Dostoyevsky's Underground Digs Deep

Concurrent with my ongoing Ayn Rand fixation is an interest in exploring works that bear some relation to her, whether directly (I'm tempted to dig into Les Miserables, her favorite novel and a conscious influence on We the Living, which actually isn't too shabby) or more obliquely, which is the case with Notes from Underground. Rand, having grown up in Russia, was familiar with Dostoyevsky and appreciated his virtually unmatched fusion of psychology and philosophy, but almost certainly was repulsed by his embrace of suffering and redemption. Notes doesn't track to her thought particularly well, in fact it is wildly divergent, but it contains some surprising connecting threads; it is, too, a quick read, and I wanted to revisit it a year-and-a-half after my first draught of its peculiar poison.

For one thing, Notes is much funnier the second time through. The first exposure leaves the reader appalled at the Underground Man's (defense of the) most inscrutable and destructive behavior. Now that one is in on the sick joke, one can better appreciate his sour wit, how much fun he's having at everyone's expense. His crack that the upcoming dinner with his old and mutually loathing schoolmates is "like a piece of bad literature," is good one. Or the several times he, in typical self-defeating fashion, goes on a tear only to limply let the air out at the end of it:

"Ah, why bother! I ought to get up right away, take my hat, and leave without saying a word. And tomorrow, I would challenge any of them to a duel. The miserable pigs! I don't have to stick it out to get my seven rubles' worth of food. They might think, though--damn it all! To hell with the seven rubles; I'm leaving right now!"

It goes without saying that I didn't leave.

Why bother, indeed. And a little further on:

"Let him hit me in the face, and all the rest of them with him. I'll shout for all to hear: 'Look at that pig who's going to seduce Circassian girls with my spit shining on his face!'

"After that, of course, everything will be over. My office will have disappeared from the face of the earth; I'll be arrested, tried, dismissed from my government job, and deported to Siberia. But never mind! In fifteen years, after I've served my time, I'll trace Zverkov to some provincial town. He'll be happily married by then, with a big daughter. I'll tell him: 'Look, you monster--look at these sunken cheeks and tattered clothes! I've lost everything--career, happiness, art, science, the woman I loved--and all through your fault. Here are the pistols. I've come to unload my pistol and... and I forgive you.' Then I'll fire into the air and no one will hear of me again."

This almost brought tears to my eyes, although I realized that I'd taken it all from Pushkin's Pistol Shot or Lermontov's Masquerade.

Even when he knows he's stolen it all, he can't even say where exactly from.

The prostitute Eliza becomes an easy mark for this treatment as well:

"You'll die all right, some day, and it'll be exactly like that woman I was telling you about. She was young too, just like you....She died of consumption."

"A dame like that would've died in a hospital."

She knows all about these things, I thought when she used the word "dame."

"She owed money to the madam," I said, enjoying the argument more and more. "And she kept working to the very end, consumption or no consumption. The cabbies around there had spoken to some soldiers, and I heard it from them. They made fun of her. They even intended to have a party in her memory in a tavern."

I had invented much of this.

All of this, the curdled humor, the disregard for sincerity and action, derives from the Underground Man's "tangled logic" of his belief that man, even--especially--when given the deepest knowledge of his world and himself, will inevitably opt for the most irrational and destructive behavior, in order to prove that he has a will of his own, free of rationality and its rigid formulae.

Such a view is not exactly practical; as the book's second half makes explicit, putting a philosophy of inaction, in action, is itself a formula for the most gruesome impotence. It is an extraordinarily pessimistic perspective, but it is not altogether wrong. Indeed it speaks to our own times, almost 150 years on:

Now, let me ask you something: what can one expect from man, considering he's such a strange creature? You can shower upon him all earthly blessings, drown him in happiness so that there'll be nothing to be seen but the bubbles rising to the surface of his bliss, give him such economic security that he won't have anything to do but sleep, nibble at cakes, and worry about keeping world history flowing--and even then, out of sheer spite and ingratitude, man will play a dirty trick on you. He'll even risk his cake for the sake of the most glaring stupidity, for the most economically unsound nonsense, just to inject into all the soundness and sense surrounding him some of his own disastrous, lethal fancies. What he wants to preserve is precisely his noxious fancies and vulgar trivialities, if only to assure himself that men are still men (as if that were so important) and not piano keys simply responding to the laws of nature. Man is somehow averse to the idea of being unable to desire unless this desire happens to figure on his timetable at that moment.

The mid to late 1990s, recall, were for the United States a time of unprecedented material prosperity. The Communism of Dostoyevsky's motherland had breathed its last, liberal democracy and capitalism were sprouting from its ashes, and scholars were openly wondering if history would indeed continue to flow. Then over the course of ten years America threw away a budgetary surplus on an ever-increasing number of disastrous and lethal fancies (tax cuts for the people who needed them least, two wars and a senior citizen drug entitlement plan, all unpaid for), and its financial sector devoured itself in the pursuit of ever higher profits generated from some most unsound economic nonsense. After a few years in victory laps the country didn't know what to with itself. Market headiness and 9/11 worked in tandem to spur the nation's slow process of ripping its skin off its body and laughing about it.

The effect is more pronounced now, in the response to Barack Obama's largely technocratic approach to addressing the nation's ills. There are valid criticisms to be made of his methods, but the Republican party's reaction--"Drill, Baby, Drill," "Death Panels," unwavering support for Israel and unflagging contempt of Muslims--is not among them. It is less a cogent critique than a spiteful retreat to its own worst impulses and a wholesale withdrawal from the "reality-based community." This is of course best manifested in the candidates they have put forward to challenge Obama for the nation's leadership; by turns vacuous, wild-eyed, vicious, vain, and inept, the party's favorites for the presidency are a reified bestiality, a regression in the face of complex problems and the need for complex solutions into imbecility for spite's sake, in the name of individual freedom, no less!

Of course, it is Ayn Rand and her ideas that are the prime movers of so much of the current moment in the Republican party. Her antipathy for any but the most basically functional of government activity was such that she considered President John F. Kennedy and his call for service tantamount to Adolf Hitler's fascism. Such comparisons were beyond the pale in polite society in the 1960s and 70s, but these days an accusation of socialism if not outright totalitarianism against the corporatist-lite Democrats is an easy shortcut to a "non-fiction" bestseller.

The contradiction in Rand's putative objectivism and her extremely distorted subjective view is not the greatest irony at work here, however. That lies in the fact that hers was an understandable overreaction to her traumatizing experience living during the Russian Revolution and the early years of the Soviet Union. The Bolshevik revolt was spearheaded by Vladimir Lenin, who was moved to action years before by a book, Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What is to be Done?, which presented London's Crystal Palace as a vision of human progress. It was exactly this ideal that Dostoyevsky's Underground Man rails against:

Actually, I'm not advocating suffering any more than well-being. What I'm for is whim, and I want the right to use it whenever I want to.

I know, for instance, that suffering is inadmissible in light stage plays. In the utopian crystal palace, it'd be inconceivable, for suffering means doubt and denial, and what kind of crystal palace would that be, if people had doubts about it? Nevertheless, I'm certain that man will never give up true suffering, that is, chaos and destruction. Why, suffering is the only cause of consciousness. And, although I declared at the beginning that consciousness is man's greatest plague, I know that he likes it and won't exchange it for any advantage. Consciousness, for instance, is of a much higher order than twice two [makes four]. After twice two, we'll of course have nothing left either to do or to find out. All that'll be left for us will be to bock off our five senses and plunge into contemplation. With consciousness we have nothing much to do either, but we can at least lacerate ourselves from time to time, which does liven us up a bit. It may go against progress, but it's better than nothing.

