How To Guess Your Age

My friend Gary liked to remark that we observe the anniversary of our birth every year, but nobody celebrates their death day. Odd, Gary thought, because it comes every year, just like the birthday.
A carper would complain that we can't identify the day of our death but I wouldn't be so sure: what with sophisticated modern actuarial techniques, we are getting closer and closer. Thanks to my friend Margaret, I now have a handy dandy new device to estimate my "real age," which amounts to the same thing (link).

Let's see now: I'm 71, which would give me an average life expectancy of about 11 years, making my ETA the age of 82. But tweak it a bit. Smoke? No, quit 47 years ago. Happy? Yes indeed. Nice wife, some exercise, lots of roughage. Overweight? Well, pleasingly plump. Put it all together and it says here that I have a "real age" of 57.2, and a "real" ETA of 95.8.

Ninety-five? I've got to live to be 95? Oy, that may be the most depressing thing I've learned all day.

A Garrett of Her Own

Ha! About time! Somebody has finally done a book about Virginia Woolf and her servants, or perhaps mainly about Nellie (Woolf persistently misspelled it "Nelly") the cook. I probably won't read it but there is a wonderful review in the London Review of Books (Ag 16 2007--link $$), worth it for this gem alone:

On one occasion she threw Virginia out of her room, demanding to be left in privacy, an irony that seems to have been lost on the author of the recently published A Room of One’s Own.

As is often the case with servants, Nellie apparently gave as good as she got. After years of service, the Woolfs kicked her out. The reviewer says:

Thwarted, grieved, and, at the age of 44, suddenly homeless, Nellie is a heartbreaking figure.

But in fact, it wasn't that way at all. Nellie "went to work almost at once for Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, one of the most glamorous show-business couples in London." She began a minor-league celebrity as endorser of a line of porcelain gas cookers and got a good enough payoff from the Laughton/Lanchester household at retirement that she was able to buy her own cottage in Surrey.

I weighed in on Virginia and the domestics a couple of years back in an Amazon review (link). Here's what I said:

My Boeuf with Virginia: Here is a small point with a larger purpose: Virginia Woolf does not know Boeuf en Daube. Or at any rate, Mrs. Ramsay, the heroine of "To the Lighthouse," does not, and there is no suggestion of any irony in her thought on the topic:

"Everything depended upon things being served up to the precise moment they were ready. ... To keep it waiting was out of the question. Yet of course tonight, of all nights, out they went, and they came in late, and things had to be sent out, things had to be kept hot; the Boeuf en Daube would be entirely spoilt."

Well, if you know anything about the kitchen, you know that this is nonsense. Boeuf en Daube is probably the last thing that needs to be "served up to the precise moment ..." As Elizabeth David says in her "French Provincial Cooking:" "there must be scores of different recipes for daubes in Provence alone... essentially a country housewife's dish." And more to the point, per Ms. David:

"The daube is a useful dish for those who have to get a dinner party when they get home from the office. It can be cooked for 1  hours the previous evening and finished on the night itself. Provided they have not been overcooked to start with, these beef and wine stews are all the better for a second or even third heating up."

I wonder how many English majors from the 1950s sold their souls for a good Boeuf en Daube (did Sylvia Plath have the recipe?) - and how much better off they would have been if they'd seen through it: understood that Mrs. Ramsay did not get the point, because Ms. Woolf did not get the point. Indeed, strictly speaking, the creation is not Mrs. Ramsay's at all, but you'd have to be a sharp-eyed reader to catch on: it is the servant who does the work and delivers the finished product and she, I suspect, knows better than her mistress how flexible and compliant it may be. There is an irony here and it is lost, I suspect, on the mistress and on the mistress' creator.

All of which leads to a larger point: Virginia Woolf does not know servants. Instance in particular her observation of Mrs. McNab, the old char who comes to reopen the summer house after long disuse. We get an elaborate set-piece description of Mrs. McNab, and it is not pretty: indeed, it is mean-spirited and dismissive in almost every way. Mrs. McNab "lurches" and "leers" She "was witless and she knew it;" she sings "like the voice of witlessness." Now, if this is true, it is inexcusably rude: one may want, for some artistic purpose, to show her lurching and leering for, but here it serves no purpose, unless you count its actual function in throwing light on the author. Anyway, the chances are it is not true. My guess is that Mrs. McNab has operated under far more constraint in life than either Ms. Woolf or Mrs. Ramsay ever dreamed of. Witless people do not survive under the iron whim of a Mrs. Ramsay; poor chars who do learn to survive will find that it takes all the skill one can muster.

I could go on, but I need to stay within Amazon's 1,000 word limit. The point is not that "To the Lighthouse" is a bad book. It's actually quite a good book; or at least it is a book full of good paragraphs, and Virginia Woolf seemingly cannot write a bad paragraph. It is as bad novel, because Virginia Woolf has little of the capacity for imaginative empathy that makes a really good novelist. They say that Shakespeare stands as a void at the center of his plays because he has poured every part of his being into his characters. Virginia Woolf takes almost all of her characters into herself. It is well done, but often we get to know more than we really want to know.

So here's to Nellie; I hope she enjoyed her gas cooker.

Funny, If it Weren't So Sad

This would be funny if it weren't so sad. No, sorry, it is funny: Zebulon Simentov, 47, is the last Jew in Afghanistan (link). But remember the story about the old Jew who kept two schuls in his back yard--one for worship, and "the other whose doorstep I will not cross, so help me God!" Now this:

The only other Jew in Afghanistan, Yitzhak Levin, died in 2005. The pair had lived together in a shabby synagogue on Flower Street throughout the Soviet invasion, a civil war and the fundamentalist Islamic Taliban government, but grew to hate each other. They held separate services, had vicious shouting matches neighbors could hear a block away, and when valuable Torah scrolls went missing, each blamed the other.

They also denounced each other to the Taliban as spies for Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, prompting Taliban police to beat them with rifle butts and jail them on occasion.

Simentov says the fight broke out nearly a decade ago when Jewish elders told him to take Levin - more than 20 years his senior - to Israel. Levin would not budge, and each man accused the other of wanting to sell the synagogue for profit. Simentov is the legal owner and plans to refurbish the 42-year-old building.

