GOD & MR. Hitchens

One of the most annoying things about Christopher Hitchens is that, even at his most vitriolic, he makes at least as much sense as the majority of sober journo-intellectuals buzzing around Washington. This despite the fact that he is one of the last defenders of Bush’s Iraq war—a position that has cost the former Nation contributor a multitude of friends and gotten him new ones like Paul Wolfowitz. Hitchens, who started questioning his faith at age 9 (and wrote a polemic against Mother Teresa called The Missionary Position), has finally written the ultimate attack book, God Is Not Great. He spoke to us about his favorite religious stories, Karl Rove (infidel?), and the one time he found himself praying.

"Clifford" Notes?

To howls of indignation from literary purists, a leading publishing house is slimming down some of the world’s greatest novels.
Tolstoy, Dickens and Thackeray would not have agreed with the view that 40 per cent of Anna Karenina, David Copperfield and Vanity Fair are mere “padding”, but Orion Books believes that modern readers will welcome the shorter versions.
The first six Compact Editions, billed as great reads “in half the time”, will go on sale next month, with plans for 50 to 100 more to follow.
Malcolm Edwards, publisher of Orion Group, said that the idea had developed from a game of “humiliation”, in which office staff confessed to the most embarrassing gaps in their reading. He admitted that he had never read Middlemarch and had tried but failed to get through Moby Dickseveral times, while a colleague owned up to skipping Vanity Fair.
What was more, he said: “We realised that life is too short to read all the books you want to and we never were going to read these ones.”
Research confirmed that “many regular readers think of the classics as long, slow and, to be frank, boring. You’re not supposed to say this but I think that one of the reasons Jane Austen always does so well in reader polls is that her books aren’t that long”.

Bemelmans (Great Bar)

It's the birthday of the author of the "Madeline" books, Ludwig Bemelmans, (books by this author) born in Meran, Tyrol, Austria (1898). He was rebellious as a child. He went to many different schools, but he failed out of all them, so his family sent him to work with his uncle, who owned a chain of hotels. When he shot and almost killed a waiter for one of the hotels, his parents gave him the choice of reform school or emigration to America. He chose America and arrived in New York when he was 16 years old.
He worked at a series of hotels and then started his own restaurant, which became very successful. He didn't think about becoming a writer until a friend in the publishing industry happened to see his childlike drawings on the walls of his apartment. His friend suggested that he write and illustrate a children's book.
And so he wrote his famous book Madeline (1939), which begins: "In an old house in Paris, that was covered with vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines ... the smallest one was Madeline!"

Next time you are near 76th and Madison, have a nice drink at the Hotel Carlyle Bar named in his honor and whose walls hepainted.

Schumpeter

MUCH honoured as an economic prophet, Joseph Schumpeter has had to wait half a century after his death for this splendid full-dress biography covering his ideas, life and times. In 1983 Forbes pronounced him a better guide to the tumultuous world economy than John Maynard Keynes. In 1986 J.K. Galbraith described him as “the most sophisticated conservative of this century”. In 2000 Business Week ran an article about him to which it gave the title “America's hottest economist died fifty years ago”. There are Schumpeter lectures, Schumpeter societies and Schumpeter prizes.
Now he has received yet another accolade: a fat, learned biography by Thomas McCraw, one of America's most respected business historians, the author of a Pulitzer prize-winning history of the rise of regulation. He has found the perfect subject in Schumpeter. He succeeds in getting inside the economist's head, explaining not just what he thought but why he thought it. Beyond this, he also succeeds in painting a portrait of his times. Fin de siècle Vienna, Weimar Germany, Harvard University (where he is seen in our photograph) before and after the first world war: all come to life on these pages.
Most economists live pretty dull lives, dividing their time between technical intellectual problems and tedious academic politics. Even Keynes inhabited a comfortable Bloomsbury cocoon. Schumpeter was anything but dull.

Nine to Five

Books Nine to five:

" The workday proves dull not only to the Computer Programmer, but to the novelist. When there's war to attend to, and heartbreak, and class struggle and familial strife and rage against the dying light, why would one preoccupy oneself, when endeavouring to write fiction, with the nine-to-five?
Work does play an important role in literature. It just doesn't mirror the importance or merit the attention it gets in real life. In The Great Gatsby, after surviving 'that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War', Nick Carraway heads east to learn the bond business. His decision comes swiftly, within the novel's first few pages; next we know, he's living in West Egg gainfully employed.
The move and the new career would be a momentous occasion in anyone's personal life, so much so that we might expect Fitzgerald to show Nick heading into work on his first day, meeting his supervisors and settling into his new office. Thankfully, only a page or two later, we meet Gatsby instead, and Fitzgerald's preoccupations - status and money and the vexing they do to one's heart and health - spring to the fore. We get hardly another peep out of Nick about the particulars of his profession. His next, perfunctory mention of it is 60 pages into the book: 'Most of the time I worked.' And 100 pages after that: 'Up in the city, I tried for a while to list the quotations on an interminable amount of stock, then I fell asleep in my swivel chair.'"

The $2.00 £

This brings back such fond memories of the mid-eighties when the GBP could be purchased for one USD. I was in Harrods Men Shop one day when a gentleman requested their entire stock of Burburies. He shipped them off to America wirh the staff lookibg quite forlorn and crestfallen.

How the world has turned upside-down since then!

DiaryRachel Johnson

In thick of whistlestop tour of the US to promote Notting Hell, so the dateline above this diary should read ‘New York, Dallas, Washington D.C, Chicago, Denver, L.A, San Francisco’ which would be a first — for me, anyway. In the taxi to the airport, I compare schedules with the novelist and leggy beauty Santa Montefiore (also touring some cities with me promoting her book The Gypsy Madonna, on our Great British Blondes roadshow. I love it!). I leaf through the bumf and then decide it hasn’t been put together by my fab team at Touchstone Fireside of Simon and Schuster without a map (NY–Dallas–DC??), but by a sadist. There are 5 a.m. starts on no less than five days. I discover that Santa is not only flying business class both ways, but she has cleverly brought an empty suitcase to fill with all the clothes she will buy at Ralph Lauren in New York at $2 to the pound, and has only two early starts compared to my five. She also brought, she mentions, a pair of open-toed espadrilles.
***

David Halberstram

Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Vietnam for The Times and the author of more than 20 books, this restless journalist always said journalism should be a great and noble mission. “It’s not about the fame,” he cautioned journalists at Columbia University. “By and large, the more famous you are, the less of a journalist you are.”
As a famous but also remarkable journalist, he could often be found sitting across kitchen tables or standing before classrooms, donating hours of his wisdom to thousands of journalistic careers. He always counseled trust in the dignity of ordinary people, not in those who arrive at any event with predigested press releases. Covering cops, he decreed, is “the best beat on the paper.” He talked about marshaling a library of facts and interviews about any subject — density, he sometimes called it — before actually winnowing that thick mass to its essence.
But it was Halberstam on Halberstam that could be especially engaging, as when he talked about a press briefing in Vietnam in 1963. Mr. Halberstam recalled that the Army brass had been so angry about his coverage that a top officer had tried to order him not to ask to go with the troops. “And I stood up, my heart beating wildly — and told him that we were not his corporals or privates, that we worked for The New York Times and U.P. and A.P. and Newsweek, not for the Department of Defense.”
It is hard to imagine the seemingly fearless David Halberstam struggling with his nerves. His lesson to journalists everywhere, as relayed to students at Columbia in 2005, is still basic to the craft: “Never let them intimidate you. Never. If someone tries, do me a favor and work just a little harder on your story.”
Those who sought his counsel must have wondered whether he lamented the gap between his lofty expectations and the way they delivered on them. After his death, his wife, Jean, offered what sounded like a general reprieve. The journalist he was hardest on, she said, was himself.

