The Republic of Dissent

Encore cette stupide exception culturelle

I agree wholeheartedly with Art Goldhammer on this :

Anyone who watches French TV or goes to the movies is aware that whatever "cultural exception" has existed since World War II has not done much to ward off American influences on French popular culture. Whether one deplores or applauds those influences (and I personally think neither deprecation nor applause is warranted), a trade negotiation is not a good place to stop it. In such a venue, money is what counts, not culture.

Perhaps as a cultural mongrel myself, capable of appreciating both high and low, domestic and foreign, I simply don't evaluate the stakes as the self-appointed defenders of European culture do. I say, let people decide what they like. I may often not approve of other people's choices, but I don't think that taste can be improved by imposing quotas, any more that it can be legislated or enforced by curricular edict. I do know that part of my love of France came from watching some fairly low-brow French films. I would have lost something if my government had tried to "protect" me from them. But American governments have never been much interested in that kind of protection (as opposed to prophylactic censorship of supposed sexual immorality). The mask of antiphilistinism is more commonly worn in Europe, but those who wear it are less concerned with the culture of the masses than they are with the profits to be made from them.

 

Reasons to read

I agree with Claire Messud on this (hat tip: Corey Robin ) :

If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities

Absolute justice

Pertinent stuff from Any Davidson on the Steubenville's rape trial:

There is something deeply harmful in all of the adults reinforcing the idea that the lives of teen-age boys are destroyed when a girl says what they have done. There is also something incomplete about just replying that they deserved the consequences (as much as they do). For one thing, it can mean asking a sixteen-year-old to be the one to judge the weight of her own trauma. It isn’t trivializing the seriousness of the sentence to say that teen-agers always think, when one door is closed, that everything is over, and that it’s the job of grownups to explain that it isn’t. A different life is not a worthless one. (Absent parents, not incidentally, are a theme of this story.)

The problem is that Americans are as obsessed with absolute justice as they are with absolute freedom.

Standard bearers

Sugary excerpt of the day from Jennifer Vanasco:

Why do we in the media try to make some women standard bearers for all women? (...) A man who writes an inspiring business book meant to help people get ahead at work doesn’t have his wrist slapped because he’s promoting himself as well — of course he is! And a man who tries to change a failing corporate culture is more likely to be lauded as courageous than accused as cowardly, as [Marissa] Mayer was. (...) Not everything every woman does is a social statement. And it shouldn’t have to be.

Ah Québec!

It is sad to realize that Quebeckers take French more seriously than France :

It began, as do many things these days, with a tweet. On February 19th, Massimo Lecas, co-owner of an Italian restaurant, Buonanotte, in Montreal, wrote that he had received a letter from the office warning him that there were too many Italian words (such as "pasta") on his menu. This was a violation of Quebec’s language charter, he was told, and if they were not changed to the French equivalents (pâtes in the case of pasta) he would face a fine. (...)Much to Quebec’s credit, French is alive and well there, even though the province's 7.4m French-speakers (94% of Quebec's population) are barraged with English from the rest of Canada and from the United States. It’s not easy for the government to find the right balance between preserving French and making peace with a world where English is the language of business. What makes the job harder is that the guardians of French also want to keep out foreign words, whereas English tends to appropriate them. Language is of course also a deeply political issue in Quebec, a former French colony conquered by Britain before it became part of Canada. The current Parti Québécois (PQ) government wants to make the province an independent country.Diane de Courcy, the Quebec minister responsible for language, tried at first to shrug off the pasta stories, saying she was satisfied with the work of the inspectors. When the bad publicity persisted, she announced a review of that particular case. The PQ government is currently attempting to toughen language laws, and pastagate was becoming a distraction. But by March 8th it was clear something more was needed. Quebec was the butt of too many jokes. Ms de Courcy announced that Louise Marchand, president and director-general of the language police, was leaving her post effective immediately.

The Closet, the sexual revolution, and the female condition

From Nidra Poller:

Contraception and abortion alone could not bring about the desired transformation of the female condition. They were the technology. The metaphysics was what has become known as “gender studies.” In the early days of Women’s Liberation it was makeshift ideology peddled in volumes of look-alike fiction and non-fiction best sellers shouting that maternity was a drag, femininity a hype, sexual differences induced by cynical manipulation, love and marriage an extension of the military industrial complex, and men were chauvinist pigs. No more pink for girls and blue for boys. Sexually marked toys were not abandoned but switched: cars and trucks for girls, dolls and tea sets for boys. Women wanted, or were told they wanted, something called equality.

The harbingers of this “sexual revolution” were, more often than not, closet lesbians. Later we not only discovered that they were lesbians telling heterosexual women to kick their men in the balls and out of their lives, they were also playing stereotypical sexual roles in private, some as simpering mistresses to others more macho than any man could be.

I'm so speechless that I've lost my French!

