As a Rawlsian, more or less, I actually sort of like the overall picture here, minus the excessive and rather perverse dogmatic-legalistic strict tidiness of the segregations of duties. It makes sense to have a market in which private actors basically look to their own interests within a system in which regulatory steps have been taken to ensure that they do not, in the aggregate, make a giant, intolerable mess of the whole world. Flawed as any regulatory system is sure to be, it’s less reasonable to expect all the individual actors to be sufficiently attentive to, hence to take individual responsibility for, the whole. We don’t need to go so far as to treat them as weirdly obliged to be totally blinkered to the whole system. But we shouldn’t make each individual responsible for solving what is, in effect, a collective action problem, and a snarly knowledge problem to boot.

But I wonder what Posner would say about the following. Take two cases.

1) there’s a severe recession.

2) there’s serious income inequality.

We’ve got both; the causes of both are broadly similar. Namely, a lot of actors individually engaged in narrowly self-interested, more or less rational economic activities. The regulations in place, such as they are, have permitted these results. But we take it for granted that trying to do something about the former is presumptively permissible. Why should there even be an issue (beyond a practical issue) about whether it’s appropriate to take steps to do something about the latter?

Some people might argue that the second isn’t necessarily bad, but I don’t think we should take that seriously. What this lot are thinking is just that 2 is a possible outcome of a lot of individually permissible activity. Since we don’t want to say those activities were wrong, we shouldn’t say the result is wrong. But even if you accept this (for the sake of argument) you should still reply as follows: no one argues that severe recession cannot be a bad thing, so long as it can be shown to be the result of a lot of activity that was permissibly engaged in. Recessions can be bad without needing to be anyone’s fault. Likewise, we ought to be willing to say, at the very least, that serious income inequality – some people are rich, others don’t have enough to eat – is a bad thing. Because people going hungry is bad thing. Whether any individual actors are to blame for the bad thing is a separate question.

And some folks might persist in quibbling, even past this point, that it’s tendentious to characterize a hunger problem – an absolute poverty problem – as though it were a relative income problem. But I don’t think so. Why do we regard a recession as a problem? Recession, too, is a relative wealth comparison. We take ‘recession’ to be the relevant category in part because the fact that we were doing significantly better just a year or so back suggests this is something we should be able to get out of. Likewise, income inequality is provoking to people, not because they are inherently resentful of the rich (not necessarily) but because it suggests to them, prima facie, that poverty in this environment ought to be get-outable-of. At least we ought to try.

Now: I think there is a tendency among liberals – hence by extension, conservatives, when engaging liberal views – to treat the case of a severe recession morally differently from that of income inequality. The latter is, presumptively, a ‘social justice’ issue. The former an unfortunate event. It isn’t unjust for the economy to go into recession. That would sound odd, because everyone takes for granted that no one wanted this result, let alone engineered it expressly. But no one wants income inequality either. Not per se. Yet we may be inclined to say the latter result is not just bad but unjust.

It would make a certain amount of sense to recalibrate our notions so that both problems look morally equivalent. When bad things happen, overall, that it is no individual’s job to fix – like recessions, or severe income inequality – then it is the job of the government to do something about it, if possible.

I think Posner would not like this result, as he would think it puts us on a slippery slope to more aggressive interventions against the entity formerly known as ‘social injustice’ – now excitingly rebranded as: big bad things – than he would think wise. That is, regulators acquire a mindset in which we assume that it is their (the government’s) job to fix anything big and bad that it’s no one else’s job to fix. But really, that is the government’s job, on Posner’s view. It isn’t anyone else’s job, by hypothesis, and – if it’s bad enough – the bad does need fixing. The only proper restriction on the government’s efforts, in this regard, are legal/Constitutional, plus a due sense of humility about the technical possibility of fixing any given ‘big bad’ thing, without making too many other things worse.

