"The Ambitious Guest."

I was rereading the excellent Roz Chast memoir "Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?" when I got to the page "Dirty Checkers":



This time through the book, I stopped, loaded Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Twice-Told Tales" into my Project Gutenberg app and read "The Ambitious Guest" right then and there. Why live at the base of a mountain that is regularly signaling its willingness to roll down and bury you? They had their reasons. What's the point of moving on? The man who would move on got buried too. And indeed, when they heard the mountain collapsing they ran out of the house, to their safe spot, and the mountain spared the house and flattened them in their safe spot. Maybe stay where you are. If you jump somewhere else, that may be the very spot where you'll get killed.

The next morning the light smoke was seen stealing from the cottage chimney up the mountain-side. Within, the fire was yet smouldering on the hearth, and the chairs in a circle round it, as if the inhabitants had but gone forth to view the devastation of the slide and would shortly return to thank Heaven for their miraculous escape. All had left separate tokens by which those who had known the family were made to shed a tear for each. Who has not heard their name? The story has been told far and wide, and will for ever be a legend of these mountains.... Woe for the high-souled youth with his dream of earthly immortality! His name and person utterly unknown, his history, his way of life, his plans, a mystery never to be solved, his death and his existence equally a doubt,—whose was the agony of that death-moment?

"It was while in the lower house of Congress that Franklin Pierce took that stand on the slavery question from which he has never since swerved a hair’s breadth."

"He fully recognized, by his votes and by his voice, the rights pledged to the South by the Constitution.... [W]hen the first imperceptible movement of agitation had grown to be almost a convulsion, his course was still the same. Nor did he ever shun the obloquy that sometimes threatened to pursue the northern man who dared to love that great and sacred reality — his whole, united, native country — better than the mistiness of a philanthropic theory.... With his view of the whole subject, whether looking at it through the medium of his conscience, his feelings, or his intellect, it was impossible for him not to take his stand as the unshaken advocate of Union, and of the mutual steps of compromise which that great object unquestionably demanded.... Those northern men, therefore, who deem the great causes of human welfare as represented and involved in this present hostility against southern institutions, and who conceive that the world stands still except so far as that goes forward,— these, it may be allowed, can scarcely give their sympathy or their confidence to the subject of this memoir. But there is still another view, and probably as wise a one. It looks upon slavery as one of those evils which divine Providence does not leave to be remedied by human contrivances, but which, in its own good time, by some means impossible to be anticipated, but of the simplest and easiest operation, when all its uses shall have been fulfilled, it causes to vanish like a dream. There is no instance, in all history, of the human will and intellect having perfected any great moral reform by methods which it adapted to that end; but the progress of the world, at every step, leaves some evil or wrong on the path behind it, which the wisest of mankind, of their own set purpose, could never have found the way to rectify."

From "The Life of Franklin Pierce" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, consulted on the occasion of the University of New Hampshire's idea that maybe it ought to rename its Franklin Pierce Law School.

"The predominantly white and male guardianship of the literary and intellectual high ground tended to view the essential American story as a solo confrontation with the wilderness..."

"... not a love triangle or intimate domestic saga. Nineteenth-century men of letters 'saw the matter of American experience as inherently male,' the literary critic Nina Baym wrote in her 1981 essay 'Melodramas of Beset Manhood.' It was a complete negation of women’s points of view, not just an artistic dismissal. That doesn’t mean American women’s fiction wasn’t popular — like 'Little Women,' Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 'Uncle Tom’s Cabin' could barely keep up with demand after its 1852 publication. But that widespread appeal was used to slight the genre out of hand and further relegate it to the status of mere entertainment. As Ms. Baym noted, Nathaniel Hawthorne, for one, complained in 1855 about the 'damned mob of scribbling women' whose inexplicably popular work he feared would hurt his own book sales. There’s some truth in the notion that women strove to write works that would sell — Ms. Alcott herself said she wrote 'Little Women' 'at record speed for money' while men toiled away on epics like 'Moby-Dick' that would fail to generate much income.... It may be that on its surface, 'Little Women' doesn’t seem as fresh and progressive, comparatively. Maybe men feel it’s too familiar — the book has been turned into a movie no fewer than seven times, including a little-seen version released just last year. But in an era when sequels and remakes clog the film landscape (many of them male-centered), it’s hardly an exception...."

