Thinking It Through

I will no longer post to this blog.  I’ll leave it in place for the curious, but there will be no more additions.

I turned on the radio this morning and heard an interview with Nat Hentoff, who has just been laid off by the Village Voice. I’m not sure whether I was more shocked by the layoff or by learning that Hentoff has been writing for the Voice for fifty years. (In fact, I thought I heard him say “sixty” in the interview, but the Voice was founded in 1955, Hentoff started contributing in ‘58, so that’s that.) Though he hasn’t been writing about jazz for a long time, Hentoff will always be a jazz critic to me. I think I first ran into his name when I read Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya, a book that he produced with Nat Shapiro in 1955, a compendium of interviews with jazz musicians. I read it when I suddenly became mad about jazz at the age of 16 (1958), and I know that I also read Hentoff’s jazz columns in the Voice.

I happen to know when the Voice was founded because I recently read a New Yorker piece about it by Louis Menand (”It Took a Village: How the Voice changed journalism” in the January 5 issue, not available online, unfortunately). Menand notes that during most of its history the Voice was a newsstand paper, not one that developed an extensive subscription base. Be that as it may, I was a subscriber, and, given the founding date, a fairly early one. How did this happen? How did a kid living in the Philadelphia suburbs in a lower-middle-brow Saturday Evening Post family come to subscribe to the Village Voice?

Jean Shepherd, that’s how. As I think I’ve mentioned here, I spent most of my Sunday nights during high school sitting in front of my Hallicrafters SX-20 receiver, headphones pinning my ears, tuned to WOR in New York as Shepherd did his weekly four hour monologues. As he did for nerdy teenage and subteen kids up and down the east coast for about twenty years, Shepherd opened a sequence of doors and windows on the world for me. He aided and abetted the jazz addiction, of course, but rather off-handedly, playing wonderful music behind his talk (Brubeck, yes, but also Jimmy Guiffre, early Ellington, Sidney Bechet, and on). He wrote for the Voice occasionally, was good friends with its editor and publisher, and eventually had the Voice as a sponsor. He would say things like, “You really owe it to yourself to subscribe to this paper. It’s like no other paper.” And I would nod and feel very mature, very urbane, and try to figure out how to send the lofty subscription price (three dollars!) to New York. I can’t remember exactly how I presented this to my parents, but the Voice started arriving in the mailbox.

And the Voice was simply more windows and doors popping open, letting in air, light, and strange fragrances. Menand notes that the Voice was not sharply political, that it was fairly middle-of-the-road, but such things are relative. In comparison to my political environment, this was the old sputtering anarchist’s bomb (I think of both the anarchist and the bomb as sputtering). And, of course, there were ads and articles in the Voice that pointed to the edges of the road. Not long after the Voice began materializing in our mailbox, other items arrived, among them Paul Krasner’s Realist.

Louis Menand begins his article by quoting the writer Floyd Dell, who said, “The Village isn’t what it used to be.” Dell said that in 1916. It is also true that the Village Voice isn’t what it used to be, particularly after the departure of Nat Hentoff and others. It is going the way of many, if not all, newspapers. These are painful times for newspapers, and the medium you are reading at this moment is a major source of the pain. I have always liked newspapers, have been a subscriber for years, but I find myself drifting away, pushed perhaps by a sharp drop in quality of the local papers here in the Chicago area.

I understand that Nat Hentoff has other outlets for his writing and will be able to continue. That’s good; he’s 83 and would probably have trouble changing careers at this point. I’m rather more concerned about all of the other folks who are receiving pink slips these days. I’m grateful to Nat for his presence, for what I learned from him over the years, and I’m grateful to the odd trio who founded the Village Voice: Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, and Norman Mailer.

Today Claude Lévi-Strauss is one hundred years young. With the hope that he is in reasonably good shape and happy to be that age, I wish him a very happy day. For those of you who are not acquainted with him and his works, here’s a link to the English language Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_L%C3%A9vi-Strauss

And here’s a link to the French language Wikipedia: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Levi-Strauss

