Robert Hughes on Andy Warhol

I've begun to read The Spectacle of Skill: Selected Writings of Robert Hughes. Hughes lived from 1938 to 2012, and these essays cover a variety of topics over a long period of time. Rather than reading it straight through, I'm going to jump around and read chapters that interest me. Perhaps because I hadn't been paying much attention to art journalism, I didn't notice Robert Hughes until recently. As he speaks in The Mona Lisa Curse documentary mentioned earlier, Hughes writes robustly and eloquently and displays a deep knowledge of his subject. He reminds me a little of Frank Rich, who used to write opinion pieces for The New York Times: he writes vigorously and reinforces each point. However, Hughes seems more interested in finding the truth than Rich, who often came across to me as a bombastic, ideological bully. I was particularly interested in reading what Hughes had to say about Andy Warhol, who was a key figure in the transition of the art world to a predominantly commercial enterprise. Hughes is worth reading for his prose alone, but he is even more valuable for his understanding and insights. I'll give you a few examples.

On the Factory, Warhol's famous studio, he writes:
Its silver-papered walls were a toy theater in which one aspect of the sixties in America, the infantile hope of imposing oneself on the world by terminal self-revelation, was played out. It had a nasty edge, which forced the paranoia of marginal souls into some semblance of style, a reminiscence of art. If Warhol's "Superstars," as he called them, had possessed talent, discipline, or stamina, they would not have needed him. But then, he would not have needed them. They gave him his ghostly aura of power. If he withdrew his gaze, his carefully allotted permissions and recognitions, they would cease to exist; the poor ones would melt back into the sludgy, undifferentiated chaos of the street, the rich ones end up in some suitable clinic.

On publicity:
Warhol was the first American artist to whose career publicity was truly intrinsic. Publicity had not been an issue in the forties and fifties. It might come as a bolt from the philistine blue, as when Life made Jackson Pollock famous; but such events were rare enough to be freakish, not merely unusual. By today's standards, the art world was virginally naive about the mass media and what they could do.

On the avant-garde:
Warhol did his best work at a time (1962-1968) when the avant-garde, as an idea and a cultural reality, still seemed to be alive, if not well. In fact it was collapsing from within, undermined by the encroaching art market and the total conversion of the middle-class audience; but few people could see it at the time. The ideal of a radical, "outsider" art of wide social effect had not yet been acknowledged as fantasy. The death of the avant-garde has since become such a commonplace that the very word has an embarrassing aura.

On Warhol's talent:
The perfunctory and industrial nature of Warhol's peculiar talent, and the robotic character of the praise awarded it, appear most baldly of all around his prints, which were recently given a retrospective at Castelli Graphics in New York and a catalog raisonné by one of his German enthusiasts. "More than any other artist of our age," it gushes, "Andy Warhol is intensely preoccupied with concepts of time"; quite the little Proust, in fact. "His prints above all reveal Andy Warhol as a universal artist whose works show him to be thoroughly aware of the great European traditions and who is a particular admirer of the glorious French Dixneuvièm, which inspired him to experience and to apply the immanent qualities of 'pure' peinture." No doubt something was lost in translation, but it is difficult to believe that the author even looked at the prints he speaks of. Nothing could be flatter or more perfunctory, or have less to do with those "immanent qualities of 'pure' peinture," than Warhol's recent graphic efforts. Their most discernible quality is their transparent cynicism and their Franklin Mint approach to subject matter. 

On the Iranian art market:
One of the odder aspects of the late Shah's regime was its wish to buy modern Western art, so as to seem "liberal" and "advanced".... Not since the death of Tamerlane had there been so much kissing Persian arse.... The main beneficiary of this was Warhol, who became the semi-official portraitist to the Peacock Throne.

On Warhol's embrace by the Reagans:
Great leaders, it is said, bring forth the praise of great artists. How can one doubt that Warhol was delivered by Fate to be the Rubens of this administration, to play Bernini to Reagan's Urban VIII? On the one hand, the shrewd old movie actor, void of ideas but expert at manipulation, projected into high office by the insuperable power of mass imagery and secondhand perception. On the other, the shallow painter who understood more about the mechanisms of celebrity than any of his colleagues, whose entire sense of reality was shaped like Reagan's sense of power, by the television tube. Each, in his way, coming on like Huck Finn; both obsessed with serving the interests of privilege. Together, they signify a new moment: the age of supply-side aesthetics.

As you might expect, I agree with all of the above. I knew that there was something wrong with Andy Warhol even when I was a teenager during the 1960's, but I would not have been able to articulate it as well as Hughes does here. Although Warhol didn't create pop culture all on his own, he was the central figure during its inauguration as a public norm. Hughes acknowledges that Warhol had genuine artistic talent as a commercial artist but laments his subsequent effect on the art world. The tradition of hawking dubious art to the wealthy is still healthy among the nouveaux riches in China and throughout the world. What is refreshing to me is that Hughes highlights qualitative changes for the worse and contextualizes them sociologically, unlike most commentators, who are reluctant to draw attention to the fact that an actual aesthetic decline has occurred.

Diary

Not to boast, I have two characteristics that give me advantages over some others: self-awareness and self-discipline. Addictions are not a problem for me if I just pay attention. Thus, for example, contrary to some dubious theories about weight gain, I have never been overweight, unlike the current 68.8 percent of adult Americans who are. If you watch your weight and don't overeat you'll never get fat, no matter what anyone tells you. I used to smoke Camels, but in 1976 I recognized that smoking was unhealthy, that cigarettes didn't taste good, and that they were a waste of money, so I quit and haven't smoked since, other than a cigar on rare occasions. Whenever I notice that one of my habits is affecting me adversely I try to do something about it.

Over the last two years I've spent a lot of time thinking about how the Internet disturbs me and have taken steps that seem to be working to remedy my malaise. One part of the problem is the sheer volume of information that is available, and I decided that I am better off not even attempting to stay remotely up to date. I still use it regularly for shopping, news and specific research, but I've cut out scanning for random articles that I might find interesting. This means that I hardly ever go browsing on 3 Quarks Daily or other sites that I used to peruse regularly. That part of the change deals with information overload, and I decided that even though it might be nice to have an infinite amount of knowledge, my brain simply can't handle it. The other part has to do with Internet discussion, which I've already written about. Here the problem is that websites can harbor a false sense of community; you delude yourself into thinking that you've found a group of like-minded people, but once you scratch the surface you discover – repeatedly – that there is no group cohesion and you have little in common with most of the others. As I said, I've stopped posting on sites other than this blog. I have been in a better mood since I made these changes.

I am also making headway on a different problem that has occupied me for even longer: what literary works should I read? Thinking about The Mandarins has helped me put this into perspective. I liked Middlemarch a lot, and that had made me think that novels would be my preferred form of literature. The Mandarins is ostensibly a novel, but actually it is a memoir. I remembered Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, which is an autobiography. These are three of my favorite literary works, and one thing they have in common is realism. Middlemarch is fiction, but it includes characters that contain elements of actual people. George Eliot herself appears both as Dorothea Brooke and Mary Garth. G.H. Lewes inhabits Will Ladislaw. Edward Casaubon is a composite of several scholarly men known by George Eliot. In all three of these works real people provided a basis for the text. I already knew that I preferred realism, but I've just recognized what it is beyond realism that sustains my interest. In these three works, the clincher is that I think the same way as the narrator, and this creates far more intimate communication than I am able to find in other works. There are different literary works that I enjoy, but I'm not crazy about them because I don't think quite like their authors. I enjoy D.H. Lawrence and Emily Brontë, but I don't think the same way they do. Gustave Flaubert comes closer, but there is still a difference. Marcel Proust is an excellent writer, but I'll never get past what I think of as his obtuseness.

So it appears that a crucial ingredient for me in literature is like-mindedness. It is probably no coincidence that George Eliot was inspired by Confessions and that Simone de Beauvoir was inspired by The Mill on the Floss. From this vantage point, it would be fair to say that there may not be enough literature in existence that would meet my requirements. Confessions was published in 1789, Middlemarch was published in 1874 and The Mandarins was published in 1954. On this basis you might estimate that a literary work that deeply affects me is published once every 80 to 85 years, so there may not be a new one out until about 2034 – 18 years from now! The prognosis is even worse if you include other factors. The Mandarins is not currently a popular work and probably isn't on the "to read" list of anyone who is or plans to become a writer. Technology, in my opinion, is dumbing down people so drastically that the number of potential writers alive who think, feel and express themselves in a manner that I would find agreeable is likely to be in steep decline, and any market for their work is becoming minuscule.

My current plan for finding literature to read is therefore essentially to give up. I'm going to stop complaining about what crap American fiction is and start ignoring it completely, in a disciplined way. If I had more scholarly proclivities than I actually possess, I suppose that I could look into other works by Rousseau and de Beauvoir, since I've already read all of George Eliot's fiction. However, based on my experience with George Eliot, it is probably best to stick to the masterpieces. If you get carried away with reading a writer's oeuvre, your reading soon begins to resemble biographical research, which is not the same thing as enjoying and appreciating literature.

