"... is new again. This summer, the stylish young men I’ve seen around New York have continued their rejection of the once-inescapable skinny pants and check shirts in favor of something a little looser and decidedly more louche."
"Years of stretch fabrics that really needed the stretch have given way to breezy textiles and retro short-sleeved knits with a natural slouch, idiosyncratic prints, a lot more color, and maybe a little bit of embroidery. There are fewer sneakers and more loafers. And then there are all those camp collars.... Tired of the sameness and omnipresence of new clothes and nostalgic for a past that many of them don’t remember, young people have plunged themselves into thrifting and vintage resale, hunting for weird or interesting things from the ’90s and early 2000s."
The White House has been touting its actions to lower prices, including targeting corporate consolidation to help create product markets that are more competitive. But inflation has proved a blistering political handicap for Biden, and a litmus test for how many Americans judge the economy. Republicans largely blame Democrats’ $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan for overheating the economy, and the GOP is set to hammer on inflation going into the midterm elections this fall.
ADDED: The word "ooze" — according to the OED — comes from the same line as the Old Frisian word wāse, which means mud, the Old Icelandic word veisa (wetness, mud, marshy ground), the Norwegian veis (marshy soil), and the Danish regional vejs, which means something that is more fun to say in English: oozy bottom. As a noun meaning wet mud or slime, "ooze" goes back to early Old English. The verb "ooze" is more recent, and I can see that the earliest uses had to do with bodily fluids. Example: "Ulcers that lye deep, and ouze out their Matter thro'..winding Passages" (1737).
Some of the greatest wordsmiths have deployed the verb "ooze":
[T]he show will be trimmed to run without an intermission by cutting the “Somewhere” ballet and—gasp—“I Feel Pretty.” The changes have not only been approved by the creators’ estates but, in fact, reflect the original desires of Sondheim, still going strong at 89, who candidly confessed in his 2010 book Finishing the Hat that he had long been uncomfortable with some of the lyrics of the latter song. Van Hove isn’t streamlining to be perverse; the show’s action takes place over 48 hours, and he wants the production to capture that race against time. “I want to make a juggernaut,” he says. “You feel that these people are running toward their death and there’s no escape from it.”
An intermission can serve some good purposes, giving people a chance to discuss the show and share interpretations and maybe compare notes and decide to get the hell out of there and maybe to help each other appreciate what's going on. You know, something like this:
But I like when a show has no intermission. Movies rarely have an intermission, and we are used to plunging straight through the story, keeping the momentum. Recently, I saw a play that had no intermission. It was the George Bernard Shaw play "Man of Destiny" (at the American Players Theater). Running time, an hour and a half. It was great.
But what about cutting "I Feel Pretty"?
Aside from the declaration that she feels "gay," this song and dance strikes me as very of the moment. Maria seems like she's got an Instagram account. Maybe the problem is that the audience isn't going to see Maria as delightfully hopeful and innocent, someone we don't want to see hurt, but a narcissistic fool who deserves a harsh dose of reality.
No one has ever before said "degringolade," let alone used "degringolade" in a sentence with "diminuendo." No. Wait. "Degringolade" is a real word, not a sudden coinage based on "gringo."
Being a massive fan of his book "The Mosquito Coast," I trust Theroux with language.
I see that "degringolade" comes from the French French, "dégringoler," which means "to descend rapidly." It has nothing to do with the word "gringo." Theroux came up with that juxtaposition, quite nicely. A "degringolade" is a rapid descent. George Bernard Shaw used it in 1895 in The Saturday Review: "Miss Lottie Collins..will soon find her popularity degringolading from the summit on which the Tarara craze exalted it."
Anyway... I like Theroux, though I haven't read his travel books (but there is plenty of travel in the novel "The Mosquito Coast").
The book excerpt is too long to sample adequately, so I'll just give you one little thing that made me laugh. He's in a restaurant and addresses the owner's granddaughter:
“How old are you?” I asked, to change the subject.
“Twelve.”
Provoked by my question, the old woman’s daughter — the girl’s mother — approached me and sized me up. “How old are you, señor?” “Adivina.” Take a guess.
She studied me, she did not speak, she cocked her head, pursed her lips, and pressed a finger to her cheek, in actressy reflection, liking the suspense she was creating.
“Seventy-six,” she said. Tilting her head back, looking haughty, she was triumphant.
“But I’m a cabrón,” I said, thumping my chest.
They shrieked, because the word had a belittling meaning here, not “dude,” as I had meant, but “dickhead.”
"The twelfth of May, 1796, in north Italy, at Tavazzano, on the road from Lodi to Milan. The afternoon sun is blazing serenely over the plains of Lombardy, treating the Alps with respect and the anthills with indulgence, not incommoded by the basking of the swine and oxen in the villages nor hurt by its cool reception in the churches, but fiercely disdainful of two hordes of mischievous insects which are the French and Austrian armies...."
ADDED: The play is "The Man of Destiny" by George Bernard Shaw (at The American Players Theater in Spring Green). There's another performance today at 1 pm, and I see one ticket available. There are 2 more performances, one of which is currently sold out and another, on the 28th — also a matinee — that has one ticket available. The "man of destiny" is Napoleon. As the play begins, Napoleon will be sitting at that table...
