Lost in the ongoing kerfuffle over whether Chelsea Clinton is qualified to report human interest segments for NBC News, and whether her hiring represents a conflict of interest for the network, seems to be a quality question: is the very private daughter of the man who was president more than a decade ago actually a draw for anyone? I kind of get the Meghan McCain thing as entertainment, if not as news — she’s got a well-cultivated personality, she’s built a following on social media; at the USA Network-The Moth storytelling event I went to earlier this fall, she comported herself with a winning degree of sophistication and self-deprecation. But I don’t know that anyone tunes in to MSNBC for her.

And it’s even more bewildering to think that people would tune in for Chelsea Clinton. One of the more admirable things the Clintons ever did as parents was to fight hard to protect Chelsea’s privacy, especially at a time when Bill’s behavior was inviting withering media scrutiny. As an adult, she kept to that pattern, working a series of bland private sector jobs and venturing out only to campaign for her mother in 2008. I looked at some of her wedding pictures (Hillary rocked a really awesome caftan in the days beforehand) in a cursory way. But the same preservation of her privacy and stringent avoidance of public life or public service that don’t make her a particularly qualified journalist don’t make her a particularly interesting person either. I have no idea what Chelsea Clinton’s unique lens on the world is, and nothing about the deal with NBC has made it seem like I should really care. I say this not to be callous, but to suggest it’s puzzling that the network would pursue a hire that invites disapproval without a clear upside.

I’m a bit late to David Haglund’s piece suggesting that ambition is ruining television, but I don’t think he’s entirely right about that. And I don’t think Erik Kain’s suggestion that it’s just a matter of quality writing is quite on the mark either (though no matter what kind of show you’re doing, writing matters).

It’s not that wanting to tell big, sweeping societal stories is a problem. It’s that prestige television has tended to be ambitious in the same way, collectively convinced that the best way to tell those stories and to get us to feel like morally sophisticated consumers is to get us to identify with anti-heroes (and they’re almost all men) and to test our tolerance even when their behavior becomes repulsive and unjustifiable. There are so many cable shows that do this, and it’s been proven so critically and commercially successful that going down that route is no longer really a sign of ambition, but of calculation. I tend to be bored with Boardwalk Empire‘s grand machinations, but I’m fascinated by its side trips into domestic dramas: I’d watch a show re-centered around Angela and Margaret. I’ll get excited when someone lays down a new marker, when they make us identify with a wholly different kind of character. Ambition is as much about innovation and perspective as about size. And venality or outright evil aren’t the only innovative sources of American stories.

It’s really impossible to say enough good things about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s revitalized and reopened Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia, an astonishingly rich journey through the centuries and a cornucopia of artistic influences and achievements. I spent three hours at the exhibit, a meandering walk around a central courtyard, full of screens and deep chairs that let you better examine gorgeous manuscripts, before Thanksgiving. And I came away from it with a powerful sense not just that I’d seen something beautiful, but that the exhibit provides a striking sense of the long arc of history.

The galleries are a reminder that constraints can be a help, rather than a hindrance, in the production of astonishing art. It’s unfortunate that so much of the contemporary discussion around Islam and art ends up involving things like prohibitions on depictions of the Prophet Muhammad (a trend that some Muslims have exacerbated by reacting to free speech with violence), rather than the alternative ways Muslim artists have found to depict the divine. One of the things that struck me most strongly was the way that artists, in forms ranging from pottery, to weaving, to stone-carving, to competitions to create enormous, tiny, and innovative versions of the Koran, bring language to life. This isn’t just a matter of illuminating manuscripts. The language itself is alive, and stunning. In some pieces, the words literally grow into plant life on the page. In others, they spin off into geometry, languidly circling the rim of a bowl or packed tight into woven patterns. The signature of Suleyman the Magnificent isn’t just some colonial-style assertion of will through flourishes and scale: it’s gilded with the weight of his authority. Taken together, the galleries are a stunning testament to the sense that language carries divine power with it.

The show also provides an astonishing sense of scale — and of impermanence. It’s exciting to see the Chinese influence on Syrian Islamic figurative art, and to get a sense that the world was a more connected place than we imagine it to be in a book of constellations with deities who look more Chinese than Persian or Turkish. Similarly, there are beautiful pieces by Iraqi potters who were mashing up Chinese stoneware traditions and Islamic calligraphy. But as big, and as far-reaching as the Muslim-ruled world was, it didn’t last as a coherent whole: the juxtapositions of influences and assimilated styles are striking precisely because they seem out of such a distant past. The show includes a style of carpet known as Bellini Carpets not because that’s the name of the artist who made them, but because the Venetian painter Giovani Bellini painted his 16th-century Madonnas standing on carpets with their distinctive keyholes: Christianity takes Islam’s place on the world stage even in art history.

But it’s a useful reminder not to assume that any dominant power will persevere. Madonnas striding across Persian carpets may seem like a revelation in a couple of centuries, rather than the norm. As they present old art in a fresh and exciting new way, the revitalized galleries accomplish a rare trifecta, giving us a sense of and context for “what is past, or passing, or to come.”

