Immigration: Europe in comparison to North America

 I came across the photo below today and could not help thinking of the difference in the migrants who are entering the "Western" world.

I realize that the red garments were supplied to these migrants, but they do seem to telegraph a difference in the populations entering "the West."

 Image credits: © picture alliance/Pacific Press/Mercedes Menendez; ABC News

"Reading the Newspaper Knowledge of Things"

A friend of mine from ages ago -- the Sixties, as a matter of fact -- told me about his experience working in the housewares department of a huge department store in Houston. We were both in grad school then. It turned out that customers purchased editions of works of writers by the size of the shelves in their living rooms.

I recalled this anecdote recently while listening to an episode of the podcasts of Tyler Cowen. Tyler's guest used the phrase that is the title of this post. He was referring to the way that most people apprehended the world around them.

I noticed some time ago that many of my liberal acquaintances, even friends, do not read books. There are not shelves of books in their homes. They might belong to a book club and read a novel once a week. They may even subscribe to the New Yorker. The husband of friend once told me, very proudly, that he read three newspapers a day. This was his way of saying he was informed. I said that reading newspapers was not reading. (This man had also told me that he found articles in the New Yorker too long)

People talk constantly on cell phones. Clearly people have a desire to talk to others. Hardly anyone reads on the subway. They use devices to communicate. It's like in the ages before "modern forms" of communication: everything is nevertheless spread quickly. Rumors, passed along digitally.

The Sixties, part 1: The Men

A Sixties-Theme Party

   For those of us who were there, it was a good time, even when  things went bad. I think Leonard Cohen said something about that in one his songs.  The premise was that everyone should have a good time, no questions asked. Of course, the failure to be “judgmental” occasionally produced disastrous consequences, since any gathering, whether at someone's house, a park, or a peace rally, drew the unsavory and the criminal along with the peace-loving and tree-hugging. The real social misfits never failed to find their way to free food and free dope. At the time, however, “bad vibes” was a cool, nonjudgmental way of characterizing the disturbances they wrought. In Austin, Texas, in 1968, when I was in grad school there, despite occasional bad vibes, things were pretty loose and cool, with everybody doing his or her own thing. It was not really what Time magazine termed the "drop-out culture." It was really a drop-in culture, and not only among the hippies who formed a large presence on and around the campus. The news that a party was taking place went out and was passed from mouth to mouth like the old prairie post. You needed only the slightest affiliation, the merest acquaintance with a party-giver –– maybe you were a friend of someone who knew somebody who was planning, maybe, to “show up” –– to turn up yourself, with your bottle of wine or your dope and check out the “scene.”

    For socially inexperienced women like myself, there was no longer a need to feel self-conscious about going to a party where you didn't know anyone and weren't invited, since anyone and everyone was welcome, although the word “welcome” scarcely did justice to the situation. You could just stand around by yourself at these gatherings, forming a party of one, staring into space, and people would say you were being profound. The important thing was not to look tied down, but simply to be open to “possibilities.”    Whether the music level was throbbing at ear-splitting decibel level or was sweet and plaintive, it heightened the sense of possibility, if obscuring the form it might take. You had to create for yourself whatever you took home from the occasion. As if to indicate that the hosts (again, if you could call them that) were taking no responsibility for their guests (ditto), the furnishings were minimal, thereby making clear that this was not one of those gatherings of hung-up types like our parents with all their rigid social conventions. Alongside psychedelic posters, there might be a beanbag chair or two or a couch purchased at Goodwill the week before or even dragged in from the street. The bare floor was a perfectly suitable place to occupy, crowded around the coffee table, which, despite being full of ashtrays and burning candles, was a good place for rolling joints. The brightly lit kitchen was also a popular gathering place.

    The lights there were bright because of the absence of a shade over the light bulb, another deficit of middle-class amenities. And the brownies, which instead of being nicely arranged on a platter, spilled onto the counter from the aluminum sheet on which they had been baked. The countertop didn't look any too clean, either (while the bathroom didn’t bear thinking about). But never mind, maybe the brownies were sterilized from the heat of the oven. Food, in any case, was a way to get into things with the assortment of types standing around in the oasis of bright light and shooting the breeze. The words “craving” and “nosh" became an active part of my vocabulary at this time, physical hunger for salty chips or outrageously sweet desserts or even peanut butter on a Ritz cracker. Alcohol helped to reduce any social unease.

    Among hippies, the talk followed an aimless and anarchic course and was miles removed from the decorous way I had learned to speak in the 1950s. The old ways of communicating were now passé, and my own reflexive attempts at polite conversation invariably brought a twinkle to the eyes behind a pair of granny glasses.

    The abeyance of social protocol added to the non-judgmental character of the time. Everything that was said was accepted, no matter how weird, no questions asked. In fact, the weirder it was, the more likely the word “cool” would be uttered as a kind of benediction. The obscene profits of oil companies were jumbled together with assertions concerning the power of apricot pits to halt the growth of cancerous tumors. If someone said Lyndon Johnson was a war criminal, so be it. If another person came up with an anecdote that showed Johnson in a sympathetic light –– his hard-scrabble origins, his civil rights legislation –– it in no way eradicated the war criminal aspect, but it too stood there, part of the mysteries of life that the brain had to juggle if good vibrations were to be maintained.

Nevertheless, at parties, besides the mellow types, sitting around stoned and listening to Donovan, grooving, smiling, nodding sagely at whatever outrageous or off-the-wall comments were made, there were guys –– and they were always guys –– who stood out, who lifted themselves above the circumambient mass of smiling and grooving. They were the ones holding court around the refrigerator in the kitchen with a bottle of beer in their hand.
 

