"Do I again go in search of lost time with Marcel Proust, or am I to attempt yet another rereading of Alice Walker’s stirring denunciation of all males, black and white?"

"My former students, many of them now stars of the School of Resentment, proclaim that they teach social selflessness, which begins in learning how to read selflessly. The author has no self, the literary character has no self, and the reader has no self. Shall we gather at the river with these generous ghosts, free of the guilt of past self-assertions, and be baptized in the waters of Lethe? What shall we do to be saved? The study of literature, however it is conducted, will not save any individual, any more than it will improve any society. Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves."

Wrote Harold Bloom, in "The Western Canon."

That jumped out at me this morning, because I've been thinking about the idea of forgetting oneself.

Last night, I was reading the story, "Kleist in Thun" (from this collection by Robert Walser), and I was struck by this passage:

"To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all."

"The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves. The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one’s own growing inner self. Reading deeply in the Canon will not make one a better or a worse person, a more useful or more harmful citizen. The mind’s dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality. We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while there is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime’s rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively. One ancient test for the canonical remains fiercely valid: unless it demands rereading, the work does not qualify. The inevitable analogue is the erotic one. If you are Don Giovanni and Leporello keeps the list, one brief encounter will suffice."

From Harold Bloom, "The Western Canon" (which I'm reading on the occasion of Bloom's death).

Looking up the Amazon link for that, I came across "The White Man's Guide to White Male Writers of the Western Canon" (publication date November 5, 2019). That's by Dana Schwartz (a female "arts and culture" writer). From the description:

From Shakespeare's greatest mystery (how could a working-class man without access to an MFA program be so prolific?) to the true meaning of Kafkaesque (you know you've made it when you have an adjective named for you), the pages herewith are at once profound and practical. Use my ingenious Venn diagram to test your knowledge of which Jonathan—Franzen, Lethem, or Safran Foer—hates Twitter and lives in Brooklyn. (Trick question: all 3!) Sneer at chick-lit and drink Mojitos like Hemingway (not like middle-aged divorcées!).

"Our readers are intelligent and discerning. We trust them to sift through something that someone says in an interview, whether it’s the president or a musician or a person accused of sexual harassment, and to judge for themselves: Do I agree with this person?"

Says Lara Takenaga, quoted in "A Q. and A. With Alice Walker Stoked Outrage. Our Book Review Editor Responds/In The Times’s latest By the Book column, the author Alice Walker lauded a writer who has been accused of anti-Semitism. Our Book Review editor explains why we featured her" (NYT).

We were talking about this issue 2 days ago in "New York Times assailed for Alice Walker interview endorsing ‘anti-Semitic’ conspiracy theorist." My position was:

I'm looking at the NYT piece now and see that it's a spare, easy-to-read Q&A about what books are "on your nightstand." These are the books Alice Walker is reading, with her own words about why. It's not the format of this style of interview to quarrel with the interviewee's book choices. It's raw material, and we the readers are challenged to read critically. The NYT archive is full of these "By the Book" interviews, and the interviewees are given the room to explain their own choices and that's that. If you take that to be the NYT endorsing the books, you're an idiot.

So I'm happy with the position expressed by Takenaga. I wish more of the NYT reflected the same confidence in the reader's intelligence and ability to sift and discern.

"New York Times assailed for Alice Walker interview endorsing ‘anti-Semitic’ conspiracy theorist."

Explained by Isaac Stanley-Becker at WaPo.

There are so many layers to this story, which I saw yesterday and decided not to blog because I'd done enough blogging for the day and it looked complicated. Now, I'm seeing this WaPo piece and thinking I can use it to organize the layers to present it to you, but I'm wearied by the first paragraph, which brings in a layer I hadn't noticed before. Look how complicated this is. This is — I must stress — the first paragraph of the article. Look how it uses the word "it" without an antecedent:

Critics call it anti-Semitic, saying it places Holocaust revisionism at the center of an odious and addled worldview. Its title has been borrowed by followers of QAnon, a conspiracy movement that favors President Trump and peddles baseless theories about government secrets and cabals.

The layer I had not noticed before is QAnon! I thought QAnon was had faded from currency. The layers I knew were: 1. A supposedly anti-Semitic writer I'd never heard of, 2. The famous writer Alice Walker, who used that other writer's work in some way, 3. The NYT who did some sort of puff piece about #2, 4. People who are criticizing #3 for not attending to #1.

Okay. I don't know if I want to do this. But let me try:

"It" in paragraph 1 of the Stanley-Becker piece is “And the Truth Shall Set You Free,” a book by David Icke, who is the writer in layer #1 of my incomplete understanding.

In the NYT piece, Alice Walker said "In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about." She called him a "curious person's dream come true."

And now the debate is whether the NYT had a "gate-keeping" responsibility to help readers discount Walker's recommendation of Icke.

