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Popularity Contest

with 9 comments

I should start with a couple of things here, just for form’s sake.

First,  Mique, who likes Dickens and read him without having to have it assigned at school, is not female.  He’s an Australian male and, if I’m remembering this right, ex-career military. 

My point about Dickens has been that you can’t have it both ways–he’s either a popular writer or something snobby English teachers adopted as “good taste”  just to beat you over the head with it. 

Dickens was not just popular in his time, he was a genunine phenomenon the like of which had not been seen before him and that would not be seen after him until Stephen King’s career got going.

What’s more, he was popular for fifty years before anybody thought to assign one of his books in an English course, and he continues to be popular in a way that can’t be explained by CATs.  A bit of Dickens assigned here and there does not account for the fact that a good dozen of the man’s books are in print from major houses as well as minor ones.

The man is a popular writer, today as well as in his own time.  That doesn’t mean you have to like him–I don’t like most popular writers–but it does mean that the reason he’s on the RRL sometimes is not that he’s something nobody likes so that teachers can push him at you to make themselves feel superior.

The other thing I wanted to get into is the thing about what people who read this blog read, or don’t.

I’ll admit I never thought of the writing of this as being something I’d do to recommend books.  I do recommend them sometimes, but when I do I come right out and say that’s what I’m doing.

I will admit I’m the opposite of John–literary recommendations tend to mean I am going to like something, at least when applied to writers from past eras (contemporary ones are complicated).  But I’m the opposite of John in a lot of ways.  John pointed out on the comments once that he’d liked the television series House until it became more about the private lives of the main characters than the medical mystery.  I started to like House when it ditched reliance on the medical stuff to focus on the main characters. 

What we like is what we like.  I never expected anybody to read this and go running out to read Dickens, or James.  And that’s especially true of James, because he can be difficult to read even for somebody, like me, who honestly enjoys him.

I will say this:  I do tend to think that books that are wildly popular are not going to be any good.

That’s not snobbishness about popular taste, or some desire to hold myself up as better than and smarter than anybody else.

It is a nod in the direction of reality.

People with intelligence, education and good reading skills read books well below their ability to understand them, but people without any of the three do not in general read books above their ability to understand them. 

There is, therefore, automatically a wider audience for simplistic, uncomplicated fiction than there will ever be for something that requires that you be able to handle literary forms (think third person multiple viewpoint), know a few references (Pearl Harbor, say, or the Canterbury Tales), and make connections (Susan went to bed with Dan and now she’s throwing up.  That means she’s…)

The more the writer demands of the reader, the fewer readers he will necessarily have–but most really good books do demand something from the reader, often quite a bit.  Even Stephen King couldn’t write what he writes without that third person multiple viewpoint, and even half of hip-hop music runs on allusions.

So much of what comes in as advice about writing here sounds to me like:  stop writing anything you’d want to write, and hope that all writers write the kind of thing you’re never going to want to read.

I like difficulty, I like ambiguity, I like nuance–and I really hate having to plod through explanations when a simple reference would have been all  I needed to understand what was being said. 

And the thing about “don’t assign real literary classics in English class, assign things people are going to like to read,” sounds to me like “only assign things in English class that YOU’LL really hate reading, because YOUR pleasure in reading doesn’t count, it’s just odd and nobody else shares it.

It doesn’t surprise me at all that people who really like reading the literary canon tend to be people who also end up majoring in English and sometimes becoming English teachers.

It doesn’t surprise me at all that people who really like math tend to be people who end up majoring in math or math-heavy subjects and that most people who set out to be math teachers really like math.

It’s not some sort of conspiracy, it’s the obvious nature of things–you’re attracted to those fields that interest you.  If they don’t interest you, you do something else. 

It doesn’t have to be some kind of conspiracy to make people feel bad–the content of the literary canon is what it is, the content of mathematics is what it is, if you’ve got an aptitude and an attraction to it you do it, if not, not.

There’s a sentence for you.

But it’s Sunday, and I’ve got harpsichords and Henry  James.

Written by janeh

May 9th, 2010 at 8:10 am

Posted in Uncategorized

Vulgar, Common and Low

with 4 comments

One of these days I’m going to have to say something about Dickens–although  I’m happy to see that by now, three people who have never been English majors OR English teachers have chimed in to say how much they like him.

And by the time Dickens died, he was not only the best selling novelist of his generation, but the best selling novelist of all time, and his works stayed in print and sold briskly for fifty years before any English department was ever established in universities–and in that time he most certainly was not taught in high schools in England or America. 

Like it or not, he always has been and is now a popular writer, not a writer just for English majors.  For that, you have to look to Joyce, maybe.

What’s more, what teachers say to students may not be what they actually think, because I know lots and lots of PhDs in English Literature who can’t stand Dickens, and who are uncomfortable even to have him in the Canon.

But that’s something for another time.

Right now, I want to circle back and get a couple of things clear, because they matter.

The big one is this–neither I, nor the Victorian novelists I’m writing about, is talking about the aristocracy.

I think the confusion comes because the sort of people somebody like James or Trollope puts at the center of his work would be, in America, “upper class.”

In England, these people are not upper class, but MIDDLE class. 

And some of them are in trade.  If they’re men, there’s really no shame in it, especially if they make money.

