Cockroaches of New York,

I’m sorry.

I’ll understand if you decline to read this letter; that’s why I’ve put what’s important up top.  I’ve said some mean things about you.  I find your little eyes revolting, and your little knot-sized heart makes me panic, and I hate the little click your adult body makes when you fall from the countertop to the floor.  It was horrible of you to move into my microwave last summer, and the time you somehow got into my mother’s bra during a college information session is really unforgivable.  She had to fish you out in a room full of people.  You’ve made me such a paranoid; each time my roommate S. cuts her eyes to the ceiling or a wall I think she’s seen you.  But I’m willing, right now – just now, so I’d take the opportunity if I were you – to extend the beginnings of a truce.

You might have guessed that this letter has something to do with our encounter yesterday (are you smart?  I don’t know.).  You’re correct.  But for this to make sense, you’ve got to get to know me a bit – at least the bit pertinent to this gesture.  It’s important to know that I’m a punctilious traveler, always early, fingering my ticket.  The size or significance of the journey has no impact on my behavior. I suffer pangs of remorse if I’m not on the subway car nearest to my next exit or transfer. On the way home, I root around for my house keys a block before I reach my apartment.  I’m at the airport an hour and a half before departure, always.  I tell you this because I think you might relate (you time your trips across my kitchen wall particularly well).

Being somewhat of a lazy person, this monstrous dedication to punctuality is tremendously helpful.  If I don’t have a schedule, I’m happy to stay in bed until I get too hungry or think a bath sounds nice.  I can see an elevated train and airplanes from my bedroom window; their cycles lend a pleasant rhythm to my inaction.  It’s only the thought of a place to be and a time to be there that prods me out of bed – I look at that train and those planes as if through the face of a clock, and the sweeping hands interrupt their spell.  The tendency has its drawbacks as well: I fight frustration that my boyfriend H. “walks too slow.”  I am overly resentful of latecomers, but I hate being the first to arrive. 

Yesterday morning (you remember), I flew JetBlue from JFK to San Jose.  The flight was scheduled to depart at 7:05 and the weather was clear on both coasts.  I had set the alarm for 4:45, and when it chirped I gave a morning speech to H. about how I would miss him, and then hopped right out of bed and headed for the shower.  There are only a few things short of flood, fire, and family emergency that could derail my travel agenda.  You’re one, and you stood in the curve of the tub.

I really thought I was hallucinating.  You were big that day, as big as my thumb, and so still.  I’d been  waiting for this moment since the heat set in.  I knew you would crawl up some drain, but I didn’t know when.  And you were so unbelievably still.  I must have made some noise, a strangled scream, because H. said my name.  I didn’t see him as I sprinted back to the bed.  My face felt funny; I gave myself a headache from screwing it up so tight.  H. gallantly made his way into the bathroom with a paper towel, and returned to tell me you’d gone down the drain.  Did you look up at me while I took the shower?  Do you have a sense of humor?  I was in limbo position, feet as far from the drain as possible.  I thought you might have gotten behind my shampoo, or in the soap dish, or on the ceiling.  It was the dirtiest I’ve felt while clean. 

I left fifteen minutes later, fifteen minutes late.  Any other day, I’d have been running a countdown to takeoff in my mind.  Yet: I didn’t even look at the clock.  I didn’t ask my cab driver if he had heard me properly (JFK, not LaGuardia).  I didn’t count the cash I’d just gotten from the ATM.

I got to the airport a bit after 6.  I didn’t take out the money for the cab fare until we were stopped in front of the JetBlue terminal.  I took my time at the check-in kiosk, though I had arrived well into my usual grace period.  And I stood in line to check my duffel bag, one that would probably have fit in the overhead compartment.  Hungry and on a roll, I got in another line to buy breakfast.  My flight, 169, began boarding while I was in line.  I knew this because of the giant screen above cashier, which flashed, “FLIGHT 169 – BOARDING.” But panic-free, I stayed in line. I bought my berries and cheese, and walked up to the gate and right onto the plane.  I sat in my seat, buckled my belt, and we took off 15 minutes later. 

You spent me.  I had nothing left.  An immutable struggle, me and clock, dissipated unremarkably in your wake.  Do I have a certain increment of anxiety to expend each day?  Did you sap it in less than a second?  Or could my day just not get worse?  Maybe I was in shock, just numb to the clock and the plane.  Perhaps you just did quickly what you do regularly – distract me.  In any case, look – I got on the plane on time.  I did it without being a human stopwatch.  And I want to say thank you. 