Both Rand and Dostoyevsky recoiled viscerally from Chernyshevsky and Lenin's utopian fervor. In some respects their responses are remarkably similar. Both stress the primacy of individual will and its indomitability in the face of external forces of societal organization. Yet they are in fact diametrically opposed. Rand's was a unified system that took rationality as its foundation and sought to repudiate altruism, from which Communism sprung, on grounds of irrationality and mysticism. Yet Dostoyevsky's critique digs far deeper than Rand and in fact damns both her and her Soviet opposites, for Objectivism and Communism both are logical systems of thought (though Rand was never so charitable as to grant her enemies that distinction). Neither could accommodate man's drive for the the irrational, the illogical, the absurd. The repressive nature of both the Soviet state and Rand's cult of personality, and their subsequent collapses, bear this out.

A century and a half later, short of trying not to dwell on the implications too long, there still doesn't seem to be an adequate response to the Underground Man's manic scribblings. The best that can be said is that the idea they describe is so self-defeating and -destructive (in the Underground Man's present-day speech he mentions having, at 40, withdrawn from the world into his mouse hole) that one could hope our current spate of spite will soon burn itself out. Cold comfort, perhaps, but what else could rancid humor provide?

Subject and Object

"The life of Ayn Rand was the material of fiction. But if one attempted to write it as a novel, the result would be preposterously unbelievable." Truer words, the first that appear in The Passion of Ayn Rand, were never spoken. Rand's story--filled with adventure, philosophy, tragedy, lurid sexuality, politics--is absolutely compelling: a ridiculously intelligent social misfit escapes Soviet Russia, works for Cecil B. DeMille while working a first novel and a play (Night of January 16th) that goes to Broadway, giving her enough money to live on, intermittently, to write The Fountainhead; she assembles a cult of personality in the name of rationality and individualism, embarks on a decade-and-a-half affair with a twenty-five years younger protege while writing a book that helps birth the Libertarian movement, and eventually drives nearly all of her friends away and dies alone. I'm at a loss to explain my ongoing fascination with Ayn Rand, but if pressed I would venture her literally incredible life's story.

Barbara Branden, Passion's author, was in a unique place to tell it. She and her husband Nathaniel Branden were for 18 years Rand's closest friends, associates, and Objectivist acolytes, and so knew Rand better than anyone besides her husband Frank. She and Rand shared hopes, fears, and fury (Rand was quite one-sided in this respect), and before their break--precipitated by Nathaniel's excommunication for disclosing that he could not continue his affair with Rand because he had fallen in love with a younger woman--she had conducted hours of biographical interviews with Rand in preparation for an earlier, and much more fawning, autobiographical sketch, Who is Ayn Rand?

The uniqueness of the author's relationship to Rand is itself enough to make the book interesting. What made it vital in its time (1986, only four years after Rand's death) was that it was virtually the only biography of Rand that existed to that point, and was also the first publicizing of Rand's affair with Nathaniel Branden. Until Anne C. Heller and Jennifer Burns' volumes, it was essentially the only complete biography of the egoist firebrand.

Reading it in quick succession after the other two is like looking at someone's baby photos; the defining characteristics are easily recognizable, but not nearly so developed. Many of the quotations and subjects in the other two books--such as Heller's detailing of Rand's childhood crush, the hero of a French adventure story--were used here first, though without as thorough an investigation of the given subjects. Rand's relationship with Isabel Paterson, an early libertarian writer who tutored Rand in American history and politics, features much more prominently in Burns' account for the considerable impact it had on Rand as a thinker, but here it is given limited treatment. Some figures are scarcely mentioned at all. Murray Rothbard, an anarcho-capitalist and disgruntled Randian who wrote damningly (and quite humorously) of the Rand cult, is only mentioned in an afterward as one of the people Rand influenced.

What most distinguishes Branden's account is its style, a sometimes breathless romanticism that details the state of the person it describes. For instance, "[Frank] spent many hours each day in his studio, but seemed to be producing less and less; he was not painting, he was drinking, drowning his grief and his failed life in liquor." Repitition is a repeated (heh) rhetorical device used throughout to emphasize certain moments. They are scattershot in their effectiveness. A less successful example:

And I had loved Ayn for too long, she had meant too much to me and had done too much for me--ever to be able, even had I wished to do so, to tear that love out of me. I had seen too often her unique, heart-wrenching charm, and the enchanting young girl who still dwelt somehwhere within her, I had witnessed too often, with a sense of wonder, the power and the passion of her intelligence. I had seen....

And so forth. This tool is most ill-used in the final chapter, which endlessly describes figures influenced by Rand, with each entry ending in "The fountainhead is Ayn Rand." In some of the more climactic moments, however, it can be quite appropriate, if still overdone:

"You dared to reject me?" She was no longer screaming, her voice was guttural, choked, and all at once her accent was startlingly heavy--and it seemed for a moment, that she no longer knew it was Nathaniel she was denouncing, she was in Russia, she was a girl again, she was damning those who had inflicted upon her a lifetime of rejection--damning her mother who had required as the price of love that she be glamorous and social and pretty, damning her father who had never touched her hand in affection, damning her schoolmates who had profited by her intelligence and excluded her from their lives and activities, damning all the men through all the years who had feared the power of her brain and so had been blind to the woman's body it inhabited--and damning Leo most of all, damning the man to whom she had offered her heart and her should and who had been indifferent to them. Leo had been born again, more than forty years later, when she had become everything she had wanted to become and achieved everything she had wanted to achieve--and once more he had done to her the unthinkable, the unendurable, once more he had tried to destroy her life, once more she had offered him her heart and her soul and he had thrown them in her face.

On the whole, however, the book reads incredibly well and provides a narrative sweep befitting its epic subject matter. Such an, ahem, impassioned and occasionally judgmental (Frank's "failed life") approach, given the nature of Branden's history with Rand, raises the question of, erm, objectivity. Strangely enough, her treatment is if anything too fair. Burns notes that Branden is too credulous of Rand's account of her early history, and may well have overplayed Frank's use of alcohol. When it comes to analyzing the Rand herself, Branden is remarkably sympathetic in describing a woman whose demand of an unceasing rationality led her to repress every feeling of weakness or inadequacy she ever felt. Her lingering affection for the person who she says gave her life direction and made her feel for the first time that ideas mattered, is palpable.

This is perhaps unsurprising. Ayn Rand's American historical counterpart, contra Johann Hari, is not L. Ron Hubbard, but Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism. Both figures were of dubious character who led movements that have been wildly more influential than anyone could have imagined. More pertinently, they were charismatic figures whose personal magnetism was such that even after the original group splintered (in both cases due to gross sexual impropriety on the cult-leaders' part), the apostates did not repent their earlier opinions. The "witnesses" of the Book of Mormon's infamous plates, as any good Latter-Day Saint will tell you, never recanted their testimony. Likewise Branden's grace, including the astonishing restraint she and her ex-husband showed, following their break with Rand, in not revealing the affair that would have humiliated and publicly destroyed her, until after her death.

Branden, in a footnote, disputes that their experience ever qualified as a cult, on the grounds that their belief was grounded in rationalism and individuality and not religious worship. One is reminded of the Cult of Reason of the revolutionary French, or the cults of personality that developed around 20th century authoritarians, which did not abolish religion so much as replace it. There is no better illustration of this similarity than the response of Leonard Peikoff, Rand's intellectual standard-bearer and executor of her estate, who insisted without ever reading it that any follower of Rand's who spoke well of the book be cut off and shunned. Peikoff, it must needs be noted, is Barbara Branden's cousin.

