Pater Familias

MENTAL ILLNESS OR PHYSICAL ILLNESS? This essay elegantly summarizes how the idea of mental illness has changed through the last fifty years. Reading it, I kept reflecting how much of the intellectual history and the literature of that period was influenced by the changing concept of mental illness. Progress has come by acknowledging how little is known. Two sentences I especially liked: “The difference between a medical diagnosis and a psychiatric diagnosis thus has less to do with the patient’s symptoms and more to do with how much the doctor understands the illness. Every so-called ‘physical’ symptom imaginable has at one time or another been termed psychogenic by eager theorizers, and when the physiological basis of a patient’s mental symptom is revealed, like the secret compartment in a magician’s cabinet, the flamboyant madness evaporates, leaving behind a leaden residue of organ damage and biochemistry.”

CRITICS AND BITTEROSITY. This harsh review (link via Arts and Letters Daily) took me aback because I think Adam Gopnik is one of the best essayists writing today. The reviewer clearly thinks that Gopnik’s new book about his children is not sufficiently grown up (the review builds to the last line, “You kids go play elsewhere”). I understand that not everyone is as happy as I am to hear stories about other people’s children. But there is more going in the review than a dislike for the subject. There is a sentence in the review that changed my reading of the entire review. Gopnik tells a story about his daughter saying that one of her imaginary playmates, in fact the fiancee of Charlie Ravioli, had died of a “disease called Bitterosity.” (Charlie Ravioli is the famous imaginary playmate whose schedule is so full that he doesn’t have time to get together with Gopnik’s daughter.) The reviewer summarizes Gopnik’s riff on Bitterosity as bitterness “born of….jealousy and resentment.” Then comes the riveting sentence: “The gnawing resentment of creative talents who never achieved what they desired or never received the breaks they felt they were due is a rich, stubbly grown-up subject that deserves better than the gentle spray of ironies that Gopnik employs whenever a fanciful notion dials his number.” This sentence seems to explain the tone of the review, its condemnation (out of the blue) of Malcolm Gladwell as a “slickster trickster”, its characterization of Gopnik as “an earnest little eager beaver whose twitchy aura of neediness makes him hard to dislike until the preciosity simply becomes too much”, the reviewer’s reaction when the New Yorker’s editor says, “Adam is adorable.” (”A damning compliment, fit for a performing flea.”). I wound up with a certain embarrassment for the reviewer’s inadvertent (or perhaps intentional?) self-revelation and a certain sympathy for his pain.

OH, RATS—NOSTALGIA FOR GREENWICH VILLAGE. News stories about a video of rats cavorting in a Greenwich Village fast food restaurant have achieved popularity on the internet. Thanks to the internet, I was able to determine that the restaurant is at 331 Sixth Avenue and is just a couple doors from a local landmark, the Waverly Theater. In the late sixties I lived on Downing Street, just a five minute walk from the restaurant. One night my cousin Walt went to deal with a mouse that was making noise in the kitchen while I either dozed or pretended to doze. It turned out that it was either a rat or a mouse as big as a football. We found the hole and stuffed it with a shoe and then, on the advice of friends who had lived in New Orleans, stuffed the hole with steel wool. Apparently rats get tired of trying to chew through the steel wool.

A SIXTH REASON DRAMAS STRUGGLE IN NEW YORK. This article by Campbell Robertson in the New York Times for February 25 says, “Each new Broadway season opens with a cherished ritual. The play is proclaimed dead, killed by — pick one or more — the musical, the tourists, the unions, the cost of advertising or the general decline of American culture.” He omits a sixth possible reason, the hostility of influential critics who are eloquent about the boredom that drama can cause them or about how most drama on Broadway isn’t good. See here and here.

JENNIFER EHLE. This blog has been cited by another blog, Jennifer Ehle, a fan blog devoted to Jennifer Ehle. I am surprised and pleased. I have been grateful to Jennifer Ehle for PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and DESIGN FOR LIVING. I am now even more grateful to her because I think it was having actors of her stature (as well as Amy Irving, Ethan Hawke, Billy Crudup…) that helped bring THE COAST OF UTOPIA to New York.

