The Scandal of Pleasure
Steiner, Wendy
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "The Scandal of Pleasure" stands before us today is the Asia that MacArthur sketched out aboard the USS Missouri in 1945: one that with American leadership had turned its energies from war to commerce and was becoming more...
...Like everything else concerning Madame, her book shouldn't be taken at face value...
...There's no comma after "Petals...
...3. Lovelace is the name not just of the "actress-victim in Deep Throat" but also of the villain in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa...
...The book's title, for instance, comes from an African proverb—"It takes a village to raise a child...
...Does the First Lady believe that Americans have something to learn from Africa about raising children...
...The Salman Rushdie pages are largely devoted to a dry plot summary of The Satanic Verses...
...half of his State of the Union Address apparently came straight from its pages, and the rest of her program suggestions are ripe to become a second term agenda...
...Her agenda here is ostensibly to exalt literary bliss, but to sing of bliss in language so determinedly unmusical is worse than paradoxical...
...Oh, and, by the way, what ever happened to the nonjudgmental liberal dogma that there is no such thing as a misreading...
...it was Stephen Dedalus, a character in a novel by Joyce, and what he actually said was: "I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning...
...Purity" is a dirty word in the liberal catechism...
...Then we hear of something called "liberal dogma," of liberalism as "an especially good faith" and "a faith militant...
...0i41...
...it's suicidal...
...These folks come from both the right—those who object to public funding for Andres Serrano or Robert Mapplethorpe, and the mullahs who'd cut off more than funding from Salman Rushdie—and the leftanti-porn feminists and joyless deconstructionists like Paul de Man...
...Paying attention in her English classes wouldn't have done much good...
...the apparition 'of these faces' —which faces...
...The right demands that art be purely aesthetic, DONALD LYONS is the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal and a frequent contributor to the New Criterion...
...The colon should be a semicolon...
...Billed as an essay on how our society can do better by its children—a timely, indeed urgent subject—it is also much, much more...
...2. Babes on Broadway was not one of Busby Berkeley's geometric spectaculars, it's a Rooney-Garland musical...
...It's pretty clear, for example, that those with any other "faith" than liberalism might be "totalizers"—and hence unwelcome at her banquet of bliss...
...When she's not mired in academic jargon like "symptomatize," she slips into vulgarity, as when she crows about Hemingway's "virile chest-thumping" being replaced in curricula by the likes of Zora Neale Hurston — "the newly canonized works are often very good...
...Besides wringing her hands at the Ayatollah and Senator Helms and Dinesh D'Souza, plus a token frown toward the puritanical left every now and then, what does Steiner like...
...But even Steiner sees things cannot be quite so simple: What if, for instance, there are basic disagreements inside...
...stands before us today is the Asia that MacArthur sketched out aboard the USS Missouri in 1945: one that with American leadership had turned its energies from war to commerce and was becoming more free with each day...
...Both efforts are dismally inept...
...The book must also be understood as the summa theologica of the most brilliant woman ever to grace the nation's capital, someone who has thought hard for a quarter century about remaking society and improving those who populate it...
...I am not sure that the aesthetic pleasures he provides are my favorites— Rabelais is not always my cup of tea—but I would not deny them...
...It Takes A Village And Other Lessons Children Teach Us Hillary Rodham Clinton Simon & Schuster /318 pages / $20 REVIEWED BY Lisa Schiffren Like its author, Hillary Clinton's first book has many missions...
...Her prose advocates pleasure, offers none...
...Her culture-war stories are refried beans, heavily dependent, as even sympathetic reviewers have noted, on other writers...
...and it is hard to see how the embrace of these virtues by three-fifths of the world's people can be anything but a blessing for the rest of us...
...She labels D'Souza's amusing variant a rightist "misreading" and smugly huffs: "On both interpretive [sic] and rhythmical grounds we might wish that he had paid more attention in his English classes...
...The apparition' —which apparition...
...She swoons over some campy shoe drawings by Warhol, preposterously describing them as reactions "against modernist purism...
...In the U.S...
...Purism takes much harder hits when the author reproduces, in full-page illustrations, Andres Serrano's Piss Christ and Robert Mapplethorpe's Self-Portrait—the one with the bullwhip sticking into, or out of, his anus...
...I suggest Professor Steiner pay a visit to a garden sometime...
...We begin to suspect that the come-one, come-all party invitation might shelter some dress codes in the fine print...
...LISA SCHIFFREN, a frequent contributor, wrote about the Clinton tax returns in the August 1993 American Spectator...
...unengaged with history and politics...
