@freddie … ❤️… in my crowded reading brain, i always make room for you, and am the better for it. so there. but hey … alice munro’s daughter was assaulted when she was 9 years old, so in the mid 1970s. in 1992, when she was in her mid-20s, she told her mum. you (and the world) now know how that went. but the timeline is important, and in today’s post, you mistakenly put the assault in the early 2000s. just sayin’.
ps we live in central ontario, not too far from wingham (munro’s birthplace) and clinton, where she and the charming paedophile lived out their later and final years.
1. Sounds like Substack has been good to you. Good, you deserve it.
2. COVID and the responses to COVID were first and foremost a matter of signaling tribal allegiances, not a matter of policy. Hence liberals who had railed against the "Trump shot" suddenly morphed into "The science is settled!" when that became the tribal position.
Trumpers played similar games. Note how COVID was a hoax, the Chinese invented it in a lab, but Trump defeated it, using a vaccine that doesn't work. Clever boy.
Much the same can be said about attitudes towards policing. They aren't coherent statements of ideology, far from it. They are statements of tribal loyalty. Me tribe good! Them tribe bad!
3. I understand that Ty Cobb probably wasn't chairman of the Waycross, Georgia chapter of the NAACP, but he probably wasn't as much of an ass as Ken Burns or the sources he relied upon would have you believe. His racial attitudes certainly mellowed as he grew older.
Agreed that Burns seems a bit up his own ass, but if you ask the average frustrated non-baseball person about Ty Cobb, whatever they know probably came directly or indirectly from Ken Burns' "Baseball".
Or the Tommy Lee Jones movie based on the biography of Cobb, which predates Ken Burns' documentary.
Heck, one of the lines of Field of Dreams is how all the players hated Ty Cobb. I really want to blame Ken Burns for the obvious reasons, but this one isn't really on him.
Charles Leerhsen wrote a very well-researched biography of Cobb called "Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty" that goes into this. It's been a few years since I've read it but, as I recall, he makes a pretty compelling case that Cobb's official biographer, Al Stump, made up a lot of the more sensational stories in order to tear down Cobb's legacy and sell lots of books (which were conveniently published long after Cobb was dead).
Ricky Henderson (and Madison Bumgarner) hit righty/threw lefty. Chas McCormick does so for the Astros currently. There is some thought that having a player's dominant eye closer to the pitcher is a big advantage, which might create this scenario.
I saw him in-person 20 years ago at a University lecture event and as far as I can tell he always has been. I like his films but his personality was pretty up-his-own-orifice.
“But what I got much more often was an exhausted unhappiness about having to talk about such things at all. There was this sense of harried grievance, from people who had so recently been using the word “reckoning” without guile or irony, over being asked whether any reckoning had occurred.” I feel this, the frustration of unlearning. Silence is the womb that holds the development of an actual opinion as opposed to a feeling.
Freddie, you are always a welcome read. This piece is particularly strong, and needed. Your distinction between feeling and effective action will soon be existentially significant.
Assume the most likely outcome in November—Trump as President, GOP control of Senate and House, judiciary corrupted up and down the line, including SCOTUS. What then?
Marches in the street? In a fascist system, that can actually be dangerous. Can it be effective action? In certain countries it has been. In others not. In China a man stood in front of a tank. The world’s feelings were aroused. So what?
So many on the left are focusing on such tiny things while ignoring the biggest one facing us in generations, if not ever. Help!
Maybe, just maybe, the hysterical people described in this article are being hysterical about the repercussions of Trump winning re-election in November.
SCOTUS immunity ruling + Trump retribution rhetoric + Heritage’s Project 2025 merit hysteria in my judgment. I hope you’re right and I’m wrong. I may watch how it turns out from somewhere else, just in case.
It's not hysterical to panic when the brakes in your car stop working. If there wasn't so much evidence––mostly from Trump's own mouth––about what we have in store, I would just shrug about Biden: "he's being an asshole; if Dems are out of power for 4 or even 8 years it will finally break the grip on the party by a sclerotic old guard.
You might instead of what he says (he’s a raving idiot and a blowhard, after all) look at what he actually did. It was utterly banal GOP politics that didn’t change the world or America very much. Michael Tracey has written on this a few times. Trump had control of all 3 wings for 2 years and… passed a tax cut. Like every normie Republican ever has done, just as every Dem prez spends their first 2 years passing a giant spending package under some vaguely Keynesian moniker. Those covid lockdown hardliners that Freddie refers to in the article were practically begging Trump to nationalize the production of factories, to be the Mussolini they apparently wanted, and he was just dithering along leaving everything to the states. His own voters wanted him to crush BLM but instead he left that to local authorities. He just isn’t the person people either hoped or feared that he was.
Otherwise normal Dems are suddenly out there talking about “Project 2025” sounding like Glenn Beck at his chalkboard on Fox News spinning tales that Obama was a Marxist. Believing your political/cultural opponent is powerful, disciplined and malignant is just as naive as venerating an artist who is “one of us”. People are just not that good or evil or competent in real life.
The argument is that Trump II would not be at all like Trump I, for good reasons. The first go-around had responsible officials in key posts, like Defense, State, FBI, COS (for most of the four years), etc. Thus time there’s a bench of crazies ready to run everything as soon as he takes office. Kash Patel, FFS!
Plus Trump himself has become demented in a way he wasn’t before.
Plus the implications of the SCOTUS immunity decision are almost infinite. I dare you to find anything that would now stop Trump ordering every Democrat in Congress be shot for treason. Prosecution? Not then, not ever. Impeachment? Find a single GOP Senator who would convict. Refusal to act by cops or armed forces? There will be those who will follow orders. And/or Trump names the Proud Boys as his Praetorian Guard, and there we go.
Well I can certainly convince you that the immunity decision doesn't mean that. It gives the president immunity for "core" functions, which are defined pretty narrowly. It gives "presumptive" immunity for "official" functions, which is rebuttable, and the only thing immunity practically means in that context is that you'd be entitled to challenge the prosecution on that point before standing trial rather than having to wait for conviction then appeal. Multiple aspects of the current indictment in question were suggested by the Chief Justice in his majority to be non-official, and merely claiming they were official wouldn't make them so. For example, the Vice-President sitting over the certification vote is acting as president of the senate, not in his executive branch capacity, therefore the majority opinion suggests this would NOT be official and therefore not immune. Likewise, Trump calling the heads of other state parties to produce fake elector slates was suggested by the majority opinion not to be official. But the SCOTUS could not bindingly rule on the matter because the appeal was rushed -- which is Jack Smith's fault for waiting. Sotomayor complains that the majority did not firmly rule any given part of the indictment to be non-official, but the procedural posture and lack of record below is the only reason, the court laid out exactly why it thought those would not be official acts in a way that any lower court would in practice feel compelled to follow.
I have a law degree, I've been reading SCOTUS opinions for 25 years, and I practiced criminal law for 20 years. I assure you the decision does not grant the president the ability to evade punishment for murdering political opponents.
Now, if you think he's going to have a military coup overthrow the government and THEN kill all his opponent's, what the constitution has to say about immunity isn't very relevant at that point because nobody's left to prosecute him. I think you would be vastly overestimating Trump and his allies' competence by a factor of 1000x, and his ambitions by 100x, and ignoring the fact that he's 78 years old with no obvious successor and therefore a very dubious person for a general to commit treason on behalf of. That coup wouldn't happen in Nigeria or Venezuela, let alone the US, generals just retire and take a spot on the Raytheon board or as a CNN guest contributor, there's nothing for them to gain here. But it seems almost impossible to convince people that Trump really is just the incompetent clown he appears to be-- taking it back to this article, people emotionally need him to be a devil or a savior, to fill some gap in their lives or to motivate their actions, but just like the rest of celebrity culture it's nuts to me that we've elevated this buffoon to that level of significance in our psyches.
Well, overturning Roe v Wade is a pretty huge "achievement." Ask the women and girls who have been forced to give birth whether his first term was a big "yawn."
I recommend you read a deeply sourced account like The Divider to find out why he didn't fulfill any of the dreams of the hardliners, other than ending 50 years of women getting to decide whether or not to end a pregnancy. Why he didn't have have BLM protestors shot in the legs. Why we didn't pull out of NATO. Why martial law wasn't imposed. Why would-be immigrants at the southern border were not fired upon. Why the effort to prevent a transfer of power did not get any traction in his actual administration and was undertaken instead by the crazies who were not in government––many of whom (if they escape prison in time) will have government positions next time and would be all in on enacting the hardline agenda.
It was not Trump's dithering. It was not for lack of trying. It was his cabinet and the White House counsel's office.
Most important, the hardliners figured this out a long time ago: we won't get anything we want unless we have our maximalist extremists in all the important offices. That was the whole origin of Project 2025.
