Latin & Religion Return to Europe

The November Prospect has some unusually intriguing articles.

Why are so many novelists in the modern age drawn to write about the ancient world, especially Rome but also, to a lesser extent, Greece? The line of those who have done so goes back at least to Edward Bulwer-Lytton and The Last Days of Pompeii, written at a time—the 1830s—when classical studies were central to education throughout western Europe. Some such genre novels are actually very "literary"—Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean, for example. But most, whatever their literary quality, aim to be popular, which is to say that they have a strong narrative, striking characters and richly dramatic scenes. If not bestsellers, Roman novels are certainly intended to please the "common reader." Two which did are Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis and Lew Wallace's Ben Hur, both of which had a Christian theme, not a characteristic of the modern Roman novel.The father of the genre, in English anyway, was Robert Graves, himself a classical scholar, if an eccentric one. His two novels about the emperor Claudius have scarcely been out of print since first being published in the 1930s. They were also successfully adapted for television in the 1970s (the series was recently repeated on BBC4). Jack Lindsay, a Marxist whose Rome for Sale, about the Catiline conspiracy, would make a nice companion to Harris, actually published his first Roman novels before Graves wrote I, Claudius, but they never enjoyed the same success and his books are now mostly out of print.

Essays: 'Return of the Roman' by Allan Massie Prospect Magazine November 2006 issue 128

CLIVE JAMES at 67

'I need another 40 years' Books The Australian:

The secret of James's writing, whether it is for TV or highbrow essays, has been to combine that spoken style of clear English with a determination to pack ideas into his work. He became a devotee of 'the resonant sentence', he writes, citing an example by British journalist Katherine Whitehorn: 'You can recognise the people who live for others by the haunted look on the faces of the others.'
'I loved the idea of talking that way on the page,' James says, and for the 35-odd years since then he has generally had the frantic energy and intellect to pull it off. 'I tried to give each piece everything, composing it as if it were a poem.'

A breakthrough came in 1972 when The Times Literary Supplement asked for a piece on US literary critic Edmund Wilson. Just 2000 words would have done but James wrote 11,000 and 10,000 were printed. The Times Literary Supplement did not name its writers in those days but Graham Greene was among many who found out who had written it so they could write to James to congratulate him.
'Flatteringly avuncular, Greene suggested that I might consider the discursive critical essay as my destined field of operations,' James writes. 'The piece wasn't as long as the letter I wrote in reply, which was probably the reason I never heard from him again. The success of the piece on Wilson was the beginning of my confidence in a tactical approach to print journalism by which I might get away with combining the apparently antagonistic roles of wiseacre and smart alec.'

So much work goes into wry observations such as his famous early description of Arnold Schwarzenegger as 'a brown condom full of walnuts' that in an unscripted chat James apologises for not being as compact and quotable as he would like to be.

ECONOMIC SLOW DOWN

Economist.com:

EVERYONE knows that America's economy is slowing. Thanks to the bursting of the housing bubble, overall GDP growth has fallen back sharply. The biggest short-term uncertainty for the world economy is whether American consumers stop spending and drag the country into recession. But beyond the business cycle, another slowdown has received scant attention. America's potential rate of growth—that is, the pace at which annual output can expand without pushing up inflation—is also falling. By some estimates, it could drop to 2.5% over the next few years, which would be the slowest pace in over a century.

If that happens, the consequences will be serious. Tax revenues will grow more slowly than expected. Monetary policy will become harder to manage: as the 1970s showed, inflation can get out of control if central bankers do not realise that an economy's speed limit has fallen. Financial markets will be disturbed as conventional wisdom adjusts from an assumption of 3-3.5% potential output growth, and investors downgrade their expectations.

Steve Martin & Roz Chast

Wonderful interview here from a video taken at the New Yorker Festival.

The New Yorker: Video

CLINTON

NYO - News Story 3:

Ready or not, he’s back.

Can she be far behind?

This weekend, the former President will be dining and drinking to 60 years with some of world’s deepest-pocketed donors at a series of glamorous events around Manhattan, beginning Friday evening and ending with a cocktail party on Gramercy Park in the wee hours Sunday night.

The price of entry for the weekend’s festivities is a gaudy reminder of slushier times in the 1990’s. With money going toward a growing endowment for the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation, donors will have to cough up $60,000 if they want to want to see Mick Jagger sing at the Beacon Theatre and at least $100,000 for poached eggs and mimosas with Bill and Hillary at Pastis.

Turned those clocks back?

Cards & Pigskin

The Saint Louis Cardinals are on the verge of a World Series win. So, open a few Budwiesers in their honor. And, if you are looking for a highly entertaing and uplifting sports saga give Michael Leais' latest, The Blind Side a read. Quite good as usual for Lewis.

The Clocks go Back

FT.com / Weekend columnists / Tim Harford - Undercover Economist: Think inside the box:

"The clocks go back tomorrow, which means an extra, delicious, guiltless hour in bed. Every year I dream of a world where the clocks go back every day. Of course, that would create trouble, notably that in a fortnight I’d be waking up after sunset. I would also be getting out of bed about the time all the good restaurants were closing. So I toe the line and put the clocks back only once a year, and - sigh - put them forward again in the spring."

830! The highest Scrabble score ever!

830! How a carpenter got the highest Scrabble score ever. - By Stefan Fatsis - Slate Magazine

THE DEPARTED

Telegraph Entertainment Masterclass in menace#dep&DCMP=EMC-art_27102006:

Martin Scorsese has come home in The Departed. Home to the crime mafias, tough-talking saloons, pistol-packing underworlds in which, as he showed in Mean Streets and Goodfellas, he finds the greatest comfort and ballistic joy. Home to the company of dark-spirited guys damning their souls for a chance of earthly riches.

FORTNUM & MASON (forever)

FORTNUM & MASON

For generations, Fortnum & Mason's tea room was where Bertie Wooster types took their maiden aunts when they couldn't think what else to do with them.

More recently, it has become home to tourists picking up decorative tea caddies and enjoying the quaint and dated atmosphere. What luxuries! The chocolates, the own-label wines and spirits, the teas, the hampers, the caviar, the salmon, the cheeses, the gentlemen's relish, and so much more; but the splendid assistance from staff is what makes the place so remarkable.

Now, to celebrate its 300th anniversary next year, the iconic store is revamping its rather tired sales rooms. The first stage, to be revealed to the public on Monday, is a modern, stainless steel atrium that links the ground floor to the basement.

When celebrities rule the Earth

spiked When celebrities rule the Earth:

"The main criticism people direct at the media obsession with celebrities is that it clogs up the news with trivia. But it matters more than that today. As serious public and political life has withered, so celebrity culture has expanded to fill the gap, often with the encouragement of political leaders desperate for some celebrity cover. What happens in the phoney world of celebrity is often symbolic of developments in the real world that affect us all – and rarely for the better. "

Iraq is no Vietnam -- it's far worse than that

Iraq is no Vietnam – it's far worse than that - Comment - Times Online:

"If victory is impossible and defeat unimaginable, what can America do? One answer is the one given by Dick Cheney, the vice-president, and Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary: denial. Last week Cheney said the government of Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq, was doing “remarkably well”. Sadly for Cheney the number of Americans willing to believe this is now much lower than the number who believe the Earth was made in seven days 6,000 years ago.
And so the smart money in Washington, especially if the Democrats retake part or all of the Congress on November 7, is on some sort of deal with the neighbouring regimes to stabilise and police Iraq.
The Bush family consigliere, James Baker, has been asked to come up with a plan. It may take talking directly to Iran and Syria, something that will represent a real volte-face for the White House. It may mean reaching out to Jordan, the Saudis, and even the Russians for direct or indirect negotiation with the various factions in Iraq — or with Iran and Syria. "

VERY Short Stories

With some credit to Hemingway, Wired has collected some pithy stories, all in six words.

Wired 14.11: Very Short Stories:

Just a sampling:

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.- Margaret Atwood
His penis snapped off; he’s pregnant!- Rudy Rucker

Lie detector eyeglasses perfected: Civilization collapses.
- Richard Powers

I’m dead. I’ve missed you. Kiss … ?
- Neil Gaiman

The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly.
- Orson Scott Card

Kirby had never eaten toes before.
- Kevin Smith"

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

Bill Bryson does it again! A wonderful autobiography of his youth. Bryson is just pure gold.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://www.amazon.com/Life-Times-Thunderbolt-Kid-Memoir/dp/076791936X/sr=8-1/qid=1161807285/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-8141399-3817765?ie=UTF8&s=books

The Three David Hockneys

The three David Hockneys - TLS Highlights - Times Online:

There are three David Hockneys, I think, and only one of them matters. The first one, and the least important, although the most intrusive, is the public, much-photographed David Hockney – the 1960s owlishly bespectacled mop-top turned twenty-first-century curmudgeon, the one who writes letters to the newspapers about smokers’ freedoms and what the modern world is coming to. The second Hockney, more difficult to put aside, is the David Hockney of “A Bigger Splash” and “Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy” – not the paintings themselves, but the postcard and poster reproductions. This Hockney is troublesome, because he stands in the way of the real David Hockney – and more worryingly, he stands in the way of a clear view of the real Hockney’s work.

