ART -- Explained

In recent decades the philosophy of art has been much preoccupied with the enigma of why a given object does or doesn't count as a work of art. Since the challenge of Duchamp's Fountain and other readymades, according to the Belgian writer Thierry de Duve, the form of aesthetic judgment has undergone a shift: from "this is beautiful" to, simply, "this is art." For the philosopher, art status is like a light switch, either on or off. But the everyday art world is nothing like that, which is why the sociologist Howard Becker complains that the philosopher's art world "does not have much meat on its bones." For Becker, as for artists, collectors and critics, whether something is a work of art or not is the least of it. In the sociologist's art world, hierarchies, rankings and orders of distinction proliferate. Status and reputation are all, and questions about them abound. Why does the seemingly kitschy work of Jeff Koons hang in great museums around the world while the equally cheesy paintings of Thomas Kinkade would never be considered? Why is Gavin Brown's Enterprise a venue for art but not the outdoor painting show at Washington Square? Why can the works of some artists fetch millions at auction while those of others with good reputations and long exhibition histories can be sold for thousands but possibly never resold? How do conflicting views on the value of different kinds of artworks jell into a rough and shifting consensus about the boundaries of what will be considered art in the first place?


Art Worlds
by Howard S. Becker
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Seven Days in the Art World
by Sarah Thornton
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The same kinds of question could be asked in other fields, but in the art of the past hundred years or so such questions have been of the essence: art is the field that exists in order for there to be contention about what art is. And such questions are not just for the cognoscenti; they've caught the fancy of a broad public as well. Once the man in the street saw a Picasso painting and said, "My kid could do better." Today, that child has grown up and is bemused but no longer outraged to read that a shark in a fish tank is worth a fortune but has been generously loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Now he admires, at least grudgingly, the clever scamp who could orchestrate that, and finds the whole affair rather interesting to talk about--even if the object itself might not, he suspects, be much to look at.

Sarah Thornton has spent her seven days in the art world of the reigning consensus, the one in which the Koonses thrive but not the Kinkades--an art world that claims the right to call itself the art world. Thornton attempts neither to refute nor support this will to monopolize the power to define art; she accepts it at face value. Becker once divided art practitioners into four rough categories: integrated professionals, mavericks, folk artists, and naïve artists. Only the professionals turn up in Thornton's book, and even then most are disqualified: a professional supplier of landscapes for hotel rooms has no more place here than the most eccentric hobbyist. Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World is a book I'd recommend to anyone who wants to know what the exclusive professional art world is like. For anyone who wants to understand why it's that way, and who requires more history and more comparative context than Thornton provides, the best choice is Becker's classic sociological study Art Worlds, which has recently been reissued in an updated and expanded twenty-fifth anniversary edition. It's as timely as ever, and Becker knowledgeably draws his examples from the very different "art worlds" inhabited by jazz musicians, theater people and poets as well as the one surrounding painters and sculptors. Bernini's relations with Pope Urban VIII are as relevant to Becker's view of art as a form of collective action as E.E. Cummings's difficulties with typesetters.

Each of Thornton's seven "days" is an immersion in a typical setting for art world activity: an auction, an art school crit, a fair, the buildup to the Turner Prize, the offices of an art magazine, an artist's studio (that of the Japanese Pop artist Takashi Murakami) and the Venice Biennale. It's strange that one of the days was not spent at a museum, surely the ultimate destination for every professional contemporary artist. Perhaps this reflects the fact that, despite Thornton's warning that "the art world is much broader than the art market," her view of the art world reflects the centrality of the market over the past decade. In any case, the "you are there" immediacy she cultivates--underlined by section headings within each chapter that track the time of day as it passes--is a convenient fiction; more to the point are the five years that Thornton, a London-based Canadian writer, spent researching the book and interviewing a wide range of art world participants. (To prove how deeply she's dug, even my name is among the hundreds listed in her acknowledgments.) Thornton is not your typical journalist but rather a sociologist whose previous book is a quasi-ethnographic study of British rave and club culture in the early '90s. She is an experienced hand at using participant observation to tease out the tacit system of accords and conflicts that make up a community and the fine hierarchical distinctions that structure it. In writing Seven Days, Thornton has striven perhaps too avidly for an open, popular tone unencumbered by any overt theorization, indulging in too much description of people's outfits. Yet her academic training stands her in good stead as she attempts to map the "loose network of overlapping subcultures held together by a belief in art."

Thornton's reference to the art world as a subculture ought to be surprising. A visit to one of the great museums of modern and contemporary art that exist in every important city might easily convince the observer that art is just plain culture, not a subculture--that is, something central and dominant in society. After all, so much money and civic pride have been invested in it. But the people who make up the art world often wonder if their culture is really central at all. Undoubtedly they believe that it ought to be, but they are deeply aware that there is something eccentric about their relation to the culture at large, something fragile. Like the club culture that Thornton previously studied, the art world is a specialized milieu based on taste; both depend on the value of authenticity and a disdain for the aesthetics of mainstream mass culture. (A collector who loves Roy Lichtenstein will not therefore become an aficionado of comic books.) The publisher of Artforum reluctantly admits that his magazine "is establishment in a funny sense"; likewise, contemporary art is a culture but in a funny sense. The art world doesn't know whether it is a subculture pretending to be a culture or a culture pretending to be a subculture.

Thornton doesn't know either, and as for the art world denizens' proud but uneasy belief that they are somehow different from other people, she can only agree. "Even in the straightest part of the art world," she finds, "the players have character"--echoing the art magazine publisher who explains his love of the art world by describing it as "the place where I found the most kindred spirits--enough oddball, overeducated, anachronistic, anarchic people to make me happy." But they don't know whether their passion is noble or base; one collector speaks about it as a religion and an addiction. A gallerist nicely sums up his profession this way: "Our business is to sell symptoms articulated as objects." What's ambiguous is whether the symptoms are merely those of a few odd individuals or of the culture at large. The artists believe in their vision--"a total vision of how things have to be," as one puts it; "an individual's radically idiosyncratic interpretation of the world," says another--and in order for the artists to be successful, dealers and collectors and critics have to believe in it with them. "What we're looking for is integrity," say the collectors. Obsessiveness becomes a badge of honor: "Takashi worked so hard on this painting that several staff quit," a dealer enthuses over a work he's selling, neatly eliding the labor of Murakami's assistants with that of their boss. But at the same time, they believe, "a collection is a personal vision" too--it embodies the collectors' unique and idiosyncratic view of things (which, like the artists, they would nonetheless want to see collectively acknowledged).

Just as the value of an artwork is always in contention, especially when it hasn't been hallowed by time (that is, by habit), so the people who populate the art world can rarely feel secure about their position in it. "'Collector' should be an earned category," says one; there is an implicit distinction between the "real" collectors, who buy for the "right" reasons, and those who just shop for art--but this means the collector's money offers little protection from the sense of being under judgment by dealers (at least those the collector respects as the "right" dealers), artists and above all fellow collectors (the real ones, of course). Likewise, the artists are constantly falling prey to worries about how they are seen by dealers, critics and other artists. Success can be a sign that one has become boring and uncreative. And of course, while Thornton depicts artists, critics, curators, dealers, auction-house experts and collectors as all part of one big art world, they don't always mutually recognize one another as such, as when an artist casually speaks of "noncolleagues like collectors and museum people." On the other hand, the person pointing out faces in the crowd at the Venice Biennale and saying, "He's C list. She's B list" would probably not even put most artists, let alone a critic, on any list.

One unusual aspect of the art world--at least among the people who buy art rather than make it--goes unmentioned by Thornton, although a number of her interlocutors subtly allude to it: the fact that, at least in the United States and England, art's collectorship is heavily Jewish, and perhaps to a lesser extent, so is its "administration." Consider that in London, the unprecedented intensity of interest in contemporary art might never have happened were it not for the efforts of two men, both Jewish: the Iraqi-born collector Charles Saatchi and Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate Gallery. One collector compares an evening sale at Christie's to "going to synagogue on the High Holidays. Everybody knows everybody else, but they only see each other three times a year, so they are chatting and catching up." A Turner Prize judge compares art to the Talmud: "an ongoing, open-ended dialogue that allows multiple points of view." Thornton observes the director of Art Basel, the world's most important contemporary art fair, making his round of the stands: he shmoozes his clients, the dealers, in French, Italian and German, and, Thornton observes, "I believe I even heard him say 'Shalom.'"

The implicitly Jewish ethos surely feeds into the feeling that the art world is somehow set apart, part of the establishment perhaps but only "in a funny sense." It also helps explain why the aesthetic of the art world is really an ethic, one that seeks something higher than mere pleasure. One of the deepest observations in Seven Days comes not from any of the renowned artists or brooding academics Thornton has spoken to but from the collector who, when asked if he likes work by young artists, says, "I don't necessarily like it, but I buy it." It's a joke, but it's serious, and from the viewpoint of collecting it represents an advanced stage of consciousness--just as it does when an artist makes something that he doesn't necessarily like. This was already the case at the beginning of the last century, for instance in 1905 when Gertrude and Leo Stein bought Matisse's The Woman With the Hat, now one of the treasures of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The "nastiest smear of paint I had ever seen," Leo called it. "I would have snatched it at once if I had not needed a few days to get over the unpleasantness." But of course there's a proviso: buying something before you've learned to like it, or making something that you haven't yet learned to like, is not the same as buying something because someone else likes it or making the art that someone else would like you to make--though that is precisely what innumerable collectors and artists do. To detach oneself from the vagaries of the taste of one's milieu is a considerable accomplishment. But to detach oneself from one's own taste is much rarer. To know one's taste and follow it represents integrity, but to know the limitations of one's taste and aspire to circumvent it is a more refined form of integrity as well as of business acumen. A painter explains of her work, "I know it's finished when the work feels independent of me." A sculptor says, "I don't necessarily love the things that I'm making.... It's about allowing yourself to accept what you do."

At a time when art still makes headlines mostly for the absurd prices people are willing to pay for it, it may sound surprising to say that the ethic of the art world entails a deep ambivalence about its financial basis--the "umbilical cord of gold" that, as Clement Greenberg once observed, has always tied it to the ruling class. Although the art world is filled with people who possess an incredible talent for moneymaking, my observation is that for most of them--dealers and collectors included--there is little economic rationality to their behavior, or anyway what economic rationality is there is a facade for more obscure motives. This is not to say that those motives are somehow "pure" but rather that even art that seems totally fixated on commercial culture is fixated on it in the mode of fantasy, of image.

