This hit my right in the sentimentality about NYC and why I'm fond of us. You know what's funny about the stories of disaster response? They're not just recognizable, they're recognizable from an O Henry story from about the turn of the twentieth century -- I wonder if I can find the story I'm thinking of.
For the past month, every time I step out of my house, I've seen people I know. I have literally stopped picking my nose except behind closed doors.
Except when something really, really itches.
The Making Of A New Yorker. It's goofy early 20th C sentimentality, but it's recognizably the same story Smith is telling, or at least it looks that way to me.
"Overplus," from that story, is a hundred times better than "surfeit."
5: Overplus sounds like a word from 1984 (the novel, not the year).
I liked the writing and the embrace of people without pasts, or without dwelling on pasts.
That seems to be the real breakdown in suburbia--you're as distant from the details of your neighbor's lives as a city, but you're divided into cars and unable to spontaneously gather to spontaneously solve problems as the baby carriage, pole, and cans examples. A suburb brings enough mobility to breakdown the bonds of "you're Anna's sister's boy, right?" but only shows blank building faces, instead of the recognizable people to set your watches by.
On the whole I didn't really like living in New York, but I really did love this particular aspect of New York. People are really quick to help each other out, but with a minimum of fuss, and an efficiency of motion.
AIMHMHB, we (dad, mom, 4 kids, grandma) were in New York on a subway platform trying to be sure we were on the right train and my dad asked a guy. About four other people started yelling directions and arguing over which was the best train. It was both helpful and a bit frightening.
I thought about the rural world, from which my husband, Nick, hails, in which such incidents would involve long, interconnected, interpersonal conversations. ("Aren't you Carol's son--the one who went off to England?" "Where do you live, love? Are you local?") And there would be shared jokes and extended sympathy and maybe even Sit yourself down, dear and I'll put the kettle on. I see how that version would look preferable to many people.
Thinking about the rural side of things reminded me think of a lovely Gordon Bok song which he describes in this introduction as follows:
The spoken part is an actual pretty good remembrance of a radio conversation I heard between to fishermen. unfortunately I could only hear one boat talking but you could pretty much tell what was going on. . . . I wrote it down later that day after I heard it. . . . The reason I wrote it down was that I thought it was a marvel of diplomacy in a field where you don't often see a lot of diplomacy.
7: Helping people when their cars are stuck in snow is the one thing that works like that in suburbia. Or at least in my low-density residential neighborhood in a city.
I liked the writing and the embrace of people without pasts, or without dwelling on pasts.
That reminds, I find this statistic (from wikipedia) remarkable.
By 2013, the population of foreign-born individuals living in New York City had increased to 3.07 million, and as a percentage of total population, was the highest it had been in the past 100 years.
Zadie Smith is one of those people. That number speaks not only to the diversity of the city, but also the amount of transformation that people in NYC have experienced; it is not a city of people staying put (with LB as an obvious example to the contrary).
More or less one percent of people in America are foreign born New Yorkers. Wow.
The percentage of Nebraska-born Pittsburgers is probably lower.
The percentage of Americans who are residents of Boyd County is approximately 6.15 * 10^-4.
Of course, the percentage of Boyd County residents among the people who taught me P.E. was about 25%.
I liked here Brexit diary:
The night before I left for Northern Ireland, I had dinner with old friends, North London intellectuals, in fact exactly the kind of people the Labour MP Andy Burnham made symbolic reference to when he claimed that the Labour Party had lost ground to UKIP because it was "too much Hampstead and not enough Hull," although of course, in reality, we were all long ago priced out of Hampstead by the bankers and the Russian oligarchs. We were considering Brexit. Probably every dinner table in North London was doing the same. But it turned out we couldn't have been considering it very well because not one of us, not for a moment, believed it could possibly happen. It was so obviously wrong, and we were so obviously right--how could it?
After settling this question, we all moved on to bemoaning the strange tendency of the younger lefty generation to censor or silence speech or opinions they consider in some way wrong: no-platforming, safe spaces, and the rest of it. We were all right about that, too. But then, from the corner, on a sofa, the cleverest among us, who was at that moment feeding a new baby, waited till we'd all stopped bloviating and added: "Well, they got that habit from us. We always wanted to be seen to be right. To be on the right side of an issue. More so even than doing anything. Being right was always the most important thing."
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/08/18/fences-brexit-diary/
I'm assuming that at an English dinner party having a baby latched to your nipple is the same as having the conch in Lord of the Flies.
I definitely feel more romantic about NYC than other big cities.
