I have been recording these thoughts for a littlew over a year. Quite discouraging to ponder how little has changed. The US is still mired in Iraq. Terrorists still are terrorizing. Energy resources are being profligately abused. Africa is still worn by hunger and cruelty.
Show me something to be optimistic about.
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)
25.8.05
Tom Hayden Speaks
A poignant paen from Tom Hayden on how to extricate the US from Iraq. http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/24539/
CHINA
China remains an enigma to the US. America badly needs China (and India) as a trading partner. Yet differences will prevent mutually trusing alliances. An interesting article: http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050901faessay84504/wang-jisi/china-s-search-for-stability-with-america.html?mode=print
The United States is currently the only country with the capacity and the ambition to exercise global primacy, and it will remain so for a long time to come. This means that the United States is the country that can exert the greatest strategic pressure on China. Although in recent years Beijing has refrained from identifying Washington as an adversary or criticizing its "hegemonism" -- a pejorative Chinese code word for U.S. dominance -- many Chinese still view the United States as a major threat to their nation's security and domestic stability.
Yet the United States is a global leader in economics, education, culture, technology, and science. China, therefore, must maintain a close relationship with the United States if its modernization efforts are to succeed. Indeed, a cooperative partnership with Washington is of primary importance to Beijing, where economic prosperity and social stability are now top concerns.
Fortunately, greater cooperation with China is also in the United States' interests -- especially since the attacks of September 11, 2001. The United States now needs China's help on issues such as counterterrorism, nonproliferation, the reconstruction of Iraq, and the maintenance of stability in the Middle East. More and more, Washington has also started to seek China's cooperation in fields such as trade and finance, despite increased friction over currency exchange rates, intellectual property rights, and the textile trade.
The United States is currently the only country with the capacity and the ambition to exercise global primacy, and it will remain so for a long time to come. This means that the United States is the country that can exert the greatest strategic pressure on China. Although in recent years Beijing has refrained from identifying Washington as an adversary or criticizing its "hegemonism" -- a pejorative Chinese code word for U.S. dominance -- many Chinese still view the United States as a major threat to their nation's security and domestic stability.
Yet the United States is a global leader in economics, education, culture, technology, and science. China, therefore, must maintain a close relationship with the United States if its modernization efforts are to succeed. Indeed, a cooperative partnership with Washington is of primary importance to Beijing, where economic prosperity and social stability are now top concerns.
Fortunately, greater cooperation with China is also in the United States' interests -- especially since the attacks of September 11, 2001. The United States now needs China's help on issues such as counterterrorism, nonproliferation, the reconstruction of Iraq, and the maintenance of stability in the Middle East. More and more, Washington has also started to seek China's cooperation in fields such as trade and finance, despite increased friction over currency exchange rates, intellectual property rights, and the textile trade.
HAIL TO THE CHIEF(ESS?)
Who is the latest darling of Rupert Murdoch? Who is now a committed supporter of the war in Iraq and even an advocate of the Patriot Act? Who is cosying up to right-wing Republicans such as Senators John McCain, Bill Frist and Lindsey Graham - and even to Newt Gingrich? Who, indeed, has just finished a "heartbreaking" working tour of Alaska with McCain to investigate the effects of global warming? And who has been seen jetting in to places such as Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket this summer, hand-in-hand with her husband but increasingly looking like the more commanding of the two? Not so long ago, it would have seemed inconceivable that the answer to all these questions would be "Hillary Clinton". I have always insisted in these pages that she is brighter than her husband and that she would make a much better president, but I now feel confident to predict that - barring unforeseen circumstances - she will be the Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2008. That would make her at least odds-on favourite to become the 44th president of the United States, to say nothing of being the first woman to hold the most powerful office in the world. Like every politician consumed with that very purpose in mind, Senator Clinton insists that she has made no decision to run, yet to say that she is spending this summer positioning herself to do just that is to put it mildly. She has a stroke of luck coming up, too. On 27 September, ABC Television will start screening Commander-in-Chief. The station plans to make the new series a prime-time hit at 9pm on Tuesday evenings; it will star Geena Davis as, yes, a wife and mother who becomes the US president. And that, I suspect, will start to get the nation accustomed to the idea of President Hillary moving into the White House, trailing alongside her First Gentleman Bill. In the latest polls, Hillary is favoured by 39 per cent of Democrats as their 2008 candidate, compared with just 21 per cent for John Kerry, 15 for John Edwards and 5 for Senator Joe Biden, with the rest split among dark horses such as Evan Bayh, Mark Warner, Bill Richardson and even Al Gore. Although 49 per cent of the country as a whole say they are "not very likely" or "not at all likely" to vote for her to become president, 51 per cent responded that they would "likely" or "somewhat likely" cast their ballot for her - which would hand her a much clearer margin of victory than those for George W Bush in 2000 or last November. This summer, too, she has been unfailingly in the news. It may be more than a thousand days to go to the 2008 election - and only ten months since the last - but the media are salivating at the prospect of an all-women contest between Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, a not inconceivable but unlikely event. (In fact, my only prediction, and it is slightly light-hearted, is that the Republican candidate will be Dick Cheney - not least because he has always said flatly, over and over again, that he won't be.) I will never forget the sight of Hillary and Bill sweeping in to midnight communion late at the Washington National Cathedral at Christmas in 2000, just before they left the White House. As though in anticipation of her newly emancipated role, Hillary assumed a magisterial swagger ahead of her lip-biting, sheepish husband - now shackled for ever, following Hillary's monumental public humiliation over Monica Lewinsky in 1998, to play the role of contrite and ever-supportive husband. He said a few days ago that he is not convinced Hillary will stand but that he will serve in her administration if she wishes - words which must have been music to the ears of his wife. Despite their forays together this summer, she spends most of the year at their house near the British embassy in Washington, DC, while he prefers their 19th-century farmhouse 265 miles north, in Chappaqua. The first hurdle Hillary must overcome is to retake in the 2006 midterm elections the New York Senate seat that she won in 2000, though one of her confidantes tells me that she would be better off to concentrate on the presidential campaign. She has been helped, again, by the emergence of her most likely Republican opponent so far - Jeanine Pirro, a hyper-ambitious 54-year-old district attorney with an ex-con husband. Pirro made a comically inept start to her campaign this month when she lost her way in a speech announcing why she would be a better senator than Hillary, stumbling for an agonising 32 seconds in front of television cameras while she sought the page with the right words. Yet, to me, perhaps the most telling bell-wether of the Hillary bandwagon is Rupert Murdoch, who snuggled up to Tony Blair (and vice versa, of course) when he realised in the mid-Nineties that the Tories were going down the chute and that Blair was going to become prime minister. Now, perhaps still seeing the future more cannily than most at 74, he is doing the same with Hillary. Not so long ago his New York Post depicted her as the most loathsome Beelzebub imaginable - not only a "liberal" demon, but female to boot. Last month, however, it switched course and hailed her as "the unlikely warrior" after she called for troop levels in Iraq to be stepped up. Predictably, the right-wing propaganda machine - funded by the likes of Richard Mellon Scaife, a publisher who has devoted both his life and many of his millions to Clinton-hating - is already churning out tides of anti-Hillary books, in the expectation that they can destroy her character in the way that the so-called swiftboat veterans destroyed John Kerry's last year. The most vile so far claimed that their daughter, Chelsea, was conceived when Bill raped Hillary. You would expect the New York Post and ratings-dominant Fox News Channel to go to town on such filth and on another upcoming muckraking book by Dick Morris, Bill Clinton's former poll adviser, but Murdoch's media are suddenly being conspicuously quiet in their Hillary-bashing. By the end of June, Senator Clinton had raised $12.6m for her New York campaign next year; a Quinnipiac University poll has her leading Pirro by 63 to 29 per cent - though, whoever Clinton's Republican opponent proves to be, that margin will dramatically narrow. Democrats claim that Pirro's main role is to bloody her up for '08, but the current mantra is that Hil-lary is merely using the voters of New York to further her longer-term campaign for the presidency. In terms of name recognition, Hillary Clinton has it all - having become, I reckon, second only to Lady Diana as the most media-scrutinised woman in history. As Hillary's profile becomes even higher and Geena Davis's fictional female president seeps further into the consciousness of America's masses, we can expect to see even more desperate demonisation of her character: that she is not only a lesbian but also immoral and a philanderer (that she had an affair with Vince Foster, the Clinton aide who committed suicide in 1993); that she is a Wellesley-educated, man-hating feminist who prospered in the anti-America Sixties (she is 57) and who also promoted healthcare reform, aka, horror of horrors, "socialised medicine". This is not forgetting wild claims that the Clintons engaged in drug trafficking, extortion, bribery, tax evasion, fraud and murder. Even some parts of the mainstream media have accused them of all these things, at one time or another. The "vast right-wing conspiracy" against them that Hillary famously blamed for pillorying her husband over the Lewinsky affair, before she discovered the truth, does in fact exist; and its adherents see anybody to the left of them as being, by definition, flawed in personal character. That is why Hillary Clinton is busily cavorting with right-wing populists such as McCain, a Republican who hates George W Bush even more than she does and who will himself be a frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2008, when he will be 72. Clinton v McCain, indeed, is more