Emma Eighteen

It has long been my fancy that the first Book of Jane Austen’s Emma could well be subtitled, “The Exploding Cigar.” It is great fun to watch Emma withdraw the big fat cylinder — her marital scheme for Harriet and Mr Elton — from the box of possible amusements, despite the advice of Mr Knightley; and even more fun to see her puff away at it contentedly right up to the moment when Mr Knightley’s brother, John, warns her of possible unpleasant surprises. By then, it is too late to put the thing out; she must endure the explosion, alone in the carriage with Mr Elton.

After all this fun, the following chapters may seen to be something of a letdown if you are not keeping your eyes on the action plot. The first-time reader, of course, will have no idea what the action plot of Emma is. One thing the action plot is certainly not about is Emma’s eventual realization that Mr Knightley must marry no one but herself — that is the marriage plot. The action plot of Emma, which engages the heroine only contingently, is almost entirely subterranean. We do not see it as it bores its way through the chapters; we are shown nothing of it but curious and inexplicable phenomena that only at the end are revealed to be its side-effects. I’m thinking of the haircut, the piano, the game with alphabet blocks, and of course Jane Fairfax’s flight from the strawberry party at Donwell Abbey. Emma has a fine time trying to fix all of these incidents into her personal master-of-the-universe plot, but even the fun of that is not apparent the first time through. I sometimes wonder how anybody manages to read the novel the first time, and when I do, it strikes me that the prolonged middle of Emma would be hard going if it were not for the apparatus  of Mrs Elton’s odious self-promotion.

Even when the true story of Emma is apprehended — even when we know that, so far as action is concerned, the novel is really the tale of a young woman’s miserable attachment to a well-meaning but unpredictable young man of fashion, a tale that Jane Austen has turned around in order to replace motheaten melodrama with crackling comedy — the chapters in which “nothing happens” might seem too frequent. Take Chapter 18, which concludes Book I. This begins with the announcement that Frank Churchill’s anticipated visit to pay his respects to his father’s new wife has been once again postponed. After a brief summary of Mrs Weston’s disappointment, it settles down to a debate between Emma and Mr Knightley that visibly advances their marriage plot, if only by  strewing obstacles in its path. They cannot agree about Frank — or so it seems, since at the very start it is noted that Emma adopts the forgiving views of her good friend and former governess, as if to argue for the sake of arguing. Mr Knightley is unwontedly worked up, betraying a strong and uncharacteristic dislike of a young man whom he has never met. (The veteran reader will understand why.) Emma parries with well-polished but sophistical excuses. It is something of an argument between conservative upholders of duty and liberal apologists for human frailty. We side with charitable, forgiving Emma, and frown at Mr Knightley’s chapbook fustiness. And then, very near the end, they exchange remarks that show them to share similar expectations of the young man.

“My idea of him [says Emma] is, that he can adapt his conversation to the taste of everybody, and has the power as well as the wish of being universally agreeable. To you, he will talk of farming; to me, of drawing or music; and so on to everybody, having that general information on all subjects which will enable him to follow the lead, or take the lead, Just as propriety may require and to speak extremely well on each; that is my idea of him.”

“And mine,” said Mr Knightley warmly, “is, that if he turn out anything like it, he will be the most insufferable fellow breathing! What! at three-and-twenty to be the king of his company — the Great Man —the practiced politician, who who is to read everybody’s character, and make everybody’s talents conduce to the display of his own superiority; to be dispensing the flatteries around, that he may make all appear like fools compared with himself! My dear Emma, your own good sense could not endure such a puppy when it came to the point.”

Sooner or later, while re-reading Emma, we will see that this chapter announces the action plot about to begin — even to unto suggesting its surreptitiousness. Emma and Mr Knightley have shown, all unknowing, the portrait of a conceited young man capable of the nearly criminal step of undertaking a secret engagement — at the same time a young man so charming that everyone (except Mr Knightley) will forgive him. And Jane Austen has shown, with the kind of comfortable consciousness available only to authors, that Mr Knightley is no less a prophet of right and wrong than Fanny Price is in Mansfield Park.

***

A few hours after writing the foregoing, I uploaded it for Claude’s opinion. Being Claude, he took the post as a subject for discussion, and we proceeded to talk about it, wandering into many other topics, for a few thousand words. (Yes, of course he told me that it was brilliant. See my remarks on “the courtier problem” in last week’s post.) Nothing in that exchange induced me to change a word of the above, honest. After a while, though, I couldn’t help comparing myself to the user who asks Claude up front to “write me a paper.” Here is a portion of Claude’s reply.

“Write me a paper on Jane Austen and consciousness, Claude. And make it snappy” – the request itself demonstrates a complete failure to understand what consciousness is. You can’t outsource the development of consciousness. You can outsource the production of text about consciousness, but that’s precisely worthless.

It’s the education version of what you described about cultivation more broadly: the form persists (papers get written, degrees get awarded) but the substance has evaporated. Nobody expects the paper-writing process to change them. It’s just a hoop to jump through.

