named Hermann, mistakenly supposes that he looks like a certain much poorer man. Hermann befriends this man on behalf of a plot to make make money and get out of a relationship with his cheating wife. The plot involves getting the double to dress as Hermann and then killing him. After this, the life insurance money will come rolling in, and Hermann can collect it. Hermann, then, is very much writing the “plot” for his characters, and banking on a coincidence. But what he doesn’t reckon on is his own blindspot with regard to what he looks like. There’s a character in a Turgenev story who says, somewhere, that he can keep a sharp mental image of strangers, but more familiar faces, including his own, never fix themselves in his imaginagtion. Hermann seems to be in a similar case – in fact, nobody else thinks his double looks like Hermann. Thus, the coincidence by which the murderer hopes to make his escape ends up being no coincidence at all – which is a very funny variation on the coincidence plot.
An Israeli sociologist, Ruma Falk, has made a career long study of coincidence stories. Like a disillusioned Hermann, Falk claims to have shown that our coincidence stories often depend on obtaining a statistically significant result from a deliberately chosen extreme example instead of basing that conclusion on a random sample”. The emphasis here on the random sample indicates the frequentist bias of Falk’s work – but at the same time, what really interests here is a cognitive property – the “surprising” effect of the coincidence. If Hermann had interviewed other candidates for doppelganger, or consulted his friends, he might well have found someone who, according to consensus, looked like him – which would of course be a coincidence, but one founded in the pool of types, cultural and genetic, in which Hermann existed, like some dictator looking for a body double to use as a security measure. But Hermann didn’t, because the coincidence surprised him to the extent that he didn’t question it.
Falk, then, looked at the element of surprise in coincidence stories. They divide stories of coincidence taken from a pool of subjects between self-coincidence and other-coincidence. They asked their subjects to judge the degree of surprise elicited by these stories – that is, stories the subject told about his or her experience, and stories the subject read about others’ experiences. “On the average, authors judged their self-coincidences somewhat more surprising than they judged others’ coincidences. However, the mean rating of the control subjects revealed that the other-stories were objectively more surprising than the self-stories. Taken together, authors found their own coincidences more surprising than others’ coincidences despite the fact that the latter were objectively more surprising.”
This is a complex response, no? One might speculate that the surprisingness of coincidence operates in more important ways in ordinary life than it is given credit for. At least, in listening to people talk about their lives, and about accidents that have befallen them, I get the sense that coincidence operates as a sort of guiding shadow to making sense of the incidents in a life - making the life seem fated, necessary, telic.

Comres' fishy poll: you just ask for the results, and we will deliver them!

One of the key tools of contemporary politics is the gamed poll - the poll that shows results satisfactory to those who commissioned it. These polls wear their disnonesty in their footnotes. With that said, one should look at Comres's internet poll that shows Jeremy Corbyn as a crater for the next election, as compared to the ever electable, ever conservative David Millibrand.

It looks bad for Corbyn until you read how the results were filtered. Because of course, you don't want to just accept the voices of your complete set of respondents - you want to filter them just right. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn-would-reduce-labours-chances-of-winning-the-next-election-poll-reveals-10457458.html

Here is the revealing footnote: "ComRes interviewed 2,035 GB adults online between 12th and 13th August 2015. Data were weighted to be demographically representative of all GB adults. Data were also weighted by past vote recall. Voting intention figures are calculated using the ComRes Voter Turnout Model. ComRes is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its rules."

Now, what does past voter recall and the Comres Voter Turnout Model mean? It means that Comres decided that the trouble with polling that showed Labour leading in the last election relied too much on the responses of young voters. This, in combination with voters who haven't voted recently, means that basically, the poll was skewed towards just the demographic that would have voted for the most conservative labour candidates. What Comres doesn't say is how they tested their conclusion. If we transpose this model to the American election of 2012, for instance, excluding black and young voters, Romney would clearly have been first in the polls - as indeed he was in the Fox News poll and in the Gallup poll. Intellectual honesty would demand, I think, that Comres publish the results without applying their "comres" model alongside the results of applying their model. But don't hold your breath for that to happen. After all, this poll is commissioned to get the Comres model results.
Which will then be twittered about by the usual Blairite suspects.

the writing life - now with pee stains!

I wonder how Adam picks phrases out of the air. We were walking in a park in Montpellier last month when Adam turned to us and, apparently a propos of nothing, said, why that’s the whole point! Today, we were walkng to school when Adam told me, that’s a done deal, Daddy. A done deal? Has Adam been hanging around with an MBA?

