Category Archives: Zeitgeist Movement

Just before she launched a panel discussion titled From the Bund to Bernies Campaign, moderator Elaine Leeder laid a little joke on the audience: Its only in a place like Berkeley, she said, that you could get a hundred Jews on a Saturday to talk about socialism.

Given that the panel was part of a conference called From the Bund to the Bern: Yiddish Socialism for the 21st Century, its no surprise the joke drew laughs.

Leeders panel came at the end of a day exploring the history of Jewish involvement in 20th-century socialist politics, and how that history sheds light on the modern progressive movement.

Held at Berkeley City College, the event was co-sponsored by the Workmens Circle/Arbeter Ring and Lehrhaus Judaica. Leeder and Diana Scott, who has chaired the Northern California branch of the Workmens Circle for nine years, organized the agenda.

The Workmens Circle/Arbeter Ring was founded in 1900 to promote social justice and a secular Jewish identity rooted in community engagement, with the Northern California branch founded in 1948. Although nearly 70 people had preregistered for the Feb. 25 event, around 100 showed up, Leeder estimated a big number for the venerable left-leaning Jewish organization.

The conference included talks on topics such as the Jewish Labor Bund in interwar Poland and divides in the Yiddish-speaking socialist movement. Scott led a breakout session on socialism and Jewish cultural autonomy. For presenters, the conference gave them a chance to illuminate details of a progressive Jewish past most people today know little about.

Today those legacies are still with us, if we realize it or not, said Tony Michels, professor of American Jewish history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, whose keynote address explored how the Russian Revolution shaped American Jewish politics.

Apparently, many conference attendees were still feeling the Bern, as in Bernie Sanders.

Running like a current through the days discussions was how the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate impacted todays progressive Jewish left. Sanders even sent a letter to the Workmens Circle that was read aloud during the conference, noting he was delighted that you are gathering to discuss the relevance of democratic socialism.

The message Bernie has is so relevant, and comes from a legacy of Jewish activism.

Barbara Epstein, professor emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at UC Santa Cruz and an expert on the history of social movements, gave a talk on the early left and Zionism in Europe. She drew a line connecting the long tradition of Jewish socialist humanism and the Sanders campaign. It seems to me that thats what Bernie was representing, she said.

The message Bernie has is so relevant, and comes from a legacy of Jewish activism, said attendee Deborah Israel of Oakland.

Carol Sanders, first cousin of the Vermont senator, also attended the event. Like others there, the Berkeley resident said she learned a lot about a topic she previously had been aware of only in broad outlines. Its something I didnt know much about, but it was part of the zeitgeist, she said of the gathering.

Audience members agreed on the strength of a politically progressive element in their Jewish identity. Its in our DNA, said attendee Clara Davis of Oakland.

As the day wound down, talk turned to practical measures, such as finding out which congressional representatives to target and how to talk to generations younger than the decidedly older cohort at the conference.

Josh Kob, a union representative for the California Teachers Association, was one of the younger people in the room. He had driven from Fresno to be there.

For Jews, understanding where we came from is a huge motivator, he said.

Although much of the day dealt with history, the most-discussed topic among attendees was the urgency of todays political climate under the Trump administration and ways in which the legacy of Jewish socialism could be relevant more than 100 years after the founding of the Workmens Circle.

Its really how we build who we are, going forward, on progressive Jewish values, Scott said.

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Big crowd still feeling the Bern at Jewish socialism confab - Jweekly.com

15 Feb 2017: Social Hall SF San Francisco

Its Wednesday night in the middle of SF Beer Week, and theres a sense of alternate realities from the realm of science fiction seeping into the current timeline. Hogwash in Lower Nob Hill is hosting a Star Wars-themed Lagunitas tap takeover complete with an appearance by a lifesize wookie, drawing in a gathering of rebel rogues and would-be Jedi Knights. Theres no band like at the Mos Eisley Cantina, although some of the recordings are piped through. But those seeking live music with a Hollywood twist need only walk a half mile up Sutter Street to catch the artist best known as FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder live in concert at Social Hall SF.

Its said that the truth can be stranger than fiction and actor David Duchovny probably knows something about that. Duchovny has become a living legend around the world for his iconic portrayal of Agent Mulder on FOX TVs The X-Files, where he spent a decade from 1993-2002 searching for the truth about aliens, the UFO cover-up and a slew of paranormal phenomena and government conspiracies. The show tapped the dark pulse of the modern zeitgeist like few others have and won Duchovny and co-star Gillian Anderson (as Agent Dana Scully) a legion of lifetime fans.

Pop cultures affinity for The X-Files surged again in 2016 when Duchovny and Anderson were reunited for a series reboot of six episodes, including a mind-blowing season premiere in which Mulder summed up the entire UFO cover-up in the episodes opening minutes. With a tagline of The Truth is Still Out There, Americas fascination with seeking the truth about UFOs and extraterrestrials was rekindled. Duchovny has done some fine work on other projects too like Californication and his scene-stealing cameo as the worlds greatest hand model in Zoolander, which mined pop cultures love of conspiracy theories for comic gold.

Then theres his recent turn as a hard-boiled detective in late 60s Los Angeles on the trail of Charlie Manson in the vintage noir of Aquarius. Duchovnys character Sam Hodiak plays a little bit of acoustic guitar when hes at home on the show, and this apparently was a direct result of the actor requesting such a character trait, so he could continue trailer guitar lessons hed started in his last season as Hank Moody on Californication.

Duchovny apparently caught the songwriting bug and cut an entire album, releasing Hell of Highwater in 2015. The album mixes low-key blues and brooding folk rock with flashes of country and alternative and holds together fairly well with its character-driven songs. Now Duchovny has put together a full band to go out and play some shows. His fans cant wait to check it out as a line forms over two hours before showtime for those who bought the VIP ticket package, of which there were many. And While hes done excellent work on those other projects, the concept of witnessing the man who plays Mulder live on stage in a rock band seems like its whats providing the buzz here for one of the more unique pop culture moments of recent years.

The band opens with 3000, utilizing one of the albums more rocking tracks to kick things off on a high note. Some of the lyrics may seem to rhyme a bit too easily, but when Duchovny sings of 3,000 steps between heaven and hell, it feels like Fox Mulder is there opening up his soul. Let It Rain features a sharp Americana style chord progression with some bluesy leads and Duchovny singing to his low vocal registers strength.

Some of the slower songs find Duchovny singing in an odd Leonard Cohen-esque drawl that doesnt seem to suit him as well. The vocals seem a little flat at times during the set, but its still interesting to watch an accomplished artist daring to put himself out there in a different realm. Duchovny introduces the new Strangers in the Sacred Heart as being about a church where people pray for others instead of themselves, an interesting theme in a crazy world where the gods offer no refunds for over-praying.

A cover of David Bowies Stay finds the band getting more funky with some stinging blues mixed in and Duchovny with some serviceable vocals. More vibe boosting occurs when Duchovny takes multiple trips out into the audience to give out handshakes, high fives and stir the vibe up ala Buddy Guy playing his guitar out in the audience. Its a classy move to break down the invisible wall between performer and audience, giving fans a chance to get even more up close and personal.

Duchovny seems somewhat obsessed with the concept of rain on his album, even dropping a box of rain line into The Rain Song that seems like a nod to the Grateful Dead and trying to find the splintered sunlight that can break through even the darkest clouds (and pictures from the VIP soundcheck session indeed show him sporting a shirt with the Deads Steal Your Face logo). When the Time Comesintroduced as a post-apocalyptic love songmines a similar bluesy Americana sound and both songs feel like they could be coming from a weary Mulder serenading Scully, conjuring an endearing vibe.

Duchovnys vocal delivery seems to work best on the more up-tempo rocking material, however. This is confirmed in the encore when he and the band break out a surprise rendition of the Velvet Undergrounds Sweet Jane. The band plays through the extended introduction, leading to a cathartic breakthrough when they launch into the main progression. The crowd eats it up, especially when Duchovny sings Me, babe, Im in a rock n roll band. Then its more classic rock goodness with The Weight, as Duchovny dons one of the trending pink pussyhats that have become a symbol of solidarity with the feminist movement against the Trump regimes assault on womens rights. Another endearing audience sing-along ensues, and its been a fun night out at the very least.

Duchovnys musical soul searching may not hit quite as deep as Mulders quest for the truth, but he seems to somehow tap into a similar existential journey.

Greg M. Schwartz has covered music and pop culture for PopMatters since 2006. He focuses on events coverage with a preference for guitar-driven rock 'n' roll, but has eclectic tastes for the golden age of sound that is the 21st century music scene. He has a soft spot for music with a socially conscious flavor and is also an award-winning investigative reporter. Follow him on Twitter at @gms111, where he's always looking for tips on new bands or under the radar news items.

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David Duchovny Hits the Road to Seek the Musical Truth That's Out There - PopMatters

Courtesy of Image Comics

One of the largest comics publishers has reached a milestone anniversary this year. Image Comics, now in its 25th year, also happens to be experiencing of its most successful years ever. Initially a major driver of the speculation boom in the early 90s comics market, Image has recently reached the pop culture zeitgeist again with numerous bestselling titles which put most of Marvel and DCs output outside the box office to shame. Image has represented very polarizing ideals in the comics scene over the years, a seeming contradiction in the direct market paradigm. On one hand, they have represented the utter absence of artistry in the mainstream, the muscle-bound inanity and collectors items of the late nineties boom and bust at their most abject. Yet at the same time, Image has stood as an ideal publishing model to many: an outlet for popular and original concepts with the creators retaining full ownership.

