About Me
- Xerxes
- New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
- Admire John McPhee, Bill Bryson, David Remnick, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr and James Martin (and most open and curious minds)
31.12.07
2007 R.I.P.
It was a year in which a certain type of person died — Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Norman Mailer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jean Baudrillard. These were intellectually pungent, culturally potent individuals, angrily dismissed as often as they were called “great”, “seminal” or “genius”. And with Luciano Pavarotti dead, another type of greatness vanished from the planet.
There were others who did not die but, somehow, faded. After a glorious renaissance in the 1990s, with Sabbath’s Theater, American Pastoral and I Married a Communist, Philip Roth began to falter with The Dying Animal and Everyman. After the slightly dodgy Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo produced the not very interesting Falling Man, about 9/11. Francis Ford Coppola, maestro of The Godfather, The Conversation and, greatest of all, Apocalypse Now, produced Youth Without Youth, which is, by all accounts, terrible. Having made the dismal Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino released Death Proof — not so much a film as an act of pathological self-indulgence — and convinced even some of his most devoted fans that the game was up.
Something happened in 2007, something ended. Old gods stumbled and fell. New ones sprang up. But they sprang up in their thousands. That’s the point these days.
Technology, hype and the sheer profligacy of the arts when confronted with a large, hungry and wealthy audience have created a climate of excess — just too many artists, too much money, too many works and too much noise. Who knows who, now, is great? Even if greatness existed, how would we find it? Do we want greatness, or would we simply prefer choice?
The further, more troubling question is, what is greatness? The climate of excess is also a climate of uncertainty and tribal dispute. When Bergman died, many said he was just a solemn old bore — a startling, almost unbelievable dismissal of one of cinema’s greatest artists. As with leaders of the Lib Dems, in the arts, when you’re out, you’re out. And artists are being pushed in and out all the time by a cultural hype industry that has increasingly infected the ranks of what should be the independent-minded. The carefully cultivated “buzz” about some artists can be so effective that I — like, I am sure, you — actually find myself questioning my own intuitions or, in extreme cases, sanity. And the “buzz” feeds on change, novelty. The very idea of an old master, an artist who endures and grows, is rapidly becoming incomprehensible.
In an attempt to counter this trend, I shall now attempt to pluck greatness from the ocean of money and hype. The intention is emphatically not to pull the usual new-year stunt of identifying bright young things. You have a public-relations industry to do that for you. Instead, I shall simply try to identify great artists, and to say something of the context of their greatness. I haven’t been able to do this alone. I have taken advice, I have consulted. What follows is, therefore, a compilation based on deep wisdom, blind prejudice and sound counsel.
As a mass-market product, the novel is dominated by women. Women, overwhelmingly, buy novels; and, as a result, women write them. Chick lit and Aga sagas are now distinct and, seemingly, enduring fictional forms. The “great” novel, however, is dominated by men. Ask any collection of reasonably well-read people who are the great novelists of our time and the chances are they will reel off John Updike, Roth and, probably, DeLillo as if they were one gigantic genius of fiction. “They,” says Ian McEwan, “are the gods.”
This is not exactly wrong, but it is oppressive. There’s something a bit testosterone-laden about this view of the great novel. Mailer was probably the most extreme example of writer as big, tough guy, but, with the exception of Updike, it is an attitude that infects all of McEwan’s pantheon, as well as our own dear Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie, both of whom aspire to join the gang. I find this odd. Nobody is preoccupied with the masculinity of Tolstoy or Dickens. In both cases, an excess of maleness would be seen as a limitation Now, though, great-novel writing is regarded as a pursuit as male as heading out to the woods and shooting stuff. I suspect that the desire to ensure the continuance of this butch legacy lies behind the mass adulation being accorded to the American writer Denis Johnson for his novel Tree of Smoke.
One effect of this — on me, at least — is that, having bought into this view, I fell into a kind of literary-critical slumber. I have, over the past couple of years, been violently shaken awake. As a result, I can now announce with total confidence that the two greatest living novelists are women: Marilynne Robinson and Shirley Hazzard. Robinson has written two novels — Housekeeping and Gilead — and a collection of essays, The Death of Adam. They are all shattering, as psychologically profound as they are morally serious. She has a new novel out next year, Home. Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, according to one of my advisers, is “the most perfect novel written in the past 100 years”. I have just read it, and he may well be right. The Great Fire runs it pretty close; in fact, everything she writes is suffused with extraordinary beauty and almost unbearable insight. She is the greatest of all writers on love. Both
Robinson and Hazzard have had their awards and successes, but both are quiet, unhyped and deadly serious. And they’re not men.
The death of Baudrillard left a gaping hole in the cultural landscape. Suddenly, we lack a great POFT — a Pointlessly Obscure French Thinker. Baudrillard, like Kristeva, Foucault, Lacan and many others, was a poseur and rhetorician. But, like some of the others, though certainly not Foucault, he was also a very brilliant man. His insights into the constructed nature of contemporary reality were, while usually buried beneath pointless obscurity, scintillating. If the French could shake off the posturing that has disfigured their post-war thought, they could perhaps recover their role as the great essayists of the world. We need a new Pascal, a new Montaigne.
Well, perhaps they are on their way. Pierre Manent is a philosopher whose book The City of Man is both Augustinian — theologically rooted in the tradition of the benign community, neither modernist individualism nor the abject Maoism of Sartre (the title refers back to Augustine’s City of God) — and liberal. He worked with Raymond Aron, one of the great opponents of the savage totalitarianism of post-war French thought. Manent is not a poseur or rhetorician. He is a thinker in the great French tradition. You may well hear a lot more of him in future. He divides his time between Paris and Boston, and has been tipped as the next editor of The New York Review of Books, one of the world’s supreme intellectual gatekeeping positions.
Michel Onfray is a militant atheist. But, unlike the Anglo-American tribe of MAs, he knows intellectual history. His book In Defence of Atheism is a serious contender; it is also clear and unposey. So, there may be no new POFT, and France may be regaining her intellectual equilibrium.
The deaths of Antonioni and Bergman drew painful attention to the lack of great European auteurs. Only Pedro Almodovar can be said to have fully inherited this role. Italian cinema is dead. French cinema is frequently good, but, on the whole, a pale shadow of its former self. Meanwhile, the east has risen in the mighty form of Wong Kar Wai. In the Mood for Love and 2046 display a feeling for film as pure, subtle and profound as that of Tarkovsky, Ford or Kurosawa. Great? Undoubtedly.Among the Americans, Scorsese’s greatness is uncontestable and well known. I would add Terrence Malick. His Badlands and Days of Heaven, from the 1970s, were masterpieces, and The Thin Red Line, of 1998, though strangely underrated, was perhaps the second best war film of our time, after Apocalypse Now. In 2005, The New World made little impression. It was, however, magical, a story told with delicacy and wonder. Malick, like Wong, can send a shiver down your spine with a singleshot or an actor’s glance. To these I would add the Coen brothers, who, in their body of weird films – Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski – have created both their own genre and their own critical language. Their latest, No Country for Old Men, due out here next year, is, I have repeatedly been told, wonderful. If the Coens are great, then it is because of their astonishing and unique tone.
Music is in crisis, as downloads take over from CDs and record-company profits slump. The old dispensation in which rock and pop supported the classical catalogue is dead. Classical artists are under pressure to deliver the goods as quickly as pop stars. Young talent can be destroyed by this pressure. Cultural pressure can have the same effect. The Chinese pianist Lang Lang was regarded as potentially the greatest of his time. Now, he has sunk into a kind of state-sponsored stardom, an asset of the 2008 Olympics, and is widely critically dismissed. So, a great pianist? Mitsuko Uchida, who has provided me with my most moving Schubert experiences.
Elsewhere, though, with Pavarotti dead, who will replace him as the superstar tenor? Nobody, says my colleague Stephen Pettitt. Greatness is by its nature unique – we don’t want another Pav. This is wise. Pettitt also points out that, if we are simply looking for great singers, we don’t need to leave the country. Ian Bostridge is a wonderful tenor. He is, unlike the Pav, thin; and, also unlike the Pav, intellectual in his approach. But the one everybody nominates for greatness is the oratorio specialist Mark Padmore. “He,” says Pettitt, “has everything.”
Poetry, our national art, is, of course, dead for the common reader. I shall say again, as I have shouted repeatedly into deaf ears for three decades, that John Ashbery is the greatest living poet in English. But now I shall add a contender – Geoffrey Hill. For some reason, I have been avoiding this man for years. There is something forbidding about him. Finally, I have reached the foothills of this poetic mountain, and, yes, I think he’s up there. Accidentally, via my blog – long story – I introduced him to Ashbery, and he seems to think so too.
The visual arts suffer most from the hype industry. With Russians flooding into London to buy anything anybody says is art, values and reputations are inflated beyond reason. When the Turner prize goes to Mark Wallinger – an otherwise gifted artist – for, among other things, his nonsensical and politically corrupt installation State Britain, it is clear that the old conceptualist axis formed by Saatchi, then Serota is not only dead, but smelly and decomposing.
I’m reluctant to dip my toe into these stagnant waters, but, okay: there is a quiet man who lives in the north. He is incapable of self-promotion, and so, but for a few minor works in the Tate, he is ignored. Many people think he is the finest painter in Britain. Many people may be right. He’s called William Tillyer.
Check him out. Oh, and have a really serious new year. As ever, only great artists can make this happen. They are like Geoffrey Hill’s The Jumping Boy – “He leaps because he has serious/joy in leaping.” And 2008 is a leap year.
There were others who did not die but, somehow, faded. After a glorious renaissance in the 1990s, with Sabbath’s Theater, American Pastoral and I Married a Communist, Philip Roth began to falter with The Dying Animal and Everyman. After the slightly dodgy Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo produced the not very interesting Falling Man, about 9/11. Francis Ford Coppola, maestro of The Godfather, The Conversation and, greatest of all, Apocalypse Now, produced Youth Without Youth, which is, by all accounts, terrible. Having made the dismal Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino released Death Proof — not so much a film as an act of pathological self-indulgence — and convinced even some of his most devoted fans that the game was up.
Something happened in 2007, something ended. Old gods stumbled and fell. New ones sprang up. But they sprang up in their thousands. That’s the point these days.
Technology, hype and the sheer profligacy of the arts when confronted with a large, hungry and wealthy audience have created a climate of excess — just too many artists, too much money, too many works and too much noise. Who knows who, now, is great? Even if greatness existed, how would we find it? Do we want greatness, or would we simply prefer choice?
The further, more troubling question is, what is greatness? The climate of excess is also a climate of uncertainty and tribal dispute. When Bergman died, many said he was just a solemn old bore — a startling, almost unbelievable dismissal of one of cinema’s greatest artists. As with leaders of the Lib Dems, in the arts, when you’re out, you’re out. And artists are being pushed in and out all the time by a cultural hype industry that has increasingly infected the ranks of what should be the independent-minded. The carefully cultivated “buzz” about some artists can be so effective that I — like, I am sure, you — actually find myself questioning my own intuitions or, in extreme cases, sanity. And the “buzz” feeds on change, novelty. The very idea of an old master, an artist who endures and grows, is rapidly becoming incomprehensible.
In an attempt to counter this trend, I shall now attempt to pluck greatness from the ocean of money and hype. The intention is emphatically not to pull the usual new-year stunt of identifying bright young things. You have a public-relations industry to do that for you. Instead, I shall simply try to identify great artists, and to say something of the context of their greatness. I haven’t been able to do this alone. I have taken advice, I have consulted. What follows is, therefore, a compilation based on deep wisdom, blind prejudice and sound counsel.
As a mass-market product, the novel is dominated by women. Women, overwhelmingly, buy novels; and, as a result, women write them. Chick lit and Aga sagas are now distinct and, seemingly, enduring fictional forms. The “great” novel, however, is dominated by men. Ask any collection of reasonably well-read people who are the great novelists of our time and the chances are they will reel off John Updike, Roth and, probably, DeLillo as if they were one gigantic genius of fiction. “They,” says Ian McEwan, “are the gods.”
This is not exactly wrong, but it is oppressive. There’s something a bit testosterone-laden about this view of the great novel. Mailer was probably the most extreme example of writer as big, tough guy, but, with the exception of Updike, it is an attitude that infects all of McEwan’s pantheon, as well as our own dear Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie, both of whom aspire to join the gang. I find this odd. Nobody is preoccupied with the masculinity of Tolstoy or Dickens. In both cases, an excess of maleness would be seen as a limitation Now, though, great-novel writing is regarded as a pursuit as male as heading out to the woods and shooting stuff. I suspect that the desire to ensure the continuance of this butch legacy lies behind the mass adulation being accorded to the American writer Denis Johnson for his novel Tree of Smoke.
One effect of this — on me, at least — is that, having bought into this view, I fell into a kind of literary-critical slumber. I have, over the past couple of years, been violently shaken awake. As a result, I can now announce with total confidence that the two greatest living novelists are women: Marilynne Robinson and Shirley Hazzard. Robinson has written two novels — Housekeeping and Gilead — and a collection of essays, The Death of Adam. They are all shattering, as psychologically profound as they are morally serious. She has a new novel out next year, Home. Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, according to one of my advisers, is “the most perfect novel written in the past 100 years”. I have just read it, and he may well be right. The Great Fire runs it pretty close; in fact, everything she writes is suffused with extraordinary beauty and almost unbearable insight. She is the greatest of all writers on love. Both
Robinson and Hazzard have had their awards and successes, but both are quiet, unhyped and deadly serious. And they’re not men.
The death of Baudrillard left a gaping hole in the cultural landscape. Suddenly, we lack a great POFT — a Pointlessly Obscure French Thinker. Baudrillard, like Kristeva, Foucault, Lacan and many others, was a poseur and rhetorician. But, like some of the others, though certainly not Foucault, he was also a very brilliant man. His insights into the constructed nature of contemporary reality were, while usually buried beneath pointless obscurity, scintillating. If the French could shake off the posturing that has disfigured their post-war thought, they could perhaps recover their role as the great essayists of the world. We need a new Pascal, a new Montaigne.
Well, perhaps they are on their way. Pierre Manent is a philosopher whose book The City of Man is both Augustinian — theologically rooted in the tradition of the benign community, neither modernist individualism nor the abject Maoism of Sartre (the title refers back to Augustine’s City of God) — and liberal. He worked with Raymond Aron, one of the great opponents of the savage totalitarianism of post-war French thought. Manent is not a poseur or rhetorician. He is a thinker in the great French tradition. You may well hear a lot more of him in future. He divides his time between Paris and Boston, and has been tipped as the next editor of The New York Review of Books, one of the world’s supreme intellectual gatekeeping positions.
Michel Onfray is a militant atheist. But, unlike the Anglo-American tribe of MAs, he knows intellectual history. His book In Defence of Atheism is a serious contender; it is also clear and unposey. So, there may be no new POFT, and France may be regaining her intellectual equilibrium.
The deaths of Antonioni and Bergman drew painful attention to the lack of great European auteurs. Only Pedro Almodovar can be said to have fully inherited this role. Italian cinema is dead. French cinema is frequently good, but, on the whole, a pale shadow of its former self. Meanwhile, the east has risen in the mighty form of Wong Kar Wai. In the Mood for Love and 2046 display a feeling for film as pure, subtle and profound as that of Tarkovsky, Ford or Kurosawa. Great? Undoubtedly.Among the Americans, Scorsese’s greatness is uncontestable and well known. I would add Terrence Malick. His Badlands and Days of Heaven, from the 1970s, were masterpieces, and The Thin Red Line, of 1998, though strangely underrated, was perhaps the second best war film of our time, after Apocalypse Now. In 2005, The New World made little impression. It was, however, magical, a story told with delicacy and wonder. Malick, like Wong, can send a shiver down your spine with a singleshot or an actor’s glance. To these I would add the Coen brothers, who, in their body of weird films – Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski – have created both their own genre and their own critical language. Their latest, No Country for Old Men, due out here next year, is, I have repeatedly been told, wonderful. If the Coens are great, then it is because of their astonishing and unique tone.
Music is in crisis, as downloads take over from CDs and record-company profits slump. The old dispensation in which rock and pop supported the classical catalogue is dead. Classical artists are under pressure to deliver the goods as quickly as pop stars. Young talent can be destroyed by this pressure. Cultural pressure can have the same effect. The Chinese pianist Lang Lang was regarded as potentially the greatest of his time. Now, he has sunk into a kind of state-sponsored stardom, an asset of the 2008 Olympics, and is widely critically dismissed. So, a great pianist? Mitsuko Uchida, who has provided me with my most moving Schubert experiences.
