MOZART

You just think you have heard Mozart's 40th. Here from YouTube is a refreshing rendition on water-filled bottles played by a passing roller-skater.

FREUD (Sigmund)

A splendid review by Ronald Dworkin in the New York Sun.

Legend has it that Freud, although educated in the philosophies of his day, studiously avoided the work of Nietzsche to preserve the originality of his ideas against external influence.

Nietzsche's analysis of the human psyche, how values were supposedly projections of people's unspoken jealousies and fears, ran dangerously close to Freud's idea (still a work in progress at the end of the 19th century) that the roots of conscious behavior lay in unconscious desires.
But after reading Dr. Peter Kramer's outstanding new biography of Freud (HarperCollins, 213 pages, $21.95), one wonders if Freud feared something else, not influence but self-knowledge, for Dr. Kramer's Freud is practically the living embodiment of Nietzsche's will to power. It's not simply that Freud was incredibly ambitious. (At age four, after soiling a chair, he reassured his mother that he would grow up to be a great man and buy her another.) Rather, it was Freud's determination to systematize the world, to bring order to chaos, and to impose his theory of life on life itself — a determination so intense that one of Freud's colleagues called it a "psychical need."

This criticism of Freud the systematizer runs throughout Dr. Kramer's book, highlighted by Freud's irritating tendency to generalize whole theories of human nature from a handful of personal observations.

THE HUMAN STAIN

(Monica Lewinsky) revealed more about America than anybody since Dos Passos. She stuck a thermometer up the country's ass." Philip Roth at his finest.

A bit early perhaps, but somehow this year we need some good cheer, so let us contemplate the splendid tree from the Metropolitan and wish each other the best.

TWO PISSERS

A classic review by Christopher Hitchens of Clive James latest. From the 15 November TLS.

The great Peter De Vries, when asked about the nature of his ambition, replied that he yearned for a mass audience that would be large enough for his elite audience to despise. In this latest volume of his tragicomic autobiography, Clive James admits twice to a similar aspiration. Meeting the dazzling Nicholas Tomalin and accidentally making a good impression on him with a piece of gaucherie about wine, he finds (or fancies) that Tomalin is describing him round town as “the boy from the bush who could quote Wittgenstein”. Looking back at the close of North Face of Soho, he rues his own tendency to fall for projects “that would duplicate the effects of the Italian Renaissance while helping to save the baby seals in the rain forest”. The first of these moments comes just as James has left the Footlights in Cambridge to launch himself in the metropolis, and the second occurs when he is back home in Cambridge trying to recuperate from the flopperoo that was the West End launch of his mock-epic poem about the grooming of Prince Charles. This, in other words, is about that weird transitional interlude “the 1970s”; a decade of “becoming” for many boomers. He faithfully notes that many people tried to warn him about the “Charles Charming” fiasco – Mark Boxer discreetly, James Fenton firmly, your humble servant rudely and coarsely – so here might be the place to state that the 70s in London would have been infinitely less amusing without the willingness of Clive James to take chances including – which is that most vertiginous of all risks – the danger of making himself look ridiculous.

Perhaps, an Exit Strategy

As the United States begins to acknowledge the magnitude of its defeat in Iraq, the conflict looks more than ever like a speed-chess replay of Vietnam. A tragedy that took a dozen years to unfold in Southeast Asia has played out in less than four in Mesopotamia. Once again, an intervention that sprang largely from idealistic, anti-totalitarian motives has gone awry because of an administration's deceptions, incomprehension, and incompetence. Once again, the domino theory at the heart of the case has been disproved. And once again, we find ourselves looking for a way out that won't compound the catastrophe.

As in the final stages of the Vietnam War, we face the question: If we have lost, why are we still there? One answer is that George Bush is a stubborn man--even this week, he was insisting we won't withdraw "until the mission is complete"--an apparent synonym for "when hell freezes over." A better answer is that we're staying to prevent genocide. Without a military force separating Sunnis and Shiites, the present savagery could go Cambodian, with remaining secular democrats as the first victims. A power vacuum could provide a new operational base for al-Qaida and severe sectarian violence (call it what you prefer) could spiral into all-out civil war and regional conflict. As awful as it is now, Iraq would surely get much, much worse if we yanked our troops.

ABSTRACTION

A splendid piece by the late Kirk Varnedoe examines the nature of abstract art. It is reprinted from the Journal of Higher Education. It brings back the memory of the wonderful explications of Alfred Barr.

FORTY YEARS AGO

It was forty years ago tonight that Truman Capote gave the famous BLACK & WHITE BALL. It was either the party to bring an era to an end or perhaps the start of something else.

LUNCHEONS WE LIKE

The River Cafe, London W6

1 x green salad
1 x mozzarella di bufala with Italian honey figs, mint, mache and cannellini beans
2 x gnocchi verde with spinach, ricotta, nutmeg and parmesan
1 x bottle chianti
1 x bottle still water
2 x espresso

No charge

THANKSGIVING REDUX

Instead of writing a traditional holiday editorial, the LAT decided to publish highlights from its Thanksgiving editorials of the last 125 years. Some are humorous (from 1912: "pumpkin pie is the one thing that a French chef cannot cook. The pastry part is all right, but "de pumpkin" is flabby and flat, and resembles sweetened sawdust more than anything else."), while others are quite serious (from 1943: "For years before 1941… peace was a standing item on our Thanksgiving agenda. But if we had known then what we know now — that the enemies of civilization had long been plotting our destruction and were ready to strike — would we have called it peace?) but they're all an interesting glimpse into what the country's mood may have been like on the fourth thursday of November throughout the years.

