Marginal Utility

by Ken Houghton

Scott Horton discovers that the guys at G-Mu (not these guys; the historians) have dropped James Buchanan to #2 in the Pantheon.

Memories of the Ford Administration (even though it elides Buchanan's homosexuality) may never be read the same again.

Labels: Bushonomics, History, literature

by Ken Houghton

Of course, there could very well be some unemployment of workers who know only the old technology—like the original Luddites—and this unemployment will be excruciating to its victims. But workers as a whole are better off with more powerful output-producing technology available to them.
--William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth, p. 54 (MIT pb, 2002)

Conspicuous by its absence is an indicator that the winners will (or should) in any way compensate the losers.*

An alternate view from one of Tom's favorite authors can be found here.

UPDATE: Pynchon presents a timeframe, which gives the lie to Easterly's claim:

But it's important to remember that the target even of the original assault of l779, like many machines of the Industrial Revolution, was not a new piece of technology. The stocking-frame had been around since 1589.

*Credit where due, he refers to them here as "victims."

Labels: Economic Development, history repeated, literature

by Ken Houghton

But then, as is his wont, contextualises it in an interesting manner:

May I just say that mainstream "orthodox" Calvinist Protestantism contains things orders of magnitude more bats--- insane than any of the "special" doctrines of the Book of Mormon?

And proceeds to post an excerpt from six books before the greatest piece of English literature ever written, wherein it is explained (roughly, colloquially) that salvation is only achieved by making mistakes, being saved, and understanding that one has been saved.

I don't understand the problem. Surely this is to be preferred to the subsequent "Straight is the gate/And Narrow the Way."

At any rate, this seems a good time to note, again that the film adaptation of (almost all of) the first book of the trilogy based on that strongly parallels that piece of Christian literature is in wide release now, and well worth seeing on the big screen.

One sentence, Mannion-like review: "The polar bears are great, the girl is marvelous, Nicole starts a long arch from a high point, and the Church may well wish it had been allowed its other trappings, instead of reduced to buggery and opposition to human inquiry."

Labels: literature, movies

by Ken Houghton

via Susan.

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Sixth Level of Hell - The City of Dis!

Take the Dante Inferno Hell Test

Could have guessed that from having gone to see The Golden Compass on Saturday night—at least as contextualised by Christianity Today, which seems to have the strange delusion that C. S. Lewis presented a worthwhile template for fiction instead of self-righteous delusion. (h/t Brad DeLong)

Labels: Brad DeLong, literature, movies, Religion

by Ken Houghton

Stanley Fish stares at his navel, and confuses lint therein for discussion:

But with what motive would the teacher initiate such a discussion? If you look at commentaries on “Moby Dick [sic],”[1] you will find Ahab characterized as inflexible, monomaniacal, demonic, rigid, obsessed and dictatorial. What you don’t find are words like generous, kind, caring, cosmopolitan, tolerant, far-seeing and wise. Thus the invitation to consider parallels between Ahab and Bush is really an invitation to introduce into the classroom (and by the back door) the negative views of George Bush held by many academics.

If the intention were, as claimed, to produce insight into Melville’s character, there are plenty of candidates in literature for possible parallels – Milton’s Satan, Marlowe’s Faust, Byron’s Cain, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Shakespeare’s Iago, Jack London’s Wolf Larsen, to name a few. Nor would it have been any better if an instructor had invited students to find parallels between George Bush and Aeneas, or Henry the Fifth, or Atticus Finch, for then the effect would have been to politicize teaching from the other (pro-Bush) direction.

Now, I'm as fond of the next person, and probably fonder than most, of the idea that you should compare literary characters to other literary characters. And I might suggest that Fish is blowing smoke when he talks about comparisons with Iago ("I am a villain" is not something Ahab would ever say) or Faust (though his search for knowledge led to mercury poisoning of his patients, that was, effectively, before the play starts).[2]

And let's leave aside for the moment that possibly the best character comparative for George W. Bush—John Ford's Perkin Warbeck—isn't even suggested by Fish.

The question is: if you are trying to teach literary texts to undergraduate students, do you only make references to other texts, or do you try to teach them by relating things to their experiences?

If you're Stanley Fish, who may not have seen an undergraduate since early in his days at Duke, you might try to keep the references all to other texts. But you would be doing yourself and your students a disservice. You're making it unnecessarily difficult to communicate with them. They may not know who Atticus Finch is, but they certainly know who George W. Bush is.