Though I never met him, I did attend his seminar at the Collège de France in 1967. The doesn’t necessarily reflect any credit on me, by the way, since the courses offered at the Collège de France have no registered students, are open to the public, and are a great opportunity for the homeless in Paris to get out of the weather. It was a curious experience. Lévi-Strauss was working at the time on his series of studies of the structure of myth, a four-volume masterpiece including Le cru et le cuit, Du miel aux cendres, L’origine des manières de table, and l’homme nu. The general plan of the whole series was to take a large number of myths emanating from various societies (North American Indians, Central and South American tribes, etc.) and identify common or corresponding elements and examine the relations between these elements. Which mean, first of all, recounting the myths. So we sat in the room in 1967 Paris and listened to this very well-spoken gentleman as he told us about lassoing the moon with a rope made of pubic hair in wonderfully formed, complicated French sentences. Lévi-Strauss was trained as a philosopher and as an ethnologist, but he is, above all, a writer, and a magnificent one at that. When he lectured, he rarely looked down at notes, but his spoken prose was as wonderfully wrought as his written prose. It was also fascinating that he would appear so promptly at the beginning of each class, striding into the room as the clock began to tick the hour, and beginning his first sentence as the tick tocked. His finish was equally as prompt.

Those were heady days for me. I would also head to the Collège de France for Jean Hyppolite’s course on Hegel, and I’d wander up the Rue d’Ulm on Wednesday’s for Jacques Lacan’s seminar. The evenings would be spent at one of the rented classrooms of the 6th section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes to listen to Roland Barthes, Lucien Goldmann, Gerard Genette, or A. J. Greimas. Then I’d head back to my sixth floor walkup apartment and read for my Ph.D. comps late into the night.

I had had the excellent luck to be around just at the time when the French structuralist and post-structuralist wave smacked up against the edifice of American academia. In the fall of 1966, just before I left for Paris and all of those amazing classes, The Johns Hopkins University, where I was slaving away as a grad student and T.A., hosted a symposium the brought many of the leading French lights to America for the very first time. The organizers, René Girard, Eugenio Donato, and Richard Macksey, assembled an incredible cast of characters: the aforementioned Barthes, Lacan, Hyppolite, and Goldmann, as well as Tzvetan Todorov, Georges Poulet, Guy Rosolato, Charles Morazé, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Nicolas Ruwet, and one other guy. The great disappointment, of course, was that they had not been able to get Claude Lévi-Strauss to come. L.-S., however, did suggest a replacement, a suggestion which was the measure of how open his thought was: Jacques Derrida. And, in fact, Derrida’s presentation was a critique of Lévi-Strauss.

Now, I would be the last to deny that the introduction of structuralism and post-structuralism, of Derrida’s deconstruction, produced some evil days in American academia. And I do remember being apprehensive about how these thinkers would be ground up and digested by the academe (I had the example of Sartre, Camus, and existentialism to guide me). But it was a magnificent symposium, an absolute blizzard of intellectual stimulation. This very blog proves that I still haven’t recovered.

I’ve just recently begun to revisit some of the texts from that era, and it’s been a curious process. It is certainly clear to me that Lévi-Strauss’s contributions are priceless. And to think he’s reached 100 years. Remarkable.

The French radio station France Culture has devoted the entire day to celebrations, observations, and commentary on this extraordinary birthday. Here’s a link to those programs.

It’s hard to imagine such a demonstration of excitement over an intellectual in this country, but, who knows, perhaps since we’re now to have a president who reads and thinks . . .

I know I’ve been neglecting this blog. I know it. But I actually have been getting the itch to write again, so, who knows, this space might become somewhat active again.

I was tempted this year to take a stab at the madness known as National Novel Writing Month, but, after attempting a few hundred words, I discovered that I really am not interested in writing fiction. I’m not interested in writing things that are absolutely true, either, of course, since that would entail a great deal of effort (more than expended by most journalists these days). But not fiction, anyway.

I have been doing a little bit of blogging, but I haven’t been doing it here. I’ve now contributed four items to Rev. Bob Thompson’s blog, avoluptuousgod.com/heretics. That’s been an interesting effort, one that probably appears more than a little strange to folks who know me. I think my kids are a little worried that the old man has suddenly gotten religion in his old age. Not to worry. I haven’t been born again. Once was quite enough, thank you. I’m not looking to go through that again any time soon. I’ve lost a lot of weight recently, but not that much. But my wife and I have really connected with this quite remarkable church in Evanston, the Lake Street Church, and when Bob Thompson asked me to contribute to the blog, I was tickled by the idea of writing about spirituality. I have thought about spirituality long and intensely for many years, but I haven’t tried to write about it. Turns out, it’s hard to do.

But I’m really looking forward to writing about this and that again. Speaking of this and that, I heard that the anthropologist and extraordinary writer Claude Lévi-Strauss will turn 100 on Friday, and that has brought back a lot of memories. I will be back here on Friday to wish him a happy one.

