Stoner

I wrote about John Williams' masterpiece Stoner just a month or so after I began this blog. I had this to say about it:

I read Stoner this summer and was immediately convinced that it’s one of the great American novels of the twentieth century. Williams’ quiet, spare prose about the life of an unremarkable man who teaches English at a university does not seem to be the stuff of great novels. I tried explaining the storyline to a friend of mine, who scoffed at my description – not for him, thanks. The problem is that a mere outline of the story is utterly insufficient as a description of the book. All I can say is, read it. The cumulative effect of Williams’ storytelling is powerfully moving and, in the end, heartbreaking. It is a tragedy but one with ameliorative effects. One gets the sense that Williams’ point is that we all live tragic lives, or at least lives that will be visited by tragedy. It’s how we handle those tragedies, how we pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off, that matters. In the end, we’ll find a way of understanding the disappointments, we’ll throw bitterness and self-pity off, and we’ll find a sense of, perhaps not peace, or even contentment, but acceptance.

In a post at Commentary Magazine literary blog today, D. G. Myers has a much longer (and better) discussion of the book. His take on it is similar to my own:

Stoner takes an outwardly nondescript life, the sort of life that many of us want to escape into fiction, and demonstrates that the real drama of human experience is in the daily refusal to escape, the uninterrupted renunciation of extreme situations, the muted decision to stay and do some good. It’s hard to make such a book sound very exciting. That Stoner is exciting — unexpectedly so, and incredibly moving — is the true measure of Williams’s achievement.

Stoner is a deeply moving book (as is Williams' follow-up to it, Augustus, which I discuss in greater detail in the post linked above) and Myers' discussion of it gets very close to the heart of why. He sums up by saying, "[Stoner] will remind you why you first started reading novels: to get inside the mystery of other people’s lives. And perhaps that is the final cause of all good fiction." Read the entire discussion, and if you like great fiction, read Stoner. It was one of the most illuminating literary experiences of my reading life.

Excerpt

"Flannery O’Connor is the only great Christian writer this nation has produced.  That is an astonishing fact. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Emily Dickinson, Frost, Stevens: not one of them Christian, at least not orthodoxly Christian. She is a Southerner and a Catholic, she’s not at the center of American culture, and yet she is our only great Christian writer."

Professor Ralph Wood, Baylor University, Interview.

A Good Man Is Hard To Find

If you love Flannery O'Connor's short stories, as I do, you are in for a treat. Click here and then click on the hyperlink "Reading at Vanderbilt, 1959" to listen to a rare audio of Ms. O'Connor reading her most famous story, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find," at Vanderbilt University in 1959. "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" is an astonishingly story always but never more so than while hearing it read by the author herself - the humor, the absurdity, and the terror are fully apparent, and it is deeply moving. I'm not sure how long this recording has been floating around the web but no matter, it is a tremendous addition to American letters.  Hat tip to Terry Teachout, who heard about it from Maud Newton. Go listen.

Excerpt

"Now the drummers did not rush out to grab Chaney or shoot him but instead scattered like poultry while Chaney took my father's purse from his warm body and ripped open the trouser band and took the gold pieces too. I cannot say how he knew about them. When he finished his thieving he raced to the end of the street and struck the night watchman at the stock barn a fierce blow to the mouth with his rifle stock, knocking him silly. He put a bridle on Papa's horse Judy and rode out bareback. Darkness swallowed him up. He might have taken the time to saddle the horse or hitched up three spans of mules to a Concord stagecoach and smoked a pipe as it seems no one in that city was after him. He had mistaken the drummers for men. 'The wicked flee when none pursueth.'"

Charles Portis, from True Grit

New Sidebars, and True Grit

You will also notice a few new sidebars on the right-hand panel: my Netflix DVDs at home, the next five DVDs in my queue, the next ten movies in my Netflix Instant Queue, and the last twenty songs I've listened to via last.fm. I don't know that any of this is of interest to anyone, even myself, but I added the plugins anyhow. One of these days I'll also update my 2011 books page too. For some reason I'm having trouble linking from that page to the best book I've read all year, True Grit, by Charles Portis. It is, no exaggeration, an American classic, and I recommend it to all. I've seen and enjoyed both versions of the movie but neither comes close to the book. Read the first two sentences and you are hooked. If you've seen the movie you see how the sentences set up the entire story:

People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.

That, my friends, is masterful writing. In two sentences Portis establishes character, place, time, and situation. And it keeps getting better. Every page contains laughs, deep insights and marvelous writing and storytelling. True Grit is true Americana, and it doesn't get much better. I love, love, love it.

Excerpt

"The decision to be a writer had come over [Briggs] while the fleet was cruising in the Caribbean, pausing in St. Thomas, Montego Bay, Port-au-Prince and other playlands where he met fellow Americans and British ladies and gentleman lounging around swimming pools with tall frosted drinks in their hands, being fanned by tireless natives.

"'Who are these people', Briggs had asked, and on being told that these fortunate folks were all writers - novelists, playwrights, journalists - Briggs cried out, 'Then that's the life for me! How do I begin?'

"With the flattering letters these genial professionals obligingly wrote for someone they felt could never be a rival, Briggs had no trouble landing the magazine job when he got out of the service. His honest statement that he had never written anything but clear, straightforward reports for superior officers charmed the City Life editor. Briggs had hoped for assignments in the field of sports but the editor felt that literary training and education were required for that, whereas art was a department where inexperience and ignorance would not be noticed."

Dawn Powell, The Wicked Pavilion

Finishing Up 2010

I mentioned the Motorola smart phones last week, but didn't mention that we also indulged in a new DVD player for Christmas.  We took the old, tired one upstairs to the bedroom and put the new one downstairs where we do most of our TV watching. The DVD player is equipped with Blu-Ray, which really doesn't interest me much. What I like about it is the Internet capability which allows one to stream Netflix movies to the TV. As long as it's available on the Watch Instantly section I can stream it right to the television when I'd like. I watch mostly older movies so almost everything I am interested in is available in this format. I've already taken advantage this week, watching three movies - Our Man In Havana, To Be or Not To Be, and The Man Who Never Was (all three terrific) - with another dozen or so queued up. I'm feeling a bit under the weather this morning so I'll use that excuse to spend New Year's Eve day, and perhaps night, finishing a wonderful book, Dawn Powell's The Wicked Pavilion (if you love biting wit and blistering take downs of the pretentious and snobbish, you'll do no better than reading Dawn Powell, one of America's great writers) and indulging in more movie watching.  A Happy New Year to all.

The Day After Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Day was fine. We gathered out in Front Royal, VA. with my wife's family, as per tradition. A few people couldn't make it but we still had a crowd, close to thirty people, some of whom we hadn't seen in awhile. A good time was had by all.

Yesterday, the day after, was even finer. My wife and I stayed in the living room all day long reading, her in the chair, me on the couch. We listened to no radio, watched no television, read no blogs, did no posting. We did take a two-mile walk around 4 o'clock just to shake out the cobwebs but other than that it was a lazy, do-nothing day. Being a lazy do-nothing in general, I love those kind of days. Neither of us wanted to do anything more than read our books, her Laura Hillenbrand's brand new Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, me Paul Johnson's A History of Christianity, which I'm reading in conjunction with listening to The Teaching Company course, The Catholic Church: A History. Hillenbrand, who wrote the terrific Seabiscuit, apparently has another winner: my baby couldn't put it down, gobbling it up in a couple of days.

As for me, this particular autodidact is realizing that he has lots of gaps in his learning, among them Christian and Catholic Church history and theology, so I've set out to do something about it. I'll follow this Teaching Co. course with another that looks brilliant: History of Christian Theology. So far I'm enjoying both the book and course immensely. Paul Johnson has always been one of my favorite historians - I've read ten of his books - so picking his history in this case was an easy call. Besides, I purchased it years ago and it's been sitting downstairs on my bookshelf, patiently waiting to be picked up. Johnson is a master of synthesis, which one must be to condense 2000+ years of Christian history to a little over 500 pages. Each sentence in this book seems loaded with information, and Johnson can satisfactorily summarize the arguments about particular points of doctrine, many that went on for centuries, in a few succinct paragraphs. It does mean that one must read carefully, slowly, to catch everything Johnson is trying to convey.

I also knew I couldn't go wrong with Professor Cook, the instructor for the Teaching Co. course, having previously listened to his course on Dante and The Divine Comedy. He is unfailingly interesting. (As a sidebar my wife and I have also begun watching his DVD series on The Cathedral - ain't we cultured!)

But I am digressing from my main point: yesterday was a lovely day, spent in the company of my wife, a good book, and also, late in the evening, some good music. My eyes got heavy and I knew sleep would come soon if I continued to read so I closed the book and popped in my iPod earphones and listened to some Beethoven, Bruch, Bach, and Schubert. Then to bed. Today it's back to real life. Many of us are heading downtown to visit the World War II memorial and tonight we will gather for dinner to celebrate a birthday. Hope you're enjoying the holiday break as much as I am.

So I Was Rereading Kierkegaard...

“I suppose I read Aristotle in college but not to know I was doing it; the same with Plato. I don’t have the kind of mind that can carry such beyond the actual reading, i.e., total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me. So I couldn’t make any judgment on the Summa, except to say this: I read it for about twenty minutes every night before I go to bed. If my mother were to come in during the process and say, `Turn off that light. It’s late,’ I with lifted finger and broad bland beatific expression, would reply, `On the contrary, I answer that the light, being eternal and limitless, cannot be turned off. Shut your eyes,’ or some such thing."

-Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being

I read Ms. O'Connor's marvelous collection of letters years ago and you can find it on my bookshelves heavily highlighted with a yellow marker. Indeed, there is a terrific quote on every page. I did not remember this one, and that goes right to the heart of this post - like Ms. O'Connor, I don't remember much of what I read. Rather, the quote was called to my attention by Patrick Kurp over at Anecdotal Evidence - read his entire post. I got a kick out of the quote because it's the first time I've thought of my own aptitude of non-retention as a gift rather than a curse, something I should be glad of. Otherwise, we'd all end up being insufferable bores, quoting the Summa Theologica, right?

I read constantly: books, magazines, blogs, etc. And I read smart people, good writers, great polemicists, experts in their fields. For years I have thought that if I could only recall a tiny percentage of what I read I'd be able to hold my own in any conversation or argument, whether it be about politics, history, literature, movies, music. People would find me interesting. Problem is, I retain next to nothing. I feel really smart while I'm reading someone really smart. Two hours later I'm a dummy again. I've come to realize (actually I realized it long ago) that it's only through long and varied engagement with a subject that one can become conversant in it, can really know it.

Kurp also claims to be "blessedly unburdened by my education. The university was no more than an intellectual match-making service, an instrument of exposure – to writers and a large library that permitted me to read them."  This recalled for me a passage from Joseph Epstein from the chapter on higher education in his book Snobbery: The American Version: "Most people come away from college, happy souls, quite unscarred by what has gone on in the classroom. The education and culture they are presumably exposed to in college never lay a glove on them."

So I guess I do recall some things, but the point is, I had to look it up. Epstein's book is open on the table in front of me right now, and only because I'd read the passage recently and the book was still on the dining room table in the next room.  If I had to go downstairs and rummage through multiple Epstein books trying to find the exact quotation for this blog post, well, forget about it. I am far too lazy to be constantly looking things up in books just so you might find my post interesting.  And that's where the Internet comes into play, and Google. By recalling that someone said something interesting about a subject once, I can google it and come up with the quote in no time, then cut and paste it into my post. Reading the passage might remind me of something else that someone else once said. So I google that. And so on. Before you know it, I have a post put together that I'm satisified with and which a few people might find interesting. People might think I'm the intelligent one, whereas all the knowledge in this post comes from Mr. Kurp, a really smart man, Joseph Epstein, one of the finest minds of our time, and Flannery O'Connor, one of the best writers America has ever produced.

This post's title comes from Robert Greenberg in a lecture from his terrific Teaching Company course How to Listen to and Understand Great Music. During one of the digressions that are part of what makes him such an interesting instructor, Mr. Greenberg advises the listener that if they are ever confronted with a snob at a cocktail party, the way to impress them is to mention, not that you're reading Kierkegaard, but that you are rereading him, and to say it in the most pretentious voice possible.  Another possibility is to say, not that you were listening to Mozart's G Minor Symphony, but that you were listening to Mozart's Köchel 550, again in an preposterously highbrow voice. My wife and I still use that example whenever we run across a snob. It's great fun.

Of course, as Mr. Epstein argues, we all have varying degrees of snobbery in us.  So now, back to Kierkegaard....

What Makes a Genius?

The word is thrown around lightly these days, isn't it? Anyone who is good at something inevitably gets called a 'genius' by one of their fans or admirers at some point. My own view, expressed in this space previously, is that most of what rightly is characterized as 'genius' is actually God-given talent improved and mastered by hard-work,  extremely hard work. Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus had God-given talents which may be called genius, but they didn't just walk on the golf course and become the greatest golfers who ever lived. They worked hard, with focus and dedication, at their craft. Same goes for say, Dostoevsky or Flaubert, Dylan or Sinatra,  Hitchcock or Bergman, etc. The great ones must work for it, in all cases. Those with 'genius' become renowned as the finest in their fields; those without it but who put in the work are the decent middle-tier journeymen who make up the vast majority of all professions; those with it but who don't put in the work are the sad-luck stories of what might have been.

Terry Teachout's column this in the Wall Street Journal this morning is about Andrew Robinson's new book, Sudden Genius: The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs, which argues something similar to my point above. Hard work is necessary but their must be the spark of creative genius to begin with. Robinson and Teachout both reject the elitist notion that there is no such thing as genius. From Terry's column:

It's easy to see why the Ericsson-Gladwell view of genius as a form of skill-based expertise has become so popular, for it meshes neatly with today's egalitarian notions of human potential. Moreover, there is much evidence for the validity—up to a point—of the 10,000-hour rule. My own favorite example is that of Charlie Parker, the father of bebop. As a teenager, he embarrassed himself by sitting in at Kansas City jam sessions before he had fully mastered the alto saxophone, thereby acquiring a citywide reputation for incompetence. In 1937 the humiliation overwhelmed him, and he took a summer job at a Missouri resort and began practicing in earnest for the first time in his life. Eight years later, he had metamorphosed into the glittering virtuoso who teamed up with Dizzy Gillespie to record "Ko-Ko," "Groovin' High" and "Salt Peanuts," thereby writing himself into the history of jazz.

The problem with the 10,000-hour rule is that many of its most ardent proponents are political ideologues who see the existence of genius as an affront to their vision of human equality, and will do anything to explain it away. They have a lot of explaining to do, starting with the case of Mozart. As Mr. Robinson points out, Nannerl, Mozart's older sister, was a gifted pianist who received the same intensive training as her better-known brother, yet she failed to develop as a composer. What stopped her? The simplest explanation is also the most persuasive one: He had something to say and she didn't. Or, to put it even more bluntly, he was a genius and she wasn't.

Mozart is the person most often thought of when we argue genius due to his prodigious and obvious gifts as a child. Rightly so. I would point out though, that the vast majority of what we now listen to of Mozart is his later work as a mature composer: his operas, piano concerti, chamber works and major symphonies all come from the Vienna days when he was past the age of twenty-five. He had the genius to start with, without question, and he wrote some fine music when he was young. But he developed that genius through years of hard work and became arguably the greatest composer of them all. If Mozart had died at the age fifteen rather than thirty-five, he'd be a little known curiosity today.

Also in the journal today as part of their Five Best series is David Thomson's First-Rate Tales Of Making Movies, which lists Pauline Kael's "The Citizen Kane Book" as one of those tales. I think he gets Kael and her intentions wrong though:

It's clear in "The Citizen Kane Book" that Pauline Kael meant to put the knife into Orson Welles and deflate what she regarded as an overrated film. So she set out to show how screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz had been cheated of proper praise and credit. Kael printed a draft script and the movie's final cutting-continuity instructions—both revelatory of Mankiewicz's vital role in forming the movie—along with an extended essay on the importance of smart, cynical writers in the 1930s and on the jazzy élan of America's best talking pictures. The book is unfair but riveting, and it had the effect of drawing attention to the uncanny genius of Welles and his movie, helping to establish it as the all-time champion in critics' polls. Scripts don't often read well, but "Citizen Kane" is an exception. The book, in addition to showing us how unkind Kael could be in her exhilaration, was the closest she came to publishing a full-length study, as opposed to her collected reviews.

I've read "The Citizen Kane Book" many times, and as recently as a few months ago, and I've never gotten the feeling that Kael was trying to 'put the knife into Orson Welles and deflate what she regarded as an overrated film." On the contrary, she acknowledges the films greatness, and Welles'. Her point, it seems to me, is to undo an historical inaccuracy which gave Welles full-credit for the movie at the expense of Mankiewicz and others. If she's trying to deflate anything it is not the movie itself, but rather some of the overblown reverence for the movie that cites it as a masterpiece that transcends film itself. Rather, she was trying to fit it into its proper place in film history, at the pinnacle of the great screwball and newspaper traditions of the thirties. If she slights Welles at all, it's in not spending enough time on the story-telling and camera techniques that were new in "Citizen Kane."  Thomson even admits that Kael's essay, "had the effect of drawing attention to the uncanny genius of Welles and his movie." How one draws attention to someone's uncanny genius while at the same time taking a knife to him is a mighty feat indeed, one I'm not sure even the brilliant Ms. Kael was capable of. And that Welles was some sort of genius is pretty much a given these days (for a delightful take on his genius rent the movie Me and Orson Welles, a fictional account of the making of Welles' historic Broadway production of "Julius Caesar") it does us no good to simply bow down to that genius and not look further into the man. It's too long to excerpt here but reading the final pages of Kael's essay finds her defending Welles from his undeserved reputation as a failure, as "the man who let everyone down":

He has lived all his life in a cloud of failure because he hasn't lived up to what was unrealistically expected of him. No one has ever been able to do what was expected of Welles - to create a new radical theatre and to make one movie masterpiece after another - but Welles' "figurehead" publicity had snowballed to the point where all his actual and considerable achievements looked puny compare to what his destiny was supposed to be. In a less confused world, his glory would be greater than his guilt.

Sounds more like an attempt at rehabilitation than deflation.

Was Leviathan Government Inevitable?

I'm reading a splendid book right now, Daniel Walker Howe's "What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848".

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The book, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2007, is part of The Oxford History of The United States series. I've also read the Oxford books which, chronologically, precede and follow it, Gordon Wood's Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 and James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. All are terrific.