Jazzfest in New Orleans

Prediction in Retrospect

It was predictable. Cho Seung-Hui was a taciturn, moody loner. Four of his professors expressed concerns about the content of his work or classroom conduct. After complaints by two female students, the campus police and a college counsellor tried to have him committed to a mental institution. But a doctor didn't agree with the judge that he presented a danger to others. And guns are easy to buy in America (though banned on Virginia campuses). As a result 33 people are dead.
Journalists' efforts to explain the Virginia Tech massacre perfectly illustrate one of the central points of an idiosyncratically brilliant new book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Penguin/Allen Lane). Having been completely caught out by some random event, we human beings are wonderfully good at retrospectively predicting it. In reality, however, Cho was what Taleb calls a "Black Swan".
Why a black swan? Taleb's starting point is what philosophers call the problem of induction. Suppose you have spent all your life in the northern hemisphere and have only ever seen white swans. You might very well conclude (inductively) that all swans are white. But take a trip to Australia, where swans are black, and your theory will collapse. A "Black Swan" is therefore anything that seems to us, on the basis of our limited experience, to be impossible

The Shootings and America

But what lessons, if any, can we learn from their pain? Does the Virginia Tech massacre reveal anything about the American psyche - its strengths, weaknesses and glaring contradictions? In the midst of the tragedy and the confusion, America leaves its distinctive and often conflicting signature.
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Cho's grotesque video testimony following his bloody massacre has to be one of the most chilling pitches for post-modern fame in a society just as much obsessed with celebrity as violence. Cho's pathology, it is clear, was nurtured through video games and on the web and yet it is in the very same sphere of cyberspace that much of the grieving and healing is now also taking place.
Then there is the ease with which he bought his 9mm Glock from a shop that had already sold weapons used in four previous murders - a fact which is alarming to say the least. The inability of the authorities to follow up on their suspicions and protect a young man with serious mental problems from himself and others should, one would imagine, be the most powerful of wake-up calls to the country that has been known to shoot first and ask later.
And yet the power of "family", as shown by 26,000 students at Virginia Tech to come together at this time, is as impressive as the civic spirit that survives such carnage. As an old sage once put it: "Everything you say about America is true. And the opposite.''
America prides itself on looking you in the eye and telling it as it is. How ironic, then, that the worst mass shooting in its history was committed by a young man who was so painfully shy that he avoided all eye contact, never spoke to his room-mate Joseph Aust, apparently had an imaginary girlfriend named "Jelly" and put a question mark into the students' year book instead of his name.

Smiley's Decameron

Smiley's new novel is set not in the Iowa cornfields but in contemporaryHollywood, California; still, she is in top form at adapting literaryprecedent to her quirky intent. Ten Days in the Hills borrowsthe scheme of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, with a cast of moralbankrupts who get tossed together in a couple of posh Los Angeles locations where they will talk, eat, sleep, and copulate.

A conclusion that only the most perverse Hollywood screenwritercould imagine. Max, a 58-year-old burned-out film director, fantasizescoming out of his late-career doldrums to direct My LovemakingWith Elena, a sort of My Dinner With Andre (1981), except thatit will feature porn technique juxtaposed with high-minded conversationabout current events. The aforesaid Elena-- Max's current loverand a bestselling author of "self-improvement guides" (Here'sHow: To Do EVERYTHING Correctly!) -- has other ideas: obsessedwith the crisis in Iraq, she would like to see a film featuringJennifer Lopez as a gung-ho American soldier who, in a firefight,will have the beautiful bottom half of her body damaged beyondrecognition. The rest of the merry crew that join Max and Elenafor a 10-day vacation include Max's former wife, Zoe, a film starwhose narcissism is matched only by her daughter Isabel's eco-pedantry,and Elena's son, Simon, a witless UC–Davis undergrad who bringsto mind the screen personality of Ashton Kutcher. Although Simonseems to bear the brunt of Smiley's strongest moral condemnation,he does have a brilliant comic moment in the takedown of Zoe'spersonal coach and gigolo, Paul. The latter is a tendentious charlatan,a New Age hack who practices yoga and recommends that his variousfemale clients eat more "organ meats." Right.

GRANTA & NEW AMERICAN LITERARY TALENT

THIS week the British literary magazine Granta, which once printed A.A. Milne and Sylvia Plath and has had an agenda-setting role since its rebirth in 1979, will publish its second "Best of Young American Novelists" issue. This time the list is younger (by design) and less Caucasian (by judge selection) than the talked-about '96 list that included Jonathan Franzen, Lorrie Moore and 18 others.This kind of list, of course, always provokes a lot of tea-leaf reading — as well as high-minded dismissals of its "problematic" nature. This year, one source of discussion is how many of the list's 21 writers were raised abroad or are nonwhite. Are stories of transnational identity where the literary action is these days? (Some things seem never to change, though: More than half of the chosen writers live in New York City, and the only Southland writer is Maile Meloy, who lives in Los Angeles.)"All of us agreed on one thing," Ian Jack, the magazine's editor wrote in the issue's introduction. "Ethnicity, migration and 'abroad' had replaced social class as a source of tension…. " The Scotland-born Jack points out that a similar transition occurred in British fiction in the '80s — what Salman Rushdie called, in a famous essay, "The Empire Strikes Back."After the India-born Rushdie won the 1981 Booker Prize for "Midnight's Children," Japan-born Kazuo Ishiguro, Nigeria's Ben Okri and Sri Lanka-born Michael Ondaatje won the award, and several showed up on Granta's "Young British Novelists" lists. Foreign-born and "nonwhite" writers have won the Booker, in fact, since the award's very earliest years.But Jack sees the U.S. as ahead of Britain on this score."Mostly because of the empire, we had an early experience of the phenomenon America's now having," he said. "But what's happening in the States is much broader than what happened here — really what happened here came out of India, and one or two parts of Africa."

LIT CRIT

MARXIST, RADICAL feminist, Foucauldian, deconstructionist, post-colonial and queer. It reads like the fight card for an ideological battle royal. In fact, these are some of the major schools of thought in literary criticism from the past 40 years - and they have much in common.
Central to these and all other approaches to understanding literature that are influenced by post-structuralism is the idea that there is no innate human nature. Nature is nurture or, put another way, our nature is to spoon up whatever culture happens to feed us - and we are what we eat.
Understanding a story is ultimately about understanding the human mind. The primary job of the literary critic is to pry open the craniums of characters, authors and narrators, climb inside their heads and spelunk through the bewildering complexity within to figure out what makes them tick.
Yet, in doing this, literary scholars have ignored the recent scientific revolution that has transformed our understanding of why people behave the way they do. While evolutionary biologists have irreparably shattered the blank slate, most students of the humanities still insist that humans are born all but free of any innate qualities.
My fellow literary Darwinists and I hope to change their minds. By applying evolution-based thinking to fiction, we believe we can invigorate the study of literature, while at the same time mining an untapped source of information for the scientific study of human nature (see "Truth in fiction"). Darwinian thinking can help us better understand why characters act and think as they do, why plots and themes resonate within such very narrow bounds of variation, and the ultimate reasons for the human animal's strange, ardent love affair with stories.

Hitchens - Jefferson - Muslims

When I first began to plan my short biography of Thomas Jefferson, I found it difficult to research the chapter concerning the so-called Barbary Wars: an event or series of events that had seemingly receded over the lost horizon of American history. Henry Adams, in his discussion of our third president, had some boyhood reminiscences of the widespread hero-worship of naval officer Stephen Decatur, and other fragments and shards showed up in other quarries, but a sound general history of the subject was hard to come by. When I asked a professional military historian—a man with direct access to Defense Department archives—if there was any book that he could recommend, he came back with a slight shrug.

Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis Booze and birds Economist.com:

WHAT I want”, wrote Kingsley Amis in 1954, a few weeks before his debut novel “Lucky Jim” made him famous, “is a chance to decide, from personal experience, that a life of cocktail parties, cars, weekending at rich houses, wine, night-clubs and jazz won't bring happiness. I want to prove that money isn't everything, to learn that pleasure cloys.

Mozart

Mozart's Quintets

On today's date in 1787, Wolfgang Mozart finished one of his finest chamber works, a String Quintet in C Major. As was his custom at the time, as soon as it was finished he dutifully entered the date into own catalog of works. Mozart had written some string quintets earlier in his life, but this new one in C Major and a companion piece in G Minor that he finished a month later were in a different league altogether.
Financially speaking, 1787 was tough year for Mozart. A 16-year old prospective student from Bonn by the name of Beethoven had arrived in Vienna hoping for lessons, but then two weeks later was called back to Bonn to attend his dying mother. Despite some big successes elsewhere, Mozart had 'cash flow' problems in Vienna.

He decided to try his hand at what we now call 'self publishing,' and in 1788 placed an announcement in a Viennese newspaper offering his new quintets directly to customers on a subscription basis.
One recent biographer described Mozart's quintets as 'a pair of four-movement masterpieces uniting symphonic dimension with the intimacy of the quartet, the first expansive in mood and of sovereign ease and heroic proportion, the second, tragic in tone and desolate beauty.'

Well, to prospective customers circa 1788, they were apparently just too dark, dense and difficult. The response was so poor that Mozart first extended the offer another year, then gave up altogether and sold the music outright to a Viennese publisher."

Dave Eggers

The Niceness Racket A review by Lee SiegelI.As I was trying to make sense of Dave Eggers's strange new book,I came across a piece of writing that captured the general culturalatmosphere in which Eggers's book took shape. Not long ago, inthe course of reviewing Martin Amis's novel House of Meetings,most of which takes place in a Soviet gulag, Joan Acocella bestowedon readers of The New Yorker this illumination: "Amis, like PrimoLevi, his great predecessor in prison-camp memorialization, isable to calculate degrees of anguish."Amis's great predecessor in prison-camp memorialization! If youhad the sublime luck to be sitting in your dentist's waiting roomwhen you read that, you could have tried faking a sudden painfulabscess and begging the nurse to infuse you with a triple doseof Demerol. That way, you might have lost consciousness beforeAcocella's sentence became stored in your memory cells. Her remarkwas shockingly and multivalently out of kilter. "Predecessor"implies a position and function kindred to those of the eventual"successor," and Amis is planets away from both Levi's experienceand his evocative power. Auschwitz was not a "prison camp," itwas a death camp. Levi's testimony cannot adequately be describedwith the bland "memorialization". And real writers, imaginativewriters, writers such as Levi, do not "calculate" anything, letalone incalculable anguish.

Mass Murder

In her book on the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt famously, and controversially, wrote of the ‘banality of evil’. The contemporary variant is the awesome banality of much of the analysis and soul-searching that evil provokes. Since the horrific murder of 32 people at Virginia Tech on Monday, there has been a spree of such commentary.
The rest of the world treats America like a dominant but dysfunctional family. So great is the cultural reach and ‘soft power’ of the United States that an atrocity of this kind quickly assumes almost global significance and is treated, quite inappropriately, as a metaphor for all manner of modern pathologies. What dark impulses coursed through the mind of the 23-year-old South Korean Cho Seung-hui as he gunned down his fellow students will never be known. But that has not deterred an army of self-appointed social commentators from drawing sweeping conclusions about his actions.
The most profound error has been to use the tools of psychotherapy rather than traditional morality to analyse the slaughter. America is once again on the couch, as everything from the Iraq war to video games to the pressures of modern university life is scrutinised as a possible contributing factor.
It is certainly plausible to argue that Cho exhibited the symptoms both of maniacal narcissism and a crushing inferiority complex. In his deranged writings, he railed against ‘rich kids’, ‘debauchery’ and ‘deceitful charlatans’ on the campus. ‘You caused me to do this,’ he wrote — strengthening the argument of those who believe that such actions are the product of society’s pressure-cooker rather than of cold-blooded choice.
On Wednesday, the Independent declared that American society ‘is more divided, more pressured and more ruthless in almost every way than any society in Europe.... There are outsiders and misfits everywhere, but communities in the US — be they schools, colleges, businesses, small towns or suburbs — can be particularly unforgiving.’ According to this dubious analysis, social and psychological adversity is moral destiny.

Michael Frayn & the Universe

You like the way Michael Frayn writes.Michael Frayn likes to write about philosophy.Therefore you might like the way Michael Frayn writes about philosophy.
This syllogism would appear to be the logic behind The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe. Frayn is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and translator who has reached a worldwide audience through two works in particular, the plays Noises Off and Copenhagen. He read philosophy at Cambridge in the 1950s and in the 1970s published a work of philosophy, Constructions. What's more, his writings often sport a philosophical turn of mind. Noises Off wasn't just a farce; it was a farce within a farce—a deconstruction of a farce. Copenhagen wasn't just a character study; it was a study of character in uncertainty—featuring the two physicists who gave the world the quantum concept of uncertainty. So, we might think, what more engaging guide to lead us non-philosophers on a tour of philosophy?
In particular, Frayn proposes that he lead us through nothing less than the whole of our species' relationship to the universe, both in the 13.7-billion-years-old-and-born-in-a-Big-Bang and in the Michael-Frayn-chose-marmalade-over-honey-at-breakfast-this-morning senses of the word. He begins the tour with science, "a palace of thought," and in the first third of the book, he methodically walks us through rooms of an increasingly fundamental significance: first the laws of nature, then cause and effect, then space and time, and finally, the power of numbers to capture it all. At each stop he invites us to examine the tapestries on the walls, and then to look closer, and closer still, until we see not the pattern but the weave, not the weave but the thread, the now we can never definitively experience, the there that dissolves into Planck-scale discontinuity. Look closely enough, Frayn argues, and the laws of nature "have no existence independent of the concepts to which they relate," and "the supposedly universal causality on which the laws of nature depend has no more existence than the laws themselves," and so on, each subsequent seeming understanding of the universe finding expression "only in the context of human thought and human purposes."

We Miss Mr. Cooke

A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.- Alistair Cooke

Philosophers of Grief

Philosophers "don't like to talk about" grief, wrote Robert C. Solomon, the longtime Quincy Lee professor of business and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, in his last book, True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us (Oxford University Press, 2007). That's because philosophers aren't grief counselors or therapists, he explained. The "bereaved," Solomon counseled, "should look elsewhere than to philosophy for solace."
I disagree. Because Bob Solomonmy longtime friend, meal mate at philosophy conferences, and onetime regular book reviewer at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the daily paper in the city where he grew upcollapsed and died in the Zurich Airport this past January while changing planes. I feel grief. His work over the years on emotions helps me make sense of it.
Solomon, an expert on existentialism whose final thoughts on that subject ran in The Chronicle in January, was also the go-to guy in philosophy when it came to emotions, the scholar the dictionary and encyclopedia editors called first. That didn't matter much for a long time in 20th-century philosophy, because the discipline's focus remained elsewhere.
Emotions? Soft, spongy stuff for sentimentalists, fans of soap operas, irrational sorts with mushy minds. Didn't Kant declare emotions, or "inclinations," irrelevant to moral reasoning? Non-girly men — that is, real philosophers (mostly men in the heyday of 20th-century philosophy) — dated reason, argument, evidence. The icier the logic, the happier the brainiac.
But Solomon knew something his contemporaries didn't: Emotions don't disappear just because they're not tenured by a clique of academics, separated at graduate-school birth from connection to real life by their field's hyperprofessionalization

What Class are You?

