What Not to Read

 Blogs, Literature  25 Responses »
Sep 272003
 

Don’t you hate it when people tell you to read something, when what you really need is less to read, not more? This blog, as ever, is at your service.

First stop reading the newspaper. My grievances against Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes are many and serious, but I have always admired his steadfast refusal to read the paper. If yesterday’s paper is good for nothing but wrapping fish, what does this say about what you’ve retained from yesterday’s paper? Besides, the news is depressing.

I know people who have read five times as many introductions to works of classic literature as works of classic literature. Don’t be one of them. Forewords and afterwords are to be treated like dessert: read, if at all, after the book, never before, lest you read through the eyes of Professor So-and-So instead of your own. Professor So-and-So tends to natter pointlessly anyway.

Biographies are the scandal sheets of the literate. Great geniuses have the shortest biographies, said Emerson, incorrectly. Great geniuses now have 800-page doorstops memorializing what they ate for breakfast. If you are interested in a novelist, read the novels; in a jurist, the opinions; in a philosopher, the philosophy; in a painter, look at the pictures. Biography is gossip. Worse, it is disingenuous gossip, which you can read in the guise of acquiring an education. Kelly Jane Torrance, among others, beat me to pointing this out; bully for her.

As I grow older I find more wisdom in Ezra Pound’s stricture that the best reading program is to know a dozen good books extremely well. (Not that ol’ Ez followed his own advice.) If your experience is anything like mine you will reliably forget most of any good book the first couple of times you read it, and misunderstand the rest. Then when you return to it you will be astonished at what an idiot you were. Which is an education in itself.

You can cut down on blogs substantially. Female bloggers, for instance. Not all of them, of course: I read several, ranging from the marvelously surly Andrea Harris to the effervescent Sasha Castel to the brilliant Megan McArdle. They have one thing in common: to my knowledge, they are childless. Mother bloggers inevitably start writing about how the school bully is picking on little Eustace or how little Tiffany has been punished for posting nastiness in someone else’s comments section and it was really her who wrote it, not me, no matter what you think, and how dare you call social services on me, and you must be deranged to imagine that I would do something like that. Follow the links if you must. The point is, you need not.

The biggest spread on Wall Street is reputed to be between your current job and your next one. The biggest spread in the universe, mothers, is between your own and everyone else’s interest in the doings of your precious darling. As for the Father of all Mother Bloggers, am I the only one who skips the Gnat parts?

Finally, stop reading the ingredients on the cereal package. Yes, you. If you’ve reached ascorbic acid and trisodium phosphate you’ve gone much, much too far.

(Update: George Wallace dubs excessive child-blogging Lilexia. I like it. Rick Coencas co-sponsors Lilexia. It’s a meme! It’s a viral meme! Brian Micklethwait comments.)

The Seven Plots

 Literature  10 Responses »
Sep 242003
 

Friedrich von Blowhard is on about story structure:

My son loves to watch Stuart Little 2; consequently, I have listened to this film a large number of times while out doing errands. Hearing the movie all the way through repeatedly, it finally dawned on me that its basic story structure is broken up into four roughly equal parts:

Part I — Introduction to our hero/heroines inner, emotional problem

Part II — Introduction to our hero/heroine’s outer, practical problem and the explanation of the link between it and the inner problem

Part III — First round of engaging the practical problem

Part IV — Second round of confrontation with practical problem, culminating in ultimate success or failure

Friedrich applies this to The Great Gatsby and amusingly concludes that it is really a noir, which, considered from a certain angle, it is.

Let’s take Friedrich’s notion out for a spin with one of my favorite novels, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady.

Part I — Isabel Archer sails from America to England to visit her cousins, the Touchetts. She is young, beautiful, clever, proud, naive, and single. She begins poor, but James provides her with a fortune, in his usual way, to allow her maximal freedom of action, or to put it differently, enough rope to hang herself. Isabel resolves to tour Europe to gain an education.

Part II — She is also touring Europe to find a husband. Suitors present themselves. First is Lord Warburton, who, being handsome, kind, well-spoken, titled, and immensely rich, clearly won’t do.

Part III — Next up is the young American magnate, Caspar Goodwood. Isabel, who by this time has fallen under the spell of the arch-European Madame Merle, refuses Goodwood because he is too good, too wooden, and just altogether too American. Instead she marries Madame Merle’s choice, the evil gold-digging aesthete Gilbert Osmond.

Part IV — Isabel realizes her error, which it is too late to correct, for super-subtle Jamesian reasons to which I cannot do justice in a sentence and to which James, in truth, doesn’t do justice in the novel either.

Well, it works, I guess. Yet it is too vague to satisfy. Friedrich deals in themes, when what we really need is a classification of plots.

Surely there are several plots even if there is only one theme. The Seven Plots (or however many there are, maybe fewer, certainly no more) is one of the desperately needed books that may never be written, along with Albert Goldman’s proposed Encyclopedia of Musical Plagiarism. One of the seven, I am sure, is the hourglass plot, in which two characters begin high and low, cross in the middle, like an hourglass, and swap positions at the end. Martin Amis, for one, can write nothing else. Success is quintessentially hourglass; and Money and The Information both rely heavily on hourglass elements.

