A master, and all he surveyed
By Neville Walker
Summer started hot and early in theMidi this year, andin inland Provence,away from the cooling breezes and inviting waters of the Côte d'Azur. Visitors were driven to find alternative sanctuary from the sun as the mercury climbed relentlessly, reaching the high 30s even before the grandes vacances had properly begun.
Rarely have the cool, dark mysteries of Aix-en-Provence's St Sauveur cathedral seemed so engrossing, the dappled shade and splashing fountains of the Cours Mirabeau more alluring, or the need to linger over a citron pressé and the latest edition of La Provence more pressing. This summer, late mornings blend effortlessly into early afternoons on the terrace at Les Deux Garçons. Anything more strenuous is, frankly, an effort.
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Right on cue, Aix's distinguished but hitherto rather dusty Musée Granet reopened its doors in June after a lengthy rebuild, and visitors to Provence's most seductive city were presented with an altogether more compelling refuge from the daytime heat. For this - in case you hadn't noticed - is the year of Cézanne in Provence. It is a century since the dogged, solitary father of modern painting was struck down while painting in the autumn rain on the hill of Les Lauves. It seemed inevitable that the city's principal art gallery should reopen with an exhibition of his work and it duly did so: the Cézanne en Provence exhibition is opening here after first being seen in Washington, DC, and it's a triumph. Far more than the stifling afternoon heat outside, this exhibition is truly breathtaking. I doubt I shall ever again see such a magnificent collection of Cézanne's paintings in one place.
It seems as though they're all here, returned to the place that inspired them from the world's greatmuseums: "Les Grandes Baigneuses" from London's National Gallery, "Les Joueurs de Cartes" from the Musée d'Orsay, the almost cubist "Carrières de Bibémus" from the Folkwang in Essen, and a roomful of Mont Sainte Victoire canvases. The museum itself has been rebuilt with more taste than audacity - there are no Bilbao-style architectural pyrotechnics to distract attention from the artworks on its walls.
And yet wonderful though Cézanne en Provence is, it isn't the only artistic revelation on offer in Aix this summer. For the very first time, it is possible to visit Jas de Bouffan, the handsome 18th- century house that was for many years the Cézanne family home, the artist's studio and the subject matter of his art. Though he only painted the house itself after the death of his domineering father, Cézanne painted much else here - the avenue of chestnut trees, the rectangular basin in the garden, and the simple Provençal farm folk who became the subject of "Les Joueurs de Cartes". He even painted the walls of the house itself, for this was the original location of his "Four Seasons", later chemically removed from the plaster of thespacious white salon. This salon is the setting for a wonderful coup de théâtre at the start of the tour, as paintings from the Jas de Bouffan period are projected on to the walls of the room in which they were painted. Many of the works thus projected are among the canvases on view a few kilometres away in the Musée Granet.
The reminders of Cézanne in Aix are everywhere. A marked Cézanne trail allows pilgrims to follow the progress of his life in the city, from his birthplace in the Rue de l'Opéra to the Saint-Pierre cemetery where he was buried on October 24 1906. Beyond Aix itself, there are guided visits to the quarries of Bibémus and to the village of Gardanne, where the artist spent part of the most decisive year of his life: the year he married, his father died and he broke with his childhood friend, Émile Zola, over the unflattering pen portrait of Cézanneand the impressionists that appeared in the author's novel The Masterpiece.
Perhaps the best-known and most visited of all Cézanne sites is the atelier on the hill of Les Lauves, a little to the north of the old city of Aix. Cézanne had it built to his own specifications and he was obsessive about getting the details right: the studio walls were originally white but created too many reflections, soseveral colours were tried before finally settling on the grey that visitors see today.
By the time it was ready in 1902 Cézanne was an old man, but financially secure, and at last attracting the attention as an artist that had evaded him for mostof his life. To walk intothis studio today is to enter a time capsule: propped against the wall is the giant easel on which he painted "Les Grandes Baigneuses", and dotted about the room are the humble artefacts he turned into compelling still lives: a skull, a basket, the olive jar that belonged to his mother, the bottle in which he cleaned his brushes.
One thing is missing from the atelier, though it can be seen a little to the north: Mont Sainte Victoire itself, a familiar motif even from the artist's earlier work but the subject of his obsessive attention in the years 1902-06. Two kilometres from the studio, near the summit of the hill of Les Lauves, an informal garden planted with olives andoleander climbs from the side of the road. This is the Terrain des Peintres, thevantage point from which Cézanne painted his beloved mountain.
It is perhaps best visited late in the afternoon or early in the evening, not just to enjoy the light but because there's little shade and the path is steep and not especially smooth - it's hot work being an art pilgrim. Only at the top does the garden fully reveal its treasure, a glorious view over the mountain and the surrounding landscape.
Plaques with reproductions of some of the Mont Sainte Victoire canvases help visitors to compare the living landscape with the artist's interpretation, though even without them it would be impossible now to imagine this as anything other than Cézanne's mountain: a vast triangle of limestone rising above a horizontal line with the deep greens and tawny shades of an unspoilt Provençal landscape below. A view worth braving any amount of summer heat to savour.
About Me
- Xerxes
- New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
- Admire John McPhee, Bill Bryson, David Remnick, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr and James Martin (and most open and curious minds)
25.8.06
CHARLES KURAULT
CHARLES KURALT SHOULD BE REMEMBERED.