Elsewhere, though, with Pavarotti dead, who will replace him as the superstar tenor? Nobody, says my colleague Stephen Pettitt. Greatness is by its nature unique – we don’t want another Pav. This is wise. Pettitt also points out that, if we are simply looking for great singers, we don’t need to leave the country. Ian Bostridge is a wonderful tenor. He is, unlike the Pav, thin; and, also unlike the Pav, intellectual in his approach. But the one everybody nominates for greatness is the oratorio specialist Mark Padmore. “He,” says Pettitt, “has everything.”
Poetry, our national art, is, of course, dead for the common reader. I shall say again, as I have shouted repeatedly into deaf ears for three decades, that John Ashbery is the greatest living poet in English. But now I shall add a contender – Geoffrey Hill. For some reason, I have been avoiding this man for years. There is something forbidding about him. Finally, I have reached the foothills of this poetic mountain, and, yes, I think he’s up there. Accidentally, via my blog – long story – I introduced him to Ashbery, and he seems to think so too.
The visual arts suffer most from the hype industry. With Russians flooding into London to buy anything anybody says is art, values and reputations are inflated beyond reason. When the Turner prize goes to Mark Wallinger – an otherwise gifted artist – for, among other things, his nonsensical and politically corrupt installation State Britain, it is clear that the old conceptualist axis formed by Saatchi, then Serota is not only dead, but smelly and decomposing.
I’m reluctant to dip my toe into these stagnant waters, but, okay: there is a quiet man who lives in the north. He is incapable of self-promotion, and so, but for a few minor works in the Tate, he is ignored. Many people think he is the finest painter in Britain. Many people may be right. He’s called William Tillyer.
Check him out. Oh, and have a really serious new year. As ever, only great artists can make this happen. They are like Geoffrey Hill’s The Jumping Boy – “He leaps because he has serious/joy in leaping.” And 2008 is a leap year.
Thanks Grey Lady
There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.
It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.
The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.
Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.
In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.
We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.
Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.
The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.
Hundreds of men, swept up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, were thrown into a prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, so that the White House could claim they were beyond the reach of American laws. Prisoners are held there with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.
In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where “high-value detainees” were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that “experts” could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.
The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.
These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.
We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.
It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.
The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.
Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.
In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.
We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.
Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.
The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.
Hundreds of men, swept up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, were thrown into a prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, so that the White House could claim they were beyond the reach of American laws. Prisoners are held there with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.
In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where “high-value detainees” were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that “experts” could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.
The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.
These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.
We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.
Noel Coward
"Even the youngest of us will know, in fifty years' time," Kenneth Tynan wrote a little over fifty years ago, "exactly what we mean by 'a very Noël Coward sort of person.'" Tynan himself was just twenty-six when he made this confident pronouncement, and although it's possible if not indeed probable that "a very Noël Coward sort of person" doesn't signify a great deal to most twenty-six-year-olds today, some of them—and certainly most people twice their age—would know precisely what kind of person Tynan was talking about. That person, we know, would be witty and amusing, with an epigram on his lips, a cocktail in one perfectly manicured hand, and a lighted ciga-rette in the other; he would, moreover, be impeccably and elegantly dressed, and would always manage to be just as impeccably, and perhaps a trifle theatrically, posed whenever he appeared in public.
He would, in fact, look just like the striking Cecil Beaton portrait of Coward that appears on the cover of Barry Day's rich new collection of Coward's letters: an image of "the Master" in dramatic profile, natty in a perfectly cut suit, holding a cigarette aloof from his lips as if he were just about to pronounce, or maybe had just pronounced, one of the bons mots for which he and his plays were so extraordinarily famous. It's an image that sums up what most people during most of the twentieth century thought urbane sophistication looked like; and yet to those who know Coward's life and work well, the amused and amusing persona that he perfected in the 1920s, when he first became famous, was just part of the story—"a nice façade to sit behind," as Coward wrote of a character based on Somerset Maugham in his 1935 play Point Valaine, "but a trifle bleak." (Both the life and work can be known in tremendous detail at this point: apart from an excellent biography by Sheridan Morley and no fewer than three volumes of autobiography by Coward himself, there are by now memoirs by friends and former lovers, his shrewd and funny Diaries, edited by Morley together with Coward's longtime lover, Graham Payn, and numerous editions of his plays and songs, a dazzling seven of which were the handiwork of Barry Day, the Coward authority who has edited the present collection of Letters.)
Coward himself never succumbed to that bleakness. For all that he would come to be known for being (as someone says in his 1930 classic Private Lives) "jagged with sophistication," the key to his phenomenal productivity and equally phenomenal emotional stability throughout his life may well have been that he managed to retain the stolid values of the decidedly unsophisticated, lower-middle class suburb where he was born (as his given name suggests) at Christmastime 1899, the second son of a piano-salesman father and a strong-willed mother who liked to reminisce about her family's once-grander circumstances. Pragmatic, hardworking, admirably without illusions about either his strengths or his defects, generous, unabashedly sentimental and patriotic, he was that rarity among people who achieve dazzling success very early on in life (as he did at twenty-four, with his smash-hit cocaine-addiction melodrama The Vortex): someone who managed to withstand, for the most part, the powerful aura of his own public persona.
Hence although Day's meticulous and artfully structured edition of the Letters will inevitably be read by those eager to be dazzled by refractions of the jagged sophistication of Coward's busy social life ("I had a tremendous party given for me last night and it was rather fun. George Gershwin played and we all carried on like one o'clock"), its greatest significance may well lie in the extent to which its content demonstrates the temperamental qualities—unanticipated, perhaps, by those searching here for "a very Noël Coward sort of person"—of humaneness, tenderness, and a kind of Edwardian sentimentality that, as I have argued in these pages,[*] both underlie and give emotional texture to the surface cleverness in so much of his work. (Coward himself understood the way in which, just below the dazzlingly urbane repartee, there lurked the Teddington native's unerring sense for what ordinary people were interested in: "I know all about my facility for writing adroit swift dialogue and hitting unimportant but popular nails on the head," he wrote to T.E. Lawrence, one of his many illustrious correspondents, in 1931.) Among the greatest pleasures of this collection are, if anything, those moments when we get to see Mrs. Violet Veitch Coward's son intersect with that "very Noël Coward sort of person," as for instance in this 1954 letter to the Lunts about a production of his new musical version of Lady Windermere's Fan:
I have been having a terrible time with After the Ball, mainly on account of Mary Ellis's singing voice which, to coin a phrase, sounds like someone fucking the cat. I know that your sense of the urbane, sophisticated Coward wit will appreciate this simile.
Coward very rarely confused himself with "Coward."
Day's edition of the Letters will add nothing new to the ample record of Coward's life, although it is interesting to see the life through the letters, which are inevitably more spontaneous, and written with less of an eye on posterity, than the entries in the Diaries. A nice continuity through the many years covered here—the first letter dates to 1906, the last to 1970 when Coward received his scandalously delayed knighthood—is provided by the fact that an astonishing number of them were written to the playwright's mother, who throughout her long life was the recipient of weekly missives that Coward faithfully wrote to her wherever he happened to find himself. (She died at ninety-one in 1954, and apart from an occasional lapse into stage-mother-ishness—"I forgive you for making me so unhappy," she wrote to him when, during World War II, he admonished her for being less than totally patriotic—seems to have been entertainingly sharp-witted herself.) This continuity is admirably enhanced by the manner in which Day has organized Coward's correspondence, woven as it is into a fluid, year-by-year narrative, complete with potted mini-biographies of long-forgotten music-hall stars, novelists, and personalities (and, indeed, photographs of them that give the whole affair a charming, scrapbook feel), which make of this volume of Letters virtually a new biography.
He would, in fact, look just like the striking Cecil Beaton portrait of Coward that appears on the cover of Barry Day's rich new collection of Coward's letters: an image of "the Master" in dramatic profile, natty in a perfectly cut suit, holding a cigarette aloof from his lips as if he were just about to pronounce, or maybe had just pronounced, one of the bons mots for which he and his plays were so extraordinarily famous. It's an image that sums up what most people during most of the twentieth century thought urbane sophistication looked like; and yet to those who know Coward's life and work well, the amused and amusing persona that he perfected in the 1920s, when he first became famous, was just part of the story—"a nice façade to sit behind," as Coward wrote of a character based on Somerset Maugham in his 1935 play Point Valaine, "but a trifle bleak." (Both the life and work can be known in tremendous detail at this point: apart from an excellent biography by Sheridan Morley and no fewer than three volumes of autobiography by Coward himself, there are by now memoirs by friends and former lovers, his shrewd and funny Diaries, edited by Morley together with Coward's longtime lover, Graham Payn, and numerous editions of his plays and songs, a dazzling seven of which were the handiwork of Barry Day, the Coward authority who has edited the present collection of Letters.)
Coward himself never succumbed to that bleakness. For all that he would come to be known for being (as someone says in his 1930 classic Private Lives) "jagged with sophistication," the key to his phenomenal productivity and equally phenomenal emotional stability throughout his life may well have been that he managed to retain the stolid values of the decidedly unsophisticated, lower-middle class suburb where he was born (as his given name suggests) at Christmastime 1899, the second son of a piano-salesman father and a strong-willed mother who liked to reminisce about her family's once-grander circumstances. Pragmatic, hardworking, admirably without illusions about either his strengths or his defects, generous, unabashedly sentimental and patriotic, he was that rarity among people who achieve dazzling success very early on in life (as he did at twenty-four, with his smash-hit cocaine-addiction melodrama The Vortex): someone who managed to withstand, for the most part, the powerful aura of his own public persona.
Hence although Day's meticulous and artfully structured edition of the Letters will inevitably be read by those eager to be dazzled by refractions of the jagged sophistication of Coward's busy social life ("I had a tremendous party given for me last night and it was rather fun. George Gershwin played and we all carried on like one o'clock"), its greatest significance may well lie in the extent to which its content demonstrates the temperamental qualities—unanticipated, perhaps, by those searching here for "a very Noël Coward sort of person"—of humaneness, tenderness, and a kind of Edwardian sentimentality that, as I have argued in these pages,[*] both underlie and give emotional texture to the surface cleverness in so much of his work. (Coward himself understood the way in which, just below the dazzlingly urbane repartee, there lurked the Teddington native's unerring sense for what ordinary people were interested in: "I know all about my facility for writing adroit swift dialogue and hitting unimportant but popular nails on the head," he wrote to T.E. Lawrence, one of his many illustrious correspondents, in 1931.) Among the greatest pleasures of this collection are, if anything, those moments when we get to see Mrs. Violet Veitch Coward's son intersect with that "very Noël Coward sort of person," as for instance in this 1954 letter to the Lunts about a production of his new musical version of Lady Windermere's Fan:
I have been having a terrible time with After the Ball, mainly on account of Mary Ellis's singing voice which, to coin a phrase, sounds like someone fucking the cat. I know that your sense of the urbane, sophisticated Coward wit will appreciate this simile.
Coward very rarely confused himself with "Coward."
Day's edition of the Letters will add nothing new to the ample record of Coward's life, although it is interesting to see the life through the letters, which are inevitably more spontaneous, and written with less of an eye on posterity, than the entries in the Diaries. A nice continuity through the many years covered here—the first letter dates to 1906, the last to 1970 when Coward received his scandalously delayed knighthood—is provided by the fact that an astonishing number of them were written to the playwright's mother, who throughout her long life was the recipient of weekly missives that Coward faithfully wrote to her wherever he happened to find himself. (She died at ninety-one in 1954, and apart from an occasional lapse into stage-mother-ishness—"I forgive you for making me so unhappy," she wrote to him when, during World War II, he admonished her for being less than totally patriotic—seems to have been entertainingly sharp-witted herself.) This continuity is admirably enhanced by the manner in which Day has organized Coward's correspondence, woven as it is into a fluid, year-by-year narrative, complete with potted mini-biographies of long-forgotten music-hall stars, novelists, and personalities (and, indeed, photographs of them that give the whole affair a charming, scrapbook feel), which make of this volume of Letters virtually a new biography.
29.12.07
IHT's Best Essays of 2007
Best essays of 2007
By David Brooks
Several months ago, Christopher Hitchens was sent an article about a young soldier, Mark Jennings Daily, who had been killed in Iraq. Daily was improbably all-American - born on the Fourth of July, an honors graduate from UCLA, strikingly handsome. He'd been a Democrat with reservations about the war. But, "somewhere along the way, he changed his mind," the article said. "Writings by author and commentator Christopher Hitchens on the moral case for war deeply influenced him."
"I don't exaggerate by much when I say I froze," Hitchens wrote about reading that sentence.
His essay in the November issue of Vanity Fair is a meditation on his own role in Daily's death, and a description of the family Daily left behind. Hitchens asks painful questions and steps on every opportunity to be maudlin, and yet for all its tightly controlled intellectualism, the essay packs a bigger emotional wallop than any other this year.
Daily took books by Thomas Paine, Tolstoy, John McCain and Orwell to Iraq.
"Anyone who knew me before I joined," Daily wrote from the front, "knows that I am quite aware and at times sympathetic to the arguments against the war in Iraq. If you think the only way a person could bring themselves to volunteer for this war is through sheer desperation or blind obedience, then consider me the exception (though there are countless like me). Consider that there are 19-year-old soldiers from the Midwest who have never touched a college campus or a protest who have done more to uphold the universal legitimacy of representative government and individual rights by placing themselves between Iraqi voting lines and homicidal religious fanatics."
Hitchens spent a day with the Daily family and then was asked to speak at a memorial service. He read a passage from "Macbeth" and later reflected: "Here we are to perform the last honors for a warrior and hero, and there are no hysterical ululations, no shrieks for revenge, no insults hurled at the enemy, no firing into the air or bogus hysterics. Instead, an honest, brave, modest family is doing its private best."
Hitchens also wrote "God Is Not Great," which Ross Douthat reviewed provocatively in The Claremont Review of Books. Douthat noted that Hitchens specializes in picking out crackpot quotations rather than trying to closely observe the nature of spiritual experience: "Like most apologists for atheism, he evinces little interest in the topic of religion as it is actually lived, preferring to stick to the safer ground of putting the godly in the dock and cataloging their crimes against humanity." Douthat, the believer, comes off as more curious about the world than any skeptic.
One of the best pieces of career advice I ever got is: Interview three people every day. If you try to write about politics without interviewing policymakers, you'll wind up spewing all sorts of nonsense. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote an entire book on the Israel lobby without ever interviewing any of their subjects.
Jeffrey Goldberg dissected their effort in The New Republic. Goldberg usefully describes Judeocentrism, the belief that Jews play a central role in world history. Walt and Mearsheimer have a tendency, Goldberg writes, to bring the vectors of recent world history back to the Jews - the rise of radical Islam, shifts in U.S. foreign policy, Sept. 11. He then offers a piece-by-piece dissection of their historical claims.
Wonks talk about inequality, but voters talk about immigration. Christopher Jencks wrote an essay on immigration in The New York Review of Books that was superb not because he took a polemical stance, but because he clarified a complex issue in an honest way.
He shows how fluid public opinion is. Certain poll questions suggest that 69 percent of Americans want to deport illegal immigrants. Others indicate the true figure is only 14 percent. He ends up at the nub of the current deadlock. Conservatives, having learned from past failures, demand "enforcement first." Employers, fearing bankruptcy, demand the legalization of the current immigrants first. Neither powerful group will budge.
Three other essays are worth your time. In the online magazine Edge, Jonathan Haidt wrote "Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion," an excellent summary of how we make ethical judgments. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, J. Bradford DeLong wrote "Creative Destruction's Reconstruction" on why Joseph Schumpeter matters to the 21st century. In her essay, "The Abduction of Opera" in The City Journal, Heather MacDonald wonders why European directors now introduce mutilation, rape, masturbation and urination into lighthearted operas like "The Abduction from the Seraglio." She argues that a resurgent adolescent culture has allowed directors there to wallow in all manner of self-indulgence.
By David Brooks
Several months ago, Christopher Hitchens was sent an article about a young soldier, Mark Jennings Daily, who had been killed in Iraq. Daily was improbably all-American - born on the Fourth of July, an honors graduate from UCLA, strikingly handsome. He'd been a Democrat with reservations about the war. But, "somewhere along the way, he changed his mind," the article said. "Writings by author and commentator Christopher Hitchens on the moral case for war deeply influenced him."
"I don't exaggerate by much when I say I froze," Hitchens wrote about reading that sentence.
His essay in the November issue of Vanity Fair is a meditation on his own role in Daily's death, and a description of the family Daily left behind. Hitchens asks painful questions and steps on every opportunity to be maudlin, and yet for all its tightly controlled intellectualism, the essay packs a bigger emotional wallop than any other this year.
Daily took books by Thomas Paine, Tolstoy, John McCain and Orwell to Iraq.