£4000

HARRODS

Here we are at Harry's Bar. What better place to talk a bit. It is Thanksgiving and I am always intrigued by lists. A couple that leap to mind are The Atlantic Monthly's release of its list of the one hundred most influential Americans. I shall let you you make your own judgements, but of the first five, three (Washington, John Adams and Jefferson) were instrumental in founding this nation and two, Lincoln at number one no less, and Franklin Roosevelt led salvation operations. The list makes fascinating reading, but the atttempt to quantify after the first ten or so is a bit feeble.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200612/influentials-main
As they themselves ask: Who are the ­most influential figures in American history? They asked ten eminent historians. The result was The Atlantic’s Top 100—and some insight into the nature of influence and the contingency of history. Was Walt Disney really more influential than Elizabeth Cady Stanton? Benjamin Spock than Richard Nixon? Elvis Presley than Lewis and Clark? John D. Rockefeller than Bill Gates? Babe Ruth than Frank Lloyd Wright? Let the debates begin.

Another list that rather depresses me is Time's attempt to list the one hundred most important albums.....I guess....ever. They break it all down by decade. Seriously....take a good, careful look at this compilation and honestly ask yourself if you are not stuck a few decades ago. I suppose it is just age, but the seventies were pretty damned good for me.
http://www.time.com/time/2006/100albums/
Kayne West? Dr. Dre? Outkast? Well, not on my playlist, but de gustibus non disputandem est!

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

KOOLHAUS in the CELESTIAL KINGSDOM

Set on a site that’s about as large as 37 football fields, Rem Koolhaas’s television authority headquarters in Beijing may initially seem intimidating. This 54-story tower leans and looms like some kind of science-fiction creature poised to stomp all over the surrounding central business district.

But if the five-million-square-foot building is one of the largest ever constructed, its architect sees it as a people-friendly reinvention of the skyscraper.“Awe is not usually a condition our buildings inspire,” Mr. Koolhaas said in an interview at the Museum of Modern Art, where a show devoted to the Central Chinese Television building — known as CCTV — opened yesterday. “Amidst all the skyscrapers there, it’s relatively low. It will feel accessible

A Guide for Us All

The Experts' Guide to 100 Things Everyone Should Know How to Do

by Samantha Ettus

Back in the day, Dad taught you how to knot a tie and Mom taught you how to write a thank-you note. Your uncle taught you how to swim; your aunt showed you how to set a formal table; your sister taught you how to kiss. And you went out in the world...competent. Where are those folks now? Scattered to the winds, if the sociologists tell us true. Now the only time the family gets together is at the iPod recharger, or when the SuperBowl is on the plasma TV. And now, if you don't have a Blackberry with you so you can Google, you're lost --- Basic Knowledge is as endangered as the teaching of Greek.Samantha Ettus --- founder and president of Ettus Media Management --- decided the world needed a "Cliff's Notes to life," and she set about creating a small but fact-filled how-to book. She's one smart cookie. Instead of mastering 100 Key Facts of Life herself, she turned to experts. And then she divided their contributions into sections built around time of day: morning life, work life, home life, weekend life, the big life.Reading the book is like a Rorschach test --- you see what you need to see. You'd never wear a bowtie? Tucker Carlson's instructions are wasted paper. Know how to make a bed? Then you don't need this primer.But there's a lot of stuff you think you know that you don't have quite right --- I, for instance, got very far in life without realizing you get a better shave if you shower first. Really. You may know this. I'm sure many do. My father, a taciturn man, never said a word about the advantages of hot water and steam to your
beard.More useful advice. From Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times: Don't save old newspapers. If you haven't read them when they were published, you never will. Frederic Fekkai advises that you don't use the same shampoo every day. Donald Trump, a buffoon about most things, does have smart advice about negotiation. Larry King shows you how to listen --- really listen.It's not all fun stuff. An oncologist tells you how to deliver bad news. A therapist breaks an apology into stages. A professor of speech helps you confront something most people fear more than death --- public speaking. Suze Orman shows you how to save thousands by banking your pennies.Then there's the Ask Heloise stuff. Did you know you should try to remove a stain from the reverse side of the fabric? That you can, in a pinch, use dental floss to sew a button? That tomatoes should never be refrigerated?Swinging a golf club and mowing a lawn --- not my thing. But I loved learning how to wash a car from Charles Oakley, one of my favorite basketball players --- and, as few people know --- owner of a chain of car washes. I needed to know that I should add warm water to vases of cut flowers every day. And many of you need to know what a "charger" is on a dinner table. (Okay, I'll tell you: It's a service plate, and it goes under all others.) And who doesn't want Debbie Fields' recipe for chocolate chip cookies?There are cool factoids here that might be useful at cocktail parties. If you jog a mile, how often does each foot hit the ground? 1,000 times. Says who? Oh....Grete Waitz.Flaws? In most cases, I'm not expert enough to spot them. But I did see one. Cecile Hudson, Senior Coffee Education Specialist at Starbucks, knows how to brew coffee --- but she doesn't tell you how to keep it hot. The Answer is NOT in an electric coffeemaker. Coffee isn't a simple liquid, it's a colloid, and in a colloid, molecules change --- and get bitter --- over heat. If you want your third cup of coffee to taste as fresh as your first, you want to pour the just-brewed coffee into a tightly-sealed thermos. One of the chapters tells you how to give a gift. It's too modest. For the graduate setting out in life or the young couple lacking guidance --- or even old duffers who think they know it all --- this book is the gift to give.

REMBRANDT at 400

Museums around the world are celebrating the 400th anniversary of the birth of Rembrandt van Rijn, a Dutch master. But Paris seems keen to outdo them all with a collaboration between four leading institutions. The Louvre is exhibiting 64 emblematic works, mostly drawings, which explore Rembrandt’s favoured themes: self-portraits, animals, humans, Biblical scenes and genre studies. The National Library is displaying 150 etchings, some acquired for the royal collection during the artist’s lifetime. Several of his most famous, such as “Ecce homo” and “The Three Trees”, are here. Another 180 or so etchings can be seen at the recently reopened Petit Palais, where the exhibition also remembers Eugène Dutuit, a 19th-century Rembrandt collector who bequeathed the works to the museum. Finally, the Institut Néerlandais has organised three related shows.

22!

Hey there Ms. Scarlett! A very happy birthday to you with many, many Happy returns!

......& enjoy your Thanksgiving. We are so thankful for you.

