CRITICS

IT WAS five in the morning when the news editor rang to tell me Alex was dead. Amid the shock and darkness, I knew that a critical era was over. Alexander Walker was not just a household name, not just someone I had read since I was 14 years old. He was the writer who defined British cinema in modern times. To be his boss for a year was an education. Replacing Walker was impossible. What was needed, I realised, was a reconfiguration of the role of film critic.

That week, in July 2003, Harold Schonberg died. Probably the most widely read music critic of the pre-web world, he was a concert-standard pianist and a chess grandmaster.

What you got from a Schonberg review in the The New York Times was not opinion but perspective. He was sometimes provocatively wrong, but never thoughtlessly so. Criticism in the age of Walker and Schonberg was not so much consumer guidance - which show to catch, which to miss - as an assessment of the state of the art and a rage at those who imperilled it. Schonberg went puce every time he had to sit through poor piano playing, especially if the player was Leonard Bernstein who, he'd tell me, shoulda known better. Walker would hit the roof with an Ulsterman's outrage whenever he saw public funds squandered on a trivial film script.

A critic's duty, in the second half of the 20th century, was to uphold classical standards against the fripperies of fashion and to convey an ideal of enlightenment to commuters who glanced at a newspaper on their way to and from work. There was no more glamour to their work than there was to a schoolteacher's, drumming knowledge into stubborn skulls.

But beyond the nightly drudge, the right critic in the right place and time could change a nation and its civilisation. Neville Cardus awoke 1940s Australia to the possibilities of symphonic music. Pauline Kael showed America that film could be more than starry-eyed entertainment. Marcel Reich-Ranicki set a benchmark for post-war German fiction. Greil Marcus defined rock criticism. Three Australians - Clive James, Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes - added dimensions of irreverence. Like drinking fresh orange juice, they showed that reading criticism was good for you.

TIMES change. It is easy to deprecate today's critics as unworthy of giants' shoes, but the challenges of the 21st century are of a different order from anything the arts have known since Gutenberg made the quill obsolete. Print, in decline, is losing its innate authority, along with the expectation that edited words will be read by many people in the same form at more or less the same time. Immediacy is the quintessence of newspaper criticism. Read online, a month after publication, the overnight review goes stone cold. Unlike revenge, it is not sweetened by delay.

In a borderless realm where anyone can tweet an uninformed response, reasoned criticism is under threat and undervalued. The arts are the first casualty of newspapers in retreat. Many US papers have sacked critics and abolished book sections. Many of those selfsame once-great newspapers are now in bankruptcy or administration.

More perniciously, editors demand a degree of cheeriness from their critics. Readers, they say, do not want to wake up to a trashing, and advertisers certainly don't. Reviewers are under orders to be more upbeat, more positive, more smiley. Often they are forced to write about superannuated celebrities in preference to fresh talent.

In deep recession, newspapers are playing safe - and criticism is a live grenade, not a safety pin. Critics, losing confidence, hedge their bets. There are, of course, good critics and bad - I have hired and fired both. There too few women critics, now why is that? Criticism was always an inside job, handed down from mentor to protege, unfriendly to outsiders. Under siege, it has resisted change and courted marginality. Yet, in changing times, its erosion is damaging our culture. A young conductor who has turned a provincial orchestra into a hub of renewal collared me in despair not long ago, demanding, ''What do I have to do to get reviewed?''

How is the public to learn of new ideas sparking off the beaten track? Who will cry scandal over Melbourne's downgraded recital centre and dismissed chief conductor?

THERE is good, adventurous criticism to be found on websites and blogs, but it is not connective in the way newspaper reviews can be. Some critics, led by Alex Ross of theNew Yorker, have adopted an online persona with relative success.

Tim Page, a Pulitzer winner, teaches criticism in California without knowing that there will be anywhere for his graduates to write.

What is needed, I realised the morning Walker died, is to reinvent criticism for the 21st century - and for this we have to groom a generation that is flexible in practice while unyielding in principle. The critic of the future is not some academic called out by a city editor to lay dust on a new show, nor is it a showbiz columnist who writes a review after interviewing the stars, nor - as we have sometimes seen - the live-in partner of a prepossessing board member.

The essentials are unchanged. A critic needs to be knowledgeable, courageous and quick with an aphorism of good headline potential (Pure Theatrical Viagra is one of Charles Spencer's that Nicole Kidman will never forget). Critics in the new era must be prepared to tweet in an interval, Facebook on the bus home and report 400 words for the morning page before adding a voice commentary to the performance snippet uploaded on YouTube. These are the multi-tasking extras.

But beyond the ravenous needs of an evolving media, there has never been a greater need in democratic society for strong, independent arts criticism. Cities without critics will never achieve their creative potential.

The arts flourish only when there are arbiters at work and civilisation dies when their voice is stilled. This is a critical moment in the dialogue between creation and reception, arts and society. A huge opportunity beckons for young critics who can meet that demand head-on - and for some of us older ones to teach them the ropes.

Norman Lebrecht's latest novel is The Game of Opposites . He was assistant editor of the London Evening Standard, 2002-09.

KEATS

On Friday July 27, 1821, five months after Keats’s death, the Morning Chronicle printed, under the heading “John Keats, the Poet”, a long letter written by someone identified only as “Y”. The letter was reprinted by Edmund Blunden in his book Shelley and Keats as they struck their Contemporaries (1925), with the warning, “Y. may have been C. Cowden Clarke, but the letter does not altogether decide the point”. A quarter of a century later, J. R. MacGillivray noted the existence of the letter in his Bibliography and Reference Guide (1949), and identified the writer as “almost certainly Charles Cowden Clarke”.

MacGillivray cited the letter writer’s description of himself as Keats’s “School-fellow and friend”, and his claims to have been present when Keats was first introduced to Leigh Hunt and to Benjamin Robert Haydon (facts which point to Clarke’s authorship), and concluded by giving a short extract in which Y describes a night he once spent talking to the poet about the recent hostile reviews of Endymion. The letter’s account of Keats’s sensitivity to the critics’ attacks has never been fully integrated into the poet’s biography. That may be partly because the identity of Y is not entirely certain, and partly because Blunden’s book, which was printed in a limited edition of 390, is a collector’s item usually lodged in rare book rooms. But there may be another more important reason. At the heart of the letter is a description of Keats lying awake “through the whole night” talking with “sensative-bitterness” [sic] about the attacks by his critics. This challenges Keats’s own claims that the hostile articles written about him in Blackwood’s and the Quarterly affected him less than his own self-criticism (claims always cited to rebut the myth that he was killed by a review).

When Cowden Clarke published his “Recollections of Keats”, forty years later, in 1861, in the Atlantic Monthly, he included a detail that identifies him as the Morning Chronicle’s Y. Describing the effect the reviews had on Keats in the autumn of 1818, Clarke wrote: “He felt the insult, but more the injustice of the treatment he had received; he told me so, as we lay awake one night, when I slept in his brother’s bed”. When revising the article for Recollections of Writers, which he published jointly with his wife, Mary, in 1878, he left out the two closing clauses. Clarke’s 1861 article makes the same claim as Y’s letter of 1821, that the writer heard Keats’s reactions to the reviews while staying with him overnight, and adds the circumstantial detail that he was sleeping in “his brother’s bed” (that is, George Keats’s empty bed in the brothers’ lodgings in Well Walk).

There are two further pieces of evidence for Clarke’s authorship of the Morning Chronicle letter. First, Y describes himself as Keats’s “School-fellow and Friend”, even though he was in fact eight years older than Keats and had been his teacher; Clarke’s Atlantic Monthly article similarly describes its author as “AN OLD SCHOOL- FELLOW” (and also suppresses the origins of the two men’s relationship). The second clue is an anonymous pamphlet published by Clarke in 1816, entitled, An Address to that Quarterly Reviewer who touched upon Mr. Leigh Hunt’s “Story of Rimini”, which has only recently come to light. Clarke’s target in his defence of Hunt’s poem, as in Y’s letter to the Morning Chronicle, is the corrupt state of book reviewing. The style and tone of Y’s letter exhibits the same “fisty-cuffish” style (Hunt’s description) as Clarke’s pamphlet and it has the same fondness for literary quotations.

The importance of Charles Cowden Clarke’s letter of July 1821 is that it was written a quarter of a century before he began to compile the recollections which are a key source for much of our knowledge of Keats’s schooling and his early development. It was not until March 16, 1846, that he was spurred into writing the memoranda of Keats’s “early Life” by Richard Monckton Milnes, who was gathering material for the first collected edition of Keats’s works. This was followed by Clarke’s article in the Atlantic Monthly, which in turn provided the basis for his most widely known account, the chapter on Keats in Recollections of Writers. The Morning Chronicle letter, written only three or four years after the events it describes, is by far the earliest account of Keats’s reactions by his most important early literary friend, and deserves to be analysed carefully. This is the full text:

JOHN KEATS, THE POET.

To the EDITOR of the MORNING CHRONICLE.

Sir, I find by the Daily Papers, that the young Poet, John Keats, is dead. I shall feel gratified if you will allow a few remarks from his School-fellow and Friend, a place in your Paper.

It appears that Mr. Keats died of decline at Rome, whither he had retired to repair the inroads which the rupturing of a blood vessel had made upon his constitution.

It is not impossible that his premature death may have been brought on by his performing the office of nurse to a younger brother, who also died of decline; for his attention to the invalid was so anxious and unwearied, that his friends could see distinctly that his own health had suffered in the exertion. This may have been one cause, but I do not believe it was the sole cause. It will be remembered that Keats received some rough and brutal usage from the Reviews about two years since; particularly from the Quarterly, and from a Northern one; which, in the opinion of every gentlemanly and feeling mind, has rendered itself infamous from its coarse pandarism to the depraved appetites of gossips and scandal-mongers. To what extent the treatment he received from those writers operated upon his mind I cannot say; for Keats had a noble – a proud – and an undaunted heart; but he was very young, only one and twenty. He had all the enthusiasm of the youthful poet burning in him – he thought to take the great world by the hand, and hold its attention while he unburthened the overflowings of an aspiring and ardent imagination; and his beautiful recasting of “The Pot of Basil” proves that he would have done so had he lived. But his ardour was met by the torpedo touch of one whose “Blood is very snow-broth;” and the exuberant fancies of a young and almost ungovernable fancy were dragged forward by another, and exhibited in gross and wanton caricature. It is truly painful to see the yearnings of an eager and trusting mind thus held up to the fiend-like laugh of a brutal mob, upon the pikes and bayonets of literary mercenaries. If it will be any gratification to Mr. Gifford to know how much he contributed to the discomfort of a generous mind, I can so far satisfy it by informing him, that Keats has lain awake through the whole night talking with sensative-bitterness of the unfair treatment he had experienced; and with becoming scorn of the information which was afterwards suggested to him; “That as it was considered he had been rather roughly handled, his future productions should be reviewed with less harshness.” So much for the integrity and impartiality of criticism! This charge would no doubt be denied with high and flouncing indignation; but he told me he had been given to understand as much, and I believe him. If the object of this hint was to induce the young Poet to quit the society of those whom he had chosen for his friends, and who had helped him in pushing off his boat from shore, it shows how little his character was known to his assailants. He had a “little body,” but he too had a “mighty heart,” as any one of them would have discovered, had the same impertinences been offered to him personally which were put forth in their anonymous scandal-rolls. Keats’s great crime was his having dedicated his first production to Mr. Leigh Hunt. He should have cowered under the wings of Mr. Croker, and he would have been fostered into “a pretty chicken.”

I remember his first introduction to Mr. Hunt, and the pleasure each seemed to derive from the interview. I remember with admiration, all that Gentleman’s friendship and disinterestedness towards him – disinterestedness, which would surprise those only who do not know him. I remember too, his first introduction to Mr. Haydon; and when in the course of conversation that great artist asked him, “if he did not love his country,” how the blood rushed to his cheeks and the tears to his eyes, at his energetic reply. His love of freedom was ardent and grand. He once said, that if he should live a few years, he would go over to South America, and write a Poem on Liberty, and now he lies in a land where liberty once flourished, and where it is regenerating.

I hope his friends and admirers (for he had both, and warm ones) will raise a monument to his memory on the classical spot where he died; and that Canova, the Roman, will contribute that respect, so amply in his power, to the memory of the young Englishman, who possessed a kindred mind with, and who restamped the loveliest of all the stories of his great countryman, – Boccaccio.

And now farewel, noble spirit! You have forsaken us, and taken the long and dark journey towards “that bourne from whence no traveller returns;” but you have left a memorial of your genius which “posterity will not willingly let die.” You have plunged into the gulf, but your golden sandals remain. The storm of life has overblown, and, “the rest is silence.”

“Fear no more the heat of the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.

* * * * * *
Quiet consummation have,
And renowned be thy Grave.”

Y.

There is no reason to doubt Clarke’s report of the exchange between Haydon and Keats during their first meeting. We know that Keats visited Haydon at the painter’s studio in Great Marlborough Street with Clarke, on or shortly after October 31, 1816, and Keats’s ardent patriotism, and the swiftness of his physical responses when emotionally aroused, are both well attested. But the more important details in the letter concern Keats’s reaction to the critical attacks on Endymion, and they suggest that Keats was more disturbed by these than either his friends or his biographers have been willing to admit.

Members of Keats’s immediate circle (like his later admirers) were anxious to discredit the unmanly story that the poet had been killed by a review. Robert Gittings asserts that the “most important by-product of this war of critics was the new maturity Keats showed towards it”. Although Gittings admits that some of Keats’s later remarks about Byron show that “some unfortunate seeds” were “sown in his mind”, he argues that Keats’s “reactions showed immense commonsense”, and cites the letter to his publisher, James Hessey, of October 8, 1818: “My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict . . . when I feel I am right, no external praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception & ratification of what is fine”; Keats concludes, “In Endymion, I leaped headlong into the Sea . . . I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest . . .”.

Gittings sees this as a “healthy attitude”. It is the stance perpetuated by Keats’s friends after his death and the one his publishers, and he himself, needed to maintain at the time: that Keats recognized the biased nature of the attacks on Endymion and could discount them rationally. Clarke’s account of him lying awake all night, talking with “sensative-bitterness” about the “injustice” of the reviews, describes the poet pouring out his confused feelings in private to someone who had known him since he was a schoolboy. What is most striking about Clarke’s framing of this incident is the violent, “fisty-cuffish” language with which he attacks Keats’s reviewers, which is shared with Clarke’s earlier pamphlet written in defence of Hunt’s The Story of Rimini. Both the letter and the pamphlet protest too much, and risk undermining their own argument. In defending Hunt against the reviewer’s charges of indecency in 1816, Clarke writes:

". . . suppose Mr. Hunt had retained his quondam mistress as waiting woman to his wife; – suppose he were a gambler, and adulterer, or a debauchee – one or all three of these characters, – suppose he had been a horse jockey who had drugged his horse, that he might be the gainer by that animal’s failure; – what would that have to do with the merits, or demerits, of his poem?"

Similarly, his intended argument in the Morning Chronicle is that Keats rose above the critical attacks on him in the Quarterly and Blackwood’s. But his line of argument is confused. Clarke’s opening claim that nursing Tom during his fatal illness had damaged Keats’s health and “may have been one cause, but I do not believe it was the sole cause” (of Keats’s illness and death) is immediately followed by reminding his readers of the “rough and brutal usage from the Reviews about two years since”. When Clarke comments, “To what extent the treatment he received from those writers operated upon his mind I cannot say”, his italics suggest that Keats’s critics were indeed a contributory cause of his death. The images used for depicting the reviewers (“coarse pandarism to depraved appetites”, “the torpedo touch”, “the pikes and bayonets of literary mercenaries”, “the fiend-like laugh of a brutal mob”) seem disproportionately violent if, as Clarke claims, Keats’s “proud . . . undaunted heart” scorned their attacks. Indeed, Clarke seems to be expressing Keats’s pain as much as proving his fortitude.

The night Clarke describes must have been early in September 1818, or at the beginning of October. Keats returned from his Scottish journey on August 18, Lockhart’s harsh review in Blackwood’s was published towards the end of August, and John Wilson Croker’s article in the Quarterly appeared on about September 27. Another piece of evidence provided by Clarke may help to narrow the timescale. His letter reports that it was “afterwards suggested to \[Keats\]” that “his future publications should be reviewed with less harshness” because Endymion had been “roughly handled”. The most likely source of this otherwise unrecorded piece of information is Keats’s publisher, John Taylor. On August 31, Taylor wrote to his partner, James Hessey, reporting a conversation he had just had with William Blackwood, who was visiting London. Blackwood was evasive about the review of Keats, and while Taylor does not mention anything about future reviews, the meeting of the two men is an obvious source for this information. It probably reached Keats via Hessey. On September 5, Hessey told Taylor he had not seen Keats since the appearance of the Blackwood’s review, suggesting both were concerned about its effects on the young poet. Hessey arranged for Keats to dine with him on September 14, along with Hazlitt, Woodhouse and others. He described Keats’s behaviour to Taylor as follows: “Keats was in good spirits. He slept here and staid some time next morning. He does not seem to care at all about Blackwood, he thinks it so poorly done, and as he does not mean to publish any thing more at present he says it affects him less”. Less often quoted are the next two sentences:

\[Keats\] is studying closely, recovering his Latin, going to learn Greek, and seems altogether rather more rational than usual – but he is such a man of fits and starts he is not much to be depended upon. Still he thinks of nothing but poetry as his being’s end and aim, and sometime or other he will I doubt not, do something valuable.

Hessey’s view of Keats as a not always “rational” man of “fits and starts”, but one for whom poetry was “his being’s end and aim”, was no doubt coloured by the dealings over Keats’s ill-advised preface to Endymion – which had to be replaced, at his publishers’ insistence, by a second version, only marginally less vulnerable. Hessey’s forecast that Keats would in the end produce “something valuable” was, of course, to prove correct.

Indeed, only a week after the dinner Keats told his friend and neighbour, Charles Dilke, that he was “obliged to write, and plunge into abstract images” in order to escape the pressure of tending his sick brother in the confines of their rooms in Well Walk. Three weeks later, writing to his brother George and his wife in America, Keats, responding to the attacks on Endymion, defiantly asserted, “This is a mere matter of the moment – I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death”. However, Keats’s publishers and their adviser, Richard Woodhouse, were not privy to his letters to his friends and family. Hessey had given a sanguine report of the poet’s reactions to the Blackwood’s review at his dinner part of September 14. Nevertheless, he was sufficiently worried about the possible effects Croker’s subsequent review in the Quarterly might have on Keats, to send him the defence signed “J. S.” (most likely by John Scott) published in the Morning Chronicle on October 3. It was this which provoked Keats into writing, by return, the eloquent letter of October 8 asserting his indifference to criticism quoted earlier.

On October 21, Richard Woodhouse drafted a long, much revised, letter to Keats arguing at passionate length that “the wealth of poetry is unexhausted & inexhaustible”. Ostensibly his letter was, like Hessey’s, triggered by the “weak & silly article on Endymion in the last Quarterly Review”, which he had read while out of town, but its real subject was “our late conversation at Hessey’s”. Woodhouse remembered Keats threatening to stop writing poetry altogether, saying “there was now nothing original to be written in poetry”, “its riches were already exhausted, – & all its beauties forestalled”, and, hence, his decision to “write no more”. Woodhouse, likening Keats to Milton, deplores the “evil days” and “Evil tongues” of current criticism, and tells Keats he is the “one bard . . . who judges of the beautiful for himself”.

Keats took a few days to answer, but his carefully written reply of October 27, which looks like a fair copy, defines the “unpoetical” nature of the “camelion Poet” and is one of Keats’s most eloquent and best-known formulation of his poetic beliefs. He concludes by saying, “I am ambitious of doing the world some good”, and asserts his recommitment to poetry. On receiving his reply, Woodhouse very quickly sent Taylor a highly intelligent analysis of the ideas in Keats’s letter and on the comparative nature of his poetic genius. Woodhouse’s advocacy of Keats’s pre- eminence, together with the carefulness of the case he makes for Keats’s kind of poetry, including references to specific passages in Endymion, suggest that he was acting as much as Taylor’s adviser as Keats’s friend. It is conceivable that Taylor and Hessey had encouraged Woodhouse to write to Keats in the first place, and it is evident that all three men shared anxieties about Keats’s possible state of mind, despite his earlier letter to Hessey.

Cowden Clarke’s Morning Chronicle letter makes clear exactly how upset Keats was by the critical attacks in the autumn of 1818. Clarke’s sleepless night at Well Walk most likely occurred before Hessey’s dinner party on September 14, in which case Keats’s “sensative-bitterness” was caused by Gifford’s (in fact, Lockhart’s) review of Endymion in Blackwood’s. The concerns of Keats’s publishers, Taylor and Hessey, and their adviser, Richard Woodhouse, were well founded, even though Keats’s letters to his publishers, friends and family show that he very quickly developed a rational and dignified response to his critics. By October 27, 1818, he was thinking seriously about, and possibly beginning to write, Hyperion, the most courageous way of answering criticism, and a project Keats had proposed for himself ten months earlier (even though he was still completing Endymion). But Cowden Clarke’s account of his initial response to Lockhart’s attack in Blackwood’s indicates that Keats was more uncertain, more deeply wounded, and more affected, than his admirers then, or subsequently, have been willing to admit.

Old Saint Nick

Today is St. Nicholas Day. St. Nicholas lived in the fourth century, and he was the archbishop of Myra in Lycia (which is now Turkey). There are all kinds of stories about him, but one of the most famous is that there was a poor man who could not afford a dowry for his three daughters, which meant they would have to be abandoned to prostitution. St. Nicholas didn't want to humiliate the man by giving him charity in public, so he left purses of gold in the man's house at night — according to one version of the story, he dropped them down the chimney, and in another, one of the daughters had set out her stockings to dry and the gold was put in them. And so St. Nicholas, the bringer of anonymous gifts, inspired Jolly Old St. Nick, Father Christmas, and Santa Claus.

St. Nicholas Day is celebrated in many European countries and in American cities with German influence like Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. On the evening of November 5th, children put out their shoes, and on this morning, they wake up to find those shoes filled with small gifts from St. Nick — chocolates and cookies, fruit, marbles or other small toys.

A deep and perhaps the deepest benefit of the speech was that a Democratic president asserted compellingly, and with a high degree of certitude and conviction, that the United States is and has been immersed in a long struggle with intractable enemies.

For eight years we heard this from Republicans. Halfway through those years people began to tune the president out: He was acting on a Republican obsession and approaching it with the usual Republican tear-jerking bellicosity. The Democrats for eight years had been removed from daily national responsibility—the party out of power always is—and in any case it's always easier to question and criticize than to know and make a decision. But to have now a Democratic president surveying essentially the same history and data as his predecessor and coming to the same rough conclusion—we are in a real struggle with bad people, it will go a long time—was encouraging, and seemed to mark a two-party sharing of overall authority and investment.

We can continue to fight over how to deal with the struggle, but we agree the struggle is real. This sounds small but is not.

***

No matter who gave the speech Tuesday night, he'd be pounded. If President John McCain announced at West Point that we would stay in Afghanistan and he would increase troop levels by 60,000, he would have been roundly denounced: "This is just more 'bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.' It's not a policy, it's a reflex." If a President Hillary Clinton had come forward to announce complete withdrawal, she would have been denounced as returning to her McGovernite roots.

It tells us something about the difficulty of the issue that no matter who decided what, he'd be derided.

That said, it appears we're seeing some things we've not seen before. The president of the United States gave a war speech, and the next day the nation didn't seem to rally around him. This is not the way it's gone in the past. Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, George W. Bush—when they addressed the nation about the wars they led, they received immediate support.

This is also the first time we've seen an American president declaring, or rather redeclaring, a war without a political base. Again, LBJ, Nixon, George W. Bush—they always had a base that would support them, on which they could rely and from which they could maneuver. But Mr. Obama's base is not with him on this decision.

Can a president fight a war without a base? Will the American people, on this issue, decide to become his base? In the end what they decide will likely determine the ultimate outcome in Afghanistan.

