Today is Leap Day, the extra day that we tack on to February every four years to keep the calendar in time with the seasons. We do this because the Earth does not orbit the sun in a nice round 365 days, but rather in 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 45 seconds.
Ancient peoples based their calendars on many things, from the movements of the stars to the activities of plants and animals. The Greek poet Hesiod told farmers to begin the harvest when the constellation Pleiades was rising and to begin plowing when it was setting, and to sharpen their farming tools when snails began climbing up plants. Most early calendars were based on the stages of the moon, with lunar months of about 29 days each. But the problem with the lunar calendar is that it's about 11 days short of the actual year, so instead of having to add a leap day every few years, you have to add a leap month. The Egyptians were one of the first civilizations to develop a calendar with 12 months and 365 days. When Julius Caesar rose to power, the Romans were using a calendar that was so faulty they often had to add an extra 80 days to the year. In 46 B.C., after his affair with Cleopatra, Caesar chose to adopt the superior Egyptian calendar, and this became known as the Julian calendar. In the first version of the Julian calendar, February had 29 days most years and 30 days in leap years. Caesar named the month of July after himself, so when Augustus came to power, he decided he needed a month too. He named August after himself, but he had to steal a day from February in order to make August as long as July.
The Julian calendar worked well for a while, but in the 13 century, a sick old friar named Roger Bacon sent a letter to the Pope. He had calculated the actual length of the solar year as slightly less than 365.25 days, and he pointed out that the Julian calendar was adding one leap day too many for every 125 years. The result was that Christians were celebrating holy days on the wrong dates. Bacon wrote, "The calendar is intolerable to all wisdom, the horror of astronomy, and a laughing-stock from a mathematician's point of view." Bacon was eventually imprisoned for implying that the pope had been fallible, and his writings were censored. It wasn't until 1582 that Pope Gregory XIII hired a group of Jesuits to fix the calendar, and they came up with the complicated system of omitting the leap day at the beginning of each century, except for those centuries divisible by 400. When Pope Gregory made the change, the calendar was about 10 days off, so Gregory deleted 10 days from the year. People went to sleep on Thursday, Oct. 4 and woke up on Friday, Oct. 15.
At first, the Gregorian calendar was only accepted in Catholic countries, and even there people were uncomfortable about losing 10 days of their lives. It led to protests and financial uncertainty, since people weren't sure how to calculate interest or taxes or rent for a 21-day month. Protestant countries didn't adopt the new calendar until much later, and this meant that for a long time, if you crossed the border of certain European countries, you had to set your clock back or forward by at least 10 days. When Great Britain finally accepted the Gregorian calendar in 1751, 11 days had to be deleted from the year. The change led to antipapal riots, because people believed the pope had shortened their lives. Mobs gathered in the streets, chanting, "Give us back our 11 days!" When the British colonies in America made the change the following year, Ben Franklin wrote in an editorial, "Be not astonished, nor look with scorn, dear reader, at ... the loss of so much time. ... What an indulgence is here, for those who love their pillow, to lie down in peace on the second [day] of this month and not awake till the morning of the fourteenth."
The Gregorian calendar has since been accepted everywhere as the standard. It is so accurate that we will have to wait until the year 4909 before our dates become out of step with the Earth's orbit by a full day.
About Me
- Xerxes
- New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
- Admire John McPhee, Bill Bryson, David Remnick, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr and James Martin (and most open and curious minds)
29.2.08
R.I.P.
William F. Buckley is dead... Nat’l Review memorials ... AP ... NYT ... WP ... old columns ... Sam Tanenhaus ... Slate ... Wash Times ... Moderate Voice ... Boston Globe ... Books by Buckley ... Guardian ... Roger Kimball ... Myron Magnet ... Chron Higher Ed ... Time ... David Boaz ... Conrad Black ... Cap Weinberger ... Nat’l Post ... Reason ... Buckley vs Mailer ... John McCain ... Rick Perlstein ... Telegraph ... London Times ... Clive Crook ... Robert Semple ... John Miller ... John Bogert ... Julia Keller ... Michael Seringhaus ... Andrew Malcolm ... Taki
25.2.08
Sister Wendy
It's the birthday of English art critic and nun Sister Wendy Beckett, (books by this author) born in South Africa (1930) and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland. She's been a nun for more than 60 years, an art critic for more than 20. She's famous for books on art and her television shows on the BBC and PBS where she talks about art in museums around the world in plain, understandable language.
Sister Wendy said, "Many people feel I am not really equipped to understand art, that I am not educated enough to speak to people in elitist languages, but don't you see — that's the point!" Her first book was Contemporary Women Artists (1988).
Sister Wendy surprises her audience with the way she openly talks about sex and nudity in paintings without any embarrassment. She says, "I use the words that come naturally...I'm absolutely astonished and bewildered to find people commenting on my delight in a naked body. Never, ever, has anyone suggested that parts of the body were not quite right, that God made a mistake, that they should be passed over. It's appropriate to comment on everything in the painting. I'm not going to deny God's glory by pandering to narrow-mindedness."
Sister Wendy negotiated in her contract that no matter where she is filming, she must go to mass every day. When not filming, she lives in solitude and prayer in a trailer on the property of the convent. All the money she makes from her book sales and her shows go to the Carmelite convent and its hospice for children. Sister Wendy says, "When you are talking about art, you are talking about God indirectly; all experience of art is an indirect experience of God."
Sister Wendy said, "Many people feel I am not really equipped to understand art, that I am not educated enough to speak to people in elitist languages, but don't you see — that's the point!" Her first book was Contemporary Women Artists (1988).
Sister Wendy surprises her audience with the way she openly talks about sex and nudity in paintings without any embarrassment. She says, "I use the words that come naturally...I'm absolutely astonished and bewildered to find people commenting on my delight in a naked body. Never, ever, has anyone suggested that parts of the body were not quite right, that God made a mistake, that they should be passed over. It's appropriate to comment on everything in the painting. I'm not going to deny God's glory by pandering to narrow-mindedness."
Sister Wendy negotiated in her contract that no matter where she is filming, she must go to mass every day. When not filming, she lives in solitude and prayer in a trailer on the property of the convent. All the money she makes from her book sales and her shows go to the Carmelite convent and its hospice for children. Sister Wendy says, "When you are talking about art, you are talking about God indirectly; all experience of art is an indirect experience of God."
Grim, the Oscar Goes to...........Grim
IT used to be that violence, even more than comedy, was the kiss of death for Oscar movies. Then came blood-saturated films like "Crash" and "The Departed," which overturned some of those rules.But perhaps no movie exemplifies how the Oscars have changed than this year's best picture winner, "No Country for Old Men," a dark, disturbing thriller from the Coen brothers.Shot in a deliberative, unsentimental style, "No Country" is a bone-chilling tale of violence, stupidity and revenge, with a relentless, amoral killer (played by supporting actor winner Javier Bardem) at its center, coolly dispatching anyone in his way with a cattle gun. It is not the only acclaimed movie to have emerged from a forbidding corner of the American psyche. Many of this year's most compelling movies -- notably, two other best picture nominees, "There Will Be Blood" and "Michael Clayton," as well as "American Gangster," "Eastern Promises," "Gone Baby Gone" and "The Bourne Ultimatum" -- were meditations on violence, betrayal, revenge and grand ambition run amok."Maybe what you're getting is a ghostly, forensic glimpse of what has happened in our culture," says Tony Gilroy, the writer-director of "Michael Clayton." "We've just lived through eight years of dark, mysterious soul-killing events. It's like these films are saying, 'What the [expletive] just happened?' "Perhaps timing is everything. Writers and directors tell stories for a thousand reasons, many of them too inchoate to ever be articulated. But it's increasingly plausible that today's filmmakers, living in a post-Sept. 11 world wracked by fear of terrorism, doubts about a bloody war in Iraq and concerns over U.S. involvement in torture, are responding to the spirit of the times.This year's films are clearly not aberrations. Last year's best picture winner, Martin Scorsese's "The Departed," was an ultra-violent look at revenge and betrayal in the Boston mob underworld. "Crash," which won best picture in 2006 for its tough-minded look at race and class in melting-pot Los Angeles, was also punctuated with confrontations, bitter invective and random violence.Filmmakers with the kind of ambition rewarded at Oscar time are often struggling to make sense of a chaotic culture. It's hardly a coincidence that as early-1970s America became increasingly unnerved by the trauma of Watergate, filmmakers began turning out a series of paranoid thrillers, among them "Three Days of the Condor," "The Conversation" and "The Parallax View."In 1967, after the assassination of President Kennedy, the Watts riots and the escalation of the war in Vietnam, the nation's movie screens were filled with an unparalleled explosion of violent films, including "Bonnie and Clyde," "The Dirty Dozen," "In Cold Blood," "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" and "Cool Hand Luke."Today, the fallout from the war in Iraq seems to have inspired a new wave of violence-tinged films. "If you look at the films up for awards this year, they all have this one thing in common -- they are from artists asking questions about what violence does to our humanity," says Paul Haggis, whose "In the Valley of Elah," dealt with violence among soldiers home from Iraq."We do our best to insulate ourselves from all the troubling effects of violence. You rarely see the coffins coming back from Iraq, you rarely see footage or photos from the war. But it doesn't go away. It just seeps in, under the door, often through our films."A decade ago, with the country in a more buoyant mood, the best picture Oscars went to movies with more uplift -- notably such films as "Forrest Gump," "Titanic" and "Shakespeare in Love." For much of the 1990s, Oscar winners looked backward, the vast majority of them safely set in distant places, including Shakespearean England, the American West of "Dances With Wolves" and "Unforgiven," the gilded age of "Titanic," the prewar and World War II-era "The English Patient" and "Schindler's List."Today's films hit closer to home. "No Country" unfolds in hard-scrabble West Texas, outside the same small town where, by coincidence, Paul Thomas Anderson shot most of "There Will Be Blood." Film historian David Thomson recalls being surprised when he heard the Coens say they made the film because they had spent time there."I thought, 'Wait a minute. I've spent a lot of time there myself and the movie isn't remotely like the real West Texas.' " he says. "It's a friendly place where people are hospitable and kind. There aren't murderous zombies running around."Thomson believes that what the movie is really reflecting is the mood in America since 9/11. "People feel that, like Tommy Lee Jones' character in the film, things are out of hand, beyond our control. The average American today has a sense that dread and evil lurks everywhere, that they could open their door and find a murderous stranger outside."Movies are at their best when they keep their distance from the breaking news of the day. Great films are rarely ripped from the headlines, instead serving as shadowy, subconscious reflections on their time. Now considered masterworks of modern cinema, the first two "Godfather" films were not only riveting stories about the mob, but also cautionary tales about power and corruption at a time when the excesses of Watergate made it appear that America was being undermined by dark forces.A number of films celebrated Sunday offer unsettling portraits of power and corruption. "Michael Clayton" stars George Clooney as a law firm's in-house fixer assigned to protect a malevolent agrochemical company from damaging revelations about its products. "There Will Be Blood" features Daniel Day-Lewis as an early 20th century oil wildcatter on a quest for riches who becomes unhinged by paranoia and homicidal rage.At a time when America's own moral certainty has been fractured by the bloodshed in Iraq and revelations about Abu Ghraib and secret CIA interrogations, it's hardly surprising to see filmmakers telling stories that serve as allegories about the abuse of power."While we were all jumping to conclusions that movies couldn't address what was going on in the world because the films about Iraq failed at the box office, we almost missed what was right in front of us -- that movies like 'No Country,' 'Michael Clayton' and 'There Will Be Blood' reflected a real darkness, a grim despair and a sense of mistrust that was very much about our world today," says Mark Harris, author of "Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood." " 'The Bourne Ultimatum' is as cynical a movie about our government and covert operations as any film since the 1970s."The films with the most lasting impact are rarely cinematic versions of op-ed page essays, but ones that rely on a deeper level of artistic inspiration. In 1967, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" was viewed as a timely commentary on race relations. But today, it feels like a musty relic, while "Bonnie and Clyde," though set during the Depression, captures the subversive, anti-heroic spirit of the '60s."Movies aren't really good at reflecting what's in the newspapers, especially in an era where we're so skeptical of what's fact and what's fiction," says Harris. "The best films use indirection. I doubt that the Coens or Gilroy or Anderson tried to sit down and reflect on how we view our leaders today. But that doesn't mean that what's in the papers isn't reflected in their art. It just comes out in more oblique ways."Gilroy says he went through a couple of years after the contested 2000 presidential election where he stopped reading newspapers entirely. "I'd had my heart broken too many times," he says. "It's easier to make a film that reflects your disgust, because it's a story to tell, but it's one step removed from reality. I was still just as upset, so maybe it all came out in my work."
24.2.08
Sadness
The miracle of melancholia
We're a nation obsessed with being happy, but sometimes feeling bad can do you some good.By Eric G. WilsonFebruary 17, 2008In april of 1819, right around the time that he began to suffer the first symptoms of tuberculosis -- the disease that had already killed his mother and his beloved brother, Tom -- the poet John Keats sat down and wrote, in a letter to his brother, George, the following question: "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?" Implied in this inquiry is an idea that is not very popular these days -- at least not in the United States, which is characterized by an almost collective yearning for complete happiness. That idea is this: A person can only become a fully formed human being, as opposed to a mere mind, through suffering and sorrow. This notion would seem quite strange, possibly even deranged, in a country in which almost 85% of the population claims, according to the Pew Research Center, to be "very happy" or at least "happy." Indeed, in light of our recent craze for positive psychology -- a brand of psychotherapy designed not so much to heal mental illness as to increase happiness -- as well as in light of our increasing reliance on pills that reduce sadness, anxiety and fear, we are likely to challenge Keats' meditation outright, to condemn it as a dangerous and dated affront to the modern American dream. But does the American addiction to happiness make any sense, especially in light of the poverty, ecological disaster and war that now haunt the globe, daily annihilating hundreds if not thousands? Isn't it, in fact, a recipe for delusion? And aren't we merely trying to slice away what is most probably an essential part of our hearts, that part that can reconcile us to facts, no matter how harsh, and that also can inspire us to imagine new and more creative ways to engage with the world? Bereft of this integral element of our selves, we settle for a status quo. We yearn for comfort at any cost. We covet a good night's sleep. We trade fortitude for blandness. When Keats invoked the fertility of pain, he knew what he was talking about. Though he was young when he composed his question -- only 24 -- he had already experienced a lifetime of pain. His father had died after falling from a horse when the future poet was only 9. A few years later, Keats nursed his mother assiduously through tuberculosis, but she died in 1810, when he was 15. Soon after, he was taken from a boarding school he loved and required to apprentice as an apothecary; he then underwent a gruesome course in surgery in one of London's hospitals (in the days before anesthesia). Orphaned and mournful, Keats spent his days brooding. But after much contemplation, he decided that sorrow was not a state to be avoided, not a weakness of the will or a disease requiring cure. On the contrary, Keats discovered that his ongoing gloom was in fact the inspiration for his greatest ideas and his most enduring creations. What makes us melancholy, Keats concluded, is our awareness of things inevitably passing -- of brothers dying before they reach 20; of nightingales that cease their songs; of peonies drooping at noon. But it is precisely when we sense impending death that we grasp the world's beauty. Keats was of course not the only great artist to translate melancholia into exuberance. This metamorphosis of sadness to joy has been a perennial if frequently unacknowledged current in Western art. Consider George Frideric Handel, the 18th century composer. By 1741, when he was in his mid-50s, Handel found himself a fallen man. Once a ruler of the musical world, he had suffered several failed operas as well as poor health. He was left in a state of poverty, sickness and heartsickness. Living in a run-down house in a poor part of London, he expected any day to be thrown into debtor's prison or to die. But then, out of nowhere, as if by some divine agency, Handel received a libretto based on the life of Jesus and an invitation to compose a work for a charity benefit performance. On Aug. 22, 1741, in his squalid rooms on Brook Street, Handel saw potentialities no one had before seen. Immediately, he felt a creative vitality course through his veins. During a 24-day period, he barely slept or ate. He only composed, and then composed more. At the close of this brief period, he had completed "Messiah," his greatest work, a gift from the depths of melancholia. We could also recall Georgia O'Keeffe, the 20th century painter. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, O'Keeffe left the East Coast for Taos, N.M. She fell profoundly in love with the lonely vistas of this world denuded of human corruption. However, even though she was enlivened by this part of the world, in 1932, her lifelong battle with melancholia caught up with her. She was hospitalized for psychoneurosis. Rather than quelling her creative spirit, this breakdown did the opposite. Upon being discharged, she returned to the Southwest. There, in 1935, she painted some of her bleakest and most beautiful landscapes: "Purple Hills near Abiquiu" and "Ram's Head, White Hollyhock Hills." Both feature dark things amid the desert's glare -- gloomy shadows and stormy clouds. Into these haunting shades -- hovering amid hard-scrabble rock and a sinister skull -- one stares. One senses something there as silent and sacred as bones.Joni Mitchell confessed in an interview that she has frequently endured long periods of gloom. But she has not shied away from the darkness. Instead, she sees her sorrow as the "sand that makes the pearl" -- as the terrible friction that produces the lustrous sphere. Given her fruitful struggles with sadness, Mitchell has understandably feared its absence. "Chase away the demons," she has said, "and they will take the angels with them." Melancholia, far from error or defect, is an almost miraculous invitation to rise above the contented status quo and imagine untapped possibilities. We need sorrow, constant and robust, to make us human, alive, sensitive to the sweet rhythms of growth and decay, death and life. This of course does not mean that we should simply wallow in gloom, that we should wantonly cultivate depression. I'm not out to romanticize mental illnesses that can end in madness or suicide. On the contrary, following Keats and those like him, I'm valorizing a fundamental emotion too frequently avoided in the American scene. I'm offering hope to those millions who feel guilty for being downhearted. I'm saying that it's more than all right to descend into introspective gloom. In fact, it is crucial, a call to what might be the best portion of ourselves, those depths where the most lasting truths lie. Eric G. Wilson is a professor of English at Wake Forest University and author of "Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy."
