Clio and Musette move to a new address at wordpress

Readers are invited to check out Musette's new blog at aliasclio.wordpress.com. It will, Musette hopes, be much the same as her old blog here at blogspot and cover the same kind of material.

Many thanks to all of you who have continued to check back here to see if anything new has been posted.

Wishing readers a happy Advent, merry Christmas, and happy New Year

Will this work? Or will it not? Musette just attempted a post, but it was lost because, though she remembered to "save" it, she did not save it to her hard drive, and absent-mindedly saved the error message when it appeared in its all too predictable way. Of course, this meant that she lost the material she had previously saved.

Calling all American Democrats

I believe there are at least a few American Democrats who read my blog. If so, could you please tell your fellow-Democrat Michael Moore to stay home and keep his nose out of our elections? Read the piece below, in Canada's National Post, and tell me if you don't think he was going rather too far in his interventionism. Here's an excerpt from the article, for those of you who don't have time to click on the link here:

Moore has built his reputation as a critic of mainstream American culture. There is no time like an election to raise the issues Moore raises. With the U.S. election in the final month of the campaign, why not participate in the political debate back home? If you believe your own backyard is such a mess, why play political peeping Tom with the neighbours?

After all, Moore has previously been caught interfering in Canadian elections.

While in Toronto promoting Fahrenheit 9/11 during the 2004 federal election, Moore attacked Stephen Harper and the newly-merged Conservative Party of Canada.

Electing a Conservative government would be a step backward for Canadians, Moore said.

Likewise, when polls showed a Conservative minority on the eve of election day 2006, Moore said the following in a statement to Canadians: “Oh, Canada -- you're not really going to elect a Conservative majority on Monday, are you? [...] I mean, if you're going to reduce Canada to a cheap download of Bush & Co., then at least don't surrender so easily.

Clio returns

Musette: Clio my dearest, where have you been? I haven't been able to write for weeks; it's getting positively painful and I'm losing all my readers!

Clio: Well, that's not all my fault, is it? I thought you were having some kind of trouble with your computer and it didn't seem worthwhile to waste my inspiration on someone who couldn't make effective use of it.

Musette: I suppose you're right about the computer. Even now it's still giving me trouble. I can never be sure whether it will let me publish posts or even comments to posts. Anyway, I'm glad to see you back, although I'm so brain-dead after your absence that it will be some time before I can make use of your influence.

Clio: What do you have to offer today?

Musette: Before you showed up, I thought I'd post a bit from an old column of Julie Burchill's that I stumbled on by accident. It made me laugh. But it has nothing to do with history...well, perhaps it does, after all. It's really about disguised snobbery and paternalism. It's of historical interest because once upon a time people didn't feel the need to disguise their snobbery, and now they do. But -

Clio: But what? I sense some reserve in your tone, darling.

Musette: It's just that Theodore Dalrymple bangs on about the same things as the snobs whom Julie Burchill excoriates, but I rather like his social commentary. Yet I find Burchill's views sympathetic too, which is inconsistent of me, isn't it? Perhaps one difference is that Dalrymple is honest about the problems of the English working classes and what he believes to be the cause of them, while the people whom Burchill holds in contempt cover themselves in smarmy niceness and don't see that some of their own political decisions and their way of life have contributed to the mess. Anyway, here's the bit that made me laugh:

Middle-class parents may stuff their children full of fruit and veg, but they abuse them in a hundred ways completely unknown to the innocent, coronary-courting sink-estate mum, by hot-housing them academically until suicide seems a welcome option (middle-class young men aged between 18 and 25 have never killed themselves as much, often just before or after an "important" exam), by making them appear in self-serving TV programmes as dinky accessories to their parents' fab lifestyle, and worst of all by waving their horrible hairy scrotums in tiny children's faces in the name of (yeah, right) "growing up with a healthy attitude to sex".

Among all of last week's breast-beating about the beastly proles killing their kiddies with calories, no one so much as raised an eyebrow at an excerpt from John Mortimer's forthcoming autobiography, printed in a Sunday paper:

"I was 62 when my daughter Rosie was born. When she was very young we were having a bath together (a fact which would lead to our immediate arrest if known to the social workers) and she suddenly said, 'I don't love you, Dad.'

"'That's very sad,' I told her.

"'Yes,' Rosie admitted, 'it's sad but it is interesting.'"

