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)
29.6.07
Some Contrary Reflections on the Fourth
Americans, unlike poets, are made, not born. Peter de Bolla, in his witty monograph on that most patriotic of days, July 4, dismantles the making machinery. His book urinates, in the most scholarly way, on the parade by which America annually affirms its identity. It would be unwise for him to do any book signings in Washington next week. He might encounter another American tradition: tarring and feathering.
With a spoilsport historian’s pedantry, de Bolla strips away the glory from “the Glorious Fourth”. America, he asserts, was not “founded”. It “happened” - gradually. The Declaration of Independence was not drawn up and signed on the 4th July. The document oozed into existence, with many compromises, over a year’s long process. Nor was its majestically declarative prose the sole composition of one mind. De Bolla virtually accuses Thomas Jefferson of plagiarism and life-long dishonesty in allowing himself to be celebrated as the Declaration’s “author”.
De Bolla does not (cannot) contradict the extraordinary coincidence of the two principal signatories of the declaration, Jefferson and John Adams, dying on the same day, July 4 1826. But he snorts derisively at the cultish belief that, as Lincoln solemnly opined, it was “a dispensation of the Almighty Ruler of Events” - that is to say, proof that God loves America.
As for Old Glory, the flag to which American schoolchildren pledge their allegiance, de Bolla pours derision on the myth that the homely seamstress Betsy Ross ”made it”. And the Liberty Bell: it was made in London, it was defective, it was never rung, and the object now worshipped is a facsimile: no more authentic than Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride.
In crisis however, purposive action is what is needed. And patriotism, however engendered, supplies that. I was in the US on 9/11, and in London on 7/7. What was extraordinary over there was how quickly the country rallied round the flag. Wal-Mart sold hundreds of thousands. The whole country was shrouded in star-spangled grief.
The flag unified and consoled the nation, and gave it purpose. In London by contrast there was confusion: huge feelings swirled round the capital with nothing to attach to. The response was not action, but a resurgence of the plucky second world war spirit: “London can take it!”
America does unperplexed patriotism better than any imperial power since Rome. So what if it’s no more genuine than the Wizard of Oz’s wizardry. It works. That is all history cares about. And that is the conclusion which de Bolla reaches in his elegant, ironic, brief but deeply researched meditation on what makes America America.
With a spoilsport historian’s pedantry, de Bolla strips away the glory from “the Glorious Fourth”. America, he asserts, was not “founded”. It “happened” - gradually. The Declaration of Independence was not drawn up and signed on the 4th July. The document oozed into existence, with many compromises, over a year’s long process. Nor was its majestically declarative prose the sole composition of one mind. De Bolla virtually accuses Thomas Jefferson of plagiarism and life-long dishonesty in allowing himself to be celebrated as the Declaration’s “author”.
De Bolla does not (cannot) contradict the extraordinary coincidence of the two principal signatories of the declaration, Jefferson and John Adams, dying on the same day, July 4 1826. But he snorts derisively at the cultish belief that, as Lincoln solemnly opined, it was “a dispensation of the Almighty Ruler of Events” - that is to say, proof that God loves America.
As for Old Glory, the flag to which American schoolchildren pledge their allegiance, de Bolla pours derision on the myth that the homely seamstress Betsy Ross ”made it”. And the Liberty Bell: it was made in London, it was defective, it was never rung, and the object now worshipped is a facsimile: no more authentic than Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride.
In crisis however, purposive action is what is needed. And patriotism, however engendered, supplies that. I was in the US on 9/11, and in London on 7/7. What was extraordinary over there was how quickly the country rallied round the flag. Wal-Mart sold hundreds of thousands. The whole country was shrouded in star-spangled grief.
The flag unified and consoled the nation, and gave it purpose. In London by contrast there was confusion: huge feelings swirled round the capital with nothing to attach to. The response was not action, but a resurgence of the plucky second world war spirit: “London can take it!”
America does unperplexed patriotism better than any imperial power since Rome. So what if it’s no more genuine than the Wizard of Oz’s wizardry. It works. That is all history cares about. And that is the conclusion which de Bolla reaches in his elegant, ironic, brief but deeply researched meditation on what makes America America.
MIDFORTNIGHT
It is difficult to conceive a lovlier weekend than this, mid-fortnight. Not quite the buzz of the finals, but the champers flows a little easier, the ladies a bit more sanguine, the berries a little redder, the court a little greener...........
TODAY"S RUSSIA
The Russian conundrum consists, first, of a growing economy with a gross domestic product that has increased by 50 percent since 1998, a solid and reliable financial system, companies listed on the London and New York stock exchanges, thirty-three billionaires on the Forbes List in 2006, and a responsible monetary and fiscal policy that has produced a fiscal surplus since 2000. Then there are the dramatic social indicators: the suicide rate has increased by about 50 percent since the nineties; alcohol and drug consumption have soared; the AIDS epidemic is the worst in Europe; there are 120,000 new cases of tuberculosis every year; and access to hospitals under the corrupt and inadequate health system depends on bribing doctors and nurses. The political indicators are no less dismaying. The system is increasingly authoritarian: all the television channels are under direct or indirect government control; the nonaligned daily and weekly newspapers can be counted on the fingers of one hand and, in any case, have an extremely limited circulation; the president has abolished the elections for regional governors; a few politicians close to Putin have recently suggested the abolition of mayoral elections as well; and pro-government parties, which win with majorities of 70 percent, control sixty-three of the eighty-eight regional parliaments. Trade union activity is almost nonexistent because, as the American journalist David Satter has made clear, trade unionists are intimidated, beaten up, and even eliminated. The climate of fear extends to the ethnic minorities that live in the country: the most recent victims have been the Georgians, who are guilty of having been born in a country that does not accept Russian political interference. During his recent anti-Georgian campaign, President Putin added a new expression to his vocabulary: korennoi narod (“the rooted population”), obviously a reference to the Russians. He insists that the interests of this latter group must be protected against ill-defined dangers. In the meantime, the police arrest and beat up the local “blacks” (non-Russians from the South). THE GRAPH THAT provides the best explanation of the Russian conundrum consists of three lines: the world oil price, the degree of democracy in Russia (political and civil rights) as measured by Freedom House, and the rate of corruption as measured by Transparency International. Once this graph has been drawn, the reader immediately sees illuminating correlations: every time the oil price goes up, the level of democracy in Russia goes down and the level of corruption goes up. For decades, political scientists have studied the so-called “wealth paradox” (most recently, Michael Ross, Steve Fish, and Peter Rutland); namely, the fact that countries that are rich in natural resources do not appear to be able to prosper economically over the long term. The classic example is that of Spanish colonization in the New World, which brought fabulous riches to the crown treasury but in the end produced economic decline. In the Spanish case, the American gold only produced powerful inflationary pressures.
28.6.07
Houseman
When A.E. Housman failed his final examinations at Oxford he went to London to work as a clerk in the Patent Office. After ten years of that, he was appointed, at the age of 33, to the chair of Latin at University College London. In his application for the job he very properly drew attention to his Oxford failure. Not, you might think, a glowing CV, especially as he couldn’t claim any teaching experience. Yet these manifest disadvantages failed to deter the electors to the chair. They had their own criteria of eminence and saw that Housman was already one of the few. He would, before very long, be called the greatest Latinist of his age, to be named in the same breath as Bentley and Porson and Housman’s famous German contemporary Wilamowitz-Moellendorff.
He was usually quite modest about his claims: ‘I wish they would not compare me to Bentley . . . I will not tolerate comparison with Bentley. Bentley is alone and supreme.’ However, ‘they may compare me with Porson if they will.’ He was willing, that is, to be compared only with the runner-up for the title of greatest English classical scholar. Ordinary readers, even if they have a bit of Latin, can have little notion of what it means to know it well; those who, in their day, did know it well were ready to appoint a young man with a record of academic failure to the most influential Latin chair outside Oxford and Cambridge.
He had spent most of his London evenings in the British Museum Library working on Greek, and more intensively, Latin authors, notably Propertius, Juvenal and Ovid, and had produced some learned articles much admired by the few who were qualified to comment. Then, at University College, he began work on an edition of a long, dull and difficult first-century astronomical-astrological poem by Manilius – a text that had earlier tested the scholarship of Bentley, which was no doubt a challenge in itself. His notes on Manilius were in Latin, and the great work was published at his own expense. Its fifth and final volume appeared in 1930, 27 years after the first.
Its few readers needed to be high-calibre specialists. He made no attempt to persuade others that Manilius was worth their trouble. ‘I adjure you,’ he wrote to Robert Bridges, the poet laureate, ‘not to waste your time on Manilius. He writes on astronomy and astrology without knowing either.’ To an American correspondent he wrote: ‘I do not send you a copy, as it would shock you very much; it is so dull that few professed scholars can read it, probably not one in the whole United States.’ Perhaps the real experts were more interested in Housman’s Latinity than in Manilius’ Latin. But Manilius was his chosen life-work, and when he finished it he seems to have felt about it much as Chapman did on finishing his Homer: ‘The work that I was born to do is done.’ He said repeatedly that the publication of the final volume left him nothing more to do; he would now (at 71) ‘do nothing for ever and ever’.
He was usually quite modest about his claims: ‘I wish they would not compare me to Bentley . . . I will not tolerate comparison with Bentley. Bentley is alone and supreme.’ However, ‘they may compare me with Porson if they will.’ He was willing, that is, to be compared only with the runner-up for the title of greatest English classical scholar. Ordinary readers, even if they have a bit of Latin, can have little notion of what it means to know it well; those who, in their day, did know it well were ready to appoint a young man with a record of academic failure to the most influential Latin chair outside Oxford and Cambridge.
He had spent most of his London evenings in the British Museum Library working on Greek, and more intensively, Latin authors, notably Propertius, Juvenal and Ovid, and had produced some learned articles much admired by the few who were qualified to comment. Then, at University College, he began work on an edition of a long, dull and difficult first-century astronomical-astrological poem by Manilius – a text that had earlier tested the scholarship of Bentley, which was no doubt a challenge in itself. His notes on Manilius were in Latin, and the great work was published at his own expense. Its fifth and final volume appeared in 1930, 27 years after the first.
Its few readers needed to be high-calibre specialists. He made no attempt to persuade others that Manilius was worth their trouble. ‘I adjure you,’ he wrote to Robert Bridges, the poet laureate, ‘not to waste your time on Manilius. He writes on astronomy and astrology without knowing either.’ To an American correspondent he wrote: ‘I do not send you a copy, as it would shock you very much; it is so dull that few professed scholars can read it, probably not one in the whole United States.’ Perhaps the real experts were more interested in Housman’s Latinity than in Manilius’ Latin. But Manilius was his chosen life-work, and when he finished it he seems to have felt about it much as Chapman did on finishing his Homer: ‘The work that I was born to do is done.’ He said repeatedly that the publication of the final volume left him nothing more to do; he would now (at 71) ‘do nothing for ever and ever’.
A Book or How May an Author be Inauthentic?
"Last Friday, Laura Albert—the woman who created 'J.T. LeRoy,' the transgender former teen prostitute who nominally wrote two novels and a short story collection—lost a lawsuit brought by Antidote International Films. Antidote had purchased the rights to LeRoy's first novel, Sarah—the novel that had made Leroy something of a literary celebrity—before the world learned that LeRoy was actually Albert's creation. After the mask dropped, Antidote sued, asking for development costs back plus punitive damages, claiming that the contract was invalid because one party to it did not exist. Albert defended herself by recounting her real history of child sexual abuse, explaining (in the Paris Review and on the witness stand) that victims can split themselves into personae: J.T., she maintained, was part of her. Antidote countered by pointing to events in which someone else (usually Albert's ex-partner's half-sister, Savannah Knoop) played the role of LeRoy in public. J.T. was no split personality, therefore, but a deliberate fake, designed to get attention for Albert's writings. Albert will now have to cough up $116,500 unless she prevails on appeal."
Terry Eagleton
For the past three decades, Mikhail Bakhtin has been more of an industry than an individual. Not only an industry, in fact, but a flourishing transnational corporation, complete with jet-setting chief executives, global conventions and its own in-house journal. In the field of cultural theory, this victim of Stalinism is now big business. Most of the mouth-filling terms he coined – dialogism, double-voicedness, chronotope, heteroglossia, multi-accentuality – have passed into the lexicon of contemporary criticism. A cosmopolitan coterie of scholars, some of whom have devoted a lifetime to his texts, have long since struggled to appropriate him for their own agendas. Is he a Marxist, neo-Kantian, religious humanist, discourse theorist, literary critic, cultural sociologist, ethical thinker, philosophical anthropologist, or all these things together?
That this once obscure Soviet philologist is now a star of the postmodern West is less surprising than it might seem. For there is hardly a hot postmodern topic that Bakhtin did not anticipate. Discourse, hybridity, otherness, sexuality, subversion, deviance, heterogeneity, popular culture, the body, the decentred self, the materiality of the sign, historicism, everyday life: this precocious post-structuralist, as Graham Pechey calls him, prefigured so much of our own times that it is surprising not to find allusions in his work to Posh and Becks. Since little of this culture is the direct result of his influence, one might claim that had Bakhtin not existed, there would have been no need to invent him.
Why this curious parallelism between the age of Stalinist terror and the era of the iPod? The answer is fairly obvious. Just as Bakhtin’s work is among other things a coded critique of Soviet autocracy, so postmodernism springs in large part from the rout of modern Marxism. In the work of Baudrillard, Lyotard and others, it began as an alternative creed for disenchanted leftists. Its obsession with discourse makes sense in an age short on political action. Instead of setting fire to campuses, American students now cleanse their speech of incorrectness. If Marxism had been shamefully coy about sexuality, postmodernism makes a fetish of it. The warm, desiring, palpable body is a living rebuke to all those bloodless abstractions about the Asiatic mode of production. Instead of grand narratives that lead to the gulag, we have a plurality of mini-narratives. Since doctrinal absolutes dismember bodies, relativism is the order of the day. If castrating homosexuals is part of your culture, it would be ethnocentric of me to object. Revolution is no longer on the agenda, but sporadic subversions may stand in for it. Class politics yields to identity politics. The system cannot be overthrown, but at least it can be deconstructed. And since there is no political hope in the heartlands of capitalism, where the proletariat has upped sticks without leaving a forwarding address, the postmodern gaze turns mesmerically to the Other, whatever passport (woman, gay, ethnic minority) it happens to be travelling on.