The feud was so intense that Afghan police suspected Simentov of murdering Levin when he died, until a post-mortem examination proved that he had died from diabetes.

Conflict is a kind of initmacy. Must be lonely out there.

The Running of the Bull

Larry reads the NYT obits so we don't have to. Here's a bit from the obit of Nancy Littlefield, who oversaw film producction in NYC (link):

Although Ms. Littlefield happily visited all manner of celluloid disaster on the city, including bank robberies and car crashes (“They’re really easy,” she told The New York Times in 1982), she also took seriously her role as a guardian of public safety. When one client wanted to shoot a commercial featuring 40 bulls stampeding on Wall Street, for instance, she put her foot down. “I don’t care how many wranglers they had — what if the bulls went out of control?” she told The Times in the same interview. “Can you imagine coming up out of the subway and being greeted by a 5,000-pound Brahma bull?

After 39 of the bulls were informed that their services were no longer required, the commercial was made, with the lone remaining bull trotting demurely down the street."

Larry adds: Reminds me of a fellow I knew who was in a Xmas kids' play at Stern's department store in the early 60s. The play was Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and early on he had the line, "All right, you other thirty-seven thieves stay here and guard the horses."

Hillary the Unbold

When Bill Richardson starts looking good to you, you know the Democratic Party field is weak. In this week’s London Review of Books, Linda Colley helps to explain why:

[Hillary] can still appear confined within some of the radical priorities of the later 20^th century, and unable or unwilling to generate a comprehensive and compelling vision of America and of the world’s present and future. But it is Al Gore who has hammered out an informed and powerful position on the environment, energy conservation and global warming. She has only belatedly borrowed some of his language and ideas. And it has been John Edwards who has been steering the Democratic Party firmly back form the direction of economics. He, not Hillary, has been the most eager to address the gulf between America’s rich and poor. A one-time Democratic senator’s critique of Hillary’s initial hard-line support of the Iraq war therefore seems more broadly applicable. She puts herself, he argued “in the position of looking backward, not forward, of caving to conventional wisdom instead of moving in the direction of…new ideas, being bold.”

—Linday Colley, “The Clinton Succession”, LRB 5, 16 Ag 2007

Sleeper on Giuliani on Opera, And Lampedusa on Italy

This one is a few months old, but new to me. Jim Sleeper explains why Rudi should never be president: he blames it on opera (link). Sleeper may be onto something here, but he may not know that he has a learned and influential predecessor in this vein. First, Sleeper:

Giuliani’s 9/11 performance was sublime for the unnerving reason that he’d been rehearsing for it all his adult life and remained trapped in that stage role. When his oldest friend and deputy mayor Peter Powers told me in 1994 that 16-year-old Rudy had started an opera club at Bishop Loughlin High School in Brooklyn, I didn’t have to connect too many of the dots I was seeing to notice that Giuliani at times acted like an opera fanatic who’s living in a libretto as much as in the real world.

In private, Giuliani can contemplate the human comedy with a Machiavellian prince’s supple wit. But when he walks on stage, he tenses up so much that even though he can strike credibly modulated, lawyerly poses, his efforts to lighten up seem labored. What really drove many of his actions as mayor was a zealot’s graceless division of everyone into friend or foe and his snarling, sometimes histrionic, vilifications of the foes. Those are operatic emotions, beneath the civic dignity of a great city and its chief magistrate.

I know a few New Yorkers who deserve the Rudy treatment, but only on 9/11 did the whole city become as operatic as the inside of Rudy’s mind. For once, his New York re-arranged itself into a stage fit for, say, Rossini’s “Le Siege de Corinth” or some dark, nationalist epic by Verdi or Puccini that ends with bodies strewn all over and the tragic but noble hero grieving for his devastated people and, perhaps, foretelling a new dawn.

It's unseemly to call New York's 9/11 agonies "operatic," but it was Giuliani who called the Metropolitan Opera only a few days after 9/11 and insisted its performances resume. At the start of one of them, the orchestra struck up a few familiar chords as the curtain rose on the entire cast and the Met's stage hands, administrators, secretaries, custodians -- and Rudy Giuliani, bringing the capacity audience leapt to its feet to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” with unprecedented ardor. Then all gave the mayor what The New Yorker's Alex Ross called "an ovation worthy of Caruso." A few days later Giuliani proposed that his term be extended on an “emergency” basis beyond its lawful end on January 1, 2002. (It wasn’t, and the city did as well as it could have, anyway.)

Now, his precursor. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, author of The Leopard, says makes the same point about Italian politics in general:

[I]t seems to me that the blossoming of opera, the extraordinary favour it hass found in Italy, and the longevity of that favour, form one of the most sinister phenomena to be found in the history of any culture.

The infection began immediately after the Napoleonic wars and spread with giant steps. For more than as hundred years, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Italians went to the opera, in the great cities for eight months a year, in the lesser cities four months a year and in the small towns for two or three weeks every year. And they saw tyrants slain, lovers committing suicide, great-hearted clowns, prolific nuns and every sort of nonsense dished out in front of them in a continual whirling of papier-mâché boots, plaster chickens, leading ladies with blackened faces and devils springing out of the floor making awful grimaces. All this synthesized, without psychological passages, without development, all bare, crude, brutal and irrefutable …

When opera mania diminished after 1910, Italian intellectual life was like a field in which locusts had spent a hundred unbroken years. Italians had become accustomed to citing as gospel truth the lines of Francesco Maria Piave or Cammarano; to thinking that Enrico Caruso or Adelina Patti were the flower of the race; and to believing that war was like the chorus of Norma. …

But there was worse than this. Saturated and swollen-headed by so much noisy foolishness, the Italians sincerely believed that they knew everything. Did they not go almost every evening that God gave them to listen to Shakespeare, Schiller, Vicgtor Hugo and Goethe? …

The whole of the nineteenth century, the period in which the brightest cultural “lights” were shining all over Europe, was spent by Italians in listening frenetically and insatiably to the opera. …

—Giusseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Siren 128-9 (1995)

Bremer to Bush: Oh, No You Don't

In the pile-on rush to parse Paul Bremer’s response to W’s shaky memory (link), may I highlight a meta-issue? I.e., this is the best evidence yet that this administration is over, ended, finito, kaputt, that nobody is afraid of this guy any more.

