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.