Portlandia

Although the tone of this blog tends to be serious, I have a sense of humor and also enjoy good comedy. The problem is that I rarely find comedic films or plays funny at all, and I've never followed stand-up comedy. There is written comedy, and I used to like reading David Sedaris, but I eventually tired of him. Most of the comedy I've come across has been in film or TV. I liked Woody Allen's Annie Hall, a romantic comedy, but think that comedy in that format is too restricted to be of much interest. I have never thought much of Monty Python, and generally dislike British humor. An exception is A Fish Called Wanda, which is probably my favorite comedy, but it wouldn't have been the same without Americans Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Kline. Another comedy I liked was Animal House. Fargo was funny, and perhaps the best Coen brothers film, though technically it is a "dark comedy crime thriller." There is also the category of black comedies, which aren't necessarily funny if you think about them, and my favorite there is Dr. Strangelove.

I used to watch Saturday Night Live regularly in the 1970's. It declined significantly in quality from 1980 to 1984, when producer Lorne Michaels was gone, and I stopped watching it then. It picked up again in 1985 when Michaels returned. Shows were inconsistent but often good up until about 1990. I watched it erratically up until about 2000 and have hardly seen it since. I've tried a few times and have always found it abysmally unfunny. However, over the years they've had quite a lot of talent on the show. I'd say my favorites have been Bill Murray, Dana Carvey and Phil Hartman.

In 2010, former Saturday Night Live member Fred Armisen teamed up with Carrie Brownstein for the filming of the first season of Portlandia. It follows a format similar to that of Saturday Night Live, and Lorne Michaels is one of the producers, but it isn't shot in front of a live audience and is filmed around Portland, Oregon. Armisen and Brownstein play a variety of characters in short skits that are sometimes broken up and shown as parts of a single episode. Generally speaking, it is a satire of trendy people who theoretically live in Portland. Portland does have its appeals. It was on my shortlist for retirement locations but in the end lost to rural New England college towns for a number of reasons. In any case, Armisen and Brownstein are incredibly creative by TV standards.

One thing that usually seems missing in American media is social satire. I think it is more common in other countries. Some of the best satire is produced under oppressive regimes, such as the U.S.S.R. under Stalin. For whatever reason, there is a deeply embedded blandness to American culture, and, especially when combined with another powerful force, political correctness, people here find it difficult to voice criticism or otherwise question the choices and behaviors of those around them, no matter how absurd. Portlandia offers empathetic satire, and it is always humorous while still doing a good job at bringing out the oddness, irresponsibility and stupidity of the lifestyle choices that trendy people often make, particularly in the Pacific Northwest.

Although it started with a low budget, after four seasons it has drawn a lot of attention and is now popular with Hollywood insiders. The budget for the fourth year seems much larger, and there are increasing cameos by celebrities. I find the best segments to be among the funniest I've ever seen. I'm not sure whether these links will always work, because the posts may not be legal, but my favorite segment is Art Project, from the third season. I've started season four and found the Social Bankruptcy segment quite amusing; note that it contains a reference to Lorrie Moore. Another thing that distinguishes their better work is an almost philosophical look at modern life. As with any TV production there are duds, but generally I am pleased with the quality up until this year.

Update, November 29, 2014. I've now seen all of season four, and overall it is quite bad. I'm not sure why it has changed for the worse, but it certainly isn't funny. The best episodes tend to be at the beginning of each season.

Free Speech I

I recently became aware of a controversy that arose following a panel discussion organized by Smith College, titled "Challenging the Ideological Echo Chamber: Free Speech, Civil Discourse and the Liberal Arts," which took place on September 22, 2014 in New York City. This panel was formed as a response to protests at Smith that caused Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, to cancel her engagement as 2014 commencement speaker. One of the panelists, Wendy Kaminer, who is a free speech advocate, used the words "nigger" and "cunt" during the course of the discussion. These words were examined by Kaminer in the context of their use in public discourse. As Kaminer explained at the time:

I just, I think there is a very important difference between calling somebody a name and uttering the name in the context of talking about how it's used. And I think it's incredibly important to recognize that difference, because, you know, there are other words and other concepts that are going to make somebody feel threatened and somebody feel disrespected, and somebody feel psychologically unsafe. And if people can't learn to deal with those feelings they really can't function effectively in a free society.

Kaminer's position seems rather innocuous and obvious, yet her use of those words still deeply dismayed some Smith students. According to the interpretation of Jordan Houston, a student at Smith:

What unfolded...left many Smithies feeling outraged, hurt, offended, and betrayed. Assuming the role as a moderator between four Smith panelists, among them being lawyer and social critic Wendy Kaminer '71, President McCartney sat in on what turned from a civil discourse on the idea of "free speech" vs. "hate speech" into an explicit act of racial violence.

Houston's view is an example of the destructive power of political correctness that has taken hold on many college campuses. Fortunately, Kaminer has found many defenders. Overall it would appear that the backlash at Smith by those who labeled Kaminer a racist is seen to reflect badly on Smith College.

As noted in an earlier post, I have grown skeptical of the desirability of the college environment. The juxtaposition of unworldly, ideologically rigid professors with naive undergraduates sometimes leads to ridiculous outcomes. I get the sense that some of these students are more empowered than they ought to be for what little they know. It seems that political correctness has blinded them to the meaning and value of free speech. One would think that a college campus is the last place one would find closed-mindedness and dogma prevalent. In a way, students like Houston are behaving in a manner that confirms their status as members of an elite class that is so far above all others that it can create its own reality, even if that means misrepresenting the reality of those whom they purport to defend.

I died for Beauty—but was scarce

I died for Beauty—but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining Room—

He questioned softly "Why I failed"?
"For Beauty", I replied—
"And I—for Truth—Themself are One—
We Brethren, are", He said—

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night—
We talked between the Rooms—
Until the Moss had reached our lips—
And covered up—our names—


—Emily Dickinson

A Poet's Anecdote

As you may have noticed from my selection of poems, I'm a fan of Denise Levertov. I know a bit about her history but am still in the process exploring it and will write more in the future. For the time being I thought I ought to mention a quote that I recently came across, because it relates to some of my other posts.

For an outsider it is a little difficult to see how the publishing industry works. Like any industry, there is probably a lot of "If you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." You have to be chummy with the right people and do them favors. This applied to Denise Levertov as much as anyone else. One of her former students, Mark Pawlak, recounts this conversation he had with her in 1975:

I asked Denise why it is that I have never seen one of her books reviewed in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. "About ten years ago," she explained, "they used to regularly ask me to write reviews. I did it for a while but found such reviewing to be making catty remarks about other authors, and that became distasteful to me. I eventually made a pact with myself not to do so any longer and began to turn down the offers from the Times, until they realized what was up and they stopped asking me. I think the editors were offended that I would turn them down because they never once since have run a review of any of my books, which they always used to do.

This is interesting, because even though Levertov is not exactly a household name, she was then and still is recognized as a major poet and regularly appears in anthologies of twentieth century American poets. While it may be obvious to insiders, casual readers of the Times may never realize how biased it can be in the selection of books to review. As an observer of the NYRB, I get the sense that similar activities occur behind the scenes there too. The NYRB seems to seek something that resembles exclusive rights on celebrity writers and public intellectuals, and it then represents them like a record producer so that the author and the publication both glow in unison as icons of the literary elite. In the case of the NYRB, which deals with a much narrower range of writers and books than the Times, there seems to be a specific emphasis on increasing the prestige of the publication. From both the Times and the NYRB, and probably The New Yorker, the reader may get a false sense of the cutting edge. The underlying activities are ultimately those of smarmy businessmen plying their trades. Those who take it all in uncritically are not entirely different from rednecks in pickups who listen to Rush Limbaugh on their radios.

One of the things I like about Levertov's poems is their honesty. As an honest person myself, I have long recognized that there is a price to pay for it.

A Woman Meets an Old Lover

'He with whom I ran hand in hand
kicking the leathery leaves down Oak Hill Path
thirty years ago

appeared before me with anxious face, pale,
almost unrecognized, hesitant,
lame.

He whom I cannot remember hearing laugh out loud
but see in mind's eye smiling, self-approving,
wept on my shoulder.

He who seemed always,
to take and not give, who took me so long
to forget,

remembered everything that I had so long forgotten.'


 —Denise Levertov

The Immigrant Experience

I promised I would write something about Welcome to Americastan, by Jabeen Akhtar, and here it is. The novel is well written, perhaps in part because Akhtar is an experienced writer of environmental regulations, but I have to say that it was of little interest to me. The story is about a young Pakistani-American woman and her family who live on the East Coast. She and her siblings were raised in the U.S. and are essentially American, while their parents still follow many Pakistani customs and actively participate in the local community of Pakistani immigrants. The protagonist, Samira, was dumped by her boyfriend, who then proceeded to marry her best friend. There is a minor incident in which she is briefly accused of being a terrorist. However, the book is completely apolitical, and offers what seems to be a realistic depiction of a well-assimilated Pakistani family during the current post-9/11 period.