As to the policy, the president chose a middle path, not this way or that way, not 60,000 but 30,000, not "go" or "stay" but stay for now, and stronger. What Mr. Obama has bought, at some cost, not all his, is time. Maybe things can be turned around, maybe it will work, hear the generals, after all this history and all this effort it is worth the attempt. Sudden departure would create a vacuum that might suck in and destabilize nuclear Pakistan. We don't want to encourage what is brewing there.

Here we should think about and emblazon on the national memory the biggest lesson of the uses of American power circa 2001-09. The minute American troops are committed anywhere in the world, there are, immediately, 10 reasons why they cannot leave, should not leave. The next day there are 20. It is, always, the commitment itself that is the dramatic fact, the thing from which all else flows, and that carries within it the heaviest implications.

***

As to the speech, much was made of the president's chosen audience, the cadets of West Point, who were appropriately and understandably restrained. Their faces communicated one thing: "Dude, I'm not here to be your backdrop." It is a great misunderstanding of the service academies, mostly held by liberals who lived through the '60s, that they are full of rabble-rousing blood-and-guts warriors who can't wait for a fight. This is a stereotype, and a stupid one. West Point is in fact populated by sober and sophisticated young men and women who've seen their colleagues, upperclassmen and instructors die or be wounded. They've grown used to presidents telling them their war plans. Some of them may die executing the one unveiled this week. They were listening. What would you do?

In his remarks, the president plowed straight in. The speech's second sentence announced his subject and its complexity. The first half of the speech was blessedly free of the emotional pleading and posing we've all grown used to. His recounting of the history of America in Afghanistan was clever and helpful: Most of us need to be reminded of at least some of the facts, and some soldiers on their way to Kandahar were only 10 and 12 years old when it all began. And so, "We did not ask for this fight." We and our allies were "compelled" to fight after dreadful men killed nearly 3,000 people on 9/11. America moved, and with a forgotten unity. "Just days after 9/11, Congress authorized the use of force against al Qaeda and those who harbored them—an authorization that continues to this day. The vote in the Senate was 98-0. The vote in the House was 420-1. For the first time in its history, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization invoked Article 5—the commitment that says an attack on one member nation is an attack on all."

This was all good, direct and unvarnished. It provided forgotten context and underscored the president's sincerity and engagement.

But there was too much "I" in the speech. George H.W. Bush famously took the word "I" out of his speeches—we called them "I-ectomies"—because of a horror of appearing to be calling attention to himself. Mr. Obama is plagued with no such fears. "When I took office . . . I approved a long-standing request . . . After consultations with our allies I then . . . I set a goal." That's all from one paragraph. Further down he used the word "I" in three paragraphs an impressive 15 times. "I believe I know," "I have signed," "I have read," "I have visited."

I, I—ay yi yi. This is a man badly in need of an I-ectomy.

After the president announced his plan he seemed to slip in, "After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home." Then came the reference to July 2011 as the date departure begins. It was startling to hear a compelling case for our presence followed so quickly by an abrupt announcement of our leaving. It sounded like a strategy based on the song Groucho Marx used to sing, "Hello, I must be going."

About two-thirds of the way through, the speech degenerated into the faux eloquence that makes people listening across our nation want to gouge out their eyes and run screaming from the room. Lots of our children and our children's children, the dark clouds of tyranny, the light of freedom. Our strength comes from "the entrepreneurs and researchers who will pioneer new industries; from the teachers that will educate our children, and the service of those who work in our communities at home . . ."

This is where normal people began to daydream. Or scream. None of it was terrible, but we've heard it now for 40 years. Enough. Make it new.

U2

“I figured out bad wine costs the same as good wine, so why not learn about it,” says Paul McGuinness as he orders a $69 bottle of Oregon pinot noir. “I probably imposed that on the young U2. We had a practice when we were first touring. We’d economise on hotels but go to good restaurants.”

More than three decades and 140m records after McGuinness, now 58, started managing four Dublin teenagers, the world’s most successful band stay in rather better hotels and he has been able to put his money where his mouth is, as an early investor in the Michelin-starred Manhattan restaurant where we now sit.

It has taken us three hours to get to our corner table in the Spotted Pig, which feels more of a village inn than the London gastropubs it is supposed to resemble. McGuinness had suggested we meet first at Madison Square Garden to watch U2 rehearse for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 25th anniversary show.

In an almost empty arena, I have been granted a private concert and a glimpse of why McGuinness is one of the few people in the miserable modern music industry to be noted for their business acumen.

EDITOR’S CHOICE
More from Lunch with the FT - Jun-12Jon Landau, Bruce Springsteen’s manager since 1974, approaches as we watch U2 warm up. “The thing I dislike about Paul is, before he came along, I liked to think I was the best manager in the world,” he jokes. “Now Bruce likes to say, ‘I call my manager the American Paul McGuinness.’”

Elvis had Colonel Tom Parker, and John, Paul, George and Ringo had Brian Epstein. McGuinness is U2’s fifth Beatle. He claims no creative role but can take credit for a series of eye-catching deals that have led to U2-branded iPods, 3D concert films, a 12-year touring deal with Live Nation, sponsorship from BlackBerry and, just before we meet, the first concert streamed live on YouTube, which was seen by 10m people around the world. Most importantly, Landau adds, McGuinness locked down the band’s master recordings and lucrative publishing rights.

On stage, I have watched Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen run through a lengthy set with guests including Springsteen and Patti Smith. Mick Jagger, the only man who competes with U2’s stadium-filling ability, has prowled about the stage with Fergie, the lead singer with the Black Eyed Peas. She has floored everybody with a scorching assault on the opening bars of “Gimme Shelter”.

“Holy cow, Batgirl!” Bono says when she’s finished gyrating. The Black Eyed Peas supported U2 at the end of the tour that has wrapped up days before we meet, and McGuinness calls out, “Nailed it!” as the leather-clad vocalist walks past, earning a grin from behind her shades. “She’s notorious and scary and a lot of fun,” he tells me approvingly before we leave.

It is almost 3pm when our car draws up outside the small creeper-clad corner site in the West Village. The Spotted Pig is packed, we are famished, and McGuinness wastes little time in steering me to the best-known dish. “The gnudi!” He pronounces it – the “g” is silent – with naughty relish. In his striped wool tie, black shirt and corduroy jacket, McGuinness doesn’t look as if he hangs out with rock stars but he does look as if he enjoys his food.

There is a chill in the air, and the pumpkin and serrano ham salad sounds comforting, so I order that followed by the gnudi – plump dumplings stuffed with ricotta. McGuinness picks smoked haddock chowder and gnudi.

Like most of his deals, his involvement with the restaurant has paid off. “It has long since repaid its syndicate of investors,” he says. “It’s a combination of the atmosphere, the decor, the pricing, which is low for a Michelin-starred restaurant, and the very straightforward, English approach to the food.”

He sniffs the wine unfussily as he tells me how he got involved through the Spotted Pig’s co-owner, Ken Friedman, a one-time manager of the Smiths and a close friend. McGuinness, it turns out, is a man of many useful friends. (As he runs me through the story of how he came to U2 he loses me in a list of names as long as the cast of an Irish Russian novel).

McGuinness met U2 at a Dublin gig in 1978 – they were supporting a band his sister managed. “They were doing quite badly what they now do well,” he says. “Edge was playing notes rather than chords – this was punk and it was almost frowned upon to be playing individual melodies. Bono was very keen to make eye contact, and physical contact sometimes, with the audience. He was very hungry for making them look at him. He was then and is now an exhibitionist, as all great performers ought to be. It was just quite exceptional.”

McGuinness, who was managing a now forgotten folk rock band named Spud, signed them up in the pub next door, over pints the band members were too young to be drinking, and laid down some business rules. “I recommended very strongly that they split everything because I’d read about other bands where there were officers and men – the Rolling Stones being a classic example, and the Beatles – where the songwriting members of the group earned significantly more than the others.”

From their first deal, all four were credited as writers. “It has stood them in very good stead because it backs up the democracy of a decision if everyone’s making the same amount of money,” McGuinness says.

Unusually, McGuinness negotiated an equal share for himself. Do you still get 20 per cent, I ask? Apparently not. “That was, in fact, reviewed later,” he says. “I had to build the management company, and they had to build the production organisation that makes the records and does the tours. If our overheads were going to be intertwined, that would be to ignore the reality. There should always be a division between client and manager.”

Those rights McGuinness did not secure for the band at the start, he doggedly clawed back as deals came up for renewal, using the band’s strengthened negotiating position.

“It was partly a moral thing,” he says, sounding for the first time a little like Bono. “You’d see a writer complain helplessly when his work was used in an inappropriate way, and we were determined that would never happen to us.”

Our first course arrives, and he invites me to try his rich chowder, decorated with crackers and shredded rocket. I offer a forkful from my plate – the roasted pumpkin is warm, the ham salty and the toasted pumpkin seeds appealingly nutty.

McGuinness has emerged as a vocal campaigner for internet service providers to pay up for the music consumed over their networks, an idea that has gained support since he raised it in a speech two years ago. Publishers’ drive to be paid for their content, symbolised by Rupert Murdoch’s talk of online subscriptions, has helped, he notes, although he says it is a pity that the News Corp chairman’s “road to Damascus conversion” did not take place sooner.

So why give away valuable content, such as a concert, online? “We don’t quite give it away,” he corrects me. YouTube will pay royalties to Universal Music, U2’s record label and publisher, and share advertising revenues. It is pointless to try to stop fans posting concert clips online, he argues. What is possible, he says, is to expect ISPs to pay rights holders their dues.

McGuinness, who was born in Germany to a military family and lived in Malta, Aden and England before going to Ireland’s Clongowes Wood College, is unsparing in his criticism of how the clashing agendas of Europe’s member states have delayed changes sought by his industry.

“As the EU expands, it is clearly the case that these small, peripheral nations have no significant cultural heritage to protect in an international context, whereas Germany, France, Britain and Ireland certainly do,” he says bluntly, in an accent more English than Irish. “When the Czech Republic held the EU presidency, for example, simply by not tabling a motion on [copyright] term extension, they were able to defeat it. The Czechs!”

Our plates are cleared away and McGuinness snaffles a stray piece of rocket stranded on the table between us. The soup has made him hot and he wipes a hand across his brow.

I ask about U2’s latest album, No Line on the Horizon, which was released in February this year and has sold fewer copies than any album by the band for a decade. “We were not anticipating that we would not have a hit single to drive the record,” McGuinness admits. “That was an unpleasant surprise.”

Our gnudi arrive in a brown butter sauce with a few crisp sage leaves on top. “Isn’t that wonderful – the gnudi?” he asks, enjoying the word again. The album has still sold more than 4m copies, he says, but he doesn’t hide his disappointment. “It didn’t work in the marketplace. It worked creatively, I think. If people give themselves the treat of sitting down with big speakers, playing it properly and giving it the time that an album needs, I think it’s a magnificent record.”

Few people now listen that way, he laments, but they will pay an average of $100 a ticket to see U2 in concert, even in an uncertain economy. In 44 sold-out dates since June, the band played to 3.2m people, for a gross of about $320m. Running the numbers aloud, McGuinness calculates that with a similar number of dates planned for next year, the tour should gross about $750m including merchandise sales, smashing the $389m record set by U2’s Vertigo tour in 2005 and 2006.

It has done so in part by using a 360º stage to increase each venue’s capacity by a fifth. Partly because of the custom-built, claw-shaped set, the tour costs are about $750,000 a day, “whether we play or not”. The tour should still be “highly profitable ... but very often that gross figure is carelessly written about as having gone straight into Bono’s pocket”. Our clean plates are taken away. It is after 4pm and it seems no table has emptied since we arrived. McGuinness orders a double espresso and I ask for an Earl Grey tea; his appearance may be rumpled but there is ruthlessness in his eye as he tells me about the importance of attention to detail when auditing the band’s payments from record companies and publishers: “On not one of those occasions did we fail to uncover an underpayment.”

Don’t such tricks help explain why people feel labels are just getting their comeuppance? “All right, it’s been the law of the jungle many times,” McGuinness says as our drinks arrive. “But what dismays me a little about the online universe is that these corporations, like Google and MySpace and Apple, don’t have anything that’s the equivalent of artist relations.”

One day, tech groups will have their own talent scouts and digital versions of record labels, he predicts. For now, the “great cultural collisions” taking place worry him. “I find I’m often dealing with [technology] executives who are really quite careless and frequently arrogant about the cultural impact of what they’re doing. I wish there were an atmosphere of nurturing and respect, which I really don’t see.”

Our waitress brings a candle. It’s late autumn in New York, and starting to get dark. McGuinness, who is married with two adult children, will soon fly back to his homes in Dublin and London and I ask what he has planned before the tour starts again in May. A stalled Spiderman musical, written by Bono and Edge, backed by McGuinness, should open on Broadway in the spring, and the band is talking about delivering another album very soon. “If they pull it off, that would be great, but I’ve learnt over the years to plan for all eventualities,” he says.

I ask for the bill, as McGuinness tells me his own musical tastes run from the Rollling Stones’ Exile on Main Street to the sung Latin mass at London’s Brompton Oratory. “There is no check,” the waitress tells her investor, and considerable confusion ensues. “No, I’m afraid that’s no good. Do you ever see that column in the Financial Times called Lunch with the FT? They have to pay. Oh that is funny.” He is still chuckling as I hand my card over (just the tea and coffee end up being free) and ask whether he’ll ever retire.

“Oh, I’d hate to. People used to think that rock and roll was music for teenagers. But we’ve just come from Madison Square Garden where Sir Mick was performing aged 66. I’m always delighted when Mick makes a record or does a tour because he makes U2 look so much younger.”

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson is the FT’s media editor

.....................................

The Spotted Pig
314 West 11th Street
New York

Serrano ham with pumpkin $16.00
Smoked haddock chowder $15.00
Sheep’s ricotta gnudi with brown butter & sage x 2 $30.00
Bethel Heights Estate wine 2007 $69.00
Large bottle of still water $6.00
Double espresso free
Earl Grey tea free
Total (inc tax & service) $174.00

In 2007, Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss, both psychology professors at the University of Texas at Austin, published a joint research paper on human sexuality titled “Why Humans Have Sex.” The answers of their study’s female participants—love, revenge, boredom, etc.—so interested Meston and Buss that they decided to conduct additional research, this time dedicated to women’s sexuality specifically. In the book “Why Women Have Sex,” there’s still plenty of love, revenge, and boredom, but they’re presented as pieces of a puzzle that we’re only now starting to assemble.

What are the basics of female sexuality?

Meston: Women’s sexuality is more complex than men’s. For example, women are more contextual than men—they are more easily distracted from sexual cues by what is going on in their environment—and this necessarily means that sexual desire is more multifaceted in women. Also, women are less connected with their genital cues than are men—when a man has an erection he generally feels sexually aroused and wants to have sex. Not so with women. Genital cues are often not noticed and, even when they are, they don’t necessarily make women want to have sex. That isn’t to say that men are so simple they have sex simply because they get an erection, but it does mean that women are, quite frankly, more complicated.

Is this why there’s been an increase in the number of studies dedicated to women’s sexuality in recent years?

Meston: When Viagra hit the market, in 1998, many drug companies began the race to discover the first “pink Viagra” for women. In 1998, I had one of three laboratories in the world with the ability to study both the psychological and physiological sexual responses of women. By 2000, there were dozens of labs popping up and millions and millions of dollars going into drug research on women’s sexuality. This necessarily fostered a lot of research into basic female sexual anatomy and physiology. Up until that point, it was assumed that men and women were very similar—physiologically speaking. What the research told us was that you could not simply apply a male template to understanding women’s sexuality.

Buss: For example, whereas men’s sexual orgasm tends to be fairly predictable and reliable in the sense of its occurrence, women’s sexual orgasm is highly variable. It’s variable from woman to woman, and variable within the same woman from partner to partner, circumstance to circumstance, etc. Sexual attraction provides another example. Men’s sexual attraction tends to be based heavily on visual cues. Women’s sexual attraction tends to be far more nuanced. It’s affected by olfactory cues (how a man smells), personality of the partner (such as sense of humor and confidence), social status (how he is regarded in the eyes of his peers), other women’s judgments of how attractive he is, and many other factors, in addition to the visual cues. The qualities women find to be sexually attractive in a man also vary across the ovulatory cycle, such as a shift toward finding more masculine features (faces, bodies, and voices) attractive at ovulation.

Meston: The upsurge of research did a number of good things for the field of women’s sexuality. It got people talking about women’s sexuality more openly, and more women felt comfortable admitting to, and seeking help for, their sexual concerns. It also brought attention to the fact that there are important differences between men and women that need to be studied if we are to ever find effective treatments for women's sexual concerns.

If women are indeed more open, that probably made for some interesting findings.

Meston: We knew that sexual motivation was more complicated than had previously been assumed—that people have sex for love, pleasure, and procreation. However, the sheer diversity of responses astonished us—they ranged from the altruistic to the borderline evil.

Buss: Some women reported having sex to give someone else an S.T.D. or to extract revenge on someone who had wronged them, for example by sleeping with the offender’s partner. Although infrequent, these sexual motivations can have dramatic and sometimes tragic consequences that are disproportionate to their frequency.

Meston: It was also interesting to see how young women today strongly defy the gender stereotypes of even a decade ago: they had sex just for the pleasure of it and if the partner wanted commitment it was often viewed as negative; they were embarrassed of, and wanted to get rid of, their virginity; they wanted to be sexually experienced and add “another notch on their belt”; they had sex because they were competitive with other women—they wanted to win; and they were curious—they had sex just to see what it was like with men of different ages, ethnicities, careers, and penis sizes.

What’s the next frontier in sex research?

Buss: If I were to single out one domain, it would be the female sexual orgasm. There needs to be more research to determine whether it has an evolved function, or possibly several evolved functions (or possibly no function, as some argue). When this is discovered with definitive scientific evidence, it will make for big news. I’m personally betting on the “Mr. Right Hypothesis,” which suggests that women use sexual orgasm, in part, as a mate selection device. Men who are attentive to the woman, sexually unselfish, take the time to learn what turns her on, etc., tend to make good partners and possibly good dads. But we need a lot more scientific research to test this, as well as competing hypotheses about the potential functions of female orgasm.

Meston: There is so much left to be learned about women’s sexuality—sex drive in particular is of great importance, given that one-third of US women report a lack of interest in sex, and if there are mismatches in sex drive within couples, it can lead to all sorts of relationship problems.

So what’s the takeaway?

Buss: For women, I would say that it’s important to realize that each woman has tremendous sexual potential. We found, for example, that some women came to the conclusion, after being with one partner for several years, that they were just not very sexual creatures. Then when they switched to a different partner, all of a sudden they started to blossom sexually. Most women have far more sexual potential than they realize.

Meston: And men: women are all different in their sexual needs. Don’t assume that what worked in the last relationship will be as effective in the next.

Buss: From an evolutionary perspective, sex is close to the engine of the most important evolutionary process—differential reproduction. Consequently, sexuality will be a primary target for the evolution of adaptations—anatomical, physiological, and psychological adaptations. There’s a good reason why, wherever there exist written laws, they include laws about who can and can’t have sex with whom. There’s a good reason why sex, and who is having sex with whom, is something people in every culture find of great interest, importance, and fascination. It’s a primary topic of gossip, and something that draws our attention like no other. To paraphrase an old rock lyric, “Without sex, where would we be now?”

Jane Austen is very funny. Her characters are vivid. The poise of her sentences is perfect. Her plots are pretty good—at least, they keep you reading. However, to write brilliant novels was not Jane Austen's foremost goal: What was most important to her was to provide moral instruction.





In their essence, Austen's books are moral works. "Northanger Abbey" is really about Catherine Morland's moral education: She learns that the world does not operate on the principles of a gothic novel. As the title indicates, "Sense and Sensibility" is a moral tale: It is the story of Elinor's self-command and Marianne's self-indulgence. The central event of both "Pride and Prejudice" and "Emma" is each heroine's discovery of her own moral weakness. "Mansfield Park" treats any number of moral issues, from the propriety of engaging in amateur theatricals to the consequences of leaving one's husband for another man. The premise of "Persuasion" is that Anne Elliot once sacrificed her happiness by doing her duty and obeying the admonishment of her moral guide, Lady Russell. Moral concerns are not only reflected in the large themes of the books, however: They are pervasive. Even the smallest act or the briefest dialogue or the mere description of a character's manner of dress is freighted with moral content.

Today's readers tend to appreciate Austen despite her didacticism rather than because of it. She can be positively priggish, and that is an embarrassment. The contemporary reader who loves Jane Austen sort of blips over the moralizing sections and tells himself that they don't really count. It is possible to ignore this aspect of her work, just as it is possible to discuss a religious painting with hardly any reference to the artist's religious intent. But this seems absurd: Ignoring a writer's central concern is a strange way to attempt to appreciate and understand her.

The question arises, then, of how to reconcile Austen's moralism with modern sensibility. To address this problem, it would be useful if we could find someone with this modern sensibility who actually reads Austen for her moral instruction (in addition to the literary pleasure she provides). How convenient that we have someone who fits that description available to us: me.

I find that reading Jane Austen helps me clarify ethical choices, helps me figure out a way to live with integrity in the corrupt world, even helps me adopt the proper tone and manner in dealing with others. Her moralism and the modern mind are not, in fact, in direct opposition, as is so often assumed.

To say that one values Austen's moral instruction may produce skepticism because, after all, she was a spinster living in provincial England 200 years ago. But our worlds aren't so very different. We see Austen's characters—vain, selfish, naïve, compassionate—in our own lives every day. Her time and place are actually an advantage. In her circumscribed world, the problems of life may be examined with clear-eyed precision.

Austen lived on the cusp of the 18th-century Augustan and 19th-century Romantic ages. In our own time, nearly every song, advertisement and movie is based on Romantic principles. No matter how much we may enjoy the "felicities of domestic life," as Austen put it in "Persuasion," we still feel the enormous Romantic pull to do something more heroic and intense. Rather than digesting a good dinner while conversing with friends, we should be out forging the consciousness of our race in the smithy of our soul, or some damn thing. I don't really want to forge the consciousness of my race, but at the same time I don't want to miss out on all that Romanticism offers. This is where Austen comes in, for she is an Augustan familiar with Romanticism, which makes her more useful than a modern writer in helping us face the Romantic challenge. Only she can so credibly show us that it is possible to have moderation and deep feeling, good dinners and good poetry.

What, then, are the values that Austen would teach us? Value-laden words and phrases appear again and again in her work, often in clusters: self- knowledge, generosity, humility; elegance, propriety, cheerful orderliness; good understanding, correct opinion, knowledge of the world, a warm heart, steady, observant, moderate, candid, sensibility to what is amiable and lovely.

Austen's moral instruction points one toward a more moral life—where "moral" refers not only to right principles but to conduct in general. Austen's value system can be thought of as a sphere with layers. The innermost core might be called "morals," the next layer we could call "sentiments," and finally the surface "manners." Morals are the fundamental principles: self-knowledge, generosity, humility, tenderest compassion, upright integrity.

Austen's emphasis on good order and propriety can seem dry and stiff. But anyone who reads "Mansfield Park" will feel the same relief that Fanny does at the change from the rackety disorder of her family's house in Portsmouth to the order of the Park. Similarly, Austen's regard for self-control, especially as expressed in "Sense and Sensibility," can seem hard, but it must be remembered how the author clearly regards Marianne's emotionalism with the greatest compassion. Austen is not advocating a suppression of the feelings themselves— despite her faultlessly correct behavior, Elinor undergoes great suffering and feels every bit of it. What Austen is saying, as a modern psychologist might urge, is that one should try to prevent the disintegration of one's personality. Sentiments are built on the foundation of our morals: an amiable heart, sensibility to all that is lovely. Manners, in turn, have to do with behavior, with the way we work in the world: perfect good breeding, gentle address. Surely it is still necessary to have models of good sense and gentle manners held up for us.

