learn to cook

From a NYTimes profile of the novelist Claire Messud:

"I had a sense that the costs [of having a family] were high,’’ she said later. ‘‘And I had a sense that I didn’t want that to be my fate. I had a sense that I’d better not learn to cook, which I never did."

From a Harper's magazine article on women in the alt-right:

In late 2016, two pundits started an online advice column...a female reader looking for an alt-right spouse got [this] advice.“Become as attractive as you are capable of. Commit to having many white babies!...Learn to cook.”

Why is a woman learning to cook making a "traditional" statement of some kind? Cooking is a skill, and a crucial one at that.  You will eat thousands and thousands of meals in your lifetime. Why would you cede the responsibility for preparing all of those meals to others? By learning to cook you are neither resigning yourself to a lifetime of drudgery nor preparing to find an alt-right husband: you are learning a basic skill. 

Obviously this applies to all humans, regardless of gender. It always seemed insane to me that anyone could make it to adulthood without learning to prepare a simple meal for themselves. This is poor parenting! Learning to crochet can be optional, learning to feed yourself should be mandatory.

And maybe if Claire Messud ever learned to cook, her husband—who, according to the article, is an excellent cook—could finally be free to have a career! Poor man. 

values ≠ morals

There's an article from Harper's Bazaar floating around the interwebs, which argues that if you should happen to find yourself married to a Trump supporter you should divorce them. Here's a part with only minimal hyperbole:

Supporting Trump at this point does not indicate a difference of opinions. It indicates a difference of values. Values aren’t like hobbies or interests. They don’t change over time, and they more or less define who you are. Trump’s administration may have been, for some of us, a time when what we value has become much clearer to us.

Re: Trump divorces, all I have to say is that people get divorced for a lot of stupid reasons and we hardly need another one.

Also, can I pause here to kvetch about how writers (who are presumably paid to choose their words carefully?) use the word values when what they actually mean is morals. Value pertains first of all to the monetary worth of something. So the word you use to justify the price of the used bathing suit you just posted on eBay should not be the same one you use to discuss morality. I know that using value as a synonym for moral is here to stay—thank you, Nietzsche—I just wish that writers would, you know, think about words more.

Anyway, all of that aside, my true beef here is with the idea that people's morals don't change. I'm going to take the author seriously and assume she really believes this. If so, then she's suggesting that she was born with the correct political and moral ideas and that absolutely nothing has changed since. (I would really like to speak to her middle school classmates to verify this.) Or maybe let's be generous and say that by the age of 20 she was morally developed enough to be able to make just decisions about absolutely everything for the rest of her life. I guess in a perfect world this is conceivable—after all, she could be Jesus!

And Jesus would be totally chill about your divorce if it was for totally justifiable Trump Reasons, right? And if you don't currently agree with this lady about Trump (for any reason) then he would totally understand that you are not just irredeemable during this election cycle, you are irredeemable forever. You cannot change! Not even if she tries really, really hard to persuade you one afternoon on twitter! No. If you voted for Trump you deserve to be divorced and, most likely, expelled from the Republic. This woman is clearly the soul of moral probity. You should most definitely take marriage advice from her. 

dead time

It's my first day back from a week's vacation, and I just spent the entire afternoon moderating two separate panels on a subject I know next to nothing about and had very little time to prepare for. And knowing next to nothing is the worst kind of know-nothingness, as I've said before, because you know enough to be acutely aware that you know nothing, which makes you self-conscious and stupid, as opposed to being just stupid. I've found that I consistently do better in these situations when I'm full-on ignorant, rather than just mostly ignorant.

And of course, I could not manage to pry any questions out of the participants and one of the panelists was a no-show. There was a lot of "dead time" to fill, and I did so, flailingly and with much sweating.

It felt a lot like the worst semester of my life, when I was a teaching assistant for a class on a subject I had never studied. Except this time, instead of a bunch of students looking at me blankly, it was a bunch of adult professionals. Which, I have to say, feels worse.

The upside: it only lasted four hours, as opposed to the semester, which lasted a never-ending, infinite, endless, immeasurable number of weeks. Also: I did at least receive a living wage to make a fool of myself today.

Suddenly, I feel so much better! I here reaffirm that really there is NOTHING worse than grad school. Though some days may come very close.

niceness is not a virtue

"The key objection to niceness amounts to the fact that it's not really a virtue. You can't rely upon it as the foundation for the duties required of friends, family members, or fellow citizens. A nice person won't fight for you; a nice person wouldn't even lie for you, unless there's something in it for him. A nice person wouldn't be a Good Samaritan, if it required genuine risk or an undue deployment of time and treasure. A nice person isn't animated by love or honor or God. Niceness, if you think about it, is the most selfish of virtues, one, as Tocqueville noticed, rooted in a deep indifference to the well-being of others. It's more selfish than open selfishness, because the latter accords people the respect of letting them know where you stand. I let you do — and even affirm — whatever you do, because I don't care what you do as long as it doesn't bother me. Niceness, as Allan Bloom noticed, is the quality connected with flatness of soul, with being unmoved by the relational imperatives grounded in love and death."

