Theodore Dreiser Tells You All You Might Want to Know about Sex

Theodore Dreiser and Henry James.   Perhaps not an obvious pairing, but perhaps more durable than might appear at first blush.  Start with the simpler stuff.  You'd have to admit that James could write, after a fashion, if you like that sort of thing (I'm ambivalent).  Dreiser, strangely, couldn't write at all.  Further: I think it's fair to say that they both wanted to tell the truth about their world, although it is an interesting question what kind of world each thought his to be.  Dreiser surely saw him as an expositor of "America," though probably understood that it was only a slice of American life.  I take it that James, too, though of himself as "American" and he may not have noticed how much of his time and  life took place overseas (for my money, one of his best pieces of work is his story "The Jolly Corner," about a narrator who comes back after a long stay away and finds the old place a ghostly shadow of its former self).

And here's an intriguing convergence: both took women seriously.  I was going to say "understood women," but who am I (and who were they?) to say?--we are not, after all, women.   Still, "understand" or not, they both seemed to recognize women as creatures with lives of heir own--lives with purposes and disappointments that they  might not even share with men.

But there is one interesting and glaring difference.  Thus James, for all his seriousness doesn't seem to understand how babies are made.  Dreiser seems at times to understand it almost too well.  It got him in trouble; it gained him notoriety it drove him and almost defined him.  

Here's a remarkable instance, perhaps not Dreiser at his best but in a sense perhaps most typical.  Once again, we're lifting from Newspaper Days, his autobiography, perhaps best characterized as a monumental effort at self-understanding:

Mrs. X, as I shall have to call her, for I have entirely forgotten her name as well as the number of the house, was entirely different to the two or three women I had known thus intimately heretofore.  She was so small, well formed, pretty, chirpy, with a pagan practicality and directness which was tonic to me at this time, but, for all that, with distinct signs of her thirty years about her.  I liked her very much indeed.  As it was, however, I still had such a sniveling and sniffy attitude in regard to all sex relations that I considered myself very much of a wastrel, if not a deep-dyed villain.  Say what one would, according to my point of view a the time, due to my raising, of course, fornication was a crime—a mortal sin, as he Catholics say—but alas, somehow vastly delicious and humanly unescapable.  No one should really do it—t was not right—but still, if one could and never be found out--.  You know the  American point of view.  In addition I was dreadfully fearful lest I be led into a life of crime or shame by this, or disease—the various diseases springing from this relation being so very much discussed at the time.  And I was always fearful lest (she being promiscuous and I not!) I would acquire some contagion, so that I was for purifying myself with the greatest care, afterwards.  I fancy, due to her American or Midwestern bringing-up, of course, that she may have entertained, or had in the pat, many notions to the same end.  Still, compared to myself, she was a creature of the world and probably noted and was amused by many of my shy puritan ways.  The mere act of silent secretive friction was sufficient for me, whereas I recall now that I was quire shocked—deliciously show of course (even if I looked on it as evil)—at some of her expressions in the process, the direct vigorous way in which, after the first two or three times, she approached this pleasure.
 “You like that!”
 “You like to do it to me?”
 .And the way she bit my neck and cheek, in lieu of love-savageries which I should have indulged in, I presume.  She was so small, and curled herself about me so tightly and pinched and uttered such muttered scrams when her orgasm was upon her that I was astonished, even if pleased.

Once again, that is the Black Sparrow reprint from 2000, T.D. Nostwich editor.

Update:  I've just now stumbled on this lovely narrative account of Dreiser's long and sometimes troubled friendship with H. L. Mencken.

Dreiser Visits the Allegheny County Library

Does anybody read Dreiser these days?  Mencken admired him, but then, does anybody read Mencken?  I read Dreiser when I was young, thanks to Mencken as presented in (I think) the old Vintage Mencken, with an inviting introduction by Alistair Cooke.  I'm pleased to see that the Mencken is still in print--there appears even to be a Kindle and wonder of wonders, it appears to be free (I haven't tried it).

But Dreiser--as Mencken understood (how could he miss?)--Dreiser is one of those great paradoxes of the literary world: a gripping, hypnotic novelist who is at the same time a terrible writer: clunky, ham-handed, overdone in almost every way.  Like Faulkner on his (too frequent) bad days.  And most of all, like Balzac. Yes, Balzac.   Two of a kind, those guys.   They both get drunk on the city--on its richness and on their struggle.  And neither one can write a simple sentence.You find yourself sucked in, and you can't imagine why.

I'm thinking of Dreiser as I disport myself with his autobiography Newspaper Days, finished in 1920 when he was 48 (he had another 25 years to live). which I've got a Black Sparrow edition from 2000, edited by T. D. Nostwich.  It has all the Dreiserian virtues and defects and it offers what is, for the moment, one remarkable insight.  How, you ask, did Dreiser becomes so--well, so Balzacian?  I suppose the answer should be obvious.  But here he is prowling the stacks at the Allegheny County Library in Pittsburgh in 1894 (which would make him 22):

[H]having nothing else to do, or at least nothing immediately pressing, I came here and by the merest chance picked up a volume entitled The Wild Ass' Skin, by one Honoré de Balzac, no less,.  I examined it curiously, reading incidentally a preface which fairly shimmered with his praise. ...  I turned to the first page and began, and from then on until dusk I was sitting in this charming alcove , beside this window, reading.  And it was as if a new and inviting door to life had been suddenly thrown open to me.  Here was one who, as I saw it then, thought, felt and understood and could interpret all that I was interested in.  Through him I saw at a glance a prospect so wide that it fairly left me breathless--all Paris all France, all life through French eyes, and those of a genius. ... It was for me a literary revolution, and this not only for the brilliant and incisive manner in which the man grasped life and invented themes or vehicles whereby to present it.  In my own estimation at least, the type of individual he handled with most enthusiasm and skill, the brooding, seeking, ambitious beginner in life's affairs--social, political, artistic, commercial (Rastignac, Raphael, de Rubempré, Bianchon) was, as I thought, so much like myself, their exact counterpart.