When Image was founded in 1992, the intent was a self-proclaimed comics revolution. Spearheaded by seven of Marvel Comics most popular artists at the time namely Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane, Jim Valentino and Erik Larsen the explicit purpose of the publisher was to offer a feasible alternate within mainstream superhero comics to Marvel and DCs contracts, which robbed the writer/artist of any rights to their own work. Historically, exploitation has always been the dark not-so-secret side of superhero comics. For example, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, spent much of their lives hovering close to the poverty line while their iconic man of steel became a billion dollar property. Taking a stand against this nonsense was and remains a big deal. Image series featured original characters without 50 years of popular baggage and sold on the popularity of the creators behind them. And unlike an indie publisher like Fantagraphics, Image comics reached a mass audience beyond the hip graphic novel scene, which had not yet grown to encompass bookstores and newspaper columns.

In many ways, Image was the ideal model, but their marketing strategies were less than utopian. Many mock the content of their comics from this time, shoulderpadded extreme nonsense drawn quickly with a poor sense of proportion and all the worst boys club impulses. I actually wouldnt go that far myself, as these comics arent exactly Persepolis, but they have a certain charm in their exclamatory energy. Liefeld and McFarlane are particularly appealing in a gnarly camp sort of way. The real issue wasnt the content, but how irrelevant the content was. Most every comic Image Comics published at that time was sold as a collectors item with at least a couple variant covers (the most infamous of these being Bloodstrike #1, whose gelatinous variant cover beckoned the buyer to Rub the Blood!). This inflated collectors market was initially fueled by the then-shocking auction sales of rare superhero comics from the 40s, 50s and 60s, but Images ferocious push on this speculation back and forth with Marvel and others added gasoline to the bonfire. Eventually, people began to realize that Violator vs. Badrock #2 wasnt going to put their kid through college, and the flame of speculation was extinguished, leading to a moment of industry-wide failures and bankruptcy even Marvel filed for chapter 11 from which the direct market scene arguably still hasnt totally recovered.

Recently, Image has come back into vogue as a publisher, mainly due to the success of The Walking Dead, a TV show spun off from one of their longest-running comics. However, what has allowed Image to muscle in on that coveted third place in the mainstream market alleged third, seeing as the sci-fi series Saga outsells most Marvel and DC books that arent Spider-Man or Batman is not Images own success but rather the failures of their competition. Vertigo, DC Entertainments mature readers imprint, previously occupied that space in the comics market with beloved titles like Neil Gaimans Sandman, but their cachet has stumbled massively in recent years since editor and founder Karen Berger left the imprint. Without her curatorial force, Vertigo has stumbled aimlessly through bad ideas and vanity projects, while Image developed a prestige television vibe that beckons new readers to their books.

The Image Comics that exists today is quite admirable in many regards. Their books are usually handsomely designed, (although the actual artistry on display may vary in its success) publications that might even gasp reach an actual audience. The work of editor David Brothers and others have pushed a greater creative diversity and diversity in creators Image publishes the Brandon Graham-curated anthology Island, which is among the most forward-thinking comics publications out there, period. And most importantly, creators own their work and receive fair compensation, still a shockingly alien concept for most publishers today.

And yet, a certain malaise seems to set in. Most of Images comics are boring, stiffly drawn art married to aggressively bland writing. Many of these titles are clearly written with multimedia potential in mind more than creative freedom, using decompressed storytelling as a pretense to spread the content of a television pilot over 6 months of single issues that cost four dollars each. Images top-selling titles are like little packages of nothing you follow them in anticipation of a morsel of something, 1000 pages from now, or in an adaptation, or perhaps a long form blog post by an adolescent youll never meet. This isnt creative freedom, this is comics dystopia.

Under the lens of late stage capitalism, the strengths and flaws of Image Comics from its inception in 1992 to today begin to make sense. Images publishing model offers an alternative to creators dissatisfied with the Big Twos system of ownership while stressing the commodification of product over celebration of artistry. There is no inherent protection under Images rules beyond what is stated in a contract, nor is a great deal of emphasis put on pursuing excellence. There is no comradery, only ambition for personal gain at the expense of fellow artists and eager readers alike. The conundrum of Image, the bad but good, the brilliant and crass, the artists in the mainstream, all of this boils down to a decision that financial capital and the rapid movement of product would be the best system to bring fair compensation to creators exploitation countered by self-exploitation. One wonders what the comics world might look like today if Images star founders had decided to unionize and demand new industry-wide standards instead of building a new comics factory.

Nathan Chazan is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at ndc39@cornell.edu.

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CHAZAN | The Revolution Will Not Have Shoulderpads: Image Comics 25 Years Later - Cornell University The Cornell Daily Sun

During the height of the violent protests by the anti-war movement in the late 60s, a cartoon circulated that reflected the shock parents experienced at their long-haired, profanity-spewing communist-flag waving children. In an attempt to soothe said parents the cartoon had one wife telling her husband, Dont worry about it, honey. Why, even Max Eastman ended up writing for Readers Digest.

This implication that Eastman, once nearly thrown in jail for supposedly violating the Espionage Act by opposing World War I on socialist grounds, had now embraced the establishment depends heavily on which establishment one is talking about.

It is certainly true that by the 1940s, the former proponent of the Bolshevik Revolution had veered rightward, abandoning even socialism and embracing the anticommunism of the Readers Digest where he worked.

But if one considers the intellectual zeitgeist as one feature of the establishment, then Eastman was never part of it; indeed, he spent a large part of his life as a minority of one.

While American crowds cheered Woodrow Wilsons declaration of war in 1917, Eastman denounced Americas entry into World War I as simply to make money for the upper classes. When he continued to oppose the war through his writings for the anti-war left-wing Masses magazine, Eastman was prosecuted by the government for supposedly violating the Espionage Act, which made it a federal crime to agitate against the war (Eastman won the case).

In the early 20s, he was a frequent visitor to Bolshevik Russia and was very much the premature anti-Stalinist while other leftists praised Stalin. Eastman, by turns, caught the thuggish nature of the then-Party member Stalin early and warned that the Soviet Union would slide into dictatorship should Stalin take power.

Sidney Hook, an anti-Stalinist Marxist who nonetheless was frequently at loggerheads with Eastman, praised Eastman as a lone voice warning against Stalin:

Of all the forms of intellectual independence Eastman displayed in his life, nothing matched the courage he had to summon up when he stood practically alone on his return from the Soviet Union in 1924. He had brought with him the first hard evidence of the Stalinization of the Bolshevik regime. In consequence, he became a rebel outcast in his own country and a pariah in the radical movement that had been central to his life.

This isolation would be even more accentuated in the 1930s when intellectuals became Stalinists. As a result, Eastmans books were largely ignored, and it reviewed by leftists were denounced as reactionary.

By the late 1930s, Eastman had abandoned even Leon Trotskys brand of Marxism and was a decided anticommunist.

When he brought these views with him into the World War II era when the Soviets and the United States were military partners, and even rock-ribbed Republicans like Henry Luce were praising Stalin, Eastman remained a voice in the wilderness.

By now regarded by even liberal anticommunists as a senile reactionary, Eastman bucked the intellectual tide even further by supporting Senator Joseph McCarthys anticommunist crusade in the 1950s. While liberals denounced McCarthy by the term of red-baiter, Eastman defended both the Senator and that term:

Red Baiting in the sense of reasoned, documented exposure of Communist and pro-Communist infiltration of government departments and private agencies of information and communication is absolutely necessary. We are not dealing with honest fanatics of a new idea, willing to give testimony for their faith straightforwardly, regardless of the cost. We are dealing with conspirators who try to sneak in the Moscow-inspired propaganda by stealth and double talk, who run for shelter to the Fifth Amendment when they are not only permitted but invited and urged by Congressional committee to state what they believe. I myself, after struggling for years to get this fact recognized, give McCarthy the major credit for implanting it in the mind of the whole nation.

Now writing for William F. Buckleys pro-McCarthy National Reviewhe was an original contributing editorEastman in 1955 completely repudiated the revolution he once so fervently championed:

Instead of liberating the mind of man, the Bolshevik revolution locked it into a states prison tighter than ever before. No flight of thought was conceivable, no poetic promenade even, to sneak through the doors or peep out of a window in this pre-Darwinian dungeon called Dialectic Materialism. No one in the western world has any idea of the degree to which Soviet minds are closed and sealed tight against any idea but the premises and conclusions of this antique system of wishful thinking. So far as concerns the advance of human understanding, the Soviet Union is a gigantic road-block, armed, fortified and defended by indoctrinated automatons made out of flesh, blood and brains in robot-factories they call schools.

As supportive of the Cold War as Buckley, Eastman typically parted company with conservatives on the magazine. Against Buckleys fervent Catholicism, Eastman remained an atheist (the magazines increasingly pro-Christian viewpoint would force Eastman to leave it in the 1960s). Always willing to entertain second thoughts, the free marketeer (Eastman helped publish the libertarian Frederich Von Hayek) now believed the conservative movement had been taken over by reactionary forces who confused the quest of social justice with Communist treason.

His final gesture of independence from the movement he was now part of occurred when he opposed the Vietnam War.

At first glance, Eastman would seem to be merely a knee-jerk rebel. But there is a consistent strain in his thinking that traced back to his days as a political leftist radical. The theme he lived by was provided in, of all places, The Masses magazine, when he wrote that the mission of the periodical was to be directed against rigidity and dogma wherever it is found.

And that was Eastmans creed, be it on the Right or the Left.

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Max Eastman: Curmodgeon - The Liberty Conservative

Approximately 50 protesters stage a die-in on a street outside of the Pentagon City Mall in Arlington, Virginia, on November 29, 2014, to show solidarity with protesters in Ferguson, Missouri. (Photo: Joseph Gruber)

An Arizona bill that sought to prosecute protest organizers like racketeers is officially dead after widespread outcry forced state lawmakers to put that effort to rest, marking a victory for the national resistance movement currently facing a rash of legislation aimed at stifling dissent.

