What A Terrorist Incident in Ancient Rome Can Teach Us - Pirates of the Mediterranean - New York Times:
"IN the autumn of 68 B.C. the world’s only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Rome’s port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped.
The incident, dramatic though it was, has not attracted much attention from modern historians. But history is mutable. An event that was merely a footnote five years ago has now, in our post-9/11 world, assumed a fresh and ominous significance. For in the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty. One cannot help wondering if history is repeating itself."
About Me
- Xerxes
- New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
- Admire John McPhee, Bill Bryson, David Remnick, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr and James Martin (and most open and curious minds)
30.9.06
The wizardry of Woz
FT.com / Arts & Weekend - Lunch with the FT: The wizardry of Woz:
"He was - indeed, still is - the primal computer nerd, a bearded whizz who rode a boyhood love of electronics to spectacular early successes of the computer industry. The Apple II, a machine he designed single-handedly in 1976, is reckoned by many to be one of the most impressive engineering feats of recent decades, a machine that laid the blueprint for the desktop and laptop machines that have become central to modern life. It turned him and Jobs into stars and multimillionaires, and launched the personal computer revolution almost overnight.
We are sitting here now because Wozniak has written his memoirs. To be more precise, he has spoken and a journalist friend, Gina Smith, has written the words down. He recently sat in this same booth for what he reckons to have been 50 days straight while he and Smith went through the text. I think of all the Hickory Pit ribs that represents.
So what does Steve Jobs, four years younger and at high school when the two first met, make of Wozniak’s rendition of this slice of Valley history? “From what I understand, he read it and thought it made him look like an asshole,” says Wozniak."
"He was - indeed, still is - the primal computer nerd, a bearded whizz who rode a boyhood love of electronics to spectacular early successes of the computer industry. The Apple II, a machine he designed single-handedly in 1976, is reckoned by many to be one of the most impressive engineering feats of recent decades, a machine that laid the blueprint for the desktop and laptop machines that have become central to modern life. It turned him and Jobs into stars and multimillionaires, and launched the personal computer revolution almost overnight.
We are sitting here now because Wozniak has written his memoirs. To be more precise, he has spoken and a journalist friend, Gina Smith, has written the words down. He recently sat in this same booth for what he reckons to have been 50 days straight while he and Smith went through the text. I think of all the Hickory Pit ribs that represents.
So what does Steve Jobs, four years younger and at high school when the two first met, make of Wozniak’s rendition of this slice of Valley history? “From what I understand, he read it and thought it made him look like an asshole,” says Wozniak."
The £1,000 hotel room
FT.com / Arts & weekend / Travel - Rise of the £1,000 hotel room:
"This is affecting the hotel industry. You can feel it in the changing demographic at leading hotels: the Russians at Badrutt’s Palace in St Moritz; the Indians at the Burj Al Arab in Dubai; and the Chinese at the Carlyle in New York. All were discernible last time I visited.
Make no mistake: price inflation for top-of-the-line luxury goods and services is racing ahead. Petrina Dolby of Capgemini says: “In 2005, the Clewi Index [cost of living extremely well] rose 4 per cent while the consumer price index rose 3.6 per cent.” Hotels are included in the basket of luxury goods monitored in the global survey.
According to Smith Travel Research, the rise in price for luxury hotels in the US stands at 8.7 per cent over the first half of 2006, almost triple the nation’s 3.2 per cent inflation rate.
The rise and rise of the $1,000 hotel room seems unstoppable, whereas five years ago it was still quite unusual,” says Glen Donovan, the managing director of Earth, a London-based travel agency for 150 high-spending clients worldwide. "
"This is affecting the hotel industry. You can feel it in the changing demographic at leading hotels: the Russians at Badrutt’s Palace in St Moritz; the Indians at the Burj Al Arab in Dubai; and the Chinese at the Carlyle in New York. All were discernible last time I visited.
Make no mistake: price inflation for top-of-the-line luxury goods and services is racing ahead. Petrina Dolby of Capgemini says: “In 2005, the Clewi Index [cost of living extremely well] rose 4 per cent while the consumer price index rose 3.6 per cent.” Hotels are included in the basket of luxury goods monitored in the global survey.
According to Smith Travel Research, the rise in price for luxury hotels in the US stands at 8.7 per cent over the first half of 2006, almost triple the nation’s 3.2 per cent inflation rate.
The rise and rise of the $1,000 hotel room seems unstoppable, whereas five years ago it was still quite unusual,” says Glen Donovan, the managing director of Earth, a London-based travel agency for 150 high-spending clients worldwide. "
White House ‘ignored’ Iraq warning
FT.com / In depth - White House ‘ignored’ Iraq warning:
"The Bush administration was shaken on Friday by revelations from a new book by Bob Woodward, the veteran investigative reporter, which said Andrew Card, the former White House chief of staff, had twice tried to force the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, over his handling of the Iraq war.
State of Denial by the Washington Post reporter who uncovered the Watergate scandal, paints a picture of an administration riven by personal rivalries, with Mr Rumsfeld at one point refusing to take calls from Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser. It claims that even Laura Bush, President George W. Bush’s wife, had misgivings about the defence secretary."
"The Bush administration was shaken on Friday by revelations from a new book by Bob Woodward, the veteran investigative reporter, which said Andrew Card, the former White House chief of staff, had twice tried to force the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, over his handling of the Iraq war.
State of Denial by the Washington Post reporter who uncovered the Watergate scandal, paints a picture of an administration riven by personal rivalries, with Mr Rumsfeld at one point refusing to take calls from Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser. It claims that even Laura Bush, President George W. Bush’s wife, had misgivings about the defence secretary."
Dubai's Many Contradictions
Been to Dubai recently? Ever been there? It is a bit strange. Sort of Disney & Vegas with a high emphasis on the overdone, ill-conceived and just plain bad. The new Singapore? Well, not likely Still, not a bad oasis for business, if one has to be in the neighborhood and flying in on Emirates First Class, ah, now that is flying!...........http://www.ired.com/news/mkt/dubai.htm
Dubai attempts to present itself as a kind of fairy tale, a place of Arab magic, an oasis of camels and sheiks and a cluster of luxury hotels where no day goes by without a golf tournament or swanky horse races. (minus any jews, of course)
But Dubai these days is mostly a noisy, rough, unkempt city -- one of the world's largest construction sites. Construction work is going on throughout most of the urbanized coastal strip, and the jackhammers can still be heard from the terraces of seaside hotels at night.
Photo Gallery: Dubai's Many Contradictions - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News
Other People's Books
The Chronicle: 9/22/2006: Other People's Books:
"It's not only the physical aspects of books that attract me, of course. In fact, I rarely buy first or elegant editions, however much I like to glance at them; good reading copies, in hardback or a decent paperback, are just fine. But seeing some of the editions in my living room reminds me of that wonderful house in Surrey, which stirred my imagination as a young man and was part of the reason I became a writer myself.
What interests me about other people's books is the nature of their collection. A personal library is an X-ray of the owner's soul. It offers keys to a particular temperament, an intellectual disposition, a way of being in the world. Even how the books are arranged on the shelves deserves notice, even reflection. There is probably no such thing as complete chaos in such arrangements."
Asleep at the Wheel
Hey, this is really good stuff. Bob Wills rides again! One simply can't maintain a funk, whilst listening to good Texas Swing. There is sound on this site.
NPR : Asleep at the Wheel: Driving Western Swing: "npr"
THE END IS NEAR!
Millions of people—Christian millenarians, jihadists, psychedelicized Burning Men—are straight-out wishful about The End. Of course, we have the loons with us always; their sulfurous scent if not the scale of the present fanaticism is familiar from the last third of the last century—the Weathermen and Jim Jones and the Branch Davidians. But there seem to be more of them now by orders of magnitude (60-odd million “Left Behind” novels have been sold), and they’re out of the closet, networked, reaffirming their fantasies, proselytizing. Some thousands of Muslims are working seriously to provoke the blessed Armageddon. And the Christian Rapturists’ support of a militant Israel isn’t driven mainly by principled devotion to an outpost of Western democracy but by their fervent wish to see crazy biblical fantasies realized ASAP—that is, the persecution of the Jews by the Antichrist and the Battle of Armageddon.
Why Everyone Has Apocalypse Fever -- New York Magazine
Why Everyone Has Apocalypse Fever -- New York Magazine
28.9.06
Ah, the Metropolitan opened with Butterfly on Tuesday. A new season with Mr. Gelb at the helm. He promises to bring the opera to us in new ways. Fine, as long as the music and production values are not compromised. So, BRAVO! BRAVA! and welcome another brilliant season.
The FT may have a more realistic view. "The brouhaha was spectacular. Manhattan was agog with excitement. On Monday, Peter Gelb, hitherto best known as a record-company executive, took over as head honcho at the mighty Met. He chose not to tread lightly.
To inaugurate his regime, he imported Anthony Minghella’s quasi-cinematic, stubbornly decorative production of Madama Butterfly from the English National Opera. That achievement per se should have moved relatively little earth. Gelb persuaded conservative New Yorkers, however, that he had engineered a coup akin to the second coming of Puccini.
He turned the dress rehearsal into an open house, admission free. He beamed the inaugural gala to massive television screens erected on the Lincoln Center plaza out front and at distant Times Square. Before the downbeat and during two extended intervals, he offered breathless interviews with gushing celebrities in attendance, informal fashion shows, architectural panoramas, rehearsal sequences, conversations with artists and ceremonies honouring millionaire donors. The impresario also transmitted the performance, the first of many, to subscribers via satellite radio. Obviously, a populist revolution had begun.
Under the circumstances, Butterfly seemed an appropriate vehicle. It abounds, after all, in hum-along melody while it deals in simple pathos. It is, we had thought, a virtually foolproof tear-jerker. On this occasion, however, it jerked few tears. Minghella’s cool and calculating interpretation, reinforced by Michael Levine and Han Feng (designers), Carolyn Choa (choreographer) and Peter Mumford (lighting), values pretty pictures as it dabbles in modernism – high-mirror vistas, fan-dance divertissements, static tableaux, irrelevant flashbacks and flashforwards, balletic distractions and stagey abstractions.
The result looks undeniably clever and endlessly artsy. Unfortunately, Minghella blurs many a narrative turn and seems embarrassed by the composer’s unabashed emotionalism.
Central to the alienation is a bizarre bit of stylisation. Butterfly’s little son, aptly named Trouble, is portrayed here not by a flesh-and-blood actor but by a Bunraku puppet. One has to admire the inherent virtuosity. One has to deplore the inherent gimmicky. Abandoned by her ugly- American husband, Cio-Cio-San commits suicide when asked to part with her adored child. If the object of her desperation is a wooden dummy, her ultimate sacrifice seems a bit silly.
Minghella’s essentially cerebral concept found a jolting contradiction in the pit, where James Levine enforced unusually slow movement and surprisingly sentimental accents. This, not incidentally, was the first Butterfly of his 35-year tenure at the Met; also his only Butterfly of the season. Puccini may not be Levine’s forte.
The uneven cast was led by Cristina Gallardo-Domâs, a heroine whose timidity emerged chronically droopy and whose vocalism vacillated between sensitive introspection and climactic strain. Marcello Giordani partnered her as a ceaselessly plangent, properly dashing Pinkerton. Like most Suzukis, Maria Zifchak capitalised on supportive restraint. Dwayne Croft exuded sympathy as Sharpless but sounded threadbare. Although strangely attired like the Mikado, Greg Fedderly managed to avoid caricature as Goro. Ultimately, poor Butterfly got lost amid the ballyhoo. From the 26 October, FINANCIAL TIMES
PHYSICS
Our splendid little world.
As if we can comprehend this, I submit from the Economist:
Loop quantum gravity is, in the jargon, background independent. This means that theorists working on it believe the laws of nature can be stated without making any prior assumptions about the geometry of space and time. Space and time are mere consequences of these laws. Loop quantum gravity can be visualised, as its name suggests, as a mesh of loops. According to its rules, it is meaningless to ask where in space and time this mesh exists, because the mesh is the stuff of which space and time are composed.
That is significant because it radically alters physicists' understanding of reality. Space is no longer the stage on which the pageant of existence is played out; it becomes part of the drama. Indeed, theorists working on loop quantum gravity think that matter itself is merely the result of twisting and braiding ribbons of space-time. A fundamental particle is created when three ribbons are joined in a plait. If one of the ribbons in the plait is twisted, it gives the resulting particle an electric charge. If it is twisted in the opposite direction, the particle has the opposite charge. And if it is twisted twice, the particle gains double the charge. So far, the theorists have described how three of the 16 particles in the Standard Model of particle physics may be created in this way.
String theory is the more established of the two; some 90% of theoretical physicists are engaged in developing it. But both it and loop quantum gravity harbour unresolved problems. Most important, neither has been tested experimentally. Nor, despite hopeful talk to the contrary, is there much prospect of an experiment being devised. While particle-physics colliders and space-based observatories could rule out some of the more exotic versions of each, no one has been able to suggest a way to decide between them in general.
Having two candidates for a theory of everything is almost as upsetting to physicists as their inability to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity in the first place. They would far rather have just one. This could be achieved by finding which one is right and which one is wrong, by finding that both string theory and loop quantum gravity are wrong and a third theory is right, or by finding that the two theories can be unified. Unfortunately, 20 years down the line, exactly how this may be done remains elusive.
Economist.com
OKAY....., and the New Yorker this week (2 October issue) also has a splendid piece on the string theory. http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/061002crat_atlarge This article is very brilliantly written and equally opaque to me, however that has not impeded me from trying to memorize a few phrases for my next cocktail hour lecture on the subject.