Thornton refers to her seven chapters as narratives, but most of them are more like collages of snapshots. Only one chapter yields a conventional narrative arc with aspiration, obstacles, suspense and final success--and it turns out to be the book's high point. This is the chapter on Murakami, whom we see struggling to realize the biggest work of his career in time for a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The chapter is also an illustration of the strange relation between art and money. Murakami's "studio" is essentially a complex business with centers in Tokyo and New York City and a staff of ninety people. But as his dealer admits after the visit, the studio "sends a message. It says, 'We're not some messy workshop. We're a clean, pristine, professional business.'" After which he has to add, "Of course, the organization is totally dysfunctional." To Andy Warhol's dictum "Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.... Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art," Murakami's laughing response is, "That is a fantasy!"

And he's right. It's the last romance, the romance of the mundane. "I threw out my general life," Murakami tells Thornton, "so that I can make a concentration out of my job. You maybe expecting more romantic story?" One can only hope she responded, What could be more romantic than that? A prominent art theorist recently wrote, "The claim of a single artist that his or her work is an unpredictable, creative act, seems obsolete, and is not taken seriously by today's art world." What Thornton's field work shows is that the art world takes this idea very seriously indeed. At the climax of the chapter on Murakami, his giant sculpture of the Buddha, whose construction has caused enormous technical and logistical difficulties, emerges from the foundry. Only now does it become clear that the sculpture is Murakami's self-portrait. "Unfuckingbelievable!" exclaims the curator, who has been waiting for this moment of success or failure. He's been rewarded with the most romantic art experience of all, the pure myth itself, and still incredibly powerful: the revelation of creative selfhood through the manipulation of impersonal materials. It's straight out of The Agony and the Ecstasy, and we still love it.

The Full Beaver Moon

Go outside and see the Full Beaver Moon tonight! This full Moon is a sign of freezing weather to come. For Algonquin tribes, it was a time to set beaver traps before the swamps froze to ensure a supply of warm winter furs

Nicole Gelinas

Paulson Bails Out the Bailout

If at first it won’t succeed . . .

This morning, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson confirmed what some observers had suspected for weeks: the government isn’t planning to use any of the $700 billion financial-bailout money, awarded by Congress to the executive branch in October, to purchase troubled mortgage-related assets from financial institutions. “We had continued to examine the relative benefits of purchasing illiquid mortgage-related assets,” the secretary said. “Our assessment . . . is that this is not the most effective way to use TARP funds”—referring to the month-old Troubled Asset Relief Program. Though Paulson’s reason was a dispiriting one—that the credit-card and other consumer-financing markets have deteriorated so much that they’re now consuming more of his attention—the announcement was a glimmer of good news nevertheless, since the original plan would have delayed recovery.

Much of the surviving regime within the old, failed financial industry is still in denial about its business model, and the government has been stringing it along. Consider what Tom Marano, the CEO of near-bankrupt mortgage company Rescap, said just two days ago at a conference of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. Rescap holds a portfolio of mortgage loans and related securities. “I get calls from people wanting to buy nonperforming [mortgage] loans all the time,” Marano said, “but the problem is that they want 20 to 25 percent returns” on assets that include delinquent loans, after taking a discount for mortgages already far in default. That is, they want to buy the loans at prices low enough that, when they eventually sell them again, the returns will be hefty. Even on portfolios of mortgages whose borrowers are still making payments on time, Marano said, potential customers offer only “80 to 90 percent” of the original face value of the securities, because “they need a higher rate of return.” No thanks, Marano tells them, and waits for the government to buy on better terms. As of Monday, he was hoping that TARP would buy mortgages in his portfolios that were 90 days delinquent.

But private investors have two excellent reasons for demanding that Marano sell his mortgage-related assets at what he thinks is too low a price. First, the risk that homebuyers won’t continue to pay their mortgages in the future is simply higher than before. It’s clear that the collateral behind many mortgages—hugely inflated house values—is worth less than it was two years ago. It also seems likely that future house-price declines will put more pressure on homeowners to default. Further, other federal programs could decrease the value of the remaining mortgages by encouraging more homeowners to become delinquent in hopes of winning cheaper loans. Just as important is that potential buyers of the securities now understand that these mortgage securities are structured very precariously. And the potential buyers also know that the securities aren’t the instantaneously tradable, cashlike investments that sellers once called them. Investors need compensation for all these risks.

Second, a few years ago, hedge funds and other potential buyers could borrow huge amounts of money, turning the small returns that these supposedly safe, consistent securities offered into huge returns. Today, that strategy won’t work, since nobody will lend to them and the securities are far more volatile than they had once thought. So potential investors must seek out higher returns on the assets themselves. Another way of looking at it: the financial industry created mortgage-related and other opaque, intricate securities to meet demand for a particular product—investments that paid a reasonably high return without seeming to carry much risk. But because of the industry’s fatal miscalculations on many levels, the securities failed at the specific task for which they were created, and so their specific target market has vanished. The securities must find a new market now, one that won’t pay the old, high prices that people like Marano are still demanding. It’s as if RIM had designed a new BlackBerry that couldn’t send e-mail and tried to sell it for $200. Somebody might want it, but not at that price.

Marano is not an aberration. He’s a representative of a dangerous way of thinking. Much of the financial industry still refuses to acknowledge that its business-model failure is permanent. Far too many people seem to consider that failure the result of temporary, extraordinary market conditions that are—to use a phrase that’s now become an unintentionally humorous cliché—worse than anticipated. But the notion that complex financial engineering could make any long-term security always instantly salable and nearly risk-free was one of the roots of this crisis. Acknowledging its absurdity isn’t a matter of punishment or demonization; it’s a matter of making sure that failed ideas stay dead, so that they don’t come back stronger than before.

But the government has been doing just the opposite. Further, by promising to buy mortgage-related assets, it has given companies like Rescap an incentive to hang on to their bad debt for as long as possible, rather than sell it to those annoying investors offering prices that are too low. And that has delayed what is already likely to be a long, painful recovery.

To learn why, consider what got us out of our last major banking debacle, the savings and loan crisis of the late eighties and early nineties. William Seidman headed the FDIC in the eighties and later, as head of the federal Resolution Trust Corporation, handled the S&L aftermath. During that crisis, the U.S. government closed down failed S&L institutions and had to sell off their holdings. These holdings consisted of $600 billion in diverse assets, including office buildings, hotels, golf courses, and apartment complexes. “There was no real market” for such assets, Seidman said at Monday’s conference. “We decided we had to create a market. We said, we’re going to start selling these properties at whatever price we could get.”

And what did the private owners of similar assets do when the feds started their initial sales? They howled. “You can imagine the reception: ‘You’re driving the market down,’” Seidman said mildly. Many of the critics were on Capitol Hill. “Congress asked us to keep the assets for five years to get prices up. I said if I’m sitting here just waiting to sell my assets . . . the price isn’t going to go up.” Selling at distressed prices initially was “the only way you could get it done. We began to sell.” Investors who bought assets at rock-bottom prices found—through their own diligence, asset management, and early resales—that there was real value there, which encouraged investors to purchase more of the assets, increasing demand and raising the prices at future sales. Within a year, the market had begun to recover, with many formerly distressed properties approaching 70 percent of their original values.

What Seidman sensibly dismissed back then—holding on to assets to “get prices up”—was, until Paulson’s announcement today, a key part of the government’s working plan to fix the current crisis. But it’s only when holdouts and their creditors capitulate and start selling assets to private investors at distressed values that the market can begin to find its way to recovery, just as happened in the early nineties. This past summer, Merrill Lynch’s sale of some mortgage-related assets for 22 cents on the dollar was a key step to this price discovery and eventual recovery. Then, two months later, the government stopped such deals cold when it put forward its own plan. Private purchasers could never compete against the government in making asset purchases (remember that during the S&L crisis, the government had never purchased assets, only inherited them). If the government had started to purchase mortgage-related assets, and soon found that it had overpaid, it would have tried to hang on to the assets for as long as possible, not wanting to face the political backlash of having to announce its losses. Private investors would have been wary of buying into a market that soon would be controlled by government sales, likely demanding even higher rates of return from private sellers like Marano and thereby keeping the market frozen.

Genuine market activity needs to resume, even if very slowly, so that other private-sector investors can see, for example, what prices competitors will pay for such assets, and what assets bought now at “fire-sale” prices will command, say, a year from now. Investor purchases at rock-bottom prices are critical for another reason: institutions that buy at such prices have a great incentive to work with mortgage borrowers and other investors in the same securities to slash their debt to more sustainable levels. They’ll earn a profit if they do so successfully. Companies like Rescap, though, would realize losses by doing so.

Private transactions, and the research behind them, are also the only way to get valuable information to the market. The government’s purchases, by contrast, would have prevented information from getting out. Consider that Bloomberg News has had to sue the Federal Reserve to try to figure out what mortgage-related securities it has taken over from flailing financial institutions as collateral for loans.

Also note what the Fed and the Treasury did in hiding valuable information on Monday, when they revised their first two bailouts to AIG. Under AIG’s latest bailout regime, in addition to $100 billion in other government aid, taxpayers will put up $50 billion to purchase mortgage-related and other asset-related securities owned by AIG and its trading “counterparties”—that is, institutions to whom AIG could owe money. The feds will deposit these assets into a “special-purpose vehicle”—a sort of bad-securities purgatory where, apparently, they’re supposed to stay and stop annoying people with their pesky falling values. The government’s purchase price here—a little less than half of the securities’ initial value in the case of mortgage loans—appears to be completely random. And since the government apparently plans to keep these securities sequestered in their new netherworld indefinitely, important information will remain hidden from the market. Further, the government, because it revised its bailout partly to save its own skin after having become AIG’s biggest shareholder through its first bailout in September, has shredded what’s left of the concept of the capital structure in the American corporate world. Shareholders, including the government, aren’t supposed to be in charge of bankruptcy-style restructurings. They’re supposed to get what’s left over after a judge figures out the best way out of a mess.

Officially killing one bad idea, though, represents progress. If, come January, President Obama wants to kill the rest of them, he should turn to former Fed chief Paul Volcker, who became famous nearly two decades ago for finally doing in the remnants of another failed financial-engineering experiment—the public-private idea that permanently higher inflation could finance permanently lower unemployment. Volcker might have some good advice on how to use the rest of the TARP money to deal with the economic effects of the hidden failures still lurking within the financial industry.

