The American Scene

An ongoing review of politics and culture

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11/12/11

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there, I fixed it

Let’s fix college sports, shall we? We do it like this:

1) Eliminate all athletic scholarships. (What’s that you say? Athletic scholarships have been key to getting people from poor and otherwise marginalized communities into the nation’s colleges? Then let’s take the scholarship money that now goes to athletes and send it towards those communities without asking whether the young people involved can run fast or kick a ball accurately. Since big-time sports are money-losing propositions for almost all schools, there may even be some extra money for scholarships.)

2) Keep all the sports that universities currently sponsor, but treat them largely as clubs. Or, if the varsity/club distinction must be maintained, limit the number of coaches and pay them on the same scale used for, say, theater or dance teachers.

3) Disband the NCAA.

4) Encourage the boosters who have poured millions of dollars into their favorite universities’ sports teams to work with the NFL to create something like England’s Football Association. Ideally, the NFL would become the equivalent of the Premier League, with only the twenty best teams in the top tier, and a promotion/relegation fight each year. The boosters would likely be far happier as team owners, able to shop for and buy talent without having to try to dodge onerous NCAA regulations. At the outset, the second tier of FA-USA would be made up of the twelve weakest current NFL teams plus eight teams located at the sites of long-standing college football powerhouses: Austin, Tuscaloosa, Baton Rouge, Pasadena, Norman, Columbus, Ann Arbor, and so on. With the application of some marketing skill — including shrewd color choices and the signing of local heroes — fan loyalty could relatively easily be transferred from the universities to the new professional teams. And the universities could make some money by leasing their stadiums to the new leagues.

5) The promotion/relegation model could be applied to basketball and perhaps baseball as well, again drawing on local fandom and university arenas. (Imagine how much fun it would be to see the Tar Heels promoted and the Bobcats relegated in the same year. Talk about rivalries!) Connect the traditional basketball powers to the NBA’s developmental league — assuming the NBA eventually gets its act together — and the traditional baseball powers to appropriate levels of the minor leagues.

6) Eliminate aluminum bats at all levels of competitive baseball. (Yes, I know that’s not really relevant here, but while I’m dreaming. . . .)

7) Encourage the FA-USA to create college scholarships for their players, to be taken advantage of in the off-season or after retirement. Let those who like the current system because they are concerned about the athletes having opportunities after college make contributions to this fund.

There, it’s all better now. You’re welcome.

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11/ 8/11

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O captain, my captain

For me, the question that looms largest about the Penn State sexual-abuse scandal is this: How could someone see a man raping a child and fail to intervene? Fail even to call 911? I can contemplate many difficult, challenging, frightening situations that cause me to ask myself what I really would do if faced with them — and cause me to have no clear answer. This isn't one of them. How could Mike McQueary not have done more?

The answer, I think, lies in the tradition — as old as football itself — of pretending that football is a branch of the military. Players often talk about other players they'd go to war with. That linebacker is a warrior. The guys in this locker room, they know I've got their back. Football coaches, more perhaps than coaches in any other sport, play up the idea that the team is comprised of a besieged band of brothers who can trust only one another. (Even at the school where I teach — a Division III school with no athletic scholarships, thank God — the football players sit together at dinner and chant and shout.) Moreover, the coaches themselves are the primary beneficiaries of this governing military metaphor: they are your commanding officers, and to them you are uniquely and solely accountable. I bet it never occurred to Mike McQueary to call the police. I bet the first, last, and only thought he had was: I have to tell Coach.

This pretense that sport is war and a team an army obviously extends to other sports as well, but it functions most powerfully in football. In most other sports there aren't enough players to make the metaphor work really well, and there is more room for purely individual initiative and achievement. But a football team really is like a company made up of three platoons — offense, defense, and special teams — whose assistant coaches are very like platoon leaders. It's no surprise that McQueary thought only of telling Coach Paterno. He was reporting to his commanding officer, than whom no higher (or other) authority could be imagined.