NAPOLEON (intent on his map, but cramming himself [with food] mechanically with his left hand). Don't talk. I'm busy.
GIUSEPPE (with perfect goodhumor). Excellency: I obey.
NAPOLEON. Some red ink.
GIUSEPPE. Alas! excellency, there is none.
NAPOLEON (with Corsican facetiousness). Kill something and bring me its blood.
GIUSEPPE (grinning). There is nothing but your excellency's horse, the sentinel, the lady upstairs, and my wife.
NAPOLEON. Kill your wife.
GIUSEPPE. Willingly, your excellency; but unhappily I am not strong enough. She would kill me.
NAPOLEON. That will do equally well.
GIUSEPPE. Your excellency does me too much honor. (Stretching his hand toward the flask.) Perhaps some wine will answer your excellency's purpose.
NAPOLEON (hastily protecting the flask, and becoming quite serious). Wine! No: that would be waste. You are all the same: waste! waste! waste! (He marks the map with gravy, using his fork as a pen.)
Scott Adams addresses the question whether Beto has done hallucinogens:
Scott's first pass at the question is another question: "Have you seen Beto?" He giggles while waiting for the question to soak in. He says anyone who's taken hallucinogens (which Scott has) will have an "easier time" with the question.
Eventually he gives his answer: He'd place a "large bet" on "yes."
He's quick to add that it's not a criticism. "In fact, I might even prefer it." This preference interweaves with his reason for believing Beto has used hallucinogenics (reasons other than that nickname, Psychedelic Warlord): Beto doesn't see barriers. People who have done hallucinogenics "think their barriers are artificial.... They see the world around them as somewhat artificial, meaning that they know it's a construct of their own mind."
Scott's use of the word "know" reveals that (by his own standard) he's used hallucinogenics. He knows the world around him is a construct of his own mind.
"Once you realize that your experience is, to a large extent, a construct of your own mind, then you can start removing barriers. So you can say to yourself, yes, it does seem that, in the normal world, it would be impossible to become President of the United States with my résumé, but I've taken hallucinogens...."
Scott ends this segment reaffirming that he believes Beto has taken hallucinogens. He never gets back to the wafted assertion that it's preferable to have a President who has acquired the knowledge/"knowledge" that barriers are artificial. It makes me think of that well known Robert F. Kennedy quote — and a lot of people think Beto O'Rourke looks like Robert F. Kennedy — "Some men see things as they are and say, why; I dream things that never were and say, why not?"
That's Teddy Kennedy at RFK's funeral. RFK adopted those words as the theme for the presidential campaign that ended in his death. The words are nearly identical to words that George Bernard Shaw had the serpent say to Eve in the play "Back to Methuselah": "You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?'"
I remembered that I'd already written about the RFK quote and Shaw and the serpent, but it blew my mind to search my archive and discover that I wrote about it at the end of a riff that began with a snippet from Scott Adams. Adams had been talking about the weird propaganda video President Trump sent to Kim Jong-Un. I leapt to the RFK quote after I'd riffed my way to: "[M]aybe the target isn't Kim at all but the American media, and they are being lured into mocking and disparaging Trump, which will ultimately help Trump, as the American people will watch the video and be taken by the optimism the elites find appalling."
Leapt, over the barrier.
Is it funny that Trump's dream of things that never were is of a barrier — his wall? Is it evidence of having taken hallucinogens that you see no barrier to... a barrier?
As you can see in the previous post, I saw a George Bernard Shaw play — "Heartbreak House" — at a lovely outdoor theater yesterday. The excellent cast gave a fine performance and got quite a few laughs. I laughed. It was a comedy, based on the style of Anton Chekhov and also inspired by the 1874 painting "The North-West Passage/It might be done and England should do it."
Anyway. Though I laughed a sort of abstracted intellectual laugh during the play and appreciated it silently much of the time, there was something I saw and thought after the play that reduced me to flat-out hysteria.
I was walking down the path from the theater in the woods on the hill, down toward the parking lot with the rest of the crowd, and in front of me was a young man in a leather jacket that has 2 words painted on the back of it. He had a blanket or something slung over he shoulder. (It was a bit cold, and many people had blankets.) So I couldn't read the entire words, just the ends of the words. I saw "-ORM" above "-OW." I tried to think of what he might have written there, and I figured that "-OW" was "NOW," and it was a political slogan. He wanted something, and he wanted it now. Like Jim Morrison:
So what was it he wanted with this primal urgency? "-ORM"? I thought: REFORM. And the idea of "REFORM NOW" as a political slogan cracked me up to the point of insanity. It's like shouting "Give me moderation or give me death!" "Reform" is just too dull of a wish to demand it NOW!
I was lost in hilarity when the man whipped the blanket off his shoulder and revealed the 2 words. Suddenly the impossibly dull political demand was a blatant, far-off mistake, which only made it funnier to me, especially in contrast to the real words, which were for me nonsense — "STORM CROW." Nonsense is funny too. You don't get nonsense when you always have the internet at your fingertips, but I did not have it there as I was dissolving in laughter on that hill. To me STORM CROW was just a new way to shout REFORM NOW!
