Eric The Blue

Netflix: "Milk" and "The Visitor"

We didn't intend to watch, back-to-back, two movies that generated Academy Award nominations for Best Actor, but I guess that is how things lined up in our Netflix queue.  Sean Penn, of course, won for Milk, in which he plays the title character, Harvey Milk, the first openly gay Californian elected to public office, who along with San Francisco mayor George Moscone was murdered on November 27, 1978, by Dan White, his former colleague on the city's Board of Supervisors.  The movie is a contribution to an instantly recognizable genre: biopics wherein the subject is aligned with all that is good and decent and radiates light, whereas the forces with which he must contend are to be despised.  You'll feel good about yourself if you're on Milk's side.  Penn is said to "inhabit the role," from which I conclude that Milk must have gesticulated oddly while making speeches.

In The Visitor, Richard Jenkins plays an economics professor moping through what's left of his life after his wife dies.  I don't know anything about acting, and maybe this is harsh, but how hard can it be to walk stiffly and speak in monotones?  For some of us flattened affect comes naturally but for Jenkins it evidently required an Oscar-worthy feat of acting.

Anyway, his character keeps an apartment in New York, and, stopping in after a long absence, he finds a couple occupying the premises.  They are brown-black illegals and turn out to be somewhat more friendly than your average squatters. The professor's involvement with them and their problems in post 9/11 America "brings him back to life."  The quotes are meant to indicate that I know it's a cliche. I can't think of a fresh way to say it.

Flannery O'Connor

Joyce Carol Oates reviews the recently published Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, by Brad Gooch, and, as is the custom with reviews in The New York Review, has as much or more to say about Gooch's subject as she does about Gooch's book.  You can't argue with much of what she says.  A fierce and devout Roman Catholic, O'Connor's stories are melodramatic cartoons written in the 1950s and 1960s, when the usual models were the carefully wrought and understated short fictions of Chekhov and Joyce.  "To the hard of hearing you shout," O'Connor explained, "and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures." 

It is the sanguine unbelievers, and their similarly comfortable lukewarm Christian communicants, who require these large and startling figures.  Sometimes it would be more accurate to dispense with "large" and "startling" in favor of "terrible" and "grim."  You laugh and laugh and then wonder what you are laughing at.  "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," maybe her most frequently reprinted story, begins with an overly chatty grandma complaining that the car trip she's embarking on with her son's family should take a different route, the better to avoid the haunts of a notorious criminal who's been terrorizing the region.  They go anyway, she keeps up a steady stream of inane commentary, for example agreeing with the proprietor of a roadside restaurant who says that these days a good man is hard to find, then there is an accident and--surprise!--the notorious criminal, known as The Misfit, arrives on the scene and kills them all, including the baby, who is in the story only so that it can be murdered.  People hate it so when bad things happen to babies.

Oates directs attention to the conclusion of this story without mentioning the last word, which, though I once made a systematic reading of her slim collected works for a school project, is the one thing I will never forget from O'Connor's world.  All the members of the family have been shot dead.  The Misfit directs his helper, one Bobby Lee, to retrieve the old lady's corpse from the ditch and toss it with the others.  He descends into the ditch "with a yodel" before declaring, "Some fun!"  The story ends with the Misfit's retort:  "'Shut up, Bobby Lee,' the Misfit said.  'It's no real pleasure in life.'"

So there for your consideration is one of the large and startling figures. Once, in a letter, O'Connor wrote:

There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.

That seems to shed some light on what is going on in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and, more generally, in the world according to Flannery O'Connor.

Oates takes up the question of whether "the art of caricature [is] a lesser or secondary art, set beside what we might call the art of complexity or subtlety."  She doesn't offer a final answer, but her catalog of the evidence, in a footnote, for O'Connor's rising stock on the Literary Reputation Index--the proliferation of book-length studies of her work, the Ph.D. dissertations, the way in which sales of the Library of America edition of her work surpass those of her fellow southerner Faulkner--suggest that academic toilers now esteem her startling figures more than, say, Faulkner's rich, complicated, comprehensive chronicle of Yoknapatawpha County.  There is a certain irony here.  O'Connor saw herself as an outsider, even as a kind of prophet to the comfortable and unconverted masses, but the source of her outsider critique is now what has made her a campus favorite.  Think of all the Catholic universities and other Christian institutions of what is called higher education, their English faculties drowning in tenure-track earnestness.  Catholics have tried to claim James Joyce, a passionate atheist, as a lost son of the Church.  Imagine the enthusiasm generated by an actual orthodox believer.

