the lost classics

There is a subculture of neglected or lost books, of which I am a member. I am a frequent visitor at the neglected books blog, which keeps lists put out at various times by journals like Anteaus and American Scholar. Typically, these lists are compiled from the responses of authors who are asked to name a book that deserves more recognition.

While I was travelling back from Paris a couple of days ago, I read a book, Lost Classics, which consisted of little essays extolling neglected books, lost books, childhood favorites, and the like. The essays were built on the format of the personal essay, the dominant form in our time. I’m not against personal essays, but I do find that context sorta gets whacked in favor of a rather uncritical self report.

I thought, naturally, about what I’d include in a list. And then I thought I’d write my own little essays about writers who have not gotten a fair shake in the American culture I know.

But before I do that: what does it mean, in a book’s career, to be lost? Or, more broadly, to be rediscovered?

The rediscovery of, for instance, the Bible during the 16^th and 17^th century was not an event of merely antiquarian interest, but was of vast importance to the  formation of a literate public, and to the formation of pre-modern culture. It was not the only cause of the religious wars, but it played a very important role in them. The New Model Army of Cromwell may have been the first to supply its soldiers with books – specifically, the Soldier’s Pocket Bible.

The Renaissance is also inextricably tied to the “new learning”. Although historians now tend to dissolve the Renaissance into an epiphenomenon or a retrospective illusion about the 14^th and 15^th century, I am true to my education and like to think of Gemistos Plethon sailing from Byzantium to Italy with a boatload of manuscripts in 1438. This is the Gemistos celebrated in Pound’s Cantos. Whoever the agent,it seems that there was a rage for manuscripts in Florence in the early fifteenth century, and that Plato was finally released into the European mainstream by translators and commentors like Ficino. Whitehead’s remark that all philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato is a bit too magisterial – Plato was teleported into Europe in various stages. Still, Whitehead’s remark is a good measure for scaling the importance, in the posthumous life of an author, of rediscovery.

That said, I’m going to list a few of my discoveries.

curiosity cabinets

A detached page…

Visit to the Muséum d’histoire naturelle yesterday on Rue Buffon. I am fond or, to be Frenchy, J’adore this little piece of Paris, between the Austerlitz station and that Hammam-mosque on St. Hilaire that boasts a little salon de the. First, I, with Adam in tow (or, more precisely, en avant, since I was pushing Adam in  his stroller) met Francois at the Luxembourg Park, where we strolled about under a grey sky that was determined to make the Park look ordinary or even dreary. And succeeded: the Park did look dreary, as we walked down dreary paths among dreary, locked up amusement areas for the kids, past the dreary tennis courts where two ardent but very wet players were batting around an increasingly soppy ball, and past the rain bedraggled flowering bushes, and past the dreary orangery into the coven of streets near Saint Sulpice, wet and grey, and into an American style lunch place. It was American style down to the menu, which advertised bagels and lox and various super burgers. Francois and I discussed the dreary state of American and especially French politics (I said that if it was between Juppé and Hollande, I’d be for Juppé, and Francois said Juppe was making an effort to get the bobo vote, like mine). Adam, after eating his bagel with cream cheese, quietly imagined that a red plastic lego piece he was carrying was Spiderman and had it fight with various other objects, all of which were, for the moment, supervillains and superheros. Finally it was time for coffee and I noticed how patient Adam had been and proposed going to the Muséum, where I thought we would find dinosaur skeletons.

In fact, I had never visited the Muséum’s exhibition space. In 2010, I have a very sweet memory of strolling the flourishing garden on an Autumn day with A. I was new in Paris then. I also remember, in 2012, visiting a seminar room in the complex of buildings with M., where we listened to lectures on the history of taxidermy,  M. being a great fan of taxidermy.