Afterthought:  Well yes, of course.   Might have guessed it, had I given it any thought (maybe it's in Mencken).  Balzac, c'est moi, he might have said, as Flaubert said of Madame Bovary.  As Thoreau said, the shock of recognition.  But one point sidetracks me.  Dreiser responds to Balzac's great gallery of young men.  Well he might, but it seems to me that Balzac is just as good at characterizing the old: Old Goriot, Cousin Pons, Cousine Bette, and (for my money, perhaps the best of them) Eugénie Grandet.  In fact Dreiser mentions the old ones, in a paragraph next to the one just quoted.  But it is clearly the young--those his own age, facing life the same way he felt he faced life--who capture his attention.  And their creator, one might say, who taught him how to write.

An Old Man's Challenge

Verdi's Otello opened at La Scala on February 5, 1887. Verdi would have been 73. It was the capstone of a great career. Many Verdians would have endorsed it as his greatest achievement.

They say that one of the governing principles for a respectable old age is to leave the party before you hear the sirens. But one more project lured Verdi on after Otello: by 1890, in his 77th year, we find him at work on what would in fact be his last opera—Falstaff—in collaboration with his indispensable librettist, Arrigo Boito.

The decision to go forward was not automatic. “Did you never think of the enormous number of my years?” Verdi wrote to his collaborator. “Suppose I couldn't stand the strain? And failed to finish it? You would then have wasted your time and trouble to no purpose.”

Boito's response is a model of subtle persuasion:

The fact is that I never think of your age either when I'm talking to you or when I'm writing to you or when I'm working with you.

The fault is yours.

I know that Otello is little more than two years old, and that even as I am writing to you it is being appreciated as it should by Shakespeare's compatriots. But there is a stronger argument than that of age, and it's this: it's been said of you after Otello: "It's impossible to finish better."This is a great truth and it enshrines a great and very rare tribute. It is the only weighty argument.

Weighty for the present generation, but not for history, which aims first and foremost to judge men by their essential merits. Nevertheless it is indeed rare to see a lifetime of artistic endeavour concludes with a worldly triumph. Otello is such a triumph. All the other arguments—age, strength, hard work for me, hard work for you, etc., etc.—are not valid and place no obstacle in the way of a new work. Since you oblige me to talk about myself I shall say that notwithstanding the commitment I should be taking on with Falstaff I shall be able to finish my work within the term promised. I'm sure of that.

I don't think that writing a comedy should tire you out. A tragedy causes its author genuinely to suffer; one's thoughts undergo a suggestion of sadness which renders the nerves morbidly sensitive. The jokes and laughter of comedy exhilarate mind and body. ... 

You have a great desire to work, and this is an indubitable proof of health and strength. "Ave Marias" are not enough. Something else is needed.

All your life you've wanted a good subject for a comic opera, and that is a sign that the vein of an art that is both joyous and noble is virtually in existence in your brain; instinct is a wise counsellor. There's only one way to finish better than with Otello and that's to finish triumphantly with Falstaff.

After having sounded all the shrieks and groans of the human heart, to finish with a mighty burst of laughter—that is to astonish the world.

So you see, dear Maestro, it's worth thinking about the subject I've sketched; see whether you can feel in it the germ of the new masterpiece. If the germ is there, the miracle is accomplished.

And Verdi:

Amen, so be it!

We'll write Falstaff then! We won't think for the moment of obstacles or age or illness! ...

Falstaff opened on February 9, 1890, just a few months shy of Verdi's 80th birthday.   It was to be his last opera, although he continued to compose until as late as 1897.  He died in 1901, at 87.

Update:  Apologies for neglecting to credit this. It's almost entirely a ripoff from  the indispensable Operas of Verdi by Julian Budder, vol. III 424-6 (1984).

Weekend Reading

Long day at San Francisco Airport yesterday, so a chance to do a lot of reading.  I ingested a large chunk of a really cool book about which I'll have something to say latter. And also, among others:

And you think our bankers are stupid greedy incompetent not so hot: compare. (in fairness, it's not just people with five-o'clock shadow).

All in the mind.  This guy needs to read more Stendahl.

"The walls are painted but you can wallpaper them if you so desire."  Former zillionaire learns to cope with the Gulag.

"F*ck Jared Diamond!"

McKinsey! (with a potted retrospective of Alfred Chandler).

Type II error! 

.Jellyfish!

Verdi v. Verdi (and the Role of the Orchestra)

European opera managers must smile with contempt at their American counterparts for giving away programs.  It's almost as silly as an airline letting you board luggage for free.  But we might as well enjoy it while we can; it gives us stuff like this:

For a poet as complex as Shakespeare, the musical language of the first half of the nineteenth century was not really adequate.  There are wonderful things in Rossini's Otello of 1816 (which is based on a French eighteenth-century translation, far from the original Shakespearean text), in I Capuleti e I Montechi of Bellini (which has very little to do with Shakespeare) and Verdi's Macbeth of 1847 and 1865, but the language of the period did not permit the composers and the librettists to enter fully into the thoughts of the English writer.  Rather, their aim was to transform the drama into a series of closed numbers, arias, duets, etc., of the kind that Verdi was writing and the public expected in 1847.

So musicologist Philip Gossett in "Giuseppe Verdi and Falstaff," in the (free) program for the current San Francisco opera season.  I suppose one way to grasp his point would be to listen to a (pretty good) early Verdi like, say, Nabucco, or an (excellent) Rossini like The Barber of Seville and reflect on the range and variety of devices available to the Verdi of Falstaff that simply wouldn't have been on offer for his earlier self.

Part of it, surely, is the influence of Verdi on Wagner--a complicated topic by any measure, but on even the narrowest reading, the influence is there.  Mrs. B points out wrinkle: the role of the orchestra as a virtual character in the opera itself.  Wagner is partly responsible here, but Mrs. B points also to Puccini, with a notable wrinkle.  That is, in Puccini, the orchestra can be downright obtrusive, whacking you over the head with its own interpretations, leaving nothing to imagination or chance.  The orchestra in Falstaff is a vivid presence, but here I'd say it is not a hindrance.  Rather, you really need the orchestra to keep you on track among the torrent of vocal possibilities under exploration on stage.