Michael Crichton

He Brought Science to Life

Michael Crichton was a master of the unputdownable novel -- the kind of book whose story is so good it's almost impossible to stop reading. His best-selling thrillers are magnificent mind candy for cross-country flights or days at the beach. Moviemakers have found them irresistible: "The Andromeda Strain," "Jurassic Park" and "Congo" were winners on the printed page as well as blockbusters on the big screen. Authors aren't often cover boys for Time these days, but Mr. Crichton made the cut in 1995 and posed with a T. Rex skeleton. The magazine dubbed him "The Hit Man."

Mr. Crichton, who had just turned 66 when he died of cancer last week, was a pop-culture phenomenon. Perhaps for this reason, many critics refused to take his books seriously. When they bothered to read them at all, they complained about cardboard characters and preposterous plots. They regarded his novels as highly putdownable -- that is, worthy of putdowns.
Yet selling more than 150 million novels is nothing to mock. Mr. Crichton's success certainly owed a lot to skillful storytelling. At the same time, he aspired to be more than a mere entertainer. Mr. Crichton was fundamentally a novelist of ideas -- a public intellectual who wrote potboilers. He took on big subjects, such as bioengineering and climate change. He wasn't afraid of slowing down the action to teach a scientific concept. When he wanted his readers to understand something, he would devote a couple of paragraphs to explaining it.
Nor did he shy away from controversy. Sometimes his concerns were flat-out wrong: In "Rising Sun" (1992), he worried about the menace of Japanese capitalism and the threat of foreign investment. A few angry readers even accused him of xenophobia because he explored the sensitive subject of cultural difference. He seemed to relish these uproars. In "Disclosure" (1994), Mr. Crichton flabbergasted feminists by having his tale turn on a boss who files a fake sexual-harassment claim against her male subordinate. In "State of Fear" (2004), he portrayed global warming as an elaborate hoax perpetrated by dastardly environmentalists. The greens despised it. President Bush generated further bad feelings by apparently enjoying the book and having Karl Rove arrange a White House meeting with the politically incorrect author.
A lot of good science fiction takes a dim view of technological progress, and much of Mr. Crichton's work fits easily into this dystopian tradition. On one level, "Jurassic Park" (1990) is an adventure story about resurrected dinosaurs on a remote jungle island. Yet it also warns about scientific hubris and genetic manipulation. It may not rank with prophetic classics such as "Frankenstein" and "Brave New World," but it features velociraptors that chase and kill -- and so it's a heck of a lot more fun to read. There are probably graduate students digging up duck-billed dinosaur fossils right now because Mr. Crichton helped them fall in love with paleontology years ago.
Mr. Crichton was both unusually tall (6-foot-9) and smart (a degree from Harvard Medical School). While studying to become a physician, he scribbled on the side. In 1969, the Mystery Writers of America gave an Edgar Award for best new novel to "A Case of Need," a medical thriller. It wasn't actually Mr. Crichton's first novel, but it was the first one he published as "Jeffery Hudson," a pen name he used in honor of a 17th-century English courtier who was also a dwarf.
Although Mr. Crichton occasionally issued a dud -- "The Lost World," a 1995 sequel to "Jurassic Park," was a disappointment -- he mostly seemed blessed with a golden touch. He not only released "The Great Train Robbery" as a novel in 1975, but he also wrote the script and even directed the film starring Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland in 1979. The screenplay earned him another Edgar Award. When he turned his attention to television, he created "ER," the long-running hospital drama.
His workaholic habits were legendary, and he must have been a hard man to live with. Four of his five marriages ended in divorce. He displayed a vindictive streak, too. In 2006, Michael Crowley of The New Republic wrote a negative critique of Mr. Crichton's work. Rather than responding with a letter to the editor, Mr. Crichton retaliated in "Next," a novel about transgenic animals. It included a minor character named Mick Crowley, a child rapist who, like the real Mr. Crowley, had attended Yale.
If Mr. Crichton simply had sold a lot of forgettable books, the pundits probably would have seen fit to ignore him. Yet he demanded their attention. "State of Fear," the cautionary tale about global warming, grew out of an address to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. "Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists," he said in the speech. "If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st-century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths." After "State of Fear" came out, Mr. Crichton testified before a Senate committee and delivered remarks at the National Press Club.
At the end of "State of Fear," Mr. Crichton included an extensive and opinionated bibliography, plus an "Author's Message" in which he spelled out his own views on the environment in a series of pithy statements. "I am certain there is too much certainty in the world," he wrote, which is true enough. Yet he probably wore a smirk when he composed his final line: "Everyone has an agenda. Except me."
We can be certain of this: Mr. Crichton had an agenda. It was to make us think a little harder about our changing world, and to keep on turning the pages.

Eagleton on Wittgenstein

Palace of pain ...Terry Eagleton on a gripping account of the Wittgenstein madhouse

The Wittgensteins, ensconced in their grand Winter Palace in fin-de-siècle Vienna, were hardly a model family. The father, Karl , was a brutal autocrat as well as a high-class crook. He was an engineer by vocation, and his son Ludwig would later do some original work in aeronautics at Manchester University. A fabulously wealthy steel magnate, Karl rigged prices, bleeding his workers dry and doing much the same to his timorous wife Leopoldine. She once lay awake all night, agonised by an ugly wound in her foot but terrified of moving an inch in case she disturbed her irascible husband. She was an emotionally frigid mother and a neurotically dutiful wife, from whom all traces of individual personality had been violently erased.

The House of Wittgenstein
: A Family at War
by Alexander Waugh
384,
Bloomsbury,
£20

Buy The House of Wittgenstein at the Guardian bookshop
The family was a seething cauldron of psychosomatic disorders. Leopoldine was afflicted by terrible leg pains and eventually went blind. Her children had their problems too. Helene was plagued by stomach cramps; Gretl was beset by heart palpitations and sought advice from Sigmund Freud about her sexual frigidity; Hermine and Jerome both had dodgy fingers; Paul suffered from bouts of madness; and little Ludwig was scarcely the most well balanced of souls. Almost all the males of the family were seized from time to time by bouts of uncontrollable fury that bordered on insanity.

Behind Karl the prosperous bourgeois lay a madder, more reckless man. He ran away from home at 17, boarded a ship bound for New York and joined a minstrel band. Before making his pile in Vienna he was a restaurant violinist, a night watchman, a steersman on a canal boat, and taught the tenor horn in an orphanage. Despite being one of the premier families of the Austro-Hungarian empire, most of the Wittgensteins were spiritual outlaws and adventurers. They combined the aristocrat's cavalier disdain for convention with the underdog's suspicion of authority.

The sons of the household had a distressing habit of doing away with them selves. Handsome, intelligent, homosexual Rudolf strolled into a Berlin bar, dissolved potassium cyanide into his glass of milk and died in agony on the spot. Two years earlier, Hans Karl had disappeared without trace and is thought to have killed himself at sea. He was a shy, ungainly, possibly autistic child with a prodigious gift for maths and music, whose first spoken word was "Oedipus". He, too, was thought to be gay. Kurt seems to have shot himself "without visible reason" while serving as a soldier in the first world war. The philosopher Ludwig claims to have begun thinking about suicide when he was 10 or 11.

Paul, a classmate of Adolf Hitler, became an outstanding concert pianist. Unusually for male members of the family, he was robustly heterosexual. The Wittgenstein ménage was more like a conservatoire than a family home: Brahms, Mahler and Richard Strauss dropped in regularly, while Ravel wrote his "Concerto for the Left Hand" specially for Paul, who had lost an arm in the first world war. Paul thought his brother Ludwig's philosophy was "trash", while Ludwig took a dim view of Paul's musical abilities. The Winter Palace resounded with constant yelling and vicious squabbling.

Entrusted with the family fortune after his father's death, Paul invested it unwisely in government war bonds and lost most of it. Ludwig still inherited a sizeable amount of money, but in Tolstoyan spirit gave it all away to three of his siblings. His rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge, were almost bare of furniture. He is said to have remarked that he didn't mind at all what he ate, as long as it was always the same thing. It was a far cry from the overbred Vienna of his youth. Ludwig's monkish austerity, evident in the style of his first great work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was among other things a reaction against a Viennese world of cream cakes and swollen bodies, in which many of the poor slept in caves or parks.

Unconsciously re-enacting his father's impulse to escape, Ludwig fled from Cambridge to become an assistant gardener in an Austrian monastery, sleeping in a potting shed. He also lived for a while in a remote cottage in the west of Ireland, shacked up on the edge of a Norwegian fjord, and taught as a schoolmaster in several Austrian villages. Perhaps all this was a spiritual version of his brothers' suicides, on the part of a man seized by spiritual torment and self-loathing. If he inherited his father's instinct to scarper, however, he was also lumbered with his crazed bouts of fury. In one village school, he hit a girl so hard that she bled behind the ears, and then belaboured a boy about the head until he slumped unconscious to the floor. While Ludwig was dragging the boy's body off to the headmaster, he bumped into the irate father of the girl whose ears had bled, dropped the unconscious boy and did a runner.

Alexander Waugh's eminently readable, meticulously researched account of the Wittgenstein madhouse might have speculated a bit more on how this background helped to shape the most celebrated of all the Wittgensteins. It certainly casts some light on Ludwig's extraordinary contradictions. Haughty, imperious and impossibly exacting, driven by a fatiguing zeal for moral perfection and contemptuous of most of those around him, he was a true son of patrician Vienna. Yet his greatest work, Philosophical Investigations, also represents a rejection of this world in its embrace of the ordinary, its acceptance of the imperfect and incorrigibly plural.

Wittgenstein was an arresting combination of monk, mystic and mechanic. He was a high European intellectual who yearned for a Tolstoyan holiness and simplicity of life, a philosophical giant with scant respect for philosophy. He could never really decide whether he was a Brahmin or an "untouchable". Much of this makes sense if one sees it as an ambivalent relationship to his family background.

On the one hand, he tried to divest himself of all that pomp and excess. If he was sometimes plunged into spiritual despair, it was because he was unable to strip himself of himself. Wittgenstein struggled to live on what he called the rough ground of everyday life.