The Mandarins VI

I'll summarize the final third of the novel and then make some comments. Against the advice of Robert, Henri publishes an article in L'Espoir exposing the Gulag system, and consequently the two have a major split. Similarly, most of the intellectual community objects to the article and sees it as an endorsement of capitalism. Paula goes into a psychological tailspin that lands her in a mental hospital, where she eventually recovers, and she slowly adjusts to life without Henri. Henri's relationship with Josette ends abruptly when he discovers that she has lied to him about consorting with the Germans during the war; he puts himself at risk by assisting her accuser in order to prevent charges from being brought against Josette and her mother. Before long Henri is seeing Nadine again; she becomes pregnant, and they marry, seemingly in love with each other for the first time. Their daughter, Maria, appears at the end. By that time Henri has given up L'Espoir, Robert has given up the S.R.L. and politics in general, and the two reconcile. Anne's relationship with Lewis continues via correspondence and summer vacations in North and Central America. During the second summer vacation Lewis admits that he no longer loves Anne and confesses that he isn't cut out to love anyone. Anne is devastated, and shortly after returning to France considers suicide, but decides against it.

Throughout the book, political machinations dominate, at least in terms of page count. I had hoped that it would be more of a novel of ideas than it is, and while it does contain many ideas, the political ones often strike me as pointless, shortsighted or incorrect. Since these ideas are the ones with which the male characters are obsessed, it makes me wonder whether de Beauvoir is trying to be realistic or whether she has intentionally included a subtext about a male predisposition for stupidity and violence. Certainly, if these are supposed to be the leading French thinkers of the time, they come across as misguided and ineffectual. Looking at them from the present, they seem to have little sense of how geopolitics would play out over the next fifty years. Although it is already quite obvious to one character, Scriassine (Arthur Koestler), that Stalin is nothing more than a brutal dictator, the rest are in denial and more anti-American than the facts warrant. They seem to have bought into the inevitable triumph of communism without taking a close look at what Stalin actually represents. The lesson for me is that if intellectuals can't see a mere fifty years into the future, why should anyone pay attention to them? Framing this in the context of some of my other posts, the wisdom of contemporary intellectuals should be viewed with even greater caution. Because of enormous technological advances and increased specialization within science and academia in general, it is now harder than ever for anyone to speak authoritatively on the subjects that were once the province of a few thinkers. If Sartre and his gang weren't up to the task then, the prospects for contemporary intellectuals are even bleaker. For this reason, my own thought has evolved from a general disappointment with current intellectuals to the view that intellectuals are now mainly historical artifacts. Intellectuals are better equipped to engage in what amounts to human interest stories for the well-educated than in imponderable subjects such as the future of mankind. Especially when it comes to the humanities crowd, their purview should be restricted to the arts, where they are likely to do the least amount of damage. The increasing complexity of civilization has placed the tasks once associated with great thinkers beyond the reach of mortals, and, as I've said, the next step is inevitably going to be AI, which may turn out very well or very badly for mankind – we don't know yet. In the meantime it is appropriate to regard the words of the reigning cognoscenti with skepticism.

The primary inquiry made in this book has to do with what strategy a middle-aged woman looking ahead to her physical deterioration ought to adopt for the remainder of her life. Specifically, Anne is in a relationship in which she feels appreciated but not loved. Robert and Anne live well together, but she sees that he could live perfectly well without her, happily occupying himself with his work. During her first trip to America she is seeking a new relationship before she even meets Lewis. While on the East Coast she makes herself available to another man she's met, Philip, but he turns her down. As a reader, I found Anne's relationship with Lewis completely unsustainable from the start. Lewis is a classic brash, anti-intellectual American, and his variety of socialism is the Depression-era socialism of Woody Guthrie, not the refined socialism of a French intellectual like Sartre. Lewis has a cantankerous personality and does poorly in his relations with others. Furthermore, the cultural backgrounds of Anne and Lewis could not be more dissimilar. As the relationship declines, Anne asks Lewis, "Why are all your best friends pickpockets, or drug addicts, or pimps?" When you add to this the fact that Lewis has no desire to live in France and she has no desire to leave Robert, the exercise looks completely futile. The Anne-Lewis relationship may have appealed to French readers who were curious about life in America, but, to me, the affair may just as well have occurred in Texas instead of Chicago and the outcome would have been the same: she was Lookin' for Love in all the wrong places.

Within the narrative, the collapse of Paula's relationship with Henri echoes Anne's romantic travails with Lewis. However, Paula really goes off the deep end, and, despite an apparent recovery, Anne remains doubtful about the quality of Paula's mental state:
"Have you seen him again, I [Anne] asked."
"Oh, no! And I won't see him again," she [Paula] said spiritedly. "He took unfair advantage of the situation."
I kept silent. I was quite familiar with the kind of explanations Mardrus [Paula's psychoanalyst] had used; on occasion, I myself made use of similar ones, and I valued them for what they were worth. Yes, to release Paula it was necessary to reach back into the past in order to destroy her love. But I thought of those microbes which can't be exterminated except by destroying the organism they are devouring; Henri was dead for Paula, but she, too, was dead. I didn't know that fat woman with the sweaty face and the bovine eyes who was swilling Scotch beside me.
To my taste, de Beauvoir's highest skill as a writer resides in passages such as this one: they are the heart of the novel.

More generally, I would say that the book has strengths and weakness, while on the whole it is very good. I felt that it didn't have to be as long as it was and might have been strengthened with some judicious editing. I suspect that there must be some overlap between The Mandarins and The Second Sex, but I'm not curious enough to explore them further. In some ways it seemed to me as if Nadine was an invented character who combined the girl of de Beauvoir's youth with an imagined version of herself in a slightly more emancipated state.

The Mandarins V

The novel continues to recount actual historical events. While on an idyllic bicycle holiday in the French countryside, Paula, Robert and Henri are shocked to learn of Hiroshima, and they come across a small village just as its inhabitants are commemorating the local deaths that had followed a German parachute invasion. Information leaks out for the first time about Stalin's Gulag system of forced labor camps and causes disagreement within Robert's group regarding whether they ought to publicize it or not. That thread of the text, which covers the calculation that goes on in the French political background, still fails to capture my interest. Meanwhile, Nadine continues to provide plenty of comic relief, and Henri's play proves to be a great success, at least among the Parisian glitterati of the day. The story of Henri's breakup with Paula is gradually playing out.

A major theme in the novel doesn't commence until the second half. Anne is invited to the U.S. to speak at various psychoanalytic venues and flies to LaGuardia on a trip lasting several months. This corresponds with de Beauvoir's actual trip to the U.S. with Sartre in 1947. Anne sees the trip as possibly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn about America, and she assiduously explores the locales to which she has been invited. She is not interested in typical sightseeing and prefers to observe ordinary people in their own neighborhoods. To this end, when she visits Chicago, a mutual acquaintance sets up contact with Lewis Brogan, an emerging writer who is well-versed on Chicago and lives in a slum, in order to have him show her around. Both Lewis and Anne are socialists, which makes Lewis a good fit for her. In the novel, Lewis is a fictionalized version of Nelson Algren, who, like de Beauvoir, was not well known at the time, but went on to win the National Book Award for Fiction in 1950. This novel is dedicated to Algren.

De Beauvoir has cleaned up events a little in the story. She has Anne meet Lewis in Chicago, return to New York, and then go back to Chicago for a second visit expressly to see him again. They do not become intimate until the second visit. In reality, within hours of meeting for the first time they became intensely attracted to each other and slept together. That was when she experienced her first orgasm, at age 39. This may seem odd if you look at de Beauvoir's background, but the fact is that her relationship with Sartre, who was four foot eleven, had been platonic for several years by then. Unlike Robert and Anne in the story, they were unmarried and lived in separate apartments. I expect that the remaining third of the novel will include the ultimate demise of de Beauvoir's relationship with Algren.

The sudden shift from the preoccupations of an intellectual woman in a rarefied Parisian atmosphere to a head-over-heels romance in a humble Chicago neighborhood is quite a surprise. It's almost as strange as it would be if, say, Iris Murdoch had fallen in love with Studs Terkel. De Beauvoir humanizes herself by eliminating every trace of the abstract in this episode. Although he is reasonably well-educated and intelligent, it is Lewis's spontaneity, warmth and body that excite Anne. She misses him when she returns to France and hopes to continue their relationship. It seems to me that de Beauvoir mixes the abstract with the concrete to make a powerful potion that accentuates both.

The Mandarins IV

I hope I don't end up boring you by spending too much time on a book that you probably haven't read, but I prefer to proceed slowly. The novel is definitely worth reading, and there is much for me to mull over in it, because de Beauvoir certainly does open a window to the intellectuals of her milieu.

As far as I've read – I'm only halfway through – the male characters are still not very compelling. They seem like automatons running on obscure programs that don't necessarily make much sense. Some are obsessed with punishing Nazi sympathizers and some are obsessed with ensuring that the political future of France turns out precisely the way they envision it. The theoretical basis for most of their thinking looks shaky to me. Although Marxism was popular in Europe at the time, I think much of it looks obsolete now. In a post-industrial society, the purported schism between the so-called bourgeoisie and the so-called proletariat seems contrived. The U.S. today looks more like one class, the bourgeoisie, which could be subdivided into the 1% and the 99%. The 1% are the winners and the 99% are the losers, as Donald Trump might say. Leona Helmsley liked to refer to the 99% as "the little people." In American thinking, just about everyone wants an opulent lifestyle, and it is hard to make out any real cultural distinction between your local plumber and a billionaire; both of them want a big house and prefer pizza to gourmet food. It is easy to imagine hiring someone like Donald Trump to install a new boiler in your house, because class distinctions here are minuscule compared to those in Europe.

