I won’t mention the book, or the press, so no one is embarrassed, but I don’t have to–this is an increasingly common phenomenon. It took me 2 minutes to find the examples below. There’s no justification for either of those prices, but the Kindle edition is especially egregious: somehow no costs at all for paper, printing, shipping and stocking translate into a difference of three dollars. The publisher, recognizing a limited market and no competition, is price-gouging.

I have a solution, one that would have the added benefit of saving the AHA  from reliance on a paper journal fewer and fewer people want: the AHA should take over this kind of publishing directly.

You write your book. As a member of the AHA, you can submit it to the AHA for publication. The AHA sends it to reviewers, who are also AHA members, and they comment on it as they do now: the AHA then after revisions publishes the ebook with its seal.

Imagine ebooks, priced at under ten dollars, that bear the stamp of the AHA: they have been vetted by academic historians, so they meet academic standards. The costs to the AHA are negligible–how much do you get paid to review a book for a press? The author gets the benefit of professional prestige and a secure path to promotion; the reader gets the advantage of low prices and assurance that professional standards have been met..

The AHA could do this very easily–it could select, say, 7 reviewers, and if five recommend publication, it could publish. Or it could require unanimity among the reviewers. Or it could imitate a press, and have a review board and an editor in chief–there are any number of ways it could choose to organize the process.

The key is the extremely low cost of electronic publication. The whole process could be funded out of AHA dues. And belonging to the AHA would mean more than it does now.

And as a result specialized books that serve their academic readers extremely well, that contain work in depth and detail beyond the interests of most readers; that are scrupulous and contextualized and accurate, would be easily accessible.

It would not end academic publishing–people who sought a larger lay audience, or books aimed at the “midlist,” would still go to academic presses that published pseudo-trade books. Nothing at all would prevent you from submitting your book to, say, Harvard or Oxford. This would free up commercial publishers to concentrate on what they do best–hagiographic biographies of the founders and books about cats–while strengthening the role of academic publishers who work the midlist.

It would be bad news for presses that charge $43 for a Kindle edition. Does anyone really feel bad about that? It’s not a good model, as the images keep showing. It’s justified entirely by habit, not anything remotely resembling the costs of production.

It’s true that the physical book is something that academics, myself included, tend to love. It’s an object that validates your years of work. Your mom puts it on a shelf in the living room. You send it to friends. Not having that object would seem anti-climactic.

But having your work published at a price so high that even your most serious readers will balk is pretty anticlimactic as well, and beyond anti-climactic it restricts the circulation of ideas.

And having something published by the AHA would not be easy. It would be a genuine mark of distinction. So, AHA, step up. Become a publisher of certified ebooks, publications that are professionally vetted and  inexpensive.

America’s M-16, on the other hand, was a disaster at first, mostly because it corroded and jammed. American soldiers and Marines in Vietnam detested and distrusted it. Congressional inquiry revealed stories of soldiers found dead with a jammed M-16 in their hands. American Marines would try to discard their M-16s and use captured Kalashnikovs instead.

The M-16 is still in use–it’s been fixed for the most part, so it’s more reliable. But Chivers points out the unexpected fact that while the Soviet system produced an extremely effective, cheap, rugged, dependable machine still in general use, unchanged, over fifty years later, the American system produced an expensive, over-complicated and unreliable rifle that put its user at risk.

The Soviets made a “peasant’s weapon,” suitable for untrained men with no access to supplies. Cheap to make, cheap to acquire, cheap to maintain: all you needed was bullets and a sense of grievance. As a result, the AK-47s is the favored weapon of stateless insurgents–Hamas, the Lord’s resistance Army, the Taliban.

The US set out to make a better automatic rifle–more accurate, with more range, a faster rate of fire, lighter. The key difference is that the US assumed a trained soldier: someone under “fire discipline,” someone hectored and drilled and habituated in the maintenance of the weapon, a soldier with access to cleaning kits and supplies and a deep conviction of their necessity. They imagined, in other words, “state actors,” individuals under the discipline of state authority. ¹

The Soviets imagined a potato farmer with the gun under his bed.

So the double irony is that the Soviets, working in an authoritarian regime, rightly critiqued for denying individual freedom, produced a machine usable by anyone, anywhere, while the Americans produced a machine that only worked well when individualism was subordinated to state authority.

Below is a modern variant of the M-16 and the array of accessories available for it.