That seems to be the real breakdown in suburbia--you're as distant from the details of your neighbor's lives as a city, but you're divided into cars and unable to spontaneously gather to spontaneously solve problems as the baby carriage, pole, and cans examples. A suburb brings enough mobility to breakdown the bonds of "you're Anna's sister's boy, right?" but only shows blank building faces, instead of the recognizable people to set your watches by.
There's not really any reason to know your neighbor in the city either, unless a disaster occurs. I've lived in apartments or townhouses since 2003 and never met anybody who lived in the same building. Despite intensely wishing I knew them there is never any specific reason to talk on a given day or anything to talk about except "Hi, I'm me. Who are you?". It's very sad.
"Hi, I'm me. Who are you?".
"What a coincidence! I'm me too! We should be friends!"
21: There are definitely different building cultures. My building is super chatty, but there are people in their sixties who were born in the building and still live there, and a whole bunch of outgoing weirdos.
I'M NOBODY? WHO ARE YOU? ARE YOU NOBODY TOO?
How did they get the weirdos to move?
Well, Tim left of his own accord.
Even if it were a hatchback, I have too much stuff for that.
Given the number of library/library-adjacent folk around here I was looking for an opportunity to recommend Wiseman's Ex Libris (documentary about the New York Public Library). This thread seems appropriate; for this non-native formerly frequent visitor what struck me most was the NYCness of it (which he visually emphasized).
3 hours 19 minutes long and probably in need of some tighter edits but definitely recommended*. Anthony Lane's review in the NYer,
*Trigger warning: it starts with Richard Dawkins giving a talk but he does not appear AGAIN. (Also Elvis Costello, Patti Smith, and Te-Nehisi Coates among others).
7: I liked the writing and the embrace of people without pasts, or without dwelling on pasts.
10: ("Aren't you Carol's son--the one who went off to England?" "Where do you live, love? Are you local?")
One of my observations I had of Houston (which was the first big city I spent appreciable time in) was the number of folks I knew there who had grown up in smallish Southern towns* who were absolutely thrilled with the relative anonymity of Houston.
*Dubach, Lousiana is one I remembered in particular.
Small town rootedness is a pain in the ass. When I had a car accident, the next night I went to the movie and had to put up with the owner saying "Run into anybody you know lately?" Because I also knew the person I crashed into.
"It sounds wonderful. Just strangers beside you. You don't know them. You don't hate them. You don't have to sit across the table and smile at him and that daughter of his every morning of your life."
On the veldt, I sure bet they had that soul-sucking smalltown everyone up in your business feel.
My neighborhood in DC was a small town, in both good and bad ways. AISIHMHB, I knew this about it, but was still unnerved the time that an overnight guest left around noon and within 10 minutes I had text messages from two different neighbor/friends wanting to know what was going on. (One of them was Armsmasher! He was so subtle. "Morning, C! Have fun last night? Anything you want to tell me about?")
One of the things I like most about living where I do now is that it's definitely _London_. It's less suburban than, say, where my Mum is from (further west as it shades into Middlesex, as was). But, people are pretty connected. I live in an apartment building, and there are four flats on this side of the building, on our floor.
One family (Turkish single dad), we've gone on a trip to a nature reserve with his kids, other family (Nigeria and Spanish) have a lot of xelA's hand-me-downs for their son, and the third is a bunch of young Polish guys who xelA talks to when they are working on their motorbikes. Literally none of us are from London, and yet, we all are.
I hated living in London for years, or at least I didn't love it, but having a child and actually working right in the centre of the city (rather than commuting west to Oxford) has completely flipped a lot of what I used to feel.
29 We're currently looking into screening it here. I worked at the NYPL (the 42nd street main building) and I'll be introducing the film if we do.
I really liked Nick Pinkerton's and Matt Zoller Seitz's reviews.
I had a great aunt from Dayton who worked in the 42nd street building in the 30s, 40s & 50s. By the time I met her she was retired back in Dayton. She was a frighteningly* proper person.
*At least to us kids. Butter knives and and an attempt at refined manners when she was visiting.
Made the NYPL kind of a mythical place for us in our librarian-oriented family.
37 Cool. There's still all the old pneumatic tubes in the cast iron stacks that they used to send call slips from the reference desk to the library pages laboring away in there. The people's own research library where anyone can walk in and see just about anything. I miss it terribly.
In another piece, Smith quotes her husband (I assume from a poem) saying "time is how we spend our love," which is something I've used as a mantra often and doesn't necessarily seem disconnected from this question. I like being in a fairly connected urban place where I'm still free enough to be who I am. And someday the children will successfully head out into the world and I can be blissfully alone.