It was because Trump's only core value is his popularity and all of the things you listed are unpopular.
Why is he running on illegal immigration? Because as David Frum wrote if liberals do not control the borders ordinary citizens will elect fascists to do the job. Anything that Trump says is calculated to boost his appeal to the masses. If you have a problem with Trump's call for mass deportations don't look at him, stop and look at the people around you.
Turley is a complete hack, pardon the insult to hacks. He argues by assertion. And he ignores the crucial issues.
SCOTUS said a President has absolute immunity for official acts specified in the Constitution. For example, appointing ambassadors and giving pardons. SCOTUS also said that other official acts were presumed be immune. Like giving orders as Commander-in-Chief.
Unfortunately, SCOTUS said that Presidential motivations were immune from being examined, as a matter of law. It said this explicitly.
That’s the whole game right there.
Trump gives a pardon. In reality he sold it? Impossible to prove. Evidence of hid corrupt motive is inadmissible.
Trump ordered the Army to execute a drone strike on the Democratic Convention? Commander-in-Chief decision. His motivation—whether anti-terrorist or political or criminally insane- well, they can’t even be investigated.
"Trump gives a pardon. In reality he sold it? Impossible to prove. Evidence of hid corrupt motive is inadmissible."
Google Marc Rich. This has already happened. The solution wasn't to press charges, it was public outrage and action at the ballot box.
"Trump ordered the Army to execute a drone strike on the Democratic Convention? Commander-in-Chief decision. His motivation—whether anti-terrorist or political or criminally insane- well, they can’t even be investigated."
That was then, this is now. New rules from SCOTUS just made are that Trump can’t be prosecuted for taking bribes. In fact, bribes are legal if you get paid afterwards, as a tip, instead of before. Plus, Trump supporters won’t punish him at the ballot box, no matter what he does. Rape, fraud, treason? They don’t care. We know he’s already been bribed. Why else would all those foreign diplomats stay in his shitty hotel in DC? He hasn’t lost any voters as a result. Cult leaders aren’t held accountable by their cult.
Michael, I think you're overreacting. Take a look a Glenn Greenwald's breakdown of the SCOTUS ruling on immunity on System Update, Greenwald's nightly show on Rumble. The Supreme Court finally put in writing what every president has enjoyed, immunity from prosecution for official acts. Every president, not just Trump. This shouldn't come as a shock because not one president has ever been charged for the dastardly deeds they committed while in office: George W Bush gave the green light for torture and CIA black sites and knowingly lied the US into invading Iraq, not prosecuted; Ronald Reagan defied Congress' ban on funding the Contras, not prosecuted; and Barack Obama gave the order to kill two American citizens by drone strikes, not prosecuted. There are many more examples, but I think the point is clear. Whether we like it or not, and I don't, presidents carrying out their official duties are immune from prosecution. SCOTUS left the definition of a president's official duties up to lower courts.
The Constitution grants every president unchecked ability to grant pardons for crimes against the US. Every president, not just Trump. And every president has enjoyed this privilege. Ordering a drone strike on the Democratic Convention is absolutely beyond hyperbole.
Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump all committed dastardly things while in office. They all did those things with the knowledge that they could be impeached (2 were impeached, 1 would have been impeached) or criminally indicted once they left office.
Somehow all Presidents in the history of the US managed to be executives and make decisions––even decisions they knew they might be indicted for––while knowing they did not have immunity.
That knowledge served the Republic well: it was fear of prosecution that made Nixon resign for a pardon. (And the language of the pardon makes it crystal clear that presidents do not have immunity.)
Beyond all that, Reagan, Clinton, Bush and Obama––and even Nixon, were not crooks. Trump alone is a crook and has always been a crook. For anyone looking objectively at the corrupt things he has done all his life, I find it silly to argue that he's just one more White House executive like the others, the only difference being that he will have explicit rather than tacit immunity. Formalism at its worst.
You are savvy and a sharp critical thinker. I'd be super surprised if you genuinely believed this from Trump. Look up the personnel running 2025 and then cross-check that with the Trump insiders. Hell, one of Trump's closest aides *wrote* one of the chapters in the 2025 plan.
1) Look, my read on Trump is that if he'd won in 2020 he'd have spent his second term celebrating on the golf course and letting the country run itself.
Now the problem is that he has a real motive to involve himself in policy and administration because he has criminal charges hanging over his head. Whose fault is that? That "lawfare" was enacted against Trump as an anti-democratic maneuver because it's been clear for some time that he was a viable candidate with respect to 2024. How did that work out? It doesn't appear to have diminished his electoral chances and now you have a candidate who is justifiably interested in dealing with the DoJ because he is personally threatened.
In other words, the worst of both worlds. And the governing class is supposedly in charge because of how competent they are?
2) As for Trump and 2025, my honest take on Trump is that he's a pro-abortion, pro-gun control New Yorker. That's all meaningless however in that what really matters to him is winning and since he's running as a Republican what amorphous personal opinions he has regarding policy have to be subservient to pleasing the base. How does that play out though?
Look at abortion. Trump is not a committed pro-lifer and his political rhetoric and influence on the Republican party platform has been to moderate, moderate, moderate. Why shouldn't he? He clearly has no firm position on the issue personally and hence no reason not to cave to popular opinion. And, again, while he may not be forcefully committed to any political stance I am pretty sure that at heart he is a pro-abortion, pro-gun control New Yorker.
The "art from the artist" question is important for a lot of reasons. Maybe I'm just looking at the past idealistically, but I seem to remember being young when it was 180 degrees different. Free speech absolutism reigned supreme and the art was mostly its own separate thing. Even back when I studied literature in college in the early 00s, formalism was still a big part of the curriculum which explicitly states its purpose was to consider the text in and of itself disregarding all outside influence.
My, how things have changed. There's a cynical part of me that thinks you can tie the "art and artist are one and the same" to the rise of celebrity culture more generally. It's the perfect literary school of thought for things like celebrity biographies (which typically sell very well). The text itself is almost an afterthought, a mere appendage or an extended PR release for the author. Most people don't read and I think we've basically lost the ability to treat literature seriously as a culture in the US on the whole. It's celebrity worship all the way down. That's why some character flaw is fatal to an author's work. It was never about the text, not really. It was about a brand, and when the Neil Gaiman or Alice Munro brand loses value everyone is ready to move on to something else. Same reason K-pop stans viciously attack people who talk trash about their favorite musicians. They're protecting the integrity of a brand.
The social justice/cancel culture politics so popular with the left were basically just trying to graft this dynamic onto what they considered worthy causes. That's about as charitable as I can be towards it. To be even more sympathetic, I don't entirely blame them because celebrity worshiping consumerist culture is the only kind of culture we have now.
Using celebrity worship as a stand-in for politics means you can look like you are doing something adult (politics) while not having to emotionally move on from high school. Writing/enacting policy or dedicating yourself to activism is often dry, boring, and frustrating. Pretending that Trump or Kim Kardashian are serious people with serious ideas means you don't have to attend community meetings or read white papers or pay union dues, but you can do it while half-watching reality TV while scrolling social media.
It's not exactly new. These observations are mostly warmed over Adorno and Rorty. If you follow them we're now just reaping the results of political and cultural trends that got underway 50-70 years ago.
I had this idea years ago to write an essay about Reagan, the former B list actor, was the first truly modern president and represented the ascendance and total domination of Americans political and cultural life by the Culture Industry. You can never pick an exact moment, but Reagan was the first pure and clean Hollywood celeb to run the government. He was, unfortunately the wave of the future...to all of our detriment.
That's really stretching the definition of celebrity to the breaking point. I'm not sure how you would consider FDR, Clinton, Nixon, etc. to have been celebrities before getting elected unless you re-define "celebrity" to be " vaguely well-known." In that case, every governor, every member of Congress, every cabinet member, etc. is a celebrity.
Depends on how you define celebrity. The rise of mass media (radio, then TV) definitely changed things, since now everyone could develop a parasocial relationship with their candidate.
I teach a class on the history of libraries. Of course, when these were clay tablets in a temple only kings and advisers had access, and when scribes copied manuscripts, they used Latin which only a few could read, and when printing was launched there was a gap between printing in Latin and the vernacular...and students today are upset that libraries weren't open to all people back in the 1200s. Have to spend some time talking about actual history for context.
If you’re referring to American Media culture, it’s certainly the predominant mode that crowds out a lot of cultural alternatives to the margins of the local or the niche.
I have the same distaste for the “death of the artist” argument as I do the “art and the artist are one and the same” argument because they not only occlude the reality of art as a product of labor existing as a separate physical entity from a person, they make the mistake of asking the wrong questions entirely - art is a means of communication, and the medium through which this communication happens necessarily causes an abstraction that the author and the recipient both must navigate.