This is going to be a long road for us.  I’ve never had a positive thought, even a neutral one, about you before.  And please don’t misinterpret this letter: you are fundamentally unwelcome in my home.  But, cockroaches of New York, I’m ready to think about our relationship.

Sincerely,

Jane (Apt 2R)

[Pictured above: Beetle bracelet purchased to ward off cockroaches.]

While most of the world has been fixated on the ongoing FIFA World Cup tournament, a Hollywood film crew has been gallivanting around the globe shooting the next  installment of the hugely successful James Bond movie franchise: Casino Royale, a remake of the 1967 classic spy spoof, based on Ian Fleming’s very first Bond move. The film marks the debut of British actor Daniel Craig as the tres suave 007.

The original, of course, is considered one of the very first satirical send-ups of espionage thrillers, well before the debut 30 years later of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. And it’s every bit as deliciously silly. The incomparable David Niven plays an aging Sir James Bond, who returns from retirement to rejoin Her Majesty’s Secret Service, specifically to head an operation bent on destroying an evil criminal organization called SMERSH.

Naturally, this involves fending off a bevy of nubile beauties desperate for a chip off the old (literally!) Bond block; a double-crossing fellow agent named Vesper Lynd (Ursula Andress); a Bond impersonator, portrayed by the always-hilarious Peter Sellers; and a crooked casino owner named Le Chiffre (Orson Welles), who supports SMERSH financially with his winnings at the baccarat tables. All Bond has to do is beat Le Chiffre at baccarat, apparently, to topple a global criminal enterprise bent on bringing about the imminent collapse of civilization. (It is a spoof, people. Work with me, here.) If that weren’t enough to deal with, Bond must also grapple with family troubles, in the form of his neurotic nephew, Jimmy Bond (Woody Allen) and an illegitimate daughter, the product of a brief liaison with the late Mata Hari.

In the Bond Universe of 1967, the fictional fate of the civilized world rested on baccarat. No doubt it’s still 007’s favored game, being the cosmopolitan super-sleuth that he is. But these days, the rarefied game of baccarat has been eclipsed by the huge mainstream popularity of that gambling workhorse, poker, especially the Texas Hold ‘Em variety. Some people attribute this in part to the introduction of online poker and the invention of a camera that can show a player’s “hold cards” to a TV audience, thereby turning tournaments into spectator sports. Not only can we tune in for live coverage of World Series Poker and the World Poker Tour, but now we can combine our love of poker with our celebrity gawking fixation by watching Celebrity Poker Showdown.

I hope nobody thinks the less of me when I confess that I’m a diehard fan of the latter series. It’s not just because of the celebrities, although the comedians who participate in particular provide endless entertainment. Nor is it for the pleasure of rattling off the cool-sounding jargon: you can “up the ante,” “see the flop,” “raise the blinds,” and if you’re really unfortunate, you might get “sucked out on the river.” (That’s what happens when you have the best hand until the very last card is dealt, losing the pot in one fell swoop.) Ultimately, the appeal is the game itself. Watching the hands and rounds of betting unfold is oddly addictive, plus there’s the play-by-play commentary by an in-house poker expert (although I mourn the departure of original commentator, Phil Gordon, who has been replaced by the far doughier — albeit knowledgable — “Captain Sideburns,” a.k.a., Phil Hellmuth).

Devoted fans of baccarat might sniff dismissively at my fondness for this rather crass, bourgeois upstart, but poker is has an equally long history, although not entirely illustrious. There’s some debate as to its specific origins, but it most likely evolved out of early games that all relied on betting against ranked card or domino combinations — not to mention the practice of “bluffing” to bamboozle one’s opponents. For instance, around 969 A.D., the Chinese emperor Mu-tsung reportedly played “domino cards” with his wife on New Year’s eve. In the 12th and 13th centuries, Egyptians used playing cards, as did the Persians in the 16th century. In fact, there’s a Persian game called  As Nas — played with 25 cards in five different suits — that could be considered one of poker’s forebears. Poker derives its name from 17th and 18th century French and German games, called poque and pochen, respectively. Those in turn evolved from a 16th century Spanish game called primero, widely believed to be the game most directly related to modern poker.

