BACK IN THE SADDLE AGAIN

My apologies for being out of touch – Paris has that effect on me.  Today, I shall post an omnium gatherum of bits and pieces of news from Paris.  Tomorrow, I shall broach a large and very difficult question that has bothered me for some time now.  Perhaps it will stimulate some interesting discussion.

Paris is unusually cold and rather rainy.  Since I gave away my heavy winter coat when I moved from Massachusetts to North Carolina four years ago, I have been reduced here to wearing several sweaters and a lined trench coat in an effort to stay warm.  I like to think that I look like Orson Welles in The Third Man [well, one can dream.]  The night before last snow was predicted, and all Paris braced, but in the end no more than a few flakes fell.

The big news from my little copropriété [which is to say “condo”] is the cave vouté or vaulted cave discovered right under our bathroom when workmen dug down to prop up the seventeenth century building [which was starting to show cracks in the outer walls.]  It is a rather large space, apparently.  I immediately announced dibs on any treasure discovered, but the engineer hired by the syndic that manages our building opined that it was probably part of an old septic system.  Pretty disappointing.  On Tuesday, at eleven in the morning, there was a gathering outside our French doors, at the hole, which narrows the access to our apartment.  The space is unusable, even as a wine cellar, because of the humidity, but it poses a threat of flooding since we are only half a block from the Seine.  The only good news is that since no one knew the cave existed, it is not mentioned in the legal documents forming the copropriété out of three buildings around an interior courtyard, so instead of charging only the owners of the apartments in our building for work dealing with the cave, all fifteen apartments will be charged.  Not equally, of course, but in proportion to their usable floor space.  Our tiny apartment is 2.77% of the total floor space, so we pay 2.77% of the repair costs.

Meanwhile, the really bad news in Paris is that the little weekly magazine, Pariscope, that lists concerts, movies, art exhibitions, and everything else happening in Paris, is on strike, so we are left to scrounge for places to visit.  On Wednesday [the day movies change in Paris] Susie and I walked down to Place de l’Odéon to see Killing Them Softly, the new Brad Pitt movie.  I thought it was a brilliantly powerful political commentary on contemporary America, with the last speech by Pitt an excoriating debunking of mainstream political rhetoric, but then I read Anthony Lane’s review in The New Yorker and discovered that I am an ignorant boob.  I think I will stick to the Critique of Pure Reason.   Film criticism is too sophisticated for me.  Next Wednesday The Hobbit opens.  I shall not attempt a commentary, lest I embarrass myself.

Today I went to the market to shop for dinner for tonight and tomorrow.  I got half a rabbit cut up [without the head], and some hazelnuts for my signature “rabbit loins with hazelnuts, five spices, and curry” dish.  Asparagus and mushrooms should go nicely.

An observation about small cultural differences between the French and Americans:  In a café, the French bring their dogs with them to the table but sit their children at an adjoining table so they will not interrupt the adult conversation.  Americans bring their children with them to the table and leave the dogs in the station wagon.

The parvis Nôtre Dame, the large cobblestoned square in front of the grand church at the bottom of our street, is almost totally occupied by large stands and other structures that have been erected to celebrate Nôtre Dame’s 850^th birthday next year.  Nôtre Dame took so long to build that the great grandchildren of the original workmen did not see it completed.  It remains, to my untutored eye, the most beautiful building in the world.

Susie and I dropped by Shakespeare and Company, the well-known English language bookstore, to find something to read.  They are asking for patrons to contribute recollections of the shop, especially in its earliest years, for a forthcoming volume. I spent a good deal of time hanging out there in the Spring of 1955, when it was still Le Mistral, and not yet Shakespeare and Co.  I shall send them an email with some reminiscences.

And so to bed, as Samuel Pepys liked to say.  Tomorrow, serious stuff.

AND AGAIN, IN PARIS

We have arrived, massively jet lagged but otherwise fine.  There is some interesting political news from Paris.  The center-right party of Sarkozy that lost the Presidential election to the socialist François Hollande [the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, or UMP] is engaged in a fratricidal split in some ways similar to what is brewing in the Republican Party at home.  The conflict, according to Le Monde, is as much one of egos as of ideology. The two contestants for the leadership of the Party, Fillon and Copé, are supposed to represent the center-right [Fillon] and extreme right [Copé] wings, and there is talk of Fillon [who lost a recent vote] hiving off to form a new party, but nothing is clear at this point, save that the extreme right-wing Front National Party started forty years ago by Jean-Marie Le Pen and headed now by his daughter Marine, is surging in strength.  The  FN is usually described as fascist, and it is certainly the repository for strong anti-immigrant French sentiment, but if you read the long and detailed article on Marine Le Pen in Wikipedia, you will see that matters are rather complicated.  The FN is very much unlike our own right wing, both because it is fiercely secular, not religious, and because it opposes the globalized capitalist world economy that our own right-wingers seem mindlessly to embrace.