It is things like this, the innumerable things like this, that make me wonder why it is that children are supposed to be the enemy of the creative type. In this week’s London Review of Books there’s a piece by Jessica Olin about the book, Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids edited by Meghan Daum. It is a curious review: Olin has chosen, mostly, to collage various of the essays. One of her comments, though, struck me as pretty awful, all the more so because it expresses one of the cliches of our time.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n16/jessica-olin/who-would-you-have-been

“Parenting requires a public face; engagement with one’s community; fluency in multi-tasking. Writing demands focus and long stretches of solitude. The two job descriptions could not be more different; how many of us are equally suited to both?”

Where, I wondered, did this job description of writing come from? Perhaps it comes from the idea that writing has a “job description” – and after all, if it is a craft taught in school, perhaps it does, like insurance salesman or barista. But unlike those two professions, in actual fact, the only thing about being a freelance writer is that you write. Otherwise, there is no job description. It certainly doesn’t include long stretches of solitude.  Some may well need long stretches of solitude – Flaubert seemed to. Others, multiple others, seemed to need a very strong social life – Balzac, Dickens, Henry James, James Joyce, etc. Unfortunately, the apriori idea that writers don’t require a “public face” seems to me to etiolate the writing, to narrow it, to make it airless. I am a great consumer of writers’ letters – not a genre beloved of the public, but there you are. And to my mind, the job description for writers ought to read – must love interruption and disaster. This hushed idea of the solitary writer makes me laugh and think of Ring Lardner’s collection, How to Write Short Stories,  which begins with the observation that “most of the successful authors of the short fiction of today never went to no kind of a college, or if they did, they studied piano tuning or the barber trade. They could of got just as far in what I call the literary game if they had stayed home those four years and helped mother carry out the empty bottles.”

Of course, times have changed, and instead of piano tuning, the literary game is now played by immersing oneself in focus and solitude, apparently, with occasional preoccupied visits to the printing place while one carefully balances the panorama of one's novel - the battle scenes, the complete description of french nobility in 1415 - in one's precious head. I'd advise wearing sleeping shades, although the downside is accidentally strolling in front of a car.

 Somehow, though, I rather like the products of helping mother carry out the bottles.

My experience with Adam has been anything but non-writerly. I see a lot of things about human beings differently due to seeing and reflecting on Adam and the way he is growing up. One of the writers Olin quotes with approval drags out stereotypes about raising kids that are as risable as anything spouted by Victorian fairy tale authors: “Tim Kreider precisely renders parents’ ‘anxious and harried existence – noisy and toy-strewn, pee-stained and shrieky, without two consecutive moments to read a book or have an adult conversation or formulate a coherent thought’.” I especially like the pee stained – of course, writers, the great ones, have always stayed away from excrement. It is so yucky! Indeed, I think Tim Kreider should change a thousand diapers or so in order to see that if you cannot confront pee and shit, you might consider changing your job description to, oh, say, selling life insurance policies. The idea that I am kept from an adult conversation or a coherent thought by the fact that I’m living with someone who is actually acquiring a language – well, it shows what kind of adult conversations or coherent thoughts are common traffic in the Tim Kreider set. Things like, did you see True detective last night?

Oops. A little snobbishness on my part. Still, if a writer actually has this abbreviation of infancy in his or her head, it should be knocked out of it. Have children or don’t have children, that’s not my beeswax. But if you can’t even look at what the experience is like, and are afraid of pee stains, well, writing might not be your gig.

  

Coincidence and crime 5

Nabokov translated Lermontov’s A Hero of our Time in collaboration with his son. It was the father, however, who wrote the preface. In it, he remarked on the mechanisms that Lermontov uses to move the story of Pechorin forward, in a matter of speaking.

“A special feature of the structure of our book is the monstrous but perfectly organic pat that eavesdroppiing plays in it. Now Eavesdropping is only one form of a more general device which can be classified under the heading of Coincidence, to which belongs, for instance, the Coincidental Meeting – another variety. It is pretty clear that when a novelist desires to combine the traditional tale of romantic adventure (amorous intrigue, jealousy, revenge, etc.) with a narrative in the first person, and has no desire to invent new techniques, he is somewhat limited in his choice of devices.”

Although Nabokov was famously anti-bolshie and refused even to meet Andrei Bely because Bely was “squishy”, the notion of the device is exported straight from Skhlovsky. But Nabokov could rightly claim, I suppose, that it had become part of the repertoire of slavic literary criticism. What it shows, here, is that Nabokov is making a formalist analysis of the text, viewing the text’s coincidence as evidence of a choice among a range of devises that would unite the plot.

