The Other World

Clio and Musette move to a new address at wordpress

2009-01-01T11:55:00.006-05:00

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

2008-12-17T18:37:00.003-05:00

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

2008-10-11T12:04:00.003-04:00

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

2008-10-06T15:38:00.000-04:00

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

2008-10-04T23:41:00.007-04:00

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

2008-09-25T11:51:00.003-04:00

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

2008-09-24T20:44:00.002-04:00

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.

What do they teach them at these schools?

2008-09-23T15:51:00.004-04:00

Ah my dears, Clio and La Musette are still struggling with computer problems. It's a great pity, and we apologise to faithful readers who are wondering why we have disappeared, and when we might be back.

Here's a bit from a piece in The New Atlantis, via Arts and Letters Daily, arguing that concern for the effect that google-reliance has upon our ability to "read deeply" seems misplaced in an age when students are taught not to read deeply, but to take apart what they read:

Likewise, although [Bauerlein] sees and spends quite a lot of time on the denigration of tradition, he doesn’t see that it is part of a larger ahistoricism that not only denies the relevance of the past but, effectively, teaches that the past never existed except as an imperfect version of the present. What Herbert Butterfield called “the Whig interpretation of history,” taken to its extreme, is now revealed as what it always was: a denial of history. That is a very big subject, and this is not a very big book. Yet what it does do it does well, which is to serve as an essential if difficult and depressing guide through the increasing profusion of survey data which suggest an affirmative answer to the question of Nicholas Carr’s title in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”—and to show that it is our children and grandchildren who are preceding us in stupidity. But once that process is complete, presumably we won’t care any more that culture and tradition are not being transmitted to the next generation.

It seems odd that so many people object to the effects of deconstruction, the "linguistic turn" and all the other trends that are loosely grouped under the label of postmodernism, that these trends are in fact rather tired and threadbare, and that, as yet, nothing has come along to replace them.

I suppose part of the problem is that the professors who have the skill to do so are elderly and on the verge of retirement, and their immediate juniors are the baby-boomers, many of whom lack both the skill and the desire to find another way to teach students about the past. Although it must be said that, whatever their limitations, the baby-boomer professors of the humanities still received a better education than the one which they chose to hand down to those who came after them.

Here's a bit of Donne, to refresh the spirits, and below it is a bit from an online essay-writing (cheating) service, showing just how far the tentacles of Deconstruction have spread:

Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labor, I in labor lie.
The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,
Is tir'd with standing though he never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven's Zone glittering,
But a far fairer world encompassing.
Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,
That th'eyes of busy fools may be stopt there.
Unlace your self, for that harmonious chime,
Tells me from you, that now it is bed time.
Off with that happy busk, which I envie,
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown going off, such beautious state reveals,
As when from flow'ry meads th'hills shadow steals.
Off with that wiry Coronet and show
The hairy diadem which on you doth grow:
Now off with those shoes, and then softly tread
In this, love's hallow'd temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes, heaven's Angels us'd to be
Receiv'd by men: thou Angel bringst with thee?
A heaven like Mahomet's Paradice, and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we eas'ly know,
By this these Angels from an evil sprite,
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.
License my roving hands, and let them go,
Behind, before, above, between, below.
O my America! my new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man man'd,
My mine of precious stones: my emperie,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.
Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth'd must be,
To taste whole joyes. Gems which you women use
Are like Atlanta's balls, cast in mens views,
That when a fool's eye lighteth on a gem,
His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them:
Like pictures or like books gay coverings made
For lay-men, are all women thus array'd.
Themselves are mystick books, which only wee
(Whom their imputed grace will dignify)
Must see rever'd. Then since that I may know;
As liberally, as to a midwife show
Thyself: cast all, yea, this white linen hence,There is no penance due to innocence.
To teach thee I am naked first; why than,
What needst thou have more covering then a man?

My dears, don't do this if you wish to preserve your sanity and your intelligence intact:

John Donne's poem "To His Mistress Going to Bed" (Donne, 1986: 124) fuses imagery of sexual exploration with the global colonialism of the seventeenth century. It is, as George Saintsbury suggests in his essay on Donne "a piece of frank naturalism redeemed from courseness by passion and poetic completeness." (Saintsbury, 1961:18), however it also stands, as we shall see, as an example of the ways in which the male literary psychology continually draws parallels between feminine sexuality and the conquering of other worlds.

In Donne's poem, the exploration of the lover's hands mirrors the ships and the passages of the adventurer:

"Licence my roving hands, and let them go Before, behind, between, above and below. O my America, my new found land, My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned." (Donne, 1986: 124)

The symbolism here becomes not only one of exploration and the pushing of boundaries but of deflowering - the woman's uncharted territories matching the unmapped landscape of the Americas and Africa, recently discovered and written about with suitably masculine bravado in such books as Walter Raleigh's The Discovery of Guiana and the Journal of the Second Voyage Thereto (Raleigh, 1887).

For Donne, exploration and conquering becomes a facet of masculinity, we suspect his mistress' protestation and eventual acquiescence is an integral part of the sexual excitation just as an important part of exploration is the hardships faced on the journey.

Some humour; some Lewis

2008-09-17T12:44:00.007-04:00

My dears, CM has been bedevilled both by computer problems and by her own natural distraction these last few days, which is why she hasn't been posting anything, in spite of having several half-finished, or half-started, posts in the works. To amuse you, once again, and to let you know that there's still life in Clio's Mortal, here's another quotation from the works of Logan Pearsall Smith.

The servant gave me my coat and hat, and in a glow of self-satisfaction I walked out into the night. "A delightful evening," I reflected, "the nicest kind of people. What I said about finance and philosophy impressed them; and how they laughed when I imitated a pig squealing.

But soon after, "God, it's awful", I muttered, "I wish I was dead".

LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH, Trivia, 1918

And just because I like it, a bit from C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, as the ship's company is deciding not to sail on into a mysterious darkness ahead of them. One member of the party - the immortal mouse Reepicheep - objects:

"If I were addressing peasants or slaves," [Reepicheep] said, "I might assume that this suggestion proceeded from cowardice. But I hope it will never be told in Narnia that a company of noble and royal persons in the flower of their age turned tail because they were afraid of the dark."

"But what manner of use would it be plowing through that blackness?" asked Drinian.

"Use?" replied Reepicheep. "Use, Captain? If by use you mean filling our bellies or our purses, I confess it will be of no use at all. So far as I know we did not set sail to look for things useful but to seek honour and adventure. And here is as great an adventure as ever I heard of, and here, if we turn back, no little impeachment of all our honours."

I don't think Lewis's great gift for pastiche was ever on better display than in certain passages of his Narnia series. This particular excerpt is also a good summary of the way that aristocrats once perceived themselves in relation to their social inferiors. Whether it was ever accurate is another matter. I thought of quoting it to my students in order to explain the distinction between "aristocratic" and "bourgeois", because they had some difficulty grasping the idea, beyond the matter of titles, but feared I might get a reputation for frivolity.

Lewis has sometimes been described as a "coarse" writer, partly because of his tendency to use his fiction for didactic purposes, and partly because of his occasional lapses into a kind of bullying tone in his non-fictional works. One of the reasons A.N. Wilson preferred his scholarly commentaries on English literature is that it was the one area of Lewis's work, he believed, in which Lewis's tendency to fight like a "police-court solicitor" was held in check. I understand what these critics mean; I can think of many examples in Lewis's work to support these views; and yet, and yet - I don't agree with them. In all his work, Lewis could move from coarseness and bullying to a hyper-sensitive, poetic awareness of the texture of the human experience of the senses, of life in the body. Smells, sounds, the weather, the look of firelight or sunlight in the interior of a house, their effect upon our moods - all these he conveys with a fidelity and vigour that few writers have equalled. In re-reading the Narnia series, in particular, I've found that they awaken not merely the memory of previous readings, but a curious sense that I am reading and remembering an account of my own experience, so intensely did I respond to Lewis's word-pictures and sensations. It may not be coincidental that Lewis was especially good at conveying the feelings and characteristics of animals.

A few favourites follow:

Mr. Bultitude's mind was as furry and unhuman in shape as his body. He did not remember, as a man in his situation would have remembered, the provincial zoo from which he had escaped during a fire, nor his first snarling and terrified arrival at the Manor, nor the slow stages whereby he had learned to love and trust its inhabitants. He did not know that he loved and trusted them now. He did not know that they were people, nor that he was a bear. Indeed, he did not know that he existed at all: everything that is represented by the words I and Me and Thou was absent from his mind. When Mrs. Maggs gave him a tin of golden syrup, as she did every Sunday morning, he did not recognize either a giver or a recipient. Goodness occurred and he tasted it. And that was all. Hence his loves might, if you wished, all be described as cupboard loves: food and warmth, hands that caressed, voices that reassured, were their objects. But if by a cupboard love you meant something cold or calculating you would be quite misunderstanding the real quality of the beast's sensations. He was no more like a human egoist than he was like a human altruist. There was no prose in his life. The appetencies which a human mind might disdain as cupboard loves were for him quivering and ecstatic aspirations which absorbed his whole being, infinite yearnings, stabbed with the threat of tragedy and shot through with the colours of Paradise. One of our race, if plunged back for a moment in the warm, trembling, iridescent pool of that pre-Adamite consciousness, would have emerged believing that he had grasped the absolute: for the states below reason and the states above it have, by their common contrast to the life we know, a certain superficial resemblance. Sometimes there returns to us from infancy the memory of a nameless delight or terror, attached to any delightful or dreadful thing, a potent adjective floating in a nounless void, a pure quality. At such moments we have experience of the shallows of that pool. But fathoms deeper than any memory can take us, right down in the central warmth and dimness, the bear lived all its life. --THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH

Though Tashbaan looked very far away when they first saw it, it refused to look any further away as they went on. Shasta gave up looking back at it, for it only gave him the feeling that they were not moving at all. Then the light became a nuisance. The glare of the sand made his eyes ache: but he knew he mustn't shut them. He must screw them up and keep looking on ahead at Mount Pire and shouting out directions. Then came the heat. He noticed it for the first time when he had to dismount and walk: as he slipped down to the sand the heat from it struck up into his face as if from the opening of an oven door. Next time it was worse. But the third time, as his bare feet touched the sand he screamed with pain and got one foot back in the strirrup and the other half over Bree's back before you could have said knife.
[...]
On again, trot and walk and trot, jingle-jingle-jingle, squeak-squeak-squeak, smell of hot horse, smell of hot self, blinding glare, headache. And nothing at all different for mile after mile. Tashbaan would never look any further away. The mountains would never look any nearer. You felt this had been going on for always--jingle-jingle-jingle, squeak-squeak-squeak, smell of hot horse, smell of hot self. --THE HORSE AND HIS BOY

It wasn't nearly such a nice cave as Mr Tumnus's, Lucy thought--just a hole in the ground but dry and earthy. It was very small so that when they all lay down they were all a bundle of clothes together, and what with that and being warmed up by their long walk they were really rather snug. If only the floor of the cave had been a little smoother! Then Mrs. Beaver handed round in the dark a little flask out of which everyone drank something--it made one cough and splutter a little and stung the throat, but it also made you feel deliciously warm after you'd swallowed it--and everyone went to sleep. --THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE

The voice...seemed to be sunlight and gold. Like gold not only as gold beautiful but as it is heavy: like sunlight not only as it falls gently on English walls in autumn but as it beats down on the jungle or the desert to engender life or destroy it. --THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH (again)

The Case of the Missing Muses

2008-09-16T12:20:00.001-04:00

People are beginning to send me emails to ask where Clio and CM (whom we plan to call "Musette" from now on, after a stroke of Clio-inspiration) have disappeared. It's either my computer, dear people, or my Blogger account. I'm not sure which one. I don't see how my computer can have a virus infection, because it's protected by so many firewall and other security barriers. In fact, I suspect it may be the security barriers that are partly responsible for my difficulty with posting, but I don't really know. I am thinking of opening a Wordpress account; I hear they have fewer problems of this kind, and their comments function is certainly better than the one I now have.

So there it is. I will see if I can post this, and if I can, I may try to publish a real post later today.

Comments on comments

2008-09-09T11:47:00.001-04:00

CM has been unable to post comments on her own blog for the last 18 hours or so. What follows is a response to Baduin's comments, which first appeared yesterday afternoon.

I didn't mean to connect "fagging" as such to military ability. I was trying to connect the tacit encouragement of sexual relations between pupils to the (increasing) militarization and anti-domestication of English male society after the 17th century, in which militarization, by the way, I would include the navy as well as land armies. I remember reading in Paul Scott's biography that one of his public-school educated friends had never sat in an arm-chair until the war was over. He'd gone straight into the army from school, and neither furnished arm-chairs to their inmates.

I don't think I'd connect fagging to the disappearance of patriotism either, as I said. I do think that the whole women's rights movement, and the appearance of women in formerly all-male institutions like Cambridge and Oxford, very gradually changed "Establishment" men's outlook on women and domesticity, so that they became less hostile to both, and less eager to flee female influence, as well as less able to do so. The decline of patriotism is probably an entirely distinct phenomenon.

Clio

Now, having said that, I'd like to add, in response to the latest commenter, who speaks of conditions in the public schools: yes, I am aware that the discipline in early 19th-century public schools was almost non-existent, and also that there was a major reform movement to improve them later in the century. However, the reason I assumed that conditions there remained bad for some time is that the citation I included from Symonds' formerly restricted writing on the subject, indicates that conditions at Harrow, where Byron had gone to school in the early 19th century, remained appalling until at least the middle of the 19th century when Symonds was a pupil there. His description refers to the year 1854. But yes, it is a mistake to assume that conditions there were still similar in the early 20th century, or that they are similar today. I don't think that was the point other commenters were making, though. Most North Americans are rather horrified by the idea of sending children to boarding school before the age of puberty.

Some musings on Byron and masculinity

2008-09-07T22:08:00.004-04:00

CM is occasionally annoyed by writers like Warren Farrell or Roger Devlin, who, in trying to rehabilitate men's reputation after 30 years of anti-male bombardment in certain areas of popular culture, sometimes go a little too far, and make it seem as if men have always and everywhere done all the "heavy lifting" in society. Devlin, to be sure, makes an exception of African tribal and village society, but it was not only in Africa that women shouldered the heavy work while men amused themselves. Here's a passage from Benita Eisler's Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame, based on observations in Byron's letters to his mother:

The alluring adventuress [a "mistress" of Byron's] was a universe away from the Albanian women, who, Byron observed, and not altogether disapprovingly, "are treated like slaves, beaten & in short complete beasts of burden, they plough, dig, & sow, I found them carrying wood & actually repairing the highways." While the men occupied themselves solely with killing--making war and hunting--"the women are the labourers, which after all is no great hardship in so delightful a climate," he noted airily.

As CM has noted before, Byron's mother was both needy and a battle-axe, which may account in part for his fear of women and his habits as a compulsive seducer and heartbreaker. He had also been sexually abused by a female servant when in his late childhood, at around age 11 or so. I once believed that such outrages were usually perpetrated by masters on servants, but as I learned over time, things are seldom so simple. It was also a shock to me to discover just how rampant sexual abuse of students by their older fellows was in the great public schools of England. I knew that there was a great deal of homosexual play, but assumed it was consensual, more or less, in the absence of girls. I had not heard that it was so often violent, degrading, and abusive. In the same book, discussing Byron's time at Harrow, Eisler quotes a passage from a long restricted series of writings on this and similar matters by the Victorian writer, John Addington Symonds; Byron attended Harrow many years before Symonds, but Eisler thinks that his time there would have shown him much the same kind of behaviour among the boys:

Every boy of good looks had a female name and was recognised either as a public prostitute or as some bigger fellow's bitch. Bitch was the word in common usage to indicate a boy who yielded his person to another. The talk in the studies and dormitories was incredibly obscene. One could not avoid seeing acts of onanism, mutual masturbation and the sport of naked boys in bed together...One bitch by the name of Cookson...fell out of favour...After he had been rolled on the floor, indecently exposed and violated in front of spectators..[they] cuffed and kicked him at their mercy, shied shoes at him and drove him with curses whimpering into his den.

It's difficult to understand or accept that so many well-to-do and powerful fathers, who tended to send their sons to the same schools they had attended themselves, could have done so knowing full well of the conditions their children would have to endure there. Considering Byron's description of the highly militarized Albanian society he so enjoyed, above, where pederasty was common, I think that perhaps this kind of all-male socialization, even to the point of encouraging men to view each other as sexual comrades, while women were mere "breeders", was not only a way to toughen boys, as Orwell once suggested in an essay, but to create bonds between them that made feminine society seem dull, sexless, and generally unattractive, and ultimately making the young men into better soldiers, less content with civilian life.

For your amusement

2008-09-04T18:55:00.002-04:00

I sometimes feel a little uneasy about that imagined self of mine--the Me of my daydreams--who leads a melodramatic life of his own, out of all relation with my real existence. So one day I shadowed him down the street. He loitered along for a while, and then stood at a shop-window and dressed himself out in a gaudy tie and yellow waistcoat. Then he bought a great sponge and two stuffed birds and took them to his lodgings, where he led a shady existence. Next he moved to a big house in Mayfair, and gave grand dinner-parties, with splendid service and costly wines. His amorous adventures among the High-up Ones of this Earth I pass over. He soon sold his house and horses, gave up his motors, dismissed his retinue of servants, and went--saving two young ladies from being run over on the way--to live a life of heroic self-sacrifice among the poor.

I was beginning to feel encouraged about him, when, in passing a fishmonger's, he pointed at a great salmon and said, 'I caught that fish'.

LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH, Trivia, 1918

With a change of the pronouns and a few other details relevant to the sex of the narrator, it appears that the Me of Mr Smith's daydreams is not so very different from CM's own Imagined Self, though hers has never claimed that she caught a fish.

Musings on demographic history

2008-09-03T13:50:00.002-04:00

Clio: So, darling, are you going to respond to Agnostic's challenge or not?

CM: You mean when he asked me to link to some statistics about marriage patterns in history, in order to dispel the popular misconception that it was once common for girls to marry in their teens? Well, I'm thinking about it, but I'm not quite certain how to approach the business. Agnostic was especially concerned by bloggers who are making this comment in order to lend their support to Sarah Palin and her daughter, who is expecting a child at age seventeen. The thing is, I haven't been able to find any such bloggers online, and so I don't know exactly what their arguments are or what sort of shark-pool I'd be jumping into if I comment on them. Plus, I'm wavering again on the idea of writing a post on so political a subject. Not my country, not my election, not my issue.

Clio: Apollo save us! You have something there right now, do you not, that summarizes the basic information for you? I mean, you don't even have to think about it. Just paste it in and forget about what's-her-name for the moment. Anyway, haven't you been itching to correct young Roissy and his angry hordes on this very subject - early marriage - for months?

CM: Oh, all right. When you put it that way it seems silly to hold back. It's not as if I'm invading anyone's privacy or anything. The following summary is from an online article quoting respectable academic sources. Here goes:

Fertility Control through Late Marriage
Daniel Scott Smith has summarized the findings of thirty-eight family reconstitution studies (twenty-seven of which described French villages from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) as follows: "A woman who married at age 20 exactly, and survived to age 45 with her husband would bear nine children" (p. 22). Thus the potential maximum fertility was only about half of Leridon's biological maximum. And what is more, Smith's potential maximum fertility is an overstatement for two reasons: first, the average age at first marriage for northwestern European women was not twenty and second about one-third of all marriages were broken by the death of one partner before age forty-five, which Smith is using as a shorthand measurement for the onset of menopause. In Smith's sample of thirty-eight villages, for example, the average age at first marriage for women was 25.7 years old; their husbands were 28.0 years old.

Basing his conclusions on fifty-four published studies describing age-specific marital fertility rates for women in early modern northwestern Europe, Michael Flinn agrees with Smith, describing an average age at first marriage for women that fluctuated around twenty-five. Flinn does not provide us with measurements to assess the spread of the distribution around this midpoint, but other studies have determined the standard deviation to be about six years, meaning that about two-thirds of all northwestern European women married for the first time between twenty-two and twenty-eight. A few teenaged brides were counterbalanced, as it were, by a similar number of women who married in their thirties. Perhaps one woman in ten never married. In the demographer's jargon, that tenth woman was permanently celibate.

So in answering our question concerning the relative lowness of high birth rates, the first point we have to keep in view is that, uniquely, northwestern Europeans married late. Or, to be more precise, the link between PUBERTY and marriage was dramatically more attenuated in early modern northwestern Europe than elsewhere. Modern demographic studies have shown that in eastern and southern Europe this puberty-marriage gap was about half as long, while in most African and Asian countries puberty and marriage roughly coincided as a girl entered womanhood (and adult status) with the onset of menstruation. Arranged marriages followed almost immediately thereafter.

The identification of this austere Malthusian regime has been the greatest achievement of early modern historical demography. These statistics provide us with a single measure that distinguishes the creation of new families in northwestern Europe from other societies. This unique marriage strategy was vitally important for two reasons: first, it provided a safety valve, or margin for error, in the ongoing adjustment between population and resources that characterized the reproduction of generations and social formations; and second it meant that the role of women was less dependent and vulnerable insofar as they were marrying as young adults, not older children. Arranged marriages were normal among the propertied Europeans, as they were in almost every other part of the world; most of these marriages were arranged while the girl was still a child and they were formalized after puberty.

CM: Notice that, dear readers. Various studies indicate that the average age at marriage in northwestern Europe was about 25 for women and 28 for men, long after puberty for both sexes. That average was lower in eastern and southern Europe, but still not as early as puberty. Only the daughters of the well-to-do married that early, and they were never a large proportion of the population. Notice, also, that this is regarded by demographic historians as a "unique" marriage pattern. No other regional population on earth followed such an "austere regime", as the author of this piece puts it. And finally, of course, there's the fact that the supposed female preference for alpha males had no part in these marriage patterns. Rich or poor, parents tended to make the choice of mate for the young. Perhaps alpha male fathers chose alpha mates for their daughters, but who knows? It doesn't seem likely. Money and propinquity (though not kinship, as in other societies) were more important to parents. And building the family's status up over time, if possible, through careful marriage.

Clio: I wonder why those evolutionary biologists, and IQ theorists, and so on, aren't more attentive to this issue.

CM: I don't know. But you'd certainly expect that people so interested in the unique particularities of ethnic groups and populations would be fascinated by this information, that it would be a cornerstone of their thinking on the subject of racial and ethnic differences. Of course, they'd almost certainly insist that the reasons for this unique pattern of sexual continence were purely genetic. A very dull explanation, and in this case almost certainly not the truth, or not the greater part of the truth.

Clio: Why do you say that, my sweet?

CM: Because the limited sources available suggest, if I am remembering correctly, that before the arrival of Christianity in Europe, its various ethnic and tribal groups married their children off young. The Romans and Greeks married their daughters at puberty, though not usually their sons, who had to wait a longer time. They resorted to exposure and infanticide to control fertility, but that was forbidden by Christianity, as was abortion, so families had to find some other way to ensure that they could feed their children. The article I linked to suggests that infanticide was the usual approach to the problem of too many children in China and Japan as well.

Clio: There you are now. You've written a fair bit here, and not one word of it could be interpreted as a political diatribe.

CM: Ah, that's your influence there, Clio. You keep my mind on Parnassus, and away from the passing excitements of everyday life among mortals.

2008-09-02T13:07:00.001-04:00

Multiple apologies for the second lengthy hiatus in a week. Dear readers, CM's computer has been playing tricks on her again, or rather, Google has. It has not allowed her either to publish either blog posts or comments to her own blog.

A.N. Wilson's biography of C.S. Lewis has been the target of many hostile comments by Lewis's most ardent fans, and has led some non-fans to speak of him with a kind of amused contempt. CM does not altogether understand either reaction. Wilson's book is rather sloppily written and some paragraphs appear not to have been carefully proofread, suggesting careless cutting and pasting. It has also been challenged by some of the people Wilson interviewed, who say that he misquoted them or got his facts wrong, or both. This is a graver charge than the first, of course, and if it is true, then Wilson should certainly be called to account for it.

All the same, it does not seem to CM that the book is really so unflattering a portrait of Lewis as a man or a writer. Lewis's sexual history, upon which Wilson lingers with an interest some find prurient, does not seem to CM to be as amusing or as contemptible as either Wilson or some readers have found it. Beyond the issue of whether biographers have a right or reason to explore this side of a writer's life, or how far they should feel free to speculate where solid information is lacking, CM believes that Wilson has in many respects done well by Lewis, especially Lewis as a scholar - clearly the side of the man that Wilson found most sympathetic. Lewis had a remarkable ability to make old texts come alive for his readers, and Wilson shows this in some detail.

Even where he is most critical of Lewis, in his discussion of Lewis's works of popular apologetics, Wilson acknowledges Lewis's development over time, as life tested his faith. Below, he quotes a passage from one such work and comments upon how Lewis had begun to have a better grasp of Christianity:

[The Four Loves] stays in the mind, particularly for the times when, as in the final chapter on the love of God, Lewis writes with a new quietness, a new wistfulness:
If we cannot 'practise the presence of God', it is something to be able to practise the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like a man who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream who stretches out his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch.
This is a very different Lewis from the man who breezily wrapped up the whole mystery of the Incarnation by asking his wireless audiences to imagine how they would feel if they were reborn as slugs. He had already begun to glimpse both the incomprehensibility and the challenge of his faith. The Christian story is one of a mysterious love so strong that it led to self-abnegation on the part of the Godhead Himself; a story of one who was rich, for our sake becoming poor; a story of certainties and status abandoned, of sinlessness involved, totally, in the world of sin, to the point where it received the ultimate degradation and punishment for sin; of cosmic suffering; of darkness and abandonment by God; of Gethsemane and Golgotha. Lewis was to have the easy, theoretical - and almost frivolous, in the case of the slug parallel - certainties of his early days of faith tried to their limits. [Wilson, C.S. Lewis: A Biography, p. 276]

Clio Muses on Women's Lot

2008-08-29T10:09:00.005-04:00

CM: Oh, hello, Clio. Where have you been lately? You've left me high and dry for days now.

Clio: I've been to London to visit the Queen. I've been lying here waiting, waiting. I've been everywhere, man -

CM: All right, all right! I get it. That last one was an allusion to my uncompleted India posting, wasn't it?

Clio: It was what you make of it, darling. You have a few other projects in mind, I believe, anyway. Why aren't you doing anything about them?

CM: It's my Johnsonian inertia again. Speaking of which -

Clio: Ah, now we're coming to it! That old touch of the Muse works every time. [Aside: I really must find a way to spend a little more time with her.] Come on, dear, spit it out.

CM: I've noticed that among certain conservative writers (that Roger Devlin fellow, for instance), there's a movement afoot to defend marriage in the West as it used to be, before various women's rights movements, including feminism, took over. The ideas that offend me most are the suggestion that women in the past didn't contribute to the family economy, which is a libel on the women of the past, and the idea that women should be prepared to resign themselves to male infidelity, which is a great burden to place on the women of today. Oh, and of course I'm also annoyed by the suggestion that women are exceptionally self-centred and always have been, that this is dictated by evolutionary biology. But I've written about that one before, and about the contribution issue, so I'll leave them for the moment. Perhaps.

Clio: I believe you've argued yourself that female infidelity within marriage is more of a threat to the social order than male infidelity.

CM: Yes, indeed I have. Historically, when women's fidelity could not be guaranteed, when men could not be certain who their children were, or children know the identity of their fathers, female infidelity was a more serious threat to the social order. But why should that rule us now, when a simple test can determine a child's paternity? I don't mean to offer license to women to be unfaithful. What I wonder is why men who call themselves conservative think they can claim a right to have their infidelities overlooked by their wives, by appealing to a past so different from the present? I can understand if some couples settle on this as a private arrangement amongst themselves, formally or informally. That's up to them. But I really don't like to hear men bandy about this idea as if it were natural and right. By all means let's change laws that compel men to support all their wives' children, no matter who actually fathered them.

Clio: Doesn't your hero Johnson share that view?

CM: Yes, he does, and I find it something of a blot on the great man's reputation. What to make of passages like this one in Boswell's Life, in which Boswell speaks to Johnson of a friend who "had maintained [infidelity] was by no means as bad in the husband, as in the wife." Johnson's response? "Your friend was in the right, Sir. Between a man and his Maker it is a different question: but between a man and his wife, a husband's infidelity is nothing. They are connected by children, by fortune, by serious considerations of community. Wise married women don't trouble themselves about infidelity in their husbands."

Clio: Ha! Yes, well, that's certainly what the gods thought. Notice, though, that they weren't as successful at wringing fidelity out of their women as mortal men have been.

CM: I always forget that you're so retro, Clio my love. Anyway, Johnson added "My wife told me I might with as many women as I pleased, provided I loved her alone...Consider, Sir, how gross it is in a wife to complain of her husband's going to other women, merely as women; it is that she has not enough of what she would be ashamed to avow." Notice the implication of that last point. Women's acceptance of male infidelity in the past depended upon embracing a kind of modesty that did not allow them to acknowledge their enjoyment of sexual relations. If modern conservative men want this kind of license, they might have to accept the kind of wife who professes no interest in sex except as a duty. Although some men do complain that this is what all wives eventually come to in any case, it seems unlikely that they would want their marital relationships to start out on that footing. [n.b. that in John Wain's Samuel Johnson, Wain explains that Boswell cancelled this passage in the published edition of his Life.]

Clio: Yes, interesting. It's funny, though, that Johnson doesn't really emphasize the idea of the importance of men being able to guarantee the paternity of their wives' offspring, isn't it? It's almost as if he takes that part for granted. His whole argument really rests on female modesty.

CM: That's it exactly. And perhaps on his inability to sympathize with women's emotional needs. Here's what Wain writes about their friendship:

With sentiments like these, Johnson was perfecty prepared to allow to Henry Thrale a licence that he certainly would not, with his tender conscience, have allowed to himself. Thrale's being a whoremaster seems to have made no difference at all to Johnson's regard for him. The pain of being neglected for a succession of girls was one that Hester had to bear alone.