That this once obscure Soviet philologist is now a star of the postmodern West is less surprising than it might seem. For there is hardly a hot postmodern topic that Bakhtin did not anticipate. Discourse, hybridity, otherness, sexuality, subversion, deviance, heterogeneity, popular culture, the body, the decentred self, the materiality of the sign, historicism, everyday life: this precocious post-structuralist, as Graham Pechey calls him, prefigured so much of our own times that it is surprising not to find allusions in his work to Posh and Becks. Since little of this culture is the direct result of his influence, one might claim that had Bakhtin not existed, there would have been no need to invent him.
Why this curious parallelism between the age of Stalinist terror and the era of the iPod? The answer is fairly obvious. Just as Bakhtin’s work is among other things a coded critique of Soviet autocracy, so postmodernism springs in large part from the rout of modern Marxism. In the work of Baudrillard, Lyotard and others, it began as an alternative creed for disenchanted leftists. Its obsession with discourse makes sense in an age short on political action. Instead of setting fire to campuses, American students now cleanse their speech of incorrectness. If Marxism had been shamefully coy about sexuality, postmodernism makes a fetish of it. The warm, desiring, palpable body is a living rebuke to all those bloodless abstractions about the Asiatic mode of production. Instead of grand narratives that lead to the gulag, we have a plurality of mini-narratives. Since doctrinal absolutes dismember bodies, relativism is the order of the day. If castrating homosexuals is part of your culture, it would be ethnocentric of me to object. Revolution is no longer on the agenda, but sporadic subversions may stand in for it. Class politics yields to identity politics. The system cannot be overthrown, but at least it can be deconstructed. And since there is no political hope in the heartlands of capitalism, where the proletariat has upped sticks without leaving a forwarding address, the postmodern gaze turns mesmerically to the Other, whatever passport (woman, gay, ethnic minority) it happens to be travelling on.
27.6.07
Clive James
I read on past the second paragraph of this interview and I was suddenly appalled. The encounter had taken place about five years ago and obviously it had depressed him deeply, perhaps permanently. The picture he painted of me was of a desperately unhappy and self-questioning paranoid sad-sack. After that it got less funny. It seemed that I not only had to fight back tears as I choked out my defensive answers, but that I started to bleed spontaneously from the scalp.
Across the years I think I can dimly remember that when he rang my doorbell upon arrival I brained myself as usual against the sloping roof of my study but it could well have been the result of one of those occasions when I open the refrigerator door to get out the butter that I'm not supposed to have, drop it on the floor, and then stand up suddenly without having remembered that the door is open. Well-adjusted people don't do that sort of thing even once.
No wonder I had forgotten ever reading the interview, let alone giving it. It was a wonder that I hadn't gone somewhere shortly afterwards to lie down in a bus-lane. Unfortunately for me, reading the piece now, I can see that my disappointed young admirer quoted me accurately and that every impression he reported was soundly based. I'd like to think that he caught me on a bad day but I'm afraid that he caught me on a typical one. If that's the way you come over, that's the way you are, and as I speak to you now I am consumed with this latest reinforcement of a recurring notion, the suspicion that I don't spend even a tenth enough time recording the fact that I actually do enjoy those features of existence that don't drive me to mumbling pessimism.
No strings attached
And so I ought to enjoy them. I'm well aware that I'm a lucky man leading a lucky life, at a lucky time in history blessed with the presence of penicillin, painless dentistry and Team America on DVD. I do feel gratitude and I ought to show it. But somehow I lack the knack for that. If young Johann is correct, even my jokes drip acid rain. It can't go on like this, or the carbon emissions from my personality will cause the wheels of baby carriages to rust in the street. So let me promise that from this moment I will try to generate the capacity for saying positive things about those few facets, wait a second, about those many facets of the world that should be celebrated out loud, on the spot and at the time, if only on behalf of the young.
Already, we are told, there are young people who can't sleep at night because they are convinced that before they reach adulthood the house they live in will be 20ft underwater and that Al Gore, at the tiller of his hydrogen-powered ark, may not have room for them and their families. If I can't generate the capacity to offset such nightmarish pressure on my own account, I'll try to borrow the capacity from others: people who, without being simpletons, nevertheless have the trick of sounding glad to be here.
One of them is the aforesaid Australian painter Jeffrey Smart. He is getting on in years, as I said. He is already a bit older than he was when I started to introduce him at the beginning of this programme. But he is one of those men on whom age looks good. I won't start another digression about how bad age looks on me, because really I am glad to have lived so long, so why complain? Certainly Jeffrey Smart has the energy of a much younger man: much younger than me, in fact. Not that I'm complaining.
He also writes very well, which is a bit steep when you consider how well he paints. Once, when he was quizzed about the high-rise skylines and the airport technology that so often form his subject matter, he said something that I wished I'd said. He said "The world has never been so beautiful". Now that's the kind of thing I've got to get better at saying. Because I've always felt that. When I was still in short trousers I used to walk from my house near Botany Bay all the way to the airport so I could watch the Lockheed Constellations and the Stratocruisers come in from America and line up in front of the terminal.
Across the years I think I can dimly remember that when he rang my doorbell upon arrival I brained myself as usual against the sloping roof of my study but it could well have been the result of one of those occasions when I open the refrigerator door to get out the butter that I'm not supposed to have, drop it on the floor, and then stand up suddenly without having remembered that the door is open. Well-adjusted people don't do that sort of thing even once.
No wonder I had forgotten ever reading the interview, let alone giving it. It was a wonder that I hadn't gone somewhere shortly afterwards to lie down in a bus-lane. Unfortunately for me, reading the piece now, I can see that my disappointed young admirer quoted me accurately and that every impression he reported was soundly based. I'd like to think that he caught me on a bad day but I'm afraid that he caught me on a typical one. If that's the way you come over, that's the way you are, and as I speak to you now I am consumed with this latest reinforcement of a recurring notion, the suspicion that I don't spend even a tenth enough time recording the fact that I actually do enjoy those features of existence that don't drive me to mumbling pessimism.
No strings attached
And so I ought to enjoy them. I'm well aware that I'm a lucky man leading a lucky life, at a lucky time in history blessed with the presence of penicillin, painless dentistry and Team America on DVD. I do feel gratitude and I ought to show it. But somehow I lack the knack for that. If young Johann is correct, even my jokes drip acid rain. It can't go on like this, or the carbon emissions from my personality will cause the wheels of baby carriages to rust in the street. So let me promise that from this moment I will try to generate the capacity for saying positive things about those few facets, wait a second, about those many facets of the world that should be celebrated out loud, on the spot and at the time, if only on behalf of the young.
Already, we are told, there are young people who can't sleep at night because they are convinced that before they reach adulthood the house they live in will be 20ft underwater and that Al Gore, at the tiller of his hydrogen-powered ark, may not have room for them and their families. If I can't generate the capacity to offset such nightmarish pressure on my own account, I'll try to borrow the capacity from others: people who, without being simpletons, nevertheless have the trick of sounding glad to be here.
One of them is the aforesaid Australian painter Jeffrey Smart. He is getting on in years, as I said. He is already a bit older than he was when I started to introduce him at the beginning of this programme. But he is one of those men on whom age looks good. I won't start another digression about how bad age looks on me, because really I am glad to have lived so long, so why complain? Certainly Jeffrey Smart has the energy of a much younger man: much younger than me, in fact. Not that I'm complaining.
He also writes very well, which is a bit steep when you consider how well he paints. Once, when he was quizzed about the high-rise skylines and the airport technology that so often form his subject matter, he said something that I wished I'd said. He said "The world has never been so beautiful". Now that's the kind of thing I've got to get better at saying. Because I've always felt that. When I was still in short trousers I used to walk from my house near Botany Bay all the way to the airport so I could watch the Lockheed Constellations and the Stratocruisers come in from America and line up in front of the terminal.
26.6.07
A Cultural Wasteland
There is an experiment I'd love to conduct. I'd like to survey a cross-section of Americans and ask them how many active NBA players, Major League Baseball players, and American Idol finalists they can name.
Then I'd ask them how many living American poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, architects, classical musicians, conductors, and composers they can name.
I'd even like to ask how many living American scientists or social thinkers they can name.
Fifty years ago, I suspect that along with Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Sandy Koufax, most Americans could have named, at the very least, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Georgia O'Keeffe, Leonard Bernstein, Leontyne Price, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Not to mention scientists and thinkers like Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk, Rachel Carson, Margaret Mead, and especially Dr. Alfred Kinsey.
I don't think that Americans were smarter then, but American culture was. Even the mass media placed a greater emphasis on presenting a broad range of human achievement.
I grew up mostly among immigrants, many of whom never learned to speak English. But at night watching TV variety programs like the Ed Sullivan Show or the Perry Como Music Hall, I saw—along with comedians, popular singers, and movie stars—classical musicians like Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein, opera singers like Robert Merrill and Anna Moffo, and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong captivate an audience of millions with their art.
The same was even true of literature. I first encountered Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, and James Baldwin on general interest TV shows. All of these people were famous to the average American—because the culture considered them important.
Today no working-class or immigrant kid would encounter that range of arts and ideas in the popular culture. Almost everything in our national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment, or altogether eliminated.
The loss of recognition for artists, thinkers, and scientists has impoverished our culture in innumerable ways, but let me mention one. When virtually all of a culture's celebrated figures are in sports or entertainment, how few possible role models we offer the young.
Then I'd ask them how many living American poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, architects, classical musicians, conductors, and composers they can name.
I'd even like to ask how many living American scientists or social thinkers they can name.
Fifty years ago, I suspect that along with Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Sandy Koufax, most Americans could have named, at the very least, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Georgia O'Keeffe, Leonard Bernstein, Leontyne Price, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Not to mention scientists and thinkers like Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk, Rachel Carson, Margaret Mead, and especially Dr. Alfred Kinsey.
I don't think that Americans were smarter then, but American culture was. Even the mass media placed a greater emphasis on presenting a broad range of human achievement.
I grew up mostly among immigrants, many of whom never learned to speak English. But at night watching TV variety programs like the Ed Sullivan Show or the Perry Como Music Hall, I saw—along with comedians, popular singers, and movie stars—classical musicians like Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein, opera singers like Robert Merrill and Anna Moffo, and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong captivate an audience of millions with their art.
The same was even true of literature. I first encountered Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, and James Baldwin on general interest TV shows. All of these people were famous to the average American—because the culture considered them important.
Today no working-class or immigrant kid would encounter that range of arts and ideas in the popular culture. Almost everything in our national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment, or altogether eliminated.
The loss of recognition for artists, thinkers, and scientists has impoverished our culture in innumerable ways, but let me mention one. When virtually all of a culture's celebrated figures are in sports or entertainment, how few possible role models we offer the young.
25.6.07
Put real business on TV and I’ll reach for the remote
Lucy Kellaway - Put real business on TV and I’ll reach for the remote:
"Business telly, so the newspapers tell us, is “the new rock and roll”. This isn’t saying much as in the last week alone opera, literary festivals, fatherhood, private equity and farming have all been held up in the UK press as being the new rock and roll too.
Yet business TV has more claim to the cliché than most. While it isn’t exactly cool, it is increasingly popular – which is more than can be said for farming or fatherhood. There is The Apprentice, Dragons’ Den and now a new series, Tycoon, and all attract enormous audiences.
Earlier this month 6.2m people watched The Apprentice – nearly twice as many as a documentary that was on the other side about Princess Diana dying in a tunnel.
There is a catch. The reason these programmes do so well is not because business is suddenly fashionable, but because they don’t have anything to do with business at all. Take the new show, Tycoon. In it Peter Jones, the handsome-ish entrepreneur who is also on Dragons’ Den, is helping “ordinary people” launch their own businesses. One of these ordinary people is an ex-Page 3 model, another a former bodyguard to the Sultan of Brunei and a third a winner of the World Karaoke Championships. This is freak-show TV, as much like real business as Big Brother is like real life."
"Business telly, so the newspapers tell us, is “the new rock and roll”. This isn’t saying much as in the last week alone opera, literary festivals, fatherhood, private equity and farming have all been held up in the UK press as being the new rock and roll too.
Yet business TV has more claim to the cliché than most. While it isn’t exactly cool, it is increasingly popular – which is more than can be said for farming or fatherhood. There is The Apprentice, Dragons’ Den and now a new series, Tycoon, and all attract enormous audiences.
Earlier this month 6.2m people watched The Apprentice – nearly twice as many as a documentary that was on the other side about Princess Diana dying in a tunnel.
There is a catch. The reason these programmes do so well is not because business is suddenly fashionable, but because they don’t have anything to do with business at all. Take the new show, Tycoon. In it Peter Jones, the handsome-ish entrepreneur who is also on Dragons’ Den, is helping “ordinary people” launch their own businesses. One of these ordinary people is an ex-Page 3 model, another a former bodyguard to the Sultan of Brunei and a third a winner of the World Karaoke Championships. This is freak-show TV, as much like real business as Big Brother is like real life."
Bringing in the Young
The under-40 crowd is the Holy Grail of every fine-arts performing group and presenter in America. Everybody wants it -- but nobody knows where to find it. "Every year expeditions went out holy grailing, and next year relief expeditions went out to hunt for them," Mark Twain wrote in "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court." "There was worlds of reputation in it, but no money."
Now, though, it looks like somebody has finally found the money. Goldstar Events, a California-based online company that sells half-price tickets to live performances in Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, San Francisco and Washington, is successfully reaching young audiences with personalized Web-based marketing techniques that match buyers with events.
To become a Goldstar member, you go to www.goldstarevents.com and fill out a simple seven-question form that asks you to choose your favorite kinds of entertainment from this list: classic rock, classical music, comedy, family, film, jazz, popular music, spas and massage, social events, sports, theater and two catch-all categories, "performing arts" and "unique ideas." That's it -- there's no membership fee. (Goldstar makes its money by adding a small service charge to each ticket.) You then receive a weekly e-newsletter listing available performances in your area, along with special last-minute email offers. Tickets are bought online and picked up at the box office at the time of the show.
Now, though, it looks like somebody has finally found the money. Goldstar Events, a California-based online company that sells half-price tickets to live performances in Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, San Francisco and Washington, is successfully reaching young audiences with personalized Web-based marketing techniques that match buyers with events.
To become a Goldstar member, you go to www.goldstarevents.com and fill out a simple seven-question form that asks you to choose your favorite kinds of entertainment from this list: classic rock, classical music, comedy, family, film, jazz, popular music, spas and massage, social events, sports, theater and two catch-all categories, "performing arts" and "unique ideas." That's it -- there's no membership fee. (Goldstar makes its money by adding a small service charge to each ticket.) You then receive a weekly e-newsletter listing available performances in your area, along with special last-minute email offers. Tickets are bought online and picked up at the box office at the time of the show.