"Anyone who knew me before I joined," Daily wrote from the front, "knows that I am quite aware and at times sympathetic to the arguments against the war in Iraq. If you think the only way a person could bring themselves to volunteer for this war is through sheer desperation or blind obedience, then consider me the exception (though there are countless like me). Consider that there are 19-year-old soldiers from the Midwest who have never touched a college campus or a protest who have done more to uphold the universal legitimacy of representative government and individual rights by placing themselves between Iraqi voting lines and homicidal religious fanatics."
Hitchens spent a day with the Daily family and then was asked to speak at a memorial service. He read a passage from "Macbeth" and later reflected: "Here we are to perform the last honors for a warrior and hero, and there are no hysterical ululations, no shrieks for revenge, no insults hurled at the enemy, no firing into the air or bogus hysterics. Instead, an honest, brave, modest family is doing its private best."
Hitchens also wrote "God Is Not Great," which Ross Douthat reviewed provocatively in The Claremont Review of Books. Douthat noted that Hitchens specializes in picking out crackpot quotations rather than trying to closely observe the nature of spiritual experience: "Like most apologists for atheism, he evinces little interest in the topic of religion as it is actually lived, preferring to stick to the safer ground of putting the godly in the dock and cataloging their crimes against humanity." Douthat, the believer, comes off as more curious about the world than any skeptic.
One of the best pieces of career advice I ever got is: Interview three people every day. If you try to write about politics without interviewing policymakers, you'll wind up spewing all sorts of nonsense. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote an entire book on the Israel lobby without ever interviewing any of their subjects.
Jeffrey Goldberg dissected their effort in The New Republic. Goldberg usefully describes Judeocentrism, the belief that Jews play a central role in world history. Walt and Mearsheimer have a tendency, Goldberg writes, to bring the vectors of recent world history back to the Jews - the rise of radical Islam, shifts in U.S. foreign policy, Sept. 11. He then offers a piece-by-piece dissection of their historical claims.
Wonks talk about inequality, but voters talk about immigration. Christopher Jencks wrote an essay on immigration in The New York Review of Books that was superb not because he took a polemical stance, but because he clarified a complex issue in an honest way.
He shows how fluid public opinion is. Certain poll questions suggest that 69 percent of Americans want to deport illegal immigrants. Others indicate the true figure is only 14 percent. He ends up at the nub of the current deadlock. Conservatives, having learned from past failures, demand "enforcement first." Employers, fearing bankruptcy, demand the legalization of the current immigrants first. Neither powerful group will budge.
Three other essays are worth your time. In the online magazine Edge, Jonathan Haidt wrote "Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion," an excellent summary of how we make ethical judgments. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, J. Bradford DeLong wrote "Creative Destruction's Reconstruction" on why Joseph Schumpeter matters to the 21st century. In her essay, "The Abduction of Opera" in The City Journal, Heather MacDonald wonders why European directors now introduce mutilation, rape, masturbation and urination into lighthearted operas like "The Abduction from the Seraglio." She argues that a resurgent adolescent culture has allowed directors there to wallow in all manner of self-indulgence.
Investing in 2008
Investors typically face a new year with a mix of hope and apprehension.This time around the backdrop favors a heavy dose of apprehension.The economy, corporate earnings, the financial system and the presidential election all are huge question marks for 2008.
You want certainty?
That was last year -- or so many people thought.Flash back to a year ago. Remember the global capital glut? Hard to believe, but the biggest "problem" Wall Street thought it faced as 2007 dawned was too much money chasing too few investment opportunities. Euphoria was boundless.From that to a housing market crash and a fearsome credit crunch in less than 12 months.Yet if stock investors are nervous, they haven't bailed out in droves. Hope hasn't vanished.The average U.S. stock mutual fund is up 6.7% for the year, according to Morningstar Inc. The average foreign stock fund is up 16.3%. But note that those gains have been supported by strength in big-name stocks while many smaller stocks have fallen since midyear.As the new year begins, here are four concerns that will dominate as investors look for clues to markets' next big move:* The economy. "Recession coming," brokerage Morgan Stanley warned clients in a recent report. "Recession averted," countered a report from Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown.Of course, opinions on the economic outlook are rarely uniform. But this time the views are extraordinarily divergent.One camp sees the effects of the housing crash filtering through the economy and turning the 6-year-old expansion into recession, or at best no growth.Morgan Stanley economists said three factors would tip the balance toward recession: "Financial conditions are tighter, [economic] weakness is broadening into capital spending and global growth is slowing."Another camp believes the U.S. will avoid recession thanks in large part to the classic remedy: lower interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve, which has reduced its benchmark short-term rate three times since mid-September.Further cuts by the Fed "will likely lead to acceleration in growth during the second half of 2008," said Larry Adam, investment strategist at Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown in Baltimore.What if the recession camp has it right? The expectation would be that investors would flee many stocks in 2008 because companies' fortunes generally are tied to the economy's.Many analysts say they'll take their cue on the growth outlook from the government's monthly employment reports. The economy has continued to create jobs despite the housing mess. If employment turns negative, however, so will the outlook for consumers' income and spending, greasing the skids for recession.Some stock market pros say another factor may be just as important: economic growth abroad. Thanks to booming demand for U.S. exports, "the rest of the world has been keeping us out of recession," said Brian Stine, investment strategist at Allegiant Asset Management in Cleveland.He said he was keeping a close watch on China's economy because it had continued to be a locomotive for the rest of the planet even as U.S. growth had ebbed. "My concern would be if we started to see China slow down significantly," Stine said.* Corporate earnings. Stock prices are underpinned by investors' expectations for earnings growth. From the second half of 2003 through 2006, the overall operating earnings of the Standard & Poor's 500 companies rose at a double-digit pace every quarter -- which in turn kept share prices advancing.That growth eased to a single-digit pace in the first half of this year. And in the third quarter, S&P 500 earnings fell 4.5% year over year, the first drop since 2002, according to data firm Thomson Financial.In the fourth quarter the decline is expected to steepen: Thomson is predicting a 9.4% year-over-year drop, based on analysts' estimates for the individual S&P 500 companies.But the main driver of lower earnings for the S&P 500 is one industry sector, financial services, as banks and brokerages reel from losses on mortgage securities. By contrast, eight of the index's 10 major sectors are expected to show earnings gains this quarter.And analysts remain upbeat about the first quarter of the new year. The S&P 500 companies overall are expected to post a 5.7% profit gain in the period.The bad news, however, is that first-quarter earnings growth estimates have fallen for eight of the 10 S&P sectors since Oct. 1, according to Thomson.So there's the risk: If Wall Street still is too optimistic about earnings and analysts continue to cut their 2008 estimates in the next few weeks, it could jolt investors who at the moment believe they can still count on decent profit growth.* The financial system. The ready availability of credit helped power the economic expansion since 2001. It also drove the stock market by abetting a boom in buyouts.Now, as most everyone knows, many banks and brokerages have become reluctant to lend because of the steep losses they've suffered from the mortgage debacle.If the credit crunch worsens in the first part of 2008 despite the aggressive efforts of the Fed and other central banks to pump money into the system, investors' fear level is likely to surge. Tighter credit would boost the risk of recession and the risk of more blowups among cash-starved financial firms."If people cease to believe in the Fed, then we've really got a problem," said Doug Peta, market strategist at J&W Seligman & Co. in New York.* The election. For the time being, Wall Street has a lot more to worry about than who wins the presidency in 2008. But the election inevitably will gain in importance for markets.Many investors may focus on the threat that tax rates on capital gains and dividends could jump if the Democrats take the White House and keep control of Congress.As the law now stands, the 15% maximum federal tax rates on long-term gains and on dividends will rise after 2010 unless Congress extends them. A number of Democratic presidential candidates are on record favoring higher rates, at least for upper-income investors.Investors are motivated by much more than taxes, of course. But if the outlooks for the economy, earnings and the financial system don't improve, the prospect of higher tax rates could become magnified as a threat to markets' health.
You want certainty?
That was last year -- or so many people thought.Flash back to a year ago. Remember the global capital glut? Hard to believe, but the biggest "problem" Wall Street thought it faced as 2007 dawned was too much money chasing too few investment opportunities. Euphoria was boundless.From that to a housing market crash and a fearsome credit crunch in less than 12 months.Yet if stock investors are nervous, they haven't bailed out in droves. Hope hasn't vanished.The average U.S. stock mutual fund is up 6.7% for the year, according to Morningstar Inc. The average foreign stock fund is up 16.3%. But note that those gains have been supported by strength in big-name stocks while many smaller stocks have fallen since midyear.As the new year begins, here are four concerns that will dominate as investors look for clues to markets' next big move:* The economy. "Recession coming," brokerage Morgan Stanley warned clients in a recent report. "Recession averted," countered a report from Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown.Of course, opinions on the economic outlook are rarely uniform. But this time the views are extraordinarily divergent.One camp sees the effects of the housing crash filtering through the economy and turning the 6-year-old expansion into recession, or at best no growth.Morgan Stanley economists said three factors would tip the balance toward recession: "Financial conditions are tighter, [economic] weakness is broadening into capital spending and global growth is slowing."Another camp believes the U.S. will avoid recession thanks in large part to the classic remedy: lower interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve, which has reduced its benchmark short-term rate three times since mid-September.Further cuts by the Fed "will likely lead to acceleration in growth during the second half of 2008," said Larry Adam, investment strategist at Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown in Baltimore.What if the recession camp has it right? The expectation would be that investors would flee many stocks in 2008 because companies' fortunes generally are tied to the economy's.Many analysts say they'll take their cue on the growth outlook from the government's monthly employment reports. The economy has continued to create jobs despite the housing mess. If employment turns negative, however, so will the outlook for consumers' income and spending, greasing the skids for recession.Some stock market pros say another factor may be just as important: economic growth abroad. Thanks to booming demand for U.S. exports, "the rest of the world has been keeping us out of recession," said Brian Stine, investment strategist at Allegiant Asset Management in Cleveland.He said he was keeping a close watch on China's economy because it had continued to be a locomotive for the rest of the planet even as U.S. growth had ebbed. "My concern would be if we started to see China slow down significantly," Stine said.* Corporate earnings. Stock prices are underpinned by investors' expectations for earnings growth. From the second half of 2003 through 2006, the overall operating earnings of the Standard & Poor's 500 companies rose at a double-digit pace every quarter -- which in turn kept share prices advancing.That growth eased to a single-digit pace in the first half of this year. And in the third quarter, S&P 500 earnings fell 4.5% year over year, the first drop since 2002, according to data firm Thomson Financial.In the fourth quarter the decline is expected to steepen: Thomson is predicting a 9.4% year-over-year drop, based on analysts' estimates for the individual S&P 500 companies.But the main driver of lower earnings for the S&P 500 is one industry sector, financial services, as banks and brokerages reel from losses on mortgage securities. By contrast, eight of the index's 10 major sectors are expected to show earnings gains this quarter.And analysts remain upbeat about the first quarter of the new year. The S&P 500 companies overall are expected to post a 5.7% profit gain in the period.The bad news, however, is that first-quarter earnings growth estimates have fallen for eight of the 10 S&P sectors since Oct. 1, according to Thomson.So there's the risk: If Wall Street still is too optimistic about earnings and analysts continue to cut their 2008 estimates in the next few weeks, it could jolt investors who at the moment believe they can still count on decent profit growth.* The financial system. The ready availability of credit helped power the economic expansion since 2001. It also drove the stock market by abetting a boom in buyouts.Now, as most everyone knows, many banks and brokerages have become reluctant to lend because of the steep losses they've suffered from the mortgage debacle.If the credit crunch worsens in the first part of 2008 despite the aggressive efforts of the Fed and other central banks to pump money into the system, investors' fear level is likely to surge. Tighter credit would boost the risk of recession and the risk of more blowups among cash-starved financial firms."If people cease to believe in the Fed, then we've really got a problem," said Doug Peta, market strategist at J&W Seligman & Co. in New York.* The election. For the time being, Wall Street has a lot more to worry about than who wins the presidency in 2008. But the election inevitably will gain in importance for markets.Many investors may focus on the threat that tax rates on capital gains and dividends could jump if the Democrats take the White House and keep control of Congress.As the law now stands, the 15% maximum federal tax rates on long-term gains and on dividends will rise after 2010 unless Congress extends them. A number of Democratic presidential candidates are on record favoring higher rates, at least for upper-income investors.Investors are motivated by much more than taxes, of course. But if the outlooks for the economy, earnings and the financial system don't improve, the prospect of higher tax rates could become magnified as a threat to markets' health.
Movie Moments of 2007
'Tis the season for critics to brighten our lives with earnest little lists of their favorite films of the year, to celebrate the tippiest toppiest cinematic achievements that have blessed our big screens -- however fleetingly -- with tales of star-crossed love, psychotic mayhem and quality French medical care. But we have decided to go in another direction. My, what is that smell?
Gather round, haters, there's a turkey in the oven. Welcome to the annual review of the Worst Movies of 2007, as scientifically tabulated for The Washington Post by the pallid gnomes at Rotten Tomatoes, the aggregating Web site that gathers thousands of movie reviews penned by more than 250 critics (online and off) and then through a complicated, weighted logarithmic formula (math) assigns the rating of "fresh" or "rotten." (To play fair, we include only films that have been widely released.)
Even so, what a fiesta of the fetid. Just get your minds around this: A much-loathed piece of female mutilation fantasy, "Captivity," doesn't even crack the Top 10 Worst. Nor does the operatically lame "Epic Movie," which impressed the critics so completely not. The cloyingly odious tweener offering, known optimistically as "Bratz: The Movie," as opposed, say, to "Bratz: The Past-Expiration Date Poultry Product"? So steep is the competition in the annual race for the bottom that these dolls are only the 16th stinkiest.
So hold your nose. Drumstick please. First, the good news. Diane Keaton will always be beloved for "Annie Hall." No one can take that away from her, though they are trying, actually, to take that away from her. Because it is with no joy that we announce that her mom-rom-com "Because I Said So" is the worst movie of the year. But don't take our word for it.
"Unusually toxic waste" is the blurb from the usually decorous Wall Street Journal. The Christian Science Monitor used the term "wince-inducing." The general lament: Why, Diane, why? As in, "Diane Keaton has a lot to answer for," according to the Toronto Star. Richard Roeper called it "the worst performance of Diane Keaton's career." Or as the Rotten Tomatoes "critical consensus" puts it: "an unfunny cliche-ridden mess that manages to make Diane Keaton temporarily unlikable." Temporarily, we must hope. (Early next year Keaton bows in "Mad Money," a bank heist caper with Katie Holmes and Queen Latifah that, well, pre-smells.)
"Her work had an unbearable finger-across-the-blackboard effect on me," wrote the film site Internet Reviews. "It's so derivative, unfunny and thuddingly bad that it's one of the more cringe-inducing movies of a genre chock-full of clunkers," thought USA Today, which just had to remind us that the film "sinks to a new low when it resorts to humor employing a good-natured golden retriever who gets excited when Keaton stumbles on an online porn site." Yikes.
Though the condemnation was almost universal for a film that the site Metromix called "the worst date movie since 'Saw III,' " there was a lone voice in the cream of the crop of "decent." Time's Richard Schickel liked it. "If you don't expect too much of it," he wrote, as coy as a schoolgirl, "you may find yourself pleasantly -- all right, soothingly -- surprised by it." Or as soothing as a family pet watching some porn can be.
Speaking of beloved national treasures, how many of us want to see Jim Carrey having sex? Anyone? Apparently not the critics, who placed his creepy (literally) thriller "The Number 23" -- which is, umm, about the number 23 -- in the No. 2 spot. "It's so cheesy that it's almost transcendent," marveled the Minneapolis Star Tribune, looking on the sunny side of the Joel Schumacher project. Or not. "As scary as Britney Spears in a hair salon." That was the Fresno Bee. The entity known as "Rex Reed" in the New York Observer wrote, "contrived, incomprehensible gibberish that exists for the sole purpose of exposing a miscast star in a career stretch for which he is pathetically unprepared. It's the worst kind of flop, a flop for its own sake."
Of course, the title also proved irresistible to the pack. The Houston Chronicle: "How do we loathe thee, 'The Number 23'? Let us count the ways." The Salt Lake Tribune: "There are 23 letters in . . . 'Joel Schumacher can bite me.' " Finally, the Boulder (Colo.) Weekly might have hit just the right note when it said, "There are any number of ways to scare audiences, but numerology isn't one of them."
Speaking of numerology, a close examination of the Top 10 Worst list reveals some conclusions, unfortunately:
1. There are movie stars who should consider changing agents. These movie stars include Oscar winners Hilary Swank, Halle Berry, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Diane Keaton.