Henri (Camus) is still looking better than most of the men. In his work, he seems to place a lot of emphasis on honesty and integrity, and, more than the others, he seems like a pure artist in need of self-expression. However, he is hell on women, and for that matter he might just as well have been a Houellebecq character. After a ten-year relationship with Paula, he's ready to dump her. To be fair, she is partly to blame. She has dreamed up a ridiculous fantasy about their undying love for each other just as he has started to see her as intrusive and out of touch with his feelings. To make matters worse, he has agreed to take on a beautiful young actress, Josette, as the lead character in his new play in order for her mother to guarantee its production. Henri immediately falls in love with Josette, who is 26, making poor Paula an undesirable old hag at 36. To be sure, Henri would rather not hurt Paula, but to his way of thinking he has a duty to pursue his personal freedom and does not feel bound to her.

I had hoped that this group of intellectuals would come out looking better than the ones I'm familiar with in the U.S. Unfortunately they don't. The only difference I can see is that, as public intellectuals, they are far more engaged with the population than American public intellectuals are now. They write articles that are read by thousands of factory workers, unlike, say, an article in the NYRB, which might be read by fifty retired college professors and quickly forgotten. It is also disappointing to me that in both cases the majority of the intellectuals are mere journalists. They are simply well-read people who write for a living, and the absence of interest in science and technical subjects is conspicuous. I don't think the writings of either group will have much long-term significance. As thinkers, these kinds of intellectuals seem to me to be of limited value, and if they are remembered at all in a few hundred years it will be only for their literary productions.

I am beginning to see similarities between Simone de Beauvoir and George Eliot. As a child, de Beauvoir was inspired by The Mill on the Floss, and she seems to have made a conscious effort to place herself at the center of the intellectual currents of her time, like George Eliot. During her life, George Eliot was overshadowed by the fame of her one-time boyfriend, Herbert Spencer. Spencer is now considered a minor thinker and is associated with the discredited concept of Social Darwinism, while George Eliot's prominence as a major novelist hasn't faded much. Perhaps a similar pattern will emerge leaving Simone de Beauvoir as a greater cultural and intellectual influence than Jean-Paul Sartre. For example, besides her fiction, de Beauvoir's The Second Sex was a seminal text of the women's movement, whereas I doubt many people have ever bothered to read Sartre's Being and Nothingness.

The Mandarins III

I thought I should provide an example of the writing that I appreciate in this novel. Anne, who is a psychotherapist, is invited to a gathering at the home of her wealthy friend, Claudie. Here is a highly abridged version of the text:

We had declined at least three of her invitations; among the people I recognized in that mob, there were very few to whom I felt obligated. They believed us to be haughty, misanthropic, or poseurs. The idea that we simply didn't enjoy going out in society I don't suppose ever dawned on those people who eagerly came here to bore themselves. Boredom was a scourge that had terrorized me ever since my childhood, and it was above all to escape it that I had wanted to grow up; I had in fact built my whole life around that avoidance. But perhaps those whose hands I was now shaking were so used to boredom that they didn't even feel it; perhaps they didn't even know that the very atmosphere could have a different tang....

There was a moment at Claudie's when she announced that the bores had left, although the order of departure varied from one time to the next. 
"I'm terribly sorry," I said, "but I'm afraid I have to leave with them." 
"What! But you must stay for supper," Claudie insisted. "We're going to set up small tables; it'll be very nice. And I want you to meet some people who are coming later." She took me aside. "I've decided to take you under my wing," she said eagerly. "It's ridiculous to live like a savage; no one knows you – I mean in the milieu where there's money to pick up. Let me launch you. I'll take you to the best dressmakers, I'll show you off, and in a year you'll have the plushest practice in Paris."
"I've got more patients than I can handle right now."
"Half of whom pay poorly, and the other half not at all."
"That isn't the question."
"It is the question. With a patient who pays ten times as much, you can work ten times less. You'll have time to go out, to dress up."
"We'll talk about it again."

I was astonished at how little she understood me, but as a matter of fact I didn't understand her very well either. She believed that, for us, work was nothing but a means to achieving fortune and success, and I was vaguely convinced that all those snobs would have gladly traded their social position for intellectual talents and accomplishments. When I was a child, a teacher seemed to me a much greater person than a duchess or a millionaire, and through the years that hierarchy had not changed appreciably. Claudie, however, believed that the supreme reward for an Einstein would be to be received in her salon. We could hardly reach any real understanding.  

The Mandarins II

I'm a third of the way through the novel and will probably have comments to make all the way up to the end. The politics, unsurprisingly, are a little tedious, but that is made up for by engaging dialogue, usually between the women, and particularly when their private thoughts are included. One of the most entertaining characters is Nadine, whom de Beauvoir has invented as the daughter of Anne (de Beauvoir herself) and Robert Dubreuilh (Sartre). In reality de Beauvoir and Sartre never married or had children, so perhaps this was an amusing exercise for de Beauvoir. Nadine is, in turn, unusually precocious for an eighteen-year-old and childishly impetuous in her daily life. Some of her moodiness can be attributed to the fact that her boyfriend, Diego, who was the son of a Spanish Jew, had been captured and presumably executed during the war. Even by contemporary standards Nadine is quite a libertine. Besides generally sleeping around, she takes up with Henri Perron (Camus), who is in his mid-thirties and a colleague of her father. This is obviously not a Puritan society, as no one, including her parents, bats an eye. Henri himself isn't even attracted to Nadine and only goes along with her to humor her. It interests me that what was considered passé in Paris seventy years ago might still cause an uproar in the U.S. today: Henri might be denounced as a pedophile, Nadine's parents might consider legal action against him, etc. At least in this group of intellectuals, sex is a private matter between individuals and carries no implications about a relationship beyond that. In this case, even Henri's live-in girlfriend, Paula Mareuil, doesn't mind. As you might expect, the relationship between Nadine and Henri quickly disintegrates, and in hindsight anyone who had made a fuss about it would look foolish. To me, it is far more civilized to live this way than to bow to the rigid and generally idiotic dictates of political correctness. At times Nadine seems implausible as a character, but I think she acquits herself well in the context of the novel.

I gather that de Beauvoir is seen by some as too cool, too detached and too serious to write good fiction, and while this may be an inescapable matter of personal taste, I find that I often think exactly as she does. My impression is that most people don't spend a lot of time examining their relationships with others and are simply guided by the social norms that they have been immersed in for all of their lives. Thus, the model for many people is to fall in love, get married, have children and continue their spousal romantic love until death. I appreciate de Beauvoir because she goes a step further than the many novelists who simply lament the development of problems in relationships between men and women and stupidly ignore the question of whether the expectations that people held were ever realistic. De Beauvoir actually thinks these things through both in her novel and in her personal life and arrives at reasoned conclusions that permit her characters and herself to live without depending on questionable concepts of someone else's making. Like de Beauvoir, I favor the realistic adjustment to facts over sentimental lamentations when delusional thinking doesn't produce the outcomes I expect.

As for the politics, there is little to theorize about here. Robert (Sartre) backs the socialist S.R.L. party, which is in a power struggle with the other party of the left, the Communist Party. At heart most of the leftists are communists, but because of geopolitics they don't consider communism a viable solution for France. The Cold War is only beginning, and clearly either the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. is going to become the dominant power in the world. While he may not yet have been fully cognizant of the crimes of Stalin, Robert thinks France must stick with the U.S. even though he dislikes and mistrusts American imperialism. To this end he encourages Henri to commit his small, intellectual newspaper, L'Espoir, to the S.R.L. The communists are also courting L'Espoir, and Henri, who would prefer to remain independent, is put in a predicament. As far as I've read, it appears that he goes with the S.R.L., which pleases Robert and perhaps will improve L'Espoir's financial situation.

I had hoped to encounter some deeper discussion of political thought in the book, and perhaps I will later on. Thinking about some of these issues myself, I can see why communism would have been appealing to the characters. In the end I think something resembling communism may well become the preferred form of government. If you look at world history over the last three hundred years, the dominant forces have been economic, not political. The idea of a classless society may never have come into existence if there hadn't been centuries of inequality caused mainly by the growth of capitalism. To a certain extent the evils of communism as expressed in American propaganda represent a straw man that discredited communism before any attempt was made to understand it. The early failure of communism in China and the later disintegration of the U.S.S.R. had more to do with economic mistakes than anything else. The combination of economic failure in one part of the world and economic success in another part of the world is almost enough to topple the political regimes that preside over the weakest economies. Moreover, a strong economy is necessary for a strong military defense. In my view, China under Mao, the Soviet Union under Stalin and Cuba under Castro were simply early experiments that failed. However, in China since Deng Xaioping, communism has changed course and China may soon have the largest economy in the world. Russia is a different story, and because it still depends on oil rather than a diversified economy for economic growth, it has fallen far down in rank as a world power. As I've said repeatedly, if you were able to remove corrupt or incompetent politicians from power and replaced them with competent leaders or, ideally for me, AI, the world's future might look a lot brighter than it currently does.

The Mandarins I

Despite the continued presence of houseguests, I've managed to make a small dent in the novel. So far I'm enjoying it a lot and it could end up becoming one of my favorites. The characters are intelligent, emotionally sophisticated, observant, articulate and free to a much greater degree than the characters in other novels that I've read. I feel as if I am reading the first adult novel since I finished Middlemarch, and Simone de Beauvoir is already becoming an imaginary friend.

The novel begins as World War II ends, and the characters are in the process of moving on after their lives have been disrupted and curtailed for four years. The men, loosely representing Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Arthur Koestler, embark on new writing projects, while the women in their lives, though far more independent than the women you are likely to find in other fiction, mostly seem to frame their lives around the men. What strikes me is the frankness of the conversations and the self-awareness of the women, which exceeds that of fictional characters I've encountered elsewhere. I think all fiction writers should be required to read The Mandarins if they have any pretensions about describing people who are not morons. Only a few pages of this were enough to confirm my view that American fiction is fundamentally children's writing produced by emotionally stunted authors for sale to infantile readers. In American literary fiction, style, if you can call it that, has replaced substance.