23.6.07
Rushdie
FOR a writer, Salman Rushdie has had a rather turbulent career.Even by his standards, however, this has been quite a week for the Indian-born, British-educated Booker Prize-winning novelist, now a resident of New York:Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for services to literature, he turned 60, and, across the Muslim world, a variety of jihad-minded fanatics and their essentially mindless apologists renewed their demand that Rushdie be murdered as soon as possible.The Islamicists' antipathy toward Rushdie goes back 19 years, to when his fanciful novel "The Satanic Verses" was deemed by some of them to blaspheme Muhammad. There was a great deal of rioting and fulminating at the time, culminating in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's pronouncement of a fatwa against Rushdie. As the Iranian revolution's spiritual leader said on Tehran radio, "The author of 'The Satanic Verses,' which is against Islam, the Prophet, the Koran and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death."Rushdie survived by spending the better part of the next decade in what amounted to an "author's protection program" maintained by the British government. Several of his translators, however, were killed or wounded.When news of knighthood spread last weekend, the flames of fanaticism rekindled. An Iranian group offered $150,000 to anyone who would murder the novelist. Effigies of the queen and the writer were burned in riots across Pakistan. That country's religious affairs minister initially said that conferring such an honor on Rushdie justified sending suicide bombers to Britain, then — under pressure — he modified his statement to say it would cause suicide bombers to travel there. Pakistan's national assembly unanimously condemned Rushdie's knighthood and said it reflected "contempt" for Islam and Muhammad. Various high-ranking Iranian clerics called for the writers' death and renewed their insistence that Khomeini's fatwa still is in force. Riots spread to India's Muslim communities.Friday, the Voice of America reported that Pakistani "lawmakers passed a second resolution calling on British Prime Minister Tony Blair to apologize 'to the Muslim world' " and that, "on Thursday, a hard-line Pakistani cleric awarded terrorist leader Osama bin Laden the religious title and honorific 'saifulla,' or sword of Islam, to protest Britain's decision."If you're wondering why you haven't been able to follow all the columns and editorials in the American press denouncing all this homicidal nonsense, it's because there haven't been any. And, in that great silence, is a great scandal.
22.6.07
Quick Bard
It might have acquired a new set of brackets - not only is it (Abridged) but also (Revised) - yet apart from the odd topical new line, the Reduced Shakespeare Company's hit is just as it was during its previous lengthy West End run.
So if, like me, you are tickled by the idea of Troilus and Cressida being explained in seconds flat with the aid of an inflatable dinosaur, this remains a hoot.
Purists scoffed before at this Edinburgh Fringe-generated hit and will doubtless scoff again. Let them. I would heartily contest that anyone who fails to smile at seeing all Shakespeare's comedies reduced to the lightning-fast skit Four Weddings and a Transvestite is taking herself too seriously.
An exuberant trio of American actors in doublets, hose and Converse boots leads us through "all 37 plays in 97 minutes", although they should surely have crowed over the fact that it took the Royal Shakespeare Company a snail-like year to get through these same Complete Works recently.
Once it has been established that "Shakespeare invaded Poland on September first 1939", the show careers off at a cracking pace, racing through the "boring" stuff and lingering longest on Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet.
The latter turns into a full-blown pantomime experience, with the audience becoming the Freudian components of Ophelia's troubled mind and being encouraged to shout out as such. Do just remember that "Cut the crap, Hamlet, my biological clock is ticking and I want babies now" isn't a line particularly welcome in Stratford.
Directors Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield, two of the original writers, keep the bouncing skulls and flying wigs under some sort of control, and achieve a neat blend of nerdiness and slacker charm (special credit to John Schwab) in their actors. Treat yourself.
So if, like me, you are tickled by the idea of Troilus and Cressida being explained in seconds flat with the aid of an inflatable dinosaur, this remains a hoot.
Purists scoffed before at this Edinburgh Fringe-generated hit and will doubtless scoff again. Let them. I would heartily contest that anyone who fails to smile at seeing all Shakespeare's comedies reduced to the lightning-fast skit Four Weddings and a Transvestite is taking herself too seriously.
An exuberant trio of American actors in doublets, hose and Converse boots leads us through "all 37 plays in 97 minutes", although they should surely have crowed over the fact that it took the Royal Shakespeare Company a snail-like year to get through these same Complete Works recently.
Once it has been established that "Shakespeare invaded Poland on September first 1939", the show careers off at a cracking pace, racing through the "boring" stuff and lingering longest on Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet.
The latter turns into a full-blown pantomime experience, with the audience becoming the Freudian components of Ophelia's troubled mind and being encouraged to shout out as such. Do just remember that "Cut the crap, Hamlet, my biological clock is ticking and I want babies now" isn't a line particularly welcome in Stratford.
Directors Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield, two of the original writers, keep the bouncing skulls and flying wigs under some sort of control, and achieve a neat blend of nerdiness and slacker charm (special credit to John Schwab) in their actors. Treat yourself.
Some Big Bones
35,000-Year-Old Mammoth Sculpture Found in Germany
In southwestern Germany, an American archaeologist and his German colleagues have found the oldest mammoth-ivory carving known to modern science. And even at 35,000 years old, it's still intact.
Archaeologists at the University of Tübingen have recovered the first entirely intact woolly mammoth figurine from the Swabian Jura, a plateau in the state of Baden-Württemberg, thought to have been made by the first modern humans some 35,000 years ago. It is believed to be the oldest ivory carving ever found. "You can be sure," Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas J. Conard told SPIEGEL ONLINE, "that there has been art in Swabia for over 35,000 years."
In southwestern Germany, an American archaeologist and his German colleagues have found the oldest mammoth-ivory carving known to modern science. And even at 35,000 years old, it's still intact.
Archaeologists at the University of Tübingen have recovered the first entirely intact woolly mammoth figurine from the Swabian Jura, a plateau in the state of Baden-Württemberg, thought to have been made by the first modern humans some 35,000 years ago. It is believed to be the oldest ivory carving ever found. "You can be sure," Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas J. Conard told SPIEGEL ONLINE, "that there has been art in Swabia for over 35,000 years."
21.6.07
Monet
It comes from a series of paintings that Monet made during three visits to London around 1900. The work is dated 1904, though, in fact, by that point Monet hadn't been in London for three years.
He would have finished the picture back at Giverny, where his water garden was located.
The painting depicts bold flashes of sunlight emerging through fog in between the arches of Waterloo Bridge as seen from the balcony of the Savoy Hotel, where Monet stayed. Monet loved London in fog.
Without it, he said, you could see all the city's ugly buildings. But with it, London became poetic and mysterious.
Recently Monet has become fashionable again - having fallen out of favour in between the world wars, when people preferred hard-edged, abstract painting.
Today, his paintings are obvious targets for rich collectors.
But, when they were first exhibited, they felt avant-garde. Monet was an extraordinary colourist and a virtuoso with a brush. Throughout his career, he tried to find ways to translate the effects of light into colour on canvas.
Traditionally, artists believed
He would have finished the picture back at Giverny, where his water garden was located.
The painting depicts bold flashes of sunlight emerging through fog in between the arches of Waterloo Bridge as seen from the balcony of the Savoy Hotel, where Monet stayed. Monet loved London in fog.
Without it, he said, you could see all the city's ugly buildings. But with it, London became poetic and mysterious.
Recently Monet has become fashionable again - having fallen out of favour in between the world wars, when people preferred hard-edged, abstract painting.
Today, his paintings are obvious targets for rich collectors.
But, when they were first exhibited, they felt avant-garde. Monet was an extraordinary colourist and a virtuoso with a brush. Throughout his career, he tried to find ways to translate the effects of light into colour on canvas.
Traditionally, artists believed
EUROPE
It is Europe’s doom that Walter Laqueur explores and explains in this succinct and clearly written book. He does not say anything that others have not said before him, but he says it better and with a greater tolerance of nuance than some other works on this vitally important subject.
There are three threats to Europe’s future. The first comes from demographic decline. Europeans are simply not reproducing, for reasons that are unclear. They seem to care more about the ozone layer and carbon emissions than they do about the continuation of their own societies. Or perhaps bringing up children interferes with what they conceive to be the real business of life: taking lengthy annual holidays in exotic locations and other such pleasures.
The second threat comes from the presence of a sizable and growing immigrant population, a large part of which is not necessarily interested in integration. As the population ages, the need for immigrant labor increases, and among the main sources of such labor are North Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. When I recently drove to Antwerp from the South of France, I thought I had arrived in Casablanca. There are parts of Brussels where the police are enjoined not to be seen eating or drinking during Ramadan. Similar accommodations are occurring all over Europe: in the Central Library in Birmingham, for example, I found a women-only table occupied exclusively by young Muslims dressed in the hijab. (They were the lucky ones, members of liberal households that allowed them out on their own.)
The third threat comes from the existence of the welfare state and the welfare-state mentality. A system of entitlements has been created that, however economically counterproductive, is politically difficult to dismantle: once privileges are granted, they assume the metaphysical status of immemorial and fundamental rights. The right of French train drivers to retire on full pension at the age of 50 is probably more important to them than the right of free speech—especially that of those who think that retirement at such an age is preposterous. While Europe mortgages its future to pay for such extravagances—the French public debt doubled in ten years under the supposedly conservative Chirac—other areas of the world forge an unbeatable combination of high-tech and cheap labor. The European political class, more than ever dissociated from its electorate, has hardly woken up to the challenge.
All this Laqueur lays out with exemplary clarity. He sees Europe, once the home of a dynamic civilization that energized the rest of the world, declining into a kind of genteel theme park—if it’s lucky. The future might be grimmer than this, of course: there might be a real struggle for power once the immigrants and their descendents become numerically strong enough to take on the increasingly geriatric native population.
There are three threats to Europe’s future. The first comes from demographic decline. Europeans are simply not reproducing, for reasons that are unclear. They seem to care more about the ozone layer and carbon emissions than they do about the continuation of their own societies. Or perhaps bringing up children interferes with what they conceive to be the real business of life: taking lengthy annual holidays in exotic locations and other such pleasures.
The second threat comes from the presence of a sizable and growing immigrant population, a large part of which is not necessarily interested in integration. As the population ages, the need for immigrant labor increases, and among the main sources of such labor are North Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. When I recently drove to Antwerp from the South of France, I thought I had arrived in Casablanca. There are parts of Brussels where the police are enjoined not to be seen eating or drinking during Ramadan. Similar accommodations are occurring all over Europe: in the Central Library in Birmingham, for example, I found a women-only table occupied exclusively by young Muslims dressed in the hijab. (They were the lucky ones, members of liberal households that allowed them out on their own.)
The third threat comes from the existence of the welfare state and the welfare-state mentality. A system of entitlements has been created that, however economically counterproductive, is politically difficult to dismantle: once privileges are granted, they assume the metaphysical status of immemorial and fundamental rights. The right of French train drivers to retire on full pension at the age of 50 is probably more important to them than the right of free speech—especially that of those who think that retirement at such an age is preposterous. While Europe mortgages its future to pay for such extravagances—the French public debt doubled in ten years under the supposedly conservative Chirac—other areas of the world forge an unbeatable combination of high-tech and cheap labor. The European political class, more than ever dissociated from its electorate, has hardly woken up to the challenge.
All this Laqueur lays out with exemplary clarity. He sees Europe, once the home of a dynamic civilization that energized the rest of the world, declining into a kind of genteel theme park—if it’s lucky. The future might be grimmer than this, of course: there might be a real struggle for power once the immigrants and their descendents become numerically strong enough to take on the increasingly geriatric native population.
20.6.07
Hilary Soprano
Thanks to Maureen Dowd
Would Carmela, she of the pans of baked ziti and casseroles of veal parm, ever deny the omnivorous Tony onion rings?
Nah.
But the Carmela-Tony pact was a lot less strict than the Hillary-Bill pact.
Besides, this is a Hillaryized Carmela, or a Carmelized Hillary, so Bill Clinton must munch carrot sticks in their diner scene.
Actually, Hillary’s probably playing Tony, since she’s the one studying the songs on the jukebox and checking out a cruel-looking stranger at the counter.
Either way, the Clintons joined forces yesterday in a comic sendup of that last scene of “The Sopranos,” complete with a Journey soundtrack and an exchange about how Chelsea would be joining them once she got past her parallel-parking problems.
The satire was a video on Hillary’s Web site to whip up attention for the winner of her online contest to choose a campaign song.
Unfortunately, the winner, “You and I,” is definitely not for you and me. (I look forward to Obama’s new campaign ditty, “I Am Thou.”) It doesn’t bode well for the cultural health of the country that Hillary picked a song by Celine Dion, who combines the worst of Vegas and Canada.
It was an acid flashback to the cultural wasteland of Bill Clinton’s reign, when instead of Pablo Casals, we got Kenny G.
During the 1992 campaign, young Clinton aides obsessed on how they could get the boss to change from Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow)” to something hipper and less baby-boomer middlebrow. Even Christine McVie, one of the band’s singers who wrote the song, said it might be better as a jingle for an insurance company.
Maya Angelou, the poet of the first Clinton inaugural, is back as well. With the campaign trying to shore up support among affluent, educated, over-35 women — women like Hillary — Ms. Angelou offers a taped testimonial to Hillary on the campaign Web site, saying that people “have profound affection for you, ever since you stood up as a woman and said: Yes, I’m a woman. Phenomenal woman. That’s my mother and all your mothers and my grandmothers and all your grandmothers. And my great-grandmothers and yours. And great-greats and great-greats and all you women here, along with Hillary Rodham Clinton and me!”
She said that she was proud that Hillary, who has dropped the “Rodham,” “gives herself the authority to be in her own skin, to be who she is.”
But Ms. Angelou gets it exactly backward. Hillary never seems at ease in her own skin, and she always gives herself too much authority.
A Los Angeles Times article notes that the paradox of the race is that voters want a Democrat to win, but when they are offered a head-to-head contest between Hillary vs. Rudy, John McCain or Mitt Romney, many switch allegiance to the Republicans. There is, the article said, “a sour aftertaste from controversies of her White House years with President Clinton.”
“Who wants four or eight more years of the Clintons’ marital disputes, paid for by the United States, we the people? I certainly don’t,” Carol Bendick, a 63-year-old Democrat, told the paper.
Whether Bill and Hill actually had a formal 20-year pact entailing two terms for president for her after two terms for him, as some suggested in “Her Way,” the Hillary bio by Don Van Natta Jr. and Jeff Gerth, they certainly had an understanding.