   Ah, the men.

    They were manly in the dressed-down way of men who look good in blue work shirts or in plaid flannel ones. They were the guys who knew what to look for when they peered under the hood of a car, who could hammer a nail straight, who weren’t squeamish when it came to unplugging a stopped-up toilet. They were the guys who did what needed to be done. It was probably the last time that men, as a whole, were outright manly. In war they were the best soldiers and officers, and in peace the best providers. Even a few years earlier most of them would have completed their military service or had their exemptions and been turning their thoughts toward marrying and embarking on a career and family.

    The career goals, indeed the lives, of many of these young men had been put on hold by the effort they applied to avoid being among the dozens of casualty figures released weekly by the Pentagon. Another reason for resistance to following the Pentagon’s orders, and one I don’t think anyone has yet suggested, was the effect of the Pill. The outright rejection of the war in Vietnam was another byproduct of the sexual revolution. With women taking responsibility for birth control, it must have entered men’s heads that women could no longer be counted on to be faithful. Who wanted to be dodging bullets in Vietnam when ambitious young women were getting on with their lives, entering law and graduate school? No one would have been so cynical as express the matter in those terms. It was easer to echo what the radicals were saying, that the war in Vietnam profited only the military-industrial complex.

    This rejection led to a heady atmosphere, one of postponement, idleness, and abandon, which was evident in the intoxicating melange of talk that took place in the midst of alcohol, drugs, and sex. The talk of the men around the fridge, colored by the era we were living in, was also of a different nature from that of my parents and their friends in the 1950s. These men were not what women would call conversationalists, though some were pretty good raconteurs. When they talked there was a forward-thrusting cascade of words, a trumpeting and a trumping with language, outrageous, often weird stories and anecdotes that gave evidence of men's strong need to match their resources against their environment.

    In the years that followed, especially after traveling in different parts of the world, I met many guys who got their start in adult social life in front of the refrigerators of the Sixties. They had got older by then, if not more mature, and you had the feeling they were stuck, mentally, under the bare light bulbs of kitchens in cockroach-infested apartments in which the smell of marijuana mingled with that of body odor. They had stories, say, about the time they had shared a cab to Orly Airport with Shirley MacLaine. In 1968 I thought the story was spontaneous, but later I learned that it had been told so many times that it had become as well oiled and smooth as the gears of a Mercedes. Or, speaking of a Mercedes, a guy would tell about his perfect 1955 Mercedes, 33,000 miles on it, owned by an old geezer who only drove it to pick up his mail in town twice a week, a steal at $1,500. It was a polished little gem of a story, repeated so many times it could be told backward. Or about the woman he met in Kabul whose ring finger had been hacked off by bandits when she traveled through the Kyber Pass because she couldn't get her rings off fast enough. Or about the best hashish in Southeast Asia.

To be continued.

Picture Credit: The Mixer

"Seeing You, Seeing Me": A Story

“Seeing You, Seeing Me”

    There’s a concept in literary theory, coined by the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, called defamiliarization. It has to do with the way familiar things are perceived without their habitual and distracting ornamentation. A little bird whispered news of this concept in Bertolt Brecht’s ear, and he ran with it. Thus, the alienation effect, Brecht’s program for destroying theatrical illusion and, indeed, affect. The result: pure, unadulterated dis-illusion.

    It was something nonliterary that has got me thinking about the concept. The first time was this past December. It was about 6:30 in the evening. We were thus heading into the darkest moments of the year in the northern hemisphere. Six-thirty in the evening was not the usual time I happened to be at the place I was at, but, being really a nonevent, it was a non-particular kind of place, a large intersection amid a canyon of skyscrapers. While I was waiting for the light to change, in the predictable big-city way amid a press of raincoats and umbrellas — did I say it had been raining? — I found myself noticing my surroundings in a new way.

    The same old things one would expect to see on such an evening were there. High above the avenue were skyscrapers lit up against the befogged sky, down at street level were the headlights of cars reflected on the wet, rained-on surface of asphalt. But I was all eyes. It was as if I were only eyes. I won’t say I had a mystical experience that damp evening, but my eyes — my entire being — were saturated with the experience of light, with the distinct and particular shape of each spot of light from thousands of windows and headlights, with the way the asphalt and concrete seemed bathed not simply in water but in the moving light, but mostly of my own distinctness from everyone and everything around me. It was at that moment that my thoughts were shot through with that strange word, something I had encountered in a class in literary criticism: defamiliarization. Seeing familiar things in an unfamiliar way.

    I remembered Shklovsky’s anecdote about Tolstoy, who had once noted in his diary, in reference to dusting his divan, that he couldn’t recall whether he had already performed this habitual action. He arrived at the conclusion that since the movements were so habitual and unconscious, it was as if he had not dusted the divan. Alongside the skyscrapers and lights and automobiles of the real world, there appeared in my mind’s eye the aged and cantankerous figure of Tolstoy puttering around in his study. In the reverse of Tolstoy’s divan, my mind began to fill with images of freezing Russian winters and samovars, an experience that came solely from reading Russian novels.

    The center of action now switched from my eyes to a scratch at the back of my throat. How slow we are sometimes to recognize something that is, in this case, right under our noses. No doubt about it, that scratch had been accompanying me for a day at least, fighting its way to my attention, and it now demanded to be recognized, to acquire a status separate from all the activities of my body that I habitually ignore. The febrile activity of my body had led me through optical hallucinations and literary byways to make me aware that I was harboring a cold. Then, the light turned green and off I went, in step with the urban crowd.