Instructors in screenwriting are fond of talking about character arcs, and they may be on to something, much as it pains me to admit. Since all stories take place in time, make time the x-axis. Represent a character’s death as y=0. Graph the plot, with a single line if there is one main character, with more if, as in the hourglass, there is more than one. Zoom out and note the shape. There’s your plot type. A Greek tragedy would look like an upside-down hyperbola, the protagonist cruising at the peak of his powers until the sudden revelation, and disaster. Novels of descent — say, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano — would look like straight lines with negative slope, with an occasional squiggle to keep the reader’s attention. Horatio Alger stories are the same, except positively sloped.

The Great Gatsby is another single-line affair, Gatsby himself being the only character who changes. It might be a skewed bell curve: Gatsby begins with nothing, reaches his peak with his affair with Daisy — “I’ve never seen such beautiful shirts” — soon realizes that nothing will come of it, and is shortly thereafter found floating face-down in his swimming pool. Tales of peril and redemption will be inverted bell curves, skewed right when the peril takes more space than the redemption, the usual case.

A book’s merit, of course, has nothing to do with its graph. If The Seven Plots is ever written, let alone read, it will serve the useful purpose of dispelling the notion that some types of plots are better than others, and refocus the reader’s attention on other qualities, where it properly belongs.

Stanislaw Lem once wrote a little collection of reviews of non-existent books called A Perfect Vacuum. Its unstated premise was that the review rendered the actual book superfluous, and the titles themselves were marvelous — Die Kultur als Fehler (Civilization as Mistake) by Privatdozent W. Klopper, Being Inc. by Alastair Waynewright, Toi, “a novel about the reader,” by Raymond Seurat. A collection of reviews of non-existent books that we actually need would be an equally profitable exercise.

Potpourri

 Poetry  8 Responses »
Sep 212003
 

Alexander Pope is the most widely quoted English poet after Shakespeare. You know a good deal of Pope whether you realize it or not. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. A little learning is a dangerous thing. What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed. To err is human, to forgive divine. Hope springs eternal. Damn with faint praise. Whatever is, is right.

At the same time he is now nearly impossible to read at any length. The reasons for this are related, and interesting.

The 18th century made a fetish of “correctness,” and Pope wrote the vast majority of his verse the heroic couplet, the preferred form of the time. Pope translated Homer, among the least correct of poets, into heroic couplets; it is excruciating reading. His couplets are invariably end-stopped; grammatical units rarely extend beyond the two rhymed lines. The accents are heavy. The caesuras fall mid-line, after the fourth, fifth, or sixth syllables, almost without exception. Enjambment, being “incorrect,” is out of the question. The effect, after thirty or forty lines, is deadly, and Pope’s poems run 500 lines or more. Here is an oft-admired passage, the introduction to Book IV of The Dunciad:

Yet, yet a moment, one dim ray of light
Indulge, dread chaos, and eternal night!
Of darkness visible so much be lent,
As half to show, half veil, the deep intent.
Ye powers! whose mysteries restored I sing,
To whom time bears me on his rapid wing,
Suspend a while your force inertly strong,
Then take at once the poet and the song.

F.R. Leavis comments that “this astonishing poetry ought to be famous and current as the unique thing it is,” which testifies only to Professor Leavis’s capacity to be moved by heavy rhythms and trite language. The passage is as far as possible from being “unique”; it is a formulaic invocation to the Muses. It succeeds to the degree it does precisely because the language is stereotyped. Here Pope mocks the convention, as in The Rape of the Lock; unfortunately ironical triteness is still trite, and still dull. And Pope employs the same procedure perfectly seriously in other poems, such as Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, that Professor Leavis praises with nearly equal fervor.

Pope has better moments:

Beneath her foot-stool Science groans in chains,
And Wit dreads exile, penalties and pains.
There foamed rebellious Logic gagged and bound,
There, stripped, fair Rhetoric languished on the ground.
His blunted arms by Sophistry are borne,
And shameless Billingsgate her robes adorn.
Morality, by her false guardians drawn,
Chicane in furs, and Casuistry in lawn,
Gasps, as they straiten at each end the cord,
And dies, when Dullness gives her page the word.

The passage is energetic but trivial. It would not make the slightest difference to its meaning if Wit were gagged, Science exiled, Morality in chains, Logic stripped, and Rhetoric garotted. And the monotonous movement has begun to set in.

The heroic couplet is indelibly associated with Pope in the history of English literature, but it can be used very differently. Consider this passage from Pope’s near-contemporary, Charles Churchill. He is satirizing Wiliam Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester, a notable literary bully of the time.