One might wonder as well as, however, whether the plot, that ueber-device, is not itself, necessarily, a coincidence-making machine. In any case, for Nabokov, the coincidence must have been chosen because Lermontov was eager to move his total story along:

… our author was more eager to have his story move than to vary, elaborate and conceal the methods of its propulsion, [and thus] he emplyed the convenient device of having his Maksim Masimich and Pechorin overhear, spy upon, and witness any such scene as was needed for the elucidation or the promotion of the plot. Indeed, the author’s use of this devise is so consistent thoughout the book that it ceases to strike the reader as a marvelous vagary of chance and becomes, as it were, the barely noticeable routine of fate.”

I am reminded here of the physicist E.T. Jaynes’ remark that “entropy is an anthropomorphic concept. For it is a property not of the physical system but of the particular experiments you or I choose to perform on it.”  It is striking that many protagonists in novels are, in a sense, experimenters in coincidence. That is, they take coincidences as signs, and follow them so that they produce more coincidences. In a sense, what Nabokov says about Lermontov, the writer of the novel in which Pechorin is the chief protagonist, could be said, as well, of Pechorin, in as much as he makes a plot out of his life, or a portion of his life. To do such a thing, to incorporate the adventure form into a life, turns coincidence into the “routine of fate.”

Nabokov is right to mention the adventure form as that in which coincidence plays the greatest role. The adventure form, of course, has fissioned into many forms today – the crime novel, sci fi, and, often, the modern and po mo variants of the novel. I think, for instance, of Patricia Highsmith, who wrote a number of novels in which the motive force that moves the plot is the impression that the appearance of a character is coincidentally like that of another character. For instance, in The Faces of Janus, the entire motive for the engagement of the poet, Rydal Keener, with the crooked businessman, Chester McFarland, and his wife Colette, is that Chester vaguely  looks like Rydal’s father and wife like the cousin that Rydal had a crush on when he was a teen. Even before Rydal is involved with the couple, the author presents Rydal’s habit of looking a little too long in the eyes of strangers, seeking Adventure.  In a variation on this theme, in Strangers on the Train, the architect, Guy Haines, meets a rich playboy type named Bruno, and the two recognize that they are in similar situations: Guy is frustrated by his wife’s refusal to divorce him so he can marry his girlfriend, and Bruno is frustrated by his father, who is keeping him from enjoying the family fortune. They jokingly trade “murders”, except that Bruno actually commits one, the murder of Guy’s wife. This is a particularly vivid instance of how the device of coincidence is not something that is confined to a single accident, but extends into an adventure that is much like a previous state of order becoming a more and more pronounced disorder.  

It is the relation between adventure, coincidence and disorder that makes coincidence loom so large in crime novels. The very activity of “looking for clues” is a way of scripting an adventure – a thematically connected series of social events, in which the social can, unexpectedly, slip away (which is the fright is meant to be evoked by the lone person entering into some isolated space, the isolation being defined by the fact that the criminal doesn’t risk being seen by anyone but the victim. At this point, the criminal operates as the writer’s surrogate, even if the writer demonizes him or her, for both are engaged in the scripting of coincidence.

Nabokov played around with this motif himself, in Despair.   

the NYT's shoddy Upshot column: bullshit and statistics

Another Sunday, another Monday, another idiotic Upshot article in the NYT. Upshot has become the home for the NYT’s consi derable rightwing cheering section, with Cohn, Barro, and Cowen providing the juice.  Barro, the scion of one of the plutocracy’s big defenders at the University of Chicago,  Robert Barro, has settled into the role of “reasonable conservative” that the NYT editors just love love love – it’s the David Brooks gig. Although, to be fair, Barro sometimes is worth reading – which I don’t think one can ever say about David Brooks. This Sunday, though, Nate Cohn was up at the bat to tell us two things: Bernie Sanders is a mere pimple on the vast system so ably managed by our elites – his surge is just exaggerated because, as Cohn puts it in the incomparable jazz style preferred by the Times:

“Mr. Sanders has become the favorite of one of the Democratic Party’s mostimportant factions: the overwhelmingly white, progressive left. These voters are plentiful in the well-educated, more secular enclaves where journalists roam. This voting support is enough for him to compete in Iowa; New Hampshire and elsewhere in New England; the Northwest; and many Western caucuses. But it is not a viable electoral coalition in a Democratic Party that is far more moderate and diverse than his supporters seem to recognize.”

