The Rapid-Response Novel

Posted on October 14, 2022 by Luke Ford

Giles Harvey writes in the New York Review of Books:

* Over the past decade, but especially since the epochal events of 2016, a growing number of writers have been running a sort of stress test on the form, stuffing their books to the point of bursting with headlines, social media posts, and other such glittering ephemera. I am thinking, among others, of Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016), Olivia Laing’s Crudo (2018), Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020), Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021)—short, frenetic, highly praised books, from which, it can sometimes seem, almost all the standard novelistic furniture (scene, plot, character) has been removed in order to accommodate the surplus of up-to-the-minute information.

Like Twitter, whose influence is everywhere in these novels, the results can be engaging and often quite funny, at least for a time.

* A page of this writing—spare, kinetic, boisterously relentless—may be thrilling, but over the course of an entire novel, even quite a short one, the effect begins to pall, especially in the absence of an organizing principle beyond keeping pace with the headlines.

That is the problem with… rapid responders. They seem content merely to replicate the chaos and confusion, the interminable shapelessness, of our news-crazed lives—something readers might reasonably expect a novel to deliver them from.

* In most rapid-response novels, that circle is never drawn. There is simply a quick-fire accretion of harrowing data, together with the breathless, telegraphic commentary it inspires. For all its surface agitation, such fiction is actually founded on a complacent premise: that all that’s needed to achieve profundity is to write down what happens. How this material is shaped and ordered, by what geometry it is finessed into meaning, remains, at best, a secondary concern.

* [Ian McEwan’s new novel Lessons] provide[s] something lacking in most rapid-response novels: a sense of perspective. The everything-all-of-the-time quality of today’s online news coverage (“Twitter’s ABLAZE gurl”) can lead us into thinking we live in unprecedentedly awful times. Without downplaying the nightmare that is our current political situation, McEwan exposes this attitude as a form of historical narcissism. Far from being exceptional, the sense of looming annihilation, of going about our daily business on the edge of an abyss, has been the norm for quite some time.

* McEwan’s rejection, or partial revision, of his deterministic view of human character comes with a political corollary. Roland is an avid consumer of the news, but what does he do about any of it? The answer is not nothing. In the 1970s he befriends a couple in East Berlin (his girlfriend at the time has a diplomatic pass) to whom he smuggles banned books and records through Checkpoint Charlie. When they are arrested for a subversive remark, he tries to intervene on their behalf, though to little effect. Back home, he does some pamphleting for Labour but is generally less engaged. Later on, when he looks around him at the world his grandchildren will inherit, he is haunted by a sense of squandered opportunity, though (as in his private life) he finds a measure of bleak consolation in the idea that there is nothing he can do about it: “Who cared what an obscure Mr. Baines of Lloyd Square thought about the future of the open society or the planet’s fate? He was powerless.”

* Because of its formal fragmentation and ultra-contemporary subject matter, the rapid-response novel carries an aura of modernist innovation. Life itself has grown more manic and fractured (the implicit argument of these books seems to run), and novels ought to reflect this. Looked at another way, however, the genre could be seen as a capitulation. Working from the premise that readers today, conditioned by social media, have trouble focusing on anything for longer than thirty seconds at a time, the rapid-response novelist decides to cater to their ravaged attention spans by writing brief, topical books comprised of tweet-like fragments generously set off by quantities of white space.

* Roland’s inner life is as dense and vivid as the outer life bearing down on him. In contrast to the thinly drawn characters who populate the work of Laing et al., he isn’t buried beneath the weight of current events.

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My Fame Peaked In 2006

Posted on October 12, 2022 by Luke Ford

Google’s Ngram viewer tracks mentions in published books.

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American Universities Began Asking For A Personal Statement Essay To Weed Out Jews

Posted on October 12, 2022 by Luke Ford

College admissions in America operate with the tools of the last century that were enacted to limit the admission of Jews. In most countries, admission to university is done on the basis of test scores, but American universities in the 20th Century moved away from that objective standard to subjective standards that allowed them to reduce their intake of Jews without overtly stating they didn’t want Jews.