Akhtar's writing is precise, but it mostly skims the surface. The descriptions are detailed and accurate, but not really interesting. All of her characters are conventional - most are boringly so - and there is not much in the way of subtlety to be mined from the text. The novel almost reads like a screenplay for an American film, and I suspect that Akhtar would not oppose a film version. Unfortunately for her, her publisher, Penguin, seems to have determined that the book would not sell in the U.S., and my copy is labeled "For sale in India and Pakistan only." It was shipped from India in fragrant packaging that the mailman thought smelled funny. I would say that Akhtar has potential as a writer, but she seems to be driven more by economic motives than by artistic motives. As an aesthetic experience, Welcome to Americastan was a waste of time for me, though compulsive, indiscriminate readers may still enjoy it.

The book did activate some of my dormant thoughts about ethnicity. This seems to be a popular topic in the U.S. In the novel, Samira's ethnicity has mostly vanished, but, because of her name and physical appearance, it is occasionally forced upon her by others. She is well-educated and does not feel out of place in her milieu. Her parents are also well-adjusted, and are appreciative of the economic opportunities afforded here in conjunction with the possibility of retaining their cultural identity through the local Pakistani community. I sometimes get a kick out of thinking about this, because my family background is extremely ethnic, but in my case this is ancient history that has almost been forgotten.

My mother's mother's father, Bedros, was an Armenian who, at about age 16, fled his village in Armenia when he was warned of an impending massacre during the 1894-1896 period. All of the Christians who remained in the village were killed. He then moved to Athens, where the Greeks discriminated against Armenians, and later married a German woman who was living there. He did not identify with the local Armenians and changed his children's surnames by adding "is" to the end in order to make them sound Greek. My mother's father's father, Mardiros, was a successful Armenian businessman who lived in western Turkey. He saw the 1915 Ottoman massacres coming well in advance and sold his possessions and moved the family to Athens. My mother's parents essentially had an arranged marriage that was set up after consultation with an Armenian priest. Most of this Armenian family history was not in evidence in our lives because my mother grew up in Greece. She went to a German school, and her parents spoke French at home. To complicate matters, she married an English soldier when she was only 21 and lived in England for ten years before we all moved to the U.S. In the U.S. she identified herself as Greek, though she did not participate at all in any local Greek community, if there was one.

The other side of my family, my father's, has long provided me with amusing ways to think about ethnicity. When we arrived here in 1957, we were already in the middle class, hardly

...your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

In fact, our English accents and manners temporarily bestowed upon us a relatively high social status. We didn't feel excluded, though some of us retained a certain amount of skepticism towards Americans and American life. Later on, when I began to think about ethnicity here, I decided that English immigrants may actually face a disadvantage. English people apparently are supposed to become assimilated immediately. If, for example, they are churchgoers, there is the Episcopal Church. As far as I know, there are no communities of recent English immigrants. As it was, we felt a certain amount of alienation, but had no cultural resources on which to fall back. To this day, 57 years later, I don't really feel assimilated, though I don't feel English either. Most other English immigrants I've met also seem neither English nor American. Certainly you get no credit or special attention from other English immigrants for being English. It is barely acknowledged.

From my point of view, ethnic assimilation amounts to little more than ostensibly accepting the local propaganda when you move from one geographic region to another. That could be moving from Pakistan to the U.S. or from Massachusetts to Mississippi. There is a lot that I don't buy into in the U.S. and never will. On this subject I am indebted to Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind. When faced with ideological pressure, one may either take the "Pill of Murti-Bing" or resort to "Ketman." The former amounts to taking a drug to obscure any fears or disagreements one has with a new dominating system and then accepting it completely without criticism. The latter involves the maintaining of a conformist outer face while remaining fully independent and critical privately. Under "Ketman," one submits to external pressures with which one does not agree while retaining a sense of integrity by concealing divergent views from others. This results in a hypocritical disconnection between the outer and inner selves. An excellent discussion of these concepts can be found here. Milosz concentrates on how intellectuals reconcile their ideas with those of a totalitarian system that is imposed on them. While conditions are not quite as severe in the U.S., Western capitalism, particularly in the U.S., shows many similarities to totalitarianism. As a person who did not pursue an intellectual career, the compromises that I've had to make have been minimal. The same cannot be said of many of America's public intellectuals on whom I've commented previously. Needless to say, none of these issues show up in Akhtar's novel, which was never intended to be thought provoking.

Last Hill in a Vista

Come, let us tell the weeds in ditches
How we are poor, who once had riches,
And lie out in the sparse and sodden
Pastures that the cows have trodden,
The while an autumn night seals down
The comforts of the wooden town.

Come, let us counsel some cold stranger
How we sought safety, but loved danger.
So, with stiff walls about us, we
Chose this more fragile boundary:
Hills, where light poplars, the firm oak,
Loosen into a little smoke.


 —Louise Bogan

Descending Sequence

     'It was a fearful thing

     to come into a man's heart...'

                                     —William Carlos Williams, "Winter Sunset"

What I thought to be a river

turned out to be sky.

What I thought were shore, island,

rocks, river-mist,

turned out to be clouds, shadow,

shot-holes in sky's canvas.

Even the deepest shade

down near the horizon

turned out not to be earth,

the real horizon was lower still.

At the oblong world's

very base,

further darkness, a round-topped tree,

a telephone pole, the sharp

ridge of a roof, chimney, gable end:

silhouettes on a sky

differently white, not the illusory

river's whiteness—and all

very small under the huge

vista above. Small,

as if in fear.

—Denise Levertov

Eusociality, Morality and Political Systems

Over time, it seems that my view of human nature as it relates to religion, morality and political systems has diverged considerably from the ideas that most people hold these days. I have always believed in evolution, but when I read The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins, in the 1990's I began to become a radical Darwinian. This involved the recognition that we are here as the result of random events, meaning that life as we know it was far from inevitable. More recently, I have been influenced by Edward O. Wilson's application of eusociality to humans. I thought that I should say something more about these concepts, because they relate to many of the views that I have presented on this blog.

According to Wilson, humans are eusocial animals because they have these features: division of labor, overlapping generations and cooperative care of the young, including ones that are not their own. Certainly it is a bit of a stretch to relate humans to social insects on this basis, but from my point of view this is simply an opening through which to look at basic human nature as it relates to genetic predispositions. There is growing evidence that the cooperation humans engage in is the central ingredient that allowed our distant ancestors to survive while all other Homo species became extinct. Human cooperation is linked to the development of language, large brains, and, ultimately, consciousness. It is also the basis for all modern societies and, by association, most modern religions.

Although humans have never behaved as mechanically as ants, it is a useful thought experiment to consider what human life would be like if we had no innate tendency to form cooperative groups. If you have a hard time visualizing this scenario, it's because it is almost unimaginable. Humans would never have developed language, agriculture, villages or technology. We would in all likelihood be extinct. Any humans who managed to survive would probably live in a manner similar to chimpanzees or other primates.

I think there is a great deal of naïveté even among educated people about why we are the way we are and how our institutions came into existence, and this has ongoing manifestations in religious, moral and political thought. In my interpretation, religions have historically supplied worldviews that unify groups and permit them to form hierarchies that provide organization and functionality to groups of varying sizes. In a very small group, a religious leader might provide explanations that calm the group and prevent its disintegration. Until recently, there was often no separation of church and state: a theocracy was a natural form of organization that often worked quite well. Because of advances in science and global population growth, we are currently in a transitional period that could play out in several different ways.

In ancient times, some populations could live in proximity to other tribes and scarcely know that they existed. Because of population growth and advances in transportation, that is impossible now. Most of the conflicts of modern history have to do with different cultures coming into contact with one another and competing for natural resources. The British and the French in particular swiftly set up exploitative colonial systems that reaped benefits for hundreds of years. More recently, the American colonies, which consisted primarily of British settlers, decided not to be exploited by Britain any longer, as they were able to manage their own affairs. The U.S., however, copied the British model and continued to exploit slaves, who were used for inexpensive labor, and Native Americans, who were removed from their ancestral lands in order to make space for settlers and allow unfettered access to natural resources.

Because many early settlers of the U.S. came to escape religious persecution, the U.S. became the first major country to support the separation of church and state. Initially this may have had to do with the desire of immigrants to escape religious persecution, but eventually, because of the influx of people from diverse cultures, toleration of differing religious views on American soil became a necessity. It may be difficult for younger people to understand it now, but John F. Kennedy was a controversial presidential candidate in 1960 simply because he was Catholic.

My personal view is that there is currently little point in belonging to any religion. It is no longer necessary in the West to use religion to express one's affiliation with a group. This is not to say that religion has no significance. The medieval universities were primarily Christian, and much of modern Western civilization, including the sciences, developed within that tradition. There will always be church teachings that have some relevance, but I don't believe that any church has real authority, and scientific knowledge, though not always complete or satisfying, is still in the process of replacing church dogma. I consider large religious organizations to be on the verge of obsolescence.