Peikoff recently midwifed The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics, a much belated (2005!) response to both The Passion of Ayn Rand as well as Judgment Day: My Years With Ayn Rand, an account of the affair written by Nathaniel Branden. I will in good time take it in, along with Judgment Day. But for now I'm going to break from the biography beat and actually start digging into Rand's actual writing, beginning her first novel, We the Living. Critics were and have been quite vicious in their estimation of Rand's fiction, and often unfairly; perhaps the best possible jumping-off point into it, then, is Barbara Branden's telling of Rand's tale: respectful without outright fawning, and with a touch of the romantic.

Greenback

Ours is a time of nostalgia, of man-children, of, well, arrested development. Technology has made it ever easier to revisit the formative media of our youth, leading to a decade defined less by the new boundaries charted in popular culture as it is the repackaging of the old: the mash-up, the homage, the reboot, all of it done with a knowing self-awareness. Few pop culture sensations were ever so self-aware as the Muppets, and so they seem especially ripe for the treatment, especially considering more time has elapsed since their last movie, Muppets from Space, than the entire existence of the Spider-Man movie franchise, which is getting rebooted next summer.

The Muppets begins with an introduction to brothers Gary (Jason Segal) and Walter (voiced by Peter Linz). While Gary is a flesh and blood human, Walter is three feet high and made of felt and naturally becomes the Muppets’ biggest fan growing up. In the present day Walter still shares a bedroom with Gary, who has been in a relationship going on ten years with his girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams). Gary and Mary (wocka wocka wocka!) take a romantic trip to Hollywood, with Gary bringing Walter along so he can make a pilgrimage to the Muppet studio. Walter is horrified to find it all but abandoned and about to be turned over to scheming oil baron Tex Richman (an appropriately oily Chris Cooper). The only way to save the property is to get Kermit and the rest of the Muppets back together to put on a telethon and raise $10 million.

Obviously self-awareness and nostalgia are baked into The Muppets from the get-go. The entire premise resting on wistfulness for the good old days of Muppet domination, and many of the movie’s biggest beats—a melancholy look at a wall of photographs the gang with Jim Henson and a variety of celebrities, a spirited rendition of “Rainbow Connection” at the telethon—draws from its built-in audience’s fond memories.

Yet this is no lazy fan-service. The film hits the floor humming with an infectiously peppy musical number, “Life’s a Happy Song,” (written, as with all the other original songs for the movie by Flight of the Conchords’ Bret McKenzie), and proceeds over the next two hours to fire off a barrage of jokes, largely cheeky, fourth-wall-busting bits, such as saving time by use of a montage or ‘traveling by map,’ but also celebrity cameos, awful puns, character bits, and more besides. (My favorite is a scene that involves a thesaurus.) The rapid clip brings to mind The Simpsons Movie, another (successful) effort to bring a wayward property back to what made it work in the first place.



The Muppets strikes a fair balance in appealing to the older audience members and those less familiar with the Muppet brand. Speaking for myself, I grew up on the Muppet Babies cartoon and have fond but distant memories of the Muppet Christmas Carol. I’m not exactly unbiased, but I still have enough objectivity not to give it a pass on nostalgia alone, and I had a shit-eating grin on my face the entire time. I don’t doubt that the film appeals to everyone in all the right ways, but whether it will get a chance to is another matter, going up as it is against the insipid Twilight juggernaut. A movie that does so much so well deserves to do well, but the half-filled theater I saw it in, containing mostly adults, isn’t promising.

The movie’s not completely perfect. Most of the principal muppets get at least a cameo bit, but surprisingly Rizzo the Rat doesn’t get to do anything but appear in the background, and Kermit’s nephew Robin doesn’t appear at all. The pacing flags in the middle, perhaps due to simple laughter fatigue, but likely because of a long stretch in which there are no songs to perk things up. At two hours it is quite long for a whimsical musical comedy, and with the shuffling around of a certain Gonzo gag the mostly unnecessary epilogue could have been easily cut.

But that's picking at nits. Mostly, The Muppets is a joy, and, coming at this particular moment, it is a most refreshing joy.

(Spoilers follow)

For the ending, undone by the aforementioned epilogue, is actually something of a downer. Tex Richman actually manages to stop the telethon at the last minute, gets the land rights, and kicks the muppets out of their old theater. But Kermit convinces them that they have nothing to be ashamed of, that they gave it their all, and then they go outside to find they’re famous anyway and everybody loves them again.

It’s a bit much, but it’s nice to see a movie that tries to surmount disappointment and failure, amid an ongoing economic malaise that have brought so much disappointment and failure to so many people. That this should be delivered by talking puppets that are aware they’re in a movie but not that they’re puppets is sort of ridiculous, and sort of sublime, but it’s always been so. The awareness that is equal parts sad-clown struggle and silly, anarchic boundary breaking, the adult wisdom and child-like optimism; these were Jim Henson's trademarks. They're what make Big Bird singing "It's Not Easy Being Green" at Henson's funeral, something that sounds ludicrous in concept, as incredibly moving as it was. It's what the world needs, more now than ever before.



The progress of our culture--currently consuming and reworking the past--is as uncertain as the economy on which it rests. With that in mind, one could scarce hope for a better examplar than a group of muppet chickens doing a buck-and-cluck cover of Cee Lo's obscenity-laden Motown throwback "Fuck You." To be able to get away from news on the impending collapse of the European Union, and settle briefly into The Muppets' company, is something for which we ought be thankful.

The Abyss Gazes Also Into You

It feels like years have passed, but Troy Davis was only executed two months ago. His was one of the highest-profile death row cases in years and touched off considerable media discussion over the wrongfulness of the death penalty. Though the debate has tapered off in the time since, questions of law enforcement continue to be asked, largely prompted by brutal police responses to the various branches of Occupy Wall Street. The climate seemed ideal, then, for Werner Herzog's Into the Abyss, a documentary that deals with the fate of a convicted murderer. The film, though, seems more interested in the environment that created its troubled subject than in the subject itself. This it presents successfully and quite devastatingly in its own right, but in doing so it nearly loses the main thread. This isn't quite a bad thing.

The springboard for Herzog's meditation on death and its penalties is a triple homicide case committed in Conroe, Texas in 2001. Teenagers Michael Perry and Jason Burkett murdered 50 year-old Sandra Stotler, along with her son--their "friend"--Adam and his friend Jeremy Richardson, in order to take Stotler's expensive car for a joy ride. They were arrested after a protracted shootout and tried for the murders. While not containing a smoking gun, the evidence, as presented in the movie, is fairly credible: Perry confessed the murder of Stotler and directed authorities to the other two bodies, underneath one of which was a cigarette butt with his DNA.

Perry and Burkett are both evasive on the subject of the actual murders in their interviews; Burkett maintains his innocence but says little else, while Perry elides the subject altogether, merely saying he should have never gotten involved with Burkett (Perry's breezy sidestepping is seemingly, alarmingly, clinical; at his execution he forgave Stotler's family, for what they were doing to him). Both were found guilty, though only Perry was sentenced to die; Burkett is eligible for parole in 2041.

Herzog spends little time dealing with and resolving the murk, instead taking Perry and Burkett's guilt for granted and expanding the scope of the film's inquiry to include Conroe itself. Its third and best chapter, The Dark Side of Conroe, lays out a panorama of human wreckage so grim that it's little wonder something like this should have happened there.