Amis on GWB 43

Deranging consequences of 9/11 - Books - Times Online:

GEORGE W. BUSH HAS prevailed in two general elections because, very broadly, male voters feel that he’s the kind of guy “you can have a beer with”. Whereas in fact George W. Bush is the kind of guy you can’t have a beer with, under any circumstances: as they say at AA, he has come to treasure his sobriety. You can have a beer with John Kerry and Al Gore; and you can have a beer with Bush Sr and Bill Clinton (and pretty well all the others, including George Washington). But you can’t have a beer with Bush Jr. "

GRAMMAR

In a monumentally depressing report, the Royal Literary Fund assessed the state of literacy among British undergraduates. It was a compilation of the accounts of professional writers sent in to help students with the basic skills of writing essays. Hilary Spurling, the chairman of the scheme, wrote: 'The individual accounts read like dispatches from a front line where students struggle to survive without basic training or equipment… What began as a private scheme devised primarily for the benefit of writers has exposed a public catastrophe.

www.telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/10/23/bohumph23.xml&site=6&page=0

A Superpower in Decline

A Superpower in Decline: America's Middle Class Has Become Globalization's Loser - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News:

At the beginning of the 21st century, the United States is still a superpower. But it's a superpower facing competition from beyond its borders as well as internal difficulties. Its lower and middle classes are turning out to be the losers of globalization.

There are essentially three exclusive characteristics whose simultaneous development have served as the foundations of the United States's success up until now -- and they only appear in this particular combination in America. They are not only the country's biggest strengths, but also its greatest weaknesses. It's worth scrutinizing them more closely.

First, nowhere in the world can you find such a high concentration of optimism and daring. America is the country that strives hardest for what is new -- not just since yesterday (like Eastern Europeans) and not just for the last three decades (like the Chinese); rather from the very instant settlers began arriving. Unabashed curiosity seems to be hardwired into the nation's genetic code.

The steady influx of the adventurous and hard-working -- which helped increase the country's labor force by about 44 million people since 1980 alone and continues today -- ensures a constant replenishment of daring. After all, it's not just the additional people that make the difference. The mere addition of 17 million people into Germany following reunification in 1990 - newcomers more concerned with preserving their guaranteed rights than with making the extraordinary effort necessary for success - did nothing to foster the kind of daring you see in the United States. Indeed, the result was exactly the opposite, and it has been a painful lesson for Germany.

Second, the United States is radically global. Its very origins -- in the rebellious citizens from every country in the world who assembled on the territory that is now the United States -- mark its people as true children of the world. Former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt calls the founding fathers of the United States a "vital elite," one that continues to pass down its genes to this very day. Their language is dominant, having marginalized Spanish and French during the second half of the past century. Their everyday culture -- from the T-shirt and rock 'n' roll to e-mail -- has peacefully colonized half the world. And from the very beginning, US corporations were eager to venture abroad in order to trade and set up production sites in other countries. Multinational corporations may not have been a US invention, but they became its specialty.

Third, the United States is the only nation on earth that can do business globally in its own currency. Indeed, the dollar has established itself as the world's currency. Whoever wants to own it has to purchase it in the United States. All important decisions about the quantity of cash that circulates or the setting of interest rates are made within the nation's borders, which guarantees a maximum degree of national independence. It's American blood that flows through the veins of the global economy. Almost half of all business deals are closed using dollars as the currency, and two-thirds of all currency reserves are held in dollars. Charles de Gaulle, who was president of France after World War II, admired this "exorbitant privilege" even then.

Will the Union see its 300th birthday?

If Scotland devolves, then what? Does anyone care? It just won't seem the same. Next year marks the three hundreth birthday of the UK.

Telegraph Expat Will the Union see its 300th birthday?

Congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. George Young Ragsdale who were married 10 June 2006.

On Truth by Harry G. Frankfurt

Powell's Books - On Truth by Harry G. Frankfurt:

"Having outlined a theory of bullshit and falsehood, Harry G. Frankfurt turns to what lies beyond them: the truth, a concept not as obvious as some might expect.
Our culture's devotion to bullshit may seem much stronger than our apparently halfhearted attachment to truth. Some people (professional thinkers) won't even acknowledge true and false as meaningful categories, and even those who claim to love truth cause the rest of us to wonder whether they, too, aren't simply full of it. Practically speaking, many of us deploy the truth only when absolutely necessary, often finding alternatives to be more saleable, and yet somehow civilization seems to be muddling along. But where are we headed? Is our fast and easy way with the facts actually crippling us? Or is it all good? Really, what's the use of truth, anyway?
With the same leavening wit and commonsense wisdom that animates his pathbreaking work On Bullshit, Frankfurt encourages us to take another look at the truth: there may be something there that is perhaps too plain to notice but for which we have a mostly unacknowledged yet deep-seated passion. His book will have sentient beings across America asking, The truth--why didn't I think of that?"

BIG BABIES ALL (of us)

The plain fact is that you are being treated like a baby. You, I, all of us are on the receiving end of a sustained campaign to infantilise us: our tastes, our responses, our behaviour, our private thoughts, our decisions, our buying habits, our philosophies, our political sensibilities.

We are told what to think. We are talked down to. We are distracted with colour and movement, patronised, spoon-fed, our responses pre-empted and our autonomy eroded with a fine, rich, heavily funded contempt.

Here is a random sample of what is implicit in the assumptions that are made about all of us: We are unable to control our appetites;

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/10/22/svbabies22.xml&site=6&page=0

World Series Puzzles

If the games themselves don't hold your interest, then try these puzzles. If you don't care for baseball or puzzles, then let Ms. Danes amuse you. If you have not seen SHOPGIRL, do so.

Puzzles: Ballpark Figuring - New York Times

Anti-Americanisms

Anti-Americanisms by Peter J. Katzenstein and Robert O. Keohane - Policy Review 139:

"Arab reactions to American support for Israel in its recent conflict with Hezbollah have put anti-Americanism in the headlines once again. Around the world, not just in the Middle East, when bad things happen there is a widespread tendency to blame America for its sins, either of commission or omission. When its Belgrade embassy is bombed, Chinese people believe it was a deliberate act of the United States government; terror plots by native British subjects are viewed as reflecting British support for American policy; when aids devastates much of Africa, the United States is faulted for not doing enough to stop it.
These outbursts of anti-Americanism can be seen simply as a way of protesting American foreign policy. Is “anti-Americanism” really just a common phrase for such opposition, or does it go deeper? If anti-American expressions were simply ways to protest policies of the hegemonic power, only the label would be new. Before World War i Americans reacted to British hegemony by opposing “John Bull.” Yet there is a widespread feeling that anti-Americanism is more than simply opposition to what the United States does, but extends to opposition to what the United States is — what it stands for. Critiques of the United States often extend far beyond its foreign policy: to its social and economic practices, including the public role of women; to its social policies, including the death penalty; and to its popular culture, including the flaunting of sex. Globalization is often seen as Americanization and resented as such. Furthermore, in France, which has had long-standing relations with the United States, anti-Americanism extends to the decades before the founding of the American republic. "

The Harvard Classics

The most comprehensive and well-researched anthology of all time comprises both the 50-volume “5-foot shelf of books” and the the 20-volume Shelf of Fiction. Together they cover every major literary figure, philosopher, religion, folklore and historical subject through the twentieth century

Eliot, Charles W., ed. The Harvard Classics and Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction. 1909–1917

Michael Crichton

It's the birthday of Michael Crichton, (books by this author) born in Chicago (1942). He decided to pursue writing at Harvard, but his writing style was continually criticized by his teachers and he earned a C average. He decided it was the school, not he, that was in error. So for the next assignment, he retyped an essay by George Orwell and submitted it as his own. The professor did not catch his plagiarism, and gave Crichton a B minus. Crichton decided to change his major to anthropology.
To pay for his medical studies, he began writing paperback adventure novels under the pseudonym John Lang. On top of his schoolwork, he managed to produce 10,000 words a day, ultimately publishing eight novels with titles such as Zero Cool (1969), The Venom Business (1969), and Drug of Choice (1970). Just one year out of medical school he published the novel that made his name: The Andromeda Strain (1969), about scientists racing to stop the spread of a deadly new bacteria introduced to Earth from outer space.
Crichton went on to become the author of many best-selling thriller novels, but he also directed several films, and created the popular TV show ER about the daily lives of hospital emergency room employees. He's one of the rare popular writers who's never settled down to one genre. Most of his books touch on science, including Jurassic Park (1990), about dinosaurs brought to life through genetic engineering. But he's also written about Vikings and Japanese businessmen, sexual harassment, and nanotechnology.