MIDDLE CLASSES

When Henry VIII’s councillor Richard Rich and two other intensely able bureaucrats were compiling the regulations for the King’s School Canterbury in 1540, they proposed that only the sons of gentlemen should be admitted. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer disagreed: “God had given talents to all kinds of people indifferently”, and anyway: “None of us were gentlemen born but had our beginning from a low and base parentage and, through the benefit of learning and other civil knowledge for the most part, all gentle ascend to their estate”. Here we already see meritocracy rearing her pretty head, but we see something else too. For only by stretching it could Cranmer call his parentage low and base. His father was an esquire, proud of his aristocratic ancestors, and Thomas himself was fast-tracked for upward mobility, being crammed in hawking, hunting and classical learning and sent to Jesus College, Cambridge, at the age of fourteen. This is in fact an early example of the Hurd Instinct, in which the speaker exaggerates the lowliness of his origins, in order to gain a political advantage (“my father was a tenant farmer” – the Rt Hon. Douglas Hurd, 1990). Perhaps only in England can this pastime develop into a competitive sport (cf. Monty Python), suggesting the fluidity, sensitivity and endless fascination of the topic in this country.
The Middle Class: A history by Lawrence James is an enchanting compendium of the games the English play, and the anxieties, frictions and resentments engendered in the pursuit of status. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath insists on precedence over her neighbours as she walks up the aisle to receive Communion. James does not make quite enough of Chaucer’s own social ascent, remarking merely that “he was the son of a London vintner who had been attached to the household of a royal duchess”; but Chaucer’s wife’s sister became John of Gaunt’s third wife, which must have helped Chaucer’s son Thomas on his way to becoming Speaker of the House of Commons and to a splendid tomb in Ewelme Church, next to the alabaster effigy of Thomas’s daughter, Alice Duchess of Suffolk. Indeed, it is hard to think of any surviving documents or life stories of the late medieval and early modern period which do not bear witness to the porosity of English society. The Paston Letters, for example, show how the Pastons became judges and substantial landowners by the late fifteenth century, but William Paston’s father, Clement, was still remembered in Norfolk as “a good plain husbandman who rode to the mill on the bare horseback with his corn under him”, and who might even have been a serf. Despite this, Clement’s grandson John managed to persuade Edward IV’s Council that the Pastons were “descended lineally of worshipful blood since the Conquest”.
Nor was there ever a time when the already-arrived didn’t resent the parvenus, those merchants and moneyed men who accounted themselves the equals of nobility, and, worse still, the rich yeoman’s son who “must skip into his velvet breeches and silken doublet and, getting to be admitted into some Inn of Court, must ever scorn to be called other than gentleman”. The fifteenth century, like the late twentieth century, suffered an explosion of lawyers and financial advisers which blasted a path for the lad of parts into the upper echelons – and provoked the usual complaints of vulgarity and arrogance. Dr Johnson complained, of City men who had retired to Twickenham, that “they had lost the civility of tradesmen without acquiring the manners of gentlemen”. Johnson’s Dictionary claimed, rather prematurely I fancy, that the definition of “gentleman” as meaning “man of birth” was “out of use”, the term now indicating “a man raised above the vulgar by his character and post”. Those aspiring to this rank needed to acquire habits which were “genteel”, that is, polished and refined. Surtees’s Mr Jorrocks, a retired grocer taking to hunting, was adjured by his wife to abandon his “low-life stable conversation in the home”, but there were some sacrifices he would not make. He spurned iced champagne, saying, “I haven’t got so advanced in gentility to like my wine froze”. But even the most painstakingly acquired skills of equitation and elocution could not appease the gratin, who felt the hot breath of the middle classes on their necks. As Bacon pointed out: “Men of noble birth are noted to be envious towards new men when they rise. For the distance is altered; and it is like a deceit of eye, that when others come on, they think themselves go back”. The heraldic pretensions and the conspicuous expenditure of the nouveaux have never ceased to be a staple of English comedy. James I remarked, when told that the Lumleys of Co. Durham traced their ancestors back to Adam, “I didna ken Adam’s name was Lumley”.

CAN WE BELIEVE OUR EYES?

Can we believe what we see? How are we to represent the unseen world? Can anything be recorded with true objectivity? These are a few of the questions Martin Kemp asks in Seen/ Unseen, a formidable and wide-ranging disquisition on the overlapping imagery of art and science. Kemp is one of the world’s leading authorities on Leonardo da Vinci, and it is hardly surprising that that Renaissance polymath, with his unfathomable scientific curiosity, is the touchstone of this enterprise. Nor that - in the spirit of Leonardo - Kemp should see more continuities than discontinuities down the centuries in the way we visualise the world, and picture its underlying coherence.

This book is not for the faint-hearted; one wouldn’t imagine that a professor of the history of art at Oxford would venture so fearlessly into the more abstruse realms of higher mathematics and particle physics in pursuit of his inquiry. But what is so stimulating about his text is its refusal to be pigeonholed as “history of art” or “history of science”, as Kemp moves deftly between the two. Central to his argument is the existence of certain shared and recurrent themes, or “structural intuitions”, that reflect the inherent patterns discernible in nature.

Seen/Unseen: Art, Science, and Intuition From Leonardo to the Hubble Telescope by Martin Kemp Oxford University Press ₤25, 368 pages

OUR NEW FRIENDS: SYRIA & IRAN

2003: THE AXIS OF EVIL

President George Bush's State of the Union address refers to the "axis of evil": Iraq, Iran and North Korea. The implication is that Iraq is the first to be dealt with in the "war on terror". But Iran aids the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, keeping the lid on Shia unrest. Tehran is dismayed as international jihadists and Sunni insurgents target the Shia majority in the hope of triggering civil war. Mr Bush rejects an overture from Iran, under pro-reform President Mohammed Khatami, to review their relationship, frozen since the US embassy hostage-taking of 1979. Instead, the US accuses Iran of sponsoring terror and seeking nuclear weapons. The crisis deepens after Iran admits it has a uranium enrichment facility. Iran fears the US wants regime change.

