Eden

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between 

***

“A more delightful country could not be imagined.” That bold statement occurs near the beginning of an article by Christopher Rand, “A Reporter at Large,” in the December 11, 1954 issue of The New Yorker. “Not only beauty but civility is here.”

Unfortunately, Rand laments, “America seems immune to Afghanistanism.”

While the States as whole seemed to be indifferent to the charms of that Asian country, a few Americans were thriving there. For example, a “plucky” American home economist

sometimes stops in at the palace to give the King's sisters-in-law a course in the planning of cold buffets for royal entertaining.

And other American women in the capital of Kabul,

single and married, go out whenever they can and do as much entertaining as their budgets will allow. Some of them ride, some play tennis, and some picnic on Sundays if they can wrangle transport; in their kitchens they supervise the creation of aspics, salads, and casseroles that would have astonished Alexander or Tamerlane.

The Americans in Afghanistan, Rand notes at the conclusion of his report

are newcomers on an ancient stage, and at the moment they seem to be rather tentative newcomers, awaiting a cue. One would like to ask the prompter what the cue will be—what drama is about to unfold—but this would no doubt be a fruitless inquiry. Wait and see, the answer will surely be. Wait and see.

Speculating about the future, Rand tells us, is “a fruitless inquiry” about the land he describes in the opening paragraph as “a large Central Asian oasis in the best manner, with delicious fruit.”

He left out one good bit of advice: "Don't bite into the apple."

Open to Whales

This blog entry contains a number of links which I hope that you will follow. The first link (and the kicking-off point for the blog) is to a cartoon in a recent issue of the New Yorker: http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/Captain-Ahab-looks-out-into-the-ocean-at-a-bright-red-whale-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i9504419_.htm.

It is generally acknowledged that to explain a joke is to ruin it; but in the expectation that you have looked at the cartoon and already gotten the joke, I feel free to expatiate upon it. We laugh at Captain Ahab in the cartoon because in his fervent quest for revenge upon the creature that has cost him his leg he registers only disappointment in not seeing the white whale--when he should be staring with wild surmise at A RED WHALE! As we move out from the joke itself, we should recognize that this discovery of such an anomalous creature offers Ahab the opportunity for a positive fame above that of most men; but he cannot see beyond  his obsession—the desire to destroy the white whale. And so he ends up destroying himself and his fellow men.

*

W. H. Auden's poem “Musee de Beaux Arts” concerns another watery death, that of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and had the wax of his fabricated wings melt away, and so plunged to his demise in the sea. Auden focuses on the painting “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus” by the 16^th Century Flemish master Pieter Breughel. (http://www.artchive.com/artchive/b/bruegel/icarus.jpg) He observes that people who could have witnessed “Something amazing” were too absorbed in their mundane tasks to turn away from them:

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. And so death occurs (in the lower right hand part of the painting) without acknowledgment. * But we need not talk just about death and destruction here. The singlemindedness of obsession or the narrowly-focused pursuit of one's everyday tasks can also lead one to miss the exceptional which is also the beautiful and the sublime. On January 12, 2007, the great American violinist Joshua Bell undertook an experiment (arranged by the Washington Post) to play works by Bach and other masters during the morning rush hour at a location in a Washington metro station. A few months later the British newspaper the Independent decided to replicate the D. C. experiment in London with the help of one of Britain's foremost violinists Tasmin Little. In the paper's words, “The Independent decided to give Little one of the more difficult challenges of her career - to test how people would react to a great artist giving a performance in a totally unexpected setting,” in her case the tunnel under the railway bridge by Waterloo station. The Post clocked 1,097 people passing by Bell during the three-quarters of an hour he played, while the Independent estimated 900 to 1,000 passers-by in the London tunnel during the same amount of time. With some of the world's greatest music being played by great artists how many people were not absorbed in the singleminded purpose that they had “somewhere to get to and [so] sailed calmly on”? In Little's case, eight people, “of whom one was under the age of three.” For Bell, seven stopped. Little summed up the experiment astutely: "Sometimes we're guilty of giving ourselves a goal, even if it's only catching a train, and leaving very little room for spontaneity in our lives. We don't deviate from our pattern. People forget to take into account that something different might happen." They might even discover a red whale! *** For Bell: Video—http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myq8upzJDJc Story--http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html For Little: Story--http://www.jessicaduchen.co.uk/pdfs/indi-2007/tasmin-20apr.pdf

For Auden (full text of "Musee des Beaux Arts"):

http://english.emory.edu/classes/paintings&poems/auden.html

Counting the Spoons

Rummaging among some old papers the other day, I came upon a draft of a letter I composed apparently in the spring of 1962. The draft has no date, but by the letterhead on the paper, I can be confident that it was written no earlier. The draft also does not state who I was writing to, but I assume it was the editor of the New York Times. The issue I was addressing was the recommendation by a commission appointed by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and headed by Henry T. Heald, president of the Ford Foundation, that the City University of New York abandon its long-standing practice of offering students free tuition. (It is worth noting that before Mr. Heald went to the Ford Foundation, he was president of New York University, a private institution in direct competition with the four-year colleges that comprised the City University system at that time: City College, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, and Queens College.) As a graduate of City College, I had no desire to see those who came after me be deprived of the great gift that the City of New York had given me--a free college education.

