Looking in the Wrong Place for New Classical Music

A friend of mine once came up with the word “outeresting” to describe things that were not only uninteresting in themselves but drained you of interest in anything when you encountered them.

I was thinking of that the weekend before last at the New York Philharmonic, where, besides classics by Berlioz, Mozart and Debussy there was the world premiere of a concerto by Mark Neikrug, whom neither I nor Marcia had ever heard of. This was a really big deal; the performance was preceded by an interview by the conductor, Alan Gilbert, about how emotional the piece was and what it was supposed to be about. My take is that it was about 30 minutes.

The concerto isn’t available at YouTube, but here’s a music video based on a early piece by the same composer, “Through Roses,” that premiered in London back in 1980. Very outeresting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhUbZ_hmJVsA

The New York Philharmonic has featured a number of “modern” works over the past few years that we’ve been attending concerts there. What they all seem to lack is any sense of direction. They may be pleasant to listen to, unlike serial music and other “experimental” forms, but they don’t seem to be going anywhere. They remind me of Silverado, a movie from 1985 that was supposed to revive the classic western. It started with what seemed to be a warmup for the main story, but it never got to the kind of story that made the classic western classic; the warmup was all we got.

Now there is contemporary classical music that you won’t find being played at the New York Philharmonic, but it comes from composers who are known mostly or only for film and TV music. Angelo Badalamenti, for example. He’s still known best for scoring Twin Peaks, but he’s composed music for dozens of movies, in a number of different styles. In “Opium Prince,” one of the tracks for The City of Lost Children (1995), he masters the classic Russian style so well that we can imagine the piece being a lost and rediscovered movement from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rdQ3v4bL_A

Nino Rota (1911-79) is best known for the Godfather theme and for having been Federico Fellini’s composer for most of his films. An extra on the Criterion DVD of 8½ is a fascinating featurette about Rota, who also composed concert music – a number of his concertos and other works (among them a ballet version of Fellini’s La Strada) have made it to CD in recent years. Yet his most innovative work may have been his score for Fellini’s Casanova (1976), which draws on influences as diverse as Mozart and Stravinsky and juxtaposes them in strange ways. But I’ve never heard anything else like the first track, “Venezia Venaga Venusia.” Really ethereal, even in a self-referential nod (1:14) to one of Rota’s familiar melodies from La Dolce Vita:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzQzxAY-wLo

Ennio Morricone has more movie scores to his credit than you can count, and he’s even conducted his music in concert (those performances, like the movies he has scored, are available on DVD). The piece below, “Penance,” is from The Mission (1986), a historical drama about the Jesuits who converted the Guarani Indians of Paraguay in the 18^th Century, but treated them fairly – unlike would-be colonists from Spain. At 1:25 here, Morricone fleetingly samples “Dies Irae,” a Gregorian chant from the 13^th Century that had been used before by composers as varied as Berlioz, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgoyQkQD1-I

Although he has a number of film scores to his credit, Jon Brion has composed only one classical orchestral score. But what a score! I read somewhere that he took on the assignment for Magnolia (1999) because he figured it was the only chance he’d get to compose music for a full orchestra. I honestly don’t know why he wanted to do that; his musical roots are in rock and pop, and he’s famed for his Friday night gigs at Largo in Los Angeles. But I’m sure glad he did. This edit of a piece with the unwieldy title “Stanley/Frank/Linda's Breakdown” is an example of something an admirer of my father calls “organic syncopation,” the layering of a rhythm and melody analogous to the heartbeat and breathing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZueG5NRyRDY&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PL783D209F8CC2972C

Now if the New York Philharmonic wants to commission a work that will really rock the classical audience, it could count on Brion to come through. Likewise Badalamenti and Morricone and others I myself may not be aware of. There have been crossover composers before – just think of George Gershwin and Kurt Weill. Maybe it’s time to look to a new generation of crossover composers to bring some vitality to the concert halls.  

Misreading "Colonialism" in Science Fiction

John Rieder, who teaches at the University of Hawaii, came out four years ago with a book called Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, which picks up where Edward W. Said left off in Culture and Imperialism (1993). Said's argument was that every aspect of Western culture is part of an Orientalist discourse aimed at justifying colonial exploitation of non-Western peoples. 

Even Jane Austen, according to Said, was an apologist for slavery. But Said doesn't mention science fiction, so Rieder rang in with a book-length case that the genre originated as vehicle for propagating demeaning colonialist images of non-Western peoples. He can find plenty of examples, because there really were incredibly racist and imperialist ideas in some sf in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But that's not enough; whatever wasn't overt,  in past or more recent times, must have been covert or unconscious propaganda of the same kind. Thus Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) becomes an exercise in the "construction of race" rather than a gothic tale of hubris in the attempt to create life; and Catherine Moore's "Vintage Season" (1946), in which tourists from some inhuman future visit the scene of what they know will be a disaster in our time, is somehow really about Cold War fears of Communism. 

Rieder isn't aware of, or simply ignores, any examples to the contrary, such as anti-racist, anti-colonial sf like that of Leigh Brackett, which appeared in Planet Stories. In “Citadel of Lost Ships” (1943), she tells a story of a fugitive Earthman among the Kraylen, natives of the swamps of Venus who look vaguely reptilian – blue-white of skin and with crests that resemble feathers but aren’t – whose homes and lives are threatened by imperialists from Earth:

"There have been men in the swamps. Now word has been sent us. It seems there is coal here, and oil, and certain minerals that men prize. They will drain the swamps for many miles, and work them."

Campbell let smoke out of his lungs, very slowly. "Yeah? And what becomes of you?"

The Kraylen turned away and stood framed in the indigo square of the doorway. The distant drum sobbed and shouted. It was hot, and yet the sweat turned cold on Campbell's body.