That should convince the most hardened skeptics that poker is every bit as international in scope as the ongoing FIFA World Cup. Alas, much of its history in the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the New World isn’t quite so civilized. We can blame the spread on the French: poker mania began in Canada with the immigration of French colonials, who brought their national card game, poque, to the New World with them. Those French settlers then drifted south to found New Orleans in the early 18th century. From there the game spread West via Mississippi riverboats, growing ever more popular, until it reached the Western frontier, finding a home in the proliferation of saloons that popped up in response to the California Gold Rush.

The riverboats functioned as lowbrow casinos, and back then, poker was largely the province of cheats and outlaws. A Time-Life book on the history of poker, called The Gamblers, relates the story of a night in 1832, when three professional card sharks aboard a Mississippi steamboat attempted to cheat a young man from Natchez out of his money via a rigged poker game. They succeeded, and the financially ruined young man was on the verge of hurling himself into the river in despair, when a mysterious observer came to his aid. That observer, one James Bowie, took on the three gamblers himself, catching one of them in the very act of cheating. He redeemed the lost money at knife-point on the young man’s behalf — although it must be said, he kept $20,000 of the $70,000 pot for himself as a reward. So he wasn’t entirely altruistic.

There were some “gentlemen gamblers,”  like Bowie, who viewed the game merely as a form of entertainment, to be practiced in moderation, and who abhorred the practice of cheating. But this period also saw the emergence of professional gamblers whose sole aim was to fleece unsuspecting players out of their hard-earned cash. In fact, it was the professionals who are responsible for the evolution of the game’s rules, to enhance their profitability, most notably via the addition of “draw cards” and a second round of betting. In the original version of the game, players received five cards face down, with no chance to improve their hands with draw cards. (Random bit of trivia: the Joker was introduced to the deck as a wild card in 1875.)

Modern tournaments didn’t really start to flourish until the 1970s, when the World Series of Poker debuted, prompting the publication of several books about poker strategies to fuel the growing public interest. And now people are flocking to casinos all over the country, hosting games of Texas Hold ‘Em in their homes, and frittering away untold hours playing in online tournaments. Local bars have even started hosting weekly “poker nights.”

Nonetheless, I managed to resist poker’s irresistible lure for quite some time, despite my fascination with Celebrity Poker Showdown. Still, I suppose it was inevitable that I would purchase that first computer game on CD and begin my descent down the slippery slope to moral depravity. Even now, I primarily play against the computer, and eschew the online tournaments. But then I went to Las Vegas in June for the first-ever YearlyKos conference, and, well, my downfall was complete when I summoned the courage to venture into the MGM Grand casino and join a low-stakes 2/4 table.

It was admittedly a bit intimidating at first, forking over $100 in exchange for a rack of chips and sitting down to a table filled with utter strangers intent on taking my chips away from me. Even though I was familiar with the rules of play and a bit of strategy — thanks to My Main Man, Phil Gordon — it took me a few hands to catch the rhythm of the game. I bided my time, playing tight, folding most of my hands before the flop, finally catching a pair of 8s (dubbed “snowmen”). And with trembling hands, I called the blinds. There’s something to be said for beginner’s luck: I picked up an extra 8 on the flop, and played my “trips” out to victory. Then I relaxed and lost myself in the game for the next few hours. In all honesty, I was prepared to lose that first $100, and I did get sucked out on the river a few times. Those are the breaks. But I made up the losses with a few well-timed wins, and ultimately walked away $90 richer, feeling quite chuffed at my modest fledgling success.

Skeptics would say that’s how they suck you in, much like drug dealers provide the first “hit” for free. Undoubtedly some people have been ruined by an addiction to gambling. But for me, the true allure of poker is not the gambling: the stakes are just a sidelight. Poker, at its heart, is an intricate, complex game, steeped in statistical probabilities, which might explain why it holds so much fascination for the mathematically inclined.

I am not so inclined. In fact, I don’t even pretend to understand the underlying statistics, although I’m slowly developing a deeper appreciation for that aspect of the game. For me, the play is made that much more interesting by the unpredictability of the “human factor”: people tend to follow their hunches, even when the conventional strategy tells them to do otherwise. So every hand unfolds just a bit differently, every round.

