Who could decline an invitation to join the most celebrated literary family in England for a weekend in a country house with a fine wine cellar, in a lovely setting far from the noisome proletariat? Alexander Waugh, grandson of the novelist Evelyn Waugh and an accomplished writer himself, offers as much in "Fathers and Sons," his "autobiography of a family." He promises to introduce us to his progenitors, not only his own father, the incendiary columnist Auberon, but also: Auberon's father, the famously acerbic Evelyn; Evelyn's brother, the prolific writer Alec; Evelyn and Alec's father, Arthur, a publisher, critic and author; and even Arthur's father, Dr. Alexander Waugh (1840-1906).
That is a lot of Waughs. It should be noted that, except for the current biographer, all of them are dead, but one's disappointment has to be muted, because meeting the Waughs alive, en masse, would have been a terrifying experience -- like stumbling into the house of Addams.
Let us imagine ourselves, at the start of a Somerset weekend, running into the author's great-great-grandfather, Dr. Alexander Waugh, a repulsive, red-faced little fat man who is drunkenly smashing ornaments in the hall, screaming at the servants and flagellating an Irish setter with an ivory-tipped whip. A wasp settles on his wife's forehead; instead of brushing it off, he squashes it with the ivory tip so as to ensure that she does not escape the sting. If we stay the night, we will see him drag his son, Arthur, out of bed to shove him into a downstairs cupboard, where the little wretch, foolish enough not to enjoy shooting animals, is made to lavish kisses on his father's gun-case.
Dr. Waugh, in short, is a sadist. "The Brute," as he is known to his descendants, is also a skilled surgeon; he is the inventor of a sinister apparatus known as "Waugh's Long Fine Dissecting Forceps." He is clearly not the fount of the literary genes that define succeeding generations, but elements of his talent for sadism are passed on. Spasms of it keep surfacing in five generations, like flecks of foam in the family's brilliantly translucent stream.
In the library, if we could brave the occupant's glare on our entering, we find a porcine man in tweeds with murder in his heart. This is Evelyn Waugh (1903-66), acclaimed by many notable writers as one of the greatest novelists in the English language ("about as good as one can be," said George Orwell, "while holding untenable opinions"). He is presently dipping his pen in vitriol to assassinate his father, Arthur, either in a diary entry or in a novel, as the model for a fatuous character. One feels that if Arthur insists yet again on sonorously reading from the entire Dickens canon to the assembled family, Evelyn will assault him with Dr. Waugh's long fine dissecting forceps.
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)
31.5.07
30.5.07
ART and the UNCONSCIOUS
The connections that paintings and dance performances, movies and novels and music make to us beyond our conscious perceptions of them are primary and transporting. Our unconscious, deep-seated responses are what bring us back to the arts for more and more, nourishing and renewing us just as food and air and water do. At the same time, we're carried away from our sensory and analytical selves, lifted or plunged into a web of emotion and association, a fretwork of glinting filaments radiating out in so many directions.
For some, this becomes a linking to the divine, to something ineffably transcendent. For others, it opens pathways to a shadowy and only fleetingly accessible territory in themselves. It may be a means of communing with an artist's own unconscious essence or of riding the mythic tides that flow timelessly through the arts. It may be a key to cultural codes or the workings of a particular artistic medium. It may open the deepest wells of delight and terror. Or it may be nothing so mysterious at all, but rather a function of physiological events in the brain and nervous system that may someday be thoroughly describable and understood.
"We have multiple minds that are processing things in parallel or interacting ways," according to Samuel Barondes, professor of neurobiology and psychiatry at UCSF. "That's what allows us to enjoy art on multiple channels."
The notion of an aesthetic bandwidth that operates with extraordinary speed and complexity is an enticing one in a digital age. The unconscious, like the Internet, can be seen as a vast interwoven fabric of data about ourselves and our connections to one another and the world. In his influential book "Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious," University of Virginia psychology Professor Timothy D. Wilson argues that we all possess "a nonconscious filter that examines the information reaching our senses and decides what to admit to consciousness."
We can only sense the workings of the unconscious, after all, through signals that we can register and at least partially decode. The arts, with their uniquely rich fusion of beauty, emotion, imaginative identification and thought, can tap our unconscious natures in particularly powerful ways. Whether by some alignment of specific circumstances and conditions or by sheer serendipity, certain works of art at certain times make that happen.
San Francisco Opera General Director David Gockley attended a performance of "Die Walküre" in Washington, D.C., not long ago and found himself strangely transfixed by a second-act encounter of Fricka, Wotan and Brünnhilde. Gockley has taken in numerous performances of this Wagner opera over the years. This time, the scene's "conflict between love and power, between being self-protective and building a wall around yourself at the expense of others" struck him with heightened immediacy and force.
For some, this becomes a linking to the divine, to something ineffably transcendent. For others, it opens pathways to a shadowy and only fleetingly accessible territory in themselves. It may be a means of communing with an artist's own unconscious essence or of riding the mythic tides that flow timelessly through the arts. It may be a key to cultural codes or the workings of a particular artistic medium. It may open the deepest wells of delight and terror. Or it may be nothing so mysterious at all, but rather a function of physiological events in the brain and nervous system that may someday be thoroughly describable and understood.
"We have multiple minds that are processing things in parallel or interacting ways," according to Samuel Barondes, professor of neurobiology and psychiatry at UCSF. "That's what allows us to enjoy art on multiple channels."
The notion of an aesthetic bandwidth that operates with extraordinary speed and complexity is an enticing one in a digital age. The unconscious, like the Internet, can be seen as a vast interwoven fabric of data about ourselves and our connections to one another and the world. In his influential book "Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious," University of Virginia psychology Professor Timothy D. Wilson argues that we all possess "a nonconscious filter that examines the information reaching our senses and decides what to admit to consciousness."
We can only sense the workings of the unconscious, after all, through signals that we can register and at least partially decode. The arts, with their uniquely rich fusion of beauty, emotion, imaginative identification and thought, can tap our unconscious natures in particularly powerful ways. Whether by some alignment of specific circumstances and conditions or by sheer serendipity, certain works of art at certain times make that happen.
San Francisco Opera General Director David Gockley attended a performance of "Die Walküre" in Washington, D.C., not long ago and found himself strangely transfixed by a second-act encounter of Fricka, Wotan and Brünnhilde. Gockley has taken in numerous performances of this Wagner opera over the years. This time, the scene's "conflict between love and power, between being self-protective and building a wall around yourself at the expense of others" struck him with heightened immediacy and force.
TOO SMART? PEDANTIC MAYBE
A capacity crowd of 1,500 people jammed into Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University last night for Al Gore's speech and book-signing. But the numbers don't matter: Even if Gore were speaking before a sellout crowd at Verizon Center, he would still be the smartest guy in the room.
He reminded his listeners of this repeatedly last night.
"Were it possible to summarize this book in only 15 minutes, it wouldn't be the book it is, but I'll do my best," he announced en route to a 34-minute talk.
He waxed esoteric about the ancients: "Both the Agora and the Forum were foremost in the minds of our Founders. . . . Not a few of them read both Latin and Greek, as you know."
He waxed erudite about the Enlightenment: "Gibbon's 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' was first published the same year as the Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith's 'The Wealth of Nations.' "
And he waxed informed about the Information Age: "One of the challenges in discussing the premise of this book is to establish as a concrete reality the importance of this virtual space, forgive the phrase, within which the conversation of democracy takes place."
Gore practically oozes gray matter.
"He's the smartest guy out there," said a former Gore volunteer named Andy Williams, who snagged a coveted front-row seat.
"He's very smart," concurred Alan Schwartz, wearing a T-shirt with President Bush's image and the words "Worst President Ever."
"He's the smartest guy in the pack," said Eugenia Ayers, who was one of the first in line.
And therein lies a problem for the Gore '08 bubble.
Publication this month of Gore's jeremiad against Bush, "The Assault on Reason," has fed fervent hopes among environmentalists and others on the left that he will run again for the presidency -- an unlikely prospect, but one Gore does not completely dismiss. Yet reading Gore's book, or listening to his speeches, may remind some of those same supporters what they liked least about him the first time he ran, in 2000. Gore is usually smart and sometimes prophetic -- but, all too frequently, pedantic.
"It's the biggest problem he's got," said Schwartz, from Germantown. "People don't want somebody who makes them feel stupid."
He reminded his listeners of this repeatedly last night.
"Were it possible to summarize this book in only 15 minutes, it wouldn't be the book it is, but I'll do my best," he announced en route to a 34-minute talk.
He waxed esoteric about the ancients: "Both the Agora and the Forum were foremost in the minds of our Founders. . . . Not a few of them read both Latin and Greek, as you know."
He waxed erudite about the Enlightenment: "Gibbon's 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' was first published the same year as the Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith's 'The Wealth of Nations.' "
And he waxed informed about the Information Age: "One of the challenges in discussing the premise of this book is to establish as a concrete reality the importance of this virtual space, forgive the phrase, within which the conversation of democracy takes place."
Gore practically oozes gray matter.
"He's the smartest guy out there," said a former Gore volunteer named Andy Williams, who snagged a coveted front-row seat.
"He's very smart," concurred Alan Schwartz, wearing a T-shirt with President Bush's image and the words "Worst President Ever."
"He's the smartest guy in the pack," said Eugenia Ayers, who was one of the first in line.
And therein lies a problem for the Gore '08 bubble.
Publication this month of Gore's jeremiad against Bush, "The Assault on Reason," has fed fervent hopes among environmentalists and others on the left that he will run again for the presidency -- an unlikely prospect, but one Gore does not completely dismiss. Yet reading Gore's book, or listening to his speeches, may remind some of those same supporters what they liked least about him the first time he ran, in 2000. Gore is usually smart and sometimes prophetic -- but, all too frequently, pedantic.
"It's the biggest problem he's got," said Schwartz, from Germantown. "People don't want somebody who makes them feel stupid."
28.5.07
DeLillo & 9/11
In his new novel, Don DeLillo shoves us back into the day itself in his first sentence: “It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night.” He resurrects that world as it was, bottling the mortal dread, high anxiety and mass confusion that seem so distant now. Though the sensibility and prose are echt DeLillo, “Falling Man” is not necessarily the 9/11 novel you’d expect from the author of panoramic novels that probe the atomic age (“Underworld”) and the Kennedy assassination (“Libra”) on the broadest imaginable canvas, intermingling historical characters with fictional creations. With the exception of Mohamed Atta, who slips into the crevices of “Falling Man” as an almost spectral presence, DeLillo mentions none of the other boldface names of 9/11, not even the mayor. Instead of unfurling an epic, DeLillo usually keeps the focus on an extended family of middle-class Manhattanites. If “Underworld” took its cues from the kinetic cinema of Eisenstein, “Falling Man,” up until its remarkable final sequence, is all oblique silences and enigmatic close-ups reminiscent of the domestic anomie of the New Wave. In DeLillo’s hands, this is not at all limiting or prosaic. There’s a method to the Resnais-like fogginess. The cumulative effect is devastating, as DeLillo in exquisite increments lowers the reader into an inexorable rendezvous with raw terror.
26.5.07
God Isn't the Only Moralist Around!
Two things,” Immanuel Kant wrote in the late 18th century, “fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we meditate upon them: the starry firmament above and the moral law within.”
The awesome starry firmament inspires plenty of controversy—about the composition of dark matter, for example. But a lot is known: the sun is composed of hydrogen and helium, the Horsehead Nebula is 1,500 light years distant, and so on.
There’s also plenty of controversy about moral law. Should we give much more to charity than we actually do? Is torture permissible under extreme circumstances? Is eating meat wrong? Could it ever be permissible to kill one innocent person in order to save five? But, again we know a lot. Throwing good taste out with the bathwater for the sake of a clear example, everyone knows that boiling babies for fun is wrong. Boiling lobsters is a matter that reasonable people may disagree about, but as far as boiling babies goes, agreement is pretty much universal. Babies suffer when boiled—they are not like the worms that live near undersea vents, who are partial to scalding water. If something goes without saying, it’s this: one ought not to boil babies for fun.
Apart from filling the mind with admiration and awe, the starry firmament and the moral law together fill the mind with a problem, which Kant’s remark obscures. The quotation suggests, misleadingly, that the astronomical and moral realms are wholly separate—the former is “above” and the latter is “within.” But they aren’t: as Moby correctly sings, “We are all made of stars.” The heavens and human beings are composed from the same physical stuff, and are governed by same physical principles. The starry firmament isn’t really “above”—it’s everywhere. We, along with lobsters and the rest, are part of it.
Everything, in short, is a natural phenomenon, an aspect of the universe as revealed by the natural sciences. In particular, morality is a natural phenomenon. Moral facts or truths—that boiling babies is wrong, say—are not additions to the natural world, they are already there in the natural world, even if they are not explicitly mentioned in scientific theories. Fundamental sciences such as particle physics and molecular biology do not speak explicitly speak of sand dunes, or boiling water, or lobsters, but facts about sand dunes and the like are implicitly settled by more fundamental facts: arrange bits of matter a certain way and you have an eroding sand dune, or boiling water, or (here the arrangement needs to be very complicated indeed) a lively lobster. And, presumably, the same goes for the moral facts.
But how can morality be a natural phenomenon? We ought not to boil babies, but the natural world seems not to contain any trace of an “ought,” or an “ought not.” A dropped stone is under no obligation to fall, it just does. Admittedly, I might say, before dropping a stone out of the window, “This stone ought to hit the ground in three seconds,” but here I just mean something like “It is likely that the stone will hit the ground in three seconds.” If the stone doesn’t do that, it has done nothing wrong, and is not to be blamed for anything. In the natural world, nothing ought to happen, or ought not to happen, in the relevant sense of “ought.” Keeping within the confines of nature, there is no space for the fact that we ought not to boil babies. Yet since nature is all there is, there is no place left to go.
This problem is sometimes traced to David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, in which Hume, writing half a century before Kant, complained of an “imperceptible change” from “the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not” to propositions “connected with an ought, or an ought not.” “This change,” Hume said, is “of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.”
The awesome starry firmament inspires plenty of controversy—about the composition of dark matter, for example. But a lot is known: the sun is composed of hydrogen and helium, the Horsehead Nebula is 1,500 light years distant, and so on.
There’s also plenty of controversy about moral law. Should we give much more to charity than we actually do? Is torture permissible under extreme circumstances? Is eating meat wrong? Could it ever be permissible to kill one innocent person in order to save five? But, again we know a lot. Throwing good taste out with the bathwater for the sake of a clear example, everyone knows that boiling babies for fun is wrong. Boiling lobsters is a matter that reasonable people may disagree about, but as far as boiling babies goes, agreement is pretty much universal. Babies suffer when boiled—they are not like the worms that live near undersea vents, who are partial to scalding water. If something goes without saying, it’s this: one ought not to boil babies for fun.
Apart from filling the mind with admiration and awe, the starry firmament and the moral law together fill the mind with a problem, which Kant’s remark obscures. The quotation suggests, misleadingly, that the astronomical and moral realms are wholly separate—the former is “above” and the latter is “within.” But they aren’t: as Moby correctly sings, “We are all made of stars.” The heavens and human beings are composed from the same physical stuff, and are governed by same physical principles. The starry firmament isn’t really “above”—it’s everywhere. We, along with lobsters and the rest, are part of it.
Everything, in short, is a natural phenomenon, an aspect of the universe as revealed by the natural sciences. In particular, morality is a natural phenomenon. Moral facts or truths—that boiling babies is wrong, say—are not additions to the natural world, they are already there in the natural world, even if they are not explicitly mentioned in scientific theories. Fundamental sciences such as particle physics and molecular biology do not speak explicitly speak of sand dunes, or boiling water, or lobsters, but facts about sand dunes and the like are implicitly settled by more fundamental facts: arrange bits of matter a certain way and you have an eroding sand dune, or boiling water, or (here the arrangement needs to be very complicated indeed) a lively lobster. And, presumably, the same goes for the moral facts.