Also, let us consider the GWB/Ahab comparative a bit more. In a world not quite so black-and-white as Fish's, characters are robust. In Fish's world, by contrast:

But with what motive would the teacher initiate such a discussion? If you look at commentaries on “Moby Dick,” you will find Ahab characterized as inflexible, monomaniacal, demonic, rigid, obsessed and dictatorial. What you don’t find are words like generous, kind, caring, cosmopolitan, tolerant, far-seeing and wise. Thus the invitation to consider parallels between Ahab and Bush is really an invitation to introduce into the classroom (and by the back door) the negative views of George Bush held by many academics.

I'm happy to see that (1) Fish is able to understand motivation so completely and (2) academics are not that much different from 63% to just under 70% of those polled by FoxNews, not to mention 75% in a poll actually taken this month.

Sarcasm aside,[3] there are many reasons to compare Ahab and GWB. Let's do a short list:

1. Each took on what may appear to be an impossible quest (The White Whale, The GWOT), and showed a dedicated energy toward that goal.[4]
   
2. Ahab was motivated in his search for Moby-Dick by having had a previous ship under his command destroyed, and having lost a leg in the process; George W. Bush's most reasonable explanation for the war in Iraq was and remains, "He tried to kill my dad."
   
3. Ahab "stayed the course"; GWB is doing the same, with the ending still to be written.
   
4. Ahab's quest is chronicled by Ishmael, who may not be reliable in his narration. GWB has been chronicled across the spectrum. What does this tell us about perspective on the two characters?

That's my very short, top of the head list of Four Questions that are perfectly reasonable, without fear or favor, comparatives, each of which can expand our understanding of the text of Moby-Dick, none of which requires a negative interpretation of GWB as either person or president.

It's a pity Stanley Fish is too busy building straw men and seeing conspiracies.
He clearly has read extensively, and has some decent interpretive skills. It's just a pity he doesn't think about literature as a living, breathing entity that is enriched by reader responses to the text as much as by the original text itself: a Self-Consuming Artifact, as it were, that reinvents itself with each new discovery.

For instance, here's Andy Serkis on the character of Iago:

There are a milion theories to Iago's motivations, but I believed that Iago was once a good soldier, a great man's man to have around, a bit of a laugh, who feels betrayed, gets jealous of his friend, wants to mess it up for him, enjoys causing him pain, makes a choice to channel all his creative energy into the destruction of this human being, and becomes completely addicted to the power he wields over him. I didn't want to play him as initially malevolent. He's not the devil. He's you or me feeling jealous and not being able to control our feelings.

That seems much more interesting than Fish's declaring him a parallel to the "inflexible, monomaniacal, demonic, rigid, obsessed and dictatorial" Ahab.


[1]Let us graciously assume the copyeditors at the NYT, not Fish himself, do not know that the actual title is Moby-Dick.
[2]My Marlowe and Goethe texts are stored in the garage as the basement gets finished; I'm working from memory, and can vouch only that the mercury poisoning is explicitly in the Goethe; it may not be in the Marlowe.
[3]Well, as much I can put sarcasm aside when dealing with cardboard characterization and arbitrary, unsubstantiated declarations of omniscience.
[4] YMMV as to whether the energy was optimally used in either case—but that's for the discussion, not the declaration.

Labels: Academia, literature, Politics, teaching

by Ken Houghton

Via the comments to this post at Making Light, a transcript from Ms. Rowling's Carnegie Hall appearance last night.

(And, yes, I do plan to entitle posts after Tom Robinson lyrics and songs for a while, his current Radio 6 job notwithstanding.)

Labels: Harry Potter, literature, sf

by Ken Houghton

Jeremy (indirectly) reminds me that the Patroness Saint of this blog has a new film in limited release Friday.

Even more cool, from a personal point of view, is that the divine Anne Newgarden got her first cover editorial credit for a book of Jane Austen excerpts and quotes with some nice, favorable reviews.

Check it out. Check them out.

Labels: Anne Hathaway, literature, movies

by Ken Houghton

Avoiding the spoilers of Laura Miller's Salon review of That Book (WARNING: Link is to SPOILER page):

1. Your mileage may vary, but is Rowling really a poorer prose stylist than C. S. Lewis? Especially if you are willing to make the argument that "[Rowling's auctorial] voice, tone and imagination are rooted in social comedy and observation, not in the metaphysical and transcendent...."* (which is what Byatt couldn't Get Over, as Michael Berube noted [PDF]).
   
2. "people expect something epic, momentous, archetypal. So it's no surprise that the closer Rowling gets to that confrontation, the more heavily she relies on borrowings from writers with a natural gift for that sort of thing: Tolkien, Lewis, even Philip Pullman." I might yield (or at least can understand) the first two, but Philip Pullman? The man who admits—nay, declares—that His Dark Materials is based on Milton. You know, the Milton taught in the British school system? An author—along with the Shakespeare or Spenser or Hooker or Apuleius or countless others—to whose work Rowling likely was exposed directly, and therefore would hardly require secondary sourcing. (JRRT is, of course, a Secondary Source.)
   