The old man's voice was distant and throbbing and full of anger, like the drum. Campbell had to strain to hear it.

"They will take us and place us in camps in the great cities. Small groups of us, so that we are divided and split. Many people will pay to see us, the strange remnants of old Venus. They will pay for our skills in the curing of leshen-skins and the writing of quaint music, and tattooing. We will grow rich."

Campbell dropped the cigarette and ground it on the dirt floor. Knotted veins stood out on his forehead, and his face was cruel. The old man whispered:

"We will die first."

Brackett is obviously drawing a parallel with American Indians and other non-Europeans robbed of their lands, resources and dignity; the reference to “camps” might even be a veiled allusion to the then-recent internment of Japanese Americans. But when racist readers wrote to Planet Stories that the Kraylen ought to be liquidated, Brackett denounced them in no uncertain terms:

If that isn’t totalitarian reasoning, I never saw it. Under democratic law, any and every minority, so long as it functions within legal limits, is guaranteed the right to live, think, and worship as it sees fit. You might as well say we ought to LIQUIDATE the Mennonites, the Amish, or any other decent, peaceable group simply because they’re different… It’s well to remember one thing, when you are planning the liquidation of minorities. Human society is a fluid and unstable thing. And it’s frightfully embarrassing to wake up one morning and find that all of a sudden you have become—a minority.

But I recently found a much earlier example, and more startling for that, in Timeslip Troopers, Brian Stableford’s rendering for Black Coat Press of La Belle Valence (1923), a time travel novel originally written by André Blandin and then rewritten by Théo Varlet, an established sf writer, to secure publication.

The original title refers to both the Spanish city of Valencia and the oranges it was famed for, which would be hard to convey in a literal translation; hence the anachronistic play on Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959) in the translation. Nobody knows anything about Blandin, although Stableford surmises that he must have been a French officer during World War I. It was he, in any case, who came up with the plot: French soldiers in the trenches near Metz in 1917 find a time machine in the basement of an old house, and learn to use it.

What follows seems at first only a variation of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), but that’s an oversimplification. By mischance, the time machine takes not only its operators but the whole surrounding area – with a company of soldiers, their advanced weapons, even a British plane that has landed nearby – to the Valencia of 1341. 

That puts them in the same position, technologically, as the Spanish conquistadores in America – only the primitives are the Catholics and their Inquisition, and it is the Moors they side with. This was the age of Averroes, after all, not that of the ayatollahs. Tortorado, Dominican inquisitor of Valencia, loves to torture Moors and Jews; he has even forced the daughter of a Jewish merchant to convert and become his sex slave. And as the French arrive, he is pursuing a case against a Franciscan monk, Geronimo: 

His love of progress and Enlightenment, and his acquaintance with Moorish and Jewish scholars, had caused him to be accused of heresy by his rivals, the Dominicans. Arrested in the middle of the night the previous day, he had been subjected a few hours later to questioning by water…[i] 

Captain Marcel Renard and his company, outraged by the state of affairs, make short work of the Spaniards and, after a brief counterattack by the Catholics, call in Moorish allies and restore the Emir to power. But that is only the beginning; the men from the future set out to bring the future to the benighted city, spreading the teachings of the European Enlightenment, launching a mini industrial revolution and even introducing paper money. Renard fantasizes going beyond Valencia itself (“In six months, Spain will be ours.”[ii]) and even bringing about the French Revolution 400 years ahead of time.

But the French are running low on ammunition even as they are running high on hubris. Renard’s troops spend much of their time boozing and wenching; even the local nuns are hot for them, but they also bring the clap. They act in reckless disregard of local sensibilities, punishing those who disrespect them with menial labor; some even bust heads and loot homes on the slightest pretext. Geronimo, meanwhile, has gotten high on the thoughts of Rousseau and Marx, and is so full of himself that he welcomes a crown offered by the French as a new “pope.” It is all too much, too soon for what is essentially a conservative society. Resentment against the French and the ways they bring erupts into violence after the factories fail for want of raw materials, throwing people out of work; and Tortorado makes good on the opportunity to stage a counter-revolution.

“Progress is an admirable thing, but it can only be realized in a propitious atmosphere, in its own time,”[iii] Renard realizes too late – only a few of his men make it back to their own time, where they take a vow of secrecy about their ill-fated venture in liberation. And make no mistake about it; they saw themselves as liberators; critics of the Said-Rieder school who imagine that Western rationalism devalues only non-Western culture overlook the fact that the Enlightenment began as a challenge to the European social and religious order of its time.

Yet Renard and his men end up behaving just like the colonialists Said and Rieder condemn, and Timeslip Troopers can thus be seen as a critique of colonialism in the classic sense. But it can also be seen as a critique of the kind of supposedly benevolent efforts to bring peace and progress to non-Western cultures that are currently called “nation building.” In the same context, it can be seen as a critique of past and present revolutionary movements, whether social or religious, that reduce people to Believers and Unbelievers and treat them accordingly. And that includes ideological movements like that of Said and Rieder,

---

[i] Varlet, Théo, and André Blandin, Timeslip Troopers, trans. Brian Stableford, Black Coast Press, 2012, p. 92.

[ii] Ibid., p. 155.

[iii] Ibid., p. 208

Alternate History, Japanese Style

The things you can learn at a science fiction convention, even when it’s not a very good one. My wife Marcia and I were at Lunacon in Rye, NY, the weekend before last, and the affair seemed to be run by knit wits. Yes, they actually had programs about knitting. Not to mention beading, blindfold sculpting… still, there were some programs that actually had to do with sf.

One of the sessions was about Japanese science fiction, which is best known here for manga and anime – distinct schools of comics and animation that have caught on abroad in a big way. You can see entire sections devoted to manga at Barnes & Noble, and Princess Mononoke (1997), a feature-length historical fantasy anime, which Roger Ebert put on his Top Ten list after it was released here in 1999, and which is a cult favorite today.