If they’re women, the situation is different, because at the time, to go out into the world and do that kind of work would have marked any woman as sexually compromised–she would have been considered an immoral little tramp, and she would not have been accepted into the homes of “nice” people.

The nice people themselves, however, although sometimes rich, were not usually so.  They were, instead, what my mother’s generation would have called “comfortable.”  They had means, but not to the extent that they need do nothing at all for a living. 

These are doctors, lawyers, even men of business–sometimes men of very good business indeed–who made a decent living and had something in reserve to enable them to send their sons to a particular kind of school, often one that had been in the family for generations. 

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were this sort of person, from the class about which Trollope and James and most of the rest of the Victorian novelists wrote. 

This class is often inately suspicious of the aristocracy, as being a group of people likely to get into a lot of debt and act dishonorably.  The fathers would rather have their daughters married to a solid man of business in the City or a lawyer with a good practice than to a lord.

Some of the women tend to be something else, impressed beyond reason with titles. But such women are not  presented favorably in these books.  Think of Lizzie Eustace (in The Eustace Diamonds), and the contrast with Mary Gray (of Can You Forgive Her).

But at issue here, and especially in the James novel I’m reading, is a particular way of life and a particular way of being in the world.

The first requirement of this way of being in the world is a highly refined sensibility about just about everything–a sensitiveness to cleanliness, taste and civility of a kind that is difficult to maintain in poverty.

(Although not impossible.  Dickens presents a number of characters over the course of his books who in fact are able to maintain such things in poverty, and sometimes even while working as governesses or hiring out as seamstresses.  See  Esther Summerson in Bleak House.)

It is this refinement of senstivity–the “gentleness” in “gentleman” and “gentlewoman,” that is at issue for all the characters in all these novels. 

And that’s true in Austen as well–the instinctive recoil against the “vulgar,” which is not a matter of money but of manners, of understanding, and of feeling.

What interests me about James, not just in the novel I’m reading but in almost all the ones I’ve read, is that he is quite clear that the means necessary to maintain such a status for a good hunk of the people in it completely destroy just that “gentleness” that they are supposedly so desperate to preserve.

And for women, the “gentleness” is always an illusion, a matter of not looking at the reality of their lives. 

Like I said yesterday, in James, there is no gauze veil cast discretely over the fact that the women of this class, whether rich or poor, are simply and brutally bought and sold. 

So–Kate Croy and Milly Theale tomorrow.

Which is Mother’s Day.

Written by janeh

May 8th, 2010 at 5:39 am

Posted in Uncategorized

Horatio at the Bridge

with 4 comments

So, before I go bounding into Henry James, let me make a few notes.

First is that I truly love the nineteenth century novel, in English and otherwise.  I’ve read French drama and French poetry, and mostly it leaves me cold, but I love Balzac.  I can read Tolstoy even though I think he’s a pig, and I can read Dostoyevski nearly nonstop because I love him.

I also love Dickens, and I’m always brought up short when Robert suggests that one of the things likely to turn students off reading is giving them a Dickens novel in high school.  I wish somebody had given me a Dickens novel in high school.  Instead, I read Dickens all on my own, in one big sweep, when I was about ten or eleven years old.  He had practically an entire bookcase to himself in the upstairs “classics” room at our public library.  The room is gone these days, and the library has been updated, and it’s too bad.  Dickens will be with all the crappy stuff in the regular stacks.

The second thing is that I love Henry James, as far as I’ve read him, which is pretty far.  It’s just a little odd that I haven’t read two of his most famous books, The Turn of the Screw and The Wings of the Dove.  I’m reading The Wings of the Dove right now, and that’s sort of what I want to talk about.

Before I do, though, I’d like to point out that my absolutely favorite James novel, The Princess Casamassima is unusual in a respect important to what follows.  The Princess of the title is a lot of things, but for the purposes of the plot of that book she is not a commodity on the marriage market.    There’s an inference made that she was once, and that that is what has led to her rather irregular situation, but the book isn’t about that.

James’s books, however, do tend to be about that–about the buying and selling of women in marriage.  Almost all of James’s heroines are either desperately looking for a way to marry, or are endowed with large fortunes that make them the target of other people’s ambitions for marriage. 

That’s almost triply true of the characters in The Wings of the Dove, which is in fact a complicated plot to make it possible for two people to marry who “don’t have the means.”

Before I go into that as it applies specifically to this book–and to other James books–I’d like to point something out.

Robert at one point complained that the people in Dickens view money as something you sort of just come across, or inherit, or something–not as something you earn, in other words.

But that’s not true, not in Dickens, and not in James either, in spite of the fact that neither gives us main characters who spend their lives doing that.  Dickens has quite a few side characters who make very decent livings, and in fact rise from poverty to comfort–they just aren’t the characters about whom the story is told.  The same is true of Trollope, who often uses solid middle class barristers to contrast with high flyers like Phineas Finn or wastrel aristocrats who go into Parliament as another way to spend money. 

And, yes, Horatio Alger does give us characters whose stories are about rising from rags to riches (although the couple I’ve read got the hero where he was going at least as much from luck and/or a fortunate marriage as from hard work and perserverance).

But even if I liked Alger’s work better–I found what I read of it sort of clunky and formulaic–I’d still not be interested in reading the same story about the same people over and over again. 

