"I used to read like a fiend, but I’ve given it up because it took up my time. I paint and draw all the time now..."

"... and watch films and read reviews in the paper. The last book I read was Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, 15 years ago."

From "Rose Wylie: I haven’t read a book in 15 years/The artist on why she had to put down Ulysses, the films that make her cry— and the fellow artist she would invite to dinner" (London Times).

Reading a book takes up time, so it's something to do if you have time that needs filling. You can fill time with other things too. How is reading a book different from those other things, and why do so many people seem to think that it's better than those other things? It's refreshing to hear Rose Wylie announce without shame that she hasn't read a book in 15 years. She prefers other things.

Here's her favorite poem.

"The dominance of the studios has both formed and deformed the American cinema and world cinema."

"It has also warped the very relationship of filmmakers to the practice of filmmaking—even psychologically. Many filmmakers attempting to take part in the business have found themselves in a grotesque Freudian struggle with Big Cinema Daddy, unable to dissociate their creative energy and their aesthetic drive from a battle with a pseudo-mythological giant. One of the paradoxes of independent filmmaking, even at its most extreme, is that it’s essentially dependent, and not just financially—it relies on a functioning film industry for equipment and services. I’m reminded of Gertrude Stein’s psychological distinction, in 'The Making of Americans,' of 'the independent dependent having attacking more or less sometime in them' and the 'dependent independent who can have sometime resisting in them.' The overt history of cinema is that of attack mode; the alternate history is one of resistance."

Writes Richard Brody in "The Greatest Independent Films of the Twentieth Century/A counter-canon of masterworks by filmmakers who took control of the means of production" (NYT).

"'In the United States,' Gertrude Stein once observed, 'there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.'"

"That was true in 1936, when she wrote 'The Geographical History of America,' and it remains so today. The numbers are startling, and not only if you live someplace like the Upper East Side of Manhattan, with your hundred thousand neighbors per square mile. Add up all the developed areas in the fifty states—the cities and suburbs and exurbs and towns, the highways and railways and back roads, the orchards and vineyards and family farms, the concentrated animal feedlots, the cornfields and wheat fields and soybeans and sorghum—and it will amount to a fifth of our nation. What is all the rest? Forests, wetlands, rangeland, tundra, glaciers, barrens, bodies of water of one kind or another. If you don a blindfold, throw a dart at a map of the country, and commit to living where it lands, you will most likely end up alone, in the middle of nowhere...."

Writes Kathryn Schulz in "What Going Off the Grid Really Looks Like/In 'Cheap Land Colorado,' Ted Conover hunkers down in a valley that has become a magnet for dreamers and the dispossessed alike" (The New Yorker).

"That was true in 1936... and it remains so today" — In 1936, Alaska wasn't a state. But the population was 39% of what it is today. The addition of all that Alaskan land would offset the population increase, so that even after the clustered populace sprawls outward from the cities, I would expect the empty places to continue to dominate. Stein's sentence is sublime, even as it understates the emptiness. Only 1/5 of the land is populated.

Anyway... I just quoted the beginning of the article. There's much more at the link! And you can buy the book — "Cheap Land Colorado/Off-Gridders at American's Edge" — here.

At long last in the public domain: "The Great Gatsby"!

New York Magazine on the books — from 1925 — that just entered the public domain:

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith, Aldous Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves, Agatha Christie’s The Secret of Chimneys....

More here, at Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain:

The BBC’s Culture website suggested that 1925 might be “the greatest year for books ever,” and with good reason. It is not simply the vast array of famous titles. The stylistic innovations produced by books such as Gatsby, or [Kafka's] The Trial, or Mrs. Dalloway marked a change in both the tone and the substance of our literary culture, a broadening of the range of possibilities available to writers....

From that BBC article: 

"Today who believes anything in the WaPo or NYT?"

Said David Begley in the comments to "The Washington Post spoke to seven scholars of the eugenics movement; all of them said that Thomas’s use of this history was deeply flawed."