Return with me for a moment to the halcyon days 2002. Can’t we all remember the almost Soviet-like efficiency with which the administration slapped down on any whisper of discord from anyone Republican within 20 miles of the Oval Office? Of course those days ended a long time ago, but I still think it is a marvel to see the President tell his story in the Sunday paper and then whap, two news cycles away we see one of the most important players on his most important team effectively calling him a liar. And dishing out the goods to prove it.

Watch Bremer as he refuses to be the fall guy:

Mr. Bremer indicated that he had been smoldering for months as other administration officials had steadily distanced themselves from his order. “This didn’t just pop out of my head,” he said in a telephone interview on Monday, adding thwt he had sent as draft of the order to top Pentagon officials and discussed it “several times” with Donald H. Rumsfeld, then secretary of defense. …

On Monday, Mr. Bremer made it clear that he was unhappy about being portrayed as a renegade of sorts by a variety of former administration officials.

Mr. Bremer said he sent a draft of the proposed order on May 9, shortly before he departed for his new post in Baghdad, to Mr. Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon officials.

Among others who received the draft order, he said, were Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense; Douglas J. Feith, then under secretary of defense for policy; Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, then head of the American-led coalition forces in Iraq; and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Mr. Bremer said that he had briefed Mr. Rumsfeld on the plan “several times,” and that his top security adviser in Baghdad, Walter B. Slocombe, had discussed it in detail with senior Pentagon officials as well as with senior British military officials. He said he received detailed comments back from the joint chiefs, leaving no doubt in his mind that they understood the plan.

Put a fork in it, this one is done: oh wait, the Ambassador just did.

Afterthought: Nothing herein should be taken as foreclosing the possibility that we will bomb Iran.

Manufacturing?

Mrs. Buce does not like to be quizzed, but she puts up with it from time to time as the price of a happy marriage.

Flipping through FP Magazine, I asked:

In 1995, the United States' share of global manufacturing was 22.4 percent. In 2005, its share was --- percent.

"I dunno," Mrs. Buce said. "Three?"

Well, fair enough. I too have been inured to believe that our manufacturing output is in catastrophic decline.

But the correct answer, per FP, is 21.1 percent--a drop of less than six percent overall. (see September/October 2007, pps 22 and 94).

But wait, can this be right? Turn the point around--what, if anything, do we manufacture, and who does it? If you read this blog, I suspect that the number of people you know who are "in manufacturing" is about the same as the number who actually fought in Viet Nam.

Automobiles? Sorry. Textiles? Oh, give me a break. Telephone ringtones? Do they count?

After cudgeling our brains, we recalled that we do know two guys in Wisconsin who make false teeth. Seems to me they are carrying a heavy load.

Against Universal Love: A Credo

Amos Oz on his grandfather; I have no quarrel with a single word of this.

He considered all human beings to be reckless children who brought great disappointment and suffering on themselves and each other, all of us trapped in an unending, unsubtle comedy that would generally end badly. All roads lead to suffering. Consequently virtually everyone, in Papa’s view, deserved compassion, and most of their deeds were worthy of forgiveness, including all sorts of machinations, pranks, deceptions, pretensions, manipulations, false claims, and pretenses. From all these he would absolve you with his faint, mischievous smile, as though saying (in Yiddish): Nu, what?

The only thing that tested Papa’s amused tolerance were acts of cruelty. These he abhorred. His merry blue eyes clouded over at the news of wicked deeds. “An evil beast? What does the expression mean?” he would reflect in Yiddish. “No beast is evil. No beast is capable of evil. The beasts have yet to invent evil. That is our monopoly, the lords of creation. So maybe we ate the wrong apple in the Garden of Eden after all? …

“But what is hell? What is paradise? Surely it is all inside. In our homes. You can find hell and paradise in every room. Behind every door. Under every double blanket. It’s like this. A little wickedness, and people are hell to each other. A little compassion, a little generosity, and people find paradise in each other.

“I said a little compassion and generosity, but I didn’t say love. I’m not such a believer in universal love. Love of everybody for everybody—we should maybe leave that to Jesus.” …

—Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness 149-50 (2004)

Liberalism and Secularism

What John Holbo said (link).

Traffic Update

This just in, from the Lawrence (KS) Journal-World and News, via Underbelly's Wichita bureau (link). Nobody will ever convince this lady that she's wrong:

Unusual hearing follows traffic stop

By Mike Belt

September 1, 2007

Laura West claims the Kansas Highway Patrol trooper who stopped her “vessel” on the night of June 11 west of Lawrence had no right to arrest her.

She’s never had a driver’s license and doesn’t need one, West said as she represented herself Friday in Douglas County District Court.

“I was not operating a vehicle; I was exercising my right to travel,” West, 21, told Judge Robert Fairchild. “I was in a private vessel on a religious mission.”

West also said her vessel is her private dwelling.

West is charged with not having a driver’s license, improper vehicle registration, failure to dim headlights and obstructing the legal process, all misdemeanors. West was arrested and taken to the Douglas County Jail after it took 45 minutes to get her to step out of the van she was driving, Trooper Brady Flannigan said.

West was traveling with her partner, J.M. Sovereign: Godsent, and her 2-year-old daughter. West and Godsent, who testified as her only witness, said they were afraid of the trooper and his supervisor, who was called to the scene of the car stop at U.S. Highway 40 and the South Lawrence Trafficway. They made calls to 911 and claimed West was being kidnapped as she was arrested.

The couple, who were on their way to visit a friend in Lawrence when they were stopped, recorded the encounter with the troopers and submitted a CD of the recording to the judge.

According to Godsent and information he presented to reporters outside court, the couple belong to a group that claims the U.S. is not a country but a foreign corporation that has invaded America. They are concerned about implanted identification chips and say sovereign Americans are being forced to choose between God’s law and man’s law.

Godsent said the trooper was presented with a card after he stopped them. The card was labeled “Sovereign Civilian Police Observation Task Force.” By the trooper accepting the card he was accepting a contract to pay a $15,000 gold fee for each question he asked. Godsent said they will take the matter to court to get paid.

Meanwhile, West, who is free on $1,500 bond, will return to court Oct. 1, when Fairchild will announce his verdicts in the case. If found guilty, West could face fines and jail sentences. Fairchild wanted to make a decision on the case next week, but West wasn’t available then.