In the clear light of morning, internet at my fingertips, I see the boring information that Storm Crow is a character in "Magic: The Gathering," and "Magic: The Gathering" is a trading card game. There are over 20 billion "Magic: The Gathering" trading cards out there. That's all news to me. Maybe if you saw "-ORM/-OW" on a young man's leather jacket, you'd figure right off it was "STORM CROW." But I had my 2 minutes of high amusement trying to think what sort of person would get so intense about reform, that he might caterwaul — in the Jim Morrison mode — We want reform and we want it... NOW!!!!!
Those are lines spoken in the play "Heartbreak House," by George Bernard Shaw, which we saw at The American Players Theater yesterday.
The 1920 play is set just before World War I. The line "But how can you love a liar?" is spoken by the rich bohemian woman Mrs. Hushabye, and the line that follows it is spoken by Ellie, a poor young woman who is in love with Mrs. Hushabye's lying husband, Hector. Ellie intends to marry a rich capitalist, Boss Mangan.
Mangan, trying to extricate himself from the planned marriage, reveals what a liar and a cheater he is, but Ellie still wants to marry him. She says: "If we women were particular about men's characters, we should never get married at all, Mr Mangan."
Hector explains his behavior:
HECTOR. What am I to do? I can't fall in love; and I can't hurt a woman's feelings by telling her so when she falls in love with me. And as women are always falling in love with my moustache I get landed in all sorts of tedious and terrifying flirtations in which I'm not a bit in earnest....
Mangan reaches a breaking point and declares he's getting the hell out of the house, "Heartbreak House," where all the action takes place. Hector makes a move to go too and to turn it into a ridiculous romantic escapade:
HECTOR: Let us all go out into the night and leave everything behind us.
MANGAN. You stay where you are, the lot of you. I want no company, especially female company.
ELLIE. Let him go. He is unhappy here. He is angry with us.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Go, Boss Mangan; and when you have found the land where there is happiness and where there are no women, send me its latitude and longitude; and I will join you there.
I thought you might enjoy those lines. There's much more, of course. Shaw was writing a play deliberately in the manner of Anton Chekhov. Note the seagull on the set in my photograph (at the middle of the right edge).
AFTERTHOUGHT: What is the difference between "escape" and "escapade"?
"Escape" + "ade" suggests a drink that produces escape.
Yes, I know that's not right! Do you expect me to look it up in a dictionary?
Speaking of drink, Captain Shotover (a very old man) speaks often of "the seventh degree of concentration," which seems to be some mystical state that he learned about in his seafaring journeys, some 1920s New Age-iness. Late in the play, Ellie declares:
ELLIE. There seems to be nothing real in the world except my father and Shakespeare. [Hector]'s tigers are false; Mr Mangan's millions are false; there is nothing really strong and true about [Mrs. Hushabye] but her beautiful black hair; and Lady Utterword's is too pretty to be real. The one thing that was left to me was the Captain's seventh degree of concentration; and that turns out to be—
Some nice lines in there about following or not following the law, and I'd quote them here if I could copy and paste them from the text of the original play (by George Bernard Shaw), but I can't, even though — searching for "law" in text — I discovered that the play is much more about law than the movie.
Anyway, the movie unleashes 3 actors — Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and Laurence Olivier — to emote against each other on the subject of revolution. And there's one woman — Janette Scott — whose task is to decide not whether to join the revolution but which hunky male she likes best. Spoiler alert: Initially her husband Burt leaves her cold and the devilish Kirk Douglas turns her on, but later when Kirk gets virtuous and Burt joins the revolution — and changes from clerical garb into a buckskin jacket — she goes running to Burt who hoists her up on his big horse.
The movie is "The Devil's Disciple," and here's the full text of the Shaw play. I'd like to see the stage play, and I think the movie could be remade. There's a lot of potential to redo the big fight scene in which the Burt Lancaster character single-handedly takes on a bunch of British officers in a room. With no weapons on him, he uses what he can, including a big flaming log he grabs out of the fireplace. How can he hold a flaming log? He swathes the metaphor in a metaphor — his black priestly coat — the one that had previously insulated him from what his smoldering wife had to give.
Ah! I see there is a version of the play with Patrick Stewart and Ian Richardson, available on Amazon Prime. That's a 1987 TV film, so... it's not likely to include a more convincing and exciting wielding of the flaming log. A quick search of the text of the play, however, makes me doubt that glaring phallic symbol was Shaw's idea.
One difference is that Scott Adams is cool with propaganda and he's simply analyzing how good it is as propaganda. Others are appalled by propaganda (when, for whatever reason, they are triggered to regard something as propaganda).
If the intended target of the propaganda knows he's looking at propaganda, then how can the propaganda work? If Kim is the intended target, it might fail because he'll think they're insulting my intelligence to imagine that I will be swayed by such obvious propaganda.