I spend most of my news-reading time on WaPo and the NYT because they're better, and the alternatives are worse. I've defended my practice many times. I'm so often challenged by readers when I engage with the text of these MSM outlets. They ask why I'm still reading that, and my answer has always been that it's the best there is. Readers prod me to read The Daily Caller and Breitbart, but my view has been that stuff is too trashy. I can't stand it, and I'm not interested in writing about it.

But this morning the issue strikes me in a different way because yesterday I encountered the opinion, "You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad." I wrote:

[The] idea seems to be that there's a special harm in exposing yourself to things that are only somewhat good. Better to read outwardly trashy things than trash that has been inflated. And then there's also the idea that those who inflate trash are dead.

It was Gertrude Stein (as presented by Hemingway) who said "You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad." And she characterized Aldous Huxley as "dead" because his writings were not truly good but trash "inflated" to seem somewhat good. ("Why do you read this trash? It is inflated trash, Hemingway. By a dead man.") So I'm thinking about that.

Maybe the worst thing to read is something that's dressed up to seem as though it's not trash. Maybe it is better to read The Daily Caller and Breitbart... and Slate and Vox or whatever. Read the frankly bad.

Ah, but I don't need to protect myself like that. I hope you're reading me because you think I'm "truly good," and I pursue true goodness by reading the somewhat good things for you. I'm choosing to expose myself to the deleterious, inflated trash. I'll approach the corpse. Gertrude Stein still talked about the "dead" man who inflated trash. That's all I'm doing, talking about the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Bonus debate issue: Trump's tweets are frankly bad, and that's why it's good to want to read them.

Second bonus debate issue: If there's one thing that deserves to be viewed as deleterious, inflated trash, it's judicial opinions. (I am a professor emerita, having spent too many years palpating that corpse.)

"You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad."

Said Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway, quoted in "A Moveable Feast," which I'm reading after someone (who?) mentioned it in the comments recently. Here's the larger context, all of which I really liked:

I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

To keep my mind off writing sometimes after I had worked I would read writers who were writing then, such as Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence or any who had books published that I could get from Sylvia Beach’s library or find along the quais.

“Huxley is a dead man,” Miss Stein said. “Why do you want to read a dead man? Can’t you see he is dead?”

I could not see, then, that he was a dead man and I said that his books amused me and kept me from thinking.

Aldous Huxley was not actually dead at the time. Huxley had the distinction of dying on the same day JFK was assassinated. Hemingway, who died in 1961, did not live one single day when Huxley was not also alive.

“You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.”

“I’ve been reading truly good books all winter and all last winter and I’ll read them next winter, and I don’t like frankly bad books.”

“Why do you read this trash? It is inflated trash, Hemingway. By a dead man.”

Stein's idea seems to be that there's a special harm in exposing yourself to things that are only somewhat good. Better to read outwardly trashy things than trash that has been inflated. And then there's also the idea that those who inflate trash are dead.

"One of the most entertaining searches you can do on Spotify is for Hitler: There are tons of songs."

"A band called The Buttplugs wrote one about Hitler’s nipples. There’s one by Antony & the Johnsons ('Hitler in My Heart'), and one by Faith No More ('Crack Hitler'). There’s the obligatory Mel Brooks number, plenty of punk, and a track by Bob Newhart. There’s a Churchill speech and a testimonial from an RAF Bomber, and the announcement of the Führer’s death on German radio. Under related artists, where you’d expect to find Hideki Tojo, Benito Mussolini, or maybe Himmler, you find Neville Chamberlain, Edward Kennedy, John Glenn, and Charles Lindbergh. Statistics aren’t the same as historians. Related Artists is actually a social network for people with extremely eccentric friends: You can get from Nazis to an album of Kurt Vonnegut reading Slaughterhouse-Five in a few clicks. Here’s how: Start with Hitler, and then go to Charles Lindbergh. Take a left at Franklin D. Roosevelt, a hard left at Studs Terkel, and an even harder left at Ward Churchill. Veer slightly right (but you’re really still going left) to Howard Zinn, then Angela Davis. Enter a tunnel until you hit Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Next you’re at Gertrude Stein, who is unexpectedly close to Dorothy Parker. Head right until you see Rudyard Kipling, and after that you can’t miss Vonnegut."