And the nineteenth century novel generally (Dickens is actually somewhat–but only somewhat–of an exception) was both aimed at and written about a class of people for whom such a story was literally senseless.

The issue, in the vast majority of these novels, is not making money, or even getting it, but being able to live a very particular kind of life among a very particular kind of people, something that would be virtually impossible for somebody who was self-made.

For women, it would be worse than impossible.  A woman could of course make a living–many women did–but she could not both make a living and be “respectable,” except in some cases as a writer.  And being “respectable” is what the point is here. 

There is a very real sense in these books that a life that is not “respectable” is ugly and difficult to endure, a nasty, dirty, low thing that is shameful in and of itself.  It is certainly all of that for women.

For men, the situation is somewhat less clear.  It was indeed possible for a man to earn his fortune and still be “respectable,” but in order for that to be the case, he had to have started out as a “gentleman.”

That is, he had to have a certain kind of accent, a certain kind of manners, a set of social behaviors and assumptions that were largely closed to anybody who, say, had not been to an English public school. 

All the British writers of this period that I can think of–and Jane Austen in the period just prior–took the superiority of “respectable” life for granted, so much so that descriptions of or encounters with other classes and ways of life tend to be entirely negative.

That goes for descriptions of and encounters with the aristocracy as well as with the lower classes.  Trollope gives us Plantagenet Pallister and Lady Glencora, but they are unusual even for him, and Planty Pall is an upper middle class professional who happens to have been handed a Dukedom.  He works like a pack mule the entire time he’s in the House of Commons, and then he works like a pack mule again when he ends up in the House of Lords.

American writers are not so automatic in their acceptance of respectability–and Edith Wharton is about as jaundiced an eye as you can get on this world–and James therefore is never entirely comfortable with absolute appreciations of “respectability.”

He gives us Isabel Archer, in The Portrait of a Lady, as a kind of epitome of all things perfect in the behavior of a gentlewoman, but he’s always a little unhappy with the way things are set up.  And he’s neither naive nor in denial. 

If part of “respectability” at this period is to be free of the taint of buying and selling–and it is–then James can see quite clearly that the respectable world is in no way free of it.  All his heroines are bought and sold, the rich ones as well as the poor ones.  They are bought and sold, and the buying and selling either destroys them or leaves them bearing up heroically in the emotional waste it has made of their lives.

That said–and I want to go on with that thought as it relates to The Wings of the Dove–what the issue is in these books is not “how to have a comfortable income,” but “how to live a life of respectability.”

And such a life would not be available to someone who earned his income the way Horatio Alger’s characters are supposed to have earned theirs.  The very acts of earning income in those ways would disqualify them for the only life the characters in the novels of James, and Trollope (and sometimes Dickens) think is worth living.

Ack.  It’s a nice day.  More later.

Written by janeh

May 7th, 2010 at 11:09 am

Posted in Uncategorized

Show Me The Money

with 11 comments

Okay, I’ll admit it.  I was up until midnight last night, which is not usual, and now I’m walking into walls.

I’d talk about Henry James, which is on the agenda, except that at the present half second I can’t read Henry James without sort of going  blank in the head.

So, still on the subject of money, let me make a note here.

I talked to a couple of students yesterday who are transferring from my place to better schools, which isn’t unusual with students from non-remedial programs.

One of them said that she’d thought of going to, I think, Georgetown, but that tuition was now $60,000 a year, and that was just past any level of debt she was willing to take on.

I know that if this student had been better as a student, she’d have gotten much more in the way of financial aid and her tab wouldn’t be so high.  But she wasn’t exactly being stiffed, either–she’d been offered ten or fifteen thousand.  It just wasn’t enough, given the sticker price.

We could go on and on forever about why costs have risen so much–yes, I know, all those extra administrators, and whatever–but the thing that bothers me is what’s happened to supply and demand.

Costs are costs, but what people are both willing and able to pay for something should factor in here too, and it usually does.  In fact, in general, it’s usually decisive. It doesn’t matter of it costs you a dollar to make, if people are only willing to pay fifty cents for it they won’t buy it when you offer it for a dollar.

And yes, I do know about Pell Grants and guaranteed student loans–but Pell Grants are small relative to prices like this, and loans are loans.  They’ve got to be paid back eventually.

What’s more, higher levels of financial aid go to better students who can get themselves admitted to better colleges–in other words, exactly the students for whom a three hundred thousand dollar college bill is actually worth it.

The people who are paying the real bills are generally not the best students and they’re generally not at the best colleges.  And then you have to ask yourself if they’re ever going to get anything like a return on their investment.

Forget the half of all college students who first rack up the bills and then drop out before graduating.

These prices are insane, and I can’t believe that they’re sustainable.  I don’t think they represent anything like a realistic appraisal of what “college” is worth, whether it’s actually “college” or just a dressed up vo-tech course.

And I also think that to the extent we’re looking at real college–back to the Great Tradition here again–the chances that anybody is going to go in for it are lowered significantly if they know they’re coming out of school $100,000 in debt.

If college costs had risen with inflation instead of well beyond it, a year at a good private university would now cost somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000, pricy but not beyond the ability of most middle class families to negotiate–I know, because they’re negotiating that much now, and more.