No one thinks trying to get out of a recession is, per se, wrong, just because we should let ‘the market decide’. We don’t like recessions. But then the same goes for anything else we really don’t like: like people going hungry. The effect of thinking this way would be to bleed ‘let the market decide’ of any vestige of moral, as opposed to prudential, authority. And the prudential point reduces to: don’t rock the boat too much. Don’t make regulatory interventions in complex situations that might make things worse. (Of course, if you are arguing with someone who doesn’t see any value in any market mechanisms whatsoever, then ‘let the market decide’ can amount to a substantive suggestion that, in general, markets can work pretty well. But, since liberals and progressives are not Maoists, we can ignore this as presently irrelevant – not that Glenn Beck will ignore it, oh no.)

Posner’s extreme position seems to me most useful for helping to map out a range of possible positions. We’ll start with his.

1) Individual economic actors are permitted to be (and may be obliged to be) borderline psychopathic in their solipsistic pursuit of narrow self-interest. In this case, you really need a government/regulatory system that is very actively concerned with the entity formerly known as social injustice – a.k.a. really big bad things.

2) Matthew Yglesias gets what he wants: “What’s really wanted here is for the United States to be a different kind of country with a more public-spirited business class wherein the bank executives could be persuaded to “do the right thing” in light of all the crap that taxpayers were doing on their behalf. But we live in the United States of America. Fundamentally, though, as with a lot of this stuff I think what’s being implicated is much less America’s financial crisis emergency response policies than our background conditions of social justice.”

3) We should ‘let the market decide’. That is, there is some reason to suppose the market gets things ‘morally right’, so if some people have less money, we should presume, prima facie, that this is the ‘right’ result. But then what is the justification for trying to moderate the business cycle? If we trust the market to decide what everyone deserves to have, then why not conclude that the reason why we all do less well in recessions, on average, is that we all become inherently less deserving people, on average. The business cycle has always been a bit of a mystery: maybe it’s fueled by an underlying moral cycle of inherent desert. Some years you get out of bed and you are just plain a worse person, economically, hence more likely to be unemployed for the next 18 months or so. And rightly so. (It’s a metaphysical thing. You wouldn’t understand.)

I could take 3 a bit more seriously, but I’m not really going to bother. The idea that you can’t make at least some judgments about what overall social-economic situations are desirable or undesirable, is pretty silly. Obviously there can be cases in which people really seriously do dispute whether a given arrangement is desirable or undesirable, in some global sense. But there are enough clear cases that we can stick with those, and grant upfront that the government has a lot less business – quite possibly none – intervening when it isn’t clear to everyone that we should want to get rid of state of affair x, if just waving a fairy wand were all it would take. (No one likes recessions or hungry poor people. We all agree that waving a fairy wand to eliminate those problems, if we could, would be an appropriate policy.) Once you grant this much, the rest is just arguing practical policy limits, pending the invention of functional fairy wands.

What I think is notable here is that liberals/progressives are more or less ok with 1 or 2, if they are spelled out in some satisfactory way. Whereas conservatives are really only happy with 3, philosophically. Very few of them will regard either 1 or 2 as philosophically tolerable, spell them out how you like. But this doesn’t seem to me like a good situation to be in.

I expect that one major line of resistance to all this would be: seriously, dude, you are underestimating the practical limits on government. You change one thing here and 12 things go wrong over there. Part of the problem with this is it assumes liberals and progressives are all Jacobin lunatics. Part of the problem is that it is actually an argument for 2 being a better option than 1. But mostly the problem is that it implicitly concedes that either 1 or 2 could still be philosophically correct.

I hammered all that out pretty quick. I’ll bet people won’t like it. I could write a post about fonts, if you want.

I really ought to find that passage from Nietzsche to plug in here but I can remember where it is. Ah well. The wages of a hyper-refined type sense (I am not speaking from experience here) is apparently a kind of inky hemophilia, through which you are capable of bleeding profusely from a minor cut. The world fills up with little letter-y fishhooks that snag your eyes, painfully, but leave the ordinary mass of readers untroubled in their reading passage. Being able to appreciate truly great typography means sacrificing the capacity to find sloppy typography to be perfectly legible. A common enough trade-off, in a sense. Coming to appreciate really good anything means becoming annoyed by merely mediocre samples of the same. But it’s a bit different when the thing is such an everyday functional item. It’s one thing to like really good beer, and come to hate cheap beer. It’s another thing to come to appreciate why a particular sort of hammer is really well-made, and be rendered slightly butterfingered by any $9 hammer from the hardware store ever after. Not a major paradox, I do concede, but kinda funny.