Arizona House Speaker J.D. Mesnard announced late Monday that the bill,SB 1142, would not move forward in the legislature.

"I haven't studied the issue or the bill itself, but the simple reality is that it created a lot of consternation about what the bill was trying to do," Mesnard, a Republican,toldthePhoenix New Times. "People believed it was going to infringe on really fundamental rights. The best way to deal with that was to put it to bed."

Indeed, the legislation, which would have expanded state racketeering laws to allow police to arrest and seize the assets of suspected protest organizers, made national headlines last week afterpassingthe GOP-led Senate.

However,according toTheArizona Republic, the bill's "fate was sealed over the weekend" as Mesnard "fielded phone calls from the public to complain about the bill. The House leader's personal cellphone number is listed on his personal website. As he listened to the callers, Mesnard realized their belief that the legislation was intended to curb free-speech rights outweighed any merits its supporters might put forward. He carefully read the legislation and by the time he returned Monday to his office, where there were more than 100 messages about the bill awaiting him, he decided he would kill the measure."

The so-called "Plan a Protest, Lose Your House Bill" was the most recent state-level attempt to crackdown on the growing protest movement and opponents celebrated its defeat.

"Thanks to everyone who spoke out against this terrible proposal!" the ACLU of Arizonawroteon Twitter. "Continue fighting for our civil liberties!"

Arecent analysisby theWashington Postfound that "Republican lawmakers in at least 18 states have introduced on voted on legislation to curb mass protests," which includes bills that would "increase punishmentsfor blocking highways,ban the use of masksduring protests, [and] indemnify drivers whostrike protesterswith their cars."

AsCommon Dreamshas previouslyobserved, most of these anti-protest bills have sprouted up in Republican-dominated states that have seen a flurry of demonstrations and civil disobedience.

In Minnesota, where people protested the police killings of Philando Castile and Jamar Clark by blocking roads, measures aimed at raising the penalties for obstructing traffic are gaining traction. Numerous bills wereapprovedby public safety committees in both the House and Senate last week, despite vocalopposition.

Running down some of the other pending legislative efforts,The Atlantic's Matt FordwroteTuesday:

Tennessee lawmakersintroducedtheir own civil-liability bill in February. [...]

Iowa'sSenate File 111would make blocking highways a felony offense with a possible five-year prison sentence.

In Washington, a version of the highway-protest bills came in response to environmentalist-led demonstrations that had targeted the oil industry. State Senator Doug Ericksen introducedSenate Bill 5009, also titled the Preventing Economic Disruption Act. It allows prosecutors to seek longer sentences against defendants who commit crimes that cause "economic disruption," which it defines as obstructing commercial vehicles or interfering with pipelines or oil-related facilities.

Meanwhile, public opposition has already defeated numerous other attempts, such asNorth Dakota's "civil liability" bill,aVirginia effortthat would have brought potential jail time for attending a protest, and now Arizona's SB 1142.

As Lee Rowland, a senior attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, explained to thePost, the new bills are "not about creating new rules that are necessary because of some gap in the law." Rather, Rowland said, the intent is to "increas[e] the penalties for protest-related activity to the point that it results in self-censorship among protesters who have every intention to obey the law."

The laws as well as the impulse to label protesters as "paid" or "professional" agitators are simply "standard operating procedure for movement opponents," according to Douglas McAdam, a Stanford sociology professor who studies protest movements.

"For instance, southern legislatures -- especially in the Deep South -- responded to the Montgomery Bus Boycott (and the Supreme Court's decision inBrown v. Board of Education) with dozens and dozens of new bills outlawing civil rights groups, limiting the rights of assembly, etc. all in an effort to make civil rights organizing more difficult," he wrote in an email to thePost. "Similarly, laws designed to limit or outlaw labor organizing or limit labor rights were common in the late 19th/early 20th century."

The Atlantic's Ford also concluded that "[t]he proposals as a whole point to a more enduring dynamic: As mass protests return to the political zeitgeist, so too will efforts to clamp down on them."

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Outcry Kills Anti-Protest Law in Arizona, but Troubling Trend Continues Nationwide - Truth-Out

Kendrick Lamars 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly became a zeitgeist. It seemed to arrive right on time and embodied the spirit of American social consciousness amid the growth of a progressive fight for civil rights in the 21st century. Alright became the theme song for a movement, while Lamars visit with President Obama and his visceral Awards performance helped make TPAB a cultural a keystone of conversations about race in America (which is in part why the album is going to be preserved in Harvards archives). As arguably one of the most influential artists in music today, Lamars next album is more than highly anticipated.

Thundercat & Kendrick Lamar Stay In The Groove On Walk On By (Audio)

The Compton artist (Lamar himself identifies as a writer, not a rapper) has kept a generally tight lip around the details of his as-yet-unnamed follow-up project. However, he did unveil the conceptual framework and mindstate behind it in a recent interview with the New York Times T magazine. To Pimp a Butterfly was addressing the problem, he says. Im in a space now where Im not addressing the problem anymore. However, he does seem to feel theres an oversight that needs to be addressed. Were in a time where we exclude one major component out of this whole thing called life: God. Nobody speaks on it because its almost in conflict with whats going on in the world when you talk about politics and government and the system. This is what goes on in my mind as a writer.

Kendrick continues to describe the thought processes informing his approach to the new album, which include visualizations of the daughter he may have some day, and how being the father of a future woman is something he grapples with on a philosophical level. One day, I may have a little girl. Shes gonna grow up. Shes gonna be a child I adore, Im gonna always love her, but shes gonna reach that one point where shes gonna start experiencing things, he says. And shes gonna say things or do things that you may not condone, but its the reality of it and you know she was always gonna get to that place. And its disturbing. But you have to accept it.

R.A. Shows That Even Rugged Men Change With Fatherhood (Video)

Its then that he expounds upon not addressing the problem anymore. You have to accept it and you have to have your own solutions to figure out how to handle the action and take action for it. When I say the little girl, its the analogy of accepting the moment when she grows up. We love women, we enjoy their company. At one point in time I may have a little girl who grows up and tells me about her engagements with a male figure things that most men dont want to hear.

Learning to accept it, and not run away from it, thats how I want this album to feel, he says.

In a video package for the magazine, Lamar says he makes music because of its powers as a form of self-expression, but also because it allows him to be a voice for those that cant release their frustration on the mic, you know. They gotta do it on the streets. He adds, I wanna put my stories and their stories together for the world to hear.

There is no news yet about when Heads can expect a new Kendrick Lamar album, but from the words he speaks in this interview, its likely to be a powerful token of artistry and once again, it will be right on time. As he says, Its very urgent.

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Kendrick Lamar Gives A Glimpse Into His Mindset As He Approaches His New Album (Video) - Ambrosia For Heads

She simply felt a powerful inner resistance to paying any price in foreign currency.

Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T.

1. The Angel in the Novel

Call this an act of piety and self-education. Academia has sacrificed entire forests to the altar of Jane Austen, and I am not likely to add one whit to the pile. But her novel Mansfield Park has been gnawing at me for two decades, ever since I taught it at Skidmore College to a class of privileged young people who might have walked out of its pages. (One vivacious co-ed wore platform shoes and glitter on her eyelids and regularly skipped sessions to attend a mysterious court case on Marthas Vineyard.) My copy is a palimpsest of notes, multicoloured highlights, underlining, and plastic flags. Its been through a basement flood, and the rippled pages have sprung from the spine. I have a digital copy on my computer, equally marked up testament to my obsession.

Mansfield Park is a brilliant book, a great book, breathtaking in its invention and orchestration. The British critic of the novel Q. D. Leavis called it the first modern novel in England. And yet it is alien territory for the contemporary reader. Whereas we live in a culture of instant gratification and intimate sharing, Austens best people find impulse and promiscuous self-expression dangerous if not pernicious. They strive to train their thoughts and emotions like garden plants; they value comfort over adventure; they practice self-command, as they call it, learn self-sacrifice and restraint. For us, restraint is tantamount to repression. It has been over a century since Freuds talking cure leapt from the analysts couch to the living rooms of the West; self-denial (good) has become simply denial (bad).

In this regard Mansfield Park is perhaps the quintessential Austen novel and the least romantic romance ever written. The heroine, Fanny Price, wins the love of her life, her cousin Edmund Bertram (an Anglican clergyman), not by pursuing the object of her affection but by default after the love of his life, Mary Crawford, comes up morally short. Its not what Mary does thats wrong; its the way she thinks. Mary Crawford calls her brothers adultery a folly, while straight arrow Edmund calls it a dreadful crime. Fanny Price, the last woman standing after the implosion of the Bertram and Crawford families, goes even further, calling it a sin of the first magnitude, here touching the Christian bedrock that defines the moral structure of the book. Everything hangs on a fine discrimination of ethical intention, and Fanny is the only one who gets it right.

Fanny Price is a good person, a paragonhumble, grateful, dutiful, self-sacrificing, and restrained. Shes very much like two other reticent, long-suffering Austen heroines, Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility and Anne Elliott in Persuasion, except that in Mansfield Park Austen takes an uncharacteristically sharp turn into the theological underpinnings of early nineteenth-century English morality. Without Austen actually mentioning it (there are no prayers, sermons, church-goings, or appeals to God), the question of holiness suffuses the book. It does this obliquely via the ordination theme. In a letter to her sister, Austen wrote, it [Mansfield Park] shall be a complete change of subjectOrdination, that is to say, taking holy orders, becoming an Anglican priest (though, of course, it is not the heroine but her love interest who is ordained). Holiness may perhaps not be the correct word, since Austen keeps a tight rein on her otherworldly intimations. Her strategy is apophatic; she is more intent on describing the here and now and, through Fanny, critiquing its ethical superficiality than talking about faith, grace, and other divine interventions. With typical Austenian irony, she leaves it to her villain, Henry Crawford, to recognize Fannys figurative divinity:

You have qualities which I had not before supposed to exist in such a degree in any human creature. You have some touches of the angel in you beyond whatnot merely beyond what one sees, because one never sees anything like itbut beyond what one fancies might be. (284) [My emphasis throughout.]

