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No work of serious social criticism was more on the minds of thinking Americans in the period preceding and during the thirties than Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. One can take The Philadelphia Story as a head-on attempt to discredit Veblen's assessment of aristocratic culture as characterized by its conspicuousness and emulation of leisure, of consumption, of waste, which is to say, by an avoidance of productive labor and hence an ignorance of or indifference to the genuine quality of the things in our lives. To the demonstration that Tracy Lord has a horror of the conspicuous, and that one cannot imagine her wishing to emulate anyone, certainly not in what they consume, one might reply on Veblen's behalf in either of two ways: that Tracy's horror of the conspicuous is really a further proof of his point, or that if you are one of the vanishing few who have as much money as the Lords of Philadelphia, and your money is as old, then this theory of leisure may not perfectly apply to you. When Tracy, alone with George for the single time in the film, at poolside after Dexter has departed, having explained George what "yare" means, cries out, "Oh, to be useful in the world," George responds by saying that he's going to build her an ivory tower and worship her from a distance. This is an especially chilling response exactly because it understands, by denying, both sources of her heartfelt cry, that it is a wish for freedom from her condition of, let me say, enforced or virginal leisure, which she understands as a condition simultaneously of inconsequence or immaturity both in sex and in work. She finds a virginal or narcissistic leisure no longer supportable; but empirical leisure, the kind that has to be chosen for oneself, and that alternates with real work, still maddeningly beyond reach. But however we come to understand how best to join work and love in a satisfying human existence, it seems clear enough to me that Veblen's book is quite deaf to the rights of the sensuous or erotic side of human nature and that it draws too simple, or angry, a picture of the line between the necessary and the luxurious, or the join between the utilitarian and the beautiful.
cool
The fullest description of what I take him to have in mind is given in, of all things, Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, in which Mill's praise of liberty is contested and from which, I suppose, Veblen got his characterization of the leisure class as the Barbarians (distinguishing these from the middle and lower classes, which Arnold calls the Philistines and the Populace). Arnold also wishes to reconceive the idea of the aristocracy. He wishes to work out the rule of the best to mean the rule of the best self, something he understands as existing in each of us. It is of course common not to know of this possibility, but more natures are curious about their best self than one might imagine, and this curiosity Arnold calls the pursuit of perfection. "Natures with this bent," Arnold says, "emerge in all classes . . . and this bent tends to take them out of their class, and to make their distinguishing characteristic not their Barbarianism or their Philistinism, but their humanity.
interesting
I am trying to find a cause of Amanda's actions that I can believe in. To believe in her immediate partisan excitement ("instinctive" is the word she will use about Adam's male brutality) upon reading that a woman shot her husband ("Kill him?" Adam inquires; "Nope. Condition critical, though."), I might alternatively imagine that she regards the situation of American women after World War II to be equivalent, morally and psychologically if not materially, to, say, that of southern slaves before the Civil War, where one slave will readily be imagined to have such an instinctive partisan reaction to news that a fellow slave had snapped and revolted against yet another outrage. A sympathetic outsider might well have an analogous reaction. Or I might try imagining the case on analogy with that of a woman whose country is under foreign occupation, or a military tyranny, and whose husband is beguiled by enemy glamour. The fact is that I do not believe this is the way things are for American women, or were soon after World War II, and I cannot imagine that Amanda Bonner believes it either. I do not at all mean that the situation of women in America around 1950 or around 1980 cannot from time to time strike one as similarly outrageous, or insupportable. But this perception, which I take to be valid, differs in two respects from the outrage of those suffering the oppressions of slavery or of foreign or domestic occupation: first, the perception is not stable, but comes and goes, which means that the situation is not simple but mixed; second, the stimulus for an occasion of being struck by the outrageousness of the situation may be something comparatively trivial, perhaps a rude remark, or perhaps its dawning on you, for no apparent reason, that your culture assumes that doctors and lawyers are men while nurses and secretaries are women -- something that reveals a process of arbitrariness and injustice. Mr. Attinger -- or of course Mrs. Attinger -- may have had good cause for straying from home; but nothing is good cause for injustice.