How can morals, sentiments and manners help one live in the world? What should one's relations to the world be? Should one reject the world entirely as corrupt and mercenary and hypocritical and shallow? Or is there some other way, where one can keep one's integrity and sensitivity, but live in the world too? W. H. Auden stated the problem well when he wrote:

"Does Life only offer two alternatives: 'You shall be happy, healthy, attractive, a good mixer, a good lover and parent, but on the condition that you are not overcurious about life. On the other hand you shall be sensitive, conscious of what is happening round you, but in that case you must not expect to be happy, or successful in love or at home in any company. There are two worlds and you cannot belong to them both.'"

In effect, Auden is asking if life offers only the two alternatives of "Sense and Sensibility," and one can sympathize with his cry of despair, for when the dilemma is put the way he puts it, the two seem hopelessly irreconcilable.

Austen comes to our rescue, though, for she does manage to modulate between "Sense and Sensibility," rejecting the excesses of both. Her attitude appeals because the combination of morals, sentiments, and manners provides a way of living that allows one both to be in the world and to enjoy the sweets of sensitivity as well. Austen does not write about bohemians and rebels; she doesn't want to change her world—"she would not alter a hair on anyone's head or move one brick," as Virginia Woolf wrote. Her sympathetic characters participate fully in their society and accept its conventions, yet they have exquisitely well-tuned minds and hearts. Good sense does not have to be at war with sensibility.

Irony is not just Austen's characteristic mode of expression: It is her characteristic mode of thought. Austen's irony reflects a perfect understanding of all the ways the world is wretched and the belief that although you can't really fight it, you can at least separate yourself from it. In her ironic sentences, there is movement with stability. She moves toward the object of criticism, then away from it, and then provides a gentle snap of closure at the end. This rhythmic motion serves as an ideal for both accepting and rejecting the ways of the wretched world while maintaining balance.

The irony of Austen's characters also gives those of us who believe in decorum a way to handle hypocrites. "Sense and Sensibility"'s Elinor Dashwood is rarely ironic, but she provides a good example. Recall the conversation when the odious John Dashwood, who has reneged on the deathbed promise to his father to help his half-sisters, suggests to Elinor that Mrs. Jennings will leave them a bequest. Elinor replies, "Indeed, brother, your anxiety for our welfare and prosperity carries you too far." John Dashwood lacks generosity and integrity. Elinor insults him, but she does it in the politest possible way.

If one is to argue that Austen's morality is useful for a person living today, one must deal with three hard cases. First, there is Fanny's objection to the amateur theatricals in "Mansfield Park." Then, in "Sense and Sensibility" there is Elinor's refusal to pursue the man she loves, Edward Ferrars, when she learns that he is oficially engaged to Lucy Steele, a woman who "joined insincerity with ignorance." Finally, there is Anne Elliot's avowal in "Persuasion" that she did the right thing by following the dictates of Lady Russell to refuse Captain Wentworth, even though this led to years of loveless misery for them both. In all three cases, Austen endorses a morality that seems nearly absurd in its strictness. What is the big deal with theatricals? Is the principle of honor worth upholding when it results in mismatches and regret? And what kind of value system puts obedience before love?

Perhaps Austen's strictness is very old-fashioned, but anyone can find merit in the concepts of honor, duty, and obedience. Those strings have gone so slack that there's nothing wrong in their being tightened by a sympathetic reading of this aspect of Austen; they will loosen again soon enough.

To dispense briefly with Elinor and Anne, I will say simply that their actions must be seen in the context of their own sincerely held beliefs. The lesson is that it is sometimes right to sacrifice something we want for the sake of our conscience.

With Fanny Price it almost seems as if Austen set out to create a character that has no manners and no personality, but is simply raw morality. She is famously disliked by readers, but her actions and attitudes can be defended. For all her timidness, she has real courage. She stands up to all the others when they want her to participate in the play, and she even withstands the terrible onslaught of Sir Thomas's disapproval when she refuses to marry Crawford. It is too rarely acknowledged that Fanny is right. The danger of the theatricals is that they bring young men and women together in a sexually charged setting, and, indeed, they do lead to the very outcome Fanny dreads: Henry Crawford and Maria Rushworth run off together. So Fanny is not simply adhering to an arbitrary and silly rule about whether amateur theatricals are proper, she is trying to forestall a circumstance that does end up causing real pain.

Jane Austen's principles are of transcendent value, they are not "priggish," and her novels illustrate and advocate a way of being in the world that is ethical, sensitive and practical. The best representative for the worthiness of Austen's approach to life, however, is Austen herself. The reflection of the first sentence of "Pride and Prejudice" shimmers beneath it: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman of small fortune must be in want of a husband." There is nothing ironic about that: In Austen's time it really was a universal truth. Austen's condition as a single woman without money and no longer young was, as she put it when describing Miss Bates in "Emma," to stand "in the very worst predicament in the world for having much of the public favor." As that very phrase indicates, however, Austen was able to regard her predicament coldly, clearly and without self-pity. The novels convey the poise, balance, forbearance and humor of their creator. By reading them, one is enfolded in her personality, a personality we might wish we could adopt ourselves, for it seems to resolve many of life's problems, moral and otherwise.

—James Collins is a writer and editor whose first novel, "Beginner's Greek," came out last year. This piece was adapted from "A Truth Universally Acknowledged," an anthology of essays about why we read Jane Austen, published earlier this week by Random House.

Evolution

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species contains only one illustration, and a rather dull one at that – a simple image of the tree-like branching relations between hypothetical species, with the present at the top (not all branches reach the top), and common ancestors deep in the past. In fact, the drawing does not look much like a tree – it is more like some kind of spindly weed. Although it might not seem impressive, this figure was a revolutionary way of representing life, summing up Darwin’s central idea of evolution by natural selection. This image was not the first that Darwin chose to represent his hypothesis. Shortly after his return from the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin drew a coral-like diagram and wrote “I think” alongside it. In his notebooks he later mused that “The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life”. Over the decades, however, the “tree” image and terminology gradually predominated. They were given particular and literal force by Ernst Haeckel, who at the end of the nineteenth century drew a sturdy oak-like tree with the names of organisms scattered around its branches. Down at the bottom were the monera (single-celled organisms without a nucleus), while at the very top – literally the pinnacle of evolution – were humans. We now know that Haeckel’s representation was wrong in so many ways. Not only are humans not at the top of the tree – we are no more or less “evolved” than the monera Haeckel put down at the bottom – if the tree of life were to be drawn to scale, in terms of either the number of organisms, or species, or the duration of their existence on the planet, then monera would take up almost all the space. Life on earth began 4 billion years ago, a mere 500 million years after the planet formed. If you represent our common history as lasting sixty seconds, life is mainly composed of monera, before proliferating in the last seven seconds, following the massive diversification of animal life that occurred with the “Cambrian Explosion” around 542 million years ago. On this scale, the appearance of our species 100,000 years ago is subliminal.

We now know that the species on our planet split, evolved and died out in only one sequence – there is only one true tree (or coral) of life. But what was that sequence? Given the number of species that have lived on the Earth over the past 4 billion years, there are more ways of arranging those species in an evolutionary diagram than there are atoms in the Universe. For example, if you have just ten species, there are about 3.6 million possible trees. With twenty species, there are more than 2 quintillion (that is, 2 x 1018) trees. We have no idea how many species have been around over the last 4 billion years – anywhere from a few dozens of millions upwards. Of all the zillions of possible trees we could draw with those species, there is just one that is right. It seems unlikely we’ll ever find out precisely which one it is, although a subset of probable trees will be identified. For the moment, we can only try and get the big picture right (are humans more related to goats or dogs?), and to ensure that we understand the fine detail at the ends of the various branches (the relations between various modern species of fruitfly are a particular favourite, and are now defined with near-certainty).

These points are well made in Francisco Ayala’s chapter on molecular evolution in Evolution: The first four billion years, a book that contains an odd mixture of magisterial summaries of key subjects and a selection of briefer encyclopedic entries. The subtitle is a bit of a swizz, as the vast bulk of the book is devoted to roughly the last eighth of that time span – the Phanerozoic eon, which began with the rise of multi-cellular organisms. On one level, this is quite understandable, as most of what we know about evolution relates to this period – these are the organisms that have left clear fossils, and we have been reasonably successful in using molecular techniques to determine their evolutionary relationships. Further back in time, things get a bit hazy, producing squabbles about precise relations down at the bottom of the coral of life – “are humans more related to mushrooms or algae?” and so on. In the last year, two major, and contradictory, studies of the relations between the major groups of organisms have been produced. We still do not know which – if either – is right.

Studies of the first 3.5 billion years of life’s history have produced some of the most thought-provoking science of the last century. An early chapter in Evolution summarizes views of how life originated. It also deals with the exciting and apparently contradictory suggestion that life first appeared within something like a cell. This is not quite as unlikely as it might seem. Although cell membranes are made of proteins and are created by the organism itself, the three key functions of the cell are that it is protective, permeable, and that it can divide. Amazingly, non-organic vesicles in clays can also show these features. Although Darwin suggested that the molecules of life first appeared in “some warm little pond”, the actual location must have been some minuscule bubble, where fragile molecules could safely meet and combine. Experiments have shown that cell-like vesicles made of fatty acids on clays can help RNA molecules string together – the first molecules of life, living in a strange and fragile “RNA world” that preceded our modern “DNA world”.

The incredible diversification of animal life that occurred during the Cambrian period was particularly intriguing – and worrying – to Darwin. Where did all that variety come from? We now know that things had begun to take off before the Cambrian period, and an excellent article in Evolution on “Organismic evolution and radiation before the Cambrian” describes the major hypotheses for why multi-cellular life suddenly became so diverse and widespread. These include changes in oxygen levels, the “invention” of sex, and the appearance of new genes controlling the shape of organisms. Strikingly, however, Evolution contains almost nothing about the enigmatic Ediacaran biota, named after the 580- to 650- million-year-old rocks of the Ediacara hills in the Flinders Range of South Australia. This omission is disappointing, for the Ediacara are some of the most curious organisms that have ever existed. There is still no consensus about exactly what they looked like – or even whether they were animals, plants or something else entirely. They were mainly soft-bodied, so fossils are rare. Those that do exist are often hard to assign even to a particular kingdom – the same shape can be seen as a kind of sand-dollar (related to sea urchins), the hold-fast of a seaweed or a sea-pen (a kind of sessile jellyfish), or a bizarre mattress-structured animal that has apparently left no descendants. In the 1990s, the geologist Adolf Seilacher suggested that these extinct organisms represented an utterly novel group, which were like quilted, stingless jellyfish. These animals, he argued, had a completely different way of organizing their bodies from modern animals, which appear immediately afterwards in the fossil record, during the Cambrian Explosion. Sadly, neither Seilacher’s views, nor the opposition they have aroused, are dealt with in the pages of Evolution. (99% Ape: How evolution adds up also skips over the early history of multi-cellular life – astoundingly, it does not even mention the Cambrian Explosion, never mind the Ediacaran biota. The editors of both books have missed an opportunity to enchant and tantalize the reader with vistas of bizarre extinct oceanic life forms, to explore arguments at the frontiers of science and to provide an insight into how scientists deal with material that is, at least partly, forever unknowable.)

Evolution attempts to summarize the whole of our knowledge of evolution by natural selection, and in so doing commits sins of omission and commission. For example, there are substantial entries on Crustaceans and Dinosaurs, but not on Chelicerates or Molluscs. And interesting as it is, did the co-editor Michael Ruse’s own book From Monad to Man really deserve a specific entry, given that its theme (evolutionary “progress”) is dealt with separately? Similarly, allowing the Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin and Piltdown Man separate entries (de Chardin was fingered by Stephen Jay Gould as the probable perpetrator of the Piltdown hoax) seems over-indulgent, while devoting a whole entry to Richard Dawkins’s notion of “memes” as units of cultural information is simply eccentric. 99% Ape, on the other hand, is brief, pithy and delightfully illustrated, and will be particularly attractive to secondary school students. It concisely presents the evidence for evolution, from the beaks of Darwin’s finches to changes in rib-numbers on the tails of trilobites, and outlines the evolution of eyes, vertebrates and humans (the “99% Ape” of the title). However, not all of its content is similarly solid. The chapter on human behaviour is based on the modish ideas of “evolutionary psychology”; although the authors accept that the way our evolutionary past affects our psychological present is an “open question”, they give no real sense of why that is the case. Above all, they do not emphasize the necessity of experimentally distinguishing between valid hypotheses and “Just So” stories based on vague guesses about our evolutionary past.

Both books are more comfortable when dealing with well-established knowledge. One of the clearest examples of how natural selection can change a population of organisms is that of the peppered moth, Biston betularia, which in the second half of the nineteenth century saw a near-complete transformation of its coloration. In 1848, the first dark-coloured moth in this traditionally speckled grey species was found in Manchester; by 1895 around 98 per cent of peppered moths in the Manchester region were dark. This change took place in less than fifty generations, and shows the power of natural selection. A century later, the dark melanic form has declined to 5 per cent. These dramatic shifts are correlated with changes in the colour of tree-trunks around the world’s first industrial city, which became soot-blackened in the nineteenth century, only to return to their naturally light colours following the Clean Air Acts of the 1950s. In the 1950s, Bernard Kettlewell carried out a series of experiments to find out exactly why the moth population changed colour. These studies have been criticized for methodological flaws, although 99% Ape is imprudently uncritical. However, their main conclusion has apparently been supported by the work of the late Michael Majerus. Just as the lepidopterist J. W. Tutt suggested back in 1896, the moths that do not match their background (dark moths on light trees, or light moths on dark trees) are subject to higher predation rates by birds. The birds can see them, so they eat them. Moths that are eaten tend not to reproduce so well, and the balance of the two colours in the next generation shifts slightly. In this case, predation is the major cause of evolution. Anti-evolutionists may take heart from the fact that Majerus died before his work could be published in peerreviewed journals. However, they would be wrong to do so: the evolution of the peppered moth populations is not in doubt; the argument has been over what exactly has been causing that evolution.

While evolutionary biologists have always argued about the pace and causes of natural selection, and the precise shape of the coral of life, the very idea of evolution has been subject to a 150-year long offensive by a vast variety of religious thinkers. Both Evolution and 99% Ape deal with the thorny relation between evolution and religion, and both books disappoint, ceding ground where they should be at their most confident. In Evolution, David Livingstone points out that “religious believers have reacted in vastly different ways to evolution, and their stances do not follow any straightforward taxonomy of theological orientation”. The key point, which explains why so many believers find evolution inimical, is that “opponents of Darwinism have been haunted by the spectre of materialism”. What Livingstone fails to conclude is that although scientists, and indeed all those who want to understand how the universe works, can believe whatever fairy stories they wish, when an individual – or a religion or a state – uses religious belief as the measure by which facts are accepted or rejected, there is an irreconcilable contradiction between the theology and scientific knowledge.

This is the implicit subject of a chapter on “American antievolutionism”, by Eugenie C. Scott. In the USA, the “debate” between evolution and religion has largely taken place in the courtroom, as Christians have tried to introduce their ideas into state-funded schools. Even though some of the people Scott describes are eccentric “young Earth creationists” inspired by Archbishop James Ussher – the man who worked out that the Creation “fell upon the entrance of the night preceding the twenty third day of October” in 4004 bc – her account is disconcertingly uncombative. A more robust rebuttal of the absurd and lightweight claims of creationist “science” (Scott drops the quotation marks early on) is necessary. Furthermore, although the United States is the source of some of the most rabid and well-organized forms of anti-evolutionism, it is by no means alone. In the UK, creationists and their sneaky cousins, the “intelligent design” crew, are growing in influence; Intelligent Design was given public backing in the Spectator earlier this year by Melanie Phillips, who absurdly claimed that it “comes out of science” not religion. On a more ambitious scale, the Turkish Islamic anti-evolutionist Harun Yahya has produced a lavish and ludicrous Atlas of Creation, which he has dispatched to educational establishments throughout Europe, in a bizarre attempt to convince his readers that evolution is not a fact. An exploration of the ideological similarities between fundamentalists of all stripes would have been invaluable; sadly, neither Scott nor Livingstone provides us with that. Worse, neither of them seems to realize that fundamentalist attitudes towards science are part and parcel of religion – the irrational rejection of the facts of evolution flows from the irrational belief in the veracity of ancient, self-contradictory folk texts, and in the power of an imaginary supreme being.

The authors of 99% Ape make clear their opposition to creationism of all stripes, too, but seem strangely reluctant to do battle on a favourable terrain. They quote various popes who argued that accepting evolution and believing in God are not contradictory, but they (like the popes) do not specify that this is only true if God is reduced to the role of a celestial clock-winder, who set the Universe running billions of years ago and then settled back to watch things unfold. In other words, it is only true if God is reduced to something that in practice is indistinguishable from a figment of imagination.

FOWLER

Henry Watson Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage is an unabashedly prescriptivist tome, which is to say that it doesn’t waffle in describing the right way, and the wrong way, to use English words. The archetypal usage manual, commonly called just “Fowler’s,” was initially published in 1926. It has undergone two revisions since, the product of the first of which, a book judiciously and lightly edited by Sir Ernest Gowers, was released in 1965. F.W. Bateson, the English literary scholar, reflected the general feeling when he wrote that Gowers was “remarkably successful . . . in retaining Fowler’s ipsissima verba while making the minor corrections and qualifications that time has made necessary.”

Similar approbation did not greet the second revision of Fowler’s, published in 1996 and helmed by the late lexicographer and linguist Robert W. Burchfield. John Simon, reviewing that book for the New Criterion, wrote that Burchfield — who before editing Fowler’s had edited both the Oxford English Dictionary and the Cambridge History of the English Language — had “made himself a true citizen of Oxbridge.” “But an ox bridge,” Simon quipped, “can be no better that a pons asinorum.”

The trouble, simply put, was that Burchfield had expunged Fowler from Fowler’s. Gone were some of the original author’s beloved subheadings (“Pairs and Snares” was pared, “Unequal Yokefellows” unyoked) and gone, too, was his jaunty, slightly mischievous, scything-while-grinning tone. Most objectionable was that Burchfield had changed Fowler’s from a prescriptive book to a descriptive one. Usage was no longer to be judged but understood. Entries that had earlier attacked ambiguity, castigated the careless, and lowered the boom on barbarism were suddenly more interested in explaining the origins and development of the English language’s scofflaws than in pointing them out and locking up. The warden had become the prison psychologist.

William Safire wrote that the first Fowler’s was “a body-and-soul book, rambling through the byways of usage” and “written with a style all its own: certain, authoritative, unafraid to make decisions.” Burchfield’s edition is not at all that. It is a fine reference manual assembled by a first-rate scholar, to be sure, and anyone seeking edification about the historical iterations of words and phrases would do well to consult its pages. But it does not follow its predecessor on a merry march through the English language, nor does it do much for Henry Fowler’s originally intended reader, that “half-educated Englishman of literary proclivities” who just wants to know: “‘Can I say so-&-so?’”

Today’s half-educated supplicants, those less than obsessive about scouring used-book shops, have had to content themselves with Gowers’s interpretation of Fowler’s because the original version was long out of print. And young people growing up on Burchfield’s book no doubt find Fowler’s just another among the plodding reference manuals to be occasionally consulted and then quickly reshelved. Not a fine state of affairs. Thankfully, Oxford University Press has now swept to the rescue with the rerelease of the first edition, in effect putting Fowler back in charge of Fowler’s.

The author of Modern English Usage, Henry Watson Fowler, was, as one might expect of the author of a 700-plus-page English usage guide, idiosyncratic. He was not the cheerful fellow suggested by the wry sentences he wrote. Rather, he was awkward and reserved. Born in 1858, educated at Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford, he spent the first 17 years of his working life teaching English and Classics at a school in Yorkshire, where his reputation was for shyness, seriousness, and rectitude. One pupil called him “a cold, mechanical machine”; another said of Fowler, “He took some knowing.” He resigned his teaching position at age 41 because he felt his lack of religious faith left him unable to properly prepare his students for confirmation in the Church of England. He was also, it seems probable, a bit bored.

And so he decamped for London, where for four years he lived in three rooms in a Chelsea boarding house and wrote essays and articles for magazines like the Spectator and the Westminster Gazette. He tried to integrate himself into the city’s literary circles, but his social uneasiness proved a hopeless impediment, and so, in 1903, he left London for Guernsey, an island 100 miles south of the English coast, where his younger brother, Frank, lived and worked as a tomato farmer. The two occupied neighboring cottages and became collaborators. First, they put out a translation of Lucian, which was published in 1905 in the Oxford Library of Translations. The book garnered an unsigned review in the New York Times that managed to be at once adulatory and cutting:

Ordinarily a translator is but a name; but this translation of Lucian is so excellent that one wants more than the names of those who have made it. “H.W. Fowler and F.G. Fowler,” says the title page. But who are they? Are they Oxford men — or are they Oxford women? The translation has a femininity about it — is dainty as well as accurate and finished.
Their next work, The King’s English — “a sort of English composition manual . . . for journalists and amateur writers,” the brothers explained to Oxford Press — was released in 1906 and sold well, to Henry’s enduring surprise. Five years after that, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, a Fowlers-edited abridgement of the 16,000-page original, was published. Then World War I erupted, and the brothers set aside writing to falsify their ages — Henry was 56 in reality — and enlist in the British armed forces. Though neither found himself in the trenches, the health of each was damaged by the experience, Frank’s health especially. He died in 1918, of tuberculosis. Henry had started Modern English Usage before the war’s onset. Fighting delayed the work, and after Frank’s death it was again waylaid. It was not until 1926 that Henry Fowler’s most important book was finally published.

Burchfield, in his preface to Fowler’s third edition, called the first edition “this extraordinary book, the Bible of presciptivists.” But in the early 20th century, when Fowler was writing the extraordinary book, the trend was away from prescriptivism and toward a descriptive, academic linguistics that, like Burchfield himself, observed rather than decreed.1 Burchfield stressed the extent of “the isolation of Fowler from the mainstream of the linguistic scholarship of his day” and highlighted “his heavy dependence” on English school textbooks and the classics of ancient Greece and Rome, the Renaissance, and post-Renaissance English literature. For Fowler, Burchfield wrote, these influences composed “a three-colored flag” that “was to be saluted and revered, and, as far as possible, everything it represented was to be preserved intact.”

Burchfield’s facts are not wrong, but he is wrong to decoct from them that Fowler was an uncritical, flag-saluting traditionalist. It’s true that Fowler was not a trained linguist, as Burchfield notes, and certainly he was removed from cutting-edge linguistics work (he did, after all, inhabit a tiny, out-of-the-way island). He also loved Latin and Greek, yes. But to represent Fowler as a sort-of linguistic reactionary, determined to fight any deviation from the textbooks of his youth, no matter how sensible or ineluctable, is to represent him in a way unsupported by evidence.

The evidence, in fact, shows Fowler to be of sensible and moderate prescriptive proclivities. Take his tack on the word none, for example, about which word Dorothy Parker wrote in the September, 1961, Esquire that “Any one who, as does [Henry] Miller, follows ‘none’ with a plural verb . . . should assuredly not be called a writer.” Here’s Fowler on the matter: “It is a mistake to suppose that the pronoun is sing. only & must at all costs be followed by sing. verbs &c.; the oed explicitly states that pl. construction is commoner.” This seems reasonable — and, of course, no respectable reactionary would embrace an approach just because the dictionary finds it “commoner.”

Another instance of Fowler’s reasonableness comes in his humorous and extended discussion of the split infinitive. He begins:

The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know & condemn; (4) those who know & approve; & (5) those who know and distinguish.
Many if not most textbook-authors and teachers of Fowler’s time, and ours, belong in the third group, the dire condemners. But Fowler sides with the fifth, a club, he writes, that believes “that a real s.i., though not desirable in itself, is preferable to either of two things, to real ambiguity, & to patent artificiality.” Writing should be clear and smooth, and if maintaining the contiguity between to and its verb occasions an unclear or jarring sentence, the infinitive in question should be split.2

Fowler also saw no problem in placing and or but at the start of a sentence, nor in plopping a preposition at its end. While he could get hooked by crotchets — objecting to amoral, for instance, on the grounds that it was an ungainly combination of a Greek prefix and a Latin derivative — he was generally practical in his rule-making and rule-breaking. His abiding hope was to promote production of precise and pleasurable sentences, and if old prejudices stood in the way of that goal, they were knocked aside. David Crystal, editor of the rereleased first edition, writes that Fowler “turns out to be far more sophisticated in his analysis of language than most people realize.” What’s more, “Several of his entries display a concern for descriptive accuracy which would do any modern linguist proud.”