Syria is added to the axis of evil by John Bolton, arch hawk, whose position as US ambassador to the UN is under threat after last week's mid-term elections. The neoconservatives believe a new democratic Middle East will sweep dictatorships from power after Saddam's fall, and Syria is in trouble after opposing the war and because senior Saddam aides - and weapons of mass destruction, the US claims - are brought across the border. Syria is accused of harbouring "terrorist" organisations. Syria tightens border controls, but fears of regime change are fuelled when Condoleezza Rice brands Syria as an "outpost of tyranny". Further setback for Syria when France and the US ensure expulsion of Syrian forces from Lebanon.

2006: THE PEACE BROKERS?

Robert Gates, the new US Defence Secretary, is an advocate of dialogue with Tehran to enlist its help in extricating allied forces from Iraq. Tony Blair, who wants Iran to help stop cross-border attacks on UK troops, backs this, setting the scene for demise of Bush's neoconservative policy. But Iran is now in the grip of a hardline leadership, headed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is defiant over its nuclear programme. Iran faces UN sanctions. Ahmadinejad will aim to make Bush and Blair sweat before he agrees to help.

President Bashar al-Assad, flush with success of Syria's proxy militia in Lebanon, holds the key to success in Iraq and Middle East peace. Courted by Bush and Blair, whom he upbraided at their last meeting. Syria harbours a leader of the radical Palestinian Hamas movement, and is a supplier of Hizbollah. Assad will play hardball on the UN's case against Syrian officials accused of assassinating former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. And there is the Golan Heights, seized by Israel in 1967.

Those Crazy Adelphians from Hanover!

Has it really been almost 30 years since ''Animal House'' came out? We grow old. The movie, on the other hand, hasn't aged a bit. ''Double secret probation,'' ''See if you can guess what I am now? I'm a zit! Get it?'' and ''To-ga, to-ga!'' are classic, time-defying, laugh-out-loud moments encased in celluloid amber. I've watched the movie with my father, now 80, and my son, who is 14; both were on the floor gasping for breath.
Comes now Chris Miller, Dartmouth Class of '63, who wrote the screenplay along with Harold Ramis and Douglas Kenney, to give us, as his subtitle puts it, ''the awesomely depraved saga'' of Alpha Delta Phi, the fraternity whose bacchanals and outrages provided the inspiration for the movie, along with Ramis's and Kenney's own experiences of Greek life. (Not to be confused with Plato or Pythagoras.) Miller calls this book, on its cover, ''a mostly lucid memoir.'' It's unclear whether ''lucid'' is a typographical error. Miller may well have meant ''lurid.''
His book is sophomoric, disgusting, tasteless, vile, misogynist, chauvinist, debased and at times so unspeakably revolting that any person of decent sensibility would hurl it into the nearest Dumpster. I couldn't put it down. I make this self-indicting admission with all due trepidation, but there it is. For better or worse, this an utterly hilarious book.
Toga-wise, Miller's book is to ''Animal House,'' the movie, what ''Caligula'' is to Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove's ''A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.'' There's enough radioactive material in here to shock everyone, and perhaps that's its strength: it's a nuclear bomb -- and a very dirty one at that -- of political incorrectness.
It's hard to imagine this book being published in the 1980's or 90's. That it's appearing now, at a time when HBO's hit series ''Entourage,'' a guy's version of ''Sex and the City,'' is playing, may indicate that some paradigm shift is under way. There seems to be some resurgent testosterone in the body cultural. Either that, or someone spilled a giant bottle of Old Spice over the country.
''Animal House'' -- the book -- also manages somehow to be elegiac. How Miller accomplishes that is beyond me, but he does. By the end, he has you -- depraved me, at any rate -- almost sighing for the good old days. Polymorphously perverse it may have been, still it all sounds like it was a blast.
I seem to be digging myself in deeper. I hereby take back everything I have said so far. It's a disgusting, horrid, loathsome book. Miller should be ashamed. No -- he should be executed. I issue a fatwa.
Normally, a reviewer quotes from the book. However, since there are very few sentences in these 321 pages that don't contain an obscenity or moral atrocity, we will not be quoting extensively from the text. The more's the pity, because Miller is a genuinely witty writer. He's also a crackerjack storyteller. Wince you may -- and if you have any modesty, you should -- but bored I guarantee you will not be.
Well, there must be something quotable. How about:
''Doberman had crawled onto the hood of the hearse and licked the bugs off the windshield, explaining to Flea, who was driving, 'I just wanted to make sure you could see.' ''
Or this description, right out of Jane Austen, of a fraternity brother: ''Rat's hair was short as a marine's, his belly hung over his belt, and he wore Dumptruck-type glasses, big with black rims. He'd gotten his name last week. The Adelphian naming thing had worked again -- he resembled a big, bloated water rat, creeping out of some Amsterdam canal, dripping with stuff you didn't want to know about.''
Or this touching moment, in which Pinto -- I can't go into the derivation of his fraternity name -- waxes nostalgic about the really good old days: ''Pinto's eyes were starry, hearing about the 'ooooold AD's,' as the brothers referred to their forebears. He loved these tales of a fabled, earlier time when the AD house was at some kind of crazed behavioral zenith and outrageous Adelphians strode the earth like depraved gods, doing whatever they felt like, and the good times never stopped.'' Given what Pinto and his brothers were doing in 1960, it beggars my imagination what catastrophic antics their predecessors were up to; in fact, I don't want to know.
Anyone remember ''norgling?'' What a ''double hogback growler'' was? Can't explain that one, either. There are, on the other hand, a few relatively innocent terms, like the synonyms for breasts: ''jehoshaphats,'' ''ba-boos,'' ''wazookies,'' ''ka-hogas'' and of course ''gabongas.'' The Inuit language contains -- what? -- 17 different words for ''snow''? The AD's must have twice that many for ''vomit.'' But vomiting is merely one of the many bodily functions extensively, indeed, exhaustively explored in the pages of ''The Real Animal House.''
Aside from drinking enough beer to fill Lake Erie, the great pursuit -- indeed, holy grail -- at AD house was losing one's virginity. Hard as it may be to believe today, back in the early 1960's this was still a tricky goal. These days it takes about 10 minutes from ''Hi, what's your name?'' to ''Oh God oh God oh God.'' When you compare the Adelphians of 1960 with the college kids in Tom Wolfe's novel ''I Am Charlotte Simmons,'' you realize what tremendous strides we've made in this field of endeavor.
In any event, the lucidly lurid events depicted herein happened a long time ago, and it would be unfair to judge them by today's P.C. standards. This is a memoir, not a manifesto. Eisenhower was president, Doris Day was the cheesecake of record and everyone was singing along to the Schaefer beer ads on TV. (''Schaefer is the one beer to have, when you're having more than one!'') Up to now, I've thought of the jacket-and-narrow-tie-wearing youth of that era as ''The Quiet Generation.'' No longer. There is nothing quiet about Pinto, Otter, Coyote, Snot, Black Whit, Giraffe, Rat or any of the other AD brothers, unless they're passed out facedown in the snow with the blood-alcohol content of an embalmed corpse.
However sick, depraved and irredeemably gross, the animal house of Dartmouth 1960 produced a writer who became a leading voice at National Lampoon, the magazine that shaped and defined the comic sensibility of its generation. He then went on, with one of his colleagues, Douglas Kenney (who died tragically in 1980), to write a movie that accomplished the same thing cinematically, as well as to inaugurate the movie careers of John Belushi, Tom Hulce, Peter Riegert, Karen Allen and others.
No mean feats. And to think it all began with power-booting (don't ask) in the basement and watching brother Seal -- a model for the movie's Bluto Blutarsky, played by Belushi -- pour a giant jar of mustard over his head and crawl around on all fours on the dance floor, biting girls on the bottom. Now we know. And as the plaque on the statue of the founder of Faber College in the movie says, ''Knowledge is Good.'

