SMUG HUMILITY, OR HUMBLE SMUGNESS.

Artists of all sorts are placed in an odd position. On the one hand, artsy culture encourages them to become intolerably smug. They are the special people, the honored creators whose piercing insight will save the world. On the other hand, society at large tells the artists that they are worth exactly as much as the other dishwashers at the Eat’n Park, and perhaps less if their artistic endeavors interfere with their dishwashing.

But this paradox is the world’s way of providing us with a few great artists. The truly great artists are the ones who absorb these two opposite lessons. It seems that a great artist requires humility and smugness in equal proportion.

Let us imagine for our purposes a dedicated and talented (but unfortunately fictional) artist, whom we shall call Joe Artist. Joe is just like all the other dishwashers who call themselves artists, except in one particular: Joe really is a genius. He paints in a unique style all his own: the best description of it is rococo cubism. When asked for an “artist statement” by one of the few galleries that would consent to exhibit his work, he was at a loss for words: he expresses himself in paint, not in writing. He finally, after many abandoned attempts, described himself as a representational painter who paints pictures of things that cannot exist but ought to.

Joe has never had much material success as an artist. He continues to exist because he is humble enough to realize that the world does not require his services as a painter, but it will pay him for washing dishes. This is the necessary humility that keeps him in the dish pit so he can remain alive and continue to paint.

But in the painting itself, Joe is confident past the point of arrogance. Over and over gallery-owners and art-show gatekeepers have told him that he needs to simplify his style radically, and that he could get into prestigious exhibitions if he would just put a political message about the oppression of his people (the name “Artist” is a corrupted spelling of a Basque surname) in his paintings, preferably in block capital letters. Joe knows that those people are wrong, because he knows that his art is right. He cannot take suggestions from anybody, because his art already is what it is meant to be, and a great artist cannot deliberately make his art worse. This may seem intolerable smugness, but it is necessary smugness. His certainty that he is producing great art is what makes Joe’s art great: if he ever lost that certainty, he would follow advice and perhaps prosper on the art-show circuit, and his art would be just like everybody else’s.

Humility and smugness are equally necessary to Joe’s continued existence as a great artist. But what happens if either bubble is burst?

If he loses the smugness, the most likely outcome is that Joe will cease to be an artist altogether. There are better ways of making a living than by washing dishes, but they may require a certain dedication that would preclude the dedication to art that keeps Joe painting. On the other hand, if Joe gives in to the temptation to listen to the gallery owners and art-show committees, he may in fact find that it is possible to make a living as an artist, as long as he is content to be a bad artist. Either way, losing the certainty that his art is right and necessary would be a mortal wound to his art.

If Joe loses his humility, the most likely outcome is that he loses everything else as well. He will decide that his art is so essential to the world that it ought to be his full-time occupation. He will not be able to make his art a paying job, because he will not make the necessary compromises, so he will become bitter and be driven to intoxication, possibly crime, and almost certainly early death. He may produce a few great works of art to be appreciated by future generations, but there will not be many, and the world will lose all the greater works he would have painted in his maturity.

So if you are an artist, and you find that the world is not rewarding you according to your merit, but you have accepted that you need to do some menial work to support your art—well then, you may be a great artist after all. Most likely you are not, but you have raised your chances.

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DR. BOLI’S NEW TELEPHONE MESSAGE.

This number is protected by a spam-elimination system. After the beep, you have five seconds to press two seven to be connected to the party whose number you have dialed before the remote spammer-elimination device is detonated. [Beep.]

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NOW IN PRESS.

The Intoxiad, by Irving Vanderblock-Wheedle. “Beggars description”—Drunken Poets’ Quarterly. 8vo, 1,327 pp.

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WHY HOMER NEVER SOUNDS RIGHT IN HEXAMETER.

At least once in every generation, some clever classicist decides that Homer or Virgil ought to be translated into English in his own meter: namely the dactylic hexameter adopted by all the Greek and Latin epic poets. It seems such an obviously reasonable decision: why should we be false to the original intent of the poet and set our translation in some barbaric meter he would not even have recognized? Who could argue against it?

You, the reader, already know the answer to that question. Dr. Boli could argue against it, and he will, in one of those periodic essays that will send most of you off to Instagram to look at pictures of birds.

There is a fundamental difference between Greek or Latin versification on the one hand and English versification on the other. The rhythm of English poetry is based on accent; there is no such thing as “quantity” in English. Like almost any definite statement about almost any human language, this one must be qualified at once. In ordinary speech, different syllables have different durations: it takes much longer to say “snakes” than it does to say “at,” though the dictionary will tell you they are both words of one syllable. But there is no regular pattern to these differences, no mathematical formula that would create a rhythm and make them a suitable basis of meter in English.

