Okay so these are three paragraphs, but they are in sum one of the wisest things I’ve read about the kinds of knowledge we have, or seek, that we tend too often to forget are so variegated. John D’Agata fans will recall a similar distinction made in About A Mountain between wisdom, knowledge, and information. This one—with its metaphor and its understanding of history—is way better. From “Data-Driven” in the 3 April 2023 New Yorker, by Jill Lepore, who just never disappoints:
[I]magine that all the world’s knowledge is stored, and organized, in a single vertical Steelcase filing cabinet. Maybe it’s lime-bean green. It’s got four drawers. Each drawer has one of those little paper-card labels, snug in a metal frame, just above the drawer pull. The drawers are labelled, from top to bottom, ‘Mysteries,’ ‘Facts,’ ‘Numbers,’ and ‘Data.’ Mysteries are things only God knows, like what happens when you’re dead. That’s why they’re in the top drawer, closest to Heaven. A long time ago, this drawer use to be crammed full of folders with names like ‘Why Stars Exist’ and ‘When Life Begins,’ but a few centuries ago, during the scientific revolution, a lot of those folders were moved into the next drawer down, ‘Facts,’ which contains files about things humans can prove by way of observation, detection, and experiment. ‘Numbers,’ second from the bottom, holds censuses, polls, tallies, national averages—the measurement of anything that can be counted, ever since the rise of statistics, around the end of the eighteenth century. Near the floor, the drawer marked ‘Data’ holds knowledge that humans can’t know directly but must be extracted by a computer, or even by an artificial intelligence. It used to be empty, but it started filling up about a century ago, and now it’s so jammed full it’s hard to open.
From the outside, these four drawers look alike, but, inside, they follow different logics. The point of collecting mysteries is salvation; you learn about them by way of revelation; they’re associated with mystification and theocracy; and the discipline people use to study them is theology. The point of collecting facts is to find the truth; you learn about them by way of discernment; they’re associated with secularization and liberalism; and the disciplines you use to study them are law, the humanities, and the natural sciences. The point of collecting numbers in the form of statistics—etymologically, numbers gathered by the state—is the power of public governance, you learn about them by measurement, they’re associated with the rise of the administrative state; and the disciplines you use to study them are the social sciences. The point of feeding data into computers is prediction, which is accomplished by way of pattern detection. The age of data is associated with late capitalism, authoritarianism, techno-utopianism, and a discipline known as data science, which has lately been the top of the top hat, the spit shine on the buckled shoe, the whir of the whizziest Tesla.
All these ways of knowing are good ways of knowing. If you want to understand something—say, mass shootings in the United States—your best best is to riffle through all four of these drawers. Praying for the dead is one way of wrestling with something mysterious in the human condition: the capacity for slaughter. Lawyers and historians and doctors collect the facts; public organizations like the FBI and the CDC run the numbers. Data-driven tech analysts propose ‘smart guns’ that won’t shoot if pointed at a child and ‘gun-detection algorithms’ able to identify firearms-bearing people on their way to school. There’s something useful in every drawer. A problem for humanity, though, is that lately people seem to want to tug open only that bottom drawer, ‘Data’, as if it were the only place you can find any answers, as if only data tells because only data sells.
If you’ve ever wondered why someone would major in English, or the Humanities in general, it’s because what we learn is how to move those folders heavenward.
From this great essay in The Point on how literature reminds us that liberalism may not be dead but flourishing, even after 2016, in its enduring relationship to failure. The writer, James Duesterberg, is responding to the critical monograph Bleak Liberalism by Amanda Anderson:
It’s important to say that these novels [Anderson covers] do not just depict a character dealing with failure, as if providing examples of how others navigate the disappointments of life. For that, we wouldn’t need literature; journalism would suffice. Anderson is after the essence, the form of the literary imagination, and she pursues it by asking how characters’ own limited desires and beliefs link up with the novel’s omniscient perspective—the godlike capacity to see and know everything in its world, by virtue of having imagined it. Think of how the narrator in Eliot or Dickens will generate sympathy and identification with a character by depicting their moral challenges and their always-partial ability to meet them. For Anderson, the text and its characters are engaged in a complex reciprocity. The characters are trying “to meet the exacting demands of the novel’s informing moral doctrines,” and yet these ideals themselves only acquire moral weight—only come alive—through the characters’ failure to live up to them. The novel succeeds because its characters fail.
I’ve got a PhD in the novel form and I’ve never seen it understood in this way.