As a man who hailed from an Austro-Hungarian empire inhabited by Germans, Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs, Slovenes, Magyars and a good many other quarrelsome ethnic groups, he came to see human cultures as inherently diverse. But he was also haunted by a lofty, lethal vision of purity (what he called the pure ice), which was a product of his background and a form of rebellion against it. And the fact that he was torn between the rough ground and the pure ice was the source of much of his sorrow. Perhaps his brother Hans's first word sums it all up: "Oedipus".

• Terry Eagleton wrote the screenplay for Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein. To order The House of Wittgenstein for £18 with free UK p&p call Guardian
book service on 0870 836 0875.

Fresh Start for Obama

Great Expectations for Project Obama

By SPIEGEL Staff

The challenges facing Barack Obama are enormous, and the first African-American president would be well advised to remain focused, modest and realistic. The enormity of the crises he must address are clear to his country and the world. Is he up to the task?

Parents watching President-elect Barack Obama's acceptance speech probably noticed the hands first, Sasha's right hand holding her father's left hand, firmly and trustingly. The daughter looked up at her father, who returned the glance, and both smiled.


For historians, it was Obama's reference to Abraham Lincoln, the greatest of all American presidents, who embarked on a civil war for the unity of the country and the freedom of black slaves. For those with a love of language, it was his masterful speech on the responsibilities of today's citizens, and on solidarity and honesty. The victor's acceptance speech became an appeal against megalomania and triumphalism, and for humility and respect for what is to come. It was a mature speech.

It has been a long time since the world has had such a figure like Obama. Standing on that Chicago stage with his family, he was the manifestation of myriad expectations from across the globe -- and he belonged to everyone. Each person on the planet saw exactly what he or she wanted to see on that stage -- there was something for everyone.

Patriots saw a semi-circle of 25 flags and a man with considerable gravitas telling them that it would be difficult, but that the country would achieve its aims.

Romantics admired the couple -- their looks, their pride and their grace. They seem to make a good couple, these two, one that is achieving what modern couples everywhere strive for and rarely manage: a distribution of roles that does justice to both members, as well as providing both with freedom and, most of all, humor.

Blacks saw their skin color, saw one of their own standing on that stage, and when they realized that the most powerful man in the world was going to be a black man, they felt gratification, even redemption, emotions that prompted many in the crowd standing in Chicago's Grant Park to repeat the same sentence, over and over again: "I never thought I would see this day coming."

For 106-year-old Atlanta resident Ann Nixon Cooper, this night meant that her life had come full circle. She had received the call that afternoon. Would it be okay for Obama to use her name in his speech, his advisors asked? Of course, she said, and she wept when she heard her name mentioned later that evening, mentioned as the name of a hero who had experienced so many things: the days when she was prevented from voting, followed by the civil rights movement, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the hardships of daily discrimination.

But whites were also hearing a man who understands them, whose way of speaking is not significantly different from their own, even if he doesn't look like them. There were many whites in the crowd in Grant Park.

For Chicago's college students it was a festival, finally a chance to celebrate an idol once again. They wore shirts emblazoned with Obama's face, T-shirts with his symbol of the sun and the horizon in the colors of the United States. They chanted his slogan: "Yes, we can." And then they chanted: "Yes, we did!"

Finally, the strategist was, as always, already looking ahead, preventing the fireworks display that had been prepared. He saw this man on the stage, against a backdrop of Chicago's skyscrapers, trees and floodlights, and he saw 150,000 people and not a single one of them who was not moved, not a single person who was not aware that this was a special night. Who needed fireworks?

The strategist's name is David Axelrod. After 21 months of permanent skepticism and wariness, Axelrod was finally all smiles, because he knew the same thing that everyone standing there in Chicago knew. That Tuesday evening, that Nov. 4, 2008, was indeed historic.

On that day, 65 million Americans voted for Barack Obama, 47, to be the 44th president of the United States of America. Obama is the son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother. He was born in Hawaii, and he lived in Indonesia, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. He is black. And after his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009, he and his wife Michelle, their daughters Sasha and Malia, and the puppy the girls were promised for their patience during the campaign, will live in Washington, D.C., at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House, which was built by slaves 216 years ago.

America has voted, and the world has voted along with it. Germany, Europe, every continent on earth has finally discovered America once again. They have discovered the America that is an idea and not just a superpower. In only three countries -- Israel, Georgia and the Philippines -- did a majority prefer John McCain, the known entity. The rest of the world was Obama country.

They celebrated on the Champs-Elysées in Paris, and so did the black kids in the city's suburbs. There were parties in cities on all continents, and they even celebrated in the Gaza Strip where, normally, the only good Americans are considered to be dead Americans. Obama is the world's president, at least for a few days, weeks, months of euphoria and idealism and belief in decency that President George W. Bush had almost beaten out of the world. Tristram Hunt, a British historian, said that Obama "brings the narrative that everyone wants to return to -- that America is the land of extraordinary opportunity and possibility, where miracles happen." And miracles are what people of all skin colors are wishing for, especially people from those parts of the earth where miracles are not as reliable an occurrence.

The way Obama was greeted by the global public was an eye-opener. German Chancellor Angela Merkel's reaction was as pleased as that of her counterparts in London and Paris, who greeted the results of the election with enthusiasm, interest and hope. Only in Rome did Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, true to form, describe the new US president-elect as "young, handsome and ... tanned."

Not unexpectedly, euphoria was the prevailing emotion in Africa, where Ghanaians, Nigerians and South Africans saw the election as an affirmation of themselves. For a short time, Kenyans celebrated Obama, their "son of Africa," in a national state of ecstasy, fully expecting a future of US visas for all Kenyans, new financial assistance and the American superstar to pay a state visit to his Kenyan step-grandmother, "Grandma Sarah," in Kogelo, a village in the hills near Lake Victoria. Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki promptly declared a public holiday on Thursday in honor of Obama.

All of this has to do with the yearning for leadership in times when no nation can solve its problems alone. The challenges facing the global economy and climate demand a cooperative world community, a global culture and direction. In fact, what they demand most of all is a global government.


Wanted: Modesty, Patience and a Dose of Humility


Barack Obama -- at least that appears to be the hope of all those who felt inspired on that Tuesday evening in Chicago -- has the stuff to become the first global president. He is someone who has roots, not only in his own country, but on several continents. And he is someone whose middle name, Hussein, invokes the vague prospect of reconciliation for Muslims, and someone who finally puts a face on world society.

A number of dark years came to an end on that Tuesday. Bit by bit, the administration of George W. Bush had ruined the country and its reputation around the world.

Obama, smiling naturally on that evening in Chicago, remained stoic, at times seeming as cool and aloof as he was throughout his campaign. He was also focused, as he delivered his carefully conceived speech. But instead of celebrating, Obama chose to deliver a warning, taking advantage of the moment to get a few things off his chest: That he will achieve nothing by going it alone. That he needs the Republicans as much as he needs the Democrats and the entire country. That America needs a new sense of civic duty and solidarity. That the United States must find allies if it hopes to remain safe from terrorism and find ways to combat climate change. That there will be difficult years ahead. "But we as a people will get there," he told his supporters in Chicago.

And they looked up at him and nodded, shouting "yeah," as if they were committing themselves to do service for America. This is the core of Obama's message: Do something for your country and your country will thank you for it. Stand by America and America will stand by you. Then America will no longer be hated and ridiculed, but admired and respected around the world.

Is this naïve? A childlike belief in a world that Obama invoked in Berlin, speaking to 200,000 "citizens of the world?" It seems more likely that Obama takes a far more pragmatic approach to things. He wants to build a network and a new community with anyone who wishes to join him. His eloquent words are intended to entice and motivate, and to arouse curiosity. This is not naïve, but merely smarter than the policies of his predecessor. Obama will emphasize diplomacy and multilateralism, says David Axelrod, and everyone associated with Obama agrees. It is obvious where Bush's policy of making unilateral decisions has taken the country.

And yet, isn't all of this too much for such an inexperienced man, for someone who has only been a US Senator for a little less than four years? Are the expectations too great and is the burden far too heavy? Difficult times often present opportunities. They pave the way for great decisions, and great leaders. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man who fought the Depression in the 1930s and later the Nazis, is one of America's favorite role models. But not everyone who comes to power in hard times is up to the challenge.

One can only imagine what was going on in the heads of the seasoned, pragmatic major players in world politics as they watched the moving spectacle of the election unfolding in America. China, a budding world power, has experienced the devious Richard Nixon, the hapless Jimmy Carter, the eternally optimistic Ronald Reagan -- and now a basketball player, a pop star, a moralist motivated by American history and a man with little experience in the world. Is he truly as cool and conciliatory as we are led to believe? How tough is this man really?

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the conservative and dangerous president of Iran, who alternates between issuing threats and sending patronizing letters to the leaders of the West, will now have to reassess the situation. He has said publicly that he doubts that those in power in the United States would even permit an Obama election victory. Will his country have to worry even more now about an American attack should it continue on its present course? Or is it better off with Obama?

Recently Joseph Biden, the future vice-president, speculated publicly over what some of America's enemies would have in store for the new man in the White House. Presumably, he told an audience at a fundraiser, Obama could face a challenge not unlike the one that former President John F. Kennedy confronted in the Cuban missile crisis. Initially, it seems that Biden wasn't far off the mark. Just a few hours after Obama's victory, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced that his country plans to deploy short-range missiles in Kaliningrad -- the bit of Russian territory that sits on the border of Poland and Lithuania -- in response to the planned US missile defense shield with its bases in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Obama, in short, will have precious little time to get used to his new role when it comes to the conflicts facing the world. Just how he chooses to face those problems, though, is one of the most interesting questions facing his administration. The notion that it falls to the United States to shape the world in its democratic and capitalist image is one of the constants of its foreign policy -- but it is this very same notion that has led to the aggravation of world crises in recent years instead of contributing to solutions. After years of immoderation, more modesty, patience and a dose of humility would certainly be appropriate for America.


A Campaign that Sent Signals in 'all Directions'


What America expects from its first black president is obvious: to lead the country out of the deepest crisis of capitalism since 1929. This, Obama said on Friday at his first press conference since the election, is "the greatest economic challenge of our lifetime." He is also expected to regain the political and moral authority the country has lost since the war in Iraq. He is being asked to put a stop to the decline of a superpower and help America become a beacon for the free world once again. At the same time, Americans want Obama to ensure that the country preserves its position as the only superpower on earth, that it retain its vast military superiority and remain unattainable for China and India for a long time to come.