The other news, of course, is that Dominique Strauss-Kahn [DSK], whose sexual harassment of a hotel maid half a year ago cost him the directorship of the IMF and probably the French presidency, has now settled “amicably” the civil suit brought against him by the maid by paying her, according to reports, six million dollars of his wife’s fortune.  You may recall that I sided with her from the very outset, despite the belief of some of my French friends that he had been set up.  The tiny bit of evidence that convinced me was her claim that when he assaulted her and she resisted, he said “Don’t you know who I am?”  That struck me as not at all something an immigrant African woman working as a maid would make up, and exactly what a man like DSK would say.  I think the payment settles the question as to who was telling the truth.

Paris is cold and rainy, and despite that utterly beautiful.  Tonight I shall cook a simple meal of dorade royale fillets, haricots verts, and fingerling potatoes, with a Keyser baguette and a Beaume de Venise for me and a Sancerre blanc for Susie.  I am afraid it us totally impossible to feel sorry for myself.

AND AGAIN -- TO PARIS

Well, Obama has been re-elected, the French presidency is once again safely in socialist hands, and it is time for me to return with Susie to Paris.  We shall be there until Christmas Eve [Paris is dead between Christmas and New Year's], and then home again so that I can crank up for the next semester at Bennett College.  On my drive home from Bennett today, I listened to an NPR discussion of the secessionist movements sprouting like weeds in the Old Confederacy.  We must be very strong and mature and resist the temptation to facilitate their departure!

DAVID BROOKS -- AN APPRECIATION

As most of you are aware, the Jewish seder is both a religious ritual and a meal.  It is a celebration of the liberation of the Jews from their captivity in Egypt and their flight, led by Moses, across the Red Sea.  The modern seder is an elaborate affair, with a text, the Haggadah, that is read [in Hebrew at a serious seder, in English at the seders I have attended] in a formulaic manner, punctuated by songs, the ritual of the "afikomen" [a piece of matzoh that is hidden, and then searched for by the children at the seder, to be held hostage until the director of the seder buys it back, inasmuch as the service cannot proceed without it], and eventually, by a meal.  It is intended to be a joyous affair, with a good deal of kibbitzing and joking and singing -- it is, after all, the celebration of a liberation.

The best seder I ever attended took place on Long Island at the home of young rabbi Waxman, son of old rabbi Waxman, who was at the table but not conducting the service.  I was then a student at Harvard, and had just taken a course on the philosophy of Spinoza with the great scholar Harry Austryn Wolfson.  It turned out that old rabbi Waxman knew Wolfson, and while the rest of the people at the table twiddled their thumbs and fumed quietly, waiting for the meal that was promised, I pressed the senior Waxman with questions, both about Wolfson and about the arcana of the interpretation of the Haggadah.  [All of this, you understand, despite the fact that I was then, and am still, an atheist who has never even been bar mitzvah'd.]

A signal moment in the seder occurs when one of those in attendance asks the person conducting the service four ritual questions, each of which is preceded by the formula, "Wherefore is this night different from all other nights, for on this night we ..."  [eat reclining, eat unleavened bread, etc.]  Each question is answered by reference to a different feature of the flight from Egypt.

There is a tradition, at least in America, that the youngest boy present asks the four questions.  [No girls needed to apply, although I imagine things have now changed.]  Since the seder is typically an affair for family and close friends, it was not difficult to figure out which little boy would have the honor of asking the questions.  In upper middle class Northeast families, it was quite common for this chosen one to be a fat-faced, petted, made much of little momma's boy dressed in a new little suit and tie and fussed over by a rather plump, preening, proud mother, who felt that the selection of her son to ask the four questions constituted a signal recognition of herself, as well as of her precious son.

Needless to say, regular boys hated this smug little brat, and would not themselves have been caught dead asking the four questions.

Whenever I see David Brooks on television, all I can think of is that little boy at a seder.  This is, of course, an unkind and quite unfair thing to say.   But I cannot help it.