But the gold standard of these drones is still Woody Allen, also courtesy of the New Yorker ca. 2003:
I am greatly relieved that the universe is finally explainable. I was beginning to think it was me. As it turns out, physics, like a grating relative, has all the answers. The big bang, black holes, and the primordial soup turn up every Tuesday in the Science section of the Times, and as a result my grasp of general relativity and quantum mechanics now equals Einstein’s—Einstein Moomjy, that is, the rug seller. How could I not have known that there are little things the size of “Planck length” in the universe, which are a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimetre? Imagine if you dropped one in a dark theatre how hard it would be to find. And how does gravity work? And if it were to cease suddenly would certain restaurants still require a jacket? What I do know about physics is that to a man standing on the shore time passes quicker than to a man on a boat—especially if the man on the boat is with his wife. The latest miracle of physics is string theory, which has been heralded as a T.O.E., or “Theory of Everything.” This may even include the incident of last week herewith described.
I awoke on Friday and because the universe is expanding it took me longer than usual to find my robe. This made me late leaving for work, and because the concept of up and down is relative the elevator I got into went to the roof, where it was very difficult to hail a taxi. Please keep in mind that a man on a rocket ship approaching the speed of light would have seemed on time for work—or perhaps even a little early and certainly better dressed. When I finally got to the office and approached my employer Mr. Muchnick to explain the delay, my mass increased the closer I came to him, which he took as a sign of insubordination. There was some rather bitter talk of docking my pay, which, when measured against the speed of light, is very small anyhow. The truth is that compared to the amount of atoms in the Andromeda Galaxy I actually earn quite little. I tried to tell this to Mr. Muchnick, who said I was not taking into account that time and space were the same thing. He swore that if that situation should change he would give me a raise. I pointed out that since time and space are the same thing, and it takes three hours to do something that turns out to be less than six inches long, it can’t sell for more than five dollars. The one good thing about space being the same as time is that if you travel to the outer reaches of the universe and the voyage takes three thousand earth years, your friends will be dead when you come back, but you will not need Botox.
Back in my office, with the sunlight streaming through the window, I thought to myself that if our great golden star suddenly exploded this planet would fly out of orbit and hurtle through infinity forever—another good reason to always carry a cell phone. On the other hand, if I could someday go faster than a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second and recapture the light born centuries ago, could I then go back in time to ancient Egypt or Imperial Rome? But what would I do there: I hardly knew anybody. It was at this moment that our new secretary, Miss Lola Kelly, walked in. Now, in the debate over whether everything is made up of particles or waves Miss Kelly is definitely waves. You can tell she’s waves every time she walks to the water cooler. Not that she doesn’t have good particles but it’s the waves that get her the trinkets from Tiffany’s. My wife is more waves than particles, too, it’s just that her waves have begun to sag a little. Or maybe the problem is that my wife has too many quarks. The truth is, lately she looks as if she had passed too close to the event horizon of a black hole and some of her—not all of her by any means—was sucked in. It gives her a kind of funny shape, which I’m hoping will be correctable by cold fusion. My advice to anyone has always been to avoid black holes because, once inside, it’s extremely hard to climb out and still retain one’s ear for music. If, by chance, you do fall all the way through a black hole and emerge from the other side, you’ll probably live your entire life over and over but will be too compressed to go out and meet girls.
And so I approached Miss Kelly’s gravitational field and could feel my strings vibrating. All I knew was that I wanted to wrap my weak-gauge bosons around her gluons, slip through a wormhole, and do some quantum tunnelling. It was at this point that I was rendered impotent by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. How could I act if I couldn’t determine her exact position and velocity? And what if I should suddenly cause a singularity; that is, a devastating rupture in space-time? They’re so noisy. Everyone would look up and I’d be embarrassed in front of Miss Kelly. Ah, but the woman has such good dark energy. Dark energy, though hypothetical, has always been a turn-on for me, especially in a female who has an overbite. I fantasized that if I could only get her into a particle accelerator for five minutes with a bottle of Château Lafite I’d be standing next to her, with our quanta approximating the speed of light and her nucleus colliding with mine. Of course, exactly at this moment I got a piece of antimatter in my eye and had to find a Q-tip to remove it. I had all but lost hope when she turned toward me and spoke.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was about to order some coffee and Danish but now I can’t seem to remember the Schrödinger equation. Isn’t that silly? It’s just slipped my mind.”
“Evolution of probability waves,” I said. “And if you’re ordering I’d love an English muffin with muons and tea.”
“My pleasure,” she said, smiling coquettishly and curling up into a Calabi-Yau shape. I could feel my coupling constant invade her weak field as I pressed my lips to her wet neutrinos. Apparently I achieved some kind of fission, because the next thing I knew I was picking myself up off the floor with a mouse on my eye the size of a supernova.
I guess physics can explain everything except the softer sex, although I told my wife I got the shiner because the universe was contracting, not expanding, and I just wasn’t paying attention.
As if we can comprehend this, I submit from the Economist:
Loop quantum gravity is, in the jargon, background independent. This means that theorists working on it believe the laws of nature can be stated without making any prior assumptions about the geometry of space and time. Space and time are mere consequences of these laws. Loop quantum gravity can be visualised, as its name suggests, as a mesh of loops. According to its rules, it is meaningless to ask where in space and time this mesh exists, because the mesh is the stuff of which space and time are composed.
That is significant because it radically alters physicists' understanding of reality. Space is no longer the stage on which the pageant of existence is played out; it becomes part of the drama. Indeed, theorists working on loop quantum gravity think that matter itself is merely the result of twisting and braiding ribbons of space-time. A fundamental particle is created when three ribbons are joined in a plait. If one of the ribbons in the plait is twisted, it gives the resulting particle an electric charge. If it is twisted in the opposite direction, the particle has the opposite charge. And if it is twisted twice, the particle gains double the charge. So far, the theorists have described how three of the 16 particles in the Standard Model of particle physics may be created in this way.
String theory is the more established of the two; some 90% of theoretical physicists are engaged in developing it. But both it and loop quantum gravity harbour unresolved problems. Most important, neither has been tested experimentally. Nor, despite hopeful talk to the contrary, is there much prospect of an experiment being devised. While particle-physics colliders and space-based observatories could rule out some of the more exotic versions of each, no one has been able to suggest a way to decide between them in general.
Having two candidates for a theory of everything is almost as upsetting to physicists as their inability to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity in the first place. They would far rather have just one. This could be achieved by finding which one is right and which one is wrong, by finding that both string theory and loop quantum gravity are wrong and a third theory is right, or by finding that the two theories can be unified. Unfortunately, 20 years down the line, exactly how this may be done remains elusive.
Economist.com
OKAY....., and the New Yorker this week (2 October issue) also has a splendid piece on the string theory. http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/061002crat_atlarge This article is very brilliantly written and equally opaque to me, however that has not impeded me from trying to memorize a few phrases for my next cocktail hour lecture on the subject.
But the gold standard of these drones is still Woody Allen, also courtesy of the New Yorker ca. 2003:
I am greatly relieved that the universe is finally explainable. I was beginning to think it was me. As it turns out, physics, like a grating relative, has all the answers. The big bang, black holes, and the primordial soup turn up every Tuesday in the Science section of the Times, and as a result my grasp of general relativity and quantum mechanics now equals Einstein’s—Einstein Moomjy, that is, the rug seller. How could I not have known that there are little things the size of “Planck length” in the universe, which are a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimetre? Imagine if you dropped one in a dark theatre how hard it would be to find. And how does gravity work? And if it were to cease suddenly would certain restaurants still require a jacket? What I do know about physics is that to a man standing on the shore time passes quicker than to a man on a boat—especially if the man on the boat is with his wife. The latest miracle of physics is string theory, which has been heralded as a T.O.E., or “Theory of Everything.” This may even include the incident of last week herewith described.
I awoke on Friday and because the universe is expanding it took me longer than usual to find my robe. This made me late leaving for work, and because the concept of up and down is relative the elevator I got into went to the roof, where it was very difficult to hail a taxi. Please keep in mind that a man on a rocket ship approaching the speed of light would have seemed on time for work—or perhaps even a little early and certainly better dressed. When I finally got to the office and approached my employer Mr. Muchnick to explain the delay, my mass increased the closer I came to him, which he took as a sign of insubordination. There was some rather bitter talk of docking my pay, which, when measured against the speed of light, is very small anyhow. The truth is that compared to the amount of atoms in the Andromeda Galaxy I actually earn quite little. I tried to tell this to Mr. Muchnick, who said I was not taking into account that time and space were the same thing. He swore that if that situation should change he would give me a raise. I pointed out that since time and space are the same thing, and it takes three hours to do something that turns out to be less than six inches long, it can’t sell for more than five dollars. The one good thing about space being the same as time is that if you travel to the outer reaches of the universe and the voyage takes three thousand earth years, your friends will be dead when you come back, but you will not need Botox.
Back in my office, with the sunlight streaming through the window, I thought to myself that if our great golden star suddenly exploded this planet would fly out of orbit and hurtle through infinity forever—another good reason to always carry a cell phone. On the other hand, if I could someday go faster than a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second and recapture the light born centuries ago, could I then go back in time to ancient Egypt or Imperial Rome? But what would I do there: I hardly knew anybody. It was at this moment that our new secretary, Miss Lola Kelly, walked in. Now, in the debate over whether everything is made up of particles or waves Miss Kelly is definitely waves. You can tell she’s waves every time she walks to the water cooler. Not that she doesn’t have good particles but it’s the waves that get her the trinkets from Tiffany’s. My wife is more waves than particles, too, it’s just that her waves have begun to sag a little. Or maybe the problem is that my wife has too many quarks. The truth is, lately she looks as if she had passed too close to the event horizon of a black hole and some of her—not all of her by any means—was sucked in. It gives her a kind of funny shape, which I’m hoping will be correctable by cold fusion. My advice to anyone has always been to avoid black holes because, once inside, it’s extremely hard to climb out and still retain one’s ear for music. If, by chance, you do fall all the way through a black hole and emerge from the other side, you’ll probably live your entire life over and over but will be too compressed to go out and meet girls.
And so I approached Miss Kelly’s gravitational field and could feel my strings vibrating. All I knew was that I wanted to wrap my weak-gauge bosons around her gluons, slip through a wormhole, and do some quantum tunnelling. It was at this point that I was rendered impotent by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. How could I act if I couldn’t determine her exact position and velocity? And what if I should suddenly cause a singularity; that is, a devastating rupture in space-time? They’re so noisy. Everyone would look up and I’d be embarrassed in front of Miss Kelly. Ah, but the woman has such good dark energy. Dark energy, though hypothetical, has always been a turn-on for me, especially in a female who has an overbite. I fantasized that if I could only get her into a particle accelerator for five minutes with a bottle of Château Lafite I’d be standing next to her, with our quanta approximating the speed of light and her nucleus colliding with mine. Of course, exactly at this moment I got a piece of antimatter in my eye and had to find a Q-tip to remove it. I had all but lost hope when she turned toward me and spoke.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was about to order some coffee and Danish but now I can’t seem to remember the Schrödinger equation. Isn’t that silly? It’s just slipped my mind.”
“Evolution of probability waves,” I said. “And if you’re ordering I’d love an English muffin with muons and tea.”
“My pleasure,” she said, smiling coquettishly and curling up into a Calabi-Yau shape. I could feel my coupling constant invade her weak field as I pressed my lips to her wet neutrinos. Apparently I achieved some kind of fission, because the next thing I knew I was picking myself up off the floor with a mouse on my eye the size of a supernova.
I guess physics can explain everything except the softer sex, although I told my wife I got the shiner because the universe was contracting, not expanding, and I just wasn’t paying attention.
Bill Clinton's 60th Birthday Blowout
CHELSEA, in case you forgot your blackberry, my address is......
Bill Clinton's 60th Birthday Benefit Blowout - washingtonpost.com:
"The 2,100 invitations began arriving this week. Weekend packages start at $60,000 (Hint: $1,000 for every year of Clinton's age). Next is the 'Vice Chair Package,' for those who contribute $100,000 or raise $250,000. Those who pledge $500,000 or more will receive the 'Birthday Chair Package,' which includes the 'Backstage Pass' dinner and photo with Clinton and platinum seating at the Saturday dinner and the Stones concert.
The Rolling Stones will perform at the Beacon Theater, an art deco landmark on upper Broadway that seats about 3,000 people. According to the invitation, the concert will be taped for an upcoming Martin Scorsese movie about the band. Organizers of the event would not say whether the Stones will be paid for their appearance."
Bill Clinton's 60th Birthday Benefit Blowout - washingtonpost.com:
"The 2,100 invitations began arriving this week. Weekend packages start at $60,000 (Hint: $1,000 for every year of Clinton's age). Next is the 'Vice Chair Package,' for those who contribute $100,000 or raise $250,000. Those who pledge $500,000 or more will receive the 'Birthday Chair Package,' which includes the 'Backstage Pass' dinner and photo with Clinton and platinum seating at the Saturday dinner and the Stones concert.
The Rolling Stones will perform at the Beacon Theater, an art deco landmark on upper Broadway that seats about 3,000 people. According to the invitation, the concert will be taped for an upcoming Martin Scorsese movie about the band. Organizers of the event would not say whether the Stones will be paid for their appearance."
27.9.06
AMIS
Breath was just another weapon - TLS Highlights - Times Online:
"A spare, even austere performance, Amis’s striking new novel marks an extension of the dark thread that surfaces in works such as Einstein’s Monsters (1987), Time’s Arrow (1991) and, most pertinently, the working through of personal and collective animus in Koba the Dread (2002); and if early works such as The Rachel Papers (1973) and Dead Babies (1975) now have a layer of unintentional historical quaintness about them, House of Meetings sees Amis working self-consciously in the mode of historical fiction, to powerful effect."
"A spare, even austere performance, Amis’s striking new novel marks an extension of the dark thread that surfaces in works such as Einstein’s Monsters (1987), Time’s Arrow (1991) and, most pertinently, the working through of personal and collective animus in Koba the Dread (2002); and if early works such as The Rachel Papers (1973) and Dead Babies (1975) now have a layer of unintentional historical quaintness about them, House of Meetings sees Amis working self-consciously in the mode of historical fiction, to powerful effect."