    A similar kind of out-of-body event occurred not long afterward. It was New Year’s Day. I had just gotten up, about noon, when the feeling that I was deaf began to creep over me. And I mean creep, for, as I became aware that I was not hearing anything, it struck me that this sensory non-experience had actually been going on for a while. I was alone in my apartment, had been puttering around, totally absorbed, mindlessly absorbed, when I was overcome by the weight of the immense silence around me. I stopped in mid-step, acutely conscious now of my bare feet sinking into the carpet. The air held the kind of hyper-quietness that accompanies conspiracy. The walls of my apartment exuded silence. My eardrums focused like giant antennae, and they were registering … nothing … quiet.

    I took up a position at the windows of my living room, which is one flight above street level. Cars occupied both sides of the street outside, cars that normally represented intrusive car alarms or horns or arguments among car owners over parking spaces. But being a holiday, there was no alternate side-of-the-street parking, and  the street was at that moment empty of humans, excepting a woman I could see from half a block away, walking her dog in the direction of my building. My ears strained, seeking to disprove this sense of deafness, anticipating the sound of her heels on the sidewalk, but none followed, even when the top of her head became visible as she passed below my window. She was probably wearing running shoes, but I could not shake the feeling that I had become deaf. Not long afterward the illusion was shattered. A car drove slowly past, its owner perhaps hoping for an omen presaging a propitious start to the new year: a parking space! No such luck. He passed beyond my sight, and the noise of the car’s motor was succeeded by the cough of another passerby, after which a car door could be heard slamming shut, sounds that traveled right through my thin window panes and struck my ear drums.

    It was then that I recalled how that earlier moment of seeing at the crowded, night-lit intersection — Shklovsky’s defamiliarization — had been preceded by a sense of the absolute cohesion of all my personal molecules, a moment of identity in which I felt intensely distinct from all the bodies around me. My febrile condition may have played a role on the earlier occasion, but that New Year’s morning I could not so much as complain of a hangover.

    Clearly, you could not only be blind, but also deaf to the world around you. This time around, however, the new way of seeing — or hearing, in this case — produced a certain revelation. That New Year’s morning my eyes and ears had become temporarily loosened from their connection with my interior life, which obsessively seeks out objects on which to pin its anger or joy. What they now saw, what they now heard, was unaccompanied by judgments or position papers on the state of the world or on the conditions of the streets. It was unaccompanied by criticism of people crossing my path or by opinions that make me bored with myself. Gone was the endless internal critical stream, and, for a moment, I had found my way to a kind of pristine situation of perception, like the suspended moment in time before Adam gave names to all the animals.

    In my encounters with the outer world, no matter what my eyes beheld, I was constantly bringing something (or maybe nothing, in the case of Tolstoy’s divan) from inside of me to match that encounter. This relentless desire of all the amorphous and competing entities (with the help, perhaps, of a scratch at the back of my throat) to find their existence in matter was depressing. And yet, wasn’t this way of perceiving the world such an innate part of the human organism that the possibility of coming to some pure perception of experience was impossible? Defamiliarization, however, promised the possibility of stepping out of the old shoes into a brave new world of unmediated experience.

    For several days afterward, before the busy-ness of everyday life took hold of my thoughts, I tried an experiment. On the subway, I would sit (whenever I got a seat), close my eyes, and try to induce a Zen-like passivity. When I opened them, however, there were no new revelations, no insights into the human condition, into my own condition. You could not simply will yourself into extracting what was important from the otherwise unnoticed background noise. I guess I proved a point similar to Tolstoy’s: like that divan, the seeing of some things was so unconscious, it was as if I didn’t see them.

    Months have passed since those revelatory moments. It is a spring evening and I am out for the evening with the man who is supposed to be my boyfriend.

    Boyfriend! What a strange word to apply to a man in his late thirties in connection with a woman who is herself just this side of thirty.

    I say “supposed to be my boyfriend,” because one thing I do see pretty clearly is that this relationship is heading toward its conclusion. It is running out, like the points accumulated on your credit card, but it will be without the usual panoply of events that accompanies the termination of relationships: fights, tears, recriminations, bitter silences. At a certain stage of life, you age out of such responses. His outward demeanor says that nothing is amiss, as long as we keep going as we are. If I care to press the point — well, that is my choice, but one he will not put into words. When the relationship ends — although, again, he has not indicated that he wishes anything of the sort — it will do so without any acknowledgment on his part. It will simply float out of existence. We will pass from a state of being lovers to that of being friends — maybe — without any contributing acrimony or reproach.

    It is already ice cream weather. He and I are both great walkers, we have been out on one of our evening strolls, and we now sit side by side on a bench eating our cones. Around us, also hanging out in front of the shop where we made our ice cream choices, is a mixed variety of urban types, catching up with friends and neighbors who have thrown off their Grey Goose coats and who have likewise felt the spring call to be outdoors and eat ice cream. Among them are two teenaged boys, one of whom I know, since he lives in the same apartment building as myself, have known since he was about five and throughout his obnoxious preteen and high school years. I overhear him saying that he has just finished his first year in college.

    I allow the vanilla ice cream to melt in my mouth, savoring every last drib, then pressing the last bits of almonds between my tongue and front teeth. As I do so, I cannot take my eyes off of the boy. It is as if I have not seen him before, which is not the case. I have simply not seen him in the young male manifestation now present before my eyes. There is a tear in his blue jeans, a gap right above the kneecap, and a section of young male flesh peeps out.