Superficially, it looks like a model of consumer choice, like options for a car. You can get all these add-ons! But as a result, each M-16 comes with a huge supply chain–each of those accessories must be contracted for and built, stored and shipped to the front; each requires a manual for its use and the personel to develop the manual. And each requires a regime of training in its proper use and a soldier disciplined in that use. Again, the imagined consumer is under the discipline of the state, enmeshed in a  vast and complex state apparatus.

This guy has no accessories, and no supply chain, no state apparatus, and little or no discipline.

Foucualt’s Discipline and Punish argued that in premodern societies, “the soldier” was a person marked by unique physical attributes–strength, but also a “martial bearing,” a character of courage that manifested itself physically. You could give a peasant a pike, and he could do some damage,  but he would not be a soldier: a soldier was born, not made. The modern Army assumes quite differently that anyone can be made a soldier; that the Army can bring to bear on him (or her) a regime of training, drill and discipline, backed by hundreds of years of experience, and study, that can make virtually anyone a soldier.

Foucault’s point is always that the Army’s capacity to individualize soldiers–to make them specialists, to address their specific strengths and deficiencies and shape them as needed–is entirely inseparable from the Army’s capacity to impose a disciplinary authority, and that “freedom” is an odd metric to use in measuring such a society.

The USSR is gone, and the society that produced the M-16, with its expectations of a disciplined, trained, habituated soldier under state authority, ended up winning the Cold War. But all around the world, untrained and undisciplined insurgents still carry the AK-47. In this sense the United States, the exponent of individual freedom, has ended up proving the  power of the exact opposite point.

An historian would sit for hours going through archival material, carefully taking notes, carefully recording citations, because the material itself was scarce, and because his or her time in the archives was a scarce and rare thing, hard to pull off. Necessity–the scarcity of perishable and rare sources from the past, collected in a special place–led to an ethic of practice that rewarded deep knowledge and sustained attention, careful citation and scrupulous records. This ethic was on the whole a good and admirable thing. I still teach it.

More and more, though, archives are digitized and open, and more and more, that kind of painstaking, slow scanning through physical documents is giving way to word searches that instantly parse and organize millions of texts.

Should the traditional method persist as a practice or an ethic when the necessity that fostered it is gone, or will be relatively soon?

You might argue why not? I’m not a religious believer, but I persist in a basically judeo-christian ethical practice even though I’ve removed the original necessity–a vengeful, interventionist god. The ethic has outlasted the thing that gave it shape initially.

On the other hand, my judeo christian ethics are in constant tension with secularism, or “secular humanism,” and it would probably be more accurate to say that I’ve adapted a judeo christian ethic to reflect the perceived lack of an intervening Mosaic god.

Operating a coal furnace required an ethic, but it would be silly to go downstairs and mime shoveling coal into a gas heater. It would be similarly silly to insist that researchers still use notecards, or worse, microfilm, or make refusal to use digital texts a requirement of academic work, and similarly silly to prize an ethic of work drawn from a vanishing necessity.

It seems to me that as necessity changes, the ethical and disciplinary practices of historians must and will change, and that those changes must reflect new necessities and possibilities.

In 1788, an anonymous satirist proposed using the body parts of black people as money, since their bodies were already for sale. To save trouble in “counting or calculating the value of this new black flesh coin,” the author wrote, “I beg leave to furnish the dealers in it with the following table, which I hope, will be current hereafter in the state of Maryland”:

“Should this species of coin be adopted,” the Swiftian author went on, “instead of saying a man is worth ten thousand pounds, it will be common to say, he is worth ten thousand dried hands or feet, or forty thousand dried thumbs or great toes.” The satirist signed himself “an enemy to the society for the abolition of slavery.”¹

“Species of coin” is an interesting phrase: it’s the Africans “species,” their imagined racial difference, that allows them to act as “specie,” as the bottom line of economic value. Like money, slaves are imagined as having both a fixed value and as endlessly negotiable.

For example, there’s a moment in nearly every slave narrative when the slave gets a chance to buy his or her freedom. Sometimes the slave rejects the idea, because buying oneself legitimates slavery’s premises. Sometimes they feel they have no choice.

The moment raises a problem: if the slave can earn the value of his or her redemption, then the slave must have a value beyond that price. Bringing the master cash for one’s redemption only advertises one’s continuing value as a slave.

