Yes, it's Advent. What a lovely preparation!
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30.11.07
Modernism
Artistic creation, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is a “form of possession or madness” that “seizes a tender, virgin soul and stimulates it to rapt expression.” Artists have always struggled to persuade the world that the madness that drives them to create is genuinely a gift of the Muses, and not merely a trick of vanity. Their task has only become more arduous as prosperity increases and works of art proliferate.
The history of artistic modernism is in part the history of the psychological plight of the artist in a prosperous world. In his new book Modernism, historian Peter Gay traces the evolution of the modernist psyche from Baudelaire to Frank Gehry. At the core of modernism, Gay concludes, is the “lure of heresy” that beguiled artists as they confronted the “conventional sensibilities” of the thriving middle classes. “It is striking,” Gay writes, “how little changed across the decades in the modernists’ sheer hatred of the commonplace bourgeoisie.” Gay makes a case that the modernist rebellion against convention enlarged the boundaries of creative freedom. He is less persuasive in his analysis of the psychological calculus that underlay the revolt.
In the nineteenth century, an unexampled prosperity began to lift the world out of its Malthusian doldrums. The new affluence threatened art by creating a surplus of artists. Competition grew more intense, and it became ever more difficult for an artist to stand out in the crowd. Some artists—now mostly forgotten—earned their bread by pandering to middle-class tastes. The shrewder ones perceived that as soon as art ceases to be the exclusive province of an elect few, it loses the mysterious qualities that distinguish it from mere technical craftsmanship.
For centuries, artists, conscious of their elect status, shunned the herd. “I hate the vulgar rabble,” Horace sang. The difficulty, for the modern artist, was that the canons of formal beauty with which Horace and Virgil kept the mob at bay were fast becoming commonplace in the literate nineteenth century. The artist, cherishing his esoteric secrets, sacrificing to the Muses to please a select clientele, was understandably distressed to discover that every shopgirl whom he met could burn with the hard, gemlike flame quite as well as he. The vulgar now aspired to culture: think of Leonard Bast in Howard’s End, reverently studying The Stones of Venice. A monopoly was broken; daylight was shed on magic.
Thus was born a new aesthetic, one that enabled the artist to revive the mysteriousness of art and shut out the prosaic masses. The Greeks taught that art springs from two sources. The artist has an Apollonian vocation: he is a maker of order. But he acknowledges, too, the claims of Dionysus, for without an insight into the secret depths of life he is powerless to create. For centuries artists tried, with varying degrees of success, to please both masters. But when the philistine classes began to “come and go, talking of Michelangelo,” the modernist rebelled. He heretically deposed Apollo and replaced his harmonies with a mysticism of disorder, an aesthetic of Dionysian misrule sure to baffle the wood-hewing peasants who were just then learning to fondle pretty things. Leonard Bast might get on with Ruskin; he’d have a harder time with Finnegan’s Wake.
One sees an early rejection of Apollonian clarity in Henry James, who, after his play, Guy Domville, was booed off the London stage, turned his back on the demos, and began composing his brilliantly obscure, quasi-modernist masterpieces. His novel The Ambassadors has many merits, but only a leisured aesthete or a salaried professor will have the time or the patience to ferret them out, given the book’s prolix obscurities. For decades the publisher reprinted it with the chapters out of order; no one noticed.
T. S. Eliot, one of Gay’s archetypal modernists, was attracted to older forms of order. As he wrote in For Lancelot Andrewes, he wanted to articulate a point of view that “may be defined as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.” But a passion for order would not suffice to make his reputation as a modern poet. He had to cultivate a wrecking instinct—a passion for “Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria”—and show a talent for demolition.
A poet, in Greek, is a “maker,” a contriver of order. In The Waste Land, however, Eliot is simultaneously both a maker and an un-maker, subverting older patterns of order by ripping apart the poems of others and stitching them back together again, out of order:
Untwisting all the chains that tieThe hidden soul of harmony . . .
Eliot reveled in Dionysian disorder; he succeeded, in The Waste Land, in composing verse quite incomprehensible to the democratic rabble who took their instruction from what he sourly called the “common type of popular literary lecture.” Yet he continued to profess himself a lover of Apollonian order, a disciple of Dante, a proselyte ravished by the originally Hellenic, subsequently Christianized idea of a divine force that harmoniously “moves the sun and the other stars.”
So, too, Virginia Woolf. She adored the traditional music of the English sentence, yet in her prose she undermined the organizing principles of English fiction and presided with a maenadic glee at the auto-da-fé of the English novel. She tapped the rock with her thyrsus, and the fatal fissure yawned. Her literary assaults played a part in the overthrow of the conventional structure of the novel, those rhythms of plot and story line that impose order on a chaos of words. In the aesthetic world that modernists like Woolf helped create, highbrow writers compose unreadable, plotless novels, which go unread save by the salaried literary caste and suburban book clubs, while middle- and lowbrows compose vulgar, cliff-hanging stories about the sexual travails of serial killers. The gulf between the two literary terrains has steadily widened and now seems all but unbridgeable.
Modernism’s code of destruction succeeded in endowing art with a new, esoteric mysteriousness. Its outré stunts allowed artists to stand out in a crowded age. The early modernists, in their destructive frenzies, found their way to new and useful forms, which, in their richness and strangeness, possess something of the occult magic that led Plato to associate art with divine madness. But the aesthetic output of the second and third generation of temple-topplers has, as Gay himself concedes, been much more meager.
Gay blames the inability of modernism to repeat its early successes on the “democratization of culture” and on vulgar middle-class tastes. But he overlooks another, no less potent reason for modernism’s slide into aesthetic impotence. Destruction has its place in art: when forms grow tired, they must be replaced. But culture is a constructive enterprise; an Apollonian instinct for harmonious form must balance the Dionysian impulse to dissolution and formlessness. Just as the neoclassical art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries died in the trite Apollonianism of nineteenth-century academic painting, so the heretical energies of the modernists have expired in the no less trite Dionysian art of the present age. Subversion has become boring. Picasso’s daring eroticism has its interest; Andy Warhol’s Blow Job is fully as insipid as a painting by Alexandre Cabanel.
The French critic Sainte-Beuve defined Baudelaire’s pioneering modernism as the artist’s effort to create, “at the extreme borders of the known regions of Romanticism, a strange pavilion of his own . . . where narcotics are indulged in for the purpose of writing of them afterwards, and where a thousand poisonous drugs are drunk in the finest porcelain cups.” Goethe, who called the Romantic “sick,” had a premonition of the aesthetic catastrophe to which this super-Romantic assault on harmonious order would lead. In the second part of Faust, his Mephistopheles cringes when confronted with the Dionysian bestiality of the Walpurgis Night. Eros, Goethe implied, had given way to wantonness; he made Satan himself sigh for a little decency.
The modernist mantras are today as dated as they are dull. Yet the modernist régime itself is, paradoxically, more powerful than ever, its orthodoxies as firmly entrenched in today’s aesthetic world as the academic school’s were in the nineteenth century. Gay’s book will only reinforce the dogma that holds that any attempt to revive Apollonian order is a sign of reactionary philistinism: good taste today recognizes only the Dionysian. Even a figure with as many resources at his disposal as Prince Charles has been unable to get very far in his attempt to reintroduce, in the world of architecture, a poetics of symmetry, proportion, and harmony. But the prince is on to something: the great artist of the future will be one who finds a way to make Apollo interesting again.
“We live in an age of musical comedies,” Gay writes in his concluding threnody for modernism. He’s right, but he fails to see that the modernists are as much at fault for this state of affairs as those who pander to middle-class tastes. The modernists, too, are guilty of treason against the Muses. They, too, have sinned against art.
The history of artistic modernism is in part the history of the psychological plight of the artist in a prosperous world. In his new book Modernism, historian Peter Gay traces the evolution of the modernist psyche from Baudelaire to Frank Gehry. At the core of modernism, Gay concludes, is the “lure of heresy” that beguiled artists as they confronted the “conventional sensibilities” of the thriving middle classes. “It is striking,” Gay writes, “how little changed across the decades in the modernists’ sheer hatred of the commonplace bourgeoisie.” Gay makes a case that the modernist rebellion against convention enlarged the boundaries of creative freedom. He is less persuasive in his analysis of the psychological calculus that underlay the revolt.
In the nineteenth century, an unexampled prosperity began to lift the world out of its Malthusian doldrums. The new affluence threatened art by creating a surplus of artists. Competition grew more intense, and it became ever more difficult for an artist to stand out in the crowd. Some artists—now mostly forgotten—earned their bread by pandering to middle-class tastes. The shrewder ones perceived that as soon as art ceases to be the exclusive province of an elect few, it loses the mysterious qualities that distinguish it from mere technical craftsmanship.
For centuries, artists, conscious of their elect status, shunned the herd. “I hate the vulgar rabble,” Horace sang. The difficulty, for the modern artist, was that the canons of formal beauty with which Horace and Virgil kept the mob at bay were fast becoming commonplace in the literate nineteenth century. The artist, cherishing his esoteric secrets, sacrificing to the Muses to please a select clientele, was understandably distressed to discover that every shopgirl whom he met could burn with the hard, gemlike flame quite as well as he. The vulgar now aspired to culture: think of Leonard Bast in Howard’s End, reverently studying The Stones of Venice. A monopoly was broken; daylight was shed on magic.
Thus was born a new aesthetic, one that enabled the artist to revive the mysteriousness of art and shut out the prosaic masses. The Greeks taught that art springs from two sources. The artist has an Apollonian vocation: he is a maker of order. But he acknowledges, too, the claims of Dionysus, for without an insight into the secret depths of life he is powerless to create. For centuries artists tried, with varying degrees of success, to please both masters. But when the philistine classes began to “come and go, talking of Michelangelo,” the modernist rebelled. He heretically deposed Apollo and replaced his harmonies with a mysticism of disorder, an aesthetic of Dionysian misrule sure to baffle the wood-hewing peasants who were just then learning to fondle pretty things. Leonard Bast might get on with Ruskin; he’d have a harder time with Finnegan’s Wake.
One sees an early rejection of Apollonian clarity in Henry James, who, after his play, Guy Domville, was booed off the London stage, turned his back on the demos, and began composing his brilliantly obscure, quasi-modernist masterpieces. His novel The Ambassadors has many merits, but only a leisured aesthete or a salaried professor will have the time or the patience to ferret them out, given the book’s prolix obscurities. For decades the publisher reprinted it with the chapters out of order; no one noticed.
T. S. Eliot, one of Gay’s archetypal modernists, was attracted to older forms of order. As he wrote in For Lancelot Andrewes, he wanted to articulate a point of view that “may be defined as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.” But a passion for order would not suffice to make his reputation as a modern poet. He had to cultivate a wrecking instinct—a passion for “Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria”—and show a talent for demolition.
A poet, in Greek, is a “maker,” a contriver of order. In The Waste Land, however, Eliot is simultaneously both a maker and an un-maker, subverting older patterns of order by ripping apart the poems of others and stitching them back together again, out of order:
Untwisting all the chains that tieThe hidden soul of harmony . . .
Eliot reveled in Dionysian disorder; he succeeded, in The Waste Land, in composing verse quite incomprehensible to the democratic rabble who took their instruction from what he sourly called the “common type of popular literary lecture.” Yet he continued to profess himself a lover of Apollonian order, a disciple of Dante, a proselyte ravished by the originally Hellenic, subsequently Christianized idea of a divine force that harmoniously “moves the sun and the other stars.”
So, too, Virginia Woolf. She adored the traditional music of the English sentence, yet in her prose she undermined the organizing principles of English fiction and presided with a maenadic glee at the auto-da-fé of the English novel. She tapped the rock with her thyrsus, and the fatal fissure yawned. Her literary assaults played a part in the overthrow of the conventional structure of the novel, those rhythms of plot and story line that impose order on a chaos of words. In the aesthetic world that modernists like Woolf helped create, highbrow writers compose unreadable, plotless novels, which go unread save by the salaried literary caste and suburban book clubs, while middle- and lowbrows compose vulgar, cliff-hanging stories about the sexual travails of serial killers. The gulf between the two literary terrains has steadily widened and now seems all but unbridgeable.
Modernism’s code of destruction succeeded in endowing art with a new, esoteric mysteriousness. Its outré stunts allowed artists to stand out in a crowded age. The early modernists, in their destructive frenzies, found their way to new and useful forms, which, in their richness and strangeness, possess something of the occult magic that led Plato to associate art with divine madness. But the aesthetic output of the second and third generation of temple-topplers has, as Gay himself concedes, been much more meager.
Gay blames the inability of modernism to repeat its early successes on the “democratization of culture” and on vulgar middle-class tastes. But he overlooks another, no less potent reason for modernism’s slide into aesthetic impotence. Destruction has its place in art: when forms grow tired, they must be replaced. But culture is a constructive enterprise; an Apollonian instinct for harmonious form must balance the Dionysian impulse to dissolution and formlessness. Just as the neoclassical art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries died in the trite Apollonianism of nineteenth-century academic painting, so the heretical energies of the modernists have expired in the no less trite Dionysian art of the present age. Subversion has become boring. Picasso’s daring eroticism has its interest; Andy Warhol’s Blow Job is fully as insipid as a painting by Alexandre Cabanel.
The French critic Sainte-Beuve defined Baudelaire’s pioneering modernism as the artist’s effort to create, “at the extreme borders of the known regions of Romanticism, a strange pavilion of his own . . . where narcotics are indulged in for the purpose of writing of them afterwards, and where a thousand poisonous drugs are drunk in the finest porcelain cups.” Goethe, who called the Romantic “sick,” had a premonition of the aesthetic catastrophe to which this super-Romantic assault on harmonious order would lead. In the second part of Faust, his Mephistopheles cringes when confronted with the Dionysian bestiality of the Walpurgis Night. Eros, Goethe implied, had given way to wantonness; he made Satan himself sigh for a little decency.
The modernist mantras are today as dated as they are dull. Yet the modernist régime itself is, paradoxically, more powerful than ever, its orthodoxies as firmly entrenched in today’s aesthetic world as the academic school’s were in the nineteenth century. Gay’s book will only reinforce the dogma that holds that any attempt to revive Apollonian order is a sign of reactionary philistinism: good taste today recognizes only the Dionysian. Even a figure with as many resources at his disposal as Prince Charles has been unable to get very far in his attempt to reintroduce, in the world of architecture, a poetics of symmetry, proportion, and harmony. But the prince is on to something: the great artist of the future will be one who finds a way to make Apollo interesting again.
“We live in an age of musical comedies,” Gay writes in his concluding threnody for modernism. He’s right, but he fails to see that the modernists are as much at fault for this state of affairs as those who pander to middle-class tastes. The modernists, too, are guilty of treason against the Muses. They, too, have sinned against art.
AMERICA
By stereotype, America is a pretty optimistic place. In my personal experience, I’ve found that to be true. Even in New York, which prides itself on being tougher than the sunny heartlands, half a dozen people urge me to “Have a nice day!” by the time I get to my desk each morning.
Yet this land of Disney and emoticons seems rather downbeat at the moment, particularly about its own role in the world. The post-cold war expectation of an era of easy and benign American dominance now looks hopelessly romantic.
A few weeks ago I heard an Asian Muslim diplomat tell a group of US policy wonks that in the wake of the war in Iraq and the treatment of prisoners in Guantánamo, his country now looked not to the US but to the European Union as its human rights model. If you like to think of yourself as inhabiting the city on the hill, that kind of comment really hurts.
Yet America’s battered global reputation isn’t the biggest source of domestic gloom. Even American elites have long been ambivalent about projecting their country on the world stage, after all, and, as we foreigners love to remind our US friends, an astonishing number of Americans do not even possess passports.
There is no such uncertainty about commerce and its central role in the nation’s life. I loved being part of Thanksgiving last week (despite grave miscalculations about turkey cooking time), but I must confess that “Black Friday”, the post-Thanksgiving retail bacchanalia, and its online twin “Cyber Monday” were celebrated with equal zeal.
Still, a lot of people are getting worried that America’s great capitalist engine is breaking down: the subprime crisis has infected much of Wall Street, house prices are falling, the dollar is tumbling and even the heroic American consumer may be retreating.
One sign of the new mood is that chief executives, the heroes of the go-go economic narrative of the past few years, are being knocked from their pedestals with a thud – the cover of Fortune magazine, which has often featured super-model style shots of business bosses, this month asks “WHAT WERE THEY SMOKING?” above unflattering mug shots of four erstwhile financial titans.
Even beyond Wall Street, serious Americans are starting to warn that there is something seriously wrong with their country. Subprime and the housing bubble, on this analysis, are manifestations of a deeper national malaise – Americans are great at consuming, but have forgotten how to study, build and invest.
As billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad told me last month: “Frankly, in America we’ve become fat, dumb and happy.” In his new book Innovation Nation, John Kao echoes Broad: “We are rapidly becoming the fat, complacent Detroit of nations”.
Part of what Broad and Kao are responding to is the rebalancing of relative global wealth and power prompted by the collapse of communism and the rise of emerging markets, especially India and China. This is the great good news of our age, but I understand how it can feel uncomfortable for America to adjust to being merely first among equals.
But they also are worried that something more dangerous than this flattening of the Earth is taking place. As Kao puts it: “Just as we are beginning to slack off, others are stepping on the gas”.