Here’s Jill Lepore—easily becoming my favorite New Yorker staffer—on animals in the 7 Sept 2020 issue. When I talk to students about their short paragraphs, or their understanding that a paragraph should cover a single subject, I’ll try to show them this one, which just soars. Or maybe it hops? It’s as moving as a montage:
In the encyclopedia of animal accommodations, the most admirable architect is the beaver. Beavers build lodges out of sticks and mud, complete with ventilation and underground entrances. Domesticated animals live in houses built by people (etymologically, that’s what it means to be domesticated), from cow barns to pigpens. One reason some people don’t eat meat is that on big farms animals are forced to spend so much time crowded together indoors. Factory-farmed chickens, raised in giant sheds stacked with thousands of cages—ten to a cage the size of a file drawer—don’t even have room to spread their wings, and most spend every last, miserable moment of their lives inside. That only started in the nineteen-fifties, and, recently, lots of people have been going back to raising their own chickens. Since the quarantine, there has been a rush on chicks and back-yard coops. (Enthusiasts who have never met a hen are well advised to read Betty MacDonald’s 1945 memoir, “The Egg and I,” in which she recounts, “By the end of the second spring I hated everything about the chicken but the egg.”) A D.I.Y. coop consists of a roof, a roost, and nesting boxes. Translucent roofing is recommended, the idea, apparently, being that if chickens can see the sky they’ll forget that they’re indoors. Chickens like to roost inside at night but among the many reasons for letting them out during the day is that otherwise they might peck one another to death. That’s what it means to be cooped up. The Italians call free range chickens polli ruspanti. A wandering chicken is a happy chicken. People are no longer ruspante. We build lean-tos and huts and shanties and houses and motels and condominiums and apartment buildings. Lately, we’ve been stuck in them, like a prickle in a quiver, chickens in a coop, bears in a den, waiting out our desolate hibernation.
This ends the piece’s opening section, what the New Yorker generally does with most of its pieces. I think it’s called a nutgraf. “A prickle in a quiver” refers to the porcupines Lepore opens the piece with, and how “[a] gang of porcupines is called, magnificently, a prickle.” She humbly suggests “quiver” as the name of their den, the floor littered, as it is, with fallen-out quills.
I picked this book up again last night, a favorite from grad school, a germinal novel of French decadence. You may know it as the book that corrupts Dorian Gray halfway through Wilde’s novel. Quick precis: the final scion of a long decaying, inbreeding aristocratic family leaves society and shuts himself up in a large house where he lives, eats, and breathes decadently. Nothing really happens. It’s a beautiful book.
I read it in the Robert Baldick translation, from 1959 and put out by Penguin, and as I’d earlier this summer loved Lydia Davis’s new translation of Madame Bovary, I thought maybe I’d see about rereading a newer translation. Searching The Booksmith, I found two: one from the 90s by Margaret Mauldon, and one from the Oughts by Brendan King.
King reviewed Mauldon’s translation for the TLS, favorably, calling it an improvement on the Baldick, so I originally assumed I should go get his translation, which is even newer. Also, I had this feeling that I wanted a queer’s translation. Des Esseintes, the “hero” of Huysmans’s “novel”, screws around with women (as you’re about to see) in his fall into decadence, but once holed up becomes, in ways, a queer hero.
At least, the paper I wrote in grad school about the novel argued so.
I have no idea on King’s sexuality or gender expression, or Mauldon’s for that matter. Or hell, even Baldick’s (queers existed in the 1950s, I sometimes forget). But mostly I was favoring King because his was newer. I have this idea that people are translating old texts better now than they used to; for one, translation studies is growing in academia, and for two, translators are less interested in “smoothing over” some roughnesses or X-ratednesses to attract “sensitive” readers.
Unlike so many movie stars, Robert Ryan was able to portray a real heterosexual. But Barbara Stanwyck in Clash by Night (1952), seen on Channel 11 at 2 a.m. March 30, 1983, is not impressed. It is very, very, very hard to impress Barbara Stanwyck. She is authentically blue collar in this picture, utterly credible when she says she used to sell sheet music in a dime store, and able to make us forget that she is a glamorous millionaire movie star. She drinks what she calls a “slug” of whiskey out of a shot glass with no chaser and holds a cigarette in her teeth when she lights it. The picture would not be the same without cigarettes; the climax for me occurred not when the director intended it but earlier in the picture when Ryan, fairly tough himself but of course no match for Stanwyck, lit two cigarettes and handed one to her. She accepted it but looked at it with an easy, graceful scorn for just a fraction of a second and tossed it over her shoulder. I was so shocked I didn’t notice what Ryan did. I believe he did nothing; what could he do?
This is Boyd McDonald’s review for Clash by Night in its entirety. It does two things I love, which every movie review McDonald wrote for Christopher Street and other gay pubs does:
1. It asserts the viewer’s right to shape a movie, deciding not just what does and doesn’t have value, but when its climaxes and low moments fall.
2. It takes the actor’s body as the lone source of all movie art.
Most of McDonald’s task is to write from his hardon—he is consistently leering over (or dismissing) the asses and bulges of male actors throughout the golden years of Hollywood. But this approach to criticism finds its way to a kind of radical rethinking of what movies can do, who they are for, and what they can do for the people they’re for.
Take, for example, this bit from his review of Fireball 500: “it is especially calming to watch a[n Annette] Funicello picture after being overexposed to such excessively gifted players as Liza Minelli, who relentlessly ram their talent up the viewer’s ass.” Or when he dismisses Katherine Hepburn’s “scenery-chewing” performance in Adam’s Rib as not worth watching.
Instead, McDonald is gaga over Hope Emerson, the 225lb 6’2″ character actress whose unconventional (i.e. “unfuckable”) body makes every (male) director in Hollywood overlook her magnetism and understated talents.