But if the slave can earn more than his or her purchase price, then the slave has no fixed value, which undermines the central premise of racial slavery,  the point the grisly satire above makes: the black person’s presumed natural, fixed state of inferiority and lesser value. At that moment the slave is in fact “worth more than he or she is worth,” and in fact the moment of self-purchase implies that this would always be the case: what if the master doubled the redemption price, and the slave met it?²

In 1766, Olaudah Equiano took the forty pounds he had earned on the side and humbly asked his master, Robert King, if he could redeem himself. The request “confounded” King. He asked, “where did you get the money? Have you got forty pounds sterling?” When Equiano said yes, “my master replied, I got money much faster than he did; and said he would not have made me the promise he did if he had thought I should have got money so soon.”

Equiano had a friend with him, who pointed out that “[Olaudah] has earned you more than an hundred a-year, and he will still save you money, as he will not leave you—Come, Robert, take the money.” King relents, to Equiano’s joy.

In this account the promise of wage labor trumps the value of slave-owning; King will get the pounds sterling now and a promise of continued profits in the future.

As a slave Equiano had a more or less fixed value, a price, and that price depended on and from his body—its strength and health but also fundamentally, on its blackness, its “race.” But he also had the potential to earn more than his price, a market potential limited only by his own energy and ambition, and in this light his race is irrelevant: indeed, his master sees clearly that Equiano is worth more—“gets money faster”—than King himself. Caught between boundless potential and fixed, essential value, between speculation and the bottom line, Equiano literally embodies both. In this sense he is like money itself. This resemblance helps explain why Americans resorted to racial slavery.

Why slavery? The economic inefficiency of slave labor was common knowledge before the American Revolution. They had other forms of unfree labor to choose from—mostly indentured servitude and apprenticeship. Up to the moment of the American Revolution, ads for runaway indentured servants filled the Pennsylvania Gazette. Why resort to slavery? We do quite well today without it.

And why racial slavery? Colonial Americans were more than happy to treat indentured servants as disposable inferiors: drawing on traditions of class and rank. Why did they need the elaborate and creaky intellectual apparatus of race? “Race” was and is a hard idea to maintain. Common sense, in the form of people of mixed race, and in the form of slaves capable, like Equiano, of doing virtually any kind of work, kept pointing out the failures of racism’s most basic premises; its boundaries constantly collapsed. Why bother with racial slavery if the whole point is just extracting labor from people?

Images of antebellum banknotes from Richard Doty, Pictures from a Distant Country ch. 3

Historians have a lot of good answers. ³ I’d add that Americans embraced racial slavery because racial slavery recapitulated the assumptions and tensions underlying free market exchange itself.
The slave had a generative, speculative potential to make wealth, like money loaned on credit, like paper bills circulating on faith, but also a fixed character that could never be negotiated away or altered, like the value embodied in “specie,” gold bars. Slaves literally embodied the contradictory desires at the heart of capitalism; they were like money.

“Blackness” served as a non-negotiable difference, the thing that marked Africans as enslavable; it marked them as different, and different in a way set by nature. But slavery also put the enslaved at the forefront of commercial negotiation—as objects for sale, as producers of value, and as targets of sexual opportunity and genetic exchange: as collateral for loans, mortgages and issues of paper money. Racial slavery was a product of capitalism, but not just of capitalism’s desire for profit or its need for a tractable labor force. Racial slavery helped ease the transition from mercantilism, with its essentialized notions of wealth, to modern capitalism, with its more subjective, virtualized sense of wealth and value. Racial slavery re-presented the dilemmas and attractions of exchange itself, and particularly it re-presented the problem and potential of money.

It’s still, the case today: arguments about money, and inflation, are never simply “economic” arguments. They are always also, in the U.S., about race.

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1. a catchy anecdote or example

2. followed by an explanation of the larger problem being addressed

3. followed by a long march though the historiography,

4. followed by a lot of examples

5. ending with the conclusion.

We know it is simply a form, simply formalism, when we look at how we actually read these articles. If you know the author and trust their work, all you need is 2 and 5. If you’re serious, or out for blood, you look at 4, maybe you look at three to see if it’s the same chain of evidence you follow, or if you’re offended.

It has this form not because it’s the best, or most useful, but because of the scarcities and costs imposed by print media. To be deliverable at reasonable cost, a journal in 1920 could only be of a specific size, which limited the room for articles. Having limited space for articles compelled a form designed to speak to outside of disciplinary specialties, which compelled the historiographical garden-paths and the extensive problem-framing. Having limited space meant the article needed to be finished; armored against all complaint and impregnable to enemies.