To increase their intake flexibility, American colleges added requirements for demographic information, personal essays, and extracurricular activities. Why? So they could exclude Jews and anyone else they didn’t want on the public basis that the university was looking for gentlemen rather than drones. What constitutes a Harvard man? This is subjective, ergo, Harvard gets to choose who it admits.

Universities assumed that Jews would fall short of their moral character standards, but moral character is a fiction. We don’t have a moral character. We have moral characters in different situations. Our traits are domain-specific. We may be honest in our marriage but not at work. We may be nice to strangers but vicious to our family. Who we are depends upon the situations we find ourselves in. The situation is frequently more determinative of how we behave than any supposedly innate character traits. Nobody is always brave. Some people are brave in certain circumstances and other people are brave in different circumstances. The person who is a hero on the football field Friday night may well be a docile lamb Sunday morning in church with his mom and then a rapist at a party that night with a stranger and then a life-saver when he stops on his drive home and rescues someone from a burning car.

America’s elite universities today use subjective admission criteria to limit their intake of Whites. Without these subjective standards, there would be more Whites on the best campuses and fewer of every other ethnic group.

Professor Merve Emre, the author of the following essay, is a Turkish-American professor at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing.

Though I was born to blog, to quote journalist Rob Eshman, I’ve never been much good at writing essays. My friend Dave Deutsch compared me to a porn star who can’t give a hand job.

I don’t believe the individual is a fiction, but we are primarily the product of time, place and heritage. I wouldn’t be who I am right now if I weren’t writing these words in anticipation of you reading them. I wouldn’t be saying these words alone to a wall. I don’t exist as I am without you. Without you, I am not me.

I am a historicist. I believe everything and everyone has to be understood in their time and place. I don’t see the world as the classical liberal does — a collection of individuals with inalienable rights. Rather, I see the world composed of nations. I don’t see individuals primarily as individuals but primarily as members of nations and whatever rights those nations can afford will be circumscribed by circumstances.

Most people who talk about themselves publicly are boring because most people don’t see themselves accurately. The winning formula for first-person writing, then, is to keep the focus on what fills you with shame. We all prefers to read about others’ troubles rather than their triumphs.

Merve Emre writes in the New York Review of Books:

A more specific genealogy for the genre—and an explanation of its distinctively American quality today—is the “personal statement” that high school students applying to US colleges and universities were asked to produce starting around 1920, and which has evolved into a cornerstone of the admissions process. Although it is difficult to pinpoint how many students per year write personal statements, more than 5.6 million applications were submitted in 2019–2020 through the Common App, a generic college admission application that requires the applicant to write at least one personal essay. Orbiting these millions of essays is a burgeoning industry of tutoring, prepping, and editing services, evinced by the popularity of books such as How to Write the Perfect Personal Statement, The Berkeley Book of College Essays, College Essays That Made a Difference, and How to Write a Winning Personal Statement. The personal narrative is the designated genre to reveal the writer’s “inner self,” an “opportunity to differentiate yourself from everyone else,” writes Alan Gelb in Conquering the College Admissions Essay in 10 Steps.

The first mention of the personal essay as an admissions requirement, according to Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (2005), came during Harvard’s drastic changes to its admissions practices in the 1920s. Since the turn of the century, selection based on exam scores had created what administrators called a “Jewish problem”: the admission of more Jewish applicants than the university deemed acceptable. “We can reduce the number of Jews by talking about other qualifications than those of admission examination,” wrote Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell in 1922, advocating for a subjective set of criteria. The other qualifications he listed, “character” and “leadership,” were to be assessed through three new genres, as Karabel writes: “Demographic information, a personal essay, and a detailed description of extracurricular activities.” The assumption was that Jewish applicants would fall short of the school’s desired “character standard”—that their “centuries of oppression and degradation” meant that they were characterized not by a commitment to individual and personal self-assertion but by a “martyr air.”