In both cases, the intentions of the author are relevant at least as far as what they are themselves intending to communicate. This is still divorced from their products in themselves and any recipient’s interpretation of them (which is a good thing!), but I consider it bad faith to ignore the context of what the author’s desire to communicate is, even if their products are enjoyed entirely as an abstracted object or subject.
We're getting deep in the weeds here but I come down way more on the side of the "death of the author" than not even if I wouldn't go that far. The author's intentions matter for relatively little. More than that, how does one even discern them? In secondary texts? These all presume the authors are reliable and honest about their intentions in whatever communications you have available. If you aren't even basing the author's intentions on something like that you're merely projecting your own interpretation onto the author (what you think they intend) and calling it theirs.
You have to bring in the author at least a little and I agree that it plays at least some role in reading a work, but it's small. It should be small too. No more of this letting the biography of an author or artist supersede any aspect of the art. Otherwise you get what we have now and you won't stop until it changes.
I’m a musician so I’m making a couple assumptions - 1) that the author is both serious and literal with their intent to communicate something through their work and 2) that they are either honest in the presentation of their work, or capable of explaining their perspective should it be inquired.
I suppose it’s a bit different in written prose, since an author can remove their perspective from their writing amongst other devices. You’re right, there are situations where authors are neither reliable nor honest.
But that’s to my point. I do agree that without that knowledge, the audience is left to either substitute their own interpretation or incorporate additional information into it should they be made aware. I certainly don’t think an author can be a dictator and prescribe some incrollabile truth that holds for every recipient of their work, but only that it is disingenuous to disregard an author’s perspective or intention should it be known.
Of course it’s out of your hands to some degree regardless, due to the nature of art. I’m particularly against the notion that someone’s art exclusively serves to be a vehicle for the narrative biography of the artist themselves, I find that exhausting.
I'm a proponent of "death of the artist" not so much that the intent of the artist doesn't matter, but that at the end of the day, the artist loses control of the art once it is released to the public. Each individual who comes into contract with that art gets to determine their own reaction and interpretation.
I also agree with Freddie that part of being an artist is being a good liar. The Beatles could just as convincingly sing "All You Need is Love" and complain about the "Taxman." And in fact, they did mean both of those songs literally.
With churches and fraternal organizations dying off, consumption and media is literally the only culture many people have. So it becomes a proxy for their social circle, morality, and lifestyle.
If we are only allowed to appreciate art that is created by infallible, morally perfect people, where is it going to come from? Maybe this is where people get the idea that AI can step in and replace artists. Morally incorruptible, sure, but the art is pretty shit, unfortunately.
I don't know why we feel that artists owe us moral purity, but we certainly seem to expect it. Yet we don't expect anything like that from, say, politicians; it's widely assumed that every politician is corrupt unless proven otherwise. Life is rarely so simplistic.
To be fair, I get the emotions behind the outrage, as FdB points out in his essay. The relationship between a reader and the voice of the author can feel very personal, which perhaps make her moral failings feel more like a betrayal than one feels from a politician or a dentist. But the readers feeling outraged would do well to remember their own failings, and then they might understand why Munro’s voice resonates as strongly with them as it does.
I've had to have three teeth expensively replaced because of a shit dentist, and at that I'm glad not to have to count myself among the patients he's rumored to have molested. Anyone who can feel betrayed by a mere author I think must be very young.
I agree. I'd be a lot more upset from a lack of authenticity from an artist, rather than where their moral compass points. Art is supposed to be about an interpretation of a given truth, distilled through the lens of the artists themselves. And be beautiful too.
And, in some way, don't we *want* artists to be a little messed up? The mess is what helps make the art; after all, well-adjusted normies aren't producing The Scream. Sinead O'Connor was a great songwriter, but good gods was she annoying. I accept the weirdness, the mess, the annoyance, because they make something to cherish.
So when I learn that X or Y artist lives a dysfunctional life...well, it's the price of admission. Otherwise, all music would be Michael Bolton and all paintings would be dogs playing poker.
I feel like there's a deep need somewhere in this... celebrities as icon-scapegoats that need to embody the primal, most disavowed parts of ourselves. Or maybe it's just that massive amounts of fame mess people up IDK.
this line resonates: "Disavowing great artists and their work after these sorts of allegations has become just another station on the cross of the educated and upwardly mobile, after all, a costless demonstration of fealty to a particularly influential vision of how to be a member of polite society in good standing."
And it's a way for aspiring Social Justice Bounty Hunters to get fame! "Look at my takedown of this Bad Person! Like and subscribe!" You may never be great, but you can use a falling great person to propel yourself upward.
I think the "art from the artist" discussion is different in this case, with Munro, given the things and people she wrote about.
I own a bunch of her short story collections but I haven't read everything she's written. With all this, it's impossible to imagine reading (or re-reading) her the same way, now that I know there's this hideous thing lurking there between the words. I won't not read her, but it will change how I read her.
I've held onto her books in some part because I want my daughter to come across them when she's older - this wonderful author from Ontario, like us, who wrote so beautifully and (I thought) unflinchingly about people, and women in particular. I still want that for her, but I'm sad that her read of Munro will be...tainted. I guess that's life though.
This doesn't go to the main points of this piece, though, which I completely agree with and hope you keep banging on about forever.
When I was a kid, you had to be a weirdo to know about HP Lovecraft. You could find one collection in Barnes and Noble or Borders, but decidedly not mainstream. Years ago, they changed away from the bust of Lovecraft they used to hand out for the World Fantasy awards because of what a racist he was back in the day. And some of his stories themselves are quite racist, it's been remarked on and is well known. In fact, a lot of his schtick is fear of the other.
Yet now , the hardback horror section at Half Price books has a whole shelf of his stuff. I've seen a hardback collection of his stuff in Costco. He was namechecked in an anti-racist deconstruction, Lovecraft Country, in print and on HBO. He's never been so mainstream popular. If Lovecraft can't be cancelled, good luck with other talented people, he's not even a particularly great writer.
Lovecraft is an interesting character to bring up in this context in that he partially disavowed his racist views later in life. But he's also interesting because people generally don't shy away from confronting his terrible views and its influence on his work, while also not calling for him to be cancelled, e.g.: https://library.brown.edu/create/lovecraftracialimaginaries/
It may be that enough time has passed that most people accept that an American white man of his era would likely hold these views, and we should read his works with that context in mind without discarding it altogether
I think the issue is that few of his major works can be entirely divorced from his racist beliefs - his neurotic racism is basically the animating horror behind his writing. Similarly, you can't divorce Poe's horror writing from his marriage to Virginia Clemm and her subsequent early death. There's less racism in Poe's writing though which means I find reading him more palatable (also, he was simply a better writer).
I'm honestly a little puzzled at the mindset of a person who claims to be interested in horror stories of a hundred years ago but is repulsed at the idea that such stories might have a racist subtext to them. What exactly is the value of reading old literature if you're not only disinterested in how people back then thought about the world, but are scared that understanding their thought processes will somehow infect you with their bigotry? Incidentally, I feel a bit compelled to note that this entire concept is an extremely Lovecraftian premise and is rather ironically the main reason his work is considered racist at all.
Ugh, the line from Constance Grady, "What do we do about Alice Munro now?” is just sad. I don't know, Constance, form your own opinion! Figure out your own action! Aren't you an adult? Everyone's desperate to be told what to think or receive confirmation that they have the correct opinion these days.
The question is really: Who is we in that sentence? If it was "Canadian high school or college teachers of English literature" it would be more realistic.
The culture writers at Vox seem to be obsessed with having wide conversations on issues that are really marginal to most people, even highly educated people. I have a masters degree and so many novels my wife is trying to get me to sell a bunch of books, but I've never read anything by Alice Munro. The number of people who care about literature is a small portion of the population, a percentage of the percentage of educated people. The percentage of people who care about, for instance, independent film is also a small portion of the population. A24 is successful, but in a very narrow space.
Ultimately they seem to mistake having a lot of discourse on Twitter as a national discussion of real importance.
I always compare these false-consensus-driven peer-pressure "movements" to that scene in Spider-Man 2 when Jameson's trying to take his pills and gets a buzzer no matter what he does BF Skinner-style
they don't want compliance in the sense of "at least pretend to believe in XYZ, disconnect from everyone who doesn't believe XYZ, don't try and come up with any alternatives or tests for XYZ": it's more about making everyone always look over their shoulder to make sure they're not about to say something forbidden; it's about keeping everyone plastic and pliable to the Group, never refusing to play the game even as the rules change every month
I don't think the personal lives of authors should be considered irrelevant to their work, BUT it will be more productive here for literary critics to further consider how the psychic limitations of a woman born in the 1930s informed her work. I'm not a Munro scholar, but I've read enough of her work to see this, even before I knew about the abuse. She wrote about women circumscribed by their worlds.
"Endless online connectivity obscures the difference between the self and the world, smudges the border that separates expression and action. Doing is hard and feeling is easy."
