EthicalDative

The Macaroni Line

Posted on December 26, 2019 by JMN

Carter Johnston for The New York Times.

This article is about how a small Texas town near me survived losing its Walmart store. I like it for its local history and photographs. Edna is “a community of about 5,700 people surrounded by rice fields, ranches and grassland.” It’s 28 miles from Victoria north on Highway 59.

A downtown theater glows with rainbow lights, and the tower on top of the building spells out the city’s name high above a ticket booth covered in cobwebs. The theater has not shown movies regularly for years, though its new owner has told residents that he plans to start screenings soon.

“It was like getting hit by a bomb,” Joe Hermes, a former mayor of Edna, said of learning Walmart was leaving. Credit…Carter Johnston for The New York Times.

The town was founded in 1882 and named after the daughter of an Italian count, who came to Texas to build a railroad stretching from Mexico to New York. Two nearby towns are named after the count’s other daughters, Inez and Louise.

Edna is roughly 100 miles from Houston. Credit…Carter Johnston for The New York Times.

The count imported hundreds of Italian laborers and fed them, according to a history of Jackson County, largely with macaroni. The railroad was nicknamed the Macaroni line. But the count left the railroad after laying only about 90 miles of track.

Landing at the Jackson County Airport in Edna. Credit…Carter Johnston for The New York Times.

Sales tax revenue has dipped only slightly since Walmart left. Credit…Carter Johnston for The New York Times.

(Michael Corkery, “The Town That Lost Its Walmart,” NYTimes, 12-24-19)

Posted in Commentary | Tagged Edna, miscellaneous, Texas | Leave a comment

Horseback Love

Posted on December 25, 2019 by JMN

austen

… The queen’s addresses tend to be broad, anodyne and even a little opaque.

“The problem with Yorkie [the Duke of York] is he can be very arrogant and petulant. I think that’s down to insecurity.” [Former palace official]

Two lines of admiration converge in these disparate quotes.

The fan of opacity can’t help but keep an ear to the palace, whose relentless scentlessness trumps unstinting reek belched elsewhere.

The queen is to say [in her Christmas message] that “small steps taken in faith and in hope can overcome long-held differences and deep-seated divisions… The path, of course, is not always smooth, and may at times this year have felt quite bumpy….”

The queen termed 1992 “annus horribilis”; 2018 was “busy”; 2019 ends “bumpy.”

The rhetoric of Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, moreover, is physical as well as verbal. Her Majesty saddled up just recently to support her insecure youngest [the Duke of York].

On Friday, the Queen was spotted horse riding with Prince Andrew in the grounds of Windsor in what one royal expert said was an apparent show of support to her second son.“He’s been through the ringer… It’s probably giving a message that whatever he’s done, he’s still my son, he’s still a member of the royal family.” [Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine]

Few nonagenarians can sit a horse. Fewer still are queens.

SOURCES
Lliana Magra, “Queen’s Christmas Message Acknowledges a ‘Bumpy’ Year for U.K.,” NYTimes, 12-24-19.
Stephen Bates, “Prince Andrew’s fall from grace brings uncertain times for the monarchy,” theguardian.com, 11-22-19.

Posted in Anthology, Commentary | Tagged language, maonarchy, rhetoric | Leave a comment

Degas: Opéra Superfan

Posted on December 23, 2019 by JMN

“Degas at the Opéra,” in Paris now and Washington in March, reveals the leering intensity rather than the sentimentality in Degas’s ballet and opera pictures. Credit…The National Gallery of Art.

This painter who “didn’t like women,” in van Gogh’s estimation, found at the Opéra [de Paris] an arena of desire and depredation that he could translate into pure form — beautiful and stifling, modern and cold. This is the truth about superfans: they smother what they love.

Jason Farago writes about the louche milieu that spawned images of dancers that are now “schmaltzy stalwarts of dorm-room posters.”

In the year 1885 alone, Degas went 55 times to the still-new Palais Garnier. He saw one opera… at least 37 times… In late 19th-century Paris, opera was a social spectacle that made it an ideal subject for a painter of modern life… Degas went as often as he could afford it… He trained his eye on both the stage and the audience…

Marie van Goethem, the model for Degas’s “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,” was an example of the shaky social status of 19th-century dancers. Credit…RMN-Grand Palais; Musée d’Orsay; René-Gabriel Ojeda.

