One Wants One's World-Class Cafeteria Trays

One way I can tell what I ought to write about is that a topic nags at me for a long time.  This example goes back five years, to Edmund White's 2018 book The Unpunished Vice (Bloomsbury).  In May 2019 I wrote about White's confusion of cultural absolutism with cultural relativism, his youthful infatuation with premodern Japanese culture. It would be tempting to call this confusion fashionable, if it weren't so widespread and enduring.

In that post I wrote that I intended to discuss some disparaging comments White made about the US educational system.  If five years seems like a long time for me to be bothered by them, notice that White was still fussing about something that had happened over sixty years earlier. 

I went to a Deweyite public grade school in Evanston outside Chicago, where no grades were handed out, only long written comments by teachers on how successfully a student was realizing his potential. That whole system of education was scrapped after the Russians launched Sputnik 1 in 1957; Americans feared they were falling behind in the Cold War. But in that happy pre-Sputnik era of "progressive" education, we were contentedly smearing finger paint, singing a cappella two hours every week, helped along by our teacher’s pitch pipe, and trying to identify Debussy’s Jeux or Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf in music appreciation class. Richard Howard, the poet, and Anne Hollander, the costume historian, had attended a similar public school in Cleveland. A poem of Howard’s starts with the line "That year we were Vikings."

Far from being the whole system of American education in those days, progressive schools were a tiny minority, and remained so.  If White hadn't been living in an upscale suburb, he wouldn't have attended a Deweyite school, even in Chicago.  His father was rich and his mother was a psychologist, both of which had something to do with his placement in such an environment.

As for Sputnik, it gave reactionaries another club with which to belabor American schools. But if they had been dominated by feel-good, academically vacuous trends (or if Deweyism had really been incompatible with academic success), it would have taken much longer than it did for the US to put its own satellite into space.  Explorer I was launched in January 1958, three months after Sputnik. The US had a large aerospace system in place already -- where did all the test pilots who went on to become astronauts come from? -- as Gerald Bracey among others explained:

Thus there were lots of reasons for the Russians to accomplish space flight ahead of the U.S.: Our neglect of ballistic missile development for 6 years after World War II; our too-many-cooks approach once we did get serious; the internecine rivalries among the services; the disregard of [rocket pioneer Robert] Goddard's achievements; and Eisenhower's thinking about long-range space policy.

None of these reasons had anything to do with what was happening in schools. It didn't matter. The scapegoating began almost immediately.*

I use Bracey here because he goes on to detail the scapegoating.  I'm old enough to remember the praise of the Soviet educational system that followed, including the five-part series in Life magazine comparing an American high school student, derided as lazy and aimless, to a driven, brilliant Soviet counterpart.  Bracey tracked down the American who, stung by the notoriety, went on to become a jet pilot, but couldn't find the Russian kid, who may not have even existed. I believe that the pro-Soviet trend expanded from the right-wing Life to such elite media as Reader's Digest; nowadays, of course, it's East Asian schools that are supposedly leaving our kids in the dust.

White's an excellent writer, and I've read most of his books, often with pleasure.  But he loves to gripe, inaccurately, about cultural relativism, political correctness, and feminists.  Sometimes he has an arguable point, but usually, as here, he's fantasizing.  

--------------------------------------------------------------------

* Gerald Bracey, Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality (Educational Research Service, 2009), 37-38.

 

The Gay 70s?

Armistead Maupin linked to this appreciation of his first novel, Tales of the City, from the Advocate's website.  I hadn't heard of the writer, Kurt Niece, before, but that doesn't mean much.  I'm a big fan of the series, which I began reading when only two of the ultimately nine volumes had appeared.

It's odd, but although I enjoyed them Maupin's books never made me want to visit San Francisco very much, and I didn't go there until the late 1990s, when the series was in hiatus; so I don't remember the City of that era.  But I don't recognize gay life in the 70s from Niece's reminiscence at all, even if I make allowance for the "rose-colored glasses" he looks through.  He remembers

casual sex, cruising and bars. When I was very young, being gay was illegal. Homosexuality was viewed as a reprehensible and allegedly treatable psychiatric condition. But even so, being gay felt easier and far less complicated then.

I met my partners in person. The internet was science fiction and screen time was devoted to a handful of broadcast television stations and basic cable. There was a perception that since we were outlaws and criminals, and since most STDs could be treated with a big dose of antibiotics, then what the hell? Whoop it up! Go for it with the understanding that Auntie Mame is right – life is a banquet and most of those poor suckers are starving. 

Everyone has their own experience, and their own perspective.  But being gay was never illegal in the US: what was illegal was sex between males.  The line was blurred in practice, of course, and probably most straights as well as most gays were probably vague about the distinction.  I remember a bit in Martin Hoffman's important book The Gay World (Basic Books, 1968), which I read in 1969 or so: one of Hoffman's informants says "Maybe I'll move to San Francisco, gay kids are legal there."  Hoffman comments, as I just did, that it was sex, not being gay, that was illegal.  California's sodomy law wasn't repealed until 1975, so Hoffman's informant was wrong however you think about it.  As I remember, Hoffman also stressed that homosexuals were usually not charged with sodomy, but with lewd behavior, indecency, and other (probably unconstitutionally vague, but go figure) offenses, and those statutes weren't affected by the 1975 repeal.