Here is the text of my letter. The only alterations I have made is spelling out the abbreviations in the original draft.

Dear Sir:

I should like to offer a few comments on your stand for tuition at the City University of New York. Like Mr. Heald, whose committee favored the imposition of tuition at the senior colleges of the University, you seem to believe that free tuition is unprincipled. I derive that conclusion from the fact that you claim, together with Mr. Heald, that it is time to introduce the “principle” of having the City University students pay a token amount of money for their education. The money involved is, of course, not important, for the token payment is not even related to the cost of the student’s education. The token—the “principle”—is the be-all and end-all of the press for tuition. Reason does not dictate the token offering, since the deficit would remain and would still have to be borne by the City and State governments. Were the proponents of tuition to argue for reason, they would have to ask the students to pay all the cost of their education (and not only the students at this one university, but also at all others, public or private). That, I should imagine, would be the only “reasonable” position.

If reason does not dictate the token payment (since it is only a token), what does propel the “principled” proponents of tuition? If I am allowed to make a guess, I should state that tuition is a reflection of the Weltanschauung of its proponents. That is, the tuition-pushers believe that America’s business is business and that “money talks.” Money rules our social, artistic, and governmental spheres—as well as most of our educational scene. The great holdout—the nay-sayer to our commercial jungle is the City University of New York. Money may dictate what books will be published and what plays will be produced (leaving us with commercial wastelands). But money cannot dictate the educational policies of at least one great educational institution. The City University confounds those who believe that everything must have a pricetag and that nothing is good in and of itself. The education received by the undergraduates of the City University must not, despite the efforts of the tuition-pushers, ever be reduced to a commercial standard. The search for knowledge must always remain valuable for intrinsic reasons, not for business ones.

The students at City College, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, and Queens College must never be seduced into believing that it is better to be rich, gross, and business-minded than poor, virtuous, and truth-seeking. Money morality may or may not be in itself evil, but the belief that everything good, true, or beautiful must first pass commercial muster is.

Need I say that the letter—wherever it was sent—was never published, and that the campaign to maintain free tuition was another of the battles that I was on the losing side of.

***

Ralph Waldo Emerson once commented about a dinner guest:

“The louder he spoke of his honor, the faster we counted the spoons.”

I think we might update the remark to:

“When they come at you speaking of principles, guard your wallet!”

Open the Door for Mr. Muckle!

For us South Africans, and for many across the globe, it is impossible to watch Oscar Pistorius run without a stir of emotion, without wanting to break down and cry and shout with joy. Pistorius is no ordinary hero: he is that rare thing, a man with an almost-impossible narrative. (Justice Malala, The Guardian) 

 *

Google “Pistorius hero” and you’ll find what you would expect to find: words like “fallen” and “flawed.” In many newspaper and magazine articles Pistorius’ downfall is linked with those of other former sports legends—especially now, because of its chronological propinquity, with that of Lance Armstrong, recently stripped of his seven Tour de France titles for doping. All the time that the public celebrated the accomplishments of these athletes, asks Jeff MacGregor of ESPN.com, “How much did we really know?”

(Answer: "little.") How many questions went unasked? (Answer: "most.") How much of the "truth" do sportswriters and sports fans really want? (Answer: "Next question, please.")

But, strictly speaking, MacGregor isn’t quite right. The tarnish on the supposed golden crowns was there to be seen. As Malala himself reports,  

There have always been niggling, worrying features to Pistorius. At the London Olympics last year, when he behaved in an unsportsmanlike manner towards another athlete and shocked many, we were reminded of his flaws. . . .There was the drinking and the short temper.

And with Armstrong ("I wrote four books about the guy. All the evidence was out there since 2004 and people will still say there is no evidence”-- 
David Walsh, sportswriter on the Sunday Times), there was, above all, the intimidation and bribery, using his clout within the sport to keep the lid on his doping practices. According to the New York Daily News,

Armstrong was probably the most litigious athlete in the history of sports.
He set a precedent for other athletes who would go on to use guerilla tactics to attempt to intimidate the media or silence accusers.

(Before I go further, it should be noted that while Armstrong has limply admitted to some degree of drug cheating, Pistorius’ killing of his girlfriend has not yet been tried and so we must await his day in a South African court to learn if it was indeed a criminal act.)