Reason and Faith at Harvard

Reason and Faith at Harvard - washingtonpost.com

When tycoons hit the menoporsche

Telegraph Expat When tycoons hit the menoporsche:

"No, when tycoons and oligarchs hit middle age, they like to take their mid-lifer to the next level and, some might say, lose the plot. They tend to trade in their wife of long standing for a younger, fresher, fitter, friskier model. It's the emotional and sexual equivalent of a new Maserati – only a lot more expensive (if divorce proceedings are initiated, Mrs Abramovich might lay claim to up to half of her husband's many billions)."

Anna Russell

Anna Russell, Deft Parodist of Operatic Culture, Dies at 94 - New York Times:

Ms. Russell’s most enduring creations, now a half-century old, were associated with the most cultic portions of the art music repertory — the works of Wagner and those of Gilbert and Sullivan. Her routines are still regularly invoked even though they can only be sampled on decades-old recordings of her performances.

Merely by telling the plot of Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelungs” in a voice laced with Edwardian-era class and postwar-era sarcasm, Ms. Russell affectionately sullied opera’s most devotional experience.

“I’m not making this up, you know,” she said when her account of the plot seemed to become particularly outrageous. That became her tag line — and the title of her 1985 autobiography.

BREATHE

Step back.

This generation has been stimulated more than any generation in history. All day and all night we can be listening or watching, exposing ourselves to the bombardment of words, music and images through all the electronic media. So we do not pray in a vacuum. Our head is full of pictures, tunes and stories. We suffer from what have been called monkey thoughts, clambering all over the place, chattering and distracting us from our centre. One escape from the monkey thoughts is the classical one: focus on how you breathe. Attend to the air bathing your nostrils as you inhale and exhale. Slow down, and repeat a simple mantra like: Lord, teach me to pray, or Maranatha, or Come Holy Spirit.

Relax & meditate

So, when shall we meet? The where is determined.

Missing their marbles

New Statesman - Missing their marbles:

"As Greece puts the finishing touches to a building fit to hold the Parthenon sculptures, museums around the world are giving their fragments back. How much longer can the British Museum cling on to Lord Elgin's loot? Helena Smith reports "

China’s Milestone, Our Millstone

$!t owed to the Chinese. Should we talk sinking fund?

China’s Milestone, Our Millstone - New York Times

The world after Bush

Essays: 'The world after Bush' by Michael Lind Prospect Magazine November 2006 issue 128:

"On 20th January 2009, George W Bush, barring his death, resignation or impeachment, will be succeeded by the 44th US president. Whether Republican or Democrat, the next president will not only inherit a number of crises, but will be in a considerably weaker position to deal with them.

Much of America's weakness will be the result of self-inflicted wounds: the unnecessary invasion of Iraq, along with the Bush administration's gratuitous insults to allies, its arrogant unilateralism and its hostility to international law. But as tempting as it may be to put all of the blame on the Bush administration, the truth is that most of the trends that will limit American power and influence in the next decade are long-term phenomena produced by economic, demographic and ideological developments beyond the power of the US or any government to influence. The rise of China, the shift in the centre of the world economy to Asia, the growth of neo- mercantilist petro-politics, the spread of Islamism in both militant and moderate forms—these trends are reshaping the world order in ways that neither the US nor any of its allies can do much to control."

The apples of our eyes

FT.com / Arts & weekend / Food & drink - The apples of our eyes:

21 October is Apple Day!

The essential Apple Day message is to look after the apples growing in our gardens, to ask for local varieties by name when shopping, to consider saving an endangered orchard, and to plan and plant local varieties of fruit in new community orchards where customs such as bobbing for apples and wassailing might be revived, and tasks such as pruning might be shared. As Clifford puts it: “The survival of diversity and locality lies in our hands. We are all implicated.” In other words, if we do not take care, the quirky, the vernacular, the particular will be crushed under the jackboot of monoculture and homogenisation"

Human species 'may split in two'

A very intriguing notion that in the next thousand or so years the human species may split into two distict types. One tall, intelligent group and another short, servile and dull group. The truly fascinating upshot of all this is that the taller more intelligent ones will die out as a result of their dependence upon technology. A good read.

BBC NEWS UK Human species 'may split in two'

Bush, quite alone

Independent Online Edition > World Politics:

The CIA Man
'Iraq is now what Afghanistan was in the late-1970s and throughout the 80s into the 90s, and that's an insurgent magnet, if you will, a mujahedin magnet, only much, much worse.'
Michael Scheuer, Former Head of the CIA's Bin Laden Unit
The Neo-Con
'The US objective in Iraq has failed... Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000. And the administration has, now, to cope with failure.'
William Buckley, Conservative Editor of The National Review
The General
'The commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions - or bury the results.'
Retired Marine Lt Gen Gregory Newbold
The Administration Man
'We didn't have enough troops on the ground. We didn't impose our will. And as a result, an insurgency got started and... got out of control.'
Colin Powell, Former Joint Chief of Staff and US Secretary of State
The Adviser
'There'll probably be some things in our report that the administration might not like... I personally believe in talking to your enemies. Neither the Syrians nor the Iranians want a chaotic Iraq.'
James Baker, Former US Secretary of State "

Ephron, Wynn & Picasso

Just a wonderful story.

Nora Ephron: My Weekend in Vegas The Huffington Post

Why this stuff matters

Changing culture of literature:

"When Lawrence Ferlinghetti stood up last week at his City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco to announce the finalists for the 2006 National Book Awards, he made sure to remind those in attendance that this was a political event, noting, 'It's a great tribute to democracy, that prizes like these still exist.'

Later, at an informal reception, the 87-year-old poet and publisher took a moment to elaborate. 'The real culture of America,' he declared, echoing a speech he made last fall after winning the National Book Awards' first 'Literarian' Award, 'is not corporate monoculture and television. It's the writers, teachers, universities, libraries and librarians. That's the mainstream culture of America.'

It's hard to say what's more unexpected: to hear Ferlinghetti invoke the mainstream or to see him take part in an event like this. Since the early 1950s, he has been a counterculture icon, the publisher of Allen Ginsberg and Subcomandante Marcos, who sees literature as a force for change. Still, the issue he raises — that of the mainstream and literature's place within it, of why this stuff matters — is one readers and writers have no choice but to take on."

Terry Eagleton

The Chronicle: 10/20/2006: Terry Eagleton, the Wanderer:

"Though Eagleton is only in his early 60s, a conference this past summer at the University of Manchester, where Eagleton is a professor of cultural theory, took stock of his prodigious work and career. I attended the conference — I was on a panel that interviewed him and am responsible for his pages in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism — looking for a handle to encapsulate his career, but instead found a kaleidoscope of themes, topics, and fields. The speakers at the conference remarked on his interest in Irish literature; his focus on aesthetic theory; his use of humor; his early engagement with French Marxism; his engagement with feminism; his forays in fiction and drama; his slide from theory to journalism; his path as a scholarship boy; his debunking of high culture; his criticism of postmodernism; and his playfulness. His work encompasses a carnival of themes.

Eagleton's wandering is not idiosyncratic, though, but presents a microcosm of the changes in criticism over the past 40 years. Like Zelig or Forrest Gump, Eagleton seems to have been there at all the crucial moments. He began precociously during the 1960s, publishing three books in his twenties as a rising figure on the British New Left, consistently declaring his Marxist stance. Then he embraced French structuralist theory, bringing the dense theoretical edifice and idiom of the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser to Britain in Criticism and Ideology (1976), his one book not in plain language. After that he became the primary expositor and popularizer of theory, in Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976), Literary Theory, The Function of Criticism (1984), The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), and Ideology: An Introduction (1991). In his down"

Which Way to Win?

This book is a very astute analysis of the effects of the "new media" on politics in general.