But how can morality be a natural phenomenon? We ought not to boil babies, but the natural world seems not to contain any trace of an “ought,” or an “ought not.” A dropped stone is under no obligation to fall, it just does. Admittedly, I might say, before dropping a stone out of the window, “This stone ought to hit the ground in three seconds,” but here I just mean something like “It is likely that the stone will hit the ground in three seconds.” If the stone doesn’t do that, it has done nothing wrong, and is not to be blamed for anything. In the natural world, nothing ought to happen, or ought not to happen, in the relevant sense of “ought.” Keeping within the confines of nature, there is no space for the fact that we ought not to boil babies. Yet since nature is all there is, there is no place left to go.
This problem is sometimes traced to David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, in which Hume, writing half a century before Kant, complained of an “imperceptible change” from “the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not” to propositions “connected with an ought, or an ought not.” “This change,” Hume said, is “of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.”
so this is where we end it
On a Sunday afternoon in Las Vegas, at the hottest pool party in town, the Hard Rock Hotel's Jack LaFleur is the man to know. The promotions director stands at the velvet rope, deciding who will shake their booties in the sun — and who won't."Only girls, send 'em up!" LaFleur barks as a stream of 20-something, bikini-clad women hop the line, leaving a couple of hundred frustrated men in their wake. "No more guys. It's out of control."This is Rehab, Las Vegas' best-known, biggest and craziest pool party. In the 21 Sundays it will operate this year, hotel executives estimate that Rehab will rake in about $6 million — nearly $35,000 every hour it's open. As many as 3,000 tanned, toned and oil-slicked bodies find their way into Rehab each week, where they play swim-up blackjack, gulp down $17 cocktails served in 30-ounce plastic jugs and make out under waterfalls, on lounge chairs and, well, just about anywhere.Since it began in 2004, Rehab has transformed Vegas' once-sleepy daytime scene into a "Girls Gone Wild" tableau of debauchery. Today, almost every major casino resort has nightclub operators managing its 21-and-over pools. They hire DJs to spin music and demand hefty cover charges. Rates vary by the weekend; on the cheapest days women pay $20, men $30.Several resorts have separate "Euro-style," or top-optional, pools, with half-naked women cavorting in the water. This summer, both the Mirage and Venetian — heavyweights in the nightclub arena — have unveiled re-imagined pools."It's done a remarkable thing to the nightlife landscape," LaFleur said. "Day life? It's hard to even categorize it…. It's finding those ways to generate revenue. For a town that's been known exclusively for nightlife, this was extremely daring and off the charts."The gamble is paying off.By 8:30 a.m., a ghastly hour by Vegas standards, people are already lining up outside Rehab, even though the pool doesn't open until 11. "It's almost like a 'Star Wars' premiere," LaFleur said. "They sit down. They hold that spot in front."Others, like Lisa Tully, a nursing manager from North Carolina, show up a bit later — and flash a little flesh to guarantee access."As soon as we pulled the cover-ups off, they said, 'Bam. Come up here,' " said the 38-year-old, who sported a pierced belly button and a black bikini dotted with rhinestones. The truly flush fork over $1,200 for a season pass — even if they plan to visit only a couple of times.Although LaFleur declined to say how he managed the gender ratio at Rehab, women were clearly in the majority. Ripped men with six-pack abs and check-out-my-pecs tattoos trolled the meat market in board shorts. Busty women, some obviously surgically enhanced, strutted around in high heels. Tully and her friend Deana Yeomans, 36, recounted the sad tale of one of their male friends, who called three times to try to rent a cabana at Rehab. "How many girls?" the operator asked. None, he answered."They said, 'Ha!' " Yeomans said. "They wouldn't even take the reservation."Fifty extra greenbacks, plus cover charge, did the trick for Shawn Conti, 27, a Tampa, Fla., real estate developer in town for a conference."I would have spent more," Conti said. "It's well worth the money. I'd rather do this than go out" at night.He figured he'd drink all day, enjoy a nice dinner, go to his hotel and pass out. Then, after a good night's sleep, he'd wake up refreshed for his meetings the next day."What's not to like?" said Garrett Williams, 25, a real estate broker. "At a nightclub, it's dark and you can't talk to anybody. Here, it's light out and everyone is half naked. The number of girls wearing thongs out there is ridiculous."When it first opened, organizers envisioned Rehab as a place to relax on Sundays after a hard weekend of partying. "That lasted about a week," said the Hard Rock Hotel's marketing guru, Phil Shalala. "People were actually beginning to stay in on Saturday night just so they could go to Rehab during the day."Once inside, people are racking up huge tabs. In addition to the $17 cocktails, Rehab serves alcohol by the bottle. Bacardi rum that retails for about $15 costs $375; for a bottle of Jagermeister — typically about $20 — it's $400. The big spenders can drop $1,195 for a bottle of Cristal champagne, which normally runs about $300. Roving photographers snap pictures like paparazzi and post them online.
UNHEARD INTELLIGENCE
Months before the invasion of Iraq, U.S. intelligence agencies predicted that it would be likely to spark violent sectarian divides and provide al-Qaeda with new opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a report released yesterday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Analysts warned that war in Iraq also could provoke Iran to assert its regional influence and "probably would result in a surge of political Islam and increased funding for terrorist groups" in the Muslim world.
The intelligence assessments, made in January 2003 and widely circulated within the Bush administration before the war, said that establishing democracy in Iraq would be "a long, difficult and probably turbulent challenge." The assessments noted that Iraqi political culture was "largely bereft of the social underpinnings" to support democratic development
The intelligence assessments, made in January 2003 and widely circulated within the Bush administration before the war, said that establishing democracy in Iraq would be "a long, difficult and probably turbulent challenge." The assessments noted that Iraqi political culture was "largely bereft of the social underpinnings" to support democratic development
25.5.07
THANK YOU MR. BUSH
One of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration has been the creation of a near consensus among those who study international affairs, a shared view that stretches, however improbably, from Noam Chomsky to Brent Scowcroft, from the antiwar protesters on the streets of San Francisco to the well-upholstered office of former secretary of state James Baker. This new consensus holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced America's standing in the world and made the United States less, not more, secure, leaving its enemies emboldened and its friends alienated. Paid-up members of the nation's foreign policy establishment, those who have held some of the most senior offices in the land, speak in a language once confined to the T-shirts of placard-wielding demonstrators. They rail against deception and dishonesty, imperialism and corruption. The only dispute between them is over the size and depth of the hole into which Bush has led the country he pledged to serve.
"QUASI" -- CATHOLICS
The pope and many others speak for the thoroughly religious. Christopher Hitchens has the latest best seller on behalf of the antireligious. But who speaks for the quasi-religious?
Quasi-religious people attend services, but they’re bored much of the time. They read the Bible, but find large parts of it odd and irrelevant. They find themselves inextricably bound to their faith, but think some of the people who define it are nuts.
Whatever the state of their ambivalent souls, quasi-religious people often drive history. Abraham Lincoln knew scripture line by line but never quite shared the faith that mesmerized him. Quasi-religious Protestants, drifting anxiously from the certainties of their old religion, built Victorian England. Quasi-religious Jews, climbing up from ancestral orthodoxy, helped shape 20th-century American culture.
And now we are in the midst of an economic boom among quasi-religious Catholics. A generation ago, Catholic incomes and economic prospects were well below the national average. They had much lower college completion rates than mainline Protestants. But the past few decades have seen enormous Catholic social mobility.
According to Lisa Keister, a sociologist at Duke, non-Hispanic white Catholics have watched their personal wealth shoot upward. They have erased the gap that used to separate them from mainline Protestants.
Or, as Keister writes in a journal article, “Preliminary evidence indicates that whites who were raised in Catholic families are no longer asset-poor and may even be among the wealthiest groups of adults in the United States today.”
How have they done it?
Well, they started from their traditional Catholic cultural base. That meant, in the 1950s and early ’60s, a strong emphasis on neighborhood cohesion and family, and a strong preference for obedience and solidarity over autonomy and rebellion.
Then over the decades, the authority of the church weakened and young Catholics assimilated. Catholic values began to converge with Protestant values. Catholic adults were more likely to use contraceptives and fertility rates plummeted. They raised their children to value autonomy more and obedience less.
The process created a crisis for the church, as it struggled to maintain authority over its American flock. But the shift was an economic boon to Catholics themselves. They found themselves in a quasi-religious sweet spot.
Quasi-religious people attend services, but they’re bored much of the time. They read the Bible, but find large parts of it odd and irrelevant. They find themselves inextricably bound to their faith, but think some of the people who define it are nuts.
Whatever the state of their ambivalent souls, quasi-religious people often drive history. Abraham Lincoln knew scripture line by line but never quite shared the faith that mesmerized him. Quasi-religious Protestants, drifting anxiously from the certainties of their old religion, built Victorian England. Quasi-religious Jews, climbing up from ancestral orthodoxy, helped shape 20th-century American culture.
And now we are in the midst of an economic boom among quasi-religious Catholics. A generation ago, Catholic incomes and economic prospects were well below the national average. They had much lower college completion rates than mainline Protestants. But the past few decades have seen enormous Catholic social mobility.
According to Lisa Keister, a sociologist at Duke, non-Hispanic white Catholics have watched their personal wealth shoot upward. They have erased the gap that used to separate them from mainline Protestants.
Or, as Keister writes in a journal article, “Preliminary evidence indicates that whites who were raised in Catholic families are no longer asset-poor and may even be among the wealthiest groups of adults in the United States today.”
How have they done it?
Well, they started from their traditional Catholic cultural base. That meant, in the 1950s and early ’60s, a strong emphasis on neighborhood cohesion and family, and a strong preference for obedience and solidarity over autonomy and rebellion.
Then over the decades, the authority of the church weakened and young Catholics assimilated. Catholic values began to converge with Protestant values. Catholic adults were more likely to use contraceptives and fertility rates plummeted. They raised their children to value autonomy more and obedience less.
The process created a crisis for the church, as it struggled to maintain authority over its American flock. But the shift was an economic boon to Catholics themselves. They found themselves in a quasi-religious sweet spot.
23.5.07
So, LINNEAUS NAMED US
ON THIS DAY in 1707, the man who invented the terms Homo sapiens and Cannabis sativa was born in southern Sweden. At the age of 28, Carl Linnaeus published a small book called "Systema Naturae" — a system of nature. Although it was only 14 pages long, with a limited circulation (only 29 copies still exist), this book changed the way that humanity looks at the natural world.Linnaeus' little book provided a simple way of classifying organisms (is it an insect or a mammal?) and of naming them (Homo sapiens). Although the details of the naming system we use have changed substantially — Linnaeus divided the natural world into three kingdoms (animals, plants and minerals); scientists now talk of five kingdoms — Homo sapiens is still Homo sapiens.Linnaeus proposed a hierarchical scheme in which each organism could be described in terms of its kingdom, class, order, genus and species — from the broadest category to the narrowest. By using Latin — the common scientific language of the time — Linnaeus was able to bypass the myriad folk names for animals and plants that made comparison of information from one country to another so difficult. He also integrated the growing conviction that like bred like, putting species at the heart of the natural world.Above all, Linnaeus argued that organisms should be classified on the basis of a small number of physical characteristics rather than, say, their habits (this animal flies, that one swims) or their use (these plants can be eaten, those are good for medicine). In the case of plants, Linnaeus used their sexual organs to distinguish one species from another. This not only led to a more effective classification, it also inadvertently provided 18th and 19th century ladies with a discreet way of initiating themselves in the facts of life.By the time "Systema Naturae" reached its 10th edition, in 1758, it named 4,400 species of animals and 7,700 species of plants, using Linnaeus' hierarchical scheme.
22.5.07
The Rise of the West
A Culture of Improvement - Robert Friedel - Books - New York Times:
How did the West emerge, though, out of what was once a diverse set of has-been or backwater cultures of a relatively small geographic region roughly contained in the boundaries of modern Europe? This is no mere academic question. That transformation is one of the great phenomena of world history. Alliances are still being made and wars still being fought in which ideas about the origins of the West and its powers play a central role. So successful has the West been that its achievements are avidly envied or used even when they are looked at with wariness or hostility
How did the West emerge, though, out of what was once a diverse set of has-been or backwater cultures of a relatively small geographic region roughly contained in the boundaries of modern Europe? This is no mere academic question. That transformation is one of the great phenomena of world history. Alliances are still being made and wars still being fought in which ideas about the origins of the West and its powers play a central role. So successful has the West been that its achievements are avidly envied or used even when they are looked at with wariness or hostility
Case of Chelsea and 'bad' feng shui
Case of Chelsea and 'bad' feng shui :Telegraph:
A complaint that a Chinese garden at the Chelsea Flower Show was inaccurate and had flouted principles of 'feng shui' was being investigated by officials last night.
The display, Through the Moongate, is the first Chinese garden at Chelsea and is designed by Lesley Bremness of East West Design.
Her garden, sponsored by the Bank of China and the Royal Bank of Scotland, is intended to resemble a quiet courtyard off a busy street where the visitor can take tea.
A path leads through a circular gate into a wilder area with plants of Chinese origin, including lilac and wisteria.
There is still and moving water, intended to represent the opposites, yin and yang. A Buddha-like figure contemplates the still pool in which floats a lotus flower.
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Officials of the Royal Horticultural Society said they had been told by three Chinese graduates that the garden was suffering from 'serious flaws' and had 'some very bad feng shui'.
They said that a dragon on the wall should have been facing east, rather than north, and that the figure next to a sign saying 'Buddha' in Chinese was not the Buddha. Worst of all, the figure was placed too close to the earth, which they say is disrespectful.
A complaint that a Chinese garden at the Chelsea Flower Show was inaccurate and had flouted principles of 'feng shui' was being investigated by officials last night.
The display, Through the Moongate, is the first Chinese garden at Chelsea and is designed by Lesley Bremness of East West Design.
Her garden, sponsored by the Bank of China and the Royal Bank of Scotland, is intended to resemble a quiet courtyard off a busy street where the visitor can take tea.
A path leads through a circular gate into a wilder area with plants of Chinese origin, including lilac and wisteria.
There is still and moving water, intended to represent the opposites, yin and yang. A Buddha-like figure contemplates the still pool in which floats a lotus flower.
advertisement
Officials of the Royal Horticultural Society said they had been told by three Chinese graduates that the garden was suffering from 'serious flaws' and had 'some very bad feng shui'.
They said that a dragon on the wall should have been facing east, rather than north, and that the figure next to a sign saying 'Buddha' in Chinese was not the Buddha. Worst of all, the figure was placed too close to the earth, which they say is disrespectful.
GORE Reincarnates
WHY do our leaders feel that they can speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth only after they have left politics? After spending nearly half his life in public office, from which he was separated involuntarily in the 2000 election, Al Gore knows the answer. As he explains in his new book, the American political system has degenerated into a rigged game that suppresses honesty and rewards deception. To anyone paying attention over the last few decades, the underlying causes that Gore identifies will be familiar, including the ascendancy of mindless television, the domination of corporate money, the concentration of ownership in influential media and the decline of engaged citizenship. In "The Assault on Reason," he lingers over those well-worn topics and others, employing the same didactic method that used to provoke irritation or even ridicule during his hotly contested presidential campaign. Yet Gore's professorial style, with its touches of sarcasm, omniscient tone, erudite asides, and yes, its occasional exasperated sighs, elicits a different response today than it did seven years ago. Many of the same publications that once poured scorn on him now offer up paragraph after paragraph of admiring prose. The change in attitude is as obvious as the reason behind it: The overwhelming scientific consensus has since confirmed Gore's years of warnings about the most important issue facing the planet, a stunning reversal that suggests those who mocked him were fools in the first place and that we can continue to ignore him only at our own peril. Even when he is saying something we already know, his voice adds a note of prophetic confirmation. Then again, Gore has changed too. Always unusually smart and farsighted, he nevertheless spent most of his public career emphasizing the expedient and conventional rather than the critical and visionary as nearly every ambitious politician must. Liberated from those constraints by defeat, he kept silent until fall 2002, when he spoke out forthrightly against the invasion of Iraq.
21.5.07
Brain Reaches Adult Levels by Age 12
Discovery Channel :: News :: Brain Reaches Adult Levels by Age 12
Most fascinating piece on how the brain grows and mutures. Is it over...by 12?
Most fascinating piece on how the brain grows and mutures. Is it over...by 12?
20.5.07
WOLFIE
Résumé of Doom
By MAUREEN DOWD
Paul Wolfowitz may be out of a job soon, but think of what an amazing résumé he’ll be shopping around:
Work Experience
President of World Bank: 2005-2007
Responsibilities: Reining in European lefties, raining tax-free money on Arab girlfriend, and giving anti-corruption efforts a bad name.