To weed out Jewish applicants, universities mobilized the essay as an heir to the Catholic tradition of confession and the later Protestant tradition of narratives of “saving faith,” notes the historian Charles Petersen in his dissertation on meritocracy. No doubt the version of individualism championed by administrators drew on the moral culture of the Protestant bourgeoisie, what Max Weber described as its use of education to cultivate a rational, self-assertive personality. This type was marked by its ability to adhere to a consistent and subjective set of values in a disenchanted world. Forced to conceive the meaning of things, and even man’s relationship to reality, as an individual matter, Weber’s rational personality type formed intellectual arrangements to anoint himself the master and the arbiter of his own destiny, and eventually the destinies of those around him.

The premise of elite college admissions was that this relation could be cinched, and indeed enhanced, by reversing its terms: that the ability to demonstrate, through the genre of the essay, one’s commitment to an idealized model of private and rational individualism marked the applicant as someone well-suited to higher education. Whereas in previous centuries, higher education would have secured a career in the ministry, now it led to executive roles in industry and government. Beyond its discriminatory function, the personal essay sought to identify the students whom the university could transform into the political and economic leaders of the future. Learning how to “game the system” was only a sign of the system’s success at shaping applicants’ behavior.

The overtly discriminatory origins of the admissions essay have been superseded by more covert models of calibrating personhood by ethnicity, as in the recent case of Harvard University admissions officers accused of assigning Asian American applicants lower scores in subjective categories such as “positive personality.” Yet the value the admissions essay—and the college application process in general—places on the private individual as a self-reflective and self-governing subject, the rightful heir to the spoils of capitalism, remains as powerful as ever. Kathryn Murphy and Thomas Karshan, in On Essays: Montaigne to the Present (2020), write:

Applicants are encouraged to draw a moral out of a personal anecdote, often about struggle, and enriched by some element of their reading or studies: “failure,” an expert on the admissions essay tells us, “is essayistic gold.”

Far from signaling weakness, the proud narration of failure speaks of character in precisely the terms set by the educated bourgeoisie of the early twentieth century: character as the capacity to maintain one’s self-comportment in a moment of distress, to tell a tale of hardship lit by the glow of self-knowledge.

At the start of the last century what Petersen has described as the “Catholic tradition of confession,” with its ponderous moral and spiritual accent, its desire for masochistic public exposure and redemption, had yet to enter the scene of personal essay writing and did not do so until the mid-1960s. Almost all the guides mentioned earlier warn applicants away from striking a tone that is too testimonial or therapeutic, working hard to buffer the admissions essay from the sins and perils of what is commonly called confessional writing. Unlike the admissions essay, whose rules and stakes are firmly pegged to educational institutions, confessional writing speaks to a shift in the importance of the individual and the technologies used to conceptualize new notions of personhood. “Its development coincides with new cold war cultures of privacy and surveillance, with therapy/pop psychology culture, with the falling away of modernist and ‘New Critical’ approaches to art and literature, with the rise of the television talk show and the cult of the celebrity,” writes Jo Gill in Modern Confessional Writing (2006).

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LA’s Anti-White Coalition of the Fringe Falls Apart (10-12-22)

Posted on October 12, 2022 by Luke Ford

00:30 LAT: Listen to audio of L.A. council members making racist, crude remarks
02:00 Tucker on PA’s senate race
12:00 Reb Dooovid joins
29:00 Why couldn’t priests with defects serve in the Temple?
31:00 List of disqualifications for the Jewish priesthood
39:00 Kanye West accused of anti-semitism
1:07:00 Mickey Kaus says he’s no longer a character voter
1:12:00 Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior

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Donald Trump Is ‘Blind to the Beautiful Mosaic’

Posted on October 9, 2022 by Luke Ford

I’m reading chapter four of Maggie Haberman’s new biography (Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America) of Donald Trump. It is called “Blind to the Beautiful Mosaic.” Apparently, Trump was largely blind to the beauty of diversity.