A NIGHT AT THE MOVIES

Yesterday, after a somewhat frustrating passage at arms at the local mega-mall on Black Friday, Susie and I went to the movies, where we saw A Late Quartet, a beautiful new film featuring outstanding work by Christopher Walken and Seymour Phillip Hoffman.  The film explores a critical time of changes in the intertwined lives of the four members of a long-established string quartet.  The second violinist [Hoffman] is married to the violist.  Their daughter, a budding violinist, is the student, and the briefly the lover, of the obsessive, driven first violinist.  But the focus of the movie is the cellist [Walken], who as the film begins is diagnosed with early stage Parkinson's.  I freely confess that in the film's final moments, I wept openly.  If Hollywood has any shred of integrity left, Walken and Hoffman will get Oscar nominations.

As I watched the film, I was reminded of a fascinating autobiographical memoir, Indivisible by Four, by the great first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet, Arnold Steinhardt.  Through Steinhardt's writing, I gained some sense of the cloistral intimacy of the personal relationships of the members of a string quartet.  A well-established quartet, like the Guarneri or the Juilliard, may remain together, its members unchanged, for decades.  Night after night, for seven months a year, they sustain an intense, focused relationship, constantly attuned to one another's most subtle variations of mood and performance in their collective effort to create transcendently beautiful music.  String quartets differ enormously from one another, though to the novice they may all sound alike.  The Borromeo, for example, the very best of the new young quartets [although Wikipedia tells me that it has now been in existence for twenty years], is defined for me by the driving intensity of its cellist, Yeesun Kim.  I once had the extraordinary privilege of listening to the Borromeo perform the great Grosse Fugue quartet by Beethoven while sitting no more than twenty feet from the musicians, and the power of her playing was a transformative experience.

Those of us in the professional upper middle classes tend to spend an entire lifetime in a single profession.  Generally speaking, none of us -- Philosophy professors, cardiologists, corporation lawyers, architects, ministers -- has any direct experience of the professional lives of anyone outside of our own sub-specialty.  My own case is actually somewhat anomalous, inasmuch as I taught History, Economics, Political Science, Mathematics, and Afro-American Studies, as well as Philosophy, and yet not once in my fifty year career did I so much as set foot in an active Biology, Chemistry, or Physics laboratory, nor did I ever go on an archeological dig or spend time in a performing arts studio.  I know as a matter of general information that scientists these days work in groups in laboratories, typically under the guidance of a senior researcher whose NIH or NSF grants support cadres of graduate students and lab technicians.  But I have no hands-on sense of what it would be like actually to work with another academic on a daily basis.  The closest I ever came, I suppose, was co-authoring a little book with Barrington Moore, Jr. and Herbert Marcuse in 1965, but each of us wrote his essay alone, and we did not even exchange them for comment before cobbling them together into a book.

Susie and I have daily watched the most popular of the soaps, The Young and the Restless, for more than twenty years [I like to think of it as being rather like War and Peace -- a great deal of a good story, rather than, like The Brothers Karamazov, a good deal of a great story.]  A number of the characters in the The Young and the Restless have been featured in the soap for more than two decades, and in several cases those roles have been, during all of that time, played by the very same actors.  I am absolutely fascinated by this fact, and I endlessly wonder what it is like to play the same character for that length of time.  This cannot at all be like acting in a long-running stage play [such as Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, which has now run continuously in London for fifty years!]  An actor in a long-running play says the same lines and does the same stage business night after night, and that is clearly its own experience sui generis.  But an actor in a soap never utters the same lines twice.  Every day is a new plot twist, a new set of lines, a new bit of stage business.  The actors playing Catherine, Victor, Nicky, and Jill have probably spent more time together in this imaginary world than they have spent with their husbands and wives.  What on earth can it be like to be a professional actor whose entire career consists of playing one part, and yet playing it in such a way that one never repeats a performance?