This is so true, and not just about Alice Munro or other topics you covered in this post. As someone who works to make my community a better place, I frequently encounter people who want solutions to the same issues I'm working on. I try to provide those opportunities but find I have few takers.
Actually solving issues takes putting some skin in the game. For many, writing an article or posting a concern on social media seems to satisfy the urge to "do something."
That is the seductive lie of the Internet...by sitting at a computer clicking and typing, you can somehow accomplish something besides moving yourself closer to death.
This is a good one. I'd add that a collective loneliness creates the urge to find fleeting community through a tiny screen via the public, performative display (and enforcement) of shared feelings. That of course does not create any lasting benefit (for anyone including the speaker), so repeat and repeat as the loneliness grows.
I recently talked to my kids about feeling v. doing, in the context of pride flags and the stars and stripes. We ended up talking about Ibram Kendi and President Lyndon Johnson, which felt like a productive comparison in material change and the messenger.
And the Ty Cobb story is pretty fascinating, since I grew up certain he was a horrible racist. Feelings about a dead guy and all, but maybe illustrative of the way historical memory works.
Besides the screen, what else is there? Churches are dying, fraternal orgs are aging out, there are very few third spaces where you can even hang out. The only meetup even going in my area is a board game club; once there were 2 dozen.
Maybe I feel differently because I speedran the process; back in 2000, instead of making real friends at college, I wound up spending countless hours discussing webcomics online. I think my parasocial acquaintances have been more real than my social acquaintances.
I think this depends a lot on where you live. The thing I've been thinking about is that it has ALWAYS been hard for socially awkward people to find a niche, but the addiction to screens (combined with suburban sprawl) is creating more and more socially awkward people coupled with unlivable communities. In my small city, there are seemingly endless third spaces, along with a collective appetite to be engaged socially, and real estate prices have skyrocketed to the point that I'm worried we will lose track of the collective identity that made our communities cool.
The appetite...that is the problem. I live in a college town where theoretically one could find social events, but can never find anything...and those groups that do manage to get members lose them when they get bored or move away. I wish I could build community, but I'm 20 years behind on social skills.
There seems to be a deep need among many people to neatly sort everyone into the "good people" and the "bad people" buckets, with no inbetween. And it seems to really sting when someone needs to go from one bucket to the other. I've seen a lot of people melting down over the Neil Gaiman accusations this week and it's clear that it's because he was one of the "good ones." These people feel somehow personally aggrieved when they have to confront the fact that (gasp!) they might have liked someone who turned out to be a bad'un.
Bad people---demonstrably bad---can do good things. How one thinks about and reacts to that fact, and its converse, is an indication of one's intellectual maturity and willingness to engage with reality.
I find Amanda Palmer (Gaiman's ex-wife) a fascinating human being in this regards - sometimes I think the entire grift of her career has been about positioning herself as one of the "good ones" while creating frisson from doing things that risk cancellation... like a British tabloid newspaper in the form of a human being! But I also think that there's something weirdly punk about that...
For instance, faking your own suicide, secretly recording your boyfriend's devestated reaction, then using that recording in a track, is almost cartoonishly villainous! Paying musicians in "exposure and hugs" sounds like satire! Doing these things (which are pretty widely known!) and managing to cultivate and retain a fandom of earnest social justice folks shows a level of confidence that I can barely begin to imagine...
I'm very glad I'm not in her orbit, but I will admit to being thankful she exists as a musician but also as a weird agent of chaos able to piss people off on the Left just as much as people on the Right. See also: Lena Dunham (who I have a soft spot for - perhaps because I think 'Girls' was good and much more self-aware than many people gave it credit for).
I don't think I will ever be able to read anything written by Alice Munro again, and that is a tremendous loss for me because Munro was one of my favorite writers, both for her subject matter (which might be described as "the secret life of women") and for her lucid, lyrical, economic style.
Plus, I've always been kinda proud of my ability to separate the dancer from the dance, to enjoy the works of the artist while disapproving of the artist’s life. (That Adolph Hitler! Yeah, sure, he had his issues, but y'know, he really had a _way_ with architectural reproductions...)
But I'm done with Munro.
This episode in Munro's life has all the plot elements of a Munro short story, you know? Munro, as an omniscient narrator, was a pitiless judge; her characters may not suffer consequences in a traditional sense, but it's quite clear when you read one of her stories that her characters are never happy with the choices they've made. Munro never quite forgives them, either.
For Munro to suddenly metamorphose into the most flawed of her own characters is _staggeringly_ dissonant to me. It's kind of as though Munro wrote her own life into being. It's Stephen King levels of creepy & weird.
To choose the man who sexually abused your child over your child!!! Who _unequivocally_ sexually abused your child—because not infrequently, there’s a kind of grey area with sexual abuse; oftern, it’s not intentional as such, it’s more a kind of clueless over-reaching, an inability to express love without some kind of libidinous element. (See Sue Miller’s very excellent "The Good Mother" for one such example.) This is wrong, of course. But understandable and so ultimately redeemable.
But that man, Munro's husband, Andrea's stepfather, _admitted_ what he did. Thought of himself as a victim! (Right, asshole. Nine-year-olds have all the power & agency in our culture!). Good for you for deciphering Nabokov's dots into the same type of secret message that schizophrenics get when they refuse to step on cracks.)
How could Alice Munro value this monster? I mean, okay, okay, okay, we've all loved the wrong person from time to time; I could have cut her slack for that one if she had immediately separated from this jerk.
But she didn't.
And it doesn't really matter that she's dead. Her extraordinary writing talent is such that she seems to be sitting beside you murmuring softly into your ear when you read anything she wrote.
There's a tremendous gulf in perspectives between individual human beings. I for the life of me cannot understand this viewpoint.
A cursory examination of history reveals a number of individuals who were tremendously flawed as human beings but produced great art. Munro isn't unique in that perspective, and this perspective applied uniformly would mean crossing Caravaggio and Roman Polanski off the list of what you consume. That's not a constraint that I want to put on my life.
For me, it's just an alien perspective. I don't understand the compulsion behind it. If you dig up an old statue buried in antiquity from a completely unknown sculptor do you suspend judgement on its artistic value because you have no idea if the artist liked to molest little children?
If it's beautiful, it's beautiful. It stands outside the fragile humanity of its creator.
Come, come. You're talking about beauty as though it's some state property of an object, whereas beauty is very subjective.
But be that as it may. I dithered at some length above that it is the _type_ of fiction Munro wrote that makes her particular betrayal proscriptive for me. If Munro wrote Regency romances, say, or science fiction, I could go on reading her without any problem.
If you want to see my reaction as just another example of the Heartbreak of Cancel Culture, I can't stop you. But it seems to me that it's something else..
I don't deny that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I'm just pointing out that the inputs that go into the subjective judgement of whether something is beautiful vary greatly from person to person and "For me, it's just an alien perspective".
And I'm not trying to brand this as some kind of cancel culture thing. If anything I suspect it's a difference between male and female perspectives.
Given how much her work meant to you, I hope that you can eventually reconcile yourself to loving her work but not her, but also accept that you don't get one without the other. Based on similar experiences I've had with writers, cannot imagine it will be easy but it's likely to be better than throwing away those parts of you shaped by her work.
Or as a literary critic said of Evelyn Waugh, after cataloguing just a handful of his deformities, `I would prefer to have [his writing] just as it is, and to appreciate that one cannot have the novels without the torments and evils of its author.'
@freddie … ❤️… in my crowded reading brain, i always make room for you, and am the better for it. so there. but hey … alice munro’s daughter was assaulted when she was 9 years old, so in the mid 1970s. in 1992, when she was in her mid-20s, she told her mum. you (and the world) now know how that went. but the timeline is important, and in today’s post, you mistakenly put the assault in the early 2000s. just sayin’.
ps we live in central ontario, not too far from wingham (munro’s birthplace) and clinton, where she and the charming paedophile lived out their later and final years.
whoops, just a typo, will fix
1. Sounds like Substack has been good to you. Good, you deserve it.
2. COVID and the responses to COVID were first and foremost a matter of signaling tribal allegiances, not a matter of policy. Hence liberals who had railed against the "Trump shot" suddenly morphed into "The science is settled!" when that became the tribal position.
Trumpers played similar games. Note how COVID was a hoax, the Chinese invented it in a lab, but Trump defeated it, using a vaccine that doesn't work. Clever boy.
Much the same can be said about attitudes towards policing. They aren't coherent statements of ideology, far from it. They are statements of tribal loyalty. Me tribe good! Them tribe bad!
3. I understand that Ty Cobb probably wasn't chairman of the Waycross, Georgia chapter of the NAACP, but he probably wasn't as much of an ass as Ken Burns or the sources he relied upon would have you believe. His racial attitudes certainly mellowed as he grew older.