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08/11/11

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Christianism redux

In Andrew's measured reply to my recent post he sticks to his guns, in one sense — he still thinks the term "Christianism" useful — but in another sense concedes some of my key points: that there can be Left and Right, good and bad, versions of a Christianity that seeks to intervene in the political arena. But if that's true that Andrew needs to use more adjectives when discussing these issues.

I think he could escape some of the problems I'm noting if he changes his definition of Christianism. He writes, "Christianism, in my definition, is the fusion of politics and religion for the advancement of political goals." This is problematic in several senses, first of all in its failure to acknowledge that such a fusion is also concerned to further religious goals. But the chief distinction Andrew needs to make involves how this advancement is sought. As our own Noah Millman put it in an email to me yesterday — I'm paraphrasing and adding some content of my own, so Noah may want to correct me or dissent from me later — there's a big difference between a Christianity that seeks to bear prophetic witness in the political sphere and a Christianity that seeks to rule. For me — and for me specifically as a Christian — what's most disturbing about conservative (or "conservative") Christian politics over the past thirty years is its frank eagerness for worldly power, its cheerful indifference to the spiritual dangers of that power, its ignorance of the long sad history of Constantinianism and Erastianism.

Indeed, I think this is precisely what Andrew is getting at when he writes of King, "He didn't just preach his faith as politics, but he practised it in a way very close to Christ's, seeking punishment, enduring imprisonment, and risking death, to bear witness to a deep moral truth about the dignity of every person. This submission to violence, rather than its gun-totin' celebration, is what distinguishes King's Christianism from so much of today's." I would just encourage him to add this "desire to rule" to his actual definition of Christianism. If he does that, then he gets out of the problems created by his willingness to define King as "a left-wing Christianist." If the desire to rule is intrinsic to Christianism, then King isn't a Christianist at all. He wanted to see justice flow down like waters, but he wasn't interested in being the Man in Charge.

So I think it's clear even from Andrew's response that he was wrong to say that what we need is "a more private, less political Christianity"; what we need, rather, is a Christianity that's political in a humble and non-coercive way, and that separates itself quite clearly from nationalism. If Andrew wants to criticize a heedlessly confident, power-hungry, jingoistic group of Christian politicians and their followers, I'm ready to hear and often (usually) to join in — heck, I've done it on this site. But please don't call it Christianism. That needlessly sullies the name of Christ. Give it a better name. How about American Constantinianism? Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, I agree, but sometimes euphony must be sacrificed to accuracy.

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08/ 9/11

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the cause of all the trouble

Andrew Sullivan writes in his usual vein about "Christianism":

Imagine a libertarian Christianity, which urged individuals to give away as much of their property as possible to the poor, to forget about the sex lives of their neighbors and focus on their own, to pray more than politic and to forgive more than to judge. Imagine, in other words, Christianity, and remind yourself how alien Christianism is to it.

And then later:

At one point, Christians will look back on this period, I believe, with horror. The desire to control others' lives and souls through politics is so anathema to the Gospels it will one day have to be exposed and ended. Until then, we just have to keep our spirits up and attend to our own failures as Christians, which, of course, are many.

I think Andrew has finally convinced me. And as I have thought more about this I have finally realized whose fault all this is: Martin Luther King. He could have stayed in his prayer closet instead of politicking; he could have attended to his own failures as a Christian, which of course were many; he could have forgiven white Southerners instead of judging them. But no. He became an "outside agitator," marching into ordinary American communities and telling them that their local laws, and indeed in some cases federal laws, were not to be obeyed — and why? Because they conflicted with the law of God! Notice the arrogance with which he associates his cause with God Himself. He even asserts that "human progress" only happens when "men [are] willing to be co-workers with God." His whole vision for America is Christian and Biblical through and through: in his most famous speech he simply identifies the American situation with that of the Biblical Israel: "I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; 'and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.'" Talk about "the desire to control other people's lives and souls"!

It's hard to imagine a vision for this country that's farther from a "libertarian Christianity" that minds its own very private business and politely declines to have anything to say about the public realm. So if you too are convinced by Andrew's denunciations of "Christianism," it's past time to point your critique at the source of all this trouble: Martin Luther King, more than anyone else, is responsible for bringing an explicitly Christian and Biblical critique of America into the mainstream of modern politics.

