Rosenblum

It was the Summer of Love. The carnival capers of the flower children could not have seemed more distant from the neo-Classical world of late-18th-century European art. Yet that same year — 1967 — saw the publication of a book that collapsed the distance of two centuries into the twinkling of an educated eye.
The art historian Robert Rosenblum, posing as Ingres’s 1826 portrait of the Comte de Pastoret in a painting by Kathleen Gilje, part of a 2006 exhibition at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art. More Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Robert Rosenblum, in 2000, standing in front of Franz von Lenbach's "Portrait of Peggy Guggenheim" (1903). More Photos >
The book was “Transformations in Late 18th Century Art.” Its author was Robert Rosenblum, a young professor of art history. The book, Mr. Rosenblum’s first, has been a staple ever since. And Mr. Rosenblum, who died in December at 79, went on to become the most consistently edifying art historian of his generation. With a combination of iconoclasm, faultless lucidity and wit, he smashed aesthetic prejudices the way physicists smash atoms. There ought to be a Nobel Prize for that sort of achievement.
Mr. Rosenblum’s life and work are to be honored today at a memorial program at the Guggenheim Museum, where he had been a curator since 1996. But I suspect I’m not the only critic who remembers Mr. Rosenblum almost every time he or she sits down to write. Sometimes I go back to the books. Sometimes their insights fly into my head unbidden, accompanied by images of the work they illuminated.

Howard Hunt & Gnosticism

OF all the heresies that have plagued the great monotheistic religions, none has been more pernicious — or as seductive — as Gnosticism. The notion that there is a secret knowledge, a special wisdom accessible only to a purified elite seems to exert an irresistible pull on a certain kind of mind.In our own time, a secular variation of this old fallacy has arisen to justify the role of the intelligence agencies in the creation of what we now can recognize as the national security state. John le Carré captured the essence of this tendency in his great novel of the Cold War, "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" when he has double agent Bill Haydon proclaim that "the secret services" are the essential expression of a nation's character.

LA MANCHE

That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Presentby Robert Tombs

Sometime intimate foes, sometime bitter allies, France and Britainhave for centuries largely defined themselves in relation to eachother. This remarkably inventive, stylish, and audacious worktraces the history of that infernal couple, from the seventeenthcentury to the present. Probing national culture and sensibilityas well as war, diplomacy, and finance, the authors (husband andwife -- he's a Cambridge don who has written a pathbreaking studyof the Paris Commune; she's a French-born historian of Britainwho works at the Foreign Office) assay the entire 300-plus yearsin their nearly 800-page history, but they focus on what scholarscall the "Second Hundred Years' War": the period of intermittentconflict between 1689 and 1815, which started when William IIIsummoned a "Grand Alliance" to thwart the Sun King's bid for Europeanmastery and ended with Wellington's defeat of Napoleon, a defeatthat permanently blunted and diverted France's power and internationalambitions

GEN Y

All the effort to boost children's self-esteem may have backfired and produced a generation of college students who are more narcissistic than their Gen X predecessors, according to a new study led by a San Diego State University psychologist.And the Internet, with all its MySpace and YouTube braggadocio, is letting that self-regard blossom even more, said the analysis, titled "Egos Inflating Over Time."In the study being released today, researchers warn that a rising ego rush could cause personal and social problems for the Millennial Generation, also called Gen Y. People with an inflated sense of self tend to have less interest in emotionally intimate bonds and can lash out when rejected or insulted

History

Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914–2003) was perhaps the most gifted British-born historian of the twentieth century. He began his career with a biography of Laud (1940); he ends it, posthumously, with a biography of Mayerne. In between, in his chosen field of early modern history, he produced a stream of remarkable essays, collected in four volumes, but no monograph. The book we now have, edited by his friend and literary executor Blair Worden, was mainly written in 1979, the year before Trevor-Roper retired as Regius Professor of History at Oxford. Had it been published then it would have followed close on the success of The Hermit of Peking (1976). Now, it follows close on the success of another posthumous work, Letters from Oxford.

Alain de Botton

Today we expect nonfiction to be either comic or somber: to make us laugh, or to inform us, warn us, or terrify us with accounts of miserable childhoods or natural and political disasters. The idea that prose might be both casual in manner and serious in intent is almost forgotten. It survives, however, in the work of Alain de Botton. In the last decade he has considered—in books whose brevity and informal tone disguise the occasional gravity of their content—travel, love, literature, philosophy, and the value of reading. His best-known work, How Proust Can Change Your Life, is accurately described on its flyleaf as both a perceptive literary biography and a self-help manual.
The simplicity of his writing is not the product of a simple mind. De Botton, who was born in Zurich in 1969, has a double first from Cambridge in history and philosophy, and is now director of the graduate philosophy program at the University of London. His aversion to deliberately difficult scholarly prose, however, has always been intense. In The Consolations of Philosophy (2000) he remarked that "there are...no legitimate reasons why books in the humanities should be difficult or boring; wisdom does not require a specialized vocabulary or syntax." He then quoted one of his favorite authors, Montaigne, who remarked over four hundred years ago that "the search for new expressions and little-known words derives from an adolescent schoolmasterish ambition."

WIKI no more?

When half a dozen students in Neil Waters’s Japanese history class at Middlebury College asserted on exams that the Jesuits supported the Shimabara Rebellion in 17th-century Japan, he knew something was wrong. The Jesuits were in “no position to aid a revolution,” he said; the few of them in Japan were in hiding.
He figured out the problem soon enough. The obscure, though incorrect, information was from Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia, and the students had picked it up cramming for his exam.
Dr. Waters and other professors in the history department had begun noticing about a year ago that students were citing Wikipedia as a source in their papers. When confronted, many would say that their high school teachers had allowed the practice.
But the errors on the Japanese history test last semester were the last straw. At Dr. Waters’s urging, the Middlebury history department notified its students this month that Wikipedia could not be cited in papers or exams, and that students could not “point to Wikipedia or any similar source that may appear in the future to escape the consequences of errors.”

See today's NYTimes.

SKYSCRAPERS

The quest for the highest. Good article. Great illustrations.

http://www.american.com/archive/2007/january-february-magazine-contents/0116-lust-for-height

I wish to thank the Academy.....................

The Oscars always go to the wrong guy

By Michael Henderson


Tomorrow evening, unless he drowns in the pool of tears irrigated by his admirers, Martin Scorsese is expected to collect an Oscar for film direction. That he will claim the prize for The Departed, which is a long way from being his finest film, will not bother those supporters who claim, with some justification, that it is high time the New Yorker is finally rewarded in the way that Hollywood knows best.
Yet Scorsese, who has been nominated on five previous occasions, is in the best of company. Alfred Hitchcock was also up five times, and went home empty-handed on each occasion. Neither Howard Hawks nor Orson Welles won an Oscar. Nor, for that matter, did Scorsese's hero, Michael Powell, or Ingmar Bergman. In 1983, when the Swede was up for Fanny and Alexander, an out-and-out masterpiece, the gong went to James L Brooks for the slushy Terms of Endearment. That's showbusiness for you.
John Ford was the King of Hollywood, winning four Oscars, but he missed out with The Searchers, which many film-goers would now consider to be his greatest film. Double Indemnity, one of Billy Wilder's classics, was deemed inferior to Going My Way. At least it was acknowledged with a nomination. Singin' in the Rain, the supreme film musical, was overlooked altogether.
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Of course, Hollywood can't get it right all the time. Nobody can. All prizes are subject to whim and fancy, and there may be perfectly good reasons why certain films or actors were not recognised by Oscar.
Chinatown, for instance, fell just short in 1974, but the film that pipped it, The Godfather Part II, could hardly be judged unworthy. However, to snub Jack Nicholson, Chinatown's star, in favour of Art Carney (Harry and Tonto), was not the Academy's finest hour.
And that's the problem. It isn't that Hollywood gets it wrong now and again. The great and the good who decide these matters make a botch of it year in, year out, decade after decade. How can anybody take seriously an institution that is supposed to honour excellence in film-making, yet denied the best actor prize to Cary Grant, the most accomplished leading man in the history of cinema?
This is the institution, it must be said, that rewarded Carol Reed for Oliver! after ignoring The Third Man; that judged Forrest Gump to be better than Kieslowski's Red, the final part of the Pole's French trilogy; that marked Titanic above LA Confidential; and which has made a habit of humiliating Scorsese. In 1980, the year of Raging Bull, Robert Redford triumphed with Ordinary People. Ten years later, when GoodFellas was on the slate, the judges gave the nod to Kevin Costner for Dances with Wolves. Scorsese should have demanded a recount.
The Departed is not classic Scorsese. He has always been half in love with the business of violence and his latest movie shows him at his most indulgent in that respect. It is also too long, and the love interest is unconvincing. But he is a serious film-maker, who has contributed significantly to post-war American cinema, so we should not begrudge him his likely glory.
It may be unfair to make comparisons, but one can't help looking back at Hollywood's great years, and wondering how many films that we celebrate today will engage popular interest 50 years from now. Certainly not the wretched Venus, with its tone-deaf screenplay by Hanif Kureishi. Maybe The Queen will pass the test of time, as a social document. Certainly Dame Helen Mirren's performance, which could have been mere impersonation, is an outstanding piece of acting.
In 1939, the films up for consideration were Gone With the Wind (the winner), Goodbye, Mr Chips, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz and Wuthering Heights. Robert Donat was voted best actor for Mr Chips, and Thomas Mitchell won the best supporting actor prize for Stagecoach, proving that Hollywood sometimes does recognise true quality.
Certain themes recur down the years. Disability or "otherness" goes a long way; witness the success of Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, and Geoffrey Rush in Shine. Recognising "class" is also important.
Not-terribly-good films about Shakespeare and Mozart have won Oscars, to show that a spot of "culture" is not beyond the Academy, so long as it is watered down, and Sir John Gielgud collected a supporting actor statuette for playing a butler in the feeble "comedy" Arthur.
Sometimes exotic foreigners are invited to the feast, too, to give the impression that the Academy is interested in things beyond the Anglosphere. Overall, though, it's really a love-in for the initiated.
Red carpet, velvet rope, expensive frocks and coat hanger smiles; in a word, "glamour".
But which prizes do reflect true quality? Hardly a week goes by without some awards ceremony or other honouring the stage, the page, the small screen, the big screen and what may be called the microphone (that loathsome parade of show-offs, the Brits, brings to mind Woody Allen's response to Diane Keaton in Annie Hall: "You mean they give awards for that sort of thing? I thought they just gave you earplugs").
The Turner Prize means nothing to lovers of art, only to the coterie of artists and dealers who stand to benefit from its patronage. The Booker Prize, one may be sure, will go to some Commonwealth writer of unknown provenance, to demonstrate the judges' broadness of view. Even the Nobel Prize has become a political bauble, swinging between continents like a giant pendulum.
Ultimately, the only awards that should have any claim on our attention are those given for work done over a lifetime. That is why the David Cohen British Literature Prize means something. Established in 1993, and awarded every two years, its first five recipients were V S Naipaul, Harold Pinter, Muriel Spark, William Trevor and Doris Lessing. There's real judgment.
When it was put to Tony Bennett a while back that he hadn't had many hits, the crooner supplied an answer that may serve for all performers of pedigree: "No, but I like to think I have a hit catalogue." That's the spirit.