Such is the arrogance of the middle classes that it obviously never occurred to Mortimer that his daughter had ceased to love him because, let's face it, to be trapped in a confined space with a naked, wet, 64-year-old John Mortimer must be so unpleasant that it would feel to a small child exactly like a punishment, one that must be outlawed somewhere in the Geneva Convention - he's a lawyer, he should know. I've often thought it would be fun to be a lesbian, but such an early experience would make it practically compulsory. No, there's definitely worse things I could do than fill my teen angel up with carbos; praise the Lord and pass the chip pan.

Some thoughts about art and life

Until very recently, a central claim for the novel was that it was a vehicle for moral and ethical enquiry. Cheeringly, Wood does not agree with the superior persons who assure us that such a view is hopelessly naïve, and explain that no novel is about anything except the act of its own composition. (That, of course, is all that many of those who have learned to write novels in creative writing courses can write about.) Wood sees in the novel the virtue that Bernard Williams found absent from much moral philosophy, that of reflecting the choice between conflicting goods rather than between a polarized good and bad. Novels should not be propaganda on behalf of a particular moral code—Wood justly deplores the "contagion of moralizing niceness" endemic in online reader reviews —but they have characteristically enquired into the sustainability of such codes (and this is true even of novelists, such as Robbe- Grillet, who disown such an agenda). A long list of examples could be given; in fact the difficulty would be who to omit.

PAUL DEAN, "The Art of Reality."

When I was about eleven years old, I moved with my family to Geneva one summer. My brothers and I knew no children of our own age, and in fact there appeared to be none in our neighbourhood. The Swiss, and particularly the people of Geneva, are notorious for the way they effectively hide themselves and their lives from foreigners. Having arrived in early July, we had not started school, so we had no school friends to talk to or play with. My brothers, who formed a sort of tribe on their own, built forts in the garden and played rough games which I was not welcome to join, and anyway, I was growing too old for games of that kind. So what could I do? I read. There was a room at the top of the house, three stories up, where our books lay in boxes, waiting to be unpacked. I sat there, day after day, taking books out of boxes and starting them, sometimes putting them back if they appeared to be too difficult, often ploughing ahead as well as I could.

One of the books I discovered at that time was a short collection of essays by Somerset Maugham, called The Ten Best Novels in the World, or something like that. Among Maugham's selections were Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, Madame Bovary, The Red and the Black, and David Copperfield. Many of the books were far too old for me, and perhaps Maugham's book of essays was too, for in addition to describing the books he had selected, he provided a biographical essay on their authors. So appalling did I find the lives he described, and especially the marriages (remember, I was only eleven at the time), that I remember promising myself then and there that I would never marry a writer. Not only do they invade the privacy of one's family life with their detached and critical eyes, but they get to have the last word on it.

My resolution has so far proven to be quite unnecessary, since no writer has ever proposed to me. But I was recently reminded of it by a series of news items I read about writers and their lives which I had coincidentally encountered at the same time. One of the writers was Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of the Anne stories and many other books about spunky young women. Her grand-daughter recently confessed in the Globe and Mail that Montgomery had committed suicide. Another of the writers was, not surprisingly, David Foster Wallace, who recently committed suicide. I didn't know his work, though I'd certainly heard his name before, but it was difficult not to be aware of his death because it was so widely reported and occasioned so many arguments and so much distress among his admirers. Finally, I happened by chance to stumble on a New Yorker piece about the children's writer Madeleine L'Engle, whose early work I knew and liked well enough, but whose later novels repelled me. She died of old age rather than suicide, but the New Yorker article revealed that her life and her marriage were far more painful and complex than she had allowed them to appear in her more autobiographical writings.

There are two equal and opposite truths about writers. One is that their families almost invariably find it difficult to live with them, even if they are not suicidal or mentally ill. The other is that their admirers, with equal inevitability, look to them as models of how to live, that is, they look not merely to their literary work for insights into life and human nature, but to their lives as they were actually lived. And, also inevitably, they are usually profoundly disappointed, perhaps so much so that they lose all interest in the writer in question, feeling themselves to have been betrayed.

Of the three writers named here, Lucy Maud Montgomery was perhaps the least likely to have inspired such feelings in her readers. She has been dead for too long now, and it is for some reason easier to feel this way about writers who are, if not our contemporaries, at least alive at the same time as ourselves. On the other hand, it is clear that many of David Foster Wallace's admirers were not only distressed by his suicide, but took it personally, as if he had let them down. Perhaps this is because he was known to have triumphed over addiction and depression, and gone on to live a productive and apparently happy life. Comments on his death on various blogs echoed with anger, disappointment, and grief, a sign of how strongly many of his readers seem to have identified with him. I must admit that when I read such pieces of his as were available on line, I found it difficult to understand why or how they could have done so. Like so many writers of the last fifteen years, Wallace to me seemed to have great difficulty breaking out of his own head, his own perceptions. It's obvious that he wanted to do so, but it's hard to imagine that he ever did. I could be wrong here of course, as my knowledge of his work is quite limited, but he struck me as ill-equipped for either story-telling or the creation of characters.