2. Robin Williams now appears to be almost radioactive.
3. And Dane Cook is his heir.
Funny, the choices these actors make. Apparently, it is hard. For example, not too many years ago, wasn't Sandra Bullock smart? Or smart-ish? That's what we read. So why did she go off and make "Premonition," a kind of "Groundhog Day" gone wrong? "Sandra Bullock," the Arizona Republic reports, "plays a woman going through a horrifying experience. She keeps waking up in this movie." Hurts, doesn't it?
And Hilary Swank. "The Reaping." Why? Alimony? Chad Lowe not working? "What, I shudder to think, were the projects Hilary Swank turned down in favor of this?" asks the Seattle Times. Nicely timed for an Easter release, to get its talons into -- what? -- the "Passion of the Christ" flyover demo? "The Reaping" is one of those biblical mumbo-jumbo Satan- spawners that was hailed for its well-executed locust attack. As noted by the New York Times, the "only remotely notable thing about this particular jumble of boos, bangs and door creaks, swaying Spanish moss, creeping blond kids and swelling decolletage, creatively presented from various angles in various contexts, is that it tries to wed the horror trend with the heated-up God market."
The Fresno Bee: "Think of it as 'The Omen' meets Oil of Olay." The satirical Onion raved, "For bad movie lovers, it's manna from heaven!"
Of course, Christianity Today was wise to the game: There are 10 plagues in "The Reaping," the reviewer wrote. "But you don't have to suffer through all of them, or wait for a deliverer. You are not a slave to Hollywood's clever marketing campaigns. You don't have to wait for an usher to yell, 'Let my people go!' You can get up out of your theater seat and go free at any time."
Is there a lowness that is too low? Perhaps. The critics thought their feet touched the murky bottom of raunchy fun with Dane Cook in "Good Luck Chuck," which features Young Chuck fornicating with a stuffed penguin. Or so we've heard.
Unlike the adolescent pleasures of "Knocked Up" and "Superbad," it appears that "GLC" was "ewww . . . gross!" Or so concludes the Quad City Times. Not convinced? "Yecch!" wrote the reviewer at Houston Community Newspapers. The dean of the film corps, the obviously bewitched Roger Ebert, harrumphed, "Here is the dirty movie of the year, slimy and scummy, and among its casualties is poor Jessica Alba, who is a cutie and shouldn't have been let out to play with these boys."
Dirty. Alba. Play. Interesting. "Alba is so exceptionally challenged as an actress, it almost seems politically incorrect to make fun of her," says the San Francisco Chronicle, which then makes fun. "It's worth mentioning for the third time that this movie is much closer to 'Caligula' than 'Sleepless in Seattle.' "
Entertainment Weekly: "Can we finally just admit that Dane Cook isn't funny?" The Chicago Tribune: "The film is some sort of humor-deprivation experiment." The cultural criticism Web site PopMatters asks: "Who are these people?"
Agents?
Anyway. Rounding out the Top 10 Worst is a cartoon ("Happily N'Ever After"); a Victoria's Secret advertisement masquerading as a feature film starring Halle Berry ("Perfect Stranger"); the Robin Williams thing ("License to Wed"); the sad and desperate Cuba Gooding Jr. vehicle ("Daddy Day Camp"); and -- yes -- "Norbit."
The Eddie Murphy-in-a fat-suit film really set the critics' teeth on bite, so much so that we found ourselves in the fascinating cultural tilt-a-whirl of reading critics accusing a black actor of racism because of his portrayal of a fat black woman (played by Murphy himself). "This movie belongs in the Black Stereotype Hall of Fame, from the three shiftless schemers to the two funky pimps," went the Boston Globe critic, who is black. "If we're not 500 pounds and insane, we're 50 pounds and stupid."
"There are so many problems with 'Norbit' that when you try to pin one down, another one splooges out elsewhere," suggested Salon. LA Weekly mused, "Original nut Jerry Lewis would say that comedy is at least half rage, and 'Norbit,' wherein Murphy plays a psychotic, gargantuan wife and the meek, battered husband of the title, is one mean movie." And the San Diego Union agreed: "A sort of compost pile of cellulite gags, and humor so broad it is almost a new dimension in physics."
Speaking of cellulite gags, we know from long experience that critical disdain cannot derail a film that the public thinks (wrongly) it wants to see, such as "Wild Hogs," the John Travolta buddy movie the reviewers trashed with an almost palpable road rage. According to the Rotten Tomatoes math, "Wild Hogs is the 15th worst movie of the year, yet it did more than $200 million at the domestic box office and rental market. So go figure.
No. The critics turn most savage not when presented with mere badness -- because, honestly, many movies are not very good. Being bad is normal. No, what the critics hate most is cynicism, when a movie appears to have been made solely to exploit (as the marketing department actually calls it) an audience. And so like guardians all along the watchtowers, the critics call out to us -- stop, listen, wait, think, nooooo! -- as we shove our dollars through the little window and say, "Two, please. We've come for 'The Reaping.' "
Gather round, haters, there's a turkey in the oven. Welcome to the annual review of the Worst Movies of 2007, as scientifically tabulated for The Washington Post by the pallid gnomes at Rotten Tomatoes, the aggregating Web site that gathers thousands of movie reviews penned by more than 250 critics (online and off) and then through a complicated, weighted logarithmic formula (math) assigns the rating of "fresh" or "rotten." (To play fair, we include only films that have been widely released.)
Even so, what a fiesta of the fetid. Just get your minds around this: A much-loathed piece of female mutilation fantasy, "Captivity," doesn't even crack the Top 10 Worst. Nor does the operatically lame "Epic Movie," which impressed the critics so completely not. The cloyingly odious tweener offering, known optimistically as "Bratz: The Movie," as opposed, say, to "Bratz: The Past-Expiration Date Poultry Product"? So steep is the competition in the annual race for the bottom that these dolls are only the 16th stinkiest.
So hold your nose. Drumstick please. First, the good news. Diane Keaton will always be beloved for "Annie Hall." No one can take that away from her, though they are trying, actually, to take that away from her. Because it is with no joy that we announce that her mom-rom-com "Because I Said So" is the worst movie of the year. But don't take our word for it.
"Unusually toxic waste" is the blurb from the usually decorous Wall Street Journal. The Christian Science Monitor used the term "wince-inducing." The general lament: Why, Diane, why? As in, "Diane Keaton has a lot to answer for," according to the Toronto Star. Richard Roeper called it "the worst performance of Diane Keaton's career." Or as the Rotten Tomatoes "critical consensus" puts it: "an unfunny cliche-ridden mess that manages to make Diane Keaton temporarily unlikable." Temporarily, we must hope. (Early next year Keaton bows in "Mad Money," a bank heist caper with Katie Holmes and Queen Latifah that, well, pre-smells.)
"Her work had an unbearable finger-across-the-blackboard effect on me," wrote the film site Internet Reviews. "It's so derivative, unfunny and thuddingly bad that it's one of the more cringe-inducing movies of a genre chock-full of clunkers," thought USA Today, which just had to remind us that the film "sinks to a new low when it resorts to humor employing a good-natured golden retriever who gets excited when Keaton stumbles on an online porn site." Yikes.
Though the condemnation was almost universal for a film that the site Metromix called "the worst date movie since 'Saw III,' " there was a lone voice in the cream of the crop of "decent." Time's Richard Schickel liked it. "If you don't expect too much of it," he wrote, as coy as a schoolgirl, "you may find yourself pleasantly -- all right, soothingly -- surprised by it." Or as soothing as a family pet watching some porn can be.
Speaking of beloved national treasures, how many of us want to see Jim Carrey having sex? Anyone? Apparently not the critics, who placed his creepy (literally) thriller "The Number 23" -- which is, umm, about the number 23 -- in the No. 2 spot. "It's so cheesy that it's almost transcendent," marveled the Minneapolis Star Tribune, looking on the sunny side of the Joel Schumacher project. Or not. "As scary as Britney Spears in a hair salon." That was the Fresno Bee. The entity known as "Rex Reed" in the New York Observer wrote, "contrived, incomprehensible gibberish that exists for the sole purpose of exposing a miscast star in a career stretch for which he is pathetically unprepared. It's the worst kind of flop, a flop for its own sake."
Of course, the title also proved irresistible to the pack. The Houston Chronicle: "How do we loathe thee, 'The Number 23'? Let us count the ways." The Salt Lake Tribune: "There are 23 letters in . . . 'Joel Schumacher can bite me.' " Finally, the Boulder (Colo.) Weekly might have hit just the right note when it said, "There are any number of ways to scare audiences, but numerology isn't one of them."
Speaking of numerology, a close examination of the Top 10 Worst list reveals some conclusions, unfortunately:
1. There are movie stars who should consider changing agents. These movie stars include Oscar winners Hilary Swank, Halle Berry, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Diane Keaton.
2. Robin Williams now appears to be almost radioactive.
3. And Dane Cook is his heir.
Funny, the choices these actors make. Apparently, it is hard. For example, not too many years ago, wasn't Sandra Bullock smart? Or smart-ish? That's what we read. So why did she go off and make "Premonition," a kind of "Groundhog Day" gone wrong? "Sandra Bullock," the Arizona Republic reports, "plays a woman going through a horrifying experience. She keeps waking up in this movie." Hurts, doesn't it?
And Hilary Swank. "The Reaping." Why? Alimony? Chad Lowe not working? "What, I shudder to think, were the projects Hilary Swank turned down in favor of this?" asks the Seattle Times. Nicely timed for an Easter release, to get its talons into -- what? -- the "Passion of the Christ" flyover demo? "The Reaping" is one of those biblical mumbo-jumbo Satan- spawners that was hailed for its well-executed locust attack. As noted by the New York Times, the "only remotely notable thing about this particular jumble of boos, bangs and door creaks, swaying Spanish moss, creeping blond kids and swelling decolletage, creatively presented from various angles in various contexts, is that it tries to wed the horror trend with the heated-up God market."
The Fresno Bee: "Think of it as 'The Omen' meets Oil of Olay." The satirical Onion raved, "For bad movie lovers, it's manna from heaven!"
Of course, Christianity Today was wise to the game: There are 10 plagues in "The Reaping," the reviewer wrote. "But you don't have to suffer through all of them, or wait for a deliverer. You are not a slave to Hollywood's clever marketing campaigns. You don't have to wait for an usher to yell, 'Let my people go!' You can get up out of your theater seat and go free at any time."
Is there a lowness that is too low? Perhaps. The critics thought their feet touched the murky bottom of raunchy fun with Dane Cook in "Good Luck Chuck," which features Young Chuck fornicating with a stuffed penguin. Or so we've heard.
Unlike the adolescent pleasures of "Knocked Up" and "Superbad," it appears that "GLC" was "ewww . . . gross!" Or so concludes the Quad City Times. Not convinced? "Yecch!" wrote the reviewer at Houston Community Newspapers. The dean of the film corps, the obviously bewitched Roger Ebert, harrumphed, "Here is the dirty movie of the year, slimy and scummy, and among its casualties is poor Jessica Alba, who is a cutie and shouldn't have been let out to play with these boys."
Dirty. Alba. Play. Interesting. "Alba is so exceptionally challenged as an actress, it almost seems politically incorrect to make fun of her," says the San Francisco Chronicle, which then makes fun. "It's worth mentioning for the third time that this movie is much closer to 'Caligula' than 'Sleepless in Seattle.' "
Entertainment Weekly: "Can we finally just admit that Dane Cook isn't funny?" The Chicago Tribune: "The film is some sort of humor-deprivation experiment." The cultural criticism Web site PopMatters asks: "Who are these people?"
Agents?
Anyway. Rounding out the Top 10 Worst is a cartoon ("Happily N'Ever After"); a Victoria's Secret advertisement masquerading as a feature film starring Halle Berry ("Perfect Stranger"); the Robin Williams thing ("License to Wed"); the sad and desperate Cuba Gooding Jr. vehicle ("Daddy Day Camp"); and -- yes -- "Norbit."
The Eddie Murphy-in-a fat-suit film really set the critics' teeth on bite, so much so that we found ourselves in the fascinating cultural tilt-a-whirl of reading critics accusing a black actor of racism because of his portrayal of a fat black woman (played by Murphy himself). "This movie belongs in the Black Stereotype Hall of Fame, from the three shiftless schemers to the two funky pimps," went the Boston Globe critic, who is black. "If we're not 500 pounds and insane, we're 50 pounds and stupid."
"There are so many problems with 'Norbit' that when you try to pin one down, another one splooges out elsewhere," suggested Salon. LA Weekly mused, "Original nut Jerry Lewis would say that comedy is at least half rage, and 'Norbit,' wherein Murphy plays a psychotic, gargantuan wife and the meek, battered husband of the title, is one mean movie." And the San Diego Union agreed: "A sort of compost pile of cellulite gags, and humor so broad it is almost a new dimension in physics."
Speaking of cellulite gags, we know from long experience that critical disdain cannot derail a film that the public thinks (wrongly) it wants to see, such as "Wild Hogs," the John Travolta buddy movie the reviewers trashed with an almost palpable road rage. According to the Rotten Tomatoes math, "Wild Hogs is the 15th worst movie of the year, yet it did more than $200 million at the domestic box office and rental market. So go figure.
No. The critics turn most savage not when presented with mere badness -- because, honestly, many movies are not very good. Being bad is normal. No, what the critics hate most is cynicism, when a movie appears to have been made solely to exploit (as the marketing department actually calls it) an audience. And so like guardians all along the watchtowers, the critics call out to us -- stop, listen, wait, think, nooooo! -- as we shove our dollars through the little window and say, "Two, please. We've come for 'The Reaping.' "
28.12.07
Obituaries master, dies
Hugh Massingberd, the genealogical and architectural historian who transformed The Daily Telegraph's obituaries, died on Christmas Day. He was 60
Hugh Massingberd, a celebrated former obituaries editor of The Telegraph of London who made a once-dreary page required reading by speaking frankly, wittily and often gleefully ill of the dead, became the recipient of his own services after dying in West London on Christmas Day. He was 60 and lived in London.
The cause was cancer, according to The Telegraph. The newspaper announced Mr. Massingberd’s death in an expansive obituary that described, not unkindly, his being “invariably strapped for cash” and the “gourmandism” and “bingeing” that had turned him “into an impressively corpulent presence whose moon face lit up with Pickwickian benevolence.”
Sometimes called the father of the modern British obituary, Mr. Massingberd was The Telegraph’s obituaries editor from 1986 to 1994. He was also a shy autodidact who had never been to college; a past editor of Burke’s Peerage, the venerable record book of the titled families of Britain and Ireland; the author of dozens of books on the English aristocracy; a recognized authority on the country homes of England, stately and moldy alike; and a rabid theatergoer whose enthusiasm for “Phantom of the Opera” was undimmed by the fact that he had seen it more than 50 times and knew every word and every note by heart.
In 2002 The Spectator, a British weekly magazine, described Mr. Massingberd as “an English eccentric of the sort Hollywood imagines shoot snipe in their underpants.”
Mr. Massingberd did not actually shoot snipe in his underpants, but he did once pose for a photograph dressed as a Roman emperor garlanded with sausages, as his obituary in The Telegraph helpfully reminded readers on Thursday.
Traditionally, the obituary departments of most newspapers were little Siberias, and The Telegraph’s was no exception when Mr. Massingberd arrived. The long, leaden recitals of awards, club memberships and honorary degrees massed on the page were distasteful pills that writers, and readers, choked down dutifully each day.
Mr. Massingberd transformed the paper’s obituaries from ponderous, sycophantic eulogies into mordant, warts-and-all profiles of the delectable departed. His model, he often said, was the 17th-century English writer John Aubrey, whose collection of biographical sketches, “Brief Lives,” offered gossipy backstairs portraits of eminences of the time.
In Mr. Massingberd’s hands the newspaper obituary became unabashed entertainment, and the page attracted a passionate following that endures to this day. It also helped to set a benchmark for newspapers throughout Britain, where obituaries are now far more irreverent, more editorial and more prurient than their American counterparts. (Witness The Telegraph’s send-off of one Lt. Col. Geoffrey Knowles, “who as a subaltern was bitten in the buttocks by a bear — he survived but the bear expired.”)
Typically unsigned, Telegraph obituaries are written by a stable of contributors. But during Mr. Massingberd’s tenure, observers widely agreed, every obit in the paper bore his droll, distinctive stamp. Naturally, he covered the presidents, kings and captains of industry who are the grist of obit pages everywhere. But Mr. Massingberd also sought out eccentrics; having the good fortune to live in Britain, he found them.
One Telegraph obituary, from 1991, opened this way: “The Third Lord Moynihan, who has died in Manila, aged 55, provided through his character and career ample ammunition for critics of the hereditary principle. His chief occupations were bongo drummer, confidence trickster, brothel-keeper, drug-smuggler and police informer.”
