The Bluestocking, vol 64: Selfish artists and Insider Baseball
Happy Friday!
My commentary all got a bit epic this week, making me think that I should return to blogging. But then it feel like work, not displacement activity for work, and I'd probably dry up.
Helen
Against Passion (LRB, sub might be required depending on how they feel moment to moment)
There is a further problem, which [Mark] Lilla sidesteps: the awkward issue of identity politics in the age of globalisation. If you frame ‘identity politics’ as a self-indulgent distraction from the vital business of creating a shared vision of America that all Americans can believe in, you’re not only taking identities of gender or race or sexuality out of play; you are also taking for granted what it means to be ‘American’. In a world without the internet or cheap air travel, in a world before there was a global higher education system, in a world where capital couldn’t shop around for the cheapest labour and the lowest taxes, in a world where governments didn’t provide their citizens with pensions and healthcare that could be compared to those in other countries, you could get away with that. But we don’t live in that world today. It is the extreme fluidity of capital, cultures and people that has created today’s multi-axis politics, and to dismiss a preoccupation with race or gender or sexual orientation as ‘identity politics’ while maintaining an unquestioning investment in one’s nationality is cloudy thinking.
James Meek reads two books by Mark Lilla. Can't say I was much interested in the second, on philosophers, but The Once And Future Liberal piques my interest. As Meek notes, it "belongs to the genre of responses to Donald Trump’s election in which liberal American academics turn their rage on their own intellectual-political class".
I'm not sure if the "identity politics is killing the left" argument has any juice to be squeezed; it feels obvious that some extreme manifestations of tribalism and "identitarian deference" (the idea that an oppressed group are the only ones allowed to have an opinion on their oppression) are intellectual dead ends.
However, it also seems clear that identity is a large and electorally salient part of politics, and some of the jeremiads about identity politics do feel a bit like white men getting annoyed that everyone is talking about gender when they could be talking about something proper, like Invading Somewhere. As Meek says, in a globalised world - particularly one with mass migration and mobile populations - identity is increasingly salient.
We'll Be Paying For Mark Halperin's Sins For Years To Come
We have an apocalyptic politics in part because Halperin helped promote an apocalyptic approach to political coverage. It made him and his little scoops seem hugely important: that conversation he overheard between McConnell and Schumer meant everything. The title of his career-making book, 2008’s Game Change — which sold over 350,000 copies and netted him and his coauthor John Heilemann a $5 million advance for a follow-up — says everything. Politics is a game and its rules are constantly being transformed. Its intentionally hyperbolic, breathless text presented details like the fact that Obama “woke up late … and went for a haircut with his pal Marty Nesbitt” the way an ancient monarch’s courtiers used to examine his every sigh for divine omens.
Kinda ironic to be posting a piece which criticises someone for a gossipy newsletter in my gossipy newsletter, but hey. I don't think anyone can accuse the Bluestocking of helping to create Donald Trump.
A useful accompaniment to this piece is Joan Didion's "Insider Baseball" from the 1988 US presidential race, where she reveals the essential hollowness of a political campaign, setting up shots of the candidate saying meaningless blather to bussed-in supporters so there's B-roll for the evening news. And why do people want to be political reporters? "It gets them out on the road, it has balloons, it has music, it is viewed as a big story, one that leads to the respect of one’s peers, to the Sunday shows, to lecture fees and often to Washington". Not much has changed in thirty years.
I had watched the movie at least a dozen times before, but even so, it charmed me all over again. Annie Hall is a jeu d’esprit, an Astaire soft shoe, a helium balloon straining at its ribbon. It’s a love story for people who don’t believe in love: Annie and Alvy come together, pull apart, come together, and then break up for good. Their relationship was pointless all along, and entirely worthwhile. Annie’s refrain of “la di da” is the governing spirit of the enterprise, the collection of nonsense syllables that give joyous expression to Allen’s dime-store existentialism. “La di da” means, Nothing matters. It means, Let’s have fun while we crash and burn. It means, Our hearts are going to break, isn’t it a lark?
Annie Hall is the greatest comic film of the twentieth century—better than Bringing Up Baby, better even than Caddyshack—because it acknowledges the irrepressible nihilism that lurks at the center of all comedy. Also, it’s really funny. To watch Annie Hall is to feel, for just a moment, that one belongs to humanity. Watching, you feel almost mugged by that sense of belonging. That fabricated connection can be more beautiful than love itself. And that’s what we call great art. In case you were wondering.
I too love Annie Hall, and hate Woody Allen. This essay makes sense of that. Plus, those concepts from Heidegger - "Dasein means conscious presence, an entity aware of its own mortality—e.g., almost every character in every Woody Allen movie ever except Tracy. Vorhandensein, on the other hand, is a being that exists in itself; it just is—like an object, or an animal" - are being squirrelled away for future reference.
But then - and this shouldn't work, but it does - the essay veers off from talking about monstrous men, to talking about how creating art demands a certain kind of monstrosity: "A book is made out of small selfishnesses." I'm so pleased someone else has written this, because I wanted to write something very similar, and couldn't work out how to do it without appearing incredibly passive-aggressive towards everyone in my life. But the author is right - art and writing does inevitably come at the expense of everything else. It takes a huge amount of time. And that's time stolen from partners, friends, children, parents - all of it.
I'm sure I've mentioned this in the newsletter before, but one of my favourite offbeat books from the last few years is Brigid Schulte's Overwhelmed, about time and leisure. It points out that men's unbroken "quality time" was expected to be protected, by wives or secretaries. When couples have children, women spend more time as the "supervisory parent" - aka the one who is ultimately responsible.
And as that great "thankyoufortyping" hashtag showed, many male writers have benefited from a partner who took care not just of their household duties, but their work admin too. The enemy of great art is the pram in the hall; it's also the birthday card for your in-laws; sorting out the work Christmas party; answering that email because your male colleague has ignored it and they've come to you.
I feel so often that our culture doesn't treat women's time as precious in the way it does with men. Women are less forgiven for what what Dederer describes as the selfishness of the "finisher".
Quick links:
1. "The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated—provides the emotional core of its appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal." Adam Serwer on the "nationalist delusion".
2. I enjoyed the relaxation of this man being systematically attacked by his snakes.
3. This (NSFW) video of Rage Against the Machine.
4. Why social networks are like early cities: pestilence sweeps through them because we haven't yet built proper plumbing and other infrastructure.
Guest gif: Hamilton is so close now, I can almost smell it:
See you next time!