We're a nation obsessed with being happy, but sometimes feeling bad can do you some good.By Eric G. WilsonFebruary 17, 2008In april of 1819, right around the time that he began to suffer the first symptoms of tuberculosis -- the disease that had already killed his mother and his beloved brother, Tom -- the poet John Keats sat down and wrote, in a letter to his brother, George, the following question: "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?" Implied in this inquiry is an idea that is not very popular these days -- at least not in the United States, which is characterized by an almost collective yearning for complete happiness. That idea is this: A person can only become a fully formed human being, as opposed to a mere mind, through suffering and sorrow. This notion would seem quite strange, possibly even deranged, in a country in which almost 85% of the population claims, according to the Pew Research Center, to be "very happy" or at least "happy." Indeed, in light of our recent craze for positive psychology -- a brand of psychotherapy designed not so much to heal mental illness as to increase happiness -- as well as in light of our increasing reliance on pills that reduce sadness, anxiety and fear, we are likely to challenge Keats' meditation outright, to condemn it as a dangerous and dated affront to the modern American dream. But does the American addiction to happiness make any sense, especially in light of the poverty, ecological disaster and war that now haunt the globe, daily annihilating hundreds if not thousands? Isn't it, in fact, a recipe for delusion? And aren't we merely trying to slice away what is most probably an essential part of our hearts, that part that can reconcile us to facts, no matter how harsh, and that also can inspire us to imagine new and more creative ways to engage with the world? Bereft of this integral element of our selves, we settle for a status quo. We yearn for comfort at any cost. We covet a good night's sleep. We trade fortitude for blandness. When Keats invoked the fertility of pain, he knew what he was talking about. Though he was young when he composed his question -- only 24 -- he had already experienced a lifetime of pain. His father had died after falling from a horse when the future poet was only 9. A few years later, Keats nursed his mother assiduously through tuberculosis, but she died in 1810, when he was 15. Soon after, he was taken from a boarding school he loved and required to apprentice as an apothecary; he then underwent a gruesome course in surgery in one of London's hospitals (in the days before anesthesia). Orphaned and mournful, Keats spent his days brooding. But after much contemplation, he decided that sorrow was not a state to be avoided, not a weakness of the will or a disease requiring cure. On the contrary, Keats discovered that his ongoing gloom was in fact the inspiration for his greatest ideas and his most enduring creations. What makes us melancholy, Keats concluded, is our awareness of things inevitably passing -- of brothers dying before they reach 20; of nightingales that cease their songs; of peonies drooping at noon. But it is precisely when we sense impending death that we grasp the world's beauty. Keats was of course not the only great artist to translate melancholia into exuberance. This metamorphosis of sadness to joy has been a perennial if frequently unacknowledged current in Western art. Consider George Frideric Handel, the 18th century composer. By 1741, when he was in his mid-50s, Handel found himself a fallen man. Once a ruler of the musical world, he had suffered several failed operas as well as poor health. He was left in a state of poverty, sickness and heartsickness. Living in a run-down house in a poor part of London, he expected any day to be thrown into debtor's prison or to die. But then, out of nowhere, as if by some divine agency, Handel received a libretto based on the life of Jesus and an invitation to compose a work for a charity benefit performance. On Aug. 22, 1741, in his squalid rooms on Brook Street, Handel saw potentialities no one had before seen. Immediately, he felt a creative vitality course through his veins. During a 24-day period, he barely slept or ate. He only composed, and then composed more. At the close of this brief period, he had completed "Messiah," his greatest work, a gift from the depths of melancholia. We could also recall Georgia O'Keeffe, the 20th century painter. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, O'Keeffe left the East Coast for Taos, N.M. She fell profoundly in love with the lonely vistas of this world denuded of human corruption. However, even though she was enlivened by this part of the world, in 1932, her lifelong battle with melancholia caught up with her. She was hospitalized for psychoneurosis. Rather than quelling her creative spirit, this breakdown did the opposite. Upon being discharged, she returned to the Southwest. There, in 1935, she painted some of her bleakest and most beautiful landscapes: "Purple Hills near Abiquiu" and "Ram's Head, White Hollyhock Hills." Both feature dark things amid the desert's glare -- gloomy shadows and stormy clouds. Into these haunting shades -- hovering amid hard-scrabble rock and a sinister skull -- one stares. One senses something there as silent and sacred as bones.Joni Mitchell confessed in an interview that she has frequently endured long periods of gloom. But she has not shied away from the darkness. Instead, she sees her sorrow as the "sand that makes the pearl" -- as the terrible friction that produces the lustrous sphere. Given her fruitful struggles with sadness, Mitchell has understandably feared its absence. "Chase away the demons," she has said, "and they will take the angels with them." Melancholia, far from error or defect, is an almost miraculous invitation to rise above the contented status quo and imagine untapped possibilities. We need sorrow, constant and robust, to make us human, alive, sensitive to the sweet rhythms of growth and decay, death and life. This of course does not mean that we should simply wallow in gloom, that we should wantonly cultivate depression. I'm not out to romanticize mental illnesses that can end in madness or suicide. On the contrary, following Keats and those like him, I'm valorizing a fundamental emotion too frequently avoided in the American scene. I'm offering hope to those millions who feel guilty for being downhearted. I'm saying that it's more than all right to descend into introspective gloom. In fact, it is crucial, a call to what might be the best portion of ourselves, those depths where the most lasting truths lie. Eric G. Wilson is a professor of English at Wake Forest University and author of "Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy."
23.2.08
Pepys
It's the birthday of the diarist Samuel Pepys, born in London (1633), the son of a tailor and maid. He had a cousin, the Earl of Sandwich, who got him good government jobs and when he was 26 years old, he made a New Year's resolution to keep an account of the events in his life. On January 1, 1660, he made his first diary entry:
This morning (we living lately in the garret,) I rose, put on my suit with great skirts. Went to Mr. Gunning's chapel at Exeter House, where he made a very good sermon. ... Dined at home in the garret, where my wife dressed the remains of a turkey, and in the doing of it she burned her hand. ... I staid at home all the afternoon, looking over my accounts; then went with my wife to my father's ...
Alongside the trivial, day-by-day details that he recorded, he also wrote about the coronation of Charles II in 1660, the Great Plague of 1665, and the Great Fire of 1666.
There was only one London newspaper at his time, and it was controlled by the government, so much of what we know about this period in history has been taken from Pepys's diary. He loved to go to plays and concerts, and he wrote about the performances that he attended.
Once, after attending a wedding, he mused in his diary, "Strange, to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and wife gazing and smiling at them."
He wrote about going to the bathroom, having sex with his wife, and his extramarital affairs — and for content that was sexual in nature, he often replaced English words with a mixture of shorthand, Latin, Greek, Spanish, French, German, and his own secret code. It took three years for a scholar to transcribe the diaries into plain English.
Pepys quit writing the diary in 1669 — almost 10 years after starting it — because his eyesight was failing and he feared going blind.
This morning (we living lately in the garret,) I rose, put on my suit with great skirts. Went to Mr. Gunning's chapel at Exeter House, where he made a very good sermon. ... Dined at home in the garret, where my wife dressed the remains of a turkey, and in the doing of it she burned her hand. ... I staid at home all the afternoon, looking over my accounts; then went with my wife to my father's ...
Alongside the trivial, day-by-day details that he recorded, he also wrote about the coronation of Charles II in 1660, the Great Plague of 1665, and the Great Fire of 1666.
There was only one London newspaper at his time, and it was controlled by the government, so much of what we know about this period in history has been taken from Pepys's diary. He loved to go to plays and concerts, and he wrote about the performances that he attended.
Once, after attending a wedding, he mused in his diary, "Strange, to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and wife gazing and smiling at them."
He wrote about going to the bathroom, having sex with his wife, and his extramarital affairs — and for content that was sexual in nature, he often replaced English words with a mixture of shorthand, Latin, Greek, Spanish, French, German, and his own secret code. It took three years for a scholar to transcribe the diaries into plain English.
Pepys quit writing the diary in 1669 — almost 10 years after starting it — because his eyesight was failing and he feared going blind.
22.2.08
Happy Birthday Mr. Washington!
Ten Things You Never Knew about George Washington, born on this day in 1732:
His dentures carved from a hippopotamus tusk. They were drilled with a hole to fit over Washington's one remaining tooth, and they rubbed against his natural tooth in such a way that Washington was in constant pain, and so he used an alcoholic solution infused with opium.
By the time he reached 30, he had survived malaria, smallpox, pleurisy, dysentery. He was fired at on two separate occasions — and in one of them, his horse was shot out from under him and four bullets punctured his coat. He also fell off a raft into an icy river and nearly drowned.
During the last night of his life, a doctor friend came over to perform an emergency tracheotomy on Washington. Arriving too late, the doctor tried to resurrect Washington by thawing him in cold water, then wrapping him in blankets and rubbing him in order to activate blood vessels, then opening his trachea to inflate his lungs with air, and then transfusing blood from a lamb into him.
He enjoyed playing cards, hunting foxes and ducks, fishing, cockfighting, horse racing, boat racing, and dancing. He bred hound dogs and gave them names like "Sweet Lips" and "Tarter."
His favorite foods included mashed potatoes with coconut, string beans with mushrooms, cream of peanut soup, salt cod, and pineapples.
He snored very loudly.
He did not wear a powdered wig, as was fashionable at the time. Instead, he powdered his own red-brown hair.
Washington had a speech impediment and was not good at spelling. He would often mix up i's and e's when speaking and in writing.
There are 33 counties, seven mountains, nine colleges, and 121 post offices named after Washington.
He delivered the shortest inaugural address ever. It was only 133 words long and took 90 seconds to deliver.
His dentures carved from a hippopotamus tusk. They were drilled with a hole to fit over Washington's one remaining tooth, and they rubbed against his natural tooth in such a way that Washington was in constant pain, and so he used an alcoholic solution infused with opium.
By the time he reached 30, he had survived malaria, smallpox, pleurisy, dysentery. He was fired at on two separate occasions — and in one of them, his horse was shot out from under him and four bullets punctured his coat. He also fell off a raft into an icy river and nearly drowned.
During the last night of his life, a doctor friend came over to perform an emergency tracheotomy on Washington. Arriving too late, the doctor tried to resurrect Washington by thawing him in cold water, then wrapping him in blankets and rubbing him in order to activate blood vessels, then opening his trachea to inflate his lungs with air, and then transfusing blood from a lamb into him.
He enjoyed playing cards, hunting foxes and ducks, fishing, cockfighting, horse racing, boat racing, and dancing. He bred hound dogs and gave them names like "Sweet Lips" and "Tarter."
His favorite foods included mashed potatoes with coconut, string beans with mushrooms, cream of peanut soup, salt cod, and pineapples.
He snored very loudly.
He did not wear a powdered wig, as was fashionable at the time. Instead, he powdered his own red-brown hair.
Washington had a speech impediment and was not good at spelling. He would often mix up i's and e's when speaking and in writing.
There are 33 counties, seven mountains, nine colleges, and 121 post offices named after Washington.
He delivered the shortest inaugural address ever. It was only 133 words long and took 90 seconds to deliver.
SAD
In april of 1819, right around the time that he began to suffer the first symptoms of tuberculosis -- the disease that had already killed his mother and his beloved brother, Tom -- the poet John Keats sat down and wrote, in a letter to his brother, George, the following question: "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?"
Implied in this inquiry is an idea that is not very popular these days -- at least not in the United States, which is characterized by an almost collective yearning for complete happiness. That idea is this: A person can only become a fully formed human being, as opposed to a mere mind, through suffering and sorrow. This notion would seem quite strange, possibly even deranged, in a country in which almost 85% of the population claims, according to the Pew Research Center, to be "very happy" or at least "happy."
Indeed, in light of our recent craze for positive psychology -- a brand of psychotherapy designed not so much to heal mental illness as to increase happiness -- as well as in light of our increasing reliance on pills that reduce sadness, anxiety and fear, we are likely to challenge Keats' meditation outright, to condemn it as a dangerous and dated affront to the modern American dream.
But does the American addiction to happiness make any sense, especially in light of the poverty, ecological disaster and war that now haunt the globe, daily annihilating hundreds if not thousands? Isn't it, in fact, a recipe for delusion?
And aren't we merely trying to slice away what is most probably an essential part of our hearts, that part that can reconcile us to facts, no matter how harsh, and that also can inspire us to imagine new and more creative ways to engage with the world? Bereft of this integral element of our selves, we settle for a status quo. We yearn for comfort at any cost. We covet a good night's sleep. We trade fortitude for blandness.
When Keats invoked the fertility of pain, he knew what he was talking about. Though he was young when he composed his question -- only 24 -- he had already experienced a lifetime of pain. His father had died after falling from a horse when the future poet was only 9. A few years later, Keats nursed his mother assiduously through tuberculosis, but she died in 1810, when he was 15. Soon after, he was taken from a boarding school he loved and required to apprentice as an apothecary; he then underwent a gruesome course in surgery in one of London's hospitals (in the days before anesthesia).
Orphaned and mournful, Keats spent his days brooding. But after much contemplation, he decided that sorrow was not a state to be avoided, not a weakness of the will or a disease requiring cure. On the contrary, Keats discovered that his ongoing gloom was in fact the inspiration for his greatest ideas and his most enduring creations.
What makes us melancholy, Keats concluded, is our awareness of things inevitably passing -- of brothers dying before they reach 20; of nightingales that cease their songs; of peonies drooping at noon. But it is precisely when we sense impending death that we grasp the world's beauty.
Keats was of course not the only great artist to translate melancholia into exuberance. This metamorphosis of sadness to joy has been a perennial if frequently unacknowledged current in Western art.
Consider George Frideric Handel, the 18th century composer. By 1741, when he was in his mid-50s, Handel found himself a fallen man. Once a ruler of the musical world, he had suffered several failed operas as well as poor health. He was left in a state of poverty, sickness and heartsickness. Living in a run-down house in a poor part of London, he expected any day to be thrown into debtor's prison or to die.
But then, out of nowhere, as if by some divine agency, Handel received a libretto based on the life of Jesus and an invitation to compose a work for a charity benefit performance. On Aug. 22, 1741, in his squalid rooms on Brook Street, Handel saw potentialities no one had before seen. Immediately, he felt a creative vitality course through his veins. During a 24-day period, he barely slept or ate. He only composed, and then composed more. At the close of this brief period, he had completed "Messiah," his greatest work, a gift from the depths of melancholia.
We could also recall Georgia O'Keeffe, the 20th century painter. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, O'Keeffe left the East Coast for Taos, N.M. She fell profoundly in love with the lonely vistas of this world denuded of human corruption. However, even though she was enlivened by this part of the world, in 1932, her lifelong battle with melancholia caught up with her. She was hospitalized for psychoneurosis.
Rather than quelling her creative spirit, this breakdown did the opposite. Upon being discharged, she returned to the Southwest. There, in 1935, she painted some of her bleakest and most beautiful landscapes: "Purple Hills near Abiquiu" and "Ram's Head, White Hollyhock Hills." Both feature dark things amid the desert's glare -- gloomy shadows and stormy clouds. Into these haunting shades -- hovering amid hard-scrabble rock and a sinister skull -- one stares. One senses something there as silent and sacred as bones.
Joni Mitchell confessed in an interview that she has frequently endured long periods of gloom. But she has not shied away from the darkness. Instead, she sees her sorrow as the "sand that makes the pearl" -- as the terrible friction that produces the lustrous sphere. Given her fruitful struggles with sadness, Mitchell has understandably feared its absence. "Chase away the demons," she has said, "and they will take the angels with them."
Melancholia, far from error or defect, is an almost miraculous invitation to rise above the contented status quo and imagine untapped possibilities. We need sorrow, constant and robust, to make us human, alive, sensitive to the sweet rhythms of growth and decay, death and life.
This of course does not mean that we should simply wallow in gloom, that we should wantonly cultivate depression. I'm not out to romanticize mental illnesses that can end in madness or suicide.
On the contrary, following Keats and those like him, I'm valorizing a fundamental emotion too frequently avoided in the American scene. I'm offering hope to those millions who feel guilty for being downhearted. I'm saying that it's more than all right to descend into introspective gloom. In fact, it is crucial, a call to what might be the best portion of ourselves, those depths where the most lasting truths lie.
Implied in this inquiry is an idea that is not very popular these days -- at least not in the United States, which is characterized by an almost collective yearning for complete happiness. That idea is this: A person can only become a fully formed human being, as opposed to a mere mind, through suffering and sorrow. This notion would seem quite strange, possibly even deranged, in a country in which almost 85% of the population claims, according to the Pew Research Center, to be "very happy" or at least "happy."