Which Way to Win? - washingtonpost.com:

"This assessment of America's meta-politics is distilled in 'The Way to Win,' a new book by two of the media's best political observers, Mark Halperin of ABC News and John F. Harris of The Post. They see two basic strategic ideas at work in today's politics: the 'synthesizer' approach of former president Bill Clinton, and the 'clarifier' tactics of President Bush and his political guru, Karl Rove.

Annie Leibovitz

A Complete Picture - washingtonpost.com:

"Fifteen years of it, to be precise, the part she's collected in her new book, 'A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005,' whose 472 pages her visitor is flipping through now. It's a startling compilation, including as it does both previously unseen images of her family and her companion, Susan Sontag -- who died in December 2004, just weeks before Leibovitz's father -- and the trademark portraits that shout out to celebrity worshipers from the pages of Vanity Fair.

Different planets? Not to the photographer. Her book title says 'life,' not 'lives.' Yet the private and the public work -- and the way Leibovitz talks about them -- can feel shockingly at odds."

P G WODEHOUSE

It's the birthday of English novelist Sir P.G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse, (books by this author) born in Guildford, England (1881). He was one of the most popular writers of the first half of the 20th century. His father worked as a magistrate in Hong Kong, and because his mother traveled back and forth between England and Hong Kong, he was raised mostly by a series of aunts.

His books are filled with evil and terrifying aunts, and he once wrote, "It is no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core they are all alike. Sooner or later out pops the cloven hoof."

While he was in high school, he found out that his father had gone bankrupt and wouldn't be able to pay for college. He got a job as a bank clerk and started publishing humorous stories and poetry on the side. He said, "[My] total inability to grasp what was going on [at the bank] made me something of a legend."

He eventually switched to journalism, and it was as a journalist that he first traveled to the United States to cover a boxing match. He fell in love with America. He said, "Being there was like being in heaven without going to all the bother and expense of dying." He moved to Greenwich Village in 1909, and began to publish the stories that made him famous in the Saturday Evening Post. From America, he wrote about an imaginary, cartoonish England, full of extremely polite but brain-dead aristocrats, and his work was wildly popular in the years leading up to the decline of the British Empire. He is best known for books such as
My Man Jeeves (1919), Carry On, Jeeves (1927), Thank You, Jeeves (1934), and Right Ho, Jeeves (1934) —books about a servant named Jeeves who is constantly saving his employer, Bertie Wooster, from all kinds of absurd situations. Wodehouse was an extremely shy man. When his wife rented them an apartment in New York, he made her promise to get one on the first floor, because he never knew what to say to the man who ran the elevator. People who knew him said that he was incredibly dull, that he was never funny in person, and that he didn't seem to have any emotions. He said, "I haven't got any violent feelings about anything. I just love writing."Over the course of his life he wrote almost a hundred books of fiction, wrote for 16 plays, and composed lyrics for 28 musicals. When asked about his technique for writing, he said, "I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit." He is known for his metaphors and similes.

He described one character as "a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say 'when!'" He wrote of another, "He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg." In his lifetime, he was generally considered a writer of light entertainment, but he's since been recognized as a master prose stylist.

The Coast of Utopia

The Coast of Utopia - Theater - Report - New York Times:

“THE COAST Of UTOPIA,” Tom Stoppard’s sweeping three-part epic that will be populating Lincoln Center for the next six months, contains, among other things: 35 years of 19th-century Russian intellectual history; more than 70 roles; discussions of Hegel, Schelling, Pushkin and Kant; adulterous affairs, both secret and permitted; the revolution of 1848; scenes in Moscow, Paris, Nice, London, under a large chandelier, at a picnic, beside an ice skating rink. It examines the lives, public and domestic, of five forefathers of the Russian Revolution: Alexander Herzen, a writer and pioneering socialist; Mikhail Bakunin, an aristocrat turned anarchist; Ivan Turgenev, a poet and novelist; Nicholas Ogarev, a poet and close friend of Herzen’s; and Vissarion Belinsky, a brilliant literary critic. It also includes their lovers, families, colleagues, antagonists, hangers-on and one ominous, cigar-smoking cat. "

FAKE NEWS

Digging for the meaning of fake news' acceptance:

"Hipsters on the streets of New York are wearing 'Stewart/Colbert '08' T-shirts, promoting a Dream Team presidential ticket featuring the Comedy Central stars. And the subway is plastered with ads for Man of the Year, the new Barry Levinson film that imagines an American public so disgusted with politics that it elects a fake news anchor president.

Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, insists he's not running. But judging from the reverential reception he received at last weekend's New Yorker Festival, and the fact that tickets to his appearance sold out in about two minutes, there's a hunger for something truthful and authentic in American politics. Man of the Year suggests the place to find it is in fake news.

'I'm a jester. A jester doesn't rule the kingdom. He makes fun of the king,' Robin Williams' character (Tom Dobbs) says in the film, which opens tomorrow. Still, he's persuaded to run for president against a Democrat and a Republican who are indistinguishable. Dobbs is the child exposing the emperors for what they are - scripted, risk-averse career pols who haven't given a straight answer in so long they no longer remember how.

'If it was unpatriotic to question the government, we'd still be English,' Dobbs says during a presidential debate in the movie.

You'll never see Stewart in such a venue. He's a reluctant hero who doesn't want to shoulder the burden of educating a generation of 'stoned slackers' - Bill O'Reilly's inexact term for Stewart's audience. He repeatedly insists that he is only a comedian and that his show is about making jokes."

Wine

"As wine experts go, Mark Oldman is just a kid, and that's a good thing. He started a wine club at Stanford University in 1990, where he and his friends sampled California wines. Later, he escaped to New York, where he taught classes in wine appreciation and drank widely from a broader selection. He's under no one's spell. He writes like a person who has not been indoctrinated in the cult of wine. And, in addition to having great taste, he has figured out a way to teach you about wine that is simple, logical and painless. Finally, he has a nose for a bargain --- learn his simple lessons and you will never be fleeced by a waiter or wine merchant again.

The joke of it all: It turns out there is very little you need to know. Oldman rockets you through a discussion of grapes (bless him for hammering away at winemakers who transformed creamy Chardonnay into wines that are like 'big, blowsy butterballs' and for singing the praises of under-appreciated Riesling). White Zinfandel? 'At best, easy drinking and refreshing, and, at worst, liquefied bubble gum.'

And then we're off to a discussion of wines, divided by type and country, then further divided by affordability. Sancerre and Pouilly-Fume --- light, citrusy, best consumed when young, and did we say inexpensive? Pinot Grigio? A safe, boring, deeply overpriced choice. Next time you are about to order white wine, you'll know.

There are great wines, and there will be times when you will want to drink them; Oldman provides a list to consider when you have a big expense account and are at a fine restaurant. But his real achievement is liberating Americans from a narrow, expensive chauvinism. The simplest fact is that, even with a falling dollar, a lot of California wine is overpriced and overhyped. If you know where to look, there "

Mark Oldham's Wines

YouTube

The People's Republic of YouTube - Los Angeles Times:

"Welcome to the new media universe, where for millions of video junkies, the best TV network in America isn't Comedy Central, MTV, ESPN or even HBO, but YouTube, the amazing website whose video clips are viewed more than 100 million times each day. Launched last year, the website has enjoyed an astounding ascent, being bought last week by Google for $1.65 billion. In an era increasingly defined by audience-driven events, YouTube represents the triumph of bottom-up culture and another sign that old media businesses, from record companies and TV networks to newspapers like The Times, are going to see more of their audience migrating to the Internet."

Hughes, After Calamity

After Calamity, a Critic’s Soft Landing - New York Times:

"Not then, not ever. Mr. Hughes, the brilliant and acerbic art critic who wrote for Time magazine for 30 years and has published a dozen books, including “The Fatal Shore,” his best-selling history of his native Australia, was never one to pull a punch. Comparing the careers of J. Seward Johnson Jr. and Jeff Koons, he once said, was like debating the merits of dog excrement versus cat excrement — although Mr. Hughes would never use a word as flat and unevocative as excrement.

He is a big man who has lived large, riding a motorcycle, attending New York parties with a cockatoo on his shoulder, deep-sea fishing. He is an accomplished carpenter: an early, romantic gift to his wife was a wooden jewelry box, which he planned to fill with jewels"

STAR TAVERN

E E Cummings

It's the birthday of poet E. E. Cummings (Edward Estlin Cummings), born in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1894). He was a man who wrote joyful, almost childlike poems about the beauty of nature and love, even though he was actually a conservative, irritable man who hated noisy modern inventions like vacuum cleaners and radios. He spent most of his life unhappy, struggling to pay the bills, ostracized for his unpopular political views.