God, Ken Burns became insufferable.
Agreed that Burns seems a bit up his own ass, but if you ask the average frustrated non-baseball person about Ty Cobb, whatever they know probably came directly or indirectly from Ken Burns' "Baseball".
Or the Tommy Lee Jones movie based on the biography of Cobb, which predates Ken Burns' documentary.
Heck, one of the lines of Field of Dreams is how all the players hated Ty Cobb. I really want to blame Ken Burns for the obvious reasons, but this one isn't really on him.
You apparently know more about the subject than I do, and I mean no snark at all.
Charles Leerhsen wrote a very well-researched biography of Cobb called "Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty" that goes into this. It's been a few years since I've read it but, as I recall, he makes a pretty compelling case that Cobb's official biographer, Al Stump, made up a lot of the more sensational stories in order to tear down Cobb's legacy and sell lots of books (which were conveniently published long after Cobb was dead).
They might also think of Joe Jackson as a lefty who batted right. Now what big-leaguer would choose to do that? Other than Sandy Koufax?
Ricky Henderson (and Madison Bumgarner) hit righty/threw lefty. Chas McCormick does so for the Astros currently. There is some thought that having a player's dominant eye closer to the pitcher is a big advantage, which might create this scenario.
I've always found his interviews to be stuffy and his shows to be well done (full disclosure, I like black and white photos and Peter Coyote's voice).
I saw him in-person 20 years ago at a University lecture event and as far as I can tell he always has been. I like his films but his personality was pretty up-his-own-orifice.
“But what I got much more often was an exhausted unhappiness about having to talk about such things at all. There was this sense of harried grievance, from people who had so recently been using the word “reckoning” without guile or irony, over being asked whether any reckoning had occurred.” I feel this, the frustration of unlearning. Silence is the womb that holds the development of an actual opinion as opposed to a feeling.
Talking about change does not magically bring change. You'd think people would have learned that.
Freddie, you are always a welcome read. This piece is particularly strong, and needed. Your distinction between feeling and effective action will soon be existentially significant.
Assume the most likely outcome in November—Trump as President, GOP control of Senate and House, judiciary corrupted up and down the line, including SCOTUS. What then?
Marches in the street? In a fascist system, that can actually be dangerous. Can it be effective action? In certain countries it has been. In others not. In China a man stood in front of a tank. The world’s feelings were aroused. So what?
So many on the left are focusing on such tiny things while ignoring the biggest one facing us in generations, if not ever. Help!
Maybe, just maybe, the hysterical people described in this article are being hysterical about the repercussions of Trump winning re-election in November.
SCOTUS immunity ruling + Trump retribution rhetoric + Heritage’s Project 2025 merit hysteria in my judgment. I hope you’re right and I’m wrong. I may watch how it turns out from somewhere else, just in case.
https://www.bangordailynews.com/2024/07/02/opinion/opinion-contributor/jared-golden-donald-trump-going-to-win-election-democracy-be-just-fine/
It's not hysterical to panic when the brakes in your car stop working. If there wasn't so much evidence––mostly from Trump's own mouth––about what we have in store, I would just shrug about Biden: "he's being an asshole; if Dems are out of power for 4 or even 8 years it will finally break the grip on the party by a sclerotic old guard.
You might instead of what he says (he’s a raving idiot and a blowhard, after all) look at what he actually did. It was utterly banal GOP politics that didn’t change the world or America very much. Michael Tracey has written on this a few times. Trump had control of all 3 wings for 2 years and… passed a tax cut. Like every normie Republican ever has done, just as every Dem prez spends their first 2 years passing a giant spending package under some vaguely Keynesian moniker. Those covid lockdown hardliners that Freddie refers to in the article were practically begging Trump to nationalize the production of factories, to be the Mussolini they apparently wanted, and he was just dithering along leaving everything to the states. His own voters wanted him to crush BLM but instead he left that to local authorities. He just isn’t the person people either hoped or feared that he was.
Otherwise normal Dems are suddenly out there talking about “Project 2025” sounding like Glenn Beck at his chalkboard on Fox News spinning tales that Obama was a Marxist. Believing your political/cultural opponent is powerful, disciplined and malignant is just as naive as venerating an artist who is “one of us”. People are just not that good or evil or competent in real life.
The argument is that Trump II would not be at all like Trump I, for good reasons. The first go-around had responsible officials in key posts, like Defense, State, FBI, COS (for most of the four years), etc. Thus time there’s a bench of crazies ready to run everything as soon as he takes office. Kash Patel, FFS!
Plus Trump himself has become demented in a way he wasn’t before.
Plus the implications of the SCOTUS immunity decision are almost infinite. I dare you to find anything that would now stop Trump ordering every Democrat in Congress be shot for treason. Prosecution? Not then, not ever. Impeachment? Find a single GOP Senator who would convict. Refusal to act by cops or armed forces? There will be those who will follow orders. And/or Trump names the Proud Boys as his Praetorian Guard, and there we go.
Convince me otherwise. Please!
Well I can certainly convince you that the immunity decision doesn't mean that. It gives the president immunity for "core" functions, which are defined pretty narrowly. It gives "presumptive" immunity for "official" functions, which is rebuttable, and the only thing immunity practically means in that context is that you'd be entitled to challenge the prosecution on that point before standing trial rather than having to wait for conviction then appeal. Multiple aspects of the current indictment in question were suggested by the Chief Justice in his majority to be non-official, and merely claiming they were official wouldn't make them so. For example, the Vice-President sitting over the certification vote is acting as president of the senate, not in his executive branch capacity, therefore the majority opinion suggests this would NOT be official and therefore not immune. Likewise, Trump calling the heads of other state parties to produce fake elector slates was suggested by the majority opinion not to be official. But the SCOTUS could not bindingly rule on the matter because the appeal was rushed -- which is Jack Smith's fault for waiting. Sotomayor complains that the majority did not firmly rule any given part of the indictment to be non-official, but the procedural posture and lack of record below is the only reason, the court laid out exactly why it thought those would not be official acts in a way that any lower court would in practice feel compelled to follow.
I have a law degree, I've been reading SCOTUS opinions for 25 years, and I practiced criminal law for 20 years. I assure you the decision does not grant the president the ability to evade punishment for murdering political opponents.
Now, if you think he's going to have a military coup overthrow the government and THEN kill all his opponent's, what the constitution has to say about immunity isn't very relevant at that point because nobody's left to prosecute him. I think you would be vastly overestimating Trump and his allies' competence by a factor of 1000x, and his ambitions by 100x, and ignoring the fact that he's 78 years old with no obvious successor and therefore a very dubious person for a general to commit treason on behalf of. That coup wouldn't happen in Nigeria or Venezuela, let alone the US, generals just retire and take a spot on the Raytheon board or as a CNN guest contributor, there's nothing for them to gain here. But it seems almost impossible to convince people that Trump really is just the incompetent clown he appears to be-- taking it back to this article, people emotionally need him to be a devil or a savior, to fill some gap in their lives or to motivate their actions, but just like the rest of celebrity culture it's nuts to me that we've elevated this buffoon to that level of significance in our psyches.
You mean that now Trump is personally threatened with bogus, trumped up criminal charges and has a huge incentive to revamp the system.
Gee, who filed those charges against him in the first place?
Well, overturning Roe v Wade is a pretty huge "achievement." Ask the women and girls who have been forced to give birth whether his first term was a big "yawn."
I recommend you read a deeply sourced account like The Divider to find out why he didn't fulfill any of the dreams of the hardliners, other than ending 50 years of women getting to decide whether or not to end a pregnancy. Why he didn't have have BLM protestors shot in the legs. Why we didn't pull out of NATO. Why martial law wasn't imposed. Why would-be immigrants at the southern border were not fired upon. Why the effort to prevent a transfer of power did not get any traction in his actual administration and was undertaken instead by the crazies who were not in government––many of whom (if they escape prison in time) will have government positions next time and would be all in on enacting the hardline agenda.
It was not Trump's dithering. It was not for lack of trying. It was his cabinet and the White House counsel's office.
Most important, the hardliners figured this out a long time ago: we won't get anything we want unless we have our maximalist extremists in all the important offices. That was the whole origin of Project 2025.
It was because Trump's only core value is his popularity and all of the things you listed are unpopular.
Why is he running on illegal immigration? Because as David Frum wrote if liberals do not control the borders ordinary citizens will elect fascists to do the job. Anything that Trump says is calculated to boost his appeal to the masses. If you have a problem with Trump's call for mass deportations don't look at him, stop and look at the people around you.
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/4757174-supreme-court-presidential-immunity/
Turley is a complete hack, pardon the insult to hacks. He argues by assertion. And he ignores the crucial issues.