Indeed, in light of our recent craze for positive psychology -- a brand of psychotherapy designed not so much to heal mental illness as to increase happiness -- as well as in light of our increasing reliance on pills that reduce sadness, anxiety and fear, we are likely to challenge Keats' meditation outright, to condemn it as a dangerous and dated affront to the modern American dream.
But does the American addiction to happiness make any sense, especially in light of the poverty, ecological disaster and war that now haunt the globe, daily annihilating hundreds if not thousands? Isn't it, in fact, a recipe for delusion?
And aren't we merely trying to slice away what is most probably an essential part of our hearts, that part that can reconcile us to facts, no matter how harsh, and that also can inspire us to imagine new and more creative ways to engage with the world? Bereft of this integral element of our selves, we settle for a status quo. We yearn for comfort at any cost. We covet a good night's sleep. We trade fortitude for blandness.
When Keats invoked the fertility of pain, he knew what he was talking about. Though he was young when he composed his question -- only 24 -- he had already experienced a lifetime of pain. His father had died after falling from a horse when the future poet was only 9. A few years later, Keats nursed his mother assiduously through tuberculosis, but she died in 1810, when he was 15. Soon after, he was taken from a boarding school he loved and required to apprentice as an apothecary; he then underwent a gruesome course in surgery in one of London's hospitals (in the days before anesthesia).
Orphaned and mournful, Keats spent his days brooding. But after much contemplation, he decided that sorrow was not a state to be avoided, not a weakness of the will or a disease requiring cure. On the contrary, Keats discovered that his ongoing gloom was in fact the inspiration for his greatest ideas and his most enduring creations.
What makes us melancholy, Keats concluded, is our awareness of things inevitably passing -- of brothers dying before they reach 20; of nightingales that cease their songs; of peonies drooping at noon. But it is precisely when we sense impending death that we grasp the world's beauty.
Keats was of course not the only great artist to translate melancholia into exuberance. This metamorphosis of sadness to joy has been a perennial if frequently unacknowledged current in Western art.
Consider George Frideric Handel, the 18th century composer. By 1741, when he was in his mid-50s, Handel found himself a fallen man. Once a ruler of the musical world, he had suffered several failed operas as well as poor health. He was left in a state of poverty, sickness and heartsickness. Living in a run-down house in a poor part of London, he expected any day to be thrown into debtor's prison or to die.
But then, out of nowhere, as if by some divine agency, Handel received a libretto based on the life of Jesus and an invitation to compose a work for a charity benefit performance. On Aug. 22, 1741, in his squalid rooms on Brook Street, Handel saw potentialities no one had before seen. Immediately, he felt a creative vitality course through his veins. During a 24-day period, he barely slept or ate. He only composed, and then composed more. At the close of this brief period, he had completed "Messiah," his greatest work, a gift from the depths of melancholia.
We could also recall Georgia O'Keeffe, the 20th century painter. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, O'Keeffe left the East Coast for Taos, N.M. She fell profoundly in love with the lonely vistas of this world denuded of human corruption. However, even though she was enlivened by this part of the world, in 1932, her lifelong battle with melancholia caught up with her. She was hospitalized for psychoneurosis.
Rather than quelling her creative spirit, this breakdown did the opposite. Upon being discharged, she returned to the Southwest. There, in 1935, she painted some of her bleakest and most beautiful landscapes: "Purple Hills near Abiquiu" and "Ram's Head, White Hollyhock Hills." Both feature dark things amid the desert's glare -- gloomy shadows and stormy clouds. Into these haunting shades -- hovering amid hard-scrabble rock and a sinister skull -- one stares. One senses something there as silent and sacred as bones.
Joni Mitchell confessed in an interview that she has frequently endured long periods of gloom. But she has not shied away from the darkness. Instead, she sees her sorrow as the "sand that makes the pearl" -- as the terrible friction that produces the lustrous sphere. Given her fruitful struggles with sadness, Mitchell has understandably feared its absence. "Chase away the demons," she has said, "and they will take the angels with them."
Melancholia, far from error or defect, is an almost miraculous invitation to rise above the contented status quo and imagine untapped possibilities. We need sorrow, constant and robust, to make us human, alive, sensitive to the sweet rhythms of growth and decay, death and life.
This of course does not mean that we should simply wallow in gloom, that we should wantonly cultivate depression. I'm not out to romanticize mental illnesses that can end in madness or suicide.
On the contrary, following Keats and those like him, I'm valorizing a fundamental emotion too frequently avoided in the American scene. I'm offering hope to those millions who feel guilty for being downhearted. I'm saying that it's more than all right to descend into introspective gloom. In fact, it is crucial, a call to what might be the best portion of ourselves, those depths where the most lasting truths lie.
21.2.08
Orrance
In the old days, if you were an ambitious young Englishman looking for adventure and glory, your career path was obvious: You became a servant of the British Empire. The memoirs of George Orwell and Leonard Woolf, like the fiction of Rudyard Kipling, give a vivid sense of how exciting a young proconsul's life could be. Back home, he was just another 22-year-old, on the bottom rung of the career ladder; in India or Burma or Malaya, he was a combination of king, judge, and general, ruling a village or even a whole province with no one to supervise him. Orwell, who wrote in "Shooting an Elephant" that his experience as a policeman in Burma "oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt," recognized that even the hatred of the native population was a tribute to his power: "I was hated by large numbers of people — the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me."
Even today, from time to time, a young Englishman falls under the spell of the British Empire; and since he can no longer govern it, he usually decides to write about it instead. James Barr, the author of "Setting the Desert on Fire" (Norton, 382 pages, $27.95) is a fine example of the type. There is no real reason why, in order to write this book about Lawrence of Arabia, Mr. Barr had to visit the sites of Lawrence's exploits. Yet every few chapters, Mr. Barr interrupts his narrative to tell us that, 90 years after Lawrence crossed this desert or attacked that railroad station, he was there as well. "From the police station, three hundred yards away to the west, I could see a dark hill that rises steeply out of a dusty plain," he writes in one typical aside. "It must have been from there that, on the night of 17 September 1917, Lawrence ... looked down on the station behind me, which was blazing with yellow light from within." This is not just history writing, but channeling, or even an elevated kind of play-acting — the author imagining himself as the soldier that, a hundred years ago, he might have been.
As Mr. Barr proves, this is just the right spirit in which to approach T.E. Lawrence. For if generations of readers (and moviegoers) have imagined themselves playing Lawrence — riding on camelback through a blazing waste, leading proud tribesmen on lightning raids — Mr. Barr shows that the first person to revel in playing Lawrence of Arabia was Lawrence himself. Reporting to a friend about an attack on a Turkish troop train, he wrote, "I hope this sounds the fun it is ... It's the most amateurishly Buffalo-Billy sort of performance." At times, he was even oppressed by the sense that he was a kind of vaudeville cowboy, and Arabia a "foreign stage on which one plays day and night, in fancy dress, in a strange language.... The whole thing is such a play, and one cannot put conviction into one's daydreams."
Lawrence's desert war was "such a play," such "fun," because it was, to a really amazing extent, like a boy's idea of war, all exploits and highjinks. "There aren't any returns, or orders, or superiors, or inferiors," he exulted. All that was back in Cairo, where the British had their headquarters, and where Lawrence worked on the intelligence staff until 1916. He had never been happy there, or popular: One of his superiors described him as "a bumptious young ass who spoils his undoubted knowledge of Syrian Arabs etc by making himself out to be the only authority on war, engineering, running HM's ships and everything else. He put every single person's back up I've met." In fact, the 28-year-old captain was so sure of himself that he had already developed his own strategy for winning the war in the Middle East: "I want to pull [the Arabs] all together, & to roll up Syria by way of the Hijaz in the name of the Sharif."
The Sharif in question was Husein, the ruler of Mecca, who in 1916 placed himself at the head of what was meant to be a pan-Arab rebellion against the Ottoman Empire. The British were eager to help — not just because it would be a way of striking at the Turks after the British defeat at Gallipoli, but still more because Husein represented a challenge to the Sultan's authority as caliph, or leader of the Muslim faithful. As the rulers of tens of millions of Muslims in India, the British were worried, to what now seems a paranoid degree, by the prospect of a worldwide jihad on behalf of the Turks. (As Mr. Barr remarks, this scenario forms the plot of the classic spy novel "Greenmantle," by John Buchan, which was published in 1916.)
But by the fall, the Arab Revolt was stalled outside the gates of Medina, and the British were beginning to realize that in Husein they had an unstable ally with delusions of grandeur. It was in this fraught moment that Lawrence seized his chance. Largely on his own initiative, he set out for Jeddah, and before long he had made himself the key liaison between the British in Cairo and Feisal, one of Husein's sons and the commander of his northern army. Roaming the desert with Feisal's Bedouin fighters, out of contact with his nominal superiors for weeks or months at a time, Lawrence was able to conduct a freelance war. His primary mission was to sabotage the Hijaz Railway, the only means for the Turks to supply their garrison in Medina. This meant that most of Lawrence's actual exploits were on a very small scale — an affair of a few dozen men planting explosives under a bridge, ripping up a hundred yards of railroad track, or machine-gunning a lonely train station.
Indeed, reading Mr. Barr's tightly focused, fast-paced account of these episodes, it is striking how minuscule Lawrence's war remained, compared with the industrial slaughter that was going on in France. As Mr. Barr writes, the money the British spent in Arabia in a year would have paid for just seven hours of fighting on the Western Front. The human scale, too, was different. Because the Bedouin tribesmen were volunteers unused to army discipline, Lawrence had to be very sparing with his human material. The casualty rate taken for granted in France was unthinkable in Arabia, where "an individual death was like a pebble dropped in water ... rings of sorrow widened out from them."
This contrast is exactly why Lawrence became such a mythic figure, one of the few real heroes to emerge from World War I. For the vast majority of soldiers, that war was a matter of stasis, constant bombardment, futile frontal attacks, and random slaughter. Lawrence's campaigns, on the other hand, were full of heroism and movement and mischief. In fact, there was something essentially boyish about the kind of sabotage he practiced, as another British officer readily admitted: "We could indulge in a love of destruction which had lain latent in us since we were small boys." And the Arab Revolt was full of larger-than-life characters, some of whom would not have been out of place in the Trojan War. Auda abu Tayi, the Huwaytat chieftain who boasted of having killed 75 Arabs (he didn't keep track of Turks), and ate the hearts of his slain enemies, was a man such as Achilles must have been.
If Mr. Barr conveys the romance of Lawrence's war, however, he also allows us occasional glimpses of its barbarism. Because the Bedouin fought at such close range, the violence they dealt out was more personal, and at times more sadistic, than the anonymous slaughter of the trenches. Some of the locomotives Lawrence so gleefully blew up, Mr. Barr points out, were carrying women and children refugees from Medina, or sick and wounded Turkish soldiers. In one especially horrible episode, after the Arabs came across the village of Tafas, where the Turks had committed atrocities, they proceeded to massacre hundreds of Turkish prisoners. "In a madness born of the horror of Tafas," Lawrence wrote, "we killed and killed, even blowing in the heads of the fallen and of the animals; as though their death and running blood could slake our agony."
This elevated style is typical of "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," Lawrence's classic memoir, and makes that book rather cloying over the long run. It is not surprising to learn from Mr. Barr that, even during the fighting, Lawrence was already planning how he would write about it: His whole career was conceived in aesthetic terms. Mr. Barr's achievement is to tell Lawrence's story more clearly and objectively, helping to make sense of a complex war fought in an unfamiliar land and language.
"Setting the Desert on Fire" only glances, however, at the most important ramifications of the Arab Revolt, which continues to shape Middle Eastern politics to this day. For while the British encouraged Sharif Husein in the idea that he would be made king of all Arabia, they had no intention of ever keeping this promise. They counted on Husein's revolt being confined to the Hijaz — the coastal area where Mecca and Medina lie. In fact, under the terms of the secret Sykes-Picot Treaty between Britain and France, the whole Arab Middle East had already been divided up between the two empires, with Syria going to the French and Iraq to the British.
Lawrence, whose idealized passion for the Arabs and their way of life led him to yearn for a free, independent Arab Empire, did all he could to undermine this cynical division of the spoils. It was largely thanks to Lawrence that the Arab forces ended up pressing as far north as Damascus, which they entered just before the British army of General Allenby, late in 1918. The result was that Husein's dynasty, the Hashemites, ended the war claiming the right to rule all of Arabia.
In a short epilogue, Mr. Barr shows the reckless and shortsighted way the British met these claims. Two of Husein's sons were made kings of the puppet states the British created in the Arab lands: Abdullah was given Jordan, where his dynasty still reigns, and Feisal was placed on the throne of Iraq, where the monarchy was overthrown in 1958. Both these dynasties, like the states they ruled, were entirely arbitrary creations, imposed by the British in defiance of cultural and political logic. Even Feisal acknowledged that "there is still — and I say this with a heart of sorrow — no Iraqi people, but unimaginable masses of human beings, devoid of any patriotic idea ... prone to anarchy and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatever."
As these words show, not much has changed in Iraq. Today, when America tries to pacify a country divided between Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds, it is reaping what the British sowed. A similar story could be told of Palestine, where Britain's failure to reconcile its promises to the Arabs with the commitment it made to the Jews, in the Balfour Declaration, helped to create the unending Arab-Israeli conflict. Even Osama bin Laden, Mr. Barr shows, lists the Sykes-Picot agreement as one of his major historical grievances.
Seen from today's perspective, then, Lawrence's story looks less like a chivalric romance than like a case of imperial arrogance run amok. Only by taking advantage of the incredible carelessness and cynicism of the men who ran the British Empire was a junior officer able to remake the Middle East according to his own whims. It is enough to make one glad that there is no more British Empire, even if it means that there will never be another Lawrence of Arabia.
Even today, from time to time, a young Englishman falls under the spell of the British Empire; and since he can no longer govern it, he usually decides to write about it instead. James Barr, the author of "Setting the Desert on Fire" (Norton, 382 pages, $27.95) is a fine example of the type. There is no real reason why, in order to write this book about Lawrence of Arabia, Mr. Barr had to visit the sites of Lawrence's exploits. Yet every few chapters, Mr. Barr interrupts his narrative to tell us that, 90 years after Lawrence crossed this desert or attacked that railroad station, he was there as well. "From the police station, three hundred yards away to the west, I could see a dark hill that rises steeply out of a dusty plain," he writes in one typical aside. "It must have been from there that, on the night of 17 September 1917, Lawrence ... looked down on the station behind me, which was blazing with yellow light from within." This is not just history writing, but channeling, or even an elevated kind of play-acting — the author imagining himself as the soldier that, a hundred years ago, he might have been.
As Mr. Barr proves, this is just the right spirit in which to approach T.E. Lawrence. For if generations of readers (and moviegoers) have imagined themselves playing Lawrence — riding on camelback through a blazing waste, leading proud tribesmen on lightning raids — Mr. Barr shows that the first person to revel in playing Lawrence of Arabia was Lawrence himself. Reporting to a friend about an attack on a Turkish troop train, he wrote, "I hope this sounds the fun it is ... It's the most amateurishly Buffalo-Billy sort of performance." At times, he was even oppressed by the sense that he was a kind of vaudeville cowboy, and Arabia a "foreign stage on which one plays day and night, in fancy dress, in a strange language.... The whole thing is such a play, and one cannot put conviction into one's daydreams."
Lawrence's desert war was "such a play," such "fun," because it was, to a really amazing extent, like a boy's idea of war, all exploits and highjinks. "There aren't any returns, or orders, or superiors, or inferiors," he exulted. All that was back in Cairo, where the British had their headquarters, and where Lawrence worked on the intelligence staff until 1916. He had never been happy there, or popular: One of his superiors described him as "a bumptious young ass who spoils his undoubted knowledge of Syrian Arabs etc by making himself out to be the only authority on war, engineering, running HM's ships and everything else. He put every single person's back up I've met." In fact, the 28-year-old captain was so sure of himself that he had already developed his own strategy for winning the war in the Middle East: "I want to pull [the Arabs] all together, & to roll up Syria by way of the Hijaz in the name of the Sharif."
The Sharif in question was Husein, the ruler of Mecca, who in 1916 placed himself at the head of what was meant to be a pan-Arab rebellion against the Ottoman Empire. The British were eager to help — not just because it would be a way of striking at the Turks after the British defeat at Gallipoli, but still more because Husein represented a challenge to the Sultan's authority as caliph, or leader of the Muslim faithful. As the rulers of tens of millions of Muslims in India, the British were worried, to what now seems a paranoid degree, by the prospect of a worldwide jihad on behalf of the Turks. (As Mr. Barr remarks, this scenario forms the plot of the classic spy novel "Greenmantle," by John Buchan, which was published in 1916.)