Bred to the law, you wisely took the gown,
Which I, like Demas, foolishly laid down.
Hence double strength our Holy Mother drew;
Me she got rid of, and made prize of you.
I, like an idle Truant, fond of play,
Doting on toys, and throwing gems away,
Grasping at shadows, let the substance slip.
But you, my Lord, renounced Attorneyship
With better purpose, and more noble aim,
And wisely played a more substantial game.

The passage has a subtle and stately movement; Churchill achieves an especially brilliant effect by ending the self-description at line 7 while suspending the rhyme. One looks in vain for anything like it in Pope.

The 18th century loved its abstractions, large and capitalized. Yet reason, as we understand it, has very little do with Reason, morality with Morality, and science with Science. These facts can be put aside when reading short excerpts of Pope but quickly become impossible to avoid. Pope conceives of Reason as knowing one’s place in universe as the middle link in the Great Chain of Being. “To reason well,” he writes, “is to submit”:

In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies;
All quit their sphere and rush into the skies.
Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes,
Men would be angels, angels would be gods.

Professor Lovejoy, whose book The Great Chain of Being is the best on the intellectual history of the century and a model for writing the history of ideas in general, properly terms this “rationalistic anti-intellectualism.” The Age of Reason turns out to be ironically named.

For all Pope’s apostrophes to Isaac Newton, his view of Science shows clearly enough in his lines on the microscope:

Why has not man a microscopic eye?
For this plain reason, man is not a fly.

It’s poor flawed humanity jumping itself up again. True Science, intent, as Pope often writes, on seeing things whole, has no need for such artificial aids. Here Pope agrees with his friend Swift; Book III of Gulliver’s Travels, the voyage to Laputa, has much the same theme. It is anti-technology and at bottom anti-scientific. All told the microscope has had a rather more impressive career than seeing things whole has.

Ethics, similarly, is easily disposed of. If whatever is, is right, then what else do you need to know? “Equal are common sense and common ease.” Know and keep your place in the universe is what Pope preaches, everywhere and always. In practice this advice devolves into petty Toryism:

Order is heaven’s first law, and this confessed,
Some are, and must be, greater than the rest,
More rich, more wise.

The best poetry is rarely the most quotable; it derives much of its meaning from its context. Pope is highly quotable because he had a superb verbal gift; but the context is foolish. He is like an exceptionally brilliant student who has mastered his exercises and regurgitates them expertly. His poetry is unsatisfactory because the dominant ideas of his time are unsatisfactory. He might have written great poetry had he been born a hundred years earlier or two hundred later. Instead he was bequeathed a cheap and facile philosophy, lacked the intelligence to think his way out of it, and became a poet of glittering fragments, no more. His vices are those of his age; his virtues are his own.

(Update: Miriam Jones comments. Alex(ei) comments.)

Trading Spaces and the Apotheosis of the Expert

 Culture  15 Responses »
Sep 162003
 

Trading Spaces, as recent visitors from distant galaxies may not be aware, is the biggest hit show on cable television. Two homeowners, given a decorator, a carpenter’s services, and $1,000 budget, have two days to redo a room in each other’s house. I watch it for the same reason everyone does, because I find before and after pictures impossible to resist. It is also a fine piece of moral instruction.

Along with the glories of the division of labor comes, perhaps necessarily, the worship of the specialist. The deference accorded physicians, scientists, and experts of all sorts never ceases to astonish me. Of all specialists the artist gets the best deal: physicians lose face if their patients die, scientists if they produce bogus results, and artists never, so long as they can continue to intimidate their clients, which, aesthetic criteria being notoriously ineffable, is a relatively simple matter. Nice work if you can get it, and unsurprisingly sub- and sub-sub-artists, like interior decorators, have begun to muscle in on the racket.

As a rule, the worse the artist, the more insistently he drapes himself in artistic trappings. So it is on Trading Spaces. The decorators are “designers.” Talk of “themes” abounds and inevitably precurses disaster. Novels have themes. Does your bedroom? Would you prefer it if it did?

Four of the show’s eight “designers,” as I suppose we must call them, are so out-and-out incompetent that their pretensions are neither here nor there. Kia is helpless in any style. She blows her budget on pointless and overelaborate creations that, fortunately for her clients, tend to fall apart, making them easy to remove. One might feel sorry for her were it not for her complete lack of self-knowledge. Confronted with the evidence of her latest trainwreck, she warbles “no problem,” often before she has been apprised of what the problem is. The hostess hates her, and liking people is her job. Watching a Kia episode is like rubbernecking; you can’t look, and you can’t look away.

Edward and Frank have been put in the wayback machine with the dials set to 1982 and 1992, respectively. No matter what the question, Edward’s answer is a high-gloss, “sophisticated” finish, while Frank puts his trust in hand painting. When all you have is a hammer then everything must look like a nail. Still, I could imagine either of them doing adequate work for a client whose sensibility dovetailed precisely with their own, whereas it is impossible to picture Kia performing competently for anyone, anywhere. The less said of giggly, jiggly Genevieve, the Princess of Distress, the better. Genevieve is to acid washes what Claus von Bülow is to insulin. Distressed baseboards. Distressed furniture. Distressed clients.