'Breeding' women who can't win

Awesome stuff from Hilary Mantel:

Marie Antoinette was a woman eaten alive by her frocks. She was transfixed by appearances, stigmatised by her fashion choices. Politics were made personal in her. Her greed for self-gratification, her half-educated dabbling in public affairs, were adduced as a reason the French were bankrupt and miserable. It was ridiculous, of course. She was one individual with limited power and influence, who focused the rays of misogyny. She was a woman who couldn’t win. If she wore fine fabrics she was said to be extravagant. If she wore simple fabrics, she was accused of plotting to ruin the Lyon silk trade. But in truth she was all body and no soul: no soul, no sense, no sensitivity. She was so wedded to her appearance that when the royal family, in disguise, made its desperate escape from Paris, dashing for the border, she not only had several trunk loads of new clothes sent on in advance, but took her hairdresser along on the trip. Despite the weight of her mountainous hairdos, she didn’t feel her head wobbling on her shoulders. When she returned from that trip, to the prison Paris would become for her, it was said that her hair had turned grey overnight.

Antoinette as a royal consort was a gliding, smiling disaster, much like Diana in another time and another country. But Kate Middleton, as she was, appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished. When it was announced that Diana was to join the royal family, the Duke of Edinburgh is said to have given her his approval because she would ‘breed in some height’. Presumably Kate was designed to breed in some manners.

Beauty is always unproblematic and uncontroversial when it is/appears to be empty and yes, David Cameron can't read.

Fertility not love

Oh no:

Much of the decline in fertility correlates with the development of poorer countries, increasing literacy and education of women, a migration from the country to the city, and a collapse in infant mortality rates with the arrival of modern medicine. All good things. But as Last describes, a population that is both shrinking and increasingly elderly leads to stalled innovation and other serious economic and political problems.

Everyone should be welcome to live life as they choose, remaining single or childless if that suits them. Freedom really does matter. But at the same time we ought to be thinking hard about how to make our society and our culture more child-welcoming. It’s a matter of life and death.

Kill me now! Why should humans be eternal?

Laisse tomber les filles

Pertinent stuff from Carly Lewis:

Male writers have had decades to remedy themselves, but still write jejunely about women, accentuating one isolated, exploitable trait (attractive, rebellious, sweet, rude, slutty, rich) for the sake of producing more easily understood subject matter. Until they learn (or at least try to learn) how to write about female subjects in a way that does not purposefully weave paternalistic generalizations into every paragraph, I propose a moratorium on this stagnant approach to literary writing. Let’s allow women to write about women for a little while. Maybe then we can swap the prevalent illusions of femininity for realistic portraits of women as complex human characters. I’m not saying that women are better writers than men, and I’m not saying all men lack the will to rise above stereotypes in their work (do you hear that, comment section?). I’m saying that something needs to change in the way literary profiles are written and the way the lives within them are handled, and that this would be a good step toward smoothing out what is currently an unbalanced gender structure in literary journalism. Too often, the privileged male writers whose bylines dominate the publications we read fail to write about women in a way that doesn’t simplify female existences into condescending phrases like “sassy kitten” and “bombshell.”

 

America is America

From Paul Barrett:

The reason why we can’t learn much in a practical sense from other countries is that we’re not other countries, and we’re not going to become other countries. We’re not going to have Australia’s society with Australia’s values and Australia’s attitudes toward firearms.

If your desire is to have a society that is more like that, it would be much easier for you to move to that society than to transpose that society onto this 300 million-person, 3,000 mile wide, incredibly complex, culture-of-many-cultures country.

Well d'oh or may be not!

Sexual Revolution and Counterrevolution

Sugary excerpt of the day from Kathryn Joyce:

Even among nonhysterics, John Kerry’s 2004 defeat was attributed by liberal writers in part to his outspoken wife, and the excesses of the Tea Party are denounced most vigorously by Republican moderates who ridicule the movement’s female politicians as unserious.

Even in the Democrats’ 2012 convention, lauded for women’s central role, First Lady Michelle Obama’s otherwise powerful speech discounted her entire professional life in favor of her role as “mom in chief.”  Listening to that speech, I don’t hear hysteria but rather calculation, which is sadly realistic at that. Understanding why it’s still necessary means understanding what continues to drive the backlash. And it demonstrates that, if the sexual counterrevolution is ever over, the unfinished work of the original revolution is still waiting.

Pornography and propaganda

The quote of the year, so far, is from the great Michael Haneke (hat tip: Jennifer Pan ):

In my definition, anything that could be termed obscene departs from the bourgeois norm. Whether concerned with sexuality or violence or another taboo issue, anything that breaks with the norm is obscene. Insofar as truth is always obscene, I hope that all of my films have at least an element of obscenity.

By contrast, pornography is the opposite, in that it makes into a commodity that which is obscene, makes the unusual consumable, which is the truly scandalous aspect of porno rather than the traditional arguments posed by institutions of society. It isn't the sexual aspect but the commercial aspect of porno that makes it repulsive. I think that any contemporary art practice is pornographic if it attempts to bandage the wound, so to speak, which is to say our social and psychological wound. Pornography, it seems to me, is no different from war films or propaganda films in that it tries to make the visceral, horrific, or transgressive elements of life consumable. Propaganda is far more pornographic than a home video of two people fucking.

