'Sympathy for the Devil,' Lorrie Moore
This is our welcome to True Detective, season two. The funny sparks of life that lit things up between Hart and Cohle will be hard if not impossible to find here—bits of Chinatown, The Big Sleep, Twin Peaks, and other detective films will lumber in instead. Any humor will be in the hands of Vince Vaughn as a struggling casino owner named Frank and will probably be inadvertent. Vaughn, who like George Clooney radiates tidy, unsexy handsomeness—Vaughn’s delicately featured profile is similar to Julianne Moore’s—has difficulty melting into the fabric of this program, trouble blending with its look and tone and so stands out as very much himself, as in, what the heck is Vince Vaughn doing in this show? He has his mouth full spouting nonsense like “Sometimes your worst self is your best self.” Or, “It’s like blue balls but in the heart.” Or, “Never do anything out of hunger. Not even eating.” As well as other lines that, as The Atlantic has pointed out, sometimes sound as if they’d been Google-translated from Farsi.
Vaughn’s rushed delivery resembles that of the character he played in the romantic comedy Wedding Crashers. This same-in-every-film movie-star trait he also shares with George Clooney, though not with the utterly transformed Rachel McAdams (who was also in Wedding Crashers). In fact, party-crashing may be the real metaphor of this season of True Detective; the McAdams character, Ani, does in fact crash a party ostensibly for investigative purposes; she is there to rescue and be rescued, the meat of all cop dramas, as well as to recover an ugly childhood memory from dad’s dubious commune.
Early on may be too soon to say that Vaughn is miscast (though one wonders how the show might have been improved if Vaughn and Farrell each had the other’s role). Vaughn’s hypnotically askew performance grows on the viewer. Perhaps his performance will become legendary with time. (The city of Vinci is already practically named for him!) He plays Frank with inexpressive manipulativeness, a dapper low-level gangster who is also an outsider. His face has the stillness of a hit man’s but every once in a while fear darts across his empty eyes. Though the tallest in any room, Frank is in over his head, again a crasher, and at season’s end Vaughn begins to own the cartoonishness of his two-bit psychopath and bully, and his Proustian death trudge in the final episode could have been funny but strangely is what it’s supposed to be: a ghost story. We see him as perhaps the rivetingly rotted peg that has held the house together from the start. After all, this is the land of show business, of visions in the desert.
Mary McCarthy, “Ghostly Father, I Confess”:
Ah, God, it was too sad and awful, the endless hide-and-go-seek game one played with the middle class.
If one could only be sure that one did not belong to it, that one was finer, nobler, more aristocratic. The truth was, she hated it shakily from above, not solidly from below, and her proletarian sympathies constituted a sort of snub that she administered to the middle class, just as a really smart woman will outdress her friends by relentlessly underdressing them. Scratch a socialist and you find a snob. The semantic test confirmed this. In the Marxist language, your opponent was always a “parvenu,” an “upstart,” an “adventurer,” a politician was always “cheap,” and an opportunist “vulgar.” But the proletariat did not talk in such terms; this was the tone of the F.F.V. What the socialist movement did for a man was to allow himself the airs of a marquis without having either his title or his sanity questioned.
Wichita Lineman
“For all we know, ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’ could have been a one-off thing,” Jimmy [Webb] told me recently. “Glen [Campbell] might never have recorded another song of mine.” They finally met at a jingle session. Soon after that date, the phone rang. It was Glen, calling from the studio. “He said, ‘Can you write me a song about a town?’” Jimmy recalls. “And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know … let me work on it.’ And he said, ‘Well, just something geographical.’
“He and (producer) Al DeLory were obviously looking for a follow-up to ‘Phoenix.’ And I remember writing ‘Wichita Lineman’ that afternoon. That was a song I absolutely wrote for Glen.”
It was the first time he had written a song expressly for another artist. But had he conceived any part of “Wichita” before that call?
“Not really,” Jimmy says. “I mean I had a lot of ‘prairie gothic’ images in my head. And I was writing about the common man, the blue-collar hero who gets caught up in the tides of war, as in ‘Galveston,’ or the guy who’s driving back to Oklahoma because he can’t afford a plane ticket (‘Phoenix’). So it was a character that I worked with in my head. And I had seen a lot of panoramas of highways and guys up on telephone wires … I didn’t want to write another song about a town, but something that would be in the ballpark for him.”
So even though it was written specifically for Glen, he still wanted it to be a ‘character’ song?