These four flail about entertainingly enough, but the meat of the show is the conflict between Good, represented by Vern and Laurie, and Evil, represented by Hildi and Doug. Vern especially, and Laurie to a lesser degree, listen to their clients, decide what the room needs, plan it in detail, and execute. They produce consistently pleasing results. Vern, an architect, appears to be the only one with any technical training, and it shows. The other decorators’ drawings for the carpenters, next to Vern’s, look like Nigel Tufnel’s efforts at scenery design.

At the other end of the spectrum are Hildi and Doug, who design the worst rooms on the show, Kia’s excepted. These two are the theme queens. No room is complete without one, preferably having nothing whatever to do with the interests of the client. Doug designed a “Brazilian” bedroom on one episode because he had just returned from a trip to Brazil. Hildi painted a room baby-blue with random white stripes in another because she liked the Tiffany box. Neither client had any connection to Brazil or Tiffany’s.

At first I believed they were just incompetent. Gradually it dawned on me that they are, in fact, actively hostile to their clients’ interests, lest they interfere with their own precious right to express themselves in other people’s houses. For some viewers the tip-off might have been when Hildi papered the kitchen of a teetotaling couple with wine labels, or when Doug framed an enormous drawing of a foot in the bedroom of a couple who had expressed a particular distaste for feet, saying, “They wouldn’t dare take it down.” (They did.)

For me it was Hildi’s hay and Hildi’s records. Hildi decorated the walls with hay in one episode and old records in another for no reason in particular. The homeowners had shown no interest in farming or music — not as if farmers would want hay in their living room, or musicians random records glued to the wall. These go beyond podiatric art, which you can easily get rid of. These are acts of wanton destruction that require stripping and repainting the whole room to repair. Doug, for his part, reliably paints his client’s furniture, provided they insist that it not be painted. To Doug also belongs the unique distinction of making a homeowner cry on camera.

In last week’s episode one couple specified that they hated pink and mauve, inspiring Hildi to paint their living room — surprise — pink! “Coral,” she insisted, as if to say it made it so.

For the most part the homeowners offer only token resistance to these catastrophes; the designers are artists, artists are experts, and experts know best. So any of you Trading Spaces guinea pigs, if you’re reading this, a few words of advice. Stop rolling over. If you think something will turn out hideous, it probably will. Remember that if you refuse to do the gruntwork it won’t get done. Hildi needs you to glue that hay on the wall. Demand Vern, settle for Laurie, and if you end up with Hildi, Doug, or, God forbid, Kia, hire an attorney to release you from the contract. It’ll be less work than redoing the room and possibly no more expensive.

(Update: Michael Krantz points out in the comments that the biggest hit on cable isn’t Trading Spaces, it’s Spongebob Squarepants. I should have said, the biggest hit on cable that is watched in my house. This blog regrets the error.)

(Further: James Joyner comments. Scott Chaffin comments.)

Make Mine Diet

 Culture  5 Responses »
Sep 052003
 

The other night the girlfriend and I, as we often do, were eating pastrami at Katz’s on the Lower East Side, the last place in New York to slice its pastrami by hand. Katz’s, like many famous old restaurants, is decorated with photographs of the owner and various celebrities. Politicians flock to the place like moths to flame: Mayors Koch through Bloomberg, Al Gore, Soviet Premier-for-a-Day Konstantin Chernenko, and Bill Clinton, who receives the special commendation of a note saying what he ate. Two hot dogs, a pastrami sandwich, and fries, washed down, in a sudden show of restraint, with a diet ginger ale and a decaf coffee. For lunch. Now Katz’s pastrami sandwiches are not of the Brobdingnagian proportions one finds at Carnegie or Stage, but they are more than ample, and the dogs aren’t exactly anemic either. We watched a little girl wander over to the table, read the list with widening eyes, and return to her mother, gesticulating wildly. (“Mommy! Mommy, look what the President ate!”) I will leave to the polibloggers the question of Clinton’s rank as a policy-maker. His place as the most porcine President in American history remains secure.

Sympathy for the Devil

 Culture  16 Responses »
Sep 042003
 

Endo, Meso, Ecto To your right are three examples of the infamous Ivy League “posture photos” (the linked story, uncredited, is by Ron Rosenbaum), which don’t offer much in the way of prurient interest from an official purveyor of pornography, but it’s the best I can do. For twenty years, from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, at the Ivy League and the Seven Sisters, freshmen were herded into the nurse’s office and snapped nude from three angles. Meryl Streep (Vassar). Hillary Rodham (Wellesley). My mother (Smith), to whom it didn’t occur until ten years later that there might be something untoward about it. That these same photographs were taken at the same time outside the Ivy League apparently bothered no one. It’s fine to take nude photographs of Army recruits and other such riff-raff, but Girls of the Ivy League? Quel horreur!