Cheap

Ah:

Though a majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal, several states retain trigger laws that would come into force if Roe v Wade were ever overturned (see map). Leaving them in place is a cheap way for politicians to place themselves on one side of a culture war without having to accept the consequences of their position.

Nowadays, in America and elsewhere, being successful in politics means being cheap!

Sexual rights

Food for thought from Alice M Milller via Balkinzation:

Contemporary sexual rights work has some of this same tendency in the hands of the nations who have picked up the standard as part of their geopolitical positioning.  Moreover, perhaps because sexual rights has had to gain credibility as a form of rights work, advocates have often mistaken respectability for respect.   There are many moments in which ‘progress’ in the sexual rights claims of one group has been made by the strategic clambering of one group  up the ladder of respectability over the backs of others.   Some sub-groups ascend the sexual hierarchy by conforming to as many of the prevailing standards of sexual legitimacy as possible.   Other advocates seek the longer and more difficult route of changing the standards of sexual legitimacy for everyone. Think of the respectability attached to monogamy, sex without money, regulated fertility.  These short cuts to advance by groups are not new problems, or unique to sexuality, nor are they likely to end—they are part and parcel of social struggles. 

Amour and Beckett

From Stefany Anne Golberg:

When we say that love is ineffable, as Beckett knew, what we mean is that, when we love, we don’t know what the hell we are doing. We can’t stop talking through it, trying to figure it out. We think we ought to be talking about everything, doing everything, doing anything — breaking into spontaneous rage, talking about suicide, playing games, complaining about our boots — instead of just loving. We wait and wait and wait. Inevitably, boredom creeps in, terror creeps in. (...) When we attempt to utter what we think we know, Beckett wrote, we are doomed, doomed to fail. Trying to talk about love may be the most futile performance of all. But just because words fail love doesn’t mean that love fails. Samuel Beckett is not known for writing explicitly about love. But he was writing about love all the time.

There is a lot of Samuel Beckett in Michael Haneke!

Bad-man stories

Sugary excerpt of the best article I read last weekend from Scott Reynold Nelson on Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, which I'm planning to see because of what Roger Ebert said about it and because I don't want Spike Lee to be right in this case :

Immediately after the Civil War, African-American men built these powerful, folkloric characters in a world where slavery had ended but attacks against black men and women had intensified. The stories of quiet, unpredictable, and violent men who were fearless and died at the end could be simultaneously cautionary tales about the dangers of challenging white authority and covert stories about the thrill of resistance.

They are fantasies about striking back. Yet they are frank about how dangerous fighting back could be. Bad-man stories passed into rhymed insults called "the dozens," then into blues songs, then into rap, and finally into hip-hop.

They were also emulated and twisted by white interpreters into "coon" songs popular for decades, then by Jim Croce in "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown," and finally wended their way into blaxploitation films. Indeed, the stories have been so distorted that it is difficult to learn about the original songs, the parodies having outshone the originals. The legendary African-American bad man became irresistible to white interpreters simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the image of a quiet, violent, fearless black destroyer. The bad-man story that freed people told about slavery and its aftermath was quickly converted into the story of the sullen black stranger, the zoot-suit Negro with a razor in his pocket, the dangerous ghetto demigod.

Sex makes Americans stupid

Great stuff from Katherine Franke:

In an ironic sort of way, sex and sexuality have been collateral victims of recent advances in the rights of gay people to the extent that their claims have been framed as a right to family, not a right to sexual freedom.  Whether by design or by accident, some of the advocates of marriage equality who have defended and celebrated the sanctity, dignity and special-ness of marriage have fortified the rather conservative notion that sex outside of marriage (whether it be adultery or hook ups with people you find out the internet) is somehow indecent and worthy of reproach.

            Thomas Friedman famously observed that “9/11 made us stupid” – well, sex, it seems, makes us even stupider.  At precisely the moment when gay people’s right to marry seems to be reaching a positive tipping point, sexuality is being driven back into the closet as something shameful and incompatible with honor (in the case of Petraeus) or decency (as in the case of Clash).   How did we get to this curious place, a place with a politics that would be almost unimaginable to the sexual freedom fighters of Stonewall?

I wish Franke hadn't used Tom Friedman to ake such a poignant point.

Collective guilt

Great stuff from Sadhvi Sharma:

The Delhi rape has led to an outburst of middle-class angst about modern India and its populace, and has generated widespread demand for more authoritarian social control. Commentators have turned this extreme act of violence into a symbol of nationwide decay, encouraging every Indian to assume guilt. With everything from Bollywood to Indian family values, from economic growth to parenting style, being called into question, the reaction to the rape appears more and more removed from the incident itself.(...)There is something perverse about the way we’re all encouraged to feel culpable for this crime. The aspiring, emerging nation of India appears simultaneously anxious about its economic and social transformations, and particularly about how those transformations are impacting on a certain class of men, who are apparently ill-equipped to deal with them. ‘Is the sight of a young, smartly-dressed educated female professional generating a sense of displacement in men?’, asks one journalist. The feminist writer Urvashi Butalia thinks an increase in the incidence of rape in India is related to the slowing down of economies in recent years and the fact that the ‘slice of the pie’ is getting smaller. That is, faced with rapid economic and cultural change, the ordinary Indian male becomes an even more brutal creature.