One of the pleasures of literature involves what has been called "the thrill of recognition."  O'Connor's large and startling figures do not provide it.  Her fiction to me is news from another world, one inhabited not by human beings but by the unusual sensibility of Flannery O'Connor.  I guess my vote is for what Oates calls an art of complexity or subtlety, not this harrowing tunnel always narrowing in on a medieval portrait of Christ.  But you can't deny the kick. 

Scott Johnson, tortured prophet, sounds the alarm

Over at Power LIne, Scott Johnson is "depressed."  The Democrats rule, wealth is evaporating, the mullahs of Iran are playing clueless Obama like a violin, and soon we shall all be wards of a "socialist" state.  Horrors!  Poor Johnson feels "utterly powerless to do anything about the fellow in the Oval Office who combines infantile leftism and adolescent grandiosity in roughly equal measures."

What a difference a couple of months make!  No sooner have sufferers of Bush Derangement Syndrome been released from doctors' care than one of the Power Line philosophers raises his cape to pose as a doomed romantic hero of the vestigial sainthood of right-wing loons.  Such is the dire state of affairs sixty days into the administration of Barack Obama, a new Dark Age. 

Johnson's den is too far from the mouth of the cave to allow the sunny consideration that his healthy readers, if there are any, will have other candidates for proper nouns to which "infantile" and "adolescent" may apply.  Predictably, fellow philosopher Hinderaker calls the post "brilliant."

Netflix: "Vicky Cristina Barcelona"

Woody Allen's arty, neurotic, discontented Manhattanites go to Barcelona.  Thus the title: "Vicky (arty, neurotic, discontented Manhattanite played by Rebecca Hall) Cristina (arty, neurotic, discontented Manhattanite played by Scarlett Johansson) Barcelona (the city they go to, played by itself)."  But it is Penelope Cruz, as an arty Spaniard whose neurotic discontentedness has flowered into a suicide attempt and pistol-waving hysteria, who wins an Oscar.  With Javier Bardem, a Spanish painter, as the love interest of all.

And when I say "all," that can mean "all at the same time," except for poor Vicky.  She is stuck with a  guy who, back in New York, appears to be the only character in the movie who has to work for a living.  How ridiculous is that!  But then he, too, goes to Barcelona, arriving in time to hear Cristina, feeling better now, breezily discourse on her threeway with the Bardem character and the Cruz character.  He listens, brows furrowed, and then, leaning in, asks: "So, would you call yourself a bisexual?"  On another occasion, he receives home decorating tips while, across from him, Vicky ruminates.  She's thinking of chucking him and joining the pile over at the painter's house.

If you must know how all this craziness is resolved, or just want to see Scarlett Johansson on a picnic wearing shorts, consider this a recommendation.

Contemplating the percentages

I recently referred to a bit of innumeracy in a Hendrik Hertzberg politcal column and challenged readers to spot it.  Since my mailbox has not been overflowing with responses from my thousands of alert readers, it is time to reveal the solution myself. 

Hertzberg himself directed attention to the error on his blog, which is how I came to know about it.  He wrote in the March 9 issue of The New Yorker that a 140 million dollar federal outlay for monitoring volcanoes, mocked by Louisiana's Governor Bobby Jindal in his lame response to the President's televised speech to a joint session of Congress, amounted to just 0.0002 percent of the total stimulus package.  Actually, it is 0.0002 ("two-ten thousandths") of the total package, which is 0.02 percent. 

I've noticed people have a hard time with the concept of percent.  Maybe they just have a hard time  figuring with numbers but the examples of innumeracy that cross my line of sight frequently have to do with percent problems.  For example, a friend, by no means dumb, charged with overseeing the United Way drive at her office, calls to ask how to determine whether someone's pledge is at least ten percent more than what they gave last year (in which case they get a prize).  I launch into an explanation and she interrupts, "Just tell me what buttons to push."