SCOTUS said a President has absolute immunity for official acts specified in the Constitution. For example, appointing ambassadors and giving pardons. SCOTUS also said that other official acts were presumed be immune. Like giving orders as Commander-in-Chief.
Unfortunately, SCOTUS said that Presidential motivations were immune from being examined, as a matter of law. It said this explicitly.
That’s the whole game right there.
Trump gives a pardon. In reality he sold it? Impossible to prove. Evidence of hid corrupt motive is inadmissible.
Trump ordered the Army to execute a drone strike on the Democratic Convention? Commander-in-Chief decision. His motivation—whether anti-terrorist or political or criminally insane- well, they can’t even be investigated.
Read Roberts’ opinion. We’re doomed.
If you don't like Turley how about Ty Cobb?
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4751078-ty-cobb-sonia-sotomayor-dissent/
"Trump gives a pardon. In reality he sold it? Impossible to prove. Evidence of hid corrupt motive is inadmissible."
Google Marc Rich. This has already happened. The solution wasn't to press charges, it was public outrage and action at the ballot box.
"Trump ordered the Army to execute a drone strike on the Democratic Convention? Commander-in-Chief decision. His motivation—whether anti-terrorist or political or criminally insane- well, they can’t even be investigated."
What did I say about hysteria?
That was then, this is now. New rules from SCOTUS just made are that Trump can’t be prosecuted for taking bribes. In fact, bribes are legal if you get paid afterwards, as a tip, instead of before. Plus, Trump supporters won’t punish him at the ballot box, no matter what he does. Rape, fraud, treason? They don’t care. We know he’s already been bribed. Why else would all those foreign diplomats stay in his shitty hotel in DC? He hasn’t lost any voters as a result. Cult leaders aren’t held accountable by their cult.
Michael, I think you're overreacting. Take a look a Glenn Greenwald's breakdown of the SCOTUS ruling on immunity on System Update, Greenwald's nightly show on Rumble. The Supreme Court finally put in writing what every president has enjoyed, immunity from prosecution for official acts. Every president, not just Trump. This shouldn't come as a shock because not one president has ever been charged for the dastardly deeds they committed while in office: George W Bush gave the green light for torture and CIA black sites and knowingly lied the US into invading Iraq, not prosecuted; Ronald Reagan defied Congress' ban on funding the Contras, not prosecuted; and Barack Obama gave the order to kill two American citizens by drone strikes, not prosecuted. There are many more examples, but I think the point is clear. Whether we like it or not, and I don't, presidents carrying out their official duties are immune from prosecution. SCOTUS left the definition of a president's official duties up to lower courts.
The Constitution grants every president unchecked ability to grant pardons for crimes against the US. Every president, not just Trump. And every president has enjoyed this privilege. Ordering a drone strike on the Democratic Convention is absolutely beyond hyperbole.
Again, you're overreacting.
Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump all committed dastardly things while in office. They all did those things with the knowledge that they could be impeached (2 were impeached, 1 would have been impeached) or criminally indicted once they left office.
Somehow all Presidents in the history of the US managed to be executives and make decisions––even decisions they knew they might be indicted for––while knowing they did not have immunity.
That knowledge served the Republic well: it was fear of prosecution that made Nixon resign for a pardon. (And the language of the pardon makes it crystal clear that presidents do not have immunity.)
Beyond all that, Reagan, Clinton, Bush and Obama––and even Nixon, were not crooks. Trump alone is a crook and has always been a crook. For anyone looking objectively at the corrupt things he has done all his life, I find it silly to argue that he's just one more White House executive like the others, the only difference being that he will have explicit rather than tacit immunity. Formalism at its worst.
https://time.com/6995370/trump-disavows-project-2025-transition-plan/
You are savvy and a sharp critical thinker. I'd be super surprised if you genuinely believed this from Trump. Look up the personnel running 2025 and then cross-check that with the Trump insiders. Hell, one of Trump's closest aides *wrote* one of the chapters in the 2025 plan.
1) Look, my read on Trump is that if he'd won in 2020 he'd have spent his second term celebrating on the golf course and letting the country run itself.
Now the problem is that he has a real motive to involve himself in policy and administration because he has criminal charges hanging over his head. Whose fault is that? That "lawfare" was enacted against Trump as an anti-democratic maneuver because it's been clear for some time that he was a viable candidate with respect to 2024. How did that work out? It doesn't appear to have diminished his electoral chances and now you have a candidate who is justifiably interested in dealing with the DoJ because he is personally threatened.
In other words, the worst of both worlds. And the governing class is supposedly in charge because of how competent they are?
2) As for Trump and 2025, my honest take on Trump is that he's a pro-abortion, pro-gun control New Yorker. That's all meaningless however in that what really matters to him is winning and since he's running as a Republican what amorphous personal opinions he has regarding policy have to be subservient to pleasing the base. How does that play out though?
Look at abortion. Trump is not a committed pro-lifer and his political rhetoric and influence on the Republican party platform has been to moderate, moderate, moderate. Why shouldn't he? He clearly has no firm position on the issue personally and hence no reason not to cave to popular opinion. And, again, while he may not be forcefully committed to any political stance I am pretty sure that at heart he is a pro-abortion, pro-gun control New Yorker.
Check out those links I posted. What did I say about hysteria?
The "art from the artist" question is important for a lot of reasons. Maybe I'm just looking at the past idealistically, but I seem to remember being young when it was 180 degrees different. Free speech absolutism reigned supreme and the art was mostly its own separate thing. Even back when I studied literature in college in the early 00s, formalism was still a big part of the curriculum which explicitly states its purpose was to consider the text in and of itself disregarding all outside influence.
My, how things have changed. There's a cynical part of me that thinks you can tie the "art and artist are one and the same" to the rise of celebrity culture more generally. It's the perfect literary school of thought for things like celebrity biographies (which typically sell very well). The text itself is almost an afterthought, a mere appendage or an extended PR release for the author. Most people don't read and I think we've basically lost the ability to treat literature seriously as a culture in the US on the whole. It's celebrity worship all the way down. That's why some character flaw is fatal to an author's work. It was never about the text, not really. It was about a brand, and when the Neil Gaiman or Alice Munro brand loses value everyone is ready to move on to something else. Same reason K-pop stans viciously attack people who talk trash about their favorite musicians. They're protecting the integrity of a brand.
The social justice/cancel culture politics so popular with the left were basically just trying to graft this dynamic onto what they considered worthy causes. That's about as charitable as I can be towards it. To be even more sympathetic, I don't entirely blame them because celebrity worshiping consumerist culture is the only kind of culture we have now.
Using celebrity worship as a stand-in for politics means you can look like you are doing something adult (politics) while not having to emotionally move on from high school. Writing/enacting policy or dedicating yourself to activism is often dry, boring, and frustrating. Pretending that Trump or Kim Kardashian are serious people with serious ideas means you don't have to attend community meetings or read white papers or pay union dues, but you can do it while half-watching reality TV while scrolling social media.
It's not exactly new. These observations are mostly warmed over Adorno and Rorty. If you follow them we're now just reaping the results of political and cultural trends that got underway 50-70 years ago.
True, but it is weird that fully half of the Republican presidents of my lifetime started out as celebrities.
I had this idea years ago to write an essay about Reagan, the former B list actor, was the first truly modern president and represented the ascendance and total domination of Americans political and cultural life by the Culture Industry. You can never pick an exact moment, but Reagan was the first pure and clean Hollywood celeb to run the government. He was, unfortunately the wave of the future...to all of our detriment.
Reagan went from shilling for cigarettes to shilling for Big Business.
What POTUS in the last 100 yrs hasn't been a celebrity first?
That's really stretching the definition of celebrity to the breaking point. I'm not sure how you would consider FDR, Clinton, Nixon, etc. to have been celebrities before getting elected unless you re-define "celebrity" to be " vaguely well-known." In that case, every governor, every member of Congress, every cabinet member, etc. is a celebrity.
My point exactly. Famous ppl are celebrities, are they not?
Depends on how you define celebrity. The rise of mass media (radio, then TV) definitely changed things, since now everyone could develop a parasocial relationship with their candidate.
I teach a class on the history of libraries. Of course, when these were clay tablets in a temple only kings and advisers had access, and when scribes copied manuscripts, they used Latin which only a few could read, and when printing was launched there was a gap between printing in Latin and the vernacular...and students today are upset that libraries weren't open to all people back in the 1200s. Have to spend some time talking about actual history for context.
If you’re referring to American Media culture, it’s certainly the predominant mode that crowds out a lot of cultural alternatives to the margins of the local or the niche.
I have the same distaste for the “death of the artist” argument as I do the “art and the artist are one and the same” argument because they not only occlude the reality of art as a product of labor existing as a separate physical entity from a person, they make the mistake of asking the wrong questions entirely - art is a means of communication, and the medium through which this communication happens necessarily causes an abstraction that the author and the recipient both must navigate.