Justin Fox on the Truck that Just Hit Us

Justin Fox's Myth of the Rational Market was much praised; I found it kind of meh, repeating and not necessarily improving on a lot of work done earlier by Peter Bernstein.  But his new Harvard Business Review piece on "What We've Learned from the Financial Crisis" is excellent, particularly the first section on macro.  The latter portion on "shareholder value" and the concept of the corporation is somewhat more diffuse, but then the topic itself is somewhat more diffuse.  Fox has always been good at exposition; I think he is developing a better feel for the place of economic ideas in the structure of the economics profession.  A must-read; or at least, as Abraham Lincoln probably did not say, "if you like this kind of article, this is the kind of article you will like."

The Manufacture of Rule in Korea

San Francisco's Asian Museum has a fascinating little show up about the creation and maintenance of what was (and I did not know this before) one of the world's most long-running dynasties.  That would be the Joseon, which held sway (it says here) from 1392 for more than 500 years.  The promos tout it as "Celebrations in Korean Art During the Joseon Dynasty," but that is somewhat overblown: most, and far and away the best, stuff comes from the 18th and 19th Century.  And the most fascinating pieces are scrolls that help to explain the theatre of elite power in Korea--call it, for lack of a better name, "the manufacture of rule."    Evidently the Joseon (or more likely, somebody on the house staff) knew how to put on a grand show, so as to demonstrate the legitimacy of state power in the incumbent.  One's first thought is--my stars the way humans will oppress others of their species. But second: my stars, how happily, how eagerly we accept this kind of domination, so long as it is wrapped up in a good story.

I could numb you with all kinds of newly-acquired factoids about the Joseon, most of which you already know or don't want to hear from me.  I will restrain myself and stick with one.  That is, per  wall panel, there were 27 generations of Joseon rulers (divide 500 by 27 and you can surmise some pretty long reigns).   Succession went by a kind of primogeniture.  Or so it was said, but there's the fun part: evidently of all these 27, only seven went off according to plan.  The other 20, it says on the wall "came to power irregularly as a result  of feuds and rivalries."  How a form of succession can be called "irregular" when it happens 20 out of 27 times is a question left to a higher pay grade than mine.

Terfel's Falstaff

You know I'm not a serious opera fan because I've seen only one performance of Bryn Terfel in Verdi's Fallstaff.  Not the three, or five, or ten, or 100, which may be the gold standard for the real fans.  I am thus unable to confirm that the new version at the San Francisco Opera (which we saw last night) is, as represented, more somber and correspondingly less comical than some of its predecessors.  I'm sorry I haven't, though.  Terfel is an appealing, engaging, accessible singer by any standard and if last night's performance is any evidence (and it probably is) then a whole catalog of Terfel Falstaffs would be great fun indeed.

A couple of other loose ends about Falstaff: One, it occurs to me that maybe this is an opera more fun for the singers than the audience.  Or at best, it needs an audience with pretty strong musical chops.  I guess I've written before that it was, ironically, the first opera I ever saw--and I was told I probably wouldn't get it and I didn't get it.  I've seen it several times since and I've come to enjoy it and I think I have some sense of what it is about. But my own musicianship never gets above the sing-in-the-shower level and I suspect that there is stuff I will  never appreciate as well as someone who, say, sings every day for money, and once in a while gets a chance really to blow it out with this masterwork.

Related point: I think there is a sense on which Verdi's Falstaff bears comparison with Shakespeare's Hamlet.  No, no, bear with me for a moment.  In Hamlet, Shakespeare tells us everything he knows about theatre, everything he has learned in his entire career.  So with Falstaff and Verdi and opera.  The notable difference is, of course, that Shakespeare was in his 40s when he wrote Hamlet; he'd been in the game for a dozen year to so and had perhaps a dozen more to go (is that all?  Yes!).  Verdi, of course, was in his 80s, with his entire life to look back on.

And one more: people always talk about Falstaff as a comedy.  I suppose it is as a sense: it is also, at best, rather mean-spirited, unkind.  And has anybody noticed that it is a "comedy" mocking as a foolish old man, written by, yes, another old man?

My Twitter Account has been Hacked

See above.  Apologies to those of you who have been getting trashy ads from me.  I've shut it down.

But Is He a Libertarian?

Amia Srinivasan poses a problem beloved of the denizens of the Ivy League seminar table:

Suppose I’m walking to the library and see a man drowning in the river. I decide that the pleasure I would get from saving his life wouldn’t exceed the cost of getting wet and the delay. 

Note: she doesn't say "are you permitted try and save he drowning man?"  On conventional principles, even a libertarian is permitted to do an act of kindness to another, just so long as it is clear that he doesn't hve to.   The question is whether you are permitted to be a loathsome shit walk on by?  Ms.  Srinivasan asserts:

If you say yes, then you think the only moral requirements are the ones we freely bring on ourselves — say, by making promises or contracts. ...  Since I made no contract with the man, I am under no obligation to save him.

In essence, the conventional current libertarian view.  You would be correct to surmise that she is not crazy about this view. "Ethically outraging," she says; she asserts that this and kindred views "grate against our commonsense notions of fairness."

She might want to explore the question further with Stephen Gilbert, Liberal Member of Parliament from St Austell and Newquay. News reports say he was standing on the House of Commons Terrace overlooking the Thames when he saw a body float past. At first he thought it was dead; then to his consternation he saw it quiver. Apparently not stopping to reflect on the philosophical implications of his action, he threw her a life buoy. She grabbed it, and was fished out a short way down stream.

"“I think it is what anyone else would have done under the circumstances" he told a local paper.” Maybe, and maybe not.

The Shostakovich Nose: An Assignment

There's a live/HD performance coming up Saturday of "The Nose" by Dmitri Shostakovich in the William Kentridge staging which opened at the Met in 2010.  So here's some homework.  No, not the Gogol story, silly--which you have already read and fully assimilated.  Rather, take a swing at something by Andrey Platonov, perhaps particularly Happy Moscow, which I mentioned briefly the other day (cf. link, link)  and which captures better than anything I know the mood of anxious and giddy expectancy that seems to have swept (urban) Russia in the 30s--that is, before the Great Purge of the later 30s which did so much to define the Stalinist experience in our memory.  