RUMPOLE'S LIST

Legal Fiction The law in literature, from Shakespeare to P.D. James.

BY JOHN MORTIMER

1. "Orley Farm" by Anthony Trollope (1861).
"Orley Farm" is the gripping and handsomely told story of an unjust will and the beautiful heroine, Lady Mason, who may be persuaded to do something illegal so that justice is done. Her lawyer, Mr. Furnival, is of course in love with her. A typical barrister, he likes port wine and pretty women, and he neglects his wife, who has stood by him in the days when he had no briefs. But the real star is Mr. Chaffenbrass, perhaps a distant ancestor of Rumpole. "Look, that's Chaffenbrass. It was he who cross-examined ---- at the Old Bailey and sent [his victim] howling out of London, banished for ever into the wilderness," one observer says, prompting the reply: "Where? Where? Is that Chaffenbrass? What a dirty little man!"

2. "Bleak House" by Charles Dickens (1853).
"Bleak House" is one of Dickens's best books. All life is there, from the aristocratic Sir Leicester Dedlock to Poor Joe, the starving little crossing-sweeper. And everybody's secrets, particularly those of the beautiful Lady Dedlock, are known to Mr. Tulkinghorn, the enigmatic lawyer to whom knowledge is power. He appears as "a little old man called Tulkinghorn" and he dies, with all his secrets, shot through the heart in his dining room, his wine half drunk, under his painted ceiling. "Bleak House" castigates the law's insufferable delays. The great case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce destroys the health and sanity of generations of litigants and is wrapped in a legal fog, much like that which descends on London and follows the Thames up to the Law Courts and finally enters the Lord Chancellor's throat. For Dickens the all-pervading fog is an apt simile for the laws of Chancery.

3. "Measure for Measure" by William Shakespeare (1604).
Shakespeare has written the most perturbing study of lawyers and the law. Angelo is apparently the perfect, incorruptible judge, although, as one of the more louche characters says, "he was begot between two stockfishes. But it is certain that when he makes water his urine is congealed ice." Angelo seems to be the right judge to enforce a law making sex outside marriage punishable by death. Isabella comes to plead for the life of her brother, Claudio, as he has got his girlfriend pregnant. Escalus, a wise old lord, asks Angelo if he had never been tempted to do as Claudio did. Angelo's answer is clear: "'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, / Another thing to fall. I'll not deny / The jury passing on the prisoner's life / May in the sworn twelve have a thief or two." But he says that it's more important that the law should take its course. Despite his reputation for being incorruptible, Angelo finally falls in love with Isabella and offers to release her brother from prison if she will spend a night with him. Up to that point the debate between the law and natural justice is brilliantly and beautifully argued.

4. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861).
Mr. Jaggers, the formidable criminal lawyer, talks to his clients in a way that many hard-pressed barristers would envy. "I have nothing to say to you," he tells two men accused of murder. "I want to know no more than I know. As for the result--it's a toss-up." One of his clients says, "We thought . . .," but Mr. Jaggers cuts him off: "That's what I told you not to do," adding, "I think for you. That's enough for you." How many times, during my career as a defending barrister, have I wished I could put the situation as clearly as Mr. Jaggers does!

5. "A Certain Justice" by P.D. James (Knopf, 1997).
P.D. James has created a super-efficient, highly professional Queen's Counsel named Venetia Aldridge. Unfortunately, when she rises to cross-examine a prosecution witness at the Old Bailey, she has only four weeks, four hours and 50 minutes left to live before she is discovered brutally murdered in her locked room in chambers. Has she been killed by the criminal riffraff she defends? The plot is developed with all the author's ingenuity, and great questions of justice are dramatized. But the book might act as a warning to all defense barristers.

(Can't Get No) Satisfaction

Scientific American: (Can't Get No) Satisfaction:

"Happiness is better equated with satisfaction than pleasure, says Emory University psychiatrist Gregory Berns in Satisfaction (Henry Holt, 2005), because the pursuit of pleasure lands us on a never-ending hedonic treadmill that paradoxically leads to misery. 'Satisfaction is an emotion that captures the uniquely human need to impart meaning to one's activities,' Berns concludes. 'While you might find pleasure by happenstance--winning the lottery, possessing the genes for a sunny temperament, or having the luck not to live in poverty--satisfaction can arise only by the conscious decision to do something. And this makes all the difference in the world, because it is only your own actions for which you may take responsibility and credit.' "

AUTHOR!...........AUTHOR!!

When the Guardian last week revealed that Martin Amis was to become professor of creative writing at Manchester University, it lapsed into a dangerous piece of journalistic shorthand: "Amis, who is often described as Britain's greatest living author . . ."

Is he? By whom? Using what criteria? One agitated reader was moved to write to the paper - and threatened the ultimate sanction: "If the media refer to Martin Amis as 'Britain's greatest living author' once more," wrote Kathy Love from south London, "I shall kill myself. The fact that such a misconception exists at all is enough to make most people with a passion for books want to emigrate to Uruguay immediately. Please save my life and don't do it again."

WHAT WE READ (Really)

Does Britain still love classic novels – Dickens, Tolstoy or Austen – or has so-called dumbing down triumphed?

John Simpson's favourite book is Tristram Shandy
An answer will be provided on March 1, on World Book Day, with the results of a poll to find the 10 books people say they "can't live without".
The online poll asks readers of all tastes to name their 10 favourite titles – fiction, non-fiction or even reference books. A final top 10 will be published to offer a picture of Britain's reading habits.
Celebrities and politicians who have allowed their choices to be announced early give a strong indication that the final selection will be high-brow.
The broadcaster John Simpson's first choice is Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Sandra Howard, wife of the former Conservative leader, chooses Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Joanna Trollope, creator of the "Aga saga", picks Tolstoy's War and Peace. The singer Katie Melua picks Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray as her number one, but also throws in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code in her list.
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By a country mile, the nation's favourite is Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Twice in surveys – for the BBC's Big Read in 2003 and for another by Waterstone's in 1997 – the Middle Earth saga came top.