He had published several books of poetry, including Tulips and Chimneys (1923), when he traveled to Russia in 1931, hoping to write about the superior society under the rule of communism. He was horrified at what he found. He saw no lovers, no one laughing, no one enjoying themselves. The theaters and museums were full of propaganda, and the people were scared to talk to each other in the street. Everyone was miserable.

When he got home, he wrote about the experience, comparing Russia to Dante's Inferno. Most of the publishers at the time were communists themselves, and they turned their backs on Cummings for criticizing communist Russia. Many magazines refused to publish his poetry or review his books. But the attacks only made him more stubborn. He said, "To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."
He tried to write a script for a ballet, but it was never performed. He tried writing for the movies in Hollywood, but found that he spent all his time painting humming birds and sunsets instead of working on screenplays. He had to borrow money from his parents and his friends. He said, "I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart." A few years later, he decided to make some extra money by giving a series of lectures at Harvard University. Most lecturers spoke from behind a lectern, but he sat on the stage, read his poetry aloud, and talked about what it meant to him.

The faculty members were embarrassed by his earnestness, but the undergraduates adored him and came to his lectures in droves. Even though he suffered from terrible back pains, and had to wear a metal brace that he called an "iron maiden," he began traveling and giving readings at universities across the country. By the end of the 1950s he had become the most popular poet in America. He loved performing and loved the applause, and the last few years of his life were the happiest. He died on September 2, 1962.

In the first edition of his Collected Poems, he wrote in the preface, "The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for most people—it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. ... You and I are human beings; most people are snobs."

Bridging Two Cultures

A Writer Above Politics - New York Times:

"THE writer Orhan Pamuk of Turkey has been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, and the timing would appear to be uniquely auspicious.
The divide between the West and Islam seems to be growing at an alarming pace. A series of troubling events, from the furor over a German opera performance to the violent reaction to the pope’s remarks about Islam, have resulted in recriminations and frustrated attempts at renewed dialogue and understanding. Anti-Islamic sentiments have shifted from the far right to the center of European political life.

And now a writer of Orhan Pamuk’s concerns and ambitions gains global prominence. In the Swedish Academy’s prize citation, he is commended as an artist who “has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.”

No doubt, the latest Nobel laureate’s books will be taken up with immediate interest by thoughtful readers searching for wisdom about the violent crosscurrents of religion, politics, history and culture whipsawing our world. But one can only hope that this rush to conscript Mr. Pamuk as a literary mediator in the clash of civilizations will fail. "

Jonathan Franzen

New Statesman - Time Out with Nick Cohen: This week Jonathan Franzen:

"If you are a youngish graduate making a career in the media or arts anywhere in the English-speaking world, the chances are you will have bought The Corrections and helped make it the bestselling literary novel to date in the 21st century. It is also likely that you would enjoy 9 Adam Street, a private club in a Georgian town house just off the Strand.

It's a place for London's music and book trades, and as I descended through its dining room to the launch of The Discomfort Zone, Jonathan Franzen's memoir of his childhood, I passed faces that were familiar as types rather than indivi duals. Perhaps unfairly, I thought I needed only a quick look at their casually unbuttoned clothes and meals of 'authentic' English food of the kind few English people would dream of eating to know where they lived, what they believed and which potential partners they would consider acceptable. "

Forsyth’s saga

FT.com / Columnists / Lunch with the FT - Lunch with the FT: Forsyth’s saga:

"At the core of his book is the implicit belief that the world has become a network for potential Armageddon, in which young men become radicalised and hand over their lives to charismatic Islamists. Then, working in association with al-Qaeda, kindred organisations or in their own self-created groups, they plot mass murder. Like many of his novels, only more so, The Afghan hangs its fictional characters on real events and makes them interact with real people - such as John Negroponte, director of US National Intelligence - who play important roles, if off-stage.

“You’ve got movements proselytising and converting at an extraordinary rate,” Forsyth told me. “They are now converting people in most major prisons - in the US, the Caribbean, and here. If you are looking for a spiritual home - something to cling to, a kind of brotherhood, membership of a sort of fraternity - they offer you all of this. I think a number of young black men are in that mood. There are a few whites, Anglo-Saxons I suppose you’d call them. The shoe-bomber was half white. And, well, there’s Cat Stevens, but he’s absolutely against terror, a good egg, goes around preaching for peace.”"

Look, it's been sort of a bad week: deaths in Iraq, scandal with the Congressional Pages, North Korea exploding a bomb -- now on the good side the Dow Jones is up, the baseball playoffs are in full swing -- but I still thought that we needed a little perk-up from the ever-so-lovely Ms. S.

So, enjoy a splendid weekend, everyone!

Karen Armstrong on Atheism

Interesting views on atheism.

FT.com / Arts & Weekend / Living - ‘I wouldn’t say I was a believer’:

"“So I went to the library and started researching a book, A History of God. Clever Karen went on the back burner and without the audience to show off to and working in silence, I started to have a different relationship with the texts. I began to see, as a Jewish colleague had told me six years before, that theology is poetry. It is an attempt to express the inexpressible. Really beautiful poetry, like a beautiful piece of music, leaves you in silence, in awe and wonderment. It touches something within you and lifts you momentarily beyond yourself. And good theological writing is like that. The monks in the Middle Ages used to practise what they called ‘divine study’, in the course of which you had a moment, milliseconds they said, of prayer. And that’s now my spirituality.”"

A North Korean Bomb?

spiked A North Korean Bomb? Not the end of the world:

"North Korea’s reported nuclear test hardly ranks as a ‘show of strength’ from this impoverished and desperate state where, as one satirical website commented after reports that the explosion had been smaller than expected, ‘even the nukes are starving’. It does, however, provide further evidence of the impotence of US and Western foreign policy.

Kim Jong-il’s regime may have built and exploded a nuclear bomb. But the rogue state of North Korea was largely created in Washington.

Thrashing about for some sense of purpose in American foreign policy, President George Bush and his advisers invented the ‘axis of evil’ almost overnight, basically as a snappy catchphrase for his 2002 State of the Union address. North Korea was given official pariah status, along with Iraq and Iran. The Bush administration abandoned its predecessor’s tentative steps to normalise relations with North Korea, and instead set up Kim Jong-il as another little Hitler against whom to show its moral resolution. "

Whose Art Is It Anyway?

Whose Art Is It Anyway?:

"But if violence in the form of war is difficult to commemorate, sex is an even touchier art subject for Americans. Which is weird, since we veritably wallow in it elsewhere. Every other province of our culture--especially fashion, movies, TV and advertising--is festooned with breasts and bums and breasts and crotch bulges and breasts and more breasts. The Internet? Please. While there's an occasional flare-up of outrage like Janet Jackson's 'wardrobe malfunction' during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime, the tide of de facto prurience--check out the Grammys on TV, or even the red carpet runway show before the Grammys--is unrelenting.
When it comes to art, however, we have a tendency to pull on our bluestockings and haul out the fig leaves. Barely ten years ago a gallery director at Brigham Young University refused to uncrate Rodin's The Kiss for a traveling exhibition. (One wonders how he would have dealt with Magritte's Lovers, which shows a man and woman kissing through the bags over their heads.) Hardly a week goes by without a story about 'inappropriate' art being hustled out of public view. The most hilarious incident I ever witnessed was at the LA County Museum of Art in 1965, when the chicken-wire couple humping in Ed Kienholz's assemblage Back Seat Dodge, '38 had the car doors closed on them during hours when school kids were most likely to wander the galleries. And the best solution I've ever heard comes from Kammen's book: Robert Moses took umbrage at the topless figures representing 'vice' being trod on by a sinless hunk with a club in Frederick MacMonnies's 1922 sculpture Civic Virtue, which stood outside City Hall in Manhattan. So in 1941 Moses had it moved to Borough Hall. In Queens."