Early Socialist Realism: Falz-Fein the Sheep King

I’ve long since abandoned the notion that Leon Trotsky was anything other than a nasty piece of business. But—and this is almost certainly part of the problem—he sure could write. As a master of nasty, unfair, hilarious political invective, he has almost no equal. But not all invective: nearly 50 years now and I still remember his nostalgic recollections of his youth on a farm outside Odessa, and in particular, I remember Falz-Fein the sheep king:

The German settlers constituted a group apart. There were some really rich men among them. They stood more firmly on their feet than the others. Their domestic relations were stricter, their sons were seldom sent to be educated in town, their daughters habitually worked in the fields. Their houses were built of brick with iron roofs painted green or red, their horses were well bred, their harness was strong, their spring carts were called “German wagons.” Our nearest neighbor among the Germans was Ivan Ivanovich Dorn, a fat, active man with low shoes on his bare feet, with a tanned and bristling face, and gray hair. He always drove about in a fine, bright-painted wagon drawn by black stallions whose hoofs thundered over the ground. And there were many of these Dorns.

Above them all towered the figure of Falz-Fein the Sheep King, a “Kannitverstan” of the steppes.

In driving through the country, one would pass a huge flock of sheep. “Whom do these belong to?” one would ask. “To Falz-Fein.” You met a hay-wagon on the road. Whom was that hay for? “For Falz-Fein.” A pyramid of fur dashes by in a sleigh. It is Falz-Fein’s manager. A string of camels suddenly startles you with its bellowing. Only Falz-Fein owns camels. Falz-Fein had imported stallions from America and bulls from Switzerland.

The founder of this family, who was called only Falz in those days, without the Fein, had been a shepherd on the estate of the Duke of Oldenburg. Oldenburg had been granted a large sum of money by the government for the breeding of Merino sheep. The duke made about a million of debts and did nothing. Falz bought the property and managed it like a shepherd and not like a duke. His flocks increased as well as his pastures and his business. His daughter married a sheep breeder called Fein, and the two pastoral dynasties were thus united. The name of Falz-Fein rang like the sound of the feet of ten thousand sheep in motion, like the bleating of countless sheep voices, like the sound of the whistle of a shepherd of the steppes with his long crook on his back, like the barking of many sheep-dogs. The very steppe breathed this name both in summer heatand winter cold.

--Leon Trotsky, My Life, Chapter 2, retrieved here (link).

Call it socialist realism avant la lettre.

"Structural Unemployment" And Russian Jews

For a small number of Jews, the economic upheaval in the Russian Empire int her late 19^th Century proved a gold mine: they created banks, railroads and great industries—and grew fabulously rich. Others triumphed in the professions and even in the arts.

But for the vast majority of Jews, the turmoil generated a calamity. By constraint, Jews had been the middlemen, mediating between country and town:

[T]hey were affected by Russia’s late-nineteenth-century modernization in ways that were more direct, profound, and fundamental than most other Russian communities, because their very existence as a specialized caste was at stake. The emancipation of serfs, the demise of the manorial economy, and the expansion of the economic role of the state rendered the role of the traditional [Jewish] mediator between the countryside and the town economically irrelevant, legally precarious, and increasingly dangerous. The state took over tax collection, liquor sales, and some parts of foreign trade; the landlord had less land to lease turned into a favored competitor (by doing much of the selling himself); the Christian industrialist turned into an even more favored—and more competent—competitor; the train ruined the peddler and the wagon driver; the bank bankrupted the moneylender; and all these things taken together forced more and more Jews into artisanal work (near the bottom of the Jewish social prestige hierarchy), and more and more Jewish artisans into cottage-industry production or wage labor (in craft shops and increasingly factories). And the more Jews migrated to new urban areas, the more frequent and massive was violence against them.

Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century--116-17

These facts alone (setting aside the brutality and bloodshed of the pogroms) was enough to drive millions of them out of the shtetl and into the great cities of Europe and America, and beyond.

Cautionary Note: Taken as a whole, Slezkine’s book can be recommended only with great qualification. I’ll try to take some time to say a bit more about it later.

Last Ashland Theatre Note (At Least for Now)

I suppose I ought to dump this theatre stuff, of which I am so richly unqualified to speak, but I got a bit of education from my car-mates (on the way home from Ashland) that I ought to share.

I was repeating my repeated “insight” that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is best at fast farce, less good at conventional performance.

Of course, wonderbuns, they explained. It’s a rep company. These people work together every day—in fact, some of them have worked together every day (summers, at least) for many years. That’s why they can be good at precisely stuff a more big-league outfit is not good at—intricate teamwork that requires playing off one another. Comedy, they say, is hard, but I bet farce is harder, requiring not just comic timing for the jokes but physical timing sufficient to assure that the bed falls down at the right moment, etc. Indeed, I think maybe the best thing I ever saw at Ashland was a performance of Georges Feydeau’s Flea in Her Ear (1993?) the bedroom farce of all bedroom farces, what with doors banging and people flying in and out in every direction, all the time. The operative word here was “cooperation.”

Works for farce and, more generally, for comedy. That Tartuffe that I enjoyed so much last weekend (link)--they played the script completely straight, but the script itself depended on intricate cooperation, as so often one actor got to finish another's sentence. The downside of all this is that it is a terrible temptation to gimmickry: they've done Two Gentlemen of Verona twice in the last 11 years, each time with a dog. As the manager tells Will in Shakespeare in Love, the audience does love a dog.

Contrast all this with the big star at the big house who seems not to notice that anybody else is on the stage with him—maybe he didn’t exactly fax in his performance, but you do get the sense that he just decamped from his UFO, and that they’ll be whisking him back to Alpha Centauri before the lights go dark. For my money, OSF has had good Hamlets, Prosperos, Falstaffs, etc., but never a really great one, which is said in a way but on the other hand, perhaps just as well.

Afterthought: Still, I can think of nothing that might improve the quality of OSF performance more than simply to cancel the props budget for a season. Some will remember the BBC Shakespeare series that ran through the 80s (and is now, apparently, available on DVD). The sheer cheapness of the productions at times approached the laughable. Often it didn’t work, but sometimes, the utter lack of distraction compelled everyone to focus on the Bard. Best Cleopatra I ever saw is the one by Jane LaPotaire (link, and scroll down for review), which seems to be unfolding in a couple of rented rooms upstairs over a candy store, but where Cleo, left to carry things on her own, got it all just about right.