HOMAGE TO CATALONIA REVISITED. This is a very interesting attack by an admirer of Orwell (Anthony Daniels) on HOMAGE TO CATALONIA (link via Arts and Letters Daily). I can think of three ways one could look at the harsh facts about the anti-Fascist forces in Orwell’s book. First, one could see them as being examples of Orwell’s ruthless honesty, showing that Orwell was not willing to skew the facts so to support his thesis. As Daniels says, Orwell was far less inclined than others to disguise uncomfortable facts. Second, you could say that the review is a successful deconstruction of HOMAGE TO CATALONIA, showing that yet again an author, when cleverly assessed by a deconstructionist critic, has wound up saying the opposite of what he thought he was saying. Or, third, you could say that Orwell points out these flaws in the socialistic future to emphasize what he was saying: despite the ugly facts about achieving socialism, socialism is worth it, and by a great deal. I favor this third interpretation. Interestingly, the review adopts the same approach; it essentially argues that Orwell is great enough to outweigh the serious objections to HOMAGE TO CATALONIA. I agree. I acknowledge the force of Daniels’s points, but I still think HOMAGE TO CATALONIA is a wonderful book.

FOLLOWING UP ON EARMARKS. I previously posted on how an experienced civil servant told me that his agency had to do detective work to identify earmarks referred to in only four or five words in a conference report. Now the Office of Management and Budget has instructed federal agencies to honor only earmarks contained in statutes, thereby supporting Congressional actions which provided that earmarks in 2006 reports were to have no legal effect.

RANKING THE WORST PRESIDENTS–DOES CIVIL RIGHTS MATTER?. The U.S. News and World Report has a new consensus ranking of the worst Presidents. It cites the famous 1948 poll of historians which ranked Harding worst and Grant second worst. For many years I have wondered whether it was an accident that the lowest ranking in 1948 went to two Presidents who had gotten too far out in front on rights for African-Americans. Grant as President fought a number of battles for Reconstruction. In the haste to describe Harding’s personal failings, it is rarely mentioned that, to quote the Encyclopedia Americana “In the field of civil rights he reversed Wilson’s practice of excluding from federal posts, and in Birmingham, Ala., in a speech of extraordinary boldness, he called for political, economic, and educational equality for the races.” That’s right. The speech was in Birmingham, Alabama. I see that Arthur Schlesinger Sr. who conducted the 1948 poll thought that what was most important in deciding who were the best presidents was whether they “took the side of progressivism and reform, as understood in their day.” I am afraid that the side of progressivism and reform in 1872, in 1922 and, unfortunately, in 1948 did not include speaking up for African-Americans. It is noteworthy that Rutherford B. Hayes, who ended Reconstruction, never seems to make historians’ lists of bad Presidents.

SNARKY POEMS (COMMENT). Lee in his comment on favorite poems mentions some funny poems and says that he likes snarky poems. Auden was an advocate of light verse, edited a couple anthologies of light verse, and, as I recall, said that about one third of the best poems were light verse. Mary Jane and I watched THE LIBERTINE with Johnny Depp as the Earl of Rochester. The movie was very accurate. I thought, the screen writer must have made up the part about Rochester teaching a girl to act on a bet, but I looked it up and it’s true. Rochester, no fawning courtier, once wrote an Impromptu on Charles II: “God bless our good and gracious king/ Whose promise none relies on;/ Who never said a foolish thing,/ Nor ever did a wise one.” (Charles II is generally thought to have gotten the better of Rochester by replying to the effect that “That’s because I decide what I say, and I have advisers to tell me what to do.”)

COAST OF UTOPIA –ARITHMETIC AND THE CRITICS. Mary Jane and I saw the first play in Tom Stoppard’s THE COAST OF UTOPIA and loved it. We came out of the play in a state of euphoria. We are eagerly looking forward to the other two plays. A friend of ours in Michigan sent us an unfavorable review of THE COAST OF UTOPIA by Charles Isherwood in the New York Times, entitled, “Utopia is a Bore. There, I Said It.” Isherwood seems to regard expressing this opinion as an act of courage, saying that “Even nonprofessional critics…. may hesitate to register a negative opinion about a play so widely regarded as evincing all the virtues serious theatergoers look for…..” Arithmetic says that Isherwood should not feel uncomfortable about his position. Only a small percentage of people comprises the audience for almost any play or book. It’s hard to imagine a million people—less than one per cent of the people in the country—being interested in any new play (movies and television still aspire to mass audiences). So most people would be indifferent to the play and agree with Isherwood’s vote (and it’s basically only a vote because he never offers an explanation beyond the statement in the headline). As I’ve commented earlier, the theater critics at the New York Times don’t seem to enjoy the theater as much as some of us do, and our hearts should go out to them. Poor Isherwood laments that he had to see the Stoppard plays twice, once in London and once in New York.