Richard Dawkins

The flying spaghetti monster Salon Books:

"Dawkins' outspoken atheism is a relatively recent turn in his public career. He first made his name 30 years ago with his groundbreaking book 'The Selfish Gene,' which reshaped the field of evolutionary biology by arguing that evolution played out at the level of the gene itself, not the individual animal. Dawkins now holds a chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. Thanks to his tremendous talent for clear and graceful writing, he's done more to popularize evolutionary biology than any other scientist, with the possible exception of Stephen Jay Gould. Dawkins has a gift for explaining science through brilliant metaphors. Phrases like 'the selfish gene' and 'the blind watchmaker' didn't only crystallize certain scientific ideas; they entered the English vernacular. And his concept of 'memes' -- ideas themselves evolving like genes -- spawned a new way of thinking about cultural evolution.
Dawkins' latest book turns to his more recent passions. In 'The God Delusion,' Dawkins fulminates against religious moderates as well as fundamentalists. He argues that the existence of God is itself a scientific conjecture, one that doesn't hold up to the evidence. And he dismisses the entire discipline of theology: I have yet to see any good reason to suppose that theology (as opposed to biblical history, literature, etc.) is a subject at all.' "

History revisited

History revisited - TLS Highlights - Times Online:

Forty years ago the TLS published three issues on the state of historical scholarship.

"The anonymous author of the leading article (Barraclough himself) asserted that historians should align themselves with the social sciences by tackling the questions “which ordinary people wanted answering”. Sir Isaiah Berlin, he added unkindly, was wrong to dismiss “scientific” history as a “chimera”; a younger generation of historians had passed him by.

The opening article was even more confrontational. It asserted that the first half of the twentieth century was “a time when most historians temporarily lost their bearings”, and declared that “academic history, for all its scholarly rigour, had succeeded in explaining remarkably little about the workings of human society or the fluctuations in human affairs”. The remedy, it suggested, was not to “grub away in the old empirical tradition” but to forge a closer relationship with the social sciences, especially social anthropology, sociology and social psychology, to develop a more sophisticated conceptual vocabulary and to employ statistical techniques. The future lay with the computer, which would replace the “stout boots” worn by the advanced historians of the previous generation. In the United States the new econometric history was already “sweeping all before it”.

Amis & Muslims

Muslims not trying to fit with society, says Amis - Britain - Times Online:

"In this country what’s happening is that young men in late adolescence and early manhood have a period of self-hatred and disgust and thoughts of suicide,” he said. “The idea you can turn this into world history is tremendously powerful.

“The absolutely crucial thing is to see whether it mutates. Death cults take on a terrible momentum.”
The allure of a philosophy based on the rejection of reason and embrace of death was intense but short-lived, Amis said. However, if this fused with a sense of the individual exerting an influence on history “then al-Qaedaism will mutate as we feared”. "

Apple's World

THE restaurant was Spago, in Beverly Hills, and Johnny Apple was in the house.

And everyone knew it.

It started with the maître d’hôtel, who fawned over us — make that: who fawned over Johnny — the moment he spotted that large frame pushing through the door. He guided us to a table in the center of the dining room (with a view, as Johnny noted upon unfolding his napkin, of Esther Williams, the 1950’s Hollywood sensation, perched at the next table). It continued with the wine steward, who looked understandably intimidated as he came over to negotiate the wines we would be drinking that evening. Then, finally, Wolfgang Puck himself embraced Johnny as if he were the only person in his dining room, never mind that Spago was teeming with its usual roster of celebrities, along with the political crowd in town for the 2000 Democratic convention.

Johnny offered Mr. Puck a challenge — “We are in your hands,” are the words I recall — and thus began a four-hour blur of plates and platters and bottles of wine the likes of which I had never seen before, or since, at a Puck restaurant. Two hours into our bacchanal Mr. Puck proved that he knew his Apple: out from the kitchen came a plate of pig prepared four ways, precisely the kind of unpretentiously rustic and absurdly rich dish that could make Johnny literally rise from his chair and yelp in delight. That’s just what he did, before proceeding to correctly guess the farm in Pennsylvania where Mr. Puck had purchased his pork.

This was dinner with Johnny Apple, the New York Times correspondent, who died last Wednesday at age 71. Or, rather, one kind of dinner with Johnny Apple.

He was capable of eating lunch at a three-star restaurant in the French countryside and, after an interval of only three hours, dinner at a brasserie in Lyon, narrating each dish as it came, as he did while traveling in France with a Times correspondent a few years ago. He was flamboyant enough to commandeer a favorite Madrid restaurant during the 1997 NATO summit meetings, never mind that it was normally closed for lunch, and then direct a three-hour afternoon feast with Sandy Berger, the former American national security adviser. The event provided little news but many opportunities to sample bottles of 1975 Imperial Gran Reserva Rioja, as one of his guests later recalled.

He brought no less gusto to a fabulous neighborhood restaurant that served Serbian food and that he somehow snuffled out in the outskirts of Milwaukee. Or to the Palm in Washington for a steak. Or to whatever was served to him at the dining table of a friend, which made him less intimidating to cook for than one might think. Presented with flageolets at a dinner at a friend’s house in Washington a few years ago, he scooped them up and roared his verdict: “Best I ever had on this continent!” The host beamed in appreciation of a nuanced compliment that said as much about the eater as the chef.

He was a gourmand, but he was not a snob, at least when it came to matters of food and wine. He loved it all, and he loved it in enormous amounts — and never more so than when he was sharing a table with his wife, Betsey, who shared his tastes, his sense of humor and his adventurous approach to food.

He was as happy eating chicken gizzards at a dusty dive he found in Nashville as he was slurping down dumplings stuffed with foie gras and shiitakes at Blue Ginger in Wellesley, Mass. He loved his oysters raw and he loved them stewed and he loved them deep-fried. When he was the Washington bureau chief for The Times he had lunch with a few colleagues and Barbra Streisand at a suite at the Jefferson Hotel near the White House. Ms. Streisand has always had a strong interest in politics and in Johnny’s writing, and knowing of his reputation she arrived with a bottle of a California cabernet.

As the story was later told, Ms. Streisand said, “When should we open it?”
“Any time before you drink it!” Johnny replied with a loud chortle.
In a business in which reporters tend to guard their personal opinions when writing about politics, Johnny compensated by having, and sharing, strong views on all matters having to do with food and wine.

Dining at the Summer Shack in Boston? One had to order Jasper’s pan-roasted lobster. (Upon sitting for dinner he made clear that this was being attended to by Jasper White himself, and that it was not open to discussion.) In Cancún? There is only one place to eat: a pizzeria on the roundabout on the main drag.

In Des Moines, Iowa, during the 2004 caucuses, we had dinner at the 801 Steak & Chop House, where Johnny ordered pork chops. A young Times reporter, out to impress the boss, ordered a dozen oysters. Johnny shot him a withering, “what are you thinking of, ordering oysters at an Iowa steakhouse” look. The judgment was borne out with the delivery of a bland and watery plate of Wellfleets.

He scoffed at the notion that one should drink the best of the wine first. Save it for last, he said, and savor it like a dessert. So it was that he brought a 1964 Burgundy, a Vosne-Romanée, I believe, from his extraordinary collection (a bottle that he no doubt bought in the 1960’s) to an engagement dinner of some friends — noting, but not bragging, that he had seen this same wine go for auction that week for about $650. He instructed the waiter to open it and put it aside until we had finished our meal. Never had I enjoyed a glass of wine as much as I did that night.
His very last e-mail message, sent the night before he died, was a response to a Times food writer looking for suggestions on pancake recipes for a magazine feature. “Just very quickly since I don’t have my files here,” Johnny wrote. “1. American pancakes — Overrated, as you say. You might try the Bongo Room, in Wicker Park, north of Chicago. 2. Don’t forget Breton buckwheat crepes. 3. From South Asia (states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu in India): they make great dosas.”

Johnny was the person to call for a restaurant recommendation when heading anywhere around the globe. To his eternal credit, he never kept secrets; he wrote about the places he discovered and loved. I soon learned a trick to find his recommendations without pestering him: I would search Nexis using three elements: his byline, the name of a city and the phrase “my wife, Betsey.”

Dining with Johnny had advantages beyond his elastic expense account. A newspaper restaurant critic strains not to be recognized. But Johnny made no secret of who he was (as if that were possible); he loved being recognized and feted as a celebrity. That was always a treat for his dinner companions: it meant a personal visit by the chef, the most intricate discussion with the sommelier about the most obscure wines, then a shower of dishes from the kitchen, most of them unavailable to the civilians in the house.

As a student working on my college newspaper I avidly followed Johnny’s coverage of the 1976 campaign, during which he established himself as one of his generation’s great political reporters. After I found myself working with him at the same newspaper, improbably enough, I could never decide what I found more unnerving: working at a desk next to him on election night, sitting next to him at a restaurant or, eventually, cooking for him in my kitchen.