Behind the posture photos was one William Sheldon, a psychologist whose body-typing theories, highly respectable at the time, provided most of their rationale. He published many of them in his Atlas of Men and intended to publish many more in an Atlas of Women, unfortunately never completed. I happened upon a copy of one of his books, Varieties of Temperament, which shows his talents to lie more in the literary than the visual arts. Varieties of Temperament concludes with capsule summaries of Sheldon’s 200 subjects. Some are savage:

An expansive, popular, garrulous young man who wasted his time as a medical student, but has since become an oculist with quite a lucrative business building up. Has joined the Masons and one or two other fraternal organizations of that sort. He is married to a gluttonous, gleeful little 6-3-1. They set a fine table.

(6-3-1 is a “somatotype,” about which much, much more below.)

A weak, baffled undergraduate to whom college is like a bad dream. He wants to cry on somebody’s shoulder but is instead required to attend gymnasium classes.

Some are shrewd:

Has as unpleasant a disposition as is often met. He suggests a partly tamed native gray rat among a generally well-behaved colony of white ones. He continually bares his teeth, although he rarely bites… Many adopt the tolerant attitude toward him that is often shown toward a noisy terrier.

…he has been accused vaguely of homosexuality, but he is in fact strongly heterosexual, and now that his academic career is securely under way he devotes perhaps a disproportionately great amount of time to the sexual pursuit. He has no etchings but his collection of symphonies has begun to grow a bit notorious.

Occasionally he seems to have been gotten the best of:

A young rabbi studying psychology. Polite, ceremonious, yet watchful and critical. His fine black eyes are disconcertingly observant. He is hyperattentional and overly intent.

All make the best bathroom reading you could hope for. Do any other shrinks write like this when no one is looking? And who was William Sheldon anyway?

Sheldon was born in 1898, grew up rural in Rhode Island, and as boy became an expert enough shot to be able to hit a marble thrown 20 feet in the air, which skill he demonstrated to Annie Oakley. He took an M.D. and Ph.D at the University of Chicago in the 1920s, began his teaching career there and at the University of Wisconsin and moved to Harvard in 1940, where he did his best work, published in The Varieties of Human Physique (1940) and The Varieties of Temperament (1942).

He was divorced twice and was apparently not the easiest of men to get on with. At Harvard he served on a Ph.D. examination committee that passed a student he considered unprepared. Sheldon concluded that the term “Doctor” no longer had meaning, and for some time insisted on addressing everyone on campus, including the elevator man, as “Doctor,” embarrassing his faculty colleagues, and no doubt the elevator man.

Sheldon enjoyed a great vogue for a while. Life magazine devoted a cover story to him in 1951, and his disciples included Aldous Huxley, who credited Sheldon with much of his success. The rise of behaviorism did his reputation in. Skinnerian psychology made his theories glacially unfashionable, and he died, bitter and forgotten, in 1977, having published almost nothing for more than 20 years.

Folk wisdom has it that temperament and physique are related: fat people are reputed jolly, short people “Napoleonic,” tall and thin people “awkward,” and so forth. Sheldon set out to ground this scientifically. He distinguished among three “somatotypes,” as he called them — endomorphy, mesomorphy, and ectomorphy; the terms are still with us. Each body type has a corresponding temperament: viscerotonic (endomorph), somatotonic (mesomorph), and cerebrotonic (ectomorph). Sheldon ranked his subjects according to their endowment of each body type, and temperament, on a 7-point scale. Although we now tend to think of people as one type or the other, the pure endo (7-1-1), meso (1-7-1), or ecto (1-1-7) turns out, in Sheldon’s system, to be extremely rare. He concluded that temperament usually matches physique nearly exactly, with at most a point difference on each of the three scales.

Like Freud, Sheldon fancied himself a scientist; Varieties of Temperament is full of scales, indices, and standard deviations. As he describes his own procedure:

First a list of 650 alleged traits of temperament was collected… These were sifted, condensed, and described as systematically as possible. A few contributions from our own observation were added, and the list was finally reduced to 50 traits which seemed to embrace all of the ideas [emphasis his] represented in the original 650. The 50 traits were then incorporated into a simple 5-point graphic rating scale (later expanded to a 7-point scale)… Then began the tedious process of analyzing a series of subjects in order to rate them in these 50 traits…

We then proceeded to build up lists of such clusters of traits as showed consistently positive intercorrelations among themselves, much after the manner of building up suits in a game of cards…we soon found that three groups of traits showed positive intercorrelation among themselves, and negative correlation with all or nearly all of the other traits…

…we set up two quite arbitrary criteria for determining the qualification of a trait within one of the nuclear groups. First, the trait must show a positive correlation of +.60 with every other trait in its nuclear group. Second, it must show a negative correlation of -.30 with every trait in each of the other two nuclear groups. Employing these criteria rigidly, we found that…22 of the original 50 traits had qualified.