San Francisco police had laid off to some extent by the time Tales of the City was written, but not entirely, so there was a very real sense in which gay men especially were criminals and outlaws in those days.  I don't believe Tales or its sequels had much to say about this aspect of gay life; a gay cop is an ongoing minor character later on, when the makeup of the police force was changing.  Antigay violence was an ongoing threat, including the gay ghettos, and there's a gay bashing in the third book of the series.  Then there was the assassination of City Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone by an antigay bigot in 1978, followed by the White Night Riots after the assassin was let off lightly by a jury.  I don't recall that Maupin ever touched on those events in the series.  "Less complicated"?  In the eye of the beholder, I guess, especially when the eye is hazed over by nostalgia.

As for meeting one's partners in person, that too is a slight oversimplification.  Gay men developed a number of ways to "meet" without getting too personal about it: the baths (with orgy rooms that let you "meet" in the dark in groups; bars also featured these), the public restrooms.  The Advocate's personal ads were notorious for their reduction of desired partners to a few fetishes; the Internet is just the evolution and fulfilment of that aspect of gay male life.  Niece reports a conversation with a much younger friend, presumably gay, and his uneasiness comparing the promiscuity of the 70s with what he assumes to be the wholesome domesticity of today:

I wondered what it would be like to have been settled and married and have had only one or two sex partners for the entirety of my life. What would it have been like to live life devoted to just one person? There was an unsettling regret that perhaps my life was not as well lived as I’d imagined.

This is baffling.  Young gay men are not, as far as I can tell, any less interested in promiscuity than their foreuncles were; what does he imagine they use the Internet for? That men can marry each other doesn't mean they're automatically going to be monogamous, any more than married heterosexuals are.  The male couples in Maupin's series aren't monogamous, certainly, but they remain devotedly together for years. Niece is viewing the past fifty years not through rose-colored glasses so much as through blinders that distort present and past alike in the service of stereotypes that are no tribute to Maupin's work.

Niece says his favorite passage in Tales is the one where Michael Tolliver and Brian Hawkins, gay and straight respectively, are sharing a joint and speculating about the future.  Michael says, “People like you and me…we’re gonna be 55-year-old Libertines in a world full of 20-year old Calvinists.”  Alas (or maybe not), it's a false prophecy.  If he weren't a fictional character, Michael would be 69 this year, and a good many of the real-life 20-year-olds are chasing each other on Grindr and other "dating" apps.  A lot of them are partnered, engaged, even married.  Things haven't changed that much. Even AIDS didn't bring about the utopia of terrified monogamy that so many Calvinists pretended to want, though I suspect like their nominally heterosexual counterparts, many of them violated their own strictures when they thought no one was looking.

My favorite scene from the series (well, one of them; I have several) involves the gay cop, Bill Rivera, who's visited by his brother's ex-lover's brother from somewhere out east.  The visitor has brought a bunch of fetish gear with him, and spends his entire vacation "trashing around."  Before he leaves, he tells his host: "You know, Bill, I could never live here - it's just too decadent!"  This perfectly sums up to me the ability of many people to dissociate their actual behavior from their pretenses about themselves.  No virus can eradicate that.

It Didn't Begin with Smartphones...

Most people still went about on foot in Göttingen.  The distances to be traversed inside the city were so short that it would have been hardly worth while to go by car or motorcycle.  Not until after the First World War did students and professors adopt the bicycle and this was a novelty not popular with everyone.  Was it not those leisurely strolls before and after lectures which had so often given rise to the most interesting ideas?  Had not chance meetings at a straight corner or along the picturesque city wall often accomplished more than formal seminars or committee sessions?

-- Robert Jungk, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists  (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1958), page 11

Whatever Happened to the America That Never Existed?

It's a strange thing, or at least it seems so to me, the very popular tendency to cast everything in terms of decline from a better past.  Even when the writer knows better.

One of my favorite examples is the late Molly Ivins's lament from 2007:

What happened to the nation that never tortured? The nation that wasn't supposed to start wars of choice? The nation that respected human rights and life? A nation that from the beginning was against tyranny? Where have we gone? How did we let these people take us there? How did we let them fool us?

Every assertion she makes in that paragraph about the better America that used to be is false.  I just reread her first book, Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She (Random House, 1991) which contains numerous references to American crimes past and present, so I know she was not as ignorant as she presented herself in 2007.

So, for some more recent examples, last week I got into a little dustup on Twitter with some guy who called for the "end to the American Empire and the Reinstatement of our authentic American Republic."  Now, the authentic American Republic limited the franchise to property-owning white males, compromised with slavery, and was from the beginning dedicated to driving the Indians into the sea.  I don't really think the other guy wants to "reinstate" those features either, but he refused to admit them.  All bad things, he insisted, started with the beginning of the American Empire in 1945 -- ignoring the Spanish-American War a half-century earlier, with its avowed imperialist aims.  Indeed, the period is referred to in history texts as the Age of Imperialism.  The Founders of the Republic, in fact, referred to America as an empire.  And so on; the discussion went nowhere.  This guy could hardly be accused of being uncritical of American foreign policy; he just refused to extend his critique to the period before 1945.