On this point, foreigner though I am, I’d like to urge them, and their fellow Americans, to be a little more, well, optimistic. It’s true that the balance sheets of the nation’s households, banks and, indeed, the nation itself are looking strained at the moment. And a few decades of prosperity have created a country which, as Kao notes, “spends more on astrology than astronomy”.
But America has one great strength that inclines me to bet that it will not only work its way out of the subprime mess, but also retain a comfortable position of global economic leadership. That strength is openness.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin is this week’s most egregious example, but he is not the only leader of a rising world power who fears openness. So do many of his fellow “petrocrats”, as Thomas Friedman has dubbed them, in the oil-rich Middle East, not to mention China, where, as a reader visiting Beijing pointed out to me in an email last month, the few copies of the FT that are allowed in sometimes have pages ripped out.
Openness is valuable in and of itself – once we are safe and fed, liberty is an enduring human need. But even if that sounds to you like the abstraction of a latte-drinking liberal, I think you will agree that openness – to money, to ideas, to people – is one of the most important drivers of which economies will flourish and which ones will founder in the coming century.
By all means watch how the subprime saga unfolds but, if you want to know if America will remain great, look to whether investors from Abu Dhabi remain welcome, college kids continue to found new Facebooks, and immigrants, for all the pre-election furor, continue to make their homes here
Yet this land of Disney and emoticons seems rather downbeat at the moment, particularly about its own role in the world. The post-cold war expectation of an era of easy and benign American dominance now looks hopelessly romantic.
A few weeks ago I heard an Asian Muslim diplomat tell a group of US policy wonks that in the wake of the war in Iraq and the treatment of prisoners in Guantánamo, his country now looked not to the US but to the European Union as its human rights model. If you like to think of yourself as inhabiting the city on the hill, that kind of comment really hurts.
Yet America’s battered global reputation isn’t the biggest source of domestic gloom. Even American elites have long been ambivalent about projecting their country on the world stage, after all, and, as we foreigners love to remind our US friends, an astonishing number of Americans do not even possess passports.
There is no such uncertainty about commerce and its central role in the nation’s life. I loved being part of Thanksgiving last week (despite grave miscalculations about turkey cooking time), but I must confess that “Black Friday”, the post-Thanksgiving retail bacchanalia, and its online twin “Cyber Monday” were celebrated with equal zeal.
Still, a lot of people are getting worried that America’s great capitalist engine is breaking down: the subprime crisis has infected much of Wall Street, house prices are falling, the dollar is tumbling and even the heroic American consumer may be retreating.
One sign of the new mood is that chief executives, the heroes of the go-go economic narrative of the past few years, are being knocked from their pedestals with a thud – the cover of Fortune magazine, which has often featured super-model style shots of business bosses, this month asks “WHAT WERE THEY SMOKING?” above unflattering mug shots of four erstwhile financial titans.
Even beyond Wall Street, serious Americans are starting to warn that there is something seriously wrong with their country. Subprime and the housing bubble, on this analysis, are manifestations of a deeper national malaise – Americans are great at consuming, but have forgotten how to study, build and invest.
As billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad told me last month: “Frankly, in America we’ve become fat, dumb and happy.” In his new book Innovation Nation, John Kao echoes Broad: “We are rapidly becoming the fat, complacent Detroit of nations”.
Part of what Broad and Kao are responding to is the rebalancing of relative global wealth and power prompted by the collapse of communism and the rise of emerging markets, especially India and China. This is the great good news of our age, but I understand how it can feel uncomfortable for America to adjust to being merely first among equals.
But they also are worried that something more dangerous than this flattening of the Earth is taking place. As Kao puts it: “Just as we are beginning to slack off, others are stepping on the gas”.
On this point, foreigner though I am, I’d like to urge them, and their fellow Americans, to be a little more, well, optimistic. It’s true that the balance sheets of the nation’s households, banks and, indeed, the nation itself are looking strained at the moment. And a few decades of prosperity have created a country which, as Kao notes, “spends more on astrology than astronomy”.
But America has one great strength that inclines me to bet that it will not only work its way out of the subprime mess, but also retain a comfortable position of global economic leadership. That strength is openness.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin is this week’s most egregious example, but he is not the only leader of a rising world power who fears openness. So do many of his fellow “petrocrats”, as Thomas Friedman has dubbed them, in the oil-rich Middle East, not to mention China, where, as a reader visiting Beijing pointed out to me in an email last month, the few copies of the FT that are allowed in sometimes have pages ripped out.
Openness is valuable in and of itself – once we are safe and fed, liberty is an enduring human need. But even if that sounds to you like the abstraction of a latte-drinking liberal, I think you will agree that openness – to money, to ideas, to people – is one of the most important drivers of which economies will flourish and which ones will founder in the coming century.
By all means watch how the subprime saga unfolds but, if you want to know if America will remain great, look to whether investors from Abu Dhabi remain welcome, college kids continue to found new Facebooks, and immigrants, for all the pre-election furor, continue to make their homes here
29.11.07
The Start of Art
The Dance of Evolution, or How Art Got Its Start
By NATALIE ANGIER
If you have ever been to a Jewish wedding, you know that sooner or later the ominous notes of “Hava Nagila” will sound, and you will be expected to dance the hora. And if you don’t really know how to dance the hora, you will nevertheless be compelled to join hands with others, stumble around in a circle, give little kicks and pretend to enjoy yourself, all the while wondering if there’s a word in Yiddish that means “she who stares pathetically at the feet of others because she is still trying to figure out how to dance the hora.”
I am pleased and relieved to report that my flailing days are through. This month, in a freewheeling symposium at the University of Michigan on the evolutionary value of art and why we humans spend so much time at it, a number of the presenters supplemented their standard PowerPoint presentations with hands-on activities. Some members of the audience might have liked folding the origami boxes or scrawling messages on the floor, but for me the high point came when a neurobiologist taught us how to dance the hora. As we stepped together in klezmeric, well-schooled synchrony, I felt free and exhilarated. I felt competent and loved. I felt like calling my mother. I felt, it seems, just as a dancing body should.
In the main presentation at the conference, Ellen Dissanayake, an independent scholar affiliated with the University of Washington, Seattle, offered her sweeping thesis of the evolution of art, nimbly blending familiar themes with the radically new. By her reckoning, the artistic impulse is a human birthright, a trait so ancient, universal and persistent that it is almost surely innate. But while some researchers have suggested that our artiness arose accidentally, as a byproduct of large brains that evolved to solve problems and were easily bored, Ms. Dissanayake argues that the creative drive has all the earmarks of being an adaptation on its own. The making of art consumes enormous amounts of time and resources, she observed, an extravagance you wouldn’t expect of an evolutionary afterthought. Art also gives us pleasure, she said, and activities that feel good tend to be those that evolution deems too important to leave to chance.
What might that deep-seated purpose of art-making be? Geoffrey Miller and other theorists have proposed that art serves as a sexual display, a means of flaunting one’s talented palette of genes. Again, Ms. Dissanayake has other ideas. To contemporary Westerners, she said, art may seem detached from the real world, an elite stage on which proud peacocks and designated visionaries may well compete for high stakes. But among traditional cultures and throughout most of human history, she said, art has also been a profoundly communal affair, of harvest dances, religious pageants, quilting bees, the passionate town rivalries that gave us the spires of Chartres, Reims and Amiens.
Art, she and others have proposed, did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many to come join the parade — a proposal not surprisingly shared by our hora teacher, Steven Brown of Simon Fraser University. Through singing, dancing, painting, telling fables of neurotic mobsters who visit psychiatrists, and otherwise engaging in what Ms. Dissanayake calls “artifying,” people can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin. Through the harmonic magic of art, the relative weakness of the individual can be traded up for the strength of the hive, cohered into a social unit ready to take on the world.
As David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary theorist at Binghamton University, said, the only social elixir of comparable strength is religion, another impulse that spans cultures and time.
A slender, soft-spoken woman with a bouncy gray pageboy, a grandchild and an eclectic background, Ms. Dissanayake was trained as a classical pianist but became immersed in biology and anthropology when she and her husband moved to Sri Lanka to study elephants. She does not have a doctorate, but she has published widely, and her books —the most recent one being “Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began” — are considered classics among Darwinian theorists and art historians alike.
Perhaps the most radical element of Ms. Dissanayake’s evolutionary framework is her idea about how art got its start. She suggests that many of the basic phonemes of art, the stylistic conventions and tonal patterns, the mental clay, staples and pauses with which even the loftiest creative works are constructed, can be traced back to the most primal of collusions — the intimate interplay between mother and child.
After studying hundreds of hours of interactions between infants and mothers from many different cultures, Ms. Dissanayake and her collaborators have identified universal operations that characterize the mother-infant bond. They are visual, gestural and vocal cues that arise spontaneously and unconsciously between mothers and infants, but that nevertheless abide by a formalized code: the calls and responses, the swooping bell tones of motherese, the widening of the eyes, the exaggerated smile, the repetitions and variations, the laughter of the baby met by the mother’s emphatic refrain. The rules of engagement have a pace and a set of expected responses, and should the rules be violated, the pitch prove too jarring, the delays between coos and head waggles too long or too short, mother or baby may grow fretful or bored.
To Ms. Dissanayake, the tightly choreographed rituals that bond mother and child look a lot like the techniques and constructs at the heart of much of our art. “These operations of ritualization, these affiliative signals between mother and infant, are aesthetic operations, too,” she said in an interview. “And aesthetic operations are what artists do. Knowingly or not, when you are choreographing a dance or composing a piece of music, you are formalizing, exaggerating, repeating, manipulating expectation and dynamically varying your theme.” You are using the tools that mothers everywhere have used for hundreds of thousands of generations.
In art, as in love, as in dancing the hora, if you don’t know the moves, you really can’t fake them.
By NATALIE ANGIER
If you have ever been to a Jewish wedding, you know that sooner or later the ominous notes of “Hava Nagila” will sound, and you will be expected to dance the hora. And if you don’t really know how to dance the hora, you will nevertheless be compelled to join hands with others, stumble around in a circle, give little kicks and pretend to enjoy yourself, all the while wondering if there’s a word in Yiddish that means “she who stares pathetically at the feet of others because she is still trying to figure out how to dance the hora.”
I am pleased and relieved to report that my flailing days are through. This month, in a freewheeling symposium at the University of Michigan on the evolutionary value of art and why we humans spend so much time at it, a number of the presenters supplemented their standard PowerPoint presentations with hands-on activities. Some members of the audience might have liked folding the origami boxes or scrawling messages on the floor, but for me the high point came when a neurobiologist taught us how to dance the hora. As we stepped together in klezmeric, well-schooled synchrony, I felt free and exhilarated. I felt competent and loved. I felt like calling my mother. I felt, it seems, just as a dancing body should.
In the main presentation at the conference, Ellen Dissanayake, an independent scholar affiliated with the University of Washington, Seattle, offered her sweeping thesis of the evolution of art, nimbly blending familiar themes with the radically new. By her reckoning, the artistic impulse is a human birthright, a trait so ancient, universal and persistent that it is almost surely innate. But while some researchers have suggested that our artiness arose accidentally, as a byproduct of large brains that evolved to solve problems and were easily bored, Ms. Dissanayake argues that the creative drive has all the earmarks of being an adaptation on its own. The making of art consumes enormous amounts of time and resources, she observed, an extravagance you wouldn’t expect of an evolutionary afterthought. Art also gives us pleasure, she said, and activities that feel good tend to be those that evolution deems too important to leave to chance.
What might that deep-seated purpose of art-making be? Geoffrey Miller and other theorists have proposed that art serves as a sexual display, a means of flaunting one’s talented palette of genes. Again, Ms. Dissanayake has other ideas. To contemporary Westerners, she said, art may seem detached from the real world, an elite stage on which proud peacocks and designated visionaries may well compete for high stakes. But among traditional cultures and throughout most of human history, she said, art has also been a profoundly communal affair, of harvest dances, religious pageants, quilting bees, the passionate town rivalries that gave us the spires of Chartres, Reims and Amiens.
Art, she and others have proposed, did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many to come join the parade — a proposal not surprisingly shared by our hora teacher, Steven Brown of Simon Fraser University. Through singing, dancing, painting, telling fables of neurotic mobsters who visit psychiatrists, and otherwise engaging in what Ms. Dissanayake calls “artifying,” people can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin. Through the harmonic magic of art, the relative weakness of the individual can be traded up for the strength of the hive, cohered into a social unit ready to take on the world.
As David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary theorist at Binghamton University, said, the only social elixir of comparable strength is religion, another impulse that spans cultures and time.
A slender, soft-spoken woman with a bouncy gray pageboy, a grandchild and an eclectic background, Ms. Dissanayake was trained as a classical pianist but became immersed in biology and anthropology when she and her husband moved to Sri Lanka to study elephants. She does not have a doctorate, but she has published widely, and her books —the most recent one being “Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began” — are considered classics among Darwinian theorists and art historians alike.
Perhaps the most radical element of Ms. Dissanayake’s evolutionary framework is her idea about how art got its start. She suggests that many of the basic phonemes of art, the stylistic conventions and tonal patterns, the mental clay, staples and pauses with which even the loftiest creative works are constructed, can be traced back to the most primal of collusions — the intimate interplay between mother and child.
After studying hundreds of hours of interactions between infants and mothers from many different cultures, Ms. Dissanayake and her collaborators have identified universal operations that characterize the mother-infant bond. They are visual, gestural and vocal cues that arise spontaneously and unconsciously between mothers and infants, but that nevertheless abide by a formalized code: the calls and responses, the swooping bell tones of motherese, the widening of the eyes, the exaggerated smile, the repetitions and variations, the laughter of the baby met by the mother’s emphatic refrain. The rules of engagement have a pace and a set of expected responses, and should the rules be violated, the pitch prove too jarring, the delays between coos and head waggles too long or too short, mother or baby may grow fretful or bored.
To Ms. Dissanayake, the tightly choreographed rituals that bond mother and child look a lot like the techniques and constructs at the heart of much of our art. “These operations of ritualization, these affiliative signals between mother and infant, are aesthetic operations, too,” she said in an interview. “And aesthetic operations are what artists do. Knowingly or not, when you are choreographing a dance or composing a piece of music, you are formalizing, exaggerating, repeating, manipulating expectation and dynamically varying your theme.” You are using the tools that mothers everywhere have used for hundreds of thousands of generations.
In art, as in love, as in dancing the hora, if you don’t know the moves, you really can’t fake them.
A Favorite! Laura Linney
Anything but typical
For Laura Linney, it's strong characters, not star roles, that grab her.By Mark OlsenSpecial to The TimesNovember 29, 2007FORGET "Inside the Actors Studio." A conversation with Laura Linney, however brief, easily morphs into a master class on the technique, craft and strange magic of acting. Focused and thoughtful, serious but with an unpretentious air about her, she is a capital-A actress in the best possible sense of the word."A lot of actresses are crazy," she says with a hearty laugh, perhaps somewhat wary of a comment that was, really, meant as a compliment.A graduate of Brown and Juilliard, as well as the daughter of noted playwright Romulus Linney, she is nothing if not an actress of fearsome technical proficiency. In films such as "You Can Count on Me," "Kinsey," "The Squid and the Whale" and now "The Savages" (which opened Wednesday), Linney creates characters that are smart and scarred, somehow at once armor-plated and utterly vulnerable."I started in theater," she says during a recent interview. "And moving into film and television was a big surprise for me. It's the big, great surprise and joy of my life to be working in film and television. It's nothing I ever anticipated would happen. I really thought I would be a theater actress my entire life."In "The Savages," written and directed by Tamara Jenkins ("Slums of Beverly Hills"), Linney assays her prickliest protagonist yet. In the role of Wendy Savage, Linney brings to life a 39-year-old aspiring playwright and temp office worker who maintains a certain estranged detente with her brother (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a Brechtian scholar. The two must reunite to take care of their even more estranged father (Philip Bosco) as he grapples with the onset of dementia. Since the film's premiere last January at the Sundance Film Festival, it has received uniformly strong reviews and a considerable amount of awards-season buzz.Within minutes of the opening of "The Savages," Wendy has told a completely self-serving whopper of a lie without so much as a second thought. Linney fleshes out the character with all the inexplicable foibles and deep-rooted idiosyncrasies of an actual person. Wendy is, to put it bluntly, a real piece of work."She's not a typical protagonist," Linney says. "She lies, she cheats, she steals, she's in a relationship with a married man. She's emotionally really immature, and yet she is also capable of great empathy, she's very smart and she's a total narcissist. She's this contradiction of things, like one of those wave machines, she goes to one side and then the other. She's all over the place."Linney's ability to navigate the hairpin twists of the script, from wry comedy to darkest drama, attracted Jenkins to the idea of casting the actress. The two had met years ago regarding a project that never came to fruition, and so Jenkins assumed that Linney still lived, as she did then, in New York City. For their initial "Savages" meeting, Jenkins took two separate planes and a two-hour bus ride to Telluride, Colo., where Linney lives with her fiancé."It sounds so self-conscious," Jenkins says of what made Linney worth the extra effort, "but I felt like she would really be able to handle the tone of the film, that she was capable of the flawed, messy humor of it and would also be able to connect to the pathos of it. And I think that's a very unique skill. In the case of all the actors, that was something I was looking for, it's something I'm very attracted to in actors. There are a lot of great actors that won't ever make anyone laugh."Linney and Hoffman had also crossed paths over the years but had never worked together. In "Savages" they convey the unforced, largely unspoken shorthand of sibling communication. Even if these are two people who rarely speak, they know each other better than they perhaps know themselves.Linney isn't one to delve deeply into her emotional history for a role, preferring instead to let the material be her guide."It's always been for me script first," she says. "I don't tend to take my deep personal experiences and layer it onto a script. It's my experience, not the character's experience, and it might not be appropriate. But also, having said that, I know that whatever residue of experience I have is going to bleed through anyway. I don't even need to tap into it, it's going to come through anyway."Born in New York City, Linney was well on her way to Broadway respectability when she started her film career with small roles in such films as "Lorenzo's Oil" and "Dave," and as her parts began to grow in size she began earning some acclaim in films such as "Primal Fear" and "The Truman Show." An Academy Award nomination for best actress came for her role in "You Can Count on Me," while "Kinsey" earned her a nomination for best supporting actress. There have also been three Golden Globe nominations and two Emmy wins."There was a shift," she says of her career's trajectory over the last few years. "The thing that's been wonderful for me is there's never been a huge leap. I feel like I've earned every little baby step. Which is a really good feeling, and also not jarring to my life. It's not like my life changed overnight. It's been very gradual, very steady. I think I've grown into it."And for me to say my life is totally normal and I'm a completely normal person is absurd. I wish I could say that, but the reality is, and I'm not a superstar by any means, but there's a little bit of recognition and it alters my life a little bit. And so there's the aspect of how do you handle that appropriately, not belittle yourself but not self-aggrandize yourself. All that territory is much more treacherous than anything you're going to deal with on a set."At 43, Linney has been able to avoid the mom-of-younger-starlet roles that so often seem to befall actresses of a certain age. Instead, she finds characters who are fiercely intelligent, sometimes a little difficult, but always full-blooded and fully rounded. She is somehow managing to buck the conventional wisdom regarding women, aging and Hollywood."A lot of people have asked me about this," she says, "and I never really know what to say other than I've just sort of minded my own business and done what I need to do. It's an unusual situation to be in, and I'm very grateful and aware of that."Linney talks passionately and articulately about the process of acting, which she says for her varies from role to role. In particular, she feels energized by the interface between her background in theater and her more recent work in film and television."I realized there is a continuum, and the film work does make the theater work better, and the theater work does make the film work better. A lot of theater people come to Los Angeles, and I was guilty of this myself, and experience film and television and are really put off, because it's not how things are done in the theater. It's completely unfair. Rehearsal in theater versus rehearsal in film, it's the same word, but it's a completely different language. I had to learn to accept each on its own terms."For "The Savages" she mostly combed through the script time and again, sifting and searching for hints and clues to her character's feelings and intentions. Even now, she still considers herself a student of acting, pushing herself to connect more deeply with the mysteries of human behavior."It's a combination of all that technical stuff," she said, "and then instinct. That's the other part of it, the more mystical part of it even I don't understand. When I say I listen to what the script tells me to do, I don't quite know how to explain that."
