Departments on the Defensive

From the New York Review:

* Academic criticism can thus be regarded as an innovation of the 1920s, like the lie detector, water skiing, the timed traffic light, and the bread slicer.

* the pitched battles over curriculum and methodology waged both inside and outside the profession were largely beside the point, given literature’s dwindling share of the cultural pie. As Guillory puts it in the new book, “It does not matter how politically ambitious the aims of literary study might be if literature itself continues to contract in social importance.”

* “By the later 1960s, the literary professoriate had begun to tire of producing ‘readings’ of literary works.” But rather than finding something to do with literature besides interpret it, they simply moved on to producing interpretations of everything: films, works of visual art, philosophical systems, archival documents, feelings, society itself. “A door was opened leading beyond literature to all of culture,” Guillory writes. “But having passed through this magic portal, it was difficult to return to literature, to be content with that object.”

* criticism as “the profession of the unprofessional.”

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Bloody Panico

Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes in the New York Review:

* 2022 will be remembered as the year of two monarchs and three prime ministers, not to mention four chancellors of the exchequer, five education secretaries, and more than thirty resignations from the government.

* When I sent half-ironical congratulations to a don at Lincoln College, Sunak’s Oxford alma mater, on the ascent of their eminent alumnus, he replied, “We’re very proud of Rishi and hope that he lasts at least a year.”

* But what distinguishes the Tories nowadays isn’t marital infidelity or sexual variety so much as sheer squalor. One MP was imprisoned for sexual abuse of minors, one was forced to resign when a woman MP sitting in the chamber of the Commons noticed that he was looking at pornography on his cell phone, and another, Chris Pincher, was seen at a party at the Carlton Club fondling the groins of younger men, to which Johnson initially responded, with his ready wit, “Pincher by name, pincher by nature.” Hancock’s own political career ended when a CCTV camera caught him in a passionate embrace in his ministerial office with a colleague who proved to be also his mistress (transgressing lockdown rules as well as the Seventh Commandment). He has since appeared on a grotesque “reality program” eating the genitals of exotic animals in some distant clime, and he looks more and more like our present-day answer to the Rector of Stiffkey, who was defrocked in the 1930s for devoting excessive pastoral care to chorus girls and ended his days exhibiting himself in a barrel at a circus before, sad to say, he was mauled by a lion.

* While Johnson was mishandling the pandemic he would address the nation on television in his rambling, bumbling manner, which prompted Robert Harris, the political journalist turned novelist, to observe that as we listened to him blathering on with his feeble excuses and totally unconvincing explanations, we all realized what being married to him must be like. And so although Johnson’s fall has been called unexpected, it was surely overdetermined. He always had a transactional relationship with MPs who knew very well that he was a “seedy, treacherous chancer,” in Ferdinand Mount’s phrase, a ruthlessly ambitious, totally unprincipled opportunist who has never believed in anything in his life apart from self-advancement and self-gratification. While they supported him as long as he could win an election, the Tories sensed that he was always a series of accidents waiting to happen.

* The first names of the latest four French finance ministers are Bruno, Michel, Pierre, and François; of their German counterparts, Christian, Olaf, Peter, and Wolfgang; of American secretaries of the Treasury, Janet, Steven, Jack, and Timothy. The four successive chancellors of the exchequer until last October were called Sajid, Rishi, Nadhim, and Kwasi. Bruno Maçães, the Portuguese politician who is now a prolific commentator, has said that there is no other European country where four people with such names could have risen to such an office. Three of the highest offices—the premiership and the two historic secretaryships of state—are now held by people of color: the foreign secretary is James Cleverly, whose mother was from Sierra Leone, and the home secretary is Suella Braverman, whose parents were Indian by way of Mauritius and Kenya.

Veneration of Churchill is a dogma of the Tory Party (with which he had a very checkered relationship over the years) as well as of the American right, although his racism is no secret. He once told a colleague that “the Hindus were a foul race” who deserved to be extirpated, and in 1955, at the last Cabinet meeting over which he presided as prime minister, he said that the Tories should fight the next election on the slogan “Keep England White.” At the Conservative Party Conference the following year, one of the speakers was Captain Charles Waterhouse, a veteran of the Great War, an MP since the 1920s, and a great conference favorite. In his speech he used the phrase “nigger in the woodpile”; added in a stage aside, “Too many of them about anyway”; and brought the house down with raucous laughter—a memory that must make today’s Tories shudder, and not only them.

This was at a time when recently arrived immigrants from the West Indies faced gross discrimination and occasional violence. In a particularly repellent story related in Matthew Engel’s new book The Reign: Life in Elizabeth’s Britain, Carmel Jones arrived in England from Jamaica in 1955. A pious Anglican, like many West Indians, she went to her local parish church, where the vicar told her, “Thank you for coming, but I would be delighted if you didn’t come back. My congregation is uncomfortable in the presence of black people.”

* I’m haunted by the memory of the speech that the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha made to his unfortunate people one January long ago: “This year will be harder than last year. On the other hand, it will be easier than next year.”