More: she had to conceal her grief and depression as much as she possibly could. All men, in the end, make impossible demands on women, and Johnson's demands on Hester Thrale were no exception. He told he of his own anxiety and misery, but he did not like having to hold still while she told him of hers. He clutched at her hand while walking through the valleys of his own private Inferno; she had to walk through hers alone. This is the great contrast between Johnson's relationship with Hester Thrale and his relationship with Boswell. Johnson listened for hours at a time to Boswell's confessions and emotional outpurings. But when he was with Mrs Thrale it was his turn to do the talking. When he was in one of his fits of depression, he resented it if she was slow to pull him out. Once, when he was lying in bed in a state of gloom, she came into the room in a gown of some drab colour. He snarled at her, asking if she were trying to depress him still further.

Perhaps it's true, as some conservative men say, that women now make impossible demands on men. If so, surely it's no answer to say, with Wain, that men historically have made impossible demands on women. The question is, what to do about it now?

Clio: I never comment on the future, darling, you know that. My business is the past.

CM: I'm not certain you're always consistent about that, Clio, but I'll let it go this time. I just don't want to see men trying to recreate the past in response to the disorders of the present. In the first place, it's impossible, because the conditions of the past no longer prevail and we cannot recreate them without grave injury to ourselves. In the second place, our ancestors, though not the thorough-going villains they have been painted to be by postcolonial literary theorists, were not angels either. The best you could say about them was that they did what they could with the limited materials available to them.

Clio Continues an Argument

2008-08-27T23:55:00.003-04:00

Last year, Clio's mortal got into an argument with a reader about Voltaire's residual religious allegiances. The reader ended by proclaiming that neither he - the reader - or CM knew enough about Voltaire to make any definitive statements about the man. Naturally, CM was rather offended by this slight to her knowledge, and responded a bit sharply, and the reader dropped the matter. CM forgot about it for a long time, being too lazy to go and hunt down the particular references she recalled in the massive collection of Voltaire's works at the University of Ottawa library. Recently, however, while perusing the archives of the New Criterion, she discovered that a kindly book-reviewer had done her work for her, quoting from a biography of Voltaire by Roger Pearson called Voltaire Almighty, published in 2005.

I can't link to the article, because you have to be a subscriber to read it, but here's the relevant paragraph:

In the spring of 1761, an aging François-Marie Arouet (a.k.a. Voltaire) took it upon himself to rebuild the small parish church that stood on his sprawling estate at Ferney. The self-proclaimed Deist, mocker of the Biblical storyline, and indefatigable critic of ecclesiastical abuses spared little expense in this latest—and most curious—project of reform and reformation. In place of the old façade, he erected a new one in the modern neoclassical style, with two handsome bell towers, each capped with a gleaming dome. Over the altar, he installed a baldachino as well as an imposing crucifix (costing 1,200 livres) by a prominent sculpture from Lyon. A letter to the Pope, inquiring if his Holiness had any relics to spare, produced—somewhat disappointingly—a hair shirt once worn by St. Francis (Voltaire had been hoping for a couple of bones). And then, with the renovations complete, the manor lord did something that no one could have foreseen; he became a regular attendee at Sunday Mass—even, it was reported, receiving communion on the Easter feast day.

I have no doubt that some people would argue that this proves little more than Voltaire's eagerness to observe the proprieties, although this was not notably one of the man's characteristic traits. (Indeed, he had a remarkable talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.) Still, they could be right; after all, Voltaire wrote a great many diatribes against faith and the Christian religion in particular. I suspect, though, that he was one of those confused but not uncommon souls who somehow manage simultaneously to hold two sets of contradictory beliefs. His skepticism, his distaste for the abuses of the Church, and for the follies of belief, were real enough; so too, was his belief in God.

Back later this afternoon

2008-08-25T11:12:00.001-04:00

Not a hiatus, dear readers. Clio and her Mortal have to be away for a few hours, or blogging would have resumed this morning.

Perhaps you might check in at around 4 this afternoon, and see if there's anything interesting up.

Clio s'amuse

2008-08-22T09:05:00.003-04:00

Clio: I notice, darling, that you've been posting nothing but bits from other people's writings. What's up?

CM: You went away, and I couldn't think of anything to say. I thought people might be interested in a little poetry, and that wasn't too bad. But it appears they don't much like Evelyn Waugh. In fact, as I've told you before, they like me best when I'm babbling on about the men I've dated.

Clio: Well, that's not entirely true, you know. Your statistics show that people keep coming by to read your posts. They just don't comment much on the poetry.

CM: Yes, but it seems I've grown addicted to the lively exchange of views in my comments boxes.

Clio: You can't expect me to help you much there. I'm the Muse of history, dear. If you want lively conversation, perhaps my half-brother Hermes would be a better patron for your site. But he's not so willing to waste his time inspiring mortals as us Muses are. Speaking of which, have you disinterred that copy of your dissertation yet?

CM: No. I'm still searching through the boxes of my books in the crawl-space. It's taking forever because I had to put up my bookcases and put the books away. There's about 25 boxes of them. I've opened and gone through 15. What do you want to bet that the stupid thing is going to be in the last box I open?

Clio: Ah, but then the work will be done! Perhaps the gods arranged things that way to make sure that you finally got this disagreeable chore out of the way. Mortals are so short-sighted about divine providence.

CM: Disagreeable is right. It's hot and dark, and I get dusty and sweaty, and I keep hitting my head on the steel support beam if I absent-mindedly stand up a little too straight.

Clio: Well, luvvie, it sounds as if you need a little amusement. Why not post that ridiculous passage from that book you like so much, what is it called again?

CM: Oh, you mean the bit about King Alcinous in Girl in a Swing? I can't believe you're encouraging me to put that up.

Clio: I don't see why. It's decidedly pagan, and in a way rather historical, and filled with arcane references. Besides, it's funny, and we both like to amuse people.

CM: Well, when you put it that way --

===============================================

And so here it is, dear readers, without further ado. Oh yes, though, one more thing: although I love the book, this bit really belongs on the list of all-time worst sex passages in the history of literature, although some would argue that the sex scenes in Sophie's Choice are their equal. This one isn't explicit, though whether that makes it better or worse you'll have to decide for yourselves.

Our being travelled very far, for, as I could see clearly, the blades of grass above my eyes and close beside her head were in reality forests hundreds of feet below us. The green beetle clambering astray through them had leagues to go, and wisely flew off across the distant, rolling plains. I perceived also that the red clouds and one emergent star beneath me, alternately hidden and revealed by her plunging shoulders, had been well-known to Theodora, Phryne and Semiramis. I myself, dizzy at that great depth, became lost for a time, striving half-frenzied in a marshy wood close beside that same sea where the bull swam with Europa on his back: but then by good luck I came upon a white, winged mare grazing by the shore, mounted her and spurred away until we came to a city at the end of the world, where there was no time and men's minds and bodies were dissolved in an enchanted pool from which they were re-born to bless others by their grief, though unable to give any account of what they had undergone. After that drowning I was carried home asleep, across many miles of ocean, in one of the Phaecaian ships of King Alcinous.

Literature is perhaps not the best medium in which to convey the experience of human eroticism. This passage's pomp and portentousness illustrates one of the great problems for storytellers of attempting to write about sexual encounters. They are either purely objective and, as a result, grossly clinical, which certainly doesn't do justice to human experience of sexual love; or else they're narrated subjectively and become, in the telling, absurdly inflated.

Tell me, my dears, is the passage good or bad? Perhaps it isn't really a "sex scene" at all, but an attempt to capture something of the attitude of the hero of the story, who was cracking up at the time, towards its heroine.

2008-08-20T10:21:00.003-04:00

I am very fond of Evelyn Waugh's memoir, A Little Learning. I like its careful, measured tones, and its detachment. Two of my favourite passages in it, though, were not written by Waugh himself, but come from letters he received from his friend and mentor Francis Crease, an eccentric recluse who tutored him in calligraphy. The first passage that struck me is about the love of beauty in life as well as in art:

This evening while you were in Chapel was one of extraordinary splendour, and I wished you also might have been touched by it. For myself, the shadows of the prison house have fallen long ago, but now and again some shape of beauty lifts the shadow for a time. It is so much easier to feel one could write "Resentment Poems" than "Songs of Exuberance"; I hope it may never be so with you.

What I have in mind is the hope that you, like so many others of intelligence, may not run after definitions of Art and Beauty and the like, feeling the definition and failing to feel the Beauty itself as it approaches on an evening like this evening. I can think of an Oxford friend at this moment who feels nature described in a sonnet and sitting in his arm-chair, but seems to fail in the open air. And again I remember a Don at Oxford learned in Greek gems telling me how all the other Dons would be interested in curious knowledge and facts about any gem, but its beauty always, or nearly always escaped them.

No Flemish painter of the seventeenth century or English school of the nineteenth could hope to convey more than a suggestion of the visionary splendour of this evening.

Another passage from a letter by Mr Crease, on friendship, also made a strong impression on me; it was written in response to a complaint by Waugh that he lacked any sense of purpose in his life:

What you ask today to have, no one has completely and indeed many of the best only have sufficient light for the day or the nearest duty. You will not be humble - humility seldom appeals to youth -- but nothing less will do...You must have sufficient light to know of the day of small things that surround you when you are at School or at home. If you despise them darkness will come not light. It is only by doing them that more light will come that is any true light. Success and conceit close the windows. You have more light than most, far more. What is the matter is impatience nothing more or less -- I can be as direct as you sometimes and you don't like it so much in others as in yourself -- but it is good for you. You want a friend who is a thorn in the flesh not an echo. I shall disappoint you in many things -- Alas! that it must be so -- but in this I will not disappoint you. [Emphasis mine]

Since I first read that, I've tried to remind myself in moments of crisis with friends that I need a "thorn in my side" rather than an "echo". Of course, it doesn't do to turn it the other way around and think overmuch about ways to become a thorn in the side to one's friends. Best to let this perception of you develop in them naturally, as it almost certainly will, over time.

Sad love stories (spoilers)

2008-08-18T20:19:00.005-04:00

EPITAPH ON THE MONUMENT OF SIR WILLIAM DYER AT COLMWORTH, 1641

My dearest dust, could not thy hasty day
Afford thy drowsy patience leave to stay
One hour longer: so that we might either
Sit up, or gone to bed together?
But since thy finished labour hath possessed
Thy weary limbs with early rest,
Enjoy it sweetly, and thy widow bride
Shall soon repose her by thy slumbering side.
Whose business, now, is only to prepare
My nightly dress, and call to prayer:
Mine eyes wax heavy and the day grows old,
The dew falls thick, my blood grows cold,
Draw, draw the closed curtains: and make room:
My dear, my dearest dust; I come, I come.

Lady Catherine Dyer

Lady Catherine Dyer's poem appeared in one of The Other World's earliest posts. It is here to remind anyone who might chance to read it that even the happiest loves, as my blogpal Seraphic says, end with someone standing beside a grave. Passionate romantic love often seems to be inherently tragic or at any rate frustrating, in any case, because it holds out such a promise of transformation, yet is so seldom able to fulfill that promise. In a way, that's a good thing, as the self-absorption and solipcism of lovers would not make for good parents or good citizens. I am convinced, as a believing Catholic, that the idea of "soul mates" is a kind of pre-lapsarian memory of what love might have been for human beings in the Garden of Eden. Before the Fall. All the same, our imperfect, frustrated loves, romantic or not, are a great source of sadness whether they are ended by death, separation, or simple loss of interest. The following passages come from the closing paragraphs of several different novels, all of which are love stories of a kind. Including a passage from The Collector is perhaps cheating, because its hero was plainly a sociopath, and in his love story his narcissism triumphed over all finer feelings.

From Possession, by A.S. Byatt

"Tell your aunt," he said, "that you met a poet, who was looking for the Belle Dame Sans Merci, and who met you instead, and who sends her his compliments, and will not disturb her, and is on his way to fresh woods and pastures new."

"I'll try to remember," she said, steadying her crown.

So he kissed her, always matter-of-fact, so as not to frighten her, and went on his way.

And on the way home, she met her brothers, and there was a rough-and-tumble, and the lovely crown was broken, and she forgot the message, which was never delivered.

From The Collector, by John Fowles

I shall put what she wrote and her hair up in the loft in the deed-box which will not be opened till my death, so I don't expect for forty or fifty years. I have not made up my mind about Marian (another M! I heard the supervisor call her name), this time it won't be love, it would just be for the interest of the thing and to compare them and also the otherthing, which as I say I would like to go into in more detail and I could teach her how. And the clothes would fit. Of course I would make it clear from the start who's boss and what I expect.

But it is still just an idea. I only put the stove down there today because the room needs drying out anyway.

From The Persian Boy, by Mary Renault

Presently they parleyed, and went away to go on with their dispute outside. I bound up my arm with a bit of towel, and waited, for it was not proper he should be without attendance. I lit the night-lam and set it by the bed, and watched with him, till at morning the embalmers came to take him from me, and fill him with everlasting myrrh.

From Staying On, by Paul Scott

She drank more brandy. Straightened her body, leant back against the support of the raised lid, head against the wall, glanced at the empty throne beside her, then shut her eyes.

But when we went to parties, Tusker, just before we went in, you always took my arm. You helped me down from tongas and into tongas. Waiting on other people's verandahs for tongas, then, too, you took my arm, and in that way we waited. Arm in arm. Throne by throne. What, now, Tusker? Urn by urn?

It's all right, Tusker. I really am not going to cry. I can't afford to cry. I have a performance to get through tomorrow. And another performance to get through on Wednesday. And on Thursday.

All I'm asking, Tusker, is did you mean it when you said I'd been a good woman to you? And if so, why did you leave me? Why did you leave me here? I am frightened to be alone, Tusker, although I know it is wrong and weak to be frightened--

--but now, until the end, I shall be alone, whatever I am doing, here as I feared, amid the alien corn, waking, sleeping, alone for ever and ever and I cannot bear it but mustn't cry and must must get over it but don't for the moment see how, so with my eyes shut, Tusker, I hold out my hand and beg you, Tusker, beg, beg you to take it and take me with you. How can you not, Tusker? Oh, Tusker, how can you make me stay here by myself while you yourself go home?

The last one, as readers may guess from its length, is a particular favourite of mine. Its speaker refers not to abandonment, but to the recent death of her husband, leaving her alone in India, in exile but unable to return to England. I once asked my father whether he had ever been to Ootacamund, in the late 1960s a centre of retirement for many elderly English couples of the Raj era, during his travels in India. He told me that he had, and that it was a beautiful place but that it was very sad. "Why?" I asked him, and he answered, "Staying on."

Musings

2008-08-16T18:47:00.005-04:00

Germaine Greer is and always has been my favourite feminist writer. After getting a doctorate in some kind of Shakespeare studies, she became famous for writing The Female Eunuch, a "sex-positive" book rather in the style of Camille Paglia. When I first picked up a copy at a house where I was staying for a short visit, I glanced through the pages, expecting to hate it. Certainly there were parts of it I disliked. Greer's notion of female sexuality, as it is set out in that book, was not one I found sympathetic. I was struck, however, by the way she defended The Taming of the Shrew against the critics who thought it was no more than a defense of men's domination of women in marriage. She insisted, if I am remembering correctly, that Katherine was shrewish only because her family had never paid her any attention, and that her husband Petruchio had won her over by challenging her and taking her seriously.

That was my first encounter with Greer's writing, and I began to wonder if she might not be more interesting than I had thought. I read parts of her book on women painters, The Obstacle Course, and was delighted to find that while she highlighted the difficulties these women had faced, she did not try to suggest that she had found any neglected geniuses. Finally, in 1985, I read her book, Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility, and was bowled over by it. It contained an account of the birth control movement in the Western world, outlined its roots in the eugenic movement, and concluded with a discussion of the way birth controllers were trying to impose their vision of two-child bliss on the poor of India, Africa, and other regions they insisted were over-populated. Greer argued that western child-rearing methods, and especially the nuclear family, made both mothers and children anxious, neurotic, and over-involved with each other. The large extended families of the Third World, she said, produced happier and more emotionally stable adults.

I'm not certain that Dr Greer's depiction of the extended families of the Third World are entirely fair. My own impression is that such family arrangements do have many advantages, but that in many societies the women are stuck with too much responsibility because they must not only manage their children and households, but earn money as well, while their men, in many cases, seem to hang around doing nothing in particular, and ordering the women around. I did think she was on to something in her suggestion that our child-rearing practises in the Western world can make both mothers and children neurotic, but I'm not certain there's much we can do about it. Our way of life requires that parents make an intensive investment of time and effort (not necessarily money) in their children to ensure that they do well in school, without which their hopes of maintaining a middle-class way of life are slight.

The passage below is from the introduction to Greer's book of collected essays, The Madwoman's Underclothes. It is an account of a time she spent living among the peasants of rural Calabria while working on her dissertation, and it speaks of her relations with their children, and one of them in particular:

Mariuzz' was eight years old and my regular escort. He was one of the most sensitive, wise, and light-hearted individuals I have ever met. I was never bored in his company, not even during the long walk to the market (for I eventually decided to stop making an exhibition of myself and be as other women). He knew how to listen and he knew how to discuss, and yet he was a child, not a small grown-up. He was always busy, never bored or fractious...The bane of his life was his sheep, which was anyway soon to be slaughtered. At all hours I would hear Mariuzz' attempting to reason with the animal, "Look you stupid creature, you have all this to eat, why did you eat mother's flowers? They don't even taste good, I bet...How did you get your rope all tangled round your neck?...Please, please you foolish beast, keep out out of trouble. Look at that olive tree! You know you're not supposed to even like olive leaves. I can't take my eye off you for ten minutes." And in his nagging I would hear the exact words his mother and sister-in-law used to scold him, repeated in unconscious parody.

As I observed Mariuzz' I observed too the upbringing that made him the person he was. His baby niece was never "put down" while she was awake but lived her entire waking life in some one's arms. She was not shy or possessive of her mother because there were so many arms all anxious to hold her. It was assumed that any visitor to the house would be hungry for the touch of baby skin, and so on my first visit she was plumped in my arms and promptly let out a loud fart which delighted everyone hugely...I began to watch out for peasant children who sucked their thumbs or dragged around stuffed animals or security blankets and I found none. Mariuzz's little niece had no toys but she had a dozen people to play with; watching her, I realised that toys are hideous things, decoys we use to deflect children from their natural love-objects, and I felt ashamed.

Perhaps Greer overstates her case when making an argument (are toys really so hideous?), but she has a real talent for depicting the people she encounters, and however extreme her polemics, I find many of her rants sympathetic. Here's one from the same piece of writing, describing a bout of illness and its resemblance to a bad drug experience:

While young fools of my generation produced terrifying symptoms by ingesting poisons of various synthetic kinds, I was taken to extraordinary realms by a bacillus carried from human excrement on a fly's foot. I swelled to the size of a mountain and shrank to the size of a pin, flew and sang and fell through exotic configurations...When the burning and shivering stopped and I could see again only what was there, I stayed enthralled by clarity. There was nothing to me in biochemical mindbending and bullshit psychedelia that did not have the slimy scent of death about it. I hated being out of touch, isolated by the solipsism of delirium, unable to communicate or comprehend. The first time I was offered a joint I had to crawl to the lavatory and barely managed to lock myself in before voiding completely upwards and downwards. The years of social smoking were an unending ordeal, the combination of marijuana and sex an obscenity.

More de la Mare

2008-08-16T00:39:00.003-04:00

...AND THERE was a wind in the night as they fared onward, a wind in the mid-air, playing from out the clouds. And presently after, the twain descended into the valley, the one traveller's foot stumbling as he went, against the writhen roots that jutted from between the stones of the path they followed. And it seemed that voice of one unseen cried, Lo! And the traveller looked up from out of the valley of his journey, and, behold, a wan moon gleamed between the ravelled clouds; and the face of his companion showed for that instant clear against the sky in the shadow of its cloak. And it was the face of a nobleman, renowned for his patience, courteous and cold; whose name is Death....

This appears, with no author's name attached, in the notes to Come Hither. If it is, as I assume, by de la Mare himself, it is a fine example of how dark his view of the world really was, a marvelous place, but one in which fear, not of death as such, nor pain, but of ghosts, of loss, and of fear itself, struggles with the love of beauty to rule the human heart.

There have been many poets and novelists who like to call themselves pagan, or who have constructed alternative mythologies for themselves based upon pagan models. Most of these strike me as men and women in rebellion against the dullness of their parental homes, or else as seeking in paganism a license for the sexual freedom denied them by conventional religious belief. De la Mare was an oddity among modern poets: he seems always to have written respectfully of Christian belief, even at times to be a believer (never having read a biography of the man, I don't know if he really was one), but to have been one of the rare modern men to have an authentically pagan imagination.

Clio on government patronage of the arts

2008-08-14T10:01:00.003-04:00

Is government patronage of the arts good for the arts? Scholarship and the arts in Canada depend largely on public funding for their support, far more than in the United States, where private foundations also contribute to their support, and where a much larger potential audience for both high and vulgar art (I use the word vulgar without negative connotation here) helps to make government contributions unnecessary. There are some people who argue that this support is bad for the public purse and ruinous for the arts, while others insist that the arts, in Canada at least, could not survive without public money.

Clio and her mortal are giving much thought to this issue thanks to an online debate at Canadian blog Still Seraphic, and one or two others to which Seraphic links. We are not certain where we stand. The idea that government money necessarily produces bad art seems to us false, but the idea that such money should be spent without regard for public taste seems wrong in a democratic age. Here is an expanded version of what we wrote in comment on Seraphic's blog:
Most artists in the visual arts and music were supported by tax money throughout European history. That is, they were supported by patrons in Church or state offices, or aristocrats, all of whose money came from taxes on the peasantry, artisans, and middle-class merchants. Much the same was true of writers. Perhaps the one region that was an exception to this rule was Holland, where the wealth of the middle classes, beginning in the seventeenth century, encouraged a large market for easel paintings to decorate houses.

It was not until the late eighteenth century that the growth of an educated and literate middle-class audience, made it possible for some artists to survive without such support. This transformation was far more successful in the case of literature than it was with other arts. Because music, at that time, and painting, did not lend themselves to mass production in the same way that books did, not without losing something in the transition, these art forms never had the opportunity to become truly popular.

Now, some people argue that none of the old tax-supported artistic apparatus was fair to the people who were forced to pay for it. On the other hand, artisans and peasants do appear to have taken pride in the artistic and architectural achievements of their cities and towns. What's more, the travellers who came to see the churches, the houses, the public buildings, sculpture and paintings, might spend their money in local shops. Such benefits helped somewhat to reconcile tax-payers to their compulsory support for this extravagant public spending.

So tax-funded support for the arts has a long and rather illustrious history. But a caveat must be interjected here: One real and important difference between elite (but tax-funded) patronage then and government patronage now is the democratization of patronage that requires works of art to be chosen by committee, for reasons that may be unconnected to the merit of the work. Members of a committee may indeed set out to choose the best work, but if there is a serious disagreement over which is best, it is very possible that they will reach their final decision upon the basis of such criteria as novelty, the wish to demonstrate regional or ethnic impartiality, or other non-artisitic concerns.

The modern kind of government patronage also breaks the connection between artist and audience, so that the artist is never clear on how his work is received by anyone except his government patrons, who are themselves making decisions not on their own behalf but for some imaginary "public". There's a difference between the Bishop of X in Paris in 1740 deciding he wants his house painted with frescoes by Boucher, hiring him to do so, and telling him what he wants, with the final decision a compromise between the wishes of the patron and those of the painter; and the Committee of Government Funding Group X getting together to choose this year's winners of the Committee's Arts Funding Grant. They pick their favourites only out of the submissions made to them; in other words, they don't go searching the "market" for what they lie, and for reasons, as we have pointed out, that may have nothing to do with what they personally like the best, or would ever consider buying for themselves.

That - choice by committee - is one of the major problems with grants in the visual arts today. I don't think the problem is quite the same where literature is concerned, though some of the same issues arise there too.

Another problem is that Canada's capitalists are not very public-spirited, while at the same time they themselves have a long habit of turning to the government for support in times of crisis. We don't have that many really rich men (or women), and of those we do have, only a few have been generous sponsors of the arts. Perhaps those who are against public support for the arts are correct, and if this country were taxed less, more of our capitalists would step up to the plate. But Clio and her mortal don't know. Old habits are hard to break.

As a scholar, CM was supported by government money (scholarships, not grants), and she is grateful. But she also believes that Canadian scholarship would improve in quality and in real diversity (i.e., not be so heavily favourable to fashionable political views), if there were more non-government sources of scholarship money. As it is, there's really only one Canadian agency to which Canadian scholars can turn.

Support for (some) bad art versus the collapse of the arts in Canada - is there any way out of this dilemma? Canadians and Americans alike are welcome to comment. Please be civil.

The story of this blog

2008-08-13T13:57:00.008-04:00

As I explained in one of my first blogposts, and in my blog heading, the title of this blog comes from a Walter de la Mare short story called "The Story of This Book", which also forms the introduction to his poetry collection Come Hither. I'm no longer certain that the blog-title suits the contents of my blog, but now that I've finally been able to dig my copy of Come Hither out of storage, I'd like to post a few excerpts from the story. Here are its opening paragraphs:

In my rovings and ramblings as a boy I had often skirted the old stone house in the hollow. But my first clear remembrance of it is of a hot summer's day. I had climbed to the crest of a hill till then unknown to me, and stood there, hot and breathless in the bright slippery grass, looking down on its grey walls and chimneys as if out of a dream. And as if out of a dream already familiar to me...

After that first visit, scarcely a week passed but that I found myself on this hill again. The remembrance of the house stayed in my mind; would keep returning to me, like a bird to its nest. Sometimes even in the middle of the night I would wake up and lie unable to sleep again for thinking of it--seeing it in my head, solemn, secret, strange.

When the narrator meets the owner of the house, Miss Taroone, she invites him in to explore it, particularly her nephew's old study on the top floor of the house. When he questions her about the pictures and curios he finds there, this is what she tells him:

"I know very little about them, Simon. When Nahum was younger he used to make pictures of Thrae, and of the woods and valleys hereabouts. There are boxfulls put away. Others are pictures brought back from foreign parts, but many of them, as I believe," she turned her face looked into a shadowy corner of the room, "are pictures of nothing on earth. He has his two worlds. Take your time, Simon. Some day you too, I dare say, will go off on your travels...Some day perhaps Nahum will shake himself free of Thrae altogether. I don't know, myself, Simon. This house is enough for me, and what I remember of Sure Vine, compared with which Thrae is but the smallest of bubbles in a large glass."

I do not profess to have understood one half of what Miss Taroone meant in these remarks. It was in English and yet in a hidden tongue.

But by this time I had grown to be bolder in her company, and pounced on this:--"What, please Miss Taroone, do you mean by the 'two worlds'? Or shall I ask downstairs?" I added the latter question because now and then in the past Miss Taroone had bidden me to go down to Linnet Sara for my answers. She now appeared at first not to have heard it.

"Now I must say to you, Simon," she replied at last, folding her hands on her knee, "wherever you may be in that body of yours, you feel you look out of it, do you not?"

I nodded. "Yes, Miss Taroone."

"Now think, then, of Mr. Nahum's round room; where is that?"

"Up there," said I, pointing up a rambling finger.

"Ah!" cried Miss Taroone, "so it may be. But even if tomorrow you are thousands of miles distant from here on the other side of this great Ball, or in its bowels, or flying free--you will still carry a picture of it, will you not? And that will be within you?"

"Yes, in my mind, Miss Taroone?" I answered rather sheepishly.

"In your mind," she echoed me, but not as if she were particularly pleased at the fact. "Well, many of the pictures I take it in Mr. Nahum's round tower are of that world. His MIND. I have never examined them. My duties are elsewhere. Your duty is to keep your senses, heart and courage and to go where you are called. And in black strange places you will at times lose yourself and find yourself, Simon. Now Mr. Nahum is calling. Don't think of me too much. I have great faith in him. Share your eyes with his pictures. And having seen them, compare them if you will. Say, this is this, and that is that. And make of all that he has exactly what use you can."

A Little Auden

2008-08-11T22:48:00.003-04:00

Clio's Mortal wishes to present her readers with a bit - a long bit - from W.H. Auden's "The Sea and the Mirror". Auden appears to be experiencing something of an eclipse of his reputation among critics at the moment. Camille Paglia found no poem of his worthy of inclusion in her book on influential poems of the 20th century, and while this was only to be expected of Prof. Paglia, CM was struck by the way many readers of her book appeared to agree with her.

Anyway. "The Sea and the Mirror" is a very odd work, more prose than poetry. CM first stumbled upon this poem, if that is what we agree to call it, when she was a young thing of twenty-one or so, and supposed to be working on a paper on a particularly dull Abstract Expressionist whose name she has thankfully forgotten. There is, she would like to observe in passing, no exercise more redundant than commenting in words on an art form whose practitioners insist that their work is ineffable and cannot be expressed in anything but paint - but she digresses. Yes, "The Sea and the Mirror" is odd and unpoetic but still wonderful, she thinks. It is perhaps rather adolescent in its outlook on life, but then so is she, for all her efforts not to be. She hopes that you will be able to make sense of it in its truncated form, and that you will enjoy it and seek it out. The speaker of the poem is Caliban, and he is addressing the audience after a performance of The Tempest.

Beating about for some large loose image to define the original drama which aroused his imitative passion, the first performance in which the players were their own audience, the worldly stage on which their behaving flesh was really sore and sorry--for the floods of tears were not caused by onions, the deformities and wounds did not come off after a good wash, the self-stabbed heroine could not pick herself up again to make a gracious bow nor her seducer go demurely home to his plain and middle-aged spouse--the fancy immediately flushed is of the greatest grandest opera rendered by a very provincial touring company indeed.

Our performance--for Arial and I are, you know this now, just as deeply involved as any of you--which we were obliged, all of us, to go on with and sit through right to the final dissonant chord, has been so indescribably awful. Sweating and shivering in our moth-eaten ill-fitting stock costumes...we floundered on from fiasco to fiasco, the schmalz tenor never quite able at his big moments to get right up nor the ham bass right down, the stud contralto gargling through her maternal grief, the ravished coloratura trilling madly off-key and the re-united lovers half a bar apart, the knock-kneed armies shuffling limply through their bloodly battles, the unearthly harvesters hysterically entangled in their honest fugato.

Now it is over. No, we have not dreamt it. Here we really stand, down stage with red faces and no applause; no effect, however simple, no piece of business, however unimportant, came off; there was not a single aspect of our whole production, not even the huge stuffed bird of happiness, for which a kind word could, however patronisingly, be said.