This resembles hard science as numerology resembles mathematics. It has about it a distinct pre-scientific whiff of bacon — Francis Bacon, who believed that one could formulate useful scientific hypotheses by gazing steadily at an object and making lists of what one notices. The blithe way Sheldon throws out the 28 of his 50 traits that don’t meet the correlation tests adds a more modern, Johnnie-Cochran flavor: if the trait don’t fit, get rid of it. Since there are no hard-and-fast rules for classifying types, either physically or by temperament, the scheme groans under confirmation bias.

Still, this is not physics but social science, where there may be something to be said for simply looking around. Dubious methods may also serve a defensible thesis. One suspects that Sheldon has been “discredited” less for his technique than his belief that physique influences temperament, which, knotty cause-effect questions aside, is obvious to any sentient inhabitant of the planet.

Sheldon was a prescient critic of therapy, which he considered useless for most people and counterproductive for some. He was no fan of endocrine, the Prozac of the 1940s: “A long history of experimentation with endocrine therapy seems to have intensified [the subject’s] unhappiness without improving the situation.” He didn’t go in much for talking therapy either: “He has been having a long series of conferences with a psychiatrist whose point of view places great weight on the early intrafamilial relationships. This has turned the youth’s attention more than ever toward his parents and familial entanglements… He has learned to blame his mother and father for every disappointment.” Thus Sheldon casually hands Freud his head without even mentioning his name. Of his 200 cases in Varieties of Temperament Sheldon recommends psychoanalysis for about five. Anyone who has observed its whiny modern products will share his skepticism.

The customary accusations of “eugenicist” and “biological determinist” have been hurled at Sheldon, with the customary accuracy. Sheldon nowhere advocated selective human breeding, and although he sometimes lets his system carry him away (“2-2-6’s do not write novels, they only dream of it”), the general thrust of his work is away from determinism. (It is the extreme environmentalists, on the contrary, who tend toward it.) Sheldon takes pains to point up cases of identical somatotype where one succeeds and one fails. At one point he remarks of two cases, an extreme cerebrotonic and an extreme somatotonic, “it is useless to expect Christopher to become a heavyweight boxing champion, or Boris to learn cuneiform,” which may sound like biological determinism to some but sounds like common sense to me.

Sheldon preaches, insofar as he preaches, that human nature is not indefinitely plastic. “Know thyself” is how the Greeks put it. Today that makes him a quack; the modern psychiatric wisdom is “be what you want to be.” How will that look in fifty years?

(Update: Howard Owens comments.)

Obligatory Frank Lloyd Wright Post

 Culture  2 Responses »
Aug 282003
 

“Form follows function — that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.” Frank Lloyd Wright said this. Wright built houses, and the function of houses, as I understand it, is to be lived in. Roofs, too, have functions, among which is to keep out the rain. One might think that a leaky roof would disturb this “spiritual union,” but AC Douglas dismisses this pedestrian concern:

Wright’s houses, for instance, are notorious for their leaky roofs. As a house is the most elemental and paradigmatic instance of a shelter a leaky roof would seem a most damning and fundamental fault. And so it would be were the house simply a building. With the possible exception of his earliest work, none of Wright’s houses qualifies as simply a building. They’re all, as is all great architecture of any sort whatsoever, first and foremost works of art. That’s to say, considerations of the aesthetic trump all else.

Buildings, no matter whose, are not “first and foremost” works of art because they are not works of art at all. “Art” is not an encomium. It is a technical term, referring to things that are intended solely as objects of contemplation. There is a fine word for edifices of this sort; the word is “sculpture.” Buildings can be beautiful or ugly, just as people can, which doesn’t make them art any more than people are. If aesthetics, in Wright’s buildings, “trump all else,” why do they need roofs at all? Tables and chairs clutter rooms so, why not dispose of them? Walls disrupt the continuity between the house and its surroundings; tear ’em down. Wright would be the first to say that this is silly, and so it is, but it is the reductio of AC’s position.

This is a case of a misapplied metaphor. The modern religion, as Tom Wolfe beat me to pointing out, is art, which has become the highest term of praise for anything at all. A well-played bridge hand, a well-placed insult, a nice-looking ashtray are all “works of art.” Except they aren’t, and neither is architecture. Art is art, and non-art is non-art, and never the twain shall meet.

(Update: AC Douglas replies. Brian Micklethwait comments. Alexandra Seely comments. Rene comments.)

Imperceptibly

 Poetry  17 Responses »
Aug 272003
 

I’ve often been asked (well, twice) what my favorite poem in English is. This one, from Emily Dickinson, is my favorite poem today. It was also my favorite yesterday, five years ago, and, I expect, ten years hence.

As imperceptibly as grief
The summer lapsed away;
Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like perfidy.

A quietness distilled,
As twilight long begun,
Or Nature, spending with herself
Sequestered afternoon.

The dusk drew earlier in,
The morning foreign shone;
A courteous, yet harrowing grace,
As guest who would be gone.

And thus, without a wing,
Or service of a keel,
Our summer made her light escape
Into the beautiful.

