Aug

13

Crumb & Mairovitz's book about Kafka argues that 1. Kafka has been reduced to a single adjective by those who haven't read him thoroughly 2. Jewishness, Jewish mysticism, and the mystical experience of the Jewish ghetto where Kafka spent almost all of his life, are the real takeaways from his work.

The second piece was strongly coloured by a father who always called him a failure, who frightened him even as Kafka tended to the old man in his dotage. The US census shows that more 20 somethings are living at home (with more degrees than ever). Pace Charles Murray, changes in living arrangement particularly the American (versus, eg, Saudi, Surinamese, Pakistan, Burkina Faso) seem to me a likely change if the U.S. jobs picture stays bad.

Stefan Jovanovich writes: 

It is difficult to tease out of the census how many "children" lived at home while working in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Our present world only began with the Fair Labor Standards Act which Congress and the President enacted in 1938. It made employment of anyone under the age of 16 a crime; but the Census had not bothered tabulating the numbers for the problems that the Progressives were solving.

The 1900 Census questions, for example, do not ask how many children are working.

Neither, for that matter, do the 2010 questions.

The American Community Survey–the "long form" questionnaire–does ask the question; but it has only been used since 1998.

It may be a scandal that people are living at home; but it may be that people are sensibly concluding that, in "average" residences that are 3 times the size they were in 1950, there is no more reason for the "children" to move out before they get married than there had been when most people still lived on farms.

I don't have the answer; but, then, neither does Charles Murray. He just likes the idea that there was once a golden era when all Americans were "normal".

Mr. Isomorphisms writes: 

Freud lived at home until a wealthy patron set him on his course of nervous therapy, setting him up with enough wealth to afford a home in which to put himself and Martha Bernays.

So did D'Alembert (inventor of the wave equation)–with his adoptive mother–until his 40s.

Early US video, eg the "Brooklyn ghetto fish market" (and you can cruise around on loc.gov or getty images to see more), shows a lifestyle much like what Mairovitz tells of Kafka's upbringing. As for people who neither would be worthy of depiction by Ms. Austen nor influenced the course of intellectual history–information on their lives is scarce indeed.

I'm not sure it's scandalous for families to share houses. For whatever reason, that became Americans' expectation, even though only a couple generations ago flophouses, boarders, county poorhouses, and many other arrangements were common. It's still an open question how money and jobs link to fertility and housing arrangements. Chinese migrant workers come to mind. I heard there is a law that children who work in factories MUST return on certain dates to their parents in the country. 

The part of Murray's most recent book that I like to focus on is the geographic segregation of rich and poor. He contrasts Manhattan in the 1950s to the 2010s. The point was made by Tom Wolfe as well (Bonfire of the Vanities is now 30 years old, if you can believe that).

It was a ten-dollar ride each morning, but what was that to a Master of the Universe?

Sherman's father had always taken the subway to Wall Street, even when he was the chief executive officer of Dunning Sponget & Leach. Even now, at the age of seventy-one, when he took his daily excursions to Dunning Sponget to breathe the same air as his lawyer cronies for three or four hours, he went by subway. It was a matter of principle. The more grim the subways became, the more graffiti those people scrawled on the cars, the more gold chains they snatched off girls' necks, the more old men they mugged, the more women they pushed in front of the trains, the more determined was John Campbell McCoy that they weren't going to drive him off the New York City subways. But to the new breed, the young breed, the masterful breed, Sherman's breed, there was no such principle. Insulation! That was the ticket. That was the term Rawlie Thorpe used. "If you want to live in New York," he once told Sherman, "you've got to insulate, insulate, insulate," meaning insulate yourself from those people. The cynicism and smugness of the idea struck Sherman as very au courant. If you could go breezing down the FDR Drive in a taxi, then why file into the trenches of the urban wars? (The same review critiques Mr Wolfe for drawing characters for whom he has no sympathy.)

Howard Gillette Jr's book on Camden, NJ, begins with a similar outlook from even earlier.

Hazzard of New Fortune, William Dean Howells

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES.


At Third Avenue they took the Elevated, for which she confessed an infatuation. She declared it the most ideal way of getting about in the world, and was not ashamed when he reminded her of how she used to say that nothing under the sun could induce her to travel on it. She now said that the night transit was even more interesting than the day, and that the fleeting intimacy you formed with people in second and third floor interiors, while all the usual street life went on underneath, had a domestic intensity mixed with a perfect repose that was the last effect of good society with all its security and exclusiveness. He said it was better than the theatre, of which it reminded him, to see those people through their windows: a family party of work-folk at a late tea, some of the men in their shirt sleeves; a woman sewing by a lamp; a mother laying her child in its cradle; a man with his head fallen on his hands upon a table; a girl and her lover leaning over the window-sill together. "What suggestion! what drama! what infinite interest!

Gillette compares this to himself as a suburb-dwelling commuter living the good life whilst gawking at the commoners in the United States' favored image of its post-industrial failure. 


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