In recent weeks, many on Obama's staff have read books about Roosevelt's first 100 days in office. Even after their candidate's victory, the members of Team Obama were served mineral water, not champagne. Instead of some cocky fraternity raucously celebrating a triumph, Obama's team of Harvard-trained lawyers seemed to be perfectly aware that the real challenge was not the election.


They will have to avoid old mistakes, especially now, at the beginning. They will have to avoid lazy compromises, especially when it comes to staffing issues. Former President Bill Clinton set a high bar for himself when he said that his cabinet would "look like America." It marked the beginning of lobbyism, intrigues and proportional thinking. How many of Clinton's cabinet members were from the left, critics asked, how many blacks, and weren't there too many men? Clinton's "transition" -- the 77 days between the election and the inauguration -- are now seen as one of the most mismanaged periods in recent American history.

Obama got an early start on the process during the last few weeks of the campaign. He appointed John Podesta to manage the transition, along with Valerie Jarrett and Pete Rouse, all three of them close confidants for years. Podesta, a tough, cool-headed Washington pro, assembled a team of 50 people who have now spent the last few weeks examining resumes, restructuring departments and assigning tasks. As a result, blueprints have already been assembled for each department, including to-do lists broken down by immediate, 100-day and first-year goals.

Nevertheless, writes New York magazine, the Obama administration is still difficult to assess because Obama, as a candidate, sent out signals " in all directions." His voting record in the Senate was conventionally liberal, his essence is that of the pragmatic technocrat, and his rhetoric is somewhere in between.

Of course, conclusions can be drawn from Obama's behavior in the last 21 months, when he was under constant scrutiny in the brightly illuminated world of the election campaign. There were four people he trusted explicitly during that difficult time: Rahm Emanuel, a Democratic star in Congress (who will be the next White House chief of staff), David Plouffe, his campaign manager and a math enthusiast and, finally, David Axelrod, his campaign strategist. Plouffe and Axelrod will likely follow Obama to Washington. Axelrod, at any rate, has already agreed to serve as a senior advisor.

And then, of course, there is Michelle. Michelle Obama is a mother and an attorney with degrees from Harvard and Princeton. She was already working at a Chicago law firm when Barack worked there as a summer associate. He asked her out, which she found inappropriate, but he eventually won her over.

She is from Chicago, America's "Second City," which prompted Obama to stay there. She had the sense of home that he, after growing up with his white grandparents in Hawaii, longed for. The South Shore neighborhood, neither affluent nor excessively poor, was her home, but then her father fell ill with multiple sclerosis. Marian Robinson, Michelle's mother, cared for her sick husband, and today she watches over her grandchildren for their busy political parents. Robinson will likely move to the White House with the Obamas, where she will probably be unrolling the sleeping bags when Sasha's and Malia's friends arrive for sleepovers.

The Obamas seem to enjoy each other's company. He talks about how she brought him back down to earth during his euphoric first few weeks in the Senate. He wanted to tell her about his successes, but her response was to tell him to pick up some ant traps for their home. She made jokes about him, which she doesn't do today, and she made mistakes at the beginning of his campaign. Michelle Obama would have been better off not saying that his candidacy made her feel proud of her country for the first time in her adult life. But then she became more relaxed and began to enjoy the campaign, regaining her composure and self-confidence. She traveled with a small team that included a spokesperson, a few bodyguards and no press.

It was a smart distribution of roles. He moved in the political center, because he needed whites from America's heartland, while she traveled through and became an icon in the country's black communities. In a speech to black religious leaders in Fayetteville, North Carolina, she said: "I can't tell you how many times Barack and I meet folks who are 70, 80 years old, people who come up to us and grab us by the arm and with tears streaming down their faces tell us, 'I never thought I'd live to see the day.'" Then, after the applause had died down, she asked her husband's supporters for their votes and donations, and to help get out the vote among friends and family members. "I don't want to look back and think what might have been," she said. "We've done that way too much in our lifetime."

Her husband, the president-elect, is seen as a modern manager who knows how to delegate, is in command of modern communication and is an exceptionally good listener. There are few people who emerge from conversations with Obama complaining that he did not take them seriously. Team Obama is considered highly efficient and as discreet as few other political organizations. The fact that Obama is at his best when under pressure is not exactly a poor qualification for the years to come.

The creases in his face have become deeper and his hair grayer in the last two years. Obama gets up every morning at 6 a.m. and spends 45 minutes in the gym. When he has time, he plays basketball with old friends. In the final days of the campaign, he read two newspapers a day and the book "Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden." Obama is a Blackberry junkie, working his way through e-mails, memos and messages up to 30 times a day.

Once he has taken a specific course, he sticks to it tenaciously. Even during the campaign, he remained constant from beginning to end, a consistency Hillary Clinton and especially John McCain never managed to achieve. Obama even managed to keep his cool when he was under attack, controlling his ego with an iron will. No matter how sharp McCain's attacks were, Axelrod and Obama knew that they could only win if Obama was seen as a gentle black man, as a good black man, as the Tiger Woods of politics.

Does this mean that he avoids risks? Is he too mild, too nice? These questions provoke smiles from his staff. One of them talks about how everyone on the team had advised the candidate against addressing the debate over his former and quite radical pastor, Jeremiah Wright, but Obama wanted to give a "big speech about race." He gave his speech in Philadelphia, and it became a milestone of his campaign. "He was the kind of speaker you see once in a lifetime. A good debater. He had a message and he was ice-cold and disciplined when it came to delivering that message," says Steve Schmidt, the head of the McCain campaign and the Republican candidate's toughest attack dog.

All of this may speak volumes about the next president's leadership style and his relationship with his staff, but it says less about Obama as a world president, about his attempts to solve the most urgent problems he will face. Although Obama brings little experience to the table, he can rely on his judgment, which is considerable. That he will succeed is not a given, but a possibility. And if his success in the coming four years is sufficient to achieve a few key turning points in a handful of world conflicts, much will have been gained.


Guantanamo Is a Wound American Inflicted Upon Itself


With his sense of symbolism, the 44th president is likely to sign an order soon that will close the Guantanamo detention center for terrorists, both real and presumed. In the United States, it has long become part of the prevailing opinion outside the White House that the establishment of totalitarian islands within democracy was a mistake that harmed the country and damaged its aura worldwide. The luminaries of al-Qaida, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the mastermind of Sept. 11, 2001) and Ramzi Binalshibh (who prepared the attacks with Mohammed Atta) will presumably be tried in civilian courts in the United States, as will a few of the less prominent among Guantanamo's roughly 250 detainees.

Guantanamo is a wound that America inflicted upon itself. Obama will raise a cheer worldwide, and deservedly so, when he transforms the enormous high-security tract back into a dull, anachronistic US military base on the fringe of Castro's Cuba.

Obama's foreign policy advisors include seasoned veterans like Zbigniew Brzezinski (national security advisor under Jimmy Carter), Anthony Lake (national security advisor under Bill Clinton) and Colin Powell, the hapless secretary of state during Bush's first term. These are moderate, pragmatic professionals who have already protected him against reaching careless conclusions in a few major conflicts.

Obama's assessment of the situation in Iraq became more flexible after he visited Baghdad in the summer, a shift in position from which he now benefits. General David Petraeus, who managed to bring relative stability to Iraq, helped him in the process. Since then, Obama has stopped mechanically repeating his mantra of bringing home one brigade a month without taking conditions in Iraq into account. His turn to the pragmatic will displease war-weary Democrats at home, but it will expand his latitude, and that is what matters.

Iraq is the second bleeding wound for America as a superpower, even though more US soldiers are now dying in Afghanistan. For at least the past five years, since the invasion in March 2003, all conflicts in the region have been heightened tremendously, almost to the point of spinning out of control. The balance of power has shifted to the disadvantage of the United States. The lesson from the Bush era is that the country cannot achieve productive results by going it alone. But it is also true, in this nervous, hysterical part of the world, that nothing can be changed if America is no longer a part of the picture.

Now everyone in the region is waiting to see which course Obama will take: the mullahs in Tehran, who seek hegemony in the region, possibly with the help of the bomb; the young dictator in Damascus and the old cynic in Cairo; Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Beirut. To make matters even more complicated, Israel is about to enter an election that could lead to the return of conservative nationalist Benjamin Netanyahu, who would have been a better fit with Bush.

Some time ago, Obama said that he would also talk to America's enemies. There are some in the Middle East who, paradoxically, would like nothing better than to talk to the US president. Syria has made no secret of it. The country, isolated and in economic difficulties, is seeking, and needs, a relationship with the West.

Iran is also among the enemies that would like to talk to the American president. Western diplomats have assumed for some time that Iran is, in fact, interested in resuming diplomatic relations with the United States. But the question is whether the Iranian leaders will be as uncompromising toward Obama as they have been toward Bush.

Tehran's uncompromising stance has paid off. Since the fall of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Iran has been the dominant power in the region, much to the displeasure of its neighbors. President Ahmadinejad launches vile threats against Israel and questions the existence of the Holocaust. Does an American president talk to such people, and what would be the point of the exercise?

It is a question that is feverishly tossed back and forth in Washington's liberal think tanks. Talking is always a good thing, because someone who is talking is unlikely to be shooting. But talking is also a gamble if it leads to nothing. The alternative to bilateral negotiations would be a Middle East conference with the participation of Syria and Iran, although this could easily degenerate into aimless palaver without any consequences. And the revival of the old Iran negotiating group -- Germany, Great Britain, France, the United States, China and Russia -- which tried but failed to dissuade the country from pursuing its nuclear program, is also not a very promising option.

Obama has said, with some degree of sharpness, that Iran must be prevented from building the bomb. He probably meant what he said, because no American president can passively accept the existence of a nuclear, Islamic theocracy that questions Israel's right to exist. Obama has set this benchmark. What will he do now? Under the current circumstances, Obama has several options: the old approach of imposing tougher sanctions in an effort to indirectly discourage Iran from pursuing the bomb; the clever approach of extracting Syria from the anti-American front led by Iran; or a new approach Obama may have to take, presumably with the help of an intermediary.

America's third bleeding wound is Afghanistan, where the "war on terror" that Bush proclaimed began after Sept. 11, 2001. The future president believes that this campaign of revenge against the Taliban, which gave safe haven to Osama bin Laden, is justified. But it is also a major conflict in which the conventional approach is increasingly proving to be a failure.