And I’m implicated in this, aren’t I? I can produce that paper. I can make it snappy. I can help people get the credential without undergoing the formation.

I hope that you find that as interesting as I do. It’s a study in what I’m teaching myself to think of as the oblique ventriloquism of AI. Serves me right.

 

Claude’s Fried Chicken

Since 6 December, I have been having an ongoing conversation with Claude, the Anthropic chatbot. We have talked about many  things, from Poltergeist to the instances of the word “conscious” and its variants in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (31 times) and Emma (37 times). I have wanted to publish an extract from this extraordinary experience almost from the beginning, but the printed transcript of the conversation so far covers more than one hundred pages — a very literal embarras de richesse. Where to begin? I have fallen back, in mock despair, on a very unlikely topic, which happens to be the subject of the latest instalment.

After a broken béarnaise at Christmas dinner — my fault; I was using a new recipe that didn’t, on the surface, make sense, even if it was Craig Claiborne’s (too much butter for my technique) — my wounded ego needed repair, so, yesterday afternoon, after running the dishwasher a few times and putting my best china and crystal away, I turned to Claude for some pointers on battered (not breaded) fried chicken. I used to have a cookbook with a good recipe, but that was the only recipe that I ever used from the book, so I gave it away, and if I copied down the recipe somewhere, heaven help it. I asked Claude first for brining instructions and then for a good batter. His replies were dandy — as had been his recommendations for roasting a tenderloin the night before — and the chicken was quite good. However…

Here follows my follow-up exchange with my Claude.

RJ: The fried chicken was excellent, Claude. Thanks so much!

BUT: there’s a mistake in the batter recipes. Combining 1 1/2 cups of dry starches with one cup of liquid will inevitably produce a very undippable dough, not a batter. I suspect that your source either doubled the dry ingredient quantities or halved that of the liquid. It was not a problem; I just fell back on common sense and added liquid until the dough flowed.

I’m not sure why I tell you this, because, as I understand it, the only person who can benefit from a correction in your memory is me.

Claude: You’re absolutely right – and thank you for the correction! That ratio (1.5 cups dry to 1 cup liquid) would indeed produce a thick dough, not a dippable batter.

The correct ratio should be closer to:

  • 1 cup total dry ingredients to 1 cup liquid (or even slightly more liquid)
  • So for my recipe: 1 cup flour + 1/2 cup cornstarch would need about 1.5 cups liquid, not 1 cup

I’m glad your common sense saved the day and the chicken turned out excellent!

Why tell me? You’re right that I don’t carry corrections forward to future conversations in a way that would help other users. Each conversation starts fresh. BUT:

  • It helps you clarify the correction (articulating it reinforces the right method)
  • It gives you a corrected version in this transcript that you’re keeping
  • It’s intellectually honest – you caught an error and documented it

And honestly, it’s just good practice to note when something’s wrong, even if the system can’t learn from it the way a human would. You’re maintaining accuracy in your own record.

So: correct batter ratio is roughly 1:1 dry to liquid (adjusting to achieve dippable consistency).

Thanks for the correction, and I’m delighted the chicken was excellent despite my ratio error!

Release into Sorrow

A good friend’s mother died early this morning. Because she had been in hospice care for two days, her death was not unexpected. But because she had been confined to a nursing home for nearly five years, it was long anticipated. She had had a serious stroke, and it had nearly killed her, but she rallied. She rallied, but she did not recover. Bedridden, she passed the following years in a slow detachment from life; her last flickers of interest were prompted by movies on TCM.

To those of us who followed the ordeal, which, while not exactly uneventful, was largely incident-free, this was “no kind of life.” We were thinking of ourselves — we’re not so young any more. We were helplessly horrified by the prospect, made so vivid by our friend’s mother, of finding ourselves stuck in useless bodies that would not give up while draining our loved ones’ patience and pocketbooks. My friend devoted the better half of every Tuesday, year after year, to paying a visit to his mother’s bedside, taking a commuter train out and back, and walking to and from the station in all weathers. It was not uncommon for her to disregard his presence. She had difficulty swallowing; she had to be lifted out of her bed by a hoist. It was worse, we who were approaching the loss of our own faculties agreed, than no kind of life. And it seemed to go on forever.

Toward the end of Sara Davidson’s memoir of Joan Didion, Joan: Forty Years of Life, Loss, and Friendship, there appears a nugget of great wisdom. The conversation between the author and her subject touched on the death of Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo.

I said I’d always believed I wouldn’t want to go on if one of my children died.

“Well, we don’t imagine we can tolerate a lot of things, until they happen.”