“Well, I didn’t want it to be about a rich guy!” he laughs. “I wanted it to be about an ordinary fellow. Billy Joel came pretty close one time when he said ‘Wichita Lineman’ is ‘a simple song about an ordinary man thinking extraordinary thoughts.’ That got to me; it actually brought tears to my eyes. I had never really told anybody how close to the truth that was.
“What I was really trying to say was, you can see someone working in construction or working in a field, a migrant worker or a truck driver, and you may think you know what’s going on inside him, but you don’t. You can’t assume that just because someone’s in a menial job that they don’t have dreams … or extraordinary concepts going around in their head, like ‘I need you more than want you; and I want you for all time.’ You can’t assume that a man isn’t a poet. And that’s really what the song is about.”
He wasn’t certain they would go for it. “In fact, I thought they hadn’t gone for it,” he says. “They kept calling me back every couple of hours and asking if it was finished. I really didn’t have the last verse written. And finally I said, ‘Well, I’m gonna send it over, and if you want me to finish it, I’ll finish it.’
“A few weeks later I was talking to Glen, and I said, ‘Well I guess Wichita Lineman didn’t make the cut.’ And Glen said, ‘Oh yeah! We recorded that!’ And I said, ‘Listen, I didn’t really think that song was finished …’ And he said, ‘Well it is now!’”
In a recent interview, Glen said that he and DeLory filled in what might have been a third verse with a guitar solo, one now considered iconic. He still can recall playing it on a DanElectro six-string bass guitar belonging to legendary L.A. bass player and Wrecking Crew member Carol Kaye. It remains Glen’s favorite of all his songs.
“Wichita Lineman” can serve as ‘Exhibit A’ in any demonstration for songwriters of the principle of ‘less is more.’ On paper, it’s just two verses, each one composed of two rhymed couplets. The record is a three-minute wonder: Intro. First Verse. Staccato telegraph-like musical device. Second verse. No chorus. Guitar solo. Repeat last two lines of second verse (“and I need you more than want you …”). Fade. There is no B section, much less a C section.
Why did such an unlikely song become a standard? There are many reasons, but here’s one: the loneliness of that solitary prairie figure is not just present in the lyric, it’s built into the musical structure. Although the song is nominally in the key of F, after the tonic chord is stated in the intro it is never heard again in its pure form, with the root in the bass. The melody travels through a series of haunting changes that are considerably more sophisticated than the Top 40 radio norms of that era. The song never does get “home” again to the tonic – not in either verse, nor in the fade-out. This gorgeous musical setting suggests subliminally what the lyric suggests poetically: the lonely journeyman, who remains suspended atop that telephone pole, against that desolate prairie landscape, yearning for home.
At Anthology Film Archives
HOME FROM HOME: CHRONICLE OF A VISION
Die andere Heimat: Chronik einer Sehnsucht
In German with English subtitles, 2013, 230 min, DCP, b&w/color
Edgar Reitz’s monumental Heimat films hold a privileged place in postwar German cinema. A precursor to some of the episodic yet cohesively crafted serial dramas that are all the rage in the U.S. and Europe today, Reitz’s enormously ambitious, ever-expanding project began in 1984 with the 15-hour Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany. Since then, Reitz has added to his career-defining edifice roughly every ten years, with 1993’s Heimat II (more than 25 hours long), 2004’s Heimat III (11 hours), and now, like clockwork, with Home from Home: Chronique of a Vision, which comes in at a breezy 230 minutes. (This account elides the smaller-scale, in-between work, Heimat Fragments: The Women, from 2006…)
A prequel to the previous Heimat films, Home from Home turns back the clock to the mid-19th century, to focus on the ancestors of the Simon family, as they struggle to subsist in the (fictional) village of Schabbach (familiar from the earlier films). Depicting both the struggles and the deeply ingrained rituals and sense of community that define their lives, Reitz shows his usual panoramic flair, bringing to life a host of characters and capturing the rhythms and textures of a whole village.
Nevertheless, the film’s attention settles on two figures in particular: the sensitive, imaginative, and restless Jakob, who immerses himself in literature and dreams of emigrating to Brazil, and Henriette, the beautiful daughter of a gem cutter fallen on hard times, who is at once drawn to Jakob and fated to take a different path. Reitz, as always, is attuned both to his characters’ daily lives and to the larger social and historical forces that shape their existence. Here he explores a world marked by famine and poverty, the stirrings of revolution, and above all the specter of emigration, a phenomenon that holds the promise of freedom even as it represents a threat to the stability of the communities that are left behind. Playing out against the backdrop of the mass exodus that saw hundreds of thousands of German farmers, laborers, and craftsman departing for the New World, Home from Home is both a heart-wrenching drama and a penetrating portrait of an historical era.Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision is presented in collaboration with Corinth Films.
