River Man

It is like death, the retirement of a singer. The voice stilled; its beauty heard no more.

Thomas Quasthoff, the great German bass-baritone, has declared that, at age 52, his health will not allow him to perform up to his high standard. He will, however, continue his teaching of younger vocalists.

Quasthoff was less than half the height of a normal grown man; he hobbled onto the concert stage bouncing from one stubby leg to the other. He turned the pages of his music with arms that were little more than flippers.

Born in 1959, Thomas Quasthoff was a physically-deformed victim of the drug Thalidomide. Thankfully, the drug spared Quasthoff two things: his booming voice and his sense of humor.

The after effects of treatment for my own illness (lymphoma) last spring prevented my hearing Quasthoff’s last appearance at Carnegie Hall as part of the vocal quartet in Brahms’ “Liebeslieder Walzer.” But I had heard him on several previous occasions at the old Hall. What stands out in my mind was an encore at the end of a (Schubert, I think) program: Kern and Hammerstein’s “Ol Man River.” Quasthoff sent chills up my spine. You can hear it here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbcBr-ZdnnI

So, thank you, Thomas Quasthoff, and good luck and good health in the future.

Mine

I recently made a purchase at Amazon.com. After the process of submitting my credit details, confirming the delivery address, and sending off the order, I was informed by a little box in the upper right hand corner of the screen that I could tell other people via Facebook, Twitter, or email that I had just purchased X.

I was quite fazed by this. What is this modern compulsion to tell the world what you are doing at any moment? Is it because of a misplaced sense of one’s own importance? Or because (at the opposite end of the ego scale) a feeling that one’s own existence can only be confirmed by the recognition of others? And why would anyone else care?

I have always had great abhorrence of people (I’m thinking especially of official types like college presidents) who gaze out at their audience from an auditorium platform and coyly state that they have “something to share” with us. When really they just want to tell us something. I have always been tempted to shout out, “Then give me half of your chocolate cake!”

So, I have desisted from sharing with you the details of my recent purchase.

Besides, I’ve eaten it all myself.

Model Family

Is there something about having a good set of cheekbones that dictates that there is nothing inside one’s skull?

I ask the question because about a week-and-a-half ago supermodel Vanessa Hessler in an interview with Italian magazine Diva e Donna spoke of the "very beautiful love story" she shared with one of the sons of Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi and explained to readers that "the Gaddafi family is not how they are being depicted, they are normal people." Yup. Jess folks—a supermodel’s updating of the nuclear family sittin’ around the old TV watchin’ re-runs of The Waltons.

Another model, a former girl friend of Mutassim Gaddafi, the dictator’s son, told the Daily Telegraph about being gifted with “the entire collection of Louis Vuitton bags.”

It’s amazing what near-anorexics will do for pieces of canvas and dead cow.

The Shadowy Figures Behind It All

Harry Pearson (The Guardian, Oct. 21, 2011):

Former vice-president of Fifa Jack Warner is like a V1 rocket, he does the most damage when he falls silent. So it was a relief to us all this week when the Trinidadian announced that his recent tumble from grace was the result of a Zionist conspiracy.

***

Fifa, for those who’ve never kicked a soccer ball, is the acronym of the worldwide boss organization of what the rest of the world calls ”football,” Fédération Internationale de Football Association. The Association had been hit by many accusations of scandalous misbehavior (reacting with head-in-the-sand alacrity to deny all) before enough public evidence about bribes for World Cup votes caused Fifa earlier this year to act. It imposed bans on Fifa executive committee members from such sporting powerhouses as Tunisia, Mali, Tonga, and Botswana.

Further, two officials of loftier status, Jack Warner of sporting powerhouse Trinidad and Tobago and Mohamed Bin Hammam (President of the Asian Football Confederation) of equally-mighty Qatar, were suspended last May while Fifa undertook to investigate bribery charges against them (having to do with the election of the president of Fifa). Warner was at the time Fifa vice-president and president of the CONCACAF region, the association of North American, Central American, and Caribbean soccer nations. Considering that the United States and Mexico are the two most prominent members of CONCACAF, one can only guess at what shenanigans a person from such a small national association (and with such a smell about him*) was up to over the years to stay in power as head of CONCACAF for more than two decades.

At any rate, immediately after his suspension Warner tendered his resignation. Fifa’s official statement of acceptance is laughable**.

As Harry Pearson has noted, Warner has broken his silence. In response to an apparently incriminating video, he posted a letter last week to the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian, in which he says that he will in the future “talk about the Zionism, which probably is the most important reason why this acrid attack on Bin Hammam and me was mounted.”