likely than Clinton v Rice. Trying to counteract the image of her as a wildly bombastic lefty explains why Hillary is tacking frantically towards the centre right, not just on Iraq but also on social issues such as gay marriage (she is against); moreover, she is accen-tuating her (genuinely devout) Methodism and her (more doubtful) devotion to her husband. The obstacles, however, are not all political. Some are personal, too. She can bring out the worst in both men and women, perhaps because so many - especially, it seems, those on the Republican side - fear a powerful and intelligent woman. In the words of Sally Quinn, the social chronicler of Washington and wife of Ben Bradlee, the former Washington Post editor, "there's just something about her that pisses people off". She can be relaxed and witty in private but is frosty in public, with little of the easy but superficial matiness so exemplified by her husband. The American media have adjudged her a polarising figure, and what the mainstream media ordain here so often proves self-fulfilling. This summer, a record 57 per cent of the American public say they have a "favourable" image of Hillary. "Hillary Clinton for President 2008" badges are selling like hot cakes for $2.99, mouse mats for $16.99. In the first half of the 20th century Edith Wilson, wife of Woodrow Wilson, in effect took over as US president (unknown to the public) when Wilson suffered a stroke in 1919; Eleanor Roosevelt was already acting as the political ears and eyes of FDR when he started to initiate the New Deal 15 years later. However, both women had to assume presidential power by back-door subterfuge. Hillary Clinton is poised to rise not so much because of her husband, but in spite of him. It has been widely reported in the press that the first woman to have stood in an American presidential election was Geraldine Ferraro, Walter Mondale's vice-presidential running mate in the election that produced the disastrous Reagan landslide of 1984. In fact, that distinction belongs to Victoria Claflin Woodhull, a flamboyant suffragette and early advocate of free love who ran for the presidency itself in 1872, but fled to exile in England five years later. Records of her candidacy have been lost in the mists of time. But Hillary, whose defining moment came when she suffered those gross personal and political abasements in the White House seven years ago, has been meti-culously planning her own triumphal return there ever since. Besides, Woodhull never had the support of Rupert Murdoch, and a multibillion-dollar worldwide media empire that always ruthlessly pursues and usually wins whatever it perceives to be in its best interests. Now, however, it seems a woman called Hillary Rodham Clinton finally does. Ten things you might not know about Hillary Clinton - Her great-grandfather came from Pembroke - Bill Clinton first proposed to her by Ennerdale Water in the Lake District in 1973, when she said no - Her Yale Law School thesis was on the rights of children - She was originally a Republican, changing her loyalties after the murder of Martin Luther King - She sat on the board of Wal-Mart for six years, starting 1986 - She is a lifelong practising Methodist - She won a Grammy for her recording of her book It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us - She was paid a record $8m advance to write her memoirs - Her high-school nickname was Sister Frigidaire - In 1978-79 she made $100,000 trading in cattle futures
24.8.05
After Fahd
It will prove fascinating to see the angling for succession in Saudi Arabia after the death of King Fahd. The generations now in their twenties and thirties will see the commencement of the depletion of the vast Saudi oil reserves. This reality combined witht the volitle politics created by the Saudi backing of International terrorism should provoke some keen succession battles. See this from the PROSPECT. http://prospectmagazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7031
18.8.05
15.8.05
NEW YORK REDUXING
The reawakening of New York has been nothing if not miraculous. Pre-Giuliani it bottomed out both economically and socially. And then over the next few decades something surprising happened. The trends slowly faltered, reversed and improved with surprising speed. From a hellhole far deeper and more worrisome than even the most depressed Londoners could conjure today, New York emerged in only a couple of decades as a different place altogether.
These days, even in the terrifying wake of 9/11, New York City boasts record low crime rates, a solid economy, rising educational standards, less racial tension and lower and lower levels of illegitimacy and domestic violence. In fact, much of what was once an edgy, terrifying, almost gothic Gotham now seems bathed in a near-narcotic calm, a bourgeois suburban theme-park from midtown south. If you want a good investment, try buying some housing stock in Harlem — yes, Harlem — the latest piece of former ghetto to become an impending upscale urban oasis.
New York was one of the more exceptional points of light in a two-decade upswing of social improvement. But much of America experienced the same beneficent trends: the reconstitution of the family, the decline of illegitimate births, the collapse of crime, the reinvention and expansion of work.
The revival baffled the pessimists. The social collapse of the “decadent” West had been hailed regularly for years — and the era after the sexual revolution seemed like the final twist downward. The younger generation had been going to the lower recesses of post-everything nihilism since Elvis.
These days, even in the terrifying wake of 9/11, New York City boasts record low crime rates, a solid economy, rising educational standards, less racial tension and lower and lower levels of illegitimacy and domestic violence. In fact, much of what was once an edgy, terrifying, almost gothic Gotham now seems bathed in a near-narcotic calm, a bourgeois suburban theme-park from midtown south. If you want a good investment, try buying some housing stock in Harlem — yes, Harlem — the latest piece of former ghetto to become an impending upscale urban oasis.
New York was one of the more exceptional points of light in a two-decade upswing of social improvement. But much of America experienced the same beneficent trends: the reconstitution of the family, the decline of illegitimate births, the collapse of crime, the reinvention and expansion of work.
The revival baffled the pessimists. The social collapse of the “decadent” West had been hailed regularly for years — and the era after the sexual revolution seemed like the final twist downward. The younger generation had been going to the lower recesses of post-everything nihilism since Elvis.
FASCINATING
People who know so much A review by Marjorie KeheRegular readers of The New Yorker will have no trouble identifyingthe byline of Mark Singer. He's the man who for decades (beginningin 1974, when he was 24) has taken them on any number of interiorjourneys.Over the years Singer has written about worm farmers, snowmobilers,Civil War reenactors, obituary writers, skinnydippers, and cockfighters.His profiles of characters most of us probably don't run intoevery day -- from a man who repairs zippers to one who claimshe sold marijuana to Dan Quayle -- have long held a special placein the affections and collective memory of his magazine's readers.Singer's new book will prove no exception. Character Studies:Encounters with the Curiously Obsessed is a compilation of humanprofiles he's written for The New Yorker. They are observationsof men and women -- although mostly men, as it happens -- whoselives are built around some type of singular obsession.They include a group of Texans in search of the skull of PanchoVilla; a Japanese-American family who combine science, art, andritual in a single-minded pursuit of the best possible farm produce;and Donald Trump (obsession: himself).Most of the pieces read like crosses between anthropological studiesand journeys through unusual interior terrain, with Singer servingas a bemused but (largely) compassionate tour guide.Any reader hoping to see Singer poke fun at what might seem the
The verbal sketches he draws are vivid and deft but rarely unkind.For the most part he seems respectful of this group who have foundsuch original ways to assign meaning to their lives.To an insatiable book collector he ascribes "a nimble verbal manner,a cheerful seen-it-all-but-show-me-some-more bluntness, infusedwith a nasal Yonkers inflection, and a look that would have engagedDaumier -- elfin, slightly paunchy, bemused."As he leaves this character, Singer tells the reader, "His eyebrowswere arched, he was nodding thoughtfully and smiling faintly.He seemed no happier than usual, but terrifically happy just thesame."As for a man devoted to the collection of Tom Mix memorabilia,Singer describes him responding with dignity to a woman tryingto sell him a saddle with dubious connections to Mix, "I am [acollector], Madam. But I\'m not a nut."Perhaps the only subject who comes in for uncharacteristic harshnessis Trump. The description of his hair -- "its gravity-defyingducktails and dry pompadour, its telltale absence of gray" --is nothing compared with Singer\'s ultimate suggestion that theDonald has "an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul."Fellow writers may enjoy Singer\'s book as a tribute to profile-writingas high art, but most will also struggle not to envy the accessand travel budget he seems to accept so casually.("I was invited to go to Tokyo with [the Chino family]," he writesof the Japanese-American farm family he covers -- and of coursehe goes. "During the ride from Cipriani to the [Venice film] festivalsite, the mood aboard [Martin] Scorsese\'s water taxi was subdued,"he confides to the reader in a profile of the filmmaker).Singer\'s collection of profiles constitutes a voyage worth taking.",1]
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more vulnerable of the characters he covers will be disappointed.The verbal sketches he draws are vivid and deft but rarely unkind.For the most part he seems respectful of this group who have foundsuch original ways to assign meaning to their lives.To an insatiable book collector he ascribes "a nimble verbal manner,a cheerful seen-it-all-but-show-me-some-more bluntness, infusedwith a nasal Yonkers inflection, and a look that would have engagedDaumier -- elfin, slightly paunchy, bemused."As he leaves this character, Singer tells the reader, "His eyebrowswere arched, he was nodding thoughtfully and smiling faintly.He seemed no happier than usual, but terrifically happy just thesame."As for a man devoted to the collection of Tom Mix memorabilia,Singer describes him responding with dignity to a woman tryingto sell him a saddle with dubious connections to Mix, "I am [acollector], Madam. But I'm not a nut."Perhaps the only subject who comes in for uncharacteristic harshnessis Trump. The description of his hair -- "its gravity-defyingducktails and dry pompadour, its telltale absence of gray" --is nothing compared with Singer's ultimate suggestion that theDonald has "an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul."Fellow writers may enjoy Singer's book as a tribute to profile-writingas high art, but most will also struggle not to envy the accessand travel budget he seems to accept so casually.("I was invited to go to Tokyo with [the Chino family]," he writesof the Japanese-American farm family he covers -- and of coursehe goes. "During the ride from Cipriani to the [Venice film] festivalsite, the mood aboard [Martin] Scorsese's water taxi was subdued,"he confides to the reader in a profile of the filmmaker).Singer's collection of profiles constitutes a voyage worth taking.