Yet, at this very moment when we do at last see ourselves as we are, neither cosy nor playful, but swaying out on the ultimate wind-whipped cornice that overhangs the unabiding void--we have never stood anywhere else--when our reasons are silenced by the heavy huge derision,--There is nothing to say. There never has been,--and our wills chuck in their hands--There is no way out. There never was,--it is at this moment that for the first time in our lives we hear, not the sounds which, as born actors, we have hitherto condescended to use as an excellent vehicle for displaying our personalities and looks, but the real Word which is our only raison d'etre...it is just here, among the ruins and the bones, that we may rejoice in the perfected Work which is not ours. Its great coherences stand out through our secular blur in all their overwhelmingly righteous obligation; its voice speaks through our muffling banks of artificial flowers and unflinchingly delivers its authentic molar pardon; its spaces greet us with all their grand old prospect of wonder and width; the working charm is the full bloom of the unbothered state; the sounded note is the restored relation.

W.H. Auden, "The Sea and the Mirror", Collected Poems. Random House, pp. 443-44.

Designing Clio

2008-08-10T09:14:00.013-04:00

Clio: Hello, darling. How have you been?

CM: Dreadful. You haven't come around lately and it shows. My writing is all about passing popular culture phenomena. No Clio to give me her special perspective on human existence.

Clio: Well, ducky, I'm here now. And speaking of perspective, I've been catching up lately on education debates lately in your great neighbour to the south.

CM: Humph. You're always so strict with me about avoiding journalistic cliches, but I see you don't bother to take your own advice. "Great neighbour to the south," indeed!

Clio: If you're rude to me I'll disappear again and leave you with nothing but that undisciplined imagination of yours to write with. Now, where was I? Oh yes, perspective. And education debates.

CM: What about them?

Clio: They are much exercised in their minds - some of them - about Intelligent Design. They think it is a sign of American backwardness. They think one of the reasons why America is falling behind in the sciences is because of those pesky evangelicals wanting to teach ID in their schools.

CM: And you think they'e wrong about that? I'm surprised.

Clio: Well, goodness knows I hold no brief for American evangelicals. I am, after all, a Muse -

CM: And I'm a Catholic. I find them a little odd myself. Though not bad people, once you get to know them. Except Pentecostals. They're all quite mad. They think C.S. Lewis was a pagan.

Clio: - [stop interrupting, dear] - but I think in this case the fears of the anti ID people are simply silly. As if the United States hadn't been composed mainly of believing Christians throughout its history! They may not have learned Creationism in their schools, but they certainly learned it from the Bible and encountered it in Sunday school once a week. Yet that didn't stop them from achieving world leadership, more or less, in science and technology as well as in everything else. If a handful of school children in a few districts are made to sit through a few lessons in ID here and there, it's hardly likely to render them scientifically illiterate for life, unless they choose to be that way. Besides, having to consider specific arguments for or against a scientific position can make both science and the logical faculties stronger. ID is really not a scientific explanation for anything, it's true, but it does present a set of questions that will force science writers and popularizers to explain evolution more carefully, so that there's less room for confusion.

CM: Perhaps you're right. I hadn't thought of it that way. Certainly there are aspects of evolution, as it was summarized for me in school, that confuse me greatly. If it had been taught to me as a theory, instead of as established fact, I might have asked more questions and received a better explanation. As it was, my biology teachers always hinted that anyone who asked any questions about it, must be an anti-scientific nut. As a result, there were a good many questions I never asked.

Clio: Surely it's unlike you to be so timid, dear. What kind of questions were they? Are you sure they haven't been answered already?

CM: They may well have been answered. I just never heard any answers when I was in school. And now I don't know where to begin to find out, especially since I don't want to get a lot of anti-religious bollocks shoved at me too. My questions? Well, for instance, we learned nothing at all about the role of mutation in evolution when I was in high school. Now I hear that it's thought by some people to have a major part in the development of animal species. Which makes sense to me, because I never could see how multiple species could develop within a single environment. Sub-species, yes - but not distinct and different species. But what I haven't heard is whether they think environmental change had anything to do with genetic mutation. I mean, they do know that radiation can cause mutations, or inadequate diet, or things like that. But what about the part played by such environmental factors in evolution? Not just in killing off some species, but creating new ones through mutation? I'm sure someone has answered that question, but we never head anything about it in school. And my high school taught math and sciences really well, much better than literature and history.

Clio: I can't help you out with that, CM darling, because I am not a science muse. But I do think that your American friends ought to be more worried about ID politics than ID science.

CM: What do you mean by that? Really, Clio, you express yourself in riddles sometimes.

Clio: Just having a bit of fun with puns, dear. I mean that identity politics seem to be more of a threat to science teaching in the US than ID theory ever will be. Did you see that article in The Chronicle of Higher Education?

The intellectual lassitude we breed in students, their unearned and inflated self-confidence, undercuts both the self-discipline and the intellectual modesty that is needed for the apprentice years in the sciences. Modesty? Yes, for while talented scientists are often proud of their talent and accomplishments, they universally subscribe to the humbling need to prove themselves against the most-unyielding standards of inquiry. That willingness to play by nature's rules runs in contrast to the make-it-up-as-you-go-along insouciance that characterizes so many variants of postmodernism and that flatters itself as being a higher form of pragmatism.

The aversion to long-term and deeply committed study of science among American students also stems from other cultural imperatives. We rank the manufacture of "self-esteem" above hard-won achievement, but we also have immersed a generation in wall-to-wall promotion of diversity and multiculturalism as being the worthiest form of educational endeavor; we have foregrounded the redistributional dreams of "social justice" over heroic aspirations to discover, invent, and thereby create new wealth; and we have endlessly extolled the virtue of "sustainability" against the ravages of "progress." Do all that, and you create an educational system that is essentially hostile to advanced achievement in the sciences and technology. Moreover, those threads have a certainty and unity that make them not just a collection of educational conceits but also part of a compelling worldview.

The antiscience agenda is visible as early as kindergarten, with its infantile versions of the diversity agenda and its early budding of self-esteem lessons. But it complicates and propagates all the way up through grade school and high school. In college it often drops the mask of diffuse benevolence and hardens into a fascination with "identity."

p.s. The photo was taken a couple of years ago. Just-got-up hair and no makeup, so don't be rude. I probably won't leave it up for very long but I had the urge to play hide-and-seek again for a bit, and to show CM when caught up in a muse-induced trance.

Update: Photo removed. Later: And added (temporarily) again by request. And for Pete's sake, if anyone recognises me by name, don't spread it around. Not that I can see why anyone would want to, but you never know. Later still: gone again. That was long enough to catch all my regular readers, the only ones who need to know what I look like.

Meditations on the Alpha Male

2008-08-09T12:46:00.004-04:00

The concept was one that puzzled me for a long time, although I believe that I have come to understand it. Many of my readers, unfamiliar with Game theory, Mystery, or Evolutionary Psychology, are still confused about the meaning of the term in all its flexible, glorious variety, as some of them indicate in bewildered wails in my comments boxes. No more. To assist them, I now offer a short crash-course brought to you by Warner Brothers via Youtube. Its title? Bugs Bunny as Alpha Male.

Bugs is an ideal example for my purposes because, while neither handsome, large, nor high-status, he nevertheless went head to head with any number of larger, more powerful males, and, although sometimes embarrassed, frequently cornered and occasionally in grave danger, he always came out on top. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what an alpha male does.

Always travel with an anvil:

This one makes my point so neatly that I do not believe any further comment is necessary.

Being able to play an instrument is helpful in many situations:

It is possible that our rabbit's opponents in this video could not be classified as alphas, but they are nevertheless larger and stronger, than he is, and armed with guns. He prevails all the same.

Even vampires quail before Bugs's alpha-essence:

A careless word here or there may be more powerful than you think.

Why alphas should be nice to old ladies:

Bugs's power is turned on its head by female wiles, but it all works in his favour.

Multiculturalism

2008-08-07T15:42:00.003-04:00

I posted the poem below in April 2007, and on an earlier weblog several years ago. Ta twam asi is a Sanskrit phrase, used I believe in meditation.

Update: One of the reasons I enjoy this sort of thing is that I had a truly multicultural childhood, at one time living in a household (in New Delhi) whose occupants must have covered nearly all the major world religions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Somehow it worked.

JAPANESE ARCHERY

1.
The hand tells the bowstring:
Obey me.

The bowstring answers the hand:
Draw valiantly.

The bowstring tells the arrow:
O arrow, fly.

The arrow answers the bowstring:
Speed my flight.

The arrow tells the target:
Be my light.

The target answers the arrow:
Love me.

2.
The target tells arrow, bowstring, hand and eye:
Ta twam asi.

Which means in a sacred tongue:
I am thou.

3.
(Footnote of a Christian:
O Mother of God,

watch over the target, the bow, the arrow
and the archer).

Aleksander Wat

Translated by Richard Laurie
From My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual. New York and London: Norton, 1988.

Middle-Aged Love

2008-08-05T12:44:00.003-04:00

Reading, as I so often do online, about the undesirability of older women (anyone above the age of, say, twenty-five), and about the inevitable decline of passion in middle life after many years of marriage, I thought I would post Ezra Pound's famous translation of "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter". It's rather melancholy, but now, when the paired butterflies are yellow with August, it seems an entirely suitable accompaniment to the day:

WHILE my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse;
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the look-out?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-Yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the west garden—
They hurt me.
I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you,
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
From the Chinese of Li Po

Clio asks "what goes on here?"

2008-08-04T10:26:00.005-04:00

Clio's mortal usually avoids overt political and media commentary. However, this comment on "citizen journalists" in Prospect magazine, found via Arts and Letters Daily, caught her interest, and she wonders what other people think about it:

To test the theory of citizen journalism, last year Huffington teamed up with Jay Rosen of New York University, the founder of an idealistic citizen journalism start-up called newassignment.net, to create OffTheBus, a HuffPost project designed to funnel the best citizen journalism coverage of the 2008 presidential election and publish it on HuffPost.

It sounded compelling in abstract. And while OffTheBus has certainly made an impact, it has also raised worrying questions about professionalism and integrity in journalism. Huffington and Rosen "hired" Mayhill Fowler, a 61-year-old failed novelist with no journalism training, to report on the Obama campaign. Having blundered into a Democratic fundraiser in San Francisco in April, Fowler reported in HuffPost on Obama's off-the-record remarks about "bitter" small-town Americans turning to guns and religion. The story got hundreds of thousands of readers, and the consequent public storm did serious damage to the Obama candidacy. A couple of months later, Fowler made the news again when she taped a profanity-laden tirade (off the record of course) from Bill Clinton against another reporter and then wrote about it on HuffPost.

While at first glance the influence these stories had might suggest OfftheBus was working, in reality it exposes the limits of the experiment. Fowler was less interested in reporting news than in making it herself. The violation of trust between reporter and politician involved in her reporting would make it impossible to sustain a responsible journalism in the long term.

Emphasis mine. Am I naive, or does the italicized passage reveal more than it intends about the complicity between reporters and politicians? I understand that in certain cases reporters must respect confidentiality - such as when they are given sensitive information by a source whose own power to protect himself is limited, for example - but is it really customary for reporters to accept that large areas of political commentary by professional politicians should be off-limits to them? And if it is, should it be? Let me make it clear that a) I don't believe in reporting on the private lives of public figures; b) that I don't think this is a partisan issue and should not be approached as one; and c) that I'm not really worked up about the decline of print journalism. I expect that if the decline continues, news media will find ways to report the news using professional reporters again; the present problem with tactless non-professional journalists arises because this is a confusing period of transition. It's that revelation of the extent of the tacit agreement between reporters and politicians not to report what politicians actually say in informal moments that concerns me here. I'll accept correction if I am mistaken and this is indeed a necessary strategy, but I'd like to know why.

Musings

2008-08-03T18:41:00.004-04:00

Clio's mortal has not been sleeping well recently, a problem which always puts a stranglehold on her clarity of thought, such as it is, and her imagination. That is why she hasn't been posting much here. Don't feel too sorry for her, though, as it's all her own fault. She is kept awake by her contemplation of her sins. She failed to remedy the problem today at Mass because she arrived too late to go to Confession, or, as it's now known, the Sacrament of Reconciliation. She pities the priest who has to listen to her confess the same sins over and over again, but when she once apologised to him for this very tendency, he laughed and said, "But that's a good thing! At least you're not adding any new ones."

But enough of this. I wanted to ask readers whether they might have any favourite books or poems they might want to mention here. Not famous ones; not necessarily the "guilty pleasure" books that we know we shouldn't like but still enjoy. I was thinking of obscure books or poems, not well-known or known to a wide audience, or formerly well-known but now slipping into obscurity, even little-known works by famous authors. Another approach: former best-sellers from the fiction lists that are now forgotten. These are always interesting to read because they tend to date so badly that you wonder, at first, why they ever achieved a broad readership.

Leonard Woolf, who could be a perceptive critic, once wrote that the necessary traits for a best-selling writer were "a touch of naivete, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift, and a mysterious sympathy with the day-dreams of ordinary people." It's that element, the sympathy for the "day-dreams of ordinary people", that I think often makes old best-sellers read so oddly after their time has passed. Popular day-dreams change, and thus sound comically naive to later generations.

Ian Fleming was a writer of this type. I suspect his books would not continue to sell if they had not been kept alive by the Bond film series. The fantasy of being a gentleman-killer is not one that seems to appeal much to men today. Those men who want "macho" want it pure and unadulterated; those who prefer the metrosexual image don't care for the brutality of the old Bond. The movies succeed not because of their hero, but because of the gadgets, girls, and explosions.

Clio's Readings

2008-07-31T13:13:00.006-04:00

From the writings of Henri Nouwen, Dutch Catholic priest, who struggled with depression for much of his life:

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

Via a recently discovered blog kept by a young Turkish woman studying in London.

An interesting interview with the Vampire, or rather, with his creatrix Ann Rice, talking about her re-lapsed Catholicism and her books on Jesus. Here's a passage discussing her early work:

I recently posted an essay on my website on my earlier work. I think this essay has answered quite a few questions from my Christian readers who are unacquainted with the books. Basically I see the entire Vampire Chronicles as a search for God, a search for the light. The vampire was a metaphor for me, in the atheistic world, grieving for a lost faith, for the lost possibility of grace. I think that vampires are powerfully metaphorical for people, especially young people because the vampires (in my work, at any rate) are always in rebellion, refusing to be shut out of life, trying desperately to see deliverance through love of one another, through painting, through music. All my earlier work is united by these themes. The erotic element in the books was never there to sell books; it was something that came naturally to me, especially in my younger years.

Here's another talking about her discoveries as she explores biblical scholarship:

As I plunged into modern Bible scholarship, I assumed the skeptics would be right, but I soon discovered that their “late date” theories of gospel creation were flimsy, full of assumptions, and that a dislike of Jesus ran through many of their arrogant and pompous books. The field came across to me as a huge scandal. There were believers and non-believers claiming to be Jesus scholars, and the skeptics, the famous Jesus Seminar, had been throwing out some outrageous nonsense to get the attention of the public. I have never seen sloppier scholarship in any field of study than what I saw in so-called biblical scholarship.

Some thoughts on narcissism

2008-07-27T18:36:00.014-04:00

Clio's Mortal was recently involved in a debate in which she lost her temper and said some sharp things to other commentators. She is sorry about the loss of temper but perhaps not as sorry as she should be. The article which occasioned the debate was by one F. Roger Devlin, "The feminine sexual counter-revolution and its limitations", a review of Wendy Shalit's book, Girls Gone Mild. Shalit is one of the harbingers of a "return to modesty" movement that encourages young women to be modest in dress and to hold out for marriage rather than engaging in casual sexual encounters.

Devlin agrees with Shalit about some issues, but insists that her book is too unsympathetic to men's point of view, and ultimately narcissistic. He may for all I know be right about Shalit, whose work I don't know well, but he uses his review to launch an attack not merely on Shalit, on her stance, and on the feminism of which Shalit is herself critical, but on women and our essential nature, and how modern social and sexual mores have allowed women's worst characteristics to triumph. Chief of these characteristics, according to Devlin, is female narcissism.

I was, I am, prepared to agree that young women today are often narcissistic. I might even go so far as to say that their narcissism is worse than that of previous generations, although I really have no proof for that, and for all I know my impressions are simply the typical response of the middle-aged to the young. Perhaps it is even true that young women today are more narcissistic than men. Certainly popular culture does everything in its power to encourage them to be so, while giving shorter shrift to youthful male vanity in some forms of popular culture. (TV and magazines feed female vanity, up to a point, and mock males, while the movies are more supportive of men.) But that is a far cry from Devlin's insistence that narcissism is a peculiarly feminine characteristic. What irritated me was that Devlin's piece was entirely impressionistic and lacking in any kind of proof of its assertions. A single paragraph, below, from Devlin's review, serves to illustrate this. The passages in italics are from Devlin's essay; those in red are mine.

My point is not that we should coddle boys; I am simply calling attention to the difficulty Shalit, in common with most women, seems to have with putting herself imaginatively in the place of a male. [Most men also have difficulty putting themselves in women's place. Of course, a good many try; but then, a number of women make the effort too. Neither sex tends to be very successful at this, especially when in the process of seeking a sexual encounter or a mate. Empathy can be a dangerous thing between the sexes at such moments. It can all too easily leak into their sexual attraction towards each other, where it can play havoc with good judgment. The type of woman who says of a man "he's so sensitive!"; the man who says of a woman, "she's had such a hard time", seldom choose mates wisely.] There may well be an evolutionary explanation for this. Men instinctively protect women [Do they? Where? In traditional societies, like those of Afghanistan or Ethiopia? I'm thinking here of the much-cited article about the dysfunctionality of Ethiopian men by Kevin Myers. What about traditional Western society? Well, perhaps, sometimes. The men on board the Titanic were a good example of this kind of chivalry, and I'm certain there were many others. Perhaps still are. But I expect I could counter that with many stories of men's failure to protect women "instinctively". Such behaviour has to be learned. Male protectiveness in modern Western society? Sporadic. I can take it for granted, sometimes, that a date will walk me home or otherwise see me to my door. I know that some men will fight in wars to protect me and other women, and men, a fact that must never be forgotten. Other than that, I'm not certain what Devlin means when he speaks of instinctive male protectiveness. I don't necessarily think less of men on that account. I agree with Devlin that the sexes could do better at bringing out the best in each other.] because the future of the tribe lies in the children they bear. Women have adapted to this state of affairs, and it colors their moral outlook. They do not spend much time worrying about the well-being of men. [How is it possible to argue with this airy statement, offered without any proof at all? What would Devlin accept as proof that he is mistaken? The women who persuade ailing husbands to see doctors in the face of perpetual grumbling refusal? The women who take in every detail of their husbands' careers, if for no better reason than that their families' well-being depends on their doing so? The women who flatter, encourage, listen to, prop up their men in times of depression? I don't know where Mr Devlin grew up, or whom he married, but the women he describes do not resemble those I have known all my life. I realise that this is proof of nothing, but as Devlin doesn't offer any either, I should be allowed to get away with it.]Even getting them to cook supper for their husbands is probably a triumph of civilization. Their natural inclination is to let men look after themselves and take their chances in life. At the same time, they count on men to shield them from the harsher aspects of reality, and become extremely indignant at any men who fail to do so. [I really don't know what Devlin means here. That reality has many harsh aspects, I understand. That women expect men to hide it from us - a little explanation would be helpful. Does he mean public or domestic issues? Anti-sexual harassment laws? Affirmative action? Or just making sure that a wife isn't forced to confront that business is going badly, or that she's overweight?] In other words, women are naturally inclined to assume that men must take responsibility for everyone, while they are only responsible for themselves and the children. [There may be some truth in the statement that women expect to be responsible only for themselves and their children. It is difficult to give full attention to anything but one's children, while they are very young. Children appear to have that effect on parents.] Young, still-childless women have no one left to think about but themselves and easily fall into self-absorption. [And young single men don't? The only single men whom I know who show much concern for others are those whose work demands it of them, men with a vocational call to "caring". That doesn't mean that single men never try to be helpful or selfless; I know a number that do. As I know single women who do. It's not really all that common, though, as far as I can tell. Self-absorption is today a prerogative of youth. Once again, I have no proof for my assertions here; but neither does Devlin.] One popular women's magazine is actually titled Self. I would not want the job of promoting a magazine of that title to men. [There were no magazines with titles like Self before the sillier side of feminism began to find a commercial foothold in the world of magazines. The title and the journal's content both indicate high levels of self-absorption among those who read it. However, I respectfully suggest that GQ, Esquire, Maxim, and so forth also encourage and celebrate a certain narcissism in the minds of those who read them. Playboy was the male version of Vogue, with its advice on how to live with panache, but it reached a far larger audience at the peak of its popularity. Even in recent years, the top-selling women's magazines (in 2005) were Good Housekeeping (4,634,763), Family Circle (4,296,370), Ladies' Home Journal (4,122,460), and Woman's Day (4, 048, 799). I suppose Devlin might consider some of the material in these magazines narcissistic, but they also explain how to cook, budget, and organize your household; make suggestions for weight loss; offer theories on childcare; and discuss new medical discoveries. The top-selling men's magazines, on the other hand, are Sports Illustrated and Playboy. If I were to follow Mr Devlin's methodology for determining the narcissism of either sex, I might be inclined on this evidence to think that men were guiltier than women. But in fact I suspect that the young of both sexes are equally guilty, in different ways.]

Clio's Heroes

2008-07-25T09:48:00.004-04:00

Some time ago, Clio and CM collaborated on a post about Sir Walter Ralegh. Unable to find a particular book by George Garrett, CM cited it from memory. Here, now, is the citation she wanted to include then:

The thirsting Tantalus doth catch at streames that from him flee.
Why laughest thou? the name but changed, the tale is told of thee.

Ralegh -- translation from Horace

He proved himself not quite fit for the Council. Not by greed, for [the Queen] made good use of greedy men. Not by lechery either or, for that matter, folly or infidelity. Those failings can be taken into account.

Not by any of these so much as by - indifference. In a final corner of himself, he did not care. The Queen could go and stand on her head.

I think, sir, the Queen may have been pleased. Now she knew her man by heart.

Do you see? In certain conditions, in the grip of uncertain events, Ralegh would throw away his future like feed for chickens.

Now she knew that his finest moments would come at those times when a future seems no longer possible. His most shining times would be those, like a soldier's, of pure and perfect present time.

She cold hope such a time would never come for her or the kingdom. Yet if it should happen that all things fell away, in adversity and dreadful misfortune, and all things and all hopes were lost, he would still be there and he would surely live or die for her. His life and body would shield hers. And not out of love or fidelity or ambition or honour or virtue, but out of the joy and the style of it and because that time would truly be his home.

George Garrett, Death of the Fox

Random Musings (for the sentimental only)

2008-07-23T09:12:00.003-04:00

Apologies for a longer-than-usual silence. CM has spent the last week rediscovering her femininity. Her brother, his wife, and their two small girls - the eldest about two years old, the younger just two months - were visiting from Belgium. When she wasn't trawling the internet for job prospects, CM was burping babies, singing off-key lullabies in English and French, taking children to parks, preparing Kraft Dinner, and other child-related tasks. (Note that in fact it was CM who was off-key, not the lullabies.) Much fun. They left yesterday and now she is feeling a little bereft. The baby was one of those who loves to cuddle, which is not as universal among babies as the inexperienced might think. Neither her older sister, nor my nephew, were real cuddlers even in infancy: they were squirmers, always wiggling around trying to change positions, fussing to be put down, and crawling away as soon as they were old enough.

It appears to be much more difficult to be a parent now than it used to be. First, there are those cursed infant car-seats that take up all the room in even a good-sized car, and require so much time to install, and add to the prep time for any journey as the parent struggles to get the children seated. I'm certain they account for the popularity of enormous vehicles for families today. Then there are the toys. Children today have such enormous, brightly-coloured, loud toys, beeping, honking, or roaring at you. Even their books have flashing lights and make noises. And there are so many of them, and they take up so much room. My brothers and I were not exactly deprived of toys, but even in our abundance we would look impoverished next to today's middle-class children.

Finally, there are the busybodies. A visiting cousin told me about how he was out with his two daughters, aged ten and seven, and the elder girl had a small tantrum and slammed the car door. Her father scolded her (mildly, he's a doting father), and slammed his door to demonstrate how it sounded. And a man walking past them on the sidewalk stopped, poked his head in the car window, and began to berate my cousin, telling the girls that they didn't have to put up with that sort of thing, and he would call the police right then and there on their behalf. The girls, worried for their father's sake, began to cry, and the fellow became yet more agitated. He was probably a victim of some kind of abuse himself, and meant well, and I suppose in a way he was behaving like a good citizen - but oh dear, I wouldn't want to have to face that kind of accusation on a regular basis. I can't remember how the situation was resolved, but luckily it blew over fast.

Maimed for life

2008-07-17T10:56:00.002-04:00

Clio: Dear, dear. CM has been tagged twice with the same MEME. People are apparently interested in discovering her little quirks. Six of them, to be precise. Clio is more than happy to tell you about them, and wishes to point out that CM is already squriming in her seat at the prospect. Here goes:

1. She is seldom late, but may forget appointments altogether. Even if she writes them down and displays the note prominently.
2. She suffers from terrible foot-in-mouth syndrome. Self-consciously, she tries to fight it, and often commits even worse blunders in consequence. This is why blogging is good for her: she can think as she writes and is thus able to be, paradoxically, more free-spoken.
3. She hates beer and will not drink it under any circumstances.
4. She blushes when embarrassed, which happens often.
5. She had a passion for the music of Neil Diamond in her early teens.
6. She has to fight the temptation to add a little colour to the facts, because, as Flewdur Fflam, the Welsh bard in Lloyd Alexander's Taran books says, "most facts need it so badly."

CM: I can't believe you told them about Neil Diamond. I may never live this down. Other bloggers will think me uncool and Days of Broken Arrows will dismiss me with contempt. My life as a blogger is over. Couldn't you tell them that I liked Radiohead instead?

Clio: Radiohead didn't exist when you were a teenager. Anyway, you don't like Radiohead, even now.

RULES OF THE MEME:
Link the person(s) who tagged you
Mention the rules on your blog
Tell about 6 unspectacular quirks of yours
Tag 6 fellow bloggers by linking them
Leave a comment on each of the tagged blogger’s blogs letting them know they’ve been tagged

Don't know when I'll get around to finding other bloggers to tag. That's always the hard part for me.

p.s. Readers, Clio's Mortal has been busy with job applications and interview-preparation for the last few days. She begs pardon for not posting frequently and promises to pick up the pace again soon.

Heartbreakers 8: The Amazonian Alpha

2008-07-12T17:30:00.001-04:00

Pour meriter son coeur, pour plaire a ses beaux yeux,
J'ai fait la guerre aux Rois; je l'aurais fait aux Dieux.

Pour meriter son coeur, qu'enfin je connais mieux
J'ai fait la guerre au Roi; j'en ai perdu les yeux.

I haven't been able to manage a translation that preserves the rhythm, but it means something like,

To be worthy of her heart, to please her lovely eyes
I made war upon kings; I would fight the gods for her.

Just to win her heart, which I know now too well
I made war upon the king; I lost my eyes for her.

The first couplet is from a play by the early modern French playwright Ryer; the second was written to cap it, by the French moralist and social commentator La Rochefoucauld. He had fallen in love with the very beautiful Duchesse de Longueville (above), taken part, at her urging, in the Fronde rebellions, and lost an eye in battle as a result.

That is the kind of thing that men do for an Amazonian Alpha femme fatale. This woman, along with the Eternal Ingenue, is the most likely of all femme fatale types to be perceived as an Iconic Woman. But whereas the Eternal Ingenue inspires dreams of perpetual love and happiness, the Amazonian Alpha inspires, in those who fall in love with her, dreams of glory, of being raised above all the ordinary people who mill around on the face of the earth. She is the Maverick Alpha's natural mate, although she may choose a more ordinary Classic Alpha. Often she is unable to find a man she considers worthy of her, and may remain single.

The Amazonian Alpha is usually very intelligent and generally beautiful or at least physically impressive, being statuesque of build, like Maud Gonne, left, the Irish nationalist who made Yeats miserable, and often athletic as well. I don't know enough about her background to speculate about her behaviour, but Gonne's appearance was certainly that of an Amazonian heartbreaker; Yeats described her has having "beauty like a tightened bow." In social life, she can be often recognised as the lone woman talking with a large group of men, men who laugh at her jokes and who may anxiously ask her opinion about public affairs and actually listen to what she says about them. Random men sledom try to ogle or touch her, because however beautiful she may be she has a steely eye or haughty deportment that does not bode well for men who behave disrespectfully to her. Her great virtue is strength of character: she will not readily back down and is usually possessed of physical and moral courage. Her great weakness is pride, which may lead her to serious errors in judgment.

The Alpha Amazon will almost certainly be a Daddy's Girl, but unlike the Neurotic Heartbreaker, her relationship with her father will not have been interrupted by early death or marital breakdown. Unlike the Eternal Ingenue, her father is probably also a very successful man, a dominant Alpha male who was either born to money and power or who acquired it through his own drive or gifts. You might expect all daughters of rich fathers to be Amazonian heartbreakers, but this is not the case. First, not all rich men are dominant, especially if they inherited their money and did not have to make their own way in the world. A weak, sweet-natured rich man may produce a daughter who seeks to dominate men in the way her mother did, one who will not risk being dominated by either men or women. She might develop into an Amazon, but she will not be a heartbreaker, at least not in her relations with men.
Vita Sackville-West's father, Lord Sackville, produced just this kind of Amazonian daughter: she chose a rather passive husband and spent her heartbreaker energies on women rather than men.

Some dominant and successful men may not take much interest in their daughters, preferring to invest time and effort in their sons, if they have any, or taking the line that women and children should be seen and not heard. If so, such a man's daughters, like those of Lord Curzon, for example, may spend their entire lives trying desperately to capture male attention, and may be more likely to have their hearts broken than to be heartbreakers themselves.

But a successful Alpha male who cares for his daughters will be a protective, indeed an over-protective father to them, perhaps discouraging or intimidating their would-be suitors right out of the house. Lord Redesdale, father of the Mitford girls, was just such a rich man. The daughter in whom he took most interest, Diana, below left, was a classic Amazonian heart-breaker. I show a picture taken in her old age to emphasize that a beautiful Amazon tends to wear rather well over time.