3. The rest of the paragraph cited above lists archetypes, but makes them appear as if JRRT or Lewis invented them. Only in Laura Miller's mind is that so.**
   
4. After three paragraphs of that, "None of this is meant as a detraction -- the writers Rowling borrows from in turn gleaned parts of their fiction from even older works." No, really? You mean works that you, Laura Miller, read but ones that Joanne Katherine Rowling assuredly has never heard of?
   
5. "That 'shiver of awe' Byatt wrote about happens when you feel the boundaries between the inner and outer worlds dissolve, if only for a moment. Given that this isn't the register that Rowling usually works in, it's impressive how well she pulls it off when she has to.
   
   Yes, folks, the above is the last sentence of that "not-a-detraction" paragraph.

All in all, this looks like an "I'm smarter than the author" review that presents no evidence of same.


*And most especially if you later note:

You could even say that Lewis and Tolkien didn't write novels at all (they called their fiction "fairy tales" or "romance," citing much earlier literary forms).

There's not much Lewis-defense room left.

**It also includes descriptions of events in Book Seven, so it is not quoted here, nor are antecedents cited. As will become apparent momentarily, they are not difficult to list.

Labels: Harry Potter, literature

by Ken Houghton

In response to point (4) of this Cheryl Miller post at The American Scene which links to this piece:

I can't be the only one who finds Wilson's piece incredibly self-indulgent, even for the Torygraph.

He buries his lede ("the panel...has been swayed by non-literary criteria") which is CritSpeak for "your literature does not fit my politics."

And if the criterion really is English literature (which, notably, it is not for the Nobel), why does he spend most of the piece ranting about Canetti and Boll?

Wilson doesn't like Seamus Heaney or Toni Morrison. We get it: he's Very English, and can't abide the Irish (even if he is Northern) Heaney or the Black American Female Morrison invading his territory. (What does he think of the Jewish Bellow or the semiliterate Steinbeck, who was assuredly a poorer writer than Pearl Buck by his own [meaning A. N. Wilson's] criteria?)

Let's do some details of the 103 winners to date (since 1901):

1. There are 23 writers whose sole language is English
   
2. There are three more, two of whom are Irish, whose writing languages include English (Samuel Beckett, the Wilson-maligned Heaney, and Joseph Brodsky).
   
3. This one more (Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose language was Yiddish), who lived a significant amount of time in English-as-first-language countries.

That produces a total of 27 writers (out of 103), including Derek Walcott (Saint Lucia) and V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad & Tobago) from whom to choose.

There is, of course, the other complication: the Nobel tends to be given near the end, not the beginning or even the middle of a career. (Until Saul Bellow [1976], no U.S. winner published a novel after winning the Nobel.) In the case of the British, that leaves the long gap from William Golding (1983) and Harold Pinter (2005) in which many died but none were chosen, which mayhaps explains part of Wilson's bitterness toward Heaney [1995] and the ignoring of Naipaul [2001] and the three Africa-based writers in English (Soyinka, Gordimer, and Coetzee).

So it's really too soon for Lawrence Norfolk (my personal pick) or Kazuo Ishiguro or Ian McEwan, and probably even Christopher Priest or any of the other writers listed in that first Best Young British Novelists by Granta the year Golding won the Prize.*

But we can still put together a Writers-in-English syllabus, covering, say, 1875-1960 that looks like this:

1. Rudyard Kipling
   
2. George Bernard Shaw
   
3. William Butler Yeats
   
4. Sinclair Lewis
   
5. William Faulkner
   
6. Samuel Beckett
   
7. Saul Bellow
   
8. Derek Walcott
   
9. Toni Morrison
   
10. V. S. Naipaul
    
11. J. M. Coetzee, and
    
12. Harold Pinter

There might need to be some changes to the order, but very few. (Bellow after Faulkner, Naipaul before Walcott, and probably close with Beloved.) It's a fairly clear lineage from empire to privilege to the rise of America to the expansion of opportunity and democracy.

Anyway, Ms. Miller, that's my answer. Or is that the problem Wilson is having?


*Norfolk is included in the 1993 Best of Young British Novelists volume. Given that Lempriere's Dictionary was published in 1991, and that he was twenty at the time of the first volume, we have to concede that he was included as soon as was reasonable.

Labels: fiction, just life, literature, Politics