One of the historical purposes of religion has been to provide a basis for moral authority and law. However, most church dogma is becoming irrelevant today. Particularly in monotheistic religions, once you take God out of the equation, there is nothing left to back up church ideology. After the emergence of Protestantism, erosion of church authority began to accelerate with the Enlightenment. In most developed countries today, the church plays no role in governance, and faith is treated as a private matter. Yet the transition away from church teachings in government is ongoing, and the conceptual basis of morality and law is still shifting.

Some now think of morality as a form of rationality, like Kant's categorical imperative. To me this is nonsense. It is more appropriate to look at human behavior first to determine the origin of moral behavior. I believe that its primary source is an instinct for group preservation. While there are indeed contexts in which rational self-interest may explain apparent moral behavior, I do not believe moral behavior would generally exist as a phenomenon were it not for a deeply implanted genetic predisposition that is supported and encouraged within human cultures. Because we are large, complex organisms, morality can only be loosely codified in our genetic makeup, and the resulting inconsistencies in individual behavior tend to mislead some into thinking of moral behavior as a rational choice. The fact is that, because of our complexity, any individual is capable of acting both morally and immorally while being fully aware of what constitutes right and wrong. I believe that it is a mistake to look for a source of morality beyond the context of human evolution and natural selection.

Another aspect of human life that ought to be examined in light of our knowledge of evolutionary processes is systems of governance. Here again I believe that we are in a transitional period. Possibly one of the most deeply-rooted instincts is to have a single leader such as a chief, king, pope or president. Although the Founding Fathers rejected the notion of monarchy, which they correctly associated with unfairness and the abuse of power, gradual increases in presidential power in the U.S. are probably to some extent indicative of an innate predisposition among humans to have concentrated sources of political and spiritual authority within their groups. This is an area where I think some of the ideas of the Enlightenment need reexamination.

In a nutshell, I believe that the concepts of governance that arose during the Enlightenment are shortsighted and incorrect, because they predated Darwin and place an unrealistic emphasis on human rationality. To make matters worse, subsequent political thinkers such as Karl Marx did not make any effort to incorporate Darwinian ideas into their thoughts and dismissed altogether the relevance of biology in the construction of political theories. The capitalist democracy is now the default system for most developed countries, and this state of affairs is probably little more than an accident of history. During the 18th and 19th centuries, many European groups that had undergone religious, political or economic repression were attracted to the U.S. because of the freedoms it offered, and because their circumstances improved dramatically here no one critically analyzed whether this was a sustainable model when seen from the vantage point of all of humanity. My view is that the U.S. started as a quick fix for social inequality in Europe and escaped scrutiny as a model only because the timeframe in which people judged its success was too short. Obviously it seemed perfect to those who were unemployed and starving when they found jobs, food and shelter after arriving. However, there is no evidence that the system set up in the U.S. is one that can last for a thousand years and be modeled throughout the world without ill effects.

The two main areas in which I think the American system has failed are environmental destruction and inequality. The success of the economy and the political system rests on pollution and the segmentation of society on the basis of wealth. As the largest polluter in the history of the world, the U.S. bears a proportionate share of the responsibility for anthropogenic global warming and the associated mass extinctions. And, as Thomas Piketty amply documents, wealth inequality is likely to increase if we remain on our current trajectory. The fact is that the Founding Fathers had no idea what the long-term consequences of pollution might be - they didn't even know that pollution could damage the planet - and their ideas about equality are unacceptable by modern standards. Slavery? No problem. Female votes? Forget it. From my point of view, these were not small errors in the plan that crept in through the cracks, but are symptomatic of a limited system that was created in an ad hoc manner and has already proven itself unfair and unsustainable.

I advocate an orderly transition to a post-capitalist society in which people live equally, fulfilling their eusocial instincts, but without the democratic system with which we are familiar. In my view, capitalism must end eventually, because any benefits that accrue from it are likely to be negated by its destructive effects. Once a certain technological level is reached - and we are probably very close - there will be very little need for further technological advancement, and it is conceivable that working for a living will become unnecessary. Currently the democratic process is intertwined with economics, and a large percentage of legislation, in the abstract, boils down to how wealth is to be distributed. If wealth were permanently equalized, most of what we now think of as democracy would serve no purpose. In the long run, I think that some sort of automated system containing equality algorithms may work best for mankind, with active democratic processes continuing mainly at the local level, where individual participation may remain relevant. Technologically, I don't think we're far from creating artificial intelligence that will be capable of thinking better than we can and that won't have private agendas like those that still infect politics. At the moment it is, if anything, unsettling to think that the people in the federal government in Washington, D.C. are determining our future. Any political system that isn't based on a deep understanding of human nature is destined to fail. Abuse of power is no less apparent in modern democracies than it was in the old European monarchies.

Résumé

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.


—Dorothy Parker

The Ache of Marriage

The ache of marriage:

thigh and tongue, beloved,
are heavy with it,
it throbs in the teeth

We look for communion
and are turned away, beloved,
each and each

It is leviathan and we
in its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside it

two by two in the ark of
the ache of it.


 —Denise Levertov

Lost in Translation

In the process of taking up poetry again, I have been rereading various poems in translation and am thinking about some of the problems associated with translation. Language has always troubled me. I was slow to talk, bad at learning other languages, and didn't read much until I went to college. Even now I am not usually talkative. In high school I preferred math and science because they were more precise than the other subjects. When I studied philosophy in college, my main interest was the clear expression of ideas in English.

It seems to me that ordinary prose can be translated from one language to another in a relatively straightforward way. There may be difficulties finding comparable terms, and some concepts may have more circulation in one language than another. The structures of the languages may differ, but it seems as if it would usually be fairly easy to translate the basic ideas in a sentence from one language to another. The translation of basic prose would not necessarily have to capture all of the subtleties, if any, in the original.

When greater precision in translation is required, as in fiction, essays or technical papers, difficulties begin to arise. Technical papers probably preempt many of the obstacles with the adoption of universal technical language that obviates the need for the translation of crucial content. Essays may include more subtleties than ordinary prose, but, assuming that both languages have traditions that include essay-writing, with attention to detail, translations can be made. Much larger problems must arise in the case of translating literary fiction. Here, the author may have used lyrical writing, unconventional word choices, slang, colloquialisms, obscure cultural references, unusual sentence structures, etc., that do not lend themselves readily to translation. I suspect that the results in translated fiction may tend to be somewhat unsatisfactory, since some aspects of the author's original intent may not survive in translation.

This brings me to poems, and I think that in many cases their translations must be complete disasters. When I read poems from other languages that have been translated into English, I often feel that they have a clunky, aesthetically grating quality and wonder what it would be like to experience them in the original. Similarly, I don't see how any of my favorite poems could survive translation into another language. Rhymes and rhythms may be impossible to duplicate. When a poet has fretted over each word, its position, the line breaks, the spacing and the punctuation within the poem, any change at all may instantly ruin the entire poem or at least divert its effect to something other than what the poet intended.

For this last reason I am inclined to read only poems that were originally composed in English. And in English it is tempting to read only those poems that are in close proximity in geography and time to the here and now. The farther away one gets, the more the uses of language diverge from the familiar, and correct interpretation becomes more problematic. Dictionaries are a recent invention, and even so they require periodic revisions if they are to maintain their accuracy.

Aware

When I opened the door
I found the vine leaves
speaking among themselves in abundant
whispers.
                   My presence made them
hush their green breath,
embarrassed, the way
humans stand up, buttoning their jackets,
acting as if they were leaving anyway, as if
the conversation had ended
just before you arrived.
                                             I liked
the glimpse I had, though,
of their obscure
gestures. I liked the sound
of such private voices. Next time
I'll move like cautious sunlight, open
the door by fractions, eavesdrop
peacefully.


 —Denise Levertov

Harlem

What happens to a dream deferred?

      Does it dry up
      like a raisin in the sun?
      Or fester like a sore—
      And then run?
      Does it stink like rotten meat?
      Or crust and sugar over—
      like a syrupy sweet?

      Maybe it just sags
      like a heavy load.

      Or does it explode?


—Langston Hughes

Poetry

As you may have noticed, I've started posting poems that I like. I have mixed feelings about poetry for several reasons. I was first introduced to it by an English teacher in high school who seems to have caused me to permanently revile nearly all English teachers, English majors and English departments. This teacher adopted annoying English affectations, though he was from Ohio. To make matters worse, my freshman roommate in college was an English major from Michigan who also adopted annoying English affectations. He once presented me with a poem that he had hand written on a piece of birch bark. By the end of my freshman year I was ready to become a serial killer of English majors.