I blogged about the Wood book here, in part regarding the irony that Hamilton's economic program during the republic's early years was so successful it made him and his class obsolete, and led to the demise of the Federalist party and their attitudes. The idea that there was a natural aristocracy whose privilege it should be to govern the masses was replaced by ideas of the thousands of successful new men ("middling sorts") that Hamiltonianism produced. These new men believed they had as much right to govern as the self-appointed elite, even more given they could better understand the common man's interests. I pointed out that:

The irony that it was Hamilton’s economic programs that gave rise to the men who would replace him and his class would not be lost on Hamilton.  After Jefferson’s election in 1800 he knew his time was through and he feared that everything he and the other revolutionaries had fought for had been subverted: “This American world was not meant for me.”

I went on further to discuss the age-old question regarding which viewpoint prevailed in the long run, the Hamiltonian or the Jeffersonian view. I declared my belief that we live in a Hamiltonian world but that Jefferson had won the argument, i.e. that granting the kind of power to the federal government that Hamilton wished, and got, would lead to the very type of coercive government that we now live under. Today's gargantuan government is the logical end-point of unchecked Hamiltonianism.

But Jefferson's Republican Party was complicit, as Howe points out in his book. Had Hamilton lived a few decades longer he may have been achieved some sort of satisfaction knowing that the Republicans who fought so vehemently against his programs would come to adopt many of them themselves. During his presidency, Madison, backed by Jefferson, proposed a Second Bank of The United States; the running of a national debt in order to finance constitutionally-questionable national infrastructure; and protective tariffs; three of the most bitterly disputed issues of Hamilton's economic program in the early days of the republic. What the Republicans had argued then as immoral and unconstitutional became part of their own agenda. While Howe points out that the Republicans had quite different reasons than the early Federalists in adopting these views, what struck me was how easily politicians shed their prior moral and intellectual objections once it became politically expedient for them. You can't change the spots on a leopard.

Which leads one to the conclusion that where we are now was probably inevitable. Given a country the size and complexity of the United States, with all its regionalism and diversity of color, religion, and attitude, it may matter little who won the initial republican arguments or small vs. large federal government, weak vs. strong states rights. Right off the bat the federal government held the upper hand and, given the nature of men and politicians, it was only a matter of time before leviathan appeared on the scene. The wonder may be that we held out so long.

What You're Doing

I listened to The Beatles during my workout the past two mornings, something I hadn't done in quite some time, perhaps six months.  That may seem a short time to some but it may be a record for me - I grew up on The Beatles and for the first twenty years plus of my music-listening life I listened to them more than anyone else, rarely going a more than a few days or a week without putting them on the stereo.  Dylan took over in the-most-listened-to category for awhile and then (and still) Van Morrison but I have always gone back to them often and with pleasure.  I can report back the answer to the question "Can you still love the music you listened to as a child nearly fifty years later?" is yes, definitely, so long as it's The Beatles.   It's not just nostalgia.  They were great.  Great singers (John Lennon in his prime, circa 1963-1965, was the greatest rock and roll singer of them all) and great songwriters, they did nearly nothing that was worthless, little that was banal or ordinary.  They were consistently great, from 1962 until they disbanded (though their final single, "The Long and Winding Road" was perhaps evidence that their time was up - it may be their only really boring song.)

You can blame Lennon and McCartney for my insistence that a great song must have a great melody for that is what stands out about The Beatles' songs to me now: they were master melodists.  Of course Lennon and McCartney wrote the bulk, and the greatest, of the songs, but George Harrison had nothing to hang his head about.  All told, their list of great songs seems never-ending (I've got 77 Beatles songs on my iPod though I could easily have 177) and are too numerous to mention.  I don't really have to, do I?  Unless you grew up in a cave far from civilazation you must know some of them.  Add to their perfect melodic touch the great vocals, the soaring harmonies, George Martin's productions, and Ringo's perfect drums, and you dozens and dozens of little gems.  They were indeed the greatest rock and roll band of them all.  They were worth listening to in 1964 when I first heard them as a six year old boy, and they are worth listening to now as I approach old age.  I don't expect that will ever change.

I just mentioned Ringo's drums.  Please don't tell me Ringo Starr was not a great drummer, as many sophisticates like to do.  Sure, he wasn't as technically adept as Charlie Watts let alone Keith Moon but he was the perfect drummer for The Beatles.  The simple technique, the steady beat, the ability to stay out of the way of the vocals, his fill-in riffs (listen to the drums on "Ticket to Ride", perhaps his finest moment) - he was as much a part of the team as the others.  And that was the key.  For a few years these supremely talented men were put their egos aside for the good of the music.  As has often been said, they melded perfectly together to become more than the sum of their parts.  They were the perfect musical collaboration.   It couldn't last and it was perhaps inevitable that it would all come to a bad ending, full of accusations and recriminations.  But while it lasted, boy were they something.  The music still fills me with something akin to glee.

The bitter end is chronicled in this recent book, Peter Doggett's "You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup", which I've heard good things about.  Click on the book's cover to get to the Amazon page.

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And finally, for your listening pleasure, one of my favorites, and the title of this post.  Ringo's drums are great here too.  I'm also using it as my song of the day.  Enjoy:

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“This passage had been stolen from Mozart”

I’m currently reading a wonderful book, Lewis Lockwood’s Beethoven: The Music and the Life.  While he gives the reader a short biographical sketch of Beethoven’s life and times, Lockwood concentrates primarily on the music, analyzing nearly every work Beethoven produced.   For the major works these analysis’ can be four, five, six pages or more.  Lockwood’s great gift is the ability to explain these mostly instrumental works in language the general reader can understand and appreciate.  His analysis always adds to one’s listening pleasure, even with works I’ve been listening to for years and know by heart.  After reading Lockwood, one approaches the piece with a fresh ears and a new perspective.

Of course, it’s taking me forever to get through the book.  Once Lockwood starts discussion of a work it does not do to simply continue reading.  I have to listen to the work, often twice, once while reading Lockwood’s analysis, the second time without.  Yesterday, for instance, I read Lockwood’s takes on the 4th, 6th, and 8th symphonies, works I am not as familiar with as the 3rd, 5th, and 7th.  I then listened to each while reading Lockwood’s breakdown of each.  I then re-listened to the 4th and 6th, before I’d had enough music for the day.  Three hours later and I had covered about twelve pages.  At this rate, I’ll finish the book by June.

Which is fine.  I am enjoying my foray into classical music immensely.  I love this stuff.  My goal at the start of the year was to learn, really learn, one new piece of classical music per week.  I shortly thereafter modified the goal to learn 50 new works this year, as I could not listen to simply a single piece of music during a week.  I’m mixing it up, listening to what I want when I want.  I may listen to fifteen or twenty works in a given week.  Eventually, I’ll winnow down what I like the most, re-listening over and over until I’ve got it down, and the work will be added to my list of favorites, i.e. it will become part of my life, a piece of music I’ll listen to for the rest of my days.

One of the most interesting parts of Lockwood’s analysis is when he explains devices Beethoven used that had been used earlier by other composers, usually Mozart and Haydn, who both had great influence over Beethoven’s development (Haydn was actually Beethoven’s teacher in 1792, though it was a disappointing relationship for them both.)  That Mozart and Haydn influenced each other is without doubt.  Though Haydn was 24 years senior to Mozart, they became great friends and admirers once Mozart arrived in Vienna at the age of 25 in 1781.  It can be argued that Mozart, child prodigy that he was, did not become a truly great composer until he came under the influence of Haydn.  Almost all of the works considered Mozart’s greatest came after he arrived in Vienna and his friendship with Haydn.  Was Haydn the deciding factor in Mozart’s musical maturity?  It can also be argued that Haydn, prolific as he had been for the previous twenty years, did not achieve his full greatness until his association with Mozart - Haydn’s most admired works were written during the 1780s and 1790s, when he was in his fifties and sixties.  Like Bird and Magic, and Evert and Navratilova, they pushed each other to greater and greater heights, heights they never would have achieved otherwise, and in the process they defined the classical style.  When we talk about the “classical style” we are really talking about the music of Haydn and Mozart and what they achieved: the development of the symphony, the concerto, and the string quartet; the organization of the orchestra; the sonata allegro form, especially, but also the formalization of minuet and trio, rondo, and theme and variations.  But we mean something more when we invoke the term “classical style” than simply form and structure.  It has to do with order, rationality, taste, and a particular emotional restraint, i.e. Enlightenment ideals brought to the musical world.  Haydn and Mozart were children of the Enlightenment and their music reflects those ideals.

So here is my question, the one this blog post was originally supposed to be about.  Mozart died at the age of 35 in 1791.  Beethoven arrived in Vienna as a 21 year old a year later, brimming with talent and ideas.  Had Mozart lived until the age of 70, he would have died in 1826, a year before Beethoven.  If this were the case, how would Mozart’s music have been affected by Beethoven’s?  The title of this blog post comes from an early score of Beethoven’s in which he wrote, “This entire passage has been stolen from the Mozart Symphony in C.”  Can we conceive of a time in our hypothetical world when a fifty-some year old Mozart would have written on one of his own scores, “This passage has been stolen from Beethoven”?