Class rears its snobby head as Britain's royal romance crumbles
Kate Middleton's blood wasn't blue enough, William's defenders say. And her mum was simply too gauche.By Kim MurphyTimes Staff WriterApril 18, 2007London — NOW that it's all over but the kerchief-wringing, now that Prince William's latter-day fairy tale romance with commoner Kate Middleton is royally kaput, it's time for the sages to weigh in. And weigh in they have, squarely in the place the English have always drawn their lines. Middleton was, sorry to say, way too middle class.It wasn't supposed to happen like this. A decade of Tony Blair's New Labor policies were meant to have opened the floodgates of upward mobility; newsreaders on the BBC who sounded like they came from Glasgow or Cardiff were agreeably multicultural. Yet there it is, the class thing, back with a vengeance.It wasn't Middleton, per se. It was her mother, a former airline flight attendant who was caught on video chewing gum next to her elegantly hatted and serenely smiling daughter at William's graduation from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.There was more. Carole Middleton, who runs a party supply business with her husband and made enough to buy a $2-million house in Berkshire and send her daughter to prestigious Marlborough College, said "toilet" instead of "lavatory." She said "pardon" when she couldn't hear what someone had just said. ("What?" is more posh.)When she met Queen Elizabeth II, William's grandmother, she said, "Pleased to meet you." Well, columnists wanted to know, who wasn't happy to meet the queen? "Hello, ma'am," was what was called for.Within days, the tabloids, which by and large sympathized with the deposed princess-to-be, had rendered their anguished verdicts: "Kate was too middle class," the Mail on Sunday pronounced sadly. "Not posh enough for royals," fumed the Mirror. By Tuesday, the papers were publishing "cut-and-keep" guides on "how to be posh," and the Telegraph had a take-at-home quiz on "what class are you?"Clue: Does your house have a number, rather than a name? Do you propose toasts like "Cheers" over drinks? Do your children have a PlayStation 3, rather than a dressing-up box? Get a better life.The Middleton affair has reminded Britain, though the rest of the world may not have needed reminding, that it has not achieved its aspirations of a classless society.MIDDLETON and the prince met as classmates at the University of St. Andrews, where they both began studies in 2001. Soon they were seen everywhere together, prompting intense speculation by February that an engagement was in the making.Then, over the weekend, came news of the couple's breakup. Officially, William was said to be focusing on his military career. Unofficially, there was talk of other women, of needing to sow some royal oats before settling down to marriage. But behind it all, there has been a persistent bass note: The Middletons weren't royal in-law material.One-third of inner-city Londoners may live in low-income households, while the average house in tony Kensington or Chelsea sells for $1.6 million. But such everyday disparities seem to inspire far less collective angst than the anonymous quotes from courtiers who revealed that mates of William would make snickering references to her mother's flight attendant background whenever Middleton entered the room. "Doors to manual," they would say, the line used in Britain to signal the opening of the cabin doors at the end of a flight."The English have developed snobbery to an art form," style commentator Stephen Bayley said in an interview. "Personally, I think the video of Mrs. Middleton at [William's] ceremony at Sandhurst showing her chewing gum was probably instrumental. I cannot imagine myself trying to explain to [the queen] what chewing gum is, or why one should do it, but I am confident that she would not be impressed or persuaded by any arguments in its favor."Yet once you get outside the rarefied grounds of Windsor Castle, England's class divide these days is a shifting fault line. The ranks of the posh and the chavs — the British equivalent of white trash, cool but just a little cheap — are as likely to be defined by money and style as breeding."Previously, people talked about, 'He's got a good background, therefore he knows people through the old boy network, and he got on because of that' — that's not the case anymore. People now get on because they've got dynamism or talent. There's not the same sort of aristocracy. There's lots of marriages between people of mixed ranks," said Mary Killen, considered the "Miss Manners" of Britain with her lively etiquette column in the Spectator magazine.These days, she said, "money is the kind of thing that brings people together. Spending power. People now socialize with people with the same amount of money as they have to spend."Still, the vocabulary clues that linguist Alan C. Ross distinguished in 1954 (don't say "mirror" when you could say "looking glass," and don't call someone "mental" when they are, more genteelly, "mad") still apply. They've just been updated.Snobby acronyms like NSIT ("Not Safe In Taxis") and OTT (Over The Top) date back to Peter York and Ann Barr's famous 1982 guide to Sloane Square preppies, "The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook." Now, they have snittier contemporary counterparts, the Telegraph noted last year, such as NFI — Not [expletive] Invited. Then too, class consciousness these days cuts both ways. Thanks no doubt to the populist residue of 10 years of New Labor, it's almost hipper to be chav (think: Victoria Beckham; think: Burberry scarf) than posh (think: Barbour jacket), though it may not get you a royal proposal of marriage."There's a kind of reverse snobbery, which England is in the grip of," Killen said.Not only do the newsreaders of the BBC, which once was the bastion of the queen's English, often sound regional — Huw Edwards, the presenter of the "Ten O'Clock News," tells of growing up as a small, studious "swot" in Wales in his official biography — but upper-class "twits" are also more often the butt of jokes in London's frighteningly wealthy financial district than are former airline hostesses.David Cameron, leader of the once solidly aristocratic Conservative Party, failed to include a single classical composition on his list of records he'd take with him to a desert isle — a calculated nod to the zeitgeist, commentators said."We even had Cameron having to apologize for having been to Eton, when it's the best school in the country," Killen said. "Why would you not want someone who'd been to the best school in the country to be in charge?"Easy. NFI.

Brilliance

It’s unlikely that someone like me would not receive a diagnosis along the autistic spectrum very early on now. But this was the 1980s - before Rain Man and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - and awareness was scarce.
I had to teach myself how to be more ”normal”, if that is the way to put it. I watched other children the way David Attenborough watches animals, and I made mental notes on what I needed to do to be like them. I forced myself to make eye contact, and to join in conversations. Those things come naturally to other people, but to me they are conscious and often awkward actions. I still haven’t got the eye contact right - I tend to stare at people very intently.
When I was 18, I decided to go travelling. I joined a volunteer scheme in Lithuania and it was there that I realised I had a special gift for languages. I’d always been good at them at school, but within a few weeks I could speak fluent Lithuanian.
I now speak 10 different languages - I learned Icelandic from scratch in seven days. I don’t look at grammar books or verb tables, I just look at patterns and how words relate to each other. It’s second nature to me.
After I came back from Lithuania, I met my partner Neil - I’ve known that I was gay since I was about 10 - and we moved in together. I then set up a language-teaching website, www.optimnem.co.uk.

FT.com print article

Return of the Abstract

Abstract painting is back. True, it never really went away, but it had been shunted aside by the vagaries of time and fashion. Abstraction was attacked for being old media, played out, new-idea stunted, and out of sync with contemporary life and thought—as well as for being decorative and solipsistic. While abstraction persisted in Europe and even Asia, it became a sidebar to the New York art scene, which was flooded, paradoxically, with a technologically sophisticated assortment of new-media works, along with an array of updated conventional representational paintings.

SACHS & The POOR

Jeffrey Sachs has probably done more to shape contemporary low horizons on global poverty than any other individual. Time magazine has twice named the celebrity economist as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He is a special adviser to the United Nations secretary general on the Millennium Development Goals and a former director of the United Nations Millennium Project (1). The goals supported by such campaigns as Make Poverty History, including halving the number of people living on less than a dollar a day by 2015, were largely formulated by him (2). If Bono – the lead singer of U2, who calls Sachs ‘my professor’ – is the official face of making poverty history, then Sachs is the brain and often the voice behind the campaign

End of the End of History

Mr. Fukuyama writes:

Fifteen years ago in my book The End of History and the Last Man I argued that, if a society wanted to be modern, there was no alternative to a market economy and a democratic political system. Not everyone wanted to be modern, of course, and not everyone could put in place the institutions and policies necessary to make democracy and capitalism work, but no alternative system would yield better results.