(And if you don't happen to be interested in denouncing Dr. King, then maybe your problem is not with anyone and everyone who brings Christian convictions into the public sphere, but rather with some particular convictions that some Christians emphasize. After all, Dr. King's faith commitments were at least as encompassing in their scope, as universal in their claims, as publicly political as Rick Perry's — and make no mistake, it was that faith that drove and anchored Dr. King, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and John Perkins, and many of the other heroes of the Civil Rights movement. So maybe, just maybe, it's not an utterly privatized and "libertarian" Christianity that we need but rather one that reads the Bible better. But if that's true then the term "Christianism" is vacuous and misleading, and Andrew needs to step back and start over.)

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06/ 7/11

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sentiment and sentimentality

James Lundberg complains — and with good reason — about the vast influence of Ken Burns’s Civil War series on students, and on the general American understanding of what in Alabama we call the Late Unpleasantness. I sympathize with the grumpiness sufficiently not to question too much of this piece, but . . . there’s this, among his list of annoyances: “Union Major Sullivan Ballou’s never-delivered letter to his wife Jenny demonstrates that the sentimentality of 19th-century romanticism can still jerk a tear.”

Do we really want to be that belittling towards Ballou’s now famous and much-reposted letter? I don’t think I do, at any rate. True, it’s unlikely that a soldier today, facing imminent death, would write in so elevated, so elaborate a style to his beloved. Almost certainly he would not write at such length. But is that wholly to our credit? Do we want to look at a culture that had a strong sense of rhetorical occasion, and embraced a far greater range of linguistic registers than we now can handle, and dismiss its products as mere “sentimentality”?

Yes, people get all gooey about Ballou’s letter, but there are far worse things to get all gooey about. And you could make the argument that the situation actually called for a higher style than most of us, in our linguistically narrow age, can muster. Maybe we could learn something from Major Ballou.

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04/29/11

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a report from Alabama

My sister Carla and her husband Carl live in the countryside in northeastern Alabama, in a valley bounded by long low ridges. This is near the southern terminus of the Appalachians: the ridges run northeast to southwest. And in that part of the world tornados run southwest to northeast.

On Wednesday evening Carla had gotten home from work, and was watching the weather on TV. She picked up the phone and called my mother, who lives ten miles away, because it looked like a tornado was headed for Mom’s house, and Mom needed to take cover in her laundry room. Carla hung up, and then noticed something strange: though it was very quiet all around, debris started falling out of the sky: pieces of wood and plastic, big clumps of earth. The tornado had shifted direction and was headed straight up their valley.

Soon everything began shaking. They put on motorcycle helmets and huddled in the center of the house. The terrified dog started to bolt for the door; Carl grabbed him and held on tight. The house shook harder. Windows burst. One floor above them, the roof came off in large pieces. Carla prayed for the house to hold together, though oddly, she says, she didn’t think about the likelihood that she could soon be dead.

And then, two or three minutes later, it was over.

Eventually they ventured outside into the dusk. The old oaks in their yard had been uprooted. Their garage still stood, but no longer had a door, and the door it had once had was nowhere to be seen. Almost every house and tree in the whole value had been reduced to sticks. Carla and Carl will have to replace their roof and some windows, and pull up some soaked carpets, and rebuild their fences, but their neighbors all lost pretty much everything.

Thursday morning they took the pickup truck and drove as far as they could up the valley, weaving around fallen trees, trying to find friends and acquaintances. Their best estimate is that eleven of their neighbors were killed. They had driven only a couple of miles from home, on a road both of them drive every day, when they looked around at a completely unrecognizable landscape. No houses, no trees, no signs. “Where are we?” they asked each other.

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09/ 5/10

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Jonathan Franzen's Freedom

So, the last three books I have read: Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace; Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen; The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon. It’s interesting to think about these novels in relation to one another, since their authors are all approximately the same age — roughly my age, as it happens: the youngest, Chabon, is four years younger than me — and represent three interestingly different takes on The Novel As A Genre. Franzen these days works wholly within the realist tradition; Chabon likes to experiment with the conventions of genre fiction; Wallace does . . . well, his thing, his blend of metafictional play and moral seriousness.