Certainly Mozart, genius that he was, would have recognized Beethoven’s own genius.  But would have have approved of Beethoven’s music?  Would he have been dismayed at the direction Beethoven took the music and the forms that Mozart helped to create?  Beethoven, after all, was not a child of the Enlightenment.  That world was dying fast during his adolescence.  The French Revolution would put a nail in its coffin, and Napoleon would shovel the dirt on top of it.  Beethoven was a man born of the heroic age, a great admirer of Napoleon (until he declared himself emperor) and of himself.  Indeed, Beethoven thought of himself and his music as heroic, an opinion that likely would have baffled Haydn and Mozart.  Certainly Beethoven used the forms and structures defined by his predecessors, but he used them for his own expressive purposes, playing with them here, distorting them until they were almost unrecognizable there.  But what is more is the emotional extremes that is often present in Beethoven’s music.  What would Mozart have thought?

On page 170 of his book, Lockwood excerpts this from a letter Mozart wrote to his father in 1781:

[P]assions, violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of disgust, and music must never offend the ear, even in the most horrendous situations, but must always be pleasing…in other words, always remain music.

Lockwood then goes on to explain:

Clearly enough [Mozart’s] music, in all its facility, formal perfection, and wide range of expression, conveys the sense that its emotional life is contained within well-defined boundaries.  Raising the notion of emotional moderation, balance, and restraint to the level of an aesthetic category, we can argue that it is a primary factor in Mozart’s aesthetic philosophy.

There, in a nutshell, is the essence of the classical style.  Many considered Beethoven’s music vulgar.  Would Mozart have? Would he have rebelled?  Or adapted?  Would the man with such a philosophy as described above accept Beethoven’s innovations and extremes?

I say, yes.  Mozart was no dogmatist.  He was always open to new ideas, or old ones (Mozart was greatly influenced by Bach, declaring upon hearing a Bach motet during a visit to Leipzig in 1789, “This is something to learn from!”) He took the style of his day and transformed it, perfected it, made it more beautiful.  He also was an innovator in his own right, particularly with his operas and piano concertos, where he more or less defined double-exposition form.  And, as the quote about Bach above shows, Mozart was always ready to learn.  Within months of Haydn’s groundbreaking Op. 33 string quartets, Mozart had produced his own batch of six quartets in the same style, dedicating them to Haydn (the six “Haydn Quartets”).  He had an ear for greatness and he no doubt would have recognized Beethoven’s greatness.  He would have learned from Beethoven and used Beethoven’s own innovations for his own purposes.  As for emotional expressiveness, Mozart did after all compose both the G Minor symphony and the D Minor piano concerto.  While most of us think of lightness and beauty when regarding Mozart’s music, he was not afraid to express emotional turmoil in his music.  So my own answer to the question of whether Mozart would have been influenced by Beethoven is an emphatic yes, making Mozart’s early death even more sorrowful.  Below, in two parts, is the first movement of the D Minor piano concerto, perhaps Mozart’s most passionate work in a minor key, and a perfect example of his ability to adhere to structural form while expressing emotional turmoil.  The wonder of Mozart is that is remains perfectly beautiful at the same time:

What’s Up?

Long time no see.  I’ve been around, and engaged, but the blogging bug seems to be just a flicker nowadays.  Part of it was the Christmas vacation.  I was off work for seventeen straight days and never once felt like blogging.  I was busy doing other things: spending time with family, listening to music, and watching movies - I must have watched 20+ movies during the month of December.  Also, I read no books during the vacation (!) a period when I usually go through three or four.

So what’s up?  Well, most importantly, it appears that Barack Obama is now a spent political force.  The man who a year ago was hailed as The Messiah, “a sort of God,” “the word made flesh,” and who had commanding majorities in both houses of Congress now has little political influence.  He over-read his mandate and overreached and now his agenda is toxic not only to a majority of voters but also to many in his own party.  Dick Morris said the other day that Obama will never get another major piece of legislation passed and I agree with that with a modification: he’ll never get a major piece of left-wing legislation passed.  Obama can still survive politically but only if he moves to the center.  The problem is he may not be capable or interested in doing so – the man appears to have too much ego to compromise with the other side, and he is too true believer, too much a dyed-in-the-wool leftist.  His answers during a town hall appearance in Ohio the other day seem to confirm that the election of Scott Brown (and Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie) taught him nothing.  He still seems to think he can continue on the path he and his advisors set out on a year ago.  That’s what happens when you live in an echo chamber filled with yes-men and sycophants - it becomes harder to get a grasp on reality.  But the reality is that the liberal dream is over.  Thank God (and Scott Brown) for that.

Enough politics.  One of the movies we watched recently was Julie and Julia, which tells the stories of Julia Child’s beginnings as a chef in France, and Julie Powell’s attempt to cook (and blog about) each recipe in Ms. Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a single year.  The movie was so-so.  But it gave me an idea, which I mentioned back in a December post: to learn one new piece of classical music per week.  (As I’ve mentioned before, I have trouble using the term “classical music” because “classical” actually refers to a period of concert music, the period roughly between Bach’s death in 1750 and Beethoven’s Third Symphony in 1805, the period dominated by Haydn and Mozart.  But since most people understand the term as meaning a certain type of orchestral music no matter when it was written, I’ll use it here in that context.)  And how am I doing with my plan?  I’m pleased to say so far, so good.  At this point I can say I’m familiar with the following new music:

Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto In E Minor, Op. 64

Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night's Dream Overture

Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture

Mendelssohn’s String Octet In E Flat, Op. 20

Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto In A, K 622

Schubert’s String Quartet No.13 in A, D. 804

Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 in d, D. 810, “Death and the Maiden”

Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto In D, Op. 35

Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto #1 In B Flat Minor, Op. 23

Bruch’s Violin Concerto #1 In G Minor, Op. 26

Elgar’s Cello Concerto In E Minor, Op. 85

I realized early on that I couldn’t simply listen to one piece of music per week, then only listen to another piece the next week, and so on.  I had to mix them up, listening to what I felt like listening to at the time.  So my plan has changed to learning 50 new pieces of classical music during the coming year.  And what do I mean by learn?  Well, to recognize it immediately upon hearing it is one yard stick, but more than that I want to really know the music as I know, for instance, much of Beethoven or Bach’s music.  I want to know what form the music is in: for example, if the first movement of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto is in sonata form (which it is) I want to know when we are in the exposition, when we move on to the development section, when the 6/4 chord is coming to introduce the cadenza, when we move on to the recapitulation, etc.  Similarly, I want to recognize if a movement is a Theme and Variations, a Rondo, a Minuet, a Scherzo, etc.  Now this is fairly simple with Haydn or Mozart because they developed and perfected these forms during the classical era and they held to them fairly strictly.  Beethoven, of course, exploded all that, using the forms in a much looser manner, expanding and altering them for his own expressive needs.  Beethoven freed composers from the strict adherence to these forms forever, so much so that, post-Beethoven, it was considered lacking in imagination if one were to simply state one’s themes, develop them, restate them, put a coda on the end, and be done with it.  Composers during the romantic era which Beethoven initiated were compelled to use these forms in new and original ways in order to express their own personal visions.  Now, this was both good and bad in terms of the music being produced, a subject which I’ll take up another time.  But in terms of learning new music it almost always makes it harder to know where you’re at in a piece.  Another thing that makes it harder is to listen to a music by a composer who lacks the melodic gift.  If the stated themes are not instantly memorable melodies it again makes it harder to follow a piece.  Now with some of the music I’m listening to right now this is not a problem as Mendelssohn, Schubert, and Tchaikovsky may be the three most talented writer’s of melody of the nineteenth century.  With someone like Rachmaninov, whose much-loved Piano Concerto #2 I’m trying to learn, it is much more difficult because often, as lovely as it is, the music sounds like one long development section: much instability and dissonance, few closed cadences among the melodic lines.  I have a feeling that with much late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century music I’ll be simply sitting back and enjoying what I can but not really understanding it much.

Once the Christmas vacation ended and I got back to the normal rhythms of life the urge to read returned.  In keeping with my 2010 musical plan, I first read The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece, by Eric Siblin, which received rave reviews over at Amazon.  Unfortunately, while Bach’s Cello Suites are sublime, this book is not.  It’s not a bad book by any means and I’m glad I read it.  It tells the life stories of Bach and Casals in relation to the cello suites, along with the story of the authors discovery of the suites and subsequent research into them.  There are six suites each made up of six movements so Siblin structured his book into six parts of six chapters, each with the title of a suite and a movement, an overly cute device in my book.  As for the subject matter, it was interesting up to a point but since I knew the main facts of Bach’s life there was little new there for me.  I knew nothing of Casals so almost all of his story was new to me.  But while I get the fact that Casals was responsible for (re)introducing the forgotten Cello Suites to the public during the early twentieth century it seemed to me that for much of the book that the author was straining to link Bach, Casals, and himself to the suites.  Bach’s catalog runs over 1000 pieces, and while the suites are wonderful so too is nearly all of what Bach wrote.  He seems to have penned them and never given them a second thought.  Casals is rightly associated with the suites but he also covered nearly every important piece of cello music in the repertoire; his life was not all about the cello suites though at times the author makes it seem that way.  In a way the part of the book I enjoyed most was Siblin’s own efforts to learn about the suites.  His story of a lover of rock and roll music (he’d been rock critic prior to writing this book) who became disillusioned with it and went off searching for something else is one I can understand.  I’ve been there.  That we both ended up at Bach and classical music was the original reason I picked up the book.  Again, it’s not a bad book.  There’s no crime in concentrating only on the cello suites. I simply felt the cello suites hook was overstated.  If you find the subject matter interesting at all you you’ll probably enjoy this book.

