More Porpentine

Evidently I am not the first person to be amused by the idea of "Porpentine."  Wordnik offers a variety of links.   Evelyn Waugh has "ears flattened back and porpentine hair," which is elegant.     There's a Douglas Adams.  A certain Richard Chenevix Trench unearths the alternate spelling "purpentine,"--that's with a "p" at the beginning, although  < auto-correct insists on renaming with a "t," as the distilled resin of a pine tree.  "Porpentine"  seems to be the web name of a live journal, now defunct.

But the champ appears to be--one could have guessed--P. G. Wodehouse, awash in Shakespeare quotations, often as misremembered by Bertie Wooster.   Bertie says "Do you recall telling me once about someone who told somebody he could tell him something that would make him think a bit? Knitted socks and porcupines entered into it, I remember."  Jeeves responds, "I   think you may be referring to the ghost of the father of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, sir" (whereupon he quotes the whole bit).  And Bertie: "That’s right. Locks, of course, not socks. Odd that he should have said porpentine when he meant porcupine. Slip of the tongue, no doubt, as so often happens with ghosts."

So How Right You Are, Jeeves,  at 116.  I'm not a good enough Jeeves student to know but evidently there are a couple of running jokes here--the "porpentine" bit and also Bertie's formidable capacity to get quotations not entirely wrong.  But  for valuable prizes, can you identify this one:

Aye aksd teh Pipchunk, adn hym haz ah fren, teh heggiipiggul, huz gotz ah cuzin en Jermanii, diz fien, beeg, ….adn ennywai, teh porpentine sez dat hym gnu ah gnome, wut maeks teh majekal birfdai baux prezzies,…

Wordnik credits these guys, although I can't pin it down and they don't seem to have a search function.

Hey, I'm working This Side of the Street:  And as I wind up this post, I find that Ian Chadwick has been all over the topic, just this week.

Epigraph

Actually, doesn't describe me at all.   But I just leap at the chance to use the word "unhousled."   Also:

But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make the two eyes like stars start from their spheres,
Thy knotted  and combinéd locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.

Porpentine, heh.  Must hang out with the mushrumps among the cowcumbers.

I'm remembering-- I think it was Irving S. Cobb--saying that the local hooch around Paducah would stop your watch, snap your suspenders and crack your glass eye straight across.

Source: oh, you know where all this is from.  Or just Google it.

The Bechdel Test

Don't ask me why but the Wichita bureau thinks I need to know about the Bechdel test.  I quote Wiki

The Bechdel test (/ˈbɛkdəl/ bek-dəl) asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. Many contemporary works fail this test of gender bias. 

The test is named after the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel. In 1985, she had a character in her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For voice the idea, which she attributed to a friend, Liz Wallace. The test was originally conceived for evaluating films, but has since been applied to other media. It is also known as theBechdel/Wallace test,^[1] the Bechdel rule,^[2] Bechdel's law,^[3] or the Mo Movie Measure.^[4]

Well he's right, and it's new to me, but I want to plug it into a larger matrix about women-talking-about-men-talking-about women and suchlike.  Example: so far as I recall, in Jane Austen, we never see a man outside the company of women.  For all the evidence, they may not even exist except when they show up to cause trouble or solve life's problems among the ladies.   Side note: FWIW, I like Sex and the City, too, even though on the Bechdel standard, that show seems to be a crashing failure.

But re Jane Austen--this is not a complaint.  I'm a huge Jane Austen fan and I suspect one reason she is so good is that she is careful not to write about what she doesn't know.  But it does move you on to the larger question: can men tell the truth about women? Can women tell the truth about men?  Or can they at best (as in Bechdel/Wallace) do no better than to tell the truth about what women think they know about men.

Can any male author tell the truth about women?  Well now I wouldn't know, would I? I'm tempted to say "Henry James," but the nearest I can come to evaluating him is to consider what women think of Henry James--and I suppose his rep in that quarter is pretty high.  I was about to say "James Joyce, channeling Molly Bloom"--but is Molly's voice that of a woman, or just a man trying to ventriloquize a woman?

Of course it cuts both ways.  Virginia Woolf doesn't have much to say about men but most of what she does say is laughable.   So also the Brontes (does anybody see either Heathcliff or Rochester as anything other than a girlish fantasy?).  Among serious novelists, perhaps the most interesting would be George Eliot: she does write a lot about men and a lot of it strikes me as shrewd and/or savagely funny. But here too, you have to wonder: are you getting a man's story, or merely the work of an (uncommonly insightful) woman on the outside looking in?

Update:  Oh, now I get it.  Sweden. Sure, should have seen that coming. Will they also movies on whether or not anything the ladies say about the men is true?

The Accent

It seems that Captain Phillips--the real Captain Phillips, non-Tom-Hanks version--and I share two noteworthy life facts.  One, we both wanted Danny DeVito to play us in our life story.  And two, we were both born in Manchester, NH (although in both cases, our mothers lived someplace else).

I therefore feel qualified to contribute to the great Tom Hanks "accent" controversy--whether Hanks can speak Boston and whether it matters.  I was geared up to go on at length on this subject although I see others got there before me (link,  link, link etc.).   I nonetheless believe I can make a contribution.