In any case (a trick of language, this “in any case”, like a dreary usher inviting the guests in to see the cosmetized corpse of a transition), there we were, entering the vast first floor hall, gazing at the cadenced, suspended skeletons of whales under what dim artificial light there was, with the outside light barely filtering through the colored windows far above us: this gave the whole the aspect of being a vast, antiquated acquarium. Adam was hesitant and frankly afraid of some of the stuffed animals. This was not just due to the Muséum’s intention, but an echo of yesterday’s disastrous decision to visit the Musée Grevin: a wax museum on Boulevard Montmartre. It was raining yesterday – rain was always strumming its fingers on the roof when we were in Paris  – and so I had looked up things to do for kids in Paris when it rains. A. was off to a business meeting. After navigating the Metro with the stroller and  Adam, we plunked down our Euros and plunged into an atmosphere of grotesque entertainment. Adam was not amused. In fact, he immediately felt something was not right at the Grevin when we went into the hoaky antechamber, a mirrored room, and were entertained by various cheap light and sound tricks. This, he decided, was definitely a monster haunted place, which who in their right mind would want to visit? The wax figures were even worse: they were too lifelike and at the same time unlifelike – had that zombie-ish glitter of in-between. Soon he was crying, and soon I was rushing through the many many chambers of that combination of chamber of horrors and celebration of celebrity with a sobbing little boy in my arms. However, the Muséum d’histoire naturelle was not out to frighten, but to edify, and Adam realized this. The rather kitsch tableaux at the Grevin charm me (I like these lefthand descendents of curiosity cabinets). The taxidermist’s dream of herds of Sub-Saharan beasts in the Muséum are charming in a different way (these are the true, lineal descendents of the curiosity cabinet – I could draw up a family tree, and show you the affects of unnatural selection). All the skins are genuine – they belong to beasts that died long ago – and the point is to learn about them close up. Or the ostensive point. The closest we came to the Grevin was the Salle des disparues et presque-disparues. It was a long, shadowy gallery, practically unlit, on the top floor. A glass case with a giant stuffed dodo is the first thing to greet the visitor, providing the motif for the effigies within. Dodoes are, legitimately, the monarchs of the kingdom of the extinct – or extinguished, as the French say. It is a tour, in brief, of man’s inhumanity, or perhaps better, surplus humanity, to beasts, braining them, plucking them, eating them or wasting them, and leaving mounds of bones upon the shore. It was so dark in there that I couldn’t read the notices on all of the glass cages, and am not sure if the snowy egret is extinct or nearly extinct – or was that the whooping crane?

Emerging from the end of the world, we descended to the ground floor again and went out to look at the Garden. The Garden was wet. Still, I like the tall plane trees that line the big peripheral paths, which led us to the gates at the bottom. In the area near the gate, there’s a large statue of the “discoverer” of evolution (a little French bragging here – the statue is of Lamarck). Tucked in a corner towards the left was a lonely ice cream stand, which we headed to. Adam ate  a double chocolate ice cream at a table from which we’d wiped away the puddles of water; after this,  Francois headed out to photograph the Seine cresting under the Pont d’Austerlitz while Adam went back to the statue and climbed onto the plinth. Then he started skipping around the statue singing London Bridge is falling down. I watched him, and allowed the spirit of some old poet to wander around inside me, looking for the symbol here. Surely I was being given a Baudelarian correspondance, and what was I going to do with it?

The day grew drearier.

Later, in the news, there were reports of flooding in Northern France. 

the thumbsuckers' gentlemen's agreement

Shakespeare makes it easy for the audience by having his villains – his Gloucester, his scheming Edmund – rehearse, in soliloquy, both the evil of their intentions and the strategy of deception by which they pursue them. Deception becomes not only an instrument but a major pleasure as well, a proof of the superiority of the evil character to the good ones.

In  our era, the soliloquy is pretty much dead. The strategy of deception more often deceives the deceivers, who think not that they are beyond good and evil, but that they are experts in nudgery, technocrats and meritocrats, and will the good. Their true intentions are estranged from them, and a whole code disguises the source of their advantages.

This is what makes the current freakout of the media over Trump such an interesting phenomenon. At least for the critics. For this freakout has made the norm of strategic dissimulation, usually denied, float to the surface as a thing defended.