There were other problems that I had with poetry. I often felt that there was no point to its ambiguity, and when it wasn't ambiguous it often struck me as uninteresting. Although my reading skills have improved since high school, I tend to react to poetry the same way that I used to. If a poem expresses an idea, it can usually be expressed more clearly in prose. If it expresses an observation, the same can be done in prose. I consider the concept of prose poetry an oxymoron. For me, poetry works best as an artistic formulation that combines language, perceptions, ideas and emotions in a way that can't be done well in prose, but sometimes can in fiction. There is some overlap between poetry and fiction, depending on the writing style of the author. This leaves a very narrow range for poetry, and in order to bother reading it at all I feel that it has to be of unusually high quality. The finer points of good poetry seem ineffable to me, and I doubt that they can be taught. In this regard I lump poetry in with fiction and dismiss the value of writing programs.

During my fiction-reading period that started in the late 1980's, I also delved into poetry somewhat. I read a couple of anthologies and found little to like. The first poet who struck me as good was Denise Levertov. However, after reading several volumes of her poems, I decided that I only liked a handful. I also liked Emily Dickinson's oddness and consider her a genuine poetic genius, if there is such a thing. But even in her case most of her poems are duds in my opinion. There was part of the poem "Come, Words, Away" by Laura Riding that intrigued me for some time, but I don't think her work holds up well. Years ago I read some Shelley and Rilke (it was recited at my wedding in 1974) and thought they were good, but I don't think they're as good as Levertov or Dickinson. After moving to Vermont I read most of Robert Frost's poems, a couple of which were familiar from high school, and though I liked two or three of them, I think he was essentially a linguistically awkward poet who could have said almost everything better in prose if he knew how to write.

This last comment on Frost ties in with a lot of what I think is wrong with contemporary poetry. The impetus behind writing poetry is the desire for self-expression. Especially now that formal structure is unnecessary in poems, every Tom, Dick and Harry (or Megan, Caitlin and Heather), regardless of their knowledge or skill, can write a poem and be praised for it. While it might be possible to pick out amateur poems from a collection that also included poems written by major contemporary poets, I think the standards are low, and the published poets may in many cases simply be lucky or have out-marketed their competition. Although I can't be counted among the cognoscenti of poetry, I often find what is expressed in the poems of leading poets to be of little or no significance or interest. They frequently pick pedestrian subjects and seem unperceptive to me. On rereading "Daddy," Sylvia Plath's most famous poem, though I acknowledge that she exhibits some skill there, the poem is essentially a childish rant that probably doesn't do her father justice at all. I'd rather not hear from angry brats.

My theory is that there is a certain amount of serendipity involved in creating a good poem. It may not be possible for many poets to write five good poems in a lifetime. In a way a poet is like an op-ed columnist who has to crank out something new each week, and there isn't enough happening in their total environment for this to work consistently. I think everything worked when Denise Levertov wrote "Living," but that that was not a common occurrence in her life. I won't go into detail describing what works in that poem, because it would feel like a desecration to me.

Living

The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.

The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.

A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily

moves his delicate feet
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go.

Each minute the last minute.


—Denise Levertov

Economic Development in Vermont

One of the very few people who have responded to my poll requested that I write about a topic that often comes up in local discussion: the shortage of well-paying jobs in Vermont. It is difficult to find them here because the state has relatively little industry compared to the surrounding states. There is a large IBM plant in Essex Junction, but the primary state industry is tourism. Some counties are agricultural; Addison County, where I live, has significant dairy and beef farming, and apples and maple syrup are produced in several counties. Wood and mining industries still flourish, and in recent years craft breweries and whiskey distilleries have been growing, but none of these employ many workers. Most of the jobs are tourism-related and don't pay well.

There are historical reasons for the current state of economic affairs in Vermont. Few came early on compared to other states, as the remote, landlocked location was not optimal for industrialization. Many of the early settlers were farmers from nearby states; they soon found out that the soil and climate are not optimal for most crops and joined the migration to the Midwest. Not many industries thrived here, and the rate of population growth significantly lagged behind that of the surrounding states. The population here has multiplied 4.1 times since 1800, compared to 33.1 times for New York, 15.5 times for Massachusetts and 7.2 times for New Hampshire.  As the economy boomed along the coast, Vermont became a vacation retreat. In the 1960's, Vermont gained a counterculture image, and wealthy people from other states began to move here, shifting state politics from conservative to liberal. As in other parts of the country, liberals emphasize protection of the environment and quality-of-life issues, while conservatives emphasize economic growth and wealth creation. To be sure, few Vermont political conservatives resemble Tea Partiers, and they don't correspond closely to the contemporary Republicans in Washington, D.C. A liberal political environment makes it harder to attract new businesses here than to pro-business states.

As a retiree transplant, I oppose wholesale economic development in Vermont. First, speaking as an individual, I came here for the low population density, the pleasant physical environment and the like-mindedness of the people. Having seen firsthand what happened when economic development hit areas such as Indianapolis, Indiana and Schaumburg, Illinois, I would definitely move somewhere else if that were to happen here. I would vote against strong economic growth purely out of self-interest. As far as the status of the unemployed or underemployed is concerned, it has been a fact of life for centuries that people go to where there are jobs, not vice versa. The breadwinners in my family, including me, have done that for generations, so I don't think of it as a punishment to impose it on others. Those who insist on living in a place without jobs are behaving like narcissists if they think they have a right to both a good job and the living situation of their choice. That privilege has been a rarity for most of recorded history.

Second, on a more fundamental level, this topic touches on what I perceive to be serious flaws in our economic and political systems. Neither democracy nor capitalism deals with the consequences of economic development on a long-term basis. Because of economic growth and population increases, the U.S. is not the same country that it was in 1776. Economic growth has historically damaged the environment and contributed to overpopulation across the globe, and the warnings of Thomas Malthus have generally been ignored only because the human race has thus far managed to survive in spite of them. Few seem willing to admit that the country and the world might be better places if they more closely resembled Vermont than New Jersey. It is certainly no coincidence that many of the retirees here moved from that state.

Most of my childhood was spent in a suburb of New York City, and though I didn't understand it at the time, I felt that I was not getting enough exposure to the outdoors. After leaving for college, I developed a sense of relief at being able to live in uncongested places with woods and fields, which, it now seems to me, more closely approximate the kind of environment to which we are adapted. I think the same is true for most people, whether they realize it or not. This takes on significance when you consider that it is a fact that has been almost ignored since the country's inception. Most of the population now lives in or near cities.

Policymakers and economists chuckle to themselves whenever someone suggests that less economic growth would be beneficial. However, economic growth is usually accompanied by population growth. Currently, the world population is projected to reach about 9 billion by 2050, almost ten times the estimated world population of 1800. Ten thousand years ago, a blink of an eye in geological terms, it is estimated that our ancestors inhabited a world with a population of only 4 million. The fact that we have survived this growth does not imply that it is desirable. Rather it has contributed to an illusion of normalcy where none should exist.

I view the world as our deteriorating habitat, with diminishing pockets of habitability. Though I feel fortunate to be able to live in a desirable state within a major economic and military power, I see no reason to support American ideology, which I have never believed. Directly or indirectly, many of the world's woes are connected to conflicting groups that have been forced into contact with each other by overcrowding. Small groups can't wage wars with people whom they don't know exist, neither can they seriously deplete world resources or create global warming. When people aren't forced to live and work in cramped quarters, they can have environments in which they feel comfortable and never encounter conflicting ideologies.

Finally, I am not opposed to all economic development. Here in Middlebury a process is in place to create a small number of jobs that do not impinge upon the existing nature of the town, which still operates much as it did in 1800.

The Meaning of Human Existence

I just finished reading the book of the above title by Edward O. Wilson. He is my favorite science writer because he writes well, has the perspective of a naturalist, tends to be honest, and is willing to address big questions. There is little new here, and several of the chapters appeared earlier as separate essays. However, this is a good summary of his views on humanity if you're unfamiliar with them.

Wilson's primary competence is in entomology, and he is a world expert on ants. This led him to study social behavior in the animal kingdom, and eventually he connected his findings to humans. He has noted the evolutionary advantage held by eusocial species and how it relates to us. Eusocial insects make up most of the biomass of all living insects, and humans have similarly come to dominate the planet.

As a writer of popular science books, Wilson has a history of running into trouble with both the general public and the scientific community. He has been accused of overgeneralizing ever since the publication of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975, in which he first drew the connection between insects and humans. People don't like being told that they have instincts similar to ants or how they evolved to their present state. In the early years, he was a victim of political correctness. He was accused of supporting misogyny, racism and eugenics, none of which was true, and a protesting Marxist once poured a pitcher of water on his head. More recently he has been criticized by the evolutionary biology community for discarding their sacred principle of inclusive fitness and replacing it with what he calls group selection or multi-level selection. In the appendix of the current book he summarizes research that supports his position.