Tragedies encourage irrationality and oversimplifications for accepting that le mal, evil, unconscionable acts are banal and that shit happens is usually difficult and so unsatisfying!  

Newtown and Nakedness

Best thing I read about the Newtown tragedy so far from Bill Benzon:

Remember the story of the Emperor's New Clothes? The Emperor parades before the town proudly display his costly and gorgeous new outfit, NOT! For, as everyone sees, he's naked. But no one says anything for fear of displeasing the Emperor. And then one little boy blurts out "he's bloody naked!" and the whole delusion collapses.

Everyone saw what the boy saw, but no one knew that their neighbor saw the same thing. Everyone was quaking in their boots in fear that they, and they alone, couldn't see the Emperor's fine raiment. Therefore, there must be something terribly wrong with them. But there wasn't. Their eyesight was fine. The little boy's cry showed them that.

These terrible gun tragedies are like the little boy's cry. Now we all can see IT. But what is this IT that we can see, and why do we so quickly forget that we saw it? Why does seeing IT seem to make this failure of vision even worse? For that's what it does: "But after moments of healing, the partisan divide in attitudes toward guns has seemed only to accelerate after similar past events, as in Columbine, Colo." Just what is it that's been polarizing the American body politic over the last forty years?

The American literary ivory tower

Interesting stuff from Tim Parks:

America is very much a net exporter of literature. Its novels are read and translated worldwide, where readers generally accept miles and Fahrenheit, pounds and ounces, AM and PM and indeed have grown accustomed to these old-fashioned, American oddities (when it comes to doing science, of course, Americans use the more practical European systems). In Germany, for example, where around fifty percent of novels are foreign works in translation, Roth’s and Franzen’s characters are not obliged to discuss distances in kilometers.

Conversely, America imports very little—only three to four percent of novels published in the States are translations—and what it does import it tends to transform as far as possible into its own formulas and notations, in much the same way that Disney has turned every fable and myth worldwide into a version of Mickey Mouse. This situation is a measure of American power, but brings with it the danger of mental closure and inflexibility. Speaking recently at a conference in Milan, the Italian literary agent Marco Vigevani, lamented that fewer and fewer American editors are able to read novels in Italian, French, and especially German, and this inevitably has reduced their enthusiasm for publishing foreign literature, since they are obliged to rely on external readers for advice.

 

Tocqueville, Europe and America

From Danilo Breschi:

In America, the matrix of individual freedom is "republican," and it is older than equality. It creates, within American democracy, devices of self-government decentralizing the exercise of sovereignty: freedom of speech and of the press, "jury," the idea of law as a duty to partake in public affairs.

In Europe, equality is imposed before individuals develop awareness of their own freedom and independently of any practice of the latter. The matrix of the continental idea of equality is absolutist and is ensured by the royal gaze. In The Old Regime and the Revolution, he wrote that "this kind of love for independence grows out of certain particular temporary mischiefs wrought by despotism, and is never durable; it passes away with the accident which gave it birth. What seemed to be love for liberty turns out to be mere hatred of a despot." For Tocqueville a "habit of despotism" was ingrained in the French people, becoming a sort of widespread popular culture.

Another reason to read Tocqueville.

The reader

From Angela Bourke in the Dublin Review of Books:

Writing culture assumes “the reader” to be male, until marked otherwise ‑ statesmen and churchmen are commonly portrayed reading ‑ but the unsettling of this assumption has been a critical pastime for decades, under the joined banners of reader-response and feminist theory. A text’s meaning changes over time, according to the culture where it is read and understood, and according to who reads it. If that person is a woman, the meaning may become excitingly unpredictable, not because women are capricious, or any more so than men, but because little in our education, even if we are women, has prepared us for how anyone but a white, northern hemisphere, heterosexual male, will read.

Tragedy with choice

From Colin Burrow :

We moderns have moved on. We’re all free agents. We make choices. Choices are what make us. So give me tragedy with choice and give it to me now. Instead of just blubbing and crying out ‘NOoooo’ while what you don’t want to happen happens, why not just turn to page 394 and get a new ending? Cool. Indeed, totally friggin’ awesome.

I am wondering whether choosing has the same importance/meaning when it is totally uninformed/ill-informed for after all the current times are ones where people are just passionate about what they don't know and what they don't care to know!  

The American infatuation with innocence

I agree strongly with Corey Robin on this:

Only a country steeped in myths of innocence would find the most conventional and boring kind of realism about politics to be the trumpet blast of Truth, Brave Truth.