Haberman writes:

* Up to that point in his life [1986], Trump had had few meaningful interactions with New Yorkers of color. When he was a child, in the decades after World War II, the city’s segregated neighborhoods were cauldrons of bigotry and resentment, cleaved off into “us” versus “them.” His childhood home in Jamaica Estates was just a seven-minute drive from Hollis, Queens, which had primarily been settled by Black residents since after the Korean War, but the two may as well have been many miles apart. The borough was on its way to becoming one of the most racially and ethnically diverse places on earth, but Trump never appeared to value the unique multiculturalism of his surroundings.
Black people were not known to be part of Fred Trump’s circle of influence…

* Donald himself spoke favorably about Black people who succeeded in entertainment or sports. But he would recount that Roy Cohn had advised him to hope for a Black judge, with the implication being that they could be manipulated, and associates recalled Trump musing about having Black judges preside over his cases. He told associates that one of his security guards disliked Black people and was aggressive when they got too close to Trump. (Trump called both statements false.) And he continued throughout his life to identify ethnic groups with the article “the,” as in a 2011 radio interview in which he declared, “I have a great relationship with the Blacks.” Over my years of reporting in New York City, Trump was the only political figure other than another Queens-born politician, Andrew Cuomo, I ever heard publicly use that specific phrase. It reflected not just a minimizing, reductive view but a transactional one: ethnic and racial groups were simply discrete units to be won over as allies in elections, or in real estate or zoning battles.
Trump publicly demonstrated little interest in the civil rights movement, though his college years coincided with one of the most intense and geographically widespread moments for race relations in our country’s history.

* Trump experienced that racial tumult at a remove. When Tony Gliedman arrived at the Trump Organization in 1986, he insisted on bringing along his assistant at the city’s housing agency, a young Jamaican immigrant named Jacqueline Williams. At the time, Trump was known to invoke stereotypes of Black people, such as laziness. Trump’s assistant, Norma Foerderer, initially expressed anxiety at the suggestion of hiring Williams. Foerderer told Gliedman that they’d never had a Black person working on the executive floor, a comment that was later shared with Williams. Foerderer requested that Williams interview with her before she could join the staff. “Wow,” Foerderer exclaimed when they met. “You’re beautiful anyway, so you’ll fit right in.”

* Trump’s most sustained encounters with Black people came as he pushed beyond real estate and into the sports business.

* The new proximity to Black athletes, celebrities, and political figures did little to change how Trump talked with people about race. Trump had seemed a largely oblivious bystander to so many of the social and cultural revolutions that defined the young-adult years of many of his peers. But as new opportunities pushed Trump beyond the lily-white milieu of his adolescence, his social ambitions pulled him from the facade of traditionalist domesticity that Fred Trump had erected in Jamaica Estates, and toward a world where sex seemed to be at the forefront of everything.