I am now on the a book that I am reveling in, Beethoven: The Music and the Life, by Lewis Lockwood.  Lockwood seems to have solved the problem of how to write about instrumental music.  His descriptions of Beethoven’s music are wonderfully descriptive and a real asset to learning and understanding Beethoven’s music.  I’m only 100+ pages into it but I’m loving it.  And now I’m going to get back to it.

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong

A few years ago I received a Louis Armstrong CD for Christmas from a family member who knew of my appreciation of the great man’s music.  Unfortunately, to my mind at the time, it was a later CD, a collection of his songs with the All-Stars, the small combo band he formed in 1947 and continued performing with right up until his death in 1971.  I had listened to little of Satchmo’s music from this period because I had the same opinion of it that many jazz fans had, i.e., that it was the music of a man who had stopped taking chances long before, that compared with the blazing hot music of his early career it was not worth listening to.  Might as well just put on “Potato Head Blues,” or “Muggles,” or “Mahogany Hall Stomp” or any of the dozens of songs he recorded back in the twenties and thirties and listen to them again. 

A few days after that Christmas, while my wife and I were taking down the decorations, I put the CD on and was more than pleasantly surprised.  It is terrific.  While the music on the CD is certainly not comparable to the music of his early years, it wasn’t trying to be.  It was something else entirely: the music of an old pro, smooth, self-assured, and highly entertaining.  It has few of the exhilarating moments of the early stuff but, again, that was not the point of this music.  This is music for the masses, pure entertainment, and it succeeds on that level.  It’s fun!  While snobs and jazz aficionados can and often have called it the music of a sell-out, they missed out on some terrific entertainment in their insistence that Armstrong had to push at the boundaries each time he picked up his trumpet.  The opinion-makers of Armstrong’s time damned him because he wouldn’t produce another “West End Blues,” and unfortunately, it was the view of these high-brows that came to prevail.  In a nutshell, the opinion of Louis Armstrong for many years before and after his death was that he had sold out in order to please white audiences, that he valued fame and popularity more than his music.

There is much to Terry Teachout’s terrific biography of Armstrong, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, but if there is a main point it is to shatter this opinion.  Teachout, who was a jazz musician himself before becoming a full-time writer and critic, shares in the enthusiasm of Armstrong early, ground-breaking work – his analysis of this early work is alone worth the price of the book - but he also builds an impressive case for the worth of Armstrong’s later music.  It’s definitely not a hagiography.  Teachout, who I consider the finest critic in America today, is intimately familiar with Armstrong’s music.  He knows when Armstrong was mailing it in or settling for less than he should have, and he has no qualms about pointing these moments out.  But he takes the music of Armstrong’s career for what it was and he is marvelous at pointing us to the highlights of his career, including what was worthwhile in his later work.  I’m not going to go into it any more than this but I’ll simply say if you love Satchmo then you need to read this book.  You’ll end up with a better understanding of the man and who he was, the man in full.  What’s more, Teachout doesn’t criticize Armstrong for not being the man many of his contemporaries wanted him to be. 

Teachout also points out something important: From the early 1930’s onward, Armstrong probably could not have duplicated his earlier technique due to the lip problems he began experiencing around that time.  His embouchure – the technique of shaping the lips to the mouthpiece of his horn - was flawed from the beginning and it was hard on his lips.  As a result his lip began to break down around this time, often rupturing in the middle of a performance, and he’d have problems with it on and off for the rest of his life.  He had to alter the way he played, if he wanted to play at all.  And he had to play.  Armstrong made it clear to everyone who knew him, including his four wives, that his horn came first.  It was his reason for being.  He would spend over fifty years, from the time he was fourteen years old until he was in his late-sixties, on the road, playing his horn.  If he took a  break, even late in life due to doctor’s orders, he would soon become restless, summon his band, and hit the road again. 

Well, who else does this remind you of?  Earlier this year in this space, I made the case that there are four musicians who could make the claim of being the “Greatest American Musician.”  Armstrong was one of them, along with Dylan, Presley, and Sinatra, take your pick.  All four of these men were (in the case of Bob Dylan, still are) obsessed with their craft.  After the prime of their careers, they all continued on, making records surely, but for the most part on the road, playing before adoring audiences.  To a man, they toured constantly.  They’ve all been accused of selling out (in the case of Armstrong, Dylan and Elvis) or continuing on long past the time when they should have hung it up (Sinatra.)  But none of them cared.  They were music men.  They all lived to play, to share their special talent with those who appreciated it.  They’ve all been condemned by the know-it-alls for these so-called failings.

But consider the following. 

If [Armstrong’s] new style was less spectacular, it was also purer, shorn of the excesses that had obscured the lyricism at the heart of his artistry.  To some extent this purity may have been imposed by the cumulative effects of the string of split lips that he suffered in the early thirties, but if that was the case, it would not have been the first time that a great artist has been freed to follow his inner impulse by technical limitations arising from physical decline.

Long before Teachout gets to this passage on page 217 I had been thinking about the parallels between Armstrong’s split lip and Sinatra’s vocal cord hemorrhage in 1950.  Sinatra had been a smash with the kids during the war, dubbed “The Voice”, a classic crooner in the style of Bing Crosby.  He had numerous number one hits for Columbia records during the forties but by 1950 his popularity was waning and he hadn’t had a number one hit for a few years.  He was also unhappy with the direction Columbia was taking when it hired the hokey Mitch Miller as its musical director.  Then came the vocal cord injury and he emerged from the incident a changed singer, perhaps even a changed man, one who was intent on becoming more than a pop star.  He left Columbia records and signed with Capitol and the rest is history.  His voice was now deeper, and he could no longer croon.  Instead, he invented a new style of singing: conversational, personal, less directly emotional, but more affecting.  There was a distance now between Sinatra and the song he was singing and that distance allowed the listener in; there was room for us to imagine ourselves in the song.  This was the key to his success, to his art.  (To illustrate this point, listen to Sinatra sing “I’m A Fool To Want You” during his Columbia days here, and then listen to his later, more mature, more controlled version of it here.)  He was no longer a pop star, he was an artist, the man who created the music in which we saw ourselves.  As with Armstrong, circumstances other than his physical injury had something to do with Sinatra’s new style but it certainly played a role.  What emerged, as Teachout says of Armstrong, was something purer and more profound.  For years afterward Sinatra was creating something new each time he entered the studio, and he knew it. 

I could make the case that Bob Dylan emerged from his motorcycle accident in 1966 a changed man but it’s a case that’s been made many time before and is hard not to see. The difference between the pre-accident Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde and the post-accident The Basement Tapes and John Wesley Harding is profound.  You may prefer the earlier work but it was Dylan’s retreat to his roots in the latter records that set the stage for the rest of his career.  Blood on the Tracks, Empire Burlesque, Good As I Been To You, and all of the records that he’s produced in the last dozen or so years during his re-emergence have much more in common with the records he produced just after the accident than those just before it. 

Read Teachout’s book.  It is marvelous, his best book yet.  I concentrated on a particular thread that happened to interest me but there is so much more to it.  

Point of No Return

John P. Marquand, once among the most popular novelists in America, is now virtually unknown.  Reading Point of No Return, his novel of middle-to-upper class manners in a small New England town, it’s hard to see why.  The high-brow critics of his era never had any use for him but the public adored him.  He won a Pulitzer Prize and many of his books were Book of the Month Club selections.  Nearly all his novels published after 1937’s The Late George Apley were best-sellers.  And now he’s virtually unread.  Why?

I have a guess as to why, though I welcome other’s ideas.  There was once a time in America when there was a ruling middlebrow culture.  During the twenty year period after WWII, the exploding demographic of young suburban businessmen and their wives saw themselves as the future.  They’d fought in the war, they’d triumphed, and they regarded economic success and personal satisfaction as their reward.  They were almost exclusively white and middle-to-upper class and they were centered in the Northeastern part of the country.  The men went to work and the women stayed home and raised the children.  Unlike their parents, they had money left over after the bills were paid and this afforded them leisure time to explore cultural activities.  They played golf, they belonged to the country club and they summered at the shore.  They listened to the same songs, went to the same movies, and read the same books.  And what were these songs, movies, and books about?  Why, themselves, of course.  If there was ever a monolithic cultural consensus in America, it was perhaps reflected in this late-1940’s to early-1960’s generation. Call it the Mad Men culture.  Marquand might be the post-child of this middlebrow culture for no one reflected it, for better or worse, than he did, and everyone seemed to realize it at the time.  Perhaps he has fallen out of favor because his subjects, like John Cheever, are so identified with this particular cultural consensus, one that is long-gone and repudiated.  This is my guess as to why Marquand has virtually disappeared.  If his subjects were a reflection of the people and attitudes of a bygone era, what could he possibly have to say to us now?   