Crystal, himself a linguist, contributes an introduction to the rereleased Fowler’s. It provides a passable overview, though it is flecked with the same condescension and pomposity that infuses Burchfield’s work and lacks the joy of the text it introduces. It contains far more criticisms than compliments. Crystal observes, for example, that Henry Fowler’s “own writing does not always live up to the high standard he sets himself”: Clarity is wanting, for instance, in the 56-word opening sentence of the Novelty-Hunting entry, and Fowler’s instruction that “Good English does consist in the main of short words” is undercut by his overall book, some 30 to 40 percent of the words of the entries of which are polysyllabic. Crystal also goes after the book’s inconsistency, both the discrepancies between one entry and the next (e.g., the definitional shift of oblivious is condemned while that of obnoxious is affirmed) and Fowler’s own obliviousness to his own rules.

“How can someone assert so many principles,” Crystal asks, “and then break them so often?” The short answer is that Fowler’s is a personal, aspirational book, the work of one man with a keenness for supporting clear English who did his best to make usage rules to that end. If he goes one way on oblivious, another way on obnoxious, it is his decision to make, and he has every right to codify it in his book. In other words, there is no requirement that Fowler justify his preferences through etymology or lexicography or anything else. Crystal is right that Fowler’s is no scientific manual. He is wrong, though, to judge the book as if it were.

When Crystal writes that Henry Fowler was “unable to detach himself completely from his own language upbringing,” one wonders why such a detachment would have been at all desirable. When Crystal writes of Fowler, “I sense a linguist inside him crying to get out, but being held back by a prescriptive conscience,” one recalls Fowler’s correspondence with Oxford Press, in which he never proposed to write a book on linguistics but a prescriptive guide to English usage. And then one wonders why Oxford hired yet another linguist, and not a prescriptivist, to write the new introduction to this most-famous of all prescriptivist tracts.

It is likely that Fowler, were he still with us, would scoff at the sentimentalists who wish to keep his book unaltered for all time. Fowler knew that language was protean; he would agree that a usage manual published in 1926 could stand some updating in the 21st century.

In the rereleased first edition, the updating comes in a useful appendix, in which Crystal addresses some 300 entries, offering here and there corrections and clarifications (and rebukes) and providing historical context. Readers can see where Henry Fowler’s judgments have proved durable and where they have not. They can also see where he made etymological and historical errors, and they can determine where it matters and where it doesn’t.

Burchfield called Fowler’s “a fossil.” He was right in one sense — the book surely is a well-preserved “monument to all that was linguistically acceptable in the standard English of the southern counties of England in the first quarter of the twentieth century.” But it’s much more than that, of course. More than a million copies of Fowler’s have been sold; it is simply, to recall Burchfield’s words, “the Bible of prescriptivists.” And, for all its early- 20th-century, southern English stuffiness, it remains today more than capable, when touched up by a few well-placed tweaks, of fulfilling its original purpose of telling us when and how we can say something and when and how we can’t.

While he could get hooked by crotchets — objecting to amoral, for instance, on the grounds that it was an ungainly combination of a Greek prefix and a Latin derivative — he was generally practical in his rule-making and rule-breaking.

The books of descriptivists have their place as chronicles of language as it is actually used. The books of prescriptivists — books like The Careful Writer by Theodore Bernstein or Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage, or any of the collections of William Safire’s “On Language” writings, and especially Fowler’s — give instruction in how language should be used, and they have their place, too. Clifton Fadiman once said, “I refer to Fowler often . . . I refer to it for spiritual sustenance. It shows me how bad a writer I am, and encourages me to do better.” Fadiman was nothing near a bad writer, but the point is well taken. It is excellent that the original Fowler’s is now back on the shelves, helping us all to be clearer and more correct, still encouraging us to do better.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This I Believe

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Let me start with the bottom line and then tell you how I got there: I can’t agree with President Obama’s decision to escalate in Afghanistan. I’d prefer a minimalist approach, working with tribal leaders the way we did to overthrow the Taliban regime in the first place. Given our need for nation-building at home right now, I am ready to live with a little less security and a little-less-perfect Afghanistan.

I recognize that there are legitimate arguments on the other side. At a lunch on Tuesday for opinion writers, the president lucidly argued that opting for a surge now to help Afghans rebuild their army and state into something decent — to win the allegiance of the Afghan people — offered the only hope of creating an “inflection point,” a game changer, to bring long-term stability to that region. May it be so. What makes me wary about this plan is how many moving parts there are — Afghans, Pakistanis and NATO allies all have to behave forever differently for this to work.

But here is the broader context in which I assess all this: My own foreign policy thinking since 9/11 has been based on four pillars:

1. The Warren Buffett principle: Everything I’ve ever gotten in life is largely due to the fact that I was born in this country, America, at this time with these opportunities for its citizens. It is the primary obligation of our generation to turn over a similar America to our kids.

2. Many big bad things happen in the world without America, but not a lot of big good things. If we become weak and enfeebled by economic decline and debt, as we slowly are, America may not be able to play its historic stabilizing role in the world. If you didn’t like a world of too-strong-America, you will really not like a world of too-weak-America — where China, Russia and Iran set more of the rules.

3. The context within which people live their lives shapes everything — from their political outlook to their religious one. The reason there are so many frustrated and angry people in the Arab-Muslim world, lashing out first at their own governments and secondarily at us — and volunteering for “martyrdom” — is because of the context within which they live their lives. That was best summarized by the U.N.’s Arab Human Development reports as a context dominated by three deficits: a deficit of freedom, a deficit of education and a deficit of women’s empowerment. The reason India, with the world’s second-largest population of Muslims, has a thriving Muslim minority (albeit with grievances but with no prisoners in Guantánamo Bay) is because of the context of pluralism and democracy it has built at home.

4. One of the main reasons the Arab-Muslim world has been so resistant to internally driven political reform is because vast oil reserves allow its regimes to become permanently ensconced in power, by just capturing the oil tap, and then using the money to fund vast security and intelligence networks that quash any popular movement. Look at Iran.

Hence, post-9/11 I advocated that our politicians find sufficient courage to hike gasoline taxes and seriously commit ourselves to developing alternatives to oil. Economists agree that this would ultimately bring down the global price, and slowly deprive these regimes of the sole funding source that allows them to maintain their authoritarian societies. People do not change when we tell them they should; they change when their context tells them they must.

To me, the most important reason for the Iraq war was never W.M.D. It was to see if we could partner with Iraqis to help them build something that does not exist in the modern Arab world: a state, a context, where the constituent communities — Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds — write their own social contract for how to live together without an iron fist from above. Iraq has proved staggeringly expensive and hugely painful. The mistakes we made should humble anyone about nation-building in Afghanistan. It does me.

Still, the Iraq war may give birth to something important — if Iraqis can find that self-sustaining formula to live together. Alas, that is still in doubt. If they can, the model would have a huge impact on the Arab world. Baghdad is a great Arab capital. If Iraqis fail, it’s religious strife, economic decline and authoritarianism as far as the eye can see — the witch’s brew that spawns terrorists.

Iraq was about “the war on terrorism.” The Afghanistan invasion, for me, was about the “war on terrorists.” To me, it was about getting bin Laden and depriving Al Qaeda of a sanctuary — period. I never thought we could make Afghanistan into Norway — and even if we did, it would not resonate beyond its borders the way Iraq might.

To now make Afghanistan part of the “war on terrorism” — i.e., another nation-building project — is not crazy. It is just too expensive, when balanced against our needs for nation-building in America, so that we will have the strength to play our broader global role. Hence, my desire to keep our presence in Afghanistan limited. That is what I believe. That is why I believe it.

Pirate Capitalism

HARADHEERE, Somalia -- In Somalia's main pirate lair of Haradheere, the sea gangs have set up a cooperative to fund their hijackings offshore, a sort of stock exchange meets criminal syndicate.

Heavily armed pirates from the lawless Horn of Africa nation have terrorized shipping lanes in the Indian Ocean and strategic Gulf of Aden, which links Europe to Asia through the Red Sea.

The gangs have made tens of millions of dollars from ransoms and a deployment by foreign navies in the area has only appeared to drive the attackers to hunt further from shore.

It is a lucrative business that has drawn financiers from the Somali diaspora and other nations -- and now the gangs in Haradheere have set up an exchange to manage their investments.

One wealthy former pirate named Mohammed took Reuters around the small facility and said it had proved to be an important way for the pirates to win support from the local community for their operations, despite the dangers involved.

"Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange. We started with 15 'maritime companies' and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking," Mohammed said.

"The shares are open to all and everybody can take part, whether personally at sea or on land by providing cash, weapons or useful materials ... we've made piracy a community activity."

Haradheere, 400 km (250 miles) northeast of Mogadishu, used to be a small fishing village. Now it is a bustling town where luxury 4x4 cars owned by the pirates and those who bankroll them create honking traffic jams along its pot-holed, dusty streets.

Somalia's Western-backed government of President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed is pinned down battling hard-line Islamist rebels, and controls little more than a few streets of the capital.

The administration has no influence in Haradheere -- where a senior local official said piracy paid for almost everything.

"Piracy-related business has become the main profitable economic activity in our area and as locals we depend on their output," said Mohamed Adam, the town's deputy security officer.

"The district gets a percentage of every ransom from ships that have been released, and that goes on public infrastructure, including our hospital and our public schools."

RISK VS REWARDS

In a drought-ravaged country that provides almost no employment opportunities for fit young men, many are been drawn to the allure of the riches they see being earned at sea.

Abdirahman Ali was a secondary school student in Mogadishu until three months ago when his family fled the fighting there.

Given the choice of moving with his parents to Lego, their ancestral home in Middle Shabelle where strict Islamist rebels have banned most entertainment including watching sport, or joining the pirates, he opted to head for Haradheere.

Now he guards a Thai fishing boat held just offshore.

"First I decided to leave the country and migrate, but then I remembered my late colleagues who died at sea while trying to migrate to Italy," he told Reuters. "So I chose this option, instead of dying in the desert or from mortars in Mogadishu."

Haradheere's "stock exchange" is open 24 hours a day and serves as a bustling focal point for the town. As well as investors, sobbing wives and mothers often turn up there seeking news of male relatives missing in action.

Every week, Mohammed said, gang members and equipment were lost to the sea. But he said the pirates were not deterred.

"Ransoms have even increased in recent months from between $2-3 million to $4 million because of the increased number of shareholders and the risks," he said.

"Let the anti-piracy navies continue their search for us. We have no worries because our motto for the job is 'do or die'."

Piracy investor Sahra Ibrahim, a 22-year-old divorcee, was lined up with others waiting for her cut of a ransom pay-out after one of the gangs freed a Spanish tuna fishing vessel.

"I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation," she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony.

"I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the 'company'."


© Thomson Reuters 2009

Intellectual Hypocrites

I think I've had my fill of moral hypocrisy. We routinely hear stories of evangelical ministers who "mentor" hookers at $500 an hour, "family values" politicians who like the cut of a congressional page's jib or senators who love to press the flesh, one bathroom stall at a time. And, given the times, we increasingly hear stories about progressive politicians and columnist who -- gasp! -- have bigger carbon footprints than they want the rest of us to have: CO2 emissions for me and not for thee! For shame.

Ever since the golden age of Fleet Street, if not the dawn of newspapering itself, the press has loved stories of moral hypocrisy. To catch a politician violating his own moral code -- particularly when he or she exhorts others to live up to that code -- warms the cockles of every reporter. Indeed, sometimes journalists seem to think the real offense is the hypocrisy and not the crime itself. "If a politician murders his mother," the late Washington Post editorial page editor Meg Greenfield once said, "the first response of the press . . . will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do, but rather that in a statement made six years before, he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide."

The crusade against moral hypocrisy will naturally hit conservatives harder, not because conservatives are more immoral but because they uphold morality more publicly, making them richer targets. The left aims much of its moralizing at moralizing itself -- "thou shalt not judge." Meanwhile, the right focuses on the oldies but goodies -- adultery, drug use, etc. I think we're right to uphold a standard even if we fail to live up to it from time to time.

Regardless, what I don't think we hear enough about is intellectual hypocrisy. What do I mean? Well, if moral hypocrisy is saying what values people should live by while failing to follow them yourself, intellectual hypocrisy is believing you are smart enough to run other peoples' lives when you can barely run your own.

I know many extremely smart liberals for whom no idea is too complex, no concept or organizational flow chart too hard to grasp. They want the government to take over this, run that, manage some other things and in all cases put people exactly like them in charge of pretty much everything. Many are geniuses, with SAT scores so high you could get a bloody nose just looking at them.

But you wouldn't ask one to run a carwash.

The chairman of a small college's English department thinks it's obvious intellectuals should take over healthcare, but he can't manage the class schedule of three professors or run a meeting without it coming to blows or tears; a pundit defends government intervention in almost every sphere of economic life, but he can't figure out how to manage the interns or his own checking account.

The most famous story of an intellectual hypocrite getting his comeuppance is the tale of George McGovern and his inn. The senator, 1972 presidential nominee and college professor thought he could run a vast, technologically sophisticated, continental nation with a diverse population and an entrepreneurial culture. Then, after leaving Washington, he bought an inn in Connecticut to while away his retirement years. For a guy as smart as him, running an inn should have been child's play. But it went belly up before the end of the year, with a contritely befuddled McGovern marveling at how much harder running a business was than he thought.

Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) offers a more timely example. Rangel heads the Ways and Means Committee, which writes the tax code, and he recently backed the imposition of an income tax surcharge on high earners to pay for healthcare, calling it "the moral thing to do." Yet he can't seem to figure out how to file his own taxes properly or, perhaps, legally. The lapses are the subject of a House Ethics Committee investigation.

Now I also know lots of conservatives who are basket cases at everything other than reading and writing books and articles, giving speeches and thinking Big Thoughts (just as I know lots of liberals who despise conservative moralizing about sex and religion who nonetheless live chaste and pious lives themselves). The point is that conservatives don't presume to be smart enough to run everything, because conservative dogma takes it as an article of faith that no one can be that smart.

Moral hypocrisy is still worth exposing, I guess. But we are living in a moment when revealing intellectual hypocrisy should take precedence. The American Enterprise Institute's "Enterprise Blog" recently ran a chart from a J.P. Morgan report showing that less than 10% of President Obama's Cabinet has private-sector experience, the least of any Cabinet in a century. From the stimulus to healthcare reform and cap-and-trade, Washington is now run by people who think they know how to run everything, when in reality they can barely run anything.

Dubai/California

The big financial news of the last few days seems to be coming out of Dubai. Dubai World and Nakheel, two big commercial real-estate involved companies that are also completely state-owned, have asked for a six-month delay on paying the interest on their current debts. This seems like a likely sign that the companies could default on their outstanding debts, which total anywhere from $60 to $120 billion.

Paul Krugman has said there are three takes on this: one, Dubai World's default signals the start of a chain of sovereign defaults, where countries start defaulting one after another, spreading a darker, deeper panic worldwide; two, Dubai World's default is really no different than any other commercial real estate company's default; or three, that this is a new ball game entirely. Krugman's going for a combo of 2 and 3; Andrew Leonard at Salon seems to be pretty firmly in the 2 camp, comparing Dubai World to Lehman Brothers; Felix Salmon at Reuters is cheering for Dubai World to be allowed to default, so that a better precedent is set here in the U.S. for government-owned entities like, say, AIG; and any number of other analysts are saying anything from "don't worry about it" to "the sky is falling, we're all gonna die."

I reject the second two of Krugman's options (though I like their combination). This situation is neither unfamiliar nor unserious. It is, in fact, a nice parallel to exactly what's happening within our own borders, with that government-owned massive debtor we in the U.S. kindly call "California."


Palm trees in California

Think of it: one state in a group of united states that has had to make its fortunes mostly on real estate, tourism/entertainment, and the goodwill of celebrities looking for a place to have a good time. It spends lavishly to create a place that's unlike any other within the country, a place people mark not only as a travel destination but as a desired dream locale. It's able to highly leverage what money it starts with because, even when its spending seems out of control -- beyond any means it might have -- everyone knows that its debts must be (wink, wink) guaranteed by its sister states.

People are antsy about what a Dubai World default might mean because it could signal that somewhere, a government is willing to let a state-sponsored entity fall. When you shift "entity" to "state," though, the conversation gets more complicated and, I think, closer to where it should be. What do you do, as a country, when your shining star goes supernova?

Dubai

Dubai is a clever blend of audacity and architecture, a shiny monument to the egos and ambition that turned a tiny emirate into a Middle East financial giant. Russian oligarchs stroll along man-made islands shaped like palm trees, and sheiks race down a ski slope built inside a shopping mall.

Lacking the oil reserves of the emirate's neighbors, Dubai's ruling family created a parallel economic reality fueled by real estate, international investment and the art of the possible. The emirate was fashioned into a sleek cityscape of startling images: Islam balanced against the seduction of Western capitalism, and tribal traditions brushing the fleeting trends of globalization.

Cranes like countless arms moved across a skyline that grew more crowded by the day, if not the hour. The world's tallest building went up, highways looped through the desert, the airport never closed. Dubai expanded into a commerce crossroads for Asia, Europe and America, a place of cigar salons, horse races, a seven-star hotel and suitcases full of money.

And then boom went bust.

The global recession has left Dubai with miles of office space it can't rent and reams of contracts it can't honor. Thousands of foreign engineers, architects, bankers and laborers have been sent home. Like everything else that has epitomized Dubai for the last decade, even its debt is staggering: An estimated $80 billion, with nearly $60 billion of it held by Dubai World, a conglomerate of a number of state-controlled businesses.

News that Dubai wanted to suspend payments on its debt shook worldwide financial markets last week. It is unclear what impact will be felt when trading opens today. Stock exchanges in Dubai and across much of the Middle East were closed Sunday during a Muslim holiday.

Dubai is one of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates, a nation wedged between the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia. The UAE's Central Bank has offered emergency support to banks with holdings in Dubai. The neighboring emirate, Abu Dhabi, which has rich oil reserves, is expected to offer a limited rescue to keep the crisis contained.

"I wouldn't expect big damage," said Joe Kawkabani, managing director of asset management for Algebra Capital in Dubai. "The dynamics in Saudi, Qatar, Abu Dhabi are very different than the dynamics in Dubai. They have much richer economies, they have oil and sovereign wealth funds that can support them even during a recession, and they have nowhere near the amount of debt as Dubai."

Apartment and office prices tumbled across the Emirates in 2008. An estimated 400 building and real estate projects valued at $300 billion reportedly have been put on hold throughout the country. There are fears that debt and weakened investor confidence will hit British banks, including the Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC, which are large creditors to Dubai and the rest of the UAE.

Collapsing real estate values were not the visions of Dubai's ruler, Sheik Mohammed ibn Rashid al Maktum, whose goal was to build an international city that would echo the grandeur of centuries past, when Baghdad and other capitals symbolized the power of the Islamic world. After Dubai emerged from British control in 1971, its ruling family quickly turned to finance, opening an airport, creating free trade zones and reaching into regional markets.

Maktum, a poet and an equestrian, was guiding much of the development before he was named ruler in 2006. His book, "My Vision," urged other countries to follow Dubai's success. But to his critics, including some in the Abu Dhabi royal family, Maktum was brash and reckless, overdeveloping and leveraging his emirate against the whims of global markets.

The emirate's architecture, with buildings that billowed like sails or twirled in delicate angles, personified the rising confidence and influence of Persian Gulf nations. Dubai's style challenged Arab world stalwarts such as Egypt and attracted a younger generation of Arab professionals from filmmakers to accountants.

"Dubai created a lot of envy in its neighbors," said Randa Habib, a Jordanian political analyst. "Maybe the development was a bit too risky, a bit too crazy, but everyone would agree that they need the dream of Dubai to continue. It was the first Arab city that proved to the world that it could compare to a Western city with its buildings and its vision. It raised a point of pride."

And it drew a wave of new languages. About 85% of Dubai's population of 1.7 million are from other countries, including about 250,000 construction workers, most of them from India and elsewhere in Asia. Human rights organizations have criticized Dubai for the low wages and poor living conditions offered workers, and for turning a blind eye to prostitution networks that discreetly serve tourists, bricklayers and tycoons.

Loose oversight and light bureaucracy allowed money to flit in and out of banks and investment houses with little scrutiny. Al Qaeda and the Taliban, along with drug smugglers and gunrunners, have laundered money in Dubai's financial institutions, according to U.S. investigators. In recent years, international pressure has forced the emirate to tighten regulations.

Dubai's carefully calibrated cultural tolerance also is facing pressure from religious conservatives who believe it is jeopardizing its soul and traditions. This tension was highlighted in the 2008 trial of an unmarried British couple found guilty of public drinking and indecency for having sex on a beach. The case was as much about cultural boundaries as it was about the dangers of Dubai's freewheeling capitalism.

The debt crisis has sent people scrambling, Kawkabani said.

"No one is saying it's the end of Dubai . . . but if this is not handled properly it could be damaging to its reputation with investors and creditors," he said.

Dubai, like General Motors, is too big not to rescue, said an editorial in the National, an Abu Dhabi newspaper.

"We should recall that it was only on June 1 that General Motors, itself once the crown jewel of American industry, sought protection from its creditors," the newspaper said. "Many feared that the firm, whose chief executive once boasted that 'What is good for General Motors is good for America,' would cease making cars altogether. It emerged anew in July, streamlined and firing on all cylinders. . . . But nobody should expect a quick turnaround. Confidence is a fragile commodity."

Gelertner

On a Wednesday afternoon in late October, David Gelernter is seated at the head of a green Formica table in a small classroom in Arthur K. Watson Hall on the campus of Yale University, where he is a professor of computer science. "Can you know something you don't know you know?" he asks the small group of students enrolled in a course called "Computer Science and the Modern Intellectual Agenda," which, according to the syllabus, explores how cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of mind can distinguish "seeming from being" and locate "a man's (or your own) identity."

An hour before class, Gelernter—technological guru, conservative polemicist, Unabomber target—had tried to locate his own identity. "I'm a misfit," he said. "Most people fit in a groove and focus on one thing, but I cut across the grain of different areas." In conversation, the eclecticism of Gelernter's mind is immediately apparent. An opinionated raconteur, he seamlessly transitions from literary criticism ("Deconstructionists destroy texts"), to trends in the art world ("Modern museums are devoted to diversity as opposed to greatness"), gender roles ("Women mainly work because of male greed"), contemporary politics ("Anti-Semitism in Europe is so intense that, I think, Hitler would have an easier time today then he did in 1933"), and earthier topics ("I am obsessed with sex and sexuality as much as anyone I have ever met").

Gelernter, a plump man with dark curly hair and a stringy beard, occupies a unique spot in American intellectual life, at the intersection of technology, art, politics, and religion. Yale University Press just published his latest book, Judaism: A Way of Being, a sweeping meditation on Jewish spirituality and belief. His career, he says, has not adhered to the "standard academic chalk lines." In 1979, as a 23-year-old graduate student, he began writing a landmark programming language that enabled multiple computers to work simultaneously on a single problem. (He named it Linda, in honor of Linda Lovelace, star of the 1972 pornographic movie Deep Throat.) In 1991, Oxford University Press published his Mirror Worlds, or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox—How it Will Happen and What It Will Mean, which imagined a time when people would be able to peer at their computer screens and see reality. Today, Gelernter is widely credited with having anticipated the rise of the Internet. His reputation as a doyen of digital culture was cemented by the publication of Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought (Free Press, 1994) and Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology (Basic Books, 1997).