But the last proved easy and immensely pleasurable; in truth, having Johnny to dinner proved to be a more profitable experience for the host than the guest. Johnny and Betsey came over a few months back, after he was ill but when he was weathering it well. He offered to bring wine, and, not having been born yesterday, I readily agreed. Johnny showed up not with one bottle of wine but 10. And not any wine but a 1982 Bordeaux, one of the best vintages of the past century, a Château Haut-Bages Averous Pauillac that he plucked from his extensive collection. “You can’t take it with you,” he said, cheerfully.

Nine of us managed to get through most of that wine that night. I put one bottle aside, for the next time Johnny and Betsey came to dinner. That was, as it turned out, his last night in our dining room. But one evening before the end of the 2008 presidential campaign — an election that we will, sadly, have to chronicle without the presence of R. W. Apple Jr. — I will uncork that 1982 Bordeaux from the Apple cellar and raise a toast to a man who taught us all about writing and reporting, yes, but also about living. And living very well.

650,000 Dead in Iraq

Independent Online Edition > World Politics:

"The human cost of the war in Iraq could be far higher than previously thought. A new survey says more than 650,000 Iraqis have lost their lives as a consequence of the invasion by the United States and Britain, with an estimated 200,000 violent deaths directly attributable to Allied forces.
The new figure is much larger than all previous estimates - more than 20 times higher than President George Bush claimed 11 months ago - and will add considerable weight to the calls of those seeking a withdrawal of troops."

Alvin Toffler

Alvin Toffler, Esteemed and Edited in China - washingtonpost.com:

"Alvin Toffler, the American futurologist, has a loyal following in China. He is held in such esteem that the Communist Party considers him among 50 foreigners -- including Karl Marx, Richard Nixon, Marie Curie and Michael Jordan -- who have most significantly influenced the country's modern development.
In fact, Toffler is apparently so beloved that Chinese editors -- with the help of government censors -- decided to massage his image a bit by removing potentially controversial references to China from his most recent book, 'Revolutionary Wealth.'"

An Elephant Crackup?

A society without fathers.

An Elephant Crackup? - New York Times

Theolonius Monk & Giuseppe Verdi

Don't get the connection? It is Verdi's birthday and Mr. Keillor has chosen the occasion to celebrate but also to give us a lovely poem about Mr. Monk. Enjoy them both by clicking below.



The Writer's Almanac from American Public Media

Forget the L.A. Times; How About a National Tribune? - Los Angeles Times

Michael Kinsley proposes a solution for the problems of the LATimes and its Tribune parent.

"But now imagine the Tribune chain as a single newspaper with separate editions in each of its cities. Call it the National Tribune. Or the papers could keep their separate identities, but carry a 'Tribune' insert or wraparound with national and international news. This paper would start out with towering dominance in two of the nation's top three markets (Los Angeles and Chicago) and a solid position, via Newsday, in the largest (New York). It would even have a toehold in Washington (thanks to the Baltimore Sun). All this, and Orlando too.

Like the British papers, this new national paper could go after a demographic slice of the market instead of a geographical one. It could aim for the currently unoccupied sweet spot between USA Today and the New York Times, or it could take on the New York Times directly.

I assumed that Tribune Co. must have had something like this in mind when it paid a premium for the Times-Mirror papers. But apparently it had something else in mind, or nothing at all."

Muslims & Freedom

Why do they hate us?...They hate our freedoms – our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other. – President Bush

Freedom is a word invoked constantly in America as a descriptive term for self-government and the concept of sovereignty of the people. The word itself conjures pride and patriotism and is an integral part of our national myth. It involves the idea of unlocking human potential, of opportunity, individualism and self-reliance. Freedom and the American ideal of individual self-realization are one and the same in the minds of most Americans. Freedom is that intangible thing we defend when we fight.

Less understood is the fact that the mujahadeen are also fighting for freedom, but a freedom very differently defined. According to the Muslim philosopher Sayyid Qutb,

This din [religion] is a universal declaration of the freedom of man from slavery to other men and to his own desires, which is also a form of human servitude. It is a declaration that the sovereignty belongs only to Allah, the Lord of all the worlds. It challenges all such systems based on the sovereignty of man, i.e., where man attempts to usurp the attribute of Divine sovereignty. Any system in which final decisions are referred to human beings, and in which the source of all authority are men, deifies human beings by designating others than Allah as lords over men. (Milestones* pg. 47)

In Islamic terms, the western concept of political sovereignty resting with the people is a form of idolatry, for Allah’s word, as given through Muhammad, is regarded as the only legitimate source of legislation, and in addition, obedience to Allah’s law is the only form of worship Islam allows. These two ideas: that the divine is a law giver, and that obedience to that law is what constitutes worship, are the two most alien concepts confronting the western mind when analyzing Islam. They combine to create the Islamic requirement for territorial sovereignty, something entirely unique among the world’s religions. According to Islamic doctrine, if a Muslim obeys the laws of man, as he must while residing in a modern western state for example, he actually worships man and becomes an idolater guilty of shirk – worshipping other than the one god, Allah. This is a grave sin for a Muslim and so to atone he must engage in the struggle against jahiliyya, which is to say, all non-Muslim culture and ideas, as these are thought to arise out of ignorance of the truth of Islam. And since Islam disallows criticism of itself, it forms a completely closed system of thought with all definitions, including the definition of freedom, self-contained.

Freedom: True and False - New English Review

When North Korea Falls

Robert D. Kaplan (in the Atlantic):

"The abbreviation for North Korea used by American military officers says it all: KFR, the Kim Family Regime. It is a regime whose demonization by the American media and policy makers has obscured some vital facts. North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, was not merely a dreary Stalinist tyrant. As defectors from his country will tell you, he was also a popular anti-Japanese guerrilla leader in the mold of Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist tyrant of Albania who led his countrymen in a successful insurgency against the Nazis. Nor is his son Kim Jong Il anything like the childish psychopath parodied in the film Team America: World Police. It’s true that Kim Jong Il was once a playboy. But he has evolved into a canny operator. Andrei Lankov, a professor of history at South Korea’s Kookmin University, in Seoul, says that under different circumstances Kim might have actually become the successful Hollywood film producer that regime propaganda claims he already is.
Kim Jong Il’s succession was aided by the link that his father had established in the North Korean mind between the Kim Family Regime and the Choson Dynasty, which ruled the Korean peninsula for 500 years, starting in the late fourteenth century. Expertly tutored by his father, Kim consolidated power and manipulated the Chinese, the Americans, and the South Koreans into subsidizing him throughout the 1990s. And Kim is hardly impulsive: he has the equivalent of think tanks studying how best to respond to potential attacks from the United States and South Korea—attacks that themselves would be reactions to crises cleverly instigated by the North Korean government in Pyongyang. “The regime constitutes an extremely rational bunch of killers,” Lankov says.
Yet for all Ki"

POX AMERICANA

WAR OF THE WORLD

The “American Century” is a myth, says historian Niall Ferguson. Though the years 1900 to 1999 witnessed the emergence of the United States as the world’s sole superpower, the bigger story was that the power of the West as a whole fell in relation to the East. The unprecedented violence of those hundred years, especially the first 50 or so, accelerated the West’s material and “moral” decline. The eruption of mass killing wasn’t arbitrary. The bloodshed was concentrated, Ferguson says, in regions that were each beset by three troubling dynamics—economic instability, ethnic tension, and the collapse of an empire. And while the West is unlikely to regain the dominance it once enjoyed, the world as a whole can avoid a reprise of the 20th century’s horrors if today’s empires attend to those three factors more wisely.

http://www.niallferguson.org/

PIGSKIN

Any follower of American football should enjoy Michael Lewis latest book -- THE BLIND SIDE. It is marvelously written and highly illuminating. Even the non-football afficiando will appreciate his skill as a writer. http://literati.net/Lewis/

SHANGHAI

As I entered its north gate, my eye was caught by a sign in Mandarin and English, entitled Public Parks’ Rules for Visitors, which in light of the festive atmosphere made salutary reading. “The visitor to the park should discipline himself instead of making a nuisance,” it cautioned. “Activities of a feudalistic or superstitious nature are banned.” (This in a city where some bars have a resident fortune-teller.) And, politely but firmly, “Visitors are expected not to urinate or shit.”

Such injunctions seemed at odds with the dynamically modern scene before me: the range of skyscrapers soaring above the stands of bamboo, the crowds of elegant Shanghainese. But nothing struck quite so unexpected a note as what was playing on the big screen opposite the Grand Theatre. Here were western ballet dancers, girls in tutus, boys in tights, members of Munich’s Bayerisches Staatsballett it turned out, dancing divertissements from Petipa’s rarely performed Raymonda. It was a preview by the company that would soon be performing here, as would the West Australian Ballet, Cairo Opera Ballet, St Petersburg State Academic Ballet, Guangzhou Acrobatic Ballet Troupe (performing Swan Lake – see those cygnets soar!) and the Shanghai Ballet itself.