Honestly, I was searching for some scene of autumnal beauty, perhaps a reference to the football season, but I kept seeing her looking at me. The film was poorly reviewed, so let's let her have another look.
NEWSFLASH. 30 September.
Esquire has just named Ms. Johansson, the "Sexiest Woman Alive". Regular readers will not be surprised that I heartily concur.
MICHLEMAS
Michaelmas 29 September.
It's not just the name of a term, it's the feast day of St. Michael, the archangel and overcomer of the Devil. It is is a Christian celebration based on the ancient Celtic calendar. Its main importance in people's lives was that of a seasonal signpost in the year. In the British Isles, crops were harvested and the surplus sold by late September, so this became the time when farmers would pay their yearly rents to landowners. Everyone ate goose at Michaelmas to bring prosperity, and many farmers included "a goose fit for the lord's dinner" with their rent payments. Great market fairs occurred just before the feast day, and the large crowds these attracted made it convenient to hold elections at this time. Foods traditional for Michaelmas include new wine; goose; cakes of oats, barley, and rye; and carrots. (Texans are free to substitute corn dogs.)
It's not just the name of a term, it's the feast day of St. Michael, the archangel and overcomer of the Devil. It is is a Christian celebration based on the ancient Celtic calendar. Its main importance in people's lives was that of a seasonal signpost in the year. In the British Isles, crops were harvested and the surplus sold by late September, so this became the time when farmers would pay their yearly rents to landowners. Everyone ate goose at Michaelmas to bring prosperity, and many farmers included "a goose fit for the lord's dinner" with their rent payments. Great market fairs occurred just before the feast day, and the large crowds these attracted made it convenient to hold elections at this time. Foods traditional for Michaelmas include new wine; goose; cakes of oats, barley, and rye; and carrots. (Texans are free to substitute corn dogs.)
BOO! Opera's Bow to Islamic Extremists
Mecca, we have a problem here. Has it come this far that we can't see Idodemeo?
Mozart has survived grandiose conductors and abstract interpretations, but the librettos for his operas never cast Islamic radicals threatening a skittish theater company. On a day of messy drama and furious debate over free speech, German Opera in Berlin reaffirmed Tuesday its decision not to revive a production of Mozart's "Idomeneo" out of fear of inciting Islamic extremists over a scene showing the severed head of the prophet Muhammad.
The cancellation of a work that has run intermittently since 2003 drew a rebuke from politicians and theater critics, who regarded it as a defeat for creative expression and a victory for militant Islamists over liberal European tradition.
Germans Jeering Opera's Bow to Islamic Extremists - Los Angeles Times
Mozart has survived grandiose conductors and abstract interpretations, but the librettos for his operas never cast Islamic radicals threatening a skittish theater company. On a day of messy drama and furious debate over free speech, German Opera in Berlin reaffirmed Tuesday its decision not to revive a production of Mozart's "Idomeneo" out of fear of inciting Islamic extremists over a scene showing the severed head of the prophet Muhammad.
The cancellation of a work that has run intermittently since 2003 drew a rebuke from politicians and theater critics, who regarded it as a defeat for creative expression and a victory for militant Islamists over liberal European tradition.
Germans Jeering Opera's Bow to Islamic Extremists - Los Angeles Times
The Chicago Manual of Style
"It's practical, it's pragmatic, and it's based on the collected wisdom of people who struggle with thorny issues every day," explains Anita Samen, managing editor of the Chicago press's books division and one of the people behind the online edition. "The manual has always recognized that language evolves, and our guidelines have evolved as well."
For many in publishing, The Chicago Manual of Style continues to be an object of veneration. "Like a lot of editors, I really cut my teeth on Chicago," says Ted Genoways, editor of the literary magazine VQR. "Using different manuals over the years, you come to appreciate how thorough it is and how thoughtful it is. ... We have, like so many places, small departures from the manual for our house style, but it's just so complete that I don't think it will ever be surpassed."
Asked if there was anything he would change about it, Mr. Genoways replies, "It's like asking which of the Ten Commandments you would change. It's the rule book. I don't question it much."
The Chronicle: 9/29/2006: 'The Chicago Manual of Style' Marks Its Centennial With an Online Version
For many in publishing, The Chicago Manual of Style continues to be an object of veneration. "Like a lot of editors, I really cut my teeth on Chicago," says Ted Genoways, editor of the literary magazine VQR. "Using different manuals over the years, you come to appreciate how thorough it is and how thoughtful it is. ... We have, like so many places, small departures from the manual for our house style, but it's just so complete that I don't think it will ever be surpassed."
Asked if there was anything he would change about it, Mr. Genoways replies, "It's like asking which of the Ten Commandments you would change. It's the rule book. I don't question it much."
The Chronicle: 9/29/2006: 'The Chicago Manual of Style' Marks Its Centennial With an Online Version
National Cultural Profiles
The Telegraph has a data base of 70 'National Cultural Profiles'. The one below is of France, but all of them make interesting reading.
Telegraph Expat National Cultural Profiles France
Telegraph Expat National Cultural Profiles France
26.9.06
graphic sex, porn or not
Egad, a truly intelligent discussion of porn. (Well illustrated to boot.)
Why the graphic sex in Destricted is more than porn. By Jim Lewis - Slate Magazine
Why the graphic sex in Destricted is more than porn. By Jim Lewis - Slate Magazine
NOAM CHOMSKY
So, who is Noam Chomsky and should we care about his views of American Foreign Policy?
OpinionJournal - Leisure & Arts:
"Although some of those ideas had been foreseen by the pioneers of modern logic, Prof. Chomsky develops them with an imaginative flair that is entirely his own. He has the true scientist's ability to translate abstract theory into concrete observation, and to discover intellectual problems where others see only ordinary facts. 'Has,' I say, but perhaps 'had' would be more accurate. For Prof. Chomsky long ago cast off his academic gown and donned the mantle of the prophet. For several decades now he has been devoting his energies to denouncing his native country, usually before packed halls of fans who couldn't care a fig about the theory of syntax. And many of his public appearances are in America: the only country in the whole world that rewards those who denounce it with the honors and opportunities that make denouncing it into a rewarding way of life. It is proof of Prof. Chomsky's success that his diatribes are distributed by his American publishers around the world, so as to end up in the hands of America's critics everywhere--Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez included."
OpinionJournal - Leisure & Arts:
"Although some of those ideas had been foreseen by the pioneers of modern logic, Prof. Chomsky develops them with an imaginative flair that is entirely his own. He has the true scientist's ability to translate abstract theory into concrete observation, and to discover intellectual problems where others see only ordinary facts. 'Has,' I say, but perhaps 'had' would be more accurate. For Prof. Chomsky long ago cast off his academic gown and donned the mantle of the prophet. For several decades now he has been devoting his energies to denouncing his native country, usually before packed halls of fans who couldn't care a fig about the theory of syntax. And many of his public appearances are in America: the only country in the whole world that rewards those who denounce it with the honors and opportunities that make denouncing it into a rewarding way of life. It is proof of Prof. Chomsky's success that his diatribes are distributed by his American publishers around the world, so as to end up in the hands of America's critics everywhere--Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez included."
The New Yorker
See my comments on 13 September on The Guardian's brilliant profile of David Remnick. Sometimes, however, even the best outdoes itself, this week the New Yorker offers: Remnick's staggering profile of Clinton (on the web from last weeks print edition), a splendid explication of the string theory, Bill Buford on Food TV and Woody Allen on well..... Surely an embarrassment of riches.
The New Yorker: Main: Start
The New Yorker: Main: Start
TS Eliot
It's the birthday of T.S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, born into a prominent Unitarian family in Saint Louis (1888). He was fond of his childhood, and he liked to watch steamboats going up the Mississippi River. He adored his Irish nurse, Annie, who brought him to church and talked to him about God. He loved to read, especially the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. He was a bird watcher and could identify more than 70 kinds of birds.
But he didn't have many friends as a boy, and he also had trouble making friends at Harvard, where he went to college. He joined some clubs and went to dances and parties here and there. He lifted weights to try to improve his appearance. But in the end, he remained somewhat of a recluse.
After Harvard, Eliot moved to England, where he got a job as a banker. He was a fastidious worker, arriving at 9:30 and leaving at 5:30 every day, working one Saturday every month. He ate lunch every day at the same restaurant, called Baker's Chop House. He met and married a 26-year-old ballet dancer named Vivienne Haigh-Wood. They had known each other for only three months, and didn't ever become completely comfortable with each other. They slept in separate rooms, and Eliot couldn't bring himself to shave in front of her. A few years into their marriage, he joined the Church of England and took a vow of chastity.
From a young age, Eliot wrote about moral decay and getting old and the hopelessness of life, and he expressed those feelings in his most famous poem, The Waste Land (1922), a long dark poem about the search for redemption in a post-World War I world.
After he divorced, Eliot had other women who loved him and wanted to marry him. Eliot said that living with a woman was a "nightmare" and something that didn't interest him. But when he was almost 70, he secretly married his 30-year-old secretary, Valerie.
Eliot and his wife were together all the time, and she made him very happy. He never left her side, and he wrote her a letter every week. They sat at home together, playing Scrabble over cheese and Scotch whiskey. His health was failing, but he brought her on a trip to the United States—to Texas and New York and Boston. They went out dancing at a boat party thrown by some Harvard students. He started telling practical jokes and became fond of whoopee cushions and exploding cigars. He wrote a fan letter to Groucho Marx, who wrote back, and the two became close pen pals.
Eliot said, "This last part of my life is the best, in excess of anything I could have deserved."
The Writer's Almanac for Tuesday, September 26, 2006
But he didn't have many friends as a boy, and he also had trouble making friends at Harvard, where he went to college. He joined some clubs and went to dances and parties here and there. He lifted weights to try to improve his appearance. But in the end, he remained somewhat of a recluse.
After Harvard, Eliot moved to England, where he got a job as a banker. He was a fastidious worker, arriving at 9:30 and leaving at 5:30 every day, working one Saturday every month. He ate lunch every day at the same restaurant, called Baker's Chop House. He met and married a 26-year-old ballet dancer named Vivienne Haigh-Wood. They had known each other for only three months, and didn't ever become completely comfortable with each other. They slept in separate rooms, and Eliot couldn't bring himself to shave in front of her. A few years into their marriage, he joined the Church of England and took a vow of chastity.
From a young age, Eliot wrote about moral decay and getting old and the hopelessness of life, and he expressed those feelings in his most famous poem, The Waste Land (1922), a long dark poem about the search for redemption in a post-World War I world.
After he divorced, Eliot had other women who loved him and wanted to marry him. Eliot said that living with a woman was a "nightmare" and something that didn't interest him. But when he was almost 70, he secretly married his 30-year-old secretary, Valerie.
Eliot and his wife were together all the time, and she made him very happy. He never left her side, and he wrote her a letter every week. They sat at home together, playing Scrabble over cheese and Scotch whiskey. His health was failing, but he brought her on a trip to the United States—to Texas and New York and Boston. They went out dancing at a boat party thrown by some Harvard students. He started telling practical jokes and became fond of whoopee cushions and exploding cigars. He wrote a fan letter to Groucho Marx, who wrote back, and the two became close pen pals.
Eliot said, "This last part of my life is the best, in excess of anything I could have deserved."
The Writer's Almanac for Tuesday, September 26, 2006
JULIAN BARNES
"Of the golden generation of British novelists now within hailing distance of old age, Julian Barnes is much the hardest to pin down. Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan – you know where you are with them, and have done for years.
But the unifying theme of Barnes's work? The through line? If there is such a thing, it's an elegant unknowability, a distaste for the business of sifting through the contents of his own navel.
The one time I met Auberon Waugh, the founder of Literary Review, he was arguing that no one would be reading Barnes in 20 years' time. This would have been about 20 years ago. Waugh had recently set up his literary magazine as a sort of critical sea-wall, its task to hold back the tide of postmodernism, experimentalism, clever-clever obfuscation and general dicking around with form. Perhaps Waugh was just trying to wish Barnes into obscurity. He was best known at that point for Metroland, a debut that loitered in suburbia and didn't frighten the horses, followed by Flaubert's Parrot, which did."
But the unifying theme of Barnes's work? The through line? If there is such a thing, it's an elegant unknowability, a distaste for the business of sifting through the contents of his own navel.
The one time I met Auberon Waugh, the founder of Literary Review, he was arguing that no one would be reading Barnes in 20 years' time. This would have been about 20 years ago. Waugh had recently set up his literary magazine as a sort of critical sea-wall, its task to hold back the tide of postmodernism, experimentalism, clever-clever obfuscation and general dicking around with form. Perhaps Waugh was just trying to wish Barnes into obscurity. He was best known at that point for Metroland, a debut that loitered in suburbia and didn't frighten the horses, followed by Flaubert's Parrot, which did."
MICHAEL FRAYN: The wise guy
See, my previous comments on Mr. Frayn, a particular favorite of mine made 0n 8 September, infra. This interview, published in The Scotsman is just splendid.
His recent novels, among them Headlong (shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and Spies (Whitbread Award winner two years ago), have sold better. Does Frayn harbour the instincts of the spy? 'Mmm ... not really. I only hesitate because, in a sense, all fiction writers are spies. Although they seem to be taking part in human life, they then go away and report on other people's activities.' "
Scotsman.com Living - Books - The wise guy:
" living.scotsman.com http:>
BORN IN THE CHINESE YEAR OF THE WATER rooster, thus bracketing him with Kierkegaard, Joan Rivers, Michael Caine and Boxcar Willie, playwright, novelist and student of philosophy Michael Frayn, 73, doubles up as an astrological Virgo. These stellar propensities, though, stay unmentioned during the course of our brief conversation. Already intimidated by the rigour of his latest foray into philosophy, The Human Touch, I refrain from the slightest whiff of such astral mish-mash. Water roosters do not suffer fools.