We see these quicksilver shifts, from innocence to cynicism or realism, in the culture all the time, especially its more elite sectors—though sometimes they go in the reverse direction. Think of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, how the wise-cracking cynic Jean Arthur becomes a true believer. Or Dave, where the Sigourney Weaver character makes the same pilgrimage. (Interestingly, in both cases it’s a woman who loses her cynicism and discovers her innocence via falling in love with a man.)

But whether it’s the cynic discovering or recovering her innocence, or the innocent losing his innocence, the story of politics among cultural and political elites in this country is always the same, toggling back and forth between two positions that are little more than the competing wisdom of juveniles.

Oh America, I have news for you even innocence can be sinful dirty complicated. As a matter of fact, in America, innocence is a way to fight the terrifying realization that purity in the modern world is impossible.

All this reminds me of the awfully good movie Agnes of God with Jane Fonda in which a young and yes innocent nun gets pregnant and there is throughout the strong suggestion that she had sex with God, which makes it more than ok, not an exploitation, not a perverted act or a worse not one of a sexual discovery and empowerment but a religiously wonderful occurrence for the Mother Superior (Anne Bancroft )  declares solemnly and fanatically in the end of the movie that to be innocent is to be god's victim.

Voltairian Irony

In honor of Thanksgiving, the sugary excerpt of the day from John Fletcher which comes a day after Voltaire's 318 birthday :

Irony is a notoriously two-edged weapon: ambiguity is of the essence. Writers seek to be understood à demi mot, that is, they wish for their overt statement to be grasped, and immediately afterwards, if not simultaneously, for their “true” meaning to force itself upon the reader’s attention. For this to happen, the skill of writers must be such that what they write will neither be too obvious (in which case there would be no irony, merely sarcasm), nor too obscure (for then the point would be lost). But the reader’s intelligence and sensitivity must also engage if the writer’s half-hidden meaning is not to pass altogether unnoticed. In other words, long before it became a commonplace in literary theory that the pursuit of literature necessitates the engagement of writer and reader in an act of cooperation rather than in the passive reception of a monologue, authors were in fact relying heavily on their audience’s ability to go half-way to meet them; if this did not happen, ironical discourse fell on stony ground. How often we say of a person in everyday life that he or she is “deaf to irony,” or that “irony is lost” on her or him. Obtuse people will receive only a writer’s overt meaning, and take it seriously; Voltaire’s belief that “a tyrant can only be spoken to in parables” holds true only if the tyrant in question is open to persuasion and willing to engage in the interpretation of double-entendres. But accomplished ironists usually manage to be sufficiently plain so that all but the most obtuse reader grasps the point they are obliquely making.

I share Baudelaire's poetic contempt for Voltaire, which is expressed magnificently in this super and still relevant maxim:

Je m'ennuie en France, surtout parce que tout le monde y ressemble à Voltaire.

Emerson a oublié Voltaire dans ses Représentants de l'humanité. Il aurait pu faire un joli chapitre intitulé : Voltaire, ou l'anti-poète, le roi des badauds, le prince des superficiels, l'anti-artiste, le prédicateur des concierges, le père Gigogne des rédacteurs du Siècle.  (I am bored in France, especially as every one resembles Voltaire.  Emerson forgot Voltaire in his "Representative Men." He could have made a fine chapter entitled Voltaire or The Antipoet, the king of boobies, the prince of the shallow, the anti-artist, the preacher of innkeepers, the father who "lived in a shoe" of the editors of the century.)

America, the prudish tease

From Walter Russell Mead:

We are simultaneously the most licentious and sexually open society since Nero was fiddling around in Rome, and the most uptight and rigid country this side of Saudi Arabia. Our social judgements and tolerance about sexual behavior swing back and forth between the views of the Marquis de Sade and those of Cotton Mather depending on complex and ever changing calculations.

As far as I can make out, the authorities American society listens to most on the subject of sex are Hugh Hefner and Gloria Steinem. We combine, somehow, a pleasure seeking hook up culture with a feminist puritanism that takes us back to the 19th century bluestockings, and the line between the libertine and the bluestocking in our culture is constantly shifting and highly politicized.

My take on the subject is that America has no problem with sex as long as it remains a form of entertainment, which doesn't shake the foundations of its society.

Sex in America can't be about solely pleasure and amorality. That's why Americans have less of a problem with Porn stars whom it believes just work the money than it does with cheating/sexually adventurous politicians whom it believes are just bad people.

 

Perpetuity

Interesting assertion from Frank Furedi:

It is important to realise that much of the conventional wisdom on the impact of abusive behaviour is driven by moral revulsion rather than by disinterested research. Of course, it is entirely legitimate morally to condemn behaviour that society deems evil. But moral condemnation should not be confused with a medical diagnosis. Nor is it an alternative to seeking and gaining clarity on the matter at hand. We do no favours to those who have suffered at the hands of adult predators if we treat them as the casualties of a moral drama.

The problem with modern societies is that they not only like victims, they love the idea of perpetual victimhood and enduring 'sin' because it makes it easier to sacralize and indeed objectify victims instead of empathizing truly with them to allow them to remain people tout simplement.