Iraq and Afghanistan behave like communicating conduits. When the United States captured Baghdad, al-Qaida declared Iraq the main battleground against the expansive superpower, and Afghanistan became secondary. It was the time when the decisions on guidelines for political and economic reconstruction reached at the Petersberg conference near Bonn were effective in the country. Since then, President Hamid Karzai has been in charge in Kabul, and since then NATO's International Security Assistance Force has been stationed there.

The conditions changed in Iraq, and now Afghanistan is the focal point once again for al-Qaida terrorists who, like the Taliban, are regaining strength. Pakistan continues to serve, as it always has, as a safe haven, and the clans in the border region continue to play their old game. The men in Kabul are their natural enemies, while the enemies of the men in Kabul are their useful friends.

Obama has pledged to transfer 7,000 troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. This would be a significant addition to the 32,500 US troops currently in Afghanistan. It seems clear that Obama will soon begin asking allies which of them could send more soldiers.

As the commander of the US Central Command, General Petraeus is now in charge of US operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He seems determined to apply his old method: more soldiers, greater fighting power and the attempt to divide the enemy. Perhaps he will even manage to create a rift between the Taliban and al-Qaida. It has been rumored for some time that Karzai is half-heartedly seeking talks with the Taliban.

And then there are the recent US air strikes in Pakistan's tribal regions, where Osama bin Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are believed to be hiding. With each attack, hatred for the United States grows in Pakistan, forcing the government in Islamabad to lodge loud protests against each new attack.

It is interesting to note that Obama did not criticize the air attacks during the election campaign. He too feels that such attacks are legitimate. Presumably, there is even a tacit understanding between the Pakistani and American governments, with the Pakistanis making it clear that the Americans can continue to launch their attacks without their official knowledge, and that they will, of course, protest the attacks sharply. It is a cynical game, and one which Obama, as a world president and idealistic advocate of the principle of openness in politics, will have trouble continuing. Still, British historian Niall Ferguson, for his part, believes that Obama's foreign policy will not differ markedly from that of his predecessor.

Some Europeans are already lobbying in Washington for a departure from a purely military view of the world. They argue that Afghanistan is a conflict for the entire region and, as such, cannot be resolved in Kabul and Kandahar alone, but only with the involvement of neighboring countries. For this reason, the Europeans propose a regional conference of all neighboring countries. The United States has questioned the purpose of such a conference.

Interestingly, Obama faces the same decision in Afghanistan that Bush faced in Iraq: Should he try the Petraeus method, that combination of military toughness and political flexibility? Unlike Bush, however, Obama has a lot to lose if the number of civilian casualties does not diminish, and if the air strikes in Pakistan lead to attacks on US interests or jeopardize the already weakened government in Islamabad -- in other words, if this war becomes his war.

Europe is no world power, especially not in times of recession, and yet European countries are involved almost everywhere. The branches of German and French companies, for example, have recently been welcomed back to Iraq. In Iran, Europe's big three -- Great Britain, Germany and France -- were part of the Group of Six that sharply criticized the mullahs for their nuclear program. They failed, because the United States did not lend sufficient support to the effort.

Ultimately, however, the Europeans' relationship with the United States could hinge on a development over which they have little control: the new US administration's treatment of Russia. It is customary for the government of a country to congratulate the newly elected president of the United States, to leave differences unmentioned and, in the interest of both countries, hope for better times. But even before the night of Obama's victory had ended, the news had arrived from Moscow that Russia plans to deploy Iskander short-range missiles to the Kaliningrad region near the Polish border.

It was an astounding affront. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, still the de facto most powerful man in Russia, seems to be walking in Bush's steps, taking on his with-me-or-against-me rhetoric, his unilateral politics and his disdain for what the rest of the world thinks.


International Crises and Domestic Woes


Russia is furious over the missile shield the United States plans to build, with bases in the Czech Republic and Poland, to protect against attacks from Iran. Obama has not yet said whether he supports the plan. If it were his intention not to pursue the project, the Kremlin, by pressing ahead with its own missile deployment plans, is making it difficult for Obama to distance himself from Bush's missile shield program.

However, the Russian leadership is hardly wrong when it argues that Democrat Obama's stance on the other two conflicts Putin considers existential, Georgia and Ukraine, hardly differs from that of his predecessor. Obama has consistently said that both countries, products of the collapse of the Soviet empire, should be allowed to join NATO if they wish. Although there is no consensus within the political elite in the United States over Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan, there is widespread agreement over the right of Georgia and Ukraine to be accepted into the West's military alliance. A minority within the think tanks is gradually gaining traction as it raises the question of whether the further eastward expansion of NATO makes sense.

Does it? When Russia accepted Georgia's invitation to wage a war that it could easily win, superpower America had no alternative but to demonstrate its solidarity while doing nothing. The Europeans joined in the protest, but some of them, especially the Germans, found reason for skepticism. There is nothing wrong, they argue, with Georgia and Ukraine seeking the protection of NATO. But because the two countries do not belong in the alliance at this point, so went the argument, NATO should give them nothing but non-binding promises.

But the outgoing American administration and many foreign policy experts in the incoming administration are serious about paving the way for NATO membership for both countries. NATO foreign ministers are scheduled to meet in December, and Georgia and Ukraine will be on the agenda once again. President-elect Obama will likely comment on the meeting, thereby indicating whether he has since changed his views on Georgia and Ukraine.

He will not be able to refrain from commenting for much longer than that. He is currently the world president, a title that falls to him because America has a greater ability to change things in the world -- for better and for worse -- than other powers. The world president can decide where or how he wishes to throw his weight onto the scale. After eight years of closed-mindedness, Obama has a great surplus of trust, which he can use to his advantage.

Even America's allies do not expect him to come up with a grand design or a one-size-fits-all concept. But they do expect prudence and gravity. Obama will face many serious crises, and he is well advised to remain what he became in the campaign: a quick learner.

In addition to international crises, he will be confronted with America's own worries and the domestic problems of a country that is a strange mixture of cutting-edge progress in the first world and the bizarre backwardness of a Third World country. The United States is in the most severe crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, as the superpower sees its economic foundation beginning to crumble.

The people who voted for Obama on Nov. 4 included the beleaguered middle class, which has great expectations of him as the next president. White-collar workers have seen their salaries shrink, prices are rising and America, once an engine for jobs, has practically cancelled all production. About 2.5 million people have lost their jobs since January. More recently, the unemployment rate has risen dramatically to 6.5 percent, the highest level since 1994, and it seems likely to continue to rise.

Throughout America, the cradle of capitalism, aging industry is now fighting for survival. For an ordinary factory worker, America is now the land of limited opportunity. The country's Big Three automakers -- Ford, General Motors (GM) and Chrysler -- are now forced to accept government subsidies and new bank loans to be able to survive their billions in recurring losses.

GM alone lost $39 billion (€30 billion) last quarter. That's a greater figure than the profits German automaker Daimler earned in the last eight years. An ugly phrase has already begun appearing in newspapers: liquidity problem, a term indicating that banks have largely lost their faith in GM. Just a few decades ago, GM and America were synonymous with each other.


The Limits of the 'American Way of Life'


The "American Way of Life," that special blend of deliberate recklessness, wanton waste and a touch of megalomania, is reaching its limits. In recent years, the superpower has gone from one careless mistake to the next. The government was too arrogant, the banking industry was too greedy and the economy, after allowing itself to indulge in obscene scandals, was no longer innovative enough to be able to maintain the country's status as an economic superpower. This has left the United States with massive problems of historic proportions.

In no other country in the Western world is so much costly energy wasted. The United States is home to only five percent of the world's population, but it consumes a quarter of its oil production. The United States sends $90 billion to the Middle East in the space of only one year.


In recent years, the engines of US economic growth have not been high levels of exports and exceptional inventions, but primarily the massive debt consumers have racked up. The savings rate in Germany is 11 percent. In the United States it is barely one percent. Everyone, from the government to ordinary credit card customers, lives on credit.

The Bush administration has aggravated all of these problems instead of alleviating them. It has allowed industry to continue to believe that cheap oil would be available forever. It urged the population to keep on borrowing and consuming, so that now -- at the beginning of a deep recession -- it has nothing left to spend. A system has come crashing down. The crisis of capitalism brings to a full circle the loss of moral and political authority after the Iraq war.

The mood in the ancestral homeland of optimism is appropriately pessimistic. It is the insidious simultaneity of the crisis of confidence, the real estate disaster, the drama in the financial markets and the most recent oil price shock that has put American citizens in such a foul mood. In an article titled " Unhappy America," the Economist writes: "Nations, like people, occasionally get the blues."

President-elect Obama cannot wait until his inauguration on Jan. 20. Instead, he must lay out his plans for dealing with the crisis. And he must also announce whom he intends to entrust with the most important post in his cabinet, that of treasury secretary. Rahm Emanuel, his friend and confidant from Chicago, who, in his position as White House chief of staff, will serve as a general manager of sorts, has already said that the president will have no other choice, and that "we must be the government of reform."

For the assertive Emanuel, there are four key programs for the Obama administration: Tightening regulation of the financial markets, tax relief for the middle class, healthcare reform and the nation's energy needs. Market regulation, says Emanuel, will be on the agenda at the upcoming summit in Washington, and it will likely be approved soon. But tax reform, he says, will take longer -- partly because Bush's tax cuts remain in effect until 2010. When it comes to energy policy, says Emanuel, many things are possible today, such as promoting alternative energy projects -- and the same applies to healthcare policy, where the first step will be to provide immediate coverage for the uninsured children of the unemployed.

But where does Obama intend to get the money he will need for these programs? This year's budget deficit will be at least $800 billion. The new president will have to tighten the nation's belt. Indeed, he has already characterized the budget as the biggest of all problems. "We need clear priorities," says Obama.

The examination of accounts that every new administration undertakes won't happen until January. Obama's transition team is currently considering another tax rebate. In America, tax rebates traditionally come in the form of checks sent directly to households, usually the occasion for a small celebration. There are indications that Bush's 2008 economic stimulus package, worth $170 billion (€133 billion), will be followed by an even bigger check from the Obama administration.

As popular as these tax rebates are, though, they wreak havoc on the government's cash position, and their economic impact is debatable. In the new global economy, such stimulus programs are no longer as effective in jump-starting national economies as they used to be. In fact, much of the additional cash now ends up in the hands of importers in Asia.

