Can we please stop saying that Trudeau needs to hit back?

In this morning's Globe, Lawrence Martin worries that Justin Trudeau's decision to "turn the other cheek" to CPC attack ads dooms him to follow in the footsteps of Dion and Ignatieff. It's a line of argument I've encountered often since JT's "crowning" (as we are calling it, apparently) as LPC leader, and it's a bloody disgrace to lines of argument everywhere. First of all, do we have any evidence that attack ads were determinative in the last elections? I admit I have not done exhaustive research, but it's certainly not a contention that's attained the status of orthodoxy. Even if attack ads were damning for Dion and Ignatieff, it was probably because both candidates had a lot of vulnerabilities. Both men would have made competent (I think excellent) PMs, but neither was a particularly good politician. Attack ads just reminded Canadians that Dion was a scholarly Parisian mouse and Ignatieff was a bookish Imperial Russian count, if a slightly rustic, folksy one. Trudeau has been repeatedly compared to Caesar, but maybe Caesar's what we need, as our recent repeated attempts to get Claudius, the reluctant academic emperor, elected demonstrate. Whatever his shortcomings, JT is popular and charismatic, and Harper's attacks come off less as bullying and more as spite. For better or worse, Harper's the weird kid who never takes off his headphones and Trudeau's on the swim team. No clever dis formulated in the AV room after hours is going to change that.

Trite Questions from Arts & Letters Daily

Arts & Letters Daily is one of my favourite places on the internet to feel smart. It's an aggregator of fairly intelligent essays, articles, book reviews and things like that —  a way to waste time on the internet without really feeling like you are wasting time.

Each link on A&L is accompanied by a tantalizing blurb which attempts to encapsulate the thrust or central question of the piece to which it leads. Often, these blurbs contain thought-provoking questions. Also often, the thoughts provoked by these questions are some that every thinking person has had provoked countless times before. I can not blame A&L. Often the questions in the blurbs accurately present the central topic of the article. It is not the questions' failure to transform my consciousness that entertains me, but the fact that they seem to attempt it. I suppose intellectuals — who I imagine are the target audience of A&L — will not click on anything that promises anything short of paradigm explosion. I think anyone who has ever written a paper has gotten excited about a question like this and clung to it despite knowing that the only answer one can reasonably reach is "maybe." Here are some obvious answers to game-changing questions. 

Does God exist?
Probably not, but maybe.

Steve Jobs is a paragon of entrepreneurial intensity, a role model. Or is his a cautionary tale, of an abusive boss with a broken family?
Probably both.

Is autocorrect progress? 
In some ways.

Does LSD have a bum rap? Can it improve problem solving?
Yes. Sometimes, but it also might break your mind.

What is the nature of knowledge?
Complex.

What does a dispute among the muses have to do with empathy?
I am sure you can find something.

This one, they answered themselves: Does quantum physics undermine materialism? Ostensibly, yes. But it sort of depends. 

Is there a more overexposed poet than Robert Pinsky?
Yes. Who is Robert Pinsky?

Wedged too tightly behind their laptops, have literary writers given up on politics?
No.

Is Facebook making us lonely?
No.

How could people listen to Mozart one day and beat up Jews the next?
They are awful.

Another self-answerer: Can punk aerobics, speed dating, and “edgy” book clubs save libraries? Not likely.

Who but Elaine Pagels can drain the melodrama from the Book of Revelation, turning the climactic confrontation between good and evil into an anti-Christian polemic?
A lot of tiresome people I have met.

That'll teach 'em to be intellectually curious.

Seriously, though, A&L is a great site and these articles are, for the most part, worth a read.

On Cemeteries and Anglo-Irish Patriots

     Yesterday, I ran to the top of Mount Royal. At least, I ran part way up. I did not go on the roads, but on the dirt paths which take you up the mountain more directly. They are also a little harder to navigate, so I got lost. I ended up in a cemetery. It looked small at first, because there were hedges and trees and things separating each bit of it, so I thought I would just run through it. In attempting this, I made my way well into it. Then I did not know how to get out. Every time I thought I saw an exit, it just led into another area. In the end I had to climb over a tall iron fence with spikes on the top to get out. I found a tree near the fence and used it to get over. On the other side of some dense brush, I found the road.

     About a week ago, I finished John Ralston Saul's biography of Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin, two of Canada's pre-Confederation founding fathers. The fathers of Canadian democracy, maybe. Saul describes in some detail the embarrassing antics of the mid-nineteenth century Anglo-Protestant Canadian merchant class, in particular the violence resulting from their religious devotion to England and Englishness. He notes several times in passing that most of these English patriots (it might be better to say "thugs who cited English patriotism as their motivation") were not English at all. They were Irish, Scottish, German, Dutch and what-have-you.

