Arts
A Porch or a Tower?
11/01/17
The New York Times has an interesting piece on a new house in a neighborhood where I used to take my walks now and then (A Modernist Box Among the Victorians, October 31 2917). I wish there had been a photograph showing the house in its context. From what I can tell from the photos, it shows a change the attitude of people toward their neighbors and neighborhoods since this building was built.
The older houses on the street have porches, which serve two purposes: they welcome visitors and they become extensions of the living area into the public sphere. When porches were actually used—as they were in the hot New Jersey summers before Air Conditioning—they were areas where one interacted with one’s neighbors as they passed by on their ordinary errands and where some would be invited to share a bit of conversation without any of the fuss involved in a visit to the actual house. But this house is clearly marked not as a part of the neighborhood community, but as a refuge from the outside world. It looks like a tower. Its public entry is narrow, and there is no space where one might sit with neighbors or even share a word with those passing by. It is clearly meant to be entered as a rule from the carport and then only by its own residents. The house is attractive in its own way, but the message it sends about how Americans now live—isolated, cocooned, cut off from their neighbors, interacting only with communities of their own choosing—is troubling.
What is most troubling for me is that this house would be more suitable for me than are the welcoming houses with their large porches. I have occasionally said that most Americans live apartment-shaped lives on half-acre lots. As the buffer between my apartment-shaped life and the rest of the world is even bigger than that—and not because of any great affection for deer and ground-hogs—I should admit that while I admire the vision of community imparted by a porch, I would never sit out one one. Like my fellow citizens, I am “bowling alone.”
English Professors are Sick, Sick, Sick
12/09/14
I am afraid my profession has never fared well in film. Anthropology professors look like Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Physics professors look like Kelly McGillis in Top Gun. They conquer the world and get the girl or guy in the end.
Male English professors are pathetic serial philanders. The best we can hope for is to lose our jobs and become unemployed stoners hooked up with Frances McDormand like Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys.
But female English Professors have it even worse. What do they get to do? Lose their memories and die. The newly-released Still Alice stars Julianne Moore as a linguist with early-onset Alzheimers. It reminds me of Do You Remember Love, a 1985 film that start Joanne Woodward as an English Professor with early-onset Alzheimers. (It was shot at Pomona College, and Woodward borrowed an academic gown from my favorite professor, who looked like a movie star and kept her memory and critical faculties through four decades of teaching.) In Wit, Emma Thompson was a Renaissance scholar who died of cancer, but lost the ability to deal anything more complicated than The Runaway Bunny before the end. Call in the CDC: we have a pattern.
I know that English teachers don't do anything very dramatic—the best we can hope for it to be inspiringly fired the way Robin Williams was in Dead Poets Society. All the same, can't Hollywood come up with a better plot for the female Professor of Language & Literature than "She dies in the end"?
(If script-writers have a body-count quota to meet, might I suggests clearing out the School of Education and the administration building?)
Male English professors are pathetic serial philanders. The best we can hope for is to lose our jobs and become unemployed stoners hooked up with Frances McDormand like Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys.
But female English Professors have it even worse. What do they get to do? Lose their memories and die. The newly-released Still Alice stars Julianne Moore as a linguist with early-onset Alzheimers. It reminds me of Do You Remember Love, a 1985 film that start Joanne Woodward as an English Professor with early-onset Alzheimers. (It was shot at Pomona College, and Woodward borrowed an academic gown from my favorite professor, who looked like a movie star and kept her memory and critical faculties through four decades of teaching.) In Wit, Emma Thompson was a Renaissance scholar who died of cancer, but lost the ability to deal anything more complicated than The Runaway Bunny before the end. Call in the CDC: we have a pattern.
I know that English teachers don't do anything very dramatic—the best we can hope for it to be inspiringly fired the way Robin Williams was in Dead Poets Society. All the same, can't Hollywood come up with a better plot for the female Professor of Language & Literature than "She dies in the end"?
(If script-writers have a body-count quota to meet, might I suggests clearing out the School of Education and the administration building?)
Expelleramus!!! Tom Wolfe Victorious!
10/30/12
I have just been reading Tom Wolfe’s new novel, Back to Blood, which I have been looking forward to for years. Thus far, I am pleased. It is exciting, involving, and full of interesting information about the various cultures of modern Miami. I’m looking forward to learning how they mark their territories, merge into each other, and enforce their own systems of status. I trust it will be another high point in Wolfe’s war to restore the novel to the position it had in the age of Balzac, Thackeray, Trollope, Flaubert, Dickens, and George Eliot, when fiction sought to show how society worked, to make us see, as Trollope put it, “The Way We Live Now.” In those days, the novel made us see how the poor and the rich, the fortunate and the miserable, interacted, all moving in a world determined by conventions of status, wealth, power, and kinship.
In novels, polemics, and plain literary cat-fights, Wolfe has for years campaigned to wrest the novel from those who are only interested the personal and the literary. Or, to put it another way, to save the novel from the M.F.A. programs and the writer’s workshops. He has sneered at the novels made from myths, fables, conventions—from other books, not from life—and at novels that focus on the over-blown egos of the author and the battered egos of puny characters. Enough of the schoolroom exercises or the whining in the garret! Bring back the big canvas and show us the world!
I think there is good evidence that Wolfe has won the war. His battle plan has been vindicated, but I think another general may enjoy the triumph. The best novel I have read in quite a while was another eagerly awaited recent release, and it does just what Wolfe said the novel should do. It is by a writer who made her name with wizards and witches.