He has taken his spectacles off. His domed forehead is mapped with deep grooves. His shirt is white, his chinos blue. But what does this mean, the blueness of blue? Once you have tussled with The Human Touch the sense of things being ill-defined or provisional tends to haunt each sentence you utter.
Frayn, a stork of a man whose head seems somewhat heavy for his body, emits a no-nonsense sense of gravitas. My water rooster informant declares the type to be "flinty and meticulous. He can always find a new way to make a living out of nothing ... and dreams of leisure time to lie about reading novels and books on philosophy." My informant fails to realise that Frayn produces such booty as well as consuming it.
He made a starry reputation first as a satirist, writing a bracingly funny column for the Guardian in the early 1960s. His first novels, all five of them comedies, none of which sold well, won critical plaudits (The Russian Interpreter scooped the Hawthornden Prize in 1967), while his philosophy tome, Constructions, a series of 309 numbered thoughts ("you can't live in the present any more than you can live in the border between Kent and Sussex"), set him in territory occupied by the century's greatest thinkers (Frayn read moral sciences at Cambridge).
His recent novels, among them Headlong (shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and Spies (Whitbread Award winner two years ago), have sold better. Does Frayn harbour the instincts of the spy? 'Mmm ... not really. I only hesitate because, in a sense, all fiction writers are spies. Although they seem to be taking part in human life, they then go away and report on other people's activities.' "
Scotsman.com Living - Books - The wise guy:
" living.scotsman.com http:>
How David Beckham tried to control the National Portrait Gallery's use of his picture
The notion of common or public property rights in one's own likeness is complicated by intellectual property law which both promotes free and uncompensated comment but does allow limited commercial exploitation by protecting certain rights. Hence, OJ Simpson is being sued by his creditors (the family of one of his murder victims) to gain any profit Mr. Simpson is making from the use of his name.
Telegraph News How David Beckham tried to control the National Portrait Gallery's use of his picture
Telegraph News How David Beckham tried to control the National Portrait Gallery's use of his picture
23.9.06
Bush and his critics
I am certainly not one of those enamoured of the job done by George Bush. But I am troubled by the seemingly unglued reaction he engenders in otherwise rational beings. The intense heat of these ad hominem attacks does not help the political discourse.
Since the president’s re-election, loathers of George W. Bush have had no shortage of cudgels with which to club him: a distressingly belated response to Hurricane Katrina; an experiment in warrantless wiretapping; a modest parade of indictments; a nation-building project so distant from its original intent that our troops are now caught in a proto-civil war. One can certainly understand how these developments — and Bush’s correspondingly rotten approval ratings — have emboldened the opposition. The problem is that these developments have also made the president’s critics more susceptible to rhetorical excess, and Bush, like his predecessor, already has an impressive gift for bringing out the yawping worst in those who disagree with him. Otherwise reasonable people go slightly berserk on the subject of his motives; on the subject of his morality, the hinged fall off their door frames and even the stable become unglued. This is both an aesthetic problem and a substantive one. Substantively, it means gerrymandering evidence so that inconvenient facts don’t make it onto the map. And aesthetically, it means speaking in a compromising and not wholly credible tone.
Books by Lewis H. Lapham and Sidney Blumenthal - New York Times
Since the president’s re-election, loathers of George W. Bush have had no shortage of cudgels with which to club him: a distressingly belated response to Hurricane Katrina; an experiment in warrantless wiretapping; a modest parade of indictments; a nation-building project so distant from its original intent that our troops are now caught in a proto-civil war. One can certainly understand how these developments — and Bush’s correspondingly rotten approval ratings — have emboldened the opposition. The problem is that these developments have also made the president’s critics more susceptible to rhetorical excess, and Bush, like his predecessor, already has an impressive gift for bringing out the yawping worst in those who disagree with him. Otherwise reasonable people go slightly berserk on the subject of his motives; on the subject of his morality, the hinged fall off their door frames and even the stable become unglued. This is both an aesthetic problem and a substantive one. Substantively, it means gerrymandering evidence so that inconvenient facts don’t make it onto the map. And aesthetically, it means speaking in a compromising and not wholly credible tone.
Books by Lewis H. Lapham and Sidney Blumenthal - New York Times
Doomed international - Frances Fukuyama
The arguments over Fukuyama’s new book have not just been among conservative think-tank intellectuals. Soon after publication the White House itself entered the brawl, sending emails citing contradictions between Fukuyama’s past statements and the positions taken in his new book, particularly his support in 1988 for the forcible overthrow of Saddam Hussein. As Tod Lindberg, Editor of the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review, put it, the Bush administration has been “more influenced by Mr. Fukuyama’s work than by that of any other living thinker”.On the sidelines, liberal commentators and reviewers in the United States have watched with a mixture of righteousness and glee the long-awaited conservative crackup over the ideological basis of the Bush administration’s foreign policy.
Doomed international - TLS Highlights - Times Online
Doomed international - TLS Highlights - Times Online
Clausewitz in Wonderland by Tony Corn - Policy Review
But, I wonder -- have we learned?
Amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics.” In the five years since the 9/11 events, the old military adage has undergone a “transformation” of its own: Amateurs, to be sure, continue to talk about strategy, but real professionals increasingly talk about — anthropology.
In Iraq as in Afghanistan, real professionals have learned the hard way that — to put it in a nutshell — the injunction “Know Thy Enemy, Know Thyself” matters more than the bookish “Know Thy Clausewitz” taught in war colleges. Know thy enemy: At the tactical and operational levels at least, it is anthropology, not Clausewitzology, that will shed light on the grammar and logic of tribal warfare and provide the conceptual weapons necessary to return fire. Know thyself: It is only through anthropological “distanciation” that the U.S. military (and its various “tribes”: Army, Navy, etc.) will become aware of its own cultural quirks — including a monomaniacal obsession with Clausewitz — and adapt its military culture to the new enemy.1
The first major flaw of U.S. military culture is of course “technologism” — this uniquely American contribution to the phenomenon known to anthropologists as “animism.” Infatuation with technology has led in the recent past to rhetorical self-intoxication about Network-Centric Warfare and the concomitant neglect of Culture-Centric Warfare. The second structural flaw is a Huntingtonian doctrine of civil-military relations ideally suited for the Cold War but which, given its outdated conception of “professionalism,” has outlived its usefulness and is today a major impediment to the necessary constant dialogue between the military and civilians.2
Last but not least, the third major flaw is “strategism.” At its “best,” strategism is synonymous with “strategy for strategy’s sake,” i.e., a self-referential discourse more interested in theory-building (or is it hair-splitting?) than policy-making. Strategism would be innocuous enough were it not for the fact that, in the media and academia, “realism” today is fast becoming synonymous with “absence of memory, will, and imagination”: in that context, the self-referentiality of the strategic discourse does not exactly improve the quality of the public debate. At its worst, strategism confuses education with indoctrination, and scholarship with scholasticism; in its most extreme form, it comes close to being an “intellectual terrorism” in the name of Clausewitz.
Clausewitz in Wonderland by Tony Corn - Policy Review
Amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics.” In the five years since the 9/11 events, the old military adage has undergone a “transformation” of its own: Amateurs, to be sure, continue to talk about strategy, but real professionals increasingly talk about — anthropology.
In Iraq as in Afghanistan, real professionals have learned the hard way that — to put it in a nutshell — the injunction “Know Thy Enemy, Know Thyself” matters more than the bookish “Know Thy Clausewitz” taught in war colleges. Know thy enemy: At the tactical and operational levels at least, it is anthropology, not Clausewitzology, that will shed light on the grammar and logic of tribal warfare and provide the conceptual weapons necessary to return fire. Know thyself: It is only through anthropological “distanciation” that the U.S. military (and its various “tribes”: Army, Navy, etc.) will become aware of its own cultural quirks — including a monomaniacal obsession with Clausewitz — and adapt its military culture to the new enemy.1
The first major flaw of U.S. military culture is of course “technologism” — this uniquely American contribution to the phenomenon known to anthropologists as “animism.” Infatuation with technology has led in the recent past to rhetorical self-intoxication about Network-Centric Warfare and the concomitant neglect of Culture-Centric Warfare. The second structural flaw is a Huntingtonian doctrine of civil-military relations ideally suited for the Cold War but which, given its outdated conception of “professionalism,” has outlived its usefulness and is today a major impediment to the necessary constant dialogue between the military and civilians.2
Last but not least, the third major flaw is “strategism.” At its “best,” strategism is synonymous with “strategy for strategy’s sake,” i.e., a self-referential discourse more interested in theory-building (or is it hair-splitting?) than policy-making. Strategism would be innocuous enough were it not for the fact that, in the media and academia, “realism” today is fast becoming synonymous with “absence of memory, will, and imagination”: in that context, the self-referentiality of the strategic discourse does not exactly improve the quality of the public debate. At its worst, strategism confuses education with indoctrination, and scholarship with scholasticism; in its most extreme form, it comes close to being an “intellectual terrorism” in the name of Clausewitz.
Clausewitz in Wonderland by Tony Corn - Policy Review
CAUSE CÉLÈBRE - A soiree with a serious agenda
Bill Cinton is coming back in a big way. Here a report on his 'Oscar Night'
calendarlive.com: CAUSE CÉLÈBRE - A soiree with a serious agenda
Also, don't miss his dustup with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/9/22/211041/433
calendarlive.com: CAUSE CÉLÈBRE - A soiree with a serious agenda
Also, don't miss his dustup with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/9/22/211041/433
Axis 'of the South'
"There's a new sense of the oppressed versus the oppressor," said a senior U.S. official, who asked to remain unnamed. "What they have in common is their hatred of the U.S., and it's created this solidarity across Third World lines." That solidarity hasn't been seen in the developing world since leftist liberation movements faded after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he said.The fallout from the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and other Bush administration policies may be particularly visible in the new bonds between many Muslim nations and populist regimes of South America, an alliance that some call the "axis of the south."
Anti-Americanism Is Providing a Glue - Los Angeles Times
Anti-Americanism Is Providing a Glue - Los Angeles Times
America's new age of anxiety
Telegraph Entertainment America's new age of anxiety:
"With the image of the United States at rock bottom, it seems a perverse time to bring a large exhibition of American art to London. The banner outside the Serpentine Gallery's group show of young Americans artists simply reads: 'Mission Accomplished'. By compressing into two words all the cynicism and contempt so many Americans feel for their president, the artist Paul Chan suavely disassociates American art from American policies and so disarms the potentially hostile audience likely to visit the show.
The exhibition itself is too big and too uneven in quality to be able to make many generalisations about trends in American art, but an undertow of melancholy runs through a lot of it, and some of the best work in it is about America itself."
"With the image of the United States at rock bottom, it seems a perverse time to bring a large exhibition of American art to London. The banner outside the Serpentine Gallery's group show of young Americans artists simply reads: 'Mission Accomplished'. By compressing into two words all the cynicism and contempt so many Americans feel for their president, the artist Paul Chan suavely disassociates American art from American policies and so disarms the potentially hostile audience likely to visit the show.
The exhibition itself is too big and too uneven in quality to be able to make many generalisations about trends in American art, but an undertow of melancholy runs through a lot of it, and some of the best work in it is about America itself."
Roger Scruton on the Cocktail
The effect of the cocktail is not so much physical as moral. People learn to divide themselves in two. There is the pre-cocktail person, who rises early, works industriously and thinks constantly and kindly of the folks at home; and there is the post-cocktail person who, once the first dagger has been stabbed down the throat, falls into a stunned abstraction. The speech that eventually emerges is slow and deliberate, and although the folks at home are frequently referred to, it is with a distant and slightly mournful affection, as though remembering people long since dead. The cocktail drinker is carried home to dinner at some unconscionably early hour, and with a fixed smile on the face, divested of all the habits of the workplace. It is hard to learn to drink cocktails in moderation. Like chocolates, they are designed to tempt you, with every stop pulled out. Nevertheless, the cocktail culture has overcome the demon alcohol in a way that the whiskey culture of the hill-billies has not. Murders in rural Virginia occur between consenting adults in private; and rye is almost always the catalyst. Cocktails, by contrast, belong to the world of people who have to get up in the morning - people who slice their day in two, so as to be alone with themselves for the better part of it. When unable to bear the chatter of their intimates, such people do not shoot them, but approach them with an eerie smile and silence them with an irresistible drink.
New Statesman - Drink: In the mix
New Statesman - Drink: In the mix
The spiritual hinterland of abstract art
What did Wassily Kandinsky, W. B. Yeats, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Piet Mondrian, Alexander Scriabin and Kasimir Malevitch have in common? Two were abstract painters (eventually) and three were Russian avant-gardists but what links them to the Irish nationalist poet and the Indian philosopher and spiritual teacher?
The answer (or one answer – maybe you can think of another) is theosophy, that strange mixture of progressive social thought and mystical religion (or a union of neoplatonism and Indian religious and philosophical thought) pioneered by the eccentric Madame Helena Blavatsky. She always sounds half charlatan (her claims as a medium were exposed as fraudulent by the Society for Psychical Research) but Blavatsky must have had something. Yeats, according to his biographer Roy Foster, “enjoyed her mixture of sardonic Russian wit and all-embracing mysticism”.
It would be tempting to dismiss theosophy as a “fad” (Foster’s word) – but if so it was a fad that attracted many of the most creative minds of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By the 1910s the Theosophical Society, based in magnificent premises outside Madras, had tens of thousands of adherents spread all over the world. After Blavatsky’s death, its leading light was Annie Besant, a formidable socialist and feminist, friend of Shaw and Gandhi, campaigner for Irish and Indian independence, and a woman with none of Blavatsky’s air of the fortune-teller’s tent.
FT.com / Arts & weekend / Weekend columnists - The spiritual hinterland of abstract art
The answer (or one answer – maybe you can think of another) is theosophy, that strange mixture of progressive social thought and mystical religion (or a union of neoplatonism and Indian religious and philosophical thought) pioneered by the eccentric Madame Helena Blavatsky. She always sounds half charlatan (her claims as a medium were exposed as fraudulent by the Society for Psychical Research) but Blavatsky must have had something. Yeats, according to his biographer Roy Foster, “enjoyed her mixture of sardonic Russian wit and all-embracing mysticism”.