    Two rather incongruous things are provoked in me by the sight of his youthful skin. One is a memory of irritation, as he once careened past me, at about the age of eight, on his skateboard in the lobby of the apartment building. The other is of a different nature, a desire to see more of that flesh, to touch it. Not a desire to talk to him, not to love him, not even to care about him. It is sexual frisson pure and simple, unmingled with any of the longing to be loved that has contaminated my relationships with men, including with the one on the bench beside me, who is eating his own ice cream: pistachio.

    When I was nineteen, this boy’s age, so it now occurs to me, I missed how luscious, how scrumptious, the skin of young males could be, because I had been preoccupied with wanting to be loved, the fate and bane of women. At thirty I am able to find them desirable, seeing them for the purely desirable physical objects they are. Defamiliarization, I say to myself. The inside entity that wants to be loved doesn’t find its correspondence in this physical manifestation and can instead see him for the beautiful young man he is.

    I tell the man beside me something of what I am thinking.

    “Saexthetic distance,” he says.

    “Very good,” I say. “I like that.”

    We stand up and continue the walk that was interrupted by our detour for ice cream.

    After a while, he says, “You’re not talking.”

    This is not something he often says to me. One of the things I like about this man is that he likes to hear me talk. I have been silent, however, because I am still thinking about the boy. I have begun to wonder if there might be a man in the universe, this man beside me perhaps, with whom I would wish only to experience saexthetic pleasure — and nothing more: pure, unadulterated dis-illusion.

    I speak, however, of something else: “I spent the entire afternoon at work today studying my Greek verbs.” I am taking an intensive course in Ancient Greek preparatory to finishing a doctorate in Renaissance literature. Unlike many graduate students, I do not teach. To support myself, I have a well-paying part-time job as a proofreader at a law firm.

    Although I have finished my ice cream, he has the habit of eating his cone very slowly, and he is doing so now. Finally, he says, ignoring the part about the Greek verbs: “You have a good deal there, able to go in and study and get paid for it.” He is an artist, a painter, and has no comparable office skills. Thus, he has less money than I, yet he always insists on paying when we are together.

    I mention that such a good deal might not last much longer. “There’s talk of reductions of the service staff.”

    “Why?”

    “Everybody’s cutting back. This week, I only worked one day, today.”

    “One day?”

    “It’s okay. There are other law firms.”

    “But you have it so easy there. You go in, you get paid, and half the time you spend studying.”

    “When it comes down to it, I’m ready to stop working in a law firm. I’d like to teach before I go on the real job market.”

    “But you have such a good deal,” he insists. “Why look for a new job at this stage of things, one where you would probably be expected to work while you’re there? You’re ready to write your dissertation, aren’t you? I wouldn’t leave the firm at this point.”

    I begin to feel that little prick of irritation I’ve had lately when we are together, like when a wasp or a fly buzzes around you while you’re eating ice cream on a hot summer day, which it is not yet. “Don’t you hear what I’m saying? They’re finally catching on to how much they’re paying us for sitting around doing, well, basically nothing. How long can that go on? A day will come when I won’t be needed. Even if I wanted to work.”

    “Oh, I see,” he says.

    From the tone of his voice I can tell that he does see. We continue to walk on in silence. Despite the warmth of the evening, we are still officially on winter time, and it is dark outside. Something is working its way loose in my head, rising to the surface from all the familiar thoughts and irritations. The sex is still good, the talk is still good, but where are we heading? The relationship is slipping right through my fingers, like warm, dry sand scooped up on the beach.

    I remember now what I was saying, before being distracted. “Do you know what the aorist tense is?” I ask.

    He shakes his head, with a smile at the rapid change of topic.

    “It’s a specifically Greek tense,” I explain. “It’s used to designate an action in the past that is completed in the moment of its inception.”

    “A delicate balance,” he says.

    “For instance, the word ‘perceive’: He saw but did not admire the beautiful hearth in his sister’s house,” I say, quoting from my Greek grammar exercises. “The aorist tense describes an action that is sudden, selective, and over as soon as it occurs.”

    “Like all good things.”

    “Did you know that the ancient Greeks used totally different words to express the different tenses of the English verb ‘to see’? If they wanted to express seeing in the present tense or the future, they used altogether different verbs.”

    “Hmm.” He has finished his cone and now concentrates on wiping his fingers with a napkin.

    “Seeing, you see,” I go on, “is something that possesses reality only in the present. ‘I will see,’ on the other hand, the future, expresses a fantasy vision, while ‘I saw’ expresses a capacity for memory by which one recalls a former optical perception. For the Greeks the three forms of see were not related, at least not in the verb system.”

    He stops abruptly, and I stop, too. Putting his hands on my shoulders, he turns me gently so that we are face to face. “He saw and he admired that such beautiful legs go with such a brilliant mind,” he said.

    When he says things like that I realize that he sees me better than I see myself. But I am unable to stop there. Without considering that he has no money, can barely support himself, I instead proceed to despair that a man who would say such things to me would not want to live with me, why he won’t say he loves me, why we can’t do our shopping together late at night at the supermarket, why we can’t list both of our names on the same mailbox, celebrate holidays together, why we can’t disagree about which DVD to watch until we are old and gray together — but mostly why he constantly eludes the story inside of me.