There are many good things about this model: the selection process can result in better work, and readers can reasonably assume that what appears in a major journal is of general value to professional historians. It may indeed be the permanent and everlasting model of scholarly communication for all time, and not just an artifact of a specific period.

But scholarly communication need not take only this specific form. Articles look like they do because the print journal had limited space and had to be exclusive, and so had to cater to as many possible objections as could be imagined. The strengths of a good monograph—as everyone knows—lie mostly in what we prise out of the decorative trappings and clanking armor imposed by 19^th century scarcities.

Within the next few months we’ll be launching American History Now, a new kind of academic journal exploring alternative forms of academic discourse. An article for AHN will be shorter, most likely, but also will not be organized like an article in print. Articles in AHN will be chosen by the editors, but peer reviewed in real time, by selected peers and by the larger community of interested readers, as described here. Articles in AHN will also be more “provisional,” less finished, and designed  more for engaging dialogue than polishing off enemies.

We’re assuming articles for AHN would begin with an abstract, a short summary of the article, the argument, and the material. Most readers would probably never get past the abstract, but the abstract would not just introduce the article: it would be a source of tags that web searches would find. From the abstract one might click “read more” to get to a more sustained version of the argument with a few examples. A separate link might establish the theoretical framework. A third might bring dedicated readers to a more sustained engagement with the evidence.

None of these sections would necessarily take the form of a conventional narrative article. The section of deep evidence, for example, might consist of pieces of evidence, links to the relevant digitized archive, and statements that amount to “this is how I’m approaching this material.”

But we have to admit we don’t know exactly what form these articles will take, because thinking your way out of formalism is difficult, and typically, alternatives emerge not in theory but in practice. We’ve considered taking submissions via a template, in order to make the rethinking/restructuring obvious. For example, you would submit a piece broken into discrete sections: Abstract, Evidence, Theory, Bibliography. We may offer a template, but not make it mandatory. The hard part is thinking out way out of our own training.

As always, this is not an argument that demands replacing conventional forty page articles, which have their strengths. The discipline required to produce those articles, like all discipline, can produce a lot of good work. Nor is it an argument against good writing; rather, writing in the form imagined here would demand concise, accurate, expressive prose to the same degree, and perhaps even a greater degree, than the conventional article.

There is surely room for more than one form of scholarly communication, and for forms of communication organized around the world we live in today. What should a shorter article look like?

It may sound absurd, but consider how often public figures known for homophobia later are arrested or caught in some version of the thing they denounce. It’s tempting to smirk at this, but who would better understand the need to repress something than the person who experiences it? If you believe homosexuality to be wrong, and feel yourself to be gay, banning “gayness” in the public sphere would offer some relief from temptation, possibly, but obviously not lasting relief. Legalizing gay marriage is threatening indeed to someone who marries to avoid the fact that he’s gay.

From Facts for the people of the free states (1847)

In the space of about 20 years, from 1830–1850, abolitionism rose from a fringe political philosophy, advanced by “long haired men and short haired women, to become the core concern of American politics. It’s an amazing change. Historians usually describe it as part of a “humane sensibility,” a new way of thinking about the sufferings of others. The humane sensibility shows up in reform of schools, of insane asylums; in moral reform work generally. It shows up very strongly in abolition, and the process by which slavery, which had been mostly considered unremarkable, came to be considered unacceptable.

from an 1853 anti-slavery tract

Abolitionist literature focused heavily on the sufferings of the slave, and especially on physical punishment. Many historians have noticed this: Karen Halttunen and Elizabeth Clark have both compared it to pornography, a vouyeristic desire to observe physical brutality and submission. It’s notable because for many abolitionists, empathy for the sufferings of the slaves was real: it spurred them to often dangerous action. That sensibility was built on buying and reading commercial copies of the spectacle of punishment

From Richard Hildreth, The White Slave; or, Memoirs of a Fugitive.

As Saidiya Hartmann points out, abolition made a spectacle of the punishment of slaves in the interest of a kind of white supremacy, a process in which white people’s sensibilities were heightened and white people were made to feel and to extend benevolence, while slaves were measured against a norm of independence they could not affect or control. What drew white readers to abolitionist literature, she argues, was the way it generalized white supremacy.

Hartman’s book is excellent and persuasive, and more complicated than I made it sound. But it’s also true that antebellum reformers made a spectacle  of cruelty to animals, to children, to the insane, cruelty to women at the hands of their husbands. All these phenomena were described and deplored through the same kind of tools, a general phenomenon in which the spectacle of suffering, and the feeling it evokes, becomes the central attraction. It became a general phenomenon of the middle classes in the antebellum decades.

