Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

Archives

I managed to transfer all the entries from my old blog to this one, and they're now available if you click on the Archives headline in the right column (or on the word in this sentence). My thoughts on the making of mix tapes, my hatred of deckle edges, and my scan of a lithograph of the Durham ox are now saved for posterity (or at least until the next technological shift).

Would you like a gift receipt with that?

The other night, a friend in publishing mentioned in conversation that December sales had been disappointing throughout the industry this past year. The 2006 holidays had brought an upward bump, as people bought books as gifts for family and friends, but the bump was smaller than expected.

His comment intrigued me, because I wondered if it might be another sign of the qualitative change in the culture caused by the decline in literary reading. Buying a book for oneself is a relatively straightforward thing to do; all that's required is that you like to read, are in the mood to, and have enough money or credit to effect a purchase. But it's a bit more complicated to buy a book as a gift. The person you're buying for has to be a reader, and you have to be one, too, because you have to feel confident that you can choose a book worth reading. Moreover, you have to know enough about the recipient's reading habits to choose one she would probably like but hasn't read already. In other words, the two of you have to have been having a fairly sophisticated, ongoing conversation about what you read and what you like to read.

Thus the purchase of books as gifts is probably a more fragile statistic than the purchase of them for oneself, and if literary reading is on the decline, one would expect books to be bought less frequently as gifts. One might even expect that the proportion of books bought as gifts would decline more steeply than book-buying generally. And that does seem to be what's happening, to judge by retail bookstore sales reported to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Here's a graph of annual bookstore sales (in light green) and December bookstore sales (in dark green). Before anyone gets too optimistic, yes, it's true that aggregate bookstore sales have grown at what looks like a healthy rate. But so has the U.S. population, and so has consumer spending overall during this period, and book sales have not kept pace. In 1985, the average U.S. household spent $141 on reading, out of a total entertainment budget of $1,311 and a total consumer expenditure of $23,490. In 2004, the average household spent $130 on reading, out of a total entertainment budget of $2,348 and a total consumer expenditure of $43,395. (Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2007 Statistical Abstract.) The upward trend you're seeing here is the result of more people and more money in America, not of an intensification of reading.

If you divide the December sales by the annual sales, you get the yearly percentage of book sales that occur during the holidays. As you can see, if December sales are a reasonable proxy for gift sales, then people have been buying fewer books as gifts, comparatively speaking, over the last decade and a half---another sign, I think, that the place of literary reading in American culture is shifting.

(A side note: Though I didn't chart them, the largest spikes in book sales every year aren't in December at all; they're in August and January, as students buy books for courses. I haven't checked yet to see whether these are becoming a higher proportion of reading expenditures, but if they are, that would be another dark sign, in my opinion...)

POSTSCRIPT (1 September 2007): I think this post is safely too outdated for anyone to be in danger of referring to it any more, but in case anyone does, there's a major flaw in my data above. The Census department's numbers only include brick-and-mortar book sales, not online book sales. Now, since Amazon automatically does packaging and mailing, it's super convenient for book giving. It's possible, therefore, that the decline in month-of-December sales noted above is *not* a decline in giving books as gifts, but rather a shift toward buying gift books online.

Where's Thomas?

In the 2 March 2007 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, Patrick McCaughey pans William S. McFeely's new biography of Thomas Eakins, writing that McFeely's "view of evidence may satisfy the claims of modern American historiography, although I rather doubt it. It certainly makes for bad art history." In particular, McCaughey is dismissive of the evidence that McFeely presents of Eakins's homosexuality. Or rather, fails to present, according to McCaughey, who accuses McFeely of making his case by mere assertion. In the 29 March 2007 issue of the New York Review of Books, Christopher Benfey is more polite and circumspect but doesn't seem any more convinced, calling McFeely's book "impressionistic and elliptical," noting its "odd combination of historical detail and orphic pronouncements," and offering praise of startling modesty: "Some of his hypotheses seem worth pursuing. . . ."

The two reviewers sharply disagree, however, on at least one issue. Both think that Eakins painted himself into The Gross Clinic (above left, 1875, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts), the famous painting of a medical professor with blood on his hands, standing heroically beside a patient with a sliced-open leg, in a surgical theater full of students (a painting recently saved from acquisition by the Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges). But they differ as to where in the painting Eakins's self-portrait is supposed to be. "Eakins himself crouches in the bottom right-hand corner spattered with blood, holding one of the retractors for the incision," writes McCaughey in the TLS. "Among the students, Eakins has painted a shadowy portrait of himself, dispassionately taking notes," writes Benfey in the NYRB.

