Author: Ophelia Benson

This is a familiar, er, story.

But in writing Sylvia, he was aiming to tell a story “that was not dependent on the audience being interested in Sylvia Plath.” So Sylvia is not actually about a writer. Mostly, it’s about a talented girl who dries up and goes mad as a housewife struggling in the shadow of a powerful and successful man.

Yes, such movies never are. They never are ‘actually about a writer.’ So what is the point of them? I never can understand it. To give people some kind of bogus feeling of cultural something-or-other? To give them the illusion that they’ve read the writer in question’s books, or at least might as well have now that they know something visual about her life? They don’t, of course, know a damn thing about what went on in her head, or about the way she transferred what went on in her head onto the page and what happened to that ‘what’ in the process and how good the translation is, or about what she read over the course of her life. No. Because that’s not what people go to the movies to see, obviously. They go to see fights and gun battles, or failing that at least some drama and emotional turmoil or a good lingering illness. They don’t go to see some bint reading in a chair and writing at a desk for hours and hours.

So what you do is, you eliminate everything to do with actual intellectual activity, and just show the entertaining stuff. Tom Eliot’s marital troubles, Lytton Strachey’s boyfriends, Byron’s sexual adventures of all sorts, Iris Murdoch fading away. And Sylvia Plath and her endlessly reviewed melodrama. Not because the audience gives the smallest tiniest damn about Eminent Victorians or Don Juan or The Waste Land, but because that way you get to have both an entertaining soap opera and a whiff of Kulcha. The whiff is totally unconvincing, indeed ridiculous, but never mind, it seems to do the trick, it puts bums on seats. But there’s something irritating about it all the same. If you want to see a soap opera see a soap opera, and if you want to read Virginia Woolf do that, but you look silly doing one while pretending to do the other.

This is a mildly amusing item. Or maybe it’s not all that amusing really, it just happens to amuse me, because a friend and I were chatting this morning about the relative merits of dogs and cats as pets and the relative merits of animals and humans for misanthropes like us.

The article considers it a scandal that people misdirect their affection onto animals instead of relatives and friends. Well but – be fair. Animals don’t argue. They don’t contradict. They don’t willfully misconstrue what we are saying and then shout at us for saying what we’re not saying. They don’t borrow our clothes. They don’t eat the last piece of cake we carefully stashed in the fridge (because they can’t open the door). They don’t smoke. They don’t say our hair looks funny like that. They don’t nag. (Well, they do, when they’re hungry or want to play or go for a walk. But it’s a different kind of nagging.) They don’t remember something stupid we said fifteen years ago and bring it up at odd moments. They don’t dirty every dish in the house and then go out for the day. They don’t want to watch football when we want to watch a movie or vice versa.

Well that was fun. I will have my little joke. Actually the article does have a point.

In this age of alienation and mobility, too many of the old and the lonely, and even the young and the lonely, find themselves having to rely on cats and dogs for love and companionship, rather than on the web of relatives and friends their ancestors had. When that happens, it becomes temptingly easy for the dependent to blur and even erase the distinctions between themselves and their pets. They begin to see pets not just as animals who share their homes but rather as friends who share their humanity. And that’s not just sad; it’s dangerous.

There is something in that. There are a lot of people out there who think their pets have Rights (we’ve discussed the slipperiness of the word ‘rights’ before). For instance their cats have the Right to roam free. Very well, but then what about the Right of birds and other wildlife not to be killed? Is it so self-evident that domestic cats that we breed for our pleasure and amusement have Rights that trump those of other animals that we don’t breed? If so, why? What of introduced species that displace native species? Whose Rights trump whose there? The answer is not self-evident, it seems to me. And this is not a hypothetical. If you’ve read our About page you know that I used to be a zookeeper. Among the animals I worked with at the zoo were five mountain goats that had been caught in the Olympic Mountains as part of a research programme to see what capture and removal did to them physically (the answer was, nothing good). It was necessary to find out because they were an introduced species who were doing a lot of damage to native plants, which then had harmful knock-on effects on other wildlife. This was a very controversial issue – there were people who wanted them removed and people who wanted them protected; there were pros and cons on either side; whose Rights should be paramount was very far from obvious. As so often, the question is a complicated one, and Rights are a tempting shortcut but maybe not all that helpful.

This is a hilarious piece. Katha Pollitt is pretty good at being hilarious. But of course she has good material here. Why are conservatives always bleating and moaning? Have they not noticed? Yo! Those heavy steel things in your hands? Those are the levers of power!

Why can’t they just admit it, throw a big party and dance on the table with lampshades on their heads? Why are they always claiming to be excluded and silenced because most English professors are Democrats? Why must they re-prosecute Alger Hiss whenever Susan Sarandon gives a speech or Al Franken goes after Bill O’Reilly? If I were a conservative, I would think of those liberal professors spending their lives grading papers on The Scarlet Letter and I would pour myself a martini.

This is what I keep saying. Of course there are a lot of leftists in humanities departments, not because conservatives are systematically excluded (though no doubt they are unsystematically excluded), but because on the whole leftists tend to be also the kind of people who want to do that kind of work and conservatives don’t. Obviously! Grading papers on The Scarlet Letter or even on ‘The Sopranos’ doesn’t pay as much as, say, being a bond trader or an oil executive. This comes as a big surprise to people? That leftists are not quite as intent on the bottom line as conservatives are?

Ah well. I don’t really want to make heavy weather of it. Actually I just thought the line about grading papers was too funny to waste, so I wanted to quote it.

It’s a very handy thing, having a Fashionable Dictionary and a Rhetoric Guide. Because whenever people who have little or nothing of substance to say, resort to mere abuse instead, it’s useful instead of merely boring and time-wasting. You can just slide it into one or the other and hey presto, your correspondent has done a little work for you.

For instance, there’s ‘Meaningless Sarcasm’. Addressing your opponent (or rather the person you’re attempting to engage, who wandered off in boredom long ago) as ‘little Ms X’ or ‘little Mr Y’. Has the disadvantage of making one sound about seven years old, but if one is delusional enough, it passes for wit.

Or there’s that old favourite, ‘I’m embarrassed for you, frankly.’ That’s a funny one. It’s hard not to wonder why it’s such an old favourite, when it’s so silly. It’s so obviously not true that one would think people would want to do better. Why should anyone feel embarrassed for an opponent who says something foolish? The time to be embarrassed is when we ourselves say something foolish, not when other people do. And that is normally how it works, isn’t it, especially in an argument. It’s quite simple, really. Here we are having a disagreement. I say something clever. Result: feeling of pleasure and triumph for me. I say something stupid. Result: feeling of embarrassment and chagrin. Opponent says something clever. Result: I feel annoyed. Opponent says something stupid. Result: I’m delighted. Where does the embarrassment come in? Sarcasm is all very well, but it has to be good to work.