Christopher Buckley's new novel, ''Boomsday,'' will be published in the spring.

St. AUGUSTINE

It's the birthday of the man who wrote the first great tell-all memoir: Saint Augustine, (books by this author) born in Tagaste, Numidia (354), a part of North Africa that is now Algeria. Though his mother was a Christian, and he'd grown up in the Christian Roman Empire, he'd spent much of his life dabbling in various pagan religions. He was living with a lower-class woman, having fathered a child out of wedlock, when he fell under the influence of Bishop Ambrose of Milan and suddenly converted to Christianity. He decided that he would abandon his secular life and devote himself to writing about Christian theology.
He was an extraordinarily prolific writer, publishing more than 90 books in his lifetime. But though he was widely read, he wasn't taken very seriously by other theologians. He couldn't read or write in Greek, which was the language of intellectuals, and he lived in a backwater part of the Roman Empire. His critics called him a "donkey protector," and said, "[He is] what passes for a philosopher with Africans."
Living on the edge of the empire, he was surrounded by renegade forms of Christianity. People who considered themselves Christians were also worshiping idols and consulting with fortune tellers. All these pagan influences were contributing to a huge diversity in Christian beliefs. Augustine became a famous theologian in part because he spoke out against this diversity, arguing that all Christian churches should follow the doctrine of the central church in Rome.
Augustine especially attacked the group of Christians known as Donatists, who believed that the only true Christians were those people who lived their lives completely free from sin. Augustine argued that no one could possibly be free from sin, because sinfulness is in the very nature of humans. He developed the idea of original sin, saying that all humans are born sinful because all humans are descended from Adam and Eve who committed the first sin.
Augustine used himself as an example of imperfection by writing The Confessions (c. 400), one of the first memoirs of Western literature. In that book, he described all the sins he had ever committed in the years of his life before his conversion, everything from crying over a fictional character in a poem, to stealing pears from a neighbor's tree, to his sexual fantasies and exploits.
In the last years of his life, Augustine was witnessing the fall of the Roman Empire. The city of Rome had already been captured by barbarians once, and Augustine's own city of Hippo was besieged by vandals. After his death, the city of Hippo was destroyed by the barbarians, but somehow Augustine's library survived. He'd spent his life defending Christianity against pagan influence, and his work went on to hold the Christian Church together throughout the medieval era. It is partially due to his writings that the Catholic Church did not break up into separate churches for almost a thousand years.

Mr. B at 80

Many thanks for many memories and a very Happy Birthday.

BURDA on IMAGE

In today's media society, in which hundreds of different media compete for the attention of viewers, readers and listeners, a great deal of importance is attached to presenting oneself. Those who know how to present themselves get noticed, and a whole raft of consultants from different horizons make sure that their protégés are presented as effectively as possible. The opportunities of personal representation and self-presentation have become democratised to an extent that would have been unimaginable many years ago. Nowadays anyone who wants to draw attention to themselves and communicate to the public an image of themselves can to all intents and purposes do so.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/burda06/burda06_index.html

Bush is far from the only lame duck today

Mick Hume is spot-on in SPIKED http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2073/

The mid-terms have confirmed the peculiar situation in which American society appears deeply polarised yet without experiencing any discernible political divide. There might be personal animosity, so that some Democrats will not speak to somebody they discover to be a Republican, and vice versa. But the two parties are not engaged in a proper political debate. Sure, voters on both sides might express strong opinions about emotive moral/cultural issues such as stem cell research or abortion. But these seem more like high-profile symbols of difference around which to strike poses, rather than part of a genuine struggle over the future direction of American society.

Let us pause at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month to remember all those who gave so much for our freedom

Why we all love the Boss

Springsteen's songwriting and production and the way he approaches live shows put him in a different class. There was a lot of standing around looking meaningful with acoustic guitars in the '70s, and all those guys got swept away by punk, except Springsteen, who carried on through, and made some great albums in the late '70s.


Telegraph Entertainment Why we all love the Boss

GHWB 41/GWB 43

A Come-to-Daddy Moment

By MAUREEN DOWD

Poppy Bush and James Baker gave Sonny the presidency to play with and he broke it. So now they’re taking it back.

They are dragging W. away from those reckless older guys who have been such a bad influence and getting him some new minders who are a lot more practical.