George Washington (February 22, 1732–December 14, 1799)[1] led America's Continental Army to victory over Britain in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), and was later elected the first President of the United States. He served two four-year terms from 1789 to 1797, having been reelected in 1792. Because of his central role in the founding of the United States, Washington is often referred to as the "Father of his Country". His devotion to republicanism and civic virtue made him an exemplary figure among early American politicians. In his youth, Washington worked as a surveyor of rural lands and acquired what would become invaluable knowledge of the terrain around his native Virginia. Washington gained command experience during the French and Indian War (1754–1763). Due to this experience, his military bearing, his enormous charisma, and his political base in Virginia, the Second Continental Congress chose him as commander-in-chief of the American forces. He scored a victory by forcing the British out of Boston in 1776, but later that year was badly defeated and nearly captured when he lost New York City. By crossing the Delaware and defeating enemy units in New Jersey in the dead of winter, he revived the "Patriot" cause. As a result of his strategic oversight, Revolutionary forces captured the two main British combat armies, first at Saratoga in 1777 and then at Yorktown in 1781. He handled relations with the states and their militias, dealt with disputing generals and colonels, and worked with Congress to supply and recruit the Continental army. Negotiating with Congress, the states, and French allies, he held together a fragile army and a fragile nation despite the constant threat of disintegration. Following the end of the war, when it was widely believed that Washington could have installed himself as King of the victorious nation, he chose instead to observe the practice of his role model, the ancient Roman general Cincinnatus, and retire to his plantation on Mount Vernon, an exemplar of the republican ideal of citizen leadership. Later, alarmed at the many weaknesses of the new nation under the Articles of Confederation, he presided over the Constitutional Convention that drafted the much stronger United States Constitution in 1787. In 1789, Washington became President of the United States and promptly established many of the customs and usages of the new government's executive department. He sought to create a great nation capable of surviving in a world torn asunder by war between Britain and France. His Neutrality Proclamation of 1793 provided a basis for avoiding any involvement in foreign conflicts. He supported Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's plans to build a strong central government by funding the national debt, implementing an effective tax system, and creating a national bank. When rebels in Pennsylvania defied Federal authority, he rode at the head of the army to authoritatively quell the Whiskey Rebellion. Washington avoided the temptation of war and began a decade of peace with Britain via the Jay Treaty in 1795; he used his immense prestige to get it ratified over intense opposition from the Jeffersonians. Although he never officially joined the Federalist Party, he supported its programs and was its inspirational leader. By refusing to pursue a third term, he made it the enduring norm that no U.S. President should seek more than two. Washington's Farewell Address was a primer on republican virtue and a stern warning against involvement in foreign wars. As the symbol of republicanism in practice, Washington embodied American values and across the world was seen as the symbol of the new nation. Scholars perennially rank him among the three greatest U.S. Presidents. And no one, even today, presumes to challenge the funeral oration of Henry Lee that among all Americans, he was "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen."

Arts & Letters Daily - ideas, criticism, debate

Always worth a look, but an especially good selection today.

Arts & Letters Daily - ideas, criticism, debate

The forgettable Millard Fillmore

The forgettable Millard Fillmore - Los Angeles Times:

"A NATION did not mourn him. History has not restored him. His picture will never adorn an ad for a President's Day sale. When death claimed Millard Fillmore, the unlucky 13th president of the United States, on a bitterly cold March day in 1874, few but his family cared about his passing.

Newspapers attempted to eulogize Fillmore, but aside from pursuing the blandest of political careers, what had he accomplished? He had been president for three years, from 1850 to 1853, but he seemed little more than a cipher. 'Could it be possible,' asked one newspaper in his hometown of Buffalo, N.Y., 'that living thus near to him, we failed to adequately appreciate his greatness?'

The answer is a resounding 'no.' Fillmore reminds us that the platitude that 'anyone can be president' is as much a threat as a promise.

Few figures in American history have aroused such overwhelming indifference as Millard Fillmore. Ascending to the presidency following the death of Zachary Taylor, Fillmore was dubbed an 'accidental' president. But before long he would gain more colorful tags, such as 'inept,' 'vacuous' and 'doughface.' Indeed, no sooner had he clambered into his new position as head of state than he seemed to let drop the reins of power. 'He was content to let chance and other persons direct his course,' sniffed one of his contemporaries"

MICHAEL FRAYN

Michael Frayn is known as a playwright ("Noises Off," "Copenhagen") and novelist ("Headlong," "Spies"). But this prolific British author is also a philosopher, having studied philosophy at Cambridge in the 1950s. "The Human Touch" is a profound, personal account of his work on a range of topics, beginning (and ending) with the philosophy of consciousness and passing through the nature of physical law, the problem of free will, the relationship of language and thought to reality, and the origin of the universe. These difficult ideas are effortlessly dealt with, leaving the reader with a sense of mild intoxication. Frayn's exultant prose entices and ultimately overwhelms you. Reading his arguments, I felt as though I were floating down a warm river, caught up in its playful, whirling eddies. "The Human Touch" is beautifully written. Is this a problem in a book of philosophy? Philosophical arguments are often hard to follow. There's little danger that (for example) Hegel will convince you of his thesis by his sheer eloquence. On the contrary, one must have strong inducement (a cattle prod, maybe?) to extract it from the dense tangle of his writing. Within Frayn's joyous prose, by contrast, one can lose one's grip on the underlying reasoning about, say, the nature of cause and effect. As I was borne along, delighting in his tropes, some part of my brain would feebly assert itself. ("Wait! There's a simple refutation of this point. I remember it from school — what was it?") Then I'd sink back into the flow. To be fair, Frayn claims that "The Human Touch" is not a work of philosophy, but given the topics he covers, this seems disingenuous. As an author, he has always gravitated to deep questions of existence; he is too modest in disavowing philosophical intent.

Can Bandar save Bush?

Can Bandar bail the United States out of the multiple crises it has stumbled into in the Middle East? Maybe not, but Washington's old friend may be one of the best bets a desperate Bush administration has going at the moment. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has maneuvered herself into a corner by refusing to talk to Syria and Iran and boycotting the Hamas-led Palestinian government. Consequently there's little the United States can do diplomatically to defuse the conflicts in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, not to mention Iraq. Rice tried calling on Egypt, abruptly dropping the administration's previous urging that its autocratic government "lead the way" in democratizing the Middle East. But Egypt has been unable to deliver: It tried and failed to pry Syria away from its alliance with Iran, and it tried and failed to win concessions from Hamas.
That leaves Saudi Arabia and the hyperkinetic Bandar. In his last visit to Washington he offered a rosy report on his travels. Iran, he assured his American friends, had been taken aback by President Bush's recent shows of strength in the region, by the failure of his administration to collapse after midterm elections and by the unanimous passage of a U.N. resolution imposing sanctions on Tehran for failing to stop its nuclear program. The mullahs, he said, were worried about Shiite-Sunni conflict spreading from Iraq around the region, and about an escalating conflict with the United States; they were interested in tamping both down.

An Exciting Weekend

A confluence!

Chinese (lunar) New Year.

Presidents Day.

Mardi Gras.

These are trying times for all of us with the situation in Iraq and the entire Middle East casting a pall on the planet. But we must be of good cheer and join in the hope that soon wiser heads will prevail and bring us to a more rational state of affairs.

SO, health wealth and prosperity to all who are commencing their new year this weekend. Let us also ponder the collective wisdom of so many of United States presidents and hope that some of it filters to the current occupant. And finally let us celebrate a joyous Carnival before the Lent begins.

Xerxes

Mardi Gras - Les Bon Temps

Old habits die hard in New Orleans, and that's the best hope for the survival of wonderful, peculiar culture the city flaunts at Mardi Gras.
Last year, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, people who had lost everything still made themselves a Mardi Gras with costumes, music, ritual and hedonism--not because their troubles had ended, but because Mardi Gras was a reason to stay and live through them. This year, in a city that's still much reduced in population and still has intractable problems, Mardi Gras remains a matter of local pride and persistence.
It's a little more familiar in one important way: local high-school bands, which were all but absent last year, are strutting through the parades again. Even at half strength, they're a sign that a next generation of musicians is wielding sousaphones and trombones. And the clubs are full of stalwart local bands, playing their regular weekly club gigs for crowds slightly swelled by tourists, but full of people who know all the words and just when to shout them.
Soul Rebels, a brass band, resumed its habitual Thursday-night gig at Le Bon Temps Roulet as soon as it could after Katrina: commuting from Houston and Baton Rouge, playing donated instruments to replace those destroyed by the flood. On Thursday night, the sousaphone bomped and hip-hop chants punctuated scrappy, freewheeling versions of New Orleans favorites like "Little Liza Jane" and "Hey Pocky A-Way." The place was so tightly packed that there was barely room for couples to bump and grind, though that didn't stop them, while a woman with a bucket for tips snaked her way through the crowd. After the set, the band plugged its CDs, its website, its next three gigs in the next few days.
In Tipitina's, another uptown club, the long-running Rebirth Brass Band -- a name chosen two decades before Katrina -- was also making people dance, with its more muscular, more richly arranged version of brass-band music, rooted in soul, funk and Latin music as well New Orleans jazz and parade traditions: "We gon' hold it on," they insisted in a hip-hop stretch. The music built to one plateau, made people scream, switched tunes and built again from there, again and again, thrill upon thrill, until it eased off with a version Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" as an implicit suggestion for post-club recreation. Of course, there would be another gig the next night, and the next; it was the Mardi Gras habit, something to hold on to.