More innocently, perhaps, there was "Sign of the times: you actually fail to read books, but still have loads of unfounded opinions about them."  Yes, indeed, that only ever happened in the age of Trump.

The recent revelations of horrifying abuse of refugee children by US Immigration officials were often deplored in similar terms.  Many people failed (or chose not) to notice that the criminal mistreatment described in the article happened during the Obama administration, though they continued under Trump.  This was a continuation of Obama loyalists' refusal to recognize their god-king's repressive immigration policy and activity.  So, a writer who pointed out that "When people say that the Trump policy of separating children from their parents at the border is 'un-American', they forget or do not know or pretend not to know that the practice is deeply American and has a history" got predictable pushback.

For example, "True, but just as slavery is part of our history, and is not to be forgotten, we don't now hold it up as an American ideal, an aspiration to reach for, or a standard to measure present conduct by."  There's the question: does "American" mean "an American ideal" or "an American reality"?   People who denounce what they dislike as "un-American" rely on this ambiguity, though they often deliberately blur the line by assuming that what they dislike didn't exist in the past; whatever they like is ancient tradition. The same is true of "Christian" and "normal."  It's also known as the No True Scotsman move: if Americans (or "so-called Americans") did it, they weren't Americans.

It has always been thus; I'm not pushing nostalgia for the glorious days when people didn't try to erase the past.  In his 1973 book The Country and the City the historian Raymond Williams described how writers have been lamenting the good old days when an honest farmer could earn a fair living from the land, though in those supposedly better days nostalgia-mongers had made the same complaint; he traced this pattern back to Greek antiquity.  More recently, Jason A. Storm showed in The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago, 2017) that the trope of Disenchantment, the Disappearance of Magic From the World, has equally ancient roots: in the days when fairies and other magical Little People supposedly communed with Man, they were already being mourned as long gone.

I wrote this particular post because I began asking myself why so many people find it necessary and natural to situate their complaints about the present in fantasies about the past.  I don't have an answer, I'm just wondering.  I suspect that it's an example of what the anthropologist F. G. Bailey calls "the moral mind," in which one establishes one's bona fides through a controlled outburst of passion.  While that describes what people are doing, however, it doesn't explain why the outburst takes this particular form. It doesn't serve any real purpose, any function in an argument; if anything, it's a distraction.  But it's like a tic of some sort, that bursts into the the discourse irresistibly.  And it fills some emotional function, as nostalgia does.

I suppose too that acknowledging the grubby, sordid side of one's team's history makes it difficult for many people to work up moral indignation when that history spills over into the present.  The only way they can condemn official crimes in the present is to cast those crimes as an aberration from a glorious tradition.  And not without reason, since one response to these denunciations is some form of "Well, this is the way we've always done it; why weren't you this angry during the previous administration?"  I believe that it's possible, and not really so difficult, to put together a criticism of present-day misconduct that doesn't rely on misrepresentation of the past.

Since many of these people, such as Molly Ivins, know their history quite well, the cognitive dissonance probably becomes painfully intense, though I don't see how tying themselves up in knots makes it any better.  Is it really so hard, though, to refrain from writing "now" or "nowadays" as if what you're criticizing hasn't been around forever?  I guess it is.  For me, though, knowing that there's hardly anything new under the sun is somehow reassuring; if anything, it's an impetus to attacking Evil right now.  If not now, when?

They Don't Make Renaissances Like They Used To

This is the sort of thing I love, and I'm surprised I haven't quoted it here before.  In Robert Darnton's The Case for Books: Past, Present and Future (Public Affairs Books, 2009), he tells of "Niccolo Perotti, a learned Italian classicist," who in 1471 confided to a friend his concerns about the new language-production technology of printing [xiv-xv]:

My dear Francesco, I have lately kept praising the age in which we live, because of the great, indeed divine gift of the new kind of writing which was recently brought to us from Germany.  In fact, I saw a single man printing in a single month as much as could be written by hand by several persons in a year ... It was for this reason that I was led to hope that within a short time we should have such a large quantity of books that there wouldn't be a single work which could not be printed because of lack of means or scarcity ... Yet -- oh false and all too human thoughts -- I see that things turned out quite differently from what I had hoped.  Because now that anyone is free to print whatever they wish, they often disregard that which is best and instead write, merely for the sake of entertainment, what would best be forgotten, or better still be erased from all books.  And even when they write something worthwhile they twist it and corrupt it to the point where it would be much better to do without such books, rather than having a thousand copies spreading falsehoods over the whole world.

Ah, the good old days!  Of course Perotte was right: any new technology that makes it easier to copy and disseminate information will increase the absolute numbers (though not, I think, the proportion) of junk that is published.  The difficulty, though, is deciding what is junk and what is treasure.

Accentuate the Positive

Recently I began following the Facebook page of Bread and Roses, a non-profit organization " established in 2010 to help with the planning, coordination, and fundraising necessary to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the Great Lawrence Strike of 1912, popularly referred to as the Bread & Roses Strike."  They post material about US labor history, some of it current, with arresting graphics, and from time to time I share their posts on my timeline, as a corrective to the nostalgia that many people my age indulge promote.  Some of my favorite items, like the one above, depict child labor, and I link to them with snarky comments about how these kids weren't spoiled with cell phones, game consoles, and other luxuries, unlike Kids Today.

