Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 21
January 17, 2015
Celebrating A Century Of Sexual Neuroticism
Jonathon Sturgeon pays tribute to T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” first published in 1915:
You don’t have to be sexually frustrated to enjoy “Prufrock,” although I certainly was as a young high schooler when I first encountered the poem. Only my life was an exact inversion of Eliot’s Brahminical privilege and Grand Touristry. Nevertheless, Eliot’s uneasy mixture of elitism and sexual anxiety mesmerized me. So did its allusive range and musicality, its dissected and etherized bodies. I never took for granted that the opening lines were entreating the reader (me) and a young woman at the same time. I guess Prufrock was my Virgil:
LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question….
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
We still broadcast on Prufrock’s frequency of selfhood today. One of the loudest and most convincing voices in contemporary poetry, for example, is Frederick Seidel’s anti-Prufrockian taunt. (It’s worth noting that Seidel’s backstory is remarkably similar to Eliot’s.) In popular culture, too — in film, television, music, whatever — sexual neurotics of every stripe owe a substantial debt to Prufrock, whether they know it or not. “Let us go and make our visit,” Prufrock says. One hundred years later: Prufrock’s world seems strange and distant, a repressed imaginary where one should tread lightly. And it’s a place we visit every day.
Mental Health Break
This cop is on the beat:
Dear Aunt Ayn
Mallory Ortberg digs up this amazingly horrible letter from Ayn Rand to her 17-year-old niece, who asked the famous libertarian novelist and “philosopher” if she could borrow $25. Here’s how it begins:
Dear Connie:
You are very young, so I don’t know whether you realize the seriousness of your action in writing to me for money. Since I don’t know you at all, I am going to put you to a test.
If you really want to borrow $25 from me, I will take a chance on finding out what kind of person you are. You want to borrow the money until your graduation. I will do better than that. I will make it easier for you to repay the debt, but on condition that you understand and accept it as a strict and serious business deal. Before you borrow it, I want you to think it over very carefully.
It gets even better. After proposing a repayment scheme, Aunt Ayn really turns on the charm:
I want you to understand right now that I will not accept any excuse—except a serious illness. If you become ill, then I will give you an extension of time—but for no other reason. If, when the debt becomes due, you tell me that you can’t pay me because you needed a new pair of shoes or a new coat or you gave the money to somebody in the family who needed it more than I do—then I will consider you as an embezzler. No, I won’t send a policeman after you, but I will write you off as a rotten person and I will never speak or write to you again.
Now I will tell you why I am so serious and severe about this. I despise irresponsible people. I don’t want to deal with them or help them in any way. An irresponsible person is a person who makes vague promises, then breaks his word, blames it on circumstances and expects other people to forgive it. A responsible person does not make a promise without thinking of all the consequences and being prepared to meet them.
Read the rest here. The missive also can be found in The Letters of Ayn Rand.
Is Gentrification A Myth?
John Buntin challenges the conventional wisdom:
That gentrification displaces poor people of color by well-off white people is a claim so commonplace that most people accept it as a widespread fact of urban life. It’s not. Gentrification of this sort is actually exceedingly rare. The socio-economic status of most neighborhoods is strikingly stable over time. When the ethnic compositions of low-income black neighborhoods do change, it’s typically because Latinos and other immigrants move into a neighborhood—and such in-migration is probably more beneficial than harmful. As for displacement—the most objectionable feature of gentrification—there’s actually very little evidence it happens. In fact, so-called gentrifying neighborhoods appear to experience less displacement than nongentrifying neighborhoods.
He shares some research by sociologist Patrick Sharkey showing gentrification’s surprising benefits:
Sometimes these changes can be difficult, resulting as they often do in new political leaders and changes to the character of the communities. But Sharkey’s research suggests they also bring real benefits. Black residents, particularly black youth, living in more diverse neighborhoods find significantly better jobs than peers with the same skill sets who live in less diverse neighborhoods. In short, writes Sharkey, “There is strong evidence that when neighborhood disadvantage declines, the economic fortunes of black youth improve, and improve rather substantially.”
In other words, the problem isn’t so much that gentrification hurts black neighborhoods; it’s that it too often bypasses them. Harvard sociologists Robert Sampson and Jackelyn Hwang have shown that neighborhoods that are more than 40 percent black gentrify much more slowly than other neighborhoods. The apparent unwillingness of other ethnic groups to move into and invest in predominantly black communities in turn perpetuates segregation and inequality in American society.
Previous Dish on gentrification here.
(Photo by Flickr user MsSaraKelly.)