Specifically, when I left New Hampshire at 17 I thought my accent was a mark of shame and I did my best to suppress it.  By the time I was, maybe, 25, I realized a New Hampshire accent was kind of cool and I did my best to recreate it.  But my father said I got it wrong.  He said I came up with a Maine accent and neither I nor he had ever lived in Maine.  Which was all right with him because he knew me as a fake anyway.

So, I feel for Tom Hanks.  Apparently it ain't that easy.*

On further reflection--the one situation in which I can come close to New England accent of any sort is when I'm reading aloud from Sarah Orne Jewett.  Which may be where the Maine thing comes in.  For a reading of Jewett's best-known work, though without the accent, go here.   For a full-throttle New England accent, with no apparent consciousness of itself, go here.  For the real Captain and his real accent, go here.

*On third thought: maybe Tom Hanks needs to get some dialect tips from Damian Lewis   or Hugh Laurie.

Ibn Khaldûn Provides a Context For Somali Piracy

Vagrant recollections after seeing Captain Phillips, which might win yet another Academy Award for Tom Hanks, should win for Barkhad Abdi and surely ought to win one for Paul Greengrass (sensational filming, nothing like it).    It is said that Ibn Khaldûn, fourteenth-century Arab scholar, was the first to notice and describe cycles in history--and in particular to note how "desert" populations (think Genghis Khan or Mohammed) may rise up and conquer "settled" peoples, only to be supplanted by other desert peoples in their turn.

Since desert life no doubt is the source of bravery, savage groups are braver than others.  They are, therefore, better able to achieve superiority and to take away the things that re in the hands of other nations. The situation of one and the same group changes, in this respect, with the change of time.  Whenever people settle in fertile plains and amass luxuries and become accustomed to a life of abundance and refinement, their bravery decreases to the degree that their wildness and desert habits decrease. 

This is exemplified by dumb animals, such as gazelles, wild buffaloes, and donkeys, that are domesticated.  When they cease to be wild as a result of contact with human beings, and when they have a life of abundance, their vigor and violence undergo change.  This affects even their movements and the beauty of their coat.  The same applies to savage human beings who become sociable and friendly. 

The reason is that familiar customs determine human nature and character.  Superiority comes to nations through enterprise and courage.  The more firmly rooted in desert habits and the wilder a group is, the closer does it come to achieving superiority over others, if both (par tires) are proximately equal in number, strength, and group feeling. 

In this connection, one may compare the Mudar with the Himyar and the Kahlân before them, who precede them in royal authority and in the life of luxury, and also with the Rabî'ah who settled in the fertile fields of the 'Irâq.  The Mudar retained their desert habits, and others embarked ion a life of abundance and great luxury before they did. Desert life prepared the Mudar most effectively for achieving superiority.  They took away and appropriated what the other groups had in their hands.  

--So Ibn Khaldûn,  The Muqaddimah 107 (Franz Rosenthal Trans., 2005).  Thomas Barfield gives a modern account along similar lines in The Perilous Frontier (1992) his history of nomadic peoples along the northern border of China.  Last I knew, there were statues of Ibn Khaldûn  in Cairo and Tunis, and his face was/is on the Tunisian 10 dinar note.

Among the Missing in the Battle of Obamacare

Quick, no Googling--who is Barack Obama's chief of staff?

Ah, got you there, didn't I?  Unless you are Ezra Klein or one of the COS' many siblings, I'd say it is very unlikely you are able to conjure up the name of the person who ought. by all rights, to be the second most important person in any Presidential administration.

Which suggests all kinds of questions.  Like: where the hell has he been during the current uproar as the Obama administration seems to descend into a bad imitation of The Pink Panther.  Isn't it the job of the chief of staff precisely to see that things do not happen, i.e., to see that health care does not go off the rails, that surveillance does not turn into a game of catch-the-hot-knife, and that the administration not look like--well, not look like the second Reagan administration as it very nearly disintegrated under the weight of Iran contra?  In all the second-guessing and finger-pointing, if anyone has mentioned the name of the COS, I must have missed it.

Of course there is a perfectly respectable answer to me here.  That is: one of the main job requirements of a COS is not to be noticed: it is the President, not his supposedly faithful sidekick, who is the protagonist of the story.  

This is a beguiling proposition but I am not quite sure it holds up.  Grant that one of the reasons why Donald Regan was not right for the job is that he seemed to think it was about him and not the other guy.  On the other hand,  James Baker seems to have been effective even though people knew his  name.  And if Andrew Card was anonymous, it is because he wasn't much more than an errand boy for Dick Cheney anyway.

So I guess my question comes down to a relatively minor inquiry in the sturdy of administrative behavior.  Where was he, or where is he?   Is he the guy who has kept things from getting far, far worse?  Or is he just a spectator in somebody else's drama?

Still can't remember the name of the incumbent? Go here.

Health Care, Solved

I tried this on Facebook and nobody bit but I like it and so I'll try again.  That is: couldn't we just give health care to the NSA?  That way we could do away with all those silly applications--they already have all they need on file.  And while we are at it, we could turn over spying to the folks at HHS.