    I am dissatisfied with this state of things, I cannot change them, but I cannot get into a position from which I can view them any other way. Sometimes I think: another few steps and your perspective will change entirely. He will look different to you. Indifferent, maybe. But that would mean that the connection between my heart and the man will be broken, that the touch of his hands on my skin will be defamiliarized. My eyes, when they look at him, will see some other kind of man, a generic man with his own existence. He will then be just like all the other bodies walking around the streets, like those that once stood unknown beside me at a crowded intersection on a wet December night.

New York, the Leibnizian City

Leibniz versus Newton

I have a special fondness for Leibniz, a philosopher hardly anyone talks about these days. You might think he has nothing to say about what agitates people these days, or even what they particularly aspire to, for themselves or for the world in general. It was through Leibniz, however, that I met my husband many years ago.

I won’t belabor it, only a few words, since it’s a charming story. For some reason, but in connection with the dissertation I was writing on Goethe, I was in the stacks of the library studying the section of books on Leibniz. A fellow student approached me and asked if I was interested in Isaac Newton. It turns out that the works of Newton in the library were catalogued in the same section. That’s how it started: two random souls in the universe.

Now, to the title of this post. There’s a lot to dislike about New York: the noise of the train pulling into the subway station, the screeching of the metal wheels as it stops. If you’re not rich it can be an assault on your senses. If you allow yourself to stand back and take a look around, distance yourself, other things occur to you. And not specifically the arts and food and other diversions, the “Sunday-best culture,” as Lionel Trilling put it, of museums and Broadway.

It’s the people who for some reason have come to live in this place, despite all its drawbacks. I can’t put myself in their shoes, but they constantly remind me that we are social animals, despite all the all-to-often unsociability that one is subjected to. I am not speaking of the bureaucratic kind, but, rather, on the most ordinary everyday level: the bike riders traveling in the wrong direction; the person who steps in front of you in a crowded market to grab the shopping basket; the gal who carries on a loud conversation on her phone on the bus or subway or even walking a few paces behind you on the street; the neighbor in your building who doesn’t properly separate the trash (thereby attracting rodents, another feature of the city).

What are the implication effect of Leibniz on our being able to put up with these features of urban life?

Monads (as I understand Leibniz) are the building blocks of reality. Human souls are a special kind of monad, a self-sufficient, indivisible, simple substance, self-sufficient because it depends on nothing for its existence. It was created directly by God. Fulguration by God: “all created or derivative monads are generated, so to speak, by continual fulgurations of the divinity from moment to moment. [G 6:614; AG 219].”

The monad is also indivisible, and this creates a problem, since anything that is touchable, material, or physical is divisible. Think of an apple or a biscuit. Anything with mass, even the smallest piece of an apple, has mass, can be cut and sliced. The only way for the monad to be indivisible is to be immaterial, not to have physical existence. The only way the monad can fulfill the condition of indivisibility; it must not occupy any space. It is not material, touchable, physical.

Got that? Based on this, all the things we interact with in daily life reality are not physical. I.e., not those screeching trains or the obnoxious folks on their phones. And yet we live our lives and interact and touching many things that feel physical.

Imagine yourself sitting  sit in a room on a sofa watching TV, talking to your husband. No room, no husband, no TV, no sofa, no interaction. Monads are windowless. It is impossible for one monad to affect another. They are closed and not affected by each other. What really exists is a spirit monad (your own consciousness, your ability to reason, your ability to make plans for the future, your cognitive ability, your memory). God simulates an interaction between the two of you, one you think you are having with your husband.

You can extrapolate this to the whole world, even to the urban life of New York. It is the best world it is possible to make. The evil we have now  is necessary for experiencing good. War is needed for courage to exist. All in the balance of the universe.

There is beauty in the world, which has been created for us to enjoy. For instance, my darling husband. We must seek our own joy and leave aside all those irritations that can blight the joys.

This is the only world we have.

Image credit: The Partially Examined Life

Contrarities of modern urban life: subway version

 

Upper West Side Virtue Signaling

This is a thrift shop on Columbus Avenue run by volunteers, i.e., they are not being paid. According to the website, it is a "healing community," the mission of which is "to end the dual crises of homelessness and AIDS through relentless advocacy ..." Housing Works has been around at least twenty years. I once visited the bookshop in their downtown location. (It was quite an impressive bookshop, and I was attending a literary event there.) I wonder if they have published any success stories, for instance, built a homeless shelter in which their volunteers work. No, it's all about feeling good, showing your virtue. Herewith two photos showing their current virtue signaling.

 

NYC contrarities continued

 Kids don't have to walk on the Upper West Side. Like a junior Royal, his father conveys him in a wagon to the market. A man finds a resting place on a subway platform. As always, click to enlarge.

Covid rant

 

Yes, I wrote that I would limit myself to photographs and the contrarities they reveal about our current way of life. I've been housebound for days now, and one of my kind neighbors has been delivering food to the top of my steps, including yesterday a delicious fruit salad with the most creamy, silky yogurt, along with a copy of the recent New York Times Book Review. So, here I sit this morning with my tea, hoping that this may be the day that I trust myself to walk down the steps and outside for some fresh air. I look at the front page of the Book Review on the table before me, and as always with this publication, I take umbrage. Which is my way of saying that I am offended by almost everything I read in it, starting with the headlines. Indeed, the headlines in the NYT are a signal for you to assume the opinion stated therein.