I'm not as impressed with the male characters. Koestler seems cold, calculating and manipulative. Sartre seems wrapped up in questionable ideology. Camus is the most natural and appealing, though at heart he seems to be no more than a carefree writer. As a thinker, Sartre is the heavyweight of the three, but his serious philosophical works have not held up well. I am hoping to compare this group to current intellectuals who, I think, are narrower as people but perhaps no better or worse in terms of their ideas.

One phenomenon that is of interest to me is the dominance of socialistic thought among intellectuals throughout the twentieth century. You can still see remnants of it in Bernie Sanders and Noam Chomsky. I tend to agree with them with respect to capitalism, which has now been documented as a source of inequality, but I have been unable to understand the unquestioned faith in self-governance that dominates leftist thought. My skepticism has become one of the themes of this blog, because I have no confidence that people will ever be able to self-govern without causing significant ill effects like the ones we live with today. The question, to me, is not how to increase freedom, but how to circumscribe it fairly and rationally. I suspect that Sartre got this wrong and that his successors still do.

Diary

I don't have much to report because I'm distracted by the arrival of visitors who disrupt my thoughts by their mere presence and strain me with their one-way conversations and humorlessness. I am waiting this out calmly.

I was just out for a walk and ran into Jim Douglas as he embarked on his; we discussed politics, since I had read his memoir and he used to be the governor. One of the things I like about Vermont is that a quiet, thoughtful, low-key person like Jim Douglas can actually win an election here. Of course, Vermont Republicans don't exactly fit the profile of Republicans in most states. He doesn't like Donald Trump and thinks Marco Rubio is too inexperienced.

I've started reading The Mandarins and think I'll enjoy it, if only for the glimpse it provides of the intellectuals of a different era. Unlike most intellectuals today, they went through difficult times and engaged each other in the café culture of Paris. Most of them didn't depend on faculty positions and lived more freely than our contemporary equivalent. It remains to be seen whether their ideas were any good – perhaps not – but certainly they don't exude that academic stench that pervades the so-called intellectuals in America today.

It may be a few days before I post again.

Cartoons

For some reason I received an e-mail from Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor at the New Yorker, recruiting me to assist in a new process for winnowing down entries to their caption contest. Presumably I was selected because I was a finalist in the contest several years ago, but I was a little surprised to hear from him because I hadn't entered since then. For the last few weeks I have been participating in the process and enjoying it. I can see why they want help, because it would be tedious to sift through thousands of entries each week. Most of the entries aren't funny, and there are usually multiple similar ones. On top of that, I find that the pictures sometimes have little potential, and that makes finding a good caption even harder. Anyway, this isn't a bad diversion for me and it takes only a few minutes each week. I like thinking about humor and agree with Wittgenstein, who once said that "a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist only of jokes."

I realized that though I've discussed my early interest in comic books I haven't mentioned anything about cartoons. As I said, I didn't start reading books until about halfway through college, and comics such as Superman and Batman influenced my imagination as much as anything until then. During my adolescence we often had copies of the New Yorker at home, and I developed an interest in their cartoons quite early. They have a universal appeal and have probably always been what sells the magazine. The cartoons of Charles Addams had the strongest effect on me. Not only did they possess a dark humor, but they also contained elements of social criticism and satire. Addams was effective at making fun of the middle class in postwar America and had an appeal to subversives like me. In contrast, the TV program, The Addams Family, was humorous but lacked satire; John Astin, who played Gomez Addams, turned him into a kooky eccentric, and Charles Addams's bite was nowhere to be seen.

I still have some reluctance to read the New Yorker, but it seems to have improved a little over the last few years with a new editor and a better staff. The cartoons, when I read them, are still pretty funny, though they are not the final word on cartoons. I think that kind of work is highly demanding and requires more creative skills than most people possess, thus I respect Gary Larson for retiring from The Far Side series after fifteen successful years. Larson would have been good at the New Yorker or anywhere, and he must be upholding higher artistic standards than most successful artists in any field. Although the New Yorker cartoonists seem to maintain their standards well, I can't understand why the cartoonist Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury didn't retire thirty years ago, because he was never in their class. As far as I can tell, Bob Mankoff is doing a good job, though as a personal matter I would prefer edgier cartoons. It amuses me to think that, for all of the stylish appeal of the New Yorker, it is the cartoons, not the short stories, poems or even the journalism that make it what it is.

Diary

I decided to add a new kind of entry, which I'll call "Diary," in order to allow myself to write about anything without naming a specific topic. I've got into the habit of writing something every few days, and it's a lot easier for me to do if I don't have to come up with a topic each time. This will be my way of blabbing a little for fun. Strictly speaking, it won't be a real diary, because there will still be certain areas that are off-limits, since anyone can read this. As in my other posts, I won't say much about household members or their families, particularly my living relatives. Ex-wives, ex-girlfriends and ex-anything are still fair game, since those bridges have already been burned, though I don't think I have much left to say about them at this point. Not many of my family members know about the blog, and although I doubt most of them would be interested in it, I'd rather not risk estranging them if at some future time they were to take issue with something I wrote.

As I said, I'm reading things on the Internet at a reduced rate and am spending more time reading printed books and periodicals now. Coming up on my reading list are The Spectacle of Skill: Selected Writings of Robert Hughes, and The Mandarins, by Simone de Beauvoir. Hughes is that rare critic who writes well and has strong convictions, and though it may turn out that I don't always agree with him I find it intensely refreshing to hear passionate people speak their mind without kowtowing to editorial hucksters or academic prima donnas. I'm not sure whether I'll like The Mandarins, but am taking the chance. I am attracted to smart women, and de Beauvoir certainly was that. This novel is a roman à clef whose characters represent Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, de Beauvoir, Nelson Algren and others, and I hope it will provide some insight into intellectual life in Paris of that period, though it may not work well as a novel. I don't think I'll burn through these books fast, so it may take some time before I comment on them. I recently resumed Proust again out of a sense of duty, but he puts me to sleep after a couple of pages – making good bedside reading. I think of him as a writer who lived in a culturally rich time and place and who explained himself thoroughly and eloquently, but these positive attributes are not enough to compensate for the fact that he is an entrenched social climber and an airhead who indulges himself at the expense of his readers. I don't find him insightful in the least, though he has more to offer than fellow windbag Henry James.

We are having a dreary, warm winter so far, with no snow. Usually we turn on the boiler in mid-November, but it hasn't been necessary yet and we are heating entirely with wood. I'm not looking forward to Christmas, as I will be spending it here with non-family members, and I have no common interests or rapport with most of them despite knowing them for fourteen years. I had thought of going to Montreal by myself for a week to escape them but decided not to be petty. As you can tell, I don't have much holiday spirit at the moment.

Sherry Turkle II

I've finished reading the book and have gradually become more disappointed in it for reasons that I'll explain later. Even so, Sherry Turkle has done her homework and provides ample documentation of the way lives have recently been altered by technology. The main areas that she examines are solitude, self-reflection, family, friendship, romance, education and work. I have found her anecdotes informative, because I don't otherwise get this exposure, and I'll copy a few more quotes that are interesting and instructive to me.

In spring 2014 Kati is interested in politics, the Italian Renaissance, and training for the Boston Marathon. When she goes to parties, she reports that there is a lot of texting. Here is what she tells me: At any party, her friends are texting friends at other parties to figure out "whether we are at the right party." Kati says, "Maybe we can find a better party. Maybe there are better people at a party just down the block." Kati is describing how smartphones and social media have infused friendship with the Fear of Missing Out – now a feeling so well known that most people just call it by its acronym, FOMO. In its narrow definition, the acronym stands for tensions that follow from knowing so much about the lives of others because of social media. You develop self-doubt from knowing that so many of your friends are having enviable fun.

Arjun, a college senior, gave me another way to view why people turn away from a friend and to a phone. For him, the phone not only serves up comforting friends; it is a new kind of friend in itself. The phone itself is a source of solace.

Comments from teachers about the students at a competitive, private middle school:
Students don't make eye contact.
They don't respond to body language.
They have trouble listening. I have to rephrase a question many times before a child will answer a question in class.
I'm not convinced they are interested in each other. It is as though they all have some signs of being on an Asperger's spectrum. But that's impossible. We're talking about a schoolwide problem.
They are talking at each other with local comments, minutia really, short bursts, as though they were speaking texts. They are communicating immediate social needs. They aren't listening to each other.
The most painful thing to watch is that they don't know when they have hurt each other's feelings. They hurt each other, but then you sit down with them and try to get them to see what happened and they can't imagine things from the other side.
My students can build websites, but they can't talk to teachers. And students don't want to talk to other students. They don't want the pressure of conversation.

Women talk about being on dates with men and going to the bathroom to check their phones to see who else has contacted them. They say that they feel a little guilty, but over time, acting on the impulse to check your phone – to check your options – comes to feel normal. Consider Madeleine, thirty-two, a financial analyst in New York. She's out to drinks with a group of friends, including a man who seems interested in her. But, phone-enabled, she is clear that "drinks do not imply the entire evening." Messages on her phone mean "things could go anywhere." In this world, she says, "if I get a message from a guy who interests me and I want to leave the group of friends I'm with, I do. I usually go to the ladies' room to set things up so I'm not sitting at the table where people can look over my shoulder as I get too specific about my next plan."

