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I recently returned from TOS-Con, where I spoke about my favorite painter, John Singer Sargent. My talk was recorded and you can watch it online soon. It was adapted from my earlier article about Sargent, but it includes some points that I didn’t address there. One question I was asked during the Q&A really stuck with me—how much should the biography of an artist, or other historical facts, factor into our assessment of an art work? I had some additional thoughts on the subject here.
This month, I have a review of a new collection of O. Henry’s short stories—which gave me an excuse to consider why it is that this writer, who was once so popular as to rival Mark Twain—has fallen into comparative obscurity. He’s not included, for instance, in the Norton Anthology of American Literature. Why? Because the trends of Modernism and Naturalism in literature that began at the dawn of the Twentieth Century shoved his sort of idealism and Romanticism aside. Still, you can find hints of it today—most notably in The Twilight Zone.
I recently appeared on the Armstrong and Getty program a couple times. I don’t get as much time to visit with the guys as I used to nowadays, but it’s always a joy to do so. You can listen to our most recent conversation here. I also got a chance to talk with John Stossel recently about “woke” language. Our conversation touched on some of the subjects that I get into in more detail in my chapter in 1984 and Philosophy.
Litigation never lets up, and I recently filed a brief urging the Arizona Supreme Court to take up a case about whether the state can tax firing ranges the same way they tax amusement parks. One fun part of this brief was getting to cite Bernard Suits’ philosophical classic The Grasshopper in the brief. That book—which I read at the suggestion of my friend Shawn Klein—is an attempt to define the concept of “game.” I used it in the brief to say that firing guns at a shooting range is not a “game” like the kinds you play at an amusement park.
I also recently talked with the Rio Grande Foundation’s Paul Gessing about the lawsuit that Goldwater and Rio Grande are litigating now in the Tenth Circuit about donor privacy rights. The court dismissed that case and we will be seeking rehearing later this month.
During a recent trip I was able to finish Jefferson’s Treasure, a biography of Albert Gallatin by Gregory May, which is superb. May has done an immense amount of research—two hundred out of his five hundred pages are just the endnotes!—but the book is not at all hard to understand, and that’s saying a lot since he explains the complicated financial and political debates of the founding era. Anyone who professes to admire Alexander Hamilton must read this book to see why the Jeffersonians were bothered by Hamilton’s schemes. I particularly enjoyed May’s observation that
“Jefferson’s unforgettable comparison of study yeoman farmers with wretched urban workers haunts historical memory, and although scholars know that Jefferson and Madison did value home manufactures, the notion that the Republicans were agrarians opposed to the development of American manufacturing dies hard. But in fact manufacturers were an important part of the Republican movement from the beginning. In the pivotal states of Pennsylvania and New York, it was striving small producers and ambitious factory owners who gave rural Republicans the post they needed to gain political control. These emerging manufacturers chafed under the stable, deferential social order that Federalists were trying to preserve, and they saw federal excise taxes on manufactured goods as a direct threat to their interests. Their determination to rise and prosper brought them into the Republican opposition, and after the Republican victory in 1800, they delivered a regular drumbeat of petitions to Congress for the protection of American manufacturing.”
I also finished Daniel Boorstin’s The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson, and was somewhat underwhelmed. Boorstin’s strategy in this book is to portray the Jeffersonian world view in ways that make it appear quaint and even absurd. For example, he quotes the quack Benjamin Rush as if he spoke for Jefferson himself in various ways, when in reality Jefferson and others often rolled their eyes at Rush. Boorstin also characterizes the Jeffersonians’ attempts to grasp psychological or moral phenomena in naturalistic or materialistic terms (a task that was just beginning in the eighteenth century) in ways that make them seem outlandish, without acknowledging that (a) their opponents in the status quo took a far more outlandish view and (b) these were the first steps down roads that have turned out to be largely right. It may seem silly to us today to speak of man being born with a moral sense just as he is born with legs or arms, but there is actually good, empirical reason to believe that there is at least an inborn moral programming along the same lines as the inborn grammatical programming in the human mind—something largely ignored by the dualism implicit in our own era’s moral relativism and its childish hostility to evolutionary psychology—and it is a position vastly superior to the mysticism endorsed by the pre-Enlightenment church or the reactionary anti-Jeffersonians. If the idea that morality can be grasped as a materialistic, physical science is laughable, how much more laughable is it to think that morality is a ghostly emanation from the supernatural commands of another dimension? While Boorstin never says anything that’s actually false, his shading and his emphasis end up holding Jeffersonians up to undeserved ridicule. He also never mentions Epicurus, which is a curious omission, indeed.
I’ve been in a Dave Brubeck phase lately, and particularly his series of five “time” albums. There’s the classic Time Out, of course, but its sequels (Time Further Out, Countdown: Time in Outer Space, Time Changes, and Time In) are not as well known. I particularly like “Softly, William, Softly,” on Time In.
On a recent trip through the airport, where the Arizona Watercolor Association is holding an exhibit, we were impressed by the work of Kim Johnson and Carol McSweeney. Check ‘em out. We’re looking forward to the Star Trek convention in Las Vegas this weekend, and next month, trips to D.C., Florida, and elsewhere, assuming the Delta Variant doesn’t ruin everyone’s plans…