Some chapters are more convincing than others in this book. While it is sprinkled with interesting facts about various insect species, the main subject is humans. One of Wilson's more recent ideas is that people tend to be both good and evil in the traditional senses in a predictable eusocial way. We are usually altruistic when it comes to defending our group against other groups, but within our own group we may act out of self-interest. This seems somewhat plausible to me. For example, some people travel to distant regions where they will be killed thinking that they are defending their own country, while at home they may lie on job applications, cheat on their income taxes and steal their best friends' girlfriends. Within the U.S. itself there are sub-groups that compete, such as the Tea Party and the Democrats. Wilson places a great deal of emphasis on the role that group affiliation plays in behavior, and it rings true. Perhaps the most convincing passages, to me anyway, have to do with religion. I completely agree with Wilson, who says that religious groups, insofar as they engage in destructive activities, are currently one of the most disruptive forces in the world. Basically, most religious ideas regarding the nature of the universe represent utter stupidity in light of the findings of science. Here, Wilson hopes that the differences can someday be talked out, but that seems highly unlikely. He laments, as I do, that all political discourse in this country requires respect for conventional religious views, no matter how ridiculous they are.

Wilson's newest ideas aren't necessarily his best. He devotes a chapter to what he thinks intelligent extraterrestrials are like. In this vein he assumes that the chemical and biological processes of the habitable planets within a few hundred light years from here will produce intelligent beings, if they do so at all, that are quite similar to us. Those that we may eventually come into contact with will not be interested in our science and technology, and he seems to think that they will be cultural hobbyists who will derive pleasure from finding out about us. Colonization would not be on their minds, because of the risks on Earth associated with organisms and ecosystems to which they are not adapted. Furthermore, he does not believe that it is advisable, either to us or to aliens, to physically enhance ourselves to excess. It is possible that Wilson is right about this, but he is so speculative that I put little credence in his views here. We seem to be approaching evolutionary crossroads, and do not yet know whether some humans will turn themselves into superhumans, which would contradict Wilson's expectations. Similarly, I think it is quite possible that intelligent extraterrestrials may have no interest whatsoever in humans; they may not want to visit Earth, remotely or in person. I agree with Wilson, though, that they probably do exist.

Another point that Wilson brings up that is of interest to me is the current dichotomy between the sciences and the humanities. This was the main topic in his earlier book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. As a scientist, he is most charitable towards the humanities and thinks that they are our future, because scientific knowledge is accumulating so rapidly that it will soon slow down and become less relevant to our daily lives. However, he doesn't give a free pass to those who study the humanities either. He traces, correctly I think, a schism between the two domains that dates back to the Romantics in the early nineteenth century. They diverted the path of the Enlightenment and created the "two cultures" described by C.P. Snow in 1959. From Wilson's point of view, scientists need to round out their perspective by studying the humanities, and those in the humanities need to understand science better. Although I have interests in both camps, in recent years I have been deeply disappointed by the lack of engagement with the real world by practitioners of various disciplines in the humanities.

I have to say that Wilson is one of the few public intellectuals for whom I have great respect. Although he has and admits to weaknesses as a human being, he rose to his current sphere of influence through honest hard work and a genuine sense of curiosity. Frankly I don't see anyone comparable in the conventional cohort of public intellectuals, including the contributors to the NYRB. Most academics are comparatively worthless when it comes to discussing the big-picture questions and problems facing humanity. Considering that this type of discussion rarely occurs on TV, and never among politicians or well-known public figures, the state of affairs is scandalous. It is appalling to me that so few people attempt to address them. When Wilson, who is 85, leaves the scene, there may be no one to replace him.

A narrow Fellow in the Grass

A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides—
You may have met Him—did you not
His notice sudden is—

the Grass divides as with a Comb—
A spotted shaft is seen—
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on—

He likes a Boggy Acre
A Floor too cool for Corn—
Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot—
I more than once at Noon
Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone—

Several of Nature's People
I know, and they know me—
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality—

But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone—


—Emily Dickinson

Entrepreneurs

My Missouri friend, Greg, and his wife, Frances, just visited us for three days. They arrived in a gigantic pickup truck pulling an Airstream trailer that is as large as some people's houses. We showed them around the area, and one of the activities was a tour of the Maple Landmark plant, which makes wooden toys and is a leader in the U.S. wooden toy market. It is a small family-owned business, and Frances saw parallels with the spa business that she and Greg own in Missouri. Entrepreneurs occupy an important role in American society, and I thought I'd take this opportunity to say something about them.

Frances began her spa business in Jefferson City, Missouri several years ago, and when Greg retired from his job managing the Missouri Medicaid program he joined in. The business grew gradually, and they opened a second spa in Columbia, Missouri. The company has been successful and now employs about 50 people, including Frances's daughter from a previous marriage, Kim, and Greg and Frances's daughter, Ariel, who is now a Vice President. They have been engrossed in running the business since its inception, and are now trying to wind down somewhat and prepare for a generational transition. This is proving to be problematic, partly because Kim is dysfunctional and married to an irresponsible, unreliable, unemployed husband while incompetently raising three children, ensuring the continuation of the white trash tradition in the next generation of the family. Frances and Kim have ongoing feuds and confrontations, with Frances usually on the losing end. She would like to help her grandchildren and see them often, and provides Kim with a job, but Kim routinely threatens to deny her access to the grandchildren. As I said to Greg, if it were me, Kim would be history, but this isn't my family. Ariel seems competent enough as an employee, but does not seem particularly interested in taking full responsibility at the company. Her husband has a well-paying job, so they don't need the money. During their visit, Greg and Frances were frequently interrupted by issues that were arising at the spa in their absence.

Despite some of the negatives associated with the spa, Greg and Frances seem to derive a great deal of satisfaction from it. Although they were well off without it, they are now becoming quite wealthy and are spending their money according to predictable nouveau riche patterns. In their case, that has involved extensive home renovations and the purchase of the Airstream, the truck, a tractor with attachments and two BMW's. Most of their drive to conspicuous consumption seems to have originated in Frances, who grew up poor, while Greg did not.

Frances enjoyed seeing the toy factory partly because it operated like one big family. It was started in the late 1970's by a local Vermont man who had taken up woodworking when he was a boy. The business continued to grow, and his mother and his grandmother, who is 95, still work there. We met them on our tour, since they have only 40 employees. Some of the jobs looked boring and highly repetitive, but many of the employees multitasked, which would reduce the tedium. Overall, they seemed happy. Their products are far more specialized than you might expect, and they are beating the competition, including China. From the outside, it looked like a pleasant place to work. Part of the appeal to Frances was the communal feeling and having three generations working together. She took a picture of the grandmother and sent it to Ariel to show her how fulfilling working in a family business can be.

My take on entrepreneurship isn't as sanguine. Americans tend to look at it at the individual level, in which it is possible to develop products and services in order to better the economic circumstances of themselves and their families. That in itself isn't necessarily bad, but when an entire economy is operated on that basis, many of the long-term consequences are, in my opinion, undesirable. Unnecessary goods and services come into existence, and successful small businesses tend to grow and merge, ending up as large, impersonal corporations. Most small businesses fail, and in the process become a waste of labor and materials. To use the examples here, I don't think it would make much difference to the country or the world if there were two less spas in Missouri and one less toy maker in Vermont. At the macro level, it seems risky and arbitrary to allow individuals to "grow their businesses" in order to meet their personal economic goals when the benefits to society are so marginal. Admittedly, an entrepreneur-friendly economy does lead to a certain amount of innovation which might not occur otherwise, but most of that innovation is of questionable value, and the end result seems to be large corporations which, unlike the cheerful family operations mentioned, take little or no responsibility toward people and systematically fire employees in order to reduce costs. The logical outcome of this kind of arrangement is the wealth inequality documented by Thomas Piketty in Capital. The fact is that the cumulative effects of the American Dream fantasy have been global pollution, national overpopulation, corporate manipulation of governance, high unemployment, and an emerging society of rich and poor. Furthermore, the capitalist model followed by the Western powers is associated with ideological conflicts and wars throughout the world.

On a personal level, I have always found entrepreneurial people somewhat offensive, if only because they tend to be aesthetically retarded. Although I like and appreciate Greg and Frances in certain respects, it is impossible for me to relate to many of their interests. Greg barely made it through college and reads low-grade science fiction for entertainment. He is still interested in UFO's, which is something I outgrew in high school. On vacation, Frances seems to have no interests beyond sightseeing and tourist trinkets. She is indifferent to the arts, which have strengths here, and local history. Neither of them ever does serious reading, and they show little interest in anyone outside their immediate families. To me, the scope of their thinking would feel like imprisonment.

George Eliot

Although I am off fiction for the most part, I can't have a blog without saying something about George Eliot. When I lived Dixon, Illinois, which is of little inherent interest unless you want to plumb the depths of how the character of a mediocre American president might have formed, in my spare time I began catching up on literature that I had never read and surveying newer fiction. This lasted for over two decades and extended almost to the present.