Nearly everyone connected with the two murderers interviewed has been warped by violence, degradation, and death. Richardson's brother reveals that his father is incarcerated, and he himself violated the terms of his parole when he left Georgia to come to his brother's funeral, where he was arrested and sent back to prison. Lisa Stotler-Balloun, the daughter and sister of Sandra and Adam Stotler, details just how many family members she's lost in how many brief years. Jason Burkett's father, who will serve out the rest of his life serving a prison sentence and was able to convince two jurors not to have his son executed, recounts the most shameful, barrel-bottom-scraping moment of his life, in which he and his two sons had Thanksgiving dinner together in prison, all in shackles.

The film's bleakness is thankfully, not completely unremitting. There are bits of humor spread throughout, mostly deriving from Herzog's curious line of inquiry. The neighboring town is called Cut and Shoot. One Conroe resident, who was illiterate until he went to prison and learned to read and write letters to and from his family and friends, spends his interview chewing and spitting tobacco and has a priceless answer when asked what he would do with his tattoo of his girlfriend's name if he ever broke up with her. A Death Row chaplain tells a story about golf course squirrels that he poignantly ties into his work.

The most complete marriage of mirth and the monstrous is Burkett's wife. She is his appeal attorney; they fell in love while she filed his paperwork in the court system. She proclaims his innocence and takes a full rainbow she saw over the his prison gates as a sign from God that the two of them were meant to be together. She's carrying his child. Death casts a pall over even the most joyous of institutions and occasions.

The picture of Conroe thus portrayed is one of vicious poverty and omniscient violence, and is painted so vividly that Perry's impending death (he was interviewed only eight days before being administered a lethal injection) almost feels like an afterthought. Like Perry's guilt, the wrongness of his fate is taken to be similarly inarguable. A former prison chaplain, who quit following his ministry of Karla Faye Tucker, inveighs against the state-sanctioned killing of prisoners, and Burkett's father argues nothing is gained in Perry's death; even Stotler-Balloun, who felt more at ease after seeing Perry put to death, says that she would be fine knowing a murderer would simply be kept in jail the rest of his life.

After everything we have seen up to now, it's hard to argue. The murders of Jeremy Richardson and Sandra and Adam Stotler were not the first to afflict Conroe. Nor will they be the last. The problems besetting the community that help give rise to such atrocities are so enormous and deep-seeded as to render the now harmless Michael Perry beside the point. His killing by the state, seen in this light, is less a display of strength than impotence.

A Little More on the Life of Rand

I suppose it would have behooved me to have read and commented on Anne C. Heller's Ayn Rand and The World She Made before Jennifer Burns' Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Burns' book states right in its subtitle it's focus on Rand's influence in the conservative movement and its libertarian offshoots. Heller keeps her eye on Rand's life and so paints a more detailed portrait of the ego queen. The details on Rand's early years in Russia--like how the hero of a French adventure story developed over her life from the subject of a girlhood crush to the prototype for the larger-than-life protagonists in her fiction, or the trivia bit that she was childhood friends with the sister of Vladamir Nabokov(!)--are particularly welcome, as are the details of some of her unpublished or unproduced works.

Perhaps the most interesting difference between the two books is the portrait of Rand's husband Frank O'Connor that emerges. He is still ultimately, acquiescent in her monomania, but he does not always remain silent. Mention is made of times when Frank would lose his temper with Rand, after which she would apologize profusely, so afraid was she of losing him. So troubled in fact was there marriage, that Rand had considered divorcing him during the long stretch of Atlas Shrugged's composition but did not want to upset her life while she was working on the novel (the virtue of selfishness made manifest). She was not the only one who considered it:

Once, during a vicious quarrel between the O'Connors in the presence of the Brandens, Frank walked out of the living room, into the bedroom. Barbara followed. She found him half sitting, half lying on the bed in an attitude of sorrow and defeat. "I want to leave her," he told Barbara, clutching her arm. "But where would I go?" Rand was the center of his life.

I'll have more to say about Rand's politics later.

Watching the Watchman

Funny things, critics. In the theater world they're widely loathed for their ability to kill a show with bad publicity, while in the cinema they are by turns ignored by the populace at large and used by the discerning to figure out what (not) to throw down $12 for. A 90+% "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes is usually a good indicator of quality, and I have no doubt that the 3% afforded Adam Sandler's latest filmic atrocity is well-deserved. But J. Edgar, Clint Eastwood's most recent offering and the subject under present consideration, has been absolutely mauled, with a 41% appraisal that's at least better than the most recent Transformers, but is worse than the Hugh Jackman Rock'em Sock'em Robots movie. I'm calling it a distortion of the all-or-nothing "Fresh" or "Rotten" grading system, for while J. Edgar has enormous problems, it is still worth checking out.

So: the movie, with a script by gay screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, tells the storied tenure of J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio), from his early days working in Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation in 1919 all the way through his death during the Nixon administration. In that time we see him bust up anarchists and gangsters, attempt to solve the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the Lindbergh baby, and listen in on the "intimate" moments of American giants Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Kennedy, and develop a closeted gay relationship with his Associate Director Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). It does so by using a framing device, Hoover's dictation of a memoir manuscript, that lets the narrative jump back and forth in time.

Occasionally this is effective; by allowing Hoover's mother (Judi Dench) to remain in the picture far longer than she would have in a straightforward chronology, the shadow she casts over Hoover's life is more effectively conveyed. Likewise with Hoover's stunted homosexuality. More often than not, though, the device works to the movie's detriment (this is true also of the nested flashbacks used in Eastwoods Flags of Our Fathers). At 137 minutes it is long and feels long, largely because early on there is little narrative shape and drive. The jumping around feels arbitrary, with earlier threads (the Lindbergh baby in particular) started, dropped, and then picked up after another interlude has taken our attention. Some scenes as a result are dropped in for no other reason that they must go somewhere to set up some later payoff. A confrontation with Attorney General Bobby Kennedy over his brother's dalliances comes and goes and then isn't mentioned until JFK's assassination.

The movie's approach to its subject is weirdly schizoid. Certain themes and ideas are handled with sledgehammer subtlety, while others are understated or overcooked with such oddness that it goes back to being good again. Much of the depiction of Hoover and Tolson's relationship is sort of sweet, what with Tolson picking out his ties, and the two of them being surrounded by lad-and-lady couples at the horseraces, but the scene in which they bring their feelings out into the open has painfully on-the-nose dialogue ("You're a scared, heartless, horrible little man!") and plays like certain scenes from Brokeback Mountain without ever feeling as emotionally raw.

The other driving motif of the story, the frightening knowledge-as-power Hoover comes to accumulate in the name of the law, fares much more consistently better. A speech about morals eroding and evil flourishing is spoken over Richard Nixon's inauguration with the heaviest of hands; but this is spoken by Hoover, whose soul we've been watching disintegrate for two hours. It's wickedly ironic and plays well with Nixon's bullshit eulogy that follows soon after. This weird double-sense occurs in other fleeting moments: Hoover learning of the JFK assassination while listening to a hidden recording of Martin Luther King, Jr. having sex; Hoover channeling his paranoia and hatred into his "portrayal" of an angry black nationalist as he dictates a forged letter he will use to blackmail King into turning down the Nobel Peace Prize. The film's heavy focus on the Lindbergh baby case, and the media hype ("Trail of the century!" "Bigger than the Resurrection!") and hysterical demonstrations it inspires, slyly acts as an indictment of overheated law enforcement reactions to horrific but freak crimes like the Casey Anthony fiasco. I wouldn't expect these kinds of left-field approaches from an earnest filmmaker like Eastwood, and it's a shame they don't appear in the film more often.