But while the Pistorius and Armstrong stories emerged very closely together and became natural fodder for the continuation of the athlete-as-fallen-hero narrative, I prefer to focus on the aspect of their stories that made their athletic success even more striking and their status as celebrities even more elevated. That is, their battles against their misfortunes (Pistorius' disability--being without legs and Armstrong's illness--testicular cancer). I believe that those afflictions led the public to perceive in the two men something even greater than the heroism their athletic feats granted them, and thus made them more immune to critical assessment of their characters by most fans and journalists. The halo effect wasn’t just a product of heroism, but of heroism-cum-sentimentality. Like cute little children, the disabled and the ill are often viewed by us as being innocent of those endearing human qualities the rest of us have—avarice, malice, spite, viciousness, pride, and so on for the next ten pages. 

*

As a reminder of what sweet little children can do, here is Baby LeRoy dunking W. C. Fields’ pocket watch in a tub of molasses: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YvHn4_8n78. Fields rightly pays him back with a furtive boot on the backside.

Here from Fawlty Towers is a desentimentalizing view of the disabled--the self-centered deaf lady: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIVDx-8kWZo

And here is what is probably the best demolishing of reflexive sentimentalizing of the disabled—the destructive Mr. Muckle from Fields’ It’s a Gift: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y189-69cQPs.

Heart of Darkness

Like everybody else in the whole wide universe I watched the Super Bowl on Sunday. Well, I didn’t actually watch it—more like glanced at it. I had it streaming on my computer with the sound off while I really watched on TV the recap of the weekend games in the English Premier League, enjoying the sight of true footballers falling to the ground without being touched, trying to get a penalty called on their opponents. Now that’s sport!

I used to be an enthusiastic watcher of the games of the National Football League. Two things turned enthusiasm into indifference: the scabbing of players against their own union when a strike was called in 1987 and the increasing militaristic posturing and chauvinism associated with the sport. (It amused me to see on Sunday that the suits of the studio analysts were adorned with flag pins, assuring the viewers that the opinions being voiced were those of true Amurricans.)

Since I had no emotional baggage attached to either the Baltimore Ravens or the San Francisco 49’ers, my initial, rather muted, rooting preference for the latter team rested on the fact that I had visited the Bay City twice and Baltimore only once. However, soon after the game began, I noticed that the Frisco quarterback was covered with tattoos, so I resurrected my love for Maryland crab cakes and switched allegiance. (Do you have to be some kind of genius to give people money to inject ink into your body?)

After a lot of falling down and getting up (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xus57BaY3hI) came halftime and the Super Bowl halftime show—which was basically a clone of a beer commercial without the beer. A stage miraculously appeared, along with a bunch of young stooges who surrounded it jumping up and down with their hands in the air—but empty of beer bottles with labels facing the camera. And on that stage was someone apparently named Bouncy, who did what she could to live up to her name. I cannot comment on the content of her songs (they may very well have matched Schubertian Lieder for all I know—sound was off, remember), but I can point out something that I have been aware of for a long time: the triteness of the clichéd wiggles and twitches that pass for rock choreography. Seen it once, seen it a hundred times.

The best part of the game was, of course, the blackout. Now I had something to root for: a hope that the lights would not go back on that evening and that the buttoned-up and anal National Football League would have to improvise. Could it marshall the troops and come back the next day (or evening)? God, I wanted to see the league have to scramble for a solution like after a loose fumble. Unfortunately, someone found some electrical tape and spliced together a few wires.

Ruined the rest of my evening.

Personal Annoyance Factor

There were only 37 minutes to go. Surely we could make it to the end? But having spent the last two hours hoping vainly that things must get better, I gave in. “Let’s get out of here,” I said. And so it was, on the film’s £8 million-grossing opening weekend, that I walked out of Les Misérables. 

Emma Gosnell
Deputy editor, Seven

 ***

I, too, have recently been doing some walking out—figuratively speaking in my case.

Just before beginning to write this blog entry I stopped reading an article from New Scientist  magazine on the subject of the equivalence of gravitational mass and inertial mass. The article was well-written, but informative beyond my needs and, eventually, easy comprehension. I put down the text, unfinished but with admiration for the author.