Slaves to passion

This sentence from Andrew O'Hogan on the BBC's child abuse scandal bothers me :

A man can’t help whom he fancies, but [Gilbert] Harding seems to have differed from the other BBC paedophiles only inasmuch as he kept it mainly to himself.

I have a hard time with the idea that man/people are just slaves of their passions, victims of their urges, their obsessions and never really choose the objects of their affection. Furthermore, fancying kids isn't about sex and taste.

Internet dating

Interesting stuff from Emily Witt:

Internet dating alerted me to the fact that our notions of human behaviour and achievement, expressed in the agglomerative text of hundreds of internet dating profiles, are all much the same and therefore boring and not a good way to attract other people. The body, I also learned, is not a secondary entity. The mind contains very few truths that the body withholds. There is little of import in an encounter between two bodies that would fail to be revealed rather quickly. Until the bodies are introduced, seduction is only provisional.

In the depths of loneliness, however, internet dating provided me with a lot of opportunities to go to a bar and have a drink with a stranger on nights that would otherwise have been spent unhappy and alone.

Isn't technology so human!

American fortresses

From Richard Davenport-Hines :

Americans are increasingly sundered from judgements and values at variance with their own, and insulated in like-minded communities which reinforce ignorance, incomprehension and inhumanity.

I don't this is true solely of Americans.

Successful integration and assimilation

A troubling assertion from Anatol Lieven:

White middle-classes in America have become more accepting of people of other colour (at least in public), without by any means necessarily becoming more tolerant of people of other culture. Successful integration still requires assimilation to conservative middle class values, including nationalism and religion.

I wonder what does Lieven mean by 'people of other culture' and  whether to him people of other colour are different than  members of the American white middle classes.

 

Arming oneself for the future

From Richard Ford :

Where I was teaching last year, at the University of Mississippi, it became known to me that it was now legal for my students to bring concealed weapons to class. Loaded pistols. I know ... it’s “impossible to imagine such a thing happening in Oxford or Cambridge”. This gun news was information I didn’t quite know what to do with. Should I just not even show up? (I’m too cowardly, plus they wouldn’t pay me, and I needed the money.) It was a fiction writing course, so should I maybe tone down my criticisms – in case somebody might not like what I say and decide to shoot me? It gives a new spin to the notion of “teacher evaluations”.

I was, after all, teaching the class, acting as the authority figure, so shouldn’t I be armed too? Be fully prepared to engage the students’ savage need to learn? This poses a new problem in pedagogy: the student as assailant. Is this just a “symptom” (everything’s a symptom, nothing’s ever just what it is) of the US falling further behind the studious Chinese and the quick-witted Indians in college achievement? “Arming oneself for the future” taken literally?

I don't understand why Americans are so worry about the Chinese or rather are choosing to believe their fears rather than to just learn about China and the outside world.

Bullying

From Wendy Kaminer:

There is much to decry in current hysteria about bullying: It teaches students that they have no right to give offence or make each other uncomfortable. It doesn’t teach them how to engage in debate. It redefines free speech as civil speech and then defines civility, between adults, as language fit for children.

I would like to be a contrarian and to agree...but I'm hesitating because I don't believe that all debates are useful.

To like a 'rapist'

I agree with Alan A on this:

(...) many people were shocked by the support – from the film industry, this time – for the fugitive Roman Polanski, who drugged and sodomised a child. How could Whoopi Goldberg opine that this was not “rape-rape”?

Well, you’re seeing this happening again, with Assange.  The message is clear: if you like a rapist, and particularly if you like the rapist’s politics, if you see him as “one of us”, then rape is just fine and dandy.

Sex game theory

Sugary excerpt of the day from Michele Pridmore-Brown's review of Paul Seabright's The War of the Sexes, How conflict and cooperation have shaped men and women from prehistory to the present :

In general, the male evolves to “want” to score at all costs – whether that means being a bully, a martyr or something else entirely. The female, however, “knows” the real stakes are viable offspring. Of course, neither sex “knows” or “wants”, which would imply sentience or introspection; rather, they are unconscious vehicles for such behaviours. Insects and humans alike, we are the descendants of those who happened to play the game exceptionally well.

Europe and inherited religious values

One of the dumbest things I have heard this fall from Fergus Downie:

Europe does not have enough of the inherited religious value fat required to sustain an ideological front against Islamism in the way that America occasionally looks like it might – and a scrupulous Weberian legalism is probably the best option available for a continent allergic to the cultivation of strong passions and the fanaticism of principle.

Remaining in Solitude

The sentence du jour from Matt Love:

Remaining in solitude is probably the hardest thing for most people to do in Western culture today.

What's 'western culture'?

You are who you were

Theodore Dalrymple 'eulogyzes' Eric Hobsbawm:

A writer of my acquaintance once turned down an invitation to dinner with Hobsbawm (who rarely refused any honor or privilege that the unjust capitalist state could offer him) on the grounds that if Hobsbawm’s political wishes had come to fruition, he would have had his proposed guest shot in short order. A man who could think until late in his life, as Hobsbawn did, that the murder of 20 million people would be justified if it brought about a socialist utopia, would hardly balk at the death of a single bourgeois guest.