Hertzberg's error is rather common.  People understand (I think) that "percent" signifies "what part of a hundred" and would have no trouble telling you that 8 is 20% of 40.  But when the "part of a hundred" is somewhat more than 100 or somewhat less than 1, it's harder to think straight about it.  In fact I think it is a little disreputable to speak of percent in certain cases.  It seems like, instead of telling the truth, you are going for a "Wow!" with "a 100% increase" (sounds like it increased a hundredfold when it only doubled) or "one-tenth of one percent" (which may sound more impressively small than "a thousandth").

Of course you can achieve even more wonderful effects if you are willing to dispense altogether with the truth of the matter.  The New Yorker recently ran an essay--abstract only, the whole thing is behind a subscriber wall--by John McPhee concerning the Olympian efforts of fact checkers who, before an article can appear in print, verify every statement of fact, no matter how trivial or tangential to the subject at hand.  So I guess first Hertzberg and then Homer nodded.  My own theory of the case is that those toiling as fact checkers for The New Yorker are probably "literary types" and numbers are not their strength. 

But it is indeed odd, as Hertzberg says, that the Governor of Louisiana should be the one to go on TV to complain, on behalf of the Republican party, that President Obama appears too interested in preparing for natural disasters.

Contemplating e

The number e, sometimes called Euler's number, may be contemplated by recreational mathematicians in the way that others gaze fondly at a painting without knowing how much time has passed.  It is, like pi, irrational, and its importance in calculus is roughly analogous to that of pi in geometry.  But you don't meet up with pi anywhere except in geometry, whereas e keeps popping up in the strangest places.

The most common definition of e is the limit, as x increases without bound, of (1 + 1/x)^x.  The first time I had to think about this, I thought the answer must be either 1 or infinity.  In favor of the former, the expression in the parenthesis goes to 1 when x is very large, and 1 to any power, no matter how huge, is 1.  On the other hand, the expression in the parenthesis is always greater than 1, and, as exponents are powerful, it seems possible the expression "blows up" when x is very large.  But it is as if my two arguments to myself fight to a draw, neither able to win in a gazillion rounds, with the result that the limit turns out to be "e," or 2.7182818284. . . .  If you are skeptical, get out a calculator and perform, successively, (1.1)¹⁰, (1.01)¹⁰⁰, (1.001)¹⁰⁰⁰, and so on.  The display on the calculator will get closer and closer to 2.7182818284. . . .

The physicist Richard Feynman created a stir with his pastime of cracking safes while working on the Manhattan Project.  His methods, however, were not magical.  For example, he got access to some top secret papers when, trying combinations that he thought would occur to a physicist, a safe swung open after he dialed 27-18-28.

Suppose you were asked the sum of the following infinite series:

1/0! + 1/1! + 1/2! + 1/3! + 1/4! + . . . .

Would you believe that this, too, is e?  That two expressions, one exponential in nature and the other a sum involving factorials, should both equal the same transcendental number--pretty weird, I think.  Possibly the diverse means of deriving e is connected to its all-around mathematical versatility.  Do you have a problem involving interest compounding continuously?  You need e.  In calculus, the derivative of the function

f(x) = e^x

is e^x, a vital fact that turns out to be exceedingly useful.  It follows that the slope of a line drawn tangent to the graph of y =e^x will be equal to e^x at every point.  Calculus teachers around the world have made use of these qualities to invent clever, marginally tricky problems.  Q: What is the slope of the line tangent to f(x) = e^x at (0,1)?  A: 1.  Q: What are the x- and y-intercepts of a line tangent to f(x) = e^x at (1,e)?  A: 0, 0.

My favorite uxexpected appearance of e is in certain probability problems.  If there is a 1/n chance of winning a casino game, and you play n times, what's the chance you never win?  Notice that if n is 2, the answer comes in at (1/2)²  = 1/4, or 0.25; if it's 3, it rises to (2/3)³ = 8/27 = 0.296; and it it's 4 it rises again to (3/4)⁴ = 0.316.  What if it's 100?  That would be given by (0.99)¹⁰⁰, which is very close to 0.366, which is getting very close to. . . (1/e).  There is a famous problem involving a butler checking hats at a party.  Each guest has a space reserved for his hat, but the butler is mute and doesn't know anyone's name, so can only guess.  If there are n guests and thus n spots for hats, what is the chance that the butler does not put a single hat in its proper place?  For a real big party, that is 1/e, too!