"It was wonderfully ego-boosting to become well known in computer science, but my interests were always drawing, painting, reading, and writing," Gelernter says. "I was being irresponsible to my own artistic responsibilities." He speaks amid the toppled stacks of paper, empty cans of diet soda, and haphazard piles of books that clutter his corner office. As he talks, he occasionally worries the Velcro strap on the black-and-white glove he wears on his right hand, the most visible reminder of the day in 1993 when he was almost killed by a mail bomb sent by the Unabomber.

Gelernter was emboldened by his brush with mortality. He loathes the idea of victimhood. To be a victim, he says, is "to define yourself in terms of what some random thug did to you. I would never sink so low as that." Says Leon R. Kass, the bioethicist and University of Chicago professor, "David is not embittered by the Unabomber attack. He doesn't walk around feeling sorry for himself. On the contrary, it seems to have energized him to make absolutely the most out of every grain of talent and power that he has." Neal Kozodoy, a former editor of Commentary magazine and a friend of Gelernter, says that after the attack, "David entered into the most creative period of his life. Everything became much more urgent to him."

While convalescing from the bombing, which tore apart his right hand, damaged his right eye and ear, and severely lacerated his abdomen and chest, Gelernter researched and wrote 1939: The Lost World of the Fair (Free Press, 1995). Described in The New York Times as "part fiction, part history, part sociology, and part prophecy," the book begins by rhapsodizing on the sensation of "acute hope" that suffused the 1939 New York World's Fair (the theme was "The World of Tomorrow") and ends with a lament on the crushing pessimism of our own time. In between, Gelernter weaves the fictional account of a young couple's experience at the fair. (Tom Hanks's production company, Playtone, has optioned the book, and Hanks called Gelernter to discuss turning it into a film. "They're crazy if they don't," Gelernter says. "It would be a great movie.")

Enlarge PhotoKen Lovell, Yale Digital Media Center for the Arts“Ashrei,” by David Gerlernter
1939 sent a clear signal that Gelernter was intent on branching out in new directions. He has established himself as a writer of fiction, a painter, a cultural critic, and a political essayist, regularly contributing to The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, and Commentary and, for a while, writing a weekly column for the Los Angeles Times. His writings have touched on wide variety of issues, including the demise of romantic love in a culture where sex has "developed the moral significance of an ATM transaction on a street corner," and the legacy of Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th-century British prime minister, who, Gelernter argues, is the "inventor of modern conservatism."

Gelernter's own politics are conservative, even, he says, "extreme right-wing" on some issues. He is scornful of feminism, about which he plainly relishes making provocative pronouncements. In a much-discussed 1996 essay in Commentary, "Why Mothers Should Stay Home," he claimed that working mothers were harming their children. In recent years, Gelernter has emerged as the chief exponent of what he calls "Americanism," a set of beliefs "that make Americans positive that their nation is superior to all others—morally superior, closer to God." Gelernter, 54, says he grew up in a liberal family but suffered a "moral crisis" as a result of America's retreat from Vietnam. That "betrayal" still haunts him. The specter of thousands of Vietnamese fleeing into rickety rowboats to escape Ho Chi Minh's dictatorship, he says, was a "pivotal political moment" in his life. He says he knew that entering the arena of opinion journalism was "poison": "I would have loved to have been above the battle. All my friends and teachers were liberals, and all you do when you publish a political piece is make enemies." Coming out as a conservative, he adds, also meant that his childhood dream of being published in The New Yorker was over.

Instead Gelernter has found an intellectual home at Commentary, where his latest cross-disciplinary incursion, Judaism, took shape as a series of essays titled "Judaism Beyond Words." Judaism is a visual tour of Jewish life, an attempt to conjure "the grand scheme" of the Jewish religion. It is perhaps Gelernter's most ambitious work to date. The slender book, which includes several glossy reprints of Gelernter's paintings, is structured around a series of images that shade into themes, which in turn, he writes, coalesce "into the richly reverberant, soaring architecture of Judaism." That somewhat amorphous premise is placed in the service of a characteristically extravagant goal: to, in Gelernter's words, answer "the great questions of human existence."

Judaism marks a return of sort for the author, who began work on a Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible at Yale but left to study Talmud at a yeshiva in New York. The book's reception, says Kass, will be an interesting test. "Will David the computer scientist make an impact as a man who 100 years ago would have been a rabbi?"

When, shortly before 8 a.m. on June 24, 1993, Gelernter opened a book-size package in his office on the fifth floor of Watson Hall, he thought it was a dissertation. It was a nail-laden bomb. Shirtless, bleeding profusely, he ran to a health clinic more than a block away. When he arrived he had no blood pressure.

"A man who has been blown up by a bomb is a mess," Gelernter wrote in his memoir, Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber (Free Press, 1997). During a six-week hospitalization, he endured several operations: reconstructive surgery on his hand, skin grafts on his torso, and, much later, a corneal transplant that restored partial vision in his right eye. His body was devastated—he has described his chest as a "gouged-out construction site"—but his mind was sharp and frantic.

"As I lay in the intensive-care unit, having almost died, I was filled with enormous remorse for the things I hadn't painted," he recalls from a paint-flecked blue leather chair in the living room of his house, where Gelernter lives with his wife, Jane, and two college-aged sons. Large tin buckets full of paintbrushes are scattered around the room. "I thought to myself: You knew you were an important painter, a major painter, but you threw it away." For a moment, Gelernter falls silent. "There is nothing worse than remorse," he says slowly, running his finger along the lip of an American-flag coffee mug.

Physical therapists told him that his left hand would develop new abilities to compensate for his injuries. "I didn't believe them," he says flatly. Gradually, though, he relearned to paint and draw. "I have resolved to never put down the paintbrush again," he says, turning his gaze to a bright-red painting on the wall in front of him. At the center of the canvas are green Hebrew letters that spell out Ashrei (a central prayer in Judaism and the Hebrew word for "happy") and a red butterfly. Butterflies are prominent in many of his paintings. "The butterfly is nature's own abstract art," Gelernter says. His affection for butterflies, however, also has to do with his love for Vladimir Nabokov, who was a lepidopterist. "I own a collection of his lepidopterology writings," he says, gesturing at the floor-to-ceiling wood bookcases that line the room. The shelves are overfull—William Blake, Kierkegaard, Ian McEwan, Tolstoy, John Updike, and countless books on artists: Degas, Jasper Johns, Gustav Klimt, Matisse, and more and more and more. "What ties my work together," Gelernter continues, "is that it begins as an image dancing around in my head." He walks up to "Ashrei," which hangs above a giant mantle. (The painting appears on the cover of Judaism.) "I am trying to invoke a spiritual aura," he says, almost to himself. "Because I have always thought in images, it was natural for me to fasten on to the fact that Jewish literature, especially the Bible, is explosively visual."

In Judaism, Gelernter zeroes in on four "image-themes"—separation, veil, perfect asymmetry, and inward pilgrimage. "Imagine yourself in an amphitheater," he writes, "gazing down at a stage on which shapes appear and sometimes blend together." He goes on to discuss how the Red Sea parts to allow the Israelites to escape Egypt (separation), Abraham strides atop Mount Moriah with his son Isaac by his side (inward pilgrimage), Moses returns from his meeting with God with his luminous face obscured by a shroud (veil), and the biblical figures of Jacob and Rachel, side by side, in love (perfect asymmetry). "Imagery is natural to Judaism," Gelernter says, his fleshy face lighting up with excitement. "Jews have always pondered the beauty of the aleph bet"—the Hebrew alphabet—"so it is natural for art and images to emerge, which can communicate much more than a description in language."

Judaism is a strange book. Gelernter's stock-in-trade flourishes are present—captured between the two covers, he writes, is "Judaism at full strength, straight up; no water, no soda, aged in oak for three thousand years"—but the book is also a deeply lyrical, even sensual, accounting of Gelernter's own faith. "He is clearly convinced that he has discovered a truth that is available nowhere else, and he is celebrating it," says David Novak, a professor of the study of religion and philosophy at the University of Toronto. Gelernter, however, casts his deeply personal argument in universal terms as a "common Judaism" (he borrows the term from Israeli scholars) whose "beauties and animating principles can be recognized and (with qualifications) agreed to by all."

Not surprising, there is much disagreement. David Biale, a professor of history at the University of California at Davis, takes exception to the very idea that Judaism can be boiled down to an essence. He calls that an antiquated notion with a long pedigree. "These sorts of books were a cottage industry a hundred years ago," he says. Their aim, in part, was tribal boosterism, an attempt to show that Judaism was a modern, even liberal tradition. "But," Biale says, "there was also a genuine intellectual conviction that Judaism could be reduced to a set of beliefs." Such a view, he adds, has largely been abandoned by contemporary scholars, who tend to regard Judaism as a complex, contradictory phenomenon.

In addition, Biale detects a "kind of chutzpah" in Gelernter's writings on Judaism. Take, for example, a short essay titled, "What Makes Judaism the Most Important Intellectual Development in Western History," which appears as an appendix in Judaism and argues that "the best ideas we possess come straight from Judaism." Gelernter acknowledges that such a view is likely to provoke. "But," he writes, "too many people have developed (in the name of tolerance) the habit of declining to say who or what is 'best' or 'most important' in any human endeavor—which shows not tolerance but laziness." Biale is unconvinced. "We need this sort of triumphalism like a hole in the head these days," he says.

Others are more sympathetic. James E. Ponet, head of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School, hails Judaism as "a magnificent credo." Novak views Gelernter's intervention into Jewish studies as a positive development "because it challenges scholars in the field to be less stodgy." Franz Rosenzweig, one of the great Jewish philosophers of the last century, Novak notes, was himself an outsider. "Such people have insights that scholars in the field don't have. They challenge the deadening professionalism that can affect any discipline."

Two years after the bombing, Theodore J. Kaczynski, who would shortly be identified as the Unabomber, sent Gelernter a letter: "People with advanced degrees aren't as smart as they think they are," he wrote. "If you'd had any brains you would have realized that there are a lot of people out there who resent bitterly the way techno-nerds like you are changing the world." Gelernter himself, in fact, has always been profoundly ambivalent about technology. "Because David has a concern for the whole of human life, he doesn't fall for the view that technology can provide answers to our deepest needs and aspirations," says Kass. Gelernter's byline routinely appears over articles that include statements like: "American schools would do better if they junked their Macs and PC's and let students fool around somewhere else. Schools should be telling students to reads books, not play with computers."

Indeed, in an unusual and overlooked epilogue to Mirror Worlds, Gelernter imagined two fictional professors—his alter egos: a composer and an electrical engineer—walking and talking in the woods north of Yale's campus. "Remember running, when you were a kid, just for the hell of it? Just for fun?" asks the technologist. "That's why we do technology … it feels great, it's the human thing to do." But the humanist remains wary. "I've never said the possibilities aren't tantalizing," he counters. "All I'm saying is that the dangers are also frightening. I'm saying I'm worried and you're saying sorry, I can't help it."

So how did a techno-skeptic awash in nostalgia for a less high-tech age become, in the words of The New York Times, a "rock star" in the world of computer science? "It was natural in the sense that computers were never remote or frightening," Gelernter says. His father, Herbert, is a professor emeritus of computer science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. "I turned to computer science to make a living, but I also did it in the belief that, if I did not depend on painting and writing for income, I would be free to paint and write what I chose." In Drawing Life, Gelernter dropped an aside that provides a key for entering his thought. In retrospect, he wrote, one of the reasons he wound up in computer science was his dislike of "intellectuals"—and his unwillingness to be one.

Gelernter traffics in ideas, but he despises intellectuals and blames them for irreparably degrading American culture. "Stop any person on the street and ask them to name a living poet, a living painter, or a living composer. There will be complete silence," Gelernter says. "When I was a child, artists were heroes. Everyday people knew Robert Frost's poems, and not only people like me, a respected Yale professor. Classical music was moving closer to the middle class, Leonard Bernstein concerts were broadcast on television. It was a marvelous thing to have poets, novelists, painters, and musicians representing the middle and working classes and giving them greater and greater artistic depth. All of this," he says, sweeping his arm through the air, "was killed or at least dealt a very serious blow by the encroachment of the universities."

Gelernter is perched on a stool in his airy, sunlit kitchen. Spread before him is a light lunch of crackers, cheese, hummus, and cookies. In an adjacent room, Audrey, a bright-red 10-year-old parrot, and Flint, a cockatiel, bustle about in their cages, which are positioned in front of a television tuned to Fox News. (He and his wife, he says later, leave the television on because the birds enjoy the stimulation. Audrey and Flint only watch Fox News. "I don't want them misinformed," Gelernter explains with a grin.)

Gelernter places himself firmly in the ranks of men—and they are almost all men—like E.B. White, so-called nonintellectuals who are dubious of ideology and abstraction, as well as patriotic (a rare quality among contemporary intellectuals, he says). Such figures—Gelernter's heroes—include White's colleagues at The New Yorker, A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell; Irving Kristol; and Norman Podhoretz, among others, all of whom operated, by and large, outside academe. "They were the smartest ones," he says. "Compare T.S. Eliot to an English professor at Yale." Now, Gelernter continues, academe has taken over the intelligentsia, turning "narrow-mindedness into a virtue, narrow-mindedness intellectually and narrow-mindedness politically." He scorns specialization as "a killer virus," the "toxic disease of the modern intelligentsia."

Depending on whom you ask, Gelernter's intellectual adventurism is the mark of a true Renaissance man or the desperate flailing of a scattershot dilettante. Around Yale, there is a curious reluctance to criticize him on the record. "Some communication at Yale is conducted in raised eyebrows and significant silences," notes Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at the university, when asked about this reticence. It may be that many of his colleagues are reluctant to speak openly about Gelernter out of sympathy for his experience with the Unabomber. Whatever the case, few want to be publicly critical. Gelernter's admirers are more effusive. Richard Starr, managing editor of The Weekly Standard, describes him as a "polymath." Kass strikes a reverential tone. "David has the moral passion and moral courage of a prophet, the sensitivity and imaginative power of a poet, and the clarity and intellectual probity of a scientist," he says, adding, "There is a kind of genius at work in David."


Gelernter's career, his habitual breaches of disciplinary borders, can be seen as a revolt against the prevailing tides of academic life. His is also the career of a supremely confident thinker. Pressed to explain his intellectual certitude, Gelernter uncharacteristically struggles for words. "An artist has to have his own vision. He has to see things uniquely." His voice trails off. "How can I put this without saying I am naturally arrogant?" he says under his breath. "My intellectual heroes," he begins again, "were all fiercely independent." William Blake—a polymathic figure renowned as both a poet and a visual artist—"declared himself a visionary and a prophet." After a few beats of silence, Gelernter adds a clarification. "I don't claim to be Blake, but his life is an inspiration. I hope to emulate his artistic heroism."

Tony Bennett, 82, lifts a glass to his friend Frank Sinatra at Manhattan’s newly revitalized Monkey Bar. The singer is integrally involved in the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, in Queens.

That Old Sinatra Magic

Tony Bennett salutes Frank Sinatra, for showing the way.


Frank Sinatra was my best friend. Seventy years ago this summer, he released his first recordings with the Harry James Orchestra. But my earliest recollection of hearing his voice actually comes from four years before. Every week, as an 11-year-old kid, I would tune in to what was really the first American Idol–type program, a radio show called Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour. The winning group on the evening of September 8, 1935, was called the Hoboken Four, and their spokesman was Frank Sinatra, then aged 19. Even before I heard them sing I was captivated by Sinatra’s confidence. In response to Major Bowes’ booming query “Who will speak for the group?,” Sinatra piped up, “I will. I’m Frankie. We’re looking for jobs—how ’bout it? Everyone that’s ever heard us liked us.” Even Bowes had to chuckle.

Who is your favorite crooner? Take your pick in VF.com’s poll.
By 1939, Sinatra was singing and recording with Harry James, and the magic was spreading. Musicians were the first to notice his uniqueness. In less than a year Sinatra would join one of the best of the big bands, the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. And I was amazed at how Frank, from studying how T.D. played, learned to extend his breathing, which gave him better vocal control and the ability to sing two or three sentences before taking another breath. That subtle and elegant nuance kept a listener hanging on every word, captivated the imagination, and caused his fans, myself included, to swoon. I couldn’t believe anyone could sing that lovely. When I would see Frank at the Paramount in Manhattan, the streets were so crowded with people hoping to get in to his shows that it looked like New Year’s Eve in Times Square, every day. Obviously, it was beyond my scope as an 11-year-old to imagine that Sinatra would go on to become the first popular singer responsible for mass hysteria from an audience—before Elvis or the Beatles.
But as Sinatra matured, the one element of his singing that had the most lasting impact on me was best articulated by the man himself. He once observed in an interview, “Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe. I’m honest.” To me, the hallmark of success in singing is “honesty,” and this is true for all manner of vocalist, from Hank Williams to K. D. Lang, from Billie Holiday to Luciano Pavarotti, to Sinatra himself. The singers who are the most honest are the ones who become immortalized. The writer Pete Hamill once noted that, unlike Bing Crosby’s, Sinatra’s singing “always revealed more than it concealed.” Emotional honesty really became the premise of every record I’ve made and every performance I’ve given.
Sinatra was the featured cover story in the April 23, 1965, edition of Life magazine. It was entitled “Sinatra Opens Up,” and he spoke candidly of how he felt about other singers such as Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. At one point he said, “But for my money Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. [He] gets across what the composer had in mind, and probably a little more.” I like to think that what he heard in my singing was the same honesty that I, and millions of others, found in his.
I remember an evening in the early 1970s when I was appearing at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and I got a phone call from one of Sinatra’s closest musician friends, saxophonist Vido Musso. He said Frank wanted to invite me to join him and Vido (who was a superb Italian cook) for dinner after my show, adding, “And bring your pianist, Ralph Sharon.” He gave me an address, which turned out to be a small restaurant way off the Vegas Strip, that would offer privacy. It was just the four of us, and the meal and conversation were memorable. Frank reflected on his life … the ups and downs … the amazing path he’d traveled from that evening with the Hoboken Four in 1935 to becoming “King” of the entertainment world. Toward the end of the evening Sinatra said, “Before we go, I’d really enjoy it if you and Ralph could perform a song.” And in this small room, late in the evening, with Frank Sinatra sitting only a couple feet away, and inspired by our time together that night, I sang a Jerome Kern song. It was a moment I will never forget: “Yesterdays / Yesterdays / Days I knew as sweet / Sequestered days.… Sad am I / Glad am I / For today I’m dreaming / Of yesterdays.”
He started out as Frankie, then became Frank, then the Chairman of the Board and, of course, Ol’ Blue Eyes—but he remained true to himself and his friends … and he was a best friend to me. One of Frank’s favorite toasts: “May you live to be 100 and may the last voice you hear be mine.”

The News

In the minds of most journalists, the work we do is indispensable, and has always been indispensable, to the successful operation of a democratic society.

A democracy requires an informed public, which journalism generates, and because we monitor the performance of government, we ensure that it honestly and capably serves the people. Journalism schools often have rhetoric to that effect emblazoned on their walls—certainly ours does. We're here to train the future bearers of our democratic function and to do what we can to nudge the current bearers to do a better job.

At this moment, given the precarious financial state of the news media, our core conviction about the role of our profession feels a bit shaky—more on that in a moment. But schools and departments of journalism are generally thriving. The contradiction is especially noticeable because the education sector is just about the only part of journalism whose business model is still in excellent health. How can we be so evidently countercyclical? And what can we do to help change the situation for news organizations, so that journalism schools and the profession might thrive together?

In hindsight, it seems clear that just about all living journalists grew up taking the solidity of the social and economic arrangements underlying our work too much for granted. Yes, until 10 or 15 years ago, it seemed as if practically everybody was in the ambit of the mainstream media, but that didn't mean there was a loyal mass audience for news about public affairs. Newspapers were vast bundles of information—sports scores, classified ads, movie schedules, comic strips, supermarket discount coupons—no one part of which had to stand on its own economically. Television and radio news were the sole sources for a summary of the great events of the day, on the day they occurred.

But today the Internet, by doing a wonderful thing—making every component part of the news separately and instantly available to anyone with a broadband connection—has relentlessly picked apart the economic logic of news organizations. It turns out that original reporting on public affairs, unbundled from other information and untethered from high-priced retail advertising, has trouble paying for itself. So, by inexorable economic logic, fewer people are being paid to do it.

Yes, the nation's founders wrote the First Amendment, and the citizens of the early republic passed it. But with respect to the press, that represented an extension of the guarantee of free speech to printed matter, not the creation of a sanctioned professional category. Information-seeking reporters took decades to arrive on the American scene. First there had to be cities, and fast, powerful printing presses, and ways of making enough money in the newspaper business to pay for newsrooms. The big-city newsrooms of the late 20th century were a workable support system for the social function of reportorial journalism, but even then it was anomalous for such an important democratic task to be entrusted almost entirely to private businesses. Anyway, the point soon became moot because the economics of the arrangement stopped working.

Related ContentAcademe and the Decline of News Media
University-Based Reporting Could Keep Journalism Alive
Hello, Sweetheart, Get Me Tenure
I've Read the News Today, Oh Boy
We Need 'Philosophy of Journalism'
Nota Bene: A Peripatetic Press
Why haven't journalism schools suffered the same fate as newspapers? In general, universities—which, like newspapers, only more so, are great bundles of unrelated activities having to do with the production and dissemination of knowledge—have thus far been immune to the process of disaggregation that has devastated news organizations. The idea that belonging to the middle class absolutely requires first getting a bachelor's degree from a residential college, a concept that would have been considered crazy a century ago, is now deeply ingrained in American culture.

Journalism programs in universities mainly serve undergraduates, so the programs live under the protective umbrella of that assumption. Graduate journalism programs mainly attract people who have fallen in love with the profession, so those programs are protected from strict cost-benefit calculations. Many young people seem to be excited by the turmoil in journalism and see it as an opportunity to get in on something new, rather than as a threat. And journalism schools have a powerful argument for themselves today because they can teach the skills that the profession demands—in working in digital media, and in reporting on complicated subjects—far better than newsrooms can.

A generation ago, the essential skill for journalists, writing a breaking news story, was fairly intuitive, and many graduates of journalism schools could expect careers that entailed long, slow rises through large news organizations, with training embedded in every step. Today many of our new graduates find themselves working at understaffed Web sites—either freestanding operations or parts of traditional news organizations—where they have to be comfortable with Web publishing from Day 1 and have to handle quite advanced and specialized editorial content, without much advice from anybody. Education is important in this environment because the workplace isn't set up to provide it.

Because of their location in universities, journalism schools have access to large populations of young people, and many are making efforts to teach "news literacy" courses to nonjournalism students. Such courses aim to educate civilians about how journalism works, but also, and more important, to instill the habit of reading the news every day. The idea is that a daily report from a reputable news organization is to citizenship what the proper diet is to health: a long-term, life-enriching practice for individuals, and, in the aggregate, an important element of a better-functioning society.

Those courses are a good thing. But journalism programs in universities can work toward the ideal of an informed, engaged citizenry in other, even more urgently important ways.

The main problem in journalism today lies on the supply side, not the demand side. It is true that the unfettered, ungoverned Internet can offer up all sorts of misinformation to readers. But it is also true that, unlike traditional news media, the Internet provides a means for instant correction and counterargument. (Our leading font of durable journalistic misinformation is talk radio and television, not the Internet.) Online encyclopedias, auctioneers, and retailers have found pretty good ways of establishing trust across large communities of strangers; that is within journalism's reach, too. The Internet almost certainly has expanded the audience for genuine news more than it has expanded the audience for misleading news. The world's top news organizations have attracted enormous global readerships, far beyond what they have ever had before, and millions of secondary sites, from aggregators to one-person blogs, are heavy direct and indirect users of material produced by those organizations.

Because the barrier to entry is so low, the Internet is also a great medium for journalistic experimentation; we don't have to wait around for big, tradition-bound organizations to innovate. The real difficulty is that the Internet doesn't support the kind of journalism that covers production costs, because almost all Internet journalism is free to readers and bargain-priced, compared with print, for advertisers. Opinion journalism, of the kind invented by pamphleteers in the 1700s, thrives on the Internet. Original reporting does not. So even if every single person under 30 woke up every morning with a gnawing hunger for news, it's not at all clear that the hunger could be satisfied, especially if it's a hunger for local news.

