The Man Who is Thursday

Liberaltarianism as Paternalism

2009-11-04T13:51:00.008-05:00

But (in large part thanks to Kerry) it's come to seem pretty obvious to me that the possibility of a society with libertarian institutions requires a huge degree of government coercion. And to will the end is to will the means, as Kant said. The possibility of actually existing libertarianism depends on a good deal of progressive government policy. Once you start thinking about the kind of policy that could sustain libertarian institutions, I think you start seeing certain government constraints rather differently. At least that's been my experience.

- Will Wilkinson.

(NOTE: I had a little fun with the Wilkinson quote. Click on the link for Wilkinson's exact words.)

Libertarians like Wilkinson and Kerry Howley don't themselves subscribe to government suppression of speech etc., but they tend to get so worked up about sexism and racism and homophobia that the average liberal thinking person has to wonder that if these things are so bad, why isn't the government doing something about them.

And the fact is that the kind of deracinated society these kinds of libertarians like to live in is only possible with massive government interference, so that these kinds of libertarians are de facto left liberals. In this context, Wilkinson's enthusiasm for Scandenavian social democracy doesn't seem all that surprising. A reminder again that these are the same countries that so ruthlessly suppress free speech on such issues as immigration, race, and homosexuality. Given such, I have no confidence that Wilkinson et al. are in fact interested in the liberty of those who disagree with them. (A google search for "will wilkinson sweden free speech" brings up zero condemnations of the outrages being done to freedom of speech in that country. See here for more Swedish goodness.)

As Jim Kalb notes:

[O]n the whole and in the long run people are more interested in how things work than in particular political structures. If so, he'll expect that people who like the idea of removing restrictions, and so become liberal or libertarian, are mostly going to end up more interested in whether they're able to get whatever they're interested in substantively than in the specific structure of what's restricted and what's permitted. They're likely to view the latter more as a means than the basic issue.

Procedure seems a specialized concern that's likely to lose out to substantive issues in political competition as in human action generally.

Getting back to Wilkinson and Howley, it isn't just us traditionalists that see liberaltarians as crypto-authoritarians, Todd Seavey sees it too:

If not, we can be forgiven for wondering why someone who thinks like Howley would embrace the basic political stance of libertarianism in the strict property-defending sense at all. If people telling you “fat chicks should be shunned” is as oppressive as being hauled off to jail, why not pass laws banning anti-fat-chick discrimination? Why not endorse affirmative action laws? Why not tell Catholic-run charities they must hire gays? The traditional libertarian answer is that rights violations are fundamentally different from behavior that merely strikes you as narrow-minded.

Howley’s thinking is potentially authoritarian (in a way that being passively bourgeois is not) because other people’s patterns of behavior will always limit your options one way or another and thus prompt demands for redress. Howley singles out a few hot-button, familiar issues such as race and gender, but the truth is that every time your fellow human beings decide, say, to be sports fans instead of talking about entomology with you, or to leave town en masse for the Bahamas (causing you to feel lonely), their actions have altered your life options. Tough luck. That’s called “other people exercising their freedom,” not “people oppressing you.”

Hey, I'm not a libertarian, so I have no problem in principle with using the government to impose certain values on others, but it seems rather ironic coming from some supposed opponents of paternalism.

FURTHER LINKS:
Jim Kalb's complete thoughts on why libertarianism almost always turns into left liberalism are here and here.

The Wisdom of the Elders and It's Decline

2009-10-06T17:58:00.003-04:00

It seems a commonplace that we do not much value old people anymore. This is in stark contrast almost all previous societies, where the experience of the old made them among the most valued members of society. Being a great reader of the classics, I have always appreciated what those who have come before me had to teach and being steeped in the Bible I was well aware of the injunctions there to take heed of my elders. But in my own life, it was always strange to me how little those elders often had to offer me. I know that as I watched my grandfather die I remember wishing that I could talk to him about the things that were going on in my life. I wanted his life to have meaning for us, for him to have something to pass along. But I also knew that for a long time he had ceased to be a participant in modern life and thus knew little of what my experiences were. He had no wisdom to impart.

That is the main reason the “wisdom of the elders” is no longer heeded. Most people aren’t abstract thinkers and therefore whatever wisdom they have to impart is very concrete and specific to the peculiar circumstance of their environment. Social change has been so drastic over the past few decades that older people don’t really understand the specifics of what their children and grandchildren are going through and thus often can’t really be that helpful. Our choices are not their choices and their wisdom is for a time long past.

Literature is somewhat different. The wisdom of the great writers is indeed applicable to how we live now. But, unlike that of most people, it is frequently a somewhat abstract wisdom and thus is only helpful to those who are capable of abstract thought. It is up to the reader to recognize the parallels to his life and properly apply it there. This is not a task for the average man. Religion does somewhat better by the average person, in that it breaks down the wisdom of the sages into digestible chunks for the masses. But for the most part they are left on their own, with only the frequently inane learning of a public school education for a guide to life. In this way too, wisdom has become a luxury good only truly available to the elites of our society, and only if they are self motivated enough to seek it out on their own.

Game and Freedom

2009-10-06T16:47:00.003-04:00

As you can all see from a perusal of my archives, I am a man with somewhat unorthodox views on sex, race and other matters. I am not PC. I am also a bit of a worry wart and someone who prefers ease and quiet to continual upheaval. Given that I work in a profession which is rather PC, this has occasionally made me somewhat fearful as to what my colleagues and superiors would do if they knew what I really thought about these and other issues.

I don’t know about anybody else, but game has made me fell much more free to speak my mind anywhere. With the decent level of game I now have, I know that no matter if my job is taken away, no matter if I’m reduced to poverty, no matter if I’m denounced by respectable society, I can still get and keep a woman. And let’s face it, a big reason men work so hard to get ahead in their careers and don’t want to have them taken away is because they are afraid of what not having a job will do to them on the mating market. But, unless they actually throw you in prison, game can’t be taken away from you. There may be some women who won’t date you for your unfashionable opinions or your lack of respectable employment, but they are a lot fewer than you might think.

As we all know, the economy has taken a downturn and jobs can be scarce. A friend of mine has had a really hard time finding work over the past few months. He’s been really hard up lately. Anyway, using game he has managed to find himself a sugar mama. She buys him food, takes him out to dinner . . . It’s nuts. Granted she’s only a (solid) 6.5 and in her mid 30s, but still, she’s basically footing the bill for everything. Dudes, with game, even if worst comes to worst, this is the lowest you can fall.

Now, liberation from all restraints is not necessarily a good thing for human beings. Some nod to the good opinion of your neighbour is a healthy requirement for a good citizen. Hubris is always ready to take overtake those who are free to live without consequence. I don't think this will be my problem. I still do care somewhat about my career and my place in society. I care about my standing before God and before his church. I don't want to needlessly offend good people. But the knawing fear of aloneness and reproductive oblivion is gone. The terror of having it swept all away is no more. It feels nice.

Thanks

2009-09-24T20:15:00.003-04:00

Thanks to Robin Hanson over at Overcoming Bias for directing an insane amount of traffic my way. Thanks also to Tyler Cowen for picking up on Robin's post.

UPDATE: Belated thanks to Robert Wiblin for directing Robin to the site.

Best Books for High School Teachers

2009-08-25T13:35:00.006-04:00

1. Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School?

The best introduction to the psychology of learning and eminently applicable to planning your lessons. It mostly confirms what traditionalists have had to say about teaching methods all along. Eg. It's pretty useless to teach critical thinking without teaching students enough facts to think critically about. The book is a little bit squishy on IQ, but no one should let that deter them from reading such an otherwise superb book.

2. Daniel Seligman, A Question of Intelligence and Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve

It's technically cheating, but while The Bell Curve is probably the more important for understanding of how different levels of intelligence affect your school, it may not make a lot of sense unless you know a little something about intelligence. Seligman's book is the best introduction to that topic, so I included it as well.

3. Gilbert Highet, The Art of Teaching

The best general introduction to the topic.

4. Madeline Hunter, Enhancing Teaching

The best book on how to plan your lessons.

5. Frank McCourt, Teacher Man

It wonderfully captures what it is like to be a teacher, from your early insecurities on to finding your place in the system. It's also a superbly written piece of literature. One for the canon.

6. Julia G. Thompson, The First-Year Teacher's Survival Guide and Discipline Survival Kit for the Secondary Teacher

Good practical advice.

Some other good books relevant to education I have read:
Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption
Charles Murray, Real Education
Rosalind Wiseman, Queen Bees and Wannabes

Relevant books I haven't read, but am planning to soon:
Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education
Robert Cialdini, Influence
Leonard Sax, Why Gender Matters and Boys Adrift
Christina Hoff Summers, The War Against Boys
William G. Pollack, Real Boys
Michael Kimmel, Guyland
James Tooley, The Miseducation of Women
Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy

NOTE: I have to express my disappointment in Peter Brimelow's The Worm in the Apple. This is particularly acute as I am a big fan of both The Patriot Game and Alien Nation. Brimelow's book sets out to prove that teachers' unions are a major obstacle to improvements in American education. They definitely don't help, but the fact is that reforming or abolishing such unions probably wouldn't make all that much difference. School choice has been touted as a grand solution for what ails North American education, but results have been disappointing. As Steve Sailer has noted, the most important factor in creating good schools is good students.

Why Church Going Guys Don't Have It That Bad With Women

2009-08-24T18:57:00.009-04:00

For all the complaints I have made about the bad dating advice, grotesque naivete about female sexuality and indifference to the plight of single men you will find in the contemporary church, I have to admit that guys in my situation are in fact in a lot of way a lot better off than their secular counterparts. These are the reasons:

1. The effects of female hypergamy are much muted.

Since women are by nature hypergamous and they are no longer constrained by the need for a provider, they will often choose to engage in one of the following:

a) Soft polygamy. Many women are willing to share the most attractive men, either by allowing these men to have concurrent relationships with more than one woman, or else by waiting their turn for a chance to have an exclusive relationship with them.

b) Voluntary spinsterhood. Some women just aren't willing to be sexually used by the most attractive men in such a way, but because they are not sufficiently attracted to other men, they would rather stay single than marry a "beta provider."

However, while church going guys have to deal with voluntary spinsterhood, for the most part they don't have to deal with soft polygamy. Even the most alpha single guy in church is, in general, not going to be able to sleep with more than one women in the church either concurrently or serially and most church women, at least where I am, are not out looking to meet guys in bars and such. Hence, there really is a girl for every boy. Furthermore, most of the church women who are choosing spinsterhood do in fact want to get married. Their inertia is a significant problem, but it is eminently overcomable.

2. There are more girls in church than guys.

The sex ratio isn't as grotesquely skewed in favour of men among younger people like it is among older age groups, but there are still more younger girls who go regularly go to church than guys.

3. Church girls are more likely to be virgins (or at least have low numbers of partners).

Church girls who have premarital sex lose significant value on the marriage market among church guys. Thus she is much more likely to bond deeply with you regardless of how ordinary your skills as a lover are.

4. Church girls have been prescreened for good character.

If you've had any extensive experience dating non-Christian women you will immediately notice the massive difference in average marriage worthiness between church girls and non-church girls. Guys whose only regular social interaction is with church girls will doubtless be able to pick out the flaws of the women beside him in the pews, but believe me it is much, much worse out there in the world.

In general, church women are much more likely to stick by their husbands out of a sense of duty and are much more likely to agree that they have responsibilities for the health of the marriage too.

However, you have to be careful. Being a conservative Christian is much less useful as a screening device when "everyone" is a conservative Christian. I wouldn't set much store by it in certain areas of the United States, such as the American South. At least in areas like that, the divorce rate is just as high among evangelical Christians as among everyone else.

5. Conservative churches will still shame women for infidelity and divorce (usually).

A woman who gets a frivolous divorce or who cheats on her husband in a conservative church will usually lose a lot of status. Combined with prescreening this means that you are much less likely to suffer from the divorce regime.

Again, you have to be careful though, especially in areas, like the American South, where "everyone" is a conservative Christian. Those churches are often little more than social clubs for the Republican party and the membership do not necessarily take their moral obligations as seriously as they should.

I have been attending a church where the 20s group recently joined together with the 30s. Being with the 20s are a good illustration of what the churches are doing right by their young men. Most of the 20s guys are plenty alpha enough. They often don't have a clue how to use their alphaness to get a girl, but they will do just fine without having to learn any game. The women they will marry have been preselected to marriage worthiness. The community will (usually) shame their wives for any infidelity they may engage in or any divorce that they frivolously engage in. Men with only one lifetime sex partner (i.e. mostly religious guys) are by far the most fertile in the U.S. These young guys will do well. They have all they need to live a happy and fulfilled life.

However, the guys in the 30s group are a prime illustration of the failings of the church in this area. The group is filled with some of the most pathetic specimens of manhood you will ever meet. Its beta central. Most of these men are decent, clean living, devout guys with good jobs, but they have zero game and hence there is almost zero dating between them and any of the 30s females. And the church does nothing to help the find and woo the women they do want to marry. (Needless to say the dating advice given in conservative Christian communities is less than worthless.)

SOME CAVEATS

1. Marrying a woman you met in church is not a substitute for screening that woman. While a large portion of truly devout Christian women are good marriage material, many women in church are just as bad as women out in the world.

2. Going to a theologically conservative church is not a substitute for screening that church. Some churches have drunk more of the feminist cool aid than others and some have more propensities for unthinkingly blaming the man than others. Reader S.L. Werner has some horror stories of men being blamed for their wives adultery and of divorced women receiving much sympathy from their church while divorced men were treated like lepers.

FINAL REFLECTIONS

In general, for all the above, I tend to have a lot less sympathy for involuntarily single Christian guys who know a little about game and refuse to implement it. You have so many advantages over non-Christian guys. Most of the women now choosing spinsterhood do in fact want to get married. You will have to overcome a little bit of inertia among these women, but, since the natural alphas will be snapped up pretty quickly too, it won't take that much to move them from indifferent to interested. I can appreciate that one might feel the need to be cautious about taking dating advice from rakes and pick up artists and there is also the question of finding an appropriate practice venue. (I definitely do not recommend nightclubs and have to emphasize the need for extreme caution even in friendly neighbourhood pubs.)

In short, church going guys have better dating chances than secular guys, and when they do find someone they want to marry, they are more likely to have a successful marriage.

LINKS:
Tom Rees on religion and infidelity here.
Mark Regenerus on early marriage here. (NOTE: I don't much agree with Regenerus' take on why men are supposedly avoiding marriage.)

How Social Conservatives and Traditionalists Got It Wrong About Femal Sexuality

2009-08-24T12:12:00.014-04:00

The older generation of men grew up, so to speak, inside The Matrix. They hold to chivalry because they believe women by nature are pure, innocent, and good, because in the world these men grew up in, that's how they were bred. Our civilization's campaign to make women that way was so successful that after millenia it seemed they really were that way, so that these guys never had a chance to see women's untamed nature.
- Jacob M. (Hermes)

Over at In Mala Fide, I have been participating in a comment thread on game and traditionalist conservatives. Commenter Rum wrote:

Traditionalists of every stripe have been very comfortable talking about the animal, brutish, hind-brain side of men, especially in regard to sexual instincts. The idea that men's sexual nature is something that must be channeled and controlled--and thus partly frustrated--for the sake of civilization is accepted without question.

It obviously makes traditionalists uneasy to think of their equally human female counterparts as having deep instincts that are equally unruly and problematic for civilization. Why this is true makes for interesting speculation but it cannot be denied that it does make them more uneasy than contemplating men's bestial component.

Traditionalists have done a fairly good job of recognizing female imperfectness in areas other than sexuality, and their critiques of feminism often had traction because of this. But traditionalists haven’t really come to terms with the dark side of female sexuality. Traditionalists never really addressed why women were attracted to rakes and bad boys in the first place, nor why they would leave good men for the same. It was all chalked up to some sort of “trickery” on the part of the rake or some moral inadequacy on the part of the nice guy husband.

As Jacob M. has mentioned, Western Civilization had done such a good job of suppressing female sexuality for the past few hundred years that it became the conventional wisdom that women didn’t really have any sexual desires. According to this line of thought, what most women really wanted was committment and family and while they were willing to give men sex in exchange for these they weren’t really interested in sex in and of itself. Oh how wrong we were.

The above is unquestionably true despite the protestations of some older traditionalists like Lawrence Auster. Here Auster replied to me:

What world is Thursday living in? Victorian England? Has he never heard of the 20th century? Has he never heard of the Roaring Twenties (the first Sexual Revolution--meaning unmarried middle-class women were getting it on)? Has he never heard of the Fifties (a.k.a. the "Sixties before the Sixties")? Has he never heard of the Sixties? Has he never heard of the Seventies? Shall I continue?

Sadly it has taken traditionalists almost 100 years to even begin to realize that the series of sexual revolutions in the 20th century were primarily driven by female sexual desire, not male sexual desire. Until recently, traditionalists have tended to assume that the behaviour of women in the Victorian era was a close reflection of their unconstrained sexual nature. The signals indicating otherwise were indeed there to read much earlier, but that doesn't mean they were in fact read. Other aspects of female sinfulness were acknowledged, but the primarily female driven nature of 20th century changes in sexual mores was not put forward by any traditionalist or social conservative before F. Roger Devlin. One might reply, as Auster does, that it is axiomatic that the sexual revolutions of the 20th Century were changes in who young women slept with. But that ignores the differing explanations as to why they started doing so. The usual social conservative/traditionalist explanation was that bad males had gotten these young girls to sleep with them because these poor females wanted love and affection (but not sex) and those bad males refused to give them love and affection unless they slept with them. Those innocent females didn't really want the sex, you see, they just wanted to be loved and cherished, but they had to give these men sex outside of marriage or else these bad men would move on to some girl who would have sex with them. It was sexual extortion, aided by the fact that the young man could now say, "But you won't get pregnant. We have birth control now."

The true explanation, of course, is that these supposedly innocent young women just liked having sex with the most attractive males. And that is definitely not what social conservatives and traditionalists before Devlin have ever said, despite the protestations of Mr. Auster.

NOTE: I had to write this blog post because Mr. Auster wouldn't post the last couple paragraphs here in his post criticizing me (see above link). I am not going to speculate as to why he hasn't done so, but the fact is that they radically undermine his position that traditionalists had it right about female sexuality all along. Furthermore, Ferdinand Bardamu has caught Mr. Auster only a year ago putting out one of the most clueless explanations ever for female misbehaviour:

So what is Auster’s explanation as to why women prefer violent men? IGNORANCE. I’m dead serious:
This isn’t about some wild attraction to dangerous and exciting men. It’s about pure insensibility, pure dullness, the quality of being tuned out from reality.

Funny that’s its only women who are drawn to physically abusive lovers. Are men not capable of stupidity? Any animal is smart enough to avoid actions that cause it pain, and yet the Western members of the female sex of the only sentient species on the planet can’t do the same.

Have you considered, Mr. Auster, that the two explanations are not mutually exclusive? Namely, that in the absence of social conditioning, women will blindly follow their genitals straight into the arms of violent dirtbags? Those men are socially dominant by dint of their nature, which is why women are drawn to them and why, when they get slapped both silly and senseless, they almost always go back to them.