By virtue of his role, a priest is a mediator, a link between the divine and the human. This is what Edmund Bertram is meant to become as the novel opens. Austen constructs his plot as a triad: Edmund pulled in two directions between Mary Crawford and Fanny Price. Though, of course, Fanny doesnt tell Edmund shes in love, nor does he recognize her as a love object until the very end of the novel. She is rather an expression of his best moral and spiritual inclinations, a model, reminder, and example. Mary Crawford represents the seduction of worldly pleasure; Fanny represents a narrowly ethical life, self-denying, dutiful, restrained, and devout; and the novel is Edmunds Pilgrims Progress.

What Fanny possesses that the other characters do not is an inner guide (We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it...(341)), a principle of discrimination and self-discipline. There is a beautiful thematic passage near the end of the novel that makes the point: this is Sir Thomas Bertram meditating on the catastrophic choices his children have made and the defects of the education he has given them.

Something must have been wanting within, or time would have worn away much of its ill effect. He feared that principle, active principle, had been wanting; that they had never been properly taught to govern their inclinations and tempers by that sense of duty which can alone suffice. (382)

The phrase active principle is an Evangelical Anglican keyword. See for example William Wilberforces 1797 book A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, In the Higher and Middle Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity:

Religion...may be considered as the implantation of a vigorous and active principle; it is seated in the heart, where its authority is recognised as supreme, whence by degrees it expels whatever is opposed to it, and where it gradually brings all the affections and desires under its complete control and regulation.

This sentence can stand as a rough guide to understanding Fanny Prices character and the structure of the novel. Fanny doesnt have a plot in the usual sense of that term. At critical moments, she steadfastly refuses to act. But she bears an active principle in her heart, and her constant struggle is to school her thoughts and emotions toward goodness in a tainted world. You might call this a plot by another name, a mysteriously atypical plot-that-refuses-plot, and Austen uses it to draw a line between Mansfield Parks real Christians (Fanny, and, finally, Edmund) and professed Christians (everyone else).

Austen was not an Evangelical (she had a brother, Henry, who became an Evangelical clergyman after a failed career in banking). But it is in the nature of novel-writing to exaggerate positions for dramatic contrast. Evangelicals, influenced by European Protestantism, stressed individual faith, humility, and the ultimate sinfulness of mankind; think of them as Anglican born-agains but professing a nuanced distinction not rebellion. They were rather dour, proto-Victorians in our stereotyped understanding of the word.

Yet the Evangelical emphasis on the heart behind the act, the inner intention, fits very well with Austens own emphasis on Fanny Prices interiority, her dramatic soliloquies, her refusal to act where she cannot find a principled path, and her disapproval of frivolous amateur theatricals (precursors of what come to be thought of as Victorian values). It helps Austen find a dramatic perspective within the novel from which to judge the ethical superficiality of people like the Crawfords. A basic distinction to keep in mind when reading the novel is between characters who act out of principle and characters who act because they want something, whether it be money, admiration, or love. Austen announces the mercenary spin of Mansfield Parks presiding ideology in the precise calculations of the first two sentences.

About thirty years ago Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronets lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income. All Huntingdon exclaimed on the greatness of the match, and her uncle, the lawyer, himself, allowed her to be at least three thousand pounds short of any equitable claim to it. (5)

2. Impulsivity & Slaves, a Little Context

Mansfield Park, published in 1814, was Austens third novel in order of publication after Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813). Emma appeared in 1815, and Austen died in 1817 at the age of 41. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously. Austen grew up in an Anglican rectory. When she was very young, she was sent away to school but contracted typhoid fever and nearly died. She lived most of her adult life with her economically insecure family (her father had to take in private students to make ends meet). She never married. It is unlikely she ever had sexual intercourse. She was already writing brilliantly when she was fifteen. Her best friend and confidante was her sister Cassandra. She had several brothers, two of whom became admirals in the Royal Navy, and one, as I have said, who became an Evangelical clergyman. There is evidence that she had more than one Austen-esque flutter with a young man, including a marriage proposal that she accepted and then turned down the next morning. Her novels are romantic comedies about young women jockeying for suitable husbands in provincial England. Usually, the young women come from economically insecure branches of upper-middle-class families. It was a time when women made their financial success or failure by the choice of the man they married. Otherwise they remained single and lived with the help of relatives, as did Austen herself.

English society throughout Austens short adult life was coloured by the events of the French Revolution and its aftermath, the Napoleonic Wars, and to a lesser degree the American Revolution and its aftermath, the War of 1812. It was an era when (apparently) poor impulse control had catastrophic international consequences and rebellious children caused horrendous imperial headaches; family and politics were reciprocally interchangeable metaphors. At the same time, Britain was in the early throes of the Industrial Revolution and a parallel surge in capitalist expansion fueled by the Enclosure Acts (1750-1860), which dumped immense numbers of rural unemployed (the so-called, oxymoronic, free labour pool) into factory towns, not to mention slave labour in the colonies.

African slavery and the Enclosure Acts created the surplus accumulation upon which modern capitalism is founded. Austen mentions the slave trade only once in Mansfield Park, in dialogue, though, of course, it is tacitly understood that slaves supply the labour on the Bertram estate in Antigua. When Fanny raises the topic with her uncle, her question is met with a dead silence (166), a response that can be read in many different ways but remains undetermined. The aforementioned Wilberforce and the Anglican Evangelicals were at the forefront of the English anti-slavery movement, which fits with Fannys implied disapproval.

New wealth (accompanied by a sense of entitlement and class privilege) and conservative tendencies were in the air Austen breathed; in this sense, Mansfield Park reflects the zeitgeist precisely, with its emphasis on emotional restraint, its use of the discourse of class and finance (income, interest, property) to gauge marital prospects, and its suppression of riot and rebellion amongst the younger generation of Bertrams. Maria Bertram, the scapegoat of the novel, fails to bury the tumult of her feelings under the restraint of society (162), commits adultery, and ends up exiled from the family.

3. What Happens

The edition I am using (Penguin Classics, 1996) runs to 390 pages, divided into three volumes (that function much like acts in a play with dramatic climaxes at the end of each) and 48 chapters. Fanny Price is the daughter of an impecunious, disabled lieutenant of Marines with a superfluity of children, living in the major naval town of Portsmouth. At the opening of the novel, Fanny goes to live in Northampton with the wealthy Bertrams (Lady Bertram is her mothers sister). Inviting her is an act of familial charity on the part of Sir Thomas Bertram, and Fanny is never allowed to integrate fully into the Bertram brood for this reason. Sir Thomas has two sons and two daughters, Tom, Edmund, Julia, and Maria. Edmund is the earnest second son; since he cant inherit the estate, he is bent on being ordained a clergyman with a living somewhere nearby. He befriends Fanny, helps with her education, and she falls in love with him without quite admitting it to herself and certainly not to Edmund or anyone else; she knows her place. Edmund loves her in his own way (as a sister, he keeps repeating), admiring her for their similarities: sense of duty, kindness, delicacy, and bookishness.

A fast, entertaining, and wealthy brother-and-sister duo, Henry and Mary Crawford, move into the neighbourhood. Edmund fancies Mary and a cat-and-mouse, book-length courtship ensues; Fanny watches and suffers. Henry Crawford is a delicious flirt; he goes after Julia, then Maria (who is already engaged). Sir Thomas has left for Antigua to fix something untoward with his plantation. In his absence, the young people get up to mischief that climaxes in a series of intense and inappropriate flirtations during rehearsals for a little amateur theatrical production they intend to perform, these illicit flirtations only brought to a thunderous and embarrassing halt on Sir Thomass return (a book burning ensues, the play books).

The young crowd scatters. Tom goes off to drink and gamble, Julia to socialize with friends and hunt a husband, Maria to her new husbands estate and town house. With no one else around to distract him, Henry Crawford pays suit to Fanny; he actually comes to recognize and value her good qualities, and he has good qualities of his own despite his impulsiveness (the reader is quite attracted at first, all the while knowing that Austen has dark plans for him). Henry makes an awkward marriage proposal; Sir Thomas becomes involved in forwarding the match, but despite his best efforts he cant convince Fanny to say yes to Henry. She has two good reasons, neither of which she can speak: she doesnt trust Henry and shes in love with Edmund. Annoyed by her silence, which he interprets as stubborn irrationality (Henry is rich, after all), Sir Thomas sends Fanny back to her family in Portsmouth to think things over in penitential squalor. This plan seems tantalizingly close to working. Fanny immediately misses the Bertrams and their estate, her health suffers, and Henry visits her, showing moral improvement and steadfastness of intention.

But then, back in the social jungle of London, the veneer of propriety comes unglued. Henry and Maria reanimate their affections and, horror of horrors, defy convention by running away together. Julia also elopes with an acquaintance from those amateur theatricals. Tom falls ill from carousing and returns to Mansfield Park on deaths door. Finally, Edmund uncovers Marys ethical superficiality and breaks off his relationship with her. Fanny has long recognized Marys failings, but she has kept her mouth shut as usual, suffering in silence. She returns to Mansfield Park to help look after the wounded family, especially Edmund, who eventually emerges from his disappointment and recognizes her not only as a figurative sister but as a potential marriage partner. They are set to live happily ever after. Not so poor Maria who cannot be resuscitated from disgrace. She is packed off to a distant place, though still supported comfortably by those long-suffering and nameless slaves.