Poker experts often bemoan those sorts of people, because such players throw off all their carefully calculated odds with their infernally illogical unpredictability. The best players don’t always win,even on Celebrity Poker Showdown. But even the poker experts might admit, when pressed, that it makes a weird kind of sense. You can’t adhere strictly to the rules all the time, after all; every now and then, you have to take a gamble, although I prefer to think of it as a calculated risk. Sometimes it pays off. Sometimes it doesn’t. Poker is a lot like life, that way. Perhaps even James Bond would agree.

When not taking random walks at 3 Quarks Daily, Jennifer Ouellette muses about physics and culture on her own blog, Cocktail Party Physics.

Do women deserve the same prize money at Wimbledon as men?  I’ll get back to that – first, a meandering introduction.  Feminism, since at least Mary Wollestonecraft, has always maintained a productive tension between agitating for gender equality and elaborating gender difference.  The very fact that equal rights for women as subjects and citizens is the legacy of feminist thought opens the ground for a philosophical argument about gender difference itself: what is its “nature,” what are its features, and how do these features affect a political program?  These issues, largely irresolvable products of the collision of activism and philosophy, play out as conflicts within feminist thinking between schools, generations, nations, etc.  In the academy, for instance, a theoretical split was seen to develop between French feminists such as Cixous and Irigaray, who argued for the intrinsic difference of women and their language, and those who argued, with Butler, that gender difference is always inessential and ideologically produced.

In more mainstream U.S. terms, in what I think of as “magazine feminism,” a similar argument has been understood as one between two generations, the “Second Wave” of the 1960’s and 70’s and the “Third Wave” of the 80’s and 90’s.  (Incidentally, the “First Wave” mostly concerns the suffrage movement: 1919, remember?)  Here’s the generational conflict in a nutshell: venerable figures such as Gloria Steinem were seen to derogate femininity in order to make the case for women’s equal abilities – their idea being that traditionally feminine traits were imposed upon women as a form of domination.  It’s all a bit unfair to the Second Wavers, since of course the Third Wave rehabilitation of femininity was made possible by the argument over capabilities having been won already.  All the same, by a dialectical movement, we find ourselves in a moment where femininity, having been cast aside in the fight for Title IX and other equal rights, and then diagnosed by high theory as nothing but a social construct anyway, is now being championed again.  (I know, I know, I’m oversimplifying and begging many questions in this little peanut of a summary.)

Let me try and illustrate these shifts using fashion.  Think about it: during the Eighties, while the Second Wave was still dominant in the mass, we had Amazons, tall, striking, intimidating women like Elle MacPherson or Grace Jones.  Just physically they were much larger than the models of other eras, and with the angular shoulder pads of their double-breasted jackets their sillouettes emphasized a masculine strength.  In the movies, overly jocky men were often rejected, while when little geeks like Corey Haim in Weird Science tried to invent the perfect woman, what happened?  Kelly LeBrock showed up and scared the crap out of him: this is the model system for a female identity concerned with appropriating equal power.

By the nineties, with Judith Butler on every sophomore’s dorm desktop, gender was fictive and boys and girls differed only in their ideological software.  What did fashion give us?  Androgyny, duh.  CK One was a unisex scent.  Read that again; is that even imaginable, let alone saleable, today?  Grunge-era Kate Moss and Jenny Shimizu dressed in white tees, combat boots and jeans, while guys dressed in…  the same.  Non-tomboy femininity, where it existed, had to do with ironic appropriations of extreme girlhood: Hello Kitty, little backpacks, Japanese animé.  The one place where extreme femininity was accepted was on men, in drag culture, which by its nature points up the mutability of gender.  The idea of young actresses glamming it up in makeup, heels and dresses every night, a la Jessica Simpson, would have seemed totally anachronistic, premodern. 

Except, of course, that’s exactly where mainstream taste did go, back towards female sexuality considered as power/agency rather than a concession to the male gaze.  First, fashion just dipped a toe in, with the mid-Nineties fetish for artisanal Italian shoes, pace Manolo Blahnik, and then gradually the entire female body was resexualized, through an alliance of endless red carpet shows, lad magazines, and “sex-positive” feminists.  Katha Pollit recently recalled Steinem comparing women who liked pornography to Jews who liked Mein Kampf; nowadays that view is less likely than a young feminist having made some of her own.  Being comfortable as the object of a sexual gaze, anathema to an earlier generation, have become the potential sign of an embrace of femininity, especially for younger women.