What offends me? Its assumptions, which are those that the loyal New York Times reader is to assume as their own. Let me start with the headline on the front page of this May 15, 2022, issue, which pictures a group of stewardesses -- oh, oh: make that flight attendants.:

TWO NEW BOOKS SHOW HOW FED-UP FLIGHT ATTENDANTS SPARKED A MASS LABOR MOVEMENT

There are two books under review concerning flight attendants. One is a nostalgic memoir of a woman who became a stewardess in the late 1970s when in her twenties. For the reviewer, Fly Girl: A Memoir "leaves out a lot" and reads "like watching a vintage Doris Day movie in which the clueless heroine mistakenly wanders out of the 1950s and into the sex, drugs, and rock and roll that followed ..." The other (The Great Stewardess Rebellion) is a takedown of such nostalgia. The reviewer stakes out her position in the opening sentences: stewardesses served as "sexual bait to lure the nation's burgeoning corps of male business travelers." The writer of The Great Stewardess Rebellion), Neil Wulfhart, is not identified in the review as having been a stewardess, but is, according to her website, a "decision coach." (Go see for yourself.) So, this expert in life coaching has done the investigation and can tell you "the real story": the stewardesses who get fired from gaining weight, the amp dependencies, "the vicious misogyny of all the sexist men ..." who countered the attempts to improve working conditions.

I'm not saying that the Doris Day account is the one to live by, but my objection is to the  assumption that "sparking a mass labor movement" was a good thing. That may or may not be the case, but destroying illusions is a given in the world of the New York Times. Is there some reason why the reviewer could not have given a more measured picture? Being a stewardess in the 1970s was not like chattel slavery. A lot of people, men and women, were trapped in jobs that were oppressive. But there is something very evil about the way that the NYT focuses on people's discontent, and clearly the reviewer here (Leslie Bennetts, author of articles on, among others, Jennifer Anniston) is committed to the arena of femal discontent. Almost every novel reviewed in the NYTBR concerns a topic like "toxic mother-daughter relationships." A headline to such a review reads: "The author suggests that the body is sickened by secrets; everything must come out." Oh, really? Why?

Thus, my disgust with this newspaper. The NYT obviously has an outsized influence on the kinds of books that are published, tales of blame and hurt and self-pity. And one wonders where the great writers have gone.  I feel for my kind neighbor, who reads this NYT trash every day and whose view of society is contaminated by it.

Corporate suck-ups, 1

 I am sure there will be more. Stay tuned.

It makes me think of people who find a gun pointed at their head and begin to whimper in fear.

Mesopotamia? Or New York?

 

Contrarities of modern urban life, 2

 

No. 1 Subway

Madison Avenue

Contrarities of urban modern life 1

It's been ages since I posted, and in fact the blog was closed to readers for a long time. I have decided to reopen it. The lockdown, the pandemic, the virus -- however you want to call what has happened in the past two years -- has made me look at the world around me more intently. I have been carrying my iTouch with me: I need my vax ID to get into a restaurant, right? and the proof is right there in my Photos file. I have loved taking pictures the past two years. There are many things about the life that grab my attention and that I would like to document. But why hide them away in the Pictures file of my Mac? For the next while, until I have a new inspiration, I want to post images occasionally. I choose the above title for today's post, and there will be other contradictions I would like to document: thus, we start with number 1. But there will be other subjects. For the most part, I will only post the pictures. I could probably write essays about them but I will allow them to speak for themselves. As always, click to enlarge.

 

Macy's Cosmetics Dept.

No. 1 Subway Line

Buying Guns in Beverly Hills

I live in New York City and have read or heard about the rise in crime here. I have not been affected (yet), and my neighborhood seems relatively quiet. I have noticed, however, that things are not tidy. It sounds petty, but since the pandemic the street cleaners have not been active in residential streets. Lately that means that the falling leaves are clogging the gutters. (It's not like the street is a forest, but things are looking very messy, )

Lately, it struck me that beggars and homeless people, when on the move, hang out at places where middle-class people like me are to be found: in front of the local bank when I exit after making a deposit, or on the corner near Zabar's. And of course in the subway, a moving procession of the indigent. In other words, they plague the consciences of people who have to go out and earn a living. I say to myself, why do they not hang out on Park Avenue or other places where really moneyed people live? Probably because they would be chased away.

In any case, the title of this post is from a report in Los Angeles Magazine. It was not only Schadenfreude (look it up!) that caused me to be amused to see that California types in favor of defunding the police are buying guns to defend their property. (Yes, I know, I am labeling an entire class of people, but, really, that state is out of control, and mostly because of the pieties of such types.)

What's Your Paw Print?

 The current climate conference is coming to an end. The vacuity of it all is overwhelming, especially the pronouncements and virtue signaling of Western leaders who are without leadership. Do they get up every morning and feel oppressed at having to go through motions that will have no outcome? Come on: no one in the West is going to give up their goodies, and why should the rest of the world not want the goodies that come from exploitation of the Earth? The conferences, the protests, the disaster scenarios are so much fury sounding. Below is a piece I wrote and published in the New York Sun in 2007. Don't get me wrong: I am all for better use or our Earthly resources. The piece, however, concerns the fatuity of the liberal mindset.

I live in one of the most liberal neighborhoods in the U.S., zipcode 10024, full of people who carry cloth shopping bags, who swear by fluorescent light bulbs, and who think that George Bush is evil for not signing on to the Kyoto Protocol.  The neighborhood also ranks high in the nation in the number of pet food deliveries.  (The highest is the adjoining zipcode, 10023.)  Parents and children now compete for space on the sidewalks and in the parks of the Upper West Side with the owners of medium-sized and large dogs or, increasingly, of multiple small dogs.  I wonder if these pet owners have calculated their dog's carbon paw print.