up by The New Yorker itself: intelligent and humorous delivery,a willingness to linger over detail, detours to some off-the-mapdestinations, and just plain good writing.Marjorie Kehe is the Monitor\'s new Books Editor
The verbal sketches he draws are vivid and deft but rarely unkind.For the most part he seems respectful of this group who have foundsuch original ways to assign meaning to their lives.To an insatiable book collector he ascribes "a nimble verbal manner,a cheerful seen-it-all-but-show-me-some-more bluntness, infusedwith a nasal Yonkers inflection, and a look that would have engagedDaumier -- elfin, slightly paunchy, bemused."As he leaves this character, Singer tells the reader, "His eyebrowswere arched, he was nodding thoughtfully and smiling faintly.He seemed no happier than usual, but terrifically happy just thesame."As for a man devoted to the collection of Tom Mix memorabilia,Singer describes him responding with dignity to a woman tryingto sell him a saddle with dubious connections to Mix, "I am [acollector], Madam. But I\'m not a nut."Perhaps the only subject who comes in for uncharacteristic harshnessis Trump. The description of his hair -- "its gravity-defyingducktails and dry pompadour, its telltale absence of gray" --is nothing compared with Singer\'s ultimate suggestion that theDonald has "an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul."Fellow writers may enjoy Singer\'s book as a tribute to profile-writingas high art, but most will also struggle not to envy the accessand travel budget he seems to accept so casually.("I was invited to go to Tokyo with [the Chino family]," he writesof the Japanese-American farm family he covers -- and of coursehe goes. "During the ride from Cipriani to the [Venice film] festivalsite, the mood aboard [Martin] Scorsese\'s water taxi was subdued,"he confides to the reader in a profile of the filmmaker).Singer\'s collection of profiles constitutes a voyage worth taking.",1]
);
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more vulnerable of the characters he covers will be disappointed.The verbal sketches he draws are vivid and deft but rarely unkind.For the most part he seems respectful of this group who have foundsuch original ways to assign meaning to their lives.To an insatiable book collector he ascribes "a nimble verbal manner,a cheerful seen-it-all-but-show-me-some-more bluntness, infusedwith a nasal Yonkers inflection, and a look that would have engagedDaumier -- elfin, slightly paunchy, bemused."As he leaves this character, Singer tells the reader, "His eyebrowswere arched, he was nodding thoughtfully and smiling faintly.He seemed no happier than usual, but terrifically happy just thesame."As for a man devoted to the collection of Tom Mix memorabilia,Singer describes him responding with dignity to a woman tryingto sell him a saddle with dubious connections to Mix, "I am [acollector], Madam. But I'm not a nut."Perhaps the only subject who comes in for uncharacteristic harshnessis Trump. The description of his hair -- "its gravity-defyingducktails and dry pompadour, its telltale absence of gray" --is nothing compared with Singer's ultimate suggestion that theDonald has "an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul."Fellow writers may enjoy Singer's book as a tribute to profile-writingas high art, but most will also struggle not to envy the accessand travel budget he seems to accept so casually.("I was invited to go to Tokyo with [the Chino family]," he writesof the Japanese-American farm family he covers -- and of coursehe goes. "During the ride from Cipriani to the [Venice film] festivalsite, the mood aboard [Martin] Scorsese's water taxi was subdued,"he confides to the reader in a profile of the filmmaker).Singer's collection of profiles constitutes a voyage worth taking.
up by The New Yorker itself: intelligent and humorous delivery,a willingness to linger over detail, detours to some off-the-mapdestinations, and just plain good writing.Marjorie Kehe is the Monitor\'s new Books Editor
LOSS FOR WORDS
On your way into work today you may have been stopped by a chugger. It is possible you made several calls on your handy and passed many greige buildings and people wearing pelmets.
Confused? These are some of the new words and phrases to appear in the revised second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English, the press's biggest single-volume dictionary of current English. A chugger is a charity mugger - a person who approaches passersby in the street asking for donations or subscriptions to a charity. A handy is a mobile phone and greige is the colour between grey and beige. Pelmet is slang for a very short skirt.
The dictionary contains many more insulting words than compliments. It has 350 ways of insulting someone, but only 40 compliments such as lush [meaning very good].
Insults include old-fashioned favourites such as clot or chump and the more modern muppet or fribble and gink.
There are 50 ways to describe attractive women, including eye candy and cutie, but only 20 ways of describing good-looking men; Greek god being an extremely handsome man.
The list also reflects the increasing influence of our multicultural society. There is desi (or deshi), a person of Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi birth or descent who lives abroad. Also Hinglish - a blend of Hindi and English characterised by frequent use of Hindi vocabulary or constructions.
Judy Pearsall, Oxford University Press's publishing manager for English Dictionaries, said: "These days it's possible to collect large amounts of data, especially if you use the internet. What's harder is to build a broad and balanced picture of the language as a whole - and that's what Oxford's unique language programme gives us."
Oxford Dictionaries draw on the Oxford English Corpus and the Oxford Reading Programme: the largest language research programme in the world. The databases contain hundreds of millions of words of English and include extracts from the works of writers such as Alexander McCall Smith and Jacqueline Wilson. They also gather evidence from song lyrics and chat rooms.
Making sense of the new
New words and phrases from the Oxford Dictionary of English Revised Second Edition:
ASBO abbreviation for Brit antisocial behaviour order, a court order which can be obtained by local authorities in order to restrict the behaviour of a person likely to cause harm or distress to the public
Cockapoo noun: a dog that is a cross-breed of an American cocker spaniel and a miniature poodle
Dramedy noun [pl dramadies]: a television programme or film in which the comedy elements derive mainly from the character and plot development
Infinity pool noun: a swimming pool whose positioning gives the impression that it merges into the surrounding landscape, especially the sea
Molecular gastronomy noun: the application of scientific principles to the understanding and development of food preparation
Phishing noun: the fraudulent practice of sending emails purporting to be from reputable companies to induce individuals to reveal personal information online
Podcast noun: a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar programme, made available on the internet for downloading to a personal audio player
Rock verb [rock up]: arrive; turn up
Sin-jay noun: a DJ who raps and sings as part of their performance
Undercrackers noun [pl]: men's underpants
Confused? These are some of the new words and phrases to appear in the revised second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English, the press's biggest single-volume dictionary of current English. A chugger is a charity mugger - a person who approaches passersby in the street asking for donations or subscriptions to a charity. A handy is a mobile phone and greige is the colour between grey and beige. Pelmet is slang for a very short skirt.
The dictionary contains many more insulting words than compliments. It has 350 ways of insulting someone, but only 40 compliments such as lush [meaning very good].
Insults include old-fashioned favourites such as clot or chump and the more modern muppet or fribble and gink.
There are 50 ways to describe attractive women, including eye candy and cutie, but only 20 ways of describing good-looking men; Greek god being an extremely handsome man.
The list also reflects the increasing influence of our multicultural society. There is desi (or deshi), a person of Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi birth or descent who lives abroad. Also Hinglish - a blend of Hindi and English characterised by frequent use of Hindi vocabulary or constructions.
Judy Pearsall, Oxford University Press's publishing manager for English Dictionaries, said: "These days it's possible to collect large amounts of data, especially if you use the internet. What's harder is to build a broad and balanced picture of the language as a whole - and that's what Oxford's unique language programme gives us."
Oxford Dictionaries draw on the Oxford English Corpus and the Oxford Reading Programme: the largest language research programme in the world. The databases contain hundreds of millions of words of English and include extracts from the works of writers such as Alexander McCall Smith and Jacqueline Wilson. They also gather evidence from song lyrics and chat rooms.