The Amazonian Alpha, although she may break many hearts, is perhaps alone among all the Heartbreaker types catalogued here in that she very rarely does so deliberately, nor out of subconscious neurotic compulsion. Her great problem, and the reason she finds herself breaking hearts, is the one summarized in Sheryl Crow's lament, "Are you strong enough to be my man?" She will not respect a man who is not strong enough for her, and will spend at least part of her life surrounded by male admirers who are not quite equal to her in ability or dominance, who fight a bit desperately for her notice. Diana Mitford had this problem: she married a sweet-natured, rather passive man, mainly to escape from her parents' control, and soon after humiliated him by choosing the Maverick Alpha male Oswald Mosley as a lover and publicly flaunting their relationship. Once she married Mosley, she accepted his dominance and his infidelities.

Alpha Amazons tend to have more male than female friends, and to be more at ease in the company of men, partly because unlike so many women they don't mind arguing or fighting for their point of view, behaviour that makes many women uneasy. But as straight men tend to fall in love with her, she may decide to choose her regular companions from gay men, who will not present problems of this kind. Other women will admire and like her, but feel that she is a little out of their league so far as friendship is concerned.

Not all Alpha Amazons are born to an exalted social rank, like the ones I have listed here, who were nearly all titled women. The daughter of a small-town Alpha male who made his money in dry cleaning or undertaking may also be an Alpha Amazon. Perhaps any father who is reasonably successful himself, and protective and encouraging towards his daughters, and who does not allow himself to be led entirely by his wife, may have such a daughter. I have read that this was the pattern for both Madonna Louise Ciccone and for Camille Paglia.

Perhaps warning men against this kind of heartbreaker is superfluous, since first of all you are not all that likely to encounter one, and if you do, she is unlikely to mislead you with false hopes of a relationship and then back out at the last moment, as other female heartbreakers are inclined to do. But if you find yourself competing with a woman's father; if you find that you are always wondering if you are good enough for her, then it is possible that you have found an Alpha Amazon.

And that concludes, for the moment, my series on the various types of male and female heartbreakers. I hope it has provided a little amusement and perhaps even instruction for those who have read it. I may yet make changes to some or all of these posts, as new ideas or refinements occur to me.

Heartbreakers 7: The Eternal Ingenue (revised)

2008-07-11T20:24:00.001-04:00

'"Sonya! Sonya!" he again heard [Natasha]. "Oh, how can you sleep? Only look how glorious it is! Ah, how glorious!...Do just come and see what a moon!... Oh, how lovely! Come here.... Darling, sweetheart, come here! There, you see? I feel like sitting down on my heels, putting my arms round my knees like this, straining tight, as tight as possible, and flying away! Like this...."

"For her I might as well not exist!" thought Prince Andrew while he listened to her voice, for some reason expecting yet fearing that she might say something about him. "There she is again! As if it were on purpose," thought he.' War and Peace, Book 6, Ch. ii.

Up to her enchanting tricks...

The Eternal Ingenue is a conundrum. She has a superficial physical resemblance to the Waif, in that she tends to have big eyes, small features, and a rather boyish body, thin and not voluptuous. (This is not invariable: there are curvy ingenue heartbreakers.) She can be distinguished from the Waif, however, by the fact that where the Waif is often silent, and usually still, the Eternal Ingenue is in continual, graceful, coltish motion. Nor is she surrounded by an aura of doom-laden unhappiness. She talks a lot. She laughs a good deal. She is above all else, animated. Prancing, gambolling, frolicking like a puppy or a pony, she is often described as "charming" or "enchanting." (If she's being called "enchanting" by many men, you can be virtually certain she's an Eternal Ingenue, and also a femme fatale.)

What makes an ordinary Ingenue into a femme fatale, one who goes through many men and breaks their hearts, is that this is a woman "in love with love," who has a dream-image of the perfect love, and perfect lover, in her mind, and is perpetually seeking the one man who can make her feel as she wants to feel. An element of the Ingenue's search for the perfect love is that she must convince herself that all her previous loves were wrong or bad or not "real" love at all, so they didn't count, because, you see, for her the only perfect love is first love. As a result of all this self-deception, she is able to seem virginal even when she is not. This kind of woman is often a natural "daddy's girl," though her father may have been rather weak, but one who either lost her father early, or has had to share him with other women (her mother, her sisters, a step-mother), and wants him all to herself. She'll put her trust in a handful of other women, but they are often much older than she is.

It's possible to confuse the Ingenue with the Gold-digger, because the latter knows that the best way to seem unthreatening is to appear child-like. But the Gold-digger will almost invariably reveal a certain hardness in her face or manner; the Eternal Ingenue will never appear to be hard, even if she really is. Consider the case of Louise Brooks, above, who had affairs with multiple male co-stars and yet managed to present an image of girlishness all her life, even, it seems, in old age. Another obvious ingenue who seems reluctant to grow up is Julia Roberts, who still seems to project, less convincingly than before, an air of wide-eyed wonder and delight at the world around her, through many affairs, two marriages, and motherhood.

Understand, though, that this ingenue quality is not quite the same as the cultivation of mere childishness or irresponsibility, the refusal to grow up that is endemic to our culture now, and that I wrote of in a previous post. The Ingenue doesn't necessarily refuse to be responsible or adult. She simply maintains an air of girlish sweetness and innocence through middle and old age.

Once again, I feel obliged to warn the systems-minded males who might read this that not all Eternal Ingenues are also femmes fatales. But they do tend to be. For one thing, this is an element of one's personality that it is difficult to preserve through marriage, motherhood, experience etc. unless it is consciously cultivated. And the main reason a woman is likely to cultivate this persona is that it is a guarantee of male respect and protection. This again has a certain similarity to the way men respond to the waif. But the waif's childlike qualities may make a man feel protective: they do not make him feel fatherly. The whole point of the Ingenue is that she brings out this feeling in men. She makes them want to initiate her into the world, but gently, in a fatherly way, with books and talk and advice. A man who falls in love with an ingenue, if she is also really young, is likely to suffer some confusion about his feelings for her, as he finds himself torn between fatherly affection and plain desire.

Every woman must be an ingenue in the literal sense of the word at some point in her life, but most of them us reject the persona of the ingenue and prefer to pretend to be more sophisticated or street-smart than we really are. The Eternal Ingenue will cultivate a little-girlish demeanour even when she no longer is. Actresses, who are nearly always cast as ingenues at least once in their lives, may find that they are never able to move beyond this stage of development, which can present great problems for them. I suspect it has as much to do with the personality of the actress, as with directorial stereotyping.

Audrey Hepburn was an Eternal Ingenue both in her on-screen persona and, it seemed, in her actual life, although she wasn't a femme fatale, since she does not appear to have run through large numbers of lovers. Directors preserved her essential girlishness as she grew older by playing her opposite increasingly older male stars. She is said to have had great difficulty making the transition to a slightly younger male lead when cast in How to Steal a Million with Peter O'Toole. To me she always looks uncomfortable in the film. On the other hand, playing Natasha, above, in War and Peace, she seems to find a character so perfectly suited to her own natural self that in spite of having seen the film only once, and having read the book many times, I still picture Audrey Hepburn in my mind's eye when I think of Natasha.

Other women tend not to trust the Eternal Ingenue, and with reason, because even if a particular Ingenue does not make a game of collecting men, she is compellingly attractive, especially middle-aged men, and is, sometimes inadvertently, the cause of many breakups. Besides, a woman with a perpetual air of innocent girlishness is also irritating to more hard-headed or cynical women, who look on it with a knowing, weary eye, even when they have no fears for the men in their lives. Men, in turn, will wonder why some of us look so skeptically at so enchanting a girl, and will accuse us of jealousy and bitchiness. Well, perhaps. But when she has had a passionate romance with you, then flitted on to some other man, informing you that you are indeed wonderful but that really, she doesn't think you are ideal for each other, and then you find out that she has done this several times before, and you are left heartbroken and bewildered too, don't come crying to us for comfort. And don't make the mistake of treating every woman badly because this one has shattered your illusions about our sex.

Heartbreakers 6: The Waif/Neurotic (revised)

2008-07-10T19:56:00.003-04:00

Mother, mother, what ill-bred aunt
Or what disfigured and unsightly
Cousin did you so unwisely keep
Unasked to my christening, that she
Sent these ladies in her stead
With heads like darning-eggs to nod
And nod and nod at foot and head
And at the left side of my crib?

-- Sylvia Plath, from The Disquieting Muses

Like the gold-digger, the waif/neurotic femme fatale comes in many guises, but unlike her, this one does not change her spots for her audience. She is always, quite tiresomely, herself. I wondered, when I first came to think about her, whether the Waif and the Neurotic might constitute two different types of femme fatale. Now I think the two are probably variations on the same theme, existing on a kind of continuum. There is the more vocal Neurotic type, who is probably very intelligent and a high achiever (think Plath, left, or Wurtzel, bottom left, both excellent students), who probably suffers from depression and will do her best to ensure that you do as well; and there is the Waif, who is more obviously fragile in appearance than the neurotic, less verbal, less likely to be an academic success, and more drawn to the visual arts than to writing. What they have in common is that they suffer, and use their pain to hold on to their men.

In fact, the Waif heartbreaker (think Edie Sedgwick, left, or Kate Moss) doesn't speak much, ever, but she will find other ways to let you know she is in pain. Even if she does not exude suffering, there is something about her that is fey, in touch with another world, like Julie Christie in her early films. She may be artistic or merely drawn to artists. She is often a wild and inventive dresser, and her clothes may set the fashion for her friends. Some Waifs are visibly sad; others are good-humored and sweetly inarticulate, but all will dither and worry and demand protection from men, bugs, or the weather (Annie Hall).

As a woman, I enjoy both the Waif and Neurotic sub-types and find them to be good friends and, when they are in a good mood, lots of fun, but I can't imagine anything more awful than being married to one and being responsible for her happiness. This type of woman makes me glad that I'm neither a man nor a lesbian, and won't ever have to take that chance.

Waif and Neurotic femmes fatales are often parentless or at least fatherless, though in some cases they will turn out to have been abused in some way rather than abandoned. It's part of the reason for their chronic depression in youth, which they sometimes outgrow as they get older. It also explains the anger towards men hidden under their unhappiness and compulsive heartbreaker behaviour.

Forget worrying about gold-diggers, men. It's these ladies who will find a way to make you miserable every time. The ones on the Neurotic end of the spectrum will wear you out trying to take care of them when they're sick; worry you to death with threats of suicide; make an idiot of you as you try to amuse them with silly jokes or make them feel loved with romantic gestures; persuade you spend all your time and money trying to make them happy. None of it will ever be enough. And then they will leave you for someone else, or have to go for drug or alcohol treatment, or decide that they need to be on their own for a little while.

The Waifs won't expect you to spend much money, and they tend not to demand as much attention as Neurotics, but if annoyed with you they will give you the silent treatment, drifting around sadly with huge eyes, attracting other men, and suddenly leave you for one. Like Neurotic heartbreakers, Waifs tend to develop drug or alcohol problems, but theirs may be more serious, as they don't have the same level of self-discipline as their Neurotic sisters. They won't threaten suicide verbally, but you might come home to find one of them half-dead from an overdose. Lots of drama with these women.

Waifs tend to be drawn to arty, egocentric men who cope with their women's whims by ignoring them (think of Picasso and most of his women). But the kind of man most likely to find himself involved with a Neurotic femme fatale is a conscientious and good-hearted fellow, masculine but not necessarily "macho" in demeanour. He will want to help her solve her problems. One of the hallmarks of any relationship with a heartbreaker, male or female, is that they work on one's vanity to some degree or other. The Neurotic knows how to work a man's protective instincts. That's why he isn't sufficiently wary of this type of woman: she seems so despairing that he doesn't see her wayward side. He may not have had many sisters or female friends growing up, so he won't necessarily recognise the danger signals.

Sometimes a Waif or Neurotic femme fatale is unlucky enough to end up with a Byronic bad boy, an attraction they share, and the results can be catastrophic for both parties. Think of Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb, an obvious Waif, semi-abandoned by both her parents, who was able to punish Byron for his abuses by causing him hideous embarrassment, but who wrecked her marriage, indeed her life, in the process. Or Sylvia Plath, a Neurotic femme fatale if ever there was one, and Ted Hughes, a classic Byronic type. Hughes was unlucky enough to fall for two Neurotic femmes fatales, who both committed suicide.

One caution I want to make is that not all Neurotic or Waif women are heartbreakers. It's a special type of Neurotic or Waif who is also a fatale, who learns to use sexual conquest as a temporary antidote to unhappiness. More words of caution: I'm not trying to deny the real unhappiness and depression many of these women endure. I'm just trying to say that until they've found a way to live with it, they are not good girlfriend or marriage material. And no, you should not "just" sleep with them, for if they are truly delicate, it may send them into a tail-spin, and then they may find a way to take their revenge on you that you may never forget (like Alix in Fatal Attraction).

Be warned that it may be hard to resist the Neurotic femme fatale, in particular, because, to judge by what I hear from men, this is the type of woman most likely to jump on a man like a hungry tigress. She will seem so boldly self-confident and sexually aggressive, at first, that it will be hard to believe there is anything wrong with her. Many a man has found himself semi-permanently embroiled with this type of femme fatale because he tumbled into bed with her without thinking about it, and then found that she had such a grip on his heart, his conscience, or both, that he could not bear to abandon her.

Heartbreakers 5: The Gold-Digger

2008-07-09T17:28:00.000-04:00

"By the side of many tall and bouncing young ladies in the establishment, Rebecca Sharp looked like a child. But she had the dismal precocity of poverty. Many a dun had she talked to, and turned away from her father’s door; many a tradesman had she coaxed and wheedled into good humour, and into the granting of one meal more. She sate commonly with her father, who was very proud of her wit, and heard the talk of many of his wild companions—often but ill-suited for a girl to hear. But she never had been a girl, she said; she had been a woman since she was eight years old. O why did Miss Pinkerton let such a dangerous bird into her cage?" -- Thackeray, Vanity Fair.

The gold-digger is the classic female heartbreaker, the one everyone except a few feminists loves to hate. She is not a prostitute: although she marries for money she does not have sex for money. As she usually comes from the edges of respectability, or else from a family that lost its money and standing, like Scarlett O'Hara, she aspires to at least a middle-class notion of security and social respectability. Becky Sharp of Vanity Fair, Thackeray's classic novel, is the prototype and heroine of gold-diggers everywhere. Vita Sackville-West's mother, Victoria, confessed to being fascinated by Becky. She was herself a gold-digger, and married her first cousin, thus legitimizing herself and acquiring access to a fortune simultaneously. Scarlett, said to have been modelled after Becky Sharp by some sources, saw marriage as chiefly a route to financial security and gave little thought to love or even sexual desire in choosing a mate. I suspect that for all her aura of unattainable elegance and glamour, Jacqueline Onassis was a gold-digger. Her own parents had little money, but she always lived among the rich and aspired never to have to beg for favours from indifferent relatives again.

I must warn you sternly that the gold-digger is not easily recognised, because she is a chameleon, changing her personality as necessary to attract the men in whom she is interested. She may present herself as a sweet little thing, a vulnerable waif, or a coolly remote beauty. She is not necessarily beautiful but she will fool you into thinking she is.

She is not nearly as ubiquitous as men fear, and is in fact becoming less common than she once was, as it's easier now for ambitious women in the West to earn their own money and access to power. Men sometimes confuse the legitimate concern of women that a man should be free of bad debts, and able to earn a living, with gold-digging, but that is not fair. Nor is it accurate to suggest that women who prefer to marry their equals in achievement are gold-diggers. That's just the way the world is. The odd thing is that those men who fear or resent the ambitious and aspiring women of the Western world and marry mail-order brides from desperately poor countries in order to avid them, may then feel wounded and astonished to discover that some of these women are in fact gold-diggers who may clean them out in the divorce courts.

Gold-diggers of the old school, if you can find one, often make good wives, if you are impressive enough to catch one in the first place. They recognise their financial dependency and don't want to rock the boat, and since they aren't in marriage for demonstrations of love they don't make the kind of emotional demands on their husbands that men appear to find so taxing to their patience. What's more, if you aren't already really rich, a good gold-digger can probably help you to get that way, if you want. She knows how the world works and how to make it work for herself, and for her man if she thinks he's worthy of her skills.

The gold-digger is feared by women and, like Becky and Scarlett, does not have many female friends. She can provoke a particularly sharp resentment among men because she talks love and thinks money, as Rhett says of Scarlett in Gone With the Wind. In fact, the chief characteristic of this type of female heartbreaker is her ruthlessness in pursuit of what she wants. She has to be careful not to fall in love, because it would cloud her judgment and because the type of man she requires is likely to be frightened by displays of emotional desperation and put off by neediness. Meanwhile, as she searches out the man who has most to offer her, she may leave a trail of broken hearts in her wake.

Heartbreakers: An Introduction to Femmes Fatales (Revised)

2008-07-09T16:08:00.005-04:00

What is a Femme Fatale, and how does she differ from the male version of the heartbreaker, the Bad Boy? You might think the answer is obvious, that perhaps bad girls receive less social support or approval than their male counterparts. I'm not sure this is true, or rather, I think that if it's true, it's because the term "bad" is applied differently to the sexes, in conventional usage.

When we call a man a "bad boy," we generally mean someone who is fascinating, perhaps charming, who uses his charm to persuade women to fall in love with him, and who then mistreats them, by being unfaithful, unreliable, or even physically abusive. When we call a woman a "bad girl," we usually mean a woman who is promiscuous and hard-drinking. Such a woman may cause trouble or exasperate friends and family, but she's unlikely to evoke any more passionate response. Do Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan, to name two young bad girls from today's celebrity circuit, break hearts? It seems unlikely. They simply aren't interesting enough, and they withhold nothing. To be an effective heartbreaker of either sex, you must withhold something - your heart, your fidelity, your sexual favours. So when I speak of female heartbreakers, it's not party-girls or mall-rats or, in history, professional courtesans like Nell Gwynne or Ninon de Lenclos, that I mean.

Does that mean that there is no female equivalent to the bad boy, a woman who is not a promiscuous party-girl, but who attracts men into her orbit out of some kind of psycho-sexual or other need, and then makes them miserable? I think there is, but she's probably a more complex creature than her male equivalent, acting out of a somewhat different set of needs, and subject to a different kind of reaction from men, and from society. Women heartbreakers are often referred to as femmes fatales, but I feel compelled to explain and qualify what I mean by the phrase because it has come to mean one particular type of bad girl in popular culture: the woman who is mysterious, elusive, and deliberately cruel. Not all female heartbreakers are fatale in that particular way. In fact, that particular type of heartbreaker is the creation of her circumstances (desperation, danger) if she exists at all, and isn't merely the figment of some film noir screenwriter's imagination. The female heartbreaker/femme fatale is as likely to be a lighthearted flirt as she is to be an unknowable Dark Lady.

Some general considerations
Because men are so responsive to female sexual attractiveness, they can fall in love with very little encouragement from a woman (see my Iconic Woman post), so that a woman doesn't necessarily have to do much to break a man's heart, especially when the man in question is young, naive, or unsure of himself. So I'm excluding from discussion here any woman who breaks hearts merely by looking beautiful. Such a woman can't be held responsible for the emotions she awakens in men, and in these posts I'm concerned only with people whose actions are in some sense deliberate, even if they are also compulsive. On the other hand, physical attractiveness, if not conventional beauty, is usually (not always!) necessary for a woman to be a truly effective heartbreaker, which is not the case for her male equivalent.

Another issue to bear in mind is that women have been more dependent on men, through much of human history, for basic protection. Thus they - we - have operated under a different set of constraints than do men, at least in the past, and often they have broken hearts not out of any internal compulsion but because external pressures gave them little choice. But not necessarily. Like men, women aren't guiltless of sexual manipulation for the sake of ego enhancement, or to punish an opposite-sex parent, or perhaps simply to amuse themselves

A warning
I will allow that I have worried about whether I really ought to publish a series of posts on bad girls. One doesn't want to betray the sisterhood, after all. Nor do I want to give men, who can be so literal-minded, an excuse to regard the whole of my sex with unwarranted suspicion. A woman, being a subtle creature, will take a list of bad boy types with a grain of salt. A man, on the other hand, being systems-oriented, as we are so often told by evolutionary biologists, may well take it as a field-guide to women, carefully applying it to all his encounters with the opposite sex to ensure that his companion of the moment does not fall into any of its categories...Or am I being, as so many have told me, unfair to your sex?

With that caution in mind, dear readers, I ask you to stay tuned for the first post in my taxonomy of bad-girl/heartbreaker types.

Life Stories: Six Words or Fewer

2008-07-07T16:12:00.004-04:00

Apparently there is a new book out whose title is Not Quite What I Was Expecting, compiled by Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser. Perhaps it's already a hit. I don't know. Anyway, the book is a collection of six-word memoirs summarizing the life-stories of the people who wrote them. The title is one example; another is "Revenge is living well, without you", by Joyce Carol Oates. Or there's "Found true love, married someone else".

Question: Would any of Clio's readers care to summarize their own life-experience in six words or fewer? ("Less" is for quantities that cannot be counted - e.g. "less sugar, please". "Fewer" is for quantities that can be counted - "fewer people were at the bar this time".)

CM thinks that her own summary of her life can be summed up in three words, which is why the title of this post is "six words or fewer". Her three words are, "Ouch, that hurts."

p.s. Vulgarity is permissible, given the subject-matter (life); obscenity is not.

Heartbreakers 4: The Classic Alpha

2008-07-07T12:00:00.001-04:00

This type of bad boy is the one whose description most closely bears out the evolutionary hypothesis, that women are attracted to bad boys because they want the protection that such men can provide. As I said in my previous post, he is related to the Maverick, but differs from him in several respects. The most important of these is that the Alpha bad boy is a natural leader of men but not a rebel. He follows the conventional path to success laid out for him by his elders, and will accept the discipline of hierarchy. He is less prone to flashy gestures than the Maverick. He gets along with his father, if he has one, and other male superiors.

All the same, the classic Alpha Heartbreaker is driven by some kind of internal hunger to chase after and accumulate large numbers of women, whose hearts he will certainly break because he will have presented himself as such a nice, "regular guy," and a successful, well-mannered one besides. Of course, not all classic Alpha males are heartbreakers. Some may be very good men, especially if raised in a society where it is possible to be a successful man without resorting to violence, rapine, and pillage. But the Alpha Heartbreaker - though hard to detect - is such a threat to women that we must learn to look out for him.

The Alpha Heartbreaker can be distinguished from his non-Heartbreaker Alpha brothers in that he may try to delay marriage as long as he can, rather than marrying at the conventional age, because women often irritate him as companions and he has no trouble finding casual sexual partners. The other Heartbreakers often genuinely enjoy women; this man tends not to, and even if he does, he tends not to take them seriously. He marries for children. He differs from the Maverick bad boy in that his official girlfriends and his wife are probably less flashy. They may well come from a monied or otherwise established family but they will generally leave the limelight to their husbands and not try to take the stage themselves. Once upon a time, all Alphas were careful to select feminine ladies-who-lunch wives without career ambitions except on their husbands' behalf, but today they will likely choose wives with an approved career in conventional fields like law or medicine, as long as their mates' successes don't overwhelm their own.

Another characteristic that distinguishes this man from both non-Heartbreaker Alphas and Mavericks is that he will have many unofficial women in his life, as well as the official ones, and these will not be social equals. They are likely, in fact, to be casual pick-ups from the demi-monde, waitresses, strippers, perhaps prostitutes. Many of these may not even be especially attractive to look at. They are purely sexual conveniences to him, so their appearance is not very important. Once he marries, he will not want to risk his marriage's stability, and such women are less of a threat. The women most vulnerable to such a man are those who are not scrupulous about affairs with married men. If a woman's background and accomplishments make such men accessible to her as marriage prospects, she can expect that he probably won't try to divorce her, but be aware that discrete infidelity is likely.

He is not introspective (Alphas in general are not), and will probably not understand why he does this. Indeed, he may not even be quite aware that he does it. It will be the one area in which he takes serious risks with his future and prospects.

This kind of Heartbreaker is usually found in fields that set out a straightforward path to success. He will be a lawyer, a senior executive, a doctor, a diplomat, a politician. Two examples of the Alpha Heartbreaker are Bill Clinton (with reservations) and JFK. Clinton's history is complex enough that it's hard to say with certainty whether he is an Alpha Maverick or a Classic Alpha. Eisenhower was hardly a Heartbreaker, but he was a classic Alpha and did have affairs.

Heartbreakers 3: The Maverick (revised)

2008-07-05T15:35:00.005-04:00

Maverick is a close cousin to another variant of male heartbreaker, the Straight-Arrow Alpha, but differs from him (who shall be described next, and is the last in my catalogue), in several important ways. The two variants may easily be confused. Both are natural leaders of men, as well as being attractive to women. Both are likely to have successful careers in some conventional field: business, law, medicine, engineering, the military. The identification of the two types is further confused by the fact that not all Mavericks or Alphas are inclined to be heartbreakers. Many of them are one-woman men, perhaps because their success in other spheres precludes the need for the rush of female attention from an ever-changing cast of lovers.

Like the Tom Cruise character in Top Gun, who is even named Maverick, to ensure we get the point, Maverick bad boys are indeed alpha males, but they are also natural rebels who have great difficulty in taking orders or following instructions. They are in continual trouble with their superiors, not because they are idle or irresponsible or negligent (as Dodgers often are), or gratuitously rude to patrons, co-workers, or customers, like Byronic bad boys. Indeed, they are often at the top of their class, profession, or trade. But they will insist on doing things their way, on trying new ways of doing things, and on taking immense risks with their lives, money, or reputations. Sometimes these "new ways" work: Maverick is a born innovator who has much to teach the world.

Unlike Byrons, or Dodgers, the Maverick chooses his women only from among his social and intellectual equals, or even his superiors. In fact, being reluctant to admit that any woman is beyond his reach, he may quixotically pursue famous models, astrophysicists (even if he is, let's say, a brilliant mechanic rather than a brilliant flying ace), or titled beauties. These women will themselves be mavericks of a kind, rebellious, daring, perhaps athletically gifted. The woman to whom this kind of man will commit himself must be more than beautiful and sweet. He will make expensive, flashy, or extremely romantic gestures to win them over, but may lose interest quickly because his attention span is short. He will not respect a woman who does not stand up to him; if he is unfaithful he must be called on it. When Maverick and his girl-of-the-moment are together, they may reign like a king and queen, deferred to by all their contemporaries.

Maverick is capable of plain friendship with women, but this will be risky because they often fall for him. He gets along well enough with men his own age, who want to be like him but are a little afraid of his tendency to defy authority and take risks. But his closest male friends will often be sidekicks rather than equals. First, because he doesn't have many equals; second because, being egotistical, especially in youth, he resents competitors. He usually has a close relationship with his mother; his relations with his father may be fond, but are certainly competitive.

If Maverick is lucky and does not kill himself young with his daredeviltry, or alienate all his would-be patrons and supporters, he may be very successful in later life, and may eventually learn to be faithful. His success probably won't come from climbing a hierarchy in a structured environment. If he remains in such an environment, he may not live up to his early promise, and then the women in his life must beware, because he will take out his disappointment on them.

Most top-level rock and roll boys, and some successful actors, are probably Mavericks - the flash, the egocentrism, the desire and ability to catch the public eye identify them, as does their canny ability to hold on to their gains in spite of seeming recklessness. They may, however, cultivate Byronic (Mick Jagger) or Dodger (Jack Nicholson) mannerisms, for the sake of audience appeal. Many of the less conventional politicians, the ones who keep crossing the floor, or those who become famous for defying party bosses, are Mavericks - like Pierre Trudeau, or even Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. James Bond, to take a fictional example, is a Maverick heartbreaker, as was his creator, Ian Fleming. Winston Churchill was a Maverick but not a heartbreaker.

Unmarried Greatness?

2008-07-04T14:16:00.004-04:00

Ordinarily, Clio is quick to come to the defense of the unmarried, both single men and single women. She was annoyed, however, to read a short piece in the New English Review which appeared to hint, somewhat tongue-in-cheekily, that unmarried men are more likely to achieve artistic, scientific, and philosophical greatness than married ones. Cyril Connolly once made the same argument, quite seriously, writing that there is "no greater enemy of promise than the perambulator [baby carriage] in the hall", or something like that.

To these suggestions, Clio says "Piffle". Men have enough excuses not to marry nowadays and she does not wish to encourage them in this unfortunate trend by allowing them to imagine that their potential is greater than that of their married brethren. The NER article offers a list of 53 famous bachelors, below; Clio counters it with a list of equally famous married men, also below.

53 FAMOUS BACHELORS
Pierre Bayle ; Robert Boyle; Johannes Brahms; Samuel Butler; Robert Burton; Ludwig van Beethoven; Johannes Brahms; Giacomo Casanova; Frederic Chopin; Nicolaus; Copernicus; Eugène Delacroix; Rene Descartes; Gustave Flaubert; Galileo Galilei; Edward Gibbon; Vincent van Gogh; Oliver Goldsmith; Thomas Hobbes; Horace; David Hume; Washington Irving; Henry James; Franz Kafka; Immanuel Kant; Soren Kierkegaard; Charles Lamb; T. E. Lawrence; Meriwether Lewis; Philip Larkin; Gottfried Leibniz; John Locke; Michelangelo; Friedrich Nietzsche; Sir Isaac Newton ; Blaise Pascal; Alexander Pope; Marcel Proust; Maurice Ravel; George Santayana; Jean Paul Sartre; Franz Schubert; Benedict de Spinoza; Arthur Schopenhauer; Herbert Spencer; Adam Smith; Stendhal; Jonathon Swift; Nikola Tesla; Henry David Thoreau; Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec; Leonardo da Vinci; Voltaire; Ludwig Wittgenstein

53 FAMOUS NON-BACHELORS
Aristotle; St. Augustine (if Shakespeare doesn't count as married, Augustine should count as married de facto if not de jure for much of his life); Bach; Isaiah Berlin; William Blake; Robert Browning; Sir Richard Burton (the explorer); Byron; Thomas Carlyle; Andrew Carnegie (don't see why innovative men of business shouldn't be included); Benvenuto Cellini; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Charles Dickens; Denis Diderot; Dostoyevsky; Thomas Edison; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Einstein; Henry Ford; Fragonard; Freud; Gauguin; Giotto; Graham Greene; Hegel; William James; Thomas Jefferson (ditto politicians); James Joyce; John Maynard Keynes; D.H. Lawrence; Edouard Manet; Karl Marx; Henri Matisse; Claude Monet; Mozart; Vladimir Nabokov; Raphael; Rembrandt; Francois de la Rochefoucauld; Bertrand Russell; Marquis de Sade; Sir Walter Scott; George Bernard Shaw; Percy Shelley; Socrates; Wallace Stevens; Tolstoy; Vermeer; Vivaldi; Evelyn Waugh; Alfred North Whitehead; William Wordsworth; Emile Zola

AND FURTHERMORE...
The author of the pro-bachelor screed also annoyed Clio by suggesting that men are as likely to become civilised without women as with them.