What I mean is this: the word on Donald Trump is that he has “crossed a line.” Where other GOP politicians have dogwhistled on race, never openly encouraging racism, Trump has openly encouraged racism.

Here’s the deal. There is no line. Dogwhistling on race is racism. Implicit appeals to racism that wear a cast of deniability are not some degree removed from racism, but the very expression of racism in a period when it operates under a code of plausible denial.

In other words, the press has long been operating under a “gentlemen’s agreement”- much like the tacit quotas on Jews that were common in universities and social associations early in the twentieth century. Except this is an agreement not to call out the dogwhistler as racist. In this way, racism found its pocket of tolerance among those who pretended to be socially liberal. It was a good deal – by pretending to find racism abhorrent, the class of elite thumbsuckers, the editors of the great papers, the tv correspondents, could comfortably inhabit the most segegated income level in America – the top one percent – without looking around and asking why it was so very, very white.

Of course, I am sure that the thumbsuckers will go on freaking out about Trump’s racism without understanding that they have revealed their own. But with the gentlemen’s agreement getting some airing, it is going to be that much harder to keep up the strategy of deception.

the page is not for turning

There seems to be a rule among old literary dogs that we all have to moan and groan about the internet and computers. I do share the prevailing angst about the extinction of the book store. Book stores civilize cities, as do parks, sidewalks, statuary, and a level of crime high enough to scare away gentrifying urban professionals.

The book, too, it is said, is on its way out. First they came for the snow leopard, then the hardback version of War and Peace. I think this exaggerates the book or in general paper media situation. However, it is true that one of the defining physical characteristics of the book – a page that must be turned – is on the way to minority status.

In the past fifteen years, I have read perhaps as many texts on computers, on pdf, epub and djvu, as I have in the media that was current when I was a lad. I am not unhappy about this.

Its deeper effect on my reading is, perhaps, to replace the unconscious expectation that is given to a reader by the mechanism of using his finger to turn the page. Epub, which I read on Ipad, cleverly reconstructs that experience, so that it doesn’t disappear altogether into a vague nostalgia, like the feel of squeezing your finger into a hole on the rotary dial to make a call on a phone. This, like turning a page, was one of the affordances of the index finger. However, the epub experience does not completely materialize the older reading experience, any more than a three d movie really makes you feel like you are moving in space.  The older experience links us to a world of vegetation that pre-existed our very species, which our ancestors scrambled down in the long morning of the Holocene.  In other words, even with the epub, our monkeyness is thwarted.

Perhaps that monkeyness is what is engaged in the page-turner – a hand-eye activity like scooting through the branches in a tree. Of course, there is the desire to know what is next. But perhaps the satisfaction of the primate self and the satisfaction of our curiosity are interlinked. And perhaps in reading a pdf, there’s a bit of a shock deep down, a dull thud among us vieux garcons, as our monkeyness falls out of the tree for real.

This, though, ignores the hand’s participation in scrolling. So far, we don’t have voice commands for it – rather, it is a carpal activity. Scrolling does, however, rather unmoor the page-trained reader. The page as a unit is no longer viable. The scroll takes in half a page or a page and a half. It may preserve the old space between one page and another, but it is a space that is no longer validated by a turn. The passages in a book leap out in a different way than they do on a page by page basis.

I recently reread Chesteron’s The Man Who was Thursday on the computer. I used both a pdf version and an epub. The pdf was digitalized for the Internet Archive and was missing some pages. The epub I got somewhere else.