Making sense of the new
New words and phrases from the Oxford Dictionary of English Revised Second Edition:
ASBO abbreviation for Brit antisocial behaviour order, a court order which can be obtained by local authorities in order to restrict the behaviour of a person likely to cause harm or distress to the public
Cockapoo noun: a dog that is a cross-breed of an American cocker spaniel and a miniature poodle
Dramedy noun [pl dramadies]: a television programme or film in which the comedy elements derive mainly from the character and plot development
Infinity pool noun: a swimming pool whose positioning gives the impression that it merges into the surrounding landscape, especially the sea
Molecular gastronomy noun: the application of scientific principles to the understanding and development of food preparation
Phishing noun: the fraudulent practice of sending emails purporting to be from reputable companies to induce individuals to reveal personal information online
Podcast noun: a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar programme, made available on the internet for downloading to a personal audio player
Rock verb [rock up]: arrive; turn up
Sin-jay noun: a DJ who raps and sings as part of their performance
Undercrackers noun [pl]: men's underpants
14.8.05
VANITY FAIR(ER)
Hooray! Our best source of gossip has finally spilled a little bit of itself onto the web. Try www.vanityfair.com for some hot items.
TOO MUCH FUN?
Are we simply having too much fun these days? Is a new Puritainism afoot? Read on...http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CACEF.htm
12.8.05
MEANING OF ART
The ECONOMIST reviews two books and gives us some insight into art's meaning.
WHAT is art for and what good does it do? Two centuries ago, Kant and Hegel spent much of their lives contemplating questions about art and aesthetics. Many others have done so since. The latest are two studies, from either side of the Atlantic, by Michael Kimmelman and John Carey. The authors are professionally involved in the arts, Mr Kimmelman as chief art critic at the New York Times and Mr Carey as a professor of English literature at Oxford University. Scholars both, they are prodigious readers, listeners to, and students of, art. Yet both their books are at their most impressive when the authors seem to be trying the least.
Mr Kimmelman, a gifted piano student as a boy, returned more seriously to the keyboard in 1999 when he entered, and went on to the final round, of an amateur piano competition in Fort Worth, Texas. Organised by the Van Cliburn Foundation, which since 1962 has presented the world's leading piano competition for young professionals, the competition brought 90 people, who neither taught nor performed professionally, to Texas.
Mr Kimmelman's article about his fellow pianists—a numismatist, two flight attendants, a hairstylist and a former crack addict who had been jailed for burglary and who found taking up music helped him recover—raised a sizeable correspondence from people who are not artists by profession, but for whom art adds an important other dimension to their lives. It was this idea, so emblematic of the author's own life, that spawned the book.
“I have come to feel”, he writes, “that everything, even the most ordinary daily affair, is enriched by the lessons that can be gleaned from art. Put differently, this book is, in part, about how creating, collecting, and even just appreciating art can make living a daily masterpiece.”
The portraits Mr Kimmelman presents in order to illustrate his point are loosely associated. There is the artist who created without lifting a finger: Ray Johnson, a coolly analytical man who was fascinated by numbers and who killed himself a decade ago at the age of 67 on January 13th (6+7=13, his friends noted), having first telephoned an old colleague, William Wilson, whose name contains 13 letters. There is the accidental artist: a German policeman photographed for posterity in 1927 hanging on to the bottom of a zeppelin that had broken its moorings. And there is the illuminating artist, a Baltimore dentist who, in the course of a lifetime, collected 75,000 lightbulbs and created the Museum of Incandescent Lighting.
But his best example is Pierre Bonnard, whose accidental encounter with a young, elfin woman alighting from a Paris tram in 1893 led to an intense relationship that would last until her death half a century later. Easily derided after his death as a facile, if accomplished, colourist, it is Bonnard's secretive, moody portraits of the woman, Marthe, many of them posed in the privacy of her bathroom, that mark him out as a painter of elegy. Often described as a painter of pleasure, one critic observed, he was something even more rare: a painter of the effervescence of pleasure and the disappearance of pleasure.
Mr Kimmelman's book works best when he describes the ineffable by showing rather than telling. His brief anecdote about how Bonnard once asked a model not to sit still, but to move around the room, is far more effective than a convoluted explanation about the difficulty of painting presence and absence at once.
Too much telling, by contrast, is Mr Carey's error. What is a work of art, is high art superior, do the arts make us better, can art be a religion? One after the other, Mr Carey head-butts these questions. The result, however, is that he ties himself up in knots. Unable to reach any conclusion about what art is, he turns instead to what it is not. There are plenty of things that are not works of art: for example, human excrement. Probably. But what about Piero Manzoni, an Italian artist who died in 1963 after creating an “edition” of 90 tin cans each containing 30 grams of his own excrement? The Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery and the Pompidou Centre snapped them up. More fool them, you say. Others would agree, but they would be no closer to defining what art is.
Far, far better is the second half of the book in which Mr Carey seeks to persuade us that the greatest of all art forms is not painting or music but literature, and English literature specifically. Uninflected and without gendered nouns, English was uniquely placed to offer Shakespeare the linguistic pliancy and suppleness he needed to turn out the epidemic of metaphors and similes that so mark his work. Here, Mr Carey turns in a bravura performance. Drawing on his great knowledge of poetry, he is able to show how literature outsmarts other art forms; how it alone is able to criticise itself, which makes it more powerful and self-aware than other forms; how only literature can comment, and therefore moralise, not by making you more moral but by giving you ideas to think with; and how by hinting rather than spelling out, it is literature's indistinctness that empowers the reader's imagination.
Read every word of Mr Kimmelman for ideas to think with, and start Mr Carey's book on page 171. You won't regret it.
WHAT is art for and what good does it do? Two centuries ago, Kant and Hegel spent much of their lives contemplating questions about art and aesthetics. Many others have done so since. The latest are two studies, from either side of the Atlantic, by Michael Kimmelman and John Carey. The authors are professionally involved in the arts, Mr Kimmelman as chief art critic at the New York Times and Mr Carey as a professor of English literature at Oxford University. Scholars both, they are prodigious readers, listeners to, and students of, art. Yet both their books are at their most impressive when the authors seem to be trying the least.
Mr Kimmelman, a gifted piano student as a boy, returned more seriously to the keyboard in 1999 when he entered, and went on to the final round, of an amateur piano competition in Fort Worth, Texas. Organised by the Van Cliburn Foundation, which since 1962 has presented the world's leading piano competition for young professionals, the competition brought 90 people, who neither taught nor performed professionally, to Texas.
Mr Kimmelman's article about his fellow pianists—a numismatist, two flight attendants, a hairstylist and a former crack addict who had been jailed for burglary and who found taking up music helped him recover—raised a sizeable correspondence from people who are not artists by profession, but for whom art adds an important other dimension to their lives. It was this idea, so emblematic of the author's own life, that spawned the book.
“I have come to feel”, he writes, “that everything, even the most ordinary daily affair, is enriched by the lessons that can be gleaned from art. Put differently, this book is, in part, about how creating, collecting, and even just appreciating art can make living a daily masterpiece.”
The portraits Mr Kimmelman presents in order to illustrate his point are loosely associated. There is the artist who created without lifting a finger: Ray Johnson, a coolly analytical man who was fascinated by numbers and who killed himself a decade ago at the age of 67 on January 13th (6+7=13, his friends noted), having first telephoned an old colleague, William Wilson, whose name contains 13 letters. There is the accidental artist: a German policeman photographed for posterity in 1927 hanging on to the bottom of a zeppelin that had broken its moorings. And there is the illuminating artist, a Baltimore dentist who, in the course of a lifetime, collected 75,000 lightbulbs and created the Museum of Incandescent Lighting.
But his best example is Pierre Bonnard, whose accidental encounter with a young, elfin woman alighting from a Paris tram in 1893 led to an intense relationship that would last until her death half a century later. Easily derided after his death as a facile, if accomplished, colourist, it is Bonnard's secretive, moody portraits of the woman, Marthe, many of them posed in the privacy of her bathroom, that mark him out as a painter of elegy. Often described as a painter of pleasure, one critic observed, he was something even more rare: a painter of the effervescence of pleasure and the disappearance of pleasure.
Mr Kimmelman's book works best when he describes the ineffable by showing rather than telling. His brief anecdote about how Bonnard once asked a model not to sit still, but to move around the room, is far more effective than a convoluted explanation about the difficulty of painting presence and absence at once.
Too much telling, by contrast, is Mr Carey's error. What is a work of art, is high art superior, do the arts make us better, can art be a religion? One after the other, Mr Carey head-butts these questions. The result, however, is that he ties himself up in knots. Unable to reach any conclusion about what art is, he turns instead to what it is not. There are plenty of things that are not works of art: for example, human excrement. Probably. But what about Piero Manzoni, an Italian artist who died in 1963 after creating an “edition” of 90 tin cans each containing 30 grams of his own excrement? The Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery and the Pompidou Centre snapped them up. More fool them, you say. Others would agree, but they would be no closer to defining what art is.