Later.

I’ve been upset by one of the reports from the field (a vast wasteland?) that I’ve heard on NPR.  There seems to be a feeling held by middle of the road voters that it’s not a good thing to have one party in possession of both the congress and the executive branch, that this defeats the constitutional mechanism by which one branch checks the power of the other.  This leads to a bothersome conclusion: since it’s clear that the Republicans are going to lose even more seats in both houses of Congress, the responsible voter should vote for McCain.  Ouch.

Well, I find this notion to be quite absurd.  The check that the Congress wields against the President arises from the nature of the institution, not from the party affiliation of its members.  Senators represent states.  Representatives represent districts.  Presidents represent the entire country as quaintly constituted in the  electoral college.  These differing consituencies mean that the viewpoints of the legislators will differ among themselves and from those of the President.  Further, the Constitution ascribes differing responsibilities to the branches, and that pattern, along with the constituency difference, produces the checks and the balances.  Party affiliation, folks, has nothing to do with checks and balances.  This is not network news.

What a Congress of one party and a President of the other CAN do is produce gridlock, stasis, stagnation, that situation where the government ties its own hands and then, in an anatomically impossible but politically frequent act, sits on them.  This is something that this country simply cannot afford at this time.

As I think I’ve said here before: vote for Barack Obama!

Political stuff is festering again, now that we have the Palin phenomenon to deal with. Every report I read of people who just love this imbecile makes me angrier and more desperate. ARE WE GOING TO LET THE LUNATIC FRINGE WIN AGAIN? I keep thinking in bumper sticker form these days.

When Palin delivered her acceptance speech, the slogan I thought of was “Jesus was a Community Organizer.” A look online found that someone else had the same idea, only better. There’s a T-shirt available that says, “Jesus was a Community Organizer — and Pontius Pilate was a Governor.”

But, seriously, what will it take for people to understand where their real interests lie? Driving around in the Nashville area last weekend we saw few bumper stickers from either side, but we did see an old blue beater of a car drive by with a McCain sticker. Now, anyone who owns such a car is absolute crazy to vote for a person who will make his situation worse. But this guy still doesn’t get it.

Well, if there are any McCain/Palin supporters reading this (which I hope for but doubt), please consider a question that was once posed by one of yours: Are you better off than you were eight years ago? Are you? I didn’t think so. VOTE FOR BARACK OBAMA.

I seem to have neglected this blog a bit lately, and I’m going to try to remedy that. There has been an apparent distraction, but I don’t think that it has really kept me from blogging here. A few weeks ago, the minister of our church, one Robert V. Thompson, whose blog I’ve been tending, asked me to be a regular contributor there, producing a contribution monthly. I don’t remember agreeing, but that’s academic, since I’ve started posting there. His blog is a part of the marketing plan for his book, A Voluptuous God, and posts are to be related to that work somehow. Here’s a link to my first one: Now’s The Time.

I fully meant to write a post from Paris, but somehow I never got to it. We took the Eurostar from that city to London yesterday, and that’s where this post is being written. The Eurostar is the high speed train that now connects those two cities, and it is amazing indeed to go from one to the other in less than two and a half hours. We took it a week ago from London as well, and I found the newly renovated St. Pancras station in London to be shiny and comfortable, while the Gare du Nord, where the Eurostar took us, seemed much closer to its 19th century origins and its pay restrooms gave it the characteristic French touch. The train itself was surprisingly low-tech and, on the return trip yesterday, definitely shabby, with worn and torn upholstery and (both ways) a less than effective air conditioning system. On the trip back to London, there were many complaints about the heat and the staff responded by bringing cold water to us.

While we were in Paris we stayed in an apartment on the southern edge of the Latin Quarter, not far from the Rue Mouffetard and the Place Monge. It was a pleasant neighborhood with good bakeries (what Paris neighborhood doesn’t have good bakeries?), cafes, and restaurants. As we were coming back to the apartment one afternoon we noticed a church just two doors away, so we took a closer look at the entrance. Posted on the door was a notice of a concert coming up on Sunday (when we would still be there) by the Baermann Clarinet Sextet. Now, this was just too coincidental to be left alone. The price of the concert was right — a donation — so we decided to go.