Shortly before that, despite having read all but about the last forty pages of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s bestseller,The Black Swan, during my recent trip to Argentina, I found that upon my return to the normalvision hearth I could not abide reading a paragraph more. But not for the reason I stopped on the science article. Taleb’s book, for those who don’t know it, is about outlier events (“Black Swans” in his terminology) that unexpectedly pop-up out of nowhere and upset—for good or (more likely) bad—the established order of things. Although somewhat repetitious, the book is well-argued and worthy of one’s attention. So why did I stop reading it? Because it set off my Personal Annoyance Factor (PAF, hereafter). While there are numerous ways one can put off by other people, I reserve the term PAF for those occasions when one is slowly afflicted Chinese water-torture style by the continual dribbling of another person’s off-putting mannerisms and/or affectations. In Taleb’s case it was his smugness and self-satisfaction that eventually broke through my PAF level. That and a snideness about those he disagreed with which raised a ha-ha in Chapter One but became petty and tiresome as Taleb kept it up. So, just as one deals with an ungracious—though perhaps intelligent and witty—fellow cocktail party guest, I excused myself and went in search of another drink.

I first came up with the term PAF about six months ago, as I was getting more and more annoyed while reading another well-acclaimed book, this one on a topic I had been compiling notes about for a blog entry—sincerity. It was a much shorter book than Swan, but I tossed it aside much sooner than I did the economics book. It aroused my PAF to the point that I was moved to write one of my rare Amazon reviews about it (I believe that I have submitted only three other product reviews all told—despite spending half my Social Security check there: one was in praise of a favorite author, David McKie; another to point out that the plot summary of a book was totally wrong; and the third was to warn potential buyers of a video that the movie was dubbed). As I read the book on sincerity, I realized that although the author had done a good deal of research, he was zipping through history at breakneck speed, with a look-at-me grin on his face and a look-at-all-the-authors-I-can-lump-together-in-one-sentence self-satisfaction oozing from the page (Oh, I’m soooo smart!). And I got more and more annoyed as I read. Finally, I quit and produced my two-star review. I had intended to award three stars, but the more I thought about the book as I wrote the review, the more my PAF pricked me and so I punched the two-star button.

A slap in the face (literal or figurative) may make one angry and desirous of revenge. But at least it’s sudden. It’s the insidious drip-drip-dripping into one’s life of another’s negative character traits that sets off my PAF.

Knife in the Back

Many moons ago I taught a class in modern drama as an adjunct at a nearby community college. After finishing our discussions of the plays of Henrik Ibsen, our first playwright, I required an essay paper from the class. Following the precedent of my own undergraduate English department, where we were allowed (or perhaps, forced) to devise a suitable topic for investigation, I had the students choose their own topics. Upon reading the submitted papers, I was dismayed to discover that two of them were dead-on plagiarisms (they were completely identical except for the first verb—one had “is,” the other “was”), while a few others had rather a smell about them.

I had recently taught at a college that had an institutional policy on plagiarism, but I didn’t know if the community college (or the English department thereof) had one, and was, therefore, at a loss at how to handle the issue. Having a friend who had been in the department for a short while, I sought his advice. No, there was no institutional or departmental policy that he knew of, and he advised me to handle the case as best I could.

Having decided that I didn’t want to get into the accusation business or a name-and-shame exposure, I announced at the beginning of the next class session that I had foolproof knowledge of plagiarism and since I could not trust the work of those students, I advised them (without naming them) to drop the class, which they do for at least one more week without academic penalty. It seemed the perfect solution. I could be rid of them without beating them over the head, and they could be thankful to escape punishment. Some hope!

At the end of the class, a very intelligent student (judging by the level of his class participation) came up to me to confess that because he had been pressed for time he had submitted a copied paper (ironically, it was one that I never suspected) and apologized and said he would drop the class. However, the blatant plagiarists went another route—to the office of the department chairman, who did not back me up, but who subsequently called me into his office and on the carpet for my allegedly draconian punishment. I tried—to no avail—to point out to him that, on the contrary, I was being quite lenient, as there was no failing or other punishment being meted out for the students’ deceitful acts. The chairman then mandated that I devise some other way of dealing with the issue.

What to do? I could give the plagiarized papers an “F” grade, but would that be fair to the dull student or two who sweated over an honestly-conceived “F” paper, one that was wrongheaded or foolish? I thought not. And so decided to give the plagiarized papers a double “F.” For some reason the guilty parties did not squeal loudly at that. I have no recollection of what grades the plagiarists ended up with at the completion of the course. But I can report that I never taught at that school again.

A decade or so later, I received a phone call from my friend in the English department to tell me of a letter found at the back of a file cabinet during a ritual clean-out of old papers. It was an unsolicited testamonial from a student (or a married couple, I don’t recall) in that modern drama class in praise of my teaching. I immediately perceived a universal truth: Complaint Goes Straight to the Top, While Praise Lies Buried at the Back of a File Cabinet!

In my last blog entry I offered three of my laws but did not include the above observation as my fourth, because someone else got there first—Marc Antony in Julius Caesar: 

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.  

(Act III, Scene 2)

*

Still, a figurative knife in the back is better than a literal stab to stomach.