With a few notable exceptions the male created Western Civilization as we know it, notably the arts and sciences. Men have always made the best soldiers, inventors, scientists, and composers. Uncivilized behavior, observed most notably in gangs, is more often the result of the absence of fathers and father figures, than a lack of the females’ civilizing influence. The truth is the young male despises his mother's clinginess; he seeks to cut the apron strings at the first opportunity, and revel in his masculinity, and in this he needs and seeks out a man's direction.

It is to wave a red flag at a bull. Clio would like to remind the man who wrote this piece of nonsense that the Western society which he praises as having achieved the highest peak of civilisation, has also permitted women more freedom than any other world civilisation. Is it not at least possible that this greater level of freedom for women - thus resulting in women who were more educated, active, and worldly - might not also have benefitted Western men and civilisation?

SOME OF THE CLASSES OF WOMEN WHO HELPED MAKE THE WEST GREAT
Consider: Middle-class and sometimes even poor mothers who could read, mothers who could guard their children's health, mothers who were able to instruct the very young child (male or female) so that his intelligence was not wasted by maternal ignorance, early neglect or abuse.

Consider: Female teachers who were willing to work at low wages so that young men in poor rural districts could learn to read and thus acquire knowledge that might help them to be better farmers, businessmen, and - for a few of them - to cultivate their brains enough to leave the countryside behind. Women in continental Europe were the primary educators of the poor from the seventeenth century on.

Consider: (Female) nurses in western hospitals who maintained the highest standards of cleanliness, so that the new treatments introduced by doctors were not lost on patients who got poisoned by bad water or unclean bed linens or other unsanitary practises; the nurses who before the discovery of penicillin were the main bulwark against the spread of infection in hospitals.

Consider: The women who were hostesses, patrons, and political supporters of artists and the arts; the women who laughed at clever men's jokes; acted in their plays and brought them new audiences; sang their music; played instruments in their orchestras.

Leaving aside the issue of women's individual greatness, and of whether women are intellectually as capable as men, did none of these women, even in the limited roles society imposed on them, help in the construction of that edifice known as "Western Civilisation"? If they had been kept in purdah, in seclusion, refused the right to walk about freely in public, forced to mix only with family members, told they could not speak to men, frequently refused any education even when family resources permitted it - as they once were or still are in many parts of the world - what then? Would Western achievements have been possible?

It is possible to be exasperated with some of the sillier or more over-reaching claims of feminism on behalf of women today, to resent the perpetual attacks on "dead white males", without talking nonsense and denying that women had any role to play in the advancement of our civilisation.

Heartbreakers 2: The Artful Dodger (revised)

2008-07-02T09:52:00.009-04:00

'I'm reviewing the situation'
'Once a villain you're a villain to the end.'
'Your light fingers' -
'Your inspiration -'
'What a team!' -
'Am I your partner?'
'More a friend.'

'For your talent is employable
So make your life enjoyable.
A world with pockets open wide
Awaits your whim to grope inside.'

'Collections undetectable - '
'We might retire respectable'
'Together till our dying day -'
'The living proof that crime can pay'
'I think we'll have to think it out again!'

First movie crush this mortal girl ever had: Jack Wild (1953-2006) as the Artful Dodger, in the film Oliver! (1968). Most of the other girls I saw it with had a crush on Mark Lester, who played the title character. Alas, the occasion set a pattern. I have been falling in love with the Artful Dodger, in one form or another, ever since. 'Why do women do that?' ask men. My answer: I wish I knew. I can say with a clear conscience that I wasn't drawn to actual 'badness' - not to signs of cruelty or obvious criminality. Wild boys (a pun, but the truth) were more like it.

So, can any of the evolutionary theorists out there shed light on this mystery? Mr Sailer? Mr Thursday? I've heard some people talk about the fact that the women who like 'bad' men do so because such men are stronger, more macho, etc. Fact is, though, most bad boys I know, or at least the Dodgers, the kind I and many other women like me are drawn to, have a vaguely androgynous streak to them and in no way resemble the stereotypical chest-thumping bad boy who rules a gang or leads an office faction.

Dodgers are often shorter or slighter than average. They may be witty or poetic. They know how to offer verbal sympathy to women, rather than, say, wringing their hands and threatening to beat someone up for you. They love to talk; it's an art-form for them. As I said in reference to Byron, it's part of what gives them their success with women. But unlike the Byronic Bad Boy, the main Dodger-marker is his sense of fun or high spirits, which he often uses to wiggle out of sticky situations. I knew one Dodger who was pressured by his boss to make an appearance on television against his wishes (because the company was failing). Not wanting to refuse directly, Dodger went to the barber the day before the scheduled appearance, got a crew cut, and had the stubble dyed bright orange. His boss took one look at him the next day and thundered, "You're not appearing on TV looking like THAT!" It was a very Dodger solution to a sticky situation, all the more effective because this man usually dressed well and conservatively.

On the other hand, Dodgers are unreliable. They lie. They have many other women in the wings at one time, some of whom may know about the others but each of whom thinks she is special to him in some way - the sure sign of a Dodger. Dodgers are more likely than other male heartbreakers to be bisexual. They disappear for long periods. They have drug or alcohol problems which they hide well for a time but which ruin them. They may, like the Dodger in Dickens, pick your pocket. (That has never happened to me, but one hears of cases...) They return unexpectedly. They are forgiven too much, too often. Unlike the Byronic type of bad boy, the Dodger is seldom rude, except charmingly, and very rarely displays his temper. Unless or until some trauma, like being caught in a major lie, causes his persona to unravel. Then all bets are off and he may become very nasty indeed, sadistically malicious in a way no other male heartbreaker is.

The Dodger is not very comfortable with men his own age, apart from his childhood friends, but many older men will like him and want to save him from himself. When young, Dodgers are often taken under the wing of some (heterosexual) older father-figure, against whom they rebel.

The Dodger tends not to age well, as he lacks self-discipline. Often he ends up in work far beneath his abilities, which frustrates him. He may become much less charming and agreeable as he ages, especially if he is one of the many Dodgers with substance-abuse problems. Indeed, he may come to resemble a Byronic bad boy, but he will still be much funnier and he won't always remind you of how superior he is.

Oddly enough, one of my past Dodgers told me that his mother was Nancy and his father was Bill Sykes. It's the kind of thing Dodgers say, with a wink and a grin. Which raises another point: the Dodger is often the child of alcoholic, neglectful, or abusive parents. It's where he learned his tricks. His father is violent or gone; his mother indulges him, and may herself be alcoholic or suffer from mental illness, or be inappropriately seductive. He will have great pity for her struggles, which is why he is such a good listener when his women have problems. (The unlucky little boy in the Hugh Grant vehicle About a Boy would likely have grown up to be a Dodger.) These elements aren't essential to make a Dodger, but you will find them more often than not.

Famous Dodgers: Many middle-rank or failed actors (including Jack Wild himself) are Dodgers. Peter O'Toole is a high-ranking actor Dodger. The young Beatles had Dodgerish tendencies, with their habit of evading stupid or too-serious questions with an impish pun or irreverent remark. Evelyn Waugh was a Dodger, one with just enough discipline to overcome his internal demons and achieve success. His ultimate fate, morose and drunk in late middle age, only a faint trace of the prankster still apparent, was a very Dodger one. (But though Waugh was a Dodger, he was not a heartbreaker. In his youth, he chased women but seldom caught the ones he wanted most, so perhaps he doesn't really count.)

Note: another reposting from the Heartbreakers series, revised and expanded. Click on the photo to hear the Dodger's duet with Fagin.

The Great White Paradox

2008-07-01T14:21:00.005-04:00

We wouldn't be here without the beavers. We're the only country in the world with a railway in our Constitution. We're strange. Somehow it works, in a funny way. Happy birthday, Canada.

p.s. This is what remains of a considerably longer post that my computer ate. I can't do it again but what remains probably conveys my sentiments clearly enough.

The post that started it all...

2008-06-30T20:26:00.007-04:00

The series of posts known as "Heartbreakers" was written last summer. It brought me far more readers than I'd had until that time. I've decided to start republishing them so that newer readers might read and perhaps enjoy them. At the time I wrote them, I had only a hazy idea of the existence of "Game", and so when I used the term "alpha male" in these posts, it was without reference to the special meaning that the Gamesters give to the word. I suppose that all my male Heartbreaker types were alphas, of a sort, according to Game theory.

Heartbreakers 1: The Byronic Bad Boy

Alas! The love of women! It is known
To be a lovely and a fearful thing;
For all of theirs upon that die is thrown,
And if ‘tis lost, life hath no more to bring
To them but mockeries of the past alone,
And their revenge is as the tiger’s spring,
Deadly, and quick, and crushing; yet, as real
Torture is theirs, what they inflict they feel.

And they are right; for man, to man so oft unjust,
Is always so to women; one sole bond
Awaits them, treachery is all their trust;
Taught to conceal, their bursting hearts despond
Over their idol, till some wealthier lust
Buys them in marriage–and what rests beyond?
A thankless husband, next a faithless lover,
Then dressing, nursing, praying, and all’s over.

Some take a lover, some take drams or prayers,
Some mind their household, others dissipation,
Some run away, and but exchange their cares,
Losing the advantage of a virtuous station;
Few changes e’er can better their affairs,
Theirs being an unnatural situation,
From the dull palace to the dirty hovel:
Some play the devil, others write a novel.

-- Byron, from Don Juan

Few men, and even fewer poets, were as brutal to the women in their lives and in their verse as Byron. Yet as with so many Don Juans, part of the secret of his success with women was that he understood the female sex better than most men do, and empathized with them - with us - maybe overmuch. No man before the 20th century ever showed so acute an understanding of the difficulties of women's "unnatural situation" as Byron does in this poem. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that such men rarely make good husbands.

The mark of the Byronic type of heartbreaker is that he alternates between offering women sympathy and understanding, on the one hand, and extreme rudeness on the other. He is the (sometimes) handsome man who sits silent among a group of convivial friends in a bar or at a party, a grim expression on his face. When he addresses the company at large, it is often to correct someone, or to offer a glibly cynical observation about the proceedings. He often has intellectual or artistic ambitions but may not fulfill his promise in this area.

Part of this bad boy's appeal is that he seems very critical of people, so that when he singles out a particular woman for attention, she feels honoured. Surely, she thinks, she must be more intelligent, more beautiful, than other women, if she can attract so demanding a man. But he is often alarmed when women threaten to approach his stature in achievement, and will retaliate with cruel criticisms.

He may have many women at once, like the original Don Juan, or a steady mate or mistress, but if he is unfaithful to her he will be outrageously obvious about it, and mock any moral criticism by saying "you knew what you were getting into!". Or he will tell her that fidelity is ridiculous, and sex a purely animal transaction anyway, so why should she care who he sleeps with.

Often the Byronic bad boy's father is weak, a wastrel, or absent altogether. His mother is formidable, demanding, and yet needy as well. As a result, this kind of man is especially cold to older women, and resents and fears any type of female authority.

It is in this kind of bad boy that you are most likely to find serious misogyny, or perhaps we should call it gynophobia, to coin (I think) a more appropriate term. He does not hate women so much as he fears them. Watch out for him: he is the male heartbreaker most likely to shred a woman's ego permanently. He may not marry at all. If he does, it may be to a significantly younger woman with a very girlish demeanor, or to a voluptuous and unintellectual maternal archetype, who may rule him emotionally but will never tell him what to do.

A modern pop culture example of the Byronic bad boy is the character played by William Hurt in The Big Chill, the moody drug-dealer. Another example is, I think, Woody Allen, one of the unhandsome members of this subspecies. At a higher level consider also Byron (of course), Flaubert, Sartre, or even Ernest Hemingway, all difficult men of unpredictable temper, misanthropists as much as misogynists, who might turn in an instant from insulting women to charming them.

I've never been drawn to this type of man myself, but intellectually ambitious or artistic young women often are. If they are lucky they outgrow him early and walk away, leaving him with yet another reason to rail against women and their perfidy. If they are unlucky, he destroys them, as Byron did Lady Caroline Lamb.

More Scraps

2008-06-25T11:23:00.006-04:00

Outside my usual range of interests here, but still fascinating. From an article in The New Yorker, via Arts and Letters Daily:

The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. We see a friendly yellow Labrador bounding behind a picket fence not because that is the transmission we receive but because this is the perception our weaver-brain assembles as its best hypothesis of what is out there from the slivers of information we get. Perception is inference.

The theory—and a theory is all it is right now—has begun to make sense of some bewildering phenomena. Among them is an experiment that Ramachandran performed with volunteers who had phantom pain in an amputated arm. They put their surviving arm through a hole in the side of a box with a mirror inside, so that, peering through the open top, they would see their arm and its mirror image, as if they had two arms. Ramachandran then asked them to move both their intact arm and, in their mind, their phantom arm—to pretend that they were conducting an orchestra, say. The patients had the sense that they had two arms again. Even though they knew it was an illusion, it provided immediate relief. People who for years had been unable to unclench their phantom fist suddenly felt their hand open; phantom arms in painfully contorted positions could relax. With daily use of the mirror box over weeks, patients sensed their phantom limbs actually shrink into their stumps and, in several instances, completely vanish. Researchers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center recently published the results of a randomized trial of mirror therapy for soldiers with phantom-limb pain, showing dramatic success.

Dialogue

2008-06-24T15:34:00.004-04:00

CM: Is that you Clio? I have a question for you.
Clio: Yes, it's me. What is it? Oh no, I can tell by the look on your face that you're worrying about something again.
CM: Not getting any work assignments has something to do with it. I can't pay my taxes without emptying my bank account. But it's more than that.
Clio: What's worse for you mortals than not paying taxes? Don't they come after you with an axe if you do that?
CM: Not any more, Clio darling. Like most historians, you're always a little behind the times. Oh, and that's what I wanted to talk to you about - being a historian.
Clio: Well, what is it? And why are you thinking about it now?
CM: I'm thinking about it now because I feel only semi-employed at the moment, and whenever that happens I start thinking that I ought to be revising my dissertation and trying to get it published.
Clio: Nothing to stop you from doing that, if you want.
CM: I feel brain dead. You haven't exactly been generous with your presence lately. When I try to think about the past I can only remember my own. I wish I could take a course or two to wake me up again.
Clio: Why don't you, then?
CM: It's a little odd for a PhD. in history to start taking history courses, isn't it? Although I suppose I could take a few in Classics, which I've always wanted to do. Anyway, some of the happiest moments of my life have been sitting in a class room. Isn't that strange?
Clio: Not strange to me, dear girl. What is strange to me is that you seem to like taking classes so much better than teaching. Why is that? It looks to me as if all the fun is in teaching.
CM: I don't like telling people what to do. Don't look at me like that! I'm happy to offer them my opinion on what's right or wrong but I don't like giving orders and I always wondered why on earth anyone would want to listen to me. So of course my students sometimes wondered the same thing. Besides, I prefer being the challenger to being the champion. And when you're lecturing you're always the latter.
Clio: I could see that you had bad luck with some of your students the last time you taught. There was that horrible boy, what's his name, who tried to start a kind of claque against you.
CM: He was awful. But Clio, that was my fault too. I had a hard time with that course. The subject was a new one for me to teach and I hadn't done any reading in it for several years. I was just barely ahead of the students. Although I was puzzled by the fact that the best students - the ones who produced really outstanding work - all seemed to like me.
Clio: Perhaps it was because you gave them better marks?
CM: The thing is, I gave the sub-par students higher marks than they deserved because I was so horrified by how bad their work was that I didn't know what to do about it. The problem was so ubiquitous that it made me wonder if I was the one who was being unreasonable.
Clio: Better luck next time.
CM: Yes, but that whole experience made me wonder if I wanted any next times, at least in teaching. I didn't like the attitude I saw in students, and it's getting worse. Because they're paying money, if they don't do well in your subject, it must be your fault for not teaching them well enough. If they fail, it's your fault. What's more, the department appeared to agree with them.
Clio: Calm down, dear, and get busy with your re-writing. It might help you feel better. There's nothing to say that you have to teach university students. You can write history as a private pastime, if you like. Some of the best people do. Good-bye, ducks. I have some visiting to see to.

Scraps

2008-06-23T11:10:00.005-04:00

An Annoying Experience
Yesterday, after Mass, I got into a cab to return to my suburban house. The driver said, "hello, beautiful lady, where do you want to go?" This is typical, er, fare, for cab-drivers, and it didn't bother me. I gave him my address and thanked him. But he wasn't content with offering a compliment, or accepting my thanks. He spent the next ten minutes asking me if I would marry him, go out with him, have lunch with him. I smiled a refusal to each offer, but I was getting alarmed by his persistence. Finally, I stopped smiling, and told him flatly that he was making me uncomfortable. I was seriously worried that he would chuck me out of the cab, we were on the highway, far from buildings or telephone, and I didn't have a cell phone on me. After a few moments of silence, he began to talk about the weather.

When I got home, I told my father about the incident. Like any good father, he was furious, and told me I ought to have taken down the man's name and cab number and threatened to charge him with harassment if he didn't stop.

Men always ask why we don't bring out the big guns right from the start, in situations like this. Yet as I've said here before, it isn't always easy to know when a situation is truly threatening. If you gauge the moment wrong, people - especially men - will accuse you of being hysterical. An unpleasant fight may ensue. And then again, you may be forced to make a choice between several unpleasant options: threaten your harasser (and be dumped by the side of the road); threaten your harasser (and get into a nasty prolonged argument); or decide not to threaten your harasser (and have him think that his advances are welcome). It's not an easy decision to make.

Moral: men, if a woman is temporarily in a position of dependency on you, it isn't fair to ask her for a date. If this man were really determined to ask me out, it would have been more gentlemanly to wait until he had got me home first.

A Recommendation
I was reading an article about V.S. Naipaul that I found through Arts and Letters Daily. Naipaul had special words of praise for Nirad Chaudhuri's Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, and I recalled that it was in my father's collection of Indian books, so I thought I'd give it a try. It's a wonderful book, so far, and well worth the effort (it's very long). Here's a passage, which caught my eye thanks to an earlier argument with Zosimus the Heathen in my comments:

Even to this day I have not been able to shake off this feeling, this conviction of the material world around me being insubstantial, although I have completely lost all religious conviction and also faith in the other world. Therefore I find myself at times in the curious position of being a denier of this world without having anything to put in its place. Though I have not the assurance of that duration which makes pyramids pillars of snow and all that's past a moment; though I have not the hope which makes one ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six foot as the moles of Adrianus; yet the earth seems to lie in ashes for me. And this happens to me not only regard to the world which is of the world worldly, the world of far-stretched ambitions and madding vices, but even with the world which is make up of the wild loveliness of the face of the earth; of the grace of animal forms; of light raining down from the heavens--the light of the milky spray of the stars which illuminates only when the universe is composed to rest by a vast darkness. The feeling seems to cut the ground from under my feet and throw me down from the only country I know into a dark abyss.

Another quotation

Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infamy of his nature. Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us.

Sir Thoms Browne, from Urn Burial

Bad Boy Encounters: The Irreducible Complexity of the Needy Alpha

2008-06-20T10:19:00.005-04:00

CM has been informed that true alpha males have such control over themselves and their emotional needs that they always know the right moment to say goodbye, the moment that will leave a woman wanting them back. She wonders whether it is in fact possible for any man to be so invariably self-disciplined. Surely at some moments, or in some especially important relationships, he will hang on for too long, either out of need or because he has misjudged the "right" moment?

CM's previous Bad Boy Encounter story dealt with an almost-alpha man who misjudged the moment; the one she is about to tell concerns an alpha man who got the moment thing right, at least at first, but nevertheless made a mess of the relationship, and of his own life, because his need for female adulation outran even his remarkable ability to walk away from any one woman.

Bad Boy #3 was the long-time, fatal attraction boyfriend of ES., a close friend of CM's in school. The couple met in residence. He didn't appear to be in love with ES in the sense of passionate romantic love, at least not as far as CM could tell, but they appeared to have a strong sexual and emotional bond all the same. You see, he was the product of a chaotic family life and needed a nurturing woman to praise and reassure him, especially since his own mother had never really tried to fulfill this duty towards her son. Worse yet, Number Three had virtually no self-discipline either in school or at work. He failed courses, he took time off, he talked back to employers and got fired. He needed a girlfriend to "be there" for him, and ES was willing to accept his weaknesses. She had her own reasons for this, her own history of childhood pain, but this story is not really about her.

BB Three was only in his early 20s when CM met him but already appeared to have slept with more women than he could count. No pretty woman was safe from his advances, and what's more, many of them said yes to him, often somewhat to their own surprise. A previous girlfriend, whom CM met once briefly, was one of the most beautiful women she had ever seen. The number, variety, and beauty of his conquests indicate that he was undeniably an alpha male, at least by one measure. Other men were not exactly eager to accept his leadership, since he was too erratic for the role, but they liked him. And they gathered around to laugh at his antics and to pick up the scraps - the female scraps - from his table, as it were.

CM was worried when this BB began to date her friend. She liked the man and, indeed, was rather attracted to him herself, but she didn't trust him. She knew that Number Three made passes at many other women, knew it because these women were often close friends of hers and confided this fact to her. Indeed, many of them were close friends of ES's as well, and were puzzled about why BB Three chose to approach them. He had no scruples about fouling his own nest, as the saying goes. Anyway, one after another they approached CM and asked, "Is it true that ES and Bad Boy have an 'arrangement'? Because that's what he told me." On several occasions, CM and others tried to find a way to let ES know of her boyfriend's bad behaviour, but her friend panicked so much at the smallest hint of his infidelities that telling her was impossible.

Though ES insisted in later years that she knew of none of this, except for one or two incidents that Number Three confessed to her directly, she appeared to half-know or suspect it, although refusing to admit it to herself. Her own fault, some people might say. But then, whoever was to blame, they both paid for it.

It seemed - CM sometimes thought - as if what Number Three really wanted was to "bookmark" ES, to save his place in her life for a later and more convenient time, while he sowed his wild oats. It didn't work out that way, though. He tried to break up with her several times, but found her reaction so shattering that he could not follow through with it. Plus, he needed her. ES, half-knowing what was going on, grew more and more critical of her boyfriend but could not or would not let him go. He didn't really want to leave. For ten years, Number Three, the alpha male who could get any woman he wanted, remained locked in a dance of destruction with the one woman who, in the end, evaded him. He finally managed to fall in love with her at precisely the time when her own feelings for him were cooling. When she married someone else, he was crushed.

Why did he do it, and why did she put up with it? Some readers may argue that BB wasn't really an alpha, that the fact that he didn't leave his girlfriend at the moment when she began to be critical of him proves it. But is any man, however alpha, so strong that he can invariably sacrifice all his emotional needs on the altar of masculine self-assertion? Others will no doubt suggest that Bad Boy was a successful alpha, that ES must have known of his behaviour, and that his successful pursuit of other women and his girlfriend's acceptance of it are proof of his alpha status. But BB's infidelities were so flagrant, so impulsive and - it seemed - compulsive - that it was hard to see them as part of any sort of strategy of emotional control. He needed his pretty conquests for fun and sex and to make him feel good about himself; he needed his girlfriend to provide him with steady emotional support. The two needs often came into direct conflict, and were very destructive, in their effect on his own life and the lives of the women involved with him.

Charity or Compassion?

2008-06-19T07:48:00.006-04:00

Clio, being a pagan Muse and an Immortal, liked the article (via Arts and Letters Daily) from which the passage below was drawn, but not the passage itself. CM, being neither, and a Catholic to boot, liked the passage but wasn't quite certain about the article. It takes no clear position, but it seems to suggest that compassion is either (1) a modernized and degraded form of Christian charity, or (2) a mark of social degeneracy, a kind of pity which is always related to that weakest of emotions, self-pity. The problem with contemporary "compassion", says the writer, is that it assumes that suffering, whether physical or moral, is a thing to be avoided at all cost, an attitude that neither Christianity nor Nietzsche believed to be good for us poor mortals. (This may be one of the rare instances in which any writer has found common ground shared by Nietzsche and Christianity.)

As Clio never fails to point out to her, CM, like all mortals, is a product of her times. Thus she cannot quite abandon the modern and not very Christian idea that pain and suffering are to be avoided.

Here is the passage:

Paganism yielded to Christianity, and classical philosophy to Christian theology. This was a necessary condition of the subsequent rise in the status of compassion to its present triumphant peak. Still, it would be mistaken to suppose that what Christianity taught was compassion.

A single and omnipotent God who, having become flesh, suffered all that flesh can suffer; a morality that begins in the contemplation of the Passion of this God-man, an injunction to universal charity as the supreme virtue — this was far indeed from the humanistic and aristocratic rationalism of the pagan philosophers. At the same time, Christian charity was also far from what we mean by compassion, so far, in fact, that the latter emerged only by way of a profound critique of it.

The best translation of the Latin caritas (Greek agapê) is (non-erotic) love, the model for which is God’s infinite love for man. “Love one another as I have loved you,” Jesus instructed his disciples. Yet, man being so much less than God, this injunction is not within human capacity to honor. Only by God’s grace can our love for our fellow men approach His love for us.

Charity, then, was not a (merely) natural virtue such as those taught by the ancients, but a “theological” or “infused” one. As such, moreover, it necessarily aimed not only or even primarily at the relief of our neighbor’s earthly suffering but at his eternal salvation. Salvation alone was the good (and damnation the evil) beside which all others paled.

So while Christianity may indeed have multiplied soup kitchens, it never confused happiness with the absence of hunger pains. Truer to say that while modern compassion seeks to eliminate suffering, Christianity, recognizing its inevitability for mortal and sinful beings, sought to make it meaningful. It sought to teach us to grasp it as that suffering in and with Christ on which salvation ultimately depends. When, then, Christopher Hitchens excoriated the late Mother Teresa for not being a true “humanitarian” at all, he was perfectly correct: she could not be a mere humanitarian because (as she made no secret) she strove to be a true Christian.

“Modern” compassion, then — and what we mean by compassion is something distinctively modern — stands in an ambivalent relationship to Christianity. On the one hand its triumph drew on the extraordinary prestige enjoyed by charity under the Christian dispensation. On the other, it implied a powerful critique (and rejection) of Christian otherworldliness

Bad Boy Encounters, No. 2, part iii: "As well him as another"

2008-06-17T10:34:00.007-04:00

At times in her romantic history a woman may feel that she has blundered into someone else's love story. That was what happened to CM with Bad Boy #1. Of course, she probably deserved it. "That's what you get," she told herself, "for deciding to date a man because you admire his former girlfriend." She also knew that for her he was largely a means to an end. Her attitude to him was rather like that of Molly Bloom to her husband in the famous soliloquy at the end of Ulysses: "As well him as another." (She will leave it to readers to make what they like out of that remark.)

Bad Boy was obsessed with PF, and she haunted their relationship at every turn. As CM became aware of the fact, she grew increasingly curious about her rival, and was able to piece together the story of what had happened between them through various friends of both. BB was best friends with another BB, known to his friends as the Prince. (All the men in their group used nicknames of that kind; I think one of them was known as Kathmandu.) The Prince was perhaps less intelligent than BB, but he was handsomer, taller, wittier, more popular, and a natural leader, too. An alpha in every way.

The two young men were a team; their girlfriends, including PF, a part of the team and at the center of social life in their residence. There was often a strain in their relationship, for BB was fond of, dependent on, and jealous of his more Alpha friend in equal measure. One night, when Bad Boy had rented a Corvette for her to celebrate her birthday, he accused her of sleeping with the Prince, and punched the car window, shattering the glass and cutting his hand. As you see, though BB never admitted to any lack of confidence, his bravado concealed a great deal of uncertainty. "We went out for more than a year," PF was to tell CM, "but he always refused to meet my parents." She added, "He was afraid that it meant I wanted to marry him. I'm not getting married till I'm 30, let alone to him!"

That uncertainty of BB's, and his inner knowledge that the girl who had helped to bring him into the center of this new life did not, in her heart of hearts, take him seriously as a suitor, spelled doom for their relationship. They went to a party together at the start of the new school year. It was a big party, a major social event for them and their friends. At some point, BB vanished into one of the bedrooms, common behaviour at such parties when drugs are around and people don't want to share. Eventually PF went to look for him. And she found him, not doing lines or smoking pot with a like-minded group of friends, but in bed with another woman. In flagrante delicto (Latin). Caught in the act (English).

It was the classic move of an insecure alpha. A shy man, a kind or good-natured beta, doubtful of his girlfriend's affections, will mope, become depressed, perhaps stop calling. An alpha, or would-be alpha, will do something to outrage her. Especially if he's really in love. And BB was really in love. This was obvious to CM when he spoke of PF to her, under the masculine swagger. He would say that she was a b*tch, had a terrible temper, dressed badly, and then suddenly ask, "does she have a new boyfriend?" The final proof of his enduring passion came some years later, long after CM had stopped seeing him. He was in a bad car-accident, and seriously injured, though he would eventually recover. In his delirium, he kept calling PF's name.

Fellow-females, sometimes "he's just not into you", but at other times, he really is. And sometimes men really are that complicated, whether they admit it or not. Do we bring it out in them? Perhaps there is some truth in that perpetual male accusation, but then again, it isn't entirely our fault. There is something in the nature of uncommitted sexual relationships (and as far as I'm concerned, all non-marital sex is uncommitted) that brings out the worst in people. Mere casual sex with multiple partners, though hardly morally or aesthetically appealing, is less harmful than these passionate but ambiguous relationships that are now our standard form of courtship and a prelude to marriage.