He gave us stories of hope and of unheralded heroes. His more than 600 episodes of "On the Road," filed from every state in America, punctuated the daily barrage of riots, wars and demonstrations on the nightly news. "Two-minute cease-fires," Time magazine called them. We should remember Charles Kuralt for his rich, mahogany voice and slow talking that brought us the relaxed pace of "Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt." And for his seven best-selling books. So many stories. So many memories.
"I objected to doing the 'On the Road' pieces at first . . . but with the very first piece he did, I was convinced that we better get them on the air."—Walter Cronkite
http://www.rememberingcharleskuralt.com/
He gave us stories of hope and of unheralded heroes. His more than 600 episodes of "On the Road," filed from every state in America, punctuated the daily barrage of riots, wars and demonstrations on the nightly news. "Two-minute cease-fires," Time magazine called them. We should remember Charles Kuralt for his rich, mahogany voice and slow talking that brought us the relaxed pace of "Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt." And for his seven best-selling books. So many stories. So many memories.
"I objected to doing the 'On the Road' pieces at first . . . but with the very first piece he did, I was convinced that we better get them on the air."—Walter Cronkite
http://www.rememberingcharleskuralt.com/
NEW LOCATION
My publisher, Blogspot -- operating sometimes through blogger.com, some sort of adjunct of google has promised me a new location. If it comes, you will be automatically re-directed. Thanks for your patience. Xerxes.
Jordana Spiro
Great scene from Must Love Dogs. But, if it were me, I would have 'done the Russian thing' with Ms. Spiro. Doctor Zhivago with one's dog sometimes just isn't enough.
24.8.06
NEWSPAPERS
From the Economist:
The future of newspapers Who killed the newspaper?
The most useful bit of the media is disappearing. A cause for concern, but not for panic
“A GOOD newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself,” mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart (see article).
Of all the “old” media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet. Circulation has been falling in America, western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book “The Vanishing Newspaper”, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition. That sort of extrapolation would have produced a harrumph from a Beaverbrook or a Hearst, but even the most cynical news baron could not dismiss the way that ever more young people are getting their news online. Britons aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web.
Up to a podcast, Lord Copper?
Advertising is following readers out of the door. The rush is almost unseemly, largely because the internet is a seductive medium that supposedly matches buyers with sellers and proves to advertisers that their money is well spent. Classified ads, in particular, are quickly shifting online. Rupert Murdoch, the Beaverbrook of our age, once described them as the industry's rivers of gold—but, as he said last year, “Sometimes rivers dry up.” In Switzerland and the Netherlands newspapers have lost half their classified advertising to the internet.
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world's general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004. Tumbling shares of listed newspaper firms have prompted fury from investors. In 2005 a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the owner of several big American dailies, got the firm to sell its papers and thus end a 114-year history. This year Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, attacked the New York Times Company, the most august journalistic institution of all, because its share price had fallen by nearly half in four years.
Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people's daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on- and offline. And they are investing in free daily papers, which do not use up any of their meagre editorial resources on uncovering political corruption or corporate fraud. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it does, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.
Getting away with murder
In future, as newspapers fade and change, will politicians therefore burgle their opponents' offices with impunity, and corporate villains whoop as they trample over their victims? Journalism schools and think-tanks, especially in America, are worried about the effect of a crumbling Fourth Estate. Are today's news organisations “up to the task of sustaining the informed citizenry on which democracy depends?” asked a recent report about newspapers from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a charitable research foundation.
Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come.
That is partly because a few titles that invest in the kind of investigative stories which often benefit society the most are in a good position to survive, as long as their owners do a competent job of adjusting to changing circumstances. Publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal should be able to put up the price of their journalism to compensate for advertising revenues lost to the internet—especially as they cater to a more global readership. As with many industries, it is those in the middle—neither highbrow, nor entertainingly populist—that are likeliest to fall by the wayside.
The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account—trying them in the court of public opinion. The internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper. News-aggregation sites such as Google News draw together sources from around the world. The website of Britain's Guardian now has nearly half as many readers in America as it does at home.
In addition, a new force of “citizen” journalists and bloggers is itching to hold politicians to account. The web has opened the closed world of professional editors and reporters to anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection. Several companies have been chastened by amateur postings—of flames erupting from Dell's laptops or of cable-TV repairmen asleep on the sofa. Each blogger is capable of bias and slander, but, taken as a group, bloggers offer the searcher after truth boundless material to chew over. Of course, the internet panders to closed minds; but so has much of the press.
For hard-news reporting—as opposed to comment—the results of net journalism have admittedly been limited. Most bloggers operate from their armchairs, not the frontline, and citizen journalists tend to stick to local matters. But it is still early days. New online models will spring up as papers retreat. One non-profit group, NewAssignment.Net, plans to combine the work of amateurs and professionals to produce investigative stories on the internet. Aptly, $10,000 of cash for the project has come from Craig Newmark, of Craigslist, a group of free classified-advertisement websites that has probably done more than anything to destroy newspapers' income.
In future, argues Carnegie, some high-quality journalism will also be backed by non-profit organisations. Already, a few respected news organisations sustain themselves that way—including the Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Miller's national conversation will be louder than ever.
Copyright © 2006 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
The future of newspapers Who killed the newspaper?
The most useful bit of the media is disappearing. A cause for concern, but not for panic
“A GOOD newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself,” mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart (see article).