The script's roteness and messy structure are fortunately surmountable by an able cast. DiCaprio sports an accent and cadence that grates early on, but eventually starts to feel natural. He spends much of his time channeling his legendary sternness, but is deft in his portrayal of Hoover's confused attraction to Tolson. Hammer's got a natural charm to him that is perfectly suited for the character, but is more often than not written as the movie's conscience, saddling him with a great deal of Very Important Dialogue that he isn't quite able to overcome. Judi Dench's turn as Hoover's (s)mother isn't bad--it's Judi Dench!--but not especially remarkable. Until late in the story she doesn't come off as especially overbearing, making Hoover's dependence on her all the stranger (did he really live with her until she died?). Rounding off the core cast is Naomi Watts as Hoover's loyal secretary Helen Gandy. After a spirited introduction with a date in the Library of Congress the character never becomes more than that, but Watts manages to give some dimension to a role that's largely functional. The aging effects and makeup used to take the actors through five decades is largely effective, with a couple exceptions. DiCaprio in his twilight years looks fantastic, but his face strangely suggests less J. Edgar than Herbert Hoover. And Hammer's, while not looking bad, makes him look too old, almost ghoulish. Looking at the two of them, it's a wonder that Hoover died first. When he does, it is actually quite affecting, thanks to Armie Hammer beneath a lot of latex.

So there you have it: a film that never becomes more the sum of its parts, but with some occasionally very good parts indeed. In a way it has a lot in common with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Both ambitiously tell a life story and utilize both cutting edge effects and clunky narrative devices and run into considerable problems doing so, and both faced a hostile response when released in the Oscar season (though Benjamin Button actually fared well with critics, which fueled its backlash). J. Edgar has an interesting story to tell, and manages to do enough interesting things amid its safe respectability to be a good investment of time and money, certainly more than one would have expected. Prestige pictures may perhaps be most vulnerable to a critical shellacking, given that they likely have a heavy overlap with people who actually read and take film criticism seriously, and it's a shame to see this film so disserviced.

Disconnect the Dots

Within evolutionary biological circles there was some controversy, decades ago, on the speed at which evolution and variation can occur. The late Stephen Jay Gould proposed his hypothesis of Punctuated Equilibrium, which said that in the Cambrian explosion (in a typical example), the sudden-seeming appearance in the fossil record of lifeforms considerably more complex than what came before, was the product of a sudden burst of evolutionary activity, as distinguished from the orthodoxy of evolutionary thinking that said evolution was ongoing and gradual. Rather than existing in a constant state of flux and branching off into new variants, Gould said, different species will remain stable for hundreds of thousands or millions of years, only to suddenly (geologically speaking) develop in new directions.

I bring this up in the context of Fred Kaplan's 1959: The Year Everything Changed due to the similarity in its thinking, as applied to developments in science, the arts, and politics more broadly in the last 50 years. As indicated by the subtitle, Kaplan believes 1959 was the pivotal year, the cultural crunch, that begot such innovations and changes as wide-ranging and varied as flash mobs, the Civil Rights movement, and New Journalism. He makes an engaging case, though not necessarily for this particular thesis.

It's not that Kaplan presents faulty evidence. The book is loaded with the goings-on of events more consequential than their obscurity would suggest. The early singles released by Berry Gordy's Tamla record label that would eventually become Motown Records shaped the early work of a Liverpool band originally called the Silver Beetles; John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me predicted a violent response by black Americans to their perennial underclass status anticipated the riots that followed the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. And so on.

The problem is that, for all the specificity suggested in pinning the year of change to 1959, the methodology employed is vague and loose. A chapter is given to the legal battle over publication of Lady Chatterly's Lover, which had been seized by the Post Office on grounds of obscenity. Kaplan presents the result, in favor of lifting the ban on the book, as "the beginning of the end" of bans on literature on the grounds of obscenity. Yet Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" had won a similar court victory just two years previous. Kaplan mentions it as background information, but doesn't elaborate on how the Lady Chatterly case is different, except perhaps in the latter book's more intentionally prurient nature.

Likewise, the chapter on "Howl" and the Beat Generation identifies Ginsberg's February 5 reading at Columbia University as a pivotal moment in the lead-up to the generational revolt of the 60s. The reading was sympathetically reviewed by for the Partisan Review by Diana Trilling, whose husband Lionel was emblematic of the stuffy, academic old guard about to be swept away by the insurgent beatniks. That her observation of the "unfathamable gap" between her experience at the reading and at home among her own social circle looks forward to the coming decade's generation gap is true. But does it outweigh in significance the publication and wild popularity of "Howl" or On the Road or any of the other moments that led to the Columbia reading?

To return to the talk on fossils and evolution--Kaplan is playing a half-hearted Gould, arguing basically:

Boring 1950s ------> 1959! ------> To the 60s, and beyond!!!

But his assessment doesn't quite live up to this. He can't just ignore precedents that would paint a more gradualist picture, only downplay them. But there they are, the dimmer stars in a night sky constellation, blotted by the light of 1959. It's isn't too damaging, as indeed the material is far too interesting to be neatly contained within the span of 365 days. The great use of the book is in illustrating the messy truth of history. Dividing it into various eras makes for a useful shorthand, but that is all. Human events rarely operate with fidelity to the rolling over a decade--indeed, this is the whole point of Kaplan's reaching further past the 60s into the supposedly drab 1950s to find the antecedents of many features of today's world. It is not surprising, then, that cultural change should not confine itself to a single year. That it goes further back than Kaplan wants to admit doesn't make him wrong, rather more right than he knows.

Out of Joint

My alarm clock squawks at me at 6:38 AM, a particular minute selected to leave me just enough time to get dressed, eat, and brush my teeth and be out the door to catch the three-minutes'-walk-away Metro to work at 7:05.

I dress and I eat and I brush and I'm gone. And I get to the Metro, and the escalators aren't working. And the metal gating is shut across the entrance at the bottom. It's unusual, I reason, but perhaps they don't open until just before the first train arrives. (At 7 AM on a Sunday, this kind of thinking makes sense.)

Looking past the escalators, I spy a guy waiting by the elevator. There's a little red light visible below the call button, indicating he's trying to get in touch with WMATA folk because there's a problem. Before long he gives up and walks off. Just after he leaves I hear some noise emanating from the call wall. I go over in the hopes of carrying the departed man's torch and finding out what's going on, but communication ceases just as I arrive.

I drift back to the escalator, wondering when they're going to open and if I'm going to need to catch the bus, and then the same crackle of static and unintelligible sound bursts from the call wall. Again I saunter over, and again I'm too late.

Now I'm getting concerned. I'm going to miss the train, it's almost (and I pull out my phone to see what time it is)--

6:03.

And there's a moment of confusion, of displacement. whatwhatwhaaaaaat? And then, realization:

"Awwwwwwwwww!"

The idea that time could be changed by fiat has always seemed a little weird to me, but in reality it is both sensible--the 24 hour day is an invention of man, not a fact of nature, and as such is open to revision--and regular, as is collective ambivalence toward it. The New Republic thought President Bush and Congress's lame attempt to lower the nation's energy use by adjusting the duration of Daylight Savings Time and "changing time itself" was "unsettling and creepily disproportionate," and DST itself has come under close scrutiny since its inception.