We know that Shostakovich embarked on his career in a mood of high optimism; we know that Stalin didn't cotton to his operatic writing (he was probably baffled and disturbed by it all).  We know that Shostakovich, unlike so many of his contemporaries, survived the turmoil that devoured so many of his contemporaries, and that he went on to become a Soviet icon.  In his introduction to the new NYRB edition Happy Moscow, Robert Chandler says:

A conventional view of Russian history sees the 1917 Revolution as a movement of Utopian  promise and the mid-1930s as a time of fear-shackled, conventional thinking in every area of life.  In many respects, however, it was the other way around.  For several years from 1917 the Bolsheviks were trying simply to cling to power, most people were trying simply to survive, and only a tiny--though vocal--artistic avant-garde was proposing Utopian plans for the restructuring of both the world and the human psyche.  By the middle 1930s, however, it was the State itself that was claiming to make Utopian dreams into a reality.

 Chandler also retells a wonderful anecdote from Wolfgang Leonhard, the German  historian, about emigrating to Moscow in 1935 with his German communist mother.  He reports that they couldn't get any adequate maps.  The only ones they found showed what the city was like before 1914, and what it would be like in the future.  

Afterthought:  And you know, now that I think of it, I remember one other item that captures the same spirit of Moscow in the 30s. That would be the early chapters of Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, of which I wrote here.  Read 'em all, and in any event, enjoy the opera.  

Aeschylus among the Somalis

In his Orestia, the Greek playwright Aeschylus recalls Orestes, whose life story provides a climax the cycle of violence that has dominated the House of Atreus. Aeschylus' audience would have known how Orestes, on the entreaty of his sister Electra, had killed their mother Clytemnestra, because she had killed their father Agamemnon, and how Agamemnon, in turn, had killed their sister Iphigenia. He thereby sparks the ire of the Eumenides (oddly, "the kindly ones"), avengers of patricide and matricide. Pursued by the spirits, Orestes seeks shelter in Athens, and the protection of its eponymous protector Athena.

Aeschylus fashions a climax in Athens which likely seems abrupt to modern audiences, and may have provoked the same sort of response from Athenians: Athena convenes a jury. She persuades the furies, in advance, to accept the verdict. The vote is a tie which, on Athena's rule, counts as an acquittal.

So Orestes goes free of the charge that he murdered (though he certainly did kill) his mother. To modern ears, I suspect the result will sound like an odd bit of casuistry, a slender reed on which to base the narrative of a great nation. Athena, that is, hasn't shown that her result is “right” any fundamental sense. Only that it may be functional insofar as it ends s cycle of killing. But this last is an empirical proposition, and it may be anyone's guess whether Athena's justice can deliver on its promise of less killing or not.

So it may seem; but none of this appears to have inhibited the critical community, which has spent the last 2500 years (or so) identifying Athena's trial and Orestes' acquittal as landmarks on the path of progress from barbarism to civilization.

I thought of Athena and Orestes this week when I was reading Jay Bahadur's Pirates of Somalia: Their Hidden World. It's an interesting book, not helped by the fact thst the notorious menace appears to have been brought under control for the moment. Though I suspect we are due for a reprise in popular media as audiences get a look at Tom Hanks in his role as the bluff and earnest defender of property and good order, a sort of Sully of the seas. In fairness, I haven't actually seen the new Hanktacular, though I did hear him chat about it with Terry Gross and he made it sound like great fun—Hanks is one of the few actors that I know of who can actually say something interesting when he's not just reading a script. 

Still, if there is anything Americans remember about Somalia aside from “pirates” it is probably Black Hawk Down and “failed state,” the three not necessarily unrelated: note that the last link to a piece on “failed states” takes you to a piece about Somalia as the very definition of a failed state.

Well, I must say I have no desire to spend my sunset years or any years in any melange so afflicted with poverty, disease, infant mortality and whatnot: “socialist” Denmark looks a hell of a lot better to me than government-less Somalia. Still, I think there is a conceptual error here, and you can see it in Bahadur's book. For if you think of “failed state,” I suspect that what comes to mind is some kind of entropy—grey and formless, loose atoms bouncing off of each other at random.

But read Bahadur and you can see that whatever is going on in Somalia, there is nothing random about it: his whole point is that living/working in Somalia put him to the task much like negotiating rush hour traffic in Palermo: it's intricate, heart-stopping and take all your luck and skill. But there is a kind of order: just not the sort of order that you and I would want to enjoy. Which is hardly a surprise. The truth is, by the standards of anyone reading this blog, most of the world is wretchedly governed most of the time, and we wouldn't want to put ourselves in the clutches of those who govern there except in our worst nightmares—or rather, not without a USA passport and a fat credit line on our Visa card.

Which brings me back to Aeschylus: perhaps he is part of the problem. He seems to have set the benchmark for what does, and does not, count as a “state.” Ever since we have counted “law” and “justice” (with somebody like Athena as the tie-breaking—actually, tie-making—vote). But her “state” endless retribution is not a “failed state;” the worst you can say for it is that it is a state “not worthy of the name.” And that, I should say, is a much different proposition. On this measure, of course, I suspect there are no "failed states;" I doubt that there can be. But as much may be the beginning of wisdom.

Afterthought:  My Daily Drucker for October 16, offers a squib on "Legitimate Power in Society."  Peter Drucker says in part:

No society can function as a society unless the decisive social power is legitimate.  Legitimate power stems from the same basic belief of society regulating men's nature and fulfillment on which the individual's social status and function rest.  Indeed legitimate power can be defined as rulership that finds its justification in the basic ethos of society.  In every society there are many powers that have nothing to do with such a principle, and institutions that in no way are either designed or devoted to its fulfillment.  In its fulfillment, in other words, there are always a great many "unfree" institutions in a free society, and a great many sinners among the saints. But as long as the decisive social power that we call rulership is based upon the claim of freedom, equality, or saintliness, and is exercised through institutions that are designed toward the fulfillment of these ideal purposes, society can function as a free, equal or saintly society.  For its institutional structure is one of legitimate power.

For extra credit, the reader is invited to make what sense he can out of this passage in terms of Aeschylus and the Somalis. 

The Ideal Major?

Overheard in the sauna at the gym: couple of old coots talking about the young athletes they'd met at Palookaville U.  From the sound of things, one had been some sort of athletic director.  I couldn't quite pinpoint the other, but they seemed to have known a number of the same young people--guys who used to play on Palookaville sports teams.