FACE the MUSIC

By DANIEL J. WAKIN

Miami Beach

SOUNDING like an elephant running sprints, Matthew Heller, a double bassist with the New World Symphony, rumbled through a swift, disembodied passage from Mozart’s Symphony No. 35. Twenty-nine years old, a thin man with small rectangular glasses and red hair, he hunched over his hulking instrument and moved on to snippets of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, Stravinsky’s “Pulcinella” Suite and Brahms’s Symphony No. 1. A crisp voice behind a black cloth screen asked him to replay sections with different tempos, better accents, a more even volume.
“I don’t think even Karajan took it that slow,” the voice said, referring to the sometimes ponderous Austrian maestro Herbert von Karajan, who died in 1989. “Can I hear a traditional tempo?”
Mr. Heller was struggling to play perfectly, yet with musicality and personality. For four months he had been practicing these excerpts in excruciating detail, preparing for auditions to win an orchestra job and a future in music. On this day in mid-November inside a theater lobby, the ordeal was hardly made easier by the window washer squeegeeing the glass door or by Beethoven’s “Eroica” playing from a video screen outside.
As it happens, though, this was no ordinary audition. It was a mock audition, a bit of play-acting painstakingly constructed to recreate the pressure of the real thing. Real auditions are torturous rituals, the crucible that every classical musician must withstand: a 10-minute blur of excerpts with consequences that can last decades. The results of those 10 minutes determine not just the future of a player’s career but also the eventual composition and sound of orchestras, including many of the world’s greatest.
Orchestras themselves tend to view auditions as a necessary, sometimes tedious duty. But the New World Symphony, a unique cultural animal in the heart of hedonistic South Beach, has turned auditions and other career-development duties into the core of its mission.
In the increasingly professionalized world of modern orchestras, where merely playing beautifully no longer guarantees musical greatness, ticket sales or successful capital campaigns, New World has set itself a distinctive mission: to mold graduates of elite conservatories and university music programs into the ultimate orchestra players while also trying to field a world-class performing ensemble. (The latest results will be on display at Carnegie Hall on Feb. 27 and 28.) The model player is not just a technical whiz but also a musician who can converse with the public, meld into an ensemble, generate interesting programming ideas, schmooze with donors and teach.
At a time when classical music faces declining audiences and, some say, irrelevance, the sort of mission espoused by New World is seen as crucial.
“For orchestras to survive in the current socio-economic environment,” said Henry Fogel, president of the American Symphony Orchestra League, “they’re going to have to mean something to people in the community who might never come to a subscription concert.”
It all started with a cruise ship.
A Carnival Cruise ship, to be exact. In his youth Ted Arison, the company’s founder, had hoped to be a pianist. Eventually abandoning that dream, he went on to build a fortune selling vacation packages. But he never lost interest in classical music.
He and his wife, Lin Arison, founded the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, which gives grants to artistically accomplished high school seniors. Then in 1986, while on vacation in England, they heard an impressive performance by young musicians. With their own city, Miami, notably lacking a professional orchestra, they put two and two together and decided to start a professional youth orchestra.
A mutual acquaintance led them to the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, a former protégé of Leonard Bernstein and now leader of the San Francisco Symphony. It turned out that Mr. Thomas had long been thinking about the need to nurture young orchestra musicians. When he and Mr. Arison met, he presented a list of the things such an orchestra would need — a building, faculty, administration — and Mr. Arison signed off on each one.
“I said, ‘To do all of that you’d have to be like the czar of Russia,’ ” Mr. Thomas recalled. “He just kind of winked and said, ‘I’m close.’ ”
Mr. Arison, who was one of the world’s richest men when he died in 1999, eventually contributed $62 million.
After the orchestra’s start in 1987, there were bumpy moments. Local professional musicians worried about the establishment of a major nonunion orchestra with the power to draw big-name conductors and soloists. In Year 5 New World’s first board chairman was indicted in the big securities and loan scandal; eventually he went to jail.
Now finishing its second decade, the orchestra has reached a turning point. This season it became a resident group at Miami’s lavish new Carnival Center for the Performing Arts. And it is planning a $135 million hall and headquarters, designed by Frank Gehry (who, back in the 1950s, baby-sat for Mr. Thomas).
The City of Miami Beach has leased it the land for $1 a year, though the orchestra still faces the long haul of raising the money. The building will rise next door to New World’s current home, once an abandoned pornographic-movie theater, on Lincoln Road, where the tattooed, shirtless and chic parade by and pop music pulses from every doorway.
The world has other top-flight training orchestras, but none offer this amount of training and professional simulation under a maestro of the stature of Mr. Thomas. And none have New World’s endowment of $72.5 million (with an annual budget of $8.5 million), which gives it extraordinary security to pursue its unorthodox mission.
Looked at in one way New World is like a job simulation machine. It has all the trappings of the big time: weekly pay, a subscription series, nearly 70 concerts a season, tours, recordings and sophisticated brochures.
At the same time New World is a postgraduate training ground similar to a medical residency. Some of the most famous figures in classical music — including Yo-Yo Ma, Pinchas Zukerman, the Emerson String Quartet, Emanuel Ax, Joshua Bell, Midori and John Adams — stream in to spend time with the fellows, as the members are called. Players from the world’s storied orchestras — the Chicago Symphony, the Vienna Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra — coach them in the nuances of orchestra playing, audition taking, coping with revolving-door conductors.
Other experts teach practical matters: managing personal finances, talking to donors, even handling a journalist. And the fellows are sent out to teach in local schools, act as mentors to young musicians, play in nursing homes.
Mr. Heller, a solid, conscientious musician with a shy quality and a slow, thoughtful way of speaking, is in some ways a typical New World fellow. He is native of Tacoma, Wash., and a graduate of the New England Conservatory in Boston, with a master’s degree in performance from Northwestern. He volunteers as organizer of the fellows’ mock auditions, and he blogs, discoursing soberly on double bass affairs, the nature of performance, the artists who pass through New World and other matters (hellafrisch.blogspot.com).
Having become increasingly frustrated with the music world and having looked toward medical school as an escape, he won a place in New World in 2004. It was a resurrection, he said, adding, “It felt like maybe I was destined to do this after all.”
Now in his third year, Mr. Heller has taken about 10 major auditions, finishing as runner-up with the Naples Philharmonic in Florida and reaching the semifinals at several major orchestras, including the Metropolitan Opera and the Minnesota Orchestra: not bad showings.
“Being here has taught me what the experience is all about,” he said backstage one day. “Being around people who are winning jobs is a very inspiring thing and a very motivating thing.”
Mr. Heller was one of about 1,000 musicians who applied to New World in 2004 for about 30 openings. He and his colleagues stay for three years, with a fourth possible in some cases.
Most are single and in their mid- to late-20s. A quarter come from abroad. They are all given weekly stipends of $425 (and $30 in recording fees), and they live rent-free in two former hotels acquired by the orchestra. An Art Deco mural showing a scene of beach abandon (with painted-over nipples) adorns the circular lobby of one. Past it lies a lounge area with a large television and a U of couches and easy chairs, fellows slung over them.
Outside there’s a pool. Fellows loaf around the patio, where the occasional keg party or pig roast takes place. Except for the sounds of practicing that fill the halls — snippets of Strauss’s “Don Juan” and Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto on a recent afternoon — it feels like college.
One day last fall Mr. Heller lugged his double bass onstage at the Lincoln Theater for rehearsal. Other musicians pulled up on bicycles, instrument cases slung over their backs. They wore flip-flops and shorts in the steamy morning air. Mr. Thomas, a slim, lithe man, his hair still wet and slicked back from a shower, appeared on the podium. He wore an open-neck blue dress shirt, his sleeves rolled up to the elbow.
The orchestra was set to rehearse “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” by Paul Dukas, a brilliant showpiece forever to be associated with Mickey Mouse thanks to “Fantasia.” After lecturing a bit on Goethe, whose poem inspired the work, Mr. Thomas began the rehearsal.
Conducting without a baton, he often sang, illustrating passages in a flexible tenor and exaggerating syllables like “yaaa-daaa, yaaa-dohhh” to illustrate a slurpy passion, sounding something like Jackie Mason and drawing smiles from his charges. At times he had sections of the orchestra play a passage in slow motion, forcing attention on every note.
He asked the trumpets at one point to sound more “roosterish” and “cackly.” Like a sorcerer himself, he conjured composers of the past. “That’s leftover Berlioz, but we can still make it great,” he said of one passage. In a fast section he told the orchestra members to be like racecar drivers: “Don’t flinch at the turns.”
I sat onstage near a small, spiky-haired young woman in white cowboy boots and cutoff jeans who was harrumphing on a contrabassoon. The sound of the orchestra was explosive, and the musicians registered their approval of one another in the traditional way: by scraping their feet, sticking out a leg, shaking a foot.
Not yet jaded by the professional world, they were on the cusp of careers in an incredibly competitive world, struggling to establish the self-confidence of professionals. They chafed, sometimes, at the school-like aspects of New World but also fretted about the real world they would soon be thrust into. Their efforts to project optimism and idealism were touching.
“There’s very few things more exciting than being part of a huge machine, part of a huge effort,” said Naomi Gray, a cellist. “The power of music is monumental, and the more I play here, the more I realize that.”
But they would soon be heading into a particularly busy audition season. Over the next two months tryouts were being held for a number of positions, including principal percussionist at the Chicago Symphony, second trumpeter at the St. Louis Symphony, cellist at the Detroit Symphony, bassoonist at the Utah Symphony, violinist at the Philadelphia Orchestra and — of special interest to Mr. Heller — principal bassist at the Buffalo Philharmonic. New Worlders would all try for the openings, sometimes arriving in groups and often competing against one another.
From the outside, auditions seem like bizarrely mannered rituals, divorced from the context in which music is normally made. Candidates play a series of the hardest bits of one strand of an orchestral score. To eliminate favoritism, they are usually hidden by screens, their footsteps muffled by carpets lest the sound of high heels reveal their sex. Individual musicians play for an eye blink to prove they will be expert ensemble players — and good colleagues — for decades to come.
“It’s a stupid-human trick,” said Jeremy Branson, a percussion fellow. And it can be a crapshoot. The player who does not make it past the first round at the Podunk Symphony one year can win a job at the Chicago Symphony the next. But as many fellows acknowledged, no one has figured out a better way.
New World gives auditioners a powerful boost. It guarantees time off. It runs through so much repertory that players know the context of many passages they might be asked to perform. And because they rotate parts — from, say, first horn to fourth horn — they are prepared to audition for different roles.