September 11 through 17, 7:00pm nightly, additional screenings on September 12 and 13, 9:00pm
Fried, Rancière and the Form of the Photograph (2011)
The photograph thus presents itself as a kind of theoretical antithesis to the Diderotian still life and, of course, this view is by no means limited to Barthes. On the contrary, from the very start, the claims photographers have made to be artists have been contested by critics denying that the photograph has enough “intentional meaning” “to be considered fine art. ”5 And Barthes is by no means the only recent writer to maintain some version of this position. But it’s a crucial fact about Barthes that (unlike, say, the notoriously sceptical Roger Scruton) his interest is not primarily in debunking photography’s claims to art, and not at all in claiming that because the photograph is not fully or adequately intended it cannot count as art. For, in Barthes’ own writing, art itself — with literature as the exemplary case — had already been disconnected from the question of intentional meaning.6 That is, starting at least in the mid 1960s and emerging more fully in “The Death of the Author” (1968) and “From Work to Text” (1971), there is a crucial sense in which for Barthes the irrelevance of “the author’s declared intentions” and the “removal of the Author”7 more generally had come to be seen as constitutive at the very least of modern aesthetic production and at the most of the idea of aesthetic production as such. “Writing begins,” Barthes says, when “the voice loses it origin” and “the author enters his own death.”8
Furthermore, as every student of literary theory knows very well — you learn it the minute you first read “The Intentional Fallacy” — this position was hardly unique to Barthes, or, for that matter, to Barthes and the others (Foucault, Derrida) who held some version of it. Beginning in the mid-1940s, the idea that the meaning of a literary work was not determined by its author’s intentions was foundational for American literary criticism, providing the material (although this was by no means what it was designed to do) for a potential theoretical solution to an aesthetic problem. The aesthetic problem was how to create anti-theatrical works of art at the moment when the very effort to do so (indeed, any effort at all) had begun to register as theatrical. The theoretical solution was to deny not that those efforts took place but that they were in any way constitutive of the meaning of the work of art. It was the syntactic and semantic rules of the language, not the author’s consciousness that determined the meaning of the work. Thus Fry’s strenuous but not very compelling attempt to imagine a kind of psychology for the painter’s desire not to produce an effect on the beholder (“half-conscious,” “almost unconscious,” “perfect sincerity,” “complete indifference”) is rendered supererogatory. The new theoretical anti-intentionalism rescues the critic from a psychological anti-intentionalism that, still committed to some account of the artist’s agency, can only register the artist’s actions as unconscious (and hence not fully actions) or as completely disconnected from all possible consequences (and hence, again, not fully actions). Now, the ontological irrelevance of the artist’s intentions, whatever they are, makes it unnecessary to deny that he actually had any.9
For our purposes, however, Barthes’s version of anti-intentionalism is more crucial than Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s, and for two reasons. The first is that Barthes’s is theoretical and aesthetic (in effect, the anti-theatrical aesthetic creates the necessity for the anti-intentional — i.e. theatrical — theory) whereas Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s is theoretical and methodological. Barthes is defending certain aesthetic values; Wimsatt and Beardsley were seeking to establish the “public” and “objective” character of literary meaning. Their concern was with professional literary criticism.10 And the second, which really follows from the first, is that insofar as Wimsatt and Beardsley were interested in establishing the public meaning of the text, they were just as opposed to considering the reader as they were to the writer; the companion to “The Intentional Fallacy” was “The Affective Fallacy.” Whereas Barthes is just the opposite; he explicitly links “The Death of the Author” to “the birth of the reader” and he explicitly celebrates the refusal of what he calls an “ultimate” meaning, the refusal to “fix meaning” that the shift from writer to reader makes inevitable.