Here, for example, is the seal of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to animals, founded in 1866.

And below is an 1865 newspaper image of a horse being beaten. The upraised arm, the cringing victim: the images have a great deal in common with the abolitionist images above. They’re in the style of the humane sensibility.

City Enormities: Every Brute Can Beat His Beast (1874)

Here is an image of “the drunkard’s home from  The National Temperance Offering, 1850).

You might reasonably ask “how else could you move people to end these things, except by dramatizing the suffering?” It certainly seems that way to us, because we are the heirs of “the humane sensibility:” it’s the way we think. But it’s not the way people always thought. There were very few accounts of the sufferings of slaves, or the insane, or animals, in 1800; by 1850 they are everywhere. Something happened to make the spectacle of suffering an appealing commercial product in 1850, in a way that it was not an appealing commercial product in 1800.

When I say “appealing commercial product” I don’t mean people consciously liked it. But people regularly go to movies like the Saw series: it’s probably not fair to say they like to see dismemberment, but the movies were attractive enough to merit sequels. And woodcuts showing slaves being punished were endlessly “sequelized” in the 19th century.

So what was the appeal? In the case of slavery, I think Hartman is right, but there’s more to it. The spectacle of punishment/suffering was “enjoyable” for readers because what was being punished was their own desire for dependence.

It’s a commonplace in American history to argue that between 1800 and 1850, a new kind of individualism emerged: a sense of self based less in social “rank” and class, or in family and kin, and more on individual will. It’s sometimes called “liberal individualism;” the idea that people are rational, that they are capable of being entirely responsible for themselves, and that a good society promotes this individualism. Liberal individuals were motivated by self interest, not familial obligation or class loyalty; they were free of such restraints.

Most Americans today are reflexively “liberal.” We tend to understand liberal individualism not as a set of political ideas, but as human nature itself.  The “tea party” wants liberal individualism, and so does the libertarian party and the Democratic Party and the GOP. They may differ in their interpretation, but for the most part they share the same basic idea. “liberal individualism,” and the idea of a rational, self interested person, arises along with “the human sensibility.” This is why it’s hard to imagine any other way of opposing either slavery or cruelty to animals.

In 1830 liberal individualism was less widespread, less normative. And it was clear then, in ways that aren’t clear now, that it had both advantages and costs. The advantages included economic opportunity, freedom of action, and autonomy, but these same qualities could translate into isolation, loneliness, and vulnerability. It’s not a surprise that in  the antebellum decades, marriage began to change from an institution primarily about property relations between families and the production of heirs and workers, to a sentimentalized relation understood through the lens of romantic love. Marriage as romance posed an alternative to liberal individualism, and extra-rational relationship of mutual dependence. So did family, increasingly re-figured as a realm of sentimental co-dependence. Ben Franklin’s Autobiography famously barely mentioned his mother, or his wife. 100 years later sentimental encomiums to wife and mother were available for sale everywhere.

So there was ambivalence in American popular culture–a desire for independence, but also a yearning for its opposite. For person engaged in making themselves over, in “self-making,” the spectacle of the slave being punished reinforced the idea that dependence was bad; it was attractive to see this, or read about it, because the reader’s own desire for dependence was always present. The spectacle of punishment had the double effect of repressing the viewer’s desire for dependence, their own doubts about individualism.

“A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.” (Aldous Huxley)

With those words in mind, consider the music of Shooby Taylor, “the Human Horn”

Stout Hearted Men

Lift Every Voice

Folsom Prison Blues

Taylor was an African American, raised in Harlem, who spent most of his life trying to break into the music business. An Army veteran, he took some music and voice lessons and went to jazz jam sessions and nightclubs hoping to sit in. He recorded these tunes either at home or at a Times Square studio that let walk-in customers record whatever they liked. He recorded more than 50 of them. There’s a YouTube video of Shooby being booed off the stage at “Amateur Night the Apollo Theater.”

Most people would say that Shooby’s music is bad–spectacularly, weirdly, fascinatingly bad, bad to the point of a kind of grandeur.¹ But bad. It’s exuberant in its badness, relentless; unabashed. Why is it bad?