In Greek or Latin poetry, on the other hand, quantity rules. Accent is irrelevant to the meter. The rhythm is made with long and short syllables; and the rule of the grammarians, in which they doubtless followed the longstanding practice of the bards, was that a long syllable was equal to two short syllables.

The basic unit of dactylic hexameter is the dactyl—a long syllable followed by two short syllables. Since a long syllable is twice the length of a short one, that gives us a “foot” of four beats, taking a short syllable as one beat. Other kinds of feet will appear in a line of epic poetry: the spondee, for example, which is two long syllables. But here again the foot is four beats: each of the two long syllables is equivalent to two short syllables.

Taking into account the cæsura, which is a pause in the middle of the line, and another pause at the end of the line, a classical epic marches along in stately 4/4 time. A good poet can do wonderful things to speed up or slow down that meter, to make it as ponderous as death or as light as children playing on the beach. But the dominant effect is serious and dignified.

But what happens when we try to haul that meter into English? We mark the lines the same way: macron, breve, breve. But now the marks indicate accented and unaccented syllables, not long and short ones. As music—and epic poetry is meant to be sung by a bard smitin’ ’is bloomin’ lyre—it is a completely different thing. We may call it dactylic hexmeter, but the dactyls are not the same dactyls. Where the Greek and Latin poems marched in stately 4/4 time, our English hexameters skip along in triplets. And that is an effect that in English suggests lightness and frivolity. An English-speaker who hears verse bouncing along in triplets immediately thinks, “There was a young man from Nantucket…”

To Dr. Boli’s ear, the only successful work in dactylic hexameter in English is Long­fellow’s Evan­geline, which is successful precisely because Long­fellow applied a great deal of poetic ingenuity to the problem of not letting his hexameters skip along like limericks.

This is why the successful translators of Homer into En­glish have always chosen iambic feet as the basis of their meter—just as our native English-speaking poets have always done when the subject is a serious one. Most of them reach for iambic pentameter, the meter of the Canterbury Tales and Hamlet and Paradise Lost—though perhaps the greatest En­glish translator of Homer, George Chap­man, set his translation of the Iliad in heptameter, or what an Eliza­bethan would have straightforwardly called fourteeners. The fourteeners, counting a pause at the end of the line, restore the 4/4 rhythm of the original, and perhaps that is the secret of Chap­man’s miraculous effect: he seems to have written the Iliad himself rather than translated it.

So now you understand why dactylic hexameter can never satisfy us as an English epic meter, and why translators who are real poets—Emily Wil­son, Alexan­der Pope, George Chap­man—have always chosen iambs. The next time you translate Homer or Virgil, you will do the same.

If you would like to spend an afternoon comparing translations, we have extensive pages for Homer and Virgil in the Eclectic Library.

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THE OTHER SIDE OF HOLLYWOOD.

Hollywood of the golden age produced some of the greatest works of art in the history of human culture. But movie studios were businesses. They produced great works of art when it seemed likely to be profitable to produce great works of art; they hired great artists when the great artists brought in money.

And even then, there was no guarantee that the artists who had made a profitable hit last year would do the same next year. The public demanded new movies, but new movies were risky by definition. Your contract players would act their hearts out, your cinematographers would pick out every detail in glorious Technicolor, your director would time each scene to the second—and yet the public might not like the movie after all.

But then there was the other side of Hollywood—the side you could rely on, the side where profits were guaranteed. This was the side of Hollywood where all the same talent and all the same technical wizardry that went into making this year’s Oscar-bait could be hired for a feature-length Technicolor musical fantasy about Westinghouse appliances. And here it is, thanks to the Library of Congress and the Internet Archive:

Ellis in Freedomland.

Just watch the credits—you don’t have to watch the whole hour and a half. The credits alone will drop your jaw six inches.

You can see the attraction for the studios. There was no worry about whether box-office receipts would pay for the production, because there was no box office. The corporate client was the audience, and the price was agreed on beforehand. This movie would make a profit, guaranteed.

And think how much more exciting it was to be an appliance salesman in those days. These days, the most exciting thing that ever happens in a salesman’s life is when some YouTube microcelebrity with a channel about different ways to cook broccoli shows up for a book-signing at the Best Buy. But in 1952, Westinghouse salesmen all over the country got to sit down in screening rooms and see the top talent in Hollywood giving voices to the appliances they peddled every day. It must have made a difference in the salesman’s morale when he could imagine every dishwasher as Maureen O’Sullivan.