And don't let the "athlete" bit mislead you: Palookaville is not on anybody's sports radar so the jocks here just play games--no talk of major league contracts, or branding, or drug use.  Just games.

Still,  the thing was, the old guys seemed to know a lot about the youngsters, and a lot about their lives, both in school and out.  In short, they seemed to take an interest in their careers and lives.  One of the speakers avowed as how he was off to the city this weekend to preside at the wedding of one of the young men.

They also talked a bit about "character."  In this context, "character" seemed to mean "a desire to win," but also steadiness, self-discipline, good order.  "Helpful in any field," said one of the saunees. "Yep," agreed the other.

And in passing they mentioned their favorite major.  My suspicion is you wouldn't guess it but take a stab.   Go on. Take a stab.   You said "English"?  Heh, dreamer--but you knew that couldn't be right once you said it, not so?   Oh, I know, you say, ROTC!  Shrewd guess, but Palookaville doesn't offer ROTC.  So now you're thinking it must be business administration.

You're getting warm, but still not quite there. Turns out that what these guys really admired was the major in construction management.  The what?  Well yes, it turns out the university does offer a major in "construction management," with a BS degree.   It is not the same as "business," though my surmise is that it is some sort of a spinoff.   

So what is it these guys liked about "construction management"?  I can only guess, but I went back to the catalog and looked at the blurb.  I find they present a faculty "with a beneficial blend of academic preparation, successful teaching experience at the college and/or university level, and most importantly significant experience managing construction operations"  (my italics). They also boast that graduates "historically experience an extraordinarily bright career horizon immediately upon graduation. Virtually all CM students are aggressively recruited by both local and nationally based construction companies of all types."

In short (my words) "we don't get bogged down in all that theory stuff. We teach you what you need to know to get a job."  It's a pitch that surely separates them from the centers of higher learning on the other side of campus. My notion is that it probably separates the construction guys also from the folks in the "real" business program who have crept, I suspect, ever closer to the realms of higher abstraction. Compare: I can't put my finger on it right now but I remember a story from a while back about the students at, I think, the Culinary Institute of America, complaining that their professors (sic?) were ladling out the theory when all the youngsters wanted was the pots and pan.

Oh I know, I know, all of this is to make the folks over in Arts and Sciences roll over and gag. That would include my nearest and dearest (it would include me, insofar as I ever did get an education, which was patchy). But I suppose there is something to be said for teaching in a department where the students (and even the faculty) know why they are there, and what they can expect to get out of it. Who knows, they might even find somebody to preside at their wedding.

Nobody Ever Called John Boehner a Bull's Pizzle (And Maybe That is the Problem)

Thanks to Brad DeLong for shipping me out to the so-called "Tea Party insult Generator."  I say "so called" because apparently it does not "generate" the insults; it just records some of the dead cats and rotten bananas that have been hurled at John Boehner, the poor hapless Speaker of the House of Representatives.

As you might expect, it can be compulsive reading, the website. Also depressing, for a reason you might or might not expect.  That is: for good or ill I can't get too worked up about the level of spleen and vituperation here: Mr. Dooley told us a hundred years or so ago that politics ain't beanbag.  But  my stars the quality, or more precisely the utter absence thereof.  I've combed through pages of this stuff and I have yet to find anything that rises much above the level of schoolyard pottymouth.

You can't do better?  Maybe not, but Shakespeare did.  His reputation depends, in no small part, on his capacity to generate lurid, baroque, unexpected--and often, very very funny, fusillades of abuse.  So Sir John Falstaff when he let loose with "you starveling, you elfskin, you dried neat’s tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you stockfish!" ("fustilarian" is a later offering).  

All this is old news to theatre goers: you can get books of Shakespearean insults; also coffee mug and refrigerator magnets. The point being that they are great theatre, the kind of stuff you want to cosset and cherish.

More important, it doesn't stop with Shakespeare. Anybody who knows the least particle about black culture recognizes that, e.g., athletes and rappers and suchlike have reduced it all to a high art. "Yo mama so fat when she back up she go ding ding." "Yo mama so old  her birth certificate says 'expired.'"  "Yo mama so ugly the Rice Krispies won't talk to her."  Now, that is imaginative. It's edgy, sure, but virtually all good comedy is edgy.  It's also funny.

Which introduces an important subtlety: yo mama jokes and suchlike are insults of a sort, but they are insults so structured that they become a kind of comedy, serving as much to reduce and dissipate tension more than to enhance it.

I can add another context. One of my law "profs" was in real life a labor arbitrator who hung onto his professorship mainly so he could have a title for his resume. When he wasn't prepared for class, which was usually, he could always fall back on war stories from his arbitration practice (this goes back to the days when there really were labor unions, and where business agents had 17-inch necks, and when arbitration came near to being a blood sport. Anyway--) Anyway my "prof"  liked to tell how in many cases, at the start of the arbitration session with the parties around the polished tabletop in the oak-lined library, he would just let them yell at each other for a while. Tended to let off steam, he said; to lower the temperature and get people ready to focus on the work at hand.

You can see where all this is going: at the beginning of each Congressional business day, 15 minutes of compulsory verbal abuse.  Maybe in lieu of the chaplain's prayer.  Maybe a weekend slanging camp.  I doubt they'll ever be as clever as Shakespeare or the guy who invented yo mama, but with time and coaching (they can afford to staff up), they might be able to get into the swing. Who knows? A brief interlude of public slanging might just make its own contribution. And if nothing else, I admit that once, just once, I would love to hear Patty Murray call Louie Gohmert a dickhead.

Ding, Dong, the Witch is .... No, Let's Rethink That

I've  long thought that Jean-Paul Sartre, though a mediocre philosopher, was a pretty good playwright and novelist.

Hold with novelist.  His trilogy Les chemins de la liberté, offers a marvellous window into France/Paris in and around the debacle that was the collapse of France in the face of the German invasion at the beginning of World War II.  The second volume, Le Sursis, when I first read it struck me as the most memorable.  The standard English translation of "Le Sursis" is "The Reprieve," but as Wiki says, the phrase "could cover a number of semantic fields from 'deferment' to 'amnesty.'"   The background for the novel is the calamitous Munich encounter of 1938, when Neville Chamberlain went to Germany to negotiate with Adolph Hitler, only to return empty-handed (well--with an empty promise) and humiliated.