Of the three, Freedom is the least satisfying to this reader. I don't know whether, as some have argued, the conventions of realistic fiction have grown stale beyond the possibility of recovery, but they’ve grown stale for me. At least within the American context. Franzen’s long book focuses on a couple, Walter and Patty Berglund. They meet, they date, they marry — he without reservation, she with some reservation, for she is far more sexually attracted to Walter’s musician friend Richard than to Walter. They have two children, a boy and a girl. They rehab a house in the city (St. Paul, Minnesota). They are good liberals. Walter works in conservation; he’s a nonprofit guy all the way. When their son Joey becomes a teenager they have a lot of trouble with him, in part because he becomes a conservative, or more conservative than they are anyway (partly in sheer cussed rebellion). The son goes through some hard times but eventually gets his ship righted. Walter and Patty each have affairs. They break up for a while. Near the end of the book they have the chance to get back together, and I won't tell you whether they take it, or what circumstances determine their success or failure.

It’s a story that, put in these schematic terms, has been told hundreds of times, and one might think that John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates, to mention just two practitioners of the craft, had said all there is to say about this particular kind of life. So there’s something admirable about Franzen’s insistence that, whatever you’ve read before, you haven't read the story of these particular people, and their story is worth the telling and worth the listening. He seems to be challenging himself as a novelist to do the extraordinarily difficult thing: to make us care about characters as commonplace as the Berglunds.

(Incidentally, while there are a few pages of the book which focus our attention on the uses and abuses of personal freedom, that theme doesn't seem central to the story, to me anyway, and I wonder why Franzen gave the novel its title.)

Franzen is an exceptionally skilled writer, and one of the ways we see that skill is in how he opens and closes his novel. Most of the book is told from the points of view of the major characters — Walter, Patty, Richard, and Joey — but the opening and closing scenes come from the perspective of the Berglunds’ neighbors (two different sets of neighbors). It’s as though Franzen is saying, Here’s what these people look like from the outside, but I show you what they’re like from the inside.

As I say, this is admirable and it’s skillfully done, but I never cared about the Berglunds — except, perhaps, during the last twenty pages, which are simply and hauntingly beautiful by any reckoning. But when can't bring yourself to invest, emotionally, in characters over the five hundred preceding pages, even the most brilliant final chapter can only do so much to recover the book for you.

I believe that people like the Berglunds matter — I’m a Christian, for heaven’s sake, I believe they matter to God Himself far more than they could ever matter to me — but that doesn't mean that I think their lives are interesting enough to sustain a book this long. There’s the question of the intrinsic value of ordinary people, and then there’s the question of the suitability of those people for novelistic representation. Those questions need to be kept separate. The Berglunds don't seem to me to be a good use of Jonathan Franzen’s energy, intelligence, and time. But God bless him for trying, all the same.

UPDATE: Looking at this, I realize that I should have noted that while Wallace is about the same age as Franzen and Chabon, he wrote Infinite Jest in his early thirties. It is his forthcoming book — The Pale King, left very unfinished at his untimely death — that he was working on at the same time that Franzen was writing Freedom and Chabon The Yiddish Policemen's Union. It will, obviously, be very, very interesting to see where Wallace was headed as a writer when he died.

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08/ 3/10

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on some of the "first things"

Of course Mayor Bloomberg is right — of course. It’s sad that there should even be debate about the core legal principles involved. Whether the building of a mosque so near Ground Zero is a good idea — whether it promotes the health of the city, as some of the proponents of the scheme say they want to do — is a completely different question, a matter of social prudence. About this reasonable people will disagree.

But legally the situation is simple, as the mayor points out: “with or without landmark designation, there is nothing in the law that would prevent the owners from opening a mosque within the existing building. The simple fact is this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship. The government has no right whatsoever to deny that right – and if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution.” He could delete the “almost” in that last sentence.