Time and history itself have been subject to edicts of rulers and religions since, well, forever. Setting aside the multiplicity of calendars that exist across cultures (including the Mayans' whose ostensible end next year will doom us all), the passage and record of time has changed frequently within Western society. Pope Gregory VIII instituted a new calendar in 1582, but because England had by then become Protestant and contrary to papal edict, it continued using the Julian calendar until 1752, and lost 11 days in the process, going from September 2 to 14 in a moment, and moved the beginning of the year from March to January. The revolutionary government of France established a new chronology entirely, starting over with Year Zero, and instituting a new calendar of its own. Compared to these measures, Daylight Savings is mere technocratic tinkering.

Yet it's enough to offset; my feeling of displacement never quite leaves. I arrive at work earlier than usual, 7:30ish, but nobody else is there, and the kitchen is locked. It's not until just after 8 that I can get in and get started, and so everything gets off now to a late start. The morning flies, and after a brief lunch spasm of food traffic business trickles. I'm lucky to find some corn beef that needs slicing to keep me occupied for 45 minutes, after which I'm told to leave, around 3:30.

After picking up a book at the library I head across town and settle in to a cafe with the book and a $3.30 mocha to pass the time before the shift at my other job. As five o' clock nears, I start feeling increasingly anxious.

Don't I have somewhere to be? I check the time, and it's only five, I still have another hour before my shift starts. But if the regular flow of time had been maintained, if Daylight Savings hadn't set us all back, I would be starting the shift now. It's incredibly disorienting, like time travel with a dash of deja vu.

The sense of existing outside of time isn't novel--it's the reason for jet lag (travel by jet, of course, being a sign of man's mastery of nature that by crossing vast distances so quick he has managed to shrink time). But air travel is disruptive to one's routine, unless, of course, one is a pilot or stewardess. Daylight Savings upsets the hours of the day but leaves one's patterns of activity untouched. The surprise in being caught unawares after the changeover is what makes it different from voluntarily getting up earlier. The disconnect in the expectation and the actual result--of having, by realization, an extra hour that just before did not exist in one's mind--makes one acutely aware one's chronological position, as if flowing down the river of time one had gotten stuck against some branches or rocks and suddenly could stop and take stock of one's surroundings.

Not that in such a state one's sensitivity necessarily translates into accuracy. Before my shift started I was chatting with a co-worker. I checked the time, 5:45, and then continued talking. Eventually she asked what time it was, we would have to get going soon.

"5:51, I'll bet you," I said. If I've checked recently I'm usually pretty spot-on in my guestimation of how many minutes have elapsed. And yet, it was in reality only 5:47.

Born Back Ceaselessly Into the Past

I'm ashamed to say that before Wednesday I had never actually seen a Woody Allen film, no, not even Anne Hall. Given that Midnight in Paris is one of Allen's best received movies in a good while, this puts me in an odd position, unable as I am to comment on the film in the broader context of Allen's body of work as a whole. This certainly doesn't mean it can't be taken on its own, however. It stands on its own quite nicely, as an entertaining look at high culture that often only seems high due to the distancing and romanticizing afforded by the passage of time.

Owen Wilson plays Gil, a Hollywood script hack vacationing in Paris with his fiance Inez (Rachel McAdams) and, high on the city's creative atmosphere, considers leaving showbiz behind to become a serious novelist, starting with his novel about a nostalgia shop owner that he hasn't let anyone read. One night he opts not to go dancing with Inez and her old pedantic douchebag friend Paul and his wife, and instead gets lost, only to be picked up at midnight by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and dropped into the literary social scene of the 1920s. Gil begins meeting with his favorite artists and authors every night, which fuels a surge of creativity, and starts to fall for Picasso's "art groupie" Adriana (Marion Cotillard).

Wilson's made a career out of being a goofball, which can make it hard to buy him as artsy writer, but his "gee wiz!" expressions when he actually meets his literary idols work to his advantage. Cotillard makes a good love interest, intelligent and eye-catching. They do most of the heavy lifting, having to compete against the outsized personas of the early 20th century's greatest artists, many of them caricatures based on their reputations and style; Corey Stoll's Ernest Hemingway is heroic, clipped, masculine ("If it's bad, I'll hate it. If it's good, then I'll be envious and hate it even more."). Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston) punctuates his dialogue with "old sport," and Adrian Brody's take on Salvador Dali is, well, eccentric.

It's fun stuff, which is the point of a concept that is to an extent playing in a literary sandbox. The film wisely doesn't bother explaining how or why a time warp appears at midnight; it just does, and it's wonderful. But the tone is not exclusively fanboy gushing. As the story goes on the film smartly turns its greatest draw on itself: 'wouldn't it be awesome to go back in the past, which was so much better?' becomes 'was the past really so much better?' It's a good examination of nostalgia and the notion of a Golden Age of anything, which has particular salience after a decade whose pop culture has more and more been defined by cannibalizing the past, whether that be in adaptations of 80s cartoons into movies, Guitar Hero, or Lady Gaga.

This stance does put the film in a strange position, tut-tutting those who would indulge nostalgia even as it depends on nostalgia for its appeal and humor. There's a good laugh had in know-it-all Paul smarmily defining nostalgia as an "erroneous," "rose-tinted" notion, but in the end the movie comes around to saying he was basically right. It's not a fatal problem, more an interesting tension, but a tension all the same.

Aside from a few minor issues (the present-day side plot dealing with Gil and Inez's relationship is subordinate enough that the incredible nature of their woeful mismatching is indeed a minor issue), the movie accomplishes what it sets out to do: provide a breezy literary fantasy for the college-educated, with a little thematic heft. It's middle-brow, maybe, but very accomplished and funny middle-brow all the same.

If You Get Naked in the Airport, Then the Terrorists Win

I just got patted down at the airport. Twice.

My mum's vacationing in the Cape Cod area, and I'm going to spend a couple days in Provincetown visiting. I arrived at Reagan Airport, ate some lunch I had brought with me, and then got in line at the security checkpoint. I opted out of the body scanner machine with the vague idea that on some level seeing a fellow passenger treated like a criminal suspect would register with the other fliers the invasiveness and stupidity of the whole process.

The pat-down went as well as it could; the TSA officer told me to put my arms out "like you're flying." When I put them straight ahead--I thought he meant as if I were holding a steering instrument, honestly--he clarified. "No, I meant flying, like in Titanic."

We all laughed, me, the officer, and another TSA officer rifling through my backpack. It admittedly wasn't the most appropriate thing to do at the time, but given the inappropriateness of the security process to begin with, there can't be said to be any single standard. Then the other officer, asked, "You had a bottle in your bag, sir?"

I had brought a NAKED Juice with me, having forgotten about the stupid liquids rule. It's not that I didn't know it, I can't bring my acne treatment with me for that reason, but in getting my lunch it'd slipped my mind. The officer asked me if I wanted to just throw it away or to go back out and drink it.

"I have to go through security again?"

Yes.

It's bad enough to have to drink my juice earlier than I wanted, but to have to go through the whole ridiculous security theater again? What is this supposed to do? How does it make us any safer? If a would-be terrorist were so inclined, he could detonate an explosive within an airport, in a security line say, and still inflict considerable damage and casualties. What difference to anyone except the food vendors does it make if I drink my juice after the security checkpoint?

So not wanting to let a good drink go to waste and intending to see my half-assed protest through to the end, I went out, downed the bottle, and proceeded through security, and the pat-down once more.

Don't you feel safer?