It would be tempting to dismiss theosophy as a “fad” (Foster’s word) – but if so it was a fad that attracted many of the most creative minds of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By the 1910s the Theosophical Society, based in magnificent premises outside Madras, had tens of thousands of adherents spread all over the world. After Blavatsky’s death, its leading light was Annie Besant, a formidable socialist and feminist, friend of Shaw and Gandhi, campaigner for Irish and Indian independence, and a woman with none of Blavatsky’s air of the fortune-teller’s tent.
FT.com / Arts & weekend / Weekend columnists - The spiritual hinterland of abstract art
Travel Writing
Travel writing can be splendid. Think of Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux. Here is a more esoteric compilation of 'five best'.
OpinionJournal - Five Best
OpinionJournal - Five Best
Oprah for President?
Kinky Friedman (yes, the same of Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jew-Boys) is running for the office of Governor of Texas with a slogan of "WHY NOT". Well, why not indeed as applied to Ms. Winfrey. Is it possible that she might bring some common sense to the office. ......and she does make a fascinating 'anti-Hillary'.
Independent Online Edition > Americas
Independent Online Edition > Americas
21.9.06
The new titans: India & China
This survey will argue that all of these puzzles can be explained by the growing impact of emerging economies. For instance, low bond yields and the dollar's refusal to plunge are partly due to the way these countries have been piling up foreign reserves. Likewise, higher oil prices have mostly been caused by strong demand from developing countries rather than by an interruption of supply, so they have done less harm to global growth than in the past. And their impact on inflation has been offset by falling prices of goods exported by emerging economies. This has also made it easier for central banks to achieve their inflation goals with much lower interest rates than in the past.
All this will require some radical new thinking about economic policy. Governments may need to harness the tax and benefit system to compensate some workers who lose from globalisation.
Monetary policy also needs to be revamped. Central bankers like to take the credit for the defeat of inflation, but emerging economies have given them a big helping hand, both by pushing down the prices of many goods and by restraining wages in developed countries. This has allowed central banks to hold interest rates at historically low levels. But they have misunderstood the monetary-policy implications of a positive supply shock. By keeping interest rates too low, they have allowed a build-up of excess liquidity which has flowed into the prices of assets such as homes, rather than into traditional inflation. They have encouraged too much borrowing and too little saving. In America the overall result has been to widen the current-account deficit.
The central banks' mistake has been compounded by the emerging economies' refusal to allow their exchange rates to rise, piling up foreign-exchange reserves instead. Bizarrely, by financing America's deficit, poor countries are subsidising the world's richest consumers. The opening up of emerging economies has thus not only provided a supply of cheap labour to the world, it has also offered an increased supply of cheap capital. But this survey will argue that the developing countries will not be prepared to go on financing America's massive current-account deficit for much longer.
At some point, therefore, America's cost of capital could rise sharply. There is a risk that the American economy will face a sharp financial shock and a recession, or an extended period of sluggish growth. This will slow growth in the rest of the world economy. But America is less important as a locomotive for global growth than it used to be, thanks to the greater vigour of emerging economies. America's total imports from the rest of the world last year amounted to only 4% of world GDP. The greater risk to the world economy is that a recession and falling house prices would add to Americans' existing concerns about stagnant real wages, creating more support for protectionism. That would be bad both for the old rich countries and the new emerging stars.
But regardless of how the developed world responds to the emerging giants, their economic power will go on growing. The rich world has yet to feel the full heat from this new revolution.
The new titans Economist.com
All this will require some radical new thinking about economic policy. Governments may need to harness the tax and benefit system to compensate some workers who lose from globalisation.
Monetary policy also needs to be revamped. Central bankers like to take the credit for the defeat of inflation, but emerging economies have given them a big helping hand, both by pushing down the prices of many goods and by restraining wages in developed countries. This has allowed central banks to hold interest rates at historically low levels. But they have misunderstood the monetary-policy implications of a positive supply shock. By keeping interest rates too low, they have allowed a build-up of excess liquidity which has flowed into the prices of assets such as homes, rather than into traditional inflation. They have encouraged too much borrowing and too little saving. In America the overall result has been to widen the current-account deficit.
The central banks' mistake has been compounded by the emerging economies' refusal to allow their exchange rates to rise, piling up foreign-exchange reserves instead. Bizarrely, by financing America's deficit, poor countries are subsidising the world's richest consumers. The opening up of emerging economies has thus not only provided a supply of cheap labour to the world, it has also offered an increased supply of cheap capital. But this survey will argue that the developing countries will not be prepared to go on financing America's massive current-account deficit for much longer.
At some point, therefore, America's cost of capital could rise sharply. There is a risk that the American economy will face a sharp financial shock and a recession, or an extended period of sluggish growth. This will slow growth in the rest of the world economy. But America is less important as a locomotive for global growth than it used to be, thanks to the greater vigour of emerging economies. America's total imports from the rest of the world last year amounted to only 4% of world GDP. The greater risk to the world economy is that a recession and falling house prices would add to Americans' existing concerns about stagnant real wages, creating more support for protectionism. That would be bad both for the old rich countries and the new emerging stars.
But regardless of how the developed world responds to the emerging giants, their economic power will go on growing. The rich world has yet to feel the full heat from this new revolution.
The new titans Economist.com
ARMANI
Sorry, no discount here for the EMPORIO. Today the Independent published its issue with the design and input of Giorgio Armani and some of his friends such as George Clooney and Ashley Judd. Half the proceeds are being devoted to Aids charities so I suppose this self-indulgence may be excused. Mr. Armani's A-Z of fashion is quite amusing to read. On the one hand I have enormous respect, bordering on awe, for what he has achieved. He is the sole shareholder, chief executive and designer of the biggest private fashion company in the world, with sales of €5bn last year. There are more than 350 stores and multiple lines: Armani Privé, the couture; Giorgio Armani, men's and women's ready-to-wear; Armani Collezione, a slightly less expensive line; Emporio Armani, the diffusion line; Armani Jeans; Armani A/X, a licence directed at the teenage market; and Armani Casa, the line of home furnishings.
He has a deserved role in fashion history for his deconstructed power suit, which changed the way both men and women dress. And he has a place in the pantheon of pop culture for introducing Hollywood to high fashion and in effect creating the modern red-carpet experience.
Independent Online Edition > This Britain
He has a deserved role in fashion history for his deconstructed power suit, which changed the way both men and women dress. And he has a place in the pantheon of pop culture for introducing Hollywood to high fashion and in effect creating the modern red-carpet experience.
Independent Online Edition > This Britain
20.9.06
Britain and France need to lead, together - International Herald Tribune
ROSBIFS & FROGS -- UNITE!
Britain and France need to lead, together -International Herald Tribune:
"At that moment (Suez) Britain and France took diverging paths in their respective quests for post-imperial influence. Britain vowed never again to cross the Americans, France never again to be humiliated by them. The battle lines were drawn in a conflict between London and Paris in and over NATO and the European Union that has raged on and off ever since, and that has become as futile as it is dangerous on both sides of the Channel. It must now end.
The recent war in Lebanon and the attempted destruction of thousands over the Atlantic demonstrate that the world in which Europeans live is dangerous in the extreme. Europeans cannot hide, even though many try. There are only two countries that can save Europe from the self-deluding isolationism into which it is tipping: Britain and France.
In the wake of the Suez crisis, Britain's elite handed over to Washington their nation's grand strategy and abandoned any pretense of strategic self-confidence. U.S. strategic leadership remains vital, but that very leadership must be open to the shaping of powerful European allies. And, as America's dangerously one- dimensional policy toward the Middle East demonstrates, Israel enjoys a far stronger special relationship with America than Britain does.
Indeed, Britain has now reached the very limits of 'poodle-ism,' the greatest tragedy of which is the lack of belief in Britain that it demonstrates on the part of Prime Minister Tony Blair.
France, in turn, has reached the limits of Gaullism, which was always founded on the need to aggregate European power in support of French aims. The rest of Europe is simply no longer prepared to pay for France's strategic ambitions."
Britain and France need to lead, together -International Herald Tribune:
"At that moment (Suez) Britain and France took diverging paths in their respective quests for post-imperial influence. Britain vowed never again to cross the Americans, France never again to be humiliated by them. The battle lines were drawn in a conflict between London and Paris in and over NATO and the European Union that has raged on and off ever since, and that has become as futile as it is dangerous on both sides of the Channel. It must now end.
The recent war in Lebanon and the attempted destruction of thousands over the Atlantic demonstrate that the world in which Europeans live is dangerous in the extreme. Europeans cannot hide, even though many try. There are only two countries that can save Europe from the self-deluding isolationism into which it is tipping: Britain and France.
In the wake of the Suez crisis, Britain's elite handed over to Washington their nation's grand strategy and abandoned any pretense of strategic self-confidence. U.S. strategic leadership remains vital, but that very leadership must be open to the shaping of powerful European allies. And, as America's dangerously one- dimensional policy toward the Middle East demonstrates, Israel enjoys a far stronger special relationship with America than Britain does.
Indeed, Britain has now reached the very limits of 'poodle-ism,' the greatest tragedy of which is the lack of belief in Britain that it demonstrates on the part of Prime Minister Tony Blair.
France, in turn, has reached the limits of Gaullism, which was always founded on the need to aggregate European power in support of French aims. The rest of Europe is simply no longer prepared to pay for France's strategic ambitions."
The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History by Jonathan Franzen, reviewed by Esquire
It begins witha perfectly crafted opening paragraph and goes on to describe,in six elegant chapters, Franzen's maturation from a "small andfundamentally ridiculous person," to the kind of successful, childlessadult who enjoys activities like birding. He seems at times tobe setting up his life as emblematic of the changes the countryhas undergone during it; for instance, he ends a long paragraphdescribing the environmental recklessness of the last ten yearsby saying that it occurred "in the decade when I left my wifeand took up with a twenty-seven-year-old and really started havingfun." Franzen seems, alternately, to be detailing his aesthetic.From the assertive averageness of his practical, Midwestern familyto his love of the sad-funny comics of Charles Schultz to hisknowledge of the German language, this book reads like a map ofthe sensibility that made The Corrections so entertaining andimportant. Even in his minor scenes and ordinary descriptions,Franzen employs a cartoonish flair that catches the reader's eyeand signifies that it all really is about something greater thanhimself.
Powell's Books - Review-a-Day - The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History by Jonathan Franzen, reviewed by Esquire
Powell's Books - Review-a-Day - The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History by Jonathan Franzen, reviewed by Esquire
The Believer
A Dave Eggers/McSweeney's production, if nothing else, Nick Hornby has a monthly column here which ought to be called "What I have not Read".
Believer is a fun read.
The Believer - September 2006
Believer is a fun read.
The Believer - September 2006
MUSLIMS ARE AT WAR WITH THE WEST
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-harris18sep18,0,1897169.story
Liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that "liberals are soft on terrorism."
It is, and they are.
A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad.
The truth is that we are not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.
...and more on the Pope,
Ironically, this increase in the oppression of Christians in Muslim countries follows the well-publicised attempts of Pope Benedict’s predecessor, Pope John Paul II, to seek reconciliation with Islam. To the dismay of the Vatican’s own historians, Pope John Paul II made his historical ‘apology’ for the sins of the Crusades. This has not been reciprocated by any Muslim apology for the centuries of jihad that took Muslim armies as far as Poitiers in 732 and to the gates of Vienna in 1683; and there are signs that Pope Benedict has had enough of these double standards. Archbishop Fitzgerald, the Curial Cardinal responsible for relations with Islam, has been sent off as Papal Nuncio in Cairo.
Yet those who read the full text of Pope Benedict’s lecture will see that it was not primarily about Islam. Addressed to an audience of academics, it was also crafted for delivery in Regensburg, a city at the very heart of Europe, once the capital of the Holy Roman Empire and a command post of the Counter-Reformation. Pope Benedict, as Cardinal Prefect of the Holy Office, had kept alive the concept of a Church militant in the face of the relativism of the modern world. Now as supreme commander of a spiritual army he is waging war on two fronts — in the West against scientific materialists and in the East against religious fundamentalists — the first holding that the very idea of God is a nonsense, and the second that God transcends reason and can therefore be known only through what has been revealed in the Bible or the Koran.
Liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that "liberals are soft on terrorism."
It is, and they are.
A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad.
The truth is that we are not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.
...and more on the Pope,
Ironically, this increase in the oppression of Christians in Muslim countries follows the well-publicised attempts of Pope Benedict’s predecessor, Pope John Paul II, to seek reconciliation with Islam. To the dismay of the Vatican’s own historians, Pope John Paul II made his historical ‘apology’ for the sins of the Crusades. This has not been reciprocated by any Muslim apology for the centuries of jihad that took Muslim armies as far as Poitiers in 732 and to the gates of Vienna in 1683; and there are signs that Pope Benedict has had enough of these double standards. Archbishop Fitzgerald, the Curial Cardinal responsible for relations with Islam, has been sent off as Papal Nuncio in Cairo.
Yet those who read the full text of Pope Benedict’s lecture will see that it was not primarily about Islam. Addressed to an audience of academics, it was also crafted for delivery in Regensburg, a city at the very heart of Europe, once the capital of the Holy Roman Empire and a command post of the Counter-Reformation. Pope Benedict, as Cardinal Prefect of the Holy Office, had kept alive the concept of a Church militant in the face of the relativism of the modern world. Now as supreme commander of a spiritual army he is waging war on two fronts — in the West against scientific materialists and in the East against religious fundamentalists — the first holding that the very idea of God is a nonsense, and the second that God transcends reason and can therefore be known only through what has been revealed in the Bible or the Koran.
Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?