But it's possible that something more subtle was intended. For example, maybe the idea was for Kim to recognize that it's frankly propagandistic and to enjoy it because he is hip to it, to appreciate the American corniness of it, and to feel in on a shared joke about something monumentally serious.
Or, maybe the target isn't Kim at all but the American media, and they are being lured into mocking and disparaging Trump, which will ultimately help Trump, as the American people will watch the video and be taken by the optimism the elites find appalling.
ADDED: Writing the last line of this post, I thought of the line associated with Robert F. Kennedy, "There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?"
Though Kennedy stated that he was quoting George Bernard Shaw when he said this, he is often thought to have originated the expression, which actually paraphrases a line delivered by the Serpent in Shaw's play Back To Methuselah: “You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’". This phrase was first used by his brother John F. Kennedy in 1963 (June 28th), during his visit to Ireland, in his address to the Irish Dail (Government): "George Bernard Shaw, speaking as an Irishman, summed up an approach to life, 'Other people, he said, see things and say why? But I dream things that never were and I say, why not?"... Robert's other brother Edward famously quoted it (paraphrasing it even further), to conclude his eulogy to his late brother after his assassination (8 June 1968): "Some men see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say why not?"
AND: The Serpent?! Maybe we should read this play. I've never read the whole thing, but here's the whole text. Let's get some context for that quote. As you've already guessed, we're in the Garden of Eden:
"... and shooting them with deadly, high-precision squirts of herbicide... Pesticides and other chemicals are traditionally applied blindly across a whole field or crop. Blue River’s systems are agricultural sharp shooters that direct chemicals only where they are needed. The startup’s robots are towed behind a regular tractor like conventional spraying equipment. But they have cameras on board that use machine-learning software to distinguish between crops and weeds, and automated sprayers to target unwanted plants." (Wired).
I think technology like this is great, but I don't know why the word "robot" is used... other than to try to make us like it more. It's just a machine. When is a machine a robot?
For example an electric screw driver is a machine, it is not autonomous. If collaborated with a robotic arm, it may be autonomous and hence can be termed as a Robot.
Is the Blue River autonomous? It's an attachment that must dragged behind a tractor. But it does seem to be making decisions on its own.
A robot is a machine—especially one programmable by a computer— capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically. Robots can be guided by an external control device or the control may be embedded within. Robots may be constructed to take on human form but most robots are machines designed to perform a task with no regard to how they look.
The Oxford English Dictionary separates the meanings, with one being "An intelligent artificial being typically made of metal and resembling in some way a human or other animal" (and restricted with "Chiefly Science Fiction") and the other "A machine capable of automatically carrying out a complex series of movements, esp. one which is programmable." Both meanings go back to the 1920s. There's also the figurative meaning, "A person who acts mechanically or without emotion," and that too goes back to the 20s, e.g., "Mr. G. Bernard Shaw defined Robots as persons all of whose activities were imposed on them" (1923).
It's interesting that today I think of the word "robot" as working to give us a friendly attitude toward a machine, but back then, the word was used to express negativity toward human beings.
Here's a line from a poem by D.H. Lawrence: "The mechanical impulse for money and motor-cars which rules the robot-classes and the robot-masses, now."
"Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions. Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts. None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences. But ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism.... Perhaps if there had been less certitude and more second-guessing in Clinton’s campaign, she’d be president. Perhaps if there were less certitude about our climate future, more Americans would be interested in having a reasoned conversation about it."
The commenters are trashing him for comparing the deficiencies of the Clinton campaign's use of data analytics with the science of climatology and for not seeing why action is sometimes needed even when you don't have absolute certainty about what's going to happen in the future.
But Stephens is trying to get people to understand how to talk with each other. I'm giving this my new "separatism" tag — invented in the previous post after something the film director John Waters said: "You know, I'm not a separatist, I'm friends with some people who voted for Trump, not many."
ADDED: Is "scientism" an annoying word? I noticed MadAsHell in the comments complaining about it — along with "traduces," "censoriously," "overweening," and "certitude." It's funny, where one's tipping point is, when you get that thesaurus-y feeling. I definitely get it at "traduces," but swallow "censoriously," "overweening," and "certitude" easily.
"Scientism," though, is a weird word. Why do we need it in addition to "science"? What's the work of the "-ism"? It makes "science" into an insult, like you're being too science-y, to the point where it's not even science at all, but a religion with the trappings of science. I looked up the word in the OED, and that got me into this George Bernard Shaw opus, "Back to Methuselah (A Metabiological Pentateuch)":
Let the Churches ask themselves why there is no revolt against the dogmas of mathematics though there is one against the dogmas of religion. It is not that the mathematical dogmas are more comprehensible. The law of inverse squares is as incomprehensible to the common man as the Athanasian creed. It is not that science is free from legends, witchcraft, miracles, biographic boostings of quacks as heroes and saints, and of barren scoundrels as explorers and discoverers. On the contrary, the iconography and hagiology of Scientism are as copious as they are mostly squalid. But no student of science has yet been taught that specific gravity consists in the belief that Archimedes jumped out of his bath and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting Eureka, Eureka, or that the law of inverse squares must be discarded if anyone can prove that Newton was never in an orchard in his life. When some unusually conscientious or enterprising bacteriologist reads the pamphlets of Jenner, and discovers that they might have been written by an ignorant but curious and observant nurserymaid, and could not possibly have been written by any person with a scientifically trained mind, he does not feel that the whole edifice of science has collapsed and crumbled, and that there is no such thing as smallpox. It may come to that yet; for hygiene, as it forces its way into our schools, is being taught as falsely as religion is taught there; but in mathematics and physics the faith is still kept pure, and you may take the law and leave the legends without suspicion of heresy. Accordingly, the tower of the mathematician stands unshaken whilst the temple of the priest rocks to its foundation.