[...] the thought that a certain line of horror films form a shadow genre of remarriage comedies, it will be necessary to distinguish the specifically pertinent films of horror from the sets of films merely meant to terrorize us. I am speaking of horror here as I do in The Claim of Reason, as a perception of the instability of the fact of human existence, its neighboring of the inhuman, the monstrous. Accordingly The Night of the Living Dead would fit here while, for example. Dead of Night would not. The comedy of remarriage is as much about separation from society, call it privacy, as the horror movie is; and as much about the establishing of civilization as the Western is.
[...] I have had occasion in speaking of the career of Othello to invoke Montaigne's horrified fascination by the being's horror of itself, as if to say: life is human hard, but then let us not burden it further by choosing tragically to call it tragic where we are free to choose otherwise. I understand Montaigne's alternative to horror to be the achievement of what he calls at the end a gay and sociable wisdom. I take this gaiety as the attitude on which what I am calling diurnal comedy depends, an attitude toward human life that I learn mostly from Thoreau, and partly from Kierkegaard, to call taking an interest in it. Tragedy is the necessity of having your own experience and learning from it; comedy is the possibility of having it in good time.
[...] But how can renewal come about? -- the perennial question of reformers and revolutionaries, of anyone who wants to start over, who wants another chance. Even in America, the land of the second chance, and of transcendentalist redeemers, the paradox inevitably arises: you cannot change the world (for example, a state of marriage) until the people in it change, and the people cannot change until the world changes. The way back to their marriage is the way forward, as if to a honeymoon even more mysterious than their first. Taking a leaf from Plato's Parmenides they discuss their human plight in some metaphysical dialogue, the longest stretch of philosophical dialogue among the films of remarriage, the amplest obedience to the demand of the genre for philosophical speculation, for the perception that remarriage, hence marriage, is, whatever else it is, an intellectual undertaking, in the present instance, an undertaking that concerns, whatever else it concerns, change.
Is there an honorable objection to the serious, humanistic study of film? The idea of humanities is, grammatically and institutionally, fixed in the plural. Thoreau is the only writer I know who uses the singular of ''humanities" to refer to a kind of knowledge. His speaking of a humanity is a part of his characteristic exaggeration, implying not merely that the humanities are one with one another, as the sciences are parts of science, but furthermore that they are not even one branching of knowledge separate from the branching of the sciences, and indeed not even separate from divinity (or from what at any rate deserves to be called divinity). For normal people, however, who bitterly accede to the plurality of humanities, what position is there from which we should credit the suggestion that film is not one of their proper objects, or subjects? Was it not promised us that one day we might each become accomplished in any branch of labor we wished; to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, raise cattle in the evening, and criticize after dinner? A university is perhaps not the best place for all these activities, but then these were surely only meant parabolically. Isn't a university the place in our culture that enables us now to teach one thing today and learn another tomorrow, to hunt for time to write in the morning, fish for a free projector in the afternoon, try to raise money for projects in the evening, and after a seminar read criticism? To some this will not seem a Utopian set of activities, but in the meantime, and for those with a taste for this particular disunity, why not have it
cute
[...] you don't get any sense of the infinity of choices that were made in the text until you start trying to reproduce them. [...]
his suggestion that students try to imitate a page of text word for word (from memory) to learn how to write like the author, so you can feel your muscles working to achieve the same effect
A good opener, first and foremost, fails to repel. Right? So it's interesting and engaging. It lays out the terms of the argument, and, in my opinion, should also in some way imply the stakes. Right? Not only am I right, but in any piece of writing there's a tertiary argument: why should you spend your time writing this? right? "so here's why the following issue might be important, useful, practical." I would think that if one did it deftly, one could in a one-paragraph opening grab the reader, state the terms of the argument, and state the motivation for the argument. I imagine most good argumentative stuff that I've read, you could boil that down to the opener.
[...] In order for your sentences not to make the reader's eyes glaze over, you can't simply use the same core set of words, particularly important nouns and verbs, over and over again. You have to have synonyms at your fingertips and alternative constructions at your fingertips. And usually, though not in the sense of memorizing vocab words like we were kids, but having a larger vocabulary is usually the best way to do that. The best. having a good vocabulary ups the chances that we're going to be able to know the right word, even if that's the plainest word that will do and to achieve some kind of elegant variation, which I am kind of a fiend for.