Quote of the Day (John Steinbeck, on His “Very Strong’ Strain of Irish Blood)

“I am half Irish, the rest of my blood being watered down with German and Massachusetts English. But Irish blood doesn't water down very well; the strain must be very strong.”—American novelist and Nobel Literature laureate John Steinbeck (1902-1968), “I Go Back to Ireland,” Collier’s, Jan. 31, 1953, collected in Americaand Americans and Selected Nonfiction, edited by Susan Shillinglaw and Jackson J. Benson (2002)

I don’t think I can wish my readers a “happy” St. Patrick’s Day—there will surely be no marching or celebrating this year. But in the 1840s, when they first came to this country, they didn’t have much to cheer about, either, what with a famine that turned into a plague in their home country and bigotry that awaited them when they came to these shores in absolute desperation.

How did they endure it? Faith, humor, sheer will—and uniting together, as tight as can be, when they were rejected  by native Americans who could have acted more tolerantly and generously but didn’t.

I worry that the current Coronavirus crisis will not only continue to split Americans into warring groups, but that it may even fracture the solidarity of groups yearning to break through, as the Irish were, after long years, finally able to manage. We must not let this happen. 

Let’s hope that the ethnic solidarity celebrated by Steinbeck remains just as strong not only within Irish-American, but among those who have taken their place as emerging groups in America. It may be now, as it was then, the only to survive.

Quote of the Day (Bernard Shaw, on Music Criticism)

“The emoluments of a music critic are not large. Newspaper proprietors offer men from a pound a week to five pounds a week for music criticism, the latter figure being very exceptional, and involving the delivery of a couple of thousand words of extra brilliant copy every week. And, except in the dead season, the critic must spend most of his afternoons and evenings, from three to midnight, in concert rooms or in the opera house. I need hardly say that it is about as feasible to obtain the services of a fully-qualified music critic on these terms as it would be to obtain a pound of fresh strawberries every day from January to December for five shillings a week. Consequently, to all the qualifications I have already suggested, I must insist on this further one--an independent income, and sufficient belief in the value of music criticism to sustain you in doing it for its own sake whilst its pecuniary profits are enjoyed by others. And since this condition is so improbable in any given case as to take my subject completely out of the range of the practicable, I may as well stop preaching, since my sermon ends, as all such sermons do, in a demonstration that our economic system fails miserably to provide the requisite incentive to the production of first-rate work.”—George Bernard Shaw, “How to Become a Music Critic,” Scottish Music Monthly, December 1894

What many people don’t realize about George Bernard Shaw—born on this date in 1856—is that, before he started writing the plays that would net him the Nobel Prize for Literature, he had served as a music critic.

Reading his tongue-in-cheek “sermon,” as he put it, on the sorry state of music criticism in his own time, I wonder what he would say about the dire state of the profession today. In a post to the blog MinnPost.com a few years ago, David Hawley asked, “Is classical-music criticism in daily newspapers going the way of the dodo?” His answer wasn’t particularly hopeful. (Actually, the tone of his piece was akin to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot—i.e., laughing in the face of gathering darkness, absurdity and all-around meaninglessness.)

Hawley focuses on the decline of newspaper classical-music criticism in the face of online reviews, but another issue may end up looming just as large. Blogger Jon Silpayamanant, looking at trends in ethnicity as well as the aging audience for classical music, raises an infinitely troubling concern: “If the white population in the US is aging at a faster rate than the population of the US as a whole and the Classical Music audience is aging at a faster rate than the population of the US as a whole I’m wondering if the rate of the aging white population is at all correlated to the rate of Classical music audiences.”

That’s one way of looking at this. But Shaw, more than 100 years ago, implicitly raises another: class. True to his Socialist beliefs, he ends with ironic jabs not only at the profession he’s about to leave for good but also at the capitalism he will spend the raise of his life deriding: “our economic system fails miserably to provide the requisite incentive to the production of first-rate work.”
These days, he might also have concluded with, “the production and appreciation of first-class work.” Look around at any classical music performance and it becomes clear how upscale the audience is.

Income may play as much a role in the troubling demographics noticed by Silpayamanant as anything else. The gap between whites on the one hand and blacks and Hispanics on the other seriously widened as a result of the most result recession. Shaw would have been the first to point this out--and the resulting implications for culture.

Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on the Impact of Exile)

“If you take tribes of people, exile them from their homelands and ship them to strange, arid lands, you’re going to produce bad outcomes for generations.”—David Brooks, “The Limits of Policy,” The New York Times, May 4, 2010

The immediate antecedent for Times columnist Brooks (tipped off by the word “tribes”) is the case of Native-Americans, which he supports with this statistic: “The average Asian-American in New Jersey lives an amazing 26 years longer and is 11 times more likely to have a graduate degree than the average American Indian in South Dakota.”

However, it’s not hard to find similar cases of exile—and similar multi-generational traumas—in other groups that did not go to “arid lands,” notably African-Americans (many exiled twice—initially from Africa, then, as noted in Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land, from the South to the North, following the mechanized picking of cotton, beginning in the 1940s) and Irish-Americans (the archetypal immigrant group, in terms of traumas suffered and coping mechanisms pioneered, following the Great Famine of the 1840s).