I was in an old part of the cemetery, I guess. Most of the dead buried there had died before 1915, many before 1900. They were nearly all perfect Canadian WASP names: Drummond, Nelson, Williams and things like that. Some of them had mausoleums. There were no ‘O’ prefixes and not even that many ‘Mc’ prefixes. Yet nearly all of them had been born somewhere in Ireland or Scotland — Ireland, more often. These, it occurred to me, might be the English patriots of which Saul writes.

     Of course, it was a different thing in those times to call oneself English. It was not implicitly to distinguish oneself from the Scots or others. Nevertheless, the fact that so many of these ardent English had in fact come from other parts is worth noting when one considers the thuggery perpetrated in the name of being “English.” None of this is to say that nobody English did anything wrong or participated in the riots Saul describes. Nor is it to denigrate in any way the Scots or Irish (Anglo or otherwise).

     Of course, the Canadian “English” come not only from the British Isles. I began recently to read about the history of ethnic Germans in Canada. There are a lot. There have been a lot all along. And many of them were what we might have considered English. There were German loyalists of no insignificant number. They spoke English. They were merchants.

     The fact is that English Canada is not nearly so English as we sometimes like to believe. It is easy to conceive Canada as a dichotomous country. It is intellectually satisfying, too. It makes sense. We have little cultural identity of our own, so English Canada looks to England. It happens to the best of us. I became a bit bleary watching the Queen at the opening ceremonies. I buy muesli from Poundbury. But Canada is not really English. Nor is it really just French, nor a hybrid of the two. Canada is something much more complicated. As convenient as it would be for English Canada to reach over the Atlantic and borrow an identity, it is not us and has never been us. We are just Canadian, and, while it would be nice to have the UK's access to all European Union job markets, I really would not have it any other way. Sorry, this got a little sentimental toward the end.  

Something What I Drawed

In an attempt to keep idleness at bay, I have recently begun to draw again. My most successful attempt is this. It is the old Montreal Stock Exchange building in Old Montreal. It's now a theatre or something.

Music to Wake Up To

When I was a child, my parents had a habit of waking my brother and I on weekend mornings by blasting music through the house. I can tell you there is nothing better than to be woken by big band jazz and the smell of pancakes. I assembled the following playlist for myself with that feeling in mind. Not all of the songs contained therein were played those mornings. Sometimes my mother would play Diana Krall to wake us, but I prefer to forget about that. The songs here all make me think of those mornings, of trips to the beach, but most of all of my parents. I made this playlist for my own benefit, but have elected to share it in the hope that someone else will wake up their kids, or someone, with it.

 

The Bizarre Economics of Espresso, Involving Exactly One Reference to Economics and a Lot of Drivel

Coffee has always had a bit of an egalitarian flavour. In Enlightenment London, coffee houses were one of the few places where clerks and the gentry, or even the nobility, could rub shoulders. In 1674, somebody named Paul Greenwood wrote a [satirical] poem about London coffee houses at the time: “First, Gentry, Tradesmen, all are welcome hither / and may without Affront sit down Together.” These disparate classes could gather in coffee houses because almost everybody could afford it.

     Today, coffee is a leveller in a different way. It is the only beverage I am aware of of which one can become a genuine connoisseur and rarely pay more than $3.00. Let's use espresso as a proxy for all gourmet coffees. After all, it is what many coffee nerds drink. Siphons and Clovers and God-knows-what will come and go into fashion, but espresso is the staple beverage of the coffee snob. Like wine, whisky, cigars and many other consumables, espresso has become for many a hobby. Unlike wine, whisky or cigars, the very best espresso is within reach of almost everybody. As much as local arts weeklies may perpetually claim to present 10 great wines under $10.00, those are the exception. The fact is that to drink anything in the least bit fancy costs $25.00. Good whisky has an even higher entry point. Most single malts are $60.00. By contrast, the best coffee shops in the country rarely charge more than $2.75 for an espresso. 

     If the worst espresso were $1.00 or around that, one could simply conclude that espresso is cheap. It would not be that remarkable that the best was less than $3.00. As it is, though, bad espresso usually costs the same as the best there is. I wish I could remember enough of my microeconomics courses to explain this to myself, but I have a suspicion that, in economic terms, no one gives a damn what their espresso tastes like. They are more interested in things like atmosphere, free wi-fi, the attractiveness of baristas and convenience, all of which are important, (though there's nothing more attractive in a barista to me than skill).

     All the more reason, then, to become one of the people who does give a damn and get a lot more for your $2.75, while those suckers pay $2.50 for some crema-less bilge from a hot barista only five minutes from their home. 