—Peter Augustine Lawler, Our Country Split Apart

p.s. My apologies for all the quotes lately—these posts are just my way of remembering particular passages. (I used to keep a journal for this purpose, but that was so very 20th century. Not that blogs are particularly avant-garde either.) 

the principle of progress

"In his marriage, he now realised, the principle of progress was always at work, in the acquiring of houses, possessions, cars, the drive towards higher social status, more travel, a wider circle of friends, even the production of children felt like an obligatory calling-point on the mad journey; and it was inevitable, he now saw, that once there were no more things to add on or improve on, no more goals to achieve or stages to pass through, the journey would seem to have run its course, and he and his wife would be beset by a great sense of futility and by the feeling of some malady, which was really only the feeling of stillness after a life of too much motion, such as sailors experience when they walk on dry land after too long at sea, but which to both of them signified that they were no longer in love."

—Rachel Cusk, Outline 

two things

First, I would like to note that Emily Nussbaum did (mostly) pull through for me in her review of The Handmaid's Tale:

"That go-girl moment made me sit up straight—and pull back. I could feel it being hashtagged, like “she persisted.” The book is never inspiring, not explicitly. Offred is a witness, not a heroine. She’s often ashamed and numb. She’s even a little cold. It’s painful for her to remember her daughter, but her drive isn’t to find her family; it’s to stay sane."

Emily is not quite as unhappy with the show as I am, but that's ok. This is still the only review I've seen with even a whiff of negative criticism, so I'll take it. I'll also remain decidedly miffed with all other television critics. You all suck.

Second, I enjoyed this essay by Keri Smith:

"I don’t yet know what to call this part of the left...It has its own dogma and jargon, meant to make you feel like a good person, and used to lecture others on their ‘sin.’ “Check your privilege”- much like “mansplaining” and “gaslighting”- all at one time useful terms - have over time lost a lot of their meaning. These days I see them most frequently being abused as weaponized ad hominem attacks on a person’s immutable identity markers…a way to avoid making an argument, while simultaneously claiming an unearned moral highground in a discussion."

I would argue that none of those terms (you can add "microaggression" and "social justice" to the list) ever really had much meaning, but whatever. The tone of the essay is a bit woe-is-me and she makes much of an aphorism from Beyond Good and Evil—which is never a good sign—but I haven't read any criticism of the left from the left since Mark Lilla's great and much-hated contribution to this genre. Liberal critiques of the left may be my new favorite type of political writing.

A Hero's Tale

I am not at all pleased with the new series based on The Handmaid's Tale. I watched the first episode recently, and not only was the tone of the whole thing wrong, at the very end of the episode the writers made a deviation from the book that is, in my opinion, totally indefensible. (Yes, there was some yelling at the television.) Dishearteningly, I have yet to read a negative review of the series; I'm counting on Emily Nussbaum to deliver for me where no one else has. (Megan McArdle has a sharp take, which is worth reading, but she's concerned with the book, not the show.)

My main beef is this: in the book, Atwood finds everyone guilty—the new regime and the old. In the show, the Republic of Gilead is purely evil, a theocratic society radically imposed upon an otherwise virtuous and free people. In the book, Atwood is very clear that Gilead is a direct product of the free and liberal society that came before it. We often want to imagine that tyranny arrives suddenly and with no chance to avert it, but the book (and history) generally indicate otherwise. The most interesting theme of the novel is an exploration of the close relationship between freedom and tyranny, but the show ignores that. I'm sure no one wants to be accused of blaming the victim.

I ended up yelling at the television at the end of the first episode because of something else, though: the show gives Offred, the main character, a name. In the book, her only name is Offred (meaning "of Fred," in reference to the man who owns her) and the reader never learns her real name. This reflects not only the narrative intimacy of the book—it's mostly interior monologue—but also something very important about Offred herself: she could be anyone. Indeed, she isn't special in any way; she isn't particularly beautiful, brave, ingenious, or even kind. By giving her a name (and in a triumphant way), the show negates all that. It suggests that Offred is special, that she is a hero. The book is about the quiet desperation of everyday life in an oppressive regime, and there is no heroism in it. But I guess that story would not be much fun to watch on television.

And finally: no matter what the critics might say, the novel sheds no light whatsoever on Trump. (Megan McArdle covers this point better than I could.) Good novels remain good no matter who the president is. This could have been a great series, too, but it would have required the writers to trust the audience a bit more. It's really a shame that Margaret Atwood didn't insist on that.