So where's Thomas? (Since I was too bleary with a head cold to do anything useful this afternoon, I decided to track down the answer in Columbia's databases.) Eakins and some of his students once posed for a parody (right, c. 1875-79, Woodmere Art Museum) of The Gross Clinic, and in a 1999 article for the journal Representations, art historian Jennifer Doyle wrote of the photograph, "I would like to assert that it is Eakins who poses in the role of the womanly, melodramatic spectator, though I cannot say for certain that it is him." Intriguing as her speculation is, of course, it doesn't decide the case at hand.

A number of critics have suggested that Eakins is to be seen in the painting as the patient etherized upon the table, or as Dr. Gross, or as both. But this is wandering into interpretation, I'm afraid.

More hardheadedly, in a 1969 article in the Art Bulletin, Gordon Hendricks gave a full list of originals of the painting's dramatis personae. Hendricks identified the woman in the painting's left as very likely the patient's mother, the man in the lower right holding the incision open as Dr. Daniel Appel, the man with the sideburns exploring the wound as Dr. James M. Barton, the holder of the patient's legs as Dr. Charles S. Briggs, the anesthetist at the patient's head as Dr. W. Joseph Hearne, and the man writing at the desk to the left of Dr. Gross as Dr. Franklin West. The two shadowy men in the tunnel to the right of Dr. Gross are Hughey the janitor and Dr. S. W. Gross, the central figure's son. "At right center, looking intently down at the proceedings with pencil and pad, the artist has painted himself," Hendricks concludes. (Hendricks doesn't identify the patient. He does say, though, that "the operation is for the removal of a sequestrum," a piece of dead bone tissue that forms during chronic inflammation of the bone.)

A description on the website of the painting's former owner, Thomas Jefferson University, also identifies Eakins as "the first figure seated to the right of the tunnel . . . sketching or writing." In other words, Eakins is the figure about two-thirds of the way up the painting's right edge, not easy to discern in the reproduction here, or in any reproduction I have at home. It seems as if Benfey is right, and as if the TLS has for once nodded. Whether Eakins was gay, on the other hand, is a controversy I decline to adjudicate this afternoon.

Mass-Observation Online

The University of Sussex's archive of Mass-Observation, the British movement I wrote about for the New Yorker in the fall, has been digitized by a company called Adam Matthew Digital. The database looks quite fun: all the day-surveys, all the diaries, all the directives, and all the books. And yet, somehow, there is "no overlap with the microfilm series," or so the snazzy pamphlet claims. There are also some Humphrey Spender photographs---rather nice ones, if what's visible in the pamphlet is representative. The price tag, alas, is $49,500, but I can always hope that Columbia or the NYPL buys a subscription.

Queer or peculiar?

While I was reading up on Andrew Jackson last month, I stumbled across what sounded like a love story between two men, a story I hadn't heard before. During the Battle of New Orleans, at the end of the War of 1812, the Jewish merchant and philanthropist Judah Touro was hit in the thigh by a cannonball while on militia duty. Touro had enlisted as a common soldier. When news of his injury reached his friend and fellow merchant Rezin D. Shepherd, who was serving as an aide to a naval commodore, Shepherd reacted dramatically: he left his post, found Touro, put him in a cart, carried him to his house, hired nurses to care for him, and thereby saved his life.

Shepherd's spontaneous actions were risky. Under Andrew Jackson's command, soldiers were sometimes shot for leaving their posts without permission. Naturally enough, Touro and Shepherd "were ever afterwards inseparable in this world," according to the 19th-century historian Alexander Walker. When Touro died, he left half his fortune to charity and the rest to Shepherd, between $500,000 and $750,000. That sounds like no more than gratitude, except for a further detail: Walker writes that Touro and Shepherd "lived under the same roof" even before Shepherd saved Touro's life.

The detail would seem to put Shepherd and Touro's relationship in a different light. Is there more to the story? Over the past month, when I've had a spare moment, I've tried to find out a little more about Touro and Shepherd. The short answer: Inconclusive.