As for Madeleine L'Engle, it may be that revelations of her life hit her readers hardest of all. Authors of children's books are even more burdened than other writers by the expectations of their fans, who are too young to understand that there is no necessary connection between a writer's outlook on life as it is expressed in books, and the writer's real life. The New Yorker article revealed not only that her son had died young of alcoholism, but that his mother had refused to acknowledge this fact even in private. Worse, he had apparently hated her fiction, or at least those works in which he had appeared in fictional guise. The writer of the article went so far as to hint that his death was somehow his mother's fault, for making him appear so saintly in her fiction that he was never able to grow out of childhood. Or something of the sort; the writer's exact accusation remains vague. The article brought an outpouring of anger from L'Engle's fans, not because the article itself was too revealing, or unfair, though it almost certainly was, but because they found it impossible to cope with the revelation that L'Engle's children had found her a difficult and a distant mother.

It seems that Oscar Wilde was wrong. Not only are certain kinds of art expected by their audience to be morally edifying, but the audience insists that the lives of their creators must be too. Painters and poets, with rare exceptions, seldom awaken similar demands for their moral perfection among their fans. Nor do classical musicians (although perhaps popular singer/songwriters do, and some actresses, and quite a few philosophers). Why should we expect so much from novelists? Perhaps novels bear a greater burden of expectation in this respect than any other art form because a novel that does not deal with the moral dilemmas of human beings must be a tedious and empty exercise. It is possible to read a poem, or look at a painting, or hear a piece of music, without any attention to their moral content, valuing them only for their beauty. Writers, in contrast, create characters, set them loose in the world, and sit in judgment on them and on their actions. How can we trust them if they turn out to be only too human themselves? Our indignant response upon discovering their feet of clay may be naive, but it is entirely natural.

A few random quotations

Taking the long view
It is all too easy to forget--more especially if one discusses the great historians one by one, devoting a chapter or essay to each as one proceeds along the giants' causeway--that historians write in the context of two traditions, always assumed though not always made explicit. One is the "long" tradition, reaching back to Herodotus and Thucydides, and proceeding majestically from St Augustine, Sarpi, and Machiavelli, to Montesquieu and Voltaire, Robertson, Hume, and Gibbon; the other the "short" tradition established by their immediate predecessors. Treating any group of more or less contemporary historians together serves to remind us of this fact. --John Clive. NOT BY FACT ALONE

Early feminism?
When I make myself imagine what it is like to be one of those women who live at home, faithfully serving their husbands - women who have not a single exciting prospect in life yet who believe that they are perfectly happy - I am filled with scorn. Often they are of quite good birth, yet have had no opportunity to find out what the world is like. --THE PILLOW BOOK OF SEI SHONAGON

What do we really value in our friends?
You have been reading Byron. You have been marking the passages that seem to approve of your own character. I find marks against all those sentences which seem to express a sardonic yet passionate nature; a moth-like impetuosity dashing itself against hard glass. You thought, as you drew your pencil there, "I too throw off my cloak like that. I too snap my fingers the face of destiny." Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fills the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. Thre is a brown pool on the table - it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-handkerchief. You then stuff your handkerchief back into your pocket - that is not Byron; that is you; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene; and if you are dead I shall weep. --Virginia Woolf. THE WAVES

Finally, an interesting email to Eve Tushnet I discovered on her website, about the differences between hetero- and homosexual relationships. Eve was the first blogger I ever read regularly, and the first to whom I wrote at her email address (she has no comments box):

Your comment "the cruel intensifying of drama I associated with sex really only took place in heterosexual couples" seems exactly right (to this straight guy at least). It raised this thought: the standard heterosexual relationship is morally problematic in a way the standard homosexual relationship is not. And this difference explains why ethical systems have an institution of marriage.

Heterosexual relationships are often, indeed typically, characterized by massive disparities -- differences in physical strength, level of and frequency of sexual desire, degree of emotional involvement, and, of course, the ultimate differential risk of pregnancy. We have ethical norms like marriage, like chivalry -- intensely powerful, civilization-shaping norms -- precisely because this relationship is a disaster waiting to happen. Leave aside any practical consequences (who takes care of the kids, etc.) these norms are essential for reliable moral behavior. Without them, people just inflict endless injustices and cruelties on each other. Homosexual relationships simply do not pose analogous problems. No one ever created 'homosexual marriage' or homosexual chivalry, because, by and large, no such institutions were needed.