Dickinson was a nearly exact contemporary of Emily Brontë, in whose novel stormy emotions and stormy weather always coincide. In this poem she takes a rather different view. It says, very approximately, that it is an error to believe that the seasons and nature are in sympathy with ourselves (“to seem like perfidy”). In fact nature is not only indifferent to human affairs (“sequestered afternoon”) but utterly alien from them (“the morning foreign shone”). We see it only through the prism of our emotions, which are real but unrelated. The late summer light escapes into the Platonic “beautiful,” a noun, and our perception escapes as well, into memory, where we confute it with summer itself. A friend once told me that Emily Dickinson’s poems reminded him of diary entries. Anyone out there who writes like this in her diary please send it to me immediately.

In the opening two lines Dickinson tosses off an incidental insight about grief to which inferior poets would happily devote an entire poem, as Wordsworth did, to a similar insight about dissolution, in his famous sonnet On Mutability. The description of late summer, given entirely in terms of its effect on the observer, fuses symbol and subject in a way that no physical description could. This poem also employs off-rhyme more effectively than any other I know. The theme, in one sense, is the off-rhyme between the natural world and how we perceive it.

I used to think that in line 14 “a keel” would do just as well and “service of a keel” was chosen to pad out the line. Eventually I realized that “service” stresses the difference between the wing and the keel, the natural and the man-made, which is integral to the theme of the poem. There is a hint of Dickinson’s eccentric spinster grammar in line 12, where she drops an indefinite article, which proves only that no poem is no perfect in God’s eye, or mine.

Trite Dickinson productions like “I’m nobody. Who are you?” find their way into the standard anthologies and this poem never does. Some selections of her own verse manage to omit it. If this doesn’t tell you all you need to know about anthologists, then consult Palgrave, Oscar Williams, Louis Untermeyer, or Quiller-Couch.

(Update: Carl G. Jung points to an aspect of the poem that I overlooked. George Wallace comments. The Russian Dilettante comments.)

Law and Architecture Revisited

 Culture, Law  12 Responses »
Aug 232003
 

David Sucher, who runs the very interesting urban planning blog City Comforts, is asking again for “a principled, thoughtful conservative/libertarian critique of how to create the built environment,” and I figure as a sort of villain in the piece.

What makes me uneasy is that in actuality there really isn’t any principled, thoughtful Conservative/Libertarian (C/L) critique of how to create the built environment. In fact it was this discussion on God of the Machine which helped me give focus to City Comforts Blog. The discussion there ended on this note, with the comment directed to me:

“If the ‘problem’ is that you don’t care for the way cities and towns look now (under rigid zoning, I hasten to add), couldn’t it be easily rectified by simply appointing you land czar? Would that be any more unjust than allowing zoning boards to impose costs on people who get no say in the matter?”

I thought further conversation unproductive.

But that, unfortunately, is the typical C/L response: either denial or sneering and ending in “It’s my party…” There simply does not exist any intelligent or useful C/L commentary on land use governance. (Please, someone, prove me wrong!)

David’s acknowledgement that I helped give his blog focus (negatively perhaps, but I take it where I find it) is certainly more gracious than my remark. Actually we agree on most of the aesthetic questions — the bankruptcy of most modern architecture, the importance of promoting street life, parking as the tail that wags the dog. His constant criticism of “starchitecture” is well-taken. As Michael Blowhard reminds us in his discussion of Frank Lloyd Wright, nobody wants to live or work in Art. Art’s roof leaks. Art’s chairs tip. Art doesn’t have enough parking.

The dispute is over means, not ends. Private developers often erect hideous buildings, but for disaster on a grand scale nobody can touch the government. Think Pruitt-Igoe, or the housing project of your choice. Think the late World Trade Towers, unlamented by anyone who ever had to work there. David professes to admire Jane Jacobs; the great lesson of The Death and Life of Great American Cities is the vast superiority of bottom-up to top-down architecture. Cities, like markets, are more than the sum of their parts, and seem to show these ancillary benefits only when individual property owners are given latitude to operate. David is a real estate developer by trade, and his experience with architecture is far wider than mine, but I know New York City pretty well, and most of the development in its most livable and attractive sections, like the West Village, antedates central planning. New York tourists, once they’re done with the landmarks, head straight for the Village, or Chinatown, another planner’s nightmare. Attractive city neighborhoods can apparently spring up without any “planning” or “policy” whatsoever.

Is the culprit bad planning rather than planning itself? Certainly 20th-century urban planning, with its emphasis on segregating uses and choking off street life, has been very bad. Yet it is difficult to see how any planner, no matter how wise, could produce the endearingly crooked streets and chaotic mix of businesses and residences that characterize the West Village, or the North End of Boston, to take Jane Jacobs’ example.

David’s demand for a libertarian theory of “land use governance,” a polite term for zoning, is not entirely reasonable. It’s like asking a libertarian how he would run the Department of Agriculture or Education, to which the obvious reply is, he wouldn’t. He’d disband it. “Land-use governance” means the nosy neighbors convene and decide what I can build on my own property and to whom I can sell it. They impose costs on me at no cost to themselves. Zoning advocates like David ought to acknowledge the manifest injustice of such a policy.