Achievements: Paralyzed the international lending apparatus to the point where small countries had to max out their Visa cards to pay for malaria medicine. Learned the traditions of many cultures, including those of Turkey, where you apparently are not supposed to take off your shoes at mosques to reveal socks so full of holes that both big toes poke blasphemously through.
Deputy Secretary of Defense for President George W. Bush: 2001-2005
Responsibility: Starting a war.
Achievements: Mismanaged the world’s most powerful army. Shattered the system of international diplomacy that kept the peace for 50 years. Undermined the credibility of American intelligence operations. Needlessly brought humankind to the brink of nuclear war. Destroyed Iraq.
Demented Visionary: 1993-2001
Responsibility: Concocting a delusional plan for regime change in Iraq with pals like Shaha Riza, Ahmad Chalabi and his merry band of Iraqi exiles who conjured up phony intelligence about Saddam’s W.M.D.
Achievements: Imagining an Iraq that didn’t exist.
Having Wolfie back on the job market is a tremendous opportunity. What do we want destroyed next? Could this walking curse on the world run Halliburton into the ground?
At the Pentagon, Wolfie tried to help Vice get rid of anything multi — multilateral treaties, multilateral institutions, multilateral alliances, multiculturalism. Multi, to them, meant wobbly, caviling, bureaucratic and obstructionist. Why be multi when you could be uni?
In the end, the forces of multilateralism took their revenge: Old Europe got rid of Wolfie.
But not before his gal pal played the multicultural victim card. In her statement to World Bank directors, Shaha complained that she had been denied promotions even before Wolfie got there. “I can only attribute this to discrimination — not because I am a woman, but because I am a Muslim Arab woman who dares to question the status quo both in the work of the institution and within the institution itself,” Shaha wrote.
She said that she had “met a wonderful American woman who told me that I should fight back for ‘us’: WOMEN. It never occurred to me as an Arab and Muslim woman that one day I would be asked by an American woman to fight on her behalf.”
Already aggrieved, Shaha got really furious when Wolfie came in 2005 and she was told she’d have to work out of the State Department.
“I was ready to pursue legal remedies,” she wrote in her statement, adding, “my life and career were torn asunder.”
According to Xavier Coll, the bank’s human resources vice president, Shaha outlined conditions for her departure that were “unprecedented” in terms of guarantees and rewards and way out of line with bank policy. Mr. Coll deemed it “inappropriate and imprudent for the president to offer Ms. Riza these terms.”
Bob Bennett, Wolfie’s lawyer, told Michael Hirsh of Newsweek that it was Shaha who “worked up the numbers” on a $60,000 raise to a $193,590 salary and cushy new deal. “She was outraged that she had to leave,” Mr. Bennett said.
The self-righteous Shaha played on Wolfie’s guilt, becoming “greedy in terms of power,” as a friend of the couple told Newsweek. Even though she had been a mere flack a few years ago and then a gender coordinator at the bank, Shaha mau-maued her man into giving her a salary that topped the secretary of state’s.
It’s like when Bill Clinton tells friends that he has to work hard to get Hillary elected president because he feels he owes her for bringing her to Arkansas in the 70s and interrupting her career. (But do we?)
Or when Tony Soprano gets Carmela some fancy piece of jewelry after he strays. Indeed, Wolfie sounded Sopranoish when he agitatedly told Mr. Coll to warn those at the bank he believed were attacking him: “If they $%#! with me or Shaha, I have enough on them to $%#! them, too.”
Wolfie used public compensation for private contrition. Gilt for guilt — not a good deal.
By MAUREEN DOWD
Paul Wolfowitz may be out of a job soon, but think of what an amazing résumé he’ll be shopping around:
Work Experience
President of World Bank: 2005-2007
Responsibilities: Reining in European lefties, raining tax-free money on Arab girlfriend, and giving anti-corruption efforts a bad name.
Achievements: Paralyzed the international lending apparatus to the point where small countries had to max out their Visa cards to pay for malaria medicine. Learned the traditions of many cultures, including those of Turkey, where you apparently are not supposed to take off your shoes at mosques to reveal socks so full of holes that both big toes poke blasphemously through.
Deputy Secretary of Defense for President George W. Bush: 2001-2005
Responsibility: Starting a war.
Achievements: Mismanaged the world’s most powerful army. Shattered the system of international diplomacy that kept the peace for 50 years. Undermined the credibility of American intelligence operations. Needlessly brought humankind to the brink of nuclear war. Destroyed Iraq.
Demented Visionary: 1993-2001
Responsibility: Concocting a delusional plan for regime change in Iraq with pals like Shaha Riza, Ahmad Chalabi and his merry band of Iraqi exiles who conjured up phony intelligence about Saddam’s W.M.D.
Achievements: Imagining an Iraq that didn’t exist.
Having Wolfie back on the job market is a tremendous opportunity. What do we want destroyed next? Could this walking curse on the world run Halliburton into the ground?
At the Pentagon, Wolfie tried to help Vice get rid of anything multi — multilateral treaties, multilateral institutions, multilateral alliances, multiculturalism. Multi, to them, meant wobbly, caviling, bureaucratic and obstructionist. Why be multi when you could be uni?
In the end, the forces of multilateralism took their revenge: Old Europe got rid of Wolfie.
But not before his gal pal played the multicultural victim card. In her statement to World Bank directors, Shaha complained that she had been denied promotions even before Wolfie got there. “I can only attribute this to discrimination — not because I am a woman, but because I am a Muslim Arab woman who dares to question the status quo both in the work of the institution and within the institution itself,” Shaha wrote.
She said that she had “met a wonderful American woman who told me that I should fight back for ‘us’: WOMEN. It never occurred to me as an Arab and Muslim woman that one day I would be asked by an American woman to fight on her behalf.”
Already aggrieved, Shaha got really furious when Wolfie came in 2005 and she was told she’d have to work out of the State Department.
“I was ready to pursue legal remedies,” she wrote in her statement, adding, “my life and career were torn asunder.”
According to Xavier Coll, the bank’s human resources vice president, Shaha outlined conditions for her departure that were “unprecedented” in terms of guarantees and rewards and way out of line with bank policy. Mr. Coll deemed it “inappropriate and imprudent for the president to offer Ms. Riza these terms.”
Bob Bennett, Wolfie’s lawyer, told Michael Hirsh of Newsweek that it was Shaha who “worked up the numbers” on a $60,000 raise to a $193,590 salary and cushy new deal. “She was outraged that she had to leave,” Mr. Bennett said.
The self-righteous Shaha played on Wolfie’s guilt, becoming “greedy in terms of power,” as a friend of the couple told Newsweek. Even though she had been a mere flack a few years ago and then a gender coordinator at the bank, Shaha mau-maued her man into giving her a salary that topped the secretary of state’s.
It’s like when Bill Clinton tells friends that he has to work hard to get Hillary elected president because he feels he owes her for bringing her to Arkansas in the 70s and interrupting her career. (But do we?)
Or when Tony Soprano gets Carmela some fancy piece of jewelry after he strays. Indeed, Wolfie sounded Sopranoish when he agitatedly told Mr. Coll to warn those at the bank he believed were attacking him: “If they $%#! with me or Shaha, I have enough on them to $%#! them, too.”
Wolfie used public compensation for private contrition. Gilt for guilt — not a good deal.
CREDO in UNUM DEUM
It was on this day in 325 that the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea was called to order. The result was the establishment of the core beliefs of the Christian Church.
Christianity had had very little organization in the years following the crucifixion of Jesus. At first, it was just a branch of Judaism. But in 70 A.D., the Roman Army destroyed the city of Jerusalem in the process of crushing a Jewish uprising. The result was that Christians, along with Jews, were scattered throughout the Roman Empire. And since Christians were no longer living in Jewish communities, Christianity lost its strong ties to Judaism and became a religion with much broader appeal among gentiles.
By 100 A.D., there were fewer than 10,000 Christians in the world, and most of them had relocated to Rome. They were the subjects of persecution by Roman officials, who believed that Christianity was a dangerous cult. The persecution of Christians seemed to help gain new converts. The stories of martyrs persuaded people to join a religion that could inspire such passion. Churches banned together to give each other courage, and the bonds between Christians became stronger and stronger. By the end of the second century A.D., the number of Christians had grown to more than 200,000. By the end of the third century, those numbers had grown almost exponentially, to about six million Christians throughout the Roman Empire.
But there was still a lot of diversity of religious beliefs among Christians. Some Christians believed that they could fall into trances and speak the word of God while under the influence of the spirit. Some believed that Jesus was not a divine figure, but merely a great man. Some believed that Jesus was a supernatural being created by God, but not really God himself. And then there were the Gnostics, who believed that the God of the Old Testament was an evil God, and that Jesus had come to save humanity from that evil God. There were many gospels other than the those of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There was a Gospel of Thomas, a Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and a Gospel of Judas.
Christianity might have continued to splinter into many different religions if it hadn't been for the emperor Constantine. He came to power after a stunning military victory, and he later claimed that during the battle he had received a vision from the Christian God. He'd never been baptized as a Christian himself, but once he became emperor, he announced that Christianity would become the official religion of Rome.
And if Christianity was going to be the official religion, Constantine thought that Christians needed to agree on what they believed. And so it was on this day in 325 A.D. that Constantine called together more than 250 bishops to debate what those Christian core beliefs should be.
The result was the Nicene Creed, a prayer that is still recited in many Christian churches today. The most important belief that the council established was that Jesus was not only the son of God, but that he was also of one being with God. And even though he was God, he had become a man, and as a man he had suffered, died, and was buried, only to rise again, in fulfillment of the scriptures.
Within 50 years of the Council of Nicaea, more than half of the citizens of the Roman Empire, about 34 million people, had converted to Christianity.
It's the birthday of French novelist and short-story writer Honoré de Balzac, (books by this author) born in Tours, France (1799). He devoted most of his life to writing a massive series of novels and short stories depicting all aspects of French society in the 19th century—La Comédie Humaine, or The Human Comedy.
It's the birthday of philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill (books by this author) in Pentonville, London (1806). He wrote On Liberty in 1859, expressing his fear that bold and freethinking people were becoming all too rare. He wrote, "The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement."
He is also well known for his book Utilitarianism (1863), where he argued that the aim of all actions should be the greatest good for the greatest number of people. He said, "Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness."
Mill also said, "If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
Christianity had had very little organization in the years following the crucifixion of Jesus. At first, it was just a branch of Judaism. But in 70 A.D., the Roman Army destroyed the city of Jerusalem in the process of crushing a Jewish uprising. The result was that Christians, along with Jews, were scattered throughout the Roman Empire. And since Christians were no longer living in Jewish communities, Christianity lost its strong ties to Judaism and became a religion with much broader appeal among gentiles.
By 100 A.D., there were fewer than 10,000 Christians in the world, and most of them had relocated to Rome. They were the subjects of persecution by Roman officials, who believed that Christianity was a dangerous cult. The persecution of Christians seemed to help gain new converts. The stories of martyrs persuaded people to join a religion that could inspire such passion. Churches banned together to give each other courage, and the bonds between Christians became stronger and stronger. By the end of the second century A.D., the number of Christians had grown to more than 200,000. By the end of the third century, those numbers had grown almost exponentially, to about six million Christians throughout the Roman Empire.
But there was still a lot of diversity of religious beliefs among Christians. Some Christians believed that they could fall into trances and speak the word of God while under the influence of the spirit. Some believed that Jesus was not a divine figure, but merely a great man. Some believed that Jesus was a supernatural being created by God, but not really God himself. And then there were the Gnostics, who believed that the God of the Old Testament was an evil God, and that Jesus had come to save humanity from that evil God. There were many gospels other than the those of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There was a Gospel of Thomas, a Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and a Gospel of Judas.
Christianity might have continued to splinter into many different religions if it hadn't been for the emperor Constantine. He came to power after a stunning military victory, and he later claimed that during the battle he had received a vision from the Christian God. He'd never been baptized as a Christian himself, but once he became emperor, he announced that Christianity would become the official religion of Rome.
And if Christianity was going to be the official religion, Constantine thought that Christians needed to agree on what they believed. And so it was on this day in 325 A.D. that Constantine called together more than 250 bishops to debate what those Christian core beliefs should be.
The result was the Nicene Creed, a prayer that is still recited in many Christian churches today. The most important belief that the council established was that Jesus was not only the son of God, but that he was also of one being with God. And even though he was God, he had become a man, and as a man he had suffered, died, and was buried, only to rise again, in fulfillment of the scriptures.
Within 50 years of the Council of Nicaea, more than half of the citizens of the Roman Empire, about 34 million people, had converted to Christianity.
It's the birthday of French novelist and short-story writer Honoré de Balzac, (books by this author) born in Tours, France (1799). He devoted most of his life to writing a massive series of novels and short stories depicting all aspects of French society in the 19th century—La Comédie Humaine, or The Human Comedy.
It's the birthday of philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill (books by this author) in Pentonville, London (1806). He wrote On Liberty in 1859, expressing his fear that bold and freethinking people were becoming all too rare. He wrote, "The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement."
He is also well known for his book Utilitarianism (1863), where he argued that the aim of all actions should be the greatest good for the greatest number of people. He said, "Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness."
Mill also said, "If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
CRITICS & OPINIONS
THE MOST grating words I've read in a newspaper recently were in a New York Times report on the shrinkage of book reviewing in many of the nation's leading newspapers. The piece suggested that this might not be an entirely bad thing. Into the breach, it argued, will charge the bloggers, one of whom, a former quality-control manager for a car parts maker, last year wrote 95 book reviews for his website. "Some publishers and literary bloggers," the article said, viewed this development contentedly, "as an inevitable transition toward a new, more democratic literary landscape where anyone can comment on books."Anyone? Did I read that right? Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author's (or filmmaker's or painter's) entire body of work, among other qualities
Art of Steel
RICHARD SERRA tells a story from his youth, one that begins to take on the contours of a Greek hero-and-mentor myth.
It was the late 1960s, and Mr. Serra was in Jasper Johns’s studio, preparing to make a splashed-lead piece: red-hot metal flung forcefully and artfully at the wall and floor. Mr. Johns, who had commissioned the piece, wanted to open the skylight to let out the lead fumes. He got a ladder, climbed it, opened the skylight, descended, put away the ladder, sat down and gulped a shot of whiskey. Then he took up a brush and very deliberately made a mark on one of his paintings in progress.
“I asked him, ‘Did you like doing that?’ ” Mr. Serra recalled.
“And he said, ‘Which part?’ ”
“And I thought, ‘Ooh.’ ”
It was the late 1960s, and Mr. Serra was in Jasper Johns’s studio, preparing to make a splashed-lead piece: red-hot metal flung forcefully and artfully at the wall and floor. Mr. Johns, who had commissioned the piece, wanted to open the skylight to let out the lead fumes. He got a ladder, climbed it, opened the skylight, descended, put away the ladder, sat down and gulped a shot of whiskey. Then he took up a brush and very deliberately made a mark on one of his paintings in progress.
“I asked him, ‘Did you like doing that?’ ” Mr. Serra recalled.
“And he said, ‘Which part?’ ”
“And I thought, ‘Ooh.’ ”
19.5.07
SEMPER GORE
Lunch with the FT: Gore Vidal
By Victor Mallet
Gore Vidal is ensconced in his wheelchair in a corner of the Mandarin Grill, Martini at his elbow, by the time I run up the stairs of Hong Kong’s most venerable hotel to meet him. Daren Simkin, his young assistant, has got there before me with his charge and is nursing a beer on the far side of the table.
I am eager to know what the famously witty Vidal is really like, but his clothes - grey suit, Paisley tie - and his imperturbably regal manner, disturbed only by a loose quiff of white hair, give nothing away. His first words do not help. As if to put the journalist interviewer at ease, Vidal launches unprompted into a series of reminiscences about his late friend Gavin Young, correspondent for the Observer during the Vietnam war. ”He was absolutely fearless because he was drunk all the time,” drawls Vidal.