On Sunday evening we filed into the church, a well-lighted Protestant church with a high-domed chancel and a round transept window that appeared to look upon our apartment building. The audience nearly filled the church, a varied group with old folks, kids, and most of the ages in between. The sextet filled on stage in the chancel area and began to play an arrangement of a selection by Handel. The six clarinets began in full cry, prompting a woman in the front row to rise suddenly, her tiny son in her arms, his hands over his years, and rush out of the church. The volume in this very live space was considerable, but the sextet showed a great deal of dynamic range, so the kid might well have been able to stay after surviving the first 8 measures of the Handel.

The program was all over the map: Handel and Mozart, but also Katchaturian, Morton Gould, some Klezmer, a Bulgarian folk dance, and two tangos by Astor Piazzola. All of the performers were remarkable clarinetists, all conservatory trained (I discovered later on checking their website:http://sextuor-baermann.com/). Bass clarinetist Marc Boutillot stood out a bit from the group because he did two improvisations, one on the Bulgarian dance and one, on regular Bb clarinet, on Piazzola’s “Oblivion.” Now, I am no proper judge or critic of classical performance, but I can lay claim to knowing something about improvisation. I loved the Bulgarian one, but I felt that he could have taken some liberties with classical clarinet tone on the Piazzola, that he could have used vibrato and some jazz feeling. As Paquito D’Rivera does with similar material. But, still, Boutillot did a splendid job, finding his way though the changes with lyricism and verve.

The concert was lovely, a delightful coincidence, a fine moment.

So now we’ll see what London will bring.

Since I’ve gotten myself into a book reviewing groove, I might as well continue:

Nicholson Baker. Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.

I have not been a fan of N.B.’s over the years. In fact, I once wrote a very nasty letter to the New Yorker criticizing his attacks on library directors over the microfilming of newspapers. A letter that was not published. And I felt that his rabble rousing against the new library in San Francisco was mean spirited and wrong-headed. Now that I am no longer a library director and no longer engaged in defending the use of technology in libraries and in library design, perhaps I should revisit his attacks. Well, I’ve got other things planned, but this present book has definitely moved me and opened a channel of sympathy to old N.B. (who looks old in his picture but is 15 years younger than I). Human Smoke is an extraordinary collage of quotations from newspapers, diaries, memoirs, and other documents arranged in a strict, day to day, chronological order that moves from August 1892 (the date of a conversation between Alfred Nobel and a pacifist author) and December 31, 1941. The title comes from a remark by a German general who ended his career in a prison cell at Auschwitz.

What the books is chiefly about is pacifism. There are many glimpses of the efforts of pacifists to stop the slide towards war. There is also a great deal of portraiture of Winston Churchill as a bloodthirsty maniac whose theories about winning the war were based on the notion that attacking the civilian population would bring about the defeat of the enemy. There is strong evidence here that the British incited and inflamed Hitler by blockading Norway’s Narvik harbor and bombing civilian sites long before the luftwaffe bombed any British areas. Similary, Baker presents strong evidence that F.D.R. incited the Japanese, with perhaps a little more remorse than Churchill, by arming and abetting the Chinese and enforcing an oil embargo against Japan. The States also left the entire Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor as an incitement (or an enticement?), one that was protested by the fleet commander.

It was clear to me at the time that we didn’t negotiate long and hard enough with Saddam Husain before attacking. But there were appeals to the example of WWII, claims that “appeasement” was a dangerous, slippery slope. As I read this book I began to wonder about what might have happened had cooler heads prevailed, and I realized that I really don’t know. Perhaps that’s the value of “alternative history.” And perhaps I should read Philip Roth and Michael Chabon. Or Harry Turtledove. Or perhaps I should try to envisage a more positive view than theirs. One of Baker’s implied points is that the extermination of six million Jews was not “simply” a Nazi project. He notes that the Nazi goal was deportation, not death, and he implies that the pressures placed upon the Axis by the Allies (blockade, bombing of civilian populations, etc.) narrowed the choices. No more transportation to Madagascar or, a bit less charitably, Siberia. Gas was more economical.

The bottom line, if bottom line there is, seems to be that violence is not the proper response to violence. Period. Which is basically what my minister, Bob Thompson, said when explaining his rejection of Hillary: “she voted for a war; that is wrong.”

One of the first items in the book is a note about the vote of U.S. Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana against war in 1917. One of the last is a note about her vote against war in 1941. In the first instance, she was one of 50. In the last, she was alone. Not a good trend.