A libertarian land use “policy,” if that is the term, might develop along coop/condo lines. Coop owners, like me, own shares in a building or group of building rather than individual units within it. I forfeit a certain amount of control over my premises in return for a lower price for the same amount of real estate. I do so voluntarily, and the rules are clear and laid out in advance. A coop agreement, unlike the zoning laws, is a deal. My coop consists of three buildings, and there’s no reason there couldn’t be larger coops of entire streets, or neighborhoods. Condominium agreements could burgeon in the same way.

This leaves the problem of burden-shifting. What happens if the guy next door decides to sell out to hog-processing plant? The short answer is, too bad. You’ve chosen to live somewhere he’s allowed to do that, and it’s his decision, not yours. The slightly longer answer is, if the hog-processing plant is damaging your property, by, say, belching toxic smoke into it, you do the American thing and sue. To the extent that the plant owner damages you — by tortiously interfering with your property, not by lowering the tone of the neighborhood — he pays. For this to work properly would require a major revision of liability law, which is a post for another day.

Agitprop for Fun and Profit

 Movies  5 Responses »
Aug 202003
 

So you want to make a left-wing propaganda movie? Then let’s see what we can learn from the most successful propaganda movie in history, to judge by actual political results, The China Syndrome. It was released in 1979, after more than a decade of steady building of nuclear power plants. Since then not a single new permit for a nuclear plant has been issued in the United States.

Correlation is not causation, and to be fair, The China Syndrome benefited from the best timing any movie has probably ever had. Three Mile Island, the worst industrial accident in history with zero casualties, followed the release of The China Syndrome by twelve days. One of the characters even muses about “contaminating an area the size of Pennsylvania.” You just can’t buy that kind of publicity. Americans had already begun to turn against nuclear power but after 1979 it was shelved, apparently permanently. This was arguably due at least as much to the movie as to the accident. There is a template for a successful propaganda movie, which The China Syndrome followed to the letter.

1. Choose your heroes advisedly. Nobody, but nobody, wants to watch heroic activists. This is one of the many reasons Costa-Gavras movies are as widely acclaimed as they are ignored. To establish your bona fides you will want to make your politically sympathetic characters as personally disagreeable as possible. And who could be more disagreeable than an already-grizzled Jane Fonda and a young and hirsute Michael Douglas? (An old and jowly Michael Douglas possibly excepted.) Douglas plays a bossy, vaguely counter-cultural cameraman of questionable hygiene habits. Fonda is the local TV bimbo who has stumbled onto the story of her life, which she doesn’t understand but tries to milk for all it’s worth notwithstanding. The anti-nuclear scientist, in a nice turn from Donald Hotton, is an obvious crank, with a supercilious manner and Warhol hair to prove it.

Our reluctant hero, played by Jack Lemmon, is a “shift supervisor” (a nice righteous proletarian title) at the power plant. “I love this plant,” he says to Fonda, and we believe him, because we always believe Jack Lemmon.

2. Admit the obvious. Everyone knows that anti-nuclear protestors are Luddite buffoons. So make a special point of showing them all standing up together at a hearing with masking tape on their mouths. This earns you extra objectivity points and costs you nothing.

3. Fictionalize history — the right way. In The China Syndrome a courier, and later Lemmon himself, is run off the road on his way to a regulatory hearing to deliver crucial incriminating documents, which disappear. Now where have we seen this before? Of course: it’s Karen Silkwood and Kerr-McGee! By replaying this hoary myth without directly referring to it, the movie reaps all of the benefits of imaginary history, without the fuss of being corrected in public by knowledgeable historians or the muss of untidy lawsuits.

4. Skate the science. So “core meltdowns” are effectively impossible in modern, non-graphite reactors. So what? Don’t bore the audience with stuff like this. Instead mutter a few imprecations about inconceivable disasters and concentrate on human error instead. Everyone understands human error. The China Syndrome contains fifteen seconds of misinformation on nuclear engineering, and it’s fifteen seconds too many.

5. Keep the villains offscreen. Give Satan too much screen time and someone is bound to accuse you of being of the Devil’s party without knowing it. Oliver Stone never quite learned this. If you must show the villains, and sometimes you must, show as many of them as possible to dilute any possible audience sympathy. In The China Syndrome a corrupt inspector, a vicious plant manager, a cold-blooded CEO, and a craven publicity man split ten minutes of face time among them. Capitalist malefactors are supposed to be faceless and soulless, right? Keep them that way.

6. No happy endings. Remember, you’re raising consciousness here; leave uplift to Hollywood lickspittles. No sad endings either: too didactic. Best of all are ambiguous endings, like the TV test pattern in the last scene of The China Syndrome. Is this the end of Southern California as we know it? Could be, unless we all get out there and do something right now.

OK team, you got all that? Now, break!

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