When we think we are multitasking, our brains are actually moving from one thing to the next, and our performance degrades for each new task we add to the mix. Multitasking gives us a neurochemical high so we think we are doing better and better when actually we are doing worse and worse. We've seen that not only do multitaskers have trouble deciding how to organize their time, but over time, they "forget" how to read human emotions.

It was only when Elizabeth returned to the university that she saw the full effect of years spent multitasking, a life lived in hyper attention. Now, as a graduate, she has been assigned an excerpt of Plato's Republic for an ethics class. "I had skimmed the chapter, as was my habit, then, realizing that I hadn't retained much, reread it again and even made a few notes. Unfortunately, on the day of the class, I did not have that notebook with me, and while I remembered the overall gist of the chapter (moderation – good; desire for luxury – bad), I struggled to recall the specific ideas expressed in it. Without access to my cell phone to refer to the article or read up on Plato on Wikipedia, I wasn't able to participate in the class discussion. Having access to information is always wonderful, but without having at least some information retained in your brain, I am not able to build on those ideas or connect them together to form new ones."

This senior physician is sad as he considers his students' discomfort: "They don't want to take responsibility for the things that might come up in a conversation, things that would come out during a full-patient history. They don't want to hear that their patients are anxious, depressed or frightened. Doctors used to want to hear these things. They knew that the whole person got sick. The whole person needed to be treated. Today, young physicians don't want to have that conversation. My students welcome the fact that the new medical records system almost forces them to turn away from the patient and keep the interchange about relevant details. They don't want to step into a more complicated role.

As I was concluding work on this book I attended a large international meeting that had a session called "Disconnect to Connect." There, psychologists, scientists, technologists, and members of the business community considered our affective lives in the digital age. There was widespread agreement that there is an empathy gap among young people who have grown up emotionally disconnected while constantly connected to phones, games, and social media.

While I think that Sherry Turkle is to be commended for examining and publicizing the effects of new technology on human lives, I also think that her analysis falls short in several respects. The tone of the book, from start to finish, is that of a psychologist who has seen an increase in troubled patients and has pinpointed the source in addictive new technology. Her prescriptions read like a self-help manual: the patients are to put away their smartphones and start having face-to-face conversations with those around them, whether at home, school or work. If only it were that simple. Like Turkle, I would prefer to be surrounded by sensitive people who were interested in interacting with me and were capable of articulating their ideas, but the obstacles to that are far more significant than she suggests. She repeatedly harks back to memories of her grandmother, who lived under conditions considerably different from those we live in today. She also idealizes more recent times that I am old enough to remember. I have lived in the U.S. for nearly sixty years, and I recall having the open-ended discussions that she relishes, mostly as an undergraduate liberal arts student. Outside that period, I have generally found people to be too private, too scared, too inarticulate or too uninterested to have what I would consider to be a satisfactory face-to-face discussion of any depth. My early home life, and, as far as I can tell, the home lives of most of my contemporaries, did not provide the conversational opportunities that Turkle seems to think were flourishing then. When I entered the workforce, conditions worsened, with coworkers tending to be too protective of their source of income to take many risks. The baby boomers I've known have their own set of undesirable characteristics. Thus, for most of my life I have had to content myself with at most one or two people who are willing and able to participate in a decent conversation. Turkle's thoughtful and articulate people have always been a rarity in my life. As I suggested in my last post, Turkle seems to inhabit a humanistic academic bubble that isn't representative of broad American culture. Her research and writing seem to focus on elites who have the resources to address concerns that everyone else puts up with quietly.

From my point of view, a deeper analysis of Turkle's subject matter would include a closer look at its sociological aspects. For example, the gadgets and apps that seem to be causing many of the problems would not necessarily exist if we didn't live in a capitalistic society. Turkle's stressed-out, insensitive multitaskers might be more relaxed and happier if they lived either in an agrarian or a post-capitalist society. There is no reference in her book to this fact, and I find a more significant, if more abstract, account of the origins of modern tensions in works such as Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Without capitalism, there would be no Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, or any of their products. In the absence of a highly competitive job market it would be much easier for people to act spontaneously and lose that unpleasant robotic veneer. Here I think Turkle may have a conflict of interest in the sense that she does not want to alienate corporate leaders who currently provide her with access that is crucial to her work.

On the whole, Turkle remains firmly planted in the humanities camp. That isn't surprising if you consider that her earliest research was on Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud. Although she is careful not to blaspheme against AI and robotics, she obviously sees them as parts of the problem and allows little or no place for them in any solution. This, I think, is where her imagination fails her. To be sure, her long presence at M.I.T. has made her fully cognizant of the past failures of AI and robotics with respect to human interface. However, in my opinion, extant anthropocentrism in the humanities precludes the possibility of her allowing that AI may one day surpass human capabilities across the board, even as it demonstrates positive emotional capabilities that are in no way inferior to ours. At that point researchers like Turkle, rather than defending human uniqueness, may well join the technological bandwagon and acknowledge that posthuman life may actually have more to offer than the lives to which we're accustomed.

Sherry Turkle I

In case you were wondering, I haven't had a stroke or died. I started reading Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, by Sherry Turkle. I had heard of her before in reference to her previous book, Alone Together, which was published in 2011, and was interested in reading about the ongoing effects of digital media. Turkle, a professor at M.I.T., seems to be one of the few public intellectuals writing nontechnical books on this subject, which I think deserves far more attention than it gets. As I've said, the brains of younger people who have access to the latest technology are being organized in ways that defy historical precedent, and there doesn't seem to be much discussion of the potentially significant negative consequences, both to individuals and to society at large.

Turkle has a background in sociology and psychoanalysis, hence, from a scientific point of view, the research cited tends to look murky and subjective compared to that of some other disciplines. However, this is just the kind of book that I was looking for, because it is filled with relevant anecdotes regarding the behavior of people with whom I have very little contact: educated Americans in roughly the five-to-thirty age group. Like most quasi-scientific popular nonfiction, the book is a little bloated, repetitive and too informal in its argumentation to generate much of a punch. Moreover, Turkle, at the age of 67, is a pre-digital person like me, and some of her thinking seems old fashioned, particularly in the area of psychoanalysis, which I consider obsolete. Still, I am finding the book useful for understanding younger people, and there are surprises. Apparently older people, me included, engage in some of the questionable behaviors encouraged by digital media. For now I'll just mention some of the points I've come across that I find interesting, and perhaps I'll follow up with another post later on.

Recent research shows that people are uncomfortable if left alone with their thoughts, even for a few minutes. In one experiment, people were asked to sit quietly – without a phone or a book – for fifteen minutes. At the start of the experiment, they were asked if they would consider administering electroshocks to themselves if they became bored. They said absolutely not: No matter what, shocking themselves would be out of the question. But after just six minutes alone, a good number of them were doing just that.

Interviewee Eleanor:
Let's say we are seven at dinner. We all have our phones. You have to make sure that at least two people are not on their phones or looking down to check something – like a movie time on Google or going on Facebook. So you need sort of a rule of two or three. So I know to keep, like, two or three in the mix so that other people can text or whatever. It's my way of being polite. I would say that conversations, well, they're pretty, well fragmented. Everybody is kind of in and out. Yeah, you have to say, "Wait, what..." and sort of have people fill in a bit when you drop out.

One of Eleanor's friends explains that if a conversation at dinner turns serious and someone looks at a phone, that is her signal to "lighten things up." And she points out that the rule of three is a way of being polite even when you're not at the dinner table. When "eyes are down" at phones, she says, "conversation stays light well beyond dinner."

In order to feel more, and to feel more like ourselves, we connect. But in our rush to connect, we flee solitude. In time, our ability to be separate and gather ourselves is diminished. If we don't know who we are when we are alone, we turn to other people to support our sense of self. This makes it impossible to fully experience others as who they are.

Developmental psychology has long made the case for the importance of solitude. And now so does neuroscience. It is only when we are alone with our thoughts – not reacting to external stimuli – that we engage that part of our brain's basic infrastructure devoted to building up a sense of our stable autobiographical past. This is the "default mode network." So, without solitude, we can't construct a stable sense of self. Yet children who grow up digital have always had something external to respond to. When they go online, their minds are not wandering but rather are captured and divided.

...if we don't have experience with solitude – and this is often the case today – we start to equate loneliness with solitude. This reflects the impoverishment of our experience. If we don't know the satisfactions of solitude, we only know the panic of loneliness.

Cara, a college student who has been using an iPhone app called the Happiness Tracker, has a different problem. How much should you look at the "output" of a tracking program to clue you in on your feelings? Over several weeks, the Happiness Tracker has asked for Cara's level of happiness as well as information about where she is, what she is doing, and who she is with. Its report: Her happiness is declining. There is no clear link to any one factor. When she gets this result, Cara finds herself feeling less happy with her boyfriend. The app did not link him to her declining happiness, but she begins to wonder if he is the cause of her discontent. Uncertain of her feelings, she ends up breaking up with her boyfriend in partial deference to the app.

These days, neuroscientists speculate that when parents caring for children turn to their phones, they may "effectively simulate a still-face paradigm" – in their homes or out in a restaurant – with all the attendant damage. It is not surprising if children deprived of words, eye contact, and expressive faces become stiff and unresponsive with others.

As you can see, Turkle provides much food for thought. She has exactly the same reaction that I had to Victoria in my earlier posts: here is a dysfunctional child who is not on track to becoming a full-fledged adult in the sense to which I'm accustomed. The book is a rallying cry for preventing children from becoming robotic zombies who never understand themselves and live in a trance in which they sail through their lives as if belonging to a subhuman herd of nervous mammals. Turkle proposes what amounts to talk therapy that gives kids a slap in the face in order to wake them up from their stupor, which she links to a lack of emotional development and an inability to empathize with others or understand themselves.