The Clintons’ “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy seems so similar to that of the Sopranos, that it could be a bit risky to play the mob couple, even for a gag.
Like Carmela, who was rewarded with jewels, watches and building permits for her husband’s infidelities with his goomahs, Hillary, too, found a way to profit from her husband’s failings and flaws.
At a lunch Carmela had with her girlfriends at Vesuvio, the women spoke admiringly of Hillary as a role model, someone who was able to turn a sow’s ear of a marriage into a silk purse.
And like Tony, Hillary is so power-hungry that she can justify any thuggish means to get the prize.
In the Clintons’ mob spoof, as a rather wooden Hillary is about to announce her song choice to a loose and funny Bill, the screen suddenly goes dark.
In the case of “The Sopranos,” this was cause for perplexity. In the case of the Clintons, it’s an unwittingly satirical moment, because if there’s one thing we know about this tough New York family, it is that they will never, ever go dark.
Where’s a black screen when you need one?
Would Carmela, she of the pans of baked ziti and casseroles of veal parm, ever deny the omnivorous Tony onion rings?
Nah.
But the Carmela-Tony pact was a lot less strict than the Hillary-Bill pact.
Besides, this is a Hillaryized Carmela, or a Carmelized Hillary, so Bill Clinton must munch carrot sticks in their diner scene.
Actually, Hillary’s probably playing Tony, since she’s the one studying the songs on the jukebox and checking out a cruel-looking stranger at the counter.
Either way, the Clintons joined forces yesterday in a comic sendup of that last scene of “The Sopranos,” complete with a Journey soundtrack and an exchange about how Chelsea would be joining them once she got past her parallel-parking problems.
The satire was a video on Hillary’s Web site to whip up attention for the winner of her online contest to choose a campaign song.
Unfortunately, the winner, “You and I,” is definitely not for you and me. (I look forward to Obama’s new campaign ditty, “I Am Thou.”) It doesn’t bode well for the cultural health of the country that Hillary picked a song by Celine Dion, who combines the worst of Vegas and Canada.
It was an acid flashback to the cultural wasteland of Bill Clinton’s reign, when instead of Pablo Casals, we got Kenny G.
During the 1992 campaign, young Clinton aides obsessed on how they could get the boss to change from Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow)” to something hipper and less baby-boomer middlebrow. Even Christine McVie, one of the band’s singers who wrote the song, said it might be better as a jingle for an insurance company.
Maya Angelou, the poet of the first Clinton inaugural, is back as well. With the campaign trying to shore up support among affluent, educated, over-35 women — women like Hillary — Ms. Angelou offers a taped testimonial to Hillary on the campaign Web site, saying that people “have profound affection for you, ever since you stood up as a woman and said: Yes, I’m a woman. Phenomenal woman. That’s my mother and all your mothers and my grandmothers and all your grandmothers. And my great-grandmothers and yours. And great-greats and great-greats and all you women here, along with Hillary Rodham Clinton and me!”
She said that she was proud that Hillary, who has dropped the “Rodham,” “gives herself the authority to be in her own skin, to be who she is.”
But Ms. Angelou gets it exactly backward. Hillary never seems at ease in her own skin, and she always gives herself too much authority.
A Los Angeles Times article notes that the paradox of the race is that voters want a Democrat to win, but when they are offered a head-to-head contest between Hillary vs. Rudy, John McCain or Mitt Romney, many switch allegiance to the Republicans. There is, the article said, “a sour aftertaste from controversies of her White House years with President Clinton.”
“Who wants four or eight more years of the Clintons’ marital disputes, paid for by the United States, we the people? I certainly don’t,” Carol Bendick, a 63-year-old Democrat, told the paper.
Whether Bill and Hill actually had a formal 20-year pact entailing two terms for president for her after two terms for him, as some suggested in “Her Way,” the Hillary bio by Don Van Natta Jr. and Jeff Gerth, they certainly had an understanding.
The Clintons’ “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy seems so similar to that of the Sopranos, that it could be a bit risky to play the mob couple, even for a gag.
Like Carmela, who was rewarded with jewels, watches and building permits for her husband’s infidelities with his goomahs, Hillary, too, found a way to profit from her husband’s failings and flaws.
At a lunch Carmela had with her girlfriends at Vesuvio, the women spoke admiringly of Hillary as a role model, someone who was able to turn a sow’s ear of a marriage into a silk purse.
And like Tony, Hillary is so power-hungry that she can justify any thuggish means to get the prize.
In the Clintons’ mob spoof, as a rather wooden Hillary is about to announce her song choice to a loose and funny Bill, the screen suddenly goes dark.
In the case of “The Sopranos,” this was cause for perplexity. In the case of the Clintons, it’s an unwittingly satirical moment, because if there’s one thing we know about this tough New York family, it is that they will never, ever go dark.
Where’s a black screen when you need one?
19.6.07
HEROES
GuardianRoll over Beethoven, move out Mozart, exit stage left Shakespeare. Ask a sample of 6,400 of us to name our heroes in the arts and we pick someone we recently came across on television, at the cinema or on an iPod.
That, at least, is the message of a YouGov survey for the Arts Council youth arts awards scheme, released today.
Young people rate Phoenix Nights comedian Peter Kay and elusive artist Banksy above Leonardo da Vinci in their list of art heroes, which was topped by Walt Disney.
The answers mention only three artists born before the 20th century - and of these, Picasso clings by his fingertips in 10th slot among adults and is not rated at all by 18- to 25-year-olds. Other historical figures to survive are Leonardo da Vinci and Jane Austen. More recent heroes nominated include Bob Dylan, Bob Marley and Andy Warhol.
Leonardo shines in top place both in the overall choices and in the list nominated by over-25-year-olds. He is fourth with those under 25. Jane Austen comes in middle positions in both lists, apparently rescued from the obscurity in which Dickens, Shakespeare and Michelangelo languish by television and film versions of Pride and Prejudice.
The arts award scheme's head, Diana Walton, said: "Peter Kay, Banksy and Walt Disney are very accessible artists, who produce work which reaches into young people's lives through contemporary media, tells stories and often makes them laugh ... Young people respond to comedy and they like artists who influence their own culture. Older people sometimes find it easier to engage with established arts figures like Leonardo da Vinci."
The survey was commissioned by the Arts Award, which recognises young people's development through the arts. The award is supported by celebrities including actor Richard E Grant, artist Sam Taylor-Wood and TV presenter Graham Norton. The culture minister, David Lammy, will present the 1,000th award tonight at the Roundhouse in Camden, north London.
The overall top 10
1 Leonardo da Vinci
2 Bob Dylan
3 Andy Warhol
4 Walt Disney
5 Peter Kay
6 Jane Austen
7 Banksy
8 Bob Marley
9 Nick Park
10 Picasso
The under 25-list
1 Walt Disney
2 Peter Kay
3 Banksy
4 Leonardo da Vinci
5 Bob Marley
6 Jane Austen
7 Bob Dylan
8 Tim Burton
9 Marilyn Monroe
10 Will Smith
That, at least, is the message of a YouGov survey for the Arts Council youth arts awards scheme, released today.
Young people rate Phoenix Nights comedian Peter Kay and elusive artist Banksy above Leonardo da Vinci in their list of art heroes, which was topped by Walt Disney.
The answers mention only three artists born before the 20th century - and of these, Picasso clings by his fingertips in 10th slot among adults and is not rated at all by 18- to 25-year-olds. Other historical figures to survive are Leonardo da Vinci and Jane Austen. More recent heroes nominated include Bob Dylan, Bob Marley and Andy Warhol.
Leonardo shines in top place both in the overall choices and in the list nominated by over-25-year-olds. He is fourth with those under 25. Jane Austen comes in middle positions in both lists, apparently rescued from the obscurity in which Dickens, Shakespeare and Michelangelo languish by television and film versions of Pride and Prejudice.
The arts award scheme's head, Diana Walton, said: "Peter Kay, Banksy and Walt Disney are very accessible artists, who produce work which reaches into young people's lives through contemporary media, tells stories and often makes them laugh ... Young people respond to comedy and they like artists who influence their own culture. Older people sometimes find it easier to engage with established arts figures like Leonardo da Vinci."
The survey was commissioned by the Arts Award, which recognises young people's development through the arts. The award is supported by celebrities including actor Richard E Grant, artist Sam Taylor-Wood and TV presenter Graham Norton. The culture minister, David Lammy, will present the 1,000th award tonight at the Roundhouse in Camden, north London.
The overall top 10
1 Leonardo da Vinci
2 Bob Dylan
3 Andy Warhol
4 Walt Disney
5 Peter Kay
6 Jane Austen
7 Banksy
8 Bob Marley
9 Nick Park
10 Picasso
The under 25-list
1 Walt Disney
2 Peter Kay
3 Banksy
4 Leonardo da Vinci
5 Bob Marley
6 Jane Austen
7 Bob Dylan
8 Tim Burton
9 Marilyn Monroe
10 Will Smith
Globalization
Foreign Affairs - A New Deal for Globalization - Kenneth F. Scheve and Matthew J. Slaughter:
"Globalization has brought huge overall benefits, but earnings for most U.S. workers -- even those with college degrees -- have been falling recently; inequality is greater now than at any other time in the last 70 years. Whatever the cause, the result has been a surge in protectionism. To save globalization, policymakers must spread its gains more widely. The best way to do that is by redistributing income."
"Globalization has brought huge overall benefits, but earnings for most U.S. workers -- even those with college degrees -- have been falling recently; inequality is greater now than at any other time in the last 70 years. Whatever the cause, the result has been a surge in protectionism. To save globalization, policymakers must spread its gains more widely. The best way to do that is by redistributing income."
RORTY
News of the death of the philosopher Richard Rorty on June 8 came as I was reading about a small Brazilian tribe that the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss studied in the 1930s. A strange accident, a haphazard juxtaposition — but for a moment this pragmatist philosopher and a fading tribal culture glanced against each other, revealing something unusual about the contemporary scene.
Mr. Rorty was one of America’s foremost philosophers, who in midcareer, after devoting himself to the rigors of analytic philosophy, decided that “it is impossible to step outside our skins — the traditions, linguistic and other, within which we do our thinking and self-criticism.” He argued that we are always dealing with multiple and conflicting claims of truth, none of which can be conclusively established. We choose what to believe based on what is useful for us to believe. For Mr. Rorty, the importance of democracy is that it creates a liberal society in which rival truth claims can compete and accommodate each other. His pragmatism was postmodern, tolerant to a fault, its moral and progressive conclusions never appealing to a higher authority.
But the Caduveo of Brazil would not have welcomed that kind of all-inclusive embrace, and probably that embrace would not have been so readily offered to them. When Mr. Lévi-Strauss wrote about this dwindling tribe in “Tristes Tropiques,” his fascinating 1955 memoir, he compared these “knightly Indians” with their “aristocratic arrogance” to a deck of European playing cards; they even looked the parts of jacks, kings and queens, he wrote, with their cloaks and tunics decorated in red and black with recurrent motifs resembling hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs. The tribal queens, Mr. Lévi-Strauss noted, even seemed to trump Lewis Carroll’s imagined Queen of Hearts with their taste for playing with severed heads brought back by warriors.
The Caduveo, in Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s description, would never have considered for a moment that their beliefs and their society were arbitrarily constructed. The Caduveo had all the presumption and self-importance of royalty. They tattooed their bodies with elaborate “asymmetric arabesques” that served as coats of arms and signs of status. Their leaders removed every bit of facial hair, including eyelashes, and sneered at hairy Europeans. They even intimidated their Spanish and Portuguese conquerors.
They were, then, preliberal, premodern. In their midst every principle Mr. Rorty valued was violated. They provided their own transcendent authority and demanded its universal recognition. A neighboring, related tribe essentially became their serfs, cultivating land and turning over produce.
The Caduveo founding myth recounts that, lacking other gifts at the moment of creation, the tribe was given the divine right to exploit and dominate others. Mr. Lévi-Strauss once suggested that the Indian tribes of the Americas were like peoples of the Middle Ages, lacking the example of Rome; but the Caduveo, in his descriptions, are more like nobility from the 17th to mid-18th century, lacking the example of either the American or French revolutions.
But there was also something else about this tribe that drew Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s attention: “It was a society remarkably adverse to feelings that we consider as being natural.” Its members disliked having children. Abortion and infanticide were so common that the only way the tribe itself could continue was by adoption, and adoption — more properly called abduction — was traditionally implemented through warfare. The tribal disdain for nature extended into its active denigration of hair, agriculture, childbirth and even, perhaps, representational art.
In all of this the tribe was proclaiming that while its dominance derived from nature and was beyond question, its superiority meant that nature had no further claim on it. Everything else was created by the tribe itself, particularly the ornate and elaborate tattoos and paintings on members’ bodies. In this respect the tribe was not countercultural but counternatural. It refused to defer to external forces or commands.
In Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s telling the Caduveo actually take on a strangely postmodern flavor, shedding the very idea of natural law or constraints. Even Mr. Rorty might have found his sympathies touched. He once suggested that science had been established by modern man “to fill the place once held by God” but that it didn’t merit that position; it should be seen, Mr. Rorty said, as having the “same footing” as literature or art, and he suggested that physics and ethics were just differing methods of “trying to cope.” The Caduveo might have agreed, as long as they were permitted to determine which methods of coping were used.
But what place would such a society have in a Rortian democratic landscape? How would they be answered if their claims to divine right and arbitrary power came in direct conflict with the more embracing arbitrariness of Mr. Rorty’s vision?
In reasoning one’s way into pragmatism, in minimizing the importance of natural constraints and in dismissing the notion of some larger truth, the tendency is to assume that as different as we all are, we are at least prepared to accommodate ourselves to one another. But this is not something the Caduveo would necessarily have gone along with. Mr. Rorty’s outline of what he called “the utopian possibilities of the future” doesn’t leave much room for the kind of threat the Caduveo might pose, let alone other threats, still active in the world.
One tendency of pragmatism might be to so focus on the ways in which one’s own worldview is flawed that trauma is more readily attributed to internal failure than to external challenges. In one of his last interviews Mr. Rorty recalled the events of 9/11: “When I heard the news about the twin towers, my first thought was: ‘Oh, God. Bush will use this the way Hitler used the Reichstag fire.’ ”
If that really was his first thought, it reflects a certain amount of reluctance to comprehend forces lying beyond the boundaries of his familiar world, an inability fully to imagine what confrontations over truth might look like, possibly even a resistance to stepping outside of one’s skin or mental habits.