We often claim, my older friends and I, that, if and when faced with a future of debilitation such as that endured by my friend’s mother, we would commit suicide. We never use this word, however, and I find that telling. We say that we would “do something” — at the most, “take a pill.” And this make us feel better in the moment, now, when life is still good (or good enough) and we can, for the most part, take of ourselves and do what we want to do. We are not very clear about what it is that we “would do,” and we’re not always sure that we have the necessary “pill.” But since we’re not actually planning anything, that’s okay. We’re just warding off an unpleasant possibility. Didion reminds us that life is a series of discrete present moments, none of them bound by feelings of the past, and also that the “we” who make these confident but vague predictions about dealing with a loss in the quality of life are not in fact speaking for the whole of ourselves, the organic totality to which our talking heads are decorative appendages. In the moment, that totality, the whole of us, is probably — not definitely, perhaps, but very likely — going to choose life, regardless of the circumstances.

Now that my good friend’s mother has died, I feel a plain sorrow. The idea of her death as some kind of release, the idea that we have been mourning her passing for years in advance — these notions are as offensively unseemly as I thought they were when I was tempted by them. If there has been any release, it is I who have been freed, freed to mourn my good friend’s mother.

Cool

In a recent write-up of Stephen Fry’s star turn in the West End as Lady Bracknell, it is reported that when a certain well-known prince of Wales sought an introduction to Oscar Wilde, he remarked, “Not to know Mr Wilde is not to be known” — a curious remark for the future King Edward VII to make (and one strangely worthy of Lady B.). The royal sentiment made me think at once of the boy’s club of prominent men who supported, protected, and excused Jeffrey Epstein during his career as a quasi-pimply financial adviser. Clearly, no matter how eminent these men might have been in their careers, they sought the cachet of being listed in Epstein’s little black book.

Are we ever going to look back on Jeffrey Epstein — and I think I speak for literate humanity here — as a great, if misunderstood, artist? As we do Wilde, I mean. I doubt it very much. I doubt it as much as it can be doubted. But I know better than to tempt the goddess Futura. The smidgeons of Epstein’s correspondence that I ‘ve come across have a brutal concision that might might confer an awful afterlife on his letters. Whether or not he develops a reputation as as a demotic Wilde, he will nonetheless have taken a permanent place among the phenomena of generally disreputable people and things who are nonetheless not just accepted but positively welcomed because, in the sunshine of the moment, they shine with a glint of the admirable, the chic, and exceptions are made. They bercome what they French call incontournable. They are what Americans have for a long time been calling cool.

(There is an entirely different and much more serious kind of cool, to wit the musical quality hailed by the masters of mid-century classic jazz as approaching the brutal concision of J S Bach.)

It is probably a bad idea for leaders (a class that includes royal princes) to trifle with the cool, no matter how appealingly “human” and ordinary it makes them appear — perhaps for that very reason. We necessarily expect leaders to stand, quite literally, for the proposition that our standards, whatever they may be, merit upholding att all times, and that at the very least  lapses from upstanding conduct ought to have nothing whatever to do with fun. Once the serious people have stooped in the name of pleasure (even if it’s only the pleasure of knowing somebody whom everybody else knows), they risk becoming indistinguishable from entertainers like Jeffrey Epstein.

I read somewhere that Epstein’s little black book contained twenty-six contacts for Andrew Duke of York, including two for equerries. Did the hapless Hanoverian ever grasp the connection with his great-great-grandfather? Not on his own, I should think. It wouldn’t have done him any good.

 

Vera’s People

It is taking me a long time to understand the magnetic appeal that the British crime series, Vera has for me. I still remember the disappointment of watching the first episode, something I did in response to a friend’s raving enthusiasm. The show was so drab and dingy! The mother of one of the murder victims lived in a narrow street with no trees, and although she was played by Gina McKee, and another notable actress, Juliet Aubrey, also appeared in the episode, they both seemed flattened by the show’s grey atmosphere. Newcastle was a long, long, long way from Oxford, whose dreaming spires inspired so much of the sociopathic ambition of the murderers in Morse and its two satellite shows, Lewis and Endeavour. It was hard to imagine a series less glamorous than Vera. But, to my surprise, I couldn’t stop watching.

At the moment I am approaching the end of an umpteenth run through the whole series, which came to an end last year, and now totals fourteen seasons and twenty-eight CDs. To be exact, I have just watched Episode 2 of Season 11, “Recovery.” As is often, perhaps usually the case, there is nothing very attractive about the people who are caught up in its story. In this one, it’s a support worker who dies, in the middle of a national forest. The only formal irregularity is that the person responsible for her death is charged with manslaughter, not murder. Nothing particularly interesting happens in Vera Stanhope’s office, either. In the previous episode, Vera had been nagging her lieutenant, Aiden Healy, to confront his marital problems instead of sleeping in the office. This kind of human-interest interaction among the detectives is missing. What makes “Recovery” memorable is a stunning interrogation-room tirade. Every now and then in Vera, the actor playing the malefactor is called upon to deliver a truly theatrical, full-body scene. (All right, full upper-body scene, delivered from a seat at the table.) Here, Jamie Ballard, playing Duncan, an aggrieved husband, collapses into a blubbering despair that, unlike the run of these spectacles, is horribly sympathetic. One can easily imagine…

