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Tag Archives: John Milton

A Newspaper Is A Business Out To Make Money

05 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Journalism, Literature, Politics

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Apology for Smectymnuus, cynicism, Edward S. Herman, free press, Government, Harlan Potter, John Milton, John Steinbeck, John Updike, Manufacturing Consent, Mark Twain, mass media, media, news, newspaper, Noam Chomsky, NSA, Philip Marlowe, Philip Roth, politics, press, Raymond Chandler, Somerset Maugham, The Long Goodbye

Raymond Chandler by Ida Kar, vintage bromide print, early 1950s

“‘We live in what is called a democracy, rule by the majority of the people. A fine ideal if it could be made to work. The people elect, but the party machines nominate, and the party machines to be effective must spend a great deal of money. Somebody has to give it to them, and that somebody, whether it be an individual, a financial group, a trade union or what have you, expects some consideration in return. What I and people of my kind expect is to be allowed to live our lives in decent privacy. I own newspapers, but I don’t like them. I regard them as a constant menace to whatever privacy we have left. Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honorable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandal, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuendo, and the political and financial uses of propaganda. A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on its circulation and you know what the circulation depends on.’…

‘There’s a peculiar thing about money,’ he went on. ‘In large quantities it tends to have a life of its own, even a conscience of its own. The power of money becomes very difficult to control. Man has always been a venal animal. The growth of populations, the huge costs of wars, the incessant pressure of confiscatory taxation — all these things make him more and more venal. The average man is tired and scared, and a tired, scared man can’t afford ideals. He has to buy food for his family.

In our time we have seen a shocking decline in both public and private morals. You can’t expect quality from people whose lives are a subjection to a lack of quality. You can’t have quality with mass production. You don’t want it because it lasts too long. So you substitute styling, which is a commercial swindle intended to produce artificial obsolescence. Mass production couldn’t sell its goods next year unless it made what it sold this year look unfashionable a year from now. We have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. But in the lovely white kitchen the average American housewife can’t produce a meal fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the cosmetic industry. We make the finest packages in the world, Mr. Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk.”

__________

A monologue from the multimillionaire Harlan Potter, speaking to detective Philip Marlowe in chapter 32 of Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel The Long Goodbye.

Like many of the best novelists, Chandler can effortlessly slip canny and credible observations like this into the mouths of characters who inhabit an otherwise plot-driven story. John Updike, Philip Roth, Somerset Maugham, and John Steinbeck are some of the other modern novelists who, at least according to the top of my head, possess this same subtle gift.

I would, however, suggest a small addition to the above monologue. After the hinge sentence, “A newspaper is a business out to make money off of advertising revenue,” there should be a declarative phrase: “Nothing more, nothing less.” The reason: I think there’s a crucial corollary to the fact that a free press within a market economy will run on advertising revenue (and to a lesser degree, private donations or public subsidies). If there is consumer demand for news which is superficial, trivial, and tawdry, then that is the content which will generate the most advertising revenue — and will therefore be supplied. If enough consumers demand exhaustive coverage of the new NSA infrastructure in Cyprus — instead of, say, Ms. Cyrus —  then the former will quickly flood the airwaves as the latter recedes. In this sense, the Harlan Potters (and Rupert Murdochs and Ted Turners) of the world are not completely deserving of our condemnation, or at least may not be the first to blame for our ignorance and delusion en masse. No, what might first deserve indictment are the skewed economic incentives themselves, the educational system and cultural institutions which make us unreceptive to sober journalism. Perhaps, most fundamentally, the responsible party is the one hardest to hold accountable — ourselves.

One beef I have with the thesis of Noam Chomsky’s and Edward Herman’s famous 1988 analysis of the American mass media, Manufacturing Consent, is that it incriminates elites for the sensationalism and superficiality of most U.S. journalism and network news. Of course these issues have been reconfigured by the advent of the internet, but according to my take, a different premise — that I the consumer is ultimately driving what passes as “content” — is what obtains. If we crave insubstantial and easy-to-digest news coverage, then, like junk food, that’s what we’ll be served. Milton famously declared that, “they who have put out the people’s eyes, reproach them of their blindness”; in our case, if we’ve lost the ability to see, we may have no one to blame but ourselves.

As Twain would later observe, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.” Surely there is enough blame to go around — but who’s most fundamentally at fault?

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Einstein, Newton, Sagan: Science As Child’s Play

31 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Science

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

A Brief History of Time, Albert Einstein, biology, Carl Sagan, chemistry, Childhood, Children, cosmology, curiosity, Einstein, Einstein and Religion, Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology., Faith, Isaac Newton, John Milton, Max Jammer, Memoirs of Isaac Newton, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Paradise Regained, physics, religion, science, scientific method, Sir David Brewster, Stephen Hawking

Albert Einstein

“We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza’s pantheism, but admire even more his contribution to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and body as one, and not two separate things.”

Albert Einstein, in a quotation pulled from the first chapter of Max Jammer’s excellent Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology.*

“The modesty of Sir Isaac Newton… arose from the depth and extent of his knowledge, which showed him what a small portion of nature he had been able to examine… a short time before his death he uttered this memorable sentiment:

‘I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.'”