Wilson on Bureaucracy: A Belated Review

The big book I spoke of the other day--it's James Q. Wilson's Bureaucracy which has been languishing unattended on myself for years, I now cannot imagine why.  It's a delight--not a grand theory but an almost illimitable number of individual anecdotes with instructive commentary.  I have only one disappointment which I will save for a moment.  First, let me see if I can lay out a few general assertions:

One, "bureaucracy" is not just about "government"  Private entities have bureaucracies just like the government. The difference is in the structure of incentives: Private entities--say, MacDonald's--can orchestrate pay and perks so as to get the most out of its people.  Government bureaucracies operate under the hawk eye of the legislature, often hampered by the  constraint of amorphous and conflicting demands, such as to make you think they are almost defined to fail.

But two, there are  bureaucracies and bureaucracies.   Some have well-defined and achievable missions.  Given good enough leadership, you can almost forget they are there.  Think the Social Security Administration.   Have you ever heard of them  mismailing a check?

And the institution may be the shadow of the man.  Gifford Pinchot at the Forest Service, J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI: love them or hate them, each  defined and instilled an institutional ethos so strong that it has long outlasted its creator.

There's a lot more good stuff here and I may come back and write about some particular topics later. But for the moment, let me go back and drill down on that  matter of "amorphous and conflicting demands."  Wilson argues that if the goals are uncertain, we may end up judging (in default of a good alternative) on procedures.  Thus he says:

Police administrators rarely lose their jobs because the crime rate has gone up or win promotions because it has gone down. They can easily lose their jobs if somebody persuasively argues that the police department has abused a citizen, beaten a prisoner, or failed to answer a call for service.  School administrators rarely lose their jobs when their pupils’ reading scores go down or win promotions when scores go up. But they can lose their jobs or suffer other career-impeding consequences if students are punished, controversial textbooks assigned, or parents treated impolitely. 

So James Q. Wilson Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do And Why They Do It (Basic Books Classics) (pp. 132-133).  (Kindle ed.).

This is tempting but wait--is this really so?  And here I come to my one real difficulty with this book: it was published back in 1991.  The more fool I for not reading it at the time.  But a lot has changed since 1991, and speculate he might write it differently today.  How much differently?   I'm not at all sure, but my tentative guess is that cops are a lot more likely to get judged today on the crime write, just as teachers are more likely to get judged on student performance.  "More likely," I'd venture, at least in part because of what Wilson wrote.

Which brings me to my real beef: Wilson had the bad grace to die before he could do a second edition (in 2012, at 79).  How inconsiderate of him to leave us with the the mere abundance of his original insights, unequipped by whatever second thoughts or revisions might have come to him in the busy decades after his first publication.

Be Careful What You Wish For (Department of Honest Toil)

Well, one more Dreiser, but on a hobbyhorse of mine.  That is: we talk with nostalgia about the good old days when we all had jobs. Well, maybe, in a sense, sort of, sometimes.  But one thing we forget is how many of those jobs were god-awful--demeaning, soul-killing exercises in extraction, designed to bleed you dry before your time.  "But they never worked in the mills," my grandmother is said to have said of her children; "they never worked in the mills."  I don't think she had contempt for millworkers or mill work; just compassion for her own, and delighted that they escaped such a fate.  

Which brings me back to Dreiser, and his first great hero(ine)--Sister Carrie, making or taking her chances as she found them, never particularly happy (I suspect she didn't have a clear notion what happiness might be), but sometimes a keen observer:

It was so sad to be ragged and poor. The hang of faded clothes pained her eyes. 

 "And they have to work so hard!" was her only comment.

On the street sometimes she would see men working— Irishmen with picks, coal-heavers with great loads to shovel, Americans busy about some work which was a mere matter of strength— and they touched her fancy. Toil, now that she was free of it, seemed even a more desolate thing than when she was part of it. She saw it through a mist of fancy— a pale, sombre half-light, which was the essence of poetic feeling. Her old father, in his flour-dusted miller's suit, sometimes returned to her in memory, revived by a face in a window. A shoemaker pegging at his last, a blastman seen through a narrow window  in some basement where iron was being melted, a bench-worker seen high aloft in some window, his coat off, his sleeves rolled up; these took her back in fancy to the details of the mill. She felt, though she seldom expressed them, sad thoughts upon this score.  Her sympathies were ever with that under-world of toil from which she had so recently sprung, and which she best understood.

--So Theodore Dreiser. Sister Carrie: a Novel (Kindle Locations 1932-1938).

So much for honest toil. But the thing is in Carrie's world, plenty of them didn't even have the privilege of being exploited.  Her companion and sometimes protector, George Hurstwood, supports himself variously as a saloon keeper and embezzler, and at last falls from grace. Whereupon he discovers a new slice of life among the bums on the Bowery:

He mingled with a crowd of men— a crowd which had been, and was still, gathering by degrees   It began with the approach of two or three, who hung about the closed wooden doors and beat their feet to keep them warm. They had on faded derby hats with dents in them. Their misfit coats were heavy with melted snow and turned up at the collars. Their trousers were mere bags, frayed at the bottom and wobbling over big, soppy shoes, torn at the sides and worn almost to shreds. They made no effort to go in, but shifted ruefully about, digging their hands deep in their pockets and leering at the crowd and the increasing lamps. With the minutes, increased the number. There were old men with grizzled beards and sunken eyes, men who were comparatively young but shrunken by diseases, men who were middle-aged. None were fat. There was a face in the thick of the collection which was as white as drained veal. There was another red as brick. Some came with thin, rounded shoulders, others with wooden legs, still others with frames so lean that clothes only flapped about them. There were great ears, swollen noses, thick lips, and, above all, red, blood-shot eyes. Not a normal, healthy face in the whole mass; not a straight figure; not a straightforward, steady glance. 