Belgian-born Marie van Goethem was the model for Degas’s statue “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen.”

Instead of capturing her mid-plié, Degas chose to sculpt her standing in the awkward fourth position, feet perpendicular to the torso and pointing in opposite directions. He gave her a sharp jaw and a forehead like a ski slope. To her body he affixed a real tutu, and real human hair… “Why is she so ugly?” wrote the critic for Le Temps…

Degas’s dancers appear more often like possessions than fellow artists. They are working girls, bent over, tying their slippers, slumped in the corner. Credit…National Gallery of Art.

… In Degas’s… superficially sunnier pastels, the dancers… are working girls, bent over, tying their slippers, slumped in the corner — rarely elegant, and always being watched… Degas was an intense misogynist, and the formal innovations of his art went together with an avaricious [?] focus on control… “I have perhaps,” he once confessed, “too often considered woman as an animal.”

(Jason Farago, “Degas: A Superfan at the Opera, Where Art Tips Into Obsession,” NYTimes, 11-15-19)

Posted in Commentary | Tagged art, Degas, painting, sculpture | Leave a comment

Transatlantic Harmonies

Posted on December 22, 2019 by JMN

diversity

There are parallels between Conservative “manifesto promises” outlined in this article and actions pursued by American Republicans.

… Redrawing constituency boundaries and legislating for voter ID checks, widely understood as locking in Conservative electoral advantage.
… Sweeping review of the Constitution, including the powers of the Supreme Court.
… “Update” of the Human Rights Act.
… Criminalization of Roma and Travellers… along with powers to confiscate their property.
… More draconian sentencing and ever harsher borders.

As Britain has learned before… Conservatives do not squander their majorities. Now they have a big one, and five full years to use it.

(James Butler, “Boris Johnson Will Change Britain Forever,” NYTimes, 12-13-19)

The author is a British journalist. “Forever” is a long time, though it may seem so to many.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged America, Britain | Leave a comment

Benjamin Creme

Posted on December 19, 2019 by JMN

The Los Angeles Police Department recently recovered more than 1,300 pieces of Benjamin Creme’s stolen artwork. Credit…Michael Flaum, via Associated Press.

This article introduced me to Scottish artist Benjamin Creme.

Mr. Creme, who died in 2016 at 93, was born in Scotland and started painting at age 13. At 16 he dropped out of school to focus on his art… Inspired by modernism, Mr. Creme was known for his abstract expressionist work, employing vibrant colors and geometric shapes.

His biography and work can be seen here.

(Jaclyn Peiser, “Stolen Without a Trace, Artwork Turns Up 7 Years Later in Los Angeles,” NYTimes, 11-7-19)

Posted in Commentary | Tagged art, Scottish art | Leave a comment

Tenangos

Posted on December 19, 2019 by JMN

Shopping for the brightly colored thread used in the style of embroidery done in villages around Tenango de Doria, a town in the Mexican state of Hidalgo. Credit…Celia Talbot Tobin for The New York Times.

The tenangos, as the embroidered pieces are called, have evolved into richly detailed works reaching a worldwide market.

Tenango embroidery is made by the indigenous Otomí community in the Mexican state of Hidalgo, whose main town is Tenango de Doria. The people call themselves hñähñu, and speak Otomí, an indigenous tonal language, along with Spanish.

Textiles in the distinctive style of embroidery done in San Nicolás, Mexico. Credit…Celia Talbot Tobin for The New York Times.

The vivid tenango embroidery designs are inspired by local vegetation and wildlife, and perhaps by nearby cave paintings and shamanistic healing ceremonies.

International brands such as Nestlé, Benetton, and Carolina Herrera have used tenango designs, sometimes without crediting their sources.

(Elisabeth Malkin, “This Mexican Village’s Designs Are Admired (and Appropriated) Globally,” NYTimes, 11-13-19)

Posted in Commentary | Tagged art, embroidery, Mexico, Otomi, tenangos | Leave a comment

Kingsize Inference

Posted on December 15, 2019 by JMN

exclamation-mark

… Parties that either oppose Brexit or want to rethink Britain’s departure won 52 percent of the total votes cast, while the Conservatives and other pro-Brexit parties won only 46 percent.