Human, All Too Human

Few have driven the Tea Party drama of late so much as the nearly thirty years dead Ayn Rand. With the jump in sales in her work following Obama's election, the "Going Galt" posturing, and the anti-government rhetoric of the past three years that, due to Occupy Wall Street, only now is beginning to wane--this has been an explicitly Randian era. Her beliefs and their consequences are a natural target for liberal scorn, no exceptions here. But after reading Jennifer Burns' Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, it's hard not to feel sorry for the extraordinarily damaged woman behind them. Ayn Rand's life, as told by Burns, shows a startling juxtaposition between sympathetic misfit and cold and alienating tyrant.

The trauma of Rand's early youth is the key to understanding her persona and philosophy of hyper-individualism and anti-statism. Growing up during the Russian Revolution, she became an early enemy of the Soviet union when government officials claimed her father's business in the name of the people. The resulting tumult left her family in increasingly dire conditions, living in miserable housing subsisting on "millet, acorns, and mush." Her response was a near-pathological aversion to "collectivism" which held that altruism of any kind was an infringement on the best and most productive members of society and crushed the individual and creative spirit.

Hers was such a one. She grew up bookish, awkward in social situations, and spent much of her youth writing stories of knights and princesses that she would tell her family. Solace from the drudgery of life in the Soviet system she found in the films of Hollywood, which she devoured--through film school--with impressive zeal. In 1925 alone she saw, graded, and cataloged the stars of 117 movies. In another time and place she would have been known as nerd; the bookish appeal of Atlas Shrugged and The Lord of the Rings is real enough. The later Rand's conversation-starter, "What are your premises?" is an extension of this: both amusingly, precociously pretentious and appealingly dorky.

Some of Rand's most sympathetic episodes occurred in the early years after she came to America. After a characteristically awkward stay with relatives in Chicago (her typing all night made them nuts) she decamped to Hollywood, where she worked for no less than Cecil B. De Mille, who was struck by her powerful gaze and impressed with her life story. The man who would become her husband, Frank O'Conner, was drawn to her for similar reasons.

Perhaps most endearing about her in this time, captured vividly by Burns, is the struggle of the aspiring writer, which Rand felt acutely after De Mille's studio closed with the advent of the "talkies" in film:

Unskilled and anonymous, she had to settle for a series of odd jobs and temporary positions. She fell behind on her rent and started skipping meals. This was not the fate she had expected when she disembarked in New York years earlier. Though she accepted small loans from her family, she was unwilling to ask Frank for help, or even to reveal the extent of her problems to him. On their dates she kept up appearances, never letting him see the depair that was beginning to suffuse her life.

What writer hasn't felt this way?

Also most humanizing is the affection she had for her husband, the way they called each other "Cubbyhole" and "Fluff," how "[s]erious and focused in her professional life, Rand could be silly and girlish with Frank." 'Girlish' is the last word one would use to describe Rand, but the inclusion of such a detail throws the less savory aspects of her character into starker relief.

It is in these same early days that the flaws of Rand's personality and character that would become all-consuming first began to bloom. She became fascinated with the case of William Hickman, who remorselessly murdered and dismembered a twelve-year-old and whose trial became a national sensation, planning (but never starting) a novel with a protagonist based on his Nietzschean superman qualities. Her description of the the character inspired by Hickman, Danny Renahan, skirts sociopathy (emphasis original):

He is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness--resulting from the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning or importance of other people.

It's like Crime and Punishment, without the moral redemption. Indeed, without wanting it in in the first place.

Rand's formulation of Objectivism, which true to its name posited that there were universal, objective, truths about the world that the individual could learn by commanding complete rationality in his thinking and behavior, was a long elaboration on and exercise of the Renehan idealization. Rand took this idea to its outermost extremes: she attracted a handful of close acolytes, including Alan Greenspan, who called themselves The Collective and came to adopt her and her characters' views and even fashion sense. Those who questioned or deviated were castigated in front of the others in a manner not unlike the Soviet show trials she lampooned in her fiction. A unified theory of everything left no room for interpretation or variation.

Perhaps the greatest casualty of her "Virtue of Selfishness" was her husband Frank. Once an up-and-coming actor, his career stalled out, making Rand early on the household's breadwinner. He stumbled on a second career as a gardener during their second extended stay in Hollywood, but it fell apart when Rand insisted they move back to New York. He later displayed a latent talent for painting which gave him some personal satisfaction.

Rand, who did love her husband after her own fashion and needed him to offer balance in her life, nonetheless craved the kind of towering, heroic individuals she created in her fiction and found it in Nathaniel Blumenthal (whom she rechristened Nathaniel Branden), her greatest devotee and twenty-four years her junior. She embarked on an affair with him that lasted a decade and a half and was conducted--rationally, you see--with the knowledge and 'permission' of both Nathaniel's wife Barbara, and Frank. Barbara became increasingly prone to panic attacks, which Rand dismissed as weak mere Emotionalism. Frank, whose abiding stoicism neatly complemented Rand's dominating egotism, was twice a week turned out of his own apartment so Nathaniel and Rand could consummate their tryst. He spent much time at a local bar and may well have become an alcoholic.

Towards the end of his life Frank descended into senility, and Rand--having furiously excommunicated Nathaniel when he eventually confessed that he had been having an affair with a younger woman--dutifully cared for him, albeit it through the filter of her unwavering belief in willpower; she initially hoped he could overcome his condition by rational explanation and training. Her approach to her own mortality following his death is surprisingly poignant: "She did not believe in life after death, she told [Phil] Donahue, otherwise she would have committed suicide by now in order to join Frank." Rand died of lung cancer in her apartment, alone but for a hired nurse.

It's not hard to understand the appeal of Rand's basic notion of individualism to today's conservatives, nor the reflexive repulsion of liberals. But it is a simplified image of Rand that both camps respond to; frankly, given the specifics of godless Calvinism, it would make better sense for both camps to disavow it, as indeed was the case during her lifetime. A closer study of Rand, as provided by Jennifer Burns, would allow her to be appreciated for her place in history, and in history alone remain.

Light Reading

So I'm going over an idea for a writing project, a play, that deals with the current economic climate, class warfare, and Wall Street, and have started doing some reading along those lines. Simon Johnson and James Kwak's 13 Bankers made the financial crisis about as digestible as a lay person as possible, yet the Byzantine quantity and workings of such "innovations" as derivatives, Credit Default Swaps, Mortgage-Backed Securities is... daunting, regardless.

My latest read is Jennifer Burns' excellent Ayn Rand biography, Goddess of the Market. I find the ideology of Rand and her followers morally repugnant, but there is no denying her influence, and any inquiry into the lead-in and aftermath of the crash would be incomplete without an understanding of the mindset that stripped "Greed is good" of all irony.

Rand is fascinating figure in her own right, and I'll have more to say along those lines. This is merely a heads-up on the direction the blog will be taking, after laying fallow for so long.

Why Othello is Almost as Funny as Falstaff

Tonight I attended a lecture by the new director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Michael Witmore, on using data-mining technology on the works of Shakespeare. The use of quantifying technology, typically associated with the sciences and other "real world" pursuits, with something as subjective as literature is novel, and offers many insights, not the least of which has to do with its own subjectivity.

The talk began with an obligatory crack about the Roland Emmerich Shakespeare authorship abortion slithering into theaters this Friday ("The media was asking me for the Folger's position on Anonymous. I told them we're a library; we don't have positions, we have collections.") and then gave some background information on his topic. As an English professor at Carnegie Mellon University was introduced to a program called Docuscope that breaks down text fed into it and assigns tags to different words based on the functions they serve. Originally intended for improving the writing skills of incoming freshmen, Witmore and his University of Glasgow colleague Jonathan Hope fed it Shakespeare's 36 plays and have been using it to analyze the results on grounds of genre.