Of all the “old” media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet. Circulation has been falling in America, western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book “The Vanishing Newspaper”, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition. That sort of extrapolation would have produced a harrumph from a Beaverbrook or a Hearst, but even the most cynical news baron could not dismiss the way that ever more young people are getting their news online. Britons aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web.
Up to a podcast, Lord Copper?
Advertising is following readers out of the door. The rush is almost unseemly, largely because the internet is a seductive medium that supposedly matches buyers with sellers and proves to advertisers that their money is well spent. Classified ads, in particular, are quickly shifting online. Rupert Murdoch, the Beaverbrook of our age, once described them as the industry's rivers of gold—but, as he said last year, “Sometimes rivers dry up.” In Switzerland and the Netherlands newspapers have lost half their classified advertising to the internet.
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world's general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004. Tumbling shares of listed newspaper firms have prompted fury from investors. In 2005 a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the owner of several big American dailies, got the firm to sell its papers and thus end a 114-year history. This year Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, attacked the New York Times Company, the most august journalistic institution of all, because its share price had fallen by nearly half in four years.
Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people's daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on- and offline. And they are investing in free daily papers, which do not use up any of their meagre editorial resources on uncovering political corruption or corporate fraud. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it does, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.
Getting away with murder
In future, as newspapers fade and change, will politicians therefore burgle their opponents' offices with impunity, and corporate villains whoop as they trample over their victims? Journalism schools and think-tanks, especially in America, are worried about the effect of a crumbling Fourth Estate. Are today's news organisations “up to the task of sustaining the informed citizenry on which democracy depends?” asked a recent report about newspapers from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a charitable research foundation.
Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come.
That is partly because a few titles that invest in the kind of investigative stories which often benefit society the most are in a good position to survive, as long as their owners do a competent job of adjusting to changing circumstances. Publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal should be able to put up the price of their journalism to compensate for advertising revenues lost to the internet—especially as they cater to a more global readership. As with many industries, it is those in the middle—neither highbrow, nor entertainingly populist—that are likeliest to fall by the wayside.
The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account—trying them in the court of public opinion. The internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper. News-aggregation sites such as Google News draw together sources from around the world. The website of Britain's Guardian now has nearly half as many readers in America as it does at home.
In addition, a new force of “citizen” journalists and bloggers is itching to hold politicians to account. The web has opened the closed world of professional editors and reporters to anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection. Several companies have been chastened by amateur postings—of flames erupting from Dell's laptops or of cable-TV repairmen asleep on the sofa. Each blogger is capable of bias and slander, but, taken as a group, bloggers offer the searcher after truth boundless material to chew over. Of course, the internet panders to closed minds; but so has much of the press.
For hard-news reporting—as opposed to comment—the results of net journalism have admittedly been limited. Most bloggers operate from their armchairs, not the frontline, and citizen journalists tend to stick to local matters. But it is still early days. New online models will spring up as papers retreat. One non-profit group, NewAssignment.Net, plans to combine the work of amateurs and professionals to produce investigative stories on the internet. Aptly, $10,000 of cash for the project has come from Craig Newmark, of Craigslist, a group of free classified-advertisement websites that has probably done more than anything to destroy newspapers' income.
In future, argues Carnegie, some high-quality journalism will also be backed by non-profit organisations. Already, a few respected news organisations sustain themselves that way—including the Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Miller's national conversation will be louder than ever.
Copyright © 2006 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
NINE ONE ONE
No event in recent times has produced as many explanations as the 11th September attacks five years ago. Within the space of an hour, al Qaeda inflicted more direct damage on the US than the Soviet Union had done throughout the cold war, a cataclysm seen by more people than any other event in history. Yet it took only 19 men armed with small knives to destroy the World Trade Centre, demolish a wing of the Pentagon and kill 3,000 people. This mismatch has led some—especially in the Muslim world—to seek a deus ex machina to explain what otherwise appears inexplicable. The usual suspects have been assembled on 9/11's grassy knoll: the Jews were behind the attacks; the US government engineered them; the "Cheney-Bush energy junta" planned them so that they could grab the oil fields of central Asia, and so on.Osama bin Laden himself claims that al Qaeda was solely responsible for 9/11. In 2004, he released a video in which he explained his dealings with lead hijacker Mohammed Atta. After the largest criminal investigation in history, the US government's 9/11 commission also concluded that al Qaeda was solely responsible for the attacks.Attributing the sole responsibility for 9/11 to al Qaeda then brings us to the larger question: what caused al Qaeda to launch the attacks? Explanations for the attacks can be sorted into two categories—the seemingly plausible but flawed, and the more credible.
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7717
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7717
TIME FOR FRANCE TO STAND UP
To those who complain about the hegemony of the United States in world affairs, the time has come to encourage Europe and France in particular to come off the sideline and take an active role in the Middle East.