DFW, From Iconoclast To Icon
Alexander Nazaryan considers the recently released, over one-thousand page David Foster Wallace Reader, which includes everything from excerpts of Wallace’s fiction to the syllabi of classes he taught:
[D]o we need The David Foster Wallace Reader? According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, probably not. Though the book seems like a Christmas gift in the making, it contains almost no new work. But I think I get what [editorial adviser and Wallace’s former editor Michael] Pietsch is doing here, and I am all for it. You need evidence of miracles for sainthood; you need something only marginally more mundane to sustain a bid for lasting literary greatness, for entrance into that pantheon protected from the vicissitudes of literary taste. This is part of that effort, a reminder of how good Wallace could be, whether he was writing about Kafka or the Illinois State Fair, whether he was making stuff up or trying to see things as they actually are.
Tim Groenland posits that the Reader answers the eternal dilemma of what DFW newbies should read first:
The David Foster Wallace Reader is, essentially, an attempt to address this question by presenting as many of the answers as possible between one set of covers. Assembled with one eye firmly on the classroom (and, perhaps, the other on a world in which people are less and less likely to read 1,079-page novels), it includes selections from each of Wallace’s fictional works as well as several of his most celebrated essays with occasional commentary from writers, critics and friends.
The foreword (written jointly by Wallace’s editor, his agent and his widow) claims that “teachers will find here an ideal introduction for students”, a statement that makes the book’s main purpose clear. The Reader can be seen as a move by the Wallace estate in the emerging struggle to manage his legacy. Since his untimely and tragic death (he took his own life at the age of 46) a certain amount of romantic tortured-genius aura has accumulated around Wallace, to the dismay of friends and family. A Hollywood biopic is due shortly in which the author will be played by Jason Segel (star of The Muppets and Knocked Up, among others); the Wallace estate has already disowned the film. The Reader represents an attempt to position the writer as a serious literary figure rather than a pop icon.
Recent Dish on David Foster Wallace here, here, and here.
The View From Your Window Contest
You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book, a new Dish mug, or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.
Last week’s contest results are here. Browse a gallery of all our previous contests here.
January 16, 2015
Beard Of The Week
A reader writes:
I submit as a candidate this photo of my friend, snapped by his wife, both of Northfield, Minnesota, with kittens Cosmo and Bartimaeus. She titled this photo “things are taking a turn for the strange today”. He and I are all among a group of folks who play Nordic Traditional music here in Northfield on Monday nights at the Contented Cow Pub. We have been playing together for 10 years and I like to think we are the best and largest nordic traditional music jam session west of Bergen. People have to keep warm here in Minnesota somehow when the nights are 14 below.
Previous BOTDs here.
Correction Of The Day
From a Guardian piece entitled, “132-year-old rifle found propped up against tree in Nevada desert”:
An earlier Reuters version of this story was amended on 16 January 2015 to correct the model of gun mentioned. It is a Winchester Model 1873, not a 1773, as we first said. The headline was also changed to make it clear that an old gun had been found, not a decrepit cowboy.
Beware The Sponsored Charticle
Last month, Jacob Harris raged against the rise of “data journalism” created by companies looking for viral media coverage, such as the Durex effort Voxified above:
PR-driven data stories [come] from an opposite direction to traditional data journalism. This is not data that is collected and analyzed in response to specific questions and whose quality is checked before publication, but prebuilt charts pushed to news organizations like press releases and targeted against specific topics like sex, anxiety, and shame that are more likely to elicit clicks. If you’re a company looking for press, why not use those fancy data scientists you hired to also generate some free publicity outside the company? And if you’re a reporter at a news startup who needs to constantly fill the news hole with new material, why wouldn’t you run one of these? Everybody’s happy, even if the data isn’t right.
Today he revisited the topic, wondering why more people aren’t creeped out by companies harvesting and publishing data about them like this:
Remember [that article] about Target figuring out which customers are pregnant [by analyzing what seemingly unrelated products they bought]; it’s hard not to see it as an invasion of privacy even if it’s perfectly legal. Contrast that with this analysis by Jawbone showing how the Napa earthquake affected its users’ sleep. Despite being built on deeply personal information, it doesn’t seem to have raised any ire from readers online. Why?
It’s possible that the difference is wearing a Jawbone is voluntary — but so is shopping at Target. Indeed, I think it’s clear that both companies analyzed personal data that users generally assume is private. It looks like Jawbone managed to sidestep squeamishness by releasing a cool chart instead of boasting about their ability to target individual user’s sleep pattern, although that’s likely something their servers are doing. All of which suggests a golden opportunity for big retailers who didn’t know how to talk about their use of big data without sounding totally creepy. Now they can — with maps!
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