American literature did not impress me at all. I tried Henry James, Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner. More recent writers included Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, John Kennedy Toole, Carson McCullers, Vladimir Nabokov and Sylvia Plath. I also read contemporary fiction by T.C. Boyle, Jane Smiley, Sheila Schwartz, Lorrie Moore, Anne Tyler, Alison Lurie, Francine Prose, Cathleen Schine, Mona Simpson, Michael Cunningham, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Dan Chaon, Alice Munro (Canadian), Carol Shields (Canadian), Carl Hiaasen, Marilynne Robinson, Lauren Groff and Dave Eggers. Recently I read a short story by Willa Cather. Of the entire American group, I would say that The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers, is the only outstanding work. I could write an essay on what is wrong with Lorrie Moore, but would rather not. My overall perception has been that the U.S. has made less of a contribution than one would expect to the arts in general compared to many other countries, when you take into consideration its size and wealth, partly because it is a relatively new country, partly because of its emphasis on commerce and partly because its patrons have tended to be the nouveaux riches.

In European literature, I read some Dostoevsky and James Joyce that I had missed. I spent a lot of time on France, reading Victor Hugo, Balzac, George Sand, Flaubert, Zola and Proust. The only French contemporary whom I've read is Michel Houellebecq. British writers, besides George Eliot, included Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence (I had read two novels by Thomas Hardy much earlier). Recent British writers were A.S. Byatt, David Lodge, A.L. Kennedy and Jeanette Winterson (I skipped Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and others). I also read a lot of Kafka, some Milan Kundera and a little Witold Gombrowicz. I have little interest in German, Spanish or Italian culture, and therefore skipped those countries. While I find flaws in all writers, my favorites are George Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Emily Brontë and Gustave Flaubert.

As for the other continents, I've read very little. Last year I read a novel and short stories by the Peruvian Julio Ramon Ribeyro and thought some of his short fiction was very good. If I were to delve further into fiction, I suspect that South America may have a lot to offer. Yet, besides not being interested in fiction, I am not particularly interested exploring unfamiliar cultures. The above list does not include fiction that I had read earlier. For historical context, I wasn't inspired at all by any fiction until my junior year in college, when I studied early twentieth century Russian fiction, not mentioned here.

While discussing their preferences in fiction, few people go to the trouble of summarizing everything they've read, which admittedly would be cumbersome. I listed some of that information in order to provide the context of what I know and what I don't know. Thus, if someone wants to challenge my position that, say, Jack Kerouac, is not the greatest writer in history, they have an obligation to first read George Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. One of the reasons why I'm reluctant to read fiction is that people, reviewers in particular, plug books that I almost invariably end up deciding are a waste of time if I read them. If every review included access to a list of all of the books ever read by the reviewer and which of those books he or she found to be excellent, it would be much easier for me to determine whether I should read the book under review. You can apply that same standard to what I say in this post. Fiction is a vast topic, and everyone's knowledge about it is bound to be limited in one way or another.

In an earlier post I discussed the difficulty of establishing aesthetic merit. That applies here too, so I'll mention some of the factors that go into my literary tastes. I think what I like best is long fiction that realistically interweaves the lives of people in a well-defined environment and covers a long time period. Obviously this is something that can't be done well in short fiction, which is why I often see the characters in short stories as stick figures who may never be able to break out of their comic book existences. Because of mobility, population growth and development in much of the West, it has become increasingly difficult to approximate the comparatively stable environments that existed up to the late nineteenth century, which is when the novel probably peaked for my purposes. That period also stands out because by then the novel had had time to mature as an art form. Beginning with World War I, the world descended into instability, and the art world changed its focus from the transition away from agricultural life to the transition to post-industrial life, which then became modernism. The modern world has a less static basis than the world of the past, making it much easier to fudge on realism: fewer people know what's going on, and a writer can now just make things up with little accountability. When challenged, they can call it artistic license, and when all else fails they can drum up critics who will call them artistic geniuses. The public, not knowing any better, takes it all in, hook, line and sinker.

For someone who prefers realism, most modern fiction is a disaster. I don't care about the nuances of one person's perceptions of Dublin, especially if he is a jaundiced literary person, so James Joyce is of little use to me. Kafka's imagination has its merits, as do his writing skills, but I find him repetitive and uninformative; in a way, his life and works are a testimony to his never having figured things out. Postmodern fiction has even less to say for a number of reasons; it often isn't well-grounded in real places or people and simulates them in a wholly unsatisfactory way, much like the empty visual art of Andy Warhol.

* * *

During my fiction period, I read that Virginia Woolf had called Middlemarch, George Eliot's best known work, "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," which captured my attention, since, in case you haven't noticed, I have a serious streak. When I began to read it, I became enchanted. I think I can say that it is the only novel I've ever read that creates a realistic world containing a variety of plausible characters who each have their distinct problems and are making their ways through life. The narrator seemed so omniscient that I sometimes felt as if the book were written by God. Moreover, it convincingly portrayed the lives of a broad swath of people, from peasants to the bourgeoisie to criminals to intellectuals, something that I had never seen before. It became my favorite novel, and I went on to read all of George Eliot's fiction and several biographies.

Most of her fiction, including the earliest, still holds up well. Her writing style, with long, convoluted sentences, appeals to me, as it did to Proust, but is not compelling to the majority of contemporary readers. As pre-modern fiction, you don't enter people's heads and access their thoughts directly, but that is made up for by close observation, which is at the heart of George Eliot's skill. Her earliest works were so accurate that readers could easily identify some of the actual people on whom her characters were based. To me, George Eliot's life is a valuable study in what I think it takes to be a good writer, and once this is understood there isn't much of a puzzle left about why I find most fiction unsatisfactory.

I attribute much of George Eliot's success as a writer to the fact that she had lived a full life, encompassing a variety of experiences and challenges, before she began to write fiction at age 36. Her father was an estate manager in Warwickshire, where she was exposed to a variety of people when she accompanied him on his rounds. Because she was not pretty, her father provided her with a better education than was the norm, perhaps in anticipation that she would not attract a husband. This prompted a lifelong intellectual curiosity that eventually led her to become an editor at the Westminster Review.

Her love life seems to have been choppy and difficult due to her preference for intellectual men. She was deeply hurt when Herbert Spencer dumped her, but soon developed a relationship with G.H. Lewes. Lewes could not marry her because he could not obtain a divorce from his wife, Agnes Jervis, who had cuckolded him with his friend Thornton Leigh Hunt, who fathered four of her children. Lewes was technically complicit in his wife's adultery, because he had knowingly accepted one of Hunt's children as his own. George Eliot and Lewes scandalized Victorian society by living together unmarried as man and wife until Lewes died in 1878. Lewes's encouragement and skill as her agent played an important role in her eventual literary success. In 1880 she created more gossip when she married an admirer, the not-so-intellectual John Cross, who was twenty years her junior. On their honeymoon in Venice, Cross jumped from a balcony in their hotel rooms into the Grand Canal. The official explanation was that he had had a sudden fit of depression. Others, Gore Vidal in particular, think that Cross was gay and perhaps had misjudged his responsibilities as a husband to his then-elderly wife. George Eliot became ill later that year and died on December 22.

I visited her grave in Highgate Cemetery in 2002. 

If a Lion Could Talk I

Ludwig Wittgenstein made many statements that became famous in philosophical circles. At the conclusion of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus he wrote "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." This is the odd ending to the quasi-logical tract that he wrote while he was a soldier and prisoner during World War I, which later became his Ph.D. thesis at Cambridge. Towards the end of his career he wrote, "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." This was published posthumously in Philosophical Investigations.

The "If a lion could talk" statement occurred in the context of Wittgenstein's thoughts about language games. Although it is an ambiguous sentence, it is generally thought to mean that the frame of reference of a lion is so different from that of a human that lion language would be unintelligible to us. The theory is that meaning is related to the use of words, and that lions, if they could speak, would have entirely different uses for language than we do.  I have tended to agree with this idea but was thinking about it again recently and am no longer sure that I do. Language involves more than words and grammar: it contains symbols. Most other animals have little or no capacity to understand symbols, but some do. I found it instructive that no animals besides humans, including all other primates, understand the meaning of pointing, with the exception of dogs. Wolves don't either. Among humans, pointing is a symbolic shorthand used to indicate that an object worthy of attention is located in a specific direction. In the case of people it might be the location of a gas station. In the case of dogs, it might be the location of prey. For all intents and purposes, a pointing dog might be saying "There are quail in these bushes."

What is different about the case of dogs is that, through habituation and breeding, they have interacted with humans enough to understand some basic symbolic communication, which I consider a form of language. Thus, in theory, if a dog could speak in sentences, we might understand some of what it says exactly. I'm sure many dog owners would agree. Some cat owners would probably be able to understand at least part of what their cats were saying if they could speak: "I'm hungry" or "I want to play," for example. Mutatis mutandis, the same might be true for lions, making Wittgenstein technically incorrect.