At the moment I don’t know what’s going on, but I do know that the issue isn’t whether or not college is “for the rich” or for “trust fund babies” (the latter have practically NO aptitude or liking for scholastic work), but whether or not ANYTHING being taught is ratinionally worth $60,000 a year, with or without financial aid.

Henry James tomorrow, when I manage to wake up.

Written by janeh

May 6th, 2010 at 7:30 am

Posted in Uncategorized

It’s the End of the World As We Know It

with 8 comments

Well, okay, maybe not.

First, let me apologize to JEM–she was the one who posted about the multiple book “authors.”

And then let me note to Robert that I wasn’t talking about writers who do two books a year, but writers who do ten.  And I do know all about house names.  The latest phenomenon does seem to be putting out what seems to be a fiction that these are all the same writer.

Or not.  I don’t know.  I don’t get it.

I’ve just finished the Bruce Thornton, which is interesting on just about every level, especially since it makes a critique of environmentalism, Goddess feminism and the Noble Savage approach to American Indian history as essentially all one thing. 

And I’ve started Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, which, interestingly enough–considering my love for all things James–I’ve never read.  But then, I’ve also never read The Turn of the Screw, although that’s deliberate.

I’ve got a lot to say about James and Dickens and the nineteenth century novel in English and the way it treats money–something that’s come up before, but that I think I have a better handle on now–but that will have to wait for tomorrow.

Right now I’ve got a half hour break between final exam periods and I’m losing my mind. 

It seems to me that a lot of the students I see need less in the way of remedial academics than they need to learn a new kind of cultural behavior–that a lot of the problem is a set of expectations and assumptions that not only do not do them any good in academic work, but that will make practically anybody they want to hire them back off in no time flat.

But it’s not the kind of thing we teach, or anybody teaches, as far as I know. 

Whatever.  I will go off to see the next set and find out how many of them have not done half their work, or don’t bother to show  up to make up work on this, the last possible chance to do it. 

And then I’ll go back to Henry James until tonight.

When I’m on a panel of writers at the New Milford Public Library.

I need tea.

Possibly spiked.

Written by janeh

May 5th, 2010 at 10:09 am

Posted in Uncategorized

Bookish

with 3 comments

So this is the first Monday in months where I don’t have to jump up and go running off to something, which is nice in a way, but disorienting in others.

Due to all that craziness last year, I’m in the middle of finishing a book–the book for next year–at a time when I wouldn’t usually be writing fiction, and that’s disorienting, too. 

And the book itself is disorienting. 

This is, I think, the closest I’ve ever come to writing the kind of golden-age dectective novel that got me interested in writing mysteries to begin with.  For better or worse–and my guess is that my people at SMP, or some of them, would say for worse–I am not a fan of the “modern” “crime novel.” 

Really, I’m not a fan of the modern crime anything.  I fall asleep during episodes of Law and Order and CSI, in any of their incarnations. 

I like Sherlock Holmes, and Hercule Poirot, and their lesser or later incarnations.  I prefer Dalgleish to Jack Ryan.  Any Jack Ryan.  Chandler drives me up the wall, but I can read Hammett and James M. Cain–someday I’m going to have to post my explanation for why the feminist critique of Mildred Pierce (the movie) is entirely wrong.

But I like old detective movies, too.  I like Nick and Nora Charles even if the scale of their drinking makes me wince.   I like Charlie Chan–and no, I don’t think  those movies are racist, although the casting was more than a little odd. 

I used to think this was okay, because even if modern writers didn’t like writing this kind of thing, modern readers must like reading it, since a lot of it is still out there on the racks, not only selling, but being published by large scale conglomerates.

Then I talked to a friend on the business end of the business, and he calmly explained to me that the reason the majors still publish most of those books is because there are long-standing contracts and other legal things going on that require it, whether they want to or not.

For instance, in order to publish the Chrities books that do sell (And Then There Were None, for instance), they are required by their contract to keep everything else in print.

And the Christie books that do sell well enough for major publishing houses to be interested in them do so only because they are now Course Adoption Texts (CATs) and having a “Literature of the Detective Novel” course in your English Department is these days considered very cool.

I doubt if any of these books would go out of print entirely.  There are small publishing houses more than willing to put them out, although print runs in small houses tend to run to hundreds, not thousands, of copies.  And if those houses don’t have distribution deals with the majors, the chances are they’re not getting much, if anything, into the big chain bookstores.

But, you know, I wouldn’t worry about this, either, if it wasn’t for another and very disconcerting aspect of present-day mystery writing.  I mean, let’s face it, EVERYTHING I like appears to be a minority taste.  I like harpsichords better than pianos, chamber music better than symphonies, and just about anything better than hip hop.  I’m out there on the cultural ledge most of the time.

But, as Robert reminded me in an e-mail a couple of days ago–and as I keep forgetting, the way people forget traumas, because it hurts to much to bring them to mind–we now have the Multiplex Phenomenon in book publishing–writers who “write” not one, but five or six or ten books a year.

Except, of course, they don’t.  Nobody could write that many books in that short a period of time.  What they do is to lend their names to books other people write.  Those other people are largely paid work-for-hire (you write, you get paid, you have no right to royalties or any other money) and anonymously, or largely anonymously.