But by the fall, the Arab Revolt was stalled outside the gates of Medina, and the British were beginning to realize that in Husein they had an unstable ally with delusions of grandeur. It was in this fraught moment that Lawrence seized his chance. Largely on his own initiative, he set out for Jeddah, and before long he had made himself the key liaison between the British in Cairo and Feisal, one of Husein's sons and the commander of his northern army. Roaming the desert with Feisal's Bedouin fighters, out of contact with his nominal superiors for weeks or months at a time, Lawrence was able to conduct a freelance war. His primary mission was to sabotage the Hijaz Railway, the only means for the Turks to supply their garrison in Medina. This meant that most of Lawrence's actual exploits were on a very small scale — an affair of a few dozen men planting explosives under a bridge, ripping up a hundred yards of railroad track, or machine-gunning a lonely train station.
Indeed, reading Mr. Barr's tightly focused, fast-paced account of these episodes, it is striking how minuscule Lawrence's war remained, compared with the industrial slaughter that was going on in France. As Mr. Barr writes, the money the British spent in Arabia in a year would have paid for just seven hours of fighting on the Western Front. The human scale, too, was different. Because the Bedouin tribesmen were volunteers unused to army discipline, Lawrence had to be very sparing with his human material. The casualty rate taken for granted in France was unthinkable in Arabia, where "an individual death was like a pebble dropped in water ... rings of sorrow widened out from them."
This contrast is exactly why Lawrence became such a mythic figure, one of the few real heroes to emerge from World War I. For the vast majority of soldiers, that war was a matter of stasis, constant bombardment, futile frontal attacks, and random slaughter. Lawrence's campaigns, on the other hand, were full of heroism and movement and mischief. In fact, there was something essentially boyish about the kind of sabotage he practiced, as another British officer readily admitted: "We could indulge in a love of destruction which had lain latent in us since we were small boys." And the Arab Revolt was full of larger-than-life characters, some of whom would not have been out of place in the Trojan War. Auda abu Tayi, the Huwaytat chieftain who boasted of having killed 75 Arabs (he didn't keep track of Turks), and ate the hearts of his slain enemies, was a man such as Achilles must have been.
If Mr. Barr conveys the romance of Lawrence's war, however, he also allows us occasional glimpses of its barbarism. Because the Bedouin fought at such close range, the violence they dealt out was more personal, and at times more sadistic, than the anonymous slaughter of the trenches. Some of the locomotives Lawrence so gleefully blew up, Mr. Barr points out, were carrying women and children refugees from Medina, or sick and wounded Turkish soldiers. In one especially horrible episode, after the Arabs came across the village of Tafas, where the Turks had committed atrocities, they proceeded to massacre hundreds of Turkish prisoners. "In a madness born of the horror of Tafas," Lawrence wrote, "we killed and killed, even blowing in the heads of the fallen and of the animals; as though their death and running blood could slake our agony."
This elevated style is typical of "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," Lawrence's classic memoir, and makes that book rather cloying over the long run. It is not surprising to learn from Mr. Barr that, even during the fighting, Lawrence was already planning how he would write about it: His whole career was conceived in aesthetic terms. Mr. Barr's achievement is to tell Lawrence's story more clearly and objectively, helping to make sense of a complex war fought in an unfamiliar land and language.
"Setting the Desert on Fire" only glances, however, at the most important ramifications of the Arab Revolt, which continues to shape Middle Eastern politics to this day. For while the British encouraged Sharif Husein in the idea that he would be made king of all Arabia, they had no intention of ever keeping this promise. They counted on Husein's revolt being confined to the Hijaz — the coastal area where Mecca and Medina lie. In fact, under the terms of the secret Sykes-Picot Treaty between Britain and France, the whole Arab Middle East had already been divided up between the two empires, with Syria going to the French and Iraq to the British.
Lawrence, whose idealized passion for the Arabs and their way of life led him to yearn for a free, independent Arab Empire, did all he could to undermine this cynical division of the spoils. It was largely thanks to Lawrence that the Arab forces ended up pressing as far north as Damascus, which they entered just before the British army of General Allenby, late in 1918. The result was that Husein's dynasty, the Hashemites, ended the war claiming the right to rule all of Arabia.
In a short epilogue, Mr. Barr shows the reckless and shortsighted way the British met these claims. Two of Husein's sons were made kings of the puppet states the British created in the Arab lands: Abdullah was given Jordan, where his dynasty still reigns, and Feisal was placed on the throne of Iraq, where the monarchy was overthrown in 1958. Both these dynasties, like the states they ruled, were entirely arbitrary creations, imposed by the British in defiance of cultural and political logic. Even Feisal acknowledged that "there is still — and I say this with a heart of sorrow — no Iraqi people, but unimaginable masses of human beings, devoid of any patriotic idea ... prone to anarchy and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatever."
As these words show, not much has changed in Iraq. Today, when America tries to pacify a country divided between Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds, it is reaping what the British sowed. A similar story could be told of Palestine, where Britain's failure to reconcile its promises to the Arabs with the commitment it made to the Jews, in the Balfour Declaration, helped to create the unending Arab-Israeli conflict. Even Osama bin Laden, Mr. Barr shows, lists the Sykes-Picot agreement as one of his major historical grievances.
Seen from today's perspective, then, Lawrence's story looks less like a chivalric romance than like a case of imperial arrogance run amok. Only by taking advantage of the incredible carelessness and cynicism of the men who ran the British Empire was a junior officer able to remake the Middle East according to his own whims. It is enough to make one glad that there is no more British Empire, even if it means that there will never be another Lawrence of Arabia.
20.2.08
Paranoia
Have you seen the latest issue of Paranoia magazine?
No? Well, that's not surprising, is it? There's a very good reason why you haven't seen it: They don't want you to see it. They know that Paranoia exposes them and their secret conspiracies to control every aspect of human life.
Who are they? Good question. That's exactly what they don't want you to know. And it's exactly what Paranoia reveals in every issue. They are the secret government. They are the Freemasons, the CIA, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, the New World Order, the Secret Council of Ten. They are the people who killed JFK, who covered up the truth about UFOs, who plotted the attacks of 9/11. They control the world and everything in it, including your mind unless you've got a tinfoil hat like the one I'm wearing right now to prevent them from bombarding my brain with secret mind-control rays.
Wait a minute . . . where was I? Oh, right, Paranoia magazine. It's an incredible magazine, founded in 1992, circulation 15,000, published three times a year and packed with the kind of information that the mainstream media won't tell you because they are part of them.
The latest issue reveals a secret Pentagon plot to control the weather with radio signals. It also reveals the secret connection between the JFK assassination and "the contamination of the polio vaccine with cancer-causing monkey viruses."
This issue of Paranoia also reveals that David Icke, the British conspiracy theorist who disclosed in a previous issue of Paranoia that the queen of England is really a shape-shifting Satanic reptile, is himself funded by money that comes from the Rockefellers, who Icke had previously identified as "reptilian full-bloods." It kinda makes you wonder about Icke, doesn't it?
And that's not all. The new issue of Paranoia also has a story about Lt. Col. Tom Bearden a "microphysics wizard" who has revealed that "1) Nothing contains everything" and "2) we can get something for nothing." Bearden is a genius who knows how to get unlimited free energy but his knowledge is suppressed by what he calls "an agency with a three letter acronym."
Now, I know you're thinking "that sounds crazy," but the article on Bearden wasn't written by some nut. It was written by Iona Miller, who is a "hypnotherapist" and "multimedia artist" who describes her work as a combination of "new physics, biophysics, paramedia, philosophy, cosmology, healing, creativity, qabalah, magick, metaphysics and society." So obviously she knows her stuff.
But one thing bothers me: Why do the editors call their publication Paranoia? Doesn't that sort of suggest that you'd have to be, you know, crazy to believe the stuff they print?
I decided to ask the co-editors, Joan D'Arc and Al Hidell. I called and Joan D'Arc answered. Well, I wasn't born yesterday so I knew that name was fake -- a subtle reference to Joan of Arc. So I asked her: "What's your real name?" She refused to tell me.
"You must surely realize that there are people out there who hate us and would want to harm us."
She told me that editing Paranoia was not a full-time job so I asked her what she did for a living.
"I'm not at liberty to discuss that," she said.
Apparently, when you're exposing the secret government you can't be too careful. D'Arc told me that Paranoia was born in 1992 in Providence, R.I., where she ran an alternative bookstore called Newspeak, which hosted weekly meetings of the Providence Conspiracy League. The league started collecting conspiracy information and storing it in a big loose-leaf binder with a picture of Lee Harvey Oswald on the cover. And the binder led to the magazine.
I asked her why the magazine is called Paranoia and she said that her co-editor, Al Hidell, named it and I should talk to him. She added that Al Hidell was not his real name.
I called Hidell, who confirmed that Al Hidell is a pseudonym that he chose because it was one of Oswald's aliases. He also wouldn't reveal his real name or his day job. "I work a nondescript office job," he said, "but I can't say anymore."
So I asked why he gave the magazine a name that seems to cast doubt on, you know, the sanity of its writers and the readers.
"I thought of it as a kind of preemptive war of words," he said. "I knew that people would call us paranoid so I kind of embraced the word."
Are you paranoid? I asked him.
"I'd describe myself as a suspicious person," he said, "but not paranoid in any clinical way."
Hidell and D'Arc represent different wings of the conspiracy theories movement. "She's more into the speculative paranormal end of things," he said. "I'm more of a meat-and-potatoes politics, international relations and secret societies kind of guy."
Together, they attempt to publish a "provocative, unpredictable mix" of conspiracy theories. "We try not to have a house conspiracy style," he said.
Hidell admitted that he doesn't believe all the conspiracy theories advanced in the pages of Paranoia. For instance, he's a little skeptical of Icke's theory that the queen of England and the Rockefellers are really shape-shifting Satanic reptiles from outer space. But then he adds this about Icke: "For all we know, he's putting all that in purposely so people think he's just a nut and he can keep publishing."
Whoa! I never thought of that! Heavy, man!
Since he and D'Arc founded Paranoia 15 years ago, Hidell said, the mainstream media has become very interested in conspiracy theories. He mentioned the TV show "The X-Files" and the History Channel's documentaries on secret societies, and, of course, "The Da Vinci Code."
"Why are 'they' allowing conspiracy theories to go mainstream?" he asked. "If there is a group that controls the world -- and I'm not saying there is -- they're probably not going to allow movies to be made about themselves, are they?"
He chuckled when he said that. But after I hung up, I got to thinking: What if he's right? And if they don't want movies made about themselves, they probably don't want to see their evil deeds exposed in Paranoia either. Does that mean that Paranoia is . . . part of the conspiracy? Could Paranoia be printing false conspiracy theories to throw us all off the trail of the real conspiracies?
Oh, man, thinking about all this stuff makes my head hurt. I'm gonna stop now and go put another layer of tinfoil in my hat, just in case.
No? Well, that's not surprising, is it? There's a very good reason why you haven't seen it: They don't want you to see it. They know that Paranoia exposes them and their secret conspiracies to control every aspect of human life.
Who are they? Good question. That's exactly what they don't want you to know. And it's exactly what Paranoia reveals in every issue. They are the secret government. They are the Freemasons, the CIA, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, the New World Order, the Secret Council of Ten. They are the people who killed JFK, who covered up the truth about UFOs, who plotted the attacks of 9/11. They control the world and everything in it, including your mind unless you've got a tinfoil hat like the one I'm wearing right now to prevent them from bombarding my brain with secret mind-control rays.
Wait a minute . . . where was I? Oh, right, Paranoia magazine. It's an incredible magazine, founded in 1992, circulation 15,000, published three times a year and packed with the kind of information that the mainstream media won't tell you because they are part of them.
The latest issue reveals a secret Pentagon plot to control the weather with radio signals. It also reveals the secret connection between the JFK assassination and "the contamination of the polio vaccine with cancer-causing monkey viruses."
This issue of Paranoia also reveals that David Icke, the British conspiracy theorist who disclosed in a previous issue of Paranoia that the queen of England is really a shape-shifting Satanic reptile, is himself funded by money that comes from the Rockefellers, who Icke had previously identified as "reptilian full-bloods." It kinda makes you wonder about Icke, doesn't it?
And that's not all. The new issue of Paranoia also has a story about Lt. Col. Tom Bearden a "microphysics wizard" who has revealed that "1) Nothing contains everything" and "2) we can get something for nothing." Bearden is a genius who knows how to get unlimited free energy but his knowledge is suppressed by what he calls "an agency with a three letter acronym."
Now, I know you're thinking "that sounds crazy," but the article on Bearden wasn't written by some nut. It was written by Iona Miller, who is a "hypnotherapist" and "multimedia artist" who describes her work as a combination of "new physics, biophysics, paramedia, philosophy, cosmology, healing, creativity, qabalah, magick, metaphysics and society." So obviously she knows her stuff.
But one thing bothers me: Why do the editors call their publication Paranoia? Doesn't that sort of suggest that you'd have to be, you know, crazy to believe the stuff they print?
I decided to ask the co-editors, Joan D'Arc and Al Hidell. I called and Joan D'Arc answered. Well, I wasn't born yesterday so I knew that name was fake -- a subtle reference to Joan of Arc. So I asked her: "What's your real name?" She refused to tell me.
"You must surely realize that there are people out there who hate us and would want to harm us."
She told me that editing Paranoia was not a full-time job so I asked her what she did for a living.
"I'm not at liberty to discuss that," she said.
Apparently, when you're exposing the secret government you can't be too careful. D'Arc told me that Paranoia was born in 1992 in Providence, R.I., where she ran an alternative bookstore called Newspeak, which hosted weekly meetings of the Providence Conspiracy League. The league started collecting conspiracy information and storing it in a big loose-leaf binder with a picture of Lee Harvey Oswald on the cover. And the binder led to the magazine.
I asked her why the magazine is called Paranoia and she said that her co-editor, Al Hidell, named it and I should talk to him. She added that Al Hidell was not his real name.
I called Hidell, who confirmed that Al Hidell is a pseudonym that he chose because it was one of Oswald's aliases. He also wouldn't reveal his real name or his day job. "I work a nondescript office job," he said, "but I can't say anymore."
So I asked why he gave the magazine a name that seems to cast doubt on, you know, the sanity of its writers and the readers.
"I thought of it as a kind of preemptive war of words," he said. "I knew that people would call us paranoid so I kind of embraced the word."
Are you paranoid? I asked him.
"I'd describe myself as a suspicious person," he said, "but not paranoid in any clinical way."
Hidell and D'Arc represent different wings of the conspiracy theories movement. "She's more into the speculative paranormal end of things," he said. "I'm more of a meat-and-potatoes politics, international relations and secret societies kind of guy."
Together, they attempt to publish a "provocative, unpredictable mix" of conspiracy theories. "We try not to have a house conspiracy style," he said.
Hidell admitted that he doesn't believe all the conspiracy theories advanced in the pages of Paranoia. For instance, he's a little skeptical of Icke's theory that the queen of England and the Rockefellers are really shape-shifting Satanic reptiles from outer space. But then he adds this about Icke: "For all we know, he's putting all that in purposely so people think he's just a nut and he can keep publishing."
Whoa! I never thought of that! Heavy, man!
Since he and D'Arc founded Paranoia 15 years ago, Hidell said, the mainstream media has become very interested in conspiracy theories. He mentioned the TV show "The X-Files" and the History Channel's documentaries on secret societies, and, of course, "The Da Vinci Code."
"Why are 'they' allowing conspiracy theories to go mainstream?" he asked. "If there is a group that controls the world -- and I'm not saying there is -- they're probably not going to allow movies to be made about themselves, are they?"
He chuckled when he said that. But after I hung up, I got to thinking: What if he's right? And if they don't want movies made about themselves, they probably don't want to see their evil deeds exposed in Paranoia either. Does that mean that Paranoia is . . . part of the conspiracy? Could Paranoia be printing false conspiracy theories to throw us all off the trail of the real conspiracies?
Oh, man, thinking about all this stuff makes my head hurt. I'm gonna stop now and go put another layer of tinfoil in my hat, just in case.
19.2.08
The Asian Century
We are entering a new era of world history: the end of Western domination and the arrival of the Asian century. The question is: Will Washington wake up to this reality? When the new president meets with schedulers in January, will he or she say, "Cut down on the visits to Europe. Send me across the Pacific, not the Atlantic. The G-8 represents a sunset process. Let us focus on the new sunrise organizations in Asia."If such a shift seems inconceivable, it shows how much old mental maps continue to cloud the vision of leading Americans. The West has so dominated world history for the last 200 years that we forget that from the year 1 to the year 1820, the two largest economies in the world (as demonstrated by British economic historian Angus Maddison) were China and India. A study by Goldman Sachs in 2003 confidently predicted that by 2050, the four largest economies in the world will be China, the U.S., India and Japan, in that order. A more recent evaluation by Goldman Sachs showed that this could happen sooner and that the Indian economy could surpass that of the U.S. by 2043.The changes will be dramatic and happen quickly. Economist and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers put it this way: During the Industrial Revolution, the standard of living rose at a rate of maybe 50% during a person's life span. Asia's current growth rate represents an unprecedented 100-fold (that is, 10,000%) rise in standards of living during one lifetime.The paradox about the American inability to recognize this great shift is that the United States has done more than any other country to spark this Asian revival. In the 19th century era of European domination, Asia was subjugated and colonized. As the U.S. became the dominant power, Asia was progressively liberated.
MUSIC (More)
The best art is not the only art, but it can be uniquely ennobling and it ought to be available to everyone. If that smacks of a belief in educational "improvement", I plead guilty as charged. I think musical taste and public values need improving. This would be a lot easier if the BBC was willing to put classical music or theatre on its main channels, as it once did. But those days are gone, sadly.
