West Coast courage.
Arts & Letters
Well, What Did You Expect?
Anne Applebaum’s ”A Cartoon Portrait of America” disappoints. She tells us “self-styled U.S. ‘conservatives’ blamed not cynical politicians and clerics but Newsweek for (accidentally) inciting violence in the Muslim world: ‘Newsweek lied, people died.’” She concludes her complaint against the right-wing blogosphere by telling us: “The moral is: We defend press freedom if it means Danish cartoonists’ right to caricature Muhammad; we don’t defend press freedom if it means the mainstream media’s right to investigate the U.S. government.” Well, right-wing blogs are right-wing; certainly we may be guilty of hyperbole & shuffling together in one group many individual opponents. And Applebaum (as repeatedly noted in right-wing blogdom) is one of the good guys – she knows in her gut the importance of proportions; the Gulag she studied was not Duranty’s Russia. Even here she criticizes what she sees as “Hypocrisy of the Cultural Left” as much as she criticizes the right. Her experience has defined her reactions, sure, but she is not a one-note speaker. And her openness is courageous: she engages with Captain Ed. Still her “moral” ignores Newsweek‘s implicit contract.
The blogosphere’s disappointment is with her confusion – and that is certainly what it seems to be – between an artist’s responsibility and that of a reporter, between a genre that honors objective truth and one that projects a subjective one. Nor does her exchange on Captain’s Quarters acknowledge this distinction. She alludes to her authority, but our respect heightens our disappointment. (See Austin Bay; Powerline.) Whether or not some people believe that Abu Ghraib should not have been reported is a red herring used too often to distract us any longer. Seeing criticism as censorship is a ploy that insults opponents & undermines dialogue.
Newsweek defines itself as an accurate source of news. Then it runs a dramatic charge with minimal (and not very credible) sourcing. That an intense investigation was begun is important; that it found Newsweek’s story not true is also important. Indeed, that it was the government & not the media that prized the truth enough to seek it out reinforces our sense that those abdicating their truth-telling responsibilities are less and less often the government and more and more often the media. To brand such observations as censorship is ingenuous at best.
The gap between expectation and fulfillment is likely to influence the audience’s sense of whether they’ve gotten a “good deal” or been snookered.
Yet Another Sign of the Apocalypse
If Jonathan’s sartorial taste were not enough, an unmistakable sign of the end times was recently revealed. Someone has made a movie out of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. If you have never read this book, I weep tears of joy on your behalf. Assuming, that is, that you go on to read it — otherwise, I just weep. The book was published in 1760, which is only 20 years after the first novel written in English, the abominable Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (yes, it is every bit as bad as the title indicates, plus a 10% bonus of awfulness for being written in epistolary form — only Tom Jones, which brutally satirizes it, justifies the waste of ink on this steaming lump of sirreverence). Tristram Shandy wanders off on digressions, digressions from digressions, subplots in flashbacks, flashbacks in subplots, asides to the reader, imagined dialogues with the reader, and pages printed in marble pattern to indicate the impenetrability of a discussion of noses. It affixed a “kick me” note to the diaper of the infant English novel. Think of going from Bach to Zappa in 20 years.
I haven’t seen it. It’s safe to say, though, that it will likely depart somewhat from the text. I gather that the movie is a movie about making a movie out of the book, which seems about right, but only if the movie is never quite finished (Tristram only gets to about age seven in this fictional autobiography, despite the thickness of the book).
To give a small taste of the book, here is it’s dedication, which is found in Chapters 8 and 9 of Book I:
“Alleged virtues”
This afternoon “All Thing Considered” did a pleasant, affectionate & informative segment on Benjamin Franklin; tomorrow is his three hundredth birthday. His breadth & wit make him a great subject. What struck me, however, was the underlying assumption that irony & wit & a sense of his own fallibility meant that he wasn’t serious about self-improvement. He doesn’t take himself seriously, he doesn’t think with pride that he has or ever will reach “perfection”: this is not just his charm but his common sense. But we can laugh at what we still hold seriously. This paradox seemed lost. D. H. Lawrence is a fool as well as completely lacking a sense of humor. However, Joel Rose simplifies in another direction when he describes Poor Richard’s moralistic aphorisms on (in Rose’s words) “temperance” and “frugality” as “alleged” virtues, I doubt Franklin would have agreed.