Far, far better is the second half of the book in which Mr Carey seeks to persuade us that the greatest of all art forms is not painting or music but literature, and English literature specifically. Uninflected and without gendered nouns, English was uniquely placed to offer Shakespeare the linguistic pliancy and suppleness he needed to turn out the epidemic of metaphors and similes that so mark his work. Here, Mr Carey turns in a bravura performance. Drawing on his great knowledge of poetry, he is able to show how literature outsmarts other art forms; how it alone is able to criticise itself, which makes it more powerful and self-aware than other forms; how only literature can comment, and therefore moralise, not by making you more moral but by giving you ideas to think with; and how by hinting rather than spelling out, it is literature's indistinctness that empowers the reader's imagination.
Read every word of Mr Kimmelman for ideas to think with, and start Mr Carey's book on page 171. You won't regret it.
NEOCONS
Krautheimmer here does an excellent job of giving the history of neo-conseratism growing from both the left and the right. He is less sure of the future.
The fathers of neoconservatism are former liberals or leftists. Today, its chief proponents, to judge by their history, are former realists. Rice, for example, was a disciple of Brent Scowcroft; Cheney served as Secretary of Defense in the first Bush administration. September 11 changed all of that. It changed the world, and changed our understanding of the world. As neoconservatism seemed to offer the most plausible explanation of the new reality and the most compelling and active response to it, many realists were brought to acknowledge the poverty of realism—not just the futility but the danger of a foreign policy centered on the illusion of stability and equilibrium. These realists, newly mugged by reality, have given weight to neoconservatism, making it more diverse and, given the newcomers’ past experience, more mature.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=12001023_1
The fathers of neoconservatism are former liberals or leftists. Today, its chief proponents, to judge by their history, are former realists. Rice, for example, was a disciple of Brent Scowcroft; Cheney served as Secretary of Defense in the first Bush administration. September 11 changed all of that. It changed the world, and changed our understanding of the world. As neoconservatism seemed to offer the most plausible explanation of the new reality and the most compelling and active response to it, many realists were brought to acknowledge the poverty of realism—not just the futility but the danger of a foreign policy centered on the illusion of stability and equilibrium. These realists, newly mugged by reality, have given weight to neoconservatism, making it more diverse and, given the newcomers’ past experience, more mature.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=12001023_1
10.8.05
ATTENTION!
Xerxes is in the market for writing assignments. Anyone who might need some assistance in getting something 'down on paper' ought to reply below. I am particularly interested in persons who might want their family histories researched.
8.8.05
Green Machines
When George W. Bush last week stunned the world with his plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions, no one was more surprised than the green lobby. Human psychology being what it is, no one was more furious. It is not so much the scale of the planned reductions that have offended the eco-warriors: how could they possibly quibble with a proposal — supported by China, India, Japan, South Korea and Australia — to reduce greenhouse emissions by 50 per cent? No: what gets the greens’ goat is the methods that Mr Bush proposes to employ.
What drives the greens nuts is the boundless technological optimism of Washington, and they have dismissed the plan in withering terms. In the words of the Worldwide Fund for Nature, Mr Bush’s efforts are like ‘a peace plan that allows guns to be fired’. It should go without saying that it is Mr Bush who is right to place his faith in mankind’s ability to think our way out of problems; and it is the poor benighted greens who are wrong.
What drives the greens nuts is the boundless technological optimism of Washington, and they have dismissed the plan in withering terms. In the words of the Worldwide Fund for Nature, Mr Bush’s efforts are like ‘a peace plan that allows guns to be fired’. It should go without saying that it is Mr Bush who is right to place his faith in mankind’s ability to think our way out of problems; and it is the poor benighted greens who are wrong.
China on the 405?
Now here is a staggering thought. China as L.A.? Professor Woo and his students from USC have been studying in Beijing and they have concluded that the sprawl, pollution and general lack of urban planning in China may mirror Southern California. A sobering conclusion.
WITH A SIZZLING economy growing 9% a year or more but facing limits on domestic energy, China has no choice but to seek more oil from foreign sources. Yet Americans were surprised when a Chinese company emerged as a serious contender to buy Unocal Corp. Then China was surprised by the ferocious political reaction among some U.S. conservatives, forcing China's CNOOC Ltd. to withdraw its bid last week.The astonishment on both sides shows that China and the U.S. are hardly prepared to relate to each other on 21st century terms. But as the expanding global economy continues to burden the global environment, each nation has much to gain or lose by studying the other's energy failures. China should look to the U.S. as it asks itself: If the price of growth is unbreathable air, undrinkable water, dysfunctional cities and congested roads, how long can a nation sustain a boom economy?What China did learn from the United States is that a prosperous auto industry spawns growth in related industries, including steel, glass, plastics, oil, finance and insurance. What it seems not to have learned is the high price that can come with such growth. In Beijing, where the number of cars is growing by 20% annually, the average traffic speed has declined from 28 mph in 1994 to 7.5 mph in 2003 — a pace easily matched on a bicycle. As in American cities, this rising level of car ownership has coincided with a sharp decline in transit ridership. Seventy percent of Beijing's population used public transit in the 1970s. Just 24% use it today. Commuters on bicycles, once ubiquitous on Chinese city streets, have been banned from major thoroughfares in Shanghai and other cities to make room for cars. As more Chinese drive, demand has risen for their version of California-style suburban sprawl, with immaculate low-density housing tracts featuring large detached single-family homes located far from jobs. Like Californians, Chinese commuters travel farther and spend more time on the road, requiring more gasoline and churning out more pollution. Clearly, California's car culture and sprawl don't provide the best model of sustainable development. China should look to Curitiba in southern Brazil or Tokyo, which combine high rates of car ownership with low daily car use by offering good public transit and adopting tough restrictions on driving. You can buy as many cars as you want (and boost the car industry and the economy), but you don't have to use a car for every trip.China's cities are not the only places under strain. China's vast rural regions are attracting smokestack industries, dumps and other pollution sources the cities shun. Western news media recently have reported violent riots among villagers protesting pollution. An estimated 15,000 protesters near Xinchang, 180 miles south of Shanghai, overturned police cars and threw rocks at authorities to vent anger over water pollution and unsafe working conditions involving dangerous chemicals used by a pharmaceutical factory. Fifty miles away, in Dongyang, an estimated 10,000 rioters rose up to demand closure of a pesticide factory. With the human costs increasingly obvious, a surprising number of government officials, academics and others talk openly about the folly of China's growth patterns. China's Center for Sustainable Transportation is drafting recommendations to promote transportation that relies less on foreign oil. There is also hope in recent actions by the State Environmental Protection Agency. Long considered weak, the agency recently moved forcefully in cases involving high-profile construction projects supported by other Chinese government agencies. China's environmental challenges could become severe enough to impede economic growth. Now the world's second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, China is expected by 2025 to surpass the United States for the dubious title of No. 1, according to the Pew Center on Climate Change. The China Academy for Environmental Planning reports that air pollution-related illness accounts for 2% to 3% of gross domestic product and forecasts that by 2020, that figure will rise to 13%. The U.S. should approach China not as a scold but as a partner, offering to help find innovative solutions. First, the U.S. could lead by example. The Bush administration's refusal to join in the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, based in part on the treaty's exemptions for China and other developing countries, sends the unflattering message that the U.S. protects its interests at the expense of the world environment. President Bush could ask Chinese President Hu Jintao to join him in working to reduce gasoline consumption and dependence on coal-fired electrical power plants in both countries, and to curtail other sources greenhouse gases.U.S. businesses seeking to invest in China could influence conditions through their selection of products, business partners and vendors. For example, General Motors could take advantage of China's lower production and marketing costs to develop new fuel-efficient vehicles. Once developed, those new vehicles also could be made in the U.S. for our consumers. The Energy Foundation and the World Resources Institute's EMBARQ project have supported trailblazing rapid-transit projects in Chinese cities similar to the MTA's Metro Rapid bus lines in L.A. Now some farsighted Chinese officials want to go further, looking for help with the underlying causes of their energy and transportation woes, seeking ways to discourage car use and reduce commuting distances. Instead of fighting over the world's limited supply of nonrenewable energy, China and the U.S. should join forces to show the world a new model of prosperity — measured not only in dollars or yuan but in livable communities and a healthy environment.