Somewhat nonplussed - I never knew Young - I turn the conversation to Hong Kong. ”The one thing I most hate in the world is shopping,” Vidal replies promptly. ”I have no interest in retail goods. What draws most people here repels me.” I think we are going to get on.
The 81-year-old American writer has a curious reputation among Europeans born a generation later: he is the famous author that people feel they ought to have read but usually have not. I had struggled to find his works in Hong Kong, but in Melbourne I was luckier and found him represented in almost every section of a bookshop, including history, politics, fiction and biography.
Vidal the author thus resists pigeonholing. Vidal the political and social commentator is easier to pin down. Scion of a political family and a failed politician himself, he can be guaranteed to be colourfully scathing about George W. Bush and to defend liberal values: among other achievements, he wrote The City and the Pillar (1948), one of the first post-war novels to deal with homosexuality.
The author is in town to publicise Point to Point Navigation, his new memoir, at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival. He orders half a dozen oysters, a Bloody Mary and Dover sole, while I opt for an artichoke soup, the sole and a glass of wine.
Vidal explains that he is taking a break from campaigning in the US for the Democrats, although campaigning against the Republicans would be a more accurate description, given his low opinion of both sides. Surely, I ask, President Bush cannot be as stupid as many foreigners believe?
Vidal is adamant that he is, that the American right effectively staged a coup d’etat after 9/11, that there is a constitutional crisis in which the republic has been replaced by an empire, and that there is a case for impeaching Bush. ”Once you’re imperial you have an emperor and once you have that you’re finished,” he says, recalling his recent reading of Aristotle’s Politics. ”And that has been our condition, taken advantage of by a bunch of sleazy gas and oil hustlers.”
If there is one thing that incenses Vidal about his fellow Americans it is ignorance. Bush, he says, ”knows nothing and he doesn’t want to know anything. He has no curiosity. Have you watched him speak? That little-boy face, mouth ajar, dazed eyes. The rumour round Washington is that he’s gone back to drinking. Well, thank God, he might make a little more sense. A group of us each vowed we would send him a bottle of whisky, but I think it’s heroin probably that he would need.”
He pauses briefly to ask the chef, who has approached our table with an amuse-gueule of truffled lobster and avocado, if he remembers Gavin Young. The young Scotsman is even more bemused than I.
Then it is back to politics, the crisis facing America and the folly of detention without trial. ”A few weeks ago, the administration got rid of Magna Carta and habeas corpus... That is Mr [Alberto] Gonzales, our Attorney-General, who thinks he’s Attorney-General of Mexico. Where he belongs. No, that is not a racist remark. But it’s on the edge.”
This offensive remark is deliberate, calibrated. Vidal sometimes gives the impression of trying too hard to deliver the perfect bon mot for a dictionary of quotations. I can almost see him placing inverted commas around his own words. Asked a little later whether he wants to be remembered as a writer or a political figure, he explicitly offers me something to quote: ”I couldn’t care less how I’m remembered. People who go in for posterity have none.” By the evening, speaking from a stage at the University of Hong Kong, Vidal has polished his answer to the posterity question. ”As far as I can tell, posterity has done nothing for me. I’m going to do nothing for it.”
But Vidal the lunchtime orator is beginning to warm up as his oysters arrive. Not for nothing did Howard Austen, his recently deceased friend of more than half a century, call him Me Me.
”Since I’ve known most of the American historians, I never took seriously anything they wrote. Therefore I wrote 20 novels based on American history because I wanted it to be accurate,” Vidal says. ”I address the crisis facing us, that we are the most hated nation on earth, and I am one of the big explainers of what we have done. Other writers can’t do it because they don’t know anything about the history of the United States, much less Islam, Saladin, Genghis Khan, Mao Zedong.”
He interrupts his self-praise briefly with praise for his Bloody Mary (”Bliss, absolute bliss, fresh tomato”), before returning to his theme. ”I said [Bush] would be the most hated president in our history. It didn’t take much prescience to do that, and still people come up to me in airports and say, ’How did you know that about him?’ And I always say, ’By the pricking of my thumbs, I can tell that evil this way comes.’ Americans are very superstitious” - Vidal is joking now, after his misquotation from Macbeth - ”and I am a witch.”
So is Bush stupid, or evil? Surely there’s a difference? ”He has acted in an evil way is the most I can say about him. Anybody who has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East is an evil man. If he was suddenly called up at Nuremberg, which I would love to see happen, he’d say, ’I don’t know. They didn’t tell me that.’”
Do any of the likely presidential candidates offer more hope? ”Nobody’s any good. Hillary’s the brightest.” Barack Obama? ”He’s pretty... he could very well sweep the election. The country is so anti-black and is dying to vote for one as a form of redress.”
The arrival of the two Dover soles for Vidal and me, and a giant ribeye steak for Daren, marginally lightens the mood at the table. US politics, I suggest, seem a bit depressing. ”More than a bit,” replies Vidal, then adds in mitigation: ”Perfect asparagus.” But does he have anything cheerful to say about the world, Mandarin Grill aside? Was he always this dyspeptic?
”I wrote a book called The Golden Age, which was about 1945 when we all got out of the army. There was a burst of energy in all the arts and I thought finally America’s going to develop a civilisation, and how wonderful it is to be at the beginning of it. And then we didn’t. The Korean war started, and we’ve been in war ever since. That cooled my sincerity about optimism.”
Vidal may be an egotist but he has carefully avoided talking about his own feelings. I suggest cautiously that he seems rather British in the way he conceals his emotions. He puts it down to class, not country. We talk about how Jackie Kennedy was criticised for not weeping at her husband’s funeral and about the film The Queen, in which Helen Mirren (another old friend) plays Queen Elizabeth as she comes under fire for not grieving publicly at the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
I venture that the most moving part of his latest book is his description of Austen’s death, a chapter that ends with the nurse weeping and the tearless Vidal writing: ”I envied him - the WASP glacier had closed over my head.” So he would like to weep, but cannot? ”Yes,” he concedes. ”I feel like it, but I don’t, I can’t. People who weep, I envy. After all, I spent most of my life in Italy... They get rid of everything, they weep all the time.”
Neither religion (he is appalled by it and is a fan of the atheist Confucius) nor sex (he claims he never did it with friends anyway) provides much comfort for the ageing Vidal, famous for advising people never to miss a chance to have sex or appear on television. ”It’s a joke, but my jokes are taken literally because I come from a literal country,” he says. ”Aids has disabused me of the values of casual sex.”
Dessert arrives, followed by cognac for him and calvados for me. Simkin hurriedly passes a pill to the diabetic Vidal as his spoon hovers over a sugary hazelnut creme brulee. As the restaurant empties, our two-and-a-half-hour lunch drifts pleasantly on with anecdotes from Vidal about a beautiful Indian Maharani in Jaipur, a bridge-playing British diplomat in Mongolia and a Hennessy brandy heiress.
Later that day - when talking at the university - he says something that I recognise as quintessential Gore Vidal. Asked about the greatest moment of his life, he replies: ”The one thing Cassandras like to be is right. The numerous times I’ve been able to say, ’I told you so’ - that is joy.”
At lunch I ask him whether he regrets not going to university after the war. ”Are you crazy? Would you rather be a published author, lecturing at Harvard, than going to Harvard?” he replies. ”All my ex-classmates were majors in the air force, that sort of thing, and there they were, juniors at Harvard. I went up there to speak, and half the audience were people I’d been at school with a few years before - and the waves of hatred that I felt coming up towards me from the audience! It was the highest moment of my life.”
It is, of course, another Gore Vidal joke. But, like a lot of his jokes, it is laced with venom, arrogance and a hefty dose of truth.
Victor Mallet is the editor of the FT’s Asia edition.
Mandarin Grill, Hong Kong
6 oysters
1 x artichoke soup
1 x organic salad
2 x Dover sole
1 x Australian ribeye steak
2 x hazelnut creme brulee asparagus, mashed potato
1 x apple crumble
1 x dry Martini
1 x Bloody Mary
2 x glasses of Sauvignon Blanc
1 x Tsingtao beer
1 x cognac
1 x calvados
mineral water
coffee
Total: HK$4,273.50 (₤277.93)
By Victor Mallet
Gore Vidal is ensconced in his wheelchair in a corner of the Mandarin Grill, Martini at his elbow, by the time I run up the stairs of Hong Kong’s most venerable hotel to meet him. Daren Simkin, his young assistant, has got there before me with his charge and is nursing a beer on the far side of the table.
I am eager to know what the famously witty Vidal is really like, but his clothes - grey suit, Paisley tie - and his imperturbably regal manner, disturbed only by a loose quiff of white hair, give nothing away. His first words do not help. As if to put the journalist interviewer at ease, Vidal launches unprompted into a series of reminiscences about his late friend Gavin Young, correspondent for the Observer during the Vietnam war. ”He was absolutely fearless because he was drunk all the time,” drawls Vidal.
Somewhat nonplussed - I never knew Young - I turn the conversation to Hong Kong. ”The one thing I most hate in the world is shopping,” Vidal replies promptly. ”I have no interest in retail goods. What draws most people here repels me.” I think we are going to get on.
The 81-year-old American writer has a curious reputation among Europeans born a generation later: he is the famous author that people feel they ought to have read but usually have not. I had struggled to find his works in Hong Kong, but in Melbourne I was luckier and found him represented in almost every section of a bookshop, including history, politics, fiction and biography.
Vidal the author thus resists pigeonholing. Vidal the political and social commentator is easier to pin down. Scion of a political family and a failed politician himself, he can be guaranteed to be colourfully scathing about George W. Bush and to defend liberal values: among other achievements, he wrote The City and the Pillar (1948), one of the first post-war novels to deal with homosexuality.
The author is in town to publicise Point to Point Navigation, his new memoir, at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival. He orders half a dozen oysters, a Bloody Mary and Dover sole, while I opt for an artichoke soup, the sole and a glass of wine.
Vidal explains that he is taking a break from campaigning in the US for the Democrats, although campaigning against the Republicans would be a more accurate description, given his low opinion of both sides. Surely, I ask, President Bush cannot be as stupid as many foreigners believe?
Vidal is adamant that he is, that the American right effectively staged a coup d’etat after 9/11, that there is a constitutional crisis in which the republic has been replaced by an empire, and that there is a case for impeaching Bush. ”Once you’re imperial you have an emperor and once you have that you’re finished,” he says, recalling his recent reading of Aristotle’s Politics. ”And that has been our condition, taken advantage of by a bunch of sleazy gas and oil hustlers.”
If there is one thing that incenses Vidal about his fellow Americans it is ignorance. Bush, he says, ”knows nothing and he doesn’t want to know anything. He has no curiosity. Have you watched him speak? That little-boy face, mouth ajar, dazed eyes. The rumour round Washington is that he’s gone back to drinking. Well, thank God, he might make a little more sense. A group of us each vowed we would send him a bottle of whisky, but I think it’s heroin probably that he would need.”
He pauses briefly to ask the chef, who has approached our table with an amuse-gueule of truffled lobster and avocado, if he remembers Gavin Young. The young Scotsman is even more bemused than I.
Then it is back to politics, the crisis facing America and the folly of detention without trial. ”A few weeks ago, the administration got rid of Magna Carta and habeas corpus... That is Mr [Alberto] Gonzales, our Attorney-General, who thinks he’s Attorney-General of Mexico. Where he belongs. No, that is not a racist remark. But it’s on the edge.”
This offensive remark is deliberate, calibrated. Vidal sometimes gives the impression of trying too hard to deliver the perfect bon mot for a dictionary of quotations. I can almost see him placing inverted commas around his own words. Asked a little later whether he wants to be remembered as a writer or a political figure, he explicitly offers me something to quote: ”I couldn’t care less how I’m remembered. People who go in for posterity have none.” By the evening, speaking from a stage at the University of Hong Kong, Vidal has polished his answer to the posterity question. ”As far as I can tell, posterity has done nothing for me. I’m going to do nothing for it.”
But Vidal the lunchtime orator is beginning to warm up as his oysters arrive. Not for nothing did Howard Austen, his recently deceased friend of more than half a century, call him Me Me.
”Since I’ve known most of the American historians, I never took seriously anything they wrote. Therefore I wrote 20 novels based on American history because I wanted it to be accurate,” Vidal says. ”I address the crisis facing us, that we are the most hated nation on earth, and I am one of the big explainers of what we have done. Other writers can’t do it because they don’t know anything about the history of the United States, much less Islam, Saladin, Genghis Khan, Mao Zedong.”
He interrupts his self-praise briefly with praise for his Bloody Mary (”Bliss, absolute bliss, fresh tomato”), before returning to his theme. ”I said [Bush] would be the most hated president in our history. It didn’t take much prescience to do that, and still people come up to me in airports and say, ’How did you know that about him?’ And I always say, ’By the pricking of my thumbs, I can tell that evil this way comes.’ Americans are very superstitious” - Vidal is joking now, after his misquotation from Macbeth - ”and I am a witch.”
So is Bush stupid, or evil? Surely there’s a difference? ”He has acted in an evil way is the most I can say about him. Anybody who has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East is an evil man. If he was suddenly called up at Nuremberg, which I would love to see happen, he’d say, ’I don’t know. They didn’t tell me that.’”
Do any of the likely presidential candidates offer more hope? ”Nobody’s any good. Hillary’s the brightest.” Barack Obama? ”He’s pretty... he could very well sweep the election. The country is so anti-black and is dying to vote for one as a form of redress.”
The arrival of the two Dover soles for Vidal and me, and a giant ribeye steak for Daren, marginally lightens the mood at the table. US politics, I suggest, seem a bit depressing. ”More than a bit,” replies Vidal, then adds in mitigation: ”Perfect asparagus.” But does he have anything cheerful to say about the world, Mandarin Grill aside? Was he always this dyspeptic?
”I wrote a book called The Golden Age, which was about 1945 when we all got out of the army. There was a burst of energy in all the arts and I thought finally America’s going to develop a civilisation, and how wonderful it is to be at the beginning of it. And then we didn’t. The Korean war started, and we’ve been in war ever since. That cooled my sincerity about optimism.”
Vidal may be an egotist but he has carefully avoided talking about his own feelings. I suggest cautiously that he seems rather British in the way he conceals his emotions. He puts it down to class, not country. We talk about how Jackie Kennedy was criticised for not weeping at her husband’s funeral and about the film The Queen, in which Helen Mirren (another old friend) plays Queen Elizabeth as she comes under fire for not grieving publicly at the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
I venture that the most moving part of his latest book is his description of Austen’s death, a chapter that ends with the nurse weeping and the tearless Vidal writing: ”I envied him - the WASP glacier had closed over my head.” So he would like to weep, but cannot? ”Yes,” he concedes. ”I feel like it, but I don’t, I can’t. People who weep, I envy. After all, I spent most of my life in Italy... They get rid of everything, they weep all the time.”
Neither religion (he is appalled by it and is a fan of the atheist Confucius) nor sex (he claims he never did it with friends anyway) provides much comfort for the ageing Vidal, famous for advising people never to miss a chance to have sex or appear on television. ”It’s a joke, but my jokes are taken literally because I come from a literal country,” he says. ”Aids has disabused me of the values of casual sex.”
Dessert arrives, followed by cognac for him and calvados for me. Simkin hurriedly passes a pill to the diabetic Vidal as his spoon hovers over a sugary hazelnut creme brulee. As the restaurant empties, our two-and-a-half-hour lunch drifts pleasantly on with anecdotes from Vidal about a beautiful Indian Maharani in Jaipur, a bridge-playing British diplomat in Mongolia and a Hennessy brandy heiress.
Later that day - when talking at the university - he says something that I recognise as quintessential Gore Vidal. Asked about the greatest moment of his life, he replies: ”The one thing Cassandras like to be is right. The numerous times I’ve been able to say, ’I told you so’ - that is joy.”
At lunch I ask him whether he regrets not going to university after the war. ”Are you crazy? Would you rather be a published author, lecturing at Harvard, than going to Harvard?” he replies. ”All my ex-classmates were majors in the air force, that sort of thing, and there they were, juniors at Harvard. I went up there to speak, and half the audience were people I’d been at school with a few years before - and the waves of hatred that I felt coming up towards me from the audience! It was the highest moment of my life.”
It is, of course, another Gore Vidal joke. But, like a lot of his jokes, it is laced with venom, arrogance and a hefty dose of truth.