But in this too the Caduveo example may be suggestive. As Mr. Lévi-Strauss points out, neighboring Brazilian tribes were as hierarchical as the Caduveo but lacked the tribe’s sweeping “fanaticism” in rejecting the natural world. They reached differing forms of accommodation with their surroundings. The Caduveo, refusing even to procreate, didn’t have a chance. They survive now as sedentary farmers. Such a fate of denatured inconsequence may eventually be shared by absolutist postmodernism. The Caduveo’s ideas weren’t useful, perhaps. Some weren’t even true.
Mr. Rorty was one of America’s foremost philosophers, who in midcareer, after devoting himself to the rigors of analytic philosophy, decided that “it is impossible to step outside our skins — the traditions, linguistic and other, within which we do our thinking and self-criticism.” He argued that we are always dealing with multiple and conflicting claims of truth, none of which can be conclusively established. We choose what to believe based on what is useful for us to believe. For Mr. Rorty, the importance of democracy is that it creates a liberal society in which rival truth claims can compete and accommodate each other. His pragmatism was postmodern, tolerant to a fault, its moral and progressive conclusions never appealing to a higher authority.
But the Caduveo of Brazil would not have welcomed that kind of all-inclusive embrace, and probably that embrace would not have been so readily offered to them. When Mr. Lévi-Strauss wrote about this dwindling tribe in “Tristes Tropiques,” his fascinating 1955 memoir, he compared these “knightly Indians” with their “aristocratic arrogance” to a deck of European playing cards; they even looked the parts of jacks, kings and queens, he wrote, with their cloaks and tunics decorated in red and black with recurrent motifs resembling hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs. The tribal queens, Mr. Lévi-Strauss noted, even seemed to trump Lewis Carroll’s imagined Queen of Hearts with their taste for playing with severed heads brought back by warriors.
The Caduveo, in Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s description, would never have considered for a moment that their beliefs and their society were arbitrarily constructed. The Caduveo had all the presumption and self-importance of royalty. They tattooed their bodies with elaborate “asymmetric arabesques” that served as coats of arms and signs of status. Their leaders removed every bit of facial hair, including eyelashes, and sneered at hairy Europeans. They even intimidated their Spanish and Portuguese conquerors.
They were, then, preliberal, premodern. In their midst every principle Mr. Rorty valued was violated. They provided their own transcendent authority and demanded its universal recognition. A neighboring, related tribe essentially became their serfs, cultivating land and turning over produce.
The Caduveo founding myth recounts that, lacking other gifts at the moment of creation, the tribe was given the divine right to exploit and dominate others. Mr. Lévi-Strauss once suggested that the Indian tribes of the Americas were like peoples of the Middle Ages, lacking the example of Rome; but the Caduveo, in his descriptions, are more like nobility from the 17th to mid-18th century, lacking the example of either the American or French revolutions.
But there was also something else about this tribe that drew Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s attention: “It was a society remarkably adverse to feelings that we consider as being natural.” Its members disliked having children. Abortion and infanticide were so common that the only way the tribe itself could continue was by adoption, and adoption — more properly called abduction — was traditionally implemented through warfare. The tribal disdain for nature extended into its active denigration of hair, agriculture, childbirth and even, perhaps, representational art.
In all of this the tribe was proclaiming that while its dominance derived from nature and was beyond question, its superiority meant that nature had no further claim on it. Everything else was created by the tribe itself, particularly the ornate and elaborate tattoos and paintings on members’ bodies. In this respect the tribe was not countercultural but counternatural. It refused to defer to external forces or commands.
In Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s telling the Caduveo actually take on a strangely postmodern flavor, shedding the very idea of natural law or constraints. Even Mr. Rorty might have found his sympathies touched. He once suggested that science had been established by modern man “to fill the place once held by God” but that it didn’t merit that position; it should be seen, Mr. Rorty said, as having the “same footing” as literature or art, and he suggested that physics and ethics were just differing methods of “trying to cope.” The Caduveo might have agreed, as long as they were permitted to determine which methods of coping were used.
But what place would such a society have in a Rortian democratic landscape? How would they be answered if their claims to divine right and arbitrary power came in direct conflict with the more embracing arbitrariness of Mr. Rorty’s vision?
In reasoning one’s way into pragmatism, in minimizing the importance of natural constraints and in dismissing the notion of some larger truth, the tendency is to assume that as different as we all are, we are at least prepared to accommodate ourselves to one another. But this is not something the Caduveo would necessarily have gone along with. Mr. Rorty’s outline of what he called “the utopian possibilities of the future” doesn’t leave much room for the kind of threat the Caduveo might pose, let alone other threats, still active in the world.
One tendency of pragmatism might be to so focus on the ways in which one’s own worldview is flawed that trauma is more readily attributed to internal failure than to external challenges. In one of his last interviews Mr. Rorty recalled the events of 9/11: “When I heard the news about the twin towers, my first thought was: ‘Oh, God. Bush will use this the way Hitler used the Reichstag fire.’ ”
If that really was his first thought, it reflects a certain amount of reluctance to comprehend forces lying beyond the boundaries of his familiar world, an inability fully to imagine what confrontations over truth might look like, possibly even a resistance to stepping outside of one’s skin or mental habits.
But in this too the Caduveo example may be suggestive. As Mr. Lévi-Strauss points out, neighboring Brazilian tribes were as hierarchical as the Caduveo but lacked the tribe’s sweeping “fanaticism” in rejecting the natural world. They reached differing forms of accommodation with their surroundings. The Caduveo, refusing even to procreate, didn’t have a chance. They survive now as sedentary farmers. Such a fate of denatured inconsequence may eventually be shared by absolutist postmodernism. The Caduveo’s ideas weren’t useful, perhaps. Some weren’t even true.
18.6.07
Simply Every Cliché
The piece from the Telegragh must be savoured. The writwers have been asked to write ashort piece using every imaginable irritant. WARNING: This hurts to read.
16.6.07
God and the Physicists
'I have a salary at Tulane," says Frank Tipler, "some 40 percent lower than the average for a full professor at Tulane as a consequence of my belief."
Physicists today, he says, are not supposed to believe in God. But he does, though I suspect that in itself would not reduce his salary. What may well do, however, is his belief that the Cosmological Singularity is God. In other words, he believes that contemporary physics has found God and that physics explains Christianity. In fact, it is probably true to say that Tipler does not believe at all. There is no need, for he feels he has proved Christianity through physics.
With his previous book, The Physics of Immortality, Tipler used physics to prove that death would be utterly conquered as future beings deployed vast energy resources, derived from the contraction of the universe, to resurrect the past, ourselves included. Here he goes much further. He says that modern physics has confirmed Christianity - from the Virgin Birth through the Turin Shroud and walking on water to the Resurrection - in detail.
Central to this argument is his conviction that there is no discontinuity between the insights of science and the revelations of the Gospels. Miracles, for example, are not, as is often claimed, sudden deformations or breaches of the natural order. They happen through known physical processes. Walking on water is accomplished through a particle beam and dematerialization through the multiple universe model implied by quantum theory. That they happen when they do is, of course, God's will, but, in making them happen, he does not violate the order of his creation.
This is not a limitation on God's power because he established the laws of physics precisely to encompass all these eventualities. Similarly, the existence of evil is neither God's failing nor proof of his nonexistence. If we could see the many universes - the multiverse - he has created, the problem would simply vanish. Our limited perspective means that we cannot fully understand this any more than we can visualize a four-dimensional cube, but, as with the cube, we can at least imagine the possibility.
Physicists today, he says, are not supposed to believe in God. But he does, though I suspect that in itself would not reduce his salary. What may well do, however, is his belief that the Cosmological Singularity is God. In other words, he believes that contemporary physics has found God and that physics explains Christianity. In fact, it is probably true to say that Tipler does not believe at all. There is no need, for he feels he has proved Christianity through physics.
With his previous book, The Physics of Immortality, Tipler used physics to prove that death would be utterly conquered as future beings deployed vast energy resources, derived from the contraction of the universe, to resurrect the past, ourselves included. Here he goes much further. He says that modern physics has confirmed Christianity - from the Virgin Birth through the Turin Shroud and walking on water to the Resurrection - in detail.
Central to this argument is his conviction that there is no discontinuity between the insights of science and the revelations of the Gospels. Miracles, for example, are not, as is often claimed, sudden deformations or breaches of the natural order. They happen through known physical processes. Walking on water is accomplished through a particle beam and dematerialization through the multiple universe model implied by quantum theory. That they happen when they do is, of course, God's will, but, in making them happen, he does not violate the order of his creation.
This is not a limitation on God's power because he established the laws of physics precisely to encompass all these eventualities. Similarly, the existence of evil is neither God's failing nor proof of his nonexistence. If we could see the many universes - the multiverse - he has created, the problem would simply vanish. Our limited perspective means that we cannot fully understand this any more than we can visualize a four-dimensional cube, but, as with the cube, we can at least imagine the possibility.
"New" Christianity
The West is awash with fear of the Islamization of Europe. The rise of Islam, many warn, could transform the continent into “Eurabia,” a term popularized by Harvard historian Niall Ferguson and other pundits. “A youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonize—the term is not too strong—a senescent Europe,” Ferguson has predicted. Such grim prophecies may sell books, but they ignore reality. For all we hear about Islam, Europe remains a stronger Christian fortress than people realize. What’s more, it is showing little sign of giving ground to Islam or any other faith for that matter.
To be fair, the trend is counterintuitive. Europe has long been a malarial swamp for any traditional or orthodox faith. Compared with the rest of the world, religious adherence in Europe is painfully weak. And it is easy to find evidence of the decay. Any traveler to the continent has seen Christianity’s abandoned and secularized churches, many now transformed into little more than museums. But this does not mean that European Christianity is nearing extinction. Rather, among the ruins of faith, European Christianity is adapting to a world in which its convinced adherents represent a small but vigorous minority.
In fact, the rapid decline in the continent’s church attendance over the past 40 years may have done Europe a favor. It has freed churches of trying to operate as national entities that attempt to serve all members of society. Today, no church stands a realistic chance of incorporating everyone. Smaller, more focused bodies, however, can be more passionate, enthusiastic, and rigorously committed to personal holiness. To use a scientific analogy, when a star collapses, it becomes a white dwarf—smaller in size than it once was, but burning much more intensely. Across Europe, white-dwarf faith communities are growing within the remnants of the old mass church.
Perhaps nowhere is this more true than within European Catholicism, where new religious currents have become a potent force. Examples include movements such as the Focolare, the Emmanuel Community, and the Neocatechumenate Way, all of which are committed to a re-evangelization of Europe. These movements use charismatic styles of worship and devotion that would seem more at home in an American Pentecostal church, but at the same time they are thoroughly Catholic. Though most of these movements originated in Spain and Italy, they have subsequently spread throughout Europe and across the Catholic world. Their influence over the younger clergy and lay leaders who will shape the church in the next generation is surprisingly strong.
To be fair, the trend is counterintuitive. Europe has long been a malarial swamp for any traditional or orthodox faith. Compared with the rest of the world, religious adherence in Europe is painfully weak. And it is easy to find evidence of the decay. Any traveler to the continent has seen Christianity’s abandoned and secularized churches, many now transformed into little more than museums. But this does not mean that European Christianity is nearing extinction. Rather, among the ruins of faith, European Christianity is adapting to a world in which its convinced adherents represent a small but vigorous minority.
In fact, the rapid decline in the continent’s church attendance over the past 40 years may have done Europe a favor. It has freed churches of trying to operate as national entities that attempt to serve all members of society. Today, no church stands a realistic chance of incorporating everyone. Smaller, more focused bodies, however, can be more passionate, enthusiastic, and rigorously committed to personal holiness. To use a scientific analogy, when a star collapses, it becomes a white dwarf—smaller in size than it once was, but burning much more intensely. Across Europe, white-dwarf faith communities are growing within the remnants of the old mass church.
Perhaps nowhere is this more true than within European Catholicism, where new religious currents have become a potent force. Examples include movements such as the Focolare, the Emmanuel Community, and the Neocatechumenate Way, all of which are committed to a re-evangelization of Europe. These movements use charismatic styles of worship and devotion that would seem more at home in an American Pentecostal church, but at the same time they are thoroughly Catholic. Though most of these movements originated in Spain and Italy, they have subsequently spread throughout Europe and across the Catholic world. Their influence over the younger clergy and lay leaders who will shape the church in the next generation is surprisingly strong.
Bloomsday
Today is Bloomsday, the day on which the action in James Joyce's novel Ulysses takes place in 1904. Leopold Bloom, the main character of Ulysses, does not have much work to do, spends most of his day wandering around Dublin doing some errands, leaves his house on Eccles Street, walks south across the River Liffey, picks up a letter, buys a bar of soap, and goes to the funeral of a man he didn't know very well. In the afternoon, he has a cheese sandwich, feeds the gulls in the river, helps a blind man cross the street, and visits a couple of pubs. He thinks about his job, his wife, his daughter, his stillborn son. He muses about life and death and reincarnation. He knows that his wife is going to cheat on him that afternoon at his house. In the evening, he wanders around the red-light district of Dublin and meets up with a young writer named Stephen Dedalus, who is drunk. And so Leopold Bloom takes him home with him and offers to let him spend the night. And they stand outside, looking at the stars for a while. And then Bloom goes inside and climbs into bed with his wife.
15.6.07
Cool & Contemplative
It is little wonder that the Japanese consider Fuji to be sacred. It hovers like a supernatural presence over the entire Nipponese archipeago. Check out :http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=79992832a rare chance to view a bit of Xerxes.
FATHERHOOD
May all the Fathers of this world be truly appreciated. And yes, nothing better than a nice claret to contemplate parenting
SPACEY
Hollywood actor Kevin Spacey said last night that he no longer cared about his cinema career.
The star of American Beauty and The Usual Suspects told London Tonight he loved his role as artistic director of London's Old Vic theatre, a position he has held since 2003.
"I don't care about my personal acting career any more. I'm done with it," he said.
"After 10 years of making movies and going better than I ever could have imagined, I sort of had to ask myself: What am I supposed to do with all of this success that I have had?
The star of American Beauty and The Usual Suspects told London Tonight he loved his role as artistic director of London's Old Vic theatre, a position he has held since 2003.
"I don't care about my personal acting career any more. I'm done with it," he said.
"After 10 years of making movies and going better than I ever could have imagined, I sort of had to ask myself: What am I supposed to do with all of this success that I have had?