In a scene that might be called “Murder on the Oval Express,” Rummy turned up dead with so many knives in him that it’s impossible to say who actually finished off the man billed as Washington’s most skilled infighter. (Poppy? Scowcroft? Baker? Laura? Condi? The Silver Fox? Retired generals? Serving generals? Future generals? Troops returning to Iraq for the umpteenth time without a decent strategy? Democrats? Republicans? Joe Lieberman?)
The defense chief got hung out to dry before Saddam got hung. The president and Karl Rove, underestimating the public’s hunger for change or overestimating the loyalty of a fed-up base, did not ice Rummy in time to save the Senate from teetering Democratic. But once Sonny managed to heedlessly dynamite the Republican majority — as well as the Middle East, the Atlantic alliance and the U.S. Army — then Bush Inc., the family firm that snatched the presidency for W. in 2000, had to step in. Two trusted members of the Bush 41 war council, Mr. Baker and Robert Gates, have been dispatched to discipline the delinquent juvenile and extricate him from the mother of all messes.

Mr. Gates, already on Mr. Baker’s “How Do We Get Sonny Out of Deep Doo Doo in Iraq?” study group, left his job protecting 41’s papers at Texas A&M to return to Washington and pry the fingers of Poppy’s old nemesis, Rummy, off the Pentagon.

“They had to bring in someone from the old gang,” said someone from the old gang. “That has to make Junior uneasy. With Bob, the door is opened again to 41 and Baker and Brent.”
W. had no choice but to make an Oedipal U-turn. He couldn’t let Nancy Pelosi subpoena the cranky Rummy for hearings on Iraq. “He’s not exactly Mr. Charming or Mr. Truthful, and he’d be on TV saying something stupid,” said a Bush 41 official. “Bob can just go up to the Hill and say: ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t there when that happened.’ ”

Bob Gates, his friends say, had been worried about the belligerent, arrogant, ideological style of Rummy & Cheney from the start. He fretted at the way W.’s so-called foreign policy “dream team” — including his old staffer and fellow Soviet expert Condi — made it up as they went along, even though that had been their complaint about the Clinton foreign policy team. A realpolitik advocate like his mentor, General Scowcroft, he was critical of a linear, moralizing style that disdained nuance, demoted diplomacy and inflated villains. In 2004, he publicly questioned the administration’s approach to Iran.

While Vice went off to a corner to lick his wounds, W. was forced to do his best imitation of his dad yesterday, talking about “bipartisan outreach,” “people have spoken,” blah-blah-blah — after he’d been out on the trail saying that electing Democrats would mean that “the terrorists win and America loses.”

“I share a large part of the responsibility” for the “thumpin’ ” of Republicans, he told reporters. Actually, he gets full responsibility.

W. has stopped talking about democracy as a standard of success in Iraq; yesterday, he said that Iraq had to “govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself.”
He was asked if his surprise at the election results showed he was out of touch with Americans. “I thought when it was all said and done,” he replied, “the American people would understand the importance of taxes and the importance of security.”

So it was just that the American people were too dumb to understand? W. also managed to bash Vietnam vets, saying that this war isn’t similar because there’s a volunteer army, so “the troops understand the consequences of Iraq in the global war on terror.” Is that why W. stayed out of Vietnam? Because he understood it?

An ashen Rummy was also condescending during his uncomfortable tableau with W. and Bob Gates in the Oval Office, implying that he was dumped because Americans just didn’t “comprehend” what was going on in Iraq. Actually, Rummy, we get it. You don’t get it.
“Baker’s no fool,” a Bush 41 official said. “He wasn’t going to go out there with a plan for Iraq and have Rummy shoot it down. He wanted a receptive audience. Everyone had to be on the same page before the plan is unveiled.”

They don’t call him the Velvet Hammer for nothing. R.I.P., Rummy.

WWII

Economist.com:

Mr Davies's two main weapons are the devastating statistic and the unexpected comparison. Stalin's death camps killed more people than Hitler's. America's army in 1939 was smaller than Poland's. The casualties of the 1944 Warsaw uprising were the equivalent of the September 11th, 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre, every day for two months.

The effect is powerful and, for the most part, convincing. The war was an appalling and complicated mess, in which heroism, individual and collective, was balanced and often outweighed by cowardice, cruelty and incompetence, and—worse—dreadful compromises and surrenders dictated by realpolitik and dressed up in the language of patriotism and morality. After reading this book, not every reader will rethink his or her view of the war altogether, but most will find their thinking enriched and stimulated by new facts and viewpoints. The muscular prose and spiky jokes are treats too.

Vanity Fair on Neocons

An NRO Symposium on Vanity Fair on National Review Online:

Vanity Unfair

A response to Vanity Fair.

An NRO Symposium

On Friday, Vanity Fair issued a press release highlighting excerpts of a piece in their January issue on “neoconservative” supporters of the war in Iraq who today, unsurprisingly, have some negative things to say about how the war is going and how the Bush administration has been handling it.

In the wake of the press release – which has gotten considerable play on the Internet – some of those “neoconservatives” highlighted in the article have responded to the excerpts and its misrepresentations, in some cases, of what they said. We collect some of those reactions — including from Eliot Cohen, David Frum, Frank Gaffney, Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, and Michael Rubin.

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

The TLS, circulation 35,204, founded in 1902, may be the only paper that can be counted upon for consistently brilliant commentary. It also has the widest range of any publication I've ever read. It calls itself literary but that's barely the beginning. The contributors write with easy authority on archeology and politics, on the stars of show business and the heroes of war, on opera, entomology, architecture, painting, astronomy, religion and anything else that swims within range of the human imagination. It's the go-to paper for those who like to be up to date on the latest theories of Renaissance poetry, military strategy or beekeeping.

Typically, a TLS reviewer uses the appearance of a new book to set down an essay (brilliant, searching or chatty, as the occasion demands) on a recent twist in the history of ideas. The approach is resolutely no-brow. In the TLS we can read about Steven Spielberg as well as Ezra Pound, about Roy Orbison as well as Seamus Heaney.

John Ciardi

A man truly missed.