Who, Sir, They Sir? No Sir, Not They Sir!

My friend Larry laments over the future of the language, or at any rate, the absence of grammarians from the NYT copy desk:

Six years ago, he met Teresa Hillary Clarke at a party on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, where both spent summer vacations with the same African-American crowd, many of who, like they, went to Harvard, teach at Harvard or have children studying there.

From the Times'Sunday wedding feature. Who, they?

Annals of Important Works of Fiction (Post-Kerouac Division)

As we reported here yesterday, Andrew Carroll has a minimum high regard for Jack Kerouac (link).

Denis Johnson is featured on the front page of today's New York Times book review (link), where Jim Lewis says he is "a true American artist." Today's Times also reports that “Jesus’ Son,” by Denis Johnson, “was voted one of the most important works of fiction of the last 25 years in the Book Review’s 2006 poll of writers and critics" (link).

Here’s a sample of "Jesus' Son," culled from Amazon’s “surprise me” feature. Wonder what Andrew Carroll would think of this:

The black man stood up and circled the neck of a beer bottle with his fingers. He was taller than anyone who had ever entered that barroom.

“Step outside,” Wayne said.

And the man said, “This ain’t school.”

“What the goddamn fucking piss-hell,” Wayne said, “is that supposed to mean?”

“I ain’t stepping outside like you do at school. Make your try right here and now.”

“This ain’t a place for our kind of business,” Wayne said, “not inside here with women and children and dogs and cripples.”

“Shit,” the man said, “You’re just drunk.”

“I don’t care,” Wayne said. “To me you don’t make no more noise than a fart in a paper bag.”

The huge, murderous man said nothing.

“I’m going to sit down now,” Wayne said, “and I’m going to lay my game, and fuck you.”

Johnson says "My ear for the diction and thythms of poetry was trained by--in chronological order--Dr. Seuss, Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, the guitar solos of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, and T.S. Eliot." As T. S. Eliot liked to say, fuckety fuck.

Who Owns Their Own Home?

Roger Lowenstein's chart on home ownership (link), which kidnap from this morning's NYT, is interesting in itself, and calls to mind some data I saw in the Economist, perhaps back in the 90s.

First, the chart: note how two of the four highest rates of home ownership are in West Virginia and Mississippi--two states by most measures among the poorest. And correspondingly, the lowest: we can forget about DC, the ultimate commuter town. But California, New York, Hawaii. The point, put crudely, is that just because you live in a state richer than Mississippi, it does not follow that you'll be putting down your own roots there.

Now, the remembered data: I recall an Economist chart doing the same sort of analysis for Europe. As I recall, the chart showed a similar pattern: high levels of ownership in
Greece and Ireland (this was before Ireland was rich); mirror-image low numbers in Germany.

I can think of all kinds of inferences you might draw, many mutually cancelling. My friend Taxmom lived and studied in Germany for a while: she remarked on how the Germans just didn't seem to regard home ownership as that big of a deal: it was as as if they felt they lived in a stable society (short memories, not so?) and that they might as well invest their money elsewhere. The Brits seem to have felt this way in a previous generation: as I recall, John Maynard Keynes didn't own his own home. By contrast, one might infer (or then again, one might not) that the Greeks regarded a home as a center of social stability independent of, and more important than, the government itself.



About the same time that I saw the Economist data, I remember hosting a law professor visiting from Athens, a fairly big noise on his home turf. I can remember two offerings from him that may bear on this discussion. One was a question: "Will you tell me, if you don't mind my asking, how many different places you have lived in your time?" Actually the answer is quite a few, but he seemed to find the number downright astonishing--in his country, people put down roots. The other was a remark, muttered sotto voce, as he marvelled at the seeming wealth of our young people: "but our children own their own homes, they own their own homes."

More Overy on Hitler, Stalin

After a break (link), I’ve gone back and finished Richard Overy’s absorbing The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia (2004). Overy certainly has an eye for the telling detail:

• The October Revolution and the attendant Civil War left the Red Army almost devoid of resources—so devoide that “on May Days in the 1920s Red Army men paraded through Red Square on bicycles.” (446)
  

• On their drive to Moscow in 1941, the Nazis moved so fast that “they entered the city of Orel with the streetcars still running.” (493)

• By 1927, the Soviets had recognized 172 ethnic minorities, and 192 distinct languages. The goal of linguistic modernization drove the campaign to extend Latin script to Arab linguages—sometimes faster than the growth of cultural comprehension. “One Kyrgyz instructor, having successfully instilled the letters of the alphabet into her class by rote, sent off to Moscow for another set.” (554)

• Prisoners packed off in boxcars en route to the Gulag found they could escape by chopping through the floor and dropping onto the railroad tracks below, “but after a time the guards fitted an improvised steel scythe beneath the last freight car to cut escapees in half as they lay on the tracks.” (563)

• Guards at Auschwitz carried “a notorious whip nicknamed ‘Interpreter’ because it could speak to the multinational workshop in any language.” (622-3)

I should add that Overy’s book is far more than mere anecdote. It is a rich, dense, detailed comparative study, resisting easy summary—unless to say that “resists easy summary” is itself a kind of summary. I’ll forgive my self for pillaging the cherries out of this cake, but the whole product deserves far more respectful and extensive attention than it is going to get here. It does remind me to go back and take a second look at one of Overy’s earlier efforts, Why the Allies Won, which I skimmed with interest but perhaps insufficient care a few years back—and which, happily, I seem not to have given away.

When Did it All Go Meta?

When did the world all go ironical, self-referential, meta-narrative? Maybe by 1981:

ZANGLER: Well, that seems all right. Just the ticket. First class. Why do I have a sense of impending disaster? (He reflects.) Sonders is after my niece and has discovered the secret address where I am sending her to the safe keeping of my sister-in-law Miss Blumenblatt, who has never laid eyes on him, or, for that matter, on Marie either since she was a baby—while I have to leave my business in the charge of my assistant and an apprentice, and follow my new servant, whom I haven’t had time to introduce to anyone, to town to join the parade and take my fiancée to dinner in a fashionable restaurant in a uniform I can’t sit down in.