38 It's a mythical place to me and I worked there. It's definitely got a kind of magic to it.
39. I think I mentioned that because I immediately pictured your frighteningly proper great aunt filling out such a call slip, popping it into the canister and sending it on its way into the stacks.
They almost destroyed the place with the Central Library Plan about 5-6 years ago. Thank god that failed.
It's "a series of tubes."
40- I like "time is how we spend our love." It reminds me of the Annie Dillard one "How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives" which I think about pretty often.
Sleeping, reading, trying to finish something so I can sleep or read.
I don't want to risk ruining the post-industrial aesthetic the city has tried so hard to cultivate.
Even though I don't make anything, sometimes I might conceptualize a thing. Especially if I've eaten raisins recently.
That shouldn't happen. Just check the expiry date.
It was both helpful and a bit frightening.
But how did you know who, if anybody, was right?
re: 40
Whenever I come across her husband's poems, I like them, but I didn't enjoy his first novel much, at all:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Laird#Utterly_Monkey
49: The traditional Ad Hoc Directional Advice Collective usually manages to successfully achieve consensus -- I don't think I've ever seen a disagreement about the best course of action that didn't resolve itself by the end of the shouting.
I don't recall the process, but we got to where we wanted without trouble.
Of course, New York was dangerous in those days, so we all were killed when we got there.
||
OT, it seems odd and slightly suspicious to me that Yglesias and Caitlin Flanagan have just written very similar pieces (and neither of them feels quite right to me. I don't know that I disagree, but I'm not sure they're framing the argument correctly).
|>
54: I don't think suspicious - it's something big enough in memories of people of this age for the current discussions to easily dredge it up again. It came on my radar from this Chris Hayes tweet et seq., which predates both articles you link by a few days.
it's something big enough in memories of people of this age for the current discussions to easily dredge it up again
Oh no, Bill Clinton's penis is our generation's Vietnam :(
Long, hard, and the full details were exposed by a Pentagon employee acting illegally?
I don't think suspicious
I didn't mean "suspicious" in the sense of "collusions" just that "I am slightly skeptical of each of these articles, taken independently, and seeing them simultaneously makes me more skeptical of both of them." It doesn't help that I saw that Caitlan Flanagan first, so I already had some skepticism when I read Yglesias' take.
I was talking about this elsewhere. I don't feel particularly good about how I reacted to the allegations about Clinton at the time, but my reactions were really heavily mediated by the fact that there had been so many insane lies told about him generally, and Flanagan really doesn't account for that. (Yglesias restricts himself to talking about the Lewinsky thing, which was an admitted fact, so not the same issue.)
I would have treated the Jones, and Willey, and Broaddrick allegations much more seriously at the time if they hadn't been aimed at a target who was also accused of being a drug-smuggler and a murderer.
I don't feel very bad for how I reacted then, because I wasn't very invested in Bill Clinton. I do feel a little bad for 57. In my defense, I'll never get a straight line that lets me make that joke again.
I don't feel particularly good about how I reacted to the allegations about Clinton at the time, but my reactions were really heavily mediated by the fact that there had been so many insane lies told about him generally
That's essentially my feeling. I think it's obvious that the ground has shifted such that if the allegations against Clinton were made now they would be handled differently, and recognizing that makes it clear that they were not handled well at the time.
On the other hand, the point at which I think those articles are (at least potentially) engaging in historical revisionism are the claims that Democrats and feminists supporting Clinton derailed change.
Flanagan:
Believing women about assault--even if they lack the means to prove their accounts--as well as understanding that female employees don't constitute part of a male boss's benefits package, were the galvanizing consequences of Anita Hill's historic allegations against Clarence Thomas, in 1991. ...
But then something that no one could have predicted happened. It was a pre-Twitter, pre-internet, highly analog version of #MeToo. To the surprise of millions of men, the nation turned out to be full of women--of all political stripes and socioeconomic backgrounds--who'd had to put up with Hell at work. ....
For that reason, the response to those dramatic hearings constituted one of the great truly feminist events of the modern era. Even though Thomas successfully, and perhaps rightly, survived Hill's accusations, something in the country had changed about women and work and the range of things men could do to them there.
But then Bubba came along and blew up the tracks.
Yglesias
The United States, and perhaps the broader English-speaking world, is currently undergoing a much-needed accountability moment in which each wave of stories emboldens more people to come forward and more institutions to rethink their practices. Looking back, the 1998 revelation that the president of the United States carried on an affair with an intern could have been that moment.