...the phrase is used exclusively in left-wing children's welfare advocacy circles, and the word "village" is interchangeable with "tax dollars...
...Actually to believe in anything—say, God, or enduring moral values—is to risk being a wallflower at the Steiner cotillion...
...Steiner misquotes the poem, putting in a comma where none belongs, and shows herself tone-deaf to the mild irony in D'Souza's paraphrase...
...petals `on a wet, black bough.'" As the author of such labored obviousness, Steiner is no one to call D'Souza, or anybody, unrhythmical...
...Is there any place on the planet where a child has a smaller chance of reaching adulthood...
...But why an African proverb...
...What are today trumpeted as "Asian values" would be recognizable to our forefathers as the old Protestant work ethic...
...As she, unwisely relying on memory or a later Pound memoir, gives it, the poem reads: "In a Station of the Metro / The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals, on a wet, black bough...
...In her infantile cosmology, liberalism is warm and cozy and inviting and not Mean and everybody can come in to play, bunnies and bears and foxes and snakes, too: "If liberalism welcomes diversity and disjunction, fundamentalism casts these out in the name of purity...
...She likes "postmodern pastiche ...violation of decorum," things "comic, light, loud, and shamelessly imitative" as opposed to "classical purity [which] is tragic, deep, noble...
...the left reduces art to mere illustrations of the two...
...First, the title—the first line—should be in caps...
...Petals' — which petals...
...She says the poem could be viewed as "a manifestation of racism" on the grounds that the faces in the subway must be exclusively "white, pink, or perhaps yellow in order for the petal metaphor to work...
...Most interesting, to those of us weirdly fascinated by her, the book is Hillary's presentation of herself as she wishes to be seen: America's First Power Lawyer Spouse is now America's "Magnificent Mom," as her husband told a dumbstruck nation...
...What does she get off on, pleasure-wise...
...Pound sent it to Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine in 1912 and it was printed there in 1913...
...She also offers her readers this: "Most of the stressed syllables are nouns chained together by prepositional phrases that draw us from one to the next: 'In a station' — which station...
...Chipps" and many others) but misunderstandings of the word...
...The Pleasure Isn't Ours The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism Wendy Steiner University of Chicago Press 251 pages / $24.95 REVIEWED BY Donald Lyons The Scandal of Pleasure is a collection of thoughts on the culture wars by Wendy Steiner, chairman of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania...
...4. Orwell did not, as Rushdie alleged and Steiner carelessly repeats, endorse "disillusioned quietism" in his famous essay "Inside the Whale"—rather, he lamented it...
...Between these battling straw men Steiner stakes out a no-man's-land called liberalism, "that most discredited of ideologies...without which aesthetic interpretation becomes grotesque...
...Twice in these pages Steiner actually essays what, in days of yore, English professors were expected routinely to do — 66 March 1996 • The American Spectator Hail to the Chief that is, to discuss a piece of literature...
...The book is also part campaign document: No piece of domestic legislation her husband has signed goes unheralded...
...Liberalism turns out to exact a faith in no faith but itself...
...Between incessant tribal warfare, savage butchThe American Spectator • March 1996 67...
...The book's governing idea is simple in the extreme: there are people who, in the name of "totalizing" and intolerant ideologies, would censor art and prevent pleasure...
...Fair enough...
...On another occasion Steiner offers a five-page analysis of a short Ezra Pound poem...
...The book is also riddled with plain mistakes: 1. "Expatriot" and "expatriotism" are not mere misspellings (like "Mr...
...I like Mapplethorpe's fearlessness in dramatizing his difference from me," she says...
...She claims it was written in 1916...
...Her discussion of the NEA controversy owes much to Robert Hughes, and the sketch of deconstruction-guru Paul de Man's Nazi background is indebted to David Lehman's extensive expose...
...Apropos of Dinesh D'Souza's paraphrase, "Across the lawns the scholars come and go, talking of Proust and Michelangelo," Steiner solemnly informs us that this is an echo of Eliot, whose lines she gives as: "In the room the women come and go, / Talking of Michelangelo...
...For Hillary's purposes the proverb means that children will only thrive when all of society, not just individual parents, act in their interest...
...5. It was not James Joyce who "said that those concerned with language must live by silence, exile, and cunning...
...the faces 'in the crowd...
...These qualities are not a threat to the West," says Rohwer...
...the station `of the Metro...
...They are what made the West in the first place, and will now help to remake it...
...Liberalism wants everyone inside...
...Wbile Steiner's squirming here is amusing, it is about the only pleasure her book offers...
Vol. 29 • March 1996 • No. 3