Two conclusions:

a) At least one strand of opposition to gay marriage (I am a supporter, FWIW) should be "it's not you, it's us." You don't need these powerful norms -- you'll do just fine! Using a jackhammer to crush a walnut inevitably degrades the performance of the jackhammer. Can't we please find some other way to officially validate your lifestyle!

b) absent a teleology of the human body, we should admit that an active homosexual lifestyle is less morally problematic than an active heterosexual lifestyle. No risk of pregnancy. Lower average asymmetries in power, expectation, and emotional investment. Less likelihood of accidental deception. Better fit with contractual liberal models all around.

Humorous Historians

Longtime readers may remember that Clio and Musette have occasionally commented upon the restrictions faced by quantitative historians. Forced to work with whatever sources happen to have survived through the ages, they may produce works of peculiarly narrow focus about uninteresting issues, truncated abruptly when the sources run out. Clio and I cannot promise that non-historians, or indeed anyone else, will be as amused by the following exercise as we were, but we hope that you will be able to draw something from it even if it fails to provoke a smile.

John Clive was a historian who taught at Harvard for 30 years, until his death in 1990. Clive was conscious of the problem we have sketched above and makes excellent fun of it. At the end of his wonderful book of historiographical essays, Not By Fact Alone, he includes an article about what direction the writing of history would take in the future, "Where Are We Heading?" The piece must have been written at the height of the profession's fascination with quantitative social history (the "New History", as it was once known), because that is the straw man which Clive tosses delightfully up in a blanket, something no one would bother to do now because the subject is as dead as a doornail.

Pondering the colourless writing of which the New History was often accused in its heyday, he suggests, as an example of the kind of subjects that interested them, the "relationship between number of siblings and extent of baldness among the clockmakers of southeastern Ohio between 1823 and 1859." (This is no exaggeration, or not really; I have read works of social history which discussed the voting patterns of Paris hair-dressers in the early 20th century, or others which looked at the reading habits of Quebec farmers in the 19th.) Having proposed the topic, Clive goes on to imagine how other great historians of the past might have handled it. I have copied a portion of each of his pastiches below.

Gibbon on bald clockmakers:
A melancholy duty devolves upon the historian who wishes to delineate the progress of luxury and error among those sullen and rebellious subjects whose occidental peregrinations led them to enjoy and abuse the hospitality proffered by the verdant declivities of the Ohio valley. He must, though, with becoming submission, inquire whether the divine clockmaker, had he foreseen that the descendants of those fierce and foolish sectaries would one day attempt to emulate his handiwork, could have brought himself in the first place to countenance the creation of the universe...

Carlyle on bald clockmakers:
Behold, then, matter for wonder--and tears, too. Two score and seven timemakers, barepated as cannonballs, ticktocking away, every man Jack of them, in Nelsonville, Hanging Rock and Athens--far from marble Acropolis and Mederranean sun, this Athens--but with demos a plenty, as well as brisk Ohio air--. In Marietta, too, named for sad Queen Toinette, of bread and cakes and tumbril fame. All of them with three or more strapping and rosy-cheeked brothers and sisters, fit as fiddles scraping yankee doodle doo. Destiny dim-brooding over shiny crowns, making us mindful of brother of German Louis, grandson of Charlemagne, Kaiser Karl der Kahle--of Mersen and Lorraine renown. Of Stratford William also, in Avon vale, he who wrote that time himself was bald, and that therefore the world's end would have bald followers...

Macaulay on bald clockmakers:
As every schoolboy knows, the population of Marietta, Ohio, in 1826 amounted to 1,051 souls. Since that time, what was then a mere hamlet has become a town and grown to a greatness which this generation can only contemplate with pride and wonder.
[...]
As baldness becomes more and more common, borthers and sisters become less and less necessary. Why this should be so we shall state as concisely as possible. As civilization advances, the wearing of hats increases. As a greater number of hats comes into the possession of a greater number of families, more hats will be worn. The more often hats are worn in outh, the greater the loss of hair in middle age. It follows, therefore, as night does day that in the Southeastern portion of Ohio, one of the United States of America, 47 percent of those clockmakers with three or more brothers and sisters were wholly or partly bald, whereas of those with two or fwer brothers and sisters as great a number as 49 percent found themselves in a similar predicament.