I wouldn’t normally do this, but this post is spoileriffic for The Magician King in a way that reveals the essential conflict of the book if you haven’t read it. So ABANDON ALL HOPE OF STAYING SPOILER-FREE YE WHO ENTER HERE.

I want to come back to our conversations about class in The Magicians and The Magician King. But I wanted to discuss something else first. Namely, the way the violent sexual assault Julia experiences at the hands of a god she and her friends summoned by accident, and the sexual degradation she suffers in the course of her magical self-education acts as the engine of Quentin’s moral awakening.

I actually think that one scene in the novel before the ritual to summon the god does a nice job of separating out genuine sexual desire from sexual performance that’s expected of you. We know that in the course of her desperate quest for magical knowledge, Julia’s resorted to sex repeatedly if asking nicely won’t do, and that her main relationship with one of the first hedge witches she meets is cemented more by need than by genuine desire. So it’s genuinely moving when Julia finally sleeps with one of her friends from the chatroom for depressed geniuses that he’s helped her hold it together and finds out that sex can be physically and emotionally rewarding, that it opens her up to confidences from her partner, a greater understanding of him and herself: “She didn’t think she’d ever done it just because she wanted to before. It felt good. No, it felt fantastic. This was the way it was supposed to work…she felt pleasantly fleshly. She was mind and body both, for once.” It’s a forceful assertion of the idea that even if you lose your sexual way, that you can find it again, that pleasure is not rendered forever inaccessible by trauma.

Which makes it frustrating when the book takes back that premise. Granted, getting raped by a deity does seem like it would be of a different magnitude, and the scene of Julia’s rape (which for my money, is more detailed and disturbing than anything that happens in A Song of Ice and Fire) is sensitively, if disturbingly, observed — apologies for the very long blockquote:
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My friend Elana Levin forwarded me the results of a writing contest with a noble goal — “bringing women’s and human rights values into mainstream culture” — and a weird way of going about achieving it:

How often have you been enjoying a book, movie, play, or TV episode…when all of a sudden things take a turn for the sexist, misogynist, needlessly violent, or worse? Have you ever wished you could jump into a story, shout at the characters, grab the pen (or keyboard) of the writer, and make it turn out the way you think it should?

Now you can! Breakthrough presents #Rewrite the Ending, our Bell Bajao campaign’s first-ever fiction (re)writing competition. Your job: take a work of fiction – a novel, movie, epic myth, opera, poem, TV episode, short story, play, or anything else that inspires you (or makes you nuts) – and rewrite the ending to erase the sexism, highlight human rights, and win yourself some great prizes.

Part of my issue here is that I’m just not that fond of the idea that art should exist to serve fans’ desires, however noble they may be. I’m fine with creators hiding Easter eggs for readers and watchers, and I think it can be totally appropriate to acknowledge common fan conceptions about a work or fan campaigns on on a work’s behalf. But that’s an entirely different thing from bending the curve of your plot or the conception of your characters in a direction that fans will find most satisfying. If that was the main obligation of artists, we’d have awfully homogenous storytelling — all couples would get together immediately, no one would ever die, and much more page and screen time would be dedicated to angsty hookups. Artists have a right to the facts of their characters and to carry out their visions of them within their own work. Art, as with life, is in part about not getting everything you want, and with reconciling yourself to that fact.

But more to the point, I don’t really want sexism to disappear from fiction, and I certainly don’t think we get to a point where the default in our culture is less misogynist by going back and redacting sexist (or racist, etc.) plot points and characters from our fiction. First, making sexism and the other isms visible is absolutely critical to getting something done about them. Not everyone is going to read about Robert Baratheon’s sexual assaults on his wife and go out and join Take Back the Night, but art can show people who don’t experience sexism directly the costs it exacts on the people who do. And it can put behavior in contexts that make clear how ugly it is: sexual harassment or domestic violence may seem like a series of isolated incidents or a slow grind when it happens in real life, but condense a pattern of escalating behavior into two hours or 400 pages, filter out the filler, and it may be harder to deny. Wishing that sexism was gone doesn’t make it so in art or in life.

And second, fiction ought to be a place that we can confront things that would be dangerous to us if we encountered them in real life, and where people get to make best-case arguments for positions we would hate to see carried to their logical conclusions if they had the force of law or norm. I don’t like the Twilight books, but if they’re the best argument in favor of women focusing exclusively on marriage and family, than I am more than happy to wade aggressively into that debate. I think Tucker Max is pretty gross, but if I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is the best manifesto a bro can hope for, it’s a useful sorting mechanism between people who have warped values and priorities and those who don’t. The answer here is not to hope that Bella Cullen throws off her vampire husband and gets a PhD in English literature, but to provide powerful and compelling alternatives. To get all Saul Bellow in this joint, “There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.” Does that mean we’ll suffer major bewildering culture fails along the way? Absolutely. But the real way to win is to join the battle of ideas, not to change the conditions in which it’s fought.