The Internet Archive has a collection of more than 24,000 “Ephemeral Films.” Most of them were ephemeral for good reason, but every once in a while we run across a treasure. Perhaps Ellis in Freedomland is not exactly a treasure. But it would be hard to think of a general-release film more beautifully photographed than American Look, a 1958 widescreen Technicolor spectacular about the marvelous world of industrial design. “Improved styling constantly adds to the ease and grace and gaiety of American living,” says the narrator, and it is a tribute to the work of the photographers that we believe every word he says.

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MOBILE FIRST.

There are some errands not to be trusted to the servants, and negotiating with the tea vendor is one of them. We were sitting on the streetcar on our way downtown to pick up two pounds of Keemun Third Grade when we decided, for no obvious reason, to count the number of other passengers who were not staring into phone screens. After a careful count, and a second count just to make sure, the number we came up with was zero. We might add that this was not in the darkness of the subway: it was on a particularly interesting part of the line, where the track is set into the side of a steep bluff with late-summer flowers on one side and an expansive view of the car-dealer district on the other.

We may grant that many of these riders see these landscapes every day; still, the landscapes are always changing, and are they really duller than what was appearing on their phone screens? Probably not, because their phone screens were at that moment proving to them that they had always been correct in every opinion they had ever held, and other people were monsters for disagreeing. That is the mission of social media.

On the streets downtown, the proportion was not quite so high; but still, among the pedestrians, many or most had their eyes glued to phone screens. It does tend to make them walk out into traffic, and perhaps Darwin ought to be allowed to do his work. But, on the other hand, even the most alert pedestrian, with phone in pocket or no phone at all, may be run down by the scrolling-while-driving motorist who runs a red light or turns left into a stream of people in the crosswalk. The state of Pennsylvania just recently made driving with a handheld phone illegal, and has placed signs to that effect along all major streets and highways. But there seems to be little diminution in the number of people who are driving while running through their TikTok feeds. To be fair to them, they probably haven’t seen the signs. How could they?

At sidewalk cafés downtown, people were sitting staring into their phone screens. On benches in Mellon Square, people were sitting staring into their phone screens. On the Diamond, people were sitting at tables staring into phone screens while a lonely guitarist failed to capture the attention of the lunch crowd.

Google and other authorities have long advocated a “mobile-first” approach to Web design: that is, giving mobile devices the priority when design decisions are being made. Two years ago, Dr. Boli argued that the mobile-first approach was wrongheaded: platform equality should be the rule. But insofar as it meant that desktop computers could no longer be regarded as the standard, “mobile first” was the right idea. More people see most sites on a phone screen than on a computer screen.

Now it seems to Dr. Boli that we have come to the point where we must take a mobile-first approach to life. We can no longer regard reality as the standard: more people see the world through their phone screens than through their unmediated eyes. Dr. Boli has already written about some of the symptoms of that change: how people perceive pictures as more realistic when they appear distorted the way our phone cameras distort them than when they appear the way they appear to our eyes. The principle, however, seems to be more general: the majority of people now see the world as a whole the way it appears on their phone screens. The screen is the default; the direct perception of reality is an occasional inconvenient necessity, and one that we increasingly forgo. This explains why mad conspiracy theories are mainstream now: an idea that can be entertained only by someone with a limited experience of reality can be entertained by a majority of the people, because most people have only a limited experience of reality. What the phone tells us is more real than what the world outside the screen tells us.

What does this observation mean for the people who are responsible for maintaining order in our society? Probably it means that they get everything they want if they just manipulate what we see on our screens cleverly enough. But let us assume that our dictators are benevolent. What do they need to do for us?

First of all, they need to assure our safety as we move through a world we no longer perceive except through a glass darkly. Modern automobiles have object-detection systems to warn us of a potential collision. The same things need to be built into our phones. The screen has to tell us that we are stepping in front of a streetcar, because we will not see the hazard in any other way. This becomes especially important in Pittsburgh, where it has just been announced that new streetcars are on the way that will be more than twice the length of the old ones.

Secondly, they need to make sure our infrastructure is hardened up with plenty of redundancy. There can be no outages in a world where truth is defined by the phone; being dropped back into reality, even for a moment, would be a terrifying experience.

Thirdly, they need to make sure, for the same reason as above, that phones cannot be lost. It should be possible in the near future, if it is not already possible, simply to replace the non-dominant hand with a phone-holder of standard size, which could then accept and lock in any preferred brand of phone.

Finally, they need to build quarantine areas or concentration camps for the small number of recalcitrant people who are still addicted to the experience of unmediated reality. Those people are in the way. In a world where the phone screen dictates what is true, the reality-addicts are a disruption. The more the things our phones tell us deviate from reality, the more reality becomes unacceptable. Mobile-first will have to be our rule, and it will have to be enforced.

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