Well, the answer is, plenty.  I was a bit dismayed when I first picked up Point of No Return and found it was 550+ pages.  Who wants to read a novel of that length about the intricate class structure of pre-war WASP society?  I immediately formed a prejudice against it and assumed it would be better if it were shorter.  The thought occurred to me that maybe this was the root of Marquand’s problems with the critics, that perhaps he was nothing more than a over-blown dramatist who heaped detail upon detail, who explained every nuance, until there was nothing left to to the reader’s imagination.  But this is not the case, not even close.  Marquand is certainly no minimalist and his exploration of pre-war WASP society is detailed and meticulous but what makes it work is that it is so true to life.  There are no false notes here, nothing that seems even remotely out of place.  You always feel like you’re reading something by someone who fully understands his characters and the situations he places them in.  The book’s length turns out to be one of its strengths because the story is told at a leisurely pace which allows the reader to clearly understand the everyday rhythms of life in Clyde, Massachusetts (a stand-in for Marquand’s hometown of Newburyport, MA.)  Another of the book’s strengths is Marquand’s steady and competent prose. He has little of the charm or style a greater writer might bring to their work but, again, this is a good thing.  A more stylistic account would take away from the verisimilitude Marquand achieves. 

The story is about the life of Charles Gray, circa 1947, who is married with two children and works as an investment banker at the Stuyvesant Bank in New York City.  Charles is being considered for a vice-presidency at the bank, a position he and his wife Nancy want very much.  One day he awakes and finds his thoughts on his boyhood home of Clyde, Massachusetts, a place he hasn’t seen in nearly two decades and one he thinks about rarely.  By what perhaps is a coincidence he is asked to go back to Clyde to do some research on a business the bank is thinking of investing in.  At this point Marquand begins to tell the story of Charles’ time in Clyde through a series of flashbacks in which we trace his boyhood through adolescence and early manhood.  One of the main plots in the book has to do with Charles’ father John, a charming, likeable, rogue of a man who has little care for convention, a liability in a town as class-oriented as Clyde.  Marquand contrasts the steady and reliable Charles with his charming but reckless father.  We see early on that Charles is the antithesis of his father, purposefully.  Charles understands early in life that John Gray, for all his good-natured likeability, is a careless and foolhardy man, a man who will inevitably hurt those who love him most.  I am not saying I identify with Charles but one of Marquand’s skills is to show us glimpses of ourselves in his characters.  While arguing with his father about his reckless investments, which threaten the entire family, John insists to Charles that he’ll be careful, which Charles knows from experience is a lie: 

When it came to money, everyone always promised to be careful.  In fact, it often seemed to Charles that most of his subsequent life had been spent in a series of timid, hedging precautions, in balancing probable gains and losses in order to keep sums of money intact.  The probity, the reliability and the sobriety that such a task demanded were to make his own life dull and careful.  Except for a few brief moments, he was to face no danger or uncalculated risk.  He was to measure his merriment and hedge on his tragedies.  He was to water down elation and mitigate disaster, and to be at the right place at the right time, and to say the right thing with the right emphasis.  Yet, whenever he thought of himself as a dull, deluded opportunist, compared with other people, he always remembered the intensity of his own feelings when his father had been speaking.  There had been a hideous sense of impending disaster, and no possible way to stop it.   

Who among us has not had such thoughts about themselves?  I certainly have about my own self, along with the same self-justifying rationalization that Charles has.  Point of No Return is full of such glimpses into the human condition.  We get it (spoiler alerts!!) when Charles, deeply in love with a young lady who, according to Clyde’s intricate class distinctions, is out of his league, convinces himself that everything will turn out fine.  His love blinds him to the fact that it could never turn out fine and the reader sees this long before Charles does.  The girl is too weak, too much a part of Clyde, to ever go against her father’s wishes.  When she finally breaks it off with Charles and lies crumpled at her father’s feet in front of him, the father and daughter are so pathetic we breathe a sigh of relief for Charles – he can get away clean from this situation. From that point it was clear (at least it was to me) that Charles’ personal relationship worked out for the best.  Nancy, who would become his wife, is a much more admirable character than the weak, tradition-bound Jessica.  Nancy has the traits – good-nature, a sense of humor, compassion and understanding, no illusions, no nonsense - most of us would want in a wife.  For those of us long married, we get another glimpse into ourselves in the relationship between Charles and Nancy, in particular the easy comfort which comes from knowing someone so well so long, when you know each other’s thoughts so well that words are often not necessary for communication.  We also get a glimpse of reality in the book’s final pages when Charles, having gotten the vice-presidency he so desperately wanted, finds no joy or satisfaction in it.  His climb up the corporate ladder will afford him and his family a bigger house in a better neighborhood, perhaps membership in a more upscale country club, perhaps a new sailboat, but that is all.  It will not buy happiness, which will still be elusive. His doubts and discontents will still remain.  Charles Gray is one of the most fully-realized characters I’ve even encountered in a novel because Marquand has made him fully human.  He’s everyman, which is another way of saying he’s you and me.

Read Marquand if you love a story in which you get such glimpses into yourself.  When my wife noticed how wrapped up I was in the book she asked me what it was about.  Not wanting to stop reading to explain the whole plot, I shrugged and simply said, “It’s about life.”  

Empire of Liberty

I’m not sure how Gordon Wood’s Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 could be any better.  It may seem strange to call a 750 page history a page-turner but it is.  I couldn’t put the thing down.  One is always worried when picking up a history of this length that you’ll be confronted with turgid, clunky prose and pedestrian insights, that you’ll have to slog through the thing for weeks to get through it, if you finish at all.  That is most definitely not the case here.  Wood’s flowing, lucid, prose-style is wonderful.  He is also a masterful story-teller, his insights are fresh and fully-reasoned, and he untangles the sometimes contradictory threads of the founding era and weaves them into a comprehensible and satisfying whole.  It’s as easy to read as a good novel and just as interesting.  The book is a triumph of the historian’s craft.

Having spent a lifetime immersed in research of the founding era, Wood has no problem seeing the men responsible for our beginnings as men, not icons.  There is no hero worship here.  Wood fully represents the greatness and the genius of the founding generation that we revere today but he also shows us their flaws, their ambition, and their motivations, which were at times base. We get a full sense from Wood of the men and their era. 

Washington’s importance as the indispensable founder is recognized, though not dwelled upon.  Wood points out that while his two terms as president were important to the stability of the infant nation, in the long run his most important act was stepping away from the presidency.  Just as when he laid down his sword after the war when he could easily have become a dictator, his retirement from the office of the presidency which he could have held for life exemplified the Roman ideal of servant government and established the precedent of the peaceful transfer of power.  By these two acts, Washington became a hero of republican liberty all over the world. 

Madison gets his due, which pleased me.  Many don’t realize how important Mr. Madison was to the founding moment but we see it clearly in Woods’ account.  Even more important was Alexander Hamilton, whose economic program allowed for the stability and remarkable growth of the early republic.  He may have been the most intelligent of the founders but he was also the most reviled.  Jefferson, who could hate with the best of them, never hated anyone more than Alexander Hamilton.  Even Adams, a fellow Federalist, despised Hamilton, calling him “the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar.”  It had always puzzled me that Madison had split so clearly with Hamilton during the first Washington administration. The two had been allies during the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and ratification period of 1788-89, collaborating on the Federalist Papers in support of the new constitution.  But within months of Washington taking office with Hamilton as his Treasure secretary, Madison became the leader of the opposition.  I’d always attributed this to Jefferson inordinate influence over Madison.  Jefferson had been abroad in France during the Convention period so Madison was free of his influence.  Upon Jefferson return to serve as Washington’s Secretary of State, he and Madison resumed their close friendship.  And I’d been of the opinion that it was solely Jefferson’s sway over his younger colleague that caused Madison’s split with Hamilton.  But Wood shows that this was not the case.  Certainly Madison took Jefferson’s views into account.  But it was more often Madison temporizing his more radical friend than the other way around.  Where it came to Hamilton, Madison’s opposition was not the result of a weakness of character that caused him to defer to Jefferson but instead one of philosophical principal.  As Hamilton began introducing his economic programs Madison realized that Hamilton’s idea of a vigorous national government differed greatly from his own.  Madison objected vehemently to the federal assumption of the states’ Revolutionary War debt and to the introduction of a national bank, both of which he believed would elevate the federal government far above that of the states.  He objected further to Hamilton’s creation of a permanent and consolidated national debt, ala Great Britain, which in Hamilton’s view would spur economic progress.  And indeed it did.  While instrumental to the early republic’s economic success, these moves were the beginning of the opposition’s fear that Hamilton and his fellow Federalist were monarchists.

Perhaps the most interesting section of the book is the discussion over many chapters of the rise of the Republican party and the demise of the Federalists during the 1790s.  Wood explains how the Federalists, while believing in the equality of men under the law, also believed there was a natural aristocracy among men, an aristocracy which had the right and duty to rule over the masses.  Washington believed it, Hamilton believed it, Adams believed it.  As the self-made men coming out of the 1790’s economic success began to proliferate, the Federalist vision came under attack.  These “middling sorts” believed they had as much right to governance as the self-appointed aristocratic class, indeed even more so since they understood and could represent the interests of the common man better than the elites ever could.  The Federalist were appalled by these men, considering them to be nothing more than low-lifes and demagogues with little understanding of society and how it should be governed.  Each side saw the other as a threat to the liberty that had been won during the revolution.  The Republicans saw the Federalists as monarchists, while the Federalists saw the Republicans as “democrats” a pejorative term at the beginning of the 1790’s.  By the end of the decade the term began to loose its negative connotations  as many of the new merchant class began to embrace the banner. In the end, the Federalists never had a chance.  The sheer number of new men coming out of the economic success of the 1790’s overwhelmed the Federalists, who over the following twenty years became progressively extinct as a political class.  This rise of Jeffersonian republicanism was nothing short of a second American revolution, one that many felt finally completed what had begun in 1776.  The irony that it was Hamilton’s economic programs that gave rise to the men who would replace him and his class would not be lost on Hamilton.  After Jefferson’s election in 1800 he knew his time was through and he feared that everything he and the other revolutionaries had fought for had been subverted: “This American world was not meant for me.”