Shanghai is a city mad for dancing. Soon after dawn in its misty parks and on the Bund esplanade, there are people practising tai chi. Come evening, however, they abandon this graceful meditative martial art for ballroom. As night falls in bosky Fuxing Park, couples foxtrot, quickstep and waltz. In Jingan Park, a couple of kilometres west of the centre, a chorus line of mostly women no longer in their first youth are putting the finishing touche"

DEJEUNER

Lunch with the FT: The fortune teller:

“French society is much more modern than people think,” she (Laurence Parisot of MEDEF) says. “It is capable of accepting change.”

Such words are not heard very often in France, where the talk is more often of the problems of globalisation - particularly its impact on job security when unemployment is above 9 per cent - and the widespread resistance to reforming the costly social security system."

I.F. STONE (Hitchens)

Now here is a pair. As the journalists now conflate around the bones of GWB, Hitchens provides an interesting view of a great iconclast.

VANITY FAIR:

"Myra MacPherson's lovely biography of the man, All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone, is ideally timed for the moment when reporters in Washington are once again rightly (and too late) flailing themselves, either for being spoon-fed information by the White House and the Defense Department or for swallowing the alternative pabulum put out by the C.I.A. When I moved to Washington, in 1982, to do the job he'd once done for The Nation, Mr. Stone helped give a reception for me—I'm no pack rat or hero-worshipper, but I still keep the spare invitation cards—and gave me some terse advice: Don't go to briefings. Don't have lunch with people in power. Go and read the original transcripts and papers, because the government doesn't always lie to itself. And take a few minutes to read The Washington Post, because 'it's a great paper. You never know on what page you will find a page-one story.' Despising journalistic sycophancy, he noted of Theodore White's moist 'Camelot' prose that 'a man who can be so universally admiring need never lunch alone.'"

COLERIDGE & WORDSWORTH

Telegraph Entertainment The house guest from hell:

"This is a story with everything – beautiful poetry, mental instability, prostitutes, 'violent diarrhoea', 'especially violent diarrhoea' (page 371), and the French Revolution. Sisman persuasively outlines the reasons why these two great writers were attracted to each other, how they inspired each other, and why they fell out. Read it not just because it is a colourful tale, but because of what it reveals about the neuroses underpinning the creative impulse"

No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face
Autumn quote by John Donne

FRIENDS

The Claremont Institute: Amicus Brief:

"Joseph Epstein remarks that there aren't many books written on the subject of friendship. Two hundred and seventy pages later, we might be tempted to think, Score one more for the marketplace! But of course you wouldn't be tempted to say any such thing after completing this book. Joe Epstein appears to have promised himself, 17 books back, that he would never be tedious, and this latest book is certainly a validation of that oath. In particular because a book on a subject so amorphous (How about a book on love? Or duty?) runs singular risks, in this case the epiphany is that there is no epiphany in the offing. Although Epstein never ceases to amuse and to illuminate, he has no thesis about friendship to communicate, no bizarre discoveries to share. He can only instruct and entertain. Instruct in what? How to make friends? No, not really. How to keep them? No, not exactly. How to weather the loss of one? Not quite, though he has a bromide or two handy. How much to care for the evanescence of one or more friendships? "

THE ECONOMY

America must avoid a return to the 1970s



It is not every day that Wall Street’s finest appear so bitterly divided about the prospects for the American economy. Equity investors are celebrating their best quarter in 12 years and the Dow came within a whisker of beating its record high last week. With all three main stock indices up around 5% in just three months, casual observers would be forgiven for thinking that America is undergoing a massive economic boom. Bond traders, by contrast, as well as most economists, are gloomy. The fixed income markets have priced in a hard landing with the leading scenario being of a slump in house prices that will hit consumer spending and hence growth. The price of US Treasuries has been going up since late June, while yields have been falling, as analysts have come to believe that the Federal Reserve will not need to raise interest rates any further.
This apparent gulf between bulls and bears is exaggerated. Nobody sensible – and that does include equity investors – would deny any longer that the American economy has slowed and that the housing market has finally ground to a halt. But this does not yet mean that share prices should be falling. What has confused many commentators is that several concurrent forces have pushed up share prices despite the economic downturn.

First and least-well understood, is that the lower long-term interest rates caused by the mounting fears of an even sharper downturn have also cut discount rates in stock valuation models, hence made shares look more attractive. Share prices have benefited from one of the self-regulating mechanisms which always help a market economy recover in bad times. At the same time, mergers and acquisitions continue to boom, pushing up share prices of target firms, thanks in large measure to the continuing influx of private equity cash; and the sharp decline in the price of oil has delivered consumers a fillip, cut input costs for manufacturers and cushioned the impact of the housing slowdown.

Equally important is that in the age of globalisation corporate profits and hence share prices are increasingly disconnected from any one economy. As luck has it, the American and global economies have decoupled since the start of the year: growth in Asia remains extremely strong and even though the euro zone’s mini-spurt has already largely come to an end, growth in Europe remains reasonable. Thanks to their vast and ever growing international operations, American companies are continuing to cash in on this global growth, even though many are understandably growing nervous about the situation at home.

The American economy, while undoubtedly in its most fragile state since 2001, is not yet in crisis and the probability that it will tip into recession at any point over the next 12 months remains low (though certainly not as remote as a few months ago, when the chances were close to zero). The latest data has been relatively encouraging. The University of Michigan’s consumer confidence gauge rose to 85.4 last week; the Chicago Purchasing Managers’ business index rose to 62.1 for September. Personal income rose 0.3% in August compared with July, quite a good result, though down from the 0.5% rise seen the previous month. Personal consumption inched up 0.1%, partly thanks to a still negative savings rate. Two of the weakest areas for the American economy are house prices and car sales. Sales of new homes priced over $300,000 have crashed by between 25% and 36% over the past year, while those priced up to $300,000 declined by 14% to 19%, according to Morgan Stanley. On some measures, house prices are now already falling in dollar terms for the first time on record; they are dropping on all measures in some of the most overheated local markets.

Partly as a result of much higher petrol prices in the first half of the year, car sales are also declining quite sharply. The moving 12-month average of seasonally-adjusted unit sales of cars and light trucks calculated by Moody’s sank by 5.3% annually in August 2006, the deepest decline since the 5.7% drop suffered in September 2001 after the terror attacks.?We are not yet in recession territory. During 1990-1991, the decline bottomed at 11.3% in November 1991; during 1980-1982, it fell -20.3% in January 1981. The recent sharp drop in oil and petrol prices is likely to reduce the pressure on car makers over the next few months but it will not save what is left of America’s home grown car industry. January-August 2006’s 3.4% year-on-year collapse in car sales was accompanied by a stunning 12.4% surge in imports and a 7.2% decline in sales of US-built models, with cars built by Japanese manufacturers in America relatively unscathed.
The trouble for the US economy is that there is no easy way out of its conundrum. After the collapse of the dotcom bubble, Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, slashed interest rates; his aim was to pull the American economy out of the bust without having to endure a massive recession and even deflation. The result was a massive house price bubble and consumer spending binge as the cost of borrowing tumbled; Mr Greenspan knew that there would inevitably be a day of reckoning, but felt that he had no choice.

In the end, monetary tightening and the normalisation of interest rates under Mr Greenspan and his successor Ben Bernanke came too late: thanks to the huge amounts of liquidity injected into the economy, price pressures moved from asset markets to consumer prices and inflation became entrenched into the economy once again. Even though economic growth was just 2.6% in the second quarter, inflation is still rising. The key price index for personal consumption expenditures, which excludes food and energy, grew by 2.5% in August, the highest since April 1995.
For the time being, Mr Bernanke should not cut interest rates. The economy may be weakening but it is not tanking; regaining control of inflation is his most pressing task. Mr Bernanke needs to make sure that annual core inflation returns to a more tolerable level of between 1% and 2% before he can even consider easing monetary policy again.

With the mid-term elections approaching, then the start of the presidential campaign early next year, this will not be easy. The last thing America and the world need is higher and higher inflation at a time of weaker growth – when that was last tried it was called stagflation and helped ensure that the 1970s are remembered today as an economic nightmare. Mr Bernanke must keep his nerve and resist the lure of returning to easy money.