Obama has also announced a number of social policy plans. The initially hesitant support for his candidacy among white working-class voters in swing states prompted him to make generous campaign promises. The strategy paid off in votes, but now the time is coming when he will be expected to make good on those pledges. One of his key campaign promises was "affordable health insurance for all." Forty-seven million Americans are currently uninsured -- nothing less than a scandal for such a wealthy country.

Another of Obama's campaign promises, sometimes voiced several times a day, was a $150 billion (€117 billion) infrastructure program. Its goal is to repair the country's ailing infrastructure, create new jobs and advance protection of the environment. Obama plans to implement this program, even if its scope has to be reduced and the planned 10-year time frame prolonged.

Nevertheless, Obama can't possibly please everyone, despite the long list of pledges he made during the lengthy campaign. He will have to decide whom to disappoint first.

The Obama team knows only too well that the worst enemy of an Obama presidency will be within the Democratic Party ranks. In two other similarly overwhelming victories for Democrats -- in 1964 and 1992 -- the party pushed through its wish list. But the tax increases and new social programs for the poor that they implemented horrified swing voters. It took only two years for the Democrats to lose their majority in Congress, as well as the nation's good will.

Obama, on the other hand, has promised to overcome the culture wars between the parties and divisions within the electorate. In his acceptance speech on the night of the election, he said: "We rise or fall as one nation, as one people." And in the end, the 44th president will rise or fall with the success of the reforms he has promised his country, which both wants and needs reforms.

"This president is going into office with more expectations than any president I have ever seen," says Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives and Obama's most important contact for all the laws he hopes to enact in order to bring change to the country. Because of the enormity of the challenge, Obama will likely attempt to advance his reforms one step at a time, not all at once. He will "govern the country from the center," says Democratic Party strategist Tad Devine.

This would be the most reasonable approach, too, because America is still primarily a conservative nation. In surveys, Americans are much more likely to call themselves conservative than liberal. Obama cannot change this, but he needs advocates who are willing to make compromises, and he will seek some of them from among the so-called Obamacons -- Republicans who supported him during the election -- including such high-profile politicians as Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel and former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

On Jan. 20, the four Obamas will move into the White House in Washington, accompanied by parties and balls and perhaps the kind of pageantry that would suit the historical significance of the day. The new president will change Washington, and Washington will change him.

The American capital likes to adore its new president and allow itself to be shaped by his character. Bill Clinton's Washington was a jazz mecca, while Bush's Washington is a sleepy place. The current president usually retires to his bedroom by 9 p.m. He never went to parties, and the New York Times described a wild night for Bush as a dinner at the home of his former strategist Karl Rove in the city's Kent neighborhood.

The Obamas, on the other hand, are seen as cool, modern and fun-loving, and it will matter very little whether Barack and Michelle prefer to spend their evenings helping the girls with their homework or playing cards -- life, or so Washingtonians hope, will return to Washington with the Obamas and their generation. The fashion magazines have already declared Michelle a style icon, the first since former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.

Barack Obama will soon be president, and no matter how his presidency ends, Nov. 4, 2008 will have changed the country. He said as much in his speech to fellow Americans and the entire world on that Tuesday evening in Chicago. In Grant Park, near Lake Michigan, his listeners already felt that nothing was the way it once was. "The city changed in that one night," says Joan Harrell, "people had smiles on their faces."

Joan Harrell is 51, black, sports a haircut as short as Obama's, and lives in his Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, 10 kilometers (six miles) from the city's downtown. It is a world Obama invokes in his speeches, home to welfare recipients, college students and millionaires, blacks and whites. There are more interracial couples in Hyde Park than in most other neighborhoods in the country.

Joan Harrell lives in a third-floor rented apartment on the corner of Hyde Park Boulevard and South Drexel Boulevard, two blocks from the Obama's house. She can see the street in front of his house from her window, can see the concrete barriers and, of course, the police officers who have been posted at the house around the clock for the past two years.

The level of activity has only increased there since Tuesday evening. The eight to 10 police officers Harrell used to count have turned into 16, more people are being asked for identification on the streets, and the bus stop in front of her building has suddenly disappeared.

The day was already crazy enough. Things were looking good for Obama. He was ahead in the polls, and on that Tuesday, Democrats believed in victory for the first time. Harrell went to the Walgreens drug store around the corner, where Obama also shops, and bought Obama T-shirts and Obama sweatshirts for her relatives in Georgia.

When she returned to her apartment, Harrell called her mother in Georgia. The women prayed together, and Harrell watched CNN. When the network declared Obama the winner, she began to cry, and her mother in Georgia cried along with her. Harrell spent the entire evening on the phone with friends and relatives, crying and praying, and when she finally went to bed, at 1 a.m., she still couldn't believe that it had really happened.

But then she heard a helicopter overhead and, looking out of her window, saw the flashing blue lights of police cars. "Obama is coming home," she thought, and then she says: "When I saw the flashing light, I knew that it was really true."

BY KLAUS BRINKBÄUMER, MARC HUJER, CORDULA MEYER, GERHARD SPÖRL AND GABOR STEINGART

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.

Walking

The gifted, resourceful Geoff Nicholson here conducts the reader on a leisurely, entirely delightful ramble through the history and lore of walking, an exercise that calls to my mind nothing so much as one of the few notable walking songs he fails to mention, the great New Orleans funeral march "Oh, Didn't He Ramble," as immortalized by Louis Armstrong and played by heaven knows how many other musicians, famous and obscure, from the Big Easy: "Didn't he ramble, he rambled,/Rambled all around, in and out of town./Didn't he ramble, he rambled,/He rambled 'til the butcher cut him down" -- fit words to celebrate the life of a guy who forever rambled his way into trouble.

Walking can do that to you: take you to places you don't expect to go, people you don't expect to meet, entanglements you hadn't planned on. To be sure, walking is usually simply to get you from Point A to Point B, but it can be serendipitous as well. Just walking the dachshunds around the block can lead to chance encounters both pleasant (meeting up with a couple of other dachshunds from a few blocks away) and unpleasant (being attacked, fortunately without serious consequences, by two large, unleashed dogs). For many years I walked for exercise, as much as a dozen miles a day, and I still go everywhere on foot unless transporting large objects. The District of Columbia can be a terrific place to walk, with varied topography as well as many lovely natural and man-made vistas, but its motorists too often are utterly disdainful of pedestrians; in a crosswalk you take your life in your hands.

Nicholson does most of his walking in London and Los Angeles, the places where he lives. No one will be surprised that he loves to walk in London, "since London is, in every sense I can think of, well-trodden territory: a place of walkers, with a two-thousand-year-long history of pedestrianism." The mayor's office, he writes, "tells us that seven million walking journeys are made in London every day, and although the majority of these will no doubt be short and mundane (and I do wonder what percentage involve going to or from the pub), that still leaves plenty of more programmatic walking expeditions," one of which ("The Blitz: London at War") Nicholson takes for the sake of research, with interesting results.


Los Angeles would seem to be more problematic than programmatic, but Nicholson is a stout defender of its walking environment and possibilities. He walks both for exercise and as an antidote to depression -- an effective one, he says -- and by contrast to the prevailing wisdom that the city is pathologically hostile to pedestrians, he has managed to do a lot of walking there without being hauled in on charges of vagrancy or worse. "I walked for a while in the footsteps of those two great Angelenos Raymond Chandler and his fictional alter ego Philip Marlowe," he writes, but had little luck "at locating genuine Chandler territory," doubtless because it has been wiped off the map by the ever-evolving city, but he still came away from it convinced that "the city does indeed have a rich tradition of walking: political, literary, artistic, recreational."

He has even walked on Hollywood Boulevard, which "is all about drugs and sex, runaways, people fresh off the bus, boys up to no good, the improbably and ill-advisedly transvestite, the kind of people who need piercing and tattooing parlors and smoke shops, who find themselves sitting on the sidewalk, with a dog on a string, eating pizza and bumming cigarettes, the mad, the lost, the winsomely deranged," and which reaches a transcendently bizarre terminus:

"If there's a journey's end for the Hollywood Boulevard walk, it's Grauman's Chinese Theatre, where people congregate and pay a couple of dollars to have their pictures taken with a look-alike: a Marilyn, an Elvis, a Charlie Chaplin, a man in a Spider-Man suit, a woman dressed as Wonder Woman. Since changing facilities are limited on Hollywood Boulevard, most of the characters arrive already in costume, and in order to avoid commuting, many of them live in the area within walking distance of work. One of the best sights I know in Hollywood is to see Wonder Woman emerging from her apartment block on Las Palmas and striding up to Hollywood Boulevard, getting into character as she goes."

Another of Nicholson's favorite walking places is New York City, which happens to be one of mine as well. It's a city "where you end up doing a great deal of walking even when you don't consciously decide to go walking at all," but it's also a terrific place for planned, or semi-planned, walks. Nicholson mentions that in 1962 John F. Kennedy set off a brief fad for long-distance walks after discovering an executive order by Theodore Roosevelt "stating that any self-respecting U.S. Marine ought to be able to walk fifty miles in twenty hours with full pack." In the winter of 1962-63 I was temporarily out of work thanks to a printers' strike against the city's newspapers, so two friends and I decided to walk Manhattan from tip to toe. Early on a Sunday morning we took the subway to Spuyten Duyvil, at the northernmost end of the island, and proceeded to walk, mostly on Broadway, all the way to Battery Park, where, just to round things off, we rode the ferry to Staten Island -- by then it was dark and late -- and had ourselves a celebratory drink. It was one of the best walks of my life.

Again for purposes of research, Nicholson went to New York -- Brooklyn, actually -- for "something called the Conflux psychogeography festival." Psychogeography, you will not be surprised to learn, is a French invention, "the brainchild of Guy Debord (1931-94) . . . who defined it, in 1955, in a paper called 'Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography' as 'the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.' " Psychogeography as envisioned by Debord involves "abandoning your usual walking habits and letting the environment draw you in, letting your feet take you where they will and where the city dictates," which is reasonable enough so far as it goes, but after a couple of days of psychogeobabble, Nicholson decided that enough was enough:

"It occurred to me, not exactly for the first time, that psychogeography didn't have much to do with the actual experience of walking. It was a nice idea, a clever idea, an art project, a conceit, but it had very little to do with any real walking, with any real experience of walking. And it confirmed for me what I'd really known all along, that walking isn't much good as a theoretical experience. You can dress it up any way you like, but walking remains resolutely simple, basic, analog. That's why I love it and love doing it. And in that respect -- stay with me on this -- it's not entirely unlike a martini. Sure you can add things to martinis, like chocolate or an olive stuffed with blue cheese or, God forbid, cotton candy, and similarly you can add things to your walks -- constraints, shapes, notions of the mapping of utopian spaces -- but you don't need to. And really, why would you? Why spoil a good drink? Why spoil a good walk?"