14.6.07
WU'S WU
When everybody’s named the same, then who knows Wu’s Wu?
In China every Tom, Dick and Harry is called Li. The number of Chinese named Zhang (88 million) exceeds the population of Germany. There are more Chinese called Chen or Zhou than there are Australians of whatever name. Hence the colloquial expression lao bai xing, “old hundred surnames”, is used in Chinese to mean “ordinary people” or commoners. In the same way that if you shout “Jones” in the garden quad of Jesus College, Oxford, twenty windows fly open, so, if you call out “Zhang Wei” in a street in Beijing, several men turn round.
This proliferation of common names causes difficulty. The police arrest the wrong man of several called Zhang Jun. When schoolteachers call Wei (“Great”) to answer a question, dozens of children reply. When everybody has the same name, then nobody knows Wu’s Wu.
So the Chinese Government proposes to change the law in order to allow parents to create double-barrelled surnames for their children. Chinese surnames are at least five centuries older than British, but they have evolved in much the same pattern. There are toponyms, descriptive names and trade descriptions. Tao means potter, and Wu means shaman. Some describe seniority in the family. Ji indicates the fourth eldest son in a family. Compare philoprogenitive Victorian families with sons called Septimus and Decimus. Chinese nomenclature is less prodigal and prettier than the wilder shores of our Puritan nomenclature, such as Obadiah Bind-their-kings-in-chains-and-their-nobles-with-links-of-iron.
We congratulate the Chinese for evolving their names naturally, rather than in a digital age giving their 1.3 billion people ever larger numbers.
China Calling-Comment-Leading Article-TimesOnline
In China every Tom, Dick and Harry is called Li. The number of Chinese named Zhang (88 million) exceeds the population of Germany. There are more Chinese called Chen or Zhou than there are Australians of whatever name. Hence the colloquial expression lao bai xing, “old hundred surnames”, is used in Chinese to mean “ordinary people” or commoners. In the same way that if you shout “Jones” in the garden quad of Jesus College, Oxford, twenty windows fly open, so, if you call out “Zhang Wei” in a street in Beijing, several men turn round.
This proliferation of common names causes difficulty. The police arrest the wrong man of several called Zhang Jun. When schoolteachers call Wei (“Great”) to answer a question, dozens of children reply. When everybody has the same name, then nobody knows Wu’s Wu.
So the Chinese Government proposes to change the law in order to allow parents to create double-barrelled surnames for their children. Chinese surnames are at least five centuries older than British, but they have evolved in much the same pattern. There are toponyms, descriptive names and trade descriptions. Tao means potter, and Wu means shaman. Some describe seniority in the family. Ji indicates the fourth eldest son in a family. Compare philoprogenitive Victorian families with sons called Septimus and Decimus. Chinese nomenclature is less prodigal and prettier than the wilder shores of our Puritan nomenclature, such as Obadiah Bind-their-kings-in-chains-and-their-nobles-with-links-of-iron.
We congratulate the Chinese for evolving their names naturally, rather than in a digital age giving their 1.3 billion people ever larger numbers.
China Calling-Comment-Leading Article-TimesOnline
ECONOMIST on BIOLOGY
NATURE is full of surprises. When atoms were first proved to exist (and that was a mere century ago), they were thought to be made only of electrons and protons. That explained a lot, but it did not quite square with other observations. Then, in 1932, James Chadwick discovered the neutron. Suddenly everything made sense—so much sense that it took only another 13 years to build an atomic bomb.
It is probably no exaggeration to say that biology is now undergoing its “neutron moment”. For more than half a century the fundamental story of living things has been a tale of the interplay between genes, in the form of DNA, and proteins, which the genes encode and which do the donkey work of keeping living organisms living. The past couple of years, however, have seen the rise and rise of a third type of molecule, called RNA.
The analogy is not perfect. Unlike the neutron, RNA has been known about for a long time. Until the past couple of years, however, its role had seemed restricted to fetching and carrying for DNA and proteins. Now RNA looks every bit as important as those two masters. It may, indeed, be the main regulator of what goes on in a cell—the cell's operating system, to draw a computing analogy—as well as the author of many other activities (see article). As important, molecular biologists have gone from thinking that they know roughly what is going on in their subject to suddenly realising that they have barely a clue.
It is probably no exaggeration to say that biology is now undergoing its “neutron moment”. For more than half a century the fundamental story of living things has been a tale of the interplay between genes, in the form of DNA, and proteins, which the genes encode and which do the donkey work of keeping living organisms living. The past couple of years, however, have seen the rise and rise of a third type of molecule, called RNA.
The analogy is not perfect. Unlike the neutron, RNA has been known about for a long time. Until the past couple of years, however, its role had seemed restricted to fetching and carrying for DNA and proteins. Now RNA looks every bit as important as those two masters. It may, indeed, be the main regulator of what goes on in a cell—the cell's operating system, to draw a computing analogy—as well as the author of many other activities (see article). As important, molecular biologists have gone from thinking that they know roughly what is going on in their subject to suddenly realising that they have barely a clue.
You Tube & the Theatre
One can often feel ignorant when venturing into the theatre. Unless you've studied the play or you're a seasoned theatregoer who follows the advice of a trusty critic, it's not uncommon to feel a bit clueless as you enter the auditorium. You subsequently feel compelled to splash out a fiver on a programme in the vain hope that it will offer something beyond information on the cast and a brief summary of what's about to happen.
Well, that was the case before the National Theatre hit YouTube with a vengeance. In a blatant endeavor to break away from the stereotypical theatre crowd and capture an alternative audience, the National has created its very own YouTube channel to showcase trailers and vox pops. (Incidentally, I found out about this channel from a link on the National's Facebook page, which is worth checking out for deals.)
Well, that was the case before the National Theatre hit YouTube with a vengeance. In a blatant endeavor to break away from the stereotypical theatre crowd and capture an alternative audience, the National has created its very own YouTube channel to showcase trailers and vox pops. (Incidentally, I found out about this channel from a link on the National's Facebook page, which is worth checking out for deals.)
13.6.07
Tony
The 61st Tony Awards (which are going head-to-head with the juggernaut discussed above) has inspired all kinds of handicapping by the nation's theater critics. (For the list of nominees, click here.) The New York Times' Campbell Robertson guesses that "[t]he night will probably end with the stage swarmed like a Cecil B. DeMille set with the legions of 'Spring Awakening' producers; 'Grey Gardens' is likely to pick up two performance awards, for leading and featured actress in a musical; Frank Langella of 'Frost/Nixon' needs to have a speech ready." Meanwhile, a blogger on the Huffington Post bemoans the awards broadcast's tedium of late: "The people producing the Tony Awards show have forgotten that it's the Tony Awards SHOW. And show business is not only a business, it's also a show. And the Tony Awards have ceased to be this."—
12.6.07
Hitchens v. Hitchens
Christopher – whose lifestyle with second wife Carol Blue was recently described in a recent profile in The New Yorker as that which "a spirited thirteen-year-old boy might hope adulthood to be"– has, until recently at least, been considered in bien-pensant circles as the more fashionable Hitchens brother.
Peter is dubbed "Bonkers" in opinion columns by his colleagues in the British press. This tactic, he says, is the old Soviet trick of dismissing outsiders as madmen. He has long been viewed as a right-wing monster, the kind you'd never have round the house, for fear of him saying something offensive. Like many assumptions about the Hitchens brothers, it is false. He is a loner, but the fact that Peter may actually be likeable is one of Fleet Street's best kept secrets.
Similarly, myths surround Christopher, chief among them that he's a hopeless drunk. While he has admitted that he regularly drinks enough to "stun or kill a mule", he defends his professionalism fiercely, pointing out that he has "never missed a deadline".
In so many ways, politically, literally, religiously, the Hitchens brothers are miles apart. Occasionally they come together and clash in public. But whichever way the ever-changing, unpredictable new world order spins, it's a safe bet that they at least, will remain permanently in opposition.
Peter is dubbed "Bonkers" in opinion columns by his colleagues in the British press. This tactic, he says, is the old Soviet trick of dismissing outsiders as madmen. He has long been viewed as a right-wing monster, the kind you'd never have round the house, for fear of him saying something offensive. Like many assumptions about the Hitchens brothers, it is false. He is a loner, but the fact that Peter may actually be likeable is one of Fleet Street's best kept secrets.
Similarly, myths surround Christopher, chief among them that he's a hopeless drunk. While he has admitted that he regularly drinks enough to "stun or kill a mule", he defends his professionalism fiercely, pointing out that he has "never missed a deadline".
In so many ways, politically, literally, religiously, the Hitchens brothers are miles apart. Occasionally they come together and clash in public. But whichever way the ever-changing, unpredictable new world order spins, it's a safe bet that they at least, will remain permanently in opposition.
11.6.07
Theatre in London
Broadway, in case you're wondering, is second to none when it comes to buzz, and to audiences that, as Ian McKellen remarked when he won his Best Actor Tony for Amadeus in 1981, 'lift you so high that sometimes you feel you want to fly for them'. But you can't compare a city with (in a good year) 40 openings a season - and perhaps as many again in the major off-Broadway venues - to a capital like London that can open well over 250 shows in a year, from big musicals to agitprop, site-specific experiments to star vehicles, and reclamations of unfamiliar plays to soul-stirring reappraisals of time-honoured ones. And always, always, there are the actors to populate them, more often than not, extraordinarily well.
Why does Britain do theatre so successfully? One is likely to come across as many answers to that question as there are registered members of Equity: between 20,000-25,000, of whom one-third are generally thought to be working at any given time. But for every cod-psychological theory about why a country in thrall to irony, argument and dressing up should find a natural artistic outlet in the theatre, comes a less sophisticated explanation pertaining, say, to the weather - a culture with so unpredictable a climate is bound to thrive on what can take place indoors. Everyone keen on the theatre here has their own treasured shortlist of great performances over time. Mine include Derek Jacobi's Cyrano and Lindsay Duncan's Amanda in Private Lives, Racing Demon's Oliver Ford Davies and the Rufus Sewell/Emma Fielding double act in Arcadia
Why does Britain do theatre so successfully? One is likely to come across as many answers to that question as there are registered members of Equity: between 20,000-25,000, of whom one-third are generally thought to be working at any given time. But for every cod-psychological theory about why a country in thrall to irony, argument and dressing up should find a natural artistic outlet in the theatre, comes a less sophisticated explanation pertaining, say, to the weather - a culture with so unpredictable a climate is bound to thrive on what can take place indoors. Everyone keen on the theatre here has their own treasured shortlist of great performances over time. Mine include Derek Jacobi's Cyrano and Lindsay Duncan's Amanda in Private Lives, Racing Demon's Oliver Ford Davies and the Rufus Sewell/Emma Fielding double act in Arcadia
Richard Rorty R.I.P.
Although his early work such as "The Linguistic Turn" (1967) was influenced by analytic philosophy, Rorty went on to embrace pragmatism in the tradition of John Dewey and William James. Those on the right charged him with moral relativism, while meanwhile he defended a pragmatic American liberalism from its European poststructuralist critics.
Among his most widely known books were "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" (1979 and "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" (1989).
In his later years, he predicted the rise of a "literary culture," whereby novels and poetry would supersede as a source for ethics philosophical and religious texts, which for him held no privileged, higher claim to truth.
"He was a courageous thinker who contributed greatly to our public culture and it is a tremendous loss," said a professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, Martha Nussbaum.
Among his most widely known books were "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" (1979 and "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" (1989).
In his later years, he predicted the rise of a "literary culture," whereby novels and poetry would supersede as a source for ethics philosophical and religious texts, which for him held no privileged, higher claim to truth.
"He was a courageous thinker who contributed greatly to our public culture and it is a tremendous loss," said a professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, Martha Nussbaum.
9.6.07
Happy Birthday!
For I am a jolly good fellow and I do wish myself a very happy 64th birthday, with many happy and healthy returns. And to you too, Johnny Depp and Aaron Sorkin.
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies." - Oscar Wilde
Albania Speaks Volumes on Bush
From today's NYTimes. Now this.....is downright tragic.
The highlight of President Bush’s European tour may well be his visit on Sunday to this tiny country, one of the few places left where he can bask in unabashed pro-American sentiment without a protester in sight.
Americans here are greeted with a refreshing adoration that feels as though it comes from another time.
“Albania is for sure the most pro-American country in Europe, maybe even in the world,” said Edi Rama, Tirana’s mayor and leader of the opposition Socialists. “Nowhere else can you find such respect and hospitality for the president of the United States. Even in Michigan, he wouldn’t be as welcome.”
Thousands of young Albanians have been named Bill or Hillary thanks to the Clinton administration’s role in rescuing ethnic Albanians from the Kosovo war. After the visit on Sunday, some people expect to see a rash of babies named George.
So eager is the country to accommodate Mr. Bush that Parliament unanimously approved a bill last month allowing “American forces to engage in any kind of operation, including the use of force, in order to provide security for the president.” One newspaper, reporting on the effusive mood, published a headline that read, “Please Occupy Us!”
There are, to be sure, signs that the rest of Europe is tilting a bit more in America’s direction, narrowing the gap between “old” and “new” Europe that opened with disagreements over the Iraq war.
France’s new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, wants to forget the acrimony that marked his predecessor’s relations with the United States, even appointing a pro-American foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who supported the United States’ invasion of Iraq.
Shortly after taking office, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that Germany did “not have as many values in common with Russia as it does with America.” She has since proposed a new trans-Atlantic economic partnership that would get rid of many non-tariff barriers to trade.
And Gordon Brown, who will succeed Tony Blair as Britain’s prime minister this month, has vacationed several times on Cape Cod and befriended a succession of Treasury officials. He is expected to maintain what Britons call the country’s “special relationship” with the United States, ahead of other American allies.
So “old Europe” has warmed toward the United States, although there has been no fundamental shift toward more American-friendly policies. But even in “new Europe,” as the post-Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe have been called, Albania is special.
Much of Eastern Europe has grown more critical of Mr. Bush, worried that the antimissile defense shield he is pushing will antagonize Russia and lead to another cold war. Many Eastern Europeans, Czechs and Poles among them, are also angry that the United States has maintained cumbersome visa requirements even though their countries are now members of the European Union.
But here in Albania, which has not wavered in its unblinking support for American policies since the end of the cold war, Mr. Bush can do no wrong. While much of the world berates Mr. Bush for warmongering, unilateralism, trampling civil liberties and even turning a blind eye to torture, Albania still loves him without restraint.