For Laura Linney, it's strong characters, not star roles, that grab her.By Mark OlsenSpecial to The TimesNovember 29, 2007FORGET "Inside the Actors Studio." A conversation with Laura Linney, however brief, easily morphs into a master class on the technique, craft and strange magic of acting. Focused and thoughtful, serious but with an unpretentious air about her, she is a capital-A actress in the best possible sense of the word."A lot of actresses are crazy," she says with a hearty laugh, perhaps somewhat wary of a comment that was, really, meant as a compliment.A graduate of Brown and Juilliard, as well as the daughter of noted playwright Romulus Linney, she is nothing if not an actress of fearsome technical proficiency. In films such as "You Can Count on Me," "Kinsey," "The Squid and the Whale" and now "The Savages" (which opened Wednesday), Linney creates characters that are smart and scarred, somehow at once armor-plated and utterly vulnerable."I started in theater," she says during a recent interview. "And moving into film and television was a big surprise for me. It's the big, great surprise and joy of my life to be working in film and television. It's nothing I ever anticipated would happen. I really thought I would be a theater actress my entire life."In "The Savages," written and directed by Tamara Jenkins ("Slums of Beverly Hills"), Linney assays her prickliest protagonist yet. In the role of Wendy Savage, Linney brings to life a 39-year-old aspiring playwright and temp office worker who maintains a certain estranged detente with her brother (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a Brechtian scholar. The two must reunite to take care of their even more estranged father (Philip Bosco) as he grapples with the onset of dementia. Since the film's premiere last January at the Sundance Film Festival, it has received uniformly strong reviews and a considerable amount of awards-season buzz.Within minutes of the opening of "The Savages," Wendy has told a completely self-serving whopper of a lie without so much as a second thought. Linney fleshes out the character with all the inexplicable foibles and deep-rooted idiosyncrasies of an actual person. Wendy is, to put it bluntly, a real piece of work."She's not a typical protagonist," Linney says. "She lies, she cheats, she steals, she's in a relationship with a married man. She's emotionally really immature, and yet she is also capable of great empathy, she's very smart and she's a total narcissist. She's this contradiction of things, like one of those wave machines, she goes to one side and then the other. She's all over the place."Linney's ability to navigate the hairpin twists of the script, from wry comedy to darkest drama, attracted Jenkins to the idea of casting the actress. The two had met years ago regarding a project that never came to fruition, and so Jenkins assumed that Linney still lived, as she did then, in New York City. For their initial "Savages" meeting, Jenkins took two separate planes and a two-hour bus ride to Telluride, Colo., where Linney lives with her fiancé."It sounds so self-conscious," Jenkins says of what made Linney worth the extra effort, "but I felt like she would really be able to handle the tone of the film, that she was capable of the flawed, messy humor of it and would also be able to connect to the pathos of it. And I think that's a very unique skill. In the case of all the actors, that was something I was looking for, it's something I'm very attracted to in actors. There are a lot of great actors that won't ever make anyone laugh."Linney and Hoffman had also crossed paths over the years but had never worked together. In "Savages" they convey the unforced, largely unspoken shorthand of sibling communication. Even if these are two people who rarely speak, they know each other better than they perhaps know themselves.Linney isn't one to delve deeply into her emotional history for a role, preferring instead to let the material be her guide."It's always been for me script first," she says. "I don't tend to take my deep personal experiences and layer it onto a script. It's my experience, not the character's experience, and it might not be appropriate. But also, having said that, I know that whatever residue of experience I have is going to bleed through anyway. I don't even need to tap into it, it's going to come through anyway."Born in New York City, Linney was well on her way to Broadway respectability when she started her film career with small roles in such films as "Lorenzo's Oil" and "Dave," and as her parts began to grow in size she began earning some acclaim in films such as "Primal Fear" and "The Truman Show." An Academy Award nomination for best actress came for her role in "You Can Count on Me," while "Kinsey" earned her a nomination for best supporting actress. There have also been three Golden Globe nominations and two Emmy wins."There was a shift," she says of her career's trajectory over the last few years. "The thing that's been wonderful for me is there's never been a huge leap. I feel like I've earned every little baby step. Which is a really good feeling, and also not jarring to my life. It's not like my life changed overnight. It's been very gradual, very steady. I think I've grown into it."And for me to say my life is totally normal and I'm a completely normal person is absurd. I wish I could say that, but the reality is, and I'm not a superstar by any means, but there's a little bit of recognition and it alters my life a little bit. And so there's the aspect of how do you handle that appropriately, not belittle yourself but not self-aggrandize yourself. All that territory is much more treacherous than anything you're going to deal with on a set."At 43, Linney has been able to avoid the mom-of-younger-starlet roles that so often seem to befall actresses of a certain age. Instead, she finds characters who are fiercely intelligent, sometimes a little difficult, but always full-blooded and fully rounded. She is somehow managing to buck the conventional wisdom regarding women, aging and Hollywood."A lot of people have asked me about this," she says, "and I never really know what to say other than I've just sort of minded my own business and done what I need to do. It's an unusual situation to be in, and I'm very grateful and aware of that."Linney talks passionately and articulately about the process of acting, which she says for her varies from role to role. In particular, she feels energized by the interface between her background in theater and her more recent work in film and television."I realized there is a continuum, and the film work does make the theater work better, and the theater work does make the film work better. A lot of theater people come to Los Angeles, and I was guilty of this myself, and experience film and television and are really put off, because it's not how things are done in the theater. It's completely unfair. Rehearsal in theater versus rehearsal in film, it's the same word, but it's a completely different language. I had to learn to accept each on its own terms."For "The Savages" she mostly combed through the script time and again, sifting and searching for hints and clues to her character's feelings and intentions. Even now, she still considers herself a student of acting, pushing herself to connect more deeply with the mysteries of human behavior."It's a combination of all that technical stuff," she said, "and then instinct. That's the other part of it, the more mystical part of it even I don't understand. When I say I listen to what the script tells me to do, I don't quite know how to explain that."
28.11.07
LATIN in L.A.
Ispent a bit of Sunday night helping my 14-year-old son study for an upcoming quiz in his Latin class. He's a freshman at a large and well-regarded school for boys. As a native Angeleno, he grew up speaking both English and Spanish, and I was interested and a little surprised that he and so many of his classmates elected Latin as their foreign language. I was still more surprised by how far Latin instruction has come from the days when it all began with a Cassell's dictionary and a copy of Caesar's "Gallic Wars" -- Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.Today's beginning Latinist gets a thoroughly modern, handsomely illustrated textbook built around the lives of teenage Romans living in adjacent country villas. Students translate incidents from their protagonists' daily lives and study vocabulary and grammar lists drawn from each chapter's main anecdote -- sort of a classical soap opera. It's all very up-to-date and thoroughly engaging, which probably is why my son and many of his classmates devote a couple of after-school hours each week to their high school's Latin club and recently spent a Saturday hosting similar groups for a day's worth of Latinate activities.I recount this bit of homey personal experience only because the spontaneity and vibrancy with which my son and his friends are pursuing their Latin stands in such contrast to the elegiac tone of Nicholas Ostler's "Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin." One supposes that after you've been the lingua franca of the entire Western world, anything less is a comedown, but this account of Latin's rise and fall definitely ends with a whimper that does not seem entirely deserved.Educated in Latin, Greek and philosophy at Oxford, the British-born Ostler completed a doctorate in linguistics under Noam Chomsky at MIT. He now heads a foundation that encourages the persistence of small languages and is the author of a well-regarded work for lay readers, "Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World." In "Ad Infinitum," he has produced a book that's often informative and fascinating, sometimes wearyingly discursive and, occasionally, just plain frustrating.Nonspecialists may find Ostler's exploration of Latin's linguistic origins, particularly its relationship to Etruscan, overly detailed -- but Ostler is particularly good on why Latin was the one language among many on the Italian peninsula that ultimately spread as it did.The author argues that Latin triumphed over the other languages spoken in what is now Italy -- particularly Etruscan and Oscan -- because, "unlike them, Latin combined three properties: It was a farmers' language, a soldiers' language, and a city language. Together, these gave it the victory." The Romans, moreover, "had some winning ways that were all their own: After a victory they demanded not tribute, but land, which they would sooner or later settle with their own farmers; and they levied soldiers too from the defeated powers, who would add their strength to the Roman army. The Roman army, too, with its compulsive program of road building, cumulatively and permanently improved ease of communication. . . . All these policies benefited not just the long-term strength of Rome, but also sustained the growth of the Latin language."As Ostler points out, the Romans were secure enough to attribute their military successes to a willingness to learn from their antagonists. The historian Sallust, for example, attributed these observations to Julius Caesar himself: "Our ancestors were never lacking in strategy or boldness . . . nor were they prevented by pride from imitating others' institutions, if they were sound. . . . [W]henever anything apt was recognized among allies or enemies, they followed it up at home with the utmost zeal; they preferred to imitate good things rather than envy them."(It may have been that the Romans' unshakable self-regard made them impervious to envy.)It also seems true that their language benefited from a similarly robust adaptability. And, though Ostler seems to feel a rather irritating compulsion to apologize for the Roman's militarism and imperialism -- we get it already, their notion of unity was more like Mussolini's than Lincoln's -- Latin ultimately spread because the people Rome conquered wanted to live like Romans.Clearly Latin's claim to functional universality also benefited when Catholic Christianity adopted it as its official language rather than the Greek in which the Gospels had been written. (Say what you will about those early church fathers, but when Constantine offered them a link to state power, they recognized the main chance when they saw it.) For its part, Christianity also gave to Latin two things that promoted its utility and its centrality to our own culture. One was the "codex" or book, which gradually replaced the "volumen," or scroll as the preferred literary and informational medium. The other was silent reading, which Ostler correctly characterizes as "closer to thought itself." Neither the ancient Greeks nor Romans read silently. Indeed, the first Western reference to the practice occurs in Augustine's "Confessions." When the young North African rhetorician, newly arrived in Milan in the 380s, called on the great Ambrose, he found the bishop reading to himself and recorded his astonishment: "But when he read, his eyes were led over the pages and his heart sought out the understanding, while his voice and tongue were quiet."Ostler's treatment of Latin as a mother to the supple vernacular tongues we call Romance languages is particularly good, and his evaluation of the Renaissance humanists and the way in which they may have loved Latin to death is provocative. But his evaluation of Latin's critical contribution to the revolutionary scientific culture so central to Western progress is sketchy, and it's here that his "biography" trails off into a dreary sequence of retreats and retrenchments, ending in irrelevance. According to his biography, Ostler now lives in what once was a part of Roman Bath -- Aquae Sullis, as it then was known. It's one among a handful of places, found more often on the empire's periphery than at its center, where you still can feel intensely not only the Roman presence, but also what it must have meant to others to live alongside that magnetic imperialism. It's a pity that something more of that sense didn't find its way into this book. Early on in "Ad Infinitum," Ostler shrewdly and -- to this reader's eye, at least -- rather movingly asserts that, "The history of Latin is the history of the development of Western Europe. . . . In fact, only seen from the perspective of Latin does Europe really show itself as a single story: nothing else was there all the way through. . . . Latin, properly understood, is something like the soul of Europe's civilization." One wishes, too, that the author had evinced a bit more of the courage that ought to flow from those sentences' implication. A simple adherence to Cicero's famous insistence on plain speaking might have helped where erudition for erudition's sake and a fashionable but unexamined political correctness have muddled an inspiring story.
27.11.07
Endurance
Last Sunday's gospel ended with the haunting words, 'By your endurance you will gain your lives' [Luke 21, 19]. The word endurance could also have been translated by the word patience. Patient endurance is a great virtue, but not one highly prized in our swiftly moving society, where e-mail is preferred by so many to what is unkindly called snail mail and where our awareness of what is happening in what were once thought of as far off places is brought to us at once by television The quicker the better, the sooner, the better pleased we are. To have to wait seems to many of us a waste of time. Quick results are better than those for which we are required to wait. All of this means that the virtue of which Jesus speaks is ignored or at best undervalued. Saint Paul , also, in his letter to the Romans has the following stirring message, when he writes; 'Suffering brings endurance and endurance produces character' [Romans 5, 3]. In other words we may not enjoy suffering, few of us do, but it brings with it the chance of strengthening our characters. Time and adversity may seem on the surface to be hostile and undesirable, but they contain hidden blessings. We become better people simply by having to put up with the difficult and unexpected challenges life has to offer.
This important truth is often lost or at best ignored not only by people who are impatient with waiting, but also by those whose natural abilities enable them to achieve results with greater speed than most of the slower witted. To such quick minded, brilliant people the boredom of patience is intolerable and yet without it lasting results rarely, if ever, emerge. I knew once a very brilliant man, who achieved great success in all the exams he entered for. But when these came to an end very little followed. He lacked the character to endure boredom and those who are afraid of boredom are as little or less likely to achieve lasting success with their great natural talents than their less talented friends and acquaintances.
Even genius benefits from perseverance as Sir Joshua Reynolds once wrote. 'If you have great talents industry will improve them, if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency'. We often secretly envy, the brilliant, but forget that they are also challenged by boredom.
What counts in the building of character or in the achieving of important results is patient endurance, which achieves by God's grace, all things. The hectic world we live in needs this message, perhaps above all else.
This important truth is often lost or at best ignored not only by people who are impatient with waiting, but also by those whose natural abilities enable them to achieve results with greater speed than most of the slower witted. To such quick minded, brilliant people the boredom of patience is intolerable and yet without it lasting results rarely, if ever, emerge. I knew once a very brilliant man, who achieved great success in all the exams he entered for. But when these came to an end very little followed. He lacked the character to endure boredom and those who are afraid of boredom are as little or less likely to achieve lasting success with their great natural talents than their less talented friends and acquaintances.
Even genius benefits from perseverance as Sir Joshua Reynolds once wrote. 'If you have great talents industry will improve them, if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency'. We often secretly envy, the brilliant, but forget that they are also challenged by boredom.
What counts in the building of character or in the achieving of important results is patient endurance, which achieves by God's grace, all things. The hectic world we live in needs this message, perhaps above all else.
Always Worthwhile from the NYTimes
Holiday Books
100 Notable Books of 2007
The Book Review has selected this list from books reviewed since the Holiday Books issue of Dec. 3, 2006.
Fiction & Poetry
THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER. By Tom Perrotta. (St. Martin’s, $24.95.) In this new novel by the author of “Little Children,” a sex-ed teacher faces off against a church bent on ridding her town of “moral decay.”
AFTER DARK. By Haruki Murakami. Translated by Jay Rubin. (Knopf, $22.95.) A tale of two sisters, one awake all night, one asleep for months.