This brings me to Noam Chomsky, whom I recently saw speaking in a video about artificial intelligence. Apparently he thinks it isn't going anywhere anytime soon. He believes that humans have unique genetics that support language, and that we are nowhere near figuring out how it works. Since language is central to our thinking abilities, Chomsky is also skeptical about our ability to create meaningful artificial intelligence that might actually rival our own intelligence. According to him, there may never be a singularity. I am not up to date on research in the fields of language simulation by machines and artificial intelligence, but I suspect that Chomsky will be proven wrong. For example, if computers can be taught to reconstruct languages based on their exposure to grammar and word usage, it seems to me that they might be able to use language just as well as humans. One of the advantages of computer learning is that if a process works at all, it can be sped up and developed rapidly simply because of the processing power and memory capacity of a large computer. While an infant might pick up grammar and usage gradually over a period of years through real-time experiences, a computer might work its way through an enormous database in a short amount of time, permitting more rapid language acquisition than humans. Once computers are able to perform a broad range of learning activities comparable to humans, it seems probable to me that they will quickly surpass humans in cognitive functions.

Whether that will happen or not remains to be seen. At the moment I am interested in the reasons why Chomsky, more so than Wittgenstein, thinks that human language is unique. It seems to be because we are the only animal that we know of that has true language. Certainly language has given us an enormous advantage, but Chomsky seems to project a sort of hubris about it. If you look into Chomsky, he is quite an odd fellow. By contemporary standards he is an off-the-charts radical who advocates anarchism and the end of the nation state. The reality is that he is a dyed-in-the-wool Enlightenment thinker who still thinks that man is the center of the universe. I think this is a better explanation for his minimization of the potential value of research in artificial intelligence than any particular knowledge that he may have of the subject. What I have noticed over the years is that even when an intellectual legitimately reaches prominence through hard work and important discoveries, once he is given a pulpit from which to speak, his ideas for the public often bear no relationship to his research and in fact may be ideas that he arbitrarily absorbed as a teenager. In Chomsky's case, he was strongly influenced by a radical uncle when he was growing up. Most of his political ideas originated then and have nothing to do with his research. Thus, as I suspect is true in the case of many public intellectuals, there is no direct link between their areas of expertise and the public opinions for which they are known.

The Obama Persona

I haven't written much about politics or news events, because I don't pay much attention to them other than reading headlines and watching the PBS NewsHour. However, I did see Barack Obama's speech on ISIS last night and will take this opportunity to make a few comments.

I had high hopes for Obama based on his 2004 convention speech for John Kerry. In 2008 he was obviously a better choice than John McCain. But over time I have come to find him unbearable. It seems impossible to know, and it is therefore essentially irrelevant, what his true worldview may be. His speeches lack authenticity to the extent that they are carefully scripted, and are off-putting to the extent that they may accurately convey his thoughts.

Obama's speeches are always laced with words, phrases and thoughts that I find offensive. He is fond of invoking evil and American values and using religious language to make his points, and I find it jarring. His job isn't to combat evil, which, in my opinion, is primarily a social construct. American values are not something that the U.S. has a right to impose on others. And religion should be removed from all political speeches, because this is a secular country.

Even if you accept the premise that the U.S. has a responsibility to maintain world order, I don't think that Obama frames issues such as ISIS appropriately. There is always an allusion to potential attacks on U.S. soil and a suggestion that this must be prevented at all costs. I don't think, for example, that each American life potentially saved is worth, say, one billion dollars. Obama, as far as I know, never discusses estimates of potential American casualties that might result from inaction. Furthermore, he, and politicians generally, do not mention that prolonged attempts to stabilize parts of the Middle East may never succeed regardless of any actions we take. It always seems to come down to good guys versus bad guys and killing or destroying the bad guys. In this respect, Barack Obama isn't much different from George W. Bush.

In my view, the assassination of Osama bin Laden, while technically justifiable, was primarily a publicity stunt. As a strategic matter, it was irrelevant that bin Laden died, because he had no operative function at the time. It immediately became an Obama talking point used to highlight his leadership skills and effectiveness in bringing bin Laden to justice, despite the fact that there was no trial and that it violated Pakistani sovereignty. As in the case of countless drone strikes, Obama was the judge, jury and de facto executioner. Should he be applauded for actions like these?

One aspect of Obama's new initiative that disturbs me is that it may have been precipitated in part by public opinion. Apparently it isn't that big a deal if thousands of Syrians and Iraqis are dying, but the entire U.S. policy in the Middle East must change instantly when Americans become upset about the beheadings of two American journalists. It is true that Obama may merely be using this as an opportunity to present his plan, but I find the linking of major foreign policy initiatives to small-scale events that happen to have had an emotional impact on the American public inappropriate.

Whenever I see Obama speak, I sense that everything he says has been concocted. Is he religious? I don't know. Does he think that the American model of capitalism is good for the world? If so, I disagree with him. Does he think that America's unemployment problem will be fixed by providing people with better educations? If so, he is probably incorrect.

The overall impression I have is that Obama is a mask. He acts as if he is attempting to channel the beliefs of the American public and to speak for them, but is that his role? I don't think so. In the process he often seems to suspend critical judgment, which might show just how irrational the public is and how public opinion can be wrong. Obama almost seems to have an identity disorder that prevents him from voicing his own views, and this signifies to me a lack of responsibility, or at a minimum brings into question his suitability for the job. The president is supposed to make decisions, not seek consensus. He seems to search for the view least likely to receive strong public criticism and then promote it, rather than make his own analysis and convince others of its merits, and as a consequence many justifiably see him as a feckless president. He exhibits the kind of behavior that could be simulated by an algorithm that rates ideas based on their popularity - or the number of "likes" they get on Facebook. Such predictability indicates a weakness in originality, and, more seriously, a deficiency in understanding.

Notes on Feminism

Throughout most of my adult life, it has been politically incorrect to say anything negative about feminism. Feminism is a broad topic that covers a long time period and a large geographical area, but I think of it mainly in terms of its second wave in the U.S. during the 1970's. When I was in college in the Midwest during the late 1960's and early 1970's, attitudes were still patriarchal, and even though political activism and sexual liberation were in vogue, men still behaved in what would now be considered a sexist manner, and most women went along with it. For that reason, it was difficult to argue convincingly against the basic concepts of feminism, which had been around at least since Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792.

In my current thinking, equality is one of the few organizing principles that continue to be valid for humans. I think it has a basis in evolutionary biology, and belief in equality can be considered a basic human trait that stems from our predisposition to belong to cooperative groups. If E.O. Wilson is correct, natural selection for humans is based on groups, not individuals or selfish genes. The theory of group selection has its detractors, but I agree with Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, who support Wilson when they say that "in the human species, a pro-social psychology arose by cultural group selection and gene-culture coevolution." This can be construed to make a strong case for equality, while other popular ideas such as democracy or capitalism seem comparatively arbitrary, transient and weak. Democracy is primarily a political system that attempts to enforce equality among conflicting groups. Capitalism is an economic system that is perceived as natural to many people only because it tends to break down society into different groups, allowing one group to feel justified in exploiting another. Earlier, slaveholders exploited slaves, and now corporations exploit workers. In a realized state of equality among all people, neither democracy nor capitalism would be necessary. It could be argued that the remaining world conflicts are related to the difficulty of convincing all people that they belong to the same group.

Although I support feminism to the extent that it advocates equality, it is difficult for me to overlook some of the destructive effects that it has had on my life. I think it helped generate interpersonal chaos in my generation. Previous generations were pressured to marry and remain married, and they usually did. Greater equality for women has allowed more women to enter the workforce and attain economic and social independence without male support and approval. In my experience, many women in the transitional group of the 1970's unconsciously absorbed both the old and new ways while they were growing up. On one hand, they saw their fathers as solid breadwinners who took care of their mothers in an unequal system that bestowed greater authority to males. On the other hand, they thought that they could live independently and make free choices without male interference. The upper-middle-class women with whom I became familiar sometimes developed unrealistic expectations as a result of exposure to both systems. They thought that they could have the security and social prestige accorded to their mothers with the support of their uxorious fathers, while simultaneously disdaining dependence on men.

In the case of my ex-wife, she deeply resented parental pressure to follow their guidelines. She was forced to study nursing under the unstated presumption that she would meet and marry a successful professional and not work. That was the model of her parents' generation. She rebelled and married an unconventional philosophy major, but when it became apparent that this would not lead to socioeconomic status comparable to what her mother had, she got a divorce. Later, when her idealized picture of life as a single mother with two children didn't materialize and her relationship with her daughter deteriorated, she defaulted to a strategy that centered on self-preservation. In her later life she is still single, with no partner and strained relations with her siblings and her daughter.

While feminism corresponded with necessary social changes, on a personal level it was disruptive to my life. I find that many educated American women in my age group retain elements of both pre- and post-feminism ideology, though the two are not compatible. In my opinion, this impedes their ability to have good relationships with men, a problem that was less common among their mothers, who in hindsight often seem happier and far more realistic.

Panic Attacks

In 1997 I had lived in Dixon, Illinois for ten years. Since I had little in common with anyone there, for my mental health I used to participate in the UC Berkeley summer programs in Europe. That year I spent three weeks in Oxford studying cathedrals and abbeys. It was my second trip to Oxford, having studied Anglo-Saxon archaeology in 1993. In 1997 I met Kimberly there; she was studying historical English journals.