While the “ End of History ” thus was essentially an argument about modernization, some people have linked my thesis about the end of history to the foreign policy of President George W. Bush and American strategic hegemony. But anyone who thinks that my ideas constitute the intellectual foundation for the Bush administration’s policies has not been paying attention to what I have been saying since 1992 about democracy and development.

President Bush initially justified intervention in Iraq on the grounds of Saddam’s programs to develop weapons of mass destruction, the regime’s alleged links to al-Qaida, as well as Iraq’s violation of human rights and lack of democracy. As the first two justifications crumbled in the wake of the 2003 invasion, the administration increasingly emphasized the importance of democracy, both in Iraq and in the broader Middle East, as a rationale for what it was doing.
Bush argued that the desire for freedom and democracy were universal and not culture-bound, and that America would be dedicated to the support of democratic movements “with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Supporters of the war saw their views confirmed in the ink-stained fingers of Iraqi voters who queued up to vote in the various elections held between January and December 2005, in the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, and in the Afghan presidential and parliamentary elections.
Inspiring and hopeful as these events were, the road to liberal democracy in the Middle East is likely to be extremely disappointing in the near to medium term, and the Bush administration’s efforts to build a regional policy around it are heading toward abject failure.

America in Decline

As political power ebbs from the Bush presidency, a number of changes are becoming visible around the world -- most of them unwelcome. Simply put, the White House is losing its ability to shape events.
President Bush's relentless focus on Iraq magnifies this problem. His almost daily comments on the war underscore just how much he has ransomed his presidency and the nation's security to the unlikely prospect of success in Iraq. And the monomania about Iraq distracts Bush and his advisers from other big issues that need attention.
What else is there to worry about? "A key question in assessing the risks to the outlook is whether the global economy would be able to 'decouple' from the United States were the latter to slow down more sharply than projected." This is from the latest World Economic Outlook report, prepared by the International Monetary Fund before this weekend's gathering of global bankers and finance ministers.

The Death of Pax Americana

With both houses of the US Congress set to maintain their challenge to President Bush’s conduct of the conflict in Iraq — and being accused in turn of ‘meddling in military strategy’ and of wanting to ‘set a date for surrender’ — America’s problems in its so-called ‘war on terror’ are deepening. In the gathering disorder, the recent visit to Damascus of Nancy Pelosi, the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, a visit carried out against the President’s wishes but with the approval of the region’s jihadists, served only to undercut the US administration’s hostile position on Syria. Last week’s humiliation of Britain at Iran’s hands, with service personnel apologising to their captors after being taken hostage and bishops this week thanking Tehran for its mercies, also compounded the difficulties faced by the US in seeking to check the growing ambitions of its foes.
But America’s problems are of a familiar kind in the history of great empires and nations. Misjudgment of the enemy, incompetent leadership, and divisions over policy caused similar turmoil in Britain in the late-18th century. At that time its war with the Americans was being lost, as the Americans are now losing the larger-scale struggle against the world-force of Islam.
On 22 March 1775, four weeks before the first shot had been fired in anger in what was to be an eight-year war between the rebellious colonists and the redcoats, the great Whig parliamentarian Edmund Burke stood up in the House of Commons and accused the Tory government of Lord North of being ‘grossly ignorant of America’. Declaring that ‘a great empire and little minds’ — the minds, say, of a Bush, a Rice, a Cheney — ‘go ill together’, he condemned the ‘woeful variety of schemes’, the ‘doing and undoing’, and the ‘shiftings and changings and jumblings of all kinds’ which characterised British policy towards the emerging United States.
He might have been talking of today’s White House, Pentagon and State Department, of the blunders of judgment and strategy in Iraq, and — more perilous — of America’s larger failures in the teeth of Islam’s advance. Like America now, Britain was a great economic and military power. It wanted to keep things as they were under its imperium, protect its markets, and hold on to its sources of wealth in the New World and elsewhere, just as corporate America must hold on at all costs to its resources in the Middle East and beyond. Yet, on the eve of the war with America, the British monarch George III and his ministry are regarded by historians as having been ‘insufficiently astute’ for their task, ‘ill-advised’ and ‘misinformed’.
Just as the British were accused by Burke of having no understanding of the ‘true temper of the minds’ of the Americans, so the inner strengths and growing momentum of Islam are being misjudged today. There are differences, of course. Among them, the Americans were fighting the Brits out of a ‘fierce spirit of liberty’, while Islamists seek to subject the entire infidel world to their faith. But Islam’s spirit is an equally formidable weapon in the present struggle. ‘You ought not to trifle with so large a mass of the interests and feelings of the human race,’ Burke warned the Commons, referring to a mere two million Americans whose numbers were increasing at what he called an ‘alarming’ rate. And 1.2 billion Muslims?

Vonnegut

Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.
Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?
He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. “Mark Twain,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, “Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage,” “finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died.”
Not all Mr. Vonnegut’s themes were metaphysical. With a blend of science fiction, philosophy and jokes, he also wrote about the banalities of consumer culture, for example, or the destruction of the environment.
His novels — 14 in all — were alternate universes, filled with topsy-turvy images and populated by races of his own creation, like the Tralfamadorians and the Mercurian Harmoniums. He invented phenomena like chrono-synclastic infundibula (places in the universe where all truths fit neatly together) as well as religions, like the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and Bokononism (based on the books of a black British Episcopalian from Tobago “filled with bittersweet lies,” a narrator says).

Death of an Education?

In De Divisione Naturae, written in the 9th century, Erigena, more popularly known as John the Scot, wrote: "musica innata est quaedam communis secundam seipsam delectatio" - that is, "music, by its very nature, is a delight to everyone". In this talk I shall take his dictum as my central proposition, remembering that "diversi diversis delectantur" - "different people enjoy different things"; and that according to Vitruvius, "ars sine scientia nihil potest" - "art is powerless without knowledge".
In a recently published essay, Susan Sontag wrote: "Take care to be born at a time when it was likely that you would be definitely exalted and influenced by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and Turgenev, and Chekhov". I understand her enthusiasm for those four Russian writers, but the choice of examples for influence could be almost infinitely varied: on many lists would appear the names of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, for instance, as well as far less well-known authors.

What all these authors have in common is that they are serious, their work concerned with the most fundamental aspects of our humanity, our relationships with each other, and with our environment. All require time and patience to get to know. To return briefly to Susan Sontag: she adds something I think is most significant - "be serious, which doesn't preclude being funny".
An educated person could construct a list of authors who have influenced his whole life and outlook, and will be able to refer to characters and situations, and even to quote directly - it is extraordinary how, in Britain, phrases and characters from Shakespeare and Dickens have made their way into the collective imagination and into everyday conversation; although there are now attempts by educators to undermine this, and dumb down a young person's contact with literature, as if this were something from which the young must be shielded.

France & Louisiana

What France Can Learn From Its ‘Lost Province’ - New York Times

It conforms, in significant ways, to the French view of what the United States ought to be - that imaginary land of jazz and Jack Kerouac, John F. Kennedy and Woody Allen, against which Gallic disappointment at God-fearing American reality, George W. Bush and all, is measured.

"Louisiana is our poor lost province," Lebovics said. "It lives in the collective memory. There's even an Indian tribe, the Houma, that speaks some French. That's why the reaction to Katrina and the devastation here was so strong in France."

That reaction's impact is unmistakable in New Orleans these days. The city is full of posters saying "From France with Love." They refer to a fine exhibition at the city's Museum of Art called "Femme, Femme, Femme."

The women in question are caught in over 80 paintings offered by more than 30 museums as their response to the city's plight. Works by Millet, Degas, Daumier, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec and others chronicle changing female roles from the 19th to the 20th century. An astonishing little Picasso from 1918 - a bright beach scene painted on honeymoon in Biarritz - is alone worth the pilgrimage.
The French have also done much else. Aid worth more than $20 million has come from private French companies including Lafarge and Sanofi-Aventis. Books have been donated, schools assisted.