The quote from Hamlet above suggests it’s only bad if you think it’s bad.  Its goodness or badness depends on the criteria you bring to bear on it. When I was an undergrad it was still common to divide art into good and bad, high and low, serious and popular, and to maintain distinctions, in which, say, Melville was a great writer and Barbara Cartland  was not. That kind of thinking mostly vanished in the 1980s, under the influence of “postmodernism,” which argued more or less that art is neither good nor bad; rather it’s rendered interesting/meaningful/beautiful by the system of thought you bring to bear on it, as Hamlet says.

So Bach is not better or worse than Lady Gaga; rather, their work needs to be seen in different “frames.” This is the apparatus I generally use myself–I assume that there is no “better,” there’s difference. It’s sometimes dismissed as “cultural relativism,” a sloppy way of saying “it’s all opinion.” But that’s too dismissive–postmodernism insisted on a lot of information, on informed opinion, and nobody who struggled with postmodern theory remembers it as easy or as a fun diversion for the lazy. Having a coherent “frame,” or set of frames for viewing art takes work.

Shooby Taylor was sincere, and worked hard at trying to be heard. But his “art” was terrible. In the passage quoted above Aldous Huxley goes on to say: “But the bad author’s soul being, artistically at least, of inferior quality, its sincerities will be, if not intrinsically uniteresting, at any rate uninterestingly expressed, and the labor expended on the expression will be wasted.”

Cartoon of Shooby from Outsider Music

I’m not willing to say that Shooby Taylor had a “bad soul” or an inferior soul: that kind of judgement seems at best “above my pay grade” and at worst simply impossible. Miles Davis was a great artist and by all accounts a mean, wife-beating, drug addicted and mostly contemptible person. What good does talk about such a person’s “soul” do? There’s a self fulfilling quality to the argument–if the art is good, it’s because the “soul” is good. That argument’s not good enough.

The argument that all art springs from the same fundamental impulse appears in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, a loving tribute to the absurdity of creative endeavor. The movie imagines a charming kind of bonhommie of the creative, but Ed Wood’s films were still terrible–astonishingly, inexplicably Shooby-Taylor-or–the-Shaggs bad.

There are any number of instances of work once considered crazy-bad later acclaimed as masterwork. Melville’s Moby Dick is an example beloved by novelists who get bad reviews: people hated it and speculated that Melville was insane. So the simple fact that the work seems crazy isn’t enough: times and tastes change.

All my academic training and intellectual work leads me to conclude that “good” is a situational, contingent thing, and that given the right frame, Shooby Taylor could be considered great.

But still, within a given aesthetic “frame,” some things are better than others. A colleague and I were playing a CD of “blues mambos” for a course we were teaching on Afro-Cuban music. They were all kind of interesting, and then we heard one from Ray Charles, and it was right away, instantly,  just… better than all the others. Similarly, we were listening to various of the many versions of The Peanut Vendor, and we came across Louis Armstrong’s. It was better, just much better.

It’s hard to say what made them better. It wasn’t because either one of them studied the original Cuban source more intently, or played with more fidelity or sense of tradition; quite the opposite. Armstrong didn’t even bother to learn the Spanish lyrics, and just made up some vaguely spanish-sounding gibberish. What they both had was a quality of recklessness and bravado, of  “don’t-give a-damn.” Both of them had a confidence in what they were doing and their ability to do it. Both of them were also indifferent to “fidelity” or authenticity or respect for boundaries.

These are both qualities Shooby Taylor had in abundance. But Shooby “goes too far.” It’s good to be a little bit different; it seems like a delightful  revision of the familiar. Being too original or different is a mistake; it just seems weird and uncanny.

As far as I can tell, what’s “good” is always a tension between speaking directly to people, in familiar language, and saying something new. It’s a sign of how well someone navigates the contrary pulls of human empathy and individual will.

Is there any good recent work on aesthetics I should be reading?

Here’s the clip:

I saw it as a kid at the movies, and barely remembered it. Then I saw it again as an adult, maybe a fifteen years ago, and was appalled.

King Louie is an ape, and he’s singing about wanting to be a man, and he’s clearly imitating Louis Armstrong. Louis Armstrong played the trumpet, as King Louie the Ape does, and he was famous for his gravelly voice, his use of jive talk, hipster slang, and his style of “scat” singing, all of which King Louie, the Ape, makes liberal use of.

Louis Armstrong was a radical, modernist figure in the 1920s, a charismatic pioneer. He had a famously relaxed and loose, irreverent and clever way of remaking songs and phrases that was powerful and fresh. Armstrong went from being an avante-garde figure, in the, 20s, to being a mainstream entertainer in the 40s and 50s, to being something of an embarrassment in the 1960s. His mugging, comical and entertaining style came to be seen as “minstrelish” and demeaning.