There are many other examples of manga and anime that have found a loyal audience here, and I have seen some of them and at least heard of others. But one I had not heard of before Lunacon is Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ōoku (2005-), a manga series set in an alternate history. Alternate history is a big thing here, as witness the dozens of novels by Harry Turtledove and others. It’s also represented in Japanese literary sf, but usually imagines history changing elsewhere rather than in Japan itself.

Only, Ōoku is set during the Edo period of Japan (the 17^th and 18th centuries by our count), after a plague called the Redface Pox wipes out most of the male population. The sex ratio is thus four women to one man; what was once a patriarchy has become a matriarchy ruled by a female shogun who maintains a retinue called the ōoku (inner chamber) of about 800 men – although few among them actually have sexual access to her; the rest are essentially advisors and bureaucrats.

For ordinary women, marriage is hard to come by, and many visit brothels to become pregnant. The first volume of Ōoku, the only one I’ve read thus far, follows the story of Mizuno Yunoshin, a troubled young man who has given his seed to women too poor to afford brothels, and considers it unconscionable that his impoverished mother hasn’t rented him out to the class of women who can pay, and thus enable her to raise a dowry for her daughter. He rejects an arranged marriage to the daughter of a bureaucrat, and forsakes his childhood sweetheart Nobu, to enter the shogun’s service – that way, at least he’ll be able to send a little money home. But once in, never out, or so it seems.

Yoshimune, daughter of the lord of a remote province, succeeds to the throne soon after his arrival, and has fresh ideas about how to run the country. In a combination of real pluck and seeming luck, Mizuno finds himself chosen as her first lover, not realizing that he’s been maneuvered into her favor because he who deflowers a virgin (which she is officially, but not actually) is put to death afterwards. But Yoshimune has fresh ideas about that, too, and Mizuno gets to live and love another day with the girl he’s left behind – under an assumed name. Further volumes in the series move back and forth in time to show how the matriarchy emerged and has shaped not only sexual politics but governmental administration and even foreign affairs.

In Yoshinaga’s history, the Tokugawa dynasty still reigns, but Yoshimune’s accession is the result of a conspiracy: there are three branch houses of the family, and her Kii branch bribed retainers of the Owari branch to withhold news of the death of the previous shogun (a sickly seven-year old girl), from their Lord Tsugotomo. First come, first served: Yoshimune has taken over at Edo while Tsugotomo is still trying to get her palanquin ready. And as soon as she assumes the throne, she shows she’s a take-charge woman.

By coincidence, we’ve recently been watching a Teaching Company lecture series on the Tudor and Stuart monarchs of England. One of the burning issues after the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 was their extravagant spending – Charles II, especially, ran up huge bills for courtiers, mistresses and assorted hangers-on. He even conspired with King Louis XIV of France to bail him out, promising to convert to Catholicism at an opportune time – if that secret had gotten out, he might have met the same fate as his father Charles I, executed in 1649.

When Yoshimune takes over, she is approached by a female privy councillor, who wants her to splurge on a fancy new wardrobe. The shogun immediately dismisses her, saying that “only a lunatic” would recommend such extravagance at a time when the shogunate’s coffers are empty. As she later tells a confidant, she had reform on her mind in any case, and Councillor Manabe gave her the perfect excuse to clean house:

But my liege… if you dismiss all of the current privy councillors, you will have none left. Is it your purpose to abolish the post of privy councillor in your government?

Verily so. And instead of having a gaggle of privy councilors, I shall create a new post of intermediary, and have but one person charged with mediating between the senior councillors and myself.

The best-looking would-be studs of the Inner Chamber also have a surprise coming when they are summoned to a general audience. They figure she’s about to pick one of them as her next lover. Only, they’re all sent packing instead – again out of concern for the state of finances and the welfare of the country:

Ye may well ask, then, wherefore the fifty men here? I shall tell you my reasoning. Ye are all young and handsome, and therefore the most likely to find good prospects of marriage in the world outside the castle.

Little is known of Yoshinaga (1971-), but her series is widely regarded as a feminist parable, and she gets in some great digs in a scene where Yoshimune receives a Dutch trading captain – who assumes she must be a man:

‘Tis reported that there is not one woman in your entire company. Wherefore is that?

Yes, my lord. ‘Tis a long sea voyage we must undertake, for we indeed circumnavigate the globe, and ‘tis far too arduous a journey for women to make.

 There’s a live-action movie based on the series, from which somebody posted a music video on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntGZFhKpiDE

I assume the man must be Mizuno, and the woman we see him with most Nobu. From a comment there, I gather the movie may stress the romance more than the manga series – in which these two don’t seem to figure much, or at all, in later volumes.

One of the other sessions was on Young Adult sf and fantasy, which is very hot right now because of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games and the movie based on it. Since I haven’t read the book or seen the movie, I’ll hold off on that. But there was talk of other YA fiction I hadn’t even heard of, such as Karen Sandler’s Tankborn, which involves genetic engineering.

Heady stuff. Grim stuff, too: it’s dystopian, too (a genetic class system). In fact, a promo for David Weber’s YA sf novel, A Beautiful Friendship (a prequel to his Honor Harrington series, just out) is at pains to stress that it “strays beyond popular dystopian fare.” That it does, although there’s a subtext about genetic engineering on a smaller scale and prejudice against “genies.”

Lots of food for thought there, in another blog post, and in Imagination and Evolution.

Even Jane Austen?

 

"What an excellent device," said he, "the use of a sheep-skin for carriages. How very comfortable they make it;--impossible to feel cold with such precautions. The contrivances of modern days indeed have rendered a gentleman's carriage perfectly complete. One is so fenced and guarded from the weather, that not a breath of air can find its way unpermitted. Weather becomes absolutely of no consequence.”