THE BAD GIRL. By Mario Vargas Llosa. Translated by Edith Grossman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) This suspenseful novel transforms “Madame Bovary” into a vibrant exploration of the urban mores of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.
BEARING THE BODY. By Ehud Havazelet. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) In this daring first novel, a man travels to California after his brother is killed in what may have been a drug transaction.
THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT HEAVEN BEARS. By Dinaw Mengestu. (Riverhead, $22.95.) A first novel about an Ethiopian exile in Washington, D.C., evokes loss, hope, memory and the solace of friendship.
BRIDGE OF SIGHS. By Richard Russo. (Knopf, $26.95.) In his first novel since “Empire Falls,” Russo writes of a small town in New York riven by class differences and racial hatred.
THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO. By Junot Díaz. (Riverhead, $24.95.) A nerdy Dominican-American yearns to write and fall in love.
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME. By André Aciman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) Aciman’s novel of love, desire, time and memory describes a passionate affair between two young men in Italy.
CHEATING AT CANASTA. By William Trevor. (Viking, $24.95.) Trevor’s dark, worldly short stories linger in the mind long after they’re finished.
THE COLLECTED POEMS, 1956-1998. By Zbigniew Herbert. Translated by Alissa Valles. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $34.95.) Herbert’s poetry echoes the quiet insubordination of his public life.
DANCING TO “ALMENDRA.” By Mayra Montero. Translated by Edith Grossman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Fact and fiction rub together in this rhythmic story of a reporter on the trail of the Mafia, set mainly in 1950s Cuba.
EXIT GHOST. By Philip Roth. (Houghton Mifflin, $26.) In his latest novel Roth brings back Nathan Zuckerman, a protagonist whom we have known since his potent youth and who now must face his inevitable decline.
FALLING MAN. By Don DeLillo. (Scribner, $26.) Through the story of a lawyer and his estranged wife, DeLillo resurrects the world as it was on 9/11, in all its mortal dread, high anxiety and mass confusion.
FELLOW TRAVELERS. By Thomas Mallon. (Pantheon, $25.) In Mallon’s seventh novel, a State Department official navigates the anti-gay purges of the McCarthy era.
A FREE LIFE. By Ha Jin. (Pantheon, $26.) The Chinese-born author spins a tale of bravery and nobility in an American system built on risk and mutual exploitation.
THE GATHERING. By Anne Enright. (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.) An Irishwoman searches for clues to what set her brother on the path to suicide.
HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS. By J. K. Rowling. (Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic, $34.99.) Rowling ties up all the loose ends in this conclusion to her grand wizarding saga.
HOUSE LIGHTS. By Leah Hager Cohen. (Norton, $24.95.) The heroine of Cohen’s third novel abandons her tarnished parents for the seductions of her grand-mother’s life in theater.
HOUSE OF MEETINGS. By Martin Amis. (Knopf, $23.) A Russian World War II veteran posthumously acquaints his stepdaughter with his grim past of rape and violence.
IN THE COUNTRY OF MEN. By Hisham Matar. (Dial, $22.) The boy narrator of this novel, set in Libya in 1979, learns about the convoluted roots of betrayal in a totalitarian society.
THE INDIAN CLERK. By David Leavitt. (Bloomsbury, $24.95.) Leavitt explores the intricate relationship between the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy and a poor, self-taught genius from Madras, stranded in England during World War I.
KNOTS. By Nuruddin Farah. (Riverhead, $25.95.) After 20 years, a Somali woman returns home to Mogadishu from Canada, intent on reclaiming a family house from a warlord.
LATER, AT THE BAR: A Novel in Stories. By Rebecca Barry. (Simon & Schuster, $22.) The small-town regulars at Lucy’s Tavern carry their loneliness in “rough and beautiful” ways.
LET THE NORTHERN LIGHTS ERASE YOUR NAME. By Vendela Vida. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $23.95.) A young woman searches for the truth about her parentage amid the snow and ice of Lapland in this bleakly comic yet sad tale of a child’s futile struggle to be loved.
LIKE YOU’D UNDERSTAND, ANYWAY: Stories. By Jim Shepard. (Knopf, $23.) Shepard’s surprising tales feature such diverse characters as a Parisian executioner, a woman in space and two Nazi scientists searching for the yeti.
MAN GONE DOWN. By Michael Thomas. (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.) This first novel explores the fragmented personal histories behind four desperate days in a black writer’s life.
MATRIMONY. By Joshua Henkin. (Pantheon, $23.95.) Henkin follows a couple from college to their mid-30s, through crises of love and mortality.
THE MAYTREES. By Annie Dillard. (HarperCollins, $24.95.) A married couple find their way back to each other under unusual circumstances.
THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES. By Nathan Englander. (Knopf, $25.) A Jewish family is caught up in Argentina’s “Dirty War.”
MOTHERS AND SONS: Stories. By Colm Toibin. (Scribner, $24.) In this collection by the author of “The Master,” families are not so much reassuring and warm as they are settings for secrets, suspicion and missed connections.
NEXT LIFE. By Rae Armantrout. (Wesleyan University, $22.95.) Poetry that conveys the invention, the wit and the force of mind that contests all assumptions.
ON CHESIL BEACH. By Ian McEwan. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $22.) Consisting largely of a single sex scene played out on a couple’s wedding night, this seeming novel of manners is as much a horror story as any McEwan has written.
OUT STEALING HORSES. By Per Petterson. Translated by Anne Born. (Graywolf Press, $22.) In this short yet spacious Norwegian novel, an Oslo professional hopes to cure his loneliness with a plunge into solitude.
THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST. By Mohsin Hamid. (Harcourt, $22.) Hamid’s chilling second novel is narrated by a Pakistani who tells his life story to an unnamed American after the attacks of 9/11.
REMAINDER. By Tom McCarthy. (Vintage, paper, $13.95.) In this debut, a Londoner emerges from a coma and seeks to reassure himself of the genuineness of his existence.
THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES. By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A craftily autobiographical novel about a band of literary guerrillas.
SELECTED POEMS. By Derek Walcott. Edited by Edward Baugh. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) The Nobel Prize winner Walcott, who was born on St. Lucia, is a long-serving poet of exile, caught between two races and two worlds.
THE SEPTEMBERS OF SHIRAZ. By Dalia Sofer. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $24.95.) In this powerful first novel, the father of a prosperous Jewish family in Tehran is arrested shortly after the Iranian revolution.
SHORTCOMINGS. By Adrian Tomine. (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95.) The Asian-American characters in this meticulously observed comic-book novella explicitly address the way in which they handle being in a minority.
SUNSTROKE: And Other Stories. By Tessa Hadley. (Picador, paper, $13.) These resonant tales encapsulate moments of hope and humiliation in a kind of shorthand of different lives lived.
THEN WE CAME TO THE END. By Joshua Ferris. (Little, Brown, $23.99.) Layoff notices fly in Ferris’s acidly funny first novel, set in a white-collar office in the wake of the dot-com debacle.
THROW LIKE A GIRL: Stories. By Jean Thompson. (Simon & Schuster, paper, $13.) The women here are smart and strong but drawn to losers.
TIME AND MATERIALS: Poems, 1997-2005. By Robert Hass. (Ecco/Harper-Collins, $22.95.) What Hass, a former poet laureate, has lost in Californian ease he has gained in stern self-restraint.
TREE OF SMOKE. By Denis Johnson. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) The author of “Jesus’ Son” offers a soulful novel about the travails of a large cast of characters during the Vietnam War.
TWENTY GRAND: And Other Tales of Love and Money. By Rebecca Curtis. (Harper Perennial, paper, $13.95.) In this debut collection, a crisp, blunt tone propels stories both surreal and realistic.
VARIETIES OF DISTURBANCE: Stories. By Lydia Davis. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $13.) Dispensing with straight narrative, Davis microscopically examines language and thought.
THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK: Stories. By Alice Munro. (Knopf, $25.95.) This collection offers unusually explicit reflections of Munro’s life.
WHAT IS THE WHAT. The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel. By Dave Eggers. (McSweeney’s, $26.) The horrors, injustices and follies in this novel are based on the experiences of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan.
WINTERTON BLUE. By Trezza Azzopardi. (Grove, $24.) An unhappy young woman meets an even unhappier drifter.
THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION. By Michael Chabon. (HarperCollins, $26.95.) Cops, thugs, schemers, rabbis, chess fanatics and obsessives of every stripe populate this screwball, hard-boiled murder mystery set in an imagined Jewish settlement in Alaska.
Nonfiction
AGENT ZIGZAG: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal. By Ben Macintyre. (Harmony, $25.95.) The exploits of Eddie Chapman, a British criminal who became a double agent in World War II.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE: A Life. By Hugh Brogan. (Yale University, $35.) Brogan’s combative biography takes issue with Tocqueville’s misgivings about democracy.
ALICE: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, From White House Princess to Washington Power Broker. By Stacy A. Cordery. (Viking, $32.95.) A biography of Theodore Roosevelt’s shrewd, tart-tongued older daughter.
AMERICAN CREATION: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic. By Joseph J. Ellis. (Knopf, $26.95.) This history explores an underappreciated point: that this country was constructed to foster arguments, not to settle them.
THE ARGUMENT: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics. By Matt Bai. (Penguin Press, $25.95.) An exhaustive account of the Democrats’ transformative efforts, by a political reporter for The New York Times Magazine.
ARSENALS OF FOLLY: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race. By Richard Rhodes. (Knopf, $28.95.) This artful history focuses on the events leading up to the pivotal 1986 Reykjavik summit meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev.
THE ART OF POLITICAL MURDER: Who Killed the Bishop? By Francisco Goldman. (Grove, $25.) The novelist returns to Guatemala, a major inspiration for his fiction, to try to solve the real-life killing of a Roman Catholic bishop.
BROTHER, I’M DYING. By Edwidge Danticat. (Knopf, $23.95.) Danticat’s cleareyed prose and unflinching adherence to the facts conceal an undercurrent of melancholy in this memoir of her Haitian family.
CIRCLING MY MOTHER. By Mary Gordon. (Pantheon, $24.) Gordon’s deeply personal memoir focuses on the engaged and lively Catholicism of her mother, a glamorous career woman who was also an alcoholic with a body afflicted by polio.
CLEOPATRA’S NOSE: 39 Varieties of Desire. By Judith Thurman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.95.) These surgically analytic essays of cultural criticism showcase themes of loss, hunger and motherhood.
CULTURAL AMNESIA: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts. By Clive James. (Norton, $35.) Essays on 20th-century luminaries by one of Britain’s leading public intellectuals.
THE DAY OF BATTLE: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944. Volume Two of the Liberation Trilogy. By Rick Atkinson. (Holt, $35.) A celebration of the American experience in these campaigns.
THE DIANA CHRONICLES. By Tina Brown. (Doubleday, $27.50.) The former New Yorker editor details the sordid domestic drama that pitted the Princess of Wales against Britain’s royal family.
THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE: A Historical Geography From the Revolution to the First World War. By Graham Robb. (Norton, $27.95.) Robb presents France as a group of diverse regions, each with its own long history, intricate belief systems and singular customs.
DOWN THE NILE: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff. By Rosemary Mahoney. (Little, Brown, $23.99.) Mahoney juxtaposes her solo rowing journey with encounters with the Egyptians she met.
DRIVEN OUT: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans. By Jean Pfaelzer. (Random House, $27.95.) How the Chinese were brutalized and demonized in the 19th-century American West — and how they fought back.
DUE CONSIDERATIONS: Essays and Criticism. By John Updike. (Knopf, $40.) Updike’s first nonfiction collection in eight years displays breathtaking scope as well as the author’s seeming inability to write badly.
EASTER EVERYWHERE: A Memoir. By Darcey Steinke. (Bloomsbury, $24.95.) A minister’s daughter confronts her own spiritual rootlessness.
EDITH WHARTON. By Hermione Lee. (Knopf, $35.) This meticulous biography shows Wharton’s significance as a designer, decorator, gardener and traveler, as well as a writer.
THE FATHER OF ALL THINGS: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam. By Tom Bissell. (Pantheon, $25.) Bissell mixes rigorous narrative accounts of the war and emotionally powerful scenes of the distress it brought his own family.
THE FLORIST’S DAUGHTER. By Patricia Hampl. (Harcourt, $24.) In her fifth and most powerful memoir, Hampl looks hard at her relationship to her Midwestern roots as her mother lies dying in the hospital.
FORESKIN’S LAMENT: A Memoir. By Shalom Auslander. (Riverhead, $24.95.) With scathing humor and bitter irony, Auslander wrestles with his Jewish Orthodox roots.
GOMORRAH: A Personal Journey Into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System. By Roberto Saviano. Translated by Virginia Jewiss. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) This powerful work of reportage started a national conversation in Italy when it was published there last year.
THE HOUSE THAT GEORGE BUILT: With a Little Help From Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty. By Wilfrid Sheed. (Random House, $29.95.) A rich homage to Gershwin, Berlin and other masters of the swinging jazz song.
HOW DOCTORS THINK. By Jerome Groopman. (Houghton Mifflin, $26.) Groopman takes a tough-minded look at the ways in which doctors and patients interact, and at the profound problems facing modern medicine.
HOW TO READ THE BIBLE: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. By James L. Kugel. (Free Press, $35.) In this tour through the Jewish scriptures (i.e., the Old Testament, more or less), a former professor of Hebrew seeks to reclaim the Bible from the literalists and the skeptics.
HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN’T READ. By Pierre Bayard. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. (Bloomsbury, $19.95.) A French literature professor wants to assuage our guilt over the ways we actually read and discuss books.
IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone. By Rajiv Chandrasekaran. (Knopf, $25.95.) The author, a Washington Post journalist, catalogs the arrogance and ineptitude that marked America’s governance of Iraq.
THE INVISIBLE CURE: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS. By Helen Epstein. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Rigorous reporting unearths new findings among the old issues.
LEGACY OF ASHES: The History of the CIA. By Tim Weiner. (Doubleday, $27.95.) A comprehensive chronicle of the American intelligence agency, from the days of the Iron Curtain to Iraq, by a reporter for The New York Times.
LENI: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl. By Steven Bach. (Knopf, $30.) How Hitler’s favorite director made “Triumph of the Will” and convinced posterity that she didn’t know what the Nazis were up to.
LEONARD WOOLF: A Biography. By Victoria Glendinning. (Free Press, $30.) Glendinning shows Virginia Woolf’s accomplished husband as passionate, reserved and, above all, stoical.
A LIFE OF PICASSO: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932. By John Richardson. (Knopf, $40.) The third, penultimate installment in Richardson’s biography spans a dauntingly complicated time in Picasso’s life and in European history.
LITTLE HEATHENS: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression. By Mildred Armstrong Kalish. (Bantam, $22.) Kalish’s soaring love for her childhood memories saturates this memoir, which coaxes the reader into joy, wonder and even envy.
LONG WAY GONE: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. By Ishmael Beah. (Sarah Crichton/-Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) A former child warrior gives literary voice to the violence and killings he both witnessed and perpetrated during the Sierra Leone civil war.
THE NINE: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. By Jeffrey Toobin. (Doubleday, $27.95.) An erudite outsider’s account of the cloistered court’s inner workings.
THE ORDEAL OF ELIZABETH MARSH: A Woman in World History. By Linda Colley. (Pantheon, $27.50.) Colley tracks the “compulsively itinerant” Marsh across the 18th century and several continents.
PORTRAIT OF A PRIESTESS: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. By Joan Breton Connelly. (Princeton University, $39.50.) A scholar finds that religion meant power for Greek women.
RALPH ELLISON: A Biography. By Arnold Rampersad. (Knopf, $35.) Ellison was seemingly cursed by his failure to follow up “Invisible Man.”
THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the Twentieth Century. By Alex Ross. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) In his own feat of orchestration, The New Yorker’s music critic presents a history of the last century as refracted through its classical music.
SCHULZ AND PEANUTS: A Biography. By David Michaelis. (Harper/ Harper-Collins, $34.95.) Actual “Peanuts” cartoons movingly illustrate this portrait of the strip’s creator, presented here as a profoundly lonely and unhappy man.
SERVICE INCLUDED: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter. By Phoebe Damrosch. (Morrow, $24.95.) A memoir about waiting tables at the acclaimed Manhattan restaurant Per Se.
SOLDIER’S HEART: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point. By Elizabeth D. Samet. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) A civilian teacher at the Military Academy offers a significant perspective on a crucial social and political force: honor.
STANLEY: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer. By Tim Jeal. (Yale University, $38.) Of the many biographies of Henry Morton Stanley, Jeal’s, which profits from his access to an immense new trove of material, is the most complete and readable.
THE STILLBORN GOD: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. By Mark Lilla. (Knopf, $26.) With nuance and complexity, Lilla examines how we managed to separate, in a fashion, church and state.
THOMAS HARDY. By Claire Tomalin. (Penguin Press, $35.) Tomalin presents Hardy as a fascinating case study in mid-Victorian literary sociology.
TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton. By Sara Wheeler. (Random House, $27.95.) The story of the man immortalized in “Out of Africa.”
TWO LIVES: Gertrude and Alice. By Janet Malcolm. (Yale University, $25.) Sharp criticism meets playful, absorbing biography in this study of Stein and Toklas.