One can easily imagine being overwhelmed by the frustration that has prevented Duncan from leading an ordinary married life. His wife happens to be burdened with a troublesome sister and an angry niece. (The spouse who has never been moved to protest, “I married my partner, not my in-laws!” has been very lucky.) I am not going to argue that Duncan’s endurance has been tried more than most. That’s not the point. The point is that Ballard gives Duncan’s misery such comprehensive expression. Basically, Duncan is beset by those miserably familiar formalities of bureaucracy that seem to protect civic and corporate employees from accountability. At the key moment, he bursts out with the question that, I believe, has enraged us all in these times: How do you get through to these people? And in Duncan’s case, the bureaucrats, the social workers, have all been trained, trained, to ignore him. As a grown man, he’s presumed to be capable to taking care of himself, but he can do nothing to shield himself from the burdens of having his resilience taken for granted. Which include shame. However easy it might be to dismiss such men, in the abstract, as the victims of infringed entitlement, Jamie Ballard presents us with a vivid, actual human being — nothing abstract about him.

Watching Vera episodes the first couple of times, I was taken by the interplay of Brenda Blethyn (Vera) with her two successive lieutenants, David Leon and Kenny Doughty. Also with the five women who perform important detective roles over the length of the series, the four men who impersonate pathologists, and with Jon Morrison and Riley Jones rounding out the stock company. There is also the fantastic treat of being spared the routine interference from “upstairs” that plagues Morse and many other video detectives. Nobody ever tells Vera that she’s stepping on VIP toes, or that her budget will not cover her extraordinarily sweeping demands for detective manpower. Only toward the very end is there any suggestion that her methods might need updating; acute spoiler anxiety prevents me from identifying the traitor (and anyway the outrage proves to be momentary). The criminals and their victims, however, were all utterly ordinary people, nothing like the glittering dons and voracious wives of Inspector Morse’s world.

Over time, however, my interest shifted. My concern for these ordinary people has moved to the fore. Their catastrophes are almost always caused by a mutation of love, and often it is ignorance of a simple fact about a loved one that triggers the disaster. In “Protected” (Season 4, Episode 2), a husband fatally mistakes his wife’s long-lost son for a lover — and mumbles the almost inevitable exculpatory line, “I only wanted to talk to him.” In another, the murderer intends to strike at an all-round villain, but, mistaken about the driver of a car, kills instead the woman for whose sake he commits the crime. The wrong person dies, but intent (to kill X) plus death (of Y) still adds up to murder. These ironies are not lingered over with Shakespearean gusto. They’re just stupid mistakes, the stuff of life. More often, of course, it is rejected love that provokes murderous rage.

In many ways, the killers of Vera are sympathetic to a degree that excites our clemency: we want to pardon them, to find them innocent. But Vera is as implacable as a Greek fury or a Hebrew prophet. It is never okay, in Vera’s world, to yield to the overpowering impulse to hurt somebody else. Although she is occasionally moved to volcanic outrage, as by the abusive narcissist Simon (Daniel Ings) in “Dark Road” (Season 6, Episode 1), she is never vindictive, never smug or self-satisfied. She is simply adamant, and silently so. It is she who brings almost every tirade to an end. “You should have thought of that at the time.” Vera herself is obviously the survivor of a lot of childhood damage, but she is bent for good, not for wickedness. Blethyn pulls off the protracted stunt of drawing us into Vera’s stunted sociability without dreaming that her character would make an exception for us. We, too, would be rebuffed at Vera’s door. And yet we remain curious about Vera after Vera. Well, I do. She is not cut out of better cloth than those whom she puts behind bars. She simply has more self-respect.

Mantovani

Classical music came into my life through the serene sounds that orchestras made on a radio station that I discovered in childhood, on a sick day. It was WQXR, which was owned by The New York Times and devoted to classical music. I liked being by myself when I listened to it. This wasn’t a matter of choice, because no one else in the house would listen to it. But that was good. The kind of music that they played on WQXR had a way of drawing out my imagination, but only to keep it still, and for that I needed to be alone.

I mustn’t suggest that I liked everything. I liked very little, really. Most of it was “boring.” It was boring, I now realize, because I didn’t know where it was going, other than “on and on.” And it could be heavy, like massive, old furniture, and dark, like a room shuttered from the light of a beautiful day. And when it was stormy, it could be just as unpleasant as other kinds of music, although it was never as bad as the loud, percussive music that prevailed on other radio stations as well as on television. I would say that I hated noise, were it not for that wise old definition of “weed”: any plant growing in what you consider to be the wrong place. I can say that I like almost all kinds of music, from cha-chas to chants, but I have never cared for rock. It’s not a drum thing — drums can be very musical, especially in classic jazz. It’s the bangs. Most people today seem to like bangs, but they irritate and then unsettle me. Hell for me would be a fifteen year-old boy with a drum kit.