It was far from the most egregious case of workplace sexual misconduct in American history. But it was unusually high-profile, the facts were not in dispute, the perpetrator had a lot of nominal feminist ideological commitments, and political leaders who shared those commitments had the power to force him from office. Had he resigned in shame, we all might have made a collective cultural and political decision that a person caught leveraging power over women in inappropriate ways ought to be fired. Instead, we lost nearly two decades.
That feels like shifting the blame, like trying to offload some of the discomfort of the current moment onto a historical one. Particularly since we don't know how much anything will change now, the articles feel a bit like projection -- "gosh think of how much better we would all be now if everybody had done this work back then." Rather than an actual reckoning with the past.
61.last is really good. And I think probably applies to a lot of progressive/liberal/left thought in the age of Trump: not just "Bernie woulda won", but "the public option woulda prevented this" and "the DNC was broken" and a lot of other things. It's not that they're false, exactly, but that they assume the can opener: why weren't (to take the middle example) red state Senators (and fucking Lieberman) in 2009 5 points to the left of the median voter in 2017?
Had we started the journey sooner, we'd be farther along. That is always a true statement, but rarely a useful one.
I would have treated the Jones, and Willey, and Broaddrick allegations much more seriously at the time if they hadn't been aimed at a target who was also accused of being a drug-smuggler and a murderer.
Yeah, the smoke=fire heuristic had been completely blown up by Clinton's enemies, and at least some of the sexual assault charges were extremely hinky*, such that you couldn't even claim a clear pattern there. And the Flowers thing was, in some weird way, vindicating: here was a clear case of consensual, non-coercive bad behavior that genuinely shouldn't have been disqualifying. Contrast that with Moore, where all of the accusations follow the same troubling pattern, and even his marriage is uncomfortably similar.
*last time I looked at this, I think Broaddrick was the only case that looked to me more than 50% likely, but I do think it's quite likely.
57, 63 I don't know about that. About 5 inches, no blemishes or growths but canted at an unusual angle.
61.last: like trying to offload some of the discomfort of the current moment onto a historical one
Particularly evident in this MY tweet from last week (11/9, so a day before Hayes's tweet linked in 55).
I wonder how much healthier a place we'd be in as a society today if Bill Clinton had resigned in shame back in 1998.
For me, words fail for the multiple inanities of that point of view. (Granted he is probably assuming a subsequent Gore* victory in 2000 in that counterfactual, but still.)
I think a similar point to the following has been made here before: I enjoy following MY on Twitter as he is quite good at pithy puncturing's of GOP hot air balloons, but I find that his more "original/substantive" stuff generally ranges from OK to very poor. And his aggressive badgering hatred of Chelsea Clinton is dreadful (something he has in common with Josh Barro--the Legacy Hire Boys).
*You know, boring climate change Gore, not sleazy massage abuse Gore.
66.5(?) Yes, MY on twitter is actually for the most part very good. I find this fairly disorienting, though not as much as the Frums of the twitterverse.
Had we started the journey sooner, we'd be farther along. That is always a true statement, but rarely a useful one.
That's a good way of putting it. Done well there's value in looking back and saying, "here's a past case in which things could easily have gone differently." But done badly it's a way of asking, "are we there yet?"
sleazy massage abuse Gore.
Wait, what now?
There are a lot of twists to the Broaddrick saga, but yes it certainly would have been taken differently today. And probably should have been, but once again per LB it happened within a veritable shitstorm of GOP/conservative lies and innuendo.
I will note that in the present moment she is definitely not a supportive ally of other women coming forward (tweet from Oct. 12th of this year):
And yes to 66.5. He was one of the other main reasons I finally signed up.
69: This. Incident was 2006 in Portland, Oregon. National Enquirer reported two other accusations later, but I no nothing really about those.
I go grocery shopping enough to know the Enquirer is totally in the tank for Trump.
The flaw--and maybe it's raised in the articles--in the Flanagan/MY premise is that several GOP House leaders were, in fact, forced to resign over sexual improprieties at that time, and nothing came of it (other than the elevation of a guy who had done much worse). I really, really doubt that a forced resignation of Clinton in '98 would have led to any real advances in the treatment of sexual harassment, for a variety of reasons. A really big one is simply that, as long as news was restricted to gate-kept publications, stories like the ones now bringing down man after man would have remained just as buried as ever. I'm 100% convinced that it's social media that's allowed this stuff to fan into a flame (even though, yes, Weinstein was brought down by major publications, and Moore by WaPo*).
Furthermore, while in theory a big punishment for a minor infraction** could send a strong message, I think in practice it would have set such a high standard that TPTB would have considered it unenforceable, and it would have ended up exactly what it looked like at the time: a singular punishment created by singular circumstances, not a model for the future.