This is not an unheard of thing in genre writing–several of the old-line Harlequin Romance writers did the same, and the practice is still the most common in Romance writing.

But it’s fairly new to mystery, as far as I know.  And it leaves me wondering exactly what is going on here.

For me, writers are largely their narrative voices–there are narrative voices that I like, those that I hate, and those that just don’t get in the way. 

After that, they are largely a sensibility–a person, very individual, I find it interesting to spend time with.

I’ve said before that story doesn’t count very much for me in what I read in fiction, and it doesn’t.  Too much story–too much plot, actually, there’s a difference–seems to me to get in the way of what I really want when I read, which is to live in a different place with different people for a while.

And by different people, I don’t mean people unlike anybody I know. 

But here’s the thing–even if your main consideration is plot, can it really be the case that these books, supposedly “written by” people they could not have been written by–actually give you that?

Even plots are, to an extent, a function of sensibility.  Agatha Christie wrote different plots than Dorothy L. Sayers, even though they were both writing in a very narrow corner of a subgenre.

I can’t quite get my mind around how this sort of thing is supposed to work.   It seems to me that either one of two things must be going on.

First possibility–the outlines for these novels are strictly and intensely formulaic.  So formulaic that they dictate not only sequential action, but character traits in main characters and side characters and even phrases and figures of speech.

And if you think no writer would write like that or no publisher would demand it, you’ve enver seen the old category romance “tip sheets” of the Eighties, which would demand that not only must the first kiss appear on page 25, but would then spend a page and a half explaining that descriptions should be “concrete and attractive.”  “Her skin was as soft and perfect as the petal of a white rose” was okay.  “Her skin had the luster of Norwegian wood” was not.

And I’m not making that one up.

The second possibility is that the readers of these books are reading them in a sense I never understood anything could be read.

That is, they don’t hear narrative voice, they don’t care about authorial sensibility, they read the way they watch television–by processing details through their heads for the moment, just to forget about most of them as soon as they put the book down.

Ack.

I know I sound insulting.  I don’t know if there’s any way to describe what I’m talking about without sounding insulting.  This is not anything I’m used to thinking of as “reading.”  There’s no engagement there. 

And I may be misunderstanding it.  It’s like looking into a thought process from Jupiter for me, so  I may have it all wrong.

I have, of course, run across people on Internet discussion groups who declare that if a book makes them try to figure something out or learn something at all, they just put it down–they read for entertainment, they don’t want to do any work. 

I’ve always thought of those people as a tiny minority of people who buy books.

But the business of cloning yourself and putting out gazillions of volumes yearly seems to be a very profitable one.  And that means that there is a significant population of “readers” out there who find that kind of thing satisfying.

It makes me look at this thing I’m writing and wonder what I’m doing–never mind the Other Thing, the start of a Possible New Series, what with its Little Old Lady (okay, more Bertha Cool than Miss Marple) and all the rest of it.

I understand narrative voice.  I understand authorial sensibility.

But maybe, in the end, I don’t understand why people read.

Written by janeh

May 3rd, 2010 at 7:51 am

Posted in Uncategorized

Kvetch the Enabler

with one comment

So, it’s a long, lazy, oddly hot Sunday morning, and I’ve gone on to Bruce Thornton’s Plagues of the Mind:  The Epidemic of False Knowledge.

Okay, I’m feeling too lazy today to go back into the living room and recheck the cover to make sure I’ve got the title right, but that’s about it, and it’s a curious experience after Barber.

For one thing, Thornton writes better–a lot better–although I think that may have less to do with talent than it does with the fact that he has a vastly different sensibility.  He also seems to have spent a lot of time reading nineteenth century British novels.   We’ve been through Austen and Dickens and a number of the minor Gothic authors already, and I’m not a third of the way through the thing. 

I do think he misreads the Emma Thompson (she produced it) movie version of Sense and Sensibility, but that’s the kind of thing I could talk about all day, and probably shouldn’t.

What  I wanted to get to was this:  in spite of the fact that Thornton tends to be considered a voice on “the right”–those scare quotes are there for a reason–he ends up blaming the infantilization of the modern American on consumer capitalism just like Barber does.

And that brings me back to something I was thinking about before, but that sort of slipped my mind in a deluge of end-of-term late papers and stdents with attitude.

I don’t think consumer capitalism causes any of this stuff.  I think consumer capitalism takes whatever cultural trend is at the ascendant and magnifies the hell out of it. 

I think it does that for two reasons.

First, because the whole point of consumer capitalism is to give the customer what he wants.  It doesn’t matter a damn if the customer wants something sensible or something stupid, something good for him or something self destructive.  Consumer capitalism is neither moral nor immoral.  It’s amoral.  If the customer wants fruits and vegetables, it will give him that.  If he wants Big Macs, it will give him that.  A big screen television, a walking brace that doesn’t collapse under excess weight, a garden bench, a pet rock, methamphetamine–it doesn’t matter.  Give the customer what he wants.

Second, because in the long run, consumer capitalism will, if unchecked, make itself any society’s only standard of value.  That is, “success” becomes how many units you move, how many customers want your product.  It’s like institutionalizing the ad populam logical fallacy.  And this particular effect is much stronger in democratic societies, precisely because democratic societies believe in the principle of majority rule.