Better reverence than irreverence. Lenin once explained that he could not listen to the Appassionata sonata too often because, wonderful and immortal though it was, the sonata might make him falter in his task of smashing his enemies' heads without mercy. Doesn't that sum up why the world is so much better off with Beethoven than with bolshevism?
There are few things I know with any confidence. One is that, in these piano sonatas, Beethoven went further towards expressing the vast scope of the human spirit in sound than anyone before or since. The last movement of the final sonata takes that process as far as even he was able. Both it and the edifice of 32 sonatas on which it rests are Beethoven's imperishable achievement. And yet, in an immensely significant way, the achievement belongs to us all.
Better reverence than irreverence. Lenin once explained that he could not listen to the Appassionata sonata too often because, wonderful and immortal though it was, the sonata might make him falter in his task of smashing his enemies' heads without mercy. Doesn't that sum up why the world is so much better off with Beethoven than with bolshevism?
There are few things I know with any confidence. One is that, in these piano sonatas, Beethoven went further towards expressing the vast scope of the human spirit in sound than anyone before or since. The last movement of the final sonata takes that process as far as even he was able. Both it and the edifice of 32 sonatas on which it rests are Beethoven's imperishable achievement. And yet, in an immensely significant way, the achievement belongs to us all.
MUSIC
Music is so ubiquitous and ancient in the human species—so integral to our nature—that we must be born to respond to it: there must be a music instinct. Just as we naturally take to language, as a matter of our innate endowment, so must music have a specific genetic basis, and be part of the very structure of the human brain.
An unmusical alien would be highly perplexed by our love of music—and other terrestrial species are left cold by what so transports us. Music is absolutely normal for members of our species, but utterly quirky.[1] Moreover, it is known that music activates almost all the human brain: the sensory centers, the prefrontal cortex that underlies rational functions, the emotional areas (cerebellum, amygdala, and nucleus accumbens), the hippocampus for memory, and the motor cortex for movement. When you listen to a piece of music your brain is abuzz with intense neural activity.
Oliver Sacks is fascinated both by the normality of this oddity and by its abnormal manifestations. Daniel J. Levitin, in his recent book This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession,[2] deals largely with the normal human response to music —particularly with the brain mechanisms that underlie ordinary human listening—but Sacks's interest is more in the pathologies of musical response, not surprisingly in view of his occupation as a clinical neurologist. Where Levitin gives us the peculiarities of the everyday, Sacks ventures into the outlandish and exotic—into the deficits and excesses of the musical brain. Yet both authors recognize that the normal is exotic enough in itself, and the abnormal merely variations on a theme (so to speak).
An unmusical alien would be highly perplexed by our love of music—and other terrestrial species are left cold by what so transports us. Music is absolutely normal for members of our species, but utterly quirky.[1] Moreover, it is known that music activates almost all the human brain: the sensory centers, the prefrontal cortex that underlies rational functions, the emotional areas (cerebellum, amygdala, and nucleus accumbens), the hippocampus for memory, and the motor cortex for movement. When you listen to a piece of music your brain is abuzz with intense neural activity.
Oliver Sacks is fascinated both by the normality of this oddity and by its abnormal manifestations. Daniel J. Levitin, in his recent book This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession,[2] deals largely with the normal human response to music —particularly with the brain mechanisms that underlie ordinary human listening—but Sacks's interest is more in the pathologies of musical response, not surprisingly in view of his occupation as a clinical neurologist. Where Levitin gives us the peculiarities of the everyday, Sacks ventures into the outlandish and exotic—into the deficits and excesses of the musical brain. Yet both authors recognize that the normal is exotic enough in itself, and the abnormal merely variations on a theme (so to speak).
18.2.08
Language - Stoppard - Albee
Do you know what it’s like to be deeply, unbearably in love, all the while aware that you can never completely trust the object of your affection? I would wager that Edward Albee and Tom Stoppard do, almost to the point of delirium.
Don’t misunderstand me. I have no intimate acquaintance with the personal lives of these dramatists. It’s just that their ruling passion, jubilant and exasperated, proclaims itself publicly in pretty much everything they write, including their new plays of this season (“Rock ’n’ Roll” from Mr. Stoppard, and “Homelife” and “Me, Myself & I” from Mr. Albee).
How could it be otherwise, when it’s the most basic tools of their trade that they so adore? The faithless lovers of Tom Stoppard and Edward Albee are, in a word, words.
Or to quote one of the interchangeable title characters in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” the 1966 play that made the young Mr. Stoppard famous: “Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.”
It is one of the livelier paradoxes of the English-speaking theater today that its two most dazzling wordsmiths are incurably suspicious of the language they ply with such flair. No other living playwrights give (and, it would seem, receive) more pleasure from the sounds, shapes and textures of their lavishly stocked vocabularies. And none is more achingly conscious of the inadequacy of how they say what they say.
This contradiction is not just an element of their style; it’s the essence of it. It’s what gives that distinctive, heady tension to their plays, the friction that sends the minds of receptive theatergoers into exhilarated overdrive. It is also what makes actors say that mastering these playwrights’ ornate, fast-footed language requires the sort of hard study demanded by Shakespeare.
Inordinately slick and fleet of tongue, Stoppard and Albee heroes — from the 19th-century Russian philosophers of Mr. Stoppard’s “Coast of Utopia” to the battling husband and wife of Mr. Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — are forever trying to pin down chameleon words, like so many adrenaline-drunk Ulysseses wrestling shape-changing sea gods. (Words, as one character in “The Coast of Utopia” puts it, “just lead you on” and “arrange themselves every which way.”) These heroes may not stand a chance of winning but, oh, what a beautiful fight.
And the love-hate matches show no signs of abating. Mr. Albee turns 80 next month; Mr. Stoppard turned 70 last year. Yet if anything, their sense of true communication as a valiant and impossible dream has only intensified in the decades since they made their names, Mr. Albee with “Zoo Story” (in 1960) and Mr. Stoppard with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.”
In “Rock ’n’ Roll,” Mr. Stoppard’s cross-cultural story of love and revolution in Prague and Cambridge, England (on Broadway through March 9 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater), the possibilities for misunderstanding are multiplied by the different languages in play: not only Czech and English, but also ancient Greek, Fleet Street journalese, governmental bureaucratese and the mystical poetry of Pink Floyd lyrics. The penultimate scene is a combative dinner party that might as well be set in the Tower of Babel.
In Mr. Albee’s “Me, Myself & I,” which closed on Sunday at the McCarter Theater in Princeton (with a New York run planned later this season), words erupt like exploding cigars in the mouths of their speakers. Almost all words — including personal pronouns and proper names — tremble with multiple meanings in this philosophical farce about a mother of identical twins who can’t tell them apart. (The idea of twins, superficially the same yet internally dissimilar, becomes a physical pun.)
“Rock ’n’ Roll” and “Me, Myself & I” found ideal embodiments for their authors’ semantic perplexity in two very different performances. As the rock-loving Czech dissident in the Stoppard play, the British actor Rufus Sewell seems to exist in a state of eternal bafflement, squinting warily at the sentences lobbed at him by academics, politicians and journalists. (The play is filled with simple misunderstandings of words: “bold” for “bald,” for example.) When he speaks, it is as if he expects what he says to bite him.
In “Me, Myself & I,” Tyne Daly played the mother with an aggrieved, ineradicable question mark on her face. On some level she has resigned herself to not knowing which twin is which and which meaning is meant by which word. But she has managed to incorporate her doubts into how she talks, to make them part of a game that she plays aggressively. Small wonder that an outsider to the family, listening to Ms. Daly’s Mother volley and dissect clichés with her doctor-companion (the wonderful Brian Murray), feels compelled to ask, “Is this English you’re speaking?”
That state of questioning every word can paralyze. There’s the sense with Mr. Albee and Mr. Stoppard that their characters keep talking as fast as they can because otherwise they would sink into silence and all the terrifying questions that lie within.
They are heirs to the feverish logorrhea that afflicts Winnie, the (literally) earthbound heroine of Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days,” brilliantly rendered by the Irish actress Fiona Shaw in Deborah Warner’s traveling production, recently at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Buried up to her solar plexus in a mound of dirt, Winnie does her best to sustain a blithe, chattering monologue. But every so often she grows still and fretful, as the terror descends that the day will come when “words fail” and “there’s nothing left to say.”
Mr. Albee and Mr. Stoppard are directly descended from Beckett. Like him they consider the meaningless of a life that knows its own extinction, of being in the face of nothingness. They share this worldview with that other great successor to Beckett, Harold Pinter.
As the splendid new Broadway revival of “The Homecoming” makes clear, Mr. Pinter too is obsessed by the unreliability of language. It’s not so much what the fractious and possibly murderous family members of “The Homecoming” say — which is often impure invention — as the intentions that lurk beneath. Silence is the only form of honesty. And Mr. Pinter’s famous pauses are cut from the same dark cloth as the stillnesses that increasingly took over Beckett’s later plays.
Mr. Albee and Mr. Stoppard respond to the echoing silence by talking a purple streak. That doesn’t mean that they don’t know that unfathomable quiet will always vanquish the sound and fury of speech, however impressively loud and polysyllabic.
It’s telling that in the debate-driven nine hours occupied by the trilogy “The Coast of Utopia,” the most enduringly theatrical image summons the noiseless world of a deaf child, who can’t hear the philosophical arguments of his elders but can feel the thunder of change.
Similarly, while “A Delicate Balance,” Mr. Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of 1966, has the structure and finesse of a drawing-room comedy, you’re always aware of the mortal chasm over which this artifice is built. Speech, elegant and striving for precision merely papers over the silence beneath, not so unlike the magpie monologues of Beckett’s Winnie.
Within this shadowy context, so profound as to be immeasurable, Mr. Albee and Mr. Stoppard use bright, impeccably assembled dialogue to illuminate the provisional structures of daily life. They see the cosmic joke within the limitations of language and revel in it in ways that remind us of how much the Absurdists have in common with music-hall comedians.
Mr. Stoppard has created unabashedly silly farces centered on characters hamstrung by speech impediments and spoon-erisms (“Rough Crossing,” “On the Razzle”), as well as dizzying homages to artistic ancestors like James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Oscar Wilde, in “Travesties,” and A. E. Housman in “The Invention of Love.”
Mr. Albee regularly comes up with light-handed but heavy-hearted verbal vaudevilles that explore love and death with the rhythms of the Borscht Belt (“The Play About the Baby,” “Counting the Ways,” “Me, Myself & I”). But puns abound in his most serious works as well. Who else would include a running joke about cardinals (as in churchmen) versus cardinals (as in birds) in a play as ontologically dense as “Tiny Alice”?)
Don’t think that these writers abandon their verbal self-consciousness when they turn to relatively naturalistic portraits of, say, marriage. The couples of Mr. Albee’s “Virginia Woolf” and “Delicate Balance” and of Mr. Stoppard’s “Real Thing” and “Jumpers” are always squabbling about the meanings and uses of words. Whoever controls language has the upper hand, however conditional.
Not that these couples ever have much hope of completely connecting through language. In “Jumpers,” a dithery philosopher and his terminally neurotic wife reach their happiest peak of communication in a game of charades. And Mr. Albee’s “Homelife” — which received its New York premiere this season and is a companion piece to his first play, “Zoo Story” — begins with this exchange between a husband and wife:
ANN: We should talk. (Waits; no reply; turns, exits whence)
PETER: (After she goes — recognizing he had heard her) What? We should — what? (Louder) We should what?
ANN: (Offstage): What? (Reentering) We should what?
PETER: We should what?
The dialogue that follows is elegant, witty and highly literate. But those first four sentences are the X-ray of all that is subsequently spoken in “Homelife” and, for that matter, much of Mr. Albee’s work — and, I might venture, Mr. Stoppard’s.
The last scene of “Rock ’n’ Roll” finds a non-Czech-speaking Englishwoman (the superb Sinead Cusack) in Prague, unsure of whether the people around her understand her or not but ecstatic all the same. The play’s final lines address what is a basic human condition of Mr. Stoppard’s world with defiance and triumph: “I don’t care! I don’t care! I don’t care!”
And the working title for Mr. Albee’s next play? “Silence.”
Don’t misunderstand me. I have no intimate acquaintance with the personal lives of these dramatists. It’s just that their ruling passion, jubilant and exasperated, proclaims itself publicly in pretty much everything they write, including their new plays of this season (“Rock ’n’ Roll” from Mr. Stoppard, and “Homelife” and “Me, Myself & I” from Mr. Albee).
How could it be otherwise, when it’s the most basic tools of their trade that they so adore? The faithless lovers of Tom Stoppard and Edward Albee are, in a word, words.
Or to quote one of the interchangeable title characters in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” the 1966 play that made the young Mr. Stoppard famous: “Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.”
It is one of the livelier paradoxes of the English-speaking theater today that its two most dazzling wordsmiths are incurably suspicious of the language they ply with such flair. No other living playwrights give (and, it would seem, receive) more pleasure from the sounds, shapes and textures of their lavishly stocked vocabularies. And none is more achingly conscious of the inadequacy of how they say what they say.
This contradiction is not just an element of their style; it’s the essence of it. It’s what gives that distinctive, heady tension to their plays, the friction that sends the minds of receptive theatergoers into exhilarated overdrive. It is also what makes actors say that mastering these playwrights’ ornate, fast-footed language requires the sort of hard study demanded by Shakespeare.
Inordinately slick and fleet of tongue, Stoppard and Albee heroes — from the 19th-century Russian philosophers of Mr. Stoppard’s “Coast of Utopia” to the battling husband and wife of Mr. Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — are forever trying to pin down chameleon words, like so many adrenaline-drunk Ulysseses wrestling shape-changing sea gods. (Words, as one character in “The Coast of Utopia” puts it, “just lead you on” and “arrange themselves every which way.”) These heroes may not stand a chance of winning but, oh, what a beautiful fight.
And the love-hate matches show no signs of abating. Mr. Albee turns 80 next month; Mr. Stoppard turned 70 last year. Yet if anything, their sense of true communication as a valiant and impossible dream has only intensified in the decades since they made their names, Mr. Albee with “Zoo Story” (in 1960) and Mr. Stoppard with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.”
In “Rock ’n’ Roll,” Mr. Stoppard’s cross-cultural story of love and revolution in Prague and Cambridge, England (on Broadway through March 9 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater), the possibilities for misunderstanding are multiplied by the different languages in play: not only Czech and English, but also ancient Greek, Fleet Street journalese, governmental bureaucratese and the mystical poetry of Pink Floyd lyrics. The penultimate scene is a combative dinner party that might as well be set in the Tower of Babel.
In Mr. Albee’s “Me, Myself & I,” which closed on Sunday at the McCarter Theater in Princeton (with a New York run planned later this season), words erupt like exploding cigars in the mouths of their speakers. Almost all words — including personal pronouns and proper names — tremble with multiple meanings in this philosophical farce about a mother of identical twins who can’t tell them apart. (The idea of twins, superficially the same yet internally dissimilar, becomes a physical pun.)
“Rock ’n’ Roll” and “Me, Myself & I” found ideal embodiments for their authors’ semantic perplexity in two very different performances. As the rock-loving Czech dissident in the Stoppard play, the British actor Rufus Sewell seems to exist in a state of eternal bafflement, squinting warily at the sentences lobbed at him by academics, politicians and journalists. (The play is filled with simple misunderstandings of words: “bold” for “bald,” for example.) When he speaks, it is as if he expects what he says to bite him.
In “Me, Myself & I,” Tyne Daly played the mother with an aggrieved, ineradicable question mark on her face. On some level she has resigned herself to not knowing which twin is which and which meaning is meant by which word. But she has managed to incorporate her doubts into how she talks, to make them part of a game that she plays aggressively. Small wonder that an outsider to the family, listening to Ms. Daly’s Mother volley and dissect clichés with her doctor-companion (the wonderful Brian Murray), feels compelled to ask, “Is this English you’re speaking?”
That state of questioning every word can paralyze. There’s the sense with Mr. Albee and Mr. Stoppard that their characters keep talking as fast as they can because otherwise they would sink into silence and all the terrifying questions that lie within.
They are heirs to the feverish logorrhea that afflicts Winnie, the (literally) earthbound heroine of Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days,” brilliantly rendered by the Irish actress Fiona Shaw in Deborah Warner’s traveling production, recently at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Buried up to her solar plexus in a mound of dirt, Winnie does her best to sustain a blithe, chattering monologue. But every so often she grows still and fretful, as the terror descends that the day will come when “words fail” and “there’s nothing left to say.”
Mr. Albee and Mr. Stoppard are directly descended from Beckett. Like him they consider the meaningless of a life that knows its own extinction, of being in the face of nothingness. They share this worldview with that other great successor to Beckett, Harold Pinter.
As the splendid new Broadway revival of “The Homecoming” makes clear, Mr. Pinter too is obsessed by the unreliability of language. It’s not so much what the fractious and possibly murderous family members of “The Homecoming” say — which is often impure invention — as the intentions that lurk beneath. Silence is the only form of honesty. And Mr. Pinter’s famous pauses are cut from the same dark cloth as the stillnesses that increasingly took over Beckett’s later plays.