From "Other People’s Playlists/Spotify’s secret social network," by Paul Ford in The New Republic.

"I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize," said Gertrude Stein in 1934.

She reasoned "because he is removing all elements of contest and struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace."

That quote appears in a May 6, 1934 NYT article so beautifully written that I searched the Times website to find more by its author, Lansing Warren. I found the obituary published in 1987, when he died at the age of 93:

In 1926, Edwin L. James, the Paris bureau chief of The New York Times, hired him...

In November 1942, Mr. Warren and his wife were arrested by the Nazis, along with other American correspondents, consular officers and Red Cross workers. The Warrens were held in Lourdes and later in Baden-Baden, Germany. To stave off boredom, the prisoners organized a ''university'' in which some taught and others studied. Thanks to a sharp memory and a few English books, Mr. Warren taught English literature. He studied Italian.

"Spouses Probably Shouldn't Try to Split Household Tasks Exactly Evenly."

Instapundit links to this piece by Noah Berlatsky in The Atlantic, which seems to state a comically obvious point. The "exactly" kind of gives it all away, doesn't it? You can't quantify tasks — different individuals take different amounts of time doing the same thing, different tasks have different degrees of arduousness (and the arduousness is different to different individuals both objectively and subjectively) — so the split couldn't be done exactly, even if that's what you wanted to do. Doing the calculations would add to the work, and different individuals would react differently to the arduousness — and symbolism — of that new dose of work. The idea is to get along better, not worse.

But there's some great stuff here: If you quantify and keep track, you are thinking in terms of debt. Berlatsky refers to David Graeber's book "Debt: The First 5,000 Years":

[M]any egalitarian societies make an enormous effort to keep clear of the logic of debt. Graeber tells a story about an Inuit man who offered a hungry anthropologist named Peter Freuchen a huge mound of seal meat. Freuchen thanked the man profusely. Freuchen recorded the man's response.

"Up in our country we are human!" said the hunter. "And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs."

The logic of debt? Isn't that the logic of gifts? Keeping track of debts is a way of avoiding too much, doing only your fair share. Gifts complicate a relationship, adding joy to serving and transforming the experience of being served. Debts make a cooler transaction. But Berlatsky conflates debt and gift in the pursuit of the idea that human beings do things for one another in recognition of mutual humanity. He also — scarily — conflates marriage and egalitarian societies:

Societies like the Inuit put enormous social effort and pressure into making sure that excellent hunters don't end up putting everyone in their debt. Marriages, too, can slide towards hierarchy if you're not careful. There's a lot of years of inequity and a lot of learned gender roles telling men and women that women owe housework to their families—an obligation that (as the hunter suggests) can pretty easily end up feeling like, and even functioning as, slavery. That's why housework is a feminist issue—and why both men and women need to work to stop it from becoming the whip that makes one spouse the master and the other the dog.

Okay, I've done my fair share of the work of untangling the mixed up ideas in this article. But that paragraph is a mess. Why don't you clean it up?

I'm going to comment on the illustration The Atlantic paired with Berlatsky's idea salad. That looks like a more amusing task. It's Grant Wood's "American Gothic." Quick! I need a picture that represents a marriage... a bad marriage.



But the article critiques a modern-day version of a bad marriage, and "American Gothic" depicts a comical, cliché, old-fashioned marriage.