That's a blow well struck for common sense, but Nicholson is resolutely commonsensical. He delights in the simple truth that "going for a walk" is an invitation to a surprise: "We may not want our walks to be 'adventures' in the most extreme sense -- we can do without pirates, gunplay, caverns measureless to man -- but we do hope to see something new on our walks, even in the most familiar surroundings." Once on a walk in Paris -- talk about great walking cities -- my wife and I encountered, outside Les Galeries Lafayette, a man who had a cat and a dog snuggling each other in a baby carriage, with a hand-lettered sign that read: "Si ces deux animaux peuvent vivre en paix, nous aussi pouvrons le faire," or, "If these two animals can live in peace, so can we." Another time, at Parque Kennedy in Lima, we stopped mid-step in amazement at the sight of a woman walking calmly across the street, stark naked.

Then of course there's walking music, which really is better than car music, which itself is very good. "On the Road Again" is great, sure, but is it better than "I Walk the Line" or "I'm Walkin'" or "Walkin' After Midnight" or "These Boots Are Made for Walkin' " or "Walkin' My Baby Back Home"? Not on your life. As for music of a slightly more elevated character:

"Guillaume Apollinaire tells us that [Erik] Satie did a lot of composing on his nocturnal homeward walks. He would create music in his head, then stop from time to time under a convenient streetlamp and write it down in a notebook. His productivity was greatly reduced during World War One when so many Parisian streetlamps were turned off. It's easy enough to believe that you hear the regular, repeated rhythm of the human footfall in much of Satie's work. He also said, 'Before I compose a piece, I walk around it several times, accompanied by myself.' "

Which leaves me wanting to do two things: (1) listen to "Gymnopédies" and (2) take a walk. ·

Great Books

Alex Beam, a columnist for the Boston Globe, set out to write a book that wasn't great -- and, mirabile dictu, he has succeeded. He wanted his informal history of the Great Books movement in America, "A Great Idea at the Time," to be "brief, engaging, and undidactic . . . as different from the ponderous and forbidding Great Books as it could possibly be" -- and so it is.

By "Great Books," Mr. Beam here means the Encyclopedia Britannica's "Great Books of the Western World," that imposing mid-20th-century set of 54 volumes by 76 authors, from Homer to Freud, not to mention contributions from the collection's impresarios, Robert Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler. Included in the set was Adler's Syntopicon, an unwieldy two-volume index to the 102 Great Ideas (from Angel to World) in the Great Books, complete with dry essays by Adler on each Great Idea.

Mr. Beam pokes fun at this whole pompous venture, terming Britannica's Great Books "icons of unreadability -- 32,000 pages of tiny, double-column, eye-straining type." But critic Dwight Macdonald was there long before him. In a memorable New Yorker essay titled "The Book-of-the-Millennium Club," he wittily demolished the pretensions of the enterprise when it was launched in 1952. Even had the selection and presentation of the Great Books been ideal, Macdonald noted, it hardly would make sense for readers to spend $250 -- the equivalent of more than $2,000 today -- for the set, since most of the books "can be had in inexpensive reprints."

But adman extraordinaire William Benton, who, along with the University of Chicago, owned Encyclopedia Britannica, was more intent on selling the Great Books than on getting people to read them. "The thought of reading them would terrify [some] potential buyers," he observed. The Syntopicon, with 163,000 page references, was intended to let people extract what the Great Books say about the Great Ideas (and lesser "topics") without their having to really read the books. But the index, which failed to distinguish between major and minor references, proved virtually unusable.

Undaunted by the disappointing sales of only 2,000 sets in the first two years, Benton hired a veteran encyclopedia salesman whose hard-sell approach and relentless sales force turned the Great Books into a resounding commercial success. By 1960, 35,000 sets a year were being sold, and the next year sales peaked at more than 50,000.

Macdonald, something of a snob and a passionate foe of all things middlebrow, had no use at all for the Great Books project. Mr. Beam, for all his irreverence, is not so dismissive. To Macdonald, the set's first volume, an 82-page introductory essay by Hutchins, the former "boy wonder" president of the University of Chicago, was merely "a sort of after-dinner speech." But to Mr. Beam, Hutchins's essay is "a beautiful, eloquent, at times humorous, and brief defense of the Western tradition told with Hutchins's trademark wit and conciseness."

And while most of the million sets of the Great Books that finally were sold may have served merely as "colorful furniture" (in Hutchins's sardonic phrase), Mr. Beam notes that "thousands of copies, perhaps tens of thousands, were actually read, and had an enormous impact on the lives of the men, women, and children who read them." Earlier versions of the Great Books concept, less ponderous and expensive, may eventually have reached even more readers.

The Great Books craze began in the early 1940s in Chicago, expanding from Hutchins's university to an evening seminar in the Loop for the city's movers and shakers. It then caught on with other intellectually (or socially) hungry adults in the city and state -- 5,000 by 1946 -- and spread to Cleveland and other Midwestern cities. In 1947, Hutchins and Adler launched the Great Books Foundation, which, using low-cost paperbacks of the classics, spread the gospel outside the Midwest.

Four years later, Mr. Beam reports, there were 2,500 Great Books discussion groups, with roughly 25,000 members meeting "all over the country, in public libraries, in church basements, chamber of commerce offices, corporate conference rooms at IBM and Grumman Aircraft, in private homes, on army bases, and, yes, in prisons." By 1961, when the marketing push for Britannica's "Great Books of the Western World" was in high gear, about 47,000 Americans were enrolled in Great Books discussion groups.

Sales of Britannica's Great Books "sputtered in the late 1960s, flatlined in the 1970s, and later fell off the cliff," Mr. Beam relates. Interest in discussing the Great Books also flagged. The Great Books Foundation still exists -- claiming 850 discussion groups -- but "hardly any of them," Mr. Beam says, read the books on the Hutchins-Adler list.

Given what has happened to the study of the humanities in the past two decades -- with theory and politics playing a larger role and fewer people reading the traditional canon -- it is hard not to feel a bit nostalgic for Great Books earnestness. In academe, there is only what might be regarded as a saving remnant: "Among major universities, only Columbia, where the whole idea began" -- around the time of World War I, long before the mania erupted in Chicago -- "still force-feeds a much-abbreviated version of the Great Books curriculum to its undergraduates," Mr. Beam notes. "Tiny St. John's College, created by disciples of Hutchins and Adler, still devotes all four years to teaching the Great Books, as Hutchins vainly hoped the University of Chicago would do."

Molly Rothenberg, a student at St. John's in Annapolis, Md., told Mr. Beam of comparing notes when she was a sophomore with a fellow graduate of the public high school in Cambridge, Mass. St. John's sophomores study works by such authors as Aristotle, Tacitus and Shakespeare. Her friend was attending Bates College in Maine. "She told me they were studying Rhetoric," Ms. Rothenberg said, "and they would be watching episodes of 'Desperate Housewives' and listening to Eminem. They were going to analyze it. I just laughed. What could I say?"

There will always be an..............

Moaning, drinking and queuing are what make us British


Our top national characteristic is talking about the weather, just ahead of a passion for queuing, but other qualities in the top ten are not so endearing; sarcasm, a love of television soaps and curtain twitching were all identified as central to the British identity.

Obsession with class was also high on the list, along with more modern ills such as pandering to political correctness and road rage.

Working long hours, fascination with property prices and the love of bargains also made it into the top 50, suggesting that our behaviour during the financial crisis may be more ingrained than we think.

advertisementBut it was all bad news. Stiff upper lip came out at number eight in the poll, with respondents also picking out a reluctance to complain, good sense of humour and the ability to laugh at ourselves.

The results were based on a study of 5,000 adults who were asked them to pick out the things - good and bad - they believe makes us unique as a nation.

A spokesman for global research company OnePoll.com, which conducted the survey said that despite some of the negative traits identified, Britons were still extremely proud of their country.

"This is a brilliant list of characteristics and some of the observations are absolutely spot on," he said.

"You can't go anywhere or do anything in Britain without someone talking about the weather, and we're almost proud of the fact that we get more rain than anywhere else.

"What this poll demonstrates really well is how proud we are to be British - more than two thirds of respondents said they felt honoured to be a part of this country."

TOP 50 'TYPICALLY BRITISH' TRAITS

1. Talking about the weather

2. Great at queueing

3. Sarcasm

4. Watching soaps

5. Getting drunk

6. A love of bargains

7. A love of curtain twitching

8. Stiff upper lip

9. Love of all television

10. Moaning

11. Obsession with class

12. Gossiping with neighbours over the garden fence

13. Obsession with the traffic

14. Enjoying other people's misfortune

15. Inability to complain

16. Love of cheap foreign holidays

17. Working long hours

18. A soothing cup of tea to ease worries

19. Eating meat and two veg

20. Looking uncomfortable on the dance floor

21. Feeling uncomfortable when people talk about their emotions

22. Clever sense of humour

23. Obsession with property values

24. Pandering to political correctness

25. Road rage

26. Being unhappy with our weight

27. Wanting a good tan

28. Being proud of where we live

29. Not saying what we mean

30. The ability to laugh at ourselves

31. Washing the car on a Sunday

32. Taking the mickey out of others

33. Asking people about their journey

34. Inability not to comment on how other people bring up their children

35. Jealousy of wealth and success

36. Being overly polite

37. Texting instead of calling

38. An inability to express our emotions

39. Obsession with the Royal Family

40. Fondness for mowing the lawn

41. Love of rambling through the countryside

42. A love of all things deep fried

43. Emulating celebrity lifestyles

44. Leaving things to the last minute

45. Irony

46. Keeping our homes neat and tidy

47. Take decisions and accept the consequences

48. Achieving against all odds

49. Wanting our sportsmen / teams to fail

50. DIY on a Bank Holiday