Today, though, I held back.  I wondered if anyone thinks I'm being negative when I pass this stuff along. I don't intend to be.  Pictures and stories like these make me feel hopeful about all the people (too often forgotten) who resisted the powerful and worked for positive change. No, they weren't perfect. Sometimes they were closed-minded. (But does anyone nowadays really believe that they're free of prejudices and other opinions that will look embarrassing fifty or a hundred years from now? I certainly don't.) Worst of all, a lot of the changes that they gave time and sometimes their lives to bring about, are taken for granted now. We often forget that the good things we have now had to be worked for and fought for, against fierce resistance. Until we have to work and fight for them again -- but the example of people like these can give us hope that we can do it, just as they did.

I was pleased. by the way, that several friends responded favorably.  History is interesting, if it's presented the right way.

The Old Book Peddler, Doing Well by Doing Good

It's like losing your virginity: you always remember the first time.

I grew up in small towns and rural areas, and the nearest dedicated bookstore was about twenty-five miles away in South Bend, Indiana.   ("Dedicated," that is, as opposed to racks of paperbacks in the drugstore or supermarket, or the newsstand in one town [where, as a teenager, I saw but didn't buy a copy of Richard Amory's Song of the Loon] or an office supply store in the same town that had some Modern Library hardcovers.)  I have a murky memory, from the age of perhaps eight or nine, of my mother taking me downstairs into a basement full of metal bookshelves and letting me pick out two books.  I think it was a bookstore in South Bend, but I have no idea which one it was.  I chose a Berlitz children's book teaching Spanish through a bilingual telling of Little Red Riding Hood and a Tom Swift book, one of the later series by "Victor Appleton II."  I think it was Tom Swift and His Jetmarine, but after more than fifty years, that detail is gone; if I recognize it, it's by the cover art.

When my family traveled, which we didn't do all that often, we went to Chicago and saw the museums. When we shopped in South Bend, it was mainly at Sears, and children weren't allowed to wander off by themselves to look for more interesting stores.  The first South Bend bookstore I found, when I got a job nearby in 1969 at the age of 18, was only a couple of blocks from Sears, but it might as well have been in Europe.  It was small, on a corner across the Post Office, and it had bohemian pretensions.  There I first saw books by Ginsberg, Genet, Purdy, Henry Miller, and many others.  But then I must have found this place before I was eighteen, because I began reading Miller during my junior year of high school.  Oh well, the chronology isn't all that important.

More important to me when I was growing up were libraries, both public libraries and school libraries, which I used as much as I could.  It wasn't until I started earning my own money that I could start to accumulate a personal library.  Since then, bookstores have joined libraries as vital resources in my life.  I immediately recognized them as places in which I felt at home.  For several years I lived above an independent bookstore in downtown Bloomington, and so it became routine for me to stop in daily as I came home from work to see what was new and chat with the owners.

With that as prelude, consider an article from Esquire magazine's website, "How to Quit Amazon and Shop in an Actual Bookstore" (subtitle: "And why you damn well should") by one Stephen Marche.  Marche begins by summarizing the current conflict between Amazon.com and Hachette Publishing:

Amazon has managed to offend the actual writers whose books Hachette publishes, including Malcolm Gladwell, James Patterson, and JK Rowling. That wouldn't matter so much if one of them wasn't Stephen Colbert. He has promoted stickers that viewers can download from his website, which read, I DIDN'T BUY IT ON AMAZON. Amazon has responded by telling customers that anybody inconvenienced by the battle with Hachette should buy books elsewhere. 

Well, that's fair enough, isn't it?  It's the free-enterprise system that supposedly made America great.  And despite the staggering hegemony of online purchasing, there do remain "elsewheres" from which one can buy books.  If a brick-and-mortar bookstore isn't close at hand, there are even online alternatives like Barnes and Noble or Powell's.  Even with the high price of gasoline these days, people are still shopping at malls, many of which have some kind of bookstore within their boundaries.  The tricky part is getting people to patronize them, and that seems to be pretty tricky.

Marche continues:

Unfortunately, by now, purchasing print books in a brick-and-mortar building is something of a lost art, like taking snuff or drinking brandy after dinner.

Indeed?  I've become intensely skeptical whenever anyone talks about lost arts, or for that matter compares the present invidiously to a better past.  I want to see evidence that things used to be better.  So, in this case, when was buying books a commonly practiced art?  (The other examples Marche gives, which I suspect are half-facetious, are hardly a loss and probably were never that widespread in the population to start with: in context they signify an anxious craving for class status that we're better off without.)