Anyway, I found a nice 2005 Slate article about "American Gothic." I hope you know the models for that painting were not a married couple that Wood found living in that house you see in the background. Wood found the house in Iowa, painted it, then got the idea to pose a couple characters in front of it. The woman is his own sister. The man was his dentist.

The critics who admired the painting in the early '30s — including Gertrude Stein and Christopher Morley — ... assumed it was a satire about the rigidity of American rural or small-town life, lampooning the people H. L. Mencken called the "booboisie" of the "Bible Belt." As [Steven] Biel [author of "American Gothic"] explains, "American Gothic appeared to its first viewers as the visual equivalent of the revolt-against-the-provinces genre in 1910s and 1920s American literature"—a critique of provincialism akin to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, and Carl Van Vechten's The Tattooed Countess.

But a few years later, as the nation sank into the Great Depression, people started to see Wood's painting in a different light. American Gothic was no longer understood as satirical, but as a celebratory expression of populist nationalism. Critics extolled the farmer and his wife as steadfast embodiments of American virtue and the pioneer spirit. "American democracy was built upon the labors of men and women of stout hearts and firm jaws, such people as those above," read one caption in 1935.

The political propagandists are everywhere, mining whatever material they can get their hands on. It's arduous work, but somebody's got to do it.

50 years ago, in a standup comedy routine, Woody Allen sketched out the idea...

... that would become the much-loved 2011 movie "Midnight in Paris":



(Via Kyle Buchanan.)

Told to "relax and allow this" writing assignment "to work for you," a college student describes his sexual attraction to various female instructors...

... and is suspended — from Oakland University — for violating a rule that says "nor shall any person in any way intimidate, harass, threaten or assault any person engaged in lawful activities on the campus."

While the entries describe various women in ways that might make them identifiable to those on campus, and are written in ways many would find immature or insulting, the entries don't contain threats against any of the women. 

Oh, lord, they've scanned his Mead composition book and posted it on line, with his name. Talk about intimidation and harassment! Oh, no wait. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which is representing the student, has put the PDF up, so any humiliation involved in making the writing available is self-inflicted. I wasn't going to link to it or name the young man if it was the university that was exposing it, but Joseph Corlett is doing this to himself. Reading. Crossing out "young" because I just read the part, under the title "Hot for Teacher" where he writes: "She is short, height/weight proportionate and brunette like my wife of thirty (30) years..."

I'll be 56 in November of 2011... It was refreshing to have some space in my brain to think about thoughts other than sex. Like dropping from a hundred times a day to just 20. What a relief, but you don't get wood at the titty bars anymore. Small tradeoff.

I can't believe I just wrote that but I did and it's staying. I don't give a fuck. It is what it is. I WILL NOT TEAR THIS PAGE. 

You know, in those Mead composition books, one page is attached to another one, on the other side of the binding. Actions have consequences.

Back to the article link:

FIRE maintains that Corlett's rights were violated by the university, and that there was no reason to treat him as threatening. "It is not against the law to be — or to be perceived as — a creep," said Adam Kissel, vice president of FIRE. Noting that many great writers have expressed their admiration for women (in ways that shocked and offended many), Kissel said, "I can hardly imagine what kind of counseling Oakland would have required for Quentin Tarantino, Vladimir Nabokov, or Stephen King."

Officials at Oakland, a public institution in Michigan, declined to comment on the case, and said that the institution could not do so without violating privacy rules. 

Rights. Everywhere: rights. Boxed in on all sides. One question is: If Quentin Tarantino, Vladimir Nabokov, or Stephen King submitted to a writing class at a university in California Michigan that authorities wielding rules against sexual harassment, what would they write? One answer is: That's a big "if."

Now, the teachers' feelings of intimidation also had to do with guns. The file contains a complaint about Corlett's "gun obsession." Corlett had, in fact written a letter to the student newspaper in support of concealed carry rights on campus.

"I cannot feel safe knowing that he might have a weapon with him at any time. He might have had a gun in his backpack when he sat 20 feet away from me at the writing center last week..." [a teacher wrote].