THE IDEA

A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay!

THE PROJECT

1. The project’s curators purchase objects — for no more than a few dollars — from thrift stores and garage sales.

2. A participating writer is paired with an object. He or she then writes a fictional story, in any style or voice, about the object. Voila! An unremarkable, castoff thingamajig has suddenly become a “significant” object!

3. Each significant object is listed for sale on eBay. The s.o. is pictured, but instead of a factual description the s.o.’s newly written fictional story is used. However, care is taken to avoid the impression that the story is a true one; the intent of the project is not to hoax eBay customers. (Doing so would void our test.) The author’s byline will appear with his or her story.

4. The winning bidder is mailed the significant object, along with a printout of the object’s fictional story. Net proceeds from the sale are given to the respective author. Authors retain all rights to their stories.

5. The test’s results — photos, original prices and final sale prices, stories — are cataloged on this website. The project’s curators retain the right to use these materials in other venues and media. For example: Maybe we’ll publish a book.

They are up to their 100th and final entry: Jonathan Lethem vs. the Missouri Shotglass (The Missouri Shotglass would be a good nickname. Greg “the Missouri shotglass” Whillikers.) Now, just as if that little birdy on the glass flew to my ear, I hear the project will continue as some sort of charity fundraiser type thing, which I think sounds like a fine model for a charity fundraiser type thing.

I think it’s interesting how central the investment of cultural ephemera with significance has been to cultural and artistic imagination, lo the last 40 years or so. Ephemeral is the new eternal. Yard sales and eBay, the new sites of the Sublime (whereas a Romantic poet once had to trudge to a picturesque ruin, the seaside, or a mountaintop.)

That’s not really an adequate summary of the state of art and culture, in case you are disappointed I can’t do it in two sentences flat. But it does seem to me interesting and actually quite appropriate, in our present age, that so many artists feel compelled to build almost exclusively by repurposing ‘low’ cultural products. They can’t build to a decent height any other way. Pop culture – nay, aged mass culture, in its dotage – is the new Nature, to which one turns for authentic inspiration: the ever-returning waves of the sea, no mere wading-pool of nostalgia. (Fear of the future combined with contempt for the present, as a wise comic book character once said.) Oh, it might seem this sort of dumpster diving and incessant craphounding around is just amusing, ironic subjection of the whole culture to Mystery Culture Theater 3000-style snark commentary. But these artists aren’t just kitsch-whisperers and camp followers, my dear sir or madam. Nay, these are so many brave Aeneases (what is the plural of Aeneas?), passing through Gates of Ivory, which they bought cheap on eBay, and it works out ok for them, for what dreams but false dreams could be true doors into themselves. Am I right, or am I right?

I’m most interested in repurposing-the-low because it is the spiritual engine of most good work done in comics for the last generation, ‘course. Anyway, I’ve enjoyed watching the Significant Objects project roll along. Best of luck to them, going forward.

Please feel free to argue about who the best doctor was/is.

Free MP3 for the night (via Stereogum): Pearl Harbor, “California Shakedown”. Sort of … I dunno, droney-droney-drone.

Bookmaking. And a quote to go with. A couple weeks ago I picked up In Quest of The Perfect Book, by William Dana Orcutt (almost uselessly rough e-version here). Chapter 2 begins as follows:

A paraphrase of, “Would that mine adversary had written a book,” might well be, “Would that mine enemy had printed a book”; for the building of books has always yielded smaller financial returns for the given amount of labor and ability than is offered in any other line of intelligent human effort.

“Are all the workmen in your establishment blank fools?” an irate publisher demanded of a printer after a particularly aggravating error. “If they were not,” was the patient rejoinder, “they would not be engaged in making books!”

On the other hand, if they can get a few people to pay almost $5000 for these retro deluxe dictionaries, Quercus Press should do alright.

You can acquire a less pricey trade version of the Pictorial Webster’s from, say, Amazon.