My bet is: Never.  Americans are probably more literate, even if only minimally, than we ever were before in our history.  Granted, with the continuing assault on public education, that's an achievement which may be in danger, and it may well be that, as in so many other areas, the US is behind other developed nations.  But before, say, World War II, most Americans didn't finish high school, and despite popular fantasies that every child finished third grade able to read highly advanced text, there were many who didn't finish third grade.  Nor were they readers.  It's proverbial that most American households had a Bible (often an expurgated "family" Bible) and perhaps a complete Shakespeare (also often bowdlerized); it's also proverbial that a country boy like Abraham Lincoln had to work hard to find more reading matter.  Sure, cities had bookstores, but in the days when the vast majority of the population lived outside the cities, I can't imagine that skilled bookstore browsers were more numerous than they are now.

There's also a tradition of working-class self-teaching, including lectors who were paid to read to their coworkers on the shift, sometimes fairly ambitious and challenging material.

La lectura (the reading) provided an education for the workers, but it also caused friction between the workers and the factory owners. Beginning with the first time a lector took his seat in an Ybor City factory in 1886, owners saw them as a negative influence on their workers. Lectors were blamed for the workers' growing socialist views, slowdowns and strikes. Yet the workers revered the lector.

How this all balanced out I don't know.  For now I'll just stress that the small towns I knew in the 1950s and early 1960s had no bookstores of their own.  One town had a very good public library, but we didn't live there after I was 8 so I mostly couldn't use it except to read on the premises; the other, smaller one, was adequate to keep me busy for years, as were the various school libraries.  In school I was one of the best readers, and diagnostic tests showed by the eighth grade I was reading at a twelfth-grade or college level -- but I was unusual.  Most of my fellow students hardly read at all as far as I could tell, though I did manage to incite one friend to read The Catcher in the Rye.  How many of them read books now?  From what I can tell, hardly any -- but neither did their parents.

Before we moved out of town, my mother belonged for a while to the Doubleday Bargain Book Club, but not past the trial period.  We had the books she got then, which included a three-volume collection of children's literature that I eventually read all the way through.  (One day in kindergarten I began giggling during nap time; I explained to the teacher when she scolded me that I was thinking of the story of the Three Billy Goats Gruff from that collection.  I had to bring the book to school with me the next day and read to her from it to prove my claim.)  Once at around this time my father brought home a box of books, most of them book-club editions, that I suppose he'd been given by a co-worker.  Since they were grown-ups' books, I didn't find them interesting at the time, but later I read several of them.  Those were pretty much all the books we had at home.  But while we lived in that town, I had the library.

Speaking of book clubs, Marche complains:

The real problem with Amazon isn't that it's strong-arming Hachette; it's that it leads readers to buy books that they've already heard about. When you pick out a summer novel for yourself online, you're going to pick the book that everybody else is reading, almost automatically. But the book that you want probably isn't Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. It probably isn't another James Patterson. A good seller in a bookstore is infinitely superior in every way to a personalization algorithm.

Ah, the algorithms.  Amazon's "recommendations" have led to me to quite a lot of interesting material, but that's because, as Marche says, they work from the kind of books I already have in my Wish List.  But it is not true, in my case and I imagine in others', that Amazon's algorithmic recommendations only point me to books I already know about.  Very much the opposite.

Mostly I do not buy books from Amazon, but from third-party dealers on the site.  But those listings and purchases are evidently grist for the algorithms.  Since I already have a long history of reading widely, the algorithms have a broader base of data to work with than they would for someone like my coworker who reads almost nothing but mysteries and romances.  Would she follow up on a good bookseller's recommendation to try something out of her usual territory?  No, she would not.  She reads for pleasure, as I do; but not, as I also do, to stretch my mind and learn. (Which, for me, is pleasure.) She reads hardly any nonfiction, and the fiction she reads is quite circumscribed.  Would she have read more nonfiction before Amazon existed?  I doubt it.  A recommendation can only work for you if you're interested in following it up.  A good bookseller, knowing my coworker as a customer, would not recommend to her Eric Foner's Reconstruction, Michael Gaddis's There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ, or Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality.  Such a bookseller would point her to more books in the vein she's already working.  The proverbial bookseller or librarian who points a child to a book that opens up new horizons exists, but he or she learns to spot the rare reader who might be receptive to the suggestion.  (And even then, I bet that most kids who receive the recommendations don't follow up on them -- we hear from the few who did.)

Before Amazon, there were book clubs.  The Book of the Month Club offered one middle-brow selection per month, selected by a board of advisors, plus a small back catalog of other works.  (Those of a certain age will recall the introductory offers, like the Durants' multivolume The Story of Civilization.)  The monthly selection would arrive in the mail unless you opted out.  No doubt BOMC broadened the reading habits of many people, but how much?  Was it any better, despite the guiding hands of Clifton Fadiman et al., than Amazon's algorithmic recommendations?

Marche's suggestions for browsing and buying physical books are largely good.  It's the context in which he puts them that isn't so good.  I'm worried myself about the loss that may follow from the digitization of reading, but I'm skeptical of my worries.  As Samuel Delany remarked some years ago:

It's the same thing with the physical books on the shelves. Anybody who does actual research in a library knows that you look on this shelf and then you turn around and you look on this thing, it's not related alphabetically; it's not related subject-wise; it just happens to be the book you need. And if you don't have the physical propinquity of the way the books are arranged, you're going to miss out on this opportunity, and this limits the kinds of research gems that can come up.