Americans who have long argued that France and Europe have a constructive, important role to play in global affairs -- including in the Middle East -- have a huge stake in this decision. That proposition is, to say the least, not obvious to all Americans. Failure to seize and use this dangerous opportunity in Lebanon that France helped forge would sink such hopes for as far ahead as I can see.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/23/AR2006082301363.html?referrer=email
Americans who have long argued that France and Europe have a constructive, important role to play in global affairs -- including in the Middle East -- have a huge stake in this decision. That proposition is, to say the least, not obvious to all Americans. Failure to seize and use this dangerous opportunity in Lebanon that France helped forge would sink such hopes for as far ahead as I can see.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/23/AR2006082301363.html?referrer=email
23.8.06
GRAHAM GREENE
This week's Times Literary Supplement has a marvelous account of Graham Greene's tenure at the TABLET. Long one of Xerxes' favorites, Greene continues to perplex...and delight.
http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25338-2323675,00.html
For all its vinegary humour, Greene’s Tablet journalism imparts a lively sense of involvement in the politics and literature of the time. During the mid-1930s Greene made trips to the Estonian capital of Tallinn; there he got to know a British diplomat, Peter Leslie, who was a Catholic and apparently involved in espionage. (See “Our Man in Tallinn”, TLS, March 3, 2006.) An habitué of shadowy places, Greene was the only Catholic writer in Britain to recommend Ignazio Silone’s novel Bread and Wine. As the title suggests, the novel is fraught with the symbols of the Eucharist, and moreover carries a Christian socialist message of redemption for Italy’s poor. By the time Bread and Wine reached its first readers in 1937, Mussolini had conquered Abyssinia and further allied the Fascist State to the Catholic Church. To many Catholic conservatives, Silone was a left-wing propagandist, but Greene defended Silone’s attempts to reconcile Catholicism with socialism: “His criticism is not hasty, shallow or partisan”, but “profoundly Christian”. On the whole, Greene was at pains to champion anti-Fascist writers like Silone who advocated “social justice”. (It is unlikely, however, that he knew of Silone’s alleged espionage activities, which involved Greenean elements of treachery and double-dealing.) Many other authors who came under Greene’s review are now forgotten. John Masefield, a former Poet Laureate, is scarcely read today. Arthur Calder-Marshall is also unfortunately neglected. Other literary aspirants whom Greene praised in the Tablet, though, have endured. R. K. Narayan, the South Indian novelist, benefited greatly from Greene’s advocacy of his work in the Tablet and elsewhere. (Greene even advised the author on what pen-name to use and moreover saw to his financial security.)
http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25338-2323675,00.html
For all its vinegary humour, Greene’s Tablet journalism imparts a lively sense of involvement in the politics and literature of the time. During the mid-1930s Greene made trips to the Estonian capital of Tallinn; there he got to know a British diplomat, Peter Leslie, who was a Catholic and apparently involved in espionage. (See “Our Man in Tallinn”, TLS, March 3, 2006.) An habitué of shadowy places, Greene was the only Catholic writer in Britain to recommend Ignazio Silone’s novel Bread and Wine. As the title suggests, the novel is fraught with the symbols of the Eucharist, and moreover carries a Christian socialist message of redemption for Italy’s poor. By the time Bread and Wine reached its first readers in 1937, Mussolini had conquered Abyssinia and further allied the Fascist State to the Catholic Church. To many Catholic conservatives, Silone was a left-wing propagandist, but Greene defended Silone’s attempts to reconcile Catholicism with socialism: “His criticism is not hasty, shallow or partisan”, but “profoundly Christian”. On the whole, Greene was at pains to champion anti-Fascist writers like Silone who advocated “social justice”. (It is unlikely, however, that he knew of Silone’s alleged espionage activities, which involved Greenean elements of treachery and double-dealing.) Many other authors who came under Greene’s review are now forgotten. John Masefield, a former Poet Laureate, is scarcely read today. Arthur Calder-Marshall is also unfortunately neglected. Other literary aspirants whom Greene praised in the Tablet, though, have endured. R. K. Narayan, the South Indian novelist, benefited greatly from Greene’s advocacy of his work in the Tablet and elsewhere. (Greene even advised the author on what pen-name to use and moreover saw to his financial security.)
9-11
What they went throughOur countrymen died real deaths on Sept. 11, and we need to listen to their last words.
By Garrison Keillor
Aug. 23, 2006
It was painful to hear the woman in anguish on the 83rd floor of the World Trade Center, crying, "I'm going to die, aren't I? I'm going to die." Melissa Doi was 32, beautiful, with laughing eyes and black hair. She was lying on the floor of her office at IQ Financial, overwhelmed by smoke and heat, calling for help. And then there was Kevin Cosgrove on the 105th floor, moments before it collapsed, gasping for breath, saying, "We're young men, we're not ready to die." And then he screamed, "Oh my God" as the building started to collapse. It's in their voices, what they went through.
Those were two of the 1,613 calls to 911 released by New York City last week, on almost all of which the caller's voice was beeped out. The city argued that to hear persons in anguish in their last minutes constitutes an invasion of privacy. The truth is that the callers had no interest in privacy, they were desperate to be heard, and censoring them now is a last insult by a bureaucracy that failed to protect them in the first place.
They were people like us; we might have sat near them in a theater or restaurant, asked them for directions on the street. They went to work that fine Tuesday morning and suddenly found themselves facing the abyss, and the first thing we thought, seeing the burning buildings on TV, was "What is it like for the people in there?" We wanted to know.