Or so we remember it from the hindsight of history.  We remember how the Munich agreement led with the force and implacability of  classical tragedy to the fall of Czechoslovakia and thence to World War II.  But Sartre reminds us of what we have forgotten: to the crowds in the street in 1938, Munich looks like a fabulous victory.  Sartre captures the sense of almost paralyzing anxiety that descended upon Paris at the beginning of the great danse macabre--followed by the eruption of giddy relief at its end.  "Peace in our time," Chamberlain famously declared, and in the immediate aftermath of Munich, the phrase had  not yet achieved its bitter irony.

I see that we have a deal over the budget "CR" and the debt limit (though not, apparently, over the menacing "sequestration" which appears almost to have become part of the furniture).   The sigh of relief in the chattering class sounds like the greatest exhalation of warm air since Hurricane Sandy.  The marital rata-tat-tat is the sound of mutual Congressional backslapping.  The worst is over; we can get back to immigration (well probably not), tax overhaul (you jest) an all those other topics that have been plaguing us for so long.  The President retains his golden slippers and Ted ("Don't Throw the Water!") Cruz flies off on his broom.

Hey, this has been fun. And I see that the new CR expires on January 15 (and the suspension of the debt ceiling, on February 7).  So it looks like we have a chance to enjoy it all again.

Gare du Nord-Ouest

PDX, 7 am.  Looks more like a 19c train station than any other airport I know. Or is it a Van Gogh "Starry Night"?

"Story of a Little Girl With No Father or Mother About a Cow"

There are few cows, since they get eaten.  A cow has legs at its four corners.  Beef patties are made from a cow, everybody gets one patty, but potatoes grow separately.  A cow gives milk herself; other animals try, but can't.  It's a pity they can't, it would be better if they could.  The girls are full of meat patty; they've gone to bed by themselves and they smell.  I'm bored.

--Andrey Platonov in a draft for Happy Moscow, reprinted in a footnote to the New York Review of  Books edition of the novel, "translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and others," at 234-5.

More about Portland: Driving

Something I just realized about Portland: driving here can be pretty hairy, or scary.  This surprises me because I think of Portland as an easy place to get around in, what with bikes, and trolleys and pedestrian lanes and suchlike.  And to be fair, lots of Portland are just fine.  But in close to downtown, and on the east side--well, two problems.

One: the river.  True, lots of cities have rivers--that's why the cities are there.  But think of St. Louis, or Sacramento: there's  river, alright, but all the action takes place on one side of the river.  The other side is just bordellos and meth labs.  Not so Portland.  Here there is action on both sides of the river, and they are deeply entangled.  And it seems like everybody has a story about how they had to cross three different bridges to get from an address on the west side to one on the east (I have no idea how this works, but I hear it).  And on either side, you can get into godawful tangles as you try to weave your way through what seems like a highly improvisational pattern of intersections.  Go left.  Now go right.  No, left, left.  Now, don't move....  I suppose if you do this as an every day as a commute, you get used to it,  but as the occasional visitor, it seems like a Mensa test, or some kind of device for testing mental acuity among the elderly.

That's one problem.  But the other problem is the stuff they brag about: the public transport, and the pedestrians, and the bikes.    I feel like a whiner for complaining: for most of my adult life I have been an out-of-the-closet pedestrian, and I own a bike (although in fairness, I haven't been riding a lot lately).  And I'm one of the new people I know who actually likes to ride the bus.

But riding them is one thing: sharing space is another.  Where ever I go here, seems like I am always getting entangled in some kind of bus-only lane:  worse, with one bus in front of me and one behind. These guys may be eco-friendly but they  can't build up much compassion for the cars that stumble into their lane.

Bikes and pedestrians are a different problem.  The city is boiling with bike lanes and pedestrian-friendly crossings.  Bully for them.  But hitting a pedestrian--or a bike--is a bummer for all concerned.  Hit a Hummer, he may not even notice.  Hit a pedestrian--well, you get the idea.

I'll grant that the bikers, at least, are moderately conscientious about staying in lane and, perhaps more important, suiting up with Da-Glo colors. Truth is, I  can't think of any city in America where I have seen so many innovative bike safety devices.

That's most of them.  Maddeningly, there still seems to be a minority who feel free pedal around at night without a light and in a black raincoat.  Them and the pedestrians: what I think we are seeing here is a sense of entitlement coupled with an extraordinary presumption of trust--trust that I, for example, while not simply turn sociopath and ice them off the planet.   Still a nice city though.  And I suppose what I'm saying is that I'm getting at least as much of an adrenaline rush from driving as I would if I walked.

Update:  Yes, Oregon. Should have said.

New Section at Powell's Books



Rumble on Division Street

I've dropped in on Portland intermittently for the last 25 years or so now, mostly in the southeast below Hawthorne.  It's a neighborhood I've heard called "hippy hollow" although the name is probably at best an easy flippancy, never a really good description.  Grant that the strip along Hawthorne from 39th down to (say) 35th persists as more or less the picture of what you expect Portland to be--and as it happens, still thriving, yet not all that different from  what it looked like when I first saw it.

So, a scruffy sort of charm, with street kids and buskers and dogs. The checkout line at the Powell bookshop is much shorter than it used to be, although I suspect this has more to do with the book trade in general than with Hawthorne in particular.   Bread and Ink Cafe is offering a special on a chicken waffle, which I suspect is new. But mostly pretty much the same.

But the side streets below Hawthorne--they've always looked to me less like counterculture and more like a neighborhood of homeowners: lovely homes mostly, lovingly if not lavishly maintained.  You don't see McMansions here, nor monster trucks.  Here's a bumper sticker that says "government off my cupcakes."  Here's another--on a somewhat shopworn Honda, it says "preferia estar matando zombies."  Here's a small panel truck with a folding ladder and a piece of PCV pipe.  Here's a boxed front-yard garden with a thriving splash of red chard.   I suspect we are dealing here not with internet superstars so much as high school guidance counselors, artisan brewers and suchlike--people with more time than money and some knack for the good life.