I feel dirty...I guess 'stalinism' is the true original sin, the one you can never expiate.

Post-modern

I agree with Chris Dillow on this even though I am wrestling with his definition of the postmodern:

In a postmodern world in which all all discourses are equally valid regardless of their truth-value, the claims of the ruling class are not exposed for the lies and imbecilities they are.

The personal is the geopolitical

Sugary excerpt from Pankaj Mishra's review of Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie's memoir:

Rushdie's neat oppositions between the secular and the religious, the light and the dark, and rational literary elites and irrational masses do not clarify the great disorder of the contemporary world. They belong to an intellectually simpler time, when non-western societies, politically insignificant and little-known, could be judged solely by their success or failure in following the great example of the secular-humanist west; and writing literary fiction could seem enough to make one feel, as Tim Parks wrote in a review of Rushdie's novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, "engaged on the right side of some global moral and political battle".

Indeed, such complacencies of imperial intellectual cultures were what Rushdie had bravely attacked in his brilliant early phase. "Works of art, even works of entertainment," he had pointed out in 1984, "do not come into being in a social and political vacuum; and … the way they operate in a society cannot be separated from politics, from history. For every text, a context." No text in our time has had contexts more various and illuminating than The Satanic Verses, or mixed politics and literature more inextricably, and with deeper consequences for so many. In Joseph Anton, however, Rushdie continues to reveal an unwillingness or inability to grasp them, or to abandon the conceit, useful in fiction but misleading outside it, that the personal is the geopolitical.

I am left wondering how much the personal even when it is geopolitical should matter in literature even when it is not fiction. Another way to phrase my discomfort would be to wonder how much who Rushdie is or isn't should affect not only how he is read, the value of his writings.

In short, I am butting heads with Mishra because although I am conceding to him that the personal is the geopolitical, I question the essential nature and even the meaning  of that assertion...

Blogging as the fetishisation of impulse

Words to munch on this weekend from Simon Schama's essay in the Financial Times on why he writes:

Orwell’s four motives for writing still seem to me the most honest account of why long-form non-fiction writers do what they do, with “sheer egoism” at the top; next, “aesthetic enthusiasm” – the pleasure principle or sheer relish of sonority (“pleasure in the impact of one sound on another”); third, the “historical impulse” (the “desire to see things as they are”), and, finally, “political purpose”: the urge to persuade, a communiqué from our convictions.

To that list I would add that writing has always seemed to me a fight against loss, an instinct for replay; a resistance to the attrition of memory. To translate lived experience into a pattern of words that preserves its vitality without fixing it in literary embalming fluid; that for me has been the main thing.

The best essay writing since Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), who invented the genre, is where this reanimation of experience is shaped by the purposeful urgencies of thought. It is not the thoughtless recycling of experience for its own sake, the fetishising of impulse, which these days is what mostly passes as “blog”; a word well suited to its swampy suck of self-indulgence.

I must the most self-indulgent person in the word! For some reason, I think that it is my greatest and most fruitful trait...

Macho politicians

I agree with Chris Dillow on this with one caveat, I am trouble by the assertion that certainty and overconfidence are masculine traits:

Politics is still dominated by the silly masculine traits of certainty and overconfidence.

Why? Here's a theory. What people (or the media?) want from politicians is not an ability to take decisions, which requires the recognition of uncertainty.Instead, they want is a false sense of certainty, a "strong leader" with a "clear" direction. And this demand favours macho politicians, even if they are poor decision-makers.

Twitter as performance

This bit from Jessa Crispin explains, in part, why I haven't been tweeting as much as I used to, performing quickly and often is hard and almost always vacuous though it can be as fun as fluff can be:

Twitter is a performance, and occasionally that performance becomes this magical, swirly world of champagne cocktails, Paris hotel rooms, strings of pearls, and world famous friends that all love you intensely, and it's important to retweet their messages of love so that everyone knows this. It's different in tone from a person celebrating good fortune, and it's different from enthusiasm and a life well lived. A life well lived doesn't need to do it in front of an audience to prove its value. Envy bait carries a gaping shadow underneath it, a toothy "Don't you wish your life were so fabulous? Well, it's not" edge.