In both cases, the intentions of the author are relevant at least as far as what they are themselves intending to communicate. This is still divorced from their products in themselves and any recipient’s interpretation of them (which is a good thing!), but I consider it bad faith to ignore the context of what the author’s desire to communicate is, even if their products are enjoyed entirely as an abstracted object or subject.
We're getting deep in the weeds here but I come down way more on the side of the "death of the author" than not even if I wouldn't go that far. The author's intentions matter for relatively little. More than that, how does one even discern them? In secondary texts? These all presume the authors are reliable and honest about their intentions in whatever communications you have available. If you aren't even basing the author's intentions on something like that you're merely projecting your own interpretation onto the author (what you think they intend) and calling it theirs.
You have to bring in the author at least a little and I agree that it plays at least some role in reading a work, but it's small. It should be small too. No more of this letting the biography of an author or artist supersede any aspect of the art. Otherwise you get what we have now and you won't stop until it changes.
I’m a musician so I’m making a couple assumptions - 1) that the author is both serious and literal with their intent to communicate something through their work and 2) that they are either honest in the presentation of their work, or capable of explaining their perspective should it be inquired.
I suppose it’s a bit different in written prose, since an author can remove their perspective from their writing amongst other devices. You’re right, there are situations where authors are neither reliable nor honest.
But that’s to my point. I do agree that without that knowledge, the audience is left to either substitute their own interpretation or incorporate additional information into it should they be made aware. I certainly don’t think an author can be a dictator and prescribe some incrollabile truth that holds for every recipient of their work, but only that it is disingenuous to disregard an author’s perspective or intention should it be known.
Of course it’s out of your hands to some degree regardless, due to the nature of art. I’m particularly against the notion that someone’s art exclusively serves to be a vehicle for the narrative biography of the artist themselves, I find that exhausting.
I'm a proponent of "death of the artist" not so much that the intent of the artist doesn't matter, but that at the end of the day, the artist loses control of the art once it is released to the public. Each individual who comes into contract with that art gets to determine their own reaction and interpretation.
I also agree with Freddie that part of being an artist is being a good liar. The Beatles could just as convincingly sing "All You Need is Love" and complain about the "Taxman." And in fact, they did mean both of those songs literally.
With churches and fraternal organizations dying off, consumption and media is literally the only culture many people have. So it becomes a proxy for their social circle, morality, and lifestyle.
If we are only allowed to appreciate art that is created by infallible, morally perfect people, where is it going to come from? Maybe this is where people get the idea that AI can step in and replace artists. Morally incorruptible, sure, but the art is pretty shit, unfortunately.
I don't know why we feel that artists owe us moral purity, but we certainly seem to expect it. Yet we don't expect anything like that from, say, politicians; it's widely assumed that every politician is corrupt unless proven otherwise. Life is rarely so simplistic.
To be fair, I get the emotions behind the outrage, as FdB points out in his essay. The relationship between a reader and the voice of the author can feel very personal, which perhaps make her moral failings feel more like a betrayal than one feels from a politician or a dentist. But the readers feeling outraged would do well to remember their own failings, and then they might understand why Munro’s voice resonates as strongly with them as it does.
I've had to have three teeth expensively replaced because of a shit dentist, and at that I'm glad not to have to count myself among the patients he's rumored to have molested. Anyone who can feel betrayed by a mere author I think must be very young.
I agree. I'd be a lot more upset from a lack of authenticity from an artist, rather than where their moral compass points. Art is supposed to be about an interpretation of a given truth, distilled through the lens of the artists themselves. And be beautiful too.
Morally right or wrong has little to do with it.
And, in some way, don't we *want* artists to be a little messed up? The mess is what helps make the art; after all, well-adjusted normies aren't producing The Scream. Sinead O'Connor was a great songwriter, but good gods was she annoying. I accept the weirdness, the mess, the annoyance, because they make something to cherish.
So when I learn that X or Y artist lives a dysfunctional life...well, it's the price of admission. Otherwise, all music would be Michael Bolton and all paintings would be dogs playing poker.
I feel like there's a deep need somewhere in this... celebrities as icon-scapegoats that need to embody the primal, most disavowed parts of ourselves. Or maybe it's just that massive amounts of fame mess people up IDK.
this line resonates: "Disavowing great artists and their work after these sorts of allegations has become just another station on the cross of the educated and upwardly mobile, after all, a costless demonstration of fealty to a particularly influential vision of how to be a member of polite society in good standing."
That line stuck out for me too. Just more elitist PMC bullshit.
And it's a way for aspiring Social Justice Bounty Hunters to get fame! "Look at my takedown of this Bad Person! Like and subscribe!" You may never be great, but you can use a falling great person to propel yourself upward.
"Doing is hard and feeling is easy." Yes.
I think the "art from the artist" discussion is different in this case, with Munro, given the things and people she wrote about.
I own a bunch of her short story collections but I haven't read everything she's written. With all this, it's impossible to imagine reading (or re-reading) her the same way, now that I know there's this hideous thing lurking there between the words. I won't not read her, but it will change how I read her.
I've held onto her books in some part because I want my daughter to come across them when she's older - this wonderful author from Ontario, like us, who wrote so beautifully and (I thought) unflinchingly about people, and women in particular. I still want that for her, but I'm sad that her read of Munro will be...tainted. I guess that's life though.
This doesn't go to the main points of this piece, though, which I completely agree with and hope you keep banging on about forever.
When I was a kid, you had to be a weirdo to know about HP Lovecraft. You could find one collection in Barnes and Noble or Borders, but decidedly not mainstream. Years ago, they changed away from the bust of Lovecraft they used to hand out for the World Fantasy awards because of what a racist he was back in the day. And some of his stories themselves are quite racist, it's been remarked on and is well known. In fact, a lot of his schtick is fear of the other.
Yet now , the hardback horror section at Half Price books has a whole shelf of his stuff. I've seen a hardback collection of his stuff in Costco. He was namechecked in an anti-racist deconstruction, Lovecraft Country, in print and on HBO. He's never been so mainstream popular. If Lovecraft can't be cancelled, good luck with other talented people, he's not even a particularly great writer.
Lovecraft is an interesting character to bring up in this context in that he partially disavowed his racist views later in life. But he's also interesting because people generally don't shy away from confronting his terrible views and its influence on his work, while also not calling for him to be cancelled, e.g.: https://library.brown.edu/create/lovecraftracialimaginaries/
It may be that enough time has passed that most people accept that an American white man of his era would likely hold these views, and we should read his works with that context in mind without discarding it altogether
There was a very broad movement to cancel Lovecraft. It's just fizzled out over time, which is what happens to all these attempts.
I think the issue is that few of his major works can be entirely divorced from his racist beliefs - his neurotic racism is basically the animating horror behind his writing. Similarly, you can't divorce Poe's horror writing from his marriage to Virginia Clemm and her subsequent early death. There's less racism in Poe's writing though which means I find reading him more palatable (also, he was simply a better writer).
iirc it was partly because Robert E. Howard said men of all races could hold their own in the Depression-era bumfights Howard boxed in
I'm honestly a little puzzled at the mindset of a person who claims to be interested in horror stories of a hundred years ago but is repulsed at the idea that such stories might have a racist subtext to them. What exactly is the value of reading old literature if you're not only disinterested in how people back then thought about the world, but are scared that understanding their thought processes will somehow infect you with their bigotry? Incidentally, I feel a bit compelled to note that this entire concept is an extremely Lovecraftian premise and is rather ironically the main reason his work is considered racist at all.
Ugh, the line from Constance Grady, "What do we do about Alice Munro now?” is just sad. I don't know, Constance, form your own opinion! Figure out your own action! Aren't you an adult? Everyone's desperate to be told what to think or receive confirmation that they have the correct opinion these days.
Constance Grady really seems like the Patient Zero of Vox becoming more and more a parody of itself.
The question is really: Who is we in that sentence? If it was "Canadian high school or college teachers of English literature" it would be more realistic.
It would also be easier to answer: continue teaching the works of a talented Canadian author.
The culture writers at Vox seem to be obsessed with having wide conversations on issues that are really marginal to most people, even highly educated people. I have a masters degree and so many novels my wife is trying to get me to sell a bunch of books, but I've never read anything by Alice Munro. The number of people who care about literature is a small portion of the population, a percentage of the percentage of educated people. The percentage of people who care about, for instance, independent film is also a small portion of the population. A24 is successful, but in a very narrow space.
Ultimately they seem to mistake having a lot of discourse on Twitter as a national discussion of real importance.