THE WHISPERERS: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia. By Orlando Figes. (Metropolitan, $35.) An extraordinary look at the gulag’s impact on desperate individuals and families struggling to survive.
THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. By Saul Friedländer. (HarperCollins, $39.95.) Individual testimony and broader events are skillfully interwoven.
100 Notable Books of 2007
The Book Review has selected this list from books reviewed since the Holiday Books issue of Dec. 3, 2006.
Fiction & Poetry
THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER. By Tom Perrotta. (St. Martin’s, $24.95.) In this new novel by the author of “Little Children,” a sex-ed teacher faces off against a church bent on ridding her town of “moral decay.”
AFTER DARK. By Haruki Murakami. Translated by Jay Rubin. (Knopf, $22.95.) A tale of two sisters, one awake all night, one asleep for months.
THE BAD GIRL. By Mario Vargas Llosa. Translated by Edith Grossman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) This suspenseful novel transforms “Madame Bovary” into a vibrant exploration of the urban mores of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.
BEARING THE BODY. By Ehud Havazelet. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) In this daring first novel, a man travels to California after his brother is killed in what may have been a drug transaction.
THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT HEAVEN BEARS. By Dinaw Mengestu. (Riverhead, $22.95.) A first novel about an Ethiopian exile in Washington, D.C., evokes loss, hope, memory and the solace of friendship.
BRIDGE OF SIGHS. By Richard Russo. (Knopf, $26.95.) In his first novel since “Empire Falls,” Russo writes of a small town in New York riven by class differences and racial hatred.
THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO. By Junot Díaz. (Riverhead, $24.95.) A nerdy Dominican-American yearns to write and fall in love.
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME. By André Aciman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) Aciman’s novel of love, desire, time and memory describes a passionate affair between two young men in Italy.
CHEATING AT CANASTA. By William Trevor. (Viking, $24.95.) Trevor’s dark, worldly short stories linger in the mind long after they’re finished.
THE COLLECTED POEMS, 1956-1998. By Zbigniew Herbert. Translated by Alissa Valles. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $34.95.) Herbert’s poetry echoes the quiet insubordination of his public life.
DANCING TO “ALMENDRA.” By Mayra Montero. Translated by Edith Grossman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Fact and fiction rub together in this rhythmic story of a reporter on the trail of the Mafia, set mainly in 1950s Cuba.
EXIT GHOST. By Philip Roth. (Houghton Mifflin, $26.) In his latest novel Roth brings back Nathan Zuckerman, a protagonist whom we have known since his potent youth and who now must face his inevitable decline.
FALLING MAN. By Don DeLillo. (Scribner, $26.) Through the story of a lawyer and his estranged wife, DeLillo resurrects the world as it was on 9/11, in all its mortal dread, high anxiety and mass confusion.
FELLOW TRAVELERS. By Thomas Mallon. (Pantheon, $25.) In Mallon’s seventh novel, a State Department official navigates the anti-gay purges of the McCarthy era.
A FREE LIFE. By Ha Jin. (Pantheon, $26.) The Chinese-born author spins a tale of bravery and nobility in an American system built on risk and mutual exploitation.
THE GATHERING. By Anne Enright. (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.) An Irishwoman searches for clues to what set her brother on the path to suicide.
HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS. By J. K. Rowling. (Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic, $34.99.) Rowling ties up all the loose ends in this conclusion to her grand wizarding saga.
HOUSE LIGHTS. By Leah Hager Cohen. (Norton, $24.95.) The heroine of Cohen’s third novel abandons her tarnished parents for the seductions of her grand-mother’s life in theater.
HOUSE OF MEETINGS. By Martin Amis. (Knopf, $23.) A Russian World War II veteran posthumously acquaints his stepdaughter with his grim past of rape and violence.
IN THE COUNTRY OF MEN. By Hisham Matar. (Dial, $22.) The boy narrator of this novel, set in Libya in 1979, learns about the convoluted roots of betrayal in a totalitarian society.
THE INDIAN CLERK. By David Leavitt. (Bloomsbury, $24.95.) Leavitt explores the intricate relationship between the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy and a poor, self-taught genius from Madras, stranded in England during World War I.
KNOTS. By Nuruddin Farah. (Riverhead, $25.95.) After 20 years, a Somali woman returns home to Mogadishu from Canada, intent on reclaiming a family house from a warlord.
LATER, AT THE BAR: A Novel in Stories. By Rebecca Barry. (Simon & Schuster, $22.) The small-town regulars at Lucy’s Tavern carry their loneliness in “rough and beautiful” ways.
LET THE NORTHERN LIGHTS ERASE YOUR NAME. By Vendela Vida. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $23.95.) A young woman searches for the truth about her parentage amid the snow and ice of Lapland in this bleakly comic yet sad tale of a child’s futile struggle to be loved.
LIKE YOU’D UNDERSTAND, ANYWAY: Stories. By Jim Shepard. (Knopf, $23.) Shepard’s surprising tales feature such diverse characters as a Parisian executioner, a woman in space and two Nazi scientists searching for the yeti.
MAN GONE DOWN. By Michael Thomas. (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.) This first novel explores the fragmented personal histories behind four desperate days in a black writer’s life.
MATRIMONY. By Joshua Henkin. (Pantheon, $23.95.) Henkin follows a couple from college to their mid-30s, through crises of love and mortality.
THE MAYTREES. By Annie Dillard. (HarperCollins, $24.95.) A married couple find their way back to each other under unusual circumstances.
THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES. By Nathan Englander. (Knopf, $25.) A Jewish family is caught up in Argentina’s “Dirty War.”
MOTHERS AND SONS: Stories. By Colm Toibin. (Scribner, $24.) In this collection by the author of “The Master,” families are not so much reassuring and warm as they are settings for secrets, suspicion and missed connections.
NEXT LIFE. By Rae Armantrout. (Wesleyan University, $22.95.) Poetry that conveys the invention, the wit and the force of mind that contests all assumptions.
ON CHESIL BEACH. By Ian McEwan. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $22.) Consisting largely of a single sex scene played out on a couple’s wedding night, this seeming novel of manners is as much a horror story as any McEwan has written.
OUT STEALING HORSES. By Per Petterson. Translated by Anne Born. (Graywolf Press, $22.) In this short yet spacious Norwegian novel, an Oslo professional hopes to cure his loneliness with a plunge into solitude.
THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST. By Mohsin Hamid. (Harcourt, $22.) Hamid’s chilling second novel is narrated by a Pakistani who tells his life story to an unnamed American after the attacks of 9/11.
REMAINDER. By Tom McCarthy. (Vintage, paper, $13.95.) In this debut, a Londoner emerges from a coma and seeks to reassure himself of the genuineness of his existence.
THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES. By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A craftily autobiographical novel about a band of literary guerrillas.
SELECTED POEMS. By Derek Walcott. Edited by Edward Baugh. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) The Nobel Prize winner Walcott, who was born on St. Lucia, is a long-serving poet of exile, caught between two races and two worlds.
THE SEPTEMBERS OF SHIRAZ. By Dalia Sofer. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $24.95.) In this powerful first novel, the father of a prosperous Jewish family in Tehran is arrested shortly after the Iranian revolution.
SHORTCOMINGS. By Adrian Tomine. (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95.) The Asian-American characters in this meticulously observed comic-book novella explicitly address the way in which they handle being in a minority.
SUNSTROKE: And Other Stories. By Tessa Hadley. (Picador, paper, $13.) These resonant tales encapsulate moments of hope and humiliation in a kind of shorthand of different lives lived.
THEN WE CAME TO THE END. By Joshua Ferris. (Little, Brown, $23.99.) Layoff notices fly in Ferris’s acidly funny first novel, set in a white-collar office in the wake of the dot-com debacle.
THROW LIKE A GIRL: Stories. By Jean Thompson. (Simon & Schuster, paper, $13.) The women here are smart and strong but drawn to losers.
TIME AND MATERIALS: Poems, 1997-2005. By Robert Hass. (Ecco/Harper-Collins, $22.95.) What Hass, a former poet laureate, has lost in Californian ease he has gained in stern self-restraint.
TREE OF SMOKE. By Denis Johnson. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) The author of “Jesus’ Son” offers a soulful novel about the travails of a large cast of characters during the Vietnam War.
TWENTY GRAND: And Other Tales of Love and Money. By Rebecca Curtis. (Harper Perennial, paper, $13.95.) In this debut collection, a crisp, blunt tone propels stories both surreal and realistic.
VARIETIES OF DISTURBANCE: Stories. By Lydia Davis. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $13.) Dispensing with straight narrative, Davis microscopically examines language and thought.
THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK: Stories. By Alice Munro. (Knopf, $25.95.) This collection offers unusually explicit reflections of Munro’s life.
WHAT IS THE WHAT. The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel. By Dave Eggers. (McSweeney’s, $26.) The horrors, injustices and follies in this novel are based on the experiences of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan.
WINTERTON BLUE. By Trezza Azzopardi. (Grove, $24.) An unhappy young woman meets an even unhappier drifter.
THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION. By Michael Chabon. (HarperCollins, $26.95.) Cops, thugs, schemers, rabbis, chess fanatics and obsessives of every stripe populate this screwball, hard-boiled murder mystery set in an imagined Jewish settlement in Alaska.
Nonfiction
AGENT ZIGZAG: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal. By Ben Macintyre. (Harmony, $25.95.) The exploits of Eddie Chapman, a British criminal who became a double agent in World War II.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE: A Life. By Hugh Brogan. (Yale University, $35.) Brogan’s combative biography takes issue with Tocqueville’s misgivings about democracy.
ALICE: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, From White House Princess to Washington Power Broker. By Stacy A. Cordery. (Viking, $32.95.) A biography of Theodore Roosevelt’s shrewd, tart-tongued older daughter.
AMERICAN CREATION: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic. By Joseph J. Ellis. (Knopf, $26.95.) This history explores an underappreciated point: that this country was constructed to foster arguments, not to settle them.
THE ARGUMENT: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics. By Matt Bai. (Penguin Press, $25.95.) An exhaustive account of the Democrats’ transformative efforts, by a political reporter for The New York Times Magazine.
ARSENALS OF FOLLY: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race. By Richard Rhodes. (Knopf, $28.95.) This artful history focuses on the events leading up to the pivotal 1986 Reykjavik summit meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev.
THE ART OF POLITICAL MURDER: Who Killed the Bishop? By Francisco Goldman. (Grove, $25.) The novelist returns to Guatemala, a major inspiration for his fiction, to try to solve the real-life killing of a Roman Catholic bishop.
BROTHER, I’M DYING. By Edwidge Danticat. (Knopf, $23.95.) Danticat’s cleareyed prose and unflinching adherence to the facts conceal an undercurrent of melancholy in this memoir of her Haitian family.
CIRCLING MY MOTHER. By Mary Gordon. (Pantheon, $24.) Gordon’s deeply personal memoir focuses on the engaged and lively Catholicism of her mother, a glamorous career woman who was also an alcoholic with a body afflicted by polio.
CLEOPATRA’S NOSE: 39 Varieties of Desire. By Judith Thurman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.95.) These surgically analytic essays of cultural criticism showcase themes of loss, hunger and motherhood.
CULTURAL AMNESIA: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts. By Clive James. (Norton, $35.) Essays on 20th-century luminaries by one of Britain’s leading public intellectuals.
THE DAY OF BATTLE: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944. Volume Two of the Liberation Trilogy. By Rick Atkinson. (Holt, $35.) A celebration of the American experience in these campaigns.
THE DIANA CHRONICLES. By Tina Brown. (Doubleday, $27.50.) The former New Yorker editor details the sordid domestic drama that pitted the Princess of Wales against Britain’s royal family.
THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE: A Historical Geography From the Revolution to the First World War. By Graham Robb. (Norton, $27.95.) Robb presents France as a group of diverse regions, each with its own long history, intricate belief systems and singular customs.
DOWN THE NILE: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff. By Rosemary Mahoney. (Little, Brown, $23.99.) Mahoney juxtaposes her solo rowing journey with encounters with the Egyptians she met.
DRIVEN OUT: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans. By Jean Pfaelzer. (Random House, $27.95.) How the Chinese were brutalized and demonized in the 19th-century American West — and how they fought back.
DUE CONSIDERATIONS: Essays and Criticism. By John Updike. (Knopf, $40.) Updike’s first nonfiction collection in eight years displays breathtaking scope as well as the author’s seeming inability to write badly.
EASTER EVERYWHERE: A Memoir. By Darcey Steinke. (Bloomsbury, $24.95.) A minister’s daughter confronts her own spiritual rootlessness.
EDITH WHARTON. By Hermione Lee. (Knopf, $35.) This meticulous biography shows Wharton’s significance as a designer, decorator, gardener and traveler, as well as a writer.
THE FATHER OF ALL THINGS: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam. By Tom Bissell. (Pantheon, $25.) Bissell mixes rigorous narrative accounts of the war and emotionally powerful scenes of the distress it brought his own family.
THE FLORIST’S DAUGHTER. By Patricia Hampl. (Harcourt, $24.) In her fifth and most powerful memoir, Hampl looks hard at her relationship to her Midwestern roots as her mother lies dying in the hospital.
FORESKIN’S LAMENT: A Memoir. By Shalom Auslander. (Riverhead, $24.95.) With scathing humor and bitter irony, Auslander wrestles with his Jewish Orthodox roots.
GOMORRAH: A Personal Journey Into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System. By Roberto Saviano. Translated by Virginia Jewiss. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) This powerful work of reportage started a national conversation in Italy when it was published there last year.
THE HOUSE THAT GEORGE BUILT: With a Little Help From Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty. By Wilfrid Sheed. (Random House, $29.95.) A rich homage to Gershwin, Berlin and other masters of the swinging jazz song.
HOW DOCTORS THINK. By Jerome Groopman. (Houghton Mifflin, $26.) Groopman takes a tough-minded look at the ways in which doctors and patients interact, and at the profound problems facing modern medicine.
HOW TO READ THE BIBLE: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. By James L. Kugel. (Free Press, $35.) In this tour through the Jewish scriptures (i.e., the Old Testament, more or less), a former professor of Hebrew seeks to reclaim the Bible from the literalists and the skeptics.
HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN’T READ. By Pierre Bayard. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. (Bloomsbury, $19.95.) A French literature professor wants to assuage our guilt over the ways we actually read and discuss books.
IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone. By Rajiv Chandrasekaran. (Knopf, $25.95.) The author, a Washington Post journalist, catalogs the arrogance and ineptitude that marked America’s governance of Iraq.
THE INVISIBLE CURE: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS. By Helen Epstein. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Rigorous reporting unearths new findings among the old issues.
LEGACY OF ASHES: The History of the CIA. By Tim Weiner. (Doubleday, $27.95.) A comprehensive chronicle of the American intelligence agency, from the days of the Iron Curtain to Iraq, by a reporter for The New York Times.
LENI: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl. By Steven Bach. (Knopf, $30.) How Hitler’s favorite director made “Triumph of the Will” and convinced posterity that she didn’t know what the Nazis were up to.
LEONARD WOOLF: A Biography. By Victoria Glendinning. (Free Press, $30.) Glendinning shows Virginia Woolf’s accomplished husband as passionate, reserved and, above all, stoical.
A LIFE OF PICASSO: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932. By John Richardson. (Knopf, $40.) The third, penultimate installment in Richardson’s biography spans a dauntingly complicated time in Picasso’s life and in European history.
LITTLE HEATHENS: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression. By Mildred Armstrong Kalish. (Bantam, $22.) Kalish’s soaring love for her childhood memories saturates this memoir, which coaxes the reader into joy, wonder and even envy.
LONG WAY GONE: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. By Ishmael Beah. (Sarah Crichton/-Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) A former child warrior gives literary voice to the violence and killings he both witnessed and perpetrated during the Sierra Leone civil war.
THE NINE: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. By Jeffrey Toobin. (Doubleday, $27.95.) An erudite outsider’s account of the cloistered court’s inner workings.
THE ORDEAL OF ELIZABETH MARSH: A Woman in World History. By Linda Colley. (Pantheon, $27.50.) Colley tracks the “compulsively itinerant” Marsh across the 18th century and several continents.
PORTRAIT OF A PRIESTESS: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. By Joan Breton Connelly. (Princeton University, $39.50.) A scholar finds that religion meant power for Greek women.
RALPH ELLISON: A Biography. By Arnold Rampersad. (Knopf, $35.) Ellison was seemingly cursed by his failure to follow up “Invisible Man.”
THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the Twentieth Century. By Alex Ross. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) In his own feat of orchestration, The New Yorker’s music critic presents a history of the last century as refracted through its classical music.
SCHULZ AND PEANUTS: A Biography. By David Michaelis. (Harper/ Harper-Collins, $34.95.) Actual “Peanuts” cartoons movingly illustrate this portrait of the strip’s creator, presented here as a profoundly lonely and unhappy man.
SERVICE INCLUDED: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter. By Phoebe Damrosch. (Morrow, $24.95.) A memoir about waiting tables at the acclaimed Manhattan restaurant Per Se.
SOLDIER’S HEART: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point. By Elizabeth D. Samet. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) A civilian teacher at the Military Academy offers a significant perspective on a crucial social and political force: honor.
STANLEY: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer. By Tim Jeal. (Yale University, $38.) Of the many biographies of Henry Morton Stanley, Jeal’s, which profits from his access to an immense new trove of material, is the most complete and readable.