Putin Seeking to Awaken the Sleeping Russian Bear

The news that an arms race may be underway once more between Washington and Moscow has brought back some unpleasant memories, but it is also a pointer to a more complicated future.
The Kremlin's threat to counter US missile defence installations in eastern Europe is a sign that Russia will no longer acquiesce in a Pax Americana.

What seemed in the west like a post cold-war honeymoon in the nineties is remembered more as a rape by Moscow's new leaders. In their eyes Russia was taken advantage of at a moment of economic weakness by Washington, London and a band of unscrupulous Russian oligarchs. A new Russian foreign policy, published by the government in recent days makes it clear that Moscow believes the era of American hegemony is now over.

"The myth about the unipolar world fell apart once and for all in Iraq," the review says. "A strong, more self-confident Russia has become an integral part of positive changes in the world."
The policy document is an elaboration of an anti-American polemic delivered two months ago by Vladimir Putin to a roomful of shocked western diplomats in Munich. "The Munich speech may be an event ... we look back to and say: that's when everything changed, but we should have seen it coming," said Cliff Kupchan, a former US state department official now at the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy.

Around the world, Putin's Russia has been serving notice for some time it is prepared to challenge US leadership of the international community. It is beginning to push back hard against missile defence and Nato's eastward expansion. It has resisted tough sanctions against Iran, and so far refused to go along with a UN-brokered plan to hand Kosovo autonomy. Moscow is also signalling it wants to be treated as a serious player in the Middle East, meeting Hamas officials at a time they are being ostracised by the US and western Europe.

Cassandra on the Boomers

Cassandra Devine knows how to solve the coming "entitlements" crisis, preordained when the 77 million baby boomers begin hitting 65 in 2011: Pay retirees to kill themselves, a program she calls "transitioning." Volunteers could receive a lavish vacation beforehand ("a farewell honeymoon"), courtesy of the government, and their heirs would be spared the estate tax. If only 20 percent of boomers select suicide before the age of 70, she says, "Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid will be solvent. End of crisis."

Okay, Devine is a 29-year-old fictional blogger in Christopher Buckley's satirical novel "Boomsday." Infuriated at the injustices awaiting her generation, she becomes an instant media celebrity with a gift for incendiary rhetoric. "Someone my age will have to spend their entire life paying unfair taxes, just so the Boomers can hit the golf course at sixty-two and drink gin and tonics until they're ninety," she tells one TV reporter.

Her plan, once in cyberspace, incites spontaneous uprisings. In Florida, "several hundred people in their twenties stormed the gates of a retirement community. . . . Residents were assaulted as they played golf."

Buckley, born in 1952, is a boomer himself, and his novel is in the best tradition of Jonathan Swift, the writer who once suggested that the Irish relieve a famine by eating their young, of using the absurd to discuss moral outrages. Buckley's comic tale revolves around two truths usually buried in our dreary budget debates.

My Daughter's XXXVIth
Much Love and Many Happy Returns

The Pope

Through the wounds of the Risen Christ we can see the evils which afflict humanity with the eyes of hope," Pope Benedict XVI said yesterday in a message that spoke of how "We may all be tempted by the disbelief of Thomas." In his comments on Iraq, however, the pope seemed himself to have succumbed to the temptation of disbelief, and the eyes of hope of which he spoke seemed to be squeezed shut, at least in respect of the current war. Said the pontiff: "Nothing positive comes from Iraq, torn apart by continual slaughter as the civil population flees."
Benedict's commentary, made to thousands gathered at the Vatican on Easter, is a reminder that while the pope may be infallible in matters of Catholic doctrine, even our greatest figures can falter in the complexities of temporal events. For this is a moment when it's important to note that much of the news from Iraq is positive, beginning with the ferment of freedom. Our columnist Nibras Kazimi, who participated in the country's liberation, wrote in these pages recently, "Bringing down Saddam gave Iraq and the Iraqi people a fighting chance at a better life … flawed freedom is far better than slavery in whatever form."

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan

For all the storytelling confidence of scientists who try to uncover the biological roots of personal emotions and social beliefs, McEwan keeps faith in the special tasks of art. "I hold to the view that novelists can go to places that might be parallel to a scientific investigation, and can never really be replaced by it: the investigation into our natures; our condition; what we're like in specific circumstances." On Chesil Beach, it strikes me, shows at its infinitely sad conclusion an example of self-punishing "negative altruism" at work. Here, a vengeful righteousness that wrecks the "injured" party takes shape not in the colour-coded neural maps of MRI - but through a vigilant writer's heartbreaking empathy with the twisted feelings of a child in its time.
If human communication and solidarity can founder so totally in this novel's little pool of fear and frustration, what are its prospects in the great ocean of social behaviour? We talk of the carbon-cutting, resource-saving sacrifices this generation may have to make on behalf of its successors, and McEwan comments that such long-term altruism "does go against the grain a bit". All the same, he adds: "I cheer myself up with the thought of medieval cathedral builders, who built for the future - or 18th-century tree-planters, who planted sapling oaks which they would never enjoy. Here, it's much more dire; but we're bound to think of our children, or at least our grandchildren.
"It is difficult to do favours to people you have never met," he says. "But we give money to Oxfam, to charities, to victims of the tsunami and so forth. These are not people who are ever going to repay those favours, or even know who bestowed them." Unlike his characters, doomed to a kind of soul-extinction in their solitude, McEwan believes in making the last-ditch gesture that might save a world. "The worst fate would be to conclude that there's nothing we can do about this, and so let's party to the end."


'On Chesil Beach' is published by Jonathan Cape (£12.99)

Clive James

A decade ago in Berlin, sunk in a plush seat in the Konzerthaus on the Gendarmenmarkt, I sneaked Clive James’s “Unreliable Memoirs” from my handbag to distract myself from a concert that was being conducted at Looney Tunes velocity. Sinking into the pages, I forgot about the music lovers around me, the chandeliers above and the strenuously laboring musicians below, and slipped into the world of James’s hardscrabble Australian boyhood. Absorbed in his account of a disastrous youth-group performance — he was supposed to crouch on the floor and wait for a large girl named Maureen to somersault over him — I read: “She came hurtling out of the back annex, along the corridor, through the connecting door, into the hall, up to the springboard and into space. She drove me into the floor like a tack.” I burst out laughing ... and was jolted back into awareness of my august setting by 80 enraged spinning heads and sputtered shushes from three rows of German aesthetes. I had failed to spot the warning printed on the cover of the book, plucked from the ticker tape parade of critical praise it had earned in Britain: “Do not read this book in public. You will risk severe internal injuries from trying to suppress your laughter.”
Reading James’s new book, “Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts” — a capacious and capricious encyclopedia of essays about everyone he considers worth knowing about in the 20th century (including people who lived long before: Tacitus, to name one) — I was surprised to learn, in his chapter on Dick Cavett, that “Unreliable Memoirs” had met with a cool reception in America. Critics slammed it, he explains, for “trying to be truthful and fanciful at the same time.” He writes, “Since I had clearly had no other aim in mind, I read these indictments with sad bewilderment.” Like the actor Tony Curtis, whom he apostrophizes in another chapter of this volume, and unlike Hitler (though Hitler, he notes, “told quite good jokes”), James is a natural master of the art form in which “serious delivery avails itself of comic timing.” It is a form that isn’t often brought to bear on journalism and letters in this country; but lucky for him, James is not from this country.

WORDSWORTH

It's the birthday of the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth, (books by this author) born in Cockermouth, England (1770). He studied at Cambridge, and during a vacation, he and a friend sailed to France for a 12-week walking tour of the Alps, during which they covered about 3,000 miles. He wrote letters home to his sister, Dorothy, trying to describe the beautiful sights he'd seen, and he later said, "Perhaps scarce a day of my life will pass by in which I shall not derive some happiness from those images."