A rather sad commentary from Mark Oppenheimer.
One might say there are two kinds of people: those who were deeply saddened by Barbara Epstein's death in June and those who had never heard of her. A co-founder of The New York Review of Books, Epstein was an obscure American, relatively speaking, an editor first of books and then of the long essays that have filled The New York Review since 1963. She was famous in literary circles, but in the wider world, she was hardly known — not compared with, say, Eminem or Paul Auster. The reminiscences I read about her were myopic in this respect: Written by her admirers, they tended to take for granted that she was widely known, because among the writers' friends she was. As for me, I knew scarcely anybody who knew her name.
The Chronicle: 9/22/2006: Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?
One might say there are two kinds of people: those who were deeply saddened by Barbara Epstein's death in June and those who had never heard of her. A co-founder of The New York Review of Books, Epstein was an obscure American, relatively speaking, an editor first of books and then of the long essays that have filled The New York Review since 1963. She was famous in literary circles, but in the wider world, she was hardly known — not compared with, say, Eminem or Paul Auster. The reminiscences I read about her were myopic in this respect: Written by her admirers, they tended to take for granted that she was widely known, because among the writers' friends she was. As for me, I knew scarcely anybody who knew her name.
The Chronicle: 9/22/2006: Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?
The New York Review of Books
I hope that this journal thrives after Barbara Epstein's death. It has been a splendid addition.
Two years ago, a lengthy piece in The Nation heralded “The Rebirth of The NYRB.” Written by a young journalist named Scott Sherman, it argued that the Review had once again become “a powerful and combative actor on the political scene.” Week after week, it carried dispatches from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Guantánamo Bay. Mark Danner and Orville Schell reported from Iraq. That courageous warhorse Norman Mailer, still contributing to the Review 40 years after his appearance in the first issue, wrote a piece denouncing the United States under Bush as “a monumental banana republic.”
But what is the Review’s place in that republic? Is it read beyond the confines of New York—by which I mean Manhattan and its cosmopolitan outposts Berkeley, Cambridge, and the university-dominated villages of Ann Arbor and Madison, New Haven, and Hyde Park? How much influence does it have in the Real World? Silvers points to the article by Mark Danner on the “dodgy dossier” that justified Tony Blair in joining the invasion of Iraq. “We were the only publication to run the full text of the Downing Street memo!” he says. Elizabeth Drew’s piece on the Bush administration’s pursuit of unchecked executive power “had an amazing effect. People in Congress read it.” Whether this constitutes influence is hard to say. “I have no great confidence that anything is influential,” says Silvers. “If it is, great.” But he values influence far less than independence—both ideological and financial.
It is a sad fact of life in America that the general audience for so-called intellectual publications, both left and right, is so small that most of them require subsidies in order to survive. Rupert Murdoch owns the neocon Weekly Standard; a consortium of prominent liberals, including Paul Newman, owns The Nation; and a consortium of no fixed ideology that includes Harvard associate professor Martin Peretz and Roger Hertog, a major donor to the conservative Manhattan Institute, owns The New Republic. The Review, too, now has a wealthy owner, Rea Hederman, whose family owned the Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger.
The New York Review of Books After Barbara Epstein -- New York Magazine
Two years ago, a lengthy piece in The Nation heralded “The Rebirth of The NYRB.” Written by a young journalist named Scott Sherman, it argued that the Review had once again become “a powerful and combative actor on the political scene.” Week after week, it carried dispatches from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Guantánamo Bay. Mark Danner and Orville Schell reported from Iraq. That courageous warhorse Norman Mailer, still contributing to the Review 40 years after his appearance in the first issue, wrote a piece denouncing the United States under Bush as “a monumental banana republic.”
But what is the Review’s place in that republic? Is it read beyond the confines of New York—by which I mean Manhattan and its cosmopolitan outposts Berkeley, Cambridge, and the university-dominated villages of Ann Arbor and Madison, New Haven, and Hyde Park? How much influence does it have in the Real World? Silvers points to the article by Mark Danner on the “dodgy dossier” that justified Tony Blair in joining the invasion of Iraq. “We were the only publication to run the full text of the Downing Street memo!” he says. Elizabeth Drew’s piece on the Bush administration’s pursuit of unchecked executive power “had an amazing effect. People in Congress read it.” Whether this constitutes influence is hard to say. “I have no great confidence that anything is influential,” says Silvers. “If it is, great.” But he values influence far less than independence—both ideological and financial.
It is a sad fact of life in America that the general audience for so-called intellectual publications, both left and right, is so small that most of them require subsidies in order to survive. Rupert Murdoch owns the neocon Weekly Standard; a consortium of prominent liberals, including Paul Newman, owns The Nation; and a consortium of no fixed ideology that includes Harvard associate professor Martin Peretz and Roger Hertog, a major donor to the conservative Manhattan Institute, owns The New Republic. The Review, too, now has a wealthy owner, Rea Hederman, whose family owned the Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger.
The New York Review of Books After Barbara Epstein -- New York Magazine
19.9.06
Classical Music (Want something new?)
I was quite fortunate in that my parents loved classical music. They treated me to live performances when I was very young. Since we lived in Palo Alto and most of the music then was in San Francisco, this was a highly commendable effort of my folks to drag me around at age five and up, mostly to the venerable War Memorial Opera House. My interest matured when I had have had full years of music appreciation in both prep school and college. I say all this because it is difficult for me to understand why the appeal of clasical music is not broader or at least more broadly taught these days. So, it is with enthusiasm that I see someone taking on the task of providing an introductory syllabus for the budding afficiando of La Scena Musicale.
A new spin Alternatives suggested to woo listeners to classical music
By Andrew Adler aadler@courier-journal.com
I'm going to take a nontraditional approach to what has often been a very traditional kind of story. I want to talk about what sort of recordings could entice, beguile and otherwise persuade a relative newcomer to classical music to seek more of the form that so many of us love and cherish.
The usual strategy would be to lay out a collection of CDs, with plenty of Beethoven and Mozart symphonies, sonatas by Schubert and Schumann, a smattering of Tchaikovsky here, Wagner there. In other words, rope new listeners with lots of stuff that they may have heard, or at least heard of. Call it the power of the standard and familiar.
What would happen if instead of sticking to all this tried and true stuff, I took a kind of anti-normal take on this whole business? I thought it would be fun to pick out pieces and recordings that wouldn't exactly be the typical introductions we make to classical music. I'm not trying to be arbitrary, or contrary simply for the sake of being contrary. All of these suggest that classical music neophytes can be served just as well with material that might be called alternative as they can with the absolute mainstream.
Let's begin with a B. Not B as in Bach, Beethoven or Brahms. But B as in Berwald. Franz Berwald was a Swedish composer who lived from 1796 until 1868 and who wrote quite a bit of music covering quite a number of genres. He was a Romanticist in the best sense of that term: free in his melodies, rhythms and harmonies, consistently imaginative and fresh. His best-known work is the Symphony No. 3, called "Singuliere," a fine score that deserves far more recognition than it usually gets. You want great tunes? It has them. You want romanticism without syrupy excess? Here's your puppy.
There are a fair number of recordings of this work, but the one I have on my shelf features the Stockholm Philharmonic from 1962 led by Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, himself a sadly neglected, first-caliber conductor. (Accord 149150)
John Corigliano certainly must be counted as among the most significant composers of the last 20 or 30 years. One of his best large-scale works is his Concerto for piano and orchestra. You'd have to go a long way to find a better account of that work than the 1994 recording by the Louisville Orchestra under its then-music director, Lawrence Leighton Smith.
The pianist is James Tocco. The combination of pianist, conductor and orchestra provides the kind of visceral excitement that makes you want to listen to the piece over and over again. The First Edition recordings CD also includes five of Corigliano's shorter scores, most notably his "Gazebo Dances." (LCD008)
Not too many years ago, Louisville audiences were fortunate enough to hear the Louisville Orchestra perform a concert featuring the music of American composer Michael Daugherty, who is celebrated for his musical translations of such pop icons as Marilyn Monroe and, in this 1996 Argo recording by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra under David Zinman, Superman. Daugherty's five movement "Metropolis Symphony" bears such titles as "Lex," "Krypton," "Oh Lois! " and my favorite, "Red Cape Tango." It's great fun, but it's also extremely well-crafted music: distinctly American with an always tantalizing edge. (ARGO 452 103-2)
Well, I said I wasn't going to give you any Bach, but I simply couldn't resist sticking at least one disc of Johann Sebastian in this round up. It's a CD featuring George Ritchie, one of the very finest organists I've ever had the pleasure of hearing, performing a collection of works under the heading of "German Virtuosity & Italian Elegance." Two performances stand out: those of the toccata and fugue in F Major, BWV 540; and the Fantasy and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542. It's no exaggeration to call these accounts stupendous. Played over an audio system with a good subwoofer, the effect is remarkably powerful. (RAVEN OAR-250)
You may be able to tell that I love big symphony orchestras playing equally big symphonies. One of my absolute favorites is Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 8 in C minor, which for me is a score that approaches transcendental satisfactions.
Now, some people complain that Bruckner goes on for too long and is far too thick. I could not disagree more vehemently. For me, this composer is at least as essential as Mahler in the late romantic scheme of things, and in a work like the Eighth Symphony, occupies a universe all his own.
There are many recordings of this work, but in a modern stereo version the account by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under Herbert von Karajan is especially distinguished. This is monumentality in the best sense, a melding of performance and score that moves from the affecting to the genuinely spiritual. (Deutsche Grammophon 427 611-2)
Henry Purcell, the extraordinary English composer who lived from 1659 to 1695, is best known for his opera "Dido and Aeneas." But the music he wrote in honor of Queen Mary often is at least as compelling, and in a work like the birthday ode "Come, ye sons of Art," the vocal glories are unmatched.
A recent EMI Classics CD offers a generous presentation of Purcell's Queen Mary tributes, performed by the Choir of Kings College, Cambridge and the Academy of Ancient Music, all conducted by Stephen Cleobury. Call it an example of authentic performance practiced without a hint of stuffiness. (EMI 0946 3 44438 2)
Merely mentioning the name Arnold Schoenberg can strike fear and trembling into listeners who associate that composer with ear-bending, atonal rigors to be endured, not enjoyed. I could debate that notion, but I won't do that now.
Instead, I'm going to hold up one of Schoenberg's earliest substantial works: "Gurrelieder," a gigantic work for very large orchestra, chorus, six vocal soloists and narrator. I first encountered a complete "Gurrelieder" in 1991, when Zubin Mehta conducted it as his farewell program as music director of the New York Philharmonic.
No recording can adequately reproduce the effect of a live performance, when the scale of sound coming off the stage can literally hurl you back in your seat. Still, the 1990 effort conducted by Ricardo Chailly captures a fair proportion of this astounding creation. Remember, this is not the steely 12-tone mature Schoenberg, but the lushly indulgent work of the young man steeped in the world of Mahler and his circle. (DECCA/London 430 321-2)
A new spin Alternatives suggested to woo listeners to classical music
By Andrew Adler aadler@courier-journal.com
I'm going to take a nontraditional approach to what has often been a very traditional kind of story. I want to talk about what sort of recordings could entice, beguile and otherwise persuade a relative newcomer to classical music to seek more of the form that so many of us love and cherish.
The usual strategy would be to lay out a collection of CDs, with plenty of Beethoven and Mozart symphonies, sonatas by Schubert and Schumann, a smattering of Tchaikovsky here, Wagner there. In other words, rope new listeners with lots of stuff that they may have heard, or at least heard of. Call it the power of the standard and familiar.
What would happen if instead of sticking to all this tried and true stuff, I took a kind of anti-normal take on this whole business? I thought it would be fun to pick out pieces and recordings that wouldn't exactly be the typical introductions we make to classical music. I'm not trying to be arbitrary, or contrary simply for the sake of being contrary. All of these suggest that classical music neophytes can be served just as well with material that might be called alternative as they can with the absolute mainstream.
Let's begin with a B. Not B as in Bach, Beethoven or Brahms. But B as in Berwald. Franz Berwald was a Swedish composer who lived from 1796 until 1868 and who wrote quite a bit of music covering quite a number of genres. He was a Romanticist in the best sense of that term: free in his melodies, rhythms and harmonies, consistently imaginative and fresh. His best-known work is the Symphony No. 3, called "Singuliere," a fine score that deserves far more recognition than it usually gets. You want great tunes? It has them. You want romanticism without syrupy excess? Here's your puppy.
There are a fair number of recordings of this work, but the one I have on my shelf features the Stockholm Philharmonic from 1962 led by Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, himself a sadly neglected, first-caliber conductor. (Accord 149150)
John Corigliano certainly must be counted as among the most significant composers of the last 20 or 30 years. One of his best large-scale works is his Concerto for piano and orchestra. You'd have to go a long way to find a better account of that work than the 1994 recording by the Louisville Orchestra under its then-music director, Lawrence Leighton Smith.
The pianist is James Tocco. The combination of pianist, conductor and orchestra provides the kind of visceral excitement that makes you want to listen to the piece over and over again. The First Edition recordings CD also includes five of Corigliano's shorter scores, most notably his "Gazebo Dances." (LCD008)
Not too many years ago, Louisville audiences were fortunate enough to hear the Louisville Orchestra perform a concert featuring the music of American composer Michael Daugherty, who is celebrated for his musical translations of such pop icons as Marilyn Monroe and, in this 1996 Argo recording by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra under David Zinman, Superman. Daugherty's five movement "Metropolis Symphony" bears such titles as "Lex," "Krypton," "Oh Lois! " and my favorite, "Red Cape Tango." It's great fun, but it's also extremely well-crafted music: distinctly American with an always tantalizing edge. (ARGO 452 103-2)
Well, I said I wasn't going to give you any Bach, but I simply couldn't resist sticking at least one disc of Johann Sebastian in this round up. It's a CD featuring George Ritchie, one of the very finest organists I've ever had the pleasure of hearing, performing a collection of works under the heading of "German Virtuosity & Italian Elegance." Two performances stand out: those of the toccata and fugue in F Major, BWV 540; and the Fantasy and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542. It's no exaggeration to call these accounts stupendous. Played over an audio system with a good subwoofer, the effect is remarkably powerful. (RAVEN OAR-250)
You may be able to tell that I love big symphony orchestras playing equally big symphonies. One of my absolute favorites is Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 8 in C minor, which for me is a score that approaches transcendental satisfactions.