THE STILLBORN GOD: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. By Mark Lilla. (Knopf, $26.) With nuance and complexity, Lilla examines how we managed to separate, in a fashion, church and state.
THOMAS HARDY. By Claire Tomalin. (Penguin Press, $35.) Tomalin presents Hardy as a fascinating case study in mid-Victorian literary sociology.
TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton. By Sara Wheeler. (Random House, $27.95.) The story of the man immortalized in “Out of Africa.”
TWO LIVES: Gertrude and Alice. By Janet Malcolm. (Yale University, $25.) Sharp criticism meets playful, absorbing biography in this study of Stein and Toklas.
THE WHISPERERS: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia. By Orlando Figes. (Metropolitan, $35.) An extraordinary look at the gulag’s impact on desperate individuals and families struggling to survive.
THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. By Saul Friedländer. (HarperCollins, $39.95.) Individual testimony and broader events are skillfully interwoven.
26.11.07
Ah, the West!
It's the birthday of the naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch, (books by this author) born in Knoxville (1893), who was an English professor at Columbia University and a part-time drama critic for The Nation when he wrote a biography of Henry David Thoreau, and Thoreau's work got him interested in nature writing. So he took a sabbatical from his job and went off to spend a year in the desert outside of Tucson, Arizona. He'd lived most of his adult life in New York City, but upon arriving in the desert he said, "[It] almost seemed I had known and loved it in some previous existence." He wrote a book about it called The Desert Year (1952), and then shocked his friends and colleagues at Columbia when he announced that he was moving to Arizona permanently.
He went on to write many more books about nature and the American West, including The Voice of the Desert (1955) and The Great Chain of Life (1956), and his work had a big influence on the environmentalist movement. Joseph Wood Krutch said, "Both the cockroach and the bird could get along very well without us, although the cockroach would miss us most."
He went on to write many more books about nature and the American West, including The Voice of the Desert (1955) and The Great Chain of Life (1956), and his work had a big influence on the environmentalist movement. Joseph Wood Krutch said, "Both the cockroach and the bird could get along very well without us, although the cockroach would miss us most."
24.11.07
Wallace Stegner and the American West
THE California writer Wallace Stegner is well known to readers for novels such as "Angle of Repose" and "Crossing to Safety." But Stegner had another dimension, as an advocate for a literary West -- especially the West of mountains and desert and big sky -- not often enough heard from.The West, wrote Stegner -- who was born in 1909 in Iowa and grew up in Montana, Utah and elsewhere before settling in Northern California's Los Altos Hills until his death in 1993 -- was a place defined by its restlessness. It was a region, in other words, from which people largely moved on, with considerable literary consequences."Except in northern California," he wrote in the essay "The Sense of Place," "the West has never had a real literary outpouring, a flowering of the sort that marked New England, the Midwest, and the South. . . . [A] lot of what has been written is a literature of motion, not of place." He referred to books by Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac and pointed out that other classic Western novels, such as Norman Maclean's "A River Runs Through It," were odes to a West that had already vanished.He founded the West's most prestigious writing program, the Stegner fellowships at Stanford University in 1946, and ran it through 1971. During this period, he shifted the center of gravity of the American literary world.With the publication for the first time this month of Stegner's letters, edited by his son Page and published by Shoemaker & Hoard, his considerable ability to inspire, exhort and engage those around him -- on issues central to the West as well as many others -- is being given a new stage. Perhaps most striking to read today are his many letters that take up now-trendy environmental issues, including an eloquent and much-quoted 1960 missive that asserts, "Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases."The literary and the environmental were never far apart for Stegner. He wrote of his hope that the West would someday develop "a civilization to match its scenery," which meant not only artists and writers, but also readers, critics, journals and writing programs.His students, many of whom became dedicated writers of the West, include Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, James D. Houston, Thomas McGuane, Ken Kesey, editor Gordon Lish, Larry McMurtry and Tillie Olsen.Stegner's influence isn't limited to people who studied with him. "I think he made novels about the West less 'regional,' " said Ron Hansen, who attended Stanford post-Stegner and whose novel "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford " was recently made into a film. "He was kind of the frontiersman: By the time I came along, no one gave it much thought. He had cut down all the weeds and hacked the bramble so I could walk through.""All of us outlanders are pushing against the Northeastern cultural orientation that the arts have had for a long time," said Berry, the poet and essayist who studied with Stegner in the late '50s and returned to his native Kentucky a few years later. "I'm not a Westerner, but I'm an outlander -- I'm not from a great center of culture. I think all of us who have been in that predicament owe a debt to him."Assorted missivesIn the collection, there are letters to friends and former students filled with support and warmth. There are letters about politics (he famously turned down an award from the National Endowment for the Arts because of what he called, in a letter to PEN West, "the dominance exerted over the NEA by its reactionary congressional and administrative enemies," abetted by President George H.W. Bush).There are letters about history, one of his passions, and about his preference for realism in literature. There are several letters about a controversy -- over his use of the life and letters of writer Mary Hallock Foote in "Angle of Repose" -- that would, for some, stain his reputation.And there are letters on the literary West in which one can see him searching for a way to square his passion for the wildness and freedom of the West with his respect for cultural discipline and tradition."I grew up in a cowboy culture," he writes in a tough-minded but gentlemanly 1968 letter to Beat poet Gary Snyder, "and have been trying to get it out of my thinking and feeling ever since." Or, in a 1982 letter to Anne McCormick about James D. Houston's "Californians": "It is astonishing how few considered and searching books there are about contemporary California. . . . There is a lot more to California than kooks."Said Jackson Benson, Stegner's biographer: "He was a Westerner and very attached to the land, always going out and camping and observing nature." But his public commitment to the West came over time, first in his early novels and later through teaching and nonfiction. "As the ecological and environmental movements got going" -- Stegner served as an advisor during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations -- "he became more and more outspoken in regard to the West," Benson said. This came partly out of his sense that the West was essentially a dry and, consequently, fragile region. (Many of his thoughts on the topic are collected in the 1992 book "Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West.")The man's missionsStegner was driven, in part, by a sense that literary capital was still tied up in New York and the East.Rob Carlson, a short-story writer who runs the fiction-writing program at UC Irvine, was deeply moved by Stegner's stories about Utah, which were some of the first he'd ever read about his home state. He responded, too, to Stegner's push to level the playing field in the West, which had partly to do with education and institutions."Harvard, I think, was founded in 1636," Carlson said. "Arizona State was founded in 1959. Harvard was 260 years old before Utah was a state."But Stegner wasn't just fighting against the storied Eastern establishment."I've written about four western writers now," said Benson, a retired professor at San Diego State. "Steinbeck, Stegner, Van Tilburg Clark, and now A.B. Guthrie Jr. They all felt that western literature had been dominated for too long by what Guthrie called gun and gallop, and what Stegner called the saga of the lone horseman, and that these things were just wrong for how the West really developed. So these major writers, really, were kind of anti-mythic in their approach to western literature."Said Berry: "He tried to break through the cowboy mythology and the movie mythology of the West, to its actual history and its reality as an arid region." Stegner lamented that the myth had been dangerous for the region's culture and politics: The romance of the rugged individualist spread a culture of guns, land-grabbing and reflexive defiance of government and made collective action, like environmental efforts, difficult.Despite often being photographed alone on a field in a way that made him resemble a cross between Ronald Reagan and the Marlboro Man, Stegner was "very liberal," according to his biographer, and marched in anti-Vietnam protests before being turned off by the destructiveness of the New Left. He was, in general, unsuited to radicalism."Stegner was very concerned with the hero-ization of the outlaw," Benson said. "In one of his books, he shows that Joe Hill was just a cheap gunman who'd been made a hero by the labor movement. That made him mad."His legacyMore than 60 years after Stegner founded the Stanford program, the West has developed a body of writers that would match any region anywhere. Stegner protégé McMurtry has created a literary and cinematic Texas, McGuane a vision of Montana, and the late Abbey stands as an important, if controversial, beacon for the environmental movement.And powerful writers who never studied with Stegner have brought his old dream of a literary West to life: Cormac McCarthy in the desert southwest, Annie Proulx and Gretel Ehrlich in Wyoming, and so on.Many of those who love Stegner's work not only write, but also spread the word through teaching. "Especially in the West, we think of him as the father of the creative writing industry," said Pam Houston, who directs the writing program at UC Davis. "And of a particular kind of very physical, landscape-centered writing. In California, Steinbeck and then Stegner put the landscape on the page."Still, Houston, like many other admirers, fears that Stegner is not well known by writing students today, who seem to hold on to fewer and fewer of their predecessors (Raymond Carver, she said, is one). Benson thinks Stegner was able to change literary culture and help launch some great careers but not, in the end, change the culture itself."I don't think the West interests people unless it's a mythic West," said Benson, downbeat in part because his well-regarded 1997 Stegner biography has just gone out of print. "Or unless, for intellectuals, it relates to the environment."But Berry says Stegner's emphasis on landscape and sense of place has finally gotten a wider hearing in the last decade or so, especially in the sustainable-farming and organic-food movements. Berry also sees the shadow of Stegner in nonfiction writers such as Michael Pollan ("The Omnivore's Dilemma"), Eric Schlosser ("Fast Food Nation") and William McKibben ("Deep Economy").FulfillmentIn a 1991 lecture at the University of Colorado, Stegner spoke of the difference between the "boomers," who approach land and water "as grave robbers might approach the tomb of a pharaoh," and "stickers," who honor the land on which they settle."I think they will learn to control corporate power," Stegner said, "and to dampen the excess that has always marked their region, and will arrive at a degree of stability and a reasonably sustainable economy based on resources that they will know how to cherish and renew."Said Berry: "I think he'd have been impressed with what's been accomplished by the development of local food economies and urban agrarianism. But when you consider the backdrop of exploitation and ruin, you can see that it can't come fast enough."This flowering of consciousness, sadly, has come too late for Stegner to enjoy it.Still, said Berry: "He's very much a part of it."
23.11.07
Thoretical Physics
Geometry is all
ONE of the mysteries of the universe is why it should speak the language of mathematics. Numbers and the relationships between them are, after all, just abstract reasoning. Yet mathematics has shown itself to be particularly adept at describing both the contents of the universe and the forces that act on them. Now comes a paper which argues that one branch of the subject—geometry—could form the basis of all the laws of physics.
Physicists are an overbearing bunch. They have long sought a “theory of everything”. Such an opus would unite the fundamental forces—gravity, electromagnetism and the two forces that become apparent only at the atomic scale—with the matter on which they act, in a single, overarching framework. It would describe the universe as it existed at the moment of its creation in the Big Bang.
The nearest thing they have to this—the Standard Model of particle physics—is messy in places and partial, because it omits gravity. Three decades of effort have been expended on string theory, which includes gravity but at the expense of having the universe inelegantly sprout hidden dimensions. Other potential avenues, such as loop quantum gravity, are also proving untidy. That a theory of everything might emerge from geometry would be neat, but it is a long shot.
Nevertheless, that is what Garrett Lisi is proposing. The geometry he has been studying is that of a structure known to mathematicians as E8, which was first recognised in 1887 by Sophus Lie, a Norwegian mathematician. E8 is a monster. It has 248 dimensions and its structure took 120 years to solve. It was finally tamed earlier this year, when a group of mathematicians managed to construct a map that describes it completely.
Dr Lisi had been tinkering with some smaller geometries. Soon after reading about this map, however, he realised that the structure of E8 could be used to describe fully the laws of physics. He placed a particle (including different versions of the same entities, and using particles that describe matter and those that describe forces) on most of the 248 points of E8. Using computer simulations to manipulate the structure, he was able mathematically to generate interactions that correspond to what is seen in reality.
Using geometry to describe the world is not new. Murray Gell-Mann performed a similar trick 50 years ago in an attempt to make sense of the plethora of particles that was then emerging from experiments. He placed these on the points of a geometric structure known as SU(3), and found that, by manipulating the structure, he was able to reproduce the interactions of the real world. Dr Gell-Mann also identified points that had no known particles associated with them—and predicted the existence of particles that would fill those gaps. He was awarded the Nobel prize after they were detected. Interestingly, some 20 gaps remain in Dr Lisi's model. That suggests that 20 particles (or, at least, 20 different identities of particles) have yet to be discovered. If Dr Lisi can calculate the masses of these, he will have made predictions that can be tested experimentally.
The particles must be relatively massive, because they would otherwise have been discovered already. Detecting massive objects takes energy. (Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2, outlines how energy is equivalent to mass times the square of the speed of light.) When it is completed, the Large Hadron Collider, a machine being built at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, will create particles with greater masses than have yet been seen. It is due to start its scientific work in the summer of 2008, so a test of Dr Lisi's theory could come soon.
Although some famous physicists are championing the idea, Dr Lisi, who spends his time surfing and snowboarding and is not employed by a university or research institute, has by no means won the acceptance of all physicists. His work, which has been posted on the internet, has not yet been accepted for publication in any journal, although he has presented his ideas at research institutes and the work on which his paper is based was funded by a grant from a charitable foundation.
Certainly, there are glitches with Dr Lisi's analysis and some of the truly fundamental problems that plague more conventional work remain. Yet the theory has several appealing facets. It is elegant. It is expected to make testable predictions. Unlike some of the more complicated efforts to devise a theory of everything, this one should either succeed relatively rapidly or fail spectacularly. And that is more than can be said for three decades of work by other physicists.
ONE of the mysteries of the universe is why it should speak the language of mathematics. Numbers and the relationships between them are, after all, just abstract reasoning. Yet mathematics has shown itself to be particularly adept at describing both the contents of the universe and the forces that act on them. Now comes a paper which argues that one branch of the subject—geometry—could form the basis of all the laws of physics.
Physicists are an overbearing bunch. They have long sought a “theory of everything”. Such an opus would unite the fundamental forces—gravity, electromagnetism and the two forces that become apparent only at the atomic scale—with the matter on which they act, in a single, overarching framework. It would describe the universe as it existed at the moment of its creation in the Big Bang.
The nearest thing they have to this—the Standard Model of particle physics—is messy in places and partial, because it omits gravity. Three decades of effort have been expended on string theory, which includes gravity but at the expense of having the universe inelegantly sprout hidden dimensions. Other potential avenues, such as loop quantum gravity, are also proving untidy. That a theory of everything might emerge from geometry would be neat, but it is a long shot.
Nevertheless, that is what Garrett Lisi is proposing. The geometry he has been studying is that of a structure known to mathematicians as E8, which was first recognised in 1887 by Sophus Lie, a Norwegian mathematician. E8 is a monster. It has 248 dimensions and its structure took 120 years to solve. It was finally tamed earlier this year, when a group of mathematicians managed to construct a map that describes it completely.
Dr Lisi had been tinkering with some smaller geometries. Soon after reading about this map, however, he realised that the structure of E8 could be used to describe fully the laws of physics. He placed a particle (including different versions of the same entities, and using particles that describe matter and those that describe forces) on most of the 248 points of E8. Using computer simulations to manipulate the structure, he was able mathematically to generate interactions that correspond to what is seen in reality.
Using geometry to describe the world is not new. Murray Gell-Mann performed a similar trick 50 years ago in an attempt to make sense of the plethora of particles that was then emerging from experiments. He placed these on the points of a geometric structure known as SU(3), and found that, by manipulating the structure, he was able to reproduce the interactions of the real world. Dr Gell-Mann also identified points that had no known particles associated with them—and predicted the existence of particles that would fill those gaps. He was awarded the Nobel prize after they were detected. Interestingly, some 20 gaps remain in Dr Lisi's model. That suggests that 20 particles (or, at least, 20 different identities of particles) have yet to be discovered. If Dr Lisi can calculate the masses of these, he will have made predictions that can be tested experimentally.
The particles must be relatively massive, because they would otherwise have been discovered already. Detecting massive objects takes energy. (Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2, outlines how energy is equivalent to mass times the square of the speed of light.) When it is completed, the Large Hadron Collider, a machine being built at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, will create particles with greater masses than have yet been seen. It is due to start its scientific work in the summer of 2008, so a test of Dr Lisi's theory could come soon.
Although some famous physicists are championing the idea, Dr Lisi, who spends his time surfing and snowboarding and is not employed by a university or research institute, has by no means won the acceptance of all physicists. His work, which has been posted on the internet, has not yet been accepted for publication in any journal, although he has presented his ideas at research institutes and the work on which his paper is based was funded by a grant from a charitable foundation.
Certainly, there are glitches with Dr Lisi's analysis and some of the truly fundamental problems that plague more conventional work remain. Yet the theory has several appealing facets. It is elegant. It is expected to make testable predictions. Unlike some of the more complicated efforts to devise a theory of everything, this one should either succeed relatively rapidly or fail spectacularly. And that is more than can be said for three decades of work by other physicists.
Have a Motto
Just ask the University of Idaho. Last year it dropped its motto "From Here You Can Go Anywhere" for a new marketing theme dubbed "No Fences," with the accompanying tag line "Open Space. Open Minds." The words were intended to evoke both the romantic landscape of Idaho and the boundless intellectual opportunities at the university. It was perfect.
Except no one really liked it. So recently both slogans were scrapped in favor of "A Legacy of Leading," which has tested better with alumni and parents. A spokeswoman says the new campaign, expected to cost $900,000 a year, will be "more impactful" with the institution's various audiences.
Impactful or not, does a college really need a motto? Quick: What's the slogan of your alma mater? An extremely informal and decidedly unscientific survey indicates that many people don't know.