Another, from 1988, memorialized Peter Langan, a London restaurateur: “Often he would pass out amid the cutlery before doing any damage, but occasionally he would cruise menacingly beneath the tables, biting unwary customers’ ankles.”
And there was this much-quoted line, also from 1988, which appeared in The Telegraph’s obituary of John Allegro. A once-renowned scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Mr. Allegro later advanced a theory that Judaism and Christianity were the products of an ancient cult that worshiped sex and mushrooms. His obit in The Telegraph pronounced him “the Liberace of biblical scholarship.”
To dispatch his subjects, Mr. Massingberd used the thinnest of rapiers, but also the sharpest. Cataclysmic understatement and carefully coded euphemism were the stylistic hallmarks of his page. Here, for the benefit of American readers, is an abridged Massingberd-English dictionary:
¶“Convivial”: Habitually drunk.
¶“Did not suffer fools gladly”: Monstrously foul-tempered.
¶“Gave colorful accounts of his exploits”: A liar.
¶“A man of simple tastes”:
A complete vulgarian.
¶“A powerful negotiator”: A bully.
¶“Relished the cadences of the English language”: An incorrigible windbag.
¶“Relished physical contact”:
A sadist.
¶“An uncompromisingly direct ladies’ man”: A flasher.
Hugh John Montgomery was born on Dec. 30, 1946, in Cookham Dean, in the Berkshire district of England. His family, The Daily Mail wrote in 1994, were members of the “stranded gentry.” Hugh’s mother was a schoolteacher; his father worked for the BBC.
But as young Hugh was dreamily aware, the Montgomerys had nobler roots: Through their blue-blooded Massingberd relatives, he stood to inherit two country houses. In the 1960s, in the hope of securing one, Hugh’s father changed the family name to Montgomery-Massingberd. But both inheritances fell through. In the 1990s Hugh shortened his name to Massingberd.
As a young man, Mr. Massingberd planned to go to Cambridge University, thought better of it and took a job as a law clerk. Hating the work, he found his way to Burke’s Peerage, where from 1971 to 1983 he was the chief editor.
When Mr. Massingberd joined The Telegraph as obituaries editor, he later said in interviews, friends regarded him with a mixture of pity and contempt. But he realized two things immediately: First, that a subject’s passage from cradle to grave furnishes writers with a built-in narrative thread from which to spin a ripping good yarn. Second, that personal stories, the odder the better, can be the stuff of deep, life-affirming levity.
One story belonged to this man, the John Allegro of the piano:
“The first sign that Liberace had embarked upon a road along which reticence would never ride came when he placed a candelabra on his piano. At this, the dam of discretion appeared to burst: first came a white tail suit, followed by stage patter about his mother and his philosophy of life, then a gold lamé jacket and a diamond-studded tailcoat.”
Mr. Massingberd’s first marriage, to Christine Martinoni, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Caroline Ripley, known as Ripples; and two children from his first marriage, Harriet and Luke.
His books include “Royal Palaces of Europe” (Vendome, 1983); “Blenheim Revisited: The Spencer-Churchills and Their Palace” (Beaufort Books, 1985); “Her Majesty the Queen” (Collins, 1985); a memoir, “Daydream Believer: Confessions of a Hero Worshipper” (Macmillan, 2001); and six anthologies of Telegraph obituaries, which, he often said, made splendid bedtime reading.
Mr. Massingberd also belonged to a spate of respectable clubs, but they will not be itemized here.
Obituary: Hugh Massingberd
Like most true eccentrics, Hugh Massingberd did his best to appear conventional.
He was naturally courteous (in his diaries, James Lees-Milne said he had the best manners of anyone he knew) and quietly spoken. But one of the great delights in having him as a friend lay in introducing him to other friends, and watching as he mesmerised them with his singular view of things.
Hugh Massingberd, who knew it was our peculiarities that make us who we are
He was a great obsessive, and his obsessions were never governed by fashion. For more than 30 years, his favourite pop group remained Manfred Mann: until he fell ill, he would travel to out-of-the-way places such as Basingstoke or Lowestoft just to hear them play. Though the chattering classes have long considered Andrew Lloyd Webber rather naff, Hugh went to see Phantom of the Opera more than 50 times, often standing by the stage door afterwards.
Though by nature shy, he loved performing, and was a wonderful after-dinner speaker, bursting into song at the slightest opportunity.
I sometimes think he might have been happiest treading the boards in pantomime, playing opposite a favourite comedian - Ken Dodd, Les Dawson or Frankie Howerd, and perhaps a couple of forgotten stars from 1970s soap operas.
Once, when Hugh was feeling depressed, a friend asked him what would cheer him up. He thought for a minute, then replied: "To sing patriotic songs in drag before an appreciative audience."
He was a great trencherman. After breakfasting at the Connaught Hotel in 1972, he was particularly proud when the head waiter shimmied up to inform him that he had eaten the biggest breakfast ever served, the previous record holder being King Farouk I of Egypt.
His background in genealogy earned Hugh the alias Hugh Massivesnob in Private Eye magazine (once, to his delight, they altered it to Hugh Massivepecker) but there was no one less snobbish.
His extraordinary memory gave him total recall for what it was like to be a tongue-tied child or a disaffected teenager, or jubilant, or hurt. He made people feel better about themselves.
In front of me, I have Hugh's copy of a book of Telegraph obituaries, complete with underlinings, showing details that particularly amused him.
Among the passages underlined are: "Lieutenant-Colonel Geoffrey Knowles (who as a subaltern was bitten in the buttocks by a bear - he survived but the bear expired)."
"Commander 'Braces' Bracegirdle of the Australian navy was asked by one of his sailors for compassionate leave on the grounds that his home town was under flood water 6ft deep, and his wife was only 5ft 3in high. Braces silently handed over an orange box and stamps to post it."
"Big Daddy, the 28-stone wrestler (real name, Shirley Crabtree) whose leotard was made from the chintz covers of his wife's sofa."
Hugh knew instinctively that it is our peculiarities - our failings, our embarrassments - that make us who we are.
This view of mankind as fallen, but redeemed through eccentricity, ran like a golden thread through all his obituaries; it is the same winning mixture that informs the Telegraph obituaries to this day.
His modesty was endearing. The last time I visited him in hospital, I told him what his old friend Hugo Vickers had just said to me about him: "There are more people who would claim Hugh as their best friend than anyone else I know".
By this stage, Hugh was very weak, so that he only just managed to whisper a reply. "Most undeserved," he said.
Hugh Massingberd, a celebrated former obituaries editor of The Telegraph of London who made a once-dreary page required reading by speaking frankly, wittily and often gleefully ill of the dead, became the recipient of his own services after dying in West London on Christmas Day. He was 60 and lived in London.
The cause was cancer, according to The Telegraph. The newspaper announced Mr. Massingberd’s death in an expansive obituary that described, not unkindly, his being “invariably strapped for cash” and the “gourmandism” and “bingeing” that had turned him “into an impressively corpulent presence whose moon face lit up with Pickwickian benevolence.”
Sometimes called the father of the modern British obituary, Mr. Massingberd was The Telegraph’s obituaries editor from 1986 to 1994. He was also a shy autodidact who had never been to college; a past editor of Burke’s Peerage, the venerable record book of the titled families of Britain and Ireland; the author of dozens of books on the English aristocracy; a recognized authority on the country homes of England, stately and moldy alike; and a rabid theatergoer whose enthusiasm for “Phantom of the Opera” was undimmed by the fact that he had seen it more than 50 times and knew every word and every note by heart.
In 2002 The Spectator, a British weekly magazine, described Mr. Massingberd as “an English eccentric of the sort Hollywood imagines shoot snipe in their underpants.”
Mr. Massingberd did not actually shoot snipe in his underpants, but he did once pose for a photograph dressed as a Roman emperor garlanded with sausages, as his obituary in The Telegraph helpfully reminded readers on Thursday.
Traditionally, the obituary departments of most newspapers were little Siberias, and The Telegraph’s was no exception when Mr. Massingberd arrived. The long, leaden recitals of awards, club memberships and honorary degrees massed on the page were distasteful pills that writers, and readers, choked down dutifully each day.
Mr. Massingberd transformed the paper’s obituaries from ponderous, sycophantic eulogies into mordant, warts-and-all profiles of the delectable departed. His model, he often said, was the 17th-century English writer John Aubrey, whose collection of biographical sketches, “Brief Lives,” offered gossipy backstairs portraits of eminences of the time.
In Mr. Massingberd’s hands the newspaper obituary became unabashed entertainment, and the page attracted a passionate following that endures to this day. It also helped to set a benchmark for newspapers throughout Britain, where obituaries are now far more irreverent, more editorial and more prurient than their American counterparts. (Witness The Telegraph’s send-off of one Lt. Col. Geoffrey Knowles, “who as a subaltern was bitten in the buttocks by a bear — he survived but the bear expired.”)
Typically unsigned, Telegraph obituaries are written by a stable of contributors. But during Mr. Massingberd’s tenure, observers widely agreed, every obit in the paper bore his droll, distinctive stamp. Naturally, he covered the presidents, kings and captains of industry who are the grist of obit pages everywhere. But Mr. Massingberd also sought out eccentrics; having the good fortune to live in Britain, he found them.
One Telegraph obituary, from 1991, opened this way: “The Third Lord Moynihan, who has died in Manila, aged 55, provided through his character and career ample ammunition for critics of the hereditary principle. His chief occupations were bongo drummer, confidence trickster, brothel-keeper, drug-smuggler and police informer.”
Another, from 1988, memorialized Peter Langan, a London restaurateur: “Often he would pass out amid the cutlery before doing any damage, but occasionally he would cruise menacingly beneath the tables, biting unwary customers’ ankles.”
And there was this much-quoted line, also from 1988, which appeared in The Telegraph’s obituary of John Allegro. A once-renowned scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Mr. Allegro later advanced a theory that Judaism and Christianity were the products of an ancient cult that worshiped sex and mushrooms. His obit in The Telegraph pronounced him “the Liberace of biblical scholarship.”
To dispatch his subjects, Mr. Massingberd used the thinnest of rapiers, but also the sharpest. Cataclysmic understatement and carefully coded euphemism were the stylistic hallmarks of his page. Here, for the benefit of American readers, is an abridged Massingberd-English dictionary:
¶“Convivial”: Habitually drunk.
¶“Did not suffer fools gladly”: Monstrously foul-tempered.
¶“Gave colorful accounts of his exploits”: A liar.
¶“A man of simple tastes”:
A complete vulgarian.
¶“A powerful negotiator”: A bully.
¶“Relished the cadences of the English language”: An incorrigible windbag.
¶“Relished physical contact”:
A sadist.
¶“An uncompromisingly direct ladies’ man”: A flasher.
Hugh John Montgomery was born on Dec. 30, 1946, in Cookham Dean, in the Berkshire district of England. His family, The Daily Mail wrote in 1994, were members of the “stranded gentry.” Hugh’s mother was a schoolteacher; his father worked for the BBC.
But as young Hugh was dreamily aware, the Montgomerys had nobler roots: Through their blue-blooded Massingberd relatives, he stood to inherit two country houses. In the 1960s, in the hope of securing one, Hugh’s father changed the family name to Montgomery-Massingberd. But both inheritances fell through. In the 1990s Hugh shortened his name to Massingberd.
As a young man, Mr. Massingberd planned to go to Cambridge University, thought better of it and took a job as a law clerk. Hating the work, he found his way to Burke’s Peerage, where from 1971 to 1983 he was the chief editor.
When Mr. Massingberd joined The Telegraph as obituaries editor, he later said in interviews, friends regarded him with a mixture of pity and contempt. But he realized two things immediately: First, that a subject’s passage from cradle to grave furnishes writers with a built-in narrative thread from which to spin a ripping good yarn. Second, that personal stories, the odder the better, can be the stuff of deep, life-affirming levity.
One story belonged to this man, the John Allegro of the piano:
“The first sign that Liberace had embarked upon a road along which reticence would never ride came when he placed a candelabra on his piano. At this, the dam of discretion appeared to burst: first came a white tail suit, followed by stage patter about his mother and his philosophy of life, then a gold lamé jacket and a diamond-studded tailcoat.”
Mr. Massingberd’s first marriage, to Christine Martinoni, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Caroline Ripley, known as Ripples; and two children from his first marriage, Harriet and Luke.
His books include “Royal Palaces of Europe” (Vendome, 1983); “Blenheim Revisited: The Spencer-Churchills and Their Palace” (Beaufort Books, 1985); “Her Majesty the Queen” (Collins, 1985); a memoir, “Daydream Believer: Confessions of a Hero Worshipper” (Macmillan, 2001); and six anthologies of Telegraph obituaries, which, he often said, made splendid bedtime reading.
Mr. Massingberd also belonged to a spate of respectable clubs, but they will not be itemized here.
Obituary: Hugh Massingberd
Like most true eccentrics, Hugh Massingberd did his best to appear conventional.
He was naturally courteous (in his diaries, James Lees-Milne said he had the best manners of anyone he knew) and quietly spoken. But one of the great delights in having him as a friend lay in introducing him to other friends, and watching as he mesmerised them with his singular view of things.
Hugh Massingberd, who knew it was our peculiarities that make us who we are
He was a great obsessive, and his obsessions were never governed by fashion. For more than 30 years, his favourite pop group remained Manfred Mann: until he fell ill, he would travel to out-of-the-way places such as Basingstoke or Lowestoft just to hear them play. Though the chattering classes have long considered Andrew Lloyd Webber rather naff, Hugh went to see Phantom of the Opera more than 50 times, often standing by the stage door afterwards.
Though by nature shy, he loved performing, and was a wonderful after-dinner speaker, bursting into song at the slightest opportunity.
I sometimes think he might have been happiest treading the boards in pantomime, playing opposite a favourite comedian - Ken Dodd, Les Dawson or Frankie Howerd, and perhaps a couple of forgotten stars from 1970s soap operas.
Once, when Hugh was feeling depressed, a friend asked him what would cheer him up. He thought for a minute, then replied: "To sing patriotic songs in drag before an appreciative audience."
He was a great trencherman. After breakfasting at the Connaught Hotel in 1972, he was particularly proud when the head waiter shimmied up to inform him that he had eaten the biggest breakfast ever served, the previous record holder being King Farouk I of Egypt.
His background in genealogy earned Hugh the alias Hugh Massivesnob in Private Eye magazine (once, to his delight, they altered it to Hugh Massivepecker) but there was no one less snobbish.
His extraordinary memory gave him total recall for what it was like to be a tongue-tied child or a disaffected teenager, or jubilant, or hurt. He made people feel better about themselves.
In front of me, I have Hugh's copy of a book of Telegraph obituaries, complete with underlinings, showing details that particularly amused him.
Among the passages underlined are: "Lieutenant-Colonel Geoffrey Knowles (who as a subaltern was bitten in the buttocks by a bear - he survived but the bear expired)."
"Commander 'Braces' Bracegirdle of the Australian navy was asked by one of his sailors for compassionate leave on the grounds that his home town was under flood water 6ft deep, and his wife was only 5ft 3in high. Braces silently handed over an orange box and stamps to post it."
"Big Daddy, the 28-stone wrestler (real name, Shirley Crabtree) whose leotard was made from the chintz covers of his wife's sofa."
Hugh knew instinctively that it is our peculiarities - our failings, our embarrassments - that make us who we are.
This view of mankind as fallen, but redeemed through eccentricity, ran like a golden thread through all his obituaries; it is the same winning mixture that informs the Telegraph obituaries to this day.
His modesty was endearing. The last time I visited him in hospital, I told him what his old friend Hugo Vickers had just said to me about him: "There are more people who would claim Hugh as their best friend than anyone else I know".
By this stage, Hugh was very weak, so that he only just managed to whisper a reply. "Most undeserved," he said.
27.12.07
Twixt Christmas and New Years
IT'S COMMONPLACE TODAY to decry the commercialization of Christmas, to yearn for the kind of holiday depicted in old engravings: a candle-laden tree, a hearty Yule log burning in the fireplace, some nuts to crack and - for those both lucky and good - an orange. But our idea of a "traditional Christmas" leaves out an important element: superstitions.
The time between Christmas and the New Year was once thick with superstitions and folk beliefs. An old-fashioned Christmas would have included not only Christianized versions of pagan traditions (such as the tree and that Yule log), but many other rituals and auguries, some of which seem to us more like Halloween traditions than Christmas ones.
At about the same time that modern Christmas traditions such as sending Christmas cards and eating turkey began, researchers and enthusiasts collected many waning folk beliefs and compiled them into exhaustive lists of superstitions, mainly from Great Britain. The results were impressive Victorian volumes with titles like "Traditions, Superstitions, and Folk-Lore" or "British Popular Customs, Present and Past," which - thanks to Google Book Search or the Internet Archive - are now available for anyone looking to celebrate a truly old-fashioned Christmas.