The second thing above magnifies the first.  And it will do that no matter what the product is that’s under consideration.  It will give you more and better science, if that’s what you want.  It will give you more and better pseudoscience, if that’s what you want.

Thornton is a colleague and sometime-collaborator with Victor Davis Hanson, and he’s written some interesting books and articles about the place of classics in the modern world.  This book references everything from Socrates and Cicero to Ann Radcliffe, and like I said, I’m only about a quarter of the way in.

Thornton’s thesis, however, is that the infantilization of Americans can be seen most clearly in the therapeutic culture, and that the therapeutic culture is specifically the hybrid child of Enlightenment rationalism (we can solve everything through reason) and Romantic emotionalism (it’s what you feel tha counts).

And that’s not a bad thesis to be going on with.  I can see how it works–feeling is all that counts, but we feel bad a lot, so we should go about solving that “scientifically,” because science can solve anything. 

I put the scare quotes around “the right,” above, because although Thornton has good things to say about religion, I’d bet just about anything that he is not religious himself, and is specifically not Christian, or at least not Christian in the  American folk Protestant sense.

Of course, there are a lot of conservatives out there who are not religious, but in the present political climate in the US, you have to qualify the the word every time you use it to point this out.  And that’s not because nasty old liberals have been targetting conservatives with false labels.  That’s because a lot of people in the American conservative movement these days make religion a defining attribute of fellow conservatives.

I did think it was interesting, though, to look at the pseudoscientific silliness we live in–the cascading serial hysterias over self esteem and false memory syndrome and all the rest of it–as a sort of Hegelian prototype:  thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

I do not know if it’s possible to do anything about any of it in a time like ours, when give the customer what he wants is the basis for just about everything. 

But I’ll go drink tea and listen to harpsichords, and I’ll get back to that later.

Written by janeh

May 2nd, 2010 at 8:27 am

Posted in Uncategorized

Kvetch: The Mission Statement

with 6 comments

It’s Friday, and I actually have something to say, but before I start, I have to admit that I was stuck by the question in the comments yesterday:  do I own a toaster?

Well, yes, I do–but interestingly enough, I’ve never bought one.  They’re the kind of thing people give for wedding and housewarming presents, so they wander through my life, but I couldn’t even guess what they cost.

And I didn’t say I was unaffected by advertising, only that I don’t actually pay attention to most of it.  And the one case in which I actually went out and deliberately bought a brand because I thought it had a good reputation was a disaster–a Black and Decker electric can opener that didn’t open cans, and that got me (when I complained) a snippy little e-mail about how I had complained to the wrong department.

Which has resulted in the fact that I now actively avoid anything by Black and Decker.  Which is a way of being affected by advertising, but not the way Barber was talking about.

But I really wanted to get to the idea that running a nonprofit enterprise “more like a business” can make it possible for it to better “fulfill its mission.”

And I’d say–that depends on what you think the mission is.

First, I’ll reiterated, because I think it should be self evident in today’s environment:  a number of nonprofit institutions now protect the institution first, even if it means violating their mission.  I have in mind here a large teaching hospital–the only one that gave me any trouble when Bill was sick–which was founded over a century ago as a charitable hospital and that now has billing practices so notorious they were the subject of an investigation by the state legislature.

I suppose that such practices–threatening lawsuits for bills that haven’t even been incurred yet, for one; aggressively going after people’s homes and attaching their wages–might help this place stay open as a hospital, but the “charitable” is gone.   There’s a fair amount of sentiment for pulling this place’s nonprofit status–what exactly are we relieving them of taxes for if they’re going to operate like a for-profit corporation anyway? 

But even smaller cases illustrate my problem well enough.  A number of the towns in my area have libraries that have started to charge for things like story hours–you buy a subscription for your child and he gets a ticket to turn in, or you pay a dollar or two when he walks in.

I’m sure this helps to make the library more viable financially, but it does abrograte its mission to provide books and book services for the town, unless you’re going to assume that the poorest residents of that town aren’t really part of the town.   You’d be amazed at how difficult it is to come up with an extra dollar or two when you’re a single mother with two kids making minimum wage.

Of course, you can always start programs that give a break to such people, but they usually require some verification of income, which means they tend to be humiliating to apply for. 

I could do a similar number of a lot of colleges and universities these days.  They charge absolutely ridiculous amounts of money to students they think of as “customers,” and then find themselves in the trap of having to satisfy those customers, which high standards (leading to lower average grades) do not.  They further get pushed out of regular college teaching into vocational stuff. 

Is a Jesuit institution founded to give a liberal education to young Catholic men still “fulfilling its mission” when it managed to triple its enrollment and quadruple its income by “giving the customers what they want” and ditching theology majors  for business majors?

The other problem I have with the businessification (I made that up) of everything is the tendency it has to reduce everything to a single standard of “success”–money is the point, and the only point, no matter what it is you do. 

Maybe that is partially the explanation for something that bothers me over and over again.

In the Great Depression, the towns around here managed to keep their schools running with full athletic programs, keep their libraries running seven days a week (a half day on Sunday, so that everybody could get to church), their public parks open and their public works up to date.