But mottos do matter, at least according to the branding experts who get paid to think them up. The problem, these experts say, is with slogans that try to say everything and end up saying nothing.
Most slogans play it too safe, according to Andy Valvur, a senior brand strategist for Igor, a naming and branding agency with clients like Nokia and Cisco Systems. His agency has been working with a college, which he declines to name, that wants a new motto and a new name. The college's brand identity is "too generic," he says, and fails to "capture what they do well."
Not long ago, Motto magazine came up with a list of the top 10 college mottos. Rob Frankel, whose Web site proclaims him "the best branding expert on the planet," was not impressed with the selections. For instance, the magazine gave high marks to Stanford University's slogan, "The wind of freedom blows."
"No, that slogan blows," says Mr. Frankel, author of The Revenge of Brand X. He was equally unkind to Dartmouth College's motto, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness," a quote from the Book of Isaiah. "That just sounds like failure to me," he says. Perhaps not surprisingly, Dartmouth's president, James Wright, thinks the motto is a nice combination of historical resonance and contemporary relevance. Maybe biblical allusions are just a little too risky.
Mr. Valvur and several other branding experts agree that mottos matter less for name-brand institutions. Yale University does have a motto — Lux et Veritas, or "Light and Truth" — but its slogan might as well be "Yale." The brand needs no introduction.
But less-well-known colleges need to put more emphasis on their tag lines, according to Mr. Frankel. "A slogan is just as important for an institution as it is for a product," he says.
Indeed, the slickest slogans often belong to for-profit colleges like the University of Phoenix ("Thinking Ahead") and DeVry University ("On Your Way. Today.")
After being sloganless throughout its history, the University of Texas at Austin added a motto — "What Starts Here Changes the World" — just a few years ago. Dave Holston, director of design at the university, says that it was previously a victim of "accidental branding," and that its public image lacked a clear focus. A motto, he says, is "all about how we think about ourselves, and how we communicate that to the outside world."
Writing a snappy slogan is no mean feat, according to Allen P. Adamson, author of BrandSimple: How the Best Brands Keep It Simple and Succeed. Mr. Adamson, whose clients have included Kraft Foods and Procter & Gamble, says colleges need to try something different. "Otherwise you hear it and forget it," he says. "It's best if it's tied to a story, woven into your heritage."
That's certainly true of Cornell University's motto, which was rated No. 1 by Motto. It's a statement made by the university's founder, Ezra Cornell: "I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study." Still, that mouthful leaves Scott White, who runs the Web site Brand Identity Guru, nonplussed. "Wow. Okay. I don't know what to say to that," he says. "I think that's just awful."
There are edgier slogans out there. Plenty of colleges have unofficial mottos, which make their way onto T-shirts and coffee mugs. For instance, Reed College's underground slogan is "Communism, Atheism, Free Love." Students at Swarthmore College experience "Guilt Without Sex." And then there's "Where the Hell Is Grinnell?" and "The University of Chicago: Where Fun Goes to Die."
Some older slogans fared better with brand experts contacted by The Chronicle. Bill Chiaravalle, co-author of Branding for Dummies, digs Seton Hall University's "Whatever Risk, Yet Go Forward" and Carnegie Mellon University's "My Heart Is in the Work."
"I love the old ones," he says. "They speak of the longstanding culture built over many years. There's something wonderful about those rich lines."
Which goes to show that writing a motto is more gut than science. Whether they work often depends on which "expert" you ask.
Even Mr. Frankel, who tends to disparage most slogans as the products of pathetic hacks, has a soft spot for at least one — "Fiat Lux," the motto of the University of California, which just happens to be his alma mater. It's translated "Let There Be Light."
Says Mr. Frankel, "It worked for God, so it ought to work for them."
Except no one really liked it. So recently both slogans were scrapped in favor of "A Legacy of Leading," which has tested better with alumni and parents. A spokeswoman says the new campaign, expected to cost $900,000 a year, will be "more impactful" with the institution's various audiences.
Impactful or not, does a college really need a motto? Quick: What's the slogan of your alma mater? An extremely informal and decidedly unscientific survey indicates that many people don't know.
But mottos do matter, at least according to the branding experts who get paid to think them up. The problem, these experts say, is with slogans that try to say everything and end up saying nothing.
Most slogans play it too safe, according to Andy Valvur, a senior brand strategist for Igor, a naming and branding agency with clients like Nokia and Cisco Systems. His agency has been working with a college, which he declines to name, that wants a new motto and a new name. The college's brand identity is "too generic," he says, and fails to "capture what they do well."
Not long ago, Motto magazine came up with a list of the top 10 college mottos. Rob Frankel, whose Web site proclaims him "the best branding expert on the planet," was not impressed with the selections. For instance, the magazine gave high marks to Stanford University's slogan, "The wind of freedom blows."
"No, that slogan blows," says Mr. Frankel, author of The Revenge of Brand X. He was equally unkind to Dartmouth College's motto, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness," a quote from the Book of Isaiah. "That just sounds like failure to me," he says. Perhaps not surprisingly, Dartmouth's president, James Wright, thinks the motto is a nice combination of historical resonance and contemporary relevance. Maybe biblical allusions are just a little too risky.
Mr. Valvur and several other branding experts agree that mottos matter less for name-brand institutions. Yale University does have a motto — Lux et Veritas, or "Light and Truth" — but its slogan might as well be "Yale." The brand needs no introduction.
But less-well-known colleges need to put more emphasis on their tag lines, according to Mr. Frankel. "A slogan is just as important for an institution as it is for a product," he says.
Indeed, the slickest slogans often belong to for-profit colleges like the University of Phoenix ("Thinking Ahead") and DeVry University ("On Your Way. Today.")
After being sloganless throughout its history, the University of Texas at Austin added a motto — "What Starts Here Changes the World" — just a few years ago. Dave Holston, director of design at the university, says that it was previously a victim of "accidental branding," and that its public image lacked a clear focus. A motto, he says, is "all about how we think about ourselves, and how we communicate that to the outside world."
Writing a snappy slogan is no mean feat, according to Allen P. Adamson, author of BrandSimple: How the Best Brands Keep It Simple and Succeed. Mr. Adamson, whose clients have included Kraft Foods and Procter & Gamble, says colleges need to try something different. "Otherwise you hear it and forget it," he says. "It's best if it's tied to a story, woven into your heritage."
That's certainly true of Cornell University's motto, which was rated No. 1 by Motto. It's a statement made by the university's founder, Ezra Cornell: "I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study." Still, that mouthful leaves Scott White, who runs the Web site Brand Identity Guru, nonplussed. "Wow. Okay. I don't know what to say to that," he says. "I think that's just awful."
There are edgier slogans out there. Plenty of colleges have unofficial mottos, which make their way onto T-shirts and coffee mugs. For instance, Reed College's underground slogan is "Communism, Atheism, Free Love." Students at Swarthmore College experience "Guilt Without Sex." And then there's "Where the Hell Is Grinnell?" and "The University of Chicago: Where Fun Goes to Die."
Some older slogans fared better with brand experts contacted by The Chronicle. Bill Chiaravalle, co-author of Branding for Dummies, digs Seton Hall University's "Whatever Risk, Yet Go Forward" and Carnegie Mellon University's "My Heart Is in the Work."
"I love the old ones," he says. "They speak of the longstanding culture built over many years. There's something wonderful about those rich lines."
Which goes to show that writing a motto is more gut than science. Whether they work often depends on which "expert" you ask.
Even Mr. Frankel, who tends to disparage most slogans as the products of pathetic hacks, has a soft spot for at least one — "Fiat Lux," the motto of the University of California, which just happens to be his alma mater. It's translated "Let There Be Light."
Says Mr. Frankel, "It worked for God, so it ought to work for them."
20.11.07
Monticello’s Shadows by Myron Magnet, City Journal Autumn 2007
Just simply a wonderful piece to re-familiarize ourselves with what an extraordinary individual we have in Mr. Jefferson.
Just essential reading
Just essential reading
19.11.07
EMPIRE
Like virtually all works of historical writing, Amy Chua's "Day of Empire" has more to do with the present than the past, and more to do with the writer's own society than with its purported objects of study, which range from the Persian Empire to the Tang Dynasty of imperial China and the 17th century Dutch Republic.
Chua is a professor at Yale Law School whose 2002 bestseller, "World on Fire," offered compelling evidence of the devastation inflicted on the developing world in the name of economic globalization. In particular, Chua effectively demolished the myth that so-called free markets breed democracy and progressive social change. "Day of Empire" derives from a similar impulse to resist widespread and potentially dominant dogmas of the day -- in this case, not the dogmas of neoliberal economists but those of neoconservative foreign-policy wizards and their allies.
You certainly can't complain that Chua's book lacks breadth or ambition. In fewer than 350 pages, she tries to survey the history of imperial "hyperpowers" -- beginning with Cyrus the Great of Persia in 550 B.C. and passing through Rome, China, the Mongol Empire, medieval Spain, Holland, the British Empire and Nazi Germany, with a few other stops on the road to post-9/11 America.
Meanwhile, like some knight errant in a legendary romance, she must fight off not one but two fearsome monsters along the way. On one flank, Chua struggles to spear the clanking pseudo-pragmatist argument put forward by historian Niall Ferguson and neocon think-tanker Max Boot, among others -- and all but explicitly adopted by the Bush administration -- that the United States must embrace its imperial mission and civilize the globe, by force if necessary. On the other, she seeks to banish the hollow-eyed specter of a paranoid, xenophobic society, seeking to protect its "national identity" and core "Anglo-Protestant" values, in the words of Samuel Huntington, with border fences, immigration crackdowns and English-only laws.
One of the central points in "Day of Empire" is that the positions thus represented, while they may sometimes be held by the same people, are not compatible. If Chua's reading of history is correct, imperial powers have universally thrived by accepting and accommodating cultural diversity, at least in relative terms. On the other hand, when imperial societies have turned inward, closed themselves off from the outside world and retreated into ethnic or cultural chauvinism, the end was generally in sight. Indeed, she finds in history near-inevitable progress from monster A to monster B: Nations rise to global hegemony by being extraordinarily pluralistic and tolerant, but such imperial expansion eventually reaches a tipping point, triggering internal conflict and xenophobia, which leads to imperial decline.
Chua clearly wants to argue that the United States should put down the white man's burden, abandon any imperial ambitions and back gradually away from its anguished, perched-on-the-precipice position as the world's sole hyperpower (which admittedly hasn't gone so well lately). Being a "mere superpower" in a multipolar century, potentially counterbalanced by the European Union, Russia and China, she suggests, may be a better prescription for longevity. Of course, she also wants to argue against nativism, isolationism and chauvinism, and draws appealingly on her own experiences as the American-born daughter of Filipino-Chinese immigrants.
Like much of Chua's down-with-Bush, out-of-Iraq audience, I'm inclined to agree with both of these positions. That doesn't make them necessarily connected; it's perfectly possible to hold one view without the other. Niall Ferguson, Christopher Hitchens and Thomas Friedman, for example, might all share the "liberal" notion that America's global predominance is intimately linked to our ever-shifting national tapestry of ethnicity, race and religion -- and that to embrace the first you must embrace the second. Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, on the other hand, would like to retreat from hegemony, bring our troops home from Iraq (and anywhere else they happen to be at the moment) and let the Middle East sort out its own problems -- while expelling illegal immigrants and slamming down an iron curtain along the Mexican border.
As Democratic presidential candidates are reportedly, and uncomfortably, discovering on the campaign trail, anti-immigrant fervor is not restricted to the right wing. It may be an irrational response to economic anxiety, but it is real, persistent and evidently immune to arguments about the price of restaurant meals or supermarket lettuce. (Paul remains the longest of long shots as a Republican candidate, but he's pretty much the only contender in either party who's telling Middle American voters exactly what they want to hear on both immigration and Iraq.)
In this context -- a nation waging a failing and cripplingly expensive overseas war while internally destabilized by acrimonious debate -- Chua's appeal to an alternate vision of the U.S. as "a hyperpower of opportunity, dynamism and moral force" seems like a wistful glance into the rear-view mirror rather than a look at the road ahead.
"Day of Empire" is a lively read, full of intriguing factoids and persuasive rhetoric, and the potential applicability of its case histories to America's current quandary, at least, is clear enough. Chua works hard not to oversimplify her encapsulated imperial histories, making clear, for instance, that the "tolerance" and "diversity" of the Achaemenid Persian Empire were instrumental methods of subjugating and absorbing conquered peoples, a long way from any modern conceptions of human rights or international law. Still, under Cyrus and his successor Darius the Great, the Achaemenid court became the most cosmopolitan place the world had yet seen, bringing together "Egyptian doctors, Greek scientists and Babylonian astronomers." (At its peak, Darius' realm extended as far east as India and as far west as the Danube River.) Local laws, customs and religions were widely tolerated -- most famously, Cyrus freed the Jews from their Babylonian captivity and rebuilt the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem at his own expense -- just as long as taxes and tribute kept flowing.
Apparently the empire's "official" languages included Aramaic, Elamite, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Lydian and Lycian (take that, English-only campaigners!), although Darius probably couldn't read any of them. Like most subsequent empires, Chua contends, the Achaemenid dynasty came unstuck for the simplest of reasons: It lacked adequate social and political "glue." "No common religion, language or culture bound the sprawling empire together," she writes; the Persians offered no conception of imperial identity or citizenship to conquered peoples, who were assumed to be innately inferior. Greeks, Egyptians and Phoenicians went right on being Greeks, Egyptians and Phoenicians under tolerant Persian rule, and when Darius' son Xerxes and his successors apparently turned cruel and intolerant -- demolishing Egyptian cities and despoiling Athenian shrines, according to some reports -- "the distinct peoples ... eventually turned on the empire itself."
In many ways, the Persian Empire is the cleanest and clearest instance of Chua's repeated historical narrative -- an empire is built on widespread tolerance, then crumbles when imperial glue melts under the heat of internal conflict -- which makes me a little suspicious, since it's also the case furthest away in history and the one about which scholars know the least. She dispenses with the Roman Empire in 29 pages and the British Empire in 38, making essentially the same points about both: New and highly effective ideas about glue were pioneered, whether this meant the Roman notion of widespread male citizenship or the British idea of empowering an English-speaking and English-educated elite; but in the long haul their dominions were torn apart by ethnic or religious bigotry and infighting.
Chua isn't a historian, and spends too much time apologizing for that fact. But she does have a keen eye for the telling detail in these truncated, scattershot accounts. If the Romans viewed nearly all foreigners as barbarians in need of civilizing, there is no evidence that they viewed skin color -- what we would today call race -- as important in any way. (Why would they? The light-skinned people they encountered in northern Europe were probably more primitive, on the whole, than the dark-skinned people they met in southern countries.) At least one emperor, Septimius Severus, was born in North Africa, and the son of a Berber tribesman from modern-day Algeria grew up to become Quintius Lollius Urbicus, governor of Britain and finally city prefect of Rome.
She also notes that the English-Scottish union of 1707 helped launch the British Empire's global reach, by enabling the Crown to divert the formidable entrepreneurial, intellectual and warlike energies of the impoverished people on England's northern frontier to new projects all over the world. And Chua is absolutely right that Britain's failure to successfully absorb another neighboring people (the Irish) presaged the "racial and ethnic arrogance" that fatally undermined British rule in India, proverbial jewel in the imperial crown. In what I'm afraid is probably a typical overcondensation, however, she boils the Anglo-Irish relationship down to a single issue (religious bigotry), when the truth -- if there's any truth to be found in 800 tormented and incestuous years of history -- is quite a bit more complicated.
I was excited to read Chua's bite-size accounts of other imperial civilizations about which I know next to nothing. She acerbically discusses the Tang Dynasty, which presided over the most prosperous, powerful and accomplished age of the world's most xenophobic major nation -- and was founded in the 7th century by Taizong, a northern warlord of mixed Chinese and Turkish ancestry. Once the religious and ethnic tolerance epitomized by Taizong and the later Ming Huang were abandoned in subsequent centuries, Chua argues, imperial China slipped into a long, slow, inward-looking decline that left it culturally and technologically far behind the West.
She's also fascinating on the subject of Genghis Khan and the Mongols, the "cosmopolitan barbarians" who thrived on adopting the best elements of every culture they came across, and who, despite lacking any science, engineering, agriculture or written language of their own, conquered Baghdad, Belgrade, Moscow and Damascus. For that matter, Chua does a nice job of summarizing the story of the Dutch Republic, which became a commercial (but never military) superpower almost overnight by welcoming Jews and Protestants who had been driven out of many other European countries by religious persecution -- along with their money.
But how far do you have to twist the definition before the Netherlands, a tiny European country that as late as 1579 was ruled directly by the Spanish crown, becomes an imperial "hyperpower"? Without question, the 17th century Dutch Republic played an enormous role in spreading capitalism to every available corner of the globe. It was probably the richest nation in the world -- shopkeepers were said to clothe their wives in silk, satin and jewels -- and because of that also the best educated and the most liberal. Women had extraordinary freedom. Clerical strictures on vice and pleasure were widely ignored. Amsterdam became a center of artistic and intellectual life; if Rembrandt and Vermeer were Dutch by birth, Descartes, Spinoza and John Locke all settled there.