The welcome return of the native

Words to munch on this weekend from Pankaj Mishra whose latest, From the Ruins of Empire, is on my must-read list:

For a long time, Western histories simply suppressed non-western perspectives — nobody cared what the ‘native’ thought. But even today, the benignly universalist West creates the standards of judgement, and the historian at the imperial metropole of course writes the truly objective and coolly rational history. And the non-westerner challenging it with other perspectives is prone to be described — and discredited — as no more than a polemicist (The word is usual preceded by a damning adjective like ‘left-wing’ and ‘angry’).  (...) By loudly invoking religion and culture and race, these Western pundits want to prevent us from examining the material basis of global inequality in all matters, intellectual as well as economic — the long history behind the fact that some countries are rich, many others permanently poor; why some forms of large-scale violence, such as neo-imperialism, enjoy moral sanction and respectability, and those opposed to them prone to be dismissed as left-wing crackpots and losers. I think the neo-imperialists and their sympathisers are best seen as a symptom of Anglo-America’s bizarre political culture of the previous two decades — a culture in which politicians supported by an unquestioning corporate media wage genocidal wars while feeding lies to their electorates, crooked bankers give themselves huge salaries and bonuses, and intellectuals — well, many of them turn to justifying and vindicating this shameful state of affairs and are given bully pulpits for this purpose at mainstream institutions like Harvard and the BBC.

International cause célèbres

Sentences du jour from Brendan O'Neill:

The guilty verdict against feminist punk band Pussy Riot doesn't only point to a powerfully censorious streak in modern Russia – it also highlights the dangers inherent in Westerners' transformation of cases like this into international cause célèbres. (...)Pussy Riot have not only been screwed over by their enemies but also, ironically and sadly, by some of their so-called friends.

Unfortunately, I suspect that O'Neill is right.

 

Sex without guilt and everything else

Sugary excerpt of the day from Linda Kelsey on Helen Gurley Brown:

During the 14 years I worked at Cosmopolitan, in two separate stints, rising through the ranks to the position of editor from 1985 to 1990, I wrestled with what critics saw as the contradictions at the heart of the magazine, but I also firmly believed – and still do – that the enduring success of Cosmopolitan is down to the fact that it has never shifted its focus from the things that really matter to young women, as laid down in the blueprint set by Helen Gurley Brown when she launched US Cosmo.

What are these things? Love, of course. And sex. And work. And men and relationships in general. These are the priorities in young women’s lives and in the 40 years since Cosmo launched in the UK, these priorities haven’t changed. What has changed dramatically is women’s sense of empowerment. Women are more confident in every aspect of their lives. They assume equality rather than having to fight for it every step of the way. They are in no hurry to marry or have children, though most still want to have a long-lasting partnership and a family. They are free to enjoy sex without guilt.

But are they still vulnerable? Of course they are. Do they still worry whether he’ll ring or notice their cellulite. Don’t we all? Do they still find it hard to negotiate relationships? Well, that’s the nature of relationships. Do they have sexual hang-ups? Not all of us have the sexual sangfroid of Samantha from Sex and the City.

I have nothing to say. 

Sperm receptacles

Sugary excerpt of the day from Sarah Wheeler's review of Eric Berkowitz's Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire:

In the Greek era, men even perceived women as sperm receptacles without eggs of their own, as Aeschylus has it in Eumenides: 'She who is called the mother is not her offspring's/Parent, but nurse to the newly sown embryo./The male - who mounts - begets.'

We are still in the Greek era!

Empire and Viagra

Pankaj Mishra on everlasting imperial fantasies in the 'West':

Even before 9/11, Tony Blair was ready to tend, with military means if necessary, to, as he put it, "the starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant" around the world. His apparently more intellectual rival Gordon Brown urged his compatriots to be "proud" of their imperial past. Sensing a sharper rightward shift after 9/11, many pith-helmet-and-jodhpurs fetishists boisterously outed themselves, exhorting politicians to recreate a new western imperium through old-style military conquest and occupation of native lands.Embracing such fantasies of "full-spectrum dominance", American and European policymakers failed to ask themselves a simple question: whether, as Jonathan Schell put it, "the people of the world, having overthrown the territorial empires, are ready to bend the knee to an American overlord in the 21st"? After two unwinnable wars and horribly botched nation-building efforts, and many unconscionable human losses (between 600,000 and one million in Iraq alone), the "neo-imperialists" offering seductive fantasies of the west's potency look as reliable as the peddlers of fake Viagra. Yet, armour-plated against actuality by think tanks, academic sinecures and TV gigs, they continue to find eager customers.

I agree with Mishra with some reservations for I wonder whether Empire is just a 'western' fantasy; in short I feel increasingly uneasy as I get older about the separation of the world between the West and the rest and I hate with a passion the term 'postcolony.' Oh well, I am a marginal eccentric.

Still Culture

Quote of the day from Mario Vargas Llosa:

If culture is purely entertainment, then nothing matters.

Well, my stance on Llosa's  statement depends on how he defines culture.  If he defines it the same was as David Brooks and Mitt Romney do then I disagree, but he defines it as actions that lead one to be cultured, to gain some erudition, then I agree with him strongly. 

Adequate justification

Sentence du jour is from Norm Geras:

Tradition is never an adequate justification for a fundamental harm or violation of an important human right.

I have a problem with the way Geras formulates his point even though I agree with it. My problem is with the expressions 'adequate justification,' ' fundamental harm,' and 'important human right.' They make the issue unnecessarily difficult. It is sufficient to say that tradition can never be a justification for anything other a personal preference, which affects solely an individual .