No, Mr. Auster, you and other, older traditionalists didn't have it right all along. It was the followers of Devlin and Roissy who pointed you in the right direction. To state otherwise is dishonest.

How to find a virgin to marry (if you are a guy)

2009-04-24T17:44:00.008-04:00

The first thought many of you may have is that such creatures no longer exist in such a sluttified place and time as 21st Century North America. You would be wrong. According to the most reliable surveys, about 25% of the U.S. female population has either never had sex, never had sex except within marriage, or only had premarital sex with their current partner. Fully 10% of women enter marriage as virgins. So, while it's rare, it isn’t that rare. Of course, in certain subcultures, it will be more common that in others. The Yale Drama school would appear to be a very bad place to look for it, as would any number of industries from the restaurant trade to Hollywood. Therefore, if a virgin is what you must have, I have devised a plan for finding these rare birds.

(On a personal note, when I was younger I was much more concerned about this sort of thing, but as I have grown older, the urgency of this particular criterion has been much attenuated. So, this is much more of an intellectual excercise than a practical battleplan for me at this point. It still would be nice though. Hey, as guys lets admit it, the thought of being the only one whose ever been in there is pretty cool.)

Look for an Evangelical Protestant (or, better yet, a Mormon)

Being a Catholic is, in practice, more like being part of an ethnic group than it is an adherence to a certain set of principles. Being a Protestant on the other hand, particularly an Evangelical Protestant, usually means you actually believe the stuff. That is why the term “bad Catholic” is in common parlance, while there is no commonly used equivalent like “bad Protestant.” For an Evangelical Protestant, faith must be personal. It’s not enough just to be on the right team. If you don’t believe in and practice traditional Christian moral standards, you aren’t a Christian at all. Now, I am not saying that this is how Catholics are supposed to view their religion, only that that is the way they often do in practice.

Furthermore, Catholicism is linked culturally to several actual ethnic groups. It is almost unimaginable to be Italian or Spanish or Irish and not be Catholic. It is part of being a member of those groups. Therefore, people in those groups are much more likely to stay Catholic, regardless of their level of devotion. Needless to say though that just being Italian or Spanish or Irish does not make one less likely to be a slut.

I would also say that the widely flouted Catholic standards on birth control and divorce tend to a more general dissolution of morals. If the community doesn’t take its standards seriously on these “smaller” things, individuals are going to follow their own inclinations on “bigger” things, like premarital sex.

Female teachers at the Catholic school I have been teaching at will openly admit to living with men before they came to work there. In fact, it is not unusual for teachers here in the Catholic school system in Canada to live together while teaching at Catholic schools. If caught, they are generally let off with nothing more than a slap on the wrist and a curt order to move out. An Evangelical teacher at a Christian school would in similar circumstances be summarily fired.

Now, morally conservative Catholics, who know their way around their Church better than I, undoubtedly also know where best to seek out their fellow true believers. Parish shopping is not an unknown phenomenon and there are certain churches where traditional Catholics are known to congregate. Furthermore, there are also still some small Catholic colleges in the United States which seem to actually take the faith seriously. Your general run of the mill Catholic though has an entirely justified reputation among Evangelical folk as little better than a heathen.

Orthodox Churches in North America have the benefit of being small, but also have the disadvantages of being tied to particular ethnic groups (Greeks, Russians etc.).

NOTE: It has been pointed out to me (see Trumwill's comment below) that a Mormon is probably an even better bet than an Evangelical Protestant. Mormons are even more tightly knit and community oriented than Evangelicals. Therefore, there tends to be far fewer deviations from community standards.

Look for someone in an area where religion is less popular

One of the great benefits of the sexual revolution for conservative minded guys was how it made it much easier to tell the sluts from the good girls. Where the stigma of pre-marital sex is non-existant, there is much less incentive to keep your slutty past private. Girls will admit to all sorts of things these days. With some carefully deployed tactical non-judgmentalism, one is usually able to smoke out the details of someone’s past.

You want as clear a line drawn between those who truly believe and those who don’t, because that functions as a clear signal as to who does and does not follow the conservative moral teachings of their church. Therefore, one of the clear exceptions to my advice about preferring an Evangelical would be in the Southern United States. Apparently “everyone” there is religious, but they don't seem to be having much less premarital sex. I am reliably informed that this is not the case in most of the rest of the United States, even Mid –Western areas such as Ohio, where conservative Christianity in general and Evangelical Christianity in particular, have become very much a minority taste. Needless to say conservative Christianity in my own country of Canada is even less popular.

For this reason, I would actually suggest that you look for someone at a church in an urban area. For example, evangelicals in downtown Toronto are there because they really believe, while those in rural Alberta perhaps less so. The women in urban churches will tend to be of a higher educational level too, meeting yet another of my criteria. However, please note that this is not a hard and fast rule.

Look for a North East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)

This may seem contradictory, as NE Asians are among the least religious people on earth. However, if you can find an attractive NE Asian Evangelical, chances are you have hit the jackpot. Even some non-religious women in these groups are virgins into their late twenties or even late thirties. My own theory is that this is at least partially due to genetics. NE Asians just tend to have a lot more conservative temperaments overall than do white or black people. One should not entirely discount culture here though, as Asian culture tend to be a lot more focused on tradition and family honour than white culture.

The same does not necessarily apply to all Asians. Philipinos and Thais have personalities a lot closer to the white average than do Japanese and Koreans. Notice that both countries are known for their prostitutes.

Look for someone young

Pretty self-explanatory. The less time she has been out in the dating world, the fewer opportunities she has had to have sex. Also, the fewer boyfriends the less chance that one of them had the moves to get her into bed.

Look for someone with a bachelor’s degree

Smarter people have more self control. The sad fact is that the people who are most likely to disapprove of pre-marital sex, the poor and uneducated, are also the ones most likely to have a lot of it. (On the other hand, one should note that women with post-graduate education are almost as bad as women with very little education, so if at all possible you will want to avoid women with graduate or professional degrees.) It have to say that it was shocking to find out how many virgins there were at so liberal a place as Harvard University, despite the fact that no one there seems to have any theoretical objections to it. Ironically, you may be better off searching for a virgin at Harvard than at the local Pentecostal Church. However, in reality, you will want someone who is against premarital sex in theory and has the self-control and foresight to actually put that theory into practice. Essentially, this means going for a conservative religious woman with a bachelor’s degree.

I would note that from my own dating experience, the ability of college educated Evangelical women to keep their legs together in our day and age is nothing short of astonishing. A shockingly large number of them have never even kissed a guy, let alone had sex with one.

Look for a someone in the 6-8 range for looks

There are two factors in how her looks influence a woman’s sexual behavior. First of all, if a woman is very good looking, she will suffer fewer consequences from having more partners. If you are a perfect 10, you are going to have lots of high quality suitors regardless of how much you slut it up. Examples apparently include Bar Rafaeli and Scarlett Johannson. If a very beautiful woman is so inclined, she can basically sleep with whomever she wants and still lose very little of her value in the sexual marketplace. Beautiful women know this, and those who want to will often take full advantage of this. The second factor is that less beautiful women will very often try to date up. But in order to compete with the really beautiful girl for the attentions of a high quality man, a less good looking girl will have to put out earlier. Even Alphas will often take the easy way out and sleep with a less attractive women, so long as they don’t have to work so hard or make any definite commitment. Sometimes the Alpha will even take a genuine liking to the less attractive girl, but putting out earlier still comes with a much greater chance of getting dumped. If a less attractive girl starts constantly chasing after the Alphas, she can easily start racking up the numbers.

According to Roissy and other pick up artists, in general society the second factor seems to be stronger. A 6 or a 7 is much more likely to be a slut than a 9 or a 10. Women will sleep around to get Alpha cock, but they don’t have the same drive for variety as men do, so if they are able to get a high quality man to stick around they don’t have much incentive to sleep around. However, in smaller religious subcultures, it is the first factor that would seem to be the stronger. The less attractive women are still trying compete with the more attractive ones, but, in these cultures, even the Alphas are not supposed to be sleeping around and will suffer a devaluation on the marriage market if they do. So, there is no general culture of sleeping around to corrupt those women lower on the totem pole. Second, for a girl in one of these subcultures losing your virginity means a significant loss of value on the marriage market, not to mention the stress of breaking a major moral standard. So there is a strong disincentive to try and move up the mating ladder by putting out early. It may work, but if it doesn’t there is the downside is huuuuuge. So, in this case, the less attractive women will, in fact, try to compete with the more attractive women by being more chaste. "I may not be quite as beautiful as her, but you will be the only man I have ever been with." On the other hand, a very beautiful girl, even in a strict religious subculture, knows that having sex will not completely devalue her on the marriage market. She will take something of a hit, but not necessarily much of one. So, if she get the chance to hook up with a really hot guy, she is much more likely to take advantage of it than a less good looking girl.

I don’t think I need to note that really ugly/fat girls everywhere are much more likely to take whatever they can get whenever a good opportunity arises. This holds even in conservative religious circles, though many ugly conservative girls, especially the ones who really believe, will resign themselves to celibacy or accept the courtship of very unattractive, but honourable suitors.

Final Thoughts

So, in conclusion, high thee to a Chinese Baptist Church near Toronto, Ontario and find yourself a cute but not spectacular 22 year old with a bachelor’s degree.

P.S. The biggest indicator that a girl is a virgin is her insistence that she wants a guy who is a virgin himself. Whether or not you can meet her standard will doubtless affect whether you think that a good thing or a bad thing.

Why the men's rights movement is going nowhere?

2009-04-24T13:42:00.002-04:00

Men’s rights will never take off for the following reasons:

1. It is hard for men to play the victim card without looking weak and therefore loserish. Most men would rather just suffer in silence than admit their weakness.

(Similarly, most men will not complain about the fact that they have lost in the sexual revolution. You just can’t admit that, while your future wife was out shagging a couple alphas, you yourself could barely get laid. Again, by complaining, you admit you are a loser.)

2. There are all sorts of men who will chivalrously jump to a women’s defense. Men’s ability to form a pack and present a united front falls apart in the pursuit of pussy.

3. Alpha males run everything and there is a human tendency to Platonically lump everyone who is of the same category together. Alpha males are making out like bandits, hence feminists and other beneficiaries of the current system will always be able to point out how “men” are the big winners in our society.

4. Alpha males are making out like bandits in the current system, so the most talented and articulate men have little incentive to speak out against it. Why would they? This leads to a huge leadership gap in the men's movement and lends a further loserish cast to the proceedings.

5. Most beta males are actually pretty happy being assraped by society. I’ve been reading James Kalb’s The Tyranny of Liberalism and from the survey data he presents there, it appears that men actually received a boost in happiness since the sexual revolution. It would appear that a lot of men really do prefer XBox 360 to sex. Or think they are doing better than they really are.

Nothing will happen to reform our truly corrupt Western societies until something goes seriously, overwhelmingly wrong. It’s going to get much worse before it gets better, if it ever does. In such circumstances, there really are only two options: huddle down in a small religious community (the Benedict option) or make hay while the sun shines (the Roissy option). In any case, submitting to the practices of the mainstream of society is a not a realistic option for the truly aware. I can’t really believe so many people simply aquiesce to it.

Who benefitted from the sexual revolution?

2009-04-24T13:10:00.004-04:00

Many social conservatives have the unfortunate habit of seeing the sexual revolution as a case of "men" unscrupulously exploiting women for their own purposes. The classic social conservative position is that what women want most is marriage to a good man, and it is only the selfish hedonism of males that holds them back. There was no place in this worldview for raw female sexual desire. Women didn't want sex, they wanted committment. I used to share that view, but have since come to see how absolutely wrong it is. As F. Roger Devlin has demonstrated, the sexual revolution was, in fact, female driven. If women did not want it to happen, it would not have happened. The fact that women are not sexually innocent should have been obvious. The human race did not propagate itself by women not liking sex. That, with regard to most men, women can take it or leave it is not, in itself, determinative. The truth is that when it comes to the top men, females' drive to copulate is as bad as men's.

Now the mere fact that the sexual revolution was female driven, does not necessarily mean that women were the real beneficiaries. In fact, it is arguable that on the whole they, in fact, lost. At the very least, most women merely found new ways to be unhappy. But let us at least grant that some women benefitted very much from the sexual revolution. Women are not necessarily averse to a little variety and at leas some women got the benefit of playing around a bit, before settling down with a satisfactory mate.

Alpha females didn’t really gain anything in the sexual revolution. In fact, they probably lost, as Alpha males, their natural long term mates, now have much, much less incentive to settle down with them. If they do manage to snag an Alpha, they are now much, much likelier to suffer the indignity of being cheated on. In short, these women would have gotten Alphas anyway, but now get them on much less favourable terms.

Lesser females don’t get much of a good deal either. When they attempt to date up, as many of them will, they have had the pleasure of having sex with an Alpha. But, in the process, they are very likely to suffer the indignity of being a frequent pump and dump victim. Furthermore, having had sex with an Alpha means they will be much less satisfied with their eventual beta husband, should they actually get married. One could somewhat plausibly argue, like DA, that giving lesser females access to sex with Alphas was an overall benefit to these lesser women, but one could also argue that ultimately they tend to suffer a lot more heartbreak and indignity than their encounters with Alphas are worth.

Beta males are the one's getting the biggest shaft here. They are forced to compete with Alpha males, meaning that they are often left out of the mating game as the Alphas monopolize more than one woman at a time. Should they actually find someone to mate with, chances are it will be with one of the Alpha's leftovers. More than just the psychological unpleasantness of having other men "break in" their woman, this means that Betas are often left to deal with the bitterness towards men that repeatedly being pumped and dumped by Alphas often bequeathes to women. Not to mention having to measure up unfavourably to the Alpha's sexual performance, and fact that the women is unlikely to bond as strongly with him after having fallen in love with an Alpha.

Alpha males have, of course, made out like bandits. They frequently get the benefit of multiple consecutive or concurrent relationships with various women. If they want to settle down, they rarely have much difficulty in finding a long term mate. Of course, if they try to hang on too long, they do risk ending up alone or with some lesser female in the end, but if they are smart they can end up with the benefits of both easy sex and committment.

Publication

2008-06-04T01:38:00.008-04:00

My Ecclesiastes translation has been given advance publication
here.

Three Types of Women: Bad Girls, Girly Girls, and Nerd Girls

2008-05-09T15:22:00.025-04:00

NOTE: Reading this post over again at the behest of some friends, I have to say that the original post implied more personal experience with these three types of women than was the case. I guess I have a taste for lurid innuendo. I _have_ had some quite interesting dealings with all three categories of women here, so much of this _is_ based on my own experiences. (For example, drunk female law students making crude sexual advances is something that I have known first hand.) But much of the following is also based on my reading, my impressions of female friends, classmates, co-workers etc., as well as paying attention to the observations of others. I have therefore modified the post to make things more clear.

I have also modified a bit of the part on bad girls, to make my observations a bit more rounded.

After you and your friends had enough experience in the dating world, things start to take on some definite patterns. Here are some modest observations on what I take to be the three types of women out there. I am willing to be corrected if anyone has any further suggestions.

1. Nerd Girls

Nerd girls are much more immune than most to pick-up techniques, and, in fact, I have found such techniques to be almost spectacularly useless in dealing with them. Nerd girls tend to look much more objectively at the character and accomplishments of those they go out with. Everything is at face value. Either you measure up or you do not. As long as you have the qualities they like, they always call you back, even if they are really good looking. Though they have some male mental traits, nerd girls are not entirely devoid of femininity. They actually tend to be quite mothering, even of their boyfriends, something which can sometimes be a real turnoff. However, some nerd girls can actually be very good looking. My family on my father’s side are good gene, good bone kind of people, but also quite nerdy. My sister, a nurse, happens to very, very good looking, but also likes to watch an awful lot of Star Wars and Star Trek. (She had bit of a a bad girl streak when younger.) My only female cousin on my dad's side is almost as good looking and is a bio nerd taking Medicine at McMaster University. An amazing girl I was dating not too long ago is a total nerd. She also happened look like a model. However, whatever their looks, nerd girls, still, alas, can sometimes be a bit boring. They lack the charm of girly girls and the wildness of bad girls. They tend to make great wives and girlfriends, but not necessarily the best lovers. But they rarely cheat or have sordid incidents in their sexual past. They are terribly loyal. I would also note, many Asian women tend to fall into this category. As I keep stating elsewhere, I have known several nerdy white math/computer guys with incredibly good looking wives/girlfriends. Of course, the women were all Asian. (National Review columnist/pop math author John Derbyshire and his wife fit this mold.)

2. Bad Girls

Bad girls too have a masculine aspect to their personality, but they are anything but mothering. They often have athletic bodies and are often found in high testosterone careers like lawyering, journalism, pornography and rock music. (Female lawyers tend to be a mix of bad girl and nerd girl, with the mix tending in one direction or the other depending on the individual.) Their calculating, amoral selfishness is frequently off-putting, but their attitude towards sex tends to be more like men’s and their wildness can make them exciting bedmates. Even so, their aggression and lack of femininity in bed means that they are not really the ideal lover, and as they get older and set in their ways it they apparently often start ordering their partners around in the sack. (With bad girls, apparently, it often feels like you are the one being fucked.) Like nerd girls, bad girls too tend to much pick their boyfriends and lovers based on more objective qualities like looks or accomplishment, though they aren’t likely to single you out for your niceness or good character. So, if you are a relatively tall, good looking nerd chances are at some point (particularly if you go to law school) one of them will up and decide “He’ll do.” Such events come at you pretty much at random and are fairly rare, but they do happen. Of course, they next day, no matter what does or doesn't happen, they will act like they have never known you. And if you happen to merely make out with them at a party, by the next day they will have really and truly forgotten that you ever existed. They will often cheat recklessly on boyfriends or husbands. On the good side though, bad girls tend not to make you fall deeply in love with them. They are good for a ride in the hay, if that is what you want, but it is almost always right up front that you can’t really expect much of anything else from them. Artsy bad girls, I have a found, are a particular temptation for the lonely art nerd.

Bad girls are still girls, however, so they are rarely completely devoid of impulses towards marriage and motherhood. But they often lack any instinct for how to fulfill these conventionally feminine roles properly and their gestures towards these roles are often touchingly pathetic. One particularly good example is Courtney Love. Her frequent attempts at girliness always seem to end up with her embarassing herself badly. I can think of few people who try so hard, and fail so miserably, at being girly.