Neftlix: "Religulous"

Bill Maher interviews some of the dimmer, weirder practitioners of religion--and some charlatans, too.  Is it meant to prove something "deep" or just be funny?  In favor of the former view, Maher interviews Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project, a believer and quote-source for journalists trying to round out a story on the everlastingly vexing case of Science v Religion.  In his brief segment, Dr. Collins sounds plaintive; also, uninformed about the gospel narratives.  I think we're supposed to conclude that, since the "big thinkers" of American Christianity sound a lot like the rubes, only with better diction, it all must be a lot of hooey.

Of course it is Maher making the movie, so maybe it is not that surprising that he looks cleverer than his interviewees.  I'd be surprised if his best moments landed on the editing room floor.

As for being funny: yes, occasionally, but it's a guilty pleasure.  The God-obsessed, Christ-twisted ones are prone to forming bizarre fantasies and Maher, by gently pursuing his cross examinations, does not have much trouble showing they are, you know, "religulous."  We are supposed to laugh at the crazy things they think and say, and sometimes I did, but maybe I'd feel better about myself if I'd felt only pity. 

The New Yorker, March 9, 2009

The table of contents for the March 9, 2009, issue of The New Yorker is enough to make me regard the prospect of two or three free hours with more than the usual volume of longing: Hendrick Hertzberg on Obama punching in (marred only by a nugget of innumeracy--see whether you can spot it), D.T. Max on David Foster Wallace, an excerpt from Wallace's unfinished novel The Pale King, John Updike's review of a biography of John Cheever, and Roger Angell on Joe Torre.

Alas, there is an elegiac aspect to my reading pleasure.  Wallace is dead, a suicide.  Updike recently died of cancer.  Angell, well into his 80s, profiles Torre, a cancer survivor.  It is possible that The New Yorker is becoming superannuated.  On the other hand, it is also possible that it has been threatening to become superannuated now for a long time while continuing to be the best general interest magazine published in the U.S.

Updike's review, presumably composed in the last working days of his life, exhibits a measure of peevishness that is unusual in his reviewing oeuvre. Cheever was a personal friend, and Updike sounds put off by Blake Bailey's biography, a "faithful adherence" that adds up only to a "painstaking chronology of a tormented man's struggle with himself."   Bailey's final assessment, says Updike, is "rather stunningly anticlimactic," and he calls attention to the claim, on page 700-something out of 770, that "Cheever is hardly taught at all in the classroom, where reputations are perpetuated."  Why bother, Updike almost asks, if Cheever was as inconsequential as all that?

And his answer would be that a stroll through Cheever's fiction is more rewarding than this biographer's slow crawl through the drunk 2 p.m.s of too many of his days.  Is Cheever not taught in the schools?  So much the worse for them and their students, who instead are subjected to the "collegiate romanticism" of F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Thus pronounces, rather shockingly, John Updike, whose glittering reviews for fifty years eschewed shocking pronouncements.  I wonder whether he accepted this assignment before he knew he was dying and, somewhere before page 700, began to resent that he was spending his short time with such a poor companion.

Netflix: "In America"

"In America" (2003) features adorable sisters, elementary-school aged, in very difficult circumstances.  And that is not the only way in which it shouts, "I dare you to say this is not great stuff!"  However, it is not great stuff. 

The genre is "magical realism," which is to say, the grinding problems of poverty and illness and frustrated dreams are at the end happily and touchingly resolved.  In this particular case, the resolution is achieved with an assist from the magical connection between a family of Irish immigrants to the United States, circa 1985, and a reclusive black artist who is their neighbor in the same squalid Manhattan tenement.  In one scene, the girls are sent to the ice cream parlor so that their blindfolded dad can impregnate mom during a thunderstorm while the black artist simultaneously stabs a knife through his paintings.  The respective penetrations are juxtaposed in a swirling montage--the "magic," I guess, of magical realism. 

At the end, the artist, on his death bed in the hospital with (I think) AIDS , manages, by an exercise of his mind, or something, to push the Irish family's preemie baby, who is languishing in an incubator, over the line from death to life.  The baby gets named after the artist, who, we learn when the dad visits the bursar, paid the family's thirty-thousand-dollar hospital bill before expiring.