From "Men Are Dismissing ‘Little Women.’ What a Surprise/The rejection of the latest screen adaptation of the beloved novel echoes a long-held sentiment toward women-centered narratives" by Kristy Eldredge (in the NYT). Eldredge is responding to a tweet by Janet Maslin, which read: "The 'Little Women' problem with men is very real. I don’t say that lightly and am very alarmed/In the past day have been told by 3 male friends who usually trust me that they either refuse to see it or probably won’t have time."

1. The media churn up this notion that you're supposed to see films. But, really, there doesn't need to be a reason not to see a film. There needs to be a reason to see a film. And films are aimed at particular sorts of people. It's absurd to criticize anyone, ever, for "rejection" of a film. Reject them all! The presumption is no. Then select only what feels right for you, what's worth your time and attention.

2. Almost no one needs to select another remake of "Little Women" as what they will allow to occupy their own precious mind for 2 hours. It doesn't matter that it's well made and the acting is good or whatever. Select it if it serves you. You don't owe Hollywood anything. Hollywood makes its offer to you, and you will be saying no to almost anything.

3. There's no reason for anyone to feel a gender-based obligation to see this or that. If something doesn't appeal to you, go somewhere else. The movie was made with intense conniving to appeal based on gender. "Little Women" gets the women that go to the movie in response to that appeal. Rather than say men ought to strive against their feeling of gender-based exclusion, I'd say women ought to strive against the pull of gender-based inclusion.

4. Louisa May Alcott herself had a distaste for what she was doing writing that book specifically for females! She wrote in her journal (quoted at "Girls adored ‘Little Women.’ Louisa May Alcott did not." (WaPo): "Mr. N wants a girls’ story, and I begin ‘Little Women.’ … I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it."

5. I wrote "females" under point #4 because you can see she was writing for girls — not women. It's a young adult novel. "Little Women" are "little" in the sense that they are very young. They're girls. It's horrifying that women are catered to with this story over and over again. Why is any adult interested in this material? Ask that, rather than ask why adult men are not interested.

6. Let people be interested in in the stories they're actually interested in. Don't push them to invent an interest to something that does not call out to them. It's awful to lose touch with what you really feel, who you really are, and to generate a false sense of interest in what you've been enticed to think you ought to like. That's a general problem in life, not specific to movies.

7. Does the question what is "the essential American story" have any serious meaning in the context of what movies people are choosing to go to see? Even if it's true that males dominate the activity of deciding what is "essential" and what is "American" — or what is "the intellectual high ground" — that has little relevance to the question of what's the next movie you're going to see. Let's assume "Moby-Dick" is that thing. I don't see any good film adaptations of "Moby-Dick"! The movies aimed at men don't come from an "intellectual high ground." They're low-culture stuff from comic books! Loads and loads of young-adult material.

8. "Moby-Dick" is not "a solo confrontation with the wilderness."

"Thus the only plausible approach for Catholicism is to offer itself, not as a chaplaincy within modern liberalism, but as a full alternative culture in its own right — one that reclaims the inheritance on display at the Met, glories in its own weirdness and supernaturalism..."

"... and spurns both accommodations and entangling alliances (including the ones that conservative Catholics have forged with libertarian-inflected right-wing political movements).... [I]t’s the pope’s traditionalist adversaries who are more likely to don the sort of 'heavenly' garb being feted and imitated at the Met — while from his own simple choice of dress to his constant digs at overdressed clerics and fancy traditionalists, the pope believes that baroque Catholicism belongs in a museum or at a costume gala, and that the church’s future lies in the simple, the casual, the austere and the plain.... Francis and other would-be modernizers are right, and have always been right, that Catholic Christianity should not trade on fear. But a religion that claims to be divinely established cannot persuade without a lot of fascination, and far too much of that has been given up, consigned to the museum, as Western Catholicism has traced its slow decline.... [T]here is no plausible path [forward] that does not involve more of what was displayed and appropriated and blasphemed against in New York City Monday night, more of what once made Catholicism both great and weird, and could yet make it both again."

From "Make Catholicism Weird Again" by Ross Douthat (NYT).

Cannot persuade without a lot of fascination....