Stanley-Becker provides the filter, telling us that Icke "disseminates conspiracy theories in self-published books and on YouTube" and "promote[s] the idea that a race of reptilian humanoids, widely viewed as a stand-in for Jews, is secretly running the world," and, to that end, has relied on "the infamous anti-Semitic forgery 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.'" Icke  has written that the Holocaust was "coldly calculated by the ‘Jewish’ elite."

The NYT has not caved to criticism. It stands by its original article and refuses to tack on any detail about Icke.

I'm looking at the NYT piece now and see that it's a spare, easy-to-read Q&A about what books are "on your nightstand." These are the books Alice Walker is reading, with her own words about why. It's not the format of this style of interview to quarrel with the interviewee's book choices . It's raw material, and we the readers are challenged to read critically. The NYT archive is full of these "By the Book" interviews, and the interviewees are given the room to explain their own choices and that's that. If you take that to be the NYT endorsing the books, you're an idiot.

Stanley-Becker never gets back to the subject of QAnon! What is the QAnon connection? I reread what S-B wrote: "Its title has been borrowed by followers of QAnon..." Its title, you mean "And the Truth Shall Set You Free"?!!

Does Stanley-Becker think Icke originated the phrase "and the truth will set you free"? I literally feel nauseated at the thought that I'm reading a long column, seeking enlightenment, and the person who wrote it does not know the Biblical verse, "and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Is the only connection between QAnon and Icke that both used that phrase?!

I need a rest.

BACK FROM MY REST: I think Stanley-Becker — eager to drag Trump into some newly available mud — gratuitously complicated an already confusing story by throwing QAnon into the first paragraph. The connection to QAnon was never explained, and as far as I can tell, is based on Stanley-Becker's ignorance of one of the most famous quotes in the Bible!

Why my tag for mothers is "motherhood" and my tag for fathers is "fathers."

Having just said that it "means something" that The New York Times put its article about Jason Patric's fight for the rights of sperm donors in its "Fashion & Style" section, I'm sensitive to the meaning of what I've long recognized as a strange lack of parallelism in this blog's tags. I've never bothered to look up the answer before, since I know it must have to do with the first post that seemed to need a tag on the subject, but now I'm interested in the specifics.

The post that led to the creation of the "motherhood" tag was "Brought up by a rabid feminist who thought motherhood was about the worst thing that could happen to a woman" (May 24, 2008). Obviously, the word "motherhood" was in the quote I used as the post title, so that preempted more subtle thinking on the topic, but what got enshrined in the tags was the abstract concept "motherhood," not the collection of human individuals who are mothers.

But now I'm puzzled, because the first post with the "fathers" tag also had the pre-existing tag "motherhood": "We bad moms are happy to confess our sins because we're confident..." (May 15, 2009).

This means that my long-standing lack of curiosity over the lack of parallelism was based on an incorrect assumption. Feel free to psychoanalyze me on the subject. Options: 1. Althouse elevates mothers to an ideal realm but leaves fathers in the mundane and concrete real world (and this means all kinds of things about what she thinks about gender politics and gender difference). 2. Althouse prefers simplicity, so she picked "motherhood" because it was right there in the quote and "fathers" because it's simpler than "fatherhood" (and never changing "motherhood" to "mothers" was itself a matter of keeping it simple).

"I felt that women betraying each other was something I was investigating at the time."

Said Tori Amos, explaining the origin of the song "Cornflake Girl":

The idea of that, and how quote-unquote friends can really hurt each other deeply, and the idea that the enemy is out there somewhere, but really, where we get hurt usually comes from people we are close to. So “Cornflake Girl” really was about two women, that one felt that the other had really betrayed her.

The inspiration came from Alice Walker’s book "The Temple Of My Familiar":

In the book, they talked about how young girls would be taken to a place for female circumcision, whether it was out in the desert of Africa or what have you, usually by somebody they trusted. A mother, a grandmother, somebody they loved, and of course the person that was doing this to them, taking them to the whatever you want to call it, the hacker or the mutilator, thought that they were doing the right thing, or else the girl wouldn’t be able to get married. They justify their betrayal, and that was really what prompted the idea of “Cornflake Girl.”

But wait, says Adam (at Throwing Things), what about that story about how "she beat out Sarah Jessica Parker to star in an ad for Kellogg's Just Right cereal?"



Just Right cereal... female genital mutilation... it's hard to imagine a greater disparity in sources for a song. And yet... everything goes into the mix, doesn't it? You read books about all sorts of drastic and dramatic occurrences and your own life ticks on with its miniature but important-to-you events, it all swirls around in your poet-brain, and out pop a song (and, over the years, out pop stories about whether the song came from).

This isn't journalism. It's art, and the only test is: it's a great song.

The Purpler Tree and the things you talked about last night.

Last night's purple tree opened a flood of conversation. Curtiss said:

Purple is the color of death.

But you know that, don't you?

I said:

I think men don't like the color purple. Women love it to excess, and men don't really understand. Death, indeed!

Palladian said:

I don't like anything Alice Walker ever wrote.