4. A Structure of Threes

The novel is elaborately and intricately orchestrated. This is its genius a pure vein of what John Shade, the poet of Nabokovs Pale Fire (1962), refers to as combinatorial delight. You cant but admire the great rhythmic surges of action that intensify and climax at the end of each of the three volumes, the way that each event neatly evolves out of previous events like segments of a telescope tube being pulled open, the gorgeously elaborated system of subplots, and the way every action, speech, and bit of stage property (Fannys pony, the amber cross, Sir Thomass bookcase, the fire in the East room) does double or triple duty as a symbol or parallel of something else. From my very first reading, I was fascinated by the Wilderness set piece at Rushworths Sotherton estate, a gorgeously choreographed sequence of events that parallels and foreshadows the events of the entire novel. I can think of nothing as good save for the steeplechase chapter in Anna Karenina in which careless Vronsky rides his mare to death while Anna, with her husband in the stands, looks on.

You can imagine the various plots as a series of triangles (Austen seems to love triangles) with Henry-Fanny-Edmund at the centre (the refusal plot that magically turns into a marriage at the end): then Fanny-Edmund-Mary (Edmund torn between Mary and ordination), and Julia-Henry-Maria (flirtation and jealousy inspiring Marias passion), which segues into Rushworth-Maria-Henry, which goes on hiatus while Henry chases Fanny Fanny-Henry-Maria only to explode in adulterous flames at the end. In effect, Austen sets Fannys interior plot inside a system of multiple contrasting romantic subplots all on the restraint-lack of restraint (inaction-action) axis backed by her moral-religious thematics. All the subordinate plots involve various conventional erotic/romantic manoeuvres that seem shallow, venal, and inconstant in contrast with Fannys persistent and unspoken love for Edmund. In other words, you learn to read the subplots from the critical point of view of the main plot and vice versa.

You can further imagine the book as a play in three acts, three large rhythmic units, huge waves that gather, surge, and break, and then begin again. Each of the first two volumes ends with a climactic explosion that is followed in the beginning of the next volume with an aftermath: moral tidying up, expulsion or scattering of key characters, and a sense of gathering or redisposition of the dramatic forces. So Volume I looks at the intense flirtation amongst the young people climaxing in the rehearsals for the play and Sir Thomass unexpected return. Volume II, after the tidying up, presents Sir Thomass well-meant plan to launch Fanny socially in parallel with Henry Crawfords romantic pursuit (the one abetting and complicating the other) leading to his shocking marriage proposal and Fannys even more shocking (to Sir Thomas) refusal.

Volume III begins with the tidying up, once again Sir Thomas trying to get control of events. This is not to be dismissed, though I use that phrase tidying up, because the first scenes here between Fanny and Sir Thomas, Fanny and Henry, Fanny and Mary, and Fanny and Edmund are the absolute moral centre of the novel, stunningly well written and intense. This is where Fanny appears utterly exposed yet admirable. This is where you come to understand the net of crossed moral imperatives that enjoins her silence and the obdurate stubbornness of her essential soul. But then, yes, everyone scatters again, Fanny to Portsmouth, Henry to his estate, Mary to London, Edmund soon to follow, etc. Volume III ends dramatically with the offstage explosion of moral turpitude (Henry and Maria) in London and contains its own aftermath when Fanny and Edmund return to Mansfield Park. The narrator tells us what Sir Thomas has learned, brings Fanny and Edmund together, and then sketches in future bliss in the final chapter.

The two dramatic explosions at the ends of Volumes I and II both require Fanny to make difficult moral choices, difficult in that she is alone in her decision and everyone around her is against her, providing her with conventionally moral and prudential (venal) imperatives counter to her own. The theatrical rehearsals and Fannys refusal to act a part in Volume I foreshadow Henrys marriage proposal and her refusal at the close of Volume II (and frame the inverse at the close of Volume III when Mary Crawford fails to take a moral stand in regard to her brothers adultery). Both these climactic explosions involve disappointing Sir Thomas. At the beginning of Volume II (after the theatrical catastrophe), he is disappointed with everyone except Fanny, and this is the inspiration for his special attention to her that leads through her brother William's visit and the ball to Henry's proposal. But at the beginning of Volume III (after the proposal and refusal), Sir Thomas is disappointed with Fanny and no one else. This is a fascinating pattern of repetition and variation that foregrounds the special relationship of gratitude, duty, and regard that exists between Sir Thomas and Fanny. Sir Thomas is the source of all good things and her sense of gratitude towards him is such that at times of difficulty it renders her mute.

5. Absence at the Core

Naturally timid but also constrained by social inferiority and duty to her benefactors, the Bertram family, Fanny creates a strange and disturbing absence at the core of Mansfield Park. Instead of driving plot by acting to achieve her desires, Fanny Price spends most of her time observing the action of subordinate characters and struggling to achieve equanimity by restraining her feelings and constraining her thoughts. When Fanny does rouse herself to act, it is in the negative, a refusal to act (rather like Melvilles Bartleby with his insistent I would prefer not to). As a result of her outward restraint, she is often misinterpreted, overlooked, and even forgotten by the other characters who misread her. In the novels third volume, as I say, Austen exiles Fanny from the plot entirely, sending her to Portsmouth while the rest of the interested characters go to London (Fanny and the reader only know what happens via letters). There is a note of comedy in this; even the author, it seems, can dispense with Fannys services.

Its a critical commonplace that Fanny is not universally admired among readers. C. S. Lewis called her out for insipidity.

One of the most dangerous literary ventures is the little, shy, unimportant heroine whom none of the other characters value. The danger is that your readers may agree with the other characters. (A Note on Jane Austen)

And an apoplectic Kingsley Amis (in a masterpiece of literary invective entitled What Became of Jane Austen?) condemned her as a monster of complacency and pride who, under a cloak of cringing self-abasement, dominates and gives meaning to the novel. Such a reading, as Lewis suggested, is a consequence of the protagonists passivity, which introduces a degree of what we might call hermeneutic play, a looseness of the novel joints. Without a concrete aim to define the meaning of a characters actions (or inaction), readers may tilt to contrary interpretation. Yet it remains rather curious that Lewis, so religious himself, should miss the drama of Fanny Prices religiosity.

Conventional (I nearly typed contemptible) wisdom dictates that there can be no real story where the main character prefers to hide behind her needle work and is constantly being left out or behind while suffering without complaint. When writer-director Patricia Rozema made her 1999 movie Mansfield Park, she felt compelled to tart up the novel with contemporary pastiche. She reinvented Fanny as a writer (like Jane Austen, using bits of Austens own unpublished work), introduced a lesbian flirtation between Fanny and Mary Crawford, turned poor, dozy Lady Bertram into a drug addict, and forced Sir Thomas Bertram to renounce slavery. This is a travesty based on bad reading and the assumption (probably correct) that most contemporary readers are equally bad.

But it begs the question: How do you talk about absolute things in a novel? God, beauty, goodness, saints, and true love? Fannys problem is how to be good (selfless, dutiful, principled, otherworldly) in a world in which all the usual assumptions swing towards calculation, mere prudence, or outright cupidity. The paradox of an absolutist morality is that there can be no acts of pure selflessness in the real world; thus Fanny cannot act hence her curiously apophatic aura: her disapproval, her silence, her stubborn refusals. She defines herself by demonstrating what she cannot do. Silence for her has the clarity of resolution; rather than do wrong or complain of others (also wrong), she will be mute.

But the novel is a child of technology, offspring of writing, paper, and the book, with a materialist bias. In a novel, its difficult to speak of absolutes. In 1868, just as he was beginning his novel The Idiot (another novel about a Christ-like character), Dostoevsky wrote to his niece describing the difficulty of what he was trying to accomplish.

The main idea of the novel is to portray a positively beautiful person. Theres nothing more difficult than that in the whole world, and especially now. All the writers, and not just ours, but even all the European ones, who ever undertook the depiction of a positively beautiful person, always had to pass. Because its a measureless ideal.

6. Desire, Restraint, & the Invention of Consciousness

There is plenty of sexual energy in Mansfield Park. No one writes more astutely about raging hormones, flirtation, and the role of jealousy as an erotic accelerant than Jane Austen. The Wilderness set piece at Sotherton and the play rehearsals following it are little masterpieces of erotic psychology and narrative foreplay. And the climax (pun intended) of the novel is a volcanic eruption of illicit desire; though it is off stage and not named as such, the implication is that Henry Crawford and Maria Bertram simply ran off and jumped into bed. Even Fanny is in love with Edmund, but her sexuality lurks solely in the intensity of her regard, and she never acts on it (the idea of marrying Edmund never crosses her mind). In her thoughts she constantly tamps down jealousy and expectation. She knows it is wrong even to hope that Edmund might give up on Mary Crawford, so she coaches herself to forbear and find solace in helping others (again, this can be comical since she mostly finds solace helping dozy Lady Bertram with her stitches).

One of the most curious and original inventions of the book is Austens use of the technique of free indirect discourse avant la lettre or at least long before James Joyce and Virginia Woolf popularized it. Instead of a plot everyone can have a plot Fanny has a very modern self-consciousness and inner turmoil. Instead of a dramatic action, she has a dramatic mental and emotional life based on a constant triangular effort to adjust her inner state between what she wants, what the world offers her, and a principled goodness. Her renunciation of her own desires paradoxically results in a richer inner self.

Edmund has a plot, while Fanny doesnt. But by virtue of being the central point of view, Fannys character is prioritized for the reader. She is what Nabokov calls the novels sifting agent. We observe Edmunds state of mind through Fannys eyes. Fanny watches, with a distanced concern that seems almost divine, loving but unable to intervene (act). Her inaction in the external world is a direct result of her continuous and intense struggle to give justice to other people and tame her weaker impulses (inaction is thematically linked with morality). When she is silent, it is because a principle prevents her from speaking. But she is thinking.