WITH A SIZZLING economy growing 9% a year or more but facing limits on domestic energy, China has no choice but to seek more oil from foreign sources. Yet Americans were surprised when a Chinese company emerged as a serious contender to buy Unocal Corp. Then China was surprised by the ferocious political reaction among some U.S. conservatives, forcing China's CNOOC Ltd. to withdraw its bid last week.The astonishment on both sides shows that China and the U.S. are hardly prepared to relate to each other on 21st century terms. But as the expanding global economy continues to burden the global environment, each nation has much to gain or lose by studying the other's energy failures. China should look to the U.S. as it asks itself: If the price of growth is unbreathable air, undrinkable water, dysfunctional cities and congested roads, how long can a nation sustain a boom economy?What China did learn from the United States is that a prosperous auto industry spawns growth in related industries, including steel, glass, plastics, oil, finance and insurance. What it seems not to have learned is the high price that can come with such growth. In Beijing, where the number of cars is growing by 20% annually, the average traffic speed has declined from 28 mph in 1994 to 7.5 mph in 2003 — a pace easily matched on a bicycle. As in American cities, this rising level of car ownership has coincided with a sharp decline in transit ridership. Seventy percent of Beijing's population used public transit in the 1970s. Just 24% use it today. Commuters on bicycles, once ubiquitous on Chinese city streets, have been banned from major thoroughfares in Shanghai and other cities to make room for cars. As more Chinese drive, demand has risen for their version of California-style suburban sprawl, with immaculate low-density housing tracts featuring large detached single-family homes located far from jobs. Like Californians, Chinese commuters travel farther and spend more time on the road, requiring more gasoline and churning out more pollution. Clearly, California's car culture and sprawl don't provide the best model of sustainable development. China should look to Curitiba in southern Brazil or Tokyo, which combine high rates of car ownership with low daily car use by offering good public transit and adopting tough restrictions on driving. You can buy as many cars as you want (and boost the car industry and the economy), but you don't have to use a car for every trip.China's cities are not the only places under strain. China's vast rural regions are attracting smokestack industries, dumps and other pollution sources the cities shun. Western news media recently have reported violent riots among villagers protesting pollution. An estimated 15,000 protesters near Xinchang, 180 miles south of Shanghai, overturned police cars and threw rocks at authorities to vent anger over water pollution and unsafe working conditions involving dangerous chemicals used by a pharmaceutical factory. Fifty miles away, in Dongyang, an estimated 10,000 rioters rose up to demand closure of a pesticide factory. With the human costs increasingly obvious, a surprising number of government officials, academics and others talk openly about the folly of China's growth patterns. China's Center for Sustainable Transportation is drafting recommendations to promote transportation that relies less on foreign oil. There is also hope in recent actions by the State Environmental Protection Agency. Long considered weak, the agency recently moved forcefully in cases involving high-profile construction projects supported by other Chinese government agencies. China's environmental challenges could become severe enough to impede economic growth. Now the world's second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, China is expected by 2025 to surpass the United States for the dubious title of No. 1, according to the Pew Center on Climate Change. The China Academy for Environmental Planning reports that air pollution-related illness accounts for 2% to 3% of gross domestic product and forecasts that by 2020, that figure will rise to 13%. The U.S. should approach China not as a scold but as a partner, offering to help find innovative solutions. First, the U.S. could lead by example. The Bush administration's refusal to join in the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, based in part on the treaty's exemptions for China and other developing countries, sends the unflattering message that the U.S. protects its interests at the expense of the world environment. President Bush could ask Chinese President Hu Jintao to join him in working to reduce gasoline consumption and dependence on coal-fired electrical power plants in both countries, and to curtail other sources greenhouse gases.U.S. businesses seeking to invest in China could influence conditions through their selection of products, business partners and vendors. For example, General Motors could take advantage of China's lower production and marketing costs to develop new fuel-efficient vehicles. Once developed, those new vehicles also could be made in the U.S. for our consumers. The Energy Foundation and the World Resources Institute's EMBARQ project have supported trailblazing rapid-transit projects in Chinese cities similar to the MTA's Metro Rapid bus lines in L.A. Now some farsighted Chinese officials want to go further, looking for help with the underlying causes of their energy and transportation woes, seeking ways to discourage car use and reduce commuting distances. Instead of fighting over the world's limited supply of nonrenewable energy, China and the U.S. should join forces to show the world a new model of prosperity — measured not only in dollars or yuan but in livable communities and a healthy environment.
Denis Dutton
The review is better than the book:
Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: a Darwinian Look at Literature, by David P. Barash and Nanelle R. Barash. New York: Delacourt Press, 2005, 272 pp. $24.00 paper, $32.00 cloth.
Human nature, evolved over millions of years and present in our genes, expresses itself not only in bedrooms, boardrooms, and battlefields but in creative human pursuits, including literature. This, anyway, is the premise of an amusing, if over-ambitious, book by psychologist/zoologist David P. Barash and his college-student daughter, Nanelle.
The Barashes line up exemplary works of fiction from Homer to Saul Bellow alongside the major claims of evolutionary psychology. The prehistoric origins of human conduct and desires, so the idea goes, should be able to tell us something about the conduct and values of characters in fiction. The results are mixed: Some of the Barashes’ explanations are far-fetched, but others have the power to jolt us into an altered view of familiar literary stories and characters.
Among the authors’ best insights is their description of Jane Austen’s fiction in terms of sexual selection theory. Darwinian evolution depends on natural selection: Unfit individuals die off in a hostile environment, while the survivors pass their fitness on to descendants. But for Darwin, there is also a second, parallel and quite distinct process that drives evolution: sexual selection.
The heavy, cumbersome peacock’s tail, far from helping the bird survive, is a distinct hindrance, making peacocks more prone to being eaten by predators. This remarkable tail is a product not of natural, but of sexual selection: Peahens choose to mate with peacocks sporting the most gorgeous feathers, which indicate both healthy genes and the capacity to produce offspring with more gorgeous feathers, increasing the likelihood that the mother’s gene line will survive into the future. By making discriminating mating choices over thousands of generations, it is actually peahens, and not their males, who by their choices have bred the peacock’s tail.
Likewise, discriminating human females are central to the world of Jane Austen, whom the Barashes call “the poet laureate of female choice.” Selecting a good mate is Austen’s major theme. She is particularly adept at bringing out, against the vast intricacies of a social milieu, the basic values women seek in men, and men tend to want in women (shortlist: good looks, health, money, status, IQ, courage, dependability and a pleasant personality — in many different weightings and orderings). Not being a peacock, Mr. Darcy does not have iridescent feathers, but for human females his commanding personality, solid income, intelligence, generosity, and the magnificent Pemberley estate do very nicely.
Cinderella is used to exemplify the well-known research of Martin Daly and Margo Wilson showing that children are statistically at much greater risk of murder or abuse by stepparents than by biological parents. In this connection, the Barashes also discuss Sarah Hrdy’s study of the way dominant male langur monkeys kill the infant offspring of rivals before mating with the infants’ mothers. In real life we may all know plenty of loving stepparents, but as the Barashes explain, historical statistics are sadly on the side of the European folk-tale tradition with its stereotype of the wicked stepmother.
The battles of elephant seals are brought to bear on the rivalry between Agamemnon and Achilles. The Barashes use evolutionary principles to explain the tragic outrage of Othello in a world whose double standard treats straying women much more severely than philandering men. A discussion of John Steinbeck’s portrayal of male friendship in Of Mice and Men follows a clear and pertinent analysis of reciprocity among animals. This includes a fascinating account of the process by which a vampire bat unsuccessful in a hunt can coax a well-fed fellow bat into vomiting up a meal of blood. That too is friendship, maybe, though I learned from this book more about vampire bats than about Steinbeck.
It is easy to make fun of animal analogies, but in fairness, the Barashes are mostly modest and persuasive in drawing their comparisons. Nevertheless, despite the authors’ enthusiasm for their subject, there is a curious flatness to Madame Bovary’s Ovaries.
First, the Barashes tend to pick and choose literary evidence as it suits their case, a procedure generally verboten in research psychology. They provide an adequate, if unsurprising, evolutionary explanation of Emma Bovary’s adultery (a female searching for better genes). But what about another important event in the story, Emma’s suicide? Maybe there is an evolutionary explanation for suicide as a solution for a person cornered in an intolerable social situation, but it’s not hinted at here.
At the same time, the authors also now and then claim for evolutionary psychology more than the evidence warrants. Catcher in the Rye is a tale of youthful alienation and rebellion. Parents, we’re told, push their children around, and “it makes perfect sense that adolescents in particular are prone to fight back.” Such conflict is bound to occur between “every young individual and the adult world that he or she must learn to negotiate.” Fine, but platitudes about Holden Caulfield’s rebelliousness hardly need validation by Darwin, and none is given here. The Barashes have slipped into doing the most ordinary brand of criticism without seeming to realize it.
In fact, Madame Bovary’s Ovaries is less a Darwinian look at literature than a discussion of evolutionary psychology that happens to trawl through fiction for examples. If readers don’t know The Grapes of Wrath or the Iliad firsthand, they’ll likely have seen the movies or read the Cliffs Notes, which will be good enough. The authors might as easily have clipped crime or human interest stories from last month’s newspapers, except that fiction normally supplies interior monologues or narratives that reveal motivations. This is a plus if you’re trying to explain how evolved psychology works.
But by reducing literature to a convenient collection of anecdotes and case studies, the Barashes fail to engage broader features of an expressive and communicative art. There is nothing here about literary style, tone, and the crucial interaction between authors and their audiences. From both a human and aesthetic perspective, literature does not just report on what happened but shows us how individuals make sense of what happened. It is about the beliefs, attitudes, and modes of perception that distinguish us from each other.