One could add that Holland enjoyed all this prosperity precisely because it perfected the art of buying and selling, and never tried to conquer the world militarily. Indeed, the principal Dutch military venture of this period brought an end to whatever superpower status it briefly held. In 1688, the Dutch nobleman William of Orange invaded England and usurped the British throne from King James II, who was both his uncle and his father-in-law. By transplanting the Dutch navy, its Sephardic Jewish financiers and a talent pool of skilled workers to London -- along with, as Chua puts it, the Dutch "business model" of welcoming immigrants and religious minorities -- William laid the foundation for the rise of a genuine hyperpower.
What's wrong with "Day of Empire" isn't so much that Chua gets the details wrong sometimes, makes dubious arguments or oversimplifies her case studies, although I bet that happens more times than I've been able to identify. It's something more ambiguous, something harder to pin down. It seems to me that her ideas about history -- what it is, what it does and the kinds of lessons it can offer us -- are themselves a little simplistic.
In her introduction, she discusses the potential risks of "selection bias," the tendency in social science to choose only examples that support one's existing thesis, but her entire book is about selecting data points from wildly different times and places and cramming them into a one-size-fits-all interpretation. It isn't that she's wrong in observing that the Achaemenids, Romans, Tang Chinese and British built long-lasting empires by accommodating diversity in various ways and to various degrees, while the opposite approach (viz., Nazi Germany and the Holocaust) has proven strikingly unsuccessful. But that observation doesn't tell you anything except that empires, like polar bears and elephants, tend to be large and dangerous things.
Any graduate of a third-rate business school can draw up a PowerPoint display to convince you that organizations will be judged on how they manage complexity. On the other side of Chua's coin, anybody who wasn't stoned during high-school physics can tell you that all systems of energy eventually decay into entropy. It's only half facetious to say that she assembles a miscellaneous mass of more or less intriguing evidence to support those two ideas, on the way toward a brief and interesting chapter that sways from optimism to fatalism and back again while discussing the U.S. and its current dilemma.
As Chua reluctantly admits, the examples of high imperial history -- the Romans, the British, the Tang -- have little to do with the present case. Pluralistic to its core yet perennially plagued by nativist hatred, the United States has become a combination of the Achaemenid Empire, which ruled by military force but made no effort to "Persianize" its subjects, and the Dutch Republic, which employed internal policies of immigration and toleration to build a commercial powerhouse that bought chocolate low and sold it high. Presumably, the U.S. could defeat any other nation in open military conflict -- something America's opponents are now savvy enough to avoid -- and despite mounting national debt and a massive trade imbalance, it remains the world's largest economic power.
Unlike the Roman and British empires, the American imperium so ardently desired by Ferguson, Boot and others has little to offer the rest of the world beyond a cultural and ideological bill of goods that is viewed with increasing suspicion. It's a new kind of empire facing an old problem: not enough glue. Pax-Americana advocates may be eager to invade all kinds of vastly smaller nations, but the last thing they want is to extend U.S. citizenship to Iraqis or Iranians or North Koreans or Venezuelans. Inviting the best students from those countries here to study might have been acceptable in the flush years after World War II, but something tells me that wouldn't go over big right now.
Instead, our decrepit colossus lumbers around the world feeling unloved, bearing freedom's cup in one hand and an M16 rifle in the other. But the cup is made of plastic and came free with a BK Double. The American promise of a blend of democracy and capitalism that could make the whole world America-like is hardly taken seriously by anyone anymore, and it's only Americans, cosseted by a soft 'n' squishy mountain of consumer debt and buffeted by wall-to-wall media coverage of Britney's latest indiscretion, who don't know it.
Do we seriously believe the world hasn't noticed that American democracy has been eaten out from within, like a cotton boll infested with weevils, and that American consumer capitalism, cruel as it can be, bears almost no resemblance to the "free markets" inflicted on the developing world? After surveying the global wave of anti-Americanism that flowed from the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the xenophobic post-9/11 backlash within the U.S., Chua concludes that transforming the country into "an aggressively militaristic hyperpower" would be massively costly both in human and financial terms, "without any of the benefits that accrued to empires of the past."
That's a fine conclusion as far as it goes. Chua's mistake, I believe, is to assume -- naively, after all the reading she's done -- that political leaders in 21st century America still possess the will, the ability or even the power to stop the inexorable process of imperial decay.
Chua is a professor at Yale Law School whose 2002 bestseller, "World on Fire," offered compelling evidence of the devastation inflicted on the developing world in the name of economic globalization. In particular, Chua effectively demolished the myth that so-called free markets breed democracy and progressive social change. "Day of Empire" derives from a similar impulse to resist widespread and potentially dominant dogmas of the day -- in this case, not the dogmas of neoliberal economists but those of neoconservative foreign-policy wizards and their allies.
You certainly can't complain that Chua's book lacks breadth or ambition. In fewer than 350 pages, she tries to survey the history of imperial "hyperpowers" -- beginning with Cyrus the Great of Persia in 550 B.C. and passing through Rome, China, the Mongol Empire, medieval Spain, Holland, the British Empire and Nazi Germany, with a few other stops on the road to post-9/11 America.
Meanwhile, like some knight errant in a legendary romance, she must fight off not one but two fearsome monsters along the way. On one flank, Chua struggles to spear the clanking pseudo-pragmatist argument put forward by historian Niall Ferguson and neocon think-tanker Max Boot, among others -- and all but explicitly adopted by the Bush administration -- that the United States must embrace its imperial mission and civilize the globe, by force if necessary. On the other, she seeks to banish the hollow-eyed specter of a paranoid, xenophobic society, seeking to protect its "national identity" and core "Anglo-Protestant" values, in the words of Samuel Huntington, with border fences, immigration crackdowns and English-only laws.
One of the central points in "Day of Empire" is that the positions thus represented, while they may sometimes be held by the same people, are not compatible. If Chua's reading of history is correct, imperial powers have universally thrived by accepting and accommodating cultural diversity, at least in relative terms. On the other hand, when imperial societies have turned inward, closed themselves off from the outside world and retreated into ethnic or cultural chauvinism, the end was generally in sight. Indeed, she finds in history near-inevitable progress from monster A to monster B: Nations rise to global hegemony by being extraordinarily pluralistic and tolerant, but such imperial expansion eventually reaches a tipping point, triggering internal conflict and xenophobia, which leads to imperial decline.
Chua clearly wants to argue that the United States should put down the white man's burden, abandon any imperial ambitions and back gradually away from its anguished, perched-on-the-precipice position as the world's sole hyperpower (which admittedly hasn't gone so well lately). Being a "mere superpower" in a multipolar century, potentially counterbalanced by the European Union, Russia and China, she suggests, may be a better prescription for longevity. Of course, she also wants to argue against nativism, isolationism and chauvinism, and draws appealingly on her own experiences as the American-born daughter of Filipino-Chinese immigrants.
Like much of Chua's down-with-Bush, out-of-Iraq audience, I'm inclined to agree with both of these positions. That doesn't make them necessarily connected; it's perfectly possible to hold one view without the other. Niall Ferguson, Christopher Hitchens and Thomas Friedman, for example, might all share the "liberal" notion that America's global predominance is intimately linked to our ever-shifting national tapestry of ethnicity, race and religion -- and that to embrace the first you must embrace the second. Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, on the other hand, would like to retreat from hegemony, bring our troops home from Iraq (and anywhere else they happen to be at the moment) and let the Middle East sort out its own problems -- while expelling illegal immigrants and slamming down an iron curtain along the Mexican border.
As Democratic presidential candidates are reportedly, and uncomfortably, discovering on the campaign trail, anti-immigrant fervor is not restricted to the right wing. It may be an irrational response to economic anxiety, but it is real, persistent and evidently immune to arguments about the price of restaurant meals or supermarket lettuce. (Paul remains the longest of long shots as a Republican candidate, but he's pretty much the only contender in either party who's telling Middle American voters exactly what they want to hear on both immigration and Iraq.)
In this context -- a nation waging a failing and cripplingly expensive overseas war while internally destabilized by acrimonious debate -- Chua's appeal to an alternate vision of the U.S. as "a hyperpower of opportunity, dynamism and moral force" seems like a wistful glance into the rear-view mirror rather than a look at the road ahead.
"Day of Empire" is a lively read, full of intriguing factoids and persuasive rhetoric, and the potential applicability of its case histories to America's current quandary, at least, is clear enough. Chua works hard not to oversimplify her encapsulated imperial histories, making clear, for instance, that the "tolerance" and "diversity" of the Achaemenid Persian Empire were instrumental methods of subjugating and absorbing conquered peoples, a long way from any modern conceptions of human rights or international law. Still, under Cyrus and his successor Darius the Great, the Achaemenid court became the most cosmopolitan place the world had yet seen, bringing together "Egyptian doctors, Greek scientists and Babylonian astronomers." (At its peak, Darius' realm extended as far east as India and as far west as the Danube River.) Local laws, customs and religions were widely tolerated -- most famously, Cyrus freed the Jews from their Babylonian captivity and rebuilt the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem at his own expense -- just as long as taxes and tribute kept flowing.
Apparently the empire's "official" languages included Aramaic, Elamite, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Lydian and Lycian (take that, English-only campaigners!), although Darius probably couldn't read any of them. Like most subsequent empires, Chua contends, the Achaemenid dynasty came unstuck for the simplest of reasons: It lacked adequate social and political "glue." "No common religion, language or culture bound the sprawling empire together," she writes; the Persians offered no conception of imperial identity or citizenship to conquered peoples, who were assumed to be innately inferior. Greeks, Egyptians and Phoenicians went right on being Greeks, Egyptians and Phoenicians under tolerant Persian rule, and when Darius' son Xerxes and his successors apparently turned cruel and intolerant -- demolishing Egyptian cities and despoiling Athenian shrines, according to some reports -- "the distinct peoples ... eventually turned on the empire itself."
In many ways, the Persian Empire is the cleanest and clearest instance of Chua's repeated historical narrative -- an empire is built on widespread tolerance, then crumbles when imperial glue melts under the heat of internal conflict -- which makes me a little suspicious, since it's also the case furthest away in history and the one about which scholars know the least. She dispenses with the Roman Empire in 29 pages and the British Empire in 38, making essentially the same points about both: New and highly effective ideas about glue were pioneered, whether this meant the Roman notion of widespread male citizenship or the British idea of empowering an English-speaking and English-educated elite; but in the long haul their dominions were torn apart by ethnic or religious bigotry and infighting.
Chua isn't a historian, and spends too much time apologizing for that fact. But she does have a keen eye for the telling detail in these truncated, scattershot accounts. If the Romans viewed nearly all foreigners as barbarians in need of civilizing, there is no evidence that they viewed skin color -- what we would today call race -- as important in any way. (Why would they? The light-skinned people they encountered in northern Europe were probably more primitive, on the whole, than the dark-skinned people they met in southern countries.) At least one emperor, Septimius Severus, was born in North Africa, and the son of a Berber tribesman from modern-day Algeria grew up to become Quintius Lollius Urbicus, governor of Britain and finally city prefect of Rome.
She also notes that the English-Scottish union of 1707 helped launch the British Empire's global reach, by enabling the Crown to divert the formidable entrepreneurial, intellectual and warlike energies of the impoverished people on England's northern frontier to new projects all over the world. And Chua is absolutely right that Britain's failure to successfully absorb another neighboring people (the Irish) presaged the "racial and ethnic arrogance" that fatally undermined British rule in India, proverbial jewel in the imperial crown. In what I'm afraid is probably a typical overcondensation, however, she boils the Anglo-Irish relationship down to a single issue (religious bigotry), when the truth -- if there's any truth to be found in 800 tormented and incestuous years of history -- is quite a bit more complicated.
I was excited to read Chua's bite-size accounts of other imperial civilizations about which I know next to nothing. She acerbically discusses the Tang Dynasty, which presided over the most prosperous, powerful and accomplished age of the world's most xenophobic major nation -- and was founded in the 7th century by Taizong, a northern warlord of mixed Chinese and Turkish ancestry. Once the religious and ethnic tolerance epitomized by Taizong and the later Ming Huang were abandoned in subsequent centuries, Chua argues, imperial China slipped into a long, slow, inward-looking decline that left it culturally and technologically far behind the West.
She's also fascinating on the subject of Genghis Khan and the Mongols, the "cosmopolitan barbarians" who thrived on adopting the best elements of every culture they came across, and who, despite lacking any science, engineering, agriculture or written language of their own, conquered Baghdad, Belgrade, Moscow and Damascus. For that matter, Chua does a nice job of summarizing the story of the Dutch Republic, which became a commercial (but never military) superpower almost overnight by welcoming Jews and Protestants who had been driven out of many other European countries by religious persecution -- along with their money.
But how far do you have to twist the definition before the Netherlands, a tiny European country that as late as 1579 was ruled directly by the Spanish crown, becomes an imperial "hyperpower"? Without question, the 17th century Dutch Republic played an enormous role in spreading capitalism to every available corner of the globe. It was probably the richest nation in the world -- shopkeepers were said to clothe their wives in silk, satin and jewels -- and because of that also the best educated and the most liberal. Women had extraordinary freedom. Clerical strictures on vice and pleasure were widely ignored. Amsterdam became a center of artistic and intellectual life; if Rembrandt and Vermeer were Dutch by birth, Descartes, Spinoza and John Locke all settled there.
One could add that Holland enjoyed all this prosperity precisely because it perfected the art of buying and selling, and never tried to conquer the world militarily. Indeed, the principal Dutch military venture of this period brought an end to whatever superpower status it briefly held. In 1688, the Dutch nobleman William of Orange invaded England and usurped the British throne from King James II, who was both his uncle and his father-in-law. By transplanting the Dutch navy, its Sephardic Jewish financiers and a talent pool of skilled workers to London -- along with, as Chua puts it, the Dutch "business model" of welcoming immigrants and religious minorities -- William laid the foundation for the rise of a genuine hyperpower.
What's wrong with "Day of Empire" isn't so much that Chua gets the details wrong sometimes, makes dubious arguments or oversimplifies her case studies, although I bet that happens more times than I've been able to identify. It's something more ambiguous, something harder to pin down. It seems to me that her ideas about history -- what it is, what it does and the kinds of lessons it can offer us -- are themselves a little simplistic.
In her introduction, she discusses the potential risks of "selection bias," the tendency in social science to choose only examples that support one's existing thesis, but her entire book is about selecting data points from wildly different times and places and cramming them into a one-size-fits-all interpretation. It isn't that she's wrong in observing that the Achaemenids, Romans, Tang Chinese and British built long-lasting empires by accommodating diversity in various ways and to various degrees, while the opposite approach (viz., Nazi Germany and the Holocaust) has proven strikingly unsuccessful. But that observation doesn't tell you anything except that empires, like polar bears and elephants, tend to be large and dangerous things.
Any graduate of a third-rate business school can draw up a PowerPoint display to convince you that organizations will be judged on how they manage complexity. On the other side of Chua's coin, anybody who wasn't stoned during high-school physics can tell you that all systems of energy eventually decay into entropy. It's only half facetious to say that she assembles a miscellaneous mass of more or less intriguing evidence to support those two ideas, on the way toward a brief and interesting chapter that sways from optimism to fatalism and back again while discussing the U.S. and its current dilemma.
As Chua reluctantly admits, the examples of high imperial history -- the Romans, the British, the Tang -- have little to do with the present case. Pluralistic to its core yet perennially plagued by nativist hatred, the United States has become a combination of the Achaemenid Empire, which ruled by military force but made no effort to "Persianize" its subjects, and the Dutch Republic, which employed internal policies of immigration and toleration to build a commercial powerhouse that bought chocolate low and sold it high. Presumably, the U.S. could defeat any other nation in open military conflict -- something America's opponents are now savvy enough to avoid -- and despite mounting national debt and a massive trade imbalance, it remains the world's largest economic power.
Unlike the Roman and British empires, the American imperium so ardently desired by Ferguson, Boot and others has little to offer the rest of the world beyond a cultural and ideological bill of goods that is viewed with increasing suspicion. It's a new kind of empire facing an old problem: not enough glue. Pax-Americana advocates may be eager to invade all kinds of vastly smaller nations, but the last thing they want is to extend U.S. citizenship to Iraqis or Iranians or North Koreans or Venezuelans. Inviting the best students from those countries here to study might have been acceptable in the flush years after World War II, but something tells me that wouldn't go over big right now.
Instead, our decrepit colossus lumbers around the world feeling unloved, bearing freedom's cup in one hand and an M16 rifle in the other. But the cup is made of plastic and came free with a BK Double. The American promise of a blend of democracy and capitalism that could make the whole world America-like is hardly taken seriously by anyone anymore, and it's only Americans, cosseted by a soft 'n' squishy mountain of consumer debt and buffeted by wall-to-wall media coverage of Britney's latest indiscretion, who don't know it.
Do we seriously believe the world hasn't noticed that American democracy has been eaten out from within, like a cotton boll infested with weevils, and that American consumer capitalism, cruel as it can be, bears almost no resemblance to the "free markets" inflicted on the developing world? After surveying the global wave of anti-Americanism that flowed from the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the xenophobic post-9/11 backlash within the U.S., Chua concludes that transforming the country into "an aggressively militaristic hyperpower" would be massively costly both in human and financial terms, "without any of the benefits that accrued to empires of the past."
That's a fine conclusion as far as it goes. Chua's mistake, I believe, is to assume -- naively, after all the reading she's done -- that political leaders in 21st century America still possess the will, the ability or even the power to stop the inexorable process of imperial decay.
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