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books always had a keen eye for the sort of thing Wolfe is interested in—status details, in-groups and out-groups, even the questions of how some people come to be courageous. But she wrote in a genre that doesn’t claim the main stage and that on the surface seems all about using the traditional, artificial, paraphernalia of a literary form. A story about warlocks is as clearly made from other books as a novel called The Centaur or Roger’s Version. The reader might even miss the portrait of England today while rooting for Gryffindor in the Quidditch match or looking for the next horcrux.
In The Casual Vacancy, the magical trappings are gone, and Rowling gives us just the social novel Wolfe has been advocating. As in Balzac and Dickens, we move from places of poverty and degradation to places of comfort and respectability—and find that those seemingly different worlds are very much connected. We see that lives are often structured as much by status as by wealth, and that distinctions that might seem trivial shape or warp characters’ actions and fates.
While the mixture of the language of magic and bureaucracy made for great verbal fun in the Harry Potter books, Rowling’s use of another corpus of imagery, that of popular culture, adds to the power and realism of The Casual Vacancy. That some characters make a Rihanna song their anthem while others are still dancing to Tom Jones tells you almost all you have to know about them. And those are just the sorts of status and tribal details a disciple of Wolfe would pick up.
I don’t know what my experience of Back to Blood will turn out to be, but there is one area where Rowling’s novel bests Wolfe’s earlier fiction—though perhaps not in a contest Wolfe cares much about. While I wouldn’t say that Sherman McCoy, Conrad Hensley, or Charlotte Simmons were one-dimensional characters, I think that is true about most of Wolfe’s fictional creations. I think the same of most of the characters in Balzac. But in the social novels I love best, I care about the characters—even that little fool Emma Bovary and poor Charles.
In Trollope, I find the author cannot help loving all his characters: even the ones who begin as the butts of satire become people worthy of compassion if he writes about them long enough. I felt the same after finishing Rowling’s novel. To be sure, I understood how a particular society used wealth and status to structure itself, and how some people used those structures to torment or neglect others. But, more importantly perhaps, I felt the plight of many of the characters trying to manage things that to them seemed not like bits sociological data, but triumph, disaster, or simply getting by. Compassion, of course, is dangerous in literature: it can easily turn into sentimentality. That charge has often been leveled at Thackeray and Dickens, but I don’t think anyone has ever accused Tom Wolfe of being sentimental. His novels might be still better if he ran the risk his Victorian models did and let us cry over someone as they let us cry over little Nell and Colonel Newcombe.
In novels, polemics, and plain literary cat-fights, Wolfe has for years campaigned to wrest the novel from those who are only interested the personal and the literary. Or, to put it another way, to save the novel from the M.F.A. programs and the writer’s workshops. He has sneered at the novels made from myths, fables, conventions—from other books, not from life—and at novels that focus on the over-blown egos of the author and the battered egos of puny characters. Enough of the schoolroom exercises or the whining in the garret! Bring back the big canvas and show us the world!
I think there is good evidence that Wolfe has won the war. His battle plan has been vindicated, but I think another general may enjoy the triumph. The best novel I have read in quite a while was another eagerly awaited recent release, and it does just what Wolfe said the novel should do. It is by a writer who made her name with wizards and witches.
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books always had a keen eye for the sort of thing Wolfe is interested in—status details, in-groups and out-groups, even the questions of how some people come to be courageous. But she wrote in a genre that doesn’t claim the main stage and that on the surface seems all about using the traditional, artificial, paraphernalia of a literary form. A story about warlocks is as clearly made from other books as a novel called The Centaur or Roger’s Version. The reader might even miss the portrait of England today while rooting for Gryffindor in the Quidditch match or looking for the next horcrux.
In The Casual Vacancy, the magical trappings are gone, and Rowling gives us just the social novel Wolfe has been advocating. As in Balzac and Dickens, we move from places of poverty and degradation to places of comfort and respectability—and find that those seemingly different worlds are very much connected. We see that lives are often structured as much by status as by wealth, and that distinctions that might seem trivial shape or warp characters’ actions and fates.
While the mixture of the language of magic and bureaucracy made for great verbal fun in the Harry Potter books, Rowling’s use of another corpus of imagery, that of popular culture, adds to the power and realism of The Casual Vacancy. That some characters make a Rihanna song their anthem while others are still dancing to Tom Jones tells you almost all you have to know about them. And those are just the sorts of status and tribal details a disciple of Wolfe would pick up.
I don’t know what my experience of Back to Blood will turn out to be, but there is one area where Rowling’s novel bests Wolfe’s earlier fiction—though perhaps not in a contest Wolfe cares much about. While I wouldn’t say that Sherman McCoy, Conrad Hensley, or Charlotte Simmons were one-dimensional characters, I think that is true about most of Wolfe’s fictional creations. I think the same of most of the characters in Balzac. But in the social novels I love best, I care about the characters—even that little fool Emma Bovary and poor Charles.
In Trollope, I find the author cannot help loving all his characters: even the ones who begin as the butts of satire become people worthy of compassion if he writes about them long enough. I felt the same after finishing Rowling’s novel. To be sure, I understood how a particular society used wealth and status to structure itself, and how some people used those structures to torment or neglect others. But, more importantly perhaps, I felt the plight of many of the characters trying to manage things that to them seemed not like bits sociological data, but triumph, disaster, or simply getting by. Compassion, of course, is dangerous in literature: it can easily turn into sentimentality. That charge has often been leveled at Thackeray and Dickens, but I don’t think anyone has ever accused Tom Wolfe of being sentimental. His novels might be still better if he ran the risk his Victorian models did and let us cry over someone as they let us cry over little Nell and Colonel Newcombe.