Now, some people complain that Bruckner goes on for too long and is far too thick. I could not disagree more vehemently. For me, this composer is at least as essential as Mahler in the late romantic scheme of things, and in a work like the Eighth Symphony, occupies a universe all his own.
There are many recordings of this work, but in a modern stereo version the account by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under Herbert von Karajan is especially distinguished. This is monumentality in the best sense, a melding of performance and score that moves from the affecting to the genuinely spiritual. (Deutsche Grammophon 427 611-2)
Henry Purcell, the extraordinary English composer who lived from 1659 to 1695, is best known for his opera "Dido and Aeneas." But the music he wrote in honor of Queen Mary often is at least as compelling, and in a work like the birthday ode "Come, ye sons of Art," the vocal glories are unmatched.
A recent EMI Classics CD offers a generous presentation of Purcell's Queen Mary tributes, performed by the Choir of Kings College, Cambridge and the Academy of Ancient Music, all conducted by Stephen Cleobury. Call it an example of authentic performance practiced without a hint of stuffiness. (EMI 0946 3 44438 2)
Merely mentioning the name Arnold Schoenberg can strike fear and trembling into listeners who associate that composer with ear-bending, atonal rigors to be endured, not enjoyed. I could debate that notion, but I won't do that now.
Instead, I'm going to hold up one of Schoenberg's earliest substantial works: "Gurrelieder," a gigantic work for very large orchestra, chorus, six vocal soloists and narrator. I first encountered a complete "Gurrelieder" in 1991, when Zubin Mehta conducted it as his farewell program as music director of the New York Philharmonic.
No recording can adequately reproduce the effect of a live performance, when the scale of sound coming off the stage can literally hurl you back in your seat. Still, the 1990 effort conducted by Ricardo Chailly captures a fair proportion of this astounding creation. Remember, this is not the steely 12-tone mature Schoenberg, but the lushly indulgent work of the young man steeped in the world of Mahler and his circle. (DECCA/London 430 321-2)
SHOCK & AWE
Tolstoy once said that, although all happy families were pretty much alike, each unhappy family was miserable in its own peculiar way. Today it is becoming clear that although each genocide has its ghastly specificity, the west's responses are remarkably similar. The population of Darfur now faces an attack on its existence, not only by the infamous Janjaweed militia, but also by Sudanese regulars. This is not a religious conflict, because both "sides" are Muslim. Rather, the black Africans of Darfur are being subjected to calculated ethnic persecution by the Arab - and Islamist - government in Khartoum. Western governments' responses to this crisis closely follow a pattern established with Bosnia between 1992 and 1995, when radical Serb nationalists sought to carve an ethnically "pure" Greater Serbia out of the ruins of Yugoslavia. Then as now, the first line of defence was denial, accompanied by attempts to blur ethnic distinctions, though Khartoum makes no secret of its desire to create an Arab-dominated state. Its agents traffic black people as slaves and literally brand women. The second line of defence is "moral equivalence". With Bosnia, our government refused to accept a real distinction between the legitimate government in Sarajevo, upholding a multi-ethnic ideal, and those seeking to destroy it. Today's spokesmen for the Department for International Development often suggest that the Darfur rebels are equally responsible for the violence, though we know that Khartoum and its proxies are to blame for more than 90 per cent of the deaths in the region's conflict. Then comes something we'll call "humanitarianisation". In Bosnia, western governments tried to turn a crime that required a military response into a humanitarian "tragedy", which could be alleviated by sending aid. So the international community has provided various "band aids" for Darfur, but not the major surgery needed for a resolution to the crisis. Only military intervention by western countries can provide security now, but again we hear echoes of Bosnia. While important parts of the proposed Anglo-US resolution on Darfur fall under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter, implying a mandate to enforce, all the rhetoric stresses the need for consent from Khartoum. This relegates the resolution to a "consent" mandate under Chapter Six. Some of these same western governments used similar jiggery-pokery to reinterpret Chapter Seven mandates on Bosnia as "Chapter Six and a Half" resolutions, which left them powerless to stop ethnic cleansing. Western governments are not doing this out of deliberate moral turpitude. An important factor is a presumption in favour of strong states, even harsh ones, and against separatist movements, which are perceived as agents of instability. This is a misunderstanding. The core problem in Sudan is not separatism, but Khartoum's attempts to marginalise groups in Darfur as it builds a state on Arab chauvinism and Islamism. It is yet another echo of the former Yugoslavia, where the west failed to grasp that the main problem was not peripheral nationalisms but "central secession" - the Serbs bailed out of Yugoslavia first.
MUSIC LOVERS: Meet your Match
Very challenging test on your knowledge of classical music. Fun to take. Post your score.
Guardian Unlimited Arts National Youth Orchestra fundraising quiz
Guardian Unlimited Arts National Youth Orchestra fundraising quiz
HACKATHALON
Courtesy of David Remnick's recent profile in the Guardian(and if you have not read that -- then now -- no, quicker -- see below) here is SLATE's spectacularly brilliant take off on the style of a New York Times Op-Ed piece, a New Yorker Talk of the Town offering, a Vanity Fair celeb puff piece and a breaking news story. Wonderful stuff. Slate ran this in 1997. It remains simply acute.
By Michael Specter, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Hanna Rosin and Malcolm Gladwell - Slate Magazine
By Michael Specter, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Hanna Rosin and Malcolm Gladwell - Slate Magazine
DUBAI Osama's Nightmare
Now here is a Muslim country we can love.
Print - Osama's Nightmare: Las Vegas in the Arabian Desert - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News
Print - Osama's Nightmare: Las Vegas in the Arabian Desert - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News
16.9.06
A Spot of Bother
But Haddon is too gifted and too ambitious to write a hacky second novel. In fact, he’s so wondrously articulate, so rigorous in thinking through his characters’ mind-sets, that “A Spot of Bother” serves as a fine example of why novels exist. Really, does any other art form do nuance so well, or the telling detail (“the pig-shaped notepad on the phone table”) or the internal monologue? A dust-up with her fiancé prompts Katie to consider her checkered romantic past: “They took up so much space. That was the problem with men. It wasn’t just the leg sprawl and the clumping down stairs. It was the constant demand for attention.” A church funeral provides George with the occasion to ponder the role of Christianity in his life, or its lack thereof: “He looked round at the stained-glass lambs and the scale model of the crucified Christ and thought how ridiculous it all was, this desert religion transported wholesale to the English shires. Bank managers and P.E. teachers listening to stories about zithers and smiting and barley bread as if it were the most natural thing in the world.”
A Spot of Bother - By Mark Haddon- Books - Review - New York Times
A Spot of Bother - By Mark Haddon- Books - Review - New York Times
A DITCH? Can We Be Serious?
Has someone been reading up on the Middle Ages?
The Washington Post and The New York Times lead with the huge effort underway to secure the perimeter of Baghdad with trenches and checkpoints, an attempt by the American military and Iraqi government to quell the surging violence there.
What's next? Valium in the water supply?
The Washington Post and The New York Times lead with the huge effort underway to secure the perimeter of Baghdad with trenches and checkpoints, an attempt by the American military and Iraqi government to quell the surging violence there.
What's next? Valium in the water supply?
ART in IRAN
Today, some of the most original contemporary Iranian artists, such as Shirín Neshat, whose work is now banned in Iran, are living and working in exile in the U.S. And an exhibition of contemporary Iranian photography, organized by the Tehran museum, is touring U.S. museums without the blessings of either government. In this ironic and unwitting cultural exchange, Iran owns historic U.S. paintings that American museums cannot afford and the works of gifted Iranian artists are celebrated by American museums as the cutting edge of the avant-garde. No one knows what will happen to the masterpieces of modern Western art in Tehran. They are said to be worth billions of dollars now and are too expensive to be destroyed. Will they be sold or traded?
OpinionJournal - Leisure & Arts
OpinionJournal - Leisure & Arts
THE WIRE
This show is simply too well done to miss. Here from SLATE:
In The Big Idea, Jacob Weisberg shares his love for The Wire, which he calls "surely the best TV show ever broadcast in America." The HBO drama confronts the political realities of the black underclass with the subtlety and eloquence of literature, prompting many critics to compare it to Charles Dickens' work. "In our civilized age, we do not send 12-year-olds to work in blacking factories as the Victorians did. Today's David Copperfield is instead warehoused at a dysfunctional school until he's ready to sling drugs on the corner, where his odds of survival are even slimmer." Starting Sept. 18, Slate will hold weekly roundtable discussions of the latest Wire episodes
In The Big Idea, Jacob Weisberg shares his love for The Wire, which he calls "surely the best TV show ever broadcast in America." The HBO drama confronts the political realities of the black underclass with the subtlety and eloquence of literature, prompting many critics to compare it to Charles Dickens' work. "In our civilized age, we do not send 12-year-olds to work in blacking factories as the Victorians did. Today's David Copperfield is instead warehoused at a dysfunctional school until he's ready to sling drugs on the corner, where his odds of survival are even slimmer." Starting Sept. 18, Slate will hold weekly roundtable discussions of the latest Wire episodes
15.9.06
The Geniuses
Have you ever coveted one of those McArthur "Genius" grants? Sometimes, I view such largesse as one of my only rapidly diminishing alternatives for survival. Here the CHITrib examines how some of those fortunate grantees have spent their stipends.
The Geniuses Chicago Tribune
The Geniuses Chicago Tribune
INCONVENIENT TRUTHS
Independent Online Edition > Environment:
"Arctic meltdown is speeding up... sea ice is vanishing faster than ever before... polar bears face extinction... and America's top climate scientist warns we only have a decade to save the planet "
"Arctic meltdown is speeding up... sea ice is vanishing faster than ever before... polar bears face extinction... and America's top climate scientist warns we only have a decade to save the planet "
Muslims seek apology over Pope’s remarks
Have we become so insanely PC that one cannot suggest that 'conversion by the sword' is perhaps not the best way to proseltyze? Let's fire up the Templars!
It is ironic that a papal visit remarkable for its lack of controversy in Christian terms should have stirred up a hornets' nest in the Islamic world.
During his tour this week of his native Bavaria, Benedict XVI referred only obliquely to issues such as women's ordination, priestly celibacy and joint Communion for Catholics and Protestants. But his quote from a late 14th-century dialogue on Christianity and Islam between a Byzantine emperor and a learned Persian has led to Pakistan's National Assembly unanimously demanding a retraction, and the chief cleric of India's biggest mosque calling on Muslims to "respond in a manner which forces the Pope to apologise". Just as it was last year over cartoons of the Prophet in a Danish newspaper, the Islamic world, from Indonesia to Morocco, is in uproar.
Given the sensitiveness of the issue, and the potential for violence, it is essential to examine the text of the lecture which Benedict gave at Regensburg university last Tuesday. In it, he describes Emperor Manuel II Paleologus as turning "somewhat brusquely" on his interlocutor and saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." Manuel goes on to detail why propagating the faith through violence is unreasonable, and to state that failure to act in accordance with reason is against God's nature.
FT.com / World / Europe - Muslims seek apology over Pope’s remarks
That so many in the Muslim world joined the protests against the pope merely show just how influential Islamist extremist groups have become. The political goal of the Islamists is clear: any dispute between Christianity and Islam must obey the rules handed down by political Islamism.
Bending to this demand would be a mistake -- indeed it would be tantamount to turning one's back on freedom of expression and opinion. What will come next? Perhaps a complaint that Allah feels insulted by the numerous European women who don bikinis during a summer trip to the beach. It could be anything really -- militant Islamists will always find something. But the response needs to be firm. Freedom of speech, after all, is a vital value and needs to be defended. Any attempt to make political speech hostage to some imagined will of God must be resisted.
It is ironic that a papal visit remarkable for its lack of controversy in Christian terms should have stirred up a hornets' nest in the Islamic world.
During his tour this week of his native Bavaria, Benedict XVI referred only obliquely to issues such as women's ordination, priestly celibacy and joint Communion for Catholics and Protestants. But his quote from a late 14th-century dialogue on Christianity and Islam between a Byzantine emperor and a learned Persian has led to Pakistan's National Assembly unanimously demanding a retraction, and the chief cleric of India's biggest mosque calling on Muslims to "respond in a manner which forces the Pope to apologise". Just as it was last year over cartoons of the Prophet in a Danish newspaper, the Islamic world, from Indonesia to Morocco, is in uproar.
Given the sensitiveness of the issue, and the potential for violence, it is essential to examine the text of the lecture which Benedict gave at Regensburg university last Tuesday. In it, he describes Emperor Manuel II Paleologus as turning "somewhat brusquely" on his interlocutor and saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." Manuel goes on to detail why propagating the faith through violence is unreasonable, and to state that failure to act in accordance with reason is against God's nature.
FT.com / World / Europe - Muslims seek apology over Pope’s remarks
That so many in the Muslim world joined the protests against the pope merely show just how influential Islamist extremist groups have become. The political goal of the Islamists is clear: any dispute between Christianity and Islam must obey the rules handed down by political Islamism.
Bending to this demand would be a mistake -- indeed it would be tantamount to turning one's back on freedom of expression and opinion. What will come next? Perhaps a complaint that Allah feels insulted by the numerous European women who don bikinis during a summer trip to the beach. It could be anything really -- militant Islamists will always find something. But the response needs to be firm. Freedom of speech, after all, is a vital value and needs to be defended. Any attempt to make political speech hostage to some imagined will of God must be resisted.
The Black Dahlia
The reviews have been a bit off, but Ms. Johannsen, well, she is capable of......