All this has remained remarkably unchanged in general temper for a long time.  But what's interesting is what seems to be happening down on Division--Hawthorne's evil twin, parallel and half a mile south and with notable exceptions, for a long time a pretty grim place.  It has been the home, inter alia, of one of the most forlorn porn theatres I've seen anywhere--looks a lot like the Elks Club down at Gridley, CA with, I speculate, very much the same clientele.

But here's the news:  Division today is a construction zone.  The street is a mess; there are new projects in process on both sides and in at least one place there's a lot where it looks like the construction company bought the lot and tore down the building so there would be storage space for other projects.

What kind of construction: well, I tried to keep my eyes on the road but I saw at least two, maybe three or four items with the same MO: tear down the old stuff, replace with "retail" (= mostly bars and restaurants); top it with one, maybe two, maybe three stories of apartments/condos.

As to the restaurants and bars--looks (and sounds) to me like they are thriving: they're packed at diner hour, and by 1030 at night, they are overflowing.  Mostly a young crowd, I assume and by all appearances they have the time and the money and the disposition to a good time.

As to the living units: I must say, I think it would be noisy up there, but they probably aren't for me anyway.  My sources say they probably run about 200k 250k, with rents perhaps 18k a month (the people I talk to are a bit vague on how many bedrooms, etc.). 

And here's the thing: for the people in the side streets  between Hawthorne and division, I suspect these numbers sound mostly astronomic, out of reach.  Grant that a lot of those "interior" homes could go for 350k or more; still, I'm betting that a lot of the owners are people who bought in at 50-100k, and have a tough time getting their minds round the fact that the market has changed.

So exactly who are all those youngsters giggling in the bars?  Hard to say.  I've made my point that I don't think they are the people from the neighborhood.  Portland has lots of prosperous kiddies in the IT game but I had thought they mostly lived elsewhere.  Whatever.  I do read that unemployment in Portland persists at about 7.3 percent, just about the national average.  And I heard a couple of new stories this weekend about (supposedly) high-skilled guys in their 50s-60s getting bounced with no options.  And did I mention that Oregon as a whole (albeit not Portland) has the worst high school graduation rate in the nation for white students (overall, it is only a paltry fourth)?  Complicated world.

Fama and the Other Fama

Friendly note to all the good folks frothing at the mouth over the idea of a "Nobel" Prize for Eugene Fama: you're right.  "Markets are never wrong" Fama aka "government is never right" Fama; "I don't understand bubbles" Fama, aka "there re no bubbles" Fama--that guy deserves a "Nobel" (even a faux Nobel) about as much as Isaac Newton deserved a prize for his alchemy.

But even a blind hog finds a few acorns and really good scientists believe a lot of nutty things.  To gain perspective, I'd urge that we take a few moments to remember what markets were like back before, say, 1965--back in the age of fixed commissions, before Charles Schwab, when we really believed Your Broker was Your Friend.  And when the broker, for his part, could make a high income and a low golf handicap from saying "Oh Buce, I wouldn't sell my Penn Central."  Back, that is, when we thought that even not-very bright people with lots of Aqua Velva in the Anglican Church vestry could make a money by picking stocks.  Back, that is, before the other Eugene Fama--the young insurgent Eugene Fama--kicked the pins out of an entire  industry whose presuppositions, as it now appeared, where about as relevant as the reading of sheep's entrails.

The trouble is that there are two Famas: manic, loony, ideological Fama as set forth above and the younger, soberer twin.  The latter doesn't know anything about how markets move and takes pride in his ignorance. The former knows (or knew): look, investing is insanely competitive.  At its best it takes extraordinary skill and hard work (not to say luck) and if you go into it expecting to get fat, you are more than likely to wind up on the menu.  In short, that trying to outguess the market is like playing Russian roulette with five bullets in the magazine.

Granted, there are still plenty of hawkers investment advisers ready to say "oh Buce, I wouldn't do that"--and plenty of customers, poor souls, who are ready to listen.   But these days, the advisers know that most investors will laugh in his face.  We see things differently now.  Trying to see them the way we did before Fama (and, to be complete, Harry Markowitz) is pretty much like trying to remember what life was like before Copernicus.

Two Famas: it's a distinction worth keeping in mind.  William Shockley got the (real) Nobel for inventing the transistor.  He spent his sunset years trying to persuade his fellow laureates to pack their sperm into little bottles.  We honor the one and laugh off the other.  We could treat Fama the same way.

Beckett? No, But...

This almost sounds like Beckett, except perhaps too florid:

No, I have not the strength to bear this any longer. God, the things they are doing to me! They poor cold water upon my head! They do not heed me, nor see me, nor listen to me. What have I done to them? Why do they torture me? What do they want of poor me? What can I give them? I have Washington. My strength is gone, I cannot endure all this torture. My head is aflame, and everything spins before my eyes. Save me, someone! Take me away! Give me three steeds, steeds as fast as the whirling wind! Seat yourself, driver, ring out, little harness bell, wing your way up, steeds, and rush me out of this world. On and on, so that nothing be seen of it, nothing. Yonder the sky wheels its clouds, a tiny star glitters afar, a forest sweeps by with its dark trees, and the moon comes in its wake; a silvergay mist swims below; a musical string twangs in the mist; there is the sea on one hand, there is Italy on the other; and now Russian peasant huts can be discerned. Is that my hope looming blue in the distance? Is that my mother sitting there at her window? Mother dear, save your poor son! Shed a tear upon his aching head. See, how they torture him. Press the poor orphan to your heart. There is no place for him in the whole wide world! He is a hunted creature. Mother dear, take pity on your sick little child. . . . And by the way, gentlemen, do you know that the Bey of Algiers has a round lump growing right under his nose?

Gogol, Diary of a Madman; the frontispiece to Vladimir Nabokov's extraordinary study of Gogol, published by New Directions Books (1944).

Posner 1, DeLong 0

I don't suppose I expected ever to say this: Judge Richard A. Posner is entirely correct sand Professor J. Bradford DeLong is dead wrong.  The topic is the activity of judging and in particular the Crawford voter ID case, and in particular, Judge Posner's refreshing and candid admission that he got it wrong.  And more generally:

We judges and lawyers, we don’t know enough about the subject matters that we regulate, right? And that if the lawyers had provided us with a lot of information about the abuse of voter identification laws, this case would have been decided differently.