I always compare these false-consensus-driven peer-pressure "movements" to that scene in Spider-Man 2 when Jameson's trying to take his pills and gets a buzzer no matter what he does BF Skinner-style
they don't want compliance in the sense of "at least pretend to believe in XYZ, disconnect from everyone who doesn't believe XYZ, don't try and come up with any alternatives or tests for XYZ": it's more about making everyone always look over their shoulder to make sure they're not about to say something forbidden; it's about keeping everyone plastic and pliable to the Group, never refusing to play the game even as the rules change every month
I don't think the personal lives of authors should be considered irrelevant to their work, BUT it will be more productive here for literary critics to further consider how the psychic limitations of a woman born in the 1930s informed her work. I'm not a Munro scholar, but I've read enough of her work to see this, even before I knew about the abuse. She wrote about women circumscribed by their worlds.
"Endless online connectivity obscures the difference between the self and the world, smudges the border that separates expression and action. Doing is hard and feeling is easy."
This is so true, and not just about Alice Munro or other topics you covered in this post. As someone who works to make my community a better place, I frequently encounter people who want solutions to the same issues I'm working on. I try to provide those opportunities but find I have few takers.
Actually solving issues takes putting some skin in the game. For many, writing an article or posting a concern on social media seems to satisfy the urge to "do something."
And so the cycle continues.
That is the seductive lie of the Internet...by sitting at a computer clicking and typing, you can somehow accomplish something besides moving yourself closer to death.
This is a good one. I'd add that a collective loneliness creates the urge to find fleeting community through a tiny screen via the public, performative display (and enforcement) of shared feelings. That of course does not create any lasting benefit (for anyone including the speaker), so repeat and repeat as the loneliness grows.
I recently talked to my kids about feeling v. doing, in the context of pride flags and the stars and stripes. We ended up talking about Ibram Kendi and President Lyndon Johnson, which felt like a productive comparison in material change and the messenger.
And the Ty Cobb story is pretty fascinating, since I grew up certain he was a horrible racist. Feelings about a dead guy and all, but maybe illustrative of the way historical memory works.
Besides the screen, what else is there? Churches are dying, fraternal orgs are aging out, there are very few third spaces where you can even hang out. The only meetup even going in my area is a board game club; once there were 2 dozen.
Maybe I feel differently because I speedran the process; back in 2000, instead of making real friends at college, I wound up spending countless hours discussing webcomics online. I think my parasocial acquaintances have been more real than my social acquaintances.
I think this depends a lot on where you live. The thing I've been thinking about is that it has ALWAYS been hard for socially awkward people to find a niche, but the addiction to screens (combined with suburban sprawl) is creating more and more socially awkward people coupled with unlivable communities. In my small city, there are seemingly endless third spaces, along with a collective appetite to be engaged socially, and real estate prices have skyrocketed to the point that I'm worried we will lose track of the collective identity that made our communities cool.
The appetite...that is the problem. I live in a college town where theoretically one could find social events, but can never find anything...and those groups that do manage to get members lose them when they get bored or move away. I wish I could build community, but I'm 20 years behind on social skills.
There seems to be a deep need among many people to neatly sort everyone into the "good people" and the "bad people" buckets, with no inbetween. And it seems to really sting when someone needs to go from one bucket to the other. I've seen a lot of people melting down over the Neil Gaiman accusations this week and it's clear that it's because he was one of the "good ones." These people feel somehow personally aggrieved when they have to confront the fact that (gasp!) they might have liked someone who turned out to be a bad'un.
Or maybe there's no "good people" or "bad people" at all, just a bunch of fallible humans screwing up but occasionally doing something wonderful.
Dangerously close to moral relativism here.
Bad people---demonstrably bad---can do good things. How one thinks about and reacts to that fact, and its converse, is an indication of one's intellectual maturity and willingness to engage with reality.
I find Amanda Palmer (Gaiman's ex-wife) a fascinating human being in this regards - sometimes I think the entire grift of her career has been about positioning herself as one of the "good ones" while creating frisson from doing things that risk cancellation... like a British tabloid newspaper in the form of a human being! But I also think that there's something weirdly punk about that...
For instance, faking your own suicide, secretly recording your boyfriend's devestated reaction, then using that recording in a track, is almost cartoonishly villainous! Paying musicians in "exposure and hugs" sounds like satire! Doing these things (which are pretty widely known!) and managing to cultivate and retain a fandom of earnest social justice folks shows a level of confidence that I can barely begin to imagine...
I'm very glad I'm not in her orbit, but I will admit to being thankful she exists as a musician but also as a weird agent of chaos able to piss people off on the Left just as much as people on the Right. See also: Lena Dunham (who I have a soft spot for - perhaps because I think 'Girls' was good and much more self-aware than many people gave it credit for).
She's cute enough to keep her Manic Pixie Dream Girl status. And hasn't done anything irredeemable, like Be Wrong on gender.
I don't think I will ever be able to read anything written by Alice Munro again, and that is a tremendous loss for me because Munro was one of my favorite writers, both for her subject matter (which might be described as "the secret life of women") and for her lucid, lyrical, economic style.
Plus, I've always been kinda proud of my ability to separate the dancer from the dance, to enjoy the works of the artist while disapproving of the artist’s life. (That Adolph Hitler! Yeah, sure, he had his issues, but y'know, he really had a _way_ with architectural reproductions...)
But I'm done with Munro.
This episode in Munro's life has all the plot elements of a Munro short story, you know? Munro, as an omniscient narrator, was a pitiless judge; her characters may not suffer consequences in a traditional sense, but it's quite clear when you read one of her stories that her characters are never happy with the choices they've made. Munro never quite forgives them, either.
For Munro to suddenly metamorphose into the most flawed of her own characters is _staggeringly_ dissonant to me. It's kind of as though Munro wrote her own life into being. It's Stephen King levels of creepy & weird.
To choose the man who sexually abused your child over your child!!! Who _unequivocally_ sexually abused your child—because not infrequently, there’s a kind of grey area with sexual abuse; oftern, it’s not intentional as such, it’s more a kind of clueless over-reaching, an inability to express love without some kind of libidinous element. (See Sue Miller’s very excellent "The Good Mother" for one such example.) This is wrong, of course. But understandable and so ultimately redeemable.
But that man, Munro's husband, Andrea's stepfather, _admitted_ what he did. Thought of himself as a victim! (Right, asshole. Nine-year-olds have all the power & agency in our culture!). Good for you for deciphering Nabokov's dots into the same type of secret message that schizophrenics get when they refuse to step on cracks.)
How could Alice Munro value this monster? I mean, okay, okay, okay, we've all loved the wrong person from time to time; I could have cut her slack for that one if she had immediately separated from this jerk.
But she didn't.
And it doesn't really matter that she's dead. Her extraordinary writing talent is such that she seems to be sitting beside you murmuring softly into your ear when you read anything she wrote.
And I NEVER want to hear her voice again.
There's a tremendous gulf in perspectives between individual human beings. I for the life of me cannot understand this viewpoint.
A cursory examination of history reveals a number of individuals who were tremendously flawed as human beings but produced great art. Munro isn't unique in that perspective, and this perspective applied uniformly would mean crossing Caravaggio and Roman Polanski off the list of what you consume. That's not a constraint that I want to put on my life.
Like I said, in most contexts, I'm fine with separating the dancer from the dance. In this instance, I'm not.
Maybe if Alice Munro had directed "Chinatown"... 😀
For me, it's just an alien perspective. I don't understand the compulsion behind it. If you dig up an old statue buried in antiquity from a completely unknown sculptor do you suspend judgement on its artistic value because you have no idea if the artist liked to molest little children?
If it's beautiful, it's beautiful. It stands outside the fragile humanity of its creator.
Come, come. You're talking about beauty as though it's some state property of an object, whereas beauty is very subjective.
But be that as it may. I dithered at some length above that it is the _type_ of fiction Munro wrote that makes her particular betrayal proscriptive for me. If Munro wrote Regency romances, say, or science fiction, I could go on reading her without any problem.
If you want to see my reaction as just another example of the Heartbreak of Cancel Culture, I can't stop you. But it seems to me that it's something else..
I don't deny that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I'm just pointing out that the inputs that go into the subjective judgement of whether something is beautiful vary greatly from person to person and "For me, it's just an alien perspective".
And I'm not trying to brand this as some kind of cancel culture thing. If anything I suspect it's a difference between male and female perspectives.
Could be. My reaction wouldn't be the same if I hadn't been so deeply moved by her writing.
Wilhoit's Law. We excuse behaviors in people who are close to us that we don't in strangers.
Given how much her work meant to you, I hope that you can eventually reconcile yourself to loving her work but not her, but also accept that you don't get one without the other. Based on similar experiences I've had with writers, cannot imagine it will be easy but it's likely to be better than throwing away those parts of you shaped by her work.
Or as a literary critic said of Evelyn Waugh, after cataloguing just a handful of his deformities, `I would prefer to have [his writing] just as it is, and to appreciate that one cannot have the novels without the torments and evils of its author.'