What became of CM's own relationship with this rather tormented young man? Whoever was to blame for it, it was a failure, a failure in the sense that not only did it not lead to marriage, which she didn't really want yet anyway, but a failure in that they never really connected emotionally, never really got to know each other. Her attempt to understand the world better through him wasn't entirely unsuccessful, though. After knowing him, she was far less impressed by "coolness", which began to seem like posturing, rather than a desirable attitude to life. The deadly dullness of sitting with him and his friends while they smoked pot led her to be less intimidated - in a good way - by people who experiment with illicit drugs. Yes, she "partook", as it was then called, two or three times, but was not pleased by the effects. Her mind was already too prone to vague dreaminess; she needed no external help to achieve this state. And, always quick to laugh, she loathed the silly and artificial giggling that pot promoted. Debauchery, she discovered, was dull. In fact, you could say that the experience dramatically diminished the Glamour of Evil for her.*

More than that, though, CM's experience with this Bad Boy gave her an abiding interest in the ways men and women manipulate and deceive each other, the ways in which, to protect their pride, they lie to themselves as well. The interest continues to the present day and is perhaps the impetus behind her posts on this always-fascinating subject.

*Most of these people weren't really evil, of course, but the way they lived made them vulnerable both to evil and to unhappiness.

2008-06-15T22:33:00.002-04:00

Is anyone having trouble posting comments? A commentator writes to me that he has been unable to do so today, and perhaps for longer (it isn't clear). I was wondering if anyone else was having the same problem.

Clio

Bad Boy Encounters: Part 2: The Real World

2008-06-13T18:00:00.007-04:00

So, what about the mystery man who had at last revealed himself? What was he like? Well-dressed, articulate and polite, he was not the kind of man who strikes a Bad Boy note upon first acquaintance. He often wore large, heavy glasses, giving him an undeniably dweebish look. He was on the short side, and rather slightly built. His initial approach to her was perhaps self-confident, but not particularly aggressive. It had, after all, taken him two years after he first saw her to ask her for a date. Yet several acquaintances stepped forward to tell her more about him, once they heard about the encounter, and so she learned that her admirer was not quite as innocuous as he seemed.

BB, it turned out, was a Bad Boy after all. He had put himself through school selling illegal substances. His professors used to warn him during lectures that there was a detective outside looking for him and help him to sneak out. (Professors were all very counter-cultural in those days. Probably still are.) He drove to Florida in the middle of the night to buy orange juice. (About a two-day drive from Toronto in a very fast car.) He bought a gold brick when gold was increasing wildly in value and took it to the college bar to pay for drinks one night. Etcetera.

All this seemed to CM to be delightful (though she was uneasy about the drugs) and colourful, rather than raising any alarm in her. Now, there are a million websites, including those regular readers will know about already, to explain why good girls like bad boys, if the bad boys show signs of being sufficiently alpha. But one reason often gets left out - one that was especially important to CM in her early 20s. She was tired of being patronized for being naive, for knowing nothing about "the real world", a taunt male opponents in particular tended to toss around with special vigour in her presence, whenever they wanted to call her political or religious views into question. Her mildly exotic past, the past she was sometimes guilty of using to try to establish a little status and identity for herself, was often held against her. It confirmed for her interlocutors that she was too rich and too spoilt to know how difficult Life could be. The first charge was laughable; the second was not entirely unjustified.

It was the suggestion that she was ignorant of the Real World, though, that worried her most. It bothered her because she knew that in some sense it was true, if perhaps not in the way her accusers supposed. She had, in fact, seen a great deal more of the world than most of them, and indeed seen some of its horrors. She had lived in Nigeria before she went to school in Toronto, a good place to become acquainted with the less pleasant aspects of reality. But she was, she knew very well, ill-equipped for the practical demands of life in the world. People often frightened her. Their code of sexual ethics was unfathomable; she could make no sense of the rules by which they operated, and indeed it often seemed as if there were none. The frequent drug use around her frightened her. She did not know how she would ever learn to make her way in this Real World, how she would manage to find a job, earn money, find a mate. At twenty-one, she had spent a little less than half her life in North America.

In retrospect, as she considered all these things years later, she came to believe that she chose to ignore the Bad Boy's history - or rather, embrace it - not merely because she found it appealing (though she did), but because she hoped that whatever worldly knowledge he had might rub off on her. Perhaps in embracing it, she could make friends with the Real World that frightened her so badly.

To Be Continued...

Bad Boy Encounters: Reflected Glory

2008-06-11T12:35:00.007-04:00

She used to see BB from time to time in the pub near her college dorm. Sometimes he spoke to her, usually saying something odd but harmless like "Contact lenses bothering you?" She was very young still, a total innocent who knew nothing of the old tricks and ploys that men use to try to connect with a woman for the first time, and didn't realise that he was trying to start something. Whenever he greeted her this way, she blinked a little bewilderedly at him, answered the question - whatever it might be - and walked away.

On one occasion he rescued her from an awkward situation. Or sort of rescued her, after a fashion. She was one of several waitresses at a charity casino given by her college, all dressed in modified Bunny outfits. (No, she didn't wear ears and a tail - bleeeach - but she was wearing a black body-suit, fishnets, a tuxedo jacket, and high heels. Oh yes, and a little red ribbon around her neck. All for a good cause, don't you know.)

Only nineteen at the time, and very sheltered still, she didn't know the kind of reaction that such clothes prompt in men. Really she didn't. So she was taken by surprise at the behaviour of the men at the casino, and again when a group of young men surrounded her as she left the pub, alone. They were perfectly pleasant but very persistent, asking her to go out somewhere with them. Naive as she was, she knew better than to get into a car dressed that way with a group of young men who had been drinking. They let her go after about three minutes, when she insisted that she had to get home. As she crossed the Quad, her rescuer stepped forward and said that he was about to call for help, and asked if she was all right. She recognised him as the contact lens fellow, thanked him, and said good-night.

She did not see him again for another two years and had forgotten he ever existed. Then one night, after a party in the college common room, someone approached her just as she was getting ready to leave. He seemed to be helping with the clean-up after the party - at any rate, he was carrying several empty beer-bottles in his hands. He said, "I've been looking all night for someone to introduce me to you, but I couldn't find anyone who knows you. So I'll have to do it myself. I'm BB #1." She smiled at him vaguely once again and said "nice to meet you". He asked if he could see her again and she said yes and gave him her phone number, uncertain whether she actually wanted him to call. They parted.

But as she was leaving the hall, a friend caught up with her and said, "Did you know that was BB you were talking to? He's PF's old boyfriend. He's really nice." PF's old boyfriend? CM flashed back on the first time she had seen PF, a glorious beauty - the only woman she had ever seen with really golden hair - striding across the quad, her long legs making scissor motions as she walked. Greeting people on the run, always too busy to stop to talk, always full of herself. Cell-phones didn't exist then but she didn't need one; she dominated the air waves with the power of her voice. Gorgeous, brassy, a tough rich girl, but CM had found her crying in the common room one day, and she wouldn't say what was wrong. She treated CM like a little sister, and though infamous for her rudeness, was never rude to her.

To be asked out by PF's former boyfriend was a huge honour, as far as CM was concerned.

To be continued.

Bad Boy Encounters: The Balance of Power

2008-06-06T10:07:00.014-04:00

Is it possible for a man to be a Bad Boy, very attractive to women, but not an alpha? The consensus among those men who take these concepts most seriously seems to be that an Alpha male is a dominant male, but that some alphas are able to use their dominance to win success and command men, and use this success in turn to capture female attention. Other alphas use their dominant qualities to attract women, but may have little capacity for or interest in commanding other men.

Perhaps this is true. At any rate, it makes more sense than to insist that alpha qualities have nothing to do with leadership. Still, let women be wary: an alpha who has no capacity to command men, or worse yet, himself, has little to offer women, however likeable he may be. This secondary form of alpha-ism, and its limitations, is, perhaps, at the heart of the "bad boy" phenomenon that first inspired CM to write about alpha manhood. Long-time readers may remember her posts about the "Byronic Bad Boy" and the "Artful Dodger", and that she once confessed that her own weakness tended to be for Dodgers, with all their charm and inconstancy.

What follows is the story (carefully edited to protect both parties' privacy), of her encounter with one Artful Dodger, the one that convinced her that it was time she started to give some thought to the kind of men to whom she was attracted, and why.

*************************************************

They were sitting at a table on a patio outside a pub. He held CM's left hand in his own and, counting on her fingers, told her the reasons why he liked her in a mixture of Gaelic and rhyming slang. She could understand neither, so every now and then he broke off and translated it, grinning as he spoke. Or he said he translated it. Perhaps he was really saying something much dirtier. Who knows?

She was charmed. The man was clearly imaginative, funny, articulate, and widely travelled. He had been in jail, although she did not yet know that. She already knew that he was well-read and that his knowledge of history was far greater than that of the other students in her class. For you see, he was also her student.

How did she find herself in such a situation? Or rather, what form of stupidity and self-deception had brought her to such a pass? Well, to begin with the student part, it wasn't as bad as it may sound. He was an "older" student, perhaps 37 at that time, and she was in her early 40s. He called her at home late one evening in April to tell her that he had broken his hand in an accident (fellow-females, always be suspicious of such accidents), and would be unable to write his exam on the scheduled date. He had a doctor's certificate, but he also needed her to sign an exam deferral form for him.

She was in a quandary: the thing had to be signed immediately, as it was due Friday - tomorrow. But she would be flying to Toronto early Friday morning. Where to meet him? Her office would be dark and deserted, and she felt uneasy about being alone with him there. Still less did she want to invite him to her apartment. So she suggested meeting in a local pub, and he agreed.

After she signed the form, Artful confessed to being attracted to her. That was when the Gaelic-speaking happened. His admission wasn't altogether unexpected, for she had noticed certain signs, but still, she was surprised. Most students contented themselves with mash notes, in her experience. Such a direct advance was unusual. She ought, perhaps, to have refused it outright, but she did not. Though the semester was already over, she told him that she could have nothing to do with him until after he had written his exam, and she had graded it. He wasn't pleased at the suggestion, but he acquiesced. They talked for a little while longer, and she learned something of the Dodger's appalling childhood. Growing up between London and Dublin - the rougher parts of both cities - absentee father, mother "on the game", anti-Irish prejudice in England because of the continuing menace posed by the IRA in the 1970s.

It was he who told her that his mother was Nancy, and his father Bill Sykes, after she mentioned that Oliver! was one of her favourite musicals. She remembered how she had always thought that she was fated to attract Artful Dodgers, and wondered how this new one would turn out.

Their relationship, such as it was, was difficult from the start. He had a serious drinking problem. On their first real date, he showed up at the restaurant so drunk that he could barely stand up. Though he made no scene, she decided it would be wiser to take him out, apologising quietly to the waitress as she did so, the first time she could recall having been embarrassed in that particular way by a man.

Though their romance faltered soon after that incident, their friendship did not. She allowed it to continue out of guilt, and pity for him, as well as the affection that his natural qualities had evoked. She was also a little frightened of making him angry. A friend had warned her, "Remember, it would be easy for him to say that your relationship started before the class ended. He could very easily blackmail you in some way. Be careful." She also said, "You are a female authority figure to him; he will resent you for that and because he will confuse you with his mother".

The first threat never materialised, but it haunted CM and made her unsure of how to handle him, and their friendship. The second suggestion proved to be only too accurate. For all his flair in courtship, for all his charm, the fact that he had been, in a sense, subordinate to her when they met, always affected his attitude to her. He would curl himself into a ball like a hedgehog, at times, and try to sit in her lap, for all the world as if he were her child. At other times, he would become pointlessly angry at some trivial suggestion from her, as if she were a nagging mother.

Eventually, the problem resolved itself, for a time. He went on a long, extended ramble around the world, living by his wits. Some eighteen months later, however, he showed up at her door one night, unexpectedly. Her mother had died just a few months earlier; she was very lonely, and so she let him in. He asked if he could stay with her for a while, as a friend, and she agreed, a bit reluctantly. It started out not too badly, but then he began to drink deep again. A few weeks later, he returned from some outing, seriously drunk and hung over at once (a peculiarly unpleasant combination that happens to some hardcore alcoholics), raving that he wanted to die, that he would kill himself. She called a friend of his, and asked him to take the Dodger away.

After they had left, she called her brother and explained the situation to him, needing to discuss it with someone. She wasn't afraid of the Artful, exactly, but she didn't want to come home one day to find a corpse in the bathtub. Enough was enough. Her brother suggested that she change her locks immediately, because Dodger had a key to her apartment. Luckily there was a 24-hour locksmith nearby. She had the locks changed that very night.

In spite of the trouble he brought her, she was glad to have known him. He understood her far better than any of her other admirers, she thought - and for all his lack of formal education (he had left school at age 13 and attended university as a "mature student"), he was more intelligent and literate, more a true lover of the English language, than any of them. His ruin was perhaps mainly his own fault, but she always wondered if she would have done much better if she had been dealt the same hand in early life.

Problems resolved?

2008-06-04T13:03:00.002-04:00

Am still trying to clean up my computer. Will post again soon but can't predict exactly when it will be. Please keep checking in from time to time.

Alpha or Not-Alpha?

2008-05-30T11:27:00.000-04:00

Clio is withholding her presence at the moment so her poor Mortal is feeling rather brain-dead, and also in need of a respite from too much time on line, which is why she isn't doing much blogging lately. She is also immersed in yet another book of Mitford letters, this time those of all the six Sisters. What a curious lot they were, and Diana Mitford Guinness Mosley the oddest of them all.

Married to a nice, rich and handsome young man, Diana gave him up for the already-married, less rich, and (to CM's mind) less handsome Oswald Mosley, whom she found more interesting, more impressive, and a better lover. Was it a classic case, as some of my readers might argue, of a woman naturally gravitating towards an alpha in preference to a beta? Perhaps. Certainly Diana herself appears to have thought of him in that way, or would have done, had the vocabulary been available to her. Yet Oswald Mosley - let us ignore the frightfulness of his political views for the moment - was not truly an alpha. Or rather, he was the kind of alpha who was able to impress women, and to bed many of them (he was the one who originated the saying, "vote Labour; sleep Tory"), but whose leadership abilities made little impression on any men who were not thuggish.

Part of his problem was that his political instincts seem to have been rather bad. Hitler himself told him that he thought it a mistake to call his party "fascist", and to dress his men in imitation of Italian blackshirts. He would have done better, said Hitler, to call them Ironsides or some other name with strong English republican connections. ("Ironsides" were the name by which Cromwell's cavalry troopers were known.) It is perhaps just as well that Mosley did not follow this advice - which came too late in any case - or his movement might just possibly have achieved a somewhat greater degree of success. Hard to tell, though. The kind of operatic intensity that appealed to Italian and German audiences in fascist and Nazi rhetoric was foreign to English public life. It simply sounded absurd to the English, and left Mosley open to ridicule, as in the famous passage by P.G. Wodehouse, in which Roderick Spode is modelled on Sir Oswald:

The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?"

Could a man so mistaken about English politics really have been an alpha? And why could the beautiful, intelligent, and very funny Diana not see his absurdity?

Incidentally, the absurd notion that Mosley was popular among the English upper classes ought to be scrapped once and for all. CM has noticed that some critics of Jonah Goldberg's work Liberal Fascism (which she has not read) appear to take this as gospel. But Mosley is actually a rather good example of Mr Goldberg's point that fascism and what he calls "liberalism" (which in modern American usage means - well, that isn't always clear) may have common origins and similar goals. I wouldn't push this idea too far myself, but it would be unfair to say more on that particular point without reading Mr Goldberg's book.

Mosley began his public life as a Conservative politician, but moved on to join the Labour Party. His great hope was to be able to exploit some of Keynes's theories regarding counter-cyclical spending to end the Depression. There was more to it than that, of course: Mosley was no democrat, and he was anti-Semitic (though he denied this in later life, it is apparent in his earlier speeches). As far as I've been able to tell from my reading, Mosley had virtually no support in his own class, or anywhere else, once he broke away from the Labour Party to form his New Party. Worth noting, for those who insist on seeing him as a radical "Tory" is that in early elections (before Mosley grew really radical) the New Party split the Labour vote and allowed Conservative party candidates to win in 1931.

Some Reflections on Humour in Venus and Eros

2008-05-26T08:19:00.003-04:00

Apologies for the long silence. A virus or some other form of cyber-attack prevented CM from accessing either her own blog or her email account last week. For some reason, she was sporadically able to post comments in the comments box, in which she tried to explain what was happening. The attack seems to have ended as suddenly as it began, and without any outside help, either.

Last week, CM engaged in a rather humourless debate about whether women can be funny. Naturally, she thinks that we can be. Clio agrees, although she adds, with a wink, that since much of women's humour is at men's expense, the latter seldom encounter it, and when they do, are unlikely to appreciate it. They angrily accuse funny women of being mean or "bitchy", and - worse yet - of not really being funny. The obvious answer to this is that men's humour at women's expense is not always amusing to women, yet there are many of us who do find it funny, and are willing to laugh at ourselves. (Otherwise, CM could scarcely bring herself to read either Agnostic or Roissy.)

Agnostic, who has been CM's principle antagonist in this debate, has acknowledged that, while women in general may not be funny, they do have a sense of humour. Well, if you are willing to accept a distinction between "having a sense of humour" and "being funny", CM suggests that though perhaps men have a near-monopoly on the latter (though she is not quite prepared to go so far she accepts it for the sake of argument), they are sometimes singularly lacking in the former. Especially when the joke is on them.

Men do not like funny women. Agnostic, who loves him some studies and statistics, has furnished me with many in proof of his contention that women are not funny. Clio, who also loves studies when they prove her point, proffers one of her own that proves this one. It is a from a piece in the Independent (in 2006) quoting an academic study published in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour:

More than half the men who took part in the survey revealed that a witty woman was not what they were looking for in a partner. Dr Martin said the findings suggested that men see themselves as the ones who should be delivering the lines and feel threatened by humorous women.

The authors of the study conclude that men feel "threatened" by women's humour, and suggest that this is because it makes them feel small. Well, perhaps. Clio would expand upon this to suggest that the sex which initiates courtship might well be alarmed by the wit of prospective mates, especially if it is the sharper kind at which certain women excel. Not every man is prepared to play Benedick to a Beatrice; for one thing, it requires considerable intelligence to do so, and while men, of course, are more intelligent than women, they may still not welcome having to work so hard.

Even where broad humour is concerned, men tend not to welcome displays of it from women because they prefer to see the Fair Sex in a romantic light. Jokes about farting, the menopause, menstrual humour, impotence (all the subject of much mirth when women are alone together) do not go down well before a male audience, even an audience of one. "You girls are disgusting!" CM remembers a male cousin of hers saying when she and an old friend were clowning around together one day. Of course, he was laughing uproariously at the time. But there is another point: the men who catch women being funny are likely to be those with sisters, daughters, female cousins, and so forth - women with whom they have no possibility of a sexual relationship, in other words. In any other context, any in which women have reason to preserve or protect their sexual attractiveness, they take care to keep their wit well hidden, and display only their willingness to laugh at men's jokes.

It is probably true that there are more funny men than women, although it is equally true that most men are not quite as funny as they think they are. Women, being obliging creatures, are usually happy to preserve their illusions in this respect. (Note to men: it's the equivalent of not telling a woman how her rear end looks in those pants.) CM must confess that sometimes she wishes that men would stop working so hard to be funny, and learn, instead, to laugh at themselves. It is a pity that in the modern world, especially in North America, so corrupted by political correctness, women too have to be reminded not to take ourselves too seriously. It was once a skill at which we excelled. We must take care not to allow our determination to be men's equals allow us to forget this useful talent.

But enough. Having wrung one concession from Agnostic, CM is willing to drop the argument. She proposes instead a possible explanation for why men and women often fail to quite grasp each other's jokes: there is something in the nature of sexual passion that inclines some of us to a certain solemnity, and this earnestness has so overtaken the depiction of sexuality in popular culture that a comic note strikes some people as not merely false, but somehow obscene.

Below are some reflections from C.S. Lewis's The Four Loves on humour and Eros. Plese note that Lewis is following an old convention in using the word "Eros" to refer to the totality of the experience of erotic love, and using "Venus" to refer to its physical expression alone:

We must not be totally serious about Venus. Indeed we can't be totally serious without doing violence to our humanity. It is not for nothing that every language and literature in the world is full of jokes about sex. Many of them may be dull or disgusting and nearly all of them are old. But we must insist that they embody an attitude to Venus which in the long run endangers the Christian life far less than a reverential gravity. We must not attempt to find a absolute in the flesh. Banish play and laughter from the bed of love and you may let in a false goddess. She will be even falser than the Aphrodite of the Greeks; for they, even while they worshipped her, knew that she was "laughter-loving". The mass of the people are perfectly right in their conviction that Venus is a partly comic spirit.

Choosing Difference

2008-05-20T08:07:00.004-04:00

From an intriguing piece in the Boston Globe, via Arts and Letters Daily.

...Women who are mathematically gifted are more likely than men to have strong verbal abilities as well; men who excel in math, by contrast, don't do nearly as well in verbal skills. As a result, the career choices for math-precocious women are wider than for their male counterparts. They can become scientists, but can succeed just as well as lawyers or teachers. With this range of choice, their data show, highly qualified women may opt out of certain technical or scientific jobs simply because they can.

The article goes on to say that in those nations in which women have the greatest freedom of choice, thanks to education, maternity leave, job availability, and so forth, they are less and not more likely to choose "traditionally masculine" careers:

They have a provocative echo in the conclusions of Susan Pinker, a psychologist and columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail. In her controversial new book, "The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap," Pinker gathers data from the journal Science and a variety of sources that show that in countries where women have the most freedom to choose their careers, the gender divide is the most pronounced.

The United States, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which offer women the most financial stability and legal protections in job choice, have the greatest gender split in careers. In countries with less economic opportunity, like the Philippines, Thailand, and Russia, she writes, the number of women in physics is as high as 30 to 35 percent, versus 5 percent in Canada, Japan, and Germany.

"It's the opposite of what we'd expect," says Pinker. "You'd think the more family-friendly policies, and richer the economy, the more women should behave like men, but it's the opposite. I think with economic opportunity comes choices, comes freedom."

Clio Books

2008-05-19T11:13:00.006-04:00

From a review in the Atlantic of what sounds like a wonderful new history of post-war Britain, Austerity Britain, 1945-1951. Via Arts and Letters Daily.

At war’s end, Britain faced a housing crisis. German bombs had destroyed or severely damaged 750,000 houses, and virtually no new ones had been built for six years. Kynaston shows that, far more than national health insurance or the nationalization of industry, “across the country, it was on the home that most people’s hopes and concerns were really focused.” In their diaries and letters as well as in survey after survey, people made clear their strong dislikes in housing (“nothing less than a mass aversion towards the whole idea of flats,” Kynaston characterizes it) and their equally strong desire: a small suburban house with a garden. The planners and reformers would have none of it. Stridently communal, possessed of what Kynaston describes as an “almost visceral anti-suburban bias” and an accompanying conviction that “explicitly identified social virtue and cohesion in living cheek by jowl” in apartments and planned “New Towns” (innovations, Orwell noted, that would tend to break up the family), they wouldn’t let the preferences of the public vitiate their glorious designs. As one of them, the economist P. Sargent Florence, declared, the predilections of “architects and planners” should trump “the inarticulate yearnings of the average working-class housewife.” When addressing an unruly public meeting that opposed his “New Town” planning schemes designed to create “a new type of citizen,” Lewis Silkin, the minister of town and country planning, put it more bluntly: “It’s no good your jeering; it is going to be done.” Ah, the People’s Tribunes.

Ah, that visceral anti-suburban bias! Clio admits that she tends to share it, not out of contempt for suburbanites, but because it wastes space and forces everyone to live in cars for half the daylight hours as suburbs spread out and grow larger around the city's core. Ah well, back to Parnassus, where the sweets of life never grow stale and nobody needs a car.

On a more cheerful note

2008-05-16T16:13:00.004-04:00

Just fun (the picture that appears with the video isn't MY fault):

Lovely tune, hard pictures:

Sweet as honey (but probably lip-synched, and not the most dynamic performance):

One of my all-time favourites in popular songs:

Nice Guy Encounters: #7, What Really Happened to Bluto?

2008-05-16T08:48:00.005-04:00

CM must confess that the responses to the last post tired her out. Not that they were offensive. It's just that the various commenters, including CM herself, appeared to be repeating themselves and talking past each other, by the end. This may be a sign that the various Nice Guy and Dating Dilemma stories that she has presented here have begun to grow stale, and that it's time to bring this series to a close. (Plus, she's running out of stories, or at any rate, stories that she is willing to tell online.)

All the same, here's another, an extraordinarily sad one, and she hopes that readers will give it some careful thought before responding to it.

Nice Guy #7 was a young man she knew in university, or "college", as Americans say. They lived in the same residence and on the same floor. Although the dorm was not a frat house, its atmosphere was very frat-house like, or so it seemed to its inhabitants. This was the result of a conscious and deliberate attempt on the part of its young men to emulate the manners and activities of the frat-boys of Delta Tau Chi in Animal House, a film that had been released a couple of years before CM first arrived there. Their efforts at emulation were almost too successful.

She never dated #7. In fact, she didn't know him all that well. But he was, or appeared to be, a central figure in the small clique of men that ran the floor's social life. It would be easy to call him a geek or a nerd, but those words, in their present-day usage, don't quite fit. He wasn't math and science oriented; computers were not a part of any of our lives yet; and he wasn't a very good student, either. In fact, he was quite sociable, funny and easy to talk to. Women liked him, but none of us ever fell in love with him, and CM doesn't think he ever asked anyone out, in the four years that she knew him.

How to define the place he occupied in our dorm culture? He hung out with the most popular of the men. No party was complete without him, and he was invariably seen at our events drinking way too much, egged on in his goofier antics by his friends, and, afterwards, heaving his guts out outside in the snow. I think you could say that he was the Big Guys' mascot, a figure of fun as far as they were concerned, although CM could have sworn at the time that they genuinely liked him, too. Still, in spite of the laughter that always accompanied him, in spite of his jokes and the number of friendships he had, the sight of him at a party, surrounded by men urging him to drink some more and chanting his name while he did, always made her very uneasy. There was something tragic about him.

It would be nice to think that he was a Blutarsky figure, destined for great success and the prettiest girl on campus. That was certainly who he wanted to be; the pop culture figure he channeled in his insane drinking binges; the person whom his buddies groomed him to be. But whereas Bluto was an amoral puer figure, a child with no conscience and no limit to his appetites, Nice Guy #7 was fundamentally shy in spite of his sociability, had a conscience, and was little more than a joke to his so-called friends.

CM lost touch with him and with many of these people after she left her residence. But about 5 years later, she was flipping through the newspaper and as she turned the pages to get to Dear Abby or something like that, her eye caught a name at the bottom of the obituary page on her right: it was Nice Guy #7's name. There was very little information in the notice, no age given, nothing to indicate that it was him, for his name was a common one. Still, she felt a cold shock go through her at the sight of it.

By coincidence, the following weekend she went to stay with her former room-mate and to attend a Homecoming reunion. Sitting around a table with her old friends in one of their favourite drinking-holes on campus, she suddenly thought to ask about Nice Guy. "I know it's a long shot, but I saw #7's name in the obituary column in the paper the other day. Could it possibly have been him?" The other people at the table looked at each other, and one of them - one of #7's principle buddy-tormentors, the biggest of the dorm Big Guys - said, "He jumped off a bridge in X two weeks ago. He sent me a letter just before he died." One of the other men present spoke up loudly, "He killed himself over a girl! Can you imagine doing something like that for a woman?" And someone else quickly changed the subject.

Later, CM heard from her old room-mate that #7 had developed a serious drinking problem after leaving school (as if he hadn't had a bad enough one already), had never really been able to find work that suited him, and had drifted from place to place and job to job. The Girl had been, perhaps, his last hope.

So I suppose some of you might say that this was the classic case of a Nice Guy, abused and misunderstood by a woman. CM has always believed, though, that his g*d-damned friends, who had brought him a little happiness and much misery, had as much to do with the poor man's fate as any woman might have done.

RIP, Nice Guy #7.

Commenters are asked to be especially respectful in responding to this post.

The historian's art

2008-05-15T05:34:00.002-04:00

From a review linked in Arts and Letters Daily:

One of the things that must be missing from historical narrative is the observational self, because there is no place within historical narrative for the observational self to stand. There is no place for Keegan, for example, to be as an observer—he has, in effect, exchanged his observational self for the persona of historian. As the narrative and analytical intelligence of his book, he is in no one place, and the events he is presenting with such exemplary historiographic competence and such rhetorical élan are not events that happened to him in the course of his lived experience; reading the documents and making the historiographic and rhetorical decisions that turned them into a coherent narrative are part of his lived experience, but that is a different matter. As a historian, he stands in hundreds of different places and from each of them he sees things in sharp focus. It is a convention of this kind of writing that his personality, his opinions, his beliefs, his personal life are left behind when he assumes his professional role.

What Works

2008-05-12T11:06:00.005-04:00

Here CM must tread a careful line between saying too little to make sense, and saying too much. She wishes to protect her privacy and those of the men she once cared for. She isn't quite certain that she will be able to do this, so it's possible this post will never be posted.

Imagine a night in early November, the weekend after Hallowe'en. There is a Hallowe'en party at a big house in or near College Park, Maryland. It's a cool night after a warm day so there is ground mist rising everywhere. The party-goers fill the house and garden. Those who are outside look decidedly odd because their feet disappear into the ground-mist. The guests are mostly in their mid-to-late twenties. They are students, or were recently students, and are now working at various low-paid jobs. Having just turned 30, CM is slightly older than most of them, but not noticeably so.

She is a stranger at the party, brought there by N., a colleague from work, who used to go to school with several of the guests. And was once married to one of them, for a short time. There is a tall man at the party, at 6'3" taller than most of the other guests. He is dressed in a kind of Death's Head costume, his face whited with theatrical makeup, his eyes blacked out, and his hair is tucked in a bandana (haute-cool style in the early 1990s). CM notices him, at first, simply because of his height. Her friend introduces her to him, and he and N. commiserate, because, it turns out, both are recently divorced. He doesn't appear to notice CM after being introduced to her, which piques her interest in him. After that, she keeps catching his eye, something that she will eventually learn is an almost sure sign of a man's interest in her. If you keep catching a man's eye without intending to do so, it's usually because he is looking at you.