Now a nearby small city is thinking of closing its municipal swimming pools this summer–there just isn’t enough money.  Schools don’t have enough textbooks for their kids, so they take contracts with soft drink companies that provide cash in exchange for exclusive rights to put vending machines in lobbies and a once a year “Coke day” or “Pepsi day” where every student is required to come in wearing the right logo.

Why is it that we’re light years better off, financially, than our grandparents, but we don’t ever seem to have the money to do anything anymore? 

And how is the school’s mission being affected, when it’s teaching “good nutrition” in health class at the same time it’s sponsoring Pepsi Day?  Or renting its cafeteria out to fast food chains instead of providing that old-fashioned nutritionally balanced, bland as hell “hot lunch?”

Well, it’s Friday.

I warned  you.

Written by janeh

April 30th, 2010 at 10:59 am

Posted in Uncategorized

Brand Name Kvetch

with 4 comments

In 1959, a British writer named Alan Sillitoe published a short story called “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” in which the narrator and, I think, his brother, turn to a life of juvenile delinquent crime soon after their first exposure to television, whose images of middle class life and middle class “stuff” expose them, for the first time, to what is really to be had in the world–if they only had money.

To be fair, the story isn’t really about advertising–it’s just that the role of advertising is what I remember about it after all these years. 

Part of me can see the point.  If you live in an area where nobody has Reeboks or plasma TVs or shiny German cars that can do 140 if you can ever get them to the Autobahn, finding out that the world does contain these things is likely to be a shock. 

And no matter how sensible it is to say that such knowledge should spur you on to work hard for the money to buy what you want, that particular idea doesn’t always occur to fifteen year olds even from wealthy neighborhoods.  In poorer neighborhoods, where people either don’t work at all or work very hard at jobs that pay too little even to handle the rent, the connection between work and stuff may be even harder to make.

I wasn’t brought up in a poor neighborhood, but when I was young the fact that some people made lots of money and other people made very little confused the hell out of me.  And I think that may have been the good news.  I grew up with a lot of people who seemed to assume that the fact that their parents made a lot more than the parents of other people just proved that they and their parents were far superior in every way to those other people.

And they were largely wrong, too.

But I got started on this as part of the kvetch, and specifically as a comment on the end of Barber’s book.

Because Barber’s book ends with advertising, and I think that people have been uncomfortable with advertising at least since the start of the 20th century and the advent of what I thnk of as “modern” forms.

That is, if you go back to the 19th century, what you find is mostly the kind of handbills that announce, “Great product!  Does laundry!   Pays for itself!”

It’s the 20th century that birthed the advertisement as lifestyle statement, or whatever you want to call the things that Benneton does.  And not just Benneton.  Back in the 1920s, you had advertisements meant to associate products with flappers and debutantes. 

Barber’s contention is familiar–that advertisements not only show us what’s available, but make us want what we wouldn’t want otherwise and don’t need.

I don’t usually give much credit to this idea.  I’m not a very unusual person, and advertising almost never has any effect on me at all–I don’t notice it, half the time, and when the commercials come on when I’m watching TV I tend to get the remote and surf for something interesting.

It may have been very different at the start of the advertising blitz we’ve all recently come to assume is normal, but I think most people these days, once they’ve passed childhood, tend to be more annoyed by advertising than seduced by it.

And a lot of the things that annoy Barber annoy me too, to the point where they’re probably counterproductive.  When some city renames its historic baseball stadium “Capital One Park” or “Fedex Stadium”–and I’m not making those up–it doesn’t make me want to get a Capital One card or to ship my stuff Fedex.  It makes me not want to.

I even think I’ve got a certain amount of science to back me up here.  The marketing textbooks my kids carry around say things like:  about fifty percent of advertising “works,” but we don’t know which fifty percent, and 96% of all new product launches fail.

It’s like the old story of the “manufactured” best seller.  If we could really do that, we’d do it all the time.  Instead, we keep falling on our faces and having to swallow the loss.

But even if I don’t think advertisers are able to brainwash us into wanting things we wouldn’t ever want otherwise, the extent to which this society has become almost monotonally oriented towards “business” is making me close to crazy.

The other day a student of mine gave a presentation on career strategies, in which she presented a series of a dozen “personality types” and the kinds of jobs they would be best suited for.  When she got to “artistic/creative,” she calmly announced that there were almost no jobs that were good for that type, so they have to settle for something they don’t like and express their artistic side in hobbies.

Now, I live in a world in which most people are the “artistic creative” personality type, most of them are making a living (and lots of them are making good ones), and there is no lack of demand for the kind of people they are and what they do.  Even the strictly artistic fields actually suffer from a dearth–not an oversupply–of talented people.  There are lots of people out there who want to do these things–writing, animating, computer graphics, publishing, television programming, designing, you name it–but not really a lot of people who can do them.

At least, not a lot who can do them well enough to give Disney, or NBC, what it wants and needs.

The idea that such jobs don’t exist and that if your personality draws you to them you have no choice but to settle for doing something you hate is a result of envisioning the entire world as if corporate organization is not just normal, but the default mode.

The result of thinking that corporate organization is the default mode is that more and more areas of society begin to adopt corporate organization for themselves, even though historically they were resistant to the very idea.