Then, inevitably, politicians began to seize the day and turn it into a patriotic tableau starring themselves. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who does not appear in a leadership capacity in the reliable accounts of that morning, who was captured on videotape fleeing uptown, soon stepped into the TV lights and put on his public face, and a few days later the Current Occupant mounted the wreckage with bullhorn in hand and vowed vengeance, and the media was glad to focus on the martial moment, the flag waving over the wreckage, the theme of America united -- and the anguished voices from the towers were unheard, the people who fell from high floors and smashed into the pavement were not seen on American TV. The media averted its eyes from the reality of 9/11 and started looking for the message.
The best book on the subject, by the way, is "102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers," by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, two New York Times reporters who fashioned a plain narrative out of thousands of stories that took place in the time between the first strike and the collapse of the second tower. You read it, you're there.
Mr. Giuliani is still flying around giving speeches on leadership, knocking down a hundred grand per shot, getting standing ovations everywhere as a stand-in for the police and firemen who died in the towers. He has never faced up to his failure to prepare for the attack, even after the 1993 bomb explosion at the World Trade Center, when it was shown clearly that police and fire couldn't communicate with each other by radio. Eight years passed, little was done, and then came the 19 men with box cutters. The 911 operators took thousands of calls and had no information to give. Police helicopter pilots, who had a clear view of the infernos and could see that the buildings were going to collapse, couldn't get word to fire chiefs on the ground, who, unable to see the fire, sent their men up the stairs to die. Official bungling cost those men their lives.
In the end, what we crave is reality. The woman crying on the 83rd floor was real. Our countrymen died real deaths on a warm September morning, and then, to avenge them, even more have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. In our hearts, we know we're on the wrong road, the road to unreality, but the man says to stay the course. And now as November nears, congressmen who have supported the war, no questions asked, find it convenient to admit to having "questions" about it. "We are facing a difficult situation," they say. They are "troubled."
The woman who cried on the 83rd floor was more than troubled. She saw death. It is indecent for New York to stifle the voices of the people in the towers. The congressmen who deal so casually with life and death ought to sit down and listen to those phone calls.
By Garrison Keillor
Aug. 23, 2006
It was painful to hear the woman in anguish on the 83rd floor of the World Trade Center, crying, "I'm going to die, aren't I? I'm going to die." Melissa Doi was 32, beautiful, with laughing eyes and black hair. She was lying on the floor of her office at IQ Financial, overwhelmed by smoke and heat, calling for help. And then there was Kevin Cosgrove on the 105th floor, moments before it collapsed, gasping for breath, saying, "We're young men, we're not ready to die." And then he screamed, "Oh my God" as the building started to collapse. It's in their voices, what they went through.
Those were two of the 1,613 calls to 911 released by New York City last week, on almost all of which the caller's voice was beeped out. The city argued that to hear persons in anguish in their last minutes constitutes an invasion of privacy. The truth is that the callers had no interest in privacy, they were desperate to be heard, and censoring them now is a last insult by a bureaucracy that failed to protect them in the first place.
They were people like us; we might have sat near them in a theater or restaurant, asked them for directions on the street. They went to work that fine Tuesday morning and suddenly found themselves facing the abyss, and the first thing we thought, seeing the burning buildings on TV, was "What is it like for the people in there?" We wanted to know.
Then, inevitably, politicians began to seize the day and turn it into a patriotic tableau starring themselves. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who does not appear in a leadership capacity in the reliable accounts of that morning, who was captured on videotape fleeing uptown, soon stepped into the TV lights and put on his public face, and a few days later the Current Occupant mounted the wreckage with bullhorn in hand and vowed vengeance, and the media was glad to focus on the martial moment, the flag waving over the wreckage, the theme of America united -- and the anguished voices from the towers were unheard, the people who fell from high floors and smashed into the pavement were not seen on American TV. The media averted its eyes from the reality of 9/11 and started looking for the message.
The best book on the subject, by the way, is "102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers," by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, two New York Times reporters who fashioned a plain narrative out of thousands of stories that took place in the time between the first strike and the collapse of the second tower. You read it, you're there.
Mr. Giuliani is still flying around giving speeches on leadership, knocking down a hundred grand per shot, getting standing ovations everywhere as a stand-in for the police and firemen who died in the towers. He has never faced up to his failure to prepare for the attack, even after the 1993 bomb explosion at the World Trade Center, when it was shown clearly that police and fire couldn't communicate with each other by radio. Eight years passed, little was done, and then came the 19 men with box cutters. The 911 operators took thousands of calls and had no information to give. Police helicopter pilots, who had a clear view of the infernos and could see that the buildings were going to collapse, couldn't get word to fire chiefs on the ground, who, unable to see the fire, sent their men up the stairs to die. Official bungling cost those men their lives.
In the end, what we crave is reality. The woman crying on the 83rd floor was real. Our countrymen died real deaths on a warm September morning, and then, to avenge them, even more have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. In our hearts, we know we're on the wrong road, the road to unreality, but the man says to stay the course. And now as November nears, congressmen who have supported the war, no questions asked, find it convenient to admit to having "questions" about it. "We are facing a difficult situation," they say. They are "troubled."
The woman who cried on the 83rd floor was more than troubled. She saw death. It is indecent for New York to stifle the voices of the people in the towers. The congressmen who deal so casually with life and death ought to sit down and listen to those phone calls.