For the most part, I am saying "Yes!" and giving high fives as I read this, but on reflection I am a little worried that Turkle may be too invested in old paradigms. I completely agree with her that this media environment has given rise to the fearful reactions of college students who make their campuses hotbeds of political correctness because they lack the self-confidence and intellectual maturity to deal with ideas and behaviors that don't fall within their narrow comfort zones. And she is obviously correct about the irresponsibility of parents who lazily allow digital devices to subvert time-tested, biologically necessary childrearing methods. However, when I think of these phenomena in the context of what I've written about anthropocentrism and AI, it may be that this digital herding is the vanguard of the future. I'm not so sure that a later form of AI couldn't lead to an improvement over the world as we know it. With the chaotic circumstances that keep surfacing in our human-controlled present, I don't see how anyone can dismiss out of hand an orderly world in which people are prevented from engaging in wars and terrorism or despoiling the planet so as to ruin it for future generations. You might say that the algorithms currently used in smartphones are primitive precursors to ones that may one day work much better and encourage richer personal development while simultaneously reducing world disorder and instability. What would be wrong with that? Possibly Turkle is stuck in obsolete Enlightenment thinking that places mankind on a pedestal and denies the existence of our recurring deficiencies.

Another criticism I have of Turkle is that psychoanalysis and talk therapy have historically not been terribly effective at changing behavior on a large scale. Through much of its existence, psychoanalysis seems largely to have been a fashion statement of the rich: they could afford to hire a very expensive personal advisor to consult on demand. Because it didn't usually work, most people couldn't afford it and drugs were a lot cheaper, it more or less died out. Even if it still exists, its popularity is probably confined to well-heeled and highly-educated people like the ones Turkle runs into in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In this regard Turkle may be addressing a very small audience. Beyond formal psychotherapy, she seems oblivious to the fact that in most families childrearing has never been a controlled process in which parents have the luxury of following all of the latest recommendations offered by the current gurus.

On a personal level I am benefiting somewhat from Turkle's mention of the failings of adult users of digital media. Although I don't fall into the category of serious abusers, there are still behaviors to watch out for. I do have a smartphone, but I mainly use it as a phone – about once a week. I don't have digital service and it is connected to our home Wi-Fi; I get beeps when I receive e-mails or messages, but that usually occurs only a couple of times a day. Occasionally I use the smartphone on public Wi-Fi while on trips. This means that I am nothing like the people discussed by Turkle, who are actively engaged with their smartphones day and night. However, I am guilty of one of their sins, which is that of constant editing. I genuinely love having the ability to edit my written communications, and I frequently do it on this blog, sometimes even after I've made a post. But my motivation is somewhat different from Turkle's target: I like being able to improve on whatever I've written. Turkle criticizes people who are obsessed with controlling their public image, and although I can't honestly say that I am completely indifferent to my public image, I genuinely don't care that much what people think of me, and I have no interest in getting "Likes" or "Thumbs Up." Even so, I do to some extent inhabit a bubble. The fact that I have withdrawn from commenting on other sites could be construed as an attempt to avoid disagreements and gain control over my environment so as to eliminate anyone who disagrees with me. From my point of view, I have retreated to this blog only because I have given up on finding substantive, interesting and civil discussion on other sites, which tend to be populated by the same narrow-minded, inflexible and intolerant people whose behavior Turkle finds problematic.

I'm only about a fourth of the way through the book and will probably have more to say later.

Town and Gown

One of the reasons why I chose to retire to Middlebury was that it has some similarities to the town where I attended college, namely, Greencastle, Indiana. Greencastle is also a rural county seat, and DePauw University is about the same size as Middlebury College. There were things that I liked about DePauw, but I wouldn't want to live in Greencastle again. I still have some connections in Indiana, but none of my relatives live there, it is a right-wing state, the educational level is low, the terrain isn't interesting and it gets hot there during the summer. Middlebury and its vicinity are much prettier and more rural, the people are better educated, the cultural amenities are superior, and so is the college. Actually, it would be fine with me if I never returned to Indiana again.

My first year at DePauw was almost a magical experience for me. I set off on a train by myself to college, sight unseen, from Manhattan, with a trunk and a reel-to-reel tape recorder in August of 1968. My father, the drunk, drove me to the station and symbolically gave me an acorn to plant when I arrived. In those days, prior to the closing of the rail line, Greencastle was a whistle stop, and I had to tell the conductor when to stop the train. It seemed as if I were in the middle of a cornfield, because that was about all you could see, and the old train station had long been abandoned. I left my belongings unattended by the tracks, walked toward town, came across a drugstore and called a cab. As colleges go, DePauw wasn't as bad as it might have been, and living in that environment was nirvana to me after living with a dysfunctional family in a suburb that had become an enclave for social climbers. Knowing that fraternities were idiotic, I elected to live in a dorm. I met many of the international and out-of-state students, so at first it didn't occur to me that the majority of the students were dull Hoosiers or the children of wealthy families from the Chicago suburbs. I was just elated to live in a place where ideas seemed to matter and most of the people I ran into didn't seem like fools. Unfortunately, I was later hoodwinked into marrying one of the dull Hoosiers, and the rest is history.

No doubt there were some town and gown disputes while I lived in Greencastle, but I wasn't aware of them at the time. DePauw is a Greek-dominated college with lots of rowdy fraternities. Things changed considerably while I was there, and by the time I left most of the students looked like hippies and smoked pot, though beneath the surface they were still conservative Midwesterners who ended up becoming accountants and lawyers. DePauw was originally associated with the Methodist Church, but Middlebury had no church affiliation and was created by townspeople who felt a need for an institution of higher learning. If you fast forward to today, there are some town and gown disputes in Middlebury, but they seem to be minor.

The relationship between town and gown has gradually become clearer to me. The townspeople are just ordinary people earning a living, and the college is populated by professors who generally know far less than I once attributed to them. As I've said, professors are usually just good students who wind up teaching college, and in hindsight I don't think I learned much from them. I used to be annoyed by the fact that my college experience wasn't well thought out and that no one at the college took any responsibility. I would have been OK with DePauw if anyone had said that with my curriculum I would receive some intellectual stimulation and have a good time, but that I would eventually have to learn something more useful to earn a living. I did eventually study printing and business, which proved sufficient to finance the rest of my life, but the process would have been far more efficient if I had gone into it knowing that I would be doing a few years of broad study followed by a few years of vocational study, and that the two would not necessarily intersect. I only found this out on my own over a long period without any help. If I knew then what I know now, I would not have expected to be prepared for the workforce when I finished college and would have selected an actual vocation before receiving my B.A. degree. At the time, the people at liberal arts colleges were mindlessly repeating the mantra that they were teaching you how to think critically and communicate well, which supposedly would leave you set for the rest of your life. In retrospect it was a lie, because throughout my working years critical thinking and communication skills were far less important than following instructions and conforming. If anything, my liberal arts education made me more incompatible with the American workforce than I might have been otherwise, because the ability to think independently is a handicap in most jobs. My undergraduate experience turned out to be a personal growth period with no practical advantages. I now view many of my former professors as vaguely incompetent adults who should never have been given the charge of vulnerable minds.

The town and gown here are fairly well integrated, and most conflicts are quickly resolved. It helps that the college has a billion-dollar endowment and doesn't balk at spending it to keep the downtown looking respectable, which makes it appealing to the wealthy students they seek. Some of the students are so rich that they could live off their trust funds and never work. There are cases in which the town and gown have literally merged. After he graduated from Middlebury in 1972, future governor Jim Douglas married his dentist's assistant, Dorothy, a woman who grew up on a farm here. She still does all the yard work (and probably all of the home repairs) and he now works as an executive in residence at the college. We have no affiliation with the college and are just as likely to oppose it as support it, depending on the issue. Recently we opposed the use of a neighbor's house for student housing, since Middlebury students have a reputation for drunkenness and loud parties. On that issue we sided with the local bubbas, who stopped by our house in a large pickup truck to tell us that there would be shooting practice next door to the students' house early in the morning after a Halloween party there. Although I sympathize with students who want to live off campus – I lived off campus myself for two out of four years – I'd rather not have them living around here.

We have many affinities with the college. Occasionally we attend concerts and lectures, and the art museum isn't bad for a small college. We attended the wedding reception of one of our neighbors, who is an economics professor. Her children had been over for some stargazing. The college has an enormous economic impact on the county, and I think of it as comparable to a large manufacturing plant, but with a highly-educated workforce. We're not close friends with any of the faculty, but I think they add to the desirability of the region. Last September, when my daughter and grandson were visiting, we happened to be seated next to Jay Parini and his wife at a restaurant. Parini is a well-known English professor who was a friend of the late Gore Vidal. His wife struck up a conversation with my daughter about babies. I like that informality. If the college wasn't here, this would be an economically depressed county with far less cultural vibrancy than it currently possesses.

Bad Behavior

As promised, I read Bad Behavior, by Mary Gaitskill. It consists of nine short stories, many of which deal with dark behaviors that don't ordinarily find their way into literary fiction. I thought I was going to finish it but gave up on the last story, which failed to capture my interest and featured multiple family members over a long period of time, making it seem too condensed to work as a short story. I read a used copy in which a previous owner had folded the top corner of the page at the end of each of the first two stories and none thereafter, perhaps signifying that they had stopped there. What stands out about the book is its honest look at prostitution and sadomasochism, and it also covers the New York writing scene from the point of view of people who are trying to succeed in it as of the 1980's.