Victor Mallet is the editor of the FT’s Asia edition.
Mandarin Grill, Hong Kong
6 oysters
1 x artichoke soup
1 x organic salad
2 x Dover sole
1 x Australian ribeye steak
2 x hazelnut creme brulee asparagus, mashed potato
1 x apple crumble
1 x dry Martini
1 x Bloody Mary
2 x glasses of Sauvignon Blanc
1 x Tsingtao beer
1 x cognac
1 x calvados
mineral water
coffee
Total: HK$4,273.50 (₤277.93)
PC? Cultural Diversity
It’s a disorganised apartheid which claims to be about equality but which has separatist consequences.’
Richard Hylton is a curator and art critic, and author of the punchy new book The Nature of the Beast: Cultural Diversity and the Visual Arts Sector. A study of diversity policies between 1976 and 2006, it is a thoughtful, thorough and searing critique of the introduction of divisiveness into the visual arts in England.
Hylton charts the various incarnations of diversity initiatives, and their various protagonists. From ‘ethnic arts’ in the late 1970s and Naseem Kahn’s formative report, The Art Britain Ignores, to the invention of ‘black arts’ in the 1980s and the activities of the Greater London Council; from the ‘new internationalism’ in the 1990s to the ‘culturally diverse arts’ of the twenty-first century, as propagated by Arts Council England and other funding bodies, Hylton explores the growth of ideas about diversity and their damaging impact. He draws out what was specific to each of the policies, and how they related to the political climates in which they were forged, drawing out their problematic content as he goes along.
“Cultural diversity initiatives have compounded tokenism and racial separation”
After taking a detailed look at the plethora of policies, Hylton concludes that they have furthered ideas of division and have been detrimental to the very artists they were set up to help. ‘Since the 1970s, cultural diversity initiatives within the visual arts sector have arguably exacerbated, rather than confronted, exclusionary pathologies of the art world. They have compounded the problems of tokenism and racial separation within the arts sector’, he writes.
This is a serious charge. Cultural diversity policies are a major priority across the arts world today; the ability to ‘demonstrate diversity’ is central to all arts funding bodies and organisations. Diversity policies are also a favourite hot topic of the current UK minister for culture, David Lammy.
Hylton’s interest in documenting and evaluating the 30 years worth of diversity policies was stimulated, he tells me, ‘by the flurry of activity around the initiative ‘decibel: raising the voice of culturally diverse arts in Britain’. That initiative was launched in 2003 ‘to great fanfare, but it seemed to go nowhere…all this stuff was coming out – official notifications, press releases, statements, plans, and word of mouth. But it never seemed to come together’, he says.
Initiatives such as the decibel project, which was initiated by Arts Council England (ACE), are typically heavily talked up and publicised – yet after they are implemented, it is rarely clear what actually comes out of them, bar lots of nice leaflets.
decibel is the focus of the opening chapter of Hylton’s book. In early 2000, ACE indicated that cultural diversity - with specific reference to ethnicity – had become its major priority, partly in response to the 1999 Macpherson report, the outcome of an inquiry into the murder of black British teenager Stephen Lawrence. ACE’s Cultural Diversity Action Plan noted that the Macpherson report ‘marked a sea change in the understanding of the significance of institutional racism’.
The prioritising of cultural diversity gave birth to scheme after scheme, including decibel. It was the ‘restless creation of new policies around this period’ that intrigued Hylton. He recalls that ‘there was a real lack of coherence at the same time as a relentless flurry of activity’. As he notes in his book, in the run-up to the launch of decibel, ‘ACE earmarked 2001 as the Year of Cultural Diversity, a nationwide festival for profiling artistic practices across all art forms’. Then, ‘for reasons that have never been made public, the Year of Cultural Diversity was postponed until 2002. Re-branded as The Big Idea, this new diversity project was to be expanded to last 18 months from September 2002 to March 2004, and was to include numerous activities: collaborations, commissions, internet what’s on guides, and a national media campaign.’ And then, ‘despite numerous updates included in Arts Council bulletins and the steady flow of job appointments, like its predecessor, The Big Idea was also scrapped’.
Richard Hylton is a curator and art critic, and author of the punchy new book The Nature of the Beast: Cultural Diversity and the Visual Arts Sector. A study of diversity policies between 1976 and 2006, it is a thoughtful, thorough and searing critique of the introduction of divisiveness into the visual arts in England.
Hylton charts the various incarnations of diversity initiatives, and their various protagonists. From ‘ethnic arts’ in the late 1970s and Naseem Kahn’s formative report, The Art Britain Ignores, to the invention of ‘black arts’ in the 1980s and the activities of the Greater London Council; from the ‘new internationalism’ in the 1990s to the ‘culturally diverse arts’ of the twenty-first century, as propagated by Arts Council England and other funding bodies, Hylton explores the growth of ideas about diversity and their damaging impact. He draws out what was specific to each of the policies, and how they related to the political climates in which they were forged, drawing out their problematic content as he goes along.
“Cultural diversity initiatives have compounded tokenism and racial separation”
After taking a detailed look at the plethora of policies, Hylton concludes that they have furthered ideas of division and have been detrimental to the very artists they were set up to help. ‘Since the 1970s, cultural diversity initiatives within the visual arts sector have arguably exacerbated, rather than confronted, exclusionary pathologies of the art world. They have compounded the problems of tokenism and racial separation within the arts sector’, he writes.
This is a serious charge. Cultural diversity policies are a major priority across the arts world today; the ability to ‘demonstrate diversity’ is central to all arts funding bodies and organisations. Diversity policies are also a favourite hot topic of the current UK minister for culture, David Lammy.
Hylton’s interest in documenting and evaluating the 30 years worth of diversity policies was stimulated, he tells me, ‘by the flurry of activity around the initiative ‘decibel: raising the voice of culturally diverse arts in Britain’. That initiative was launched in 2003 ‘to great fanfare, but it seemed to go nowhere…all this stuff was coming out – official notifications, press releases, statements, plans, and word of mouth. But it never seemed to come together’, he says.
Initiatives such as the decibel project, which was initiated by Arts Council England (ACE), are typically heavily talked up and publicised – yet after they are implemented, it is rarely clear what actually comes out of them, bar lots of nice leaflets.
decibel is the focus of the opening chapter of Hylton’s book. In early 2000, ACE indicated that cultural diversity - with specific reference to ethnicity – had become its major priority, partly in response to the 1999 Macpherson report, the outcome of an inquiry into the murder of black British teenager Stephen Lawrence. ACE’s Cultural Diversity Action Plan noted that the Macpherson report ‘marked a sea change in the understanding of the significance of institutional racism’.
The prioritising of cultural diversity gave birth to scheme after scheme, including decibel. It was the ‘restless creation of new policies around this period’ that intrigued Hylton. He recalls that ‘there was a real lack of coherence at the same time as a relentless flurry of activity’. As he notes in his book, in the run-up to the launch of decibel, ‘ACE earmarked 2001 as the Year of Cultural Diversity, a nationwide festival for profiling artistic practices across all art forms’. Then, ‘for reasons that have never been made public, the Year of Cultural Diversity was postponed until 2002. Re-branded as The Big Idea, this new diversity project was to be expanded to last 18 months from September 2002 to March 2004, and was to include numerous activities: collaborations, commissions, internet what’s on guides, and a national media campaign.’ And then, ‘despite numerous updates included in Arts Council bulletins and the steady flow of job appointments, like its predecessor, The Big Idea was also scrapped’.
18.5.07
Cannes
It is tempting to imagine the first Cannes film festival as a Jacques Tati film, or an early misadventure of the hapless Inspector Clouseau: a catalogue of cock-ups culminating in unlikely success. In 1946, still reeling from the Occupation, racked by shortages and political strife, France called on the "seventh art" to semaphore its national grandeur to the world, staging a glittering jamboree in celebration of the peace.The first Festival International du Film was scheduled to take place at Cannes in 1939, but had to be aborted when war broke out
In so doing, it set the template for future festivals, where opulence would strain (not always successfully) to contain the combined forces of artistic dissent, diplomatic tussles and political wiles. "The festival must be a victory for France," declared an official government communiqué of the time. But victory had to be snatched from the jaws of defeat.
Technical mishaps provoked great power spats. Eleventh-hour crisis management narrowly averted meltdown. Even for a gathering of film people, there was more than the usual complement of hustlers and chancers in attendance. Worse, the public were invited. The great unwashed of Cannes not only had the nerve to "refuse to refrain from smoking" during screenings, they freely nabbed the best seats. Worse still, it was discovered that organised scams were being operated to smuggle three or four people into the cinema on a single invitation
NIXON v. BUSH
WASHINGTON — A favorite pastime of political scientists and pollsters is compiling lists of the best presidents. The results vary widely, as the judgments of history conflict with contemporary sentiments. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and F.D.R. always finish high on the lists, with more controversial choices like Truman and Reagan often thrown in.
Currently, however, we’re seeing an outbreak of consensus on the worst: George W. Bush. The Internet is awash with academic tomes, blogs and partisan rants, the condemnation coming often from liberal Democrats but also from such varied figures as that eminent historian, Donald Trump.
Having been in Washington for only 53 years, I cannot from personal exposure espouse the view that the current president is the worst in American history. I have observed only 10 of them since reaching the age of reason, so I can judge only that he is the worst in my adult lifetime.
From World War II to date, there is in my mind and experience only one serious and obvious competitor: Richard Nixon. I say that not simply because he was the first president to resign from office in scandal and disgrace. Well before the Watergate affair that eventually was his undoing, he had compiled a long record of deception, deceit and duplicity.
But the crimes and constitutional breaches of Watergate and Nixon’s obsessive efforts to cover them up went a long way toward immobilizing the executive branch of the government at the critical time when there was a war in Vietnam and great domestic unrest. His successor and ultimate benefactor, Gerald Ford, rightly called the period “our long national nightmare.”
Nixon’s sins basically grew from an unquenchable lust for power. He was determined to hold on to what he had and to get more and more of it, contrived through secrecy and an anything-goes political ethic that in time poisoned much of his five-and-a-half-year presidency.
In the end, the damage done to the nation was arrested by a change in the Oval Office with the elevation of Ford, a man of limited imagination and talents but a sense of good will. The adaptability of the American political system, demonstrated in the orderly transference of presidential power, saw Ford and the country through until the people were able to express their preference for a leader in 1976. Importantly, the Watergate nightmare essentially shook America domestically without more than temporarily impairing her relations with the world.
George W. Bush, on the other hand, who ran in 2000 as a unthreatening “compassionate conservative,” soon encountered a crisis and a fateful opportunity that put him on a different mission. He seized on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to segue from domestic affairs and a legitimate self-defense invasion of Afghanistan to a radical foreign policy of supposedly preventive war in Iraq.
As the Republican presidential nominee in 2000, Bush had vowed in a debate with Democratic nominee Al Gore that he had no interest in seeing America become the world’s policeman, or engaging in nation-building. But now he had suddenly turned into the cop on the beat in Iraq and, soon after, the master builder of democracy in the Middle East.
In a bold display of opportunism, Bush anointed himself as a “war president” who capitalized on a combination of American patriotism and fear to set the nation on its current course. As Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser in the Carter administration, has written, Bush’s use of the phrase “war on terror” was “a classic self-inflicted wound” that intentionally created “a culture of fear in America,” enabling him to mobilize the public behind his military actions.
This almost overnight plunge into foreign-policy unilateralism, transparently masquerading as a “coalition of the willing” in Iraq, dealt a severe blow to this country’s reputation and support in the international community, effectively built over the previous half century of cooperation and Cold War containment.
The whole adventure, compromised by the faulty intelligence used to sell the United Nations and the American people on the invasion of Iraq, was marked by an inept assessment of and inadequate response to the long-term challenge on the ground.
Like Nixon in 1972 winning re-election by feeding off unrest and violence in the streets, Bush in 2004 tapped into post-9/11 fears and appeals to patriotism to gain a second term. Although there is not yet any domestic scandal of Watergate dimensions hanging over him, an odor of incompetence in the management of the war, in the care provided to returning wounded, and in the disarray of his Justice Department stifles the atmosphere for his remaining time in the White House.
With less than two years to go, the incumbent is pressing on with his stay-the-course strategy peddled as something else — a tactical “surge” that he hopes will stave off the growing pressure from the now-Democratic Congress to alter and ultimately end the American involvement in Iraq.
While Bush continues to have the power of the veto with which to combat the Democratic challenge, he is staggering toward the finish line of his presidency. Whatever happens in Iraq, there seems little chance that history will accord him any positive legacy for his eight years of over-reaching in foreign policy and abuse of civil liberties at home.
Nixon’s fall from grace in 1974 cast a heavy shadow over some historic achievements, most notably his opening to China. But his sins, deplorable as they were, mostly concerned domestic matters. They did not leave his party in the hole that Bush’s radical adventurism abroad has dug for the Republicans, and for the country he has so catastrophically led, without any compensating accomplishments akin to Nixon’s, domestic or foreign.
During the Nixon years, I never thought I would see another president who would almost make me wish we had him back. Almost. Thankfully, 21 months from now the voters will have other choices, whatever they turn out be.
Currently, however, we’re seeing an outbreak of consensus on the worst: George W. Bush. The Internet is awash with academic tomes, blogs and partisan rants, the condemnation coming often from liberal Democrats but also from such varied figures as that eminent historian, Donald Trump.
Having been in Washington for only 53 years, I cannot from personal exposure espouse the view that the current president is the worst in American history. I have observed only 10 of them since reaching the age of reason, so I can judge only that he is the worst in my adult lifetime.
From World War II to date, there is in my mind and experience only one serious and obvious competitor: Richard Nixon. I say that not simply because he was the first president to resign from office in scandal and disgrace. Well before the Watergate affair that eventually was his undoing, he had compiled a long record of deception, deceit and duplicity.
But the crimes and constitutional breaches of Watergate and Nixon’s obsessive efforts to cover them up went a long way toward immobilizing the executive branch of the government at the critical time when there was a war in Vietnam and great domestic unrest. His successor and ultimate benefactor, Gerald Ford, rightly called the period “our long national nightmare.”
Nixon’s sins basically grew from an unquenchable lust for power. He was determined to hold on to what he had and to get more and more of it, contrived through secrecy and an anything-goes political ethic that in time poisoned much of his five-and-a-half-year presidency.
In the end, the damage done to the nation was arrested by a change in the Oval Office with the elevation of Ford, a man of limited imagination and talents but a sense of good will. The adaptability of the American political system, demonstrated in the orderly transference of presidential power, saw Ford and the country through until the people were able to express their preference for a leader in 1976. Importantly, the Watergate nightmare essentially shook America domestically without more than temporarily impairing her relations with the world.
George W. Bush, on the other hand, who ran in 2000 as a unthreatening “compassionate conservative,” soon encountered a crisis and a fateful opportunity that put him on a different mission. He seized on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to segue from domestic affairs and a legitimate self-defense invasion of Afghanistan to a radical foreign policy of supposedly preventive war in Iraq.
As the Republican presidential nominee in 2000, Bush had vowed in a debate with Democratic nominee Al Gore that he had no interest in seeing America become the world’s policeman, or engaging in nation-building. But now he had suddenly turned into the cop on the beat in Iraq and, soon after, the master builder of democracy in the Middle East.
In a bold display of opportunism, Bush anointed himself as a “war president” who capitalized on a combination of American patriotism and fear to set the nation on its current course. As Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser in the Carter administration, has written, Bush’s use of the phrase “war on terror” was “a classic self-inflicted wound” that intentionally created “a culture of fear in America,” enabling him to mobilize the public behind his military actions.
This almost overnight plunge into foreign-policy unilateralism, transparently masquerading as a “coalition of the willing” in Iraq, dealt a severe blow to this country’s reputation and support in the international community, effectively built over the previous half century of cooperation and Cold War containment.
The whole adventure, compromised by the faulty intelligence used to sell the United Nations and the American people on the invasion of Iraq, was marked by an inept assessment of and inadequate response to the long-term challenge on the ground.
Like Nixon in 1972 winning re-election by feeding off unrest and violence in the streets, Bush in 2004 tapped into post-9/11 fears and appeals to patriotism to gain a second term. Although there is not yet any domestic scandal of Watergate dimensions hanging over him, an odor of incompetence in the management of the war, in the care provided to returning wounded, and in the disarray of his Justice Department stifles the atmosphere for his remaining time in the White House.