That’s doesn’t come from a work of proto-science fiction, although a few such works had appeared by 1815, when Emma was first published. It’s doubtful that Jane Austen was aware of them, and she may never have given a thought to hot air balloons or other technological innovations that figured in them. But the introduction of sheepskin insulation for carriages would have been part of the world she wrote about, that of the English country gentry, and for an sf reader it jumps off the page as evidence, however trivial, that change was coming to that world.

I’ve become familiar only lately with the world of Jane Austen, and through a curious circumstance. P.D. James, one of the great mystery writers of our generation, had just published Death Comes to Pemberley, a sequel to Pride and Prejudice. I have a vague recollection of Pride and Prejudice having been assigned reading in prep school more than 50 years ago, and it can’t have made much impression on me at the time. But even people who’ve never read it at all may recognize the opening line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

It was hard to avoid the publicity three years ago about Seth Grahame-Smith’s urban fantasy rip-off of Austen’s classic, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, with its alternate opening: “'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.'' I avoided that like the plague. But James’ novel was another matter; there have been any number of mystery novels featuring historical figures like Benjamin Franklin and John Fielding (who commanded the Bow Street Runners, the first professional police force, in 18^th Century London) or esteemed writers like Charlotte Bronte getting involved in mysteries.

Some of them have been really good. But was Death Comes to Pemberley among them? And was it authentic? Last year my wife Marcia read Joanna Challis’s The Villa of Death, which features novelist Daphne du Maurier (best known for Rebecca) – but Challis didn’t bother to get even the most basic facts of du Maurier’s life straight. On the other hand, Marcia just finished Barbara Hamilton’s Sup with the Devil, which stars Abigail Adams and is true to her and her time. But to make an informed judgment about Death Comes to Pemberley, I had to get back to Pride and Prejudice.

It turned out to be a revelation in more ways than one. The novel is every bit as good as its reputation, but it is also a fascinating look at another world and another time. First off, however, those who still aren’t familiar with the novel may have the impression (I did) that the mistaken pride and prejudice are all on the part of Elizabeth Bennet, who spurns the marriage proposal by Fitzwilliam Darcy because he has not only taken upon himself to thwart a budding love between her sister Jane and Charles Bingley, but has seemingly been cruel towards George Wickham – a militia officer who had once been taken under the wing of Darcy’s father and promised a living as the local vicar.

Elizabeth had previously turned down a proposal by William Collins, a clergyman – a good thing, because he turns out to be a complete and utter pill. It’s a wonder he’s able to win over Elizabeth’s friend Charlotte Lucas, or how she can put up with him after their marriage. But Wickham knows how to turn on the charm, and forms an attachment with Elizabeth, pouring out his tale of woe about Darcy’s alleged mistreatment of him. Moreover, she knows how her sister feels about Bingley, only to learn that Darcy has contrived to keep him from seeing her. Elizabeth rakes him over the coals for that; his only excuse is that he thought Jane wasn’t really interested in Bingley. As for Wickham, Darcy declares him to be a complete wastrel and scoundrel, but Elizabeth isn’t about to believe anything he says.

The thing is, Elizabeth eventually finds out that Darcy was right about Wickham. Yet he learns that he was wrong about Jane’s love for Bingley: he too has to eat crow, and help make things right by Jane, before they can find happiness together. The fact that these two had equally been in the wrong makes Darcy and Elizabeth more credible as equal partners. That wasn’t what I expected, and it may not be what others still expect if they haven’t read Pride and Prejudice. But then there are other details that stand out – not only matters of custom, but matters of language, as in this bit from Elizabeth’s father:

"From all that I can collect by your manner of talking, you must be two of the silliest girls in the country. I have suspected it some time, but I am now convinced." 

“Collect” instead of “gather:” one of those changes in the way English is spoken, but not as well known as others – notably the shift in meaning of “silly” from “blessed” to, well, silly, a few centuries earlier. Actually, I first came across the old usage of “collect” in a Georgette Heyer novel, The Quiet Gentleman, set during the same period, in which there are expressions like giving one the bag (as opposed to the slip). Another usage of the time was “in-law” to refer to step-relatives as well as the relatives of one’s spouse; this might have been rooted in legal language of the late 18^th and early 19^th century for all I know. 

After Pride and Prejudice, I turned to Death Comes to Pemberley, of which I’ll say only a little here. It is a murder mystery – James is a mystery writer, after all – and Wickham is at the center of it. Darcy and Elizabeth return, but not as sleuths in the classic sense; the solution to the murder involves the work of a number of parties. What is more important is that James captures the essence of Austen’s time, and even her manner of writing about it, as Charles McGrath pointed out in a review for The New York Times:

The prologue remarks, for example: “A family of five unmarried daughters is sure of attracting the sympathetic concern of all their neighbors, particularly where other diversions are few.” And the odious Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Darcy’s aunt, makes a characteristic appearance, declaring: “I have never approved of protracted dying. It is an affectation in the aristocracy; in the lower classes it is merely an excuse for avoiding work.”

Emma is the story of Emma Woodhouse, who fancies herself a matchmaker but doesn’t know the hearts and minds of the people she’s trying to match, or even her own. When Amy Heckerling wrote and directed an updated movie version set in California, she called it Clueless. That would be an apt characterization of Austen’s heroine if “clueless” had been an idiom in her time as opposed to that of Cher Horowitz in the 1995 movie.