In pig wrestling, people of all ages chase the animal around a muddy pen, trying to grab the slippery pig and place it on a barrel in the center of the ring before time expires. Pig wrestling has been a decades-long tradition at many fairs and similar events, drawing huge crowds of spectators.
So much for tradition! It was overcome by an online petition run by the Madison-based Alliance for Animals and the Environment. How does Madison wield such influence over Stoughton?
Hillary's response was just "Thx, as always, for your insights," which is perfectly opaque and boring.
"Louche" is a great word. It means — according to the (unlinkable) OED) — "Oblique, not straightforward. Also, dubious, shifty, disreputable." Sounds like everyone in government, no?
The etymology is: It's French for squinting and comes from the Latin word "lusca," which is the feminine form of the word for one-eyed.
One of the historical examples at the OED comes from George Bernard Shaw, a 1905 letter to Granville Barker: "You could play Snobby. I want a slim, louche, servant-girl-bigamist, half-handsome sort of rascal."
ADDED: For fun, I wanted to add a picture of Hillary squinting. I ran across a bit of Think Progress nonsense from 2008: "Drudge Posts A Picture of Hillary Clinton With Squinted Eyes, Says She’s ‘Feeling Japanese.'" ("Drudge seems to have deliberately chosen a picture of Hillary that hints at Asian stereotypes — slanted eyes, arched eyebrows, and prominent teeth — to pair with the caption that she’s 'feeling Japanese.'")
Oh, that's not Japanese, it's just louche. Here's a better louche Hillary picture...
"And it's very strange. I actually intellectually find this very curious. But on 9/11, I didn't like how rock music responded. And country music collectively, the way they responded, it resonated with me. And I have to say, it just is a gut-level. I had an emotional reaction that says, these are my people... So ever since 2001, I listen to country music. But I'm an odd country music fan, because I didn't listen to it prior to 2001."
I can understand feeling so different because of 9/11 that your preference for music would changed. You might resist loud, harsh guitars and self-involved, cynical words. You might find succor in mellower instrumentation and sincere-sounding lyrics. But Cruz's isn't only talking about how he felt, subjectively. He does speak of what "resonated with" him, on a "gut-level." But he's also passing judgment on musicians, how they responded.
"... as if one need only pat Nero and stroke Ivan the Terrible. This mere belief in bodily humanitarianism is not sentimental; it is simply snobbish. For if comfort gives men virtue, the comfortable classes ought to be virtuous — which is absurd. Then, again, we do hear of the yet weaker and more watery type of sentimentalists: I mean the sentimentalist who says, with a sort of splutter, 'Flog the brutes!' or who tells you with innocent obscenity 'what he would do' with a certain man — always supposing the man's hands were tied. This is the more effeminate type of the two; but both are weak and unbalanced. And it is only these two types, the sentimental humanitarian and the sentimental brutalitarian, whom one hears in the modern babel."
Wrote G.K. Chesterton, in "Tremendous Trifles," something I ran across looking up the word "brutalitarian" in the OED, which has only 4 quotes, 2 of which are from Chesterton. The other is "And in this the brutalitarians hate [George Bernard Shaw] not because he is soft, but..because he is not to be softened by conventional excuses." Those quotes are from 1909 and 1910. The oldest iteration of "brutalitarian" (from 1904) is the title of a journal: "The Brutalitarian, a journal for the sane and strong." The word — used as a noun or adjective — is patterned on "humanitarian" (not on "totalitarian," which is a word that doesn't get started until 1926, and which migrates into English from Italian ("totalitario").
You might think: Brutalitarian! What a great word! Why don't we hear it more? A Google search turns up only 26,000 hits, and the first couple of pages are mostly dictionary definitions. A search of the NYT archive turns up only 5 articles, and the only 2 in the last 50 years were in letters to the editor. The New Yorker has only used the word 3 times, and 2 of those were in the mid 1930s. The recent one, from 2008, seems to be a malapropism: "F.B.I. headquarters in Washington is still housed in a brutalitarian structure known as the J. Edgar Hoover Building." I think the author (Hendrik Hertzberg) intended the architectural term"brutalist."