One false move and we could have a farce on our hands.

--Tom Stoppard, On the Razzle 22 (1981)

A Load Off My Mind: Kerouac

Ha, that’s a relief! Per Andrew Carroll (Theodore Dalrymple), I do not need to respect Jack Kerouak as a great writer (H/T Kurp).

Throughout the book, which covers a period of years, Dean Moriarty does not do a single decent thing and does many bad ones. We are told that in one year he stole 500 cars, as if this were a mere matter of fun or romance; it does not seem to occur to Paradise that this means that his friend must have caused considerable suffering and anguish, solely to gratify himself very briefly. It is a tediously obvious point, but the fact is that most people are attached to their vehicles, if not emotionally, then for very practical reasons; they find it upsetting when they are stolen. Only someone fundamentally indifferent to the interests and feelings of others would not think this not very difficult thought.

When the pair of them engage to drive a Cadillac from the south to Chicago, to deliver it to its owner there, they wreck it. They feel no guilt about this, because the owner is a rich man who can probably afford ten Cadillacs. Of course, they don’t know this in advance; perhaps the car is his sole asset, but his wealth provides them with a post facto exculpation of their irresponsibility. For them, the question of honor, honesty, and due care for what belongs to another simply does not arise.

Moriarty treats women abominably and uses them solely as objects for his gratification; he is violent towards them; no single instance of consideration towards any of them is given in the book; he has several children by them, all of whom he abandons without a moment’s hesitation or subsequent thought for their fate, though he himself is the victim of an unfortunate upbringing. This, it should be noted, makes him not less, but more culpable, inasmuch as he is perfectly aware of the effect that such an upbringing can have upon a child.

... In fact, it is the extreme banality of On the Road, combined with a glamorous aura of anarchy (in the midst of a society in which there is always enough gasoline for the anarchists to resume their journey, of course), which has made it perennially attractive to youth—an age of man always tempted by bad taste—ever since its publication. If Dean’s utterances are profound and worthy of record, then anything that any of us says is likewise profound and worthy of record; if Dean is a philosopher, we are all philosophers. In this respect, the book is like a soap opera that reassures untold millions that the day-to-day flux of their existence is not without significance, or else why would something so closely resembling it be on television?

…[ N]either Sal nor Dean are very interested in anything at all apart from themselves, and even in themselves only in the shallowest, most inconsequential possible way. They travel across America four times, but they express only the most cursory interest in the people they meet, and often no interest in them at all if they cannot use them in some dishonest way or other; the history of the country does not arouse their curiosity or enthusiasm; neither do questions of politics or economics; nature, in the form of landscape, flora, and fauna, entirely escapes their notice. If On the Road is a Bildungsroman, it is one that is very short on the Bildung.

Update:Gilleland nails it (link).

Milestone

This is post #1,000, although it's a bit of a cheat because on one occasion I see I accidentally wrote the same item twice--being old and garrulous, I try to be on guard against that, but here at least I seem to have slipped up (and no, I'm not going to tell which--go find it for yourself).

I see also that I've had some 1,500 individual profile hits--but that is a bit of a deception because I appear also to have 40-odd subscribers. To my taste, those numbers are perfect--just enough attention to insulate me against pure solipsism, not enough to compel me to take any of this seriously.

Ashland Theatre Note: On the Razzle

I guess my favorite Tom Stoppard play is Professional Foul, done for BBC TV back in 1977, about philosophers in Prague under the Soviets. It’s the only one I can think of where he gets a completely right mix between Deeper Meaning and his natural silliness. Others, even the best of them, always seem to get a bit labored whenever they get a bit serious: I like them all a lot, but I almost always have to keep my fingers crossed (and I haven’t seen the new trilogy, Coast of Utopia).

So my second favorite would be On the Razzle, the one about grocery clerks on a spree--the one with no redeeming social value whatever (but Ben Brantley in the NYT offers some interesting notes on what a serious interpretation might look like (link)). As such it is pure, distilled Stoppard, with all the virtues that phrae implies.

I’ve thought for a long time that what the Oregon Shakespeare Festival does best is farce. This is farce. They do it well. Indeed, the nearest thing I can think of as a complaint is that it’s so obviously their strong suit, they have trouble coming up with anything really unexpected. For my taste, I’d rather have written On the Razzle than the Declaration of Independence itself.

Update: For some further thoughts on farce at Ashland, go here (link).

Ashland Theatre Note: Tartuffe

In Tartuffe, the folks at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival do what I always complain that they don’t do: they trust the text. And what a text it is: Molière’s original as translated by Ranjit Bolt is in iambic quatrameter—sic, four beats—and rhyming couplets. You’d think it would be impossible to sustain, but with pell-mell enjambment and ping-pong versification—ending each other’s rhymes—it is so smooth as to be almost conversational It’s the smoothest bit of versification I’ve heard since Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate—another parlor trick that shouldn’t ought to work, but does. With a capable cast and a minimum of distraction, it’s an all-round success. Heck, he even colored the faux 17^th Century stage in muted pastels, so as almost to call attention to the fact that he wasn’t calling attention to anything but the verse.

Update: For an extension of remarks, go here (link).

Follow the Money (To Know Her is to Love Her Dept.)

David D. Kirkpatrick in the Times this morning has an instructive little piece about the bundling of Presidential campaign funds, along with a cool chart of who bundles for whom (link, and link on "boldface bundlers"). I see three takeaway points:

• New evidence that to know Hillary is not to love her: of 11 people on the Obama list, three are former Bill Clinton (Clinton I?) insiders. Of 10 people on the Hillary list, none are.

• The folks at Dreamworks really know how to diversify their portfolio: there's a Dreamworks insider on each of the three Democratic lists (Clinton, Obama and Edwards)--and Meg Whitman, CEO of Ebay and a Dreamworks board member, is on the list for Mitt Romney.

Ashland Theatre Note: As You Like It

There are so many things to like about the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of As You Like It, that it’s a shame there’s a queer kind of vacuum at the center. The play displays, first of all, an exuberant physicality—lots of little kicks, pirouettes, and high-fives, obviously choreographed by somebody with great care (I assume the director, J. R. Sullivan?). This kind of thing can be a distraction if it takes over but whoever put it together made sure that each little gesture makes sense in context and helps move the plot-line downfield. Indeed a critical plot-point is a wrestling match, so elaborately crafted (on the model of a Thomas Hart Benton painting—thanks, Hal) that it garnered a round of applause all its own.