For some, Christmas superstition begins at birth. People born on Christmas are considered either fortunate, as they supposedly cannot be drowned or hanged, or unfortunate, because they are more likely to be able to see ghosts and spirits. (Sir Walter Scott said that the Spaniards attributed the gloomy mood of King Philip II, thought to have been born on Christmas, to his frequent ghost sightings, and not - as we might imagine - to always having his birthday and Christmas presents combined.)
Some also believe that those who are born on Christmas Eve turn into ghosts on that day every year while they sleep. If you were born on Christmas Eve and don't want to have this happen to you, the remedy is to count the holes in a sieve from 11 o'clock on Christmas Eve until morning.
Other Christmas superstitions revolve around the natural world. Some white-thorn trees are supposed to blossom only on Christmas Day; other plants, including myrrh, save their blossoming for Christmas Eve - often for only an hour. Hay carried around a church three times on Christmas Eve was said to ensure that cattle would fatten easier on less feed in the year to come. Christmas Eve is when animals behave oddly, too: cattle, donkeys, and oxen are said to fall on their knees and moan at midnight. If you can find a kneeling donkey on Christmas Eve, and make the sign of the cross on its back, you will get your heart's desire. Cattle, donkeys, and oxen, as well as the other animals, are also given the gift of speech on Christmas Eve. On the same night, you can also hear the bells of lost churches that have been flooded or buried by landslides and earthquakes.
Christmas Day is a great day for increasing your luck for the year, truly important in the days when one unlucky turn - an injury, or a bad harvest - meant not just inconvenience, but possibly starvation and death. The first person to hear the rooster crow on Christmas Day is assured of good luck (and, in Ireland, is due a cup of whiskey or tea). Every mince pie you eat at Christmas means a happy month in the year to come - if each pie is made by a different person and eaten in a different house. If you carry in your pocket a scale from a fish eaten at Christmas, your purse will be full all year. Other things that bring good luck on Christmas Day include wishing someone a Merry Christmas before putting on your socks and shoes, sneezing, eating breakfast by candlelight, hearing a cricket chirp, kissing the oldest person in the house, giving coins to a beggar, and stirring the Christmas pudding. Bathing on Christmas Day will keep you safe from fevers and toothache in the year to come.
Unlucky things on Christmas Day include picking up nuts or fruit from the ground, leaving the dinner table before everyone has finished, sending carolers away without giving them any money, being the first one home from church, carrying a spinning wheel from one side of the house to another, stepping on cotton thread, receiving a present of new shoes or tanned leather, and letting the candles or the fire go out. If you eat nuts without honey on Christmas Day, you will lose your teeth. On Christmas Eve it is unlucky to spin or sew, to grind grain, or to leave the dishes unwashed.
Fittingly for a holiday in which souls gather against the dark and face the uncertain year to come, Christmas superstitions offer the hope of predicting the unpredictable and controlling the uncontrollable.
Whatever you dream on any of the 12 nights between Christmas and Epiphany (Jan. 6) will come to pass within the next year. The weather for the whole year is also determined during this time: as the weather is on each of these days, so will it be on the corresponding month of the following year. If you really want to know the rainfall for the next year, you can hollow out 12 onions, putting salt into each. Each onion is named after a month of the year, and there will be rain in every month where the salt in that onion is wet. And if Christmas Day falls on a Thursday, the following year will be windy.
To predict the next year's harvest, count the stars on Christmas Eve, and there will be as many sheaves as you have counted stars. If the sun shines through the limbs of the apple trees on Christmas Day, there will be a good crop of fruit next year. But if there's a full moon on Christmas, the following harvest will be scanty.
At Christmas women can also predict the course of their love life (not many spouse-finding superstitions work for men). Young women who go out and hit pigs with a stick at Christmas can tell the age of their husbands-to-be: if the first pig that squeals is old, that means an old husband; a squealing young pig equals a young husband. If there's a henhouse handy, a woman can knock on its door between 11 and 12 on Christmas night. If a rooster answers her knock, she will be married, but if her knocking is followed by silence, she will never marry. Looking into a well on Christmas Eve will show the destined husband - the same can be determined by throwing a ball of yarn in the air at midnight on Christmas Eve; the arrangement of the yarn on the ground will look like the future husband's face. If you're unmarried and no one kisses you under the mistletoe at Christmas, you won't marry during the following year.
The last day to indulge your Christmastime superstition is Candlemas (Feb. 2). To avoid bad luck, all of your Christmas decorations should be down by that day. But be careful what you burn: it's unlucky to burn Christmas greenery, except for mistletoe, which must be burnt or else those who kissed beneath it will become enemies. Every leaf left up after Candlemas will result in either a goblin seen or a death in the house during the year.
These superstitions are all hundreds of years old, at least, but there's room for new ones to calm our new anxieties. For instance, if you give a friend an electric nose-hair trimmer at Christmas, you will quarrel in the year to come, and not tipping your newspaper delivery person will result in bad luck all year long.
The time between Christmas and the New Year was once thick with superstitions and folk beliefs. An old-fashioned Christmas would have included not only Christianized versions of pagan traditions (such as the tree and that Yule log), but many other rituals and auguries, some of which seem to us more like Halloween traditions than Christmas ones.
At about the same time that modern Christmas traditions such as sending Christmas cards and eating turkey began, researchers and enthusiasts collected many waning folk beliefs and compiled them into exhaustive lists of superstitions, mainly from Great Britain. The results were impressive Victorian volumes with titles like "Traditions, Superstitions, and Folk-Lore" or "British Popular Customs, Present and Past," which - thanks to Google Book Search or the Internet Archive - are now available for anyone looking to celebrate a truly old-fashioned Christmas.
For some, Christmas superstition begins at birth. People born on Christmas are considered either fortunate, as they supposedly cannot be drowned or hanged, or unfortunate, because they are more likely to be able to see ghosts and spirits. (Sir Walter Scott said that the Spaniards attributed the gloomy mood of King Philip II, thought to have been born on Christmas, to his frequent ghost sightings, and not - as we might imagine - to always having his birthday and Christmas presents combined.)
Some also believe that those who are born on Christmas Eve turn into ghosts on that day every year while they sleep. If you were born on Christmas Eve and don't want to have this happen to you, the remedy is to count the holes in a sieve from 11 o'clock on Christmas Eve until morning.
Other Christmas superstitions revolve around the natural world. Some white-thorn trees are supposed to blossom only on Christmas Day; other plants, including myrrh, save their blossoming for Christmas Eve - often for only an hour. Hay carried around a church three times on Christmas Eve was said to ensure that cattle would fatten easier on less feed in the year to come. Christmas Eve is when animals behave oddly, too: cattle, donkeys, and oxen are said to fall on their knees and moan at midnight. If you can find a kneeling donkey on Christmas Eve, and make the sign of the cross on its back, you will get your heart's desire. Cattle, donkeys, and oxen, as well as the other animals, are also given the gift of speech on Christmas Eve. On the same night, you can also hear the bells of lost churches that have been flooded or buried by landslides and earthquakes.
Christmas Day is a great day for increasing your luck for the year, truly important in the days when one unlucky turn - an injury, or a bad harvest - meant not just inconvenience, but possibly starvation and death. The first person to hear the rooster crow on Christmas Day is assured of good luck (and, in Ireland, is due a cup of whiskey or tea). Every mince pie you eat at Christmas means a happy month in the year to come - if each pie is made by a different person and eaten in a different house. If you carry in your pocket a scale from a fish eaten at Christmas, your purse will be full all year. Other things that bring good luck on Christmas Day include wishing someone a Merry Christmas before putting on your socks and shoes, sneezing, eating breakfast by candlelight, hearing a cricket chirp, kissing the oldest person in the house, giving coins to a beggar, and stirring the Christmas pudding. Bathing on Christmas Day will keep you safe from fevers and toothache in the year to come.
Unlucky things on Christmas Day include picking up nuts or fruit from the ground, leaving the dinner table before everyone has finished, sending carolers away without giving them any money, being the first one home from church, carrying a spinning wheel from one side of the house to another, stepping on cotton thread, receiving a present of new shoes or tanned leather, and letting the candles or the fire go out. If you eat nuts without honey on Christmas Day, you will lose your teeth. On Christmas Eve it is unlucky to spin or sew, to grind grain, or to leave the dishes unwashed.
Fittingly for a holiday in which souls gather against the dark and face the uncertain year to come, Christmas superstitions offer the hope of predicting the unpredictable and controlling the uncontrollable.
Whatever you dream on any of the 12 nights between Christmas and Epiphany (Jan. 6) will come to pass within the next year. The weather for the whole year is also determined during this time: as the weather is on each of these days, so will it be on the corresponding month of the following year. If you really want to know the rainfall for the next year, you can hollow out 12 onions, putting salt into each. Each onion is named after a month of the year, and there will be rain in every month where the salt in that onion is wet. And if Christmas Day falls on a Thursday, the following year will be windy.
To predict the next year's harvest, count the stars on Christmas Eve, and there will be as many sheaves as you have counted stars. If the sun shines through the limbs of the apple trees on Christmas Day, there will be a good crop of fruit next year. But if there's a full moon on Christmas, the following harvest will be scanty.
At Christmas women can also predict the course of their love life (not many spouse-finding superstitions work for men). Young women who go out and hit pigs with a stick at Christmas can tell the age of their husbands-to-be: if the first pig that squeals is old, that means an old husband; a squealing young pig equals a young husband. If there's a henhouse handy, a woman can knock on its door between 11 and 12 on Christmas night. If a rooster answers her knock, she will be married, but if her knocking is followed by silence, she will never marry. Looking into a well on Christmas Eve will show the destined husband - the same can be determined by throwing a ball of yarn in the air at midnight on Christmas Eve; the arrangement of the yarn on the ground will look like the future husband's face. If you're unmarried and no one kisses you under the mistletoe at Christmas, you won't marry during the following year.
The last day to indulge your Christmastime superstition is Candlemas (Feb. 2). To avoid bad luck, all of your Christmas decorations should be down by that day. But be careful what you burn: it's unlucky to burn Christmas greenery, except for mistletoe, which must be burnt or else those who kissed beneath it will become enemies. Every leaf left up after Candlemas will result in either a goblin seen or a death in the house during the year.
These superstitions are all hundreds of years old, at least, but there's room for new ones to calm our new anxieties. For instance, if you give a friend an electric nose-hair trimmer at Christmas, you will quarrel in the year to come, and not tipping your newspaper delivery person will result in bad luck all year long.
2007
IT was a year of miraculous events. President Bush invited Al Gore to the Oval Office for a friendly chat about global warming. France elected a president who likes and admires Americans. Eliot Spitzer discovered the virtue of humility. In mid-rant, Hugo Chávez was finally told to shut up. The cute little Canadian dollar — the “loonie” — became worth more than a greenback.
People rooted for Kevin Federline to get the kids. After electing 43 consecutive white male presidents, Americans seriously considered a woman, a black man and an Italian-American from New York on his third marriage.
Amid such strange occurrences, one could be excused for missing news of more subtle — but lasting — importance. Here are a few developments you haven’t heard the last of:
HOW DRY WE ARE One of the consequences of global warming for the United States, climatologists warn, will be prolonged droughts. This summer, more than 40 percent of the country found itself in the grip of “extreme or moderate” drought. In the Southwest, seven years of rainless skies and warmer temperatures left the Rockies without much snow pack, and created alarming bathtub rings around the Lake Mead and Lake Powell reservoirs.
In the Southeast, a drought of a severity not seen in more than a century destroyed crops and turned rivers and lakes to dust in several states; Atlanta’s primary source of drinking water, Lake Lanier, fell to a record low, setting off a water war between Florida and Alabama. Things got so bad that Gov. Sonny Perdue of Georgia staged a prayer ceremony. “God, we need you,” he beseeched the heavens. “We do believe in miracles.” The heavens have yet to respond.
NOT-SO-BENIGN NEGLECT After a 40-year-old highway bridge in Minneapolis collapsed on Aug. 1, dropping 50 cars and trucks into the abyss and killing 13 people, the public was surprised to learn that engineers had given 74,000 other bridges in the United States the same rating as the fallen span: “structurally deficient.” Engineers and state officials clamored for repairs to these aging bridges, but estimates of the total cost were as high as $188 billion. Representative Jim Oberstar, Democrat of Minnesota, proposed a temporary five-cent gas tax to pay for the repairs, but his legislative colleagues argued that Congress and the states simply had to spend existing highway funds more wisely, instead of wasting them on earmarks for pet projects. Instead, Congress allocated $1 billion to inspect and repair deficient bridges, about $13,500 per bridge.
In the same bill that established the bridge fund, Congress voted to spend $7.4 billion on such earmarks as a National First Ladies’ Library in Canton, Ohio; a project to improve “rural domestic preparedness” in Kentucky; and a high-speed ferry to the remote Matanuska-Susitna Borough in Alaska.
GAY PRAIRIE Culture warriors may be fighting over gay marriage, but acceptance of gays and lesbians is growing even in the most conservative states. The gay population of Nebraska jumped 71 percent from 2000 to 2005, according to a new analysis of Census Bureau statistics. In Kansas, the number of people who said they were gay rose 68 percent. In Iowa, the increase was 58 percent.
It’s not that more people are gay, or that there’s been a huge migration of gays from San Francisco and New York to the Farm Belt, demographers say. Gay people are simply “coming out” in places where they once hid or fled.
BUILDING WALLS, NOT BRIDGES As presidential candidates vow “to secure the border,” the Department of Homeland Security has already started work on a 700-mile “wall” along the 1,952-mile Mexican border. Half of the new wall, extending from Tecate, Calif., to Laredo, Tex., will consist of barriers like 15-foot-high fences made of sheet metal and solid concrete. For about 150 miles in the remote desert, the border will be guarded by a high-tech “fence” of cameras, light towers, underground sensors and radar.
The biggest opposition so far has come from local ranchers and farmers, who say the fence is cutting off parts of their land and blocking access to the Rio Grande. Homeland Security officials say they’ll try to accommodate local concerns, but that national security trumps property rights.
SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM Four years ago, Bill Gates of Microsoft predicted that the problem of unsolicited commercial e-mail, or spam, “will be solved by 2006.” It wasn’t. Spammers, in fact, figured out several ways to evade anti-spam software and other efforts to stop them, and are now sending out close to 200 billion messages a day. About 70 percent of all e-mail is now spam. In weary resignation, the average Internet user spends three minutes a day hitting the delete button on the scores of spam messages that evade the filters.
EXPORTING THE CAR CULTURE In the West, “going green” may be all the rage, but in China and India, the automobile is being discovered all over again. The two countries each have populations of more than a billion, booming economies and rapidly expanding middle classes, and an unsated appetite for Western goodies — including cars. In India, Tata Motors is introducing the People’s Car, with a sticker price of $2,500. Over the next 12 years, some economists predict, more than 150 million Indians will buy cars. China, meanwhile, may have 140 million cars on its roads by 2020.
If this all comes to pass, climate experts say, it will be impossible to make meaningful, worldwide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. China and India already account for 70 percent of the worldwide increase in energy demand over the last two years. “This is a very worrying message,” said Fatih Birol, chief economist for the International Energy Agency, which provides policy advice to industrialized nations. “China and India are transforming our energy markets. We have a window of opportunity of 5 to 10 years before it becomes unsustainable and irreversible.” In other words, get used to praying for rain.
People rooted for Kevin Federline to get the kids. After electing 43 consecutive white male presidents, Americans seriously considered a woman, a black man and an Italian-American from New York on his third marriage.
Amid such strange occurrences, one could be excused for missing news of more subtle — but lasting — importance. Here are a few developments you haven’t heard the last of:
HOW DRY WE ARE One of the consequences of global warming for the United States, climatologists warn, will be prolonged droughts. This summer, more than 40 percent of the country found itself in the grip of “extreme or moderate” drought. In the Southwest, seven years of rainless skies and warmer temperatures left the Rockies without much snow pack, and created alarming bathtub rings around the Lake Mead and Lake Powell reservoirs.
In the Southeast, a drought of a severity not seen in more than a century destroyed crops and turned rivers and lakes to dust in several states; Atlanta’s primary source of drinking water, Lake Lanier, fell to a record low, setting off a water war between Florida and Alabama. Things got so bad that Gov. Sonny Perdue of Georgia staged a prayer ceremony. “God, we need you,” he beseeched the heavens. “We do believe in miracles.” The heavens have yet to respond.