*

Now is perhaps the appropriate time to update for the 21^st century the famous proclamation by Dr. Johnson; the last refuge of a scoundrel is not patriotism—it is a conspiracy theory.

***

*See for instance:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-404756/FIFA-chiefs-World-Cup-ticket-scam.html

** See: http://www.fifa.com/aboutfifa/organisation/bodies/news/newsid=1455834/index.html

Ciao

Are you looking to buy a car? Well, there’s the FIAT 500, newly introduced to the States. FIAT had been absent from these shores for almost forty years (quality control, anybody?); indeed, Italian cars in general have been conspicuous by their absence—except for a handful of Ferraris for a few megabuck people and a Maserati for Johnny Sack on The Sopranos (forget about Alfas and Lancias).

But back to the FIAT 500: it’s a car so small that you could park it in your linen closet, with enough spare room for a few sheets and a bed sham. (And that sham probably has more horsepower.) Nevertheless, assuming you do want a 500, don’t go running down to your local car dealer begging for one--because, according to the FIAT ads in the New Yorker (where one would have expected instead to see glossy layouts for the latest Mercedes and BMWs), the little Tinker Toy car is “available at a FIAT Studio.”

Looking for further information about the car, I clicked onto the website for Autoweek magazine. Members of the staff had driven around in the 500 and the one thing they all seemed to agree on is that it’s “cute.”

Pretentiousness is bad enough—but pretentiousness and cuteness? That’s barfable.

Ask the Wrong Question . . .

From The Economist:

JOSHUA KNOBE, a pioneer in the field of "experimental philosophy" at Yale, has contributed a fascinating piece to the New York Times' online philosophy forum on the intuitions of ordinary folk about what constitutes the "true self". Mr Knobe takes up the illustrative example of Mark Pierpont, a once-prominent figure in the evangelical Christian movement to "cure" homosexuality who (surprise!) felt himself strongly attracted to men. So, who's the "real" Mark Pierpont? Mr Knobe writes:

One person might look at his predicament and say: “Deep down, he has always wanted to be with another man, but he somehow picked up from society the idea that this desire was immoral or forbidden. If he could only escape the shackles of his religious beliefs, he would be able to fully express the person he really is.”
But then another person could look at exactly the same case and arrive at the very opposite conclusion: “Fundamentally, Pierpont is a Christian who is struggling to pursue a Christian life, but these desires he has make it difficult for him to live by his own values. If he ever gives in to them and chooses to sleep with another man, he will be betraying what was is most essential to the person he really is.”

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/06/ideology-and-self

(Knobe’s original piece: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/in-search-of-the-true-self/)

***

In his essay Knobe asks, “How is one to know which aspect of a person counts as that person’s true self?” “Philosophical tradition,” Knobe says, has “a relatively straightforward answer”:

This answer . . . says that what is most distinctive and essential to a human being is the capacity for rational reflection. A person might find herself having various urges, whims or fleeting emotions, but these are not who she most fundamentally is. If you want to know who she truly is, you would have to look to the moments when she stops to reflect and think about her deepest values.

But in contrast to the philosophical idea of the true self, Knobe says that people outside the field

are immediately drawn to the very opposite view. The true self, they suggest, lies precisely in our suppressed urges and unacknowledged emotions, while our ability to reflect is just a hindrance that gets in the way of this true self’s expression.

Knobe, himself, feels that neither of these definitions “fully captures the concept of a true self.” Knobe goes on to describe an experiment to test people’s ideas of a true self. To cut to the quick: the experiment determined that liberals thought that the true self was liberal and conservatives thought—well, you can guess. The findings of this study—a project of “the emerging interdisciplinary field of ‘experimental philosophy’”—Knobe says, “seem to point to an interesting new question.”

Does our ordinary notion of a “true self” simply pick out a certain part of the mind? Or is this notion actually wrapped up in some inextricable way with our own values and ideals?

(Those are two questions, but who’s counting?)

***

Well, ask a wrong question (or two) and you’ll get a wrong answer.

Knobe’s philosophical quest for the true self is grounded in the concept of “essentialism”—that is, there is underlying essence that defines the self and that is what makes it “true.”