The Black Dahlia - Movies - Review - New York Times
14.9.06
CLINTON ON BLAIR
.......& McCain on the Tories.
Here from the 16 September SPECTATOR is comment on Bill Clinton's views of Blair/Brown. Clinton will speak to the Labour Party conference next month. John McCain will hector the Conservatives. Cross-pond alliances?
"The question I had asked him (Clinton) was whether he had a message for Tony Blair. But the former US president chose not to mention the Prime Minister by name or to refer to his accomplishments in anything but general terms. But he brought up Brown unprompted. ‘You’ve got a great economy, better growth than America has and less inequality than America,’ he said. ‘Gordon Brown has been a great Chancellor of the Exchequer. They just have to work this out. You can make too much of the politics and too little of the substance. The point is that New Labour has served the British people well.’
Later this month Clinton is expected to be the headline act in another arena half a world away — the G–Mex Centre in Manchester. Four years after he left delegates spellbound at Labour’s party conference in Blackpool, he is being enticed back.
With the Conservatives having bagged John McCain for their October bash in Bournemouth, expect the transatlantic party relationships to begin to revert to their traditional axes of Labour/Democrats and Tories/Republicans — David Cameron’s criticism of Bush notwithstanding — after the Blair/Bush years
Here from the 16 September SPECTATOR is comment on Bill Clinton's views of Blair/Brown. Clinton will speak to the Labour Party conference next month. John McCain will hector the Conservatives. Cross-pond alliances?
"The question I had asked him (Clinton) was whether he had a message for Tony Blair. But the former US president chose not to mention the Prime Minister by name or to refer to his accomplishments in anything but general terms. But he brought up Brown unprompted. ‘You’ve got a great economy, better growth than America has and less inequality than America,’ he said. ‘Gordon Brown has been a great Chancellor of the Exchequer. They just have to work this out. You can make too much of the politics and too little of the substance. The point is that New Labour has served the British people well.’
Later this month Clinton is expected to be the headline act in another arena half a world away — the G–Mex Centre in Manchester. Four years after he left delegates spellbound at Labour’s party conference in Blackpool, he is being enticed back.
With the Conservatives having bagged John McCain for their October bash in Bournemouth, expect the transatlantic party relationships to begin to revert to their traditional axes of Labour/Democrats and Tories/Republicans — David Cameron’s criticism of Bush notwithstanding — after the Blair/Bush years
WILL THERE ALWAYS BE?........
There are other pressing problems—the vanishing Sunday roast, the reform of the Anglican liturgy to make it more “user-friendly” and the tragic disappearance of the milkman. Most worrying are the changes to children's parties, which now cost over £200 a pop, according to a survey in February. Once sprogs would sit in a circle, play pass the parcel and leave (after saying thank you) with a squashed piece of sponge cake in a napkin. Now many have contracted “Posh Party Syndrome” as they struggle to keep up with Posh and Becks (the footballer and his wife), who spent some £10,000 on a birthday celebration for their son.
But all is not lost. Bovril, a traditional hot beef drink served to men in sheds, is back, now the European Union has lifted its ban on Britain's beef products. Tea-time has never been more popular—London hotels are booked up for months in advance. Although the music show “Top of the Pops” has disappeared from the BBC's schedule, Auntie has graciously brought back “Dr Who”—and a new generation can enjoy the deliciously spine-chilling experience of hiding behind the sofa whenever the Daleks appear.
Economist.com
But all is not lost. Bovril, a traditional hot beef drink served to men in sheds, is back, now the European Union has lifted its ban on Britain's beef products. Tea-time has never been more popular—London hotels are booked up for months in advance. Although the music show “Top of the Pops” has disappeared from the BBC's schedule, Auntie has graciously brought back “Dr Who”—and a new generation can enjoy the deliciously spine-chilling experience of hiding behind the sofa whenever the Daleks appear.
Economist.com
The Possibility of an Island
Houllebebecq is well worth the time it takes to penetrate the occasional obscurity. Read the review of The Possibility of an Island.
This dual story, obviously enough, allows Houellebecq to frame his customarily sardonic, pornographic, and dispiriting human narrative in a moral context; it is the moment at which the novelist can move away from his characters, and tearfully judge them. Daniel may be a bastard, Houellebecq seems to say, like all the bastards in my other novels, but at least the bastards are fighting, however gracelessly, to exercise the fundamental human capacities -- chief of which is not sex, in fact, but love. "I continued all the same,in my heart of hearts, and in the face of all the evidence, to believe in love," says Daniel. For despite apparent evidence to the contrary, Houellebecq is not a nihilist but a moralist -- and a moralist who consistently idealizes heterosexual love. This is why, though it is often hard to like his fiction, it is possible to admire the strange tortured creature who writes it. Houellebecq was born Michel Thomas, on the French island of Réunion, in 1956, where his accomplished mother, a reader of Mann and Dostoevsky, worked as a doctor. His father, René Thomas, had left school at thirteen, but was a keen reader. (He liked Céline.) He worked as a grocer, a gardener,and finally as a mountain guide.
This dual story, obviously enough, allows Houellebecq to frame his customarily sardonic, pornographic, and dispiriting human narrative in a moral context; it is the moment at which the novelist can move away from his characters, and tearfully judge them. Daniel may be a bastard, Houellebecq seems to say, like all the bastards in my other novels, but at least the bastards are fighting, however gracelessly, to exercise the fundamental human capacities -- chief of which is not sex, in fact, but love. "I continued all the same,in my heart of hearts, and in the face of all the evidence, to believe in love," says Daniel. For despite apparent evidence to the contrary, Houellebecq is not a nihilist but a moralist -- and a moralist who consistently idealizes heterosexual love. This is why, though it is often hard to like his fiction, it is possible to admire the strange tortured creature who writes it. Houellebecq was born Michel Thomas, on the French island of Réunion, in 1956, where his accomplished mother, a reader of Mann and Dostoevsky, worked as a doctor. His father, René Thomas, had left school at thirteen, but was a keen reader. (He liked Céline.) He worked as a grocer, a gardener,and finally as a mountain guide.
13.9.06
Bush's Useful Idiots
Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia of the United States in recent years kept its head safely below the parapet?
LRB Tony Judt : Bush�s Useful Idiots
LRB Tony Judt : Bush�s Useful Idiots
A DICTIONARY TEST
For a snap judgement on a dictionary, I use the Pavlova test. Turn to the entry for this antipodean confection, a muscular structure of meringue and fruit with a tutu of whipped cream, and see whether your favourite lexicon tells you the dates of Madame Pavlova’s visits Down Under. Observe whether it favours New Zealand or Australia as the origin (several thousand bloggers are happy to give their opinions); a dictionary with unlimited space would discuss the rival claims of Henry Sachse (Perth, 1935) and Davis Dainty Dishes (Davis Gelatine Co, NZ, 1927) together with the outsider claim of Dr Pavlov, a tribute to the specialist in mouth-wateringness. Further study would record whether it specifies the fruit content. I like to think that the choice of strawberry, kiwi fruit (erstwhile Chinese gooseberry), mango, or passion fruit might relate to a balletomane chef dreaming of the Dying Swan, dying of, respectively, TB, chlorosis, jaundice, or a broken heart. And at the very least let it not omit “pav” (Aust. informal). The Chambers Dictionary’s score on this scale is subminimal. No location at all, no mention of rivalry, no specification of fruit, no pav; though it does give the dancer’s dates (not perhaps of prime lexical significance), and in passing I acquired the valuable “ockerism” (“or Ockerism”), defined curtly as “boorishness in Australians”.
A logophile's asylum - TLS Highlights - Times Online
A logophile's asylum - TLS Highlights - Times Online
Edward Tufte, Offering 'Beautiful Evidence'
Good design can be its own reward or it can be damn useful.
NPR : Edward Tufte, Offering 'Beautiful Evidence'
NPR : Edward Tufte, Offering 'Beautiful Evidence'
EUROPE:IMMIGRANTS
A muzzein at St. Peters? Enoch Powell's 1968 speech in retrospect.
The New Criterion � Should he have spoken?
The New Criterion � Should he have spoken?
DAVID REMNICK
Thank God for David Remnick! Thank God for the New Yorker.
l
In a profile he wrote many years ago of the legendary Post editor Ben Bradlee, Remnick remarked: 'Generalship is not about fighting the battle; it's about inspiring the enlisted.' It's a notion Remnick has clearly kept in mind in his own work as General. Asked to illustrate his editorial methods, Remnick reaches for a baseball analogy: Joe Torre, the manager of the Yankees, 'gives players the confidence they need to play their best, then he gets the hell out'. He adds: 'I don't believe in swagger. I think it's infantile.'
l
In a profile he wrote many years ago of the legendary Post editor Ben Bradlee, Remnick remarked: 'Generalship is not about fighting the battle; it's about inspiring the enlisted.' It's a notion Remnick has clearly kept in mind in his own work as General. Asked to illustrate his editorial methods, Remnick reaches for a baseball analogy: Joe Torre, the manager of the Yankees, 'gives players the confidence they need to play their best, then he gets the hell out'. He adds: 'I don't believe in swagger. I think it's infantile.'
EPHRON ON DINING
To Ms. Ephron, it's all so obvious. A wonderful piece on the restaurant experience.
What to Expect When You�re Expecting Dinner - New York Times
What to Expect When You�re Expecting Dinner - New York Times
SPAMALOT
Eric Idle re-takes London as Spamalot opens on 30 September. Dave Eggers does a splendid interview demonstrating how needed this diversion is at this moment on both sides of the Atlantic.
Guardian Unlimited Arts Arts features And now for something completely difficult ...
Guardian Unlimited Arts Arts features And now for something completely difficult ...
FOOD - GLORIOUS FOOD
A wonderful site for foodies, list after list of people making their choices for their five 'must-eats' before they die.
http://www.travelerslunchbox.com/journal/2006/8/21/calling-all-bloggers-things-to-eat-before-you-die.html
http://www.travelerslunchbox.com/journal/2006/8/21/calling-all-bloggers-things-to-eat-before-you-die.html
Realism, Reconsidered (Reinhold Neibuhr)
It seems that Mr. Neibuhr's views are becoming fashionable again. Pity they ever went out of fashion. they should be required reading before taking an oath of office.
The Bush years are a fine time to rediscover the place of self-criticism in patriotism, the corruption of nationalism by self-love. And yet the liberal construction of Niebuhr's idea disturbs me. A connection is angrily made between the heartlessness of much of Bush's domestic policy and the thoughtlessness of much of Bush's foreign policy, to the effect that we have no right to make Iraq a better place until we make America a better place. Our power is neutralized by our imperfection. Now, whatever one's opinion of the Iraq war, this was not Niebuhr's view of the relation of morality to force. More generally, it is an erroneous view of the relation between domestic policy and foreign policy. The one does not, or should not, shape the other. A state that treats its citizens justly sometimes behaves abominably beyond its borders, and a state that treats its citizens unjustly sometimes is a force for good abroad. When we fought Hitler, we were a Jim Crow country. Colonialism was to a large extent the odious project of liberal states. If Bush's foreign policy is scandalous, it cannot be because his environmental policy is scandalous. So I do not see what bearing the reform of Congress or the repeal of the tax cut will have upon the objectives and the methods of our struggle against Islamism. Green yourselves all you want, they will still wish to kill you. When I hear liberals synchronizing all things, I am reminded not of Reinhold Niebuhr but of his very opposite among the intellectuals of his time, the charismatic and repulsive Simone Weil. She wrote in 1939 that France's colonial possessions could disqualify it from the fight against the Third Reich, because "there must not be a single genuine lover of freedom in the whole world who can have a valid reason for hating France." In 1939! Weil hated totalitarianism, but she loved purity. Niebuhr insisted that in politics purity is a sin. The new Niebuhrians should be wary of their own wholeness, and of the satisfaction that comes from the belief that everything is connected to everything else. Policy is not the work of monists. The exercise of American power, when it is right, cannot wait upon the attainment of American perfection. America will have to use force against its enemies even if many millions of Americans are without health care.
Realism, reconsidered
The Bush years are a fine time to rediscover the place of self-criticism in patriotism, the corruption of nationalism by self-love. And yet the liberal construction of Niebuhr's idea disturbs me. A connection is angrily made between the heartlessness of much of Bush's domestic policy and the thoughtlessness of much of Bush's foreign policy, to the effect that we have no right to make Iraq a better place until we make America a better place. Our power is neutralized by our imperfection. Now, whatever one's opinion of the Iraq war, this was not Niebuhr's view of the relation of morality to force. More generally, it is an erroneous view of the relation between domestic policy and foreign policy. The one does not, or should not, shape the other. A state that treats its citizens justly sometimes behaves abominably beyond its borders, and a state that treats its citizens unjustly sometimes is a force for good abroad. When we fought Hitler, we were a Jim Crow country. Colonialism was to a large extent the odious project of liberal states. If Bush's foreign policy is scandalous, it cannot be because his environmental policy is scandalous. So I do not see what bearing the reform of Congress or the repeal of the tax cut will have upon the objectives and the methods of our struggle against Islamism. Green yourselves all you want, they will still wish to kill you. When I hear liberals synchronizing all things, I am reminded not of Reinhold Niebuhr but of his very opposite among the intellectuals of his time, the charismatic and repulsive Simone Weil. She wrote in 1939 that France's colonial possessions could disqualify it from the fight against the Third Reich, because "there must not be a single genuine lover of freedom in the whole world who can have a valid reason for hating France." In 1939! Weil hated totalitarianism, but she loved purity. Niebuhr insisted that in politics purity is a sin. The new Niebuhrians should be wary of their own wholeness, and of the satisfaction that comes from the belief that everything is connected to everything else. Policy is not the work of monists. The exercise of American power, when it is right, cannot wait upon the attainment of American perfection. America will have to use force against its enemies even if many millions of Americans are without health care.
Realism, reconsidered
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