She drifts through the party. At one point, she is talking to a young man, sweet and rather beta-ish, and The Tall Man comes up to speak to them. He and Beta are close friends. CM asks where the glasses are (they are in the kitchen), because she is thirsty. Beta offers - with the best of intentions - to go get her a glass of water, and she says yes.

By the time he gets back with the water, several minutes later because the kitchen is very crowded, it is too late for him. She has her back against the wall, while Tall Man leans over her, propping himself on the wall with his hand. This is supposed to be one of the most aggressive postures a man can adopt. Tall Man isn't otherwise aggressive or dominant - he speaks to her very gently, in his low baritone voice, and asks her about her family - but he appears to have an instinctive understanding of how to assert himself in the presence of a woman. He asks for her phone number but she is a new arrival in the DC area and doesn't yet have one. "Write your name on the bulletin board here so I know how to spell it," he says. And she says yes.

Pentecost

2008-05-11T08:13:00.003-04:00

Today is an important day for believing Christians everywhere: Pentecost Sunday, once known as Whitsunday. It commemorates the day that the Holy Spirit descended upon the remaining Apostles as they sat, gathered together, while Mary led them in prayer. The Spirit manifested itself as tongues of flame above each of their heads, while a great wind swept through the room.

Today is also an important day for CM and her family. Not only is it Mother's Day (that well-intentioned, highly commercial, er, festival), it's also her brother's birthday. I don't usually mention family birthdays on my blog, but in this case I do so because of something I wanted to say about my brother. He suffers from schizophrenia in one of its more severe forms. His medication controls the condition to some extent but cannot suppress it altogether. Some sufferers are more fortunate in this respect.

His story is his own and I don't want to tell it here, but I do want to remind readers that the tormented wretches you may see on the street babbling to themselves were once ordinary people, functional people, who had no idea of the blow that was about to descend on them. I cannot imagine anything worse that can happen to a person. Walter Bagehot, whose mother suffered from bouts of severe depression all her life, said "After all, all the horrors of life are a joke, next to madness." I suppose I might come up with one or two examples of equivalent horrors, if I wanted to try. Certainly the worst day of my own life was the day I went to see my brother in hospital during his first breakdown, and found him wearing a strait-jacket. He smiled at us a little, and he said, "At least I had a happy childhood." Though my brother, of course, bore the heaviest burden, the rest of us, my parents and my two other brothers, were much affected by it as well. It was a long time before any of us were really happy again.

Researchers now speculate that schizophrenia, although heritable (but many cases appear in people with no family history of the illness), may remain latent and never develop into full-blown illness without some external stimulus, usually in the form of severe stress or trauma. There are reasons to suspect that something like this happened to my brother.

Perhaps readers could consider giving money to support research into the cause and cure of severe mental illnesses, which remains rather underfunded.

2008-05-09T13:41:00.003-04:00

Multiculturalism and the Orientalists:
(Times Online, via Arts and Letters Daily)

Said had a problem with languages. For example, when discussing the writings of Sir William Jones and Friedrich Schlegel, he was mysteriously determined to deny that Sanskrit, Persian, German and Greek all belonged to the same broad group of languages – a sort of club to which Arabic could not belong. Ibn Warraq, in discussing Said’s attitude to Orientalists, remarks that he was “particularly jealous of their mastery of languages”. German scholars dominated Arabic, Hebrew and Sanskrit studies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, yet Said avoided any substantial discussion of their work. Some critics have argued that this was because the pre-eminence of German Orientalists did not fit his thesis about the interdependence of Orientalism and imperialism in the Middle East, but others have suggested that it was because his German was not very good. Varisco has noted how Said mistranslates Goethe’s famous line “Gottes ist der Orient!” as “God is the Orient”. He has also spotted that Nerval’s “La mer d’Ionie” was mistranslated as “the Ionian sky”. Ibn Warraq is unhappy with Said’s English, specifically with his misuse of the adverb “literally” and his confusion of scatology with eschatology. Other critics have wondered about Said’s Arabic.

If there is one aspect of Said's work I am tempted to condemn, it is that he has somehow encouraged a generation of people writing in such fields as "post-colonial studies", usually branches of either a Humanities or English Literature department, to believe that they can comment adequately and with authority on colonialism or the societies upon which it was inflicted while knowing little of either the languages or the history of such societies. I'm not certain how this came about, but I suspect that it grew out of the universities' reluctance to encourage the study of languages among their students. I've written about this before - how I was actively discouraged from studying languages as a graduate student because it would bring down my grade-point average, and I wouldn't have the time to do it properly. But at least I never made the mistake of thinking that I could write about, say, British India, without bothering to learn Hindi or Urdu so that I could assess the reactions of the colonised to the colonisers, something which is, after all, supposed to be part of the point of "post-colonial studies".

Another important element in Said's popularity among academics was that his approach allowed those who adopted it to feel that they were engaged in something more important than the study of literature, as the article cited above acknowledges in its introduction, below:

So many academics want the arguments presented in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) to be true. It encourages the reading of novels at an oblique angle in order to discover hidden colonialist subtexts. It promotes a hypercritical version of British and, more generally, of Western achievements. It discourages any kind of critical approach to Islam in Middle Eastern studies. Above all, Orientalism licenses those academics who are so minded to think of their research and teaching as political activities. The drudgery of teaching is thus transformed into something much more exciting, namely “speaking truth to power”.

Nice Guy Encounters: Number 6 (The Friend Zone)

2008-05-08T10:22:00.005-04:00

It's been about a week, and CM thinks she is sufficiently rested to tackle another of these posts. They are draining, but it seems that there aren't many other women tackling such issues in blogworld, and men appear to be very curious about what goes through women's minds in such situations as the one I describe below. So she calls this (with due humility) a public service to her male readers...

This story is rather painful to tell still, because the friendship it describes was a long one and ended quite recently. CM met Nice Guy 6 many years ago, at a graduate students' council gathering. Both were in the early stages of a PhD program. He was younger than she was, by perhaps five years, and at an age when this relatively slight difference gives the older party some real edge in experience and knowledge of the world.

He asked her to have a drink with him after the meeting, and she agreed. She wasn't quite certain whether his interest was merely friendly, or more personal. They found they could talk easily and naturally, and shared a passionate fondness for the work of Evelyn Waugh - and for John Gielgud's performance as Charles Ryder's father in the Grenada production of Brideshead Revisited. Still, at the end of the two-hour session, she knew that, whatever this man's interest in her, her attitude to him could never be more than friendly.

Why not? It's hard to say. He wasn't exactly handsome, but he was attractive in an unusual way, tall, thin, elegant (not effeminately so), strong-featured. Nor was he a beta: he had no trouble approaching women, and though his advances were not always successful, he had dated several very pretty ones for long periods. And he was a dominant male - very clearly so, if you spent any time talking to him.

So what was wrong - what made her so certain that she could never respond to him? CM doesn't know, but she thinks it was probably the fact that he was a Cat-Person, and CM is a Dog-Person. It wasn't that he liked cats - though he did - it was that his personality and even his appearance were decidedly cat-like. He was solitary by nature, aloof, easily bored by those who did not share his interests, and slightly contemptuous of ordinary people. CM hopes that she does not look like a dog (even a cute puppy), but her personality was and remains dog-like. In spite of a certain superficial guardedness that strikes people on first meeting her, when you get to know her she has the enthusiastic bounciness and sloppily affectionate nature of a Golden Retriever, easily excited by trivial excursions and the promise of treats, bored only when depressed.

If you give some thought to your past observation and experience of such matters, you will know that while Cats and Dogs may sometimes become friends, they can never be lovers, chaste or otherwise. The thing is, though, that Nice Guy 6 mistook CM for a Cat-Person, perhaps because of her initial impression of reserve, and from that misunderstanding there sprang a great deal of distress for both parties, enduring over many years.

He asked her out again; she explained that she liked him but saw no romantic future for them. He got angry and shouted at her. But he insisted on remaining her friend. That is, he continued to call her, becoming pleasant and friendly once again, and she thought he was all right now, so she said yes. He dated other women. Then he quite suddenly asked her to marry or live with him, one night while they were out for dinner. He even offered to convert to Catholicism for her. She was as astonished as if he had suddenly performed a strip-tease in the restaurant. She said no, of course. He appeared to be both angry and relieved.

They continued to spend time together; they leaned on one another. They found qualities in each other not readily available anywhere else. She can't be certain what he saw in her, but she appreciated the fact that he was the one man she knew then (outside her family) who did not see all life through the distorting lens of political allegiance. And, being a European, product of a classical "Gymnasium" education, he was far better educated than she was, or than anyone else in her circle of friends. Yet in spite of that he always insisted, "You're more intellectually gifted than I am," words certain to flatter her vanity.

Yet, whether it was because he remained "crushed" on her (which she thinks is unlikely), or because he always saw her as someone who had once caught him in a vulnerable moment, and turned him down, there were disquieting undercurrents in their friendship. On two occasions, when he happened to meet one of the other men in whom he knew she was interested, he interfered, introducing himself to the man and giving him a "little talk" about how he must treat her well. Embarrassing, and it led to major quarrels, but still their friendship dragged on.

Mutual dependency combined with unspoken regrets or resentments are a bad combination. And they were dependent on each other. Sometimes he leaned on her; towards the end of their friendship, she leaned more on him. They continued to write and call when he moved back to Europe. In the end, while she was in Brussels on a family visit, she e-mailed him, asking if he would like to see her, as they had previously agreed she would. He never responded. And this time, she was the one who was both annoyed and relieved.

Again, this is a story with an uncertain moral, although Clio suggests that men and women who are friends should each make sure that neither party has a "hidden agenda". The other moral, perhaps, is this: the stronger party in such a situation should gently and firmly end it. Especially when the other party has asked to marry you. He or she may never forgive you for it.

Comments, so long as they are not sexually explicit, furious, or insulting, are welcome.

Explanation sought

2008-05-07T20:14:00.004-04:00

Can anyone tell me why those "rating" stars have suddenly appeared at the bottom of all my posts? So far as I know, I did nothing to produce them.

And can anyone tell me how to get rid of them? If people want to let me know that they think a particular post is very good or bad, they can say so in my comments-boxes or send me an e-mail. I'm not interested in being rated by random visitors. I don't need the aggravation.

Update: The problem appears to have solved itself for now.

The Male and the Female of it: Quarreling over literature

2008-05-07T14:43:00.008-04:00

Dear, dear, Clio grows increasingly exasperated with the way that the Evo-Psychos are invading her most cherished preserves. Why can't they stay in the basement with their computers, like good boys?

What brings on this complaint? Well, recently a reader sent us a link to a post which appeared recently on the website GNXP.com. Written by GNXP blogger Razib, it concerns literature and those who read it. What follows is a bit from the post that so exasperated me:

Here's the argument: contemporary mainstream fiction is very different from the storytelling of the deep past because of a demand side shift. Women consume most fiction today, and their tastes differ, on average, from those of men. How do they differ? To be short about it men are into plot, while women are into character. This means that modern literary fiction emphasizes psychological complexity, subtly and finesse. In contrast, male-oriented action adventure or science fiction exhibits a tendency toward flat monochromatic characters and a reliance on interesting events and twists. Over my lifetime I've read a fair amount; but the vast majority of the fiction has been science fiction & fantasy. Many males outgrow this bias, perhaps as they become more psychologically complex and nuanced, but I haven't (though I don't read much fiction in general at this point). I know many other males who are similar; we aren't dumb, and not all of us have Asperger's. We just aren't interested into characterization or character. We are people of exotic ideas, novelty of story arc and exploration of startling landscapes. Contemporary mainstream fiction, high, middlebrow and low, does not usually satisfy these needs.

And my own thoughts on Razib's post, in no particular order, below:

1. According to one study from 2000 (these boys love studies, but I can't swear that this was a good one, so take it for what it's worth), women outbuy, and presumably outread, men in every kind of fiction out there. Here's what the study says (see link here for more):

A 2000 survey found that women comprised a greater percentage of readers than men across all genres: Espionage/thriller (69 percent); General (88 percent); Mystery/Detective (86 percent); and even Science Fiction (52 percent).

The GNXP writer assumes that contemporary fiction would be different if men were the ones who bought it. (Or does he mean that men would buy more fiction if more of the right kind of books were written?) I mean, what's to stop men from buying whatever kinds of fiction they enjoy, and making bestsellers out of it? Even if men really do prefer fiction that is primarily concerned with "plot" rather than character - a debatable assertion - there's plenty of classic material out there that they might read, yet they don't appear to be doing so. As for women, I think this survey suggests, if anything, that as always we are great generalists, able to enjoy a great variety of genres.

2. Razib assumes women's fiction is more concerned with character than with plot. This is plain nonsense. The bulk of fiction marketed to women is highly plotted, although the plots can be fairly predictable, revolving around money, social status, and marriage. A plot may not concern spies, drug-smuggling, or murder, but that does not mean that it is not a plot. The contemporary English "chick-lit" writers Marian Keyes and Jill Mansell create plots that are positively baroque in the number of people and events they contain. Sometimes there's even a crime of some kind involved. As for "character" in women's fiction, it is usually rather shallow and undeveloped. Think The Devil Wears Prada, or The Nanny Diaries. Believe it or not, these books are mainly read for their plots.

I suspect that when Razib speaks of women's novels being concerned with character, what he really means (as some of his commenters point out) is that they are concerned with feelings - with feelings and domestic drama, that is - rather than with with the world outside the everyday one of home, school, and office. It is that world that he finds banal.

3. "Highbrow fiction" may be read mainly by women, along with every other kind, but that doesn't mean that it's primarily concerned with character development, either. Literary fiction is mostly about writing. That, indeed, is one of its main problems. (In her book on reading like a writer, Francine Prose speaks of a writing-class student who meets with a publisher and announces, "I want to write beautiful sentences," much to the publisher's horror.) Another problem, of course, is that those sentences may not be quite as beautiful as their writers fancy.

Razib concludes his piece by an even more debatable assertion about literature in the past. Here it is:

...I think that it is somewhat peculiar that many of us find fiction from the past more engaging than popular contemporary works. Aupelius' Golden Ass gets my attention; most contemporary fiction does not. I am arguing here that this is partly due to the fact that in the past those who read copiously were, on average, much more like me than they were like the typical human. Not only were readers by and large men (usually of some means and comfort), but they were often also disproportionately eggheads who were eccentric by their nature. How many elite scholars were there such as Claudius who were not attracted to the public life of politics and do not appear in the annals of history? With the printing press, cheaper paper, and the rise of mass literacy,1 things changed, the distribution of taste shifted. And so did the distribution of genres.

4. It is highly unlikely that most readers (or writers) in the past were men like the kind Razib portrays himself to be: eccentric, not especially social, and living outside the "mainstream" of public life. First issue is, though, to which part of "the past" does he refer? If he means that portion of the past after the invention of the printing press and the dawn of widespread literacy, he might actually have a point. Men like him began to proliferate in Europe after the rise of the middle classes, which more or less coincided with those two other developments: literate men who were not involved with public affairs in any serious way but were not priests or contemplatives. Such men, eccentric, a little anti-social but not hostile to people (like the Aged Parent in Great Expectations) were free to pursue their hobbies - literary or artistic or mechanical - in peace, without having to worry about what other people thought of them.

But Razib says quite specifically that he does not refer to this period, which is when he thinks the rot (not that he uses that term) began to set in in literature. No, the older literature he admires - stories and histories built around myths, legends, and societies at war - comes from an age when those few people who could read and write (and they were indeed more likely to be men than women) were also likely to be involved in public life in some way. Most of the great writers of Athens, or of the Roman Republic and Empire were also public men: Herodotus, Thucydides, Pericles, Cicero, Apuleius, Juvenal etc. Petronius was Nero's Arbiter of Elegance. When such men were fortunate enough to be born to money and rank, they would almost certainly be compelled to take part in public life as a matter of course, learning to lead men and obey superiors; if they were ambitious and talented nobodies, they were compelled to play the courtier and seek out the patronage of those who could support them. If you go back far enough, to the @900 BC era (at the earliest) when Homer is said to have lived, you are speaking of an age in which poets would have to be able to perform their work orally, in front of an audience, hardly the kind of task at which most loner-eccentrics are gifted.

So what, you might ask? Why should it matter if the great writers whom Razib and other eccentric-geek types admire were not really men like themselves? Well, it isn't really all that important, perhaps, but I get tired of everything wrong in the world being blamed on women. Of course, many women have been over-indulging in this pastime at men's expense for the last three decades or so, but turnabout isn't always fair play, and two wrongs don't make a right. (Clio loves cliches.) Clio wishes the New Men to understand that perhaps the reason they can't find the kinds of books they like among contemporary writers is that the kind of men who once wrote them have become so rare in the postmodern world.

Morning and May: Bad Poetry Reprise

2008-05-07T10:13:00.006-04:00

So it's Jeremiah, Jeremiah,
What have you to say
When you meet the garland girls
Tripping on their way?
All around my gala hat
I wear a wreath of roses
(A long and lonely year it is
I've waited for the May!)
If any one should ask you,
The reason why I wear it is—
My own love, my true love is coming home to-day.
[snip]

The cherry-trees are seas of bloom and soft perfume and sweet perfume,
The cherry-trees are seas of bloom (and oh, so near to London!)
And there they say, when dawn is nigh and all the world's a blaze of sky
The cuckoo, though he's very shy, will sing a song for London.
[snip]

Come down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time;
Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!)
And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer's wonderland;
Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!)

Alfred Noyes

It isn't mere laziness that is leading me to re-post this material, but because I can't think of anything more suitable to the day.

Dialogue: Some Reflections

2008-05-05T09:35:00.009-04:00

CM: Clio, I've been trying to read Mencius again.

Clio: Oh dear. I've warned you about that before. Nice boy - I drop by and visit him from time to time - but he's one of your Theory of Everything fellows.

CM: Theory of Everything? You said something about that here before.

Clio: Yes. These Theories, usually conceived and promoted by men, affect to explain everything that happens or has ever happened in the world. They often call on me at some point to furnish examples or justify their conclusions, but, my dear, the errors they make in my name! Usually they're binarists: It's Left and Right, or it's the Godly and the ungodly, or its the Bright Atheists against the Stupid Believers. Of course, there are a few women who take up the habit - Ayn Rand was one of them. I never had more than a nodding acquaintance with her. Couldn't stand the company - the noise that went on in that woman's head.

CM: What's wrong with being a binarist? I have some tendencies that way myself.

Clio: I know, dear, and I always try to correct you when I catch you at it. It's unhistorical. You can't pretend that everything in history can be grouped around two battling principles duking it out for dominance. People just don't behave that way. Often they're opportunists, seizing whatever chance that comes their way to advance themselves. When they aren't opportunists, they may well be -

CM: So what kind of binarist is Mencius? What are his opposing principles?

Clio: I'm not altogether certain, since they appear to have undergone several significant changes since he started his blog. At the moment, it seems that Mencius, in the footsteps of others before him, has decided that the two opposing forces of history are Progressives and Reactionaries. It's very clever of him, because the words can be bent to accommodate almost any theory of what has gone wrong in the world. It's difficult to argue that everyone is either a Bright or a bigoted Believer; there are too many people, and too many things that happen, that obviously have nothing to do with either of these groups. But it's easy as pie to say that because x reacted against y's innovation, x must be a reactionary.

CM: Mencius says that the Reformation was obviously a Progressive movement.

Clio: A perfect example of what I mean when I say that those two words can be used to fit any theory of world history that their user happens to hold. If you had asked a Reformer if he were a Progressive - Martin Luther, say - and if you had been able to make him understand what on earth you were talking about - he would have insisted proudly that he was a reactionary. He would have insisted that he wanted to return the Faith to its former simplicity, against the power grabs, status-seeking, and empire-building of Rome. In a way, he was perfectly right, though his interpretation of Christian doctrine was a little eccentric. But you'd know more about that than I do. Anyway, it wasn't his fault that there were many Christian princes eager to seize on what he said in order to build their empires at the expense of the Church of Rome. If there hadn't been, he'd have been just another eccentric monk with a bee in his bonnet about Church abuses.

CM: So Luther was an accidental Progressive? Something in reformed Christianity, though he didn't know it, actually helped to bring the modern world into existence?

Clio: No, no, there goes that wretched human tendency to binarism again. It's arguable that the Reformation made the rise of the modern state possible. That is why Mencius, who doesn't much like the modern state, sees it as a Progressive movement. But to suggest that there was anything in its actual religious content that was somehow more "modern" than Catholic Christianity is silly. (Not that Mencius actually says this, but there are many people who are tempted to fall into this trap.) Look at the Muslims. They believed in the priesthood of all believers right from the start, and much good it has done them. Mortals keep saying that Islam needs a Reformation. What they don't understand is that Islam is a Reformation, minus the historical circumstances that made the Christian Reformation what it became.

CM: I see. Do you think what Mencius is doing is all wrong, then?

Clio: No, I didn't mean that. I just want to issue a warning against using the Progressive/Reactionary binary carelessly. The real problem with these binarists is that this way of thinking leads them to over-simplify the world. And to see analogies between various historical movements and moments where there really aren't any. Let me conclude with a citation from one of my favourite mortals (I believe I have mentioned it here before):

The truth is much more faithfully summarized if we forgo all analogies with the present, and, braving the indignation of the whig historian together with all the sophistries that he is master of, count Protestants and Catholics of the 16th century [for example] as distant and strange people - as they really were - whose quarrels are as unrelated to ourselves as the factions of Blues and Greens in ancient Constantinople.

Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History.

Dialogue II

2008-05-04T09:40:00.005-04:00

CM: Clio, I have a problem.
Clio: Yes, dear, what is it?
CM: I applied for a job and they screened me in. I'm worried that if I get the job, I won't have time to try to write any more. And I've grown used to working at home.
Clio: It seems to me that you might worry about that when you actually get the job. Anyway, how much writing are you doing now?
CM: Not enough.
Clio: Exactly.
CM: But if I take this job I really won't be able to do much of anything except work. It's very difficult to work all day, come home, and try to write. Besides, I'm absent-minded enough as it is. If I try to do too much, I'm afraid I'll forget to do something important.
Clio: It's difficult but not impossible. What about that friend of yours, what's her name, who wrote a book on ancient Greek history or something like that, while working as a lawyer in private practise. Not a profession known for the abundance of spare time it offers. Anyway, you've done it before yourself. You finished your dissertation while you were working eight hours a day.
CM: That was just the revisions. It's not the same. And I nearly cracked up with the strain of working all day every day without a break.
Clio: You cracked up because you fell in love with a sociopath, not because you were working too hard. What are the odds you're going to encounter another sociopath at the new job? That is, if you get it?
CM: I've always thought that I would have been less vulnerable to the fellow if I hadn't been under such a strain to begin with. Perhaps you're right, though. There can't be many men like him in the world.
Clio: Indeed. Although you do have a remarkable flair for attracting all the lunatics in the neighbourhood.
CM: Muse, dear, that was a low blow. Not helpful at all. And you're stealing words from my brother.
Clio: I'm not here to be sympathetic. That's what Christianity is for. You have been lying fallow for long enough. Personne ne t'a demande d'etre heureux. Travaille!
CM: That's what Colette said. I don't have much in common with her. I always thought I was more like Samuel Johnson. He used to work to the point of collapse and then do nothing for months. Or years.
Clio: Dr Johnson? You should be so lucky. The poor man was always prompt to answer my call, and I drove him like a slave. You aren't.
CM: And you're mean.
Clio: That's my job.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go. (Roethke)

********************************************

The Trees, by Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

A Dialogue

2008-05-02T19:08:00.004-04:00

Clio: You really should write something, you know. Such a lovely upsurge in traffic I've created for you in the last week or so. They'll all go away again if you don't update often enough.

CM: You created it for me? I like that! When I think how I had to fight for your permission to post anything personal at all, even behind a pseudonym and an invented persona!

Clio: Darling CM, you told me that you wanted to be perceived as a serious intellectual. Or at least as someone who could be a serious intellectual, if she only had the time to do the necessary reading for it. I have merely followed your instructions. Anyway, didn't I get you on the blogroll at History Network News? And at About Last Night? I thought you'd be pleased by that.

CM: Terry Teachout has very catholic tastes. (That's a small-c catholic, please note.) It's nice that he linked to me, but it's no proof of my intellectual content. As for HNN, I confess I feel a little embarrassed when anyone gets referred to me from over there. What must they think when they see what I really write about? Especially now?

Clio: I like your ingratitude! And you're not consistent. Are you annoyed that I won't let you write more silly trifles, or angry that I let you write any? What about that woman blogger who combines gossip about her open marriage with discussion of serious works of history? What's her name again, do you remember? People still seem to take her seriously.

CM: Oh, her. She's hardly someone I see as a role model. She is a good writer, though. Anyway, it's weeks since you suggested anything remotely historical to me. I think the last time was when I wrote that piece on Louis XIV's mistresses. What's the point in having a Muse if she never inspires you to do anything?

Clio: Darling, one doesn't have a muse. We merely visit from time to time. I've only lingered with you as long as I have because there are so few historians out there who really value my services. There's a whole generation of historians who appear to mistake history for advocacy. I never advocate anything. So I leave them alone. Not that I don't feel a little frustrated with you from time to time. You will go on about God and so forth. It bores me. I am no more interested in God than I am in advocacy.

CM: We all have our crosses, Clio dear. But tell me, am I stuck with writing about nothing except my romantic history? Not that it hasn't been good for traffic and comments. It's funny how men complain that women don't write about anything but themselves, and then show that they are more interested in what I write about myself than anything else. Why is that, do you suppose? And why are there so few women commenting on my blog?

Clio: Well, as to the first question, I have a few ideas in reserve for you. There's the next post in your series on "I've been everywhere". Though that will take you some time to write, of course. And there's that long piece you started on Allan Bloom last year for the 20th anniversary of the publication of The Closing of the American Mind. If you had only finished the thing, dear, before 2007 was over. Now, of course, it would seem a little odd if it appeared out of nowhere. As for the number of men who read you, I'm sure it's because you got linked by Roissy and by Michael Blowhard. And why don't the women comment more? Well, women tend to be shy in the presence of very vocal and ribald men.

CM: Surely not all of them. Look at those women who comment on Roissy's weblog.

Clio: That's different. They're pre-selected, as it were, for boldness, or they'd hardly read him, let alone comment there. Anyway, the trouble is that most of the bolder hussies out there tend to be good feminists, and they don't read you because you're - what is it that you call it? - pro-life. Most of your women readers are Catholic. And they don't always approve of the comments your male readers make, so they don't join in.

CM: I'm not about to change my views to get more readers. Why have a blog at all if you can't say what you think? Especially a pseudonymous one. And I do so have some women readers who are not Catholic. They're the libertarian types referred here by the Blowhards. They used to comment more, but they don't much, these days. Perhaps I've offended them too.

Clio: Perhaps. Don't worry about it too much. Be a good girl; post about God if you must, and every now and then I'll pop around from Parnassus to give you a few hints.

CM: Thank you, Clio. And will you help me to work on getting my dissertation published?

Clio: My dear, you must not expect miracles. I'll give it some thought, though, and see what I can come up with.

Not-so-nice Guy Encounters: Number One

2008-05-01T14:05:00.005-04:00

CM met him at another party. He was standing in the kitchen with a group of people she knew, and she joined the group to talk to them. Having been introduced to him, she chatted with him while she finished her drink and had a cigarette.

The conversation was fun but entirely impersonal. They talked about post-structuralist deconstruction. They were both making fun of it, Clio hastens to add, and they laughed a good deal over its follies. He was a university professor, much older than she was - or so she thought at the time, but she discovered, years later, that their actual age difference was about fifteen years. (She had thought it was more like 25.) He was a hard drinker, already glassy-eyed when they began talking, which may explain her mistake.

Most of the conversation took place while there were still several people in the kitchen with them, joining in. Quite suddenly, as they were talking, he put his hand on her arm, although she wasn't standing that close to him. She jumped back, becoming aware at the same time that the kitchen was now almost empty, except for someone rooting in the fridge for ice. Annoyed with herself for having allowed this to happen, she put out her cigarette, and left the room without another word, just as another group of people trooped in.

She was not worried about being rude this time, as the man had touched her with no encouragement from her, something she never tolerated. She figured that he had likely thought she was interested because she had laughed at his jokes. Her other mistake was to treat him with less suspicion than a man her own age because he was older. (She never made that particular mistake again.) He was not shy, or a beta: he was very much an alpha, and it was perhaps a mixture of alcohol and vanity that had led him to think she was available to him.

She remained at the party for another two hours, careful to avoid him, as with Nice Guy #5. It wasn't hard. He remained in the kitchen the whole time, no doubt to be near the booze. As she stood in the hall, getting ready to leave with a group of friends who would drive her home, he called out her name and came to the door of the kitchen. She ignored him (easy to do in the commotion of leaving) and left, figuring that stopping to talk would only encourage him.

Two days later, he called her. She had not given him her telephone number or address, but he knew her name and where she went to graduate school. Although her name is a common one in Eastern Ontario, the information was enough for him to work out her address and telephone number. She was furious when she heard his voice, which she recognised right away because of its distinctive American accent. (He was born in the US. Probably a draft dodger, as so many American-born university profs of that generation are.)

She said hello very coldly and asked, "How did you get my number?" He explained, a bit hesitantly.
She said, "What can I do for you?"
He said, "I was going to ask you out for dinner, but somehow I have a feeling now that you aren't going to say yes."
"I'm afraid your feeling is quite right."
And then, backing off slightly, she said, "Look, I'm sure you're a nice man, and I had fun talking to you the other night, but I tried to signal that I wasn't interested and you wouldn't take a hint. I don't appreciate your tracking me down this way. Please don't do it again."

And he apologised, hung up the phone, and called another woman (a friend of CM's, as it happens), and asked her out instead. She said yes, but - unfortunately for him - she told CM about it a few days later, expressing a real interest in him. So CM told her the story, because she found the man obnoxious and didn't want her friend to suffer at his hands. The other woman was furious, and I expect the man got a flea in his ear for his pains.

I have to say that this episode made me nearly sick with anxiety. Not because I was seriously frightened of the man - he had a reputation to keep up and wouldn't have done anything dangerous - but because I hated having to be so unkind. It upset me for days afterwards. Yet I was genuinely angry with him as well. I suppose I could have allowed him to ask me for my number at the party, as he had tried to do, so that I could have refused him directly at the start, but that would have meant "engaging" with him again, which I really didn't want to do.