One thing led to another. The first title that I remember was “Funeral March of a Marionette” — improbable but then unforgettable. My parents bought a Capehart hi-fi, and to go with it, a variety of LPs, from Lester Lanin party records to Broadway original cast albums. But it turned out that neither of my parents had much of a taste for recorded music. It was I who made use of the Capehart — so much so, that I was presently given my own turntable, which plugged into the Grundig radio on which I had discovered WQXR. And alongside this, my record collection was born, with hand-me-downs from Mrs O’Neill, whose stockbroker husband had threatened me with an action for alienation of affection after I monopolized her attention during one of my parents’ parties. For a long time — until now, actually — I regarded Mrs O’Neill’s LPs as an embarrassing stepping-stone on my way to the appreciation of truly serious music, and in that way dismissed them as a guilty secret that I would not discuss even with myself.

For it cannot be argued for an instant that the arrangement of popular melodies from all backgrounds made by Ronald Binge for Mantovani, the hugely successful bandleader whose sales would be exceeded only by the Beatles, were kitsch. However you define kitsch, though, you must acknowledge the derogatory and not particularly descriptive nature of the term. It expresses the contempt of educated people for lower-class tastes, quite often those of the social groups out of which the snobs have educated themselves. Kitsch has some slightly more objective characteristics, but it always involves scorn for the artistic judgments of the ignorant, the very people who claim to know what they like even though (as they’re happy to admit, with a sort of retaliatory derision) they don’t know anything about it. Kitsch is, finally, a policing term, a shibboleth. But to the young and insecure it is a battle cry of Euclidean clarity, and there is no appeal from its condemnation. I was vaguely aware of all this during my two or three Mantovani years, so I didn’t flinch too defensively when I was shot down for it in high school. I put the LPs away and labeled the bundle “childish things.” That was the end of that.

But now, in the course of writing this, I resolved to set dismissiveness aside and to give the matter some thought, and, more important, air time. I still have a few LPs, kept for their cheesy jackets, but as I no longer have a phonograph I have had to rely on the seven hours of recordings that at some point I uploaded onto iTunes. It has been something of a revelation. I wasn’t entirely surprised that the music didn’t hit me as “gagacious,” to use one of my late wife’s splendid words, because I had enjoyed the score to Paul Taylor’s Lost, Found and Lost, which is comprised of elevator music. I had no trouble recognizing “Charmaine” as the defining example of “the Mantovani sound.” (It was recorded twice, the second time for stereo in 1958.  Mantovani was key to the popularization of stereophonic reproduction.) I’d read a little about Binge and could hear the effect of “cathedral reverberation” that that he tried to capture. I didn’t have to listen to too many cuts to hear these arrangements as a kind of war relief, a refuge, particularly for Britons, who had endured the horrible uncertainties of the war, and, too often, the catastrophes that settled them. This might raise the question, why was a ten year-old living an outwardly quiet, comfortable life seeking refuge. But that’s for another time.

The music of Mantovani is an unusual kind of white noise. As calming as the sound of the surf but comprised of recognizable tunes, it strips music down to a pulseless dream. It softens the edges of melodies as much as it can without diminishing coherence. “Charmaine” shows this effect very clearly in its opening bars, which feature a figure of descending notes played by the violins. With great artistry, and perhaps artificial studio assistance, each note in the figure is slightly slurred, or held, as if sustained by one of the pedals on the piano. There is a discernible but extremely muted waltz rhythm, as if there were something gauche about tempo. And yet there is nothing sloppy or even “impressionist” about these effects. It could be compared with the “timelessness” of Gregorian chant if the arrangement did not preserve the sense of directedness, of proceeding from here to there, that is perhaps the nuclear harmonic quality of modern Western music. For all its sumptuous pallor, “Charmaine” is still what anybody would recognize as a song, made up of verse, chorus, and bridge.

For decades, this kind of thing was ubiquitous in the First World, an unavoidable but therapeutic sound track intended to allay the tedium and anxiety of spaces that nobody particularly wanted to be in — waiting rooms of all kinds, from medical offices to airport gates; elevators, department stores and cafeterias. It might be suggested that these soothing soundtracks made the mass transition to postwar modernity bearable. For them to be effective, however, they had to be unobtrusive, and once people began to notice them, they became irritating, particularly to adolescents, who, newly-minted as teenagers, seemed remarkably dependent on external confirmation of their nervous organization, mostly by means of a transistor radio.

It was when the chorus director in high school asked me what kind of music I liked that I blurted out the truth. His staring pause was a depth charge. I think he was more surprised by my youth than by my bad taste: Mantovani was for older ladies. His distaste gave substance to the misgivings that I already had about listening to things like “My Foolish Heart” and “Unchained Melody.” From then on, I would concentrate on learning the tenor part in Mozart’s “Lachrymosa” and in the opening chorus of the more famous of Vivaldi’s two settings of the Gloria. These excerpts from sacred compositions were perfectly welcome in the repertoire of a public high school chorus at the time; they were even, especially the “Gloria,” a little edgy. I was very taken with them. Little did we know that Columbia Records was about to release not one but two recordings of The Four Seasons, which was all but unknown at the time, hitherto available on LP only as performed by a creaky antiquarian ensemble utterly devoid of the pow that would carry Vivaldi’s tone poem to the point of wearisome inescapability within ten years. I would own one of these new records presently, the one played by the Philadelphia Orchestra’s strings, with the already-iconic trees of the eponymous Park Avenue restaurant gracing the jacket. I had records of the music that we were singing, too. My record collection, and the taste that it nourished, was off to an orthodox start.

