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"Stephen Spender: A Life in Modernism" by David Leeming
A biography of the celebrity-loving man of letters -- friend of Auden and Isherwood, surrogate son of Eliot and Woolf -- whose social calendar was one of his finest works.
By Jaime Manrique
[11/09/99]

Dear Mr. Blue
Murder, she wrote
The victim in my wife's latest mystery looks suspiciously like me -- a middle-aged man who left his wife for a younger woman.
By Garrison Keillor
[11/09/99]

Book Bag
Who's screwing who
The author of "The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil" picks five great novels about exploitation.
By Fay Weldon
[11/08/99]

Ivory Tower
The N-word
Jefferson Community College teacher Ken Hardy wanted to teach a class on taboo words. He said one and lost his job.
By Chris Colin
[11/08/99]

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"The Tiny One" by Eliza Minot
An 8-year-old faces the death of her mother.
By Lindsay Amon
[11/08/99]

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It certainly doesn't make Mozart evil. It's strange that anything about the Nazis could ever get confused with beauty.

To move sideways again, in your book you talk about "mistakes of beauty" -- when you suddenly realized that a palm tree was beautiful. You could say that everything is beautiful. We're only limited because of culture and education.

I think that may well be the case. Certainly many people have argued that way back starting with Plato -- that when you see one beautiful thing, if it's truly beautiful and if you're truly vulnerable to its beauty, it will lead you to eventually see the beauty of everything.

I do a lot of cultural criticism, and I find just as often the opposite is the case. For example, someone who loves opera isn't even going to consider that there is beauty in Japanese noise guitar.

What's really peculiar about that argument is that only once I like opera do you begin to expect me to begin to be capable of liking the Japanese ... noise guitar?

Noise guitar.

And that I refer to in the book as the problem of lateral disregard. That is, what I argue is that a beautiful object seizes our attention often without our volition. But then either on our own or because a neighbor taps us on the shoulder and says, "You know, here's something over here that deserves just that kind of attention from you" ... Beauty makes us eligible not only to look at the things that seize our attention, but makes us eligible to go on and be caring about other objects as well, and the same thing can be said of persons.

Consider that African tribe where they extend the women's necks with metal rings. If you belonged, those women with their giraffe necks would be beautiful, whereas people outside the tribe are likely to see them as grotesque. How much of the appreciation of beauty is natural, and how much cultural?

To everyone's surprise, there's been a lot of work in the 1990s by scientists that seems to suggest that norms about beauty are much more widely shared culturally than we've been saying. But let's assume that people really did have their own taste in beauty, that cultures have their own taste in beauty, and see where it would lead us. Is that an argument against beauty? In a way, it's an extreme example of the fact that each person everywhere always gets to choose for himself or herself what's beautiful. The most stark place in which that's true is in the choice of a spouse or a mate. And the individual always is the arbiter of what's beautiful. That is long in advance of the notion of individualism and pluralism in the realm of justice. It took cultures a long, long time before they understood that one person, one vote was the best rule. But in beauty it's always been one person, one vote.

Can too much beauty dilute the concept? If you went to a party where absolutely everybody was beautiful -- the people, the art on the wall, the food -- would you eventually numb out? Doesn't beauty need an opposite?

Kant said our desire for beauty is inexhaustible, that any other pleasure we can get exhausted by -- too much food, too much this, too much that -- and yet the one thing we can't get tired of is beauty.

Is cynicism a formal philosophic school?

Next page | I became a cynic after I was run down by a truck