The article, at Inside Higher Ed, continues:

The Corlett dispute is one in a series of instances in which students have been scrutinized for their work in writing classes -- more typically when the writing is explicitly dealing with violence. Colleges and universities have been criticized both for failing to act on student writing and for overreacting. The issue is complicated, writing instructors say. Instructors note that many students are immature, aren't good writers and mix fantasy and reality without much attempt to differentiate the two...

The article fails to include the fact — which jumped out at me when I read the notebook — that the man is 56 years old. That's part of the factual context of the case. Many students are immature, but when the immature student is 56 years old, that affects the assessment of the evidence.

Let's not jump to assume he was suspended solely for writing about his sexual attraction to the teachers (or for speaking out about gun rights). We don't know the totality of the facts here, only that the man has engaged representation and gone public in a context where the school is not able to explain its action.

By the way, when I think of great writers and Oakland, I don't think of Quentin Tarantino, Vladimir Nabokov, or Stephen King, I think of Gertrude Stein, who famously remarked: "The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there, there isn't any there there." 

Anyway, I don't know what the there here is, and neither do you.

ADDED: I really didn't know where the there there was. Oakland University is in Michigan, not in Stein's no-there-there Oakland, which was the one that's always there there in your head, the one in California.

"I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences."

"I suppose other things may be more exciting to others when they are at school but to me undoubtedly when I was at school the really completely exciting thing was diagramming sentences and that has been to me ever since the one thing that has been completely exciting and completely completing."

Diagram that! is the implicit challenge from Gertrude Stein – whose sentences are devilishly devoid of commas.

Stein hates commas passionately. I wish she were just a little more fond of them, LOL. Even I have a nagging desire to insert commas in her prose!

Commas are servile and have no life of their own... what does a comma do, a comma does nothing but make easy a thing that if you like it enough is easy enough without the comma.

She uses them instead of question marks, though, because she hates them even more! She says the question mark looks like "a brand on cattle."

"She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious."

"She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting."

Gertrude Stein, writing about herself in the 3rd person.

Part 2 in a continuing series of blog posts made from passages I marked in books I read long ago.

"After years of litigation, endless depositions, the fictionalized portrayal of this lawsuit and its litigants on television, and innumerable histrionics, this Court is left to conclude that with this lawsuit, to quote Gertrude Stein, 'there's no there there.'"

And so the federal district judge would shut the drawer on the 1996 scandal known as Filegate.

While this Court seriously entertained the plaintiffs' allegations that their privacy had been violated  — and indeed it was, even if not in the sense contemplated by the Privacy Act — after ample opportunity, they have not produced any evidence of the far-reaching conspiracy that sought to use intimate details from FBI files for political assassinations that they alleged. The only thing that they have demonstrated is that this unfortunate episode — about which they do have cause to complain — was exactly what the defendants claimed: a bureaucratic snafu.

By the way the there that wasn't there for Gertrude Stein was Oakland, California, which really does exist. She just didn't think much of it. I'm not sure what that says about Filegate.

Ever since Gertrude Stein wrote that there was “no there there” during a return trip to her childhood home in Oakland, California, her words have been distorted to imply that Oakland was a “nowhere,” a dissing along the lines of Neil Young’s “Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere,” which was funny for Young, a transplanted Canadian singer, to write for an U.S. pop market, because Young had really been a Californian before he transplanted himself to California, as Stein had been really been an American in Paris long before she left the U.S., and returning to her “there is no there there,” she later clarified that the Oakland of her childhood was gone, she was commenting on her great theme, not just hers, of course, a great thread in American literature concerning place and memory, we all lose the place of our childhood, and in adulthood clutch that place, or more accurately, a complex tangled image of that place, close to our bosom, as Cather did with her....

Hey, wait a minute. I see what he's doing there. That sentence goes on for 1,316 words more. Essay dismissed.