22.8.06
BUSH & CAMUS
Adam Gopnik has a wonderful piece in this week's New Yorker on George Bush's Summer reading. It is titled "Read It and Weep" http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060828ta_talk_gopnik
It concludes: And all this brings us no further than book one on the President’s stack, with Oppenheimer and Lincoln still to be chewed on. Bush may have emerged from his syllabus as little altered as most undergraduates emerge from theirs. Still, it is encouraging to think that he has spent the summer reflecting on the inscrutable origins of human violence and on the unimaginable destructive powers now available through American science, while contemplating the achievements of a great man who hated wars, made a necessary one, and wandered the halls of the White House agonized by the consequences. It sounds almost like the beginnings of wisdom, or, at least, a compulsory fall reading list for us all.
It concludes: And all this brings us no further than book one on the President’s stack, with Oppenheimer and Lincoln still to be chewed on. Bush may have emerged from his syllabus as little altered as most undergraduates emerge from theirs. Still, it is encouraging to think that he has spent the summer reflecting on the inscrutable origins of human violence and on the unimaginable destructive powers now available through American science, while contemplating the achievements of a great man who hated wars, made a necessary one, and wandered the halls of the White House agonized by the consequences. It sounds almost like the beginnings of wisdom, or, at least, a compulsory fall reading list for us all.
RELIGION
Things CNN Will Never Tell You About Religion
By R. Joseph Hoffmann
1. That there is no God.
2. That you will not live forever.
3. That Noah’s ark will never be found because it never existed.
4. That Christianity began as a violent first century messianic sect which learned to cope peaceably when its messiah didn’t show up.
5. That most fundamentalists are rather stupid, Muslims and Christians alike.
6. That most evangelical Christians cannot describe what they mean by “inerrant” - speaking of the Bible.
7. That the vast majority of Christians opposed to stem cell research think it means killing babies for their brains.
8. That biblical Israel ceased to exist in 720 BC, lasted for less than two hundred years, and that modern Israel didn’t exist again until 1948.
9. That virtually no Jews use the phrase ‘Judaeo-Christian’, applied to ethics or anything else.
10. That Muhammad, a delusional first century Arab who thought the God of the Jews was speaking to him, was not a Muslim.
11. That Jesus, a delusional first century Jew who, if he existed, thought that the God of Abraham was his father, was not a Christian.
12. That most Arabs don’t like Palestinians.
13. That religion is the cause and not the cure for Middle Eastern violence.
14. That most Lebanese who are not Shi’a would rather be called Phoenicians than Arabs.
15. That the intellectual tradition in Arabia that is supposed to have given us everything from astronomy to the Zero and algebra…didn’t.
16. That not all religions are about peace, love and brotherhood—specifically, that the word Islam does not derive from the Arabic word peace but from the term for “Give up?”
17. That the term Jihad historically has never meant an inner struggle for spiritual perfection but killing the enemies of Islam before they can hurt you.
18. That almost no one in the Middle East believes that the future of the Middle East resides with “moderate” Muslims.
19. That atheism, secular humanism, and agnosticism are essential ingredients of the pluralist culture of modern Europe and America.
20. That when secularism and humanism fail, democracy fails.
21. That religious tolerance is not possible in the Middle East.
22. That unless the phrase ‘freedom and democracy’ includes the construct ‘secular’ neither term is meaningful.
23. That prior to the war on Iraq, the American president did not know that Iraq was biblical Mesopotamia, Eden.
24. That the American President thinks the distinction between Shi’a and Sunni is similar the distinction between Methodist and Presbyterian.
25. That the new ‘democratic’ regime in Iraq - Iraqi Shi’a - and Not Syria or Iran, were the staunchest supporters of Hezbollah prior to the invasion of Iraq.
26. That this means that the people we are calling the bulwark of freedom and democracy in Iraq are the terrorists of southern Lebanon.
R. Joseph Hoffmann is currently senior fellow and Chair of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion, at the Center for Inquiry, Amherst, New York. From 2000 until the break out of the war against Iraq, he was Professor of Civilization Studies at the American University Of Beirut.
By R. Joseph Hoffmann
1. That there is no God.
2. That you will not live forever.
3. That Noah’s ark will never be found because it never existed.
4. That Christianity began as a violent first century messianic sect which learned to cope peaceably when its messiah didn’t show up.
5. That most fundamentalists are rather stupid, Muslims and Christians alike.
6. That most evangelical Christians cannot describe what they mean by “inerrant” - speaking of the Bible.
7. That the vast majority of Christians opposed to stem cell research think it means killing babies for their brains.
8. That biblical Israel ceased to exist in 720 BC, lasted for less than two hundred years, and that modern Israel didn’t exist again until 1948.
9. That virtually no Jews use the phrase ‘Judaeo-Christian’, applied to ethics or anything else.
10. That Muhammad, a delusional first century Arab who thought the God of the Jews was speaking to him, was not a Muslim.
11. That Jesus, a delusional first century Jew who, if he existed, thought that the God of Abraham was his father, was not a Christian.
12. That most Arabs don’t like Palestinians.
13. That religion is the cause and not the cure for Middle Eastern violence.
14. That most Lebanese who are not Shi’a would rather be called Phoenicians than Arabs.
15. That the intellectual tradition in Arabia that is supposed to have given us everything from astronomy to the Zero and algebra…didn’t.
16. That not all religions are about peace, love and brotherhood—specifically, that the word Islam does not derive from the Arabic word peace but from the term for “Give up?”
17. That the term Jihad historically has never meant an inner struggle for spiritual perfection but killing the enemies of Islam before they can hurt you.