As books from the stacks in the university library I use are moved to the auxiliary facility to make shelf space for more acquisitions, I worry about the loss of this kind of serendipity.  But then I remember that in traditional research libraries, the stacks were closed.  You filled out a form for the material you wanted, and the librarian brought it to you -- just like the "new" model.  Open stacks are evidently an atypical situation (and one for which I'm very grateful myself).

I also suspect that new forms and methods of browsing, and of serendipity, will arise as more and more material is disseminated to the Web.  Those who are interested are also inventive; but they're also a minority, and probably always have been.  A more fruitful challenge might be thinking of ways to get more and more people, especially young ones (get 'em young!), comfortable in libraries and information exchanges in the first place.  That will become more important as the war against public education and public resources generally advances in the years to come.  Whining about an imaginary past of brandy snifters and bookstores won't do any good about the real barriers to general literacy that will be erected and must be torn back down.

Against Nature

A reader wrote in to correct something I wrote in this post, that "this cultivated nostalgia for a carefully modified-and-tamed-by-humans Nature is an artifact of modernity.  It's a luxury we moderns can indulge because we can keep Nature at bay.  (Most of the time, anyway.)"  My reader pointed out "the Roman poets and their longing for simple country life," and I sit corrected.

I should also have remembered Socrates, who according to Plato, reacted against a similar romanticizing of nature even before the Romans.  In the Phaedrus, Socrates says that "the country places and the trees won't teach me anything, but the people in the city do."  The trick to getting him out of the city, he continues, is to dangle a book in front of him, as people dangle carrots in front of hungry draft animals to get them moving.

I noticed this too when I read The Tale of Genji about a decade ago.  It's a vast novel a thousand years old about Japanese court life.  The title character likes to send flowers on branches, wrapped in poems of his own composition, to the ladies he pursues.  (And rapes, as often as not.)  But when Genji goes out in the rain or snow to collect these romantic gifts, he is wrapped in oilcloth against the elements.  It's his servant, less well covered, who does the work of breaking the branches off their trees.  Japanese culture is famous for its aestheticization of nature, but I noticed that "nature" in Genji's day was something to be cut up and gift-wrapped.  Just like my co-worker, taking her backlit e-reader with her when she goes camping to commune with nature.  So I admit, this fetish isn't a product of modernity.

This might also be the place to mention a couple of related things I've read lately.  Today I noticed a collection of C. L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry sword-and-sorcery stories.  The stories themselves date back to the 1930s, but the collection was published in 2007, with an introduction by the science-fiction writer Suzy McKee Charnas.  I liked some of what Charnas had to say, but much of it baffles me.

For example, she discusses the popularity of "two-fisted action" in pulp writing of the early twentieth century, and contrasts it with literary fiction of the period:

Meanwhile back at the library, the stuff called “literature” in the United States was dominated by people like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, stylists of a terse, “masculine” mode touted as the truest voice of serious American writing.  This hard, stripped-down style was clearly intended to challenge the more ornate, emotional, and melodramatic style of novel that had been popular (especially with middle-class women) for generations – think Dickens, and you’re definitely in the ballpark.  World War One had a powerful effect in concentrating the cultural mind on consensual reality.  After all that killing and dying in reality, mere “fancy” had come to be considered childish and insignificant in literary quarters.  Or, worse, decadent (code for – gasp! – homosexual) [12].

First, Hemingway I can see (though he learned his "terse, 'masculine' node" from the much butcher Gertrude Stein), but Fitzgerald?  His writing is only "terse" compared to, say, Dickens.  I just took another look at the opening pages of This Side of Paradise, thanks to Project Gutenberg:

When Amory was five he was already a delightful companion for her. He was an auburn-haired boy, with great, handsome eyes which he would grow up to in time, a facile imaginative mind and a taste for fancy dress. From his fourth to his tenth year he did the country with his mother in her father's private car, from Coronado, where his mother became so bored that she had a nervous breakdown in a fashionable hotel, down to Mexico City, where she took a mild, almost epidemic consumption. This trouble pleased her, and later she made use of it as an intrinsic part of her atmosphere—especially after several astounding bracers.

Young Amory sounds more like Truman Capote than Conan the Barbarian.  I also know from reading Ann Douglas's The Feminization of American Culture (Knopf, 1977) that nineteenth-century American male writers were obsessed with writing what Julian Hawthorne called "Man-books."  Herman Melville, says Douglas, "regarded the reception of his books as a test which would ascertain what genuine masculinity, or, as he tacitly defined it, what health and independence of mind, remained in American culture" (296).  "Over and over, Melville assures us that he will "set forth things as they actually exist"; he writes to correct 'high-raised romantic notions' about life at sea; no 'sentimental' illusions motivate him; he will give us 'facts'" (301).  Self-conscious striving after "literature" by American males seems to go along quite often with masculine anxiety and homosexual panic; it's not specific to any particular period.