Why was I looking for "brutalitarian"? The previous post quotes the famous line from the Army-McCarthy hearings — "Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" — and links to the transcript. If you keep reading the transcript, you'll see that Senator Joseph McCarthy has plenty to say, including:
... I think we must remember is that this is a war which a brutalitarian force has won to a greater extent than any brutalitarian force has won a war in the history of the world before. For example, Christianity, which has been in existence for 2,000 years, has not converted, convinced nearly as many people as this Communist brutalitarianism has enslaved in 106 years, and they are not going to stop. I know that many of my good friends seem to feel that this is a sort of a game you can play, that you can talk about communism as though it is something 10,000 miles away.... let me say it is right here with us now....
No one who lived in Germany in the Thirties, and who cared about such matters, can ever forget the sickening decline of the cultural standards of a people who had had such high ones for so long a time....
The theater, it must be said, retained much of its excellence as long as it stuck to classical plays.... The Nazi playwrights were so ludicrously bad that the public stayed away from their offerings, which invariably had short runs. The president of the Reich Theater Chamber was one Hans Johst, an unsuccessful playwright who once had publicly boasted that whenever someone mentioned the word “culture” to him he wanted to reach for his revolver. But even Johst and Goebbels, who determined what was played on the stage and who played and directed it, were unable to prevent the German theater from giving commendable and often moving performances of Goethe, Schiller and Shakespeare.
Strangely enough, some of Shaw’s plays were permitted to be performed in Nazi Germany— perhaps because he poked fun at Englishmen and lampooned democracy and perhaps too because his wit and left-wing political views escaped the Nazi mind.
And pages 783-784:
The Special Search List, G.B. (die Sonderfahndungsliste, G.B.) is among the more amusing “invasion” documents found in the Himmler papers, though of course it was not meant to be. It contains the names of some 2,300 prominent persons in Great Britain, not all of them English, whom the Gestapo thought it important to incarcerate at once. Churchill is there, naturally, along with members of the cabinet and other well-known politicians of all parties. Leading editors, publishers and reporters, including two former Times correspondents in Berlin, Norman Ebbutt and Douglas Reed, whose dispatches had displeased the Nazis, are on the list. British authors claim special attention. Shaw’s name is conspicuously absent, but H. G. Wells is there along with such writers as Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, J. B. Priestley, Stephen Spender, C. P. Snow, Noel Coward, Rebecca West, Sir Philip Gibbs and Norman Angeli....
AND: I accidentally wrote over this post, so I'm reconstructing it. Here are all the original comments:
Michael K said...
In spite of the decline of US culture (I sometimes want to reach for a revolver lately), I suspect Shakespeare will be perfumed long after Shaw is forgotten.
8/3/14, 10:00 AM
Phil D said...
Quote from Shaw on the show trials:
"They often have to be pushed off the ladder with a rope around their necks," wrote Shaw, apparently justifying Stalin's execution of many of those who had led the Bolshevik revolution in 1917" (Mind, I find the execution of the "Old Guard" by Stain one of those silver linings. After all, It's the only justice the communist mass murderers ever got, to be killed by their own kind. But millions were murdered together with them).
From wiki;
"Prominent British writers who visited the Soviet Union in 1934, such as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, are also on record as denying the existence of the Famine in Ukraine"
Other sources;
"The Fabian Socialist George Bernard Shaw, after receiving a tour carefully orchestrated by the Soviets, proclaimed in 1932: 'I did not see a single under-nourished person in Russia, young or old.' "
Shaw, a good artist but an extraordinary piece of excrement as a human being, the perfect example of the moral degeneracy of the left.
8/3/14, 11:54 AM
Ann Althouse said...
"In spite of the decline of US culture (I sometimes want to reach for a revolver lately), I suspect Shakespeare will be perfumed long after Shaw is forgotten."
A nice autocorrect there: perfumed.
We're talking about dead bodies...
8/3/14, 11:57 AM
Sam L. said...
I see Shaw was NOT on the list.
OOOOOOOohhhhhhhh, dat HURTS.
8/3/14, 12:43 PM
Robert Cook said...
Sounds like professional jealousy on Shaw's part, borne of his realization he would never equal Shakespeare's genius or achievement.
8/3/14, 12:45 PM
David said...
Another difference: Shakespeare's plays were wildly popular and financially successful.
8/3/14, 1:22 PM
ganderson said...
And Lord Blackadder's take on the Bard:
http://youtu.be/NM-Y1ch4b5c
8/3/14, 2:20 PM
NotquiteunBuckley said...
"ON STAGING SHAKESPEARE AND ON SHAKESPEARE'S STAGE
By Orson Welles
Director of the Mercury Theater
Shakespeare said everything. Brain to belly; every mood and minute of a man's season. His language is starlight and fireflies and the sun and moon. He wrote it with tears and blood and beer, and his words march like heartbeats. He speaks to everyone and we all claim him but it's wise to remember, if we would really appreciate him, that he doesn't properly belong to us but to another world; a florid and entirely remarkable world that smelled assertively of columbine and gun powder and printer's ink, and was vigorously dominated by Elisabeth.
Shakespeare speaks everybody's language, but with an Elizabethan accent. When he came squawking and red faced into it, England could carry a tune and was learning to talk. It was a kid of a country, waking up noisily and too suddenly into adolescence and bounding blithely into the sunny, early morning of modern times."
http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=190
8/3/14, 2:21 PM
Left Bank of the Charles said...