And here we stand.  It’s hard at the moment to tell feminism from its backlash, or maybe I should say that which is which depends on who you ask.  Anyway, recently the issue I started with came up in the popular press that brings a lot of this stuff into relief.  In case you forgot: do you think women deserve as much prize money as men at Wimbledon?  No, seriously, it’s a real question and I want your opinion on it.  Cause to be honest, it seemed like a no-brainer to me for a long time: of course they do!!!  But discussing it, several female tennis-fan friends made the case to me that they don’t, and the whole thing started to seem like an object lesson in the philosophical transformations of feminism.  But let me give you the facts first.

Wimbledon, conserver of tennis tradition and requirer of tennis whites, is the last of the four major tennis tournaments (the Grand Slams) to award different amounts to the male and female winners.  This year Roger Federer (whoops, I mean whoever the winner is) will get 655,000 pounds, while the female winner will get 625,000, for a paltry difference of 30,000 pounds, or less than five percent.  The U.S. Open has paid equally for decades (hey! something to be proud of this July 4th, damn it!), Roland Garros (the French Open) began just this year.  But the All-England Lawn Tennis Club hangs on to their petty disparity, infuriating lots of female players and much of British society, and contributing generally to worldwide distrust of old red-faced white men having clubs.  American Venus Williams is the leader of the player’s movement for equal pay, Tony Blair and John McEnroe have come out in support of it, and the Times of London (hardly a bastion of leftism) had this to say: “And by its mean-spirited defence of an anachronism well beyond its sell-by date, the All England Club has forfeited any vestige of quaintness.”  So what’s the problem?

Well, pointed out my interlocutors, for starters, women only play best of three set matches, not best of five as the men do: this means the men are already being paid less per game played (a set is up to six games) than the women.  Secondly, the women’s field is clearly less competitive than the men’s leading to a great number of easy matches in the early rounds.  (And, ugly irrelevant truth though it is, the respective levels of play are not close.)  Now, you might say (and I did say) that tennis is a sport, and sports are entertainment, and we don’t pay entertainers based on how long the album or movie or play is (if so, Andy Warhol might be the richest filmmaker of all time).  You might say that the competitiveness of the respective tours is irrelevant; they are evolving differently, and the principle of equality doesn’t change based on that evolution.  You might say, as Venus Williams did: “It has nothing to do with our campaign for equality. The time spent on court or the sets played is a moot topic. We are not arguing about that. It’s about being treated equal as human beings.”

You might also realize that this is a cosmetic issue that’s easy for politicians to look good decrying (new maxim: the cosmetic is the political?).  Women are underpaid relative to men in all the smaller tournaments, earning about 66% of their counterparts (even though both sexes play best-of-three sets in those), just as they earn less in every other industry (except modeling!).  They even get less as a per diem at many tournaments, which is despicable.  Yet the symbolism of Grand Slam prize money overrides all this: tennis is the most visible womens sport in the world.  And the U.S. Open’s equality on this has rightly and for a long while been a great source of pride: here in the nation of Billie Jean King, Second Waver extraordinaire, we do symbolic equal rights right. 

Yet here’s another difference between Billie Jean and her modern descendants: the sexual marketing of female tennis players (males too, for that matter) has accelerated considerably.  And just as in the world of fashion, modern women tennis players quite consciously trade on their appearance for major endorsements.  The tennis/fashion crossover means that Stella McCartney makes outfits for Maria Kirilenko, and Serena Williams designs clothes with Kimora Lee Simmons.  Of course, the queens of the scene still tend to be not so much beautiful as possessing all the signifiers of commercial beauty: blond hair and long limbs.  (Meanwhile, the truly gorgeous female tennis players, such as Ana Ivanovic, are ignored by the marketers in favor of the Sharapovas and Kournikovas.)  Does this sexualization constitute new-style feminism, or a backlash?  And how does this affect the drive for equality of paychecks?

The several people (all women) who argued with me that women don’t deserve equal money argued that to take the same pay for (shorter, easier) labor is unfair to men, and an unnecessary politics of gesture.  Perhaps this is the sign of truly consolidated strength, a confidence in one’s power and security that means one doesn’t have to accept merely symbolic gifts.  Okay, but the equal-pay movement going on right now is possible because the women’s game is nearly as popular (and occasionally more, in the ratings) as the men’s game now.  And in part, this is because of the women knowingly playing up to tennis’ image as an sanctioned arena in which to watch beautiful female athletes.  If sports are profit-seeking entertainment, and sex helps sell tickets and commercials (“Make every shot… a PowerShot”), then shouldn’t women demand an equal share of the pie, even if it’s for unequal on-court labor?  Or does that demean the principle of equality that women have fought for, as my opponents argued?  Which is capitulation, and which steadfast determination?  It’s a conundrum.  My gut is still heavily with equality, but what do you think?