The etymology of "fascination" takes us back to a Latin word that means spells and witchcraft. The oldest meaning (now obsolete) is "The casting of a spell; sorcery, enchantment" (OED). Another old meaning is "The action and the faculty of fascinating their prey attributed to serpents, etc." (Example from 1848: "The fascination of the serpent on the bird held her mute and frozen.") The meaning we think of when we hear the word is "irresistibly attractive influence." Examples, from Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Marble Faun" (1860):

Donatello, of whose presence she was possibly not aware, now pressed closer to her side; and he, too, like Miriam, bent over the low parapet and trembled violently. Yet he seemed to feel that perilous fascination which haunts the brow of precipices, tempting the unwary one to fling himself over for the very horror of the thing; for, after drawing hastily back, he again looked down, thrusting himself out farther than before.

"I bethink me that you may have no objections to hear something of my whereabout and whatabout."

Wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1841. Did you ever think about the word "whatabout," corresponding to "whereabout"? We usually see "whereabout" in the plural — as in "I was right glad..to learn of your whereabouts and whatabouts."

I found both of those sentences in the OED as I was looking up "whataboutism" in the OED. "Whataboutism" isn't there — nor is "whataboutery" — but I'm seeing the word "whataboutism" a lot this week. It's in reference to Trump, of course. Trump famously referred to the "alt-left" when asked about the "alt-right," and there's some very heated criticism of that form of argument, which really is very annoying when you're criticizing someone and you don't want to hear that there's a corresponding — and smaller!!! — criticism against you.

One problem is that very few people are willing to give up that form of argument when the tables are turned. In other words, what about your whataboutism?

Did Chris Christie react to the charge that he was using his power as chair of the Republican Governors Association to undercut Scott Walker's reelection bid?

"The RGA, chaired by Gov. Christie (R-N.J.), has been under pressure in recent days to do more to help Walker, a tea party favorite who rocketed to political stardom after he curbed bargaining rights for most public workers in his state. The Weekly Standard reported Thursday that there were brewing suspicions on the right that Christie, as RGA chairman, has been “undercutting” Walker, his potential rival for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination."

That's from a Washington Post article noting that the Republican Governors Association has just put another $1 million into ads for Scott Walker's reelection. The headline of the article puts the emphasis on Walker's state of mind — "RGA puts additional $1 million into Wisconsin ad buys as Walker frets" — but I think Christie's is the more interesting mind about which to speculate.

Walker is trying to get reelected and the polls show a close race. That's a mundane objective reality. The subjective matter of how that feels to him — whether he "frets" — is dumb in the same way that it's dumb for reporters to ask, say, a person whose house is burning down "How do you feel?" The answer is already known: How do you think I feel? There's nothing about the subjective aspect of the story that isn't inherent in the objective aspect of the story.

But what's going on in The Mind of Chris Christie? That's where the subjective part of the story is complex and speculation-ripe.

Here's the above-referenced Weekly Standard article: "Does Chris Christie Have Scott Walker's Back?"

"The Center for Public Integrity reported Thursday that Walker and his backers spent nearly $6.1 million on ads through Monday, while Burke and her supporters ran nearly $6.6 million," the AP reported on Thursday. On Sunday, Walker told the Washington Post's Robert Costa: "We are always looking for more help. Our main help has to be the RGA." But according to the Center for Public Integrity, the Republican Governors Association has spent $5.9 million on TV ads in Michigan, where Governor Rick Snyder is up for reelection, and just $801,000 on TV ads in Wisconsin.

Why would the RGA spend more on Rick Snyder than Scott Walker?...

ADDED: Writing this post made me want to look the word "fret" up in the OED. The original meaning is to eat, to devour, referring to the behavior of nonhuman animals. It still has that meaning in the sense of a small animal — like a worm or a moth — consuming or wearing away something by gnawing at it. The figurative usage is very old, the passions and various irritants consume or wear away at a person's mind. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: "So many curiosities drive one crazy, and fret one's heart to death." The intransitive use — "To distress oneself with constant thoughts of regret or discontent; to vex oneself, chafe, worry" — is also very old, going back to 1551, first in a translation of Thomas More's "Utopia": "He..so fret so fumed & chafed at it."

I like the verb "fret," and use it a lot, probably mostly to make a person seem fussy and overly inward. But searching this blog to find how I've used "fret," I see the first thing that comes up is a fond tribute to an old Kinks song: "Don't You Fret." And there's a reference to the famous line from "MacBeth": "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more: it is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing." And, remember, MacBeth was already king when he said that. Chris Christie, on the other hand, is only the Thane of New Jersey.

Adventures in nonfiction narrative e-publishing.

Tony Horwitz disappears into thin air (to pinch a phrase from nonfiction narrative bound-paper-object publishing).