Perhaps the Nazis considered Shaw an Irishman not an Englishman. I do wonder what follows that because.
8/3/14, 3:02 PM
LYNNDH said...
Ann, am I being blocked? Second email the past week that did not post.
8/3/14, 3:49 PM
virgil xenophon said...
@Althouse/
Your not too far from my generation (I'm 70) and you consider yourself an educated and credentialed person yet you're JUST NOW getting around to reading Shirer?? I read him as a soph in H.S. when it was first published in 1960. Your intellectual curiosity must have developed late in life..
8/3/14, 4:00 PM
virgil xenophon said...
PS: Well, I take that back partly, AA. Your reference to culture and reaching for a gun shows you have at least a nodding acquaintance with the utterances of Herman Goring..
8/3/14, 4:04 PM
Fred Drinkwater said...
Thank you for the reminder to re-read Shirer. I first read it when I was about 17, and was impressed by the apparent quality of the reportage. Now I'm curious to see what a few years will have done to my opinion.
8/3/14, 4:04 PM
The Godfather said...
Do you remember Mark Twain's hilarious put-down of J. Fenimore Cooper? You can find it here: http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/offense.html
It was, of course, unfair, because literary conventions had changed between Cooper's time and Twain's. (In retribution, Twain's reputation today suffers from the fact that his work is considered not politically correct because of his frequent use of the N-word.)
But the Shaw put down of Shakespeare and Homer is different. These writers of course wrote in accordance with the conventions of their times, and those conventions are different from those of our time. But both wrote works that can speak to us hundreds or thousands of years later, not withstanding those stylistic differences. Whereas Shaw's work is now just a period piece: often witty to be sure, but reflecting a socially time-bound ideology, and one at least somewhat disgraced by subsequent events.
8/3/14, 5:09 PM
SOJO said...
I only developed an appreciation for Shakespeare after I saw his work performed live at a playhouse. Having to read him in high school with American kids struggling through the prose and a zillion footnotes was no fun at all.
8/3/14, 5:38 PM
John said...
Everybody says shakespeare represents the perfection of English drama.
I wonder how many of those fans actually read him? Not as a HS or college requirement but for pleasure.
I've read, or tried to read, several of his plays since school. Never could get through them.
I have seen several of them acted on stage, films of on stage and movie adaptations and they are much better seen than read.
I've read half a dozen of Shaw's plays for pleasure and they are much better reading than Shakespeare.
One man's opinion.
John Henry
8/3/14, 8:35 PM
John said...
Speaking of Willy the Shake, does anyone else remember Lord Buckly? 50's and 60's hipster (when the word meant something) comedian?
As he started his version of Marc Anthony's eulogy to Ceasar:
Hipsters, Flipsters and Finger Poppin' Daddies Knock Me Your lobes.
I came to lay Ceasar out, not to hip you to him.
And so on...
Just checked YouTube and there is not much there but I did find this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksevaIflRnI
John Henry
8/3/14, 10:05 PM
traditionalguy said...
The thing about Shakespeare is that he was witty. and also that he knew all of the questions a man has from living this life...not the answers, but all the questions.
GBS was also witty, but that was about it. Shakespeare is without competition and GBS could not find a way to beat him, so instead he just took a superior attitude about Shakespeare to fool the weak minded.
8/3/14, 10:37 PM
Rich Rostrom said...
avid 8/3/14, 1:22 PM said...
Another difference: Shakespeare's plays were wildly popular and financially successful.
As were Shaw's. Shaw was a very accessible and entertaining playwright. He should not be confused with avant-garde and kitchen-sink playwrights like Beckett and Ionescu and Pinter.
8/4/14, 12:04 AM
John said...
traditionalguy said...
Shakespeare is without competition...
So Trad Guy,
What is the last play of Shakespeare's that you read for pleasure and when?
I'd be curious about others here who sing Willie's praises. What is the last thing of his you read and when?
Is anyone actually reading Shakespeare?
John Henry
8/4/14, 6:55 AM
richard mcenroe said...
Shaw progressed, over his life, from the parodic use of monsters such as arms dealers and Napoleon to shock his bourgeois British audience, to admiring pastiches of Britain's enemies ("The Inca of Perusalem") to uncritical praise of Hitler and Stalin.
He looked at the monsters and the monsters looked back.
8/4/14, 11:39 AM
Anthony said...
Shirer's book is odd. I read it during a magical summer that I first took classes at UW. Not sure how his analysis of the Third Reich holds up, but I've read it twice. Last time (two years ago) what struck me was how he described many of the Nazi's a "perverts and homosexuals" and such. So not PC today.
Writing the previous post, quoting the original Armistice Day proclamation, fixing on the word "sanguinary," I noticed that I had not looked a word up in the Oxford English Dictionary in a long time. Of course, I know that "sanguinary" means bloody, but what would motivate anyone to use the word "sanguinary," instead of "bloody"?