With less than two years to go, the incumbent is pressing on with his stay-the-course strategy peddled as something else — a tactical “surge” that he hopes will stave off the growing pressure from the now-Democratic Congress to alter and ultimately end the American involvement in Iraq.
While Bush continues to have the power of the veto with which to combat the Democratic challenge, he is staggering toward the finish line of his presidency. Whatever happens in Iraq, there seems little chance that history will accord him any positive legacy for his eight years of over-reaching in foreign policy and abuse of civil liberties at home.
Nixon’s fall from grace in 1974 cast a heavy shadow over some historic achievements, most notably his opening to China. But his sins, deplorable as they were, mostly concerned domestic matters. They did not leave his party in the hole that Bush’s radical adventurism abroad has dug for the Republicans, and for the country he has so catastrophically led, without any compensating accomplishments akin to Nixon’s, domestic or foreign.
During the Nixon years, I never thought I would see another president who would almost make me wish we had him back. Almost. Thankfully, 21 months from now the voters will have other choices, whatever they turn out be.
17.5.07
BARD ILLUSTRATED
Emory’s Shakespeare Illustrated collects 19th century British artists’ renderings of scenes from the Bard’s plays. A few of French artist Eugène Delacroix’s Hamlet paintings and lithographs are included.
Professor Harry Rusche notes that the lithographs were inspired by an 1827 English production of Hamlet in Paris, with Harriet Smithson in the part of Ophelia. (Hector Berlioz saw the same production and “fell instantly in love with Smithson and later married her.”)
Professor Harry Rusche notes that the lithographs were inspired by an 1827 English production of Hamlet in Paris, with Harriet Smithson in the part of Ophelia. (Hector Berlioz saw the same production and “fell instantly in love with Smithson and later married her.”)
For the Greeks, It isn't just to be Literate
I have lived through a tremendous change in the evolution of classical studies in western culture”, muses David Grene as he recalls his undergraduate studies, devoted to the linguistic minutiae of ancient texts, at Trinity College, Dublin, in the early 1930s. His experience of Irish, British, Austrian and American Classics across the whole period from the 1920s until 2002 makes this slim, deftly written, posthumously published volume an illuminating read for every classical scholar engaged with the current quest for the subject’s roots, and the excavation of the way that it has evolved over the past century and a half. But Grene’s memoir is made really memorable by his “other”, bucolic voice; for his account of twentieth-century Classics runs in tandem with his memories of his other profession, as a dairy farmer in Illinois and subsequently in Wicklow and Cavan in Ireland.
Most classical scholars spend much of their time incongruously reading about activities that they are unlikely ever to develop expertise in, or even witness: rowing triremes, casting metal weapons, and handling distaffs. But Grene actually performed the same tasks as one of his heroes, the narrator of Hesiod’s Works and Days. Persephone-like, for half of each year, Grene was a scholar of ancient Greek literature and thought, with something of a cult following, at the University of Chicago. But what he was really proud of was what he did with the other six months. He knew more about farming than any other twentieth-century classicist, with the possible exception of Victor Davis Hanson, who farms grapes and olives. The pervasive Aesopic tone in Of Farming and Classics is set in the opening two pages, with Grene’s description of the hedgehog he had captured as a child: “Like all hedgehogs I have ever known he managed to escape fairly soon”. The point here is not that the spiny mammal got away, but that Grene had, during the course of his life, been personally acquainted with a significant number of hedgehogs
Most classical scholars spend much of their time incongruously reading about activities that they are unlikely ever to develop expertise in, or even witness: rowing triremes, casting metal weapons, and handling distaffs. But Grene actually performed the same tasks as one of his heroes, the narrator of Hesiod’s Works and Days. Persephone-like, for half of each year, Grene was a scholar of ancient Greek literature and thought, with something of a cult following, at the University of Chicago. But what he was really proud of was what he did with the other six months. He knew more about farming than any other twentieth-century classicist, with the possible exception of Victor Davis Hanson, who farms grapes and olives. The pervasive Aesopic tone in Of Farming and Classics is set in the opening two pages, with Grene’s description of the hedgehog he had captured as a child: “Like all hedgehogs I have ever known he managed to escape fairly soon”. The point here is not that the spiny mammal got away, but that Grene had, during the course of his life, been personally acquainted with a significant number of hedgehogs
Do We Need the Middle East?
Western analysts are forever bleating about the strategic importance of the middle east. But despite its oil, this backward region is less relevant than ever, and it would be better for everyone if the rest of the world learned to ignore it
Edward Luttwak
Edward Luttwak is senior adviser at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC
Why are middle east experts so unfailingly wrong? The lesson of history is that men never learn from history, but middle east experts, like the rest of us, should at least learn from their past mistakes. Instead, they just keep repeating them
Edward Luttwak
Edward Luttwak is senior adviser at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC
Why are middle east experts so unfailingly wrong? The lesson of history is that men never learn from history, but middle east experts, like the rest of us, should at least learn from their past mistakes. Instead, they just keep repeating them
16.5.07
Atheism
Great portents and disasters turn some minds to God and others away from him. When an unusually bright and long-tailed comet was tracked through the sky in the last two months of 1680, posters and sermons called on Christians to repent. A hen in Rome seemed to confirm that the Day of Judgment was near. On December 2nd, it made an extraordinarily loud cackle and produced an exceptionally large egg, on which could be seen a likeness of the comet, or so it was said. This added to the religious panic. But the comet also sparked a small triumph for rationalism. In the next few years, as Armageddon somehow failed to arrive, a stream of pamphlets across Europe and America argued that heavenly displays were purely natural phenomena. The skeptics won the day. From the eighteenth century onward, no respectable intellectual saw comets as direct messages from God—though there were still some fears that one might eventually hit the earth
12.5.07
JAMES THURBER
By JONATHAN YARDLEY
When James Thurber died in November 1961, I had just turned 22 years old, and I felt as if a large part of my world had gone with him. Probably it's difficult for readers today to understand just how much Thurber meant to readers then, even though many of his books are still in print and enjoy respectable sales. Thurber in my youth wasn't something you went to the bookstore for -- though of course you could -- but something that came in the mail almost every week, as regular and reliable as the clocks of Columbus, Ohio, which he wrote about in the pages of the New Yorker.
Today the New Yorker still comes in the mail, but it isn't the same magazine. It's less a writer's magazine now than a reporter's, and except for its cartoons and an occasional light piece, it isn't a humor magazine anymore. The humorous touch brought to it by Thurber and his fellow immortal E.B. White -- not to mention S.J. Perelman and Wolcott Gibbs and Dorothy Parker and Ogden Nash and Robert Benchley and Phyllis McGinley and . . . well, how much time have you got? -- hasn't entirely vanished, but it's no longer the magazine's chief characteristic.
For the first quarter-century of its existence -- it was founded in 1925 -- the New Yorker's editor was Harold Ross, but Thurber and White were its public face. No one could imagine it without them. In time we'll get to White in this series of reconsiderations, but today it's Thurber's turn, and what a pleasure that is. Picking one of his books at first didn't seem exactly easy -- how could I omit "Lanterns and Lances," or "Thurber's Dogs," or "Thurber Country," or "My World -- and Welcome to It," or "The Owl in the Attic"? -- but actually it was easy indeed. If you can have only one book by James Thurber, then it has to be "My Life and Hard Times," the memoir of his youth in Columbus that is, as Russell Baker writes in a column reprinted as an afterword to my HarperPerennial edition, "possibly the shortest and most elegant autobiography ever written."
"My Life and Hard Times" was published in book form in 1933, when Thurber was one year shy of his 40th birthday. He had firmly established himself as a writer "of light pieces running from a thousand to two thousand words," and firmly denied that "such persons are gay of heart and carefree." No, he said: "They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats. Afraid of losing themselves in the larger flight of the two-volume novel, or even the one-volume novel, they stick to short accounts of their misadventures because they never get so deep into them but that they feel they can get out."
Thurber then proceeded to disprove every syllable of that by writing a book that, though barely over 20,000 words, comes far closer to Literature and Life than all but a handful of other American memoirs, and into the bargain has something that no other memoirist can offer: drawings, in abundance, by James Thurber. He still had limited eyesight when he wrote this book -- he went blind in 1951, the same year that Harold Ross died -- and was at the peak of his idiosyncratic but uniquely effective drawing style. The drawings of citizens of Columbus "in full flight" from an imagined dam break, or of the Thurber family in "a tremendous to-do" when it was learned that grandfather had taken the car out for a spin, or of Thurber's botany professor at Ohio State "beginning to quiver all over like Lionel Barrymore" -- they alone are worth the very modest price of admission, yet they're merely lagniappe.
One does indeed turn to Thurber for the drawings, but the great glory is his prose. Whether he was the funniest of all American writers can be debated to the end of time, but he was much more than funny. Like his friend White he was wise, and there was a soft spot to him. As John K. Hutchens writes in his introduction to this book: "He loathes cruelty. His sympathy for the out-of-luck man is as intense as his contempt for the pretentious and stupid one. He sees that children, being closer to the natural world than their elders are, have more true wisdom than adults. He finds the family life of dogs to be more rational than that of humans, and their courage and loyalty generally superior."
Certainly there was precious little rationality to the family life of the Thurbers of Columbus. They were forever caught up in "those bewildering involvements for which my family had, I am afraid, a kind of unhappy genius." In the Thurber household things went bump in the night as a matter of routine, always -- at least as revised and re-imagined by Thurber as an adult -- to hilarious effect. With the very first paragraph of the famous first chapter, he sets the tone:
"I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father. It makes a better recitation (unless, as some friends of mine have said, one has heard it five or six times) than it does a piece of writing, for it is almost necessary to throw furniture around, shake doors, and bark like a dog, to lend the proper atmosphere and verisimilitude to what is admittedly a somewhat incredible tale. Still, it did take place."
Well, it did and it didn't. The night that father retreated to the old bed in the attic, the bed never actually fell on him. Instead the teenaged James, sleeping on a rickety Army cot, found himself suddenly under the cot when it took a flip. The noise woke his mother, "who came to the immediate conclusion that her worst dread was realized: the big wooden bed upstairs had fallen on father. She therefore screamed, 'Let's go to your poor father!' " This set off a chaotic chain reaction involving James, his brother Roy, their dog Rex and "a nervous first cousin of mine named Briggs Beall, who believed that he was likely to cease breathing when he was asleep."
If you're reading this, chances aren't bad that you already know by heart "The Night the Bed Fell." It is an American classic. I have no recollection of when I first read it, but it may well have been read to me by one of my parents, who adored Thurber and passed that passion along to me. Over the years I have read it dozens of times, heard it read onstage by Tom Ewell in the early 1960s on Broadway in "The Thurber Carnival," and listened to it dozens of times on the wonderful recording of that show, which for some unknown reason is no longer available.
But wonderful though "The Night the Bed Fell" most certainly is, it is but one among the nine brief chapters of "My Life and Hard Times," each of which is a gem. Some have to do with alarms at night (the phrase, in fact, is the title of one), which seem to have befallen the Thurbers with remarkable frequency. There was the night the ghost got into the house, which "caused my mother to throw a shoe through a window of the house next door and ended up with my grandfather shooting a patrolman." There was the time when Thurber himself had been trying for hours to think of the name Perth Amboy:
"I fell to repeating the word 'Jersey' over and over again, until it became idiotic and meaningless. If you have ever lain awake at night and repeated one word over and over, thousands and millions and hundreds of thousands of millions of time, you know the disturbing mental state you can get into. I got to thinking that there was nobody else in the world but me, and various other wild imaginings of that nature. Eventually, lying there thinking these outlandish thoughts, I grew slightly alarmed. I began to suspect that one might lose one's mind over some such trivial mental tic as a futile search for terra firma Piggly Wiggly Gorgonzola Prester John Arc de Triomphe Holy Moses Lares and Penates. I began to feel the imperative necessity of human contact."
So he got out of bed and woke his father, and said: "Don't bother about dressing. Just name some towns in New Jersey." The elder Thurber, thinking his son had gone round the bend, got out of the room and called out to the rest of the household, which in a jiffy was in precisely the sort of turmoil in which it specialized.
It was a family of eccentrics to whom eccentric things happened. Thurber's boyhood in the early years of the 20th century was close enough to the Civil War so that people still remembered it -- his grandfather occasionally complained "that the federal Union was run by a passel of blockheads and that the Army of the Potomac didn't have any more chance than a fiddler's bitch" -- and coincided with the arrival of the automobile. Both proximities inspired some of the funniest stories Thurber tells.
But "My Life and Hard Times" is more than a collection of laughs. It is also a book about the ties of family, about the connections between people and places ("Columbus is a town in which almost anything is likely to happen and in which almost everything has"), about the ways in which dogs insinuate themselves into families, even Muggs, "the worst of all my dogs." Though Thurber does not dwell on it, the mood of the book is thoroughly Midwestern, i.e., bedrock American. Thurber never got over his love of Ohio and the Midwest, the points of his compass that directed his entire life. He's as genuinely American a writer as any we have, and a true national treasure.
When James Thurber died in November 1961, I had just turned 22 years old, and I felt as if a large part of my world had gone with him. Probably it's difficult for readers today to understand just how much Thurber meant to readers then, even though many of his books are still in print and enjoy respectable sales. Thurber in my youth wasn't something you went to the bookstore for -- though of course you could -- but something that came in the mail almost every week, as regular and reliable as the clocks of Columbus, Ohio, which he wrote about in the pages of the New Yorker.
Today the New Yorker still comes in the mail, but it isn't the same magazine. It's less a writer's magazine now than a reporter's, and except for its cartoons and an occasional light piece, it isn't a humor magazine anymore. The humorous touch brought to it by Thurber and his fellow immortal E.B. White -- not to mention S.J. Perelman and Wolcott Gibbs and Dorothy Parker and Ogden Nash and Robert Benchley and Phyllis McGinley and . . . well, how much time have you got? -- hasn't entirely vanished, but it's no longer the magazine's chief characteristic.
For the first quarter-century of its existence -- it was founded in 1925 -- the New Yorker's editor was Harold Ross, but Thurber and White were its public face. No one could imagine it without them. In time we'll get to White in this series of reconsiderations, but today it's Thurber's turn, and what a pleasure that is. Picking one of his books at first didn't seem exactly easy -- how could I omit "Lanterns and Lances," or "Thurber's Dogs," or "Thurber Country," or "My World -- and Welcome to It," or "The Owl in the Attic"? -- but actually it was easy indeed. If you can have only one book by James Thurber, then it has to be "My Life and Hard Times," the memoir of his youth in Columbus that is, as Russell Baker writes in a column reprinted as an afterword to my HarperPerennial edition, "possibly the shortest and most elegant autobiography ever written."
"My Life and Hard Times" was published in book form in 1933, when Thurber was one year shy of his 40th birthday. He had firmly established himself as a writer "of light pieces running from a thousand to two thousand words," and firmly denied that "such persons are gay of heart and carefree." No, he said: "They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats. Afraid of losing themselves in the larger flight of the two-volume novel, or even the one-volume novel, they stick to short accounts of their misadventures because they never get so deep into them but that they feel they can get out."
Thurber then proceeded to disprove every syllable of that by writing a book that, though barely over 20,000 words, comes far closer to Literature and Life than all but a handful of other American memoirs, and into the bargain has something that no other memoirist can offer: drawings, in abundance, by James Thurber. He still had limited eyesight when he wrote this book -- he went blind in 1951, the same year that Harold Ross died -- and was at the peak of his idiosyncratic but uniquely effective drawing style. The drawings of citizens of Columbus "in full flight" from an imagined dam break, or of the Thurber family in "a tremendous to-do" when it was learned that grandfather had taken the car out for a spin, or of Thurber's botany professor at Ohio State "beginning to quiver all over like Lionel Barrymore" -- they alone are worth the very modest price of admission, yet they're merely lagniappe.