18. That almost no one in the Middle East believes that the future of the Middle East resides with “moderate” Muslims.
19. That atheism, secular humanism, and agnosticism are essential ingredients of the pluralist culture of modern Europe and America.
20. That when secularism and humanism fail, democracy fails.
21. That religious tolerance is not possible in the Middle East.
22. That unless the phrase ‘freedom and democracy’ includes the construct ‘secular’ neither term is meaningful.
23. That prior to the war on Iraq, the American president did not know that Iraq was biblical Mesopotamia, Eden.
24. That the American President thinks the distinction between Shi’a and Sunni is similar the distinction between Methodist and Presbyterian.
25. That the new ‘democratic’ regime in Iraq - Iraqi Shi’a - and Not Syria or Iran, were the staunchest supporters of Hezbollah prior to the invasion of Iraq.
26. That this means that the people we are calling the bulwark of freedom and democracy in Iraq are the terrorists of southern Lebanon.
R. Joseph Hoffmann is currently senior fellow and Chair of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion, at the Center for Inquiry, Amherst, New York. From 2000 until the break out of the war against Iraq, he was Professor of Civilization Studies at the American University Of Beirut.
CLASSICAL MUSIC
New technology will likely spell the end of the CD, at least the commercially produced and sold in a record store type. Current download services are largely focused on popular music but the availability of new classical works and performances should be high. Here the LATimes speculates.....http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/showcase/la-ca-downloads20aug20,0,5941167,full.story
19.8.06
OLD AMERICA
The Americans are more old-fashioned than us, and what is equally admirable, they are not ashamed of being old-fashioned. They know Churchill was a great man, so they put his house on the map. There is a kind of Englishman to whom this sort of behaviour seems painfully unsophisticated.
document.
We are inclined, in our snobbish way, to dismiss the Americans as a new and vulgar people, whose civilisation has hardly risen above the level of cowboys and Indians. Yet the United States of America is actually the oldest republic in the world, with a constitution that is one of the noblest works of man. When one strips away the distracting symbols of modernity - motor cars, skyscrapers, space rockets, microchips, junk food - one finds an essentially 18th-century country. While Europe has engaged in the headlong and frankly rather immature pursuit of novelty - how many constitutions have the nations of Europe been through in this time? - the Americans have held to the ideals enunciated more than 200 years ago by their founding fathers.
The sense of entering an older country, and one with a sterner sense of purpose than is found among the flippant and inconstant Europeans, can be enjoyed even before one gets off the plane. On the immigration forms that one has to fill in, one is asked: "Have you ever been arrested or convicted for an offence or crime involving moral turpitude?" Who now would dare to pose such a question in Europe? The very word "turpitude" brings a smile, almost a sneer, to our lips.
The quiet solicitude that Americans show for the comfort of their visitors, and the tact with which they make one feel at home, can only be described as gentlemanly. These graceful manners, so often overlooked by brash European tourists, whisper the last enchantments of an earlier and more dignified age, when liberty was not confused with licence.
But when the Americans speak of freedom, we should not imagine, in our cynical and worldly-wise way, that they are merely using that word as a cloak for realpolitik. They are not above realpolitik, but they also mean what they say.
These formidable people think freedom is so valuable that it is worth dying for.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=1LQBHHVRCPN4HQFIQMFSFF4AVCBQ0IV0?xml=/opinion/2006/08/11/do1102.xml
document.
We are inclined, in our snobbish way, to dismiss the Americans as a new and vulgar people, whose civilisation has hardly risen above the level of cowboys and Indians. Yet the United States of America is actually the oldest republic in the world, with a constitution that is one of the noblest works of man. When one strips away the distracting symbols of modernity - motor cars, skyscrapers, space rockets, microchips, junk food - one finds an essentially 18th-century country. While Europe has engaged in the headlong and frankly rather immature pursuit of novelty - how many constitutions have the nations of Europe been through in this time? - the Americans have held to the ideals enunciated more than 200 years ago by their founding fathers.
The sense of entering an older country, and one with a sterner sense of purpose than is found among the flippant and inconstant Europeans, can be enjoyed even before one gets off the plane. On the immigration forms that one has to fill in, one is asked: "Have you ever been arrested or convicted for an offence or crime involving moral turpitude?" Who now would dare to pose such a question in Europe? The very word "turpitude" brings a smile, almost a sneer, to our lips.
The quiet solicitude that Americans show for the comfort of their visitors, and the tact with which they make one feel at home, can only be described as gentlemanly. These graceful manners, so often overlooked by brash European tourists, whisper the last enchantments of an earlier and more dignified age, when liberty was not confused with licence.
But when the Americans speak of freedom, we should not imagine, in our cynical and worldly-wise way, that they are merely using that word as a cloak for realpolitik. They are not above realpolitik, but they also mean what they say.
These formidable people think freedom is so valuable that it is worth dying for.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=1LQBHHVRCPN4HQFIQMFSFF4AVCBQ0IV0?xml=/opinion/2006/08/11/do1102.xml
THE STUDY OF ENGLISH LIERATURE
There now that really grabbed you, didn't it?
It is, however well worth the time to read this wonderful piece from the New York Review of Books from 1999. The subject may be literature but the topic is education or as Emerson commented: can man be converted?