Therefore journalism schools ought to explore, and are already exploring, the possibility of becoming significant producers of original news reporting to make up for the loss of the reporting that economically devastated news organizations can no longer afford. Journalism schools and departments are practical-minded, often to a fault; they are oriented toward sending their students out to report under faculty members' direction. The advent of the Web has made publication and distribution of the fruits of students' reporting easy and inexpensive. Anyone in the world who has a good Internet connection can log on to the Columbia School of Journalism's Web site and find at least two dozen journalistic sites operated by our students and faculty members. The efforts include local-news sites about Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and upper Manhattan; subject-matter sites on charter schools, religion, and the economic crisis; and media-related sites for magazine, radio, broadcast, and digital journalism.

What journalism and the public most need right now is serious, continuing coverage of matters of public importance: city halls, school systems, statehouses. Journalism schools are not fully equipped to provide that now, but the logistical and financial difficulty of equipping them to do so would be far less than the difficulty of creating and sustaining new news organizations built from scratch. Like teaching hospitals, journalism schools can provide essential services to their communities while they are educating their students.

Journalism schools not only can replace the original reporting capability that news organizations have lost, but also can raise the level of sophistication in the practice of journalism. Why? Because so many of them are located in research universities that are our society's leading collections of top-level expertise across all realms of knowledge. Journalism schools should be deeply involved with the other parts of their universities, not just in order to spread the word about journalism, but also to learn, and then to teach, about the substance of the issues that their students report on.

Journalism is more interdisciplinary than most other fields of study in the university, and more oriented toward producing published work aimed at nonexperts. But it should—and, at this point, probably must—have a greater ambition than simply reporting facts without analysis or context. News organizations are finding that "breaking news" has become a commodity without much economic value. Journalism schools, because they are in universities, are an ideal place for journalism to find its way toward producing work that truly explains societies to their citizens.

Nicholas Lemann is dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.

Perhaps Consuls

He Can't Take Another Book

An icon of a White House that is coming to seem amateurish.

By PEGGY NOONAN

This week, two points in an emerging pointillist picture of a White House leaking support—not the support of voters, though polls there show steady decline, but in two core constituencies, Washington's Democratic-journalistic establishment, and what might still be called the foreign-policy establishment.
From journalist Elizabeth Drew, a veteran and often sympathetic chronicler of Democratic figures, a fiery denunciation of—and warning for—the White House. In a piece in Politico on the firing of White House counsel Greg Craig, Ms. Drew reports that while the president was in Asia last week, "a critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man." They once held "an unromantically high opinion of Obama," and were key to his rise, but now they are concluding that the president isn't "the person of integrity and even classiness they had thought."
She scored "the Chicago crowd," which she characterized as "a distressingly insular and small-minded West Wing team." The White House, Ms. Drew says, needs adult supervision—"an older, wiser head, someone with a bit more detachment."
As I read Ms. Drew's piece, I was reminded of something I began noticing a few months ago in bipartisan crowds. I would ask Democrats how they thought the president was doing. In the past they would extol, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, his virtues. Increasingly, they would preface their answer with, "Well, I was for Hillary." This in turn reminded me of a surprising thing I observe among loyal Democrats in informal settings and conversations: No one loves Barack Obama. Half the American people say they support him, and Democrats are still with him. But there were Bill Clinton supporters who really loved him. George W. Bush had people who loved him. A lot of people loved Jack Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. But no one seems to love Mr. Obama now; they're not dazzled and head over heels. That's gone away. He himself seems a fairly chilly customer; perhaps in turn he inspires chilly support. But presidents need that rock—bottom 20% who, no matter what's happening—war, unemployment—adore their guy, have complete faith in him, and insist that you love him, too.
They're the hard 20 a president always keeps. Nixon kept them! Obama probably has a hard 20 too, but whatever is keeping them close, it doesn't seem to be love.
***
Just as stinging as Elizabeth Drew on domestic matters was Leslie Gelb on Mr. Obama and foreign policy in the Daily Beast. Mr. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and fully plugged into the Democratic foreign-policy establishment, wrote this week that the president's Asia trip suggested "a disturbing amateurishness in managing America's power." The president's Afghanistan review has been "inexcusably clumsy," Mideast negotiations have been "fumbling." So unsuccessful was the trip that Mr. Gelb suggested Mr. Obama take responsibility for it "as President Kennedy did after the Bay of Pigs."
He added that rather than bowing to emperors—Mr. Obama "seems to do this stuff spontaneously and inexplicably"—he should begin to bow to "the voices of experience" in Washington.
When longtime political observers start calling for wise men, a president is in trouble.
It also raises a distressing question: Who are the wise men and women now? Who are the Robert Lovetts, Chip Bohlens and Robert Strausses who can came in to help a president in trouble right his ship? America seems short of wise men, or short on those who are universally agreed to be wise. I suppose Vietnam was the end of that, but establishments exist for a reason, and it is hard for a great nation to function without the presence of a group of "the oldest and wisest" who can not only give sound advice but help engineer how that advice will be reported and received.
***
More Peggy Noonan
Read Peggy Noonan's previous columns
click here to order her new book, Patriotic Grace
Mr Obama is in a hard place. Health care hangs over him, and if he is lucky he will lose a close vote in the Senate. The common wisdom that he can't afford to lose is exactly wrong—he can't afford to win with such a poor piece of legislation. He needs to get the issue behind him, vow to fight another day, and move on. Afghanistan hangs over him, threatening the unity of his own Democratic congressional base. There is the growing perception of incompetence, of the inability to run the machine of government. This, with Americans, is worse than Obama's rebranding as a leader who governs from the left. Americans demand baseline competence. If he comes to be seen as Jimmy Carter was, that the job was bigger than the man, that will be the end.
Which gets us back to the bow.
In a presidency, a picture or photograph becomes iconic only when it seems to express something people already think. When Gerald Ford was spoofed for being physically clumsy, it took off. The picture of Ford losing his footing and tumbling as he came down the steps of Air Force One became a symbol. There was a reason, and it wasn't that he was physically clumsy. He was not only coordinated but graceful. He'd been a football star at the University of Michigan and was offered contracts by the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers.
But the picture took off because it expressed the growing public view that Ford's policies were bumbling and stumbling. The picture was iconic of a growing political perception.
The Obama bowing pictures are becoming iconic, and they would not be if they weren't playing off a growing perception. If the pictures had been accompanied by headlines from Asia saying "Tough Talks Yield Big Progress" or "Obama Shows Muscle in China," the bowing pictures might be understood this way: "He Stoops to Conquer: Canny Obama shows elaborate deference while he subtly, toughly, quietly advances his nation's interests."
But that's not how the pictures were received or will be remembered.
It is true that Mr. Obama often seems not to have a firm grasp of—or respect for—protocol, of what has been done before and why, and of what divergence from the traditional might imply. And it is true that his political timing was unfortunate. When a great nation is feeling confident and strong, a surprising presidential bow might seem gracious. When it is feeling anxious, a bow will seem obsequious.
The Obama bowing pictures are becoming iconic not for those reasons, however, but because they express a growing political perception, and that is that there is something amateurish about this presidency, something too ad hoc and highly personalized about it, something . . . incompetent, at least in its first year.
It is hard to be president, and White Houses under pressure take refuge in thoughts that become mantras. When the previous White House came under mounting criticism from 2005 through '08, they comforted themselves by thinking, They criticized Lincoln, too. You could see their minds whirring: Lincoln was criticized, Lincoln was great, ergo we are great. But of course just because they say you're stupid doesn't mean you're Lincoln.
One senses the Obama people are doing the Lincoln too, and adding to it the consoling thought that this is only the first year, we've got three years to go, we can change perceptions, don't worry.
But they should worry. You can get tagged, typed and pegged your first year. Gerald Ford did, and Ronald Reagan too, more happily. The first year is when indelible impressions are made and iconic photos emerge.

How about letting Cokie Roberts, husband Steve, Elizabeth Drew, Oprah and Peggy Noonan run things for a while?

Dubai

It was almost a convincing show. The message to the City of London from Dubai was that the city-state had not only weathered the global economic crisis but was now destined to benefit as more financial groups escaped the high tax regimes and mounting regulatory restraints of more established centres.
That was two weeks ago. I was at a conference in London organised by the Dubai International Financial Centre, which bills itself as one of Dubai’s great achievements. Of course at the time no one in the room had an inkling of the storm that was about to be unleashed by the emirate – the demand for a delay in the debt payments of its flagship Dubai World, a move that sent jitters through global markets and sparked fears of a setback to the economic recovery.
Nor did participants know that the man who opened the conference – the well-respected Omar bin Sulaiman, head of the DIFC – would be sacked a few days later, without a hint of explanation. But then, this was only the most dramatic sign of a certain malady in the emirate – an alarming disconnect between the bubble of Dubai and the real world.
Today the city-state, which gave us Palm-shaped islands and indoor ski resorts, is a financial centre that cannot pay its debts. And it has the financial community – much of it, incidentally, with offices at the DIFC – up in arms, contending that it had been misled about the city’s debt management intentions.
Dubai has always marketed itself as a model of a global city, in a backward Arab region which has miserably failed to overcome its conflicts or meet the aspirations of its young population. The biography of its ambitious ruler – Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum – depicts a man with a mission to usher in no less than an Arab renaissance.
Yet Dubai has managed its finances with a combination of an autocratic state refusing to face reality and a secretive family company oblivious to the expectations and the workings of world markets.
If the global meltdown washed up on the Dubai shores this week, when other troubled cities are on their way to recovery, it is, at least in part, because it took the emirate so long to admit that it was in trouble.
Just over a year ago, when Lehman Brothers collapsed and world markets tumbled, the word in Dubai was that the emirate was too strong to be caught up in the turbulence.
In one of many surreal moments that followed the Lehman debacle, Nakheel, the debt-laden Dubai World developer at the centre of the storm, unveiled plans to build the tallest tower in Dubai. A competitor, of course, was already well on its way to completing the emirate’s tallest building. The new one, though, would soar above Burj Dubai, said Nakheel.
Officials insisted that Dubai knows how to take advantage of the misfortunes of others. We live in a violent and unstable environment, they would say, but that makes us a magnet for people and money fleeing other volatile spots. This is the Dubai model. This is the Dubai miracle.
In fact, it was probably officials’ fear of admitting to their boss the extent of the indebtedness of companies under their charge that delayed the reckoning.
Dubai eventually got over its denial – once it had counted its debts, which reached a massive $80bn, it was impossible not to. But it was not until February that it was helped out by Abu Dhabi, through a $10bn Dubai five-year bond issue to which the central bank of the federation, the United Arab Emirates, subscribed.
Why so long? Because the proud Sheikh Mohammed, it seems, was reluctant to be bailed out by his richer neighbour, possibly fearing it would put a damper on Dubai’s image and constrain its independence. Nor was he willing to part with some of Dubai’s crown jewels at distressed prices. Some people suspect that it is the same dogged resistance that has landed Dubai in this week’s mess.
Even after the February bond issue, officials in the emirate were coming up with all sorts of explanations for why it should not be defined as a “bail-out”.
Though the markets calmed down after the bail-out, it was not long before more confusion set in. In May one of the main people entrusted with steering the emirate out of the crisis – and one of the few who recognised the full scope of the challenge – was demoted.
Nasser al-Sheikh, the director-general of the finance department, seemed to have been a victim of a power struggle that intensified this year, as the head of the ruler’s court has sought to consolidate his own power, at the expense of aides who had been in favour during the boom years. It was not lost on some observers that while other competent people were being removed, Sultan bin Sulayem, the head of Dubai World, had been stripped of many of his powers, but is still at the helm of the company.
To be fair, Dubai’s plans to restructure its companies and put resources in the most viable assets might be sound. But given that details of any strategy are treated like a national secret, and that decision-making is wrapped up in palace intrigue, the city and now the rest of the world are left to operate on rumours and speculation rather than facts.
Perhaps none of this should surprise us. Dubai is a place where investors fell for trick advertising a few years ago that said the emirate would build a “bubble city”, a development of restaurants and museums suspended above ground by helium balloons and surrounded by a transparent enclosure.
This fantasy was never meant to get off the ground. But maybe it secretly did? And maybe that is where some of the decision-makers have been living.

The writer is the FT’s Middle East editor

Memoirs

This is because, unlike the books by Conroy and Morris, which were immensely skillful and revealing but emotionally guarded, Exley's was raw, self-lacerating and unrelievedly confessional. Oddly enough, it is mentioned only in a footnote in Ben Yagoda's excellent "Memoir: A History" -- evidently because it was passed off as fiction -- but it soon became a model, if not the model, for all those men and women, most of them relatively young, who now pour forth their confessions in book after book after book.
Never mind that few of these confessions can be of interest to anyone except the people writing them, never mind that few of these people know how to tell a story or write literate prose, never mind that the market is now so thoroughly saturated that it is just about impossible to separate what little wheat there may be from the vast ocean of chaff. What matters is that, as Yagoda says, we live in an age of "more narcissism overall, less concern for privacy, a strong interest in victimhood, and a therapeutic culture." He quotes Washington Post reviewer Carolyn See: "Those people in [Alcoholics Anonymous] in the late 40's and early 50's can be said to have reinvented American narrative style. All the terrible, terrible things that had ever happened to them just made for a great pitch."
One would look high and low to find more incontrovertible and devastating evidence of the triumph of memoir (if "triumph" is the word for it) than is contained in Yagoda's opening chapter. In mostly deadpan style, he enumerates in some 25 pages the "million little subgenres," from "celebrity, misery, canine, methamphetamine, and eccentric-mother memoirs" on and on through "the dad memoir," the spiritual memoir, the "rock-star memoir," and of course "the seemingly endless series of bombshells over fraudulent lives," most notoriously James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces," which was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as a selection for her book club, then revealed as a fraud, for which "she invited him again onto her show and hung him out to dry." As Yagoda says:
"Autobiographically speaking, there has never been a time like it. Memoir has become the central form of the culture: not only the way stories are told, but the way arguments are put forth, products and properties marketed, ideas floated, acts justified, reputations constructed or salvaged. The sheer volume of memoirs is unprecedented; the way the books were trailed by an unceasing stream of contention, doubt, hype, and accusations is distressing. Yet every single one of the books, and every piece of the debate about them, had a historical precedent. How did we come to this pass? The only way to answer that question is to go back a couple of thousand years and tell the story from the beginning."
Which is just what Yagoda does. Beginning with Julius Caesar's "Commentaries" (known to generations of Latin students as "Caesar's Gallic Wars") and "The Confessions of Saint Augustine," he brings in example after example: "Peter Abelard's Historia calamitatum (The Story of My Misfortunes), remains a compelling cautionary tale and, in its depiction of mental and physical hurt, anticipates today's misery memoirs"; spiritual memoirs of the 17th century, with their "back-and-forth dance between doubt and faith," anticipating modern memoirs that "follow an account of the author's wayward past (and the more wayward the better), his or her discovery of some sort of secular or sacred light, and then, finally, sweet redemption"; 19th-century American slave narratives, which "outnumbered every other kind of book by African-Americans" and anticipated the 20th-century memoirs by the likes of Richard Wright, Maya Angelou and Malcolm X.
Yagoda -- a much-published writer who teaches at the University of Delaware -- touches just about all the bases, some more lightly than others, but I can think of no significant omissions beyond his failure to give Exley anything more than a footnoted nod. He offers a nimble and nuanced discussion of the nettlesome issue of truth and fiction in autobiography and memoir. Dating back to the 19th century, "the spate of unreliable memoirs [has] reflected an uncertainty and sometimes malleability about 'truth' that showed up in the wider culture as well." On the one hand, we want "authenticity and credibility" in autobiographical writing; on the other, we want to be entertained, which can sometimes lead writers to exaggeration or invention.
Beyond that, we don't really understand that "the human memory is by nature untrustworthy: contaminated not merely by gaps, but by distortions and fabrications that inevitably and blamelessly creep into it." Memory "is itself a creative writer," and the combination of "memory like Swiss cheese, arrogant confidence in its integrity -- seems to be a human trait, and is certainly reflected in most autobiographies . . . which do not grant even the possibility that the chronicle they offer -- including the word-for-word transcription of conversations held half a century before -- is less than 100 percent accurate." Yagoda quotes Mark Twain:
"I used to remember my brother Henry walking into a fire outdoors when he was a week old. It was remarkable in me to remember a thing like that and it was still more remarkable that I should cling to the delusion for thirty years that I did remember it -- for of course it never happened; he would not have been able to walk at that age. . . . For many years I remembered helping my grandfather drinking his whiskey when I was six weeks old but I do not tell about that any more now; I am grown old and my memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened."
Yagoda quotes that wonderful passage to underscore the unreliability of memory, but it does not deter him from taking an upbeat view of his subject. "The memoir boom," he writes, "for all its sins, has been a net plus for the cause of writing. Under its auspices, voices and stories have emerged that, otherwise, would have been dull impersonal nonfiction tomes or forgettable autobiographical novels, or wouldn't have been expressed at all." Alas, it is here that I part company with this otherwise exemplary book. What the memoir boom has in fact given us is too many dull or forgettable memoirs, precious few of which have enriched our literature but most of which have simply encouraged the narcissism of their authors.
yardleyj@washpost.com

Brain

About 5,000 years ago, societies in ancient Sumeria, China and South America invented writing, and in the millennia since, the ability to read has propelled human intellectual and cultural development, vastly expanding our capacity to learn, create, explore and record what we think, feel and know. Reading supplies our brains with an external hard drive and gives us access to our species's past: In the words of Francisco de Quevedo, it enables us "to listen to the dead with our eyes."
But how, in such a short time, did the human species evolve this unique skill, one that requires the brain to decode written words visually and process their sounds and sense rapidly? In this fascinating and scholarly book, French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene explains what scientists now know about how the human brain performs the feat of reading, and what made this astonishing cultural invention biologically possible.
Presented with a word's image on the retina, average readers of English can, within a few 10ths of a second, match it with one of 50,000 or more words stored in their mental dictionaries, comprehend its meaning in context, and proceed seamlessly to the next word. Amazingly, most children become proficient readers during elementary school (although learning to read Italian is easier, and learning to read Chinese harder, than learning to read English). In recent years, new imaging techniques have allowed researchers to watch normal brains in the act of reading, and studies have shed light on why the brains of dyslexic children, as well as those of certain stroke victims, fail to process written words successfully.
"Only a stroke of good fortune allowed us to read," Dehaene writes near the end of his tour of the reading brain. It was Homo sapiens's luck that in our primate ancestors, a region of the brain's paired temporal lobes evolved over a period of 10 million years to specialize in the visual identification of objects. Experiments in monkeys show that, within this area, individual nerve cells are dedicated to respond to a specific visual stimulus: a face, a chair, a vertical line. Research suggests that, in humans, a corresponding area evolved to become what Dehaene calls the "letterbox," responsible for processing incoming written words. Located in the brain's left hemisphere near the junction of the temporal and occipital lobes, the letterbox performs identical tasks in readers of all languages and scripts. Like a switchboard, it transmits signals to multiple regions concerned with words' sound and meaning -- for example, to areas that respond to noun categories (people, animals, vegetables), to parts of the motor cortex that respond to action verbs ("kiss," "kick"), even to cells in the brain's associative cortex that home in on very specific stimuli. (In one epileptic patient, for example, a nerve cell was found that fired only in response to images or the written name of actress Jennifer Aniston!)
Children learn reading in a stepwise process: first, awareness that words are made up of phonemes or speech sounds (ba, da); then the discovery that there's a correspondence between these speech sounds and pairs or groups of letters. Later the child begins to recognize entire words, and after a few years, reading speed becomes independent of word length. Dehaene deplores the whole-language approach to teaching reading in which beginning readers are presented with entire words or phrases in the hope of fostering earlier comprehension of text. He cites research showing that children who first learn which sounds are represented by which letters, and how pairs or groups of letters correspond to speech sounds, make steadier progress and achieve better reading scores than those taught using the whole-language method. He also notes the success of teaching methods that incorporate multiple senses and motor gestures, such as those used in Montessori schools. For example, in preparation for learning to read, young Montessori students are often asked to trace with their fingers the shapes of large letters cut out of sandpaper. The exercise makes use of vision, touch and spatial orientation, as well as mimicking the gestures used to print each letter.
Between 5 percent and 17 percent of U.S. children suffer from dyslexia, or severe difficulty in reading. The disorder runs in families and probably has no single cause. Several susceptibility genes have been identified, most of them influencing the migration of nerve cells within the developing brain of the fetus. Research suggests that, even as infants, many dyslexic children have trouble hearing the difference between similar-sounding consonants such as b and d; but about one in four dyslexics has primarily visual difficulties with word-processing. Although there is no prospect of a cure for dyslexia, Dehaene points to promising results with various intervention strategies aimed at strengthening awareness of speech sounds and letter differences. After dozens of hours of training using such programs, Dehaene writes, the majority of dyslexic children "end up reading adequately, even if performance continues to lag behind that of their peers."
Reading, Dehaene writes, is "by far the finest gem" in humanity's cultural storehouse, and judging by the ubiquity of electronic messages and Web surfing, it's a skill no less essential in the digital age than it was during the age of print.