Witmore's blog demystifies some of the technical aspects of how this works:

Docuscope, that is, codes words and “strings” of words based on the ways in which they render a world experientially for a reader or listener. The theory behind how texts do this, and thus the rational for Docuscope’s coding strategy, is derived from Michael Halliday’s systemic-function grammar. But what is particularly interesting about Docuscope is the human element involved in its creation. The main architect of the system, a rhetorician named David Kaufer, spent 8 years hand-tagging several million pieces of English according to their rhetorical function, and then expanded out this initial tagging spread with wild-card operators so that Docuscope now classes over 200 million strings of English (1 to 10 words in length) into over 100 distinct categories of use or function.

The resulting data clusters, they found, would belong in certain categories, while being (categorically?) excluded from others--given text chunks would be characteristic of ABC, but not XYZ. Add these together and you'd get a Gaussian scatter plot, divided among Tragedy, Comedy, History, and the Late Romances of Shakespeare. The purest Comedy section came from The Merry Wives of Windsor, while the purest History was a scene from Richard II, which after consideration most would probably agree is the least funniest of the History plays.

How these results were reached all have to do with the generic criteria at work. As Witmore described it, comedy often involves two people plotting away, which involves a lot of 'I' and 'you' exchanges, setting in motion a snowballing series of misunderstandings. A hallmark of History, by contrast, is heavily descriptive dialogue, which makes sense considering the sheer amount of, well, history that needs to be conveyed.

These distinctions lead to the seemingly unusual grouping of Othello with The Merry Wives of Windsor in comedy. Its plot, recall, revolves on an elaborate scheme of mounting falsehoods to trick Othello into suspecting his wife of cuckoldry. Familiar comic territory, but punctuated with the horrible success of Iago's stratagem.

An obvious objection to this computerized approach to textual analysis is that its reasoning is circular. A computer program can only find what its programmers tell it to find, so how can it actually tell us anything new? Witmore was asked such a question in the follow-up Q&A (I think. It was by an analyst who works with similar data, and so the wording was far more technical and above my pay grade.), and his response was, essentially, that one had to find a balance, that overly detailed programming would indeed provide narrow and redundant results.

I myself had a hard time getting past the issue of the premises Docuscope is given, but it seems its real strength is in allowing us to re-examine our notions of genre and classification of plays. Witmore mentioned to me that one of the other surprising results was the grouping in History of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and this had all to do with the extensive descriptive language in the play, plus the whole Pyramus and Thisby episode. One can actually track the points in a play where it veers into different territory, he said. More accurate than identifying plays by genre is their tendency towards a given genre.

Thus the usefulness of the Docuscope approach is in fact its strict logic. Though we may know what we're telling it when we input its text tagging parameters, its thoroughness and consistency in applying them will show us things we may not have before considered.

The Revolution Devours Its Own

Netflix's decision to split its DVD-by-mail and streaming video services into two completely separate companies is... vexing, to say the least:

...What is Reed Hastings smoking? As far as anyone can tell, he seems to have rolled up pages from The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen's influential 1997 book about the ways that successful companies die at the hands of upstarts. Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, coined the term "disruptive technology," which describes innovations that come out of nowhere to undercut a market leader's dominant position. Christensen cited the way that Digital Equipment, the leader in 1970s-era corporate minicomputers, completely missed the 1980s boom in personal computers. But a better example may be Netflix itself—its all-you-can-eat business model disrupted, and eventually killed, the previously dominant Blockbuster model for movie rentals. Hastings is likely paranoid, then, that Netflix is vulnerable to the same kind of disruption. And that's the logic behind the mail/streaming separation. Hastings would prefer to kill his own golden goose before anyone else beats him to it.

In its own technocratic fashion this brings to mind the image of the Titan Saturn (Cronos, to the Greeks) devouring his children. He did so in order to prevent the same kind of overthrow he led against his father, which famously led to his wife Ops/Rhea substituting a stone for the last of them, Jupiter/Zeus, who grows up to lead a rebellion against the Titans. (God of War 2 summarized it nicely.) Netflix, in announcing the Qwikster split, just swallowed a stone of its own.

CEO Reed Hastings is essentially betting that because streaming technology is "the future," he needs to cut off the DVD-mailing service before it becomes insolvent and obsolete. But their streaming library is underwhelming and best functioned as a compliment to its vast DVD library. It doesn't have enough to justify a subscription on its own. That Qwikster was seemingly named as a nod toward another doomed internet upstart, and with no consideration that the domain name and Twitter handle had already been snapped up, does not bode well.

The net effect of all this, of course, is to anger a customer base already irate with having its monthly rates jacked up. For myself, my movie-watching habits are bad enough that I've had discs sitting for months at a time without getting watched, and my internet connection isn't fast enough to let me watch movies uninterrupted. I'm probably going to cut "Netflix" loose because I can't justify paying for something I can't/won't use, especially when my Amazon Prime membership gives me free access to a sizeable library of streaming films already. I may hold on to Qwikster to get ahold of more obscure titles, but even that's not a certainty. Redbox aside, Netflix has until now dominated the movie rental market; dividing itself and its customer base makes it much more vulnerable now to competition than it was before.

Netflix may have done the Qwikster split in order to get rid of a declining business model, but in doing so they may have hastened their own decline. As with many a revolution before, the insurgent, now established as the leader, can only go down and will resort to dread measures to keep its grip on power. Netflix's anxiety is perfectly understandable, but they should have known what the Greeks and Romans figured out millenia ago, that those who try to escape their fate will only blunder into it the worse.

That Day

It was a school day. I was a high school sophomore. After waking up and showering, I got ready for class. My high school operated on the block system, whereby instead of seven or eight classes of less than an hour each were crammed into one day, three or four classes roughly an hour and a half long were spread over A and B days. The B days had a kind of study hall period in the early morning, so that one needed not be there until 9:30 or thereabouts. That Tuesday was such a day, and so I was able to be more leisurely about getting ready.

My mother, having worked the night shift at the hospital the night before, called the house. No surprise there. From what I remember, it was a typical phone call: be there in 15 minutes (or whatever), don't forget to put the garbage out.

Then, before hanging up, almost as an afterthought, "Turn on the TV, the World Trade Center's been attacked."

What?

Such was my understanding of the wider world around me that the phrase 'World Trade Center' sounded familiar, though I really had no idea what it was, not even that included two iconic twin skyscrapers. In any case, it was news. I went over to the living room TV and switched it to some station, any station, to the chagrin of my younger, hockey playing brother who had been watch ESPN.

And here memory, notoriously unreliable, fails completely. I don't remember what I said, much of what I immediately felt, or even what I saw. I might have seen the live 8:28 (my time) collapse of the second tower, but probably not the 7:59 collapse of the first. But everything is fragments.

At the school they had the TV, a box large-screen sitting on top of a rolling cart, airing coverage of the unfolding disaster. Classes proceeded as normal.

A friend of mine was somewhat bewildered, saying, "They cancelled classes at my dad's school when Kennedy was assassinated."

Being so removed from the disaster, the following days felt less alarming than slightly menacingly strange. The grounding of nearly all air traffic felt particularly off because the high school is located in front of our town's landing strip, and descending aircraft were an unremarked feature of everyday life.

My brother was angry with Muslims. My mother and I explained to him that collective punishment was wrong, and used as a personal hypothetical his Chinese friend whose life would be made more difficult by an attack by China. He came around.

We heard about people saying very unkind things to the Egyptian family with whom we were friends.

Strange times. Strange times, all and ever.