Beyond that, New World emphasizes practical matters. What sound does the Chicago Symphony want from a cymbal? How do you react if a member of the audition committee yawns audibly? Should you ask to start over if you flub a passage? How do you deal with lousy hotels? Most important, how do you conquer fear, nerves and self-doubt?
The pivotal tool is the mock audition, which New World has refined into an art. Often the fellows contend with planned intrusions of ringing cellphones or rustling newspapers to steel them for the unexpected. Players audition for one another, for Mr. Thomas, for the outside coaches.
Always the point is the same: to see them safely married off to a new orchestra. “It hurts a little bit to say goodbye,” said Howard Herring, the orchestra’s affable president and chief executive officer. “But it is our job to move them on.”
It has done that job very well. Of the 676 alumni before this season started, New World said, at least 619 have jobs in music, most of them with professional orchestras. Sixteen alumni play in the so-called Big Five orchestras: Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York and Philadelphia. More than two dozen play in other elite orchestras, like those in Pittsburgh, St. Louis, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Others inhabit the ranks of regional orchestras or foreign groups like the Bamberg Symphony in Germany, the BBC Symphony in London and the Royal Stockholm Opera.
Despite that record of success, a current of anxiety runs through the fellows, particularly those in their third year. “It’s entirely possible I’m going to leave here and not have a job,” said Aaron Merritt, a cellist preparing for the Detroit audition, who called third year “death row.”
“You invest so much — not only money but practicing, anticipation and anxiety,” he added. “If you really want it, you have to be 120 percent prepared.”
For Elizabeth Jaffe, a 29-year-old violist from San Jose, Calif., the stakes were even higher. She decided that if she didn’t have a musical career by 30, she would move on, as inconceivable as that prospect was.
“I’ve been doing this forever,” she said. “I don’t know anything else.” While Mr. Heller was preparing for his big audition in Buffalo, Ms. Jaffe was trying for the job of assistant principal violist at the Richmond Symphony, even though she had never imagined herself as anything but a player in the middle of the section.
Until the fellows leave, Mr. Merritt said, preparing for auditions is “the No. 1 reason we are here.”
“We’ve been competing our entire life about getting into school, about winning a competition, about getting this seat in an orchestra,” he added. “It gets grating. I think we all notice it, an air of competitive energy.”
The other source of energy at New World is Mr. Thomas. During dinner at one of the more upscale spots on Lincoln Road, he spoke of New World as a place for the young players to take a sort of musical Hippocratic oath: “ ‘I will do this because of my love of learning and caring about people,’ as opposed to, ‘I can become such a star plastic surgeon that I can have a 19-car garage.’ ”
New World is also a “launching pad for people’s lives,” a sabbatical-like moment for young players to explore different ways to make a career in music, he said. “My personal mission is to have them hold onto ‘What does this mean?’ I’m trying to give the larger message of what music is all about.”
When in residence Mr. Thomas is a walking, talking master class. He meets with the fellows, collaborates with visiting luminaries, drops in on workshops, helps with mock auditions, holds training sessions.
To anyone who saw him as the boyish leader of the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts in the 1970s, he is, at a strikingly energetic 62, an unlikely elder statesman. When I made a passing reference to Bernstein, he jumped into a discussion of Bernstein’s compositional technique, pointing out how a phrase from “On the Town” was borrowed from Mahler’s 10th Symphony after passing through an “Appalachian Spring” transformer. He sang each version of the theme with an emphasis on the common rising interval.
His view of classical music remains unabashedly messianic. “We’re living in a time in which every conceivable tradition is being exalted so much, every possible expression of art is sort of being considered to be the same,” he said. “What I’m saying is, ‘Listen, this is a 1,200-year-long tradition of classical music you’re talking about here.’ Basically from now back to the time of Gregorian chant it’s demonstrably a particular line of thought concerning what sound does, what music does.”
But he recognizes that those who carry on that tradition face pressures their forebears never knew. “Anybody who can play as a professional musician for 40 or 50 years and come out of it with his soul intact — or even better, well nourished — is the big winner,” he said.
In the days leading up to his big audition in Buffalo, Mr. Heller was touched by doubts about how much longer he could keep plugging away at the tryouts. “If I don’t get a job this year,” he told himself, “I could consider giving it another year. Then I would probably look for other options” — options outside music.
He took solace in something Jeffrey Turner, a bassist in the Pittsburgh Symphony, had said while coaching him at New World: “He said that if I don’t advance, it won’t be because I’m not a strong musical player. It will just be because of these little technical issues he’s been talking about with me. That was really important to me, because sometimes I have a hard time in having confidence. I don’t have a huge sound, or am naturally talented like I think other people are.”
Mr. Heller arrived in Buffalo a day early, hoping for an advance look at the hall. But he found that Neil Sedaka was playing there. Too uninspiring. He settled for looking at images on the orchestra’s Web site.
At the hotel breakfast the next day, he ran into an old friend: Scott Dixon, a New World alumnus. “We talked about New World stuff and people,” Mr. Heller said. Mr. Dixon was there for the same audition. Back in his room Mr. Heller could hear his friend practicing. “We got a little of the warm-up room syndrome already in the hotel,” he said.
His stomach in turmoil, he skipped lunch and went to the hall, where he was told he would be the 25th to play out of 65. His warm-up space was near the furnace and quite hot. But his hands were cold, so maybe the heat was good, he thought. “The whole thing is how you spin your own positive narrative out of it,” he said. He ate a banana, having heard somewhere that bananas contain tryptophan, which has a calming effect.
Only four excerpts were on the list. “Four excerpts,” he thought. “If I have to go home after four excerpts, that’s going to be a bummer.”
When his time came, Mr. Heller was told not to play a note until his first excerpt. (Many musicians have signature warm-up noodles, which can give their identities away.) Then he was directed to a long diagonal carpet that led to a pair of music stands. Earplugs from a previous concert littered the stage. He recognized lighting fixtures from the Web site.
The first item was the bass recitative in the “Ode to Joy” movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Mr. Heller thought it was an auspicious opening: a big declarative statement that prefigures the bass vocalist’s solo line: “Oh friends, not these tones! Let us raise our voices in more pleasing and more joyful sounds!”
He said, “If you need to find your sound in a new place it’s a good one to do it.” His heart was pounding less than it usually did on such occasions. “I wasn’t feeling crazily nervous,” he said.
Then it was on to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the famous bass passage in the trio of the scherzo. He tried to set a clear tempo and thought about Mr. Turner’s warning not to shortchange half-notes. But a diminuendo at the end could have been more graceful, with better vibrato on the last note.
The first phrase of a passage from Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 fell flat. He thought back to an audition panel the previous week, when the Toronto Symphony’s principal trumpeter, Andrew McCandless, stressed that showing the committee how you can recover from a mistake is just as valuable as playing perfectly. Don’t stop, he told himself.
Then came a passage from the last page of Strauss’s tone poem “Don Juan.” He had never seen it before, but he plowed through and nailed it. The audition was over. A laconic voice said, “Thank you.”
He joined others in the waiting room. An orchestra staff member came in with a little slip of paper. “She said, ‘Thank you very much for coming,’ ” Mr. Heller recalled. “ ‘The committee has actually chosen three of you.’ ” He was one of the three.
Mr. Heller had advanced to the semifinals. He walked out into the cold, empty streets of Buffalo feeling great. “I had something to celebrate,” he said. He called his mother to tell her.
The morning of his second round in Buffalo, Mr. Heller was checking out to move to a hotel closer to the hall when he ran into Mr. Dixon, the New World alumnus he knew from the auditioning circuit. He refrained from asking how Mr. Dixon had done the day before. “I didn’t want him to feel bad if he didn’t advance, and he probably thought I didn’t advance because I was moving my stuff out of the hotel. It was strange and awkward.”
He took the bus to the hall. While waiting for a warm-up room, he listened to a Chicago Symphony recording of “Don Juan” on his iPod, then in the same overheated room he played scales. The audition routine was the same, but this time there were six excerpts. “Again there was the ‘Thank you,’ ” Mr. Heller said. “It seemed like a little more encouraging ‘Thank you’ than the other day.” Back in the waiting room, after about 15 minutes, an official came in and announced that players Nos. 9 and 10 had advanced.
Mr. Heller was No. 12, and done with Buffalo.
“I’m trying to analyze every note I played and figure out, was that the one that revealed my ineptitude?” he said. “I’m realizing that was not the way to think about it. I just didn’t play stuff as well as you want to hear a principal player play it.” He wondered about his competitors. “I wasn’t good enough today, but who is? What’s the standard?”
Eventually the Buffalo Philharmonic picked a candidate for the principal job: Scott Dixon. Two months later, Mr. Dixon would win an audition for the more prestigious Cleveland Orchestra. And as for Elizabeth Jaffe, the violist who had given herself an ultimatum, the Richmond Symphony offered her the job of assistant principal. “I guess I kind of broke my curse,” she said, questioning her old back-of-the-section mind-set. “Maybe I am cut out for something.”
Other fellows won the jobs of principal oboist in San Diego and principal cellist in Memphis. In all, 10 New Worlders have found positions since the year began. “It certainly is a really fine start,” Mr. Herring said.
For those still looking, life went on at New World, with seminars on stage etiquette and how to reach new audiences; a concerto competition; a barbecue at the lavish home of the board chairman, Gerald Katcher, in Coconut Grove; and of course concerts.
Three weeks after Mr. Heller and Ms. Jaffe auditioned, they were back on the Lincoln Theater’s stage with the rest of the orchestra for a new-music concert, conducted by the Austrian composer H K Gruber.
First on the program were works by Brett Dean and James MacMillan, who introduced their pieces via an Internet2 hookup, their images broadcast on the wall behind the stage. Mr. MacMillan’s comments were recorded in Scotland, but Mr. Gruber interviewed Mr. Dean live from Australia. At intermission in the lobby, audience members came to shake Mr. Thomas’s hand.
Back in their seats, they heard “Frankenstein!!,” Mr. Gruber’s wild romp for orchestra, toy instruments and chansonnier. Mr. Gruber conducted while half-singing the score’s demented nursery rhymes and playing a slide whistle and other toy instruments. Ms. Jaffe and her fellow violists did double duty on kazoos.
Gavin Dougherty, the timpanist, blew up paper bags and popped them in time, balling them up and throwing them toward the audience. At one point the entire orchestra stood and sang. Players waved plastic hosepipes to create eerie whistling sounds. And when it was over, the audience gave a standing ovation.
After the concert many of the players gathered at Zeke’s, the cheapest watering hole along Lincoln Road, where beers are $3. “It felt really good to be back in front of all those people,” Mr. Heller said, “and with the section.”