Mr. Albee and Mr. Stoppard respond to the echoing silence by talking a purple streak. That doesn’t mean that they don’t know that unfathomable quiet will always vanquish the sound and fury of speech, however impressively loud and polysyllabic.
It’s telling that in the debate-driven nine hours occupied by the trilogy “The Coast of Utopia,” the most enduringly theatrical image summons the noiseless world of a deaf child, who can’t hear the philosophical arguments of his elders but can feel the thunder of change.
Similarly, while “A Delicate Balance,” Mr. Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of 1966, has the structure and finesse of a drawing-room comedy, you’re always aware of the mortal chasm over which this artifice is built. Speech, elegant and striving for precision merely papers over the silence beneath, not so unlike the magpie monologues of Beckett’s Winnie.
Within this shadowy context, so profound as to be immeasurable, Mr. Albee and Mr. Stoppard use bright, impeccably assembled dialogue to illuminate the provisional structures of daily life. They see the cosmic joke within the limitations of language and revel in it in ways that remind us of how much the Absurdists have in common with music-hall comedians.
Mr. Stoppard has created unabashedly silly farces centered on characters hamstrung by speech impediments and spoon-erisms (“Rough Crossing,” “On the Razzle”), as well as dizzying homages to artistic ancestors like James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Oscar Wilde, in “Travesties,” and A. E. Housman in “The Invention of Love.”
Mr. Albee regularly comes up with light-handed but heavy-hearted verbal vaudevilles that explore love and death with the rhythms of the Borscht Belt (“The Play About the Baby,” “Counting the Ways,” “Me, Myself & I”). But puns abound in his most serious works as well. Who else would include a running joke about cardinals (as in churchmen) versus cardinals (as in birds) in a play as ontologically dense as “Tiny Alice”?)
Don’t think that these writers abandon their verbal self-consciousness when they turn to relatively naturalistic portraits of, say, marriage. The couples of Mr. Albee’s “Virginia Woolf” and “Delicate Balance” and of Mr. Stoppard’s “Real Thing” and “Jumpers” are always squabbling about the meanings and uses of words. Whoever controls language has the upper hand, however conditional.
Not that these couples ever have much hope of completely connecting through language. In “Jumpers,” a dithery philosopher and his terminally neurotic wife reach their happiest peak of communication in a game of charades. And Mr. Albee’s “Homelife” — which received its New York premiere this season and is a companion piece to his first play, “Zoo Story” — begins with this exchange between a husband and wife:
ANN: We should talk. (Waits; no reply; turns, exits whence)
PETER: (After she goes — recognizing he had heard her) What? We should — what? (Louder) We should what?
ANN: (Offstage): What? (Reentering) We should what?
PETER: We should what?
The dialogue that follows is elegant, witty and highly literate. But those first four sentences are the X-ray of all that is subsequently spoken in “Homelife” and, for that matter, much of Mr. Albee’s work — and, I might venture, Mr. Stoppard’s.
The last scene of “Rock ’n’ Roll” finds a non-Czech-speaking Englishwoman (the superb Sinead Cusack) in Prague, unsure of whether the people around her understand her or not but ecstatic all the same. The play’s final lines address what is a basic human condition of Mr. Stoppard’s world with defiance and triumph: “I don’t care! I don’t care! I don’t care!”
And the working title for Mr. Albee’s next play? “Silence.”
Dumb & Dumber
"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.
This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just "folks," a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.
The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.
Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.
First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.
This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just "folks," a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.
The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.
Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.
First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.
17.2.08
16.2.08
Lazy Language - Lazy Thought
When people spout empty phrases nobody knows what they mean—including the spouters. JOHN GRIMOND calls for clarity
Open a newspaper and you are likely to find a pundit putting you right about language. Pedants bemoan the misuse of such words as "execution" (which means "putting into effect the verdict of a court of law", not "murdering a hostage"), "presently" ("soon", not "at present") and "enormity" ("great crime", not "big thing"). They have a point. Language is impoverished when words lose their meanings.
But it can also be enriched when words gain meanings. One of the strengths of English is its readiness to change, to allow words and phrases to gain new uses. Publications no longer have to appear daily to be journals, nor salaries to be paid in salt. And "making love", which once involved only a bit of billing and cooing, now means going the whole hog, a phrase, incidentally, that derives from the inability of Islamic scholars to decide which bit of the pig was forbidden to Muslims. So said the poet William Cowper, anyway:But for one piece they thought it hardFrom the whole hog to be debarred.Languages, like French and Spanish, that are supervised and censored by a board of self-important overseers risk becoming fossilised, absurd or just useless, unable to carry out the tasks that their users demand of them. And in the age of booting up, corporate governance and waterboarding, new tasks appear all the time.
One task that users demand is communication. This does not need perfect English. No one is really misled by a sign that says, "This door is alarmed" or "Disabled toilet", still less by "I ain't done nothing." The task that suffers most from mangled language is though, when people communicate with themselves. If they cannot express themselves to themselves, they have no chance of expressing themselves to other people.
Anyone trying to impress, to sell or to obfuscate is likely to brutalise the language. Prominent offenders are businessmen, with their on-board customer-service representatives, collision damage waivers, non-incremental growth opportunities and enhanced information-management activities, providing innovative solutions and significant leverage in the use of resources, and thus permitting an increasing percentage of senior professional time to be expended on value-added solutions.
Politicians can effortlessly match this. Their stock-in-trade is sustainable development, key performance indicators, the knowledge-based economy (any takers for the ignorance-based alternative?), inclusiveness and empowered communities, all offered up with mandatory passion, vision and excitement. Put politicians together with soldiers and you get Islamofascism, extraordinary rendition, self-injurious behaviour incidents and the war on terror.
'Twas ever thus. Orwell pointed out in 1946 that, since political language is usually the defence of the indefensible, it has to consist "largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness". And long before him Tacitus remarked, "They make a desert and call it peace."
That euphemism, word-twisting and empty phrase-making have been around for ever does not make them any less pernicious. In an age of mass communication they are quickly absorbed by lazy thinkers who believe they are saying something important when they declare, "It is this combination of hard-edged critical thinking and innovation with commitment and perseverance that will be the hardest challenge."
From here it is but a short step to explaining, as a prominent British politician did recently, that "If I did use the word meaningful, I didn't mean it to mean anything at all." Confused? Don't be: it was an honest admission. Such talk is mere background noise created by people who have nothing to say but think they must say something.
This can sometimes have serious consequences. Once it took a face to launch a thousand ships; now a slam dunk is enough to send America to war. "Our business is to see what we can do with the English language as it is," wrote Virginia Woolf. "How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth?"
Open a newspaper and you are likely to find a pundit putting you right about language. Pedants bemoan the misuse of such words as "execution" (which means "putting into effect the verdict of a court of law", not "murdering a hostage"), "presently" ("soon", not "at present") and "enormity" ("great crime", not "big thing"). They have a point. Language is impoverished when words lose their meanings.
But it can also be enriched when words gain meanings. One of the strengths of English is its readiness to change, to allow words and phrases to gain new uses. Publications no longer have to appear daily to be journals, nor salaries to be paid in salt. And "making love", which once involved only a bit of billing and cooing, now means going the whole hog, a phrase, incidentally, that derives from the inability of Islamic scholars to decide which bit of the pig was forbidden to Muslims. So said the poet William Cowper, anyway:But for one piece they thought it hardFrom the whole hog to be debarred.Languages, like French and Spanish, that are supervised and censored by a board of self-important overseers risk becoming fossilised, absurd or just useless, unable to carry out the tasks that their users demand of them. And in the age of booting up, corporate governance and waterboarding, new tasks appear all the time.
One task that users demand is communication. This does not need perfect English. No one is really misled by a sign that says, "This door is alarmed" or "Disabled toilet", still less by "I ain't done nothing." The task that suffers most from mangled language is though, when people communicate with themselves. If they cannot express themselves to themselves, they have no chance of expressing themselves to other people.
Anyone trying to impress, to sell or to obfuscate is likely to brutalise the language. Prominent offenders are businessmen, with their on-board customer-service representatives, collision damage waivers, non-incremental growth opportunities and enhanced information-management activities, providing innovative solutions and significant leverage in the use of resources, and thus permitting an increasing percentage of senior professional time to be expended on value-added solutions.
Politicians can effortlessly match this. Their stock-in-trade is sustainable development, key performance indicators, the knowledge-based economy (any takers for the ignorance-based alternative?), inclusiveness and empowered communities, all offered up with mandatory passion, vision and excitement. Put politicians together with soldiers and you get Islamofascism, extraordinary rendition, self-injurious behaviour incidents and the war on terror.
'Twas ever thus. Orwell pointed out in 1946 that, since political language is usually the defence of the indefensible, it has to consist "largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness". And long before him Tacitus remarked, "They make a desert and call it peace."
That euphemism, word-twisting and empty phrase-making have been around for ever does not make them any less pernicious. In an age of mass communication they are quickly absorbed by lazy thinkers who believe they are saying something important when they declare, "It is this combination of hard-edged critical thinking and innovation with commitment and perseverance that will be the hardest challenge."
From here it is but a short step to explaining, as a prominent British politician did recently, that "If I did use the word meaningful, I didn't mean it to mean anything at all." Confused? Don't be: it was an honest admission. Such talk is mere background noise created by people who have nothing to say but think they must say something.
This can sometimes have serious consequences. Once it took a face to launch a thousand ships; now a slam dunk is enough to send America to war. "Our business is to see what we can do with the English language as it is," wrote Virginia Woolf. "How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth?"
Cuisine
Hervé This and I are sitting in an unpretentious Chinese restaurant just round the corner from the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris and the National Institute for Agricultural Research where This, a chemical physicist, has worked for the past eight years. This, 52, is best known as one of the founders of “molecular gastronomy”: his culinary ideas and writings have influenced some the world most famous chefs, Ferran Adrià, Heston Blumenthal and Pierre Gagnaire among them.
We might have eaten at the experimental restaurant Chez Léna et Mimile up the road but This hadn’t booked a table there so we’ve settled instead for this unpretentious Asian, a stroll away from the laboratories where he works with a team of 14 researching cooking. “Pot au feu, cassoulet, daube, choucroute – it’s infinite,” he says, “particularly since I’ve come up with a simple formula for inventing an infinite number of new dishes.”
“You’re on TV a lot,” the restaurant’s owner says, unsmilingly, putting down a Chinese beer. And it is true, This – jovial, grey-haired, passionate about the science of cooking – is one of the public faces of food in France. He not only teaches, researches, appears on television, lectures round the world and writes bestselling books, of which two so far have been translated into English – Molecular Gastronomy (2005) and Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking (2007) – he has also advised the French ministry of education on how to teach primary school children about food. Hervé This is a born communicator and performer. Only a few weeks before meeting in Paris, I had seen him at a cookery class in Brussels, demonstrating to an admiring group just how to beat a single egg white into a square cube of froth. Today, as he drinks his beer, This says there’s nothing wrong with traditional cooking that isn’t knowingly grounded in science.
Molecular gastronomy and the proof of the pudding
Hervé This examines the science behind some culinary sayings.
Pepper should be added to a stock eight minutes before it is taken off the heat
True, after that bitter tannins replace the aromatic molecules.
Don’t put berries in pewter pots
True, they turn a horrid purple.
Egg whites rise better when beaten in the same direction
Wrong.
Bread crust has more flavour than the crumb.
True. It’s about “Maillard reactions”, the chemical reactions that create brown, fragrant and tasty compounds in cooking. The same applies to rubbing a leg of lamb with oil before putting it in the oven.
Green vegetables lose their colour when over-cooked.
Yes. After a few seconds boiling vegetables go an intense green thanks to the release of gases trapped in the spaces between the vegetable cells. However, after that, the pockets of air that act as colour magnifying glasses disappear, and spinach, leeks and other vegetables go brown. Adding vinegar to the boiling water will only enhance the effect. Vegetables will stay green if steamed.
Old flour makes good bread.
True. If stored for a month or more, the thiol groups oxidate and thus give the dough better elasticity.
The best scientific way to knead dough?
Place the dough on the far side of the table. Unstick it and form a ball that you bring towards you by folding it, trapping air in the process. Pound the folded dough firmly, and repeat, sprinkling flour on to it from time to time.
This confirms the following:
● Meat should be beaten with a rolling pin or a special round meat pounder to break its fibres and not with a cleaver, which would flatten them.
● If meat for a daube (stew) is a bit coarse, it must be cooked longer at a higher heat, seasoned twice and tenderised.
● Add lemon juice to grated carrots to prevent them from darkening at the contact of air.
● When preparing stock, leave a two-finger-wide opening on the lid of the boiling pan: the stock would go cloudy in a hermetically sealed pot.
● The best stock is made in an earthenware pot that has already been used several times.
● To obtain good stock, it is preferable to use a pot that is higher than it is wide.
His family comes from Alsace-Lorraine in eastern France and there is something German about his build but his rattle-bang rapid delivery is Parisian and as quick as his inquiring mind. As we talk, he cites the Bible (apparently Noah got drunk on too much beer), quotes Borges, refuses to accept that some people have sharper taste buds than others, or are more intelligent, and waxes lyrical about the French language. At his feet is a briefcase containing the battered A4 notebooks in which he scribbles down his thoughts and theories.
This is the son of two psychoanalysts – his father Bernard This introduced sophrology, a relaxation technique, to France and, though 80, still receives patients from 7am until well into the night, his son explains admiringly; his mother, Claude, still works too. The whole family, adds This, is mad about food. He is also, he wants me to know, related to Brigitte Bardot and Ségolène Royal (although not on the same side), as well as to photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.
In the late 1970s, he studied to become a chemical physicist at Paris’s prestigious Ecole Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie while also reading modern French literature. On graduation, he wrote for and subsequently became editor of Pour la Science, the French equivalent of Scientific American.
It was while working at Pour la Science, that This first met the late Nicholas Kurti, Hungarian-born physicist and president of the Royal Society. They hit it off immediately and, as they talked, the two men discovered that both were carrying out experiments in their kitchens in the evenings after work. They started exchanging their findings, calling each other up several times a day. Together they came up with the term “molecular gastronomy” to describe a discipline concerned with the scientific phenomena – the chemical reactions – that occur during culinary transformations: why soufflés expand, why the wine in coq au vin changes colour, the perfect temperature at which to bake an egg. The point was to use this knowledge to enhance the quality of cuisine. “When you give something a name, a field develops around it,” says This. In 1992 Kurti and This organised the first International Workshop on Molecular Gastronomy, which was held in Erice, Sicily, in 1992 with the American doyen of food science Harold McGee as keynote speaker.
The idea was to apply science to the art of cooking in the same way as a geo-physician applies his mind to mountains or a botanist to plants, and This drew up a programme for the discipline. It involved:
1 Testing culinary sayings, such as whether adding lemon to pears helps them keep their colour.
2 Understanding exactly what constitutes a recipe (stewed pears is simply pears, sugar and water, then heat).
3 Inventing new recipes, which is technology, not science, This says, “because technology is invention and science is discovery”.
4 Introducing new ingredients, utensils and methods, such as using an electrical field to smoke salmon
5 “Demonstrating that science is a beautiful, wonderful discipline,” and thus inspiring vocations.
Over the past 20 years or so, This has been collecting and testing culinary adages, old wives’ lore and sayings. He now has 25,000 of them, many gleaned from 19th-century French cookbooks, and is planning to have them put on INRA’s website. One of the things that most struck him is how sayings that sound wrong are often right and vice versa. Such as? “Well,” he answers, “you really do have to cut the head off a suckling pig as soon as it comes out of the oven if you want the skin to stay crisp.”
This tested the truth of this particular adage with an experiment carried out during a feast celebrating his 10th wedding anniversary, for which he cooked four suckling pigs, cutting off the head of two of them immediately. An example of the reverse? “It’s not true – at least it’s not generally true – that salt draws water out of meat, which is why you are told not to salt steak until after it’s cooked. It is also untrue that eggs and oil must be at the same temperature when you make mayonnaise. I’ve demonstrated this on television with hot eggs and cold oil and the other way around and the results were exactly the same.”
You’d think from the range of his activities and the number of his public appearances that he was raking in the money but, This says, his extra earnings go straight into his laboratory work. Taking me round his laboratories before lunch, he opens a cupboard packed with “extremely expensive” kitchen equipment. He says he can’t really afford the restaurants his work inspires and he doesn’t like cadging free meals.
When I ask if France can still claim to be the world’s culinary centre, he simply shrugs. So, I persist, you don’t agree? “It’s not that I don’t agree,” he replies, “it’s just not true.”
As an official of the state, he says, he is paid to transmit his discoveries back to the taxpayer. “And in order to produce knowledge, I need to distribute it efficiently. I’m very proud when I have something published in a prestigious scientific magazine but I get nothing like the readership I get when I write for Elle, which sells 1m copies.” Indeed, it was Elle that first aroused his interest in recipes, when he tried to work out why eggs had to be added two at a time to a soufflé preparation. Since then, to his great pride, they’ve published his recipe for chocolat chantilly (whipped chocolate prepared, remarkably, like crème chantilly).