Gaitskill's writing style is less affected than that of many of her peers and often reads like straight journalism, but with close-up looks at individuals who speak in their own voices as they go about their daily lives. For someone like me, who has never been promiscuous, solicited a prostitute or had a sadomasochistic thought in his head, the book is somewhat of a revelation. The drug abusers bear no relationship to my own use of psychedelics in my hippie days: they anesthetize themselves with heavy drugs that I never took. The impression I get is that Gaitskill is intent on emotional precision, especially regarding women, and that she likes to humanize characters who are typically discarded by society and never thought worthy of discussion.

Although much of the writing seems a little flat and factual to me, Gaitskill is good at description, and occasionally she inserts short flourishes that few writers could match:
Connie drew up her legs and sat with her arms around both knees and looked out the window again. It was true that in the summer the air shaft had an oddly poetic aspect. On days when the apartment air was as heavy and stifling as a swamp, noises and smells came floating up it on clouds of heat, lyrical blends of voice and radio scraps, drifting arguments and amorous sighs, the fried shadow of someone's dinner, a faded microcosm that lilted into their apartment and related them to everyone else in the building.
I gather that Gaitskill is considered an expert writer on female emotions, both positive and negative, but to me this volume seems like reportage; just as we never hear much about prostitution or sadomasochism, we never hear much about female emotions, but they are all there for anyone to see, and it could be argued that Gaitskill has found a fishing hole that has mostly been avoided by other writers of her generation.

Since this is my personal blog, I reserve the right to make simplistic, unsupported assertions from time to time (subject to your rebuttal, of course). If I were to sum up Bad Behavior, I would say that it is carefully written and strives for authenticity, which means that it is honest and accurate, without much emotional wavering and no moral judgment. Compared to her female peers, I think Mary Gaitskill stands up well. That would include Francine Prose, Mona Simpson, Cathleen Schine, Anne Beattie, A.M. Homes, Maxine Chernoff (I confess to having read one book of each), and Lorrie Moore. Although I no longer read Lorrie Moore, she seems comparatively remote and disengaged, as if she were writing from the point of view of an insular girl who has never left home but has heard bad reports from the outside; I think contrivance has been seeping into her work for years, and I'm not even convinced that she still likes to write. But if Moore has had too little experience, perhaps Gaitskill has had too much.

Mary Gaitskill probably deserves more to be read than the other writers I've mentioned, but that isn't saying a lot. I am not familiar with all of the details of her life, but apparently she ran away from home at the age of 15 and later on became a prostitute. She knows whereof she speaks. I don't have any evidence, but I wouldn't be surprised if the story "Secretary" stems from some kind of sexual abuse that she experienced during her childhood. In trying to think of someone similar to Gaitskill, Vivian Maier comes to mind. Though Maier was far more of an outsider and an eccentric than Gaitskill ever was, I get some of the same feelings from her work, and she apparently had a tendency to be cruel. Gaitskill is not on the "A" list of female literary authors, probably because she doesn't play well into the feminist propaganda of her generation or the sheltered political correctness of the current MFA environment. I don't feel compelled to read any more of her work, which is not to say that you shouldn't read her yourself, particularly if you have an interest in contemporary American fiction. I hardly bother at all with it now, though I liked The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, who is currently quite antique at 82.

ISIL

Though I don't particularly like to comment on current events, it seems appropriate to say something about the terrorist attacks in Paris of November 13. There is a general consensus in developed nations that ISIL (or ISIS or Da'ish or Daesh) is an unfathomable organization whose destruction must be stopped by a coordinated international effort. That much is clear, but from a political and journalistic standpoint I haven't seen the events described in the same way that I think about them, namely, as a biological phenomenon. No doubt this is a highly complex situation, but I think the best way to look at it is through the lens of science.

What seems to stump commentators is the brutality of ISIL in conjunction with what looks like the absence of a coherent ideology. ISIL is wreaking havoc in the name of Islam when no one can see the teachings of Mohammed in its behavior. World leaders and journalists are at a loss to explain it in the familiar language of religious conflict. From my point of view this is a perfect opportunity to drop comfortable Western ideology and look at ISIL as a Malthusian phenomenon with the help of modern science. Although ISIL exists in real time, it can be studied in the same way that archaeologists, for example, are studying the collapse of Pueblo society in Mesa Verde, Colorado during the late 1200's.

Broadly speaking, what is occurring probably has to do with overpopulation, political instability, environmental change, in-group and out-group conflict and instinctive male behavior. It would appear that ISIL was conceived and is being operated by out-group male Muslims whose life prospects, for multiple reasons, whether they live in the Middle East or Europe, are inadequate. In a situation like this, religion is at best a pretext for violence and it may be a waste of time to look for coherent ideology. ISIL is following an ancient survival model that can be found throughout human history and has nothing to do with the contemporary templates that we use to describe the world.

What is different this time is the high population levels in the Middle East, where disruption has implications thousands of miles away and potentially throughout the world. Obviously this is an enormous topic that I can barely touch here. I'll just mention a couple of aspects that relate to some of my earlier posts. First, I think it is important to see beyond ideology such as political correctness in situations such as this. As I said earlier, the PEN protesters who didn't want Charlie Hebdo to receive a free speech award could not have had a good conception of the underlying causes of the January, 2015 attacks in Paris. They were probably thinking along politically correct lines something to the effect that the satirical magazine made Muslims feel insulted. If these Muslims had been students in America, perhaps they would feel "unsafe." No trigger warnings were provided! Is that how we ought to interpret these events? No, it isn't. Second, this is an opportunity to see how inadequate the arts and religion can be for dealing with occurrences like this. I am thinking specifically about Michel Houellebecq's novel, Submission, which I just reviewed. Although Houellebecq gets some credit for concocting an imaginative outcome for France in light of its growing Muslim population, the novel is actually rather inadequate if you are looking for an understanding of why so many Muslims live in France today or why the Middle East is in turmoil. The point here is that even if it isn't the responsibility of novelists to solve world problems, Houellebecq should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt and certainly should not be magnified to the status of a major thinker on the basis of his work. Similarly, if you regard Marilynne Robinson as a serious author, consider here that it is biology, not religion, that is driving these events. Religious traditions are malleable, and there is little to prevent outlier groups from diverting them to serve their purposes. If religions were static ideologies there would be far fewer varieties of them in the world than presently exist.

It is a mistake to think that our current social norms such as political correctness are going to be broadly applicable to other cultures on different continents. As humans, we have a very long history of resorting to religion and art to assuage the stresses of life, and it can be difficult for us to think beyond them. Admittedly there is an unsatisfying, counterintuitive aspect to modern science, and we tend to resist it even when it is our best option for understanding life's complexities. However, we stand a better chance of comprehending ISIL by studying disintegrating societies of the past than we do by falling back on the comforts of our cultural perspective, including religion and art.

Update

You may have noticed how my attitude has changed toward the Internet over the course of writing this blog. For a number of reasons I am reverting back to the way I used it ten years ago. I was a late adopter of computers and didn't buy one until the Internet had become an important tool for shopping, banking and investing, which justified my purchase at the time. I gradually became diverted into using it for broader reading and discussion, and am now finding it to be more problematic in these areas. Life in cyberspace is conducive to information overload, a short attention span, bad manners and, especially in my case, cognitive dissonance. The sense I get is that it contains chaotic, uncontrolled elements that undermine some of the benefits that its users imagine they are receiving. I find it jarring to enter an environment which at first seems coherent and rational only to discover that my initial perceptions were illusory and that I have inadvertently walked into an unexplained free-for-all in which discontinuities surround you. I occasionally end up feeling as if I have been attracted by a display window outside a department store and, upon entry, I discover an empty warehouse with a few lunatics wandering around. The ideas behind a given website may or may not match its outward appearance, and in the latter case you may be in for a series of rude awakenings. Websites loosely designed for literary and cultural content tend to be less reliable than ones designed specifically for the sale of products or services.

There is a tendency among many Internet users to become obsessed with the next new thing. This behavior is encouraged by companies like Twitter, which create the illusion of real-time news as events unfold. In a similar vein, there are more serious-seeming sites that have a tendency to pretend that they are offering content that is more in-the-know, that they are the sanctum sanctorum of the cognoscenti. In either case a web surfer may become buffeted around by waves of Internet nonsense and come out none the wiser in the end. Psychologically I feel myself pulled into this a little, and I'd rather not be, because on the whole it is a waste of time.

Not that I have ever tried to be "with it," I will henceforth retreat somewhat from the Internet resources that are available and if possible focus more on books. This will affect the blog, because it will take longer to absorb material and comment on it, resulting in a lower frequency of posts. I will continue to write about my favorite topics such as capitalism, Darwinism and AI, but will make an effort to do so only when I have something new to say. As always, I am open to suggestions for new topics and will write about them if I feel competent and am interested myself.

Belonging

Among the people whom I know best, one of their greatest concerns is that they don't feel that they belong to any particular group. I think the need to belong is hard-wired into us and is a manifestation of our eusocial nature, as discussed earlier. We have evolved to live in cooperative groups, and if we're not integrated into one we are likely to feel uneasy, because it was once impossible to survive alone. A genetic predisposition for a solitary life is weak in our gene pool, because over hundreds of thousands of years it tended to result in early death.