By this I mean the canine variation on "carbon footprint," a concept invented by environmentalists for measuring our energy consumption and, hence, our damage to the environment.  The more energy we consume, so it is claimed, the more carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere and, ergo, the more damage to the thermal equilibrium.  When we are not being told to hang out our laundry to dry, we are encouraged to visit websites where we can calculate our personal carbon footprint, based on household fuel use and travel.  On the larger scale of things, the so-called Carbon Trust in the U.K. is trying to force companies to publish the size of the carbon footprint required to bring their products to market.  It is only by submitting to such behavior-modifying protocols, say the environmentalists, that the polar bears, the rain forest, the earth itself can be saved.  As with most seemingly well intentioned but trendy projects, one can't help feeling that a great deal of obfuscation and hypocrisy is at work.

I'm not talking about Laurie David (living on Seinfeld royalties while traveling on her private Gulfstream jet to save the pl
anet) or Al Gore (spending $30,000 a year for electricity for his 20-room house with pool), but about my pet-rich neighbors on the Upper West Side.  According to the Waltham Centre for Pet Nutrition, a moderately active 80-lb dog requires 1,955 calories a day, in other words, the energy requirement of a 120-lb woman.  A lactating dog of that weight requires 3,900 to 7,800 calories daily.  Smaller dogs of, say, 20 pounds, consume energy disproportionate to their weight compared to large dogs: translated, that means two miniature poodles consume more than a small German shepherd.  So, when calculating one's carbon footprint, dog owners should add an extra individual (or two or three) to their household size.

While it is true that some of the carbon dioxide released into the environment as a result of the metabolism of pet food is renewable, the energetics required to produce this food fare — the factories, the delivery trucks, the metal for the cans — are often nonrenewable or renewable more in principle than in practice.  "Tin" cans, for instance, made of iron, require about half a pound of carbon (in the form of coke) per pound to manufacture.  After use, they go to the city dump, where they may or may not be recycled.  Even the best metal-recycling systems recover only a fraction of the metal, while using huge amounts of nonrenewable energy in their operation.  A dog's natural diet is heavily weighted toward protein, while the fertilizer chemicals required to produce cattle feed or the high-protein legumes and grains that make up some pet foods are highly energy intensive.

Based on a report by MarketResearch.com, the U.S. pet food market is experiencing healthy growth: "marketers continue to convert pet owners to better quality, higher priced, more upscale fare."  This glowing report (from October 2006) mentions the "bases" that premium pet food makers manage to cover: among others, natural/organic, fortified/functional, weight control, breed-size specific, and gourmet.  People who purchase organic pet food would hardly be so cruel as to leave Fido in a warm apartment in the summer months without air conditioning.  Besides eight hours of cool air, don't forget to factor in the TV to keep him company, or the electric lights when he is home alone in the evening.  In very round numbers, a single 6000 BTU air conditioner run for eight fihours has the carbon footprint of 15 gallons of gas, which will drive a car for about 300 miles.  Over its ten-year life span, a dog enjoying the benefits of air conditioning will consume about 150 gallons of fossil fuel -- and that's assuming the system is operating at 100% efficiency! Don't get me started on cats, who compete with humans in consuming annually millions of tons of various fish varieties from overfished seas.

This exposition is not about animals, however, but about the hypocrisy and willful ignorance of the liberal mindset.  After all, what is the point of feeding "natural/organic" food to animals that lick the behinds of other animals, drink from toilets, chew on shoes (dyes and other chemicals in the leather), and sniff up dirty curbs and sidewalks?  As with the cloth shopping bags, the fluorescent light bulbs, and the Kyoto Treaty, Upper West Siders want to appear virtuous, all the while polluting the ground under our feet and fouling the air we breathe.

Alice Neel's Canonization by the New York Times

I was at the Metropolitan Museum yesterday, finally able to wander into the galleries displaying the works of artist Alice Neal. It was one of those times (very frequently these days) when I felt myself at odds with the Zeitgeist as proclaimed by the New York Times.

Neel's paintings are fun to look at. I was reminded of David Hockney's paintings, although they lack the sociability of Hockney's work. In any case, as I read today online such is the company in which the NYT places Neel: "This array confirms Neel as equal if not superior to artists like Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon and destined for icon status on the order of Vincent van Gogh and David Hockney."

But, really, Vincent van Gogh?

I am not an art critic, have not studied art history, but I have looked at a lot of paintings. There are many paintings by Neel that I find pleasant to look at, for instance, the one at the top of the post of "Two Dominican Boys of 108th Street." (Click to enlarge.) It is really quite charming, but from today's perspective (it was painted in 1955), one can't help feeling that it is a little patronizing.

Is she really a major artist? Why do I suspect that if she were not a "radical feminist" she would not receive this accolade? Would not indeed have major galleries of the Museum given over to her work. It is one of those exhibitions where the Met's publicity machine brings in the numbers, with people carefully reading the captions that reveal Neel's political and social ideas. Not much about the art itself, the craft. The other painting shown here is entitled simply "The Marxist Girl" (from 1978). It is not patronizing, like "The Dominican Boys," but it is evidence of Neel's bona fides. If you hear people talking about the show, be sure you will hear them talking about Neel's "radical" vision.

The Stasi = Cancel Culture

For a while I have been wondering who the cancelers are. I mean who are these people who jump out of the woodwork demanding blood when someone is incautious enough to say something they find offensive? I thought we lived in a time in which everything is relative, right? To be serious, however, does anyone reading this perchance know such a person? I know lots of people who foam at the mouth at the mention of the name of Donald Trump, but they are not cancelers. So who belongs to this invisible crowd?