Isaac Newton, as quoted by Sir David Brewster in volume II of his Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton.**

“We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world… Except for children (who don’t know enough not to ask the important questions), few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is; where the cosmos came from, or whether it was always here; if time will one day flow backward and effects precede causes; or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know.”

Carl Sagan, writing in the introduction to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.

__________

Neil deGrasse Tyson: I’m often asked by parents what advice can I give them to help get kids interested in science? And I have only one bit of advice: get out of their way. Kids are born curious. Period. I don’t care about your economic background. I don’t care what town you’re born in, what city, what country. If you’re a child, you are curious about your environment. You’re overturning rocks. You’re plucking leaves off of trees and petals off of flowers, looking inside, and you’re doing things that create disorder in the lives of the adults around you.  

And so then so what do adults do? They say, “Don’t pluck the petals off the flowers. I just spent money on that. Don’t play with the egg. It might break. Don’t….”  Everything is a don’t. We spend the first year teaching them to walk and talk and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down.

So you get out of their way. And you know what you do? You put things in their midst that help them explore. Help ‘em explore. Why don’t you get a pair of binoculars, just leave it there one day? Watch ‘em pick it up. And watch ‘em look around. They’ll do all kinds of things with it.

For me at age 11, I had a pair of binoculars and looked up to the moon, and the moon wasn’t just bigger, it was better. There were mountains and valleys and craters and shadows. And it came alive.”

* I’ve hosted the PDF of the first chapter of Jammer’s book. For some context, however, the quote cited above occurs on page 48. Jammer follows it with the following clarification of Einstein’s theology:

“…Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein of the Institutional Synagogue in New York cabled Einstein, ‘Do you believe in God? Stop. Prepaid reply fifty words.’ Einstein replied, ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.’ Rabbi Goldstein commented that this reply

‘very clearly disproves . . . the charge of atheism made against Einstein. In fact, quite the reverse is true. Spinoza, who is called “the God-intoxicated man” and who saw God manifest in all of nature, certainly could not be called an atheist. . . . Einstein’s theory, if carried out to its logical conclusions would bring mankind a scientific formula for monotheism. He does away with all thought of dualism or pluralism. There can be no room for any aspect of polytheism.'”

** Could Newton have possibly read John Milton’s Paradise Regained, which was published in 1671, when the former would have been twenty-nine?

In Book Four of the poem, Lines 327 to 330 read:

Deep verst in books and shallow in himself,
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys,
And trifles for choice matters, worth a spunge;
As Children gathering pebbles on the shore.

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Hangover Reading

25 Saturday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Humor, Literature

≈ Comments Off on Hangover Reading

Tags

A.E. Housman, Alcohol, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Anthony Powell, C. S. Forester, Dick Francis, drinking, Eric Ambler, Evelyn Waugh, Everyday Drinking, G.K. Chesterton, Gavin Lyall, Geoffrey Household, hangover, Ian Fleming, John Milton, Kingsley Amis, liquor, literature, P.G. Wodehouse, Peter De Vries, poetry, reading, wine

Kingsley Amis

“Begin with verse, if you have any taste for it. Any really gloomy stuff that you admire will do. My own choice would tend to include the final scene of Paradise Lost, Book XII, lines 606 to the end, with what is probably the most poignant moment in all our literature coming at lines 624–6. The trouble here, though, is that today of all days you do not want to be reminded of how inferior you are to the man next door, let alone to a chap like Milton. Safer to pick somebody less horribly great. I would plump for the poems of A. E. Housman and/or R. S. Thomas, not that they are in the least interchangeable. Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum is good, too, if a little long for the purpose.

Switch to prose with the same principles of selection. I suggest Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It is not gloomy exactly, but its picture of life in a Russian labour camp will do you the important service of suggesting that there are plenty of people about who have a bloody sight more to put up with than you (or I) have or ever will have, and who put up with it, if not cheerfully, at any rate in no mood of self-pity.

Turn now to stuff that suggests there may be some point to living after all. Battle poems come in rather well here: Macaulay’s Horatius, for instance. Or, should you feel that this selection is getting a bit British (for the Roman virtues Macaulay celebrates have very much that sort of flavour), try Chesterton’s Lepanto. The naval victory in 1571 of the forces of the Papal League over the Turks and their allies was accomplished without the assistance of a single Anglo-Saxon (or Protestant). Try not to mind the way Chesterton makes some play with the fact that this was a victory of Christians over Moslems.

By this time you could well be finding it conceivable that you might smile again some day. However, defer funny stuff for the moment. Try a good thriller or action story, which will start to wean you from self-observation and the darker emotions: Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler, Gavin Lyall, Dick Francis, Geoffrey Household, C. S. Forester (perhaps the most useful of the lot). Turn to comedy only after that; but it must be white—i.e. not black—comedy: P. G. Wodehouse, Stephen Leacock, Captain Marryat, Anthony Powell (not Evelyn Waugh), Peter De Vries (not The Blood of the Lamb, which, though very funny, has its real place in the tearful category, and a distinguished one). I am not suggesting that these writers are comparable in other ways than that they make unwillingness to laugh seem a little pompous and absurd.”

