Artistic Intimacy

Dr. Leah Price is Professor of English at Harvard and has an incredibly impressive resume - particularly when you consider that she is still on the shy side of 40. One thing I don't understand though, she got her Ph.D. at Yale. I thought there was a rule that if you got your Ph.D. at Yale you weren't allowed to teach at Harvard. I have chosen to "talk" with her since she was quoted in the story that sparked this post.
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Leah, may I speak frankly?

In life, Leah, certain intimacies should remain private. I am aware that in the age of the Internet that assertion seems quaint at best, at worst, foolish or even stupid. But simply because something can be made public doesn’t mean it should be. Evidence is all around us. Micro-blogs like Twitter and Facebook's “What’s on your mind” are easy targets. Someone I do not know just informed me via my Facebook page that, “Sweden is great. Very interesting, but also clean and friendly people.” And I should care because . . . .? Darker examples also abound. Do a search on any pejorative term and you will encounter thousands of public symptoms of social pathology that should be confined to the privacy of a therapist’s inner sanctum.

But, the current burr under my saddle is somewhat different, even strange. I heard an interesting story on NPR the other day [see below] about a website called BookGlutton. [http://www.bookglutton.com/] You were quoted so you know the site and the story far better than I, but apparently the site is a sort of cyber book club where everybody simultaneously reads a book and discusses it in a semi-social, semi-intellectual gabfest that occurs as a live chat session in the margin of the screen, right? The story quotes teachers who love the site as a teaching tool. I can see the value in that. Given that reading for pleasure has largely tanked among young people, I am in favor of anything that draws people to the joy of reading. However, the article also quotes you as saying:

"There's something frustrating about reading on a Kindle. "The fact that you're reading on a screen makes you expect, 'Oh, I should be able to click through on this. Oh, I should be able to look this word up. I should be able to Google this name.' "

And then they say that you have no doubt that within the next decade, no one will feel that frustration anymore - because, I assume, we'll be reading novels interactively with a bunch of friends?

Leah, I have to admit that that just creeps me out. OK, you're still a thirty-something. I can cut you some slack there. You probably grew up reading on a screen. But the notion of clicking my way through a novel with folks chatting along side in the margin? Come on now.

“OMG! Didn’t see that coming! Did anyone else? I thought she was his sister! LOL!”
“Oh, I knew it had to happen. Total manifestation of the commodification of cultural dominance.”
“The what of what? Who are you?”
“I’m a grad student at Stanford.”
“Well, excuuuuse me!”

OK, I am aware that once an artist puts a work before an audience he or she lets go of the work. The audience can do whatever they want with it. But I always think of that interaction – artist and audience – as one-to-one. Even theater and film, which are often presented to groups, are experienced individually. We – one person – interact through the artwork with another person. For me it doesn’t matter if my role at the moment is artist or audience member, that interaction is more than personal – it is intimate.

This notion of “group think” being brought to bear on novels, on any artform, becomes a problem once we leave the realm of pedagogy. When you teach you have to at least pay lip service to the notion that there are no stupid questions, that every input moves us along the path to learning. That is, of course, a crock. There are incredibly stupid questions that create horrific detours on the road to insight. But in the classroom you often have to walk that road.

Docents walk that road for us in museums, and many do it brilliantly. I remember a woman at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. We had signed up for a tour, there were supposed to be seven of us, but five people failed to show up, so my wife and I got a tour for two. It was quite wonderful, we learned a lot. But that was pedagogy. When I am intimately involved with a work of art I am completely unconcerned about what the kid in the back row thinks. I am equally disinterested in an expert point of view. When I am looking at The Birth of Venus, I don’t want anyone else there, thank you. This is between Botticelli and me. This is private. I don’t want to be disturbed.

The good people at Bookglutton, and you Leah, should be quick to point out that their site in no way denies me the privacy to read a book all by myself. You are, of course, right. But I worry that it puts us on a slippery slope. It creates a space that redefines our interaction with art. It is the same slope that leads to babies in strollers parked in front of Michelangelo’s David, to the seven-year-old with the toy musket shooting at the actor portraying George Washington at Colonial Williamsburg, to our seeming inability to distinguish between entertainment, public pedagogy and private artistic intimacy.

There is certainly space for all three in our society – but not in the same room, not on the same screen, not at the same time.

NPR story on Bookglutton:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106150832

Temporary Sanity

Dr. James H. Bray, is the President of the American Psychological Association. I have not read of his research, but I assume he would be qualified to give me some feedback here.

“Has he lost his mind?” is the question that springs to mind when watching Gov. Mark Sanford explain the last few weeks of his life. One could argue that the opposite is true – that he found it. Bear with me, Dr. Bray, then let me know what you think.

I think of it as the water balloon theory of the self. Imagine – or actually go get – a round balloon. Fill it with water until it is about the size of a softball. It should be able to retain its spherical shape but shouldn’t be in danger of bursting. That is the self at rest, when we are comfortably all alone – no obligations, no roles to play. Now pick up the balloon, hold it between your hands and begin to wiggle your fingers. As each finger exerts pressure on the “balloon-self” the surface distorts as portions of the “self” swell while others recede. The fingers are the expectations, the pressures placed upon us by life. Some fingers we choose – by our jobs, our relationships. Some we are born into - our family, our ethnicity. Some are a blend – our beliefs and values.

