Sarang  haha i can hold my cards better than my drink

the problem with chess — which as far as i can tell is a fine game — and the rest of that is that i really am repelled by most aspects of nerd culture

Zach  Yes, chess culture suffered hideously after Bobby Fischer. I quit chess at a very early age because my dad was extremely good and I developed an intense inferiority complex about losing.

Sarang  yes that would do it too

Zach  You would love 19th-c. chess culture, very colorful

Sarang  i think you’re right — in general i think i would have been much more comfortable in victorian “nerd” circles

it is this “two cultures” thing. my view is that it’s a false equivalence

or perhaps not. i cannot entirely put my finger on why nerd culture is so consistently awful

Zach  It certainly is

It’s funny how even nerd culture has deep-rooted anti-intellectualism

Sarang  oh there isn’t an “even” about it

Zach  Right

Sarang  it is worse than all that; i mean a lot of nerds are firmly convinced that profs are all drudges and one should drop out of college and so on

Zach  For someone who thought nerd = smart kids, but it really doesn’t have much to do with that does it

Nor is it weirdo

Sarang  it is just another subculture

has to do with programming, video games, typically anime, comic books

superheroes, most often

Zach  I guess the thing that is so off-putting is it seems to be a complex of fetishes rather than any particular personal feature

Sarang  fantasy. yes

Zach  Even the interest in e.g. Star Wars or comic books seems to necessarily take on obsessive, fetish qualities

And then there are the fetishes qua fetishes which need not be named

Sarang  yeah

i wonder if what is so unpleasant about the nerd response to art is that they only like stuff that can be read the “wrong way” as it were

i am in some ways at the other extreme. i do not have much interest in myth

Zach  Hm I’m not sure I follow about the wrong way

I think they read Star Wars very patently in the meant way, which is disturbing only because it’s such blatant schlock

I am into myth but mostly of its template/trope qualities

The Bible and so on

Sarang  yes, i think “wrong way” only applies to things that can be read multiple ways

there is definitely a nerd canon of Good Literature though it consists largely of borges

Zach  Right and then Kafka (ha)

Eco

Neal Stephenson

William Gibson

Sarang  yes

Zach  Pynchon

Sarang  pynchon definitely

vonnegut

Zach  Yeah

Fantasy, again

Sarang  yup

Zach  Is there any word that describes the persuasion of being emotionally sensitive to one’s own actual plight and intelligent enough to engage it (in some sense) rather than e.g. fantasizing about something that doesn’t have to do with anyone’s plight?

The French, surely, have such a word

Sarang  it is a good question. i associate the idea with keats

(ironically!)

he said sth somewhere about the idea that you want to be able to handle horror w/o having it dull your sensibility

something about doctoring and phthisis

Zach  Medical doctoring?

Sarang  yeah

Zach  I’m amused that there’s a certain American wise man who always has “a small practice” the [William Carlos Williams] and so on

Countless others

Sarang  ha! yes

Zach  Did you really remember some obscure three-word phrase buried deep in “Cities of the Plain” ?

Sarang  ?

oh!

you mean the swann thing?

Zach  Yes

Sarang  no, i remembered something about a punchinello nose

Zach  Oh that makes more sense

Sarang  the three-word phrase was a cleaner more googlable version

…

Zach  About to finish that thing second time round

Much better at this age

Sarang  ha! wonderful

i have not really thought of rereading

it still lies in the too-recent past

ulysses will have to be done this summer, there are social necessities

Zach  He is sort of a twerp about girls sometimes but that probably has to do with the relationship prospects for a gay dude in his milieu

Sarang  i think the narrator is awfully good about not seeming overly sympathetic

Zach  Yeah

Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland had challenged and defeated the contract system. Katharine Hepburn contrived her own material as early as The Philadelphia Story. Ingrid Bergman made her bold journey to Italy to make ‘real’ films. Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Doris Day and Susan Hayward rode the studio attitudes of the 1950s without breaking down. Kim Novak was shy and limited as an actress, and vulnerable to male estimates that she was merely sexy. But she did The Man with the Golden Arm, Strangers When We Meet and Picnic – not great pictures, but worthwhile. And she was Madeleine and Judy in Vertigo. Does anyone believe Monroe could have done that film, or lived up to Hitchcock’s need to trap anguished actors in his taut frames?

Yet if Monroe could not generate her own projects, then surely it was up to her to seek the best opportunities available? That fits Judy Holliday, who sometimes reminds one of Monroe as the ‘dumb blonde’, Billie Dawn, in Born Yesterday. Holliday was not dumb, though she was neurotic, but in Adam’s Rib and Born Yesterday she found a democratic intelligence within the dumb blonde archetype that surpasses anything ‘Lincolnian’ in Monroe’s career.

There is an even more telling example of what could be done. When Arthur Miller’s play After the Fall had its debut in 1964, directed by Elia Kazan, the role of Maggie (plainly based on Marilyn) was taken by Barbara Loden. Kazan had had an affair with Monroe before her marriage to Joe DiMaggio, and in A Life he spoke fondly of her. But this inspired discoverer of performers did not make a film with or for Monroe, just as Lee Strasberg’s admiration for Marilyn’s reading of Anna Christie never led to a stage production. Had they realised that Monroe’s spasmodic glow (so magnificent in stills) was hardly viable in a complete dramatic context?

On the other hand, Loden wrote, directed and acted in a poignant, independent movie, Wanda, where she plays a fragile unsmart woman involved with a minor criminal. Wanda is a pioneering achievement, showing that an unfulfilled actress could do something for herself. Much the same applies to Gena Rowlands in A Woman under the Influence and her other work with John Cassavetes. Wanda cost only $200,000 but Loden needed six years to raise the money. She took control and responsibility. Monroe left an estate of just over $90,000, which ended up with the family of Lee Strasberg. Control in Hollywood is more frequent, and more complicated, than Rose allows.

David Thomson
San Francisco

The Buried Whom, as it is called, forms a special problem. That is where the word occurs deep in a sentence. For a ready example, take the common expression: “He did not know whether he knew her or not because he had not heard whom the other had said she was until too late to see her.” The simplest way out of this is to abandon the “whom” altogether and substitute “where” (a reading of the sentence that way will show how much better it is). Unfortunately, it is only in rare cases that “where” can be used in place of “whom.” Nothing could be more flagrantly bad, for instance, than to say “Where are you?” in demanding a person’s identity. The only conceivable answer is “Here I am,” which would give no hint at all as to whom the person was. Thus the conversation, or piece of writing, would, from being built upon a false foundation, fall of its own weight.

A common rule for determining whether “who” or “whom” is right is to substitute “she” for “who,” and “her” for “whom,” and see which sounds the better. Take the sentence, “He met a woman who they said was an actress.” Now if “who” is correct then “she” can be used in its place. Let us try it. “He met a woman she they said was an actress.” That instantly rings false. It can’t be right. Hence the proper usage is “whom.”

In certain cases grammatical correctness must often be subordinated to a consideration of taste. For instance, suppose that the same person had met a man whom they said was a street cleaner. The word “whom” is too austere to use in connection with a lowly worker, like a street-cleaner, and its use in this form is known as False Administration or Pathetic Fallacy.

You might say: “There is, then, no hard and fast rule?” (“was then” would be better, since “then” refers to what is past). You might better say (or have said): “There was then (or is now) no hard and fast rule?” Only this, that it is better to use “whom” when in doubt, and even better to re-word the statement, and leave out all the relative pronouns, except ad, ante, con, in, inter, ob, post, prae, pro, sub, and super.