Books of the Year 2009

Beckett, Tóibín, Mantel and Bolaño feature in this year's list
Julian Barnes, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Nagel, et al

This is a selection of pieces from the TLS Books of the Year

JULIAN BARNES
The main literary event of 2009 was the death of John Updike. Generous to the last, he left us two posthumous books: in prose, My Father’s Tears, and in verse, Endpoint (both Hamish Hamilton), an account of his last years – and days – of grateful, tender looking around. He was still writing in his final weeks (“Days later, the results came casually through: / the gland, biopsied, showed metastasis”) and correcting proofs on his deathbed. Over here, death afforded him no courtesy, and the stories received several reviews of impudent stupidity; the longer view will see them as a fit end to the staggeringly rich arc of story collections which began fifty years ago with “The Same Door” (1959). In part-homage, Everyman usefully reprinted the full version of “The Maples Stories”, one of his keenest anatomies of the marriage problem.
Everyman also publish Updike’s final reworking of the Rabbit quartet, retitled by him as Rabbit Angstrom. Rereading confirms it as the greatest American novel of the second half of the twentieth century. An Angstrom is a hundred-millionth of a centimetre: a fitting name, since Updike, apart from his many other virtues, simply saw in finer detail than most of his contemporaries.
ALEX CLARK
People have queued up to praise Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate), but it can hardly be said too frequently what a brilliant novel it is: brimming with invention, conceived with a powerful intelligence and executed near-flawlessly. The result was to make us see a set of people and historical events from an entirely different perspective and to render them far more comprehensible to us than a more ostensibly straightforward retelling. I also loved Iain Sinclair’s work of non-fiction, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire (Hamish Hamilton). Despite being a longstanding fan of Sinclair’s work, I really began this because I live in the part of London that he describes, and feel I know it well; a few pages in, and I realized how little I have really come to grips with its peculiar pockets and byways. I don’t imagine it’s required reading at Hackney Town Hall, but it certainly made the streets around me seem alive with histories hitherto largely untold, and brought home the strange psychological bond we form with our little patch of town.
To read the TLS review of Wolf Hall, click here.
To read the TLS review of Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, click here.
TERRY EAGLETON
Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso) may not be the greatest work of genius to have appeared this year, but it is certainly one of the bravest. Sand, who teaches history in Tel Aviv, argues that the Jewish people, far from constituting a distinct ethnic group, descend for the most part from converts whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Only under the sway of a historiography which arose on the back of European nationalism – what Sand calls “mythistory” – could these disparate groups be welded into a single nation. One major item of mythistory was the idea of exile, on which Sand writes a coolly demystifying chapter. Only by acknowledging a real rather than mythological past, he argues, can the intellectual foundation be laid for a new vision of Israel’s political future. It is gratifying to learn that the book lingered for a long time on Israel’s bestseller list.
SEAMUS HEANEY
The most bracing read was The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929–1940 (Cambridge), a portrait of the Dubliner as a young European with a hard gemlike gift for language, learning and mockery. Beckett’s genius exercises itself most exuberantly in the correspondence with Thomas MacGreevy, another Irish poet more at home in Paris, his senior but his soulmate. Constantly Beckett is veering between certainty about his need to write and doubt about the results, all expressed in prose that is undoubting, delighted and demanding. Which might be one way of describing John Banville’s The Infinities (Picador), a novel (if that is the word for a work that flaunts its Ovidian art so mischievously) where the gods are not so much ex machina as in flagrante and where this author once again surprises by a fine excess. Surprise abounds also in Paul Durcan’s Life Is a Dream (Harvill Secker), the poet’s selection from his variously heartbreaking, hilarious, Hibernia-baiting work done between 1967 and 2007. Durcan’s copious bitter-sweet clowning is a way of telling the truth slant, but William Golding’s 5,000-page journal seems to have told it direct, and as such was a valuable source for John Carey’s compelling, revealing and very readable William Golding: The man who wrote “Lord of the Flies” (Faber). This is “official” biography but nothing seems to have been off the record.
To read Allan Massie's review of William Golding: The who wrote "Lord of the Flies", click here.
SIMON JENKINS
There is no let-up in the stream of books on present discontents. On Iraq and Afghanistan there has been a predictable surge, evenly divided between the wars’ foregrounds and backgrounds. Best of the former is Stephen Grey’s Operation Snakebite (Viking), a devastating account of the battle for Musa Qala in Afghanistan in December 2007. It explains why the world’s most sophisticated armed forces are being defeated by the world’s least sophisticated, when the latter feel they fighting for a cause (and a homeland).
As for whether British troops are indeed the most sophisticated, Richard North’s Ministry of Defeat (Continuum) begs to differ. An admirable investigation of Britain’s most rotten ministry, it helps explain the questionable performance of British troops and especially their equipment in Iraq, with tales of incompetence worthy of the trenches. Heaven help us in a real war.
A different sort of front line is charted in Gillian Tett’s brilliant Fool’s Gold (Little, Brown). The war is the credit crunch and the theatre of operations the trading floor of J. P. Morgan. Anyone who thinks these antics need no further regulation should read Tett first. An elegant overview of the same events is supplied by the economic historian, Vince Cable, disappointing only when he attempts a cure. But then he is a Liberal Democrat spokesman.
Those eager for distraction on the home front can turn to Michael Bloch’s enjoyable biography of James Lees-Milne (John Murray). This picture of a mildly eccentric Briton incidentally relates a conservation epic, Lees-Milne’s virtually single-handed rescue from catastrophe of the finest portfolio of historic houses in the world, those of the National Trust.
FERDINAND MOUNT
The Italian Front in the First World War has been eclipsed by the horrors of the Western Front, but in fact the casualties in the slush and scree of the Italian Alps were just as appalling as they were in the mud of Flanders, the war aims as squalid and confused and the generals even more stupid and sadistic. Mark Thompson’s The White War (Faber) manages a perfect balance between gripping narrative and sober analysis. It picks up the unfinished business of the Risorgimento and helps to explain both the rise of Mussolini and the incoherent state of Italian politics to this day.
The long reflective essay on contemporary themes is a presently endangered species. (One can imagine a modern publisher turning down Lord Macaulay saying “Sorry, Tom, it’s just a lot of essays”.) Tony Judt is the master of the form on both sides of the Atlantic. In Reappraisals (Heinemann), there is a compelling ease about the way he leads you through the topic – Blair’s Britain, the Hiss case, the Fall of France – while you murmur “yes, that’s exactly how it really is”, until you find yourself at a destination which you had not quite expected but which is unarguably the right one.
THOMAS NAGEL
János Kis’s Politics as a Moral Problem (Central European University Press) is a superb study of the problem of dirty hands in politics, particularly democratic politics – the moral dilemmas that politicians face in achieving, maintaining, and exercising power. This is a particularly acute form of the moral problem of ends and means. The book discusses the philosophical background in Machiavelli, Hobbes, Kant, Weber and others, and examines a number of recent examples from European politics. Kis is a philosopher, but his political experience includes negotiating the transfer of power in Hungary in 1989, as leader of the primary dissident party, the Free Democrats.
Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperCollins) is a detailed account of the problem of how life came into existence from lifeless matter – something that had to happen before the process of biological evolution could begin. The controversy over Intelligent Design has so far focused mainly on whether the evolution of life since its beginnings can be explained entirely by natural selection and other non-purposive causes. Meyer takes up the prior question of how the immensely complex and exquisitely functional chemical structure of DNA, which cannot be explained by natural selection because it makes natural selection possible, could have originated without an intentional cause. He examines the history and present state of research on non-purposive chemical explanations of the origin of life, and argues that the available evidence offers no prospect of a credible naturalistic alternative to the hypothesis of an intentional cause. Meyer is a Christian, but atheists, and theists who believe God never intervenes in the natural world, will be instructed by his careful presentation of this fiendishly difficult problem.
GRAHAM ROBB
I finally caught up with The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek (Allen Lane), in which the congenially authoritative Barry Cunliffe explains how a fourth-century bc inhabitant of Marseilles managed to circumnavigate Britain. Pytheas’s lost work, On the Ocean, must have been the book of the millennium. An equally perilous journey is undertaken by the unforgettable heroine of Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (Viking). Novelists whose prose is described as “flawless” can be a chore to read. Tóibín’s perfection is simply the unobtrusive vehicle of his surprisingly complex adventure.
André Guyaux’s Pléiade edition of Arthur Rimbaud’s Oeuvres complètes (Gallimard) was a welcome addition to the mountain of scholarship that would have appalled and embarrassed the boy from Charleville. There was a rare sense of academic fun in David Coward’s modern morality tale of Ken Deede – Voltaire Reloaded: Candide left, right and centre (lulu.com) – and in Corry Cropper’s Playing at Monarchy: Sport as metaphor in nineteenth-century France (Nebraska), which contains this piece of advice from the sports journalist, Eugène Chapus: “Appear to know nothing of your profession, and avoid technical terms at all times”.
To read Graham Robb's review of Rimbaud's Oeuvres complètes, click here.
ALI SMITH
The final parts of two great European novel trilogies were published in English this year: Jan Kjærstad’s Wergeland trilogy with The Discoverer (Arcadia), and Javier Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell (Chatto). Kjærstad’s trapeze act of interconnection makes life force out of its endgame; translator Barbara J. Haveland navigates this irrepressible Norwegian voyage through the universe with a studied lightness. Marías is simply astonishing. The concluding volume of his mighty Spanish trilogy about power, surveillance, morality and mortality is even more gripping than its predecessors. With its contemporary longsightedness and unique ethic-aesthetic agenda, Your Face Tomorrow seems to me unparallelled in literature – as, in its own right, does Margaret Jull Costa’s translation. In The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume Five, 1922–1923, edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, (Oxford), Mansfield’s uncharacteristic repetitiveness coupled with a forced faux-brightness make it clear that she’s dying, and “governed by the Furies”. But its real revelation is the humour, liberation and unforeseeable uplift in her very last letters, from Gurdjieff’s freezing cold commune in Fontainebleau. “Do send Lit. Sups”, she wrote Murry. “They are so good for lighting fires.” And Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (Viking) isn’t just a book for Christmas; a work of such skill, understatement and sly jewelled merriment could haunt you for life.
To read the TLS review of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, click here.
To read Ruth Scurr's review of Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, click here.
EDMUND WHITE
Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (Picador) was my favourite book of the year, though in some ways it falls short of the same author’s The Savage Detectives. What both books share is a romantic fascination with literary people. The first section of 2666 is about four literary scholars – three men and one woman, each person from a different country – all devoted to studying the same contemporary but utterly mysterious German novelist. The three men end up having sexual alliances with the woman, and the erotic game of musical chairs they play is both touching and mesmerizing for the reader. In later sections of this massive novel, Bolaño becomes obsessed with an endless series of murders in the north of Mexico – which surprisingly finally links up with the German novelist and his frightening son.
Whereas so much long contemporary fiction is a struggle to get through, Bolaño is always interesting. If the first and foremost requirement of fiction is that it be interesting, then there is no other contemporary writer as pleasing and successful as Bolaño.
To read Michael Saler's review of 2666, click here.

"Strategy without tactics is the slow road to victory," wrote Sun Tzu in The Art of War, "but tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." Stanley McChrystal, the top US military commander in Afghanistan, would do well to heed the words of the ancient Chinese general.
McChrystal is a lead member of the counter-insurgency (or "Coin") brigade that now dominates the US national security establishment. Coin theory emphasises a "population-centric" over an "enemy-centric" approach. It disinters the language of "clear, hold and build", resonant of the Vietnam era, and describes soldiers and marines as "nation-builders as well as warriors" (to borrow a phrase from the US army's much-lauded 2006 counter-insurgency field manual, co-authored by the celebrated General David Petraeus). Coin is predicated on the idea that it is possible to win supporters for an insurgency by providing security and basic services, and ensuring the presence of a strong, legitimate government.
Or, as McChrystal put it, in a memo to President Barack Obama leaked in September: "This new strategy must . . . be properly resourced and executed through an integrated civilian-military counter-insurgency campaign that earns the support of the Afghan people and provides them with a secure environment." Without extra troops, said McChrystal, the mission "will likely result in failure".
Critics of the new focus on counter-insurgency theory claim it is a tactical gimmick that enables policymakers to avoid thinking long and hard about what the endgame in Afghan­istan will actually look like. It is not a recipe for winning the war in the long run, they say; it is only for avoiding defeat in the short run.
“Coin doctrine is, at best, a collection of tactics that may or may not apply to a given situation," says Celeste Ward, a former deputy assistant secretary of defence under George W Bush. "But because of the absence of real discussion about US strategy and priorities, Coin has been elevated to the status of a strategy."
Coin's popularity, Ward told me, is that it "offers a framework that is palatable to people from very different political points of view: there is a unity of vision among both neocons and traditional Democrats". The former are excited by its emphasis on more troops, the latter by its focus on winning "hearts and minds" and "nation-building". It is for this reason, she says, that in Washington, DC today "counter-insurgency is king".
The proponents of Coin - or "Coinistas", as they have come to be known - point to the success of the 2007 US military "surge" in troop numbers in Iraq under the leadership of General David Petraeus, which they credit with reducing the levels of violence and insurgency across the country.
It is this "surge narrative" that has emboldened the Coinistas, but traditionalists, such as Colonel Gian Gentile, director of the military history programme at the US Military Academy at West Point, remain unconvinced.
The dramatic drop in violence in Iraq was the result of "a decision by senior American leaders in 2007 to pay large amounts of money to Sunni insurgents to stop attacking Americans and join the fight against al-Qaeda", says Gentile, who remains an outspoken critic of Coin despite being an active-duty officer. "Coupled with this was the decision by the Shia militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr to refrain from attacking coalition forces."
Gentile, who commanded a cavalry squad­ron in west Baghdad before the surge, says his "fundamental mission was to protect the people" and the "overall methods that the US army employed at the small-unit level where [he] operated were no different from the so-called new counter-insurgency methods used today".
Aside from the Iraq surge, Coinistas also point to earlier examples from history where counter-insurgency methods seem to have succeeded - in particular, the British colonial experience in Malaya (now Malaysia) between 1948 and 1960.
“Malaya is the 'gold standard' for Coin," says the historian Michael Vlahos, a member of the national security assessment team at Johns Hopkins University. But, he argues, this is a mistaken view: the Chinese Communist insurgents were a tiny and unpopular outside movement removed from the population, the British had a close and credible relationship with the ruling princes, and the local people were politically passive. And, it should be noted, it still took the British a dozen years to prevail.
None of those favourable conditions holds in Afghanistan, where the war has now entered its ninth year. The Taliban represent a huge section of the Pashtuns, the country's largest ethnic grouping, who are largely unrepresented in the political and military establishment of the "new" Afghanistan; and neither America nor Britain is considered a friendly nation.
The Pashtuns are among the most fiercely tribalised and nationalist peoples in the world, united only against a foreign invader. The thread running through almost all insurgencies is opposition to foreigners. Sending more and more troops increases the size of the foreign footprint in Afghanistan, undermining the legitimacy of the host government. As even the US defence secretary, Robert Gates, has worried in the not-so-distant past: "Too many forces could look a lot like an occupation."
A numbers game
The Coin theory of "clear, hold and build" is manpower-intensive, relying on an increased number of counter-insurgents to maintain widespread law and order. The field manual emphasises the importance of "troop density", or the ratio of security forces to inhabitants: "20 counter-insurgents per 1,000 residents [or 1:50] is often considered the minimum troop density required for effective Coin operations".
The CIA estimates Afghanistan's population, as of July 2009, to be roughly 28.4 million. Thus, going by the 1:50 ratio, the size of the US-led coalition force would need to be approximately 568,000 troops.
The US military commitment to Afghan­istan stands at 68,000 troops. There are about 38,000 non-US troops in Nato's International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) also deployed in the country, including 9,000 from the UK. The expected US troop surge of up to 40,000 - the number McChrystal is said to be demanding - would take the total to only 146,000, or just over 400,000 troops short of the number needed to satisfy Coin's own textbook definition of "minimum troop density".
The Coinistas, however, claim that their ratio allows for the host nation's military and police forces to be included in the total figure.Would this make a difference? Even adding in the 97,000 Afghan police officers and the 100,000-odd Afghan soldiers leaves the Nato-led force more than 200,000 counter-insurgents short of the "minimum".
Furthermore, the Afghan National Army is plagued by desertion: 10,000 recruits have disappeared in recent months. Soldiers are under-equipped and underpaid; some 15 per cent of them are thought to be drug addicts. Dominated by Tajik troops from the north of the country, the "national" army has little or no credibility in the southern, Pashtun areas of Afghanistan, where the Taliban mainly operate, and from where they draw ethnic support.
Meanwhile, the Afghan police, one member of whom shot dead five British soldiers on 3 November, are prone to infiltration and corruption and lack proper training. They have lost roughly 1,500 staff to insurgent violence this year and around 10,000 policemen are absent without leave.
“The Afghan army is useless and the police are corrupt," says Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the School of Oriental and African Studies. "So what does McChrystal propose? More useless troops and corrupt police. It's a counter-intuitive solution."
According to Plesch, there is a yawning gap between Coin theory and practice. "It's all fine on paper, but that doesn't translate into success on the ground," he told me. "You're still the foreign infidel with big boots on. You are still bombing, shooting and occupying."
But Coinistas are nothing if not optimistic, or even triumphalist. "Coin theorists tend to imply a kind of determinism: if Coin precepts are followed, the campaign can be successful," says Ward. Or, in the words of Vlahos: "Do this and then this, and at the right moment add this ingredient and . . . you win."
“For all its claims to novelty and modernity, Coin is eerily reminiscent of [the Napoleonic military thinker] Jomini at his worst - a list of prescriptive doctrines that claim to be valid for all times and places," says Colonel Douglas Macgregor, the retired senior military officer who commanded US cavalry troops during the first Gulf war.Macgregor, like Gentile, is critical of this latest plea from hawks to deploy US military force for utopian political ends. "We cannot 'fix' Afghanistan with military power, nor can we shape the destiny of hundreds of millions of Muslims living in the region. Only the people who live there can do that, because nations are built from within, not from without."
Taliban red herring
As a young officer in the Gurkhas, John Mackinlay experienced a conventional Maoist-style insurgency at first hand in the rainforests of North Borneo during the 1960s. But, as he argues in his new book, The Insurgent Archipelago, such experiences are of no use to modern counter-insurgents confronted with the threat of post-Maoist, globalised attacks. "Malaya is so long ago that it is not relevant," he told me.
“The Americans think they can take their fire extinguisher and go abroad to squirt some water, put out the blaze and go home," says Mackinlay, who teaches in the war studies department at King's College, London. "That's bollocks." The Taliban insurgency, he argues, is a red herring and sending more troops is a distraction. What matters, he says, is the al-Qaeda insurgency across the globe. Mackinlay distinguishes between what he calls an "expeditionary campaign" against insurgents in Afghanistan and the "domestic campaign" against extremists in the UK. His criticism of the obsession with Coin is that the domestic campaign should have "primacy" and that "the expeditionary campaign is antithetical to the domestic campaign, because it pisses off your average Muslim punter in Bolton".
The Taliban have no known interest in attacking mainland Britain (or America). Of the 15 major terror plots that UK security agencies have successfully prevented since 11 September 2001, none has been linked to Afghanistan. Of the 90 or so Islamists imprisoned in Britain on terrorism offences, not a single one hails from Helmand. On the contrary, Mackinlay tells me, "Afghanistan is the recruiting sergeant for what is happening in the UK."
As centre-left governments in the US and UK prepare to commit additional troops to the Afghan war effort, his words seem to go unheard. The Ministry of Defence plans to deploy 500 further British troops to the killing fields of Helmand and seems to have signed up fully to America's Coin approach, even publishing the first UK counter-insurgency manual in eight years.
One retired British colonel who served in Iraq and Afghanistan is aghast. "It doesn't matter whether you send 500 troops or 5,000 troops," he says. "What is the point when there is no endgame and no exit strategy?"
Coin has become an oversimplified and superficial doctrine for fighting foreign battles, one that makes war a more attractive, easy and likely option, but is also enormously burdensome in troops and money. Nonetheless, such doctrines are seductive: Bill Clinton had liberal interventionism in Kosovo, George Bush fell back on neoconservatism over Iraq, and Barack Obama is on the verge of opting for Coin in Afghanistan.
Coin will not provide a silver - or even a lead - bullet in Afghanistan. And, even if its critics such as Gentile, Ward and Plesch are wrong, the counter-insurgency tactics of Petraeus and McChrystal in Kabul and Kandahar will do little to win hearts and minds here at home, or in the disaffected and alienated Muslim communities across Europe. It is this strategic truth that the Coinistas avoid at their peril.

Mr. Keillor's Thanksgiving

We now interrupt Mrs. Palin's book tour to bring you Thanksgiving, a grand old holiday, and we in the book business are thankful for her, that a busy woman who wanted to tell her story chose the medium of ink and paper between hard covers. Her tour is not about politics. It's about books.
Those big crowds waiting in the cold outside bookstores were looking forward to cozying up to her book and savoring the intense intimate pleasure of a memoir, the feeling that you and the author are close personal friends. You don't get that feeling from watching someone on TV; you get it from a book. Mrs. Palin's job was not to impress book reviewers or stake a claim to the Republican Party but to give pleasure to people who already love her, which evidently she did. Good for her.
And that's the challenge of Thanksgiving -- to gather among our kin who know us a little too well and have an amiable occasion enjoyed equally by all, at which nobody is stabbed through the heart with a carving knife.
We're a mobile and over-caffeinated people, and at every family gathering, amid the ancient aroma of turkey and sage and squash and sweet potatoes and a few pounds of butter, you'll find some edgy individualists, someone who knows the true story of what happened on 9/11, the story that the mainstream media have suppressed. A tea party devotee or two. Someone who believes that yeast is the secret of happiness. People capable of harangues and diatribes, but nobody wants this.
The family liberals smile at the family wingnuts. The vegetarian daughter-in-law produces her tofu loaf, which looks as if a large animal such as a buffalo came by and dropped it hot and steaming on the plate. We don't comment on this. She believes that the treatment of turkeys is a moral blight on America, but she does not say so. The Unitarian cousin listens to the fervent Lutheran prayer and murmurs Amen. The Viking fans and the Packer fans sit side by side.
It is the dinner of all dinners, generous and comforting and completely predictable, and a true test of civility, and we do it in gratitude for the simple goodness of life. Our consumer society is all about need and craving, and politics is so much about complaint and resentment, and here is a day devoted to something else.
My family gathers in the house that Dad built in 1947, by the fireplace that Great-Uncle Alfred, a stonemason, built when he was 80. He lived to be 90, and whenever you saw him and Aunt Millie, they were holding hands. Joining us will be cousin Dorothy Bacon, who recently told me that my grandfather James, who died before my time, loved to read and even out in the field raking hay with a team of horses he had a book in his hand; that he was often seen kissing Grandma; and that every night, until he was very old, he carried her in his arms up the stairs to bed. Good to know these things.
In my day, we went outdoors after dessert and ran off our dinner and when it was dark, were allowed back in the house, and we flopped down on the floor and listened to Uncle Lew tell about the night their house burned down in Charles City, Iowa, and afterward watched "The Bell Telephone Hour" on television with Robert Merrill and Patrice Munsel singing "Dear Hearts and Gentle People," and then a horn honked in the driveway and my sister came down from upstairs where she'd been primping in the bathroom and Mother said, "Tell him he has to come inside and pick you up, he can't sit in the car and honk." And so the boy came in. Sheepish, tongue-tied, hair oiled and swirled around on top, he stood as close to the door as possible and we inspected him as a potential relative and thought, "Naw. She could do better."

LATIN

Next time you curse a flashing speed camera or are undertaken on the inside lane of the M40, here's a little tip: say your rude words in Latin. That's what Mark Lowe, the millionaire hedge-fund boss being sued for wrongful dismissal, did when he sent an email quoting one of the filthiest expressions ever written in Latin – or in any other language, for that matter.

Ariane Gordji, a young woman seeking work experience, had asked Mr Lowe, an Oxford classics graduate, the meaning of: "Ego autem dico vobis: diligite inimicos vestros, benefacite his qui oderunt vos."

It's actually from the New Testament (Matthew 5:44) and means, "But I say to you: love your enemies; be kind to those who hate you." Mr Lowe didn't bother with a translation and instead answered with a chunk of Catullus's Carmina (or "songs"), which is so sexually explicit that it wasn't openly published in English until the late 20th century.

"Irrumabo vos et pedicabo vos," wrote Mr Lowe, before kindly adding, "It's Catullus, not very polite."

Too right, it's not polite; in fact it's so rude that the English translation still can't be printed in a family newspaper without using dashes. For those of a sensitive disposition, turn away now. Even with dashes, it's pretty graphic stuff – "I will b----- you and face-f--- you."

Mr Lowe may or may not be the most enlightened of bosses. Another young woman, the one suing him for claiming he hounded her out of her job, also claims he brought prostitutes to business functions and made her attend strip clubs.

But I'm with him when it comes to Catullus. As he said in court, Catullus's poetry "is not vile. It's burlesque. It was always light-hearted in the first century and it is now."

The poem was indeed a light-hearted skit, aimed at two critics of Catullus's verse: "Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi". More dashes, I'm afraid; this means, "----sucker Aurelius and catamite Furius."

Mr Lowe's response, like Catullus's poem, was also light-hearted. He took the bother to warn Miss Gordji that the translation wasn't very polite. And he wasn't insulting her personally; he says he was giving a jokey summary of his general philosophy on how to deal with your enemies. He also knew she knew no Latin, and so would only find out the meaning if she went out of her way to look it up.

But the Latin itself wasn't rude to someone who couldn't understand it. That's one of the wonders of Latin – and why you should use it on the speed camera or that fool driver careening down the inside lane. Because it's a dead language, understood by only a few Latin fans, and because it's drenched in high-minded, august connotations, you can describe the most degraded sexual act, and most people will think you're quoting from Virgilian epic poetry
in iambic hexameters.

There is no other language quite like Latin that can pull this off. An obscenity in a modern, living language would be too close to the bone. An insult in another dead language – say, ancient Greek or Assyrian – would simply be too obscure. No wonder, then, that Latin crops up the whole time as a supple device for advertising your wit, intelligence or evasiveness.

The Labour MP Denis MacShane was at it only last week, in his response to the Queen's Speech. "Let me finish by saying that, as a House," Mr MacShane told the Commons, "we are not rising to the geopolitical and national economic and social changes that face us. As Horace put it: 'Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus'."