“Boris is part of the establishment,” [Thomas Wright, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution] said, “and Brexit is largely a Conservative establishment project.”

“This election means that getting Brexit done is now the irrefutable, irresistible, unarguable decision of the British people…” [Boris Johnson in his victory speech].

(Mark Landler, “Brexit Is Going to Get Done. But on Whose Terms?” NYTimes, 12-13-19)

Posted in Quotations | Tagged language, rhetoric | Leave a comment

“Morally Murky World” Redux

Posted on December 12, 2019 by JMN

John le Carré at his home in London, 2019. Credit…Charlotte Hadden for The New York Times.

This morally murky world of spying is where le Carré continues to make his literary mark.

John le Carré’s 25th novel, “Agent Running in the Field,” was published on October 22, 2019. It came two years after the 88-year-old author’s last novel, “A Legacy of Spies.”

In the late 1950s le Carré taught foreign languages at Eton, Britain’s most elite all-boys’ boarding school. It gave him insight into a culture that has provided Britain with a production line of Old Etonian politicians, including [Boris] Johnson. “I’ve taught a dozen Johnsons,” le Carré says. “Eton does something extraordinary. It doesn’t teach you to govern. It teaches you to win. That’s what it’s about.”

Floreat Etona: “May Eton Flourish” (School motto).

… “[Brexit] began in the big landed houses of England,” he says. “That’s where the Brexit fantasy, the nostalgia for the suspicion of your German and your Frenchman and those chaps who weren’t much use in the war, that’s where that was born.”

(Tobias Grey, “Tinker, Tailor, Writer, Spy,” NYTimes, 10-12-19)

Posted in Quotations | Tagged Brexit, Eton, fiction, John Le Carré, literature | 1 Comment

A. O. Scott on Sontag

Posted on December 10, 2019 by JMN

“Susan Sontag alone on a bed. N.Y.C. 1965.” Photograph by Diane Arbus.

The credit on this piece says “A.O. Scott is a chief film critic at The Times and the author of ‘Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth.’” I read him frequently. (Strictly as a side note, I’m intrigued that The Times calls him “a” chief film critic at that newspaper. Generally, can there be more than one “chief”?) His engaging essay about Sontag’s writings helps me understand my early infatuation with her “Notes on Camp.”

against by sontag

In the chapter of “Against Interpretation” called “Camus’ Notebooks” — originally published in The New York Review of Books — Sontag divides great writers into “husbands” and “lovers”…

[Quoting from Sontag:] Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover — moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality — that they would never countenance in a husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling. In the same way, readers put up with unintelligibility, obsessiveness, painful truths, lies, bad grammar — if, in compensation, the writer allows them to savor rare emotions and dangerous sensations. [End of Quote from Sontag]

The sexual politics of this formulation are quite something. Reading is female, writing male. The lady reader exists to be seduced or provided for, ravished or served, by a man who is either a scamp or a solid citizen. Camus, in spite of his movie-star good looks (like Sontag, he photographed well), is condemned to husband status. He’s the guy the reader will settle for, who won’t ask too many questions when she returns from her flings with Kafka, Céline or Gide. He’s also the one who, more than any of
them, inspires love.

(A. O. Scott, “How Susan Sontag Taught Me To Think,” NYTimes, 10-8-19)

Posted in Quotations | Tagged A. O. Scott, criticism, literary criticism, literature, Susan Sontag | 1 Comment

Robert Johnson

Posted on December 10, 2019 by JMN

A photo booth portrait of the blues musician Robert Johnson. It was taken around 1930 and is one of two confirmed photographs of him. Credit…© 1986 Delta Haze Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

It was in… popular juke joints — segregated stores or private houses that doubled, after hours, as recreational places — that his now legendary music career began… The young musician had trained on a diddley bow — one or more strings nailed taut to the side of a barn…

…The guitar playing on Johnson’s recordings was unusually complex for its time. Most early Delta blues musicians played simple guitar figures that harmonized with their voices. But Johnson, imitating the boogie-woogie style of piano playing, used his guitar to play rhythm, bass and slide simultaneously, all while singing.

(Reggie Ugwu, “Overlooked No More: Robert Johnson, Bluesman Whose Life Was a Riddle,” NYTimes, 9-25-19)

Posted in Commentary | Tagged blues, guitar, language, music, Robert Johnson | Leave a comment