Here’s the rest of dispatches.

At first, I thought it was an item from that old underground favorite, Tales of the Weird. But no, it was from the Boston Globe, under an April 18 byline by Globe staffer Carolyn Johnson:

Three hundred “pet waste removal” companies are reported to be operating nationwide. They have formed their own trade association, have annual meetings, and an annual “Golden Shovel” award. Poop-scooping has even been franchised by an outfit named “Doody Calls.”

A Boston-based poop-scooper cleans a backyard once a week for $10-15. Business, as he puts it, picks up in the springtime as people put their dogs out in the yard, and “the aroma starts hitting the open window.” Apparently friendly client-provider relationships are formed: 90% of this scooper’s clients come out and talk with him while he scoops their dogs’ poop.

You can chalk it all up, this pooper-scooper story, to another instance of how markets work to satisfy the needs of both buyers and sellers. Yes, it is about dog shit. But poop-scoopers wouldn’t offer the service if they didn’t want to, would they? And, after all, think of how many people make their living, and a good one, off of shit, from the plumber to the sewer worker to the sanitation works supervisor. You might reply that they worry about human, not dog shit. But let’s not forget where all of that Tidy Cat stuff goes…. As someone’s father always says, it is a free country. If people want to scoop up dog shit for a living, well, Godspeed. Or as the Godfather says, as long as their interests don’t conflict with mine, good luck.

Let me switch the context a bit. You are an untouchable in rural India, and your job is to clean the shit out of upper caste people’s outhouses. Lacking baggies, you use your hands. The horror, the outrage your plight ignites in western readers. How can Indian society tolerate your humiliation, your degradation?

Of course, it could be the species shift. Perhaps dog shit is cleaner than human shit. Of course, I forgot salvation by baggie. When picking up my dog’s shit, I myself prefer the blue New York Times wrappers to the Globe transparent plastic wrappers: it places a micro-thin membrane between me and the shit.

However, I don’t know whether the average Westerner would feel that much better if somehow Shiva would shower baggies on the rural untouchables, or even New York Times wrappers for that matter. The degradation is done, not by contract, but by caste.

The contract, that great leveler of social difference, stands between buyer and seller of doody scooper-power in the USA. It saves the seller from degradation and the stigma of being a poop-scooper and the buyer from the responsibility of having degraded the scooper. As long as the doody-scooper scoops up some cash, most moral doubts are resolved. A cancer cure it’s not but not everyone can have interesting, life-affirming work. And if everyone is happy, far be it from me…..

Their mutual consent to a contract prevents us from asking: why is there a market for poop-scooping anyway? Here I would argue that Blim’s Law of Degrading Labor applies: the cheaper labor becomes, the more degrading it becomes. Look, poop-scooping is never going to become my favorite job or yours. When I get the short straw at home, my partner puts the Globe bags in my hand (no blue Times bags are left, the cost of having cancelled our subscription on account of the Iraq War), and hustles me out the door with the injunction: “Let’s be careful out there. It’s a minefield.” Of course, I wish he had drawn the short straw. Does any young child wake up in the morning with the fantasy that she is going to grow up to be a poop-scooper?

Of course not. Two conditions transform my weekend nightmare – and perhaps yours – into a world where mine or your dog’s shit can be picked up for a fee. First, to avoid picking up your own dog shit, you need to have some money. If I had some money, poop-scooping services would not be high on my list, but if a person has a lot of money, my preference-ordering, and my scruples for that matter, become irrelevant. Let us suppose for a minute that everyone would hire a poop-scooper, if they could. The second condition then becomes the key. The cheaper poop-scooping is, the more likely a person would be to hire a scooper.

But what determines the cost of poop-scooping? The supply of poop? The number of scoops(ers)? Only in part. The fact that America has more rich and well off persons as a proportion of its population now than even in the Gilded Age over a century ago counts for something. There are a certain number of people, not just the Buffetts and the Gateses mind you, that have the cash. Examine your own bank accounts, and at least to thine own self be true.