The setting is—rather, settings are—deliberately anachronistic. This can be a dodgy business, but here I think it mostly worked. The “court” scenes leapt right out of 1930s Batman, which made sense because it helps to establish the mood of social instability and casual violence that frames the story. The “country” scenes were more on the order of Garrison Keillor, which was acceptable, though for the life of me I can’t imagine why they insisted on leaving Duke Senior in a bowler hat. I do regret the failure of nerve that impelled them to replace the original Shakespearean song texts with early country and funky cowboy. Granted as the tune, melody, we have no idea what, exactly the Shakespearean players sang. But the text is Shakespeare and it has its purpose which should not be lightly regarded.

[But speaking of Shakespearean texts, what is it with the sonnets? This is the second show in a row we’ve seen where they felt they had to tart up the script with a bit of sonnet action—hardly evil in itself, but not serving any obvious positive purpose].

Casting was never less than adequate and sometimes wonderful. The play has to have a good Touchstone and a good Jaques, and this performance had both—also a bunch of other good performances in a variety of roles. The surprise of the day was Danforth Comyns as Orlando. By common understanding, Orlando is a Labrador retriever role if there ever was one—the tenor lead who has no more function than to stand still and look pretty, like the groom on the wedding cake (someone has said that Rosalind will spend her life doing Orlando’s thinking for him). But Comyns reminds us (once again?) that there are no empty Shakespearean roles—he gives Orlando grit and sinew and makes Rosalind’s enchantment plausible as I have never seen it before.

Which brings us to Rosalind and her cousin/companion Celia. Matter of some delicacy here. I grant that Rosalind may be the toughest role in the Shakespearean canon: a girl-boy-girl (sometimes a boy-girl-boy-girl) who speaks about love and womanhood with a clear-sightedness that is nearly unique. No wonder that almost every good actress wants to give it a swing. And you find yourself rooting for Miriam Laube, who understands that she has a great opportunity, and struggles to embrace it.

Yet at the end of the day, you get the feeling that she just can’t find the right note. Part of the problem is that she is caught in a crazy syncretic mélange. She has a voice of a cabaret singer; but they decked her out a costume left over from Hee Haw. Then to top it off, they put her through a display of swoops and kicks so manic that she looked like the speeded-up celluloid of an old Buster Keaton movie. And here, unlike in other parts of the show, there often seemed to be little or no relation between the character’s moment and the physical byplay. Hardly any wonder that in this thicket, Laube never seemed really able to find her own (one saving grace: I loved the way she did the epilogue).

An added complication was Julie Oda as Celia. Anybody who saw Oda in The Importance of Being Earnest knows that she is a glorious comic talent—funny and sexy and full of energy all the time. As with Danforth Comyns as Orlando, she squeezed more out of Celia than I have ever seen before, but that’s a problem. I don’t blame Oda here, who was just being her adorable self. But if Rosalind is not to dominate, then at least they must work as a team. And an As You Like It without a Rosalind is a play with a vacuum at the center.

Ashland Theatre Note: The Tempest

Nobody doubts that Shakespeare’s Tempest is full of dynamite verse, some of his best. It is possible to argue that the play is static, in that Prospero the magician knows all and control all. In this summer’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival performance, Derrick Lee Weeden finds a plausible way to sidestep the problem: his Prospero is near exploding with passion, anger, regret, perhaps even lust. You can think, if you worry about that sort of thing—woops, he might just get fed up and blow it all apart.

This is Weeden’s 17^th season at Ashland –more or less the same time frame as Prospero’s exile from Milan. Weeden has grown into the part: he’s worn and weathered, a man who has known betrayal, and has learned simply to survive. Weeden has a somewhat formal elocution-teacher style of speech which doesn’t work for everything, but seems to fill this role well. He’s also got an odd little falsetto trick that he’s learned to use to give just the right comic touch to a role that can use a little comedy, but not too much.

Libby Appel’s production is straightforward, not too tricky. She interpolates a collage of Shakespearean sonneteering which actually works pretty well in its place. She rings in a duchess in lieu of a duke for no more obvious reason than to provide an extra role for a woman (Greta Oglesby)—but it works fine, so no complaints. She gives us a singing Ariel (Nancy Rodriguez) with a posse of singing, dancing, rope-climbing sidekicks—the kind of showmanship that Ashland does well, but which this play, at least, can sustain. Dan Donohue as Caliban shows again that he is an actor of remarkable range—he did a first-class Dvornicheck in Stoppard’s Rough Crossing a few years back, and followed it up with a wonderful Henry V, neither an obvious preparation for Prospero’s savage underling (having a black Prospero lord it over a white Caliban is an invigorating touch).

The Party of Kick You When You're Down

[Update below.]

There's an old story about Charlie Lederer the writer, standing next to his Waspy/anti-semitic hostess, beside her highboy full of priceless China. "Admit it," said Charlie, "you don't really have a good reason for hating Jews, do you?" No, his hostess admitted, she really did not. Whereupon Charlie pushed over the highboy and said "now you do."

I have often wondered why I dislike Mitt Romney so much. Maybe now I know. But first, let me tell you a story about Dean Acheson and Alger Hiss.

I’ve lived long enough that I now believe—as I did not once believe—that Alger Hiss was indeed probably guilty of spying for the Soviets. But I remember few parts of the story more vividly than his relationship with Dean Acheson. Time Magazine recounts (link):

Hiss scarcely had time to post $10,000 bail and file an appeal before Secretary of State Dean Acheson set off the storm. At a crowded press conference in Washington, Acheson went to the defense of the former top State Department official whom a federal jury had convicted of perjury and thus found, guilty of stealing State documents to be sent to Russia.

"Whatever the outcome of any appeal which Mr. Hiss or his lawyer may take," said the Secretary of State. "I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss."

By His Own Standards. Dean Acheson spoke in a voice weighted with emotion. "I think every person who has known Alger Hiss . . . has upon his conscience the very serious task of deciding what his attitude is and what his conduct should be," he said. "That must be done by each person in the light of his own standards and his own principles. For me, there is very little doubt about these standards or these principles. They were stated for us a very long time ago ... on the Mount of Olives."