A more serious complaint is that the writings in Master Typographer are not just mutually uncoordinated, as I noted, but individually sloppy and inaccurate. Kinross says the only full-length monograph about Tschichold I’ve actually read – Doubleday’s[amazon] – is an amateurish mess. Hence Doubleday’s contribution to this Master Typographer volume is not the informative thing I claimed it is, but a mess. Well, this is news to me. I thought the Doubleday was very interesting, but now I pass along the credible allegation that it’s problematic. The Carter review says the same as Kinross: namely, the contents of Master Tyopgrapher need fact checking. I’m not nearly as qualified as Kinross to judge. Then again, I’m not as qualified as Doubleday either. At least one criticism of Doubleday from the Carter review seems to me over-reaching:

Doubleday’s grasp of the material does not seem to have improved since his earlier book was written. He makes the remarkable claim that in England, Tschichold ”helped to bring forth a resurgence of classical typography and book design.” This would have come as a considerable surprise to Stanley Morison, Oliver Simon, and countless other designers in a land barely touched by modernism. Rather, Tschichold, while working within the existing tradition, had a profoundly beneficial influence in raising standards of design. The before-and-after examples of title-pages in the King Penguin series show how he took pedestrian layouts, tightened them up, and injected elements of imagination and wit which have greatly inspired designers who came after him.

Doubleday’s point wasn’t that England had been conquered by modernism, and needed to be taken back for classicism, just that English, basically classical book designs were undistinguished before Tschichold gave them the treatment. So Carter is basically not willing to agree to agree. Well, anyway.

I’ll leave it at that. (I’m still waiting for my school library to get hold of the new Christopher Burke book about Tschichold, Active Literature: Jan Tschichold and New Typography [amazon]. Kinross is the publisher, and I have high hopes, since Burke’s Paul Renner book was great. So I feel a bit chagrined to be getting on Kinross’s bad side.)

In other news, I cranked out a couple of S&O pages for the Tschicholdian occasion.

Jan Tschichold: Master Typographer: His Life, Work and Legacy

In the light of my present knowledge, it was a juvenile opinion to consider the sans serif as the most suitable or even the most contemporary typeface. A typeface has first to be legible, nay, readable, and a sans serif is certainly not the most legible typeface when set in quantity, let alone readable … Good typography has to be perfectly legible and, as such, the result of intelligent planning … The classical typefaces such as Garamond, Janson, Baskerville, and Bell are undoubtedly the most legible. In time, typographical matters, in my eyes, took on a very different aspect, and to my astonishment I detected most shocking parallels between the teachings of Die neue Typographie and National Socialism and fascism. Obvious similarities consist in the ruthless restriction of typefaces, a parallel to Goebbel’s infamous Gleichschaltung (enforced political conformity) and the more or less militaristic arrangement of lines.

As I point out in the review, it seems a bit silly to conflate militant fascism with minimalist fastidiousness. But that’s not really the point of the review, overall. (By the by, I found a nice, short book – but, egad! out of print and overpriced! – on that whole what-fonts-did-the-Nazis-outlaw? question. Remember?) But you know what Crooked Timber really needs, to get the comments perking along? An open thread to discuss the NY Times piece on the new Emmanuel Faye Heidegger book, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 [amazon], that’s what.

I’m curious to hear about previously unpublished seminar material. I have every faith that Heidegger will not come up covered in glory. But surely Faye’s denunciations are so over the top that nothing really edifying can come of from the book’s main thesis, as I understand it. (Not that I have much at stake personally. Heidegger just seems murky to me. I get impatient. I don’t feel compensated for my pains, wandering through this Black Forest of Being. But … well, Bert Dreyfus was my teacher. Lots of my friends seem to think this stuff is pretty important. I dunno. Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures were sorta ok. Of course he got Nietzsche wrong … ) Faye, from the NY Time article: “I’m merely saying that we should know more about the ideological residues and connotations of a thinker like Heidegger before we accept his discourse ready-made or naïvely.” Yes, but no one has ever advocated ready-made, naive Heideggerianism, per se. And we’re off! waffling between an absurdly weak complaint and the absurdly strong threat of the book’s title, I anticipate.