3. Girly girls

Girly girls are the one’s who are most flakey. They tend to like astrology, psychics, and pop psychology. While nerd girls tend to go in for more conventional religion, girly girls are into “spirituality.” They also tend to have more than their share of feminine charm. Bad girls may be the most sexual, but girly girls are the one’s you tend to find most sexy. Unlike bad girls, girly girls will be attracted to good qualities like kindness and character, but they aren’t nearly enough to seal the deal. Furthermore, even if you run the gamut on objective qualities like good looks, humour, moral character, and accomplishment, if you don’t establish dominance in the relationship, it is doomed. You won’t get rejected exactly, you are too good a catch to be explicitly dismissed, but you’ll find yourself getting strung along. (I should say that I myself tend not to get stuck in the lets just be friends zone. Rather I tend to get stuck in the dating/make-out buddy stage.) When a girly girl fails to call me back after a few days, I frequently will call them again to ask if they are actually interested and if I should move on to dating other women. Not wanting to lose me and my many good qualities, they will almost invariably call you back for a date. I remember one particular girl that I begged to tell me she wasn’t really interested. She told me she couldn’t say that. When they finally do reject you it will be with something like, “I really tried to love you.” And so they did. Because of their charm and emotional openness, it is easy to fall hard for these girls. But they will break your heart like no other. Of course, it will in all truth be quite unintentional. I actually find that with my own minimal investment in pick-up techniques that I have been getting my heart broken more, not less than before. Before, it was either nerd girls or bad girls, who. whatever their merit, are just incapable of inspiring me with the kind of obsessive emotions a girly girl can. Girly girls, though maddeningly attractive, were just completely beyond my reach. Now I find it actually isn’t hard to chat up and get dates with this other kind of woman. And I don’t find it hard to keep dating them, at least for a while. It isn’t even hard to get them to make out with you. (Mystery’s technique works spectacularly well for me. Establish touching. Wait until you see the “doggie dinner bowl” look. Ask her if she wants to kiss you. If she says yes kiss her. If she hesitates, you still kiss her. It is darn near infallible. The rest is easy.) But I keep getting my heart broken by these girls nonetheless. Girly girls are generally sexually conservative, but also somewhat erratic. They will often go long periods without sleeping with anyone and then all of a sudden have a fling. They tend not to cheat, but then all of a sudden they sometimes do. Nothing is more maddening for a man that to date someone who has been for the most part genuinely chaste, but who also happens to have one or two spectacularly sordid sexual incident in their past. Bad girls, who have slept with many more men, but who own their own promiscuity, don’t awaken any such jealous passions.

I am not sure if I should really just accept my fate and just marry a cute nerd girl, something well within reach. It certainly would make life a lot simpler, but they aren’t necessarily what I am most attracted to. Bad girls are, of course, off the table. I have deep passions, but they tend to lie beneath the surface. I tend to cultivate a stoic reserve. (I think I resemble the remark in Singin’ in the Rain: “Dignity, always dignity.”) Control and restraint: these are all wonderful qualities to inject into a prose style, but they won’t do much to attract a girly girl. I have noted with some jealousy the sexual tension between Roissy and Clio (herself a blend of nerd girl and girly girl, with just the barest hint of bad girl). Morally and spiritually, Clio and I have much more in common than her and Roissy, but, sadly, despite my admiration for her very French ooh la la (French Canadian women are some of the most charming on earth), there is just no chemistry there. I'm crushed.

Smart or talented betas tend to end up with either nerd girls or bad girls, rather than low end girly girls. Examples of talented beta/nerd girl matchups include Kurt Cobain’s first girlfriend, Tracy Marander, was a mothering nerd girl. William Hazlitt ended up married to some rather mannish women. Alfred Hitchcock ended up with Alma, a bit of a cutie, at least in her younger days, but hardly Hitch’s ideal. As for beta/bad girl matchups, Kurt Cobain eventually ended up with Courtney Love. Charles Baudelaire ended up with Jeanne Duval.

SUGGESTED READING:
Roissy examines women by career here and by nationality here. He takes on Type A women here.

Supernaturalism, Tradition and the Law

2008-05-04T12:11:00.005-04:00

Ever notice how weird it is that you can believe any crazy shit you want, implement it as government policy, teach it in public schools or whatever, so long as you scrupulously avoid referring to a supernatural being. Such a belief doesn't have to actually be rational or scientific, so long as you claim that you arrived at it through purely rational or scientific means. Conversely, if you want to enact a sensible policy, but make your appeal to the people on the basis of traditional attachment to some supernatural entity, you are an enemy of peace, order, and good government.

I remember sitting in one classroom in downtown Toronto during my practicum where a we watched a film that presented the case that the pyramids were the work of some alien civilization. I know that many teachers present Michael Moore documentaries in their classroom almost without comment. While subbing north of Toronto, I was given the film What the Bleep Do We Know? to show to the class. Its muddled and mystical pseudo-science was apparently perfectly acceptable fare for the students of York Region, though a similar propagandist film for Christianity would have brought howls of protest.

The effect has been to on the defensive all political ideas based on tradition, because most traditions have been expressed in religious form. We don’t do these things because someone has thought out all the extended details, but because it is the command of God. I would suggest therefore that the prohibition against entanglement of religion and politics has become wholly arbitrary and should be abolished. In our present context it is nothing except a club for liberals, left and right, to beat traditionalist conservatives over the head with. Policy enacted for religious reasons is just as likely, perhaps even, being based on tradition, more likely, to be of benefit to the vast majority of people. That the secular reasons behind such policies may have been forgotten or never even consciously articulated, does not mean they are not there. Asking religious social conservatives to produce explicit secular justifications for every aspect of their policy preferences is absurd. Furthermore, even when we can see that a particular policy is possessed of good secular justifications, sometimes it can only be expressed to the commonality of men in religious terms.

For example, there are several good non-religious arguments against gay marriage. Clio put out the primary one:

I am concerned about same-sex marriage because I believe that the purpose of marriage is to tie biological fathers to their biological children. Same-sex marriage confuses and confounds that primary purpose of marriage because it insists that biology is of no significance to marriage, and moreover that biological parenthood is also not important to the formation of families. It is one thing to say that gay people can be good parents, which I believe. It is another thing to say that biological parenthood doesn't really matter.

Right, marriage is there to convince masculine men to express their masculinity by sticking around and supporting their children, rather than in that other popular form of expressing your masculinity: screwing as many chicks as possible. Therefore, marriage needs to, in some way, celebrate masculinity as masculinity. Gaying it up isn’t helpful. Furthermore, extending marriage into a situation, male-male relationships, where monogamy is unlikely doesn’t exactly send the message to other men that society expects you to take your marriage vows seriously. But few people can follow the kinds of complex economic arguments necessary to make the case this way, and the core of people opposed to gay marriage do so for religious reasons.

To cite another example, there are several good arguments against our current sexual mores (i.e. sexual anarchy). For most people, having a clear set of rules about when you should and should not engage in sexual relations was a good thing. It brought some order to the sexual marketplace. The old rules weren’t perfectly fair to everyone, but they dampened down the sexual warfare aspects of courtship and had the virtue of clarity. You knew when you had stepped into the outlaw zone. But of course no one, except perhaps yours truly, thinks about the complexities of the sexual marketplace when deciding whether to sleep with someone. No one thinks of how living with someone in a stable long term relationship subtly undermines the bright line rule that you should only engage in sex once married and thus increases the likelihood that the less intelligent and the less restrained will truly get themselves into trouble. So, the only effective way to convince most people of the need for restraint is a firm “Thus Saith the Lord.” The alternative, which is to vastly overstate the emotional and physical risks of pre-marital sex for everyone, is ridiculous. Secondly, there is the collective action problem within the sexual marketplace. In an anarchic sexual marketplace, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for just one person to act with restraint. There are plenty of men and women out there willing to do double duty. (If a woman doesn’t put out, a man can go off to find someone else who will, while if a man restrains himself during dating while others do not, unless his dates come from a pool where chastity is the norm, chances are he will end up buying at full price the cast off of some someone like Roissy.) So, unless you ensconce yourself in a smaller religious community you have to put yourself out there to compete. But, in doing so, almost everyone ends up just slightly less well off. Most women are putting out slightly sooner than they really want to and sleep with a couple men they really wish they hadn’t, and most men are ending up with someone slightly more sexually experienced than they would prefer (i.e. with slightly more sexual experience than they have). Once again, most people are totally incapable of following the logic here, so the only recourse for convincing people is to proclaim morality by divine fiat and unapolagetically enact policy that reinforces this. (In this particular case, I’d suggest much tighter divorce laws (but not abolishing divorce altogether), stripping fathers of any rights over children unless married to the mother, ending the right to child support unless the mother is married to the father, and reintroducing criminal sanctions against adultery.)

As a side note, I don’t really get the fetish many people have about keeping opposition to Darwinian evolution out of schools. I myself am a firm Darwinian, but all sorts of absurdity is taught in our public schools, much of it with far worse social and public policy implications. Why the particular outrage over this particular variety of creationism? The only thing I can think of is because of its reference to a supernatural being. The ideas of economic and racial, and sexual creationism are just as absurd, but are nonetheless all but our official ideology. They have not, however, made the mistake of appealing to the supernatural.

SUGGESTED FURTHER READING:
Megan McArdle on gay marriage.
Mencius on pseudo-atheists. My response is here
Mencius further opines on how our supposed rationalism is really nothing more than one group of religious (though often non-theistic) sects persecuting another.
Pith comments on publicly funded religious education here, here and here

Apologies and Announcements

2008-04-07T21:58:00.006-04:00

Apologies to my readers. I never intended to go this long between posts. I haven't disappeared or given up on blogging. I haven't run out of ideas or lost interest in writing. I have been settling nicely into a new job from this fall. While that in itself wouldn't have kept me from posting, the fact is that since settling in to my new city I have started dating and socializing rather a lot. So, that plus work, plus the fact that I seem to like consuming art even more than I like writing about it, has put blogging pretty much on the back burner. I do promise to try to write more however in future, and, in particular, I will definitely be writing something here over summer holidays.

Furthermore, I have something of an announcement to make. The journal Literary Imagination, put out by Oxford University Press, is going to be publishing part of my translation of Ecclesiastes sometime in the next few months. I am hoping that this will lead to the whole thing being published as a book. If that happens it will pretty much put an end to the anonymity of this blog, since I'd prefer my writing to be considered of a piece. However, I am not quite willing to reveal myself in full as of yet, though as I well know, anyone intrepid enough could probably track me down anyway.

Thanks to all my faithful readers. I shall return.

The Unbearable Lightness of Quirk: A Review of Juno

2008-02-14T15:35:00.004-05:00

Last night I went out to see the movie Juno. It was a mixed experience. Certainly the film got quite a few laughs out of me. But I have deep reservations about this kind of hyper-literate quirky comedy.

First of all, an interesting character is more than a collection of peccadillos. Juno is a film prime example of the fallacy that if you just load up your characters with enough unusual tics, they will emerge as convincing individuals. Such peccadillos, like Juno’s father’s being “born to work in HVAC” or her step-mother’s obsession with dogs, are little more than a crude attempt to distinguish between characters who actually sound an awful lot alike. There are some great lines in the movie, but they are scattered more or less randomly among the characters and, in isolation, I would dare you to tell me who said what. Nothing illustrates better that a great script is more than a heap of witty lines. Great comedies use wit to reveal character, not show off the writers virtuosity.

The actors, especially Ellen Page, labour mightily to render these characters three dimensional, with somewhat mixed success. In general, there are two kinds of movie characters, which I will name after the two main figures in Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire: Stanley characters and Blanche characters. For a Blanche character, the writer gives the character a distinct individual mode of thought and expression evident on the page, and it is the actor’s job to serve the character as written. On the other hand, for a Stanley character, the writer gives you hardly anything more than a sketch and it is the actor’s job to more or less create the character from a few basic building blocks, much like Brando did with Stanley Kowalski. Stanley characters are often don’t have a lot to say, and the performance is more about pure emoting. Cinema is the perfect medium for this kind of thing, and, indeed, in the film version of Streetcar, Stanley is a much fuller character than in the play. (Martin Scorsese with his series of inarticulate male characters is very much the master of this, but there are scores of classic film roles where the actual dialogue is banal to non-existant.) The problem with Juno is that it is a dialogue heavy film with roles that all sound the same. With so many words already defining their characters, the actors don’t have much room to fully create anything memorable. The kind of actor based character building that Brando did with Stanley doesn’t work nearly so well when you have this much dialogue to work against.

What actually may ensure the film’s survival is not the portrait of the central character or her quirky family, but that of the Jason Bateman/Jennifer Garner marriage. Alas, the whole mess rings all too true. Some might wonder why a self-consciously arty guy like the husband would want to settle down with such a conventionally domestic wife, but it wasn’t any mystery to me because, well, Jennifer Garner is a smoking hot babe. There is no end to the betrayals a man will commit, even of himself, if it involves the chance to hop into bed with a pretty girl. If the price you have to pay for getting the girl is Anne Geddes prints and muzak, then so be it. But this is a dangerous strategy, especially in an age of easy divorce. “Men are April when they woo, December when they wed.” Most men, even if they really don’t really believe all the romantic crap the spout when pursuing a woman, manage to at least temporarily convince themselves that they do. However, once the delights of physical love become routine, as they always do to some degree, what once seemed like an acceptable compromise now begins to look like a trap. I recognize a lot of myself Jason Bateman's Mark, the ambivalence about having children (though having gone that far down the path, I don’t think I would be turning back), the difficulty of meshing my desire for a stable home with my far-out and time consuming arty interests (religious women, my prime targets in the marriage market, tend to be extremely conventional), and, of course, the conviction that 90s alternative music rocks. I sympathize, while ultimately judging him to be a creep. To paraphrase Slash on Axl Rose, he is an asshole, but he’s not just an asshole.

What makes Juno interesting is that it is a strenuously hip film (the soundtrack is filled with the songs from all the best bands people like you and me have never heard of) that dare to question the value of hipness. The film is in love with how cool it is, but is harsh in its distain for those who would let coolness keep them from doing their duty. Unlike many defenses of conventional morality, it recognized just how, well, cool cool stuff really is. It doesn’t flatter middle class vulgarity; it just refuses to make coolness the ultimate standard of value. The film sets us up to dislike the Jennifer Garner character, what with the cloyingly romantic pictures on the wall and the perfectly set towels in her bathroom. Juno, like many arty girls, has something of a tomboyish distain for the stereotypical trappings of romance (arty girls tend not to care about China patterns or the perfect shade of paint for the nursery), and we are expected to agree with her. But over time we warm to Garner’s Vanessa. On the basis of dreck like Daredevil or Elektra, designed to showcase her big, healthy, fit body more than her acting chops, one would never have thought Garner capable of such a performance. She is warm and feminine, deftly adding in a restrained touch of the baby mania and domestic perfectionism that often goes along with the admirable desire for home and family. In short, her Vanessa, good but not faultless, is an authentically rounded person, as opposed to the walking tics that seem to inhabit the rest of the movie.

On a couple side issures, I have to disagree with the notion that Juno’s decision not to have an abortion is just a part of her quirky, unconventional nature. It is absurd to believe that Juno left the abortion clinic “just to be different.” I hasten to add that Juno’s decision not to have an abortion is not some deeply considered moral decision, but more one of aesthetic revulsion. The portrait of the abortion clinic is extraordinarily harsh. (The lone abortion protester on the other hand is portrayed as rather dopey, but still, well, rather nice.) For Hollywood, this involves some bravery, as it involves exposing some rather harsh truths. Its one thing to be go along with the polite consensus and generally be in favour of “choice” in the abstract, but the people who actually care strongly about abortion rights, or who get involved in the abortion industry are, in fact, more than a little creepy. It would have been nice if Juno had made some sort of reasoned decision on the matter, instead of basing it on pure disgust, but the fact is that most people are not capable of deep moral introspection and base their moral judgments almost entirely on gut feeling.

On a much less urgent matter, Juno’s friend Leah’s crush on the math teacher was totally implausible. No teenage girl would ever have a crush on someone who looked like that. However, as a teacher myself, I would add that if you are a) not totally incompetent, b) not an asshole, c) not totally hideous, and d) under 35, a significant portion of your female students will fall in love with you. I tend to find this is rather disturbing, so I have actually found myself toning down my dress for work. I always wear my glasses at school and the good old teacher standby of khakis and a plaid shirt suits me just fine. Of course, what with the teaching profession itself being so heavily female, I don’t want miss any opportunities with there. So, I will admit to being somewhat torn.

Lastly, I must confess I’m a little annoyed at films where teenagers are given absurd levels of cultural sophistication. Juno’s knowledge of obscure 70s punk and horror movies is more than a little implausible. There are no sophisticated sixteen year olds. No matter how smart or hip, they just don’t actually know that much.

LINKS:
Ross Douthat takes a look Juno and abortion here.

Steve Sailer reviews the film in the February 11,2008 version of The American Conservative. An excerpt is here.

The Steve Sailer Rule of Conspiracies

2008-02-02T14:02:00.001-05:00

Over the past couple years, Steve Sailer's writings on conspiracy theories (see below) have intrigued me. Like most educated Westerners I don't think much of conspiracy theorizing, but the examples Steve has given got me thinking. Some of the stuff he cites is pretty banal, if it even counts as a conspiracy at all, like the USSR spreading stories about aliens in New Mexico to cover up their reconaissance missions. Gossip doesn't really require any actual group cohesion. If your story is interesting enough (aliens and sex acts are always popular), all you really need is one person to get the ball rolling.

More interesting though are some of Steve's other examples: the Mafia, the 90s Russian oligarchs, the Donmeh, the diamond business, not to mention conspiratorial groups like the Druze or the Assasins. What these all have in common is that they all involve small, closely knit ethnic groups or people with close family ties. To be precise, actual conspiracies tend to be found only among family members or, what amounts to the same thing, closely knit endogamous ethnic groups. Therefore, in honour of Steve's abiding interest in family, I give your the Steve Sailer Rule of Conspiracies. So far as I know, Steve hasn't spelled this out explicitly, but I'll do it for him:

The more closely related the alleged conspirators are, the more likely that there is an actual conspiracy.

We in the West, with our loosely knit families and anti-nepotistic traditions (the Catholic Church ruthlessly suppressed cousin marriage), don't think much of conspiracies, and for good reason. Without family ties, there are just too many incentives to defect and therefore somebody almost always does.

What surprises me in all this is how few actual conspiracies Jews in the West have been involved in, despite their otherwise fitting the profile quite well. I just don't see a lot of evidence for Jewish conspiracies, except in a very few, limited cases. The much simpler explanation for their disproportionate success is that of Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending. I suspect that when you you have such high natural intelligence, the tendency is to start fighting amongst yourselves for the true top dog position. In fact, of the relatively few Jews who have been involved in conspiracy type behavior, like those in the diamond business, many seem to be the presumably less intelligent ultra-Orthodox types. Why conspire when you can kick everybody's ass on a level playing field?

So, if we in the West have little time for conspiracy theories, why are they so popular in the rest of the world? The reason is that family is that much more important there. Therefore, in places where this is so, conspiracy is entirely plausible fact of daily life. Is it any co-incidence that the current hotbed of conspiracy theories is the Middle East, with its high incidence of cousin marriage? In most places in the world, a good and decent person, as a matter of course tries to benefit his family first, at the expense of everyone eles, so, by the lights of their experience, why wouldn't America and the West work the same way. Therefore, it is that much easier, and happily much more self-flattering, to think that the West's technological and economic superiority must be a result of devilish scheming, not of any deficiencies on your own part. (The U.S. tendency to elect people named Bush and Clinton does nothing to relieve this suspicion, I'm afraid.) Even in the West, it is the Italians, with their tradition of family-centred corruption, that tend to be the most open to conspiracy theorizing. (They also traditionally have have the reputation for being, well, the most Machiavellian.)