NOT-SO-BENIGN NEGLECT After a 40-year-old highway bridge in Minneapolis collapsed on Aug. 1, dropping 50 cars and trucks into the abyss and killing 13 people, the public was surprised to learn that engineers had given 74,000 other bridges in the United States the same rating as the fallen span: “structurally deficient.” Engineers and state officials clamored for repairs to these aging bridges, but estimates of the total cost were as high as $188 billion. Representative Jim Oberstar, Democrat of Minnesota, proposed a temporary five-cent gas tax to pay for the repairs, but his legislative colleagues argued that Congress and the states simply had to spend existing highway funds more wisely, instead of wasting them on earmarks for pet projects. Instead, Congress allocated $1 billion to inspect and repair deficient bridges, about $13,500 per bridge.
In the same bill that established the bridge fund, Congress voted to spend $7.4 billion on such earmarks as a National First Ladies’ Library in Canton, Ohio; a project to improve “rural domestic preparedness” in Kentucky; and a high-speed ferry to the remote Matanuska-Susitna Borough in Alaska.
GAY PRAIRIE Culture warriors may be fighting over gay marriage, but acceptance of gays and lesbians is growing even in the most conservative states. The gay population of Nebraska jumped 71 percent from 2000 to 2005, according to a new analysis of Census Bureau statistics. In Kansas, the number of people who said they were gay rose 68 percent. In Iowa, the increase was 58 percent.
It’s not that more people are gay, or that there’s been a huge migration of gays from San Francisco and New York to the Farm Belt, demographers say. Gay people are simply “coming out” in places where they once hid or fled.
BUILDING WALLS, NOT BRIDGES As presidential candidates vow “to secure the border,” the Department of Homeland Security has already started work on a 700-mile “wall” along the 1,952-mile Mexican border. Half of the new wall, extending from Tecate, Calif., to Laredo, Tex., will consist of barriers like 15-foot-high fences made of sheet metal and solid concrete. For about 150 miles in the remote desert, the border will be guarded by a high-tech “fence” of cameras, light towers, underground sensors and radar.
The biggest opposition so far has come from local ranchers and farmers, who say the fence is cutting off parts of their land and blocking access to the Rio Grande. Homeland Security officials say they’ll try to accommodate local concerns, but that national security trumps property rights.
SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM Four years ago, Bill Gates of Microsoft predicted that the problem of unsolicited commercial e-mail, or spam, “will be solved by 2006.” It wasn’t. Spammers, in fact, figured out several ways to evade anti-spam software and other efforts to stop them, and are now sending out close to 200 billion messages a day. About 70 percent of all e-mail is now spam. In weary resignation, the average Internet user spends three minutes a day hitting the delete button on the scores of spam messages that evade the filters.
EXPORTING THE CAR CULTURE In the West, “going green” may be all the rage, but in China and India, the automobile is being discovered all over again. The two countries each have populations of more than a billion, booming economies and rapidly expanding middle classes, and an unsated appetite for Western goodies — including cars. In India, Tata Motors is introducing the People’s Car, with a sticker price of $2,500. Over the next 12 years, some economists predict, more than 150 million Indians will buy cars. China, meanwhile, may have 140 million cars on its roads by 2020.
If this all comes to pass, climate experts say, it will be impossible to make meaningful, worldwide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. China and India already account for 70 percent of the worldwide increase in energy demand over the last two years. “This is a very worrying message,” said Fatih Birol, chief economist for the International Energy Agency, which provides policy advice to industrialized nations. “China and India are transforming our energy markets. We have a window of opportunity of 5 to 10 years before it becomes unsustainable and irreversible.” In other words, get used to praying for rain.
Mr. Sheed
It's the birthday of novelist Wilfrid Sheed, (books by this author) born in London, England (1930). Wilfrid Sheed wrote My Life As a Fan (1993), about his love of baseball, and In Love with Daylight: A Memoir of Recovery (1995). He once said,
"The American male doesn't mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities."
"The American male doesn't mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities."
26.12.07
ON AND AROUND Dec. 25, 1914, many of the men fighting in the recently inaugurated war in Europe stopped for a short time to observe what came to be known as the "Christmas Truce." They sang carols back and forth, then came out of the trenches to meet, play a bit of soccer, share some food. "Just before dinner I had the pleasure of shaking hands with several Germans," a British soldier wrote in a letter home. "[A] party of them came 1/2way over to us so several of us went out to them. I exchanged one of my balaclavas for a hat. I've also got a button off one of their tunics. We also exchanged smokes etc. and had a decent chat. . . . We can hardly believe that we've been firing at them for the last week or two -- it all seems so strange."
Normality was not long in returning. The Great War resumed in earnest, further spontaneous truces were discouraged in the interest of good military order, and by Christmas Day 1918 nearly 10 million men had died at war, along with some 10 million civilians. And of course it was still early in the century, the 20th since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, an event whose significance had been proclaimed in the Book of Luke in words that resonated among people of every faith and following: "Peace on earth, goodwill toward men." Literally uncounted millions more were yet to perish in the wars, pogroms, purges, ethnic relocations and other acts of organized violence that culminated in the Second World War, which was in turn followed by a long "peace" in which uncounted millions more were killed.
The odd thing is that so much of the horror has been so mindless -- not part of a struggle for food, land or dominance or even of long-simmering discord between one group of people and another, but rather a puzzling eruption of hatred toward entire categories of people suddenly found, for no good reason, to be threatening, deviant, dangerously different -- the cause of all problems real and imagined.
Some students of the subject voice cautious optimism that the impulse to such violence is gradually declining or is being reined in. But then, of course, they thought that a hundred years ago, too. There was confidence then that the forces of education and technological and economic advancement would move civilization forward into an era of prosperity and understanding in which peoples would no longer wage war on one another. Perhaps by now we comprehend that while there is some truth in this, what is far more important than all the engines of progress is simply to understand and truly feel what it was that moved the hearts of the men who put down their guns and walked across a blasted field toward their enemies on Christmas Day 1914.
Normality was not long in returning. The Great War resumed in earnest, further spontaneous truces were discouraged in the interest of good military order, and by Christmas Day 1918 nearly 10 million men had died at war, along with some 10 million civilians. And of course it was still early in the century, the 20th since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, an event whose significance had been proclaimed in the Book of Luke in words that resonated among people of every faith and following: "Peace on earth, goodwill toward men." Literally uncounted millions more were yet to perish in the wars, pogroms, purges, ethnic relocations and other acts of organized violence that culminated in the Second World War, which was in turn followed by a long "peace" in which uncounted millions more were killed.
The odd thing is that so much of the horror has been so mindless -- not part of a struggle for food, land or dominance or even of long-simmering discord between one group of people and another, but rather a puzzling eruption of hatred toward entire categories of people suddenly found, for no good reason, to be threatening, deviant, dangerously different -- the cause of all problems real and imagined.
Some students of the subject voice cautious optimism that the impulse to such violence is gradually declining or is being reined in. But then, of course, they thought that a hundred years ago, too. There was confidence then that the forces of education and technological and economic advancement would move civilization forward into an era of prosperity and understanding in which peoples would no longer wage war on one another. Perhaps by now we comprehend that while there is some truth in this, what is far more important than all the engines of progress is simply to understand and truly feel what it was that moved the hearts of the men who put down their guns and walked across a blasted field toward their enemies on Christmas Day 1914.
On this day in 1913, the author of The Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce, disappeared into Mexico while traveling with the army of rebel Pancho Villa. In one of his final letters, the 71-year-old Bierce wrote to his niece, Lora, "Good-bye if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life."
BOXING DAY
Boxing Day is a traditional celebration, dating back to the Medieval Ages, and consisted of the practice of giving out gifts to employees, the poor, or to people in a lower social class. The name has numerous folk etymologies[3]; the Oxford English Dictionary attributes it to the Christmas box; the verb box meaning: "To give a Christmas-box (colloq.); whence boxing-day." Outside the Commonwealth, the day is still celebrated but just with a different name.
Folk etymologies
The more common stories include:
It was the day when people would give a present or Christmas box to those who had worked for them throughout the year.
In feudal times, Christmas was a reason for a gathering of extended families. All the serfs would gather their families in the manor of their lord, which made it easier for the lord of the estate to hand out annual stipends to the serfs. After all the Christmas parties on 26 December, the lord of the estate would give practical goods such as cloth, grains, and tools to the serfs who lived on his land. Each family would get a box full of such goods the day after Christmas. Under this explanation, there was nothing voluntary about this transaction; the lord of the manor was obliged to supply these goods. Because of the boxes being given out, the day was called Boxing Day.
In England many years ago, it was common practice for the servants to carry boxes to their employers when they arrived for their day's work on the day after Christmas. Their employers would then put coins in the boxes as special end-of-year gifts. This can be compared with the modern day concept of Christmas bonuses. The servants carried boxes for the coins, hence the name Boxing Day.
In churches, it was traditional to open the church's donation box on Christmas Day, and the money in the donation box was to be distributed to the poorer or lower class citizens on the next day. In this case, the "box" in "Boxing Day" comes from that lockbox in which the donations were left.
Boxing Day was the day when the wren, the king of birds,[4] was captured and put in a box and introduced to each household in the village when he would be asked for a successful year and a good harvest. See Frazer's Golden Bough.
Evidence can also be found in Wassail songs such as:
Where are you going ? said Milder to Malder,
Oh where are you going ? said Fessel to Foe,
I'm going to hunt the cutty wren said Milder to Malder,
I'm going to hunt the cutty wren said John the Rednose.
And what will you do wi' it ? said Milder to Malder,
And what will you do wi' it ? said Fessel to Foe,
I'll put it in a box said Milder to Malder,
I'll put it in a box said John the Rednose.
Because the staff had to work on such an important day as Christmas by serving the master of the house and their family, they were given the following day off. As servants were kept away from their own families to work on a traditional religious holiday and were not able to celebrate Christmas Dinner, the customary benefit was to "box" up the leftover food from Christmas Day and send it away with the servants and their families. (Similarly, as the servants had the 26th off, the owners of the manor may have had to serve themselves pre-prepared, boxed food for that one day.) Hence the "boxing" of food became "Boxing Day".
From the OED
The first week-day after Christmas-day, observed as a holiday on which post-men, errand-boys, and servants of various kinds expect to receive a Christmas-box. So also Boxing-night, Boxing-time.
1833 in A. MATHEWS Mem. C. Mathews (1839) IV. viii. 173 To the completion of his dismay, he arrives in London on boxing-day. 1837 DICKENS Pickw. xxxii. 343 No man ever talked in poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day. 1837 in Bentley's Misc. Mar. 296 The most turbulent sixpenny gallery that ever yelled through a boxing-night. 1849 G. SOANE New Curios. Lit. 317 The feast of Saint Stephen is more generally known amongst us as Boxing-Day. 1871 Hood's ‘Comic Ann.’ 59 It was the Saturday before the Monday Boxing Night. 1877 PEACOCK N. Linc. Gloss. (E.D.S.) Boxing-time, any time between Christmas-day, and the end of the first week in January. 1884 Harper's Mag. Dec. 9/1 In consequence of the multiplicity of business on Christmas-day, the giving of Christmas-boxes was postponed to the 26th, St. Stephen's Day, which became the established Boxing-day.
1833 in A. MATHEWS Mem. C. Mathews (1839) IV. viii. 173 To the completion of his dismay, he arrives in London on boxing-day. 1837 DICKENS Pickw. xxxii. 343 No man ever talked in poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day. 1837 in Bentley's Misc. Mar. 296 The most turbulent sixpenny gallery that ever yelled through a boxing-night. 1849 G. SOANE New Curios. Lit. 317 The feast of Saint Stephen is more generally known amongst us as Boxing-Day. 1871 Hood's ‘Comic Ann.’ 59 It was the Saturday before the Monday Boxing Night. 1877 PEACOCK N. Linc. Gloss. (E.D.S.) Boxing-time, any time between Christmas-day, and the end of the first week in January. 1884 Harper's Mag. Dec. 9/1 In consequence of the multiplicity of business on Christmas-day, the giving of Christmas-boxes was postponed to the 26th, St. Stephen's Day, which became the established Boxing-day.
24.12.07
May God Bless Us..........
Christmas Eve is also the setting for the beginning of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, published in 1843, a story credited with reviving Christmas in England, which begins:
"Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail."
Scrooge is the famous bitter old miser who holds Christmas in contempt but on Christmas Eve he gives Bob Cratchit Christmas day off. He dines alone in his usual tavern, and returns to his lodgings, where on the door knocker her encounters an image of the face of Marley, his old business partner. Marley warns him that he will be visited by three spirits and if he does as they tell him, then he can escape Marley's fate, which is to walk the earth bound in chains because he had no concern for mankind during his life. The ghosts come and Scrooge awakens "'I don't know what to do' he cried, 'laughing in the same breath...I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody!'" The boy stops under the window and he sends him down to the poulterer's shop to buy the enormous turkey to send to Bob Cratchit's family. Scrooge dressed himself all in his best and got out into the streets. The people were pouring forth and walking with his hands behind him Scrooge regarded everyone with a delighted smile. He looked so pleasant that three or four good humored fellows said, "Good morning, sir. A merry Christmas to you.' And Scrooge said afterwards that they were the most delightful sounds he had ever heard in all his years. He went to church and walked up and down and found that everything could yield him pleasure.
Much as I love “A Christmas Carol,” I don’t believe Charles Dickens really did justice to the nature of his hero, Ebenezer Scrooge. If Dickens hadn’t been such a sucker for personal redemption, he might have let us see how perceptive the old Scrooge really was — the one who savors all the ironies of Christmas. How else, after a night of ghostly trauma, could he have remembered there were two prize turkeys in the poulterer’s window at the corner in the next street but one?
I always imagine Scrooge into existence for a little while about now, not because I dislike Christmas — I don’t — but because the old Scrooge is as much a part of it as the new one. “Where do you keep your young the rest of the year?” I can hear him saying while he waits for the No. 1 train at Times Square. And, indeed, the platform is filled with children who seem to be knotted together, mitten to mitten. “Have you never heard of shopping online?” he shouts on the street after being banged in the knee yet again by a heavy shopping bag. “Why don’t you go home and let some air out?” he mutters in a crowded supermarket aisle, where it looks as if everyone, swaddled in winter gear, is inflated to maximum pressure.
The really surprising thing about this time of year is that there is so little Scrooge-like behavior, so little personal holiday vitriol on the loose. Never mind that the subways are packed and the sidewalks are jammed and people who should never be allowed to drive in Manhattan have driven in nonetheless. Without all of it, the city would look only half-decorated. The story calls for a crowd scene, and we are all extras in it.
It doesn’t mean the old Scrooge doesn’t still get around. He ran a counting house, and he had his accustomed spot among the merchants at the Royal Exchange. He would have applauded the way we have turned Christmas into an economic benchmark. He would have been disappointed, I think, that we have not found a way to trade Christmas futures. He would have noted the brisk business in inflatable plastic lawn decorations. He would have ... but perhaps that’s enough of the old Scrooge for one year. Time to remember that tonight is the night when that new old man was made.
"Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail."
Scrooge is the famous bitter old miser who holds Christmas in contempt but on Christmas Eve he gives Bob Cratchit Christmas day off. He dines alone in his usual tavern, and returns to his lodgings, where on the door knocker her encounters an image of the face of Marley, his old business partner. Marley warns him that he will be visited by three spirits and if he does as they tell him, then he can escape Marley's fate, which is to walk the earth bound in chains because he had no concern for mankind during his life. The ghosts come and Scrooge awakens "'I don't know what to do' he cried, 'laughing in the same breath...I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody!'" The boy stops under the window and he sends him down to the poulterer's shop to buy the enormous turkey to send to Bob Cratchit's family. Scrooge dressed himself all in his best and got out into the streets. The people were pouring forth and walking with his hands behind him Scrooge regarded everyone with a delighted smile. He looked so pleasant that three or four good humored fellows said, "Good morning, sir. A merry Christmas to you.' And Scrooge said afterwards that they were the most delightful sounds he had ever heard in all his years. He went to church and walked up and down and found that everything could yield him pleasure.
Much as I love “A Christmas Carol,” I don’t believe Charles Dickens really did justice to the nature of his hero, Ebenezer Scrooge. If Dickens hadn’t been such a sucker for personal redemption, he might have let us see how perceptive the old Scrooge really was — the one who savors all the ironies of Christmas. How else, after a night of ghostly trauma, could he have remembered there were two prize turkeys in the poulterer’s window at the corner in the next street but one?
I always imagine Scrooge into existence for a little while about now, not because I dislike Christmas — I don’t — but because the old Scrooge is as much a part of it as the new one. “Where do you keep your young the rest of the year?” I can hear him saying while he waits for the No. 1 train at Times Square. And, indeed, the platform is filled with children who seem to be knotted together, mitten to mitten. “Have you never heard of shopping online?” he shouts on the street after being banged in the knee yet again by a heavy shopping bag. “Why don’t you go home and let some air out?” he mutters in a crowded supermarket aisle, where it looks as if everyone, swaddled in winter gear, is inflated to maximum pressure.