In the manner of much of her inventiveness, Austen here borrows from Shakespeare, in particular his soliloquies. She elevates thought to the level of dialogue and erases the critical distance between the narrator and the mind of the character. It is as if we overhear Fannys actual thoughts or she is talking out loud to herself (in intense intimacy with the reader). Here is a typical passage from the first volume, Fanny trying to parse her feelings and obligations when everyone is urging her to take a part that is, to act, to perform on stage in the amateur theatrical.

...she had begun to feel undecided as to what she ought to do; and as she walked round the room her doubts were increasing. Was she right in refusing what was so warmly asked, so strongly wished for what might be so essential to a scheme on which some of those to whom she owed the greatest complaisance had set their hearts? Was it not ill-nature, selfishness, and a fear of exposing herself? And would Edmunds judgment, would his persuasion of Sir Thomass disapprobation of the whole, be enough to justify her in a determined denial in spite of all the rest? It would be so horrible to her to act that she was inclined to suspect the truth and purity of her own scruples; and as she looked around her, the claims of her cousins to being obliged were strengthened by the sight of present upon present that she had received from them. The table between the windows was covered with work-boxes and netting-boxes which had been given her at different times, principally by Tom; and she grew bewildered as to the amount of the debt which all these kind remembrances produced. (127)

Fanny defines a moral problem and proceeds by a run of rhetorical questions to examine her soul, her motives, and the various ethical principles involved (duty and gratitude to Sir Thomas, gratitude to cousins). She even suspects the nature of her own vehemence in resisting the invitation to act. I emphasize the crucial sentence in which scruples prevent her from acting because thats the key to her character and the ethical structure of the novel.

And amusingly enough, Fannys self-restraint does have a certain erotic appeal both for Henry Crawford and Edmund Bertram. In fact, Edmund seems to find this abasement one of the most attractive things about Fanny Price. (I wrote an early draft of this essay under the title Bondage Lit.) Witness the masochistic (delight and pain mixed) scene near the end of the novel when Fanny fights to suppress every (just) resentful, jealous, loving bone in her body in order to make herself available to Edmund as a sympathetic interlocutor so that he can freely bemoan and anatomize his breakup with Mary Crawford.

How Fanny listened, with what curiosity and concern, what pain and what delight, how the agitation of his voice was watched, and how carefully her own eyes were fixed on any object but himself, may be imagined. (375)

By the end of the scene Fanny has accomplished what she set out to do, which is to win Edmunds trust, create an intimate bond in his mind, and become his necessary confidante. Fannys friendship was all that he had to cling to. (379)

7. Religion, Education, & The Amber Cross

The novel focuses on a contrast between Fanny Price and everyone else (each character representing a degree of superficiality and calculation if not outright corruptionEdmund Bertram being nearest Fanny in goodness and poor Henry Crawford, in a tie with Maria Bertram, being the most remote). Austen situates Fanny in a transitional axis between a Christianity of ardent, principled practice and a new faux Christianity that is more about appearances, just as she is situated (in a structural triangle of her own) between Edmund Bertram and Henry Crawford).

As I say, there are no church-goings, prayers, sermons, or direct appeals to God in Mansfield Park, but the thematic orchestration of the novel is such that religion forms a crucial part of the discourse of the characters. No one goes to church in the novel, but the chapel scene at Sotherton is a set piece illustration of a religious culture in transition. Fanny is disappointed; the signs of awe and mystery are absent, and the chapel is no longer a locus of family and community worship as it once was. This is also the scene in which Mary Crawford discovers Edmunds intention to be ordained but not before she has dropped a joke about the conventional image of lazy, gluttonous priests. There are no sermons in the novel either, but in the second volume Edmund and Henry Crawford have a lively discussion about giving sermons; Henry would love to give sermons but just once in a while before large audiences and in London.

And there is an ostentatiously symbolic sequence of scenes involving the Henry-Fanny-Edmund triangle and an amber cross Fannys brother has given her. She wants to wear it to the ball in her honour that leads into the climax of Volume II, but she lacks a chain from which to hang it. Henry makes an awkward gift of a chain through his sister Mary, but just a little later Edmund comes through with a beautiful gold chain of his own, which Fanny likes better because its from him. But shes in a tizzy, torn between the conventional obligation of gratitude to Henry and Mary and her hearts delight in Edmunds gift. At the last moment, fate (the author) saves Fanny when it turns out Henrys chain is too large and Edmunds fits the cross perfectly.

Finally, an education theme runs through Mansfield Park; I have not space to explore it except to mention in passing how it inflects the novels Evangelical torque. The Bertram childrens indiscretions raise the question: How does one learn proper restraint? How does one acquire the necessary active principle? And the novels answer is: A proper religious education. This is clear in the expanded version of the thematic passage I cited earlier in the essay, Sir Thomas meditating on his childrens errant ways.

...he gradually grew to feel that it had not been the most direful mistake in his plan of education. Something must have been wanting within, or time would have worn away much of its ill effect. He feared that principle, active principle, had been wanting; that they had never been properly taught to govern their inclinations and tempers by that sense of duty which can alone suffice. They had been instructed theoretically in their religion, but never required to bring it into daily practice. (381-382)

Mary and Henry, too, have been ruined by bad parenting. Henrys behaviour toward women, according to Mary, is detestable because the Admirals lessons have quite spoiled him. (37) The effect of education (222) observes Fanny (a bit primly) when Edmund moans about Marys improper conversation. In contrast, Fanny escapes the effects of the Bertram household by virtue of being an impoverished outsider in the family circle. The chief part of her education comes from Edmund, who, like her, is cut out of the social sweepstakes because he is pre-destined for the priesthood. And once again, Austen gives Henry Crawford the role of recognizing Fannys essentially religious nature (and the connection between manners, principle, and religion).

...her manners were the mirror of her own modest and elegant mind. Nor was this all. Henry Crawford had too much sense not to feel the worth of good principles in a wife, though he was too little accustomed to serious reflection to know them by their proper name; but when he talked of her having such a steadiness and regularity of conduct, such a high notion of honour, and such an observance of decorum as might warrant any man in the fullest dependence on her faith and integrity, he expressed what was inspired by the knowledge of her being well principled and religious. (242-3)

8. Acting & the Inner Drama of Holiness

The novels inner drama of holiness is enacted on two parallel tracks, one truly inward while the other is more conventionally expressed in external action. While Fanny struggles with herself, taming her resentments and schooling herself to humility and self-denial, Edmund pursues the reluctant Mary Crawford (she cant imagine becoming a country parsons wife), at war with himself over her alarming frivolousness. Fannys big dramatic moments are negative and come when she finds herself under relentless pressure to act in ways she finds objectionable, and she refuses.

This is a complex and subtle figure; the structure of the novel plotless pivot reflected against dramatic subplots enacts the theme of the novel, which is ultimately the nature of goodness in a contingent universe. The thematic construction of Fannys plot-that-refuses-plot turns on a triple pun, three senses of the verb to act: to act as in a play, performing a role for an audience; to act in life so as to achieve an effect, manipulate, entertain, or impress; and to act as a moral agent with conscious intention. For a professional actor to act in a play is innocuous, morally neutral (Edmund makes this point). But for a person to pose or dissimulate to achieve an effect can be morally suspect, in Fannys absolute terms, evil.

Austen is emphatic; Fanny announces her inability to act three times.

Me! cried Fanny, sitting down again with a most frightened look. Indeed you must excuse me. I could not act anything if you were to give me the world. No, indeed, I cannot act. (122)

It is not that I am afraid of learning by heart, said Fanny, shocked to find herself at that moment the only speaker in the room, and to feel that almost every eye was upon her; but I really cannot act. (123)

Her constitution, incorporating that active principle, is such that she cannot pretend, in life or on the stage. She is incapable. In life, she must pursue the principled course, and when she cant (for lack of good options or because of conflicting moral imperatives), she falls silent. If pressed, she begs off.

Edmund at first declines to act a part in the play until steamrolled by fears for Mary Crawfords virtue, a dismal shock to Fannys heroic opinion (note the lapse into free indirect discourse).

To be acting! After all his objectionsobjections so just and so public! After all that she had heard him say, and seen him look, and known him to be feeling. Could it be possible? Edmund so inconsistent! Was he not deceiving himself? Was he not wrong? Alas! it was all Miss Crawfords doing. She had seen her influence in every speech, and was miserable....he was to act, and he was driven to it by the force of selfish inclinations only. Edmund had descended from that moral elevation which he had maintained before. (130-131)

In contrast to both Fanny and Edmund, Henry Crawford is a theatrical enthusiast from the get-go, using every rehearsal to flirt outrageously with Maria Bertram. Acting is his habit of being. He acts for entertainment, for applause, for effect, and to persuade, not out of principle. Austen repeatedly demonstrates Henrys inability to be genuine by knowing slips that are her specialty. While visiting Fanny in Portsmouth, Henry makes a show of taking responsibility for his estate and tenants (which, till then, he has mostly ignored).

This was aimed, and well aimed, at Fanny. It was pleasing to hear him speak so properly; here he had been acting as he ought to do. To be the friend of the poor and the oppressed! Nothing could be more grateful to her; and she was on the point of giving him an approving look, when it was all frightened off by his adding a something too pointed of his hoping soon to have an assistant, a friend, a guide in every plan of utility or charity for Everingham: a somebody that would make Everingham and all about it a dearer object than it had ever been yet. (335)

He cannot resist revealing that he has an ulterior motive, that he is acting not out of duty but out of a desire to engage Fannys affection. His intentions are toward an audience and not the counsel of his heart. But such were his habits that he could do nothing without a mixture of evil. (249)

Holiness is a word falling into disuse (as are churches and the clergy). Nor are we accustomed to the idea that our acts are moral acts (we are more apt to call them political in this age of political correctness) that require rigorous self-inquiry as to motives, feelings, duties, and justice. Popular therapeutic dogma enjoins us not to feel guilt but to turn our traumas into identity stories. We do not learn anymore to criticize and correct our emotions. And we are apt to miss the pun on the verb to act and the essentially apophatic nature of its structure. Fanny defines what is right and good by refusing to be calculating, self-regarding, ingratiating, manipulative, or even shrewd about her prospects. She refuses to act on terms that most of the people in the novel find perfectly normal. Shell risk poverty and obloquy rather than betray principle and the man she loves (even when his own enthusiasms lead him elsewhere). And her torment must remain internal, always unspoken, again for the sake of principle.