On another topic, more plausible explanations for many alleged conspiracies in the West are groupthink and inertia. For example, some would cite the exclusion of conservatives from certain professions as proof of conspiracy. But in fact, there is no such conspiracy to keep conservatives out of Hollywood, the universities, the teaching profession or the media. People on university tenure committees or in Hollywood casting agencies don't sit around planning how to keep conservatives out; these types of jobs just naturally attract rootless, less family oriented individuals, and once a critical mass is reached, well by God the opinions of my group are correct and don't let me hear otherwise. There is no central direction or planning, just the natural tendency to ostracize people with different views.

LINKS:
Steve reviews Antitrust here. He follows up here. Steve's thoughts on Lee Harvey Oswald and the plot to assassinate JFK are here. He writes on the Donmeh here, here, here. and here. He writes about conspiracy hotbed Salonika here. He writes on post WWII Italy here. His thoughts on the great Italian conspiracy novelist Umberto Eco are here.

PLEASE NOTE:
Comment moderation has been enabled. I have no interest in letting the comment section becoming a place for people to rail against the Jews or other groups. While some Jews have been involved in some conspiracies, the idea of a some secret worldwide Jewish cabal is to me self-evidently absurd. Furthermore, whatever Jewish involvment there has been in specific conspiracies clearly seems due to historical circumstance, not some unique awfulness of Jewish character.

Atheism and the Arts

2007-12-27T19:46:00.000-05:00

Razib Khan has a very intersting post up on Christmas and atheism. While Razib is somewhat appreciative of religion's ability to inspire culture, some of his commenters will have none of it:

The constant evocation religion as the fountainhead of art, music and other fine human enterprise is false, in my opinion.

Thinking about this issue, the work of Steven Goldberg on patriarchy comes to mind. Now the fact that every society on earth has ended up as a patriarchy of some sort, often in total defiance of its official ideology, does not prove that patriarchy is inevitable, but it provides a pretty strong indication that it may be. Similarly, the fact that there are all sorts of astonishing works celebrating God or the gods (the Bible, the Quran, the Mahabharata, the Upanishads, the Gita, the Commedia, Paradise Lost, Giotto, Chartres Cathedral, the Sistine Chapel, Raphael's Madonnas, Bernini's sculptures, Bach's B-Minor Mass and St. Matthew Passion, Beethoven 9th symphony and Missa Solemnis, Haydn's Creation, Handel’s oratorios etc.) and the fact that there is an almost complete dearth of comparable works celebrating the absence of God (or the gods) does not prove that you need religion to inspire such great work, but it is a fairly strong prima facie case that religion is a lot better than atheism at inspiring these kinds of works. Even if we grant that atheism could provide equal inspiration for comparable works, which I somewhat doubt, the remarkable ability of religious subjects to provide materia poetica for such astounding masterpieces must still be acknowledged.

Now, just because religion may be really good at inspiring great art does not mean that it is true, and conversely, just because atheism may be true, does not mean that it is capable of inspiring great art. Something can be detrimental to the arts and still be true. Something can be totally crazy and still inspire a masterpiece. Religious stories and ideas tend to provoke strong emotions in most people, and therefore tend to be prime material for the arts, but it is possible that this has more to do with people's innate cognitive programming than it necessarily does with the truth value of the religion. Aesthetic power, in itself, is not an indicia of truth.

The human mind has a cognitive bias towards conflating the good, the beautiful, the useful and the true. This conflation may work as a rough rule of thumb, but, in an absolute sense, it is false. The assumption often made by atheists is that since atheism is true, it will serve well as inspiration for the beautiful. Conversely, the religious will look at the beauty of religious art and conclude that therefore the religion is true. Neither conclusion is necessarily warranted.

Rebellion against religion may provide something of an impetus for art, but cold materialism, in itself, is a rather austere, uninspiring creed. It may be true, but that does not mean that it is particularly beautiful. But why should it be? If you really believe that atheism is true, that should be enough. There is no need to prove that it inspiring or morally beneficial or whatever.

The commenter continues:

The artistic input however brilliant and loving, need not have come from any particular religious stirring in the heart of the craftsman artist. It may have been no different from building a sleek car or building a beautiful house - pure aesthetics, precision and pride in one's workmanship. Aesthetics with utility.

Subject matters. Craftsmanship alone = minor art. Of which we have a lot in this century. The mistaken assumption is that the 20th century produced almost nothing of value. This is not true; there is a plethora of good, well crafted art being made right now. What is missing is the really great stuff, the Beethovens, the Miltons, the Michelangelos. As a stylist, Vladimir Nabokov is easily the equal of the translators of the King James Bible, in craftsmanship he's as good as anyone who's ever written English, but in the end style and craftsmanship are not enough. Lolita and Pale Fire are fairly empty books. Even in the visual arts we don't lack for craftsmanship. Charles Murray notes in his Human Accomplishment that going to the movies one sees the tiniest details rendered with fantastic care and attention, as in films like Ratatouille or Transformers. But this is so often put to use serving piffle. The technical ability is there, but somehow its not turning into masterpieces. The example given of the car design is I think a telling one. The track record of “aesthetics with utility” is rather dismal. Car design, however admirable, rarely evokes any strong emotion. Even at its best, there is only so deep you can go with it. Contemporary talent is being diverted into minor genres.

The commenter futher asserts:

It is just a thing at that moment, certainly not a representation of that the worker worships, adores, or venerates.

Any cursory study of the lives of Dante, Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Michelangelo, Raphael etc. puts the lie to this. They were all intensely devout men, in their own way, and their art was no mere bunch of technical exercises. Even the comparatively urbane Handel spoke of the heavens opening up when he composed the Messiah. Of course craftsmanship matters; you have to have the tools to express yourself, but inspiration and subject matter too. Craftsmanship is a means to an end; art is about communicating your thoughts and feelings to someone else, and sometimes that includes your religious thoughts and religious feelings. As sympathies vary from person to person, some may respond more or less to these feelings, but the use of craftsmanship does not vary. It enables, but is not an end in itself. Art, at its best, give form to feeling, but it does not exist independently of it. Now please note, religious feeling, or feeling of any other kind, obviously is not enough in itself to produce great art. In fact, feeling alone, whether religious or not, cannot in itself produce even good art. If craftsmanship alone = minor art, feeling alone = no art at all. If form without feeling can leave you cold, feeling without form leaves you wallowing in a mass of undifferentiated emotion.

Now, let me be clear, religious feelings are not the only feelings that can be the subject of great art? Love, sex, children, war, hate, ambition, all are amply represented in the world of art. Everything that is human is represented in art. There is nothing all that religious about Mozart’s operas or most of Shakespeare. But is it really any surprise that something, like religion, that addresses itself to people’s deepest fears and desires should not fail to inspire much great art? Really, religion's only authentic rival as artistic inspiration is love and sex. As the atheist novelist Zola once put it oh so delicately, "Religion and the cunt, there is nothing else."

I should add that I just don't buy the argument that the religious quality of works like the B-minor Mass or the Paradiso is wholly incidental, that if you took the religious component out of these works, and substituted, say, the wonders of particle physics, it would be just as inspiring. In fact, any cursory familiarity with these works plainly shows that the religious component is woven deeply into the fabric of the work of art. Take out the religious content from say the Agnus Dei of the former or from the last canto of the latter and there is hardly anything left. Take out the story from the St. Matthew Passion and have you increased or diminished it? Take out the religious argument from the Upanishads and have you increased or diminished them? None of this means you have to believe in the religious component of a work of art to appreciate it fully, but you do need to enter into at least some emotional sympathy with its religious content. This applies whether you are a believer of some sort or not. I am not a Hindu nor, on the whole, do I have much sympathy for Hinduism, but I find the Gita intensely moving. Appreciation does not necessarily imply assent.

Charles Murray Challenge (Belated Edition)

2007-12-01T18:19:00.000-05:00

In a 2003 interview with Steve Sailer to promote his book Human Accomplishment, Charles Murray said the following:

I think that the number of novels, songs, and paintings done since 1950 that anyone will still care about 200 years from now is somewhere in the vicinity of zero. Not exactly zero, but close. I find a good way to make this point is to ask anyone who disagrees with me to name a work that will survive -- and then ask, "Seriously?" Very few works indeed can defend themselves against the "Seriously?" question.

To which, Steve challenged his readers to come up with works that would meet that criteria. (Steve’s review of the book is here.) Well, I have belatedly taken up the challenge.

First of all we must clarify what we mean by work that anyone will care about 200 years from now. Now it is quite apparent to me that the period since 1950, contrary to many theorists, was not a total artistic wasteland. In fact a rather large amount of good work has been done since that date. I have no doubt that someone will care about the poetry of say, May Swenson, Elizabeth Bishop, John Hollander and Galway Kinnell or the songs of Paul Simon, The Clash, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Gwen Stefani in the 2207, just as poetry lovers today still care about the poetry of Thomas Carew, Richard Crashaw, George Darley, William Morris and George Meredith. If that is the standard, quite a bit of work from 1950 on will survive in one way or another. However, what I think Murray really means is work that the generally cultured person, as opposed to the specialist or an obsessive like me, is likely to know or at least have heard of, that is to say work that has true greatness, stuff that compares reasonably with the likes of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Austen, Whitman, Browning in literature or Beethoven, Mozart, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky in music. In that sense, the period since 1950 can be judged fairly harshly. It has produced lots of good, minor art, but failed, for example, to produce anything in painting the likes of Giotto, Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, Rembrandt, Turner, Van Gogh, Manet, Renoir, Degas, or even Picasso or Matisse, to mention only a random few.

The one exception is film. The one thing most apparent from my list is that most of the artistic energy of the late 20th century has gone into film. I suspect this does not necessarily have anything to do with the underlying health of the culture so much as the fact that film is still pretty much virgin territory. There is just so much low hanging fruit to pluck. It hasn’t all been done before. Add to this that film is still pretty much a popular art form, that has to serve its audience, and you have gone a long way to explaining the relative well-being of the art form. Harsh elitist art theories won’t put bums in the seats (and with a paint kit that expensive a film better bring in an audience). Similarly, pop music, which also has to immediately connect with its audience, is fairly strong. Classical music, regrettably, is all but dead; there are still decent composers out there, but none of their work is entering the general repertory. Fortunately there are still good classical performers out there and a plethora of archived recordings.

Excluding film as something of an outlier, the one other thing you will immediately notice is that the great European cultures have nearly dropped off the map as far as achievement. The great art, such as it is, since 1950 has been largely produced in obscure places like Latin America, Czechoslovakia, Jamaica, and Canada. The United States has fared much better than Europe, but is not as dominant as one might think, and much of the American art on the list below has been produced by blacks.

What surprised me was just how many of these works were Canadian. To a certain extent this may be selection bias; being Canadian I just know that much more about Canadian culture. And yet I know enough about art around the world, that I don’t think it can entirely account for this disparity. My own theory is that Canada came rather late to modernist game, and avoided, at least for a time, many of the destructive tendencies that played havoc with the arts since 1900. Of course now Canada has gone the whole hog for the modern project, but up until the late fifties Canada was still a very traditional, British place, committed to God and Empire, in contrast to those wild, godless Yankees. Canada had no artistic achievement to speak of before the 1940s. That brief interval between Canada’s artistic awakening in the 40s and 50s and full entry into modern culture gave rise to a lot of achievement. The Canada of Northrop Frye, Robertson Davies, Norman McLaren, Yusuf Karsh, Bill Reid and Norval Morrisseau was actually a pretty impressive cultural flourishing, especially considering what the rest of the world was like. That distinctive culture is gone. In general, the longer and harder a place holds on to traditional values the more complete its collapse into modernism. The arts scene in Canada is now pretty dismal, and its products are indistinguishable from arts scene anywhere else. Canadian cities west of Quebec are some of the most bland places on earth. Nobody builds in Ontario Gothic anymore. In contrast, those revolutionary Americans, who adopted parts of the modernist project at an earlier time, have in many ways better managed to hold onto some sense of tradition. (Quebec, until the 1960s a bastion of ultra-traditional Catholicism, is even worse off than English Canada.)

The reader may be somewhat surprised to see Reid and Morrisseau on this list. In fact when I suggested Reid’s work over at Pith and Substance as one of British Columbia’s main contribution to world civilization, someone called it “a quick yen earner.” This is ridiculous. Reid and Morrisseau are great artists, comparable to just about anything in the European tradition. They need no apology. But the sentiment expressed by the commenter is not unindicative of their treatment at the hands of the artistic establishment. Reid and Morrisseau are not in the mainstream. Their work does not fit easily into the status game played within the white artistic community and has mostly been relegated to Anthropology museaums instead of art galleries. Morrisseau, easily the best painter Canada has produced, only had his first showing in the National Gallery last year. But white condescension was a benefit to these artists. Since their work was considered more folklore than high art, they were expected to maintain a stronger attachment to tradition. This was all to the good of their art. As Steve Sailer has noted, while cultural exchange may fuel artistic innovation, isolation may be just as important:

Let's use Liverpool in the early 1960s as an example of creativity: you could buy all the records you wanted of American black musicians (openess), but there weren't any American black musicians in town to monopolize the music jobs (opportunity). So, local English kids were needed to play American music in the dance halls, and they started to bring their own spin to it.

In contrast, music has gotten bogged down in a racial caste system in the last two decades, which is a big reason why it's gotten boring. For example, when rap first came out, white bands like the Clash, Blondie, and Talking Heads did a few rap songs and nobody minded. But after awhile, that kind of crossover became unfashionable. Nowadays, you have to be as good as Eminem for whites to do hip-hop. Similarly, blacks have lost all interest in the electric guitar. On "Live at the Apollo" the other night, a black guy came out carrying an electric guitar and got booed off the stage. So, there's lots of diversity, but little cross-fertilization.

In a somewhat similar fashion, Native Canadian artists got all the benefits of European advances in technique, while keeping the benefits of isolation from the theoretical games that were destroying the European arts tradition. This combination of European technique and traditional form set off something like an artistic explosion among Native Canadians, one which only now may be slowing down.

On a sadder note, most of the artists I have listed below got their start before 1950. Robert Penn Warren, probably the best of the poets on the list, was born in 1905 and already published a superb novel in All The King’s Men before 1950, before focusing more on his poetry from the 60s on. All of the jazz is from the 1950s and early 60s. The youngest guy on this list is Kurt Cobain from Nirvana. The rest are all getting pretty old or are already dead of old age.

NOTE:
With the exception of film, I have not included anything from the Middle East, India, or East Asia. I just do not know enough about work done there since 1950 to be helpful. I also do not know enough about African or Latin pop music to be of use there either. On the other hand, I have tried to make judgments purely on artistic merit. Thus, important technical innovators whose work leaves me somewhat cold, like the films of Jean-Luc Godard, have not been included.

The difference between a major and minor artist is always somewhat debatable. There is no hard and fast line, only a matter of gradations. It is, I suppose, possible to argue that say Swinburne, at least in pieces like Hertha and Anactoria, was a major poet, but not, say, Beddoes (good as he sometimes was). I seriously considered the poems of James Merrill and Jay Wright, the songs of Townes Van Zandt, Jose Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, the criticism of William Empson and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction for this list.

I have been somewhat stingy in the matter of pop music. Individual songs and performances I consider undoubtedly great include Ray Charles’ Hard Times, Astrud Gilberto’s The Girl from Ipanema, Gordon Lightfoot’s Song for a Winter’s Night, Otis Redding’s Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay, Willie Nelson’s Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain, Emmylou Harris’ If I Needed You (with Don Williams), Neil Young’s Hey Hey My My, Roy Orbison’s Crying (with k.d. lang), The Cranberries’ Linger, Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game, among many others. But I don’t think that any of these artists ever consistently reached the level of Dylan, Marley or the Beatles. Therefore they are not on the list. I applied a similar standard to poetry.

ALSO NOTE:
When Steve Sailer originally asked his readers to suggest work that would meet the Charles Murray challenge, the most common responses were Vladimir Nabokov and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. I expect that both of them will last in some way or another, but while I admire the work of both men, I do not think that either of them match the work of the writers below. They are true, but minor, artists. Solzenitsyn is a very good writer, but he owes his outsized fame more to his personal bravery and historical importance than to his greatness as a writer. The Gulag Archipelago is a work of art, but I suspect it will be of more interest in future to historians than artists. Nabokov is perhaps the best and certainly the most spectacular stylist in English since 1950, but his work seems to owe its popularity more to its flashiness than its depth. No one writes more extatic prose. His books are fun, but there is not much there there.

I apologize if you favourite work is not on this list. It may be very good work, but probably not great work. I too have personal favourites (the films of Eric Rohmer, the criticism of Harold Bloom, albums by U2, fiction by Ursula LeGuin) that hold a special meaning for me, but which I could not justify including on this list. No insult is intended to them or to you.

Classical Music

Dmitri Shostakovich
String Quartets
Symphony No. 10

Benjamin Britten
Billy Budd

Jazz

Ella Fitzgerald
The Duke Ellington Songbook

Miles Davis
Steamin’
Workin;
Relaxin’
Kind of Blue

John Coltrane
My Favorite Things
The Complete Africa/Brass Sessions

Pop Music

The Beatles

Bob Dylan

Aretha Franklin
Amazing Grace

Bob Marley

Nirvana

Dance

Georges Balanchine

Sir Frederick Ashton

Novels

Robertson Davies
The Deptford Trilogy
The Rebel Angels

Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian

Philip Roth
Operation Shylock
Sabbath’s Theatre

Poetry

Paul Celan

Octavio Paz

Jaroslav Seifert

Robert Penn Warren

Criticism etc.

Northrop Frye
Anatomy of Criticism

Deogolwulf
Fewtrils

Painting and Sculpture

Pablo Picasso

Norval Morrisseau

Bill Reid

Robert Davidson

Photography

Yusuf Karsh

Edward Weston

Film

Joseph L. Mankiewicz
All About Eve

Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen
Singin’ in the Rain

Billy Wilder
Sunset Blvd.
The Apartment

John Ford
The Searchers
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence

Stanley Kubrick
2001: A Space Odyssey
Dr. Strangelove

Francis Coppola
The Godfather
Apocalypse Now

Woody Allen
Annie Hall
Hannah and Her Sisters
Deconstructing Harry

Martin Scorsese
Raging Bull

Steven Spielberg
Schindler’s List
Saving Private Ryan

Alfred Hitchcock
Vertigo
Psycho

Kenneth Anger
Short Films

David Lean
Bridge on the River Kwai
Lawrence of Arabia

Anthony Minghella
The English Patient

Francois Truffaut
Jules and Jim
Two English Girls

Werner Herzog
Aguirre: The Wrath of God

Vittoria De Sica
Umberto D

Federico Fellini
Nights of Cabiria
8 1/2

Bruno Bozetto
Allegro Non Troppo

Akira Kurosawa
Rashomon
Ikiru
Kagemusha
Ran

Hayao Miyazaki
Princess Mononoke

Ingmar Bergman
Summer Interlude
Summer with Monika
The Seventh Seal
Wild Strawberries
Persona

Andrei Tarkovsky
Andrei Rublev

Satyajit Ray
The Apu Trilogy

Norman McLaren
Short Films

The Creative and the Critical, or Taste and Genius

2007-11-04T22:09:00.000-05:00

Genius can, of course, dispense with taste. Of this Beethoven is an example. Mozart, on the other hand, his equal in genius, has, in addition, the most delicate taste. – Claude Debussy

In his overview of Kurt Cobain’s life, Steve Sailer makes the following remark:

Evolutionary psychologists such as Geoffrey Miller of the U. of New Mexico often argue that geniuses don't generally have better thoughts than you or me; they just have far more thoughts, and then choose the best of them.