At the time, most poets were writing poetry about broad topics of history and religion and philosophy. Wordsworth wrote about ordinary things and private thoughts, the view from a bridge, daffodils. Critics thought he was wasting his time on uninteresting subjects. But by the time he had reached middle age, he became a cult sensation and his collections of poetry became best-sellers. Tourists from London would take day trips up to the Lake District where Wordsworth lived and gawk at him through the window of his house. His wife once wrote in a letter, "At this moment, a group of young Tourists are standing before the window. ... William is reading a newspaper and on lifting up his head a profound bow greeted him from each."

A Glorious Easter to All!

What Christ Said

What He said - TLS Highlights - Times Online:

"The Synoptic Gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke – present a conundrum that is probably unique in the annals of literary research. On the one hand they display similarities which are sometimes so close that it has been thought impossible they should have occurred had not the author of one had access to at least one of the others (and the reigning but not the only possible hypothesis is that Matthew and Luke both made use of Mark). On the other hand they have differences, mainly of verbal expression but sometimes also of content and arrangement, which generations of scholars, brought up in the tradition of historical criticism, have assumed is due to the use of different sources – so much so that the notion of “source” (Quelle in German) has given rise to the reconstruction of a document (“Q”) that is assumed to be the “source” of material that appears in similar form in Matthew and Luke but is absent in Mark. The consequence is that a Gospel writer must be imagined, no longer as a serene recipient of inspiration from on high (as envisaged in so many ancient works of art) but as a sometimes puzzled, sometimes creative, editor, using scissors and paste to weave together several different narratives or “sources”, and (according to more recent scholarship) compounding the complexity of his task by introducing theological interpretations of his own."

Food & Fiction

An unbeatable combination from the Wall Street Journal.


OpinionJournal - Five Best

FEAR

Fear plays a key role in twenty-first century consciousness. Increasingly, we seem to engage with various issues through a narrative of fear. You could see this trend emerging and taking hold in the last century, which was frequently described as an ‘Age of Anxiety’ (1). But in recent decades, it has become more and better defined, as specific fears have been cultivated. The rise of catchphrases such as the ‘politics of fear’, ‘fear of crime’ and ‘fear of the future’ is testimony to the cultural significance of fear today. Many of us seem to make sense of our experiences through the narrative of fear. Fear is not simply associated with high-profile catastrophic threats such as terrorist attacks, global warming, AIDS or a potential flu pandemic; rather, as many academics have pointed out, there are also the ‘quiet fears’ of everyday life.

whisky

Scots drive world to drink whisky Business Money Telegraph:

"whisky now accounts for a quarter of all of British food and drink exports by value.
More than one billion bottles were shipped last year, an increase of 6pc on 2005, the Scotch Whisky Association said."

Are the NEOS Dying?

As the presidential race ramps up (with depressing prematurity), big-picture political thinkers incant the usual litany of pronouncements and chin-scratching over whether such and such an ideological force is dead. Playing the death certificate card is pundit gold, a makework perpetual motion machine for political deepthink, but still worth thinking about for what it says about ideological stagnation in American politics—and a refusal to recognize from what direction the next big change ought to come.
Last week in the New York Times (alas, behind their “Times Select” wall), light-right thinker David Brooks declared “neoliberalism” dead. Neoliberalism was born of a bunch of young writers of a liberal bent in the 1980s, mostly centered around the political journals Washington Monthly and New Republic.
They were disenchanted with hidebound '70s liberalism, were sharp and fun-loving (at least compared to Jimmy Carter and/or Michael Harrington),were not entirely beholden to unions, were willing to be reformist about the welfare state, were OK with the American military, and liked to spar with their partisan comrades further to the left. Michael Kinsley could be considered their philosopher-king, and their spawn filled the mainstream of American journalism as well as inspiring such politicians as Bill Clinton, who might be dimly remembered as the president of the United States through much of the last decade of the previous century.
It might be noted, but wasn’t by Brooks, that Clinton’s most prominent political stances and achievements—welfare reform, failed attempts at rejiggering the health care system, and a clumsily executed, half-assed neo-Wilsonianism—pretty much define the politics of today as well, give or take a domestic war on terror and a new wave of pointless immigration fear.

MASTERS

JUDAS

MAUNDY THURSDAY

Whether it is Easter or Passover or just a lovely Spring Day

Some Lamb is always nice.

American Megachurches

Karaoke for the Lord: The Recipe for Success at American Megachurches - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News:

"The megachurches mushrooming in the United States are mammoth feel-good temples providing entertainment for one and all. The ministers used to deliver weekly jeremiads excoriating homosexuality, feminism and abortion, but many -- particularly younger evangelists -- are now using the pulpit to preach about Africa and the environment."

CHINA: THE FUTURE OF CLASSICAL MUSIC?

“I honestly think that in some real sense the future of classical music depends on developments in China in the next 20 years,” said Robert Sirota, the president of the Manhattan School of Music. “They represent a vast new audience as well as a classical-music-performing population that is much larger than anything we’ve had so far. You’re looking at a time when, maybe 20 to 40 years from now, Shanghai and Beijing are really going to be considered centers of world art music.”
Cultural generalizations are always perilous. But many Western musicians and educators interviewed cited similar qualities in Chinese virtuosos: passion and refinement, expressiveness and brilliance. Chinese players seem less bound by the culture of conformity sometimes found in Asia, those Westerners said.

TONY'S END?

THE SOPRANOS" begins its final run of nine installments this Sunday on HBO with the sound of law enforcement banging at Tony Soprano's door. "Is this it?" Carmela says, sitting up in bed. I took that line as a poke at the audience, mocking the otherworldly hype and expectation about the conclusion of the series, which is to say who gets to live and who gets to die. Some of what makes "The Sopranos" great is unforeseen magic, inexorably tied to the freedom success on HBO has granted — the way Robert Iler, for instance, who plays AJ Soprano, has gone in real time from chubby kid to the sullen, direction-less twentysomething that perfectly embodies the questionable citizen Tony (James Gandolfini) and Carmela (Edie Falco) have produced.