* They [former employees] also recalled Trump mocking gay men, or men who were seen as weak, with the words “queer” or “faggot.” If someone gay was of use to Trump personally or for a business purpose, Trump appeared open to the person, but it did not exempt them from private scorn. In front of one openly gay executive, Trump was nothing but pleasant and accepting, even taking him and his husband for Florida weekend getaways on his private jet and calling the executive’s husband for advice on orthodontia for Trump’s children. Behind the executive’s back, however, a former Trump Organization consultant named Alan Marcus said, Trump belittled him as a “queer” and bragged that he paid the executive less than he would have to otherwise because of it, a claim about compensation that appeared to be untrue.
The homophobia that had existed throughout the country for decades intensified around the AIDS virus. The New York Times carried its first, brief report of a rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals , as the headline put it, in July 1981. The mysterious condition, which became known as AIDS, had what was at first an uncertain transmission but was identified as circulated through sexual contact and drug use. Yet for years polls showed Americans casting judgment on people who got infected. New York City became an epicenter of the disease. Ed Koch, who never married and whose sexuality was a source of speculation over his time in office—posters that cropped up during Koch’s gubernatorial race against Mario Cuomo in 1982 read vote for cuomo, not the homo —was widely seen as late in trying to mobilize public awareness of the virus. A city’s carefree attitude toward sex quickly turned dark, curtailing the greatest excesses of the club scene where Trump had once enjoyed being visible.
A country that was slow to react moved to action as the disease suddenly began impacting celebrities and heterosexuals. President Ronald Reagan made his first public reference to AIDS in 1985, years after it became an epidemic, and by which time panic about the virus was everywhere. Trump was plainly terrified of the disease, which seemed to elevate his fear of germs and illness to an almost pathological level. He told one friend after another that he wore two condoms to protect himself, and he announced publicly that he would require prospective dates to take an AIDS test. “It’s one way to be careful. There are a lot of ways,” he told an interviewer. “I’m saying, take all of those ways and double them, because you will need them.”
Among straight New Yorkers, fear of AIDS also increased speculation about sexual orientation—musing about who might be gay and who wasn’t, including about Koch—that was often homophobic in its effect. Trump was far from alone among prominent men in New York City experiencing some level of that panic, but for him, the anxiety was pronounced. He called reporters to inquire if people with whom he had just met might be gay, worried simply because they had just exchanged a handshake.

* In the world of New York’s broader racial politics, Trump was extreme, but not so completely out of sync with other whites—both the white ethnic working class of his native Queens and the elite of his adopted Upper East Side, who were perhaps less overt about expressing their prejudices—as to stand out glaringly in day-to-day conversations. Koch’s relationships with some Black leaders were famously contentious, beginning with the closure of a hospital in Harlem and right into his final reelection campaign; he made controversial statements and then complained that Black leaders and voters reacted to them. “It’s been my impression there is a lot of anti-Semitism amongst substantial numbers of black leaders—not all,” Koch said during his 1985 reelection campaign, sparking a furious reaction.

* Over time, the calcified racial politics of New York City began to loosen, transformed by demographic and cultural change, but Trump’s own views did not seem to. As he built his Manhattan real estate empire, the “Fear City” moniker that public-sector union leaders had used to pressure City Hall a decade earlier had come to describe a city where crime rates had stayed historically high for ten years. There were nearly 2,000 murders in 1980 and 1981, and violent crime reports overall exceeded 180,000 both years. By the mid-1980s, New York was plagued by the crack cocaine epidemic. In the city, street crime exploded as users of the drug robbed people to pay for the next cheap hit. Tensions over crime and policing provoked a series of racial conflagrations with a uniquely New York character.

* Police, Trump said, needed to be let loose. “Unshackle them from the constant chant of ‘police brutality’ which every petty criminal hurls immediately at an officer who has just risked his or her life to save another’s. We must cease our continuous pandering to the criminal population of this City.” The primary target of Trump’s ire was Koch, who had instructed citizens not to carry “hate and rancor” in their hearts. “I want to hate these muggers and murderers,” the ad continued. “They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence. Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers and I always will. I am not looking to psychoanalyze or understand them, I am looking to punish them.”
It was as clear a guiding ethos for his life as Trump seemed to have: hate should be a civic good. He sat with a handful of reporters to underscore his message that hate could be a uniting force for the city. “You better believe that I hate the people that took this girl and raped her brutally,” he said. “I want society to hate them.”
The case increased Trump’s visibility as a commentator on topics well outside his area of business expertise. On CNN’s Larry King Live , he spoke about what he characterized as the weakness of policing tactics, a subject that did not at all relate to the specifics of the Central Park Jogger case. (On air, Trump scooted back from King and said he found the host’s breath to be unbearable.) “The problem we have is we don’t have any protection for the policeman,” Trump said. “The problem with our society is that the victim has absolutely no rights and the criminal has unbelievable rights, unbelievable rights, and I say it has to stop.”
Trump was hardly the lone voice furious about the crime, or even the lone voice demanding swift justice. (Some white liberals, living in a terrified city that had seen record crime increases over more than a decade, agreed with Trump’s general sentiment more than they would be comfortable admitting publicly.) But none called for brutality in response quite as Trump did.