Austen admitted that Emma was pretty hard to take for anyone but herself, and – contrary to the case with Elizabeth and Darcy – I couldn’t fathom what she and George Knightley, the man she eventually marries, ever saw in each other. But I could see a lot of things in the novel that readers at the time might not have noticed, because – like the casual details in novels today – they were taken for granted. Sheepskin for carriages was one; it may well have been the talk of the town, or should that be talk of the country, at the time Austen was writing. Another example, which is unintentionally funny today, has to do with a family supper (served in “basins,” as bowls were called in those days):

The gruel came and supplied a great deal to be said--much praise and many comments--undoubting decision of its wholesomeness for every constitution, and pretty severe Philippics upon the many houses where it was never met with tolerable;--but, unfortunately, among the failures which the daughter had to instance, the most recent, and therefore most prominent, was in her own cook at South End, a young woman hired for the time, who never had been able to understand what she meant by a basin of nice smooth gruel, thin, but not too thin.

As the Wikipedia entry on gruel (cereal boiled in water or milk) puts it, there are similar staples even today for recently-weaned children and invalids, but none would dare call them "gruel" because of "the negative associations attached to the word through novels like Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist." But there are other passages in Emma that uncannily seem to look forward to elements of our own literature. There is, for example, a spinster, referred to only as "Miss Bates," who can't seem to shut her mouth once she's opened it to declaim on any subject – like, for example, the apple harvest:

The apples themselves are the very finest sort for baking, beyond a doubt; all from Donwell--some of Mr. Knightley's most liberal supply. He sends us a sack every year; and certainly there never was such a keeping apple anywhere as one of his trees--I believe there is two of them. My mother says the orchard was always famous in her younger days. But I was really quite shocked the other day--for Mr. Knightley called one morning, and Jane was eating these apples, and we talked about them and said how much she enjoyed them, and he asked whether we were not got to the end of our stock. 'I am sure you must be,' said he, 'and I will send you another supply; for I have a great many more than I can ever use. William Larkins let me keep a larger quantity than usual this year. I will send you some more, before they get good for nothing.' So I begged he would not--for really as to ours being gone, I could not absolutely say that we had a great many left--it was but half a dozen indeed; but they should be all kept for Jane; and I could not at all bear that he should be sending us more, so liberal as he had been already; and Jane said the same. And when he was gone, she almost quarrelled with me--No, I should not say quarrelled, for we never had a quarrel in our lives; but she was quite distressed that I had owned the apples were so nearly gone; she wished I had made him believe we had a great many left.

When I read that, two things came to mind: stream of consciousness and Edith Bunker. As you’ll see from the link below, I found that I was hardly the first to think of stream of consciousness in connection with Miss Bates:

http://www.shmoop.com/emma/writing-style.html

A Google word search [Austen/Emma/“stream of consciousness”] brings up others – including a pdf of a 2003 Master’s thesis at Marshall College by one Diane M. Counts that invokes Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Sheesh! But the parallel with Edith Bunker may take more explaining than that with Woolf and Joyce, since All in the Family isn’t likely to be as common a subject for college courses. One of the recurrent shticks of the show was Edith starting in about some trivial happening in her day and going on and on and on – until Archie mimed committing suicide in various ways. I wasn’t able to find any of her actual ramblings on YouTube, but there’s one link that shows Archie’s reaction to them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKwdRHovYok

What would Jane Austen have made of that?

Strange Bedfellows

Is this weird, or is weird?

You can’t get much more left-wing than the Occupy movement. You can’t get much more right-wing than the Tea Party. And yet here they are making common cause in press releases two weeks apart, both condemning a sweetheart deal between the New Jersey state government and Prudential Insurance. I haven’t changed a word; both of these broadsides come exactly as they popped into my e-mail box at work.

Occupy Newark release, Feb. 15

NEWARK OCCUPY LEADER CALLS PRUDENTIAL EXECUTIVES “PIGS”  VOWS PROTEST AIMED AT INSURANCE GIANT

Only one day after Occupy Newark protestors were removed from Military Park, Occupy Newark spokesperson Adam Karl today blasted a state deal to give $250 million in tax credits to a company, Prudential Insurance that made $3 billion in profit last year. The Occupy Essex and Occupy Newark groups have vowed civil disobedience to stop the Prudential deal. 

At Military Park, the site of Occupy Newark, about two dozen police officers and fire fighters disassembled what was left of the movement’s encampment yesterday. Karl said Prudential would be the target of the next occupation by his group.

“If Prudential insurance wants a posh new corporate tower in downtown Newark let them pay for it themselves” said Karl who was elected spokeperson for Occupy Essex, an affiliate of Occupy Newark that is connected to Occupy organizations in D.C., Oakland, and New York. “New Jersey taxpayer’s shouldn’t be asked to subsidize successful billion dollar corporations.”

“This corporate welfare for billionaires” said Karl. “Adding insult to injury Prudential is getting tax credits reserved for companies moving from out-of-state and bring new jobs to New Jersey. Claims by Prudential that the consolidation of all their New Jersey employees in a shiny new corporate tower in downtown Newark will create 400 new are Bullshit” said Karl. ‘In fact the Pru will lose employees who don’t want to leave Morristown for downtown Newark”

“Now we know why Prudential—a hugely profitable corporation wants $250 million in tax credits they are not eligible for” said Karl “They have to make up for the giant losses they are taking on a bad real estate investment, 11 Times Square in Manhattan. More than a year after it opened, the 1.1 million square-foot building is about 60% empty and unleased. 

“Prudential is the 1% “ said Karl “This is crony capitalism at it’s worst. Karl said his group would occupy a Prudential facility but has refused to say when.” The 99% percent will make our voices heard soon,” said Karl.

“By taking tax credits they are not entitled to they are screwing the people in Newark, Camden, Jersey City, East Orange, Elizabeth, Hoboken, New Brunswick, Paterson, and Trenton who could be using these specific tax credits to bring new jobs to those cities” said Karl “The executives at Prudential are pigs at the trough.”