Part of the problem – here’s a point we can focus on, maybe – is this sort of thing: “’You cannot read most of the important philosophers of recent times without taking Heidegger’s thought into account.’ Mr. Rorty added, however, that ‘the smell of smoke from the crematories’ will ‘linger on their pages.’” I think this is too much. The problem with Heidegger is not that you can smell the smoke from the crematories through the vaguely mystical ‘primordialness’ of it all, but that you can’t. Heidegger is so attuned to the alleged dangers on the other side (problem of technology, all that) that he’s just oblivious to the ways in which his own position could betray a person into … inauthenticity, and that’s just for warm-ups. Heidegger never seems to me to be personally concealing some primordial pit of hate or resentment, anger or suppressed violence – not him, not in his writings. I doubt the seminars are going to change my mind. But he seems disappointingly clueless about the risk that evil-spirited stuff could work its way out through stuff that sounds like stuff he thinks will save us. So obviously the stuff he thinks will save us needs to be handled with a different sort of care than it occurs to Heidegger to take (and lord knows he takes care, in his way.) So I guess I think it sounds flatly preposterous to say that Heideggerian philosophy is fascist. It’s just that the Heideggerian immune system, so to speak, is particularly bad at fighting off something like fascism. That’s not what it’s built to do. Which is a very bad thing. A lot worse than Jan Tschichold thinking maybe he was a bit of a type authoritarian in his exuberant youth. That’s fine, because it was just letters and shapes. Heidegger’s case is also obviously a lot worse than, say, Frege’s. You can separate the logic from the anti-semitism. The fact that Heidegger’s philosophy betrayed him into deep ethical inauthenticity is not something Heideggerian philosophy can shrug off, lightly. (We philosophers are always saying you can abstract arguments and positions from their authors. But Heidegger can’t say that. He’s not ‘we philosophers’, after all.) Still, Heidegger’s is not essentially a Nazi philosopher, surely.

My good old dissertation advisor, Hans Sluga, did a good job in Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany [amazon], I think. The book has a lousy title (blame the publisher, I’m sure), because it’s really about academic philosophy’s crisis, under the Nazis. How the field failed. (Not that this is, or is intended to be, some sort of excuse for Heidegger’s sorry personal showing in time of crisis.)

Discuss.

I’ve still got to find the time to write that long piece I’m gonna write about how Tschichold is weirdly exactly like Wittgenstein.

So, which page is your favorite and why? (Defend your answer.) I’m partial to the Escher-like quality of Thunderstrike’s – what is it? I guess you could describe what we are seeing here as a cross between a deltoid and a mobius strip. Or between a pectoral and a tesseract?

In short: where exactly is either his left shoulder or the left side of his chest? Did his shoulder just sort of give up on becoming an arm and then the arm tried again, launching itself out, a bit below, where the intercostals should be? I could stare for hours. It’s like a cross between a Japanese sand garden and a fancy butcher shop. But perhaps you prefer the Doctor Strange pin-up in which the good doctor is – well, how tall would you say he looks to be?

via War Rocket Ajax

I like this next one for its precocious meta quality. Making fun of people making fun of Oscar Wilde:

I don’t really have a lot to say about all this. I just thought my post about OCR applications was getting a bit boring, at the top of the page.

[UPDATE: see below in comments for a possible, major drawback: namely, Readiris has trouble with PDF’s based on black&white, as opposed to grayscale, scans.]

First, processing really long documents that might be of borderline quality, threatening you with a huge amount of clean-up. (I’m assuming you have decent scan quality, otherwise you should rescan it; but maybe the original print quality was so-so.) You have to spend maybe 15 minutes training Readiris to process the distinctively dubious quality of whatever specific thing you’ve got. But it actually seems to learn. Then the app pretty much just chews through, in 50 page chunks, surprisingly error-free. Not perfect. But better than I had expected. I was on the fence about some projects for making e-editions of old public domains books I’ve got kicking around the place. Now it actually seems like a do-able thing.