An answer that leads back, I believe, to the core of a literary education is to be found in an entry Emerson made in his journal 165 years ago. "The whole secret of the teacher's force," he wrote, "lies in the conviction that men are convertible. And they are. They want awakening." Having left the ministry two years before, Emerson was still in the process of transforming himself from a preacher into a lecturer, and of altering the form of his writing from the sermon to the essay. But his motive for speaking and writing had not changed with the shedding of his frock. Like every great teacher, he was in the business of trying to "get the soul out of bed, out of her deep habitual sleep."
None of us who has ever been a student can fail to read this passage without remembering some teacher by whom we were startled out of complacency about our own ignorance. For this to take place, the student must be open to it, and the teacher must overcome the incremental fatigue of repetitive work and somehow remain a professor in the religious sense of that word—ardent, exemplary, even fanatic.
Literary studies, in fact, have their roots in religion. Trilling understood this when he remarked, in his gloomy essay about the future of the humanities, that "the educated person" had traditionally been conceived as
an initiate who began as a postulant, passed to a higher level of experience, and became worthy of admission into the company of those who are thought to have transcended the mental darkness and inertia in which they were previously immersed.
please see, www.nybooks.com/articles/318
It is, however well worth the time to read this wonderful piece from the New York Review of Books from 1999. The subject may be literature but the topic is education or as Emerson commented: can man be converted?
An answer that leads back, I believe, to the core of a literary education is to be found in an entry Emerson made in his journal 165 years ago. "The whole secret of the teacher's force," he wrote, "lies in the conviction that men are convertible. And they are. They want awakening." Having left the ministry two years before, Emerson was still in the process of transforming himself from a preacher into a lecturer, and of altering the form of his writing from the sermon to the essay. But his motive for speaking and writing had not changed with the shedding of his frock. Like every great teacher, he was in the business of trying to "get the soul out of bed, out of her deep habitual sleep."
None of us who has ever been a student can fail to read this passage without remembering some teacher by whom we were startled out of complacency about our own ignorance. For this to take place, the student must be open to it, and the teacher must overcome the incremental fatigue of repetitive work and somehow remain a professor in the religious sense of that word—ardent, exemplary, even fanatic.
Literary studies, in fact, have their roots in religion. Trilling understood this when he remarked, in his gloomy essay about the future of the humanities, that "the educated person" had traditionally been conceived as
an initiate who began as a postulant, passed to a higher level of experience, and became worthy of admission into the company of those who are thought to have transcended the mental darkness and inertia in which they were previously immersed.
please see, www.nybooks.com/articles/318
18.8.06
He has seen the future
It is nice to keep up with Alvin Toffler, and throw in a very spiffy lunch to boot.
FT.com / Arts & Weekend - Lunch with the FT: He has seen the future
FT.com / Arts & Weekend - Lunch with the FT: He has seen the future
LABOUR ON BUSH
George isn't doing so well with Labour these days. Check out Glenda Jackson and Red Ken.
Independent Online Edition > UK Politics
Independent Online Edition > UK Politics
17.8.06
NEW ORLEANS (after the storm)
In the midst of the blight surrounding us, I see signs of something I’ve never seen in my 15 years of living in New Orleans: civic pride, activism — regular people, not city employees, making their own street signs, taking hammer and nails and rebuilding their own schools. When New Orleans does rise above its current plight — and it will — it will be because of the determination of its citizens, crazy though they may be, who are rebuilding, surviving, fighting over, around and despite the government. We still love our food and drink (and the restaurateurs were the first small-business owners to reopen); we just want to be able to enjoy it for a long time to come.
‘If there was no New Orleans, America would just be a bunch of free people dying of boredom,’ wrote Andrei Codrescu, the Romanian novelist who calls the city home. More than ever, it is not boring here. It is hard, really hard, but we are not bored. We have a lot to do. And the rest of America should be grateful to us.
The Spectator.co.uk
‘If there was no New Orleans, America would just be a bunch of free people dying of boredom,’ wrote Andrei Codrescu, the Romanian novelist who calls the city home. More than ever, it is not boring here. It is hard, really hard, but we are not bored. We have a lot to do. And the rest of America should be grateful to us.
The Spectator.co.uk
Simon Blackburn on Plato's Republic
If any books change the world, Republic has a good claim to first place. It is commonly regarded as the culminating achievement of Plato as a philosopher and writer, brilliantly poised between the questioning and inconclusive earlier dialogues and the less compelling cosmological speculations and doubts of the later ones. Over the centuries it has probably sustained more commentary, and been subject to more radical and impassioned disagreement, than almost any other of the great founding texts of the modern world. Indeed, the history of readings of the book is itself an academic discipline, with specialist chapters on almost every episode in the story of religion and literature for the past 2,000 years and more. To take only the major English poets, there are entire books on Platonism and Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Shelley and Coleridge, to name but a few, and there are many others on whole movements and times: Plato and Christianity, Plato and the Renaissance, Plato and the Victorians, Plato and the Nazis, Plato and us. The story of Plato's direct influence on philosophy is another study in itself, one peppered with names such as Philo Judaeus, Macrobius, Porphyry, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, as well as the better-known Plotinus, Augustine or Dante. Sometimes the Plato in question is the author of other texts, notably the inspirational dialogue Symposium and the theologically
Guardian Unlimited Books Review Simon Blackburn on Plato's Republic
Guardian Unlimited Books Review Simon Blackburn on Plato's Republic
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