Louis Armstrong as “king” of the Zulu Krewe, 1949

Armstrong added to this when he proudly accepted being named “King of the Zulus” in the Mardis Gras parade in his home town of New Orleans, something Armstrong regarded as a signal honor but which looked, since it involved blackface makeup and grotesque African caricatures, pretty bad by 1960. So there’s Louis Armstrong, or someone who sounds a lot like him and plays the trumpet, as a cartoon ape singing about wanting to be human in the Disney Jungle Book. It looks like the worst form of (at best) unconscious racial stereotyping. ¹

It turns out to be much more complicated. The voice of the ape is Louis Prima, who was in many ways a Louis Armstrong imitator. Prima was also born in New Orleans; nine years after Armstrong. The child of Italian immigrants, he grew up in the working class of that famously mixed city.  He idolized Armstrong as did many musicians and virtually all jazz trumpeters.  Between being from new Orleans, being from the working class, being Italian American and being a jazz musician, Prima picked up what might be called a “black”  affect. According to Gary Boulard in his biography of Prima, when Prima arrived for his first gig in New York, the owner refused to let him play, assuming he was black. Reportedly, he had to call back down to a friend in New Orleans who assured him that no, Prima was white.

So this gives a very different resonance to Prima singing “I want to be like you:” it makes the “you” he wants to be like Louis Armstrong, and the song appears to be less a black man aspiring to be human and more a white man aspiring to be black. When the Disney team brought Prima and his band in to record the tunes, they filmed the band as they went into their Las Vegas act, which involved walking through the audience in a line. You can see film of that here. The animators, they claim, patterned the cartoon ape’s movement on Prima. The casting of Prima is an interesting choice. Prima was a good musician and initially a good jazz player in the “dixieland” style, which was growing dated even in the 1930s. He remade himself as a swing band leader, then as the leader of a celebrated Las Vegas lounge act, and finally as a singer of ethnic Italian novelty songs. He’s frequently seen as a precursor to rock and roll music, because of his exuberance his raucous semi-R&B style and his excellent band, “the Witnesses.” Modern audiences know Prima mostly through the movie Big Night and through the David Lee Roth song Just a Gigolo and the Brian Setzer song Jump Jive and Wail, both of which are almost exact copies of Prima’s originals.

Mowgli himself, in  the cartoon, is, like Prima, “ambiguously white.” Kipling, in the original books, has him as  a high caste indian from Rajahstan, possibly the son of “the richest man in the village.” In american culture in the 60s and even today Indians were racially ambiguous–officially Indians were caucasians, because they were descendants of the original Aryans. In the case of US v. Thind, the Supreme Court ruled explicitly that yes, “hindus” were caucasian, but they weren’t white.

Disney’s Mowgli is light brown, but speaks American accented English. That Prima, an olive-skinned Italian American once taken for black, wants to be like both Louis Armstrong and brown-skinned aryan boy adds to the complexity of the racial subtext. That the background music for the whole process is “white negro” hipster jive talk, something Baloo and King Louie have in common, adds even more: African American popular culture, ventriloquized, is the field on which whiteness is being defined.

Disney’s history has deep roots in the minstrel show. Christopher Lehman’s excellent The Colored Cartoon describes in detail the way Disney borrowed features and plots and music from the minstrel show. The first Mickey Mouse cartoon puts the mouse on a steamboat, long a part of minstrel iconography, and added a soundtrack of minstrel tunes. Disney’s early collaborator, the fantastically named Ub Iwerks, made a series of minstrel show cartoons after he left Disney studios. I don’t mean to simply call Disney a racist; rather I want to point out the complicated way racialized themes, and the minstrel show tradition, worked in American culture.

The ventriloquism of the King Louie scene is extremely complicated.  There are no actual African Americans in the cast of The Jungle Book,  but African American culture, or at least ventriloquized versions of it, is everywhere in the film, from Prima’s song to the cartoon vultures who are clearly imitations of the Beatles, themselves partly “imitations” of African American R&B and blues. The most responsible “person” in the film, Bagheera the Panther, speaks in plummy british english and stands for seriousness and bourgeoise normalcy: the jive talking jungle hipsters pose an alternative form of whiteness, americanized and inflected by African American culture. Actual African Americans, though, appear only in cartoon versions of themselves.