About Jirel of Joiry, whose adventures take place in a version of medieval Europe, Charnas goes on to say that of course both her parents are dead by the time she's an adult, because "In such a violent age if you reached maturity your parents were likely dead, leaving you to replace them as you were meant to" (17).  True, the feudal period was violent, but violence wasn't the only thing that killed people then.  Plague swept through Europe periodically, decimating the population, and women often died in childbirth.  Also, says Charnas, "The feudal, rural France of 'Joiry' is nothing like the Renaissance world of reason, light, and beauty we’re familiar with from history" (15).  Renaissance Europe was still a violent, dirty, stinking, plague-ridden place, with "reason, light, and beauty" kept within strict limits.  Charnas seems to be relying on some outdated histories here, which depicted the medieval period as much 'darker' than it was, and the Renaissance as much 'lighter' and more rational.

I've just begun reading George Sturt's The Wheelwright's Shop (Cambridge UP, 1923), several months after I learned about it from David Ellis's Memoirs of a Leavisite.  Ellis accuses Sturt of romanticizing the old ways of working and living, but this seems at odds with this lovely passage:

The shop was still but half opened when the two front doors had been unfastened.  On either hand was a window, shuttered at night with two shutters put up from within and then fixed with a wooden bar.  When the shutters had been taken down from the windows there was nothing to take their place.  Snow, freezing wind, had a clear run.  With so much chopping to do one could keep fairly warm; but I have stood all aglow from yet resenting the open windows, feeling my feet cold as ice though covered with chips.  To supply some glass shutters for day-time was one of the first changes I made in the shop.  Nowadays, when all the heavy work is done by machinery, men would not and probably could not work at all in such a place; yet it must have sufficed for several generations.  My grandfather and my father had put up with it, and so did I until the winter came round again and the men began to ask me for sundry small indulgences, of which this was one.

Six o’clock in the morning was well enough in the summer; none the less I liked the dark winter mornings better.  Truly they were dark!  At that time the Farnham Local Board, caring nothing for working-class convenience and caring much to save money, had all the street lamps in the town put out at midnight.  The result was that, in the depth of winter, every man who went to work at six in the morning, and most artisans did, had to find his way without any light.  To be sure, there were moonlight mornings.  Sometimes, too, snowy roofs showed clear enough under glittering starlight.  But, on the other hand, there was freezing fog, there was the blackness of dense rain.  One foggy morning I lost my whereabouts in the familiar street; no building could be seen nor any sky distinguished; nothing but a slight difference in the feel of the pavement under my feet told me that I was passing So and So’s shop.  Another time a little glimmering light that met and passed me proved to be a lighted candle-end between the fingers of a chimney sweep, against whom one might otherwise have uncomfortably blundered.  And one black morning I walked through and was conscious of what I took to be the aura of a man on the pavement whom I never saw – probably a motionless policeman [13-14].

Lately I've been thinking often about what life was like in the days before electric light, about town streets -- let alone country roads and paths -- at night; or what it would be like to work in a place like the shop Sturt describes.  Sturt gives a striking picture of that time, and he doesn't seem unduly nostalgic about it.  Well, I've only read the first chapter or so, but I suspect I'll find more nuance here than Ellis allowed.

Up to Downing

I'm still reading along in David Ellis's Memoirs of a Leavisite and enjoying it, especially since as Ellis himself says at one point, he "was only ever a tepid Leavisite" (54).  His discussion of class and politics is quite good, or maybe I just mean that he agrees with me about a lot of things.  But I'm especially enjoying his critique of Leavis's nostalgia for the days when the common Englishman lived in a web of interrelations with the Earth, Nature, and his fellow Englishman.

Apparently Leavis was fond of The Wheelwright's Shop, by George Sturt, who gave up teaching grammar school in 1884 to run the family wheelwright shop, and wrote numerous books about his experience.  Leavis's students treated this fondness with amused scepticism.  Ellis allows that The Wheelwright's Shop "is in many respects a finely written book but I was a poor audience for it" (56).

... I was receptive to Leavis's picture of the general poor state of contemporary society and where popular culture then stood ("Distracted from distraction by distraction"); but I was not so sure it had ever been much better.  Sturt's employees may well have had far more satisfaction in their work than Chaplin's frantic factory hand in Modern Times, or those I had met on the assembly line in Kellogg's, but quite how much more they would have had to have in order to compensate for their long hours, poor pay and scant provision for sickness and old age was not clear to me.  Besides, even the the exquisite craftsmanship involved in making a good cart might become tedious, and therefore unsatisfying, when you have been doing it over and over again for thirty years.  A further satisfaction the employees enjoyed, Sturt implied, was integration into a traditional social organization where people cared for each other and there was a general acceptance of mutual duties and responsibilities, where, in the words of Tawney, society was 'a spiritual organism, and not an economic machine'.  This is what Leavis used to call the 'organic community'.  That gave to its members  both the security and comfort of knowing where they stood but chiefly because, it seemed to me, there was never ever much likelihood of their being able to stand anywhere else [56].