The tower, built by a Prudential Financial Inc.-run fund cost $950 million to build. “Prudential must pour more cash into 11 Times Square. Its $720 million construction loan, held by a group led by PNC Financial Services Group, must be repaid in May” said Karl. “ Why should New Jersey’s taxpayers bail them out?”

“Prudential says they will pay off the current loan using the fund's own capital. " said Karl ‘’Why should we provide offsets for their balance sheet?” he said. Given the building's declining value, Prudential would be able to refinance the construction loan for no more than about $600 million—leaving them a $120 million hole” Said the veteran organizer “Why should New Jersey pick up the tab? Prudential’s greed is stunning.”

Tea Party release, March 1

WHY THE PRU IS TAKING ADVANTAGE OF NJ TAXPAYERS

By Donald Hurley - Chairman

It’s not just government that needs to be drastically down-sized. Giant corporations that suck up taxpayer dollars all the while they are getting perks from their government partner–in- crime also need to be reined in and hog-tied like a calf cut loose in a rodeo.

 And there’s no bigger cash cow than the Prudential Insurance Co., which pulled in $3.5 billion in profits in 2011and has more than $870 billion in assets and now has the temerity to take $250 million in tax credits created to attract companies that bring new jobs so it can build a huge monument to itself in Newark, the city of its birth.

The suits in the corner offices may have forgotten that Prudential began as the Prudential Friendly Society in a basement office in Newark in 1875, the first company in the country to make life insurance available to working-class people, and at very low premiums. Now it is crushing the already meager city and state coffers with a greedy grab to erect a new edifice and pay as little as possible for it.

The excuse? They claim new facility will create 400 new jobs at the Rock.  Since they are doing a consolidation and closing smaller offices in New Jersey, this number is suspect. The head of Occupy Newark has called it “bullshit.”

The state solons in Trenton designed the tax credits to encourage outside companies to relocate to New Jersey and thereby provide jobs to an area that desperately needs to boost employment rates. But the state Economic Development Authority, in league with state politicos, has been crushed by “the Rock.” Why else would the EDA approve the tax credits first applied for under the Corzine administration?

Making the situation worse, Prudential is sucking up tax credits meant to bring new jobs to Newark, Camden, Jersey City, East Orange, Elizabeth, Hoboken, New Brunswick, Paterson, and Trenton. The tax credits the Pru is grabbing are reserved for companies bringing new jobs and industries to these troubled cities.

Now the New York Times tells us Prudential is underwater in a real estate investment they made in Manhattan, 11 Times Square. The skyscraper built by a Prudential Financial Inc.-run fund cost $950 million to build. Its $720 million construction loan, held by PNC Financial Services Group, must be repaid this May. The Pru can only refinance the construction loan for $600 million given the declining value of the property, That means the Pru is $120 million short-and they want us to pay for it by adding $250 to their bottom line in taxes they won’t have to pay. Bad idea.

Why Governor Chris Christie would approve these tax credits born in the Corzine administration is a mystery. Christie has battled mightily to get New Jersey’s fiscal house in order. He has fought the Democrat spenders in both the Senate and the Assembly. Only Governor Chris Christie can stop this drain of state funds by a wealthy, profitable corporation. New Jersey has no obligation to bail out the Pru. Governor Christie should tell his EDA Director to kill this sweetheart deal.

Contradictions of the Prick

“New poems by a noted publisher tell the story of an aging, married man who falls in love with a younger man.”

That’s the subhead of a front-page story in the Metropolitan section of today’s New York Times, “Contradictions of the Heart,” which tells what is apparently intended to be a heart-warming story of Jonathan Galassi, the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, finding himself as gay and coming out with a book of poems about it.

On the front page of the Times Sunday Review, also today, there is another piece, “Newt’s Real Legacy,” which opens: “Do you think that after all is said and done, Newt Gingrich will just go down in history as the politician who conclusively proved that voters don’t care about a candidate’s sexual misbehavior?” This obviously isn’t meant to be heart-warming.

The week before I read these two pieces, I’d been kidding people at the office about how Newt Gingrich’s victory over Mitt Romney in the South Carolina primary could be seen as a victory of slob appeal over snob appeal. Romney is an establishment candidate, part of the Country Club set – and it doesn’t help that he benefits from tax breaks tailored for those rich who derive huge incomes from capital gains and dividends rather than salaries. Gingrich, by contrast, can appeal to the Joe Sixpacks – many of whom have been through a divorce or two themselves, even if they see themselves and their party as defenders of moral purity. Gail Collins, author of the Sunday Review piece, appears to see things the same way, although she’s hardly a Romney booster – she never mentions him in a column without a reference to his having once taken a trip to Canada with his dog strapped to the roof of his car.

People like to talk about class warfare, the 99 percent versus the one percent. They see class only in economic terms; the Wall Street fat cats versus the working stiffs, and that has become an element in the political campaigning. Demonizing the rich has gained traction since the economic meltdown of 2008, and from the rhetoric of the Left you’d think none of our multi-millionaires pay any taxes at all -- while robbing us blind. According to that logic, Steve Jobs must have been just as bad as the kind of bankers who peddled credit default  swaps and paid themselves huge bonuses while ripping off investors and costing many ordinary people their homes. Of course, class warfare cuts both ways; from the rhetoric of the Right, you’d think that all our economic woes are caused by Mexican immigrants, who are either too lazy to work and live off welfare, or are taking away jobs from Real Americans. Only black people are on food stamps, of course. And for some reason, allowing gays to marry will bring the country to total collapse.