__________

Another section from Kingsley Amis’s Everyday Drinking, this one “Hangover Reading”.

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When I Consider How My Light Is Spent

09 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

John Milton, Matthew, On His Blindness, the Bible, The Parable of the Talents, When I Consider How My Light Is Spent

John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg’d with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide,
‘Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?’
I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: ‘God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best, His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’re Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.’

__________

“On His Blindness” by John Milton.

In 1652, just a few days shy of his forty-fourth birthday, John Milton’s world went black. Struck with glaucoma, and lacking a cure, the great writer experienced the gradual loss of his vision — the onset of optic nerve pressure, the steady contraction of his field of view, the dimming of his sight, and the final eclipse of darkness that left him permanently blind. “That one talent,” Milton lamented, “lodg’d with me useless.”

“On His Blindness” is one of the most celebrated poems in English. The work, which was written — or rather dictated — by Milton in 1655, is a meditation on what God demands of men, blind or seeing. Milton begins with a simple premise: When I consider how my light is spent. In this, the poem is a work of epistemic philosophy, very logical in its force, for it posits a simple fact and then moves to deduce others from it.

But the brilliance of Milton is not merely a matter of his logic. “Spent” here also establishes an extended metaphor. Milton is overlaying the Biblical “Parable of the Talents” onto his own struggle to cope with the desire to work in the face of debilitating blindness. Thus “talent” in the third line is a double-entendre — it refers to the talent of sight as well as the talents, which are units of monetary measure, in the New Testament allegory. Those who have read Matthew 25 will know the significance of talents in the parable, for they are the treasures left by a master to his three servants as he leaves for an extended period. The master entrusts them with this bounty so that they may use their talents for good while he is gone. However, upon his return, the master finds that only the first two servants have turned their talents into a profit. The third servant merely hid his treasure, burying it in the ground.

Milton regards himself as that third servant. His talent — death’s to hide — has been spent.

The parable of the talents also provides the origin of what many Christians view as the salutary pronouncement which will be uttered upon their entrance to heaven. “Well done, good and faithful servant,” says the master to the first two men, “You have been faithful over a few things, I will set you over many things. Enter into the joy of your lord.” (Matthew 25:23) Hence, the word “account” is also a double-entendre, which applies to both sides of the extended metaphor. The account given by each of the servants, which describes how he used his treasure, mirrors Milton’s “true account”: the justification he must offer for what he has done with his allotted talents and time on earth.

Yet from this legalistic view of a vengeful Maker, Milton asks, ‘Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?’ The answer he finds is ultimately freeing. ‘God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts (the talents God bestows in us)’.

They also serve who only stand and wait.

Milton died on this day, 338 years ago.

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When We Say That We Love a Writer’s Work

20 Thursday Sep 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Charles Dickens, Don Delillo, Franz Kafka, George Eliot, Harper Lee, Homer, James Joyce, Jane Austen, John Milton, Marcel Proust, Martin Amis, Shakespeare

Martin and the Pinball Machine“When we say that we love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less. The vast presence of Joyce relies pretty well entirely on ‘Ulysses,’ with a little help from ‘Dubliners.’ You could jettison Kafka’s three attempts at full-length fiction (unfinished by him, and unfinished by us) without muffling the impact of his seismic originality. George Eliot gave us one readable book, which turned out to be the central Anglophone novel. Every page of Dickens contains a paragraph to warm to and a paragraph to veer back from. Coleridge wrote a total of two major poems (and collaborated on a third). Milton consists of ‘Paradise Lost.’ Even my favorite writer, William Shakespeare, who usually eludes all mortal limitations, succumbs to this law. Run your eye down the contents page and feel the slackness of your urge to reread the comedies (‘As You Like It’ is not as we like it); and who would voluntarily curl up with ‘King John’ or ‘Henry VI, Part III’?

Proustians will claim that ‘In Search of Lost Time’ is unimprovable throughout, despite all the agonizing longueurs. And Janeites will never admit that three of the six novels are comparative weaklings (I mean ‘Sense and Sensibility,’ ‘Mansfield Park,’ and ‘Persuasion’). Perhaps the only true exceptions to the fifty-fifty model are Homer and Harper Lee. Our subject, here, is literary evaluation, so of course everything I say is mere opinion, unverifiable and also unfalsifiable, which makes the ground shakier still. But I stubbornly suspect that only the cultist, or the academic, is capable of swallowing an author whole. Writers are peculiar, readers are particular: it is just the way we are. One helplessly reaches for Kant’s dictum about the crooked timber of humanity, or for John Updike’s suggestion to the effect that we are all of us ‘mixed blessings.’ Unlike the heroes and heroines of ‘Northanger Abbey,’ ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ and ‘Emma,’ readers and writers are not expressly designed to be perfect for each other.”

__________

Martin Amis’s brilliantly clever introduction to his review of Don DeLillo in The New Yorker.

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