Mr. Bush will be the first sitting American president to visit the country, and his arrival could not come on a more auspicious day: the eighth anniversary of the start of Serbian troop withdrawals from Kosovo and ratification by the United Nations Security Council of the American-brokered peace accord that ended the fighting. Mr. Bush is pushing the Security Council to approve a plan that would lead to qualified Kosovo independence.
Albanians are pouring into the capital from across the region. Hotel rooms are as scarce as anti-American feelings.
Albanians’ support for the war in Iraq is nearly unanimous, and any perceived failings of American foreign policy are studiously ignored. A two-day effort to find anyone of prominence who might offer some criticism of the United States turned up just one name, and that person was out of the country.
Every school child in Albania can tell you that President Woodrow Wilson saved Albania from being split up among its neighbors after World War I, and nearly every adult repeats the story when asked why Albanians are so infatuated with the United States.
James A. Baker III was mobbed when he visited the country as secretary of state in 1991. There was even a move to hold a referendum declaring the country America’s 51st state around that time.
“The excitement among Albanians over this visit is immeasurable, beyond words,” said Albania’s new foreign minister, Lulzim Basha, during an interview in his office, decorated with an elegant portrait of Faik Konica, who became the first Albanian ambassador to the United States in 1926. “We truly believe that this is a historic moment that people will look back on decades later and talk about what it meant for the country.”
Mr. Bush’s visit is a reward for Albania’s unflinching performance as an unquestioning ally. The country was among the first American allies to support Washington’s refusal to submit to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. It was one of the first countries to send troops to Afghanistan and one of the first to join the forces in Iraq. It has soldiers in both places.
“They will continue to be deployed as long as the Americans are there,” Albania’s president, Alfred Moisiu, said proudly in an interview.
Most recently, the country has quietly taken several former detainees from the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, off the Bush administration’s hands when sending them to their home countries was out of the question. There are eight so far, and Mr. Moisiu said he is open to accepting more.
Mr. Rama, Tirana’s mayor, says he is offended when Albania’s pro-Americanism is cast as an expression of “provincial submission.”
“It’s not about being blind,” he said, wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with the Great Seal of the United States. “The U.S. is something that is really crucial for the destiny of the world.”
The pro-American feeling has strayed into government-commercial relations. The Albanian government has hired former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge as a consultant on a range of issues, including the implementation of a national identity card.
Many people questioned the procedures under which a joint venture led by Bechtel won Albania’s largest public spending project ever, a contract to build a highway linking Albania and Kosovo. President Moisiu said state prosecutors were now looking at the deal.
In preparation for Mr. Bush’s six-hour visit, Tirana has been draped in American flags and banners that proclaim, “Proud to be Partners.” A portrait of Mr. Bush hangs on the “Pyramid,” a cultural center in the middle of town that was built as a monument to Albania’s Communist strongman, Enver Hoxha. State television is repeatedly playing a slickly produced spot in which Prime Minister Sali Berisha welcomes Mr. Bush in English.
What Mr. Bush will get in return from the visit is the sight of cheering crowds in a predominantly Muslim nation. When asked by an Albanian reporter before leaving Washington what came to mind when he thought of Albania, Mr. Bush replied, “Muslim people who can live at peace.”
Albania is about 70 percent Muslim, with large Orthodox and Catholic populations. To underscore the country’s history of tolerance, President Moisiu will present Mr. Bush with the reproduction of an 18th-century Orthodox icon depicting the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus flanked by two mosques.
“President Bush is safer in Albania than in America,” said Ermin Gjinishti, a Muslim leader in Albania.
The highlight of President Bush’s European tour may well be his visit on Sunday to this tiny country, one of the few places left where he can bask in unabashed pro-American sentiment without a protester in sight.
Americans here are greeted with a refreshing adoration that feels as though it comes from another time.
“Albania is for sure the most pro-American country in Europe, maybe even in the world,” said Edi Rama, Tirana’s mayor and leader of the opposition Socialists. “Nowhere else can you find such respect and hospitality for the president of the United States. Even in Michigan, he wouldn’t be as welcome.”
Thousands of young Albanians have been named Bill or Hillary thanks to the Clinton administration’s role in rescuing ethnic Albanians from the Kosovo war. After the visit on Sunday, some people expect to see a rash of babies named George.
So eager is the country to accommodate Mr. Bush that Parliament unanimously approved a bill last month allowing “American forces to engage in any kind of operation, including the use of force, in order to provide security for the president.” One newspaper, reporting on the effusive mood, published a headline that read, “Please Occupy Us!”
There are, to be sure, signs that the rest of Europe is tilting a bit more in America’s direction, narrowing the gap between “old” and “new” Europe that opened with disagreements over the Iraq war.
France’s new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, wants to forget the acrimony that marked his predecessor’s relations with the United States, even appointing a pro-American foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who supported the United States’ invasion of Iraq.
Shortly after taking office, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that Germany did “not have as many values in common with Russia as it does with America.” She has since proposed a new trans-Atlantic economic partnership that would get rid of many non-tariff barriers to trade.
And Gordon Brown, who will succeed Tony Blair as Britain’s prime minister this month, has vacationed several times on Cape Cod and befriended a succession of Treasury officials. He is expected to maintain what Britons call the country’s “special relationship” with the United States, ahead of other American allies.
So “old Europe” has warmed toward the United States, although there has been no fundamental shift toward more American-friendly policies. But even in “new Europe,” as the post-Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe have been called, Albania is special.
Much of Eastern Europe has grown more critical of Mr. Bush, worried that the antimissile defense shield he is pushing will antagonize Russia and lead to another cold war. Many Eastern Europeans, Czechs and Poles among them, are also angry that the United States has maintained cumbersome visa requirements even though their countries are now members of the European Union.
But here in Albania, which has not wavered in its unblinking support for American policies since the end of the cold war, Mr. Bush can do no wrong. While much of the world berates Mr. Bush for warmongering, unilateralism, trampling civil liberties and even turning a blind eye to torture, Albania still loves him without restraint.
Mr. Bush will be the first sitting American president to visit the country, and his arrival could not come on a more auspicious day: the eighth anniversary of the start of Serbian troop withdrawals from Kosovo and ratification by the United Nations Security Council of the American-brokered peace accord that ended the fighting. Mr. Bush is pushing the Security Council to approve a plan that would lead to qualified Kosovo independence.
Albanians are pouring into the capital from across the region. Hotel rooms are as scarce as anti-American feelings.
Albanians’ support for the war in Iraq is nearly unanimous, and any perceived failings of American foreign policy are studiously ignored. A two-day effort to find anyone of prominence who might offer some criticism of the United States turned up just one name, and that person was out of the country.
Every school child in Albania can tell you that President Woodrow Wilson saved Albania from being split up among its neighbors after World War I, and nearly every adult repeats the story when asked why Albanians are so infatuated with the United States.
James A. Baker III was mobbed when he visited the country as secretary of state in 1991. There was even a move to hold a referendum declaring the country America’s 51st state around that time.
“The excitement among Albanians over this visit is immeasurable, beyond words,” said Albania’s new foreign minister, Lulzim Basha, during an interview in his office, decorated with an elegant portrait of Faik Konica, who became the first Albanian ambassador to the United States in 1926. “We truly believe that this is a historic moment that people will look back on decades later and talk about what it meant for the country.”
Mr. Bush’s visit is a reward for Albania’s unflinching performance as an unquestioning ally. The country was among the first American allies to support Washington’s refusal to submit to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. It was one of the first countries to send troops to Afghanistan and one of the first to join the forces in Iraq. It has soldiers in both places.
“They will continue to be deployed as long as the Americans are there,” Albania’s president, Alfred Moisiu, said proudly in an interview.
Most recently, the country has quietly taken several former detainees from the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, off the Bush administration’s hands when sending them to their home countries was out of the question. There are eight so far, and Mr. Moisiu said he is open to accepting more.
Mr. Rama, Tirana’s mayor, says he is offended when Albania’s pro-Americanism is cast as an expression of “provincial submission.”
“It’s not about being blind,” he said, wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with the Great Seal of the United States. “The U.S. is something that is really crucial for the destiny of the world.”
The pro-American feeling has strayed into government-commercial relations. The Albanian government has hired former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge as a consultant on a range of issues, including the implementation of a national identity card.
Many people questioned the procedures under which a joint venture led by Bechtel won Albania’s largest public spending project ever, a contract to build a highway linking Albania and Kosovo. President Moisiu said state prosecutors were now looking at the deal.
In preparation for Mr. Bush’s six-hour visit, Tirana has been draped in American flags and banners that proclaim, “Proud to be Partners.” A portrait of Mr. Bush hangs on the “Pyramid,” a cultural center in the middle of town that was built as a monument to Albania’s Communist strongman, Enver Hoxha. State television is repeatedly playing a slickly produced spot in which Prime Minister Sali Berisha welcomes Mr. Bush in English.
What Mr. Bush will get in return from the visit is the sight of cheering crowds in a predominantly Muslim nation. When asked by an Albanian reporter before leaving Washington what came to mind when he thought of Albania, Mr. Bush replied, “Muslim people who can live at peace.”
Albania is about 70 percent Muslim, with large Orthodox and Catholic populations. To underscore the country’s history of tolerance, President Moisiu will present Mr. Bush with the reproduction of an 18th-century Orthodox icon depicting the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus flanked by two mosques.
“President Bush is safer in Albania than in America,” said Ermin Gjinishti, a Muslim leader in Albania.
Anthony Soprano R.I.P.
The Sopranos" is built not just on moral ambiguity, but moral obscenity. It achieves this by graphically depicting the most brutal events, while suspending all judgment about them. This holds true for the good guys and bad guys alike. Actually, there are no good guys. FBI agents are icy zombies. Priests are corrupt and confused. Psychiatrists are backstabbing pedants, trotting out neat phrases like "sociopath" that illuminate nothing. Married men are only as faithful as their options. Married women are manipulative and self-serving. Human behavior of any kind, from adultery to blackmail to murder, has no transcendental meaning. If Tony Soprano can strangle somebody and then return to checking out a college campus, it doesn't mean he's a madman. It's what he does.
............and you know it is still the best. In re-runs, one catches so much that one missed the first time around.
Well, at least we still have The Wire.
............and you know it is still the best. In re-runs, one catches so much that one missed the first time around.
Well, at least we still have The Wire.
8.6.07
IX JUNE
Xerxes' birthday! French Open! Tonys! Belmont Stakes!
It just doesn't get any better!
A great weekend to all.
7.6.07
Thanks David Chase
With the possible exception of the Wire, no work on television matches the splendid, characterizations, acting, writing, directing, music and the thousands of wonderful throwaway details of the Sopranos. It is time to leave but Sunday night is bleak at the prospect.
Dick Cavett
I welcome any advice anyone has about a certain problem: How is a person supposed to live without “The Sopranos”?
Last Sunday’s penultimate episode gave me a vivid nightmare. A woman I know was unable to sleep at all after watching it. God knows what watching the ultimate one will do this weekend, on what we the devoted think of as Black Sunday.
The great David Chase, who created it all, decided to pull the plug on his stately craft while her sails are still billowing, an action as rare in the world of television as a sincere compliment. Or a program as good as “The Sopranos.”
I’m glad it’s only a rumor that he has had to increase security for himself against armed fans unable to accept the reality of the long-dreaded terminus. How can we fan(atic)s of the show express our boundless gratitude to Mr. Chase? Maybe we could all sign one huge “thank you” to him — a Hallmark card the size of New Jersey. Were this Japan, Chase-san would have long since been declared a Living National Treasure.
Accusations of name-dropping are bred of envy, and I felt it strongly toward anyone who met or claimed to have met actors from the show — until, that is, I met actors from the show. I came bounding home some years ago to announce to my wife (the late Carrie Nye, an actress) that we could go to a party where there would be members of the cast. She declined: “They’re such fine actors, but I don’t want to know that they’re actors. I want them to remain those people.”
Please resist envy, then, when I say that I have gotten to know and hang out with the sinfully talented Michael Imperioli (“Christopher,” Tony’s problem nephew, as well as the author of numerous episodes). Having dinner with him (and his wife) had no effect whatever of the kind my wife refused to risk. There he was, a day later, on the show: Christopher again. Moving, scary and certainly no one I had ever met. The magic of acting.
This year, Michael got me onto the set and I was in hog heaven. Getting to rub shoulders with cast members and lucky souls like wardrobe people and best boys who got to be there every day, and magic names I knew from the screen credits like Brad Grey — all of it a most heady experience. I stayed long and late and left feeling like a kid coming back from the circus, with nothing to look forward to but home and school.
I don’t know how to relate, nor what to say, to people who gave the show a pass because they “didn’t want to see another crime show.” I suppose it’s possible to lead a full life without ever having known what is meant by “Bada Bing” or “Big Pussy” or “Uncle Junior” or “Dr. Melfi,” but I’m not sure. I doubt that such willfully self-deprived souls would welcome my sympathy. But, my God, what they missed. If I were artistic commissar it would have been required viewing.
(I feel much sorrier for those who sampled it and found nothing to admire. They are beyond hope.)
I gave DVDs of the show’s first season to a very intelligent, well-educated, couple I know. They are high-toned people. They scorn television. To shut me up, they agreed to watch at least part of the first show late one afternoon. They tolerated, with a snicker, my suggestion that as in the potato chip commercial, they couldn’t watch just one episode. They later confessed that they barely moved as both dinner and bedtime came and went before they could make themselves shut it off.
A special Emmy should be awarded for the casting. There was not a dud in the carload. And no one was ever just a type. They were whole, intricately complex people and we got to peer into their lives and personalities to a degree I’ve never seen achieved before.
I don’t know enough about camera technique, cutting and editing skills to be able to explain why the violence was, strange to say, better violence than you get elsewhere. It was cruelly and sometimes repellently real. You got a solid, visceral punch. Where else would a man, having stomped and kicked the head of his victim, look down later during his therapy session and remove a bloody tooth with some clinging gum tissue from his cuff? You wouldn’t say it was funny, but it was handled in such a way that it was not entirely unfunny.
Maybe the show’s trickiest accomplishment was the way it made characters clearly deserving of hate be so sympathetic. You could not only find yourself liking an evil character, but having fun feeling guilty about it. How could you not feel a tug at your heart when a tough and disreputable gangster, Paulie Walnuts (Tony Sirico), confesses to having sought professional help? (“Right now we’re working on my coping skills.”)
I found it rewarding to watch each episode a second time. Subtleties of both dialogue and acting were often missed on a single viewing.