Literature also serves the human craving for novelty and surprise, including twists and shocks that go against our normal, evolved expectations and desires. The Barashes’ approach can explain the vicarious pleasure we might get in following the choices and indecisions of a Jane Austen character as she settles on her man. It can explain any story of a mother who fights to protect her children from danger. But it has more trouble with the likes of a Medea, who murders her children to satisfy her consuming hatred for their father. The family story of Jason and Medea is one of the most revoltingly entertaining soap operas in literature, exactly because it perverts all expectations of a mother’s normal conduct toward her children.
David and Nanelle Barash wisely insist that they are not trying to provide the decisive framework to explain literature. They give us a few of the patterns of human behavior that contemporary science can explain, showing that reproduction, survival and social reciprocity are bread and butter topics of the fiction we love. Yes, Sophocles, Shakespeare and Flaubert knew the human race at least as well as any psychologist. The science in this book comes out better than the literary criticism, but classic literature remains, as ever, the ultimate winner.
Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: a Darwinian Look at Literature, by David P. Barash and Nanelle R. Barash. New York: Delacourt Press, 2005, 272 pp. $24.00 paper, $32.00 cloth.
Human nature, evolved over millions of years and present in our genes, expresses itself not only in bedrooms, boardrooms, and battlefields but in creative human pursuits, including literature. This, anyway, is the premise of an amusing, if over-ambitious, book by psychologist/zoologist David P. Barash and his college-student daughter, Nanelle.
The Barashes line up exemplary works of fiction from Homer to Saul Bellow alongside the major claims of evolutionary psychology. The prehistoric origins of human conduct and desires, so the idea goes, should be able to tell us something about the conduct and values of characters in fiction. The results are mixed: Some of the Barashes’ explanations are far-fetched, but others have the power to jolt us into an altered view of familiar literary stories and characters.
Among the authors’ best insights is their description of Jane Austen’s fiction in terms of sexual selection theory. Darwinian evolution depends on natural selection: Unfit individuals die off in a hostile environment, while the survivors pass their fitness on to descendants. But for Darwin, there is also a second, parallel and quite distinct process that drives evolution: sexual selection.
The heavy, cumbersome peacock’s tail, far from helping the bird survive, is a distinct hindrance, making peacocks more prone to being eaten by predators. This remarkable tail is a product not of natural, but of sexual selection: Peahens choose to mate with peacocks sporting the most gorgeous feathers, which indicate both healthy genes and the capacity to produce offspring with more gorgeous feathers, increasing the likelihood that the mother’s gene line will survive into the future. By making discriminating mating choices over thousands of generations, it is actually peahens, and not their males, who by their choices have bred the peacock’s tail.
Likewise, discriminating human females are central to the world of Jane Austen, whom the Barashes call “the poet laureate of female choice.” Selecting a good mate is Austen’s major theme. She is particularly adept at bringing out, against the vast intricacies of a social milieu, the basic values women seek in men, and men tend to want in women (shortlist: good looks, health, money, status, IQ, courage, dependability and a pleasant personality — in many different weightings and orderings). Not being a peacock, Mr. Darcy does not have iridescent feathers, but for human females his commanding personality, solid income, intelligence, generosity, and the magnificent Pemberley estate do very nicely.
Cinderella is used to exemplify the well-known research of Martin Daly and Margo Wilson showing that children are statistically at much greater risk of murder or abuse by stepparents than by biological parents. In this connection, the Barashes also discuss Sarah Hrdy’s study of the way dominant male langur monkeys kill the infant offspring of rivals before mating with the infants’ mothers. In real life we may all know plenty of loving stepparents, but as the Barashes explain, historical statistics are sadly on the side of the European folk-tale tradition with its stereotype of the wicked stepmother.
The battles of elephant seals are brought to bear on the rivalry between Agamemnon and Achilles. The Barashes use evolutionary principles to explain the tragic outrage of Othello in a world whose double standard treats straying women much more severely than philandering men. A discussion of John Steinbeck’s portrayal of male friendship in Of Mice and Men follows a clear and pertinent analysis of reciprocity among animals. This includes a fascinating account of the process by which a vampire bat unsuccessful in a hunt can coax a well-fed fellow bat into vomiting up a meal of blood. That too is friendship, maybe, though I learned from this book more about vampire bats than about Steinbeck.
It is easy to make fun of animal analogies, but in fairness, the Barashes are mostly modest and persuasive in drawing their comparisons. Nevertheless, despite the authors’ enthusiasm for their subject, there is a curious flatness to Madame Bovary’s Ovaries.
First, the Barashes tend to pick and choose literary evidence as it suits their case, a procedure generally verboten in research psychology. They provide an adequate, if unsurprising, evolutionary explanation of Emma Bovary’s adultery (a female searching for better genes). But what about another important event in the story, Emma’s suicide? Maybe there is an evolutionary explanation for suicide as a solution for a person cornered in an intolerable social situation, but it’s not hinted at here.
At the same time, the authors also now and then claim for evolutionary psychology more than the evidence warrants. Catcher in the Rye is a tale of youthful alienation and rebellion. Parents, we’re told, push their children around, and “it makes perfect sense that adolescents in particular are prone to fight back.” Such conflict is bound to occur between “every young individual and the adult world that he or she must learn to negotiate.” Fine, but platitudes about Holden Caulfield’s rebelliousness hardly need validation by Darwin, and none is given here. The Barashes have slipped into doing the most ordinary brand of criticism without seeming to realize it.
In fact, Madame Bovary’s Ovaries is less a Darwinian look at literature than a discussion of evolutionary psychology that happens to trawl through fiction for examples. If readers don’t know The Grapes of Wrath or the Iliad firsthand, they’ll likely have seen the movies or read the Cliffs Notes, which will be good enough. The authors might as easily have clipped crime or human interest stories from last month’s newspapers, except that fiction normally supplies interior monologues or narratives that reveal motivations. This is a plus if you’re trying to explain how evolved psychology works.
But by reducing literature to a convenient collection of anecdotes and case studies, the Barashes fail to engage broader features of an expressive and communicative art. There is nothing here about literary style, tone, and the crucial interaction between authors and their audiences. From both a human and aesthetic perspective, literature does not just report on what happened but shows us how individuals make sense of what happened. It is about the beliefs, attitudes, and modes of perception that distinguish us from each other.
Literature also serves the human craving for novelty and surprise, including twists and shocks that go against our normal, evolved expectations and desires. The Barashes’ approach can explain the vicarious pleasure we might get in following the choices and indecisions of a Jane Austen character as she settles on her man. It can explain any story of a mother who fights to protect her children from danger. But it has more trouble with the likes of a Medea, who murders her children to satisfy her consuming hatred for their father. The family story of Jason and Medea is one of the most revoltingly entertaining soap operas in literature, exactly because it perverts all expectations of a mother’s normal conduct toward her children.
David and Nanelle Barash wisely insist that they are not trying to provide the decisive framework to explain literature. They give us a few of the patterns of human behavior that contemporary science can explain, showing that reproduction, survival and social reciprocity are bread and butter topics of the fiction we love. Yes, Sophocles, Shakespeare and Flaubert knew the human race at least as well as any psychologist. The science in this book comes out better than the literary criticism, but classic literature remains, as ever, the ultimate winner.
6.8.05
WE NEED THIS
Why people laugh
The true story of how your wife's stalker rang her to discuss killing you isn't supposed to provoke mirth. But when John Morreall, of the College of William and Mary in Virginia, related the events last week to a group of scholars in Tuebingen in Germany, they were in stitches as he divulged the details of how his wife tried to dissuade the confused young man by pleading that her mortgage was too large to pay without her husband's help.
So why did they laugh? Dr Morreall's thesis is that laughter, incapacitating as it can be, is a convincing signal that the danger has passed. The reaction of the psychologists, linguists, philosophers and professional clowns attending the Fifth International Summer School on Humour and Laughter illustrates his point. Dr Morreall survived to tell the tale and so had an easy time making it sound funny.
One description of how laughter is provoked is the incongruity theory developed by Victor Raskin of Purdue University and Salvatore Attardo of Youngstown State University, both in America. This theory says that all written jokes and many other humorous situations are based on an incongruity—something that is not quite right. In many jokes, the teller sets up the story with this incongruity present and the punch line then resolves it, in a way people do not expect. Alternatively, the very last words of the story may introduce the absurdity and leave the listeners with the task of reconciling it. For instance, many people find it funny that a conference on humour could take place in Germany.
Why do people laugh at all? What is the point of it? Laughter is very contagious and this suggests that it may have become a part of human behaviour because it promotes social bonding. When a group of people laughs, the message seems to be “relax, you are among friends”.
Indeed, humour is one way of dealing with the fact that humans are “excrement-producing poets and imperfect lovers”, says Appletree Rodden of the University of Tuebingen. He sees religion and humour as different, and perhaps competing, ways for people to accept death and the general unsatisfactoriness of the world. Perhaps that is why, as Dr Morreall calculates in a forthcoming article in the journal Humor, 95% of the writings that he sampled from important Christian scholars through the centuries disapproved of humour, linking it to insincerity and idleness.