Theodore Dreiser. Sister Carrie: a Novel (Kindle Locations 6435-6439).

Mr. Dooley and the War Lovers

Oh, now I know why I've been rattling on about Theodore Dreiser.  It's because I have been reading Evan Thomas' admirable The War Lovers, about the great spasm of bellicosity that led us to grab an empire we didn't need from paltry and pathetic Spain--and the spasm of aversion and regret that almost restrained us.

They say that history is written by the victors but it isn't quite that.  The real point is that the victors' story is so full of cheery self-congratulation that you lose sight of all the reservations and second thoughts even if they are right before your eyes.  So we remember Theodore Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst, the bumptious bullyboys who carried us into the Spanish American war as if it were a picnic.  You tend to forget people like Thomas Reed, speaker of the House of Representatives who threw up his hands in dismay when he saw he couldn't do anything to stop it.   And beyond the leaders: one of the virtues of Thomas' book is that it shows you the mindless awfulness of the war fever as it possessed not just the leaders but the masses of Americans who cheered them on.  Another virtue is that he shows how even at high tide, war fever was far from universal--and how, as the war slogged on in the Philippines, more and more Americans came to wonder what it was all about, and even Roosevelt himself seemed almost (but not quite) ready to distance himself from what was, in large part, his own creation.

Which beings me to one of the most refreshing creatures in the whole menagerie--Finley Peter Dunne, Chicago newsman, sometimes friend and colleague of Theodore Dreiser, supra, surely one of the sharper political commentators we've ever had the good fortune to enjoy. It is Dunne who created Mr. Dooley, the Chicago saloon keeper who did so much to deflate the pretensions of the war madness.  Of course he didn't prevail; he wouldn't have been funny if he had prevailed.  But it's a bit of a consolation to recall that he was able to hold an audience--to evade lynching--even at the height of the war enthusiasm.   In the following excerpt he instructs his friend Hennesey on the correct approach for us to take against a country which, as Mr. Dooley suggests, most of us couldn't have found on the map.  "Mack" is William McKinley, nominally the President of the United States but often a seeming spectator at his own sideshow.  Anyway:

I know what I'd do if I was Mack," said Mr. Hennessy. "I'd hist a flag over th' Ph'lippeens, an' I'd take in th' whole lot iv thim." 

"An' yet," said Mr. Dooley, "tis not more thin two months since ye larned whether they were islands or canned goods. Ye'er back yard is so small that ye'er cow can't turn r-round without buttin' th' woodshed off th' premises, an' ye wudden't go out to th' stock yards without takin' out a policy on yer life. Suppose ye was standin' at th' corner iv State Sthreet an' Archey R-road, wud ye know what car to take to get to th' Ph'lippeens? If yer son Packy was to ask ye where th' Ph'lippeens is, cud ye give im anny good idea whether they was in Rooshia or jus' west iv th' thracks ?" 

"Mebbe I cudden't," said Mr. Hennessy, haughtily, "but I'm f'r takin' thim in, annyhow."
"So might I be," said Mr. Dooley, "if I cud on'y get me mind on it. Wan iv the worst things about this here war is th' way it's makin' puzzles f'r our poor, tired heads. Whin I wint into it, I thought all I'd have to do was to set up here behind th' bar with a good tin-cint see-gar in me teeth, an' toss dinnymite bombs into th' hated city iv Havana. But look at me now. Th' war is still goin' on; an' ivry night, whin I'm countin' up the cash, I'm askin' mesilf will I annex Cubia or lave it to the Cubians? Will I take Porther Ricky or put it by? An' what shud I do with the Ph'lippeens? Oh, what shud I do with thim? I can't annex thim because I don't know where they ar-re. I can't let go iv thim because some wan else'll take thim if I do. They are eight thousan' iv thim islands, with a popylation iv wan hundherd millyon naked savages; an' me bedroom's crowded now with me an' th' bed. How can I take thim in, an' how on earth am I goin' to cover th' nakedness iv thim savages with me wan shoot iv clothes? An' yet 'twud break me heart to think iv givin' people I niver see or heerd tell iv back to other people I don't know. An', if I don't take thim, Schwartzmeister down th' sthreet, that has half me thrade already, will grab thim sure. 

