Rants and reactions to contemporary politics, art and culture.
Friday, October 24, 2014
“Here Comes the Judge"
photo of Somerset Maugham by Carl Van Vechten
In an Op-Ed piece entitled
“The Good Order,” (NYT, 9/25/14), David Brooks bridges the gap between
international and individual order, in comparing the discipline of creation to
that of a superpower’s obligation to keep chaos at bay. Brooks’s primary
examples are writers like John Cheever, Maya Angelou, Anthony Trollope and Somerset Maugham who created rigid routines or schedules and he quotes W. H. Auden to the effect that “A modern
stoic knows that the surest way to discipline passion is to discipline time:
decide what you want or ought to do during the day, then always do it at
exactly the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble.” This
idea of the artist is a far cry from the ethos many baby boomers grew up with, influenced as they were by the
idea of creative people as drop outs and rebels against rigidity and routine. Their role models were the abstract expressionists
of the 50’s or rock stars like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix whose lives were
like supernovas which blazed forth a blinding light just as they courted oblivion. The kind of writers and artists that Brooks is writing about seem
more like businessmen. Brooks remarks, “They think like artists, but work like accountants.” That statement recalls Flaubert’s famous quote that one should, “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work." How are these two conflicting views translatable
on the world stage? Brooks uses the occasion of his piece to praise President
Obama’s speech at the U.N. which he says, “put tough minded realism at the
service of a high calling.” But is discipline in the political sphere really
translatable into inspiration? Artists are attempting to find something through
the maintenance of a practice but what is a politician or leader trying to
find? The answer is usually a series of intelligent decisions that lead his
country out of a quagmire. “Uh-oh, Here Come the Judge, Here Come the Judge/Everybody know That he is the judge," Pigmeat Markham once intoned. A political
leader has no choice but to work in a consistent and disciplined way, but it’s
no guarantee that his or her actions will lead to the kind of vision that
characterizes the work of the artistic geniuses who Brooks cites.
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Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). His collection of parables, The Kafka Studies Department with illustrations by Hallie Cohen will appear in
September.
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