QUOTES?

NOTABLE QUOTABLES

by LOUIS MENAND

Is there anything that is not a quotation?

Sherlock Holmes never said “Elementary, my dear Watson.” Neither Ingrid Bergman nor anyone else in “Casablanca” says “Play it again, Sam”; Leo Durocher did not say “Nice guys finish last”; Vince Lombardi did say “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” quite often, but he got the line from someone else. Patrick Henry almost certainly did not say “Give me liberty, or give me death!”; William Tecumseh Sherman never wrote the words “War is hell”; and there is no evidence that Horace Greeley said “Go west, young man.” Marie Antoinette did not say “Let them eat cake”; Hermann Göring did not say “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my gun”; and Muhammad Ali did not say “No Vietcong ever called me nigger.” Gordon Gekko, the character played by Michael Douglas in “Wall Street,” does not say “Greed is good”; James Cagney never says “You dirty rat” in any of his films; and no movie actor, including Charles Boyer, ever said “Come with me to the Casbah.” Many of the phrases for which Winston Churchill is famous he adapted from the phrases of other people, and when Yogi Berra said “I didn’t really say everything I said” he was correct.
So what? Should we care? Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation. What Michael Douglas did say in “Wall Street” was “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” That was not a quotable quote; it needed some editorial attention, the consequence of which is that everyone distinctly remembers Michael Douglas uttering the words “Greed is good” in “Wall Street,” just as everyone distinctly remembers Ingrid Bergman uttering the words “Play it again, Sam” in “Casablanca,” even though what she really utters is “Play it, Sam.” When you watch the movie and get to that line, you don’t think your memory is wrong. You think the movie is wrong.
“For lack of a better word” spoils a nice quotation—the speech is about calling a spade a spade, so there is no better word—and “Play it again, Sam” is somehow more affecting than “Play it, Sam.” But not all emendations are improvements. What Leo Durocher actually said (referring to the New York Giants baseball team) was “The nice guys are all over there, in seventh place.” The sportswriters who heard him telescoped (the technical term is “piped”) the quote because it made a neater headline. They could have done a better job of piping. “Nice guys finish seventh” is a lot cleverer (and also marginally more plausible) than the non-utterance that gave immortality to Leo Durocher. But Leo Durocher doesn’t own that quotation; the quotation owns Leo Durocher, the way a parasite sometimes takes over the host organism. Quotations are in a perpetual struggle for survival. They want people to keep saying them. They don’t want to die any more than the rest of us do. And so, whenever they can, they attach themselves to colorful or famous people. “Nice guys finish last” profits by its association with a man whose nickname was the Lip, even if the Lip never said it, just as “Winning isn’t everything” has a higher market valuation because of the mental image people have of Vince Lombardi. No one has a mental image of Henry (Red) Sanders, the coach who used the phrase first.
The adaptive mechanism benefits both parties. The survival of the quotation helps insure the survival of the person to whom it is misattributed. The Patrick Henry who lives in our heads and hearts is the man who said “Give me liberty, or give me death!” Apparently, the line was cooked up by his biographer William Wirt, a notorious embellisher, who also invented Henry’s other familiar quotation, “If this be treason, make the most of it!” But a Patrick Henry who never said “Give me liberty, or give me death!” or “If this be treason, make the most of it!,” a Patrick Henry without a death wish, is just not someone we know or care about. His having been said to have said what he never said is a condition of his being “Patrick Henry.” Certain sayings, like “It’s déjà vu all over again,” are Berra-isms, whether Yogi Berra ever said them or not. “Je ne suis pas marxiste,” Karl Marx once complained. Too late for that. Like Yogi, he was the author of a discourse, and he lives as long as it does.
Karl Marx has thirteen quotations (plus eight for which he shares credit with Friedrich Engels, who, interestingly, never felt it necessary to say “Je ne suis pas engeliste”) in the compendious, enjoyable, and expensive “Yale Book of Quotations” (Yale; $50), edited by Fred Shapiro. Groucho Marx (no relation) has fifty-one quotations. The big winner is William Shakespeare, with four hundred and fifty-five, topping even the Yahwist and his co-authors, the wordsmiths who churned out the Bible but managed to come up with only four hundred quotable passages. Mark Twain has a hundred and fifty-three quotations, Oscar Wilde a hundred and twenty-three. Ambrose Bierce edges out Samuel Johnson in double overtime by a final score of a hundred and forty-four to a hundred and ten. And Woody Allen has forty, beating out William Wordsworth, Rudyard Kipling, and both Roosevelts.
Shapiro, a librarian at the Yale Law School, is an attribution hound, as is Ralph Keyes, a quotation specialist and the author of “The Quote Verifier” (St. Martin’s; $15.95). “Misquotation is an occupational hazard of quotation,” Keyes advises, and both he and Shapiro have gone to considerable trouble to track down the original utterances that became famous quotations and their original utterers. Keyes finds that quotations tend to mutate in the direction of greater pith. He offers the original words of Rodney King as an instance: “People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids? . . . Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out. Let’s try to beat it. Let’s try to beat it. Let’s try to work it out.” This is the rambling outburst that became the astringent and immortal “Can’t we all get along?” Keyes calls the process “bumper-stickering.” It worked well for Rodney King.
Shapiro gives us results of similar detective work, and he offers additional scholarly fruit in the form of citations for the first appearance of many well-known terms, slogans, and catchphrases. “This book takes a broad view of what constitutes a quotation,” he explains. The Internet has helped him out, and a lot of the stuff he has come up with is pretty irresistible. It is extremely interesting to know, for instance, that the phrase “Shit happens” was introduced to print by one Connie Eble, in a publication identified as “UNC–CH Slang” (presumably the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), in 1983. “Life’s a bitch, and then you die,” a closely related reflection, dates from 1982, the year it appeared in the Washington Post. “Been there, done that” entered the public discourse in 1983, via the Union Recorder, a publication out of the University of Sydney. “Get a life”: the Washington Post, 1983. (What is it about the nineteen-eighties, anyway?) “Size doesn’t matter,” a phrase, or at least a hope, that would seem to have been around since the Pleistocene, did not see print until 1989, rather late in the history of the species, when it appeared in the Boston Globe.
There are some neat finds and a few surprises (to me, anyway) in the Yale book. I did not know that Billy Wilder was the person who said that hindsight is always 20/20. “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” is attributable to a journalist named Walter Morrow, writing in the San Francisco News in 1949. We owe the useful phrase “Sue the bastards!” to Victor J. Yannacone, Jr., identified as a U.S. lawyer and environmentalist. It was Jack Weinberg, of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, who first said “You can’t trust anybody over thirty.” Joey Adams gets the credit for “With friends like that, who needs enemies?” The phrase “You can’t go home again” was given to Thomas Wolfe by the writer Ella Winter. It was the wonderful story writer John McNulty, and not Yogi Berra, who was responsible for “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” “I’m not really a Jew. Just Jew-ish”: Jonathan Miller, in “Beyond the Fringe.” And the first person to call a spade a spade? That’s right, it was Erasmus.