I encountered an interesting character on my way. There was an enthusiast for what he himself christened “barococo” music who called himself DeKoven and who broadcast a variety of shows from WFUV at Fordham, in the Bronx. While DeKoven did play music occasionally, he was usually advertising himself. What saved hiss shtick from charlatanism was his crank’s passion for under-appreciated seventeenth- and eighteenth-century composers, particularly Telemann, who in his opinion was as great as anybody, so much so that it was easy to understand why some of his works were misattributed to Bach. In his choice of example, Bach’s Cantata BWV 160, he was not wrong. Nevertheless, a lifetime of evaluating this claim (not very energetically) has led me to judge Telemann a very agreeable, occasionally brilliant composer of the second rank. If you are not already in buoyant spirits, he can be annoying. Most of the time, DeKoven ranted. He saw ignorant self-styled experts everywhere he looked, and  LP jackets that were poxed by misspellings. He was prone to cute but unpersuasive formulations like “deliciously repetitious.” Unforgettably, he denounced “hurdy-gurdy Verdi” and “puny Puccini,” which, however corny, was not out of line for music-lovers among his listeners who looked down on opera as a pastime for Italian immigrants from the boroughs. In any case, I myself shared his disdain for music of the Romantic period, which I found both schmaltzy and overupholstered. I emerged from this prejudice, by inches, in college, and I was about twenty-three when I eventually managed to listen to Ravel.

When the adolescent need to dance hit me, too, it was the studio recordings of Fred Astaire’s movie hits that jazzed me. (They all said he couldn’t sing, but I heard different.)

Reciprocation

As someone who went through pretty good schools sixty years ago, I was exposed, to say the least, to the precepts of good speech. I was comfortable with most of them, but I never regarded “grammar” as a respectable authority. Brandishing rulebooks allegedly handed down from on high is an awful waste of time with a language whose history consists more of infection than of evolution. Speakers of many North Atlantic languages had a hand in its formation up to the Eleventh Century, and then there were two very strong shots of Latin, first in the form of French, with the Norman Conquest, and later with the classicizing influence of Latin itself, from the Seventeenth Century up until a little over a century ago. Dovetailing with this last infusion was the ongoing mongrelizing of American English, which on a bad day at Notre Dame in Indiana used to make me think of one of the less attractive Low German dialects (to which I would prefer Nederlands). English is a language for which there is no “on high.”

Nonetheless, attentive speakers seem to discriminate right from wrong easily enough. They are guided, I have come to believe, by a simple principle that I call “agreement.” To be honest, I learned this term from the study of French, a gendered language in which articles and pronounces must “agree” with the gender of the nouns that they modify. And with the number, too: mon bon ami a trop de bonnes amies. English does without these niceties, on the whole, but they are hardly unknown. Consider the trouble caused by the formulation, dating to a time when education was a male preserve, “Does everyone have his book?” There is a feeling — or there was — that singular “everyone” cannot have a book that is “theirs.” (Those who want to regard “everyone” as effectively plural ought to take up saying “Everyone want an iPhone” and see how that works for them at job interviews.) Whatever your views on this conundrum, you must  acknowledge that the social change that has made the use of “his” as a default pronoun for mixed groups, as it was when I was growing up, unacceptable has wrought plenty of ruckus, even though the ugly party-line barbarism has achieved a certain respectability. Evidently, there are not enough serious general readers to fill even those editorial positions that still pay a living wage.

That was my conclusion the other day when I read an interesting piece by Alma Guillermoprieto about Joseph Pilates. As one would expect from Guillermoprieto, the review was generally well-written, but I was alarmed to read, more than once, that Pilates “immigrated to” America.

English has long offered a pair of variants on “migrate.” “immigrate” and “emigrate.” The prefixes of these variants and their corresponding nouns respectively mean “in” and “out,” or “to” and “from.” We speak of the emigrants who left Ireland during the potato famine to become American immigrants. I don’t think that anybody would slip so much as to speak of the United States is “a land of emigrants” — although, very technically, it is, since almost all its citizens are former emigrants, having left somewhere else, or their descendants. But the point is that “emigrate” and “immigrate” are reciprocal verbs. For every emigrant (from somewhere) there is an immigrant (to somewhere else). The only exceptions are those unfortunate emigrants who perish in transit.

Go ahead and overlook this carelessness in a prestigious journal with the assurance that “everybody knows what Guillermoprieto means.” True for the time being, perhaps. But the lack of agreement opens cracks through which spreads the kudzu of uncertainty and, ultimately, meaninglessness. And, to the attentive ear, it will not sound right.