I'm reading that NYT op-ed right now because the link was sent to me by a fiction writer whom I'm trying to prod to take e-publishing seriously. Horwitz tells a horror story and ends by resituating himself in the (dying?) world of old-fashioned real-object book publishing.

But Horwitz is writing in the nonfiction narrative genre, which is what is getting taught to the privileged kids at Harvard, by Jill Abramson, who was ousted by the NYT, which is flailing in the digital age.

Horwitz notes that most of stuff on the e-book best-seller list is fiction, and I think the e-market for fiction, especially genre fiction, is much better. I'm thinking maybe there's more e-hope for the fiction writer than for the nonfiction narrator, especially if the fiction is in a genre like sci-fi or YA (Young Adult).

My correspondent used YA as a verb, as in: When my serious literary novel didn't sell, I YA'd it, but it still didn't sell.

I had an idea for an app: YA it 4 U.  Put any e-text into it — "The Scarlet Letter," say, or whatever the authorities are inflicting on kids these days — and it rewrites it according to the conventions of Young Adult literature.

Most of what I know about YA comes from the cool New Yorker article: "The Teen Whisperer: How the author of 'The Fault in Our Stars' built an ardent army of fans." I take it that the conventions to be programmed into my app are: "narrated in a clever, confiding voice," with characters like "sweetly intellectual teen-age boys" and "complicated, charismatic girls," "funny," with "story lines propelled by spontaneous road trips and outrageous pranks," and feeding "a youthfully insatiable appetite for big questions" like "What is an honorable life? How do we wrest meaning from the unexpected death of someone close to us? What do we do when we realize that we’re not as special as we thought we were?"

Well, clearly you could YA "The Scarlet Letter." But can you program a robot to YA "The Scarlet Letter"? That's a question, but not, I suspect, the kind of "big question" for which these kids today have an "insatiable appetite." What counts as a cheeseburger of a question and what is an arugula question? Surely not that, right?

"My fit of illness had been an avenue between two existences; the low-arched and darksome doorway, through which I crept out of a life of old conventionalisms..."

"... on my hands and knees, as it were, and gained admittance into the freer region that lay beyond. In this respect, it was like death. And, as with death, too, it was good to have gone through it. No otherwise could I have rid myself of a thousand follies, fripperies, prejudices, habits, and other such worldly dust as inevitably settles upon the crowd along the broad highway, giving them all one sordid aspect before noon-time, however freshly they may have begun their pilgrimage in the dewy morning."

Ever been sick like that? 

Put in charge of shoveling the hill of manure.

"[T]he campaign biography is an American tradition dating as far back as 1852, when Nathaniel Hawthorne put aside his nobler duties to produce a piece of unfortunate hackwork dedicated to spreading the gospel of Franklin Pierce."

(Hawthorne had known the candidate since their days together at Bowdoin College in the 1820's and was thus able to look beyond Pierce's spectacular weaknesses -- his unwillingness to oppose slavery, notably -- and produce a work of gaseous flattery.)

We've come a long way, baby. No self-respecting writer would deliver such a polemic today....

"Today" was March 2000. I'm quoting a NYT review of some damned book about Al Gore (which the reviewer informs us is "evenhanded"). Who cares about a 2000 book about Al Gore? I'm interested in

"It is a mistaken idea, which men generally entertain, that nature has made women especially prone to throw their whole being into what is technically called love."

"We have, to say the least, no more necessity for it than yourselves; only we have nothing else to do with our hearts. When women have other objects in life, they are not apt to fall in love. I can think of many women distinguished in art, literature, and science — and multitudes whose hearts and minds find good employment in less ostentatious ways — who lead high, lonely lives, and are conscious of no sacrifice so far as your sex is concerned."

That's a passage I marked in my paperback copy of one of my favorite novels when I read it quite a few years ago.

High, lonely lives... conscious of no sacrifice...

"A height of some fifty feet above the roofs of Rome gives me all the advantages that I could get from fifty miles of distance."

"The air so exhilarates my spirits, that sometimes I feel half inclined to attempt a flight from the top of my tower, in the faith that I should float upward," said Hilda.

"O, pray don’t try it!" said Miriam laughing. "If it should turn out that you are less than an angel, you would find the stones of the Roman pavement very hard; and if an angel, indeed, I am afraid you would never come down among us again.” 