Chesterton dealt in the page – turner genre, the mystery or thriller, but one doesn’t chase his puzzles like one chases, say, the puzzles of H.G. Wells or John Buchan, even.As Chesterton himself said, the MWWT is a bad novel, if one judges by the conventions of the novel, but it is an excellent surface upon which Chesterton mounted his beautiful paradoxes and an allegorical poem, of sorts. Chesterton warns the reader in the subtitle: a Nightmare. It is more like an allegorical vision, however, except much funnier than Piers Plowman. But the fabula, to use the Russian formalist term, is much more tedious than the syuzhet. The plot device of an anarchist conspiracy in which all the anarchists are really secret policemen is good – it makes for a fine farce – but Chesterton is not interested enough in the mechanics of revelation to remove the tediousness from the exposure, one after the other, of the anarchs as cops.  Chesterton never absorbed a single lesson from the master, Henry James. Wells, who has a similar allegorical bent, did. Chesterton’s master was the fairy tale, but his sensibility was shrank too much from the sadistic side of H C Anderson and the Grimms. His fairy tale model was Victorian, a matter that was sieved through the middle class morality of Andrew Lang.

To get back to my thesis, what this means is that Chesterton’s words often hang on the page as unturnable wholes. We don’t feel these words are engaged in a chase, but rather, the frieze portraying a chase. In that sense, TMWWT is as unturnable as The Gay Science (a comparison that Chesterton would have loathed).

It is a matter of various kinds of turns, really. Chesterton chose the turn of the phrase over the turn of the page. The turn of the phrase, in turn, overturns the inversions characteristic of Wildean paradox. It is as if Chesterton came upon the back, or shadow, side of the commonplaces that Wilde was always showing up. But in doing this in a narrative, he mader the page a heavier business.

Still, it was the business Chesterton knew. When the page form floats away, it makes the story part of the book even more of an irritant. On the other hand, the beautiful passages, which are what one remembers of Chesterton, stand out, although they still feel like they have not been roughed up by experience.  The famous passage at the end, for instance.

Syme sprang to his feet, shaking from head to foot.

"I see everything," he cried, "everything that there is. Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe? For the same reason that I had to be alone in the dreadful Council of the Days. So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. 

I began this meaning to protest against the old dog growling about the sin and shame of reading on computers, but I see that, by now, I have varied the bark but barked nevertheless. Well… I am an old man. I have heard the mermaids singing each to each, but I do not think that they will sing to me.

Gender equality - plus d'effort!

When, last year, the Washington Examiner claimed that Clinton’s Senate office paid women less than men, Clinton responded by claiming that the Examiner figures  only included median salaries among full-time, year-round employees. Among all employees, however, median salaries were equal. This devolved into a tit for tat about Clinton, and the larger point was lost.

The larger point shouldn’t be. The careers of women are much more subject to interruption than the careers of men. The reason? The responsibility for child care is still thrown for the most part on women. This is aggravated by the lack of a national pre-k child care program, and the way in which parental leave is largely unmandated in the US. The scandinavian countries have put in place pre-k child care programs, as well as instituting generous parental leave programs for both sexes. This is, paradoxically, important for the equality measure that takes in the whole career path. Men in Norway, for instance, can’t transfer their leave to women, and are under some pressure to take the leave. 68 percent of males do. This means that men also interrupt their career paths.

As this happens, career paths start accomodating this life style change, instead of the life style having to accommodate the career path.

As World Watch put it about the Norwegian example:

“Then there are the childcare services – the guaranteed service to all families with children between one year and school age is seen an important enabler of gender equality. Even though a large number of women work part-time, 77% of Norwegian children between three years old and school age are in childcare for 30 or more hours per week, and 35% of children below three years of age are receiving the same amount, or more, of care. This number has increased significantly in the last six years, rising 25% between 2005 and 2011.”

http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/services/audit-assurance/corporate-reporting/world-watch/norway-gender-gaps-persist.html

These institutional supports still have not produced gender compensation equality. More women are part time, less men take their paternal leave (although the numbers on the latter keep rising), and the quota system that has tried to promote more women in management positions has still not cracked the hegemony of males in top executive positions.

The US will never reach parity between male and female compensation without a Norway style guarantee of childcare service for pre-K children and, incidentally, Kindergarten.

This issue reached into Clinton’s senate office, into Walmart and Goldman Sachs, and, really, everyplace in the labor market.