But there is another kind of class warfare, which has unintentionally surfaced lately in the Occupy movement. Most of the people involved in that movement, or at least the most seen and heard, are college students, and their most pressing issue is student loan debt – which they think should be forgiven. That means the rest of us should be paying for their education, so that they can become members of the class they aspire to: the intelligentsia. And while they profess a traditional Left commitment to the working class, and have won some token support from union leaders, their attitude is paternalistic. On the West Coast, they shut down several ports a while back, which meant that dock workers and truck drivers lost work – and pay. But the Occupy people were sure they knew better than the workers what was good for them. They may not have class, but they have a sense of class.

 “All of a sudden I felt, ‘This is how I’m supposed to feel,’ ” Charles McGrath quotes Jonathan Galassi in the Times piece regarding his affair in 2005 with a man he called “Jude,” which led to a painful divorce from his wife of more than 30 years, Susan Grace, with whom he had two daughters. “Jude” was soon outed by “publisher insiders” as Bill Clegg, a literary agent and author of a confessional book, “Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man,” a memoir of alcohol, meth and crack addiction. Clegg is also said to be the inspiration for Keep the Lights On, a movie by his former boyfriend, Ira Sachs.

Now if Galassi had been either a congressman or a banker, it’s doubtful that the Times would have worked up much enthusiasm for him. Perhaps he deserves more sympathy than Gingrich; I gather he never did anything as gross as visiting his first wife in the hospital to demand a divorce while she was recovering from cancer surgery. Even so, Galassi’s wife (who declined comment for McGrath’s feature) can’t have been any more thrilled than former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey’s wife Dina (his second) after he cheated on her with Golan Cipel -- an Israeli he had appointed homeland security advisor, but who later claimed that he and others had been pressured into sex by the governor. McGreevey has since studied for the Episcopal priesthood, and gone into counseling for ex-prisoners – which may have gotten him the kind of sympathy denied the likes of John Edwards and Mark Sanford.

The thing with Galassi is that he’s not only a publisher but a poet, and McGrath’s focus is on Left-handed, Galassi’s new book of poetry inspired by his journey of self-discovery. That gives him class, and may have more to do with his positive image than being a liberated gay. By a coincidence as sheer as that which put the Galassi and Gingrich stories on front pages of different sections of the Times, the cover of its Sunday Book Review featured a review of Renegade, Frederik Turner’s biography of Henry Miller. Miller, best known for Tropic of Cancer, which was published in Paris in 1934 but wasn’t available here until a court battle in 1961, became a literary celebrity and was widely hailed as a prophet of the sexual revolution. But Jeanette Winterson, in her review, points out that it was hardly a revolution for half the human race: Miller sponged off women nearly all his life, and treated them as sexual doormats in and out of his fiction. Whatever else you can say about him, he was as straight as they come in his sexual orientation. Perhaps it is no longer considered anti-intellectual to point out his misogyny, but it surely would have been when I was young: he had class. I never got around to reading Tropic; I don’t think I’d want to wade through it now.

It’s amazing how forgiving the intelligentsia can be. William S. Burroughs, who later became a darling of the literary avant-garde, killed his wife Joan Vollmer in a stupid William Tell stunt, and managed to avoid any serious punishment. “Like O.J., he got away with murder,” acerbic sf writer Thomas M. Disch complained. But an entry in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia co-authored by John Clute doesn’t even mention the killing, while giving a reverential account of Burroughs' work and influence. Burroughs’ Wikipedia entry offers a detailed account, including his later self-justification -- “I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death” (at least he admitted this was “appalling”) -- while pointing out that he had been writing before that, if none too successfully. In the literary mainstream, Burroughs is as highly regarded as his fellow beat Jack Kerouac. Among Leftist intellectuals, meanwhile, Louis Althusser seems to be just as highly regarded for his work in purging Marxist theory of “humanist” elements, although he killed his long-time wife in 1980 in what was described as a fit of madness. Would a mere popular fiction writer like Stephen King, or some right-wing pundit like William F. Buckley get a free pass for doing the same thing?

Only, it isn’t all about fashionable politics, any more than it’s about sexual identity. It’s about class. Louis Ferdinand Céline, a novelist who was a fascist and an anti-Semite, still commands respect among the intelligentsia because he is considered one of them. Incredibly, no less a political thinker than Hannah Arendt -- author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, and famed for coining the phrase “the banality of evil -- once tried to cut some slack for Martin Heidegger, a philosopher with whom she had had an affair but who later went over to the Nazis. Decades afterward, Heidegger was an influence on Jacques Derrida, the much-admired French philosopher who turned “deconstruction” into a household world -- at least in academic households.

If Roman Polanski had been a plumber, nobody would have excused him for having had sex with 13-year old girl – but Polanski was a genius film director, so the rules that apply to plumbers didn’t apply to him, at least in the eyes of the Hollywood community – which is supposed to be progressive on social issues. If Woody Allen had been a plumber and had an affair with the adopted daughter of the woman he was living with, his fellow plumbers might well have shunned him. But he too was a genius director, and the film community certainly didn’t ostracize him for the way he treated Mia Farrow when he cheated on her with Soon-Yi Previn, whom he later married. This sort of acceptance of bad behavior by icons of the film industry among their peers and admirers has trickled down the masses, as witness the fans who groove on the antics of the Kardashians or Snooki.

I could go on at much greater length about how the cultural and intellectual elites are no better than elites that have held power in ancient and modern times. C.S. Lewis once coined the term “charientocracy” for the rule of a managerial elite that might arise from the intelligentsia and justify itself by its intellectual pretensions. Would this be any better than the aristocracy of the Middle Ages or the plutocracy of crony capitalists and their political allies?

An Unwitting and Unholy Alliance

If you follow the news about the seeming political gridlock in Washington, no matter which paper or news channel you get it from, you’ll have the impression that there’s a Manichean struggle between Good and Evil for the heart and soul of the country – not to mention its fiscal health and the economy.