The really surprising thing about this time of year is that there is so little Scrooge-like behavior, so little personal holiday vitriol on the loose. Never mind that the subways are packed and the sidewalks are jammed and people who should never be allowed to drive in Manhattan have driven in nonetheless. Without all of it, the city would look only half-decorated. The story calls for a crowd scene, and we are all extras in it.
It doesn’t mean the old Scrooge doesn’t still get around. He ran a counting house, and he had his accustomed spot among the merchants at the Royal Exchange. He would have applauded the way we have turned Christmas into an economic benchmark. He would have been disappointed, I think, that we have not found a way to trade Christmas futures. He would have noted the brisk business in inflatable plastic lawn decorations. He would have ... but perhaps that’s enough of the old Scrooge for one year. Time to remember that tonight is the night when that new old man was made.
22.12.07
How is Your Drink?
How's Your Drink? Cocktails, Culture, and the Art of Drinking Well
by Eric Felton -- reviewed by Christopher Hitchens
"How's your drink?" was, apparently, the cordial question asked of his guests by Frank Sinatra, who didn't like to think of anyone going short. "How's your glass?" was the equivalent question (and, later, book title) in the case of Kingsley Amis, whose domestic strategy later boiled down to telling his more favored friends that if they didn't have a full drink in their hands, it was their own bloody fault for not refilling without waiting to be asked.
That book was actually a quiz book, in which you could be asked "From what does Scotch receive its color?" or "What happens to a vintage port before and after bottling?" The answers were helpfully included at the end, often with a cheery wealth of extra detail, so the volume doubled as a guide and general adviser as well. But Amis also wrote two other drinkers-companion efforts, entitled Every Day Drinking and On Drink. (Interest declared: All these will soon be reissued in a handy single volume by Bloomsbury, with an introduction by your humble servant.)
Eric Felten doesn't write as well as Kingsley Amis, which is no disgrace (he is a jazz musician, an occupation for which Amis had a high regard) but he does have a feel for literature as it relates to booze, and he has been out there on our behalf and done an awful lot of homework. His book, which is a distillation, if I may put it like that, of his celebrated Wall Street Journal column of the same name, is by far the wittiest and the most comprehensive study of the subject since the author of Lucky Jim laid down his pen.
(By the way, a "Lucky Jim," according to Felten, is "3 oz. vodka, oz. dry vermouth, oz. cucumber juice: Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Float a slice of unpeeled cucumber on the top." A bit herbivorous when compared to its namesake, but there you have it.)
It's always a good plan to see how an author handles a topic with which you are yourself familiar. So I began by looking up "Negroni": a favorite tipple of mine either on sunny days or in Mediterranean countries (it won't work in cold or gray conditions). I had always been authoritatively told that this cryptically effective cocktail--gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth--was so named because a certain Count Negroni once found himself with unexpected guests and with only those three ingredients at hand. Thanks to Felten, I now know a good deal better. It seems that Count Camillo Negroni was a drinker of Americanos--the cocktail, you may remember, that James Bond actually asks for in Casino Royale. But one day he tired of the blandness of campari, vermouth, and a swoosh of soda, and asked the barman at the Caffè Casoni in Florence--a man named Fosco Scarselli--to put a spike of gin in it. Like so many improvisations of genius, this was simple and easily emulated. (Though I should leave out the soda if I were you.)
Felten then goes on to elucidate the role played by the Negroni in the film version of Tennessee Williams's novel The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, where it acts the part of accomplice to a gigolo, and in the novel version of Christopher Buckley's movie Thank You For Smoking, where in its vodka incarnation it acts as a prop and stay to the villainous lobbyist Nick Naylor. Buckley is quoted as saying that he himself has "been known to drink a [vodka] Negroni or two (but never three)" because "it signals a certain, shall we say, suavity, refinement, je ne sais quoi, sophistication, to say nothing of startling good looks and abundant masculinity. Unlike those girlie-men who drink Gin Negronis."
Well, everything had been going fine for me up until that point. But, secure enough in my own huskiness, I shall pardon young Buckley because he provides a segue--actually two segues--to an important subtext. This is the fraught question of cocktails and sex or, if you like, cocktails and gender.
His remark about one or two but never three has been, I hope, lifted from my own axiom about the relationship between martinis and female breasts. One is too few. Three is too many. Two seems somehow superbly right. His second observation, about the girlie factor, is something that greatly preoccupies Felten. When all is said, isn't there something very slightly fussy about all this mixing and shaking and measuring: something, perhaps, fractionally light in the loafers?
Borrowing from an old Esquire distinction, he suggests that masculine cocktails involve whiskey whereas feminine ones "lean heavily on cream, fruit juices and crème de this-and-that." That seems fair enough, except that both he and Kingsley Amis (about whom there was nothing limp-wristed) demonstrate a high degree of affection for the "Irish Coffee" cocktail and the exquisitely careful means of making it. Of course whiskey, which Felten calls "that least feminine-seeming of spirits," is involved, so the honors here can be reckoned as about even.
Negronis to one side, and Ameri canos being as un-American as could be, there is still a sense in which the whole concept of the cocktail is an American one. As often as not, the cocktail bar in a decent European hotel will be called "The American Bar." The word cocktail itself is of American provenance, though rather vague in origin. I think the invention must have something to do with the distinctly American passion for plentiful ice: a commodity that was until fairly recently in niggardly supply in overseas bars and pubs. And somehow, one can't picture the martini being evolved in any other culture.
For any fooling around with the said and beloved martini--especially the sickly new tendency to put the "tini" suffix onto something insipid (like "appletini")--Felten has zero tolerance. His long section on the subject is taut and muscular and matter-of-fact. He reviews the work of the no-or-nearly-no vermouth school, uncharacteristically missing the chance to cite Luis Buñuel's advice to merely let a ray of sunshine through the vermouth bottle into the gin, but comes down in favor of a decent dollop and gives cogent reasons for his verdict as well as a very good selection of recipes and some hard thinking on the subject lifted (with attribution) from Bernard De Voto.
Occasionally his writing falls into a slight archness (I have always found the term "mixologist" for "bartender" to be wince-making) and he overuses terms like "so the story goes" and "legend has it," but in general this book is a superb guide to the world of the cocktail, and a handsome tribute to the bold society that produced it.
by Eric Felton -- reviewed by Christopher Hitchens
"How's your drink?" was, apparently, the cordial question asked of his guests by Frank Sinatra, who didn't like to think of anyone going short. "How's your glass?" was the equivalent question (and, later, book title) in the case of Kingsley Amis, whose domestic strategy later boiled down to telling his more favored friends that if they didn't have a full drink in their hands, it was their own bloody fault for not refilling without waiting to be asked.
That book was actually a quiz book, in which you could be asked "From what does Scotch receive its color?" or "What happens to a vintage port before and after bottling?" The answers were helpfully included at the end, often with a cheery wealth of extra detail, so the volume doubled as a guide and general adviser as well. But Amis also wrote two other drinkers-companion efforts, entitled Every Day Drinking and On Drink. (Interest declared: All these will soon be reissued in a handy single volume by Bloomsbury, with an introduction by your humble servant.)
Eric Felten doesn't write as well as Kingsley Amis, which is no disgrace (he is a jazz musician, an occupation for which Amis had a high regard) but he does have a feel for literature as it relates to booze, and he has been out there on our behalf and done an awful lot of homework. His book, which is a distillation, if I may put it like that, of his celebrated Wall Street Journal column of the same name, is by far the wittiest and the most comprehensive study of the subject since the author of Lucky Jim laid down his pen.
(By the way, a "Lucky Jim," according to Felten, is "3 oz. vodka, oz. dry vermouth, oz. cucumber juice: Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Float a slice of unpeeled cucumber on the top." A bit herbivorous when compared to its namesake, but there you have it.)
It's always a good plan to see how an author handles a topic with which you are yourself familiar. So I began by looking up "Negroni": a favorite tipple of mine either on sunny days or in Mediterranean countries (it won't work in cold or gray conditions). I had always been authoritatively told that this cryptically effective cocktail--gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth--was so named because a certain Count Negroni once found himself with unexpected guests and with only those three ingredients at hand. Thanks to Felten, I now know a good deal better. It seems that Count Camillo Negroni was a drinker of Americanos--the cocktail, you may remember, that James Bond actually asks for in Casino Royale. But one day he tired of the blandness of campari, vermouth, and a swoosh of soda, and asked the barman at the Caffè Casoni in Florence--a man named Fosco Scarselli--to put a spike of gin in it. Like so many improvisations of genius, this was simple and easily emulated. (Though I should leave out the soda if I were you.)
Felten then goes on to elucidate the role played by the Negroni in the film version of Tennessee Williams's novel The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, where it acts the part of accomplice to a gigolo, and in the novel version of Christopher Buckley's movie Thank You For Smoking, where in its vodka incarnation it acts as a prop and stay to the villainous lobbyist Nick Naylor. Buckley is quoted as saying that he himself has "been known to drink a [vodka] Negroni or two (but never three)" because "it signals a certain, shall we say, suavity, refinement, je ne sais quoi, sophistication, to say nothing of startling good looks and abundant masculinity. Unlike those girlie-men who drink Gin Negronis."
Well, everything had been going fine for me up until that point. But, secure enough in my own huskiness, I shall pardon young Buckley because he provides a segue--actually two segues--to an important subtext. This is the fraught question of cocktails and sex or, if you like, cocktails and gender.
His remark about one or two but never three has been, I hope, lifted from my own axiom about the relationship between martinis and female breasts. One is too few. Three is too many. Two seems somehow superbly right. His second observation, about the girlie factor, is something that greatly preoccupies Felten. When all is said, isn't there something very slightly fussy about all this mixing and shaking and measuring: something, perhaps, fractionally light in the loafers?
Borrowing from an old Esquire distinction, he suggests that masculine cocktails involve whiskey whereas feminine ones "lean heavily on cream, fruit juices and crème de this-and-that." That seems fair enough, except that both he and Kingsley Amis (about whom there was nothing limp-wristed) demonstrate a high degree of affection for the "Irish Coffee" cocktail and the exquisitely careful means of making it. Of course whiskey, which Felten calls "that least feminine-seeming of spirits," is involved, so the honors here can be reckoned as about even.
Negronis to one side, and Ameri canos being as un-American as could be, there is still a sense in which the whole concept of the cocktail is an American one. As often as not, the cocktail bar in a decent European hotel will be called "The American Bar." The word cocktail itself is of American provenance, though rather vague in origin. I think the invention must have something to do with the distinctly American passion for plentiful ice: a commodity that was until fairly recently in niggardly supply in overseas bars and pubs. And somehow, one can't picture the martini being evolved in any other culture.
For any fooling around with the said and beloved martini--especially the sickly new tendency to put the "tini" suffix onto something insipid (like "appletini")--Felten has zero tolerance. His long section on the subject is taut and muscular and matter-of-fact. He reviews the work of the no-or-nearly-no vermouth school, uncharacteristically missing the chance to cite Luis Buñuel's advice to merely let a ray of sunshine through the vermouth bottle into the gin, but comes down in favor of a decent dollop and gives cogent reasons for his verdict as well as a very good selection of recipes and some hard thinking on the subject lifted (with attribution) from Bernard De Voto.
Occasionally his writing falls into a slight archness (I have always found the term "mixologist" for "bartender" to be wince-making) and he overuses terms like "so the story goes" and "legend has it," but in general this book is a superb guide to the world of the cocktail, and a handsome tribute to the bold society that produced it.
At Christmas
Most religions worldwide hold that God interacts with humans on Earth. But in the Christmas story, something quite different happens. In Christian teaching, God doesn't just visit Earth, but becomes human. Understanding that difference, say clergy and scholars, is key to grasping the theological underpinnings of Christmas. Even Christians brought up in the belief that Jesus Christ is God's son may not be aware that this teaching, compared with other faiths, is unique.The Rev. Clay Schmit, a Lutheran minister and professor of preaching at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, says Christmas is about celebrating God's grace that came "in this unexpected contrary form -- the most powerful essence of the universe is reduced to the weakest possible human being -- the newborn infant." As theologian F. Dale Bruner observes, "It is the central Christian conviction that the Great Invisible God became a real human being and lived among us as the historical Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, between 6 BC and AD 30 in Palestine."God choosing to become human -- the doctrine known as Incarnation -- shows that God understood that the only way to reach humans was for him to come to them, Schmit said."The distance is so great, there is no way any human person could imagine reconciling with God," Schmit said. "Only God could do that. That's the very central part of God's grace. God knows that we cannot, therefore, God must, and surprisingly, magnificently, God did."It's not easy, he added, for mortals to accept the idea that God would come down to be with them because that's so counter to their natural instinct to put God on a pedestal. "We're so limited to control our own circumstances, we want God to be up there and in control of everything," he said. "The thought that God would choose to come down and be side by side with us is counter to that natural instinct."Yet, that's at the heart of Christianity, Bruner said. In an e-mail, he expanded on this theme:"Our Muslim brothers and sisters do not believe that God would so lower himself because 'Allah Akbar,' God is great, and would not demean himself to be an ordinary human being. "But Christian Faith believes that precisely because God IS so great, he shows his greatness in this great Christmas act of humility and condescension . . . by becoming one of us and even going to the . . . extent of dying for us as a common criminal. Then when God raised Jesus from the dead on Easter (the other great Christian celebration), God validated and authenticated, in history, the wonder of The Incarnation -- that all this was for real."The term incarnation comes from the Latin incarnatio, meaning "being in flesh."Technically, the doctrine of the Incarnation was adopted in the 12th century, theologians say. But, they also note that the word incarnatio was used by church fathers in the 4th century. And, the corresponding Greek sarkosis or ensarkosis was invoked by the Greek church fathers in the 3rd and 4th centuries. The Greek verb sarkousthai -- "to be made flesh"-- is contained in the Creed of Nicaea of AD 325, authorities say. That creed was broadened decades later in the Nicene Creed, recited by Christians to this day, which affirms the unity of God, insists that Christ was "begotten from the Father before all time," and declares that Christ is "of the same essence as the Father," according to the New Dictionary of Theology. Bruner, a professor emeritus of religion at Whitworth College in Spokane, Wash., and author of a critically acclaimed two-volume commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, said the "Incarnation text" in the New Testament is John 1:14 -- "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us."The Rev. Robert K. Johnston, a professor of theology and culture at Fuller, says Christianity has repeated the pattern of the original Incarnation, "seeking to enflesh the divine" in current and contemporary form."So, the Incarnation is not only an event but a lifestyle," Johnston said. "It's not only once and for all, but it's ongoing. It's our attempt to express our faith in the vernacular to both understand it and re-express it in the common and everyday. Just as in Jesus we see the God-Man, so we are called to be godly men and women in our very physicality, in our person, in our actions, not just in our thoughts."This connection is embodied in the "living creches" churches often stage during the holiday season. The Church at Rocky Peak in Chatsworth is one such church, and after tonight's service concludes shortly before 7, congregants and visitors have an open invitation to go "Back to Bethlehem," down a steep hill to a two-acre "village," made to look like the little town the night that Christians believe Jesus was born more than 2,000 years ago.They will see angels pronounce "Glory to God in the highest," startled shepherds in the fields falling to their knees, wise men on camels coming from the East bearing gifts, and a Bethlehem full of people who have come to register in a census decreed by Caesar Augustus. Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus will be there, in a cave-like stable.In his Advent sermon tonight and Sunday at Rocky Peak, the Rev. Mike Yearley will touch upon this theme. Quoting passages from the Hebrew Bible, he will share the "back story" -- the ancient prophesies of the Hebrew prophets about the coming of the Messiah. They prophesied that the Messiah would be a Jew, from the tribe of Judah, in King David's line, born in Bethlehem of a virgin, and that this child would be a mighty God, Yearley said, referring to numerous verses from Genesis, 2 Samuel, Micah and Isaiah. "If you don't understand the back story, you can't really catch what Christmas is about," he said, adding that it would be like trying to understand a book without reading the first half.At this time of the year, when it's so easy to get caught up in the materialism of the season, it is important to step back to reflect, theologians say."Regardless of our belief in Jesus as the Christ, we can all look at Christmas not so much as a time of spending and consumerism, but as a time to reflect on the vocation of Christ as bringing love to the human community," Schmit said.In the search for meaning and spirituality, it's important to look for symbols, he said.Recently, a student in his preaching class had a baby."It was one of the most wonderful things that happened in my class," Schmit said. "It's important to look for those kinds of symbols to encourage and to strengthen our faithful understanding of the season."
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