New Yorker

Like a school of fish

I love little observations of the everyday like this one in Nick Paumgarten’s essay on elevators:

Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die. With each additional passenger, the bodies shift, slotting into the open spaces. The goal, of course, is to maintain (but not too conspicuously) maximum distance and to counteract unwanted intimacies—a code familiar (to half the population) from the urinal bank and (to them and all the rest) from the subway. One should face front. Look up, down, or, if you must, straight ahead. Mirrors compound the unease.

This reminds me of what is quite possibly the best poetic description of riding the elevator, part III of T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” (from Four Quartets). In particular, it’s about the long elevator ride at the tube stop at Russell Square:

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.

(Why hasn’t “Not here the darkness, in this twittering world” been quoted regularly?)

Another great bit from Paumgarten, which relates to my earlier “potatoes, paper, petroleum” observation about the 19th century:

The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment. The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete.

A meta/editorial/critical note: Paumgarten’s essay has a regrettable B-story, about a guy who worked at a magazine who was trapped in an elevator. He dribbles it out graf by graf, to create the illusion of dramatic tension. Just speaking for myself, I didn’t care; also, it kind of bothers me that this is starting to become one of the default templates for magazine writing. Either find a reason to do it and do it well, or just… try something else.

 

Up from the gutter-forms

I like this summation—grabbed real-time from a chat with Neil Gaiman over at the New Yorker:

Authors like Michael Chabon have been crusading for awhile to break down the barriers between so-called ‘literary fiction’ and ‘genre fiction’. Do you have any idea why literature remains so compartmentalized? Is there any end in sight?

Neil Gaiman: Honestly, I think the barriers are imaginary, the walls have already been breached and the key to literature in the early 21st century is one of confluence. There’s not much high and low culture any more: there’s just mingling streams of art and what matters is whether it’s good art or bad art. But then, I come from comics, and miss the days when it was a gutter art-form in which nobody was expected to make art; and think that SF was much more vibrant and relevant before they taught it in universities. Either way, Michael Chabon is a very wise man.

Mostly I like this part: “the key to literature in the early 21st century is one of confluence.”

 

The Useless Iconoclast

A couple of months ago, I started typing up a long post bashing David Goldhill’s Atlantic Monthly cover story on health care that everybody was lauding (especially David Brooks). The article had appeared in the midst of August, when health care reform was on the ropes, and it seemed like just another antagonist helping to push the process to defeat. But by September, when I was drafting the post, the prospects for reform had brightened dramatically. It was revived! With a public option! In the Senate, even! So I put my post away.

Another article, in the New Yorker this time, is getting my dander up again. (OK, it’s a blog post, but for any other publication it would have been an article.)

These articles perpetuate the belief rampant in journalism that systemic change happens in sweeping gestures. And very, very occasionally, it does. But over the past 90 years, almost every sweeping change proposed to overhaul the health care system has gone down to crushing defeat. The real changes have been step by step, bit by bit. Even Medicare when enacted was a mere condolence for the death of the comprehensive insurance system Truman had envisioned 20 years before.

But the worst thing about these articles is that they’re not content to just paint a grander vision than is practical or possible. They also spit at the seeds of change reformers have fought hard to embed within the legislation that’s proceeding.

At the heart of both Cassidy and Goldhill’s arguments is a familiar contention and one I agree with — that one of the biggest problems with the US health care system is the way it distorts costs by shuffling most payments for health care through a gruesome patchwork of employers and private insurers. Goldhill would reboot the current system in favor of a more libertarian solution, establishing affordable options for catastrophic coverage and handing out vouchers for individuals to purchase more routine care. Cassidy suggests he’d like a more progressive solution, perhaps straight-up single-payer insurance.

If their arguments stopped there, I’d appreciate them. Either of these proposals could be part of a good conversation about what health reform might look like in an ideal world. And I think it’s tremendously important that folks continue to paint these alternative visions of what health care can become.

What I find most maddening about these articles, though, is the pose of the lonely iconoclast. The way the authors pretend their ideas are so novel and transgressive that no one’s pointed them out until now. The way they ignore the past 90 years of attempts at health care reform. And worst, worst of all — the way they off-handedly dismiss the real reforms that try to incorporate those ideas into actual legislation as pragmatically as politics allows.

Both men frame their arguments as though they’re the hard-headed realists pointing out the truths no one else will acknowledge. But both are ignoring (or dismissing) reality themselves, not even really engaging with politics as it exists in the real world.

If you don’t mind a bit of wonkiness, read on. Read the rest of this entry »