Even though I am a relatively solitary person myself, I also have a need to belong, and it used to affect my decisions more than it does now. In my early years I thought that I might fit in well in a college environment, but I eventually determined that I am too independent and unscholarly for academia. I moved to Oregon in 1975 with the hope that the local culture would agree with me better than it had in the Midwest or the East Coast. It didn't. By the time I moved to Vermont in 2011, my view was that I was unlikely to fit in anywhere, and the decision to move here did not assume that I would find friends or like-minded people, and in fact I haven't and don't expect to.

You could also describe some aspects of my recent forays into the Internet as efforts to connect with specific groups of people. In that sense the efforts were of no avail. I eventually discovered that Internet communities are transient and often illusory. Besides that, they can be downright unpleasant, because it is a place where people can behave uncivilly with little or no consequence. As discussed, the New York Review of Books left me with the impression that it serves the needs of a small number of people who aren't necessarily cohesive themselves, and there is no evidence that they care about anything beyond their individual needs. Incongruously, the NYRB, which supposedly promotes ideas, has no apparent interest in the discussion of ideas or the public who wish to participate in it. From the standpoint of belonging, the Internet has been no different from my previous life experience. In effect, I have withdrawn to my own blog with no expectation of group participation, except perhaps on a minuscule level with a small number of readers. If the readership ever went up, the blog could easily be ruined.

Since we live in a capitalistic society, I should also mention that the widespread need to belong creates economic opportunities. A fairly large percentage of TV programming amounts to nothing more than a substitute for an actual social life. It took a while for TV executives to figure it out, but by the 1960's sitcoms and talk shows had become staples. Talk shows have changed little since then, but sitcoms have expanded broadly into the miniseries and reality TV formats. Network news is now far less devoted to actual news than to infotainment and feel-good moments. Most of this programming places an emphasis on providing an artificial sense of community. Its very existence can be attributed to profit motives that have nothing to do with artistic value, as I often complain. Because families and friends are often geographically separated and fragmented by contemporary living conditions, the media cater to them by providing substitute products to satisfy that basic human need.

The exploitation doesn't end there. Professional and amateur sports could never exist as dominantly in American society as they do without someone promoting their expansion. Team sports are quintessentially about group affiliation, and by association they become monopolies over large geographic areas. For example, I'm supposed to be a Boston Red Sox fan even though I live in a different state, about 200 miles away, and don't care about baseball. Likewise, colleges and universities have figured out how to use sports to generate funding directly through sporting events and indirectly through alumni giving stimulated by sports. They have also recently expanded their marketing to alumni by encouraging them to retire in or near their campuses, providing an even more concrete sense of community.

With advances in technology, it is beginning to become a little frightening to think about what might happen if current trends in the creation and marketing of artificial communities continue. It is easy to imagine younger people who have grown up in a digital environment inhabiting virtual communities tailored to fit their personalities and interests. Prima facie, given the plasticity of the human mind, I see no reason why people couldn't learn to live in the complete absence of actual human contact if suitable artificial substitutes were provided. As for myself, I am satisfied to inhabit the more traditional world in which I have created an imaginary relationship with the mostly invisible readers of this blog.

Video of the Day

Click here for Henri 2, Paw de Deux

Kakutani on Houellebecq

Though I no longer make a habit of reading book reviews of popular fiction after years of finding them unsatisfactory, I looked at Michiko Kakutani's review of Submission out of curiosity to see what she thought. She has a reputation for being an honest, if quirky, reviewer who doesn't shy away from going into attack mode when she dislikes a well-received work of fiction. Unsurprisingly, she hates Michel Houellebecq and Submission, and I thought I would comment on the strengths and weaknesses of her review and on the whole reviewing system that readers have to put up with.

In the first paragraph of her review she links Houellebecq to "hate-mongering." In the second paragraph she refers to the novel as "ugly." In the third paragraph she says that for Houellebecq "controversy has proved to be a very rewarding career move," and remarks that one of his earlier novels is "filled with misogynistic put-downs, putrid sex scenes and nihilistic pronouncements on the depravity of the human species." In the fifth paragraph she says that "Mr. Houellebecq's writing tends to be highly derivative of earlier writers," and that "his protagonists are simply variations of one odious type–self-pitying, self-absorbed and misanthropic men who have a hard time feeling any emotion other than lust." Referring to the book in the eleventh paragraph, she says that Houellebecq's "mockery of French academics...and an arthritic political system" is "all done with an extremely heavy hand." In the twelfth and final paragraph she concludes that the protagonist, François, "gets a new start in life by remaining true to his egocentric, opportunistic self." While her summary of the plot and her description of some of Houellebecq's techniques are reasonably accurate, she seems to me to intensely dislike the book for reasons that cannot be considered objective.

Where I think Kakutani goes astray is in her understanding of what constitutes art. Certainly it is easy to see that Submission does not fit the model of conventional popular American fiction, but she makes no effort to identify how anyone who is not a deranged pervert or something of the sort might find it worthwhile. I agree with her that it is written in a specific French tradition, but think she is being lazy about examining how that tradition works and the ways in which Houellebecq falls short in that regard. She negatively compares him to Camus, whom I now think is rather overrated myself, but doesn't try to determine what Houellebecq might be trying to say or how he might have said it better.

My view is that Houellebecq is not first and foremost a good writer in the sense of producing beautiful writing or the clear exposition of ideas, but that those are not really the essence of the novel as a form of art. Kakutani's position is not unlike that of art critics in the late nineteenth century who might have said that van Gogh's crude brushstrokes are proof of an imbecilic lack of talent. It is a little difficult for me to evaluate just how badly Houellebecq reads in French, but it isn't hard to see that his sentences generally lack elegance. I also believe that the ideas underlying his novels could be expressed better even in novelistic form, but to a serious reader that is not a sufficient reason to dismiss an entire work. Houellebecq appeals to me in Submission and some of his other novels because I believe that there are aspects of his worldview that are legitimate and stand in contrast to conventional optimistic views of mankind, and he offers a needed corrective. Reviewers like Kakutani seem blind to the fact that a negative or pessimistic outlook on mankind may be just as plausible as their optimistic view, and that their critiques of Houellebecq are based more on dislike of a competing worldview than on substantive reasoning.

I concede that there is a somewhat cartoonish element to the way that Houellebecq writes, but must point out that even comic books are now accepted as a legitimate form of art. If you have read my previous posts you will have seen that I prefer to view the limitations of mankind more calmly, in a somewhat detached manner. I think Houellebecq is just a little more hysterical and uninformed than he might be. From my point of view it would be preferable to express Houellebecq's ideas in a clear and accurate essay, but the fact is that no one reads that kind of thing, and most people respond more to a Houellebecqian tirade. When you take objectivity seriously it becomes apparent that Americans are far more optimistic than they ought to be–delusionally so–and Houellebecq, though excessive in the opposite direction, is constantly drowned out by a majority that is optimistic to the point of obtuseness. Regarding the accusation that Houellebecq is a misanthrope, misogynist, nihilist, narcissist, bigot, etc., I think that these are primarily name-calling labels that people use without bothering to understand his work; he must take some blame for being less articulate than he might have been, but I think that being completely articulate is not necessarily the responsibility of an artist, because incomprehensible complexity is something that art, particularly the novel, seeks to address. For me it is more appropriate to see Houellebecq as an enfant terrible who presents a particular worldview in a forceful and expressive manner.

Kakutani's review looks like a barely civil hatchet job. Beneath the "Mr." this and so on of the stilted New York Times writing style that she employs, one gets the sense that there may lie a simmering rage against all things French. This could place her in same camp as Jeb Bush, who, during a recent Republican debate, said that Marco Rubio's poor attendance record in the U.S. Senate looked like "a French work week." Of course, that was a continuation of the long-running hate affair that the Republicans have held with France since they changed the name of french fries to "freedom fries" because France, showing great prescience, refused to support George W. Bush's disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. In this case I would only point out to Kakutani that French literary and intellectual history, whether one likes them or not, were once and perhaps still are the apex of Western civilization, and that beyond the fact that French writers and thinkers produced many of the ideas that made the very existence of the U.S. possible, throughout most of its history America has looked like a long-running episode of "The Beverly Hillbillies" compared to life in France. Whether you like Houellebecq or not, he descends from a literary tradition that dwarfs American literature.

For me, reviews like Kakutani's are but another symptom of the cultural oligarchy that is headquartered in New York City. To figure out what's going on here you need only know that New York City is a center for publishing, and that major newspapers hire columnists who, in the course of producing columns, inevitably become hacks, regardless of their level of talent. The New York Times is in the business of making money, and to do that they need a constant flow of new content. One proven method for generating it is maintaining a fixed group of columnists with whom their readers come to identify. A few years ago it dawned on me that even the best columnists fail eventually if you hold them up to any real standards. If you look at what Michiko Kakutani has to do, there is no mystery to this. She speed-reads fifty-plus books each year that have been identified as being of potential interest to her readers, and then she quickly writes a short essay on each one. If she happens to come across a complex, puzzling or highly specialized book, she may not have the time or knowledge to do it justice, and usually no one will know the difference, because her columns are not combed religiously by scholars from all fields. To use Submission as an example, whether or not it is as lofty a work as I may have made it seem, it may simply be a matter of expedience for her to trash it. Her readers won't be any the wiser, her reputation won't be affected, and her company doesn't care whether the novel sells well or not. My point here is that the constraints under which reviewers like Kakutani work place an upper limit on the quality of their reviews. Besides the fact that it would be nearly impossible for one reviewer to produce fifty high-quality reviews per year, she would have no incentive to do so, because that would entail writing over the heads of her readers, contradicting the purpose of her employment.