Miller puts it this way:

Among competent professionals in any field, there appears to be a fairly constant probability of success in any given endeavor. Simonton’s data show that excellent composers do not produce a higher proportion of excellent music than good composers – they simply produce a higher total number of works. People who achieve extreme success in any creative field are almost always extremely prolific. (Page 409, The Mating Mind)

Miller is certainly right that one of the hallmarks of almost all great artists is their obsessive need to pump out product, a need which often manifests itself well before they have any idea what they are doing. All but a very few artists have large heap of embarrassing juvenilia stored up somewhere, whether published or unpublished. (Unthinking poetry editors, unfortunately, have a habit of piling this stuff up at the start of a Collected Poems and therefore scaring the living daylights out of the casual reader.) Even after an artist matures, they all too often tend to produce an endless string of good but minor work, before finally hitting upon the material for their best work. For example, in reality, Mark Twain is essentially the author of Huckleberry Finn and Henry James is essentially the author of The Portrait of a Lady, but would they have written those two works without the impetus that led each to produce that shelf full of books they have mouldering away in university libraries everywhere. I am astonished that, time after time, the urge to produce leads writers and artists to keep pumping out work after work, long after it has become obvious that they no longer have anything left to say. Examples of this are too numerous to cite, but I am particularly haunted by the image of the dying Bernard Malamud having dinner with Philip Roth and his crushing disappointment at Roth’s judgment that he should not publish his last novel. Not that I would discourage any artist from continuing to work; sometimes lightening strikes again, like it did for John Huston, who, long in the creative wilderness (he hadn’t made a good film since the early 50s), returned marvelously to form with the late masterpiece The Man Who Would Be King.

But, partly true as Miller’s theory is, it cannot be the whole explanation for artistic genius. To be a genius you can’t just produce a huge number of ideas and then just magically pick the best ones. You need to be able to pick the best ones. You need to know, more or less, which the best ones are. Furthermore, not only do you have to pick the best ideas, you need to be able to follow them up, develop their implications, and put them into some sort of coherent order. As Mihaly Csikzentmihaly puts it, “Divergent thinking is not much use without the ability to tell a good idea from a bad one – and this selectivity involves convergent thinking. Manfred Eigen is one of several scientists who claim that the only difference between them and their less creative colleagues is that they can tell whether a problem is soluable or not and this saves enormous amounts of time and many false starts.” With some modifications, this holds true in the artistic world as well. A novelist needs to know almost instantly whether a story is worth telling. A composer needs to see right away whether a folk tune has the potential to be turned into a symphony. Sure a few false starts are allowed (almost all artists have produced inferior work), but you only get so many free passes.

Let us concede then that these two abilities, the one, to generate lots of ideas, the other, to recognize good ideas, are both necessary for an artist to achieve greatness. But they are not present in equal amounts in all artists. Some are more prolific, others have better taste. This is perhaps best illustrated by Paul Valery’s comparison of Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire.

Thus Baudelaire regarded Victor Hugo, and it is not impossible to conjecture what he thought of him. Hugo reigned; he had aquired over Lamartine the advantage of infinitely more powerful and precise working materials. The vast range of his diction, the diversity of his rhythms, the superabundance of his images, crushed all rival poetry. But his work sometimes made concessions to the vulgar, lost itself in prophetic eloquence and infinite apostrophes. He flirted with the crowd, he indulged in dialogues with God. The simplicity of his philosophy, the disproportion and incoherance of the developments, the frequent contrasts between the marvels of detail and the fragility of the subject, the inconsisitency of the whole - everything, in a word, which could shock and thus instruct and orientate a pitiless young observer toward his future personal art - all these things Baudelaire was to note in himself and separate from the admiration forced upon him by the magic gifts of Hugo, the impurities, the imprudences, the vulnerable points in his work - that is to say, the possibilities of life and the opportunities for fame which so great an artist left to be gleaned. . . .

Hugo never ceased to learn by practice; Baudelaire, the span of whose life scarcely exceeded the half of Hugo's, developed in quite another manner. One would say he had to compensate for the probably brevity and foreshadowed insufficiency of the short space of time he had to live, by the employment of that critical intelligence of which I spoke above. A score of years were vouchsafed him to attain the peak of his own perfection, to discover his personal field and to define a specific form and attitude which would carry and preserve his name. Time was lacking to realize his literary ambitions by numerous experiments and an extensive output of works. He had to choose the shortest road, to limit himself in his gropings, to be sparing of repetitions and divergences. He had therefore to seek by means of analysis what he was, what he could do, and what he wished to do; and to unite, in himself, with the spontaneous virtues of a poet, the sagacity, the skepticism, the attention and reasoning faculty of a critic.

As Valery sees, Hugo is an example of an almost purely creative artist, while Baudelaire is an example of a more “critical” artist. Like many creative artists, Hugo was enormously productive. As Harold Bloom has said, “Has anyone read all of him?” He managed to produce 7 novels, 12 plays, 155, 000 lines of verse, scores of essays. Baudelaire, in contrast, gave us only one slim volume of verse in Les Fleurs Du Mal (which tops out at 176 pages in Richard Howard’s English translation), and an even slimmer book of prose poems in Paris Spleen. Furthermore, as with many “creative” artists, the quality of Hugo’s work is extremely variable. Among his vast sums of poetry and prose are many pieces that are apallingly amateurish in quality: when Hugo is bad, he is very bad. Furthermore, he lacked the ability to unify longer works. Despite his epic pretensions, he never could write a coherent long poem, and, marvelous as his novels are they give off the impression of great big bags stuffed to bursting with all sorts of colourful rags. I don’t necessarily fault him for his inconsistency: it was what he needed to do to produce great work, and, besides, it is always our privilege as readers to pick out the good work and ignore the bad.

However, one has to be careful here. While a creative artist is, almost by definition, enormously prolific, a prolific artist is not therefore necessarily a creative artist. Almost all the work of the very productive Henry James, except for the wonderful The Portrait of a Lady, bores me nearly to tears. But it is all exquisitely written; the Jamesian prose style never flags. When reading his late work, I can never think of a good reason to stop, though I may be desperately hoping to find one. While his work may be boring, it is never in bad taste, and therefore I cannot quite put him in the same category as Hugo. James seems to me more of a primarily critical artist who suddenly caught the creative fire, only to have it abandon him for the rest of his career.

If Hugo and Baudelaire are perhaps the best examples of the creative and the critical poet, perhaps Charles Dickens and Jane Austen are the best examples of the creative and the critical novelist. Dickens, much like Hugo, was enormously productive. By the age of 42, the same age as Austen died, Dickens had already written ten large novels, several novellas and short stories, two travel books, a history of England, and a mound of varied journalism. His novels are notoriously messy in construction, and even some of the best contain appalling lapses into sugary sentimentality and overcooked melodrama. Austen, by contrast, had only her six relatively short novels and a few pieces of juvenilia. Her books are perfectly plotted, highly economical, and are always put together with the most perfect taste. They have no fat on them. If they never quite rise up to Dickens’ heights, neither do they falls down to his lows. I am not sure I would go so far as Paul Johnson, who says that Austen was a great artist without being a genius. Certainly her characters are not rammed with life in the same way as Dickens’, but Emma Woodhouse and Elizabeth Bennett are still lively enough by any standard. Even so, Johnson’s point is well taken: Austen does not share in the creative faculty to the same degree as a Dickens, a Shakespeare, or a Chaucer. She is not as rich in invention. I would note, however, that even Dickens was not as pure a creative artist as Hugo. When meeting Dickens, people sensed being in the presence of a critical intelligence, sometimes, they thought, rather coldly sizing them up for placement in one of his novels. Furthermore, his books, unlike Hugo’s, always rest on a bedrock of good sense and human decency. Dickens just plain wasn’t as crazy as poor Hugo. Even outside his writing, Dickens personal life was far less disordered, his political judgments were far more sagacious, and his work on behalf of the poor and oppressed consisted far less of rhetoric and posturing and far more of pragmatic help. All we know of him, from his treatment of others to his artistic procedure, suggests him to have been a much more intelligent man, and a much more critical artist, than Hugo.

However, it is important to note that even so nearly pure a creative artist as Hugo could not do entirely without critical skills. In order to create great art, you have to be able to recognize, at least vaguely, what great art is. You have to have some degree of taste and perception, and you have to understand at least the basics of craft and construction. A 1200 page novel like Les Miserables may inevitably be something of a loose baggy monster, but even Hugo’s immense headlong invention and ability to entertain still needed to be put into some kind of coherent order. You cannot just throw everything but the kitchen sink into a book and call it a novel. Even Les Miserables, vast and digressive as it is, achieves a kind of unity, and that, to my mind, indicates at least some kind of critical intelligence.

It should be noted that Victor Hugo’s artistic inconsistency illustrates an important point: to be a primarily creative artist you don’t necessarily have to be that smart. Paul Johnson, in his recent book Creators, called his chapter on Hugo “The Genius Without A Brain” and quotes the great French critic and storywriter Chateaubriand, who called Hugo a “sublime infant.” Now, I don’t think Hugo could have had that low of intelligence. Most scientists working in this area don’t think you can do truly great work in the arts with an IQ of below 120. While I agree with that, I would go further: almost all truly major artists have had an IQ well above that minimum threshold. However, if asked to nominate any author of worldwide importance as a candidate for having an IQ of under 130, Hugo would be it. As Black Sea, commenting on one of my earlier posts, said “I wouldn't be surprised to discover that talented critics generally score higher than talented artists. IQ tests focus on abstract reasoning, and while art has its element of craft and construction, reasoning alone is hardly sufficient to bring a piece of work to life.” If you haven’t been blessed with the Dickensian or Hugoian plentitude of invention, then like Austen or Baudelaire, you are going to need every tool of analysis you can get your hands on, if you hope to challenge them in the artistic realm. This is not to say that Austen and Baudelaire had no creative faculty. No artist can do entirely without it, but the less you have of it, the more you are going to need your intelligence to help you compensate.

II.

What exactly do the creative and the critical faculties consist of. The creative faculty seems to consist of two things, the ability to generate ideas and a strong work ethic, while the critical faculty seems to consist of high intelligence and high sensitivity. Now, you might ask, why group can’t these four attributes be regarded separately? Why group them together into two faculties? Why not consider each of them separately? Well, because the characteristics they tend to correlate with each other.

Let us consider intelligence and sensitivity. One main reason that they tend to go together is that both one’s raw brain power and one’s emotional sensitivity are both at their height when young. Both start deteriorating in ones 30s. This is one of the main reasons that lyric poets tend to peak so early. Poetry is both the most abstract form of literature and the one requiring the most sensitivity, and therefore it. But because a poet has only so long before his intelligence and sensitivity start to fade, he not only has to meet the high demands for abstract thinking inherent in his art, but he has to learn how to master it quickly. Therefore this jacks up the IQ requirements even more. Furthermore, he needs every bit of sensitivity he can muster to learn as quickly as possible from his precursors, jacking up the requirements for his art there. The same thing applies to critical artists in other genres, to a lesser degree. Still, even in something like that novel, very few critical artists continue to make real contributions into old age. Among critical artists, those who have the most intelligence tend to last longer than those whose art is based almost solely on sensitivity. A high IQ critical artist like James Joyce can keep learning and therefore can sometimes keep coming up with new high concept ideas to keep their art going. But for an almost purely intuitive artist like Walt Whitman, once sensitivity is gone, it is gone, leaving a burnt out poet to gaze back at his past achievement and wonder where it all went.

On the other hand, it is not hard to see why the ability to generate ideas and a work ethic go together. If you are not blessed with a lot of intelligence to quickly evaluate what does and does not work, you are going to need a lot of trial and error to finally get it right. You learn by experience and because coming up with new ideas is something natural you will have lots of material to try out new things with. So what if you put out a lot of junk. Its all grist for the mill. Furthermore, if you have a hard time distinguishing good work from bad, you may need to pump out a lot of product before the stars aligns in your favour and the right combination appears, often as if by magic.

Certain genres lend themselves to a certain type of artist. Critical artists tend to work best in lyric poetry, shorter stories and the essay, creative types in the drama, epic and the novel. It is rare for a novelist to achieve success early in life. He needs to gather and synthesize vast amounts of social data before he can start his work. A few young critical artists can sometimes produce a good version of what I would call the lyric novel, such Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises or Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. But books like those do not exploit the full potential of the genre and are hardly candidates for the novel at its best. In spite of their extremely fine prose, neither Fitzgerald nor Hemingway is on the level of Melville, Twain, Hawthorne, James, or Faulkner, let alone that of Dickens, Eliot, Tolstoy, or Proust. Lyric poets however quite often appear at an early age, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Rimbaud, and only a few, Hugo, Browning, Frost, Hardy, Yeats, and Warren, continue to produce great work into old age. Lyric does tend to be a genre for the young and for primarily critical artists, but this is not a hard and fast rule. Primarily creative artists too have throve in the genre and continued their poetic careers well past middle age.

If I had to choose which faculty is more important to the artist I would have to say the creative. Without it the artist is sterile. Sensitivity and intelligence are great for appreciation, but they are not in themselves enough to create something new. Intelligence can help shape a work of art into a coherent whole, but the materials of art come from intuition. Without creative ideas there is nothing for the intelligence to shape Furthermore, the critical faculty can actually inhibit creation. I remember talking to an aquaintance who works as a fine artist and she told me that she often has to actively suppress the urge to be critical and just let things flow. Primarily critical artists, however good, tend to produce very little.

The creative and critical types I have sketched here tend to parallel the experimental and conceptual types outlined by David W. Galenson. However, Galenson’s typology only emphasizes intelligence in the conceptual type and work ethic in the experimental type. This has serious problems. It compels him to minimize distinctions between which types of genres better suit which kinds of artists. For example, it is possible for a critical (conceptual) writer to write a good lyric novel when young, but the genre tends to favour creative artists. Even fiction writers, like Joyce and Melville, who tend a bit more to the critical end of things, have a lot more creative characteristics than their counterparts in lyric poetry. In turn, while several lyric poets like Hugo, Browning, Frost, Hardy, and Warren (please note that Hugo, Hardy, and Warren were also great fiction writers) continued to be productive well into old age, there is no point denying that lyric poetry on the whole does tend to favour younger artists like Blake, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Colridge, Byron, Rimbaud. Furthermore, Galenson’s taxonomy leads him to misclassify artists. Henry James, for example, was a critical artist masquerading as a creative artist. He produced an extrodinarily fine prose, wrote a good many good critical essays, and had only the one indisputable achievement, The Portrait of a Lady, which he wrote at a relatively young age for a novelist. But James wanted to be an old master like his idol Balzac, and he set himself to the talk with immense deliberation. He continued to learn and produce new work right up to the end of his life. He was indeed a master of his art. But Galenson’s focus on James’ undoubted work ethic leads him to ignore the fact that, while extrodinarily well crafted, James’ later work is rather thin in content. What mislead Galenson was that the novel as a genre tends to favour the creative type, so that, when working in the novel, even a primarily critical artist like James will show creative tendencies. James vast intelligence and sensitivity mark him out a primarily critical artist, but his work ethic adds a tinge of the creative to his achievement.

III.

How does the critical aspect of being a great artist relate to, well, being an actual critic. Well, the pattern holds. Very few critics have been very productive as poets or fiction writers. The ability to recognize great art, apparently, does not always come with the ability to create it, and vice versa. While many major literary critics, from Johnson and Hazlitt to Coleridge and Ruskin, have managed to put out a large body of critical writing, not many have produced a comparably large amount of poetry, and none at all have given us a major work of fiction. Samuel Johnson produced only two major poems, London and The Vanity of Human Wishes. Coleridge, during his poetic phase, produced only six poems of real value. Valery’s prose vastly overshadows his poetry. T.S. Eliot, like his model Baudelaire, produced only enough verse to fill a slim volume. William Empson too had only the one volume. Chesterton was prolific at everything, but his prose output dwarfs his poetry, most of which is pretty minor stuff anyway. Auden sure wrote enough poetry, but most of it is just going through the motions. Only his relatively early Letter to Lord Byron and a very few lyrics are really worth reading. The only real exception I can think of is John Dryden, but then he, unlike Johnson or Coleridge or most of the others, was a much better poet than a critic. Many major critics, from Hazlitt, Ruskin and Pater in the 19th Century to Frye, G. Wilson Knight, Kenneth Burke, and Harold Bloom in the 20th, have given us nothing of worth except their criticism.

However, if most critics have been unproductive as poets, their achievement as fiction writers has been almost non-existant. Poetry is the most abstract of literary genres and the one that requires the greatest sensitivity, therefore poets tend to be primarily critical artists. As intelligence and sensitivity are the prime critical virtues, this also means that they tend to be much better critics than novelists. Some of the most staggeringly creative artists in that genre have been strangely unable to produce good criticism. Victor Hugo, the epitome of the creative artist, had extraordinarily bad taste, and Dickens, despite his vast acres of journalism, never engaged in any criticism of any authors whatsoever, preferring to support anyone and everyone who came across his path. Of novelists noted for writing criticism, only Henry James and Virginia Woolf come to mind, and as critics they are pretty small potatoes compared to Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Baudelaire, Swinburne, Valery, Eliot, Empson, Auden. One might round up Chesterton and C.S. Lewis into the fiction camp, but they wrote rather short archetypal fantasies, a poetic genre somewhat removed from the social novels of James and Woolf. Pater gave us Marius the Epicurean, but that unusual work was mostly criticism disguised as fiction. Poets, who tend to be primarily critical artists, also tend to burn out early. But they are also still intelligent guys who read a lot and can still write a bit. However, while the intelligence and sensitivity that characterize the critical artist are also the prime virtues of the actual critic, criticism also requires a broad experience of the art one is criticizing. Therefore, it tends to be the providence of poets who, having passed beyond their best days as poets, still have much to say on the subject of poetry. Criticism seems the perfect literary vehicle for such men, and, in fact, this is exactly the pattern one sees in the carreers of Johnson, Coleridge, Valery, Eliot, Empson, etc.