But what most scholars need more than the ability to convert whole old books into e-books is the quick-and-dirty (but surprisingly clean) capacity of Drop2Read, which is part of ReadIris. It sits in the dock. You just drag-and-drop a PDF onto it; it creates and autosaves an RTF conversion into the same folder as the PDF original, then opens it for you to check. (You can set preferences about the details of all this.) It works well, often even with multi-column text with figures and illustrations. (It doesn’t preserve and place illustrations for you, but it isn’t driven mad by the presence of such things.) It’s 90%, for formatting and for the text itself. For one measly click, that’s a bargain. Text masticated via Drop2read is more wholesome for feeding DEVONthink. More to the point, for most people, it’s ready for you just to cut&paste, later, when you want that block quote. Keep the RTF version alongside the PDF, which can be used as a reading copy and/or a thing against which you check OCR problems. (Next: I need a faster scanner.)

But what should I listen to while performing these night-time chores? What plangent sounds to soothe my ears, as I watch the scanner weave it’s gentle path of light ‘neath the closed cover? If you don’t like Philip Glass … then you’ll probably hate the Doveman I’ve now got on high rotation. I love the new album, The Conformist [amazon]. (And before that, I liked The Acrobat a lot, too.) You can stream various tracks here. And there are a couple freebies floating around here and here (oh, and don’t miss the Footloose cover.) And if you have listened to that, and want something else breathy and a bit wimpy (but maybe not so Belle and Sebastian tweecore), I notice that Amazon is selling The Zombies, Odessey and Oracle for a lousy $1.99. As I believe I have mentioned: I like Colin Blunstone’s voice. (You like Ray Lamontagne’s voice? It’s like that.) Seriously, this is some classic 60’s slightly not rocking quite enough but still great stuff; right up there with the Beach Boys, Pet Sounds. But more breathy and proto-proggy. Here’s a Pitchfork review of this particular release, with which I am in substantial agreement. (Although I think giving it a 9.3 might be generous.) But it seems like you don’t get all the bonus tracks if you just buy the mp3’s. Hmmmm. Still, a good deal.

Doveman and The Zombies have this in common: the lead singer is basically breathing in your ear, from, like, 3 inches away, sounds like. This could get silly – to say nothing of the threat of looming emo; but instead it’s … steady and consistent. Which may mean that you get a bit tired of it. Me? I’m playing it over and over. [UPDATE: Oh, Pitchfork pretty much agrees about the Doveman, too.)

Four years before this book was published [in 1955], Chapter XVII, “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow,” appeared in Harper’s Magazine, of which I was then an editor. This chapter was written before any of the rest of the book, but it was written because of it. I thought that if I was going to write about tastemakers, I should define their quarry, and on one of several attempts to write an introductory chapter to the book, I devoted a couple of pages to highbrows, lowbrows, upper and lower middlebrows. I showed this draft to Katherine Gauss Jackson, a colleague of mine at Harper’s, who said, “You’ve got the essence of a piece here. Why don’t you write an article on brows?” So I did, and it appeared as the lead article in the February 1949 issue of Harper’s. Several weeks later Life magazine, which was at the time “the king of the visual media,” did an article about my article and published a pictorial chart illustrating the several “brow levels” of American taste at that time. Since then this article (later the chapter only slightly revised) has had an independent life of its own, and though I invented none of them, the words highbrow, lowbrow and middlebrow, with its subdivisions into upper and lower, have become part of the language of taste along with “tastemakers,” which was, so far as I know, my coinage.

I can think of no better way to indicate the changes in taste that have occurred in the last quarter of a century than to reproduce here the Life chart, in which I had the controlling hand, and to note what has happened in the interim …”

Lynes concludes thusly:

As I look at the chart, which a Life editor and I concocted over innumerable cups of coffee years ago, it strikes me, as it must you, that what was highbrow then has become distinctly upper middlebrow today. The rate of change, indeed, is about the same as that which is demonstrated in the chart showing what happened between the 1850S and the 1950S [I’ll reproduce these charts below]. Who regards an Eames chair as highbrow now? Or ballet, or an unwashed salad bowl or a Calder stabile? They have all become thoroughly upper middlebrow, and what was upper has become lower. Only the lowbrow line of the chart makes spiritual if not literal sense. Today television would find itself at all levels of the chart in ways, as we have noted, too obvious to define. The “pill” has taken the glamor out of Planned Parenthood as an upper middlebrow cause, and Art and The Environment are now their causes instead … and so on. Even if the shapes of the pieces have changed, and the board looks quite different, the basic rules seem to me much the same as they have been since Andrew Jackson Downing set about in the 1840s to make our forebears lead harmonious lives in tasteful surroundings.

“Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow” is a fun read. When it comes to brow-flexing, to hold back the forces of evil, it’s a tough call whether the prize goes to Sammo Hung, for his role as Longbrow in Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain (1983), or to Clement Greenberg for his role as Highbrow, getting quoted saying this sort of thing: “It must be obvious to anyone that the volume and social weight of middlebrow culture, borne along as it has been by the great recent increase in the American middle class, have multiplied at least tenfold in the past three decades. This culture presents a more serious threat to the genuine article than the old-time pulp dime novel, Tin Pan Alley, Schund variety ever has or will. Unlike the latter, which has its social limits clearly marked out for it, middlebrow culture attacks distinctions as such and insinuates itself everywhere …. Insidiousness is of its essence, and in recent years its avenues of penetration have become infinitely more difficult to detect and block.”

Lyne is bemused by such stuff:

The popular press, and also much of the unpopular press, is run by the middlebrows, and it is against them that the highbrow inveighs.

“The true battle,” wrote Virginia Woolf in an essay called “Middlebrow” (she was the first, I believe, to define the species) lies not between the highbrows and the lowbrows joined together in blood brotherhood but against the bloodless and pernicious pest who comes between. . . . Highbrows and lowbrows must band together to exterminate a pest which is the bane of all thinking and living.”

Pushing Mrs. Woolf’s definition a step further, the pests divide themselves into two groups: the upper middlebrows and the lower middlebrows. It is the upper middlebrows who are the principal purveyors of highbrow ideas and the lower middlebrows who are the principal consumers of what the upper middlebrows pass along to them.

And we’re off! But you should probably start by reading the original Woolf essay (really, a letter), which some months ago my friend Josh Glenn very kindly and shrewdly and thoughtfully posted on his site, Hilo, which is all about this stuff, and then some. Here is Woolf, coining the term:

Lowbrows need highbrows and honour them just as much as highbrows need lowbrows and honour them. This too is not a matter that requires much demonstration. You have only to stroll along the Strand on a wet winter’s night and watch the crowds lining up to get into the movies. These lowbrows are waiting, after the day’s work, in the rain, sometimes for hours, to get into the cheap seats and sit in hot theatres in order to see what their lives look like. Since they are lowbrows, engaged magnificently and adventurously in riding full tilt from one end of life to the other in pursuit of a living, they cannot see themselves doing it. Yet nothing interests them more. Nothing matters to them more. It is one of the prime necessities of life to them — to be shown what life looks like. And the highbrows, of course, are the only people who can show them. Since they are the only people who do not do things, they are the only people who can see things being done. This is so — and so it is I am certain; nevertheless we are told — the air buzzes with it by night, the press booms with it by day, the very donkeys in the fields do nothing but bray it, the very curs in the streets do nothing but bark it — “Highbrows hate lowbrows! Lowbrows hate highbrows!” — when highbrows need lowbrows, when lowbrows need highbrows, when they cannot exist apart, when one is the complement and other side of the other! How has such a lie come into existence? Who has set this malicious gossip afloat?

There can be no doubt about that either. It is the doing of the middlebrows. They are the people, I confess, that I seldom regard with entire cordiality. They are the go–betweens; they are the busy–bodies who run from one to the other with their tittle tattle and make all the mischief — the middlebrows, I repeat. But what, you may ask, is a middlebrow? And that, to tell the truth, is no easy question to answer. They are neither one thing nor the other. They are not highbrows, whose brows are high; nor lowbrows, whose brows are low. Their brows are betwixt and between. They do not live in Bloomsbury which is on high ground; nor in Chelsea, which is on low ground. Since they must live somewhere presumably, they live perhaps in South Kensington, which is betwixt and between.