A generation of young chefs nowadays applies the results of This’s observations and deductions about cooking. When he sees his discoveries put to exciting use, he says he feels as proud as if he were the maker of Rembrandt’s paintbrushes. Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck used to come to Paris to learn from This about alginate pearls, liquid nitrogen and foams, emulsions and gels, and Adrià of El Bulli culled his knowledge from This’s books. He says the chefs at La Table d’Anvers in Paris were the first to put the new techniques into practice but they wouldn’t admit it for fear of scaring off customers. “Ferran was the first to have the guts to admit he was doing molecular cooking.”
Today, though, molecular gastronomy itself could almost be considered passé. Adrià himself has repudiated the term and now describes himself as an artist.
This, however, has a new theory of taste: he says that if he were a young chef today, he would shun molecular cuisine. “If I was 20 today and I was a truly creative person, I wouldn’t do molecular cuisine. Everybody is doing it.” He would, he says, go for “note by note” cuisine, which he compares to music. “A carrot is made up of molecules, like notes in a musical chord. Traditionally, if you cook carrots and turnips together, you have two chords,” he says. “Nothing prevents you from creating a dish one molecule at a time.” Up the road, Chez Léna et Mimile does just that; chef Christèle Gendre flavours sauces in this pick-and-choose manner, which This has called “Wöhler,” after the chemist who first synthesized molecules.
Although he occasionally prepares meals for his wife and two sons, 17 and 20, This is, he says, a hit-or-miss cook. He insists that great cooking is an art and that what he contributes is science: he can give tips on how to make lavish mousses, tender meat and stable emulsions but he can’t convey the genius that makes an outstanding cook. He also leaves space for poetry in the kitchen, claiming that “love” is an important component. “The fact is that cooking is about giving people pleasure. Why did our grandmothers give us good food to eat? Technically, they were simply yokels. I had two grandmothers. One made delicious food, she spilled over with love. We weren’t eating protein, lipids and glucides, we were eating my grandmother’s love. The other was thin, unloving, she couldn’t give other people pleasure and she was an awful cook. Eating is also about relationships.”
To illustrate this, he tells me about a meal he once had at his three-star friend Pierre Gagnaire’s restaurant in Paris, which he was eating in the company of men he thoroughly disliked. He was not enjoying the food but then Gagnaire sent him a note from the kitchen on a folded napkin, which read, “You look miserable.” The whole experience was transformed; the meal suddenly became good. Every month, This provides Gagnaire with an idea that Gagnaire publishes on his website along with a recipe inspired by it. A recent one concerned the 19th-century German chemist Justus Liebig, and elaborates an idea about combining gelatine and oil into a gelified emulsion. “Wonderful, simple idea,” writes Gagnaire, and comes up with a recipe for grape juice with flat parsley and a “Venice bouillon”.
As we finish our coffee, I bring up a question that has been nagging at the back of my mind. Why does microwaved porridge taste so much better? The answer is that porridge is made up of granules of starch that either bloat homogeneously (in the microwave) or keep a tough core (on the stove). “I am ready to take a microscope – no, I encourage you to take a microscope – and examine your grain of porridge.”
www.pierre-gagnaire.com
We might have eaten at the experimental restaurant Chez Léna et Mimile up the road but This hadn’t booked a table there so we’ve settled instead for this unpretentious Asian, a stroll away from the laboratories where he works with a team of 14 researching cooking. “Pot au feu, cassoulet, daube, choucroute – it’s infinite,” he says, “particularly since I’ve come up with a simple formula for inventing an infinite number of new dishes.”
“You’re on TV a lot,” the restaurant’s owner says, unsmilingly, putting down a Chinese beer. And it is true, This – jovial, grey-haired, passionate about the science of cooking – is one of the public faces of food in France. He not only teaches, researches, appears on television, lectures round the world and writes bestselling books, of which two so far have been translated into English – Molecular Gastronomy (2005) and Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking (2007) – he has also advised the French ministry of education on how to teach primary school children about food. Hervé This is a born communicator and performer. Only a few weeks before meeting in Paris, I had seen him at a cookery class in Brussels, demonstrating to an admiring group just how to beat a single egg white into a square cube of froth. Today, as he drinks his beer, This says there’s nothing wrong with traditional cooking that isn’t knowingly grounded in science.
Molecular gastronomy and the proof of the pudding
Hervé This examines the science behind some culinary sayings.
Pepper should be added to a stock eight minutes before it is taken off the heat
True, after that bitter tannins replace the aromatic molecules.
Don’t put berries in pewter pots
True, they turn a horrid purple.
Egg whites rise better when beaten in the same direction
Wrong.
Bread crust has more flavour than the crumb.
True. It’s about “Maillard reactions”, the chemical reactions that create brown, fragrant and tasty compounds in cooking. The same applies to rubbing a leg of lamb with oil before putting it in the oven.
Green vegetables lose their colour when over-cooked.
Yes. After a few seconds boiling vegetables go an intense green thanks to the release of gases trapped in the spaces between the vegetable cells. However, after that, the pockets of air that act as colour magnifying glasses disappear, and spinach, leeks and other vegetables go brown. Adding vinegar to the boiling water will only enhance the effect. Vegetables will stay green if steamed.
Old flour makes good bread.
True. If stored for a month or more, the thiol groups oxidate and thus give the dough better elasticity.
The best scientific way to knead dough?
Place the dough on the far side of the table. Unstick it and form a ball that you bring towards you by folding it, trapping air in the process. Pound the folded dough firmly, and repeat, sprinkling flour on to it from time to time.
This confirms the following:
● Meat should be beaten with a rolling pin or a special round meat pounder to break its fibres and not with a cleaver, which would flatten them.
● If meat for a daube (stew) is a bit coarse, it must be cooked longer at a higher heat, seasoned twice and tenderised.
● Add lemon juice to grated carrots to prevent them from darkening at the contact of air.
● When preparing stock, leave a two-finger-wide opening on the lid of the boiling pan: the stock would go cloudy in a hermetically sealed pot.
● The best stock is made in an earthenware pot that has already been used several times.
● To obtain good stock, it is preferable to use a pot that is higher than it is wide.
His family comes from Alsace-Lorraine in eastern France and there is something German about his build but his rattle-bang rapid delivery is Parisian and as quick as his inquiring mind. As we talk, he cites the Bible (apparently Noah got drunk on too much beer), quotes Borges, refuses to accept that some people have sharper taste buds than others, or are more intelligent, and waxes lyrical about the French language. At his feet is a briefcase containing the battered A4 notebooks in which he scribbles down his thoughts and theories.
This is the son of two psychoanalysts – his father Bernard This introduced sophrology, a relaxation technique, to France and, though 80, still receives patients from 7am until well into the night, his son explains admiringly; his mother, Claude, still works too. The whole family, adds This, is mad about food. He is also, he wants me to know, related to Brigitte Bardot and Ségolène Royal (although not on the same side), as well as to photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.
In the late 1970s, he studied to become a chemical physicist at Paris’s prestigious Ecole Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie while also reading modern French literature. On graduation, he wrote for and subsequently became editor of Pour la Science, the French equivalent of Scientific American.
It was while working at Pour la Science, that This first met the late Nicholas Kurti, Hungarian-born physicist and president of the Royal Society. They hit it off immediately and, as they talked, the two men discovered that both were carrying out experiments in their kitchens in the evenings after work. They started exchanging their findings, calling each other up several times a day. Together they came up with the term “molecular gastronomy” to describe a discipline concerned with the scientific phenomena – the chemical reactions – that occur during culinary transformations: why soufflés expand, why the wine in coq au vin changes colour, the perfect temperature at which to bake an egg. The point was to use this knowledge to enhance the quality of cuisine. “When you give something a name, a field develops around it,” says This. In 1992 Kurti and This organised the first International Workshop on Molecular Gastronomy, which was held in Erice, Sicily, in 1992 with the American doyen of food science Harold McGee as keynote speaker.
The idea was to apply science to the art of cooking in the same way as a geo-physician applies his mind to mountains or a botanist to plants, and This drew up a programme for the discipline. It involved:
1 Testing culinary sayings, such as whether adding lemon to pears helps them keep their colour.
2 Understanding exactly what constitutes a recipe (stewed pears is simply pears, sugar and water, then heat).
3 Inventing new recipes, which is technology, not science, This says, “because technology is invention and science is discovery”.
4 Introducing new ingredients, utensils and methods, such as using an electrical field to smoke salmon
5 “Demonstrating that science is a beautiful, wonderful discipline,” and thus inspiring vocations.
Over the past 20 years or so, This has been collecting and testing culinary adages, old wives’ lore and sayings. He now has 25,000 of them, many gleaned from 19th-century French cookbooks, and is planning to have them put on INRA’s website. One of the things that most struck him is how sayings that sound wrong are often right and vice versa. Such as? “Well,” he answers, “you really do have to cut the head off a suckling pig as soon as it comes out of the oven if you want the skin to stay crisp.”
This tested the truth of this particular adage with an experiment carried out during a feast celebrating his 10th wedding anniversary, for which he cooked four suckling pigs, cutting off the head of two of them immediately. An example of the reverse? “It’s not true – at least it’s not generally true – that salt draws water out of meat, which is why you are told not to salt steak until after it’s cooked. It is also untrue that eggs and oil must be at the same temperature when you make mayonnaise. I’ve demonstrated this on television with hot eggs and cold oil and the other way around and the results were exactly the same.”
You’d think from the range of his activities and the number of his public appearances that he was raking in the money but, This says, his extra earnings go straight into his laboratory work. Taking me round his laboratories before lunch, he opens a cupboard packed with “extremely expensive” kitchen equipment. He says he can’t really afford the restaurants his work inspires and he doesn’t like cadging free meals.
When I ask if France can still claim to be the world’s culinary centre, he simply shrugs. So, I persist, you don’t agree? “It’s not that I don’t agree,” he replies, “it’s just not true.”
As an official of the state, he says, he is paid to transmit his discoveries back to the taxpayer. “And in order to produce knowledge, I need to distribute it efficiently. I’m very proud when I have something published in a prestigious scientific magazine but I get nothing like the readership I get when I write for Elle, which sells 1m copies.” Indeed, it was Elle that first aroused his interest in recipes, when he tried to work out why eggs had to be added two at a time to a soufflé preparation. Since then, to his great pride, they’ve published his recipe for chocolat chantilly (whipped chocolate prepared, remarkably, like crème chantilly).
A generation of young chefs nowadays applies the results of This’s observations and deductions about cooking. When he sees his discoveries put to exciting use, he says he feels as proud as if he were the maker of Rembrandt’s paintbrushes. Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck used to come to Paris to learn from This about alginate pearls, liquid nitrogen and foams, emulsions and gels, and Adrià of El Bulli culled his knowledge from This’s books. He says the chefs at La Table d’Anvers in Paris were the first to put the new techniques into practice but they wouldn’t admit it for fear of scaring off customers. “Ferran was the first to have the guts to admit he was doing molecular cooking.”
Today, though, molecular gastronomy itself could almost be considered passé. Adrià himself has repudiated the term and now describes himself as an artist.
This, however, has a new theory of taste: he says that if he were a young chef today, he would shun molecular cuisine. “If I was 20 today and I was a truly creative person, I wouldn’t do molecular cuisine. Everybody is doing it.” He would, he says, go for “note by note” cuisine, which he compares to music. “A carrot is made up of molecules, like notes in a musical chord. Traditionally, if you cook carrots and turnips together, you have two chords,” he says. “Nothing prevents you from creating a dish one molecule at a time.” Up the road, Chez Léna et Mimile does just that; chef Christèle Gendre flavours sauces in this pick-and-choose manner, which This has called “Wöhler,” after the chemist who first synthesized molecules.
Although he occasionally prepares meals for his wife and two sons, 17 and 20, This is, he says, a hit-or-miss cook. He insists that great cooking is an art and that what he contributes is science: he can give tips on how to make lavish mousses, tender meat and stable emulsions but he can’t convey the genius that makes an outstanding cook. He also leaves space for poetry in the kitchen, claiming that “love” is an important component. “The fact is that cooking is about giving people pleasure. Why did our grandmothers give us good food to eat? Technically, they were simply yokels. I had two grandmothers. One made delicious food, she spilled over with love. We weren’t eating protein, lipids and glucides, we were eating my grandmother’s love. The other was thin, unloving, she couldn’t give other people pleasure and she was an awful cook. Eating is also about relationships.”
To illustrate this, he tells me about a meal he once had at his three-star friend Pierre Gagnaire’s restaurant in Paris, which he was eating in the company of men he thoroughly disliked. He was not enjoying the food but then Gagnaire sent him a note from the kitchen on a folded napkin, which read, “You look miserable.” The whole experience was transformed; the meal suddenly became good. Every month, This provides Gagnaire with an idea that Gagnaire publishes on his website along with a recipe inspired by it. A recent one concerned the 19th-century German chemist Justus Liebig, and elaborates an idea about combining gelatine and oil into a gelified emulsion. “Wonderful, simple idea,” writes Gagnaire, and comes up with a recipe for grape juice with flat parsley and a “Venice bouillon”.
As we finish our coffee, I bring up a question that has been nagging at the back of my mind. Why does microwaved porridge taste so much better? The answer is that porridge is made up of granules of starch that either bloat homogeneously (in the microwave) or keep a tough core (on the stove). “I am ready to take a microscope – no, I encourage you to take a microscope – and examine your grain of porridge.”
www.pierre-gagnaire.com
Lunch with the FT
It is now 16 years since the FThad the idea for the FT’s Lunch for a Fiver, as it was then called. Over time it became, simply, Lunch with the FT and, partly as a gesture of optimism amid a growing sense of economic unease, the paper has decided to resurrect it – in a bigger, better and more interactive form.........read on at the above website
Stealing Art
In the wake of Sunday's theft of four Post-Impressionist paintings from the Buhrle Collection in Zurich (following the lifting of two Picassos from another museum in Switzerland four days earlier), most people are probably asking: How did they do it? Will the thieves get caught? What will become of the pictures if they aren't?
Good questions. But there's another more fundamental one: Why do people steal art at all? Art theft is a labor-intensive, high-risk business. Works of art are hard to store and even harder to get rid of. High-profile thefts, such as those that have occurred in the past two weeks, attract extensive publicity -- making the pictures widely recognizable and therefore too "hot" to be easily fenced.
One of the main factors determining a work of art's value on the open market, says Special Agent Robert Wittman, senior investigator on the FBI's National Art Crime Team, is a legitimate provenance, or ownership history. What thieves rarely recognize is that once artworks have been stolen from a museum, "they have no provenance. They can't be sold, so they're really worth nothing." It is surely no accident, for example, that the 13 paintings stolen from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 -- among them, works by Rembrandt and Vermeer -- haven't surfaced. Anyone with the means to buy such paintings has seen the pictures reproduced in the media.
Sometimes the art is so hard to get rid of that the thieves just have to dump it. Sharon Flescher, executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), cites a 1978 theft at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. The case went unsolved until 21 years later, when "three of the four works turned up in a box" at the William Doyle auction house in Manhattan, secreted there during an open house by someone who trusted they could get in and out without being seen.
So why don't thieves stick to jewelry heists or bank robberies? The most popular explanation is that they are commissioned by shadowy underworld figures to obtain art for their private delectation. In the movie "Dr. No," James Bond, an unwilling guest in the eponymous doctor's lair, does a double take as he passes a painting on his way into dinner with his host. Audiences don't laugh now, but they did when the film was first released: The painting in question, Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington, had been stolen from London's National Gallery the year before the movie was made. (It was recovered in 1965.)
But this idea of the evil genius as art connoisseur is "a myth," according to Ms. Flescher. Nobody has ever arrested a drug dealer or mafia kingpin and found his hideaway lined with A-list masterpieces from the world's museums.
Still, art thievery continues apace. It amounts to what Special Agent Wittman says is a $3 billion to $5 billion world-wide business. It includes forgery, fraud, high-end museum capers as well as -- the majority of the business -- simple domestic burglaries whose loot is easily disposed of in flea markets. In the past year, Mr. Wittman says, there have been at least five major heists in countries ranging from France to Brazil.
Perhaps art thievery persists for reasons that have less to do with personal prestige or monetary gain than with a vague sense of cultural longing. When the British mountaineer George Leigh Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, he said "because it's there." Maybe that is why art is stolen too. Society has historically expressed its reverence for art by displaying it, paying high prices for it, commissioning it and elevating the people who make it to the status of celebrities if not demi-gods.
These days we venerate art with our blockbuster exhibitions and black-tie auctions. Art theft, too, is a kind of veneration, albeit of a decidedly sinister sort, a backhanded salute to art's powerful grip on the collective imagination. In spite of its inherent difficulties and risks, art theft may be driven primarily by art's easy availability and its high social profile. This explanation doesn't justify what was done in Switzerland on Sunday. But it does show why art theft has always been with us -- and always will be.
Good questions. But there's another more fundamental one: Why do people steal art at all? Art theft is a labor-intensive, high-risk business. Works of art are hard to store and even harder to get rid of. High-profile thefts, such as those that have occurred in the past two weeks, attract extensive publicity -- making the pictures widely recognizable and therefore too "hot" to be easily fenced.