We were both looking for changes in our lives. I was sick of Dixon, and it wasn't a good location for my daughter, who had just finished tenth grade at Dixon High School. Staying there, she might have turned out the way some of her friends later did, becoming a topless dancer or an unwed mother. Kimberly had worked for ten years in the Religious Studies Department at UC Santa Barbara and had recently broken off an engagement.

In the early fall, Kimberly visited us in Dixon. During that trip, she suddenly had a small panic attack. I don't recall what precipitated it, but it was the first of many to follow. Nevertheless, we began to develop a tentative plan to pursue the relationship. I started to look for jobs in the Chicago area, and I planned a trip to see Kimberly in Santa Barbara over the Christmas holidays. As it happened, I got a job offer in Wheeling, Illinois, near Chicago, and accepted it over the phone while I was in Santa Barbara. In January, 1998 my daughter and I moved to Lake Forest, Illinois. Kimberly soon quit her job, moved to Wilmette, Illinois and shortly thereafter found a new job nearby at Northwestern University in Evanston.

The next panic attack that I distinctly remember occurred when Kimberly came over to our apartment in Lake Forest to watch a movie. We watched River's Edge, starring Keanu Reeves, with a humorous cameo by Dennis Hopper. I had seen the film previously and liked it. It is a dark film, but very well done, and an observant study of teenage culture in a small Western town. However, it was too upsetting for Kimberly to watch, and it triggered a panic attack. She couldn't stand watching it, became extremely agitated, and finally asked me if I had ever killed anyone.

The relationship lasted for about three years, and was punctuated by panic attacks, which diminished in intensity over time as she became accustomed to me. One of the things I liked about Kimberly was that she knew herself well and provided specific instructions about what I should do on occasions such as birthdays, Valentine's Day, Christmas, etc. She knew exactly what might upset her and had learned to speak up about it in advance whenever possible. I came to see that she suffered from an anxiety disorder and tended to resolve her issues by being a control freak, but I appreciated having much of the guesswork taken out of the relationship, because women are often far more capricious in their expectations.

Although I attempted to accommodate Kimberly as best I could, it wasn't really possible to save the relationship. My daughter at that time was in the process of stabilizing after a rebellious adolescence during which her mother had in effect kicked her out twice. Kimberly was ill-equipped to deal with children. She was unable to develop rapports with them and was easily disturbed by unruliness. At that time, my son was having difficulties living with my ex-wife, and Kimberly was troubled by him too. Shortly after the Columbine High School massacre, he was visiting in Lake Forest, and the three of us went to a Cubs game. My son's behavior seemed to precipitate a small panic attack roughly based on the idea that he might become a murderer because he played violent video games. By then I was getting a little fed up with Kimberly, who obviously had led a sheltered life and hadn't been challenged much. She had never lived with anyone, never been married and never had children, though in 1999 she was 43. After a bad experience as a schoolteacher, she had avoided demanding jobs and lived like a college student. Although she was very frugal, she was subsidized by her father, who was a retired engineer.

There were other things that Kimberly didn't like about the relationship, but she tended to discuss them with female confidantes, clergymen and psychologists rather than with me. Religion was of considerable interest to her, and she had played at being a Roman Catholic and an Episcopalian. I, on the other hand, have been an atheist continuously since about age 14. Ordinarily this did not produce a conflict, because she only had half-baked religious ideas and was pretty smart; I suspected that at the back of her mind she knew that it was all bunk. As part of her control freak strategy, it suited her to think that God was providing order to the apparent chaos of everyday life.

In August, 2000, during the final build-up to the end of the relationship, we went on a two-week vacation to Switzerland, with side trips to Annecy, France and Tremezzo, Italy. There were things I did that upset her on the trip, but she said nothing at the time. Apparently it bothered her a lot that I had walked ahead of her in the hills around Gruyere when she had a leg cramp. Later, in November, it came to a crescendo. She had thought over the relationship and discussed it with others, and then went through a major anxiety episode, during which she became an insomniac requiring medical attention. Shortly after that, she unilaterally broke off the relationship without discussion.

While I was hurt and saddened by the breakup, I was assuaged by my awareness of her apparent mental illness, and there was in fact little surprise, because there had been clear intermittent warnings of the potential demise of the relationship ever since its inception. However, I misjudged the severity of Kimberly's self-protective regimen that ensued. I mistakenly thought that we would still see each other occasionally and discuss aspects of the relationship in a way that might increase our understanding so that we might each benefit from that knowledge in the future. That was not to be, and I haven't spoken to her since November, 2000. We exchanged a few e-mails, but she no longer replies to mine.

What has stuck with me over the years is Kimberly's unwillingness to communicate. In this context I find it completely unacceptable. How does one honestly erase three years of one's life without any accountability? It is deep hypocrisy to espouse Christian or similar values while blotting out a person who is at odds with your personal mythology. If you've ever read Martin Buber, Kimberly has made me an It.

As far as I know, Kimberly now lives alone in a condominium on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Genius

When I was growing up, I got the impression that a genius was a person who had an extremely high IQ and could figure things out much better than most people. A model genius was Isaac Newton, who made astounding advances in physics and developed a new branch of mathematics in the process. I thought that you either had it or you didn't, and if you had it you would get high grades and high SAT scores and go to an elite university. A girl in my high school class was like that; she skipped the twelfth grade and departed for M.I.T. In those days I didn't read much, and I wasn't fully aware that someone might also be called an artistic or literary genius. In any case, genius then seemed to me to be an innate characteristic.

Over the years I came to realize that genius is largely culturally defined and, particularly in the U.S., the term shows up in many different areas of human success. There are business geniuses such as Steve Jobs and pop music geniuses such as Bob Dylan. This really complicates things, and you have to look closely at each "genius" to see exactly what is going on. I think Jobs was an extraordinarily ambitious marketing guy with good aesthetic sensibilities and psychopathic tendencies. Bob Dylan was an extraordinarily ambitious musician who fortuitously resorted to his innate linguistic skills when he saw that his musical skills, physical presence and voice would be insufficient. Both of these men were single-minded and probably would not have been particularly successful without that trait.

I've spent a lot of time ruminating over Bob Dylan. He stood out as a pop artist mainly because he had good lyrics. However, on close examination it becomes apparent that during his rise to success his lyrics were tailored to meet market demand, and his persona was sculpted from elements stolen from other performers. In short, he was just an act. Within a full social context, Dylan closely resembles Steve Jobs, and there is a point at which their talent is inextricable from their will to succeed commercially.

As mentioned in an earlier post, aesthetic merit is something that is hard to pin down, and that becomes nearly impossible when you elevate it all the way to a "genius" level. In my view there are two different aspects to great writing. One is a pure linguistic facility, which varies greatly among writers and reaches a peak in writers such as Shakespeare and James Joyce. The other is a facility for reaching depth, and that is far more elusive. To me, poetic genius skirts around deep enigmas without being explicit. I wouldn't expect everyone to agree with me, and I don't read much poetry, but I've seen it in snippets of Emily Dickinson and Denise Levertov. In fiction I've seen depth in George Eliot, Dostoevsky, Flaubert and a few others. According to my taste, very few writers deserve to be called geniuses, and I would not include in that group Shakespeare or Joyce or the merely fluent and linguistically creative.

If you read my previous post, you will have seen that in the visual arts, genius has become entirely subject to contemporary cultural definition. Thus, while some collectors consider Andy Warhol a greater artist than Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Hughes won't hesitate to tell you that he thinks Warhol was an idiot. In this sense, "genius" means little more than "of great cultural significance." To my way of thinking, that diminishes the importance of genius to such a degree that it isn't even worth discussing.

I think a case can be made for genius in film-making, but it would be hard to reach a consensus. Moreover, film production is a group effort and usually occurs in a factory-like setting. Nevertheless, I think some of the subtle films of Eric Rohmer can be called works of genius; not so for any American director, except perhaps Stanley Kubrick (who moved to England!).

Music is probably the art that best accommodates the use of the word "genius." It can comfortably be applied to Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, but after that it gets fuzzy quickly. Is Stevie Wonder really a genius? I'm not sure.

With all this ambiguity I am tempted to revert back to my earlier understanding of "genius." However, that doesn't work either. It's fairly obvious that most of the smart people streaming into the top universities aren't much like Isaac Newton, even if they have good grades and high IQs. The majority of them go on to lead ordinary lives, while perhaps living in a higher socioeconomic bracket than most people. Similarly, if you look at the current crop of college professors and intellectuals, you probably won't find many Newtons or Einsteins in that group. Science is now much more of a cooperative activity than earlier and has few solitary players. In the writing programs there probably aren't any Flauberts or Dickinsons. As for the public intellectuals, on the whole they have been an enormous disappointment in recent decades.

The conclusion, then, is that, while genius may still be construed as a special talent that is confined to a small number of individuals, there is an irreducible element to it that at any given time depends on the prevailing social values. Thus, under the current conditions of late-stage capitalism and conspicuous consumption run wild, genius isn't what it used to be.