"It ain't that I'm afraid iv not doin' th' r-right thing in th' end, Hinnissy. Some mornin' I'll wake up an' know jus' what to do, an' that I'll do. But 'tis th' annoyance in th' mane time. I've been r-readin' about th' counthry. 'Tis over beyant ye'er left shoulder whin ye're facin' east. Jus' throw ye'er thumb back, an' ye have it as ac'rate as anny man in town. 'Tis farther thin Boohlgahrya an' not so far as Blewchoochoo. It's near Chiny, an' it's not so near; an', if a man was to bore a well through fr'm Goshen, Indianny, he might sthrike it, an' thin again he might not. It's a poverty-sthricken counthry, full iv goold an' precious stones, where th' people can pick dinner off th' threes an' ar-re starvin' because they have no step-ladders. Th' inhabitants is mostly naygurs an' Chinnymen, peaceful, industhrus, an' law-abidin', but savage an' bloodthirsty in their methods. They wear no clothes except what they have on, an' each woman has five husbands an' each man has five wives. Th' r-rest goes into th' discard, th' same as here. Th' islands has been ownded be Spain since befure th' fire; an' she's threated thim so well they're now up in ar-rms again her, except a majority iv thim which is thurly loyal. Th' natives seldom fight, but whin they get mad at wan another they r-run-a-muck. Whin a man r-runs-a-muck, sometimes they hang him an' sometimes they discharge him an' hire a new motorman. Th' women ar-re beautiful, with languishin' black eyes, an' they smoke see-gars, but ar-re hurried an' incomplete in their dhress. I see a pitcher iv wan th' other day with nawthin' on her but a basket of cocoanuts an' a hoop-skirt. They're no prudes. We import juke, hemp, cigar wrappers, sugar, an' fairy tales fr'm th' Ph'lippeens, an' export six-inch shells an' th' like. Iv late th' Ph'lippeens has awaked to th' fact that they're behind th' times, an' has received much American amminition in their midst. They say th' Spanyards is all tore up about it. 

"I larned all this fr'm th' papers, an' I know 'tis sthraight. An' yet, Hinnissy, I dinnaw what to do about th' Ph'lippeens. An' I'm all alone in th' wurruld. Ivrybody else has made up his mind. Ye ask anny con-ducthor on Ar-rchy R-road, an' he'll tell ye. Ye can find out fr'm the papers; an', if ye really want to know, all ye have to do is to ask a prom'nent citizen who can mow all th' lawn he owns with a safety razor. But I don't know." 

"Hang on to thim," said Mr. Hennessy, stoutly. "What we've got we must hold." 

"Well," said Mr. Dooley, "if I was Mack, I'd lave it to George. I'd say: 'George,' I'd say, 'if ye're f'r hangin' on, hang on it is. If ye say, lave go, I dhrop thim.' 'Twas George won thim with th' shells, an' th' question's up to him."

--From Mr. Dooley in Peace and War, first published in 1898 and available at  Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.  "George" is elsewhere identified as Mr. Dooley's cousin George Dooley, of whom his Chicago expositor says "whin we come to find out about him, we'll hear he's ilicted himself king iv th' F'lip-ine Islands. Dooley th' Wanst."  

Theodore Dreiser Tells You All You Might Want to Know about Sex

Theodore Dreiser and Henry James.   Perhaps not an obvious pairing, but perhaps more durable than might appear at first blush.  Start with the simpler stuff.  You'd have to admit that James could write, after a fashion, if you like that sort of thing (I'm ambivalent).  Dreiser, strangely, couldn't write at all.  Further: I think it's fair to say that they both wanted to tell the truth about their world, although it is an interesting question what kind of world each thought his to be.  Dreiser surely saw him as an expositor of "America," though probably understood that it was only a slice of American life.  I take it that James, too, though of himself as "American" and he may not have noticed how much of his time and  life took place overseas (for my money, one of his best pieces of work is his story "The Jolly Corner," about a narrator who comes back after a long stay away and finds the old place a ghostly shadow of its former self).

And here's an intriguing convergence: both took women seriously.  I was going to say "understood women," but who am I (and who were they?) to say?--we are not, after all, women.   Still, "understand" or not, they both seemed to recognize women as creatures with lives of heir own--lives with purposes and disappointments that they  might not even share with men.

But there is one interesting and glaring difference.  Thus James, for all his seriousness doesn't seem to understand how babies are made.  Dreiser seems at times to understand it almost too well.  It got him in trouble; it gained him notoriety it drove him and almost defined him.  

Here's a remarkable instance, perhaps not Dreiser at his best but in a sense perhaps most typical.  Once again, we're lifting from Newspaper Days, his autobiography, perhaps best characterized as a monumental effort at self-understanding:

Mrs. X, as I shall have to call her, for I have entirely forgotten her name as well as the number of the house, was entirely different to the two or three women I had known thus intimately heretofore.  She was so small, well formed, pretty, chirpy, with a pagan practicality and directness which was tonic to me at this time, but, for all that, with distinct signs of her thirty years about her.  I liked her very much indeed.  As it was, however, I still had such a sniveling and sniffy attitude in regard to all sex relations that I considered myself very much of a wastrel, if not a deep-dyed villain.  Say what one would, according to my point of view a the time, due to my raising, of course, fornication was a crime—a mortal sin, as he Catholics say—but alas, somehow vastly delicious and humanly unescapable.  No one should really do it—t was not right—but still, if one could and never be found out--.  You know the  American point of view.  In addition I was dreadfully fearful lest I be led into a life of crime or shame by this, or disease—the various diseases springing from this relation being so very much discussed at the time.  And I was always fearful lest (she being promiscuous and I not!) I would acquire some contagion, so that I was for purifying myself with the greatest care, afterwards.  I fancy, due to her American or Midwestern bringing-up, of course, that she may have entertained, or had in the pat, many notions to the same end.  Still, compared to myself, she was a creature of the world and probably noted and was amused by many of my shy puritan ways.  The mere act of silent secretive friction was sufficient for me, whereas I recall now that I was quire shocked—deliciously show of course (even if I looked on it as evil)—at some of her expressions in the process, the direct vigorous way in which, after the first two or three times, she approached this pleasure.
 “You like that!”
 “You like to do it to me?”
 .And the way she bit my neck and cheek, in lieu of love-savageries which I should have indulged in, I presume.  She was so small, and curled herself about me so tightly and pinched and uttered such muttered scrams when her orgasm was upon her that I was astonished, even if pleased.

Once again, that is the Black Sparrow reprint from 2000, T.D. Nostwich editor.

Update:  I've just now stumbled on this lovely narrative account of Dreiser's long and sometimes troubled friendship with H. L. Mencken.

Dreiser Visits the Allegheny County Library

Does anybody read Dreiser these days?  Mencken admired him, but then, does anybody read Mencken?  I read Dreiser when I was young, thanks to Mencken as presented in (I think) the old Vintage Mencken, with an inviting introduction by Alistair Cooke.  I'm pleased to see that the Mencken is still in print--there appears even to be a Kindle and wonder of wonders, it appears to be free (I haven't tried it).

But Dreiser--as Mencken understood (how could he miss?)--Dreiser is one of those great paradoxes of the literary world: a gripping, hypnotic novelist who is at the same time a terrible writer: clunky, ham-handed, overdone in almost every way.  Like Faulkner on his (too frequent) bad days.  And most of all, like Balzac. Yes, Balzac.   Two of a kind, those guys.   They both get drunk on the city--on its richness and on their struggle.  And neither one can write a simple sentence.You find yourself sucked in, and you can't imagine why.

I'm thinking of Dreiser as I disport myself with his autobiography Newspaper Days, finished in 1920 when he was 48 (he had another 25 years to live). which I've got a Black Sparrow edition from 2000, edited by T. D. Nostwich.  It has all the Dreiserian virtues and defects and it offers what is, for the moment, one remarkable insight.  How, you ask, did Dreiser becomes so--well, so Balzacian?  I suppose the answer should be obvious.  But here he is prowling the stacks at the Allegheny County Library in Pittsburgh in 1894 (which would make him 22):

[H]having nothing else to do, or at least nothing immediately pressing, I came here and by the merest chance picked up a volume entitled The Wild Ass' Skin, by one Honoré de Balzac, no less,.  I examined it curiously, reading incidentally a preface which fairly shimmered with his praise. ...  I turned to the first page and began, and from then on until dusk I was sitting in this charming alcove , beside this window, reading.  And it was as if a new and inviting door to life had been suddenly thrown open to me.  Here was one who, as I saw it then, thought, felt and understood and could interpret all that I was interested in.  Through him I saw at a glance a prospect so wide that it fairly left me breathless--all Paris all France, all life through French eyes, and those of a genius. ... It was for me a literary revolution, and this not only for the brilliant and incisive manner in which the man grasped life and invented themes or vehicles whereby to present it.  In my own estimation at least, the type of individual he handled with most enthusiasm and skill, the brooding, seeking, ambitious beginner in life's affairs--social, political, artistic, commercial (Rastignac, Raphael, de Rubempré, Bianchon) was, as I thought, so much like myself, their exact counterpart.

Afterthought:  Well yes, of course.   Might have guessed it, had I given it any thought (maybe it's in Mencken).  Balzac, c'est moi, he might have said, as Flaubert said of Madame Bovary.  As Thoreau said, the shock of recognition.  But one point sidetracks me.  Dreiser responds to Balzac's great gallery of young men.  Well he might, but it seems to me that Balzac is just as good at characterizing the old: Old Goriot, Cousin Pons, Cousine Bette, and (for my money, perhaps the best of them) Eugénie Grandet.  In fact Dreiser mentions the old ones, in a paragraph next to the one just quoted.  But it is clearly the young--those his own age, facing life the same way he felt he faced life--who capture his attention.  And their creator, one might say, who taught him how to write.

An Old Man's Challenge

Verdi's Otello opened at La Scala on February 5, 1887. Verdi would have been 73. It was the capstone of a great career. Many Verdians would have endorsed it as his greatest achievement.

They say that one of the governing principles for a respectable old age is to leave the party before you hear the sirens. But one more project lured Verdi on after Otello: by 1890, in his 77th year, we find him at work on what would in fact be his last opera—Falstaff—in collaboration with his indispensable librettist, Arrigo Boito.

The decision to go forward was not automatic. “Did you never think of the enormous number of my years?” Verdi wrote to his collaborator. “Suppose I couldn't stand the strain? And failed to finish it? You would then have wasted your time and trouble to no purpose.”

Boito's response is a model of subtle persuasion:

The fact is that I never think of your age either when I'm talking to you or when I'm writing to you or when I'm working with you.