Unsurprisingly the results of the contest aren’t actually that funny, or that much of a narrative challenge to the works they’re critiquing. Yes, it’s creepy to do sexual things to people who aren’t conscious, but give me an actual rewrite of Sleeping Beauty over a lecture. Snow White in armor is a better rebuke to Snow White in the glass coffin than Snow White the lit professor. The Giving Tree telling off the boy isn’t nearly as weird and spiky a rewrite as Amy Winfrey’s “The Muffin Tree,” in which the tree poisons its ungrateful beneficiary.

The bridge is yours.

-The story behind your Eames chair. Or the Eames chair you window shop at Design Within Reach.

-A great interview with Margin Call director J.C. Chandor.

-The end of video game censorship.

-Liberty and Game of Thrones.

-Anyone in for a documentary club on PBS’ American Primetime special?

Hugo, Marin Scorsese’s wonderfully humane adaptation of a young adult novel, may be one of the most moving films I’ve been to all year. Like Pixar masterpiece Ratatouille, Hugo is a movie about the recovery of the lost self through aesthetic experience. But it’s also a powerful testament to the need for meaningful work, something that resonated with me in particular in this moment.

“I figures if the whole world was one big machine, I couldn’t be an extra part,” Hugo, the titular orphan and clock-keeper, tells his new friend Isabelle (who should play Valentine Wiggin to Asa Butterfield’s Ender in the upocoming Ender’s Game movie so these two immensely talented young people can work together again) as he shows her around the massive timepieces of Paris’s central train station. “I had to be here for a reason.” Work, whether it’s keeping the people who run the train station’s businesses on schedule, repairing the fiendishly complicated automaton his late father rescued from a museum storeroom, or finding a way to puzzle out the rigid station toy shop proprietor, give meaning to a boy who has been abandoned by a drunken uncle and the accident that claimed his father. “I don’t understand why my father died, why he left me alone,” Hugo cries to the station master, who wants to ship Hugo off to the same orphanage that raised him. “This is my only chance. To work.”

We may not face the same dire circumstances as orphans in the pause between the World Wars — or filmmakers who have fallen out of vogue and been reduced to clever tinkering. But that doesn’t mean that the desire for work that is spiritually as well as materially sustaining is the stuff of fairy tales. One of the least attractive aspects of the calls, whether from Republican candidates or University of Pennsylvania students, for Occupy protestors to just get a job is that they assume that bread is not just available, but sufficient, and that roses are a part of the equation if not just for the 1 percent, for a smaller part of society. It may be right that in a readjusting economy controlled by increasingly larger companies, there are simply fewer deeply meaningful jobs available. Not everyone is going to work in a creative industry, or fight for the disadvantaged in court, or run a thriving small business that operates like a genuine family rather than a corporate facsimile of one. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t want to do work that feels in some way meaningful, and that they believe themselves not just qualified for but suited to. And even if economic reality is harsh, you’re not a flake to want those things and to strive for that sense of meaning. It may ultimately be easier to bridge financial gaps than emotional ones. But in Hugo, even the harsh station master finds there’s more pleasure in exercising discretion than there is in blind enforcement of the rules.
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Dear Herman Cain,

Next time you want to make an animated movie to speed us quickly through some complicated ideas:

You might consider hiring someone who’s actually visually clever, like the folks behind the Tale of the Three Brothers:

Or the introduction to Hellboy 2:

That, or having a narrative that actually holds up under scrutiny and has a direct relationship to real American problems. Those tend to pan out better in the long term than Sim City ripoffs and Pokemon soundtracks.

Cheers,
Alyssa

In two delightful pieces of news, Kathryn Hahn is rebounding from the cancellation of Free Agents by signing up to star as Leslie’s City Council opponent on Parks and Recreation, and Louis C.K. is will reprise his role as Leslie’s ex-boyfriend Sergeant Dave Sanderson. These strike me as good developments in this slightly sentimental season for two reasons.

First, Leslie deserves a real race. One of the joys of Parks and Recreation is Leslie’s hyper-competence, but it’s become a little bit too effortless as she’s conquered everything from the Pit to Joan’s Gotcha Dancers. It’s time for Leslie to stretch, and to stretch over something other than a boy. Running for office is the dream of her life, and it should be a heroic quest, not just another one-off episode. And after avoiding the mechanics of the campaign, I’m excited to see the mechanics of the race kick into play, to see Chris write speeches for Leslie in a West Wing nod, to see Tom to find his purpose not as an entertainment mogul but as a different kind of public servant. And I want to see Leslie face a realistic obstacle, rather than an entirely ridiculous one.

Second, I think it’ll be intriguing to see Leslie at least temporarily reunited with a boyfriend who gave her the option of coming with him when she moved, but who left anyway when she said no. Is this whole season going to be a refutation of the idea that you have to make tough choices in order to achieve your dreams? Or will Dave be a counterpoint, someone who looks back on Leslie fondly but is certain in his decision?

I’m running up north today and tomorrow to speak at my alma mater and to hit up the British in India exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art. Posting will continue at the usual rate, but if I’m a tad pokey answering email, that’s why, and my apologies.