Shapiro has a good ear for the quote bites of contemporary celebrity culture, and the courage to set out on this endless sea. Donald Trump appears twice, for “Deals are my art form” and (in a section headed “Television Catchphrases”) “You’re fired!” Cherilyn Sarkisian LaPierre, known to most of us as Cher, is included for the lines “Mother told me a couple of years ago, ‘Sweetheart, settle down and marry a rich man.’ I said, ‘Mom, I am a rich man.’ ” (The great Sonny Bono, on the other hand, is sadly missing and deeply missed. What about “The beat goes on”? “I got you, babe”? Jingles that got us through some unhappy hours.) Zsa Zsa Gabor, asked how many husbands she has had, said, “You mean apart from my own?” Tug McGraw, asked what he would do with the salary he was making as a pitcher, said “Ninety percent I’ll spend on good times, women, and Irish whiskey. The other ten percent I’ll probably waste.” “I ate a whole chocolate bar” was Claudia Schiffer’s comment after her retirement from the catwalk. There are separate sections in the Yale book for “Star Trek” (ten items, including “Live long and prosper” and “He’s dead, Jim”; Gene Roddenberry has a section of his own), for “Advertising Slogans” (immediately following the section for Theodor Adorno, who would have grimly appreciated the irony and probably composed an incomprehensible aphorism about it), for “Sayings” (“No more Mr. Nice Guy”: New York Times, 1967), for “Political Slogans,” and for “Film Lines.” I’m not sure that the sentence spoken by L. Paul Bremer III upon the capture of Saddam Hussein, “Ladies and gentleman, we got him,” is all that deathless, but I’m quite pleased with the single quotation attributed to Richard B. Cheney, identified as a U.S. government official, and dated May 30, 2005: “The insurgency is in its last throes.”
It is tiresome to encounter, for the millionth time (J. Joyce), George Santayana’s tiresome mot “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (manifestly untrue any way you look at it). And it is annoying to reread Alfred North Whitehead’s pompous bouleversements: “There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths”; “Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.” But if sententious paradoxes get endlessly circulated, that is not the editor’s fault. Wilde was an epigrammatic genius, it’s true, but too large a dose may cause stomach upset. Shapiro is interested in the sociology of knowledge (which is precisely where the study of quotation belongs), so there are quotations from Robert K. Merton, George Sarton, and Talcott Parsons, but relatively less attention is given to other academic figures. (Stanley Fish does not appear, though it can’t be for lack of material. Edward Said does.) There is inevitably a problem in the case of people who are the quotation equivalent of vending machines. Charles Dickens, for example, or Bob Dylan, who is represented by a list of twenty-seven quotations that will seem, to anyone who is a Dylan listener, hopelessly arbitrary. It should all be here, every line!
In fact, though it is ungracious to say, a lot of the fun of this fun book is in second-guessing the editor. Virginia Woolf’s quotations include the first sentence of “Mrs. Dalloway” (“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”) but not the equally famous last sentence of “To the Lighthouse” (“She had had her vision”). Franz Kafka, a deep mine of quotability, has just eleven entries, and it is disappointing that one of them is not “It is enough that the arrows fit exactly in the wounds that they have made.” There are two quotations from William James on the subject of truth, but not the most elegant of his formulations: “The true is the name for whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.” Guy Debord, a brilliant aphorist who coined the phrase “society of the spectacle,” is represented only by a late and dubious quotation about quotations. (“Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.”) The section for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—like his father an inexhaustible fount of one-liners—lacks the always apt reminder that “certitude is not the test of certainty.” The philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, whose offhand remarks were celebrated enough to have been collected, is here only for his famous retort to a speaker who had said that although there are many cases in which two negatives make a positive, he knew of no case in which two positives made a negative (“Yeah yeah”). Samuel Beckett has only nine quotations, most of them from “Waiting for Godot.” We miss his remark about what it will be like in the afterlife: “We’ll sit around talking about the good old days, when we wished that we were dead.” Goethe has twenty-six entries, including one that was new to me (the attribution, not the sentiment): “He can lick my ass” (1773). But a line from “Wilhelm Meister” that has given me resolve is not here: “Action is easy; thought is hard.” We miss Henri Bergson’s gnomic observation “The universe is a machine for the making of gods.” There is a large woodpile of Robert Frost lines, but the couplet that ends “The Tuft of Flowers”—“Men work together, I told him from the heart, / Whether they work together or apart”—is not in it.
Poetry is, admittedly, an insuperable problem for quotation compilers. The feeling that the top of your head has been taken off, a definition of what makes a quote quotable that Shapiro takes from Emily Dickinson (who took it, basically, from Kant and Burke, who took it from Longinus—a nice example of the sociology of quotation), is a feeling that readers of poetry expect from every poem they read. They are in the game to look for the strong line. But—and now we are getting to the theoretical heart of the Problem of Quotation—the experience of sublimity is subjective and associational. For some reason, a string is plucked and it never stops vibrating. Who knows why, exactly? Everyone has a list. “My glass is full, and now my glass is run.” “But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.” “In the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it.” “Led by a blind and teachit by a bairn.” “And softly said, Dear heart, how like you this?” “The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.” “I bleed by the black stream/ For my torn bough.” “There’s a stake in your fat black heart.” “This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.” “Drive, he said.” “You must change your life.” None of these are in the Yale book, but why would I expect them to be? They’re from my book.
“You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye,” the younger Holmes once wrote. He thought that you could find wisdom and felicity even in advertisements if you knew how to tweak them properly. And when you start taking phrases out of context and recasting them as quotations, you begin to feel (Shapiro must have undergone this sensation) a little vertiginous. What is not, potentially, a quotation? The dullest instructional prose, with the right light thrown on it, can acquire the gleam of suggestiveness or insight. “Objects in the rear-view mirror may appear closer than they are”: that one has been appropriated many times. Whenever I take a plane, I am struck by “Secure your own mask before assisting others” as advice with wide application. And I have often found myself imagining ways of fitting tab A into slot B.
Public circulation is what renders something a quotation. It’s quotable because it’s been quoted, and its having been quoted gives it authority. Quotations are prostheses. “As Emerson/Churchill/Donald Trump once observed” borrows another person’s brain waves and puts them to your own use. (If you fail to credit Emerson et al., it’s called plagiarism. But isn’t plagiarism just the purest form of quotation?) Then, there is a subset of quotations that are personal. We pick them up off the public street, but we put them to private uses. We hoard quotations like amulets. They are charms against chaos, secret mantras for dark times, strings that vibrate forever in defiance of the laws of time and space. That they may be opaque or banal to everyone else is what makes them precious: they aren’t supposed to work for everybody. They’re there to work for us. Some are little generational badges of identity. Some just seem to pop up on a million occasions. Some are razors. “I see a red door and I want it painted black.” “Devenir immortelle, et puis, mourir.” “Much smaller piece.” “You’re two tents.” The quotation I have found most potent in warding off evil spirits is the motto of the Flemish philosopher Arnold Geulincx (1624-69): “Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis.” “Where you are worth nothing, you should want nothing.” That’s mine. You can’t use it.