Every politician juggles the interests of a variety of constituencies, and is, in turn, squeezed by many fingers. The higher the office, the more insistent the pressure of influential constituents. Gov. Sanford’s constituents brought a rigid social and political orthodoxy to the table. Then he meets a “soul mate”; someone in whose presence his self escapes pressure. Here is the same self usually allowed only in solitude, round, full, comfortable – a water balloon at rest. In that relationship he sees the promise of a synthesized life. No having to select the “reality” of the moment. The chance of a constant self; of a life without lies. How wonderful. He momentarily finds his mind, he finds “temporary sanity.” But it is a sanity that cannot survive in the rest of the world that he has chosen; it is a sanity in opposition to the norms of his previous personal and political constituents. In that world this new self, this new sanity, is lunacy.

He tries to bring that new sanity back into his old world and those powerful old fingers reach out to grab him by the balloons. It remains to be seen if he has the flexibility and the resilience to survive in this reality, or if he will seek another more amenable to recently discovered new facets of his self.

So what do you think, James? Does that balloon hold water?

Plainly Speaking About Finance

Daddy Warbucks was Little Orphan Annie’s adoptive father in the long running comic strip, Broadway show, movie, etc. I have chosen him to chat with because he was depicted as a reasonable – though admittedly fictional – billionaire. The motivation for this posting was a story I heard a couple of times during the day on NPR. June 29th? 30th? I’m not sure and can find no reference to it. Please let me know if you heard it. The gist of the story was that legislation either just passed or pending would require that financial institutions describe their various products and services in a way that could be read and understood by reasonably intelligent adults in the general population. The legislation was being “fiercely opposed” by the banking community on the grounds that the requirements would “severely limit” the products they could offer.

Daddy Warbucks, may I speak frankly?

Didn’t we take care of this a long time ago? 1400s? 1500s? Then it was the Catholic Church asserting that the word of God could only be communicated in Latin. Bad enough that this goldsmith Gutenberg was printing copies of the Bible and selling them to those nouveau riche merchants. Next thing you know people will get the idea that Jesus of Nazareth, a nice Jewish boy, didn’t speak Latin. Adfectus deus! I recall reading that they got rather, well, catholic about the whole issue. My way or the highway – translate the good book into English and we will kill you, dismember you, grind your bones into dust. Princes of the Church acting in behalf of the Prince of Peace, no doubt to guard the common people from holy writ, writ in unholy tongues.

Folks didn’t buy it then and hopefully, we will buy it no longer. It is lunacy when the language that guards or removes our freedom is one we cannot understand. People are reading these words on some type of digital device requiring software. Most likely, they installed that software. During that process they clicked on a link asserting that they had read and agreed to the provisions of the software license or the terms of service. They lied. Nobody reads that stuff unless there is some sort of firestorm over the Facebook or the MySpace terms of service. “Huh?” we then ask, “Wazzat?” We don’t read the lease on our apartment, the mortgage agreement on our house, the service agreement on our rental car, the terms of our credit cards, the patient release forms at the hospital, the entirety of our health or home insurance policies. We don’t read any of that stuff. Are we complete idiots? Yes and no.

Yes, we are idiots because those are important documents; we are signing, clicking, swearing and affirming to agreements that can cost us, literally, life, liberty and the ability to pursue happiness. And, no, we are not idiots because even if we read the documents we could not understand them. My older daughter is a lawyer, and I love her dearly – but her progress through law school taught me a very basic truth. Lawyers do not speak English, they do not write English; I sincerely doubt that they think in English. You may substitute French, German, Russian, Farsi, or Hebrew in that sentence. The truth remains. Here is what happened:

My students will affirm that I am a hardliner when it comes to writing. They will often use other descriptive phrases to describe my insistence that they write according to the formal rules of grammar and style; that words be correctly spelled. When my daughter was an undergraduate I would often proofread her drafts – one of the few perks of being raised by a university professor. She wrote well. Then she went to law school. She sent me a paper to look over. The words were English, the phrases had individual meaning – but the sentences were macabre. There was no discernible meaning in English as it is commonly employed. This is the language of the law. It stands apart from the normal language of the culture. It is the language by which the powerful assert dominion over the powerless. It certainly can be the language through which the powerful can protect the powerless; but it is never the language of the powerless.

As I understand it, this legislation would require financial institutions to define their products – from checking accounts and credit cards to arcane derivatives – in the common language of the culture. Daddy W, it can be done and it should be done.

Something you learn when you teach is that when your students don’t understand you, it isn’t always their fault. Sure, sometimes they aren’t paying attention. Sometimes they don’t care. But sometimes you are not being clear, you are not speaking a language they are capable of understanding. Often in my world junior professors speak graduate school jargon to freshmen. In that case the fault is not in the stars, Daddy, it is in us. Speak plainly, speak clearly. If you cannot communicate the idea behind a financial transaction in the common parlance to a reasonably intelligent adult, then the fault is not theirs, and their suspicion is probably warranted.


You need to tell your billionaire finance cronies that they are going to have a hard time selling this whole “if everyone can understand it we can’t make money from it” gambit. They are without much credibility these days. We used to believe the powerful when they said, “You don’t really need to read all that. Essentially what it means is . . . . .” We now assume they are lying. Besides, they’ll survive, the grandest cons use simple language. “150% return on your investment is guaranteed.” “There is no risk at all.” “I’m going to put a simple pea under one of these three shells. . .” If we fall for that – a con in simple, clear language, then the blame does rest with us. But at least show us the respect of stealing from us in a language we can both understand.

Oops. Excuse me Daddy, I have to take this. “Yeah, Bernie, I heard. 150 years. That’s cold. No, Bernie, I can’t lend you 20 bucks. No, my daughter doesn’t do criminal law . . . Bernie, you know I hate it when you whine like that.”