This is very good, and to it could be added the writings of Fred Kitchen, an older contemporary of Leavis himself.  Kitchen was a miner and farm worker who produced several books about life as a laborer in the early 20th century.  The "organic community" was also something of a spider's web, where one moved from place to place with difficulty if at all, and as Ellis says, "there was never much likelihood of their being able to stand anywhere else."  (Despite fantasies of universal rootedness in the good old days, both external circumstances -- war, famine, pestilence, civil upheavals -- and internal restlessness ensured that despite the difficulties and dangers, many people, both men and women, did stand elsewhere, moving and migrating in search of adventure or a simple change of scenery.)  For all that Leavis wasn't a typical British academic of his generation -- his class background was non-U, and because of his name he was often thought to be Jewish -- there's still some cognitive dissonance in a professor of literature, safely ensconced in the university system, daydreaming about the delights of traditional English country life which he himself couldn't have endured for more than about a week, if for no other reason that like any other bookworm, he'd soon go nuts without a good library near at hand.  (As one of Andrew Holleran's characters pointed out in Dancer from the Dance, Thoreau built his cabin in the woods in search of solitude, but he went into Concord every day to gossip with his fellow literati, and as someone else pointed out, he took his laundry home for his mom to wash.)

Ellis goes on:

... I pointed out to a friend that if, as all the scholars say, the English language was in a particularly vibrant and expanding state when Shakespeare came on the scene, it was as much because of the economic and cultural forces which broke up the village communities Eliot is describing [in "Burnt Norton"] as of those communities themselves.  But he merely nodded wearily and cited Popper's remark that, when you see someone struggling in a bog, the last thing you should do is jump in after him, and it is true that there is not much to be made of the very broad cultural generalisations which both the Leavises were inclined to make throughout their careers.  Perhaps they were right to believe that the disappearance of the organic community has brought us immeasurable loss; but if 'immeasurable' becomes an appropriate word and there is a then a great deal of difficulty in defining the 'us' referred to in the formulation.  Any statement about the cultural well-being of a past society or community considered as a bloc is vulnerable to the citing of exceptions.  This is why, in spite of F. L. Lucas's glaring prejudice and unfairness, a remark he makes about Mrs Leavis's notion of entertainment for the masses being on a steady downward curve remains relevant to what she and her husband had to say on that subject long after Fiction and the Reading Public had appeared.  'It is surely a great deal better,' he wrote, 'to like the trashiest fiction than to enjoy seeing a witch burnt, or to go to the silliest cinema than to soak in an eighteenth-century gin-shop' [57; emphasis added].

I think I'll have that last quotation embroidered on a sampler to give to RWA1 next Christmas, in honor of all his bleating about 'the culture going into the toilet.'

For all that, though, it sounds like Mrs Leavis's Fiction and the Reading Public is worth a read.  She seems to have been, like many achieving women of her generation, a proto-feminist who rejected the Second Wave for mainly generational reasons.  She was affected by the glass ceiling at Cambridge, where despite exemplary teaching and publications she never got a full teaching position.  And what Ellis has to say about both Leavises' cultural materialism -- their willingness to take economic and other social factors into account in the meaning of literature -- and their class backgrounds made me wonder what they thought about Raymond Williams, the great Marxist historian of literature and culture, originally a scholarship boy from rural Wales, who taught at Cambridge at Jesus College while the Leavises taught at Downing.  I looked for Williams in the index, and lo:

How fortunate I was to have had [Leavis's support] was brought home to me much later by a friend and colleague who went to Cambridge only a few years after I did.  A working class boy from Liverpool, he lived in St Edmond's, then a Catholic 'house of residence', while he was reading English at Fitzwilliam. For reasons not easy to explain, there were strong ties between Leavis and some of the priests at St Edmond's, as well as with other Catholic groups.  They too may have felt beleaguered and it may be also that they had detected in his writing a whiff of that nostalgia for the pre-industrial many of them shared ('Ah, there's a donkey', exclaims the priest in a Catholic joke, 'this country must be Catholic').  Whatever the explanation, relations between Leavis and St Edmond's were close so that my friend found himself often having tea with him there, and then being invited back to the Leavises' house.  When he decided to apply for a State Studentship he had received a sufficient number of encouraging signs from Leavis and felt he knew him well enough to request his support.  He was asked who the other referees were and, on explaining that one was Raymond Williams, found the support denied.  'Oh don't be silly, Frank', Mrs Leavis apparently then said, 'if you won't do it, I will' [81].

Memoirs of a Leavisite is turning out to be more entertaining than I expected.

I want to add, though: Ellis remarks of this last story that "this is about the worst thing I ever heard about [Leavis] (and the best about his wife)."  Ellis isn't, as should be clear by now, an uncritical disciple of his teacher.  But I think this story isn't especially "bad" -- that's the trouble with it.  Leavis' willingness to indulge in petty personal feuding with colleagues for ill-defined reasons appears to be quite common in academia, and elsewhere, among supposed adults of good standing in society, so I'm not singling him out: that's exactly my point, he was all too normal in letting grudges and petty grievances turn into feuds that ended up affecting students who had nothing to do with the original grievances.  (No wonder Norman Podhoretz got along well with him.)  Ellis speculates that Leavis refused (at first? it's not clear whether or not he changed his mind) to referee the application as "a protest on Leavis's part against my friend's patent Marxism," but I wonder if Leavis himself could have explained it coherently.  But notice that someone like Leavis could still at times produce useful, well-thought out analysis of literature, maybe even of society; it's not an all-or-nothing thing.  This is why even the most distinguished authorities on all kinds of subjects -- including people I like and respect -- must be read critically and with due skepticism, always.