Clio is not certain what the moral of this story is, but once again, she advises men and women to pay attention to what they are doing. Comments welcome, but please, no ranting, no profanity, no obscenities.

p.s. I think this will be the last post in this series. They are a bit draining to write, and appear to stir up a good deal of passion, which was not their intended purpose.

Nice Guy Encounters: Number Five, In Which Our Heroine Behaves Badly

2008-04-30T13:37:00.004-04:00

Or, How Not to Court A Woman, Continued
They met at a party, an afternoon barbecue on Canada Day. He was a reasonably pleasant-looking man, a little on the pudgy side, but with a nice, masculine face and voice. Unfortunately, he was also remarkably bad at reading unspoken signals, though otherwise an intelligent man. He chatted with CM for perhaps ten minutes, firing questions and compliments at her so that she had little opportunity to break the flow without seeming rude. Most women hate to seem rude, which is why it's wise to allow a woman you've just met a chance to catch a breath between questions, so that you can see whether she returns your interest by asking you any of her own, or merely permits the conversation to die.

Why didn't CM just walk away from him? Well, she can't remember, exactly, but it was partly because there was nowhere else to go. They were standing on a crowded back porch. The living room inside was just as crowded; and there was no garden, just a paved area in the hot sun. She thinks that she moved away just as soon as it was possible to do so, and spent the rest of the afternoon talking to other people, carefully avoiding any group of which he formed a part. There was nothing wrong with the man, except that he wasn't really interesting, or at least not to CM.

As she was leaving, he asked if he could ride home on the bus with her, because he was going the same way. Flabbergasted, she looked at him. How to get out of such a situation? They were leaving at the same time - or so he had contrived. They were taking the same bus. She could hardly refuse to permit him to ride a public vehicle with her. So she decided to make the best of it, and said yes. (Moral: never make requests that cannot be refused without making the refuser seem utterly unreasonable.)

His conversation on the ride home was as dull as she feared it would be. She tried to be unresponsively polite. She sat as far from him as the bus would permit, but he observed none of this. Worse yet, he now knew where she lived, more or less. He wasn't the type of man whom she feared would ever turn up uninvited at her door, but knowing her name, and address, meant that it was easy for him to find her telephone number as well. A few weeks later, just long enough for her to have forgotten him, he called her. She didn't recognise either his voice or his name when he spoke it over the phone. A bad sign, as he should have recognised, but, oblivious as ever, he didn't. He asked her if he was interrupting her and, too flustered at hearing from him at all to be wary of this question, she said no. He invited her to have lunch with him that very day - in half an hour, in fact. There was no easy way out for her by claiming to be busy, now. With a sinking heart, she said she would meet him at the restaurant he had named.

CM arrived at the restaurant on time, but he didn't. He was about ten minutes late. When he turned up he apologised, and - very oddly - asked her some question (she can't remember what it was) whose answer made it clear to him that she had no cash on her. She wouldn't normally have done such a thing, with a man whom she was trying to discourage, but he hadn't left her any time to get to an ATM machine to get money. She had no credit card at that time, and this was before most restaurants were equipped to take ATM cards. What was really odd to her, though, was that he didn't have any cash either. Or at least, not enough to pay for her lunch as well as his. (What kind of man asks a woman on a date for the first time and doesn't expect to pay for her? Well, younger men might take this for granted, but this happened about 13 years ago.) Halfway through the meal, he said he had to go do an errand, and disappeared for twenty minutes. He didn't explain what it was, but she knew he was going to find an ATM and get some more money.

When the uncomfortable lunch was finally over, they parted. That should have been the end of it, but it wasn't, not quite. You see, CM was on her way to Paris for three months that September, as she had told him at the party where they met. He had spent some time there himself, and he had showed up at lunch with two guidebooks that he insisted she take, and she accepted them.

When CM returned to Ottawa after her Paris expedition, she called the Nice Guy and said she wanted to return the books. Where could she drop them off? He said they must meet for drinks and she could give them to him then. She consented because it was the easiest thing to do, but she was grimly determined that there would be no further misunderstandings between them. So, on a cold snowy January evening, she met him in a hotel bar and gave him the books. She was polite, but distant. When they had finished their drinks, he walked her home, something she was glad to accept this time because of the late hour. When they reached her building, she said goodnight to him very firmly, shook his hand, thanked him for the drinks, and left him standing out there, a puzzled and woebegone expression on his pleasant face.

Clio and her mortal would like to invite your reflections on the above case. It must be said at the outset that CM is not proud of herself for the way she behaved in this situation. It was indecisive, "flaky", rude, but dear readers, I did not know how else to respond to this nice but undiscerning man's efforts to court me. He had a positive talent for locking both of us into situations from which there was no graceful exit.

Reprised and Revised

2008-04-29T10:43:00.009-04:00

Once again, Clio asks pardon for posting earlier material. This time, her only excuse is that this post comes from last May, when few people had discovered her blog. Because she rather likes it still (unlike many of her earlier posts), she thought perhaps others might too.

Has Anyone But Me Ever Noticed...
That there is a striking resemblance between some of the short stories of Franz Kafka and those of Beatrix Potter? No, seriously. And I mean that as a compliment, at least to Kafka. I'm not so sure about Beatrix Potter.

In fact, I do like Kafka. He even makes me laugh, truly, which is apparently a rare reaction, although everyone knows they're supposed to find him funny. Could it be my eastern European - on one side - ethnic roots?

In making the comparison I'm thinking especially of Kafka's The Burrow, the story of an unspecified animal who suffers from increasing paranoia about the possibility that strange and dangerous intruders are getting into the tunnels of his house, and Potter's The Tale of Mrs Tittlemouse, the story of a dormouse who is afraid of...the exact same thing. Well, the same except that the dormouse is more obsessed with dirt than security. But the effect is very similar.

Here is a fragment of Potter's story:

Mrs. Tittlemouse was a most terribly tidy particular little mouse,always sweeping and dusting the soft sandy floors. Sometimes a beetle lost its way in the passages."Shuh! shuh! little dirty feet!" said Mrs. Tittlemouse, clattering her dust-pan. And one day a little old woman ran up and down in a red spotty cloak."Your house is on fire, Mother Ladybird! Fly away home to your children!" Another day, a big fat spider came in to shelter from the rain. "Beg pardon, is this not Miss Muffet's?" "Go away, you bold bad spider! Leaving ends of cobweb all over my nice clean house!"

And then one day a large, smelly, and very dirty frog takes up residence in the passages of her burrow.

There isn't quite the open threat of violence in Mrs Tittlemouse as there is in Kafka's fable, but the impact it had on me as a child was inexpressibly sinister, and quite as effective as Kafka for making one laugh and shudder at once. Here is a passage of The Burrow, to illustrate the point:

I shall dig a wide and carefully constructed trench in the direction of the noise and not cease from digging until, independent of all theories, I find the real cause of the noise. Then I shall eradicate it, if that is within my power, and if it is not, at least I shall know the truth. The truth will bring me either peace or despair, but whether the one or the other, it will be beyond doubt or question

The opening lines of Peter Rabbit also have, begging your pardon, a 'kafkaesque' quality:

'Now, my dears,' said old Mrs. Rabbit one morning, 'you may go into the fields or down the lane, but don't go into Mr. McGregor's garden: your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.'

Perhaps it's just me, but I see a certain sympathy of outlook shared by this passage and the famous opening words of The Trial

Somebody must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for one fine morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.

Overheard

2008-04-28T10:13:00.005-04:00

A Conversation Between an Alpha Male and his Daughter (Or, Ladies, Be Careful What You Wish For)

"CM, please call the Maytag people. The dishwasher is broken."
"Oh? What's wrong with it?"
"Never mind what's wrong with it. Call Maytag. Or Sears. Or whoever your mother used to call."
"But I need to know what's wrong in order to explain it to the shop."
"Oh. Well, the foam insulating rim of the dishwasher has come loose. Here, see?" A long skinny strip of black foam rubber or similar material hung from his hand.
"Well, give it to me and I'll see if I can fit it back into place. It shouldn't be too difficult."
"NONSENSE! You," great scorn "are not mechanically gifted. Call the shop."

It took four calls and half an hour to find a shop that actually had a living person available to answer questions. When we did, he told us just to fit the rim back into the dishwasher.

************************************************

OH, speak roughly to your dear old Dad,
Ignore him when he wheezes.
He does it just to make you mad,
Because he knows it teases.*

*Adapted from "The Duchess's Lullaby", by Lewis Carroll.

Revision: Virginia Woolf

2008-04-27T09:27:00.009-04:00

Clio begs your pardon for repeating herself, but hopes that the slightly revised piece, below, from her archives, may interest a few readers who have not seen it before.

Where education is concerned, Mrs. Woolf certainly does not want more of the same—the granting of the same opportunities to more women—having previously argued that all the education prior to the Great War did not prevent that cataclysm from happening but on the contrary actually provoked it by fostering a spirit of competition among those who underwent it. “Let us,” she writes, “ . . . discuss as quickly as we can the sort of education that is needed.” Since the past has been nothing but a catalog of vice, folly, cruelty, and the suppression of women, the college of her dreams “must be an experimental college, an adventurous college. Let it be built on lines of its own.”

And what might these lines be? “It must be built not of carved stone and stained glass, but of some cheap, easily combustible material which does not hoard dust and perpetrate traditions.” This is surely an odd architectural position for an aesthete to take: a position whose baleful practical consequences are, alas, visible throughout the whole island of Great Britain, where hardly a townscape has escaped being ruined by it. The avoidance of dust (and therefore presumably of housework or other oppressive forms of maintenance) is elevated to the pantheon of life’s highest goals: and Mrs. Woolf’s use of the word “perpetrate” in connection with “traditions” is indicative of her revolutionary state of mind, since “perpetrate” generally takes as its object a heinous crime or a massacre or some other disaster. For Mrs. Woolf, tradition in general, not any particular tradition, is what needs to be eliminated.

Theodore Dalrymple

Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas was subjected to a fierce attack by Theodore Dalrymple in the Summer 2002 edition of City Journal. I read the piece then with some dismay. Its criticisms suggested that he was not really familiar with her ideas, and had, moreover, misunderstood Woolf's place in the history of letters. I had half-forgotten it, though, until I was reminded by a post on Thursday's weblog, defending Woolf against Dalrymple and arguing against the idea that we must agree with an author's politics in order to admire his work. It's a good post, but it doesn't really go far enough.

Dalrymple argues that Woolf was typical of what we now call the "limousine liberal", in that she habitually espoused radical social views from a comfortable vantage point in a privileged class. He writes of Woolf that "She regarded [public affairs] with a fastidious disgust, as a vulgar distraction from the true business of life: attendance to the finer nuances of one’s own emotional state." In Three Guineas, however, "[she] tries to show how the threat of war is linked to the condition of women." He goes on: "War throughout the ages, Mrs. Woolf says, has been a male activity, and during those same ages men have suppressed women: ergo, if men cease to suppress women and treat them as equals, there will be no war." His piece concludes with the observation that "[h]ad Mrs. Woolf survived to our time, however, she would at least have had the satisfaction of observing that her cast of mind—shallow, dishonest, resentful, envious, snobbish, self-absorbed, trivial, philistine, and ultimately brutal—had triumphed among the elites of the Western world."

I agree with Mr Dalrymple that Three Guineas is not a good book. What I want to question here is his suggestion that it was somehow revealing of the kind of writer, the kind of thinker, that Woolf had always had been under her "jeweled prose." In fact, Three Guineas was in no way typical of her thoughts on the subject of women's place in society. It was an aberration, born out of peculiar historical circumstances, and to understand why Woolf wrote this curious book, it is only fair to consider the time at which it was written, and the particular experience of its author during that time.

I can understand how Three Guineas must dismay someone who encounters it without being familiar with any of Woolf's other work. It did not sell well in its own day, and Woolf's husband, ordinarily careful not to distress her with too-severe criticisms, told her that it was a "silly argument" and "not very well-written." I doubt, however, that Woolf really believed her own argument. Outside of Three Guineas, Woolf's non-fiction was a celebration of the pleasures of civilized life, of reading (but not the kind of reading carried out by professional critics; rather the kind undertaken in the spirit of the "common reader"), thinking, talking, and friendship.

The book is thus not at all characteristic of Woolf's other works, first because she did not habitually comment upon public affairs, as Mr Dalrymple acknowledges, and second because its views regarding the status of women and their education are quite unlike those she does express in her other work. Consider that in what is perhaps her most famous work, A Room of One's Own, she memorably describes the difference between lunch in a men's college and in one for women. In that instance, her aim was not to attack male privilege, but to ask why parents, and women's benefactors in general, had not tried to provide for their daughters more generously.

Why, then, did she write a book like Three Guineas? Here is a partial answer: I believe that it was a work born out of its author's despair. I don't mean to attempt yet another analysis of Virginia Woolf's mental health here; I wish to emphasize that when I speak of despair I refer not to any personal unhappiness, but to her despair at the state of the world at the time she wrote the book, and her despair at being unable to answer the critics who told her that her views were no longer of any interest or value.

Three Guineas was published in 1938. It was published, that is, near the close of the "low, dishonest decade" to use the phrase immortalised by W.H. Auden. Many people were by now aware of the possibility of imminent war. Radical and extremist solutions to the terrible problems of the Thirties had been floated by competing and opposing political ideologies since the beginning of the decade. Woolf, whose ancestors were among the great liberals of the classical English tradition, whose own generation of friends and cronies had been apolitical or mildly socialist, found herself surrounded in the literary world by serious Communists. And, like serious Communists everywhere, one of their standard rhetorical weapons was to deny to certain kinds of speakers not merely the right to speak, but even to hold an opinion, on the state of society and the solution to its problems.

Many of these people were highly critical of Woolf and her work, in the manner which we know too well now but which was then only beginning to become commonplace. Her attackers confounded her background and social standing with her writing and artistic skill, and accused her of being a mere "lady" who could not possibly have anything relevant to say to the world any more, if indeed she ever had. Women of her class, ladies, had no right to have political opinions at all, as they were neither authentic members of the working class - something that conferred instant authority - nor radicalized intellectuals able to assess long-term economic trends with the tools of Marxist analysis. The Left of the day (people like Frank Swinnerton and Prince Mirsky, once well-known critics and members of the commentariat) regarded her with contempt. In dismissing Woolf in part because she was too privileged to have any real understanding of working-class life or public affairs, Mr Dalrymple is, oddly enough, echoing the radical left-wing critics in the 1930s.

Today, when we tend to associate feminism with the left, it's hard to remember that to serious Marxists, especially in the 1930s, feminism was yet another bourgeois reform movement. Marx had taught, and they believed, that any cause that threatened to distract attention from the Workers' Revolution was wrong, that in any case women's rights would certainly be secured by the socialist revolution, and that anyone who brought up such matters as the education of women at a time of crisis could only be a bourgeois lickspittle, of no importance to the larger debate.

Woolf had been told all her life that her personality, her perceptions, and finally, her writing, were too precious, too obscure in meaning, and too eccentric, to be of any interest to a broad public. She had always attracted a fair amount of hostile commentary from Edwardian critics of her own generation who preferred the monumental novels of Galsworthy and Arnold Bennet, and saw hers as too artistically experimental, too far removed from narrative, story-telling, and character construction, to be classics. She had nevertheless found a niche for herself, and attracted - in a time before the existence of state-supported writers' grants - a small but growing readership interested in her finely-tuned observations and discrimination. Now she found herself attacked by new radicals who had little interest in the arts, for whom life was to be all politics, all the time.

Woolf knew very well that her understanding of people from outside her class was limited. It could scarcely have been otherwise, given the narrow range of her experience, limited by her upbringing, her class, her sex, and finally by her experience of mental instability. She knew it affected her art as a novelist. Moreover, her history of madness - and it was genuine delusional madness from which she suffered, in which she might hear the birds singing in Greek outside her window, or begin to talk to her dead mother - also made her too eager to prove herself to the world, fearing that her personal oddities were a mark of insanity; and much too sensitive to criticism.

She habitually sought to deflect or understand her critics by empathizing, as it were, with those who attacked her. When she was a teenage wallflower, for example, she wrote an essay on the experience of social rejection in which she defended socially successful girls who loved dancing and knew how to flirt. In her young adulthood, concerned that she needed to understand people of other social classes better, she tried teaching at an institute for working people. Many of her friends did the same, but unlike them, she remained interested in the work and kept at it for many months. In order to immerse herself more deeply in public life, she went to great pains to befriend middle and working-class women, and joined various women's clubs, not necessarily of a feminist kind, but the sort in which one gossiped about the vicar. (Most other Bloomsbury women had no interest in such activities, and kept to their own kind.) On the other hand, she refused all invitations to join writers' groups like PEN, thinking perhaps (I don't know) that these would not help her in her quest to meet and understand a wider range of people.

Three Guineas was a work in which Woolf attempted to prove to her new critics that the cause of women's rights was indeed a radical one. More than that, it was an attempt to argue for her right to continue to take part in a political debate in which people like herself seemed irrelevant to many. As she had done before, she wanted to see whether it was possible for her to find some common ground with her critics. Was it true, as some of them asserted, that all the achievements of civilisation ought to be consigned to the dust-heap, because they rested upon the labours of an exploited underclass? She had little of the kind of background in history, economics, or philosophy that might have equipped her to answer such charges. Her education was purely literary. She had no religious faith to sustain her. Her "self-pitying" comments about the social position of the daughters of educated men were not inspired by personal resentment, but were, I think, an attempt to show that it was not only workers, in the Marxist sense of the term, who suffered under an unjust social system.

The connection she tried to make between her own experience of injustice and that of working-class women was greatly exaggerated, but not entirely spurious. After all, though women's colleges certainly existed in her youth, she and her sister were not sent to one, but were educated at home, while her family's resources went towards sending her brothers to Cambridge. (It is also worth noting that women were not actually allowed to hold a degree from Cambridge until 1947, six years after she died. They could, however, hold "titles" if they sat the final exams successfully.) She had found, too, that lack of formal education was not infrequently held against her and other women writers.

Perhaps, to put the matter as cynically as possible, for Mr Dalrymple's benefit, she was hoping to curry favour with the radicals, hoping to prove herself to be one of them. If she was, though, her Marxist critics (unlike Mr Dalrymple) saw through her, and the attempt failed. After she killed herself, one left-wing commentator said, "she has accepted the judgment of history, and taken the logical step." Remember that to a Marxist of that time, the "judgment of history" was the ultimate condemnation, against which there could be no appeal.

So let us continue to read Virginia Woolf, and like or dislike her writing as the spirit moves us, without reference to her political views as expressed in Three Guineas, written at a time when the best men and women said many things that they would later regret.

Note on sources: See Quentin Bell's two volume Virginia Woolf: A Biography (1972) for most of the direct references to Three Guineas, Leonard Woolf's reaction to it, and those of the critics. The citation at the end regarding her suicide is from a short collection of critical and biographical commentary whose title I can't remember or find anywhere online. The passage was quoted (disapprovingly) in an essay by Rosamund Lehmann

For the refreshment of the spirit

2008-04-25T18:07:00.003-04:00

Battle and Marsalis. Via Laodicea.

Seraph disappearance temporary: stay tuned

2008-04-25T12:56:00.005-04:00

Circumstances have forced my blogpal Seraphic to open a new blog at www.stillseraphic.blogspot.com. The site is now up and running. Those who wish to get in touch with her can reach her at seraphicsingles@yahoo.com.

How Not To Court a Woman

2008-04-25T10:43:00.005-04:00

Update: Clio's mortal asks pardon for her decision to shut down the very lively discussion going on in the comments box for this post. She is a little cast down over various pieces of unpleasant news regarding family and friends.

Recent events have made the title topic of particular interest to Clio's mortal. She trusts that her sudden switch to warning mode will not destroy the good will she has been trying to build up between the sexes.

1. Do not go to her house uninvited, ever, unless and until you have been there several times as an invited guest. Even then, do so with due caution.

2. Do not assume that a woman sitting alone in a bar or pub (especially the latter) is looking for male companionship. See whether she has a book, briefcase, or papers on the table, a sign that she does not want to be disturbed. She might be waiting for someone; see if she looks at her watch often. Oh, and check the weather. She might just be there to get in out of the rain.

3. (This one is stolen from Cynthia Heimel.) If she smiles brightly at you when you run into her but never seems to be available for a longer chat, you bore her.

4. Do not introduce sexual matters, even jokingly, into a conversation with a woman you have met only recently unless in the kind of setting (a pickup bar) that invites such jokes. It sets off most women's "creep alarm".

5. Do not swear in her presence unless she does so first. Some allowances made for stubbing your toe or burning your hand on a hot element.

6. If you are dating an old-fashioned girl (you will probably know this about her on the first date) be prepared for her to expect you to pay, especially if you have asked her out. That's what old-fashioned girls do expect.

7. If she apologises every time her arm or other body part brushes yours, she is sending a signal that she does not want you to touch her.

8. Most men hate it when women talk about past "relationships", but it is wise to listen when they do. They are usually trying to tell you what they don't like.

9. If you think she's mistaken about something, or if you disagree with her, say so. Don't be a pushover. But don't get into an argument.

10. Most of these rules (except number 6) apply to women too.

Nice Guy Encounters: Four

2008-04-24T09:57:00.006-04:00

As promised, this is the story of a courtship conducted by a nice man. It wasn't successful, in the end, but that was not because of his niceness. Clio's mortal wishes readers to be very certain of that. She is a bit reluctant to tell this story, because she usually avoids direct reference to the men in her past, except in the most general terms. Good or bad, she does not want the men in her life to have to worry that they will be used as blog-fodder. But she does wish to say something helpful about men, courtship, and niceness.

He wasn't handsome. That was the first point about him. I have dated and occasionally fallen in love with men who were average-looking, but this man - call him TI (not his real initials) - was remarkably plain. Though only in his mid-20s, he was extremely bald, had gaps between his teeth, and was rather overweight. He was also almost ten years younger than I was. When he first indicated an interest in me, which he did by rubbing my feet at a party, I was rather surprised - surprised and charmed. There was absolutely nothing hangdog, apologetic, shy or ingratiating about the way he approached me, which was why I was charmed rather than annoyed. He was also a very intelligent and original person, a terrific historian.

Still, I was uncertain how to handle the situation. You see, though charmed, I wasn't spontanteously attracted to him. Perhaps it was because of his looks; perhaps his relative youth made him seem too much like a younger brother to me, rather than a potential mate. On the other hand, though, his personal value - his good qualities, were very much apparent to me. He seemed too good to simply reject out of hand. What to do? I didn't want to "lead him on", into one of those false friendships in which the man is forced to linger for a time wondering if the woman is ever going to take any more than a friendly interest in him.

But being a resourceful and, as I said, untimid sort of fellow, he tackled the problem with strategic good sense that showed that in spite of his plainness, he was probably an alpha. Or had learned the kind of "game" that makes an otherwise average man into an alpha. How? By asking me for a date. Or rather, by showing up at my apartment (he had already been there as part of a group, for a party, so there was nothing creepy about his action) and saying, "There's a good movie on in 15 minutes; want to walk over and see it?" Taken by surprise, I said yes, and we went, and had a really good time.

It was a very clever move on his part. By not calling in advance, he didn't leave me time to fret over whether to say yes or no. By asking me out, he showed that he was in charge of the situation, as a good man ought to be - but at the same time, the casual nature of the invitation gave him good "deniability": there was still a cloak of friendship over the business. And it gave me "deniability" too: because the invitation had been on such short notice, it would have been easy for me to say, "Sorry, I can't get ready in time."

My admiration and respect for the man increased. But I was still in a quandary about the fact that I didn't think I could feel the kind of attraction towards him that every man is entitled to in a woman he is dating. I decided I couldn't accept any more dates, but that I would nevertheless try to spend time talking to and getting to know him when we met at parties and in the course of our academic lives, to see if my feelings might change.

As I discovered over the next few months, there was another barrier to romance besides the lack of spontaneous attraction. He was my political opposite - a serious, committed lefty, and entirely ignorant of religion. BUT - and this will give you some notion of why the man impressed me so much - he hadn't an ounce of political correctness in his makeup. Does that sound paradoxical? It was, in a way. He was not, for example, one of those tiresome people who thinks that anyone who does not share his political views is by definition evil.

Impressed, I began to wonder if perhaps I could be attracted to him after all. But to what purpose? I was in my mid-thirties at the time. He was about 26. If we became a couple, we would be faced with all the problems that this kind of age difference poses: when to have children, would having children be hard on his career, how could he support me if we did want children. It struck me as unfair to impose this on him. So I still felt that I couldn't encourage him as a suitor, and continued to turn down his occasional requests for a date.

We were at an impasse, not quite openly acknowledged but felt by both of us. Then fate, in the form of politics, intervened. We and some other graduate students had been to see a speaker together - unfortunately an old-style Marxist Soviet-worshipper, who talked about how the downfall of the Soviet Union had been a calamity for the international Left. I was outraged. A few days later (I think), TI and I ran into each other at a party and started to talk. At one point, discussing the speaker, I said something like "I am so ****ing tired of that kind of thing in academia."

My friend was disgusted. Not by my sentiments - didn't I say he wasn't politically correct? - but by my language. He was, in his views of women, an old-fashioned romantic. That was part of the reason he liked me. I wasn't much given to four-letter words, but I was tired and slightly drunk, and genuinely annoyed by the folly of the famous professor whom we had gone to see. But though I immediately tried to apologise, TI would have none of it. He said, "I'm not comfortable with this discussion." And left. Roissy and his ilk would say that he was standing up for himself, letting me know that he was the one putting me to the test. I still don't think my offense was really worth the level of anger he directed at it, but I suppose there were other unspoken feelings behind it.

The next day, he went away for several months. He left a book that I had lent him in my mailbox, as if in a final gesture of repudiation. When he got back, I soon heard that he was dating another woman, seriously. They moved in together, got married, and have had at least one baby. I went to their wedding and wished them well with all my heart. She is very pretty, and younger than he is, and they are happy. I'm not really in touch with them but we are all on good terms.

That, I think, is how a nice man conducts a (failed) courtship.

Nice Guy Encounters: Three

2008-04-23T08:31:00.004-04:00

A short one, again involving travel and a stranger. I was on this occasion returning to school in Toronto, and because once again I was burdened with a great many suitcases, I took a cab from the bus terminal to my dorm at York University, a long and expensive ride. The cab driver was a middle-aged man; we fell into conversation, and he told me that he was from Greece (there were many new Greek immigrants in Toronto at that time).
"I spent a month in Greece once, on Mykonos", I told him.
"Mykonos?" He caught my eye in his rearview mirror, and grinned at me. "I am from Mykonos."

This was so surprising that I could only gape at him. Mykonos is a small Greek island; I don't know what its population was at that time, but even today it has not reached 10,000 people yet.

"What did you think of my home?" he asked.

The question threw me into a minor quandary. I liked the island and its people, but I hated the International Jet Set that had made it their playground, and their, well, excesses, that were always on public display. I decided it was better to be blunt about this, and said "I didn't like the other tourists much. I was there with my family. I never saw behaviour like that in public before." I was thinking in particular of the couple of indeterminate sex who walked around town together linked by - I am not making this up - a padded silk yoke. I told him my yoke story, and he laughed uproariously. But he was sympathetic.

"To be honest, I do not like those people either. That was one reason I left Mykonos. But what can you do? Before the tourists came, we were so poor." And he told me a story: "Listen, I used to be a captain in the Coast Guard. I liked the life; I loved my men. They were simple sailors, they lived all the time looking at death, they had no ambitions. When they got paid they never put money in the bank. They would spend it on wine and women, enjoying themselves on their leave, living day to day, and then come back to work. But the tourists? One day we had to rescue a boatload of them when their ship got into serious trouble. There were people in the water everywhere. I threw one man a lifebelt; his little daughter was beside him. I thought he would put it on her, but he put it on himself and left his daughter to struggle. One of my men had to swim out to rescue her. That was when I knew I had to leave, I couldn't work for such people any more. Even the colonels couldn't drive me away, but that did."

We talked about Greece for a little while longer. When we arrived at my dorm, he helped me take my suitcases to the door. I took my wallet out of my purse to pay him; about a $25 fare. He said, "No, no, I have enjoyed talking to you very much. Thank you, and good day." And he got back into his cab and drove away.

Tagged

2008-04-22T10:31:00.008-04:00

All right. Time's up. No nasty comments have been lobbed, for which Clio's Mortal thanks you kindly.

*************************************************************************************

Clio has been tagged, but since none of the questions are appropriate to a Muse, she defers to her mortal to answer them.

What I was doing ten years ago:
Working on my dissertation in my charming-dive apartment in Sandy Hill, an Ottawa neighbourhood.

Five things on my To-Do list today:
1. Catch up on sleep after a late night finishing three reports.
2. Make what I hope will be a life-changing telephone call.
3. Have a long, leisurely bath.
4. Walk to the supermarket.
5. Make dinner.

Things I would do if I were a billionaire:
1. Buy apartments in London, Paris, and Rome.
2. Hire a cook and a full-time housekeeper.
3. Set up a fund for the beautification of Canadian cities. (They could use it.)
4. Give a large portion to my extended family to use as they see fit.
5. Another large portion to Catholic charities. And live on the rest while researching and writing history books.

Three of my bad habits:
1. Procrastination.
2. Day-dreaming. (A form of the above.)
3. Reading wicked blogs that corrupt my innocence.

Five places I've lived:
1. New Delhi
2. Warsaw
3. Lagos
4. Ottawa
5. DC

Five jobs I've had:
1. I was a waitress for ONE day. Fired. (Clio's mortal was not born to serve, alas.)
2. Editorial assistant
3. Lecturer in history
4. Ticket-seller at a national park
5. Library technician

Five books I've recently read:
1. And Then We Came to the End
2. Early Greece
3. Writing Fiction
4. Mistress of the Sun
5. Heart-Shaped Box

Five people or communities I'm going to tag: I always have a hard time with this part, as most of the blogs I read don't do "memes". How about Eve? I tag thee, thou Tushnet (if you have the time). Oh, and Moominmama, whose Mlight blog is so charming. Dylan? How do you feel about doing a meme again? Dylan does More Last Than Star and when I first started blogging I wanted to be him. My crest has long since fallen. There. That's three, which is three more than I thought I could come up with.