Thus we have both an aesthetic solution to the problem of the artist’s agency — How do you avoid seeming to seek to produce an effect on the reader/beholder? Do nothing — and a theoretical answer to the question of the author’s agency — How do the artist’s actions determine the meaning of the work? They don’t. And just as, in Barthes, the theoretical answer immediately and (as I shall show) necessarily produces an appeal to the reader, so too does the aesthetic solution. That is, the theoretical solution to absorption’s aesthetic problem (the invention of an artist who could not be understood as performing for an audience because his intentions to produce certain effects were now understood as in principle irrelevant to the effects his work in fact produced) is simultaneously the transformation of absorption’s aesthetic indifference to the reader or beholder into a total — indeed (as I will also show), programmatic — appeal to the reader or beholder. In Camera Lucida, this is the whole point of the punctum, which is nothing but an accidental and unintended effect of the photograph on the beholder — the “detail” that can “‘prick’ me” only if the photographer has not put it there “intentionally” and that can prick me but may not prick you.11 That’s why Barthes famously doesn’t reproduce the Winter Garden photograph of his mother; it cannot have the effect on us (she’s not our mother) that it does on him — for us, no punctum, for us, “no wound.” The punctum, in other words, functions as an absorptive reproach to the “artifice” of the photographer, resisting and reproaching his inevitably theatrical efforts to produce a particular effect on the beholder while at the same time (and for the same reason) it transforms the photograph into a work dependent entirely on the beholder — a purely theatrical object. The absorptive demand of indifference to the reader/beholder becomes an insistence on the absolute primacy of the reader/beholder.
A Lazarus beside me
Avies Platt
The room filled up. [Norman] Haire and [Harry] Benjamin mounted the platform. Haire, from the chair, introduced Benjamin with appropriate remarks and Benjamin delivered his lecture. Here was quietness, assurance, scientific fact, human understanding, a vision for mankind: a German and a Jew who had found asylum in America, giving of his knowledge in England without self-interest or thought of personal gain. I was carried away beyond thought of my own gain, beyond the welfare of M.M. to a vision of a world made utopian by the fellowship of nations and the conquest of old age. ‘Life, after all, is not important,’ the speaker concluded. ‘Only living is.’
Questions and discussion followed. Two things remain in my memory. A man asked scornfully what was the connection, if any, between physical rejuvenation and the love to which the poets testified all down the ages? Strangely, I cannot recall Benjamin’s reply, but a woman got up and said that she had been ‘rejuvenated’ with the sole idea of benefiting her health, but that to her amazement she had fallen in love again and to her even greater amazement her love had been returned, and that, she submitted, was the gentleman’s answer. As far as I am aware the man who had gazed upon me said nothing. Neither did I. There seemed nothing more to say.
The meeting dispersed. I stayed behind to speak to the society’s secretary and so was one of the last to go down the stairs and out into the street. I remember how refreshing was the spring evening after the stuffy room.
The last cars, mostly large fashionable ones, were moving off. Only my poor old Singer remained, parked in the cul-de-sac outside the galleries. I knew that the battery was down so I took the starting handle and proceeded to crank up the engine. It was obstinate, and as I stooped there, struggling (somewhat incongruously, for I was in evening dress), I heard a voice say, ‘I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’m not much good with those things.’ I looked up and recognised the man who had compelled me to turn round in the lecture room. He stood on the pavement, half in shadow, at the end of the little street; motionless, as though he had always stood there, and always would. His presence there came as a shock. With my mind full of the lecture I had completely forgotten to notice what had happened to him after the meeting had broken up.
‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘Please don’t apologise. I’m used to it.’ He looked on in silence. By the time the engine was going the place was deserted. We were the only people left. It seemed queer that so distinguished looking a person should appear so lonely and not have gone off in one of the big cars. I became acutely aware of the defects of mine, but at least it was going. It was clearly up to me to do something about it.
‘Are you, by any chance, going to Norman Haire’s party?’ I inquired. ‘I rather think that is where I’m supposed to be going,’ he replied. A little strange, that, I thought. But I said, ‘That’s where I’m going, so perhaps I may give you a lift?’ ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That’s very kind of you.’ And we got into the car and drove off.
At first neither of us spoke. I was concerned with joining the stream of traffic in Lower Regent Street. Then he asked abruptly: ‘Are you connected with the arts?’ ‘I don’t know about connected,’ I replied guardedly. ‘I’m interested.’ ‘And may I ask the name of my kind chauffeur?’ he continued. ‘Platt,’ I said. ‘Avies Platt. And may I ask yours?’ ‘Yeats,’ he said! ‘W.B. Yeats.’ And added: ‘I’m a poet.’
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
ABSTRACT There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research.