WAR

FIVE BEST

Commanding HistoryPortraits of wartime leaders, from Washington through Churcill to LBJ.

BY JAMES L.

1. "President Washington's Indian War" by Wiley Sword (University of Oklahoma, 1985).
He won the Revolution and secured American Independence several years before his 1789 inauguration, so we do not think of George Washington as a wartime president. But frontier conflicts in the old northwest bedeviled his administration. The struggle climaxed on Nov. 4, 1791, with the great "Columbian Tragedy," the massacre of almost 1,000 U.S. soldiers by the forces of Chief Little Turtle in the Miami Valley of Ohio. The stunning catastrophe caused many to suspect divine disfavor for the prospects of the young republic and to question the destiny of the American enterprise. Wiley Sword, renowned for his Civil War scholarship--including the classic "Shiloh: Bloody April"--chronicles the little-known but pivotal battles to expand the territory of the new nation. A master of combat narrative, Sword also reveals how President Washington's Indian-war policy set the stage for the century-long conflict to come between the federal government and the Native Americans who occupied the continent's coveted western and southern lands.
2. "Polk" edited by Allan Nevins (Longmans, Green, 1929).
Allan Nevins, America's greatest narrative historian in the first half of the 20th century, distilled the cumbersome four-volume edition of the diaries of James K. Polk, first published in 1910, into "Polk: The Diary of an American President, 1845-1849." It is an accessible and revealing self-portrait of the president who did as much as Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt to transform the U.S. into a world power with international interests. The Mexican War (1846-48), overshadowed by the Civil War that followed a generation later, set in motion a chain of events that added vast new territories to the American map, caused the expansion of slavery, brought notice--and ridicule--to an obscure antiwar congressman named Abraham Lincoln, ignited the embers of Southern nationalism, and, ultimately, incited secession and armed rebellion. Ignored today, but in fact one of our five most important and successful presidents, Polk sent a shock wave through American history that still reverberates. His diary takes the reader into the mind that envisioned the American empire and sent the nation in frenzied pursuit of her Manifest Destiny.
3. "Lincoln and His Generals" by T. Harry Williams (Knopf, 1952).
Most books on Abraham Lincoln focus on and often romanticize his pioneer youth, prairie wanderings, folksy law practice, family life, antislavery leadership, rise to the presidency and poetic writings. Indeed, the trend in recent scholarship is to cut the thinnest possible slice from the Lincoln pie and subject it to microscopic and often tedious scrutiny. This will not do for the warrior Lincoln, who saved the Union and smashed slavery, evolving from an inexperienced chief executive reluctant to challenge his generals into an intuitive master strategist who fired them in rapid order until he found one, Ulysses Grant, who shared his killer instinct. In a vintage study--one of the best Lincoln books ever--a great historian of the old school reveals how Lincoln remade himself and won his war.
4. "Franklin and Winston" by Jon Meacham (Random House, 2003).
The outcomes of our wars have turned not only on troops and tactics but also on the individual characteristics and personalities of our presidents. The "friendship that changed the world" genre has become overpopulated of late--possibly a tribute to the brilliance of Jon Meacham's account of the relationship between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. It did not begin as a friendship of equals. From 1939 to late 1941, while Britain was engaged in a death struggle with Hitler's Germany, the U.S. sat on the sidelines. Churchill believed that without America he would lose the war, and he tried desperately to bring Roosevelt into the conflict. After Pearl Harbor, when the U.S. joined against Japan and Germany, Churchill said he knew that no matter how long it took, or what price it would cost, England was saved. Roosevelt and Churchill exchanged almost 2,000 letters and spent 113 days spent in each other's company during the war, forming a partnership that Churchill called "the rock on which I build for the future of the world." The image of these convivial men plotting the defense of civilization over cocktails and champagne in the White House, chatting and laughing late into the night, is magical.
5. "Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream" by Doris Kearns (Harper & Row, 1976).
Before there was Robert Caro (whose grand multivolume work has not yet taken Lyndon Johnson into the presidency), there was a young historian who had served LBJ and whose debut book remains the essential character portrait of the wily Texan. A shrewd observer of power and politics, Doris Kearns (Goodwin was added later) anticipated the current Johnson revival, which does not ignore Vietnam but looks beyond it. Kearns's LBJ is a man of Shakespearian proportions who could at one moment humiliate a bullied foe and at the next deliver, 100 years after the Gettysburg Address, one of the greatest speeches in modern politics, calling on the nation to complete Lincoln's promise to black Americans. Kearns not only documents the ruin of Johnson's administration in the jungles of Vietnam but also unfolds one of the saddest "what might have been" stories of the American presidency.

YEAR of the PIG

May the New Year bring health, peace and prosperity!

CHINESE ENGLISH

"Chinese pupils are best-performing ethnic group with 86% passing national curriculum tests
Schoolchildren of Indian origin come second with 85% achieving the same standard
But only 80% of white British pupils manage to reach a similar level in the assessment "

FRANCE

Au-delà de l’aspect commercial de la vague French Touch, le mouvement aura surtout permis d’envisager la France comme un territoire qui compte en matière de création musicale. Au point que, le note Eric Morand (directeur du label F-Com) des artistes plus ancrés dans la tradition des chanteurs ont bénéficié d’un regain d’attention à l’étranger. Tel a été le cas pour Benjamin Biolay, Carla Bruni, Yann Tiersen et Keren Ann dont les disques se vendent bien à l’export. La bande originale du film de Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain, composée par Yann Tiersen s’est vendue à plus d’un million d’exemplaires. Quelqu’un m’a dit de Carla Bruni s’est écoulé à 600.000 exemplaires. Les 50.000 exemplaires déjà vendus chez nos voisins de Not Going Anywhere de Keren Ann lui valent d’être considérée chez eux comme une valeur montante parmi les artistes francophones.

St. Valentine

Today is Valentine's Day, the day on which we celebrate romantic love. Every February, florists in the United States import several million pounds of roses from South America. About 36 million boxes of chocolate will be given as gifts today.

Many writers have been inspired by love. William Butler Yeats met the Irish Nationalist Maud Gonne in 1889. She was one of the most beautiful women of her time, and Yeats fell in love with her the first time he saw her. He said, "[When I met her] the troubles of my life began." He described her as "Tall and noble but with face and bosom / Delicate in colour as apple blossom." He proposed marriage soon after their first meeting, and she refused. But they both believed in magic and the occult, and in their letters they referred to their mystical marriage, and their telepathic communication. Gonne later told Yeats that she couldn't marry him because she believed they had been brother and sister in a previous life. But she inspired some of his greatest poetry.

Robert Louis Stevenson was passing by the window of a house one night in France when he looked inside and fell instantly in love with a woman he saw eating dinner with a group of her friends. Stevenson stared at her for what seemed like hours, and then opened the window and leapt inside. The guests were shocked, but Stevenson just bowed and introduced himself. The woman was an American named Fanny Osborne. They fell in love and got married a few years later. Marriage seemed to make Stevenson more industrious. Even though he was often bed-ridden with his respiratory illness, he published on average 400 pages of writing a year for the rest of his life.

E.B. White was a staff writer at The New Yorker when, in 1929, he took a vacation to Ontario, working at a summer camp that he had gone to as a kid, and he seriously considered quitting his job at The New Yorker to become a camp director. He had just turned 30, and he was disappointed that he'd failed to produce anything other than humorous magazine pieces. He wrote a letter to the fiction editor of The New Yorker, Katherine Angell, saying that he considered himself a failure as a writer, and he wasn't sure what the point was in continuing. She wrote back to say that there was no question in her mind that he was a great writer, even if he hadn't produced a masterpiece yet. She said, "For you to give up writing now would be like a violinist giving up music, the thing he most loved in the world, because he can't be [the best]." When White returned to New York, he married her.

In 1956 Sylvia Plath was studying in Europe on a Fulbright Scholarship when she went to a publication party for a literary magazine. It was there that she met the poet Ted Hughes, whose poetry she admired. When he introduced himself, Plath quoted one of his poems to him, and he guided her to a side room of the bar. She later wrote in her journal, "He kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband off ... and my favorite silver earrings ... I bit him long and hard on the cheek and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face." They got married four months later.