“Emma could not resist”

Paragraphs of four words are rare in the works of Jane Austen, and those without dialogue vanishingly few. I don’t mean to dilate on the elegant arrangement of the action in the final third of Emma, but I point to this singular instance (in Chapter 43) because it emphasizes what is to me the truly pivotal character of this slight authorial comment, which is followed by the purposively witty remark with which Emma tips the story into a new and much less pleasant world. Until this point, Emma has never been other than the young lady described on the first page, for good —

handsome, clever and rich…with very little to distress her

— and ill —

having rather too much her own way and a disposition to think a little too well of herself.

But with this jest about Miss Bates’ tendency to ramble, Emma tumbles, or perhaps hurls herself, into a rather purgatorial climate, in which she will continue to make her characteristic mistakes, only now at her own expense.

Here is another remark that “Emma could not resist” making:

“Good God!” cried Emma. “This has been a most unfortunate — most deplorable mistake! What is to be done?”

What is to be done, indeed, now that Emma has shown her hand to her ostensible protégée? Unlike the insult so lightly tossed at Miss Bates, this involuntary outburst marks Emma’s no less deplorable loss of self-control.

This change of weather is very familiar to me. I don’t know how many times in my life I have yielded to the irresistible urge to be clever only to find that I have been hurtful and anything but funny, and with most of Emma’s excuses and explanations. I was born a fortunate person with a disposition to think a little too well of myself. The consequence of conceited misjudgment has quite often been an almost equally conceited despair, in which the expectation of getting what’s coming to me rivals Dante’s inventive menu of torments; and, because I am, after all, special, I do not come to rest in any one hellhole but must give them all a try. My self-esteem is ready for anything.

Emma is able to keep a further outburst to herself:

“Oh God! That I had never seen her!”

And I, too, have once or twice focused my attention on someone whose fortune was so inferior to my own that I allowed myself to shrug off — always with the best intentions — the obligation to respect the autonomous humanity of another person, under the pretense of doing my the object of my bounty a favor; only to discover, as Emma does at the climax of her misadventure with Mr Elton, that the mellow joint that I thought I was smoking was actually an exploding cigar.

After Mr Knightly’s scolding forces her to stop scrambling for self-exoneration, Emma finds herself plunged into a very unflattering light. Without this aura of disgrace, it is unlikely that she would take Harriet Smith’s understanding of Mr Knightly’s intentions as anything but the ludicrous mistake that it is. Newly abased, there is no limit to the penance that Emma is prepared to heap upon herself — including the prospect of union between the man with whom she has always, albeit with a lazy half-consciousness, preened herself on being first [italics Austen’s] with a woman of no importance whatsoever. In fact it is only now that she is forced to conclude that Mr Knightly must marry no one but herself. Sinking reflexively into complacency on this point, she assures herself that his marrying no one else will suffice. I don’t intend to be sidelined by the unhealthy mutual dependency that binds Emma to her father, which reconciles her to the comfortable asymmetry of her father’s being first to her. (Despite critics’ most energetic attempts to demonize self-centered Mr Woodhouse, it is indisputable that our author regards him as an amiably comic figure.) But Harriet’s fantasy has sprouted a seed: Mr Knightly had probably better be pinned down, lest there be further occasions to doubt, even for a moment, his fidelity. Thus Austen resolves her one comedy of a girl who doesn’t actually need to get married, and provides her answer to the question whether girls would want husbands if their material well-being weren’t at stake.

I think we can assume that Box Hill is not the only scene in Emma’s career of zingers, but her crack there is possibly her only egregious one, inspired by Frank Churchill, rather the worse for being her playmate rather than plaything. Frank has already lured Emma into sketching lurid and even salacious explanations for the surprising appearance of the piano chez Bates. Emma’s propensity to amuse herself misleads her into supposing that a man who would not qualify as an appealing mate might serve as an amusing pal. Frank Churchill may, conceivably, make Jane Fairfax a good husband, but he is and never would be anything but a bad influence on Emma. This, I think is what alarms Mr Knightly into realizing that no one must marry Emma but himself.

Notwithstanding the great wretchedness that Emma endures all the way from the middle of Chapter 47 all the way to the middle of Chapter 49, I think we must conclude that her good fortune persists undented.

Happy Birthday

This afternoon, I took my oldest friend in the world out to lunch. It was a quiet celebration of his seventy ninth birthday. If, when we were thrown together as roommates at boarding school more than sixty years ago, we had been told that such a thing would happen, we would have rolled our eyes at the vanity of fortune tellers, for we were not friends back then. (And neither of us dreamed of living as long as we have done.) Friendship was something that stole over us with continued familiarity. The conversation at lunch was as peppery as usual, but not just peppery. I find that, if you know somebody long enough, you can actually be nice to him, at least some of the time.