BRIT Geisha on Nippon

Ask the average Westerner to tell you what they know about Tokyo, and it's a pretty safe bet you will get a sentence or two about the "New York of Asia"; streets full of neon signs but no graffiti or litter; the trains running on time and a crime rate so low as to be almost invisible. And that most men go out most nights and get drunk.
All pretty much true, of course. Except that Manhattan doesn't feel half as modern as Tokyo, which is full of skyscrapers designed by the likes of Renzo Piano and Norman Foster. Nor are New Yorkers as well-dressed. The general level of wealth is noticeably higher in Tokyo than in much of the West. As the French sales manager for Cartier Japan once told me: "All Japanese wear Cartier because they can." Louis Vuitton has more than a dozen branches in Tokyo and there's always a queue at each of them.
Of course the trains run strictly to timetable, but what most people in Britain don't realise is that the Tokyo subway system is also air-conditioned and the stations all have loos. Spotless, naturally.
There is youth culture in abundance, too. Harajuku, the Tokyo equivalent of London's Camden Town, is full of teenagers in off-beat fashions, but without the overtones of violence and disaffection. There are no street gangs, hoodies or yobbery. There are many more police per head than in Britain and they still operate a "bobby on the beat" system. Each policeman knows his patch. He knocks on doors, drop in for cups of tea - and if young Jiro feels like misbehaving, he knows the next knock will be on his front door.
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It all, superficially at least to a Westerner, seems like paradise. So how then do you account for the macabre and tragic killing of Lindsay Ann Hawker, last week, and that of Lucie Blackman in 2000? For the culture of heavy after-work drinking? And for the vast consumption of lurid, violent and highly pornographic "manga" comic books? Is this all evidence of a schizophrenic society: glossy and glitzy on the surface, but with dark, disturbing and dangerous undercurrents? I don't think so.
I spent some 12 years in Japan, living as a single woman. When I arrived, I taught English and, like Lindsay Hawker, gave private classes and taught businessmen. I hitchhiked alone all over the country, something I wouldn't dare do in Britain. And I even worked for a while as a geisha to research a book I was writing. Never in London have I felt as safe as I used to in Tokyo.
To understand the duality of Japanese society - the strait-laced conformity, on the one hand, combined with what we might consider almost reckless abandonment - it is necessary to get to grips with two Japanese concepts: honne and tatemae. Honne means your true feelings, which you normally keep to yourself. Tatemae is the face you present to society, the way society expects you to behave. Japanese people always understand, when someone says or does something, that they may be merely expressing tatemae. It may well not be what they really think or feel.
Everything in Japan, therefore, is not always what it seems. This causes problems with Westerners, accustomed to taking everything at face value. But the Japanese also understand that maintaining this public face puts one under great pressure, so there are times when and places where society allows you to let go. One of these is when you leave the office and head for the bar with your workmates.
It is the same with manga comics. In Japan, grown men read pornographic comics on the subway, without embarrassment. There are racks of them in corner shops, not high up but where everyone can see them. The Japanese attitude is that these comics remain in the world of the imagination and are therefore not a threat. If the imagination is free to roam, people do not feel the need to act out dark desires. There is a clear demarcation between fantasy and reality that doesn't usually get crossed. Tragedies occur in the rare instances when an individual doesn't understand that demarcation line.
This is also the case with otaku, nerds who spend their time in front of the computer, playing games or collecting figurines of games characters. The latest trend is moe otaku, who collect images of underage girls, sometimes, though not usually, engaged in overtly sexual activities. In "maid cafes" in Tokyo, waitresses dressed as cartoon characters in short skirts sit with customers and address them as "master". But it's only commercial flirtation. Fantasy, the Japanese realise, is more fun when it remains just that: fantasy.
Drunkenness, though, is all too real, but is rarely associated in Japan with violence. It's a socially acceptable way of letting off steam. A drunk might fall asleep on the subway or station platform, vomit or need to be helped home by his colleagues. But he will not get violent. The worst he might do is be rude to his boss.
When I lived among the geisha to research my book I saw plenty of drinking at the evening geisha parties. Geisha are artists. They join the profession at the age of 15 and spend five years training as classical singers and dancers. In the evenings, they entertain at parties at which the customers are largely but not exclusively men.
The geisha puts on her evening persona along with her white make-up and red rosebud lips. Part of her job is to flirt with customers, to make the most wizened company chairman feel he is the sexiest man alive. But it's just a job. She is no more serious than an actress saying her lines.
Western men may sometimes misunderstand. This is one source of the misconception that geisha are prostitutes. Geisha offer not sex, which is not difficult to come by in Japan, but romance, which is.
This is a country where a sizeable proportion of people still have arranged marriages or marry because it's time to get married, not because they've met the right person. A geisha party provides a discreet environment to play-act, to flirt without repercussions and forget about the disappointments of work and (maybe) home.
Of course, no one claims that geisha never have sex. The geisha districts are often side by side with the red-light districts. And organised crime - the yakuza, the Japanese Mafia, who control gambling and the sex trade - is never far away. At the edge of the geisha district where I lived was a house where disreputable-looking men hung around, apparently doing nothing: very suspicious in Japan. My geisha friends told me this was the local yakuza headquarters. It was opposite a love hotel called the Yellow Whale where people could rent rooms by the hour, no questions asked. But I never saw the yakuza in action.
In fact, unless they nose around as I did, Westerner visitors are unlikely ever to come across any criminals, gangsters or otherwise. The greatest danger, perversely, comes from its lack of danger: Japan is so safe it is easy for a woman to let down her guard, to take risks she would not in the West. Could that be the explanation for the deaths of Lindsay and Lucie?

The Shifting Sands of Patriotism

Every one of us needs a sense of patriotism

In Britain, the concern over ethnic minority isolation is now largely to do with the fear of terrorism; in France, it is more about conventional crime and civil unrest. But the dilemma - and what politicians are beginning to understand as the source of it - is turning out to be remarkably similar.
The Left in France, just as in Britain, is discovering the importance of patriotism. Ségolène Royal has decreed that her political rallies should end with the playing of the French national anthem rather than the Marxist Internationale. She has even suggested, as Gordon Brown has here, that it would be a good idea if the flag were to be displayed more often and more proudly, as it is in the US.
Cynical old Europe has taken a long time to learn what New World countries, which were founded by immigrants, have always known. A nation cannot absorb large waves of migrants without having some strong sense of national identity of its own to offer them.
Displaced people will quickly become isolated and deranged in a new homeland if that country does not present them with a sense of belonging to something desirable and attractive in its own right, something more than just residence or vague opportunity or even welfare benefits. For those who have come from closely knit homogeneous communities, as most ethnic minority immigrants have, there is something peculiarly empty and soul-less about the anonymity and sophisticated indifference of urban Europe.
When the political fashion explicitly despises pride in one's nationality and culture, there is nothing for the dispossessed to turn to: nothing to compete with their old kinship and loyalties. And so they cling together in alienated, separatist networks prey to whatever anti-social forces wish to exploit their bitterness.
Patriotism has been deeply suspect in Europe ever since the blood-and-soil nationalism of the Fascists brought it into contempt. Indeed the whole rationale of the European Union was based on the downgrading of national pride in favour of a trans-national fellowship.
But the elite class who so despised the notion of love of country had little understanding of its importance for ordinary people. It is not deracinated, cosmopolitan intellectuals - at home anywhere universal ideas are discussed - who need to identify with a homeland or a romantic ideal of a country. Because the Left has always been international for ideological reasons - it was class to which one was supposed to be loyal not nationality ("workers of the world unite") - this has been a particularly hard lesson for Left-wing parties to accept.
The children of immigrant parents in the US can tell you that being American involves believing in "government of the people, by the people and for the people". I assume that French children still learn, even after a generation of Euro-propaganda, that "liberty, equality and fraternity" are the fount of their political tradition.
Britain, not being a revolutionary republic, has more of a problem finding a formula. ("Tolerance and fair play" doesn't cut it, I'm afraid.) But the lesson is being learned: most human beings need to feel that they belong to something larger than themselves.
They do not obey the rules of a society in the abstract interest of the "rule of law". They want to have a positive idea of what it means to be French or British or American in their hearts - and that desire, as Europeans once understood, can be a fine and generous thing.

Jane Austin Today

This is only the beginning of the Jane Austen makeover. A new film about her will come to this country in August. It is called “Becoming Jane” and stars Anne Hathaway, who was last seen in “The Devil Wears Prada.” Ms. Hathaway is indeed a becoming Jane. Publishers of “Emma” and “Pride and Prejudice” and the rest of Austen’s works should simply reprint a still from the film — Ms. Hathaway in Georgian costume, superbly blushed and coiffed and playing cricket — and call it “Jane Austen,” with the quotation marks. The novels would be so much richer if only we could believe they were written by a looker.
I reread “Emma” recently and found myself wondering, what if we knew as much about Shakespeare’s life as we do about Austen’s? And what if we knew as much about Austen’s life as we do about Virginia Woolf’s? No one would give up the chance to have 150 letters by Shakespeare or 26 years of copious diaries by Austen.
But the work always stands apart from the life, no matter how much we know. No amount of biography — no grasp of the details of the life as it was lived — ever accounts for the transfiguration that takes place in the work itself. You can search all you want in the life, but you will never find the ghostly separateness, the act of imagination, in which the work emerges.