9. The Via Negativa of Fiction

Apophasis, or the ancient via negativa, assumes that God is outside creation, that He is literally no thing, concludes that He cannot be seen, described, or communicated with, and proceeds to define Him by negatives. Conversely, the only way to know God directly is to bracket out the things of this world. This is the path Fanny Price takes poverty, humility, and exile until Jane Austen rescues her at the very end of the novel.

I can think of two other fictional works that follow the same conceit: the aforementioned Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street by Herman Melville and The Quest for Christa T. by Christa Wolf. Bartleby hires on as a lawyers copyist but refuses to do chores ancillary to copying. I would prefer not is his refrain. He takes up residence in the lawyers office and refuses to leave when hes fired. The lawyer moves, but Bartleby remains. When hes evicted, he haunts the entry and stairwell. Hes arrested, sent to the Tombs, refuses food arranged for him by his former employer, and dies. Bartleby will not even act to preserve his life. Subsequently, it turns out that he has worked as a clerk in the Dead Letter Office in Washington, the repository of dead hopes, affections, and prayers. Bartlebys pallid otherworldliness derives not from religious conviction but from his association with death, which has unfitted him for life, imbued him with a reluctance to act in the world of affairs, and consigned him to the tomb.

The Quest for Christa T. is a fictional memoir of a spirited German girl named Christa who grows up in the time of National Socialism then lives as an adult under Soviet Communism, two rigidly prescriptive ideologies. The word quest in the title is ironic; as Christa Wolf tells us in her essays The Conditions of Narrative, she has set out to create a sort of anti-myth to answer all the male-dominated literary quests. Wolfs heroine Christa is energetic, charming and well-intentioned, but her story is a baffling litany of failure, breakdown and self-defeating impulses. Eventually, she marries and bears a child, only to throw away domestic security for an affair. And then she dies of cancer having accomplished pretty much nothing. Again, this is a plot-that-refuses-plot. Although Christa seems to want to act, she mysteriously stymies herself every step of the way.

The key to understanding Christas failure to thrive lies in a counter story told through the novels word patterns. Christas life is full of teachers, mentors, advisors and interested friends who counsel her to seek health and success by curbing her lively and imaginative impulses. Toe the party line, they say, and by this they dont only mean the Communist Party doxa but also the calculation and prudence necessary to get on in any system.

To survive...has always been mans goal and always will be. This means that at all times conformity is the means to survival: adaptation, conformity at any price.

Conformity, self-extinction, it turns out, is a price that Christa, like Fanny Price, cant pay; as the novel progresses, words like success, adaptation, conformity, calculation, and measuring acquire a sinister aura, and Christas failures begin to look like assertions of a self under pressure from all sides to live the life of compromise. Her neurotic and stubborn resistance, her refusal to deal in false currency, her kenotic dying to the world are paradoxically essential to the preservation of an awakened self. What does it mean to be alive? the novel asks. And of the attempt to be oneself?

10. The Ambiguous Construction of a Self

What is truly paradoxical in Mansfield Park is the way it reaches beyond its satire on the marriage customs of Regency England, beyond the conventions of the romantic comedy, and beyond even its theological torque to tell a very modern story about the construction of a self. Much like Wolfs Christa T., Fanny forges her self not in any positive way but in resisting imperatives, the forms imposed on her by her society and the gaze of the individuals around her. She is not simply a passive character; she is symbolic, fused with theme. I dont want to, I cant act, I wont do thatFanny Prices refrain. She defines what action is by not acting. She defines morality by refusing to act.

The climax of Fannys non-plot is the sequence of scenes after the ball when she steadfastly persists in refusing to marry Henry Crawford. The fact that she cannot tell anyone that she loves Edmund, least of all Edmund himself, who is obstinately smitten with Mary, makes her appear irrationally stubborn. She remains cagey about her distrust of Henry. She cant tell Sir Thomas about it at all; she confides in Mary (discreetly) and Edmund (explicitly), but Mary passes Henrys flirtations off as harmless, and Edmund, too, minimizes Henrys faults and suggests that time will prove his constancy (weasel words).

Above all, Fanny cannot escape their watchful, measuring eyes. Fanny is alternately cajoled, coerced, bludgeoned, and sent into exile, but she remains true to her principles. She is the poor, underclass cousin who has never stood up for herself before; but in these chapters she asserts herself against every authority, including the wishes of the man she loves. She even makes a speech (unique for Fanny) in which she enunciates what might be called the novels quintessential moral (in a novel full of moral discrimination).

I should have thought, said Fanny, after a pause of recollection and exertion, that every woman must have felt the possibility of a mans not being approved, not being loved by someone of her sex, at least, let him be ever so agreeable. Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain, that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself. (292)

This speech reads like a feminist call to arms; those sentiments certainly existed. It asserts Fannys right of self-determination, and in the context of the novel, this radical selfhood stands against the ubiquitous dogma of property, propriety, income, estates, inheritance, class, and rank. By extension, it claims for any individual the right of refusal in the face of what the world offers. The basis of self is apophatic: the ability to say, I am not that, and I am not that either. What the world offers is contingent, mired in circumstance, calculation, and history, rated by pre-existing discourses (habits, traditions, forms). The soul proceeds by denial. Its struggle is less a matter of knowing itself as essence than of knowing when it is not itself. Sorting and discarding the trivia of life is the existential duty of the modern.

That Fanny (and the novel) cant quite live up to this transcendent declaration is a sign of the tension that exists between Austens inspiration, the time in which she wrote, and her preferred genre, the romantic comedy. Fanny must marry Edmund Bertram despite the fact that as Edmund himself concedes, she is too good for him. Even the narrator is only dimly celebratory about the upshot.

With so much true merit and true love, and no want of fortune and friends, the happiness of the married cousins must appear as secure as earthly happiness can be.

This passage is sometimes construed as Austens ironic commentary on the romance genre or the institution of marriage. But we must wait another 150 years for a manifest critique of that ending in the form of John Fowless novel The French Lieutenants Woman in which the author offers readers the possibility, among others, that the disgraced, impoverished, abandoned female lead might continue to exist on her own and even prosper. When her lover finally appears after a gap of years, she remains cool, aloof inviolable; she has her own life and no need of rescuing by a man.

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The Erotics of Restraint, or the Angel in the Novel: A Note on Jane Austen's Mansfield Park - Brooklyn Rail

DULUTH, Minn.- Throughout the years, many Iconic Figures have progressed the Civil Rights movement, and Sunday,images honoring some of those people lined the walls of the Zeitgeist arts building in Duluth, as part of a fundraiser for the local NAACP chapter.

UMD graphic design students created all of the art on the wall, and each one features a black activist and each of the designs were inspired by a black designer.

The images were sold at a silent auction, with half of the proceeds going to the NAACP.

To be able to give something to the NAACP in a way that I can contribute and use my art to do something like that is nice, said Rachel Koch, a Graphic Design Student at UMD.

Terresa Hardaway, Associate Professor of Graphic design at UMD believes teaching students to design for social change is crucial. And this project was a great way to teach them how to do just that.

Graphic design industry, 90 percent white. So when you get racist advertisements or racist commercials, its because people who are designing that and creating that are white, and theyre not open to other cultures, so what I want to teach my students is to make sure they understand what it means to be a designer for the people, said Hardaway.

NAACP members also read black slave narratives in the theatre as part of the event.

We really want to have a footprint in Duluth and let people know the African American culture is in American culture as well, said Stephan Witherspoon the president of the NAACP Duluth Chapter.

The purpose of the fundraiser wasnt just to raise money. Witherspoon says a major goal for the event was to bring the community together, and educate the public about Black history, that is often left out of history classes.

African American history is American history, said Witherspoon.

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NAACP Fundraiser Honors Black Leaders, Activists - FOX 21 Online

Bass discussed the initiatives the company is using to unlock good through mobile marketing initiatives at a Mobile World Congress session in Barcelona today.

She said: "We have a new vector around empathy and how we think about communities in the digital age. Empathy allows us to ignite a social movement for good.

"Whats interesting as we plug into the cultural zeitgeist, we have talked about Brexit and the election in the US, and we saw the Catalan protest outside.

"We are living in an age of anxiety and mistrust. And what was once at the bottom of the hierarchy of needs of safety and trust and shelter and sleep is now of the upmost importance at the top of the pyramid."

In order to address the issues of sleep Johnson & Johnson developed a "clinically proven routine" to help babies sleep better, which includes practices such as giving the baby a warm bath.

To go alongside it Johnson & Johnson created an app called Nod that allows parents to "care and personalise more delightful sleep experiences".

The app has been developed in partnership with analytics firm Mimo, which is helping create a data repository to "offer the next generation of technology enabled sleep solutions".

Nod is primarily being advertised through search and being pushed by clinical professionals when people ask about getting better sleep for themselves and babies.

Johnson & Johnsons other initiatives that use mobile to benefit society is an app for its Listerine brand that allows visually impaired people to realise when people are smiling at them.

The app uses the phones camera to detect the smile and then buzzes to notify the user of a smile.