But consider in contrast another New York Times essay, “What You See is the Real You” by psychoanalyst Willard Gaylin (Oct. 7, 1977). The essay begins as follows:

It was, I believe, the distinguished Nebraska financier Father Edward J. Flanagan who professed to having "never met a bad boy." Having, myself, met a remarkable number of bad boys, it might seem that either our experiences were drastically different or we were using the word "bad" differently. I suspect neither is true, but rather that the Father was appraising the "inner man," while I, in fact, do not acknowledge the existence of inner people. (Beautiful sarcasm, assuming you remember what Father Flanagan was all about.)

Gaylin goes on to confess that psychoanalysts have “unwittingly contributed” to a confusion that “has led to the prevalent tendency to think of the ‘inner’ man as the real man and the outer man as an illusion or pretender." We are asked to consider two cases. In the first case, a ninety-year-old man lies on his deathbed,

joyous and relieved over the success of his deception. For ninety years he has shielded his evil nature from public observation. For ninety years he has affected courtesy, kindness, and generosity -- suppressing all the malice he knew was within him while he calculatedly and artificially substituted grace and charity. All his life he had been fooling the world into believing he was a good man. This "evil" man will, I predict, be welcomed into the Kingdom of Heaven.

The second case is that of a “young man who earns his pocket money by mugging old ladies.”

I will not be told [says Gaylin] that the young man . . . is "really" a good boy. Even my generous and expansive definition of goodness will not accommodate that particular form of self-advancement.
It does not count that beneath the rough exterior he has a heart—or, for that matter, an entire innards—of purest gold, locked away from human perception. You are for the most part what you seem to be, not what you would wish to be, nor, indeed, what you believe yourself to be.

And what you “seem to be” is determined by what you do. This is the existential answer to Knobe’s essentialist quest. Gaylin sums up:

The inner man is a fantasy. If it helps you to identify with one, by all means, do so; preserve it, cherish it, embrace it, but do not present it to others for evaluation or consideration, for excuse or exculpation, or, for that matter, for punishment or disapproval.
Like any fantasy, it serves your purposes alone. It has no standing in the real world which we share with each other. Those character traits, those attitudes, that behavior—that strange and alien stuff sticking out all over you—that's the real you!

Body of Knowledge

One of the biggest laughs I’ve had in recent days came when I was watching a DVD of Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library, the version with Joan Hickson as Miss Marple*. After opening the downstairs curtains to start the new day, the maid rushes upstairs to her mistress’ bedroom, knocks on the door, and after perfunctory invitation to enter, announces, “There’s a body in the library.” What a delicious send-up, I thought, of the artificiality of the upper-class countryside world in which Christie’s murder mysteries take place.

My delight in Christie’s self-parody (for such is what I thought it) continued with the reaction of the master of the house to the news of the corpse:

(Quoting the novel itself here) “Do you mean to tell me,” demanded Colonel Bantry, “that there’s a dead body in my library—my library!”

The butler coughed.

“Perhaps, sir, you would like to see for yourself.”

*

“It’s frightfully awkward, Mater, but I’m afraid there’s a

dead body in the library.”

“Not now, Blotto. We have guests.”

Such is the beginning of Blotto, Twinks and the Ex-King’s Daughter, Simon Brett’s spoof of the Christie-esque genre of British gentry murder and adventure novels. The scene ends with aristocratic twit Blotto addressing the butler:

“Bit of bother in the library.”

“What kind of bother?”

“Dead body.”

“I will deal with it at once, milord.”

*

In a previous blog entry, “In Character” (February, 2011), I discussed the rigidity of character that allows others to type us and to laugh at us. Not just a rigidity of character, but also a rigidity of style is open to the laughter of others. And since as the 18th Century French author Georges Leclerc, Comte De Buffon declared, “Le style est l'homme même” (“The style is the man himself”), the laughter directed at a rigidity of style is ultimately laughter against the person himself.

Simon Brett’s parody of Christie interests me less than what I took to be Christie’s self-parody. That is because deliberate self-parody implies self-knowledge. Engraved on a pillar at the entrance to the Oracle of Delphi was the admonition “Know Thyself.” And perhaps there is no greater way of demonstrating self-knowledge than deliberate self-parody.

As time has moved on, I have had increasing doubts that the self-parody was deliberate. But I really hope that it was, and that Christie had the self-awareness (at least in one novel) to laugh at herself.

***

*Avoid the more recent dramatic version of the novel starring Geraldine McEwan, who is totally miscast as Jane Marple. To see McEwan at her best, check out The Barchester Chronicles, which also features great acting by Donald Pleasance, Clive Swift, and especially Alan Rickman as the shifty-eyed Mr. Slope.