If I may return to the world of the string quartet, I played viola for several years in an amateur quartet when I lived in Pelham, Massachusetts.  I was brought into the quartet by a wonderful woman, Barbara Greenstein, who had been playing quartets for sixty years, and served as our second violinist.  The cellist was Barbara Davis, a woman in her late forties whose husband was the neurologist who, for a while, treated Susie's Multiple Sclerosis.  It was a delight for me to sit next to her [as the violist and cellist do in a string quartet] and listen to her beautiful sound.  The first violinist, Don White [who, like a number of accomplished amateur string quartet players could handle both the violin and the viola parts], was the most skilled of the four of us, but not a terribly sympatico person.  Weak as my playing was, I cherished our weekly sessions.  When Barbara Greenstein was taken from us by cancer, the heart went out of my playing, and although I did some pick-up quartet playing for a while, when I retired a bit later and moved to North Carolina, I put my beautiful Marten Cornellissen viola and my Benoit Roland bow in the closet and have not played since.  For me, the personal relationships with my quartet mates were inseparable from the music making.

All of this, the elevated and the banal, was evoked by watching the A Late Quartet yesterday evening.  I think I wept as much for my own personal loss as for the affecting end of the film.

HOME AGAIN

I have returned from a quick visit to the West Coast to see my grandchildren [and their parents, of course].  A few personal items to report:

1.  An objective, unbiased evaluation of my grandchildren resulted in the conclusion that they are the two cutest kids in the universe.  Tiny four year old Athena is the spitting image of Cindy Lou Who of Whoville [The Grinch Who Stole Christmas].  She is currently very much into the heroine Merida from the movie Brave, and walks around carrying a bow and some suction rubber tipped arrows.  About to be seven year old Samuel, who takes with him to bed each evening The Complete Idiot's Guide to Chess  [which as it happens was written by his father] has suddenly become a sports fan.  He is a raving San Francisco Giants rooter.  As a one-time Dodgers, Mets, and then Red Sox fan, I know how hard it is to keep the faith when your team keeps losing.  It doesn't hurt that the Giants have won the World Series two out of the last three years.

2.  I may be crazy, but the whole country feels better as a result of how the election turned out.  There is a great deal to do now, but it is building on success, not damage control.  I am delighted that the Obama machine is trying to keep itself in business to pressure Congress.  We have taken small steps, but that is how political change takes place.  Alan West is gone, Joe Walsh is gone, Elizabeth Warren has become a senator, several more states have endorsed same sex marriage.  There is a good chance that immigration reform will finally become possible, that further steps can be taken to address global warming, that tiny positive adjustments will be made to the tax rates and code.  And on the schadenfreude front, Mitt Romney is finally emerging from his cloud of etch-a-sketching to reveal himself clearly as the horrible person he is.

3.  On my way home, I changed planes in Denver, and had a meal there to tide me over.  Delicious elk medallions!  That is surely the only chance I will ever have to eat elk, and it was lovely.

Once I catch up on my mail and such, I will try to say something coherent about the tasks for the Left that lie immediately ahead.

THE DELPHI PROJECT

One of the many things Freud taught us [see my tutorial, The Thought of Freud, archived at box.net] is to look closely at the details of the non-rational elements of our thought processes for clues about their origin and meaning.  He used this technique most famously and successfully in his analysis of dreams, but the advice has a much broader applicability.  A case in point:  My son, Tobias, alerted me to a Salon.com story about a meeting called by the head of the Georgia State Republican Party at which a documentary was screened concerning a conspiracy between the UN and Obama to use mind-control techniques developed by the Rand Corporation.  I was rather startled to read that the goal of this insidious project is -- wait for it -- to get us all to move to cities.

At first, of course, all we can do is scratch our heads at the sheer bizarrerie of this paranoid theory.  But it takes very little thought to uncover the real sources of the fantasy.  America has for generations been undergoing a steady movement of populations from rural areas and small towns into cities and their suburbs.  This is in fact a world-wide trend.  Far and away the largest cities are to be found in Asia and Latin America, not in Europe or North America.  When I was a boy, New York's seven million inhabitants made it the largest city in the world, but now there are many cities around the globe that are two and three times that size.

In recent decades, the hollowing out of rural and small town America has proceeded apace.  The psychic dislocation is enormous for millions of Americans who define themselves essentially in relation to the small towns and farms where they grew up.    It is completely natural and also totally irrational to explain this painful life-altering change as the product of a hostile conspiracy.

What makes such thought processes politically significant is that people exhibiting them seem to have captured large parts of the Republican Party.

One final thought as I prepare to fly out to San Francisco tomorrow to see my grandchildren and their parents.  For several years the conventional wisdom has been that the election of a Black president was a life-altering, game-changing revolutionary transition for America, but I am beginning to think that the real revolution, with which millions upon millions of Americans simply cannot deal, is in fact the re-election of a Black president.