Instead of transcribing my laughter, let me give you a newer and purpler version of the tree that opened the canyons of your minds:



When I stopped my starry-eyed laughing, I said:

But quite apart from [Alice Walker], I think visual perception is partly deeply biological and there's serious sexual discrepancy about purple.

Then Meade said:

"I think men don't like the color purple. "

The professor speaks truth. And she does so in a most colorful way.

I, however, as a man am an exception to the rule: I love purple. In fact, I wear a purple hat and a purple scarf. Men leave me alone while women can't seem to keep their hands off me. That is, as long as I wear the hat and scarf.

Meade inspired me to make the new tree the color of his scarf. And to give him this advice — in case we should ever meet IRL.

Subsequently, Meade asks the guys a great question, and Curtiss gives a great answer. You'll have to go in there and find those things, but don't trip over the things Titus says he's having trouble finding.

Professor Palladian had to step back in and cool us off with this historical lecture:

The word "purple" comes to us from the Greek (via the usual circuitous route through Latin and Old English) πορφύραν, porphura, of the mollusk that produced the only bright, deep, color-fast purple dye available in the world until the mid-nineteenth century. Walk through any art museum and you'll see no bright purple color in any painting produced before then. The color to which the name "purple" referred has changed many times depending on the time period and the culture being discussed. The "Prince" sort of purple that most people think of is not the color of the purple of antiquity. The ancient purple, Tyrian purple, is more akin to the color of a fresh Welch's grape juice stain on a white cotton shirt, only much more intense. Tyrian purple is made from the fresh mucous secretion of a big sea snail that is variously known as Murex brandaris and Haustellum brandaris. It requires harvesting and killing 10,000 of these gastropods to produce one gram of the dye, hence the astronomical price and rarity of the color.

I have a sample of the dye, about 50 milligrams, which cost me nearly two hundred dollars. To put that in perspective, an extra strength Tylenol pill contains 500 milligrams of Acetaminophen alone, not counting the weight of the other ingredients.

As I said, there was no other bright, color-fast purple dye or pigment available to artists until the 19th century. The use of Tyrian purple pretty much died out by the 11th century in the West. Artists could mix purple hues by glazing blue pigments with red pigments, but as there were only three bright red pigments available to artists until the 19th century, two [1; 2] of which faded rapidly and one of which is both too opaque and too orange to actually produce a mixed purple, not many artists bothered.

What changed everything (and by extension, the world as we know it) was W.H. Perkin's discovery and production of the world's first synthetic organic dye: 3-amino-2,±9-dimethyl-5-phenyl-7-(p-tolylamino)phenazinium acetate, or Mauveine, later known as the color mauve. Perkin was, on a challenge from one of his professors, trying to synthesize quinine and failed, producing a black lump. While he was trying to clean the lump out of his flask, he discovered that a portion of the lump dissolved in alcohol and produced a bright purple. Voilà! The first aniline dye, which changed not only the world of fashion and art, but as I said before, changed the entire world. It was through Perkin's discovery and subsequent manufacture of Mauveine and the resulting proliferation of aniline dye research and industry that the first antimicrobial drugs, the sulfonamides (the early examples of which were dye-based) were invented. Not to mention Tylenol, Polyurethane and the whole synthetic chemical industry.

Not bad for a chemical that started as an accident involving a substance (aniline, phenylamine) that stinks of rotting fish. An apt smell for the chemical that was responsible for the rebirth of purple in the modern world, the olfactory memory across the millennia of those vast piles of dead, rotting mollusks that yielded the color of Emperors.

Sex, science, and art — all night long, all because of purple. And trees. You know I'm an Ann Arborist. Here in Madison.

"Brought up by a rabid feminist who thought motherhood was about the worst thing that could happen to a woman."

"I very nearly missed out on becoming a mother."

And I very nearly missed out on linking to this article — because I've already written about Rebecca Walker and, even then, I felt put off by the way this woman is getting too much publicity saying thoroughly conventional things — motherhood is fulfilling — while being the daughter of a writer (Alice Walker) who had to build her fame by coming up with interesting new things to say and now has a daughter who manufactures fame out of expressing hostility toward her famous mother.

But this article is getting a fair amount of attention. Michelle Malkin is saying: "Print this out and send it to every young liberal woman you know."

So I read it. This struck me:

My mother took umbrage at an interview in which I'd mentioned that my parents didn't protect or look out for me. She sent me an e-mail, threatening to undermine my reputation as a writer. I couldn't believe she could be so hurtful - particularly when I was pregnant.

Devastated, I asked her to apologise and acknowledge how much she'd hurt me over the years with neglect, withholding affection and resenting me for things I had no control over - the fact that I am mixed-race, that I have a wealthy, white, professional father and that I was born at all.

But she wouldn't back down. Instead, she wrote me a letter saying that our relationship had been inconsequential for years and that she was no longer interested in being my mother. She even signed the letter with her first name, rather than 'Mom'.

But wait. You are the one trying to undermine her reputation. What is she supposed to do? Write articles portraying you as lying or exaggerating or nutty? She seems to be keeping her silence. I'm back to my original instinct: Look away.