Take a look at some of his poems. Some representative first lines below:

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/johnciardi107264.html

A university is what a...
- But when the pen is...
- Every game ever invented by...
- Intelligence recognizes what has...
- It's not a how-to...
- Love is the word used...
- Modern art is what happens...
- Nothing goes further toward a..
.- Poetry lies its way to...
- The day will happen whether...
- The reader deserves an honest..
.- What has any poet to...
- Written by a sponge dipped...
- You don't have to suffer...

Charles Osgood

Thank you, sir

Your beat is originality and heart and music and life and poetry.

And in a time of peril, your message is welcome news.

HERBERT WARREN WIND

George Plimpton’s theory of sportswriting was the smaller the ball, the better the literature. And while Plimpton never provided any historical evidence of a bard of marbles, he was probably right. Herbert Warren Wind, who wrote (mainly) about golf , beginning in 1947, and who died last June, at the age of eighty-eight, often said that Charles Darwin’s grandson—Bernard Darwin, of the London Times and Country Life—was the greatest of all golf writers. One could easily find a place in the clubhouse as well for P. G. Wodehouse, John Updike, Michael Murphy, and Dan Jenkins, but Wind himself was surely the most devoted American on the course, and the most elegant. His writing on the game, and on tennis and other sports, too (he wrote a particularly strange and wonderful disquisition on the history of football placekicking), was always spare, measured, and sure, like the man.

Wind was equally acute on the complexities of the game and on the characters of the players. He was, in spirit, prelapsarian, uninterested in the issues of money, endorsements, or scandal of any kind. If he had a hero in golf, and even in life, it was certainly Bobby Jones, who won thirteen major championships as an amateur between 1923 and 1930 and then went on to help design the ne plus ultra of American courses, Augusta National, the site of the Masters. Jones was an educated athlete, a lawyer, a writer, and a reader, and the two men became friends, talking about books and the intricacies of golf. Wind learned a great deal from his subject. “About three days before Jones’s death, when he knew he was dying, he said to the members of his family, ‘If this is all there is to it, it sure is peaceful,’ ” Wind wrote in 1972. “That is good to know.”
As a young man, Herb Wind was an excellent golfer. He had a big, modern swing, but he always cut a traditionalist’s figure. His self-effacing, uncomplaining manner, his chesty stride, his clothes, even the tripartite name—Herbert Warren Wind—seemed a thing of the pastoral, perhaps English, past. Tweed, of course, was his preferred fabric. He once showed up on a course in all-tweed, including tweed knickers and a tweed cap. It was the middle of July.

“Aren’t you a little hot, Herb?” his partner asked him.

“Yes, I am,” he replied.

MIDTERMS

The Difference Two Years Made

On Tuesday, when this page runs the list of people it has endorsed for election, we will include no Republican Congressional candidates for the first time in our memory. Although Times editorials tend to agree with Democrats on national policy, we have proudly and consistently endorsed a long line of moderate Republicans, particularly for the House. Our only political loyalty is to making the two-party system as vital and responsible as possible.
That is why things are different this year.
To begin with, the Republican majority that has run the House — and for the most part, the Senate — during President Bush’s tenure has done a terrible job on the basics. Its tax-cutting-above-all-else has wrecked the budget, hobbled the middle class and endangered the long-term economy. It has refused to face up to global warming and done pathetically little about the country’s dependence on foreign oil.
Republican leaders, particularly in the House, have developed toxic symptoms of an overconfident majority that has been too long in power. They methodically shut the opposition — and even the more moderate members of their own party — out of any role in the legislative process. Their only mission seems to be self-perpetuation.
The current Republican majority managed to achieve that burned-out, brain-dead status in record time, and with a shocking disregard for the most minimal ethical standards. It was bad enough that a party that used to believe in fiscal austerity blew billions on pork-barrel projects. It is worse that many of the most expensive boondoggles were not even directed at their constituents, but at lobbyists who financed their campaigns and high-end lifestyles.
That was already the situation in 2004, and even then this page endorsed Republicans who had shown a high commitment to ethics reform and a willingness to buck their party on important issues like the environment, civil liberties and women’s rights.
For us, the breaking point came over the Republicans’ attempt to undermine the fundamental checks and balances that have safeguarded American democracy since its inception. The fact that the White House, House and Senate are all controlled by one party is not a threat to the balance of powers, as long as everyone understands the roles assigned to each by the Constitution. But over the past two years, the White House has made it clear that it claims sweeping powers that go well beyond any acceptable limits. Rather than doing their duty to curb these excesses, the Congressional Republicans have dedicated themselves to removing restraints on the president’s ability to do whatever he wants. To paraphrase Tom DeLay, the Republicans feel you don’t need to have oversight hearings if your party is in control of everything.
An administration convinced of its own perpetual rightness and a partisan Congress determined to deflect all criticism of the chief executive has been the recipe for what we live with today.
Congress, in particular the House, has failed to ask probing questions about the war in Iraq or hold the president accountable for his catastrophic bungling of the occupation. It also has allowed Mr. Bush to avoid answering any questions about whether his administration cooked the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. Then, it quietly agreed to close down the one agency that has been riding herd on crooked and inept American contractors who have botched everything from construction work to the security of weapons.
After the revelations about the abuse, torture and illegal detentions in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Congress shielded the Pentagon from any responsibility for the atrocities its policies allowed to happen. On the eve of the election, and without even a pretense at debate in the House, Congress granted the White House permission to hold hundreds of noncitizens in jail forever, without due process, even though many of them were clearly sent there in error.
In the Senate, the path for this bill was cleared by a handful of Republicans who used their personal prestige and reputation for moderation to paper over the fact that the bill violates the Constitution in fundamental ways. Having acquiesced in the president’s campaign to dilute their own authority, lawmakers used this bill to further Mr. Bush’s goal of stripping the powers of the only remaining independent branch, the judiciary.
This election is indeed about George W. Bush — and the Congressional majority’s insistence on protecting him from the consequences of his mistakes and misdeeds. Mr. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 and proceeded to govern as if he had an enormous mandate. After he actually beat his opponent in 2004, he announced he now had real political capital and intended to spend it. We have seen the results. It is frightening to contemplate the new excesses he could concoct if he woke up next Wednesday and found that his party had maintained its hold on the House and Senate.