Put the emphasis on "magical" and don't forget that the adorable girls are sisters in real life.

Attorneys for Norm Coleman

I notice that I made it through the month of February without commenting on Norm Coleman's contest of our U.S. Senate race here in Minnesota.  It was on January 26, in "Coleman flails away, looks more ridiculous," that I dipped into Minnesota election law and argued that, with the lawyer-talk pared away, Coleman was essentially asking the three-judge panel hearing his contest to overturn those laws and to make new ones that might yield the result he desires--a highly unlikely outcome that, if it came to pass, would be an obvious instance of the kind of "judicial activism" that Republicans purport to abhor.

In February, Coleman's prospects dimmed.  Decisions rendered by the judges suggested their view of the merits of his case is roughly in line with mine.  It became apparent, too, that Coleman's team had pretty much given up on prevailing in the contest.  They have now rested their weak case, and in the later stages it was clear, from their arguments in court and their comments to the press, that their sights had shifted to yet other courts--the Minnesota Supreme Court and, if necessary, the federal court system, including possibly the U.S. Supreme Court.

Of course there is also the court of public opinion.  Coleman's chances there are as poor as anywhere.  His lawyers are now plainly hinting that they want a "do-over"--another election, for which there is no provision in Minnesota law, and which Coleman, largely on account of his actions since last election day, would have no chance of winning. 

One reads repeatedly in journalistic accounts of the proceedings the phrase, "attorneys for Norm Coleman," but it became evident awhile ago that it is not Norm Coleman's interests that his attorneys are pursuing.  The law governing close federal elections has been followed, the result is a narrow win for Al Franken, and Coleman, having failed with the voters, is not going to win back his seat in court. His attempts to do so are running his bad name into the nether regions.  As "attorneys for Norm Coleman," his team is a colossal failure.

His legal team is, however, keeping Al Franken from becoming the fifty-ninth Democrat in the U.S. Senate.

Native Son

Native Son is probably the the most exotic specimen on my list of Ten Favorite American Novels.  Remember, you can't really argue with me, or with Mailer, whose list moved me to make my own,  because admission is based only on how much I, or he, like the book.  But I know that to a lot of people Native Son will look out of place on a list that includes such standards as Moby-Dick and The Great Gatsby.  So I have an explanation.

I first read Native Son when I was about 15.  I had always been interested in sports, and when quite young read a lot of books with titles like Babe Ruth, Boy Slugger.  As I got older, my interests didn't really change, but I progressed to I Never Had It Made (Jackie Robinson) and Go Up For Glory (Bill Russell).  These contributions to publishing history served up what you'd expect, including a measure of racial animus that, to a boy in an all-white suburb, was an exciting new topic.  I moved off the sports shelves and, for some reason I can no longer remember, chose The Autobiography of Malcolm X.  Native Son followed, along with Wright's autobiography, Black Boy, and then many of the essays, stories, and novels of James Baldwin.  This was to me all news from another world. 

Years later, in college, I was enrolled in a seminar, "American Literature of the 1930s."  We were all assigned to choose a book from a list, read it, and report on it to the other participants.  Someone else took Native Son, a woman who, it developed when she delivered her report, hated it.  Mainly she couldn't stand the way it was written--"indulgent," "wordy," "sloppy." Since it was one of the books that made me a reader, I felt that my personal taste was under assault.  She didn't understand.  It was an angry book, the author was angry, and that was the way angry people talked.  They used a lot of adjectives.  The woman had mentioned that she was also in a "lyric poetry workshop," something like that, and so maybe she didn't comprehend that those conventions did not necessarily apply to novels.  Clumsiness, if that is what it was, can be expressive.  Bob Dylan's voice is fine for the songs he sings.  I worked up this defense after it was too late to air it in the seminar.  But I was on Richard Wright's side.

The woman in the seminar, by the way, was named Sarah Lindsay.  She is now quite a well known poet.  I can see how everything she said against Native Son was, from a certain perspective, true.  She might have mentioned, too, the melodrama and stock characters. Doesn't matter to me.  Irrelevant.  Native Son is the first grown-up American novel I loved.