The work of the critic is in many ways similar to the scientist, in that he is highly reliant on convergent thinking. The chief difference between the work of the scientist and the work of the critic is that art is above all else about your subjective experience. There may be an objective reality behind that experience, but unless you experience it yourself, it is lost to you. Though a critic may reason, compare, and systematize much like a scientist, he cannot rely on anyone else’s data from which to do his work. Therefore, unlike a scientist, a critic doesn’t just need to be intelligent, in the sense of being able to reason well, he needs to be perceptive too. His own experience is the data from which he must reason. He may pay some attention to authority, but ultimately he can only rely on what he himself knows. If he is imperceptive, as many very high IQ people, especially in the sciences, are, he will not make good critical judgments. Interpreting art well requires more than just raw intellectual horsepower.

Gwen Stefani

2007-10-06T17:45:00.000-04:00

This week I happened to run across the above video for Gwen Stefani’s 4 in the Morning. I’ve long been an admirer of Gwen Stefani and her band No Doubt, but hadn’t really tuned in to this particular piece until now. It is both Stefani’s and Muller’s masterpiece, at least so far. Muller’s videos can be a bit sickly and baroque. She tends to over do it on gross imagery (see the blood in Garbage’s Bleed Like Me or the rotten fruit in No Doubt’s Don’t Speak), and she tends to inappropriately edit that imagery together with more conventional footage, resulting in often jarring changes in tone. Her videos also tend to be a bit too sparkly for my taste: too many mirrorballs, sequins and glitter. (Much in evidence here.) But 4 in the Morning is almost classical in its purity. No spinning holograms, no sparkles, just one exquisitely photographed sequence after another (though some of the later bits with Stefani rolling around in bed are perhaps just bit too cheesecake). Most of all, we’re allowed the time to take in Stefani’s performance. Though the video has numerous cuts, unlike many music videos, it doesn’t overdo it. Muller’s editing isn’t just random cutting, it is subtly attuned to the music. For a slower section Muller focuses only on Stefani’s face as she sings in a bath tub, during a faster section we have several cuts of Stefani marching out to her limousine. The video is a textbook example of how editing can be used to highlight a great performance, not just distract from a mediocre one.

And what a performance Stefani gives. This is the Gwen Stefani performance to end all Gwen Stefani performances. It is one of the most astonishing things I’ve ever seen on film. Who says musicians can’t rival movie stars in front of the camera? I’d set this up against just about any female performance by anybody ever. Perhaps Stefani’s most evocative features are her eyes, and with each close-up she uses them to full effect. Their movement is precise yet hesitant, subtle yet tentative; each flutter seeming to reveal a new world. Yet, she uses her mouth to almost as good effect: the movement of her slightly pouty lips is so delicate that, brushing up against them, it makes even her teeth seem sublime. But its not just her face: she throws her whole body into the performance. When she stands up against a sunlit window, it is like shivers of girliness are running back and forth from the top of her head to the bottom of her heels and back again.

Now, there are a fair number moments in this video that seem a bit practiced, but some of this stuff you just can’t teach, even to yourself. Some people simply seem to spring out of the abyss as fully formed works of art, completely unconscious of the greatness they bear. I remember one particular girl, a dark-skinned southern Italian, who I used to watch in one of my education classes. I am not ashamed to say that I stared at her for hours. (It was just about all that made the class bearable.) She was, of course, stunningly beautiful, but not any more than one or two of the other girls in the class. Only one word will really do to describe what set her apart: grace. Simply to watch her sit and eat an apple was worth more than all the pornography that ever has or ever will exist on earth. It is strange; such people seem to require no training, and the beauty of their movements is all the more evocative for its complete lack of art. Every movement, every shrug of their shoulder, seems sent to convey some secret message from a higher world. Among writers, perhaps only Katherine Anne Porter ever captured something of this in her story Flowering Judas when she wrote, “No dancer ever danced as beautifully as Laura walked.”

In contrast to most other female pop singers, Stefani basically comes across as a good girl. Though sometimes a bit naughty, she is never trashy. (OK, maybe this crosses the line.) She seems (and I emphasize seems, who knows what is real under the media bubble) to be a sensible, down to earth person, and, for a pop culture icon, surprisingly chaste. No hint of scandal has ever touched her and it is entirely possible she has only been with two men in her whole life (current husband Gavin Rossdale and former boyfriend Tony Kanal, bassist for her band No Doubt). And yet, despite such sexual conservatism, she is incredibly sexy. Stefani seems to have hit the exact level of sexiness a nice man would want in a wife. Unlike a bad boy, who, if he cares to get married at all, might be happy enough with a very conventional wife at home and more exciting partners elsewhere, a nice guy has only got one shot. Like most men, he wants someone exciting in bed. But not too exciting. Hyper-sexiness of the Britney Spears type may have its attractions, but may also indicate a potential for unfaithfulness. Such blatant, overwhelming sexuality is an unsettling force in a marriage, as it tends to spill out into the world at large, and all men would be wise to deeply consider the consequences of marriage to someone possessed of it. Unfortunately for nice guys, someone with a Stefani-like balance is an extraordinarily difficult thing to find. Few women can walk up to such a line without going over, and we often correctly choose to marry a nice but somewhat unexciting woman. That’s usually no more than we deserve, but, ah, wouldn’t it be nice.

Despite occasional flirting with masculine fashion, Stefani has to be just about the girliest singer ever. Just as rich and charismatic male rockers can get away with wearing wearing make-up and assless leather pants, Stefani’s sometimes masculine outfits, from her early sporty look, and the tie and shirt combo seen in 4 in the Morning, really serve only to make her ultra-femininity that much more obvious. Stefani’s look is highly constructed, and highly made up (she does love her make-up), but I doubt if any drag queen could effectively pull her off. Unlike, say, Madonna, whose persona, at least once past her early twenties, always included a heavy dose overbearing masculine will, Gwen is just too girly, especially in her mannerisms, for any mere man to even hope of copying. One wonders if this will last much longer, however. An almost inevitable hint of masculinity seems to enter women as they enter their forties. If Stefani is to continue her career, her songs and her performing style will have to change. You simply can’t be a girl forever. It will be interesting to see if someone whose appeal has rested so heavily on her girlishness can make the transition. One can only wish her better success than Madonna’s unconvincing turn from dominatrix to earth mother. (Could any woman be less down-to-earth than Madonna?) There are hints of a more natural Stefani under the make-up, in her video for Cool (dir. Muller) and at the end of her video for Underneath It All (also dir. Muller, though it starts off unbearably gaudy, the last sequence now looks like a dry run for 4 in the Morning). Heavy make-up will only make her rather thin face look more severe as she gets older. It is to be hoped that she has the good sense not to let herself be turned into a latter-day Joan Crawford.

Girliness isn’t for everyone. Many male critics, in particular, seem to prefer the earlier ska-punk of No Doubt. I remember listening in disbelief as a Toronto DJ went on a rant about Stefani’s song Hollaback Girl. The song, a silly cheerleader chant featuring the immortal refrain: B-A-N-A-N-A-S, isn’t very good, but I was struck by his extreme reaction, going on about “back when she used to have musical integrity.” Since all artists’ output is uneven, and Stefani actually seems to be close to her artistic peak, what he doubtless really meant is that she should have written her bad songs in a more masculine manner. All artists tend to err in particular ways, and female artists tend to err in feminine ways, just as male artists tend to err in male ways. That’s just the way it is. The song does take girly enthusiasm to grotesque levels, but the DJ protested too much. I doubt he was so put out by the metal-machine-music that serves as filler on Nirvana’s studio albums. What seems to upset him so much is that Stefani actually turns out to be a girl with actual girly interests. The ska-punk girl of his dreams, the one who had the same masculine punk rock tastes, was no more. To quote Shaw’s Henry Higgins, “Oh, why can’t a woman be more like a man?”

It is amazing how good Stefani looks at 38. She is as attractive as she ever was, perhaps more so. (Her one flaw used to be a chest flat as a board, something that having a child seems to have corrected.) Doubtless clean living has something to do with this longevity, but having a skinny build probably helps too. (Skinny girls do seem to keep their looks the longest.) Normally, women reach their peak attractiveness from about 18 to 22, but this will vary somewhat from woman to woman. Some women actually seem to peak in their late 20s. A prime example would be Nicole Kidman, who looked rather mousy in earlier movies like Dead Calm, but who, by her appearance in Batman Forever (stinker that it was), was just about the most beautiful woman in the world. Doubtless, part of this is learning how to groom and dress well, but some of it really is natural variance in peak attractiveness. Alas, however, this means that some poor girls reach their peak much earlier than 18, sometimes as early as 13 or 14, well before they can put their looks to any respectable use, such as finding a husband. Even under normal circumstances, many commentators have noted the special glow that girls under 18 have. It is true there is something irrecoverably attractive at that age, and that the last vestiges of it are all but gone by one’s late twenties. However, actresses and performers, who are rarely at their artistic peak before age 28, are fortunate in that peak on-screen attractiveness seems to extend over a much longer period, sometimes well into the late thirties. Bone structure evidently transfers well to the screen, “glow” does not.

Stefani’s current sound owes a lot to eighties influences, but she improves on them. Eighties synth pop was a pretty crude beast. Despite the example of artists like Stevie Wonder, by the early eighties most synth music still sounded pretty tinny and stilted. As U2’s Bono once scornfully noted, “We were the world’s biggest band in a decade full of crap music.” But the greatness of an artist’s influences is often secondary. For the purposes of making new art, the crappy is often just as important as the great. A strong enough artist is often able to see potential in the most unlikely of sources, take the best bits out of it, and turn it into gold. It is not surprising that a girly girl like Stefani would find the somewhat effeminate sound of eighties synth pop more congenial to her artistic purposes than the bombastic male rock of a group like U2, regardless of their relative merits. Influence is all about what you can use.

Then there is Stefani’s unique voice, utterly like anything else you’ve heard. She is fortunate to have grown up in a place where it could be appreciated. America has always been somewhat infertile ground for the high arts. There has never had much room for classical tradition there. Popular art, from Mark Twain to hip-hop, has long ruled the roost. In many ways, this has seriously impoverished the American arts scene: the United States has, for example, produced nothing comparable to a Shakespeare or a Bach. But this fitful rebellion against European art tradition has not been without its compensations. Popular art, with its emphasis on performance and individual expression, has always made more room for individual quirks, and American artists have taken full advantage of that openness. What a wild thing American art is! Can you imagine a voice like Stefani’s in classical music? All praises to the European classical music tradition; it really is the highest form of musical expression. But it is not without its limitations. One of them seems to be its inability to accommodate any great degree of vocal individuality. Though the classical tradition does seem to provide a much larger scope for compositional greatness, it’s often extreme vocal demands mean that only a limited number of vocal types are suitable for interpreting its works. If a music lover were to limit himself to just that one tradition, they would be depriving themselves of the pleasure of such unique talents as Billie Holiday, Astrud Gilberto, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, B.B. King, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and, of course, Gwen Stefani. I don’t mean to slight the uniqueness and talent of classical performers, but the differences between, say, a Pavarotti and a Domingo, or a Schwarzkopf and a Baker, hardly compare to the vast gulf between the vocal styles of country singers Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash. And that’s just within one genre! The work of classical vocalists is often so subsumed in the composition that, unless you have the CD booklet in hand, one can often hardly tell which is which, but I defy any listener at any moment to mistake Willie Nelson for anyone else whatsoever.

Much has been made of Stefani’s faux feminism, exemplified by her song Just A Girl (dir. Muller):
'Cause I'm just a girl, little 'ol me
Don't let me out of your sight
I'm just a girl, all pretty and petite
So don't let me have any rights

But I am not convinced. If you only read feminist propaganda, you would think that before 1960 the life of a woman was nothing but an unending tale of oppression, drudgery and woe. I for one highly doubt that women’s lives for most of history consisted mostly of unhappiness, at least any more than men’s: it is simply not credible for evolution to have left women without any power of getting what they want. Feminism tends to attract those who are bad at (or excluded from) using traditionally feminine ways of getting what they want: lesbians, the unattractive, the young and inexperienced, and, sometimes, the promiscuous (if a woman can’t control access to her body, she won’t get much respect in return). Since Stefani is neither ugly, promiscuous, nor a lesbian, that leaves young and inexperienced. To be honest, young women’s fear of men is not entirely unjustified: men are big, aggressive creatures who run the world and judge you mercilessly on on things like your looks, and you haven’t learned to deal effectively with them. (Also, men’s commitment to the good and the respectable is sometimes less than wholehearted.) That’s not to defend feminism, but to say that it is not coming out of nowhere. In any event, Just A Girl is a bit of a lark. The tone is light and Stefani’s bratty delivery hardly encourages anyone to take the whole thing too seriously. The ultimate message of the song seems to be that feminism is something silly young girls get a few kicks out of. Its an ideology made to be discarded. Indeed, the main reason feminism has never really caught on among most women is that they are, in the end, actually pretty good at getting what they want without it. Not surprisingly, Stefani’s later albums feature more songs about babies than girl power. Once they learn how to deal with them, young women tend to discover that men aren’t actually that bad. How many young women go around saying “I don’t need a man” at 22 only to end up married and voting Conservative (or Republican) at 30?

Feminism, however, cannot just be reduced to being bad at such traditional feminine means. Feminism, or at least feminism-lite, also attracts at least some lively, talented young women, especially those inclined to enter into traditionally male-dominated fields, which includes many of the most exciting ones. It is not surprising that such women should be impatient of the strictures placed on them, whether by nature or society. Talented human beings, whether male or female, almost always want to, in Nietzsche’s words, vent their strength. To some degree this would seem to apply to Stefani. The music business is in many ways a man's world, and, if you a woman who wants children and a family, negotiating it becomes even more difficult.

Indeed, one of the great themes of Stefani’s work, exemplified by her song Simple Kind of Life (dir. Muller), is the conflict between her art and her desire for a family. This isn’t an exclusively female conflict, I too identify with the desire to settle down with a family, but the artistic life has always put more pressure on women than men. Art makes enormous demands on your time, and every minute making art is one less you have for finding a mate and settling down. Samuel Beckett memorably contrasted the ecstasy of the art life with the felt desire for a more ordinary happiness:

Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.

Despite Beckett’s high rhetoric, however, such grand renunciations are much less final for a man. He always has much more time to engage in such extravagant poses before changing his mind. An introverted male writer may spend all his younger days writing the Great American Novel, make a great success of publishing it at 40, marry a 25 year old groupie, and father 4 children. A female artist who attempted the same would be at great risk of finding herself irretrievably alone and childless. That biological clock keeps ticking.

There may be something to the idea that women’s artistic achievement has been limited by societal pressure. However, this isn’t necessarily because of any special effort to discourage female artists, but perhaps because women tend to be more easily discouraged. For many female artists, achievement involves overcoming powerful urges in favour of domestic life. These artists doubtless feel torn between the contradictory demands imposed by their own bodies. In such circumstances, it is not surprising that every little bit of social pressure would be interpreted as an attempt to clamp down on their artistic pursuits. But conspiracy mongering is not necessary to explain this phenomenon. It is women’s sensitivity to that pressure, not its particular intensity towards them, that is the real obstacle to female achievement. Male artists, on average, are simply blessed with much less attachment to family life, and thus tend to be less conflicted about single-mindedly pursuing their art. Its just that much easier for them to blow off pressure to settle down. (They are also, it must be said, possessed of a much more forgiving biological clock, should they decide to change their mind later in life.)

LINKS:
I wrote about Shirley Manson, another of my favourite female singers here. I wrote about the efflorescence of female musical artists in the 90s here. I wrote about how women may be underperforming in the arts here. I wrote about how great artists create art out of junk here. I wrote about rock star androgyny here. Muller got her start making videos for the Eurythmics. There are couple good examples here and here. Another of my favourite Muller videos is here. The fast cutting actually fits Sinead O'Connor's fragile, distracted genius extremely well.

Filmmakers: David Cronenberg

2007-09-25T20:03:00.000-04:00

Michael Blowhard reviews the latest David Cronenberg film Eastern Promises here.

In contrast with Michael, I’ve always thought Cronenberg's films "clunky, pretentious, and perverse." None of them are exactly examples of meticulous craftsmanship and his narratives tend to ape third rate Hollywood clichés. I often wonder if he isn’t an artist who wandered into the wrong medium. When I think of his films, I don't think of the story or the dialogue or the cinematography or the editing, all of which are usually pretty pedestrian; what I do think of are those appalling gynaecological instruments from Dead Ringers or the meat gun/hand from Videodrome, or the various new orifices he's managed to come up with throughout his oeuvre. Cronenberg seems to belong to a group of filmmakers, like James Whale and Tim Burton, who only incidentally work in film. What they are really interested in is set design or costuming or whatever. I tend to prefer that the films I watch actually work as films, but I can still see what attracts people to the work of these other kinds of artists. However, lately, in films like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, Cronenberg has seemed to back away from his former preoccupation with the grotesque and the gynaecological to focus on more straightforward narratives, and has been rewarded with much more mainstream success. However, as Michael implies, straightforward narrative would not seem to be his strength. Take away from Cronenberg his high concept scenarios, his crazy props, his over-the-top make-up, and, yes, his newfangled orifices, and there just isn't much left.

One of the most annoying things about each locality's arts scene is that you are just expected to think well of local artists. For example, if you live in Toronto and happen to think Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg are a couple of pretentious windbags, you’re not just expressing an opinion about art, you’re letting down the home team. You’ve diminished the city’s international filmmaking cache. Something of the same problem exists in the Christian community. If anything remotely Christian manages to break out into the mainstream, the bums in the pews are implicitly expected to support it. Aesthetic displeasure wasn’t the only reason I reacted so strongly against The Lord of the Rings, but the implication, at least in the circles I run in, that not liking Tolkien was a somewhat un-Christian thing to do. (The same thing might have happened with regard to Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, but for the fact that a lot of women in the church did think well of its blood and guts version of the gospel. I happened to like The Passion a lot, but it is a far from perfect representation of the Christian message. It would not be healthy for Christians to just circle the wagons around it.) Now, a bit of local or religious patriotism isn’t entirely a bad thing. As a Canadian, for example, I probably read Northrop Frye and Robertson Davies more than I would if I were born in the U.S., and I have an affection for the works of Eric Rohmer and C.S. Lewis that I might not feel if I didn’t share with them something of a similar outlook on religion. (Though fairly reactionary on canonical matters, I can understand the reasons why different groups, like blacks or Hispanics, would like to read works by authors of their own kind.) But such things can go too far. It is one thing to feel a particular affection for good work that has some extra-artistic connection to oneself, it is quite another to elevate bad work to the status of good for the same reason. The first is a natural extension of particular loyalties, the second it a betrayal of all intellectual and artistic standards. If the only reason you read is to express tribal loyalties, why read at all? No honest patriot, of whatever group, can but deplore the unthinking jingoism of this “my mother drunk or sober” school of criticism.