But the really sad thing is that people who call themselves conservatives — Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin — should be crying out for apparatuses of the state to limit and police voluntary religious association. This is a profoundly anti-conservative view in two ways. First, it is historically myopic, as Mayor Bloomberg’s brief history of controversies about religious freedom in New York City demonstrates. It’s remarkable that people who invoke the Founders so regularly and in such tones of devotion could be utterly deaf to the Founders’ concern to ensure freedom for mistrusted minority religions. They might start by reading George Washington’s once-famous letter to the Newport synagogue, paying special attention to this sentence: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts.” In Washington’s understanding, it is misbegotten even to ask the question, “Should we tolerate this?”

Moreover, the Gingrich-Palin view of the matter is as blind to the future as it is to the past. No one would make such an argument who did not anticipate that his or her own religious preferences will forever be enshrined as the socially dominant ones. Having endorsed the principle that minority religions can be policed by the state, Gingrich and Palin may well be unpopular figures to their descendants, if Christianity continues to decline as a force in American culture.

In its origins, with Burke, conservatism was supposed to be about taking the long view, having proper deference to the wisdom of our ancestors and taking proper care for the flourishing of our descendants. This is also what Chesterton meant when he said that tradition is “the democracy of the dead.” Burke thought this long view was most likely to be taken by the aristocracy, but in a society without an aristocracy there needs to be a body of intellectuals who take it as their special mission to meditate on the “first things”, one might say, that link us to those who went before us and those who will come after.

The approach Gingrich and Palin take to the proposed lower Manhattan mosque has nothing to do with conservatism in this sense. It is neither conservative, nor liberal, nor anything else worthy to be called “political thought.” It is an infantile grasping after a fleeting and elusive cultural dominance.

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07/23/10

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storytelling

Over at the PoMoCon blog, Robert Cheeks asks a question about this statement by Shirley Sherrod: “So I figured if I take him to one of them, that his own kind would take care of him.”

Now I don’t have a problem with Ms. Sherrod’s use of the phrase. I’m not offended in the least. But, my question is, is it permissible for a white federal bureaucrat to use that phrase (“. . . his own kind would take care of him”) to describe his/her dealings with an African-American?

Well, presumably not. But I have a question of my own: How does Robert Cheeks think that Shirley Sherrod was using that phrase? I ask not because I think there’s anything particularly or inappropriately aggressive about Cheeks’s question, but because it seems so oddly irrelevant. It’s a question that would only arise, I think, in the mind of someone who doesn't fully grasp that Shirley Sherrod was telling a story. Sherrod was not delivering a lecture; she was not presenting a position paper; she was not outlining policies and procedures. Instead she was narrating events that occurred twenty-four years ago — and among those events, the ones she was clearly most interested in were internal, mental: her chief purpose in her talk was to deliver an account of her own state of mind and how it changed.

So in that light, look again at the sentence that Robert Cheeks finds noteworthy — “So I figured if I take him to one of them, that his own kind would take care of him” — and then listen to her whole talk, or read the transcript. Isn't it perfectly obvious that the whole point of the talk is to narrate her own movement from a place where it seemed natural to her to think in terms of “my own kind” and “his own kind” to a place where those distinctions are abolished?

And that this is her purpose she makes clear not only at the end of her talk but when she introduces the story of how she dealt with Roger Spooner: “When I made that commitment [to work in rural Georgia], I was making that commitment to black people — and to black people only. But, you know, God will show you things and He'll put things in your path so that — that you realize that the struggle is really about poor people, you know.” What she found was that if the lawyer who was supposed to be working to help Roger Spooner was “his own kind” it was only in skin color, because, though Spooner was paying the lawyer, he wasn’t getting any help from him. Sherrod saw that Spooner was too poor to mean a damned thing to the man who was supposed to be working on his behalf. And so, at the end of the anecdote, she circles back to her point: “Well, working with him made me see that it's really about those who have versus those who don't, you know. And they could be black, and they could be white; they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people — those who don't have access the way others have.” It’s as clear and straightforward a critique as you could possibly ask for of the idea — the idea that Shirley Sherrod had in 1986 — that people of the same skin color will necessarily see one another as of the same kind, as kin, as sharing a common nature. (Those italicized words are extremely closely related: see chapter two of C. S. Lewis’s Studies in Words.)