Smith says he’s resigning, after 12 years at the firm, because the firm has a thoroughly unethical culture, and treats its customers like marks to be fleeced. I don’t doubt that for a second: the firm exists to make profits for itself–profits to its clients in the process are a happy but not necessary outcome.

Smith started, he says, around 1990, with idealistic expectations. He writes:

 It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients.

“Surprising” is not the right word here: Something more like “unbelievable” or “preposterous” fits much better.

Back in the 1980s, there was a whole series of books about Wall Street. Liar’s Poker, for example, described the culture of investment banking as crude, relentlessly rapacious, and entirely unprincipled. Michael Lewis, the author, cannot describe this enough: at one point he describes one of his co-workers sneering “some people are born to be customers,” that is, chumps. Bonfire of the Vanities, a staggeringly popular bestseller which was made into a terrible movie, made exactly the same point. Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street  makes it again, and adds the same lament for better days in the past, when men of character ran the show.

Arrant nonsense! People go into investment banking because they love making money, not because of some humble spirit of public service, and they get away with acting like unprincipled thieves because:

A. they have a near monopoly over the services they offer

B. They were unencumbered, for the most part, by regulation.

Goldman Sachs is a member of the Federal Reserve System, which means among other things it gets to borrow money for the Fed at practically zero interest, then lend it back to people at higher interest. What a lovely arrangement! And made lovelier by the fact that its top management is closely connected to the Federal Reserve itself, serving on its boards. Two of its highest level employees, Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson, served as Secretary of the Treasury. Another Goldman employee, Stephen Friedman, was named Chairman of the New York Branch of The Federal Reserve. The bank took, directly and indirectly, nearly 200 billion dollars of taxpayer bailout money after 2008.

Henry Ford is reputed to have said that if the American people understood how the Federal Reserve System worked, there’d be rioting in  the streets. He didn’t actually say that, as far as I can tell, but he should have.

What level of slack jawed credulity is required to accept the argument that Goldman Sachs was once run by honorable “humble” men who put their clients first?  How big a set of blinkers would it have taken for Smith to not have been aware of these best selling critiques of Wall Street?

This kind of discourse endlessly repeats itself, as if there was some imaginary time when people on Wall Street were honorable and good, and then the wrong people got in there and now it’s greedy and bad. .

People go to work on for investment banks because they love money–that’s the whole story. The only way to restrain their greed is to restructure the economy and introduce effective regulatory restraint. Everything else is just fantasy

This could just be neurosis, because according to the standard metrics we use to measure teaching quality (peer reviews and student evaluations)  I show up as quite a good teacher.

It’s true those measures are suspect–students fill them out in haste, and especially with undergraduates, it’s not always clear that they understand “good teacher” in the same way we do. That is, on the aggregate undergraduates tend to reward an entertaining teacher rather than a demanding teacher.

I also enjoy a range of unearned advantages–I’m very tall, I have gray hair, I’m middle aged, and a male, which is pretty much the jackpot of assumed, unearned credibility with first year students, and probably inflates my scores.

But I think the recurring sense of failure–and fellow teachers, check me if I’m wrong–is a problem of scale, the feeling that however well you did, there’s so much more to it. And the more you know, the more you care, the worse the problem gets. The more you know, the less likely you are to be able to convey it effectively: it’s too complicated and there’s too much of it.

One argument to this would be “it’s not about conveying your knowledge, you egotist; it’s about teaching the process of making knowledge available.” That’s very true, but even there, as a teacher your sense of/experience of the process of making knowledge available is so much deeper/broader than the students. I have a lot more “ways of reading” available to me and what’s more I’m comfortable with them and reasonably fluid, the way everybody gets with practice. It takes years.

So the the argument becomes “you aren’t teaching actual knowledge and you aren’t teaching actual methods, you’re opening a door students can walk through.” That is, to paraphrase the old cliche, you aren’t actually teaching a man to fish, you’re just teaching him that there’s such a thing as fishing and here’s a way to do it, which probably won’t actually work because it’s much too simple.

There are probably fields where experience doesn’t work against you. General contracting, for example, or skilled trades generally. But I’m willing to bet that in most fields there’s a balance point, after which experience and knowledge become a double edged sword. Imagine you are a professional musician. The longer you play, the more the weight of what you’ve already played before bears on the present.

This may seem like whining, or worse like fishing for compliments. I don’t mean it as either. I like my job and in the spectrum of jobs, it’s a good one and I’m lucky to have it, and I’m not bad at it. But I doubt I’m alone in this feeling.