The problem of boosterism in criticism mainly seems to show up among provincial or marginal groups. If a critic in Los Angeles doesn’t think an American film is good, he will generally say so. He might be tempted to engage in boosterism for some other group he belongs to, but American film so dominates the film universe that boosterism on its behalf would be entirely beside the point. In contrast, the Canadian film industry, when it has existed at all, has always operated in the shadow of the American behemoth, utterly unshielded by language or geography. The best known Canadian director, Norman Jewison, is a full on member of the Hollywood establishment who reached his artistic apotheosis helming such decidedly non-Canadiana pieces as Fiddler on the Roof and Moonstruck. He is beloved here, but only by something of a stretch can his films really be classified as Canadian. The animation and documentary tradition of the NFB has produced fantastic work, but it has had a tiny audience, and cannot satisfy the hunger for more mainstream recognition. I don’t really see much solution to all of this. American movies are more dominant than ever, and overpraising the work of directors like Cronenberg and Egoyan isn't going to change this.

Christian Novelists: J.R.R. Tolkien

2007-09-06T00:57:00.000-04:00

I dislike Lord of the Rings. I dislike the books and I have grave reservations about the films.

What do I dislike about them? Let's tackle the books first. The first thing is the prose. I want to make it clear that this mostly applies to The Two Towers and The Return of the King. The badness of the writing there is sometimes almost beyond belief. Too much dialogue like "Evil is afoot in Mordor" and "He lives now in terror of the shadow of Mordor, and yet he still dreams of riding the storm." One or two of these lines might not spoil the book, but, simply put, no sensitive reader can take this kind of continuous bombast for 1500 pages. I am sad to say that The Two Towers and The Return of the King are, without doubt, the worst written books I have ever had the misfortune to read.

Which, brings me to my second complaint, the shallowness, which afflicts the book almost from the beginning. Tolkien said that LOTR had no meaning, that there was no allegory to the book. I am afraid that he was all too right about his creation. It is one of the emptiest books I have ever read. Not that the plot does not create opportunities to express meaning. One longs for the narrator or the characters to comment on the nature of friendship, on overcoming hardship, on the nature of temptation. But then . . . they don’t. The books admirers always say that the book is about heroism, but I confess that I could not find even one interesting observation on that topic in the whole book.

Of course, lots of critics are willing to admit Tolkien's failings, but then tell us to go read him for the plot. But what if you don’t primarily read for plot? What if you read for insight? Furthermore, if all there is is the plot, why exactly should a book exist as a book? Why do you need words at all? Won’t a movie or ballet convey its essence just as well? When it comes to books, there is no use talking about "the whole." Books are written sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and great sentences and great paragraphs are individually memorable and insightful. Great books have things worth quoting. Of course, even in the greatest works there have to be transitions and even the best sentences sometimes need buildup, but eventually you have to come to the meat. A book cannot be all transition and all buildup. Alas, even at its best (as in The Fellowship of the Ring), Tolkien's writing is merely inoffensive.

The fact is that as far as literature is concerned, story is secondary; insight and observation are what make a book worthy of being a book. When I think of the books I’ve read, I only secondarily remember their plots. What I do remember are Margret Atwood's remark that stupidity and evil are the same, if you go by the results, or E.M. Forster telling us that while death destroys man, the thought of death saves him, or Milton telling us it is better to reign in hell than serve in heaven, or Balzac that you are always welcome, but you will never be missed. Those things are what makes a book worth reading, and the best books are studded with them. I dare anyone to find anything so memorable in the last thousand or so pages of The Lord of the Rings. There are couple of memorably humorous moments at the start in the Shire and Gandalf makes a pretty impressive speech on pity, also near the beginning, but after that it is all downhill. A handful of such things cannot sustain literary interest over a full thousand pages. If this is all he had to say, I am afraid that Mr. Tolkien should have spared himself (and the reader) such a mammoth undertaking, and given us a short story.

(Of course, if you do read primarily for the plot, then perhaps The Lord of the Rings is your kind of book. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi notes in his book on Creativity that for many writers, reading bad prose is actually painful. That was my experience of reading Lord of the Rings. Physical pain. But, as the ability to appreciate good storytelling is much more universal than the ability to to appreciate good prose, if you don't happen to be one of those few people particularly sensitive to bad writing, you doubtless will not notice these faults and be able to enjoy the book. My experience of the book, however, was so bad that I cannot approach anything like that equanimity.

I suspect also that I came to the book too late in life. If you read Lord of the Rings as a teenager it may seem to reveal all the world to you. The Derelict has a superb post up on why our childhood tastes are often so different from those as an adult. Lord of the Rings would seem to fall precisely under his analysis. It does seem to be one of those books you have to read before you turn 25. If you don't read it by then, its appeal may be irrecoverable. One of the saddest parts of developing an adult taste is letting go of childhood favourites. This can mean giving up truly deep attachments, and the entire process can be horribly wrenching. Some people simply cannot do it. So, perhaps for some LOTR brings up memories of their long lost youth, when it seemed the book would reveal all the mysteries of reality. They cannot let go. One should have some compassion for this. Letting go is painful. But compassion cannot be allowed to usurp the judgment. We owe a duty to the truth as we see it.)

That is my last word on the books. I am happy to report that the movies are considerably better. After all, as even its detractors have had to admit, LOTR does have a fairly good plot, and the movies, much more efficiently than the books, deliver that plot to the audience. Salman Rushdie, comparing the books and the movies, almost goes so far as to imply that you might as well skip the books altogether. But even this will only take you so far. The fact is that Peter Jackson has made three rather cheezy horror flicks, complete with buckets of slime and a bombastic musical score that feels it necessary every so often to announce that "THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT MOMENT!" The acting is often very good, but even that is not without its problems. Ian McKellan’s Gandalf lends some dignity to the proceedings (though the silliness of the cave scenes made me want to call out “Run, little wizard, run”), and Andy Serkis is superb as Smeagol (what's up with the whispy combover though). But Viggo Mortenson’s dialogue is so “horribly stuffed with bombast” that no one could do much with it; he inevitably sounds like a parody of a hero instead of the real thing. And the Hobbits, with the partial exception of Ian Holm’s Bilbo, are some of the least likeable characters on film: Merry and Pippin are dumber than a couple of high school potheads and about as interesting, Frodo has no personality to speak of, and Sam is just about the most cloying character in all film; by the middle of the third film I wanted to throw him off the cliff. In general, Jackson's lack of taste is matched only by his lack of personal hygiene. He is a man who obviously doesn't care much for appearances. This might not matter quite so much in a novelist or composer, but in a film director it more than matters. Appearances are what the movies are. Lets fact it, drenched in slime, stuffed with bombast, unevenly acted, Jackson's Lord of the Rings is the epitome of the slob aesthetic.

That may be a bit harsh, but I don't mean to entirely dismiss the films. As far as cheezy horror films go, these ones are all eminently watchable, and you can't say that about many 3 hour movies, let alone 3 of them. (Though the last film does go on a bit too long. My sister remarked that it should have stopped with the crowning of Aragorn. After all, the film is called Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, not Lord of the Rings: Sam Marries a Fat Hobbit.) But, while the films are not without their merits, they are decidedly not anywhere near great art, and unfortunately represent the culmination of a long and disturbing trend in the movies. LOTR is a movie of, by and for geeks and is more concerned concerned about being "neat" than being art. I have come to appreciate the virtues of nerds and geeks; they are an underappreciated and much maligned segment of society. They frequently do not deserve the contempt they receive. But geekiness does have its definite downsides and nowhere is that more apparent than in the arts. Now, if this were some modest sci-fi/fantasy production, I would doubtless be content to pass on by in silence. There is a bit of the unshowered geek in all of us, and it enjoys the occasional LOTR type fantasy film. But LOTR isn't just a geek movie, it is the biggest, sloppiest, most over-the-top geek movie ever made. Its triumph represents the total geekification of the movies, something which has made the prospect of going to the theatre such a depressing experience lately. It demands a response.

However, what most disturbed me about the reception of The Lord of the Rings films was not their immense popularity among the general public (bad art will always be more popular than good), but instead its rather uncritical embrace by the Christian community. I can understand the reasons. Christians consume a lot of popular culture. They are human beings, and they enjoy a lot of the same things other people do. But most producers of that popular culture want nothing to do with Christianity. It’s not cool. It’s a niche market. It appeals to squares. Worst of all, its stringent moral code prevents full enjoyment of all the multitudinous sexual opportunities available in the entertainment industry. So, as much as they consume its products, Christians have an uneasy relationship with the entertainment industry. They feel its rejection. For them Christianity is the greatest thing in the world. It should be right at the centre of everything. It should be able to inspire great art. (And it has!) Consequently, whenever some piece of quasi-Christian pop culture comes along and isn’t terrible, they tend to be a bit overeager in their embrace of it. Imagine the exstasy many felt when Jackson’s films were lauded to the sky. Finally, they felt, we too get to be cool. Well, I have news for my fellow Christians: Christianity will never be cool. It will never be sexy. Christianity has its aesthetic appeal, but the kinds of things Hollywood specializes in (not always unworthy) are not really part of it. Stop whoring after every pathetic little tidbit the Hollywood machine deigns to throws you. Lord of the Rings, for all its critical acclaim, is actually a pretty mediocre movie. In the long term, Christianity will not gain by association with it. Its popularity will doubtless go on for a while, but will eventually evaporate. It is not for all time. Ask yourself, do you really want to hold up something this mediocre as an exemplar of Christian art in the 20th century? That is, if it even really is Christian art. Tolkien the man was a conservative Catholic, but Lord of the Rings the book, much less the movie, doesn’t really seem to me particularly Christian at all. It doesn’t really seem to me even religious. Its not even pagan. You will probably find more spiritual content in the Iliad, and that's saying alot. So, my plea to my fellow Christians is, please be more careful in embracing supposedly Christian products of the popular culture. Enjoy them sure, but don’t hold them up to be more than they are. Otherwise you will only hurt what you profess to love.

Virgil Translations

2007-08-22T23:05:00.001-04:00

After posting my thoughts on Homer translations, one of my commenters asked me what I thought were the best Virgil translations. This is my response, along with a few other thoughts about the great latin poet.

I.
Virgil is almost the epitome of the highly sensitive person. Doubtless many poets fall roughly under that description, but Virgil, like Tennyson, the closest equivalent in English, seems to have been more sensitive than most. Again as with Tennyson, this sensitivity, when applied to the proper use of words, resulted in a phenomenal technical perfection. Both their verse is exquisitely nuanced. Furthermore, such sensitivity gave them a deep well of feeling from which to draw. Both poets were finely attuned to the pain of others. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that Virgil’s great theme was suffering. In fact, feeling in Virgil often seems like it is almost about to break all bounds. Frequently, he nearly loses control. Reading, say, the story of Dido, the prevailing impression is often one of near hysteria, held in check only by the strictest artistic control:

It came to this then sister? You deceived me?
The pyre meant this, altars and fires meant this?
What shall I mourn first, being abandoned? Did you
Scorn your sister's company in death?
You should have called me out to the same fate!
The same blade's edge and hurt, at the same hour,
Should have taken us off. With my own hands
Had I to build this pyre, and had I to call
Upon our country's gods, that in the end
With you placed on it there, O heartless one,
I should be absent? Your have put to death
Yourself and me, the people and the fathers
Bred in Sidon, and you own new city.
Give me fresh water, let me bathe her wound
And catch upon my lips any last breath . . .
(Book IV)

It must be said that neither Virgil nor Tennyson were great thinkers, but they did not need to be. Such flawless technique and deep feeling are more than enough to propel them into the first ranks of literature.

As Robert Royal of the Weekly Standard notes:"There are many signs that the young Virgil was an Epicurean and that he never wholly repudiated that philosophy in adulthood." Virgil was without doubt deeply influenced by the latin poet Lucretius, himself a devout follower, if one may use the term, of the materialist philosopher Epicurus. The Epicureans emphasized knowledge, contemplation, and moderate pleasure as the only way to avoid suffering. They were also harsh critics of religion, the ancient equivalents of militant atheists like Richard Dawkins (though, to be fair, they did grant the gods a kind of platonic existence). It was undoubtedly the Epicurean emphasis on how to avoid suffering that initially attracted such a sensitive soul as Virgil. However, while the Epicureans were quite concerned with suffering, it was mostly with their own. Like many elite philosophers, they were quite prepared to write off most of humanity:

Pleasant it is, when over the great sea the winds shake the waters,
To gaze down from shore on the trials of others;
Not because seeing other people struggle is sweet to us,
But because the fact that we ourselves are free from such ills strikes us as pleasant.
Pleasant it is also to behold great armies battling on a plain,
When we ourselves have no part in their peril.
But nothing is sweeter than to occupy a lofty sanctuary of the mind,
Well fortified with the teachings of the wise,
Where we may look down on others as they stumble along,
Vainly searching for the true path of life.
(Lucretius, On the Nature of Things)

But for someone so attuned as Virgil to suffering, his own and that of others, this kind of detachment was doubtless all but impossible to achieve.

I myself recently had a bit of an online dialogue with Razib Khan about whether an atheist vision of the universe was objectively horrible or not. I contended that any world with so much wanton cruelty was indeed objectively horrible, and that supernatural intervention, likely or not, was the only way out of this mess. I was struck by the idea that he didn’t seem to have ever given the suffering of others much thought. After all life isn’t so terrible for him. I suppose if you have a relatively nice life, and you do not feel emotional pain very deeply yourself, and you are more interested in systems than in other people, and you yourself have the kind of nerdy mind that does not easily identify with others, then the immense suffering of the human and natural world won’t much disturb your sleep. This doesn’t necessarily mean you are a bad fellow, but it does mean that you may not have given the suffering of the world as much thought as it deserves. For Virgil, though, highly sensitive fellow that he was, this was not really an option; he doubtless made a miserable Epicurean.

Furthermore, as Royal notes:

. . . Adler believes Virgil detected a fatal flaw in the Epicurean system, which he presents most memorably in the contrast between Aeneas and Queen Dido, and between Rome and Carthage. It may be true that the radically rational philosopher is freed from fear of both the gods and death--while limiting himself to rationally moderate pleasures. But such philosophers are so rare as to be of almost no social effect. Almost always, those who free themselves from traditional religion find themselves, like poor Dido, subject to furor: anger and lust. Epicurus was far too optimistic about our ability to tame these demons, and in his desire to spread this philosophy to the entire populace, Lucretius threatens the civic order. Indeed, he invites his own destruction, for the retired life of the Epicurean philosopher depends upon the existence of a peaceful city, which the passions unleashed by disbelief in the gods will not produce.

Harold Bloom, in his incessant jihad to cleanse literature from any relationship with Christianity, would have us believe that Virgil, while clearly influenced by Lucretius, slavishly followed him in all things. This is patent nonsense. In his own way, Virgil seems to have been a deeply religious man. Piety is one of his prime virtues. He advises his farmer:

Above all else,
Be sure to pay due reverence to the gods.
When spring has come and winter is over and done with,
Yield to great Ceres the yearly rite you owe her.
(Second Georgic)

The Virgil who emphasizes his hero's piety, who centres his epic on a vision of Heaven and Hell, and whose pity for his fellow creatures, human and non-human alike, animates all his work could hardly be more different than the haughty, aloof Epicurean philosopher-poet, who identifies with no one and who, wrapped up in his own heroic self-image, thinks perhaps a bit too well of his own opinions.

II.
It is perhaps one of the ironies of history that it is Virgil the pagan homosexual who, as far as any writer may be put to blame, may have done most to bequeath to the West its strain of sexual puritanism. Here he sounds frankly envious of the asexual bees:

And you will be surprised that the bees are never
Known to indulge in sexual intercourse; they never
Dissipate or enervate their bodies
By making love.
(Fourth Georgic)

Augustine and Jerome, the usual suspects in any polemic against sex-hating Christians, were themselves steeped in Virgil. But they have nothing on the pagan. Where else could they have found the words and ideas to express their distaste for the merely physical? I don’t recall much of this kind of thing in the Greek fathers, and there is far more agonizing over sex in Virgil than there is in the Bible. Even for St. Paul, who urged his followers not to marry, it was, as C.S. Lewis long ago pointed out, marriage itself, not the marriage bed that was the married person’s prime obstacle to God. That is, it is the mundane, day to day struggle of maintaining a household, not the act of congress, that distracts us most easily from those first things.

I’m still not convinced, however, that there have ever been many people, devout Christians or no, who have really, in fact, been anti-sex. Doubtless there have been some. But even Augustine, who did say some pretty silly things about sex, was in his pastoral duties surprisingly easy-going. Then, who actually doesn’t like sex? Perhaps a few people who have been really burned by their desires. But, if that is the case, who can actually blame them? Our fear of sex’s power over us seems to me entirely legitimate:

And a sudden madness seized him, madness of love
A madness to be forgiven if Hell but knew
How to forgive; he stopped in his tracks, and then,
Out into the light, suddenly, seized by love,
Bewildered into heedlessness, alas!
His purpose overcome, he turned and looked . . .
(Fourth Georgic)

Is there any better way to describe the effects of desire than “bewildered into heedlessness”? Sex urges us on into unhealthy emotional entanglements, and drives to do bad things we otherwise wouldn’t do. It is directly or indirectly the cause of much violence, emotional and physical, that we inflict on each other:

All living creatures on earth, no matter whether
It’s human beings or other kinds - fish, cattle
Beautiful birds - they all rush into the fire:
Love is the same for all. There is no other time
When the lioness forgets her cubs and prowls
With such avid savagery across the plains;
When the shapeless bear rampaging in the woods
Is the cause of the so much havoc and destruction;
It’s the time when the boar is at his very fiercest,
The tigress at her worst. Ah! Not the right time
To dare to go out in deserted Libyan fields.
Haven’t you seen it, your horse begins to tremble,
His whole body shivers, because he’s snuffed
A hint of a familiar scent on the breeze?
The reins won’t hold him back then, nor the whip,
Nor wide opposing rivers, whose rising can
Bring mountains down into their roiling waters.
(Third Georgic)

Sex, then, is not an unqualified good. I am further reminded the quote from Whit Stillman’s Last Days of Disco, “I always considered you a man of some integrity, except in your dealings with women.” How many men are there who would never think of lying for any other material advantage, but who would lie as a matter of course to get a woman into bed. Who, even among the most upright of men, hasn’t at least had the thought flit across the mind, “Its only a little lie, and besides she’ll enjoy it too once we get there.” I don’t think any decent male human being could be any thing but appalled at the things sex has at least tempted him to do.

At least in a society like ours, mostly free as it is from material want, I don’t think its too much to say that the vast majority of people’s intense suffering is rather closely related to sex. Who can fail to note the anguish and self-doubt of being alone, the terror of rejection, the lies and misunderstandings of courtship, the sting of betrayal, and, even in the best case, the inevitable difficulties of living with another flawed human being. I remember reading David M. Buss’ Evolution of Desire and remarking that it made one want to burn every bed in the country. I don’t want to be too negative, most of the good things in life, including sex itself, come out of sex too, but we do well to note its easy transformation into a thing of the night. Along with its immense potential for good comes an immense potential for evil.