The puzzle about where the middle-brows can possibly live has been pursued down the decades to this very day. In the very best and most thoughtful book on the subject ever written – that would be Carl Wilson’s Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (33 1/3) [amazon] – the author quotes a baffled British critic, wondering where all the Celine Dion fans can possibly live. “Wedged between vomit and indifference, there must be a fan base: some middle-of-the-road Middle England invisible to the rest of us, Grannies, tux-wearers, overweight children, mobile-phone salesmen and shopping centre-devotees, presumably.”

But I promised you Lyne’s original, pre-Life charts. Here they are. (The one on the bottom is supposed to be on the facing page. So the top level is high, the middle middle and the bottom low. Obviously.)

Reginald Marsh, it turns out, was “best known for his paintings and illustrations depicting scenes of vaudeville, night clubs, burlesque, and New York City. Marsh was a lifelong free-lance illustrator for the New Yorker, Esquire and many other national magazines.” I know that because you can see a lot of his material here.

I heard about the book via John Kricfalusi’s epic screed against the UPA style (which I linked before in this post (Plato, Plato, Plato! – there, that oughta be enough SEO for this week.) He alleged that it provided some evidence of ‘the UPA style before UPA’, and of a greater diversity of cartoon styles early in the century. Which seemed interesting to investigate. I have to say I come away with a different impression: namely, that the received wisdom about UPA turns out to be right. That stuff feels different to me, in terms of graphic sensibilty, than a lot of the stuff in Calvalcade, which cuts off exactly when the UPA era begins. (It’s a bit more complicated. Maybe I’ll post more about that later.)

But mostly I was hoping to press Cavalcade into service as a kind of visual companion to Gilbert Seldes’ discussion of comics in The 7 Lively Arts [amazon]. Seldes perpetrated some of the earliest positive comics criticism way back in 1924. (He was a big Krazy Kat fan. Who isn’t? He also loved UPA stuff, later on.) Reading his early comics writing, I have always regretted not really knowing what the hell he is talking about some of the time. Now I have a better sense of some specific titles he mentions.

One thing I was surprised to learn is that Buster Brown is actually sort of funny. But only sometimes. All I knew about the strip before was that Buster’s creator, Outcault, was a true comics pioneer; that Buster was sort of like the Katzenjammer Kids, in that he basically made trouble, then got whacked for it. But he was a rich, Anglo-Saxon kid and invariably delivered some sort of mea culpa after getting whacked. And that somehow he was supposed to provide the Ur-Calvin and Hobbes template: boy with slightly smarter talking animal tagging along, in Sancho Panza mode. Indeed, this would appear to be true.

To my surprise, it turns out that that the pious little homilies are actually the funny part:

And my favorite (I’ll skip the panels in which Buster goes out with a gun and gets whacked from one end of the farm to the other, which really isn’t very funny):

On the strength of this pair, from Cavalcade, I snagged another old item – Buster Brown’s Maxims For Men (1906); which isn’t funny. In fact, it’s a pious, conventional bore. Outcault seems to have been only intermittently aware that this whole formula only works when the final panel declines into incoherent self-parody. A seriously wounded kid maundering on about Teddy Roosevelt’s faults, by way of planning to do better, is funny. A kid just plain planning to do better is the death of comedy, and now I own the book. Fortunately, it was cheap.

There is, I think, an even more basic problem, which is theoretically interesting, which I would certainly like to see used to swat down Boehner-style arguments, and which I’ve never actually seen anyone make (but probably I just missed it). Practically all crime is ‘thought crime’ in the good ol’ common law sense of the Latin phrase actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea – ‘the act does not make guilt unless the mind be guilty.’ If we were to take a strict liability approach to all violent crime we would be obliged to place wrongful death on a par with premeditated murder. (After all, it’s not as though the lives of those killed accidentally are worth less.)

This refutes the notion that there is something sinister and Orwellian about post-Drakonic/post-Hammurabian developments in criminal law. (Damn liberals and their newfangled political correctness!) It doesn’t follow that ‘hate crime’ legislation makes moral and practical sense, of course. We could have that discussion after Boehner is done looking up ‘immutable’ in the dictionary.