One does indeed turn to Thurber for the drawings, but the great glory is his prose. Whether he was the funniest of all American writers can be debated to the end of time, but he was much more than funny. Like his friend White he was wise, and there was a soft spot to him. As John K. Hutchens writes in his introduction to this book: "He loathes cruelty. His sympathy for the out-of-luck man is as intense as his contempt for the pretentious and stupid one. He sees that children, being closer to the natural world than their elders are, have more true wisdom than adults. He finds the family life of dogs to be more rational than that of humans, and their courage and loyalty generally superior."
Certainly there was precious little rationality to the family life of the Thurbers of Columbus. They were forever caught up in "those bewildering involvements for which my family had, I am afraid, a kind of unhappy genius." In the Thurber household things went bump in the night as a matter of routine, always -- at least as revised and re-imagined by Thurber as an adult -- to hilarious effect. With the very first paragraph of the famous first chapter, he sets the tone:
"I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father. It makes a better recitation (unless, as some friends of mine have said, one has heard it five or six times) than it does a piece of writing, for it is almost necessary to throw furniture around, shake doors, and bark like a dog, to lend the proper atmosphere and verisimilitude to what is admittedly a somewhat incredible tale. Still, it did take place."
Well, it did and it didn't. The night that father retreated to the old bed in the attic, the bed never actually fell on him. Instead the teenaged James, sleeping on a rickety Army cot, found himself suddenly under the cot when it took a flip. The noise woke his mother, "who came to the immediate conclusion that her worst dread was realized: the big wooden bed upstairs had fallen on father. She therefore screamed, 'Let's go to your poor father!' " This set off a chaotic chain reaction involving James, his brother Roy, their dog Rex and "a nervous first cousin of mine named Briggs Beall, who believed that he was likely to cease breathing when he was asleep."
If you're reading this, chances aren't bad that you already know by heart "The Night the Bed Fell." It is an American classic. I have no recollection of when I first read it, but it may well have been read to me by one of my parents, who adored Thurber and passed that passion along to me. Over the years I have read it dozens of times, heard it read onstage by Tom Ewell in the early 1960s on Broadway in "The Thurber Carnival," and listened to it dozens of times on the wonderful recording of that show, which for some unknown reason is no longer available.
But wonderful though "The Night the Bed Fell" most certainly is, it is but one among the nine brief chapters of "My Life and Hard Times," each of which is a gem. Some have to do with alarms at night (the phrase, in fact, is the title of one), which seem to have befallen the Thurbers with remarkable frequency. There was the night the ghost got into the house, which "caused my mother to throw a shoe through a window of the house next door and ended up with my grandfather shooting a patrolman." There was the time when Thurber himself had been trying for hours to think of the name Perth Amboy:
"I fell to repeating the word 'Jersey' over and over again, until it became idiotic and meaningless. If you have ever lain awake at night and repeated one word over and over, thousands and millions and hundreds of thousands of millions of time, you know the disturbing mental state you can get into. I got to thinking that there was nobody else in the world but me, and various other wild imaginings of that nature. Eventually, lying there thinking these outlandish thoughts, I grew slightly alarmed. I began to suspect that one might lose one's mind over some such trivial mental tic as a futile search for terra firma Piggly Wiggly Gorgonzola Prester John Arc de Triomphe Holy Moses Lares and Penates. I began to feel the imperative necessity of human contact."
So he got out of bed and woke his father, and said: "Don't bother about dressing. Just name some towns in New Jersey." The elder Thurber, thinking his son had gone round the bend, got out of the room and called out to the rest of the household, which in a jiffy was in precisely the sort of turmoil in which it specialized.
It was a family of eccentrics to whom eccentric things happened. Thurber's boyhood in the early years of the 20th century was close enough to the Civil War so that people still remembered it -- his grandfather occasionally complained "that the federal Union was run by a passel of blockheads and that the Army of the Potomac didn't have any more chance than a fiddler's bitch" -- and coincided with the arrival of the automobile. Both proximities inspired some of the funniest stories Thurber tells.
But "My Life and Hard Times" is more than a collection of laughs. It is also a book about the ties of family, about the connections between people and places ("Columbus is a town in which almost anything is likely to happen and in which almost everything has"), about the ways in which dogs insinuate themselves into families, even Muggs, "the worst of all my dogs." Though Thurber does not dwell on it, the mood of the book is thoroughly Midwestern, i.e., bedrock American. Thurber never got over his love of Ohio and the Midwest, the points of his compass that directed his entire life. He's as genuinely American a writer as any we have, and a true national treasure.
11.5.07
BUSH & THE QUEEN
So President Bush, it seems, confounded expectations and managed to keep it together for Queen Elizabeth II’s state visit this week. He didn’t slobber, chug-a-lug from an Evian bottle, spew bits of buttered roll or engage in any impromptu shoulder massages.
Bully for him.
His only slip-up came when he had a bit of a sequencing problem and placed one of the Queen’s prior Washington visits back in the 18th century. “You helped our nation celebrate its bicentennial in 17…,” he blundered, before self-correcting. But that turned out to be kind of cute.
“She gave me a look that only a mother could give a child,” he said, after reportedly winking at the Queen, his ease and rapid wit indicating that he perhaps has had long experience with just that kind of maternal look. And perhaps with just that kind of mother. All of which, with that wink, put the lie to the whole conceit of this week’s story line, which was that, in the presence of well-mannered aristocratic types, our “regular-guy president,” as the Washington Post called him, is a fish out of water.
In fact, I’d venture to say that it’s just the opposite. I think it’s in the presence of people like Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip and the various courtiers who came with them that our president finds himself pretty much right at home.
This isn’t what the White House would have us believe, with all the bluff and the bluster and the not-so-secret leaks about Laura and Condi’s all but physically forcing the president into his white tie and tails. It isn’t what the president himself would have us believe, having spent considerable energies over the years rebranding himself as a Texas good old boy, as different as can be from his patrician dad. (“The biggest difference between me and my father is that he went to Greenwich Country Day and I went to San Jacinto Junior High,” is how he has put it.)
But let’s take a moment to think past the spin. Our president may have grown up in West Texas riding bikes and blowing up frogs, but he’s no rube. He’s the son of a diplomat and statesman. He’s said to be a 13th cousin to the Queen. He’s got at least as much Kennebunkport as Midland in his veins. And he is one of a tiny handful of people in this country who actually came up in the world with things like White House state dinners and even royal visits as a feature of family life.
In her memoir, Barbara Bush recalls Queen Elizabeth’s 1991 state visit to our George I:
We had a quiet lunch. … I jokingly told Her Majesty that I had put our Texas son as far away from her as possible at the table and had told him that he was not allowed to say a word to her. … She asked him why that was. Was he the black sheep in the family? George W. allowed as how he guessed that was true. (Not true at all.) Then she said, “Well, I guess all families have one.” George W., of course, asked her if their family had one and who it was. She laughed and asked me why I thought him so dangerous.
Not exactly the experience of a “regular guy.”
Bush talks with his mouth full because he can. He drinks mineral water straight from the bottle at a formal function because he doesn’t have to prove his good breeding to anyone. His “black sheep” exchange with the queen wasn’t a “gaffe”; it was a tribal handshake. He has the arrogance of the long-established.
So how about we retire the notion that the president’s comportmental shortcomings – his dubious straight talk and selectively bad table manners – make him “normal” or in any way one of “us”? And why don’t we acknowledge instead that he’s much less some kind of phantasmagorical Average Joe than cut from the same cloth as Prince Philip, another naughty and haughty verbal prankster, known throughout the world for his faux pas and bons mots?
(Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, to a Scottish driving instructor: “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?”
To British students in China: “If you stay here much longer you’ll all be slitty-eyed.”
About the less fortunate, in recession-era Britain: “Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed.”)
The “people,” it should be said, didn’t have to be dragged kicking and screaming into their most special duds for the Queen’s visit this week. They voluntarily got decked out in their best suits, hats and dresses. They were on their best behavior, while the Queen and her consort did their part to work at giving an impression of relaxed “regularness,” which they did, with all the forced charm that their nobility requires.
The Queen visited a one-year-old heart patient at Children’s Hospital in Washington and pronounced him “jolly.” The Duke gently jousted with a 14-year-old girl in a wheelchair. And on a royal tour of Goddard Space Flight Center, he asked British astronaut Piers Sellers, who was describing a space suit’s life-support system, “What do you do about natural functions?”
Prince Philip and the president really ought to spend more time together. Seems like they could have some good laughs.
The idea that being boorish, ill-mannered and uncouth somehow brands you as a “regular guy” holds water only if you ascribe to the view that the people, globally, are idiots. It works, I suppose, if your whole political reason for being is to dress up elitism in know-nothing populist garb.
Bully for him.
His only slip-up came when he had a bit of a sequencing problem and placed one of the Queen’s prior Washington visits back in the 18th century. “You helped our nation celebrate its bicentennial in 17…,” he blundered, before self-correcting. But that turned out to be kind of cute.
“She gave me a look that only a mother could give a child,” he said, after reportedly winking at the Queen, his ease and rapid wit indicating that he perhaps has had long experience with just that kind of maternal look. And perhaps with just that kind of mother. All of which, with that wink, put the lie to the whole conceit of this week’s story line, which was that, in the presence of well-mannered aristocratic types, our “regular-guy president,” as the Washington Post called him, is a fish out of water.
In fact, I’d venture to say that it’s just the opposite. I think it’s in the presence of people like Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip and the various courtiers who came with them that our president finds himself pretty much right at home.
This isn’t what the White House would have us believe, with all the bluff and the bluster and the not-so-secret leaks about Laura and Condi’s all but physically forcing the president into his white tie and tails. It isn’t what the president himself would have us believe, having spent considerable energies over the years rebranding himself as a Texas good old boy, as different as can be from his patrician dad. (“The biggest difference between me and my father is that he went to Greenwich Country Day and I went to San Jacinto Junior High,” is how he has put it.)
But let’s take a moment to think past the spin. Our president may have grown up in West Texas riding bikes and blowing up frogs, but he’s no rube. He’s the son of a diplomat and statesman. He’s said to be a 13th cousin to the Queen. He’s got at least as much Kennebunkport as Midland in his veins. And he is one of a tiny handful of people in this country who actually came up in the world with things like White House state dinners and even royal visits as a feature of family life.
In her memoir, Barbara Bush recalls Queen Elizabeth’s 1991 state visit to our George I:
We had a quiet lunch. … I jokingly told Her Majesty that I had put our Texas son as far away from her as possible at the table and had told him that he was not allowed to say a word to her. … She asked him why that was. Was he the black sheep in the family? George W. allowed as how he guessed that was true. (Not true at all.) Then she said, “Well, I guess all families have one.” George W., of course, asked her if their family had one and who it was. She laughed and asked me why I thought him so dangerous.
Not exactly the experience of a “regular guy.”
Bush talks with his mouth full because he can. He drinks mineral water straight from the bottle at a formal function because he doesn’t have to prove his good breeding to anyone. His “black sheep” exchange with the queen wasn’t a “gaffe”; it was a tribal handshake. He has the arrogance of the long-established.
So how about we retire the notion that the president’s comportmental shortcomings – his dubious straight talk and selectively bad table manners – make him “normal” or in any way one of “us”? And why don’t we acknowledge instead that he’s much less some kind of phantasmagorical Average Joe than cut from the same cloth as Prince Philip, another naughty and haughty verbal prankster, known throughout the world for his faux pas and bons mots?
(Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, to a Scottish driving instructor: “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?”
To British students in China: “If you stay here much longer you’ll all be slitty-eyed.”
About the less fortunate, in recession-era Britain: “Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed.”)
The “people,” it should be said, didn’t have to be dragged kicking and screaming into their most special duds for the Queen’s visit this week. They voluntarily got decked out in their best suits, hats and dresses. They were on their best behavior, while the Queen and her consort did their part to work at giving an impression of relaxed “regularness,” which they did, with all the forced charm that their nobility requires.
The Queen visited a one-year-old heart patient at Children’s Hospital in Washington and pronounced him “jolly.” The Duke gently jousted with a 14-year-old girl in a wheelchair. And on a royal tour of Goddard Space Flight Center, he asked British astronaut Piers Sellers, who was describing a space suit’s life-support system, “What do you do about natural functions?”
Prince Philip and the president really ought to spend more time together. Seems like they could have some good laughs.
The idea that being boorish, ill-mannered and uncouth somehow brands you as a “regular guy” holds water only if you ascribe to the view that the people, globally, are idiots. It works, I suppose, if your whole political reason for being is to dress up elitism in know-nothing populist garb.
An Austrian View
He is more circumspect about Gordon Brown. Grasser speaks respectfully about Brown’s economic record. ”But do you think he’ll make a good prime minister?” he asks. Dessert lets me off the hook. A giant frying pan of Moosbeernockn - think of pancakes, but more solid - appears. Although ordered by Swarovski, she has left early, leaving us with the task of demolishing the plate. I remind him he has a ski race ahead of him and needs the calories. He recommends vanilla ice-cream to wash it down.
In spite of the knocks the pact has received, Grasser remains convinced of the stability of its merits. ”Even the revised pact was better than nothing,” he says. ”It would be good for all European politicians to go to Shanghai to see how the world is really moving. They are really gaining competitiveness, and that’s what we have to face up to. We are too smug, we are not working hard enough.”
The mention of work takes me to my final topic: what is he planning to do next? Grasser has been said to be looking at investment banking and private equity, as well as positions in industry. Last month, he was elected chairman of a small Austrian specialist fund manager. He won’t be more specific about other plans. ”I’ve received some offers, and have left myself some time to decide.” He suggests his options may well involve working outside Austria - although Kitzbühel will remain a family base. ”And that’s why I expect to see you here next year,” he says, turning to me with a winning smile. ”For the race.”
Haig Simonian is the FT’s Switzerland and Austria correspondent.
Gasthaus Bärenbichl, Jochberg
2 x Fleischlaiberl
1 x Backhänderl
2 x Moosbeernockn
2 x vanilla ice cream
2 x espresso
2 x Le Serre Nuove dell’Ornellaia
2 x bones (for the dogs)
Total: E228.20
In spite of the knocks the pact has received, Grasser remains convinced of the stability of its merits. ”Even the revised pact was better than nothing,” he says. ”It would be good for all European politicians to go to Shanghai to see how the world is really moving. They are really gaining competitiveness, and that’s what we have to face up to. We are too smug, we are not working hard enough.”
The mention of work takes me to my final topic: what is he planning to do next? Grasser has been said to be looking at investment banking and private equity, as well as positions in industry. Last month, he was elected chairman of a small Austrian specialist fund manager. He won’t be more specific about other plans. ”I’ve received some offers, and have left myself some time to decide.” He suggests his options may well involve working outside Austria - although Kitzbühel will remain a family base. ”And that’s why I expect to see you here next year,” he says, turning to me with a winning smile. ”For the race.”
Haig Simonian is the FT’s Switzerland and Austria correspondent.
Gasthaus Bärenbichl, Jochberg
2 x Fleischlaiberl
1 x Backhänderl
2 x Moosbeernockn
2 x vanilla ice cream
2 x espresso
2 x Le Serre Nuove dell’Ornellaia
2 x bones (for the dogs)
Total: E228.20
10.5.07
OPPORTUNITY LOST
A LITTLE over a decade after he came in as the young hope of a New Britain, Tony Blair, who is expected to announce his resignation date today, is a figure vilified and loathed by his own party and disliked by people in Britain at large.
There is, however, one good legacy he bequeaths us, and we should not be ungenerous in recognizing it. That is peace in Ireland. Both sides in the Northern Irish dispute hate the English, and both have good reason to do so. This hatred was a substantial reason successive British prime ministers, many of them doing their very best to undo the mistakes of the past, got nowhere with the Irish.
But the hatred was only part of the reason. Another was the phenomenon of language. The Ireland of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde, Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams is a place where words bounce, and fly and sing, often meaning several things at once, sometimes meaning nothing at all. Expecting the various parties in Northern Ireland to negotiate with such solidly Aristotelian figures as Margaret Thatcher simply wasn’t fair. Her word was her bond. Of course, both sides became entrenched behind barricades not only of barbed wire but of discourse.
Mr. Blair, however, is a boundlessly superficial person, and he was perfectly happy to swim about in the weird world of Irish politics where words could mean anything you liked. Most of his sentences would be untranslatable. They were even delivered in quite different accents, as though he was more than one person, which in a way he is.