*not that he's down yet, but you know what I mean
**not to relitigate Lewinsky, but IMO it's infantilizing to say that it was impossible for her to consent, and so I bucket what happened as morally dubious and professionally unacceptable, but fairly clearly on this side of coercion/assault. Indeed, had it not been, Starr would have brought criminal charges.
I was always bothered that Clinton did, in fact, perjure himself. Yes, it was due to the machinations of his political enemies as part of bullshit lawsuit that I would agree a sitting President should not have to deal with.
But, the line was crossed and he plainly broke the law in a way that everyone could see. At that point, it became a question of "does the laws apply equally to the President as anyone else or not?" That the answer being "not", I think, set up a really shitty precedent that has been very much abused by subsequent Presidents.
76: I get that. OTOH, if he had gone down it would have set a precedent for bullshit machinations overthrowing a duly elected president. So the lesson I think is that one can't have rule of law in a democracy without a very large critical mass of good actors. For short, fuck Republicans.
But, the line was crossed and he plainly broke the law in a way that everyone could see. At that point, it became a question of "does the laws apply equally to the President as anyone else or not?" That the answer being "not", I think, set up a really shitty precedent that has been very much abused by subsequent Presidents.
I haven't thought much about what, in retrospect, would have been the best outcome for the situation. But are you arguing that it would have been for Clinton to have been convicted of perjury and faced criminal penalties? I think that's a minority position.
I think NickS has it in 61.last. We kind of sucked in our response to Clinton, but we sucked in our response to a lot of stuff. We sucked at lots of stuff on race and gender in the 90s. We learn; we improve.
74.last, I disagree. Getting blowjobs from an intern is generally considered coercive, isn't it? I mean, it would be something one might be fired for now. I don't want to relitigate it either, but I think it is safe to say it was coercive because of the power differential and not a situation where she would be considered able to freely consent.
Also, I'd have to look things up to remember all this well enough to argue it, but my recollection is that it was far from clear that it would have been reasonable to convict him of perjury. First, there's the literal falsehood issue (which is pettifogging quibbling, sure, but for a criminal conviction that matters), and then it's got to be material to the proceeding in which the question was asked, and it really, really wasn't.
If it bothers you that someone who wasn't the president would have gone to jail for what Clinton did, and he got special treatment, I think you can feel better -- that wouldn't have been a perjury conviction for anyone.
77 is why this "he should have resigned" take is bullshit woke virtue signalling. Fuck all these people. Relatedly, there's no ordinary language, non-seminar sense in which Clinton/Lewinsky was coersive. She had to convince him to orgasm, for crying out loud. It was stupid and irresponsible and obviously took advantage of the dazzle of being president, but she was 22 and totally into it.
79.2 I don't agree, but can't find a way to say so that isn't relitigating, which I don't want to do either.
80 is correct, and being fined and disbarred suspended was sufficient punishment, imo.
I'm not going to read the links, but note that Clarence Thomas was confirmed.
how I long to grow up to be the frighteningly proper aunt, but alas no nieces it nephews for me.
I remember really pissing off someone by maintaining it was total bullshit to expect Lewinsky to perjure herself.
God I hate the phrase "virtue signaling". Although ogged's usage in 82 at least doesn't seem to be the kind of zombie-like repetition you see the phrase get in the horror show of twitter replies to popular tweets.
86 Would it be virtue signalling to say enthusiastically seconded?
79, 82, 83: Yeah, I really want to find a conceptual category other than coercion for what Clinton did wrong with regard to Lewinsky. He behaved wrongfully in a whole lot of ways, including toward her -- the fact that from everything she's ever said about the situation, she was a completely voluntary participant, and apparently initiated the whole thing, doesn't let him off the hook for having exploited her and having both treated her badly himself and been complicit in others treating her badly in the aftermath. He acted very wrongly. But I still can't look at how she's described the contacts they had and think that describing what he did wrong as coercing her into sex makes sense at all.
I agree with LB on this. It was the office, not the man. Though Clinton was obviously possessed of astonishing sexual magnetism.
88
I really want to find a conceptual category other than coercion for what Clinton did wrong with regard to Lewinsky.
Ludicrously unprofessional, maybe? Misuse of his office? For you and me, professionalism might just be a concern because of the impact it has on our resumes, but for elected officials there's some sort of public trust issue. It's not like his philandering was the first or worst, but on the other hand whataboutism is a bad excuse.
|| NMM to Lil Peep. I only heard of him minutes ago, but it feels like I lost a little brother I never knew I had. ||