Who won, in the long run?  Do we now live in a Jeffersonian or a Hamiltonian world?  Books could be written on this question alone and I myself could argue the question from both sides.  But in the end, in regards to the leviathan federal government of modern day America (one that would most likely horrify even Hamilton and would certainly send Jefferson into fits of outrage and despair) I believe we live more in a Hamiltonian world, one in which government coercion is everywhere, in which we are ruled by a small group of elites interested primarily in their own survival.  With his support for a strong and energetic executive and for the primacy of the federal government over the states, this is certainly not what Hamilton intended.  But it is perhaps the inevitable result of the Hamiltonian vision.  We have now what Jefferson continually warned about: the tyranny of the few over the masses.  So while we live in a Hamiltonian world I believe Jefferson won the argument. 

Jefferson is the winner in another sense also.  As Wood points out, Jefferson:

…personified this revolutionary transformation.  His ideas about liberty and democracy left such a deep imprint on the future of his country that, despite persistent attempts to discredit his reputation, as long as their is a United States he will remain the supreme spokesman for the nation’s noblest ideals and highest aspirations.

Wood does not flinch from the fact that Jefferson, while embodying for all time our most cherished vision of ourselves, was himself a member of the elite:

[Jefferson] was a well-connected and highly cultivated Southern landowner who never had to scramble for his position in Virginia.  The wealth and leisure that made possible his great contributions to liberty and democracy were supported by the labor of hundreds of slaves.

That Hamilton, the self-made man, would represent the rejected aristocratic vision while Jefferson, an aristocrat to his bones, would represent the adopted democratic vision, is one of the strange ironies of American history.    

Also at play during the 1790’s was the effect the French revolution had on the country.  I’d always known it was an issue but I didn’t realize how much until I read Wood’s book.  Virtually everyone in the United States supported the French revolutionaries in 1789 believing, correctly, that their own revolution had inspired the French.  However, as word spread about the appalling activities going on in France circa 1792-93, the Federalists began to have doubts about the true nature of the new French government.  On the other hand, Jefferson, who was blindly pro-French, and many fellow Republicans were always ready to excuse away any French democrats atrocities under the reasoning that you need to break a few eggs in order to make an omelet. To the Federalists it appeared that France’s revolution had devolved into nothing more than anarchy and terror, and given the rise of the democratic notions of the new merchant class, feared the same might happen here at home.  The issue fueled the mistrust between the two sides and colored virtually every public debate of the decade. 

And this only covers half the book though the idea that Wood concentrates on in the first half – that of the Jeffersonian revolution of the common man - infuses everything that comes later, for instance the furious rush westward, one that the federal government only could hope to control:

The carefully drawn plans of the 1780s for the orderly surveying and settlement of the West were simply overwhelmed by the massive and chaotic movement of the people….[m]any settlers ignored land ordinances and titles, squatted on the land, and claimed preemptive rights to it.  From 1800 on Congress steadily lowered the price of Western land, reduced the size of purchasable tracts, and relaxed the terms of credit for settlers in ever more desperate efforts to bring the land laws into line with the speed with which the lands were being settled.

If you ever need evidence of the American propensity for liberty and individual initiative free from government coercion, read Wood’s chapter on the push westward. 

This push, however, was disastrous for the American Indian.  (It would also set the stage for the argument about slavery in the Western territories, which set the stage for the Civil War.)  Jefferson and other leaders of the time held what they considered to be the enlightened view on the Indian issue: the civilization and assimilation of the Indian into white society.  This view:

…gave no recognition whatsoever to the worth or integrity of the Indians’ own existing culture.  In the minds of many early nineteenth-century whites, enlightened civilization was still too recent, too precarious, for them to treat it as simply an alternative culture of lifestyle.  Only later, only when the Indian culture had been virtually destroyed, could white Americans begin to try to redeem the tragedy that had occurred.

There is more, much more, to talk about in this wonderful book but I’ll leave it to you to explore the rest.  I’ll just end by saying simply that I loved this book.  It taught me much, explained a lot, and it made me think hard about the American character, the one that emerged during the Jeffersonian revolution of the '”middling sorts.”  Their confidence, initiative, and determination for self-improvement became instilled in the American persona, the idea of what it is to be an American.  Their demand for liberty became our birthright.  In the Age of Obama, do we still retain these characteristics?  I think so.  The push back against the statist, European vision of the Obama administration is heartening to see.  While I am certain that the elites in Congress don’t give a damn what ordinary Americans think, they do take public opinion into account when it comes to their reelection.  If there are enough of us “middling sorts” left out there, we may be able to defeat their collectivist vision and continue this Empire of Liberty with which we’ve been blessed.   

Dropping Out

I sent this Victor Davis Hanson blog post to my wife a few weeks back and she responded that I could have written it, so closely did it resemble my own experience.  The post’s subject has to do with Hanson’s alienation from contemporary culture and, judging by the responses in the comments section, Hanson and I are clearly not alone.  Like Hanson, I once was deeply engaged with the popular culture.  But also like Hanson, alas, I never go to the movie theater anymore and I only watch a few current movies per year on DVD.  There’s simply very little coming from Hollywood these days that interests me as most of what I see is predicable, trite, and boring.  Likewise music.  I have no idea about music being produced today or who is producing it. I couldn’t name a popular hit song over the past decade if my life depended on it.  As I’ve mentioned before, modern popular music is a world that doesn’t exist for me.  And so on: I don’t read the newspaper beyond a glance at the morning sports page, I very rarely watch or listen to public TV or radio, and I watch less sports than I used to.  For instance, I loved professional basketball from the time I was a child until the day Larry Bird retired but I never watch it anymore.  Like other once glorious things, it has devolved.  Rather than being a team game, it’s now a one-on-one or two-on-two affair, with little of the teamwork, ball movement, movement away from the ball, and beauty (think the old Celtics teams from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s) that once epitomized the game.  Pro basketball these days seems to be about clearing out for one player to go one-on-one to the basket against his defender and, if that doesn’t work, to pop it out to a teammate for a three-pointer.  Indeed, the three-point shot is one of the problems with the game today.  The twenty-foot jump shot is a thing of the past as is working together to get the best shot under the best circumstances. 

I watch a smattering of TV.  I still watch Entourage, which isn’t as good as it once was, and I’ll watch Curb Your Enthusiasm until it’s run is complete.  And, as any reader of this blog knows, I love Mad Men.  I started watching 30 Rock last year but it got unfunny after its first season.  I’m thinking about starting to watch The Office because I watched a few episodes recently and found it quite good, particularly how they handle the relationship between Jim and Pam, which is touching.  I had a bit of a bias against it when it first came on because my wife and I had watched the original British version of the show, which was brilliant, and I thought the American version could not possibly match it.  Perhaps not, but my cursory viewing of these recent episodes tell me it’s well-made.  We’ll see if it’s worth watching the full run.

I don’t want to be this way.  To anyone who reads this blog, clearly I love movies, music, television, books, and sports.  But in the desert called modern culture it’s more rewarding to look backwards.  There’s still lots out there to find so long as you know where to look. 

Scanning vs. Reading

I’ve been scrolling the literary blogs recently as there seems to be nothing new in politics.  How many times can one write about Obama’s naiveté and incompetence?  This post over at The Elegant Variation caught my eye the other day.  It refers back to an essay in the L.A. Times by David Ulin whose subject is how the Internet has ‘fractured our attention spans’ and affected our reading habits.  This is something I have thought about often and am constantly on guard against – see this post here, which is related to these concerns.  I spend a lot of time on the Internet and am very aware of how one reads a computer screen.  We become scanners, pickers and choosers, never fully focused on what’s before us because of the instantaneous and ephemeral nature of Internet content.  Those habits can carry over and affect our book reading. 

I first noticed this when I graduated college.  As I’ve explained elsewhere I started college late.  I was already working and owned a home.  I had financial responsibilities.  So for five years I worked full-time and went to school full-time, a schedule that left me no time for other pursuits, such as reading for pleasure.  One of the main reasons I was so eager to graduate was that I would be able to read what I wanted again.  But when I started I realized that five years of furiously scanning text books and notes had affected the way I read.  I found myself scanning down to the bottom of every page, trying to do the picking and choosing one does while studying for an exam, separating out what’s important and what’s not.  It seemed I lost the ability to become fully engrossed in a book, to enter that fugue-like state that all book-lovers know when one becomes unaware of their surroundings.  You lose yourself within the book, almost like you’re a part of it, only coming to hours later, like waking up from a dream.  I had that ability from the time I started to read as a child.  After graduating college at the age of thirty, I wondered if I’d ever get it back.

Fortunately I did, though maybe not to the degree I had it when I was young.  I can still lose myself in a book and I hope I always can.  I think I’ve mastered what are probably two separate abilities, Internet reading and book reading. One reason may be that I’m in two physically different spots and positions when doing each.  When reading on the Internet I’m sitting up, at my computer terminal or sitting at my kitchen table reading on my laptop.  I would never read a book in this position.  As I’ve explained before, I read a book lying down, almost always on my living room couch.  At this point they seem to have become almost two separate activities, though as I mentioned above, I’m always on aware of how the one can affect the other. 