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Chekhov – The Master of Concealment

From the April 6, 2023 New York Review of Books:

How straightforward Chekhov stories seem, and yet how strangely moving. Like the soul as he understood it, they appear simple but are profoundly mysterious. In her splendid book Reading Chekhov (2001), Janet Malcolm stresses how, for him, each person’s soul harbors a secret accessible to no one else. She quotes the passage in his best-known story, “The Lady with the Dog,” in which the hero, Gurov, pondering the secret love affair that constitutes his real life, imagines that one person never understands another because it is always what cannot be seen that truly matters. Everyone, he reflects, has

his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy…. All personal life rested on secrecy, and possibly it was partly on that account that civilized man was so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected…

Even when Chekhov characters wish to reveal their deepest secret, they usually find it cannot be put into words. The hero of “The Kiss” tries to tell his fellow officers about the chance event that changed his life but cannot convey what made it so transformative:

“He began describing very minutely the incident of the kiss, and a moment later relapsed into silence…. In the course of that moment he had told everything, and it surprised him dreadfully to find how short a time it took him to tell it. He had imagined that he could have been telling the story of the kiss till next morning.”

No one understands, and the hero vows “never to confide again.”

…One letter Chekhov received in March 1886 changed his view of himself. The veteran writer Dmitry Grigorovich offered his unsolicited opinion that Chekhov was a major literary talent and urged him to take his work more seriously. Chekhov, Grigorovich asserted, should not write so hurriedly and instead make each story the work of genius it could be. “I am convinced…you will be guilty of a great moral sin if you do not live up to these hopes,” he enthused. “All that is needed is esteem for the talent which so rarely falls to one’s lot.”

…“On the Road,” in which a man, Likharev, and a woman, Ilovaisky, are trapped in an inn during a Christmas Eve storm. Likharev recounts his life of total commitment to one ideology after another, a life he describes as typically Russian. “This faculty is present in Russians in its highest degree,” he comments.

Russian life presents us with an uninterrupted succession of convictions and aspirations, and if you care to know, it has not yet the faintest notion of lack of faith or scepticism. If a Russian [intellectual] does not believe in God, it means he believes in something else.

Likharev has never experienced either disillusionment or skepticism because whenever he abandoned one belief system, he immediately adopted another. At first fanatically devoted to “science,” Likharev abandoned it for nihilism and then for populism: “I loved the Russian people with poignant intensity; I loved their God and believed in Him.”

Likharev’s enthusiasm is infectious, especially to women…Likharev and Ilovaisky listen with pleasure to a crowd singing a popular ditty:

Hi, you Little Russian lad,
Bring your sharp knife,
We will kill the Jew, we will kill him,
The son of tribulation…

Why did Chekhov include these terrible verses? …that these verses are appalling is the whole point. Likharev enjoys them, “looking feelingly at the singers and tapping his feet in time,” because of his populist sympathies. However appealing and inspiring, ideology, to which the Russian intelligentsia was so susceptible, can lead to horror. In 1881 the populist People’s Will assassinated Tsar Alexander II, and Russia witnessed murderous pogroms, perhaps provoked by the fact that a Jewish woman had played a prominent part in the plot. The People’s Will cynically decided to exploit anti-Jewish sentiment to unleash popular rebellion. Two decades later it was the government that inspired pogroms, but in the early 1880s it was populist revolutionaries. On August 30, 1881, the Executive Committee of the People’s Will issued a manifesto, written in Ukrainian and addressed to “good people and all honest folk in the Ukraine.” It began:

“It is from the Jews that the Ukrainian folk suffer most of all. Who has gobbled up all the lands and forests? Who runs every tavern? Jews!… Whatever you do, wherever you turn, you run into the Jew. It is he who bosses and cheats you, he who drinks the peasant’s blood.”

As Chekhov writes the story, readers, like the heroine, first sense the attractiveness of Likharev and his enthusiasms. But the story turns and, without explicitly saying so, exposes the horror that Likharev’s charismatic idealism may entail.

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LA Marathon Finish

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Oxytocin Is Pretty Racist (3-19-23)

01:00 Maybe the sheep know something?
05:00 Trump is king
08:00 Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=147202
18:40 Why do people seek out pain? For meaning, connection and identity, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsHkYICSaGY
25:00 What People Still Don’t Get About Bailouts, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/silicon-valley-bank-collapse-2008-recession-bailout/673431/
34:00 Narcissism & Holidays, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=61839
39:50 The case for cognitive empathy
42:00 Extending empathy for people who have the power to blow up the world
44:40 Elliott Blatt joins
45:00 Extroverts are usually happier and more effective than introverts
55:00 The unwarranted confidence of podcasters
1:01:00 James Lindsay and love bombing
1:08:00 NYT: A Landlord Got a Low Appraisal. He Is Black, and So Are His Tenants., https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/realestate/appraisal-racial-discrimination-cincinnati.html
1:10:00 Our America: Lowballed

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