One of the joys of criticism is feeling yourself able to elucidate the presence and textures of talent better than the average person can. (I’m kind of doing this right now.) Critics then, love stars and the abundantly skilled, and they love to play to our similar enthusiasms. If you go to movies to be allowed closer to the more ideal versions of us, conventional film criticism is for you.
If you feel that beauty is cheap and you’re more interested in real human faces,[*] buy McDonald’s book. His eye is so honed to the real that slips through a film’s worth of sheeny inauthenticity, and his variant (deviant/perverted) tastes open movies up as documents to a kind of U.S. viewership unreported by critics reading movies as auteur narratives.
What I love about the above paragraph-review is how succinctly he gets at those moments of the real, and how confidently he shuts out whatever gets in their way. As a “movie review” aimed at telling you what the thing is about and whether you should spent money on it, McDonald’s blurb provides no service, which is what lets it hang out as art.
Footnotes (↵ returns to text)
No surprise I count myself among you. My favorite film performance of the year is Louise Latham in Hitchcock’s Marnie (which I just saw last month in Finland so it counts). Go see it and watch what her face is capable of.↵
On the 56 Vermonter train out of New York, I put on a movie because everyone in the Quiet Car wanted to deny the fact of their having chosen the Quiet Car, and I chose The Cruise. Perhaps my favorite documentary, it’s about Timothy “Speed” Levitch, who in the 1990s was a rhapsodic, erudite, and literary bus tour narrator in New York City.
About midway through the movie, the crew follows him around town, and he points out a white comforter bundled over a sleeping person in a dark nook on a quiet street, and he speaks, extemporaneously, this monologue:
The image makes me think of a conversation with this woman the other day. She was a fastidious, Judaic-type woman, in very sexual slacks, and we were talking about the Grid Plan. I made the comment about how the Grid Plan emanates from our weaknesses. This layout of avenues and streets in New York City, this system of 90-degree angles. To me, the Grid Plan is puritan. It’s homogenizing in a city where there is no homogenization available. There is only total existence, total cacophony. A total flowing of human ethnicities and tribes and beings and gradations of consciousness and awareness and cruising. And this woman turns to me, and she goes, “I never even thought of that.” She goes, “I can’t imagine it. Everyone likes the Grid Plan.” [Here, Levitch makes a dubious face.] And of course the question is like Who is Everyone? I mean it’s just like I said, and whoever that is under the white comforter, cuddled up with 34th Street and Broadway, existing on the concrete of this city, hungry and disheveled, struggling to crawl their way onto this island with all their machinated rages and hellishness and self-orchestrated purgatories—I mean what does that person think about the Grid Plan? Probably much more on my plane of thinking, my gradation of being, which is: Let’s just blow up the Grid Plan and rewrite the streets to be much more self-portraiture of our personal struggles, rather than some real estate broker’s wet dream from 1807. We’re forced to walk in these right angles. I mean doesn’t she find it infuriating? By being so completely allegiant to the Grid Plan, I think most noteworthy is this idiom, I can’t even imagine changing the Grid Plan. She’s really aligning herself with this civilization. It’s like saying, “Oh I can’t imagine altering this civilization. I can’t imagine altering this meek and lying morality that rules our lives, can’t imagine standing up on a chair in the middle of the room to change perspective, can’t imagine changing my mind on anything, and in the end, can’t imagine having my own identity that contradicts other identities.” When she says to me, after my statement, “Everyone likes the Grid Plan,” isn’t she automatically excluding myself from Everyone? How could you not like the Grid Plan! So functional! Take a right turn and a right turn and a right turn, and this is a red light and a green light and a yellow light! It’s so symmetrical! By saying that everyone likes the Grid Plan, you’re saying: I’m going to relive all the mistakes my parents made. I’m going to identify and relive all the sorrows my mother ever lived through. I will propagate and create dysfunctional children in the same dysfunctional way that I was raised. I will spread neurosis throughout the landscape and do my best to recreate myself and the damages of my life for the next generation.
I was struck most by isn’t she automatically excluding me from Everyone? It’s a familiar feeling, but what made me want to pause the movie and type the monologue out was the greater feeling I got that here, as I start the first of three 4-week writing retreats, is an excellent artist’s statement.
It’s a perfect image of the artist’s job of going against the grain of accepted norms, and it’s also the perfect example of the essayist’s job of taking an encounter from your past and making something more of it. You may think Levitch is Making Too Much Of Things when he claims that believing in the Grid Plan is like promising to be complicit in the Boomer-Republican project of leaving the world a worse and less inspiring place, but the beauty of the idea as an idea is that it is indefensible, unproveable, and it sticks in your mind like a song you can’t tell is good or bad. It puts two things together I have never myself put together, and even if I decide he’s wrong those things won’t soon unstick, and loving essays the way I do, I love Levitch for essaying me to that place.
I have been for two weeks in New York City, home of the Grid Plan, and many of the people I have seen and spent time with stood somewhere on the plane of Levitch’s thinking, and some of the people aligned themselves, in some way or another, with the Grid Plan. Not Everyone, but some. I’m knowing myself more and more as not among them, and that used to make me feel so terrible and lonely.