Bass said: "That is a great example of going beyond than hawking bottles, jars, and tubes but leading with a greater sense of purpose and having mobile help people feel something."

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Johnson & Johnson pursues empathy in an age of 'anxiety and mistrust' - CampaignLive

Casablanca

Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photo by Thinkstock. Still by Warner Bros.

In 1957, the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square kicked off its Humphrey Bogart series with the 1942 classic Casablanca.* Bogart himself had just died, and the response to the film was rapturous. By the fourth or fifth screening, the audience began to chant the lines, the theaters then-manager told Noah Isenberg, author of Well Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend and Afterlife of Hollywoods Most Beloved Movie. It was the dawn of the art-house era, the moment when film was beginning to be taken seriously as an art form by college students who flocked to theaters like the Brattle to see the work of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Michelangelo Antonioni. Casablanca didnt exactly rank among those auteurist masterpieceseven the movies most ardent champions have always described Casablanca, directed by Michael Curtiz and credited to screenwriters Howard Koch and Julius and Philip Epstein, as the quintessential product of the Hollywood studio system. But it nevertheless became a cult object for a generation or two of cinephiles, particularly young men, over the next several decades.

Allen Felix, the fictional film-critic hero of Play It Again, Sam, Woody Allens 1969 play and 1972 film, epitomizes that breed of young man. The film begins with the closing scene of Casablanca, in which Rick Blaine (Bogart) nobly parts from Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) on a misty North African tarmac. Then the camera cuts to Woody Allens rapt face, his mouth gaping, as he inhales the movies glossy, yearning romance. Felix lives in an apartment wallpapered with movie posters, most of them featuring Bogart, and as he bumbles his way through a largely unsuccessful love life, the phantom of the movie star in his trademark trench coat and snap-brimmed hat appears to offer hard-boiled advice on how to handle dames.

As late as the 1990s, you could still find plenty of Bogey idolizers in the lobby of your neighborhood rep house, but sometime between then and now Casablanca began to slip from the perch Isenberg claims for it. Could you really still call it Hollywoods most beloved movie? Not to judge by the films IMDB ranking, which shows a precipitous drop from the fourth highest film to the 34th in the 21st century. Once, Casablanca was a touchstone, a vision of love and glory its fans aspired to even if they knew they could never attain its heights. When Harry and Sally, of the 1989 Nora Ephron film that bears their name, drive together from Chicago to New York, they debate the romantic triangle at the center of Casablanca as if the choices the characters make somehow pertain to their own.

In a later split-screen sequence, they talk on the phone while watching the movie on late-night TV in their separate apartments, then sigh over the ending with almost as much longing as Felix. Thats how Ephrons audience knew Harry and Sally were made for each other. Today, the only on-screen lovers who hold Casablanca in equivalent reverence are the pair played by Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in La La Land, a couple of vintage fetishists snow-globed inside a movie genrethe musicaleven more retro that the luxe exotic melodrama of Casablanca itself.

Make no mistake: Everything about Casablanca is indelible. As Isenberg writes, even people who have never even seen the film (like most of his millennial students at the New School in New York) know the basic plot and can quote such celebrated lines as Heres looking at you, kid and This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. The movies dialogue has disseminated into everyday English to such an extent that many who sarcastically pronounces themselves Shocked, shocked at some thoroughly predictable scandal dont even realize theyre parroting the suave, corrupt Capt. Renault (Claude Rains) as he raids the back room of Ricks Caf Amricain.

Make no mistake: Everything about Casablanca is indelible.

Well Always Have Casablanca is less a history (Aljean Harmetzs Round Up the Usual Suspects, published in 1992, already covered that comprehensively) than a scrapbook: a digestible assembly of interesting facts, a few fresh quotes, ongoing controversies about who wrote which bits of dialogue, and tributesfrom Simpsons parodies to Saturday Night Live sketchesmeant to illustrate Casablancas lasting legacy. But as the 75th anniversary of Casablancas release arrives, Isenberg doesnt seem to perceive the subtle but distinct transformation of the movies cachet over the past 10 or 15 years.

In 2013, when Sight and Sound magazine tallied up the votes of 846 critics, programmers, academics, and distributors to compile what many view as the definitive list of the 50 greatest films ever made, Casablanca didnt even make the cut. But it was never a critics picture. The critic Pauline Kael, in her seminal 1969 essay Trash, Art, and the Movies, held it up as a prime example of how entertaining a bad movie can be. For Kael, that wasnt necessarily an insult; her essay was a frontal assault on the prevailing, staid concept of quality films. Even the fact that Casablancas screenplay has been used as a model by such screenwriting gurus as Syd Field and Robert McKee tends to underscore the view that the movie represents a perfection of craft rather than of art.

Whats changed about Casablanca is the most powerful and intangible element in any work of popular culture: its ability to make each audience member feel this is about me, about who I am, but most of all, who I want to be. Often, a movie elicits this sort of identification in ways that defy rationality. Umberto Eco wrote of Casablanca, in order to transform a work into a cult object, one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship with the whole. As Play It Again, Sam demonstrates, much of the spell Casablanca cast over postwar youth originated in the image of Bogart as a tough, wised-up man of the world. Rick is depicted in an early scene giving the brush-off to the beautiful Yvette, with whom hes apparently had a fling. How extravagant you are, throwing away women like that, Renault tells him. Someday they may be scarce.

This is the Bogart that Allen Felix idolizes, daydreaming of mesmerizing a series of beauties with his bedroom prowess and implacable cool. I never saw a dame yet that didnt understand a good slap in the mouth or a slug from a .45, his imaginary Bogey counsels. This figure is most definitely not the Rick who falls apart (and then into a bottle) the moment that Ilsa walks into his gin joint. Its also not the Rick who once fought in the Spanish Civil War or who resists the Nazis, craftily at first and by the end of the movie overtly. The politics that provide Casablanca with its context and meaning have been erased from Play It Again, Sam, leaving nothing but a mirage of sexual mastery.

There were, of course, other aspects of Casablanca that appealed to young fans during the 1960s and 70s. Todd Gitlin, a leading historian of that periods counterculture, tells Isenberg that the film appealed to students opposed to segregation and the Vietnam War because it asks what it takes to be a good person in a monstrous age. As Isenberg puts it, Casablanca spoke to the young-activist zeitgeist, providing a kind of mythic bedrock. Certainly, Casablanca is a movie about political resistance, but its also a clarion call to cast aside isolationism and self-interest to fight on behalf of the invaded and oppressed. Although Isenberg doesnt include interviews with conservative students who supported the Vietnam War, its not difficult to see how they might have interpreted the movie as an argument on behalf of their side.

Great works of popular culture often have this chameleon-like ability to reflect whatever their audience most wants to see. In a case of spectacularly good timing, Casablanca was released hot on the heels of the arrival of Allied troops in North Africa. The movie was a hit and won three Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. As Philip Epsteins son Leslie told Isenberg, its the signature archetype of how Americans would like to think of themselves, as tough (I stick my neck out for nobody), but underneath it theres a heart and they do the right thing somehow. In Rick Blaine, the seemingly irreconcilable aspects of rugged individualism and selfless heroism meet and intermingle.

By the time the Vietnam War ended, Casablanca seemed less a summons to decisive political action than a celebration of a certain type of masculinity. If you dated a young, cinema-loving, commitment-shy guy during this period, chances are you saw Casablanca enough times to notice the way Rick proves the depth and soulfulness of his love by running off to have adventures in the desert with another guy. Virtually every other character in the movie exists to experience Ricks emotions for him, as in the famous scene in which the resistance leader Victor Lazlo rallies the customers at Ricks Cafe to drown out some singing Nazis with a thrilling rendition of La Marseillaise. Although Rick sympathizes with Lazlo, his sole involvement in the scene is the curt nod he gives to the band when Lazlo asks them to play the French anthem. Casablanca is generally seen as Bogarts movie but it would have withered to a husk without the lustrous performance of Ingrid Bergman, whose dewy face, with its natural, unplucked eyebrows, is the place where all the authentic feeling in the film resides.

This is a film of my parents generation, Gitlin told Isenberg, so in some way its a bridge. Their world became more palpable, richer, and more significant to me as a result of this stylized, incandescent representation of it. Baby boomers like Gitlin had to square a circle. They grew up among adults who had, according to common knowledge, rescued the world from a great evil: People who fought, suffered, and died for the freedom that movies like Casablanca unabashedly celebrate. Their children, however, chose not to fight, and had to reframe as valiant a refusal that was often interpreted as cowardice or selfishness. Their parents generation admired plenty of gung-ho, all-American film heroes, the type of men played by John Wayne, who publicly condemned the anti-war movement. But the counterculture cherished Bogey: a skeptic, sure, but definitely not a coward. The men Bogey played could be persuaded to take a stand but only when the cause had sufficiently proven itself to them. Jingoism and patriotic rhetoric earned nothing more from him than a sneer.

These days, the black-and-white artifices of midcentury studio films often seem overly mannered to viewers who didnt grow up watching them on TV as Harry and Sally did. And while young men will always struggle to define masculinity in a way that feels authentic, the world in which theyre struggling has changed dramatically. The bitter stoicism that made Bogey cool in the eyes of Allen Felix might look like emotionally stunted self-pity to Felixs son.

Bogart, and Casablanca, offered baby boomers, as Gitlin aptly puts it, a bridge between themselves and the parents they both admired and openly rebelled against. He showed them a way to be as manly as a warrior while standing apart from war. Americans still underestimate the degree to which the Second World War cast a long shadow over the last half of the 20th century. That shadow has mostly subsided, and the radiant dreams that consoled us as we walked through it, while still worth revisiting, now seem less captivating and necessary.

*Correction, Feb. 27, 2017: An earlier version of this story misidentified the Brattle Theatre. (Return.)

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The End of a Beautiful Friendship - Slate Magazine