The midterms by numbers

62% George Bush's approval rating during the 2002 midterm polls

37% Bush's current approval rating

41% Bill Clinton's approval rating in 1994, when the Republicans swept to power in Congress

80% Voters who will use touch-screen voting machines in this year's election

27 number of states that don't provide a paper trail to support touch-screen voting machines

(more) CLIVE JAMES

James has just published the latest iteration of his autobiography, NORTH OF SOHO. It promises much.

For most of their 38-year marriage, James has lived apart from Prudence Shaw, an academic who lives in Cambridge, where she did most of the parenting of their two daughters. The self-described "absentee father" has spent his weekends there and weekdays in London. Without giving any details, he makes it clear in the fourth volume of his highly personal memoirs, North Face of Soho, that he struggled with the concept of monogamy. "Marriage to a beauty had done nothing to blind me to the beauty of all the women I had not married: far from it. If my libido could have been given a face, it would have been the face of Robbie Williams singing a one-night date at a training camp for cheerleaders.

His apartment in a converted warehouse 200m from the Thames is full of books, many written in the German, French, Spanish and Italian he has taught himself. Upstairs is a small dance floor reserved for his hobby, tango.

OUR DNA

This past week is a to note our solidarity with all the dead (on Thursday 2nd), the saints (on Wednesday the 1st), the uncanonised and maybe the accursed. We are one human family. St Matthew, listing the pedigree of Jesus, draws attention to the harlot Rahab and the adulterous David and Tamar. What mixture of DNA is in my makeup, linking me perhaps to farmers, poets, kings, rapists, the violent or the victims? This is the makeup in which I work out my way to God. I inherited it, I did not choose it. But like a good card-player, I can make much or little of the hand I am dealt.

How am I doing?

May I improve my play.

Modern Drunkard

Some fine writing here along with much wry commentary.

A remarkable amount of brilliant literature (and a whole lot else) was produced 'under the influence'.

An intriguing website to peruse occasionally.


Modern Drunkard Magazine Online

John Derbyshire on Religion

An extraordinary piece. A thoughtful journey.

John Derbyshire on Religion on National Review Online:

"Q. Are you a Christian?

A. No. I take the minimal definition of a Christian to be a person who is sure that Jesus of Nazareth was divine, or part-divine, and that the Resurrection was a real event. I don’t believe either of those things.

Have I ever? Well, up to about three years ago there were moments when I would have answered that question with a hesitant “Yes.” For the most part, though, I would rather not have been asked. My Christianity was of the watery, behavioral Anglican variety (see below) — an occasional consolation and a habit, not a core feature of what neuroscientists call my “BDIs” — that is, my mental system of beliefs, desires, and intentions — and certainly not a waterproof philosophical system that I relied on in decision-making and opinion-forming. My ability to reply “yes” to this question, even occasionally, ended sometime early in 2004. Since about the end of that year I’ve been coming clean with myself, and quit going to church. No, I am not a Christian.

Q. Do you believe in God?

A. Yes, to my own satisfaction, though not necessarily to yours. I don’t believe in a sort of super-guy with a human-ish personality (yes, yes, I know that’s the wrong way round: we are supposed to be made in His image) who can be put in a good mood by proper ceremonies, whose mind can be fathomed by reading scripture, and whose help can be enlisted through prayer.

I belong to the 16 percent of Americans who, in the classification used for a recent survey, believe in a “Critical God.” My God is at, or possibly just is, one pole of the great two-poled mystery of everything: the origin of the universe, which passeth all human understanding. He is the Creator. Since He was present in the cosmos then, I assume He is now (or “now,” since He is obviously outside spacetime); and since I can apprehend Him, I assume He is aware of me. The two poles of mystery, the Him and the Me (I mean, the invidual human consciousness, the I, the Me — that’s the second pole) are in contact somehow, and may actually be the same thing, as is hinted at by some by some religious teachers outside Christianity. I am, in short, a Mysterian.

Q. Do you go to Church?

A. Not since about the end of 2004. Just before Christmas that year, I think. (I never did attend the big, cast-of-thousands services at Christmas and Easter. I was the opposite of a PACE Christian — palms, ashes, Christmas, Easter. I used to most enjoy summer services, when half the congregation was away on vacation.) To say I lost my faith would be to over-dramatize it, since I was never a person of strong faith anyway. But I stopped being a churchgoer about then. Downsides of ceasing church attendance: (1) I still owe my church $500, according to their accounts — I was quite conscientious about pledges and collections. I shall pay it when I can afford to, but I can’t just now. (2) My church is right on Main Street in the village, so every time I go down there I face the embarrassing prospect of running into my minister, I mean ex-minister. This has now become a family joke — you know, the kids offer to scout ahead for me, and so on. (3) Whether to go on saying grace at family meals — see below.

Q. What caused you to lose your faith?

A. I can identify four factors: age, parenthood, biology, and exile.

Please read this article in its entirety. (link supra)

Singapore

FT.com Can a nanny state really rock?:

Singapore has long been a city that expatriates in Asia either liked or lampooned. While living in Hong Kong in the 1990s, I admired Singapore as a model of urban planning even as I was amused by its nanny-state obsessions. On my first day on the island more than 10 years ago, the lead editorial in The Straits Times was on the need to be punctual. And if Orchard Road, Singapore's main thoroughfare, seemed like one of those irritating Ikea affairs that funnel you through the entire store in the hope that you might buy more, it was easy enough to escape.

Ten years on, the world has changed and become more like Singapore. Today, in New York's Times Square, the glitzy neon is so overpowering that it seems like an outsized stationary carousel with a few skyscrapers attached - exactly like Singapore's riverside financial and restaurant district, in fact. From New York to London to Kuala Lumpur, city centres are jammed with stores. At some level, we are all Singaporeans now."

Elevenses with the FT

Al Gore fighting the environmental wars. Un autre croissant, monsieur?

FT.com / Columnists / Lunch with the FT - Elevenses with the FT: Emission statement