Touro never married. I don't know yet whether Shepherd did, but probably so; he had at least one daughter. It turns out that Touro was rather famous as a philanthropist; he gave money not only for the Bunker Hill Monument but also to Mass General Hospital in Boston and Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, and to churches and synagogues in New Orleans, New York, Newport, and elsewhere. He even left $50,000 to Sir Moses Montefiore for relief of the poor in Jerusalem. And he was almost as famous as an eccentric. Though one of the richest men in America, Touro "usually ate his meals by himself, and . . . resided in cheap boardinghouses until relatively late in life," according to the American National Biography---a description that seems to contradict Walker's claim that Touro and Shepherd lived together. But the ANB adds, somewhat cryptically, "What has not been learned since [Touro's] death continues to puzzle scholars."

In 1955, the scholar Bertram Korn argued in the Jewish Quarterly Review that Touro had been praised as a Jewish philanthropist more than he deserved to be. Korn suggested that Touro was in fact guilty of an inexplicable "indifference towards Jewish life" and felt that the credit for Touro's bequests should actually go to a journalist named Gershom Kursheedt, without whose charm, patience, and persuasive powers, Korn believed, Touro would have left his money only to civic charities. Korn shed no light on Touro's special bond with Shepherd, but he did quote a number of Kursheedt's private expressions of frustration with Touro. "You know he is a strange man," Kursheedt confided to a friend, and likened the millionaire to a snail or a crab. "Mr. Shepherd tells me I must be very careful to humor him or in an instant all may be lost."

In the end, I can't say whether Touro was queer or merely peculiar. A couple of sources relayed a rumor that Touro remained a lifelong bachelor because in youth he had been in love with a cousin, Catherine Hayes, and had never got over his broken heart when their family separated them. But the sources were careful to specify that it was no more than a rumor. Another source adds that "he certainly avoided the society of ladies and was never willing to exchange a word with them." But that doesn't really tip the scales either; social awkwardness would explain that behavior better than homosexuality would.

Turned around

In Martha Gellhorn's novel A Stricken Field (1940), a young journalist named Mary Douglas arrives in Prague just after the Munich Pact---that is, just after the West has agreed to let Hitler have the northwest strip of Czechoslovakia known in German as the Sudetenland and in Czech as the pohraničí. Gellhorn was herself a reporter, and A Stricken Field is a reporter's novel, designed to bring to emotional life facts that the democracies weren't yet ready to face. The facts matter, in other words, so I stopped for some time over a detail that confused me in the following passage. Mary and a fellow reporter named Tom Lambert have rented a car in order to drive out to former president Edvard Beneš's country home, to see if they can get an interview:

Tom paid for the gasoline and they started off at twenty miles an hour, Tom saying that until they left town she was not to speak to him, so that he could concentrate without emotion on the Prague traffic.

"The Wenceslaus Square beats all," he said. "How's a man supposed to know which side to drive on? Besides those street cars racing to and fro in the middle and people ambling about like damned chickens and me with no driver's license."

"Take it easy," she said. "You go down town on the left."

But you go down town on the right in Wenceslas Square these days. In fact, you drive on the right everywhere in the Czech Republic. The detail matters, in Gellhorn's plot, because Tom, a little bewildered by the traffic patterns, ends up hitting a pedestrian, and the police insist on taking the reporters and their victim into the precinct headquarters, despite the pedestrian's somewhat desperate insistence that he's fine and has no wish to file a complaint. As it turns out, the pedestrian is an ethnic German from the Sudetenland, who's become a refugee because of his politics (he's a democrat), and the sooner the Prague police take note of him, the sooner he'll be returned to his former home, where he'll probably be killed.

A week or so after this puzzled me, my bewilderment was remedied by a map of worldwide driving patterns on the blog Strange Maps. Apparently people used to drive on the left in Czechoslovakia, and it was the Nazis who switched the country to right-side-of-the-road driving. At the moment of Gellhorn's novel, the Gestapo are already operating freely in Prague, but the government is still in Czech hands.

While I'm on the subject, there's another period detail that might confuse a contemporary reader. Gellhorn never explains that the Nazis are the villains of her story. She assumes that the reader will understand that they are, because she portrays them arresting people extralegally in a foreign country and then torturing them in order to extract information.

"Everybody," including my sister

My sister, Abby Crain, is performing in "Everybody," a new dance by Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People. In the New York Times this morning, Claudia La Rocco raves about the show:

[Gutierrez] and his dancers are beautiful to watch, but more important, they’re interesting. You can see them figuring themselves out, whether they’re staring into the rafters or hurling their bodies through the air in leaps both heroic and absurd. As various repetitions and endurance games play out, the dancers exhibit a virtuosity of a far more nuanced but no less dazzling sort than the orthodox understanding of the term.