This multifaceted quality was very useful in Ireland. He is a naturally pleasant, polite person. And he has courage. These qualities have been an essential ingredient in the Irish peace process. They have led to the Alice in Wonderland situation we now have, in which the government of Northern Ireland has been placed in the hands of two sworn enemies — the extreme Protestant minister Ian Paisley and the former I.R.A. guerrilla Martin McGuinness.
In other areas of British life, where you might have expected a politician of Mr. Blair’s apparent élan and ambition to make a difference, he has made no impact whatever. One of his weirdest displays of oratory — delivered this time by Mr. Blair in his role as semi-tearful revivalist preacher — was that he would “heal the wounds” of Africa. That was Blair the Redeemer.
Then there was Blair the Efficient, who told us he would improve the educational system, transportation, hospitals: in all these areas, Britain is in a parlous state, with railway accident rates reminding us of the 19th century and true literacy levels much lower than those of the Victorians. As many as one-quarter of British parents now pay for ruinously expensive private education for the children. That is the measure of Mr. Blair’s success with the schools.
Being a man of quick though skin-deep intelligence, Mr. Blair found out very quickly that there are in fact fewer and fewer areas over which British politicians, perhaps any politicians, have control in today’s world.
The economy in Britain has been so successful over the last decade because politicians have at long last had so little to do with it. Our Bank of England, rather than our Treasury, has controlled the interest rates. The largely non-British City of London, most of whose firms and institutions are now in American, German or Japanese control, is the bubbling center of British wealth, and has nothing to do with Mr. Blair or his likely successor, Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer.
To make an impact — and there is no doubt that Mr. Blair wanted to make an impact as prime minister — he could play on only two stages: the theater of Europe as a member of the European Union, and that of the wider world as an acolyte of the United States. He quickly discovered that Europe was too amorphous for him to stand out beside the bigger players, especially beside the president of France, Jacques Chirac. It was inevitable that he would emerge as the Odd Man Out of Europe, the one who supported President Bush in his Middle Eastern adventures.
Some people think he did so out of religious conviction. Maybe. Commentators make much of Mr. Blair’s religion, but it has never been an issue of public importance in Britain, and it has made no obvious impact on his policies. (Abortion, the rights of gay couples to marry and adopt children, the rights of religious schools to determine their own curriculum — in all these areas the laws enacted by the Blair government have gone against the expressed views of the Roman Catholic Church, to which his wife belongs and which it is rumored he wishes to join.)
Iraq has been a fiasco, but I think he got involved in the calamity because, once again, he is superficial, decent and brave. The superficiality made him think it would be a quick and easy operation, like the military action in 2000 in Sierra Leone, where the British Army nipped in and out to remove a rogue warlord.
Alas, his disregard for truth — indeed it seems very unlikely he even quite knows what truth is in this case — led him to think it did not matter what reason he gave for sending in the troops. You have to concede that he has been brave in his unwavering support for the war, but not so brave as the many people who have died as a result of his and President Bush’s calamitous mistake.
There is, however, one good legacy he bequeaths us, and we should not be ungenerous in recognizing it. That is peace in Ireland. Both sides in the Northern Irish dispute hate the English, and both have good reason to do so. This hatred was a substantial reason successive British prime ministers, many of them doing their very best to undo the mistakes of the past, got nowhere with the Irish.
But the hatred was only part of the reason. Another was the phenomenon of language. The Ireland of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde, Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams is a place where words bounce, and fly and sing, often meaning several things at once, sometimes meaning nothing at all. Expecting the various parties in Northern Ireland to negotiate with such solidly Aristotelian figures as Margaret Thatcher simply wasn’t fair. Her word was her bond. Of course, both sides became entrenched behind barricades not only of barbed wire but of discourse.
Mr. Blair, however, is a boundlessly superficial person, and he was perfectly happy to swim about in the weird world of Irish politics where words could mean anything you liked. Most of his sentences would be untranslatable. They were even delivered in quite different accents, as though he was more than one person, which in a way he is.
This multifaceted quality was very useful in Ireland. He is a naturally pleasant, polite person. And he has courage. These qualities have been an essential ingredient in the Irish peace process. They have led to the Alice in Wonderland situation we now have, in which the government of Northern Ireland has been placed in the hands of two sworn enemies — the extreme Protestant minister Ian Paisley and the former I.R.A. guerrilla Martin McGuinness.
In other areas of British life, where you might have expected a politician of Mr. Blair’s apparent élan and ambition to make a difference, he has made no impact whatever. One of his weirdest displays of oratory — delivered this time by Mr. Blair in his role as semi-tearful revivalist preacher — was that he would “heal the wounds” of Africa. That was Blair the Redeemer.
Then there was Blair the Efficient, who told us he would improve the educational system, transportation, hospitals: in all these areas, Britain is in a parlous state, with railway accident rates reminding us of the 19th century and true literacy levels much lower than those of the Victorians. As many as one-quarter of British parents now pay for ruinously expensive private education for the children. That is the measure of Mr. Blair’s success with the schools.
Being a man of quick though skin-deep intelligence, Mr. Blair found out very quickly that there are in fact fewer and fewer areas over which British politicians, perhaps any politicians, have control in today’s world.
The economy in Britain has been so successful over the last decade because politicians have at long last had so little to do with it. Our Bank of England, rather than our Treasury, has controlled the interest rates. The largely non-British City of London, most of whose firms and institutions are now in American, German or Japanese control, is the bubbling center of British wealth, and has nothing to do with Mr. Blair or his likely successor, Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the Exchequer.
To make an impact — and there is no doubt that Mr. Blair wanted to make an impact as prime minister — he could play on only two stages: the theater of Europe as a member of the European Union, and that of the wider world as an acolyte of the United States. He quickly discovered that Europe was too amorphous for him to stand out beside the bigger players, especially beside the president of France, Jacques Chirac. It was inevitable that he would emerge as the Odd Man Out of Europe, the one who supported President Bush in his Middle Eastern adventures.
Some people think he did so out of religious conviction. Maybe. Commentators make much of Mr. Blair’s religion, but it has never been an issue of public importance in Britain, and it has made no obvious impact on his policies. (Abortion, the rights of gay couples to marry and adopt children, the rights of religious schools to determine their own curriculum — in all these areas the laws enacted by the Blair government have gone against the expressed views of the Roman Catholic Church, to which his wife belongs and which it is rumored he wishes to join.)
Iraq has been a fiasco, but I think he got involved in the calamity because, once again, he is superficial, decent and brave. The superficiality made him think it would be a quick and easy operation, like the military action in 2000 in Sierra Leone, where the British Army nipped in and out to remove a rogue warlord.
Alas, his disregard for truth — indeed it seems very unlikely he even quite knows what truth is in this case — led him to think it did not matter what reason he gave for sending in the troops. You have to concede that he has been brave in his unwavering support for the war, but not so brave as the many people who have died as a result of his and President Bush’s calamitous mistake.
Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler’s life and work embodied the existential dilemmas of our age.
Someone who had known Arthur Koestler told me a little story about him. Koestler was playing Scrabble with his wife, and he put the word vince down on the board.
“Arthur,” said his wife, “what does ‘vince’ mean?”
Koestler, who never lost his strong Hungarian accent but whose mastery of English was such that he was undoubtedly one of the twentieth century’s great prose writers in the language, replied (one can just imagine with what light in his eyes): “To vince is to flinch slightly viz pain.”
How many people could define a word in their first language with such elegant precision, let alone in their fourth, and moreover combine it with such irresistibly wicked humor? One can see in this trifling incident how being with anyone less brilliant than Arthur Koestler must have seemed intolerably dull to any woman who had been in love with him.
Someone who had known Arthur Koestler told me a little story about him. Koestler was playing Scrabble with his wife, and he put the word vince down on the board.
“Arthur,” said his wife, “what does ‘vince’ mean?”
Koestler, who never lost his strong Hungarian accent but whose mastery of English was such that he was undoubtedly one of the twentieth century’s great prose writers in the language, replied (one can just imagine with what light in his eyes): “To vince is to flinch slightly viz pain.”
How many people could define a word in their first language with such elegant precision, let alone in their fourth, and moreover combine it with such irresistibly wicked humor? One can see in this trifling incident how being with anyone less brilliant than Arthur Koestler must have seemed intolerably dull to any woman who had been in love with him.
9.5.07
SEGO & SARKO
Beauty has been chased off by the Beast.
Now France waits to see just how feral and domineering Nicolas Sarkozy will be.
The lovely Ségolène Royal — more phenomenon than politician — ran a maternal, Manichaean campaign painting her intense, Napoleon-sized opponent as an immoral political animal and a brute whose election would spark riots and “a sort of civil war.”
The luminous Sego did not even deign to address the “dark” Sarko by name, either in the debate or in her concession speech Sunday night.
Cartoonists have depicted the tough guy — who bullies rivals, betrays mentors and calls young troublemakers in low-income housing in the Paris suburbs “scum” — as a gargoyle, Dracula, an evil sorcerer and a devil.
The imagery of the presidential duel tapped into mythic Gothic tales of France, like “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Phantom of the Opera,” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”
Now France waits to see just how feral and domineering Nicolas Sarkozy will be.
The lovely Ségolène Royal — more phenomenon than politician — ran a maternal, Manichaean campaign painting her intense, Napoleon-sized opponent as an immoral political animal and a brute whose election would spark riots and “a sort of civil war.”
The luminous Sego did not even deign to address the “dark” Sarko by name, either in the debate or in her concession speech Sunday night.
Cartoonists have depicted the tough guy — who bullies rivals, betrays mentors and calls young troublemakers in low-income housing in the Paris suburbs “scum” — as a gargoyle, Dracula, an evil sorcerer and a devil.
The imagery of the presidential duel tapped into mythic Gothic tales of France, like “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Phantom of the Opera,” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”
Evolution, Immigration and Trade
Paul H. Rubin - Evolution, Immigration and Trade - washingtonpost.com:
"Our primitive ancestors lived in a world that was essentially static; there was little societal or technological change from one generation to the next. This meant that our ancestors lived in a world that was zero sum -- if a particular gain happened to one group of humans, it came at the expense of another"
"Our primitive ancestors lived in a world that was essentially static; there was little societal or technological change from one generation to the next. This meant that our ancestors lived in a world that was zero sum -- if a particular gain happened to one group of humans, it came at the expense of another"
8.5.07
So Much for the New European Century
The Chronicle: 5/11/2007:
So Much for the New European Century:
"This, then, is the picture of Europe in the first decade of the new century. It is a picture of gradual decline. Future historians may well be at a loss to understand why the sorry state of affairs was realized only late in the day, despite the fact that all the major trends — demography, the stalling of the movement toward European unity, and the crisis of the welfare state — had appeared well before the turn of the century.
The decline of the Roman Empire has been discussed for centuries, and it could be that the discussion about the decline of Europe will last as long. Decline often does not proceed as quickly as feared; there are usually retarding circumstances. But it is also true that, for better or worse, the pulse of history is beating quicker in our time than before.
There is also a danger that we will throw up our hands in despair and accept with resignation Europe's future role as a museum of world history and civilization, preaching the importance of morality in world affairs to a nonexistent audience. Surely decline offers challenges that ought to be taken up, even if there is no certainty of success. No one can say with any confidence what problems the powers that now appear to be in the ascendancy will face in the years to come. And even if Europe's decline is now irreversible, there is no reason that it should become a collapse.
There is, however, a precondition — something that has been postponed. The debate should be about which of Europe's traditions and values can still be saved. The age of delusions is over."
So Much for the New European Century:
"This, then, is the picture of Europe in the first decade of the new century. It is a picture of gradual decline. Future historians may well be at a loss to understand why the sorry state of affairs was realized only late in the day, despite the fact that all the major trends — demography, the stalling of the movement toward European unity, and the crisis of the welfare state — had appeared well before the turn of the century.
The decline of the Roman Empire has been discussed for centuries, and it could be that the discussion about the decline of Europe will last as long. Decline often does not proceed as quickly as feared; there are usually retarding circumstances. But it is also true that, for better or worse, the pulse of history is beating quicker in our time than before.
There is also a danger that we will throw up our hands in despair and accept with resignation Europe's future role as a museum of world history and civilization, preaching the importance of morality in world affairs to a nonexistent audience. Surely decline offers challenges that ought to be taken up, even if there is no certainty of success. No one can say with any confidence what problems the powers that now appear to be in the ascendancy will face in the years to come. And even if Europe's decline is now irreversible, there is no reason that it should become a collapse.
There is, however, a precondition — something that has been postponed. The debate should be about which of Europe's traditions and values can still be saved. The age of delusions is over."
Top 20 Richest Asians
Top 20 Richest Asians
"The Asian influence on British business is staggering. From the entrepreneurial types such as the Jatania brothers, to Vodafone chief executive Arun Sarin at the helm of a FTSE 100 company, and now Asian companies stalking their European rivals, this vast continent is making its presence felt at every level of UK plc.
Top of the list: Mike Jatania and his three brothers run the cosmetics giant Lornamead
The figures alone tell quite a story. Asian-owned businesses in London have a turnover of about £60bn a year, while real Asian wealth increased by 69pc between 1998 and 2005, compared with UK GDP up just 23pc."
"The Asian influence on British business is staggering. From the entrepreneurial types such as the Jatania brothers, to Vodafone chief executive Arun Sarin at the helm of a FTSE 100 company, and now Asian companies stalking their European rivals, this vast continent is making its presence felt at every level of UK plc.
Top of the list: Mike Jatania and his three brothers run the cosmetics giant Lornamead
The figures alone tell quite a story. Asian-owned businesses in London have a turnover of about £60bn a year, while real Asian wealth increased by 69pc between 1998 and 2005, compared with UK GDP up just 23pc."
They call it the superstar of supernovas
Los Angeles Times:
Hey......this is BIG!
Shining like a hay fire across a wide prairie, the brightest supernova ever recorded has been found in a galaxy 240 million light-years from Earth.Astronomers said Monday that the supernova might represent a new way for giant stars to die."Of all the exploding stars ever observed, this was the king," said UC Berkeley astronomer Alex Filippenko. "We were astonished to see how bright it got, and how long it lasted."Six months after it was spotted by University of Texas graduate student Robert Quimby, it is still as bright as an average supernova, NASA astrophysicist Alan Smale said at a news conference in Washington.Astronomers identified the star as SN 2006gy. They estimated its size at more than 100 solar masses, which makes it one of the largest stars ever observed. The Milky Way, with a population of 400 billion stars, has only a few known to be as big.The supernova's power is so immense that it outshines its galaxy, NGC 1260, home to some of the oldest known stars in the cosmos, scientists said. It was observed by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory in space, as well as by telescopes on Earth.Stars 10 times the size of Earth's sun and larger had been thought to end their lives by burning off the heavier elements until the fusion process that powers the stars stopped.At that point, the heat produced in the core of the star can no longer support itself and the star starts to collapse.The outer shell is blown off in a typical supernova, of which hundreds are seen every year across the cosmos, while the inner layers go on crunching until the star becomes a highly compact neutron star or a black hole.
Hey......this is BIG!
Shining like a hay fire across a wide prairie, the brightest supernova ever recorded has been found in a galaxy 240 million light-years from Earth.Astronomers said Monday that the supernova might represent a new way for giant stars to die."Of all the exploding stars ever observed, this was the king," said UC Berkeley astronomer Alex Filippenko. "We were astonished to see how bright it got, and how long it lasted."Six months after it was spotted by University of Texas graduate student Robert Quimby, it is still as bright as an average supernova, NASA astrophysicist Alan Smale said at a news conference in Washington.Astronomers identified the star as SN 2006gy. They estimated its size at more than 100 solar masses, which makes it one of the largest stars ever observed. The Milky Way, with a population of 400 billion stars, has only a few known to be as big.The supernova's power is so immense that it outshines its galaxy, NGC 1260, home to some of the oldest known stars in the cosmos, scientists said. It was observed by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory in space, as well as by telescopes on Earth.Stars 10 times the size of Earth's sun and larger had been thought to end their lives by burning off the heavier elements until the fusion process that powers the stars stopped.At that point, the heat produced in the core of the star can no longer support itself and the star starts to collapse.The outer shell is blown off in a typical supernova, of which hundreds are seen every year across the cosmos, while the inner layers go on crunching until the star becomes a highly compact neutron star or a black hole.
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