This young American girl was an example of the freedom of life which it is possible for a female artist to enjoy at Rome. She dwelt in her tower, as free to descend into the corrupted atmosphere of the city beneath, as one of her companion doves to fly downward into the street;— all alone, perfectly independent, under her own sole guardianship, unless watched over by the Virgin, whose shrine she tended; doing what she liked without a suspicion or a shadow upon the snowy whiteness of her fame. The customs of artist life bestow such liberty upon the sex, which is elsewhere restricted within so much narrower limits; and it is perhaps an indication that, whenever we admit women to a wider scope of pursuits and professions, we must also remove the shackles of our present conventional rules, which would then become an insufferable restraint on either maid or wife.

From Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Marble Faun."

Is "real" sarcasm or is "real" real?

The latest food article in the NYT stimulate, in me, a hunger for an understanding of "real" — not like some what-is-reality? philosophy/stoner college student, but as a connoisseur of language and humor. In 2 different articles, the modifier "real" is appended to a noun, first "milk" and then "vegetables."

1. "Pots and Pans, but Little Pain/Making Lunch With Michael Pollan and Michael Moss," written by Emily Weinstein, has the Pollan (author of books like "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto") and Moss (author of "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us") wandering judgmentally through the kind of crowded grocery store that people in NYC call a "supermarket."

Mr. Moss and Mr. Pollan considered the mozzarella choices, skipping the pre-shredded kind in favor of a cheese that advertised itself as a product of Amish country and that cost the same as the more generic ball beside it.

“Real milk, no hormones, no antibiotics,” Mr. Pollan said, reading aloud from the label. “I love the term ‘real milk.’ I wonder if we can get fake milk anywhere here.”

2. "The Frankfurter Diaries," by Mark Bittman was about Bittman eating a hot dog. (Somehow, when I clicked on the link, I was hoping for something about Felix Frankfurter, even though I know Bittman is a food writer. I love his cookbook, "How to Cook Everything."). Bittman — like Pollan and Moss in the grocery store — comes across as an elitist out of his normal environment. He's on "a drive to the Jersey Shore" and looking for something to eat at a parkway restaurant.

Would those who disapprove of von Hagens's exhibit also condemn the display at the Church of the Capuchins in Rome? The place, also called Santa Maria della Concezione, is quite popular with tourists. Nathanial Hawthorne wrote about it disapprovingly:

The cemetery is beneath the church ... . The arrangement of the unearthed skeletons is what makes the special interest of the cemetery. The arched and vaulted walls of the burial recesses are supported by massive pillars and pilasters made of thigh bones and skulls, the whole material of the structure appears to be of a similar kind; and the knobs and embossed ornaments of this strange architecture are represented by the joints of the spine, and the more delicate tracery by the smaller bones of the human frame. The summits of the arches are adorned with entire skeletons, looking as if they were wrought most skillfully in bas-relief. There is no possibility of describing how ugly and grotesque is the effect, combined with a certain artistic merit, nor how much perverted ingenuity has been shown in this queer way, nor what a multitude of dead monks, through how many hundred years, must have contributed their bony framework to build up these great arches of mortality. On some of the skulls there are inscriptions, purporting that such a monk, who formerly made use of that particular headpiece, died on such a day and year; but vastly the greater number are piled up indistinguishably into the architectural design, like the many deaths that make up the one glory of a victory.

In the side walls of the vaults are niches where skeleton monks sit or stand, clad in the brown habits that they wore in life, and labelled with their names and the dates of their decease. Their skulls (some quite bare, and others still covered with yellow skin, and hair that has known the earth damps) look out from beneath their hoods, grinning hideously repulsive. One reverend father has his mouth wide open, as if he had died in the midst of a howl of terror and remorse, which perhaps is even now screeching through eternity. As a general thing, however, these frocked and hooded skeletons seem to take a more cheerful view of their position, and try with ghastly smiles to turn it into a jest. But the cemetery of the Capuchins is no place to nourish celestial hopes: the soul sinks forlorn and wretched under all this burden of dusty death; the holy earth from Jerusalem, so imbued is it with mortality, has grown as barren of the flowers of Paradise as it is of earthly weeds and grass. Thank Heaven for its blue sky it needs a long, upward gaze to give us back our faith. Not here can we feel ourselves immortal, where the very altars in these chapels of horrible consecration are heaps of human bones.

If we would not ban the religiously motivated display of body parts, should we not leave von Hagens alone? (I am putting the charge of using executed criminals to the side in asking this, though, as noted yesterday, Vesalius made great medical advances precisely because such bodies were made available to him.)