If Clinton is going to press on the symbolic value of having, at last, a female president, then let’s turn that symbolic power into real changes in the gender status quo.

journalists and prediction 2

Prediction 2

In the sciences, the ideal of prediction is given by a test. A guess – a hypothesis – is made about a situation. The situation is tested in some way and the prediction about the results of the test are based on assumptions about the causal compositon of the situation, what factors are in play, and whether one has assigned them a correct value. Naturally, there are levels of causal consistency. Two factors can, separately, have different effects than they do when combined.

In journalism, there is definitely a reference to science, but more for the prestige than the method. More important in the shaping of public opinion is to make predictions that exclude any radical change in the current order. In other words, predictions are instruments for making the order seem inevitable.

This is correctly intuited by the citizenry. For some, this is reassuring. Often the majority will prefer inertia to the risk of change, even if the order itself is changing in such a way that they are exposed to more and more risks anyway. Journalism at the national level is conducted by people who, at least officially, suffer from none of the woes that they often go out and describe. They officially have insurance. They officially have savings. They officially are not addicted to drugs. They officially are not dodging debt collectors or relying on high interest credit cards to get by on a weekly basis. In actuality, none of this is necessarily true. Neal Gabler, a high profile writer, recently published a piece about his poor financial state. The only point of the piece was to say that one of the top ranked non-fiction writers was not in the official state. It was shocking to the extent that the code is mostly kept. The comments to his article were what you expect, people rushing in blaming him for his plight. The blamers don’t attach their own credit card statements or savings account data to show us what state they are in, but they feel pretty free to heckle, since otherwise, it might turn out that it is not an individual’s fault, but the fault of a system that cannot control life style costs like education or healthcare, and that uses technology not to spread wealth and leisure more equally, but to concentrate it ever more at the top.

The code among journalists, which comes out in their careless us of the “we” word, is that they are on the side of the successful. Radical change, of course, challenges the very canons of success.

That kind of change is what predictionis made, implicitly, against.

The deeper level of this use of prediction is to annex, journalistically, the future to the temporal dimention of the news – the contemporary. It is to press an image of a faux eternity on the forehead of the leviathan who represents our current power arrangements.

The critics of the newspaper recognized that the news “thins” life out – it undermines temporal depth by creating a sort of depthless contemporaneity. From this perspective, we can see not only why the press likes to predict, but why it is so naïve about the motives  for the impulse to predict. 

journalists and prediction 1

On Prediction 1

Obama, at his last roast, said – on a serious note that was quasi-bogus – that the press should seek for the truth (although of course not too hard – Obama’s Justice department, which has sought more injunctions against the press than any since the Nixon administration, will see to that).

Obama’s statement is in the true grain of American piety. We are always being told that the truth, objectively, is seeking the truth. Although the majority of the population doesn’t believe that at all. As David Bowie sang in Five Years about the newscaster who said the world was ending

“News guy wept when he told us
Earth was really dying
Cried so much his face was wet
Then I knew he was not lying.”

Of course, this was before we had an inkling that the ice cap in the Antarctic was likely to diminish by half within our lifetimes. News guys have ceased reporting on this news – it is too depressing, so they leave it to NOVA.

In any case, the self-image of the media – that they are truth seekers – is curiously empty when it comes to what the “truth” means and how to find it. This feeds back into the lack of a definition of journalism. What is it exactly? A science? An art? Is it like the courtroom, a forum for competing versions of events? The courtroom, of course, is not constructed to arrive at the truth, but to arrive at a verdict of guilty or not guilty. But the news guys hesitate before embracing that construct. A newspaper that proclaimed that it would sort the guilty out from the innocent would immediately call down a lot of derision upon its head, and make itself liable for losses in court.

And after all, the news doesn’t quite fall into the categories of guilty/not guilty, although a subset of it does.