And in response, DeLong:

SHORTER RICHARD POSNER: IT'S NOT MY FAULT I DIDN'T DO MY JOB AND VINDICATING RIGHTS I AM SUPPOSED TO--IT'S THE LAWYER'S FAULT.

Well, let's start by setting aside the non-essentials. One, it's a rhetorical flourish to paraphrase Posner as saying he "didn't do my job." He didn't say he didn't do his job; he just said he got it wrong. Two (corollary), it's not his job to get it right, because that kind of exaction isn't available this side of the grave. A decent judge certainly wants to get it right and tries his damnedist to get it right. But perfection isn't available this side of the grave and it's refreshing to find a judge ballsy candid enough to say so.

So move on to the main event.  Was it Posner's job to suss out the rights here?  Or was it the job of counsel?  A pert answer would  be: of course it is the job of counsel--that's why they are there.  And indeed it is why they are there: to advocate, but also to advise and instruct the judge--the judge who, by necessity, is being pushed in all kinds of directions by all kinds of pressures and demands.  That's why you have briefs and arguments.  That's why the Supreme Court, say, in a case like Citizens United, say, will roll a case over and invite additional briefing/argument in a case where it feels it hasn't been properly advised.   Anecdote: I overheard the best courtroom lawyer  whose briefcase I ever had the privilege to carry as he cautioned the court "your honor, it is one of the responsibilities of counsel to make sure the court does not fall into error."  That was a polite way of saying 'DAD RAT IT JUDGE YOU ARE JUMPING OFF A CLIFF."  But was true in any event.

Flip the coin.  Not only is it the responsibility of counsel to make its case, there very good reasons for the judge to butt out.  The point  is that any time the judge starts taking his own initiative in the case, he is making himself an advocate: once the judge becomes an advocate, he is no  longer a judge, and when the judge becomes an advocate, then for the opposing counsel, it's two against one. 

That said, I'll grant that every  conscientious judge at least worries about those cases where he feels that counsel is a bumbling idiot isn't doing his job.  But a judge who tries to do counsel's job is putting his own sanity in peril, and inviting real risks into the system.  It was said of Teddy Roosevelt that he wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.  You could easily be tempted to say the same about Judge Posner, who comes close to telling himself (and us) that he really is better than anybody else at doing anybody else's job as well as his own.  Happily and refreshingly, he understands that he, even he, has (and should have) his limits.

 



 

 

The Making of Mark Tushnet

The first time I ever noticed Mark Tushnet was 45 years ago in a class on the history of English law.   He suggested that he thought that maybe we had been to quick to dispense with outlawry as a form of social control.  I thought the remark clever, suggestive and probably good for a couple of extra points though I couldn't escape the notion that he probably enjoyed being a bit provocative.

The next time I noticed him, he had become one of the linchpins of the Critical Legal Studies movement, then the hot new thing in speak-truth-power law scholarship.  I'm vague on details (and the online CVs I've seen don't include his early stuff).  I recall he was writing a lot of those days (he seems always to have written a lot).  He remained clever and suggestive, but as I remember it, he pretty quickly moved beyond provocative to downright abrasive.  He seemed to enjoy ripping the socks of assorted feet of clay.

If you remember those days, I suppose you might say I have characterized the whole mischievous CLS crew, but Tushnet, though seemingly at the center of the action, always appeared to me to be his own man: a bit more serious, less juvenile--perhaps better "less frivolous"--than some of his CLS colleagues, a number of whom seemed to be cossetted Ivy League seminar brats determined to pee on their own bread.

I didn't pay much attention to Tushnet's work for many years--I've never in any serious way done con  law.  But I did read and enjoy his American Law of Slavery, 1810-1860, which I suspect might be one of his lesser known works.  I also skimmed at least one of his two books on the late Justice Thurgood Marshall for whom Tushnet had clerked.  I enjoyed what I read and in my recollection I found something there that I hadn't noticed in Tushnet's work before: a thread of warmth and affection for the brave old man (maybe it was just projection: Marshall has long  been a hero of my own).

I can't remember, then, exactly what prompted me to pick up A Court Divided, his history of the Rehnquist court, but I remember reading it with great enthusiasm over a long weekend while I was on my own in DC about 2006.  In some ways, it reminded me of what (little) I already knew of its author: serious, diligent, shrewd, but still independent minded.   Also firm in its views although I missed the edginess that I had noticed earlier (I went so far as to steal an observation of his for a talk I gave to a bar forum in  Fresno later that year.  "I think that Thomas is smarter than people give him credit for," I said (muted murmur of assent from the audience), "and that Scalia is not as smart" (undercurrent of growl).  On reflection, I really think he had Scalia's number: smart but shallow, a debater-boy, probably better suited for a Sunday morning talk show than the nation's highest court).

This is really a long buildup to a shoutout for In the Balance, his latest, a kind of a sequel to his Rehnquist book, certainly the best overview I've seen so far of the Roberts court.  Like his Rehnquist book, this new one is a remarkable mix of the doctrinal and the political.  He offers some excellent insights on the contrasting agendas of Democrats as against Republicans in seeking appointees to the high court; also a wonderful sketch of the nature and content of the "Supreme Court bar"--the small gaggle of lawyers (formerly including Justice Roberts) who do an outsized share of face-time with the justices on the bench.  But most of the book is a detailed account of the major cases: not just what they say, but how they got there, with some thoughts about what it tells us of the nature of the process.  It's pretty much of a lawyer book, not a popular book;  not for the faint-hearted, but on the off chance that I number among my readers anyone who is or soon will be tackling con law class, I'd heartily recommend it as near-essential bedside prep reading.

In short, it's got the virtues you would have seen in the young Tushnet, mostly cleansed of the impurities.   And I guess you could say I saw this coming in  my only other direct personal contact with the author.  I was on the elevator at Georgetown Law School one day, where he was then on the faculty--I guess this would be 2006, just after I had read he Rehnquist book.  I saw this short, chubby, blondish, baldish guy behind me.

"You Mark Tushnet?"  I asked.

"Yeh."

"I  enjoyed your book."

Momentary pause. Then: "Well, the publisher said it earned back its advance."

The door opened and he went out of my life, I suppose forever.