Fear of idleness is why many managers discourage laughter during office hours, Dr Morreall notes. This is foolish, he claims. Laughter or its absence may be the best clue a manager has about the work environment and the mood of employees.
Indeed, another theory of why people laugh—the superiority theory—says that people laugh to assert that they are on a level equal to or higher than those around them. Research has shown that bosses tend to crack more jokes than do their employees. Women laugh much more in the presence of men, and men generally tell more jokes in the presence of women. Men have even been shown to laugh much more quietly around women, while laughing louder when in a group of men.
But laughter does not unite us all. There are those who have a pathological fear that others will laugh at them. Sufferers avoid situations where there will be laughter, which means most places where people meet. Willibald Ruch of Zurich University surveyed 1,000 Germans and asked them whether they thought they were the butts of jokes and found that almost 10% felt this way. These people also tended to classify taped laughter as jeering. Future research will focus on the hypothesis that there is something seriously wrong with their sense of humour.
The true story of how your wife's stalker rang her to discuss killing you isn't supposed to provoke mirth. But when John Morreall, of the College of William and Mary in Virginia, related the events last week to a group of scholars in Tuebingen in Germany, they were in stitches as he divulged the details of how his wife tried to dissuade the confused young man by pleading that her mortgage was too large to pay without her husband's help.
So why did they laugh? Dr Morreall's thesis is that laughter, incapacitating as it can be, is a convincing signal that the danger has passed. The reaction of the psychologists, linguists, philosophers and professional clowns attending the Fifth International Summer School on Humour and Laughter illustrates his point. Dr Morreall survived to tell the tale and so had an easy time making it sound funny.
One description of how laughter is provoked is the incongruity theory developed by Victor Raskin of Purdue University and Salvatore Attardo of Youngstown State University, both in America. This theory says that all written jokes and many other humorous situations are based on an incongruity—something that is not quite right. In many jokes, the teller sets up the story with this incongruity present and the punch line then resolves it, in a way people do not expect. Alternatively, the very last words of the story may introduce the absurdity and leave the listeners with the task of reconciling it. For instance, many people find it funny that a conference on humour could take place in Germany.
Why do people laugh at all? What is the point of it? Laughter is very contagious and this suggests that it may have become a part of human behaviour because it promotes social bonding. When a group of people laughs, the message seems to be “relax, you are among friends”.
Indeed, humour is one way of dealing with the fact that humans are “excrement-producing poets and imperfect lovers”, says Appletree Rodden of the University of Tuebingen. He sees religion and humour as different, and perhaps competing, ways for people to accept death and the general unsatisfactoriness of the world. Perhaps that is why, as Dr Morreall calculates in a forthcoming article in the journal Humor, 95% of the writings that he sampled from important Christian scholars through the centuries disapproved of humour, linking it to insincerity and idleness.
Fear of idleness is why many managers discourage laughter during office hours, Dr Morreall notes. This is foolish, he claims. Laughter or its absence may be the best clue a manager has about the work environment and the mood of employees.
Indeed, another theory of why people laugh—the superiority theory—says that people laugh to assert that they are on a level equal to or higher than those around them. Research has shown that bosses tend to crack more jokes than do their employees. Women laugh much more in the presence of men, and men generally tell more jokes in the presence of women. Men have even been shown to laugh much more quietly around women, while laughing louder when in a group of men.
But laughter does not unite us all. There are those who have a pathological fear that others will laugh at them. Sufferers avoid situations where there will be laughter, which means most places where people meet. Willibald Ruch of Zurich University surveyed 1,000 Germans and asked them whether they thought they were the butts of jokes and found that almost 10% felt this way. These people also tended to classify taped laughter as jeering. Future research will focus on the hypothesis that there is something seriously wrong with their sense of humour.
3.8.05
Britishness
One of the more interesting sidebars of the recent bombings in Britain, is to notice the rather distinct difference with which the British population has reacted to the attacks from the fashion in which Americans followed up to 911. There has been no great flag waving or spontaneous outbursts of Rule Brittania. Part of the reason may be that some sort of attack was expected, unlike the surprise nature of the 911 events. Part may also be that Britons view the attacks less as a statement about British culture and more of a reaction to the Iraq unpleasantness. In any case these reactions to what it means to be British are quite fascinating. http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/ETHtml/content/promotions/sethomepage/setHomePage.jhtml
1.8.05
A Vacuum of Belief?
NIALL FERGUSONNiall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University. He is the author of "Empire" (Basic Books, 2003) and "Colossus" (Penguin, 2004). He will be writing a weekly column for The Times.August 1, 2005The writer G.K. Chesterton once suggested that atheists were "balanced on the very edge of belief — of belief in almost anything." I was reminded of this critique last week by a report of a conversation between one of the would-be London bombers, Muktar Said Ibrahim, and a former neighbor of his in Stanmore, the suburb of North London where he grew up. Americans tend to assume that what is going on in Europe today is a struggle between Islamic extremism and Western — or Judeo-Christian, if you will — tolerance. But this is only half right."He asked me," Sarah Scott said, "if I was Catholic because I have Irish family, and I said I didn't believe in anything. And he said I should. He told me he was going to have all these virgins when he got to heaven if he praises Allah. He said if you pray to Allah and if you have been loyal to Allah, you would get 80 virgins, or something like that."Now, it is the easiest thing in the world to make fun of the notion, apparently a commonplace among jihadists, that a suicide bomber who successfully blows up a decent number of infidels is rewarded in heaven with 80 virgins. (Wouldn't you prefer, say, two desperate housewives?) But is it, I wonder, significantly stranger to believe, like Sarah Scott, in nothing at all? Scott's recollected conversation with Said is fascinating because it illuminates the gulf that now exists in Britain between a minority of fanatics and a majority of atheists. "He said," Scott recalled last week, "people were afraid of religion, and people should not be afraid."I am not sure British people are necessarily afraid of religion, but they are certainly not much interested in it these days. Indeed, the decline of Christianity — not just in Britain but across Europe — stands out as one of the most remarkable phenomena of our times.There was a time when Europe would justly refer to itself as "Christendom." Europeans built the Continent's loveliest edifices to accommodate their acts of worship. They quarreled bitterly over the distinction between transubstantiation and consubstantiation. As pilgrims, missionaries and conquistadors, they sailed to the four corners of the Earth, intent on converting the heathen to the true faith. Now it is Europeans who are the heathens. According to the Gallup Millennium Survey of religious attitudes, barely 20% of West Europeans attend church services at least once a week, compared with 47% of North Americans and 82% of West Africans. Fewer than half of West Europeans say God is a "very important" part of their lives, as against 83% of Americans and virtually all West Africans. And fully 15% of West Europeans deny that there is any kind of "spirit, God or life force" — seven times the American figure and 15 times the West African.The exceptionally low level of British religiosity was perhaps the most striking revelation of a recent ICM poll. One in five Britons claim to "attend an organized religious service regularly," less than half the American figure. Little more than a quarter say that they pray regularly, compared with two thirds of Americans and 95% of Nigerians. And barely one in 10 Britons would be willing to die for our God or our beliefs, compared with 71% of Americans.The de-christianization of Britain is in fact a relatively recent phenomenon. Prior to 1960, most marriages in England and Wales were solemnized in a church; then the slide began, down to around 40% in the late 1990s. Especially striking is the decline in confirmations as a percentage of children baptized. Fewer than a fifth of those baptized are now confirmed, about half the figure for the period from 1900 to 1960. For the Church of Scotland, the decline has been even more precipitous.Some of the greatest British writers of the 20th century anticipated this decline. Evelyn Waugh knew, once he had finished his wartime "Sword of Honour" trilogy, that he had written the epitaph of a particular ancient kind of English Catholicism. C.S. Lewis wrote "The Screwtape Letters" in the hope that mocking the devil might keep him at bay. Both sensed, understandably enough, that the war posed a grave threat to Christian faith. Yet it was not really until the 1960s that their premonitions of secularization came true.Why have the British lost their historic faith? Like so many difficult questions, this seems at first sight to have an easy answer. But before you blame it on "the '60s" — the Beatles, the Pill and the miniskirt — remember that the United States had all these earthly delights too, without ceasing to be a Christian country. To be frank, I have no idea what the answer is. But I do know that it matters. Chesterton feared that if Christianity declined, "superstition" would "drown all your old rationalism and skepticism." When educated friends tell me that they have invited a shaman to investigate their new house for bad juju, I see what Chesterton meant. Yet it is not the spread of such mumbo-jumbo that concerns me as much as the moral vacuum that de-Christianization has created. Sure, sermons are sometimes dull and congregations often sing out of tune. But, if nothing else, a weekly dose of Christian doctrine helps to provide an ethical framework for life. And it is not clear where else such a thing is available in modern Europe.Over the last few weeks, Britons have heard a great deal from Tony Blair and others about the threat posed to their "way of life" by Muslim extremists like Muktar Said Ibrahim. But how far has their own loss of religious faith turned Britain into a soft target — not so much for the superstition Chesterton feared, but for the fanaticism of others?
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