It just hit me the other day that our current cancel culture works like the Stasi. For those who don't remember East Germany, the Stasi was the State Security Service, which, according to Wikipedia, "has been described as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies ever to have existed." It's worth looking at the Wikipedia article, just to see the complexity of its resources. Alongside tens of thousands of official employees, the Stasi also relied on almost 200,000 "civilian informants, in other words almost 2.5 percent of the population between the ages of 18 and 60. The purpose of which, lest we forget, and this is why the Stasi reminds me of cancel culture, was "to root out the class enemy." Cancel culture is rooting out deviant ideas.

Isn't that exactly what is going in the United States now? A very small percentage of people have a large majority of people scared to open their mouth to offer an opinion. Like the "civilian informers" in East Germany,  the cancelers are ordinary people. And invisible, hiding behind the anonymous nature of the internet.

 Image: LifestyleInquirer

A more unxious and hectoring Hillary Clinton

I am surprised that no one has yet compared Meghan Markle to our former First Lady. It should not come as a surprise that Meghan Markle is reportedly running for president. Unfortunately for Meghan, the draw is Prince Harry, just as it was Bill, who gave Hillary her outing in the public eye.

Image credit: Toons Mag

New York Headlines of the Day NOT

I just tried to set up a blog with the above title and was told by Google I could not do so. The idea for such a blog came to me, as it occasionally does, because the headlines in the New York Times regarding Trump and conservatives generally (and today's, October 9, 2020 are a doozy) are from the get-go biased. My idea was to set up a blog giving an alternate headline of the day if, for instance, Obama were in office or, alternately, if the New York Times were predisposed to Trump. Today's headline reads:

"AS VIRUS JOLTS WEST WING, TRUMP ENDS TALKS ON AID"

Let's say that Obama were in the White House on this date, would you be surprised to see the following headline:

"AS VIRUS JOLTS WEST WING, OBAMA TEAMS CONTINUES SEARCH FOR VIRUS"

In the second scenario, insert TRUMP for OBAMA.

I think everyone can see what is meant.

From the get-go, however, the New York Times has led the way in maligning an elected president, as can be seen in the image above, right after the election in 2016. I encourage folks to keep their own record.

The true downside of this media bias is its effect on the people of the Upper West Side, where I live. Their blood pressure rises every time they look at the front page of the Times. They have been turned into haters. They wish an elected president would die. These are people who are well educated, have a good income, and so on. But the worst part is that well-educated people have simply stopped thinking. I have friends who have law or literature degrees who nowadays reading nothing but The New York Times. One recently told me he finds even the long essays in the New Yorker too long. How pathetic is that. People in the former Soviet Union read through the bias, knew what the papers reported was false or biased. Americans, living in a free country, have given up thinking.

Group Think

In these times, when one feels despair about the intellectual state of America, it is enlightening (a word used advisedly here) to look at other times, other places. I speak of the Enlightenment itself. In connection with a book I am reviewing concerning literary journals in 18th-century Germany, I have been led to read a piece that appeared in an online forum called Republic of Letters, in which appeared, in 2008, a piece by the scholar Elena Russo, entitled "Slander and Glory in the Republic of Letters: Diderot and Seneca Confront Rousseau." It is of course an exceedingly arcane subject, concerning a quarrel between two of the major French philosophes. Diderot, it seems, was channeling the Roman philosopher Seneca in order to demolish intellectually the status of Rousseau. In a familiar tale, the two had as young men been friends, but in the course of time fell out. Rousseau could be quite contrary, and Diderot seemed to fear for the slander that Rousseau might publish about him. So, intellectual feuds come and go.

The terms of the argument in Diderot's essay, however, strike a familiar note in respect of contemporary attacks on people with different opinions. Herewith two quotes from the essay. In the first, the author is discussing Rousseau. I include the footnote, which renders Rousseau's own words:

1. "The Dialogues and the Essai [writes Elena Russo] evoke a world in which individuals cannot endure being alone, but are eager to make themselves subservient to the opinion of the majority, regardless of what evidence and reality tell them": 'Once the spin is set in motion, each and everyone follows the current and increases its force. How can one mistrust one’s own opinion when one sees that it is shared by everybody else?'”[19]

[19] “Quand une fois le branle est donné, chacun suivant le torrent en augmente l’impulsion. Comment se défier de son sentiment, quand on le voit être celui de tout le monde?” (ibid., 892).

2. The other quote is from Diderot, in which he speaks of the intellectual fraternity that should guide public opinion, i.e., men like himself, which he calls an "invisble church."

"I am talking about that small flock, that invisible church which listens, observes, meditates, and speaks in muted tones, but whose voice prevails in the long run and shapes public opinion." [24]

[24] Je parle de ce petit troupeau, de cette église invisible qui écoute, qui regarde, qui médite, qui parle bas, et dont la voix prédomine à la longue et forme l’opinion générale.

Finally, the author says the following about Rousseau:

Rousseau, who had always seen the philosophical church as a malevolent secret society entirely devoted to his personal destruction, had been living in that hell for a long time.

"Invisible church" is an interesting expression, for it conveys rules and dogma such that they become established, every bit as much as those of a "visible church, but, unless you are contrary (like myself), you accept the dogma and even believe that there is nothing intellectually conformist or repressive about it. It becomes "naturalized," indeed "enlightened"; after all, everyone YOU know thinks the same way, right, and even use the same words. Faced someone who disagrees with the dogma, the "muted tones" that Diderot invokes disappear, to be replaced by screams that drown out the words of heretics.