I’ll put it to the test today.  I received my copy of Gordon Wood’s Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 in the mail yesterday and I am very eager to get to it.  Wood is considered probably the finest historian we have on the founding era and, at 700+ pages, it’s the kind of book you must fall into, become engrossed with, if you hope to get through it in any reasonable amount of time.  Usually a book of this length I will figure I’ll be reading it for a good three weeks, maybe a month.  I don’t mind this a bit.  I like falling into another time and place and living in that world for awhile. 

Digital Barbarians

I haven’t read Mark Helprin’s Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto and I’m not sure if I will, but it sure looks interesting.  I may not read it because I’m already a convert to Mr. Helprin’s point of view.  His subject is something I’ve long been aware of and concerned about.  So what’s it about?  Let Joseph Epstein, whose marvelous review brought the book to my attention, explain:

Mark Helprin's Digital Barbarism is ostensibly a book about copyright: the need for preserving it and indeed extending its span, the distinctions between it and other forms and kinds of property, the political implications behind recent attempts to eliminate it. As a copyright holder myself, who has not thought lengthily on the subject, but only gratefully collects his peasantries (as I refer to my rather meager royalties) and moves on, Mr. Helprin's argument strikes me as sound, persuasive, even penetrating. But the book is about much more than copyright. Digital Barbarism is, in fact, a diatribe, harangue, lecture, attack, onslaught, denunciation, polemic, broadside, fulmination, condemnation, no-holds barred, kick-butt censure of the current, let us call it the digital, age.

And what are Mr. Helprin’s concerns about the digital age?  Epstein:

Without gainsaying the rich new possibilities that digital technology has made available, Helprin makes the case that this same technology inculcates a frenetic habit of mind, quick on the trigger yet slow to appreciate subtlety and dazzlingly blind to beauty. "The character of the machine is that of speed, power, compression, instantaneousness, immense capacity, indifference, and automaticity," he writes. The other side of this debased coin is that the machine does not understand tradition, appreciate stability, enjoy quality, but instead "[hungers] for denser floods of data" and fosters a mentality in which "images have gradually displaced words."

Early in Digital Barbarism, Helprin posits two characters, one a high-flying executive in 2028 of a company that "supplies algorithms for the detection of damage in and the restoration of molecular memories in organic computation," the other a British diplomat in 1908 on holiday at Lake Como. The first is living virtually the virtual life, so to speak, which means that he is hostage to the machinery of communication and information, flooded by e-mail, cell-phone calls, screen imagery, in a life lived very much from without. The second, reachable only by slow international post, lives his life with ample room for reflection, cultivation of the intellect, acquiring musical and literary culture directly and at leisure. Helprin naturally prefers the life of the latter, and if you don't grasp the reasons why, you are a digital barbarian in the making, if not already made.

Reading Mr. Epstein in full will certainly be more profitable than staying here with me.  But, in case you choose wrongly and stay here, let me make my own meager points. 

I’ve been long concerned that the digital age is producing a state of mind that can no longer recognize, never mind appreciate, beauty, depth, or greatness.  We are breeding a generation that is hooked up to all the latest technology but which appreciates only what can be gotten instantaneously and in small packages, via text messages, Twitter, Facebook, and goodness knows what else.  One of the marvels of the Internet revolution is that information can be shared in real time.  But it’s also has its drawbacks.  You can’t do any analysis on these tiny communication devices, all you can do is transfer raw data.  As a result young people today think in 140 characters, and often much less.  Subtlety, depth, analysis, thought, are impossible in these arenas.  An entire generation is swept up in this world, and it will have its consequences. 

I mentioned many months ago that I created a Twitter and Facebook account for myself.  I twittered three times, I believe, before I realized its uselessness.  What does anyone care, even those closest to me, what I’m watching on TV now, or if I’m off to work, or if I’m bored.  Isn’t that the bulk of what gets written on Twitter?  Now, I’m not totally anti-Twitter.  If you’re someone like James Lileks, who can make anything sound funny (“Picked up dog's arthritis meds. At this price I want him to get up on hind legs and riverdance.”) I’ll gladly browse through his Twitter feeds.  But few have that ability.  For most, the twitter above would end after the first sentence, and again I say, who cares?

The same thing with Facebook.  It is a complete waste of time, at least the way the vast majority of people use it.  I joined up hoping to get into conversations with people, debate issues, talk about movies or music, and the site has the potential for that.  But most users are simply not interested in debate, and don’t have the patience or knowledge to engage for any period of time longer than a few minutes.  From what I see, someone makes a statement, you get a lot of concurrences, and some smiley faces and exclamation points.  Who needs it?

As for text messaging, why not pick up the phone if you need to communicate?  I have long said that I will leave this earthly realm without ever having sent a text message or owned a personal cell phone.  I’ll never understand the need to constantly be in touch.  I’m perfectly comfortable alone by myself. When I’m out on my own that’s what I want to be, on my own.

Now, I’m not anti-technology.  I’m simply dismayed at how its used.  Hell, I’m blogging on the Internet as we speak.  But I do it not for you but for myself.  At the very start of this blog I wrote:

I'm thinking writing about my interests may deepen my understanding of them. Pauline Kael once wrote, in her introduction to Deeper Into Movies, that "I write because I love trying to figure out what I feel and what I think about what I feel, and why." I guess I'm thinking something similar for the blog, though I'd be more comfortable saying "I write because I want to figure out what I think, and why.

And that has proved true.  Writing forces me to think, it allows me to organize my thoughts, it gives me an outlet for self-expression.  I enjoy all those things about it.  I read a six or seven other blogs daily because I’ve found people on the internet who make me think, make me laugh, who expand my own horizons.  I love the Internet, when put to the uses of furthering understanding, knowledge, and open debate.  But the instant, cotton-candy uses the digital barbarians employ it for is corrupting.  It doesn’t expand horizons, it limits them.  Stuck in a world of Twitter, Facebook, and text messaging, the youth of today have no time or inclination to explore the worthy things of life. 

My buddy Mike and I have been in agreement for more twenty years that the cultural and social environment of the day have degraded to the point that we no longer have the capacity to produce another Beethoven, or Michelangelo.  The digital generation has furthered this decline.  Not only can’t the digital age produce a Beethoven or a Michelangelo, it can’t recognize their greatness, preferring instead Michael Jackson or Brittney Spears or the latest American Idol winner.  With the great cultural treasures of the western world at their fingertips, they can’t rise above childish modern pop, violent special-effects movies, and mind-numbing video games.  And tiny little hand-held devices. 

I become daily more concerned that we are leaving the treasure of western civilization behind, not simply the cultural aspects of art, music, and literature, but also the organizing political ideas upon which we’ve all previously agreed.  These youth do not understand nor respect republicanism, democracy, or capitalism.  Many openly disdain them.  It’s no secret that the public schools long ago stopped teaching western civilization (except to criticize it).  That loss of knowledge about, and confidence in, those ideas that have shaped our society may now be coming home to roost.  Enter the digital barbarians and their childish sense of entitlement to every whim or fancy, their lack of civility towards anyone who disagrees with them, and you have the potential for true cultural and political chaos. 

Plato asked (and I’m paraphrasing), “what if one generation of children could be perfectly taught?”, implying that it would lead to a perfect social order.  Well, consider the opposite.  What if one generation of children could be perfectly emptied of all the wisdom of their ancestors?  Now, both those scenarios are equally implausible in that they are asking for perfection, which doesn’t exist.  The concern is that we are producing too many citizens devoid of the cultural and political wisdom that once was a inheritance, a given.  Produce enough of them and you end up with a society that becomes unlivable - think modern day England, which many Brits now living in the U.S. consider to have entered into a state of semi-barbarism. 

I nearly didn’t post this.  If I have any readers at all it well might drive them away, or at least solidify their opinion of me as a hopeless old-fogy.  Be that as it may.  But before you laugh off my musings, please read Helprin’s account of the “holy war” he entered into when the Wall Street Journal published his article in defense of copyright, the article that became the basis for his book.  His account of the barbarians ignorant yet ferocious reaction to his column is not pretty.  

I’m self-taught for the most part, but well enough to know that their are things that make life worth living.  The pursuit of virtue, the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of wisdom, and the pursuit of beauty, all make up a large part of what I consider the good life, and all of these concepts depend upon one another.  My concern for years was that we were raising (or have raised) a generation which no longer recognizes this, that cannot see the sublime in Bach or Shakespeare, that can’t find beauty in Mozart or Raphael, that can’t perceive majesty in Beethoven or Michelangelo.  The digital barbarians heighten that concern, expand it into the political and social arena.  Their’s is, according to Epstein, “a mind propelled by a strong sense of entitlement, inane utopian visions, and less than no regard for those distinctions and discriminations that make a complex culture hum,” and according to Helprin, “"is against property, competition, and the free market," which "favor a world that is planned, controlled, decided, entirely cooperative, and conducive of predetermined outcomes." At minimum, a mindset like this will degrade public life.  At worst, one is reminded of Burke’s dismay as he watched the unfolding of the French Revolution (the italics are mine):

The unbought grace of life … is gone.… All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of her naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.