President Obama is either that evil socialist and secret Muslim scheming to spend the country into bankruptcy through a new welfare state at home while abandoning Israel and cozying up to jihadists abroad, or the only hope of saving the country from greedy Wall Street bankers, racists and other bigots of every stripe. The Republicans are either those racist bigots, homophobes and religious zealots who want to give away the country to Wall Street, or the only hope of stopping Big Government at home while safeguarding us from those Muslim hordes abroad.

It makes for great Political Theater, but theater is all it is. To give just a few examples, Obamacare may be a bad idea, and even unconstitutional – but Mitt Romney had that idea first on a state level, and Newt Gingrich favored it at the time. Calling for higher taxes on millionaires may be class warfare, but so is blaming illegal immigrants for our economic troubles, and filling up our prisons with mostly black drug offenders while letting corporate crooks off scot-free. There may be a argument for states’ rights on some matters – but the kind of conservatives who raise that argument don’t think states should have the right to legalize marijuana or gay marriage.

Ross Douthat, an op-ed columnist for The New York Times, had a piece today about Ron Paul, self-proclaimed libertarian who has been gaining in polls recently against the Religious Right candidates for the Republican presidential nomination. I wish I could support Paul – not that it matters, because I don’t live in Iowa or New Hampshire or any of the other states that will be decisive, and I’m not even a Republican. I believe for the most part in libertarian values, but I can’t trust that Paul himself does. Like the Religious Right candidates, he’s absolutely opposed to abortion. But beyond that, he’s been caught out (like practically every candidate in the field) by his past: newsletters he once sent out that were filled with racist and homophobic venom. He now claims these didn’t represent his views, and that he wasn’t even aware at the time of their content. I find this as disingenuous as Jon Corzine’s claim that he doesn’t have any idea what happened to the $1.2 billion that disappeared from client accounts at MF Global before it tanked.

But Douthat argues that even if he’s a crank with a disreputable past, Ron Paul is serving a very timely and very useful purpose:

In both the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, Paul has been the only figure willing to point out the deep continuities in American politics — the way social spending grows and overseas commitments multiply no matter which party is in power, the revolving doors that connect K Street to Congress and Wall Street to the White House, the long list of dubious policies and programs that both sides tacitly support. In both election cycles, his honest extremism has sometimes cut closer to the heart of our national predicament than the calculating partisanship of his more grounded rivals. He sometimes rants, but he rarely spins — and he’s one of the few figures on the national stage who says “a plague on both your houses!” and actually means it.

Douthat could have added that both parties have advanced the cause of Caesarism, concentrating more and more power in the executive branch. Democrats roundly condemned Bush for indefinite detention of terrorist suspects and legalized torture at Guantanamo, but Obama has not only kept Guantanamo open but signed a law authorizing indefinite military detention of American citizens living in America – without evidence, without trial. He claims to have opposed that provision in the National Defense Authorization Act, yet its sponsor, Democratic Senator Carl Levin, testified that he got his marching orders from the White House. Obama has also embraced Bush’s policy of unlimited and warrantless surveillance of telecommunications. And then there’s Fast and Furious, a harebrained scheme by the FBI to track illegal gun sales that ended up with the government selling guns to Mexican drug cartels – which used them as you’d expect them to. Bush was condemned by Democrats for signing statements that proclaimed he didn’t agree with some provisions in laws passed by Congress and therefore wouldn’t enforce them – but now Obama is doing exactly the same thing. He is also carrying on such Bush initiatives as the Transportation Security Administration’s draconian and even sadistic practices – like strip searches of little old ladies. He’s actually been harder on illegal immigrants – 1.5 million so far deported on his watch – than the Republicans who claim he’s “soft” on that issue.

But enough about Bush and Obama. What about government policy in general? Gretchen Morgenson, another columnist for the Times, created a stir last year as co-author of a book called Reckless Endangerment, which argues that liberals and conservatives worked hand-in-glove to create the housing bubble that wrecked the economy. The liberals wanted to show that they were Doing Something for poor blacks and Hispanics by pushing banks to give them mortgages on easy terms. That led to a wave of liar loans (I still remember radio commercials from lenders who promised “no income verification."), but the mortgage bankers didn’t care, as long as they could palm off the risky debts on suckers by repackaging them as “credit default swaps.” Anyway, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, those idealistic semi-government institutions that had spearheaded the campaign for liar loans, were there to pick up the pieces. Well, you know what happened. Morgenson looks back on the scandal here:

http://www.npr.org/2011/12/28/144358754/fannie-freddie-catastrophe-began-in-1991

She had a follow-up in today’s Times about what those we trust to manage the economy have “learned” from all this: namely nothing. The crooks are having their SEC legal bills paid by shareholders or the taxpayers. Nobody is being criminally prosecuted for fraud, and Congress is even still using Fannie and Freddie as piggy banks – authorizing them to stick borrowers with higher mortgage guarantee fees to fund an extension of the payroll tax cut.

We have very noisy activists on both the Right and the Left, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. The Tea Party people are supposedly against Big Government and Big Spending, but only for social programs. They don’t seem to be worried about the ruinous cost of the wars Bush launched and Obama continued, and the way the carry on about Obama’s deficits you’d think Bush had never put the country a dime into the red. And they have nothing to say about Caesarism. The Occupy people claim to represent the 99 percent as opposed to the one percent, but they seem to be mostly college students whose chief aim is forgiveness of student loans. And while they have gotten lip service support from some union leaders, they don’t care much for working people – closing the port of Oakland hit dock workers and truck drivers in their pocketbooks Like elitist Marxists, they think only they know what’s best for the proletariat.

Maybe we need a Coffee Party. It’s sure time to wake up and smell the coffee – and to challenge the unwitting and unholy alliance of the worst elements of the conventional Right and Left that endanger both our liberty and security.