The general cost of labor also weighs in. Poop-scooping labor is cheap. If you can get your yard done for $10 a week (my dog does it 2-3 times a day, so let’s call it 15 poops at 67 cents a scoop), eyeball it. That’s cheap. Economists would say it’s cheap too because people are able to replace the $10 they spend on a poop-scooper in less time that it takes the poop-scooper to scoop up the dog shit. If poop-scoopers charged as much per hour as their clients made per hour, you can bet there would be more people out in their back yards with those Times or worse Globe bags scooping up dog shit.

Don’t believe me. A recent analysis of the Swedish economy by the McKinsey Global Institute, meant to be the business guide to economic policy in social democratic Sweden, laments that high wages protected by government unemployment and welfare policies means that fewer people avail themselves of personal services and fewer frequent restaurants than any other rich society. Why? Because the services and restaurants cost so much, labor being, ahem, much more expensive than in other societies that people end up doing things for themselves. A Stockholm lawyer must reflect on whether she wants to spend $400 dollars on a meal for two at a restaurant, roughly twice her after-tax hourly wage, or stay home and cook it herself. Or per chance, pick up her dog’s shit herself. When labor is more expensive, people degrade workers less. Or it must cost them significantly to do it.

As Blim’s Law of Degrading Labor would predict, as the cost of labor in America slips, more workers do degrading labor.

With July Fourth, summer vacations really begin. If you travel abroad and find yourself in a poor country, notice how so many people do so many things, often embarrassing and degrading things, for a pittance. Or travel in America for that matter, and ask why that hotel room is a bargain, and the maid is so friendly. In both cases, you have entered lands where labor is cheap, Blim’s law applies, and cleaning someone else’s shit, and the degradation it implies, is cheap too.

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD’s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

If Solomon Volkov’s Shostakovich memoirs are to be believed, Stalin was listening to Mozart before he died. And Mahler had a secret passion for The Merry Widow. And Hitler liked The Merry Widow too. And Mahler was a great Wagner conductor. How easy it is to get all worked up about the chance encounters historical figures can make. Are we to enlist Mozart as the avenging angel of Stalinism. Was Mahler a proto-Hitlerite: you know he liked The Merry Widow too and was prone to dictatorial mannerisms just like . . .  The absurdity of thinking in this way is clear. In the case of Wagner, such false historicism seems to be the only way that some people manage to cope with complexity. An important artist is always going to be misunderstood at first. With Wagner the misunderstandings show no sign of diminishing. If only Wagner hadn’t written Judaism In Music or any other of those interminable essays he cooked up in between bouts of supreme creativity. That is just the point. Artistic grandeur survives the unedifying spectacle of an advancing anti-Semitism. Even as Wagner died he was trying to give theoretical shape to the enormity of existence so convincingly conveyed in his music. The theory fails, the art succeeds. Art does not seek to explain. It expresses our mystery, our tenderness and joy, our beauty, and our destructive capacity too. When we listen intently to Wagner’s music we undergo an aesthetic experience which transcends our usual gravitational urge to banality. That some find the experience tedious or incomprehensible is no criticism of Wagner. The art waits for us; if we are not worthy of it there is always some cultural product that will be.

To call Wagner a Romantic does not get us very far. The so-called Romantic poets—Byron, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth—are often lumped together despite the fact that each has an independent sensibility. The mania for classifying performs no useful function for the artist concerned. After all, Schumann, Brahms and Chopin get called Romantic composers too, but does that label really help us to come to terms with each of their unique oeuvres. The appeal of Wagner to modernists as diverse as Baudelaire, Eliot and Joyce should warn us of the dangers inherent in this unsatisfactory label. Wagner belongs to the world of Freud and Ibsen as much as to that of Heine and Caspar David Friedrich.