Though I’ve been pecking away at Proust, I confess that Marcel has landed on the back burner again for a while. What I’ve popped onto the front burner is Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008), a book that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed, though I’m not sure that enjoyment is what I mean. My wife and I saw Jacoby on Bill Moyers’ program and were mightily impressed. Having read the book, I believe it is an important one, one that I will probably return to often and mention here frequently.

I’ll let her sum up her points (from her preface, page xx):

If, as I will argue in this book, America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism—as opposed to the recognizable cyclical strains of the past—the virulence of the current outbreak is inseparable from an unmindfulness that is, paradoxically, both aggressive and passive. This condition is aggressively promoted by everyone, from politicians to media executives, whose livelihood depends on a public that derives its opinions from sound bites and blogs, and it is passively accepted by a public in thrall to the serpent promising effortless enjoyment from the fruit of the tree of infotainment. Is there still time and will for cultural conservationists to ameliorate the degenerative effects of the poisoned apple? Insofar as the weight of one’s will is thrown onto the scales of history, one lives in the stubborn hope that it might be so.

The book wittily supports every point made in that paragraph and is well worth reading. I recommend it highly, without reservation. Read it.

There were many uncomfortable moments for me during my trip through the book. Jacoby does an excellent job of putting the 1960s into a more balanced and accurate perspective. Usually seen by those of us on the left as a time of positive if overly exuberant intellectual ferment, the Sixties also saw the birth and development of the religious right. The excesses on both sides of that coin haunt us still. Since the decline of educational effectiveness is a constant theme of her book, Jacoby is highly critical of the demise of core requirements in university curricula during the late sixties and early seventies. I was very much in the midst of that particular issue, being a very junior faculty member at a large public university at the time. I was, I need to admit, very much on the side of curriculum restructuring and reform. As I faced undergraduates every day (most of them from New York City) who were beginning to measure everything I did and said by a self-constructed standard of “relevance,” I reacted defensively (or, at least, it seems so now) by trying to find texts that would meet that standard. I remember one faculty meeting where we were selecting the texts to be read by the intermediate French classes in which I pushed for some third world francophone texts while an older faculty member snapped back, “We must teach masterpieces, only masterpieces!” The texts I was pushing were not chopped liver—they included Senghor and Aimé Césaire—and I never meant to ban the dead white males from the curriculum. At the time, what I believed was that we needed to add the new rather than subtract the old. That little twist seems to have been lost.

I was surprised and rather pleased to find as I read Jacoby that I am a product of middlebrow culture. In fact, my roots are definitely lower-middlebrow, as opposed to the culture that Jacoby describes as a part of her own background. Magazines that arrived in my parents home included the Saturday Evening Post ( where I first read Vonnegut), the Saturday Review, Life, and the Reader’s Digest. Unlike Jacoby, I didn’t see the selections of the Book of the Month Club, but I did peruse many a Condensed Book and was delighted to find full-length versions in the local library. I had to rely on visits to the doctor and dentist to meet the New Yorker. When I arrived in my teens, I subscribed, much to the horror of my parents, to The Village Voice and The Realist.

My father’s library was compact. It included the Harvard Classics and a set of Burton Holmes travelogues. When I was about eleven years old, my father succumbed to the wiles of an encyclopedia salesman, and we acquired the Brittanica, yearbooks arriving punctually ever after. I dipped into the Five Foot Shelf from time to time, but I often found the translations turgid and unintelligible. While the Brittanica was useful, and I consulted it frequently, it was off-limits for term papers, and I ended up in a local university’s library for school projects, sometimes taking the train into Philadelphia to be intimidated by the great hall and condescending staff of the Free Library. (I hasten to add that I was a librarian myself for nearly thirty years and that the Free Library’s staff today is not what it was in the 1950s).

What this middlebrow youth did to me was basically what it did to Jacoby. It made me a reader. Being a reader made me value the life of the mind. Which is why I am so taken by her book and so thoroughly delighted (and alarmed) by it and by this observation by John Updike, which she quotes on page 267:

The printed, bound and paid-for book was—still is, for the moment—more exacting, more demanding, of its producer and consumer both. It is the site of an encounter, in silence, of two minds, one following in the other’s steps but invited to imagine, to argue, to concur on a level of reflection beyond that of personal encounter, with all its merely social conventions, its merciful padding of blather and mutual forgiveness. Book readers and writers are approaching the condition of holdouts, surly hermits who refuse to come and and play in the electronic sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village.

Surly hermits. Please think of this blog as a moment when this surly hermit hobbles out to bray at the electronic sunshine.