There aren’t many books that examine this question. Emil Loebl’s Kulture und Presse, written in 1904 and never, to my knowledge, translated into English, is one of the few to venture into the deeper questions of what the media does and how it does it without falling into banality. Myself, I think one way through this sticky labyrinth is to address the place of prediction in the political press. It is of a queerness…

Prediction, like truth, is a manufactured process. In the financial sector, pediction – “expectations” – plays a distinct role not only in reporting, but on the reported on. Every announcement of quarterly earnings is heralded by predictions of quarterly earnings, and when these predictions are exceeded, or ‘disappointed’, the price of the stock changes accordingly. Or sometimes not. In truth, it is a price change that effects only one day of change, although it can inaugurate longer term change – but one has to remember that the flow of prices are effected by a host of opinions, and probably can’t be traced to a single cause – there are times that the exceeded earnings report actually leads to a decrease in stock price as, retrospectively, expectations are adjusted.

Prediction in the political press is also about expectation. But expectation requires a reference groups – after all, whose expectation is it? I have no expectation at all about Air Liquide’s next quarterly earnings report – but there are people who work in banks and stockbroker firms who specialize in just such things. The people whose expectations count in the political press are similarly insiders, narrative creators. The narrative they create determines what is plausible and what is implausible to the journalists. And self-consciously realizing this power, both the journalists and the administrators in the political image industry are continually shifting what is plausible and what isn’t according to standards that are not defined by what is popular among the electorate, or among the broader mix of the electorate and non-electorate. For instance, it is perennially popular, in these insider circles, to insist that we need to cut social security benefits, although outside those circles, this has zero support. So the only plausible stances on social security is the radical one of preserving it as it is or the more popular one of cutting it. Expanding it isn’t even on the plausibilty scale. The notion, of course, is that after the politically accredited have done their work, the political image makers will do theirs, and like Pavlov’s dogs, we will salivate on cue.

Still, even if we grant that plausibility in political circles – circles that include politicians, lobbyists, think tankers, and journalists – takes this shape, it is still not clear why journalists feel the need to predict. Or what constitutes the basis of their predictions.

Prediction has long been coupled to truth in the sciences, although the nexus is metaphysically obscure, since it has to do with that most knotty of issues, induction. Prediction and prophecy have a distinct family tree, and an ancient social function that was not controlled by a  philosophically credible theory of truth. Prediction was, and is, partly magical, just as the future is partly magical. Our subjectivity, I think, will always cause the future to be partly magical, to seem to bend towards our wishes or prejudices. I can’t go on I’ll go on is not a truth many of us can bear – we were not born to be Beckett characters, for good and ill. Magic has a prestige that is lent to prediction. In, say, economics, this becomes a justification for the whole discipline – at least of the mainstream, where Milton Friedman’s flatheaded positivism is still the ghost below the boards. Oddly, economists are notoriously bad at forecasting. It is a standard joke in the business world to compare the forecasts economists make at the beginning of the year with the national data collected at the end of the year.

However, economists at least have models. Journalists rarely do. This is all the more true with the explanationist, the current crop of hip journalists who have spread out over the face of the land, from Slate to Vox to Upshot (on the new york times) to Politico. These places are manned by second order men – and it is a heavily male phenomenon, which perhaps explains the way explanationists often seem to be mansplaining on a more industrial scale – and their explanations are not so much research heavy as tone heavy. Although any journalist at these places should have access to the universe of scholarly journals at JSTOR or EBSCO, one rarely feels that the explanatory pieces are well researched. In fact, the explanationists are the heirs of the previous decades contrarians. The craze for contrarians rose and fell with the reputation of Christopher Hitchens, and his deep support for the Iraq war. Myself, I felt like Hitchens, during the decade of his celebrity, traded in his rather elegant prose style for the kind of programmed barking that conservative American columnists perfected in the sixties – the sound emitted by James Kirkpatrick whenever the name Martin Luther King Jr. was uttered.

Contrarianism lost its luster, but its moves were taken up, with less barking, by the explanationists, who form a sort of core prophecy group in American journalism.

I’m going to continue this reflection tomorrow.