Autumn of the Gentleman-Scholar

     There is a cult of change and progress in our society which extends to the scholarship produced in the Anglosphere. In their hurry to disprove our assumptions about everything, the academics of today look back only when there is something to tear down or denounce. Or maybe we look back sometimes if there is some way that modern civilization can be found unsatisfactory by analogy to some ancient and enlightened one (though this is not very common anymore). It is easy to forget that scholarship was once largely the domain of the leisure class; that academics, if they could be called that, were often concerned with the accumulation of knowledge rather than the significance of it; and most of all that scholarly pursuits were a form of pleasure (I cannot write this sentence without reference to Lucille and Buster Bluth's conversation in Arrested Development: Buster — “I'm a scholar. I enjoy scholarly pursuits.” Lucille — “Suddenly playing with yourself is a scholarly pursuit?”).

     These gentleman scholars, to give them a very sentimental and flattering name, still exist, but they are fewer in number. Our current generation may be the last, though maybe the upper classes of tomorrow will follow in their footsteps in some way. Like their predecessors and unlike their peers in academia, these men (for the authors I am talking about just now are all men) concern themselves more with preservation than change or epiphany. And they allow themselves to enjoy their work. It is hard to avoid thinking that their approach to writing is related to their class. Each writes with an ease and familiarity which can only come from security of social place, which in turn is characteristic of the aristocracy. It would be snobbish and unfair to congratulate an author for being born into a situation which allowed him to pursue whatever he wished, but it would be a bit more cynical than I am to deny that there is a certain pleasure in reading something produced for the sheer pleasure of knowledge and of language. John Julius Norwich satisfies the first requirement for gentleman-scholardom. Like most with titles now do, he does not get his out of the closet very often, but he is properly John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich. He is related to William IV.

The great project of Norwich's life has been Venice. He has written several books on the city and its history and has dedicated himself to its preservation. Here he is talking about his acquaintance with Venice and his subsequent infatuation:

     

     Two things are very clear in the video: Norwich writes about Venice because he loves it; and, as a scholar of the old school, he is content with preservation and not driven to revolutionize anything. In this case, it is the quite literal preservation of the city which concerns him. But the nature of his works demonstrates that he is also interested in the preservation of knowledge. All of his books, as history books often do, look backward, but some, such as Great Architecture of the World and Great Cities in History (of which he is editor), reveal another habit of this outgoing class of author: the tendency to catalogue.

     This tendency is pronounced in the work of the Anglo-Irish Thomas Pakenham. Since we are talking about aristocratic authors, it is worth observing that Pakenham is the 8th Earl of Longford and has, as his family home, Tullynally Castle. He is recognized equally as historian and arborist, though history pops up in his work as an arborist more than the other way round. He is an arborist the way Pausanias is a geographer: more of a tour guide than a navigator. His tree books exemplify more his propensity for cataloguing. Almost all of them include the phrase “remarkable trees.” Most of them are not very scientific, but rather kinds of tree versions of Who's-Who. Maybe even tree versions of Debrett's Peerage, since Pakenham seems most interested in the historical pedigree of the trees he finds. Which brings us to another trait which Pakenham shares with Norwich and with the archetype of the old gentleman-scholar: the desire to preserve; the backward-looking reverence for the past. It is not sentimentality of course. That is a much lower emotion. It is fascination, more. Maybe it is even a feeling of necessity. Someone has to write about these trees or else no one will remember.

     It is hard to imagine anyone more different from Pakenham than Nick Foulkes is. Pakenham seems the country naturalist. The sight of his books inspires the image of cloth caps and walking sticks. Foulkes is urbane, dandy, almost brash. The video below is probably the most country Foulkes has ever looked:



     Foulkes is also curiously undocumented. It is not clear from where he sprang. If he is not by the most snobbish standards aristocratic, then he is at least relatively rich and has been educated as many an aristocrat is. More importantly, his writing is chatty, elegant, light and a tiny bit scandalous, just as we all want our aristocrats to be (if we are going to have any, that is). Even more than Pakenham or Norwich, Foulkes seems to write for pleasure, even fun. Foulkes is the world authority on the upper classes — of the past and present — at play. He is a very big fan of spending money. The biography on the sleeve of his books says that he “lives beyond his means,” and he edits the Financial Times' How to Spend It section (do not read it unless you want to feel very populist for a few hours). He is also a bit of a jewelry-lover and made this segment for Van Cleef and Arpels:

   

      Younger than the other two, Foulkes is a more modern version of the gentleman-scholar (though he clearly does not see himself as a gentleman). He is a more capitalist version, less restrained. Perhaps he is the new generation in this tradition. His books can be enjoyable, but does not have the charm of the old guard, the Pakenhams and Norwichs of the world. However you feel about the aristocracy in general, it is hard not to feel a little sentimental about the passing of the gentleman-scholar. It is like getting sentimental when the Italian gangs in your favourite gangster movie put the Irish ones out of business. Not that aristocrats are gangsters. Only, it is okay sometimes to think wistfully of the past, even if change is for the better.