I'm not surprised, and not merely because I have a blood relative in the production; their last show was something of a blockbuster. This one opened on Thursday night at the Abrons Art Center, at the Henry Street Settlement at 466 Grand Street on the Lower East Side, and continues until next Sunday, March 11. For tickets, which should probably be purchased soon, contact the Abrons Art Center (the dance is an offsite production by Danspace Project). Miguel talked about the dance with John Schaeffer of WNYC on 27 February 2007, and you can stream or download his interview.

Read all about it

The house bloggers of The New Republic are agitating for a new American book review, which would bring to an intelligent lay readership the news to be found in the thousands of scholarly books published every year. Their model seems to be Britain's Times Literary Supplement (which, I agree, is well worth the more-than-$150-a-year price tag). "At the moment there is a hole in our cultural life where a bridge needs to be built," writes Jeffrey Herf.

The project sounds worthy, and I hope it happens, though I'm not optimistic. My gloomy suspicion is that the hole in the culture is a geological fault that's likely to widen, and that any bridges built across it are likely to founder unless they're made of something highly stretchable. Though many observers (and good friends of mine) do not believe that there's a reading crisis, I think that something happened to the nation's reading habits and skills in the past decade or two (click here for a meandering essay of mine on the subject). It seems possible to me that a healthy, high-volume exchange of ideas between the scholarly community and the general public may be a part of the collateral damage.

As it happens, last week brought another piece of evidence about the reading crisis, when the National Center for Education Statistics released the results of the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). As the New York Times reported on 23 February 2007, "It showed that the share of 12th-grade students lacking even basic high school reading skills . . . rose to 27 percent from 20 percent in 1992. The share of students proficient in reading dropped to 35 percent from 40 percent in 1992."

It's the loss of proficient readers that most concerns me, and that is most likely to have an impact on what might be called the country's intellectual health. If you download the 2005 NAEP and take a closer look, you'll see that they assessed three kinds of literacy: reading for information, reading to perform a task, and reading for literary experience. No prize for guessing which declined the most steeply.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lindsay Waters recently noticed the general, nationwide decline of reading, and blamed professors for it. "We have distinguished professors of literature at elite universities promoting methodologies of study that positively discourage reading," Waters wrote. I'm inclined to exonerate the professors. They've been trying to make literature seem harder than it is for a long time; it's only in the last couple of decades that they've been able to succeed. The temptation to blame them for it is a perspective mistake, I suggested in a little essay I wrote for n+1 last year. Did the chicken expel the egg, or did the egg abandon the chicken? My guess is that academic literary critics lost their interest in such humane values as style, pleasure, and taste after they lost their audience among the general public, not before. Nothing they did or wrote caused the divide. It only seemed that way if you spent a lot of time reading them (or, er, us).

The loss lamented by the New Republic bloggers---that is, of the public intellectual's niche in the ecosphere---is probably of a piece with the waning of the pertinence to literature of scholarship in the literary humanities. Thus my pessimism about the prospects of their proposed review. (I reviewed Richard Posner's book on the demise of public intellectuals for The Nation a few years ago; as it happens, he called in that book for the creation of a periodical not unlike the one the TNR-ites are asking for.) In the unlikely event that the TNR bloggers do succeed, however, I hope they won't take too seriously all of their pronouncements about what is and is not proper in a book review. Some of those pronouncements seem to me symptomatic of a declining participation in the public sphere, rather than diagnostic of it.

For example, I'm glad that Herf recognizes that a well-written book review does more than merely rate the book in question, and is also supposed to engage with its ideas. But Eric Rauchway (scroll down for his contribution) admonishes would-be reviewers as if their first loyalty should be to the authors of the books they review, and as if they oughtn't dare write one at all if they haven't been properly credentialed. "Write a book before you review one," commands Rauchway. As Samuel Johnson once replied, to a very similar stricture, "Why no, Sir; this is not just reasoning. You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables."

Rauchway also orders reviewers to "Write about the book you're reading, not . . ." and then interdicts a number of topics, all of which might well enhance and illuminate a review, which is a species of essay, whether he likes it or not, and as such is perfectly entitled to take a book merely as an occasion and to be as whimsical and digressive as it pleases, unless we're to be condemned to a narrow utilitarian consumerism. Rauchway further orders reviewers to "Avoid quips," and here, too, I disagree. I'm against gratuitous and excessive malice, but obsequiousness is no more desirable than sadism in a book reviewer, who should not have to worry too much about the vanity of the author. Sometimes a joke is the quickest and liveliest way to make a point. And from time to time there are some real zingers in the TLS.