The fault is yours.

I know that Otello is little more than two years old, and that even as I am writing to you it is being appreciated as it should by Shakespeare's compatriots. But there is a stronger argument than that of age, and it's this: it's been said of you after Otello: "It's impossible to finish better."This is a great truth and it enshrines a great and very rare tribute. It is the only weighty argument.

Weighty for the present generation, but not for history, which aims first and foremost to judge men by their essential merits. Nevertheless it is indeed rare to see a lifetime of artistic endeavour concludes with a worldly triumph. Otello is such a triumph. All the other arguments—age, strength, hard work for me, hard work for you, etc., etc.—are not valid and place no obstacle in the way of a new work. Since you oblige me to talk about myself I shall say that notwithstanding the commitment I should be taking on with Falstaff I shall be able to finish my work within the term promised. I'm sure of that.

I don't think that writing a comedy should tire you out. A tragedy causes its author genuinely to suffer; one's thoughts undergo a suggestion of sadness which renders the nerves morbidly sensitive. The jokes and laughter of comedy exhilarate mind and body. ... 

You have a great desire to work, and this is an indubitable proof of health and strength. "Ave Marias" are not enough. Something else is needed.

All your life you've wanted a good subject for a comic opera, and that is a sign that the vein of an art that is both joyous and noble is virtually in existence in your brain; instinct is a wise counsellor. There's only one way to finish better than with Otello and that's to finish triumphantly with Falstaff.

After having sounded all the shrieks and groans of the human heart, to finish with a mighty burst of laughter—that is to astonish the world.

So you see, dear Maestro, it's worth thinking about the subject I've sketched; see whether you can feel in it the germ of the new masterpiece. If the germ is there, the miracle is accomplished.

And Verdi:

Amen, so be it!

We'll write Falstaff then! We won't think for the moment of obstacles or age or illness! ...

Falstaff opened on February 9, 1890, just a few months shy of Verdi's 80th birthday.   It was to be his last opera, although he continued to compose until as late as 1897.  He died in 1901, at 87.

Update:  Apologies for neglecting to credit this. It's almost entirely a ripoff from  the indispensable Operas of Verdi by Julian Budder, vol. III 424-6 (1984).

Weekend Reading

Long day at San Francisco Airport yesterday, so a chance to do a lot of reading.  I ingested a large chunk of a really cool book about which I'll have something to say latter. And also, among others:

And you think our bankers are stupid greedy incompetent not so hot: compare. (in fairness, it's not just people with five-o'clock shadow).

All in the mind.  This guy needs to read more Stendahl.

"The walls are painted but you can wallpaper them if you so desire."  Former zillionaire learns to cope with the Gulag.

"F*ck Jared Diamond!"

McKinsey! (with a potted retrospective of Alfred Chandler).

Type II error! 

.Jellyfish!

Verdi v. Verdi (and the Role of the Orchestra)

European opera managers must smile with contempt at their American counterparts for giving away programs.  It's almost as silly as an airline letting you board luggage for free.  But we might as well enjoy it while we can; it gives us stuff like this:

For a poet as complex as Shakespeare, the musical language of the first half of the nineteenth century was not really adequate.  There are wonderful things in Rossini's Otello of 1816 (which is based on a French eighteenth-century translation, far from the original Shakespearean text), in I Capuleti e I Montechi of Bellini (which has very little to do with Shakespeare) and Verdi's Macbeth of 1847 and 1865, but the language of the period did not permit the composers and the librettists to enter fully into the thoughts of the English writer.  Rather, their aim was to transform the drama into a series of closed numbers, arias, duets, etc., of the kind that Verdi was writing and the public expected in 1847.

So musicologist Philip Gossett in "Giuseppe Verdi and Falstaff," in the (free) program for the current San Francisco opera season.  I suppose one way to grasp his point would be to listen to a (pretty good) early Verdi like, say, Nabucco, or an (excellent) Rossini like The Barber of Seville and reflect on the range and variety of devices available to the Verdi of Falstaff that simply wouldn't have been on offer for his earlier self.

Part of it, surely, is the influence of Verdi on Wagner--a complicated topic by any measure, but on even the narrowest reading, the influence is there.  Mrs. B points out wrinkle: the role of the orchestra as a virtual character in the opera itself.  Wagner is partly responsible here, but Mrs. B points also to Puccini, with a notable wrinkle.  That is, in Puccini, the orchestra can be downright obtrusive, whacking you over the head with its own interpretations, leaving nothing to imagination or chance.  The orchestra in Falstaff is a vivid presence, but here I'd say it is not a hindrance.  Rather, you really need the orchestra to keep you on track among the torrent of vocal possibilities under exploration on stage.

Justin Fox on the Truck that Just Hit Us

Justin Fox's Myth of the Rational Market was much praised; I found it kind of meh, repeating and not necessarily improving on a lot of work done earlier by Peter Bernstein.  But his new Harvard Business Review piece on "What We've Learned from the Financial Crisis" is excellent, particularly the first section on macro.  The latter portion on "shareholder value" and the concept of the corporation is somewhat more diffuse, but then the topic itself is somewhat more diffuse.  Fox has always been good at exposition; I think he is developing a better feel for the place of economic ideas in the structure of the economics profession.  A must-read; or at least, as Abraham Lincoln probably did not say, "if you like this kind of article, this is the kind of article you will like."