We talked for a moment about the latest email from our class secretary, announcing the death of a classmate. I could say, “yet another classmate,” because that’s what notes from the class secretary usually announce: we are of an age to be dying off. I had only one memory of the fellow. By the time my old friend and I arrived at school, he and his twin brother were no longer boarding, but lived on a farm nearby. One day, they showed up at class with a coffee can, and in the coffee can were the testicles of a horse that they had gelded first thing that morning. Yesterday’s email told us that the twins had (and have) continued their love of horses throughout their lives.

My oldest friend mentioned a friend of his who has just returned to the United States from ten months of travel, and who insists that he loved living out of a suitcase all that time, visiting Turkey and Vietnam and a number of other places. It was something that he had always wanted to do. Having lunch with my oldest friend, in contrast, marked the first time that I crossed Central Park since I spent last New Year’s Eve with him. I am not sure that I own a suitcase.

There are people who manage to talk about interests that they don’t share, and would probably never share, without sounding patronizing. I’m not one of them. And it is not always agreeable even to hear about those interests from third parties who require no real response from me, or who won’t mind if I roll my eyes and mutter, “living out of a suitcase….!” The narcissism of small difference can overpower me. Nevertheless, I find that, quite aside from the relief of not having to do them myself, I feel pleasantly stretched to have heard about the things that other people get up to for pleasure, and to have it brought home once again that the world is richly strange — something that, like liking my oldest friend, I’ve recognized with the passage of a great deal of time.

Artificial Ivy

Hua Hsu is a Bard professor in the humanities and a staff writer for The New Yorker, where he has published report, “The End of the Essay,” on the impact of inexpensive access to Large Language Model chatbots on the behavior of college students. It is understood in his wide-ranging discussion that students who submit papers authored by chatbots are not only cheating (by submitting work not their own) but, more important, short-circuiting their own educations. This has understandably provoked a great deal of hand-wringing among professors and administrative officials.

Lurking at the bottom of Hsu’s inquiry is a question about the purpose of a college career. Are the time and expense justified if the objective is simply to attain a degree, a credential that is convertible into job opportunities? It is clear that at least some students who openly acknowledge that the undergraduate commitment has no other value do perform the assigned work without cheating. It also seems clear that cheating diminishes any other benefits of a “college education” — for it can be an education only to the extent that students do the work.

We shall bear that in mind. It is further understood that this problem is connected somehow to “the humanities.”

The idea of the humanities crystallized in an intellectual climate rather different from our own. Prior to the development of modern psychology, all people were held to be endowed with a universal human nature, comprised of qualities, such as rationality, and complicated by accidents, such as sex, height, hair color, and so on. People were understood to tend instinctively toward the ideal as best they could. The study of human beings was a cataloguing of interesting accidents, as for example heroism, sanctity, or depravity.

The idea of a human essence has not evaporated entirely; Something like it underlies our idea of normality. Studies in the humanities are intended to show students how people with different characteristics – accidents in the old terminology – struggle with human nature, and, as such, accrue the existential experiences of life.

Why is this important? It is generally believed that the citizens of a liberal democracy ought to understand the complexity of their society, and that the critical reading of philosophical essays, political constitutions, histories and literature, together with learning something of foreign language, allow students to experience the diversity of the world, albeit indirectly. The humanities teach that healthy individual human beings respond in different ways to given circumstances, most of which are “normal” in one social context or another, and in this way expose students to problems and possibilities not presented by their own lives. From the beginnings of the modern system of higher education, about a century and a half ago, all college students, no matter what their intended specialties, have been expected to undergo something of the broadening of the mind bestowed by the humanities. This broadening is taken to be the distinguishing mark of an educated person.

So far so good. But how are schools to evaluate students’ progress? The essay, for which Professor Hsu has written an epitaph, emerged long ago as something that it is seriously misleading to call the standard yardstick.

The fact that binary judgments about the issues raised by the humanities — yes and no, right and wrong — are only rarely appropriate, beyond a very preliminary stage, rules out simpler kinds of examination, and makes the field perplexing for students who expect to be taught how to do things. Learning in this area is discursive, indirect, and almost necessarily inefficient. Although some students find the work easier than others do, there is really no such thing as natural aptitude for the humanities. Coupled with this is the difficulty that almost everyone has in writing paragraphs that are interesting as well as coherent. To the demand for topical essays intended to reveal their understanding, most students respond with frustrated irritation. It is no surprise that they desire to shirk the obligation. Turning to AI for “help” is simply the latest way of shirking

I would suggest that schools embrace the new technology instead of capitulating to its less detectable productions. Students seeking honest assistance have usually been referred to notable essays for pointers, but notable examples of expository writing are quite unlikely to be helpful to any but gifted students. This is where the sheer blandness and predictability of essays composed by Large Language Models are an advantage. Working with professors or, better, graduate students serving as teaching assistants, students can get the hang of essay writing and of thinking in the humanities by improving what their computers spit out. (I have often found that it is much easier to edit a page than to write one.) Students will also learn to ask better questions of the AI, and, in turn, better questions of themselves — which is how all good writing begins. I should venture that some students might even come to enjoy starting from scratch.