The principle examples I can think of at the moment are colleges and universities and nonprofit charitable foundations like hospitals.  Both of these are nonprofits, and they were given tax breaks for being nonprofits BECAUSE it was assumed that they did not operate on the same assumptions as did for-profit entities.  They were organized differently, and brought different processes of operation to their endeavors, because their purpose was not to make money (never mind maximize profit) but to do something specific that was assumed to be probably not profitable:  care for the sick, for instance, or educated even the impecunios young.

When the standard of success for Hallowed University or  Prestigious Research Hospital becomes making sure the organization expands its wealth and reach, instead of how many students receive a first-class education or how many sick people are cared for and how much knowledge about their sicknesses produced to help others–at that point, the nature of the world we live in has changed.

It’s not just “artistic creative” types who don’t necessarily want to spend their lives maximizing the health of an institution, whether labeled for-profit or non-profit. 

There are other ways of being in the world, and at most times these other ways predominate.  Some of us will go into business and maximize profit and help our corporations grow in wealth and power.  Some of us will teach because what we want is the sight of a child’s face glowing and happy when she learns something new.  Some of us will go into research because we just want to know how things work.  Some of us will give up money and “stuff” to stay home with our children when they’re young.  Some of us will  climb mountains or go trekking through the rainforst because, well, we just want to see it.

The issue, in first world countries, at any rate, is not making enough money to survive.  Most of us can do that in a variety of ways, and without the making of more and more money and the accumulation of more and more stuff be the focus of what we do. 

But what has happened, lately, is that we seem to have come down to a single life model that is supposed to apply to everybody and everything, and our institutions–hospitals, universities, musems, governments as well as corporations–are all hell bent on following it and only it. 

I feel like I’m tying myself up in knots here again.

Maybe I should just say that it seems to me that, on one level, the founding principle of the Harvard  Business School–that management is a skill, and if you learn it you can manage anything–has become the operating principle of most of American society. 

It’s all business now, and if somebody gets well the only significance is that it will make our brand stronger, if somebody graduates knowing the meaning of Greek philosophy it doesn’t matter at all.

Hell, with the Greek philosophy, what we seem to have with a lot of people is not a desire to learn that sort of thing, but to adopt a shallow erudition in it as a kind of fashion.

But that’s another discussion, and I’ve stopped making sense.

Written by janeh

April 29th, 2010 at 7:48 am

Posted in Uncategorized

Walking Into Walls

with one comment

So, this is the last Wednesday any time soon when I’m going to be quite this messed up–my Tuesday late nights came to an end yesterday.  So now I’m sitting in the computer lab listening to students to everything except their work, and I’m too tired to think about Benjamin Barber, or Bruce Thornton, either, and he’s next on the list.

But I have been thinking about writers.  And that sort of goes back to Barber anyway, because at one point he complains about the “homogenization of taste.”  Then, a few sentences later, he notes that there’s a great deal of diversity in music available, it’s just that the vast majority of people end up in pop, and all the other varieties have only a few (more or less) devotees.

But I think it’s the inevitable result of difficulty.

Here’s the thing–people who don’t read well but do read tend to read stuff that’s easy, both in terms of form and content.  They never read stuff that’s difficult, because they can’t understand it.

But people who read well do sometimes read things that are easy.  Why not?  Some of it is interesting, and some of it is relaxing.  Then they read the more difficult stuff.

But that means the easy stuff has two sets of readers–the people who read only this, and at least some of the people who read the next level up, and the next, and the next.

And at each level of difficulty, you have the same situation–readers at that level, plus at least some readers from each of the more difficult levels.

I suppose that the way to get lots of readers and turn yourself into that Public Personality I was talking about would be to write at the absolute base level of whatever it is you’re doing–except that not every writer can do that even if he wants to, and not every subject actually works on that level. 

So we’re left with the fact that the people who read Dan Brown include both people who couldn’t understand Umberto Eco if they went after one of his books with a guide, and people who love Eco but want to relax a little and be mindless this Thursday.

Also, to clarify the personality thing, from yesterday–I wasn’t talking about things like author photos or bios on books.  I was talking about the fact that somebody like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens or Bill O’Reilly sells books because he is a public personality.

Whether the people who buy the books read them is another question.  I’m fairly sure that at least some of the people who buy Dawkins either don’t read the books or don’t understand them. 

But the fact is that a publci personality, even a rankly idiotic one, sells more books that an author without a public face.

If that makes sense.

In the end, though, I’ll come down to the thing I usual do:  the problem with bookselling is that the media corporations who have taken it over want it to behave like movies or pop music albums, and therefore expect things (17% returns, for instance) that have never been true of publishing and can’t be true even under ideal conditions, which the present circumstances are not.

The mistake was in not understanding that publishing is not just “entertainment” in the same sense television shows are–it doesn’t appeal to the same people, or appeal to anybody for the same reasons, and the extent to which the audience can be enlarged is limited by the fact that reading requires acquired skill, decent concentration, and cannot be down while multitasking.

It’s not that New York publishers don’t know what readers want–movie studios don’t know what movie audiences want, either; that’s why we’re drowningin sequels.

The problem is that New York publishers don’t understand that a book that sells, say, 10,000 copies in hardcover hasn’t failed, but succeeded.

And I’m being very distracted and wandery today.

Off to tackle the hordes.

Written by janeh

April 28th, 2010 at 10:23 am

Posted in Uncategorized

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