III.
We also do well to remember that Virgil, in contrast to Homer, is a poet of civilization. Camille Paglia has pointed out that while Homer’s heroes give each other gifts of immense practicality, in Virgil they give objets d’art. We tend to forget that Homer comes only at the dawn of civilization. The Greeks of Homer’s time were indeed in some sense civilized, but, as William Morris’ translation has the virtue of reminding us, his Greeks have as much or more in common with the Viking raiders as they do with us.

Christian writers and poets, from Augustine and Jerome to Dante, from Dryden on to Tennyson, have always felt an immense affinity for Virgil. With his emphasis on family, piety, and suffering, it is not hard to see why. But Virgil also, unlike Homer, writes with a sense of history. Rome, as an entity, has a purpose, and so everything that has led up to it shares in that purpose. In the Iliad, the sack of Troy has no ultimate meaning; its cause really is nothing but a random quarrel over a beautiful woman, and the motive behind it is nothing but private revenge. It has no other ultimate purpose than to be a showcase for individual heroics, whether of the martial prowess of Achilles or the cunning of Odysseus, that provide entertainment for the Gods. For the Greeks, the sack of Troy, however magnificent in itself, doesn’t move towards anything, while for Virgil it is the prelude to the founding of the Roman state. In this sense, Virgil is closer to the Judeo-Christian view that history is moving towards an end. The fourth eclogue, while obviously not the Christian prophecy it was sometimes made out to be, does share something of Christianity’s messianic sensibility:

The Virgin now returns, and the reign of Saturn;
The new generation now comes down from heaven.
Lucina, look with favor on this child,
-Lucina, goddess, pure- this child by whom
The Age of Iron gives way to the Golden Age . . .
[H]e will be ruler of a world
Made peaceful by the merits of his father . . .
Your cradle will be a cornucopia
Of smiling flowers blossoming around you;
Nowhere will there be serpents anymore,
And nowhere plants where any poison hides . . .

Of course, for Virgil, this messianism was almost entirely secular and imperial. Rome was the culmination of history, bringing peace and order to a world filled with chaos and blood; it was the culmination of all that had come before and it would last forever.

Virgil’s political program has come in for much criticism. His idealization of order, restraint, discipline and piety is not much in favour these days amongst our elites, though it must be said that Virgil shared with many among them an intense horror of war:

O Caesar, the gods begrudge your care for us;
Right and wrong are turned into each other;
War everywhere in the world; crimes everywhere,
In every way and every shape and form . . .
There’s war on the Euphrates; on the Rhine’
Neighboring cities breat their mutual oaths,
Sword against sword; Mars rages everywhere.
(First Georgic)

Harold Bloom once made fun of Virgil, suggesting that given Virgil’s nightmarish apprehension of reality, his idealization of Augustus was much like Thomas Pynchon going into the service of Ronald Reagan. But Bloom's irony falls flat. It is hardly surprising that those most sensitive to the shadows should most appreciate order and restraint. Furthermore, left-liberal alternatives to traditional virtue have all been notorious failures. Strong nuclear families are the basis of any good society. (The sexual revolution may have been nothing but good, clean fun for our upper middle classes, but it was it, not the legacy of white racism, that eviscerated the black family.) Law and order are the first duty of the state. Military strength is necessary to preserve peace. Handouts to the poor are a moral hazard and often do cause more harm than good. It may not be pleasant to say it, but in this realm as in others, two and two really do equal four.

But all of these policies have a terrible, terrible cost. Human beings will suffer because of them. Tough divorce laws may make marriage stronger overall, but individual people will end up trapped in appalling marriages. Locking up criminals may be the right thing to do, but it will deprive thousands of children of a father's support, and his paycheck. A strong military may be necessary, but it does come with the temptation to overreach. Welfare reform may keep the many off of dependancy, but some who truly cannot help themselves will slip through the cracks. These policies may indeed be for the best overall, but we cannot flinch from their darker consequences. The instruments of state are all blunt, and it is to Virgil's credit that he so intensely mourns their inevitable victims.

There is, it is true, something of the artist’s political naivite in Virgil’s program. Rome didn’t, obviously, last, and its history, far from exemplifying an ideal order, was for the most part one of plunging from political crisis to political crisis. Furthermore, much of Roman empire building was taken on, not so much in order to bring Roman virtues to the barbarians, as to fill the coffers of predatory elites. Finally, no mere political order can truly shield us from ourselves. We live in a fallen world. Virgil’s over-idealization of Rome is fair warning of how even ostensible conservatism can lapse into quasi-utopianism. I would note that this seems a particular temptation for Americans. Much as I admire Ronald Reagan, he was wrong, America is not a shining city on a hill. It may indeed be an example for the world, but we should never forget that, even in the best of all political orders, there is still eminent scope for human evil. America may be significantly less awful than just about any human society in history, but it is still far from the City of God.

Once again I don’t want to be too negative. I am frequently amazed at just how much good we have been able to make out of such stuff as we are. Who can fail to join in Virgil’s celebration of man’s accomplishment:

And then there are so many wonderful cities,
That so much toil has built, and all those towns
The hand of man has made, high up upon
The rocky cliffs above the mountain streams
That flow along beneath their ancient walls.
(Second Georgic)

Though man remains deeply flawed, and though in every society a thousand heartbreaking things happen each day, we still really should be grateful for what we have. Things could be a lot worse. But neither should we relax our guard. Civilization is a fragile thing and cannot be taken for granted. Everything we have accomplished is waiting to fall apart. We too are part of nature and as Virgil, in one of his wisest moments, notes:

All things by nature are ready to get worse,
Lapse backward, fall away from where they were,
Just as if one who struggles to row his little
Boat upstream against a powerful current
Should but for a moment relax his arms, the current
Would carry him headlong back again downstream.
(First Georgic)

What is truly disturbing about Virgil however, is not so much his imperialism or his somewhat naïve hopes for Rome, but that his quest for order can lead him to endorse a kind of collective totalitarianism:

They are the only ones who share their children
In common parentage, the only ones
To share in common the houses where they dwell;
They live together under the rule of law.
It is only they who have a common country
And share an unchanging home, and in the summer,
Knowing that winter is coming, their enterprise
Is to gather together what they’ll have in common.
(Fourth Georgic)

Virgil’s bees live in harmony, but they have no individuality. There is no pain in their lives, but no real joy either. One cannot help but feel that Virgil’s obsessive quest to alleviate the sorrows of this world has let him to advocate the individual’s complete absorption in the state. Its as if somehow only a grey, colourless, monotony, of the kind found in socialist realism, were the solution to the problem of pain. But of course the sensual, artistic Virgil, lover of Falernian wine and Tyrian purple dye, could never have standed living in such a place for a minute. No one could. It is not a fit environment for human beings. As E.O. Wilson, the world’s authority on social insects, once said of Marxism, “Wonderful theory, wrong species."

IV.
Virgil is said to be notoriously difficult to translate. So, while numerous eminent translators have taken up the challenge, only a few are really worth taking a look at. Here are my recommendations, ranked from first to last:

The Aeneid
1. Robert Fitzgerald
2. Allen Mandelbaum
3. Robert Fagles
4. John Dryden

Eclogues and Georgics
1. David Ferry
2. John Dryden
3. L.P. Wilkinson
4. C. Day-Lewis

As I have noted before, Virgil’s foremost excellence lies in the fineness of his verse, and this demands an answering fineness in his translators. As Harold Bloom has noted, he is a master of nuance. Some writers can survive indifferent translation, but not Virgil. In this case, two translators stand clearly above the rest: Robert Fitzgerald and David Ferry. Ferry especially is a superb verse artist. Even John Dryden, superb translator that he was, cannot really compete with the two Bostonians. Dryden, a superb comic poet, was perhaps too hearty and robust a fellow to fully capture Virgil’s fragile art. And, once again, I have reservations about his decision to render a long narrative poem like the Aeneid in rhymed couplets.

(In fact, though they styled themselves Augustans, the English neo-classicists (Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, and Fielding) did not, in general, have much in common with the greatest of the original Augustans. Though they lived in an age of elegance, they were all men of rough common sense and tough minded humour. They were at their best in comedy and satire, and had little enough use for an art of twilight and whispers. Their poets were Horace and Juvenal, not the pale Mantuan. In fact, it was the Romantics and their successors, the Wordsworths and Tennysons, who were the most authentic Virgilians in the language. What with their fellow emphasis on depth of feeling, they could not help but respond to this great personalizer of the the epic. It is to our great loss that Wordsworth never completed his translation of the Aeneid, and to our even greater loss that Tennyson never even attempted it.)

When I started writing this review, my impression was that there wasn’t much to choose between Mandelbaum and Fitzgerald as translators of the Aeneid. I was wrong. Mandelbaum’s version is excellent, but, as a poet, he is just not up to Fitzgerald’s standards. Mandelbaum’s strengths are his clarity and his storytelling ability. You always know what is going on. His weakness is that he sometimes misses the telling detail. As I noted in my review of Homer translations, his approach works marvelously in the Odyssey, but it works far less well with the Aeneid.

Virgil is not primarily a storyteller, and, with him, detail really matters. A lack of intellect will show itself most in weak construction and failure of large scale craft, and it is here that Virgil is at his worst. Even the Georgics tend to lack structure. By nature a poet of the small and beautiful; his gift was not really for the epic. The Aeneid, powerful as it is, reads more like a series of fragments than a unified narrative. It doesn’t burn all the way through as one star, like the Iliad, but, rather like a comet that breaks into pieces once it hits the atmosphere, it shines now here now there, always brilliantly, but always apart.

Robert Fagles translation of the Aeneid has many of the same virtues and problems as Mandelbaum, with the addendum that Fagles is both plainer and rougher. I am an immense admirer of Fagles’ Odyssey, a superb performance in which he fully comes up to the standards set by Fitzgerald’s own classic version. Sadly, his Virgil is not quite up to the mark. Virgil may praise the virtues of rough and plain folk, but his verse is anything but.

(L.P. Wilkinson's translation of The Georgics has many of the same virtues and limitations of Fagles.)

C. Day-Lewis, father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis, was once very well known for his translations of Virgil. However, I personally can’t stand his version of the Aeneid. He had something of a genuine poetic gift, but he was not a particularly fine stylist and his versions are generally too clumsy and heavy handed to work for a poet like Virgil. It was, however, in his translations that I first read the Eclogues and the Georgics around ten years ago, and I can report that his version of the Georgics still holds up fairly well. I suspect that this is because it is Virgil’s meatiest poem, and consequently the one that survives translation best. Good as the Aeneid is, the Georgics are Virgil’s masterpiece. Still, while Day-Lewis is adequate, if at all possible you should try to read it in Ferry’s incomparable version.

Though they have done excellent work elsewhere, I was not particularly impressed by the versions of Rolfe Humphries, Stanley Lombardo or C.H. Cisson.

Please note that all translations quoted in the body of this post are by Ferry or Fitzgerald.

Neglected Art: Random Thoughts on Shakespeare, The Simpsons, and Stand-up Comedy

2007-08-16T15:02:00.000-04:00

Akshay over at The Occasional Review has a post up on stand-up comedian Louis CK that got me thinking. His main thesis is that many artists working in low prestige genres will later be recognized as among truely great. For him, Shakespeare is an example of how this happened in the past, and The Simpsons is an example of how it might happen in future.

Here are some of my own thoughts:

I.
The best work on The Simpsons actually comes from a relatively small team that coalesced around the 2nd season. There was of course Groening, who set out the broad vision for the show. But the tightest episodes are almost all directed by Rich Moore or Jim Reardon and most of the really classic episodes seem to come from a relatively small stable of writers: George Meyer, Jon Vitti, Jeff Martin, John Schwartzwelder, and the duo of Jay Kogen and Wallace Wollodarsky. By the end of the second season this team had picked up a lot of creative momentum and going into the third and fourth seasons were all working on an extrodinarily high level. But, from the fifth season on, the show started to slowly lose some of its focus, not coincindentally, I think, as some of these people started to drift away. A few great episodes aside, it hasn't ever fully regained its glory.

I do think, however, that televsion shows, especially those with long story arc are not, on the whole, very conducive to creating great art. The main factor is the need to pump out product. The best art almost always comes out of the vision of one man, and there is just no way that any one person can sustain the necessary creativity through the hours and hours of programming demanded by the format. Even the greatest artists have had trouble sustaining creativity at that high a level. Look at Wagner. Though uncontestably a genius of the highest order and an artist of amazing stamina, no reasonable person can fail to note that his Ring cycle, beautiful as it is, contains a fair amount of stuffing. Dickens too. Great as he was too, many of his novels are rather padded. And if this caused trouble for Wagner and Dickens, how much more so for the lesser mortals who create television shows?

Parcelling out the creative responsibility wouldn't seem to be much better. Unless everybody is equally talented, the quality will be uneven, with good directors being undermined by bad writers and vice versa. Given the hours and hours of product needed, there are just that many more opportunities for things to go wrong. Furthermore, great art almost always needs a unified vision. Unless everyone is on exactly the same page creatively, the tone will be uneven too. This can be managed by having one "creator" oversee everything, but even then individual risk taking, the stuff out of which really great art is so often made, will inevitably be discouraged, lest it upset the flow. So, if each individual follows his genius, the show might be occasionally brilliant, but will tend to lack unity. However, if everyone subordinates themselves to the creator, the show will tend to be mediocre. Even worse, all of these factors tend to make television a writer dominated medium, and this too is not conducive to great art. As I wrote earlier:

If you just want a decent popcorn flick [or television episode] , you're much more likely to get it with a solid screenplay and a good journeyman director. But if you want a piece of art that someone is going to remember 200 years from now, you're best to see if a directorial genius can manage to spin some gold out of a piece of fluff.

Television production techniques seem almost exclusively geared to achieving, at best, a kind of high level mediocrity; it is extremely difficult to break out of that mould.

The Simpsons, however, seems to have avoided most of these traps. The show is almost entirely episodic, so the effect of one bad episode doesn't carry over into another. The tone of the show is satirical, so it can make do with more stereotypical characters and doesn't have to worry about long term character development. And, as I noted before, it was essentially created by a relatively small and unusually cohesive group of people, including two great directors. Everything fell into place.

As for Shakespeare not being fully appreciated in his lifetime, I think this had something to do with the fact that his texts were not fully available to the public until after his death. Ben Jonson famously accused Shakespeare of lacking art during his lifetime (though he always insisted that he loved the man). David Riggs, Jonson's biographer, suggests that it was only after Jonson got ahold of the texts being prepared for the first folio, that he realized just what Shakespeare's achievement was, resulting in Jonson's famous poem in which Shakespeare triumphs over Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Kyd, Beaumont, Aristophanes, Terence and Plautus. Only Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripedes are his equals. I would further note that Shakespeare was easily the most influential writer among his peers: Ford, Webster, Tourneur, Beaumont and Fletcher, all show more of his influence than of anyone else. So, it can hardly be said that he was that neglected.

More generally, the myth that many great artists were thought of as mere popular entertainers during their lifetime and only later enshrined as immortals is just that, a myth, or at the very least a wild exaggeration. Though there are a (very) few exceptions, it is much more usual for great artists to be recognized in their lifetime. Popular writers like Balzac and Dickens were recognized for their artistry. Even a less popular artist like Wordsworth may have started out as a literary pariah with only a small band of fanatical admirers, but by the end of his career he was poet laureate. At the most, great artists will have to wait one or two decades for members of the cognizati to catch on. With regard to The Simpsons, I think we can see this process happening before our eyes. People are starting to recognize just how good the show was and critical opinion is starting to coalesce around seasons 3 and 4 as the shows peak. We should remember that season 3 only started airing in 1991, only 16 years ago, hardly an eternity for people to catch up.

II.
As for standup comedians, I think Akshay is right. Some of them undoubtedly will come to be seen as great artists; as writers and performance artists they deserve to be taken as seriously as anyone. But you have to be careful; some humour really dates. Is Lenny Bruce funny anymore? I (and a lot of other people, apparently) aren't so sure. I remember, in particular, the scene from Lenny where Bruce rants about how ridiculous it is that gays aren't allowed to become teachers. "What, do you think they are going to start teaching two minutes of cocksucking before recess?" Setting aside the merits and demerits of gays becoming teachers, its ironic that that is often exactly what happened, as anyone familiar with the sex ed wars can tell you. The same with that preachy bore George Carlin. A rant like "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" loses something of its lustre in an age where even toddlers feel free to come up and tell you to "fuck off," and where sites like www.shitforyou.com cater to every vile perversion you can think of and are now available in every household at the click of a mouse. In a world overflowing with cuss words and digital vaginas, a little decorousness would be nice.

Questions about Single Sex Education

2007-08-15T20:16:00.000-04:00

Clio has a nice discussion going about men and women, boys and girls. She writes:

I used to argue against single-sex education, thinking that the sexes need to learn to understand each other from an early age, but now I suspect I was wrong. Co-education doesn't seem to do much to develop mutual understanding, and it may even encourage both sexes to play to their stereotypes, especially when puberty sets in. Boys allow themselves to be "artier"; girls allow themselves to be "tougher", when they aren't trying to prove something to the opposite sex.

I myself am not so sure about the merits of single sex education for high school boys. All boys high schools can often develop a hyper-masculine culture where no one wants to be seen as being the slightest bit feminine. If you are even a little bit "girly", you're automatically on the bottom. And because you're not an actual female, you aren't even given the minimum respect high school boys have to give high school girls. It can sometimes drive boys away from the arts. Now I'm not saying that this kind of hyper-masculine culture has to develop in an all male school. In a school with more upper middle class students, there may be enough artistically inclined boys to form a critical mass resistant to this kind of lowest common denominator masculinity. But a hyper-masculine culture can develop. One of my closest friends teaches at an all boys Catholic high school in the north end of Toronto. From his account, the school culture is not at all hospitable to the arts. I have a couple other friends who also attended all boys Catholic schools in the Toronto area and their experiences were much the same. This really shouldn't be much of a surprise. The presence of women civilizes men. Left to themselves, they can turn into barbarians.

(A commenter at Clio's writes: I'm sure there are all-male environments that do just that (say, prison), but I haven't seen any evidence of it in education. Unfortunately, as Paul Graham has noted, in some ways schools are a lot like prisons, so, yes, it does happen in education.)

Now, of course, this says nothing about the merits or demerits of all girls schools. Young women at these schools really do seem to get more opportunities to try on more traditionally masculine roles, whether in leadership or academics. Their self-esteem really does seem to be higher, undoubtedly because they are not being constantly judged by males on their appearance. They don't have to meet male behaviour expectations and they don't have to face aggressive male competition. They can try stuff out. Furthermore, while there are doubtless disadvantages to all girls schools, they don't seem to involve turning young women into hyper-feminine math haters. An all girls school doesn't seem to encourage bad behaviour either. A women needs a man much, much more than a fish needs a bicycle, for some things, but she doesn't usually need him to show her how to act like a civilized human being.

And, of course, neither does any of this say much about single sex education at the Elementary or Middle School level. I have to agree with Clio this far, contact with girls in earlier grades would not seem to be particularly helpful in turning budding Conans into civilized gentlemen. Furthermore, it is indisputable that young boys do have a different needs and a different development timetable. I just don't see much downside to educating younger children separately.