If you understand this, you’ll also understand that the responses from Sherrod’s audience are not remotely what Andrew Breitbart has said they are, but instead are ways for the audience to register that they’re tracking with the path of the story. And I bet that pretty much everyone in that room understood what kind of story Shirley Sherrod was telling: it was a testimony, a conversion narrative, of the kind that Christians have told in churches from time immemorial. If you think that Shirley Sherrod endorses thinking of white people as being of a different “kind” than her, you may as well also think that St. Augustine endorses the stealing of pears. Because her story is in the same genre as his Confessions (which title, as Garry Wills has pointed out, might better be translated Testimony).

As Andrew Breitbart has so helpfully reminded us, “Context is everything,” but especially in stories — and more especially still in stories that narrate a personal transformation. In political and journalistic and blogospheric environments dominated by sheer polemic, it might be worth our while to pause to remember that there are other, and very ancient, ways of getting a point across.

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08/31/09

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Jews with Swords

“The story of the Jews centers around — one might almost say that it stars — the hazards and accidents, the misfortunes and disasters, the feats of inspiration, the travail and despair, and intermittent moments of glory and grace, that entail upon journeys from home and back again. For better or worse it has been one long adventure — a five-thousand-year Odyssey — from the moment of the true First Commandment, when God told Abraham lech lecha: Thou shalt leave home. Thou shalt get lost. Thou shalt find slander, oppression, opportunity, escape, and destruction. Thou shalt, by definition, find adventure.”

That’s Michael Chabon. My essay on his recent work is here.

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08/ 6/09

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great expectations

My dear friends, the kind of response I was hoping for when I wrote that previous post was something like this:

Well, Alan, I hardly think we’re in for another Night of the Long Knives or a re-run of the McCarthy era — that’s not what you’re suggesting, is it? — but that really wasn’t the smartest thing for the White House staff to say. They should have known that a request to report to the White House anything “fishy” was bound to get spun as the first steps towards totalitarianism.

See, wouldn’t that have been reasonable and constructive? Instead I got a bunch of rotten eggs flung at my door.

People. Seriously. This isn’t the Daily Kos or No Left Turns. This is The American Scene — the Scene, man! — an oasis — yeah, I know I’m changing metaphors, just bear with me — an oasis of civilized discourse in the vast desert of the political blogosphere. Granted, it’s an oasis with a few putrid patches, but we know how to step over those, don’t we?

Really, I’m disappointed in you folks. Try to do better the next time, okay?

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08/ 6/09

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inquiring minds at the White House

Via a post from Erin O’Connor that’s interesting on several fronts: the White House says,

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

Let them know so they can do what?

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08/ 4/09

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The Franchise Affair

If you like mystery novels, be prepared for spoilers ahead — though I try not to be too explicit, I still give a lot away.

The Franchise Affair (1948) is a mystery novel by Josephine Tey, one of the most remarkable writers ever to work in that genre. (She’s also something of a mystery herself. She was a Scot whose real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh — “Josephine Tey” was just one of her pseudonyms — who worked in London for much of her adult life, and . . . not much else is known about her.) The Franchise Affair is a modernization of one of the great “true crime” stories of the eighteenth century, and is generally considered one of the classic mysteries.

However, recently in the Guardian Sarah Waters — an interesting novelist herself — offered a strong dissent from the usual view. While admitting that “in some ways Tey’s retelling of the Elizabeth Canning story is a quite brilliant one,” Waters is “mystified and appalled” by the general tenor of the story, which, in her reading, is driven by a particularly ugly form of British class warfare: it’s a “bilious, bigoted” tirade against the manners and morals of the unruly working classes.

