Aretha Franklin died without a will, the New York Times reports: “Franklin, who had songwriting credits on some of her hits, including ‘Think,’ ‘Dr. Feelgood (Love Is a Serious Business)’ and ‘Rock Steady,’ was known to be private and unusually protective of her finances. According to a 2016 profile in The New Yorker, she demanded cash before performing live, and then often kept the money in a handbag that she kept near her onstage.”
Kevin Spacey’s latest film, Billionaire Boys Club, opened last Friday in eight theaters. It grossed $126. (And it was reported Wednesday that the actor is now facing a second sexual assault allegation.)
In defense of modern architecture: Stephen Bayley reviews James Stevens Curl’s Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism: “Yes, modernist principles, misunderstood by unimaginative planners, often led to atrocious results. Le Corbusier’s ‘vertical garden cities’ became vertical slums. And there is only a sliver of difference between Walter Gropius’s lofty Bauhaus ideals and a crap council estate. Curl’s ambition is to compose the critique of all critiques, joining a tradition of anti-modern alarm which has included E.M. Forster, Orwell, Vonnegut and Prince Charles. And, of course, Evelyn Waugh. In Decline and Fall, Margot Beste-Chetwynde commissions a new ‘clean and square’ house from Professor Otto Silenus. Dismayed by the result, she soon has it demolished, saying: ‘Nothing I have ever done has caused me so much disgust.’” But: “The ‘moderns’ were not a coherent gang of unlettered anarchists, bent on destroying history. They did not represent a ‘sundering, a cultural catastrophe, based on dissolution and unreason’. They were a very broad church. And his Manichean distinctions between modernists and traditionalists were not at all clear cut.”
The humanities have been in “crisis” for decades it seems, but they are still (mostly) around and, at some institutions, flourishing. Still, Benjamin Schmidt argues, something changed in 2008: “Five years ago, I argued that the humanities were still near long-term norms in their number of majors. But since then, I’ve been watching the numbers from the Department of Education, and every year, things look worse. Almost every humanities field has seen a rapid drop in majors: History is down about 45 percent from its 2007 peak, while the number of English majors has fallen by nearly half since the late 1990s. Student majors have dropped, rapidly, at a variety of types of institutions. Declines have hit almost every field in the humanities (with one interesting exception) and related social sciences, they have not stabilized with the economic recovery, and they appear to reflect a new set of student priorities, which are being formed even before they see the inside of a college classroom.” I wonder what these numbers will look like in 10 years. Maybe worse. Maybe better.
David Pryce-Jones remembers his long friendship with V. S. Naipaul: “A mere whippersnapper in my mid twenties, in 1963 I was literary editor of The Spectator and couldn’t help noticing that the rival New Statesman had this V. S. Naipaul as a new and particularly sharp reviewer of fiction. I invited him to review for us, he came to the office in Gower Street, and we went to have tea in one of the gloomy Bloomsbury hotels nearby. On the way we passed some workmen on a scaffold. Some profound psychological mechanism has repressed the question he put to me about those workmen, and my answer too. ‘I’m glad you said that,’ Vidia summed up. ‘If you’d said anything else, I would not have seen you again.’ Try as I might, I never managed to get a review out of him.”
John Wilson asks an interesting question over at First Things. In Unguarded Thoughts, the Russian writer Andrei Sinyavsky remarks that in “all true writing—even when no clash with authority is involved—is something forbidden, something reprehensible, and in this illicit element lies the whole excitement, the whole dilemma of being a writer.” “If you think, from this excerpt,” John writes, “that Sinyavsky is puffing himself up, and if moreover this sounds to you very much like a lot of the huffing and puffing we hear daily (about writing that is ‘subversive,’ ‘transgressive,’ and so on, ad nauseum, while miraculously being showered with prizes and public acclaim), you need to read the whole essay…Having said that, I want you to understand that I am not putting forward Mandelstam’s and Sinyavsky’s accounts of ‘true writing’ as normative. That would be absurd. Writers are forever framing what they do in sweeping terms. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. But let us suppose, for the moment, that a young reader of this column (who has never before read Sinyavsky) is delighted by the Mandelstam epigraph, tracks down Sinyavsky’s essay, and finds it enormously energizing. A question then arises: What would it mean for a writer in the United States today—a Christian like Mandelstam and Sinyavsky, but working in a society and a time very different from theirs—to write ‘without permission’?”
Essay of the Day:
In the Atlantic, Ian Bogost writes: “The personal-data privacy war is long over, and you lost.” Here’s more:
“Many people still think their smartphones are listening to them in secret—recording their conversations in the background, then uploading them to Facebook or Google surreptitiously. Facebook has been accused of the practice more than others, probably because its services (including Instagram) are so popular and ads are so easy to spot. The company denies doing so every time, and researchers have shown it to be technically infeasible, too. But the idea still persists.
“It persists because it feels true, and also because it is true, by the spirit if not the letter. Facebook and Google might not literally be listening in on our conversations, but they are eavesdropping on our lives. These companies have so much data, on so many people, and they can slice and dice it in so many ways that they might as well be monitoring our conversations. Traveling out of town and searching for restaurants? It’s not just that Facebook or Google knows where you are and what you’re searching for, but also if you’re a foodie or a cheapskate, if you’ve ‘liked’ Korean hot pot or Polish pierogi, and what your demographics say about your income, and therefore your budget.
“Tech companies do collect data in unexpected, and sometimes duplicitous, ways. Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica catastrophe offers one example. More recently, a report based on research at Vanderbilt University suggests that Google collects or infers vast quantities of information about its users, based on their web browsing, media use, location, purchases, and more—sometimes even absent user interaction. Location data was particularly voluminous, with Android smartphones conveying a user’s position in space more than 300 times in a 24-hour period—even if the user has turned off location history in the device’s Google settings. The study also shows that the ‘incognito’ mode in Google’s Chrome browser, which promises to hide a user’s information from websites while browsing, still makes it possible for Google to connect those supposedly hidden visits to its own, internal profile of a user.
“Revelations like these have spawned a class-action lawsuit against the company, and it’s tempting to imagine that oversight, regulation, or legal repercussions might eventually discourage or even change the way tech companies collect and manage data. This hope jibes with the ongoing ‘techlash’ that has consumed the sector for the past year or more. But it also ignores the fact that Google and Facebook’s data hunger takes place within the context of a widespread, decades-old practice of data intelligence.”
Photo: Sun over the Dolomites
Poem: Arthur Rimbaud, “My Bohemia” (translated by Ryan Wilson)
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