I’m afraid, by the way, that I have no patience with pressure groups of the kind that have arisen from time to time, wanting “The Sopranos” killed because it gave a bad name to Italian-Americans; implying, they felt, that all folks from Italy are gangsters. It doesn’t, of course, and couldn’t. But it reminds me of when the same problem came up with the highly popular “The Untouchables.” Why, it was demanded, must all the crooks have Italian names? Since the show dealt with real figures, it would have been a bit silly to change Al Capone’s name to, say, Al Hollinshed. (A great comedy writer, the late Jack Douglas, offered a solution. When asked about this, he said, “Why not get the gangsters to change their names?”)
The fact that James Gandolfini wasn’t necessarily the first or only choice for the role of Tony is scary. And Edie Falco has confessed that she almost didn’t get the part of Carmela; not because she wasn’t good enough but because she almost didn’t go to the casting appointment: “I’d been four other places that day and I was tired and it sounded like a show about singers and….” As she admits, what she got was, simply, “the part of a lifetime.”
Gandolfini and Falco. These two gifted actors created a classic dramatic couple. I see them as no less than the Lunt and Fontanne of their particular artistic world. (I can hear the uninitiated saying, “Get hold of yourself, Cavett.” Let ‘em.)
Well, it’s nearly closing time in the gardens of New Jersey. The “Sopranos” Web site is full of speculation by fans. Will Tony die in the final episode? (If the show ends but he doesn’t, where does that leave him? And us?) Will David Chase ever reveal the formula for such a smashing success? And could it be as simple as: perfect writing, casting, acting, directing, costuming, lighting and editing? And make-up?
Having to make do without any new episodes of what, in the fullness of time, will be judged to be the Mt. Everest of television achievement is a chilling prospect.
If only there were a rehab place to deal with us, the addicted ones. Or, maybe, some kind of “Sopranos” Nicorettes?
Define by Affluence
Half a century before the postwar era began, the connection between one kind of abundance and national character was postulated by Frederick Jackson Turner , who argued that America’s democratic culture was shaped by the fact of the frontier, which promised land for all comers. In 1954 , the historian David M. Potter , in “People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character,” explored, among other subjects, how the ubiquity of advertising (also a preoccupation of John Kenneth Galbraith’s “Affluent Society,” in 1958 ) conditions Americans’ consciousness. In 1976 , the sociologist Daniel Bell warned about what he called “the cultural contradictions of capitalism,” by which he meant the tendency (or so he thought) of the abundance that capitalism produces to subvert the attitudes and aptitudes necessary for capitalism’s success — thriftiness, industriousness, the ability and willingness to defer gratifications.
It took confidence for Brink Lindsey, of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, to venture onto this well-plowed ground with “The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture.” This constantly stimulating book vindicates that confidence. His thesis, stated ironically with Karl Marx’s categories, is that in the second half of the 20th century, America left the “realm of necessity” and entered the “realm of freedom.” Americans “live on the far side of a great fault line” separating them from all prior human experience.Half a century before the postwar era began, the connection between one kind of abundance and national character was postulated by Frederick Jackson Turner , who argued that America’s democratic culture was shaped by the fact of the frontier, which promised land for all comers. In 1954 , the historian David M. Potter , in “People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character,” explored, among other subjects, how the ubiquity of advertising (also a preoccupation of John Kenneth Galbraith’s “Affluent Society,” in 1958 ) conditions Americans’ consciousness. In 1976 , the sociologist Daniel Bell warned about what he called “the cultural contradictions of capitalism,” by which he meant the tendency (or so he thought) of the abundance that capitalism produces to subvert the attitudes and aptitudes necessary for capitalism’s success — thriftiness, industriousness, the ability and willingness to defer gratifications.
It took confidence for Brink Lindsey, of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, to venture onto this well-plowed ground with “The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture.” This constantly stimulating book vindicates that confidence. His thesis, stated ironically with Karl Marx’s categories, is that in the second half of the 20th century, America left the “realm of necessity” and entered the “realm of freedom.” Americans “live on the far side of a great fault line” separating them from all prior human experience.Half a century before the postwar era began, the connection between one kind of abundance and national character was postulated by Frederick Jackson Turner , who argued that America’s democratic culture was shaped by the fact of the frontier, which promised land for all comers. In 1954 , the historian David M. Potter , in “People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character,” explored, among other subjects, how the ubiquity of advertising (also a preoccupation of John Kenneth Galbraith’s “Affluent Society,” in 1958 ) conditions Americans’ consciousness. In 1976 , the sociologist Daniel Bell warned about what he called “the cultural contradictions of capitalism,” by which he meant the tendency (or so he thought) of the abundance that capitalism produces to subvert the attitudes and aptitudes necessary for capitalism’s success — thriftiness, industriousness, the ability and willingness to defer gratifications.
6.6.07
AUDEN
Auden assumed a significant public presence in the United States: in the war years and after he wrote for a remarkable range of periodicals, including The New York Times, The New Republic, Commonweal, and The Nation. But American intellectuals were nearly as befuddled by Auden's religion as his British ex-admirers. Randall Jarrell, the country's most brilliant and influential critic of poetry and a fine poet himself, treated the Christian Auden with something approaching contempt, and convinced more than a few others to do the same. Auden was never forgotten, and occasionally his brilliance was recognized—even at times by Jarrell, who was so awestruck by a poem called "Under Sirius" that he could only respond, "Well, back to my greeting cards"—but his reputation underwent a long, slow decline which lasted through the rest of his life.
Where does that reputation stand now? It's hard to say. Probably the most common view is that Auden was a major poet in his twenties but, after his move to America and subsequent religious conversion, drifted off the path. Many poets and critics read Auden's story as one of a prodigious talent mostly frittered away. The greatness of those early poems is rarely disputed; the question is whether that one decade of greatness is sufficient to make a major career.
Where does that reputation stand now? It's hard to say. Probably the most common view is that Auden was a major poet in his twenties but, after his move to America and subsequent religious conversion, drifted off the path. Many poets and critics read Auden's story as one of a prodigious talent mostly frittered away. The greatness of those early poems is rarely disputed; the question is whether that one decade of greatness is sufficient to make a major career.
5.6.07
Huxley at 75
The critical reception of Brave New World was largely chilly. Most reviewers were disgruntled or disgusted with what they saw as unjustified alarmism. H. G. Wells was downright offended. “A writer of the standing of Aldous Huxley has no right to betray the future as he did in that book,” Wells said. In fact, Wells felt the bite of this betrayal personally—his own writings, especially his 1923 novel Men Like Gods, had been Huxley’s inspiration. Huxley told a friend in 1931 that he was “writing a novel about the future—on the horror of the Wellsian Utopia and a revolt against it.”
Wells is often considered the father of science fiction. His long train of novels predicted, among other things, tanks, aerial warfare, and the atomic bomb; as J. B. S. Haldane said, “the very mention of the future suggests him.” Although his earlier and most memorable work explores the darker possibilities of scientific advancement (in a 1940 preface to his 1908 novel The War in the Air, Wells said he wanted his epigraph to read “I told you so. You damned fools.”), in Huxley’s heyday Wells was writing utopias teeming with technogadgetry and what George Orwell called “enlightened sunbathers.” Rejecting Rousseau’s noble savage and the romantic utopias of Coleridge and Wordsworth, he saw the Industrial Revolution and modern science as enduring and largely positive developments in man’s eternal conflict with pitiless nature, including his own. Men Like Gods is the story of a group of contemporary Englishmen accidentally transported into an alternate dimension of peaceful, passionless Utopians who are uncritically committed to scientific rationalism and the self-negating collectivist state. As the title suggests, this is Wells’s idea of perfectible Man, achieved through communitarian ideals, technological enhancement, and an aggressive program of eugenics. The Utopians share their wisdom with the time-travelers, explaining how they put “the primordial fierce combativeness of the ancestral man-ape” behind them. Just as man’s intrinsic aggression had brought civilization to the brink of collapse, a great prophet saw the light. In “a dawn of new ideas,” an elite group of researchers reordered society until, finally annihilating the sources of strife, they achieved a cooperative state with “no parliament, no politics, no private wealth, no business competition, no police nor prisons, no lunatics, no defectives nor cripples,” whose motto is “Our education is our government.”
Huxley thought this vision preposterous. “Get rid of priests and kings, make Aeschylus and the differential calculus available to all, and the world will become a paradise,” he scoffed. Men Like Gods “annoyed me to the point of planning a parody, but when I started writing I found the idea of a negative Utopia so interesting that I forgot about Wells and launched into Brave New World.”
Prior to Huxley’s book, however, another great dystopia had cast a scorching glare on totalitarian rationalism. Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We depicts a technocratic OneState whose citizens are “Numbers” governed with absolute authority in a system where political and quantitative laws are fused. Zamyatin, the Russian editor of H. G. Wells’s novels, had at first supported the Bolshevik Revolution but came under fire throughout the 1920s for his vocal criticism of the Soviet regime. His works were banned and he was arrested several times, and finally moved permanently to Paris in 1931. First released in English in 1924, We was not officially published in Russian until 1988 under glasnost. Some critics suggested Huxley had borrowed from or been heavily influenced by We. George Orwell—himself not especially impressed with Brave New World, which he called a “brilliant caricature of the present” that “probably casts no light on the future”—even accused Huxley of plagiarism (a particularly strange charge since Orwell’s own 1984 was much more directly influenced by We). Curious about it himself, Zamyatin learned through a mutual friend that Huxley had not read We before he published Brave New World, “which proves,” he said, that “these ideas are in the air we breathe.”
But most critics shared Wells’s, not Zamyatin’s, reaction to the book. “As prophecy it is merely fantastic,” dismissed essayist Gerald Bullett. Wells’s friend and fellow writer Wyndham Lewis called it “an unforgivable offense to Progress.” Marxist literary critic Granville Hicks began his review by asking, “With war in Asia, bankruptcy in Europe and starvation everywhere, what do you suppose Aldous Huxley is now worrying about?” and ended it with several personal attacks.
Economist Henry Hazlitt sarcastically remarked that “a little suffering, a little irrationality, a little division and chaos, are perhaps necessary ingredients of an ideal state, but there has probably never been a time when the world has not had an oversupply of them.” J. B. S. Haldane’s then-wife Charlotte penned a snide review for Nature, complaining that Huxley’s great-uncle Matthew Arnold, the conservative literary critic, had taken demonic possession of him, and that in any case, “biology is itself too surprising to be really amusing material for fiction.” Even G. K. Chesterton thought Huxley’s book sadly laughable, observing that, “However grimly he may enjoy the present, he already definitely hates the future. And I only differ from him in not believing that there is any such future to hate.”
Wells is often considered the father of science fiction. His long train of novels predicted, among other things, tanks, aerial warfare, and the atomic bomb; as J. B. S. Haldane said, “the very mention of the future suggests him.” Although his earlier and most memorable work explores the darker possibilities of scientific advancement (in a 1940 preface to his 1908 novel The War in the Air, Wells said he wanted his epigraph to read “I told you so. You damned fools.”), in Huxley’s heyday Wells was writing utopias teeming with technogadgetry and what George Orwell called “enlightened sunbathers.” Rejecting Rousseau’s noble savage and the romantic utopias of Coleridge and Wordsworth, he saw the Industrial Revolution and modern science as enduring and largely positive developments in man’s eternal conflict with pitiless nature, including his own. Men Like Gods is the story of a group of contemporary Englishmen accidentally transported into an alternate dimension of peaceful, passionless Utopians who are uncritically committed to scientific rationalism and the self-negating collectivist state. As the title suggests, this is Wells’s idea of perfectible Man, achieved through communitarian ideals, technological enhancement, and an aggressive program of eugenics. The Utopians share their wisdom with the time-travelers, explaining how they put “the primordial fierce combativeness of the ancestral man-ape” behind them. Just as man’s intrinsic aggression had brought civilization to the brink of collapse, a great prophet saw the light. In “a dawn of new ideas,” an elite group of researchers reordered society until, finally annihilating the sources of strife, they achieved a cooperative state with “no parliament, no politics, no private wealth, no business competition, no police nor prisons, no lunatics, no defectives nor cripples,” whose motto is “Our education is our government.”
Huxley thought this vision preposterous. “Get rid of priests and kings, make Aeschylus and the differential calculus available to all, and the world will become a paradise,” he scoffed. Men Like Gods “annoyed me to the point of planning a parody, but when I started writing I found the idea of a negative Utopia so interesting that I forgot about Wells and launched into Brave New World.”
Prior to Huxley’s book, however, another great dystopia had cast a scorching glare on totalitarian rationalism. Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We depicts a technocratic OneState whose citizens are “Numbers” governed with absolute authority in a system where political and quantitative laws are fused. Zamyatin, the Russian editor of H. G. Wells’s novels, had at first supported the Bolshevik Revolution but came under fire throughout the 1920s for his vocal criticism of the Soviet regime. His works were banned and he was arrested several times, and finally moved permanently to Paris in 1931. First released in English in 1924, We was not officially published in Russian until 1988 under glasnost. Some critics suggested Huxley had borrowed from or been heavily influenced by We. George Orwell—himself not especially impressed with Brave New World, which he called a “brilliant caricature of the present” that “probably casts no light on the future”—even accused Huxley of plagiarism (a particularly strange charge since Orwell’s own 1984 was much more directly influenced by We). Curious about it himself, Zamyatin learned through a mutual friend that Huxley had not read We before he published Brave New World, “which proves,” he said, that “these ideas are in the air we breathe.”
But most critics shared Wells’s, not Zamyatin’s, reaction to the book. “As prophecy it is merely fantastic,” dismissed essayist Gerald Bullett. Wells’s friend and fellow writer Wyndham Lewis called it “an unforgivable offense to Progress.” Marxist literary critic Granville Hicks began his review by asking, “With war in Asia, bankruptcy in Europe and starvation everywhere, what do you suppose Aldous Huxley is now worrying about?” and ended it with several personal attacks.
Economist Henry Hazlitt sarcastically remarked that “a little suffering, a little irrationality, a little division and chaos, are perhaps necessary ingredients of an ideal state, but there has probably never been a time when the world has not had an oversupply of them.” J. B. S. Haldane’s then-wife Charlotte penned a snide review for Nature, complaining that Huxley’s great-uncle Matthew Arnold, the conservative literary critic, had taken demonic possession of him, and that in any case, “biology is itself too surprising to be really amusing material for fiction.” Even G. K. Chesterton thought Huxley’s book sadly laughable, observing that, “However grimly he may enjoy the present, he already definitely hates the future. And I only differ from him in not believing that there is any such future to hate.”
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