And you know what? I think Waters nails it. I read The Franchise Affair just a few months ago, and I found it much less satisfying than some of Tey’s other work, but I didn’t describe it to myself in the terms that Waters uses — I was thinking more of the way that mysteries tend to work. In this novel, the protagonist is a small-town solicitor named Robert Blair who, though not a specialist in criminal law, takes up the cause of two local women, an elderly mother and her middle-aged daughter, who are accused of kidnapping a teenage girl and forcing her into slavery in their house, until after a month of misery she manages to escape.

Right from the beginning, Blair — who doesn’t know any of these people at all — determines that the mother and daughter are innocent and that the girl who accuses them is a lying, scheming little bitch. He never wavers in this view of the case, even when evidence seems to be strongly against his new friends, and in the end . . . he is proven to be precisely right.

That was what threw me. Blair was so certain, I felt that Tey was — perhaps over-obviously! — setting the reader up for a reversal. But the reversal never came. All Blair’s instincts were right all along. The “mystery” of the book turns out to be the explanation for the girl’s lies, and for their plausibility. And while the late revelations of the girl’s real story are well-handled, that just wasn’t what I was expecting — or not all that I was expecting.

There are some other things that are strange about the story. At the darkest hour, Blair’s aunt says she will pray for an angel to come and set everything right, and the very next morning a man comes to Blair’s office with information that reveals all and eliminates the clients’ danger. It’s almost as though Tey is playing with her readers — almost as though The Franchise Affair is a po-faced, deeply ironic parody of the genre.

But Waters’s essay gives a much more plausible explanation for the book’s strangeness — alas: I was enjoying my speculations about its irony. Class-based angst can make a writer do some strange things.

The Franchise Affair is very much worth reading, though — all of Tey’s novels are interesting for reasons unrelated to what mysteries usually do. I think the best of them is her last, The Singing Sands, though The Daughter of Time — in which her detective Alan Grant lies in a hospital bed and tries to figure out whether Richard III really murdered the little princes in the tower — is justly famous.

(Cross-posted at Text Patterns.)

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08/ 3/09

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the English Montaigne?

My essay on William Hazlitt — and Duncan Wu’s recent biography of the great essayist — is now up on the Books & Culture website. Excerpt:

Reading Hazlitt’s essays I am rarely conscious of anything much happening to me. His prose moves in irregular rhythms, but without calling overmuch attention to itself, and in his best work he does not seem even to try to convince me that his subject is important or his treatment distinctive. And yet when I reach the end of any of his finest pieces, I find myself setting the book on my lap and raising my head from the page a while: I feel vibrations in my mind, echoes of ideas that have just been suggested to me, echoes that resonate with one another variously and strangely. No one makes me think quite the way that Hazlitt does.

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08/ 1/09

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inquiring minds want to know

So, the Powers That Be at Apple have rejected a number of apps for the iPhone that rely on Google Voice — including one from Google itself — and now the FCC wants to know what’s up. Yet it was just a couple of months ago that the Federal Trade Commission wanted to know whether Apple and Google were getting too snuggly with each other. What are the chances that the rejection of a few Google apps is a way for Apple and Google to get the spotlight off their relationship? If they can convince the FTC that, as the old saying goes, it’s not what it looks like, then they’re going to be better prepared to deal with anything that the new Microsoft/Yahoo partnership might throw their way. Not that I’m cynical.

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07/31/09

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testing, testing

I’m sure someone has made the point I’m about to make, but I haven’t seen it, so: in Sam Harris’s recent op-ed about President Obama’s choice of Francis Collins to head the National Institutes of Health, he makes it very clear that his only objection to Collins is the man’s religious beliefs. “Dr. Collins’s credentials are impeccable: he is a physical chemist, a medical geneticist and the former head of the Human Genome Project.” Yet the U. S. Constitution says that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” So the Constitution would have to be amended before decisions of this kind could be made on the grounds that Harris wants to employ. Harris would be happy with such an amendment, of course.

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07/19/09

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sauce for the goose

From this NYT story on the dangers of talking/texting on your cellphone while driving:

Others cite more fundamental reasons to block any such legislation. “To me, the death of freedom is far worse than the risk of talking on the phone while driving,” said Carl Wimmer, a state representative in Salt Lake City who successfully fought a bill this year to ban talking while driving. “Why pick on cellphones?” he asked, noting that distraction comes in many forms. “You can’t legislate against stupidity.”