One of the main factors determining a work of art's value on the open market, says Special Agent Robert Wittman, senior investigator on the FBI's National Art Crime Team, is a legitimate provenance, or ownership history. What thieves rarely recognize is that once artworks have been stolen from a museum, "they have no provenance. They can't be sold, so they're really worth nothing." It is surely no accident, for example, that the 13 paintings stolen from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 -- among them, works by Rembrandt and Vermeer -- haven't surfaced. Anyone with the means to buy such paintings has seen the pictures reproduced in the media.
Sometimes the art is so hard to get rid of that the thieves just have to dump it. Sharon Flescher, executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), cites a 1978 theft at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. The case went unsolved until 21 years later, when "three of the four works turned up in a box" at the William Doyle auction house in Manhattan, secreted there during an open house by someone who trusted they could get in and out without being seen.
So why don't thieves stick to jewelry heists or bank robberies? The most popular explanation is that they are commissioned by shadowy underworld figures to obtain art for their private delectation. In the movie "Dr. No," James Bond, an unwilling guest in the eponymous doctor's lair, does a double take as he passes a painting on his way into dinner with his host. Audiences don't laugh now, but they did when the film was first released: The painting in question, Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington, had been stolen from London's National Gallery the year before the movie was made. (It was recovered in 1965.)
But this idea of the evil genius as art connoisseur is "a myth," according to Ms. Flescher. Nobody has ever arrested a drug dealer or mafia kingpin and found his hideaway lined with A-list masterpieces from the world's museums.
Still, art thievery continues apace. It amounts to what Special Agent Wittman says is a $3 billion to $5 billion world-wide business. It includes forgery, fraud, high-end museum capers as well as -- the majority of the business -- simple domestic burglaries whose loot is easily disposed of in flea markets. In the past year, Mr. Wittman says, there have been at least five major heists in countries ranging from France to Brazil.
Perhaps art thievery persists for reasons that have less to do with personal prestige or monetary gain than with a vague sense of cultural longing. When the British mountaineer George Leigh Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, he said "because it's there." Maybe that is why art is stolen too. Society has historically expressed its reverence for art by displaying it, paying high prices for it, commissioning it and elevating the people who make it to the status of celebrities if not demi-gods.
These days we venerate art with our blockbuster exhibitions and black-tie auctions. Art theft, too, is a kind of veneration, albeit of a decidedly sinister sort, a backhanded salute to art's powerful grip on the collective imagination. In spite of its inherent difficulties and risks, art theft may be driven primarily by art's easy availability and its high social profile. This explanation doesn't justify what was done in Switzerland on Sunday. But it does show why art theft has always been with us -- and always will be.
The (not so) Dismal Science
The Logic of Life: Uncovering the New Economics of EverythingTim Harford, Little Brown 288pp, £18.99
"An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible," said Alfred A Knopf, a leading American publisher of the early 20th century. Even today, Knopf is not alone in his contempt for the profession of economics. After all, how much have the endless lists of equations, the reams of simulation results and the mountains of volume upon volume of economic journals added to our understanding of society and policy? In The Logic of Life, however, Tim Harford uncovers the true essence of economics, not as a set of policy prescriptions but as a toolkit for understanding how most people make decisions in a world of uncertainty. To turn the quotation on its head, Harford manages to explain some of life's most incomprehensible occurrences in rather obvious terms.
The Logic of Life is the latest addition to the growing body of work attempting to popularise the subject of economics. One of the earliest examples of what many call "pop economics" was Steven E Landsburg's book The Armchair Economist. He recalls how "in 1991, when I first approached publishers, my covering letter began thus: 'When lawyers or executives meet for lunch, they more often speculate about economics than about evolutionary biology. Yet bookstore shelves are well stocked with books on evolution and almost empty of economics.' Nobody could say the same thing today. Dozens of good writers have stepped in to explain the economic way of thinking to a wider audience."
Indeed, the pop economics phenomenon has intensified since the 2005 publication of the hugely popular Freakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner. This new genre is different from the more established variety of accessible writing on economics, represented by the likes of Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Martin Wolf. The distinction is in the choice of topic.
The old-school pop economists, for want of a better label, tackle the big issues most people think about when they hear the word "economics": monetary policy, international trade, development, fiscal policy, financial markets. The new-generation practitioners of pop economics (or "gadget economics" or "cute-o-nomics", depending on one's regard for the genre) apply the tools of the pro fession to a much wider range of situations. Just look at the subtitles of some of these books: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Economics and Everyday Life, Uncovering the New Economics of Everything. And the reading public loves it. To paraphrase Richard Nixon, we are all freakonomists now.
In fact, Harford is probably one of the most representative members of the movement. His bestselling first book, The Undercover Economist, which stemmed from his column of the same name in the Financial Times, was followed by various radio and television efforts, such as Trust Me, I'm an Economist on BBC2.
Harford's new book is overwhelmingly about one concept: rationality. He offers a simple and attractive definition: rational people will make decisions based on the costs and benefits of a specific choice, the effect on their total budget, and the future consequences of their actions. But he is quick to warn us of the usual simplifying assumptions made by economists. First, people are motivated by all sorts of emotions: "I do not suggest that people are wholly self-interested or obsessed with money." Second, he acknowledges that people are not "blessed with the omniscience or perfect self-control" often assumed in economic models: "I do not deny that humans have irrational quirks and foibles." Finally, he rejects the idea that economic agents are constantly calculating supercomputers that consider every possible outcome: "When we act rationally, we often do it unconsciously, just as when someone throws a ball for us to catch, we aren't conscious of our brain solving differential equations to work out where it's going to land."
Early in the book he illustrates his definition of rational behaviour with a few, truly eye- opening examples. He writes about how recent worries in the US of an "oral sex epidemic" among teenagers are misplaced: young people are simply deciding to avoid the increased costs of disease/pregnancy associated with penetrative sex, which they have been taught about in sex-education lessons. In another example, crime rates among teenagers react to changes in the severity of the youth justice system across different US states. In the Mexican town of Morelia, prostitutes calculate the costs and benefits of having unprotected sex with their clients, and charge them accordingly. Even laboratory rats, when given the choice of two drinks - root beer or tonic water - react rationally to changes in the "price" of their least favourite option. Most importantly, these are not just simple intuitions. In all cases, in arriving at his intuitive conclusion, Harford refers to published economics research that uses changes in laws, differences across regions or economic experiments.
The point of this exercise is not to teach us that rats prefer root beer to tonic water (though they do, by the way). When I asked Harford about his view on rationality, he put it like this: "Clearly we are not selfish supercomputers, but few economic models need to assume that we are. For me, both our selfishness and our ability to subconsciously weigh costs and benefits are a question of evidence, and the evidence shows that we respond to changing costs and benefits in unexpected situations - sex, marriage, crime, as victims of bigotry - and more coolly than you might think."
The Logic of Life proceeds in an incremental manner, gradually tackling bigger and bigger portions of our everyday life, sometimes within the space of a single chapter. There is a very interesting exposition of game theory, the economic study of interactive decision-making. Harford starts by going behind the scenes at the World Poker Championship in Las Vegas. He illustrates the rational logic of the competitors with the life story of Chris Ferguson, the computer science academic-turned-poker champion. This moves on to the seminal 1944 contribution to game theory in economics by John von Neumann, whose theories were later used by the Nobel laureate economist Thomas Schelling to advise John F Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis. This in turn leads to a discussion of addiction and the use of focal points and tactical taboos as techniques to abstain. The further one reads, the clearer it becomes that this sort of decision-making applies in our own lives.
A good example is the story of the experiment where subjects are given the choice of snack: either chocolate or a healthy alternative such as fruit. When the snack was to be consumed immediately, a large majority chose chocolate; when the snack was to be had in a week's time, the majority chose fruit. This, in short, is nothing but another rational choice, but one that weights long- and short-term benefits differently.
There is almost no situation that Harford cannot dissect with his sharp economist's tools. "Since I see economics around me every day, it is more of a pleasure than a challenge. Translating economic jargon and especially mathematics into plain English is a bit more of a headache. It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it."
Among other things, he explores the idea of a marriage market, using research from speed-dating events; he looks at how workplaces provide incentives to employees to work harder, using data on the number of items scanned by supermarket checkout operators; he examines the costs and benefits of living in cities rather than the countryside; and he discusses the monetary value of the right to vote in an election.
The Logic of Life also benefits from Harford having spent time with some of the most radical economic thinkers of recent times. He peppers his journey through the rational landscape with anecdotes of meetings with Nobel prizewinners and influential academic economists.
However, Harford is well aware of the limits to rational behaviour. He shows this in his chapters discussing rational racism, the result of employers trying to recruit with imperfect information, and community segregation in cities, the result of only mild individual preferences for homogeneous communities. As he explained recently on Radio 4's Start the Week, "Just because people are behaving rationally, it doesn't mean that the result is a socially happy outcome - and there is a lot that governments can do." But he ends on a good note. His final chapter, "A Million Years of Logic", offers an entertaining and powerfully optimistic defence of rational behaviour as a means to improve society and the planet.
What does Harford's contribution mean for the phenomenon of pop economics? It seems that there is still more of it to come - especially given that Levitt and Dubner are planning a follow-up to Freakonomics. Crucially, people like it. As Harford told me: "Done well, it's fun and it helps people understand the world." Or, in Steven Landsburg's words: "The challenge is to raise questions ('Why is popcorn so expensive at the movie theatre?'), to explain why the obvious answers ('monopoly power') are wrong, to tease out better answers, to draw general morals, and to make the whole thing fun."
Will pop economics help remedy the profession's reputation? Harford thinks that "we should wear the badge of 'the dismal science' with pride. It was given to us not by Malthus - as most people seem to think - but by Thomas Carlyle, who attacked John Stuart Mill and his fellow political economists for their 'dismal' support for emancipation, and their insistence that former slaves, women, even the Irish, were all equal. I think that basic respect for individual dignity is fundamental to economics, however strange that might sound."
Successful writers of pop economics have benefited greatly from the vast body of research produced by academic and professional economists. Perhaps it is time these economists learned from authors such as Harford how to make their work more relevant and accessible. Some may disagree, but one thing is clear: economics has never been this cool.
"An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible," said Alfred A Knopf, a leading American publisher of the early 20th century. Even today, Knopf is not alone in his contempt for the profession of economics. After all, how much have the endless lists of equations, the reams of simulation results and the mountains of volume upon volume of economic journals added to our understanding of society and policy? In The Logic of Life, however, Tim Harford uncovers the true essence of economics, not as a set of policy prescriptions but as a toolkit for understanding how most people make decisions in a world of uncertainty. To turn the quotation on its head, Harford manages to explain some of life's most incomprehensible occurrences in rather obvious terms.
The Logic of Life is the latest addition to the growing body of work attempting to popularise the subject of economics. One of the earliest examples of what many call "pop economics" was Steven E Landsburg's book The Armchair Economist. He recalls how "in 1991, when I first approached publishers, my covering letter began thus: 'When lawyers or executives meet for lunch, they more often speculate about economics than about evolutionary biology. Yet bookstore shelves are well stocked with books on evolution and almost empty of economics.' Nobody could say the same thing today. Dozens of good writers have stepped in to explain the economic way of thinking to a wider audience."
Indeed, the pop economics phenomenon has intensified since the 2005 publication of the hugely popular Freakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner. This new genre is different from the more established variety of accessible writing on economics, represented by the likes of Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Martin Wolf. The distinction is in the choice of topic.
The old-school pop economists, for want of a better label, tackle the big issues most people think about when they hear the word "economics": monetary policy, international trade, development, fiscal policy, financial markets. The new-generation practitioners of pop economics (or "gadget economics" or "cute-o-nomics", depending on one's regard for the genre) apply the tools of the pro fession to a much wider range of situations. Just look at the subtitles of some of these books: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Economics and Everyday Life, Uncovering the New Economics of Everything. And the reading public loves it. To paraphrase Richard Nixon, we are all freakonomists now.
In fact, Harford is probably one of the most representative members of the movement. His bestselling first book, The Undercover Economist, which stemmed from his column of the same name in the Financial Times, was followed by various radio and television efforts, such as Trust Me, I'm an Economist on BBC2.
Harford's new book is overwhelmingly about one concept: rationality. He offers a simple and attractive definition: rational people will make decisions based on the costs and benefits of a specific choice, the effect on their total budget, and the future consequences of their actions. But he is quick to warn us of the usual simplifying assumptions made by economists. First, people are motivated by all sorts of emotions: "I do not suggest that people are wholly self-interested or obsessed with money." Second, he acknowledges that people are not "blessed with the omniscience or perfect self-control" often assumed in economic models: "I do not deny that humans have irrational quirks and foibles." Finally, he rejects the idea that economic agents are constantly calculating supercomputers that consider every possible outcome: "When we act rationally, we often do it unconsciously, just as when someone throws a ball for us to catch, we aren't conscious of our brain solving differential equations to work out where it's going to land."
Early in the book he illustrates his definition of rational behaviour with a few, truly eye- opening examples. He writes about how recent worries in the US of an "oral sex epidemic" among teenagers are misplaced: young people are simply deciding to avoid the increased costs of disease/pregnancy associated with penetrative sex, which they have been taught about in sex-education lessons. In another example, crime rates among teenagers react to changes in the severity of the youth justice system across different US states. In the Mexican town of Morelia, prostitutes calculate the costs and benefits of having unprotected sex with their clients, and charge them accordingly. Even laboratory rats, when given the choice of two drinks - root beer or tonic water - react rationally to changes in the "price" of their least favourite option. Most importantly, these are not just simple intuitions. In all cases, in arriving at his intuitive conclusion, Harford refers to published economics research that uses changes in laws, differences across regions or economic experiments.
The point of this exercise is not to teach us that rats prefer root beer to tonic water (though they do, by the way). When I asked Harford about his view on rationality, he put it like this: "Clearly we are not selfish supercomputers, but few economic models need to assume that we are. For me, both our selfishness and our ability to subconsciously weigh costs and benefits are a question of evidence, and the evidence shows that we respond to changing costs and benefits in unexpected situations - sex, marriage, crime, as victims of bigotry - and more coolly than you might think."
The Logic of Life proceeds in an incremental manner, gradually tackling bigger and bigger portions of our everyday life, sometimes within the space of a single chapter. There is a very interesting exposition of game theory, the economic study of interactive decision-making. Harford starts by going behind the scenes at the World Poker Championship in Las Vegas. He illustrates the rational logic of the competitors with the life story of Chris Ferguson, the computer science academic-turned-poker champion. This moves on to the seminal 1944 contribution to game theory in economics by John von Neumann, whose theories were later used by the Nobel laureate economist Thomas Schelling to advise John F Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis. This in turn leads to a discussion of addiction and the use of focal points and tactical taboos as techniques to abstain. The further one reads, the clearer it becomes that this sort of decision-making applies in our own lives.
A good example is the story of the experiment where subjects are given the choice of snack: either chocolate or a healthy alternative such as fruit. When the snack was to be consumed immediately, a large majority chose chocolate; when the snack was to be had in a week's time, the majority chose fruit. This, in short, is nothing but another rational choice, but one that weights long- and short-term benefits differently.
There is almost no situation that Harford cannot dissect with his sharp economist's tools. "Since I see economics around me every day, it is more of a pleasure than a challenge. Translating economic jargon and especially mathematics into plain English is a bit more of a headache. It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it."
Among other things, he explores the idea of a marriage market, using research from speed-dating events; he looks at how workplaces provide incentives to employees to work harder, using data on the number of items scanned by supermarket checkout operators; he examines the costs and benefits of living in cities rather than the countryside; and he discusses the monetary value of the right to vote in an election.
The Logic of Life also benefits from Harford having spent time with some of the most radical economic thinkers of recent times. He peppers his journey through the rational landscape with anecdotes of meetings with Nobel prizewinners and influential academic economists.
However, Harford is well aware of the limits to rational behaviour. He shows this in his chapters discussing rational racism, the result of employers trying to recruit with imperfect information, and community segregation in cities, the result of only mild individual preferences for homogeneous communities. As he explained recently on Radio 4's Start the Week, "Just because people are behaving rationally, it doesn't mean that the result is a socially happy outcome - and there is a lot that governments can do." But he ends on a good note. His final chapter, "A Million Years of Logic", offers an entertaining and powerfully optimistic defence of rational behaviour as a means to improve society and the planet.
What does Harford's contribution mean for the phenomenon of pop economics? It seems that there is still more of it to come - especially given that Levitt and Dubner are planning a follow-up to Freakonomics. Crucially, people like it. As Harford told me: "Done well, it's fun and it helps people understand the world." Or, in Steven Landsburg's words: "The challenge is to raise questions ('Why is popcorn so expensive at the movie theatre?'), to explain why the obvious answers ('monopoly power') are wrong, to tease out better answers, to draw general morals, and to make the whole thing fun."
Will pop economics help remedy the profession's reputation? Harford thinks that "we should wear the badge of 'the dismal science' with pride. It was given to us not by Malthus - as most people seem to think - but by Thomas Carlyle, who attacked John Stuart Mill and his fellow political economists for their 'dismal' support for emancipation, and their insistence that former slaves, women, even the Irish, were all equal. I think that basic respect for individual dignity is fundamental to economics, however strange that might sound."
Successful writers of pop economics have benefited greatly from the vast body of research produced by academic and professional economists. Perhaps it is time these economists learned from authors such as Harford how to make their work more relevant and accessible. Some may disagree, but one thing is clear: economics has never been this cool.
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