* The same year as the Central Park assault, Trump appeared on an NBC News special focused on race relations, along with other guests including the filmmaker Spike Lee, poet Maya Angelou, home-entertaining celebrity Martha Stewart, and conservative commentator Pat Buchanan. The guests were asked to speak about affirmative-action policies and their impact on economic opportunity in the United States. “A well-educated Black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market,” said Trump, whose father’s connections and money shaped nearly every aspect of his career. “And, I think, sometimes a Black may think that they don’t really have the advantage or this or that but in actuality today, currently, it’s, uh, it’s a, it’s a great. I’ve said on occasion, even about myself, if I were starting off today I would love to be a well-educated Black because I really believe they do have an actual advantage today.”

* From the outset, it was clear that he would incorporate racial paranoia into his public persona and his views of civic life. The first time I saw Trump after he left office, in an interview for this book, I asked him how he thought racial politics in New York were different than in the rest of the country. “I think they’re more severe,” he replied. When I asked in what way, he said only, “I don’t know why. I think it’s more severe. I think it’s a tougher game.” He added, “Racial is more severe in New York than it is anywhere else that I can think of.”
That was the lens through which Trump seemed to view the entire country, if not the world: tribal conflict was inevitable. One day in the 1990s, Alan Marcus brought up a news item he had just seen about the changing demographics of the United States, projecting that nonwhites would one day be the majority population, intentionally trying to get a rise out of Trump by raising a subject he knew would needle him.
That won’t happen, Trump said. First, he insisted, there would be a revolution. “This isn’t going to become South Africa,” he said.

* A year after he was released from prison in March 1995, Tyson moved into a new mansion in Farmington, Connecticut, an upscale suburb of Hartford. When Sharpton arrived for a party there, he followed a winding staircase to a terrace overlooking the pool, where he found Don King chatting with Trump. The topic of their discussion: Tyson’s white neighbors were petitioning to get him out of the community, and they were speculating about how much money Tyson could demand from them if he obliged by moving out.
“When Trump got elected, that’s what occurred to me: if Donald Trump had been born Black, he would have been Don King,” Sharpton said. “Because both of them—everything was transactional.”

From chapter eight:

On and off over roughly two years he had dated another beautiful model nearly two decades his junior. Kara Young was seen by his employees as fun, interesting, and down to earth. She was also the daughter of a Black mother and white father. “Do you think she looks Black?” Trump asked Marcus.
Young has said very little about the relationship over the years. In one of her few interviews on the topic, she described a boyfriend who exhibited a cultural ignorance about Black people and appeared to rely on stereotypes to process unfamiliar activities. When they attended a tennis match featuring the sisters Venus and Serena Williams, Trump expressed surprise at the racially diverse crowd because he appeared to believe that Black people were not interested in tennis. “ He was impressed that a lot of black people came to the U.S. Open because they were playing,” Young recalled to The New York Times in 2017. Yet she also helped Trump ingratiate himself into a new world of Black celebrities, such as the rap artist Sean Combs and the influential music producer Russell Simmons. Trump would later point to those associations as examples of why he couldn’t be a racist, because he knew Black people, and, more significantly they had engaged with him without taking issue. (Weeks after meeting Young’s parents, Trump told her that she had gotten her beauty from her mother and her intelligence “from her dad, the white side.” He laughed as he said it; Young told him that wasn’t something to joke about.)

From chapter twenty:

After Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, Trump was reluctant to dispense aid, due in part to his refusal, in conversations with aides, to accept that the island was a part of the United States; he seemed to view it as a distressed property, referring to it as a place with “absolutely no hope” when an aide described its potential.

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