Wouldn't this be an argument against drunk-driving laws also? Especially since there’s evidence to suggest that talking on a cellphone while driving is as dangerous as driving drunk, while texting is even more dangerous?

Putting my question another way: is there an argument in favor of allowing phoning and texting while driving that wouldn't also be an argument for repealing DUI laws — assuming that the research noted above is accurate? Obviously, if phoning and texting are in fact less dangerous than driving drunk, my question doesn't apply. But if the research is right, then, to paraphrase Rep. Wimmer, why pick on drinking?

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07/17/09

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one more note about that island

If you’re going to be a successful teacher at a liberal-arts college — something I have tried to be for twenty-five years now — you have to be flexible and adaptable. You can't work just within your specialization, as you might be able to do at a research university. Sooner or later, you are bound to have to fill in for someone on leave, or team-teach a course whose reading list is not within your control — or maybe you'll just decide to try something new.

For some people this can be frustrating; for me it’s one of the best things about my job. Every year I teach books that are new to me; and I don't enjoy them all. But if I’m going to teach them well, I have to practice appreciation of them — even if I openly admit (which I do) that this book or that one isn't my cup of tea.

I think that this discipline has made me a more wide-ranging reader, but it has also revealed to me that there are limits to my catholicity of taste. D. H. Lawrence, for example, has always set my teeth on edge and probably always will; but I can recognize why he’s important, and I can show my students that importance. I wouldn't want to boot him off the island, though I would like him to stay on the other side of it most of the time.

And there’s another point I want to add to this conversation: we can change over time. Until just a few years ago I greatly preferred the Odyssey to the Iliad, but that preference has been reversed. Don't know why, but it has. I find it almost impossible to read Faulkner now, except for a handful of things, chief among them “The Old People” — one of the best short stories ever written. Yet reading Absalom, Absalom! as an undergraduate was one of the transcendent reading experiences of my life.

I am almost certain that if I read Absalom, Absalom! for the first time now, I wouldn't like it very much. I would think it absurdly overwrought. I might not even be able to finish it. But I don't think that’s necessarily because I’m a smarter or better or more sophisticated reader than I was thirty years ago. Maybe I knew some things then that I don't know any more. Maybe I was open to experiences then that — for whatever reason — I’m no longer open to.

And maybe when I’m seventy I’ll learn to love Faulkner all over again. Who knows? So here’s a reason for being very careful before you throw any books off the island: later on, even much later on, you may find that you need them after all.

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07/16/09

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my official response to Noah's books-off-the-island post

“Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.” — W. H. Auden

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07/14/09

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a follow-up to that bleg

1) Sure wish I had remembered to say what we’re doing in math, science, and language (fourth year of Latin). Sorry about that.

2) Did not expect to get sixty-plus comments, but I am really thankful for them.

3) We’re not as ambitious as it might look. (Though at least one commenter thinks that all that material on Victorian sanitation, the problem of evil, and Chinese printing technologies is Easy Street.) We’ll be simply introducing Wes to a lot of this stuff, and nobody in our household expects him to be writing books on these subjects. The idea is that trying to get your head around the full scope of a particular issue — or set of interrelated issues — is useful in itself. The problem of sanitation in Victorian London was brought to the attention of English society as a whole by novelists like Dickens, but it is also a matter of ethics, sociology, science, technology, medicine, politics, city planning, and Lord knows what else. Most of the really interesting and really important issues people study are like that: they have a dozen or more points of entry, each of which gives you a different angle on the overall topic. There’s no way for Wes — or for me, if it comes to that — to get the whole picture. But learning just how much there is to the picture, and learning to fill it in as completely as you can — those are goals eminently worth pursuing. And when you get a sense of the complexity of one such issue, you just might learn to be a little less confident that you thoroughly comprehend other equally complex issues. In short, we want to teach our son a little bit about disciplined research and epistemic humility.

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