No dashes needed here. This is from Horace's Epistle to the Pisones, and means, "The mountains will go into labour, and give birth to a ridiculous mouse", a neat expression to describe huge efforts that amount to very little. Poor old Denis got the tense wrong in his translation – he put it in the past, not the future – but he'd made his point. "I know Latin," was the undertone. "I'm awfully clever and, by finishing on this quote, I know all about Ciceronian oratory and the need to end my speech with a flourish."

The master of the well-deployed Latin quote is the Mayor of London. By injecting just the right squirt of self-mockery and gags, Boris Johnson can spray Latin allusions all over the place, without being pompous, but still, almost as if by accident, end up revealing the generous dimensions of his planet-sized brain.

When asked if he wanted to be prime minister, Boris said: "Were I to be pulled like Cincinnatus from my plough, then obviously it would be an absolute privilege to serve."

Beautifully done. Just the right measure of braininess – Cincinnatus was the Roman leader called from his farm to take charge of Rome in 457 BC in the battle against the Aequians. In 16 days, he defeated the enemy and returned to the plough. But also, just the right measure of modesty. By placing his bid in those mock-highfalutin, comical, ancient Roman terms, Boris built himself an ejector seat from charges of overweening ambition.

The list of those who turn to Latin for its echoes of big brains and ancient grandeur includes Angelina Jolie, who has a tattoo on the lower slopes of her belly that reads "Quod me nutrit me destruit"– "What nourishes me destroys me". It's a kind of ancient anorexic's slogan, a Roman version of Kate Moss's "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels".

Of the 11 tattoos on David Beckham's body, four are in Latin (and two of the others, "Victoria" and "Romeo", are Latin-inspired names). On his left forearm, he has "Ut Amem et Foveam" – "That I might love and cherish": nice use of the subjunctive there.

On his right forearm are punctured the words "Perfectio in Spiritu" – "Perfection in Spirit". His skin art also includes the date of his renewal of his marriage vows – VIII.V.MMVI – and the English translation of the Emperor Caligula's favourite catchphrase, "Oderint dum metuant" ("Let them hate as long as they fear").

The Latin on Angelina Jolie's tummy and pretty much all over David Beckham's torso has echoes resonating back through the ages, and through the pens of the greatest writers of all time. That's why they had their tattoos in Latin, not in English or Swahili.

The same goes for Roman numerals. Elizabeth II looks a lot more impressive than Elizabeth 2; ditto the 7 on the back of Beckham's football shirt, which is commemorated on his right arm with a tattooed VII. (Even "ditto" comes from the Latin "dictus", meaning "said".)

For centuries, Latin's ancient grandeur has appealed like this to people who want to come across as a little bit special. Precisely because it is a dead language and has no practical use, from the Norman Conquest onwards it won kudos among those who could afford to dedicate their time to fine prose, poetry and history rather than money-making disciplines such as science or engineering.

So the study of Latin flourished in grammar schools, Catholic schools and public schools for half a millennium. After nearly disappearing altogether in comprehensives over the past half century, it has – mirabile dictu ("wonderful to say") – had a recent recovery.

The number of comprehensives doing Latin has doubled in the past decade, helped by a revival in the study of grammar, thanks to Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Harry Potter has chipped in, too. The Hogwarts curriculum is rich in Latin; its motto even includes a tricky gerundive – "Draco dormiens numquam titillandus" ("Never tickle a sleeping dragon").

Thank God for this revival. And not because Latin is a pompous, grand or show-off language, or one in which you can write rude words safely. But because some of the best prose and poetry ever written was in Latin; not least by Catullus, who went way beyond sexual insults to produce the most stirring love poems to his beloved Lesbia.

Throw in satire, comedy, architecture, Roman numerals, Roman history and the correct use of Latinate English words, and the thrilling vitality of Latin never fades, centuries after its supposed death.

'Amo, Amas, Amat and All That – How to Become a Latin Lover' by Harry Mount is published by Short Books (£7.99)

Slow Down

Start living in the now

This letter comes early this week, hoping to catch you with greetings and best wishes for Thanksgiving, wherever it takes you. This is one of those years when Advent begins on what has turned into a virtual holiday weekend. For traditional Christians, this compact four-week season seems more and more a gift, and sometimes a powerfully counter-cultural gift. Advent whispers to the soul: Slow down, find some quiet, look at something other than the anxious rush. It will take an effort, won't it, to find that pace and that quiet?

Smells

Even though the weather has turned cold, I am thinking tonight of summer camping trips to Lake Erie, and more specifically of my adopted grandfather singing old Scout songs with as much gusto as he could manage on the 15th repetition, all in the name of making the travel time go a bit faster for the eight-year-old kid (me) in the back seat.

Oh, the cannibal king, with the big nose ring, fell in love with a lusty ma-a-aid. And every night, by the pale moonlight, across the bay he'd wa-a-ade...

Admittedly, some of the lyrics would not make for nursery-friendly group sing-alongs these days, but I loved the tune so much that I made a habit of crying out for encores, requests that my adult self can hardly believe were always honored. Now that's love.


It's often noted how a familiar smell can transport you across decades in a flash, but it's amazing to me how deeply the roots of a sonic memory can grow and how powerfully they can do something similar. I find this especially true when it comes to the sounds of once familiar routines. Those same camping trips were also colored by the comforting habits of pre-dawn mornings in a small pop-up camper. The open and shut of the flimsy aluminum door, a heavy footfall on the detachable red felt step, the pop of a cupboard door when a jar of instant coffee was retrieved. It was the excited boil of an electric kettle that carried real meaning, however, and the clink of a spoon against a mug that signaled morning had come and another day's adventures were about to begin.

WALES

LAND OF MY FATHER: JASPER REES ON WALES

Jasper Rees is an Englishman with Welsh roots. After neglecting them for years, he decided it was time to explore them. So he drove right around Wales ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Autumn 2009

You have to pay to get in. The cost, if you’re in a car, is £5.40 ($10). Pressing a note and two coins into a fleshy female palm, I deploy the lone word of conversational Welsh in my locker. “Diolch.” Thank you. Then push my right foot down and accelerate into the land of my fathers. There’s not initially much difference from the foreign field back at the other end of the Severn bridge. Arable land trimmed into rectangles. An unremarkable town or two. Grey clouds flattening the light. Croeso i Gymru, said the sign.

Am I really welcome to Wales? I’ve been coming here since before I can remember, the ancestral call dutifully answered at Christmas and in summer. We ploughed over the old bridge—which back then was new—westward-bound along roads which down the years became broader and smoother and faster until eventually it was possible to get from the toll gate to my grandparents 90 miles away in not much more than an hour. South Wales was reduced to a race against time, a chain of conurbations whipping by in a blur of turn-offs. Newport. Cardiff. Swansea. This was my father’s twice-yearly speed-trip back to his Welsh childhood. Quite early on in mine, the road signs began speaking in two tongues: Casnewydd, Caerdydd, Abertawe. Services:gwasanaethau. Parking: parcio. How we laughed at that one—the foreign language indebted to the master. All I knew of Wales was the road, and a house on a hill above the market town of Carmarthen. Caerfyrddin. Merlin’s Castle.

I make a left turn. An empty road delivers up pretty villages with English names: Summerleaze, Redwick, Goldcliff. I’ve always sailed past this pocket of Wales. Flat, even sunken, and riven with ditches, the countryside looks neither English nor Welsh, in fact, but Dutch. I follow a track down until a forbidding sea wall blocks the view. Setting foot on Welsh soil, I clamber up the steps and there, arrayed in front of me, is the Severn estuary, the Bristol Channel. England fans out along the horizon. I breathe in briny air. Overhead, gulls squawk territorially. Before the wall was raised, high tides would have scurried inland and drowned the fields in salt water. It’s hard to say from here where the river ends and the sea begins. It’s hard also, it occurs to me, to say where my Englishness ends and my Welshness begins. I’ve wanted to know this for ever. Which is why I am here.

My father was of that generation that was sent to school in England and never really came back. Wales was educated out of him. His emotional detachment from the scenes of his youth manifested itself in a ritual we performed every time we turned for home in a series of monstrous Range Rovers. As we crossed the bridge back into England, he made us all cheer. I could never quite work out what Wales had done wrong, but I swallowed the story that England was where it was at. Eventually there came a time when if I wanted to go to Wales it would be under my own steam. An awareness soon budded as I visited my grandmother—my grandfather having died when I was 20—that we had been hoodwinked. But hold on, I remember being shocked to realise one evening as loafy hills bronzed in the slanting sunlight, Carmarthenshire’s gorgeous.

That yearning to belong has had to sprout from barren anglicised soil. I’ve never lived in Wales. In fact I scarcely know it. But on some inchoate level I sense that I love it. It’s like having a crush on a long dead star whose face you know only in the black and white shimmer of the silver screen. There seems to be just the one way round this state of ignorance, and that way is round Wales. This is what I’m proposing to do. Go all the way round, sticking—because there must be rules—to the road closest to the sea. I see it as an obsessive-compulsive search for my inner Welshman. I’m attracted by the project of putting a girdle around a whole country. Besides, I bet it’s not been done much. If at all.

With that, I clamber down from the sea wall, lower myself behind the steering wheel, open the map, put the milometer back to zero, and turn the ignition.

What follows is a slow and winding crash course in Welshness, although they have a more resonant word for it: Cymreictod. On the surface at least, the induction is topographical. Knobbly headlands and beetling cliffs make way for windy strands of white powdery beach. Chimneys belch and cough. There are Georgian jewels and kiss-me-quick resorts.

Estuaries bite deep chunks out of the coast. Turrets of innumerable castles prop up the clouds. Mountains tumble into the sea. Along the edge of Offa’s Dyke, delineating the old border with England, empty moorlands sound like the winds that howl about them: Eglwyseg, Berwyn, Y Mynyddoedd Duon.

There’s a ton of driving to do—it’s nearly 800 miles of narrow lanes and fast lanes around the Welsh rim—but at strategic points I get out of the car and walk. And walk. Strategic because, weather permitting, in each place it’s usually possible to see along the tumultuous coast towards the site of the next ramble. From the Rhossili cliffs on the Gower to the lighthouse on Caldey Island; from St Anne’s Head at the mouth of the vast natural harbour of Milford Haven, to the headlands of St David’s; from the tiny fishing village of Llangrannog up to the river-mouth towns of Aberaeron and Aberystwyth and Aberdyfi; from the miles of beach at Harlech to the multitude of beaches on the Llyn peninsula. Up on Edward I’s turrets at Caernarfon I can look along the north coast towards the Great Orme, the hulk of rock above Llandudno. And then down the hundred-mile chain of uplands which guard the border all the way back to the Severn.

And the weather, contrary to expectation, does permit. Once or twice it rains old women and sticks, as they say in Welsh, and I can’t see beyond the fence. Mostly, though, clouds choose not to muster, there are no avalanches of fog cascading from the hills, but that’s because the weather is much better on the coasts than reputed. The sun is free to pick out vibrant blues and greens, seas and meadows partitioned by tongues of white sand and seams of black rock.

The more I stop to clamber up hummocks and take in the view, the more I am baffled by something. When you can see so much of it in one go the country seems no larger than a postage stamp. On the one hand I can see for miles. One miraculous dusk I sit on a dry-stone wall and take in the entire 60-mile semi-circular sweep of Cardigan Bay while Snowdon and her siblings bristle beyond the shore. I’ve only ever gawped at that from a plane before. Another golden twilight I look down on the long arcadian corridor of Clwyd, and beyond it the whole grand commotion of North Wales erupting. In short, Wales doesn’t go far.

On the other hand, criss-crossed by a labyrinth of ridges and ravines, it goes on for ever. Its distances are in its ups and downs, in the intestinal coils of roads pushed this way and that by Welsh geology. The trip started and ended at sea level, but the nerd in me would be keen to know the metres climbed and plummeted. I can turn a corner and find just about anything sheltering there. The narrow opening to a splendid estuary, its meadowed shores patrolled by a lone diesel train. An elegant county town hibernating in the fold of a hill. An aqueduct riding supremely overhead. A crumbling abbey long abandoned by Cistercians.

I stop at an abbey for a night. My uncle is a monk on Caldey, the little island across the water from Tenby in Pembrokeshire. The White Monks have been here since 1929, although there is proof of rather more ancient worship in the sixth-century Ogham script carved into the Caldey Stone in St Illtyd’s church. My uncle lived most of his life in England. After his mother—my grandmother—finally died at 96, he answered a summons. Unlike his younger brother—my father—he never felt the tug of elsewhere as strongly as the magnetic pull of home. The Welsh word for it is hiraeth, for which the pallid English equivalent is “longing”.

To the outsider—in this case me—it seems a hard life. In winter they wear a lot of layers under their robes. However cold it is, the brothers join prayer at 3.15 in the morning. One of my uncle’s duties is to sound the reveille, so he gets up at 2.45 and fortifies himself with a mug of tea. Other tasks include being an archivist, measuring rainfall for the Met Office and packing shortbread. But his time is mostly devoted to devotion. The monks measure out their days in Latin appointments: Terce, Sext, None (pronounced with a long o). Whenever I visit him my uncle is like the White Rabbit, always looking at his watch.

The simple life extends to the kitchen—the abbey is no place for carnivores. The evening I eat supper in the refectory is an exception—it’s a feast day and a nice paella is left over from lunch. “Absolutely no talking in here,” he tells me sternly as we go in. A silent order strikes me as an odd choice for a man of many words— he’s very Welsh in that sense—and in the kitchen after wards the brothers are all yakking their heads off. The next morning my uncle walks me to the boat. I’m the only passenger going back to the mainland as day-trippers from Tenby step off onto the quay. He stands among them in his robes, white hair cropped above bony shoulders, and it occurs to me that my Cistercian uncle is a good advert for repatriation. Wales has rejuvenated him. With perhaps a bit of help from above.

I return to the road, where the binary nature of the place is of course underlined, even enforced, by the names of things. Such has been the success of the Welsh Language Society’s rearguard action that this is the only country I know where I can be driving to two places at once: one with an English name, the other with the name it was created to replace. To the uninitiated, Welsh words can look like anagrams of themselves. I try to exhume a grandson’s sepia memories of Welsh pronunciation. The signposts are never slow to tease the tongue: I pass through Dinbych y Pysgod and Abereiddy, Mwnt and Tywyn and Gwyr, Llanystumdwy and Rhydycroesau, Dwygyfylchi and Penbontrhydyfothau. The consonants I’m sort of on top of, but the vowels can seem as alien as Cyrillic. It’s as if they’re encrypted to bamboozle some nameless enemy. Other words are pure poetry. Why on earth say Cardiganshire when there’s Ceredigion?

And then there is the quilt of voices. As I make my clockwise circuit, the accents of the place sing and dance, narrow and fatten. The voice of the capital has a tight, parsimonious tang. The Dyfed accent in the south-west swoops and dips in a hilly lilt. In Gwynedd to the north, delicate wispy vowels flutter upwards as if wind-borne. Across the porous border of Clwyd come abrupt stabs of nasal Scouse, while farther south in Powys and Gwent impenetrable inflections form a kind of natural barrier with England.

And yet the stony imprint of past incursions is inescapable all around the Welsh perimeter. The Romans left their DNA not only in buildings but in the names for them:ponts and porths and cestyll (the plural of castell). One day I wander through Valle Crucis, perhaps the most beautiful of the abbeys erected by the Cistercians who, until the Hundred Years War, ans wered to the mother abbey in France. My favourite castle planted by the French-speaking Plantagenets is at Harlech. One day I walk for miles along the lengthy shore it guards, and have no company but sea birds.

Wales is a broth, thousands of years in the brewing. So perhaps there is no point in trying to pin down the moment when I felt most at home. It could have been the places I associate with my grandmother—rather more than my grandfather, who was a remote and taciturn figure. I used to be slightly afraid of him in his plus-fours as he poured throat-rasping ginger beers. My grandmother dispensed scones, cuddles and complex jumpers she would spend the year knitting. “Bach” she used to call us—little one—for years the only Welsh word I knew. They married in 1927. She was one of two children, he one of nine children, and they all married. My grandparents were, so far as I know, the only ones to stay in Wales, and she was the last of the 20 to die. I think of her in Llansteffan, where a broken-toothed old castle still proudly commands the heights above the Tywi estuary. From the many times she brought us here I retain a strong memory of old women and sticks, and the train sweetly chugging along the other shore. And then I think of her again when I get to Porthmadog, the pretty port where the slate fetches up after the scenic train ride down from Blaenau Ffestiniog. It’s the first time I’ve been to the place where she grew up. I never realised that every day she could feast her eyes on one of the most beautiful views in Britain, across wide marshy pastures towards Snowdonia. The sight is so beautiful, it comes as a fresh shock to me that by the time I knew her, North Wales was a memory to my grandmother.

If there was a moment when I most felt a surge of connection, it was on the last day. I spent the morning in Hay-on-Wye, looking for a paperback about the two Ladies of Llangollen who famously introduced the concept of the beautiful lesbian friendship to Georgian Britain. The day before I’d spent a couple of hours looking round their exquisite nest, Plas Newydd (or New Hall), full of quirky black timbering and doll’s-house detail. I spent as long in Hay hunting the book down, and eventually I found a dog-eared Penguin and returned vindicated to the car. Slowly through hedge-heavy lanes I climbed until several hundred feet higher I was up in another world: the rampart of the Black Mountains (those Mynyddoedd Duon). A thin ribbon of road traversed a bald summit—or penfoel, as they call it. The grass was dotted with dark sheep droppings. A fierce wind dragged the ambient temperature downwards. Gobbets of rain spat from restless clouds overhead. A world away from the trim civility of the little forest of bookshops below, I stood and looked far into England and farther into Wales. Up here, such questions as who comes from where are rushed away on the gale. I belong, I said to myself. I’ve circled this glorious country and I hope I feel I belong.

Fired by the surprise of this new feeling, I drove on, along the curving edge of mountains, back through the tree line and into a densely wooded valley. The lane, narrowed by foliage, plummeted. A stream kept it company. Eventually the road came to somewhere near the bottom. Fields fanned out either side, and agricultural buildings made their presence known. And then, on the left, was another ecclesiastical ruin nestling under a tall slope in the lee of the wind.

Llanthony Abbey is close to perfect. It’s rumoured that St David, the nation’s patron saint, lived here as a hermit. True or not, that was enough to persuade one and then another hermit to follow suit in the early 12th century. An Augustinian monastery was soon endowed, but within three decades the 40 monks had been driven over the border by the weather and the Welsh. In the next century a priory was built. One night in 1327 it housed the dethroned Edward II, shortly to be murdered. After the dissolution of the monasteries the buildings crumbled. Two hundred years ago Walter Savage Landor bought the estate, fired by dreams of picturesque rural seclusion, but he vanished abroad and left his creditors and mother nature to continue the dilapidation. It was in this semi-naked state that Turner captured Llanthony’s lonely ravishing roofless essence. There’s something ineffably Welsh about a place where saints and kings, writers and painters all experienced the hermit’s solitude. And now me too.

That’s another of the great things about Wales. It’s not just that the sheer foreignness of England’s neighbour is overlooked. It’s the emptiness. I say it with a slightly heavy heart, but there doesn’t seem much doubt that more people will eventually choose to cotton on to Wales’s extraordinary beauty, thanks to global warming and the global downturn. And no sea wall will be able to protect Wales’s lonely corners from inundation.

There’s a bit more driving to do, incorporating one minor disaster. As I descend towards Tintern Abbey along the south-meandering Wye, the road randomly jerks left across a bridge into Gloucestershire and proceeds for four agonising miles along the English bank before ducking back into Wales. I have to control an urge to turn round and snake back along another route and maintain the Welshness of my footprint—but there are only so many country lanes that even the keenest born-again Welshman can take. Eventually the valley drags me towards Chepstow.

The Wye, which began its journey on the same distant mountain as the Severn on the other side of Wales, rounds a final Welsh castle and consummates a muddy reunion as one river spills into the other under the old bridge. I cross to leave Wales and return to the other side. I do not cheer.

(Jasper Rees writes arts interviews for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times. "I Found My Horn", his book about relearning an old musical instrument, was published in January.)

It's Your Week!

Peggy Noonan

Last Thanksgiving, it looked as if a hard year was coming, and it was and it did. The holiday was shadowed by a sense of economic foreboding—Wall Street failing, companies falling and layoffs coming. It isn't over—no one thinks it's over. But the mood of this Thanksgiving looks to be different.

An unofficial poll of a dozen friends yields two themes: "We're still here," and, "I am so grateful." Almost all experienced business reverses, some of which were deep, and some had personal misfortunes of one kind or another: "I am thankful that my mother's death was fast and that she did not have to suffer," wrote a beloved friend. But something tells me that a number of Thanksgiving dinners will be marked this year by a new or refreshed sense of gratitude: We're still here. I am so grateful.

I felt it the other night, unexpectedly, in a way that reminded me of the anxieties of last year. I had been away from the city. I was in a cab going down Fifth Avenue. I hadn't been there in months. I looked up and suddenly saw, looming in the darkness to my right, the white-gray marble and huge windows of the Bergdorf Goodman building—tall, stately, mansard-roofed. Its windows were covered, but some lights were on, and there seemed to be people inside. They were preparing its Christmas windows. Something about the sight of it caught me—proud Bergdorf's, anchor of midtown commerce. It looked exactly as it looked 10 years ago, 20, only better. Because it's there. New York has been so damaged by the crash, and last year at this time small shops, the ones with the smallest margin for error, were closing. And now I see more that are opening, and Bergdorf's is preparing its Christmas windows. The sight of it came like an affirmation. We're still here. I am so grateful.

What are you most thankful for in 2009? I asked an old friend, a brilliant lawyer who lives in a New York suburb. "I saw my 6-year-old son run a mile, and catch a bunch of fish," he immediately replied. He saw his wife, a journalist, "dodge the firings" in her office. He still has a job, too. All of this sounds so common, so modest, and yet, he knows, it is everything. A child caught a fish, he ran, his father saw it. "Broadly," he added, "I am grateful to America for its freedom, for its yeastiness and, at times, its noise. Dee Snider belting out 'I Wanna Rock' is so America."

View Full Image

Heidi Stevens
My friend Robert wrote, "I am thankful that I lived to see a person of color sworn into the office of President." He takes heart that America has set a new face toward the world. "I am thankful and proud when I am in London and people ask me about my president and show great interest in him." And, "I am thankful that my friends survived the global financial disaster. I am thankful America survived it."

A real estate lawyer in Washington emailed, "Whether you agree with the policy decisions made by the new administration or not, let's be thankful that our economy did not fall apart since last Thanksgiving."

A Washington journalist: "I am thankful that this is still a normal country, with predictable common-sense reactions to excesses. The American people served as a counterweight to the excesses of the Bush years, and are now serving as a counterweight to the excesses of the Obama years."

A friend who emigrated from Nicaragua 21 years ago and lives now in New York knew right away what she was thankful for: her still-new country. "I'm mainly grateful that I could raise my son in freedom. I could vote for the first time in my life. I could express my opinions without being shot on the spot, jailed, or exiled like my grandfather. I could sleep through the night without fearing for my life. I could work and buy food without rationing."

My friend Stephanie is grateful that she got health insurance despite a pre-existing condition. Another friend, an academic, was grateful to have been raised in America that taught well the rules of survival—perseverance, discipline.

Jim, who owns a small business, told me that as 2009 began, with all its troubles, "the number of frowns" he saw on the street "was overwhelming." He decided to take action. "I now make a conscious effort to smile at people in the street, in a bus, while waiting in line. It's such a simple form of connection, and it only takes one smile returned to make a difference in my day, and I hope the same is true for the other person smiling back." He hopes to start "a smiling epidemic" in Chicago.

My friend Vin said, when I asked him what he was most grateful for in 2009, "I remember reading that survival rates for breast cancer have been improving. I remember thinking: Thank God."

I am grateful for a great deal, especially: I'm here. I'm drinking coffee as I write, and the sun is so bright, I had to close the blinds to keep the glare from the computer. When I open the blinds, I will see the world: people, kids, traffic, dogs. Too many friends have left during the past few years, and it reminds us of what death is always trying to remind us: It's good to be alive.