There are some who regard all this concern with Wagner as so much antediluvianism. They look to Pound, Marinetti, Gertrude Stein, Pollock or whoever as the way forward. The concept of cultural heritage does not figure prominently in their attitude. They favour the approach of the tabula rasa, like Pol Pot emptying Phnom Penh, murdering all the professionals and starting up from primitive scratch. A wholly new approach can sometimes yield worthwhile cultural results—Rimbaud, for example—but most artists know that the inheritance of the past must sit on their shoulders and bear down on them with its splendours. Wagner knew that. The regular readings from the Greek tragedians, Shakespeare and Goethe tell us as much as the concern with Beethoven and Weber. Wagner was honest enough to admit that his great bête noire, Mendelssohn, would have been horrified to see how he composed. In other words, Wagner was an artist who cared about musical technique and the degree to which he could use that technique to convey the cultural heritage of the past to the future. If a critic today looks on the basilisk face of Wagner and sees only overweening arrogance, how little do they find of the real Wagner, the Wagner whose insecurities and bad dreams still reach out to us today. We have our bad dreams too. Only now our bad dreams are realities. If we could listen to Wagner with open ears we would hear the voice of an art that, to use Grillparzer’s phrase, transfigures what it consumes. If darkness is visible in this art, so much more truthful is it in portraying the human element in its entirety. The ideal can only be approached after an exhaustive struggle with reality—Parsifal’s lonely years of wandering finally allow him to understand the significance of the Grail. Name calling of the Jews and the French might have been a popular pastime at Tribschen and Wahnfried, and Alberich, Mime, Beckmesser and Klingsor may have begun life as Jewish caricatures—Wagner knew perfectly well that art had to get beyond chauvinism and prejudice if it was to take its place in the great chain of cultural being.

Whereas the Greek work of art expressed the spirit of a splendid nation, the work of art of the future is intended to express the spirit of free people irrespective of all national boundaries; the national element in it must be no more than an ornament, an added individual charm, and not a confining boundary.                                                                                                                                              Art and Revolution

Wagner was an arch-hypocrite on the subject of the Jews, displayed nowhere more clearly than in his investment of a 40 000 thaler gift from Ludwig in 1865 with the Jewish banking firm of Hohenmeser in Frankfurt. However, if we are going to look for moral perfection in an artist we have absolutely no hope of finding within ourselves, then we are participating in the very hypocrisy we criticise the artist for. Science tells us that dinosaurs roamed the Earth for millions of years before the most enigmatic arrival of all—that of Homo sapiens. Artists of Wagner’s significance do not come along very often. To reduce an art as grand and poetic as Wagner’s to the level of a series of moral failings simply wont do. We all of us have moral failings, but we are not very likely to leave a Ring cycle behind as our calling card to posterity.

What a cast of characters can be called in to witness the Wagnerian biography as it makes it stormy progress from one unsettled residence to yet another, dogs in faithful attendance. It is just as well there are biographical remains for us to look at, otherwise we would be hard put to understand just how the art and the life all got fitted into the space between 1813 and 1883. Aspects of that life still fire the imagination with their drama and passion, perhaps nowhere more profoundly than in that great moment when Ludwig summoned Wagner for the first time. How one would have liked to be a fly on the mental wallpaper of that first encounter. Naturally, this friendship has been trivialised and parodied beyond the point of no return. A sober and detached view would reveal one of the most significant cultural and political relationships in the history of artistic endeavour. To sit in the theatre in Bayreuth and see a performance there is to participate in a poetic ideal, an ideal that still comes to the world across minefields of ideology and propaganda. Wagner once commented that every part of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus was stained with his and Cosima’s blood. That is probably true but it is terribly unfair to Ludwig. It is all very well to say that Ludwig was unsuited to the task of kingship or that Wagner manipulated the rhetorical tone of his letters to the king so as to ensure a codependent relationship. Let us remember Ludwig’s steadfastness; without it there would be no Bayreuth ideal, an ideal that goes beyond Wagner and Wagnerism, the fairy-tale castles or the drowning in Lake Stamberg. And let us remember too that Ludwig, who must surely be the most perfect Wagnerite of all time, completely rejected Wagner’s anti-Semitism. Adomo once claimed that attending the Bayreuth Festival was akin to actively participating in one’s own oppression. Ludwig gives the lie to this idea right from the start, because not only did Ludwig occasionally tire of the whole Wagnerian circus, staging works in Munich when he lost patience with the composer’s grandstanding; he actually refused to attend a premiere in the Festspielhaus itself. How annoying for the composer that the king, his great benefactor, should turn out to be so independently-minded. In fact, Wagner’s attempt to get the world to think as he did has failed. We are Ludwig’s heirs as well as Wagner’s in that regard. We can honour the greatness of Wagner the artist, but we do not leave our conscience or our critical faculties at the door of the Wagner treasure trove.

Part 3 of Orpheus Ascending can be read here.

The end of the Ring with the Wiener Philharmoniker conducted by Sir Georg Solti and Birgit Nilsson singing in the Culshaw Decca recording can be heard here. 8′ 30”