The Manufacture of Rule in Korea

San Francisco's Asian Museum has a fascinating little show up about the creation and maintenance of what was (and I did not know this before) one of the world's most long-running dynasties.  That would be the Joseon, which held sway (it says here) from 1392 for more than 500 years.  The promos tout it as "Celebrations in Korean Art During the Joseon Dynasty," but that is somewhat overblown: most, and far and away the best, stuff comes from the 18th and 19th Century.  And the most fascinating pieces are scrolls that help to explain the theatre of elite power in Korea--call it, for lack of a better name, "the manufacture of rule."    Evidently the Joseon (or more likely, somebody on the house staff) knew how to put on a grand show, so as to demonstrate the legitimacy of state power in the incumbent.  One's first thought is--my stars the way humans will oppress others of their species. But second: my stars, how happily, how eagerly we accept this kind of domination, so long as it is wrapped up in a good story.

I could numb you with all kinds of newly-acquired factoids about the Joseon, most of which you already know or don't want to hear from me.  I will restrain myself and stick with one.  That is, per  wall panel, there were 27 generations of Joseon rulers (divide 500 by 27 and you can surmise some pretty long reigns).   Succession went by a kind of primogeniture.  Or so it was said, but there's the fun part: evidently of all these 27, only seven went off according to plan.  The other 20, it says on the wall "came to power irregularly as a result  of feuds and rivalries."  How a form of succession can be called "irregular" when it happens 20 out of 27 times is a question left to a higher pay grade than mine.

Terfel's Falstaff

You know I'm not a serious opera fan because I've seen only one performance of Bryn Terfel in Verdi's Fallstaff.  Not the three, or five, or ten, or 100, which may be the gold standard for the real fans.  I am thus unable to confirm that the new version at the San Francisco Opera (which we saw last night) is, as represented, more somber and correspondingly less comical than some of its predecessors.  I'm sorry I haven't, though.  Terfel is an appealing, engaging, accessible singer by any standard and if last night's performance is any evidence (and it probably is) then a whole catalog of Terfel Falstaffs would be great fun indeed.

A couple of other loose ends about Falstaff: One, it occurs to me that maybe this is an opera more fun for the singers than the audience.  Or at best, it needs an audience with pretty strong musical chops.  I guess I've written before that it was, ironically, the first opera I ever saw--and I was told I probably wouldn't get it and I didn't get it.  I've seen it several times since and I've come to enjoy it and I think I have some sense of what it is about. But my own musicianship never gets above the sing-in-the-shower level and I suspect that there is stuff I will  never appreciate as well as someone who, say, sings every day for money, and once in a while gets a chance really to blow it out with this masterwork.

Related point: I think there is a sense on which Verdi's Falstaff bears comparison with Shakespeare's Hamlet.  No, no, bear with me for a moment.  In Hamlet, Shakespeare tells us everything he knows about theatre, everything he has learned in his entire career.  So with Falstaff and Verdi and opera.  The notable difference is, of course, that Shakespeare was in his 40s when he wrote Hamlet; he'd been in the game for a dozen year to so and had perhaps a dozen more to go (is that all?  Yes!).  Verdi, of course, was in his 80s, with his entire life to look back on.

And one more: people always talk about Falstaff as a comedy.  I suppose it is as a sense: it is also, at best, rather mean-spirited, unkind.  And has anybody noticed that it is a "comedy" mocking as a foolish old man, written by, yes, another old man?

My Twitter Account has been Hacked

See above.  Apologies to those of you who have been getting trashy ads from me.  I've shut it down.

But Is He a Libertarian?

Amia Srinivasan poses a problem beloved of the denizens of the Ivy League seminar table:

Suppose I’m walking to the library and see a man drowning in the river. I decide that the pleasure I would get from saving his life wouldn’t exceed the cost of getting wet and the delay. 

Note: she doesn't say "are you permitted try and save he drowning man?"  On conventional principles, even a libertarian is permitted to do an act of kindness to another, just so long as it is clear that he doesn't hve to.   The question is whether you are permitted to be a loathsome shit walk on by?  Ms.  Srinivasan asserts:

If you say yes, then you think the only moral requirements are the ones we freely bring on ourselves — say, by making promises or contracts. ...  Since I made no contract with the man, I am under no obligation to save him.

In essence, the conventional current libertarian view.  You would be correct to surmise that she is not crazy about this view. "Ethically outraging," she says; she asserts that this and kindred views "grate against our commonsense notions of fairness."

She might want to explore the question further with Stephen Gilbert, Liberal Member of Parliament from St Austell and Newquay. News reports say he was standing on the House of Commons Terrace overlooking the Thames when he saw a body float past. At first he thought it was dead; then to his consternation he saw it quiver. Apparently not stopping to reflect on the philosophical implications of his action, he threw her a life buoy. She grabbed it, and was fished out a short way down stream.

"“I think it is what anyone else would have done under the circumstances" he told a local paper.” Maybe, and maybe not.