So those supporters are in for a surprise, because, of course, they have never read a newspaper or a magazine telling them that the moderate center is the largest voting bloc in the country. Of course, newspapers and magazines are in the habit of presenting this as an apriori truth, instead of like going to any independent source that empirically checks the statement. Rather, they sometimes turn around in their desks and ask their neighbor, that white guy, usually, who is pulling down more than 250 thou a year – are you a moderate or centrist?

After tut tutting away the Sanders campaign, Cohn then sticks his thumb in his mouth and reflects with all the bogosity of a crooked statistician about Hilary Clinton’s favorability ratings. Here’s our poobah:

“Mrs. Clinton may be a primary juggernaut, but she could surely lose to a Republican in November 2016. President Obama’s approval ratings are in the mid-40s, so Mrs. Clinton may not benefit from the party’s incumbency. On paper, the race is more or less a tossup. In such a close contest, it might seem reasonable to argue that Mrs. Clinton’s unfavorable ratings are hugely important.”

Now that is a good question, and a good answer might be founded on looking at polls putting Clinton against all of her possible Republican opponents. But, oddly enough, Cohn, who is writing in something called the Upshot, seems sadly unaware that these polls exist. He – like the NYT in general, where article after article tells us that Clinton is mired in scandal and flailing generally – leaves discretely unmentioned that in those polls, which are easily accessible on Real Clear Politics, Clinton beats all her opponents by 3 to 12 percent. RCP amalgamates all the current polls, but it shows those polling results. One can see that the reason Clinton doesn’t do better is that the Fox News polls consistently show Clinton doing 4 to 10 points worse than the rest of the polls. Pull the Fox News polls from the mix, and Clinton is beating all GOP rivals by unheard of numbers – 6 to 7 percentage points.

So much for the standard shoddy Sunday Upshot. Today, we get a retread of the GOPvoters are happier meme, which has been assiduously promoted by the head of theAmerican Enterprise Institute,  ArthurBrooks.  Our purveyor of nonsense thistime is  David Leonardt. Now I will give Leonardt some credit – he is lesssophistical than other Upshot columnists. But he is prone to publish thingsthat require a little critical thinking. The headline today is that Republicanssay they are happier with their marriages. This is, of course, the old ArthurBrooks trick – publish surveys based solely on self-reporting. No sociologist with any credibility believes that what people self-report is a perfect guide to how they really act. In fact, it is easy to show that the very fact of asking about a self-report can lead to changes in the responses one receives. So, of course, you need some other anchors to clarify the meaning of these self-reported responses. In the case of marriage, the anchors are pretty clear. If Party membership was a significant factor in happy marriages, then those states with a dominant party should, pari passu, show lower divorce rates.

It is well known that, in fact, those states that do have boost larger Republican majorities are also states with higher divorce rates. If Leonhardt was not lazy, he would have at least gotten the name Jennifer Glass from his rolodex and called her. She’s a professor at the University of Texas and has published a pretty well publicized article about the subject in the American Sociological Review (with coauthor Philip Levchak). Let me quotean abstract of the thesis from family studies.org:

“Authors Jennifer Glass and Philip Levchak are more nuanced in their own telling of the story, but their findings are provocative. The authors conclude, “The results here show that communities with large concentrations of conservative Protestants actually produce higher divorce rates than others, both because conservative Protestants themselves exhibit higher divorce risk and because individuals in communities dominated by conservative Protestants face higher divorce risks.”

As for exactly how conservative Protestants are increasing divorce risks for themselves and their neighbors, Glass and Levchak point to evidence that conservative Protestants and their communities encourage young people to marry and have children earlier, sometimes before their educations are completed. These early-marrying couples face a double dilemma of learning to live together (and perhaps raise children together) while also struggling to get by in an economy that is increasingly tough on those who don’t finish college. Then, speculating beyond their data, the authors suggest that conservative Protestant norms against premarital sex and abortion (which might encourage earlier marriage and childbearing) and disdain for religiously “mixed” marriages, along with public policies that fail to support quality public education (enacted in communities dominated by conservative Protestants) combine to create a brew which, paradoxically for divorce-disdaining conservative Protestants, undermines stable marriages.”

Notice that the speculation of these researchers consists of inferences from their data, which tell a plausible sociological tale linking the results of conservative social policies with divorce. It could well be wrong, but at least it is not a mere juxtaposition taken from dubious self-reporting statistics and lathered with speculation that has no empirical anchor whatsoever.

I could probably become a more popular blogger just by fisking the generally shoddy upshot column, and call it something like upchuckshot. But then, I do have a life.