One reason is that "bloody" "has long had taboo status, and for many speakers constituted the strongest expletive available... Following the original use in England, Scotland, and Ireland, the sense spread to most other parts of the English-speaking world, with the notable exception of the United States, where it has apparently only ever achieved limited currency, e.g. among sailors during the 19th cent." (I'm quoting the OED, which I cannot link.)
So, "sanguinary" is a useful word for avoiding offense to those who take offense, and the OED even officially defines "sanguinary" — at definition #4, slang — as "a jocular euphemism for bloody adj., n., and adv., in reports of vulgar speech." Examples:
1800 S. T. Coleridge Coll. Lett. (1956) I. 564 This Extract breathed the spirit of the most foul & sanguinary Aristocracy—& depend upon it, Sheridan is a thorough-paced bad man!
1890 R. Kipling in Macmillan's Mag. LXI. 155/1 This is sanguinary. This is unusual sanguinary. Sort o' mad country....
1910 G. B. Shaw Lett. to Granville Barker (1956) 168 The inhabitants raise up their voices and call one another sanguinary liars.
I'm not suggesting that Woodrow Wilson, in his original Armistice Day proclamation, intended to attach the suggestion of an obscenity to "war" — the noun modified by "sanguinary" — though it is common enough to call war an obscenity.
The first meaning for "sanguinary" is "Attended by bloodshed; characterized by slaughter; bloody," and the second is "Bloodthirsty; delighting in carnage." The first meaning for "bloody" is "Containing blood; composed or consisting of blood; resembling blood," which, interestingly, is less emotive than the original meaning of "sanguinary." So "sanguinary" can be considered more apt — quite aside from any desire to avoid a frisson of obscenity.
David Bowie, musician
Francis Crick, physicist and Nobel Prize winner
Michael Faraday, scientist
Albert Finney, actor
E. M. Forster, author and essayist
Michael Frayn, novelist and dramatist
John Galsworthy, playwright and novelist
Graham Greene, novelist
Stephen Hawking, scientist
David Hockney, CH, RA, artist
Aldous Huxley, author
Rudyard Kipling, author
Henry Moore, sculptor
J.B. Priestley, novelist and playwright
George Bernard Shaw, playwright and critic
Paul Scofield, actor
Ralph Vaughan Williams composer
H.G. Wells, writer
Meanwhile, also at the link: Winston Churchill declined a Dukedom, Neville Chamberlain declined an earldom, John Cleese declined a barony, and John Lennon returned his MBE "in protest against Britain's involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against Cold Turkey slipping down the charts."
The United States is constitutionally forbidden to grant titles of nobility. How different would we be now if we'd been doing that sort of thing all these years?
Dignities and high sounding names have different effects on different beholders. The lustre of the Star and the title of My Lord, over-awe the superstitious vulgar, and forbid them to inquire into the character of the possessor: Nay more, they are, as it were, bewitched to admire in the great, the vices they would honestly condemn in themselves. This sacrifice of common sense is the certain badge which distinguishes slavery from freedom; for when men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.
It's been a long time since we've had a movie in that category, don't you think? (Remember when Pauline Kael single-handedly forced everyone to sit through "Last Tango in Paris" and believe this was the movie we'd talk about for as long as human civilization endured?)
[Aaron] Sorkin crafted dialogue for an as-yet-not-evolved species of humans—ordinary people, here students, who talk perpetually with the wit and brilliance of George Bernard Shaw or Bertrand Russell. (I’m a Harvard professor. Trust me: The students don’t speak this language.) With that script, and with a massive hand from the film’s director, David Fincher, he helped steer an intelligent, beautiful, and compelling film through to completion. You will see this movie, and you should. As a film, visually and rhythmically, and as a story, dramatically, the work earns its place in the history of the field.
But as a story about Facebook, it is deeply, deeply flawed....
The total and absolute absurdity of the world where the engines of a federal lawsuit get cranked up to adjudicate the hurt feelings (because “our idea was stolen!”) of entitled Harvard undergraduates is completely missed by Sorkin. We can’t know enough from the film to know whether there was actually any substantial legal claim here. Sorkin has been upfront about the fact that there are fabrications aplenty lacing the story. But from the story as told, we certainly know enough to know that any legal system that would allow these kids to extort $65 million from the most successful business this century should be ashamed of itself. Did Zuckerberg breach his contract? Maybe, for which the damages are more like $650, not $65 million. Did he steal a trade secret. Absolutely not. Did he steal any other “property”? Absolutely not—the code for Facebook was his, and the “idea” of a social network is not a patent. It wasn’t justice that gave the twins $65 million; it was the fear of a random and inefficient system of law. That system is a tax on innovation and creativity. That tax is the real villain here, not the innovator it burdened.
But great movies about law really do shape what people think about law and that affects what law means. How many will read and understand Lessig's pushback?
ADDED: Here's the famous Pauline Kael review — the most famous movie review of all time that we will think about for as long as there are movie reviews:
This is a movie people will be arguing about, I think, for as long as there are movies. They’ll argue about how it is intended, as they argue again now about The Dance of Death. It is a movie you can’t get out of your system...
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