In terms of sheer tactics, it was an epic blunder. Acheson met with near-universal denunciation, and established himself irrevocably in the pantheon of traitors. Less obviously, but no less truly, it established him as one who would not trade away his personal integrity for momentary political advantage.

Back to Mitt Romney. Today someone asked him what he thinks of his former Senate liaison, Larry Craig (link):

Once again, we’ve found people in Washington have not lived up to the level of respect and dignity that we would expect for somebody that gets elected to a position of high influence. Very disappointing. He’s no longer associated with my campaign, as you can imagine… I’m sorry to see that he has fallen short.

Shorter Mitt Romney: Larry who?

I used to wonder why I disliked Romney so much. I think I’m beginning to catch on.

Update: The Wichita bureau brings me current on news I had missed:

Romney's munchkins went back and altered previous information on his website to delete any reference to Craig being associated with the Romney campaign. ... Don’t know that they tried to edit him out of pictures, however.

Via a friend, Wichita adds:

The restroom in which [Craig] was arrested is outside security--so he had to leave and re-enter through security to make his connection (no pun intended) for Idaho.

Craig Followup: Tallulah

Since everyone else is trotting out their favorite bathroom-stall joke today, allow me to add mine. Attributed to Tallulah Bankhead:

--Any paper in there?
--No, sorry, none.

[Long pause]

--Got two tens for a 20?

Update:Underbelly scoops Dish (link).

Is Lingering Nothing? Is Tapping Toe to Toe?

The blogosphere is having a conniption fit this morning over Senator Larry (“Wide Stance”) Craig and his bust in an airport men’s room. The best and most useful thing I’ve seen so far is Glen Greenwald’s piece on how the wingnuts have turned on a dime on this one—ferocious against any questions about Craig’s, ahem, “lifestyle” before the election, out for his scalp today (link). And I have to admit I believe that every time a hypocrite is outed, an angel gets its wings.

But read the charge sheet, and you certainly wonder what, if anything, this guy was really guilty of. As TPM says (link):

Leering stares, foot tapping, a lingering presence. Are any of those, even taken together, what most reasonable people would call criminal? Is it because they happened in a bathroom? God knows they happen every night in bars and other public spaces, among gays and straights.

Must the Cop was reading Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale:

Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career
Of laughing with a sigh?--a note infallible
Of breaking honesty--horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift?
Hours, minutes? noon, midnight? and all eyes
Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only,
That would unseen be wicked? is this nothing?
Why, then the world and all that's in't is nothing;
The covering sky is nothing; Bohemia nothing;
My wife is nothing; nor nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing.

--but if so, he ought to read the rest of the play where we learn that Leontes was calamatously wrong.

Fn.: Okay, okay, I also read on the blog that Craig felt he couldn’t risk a trial because it would have outed his previous gay life style—works for me. I’m also persuaded that the wingers are willing to forgive Sen. David (“DC Madam”) Vitter of Louisiana while trashing Craig because Louisiana has a Democratic governor (link).

Update: What Matt said (link).

Oz on America

More Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness. We’re reading it aloud, and it is almost impossible to speak it in anything other than a faux Catskills accent:

In America… people dig for gold, hold up mail trains, stampede herds of cattle across endless plains, and whoever kills the most Indians ends up getting the girl. That was the America we saw at the Edison Cinema: the pretty girl was the prize for the best shooter. What one did with such a prize I had not the faintest idea. If they had shown us in those films an America where the man who shot the most girls was rewarded with a good-looking Indian, I would simply have believed that that was the way it was.

--Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness 17 (2004)

My Friend the Bear Who Swims Goes Shopping

My friend the Bear Who Swims found a sausage in a market called "British Pride."

Contains 13 percent bread crumbs.

BADA BOOM. Actually, I think 13 percent is pretty modest. My mother and I used to make Swedish sausage at Christmas. Lotta barley, let me tell you.

And I remember--who?--Chico Marx?--who carried around a piece of sausage one end of which was all bread. Times-a like-a this, he says, it's-a hard to make both ends a-meat. BADA BOOM

Lift 'em Up, Put 'em Down

Mrs. Buce has been telling me I must read Amos Oz’ A Tale of Love and Darkness. God bless ‘er, she’s right again:

In Jerusalem people always walked rather like mourners at a funeral, or latecomers at a concert. First they put down the tip of their shoe and tested the ground. Then, once they had lowered their foot, they were in no hurry rto move it: we had waited two thousand years to gain a foothold in Jerusalem and were unwilling to give it up. If we picked up our foot, someone else might come along and snatch our little strip of land. On the other hand, once you lifted your foot, do not be in a hurry to put it down again: who can tell what coil of vipers you might step on.

--Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness 7 (2004)

Let This Cup Pass From My Lips..

Recycled form last month, Jess Bravin at the Wall Street Journal offers a shrewd account of how the job of acting attorney general may be, for Paul Clement, a poisoned chalice (link):

Over the past six years, Mr. Clement, 40 years old, has become one of the conservative legal movement's brightest stars. He has been praised by Republicans and Democrats for his skill as he defended some of the Bush administration's toughest positions. Some predict he may follow the path of previous solicitors general, including Robert Jackson and Thurgood Marshall, to a seat on the Supreme Court.

Now [i.e., mid-July--ed.], however, the Justice Department controversies have thrown Mr. Clement a curve. As the highest-ranking Justice official not involved in the firings, he is charged with overseeing the department's investigations into the matter. The solicitor general's regular job is pondering the great questions of law and, dressed in a traditional morning coat, arguing on the government's behalf before the Supreme Court. It is only on rare occasions the solicitor general is dragged directly into the political fray, becoming acting attorney general when his superiors are disqualified from exercising their authority.

Mr. Gonzales remains under fire, and the deputy attorney general has tendered his resignation. This could be a defining moment for Mr. Clement, who may be torn between Capitol Hill demands for disclosure of internal deliberations and the White House claim that executive privilege shields its actions from congressional review.

How Mr. Clement navigates those shoals could determine whether he emerges as a replacement should Mr. Gonzales depart -- and how far his judicial ambitions will take him. Mr. Clement's supporters say partisanship won't cloud his judgment. As solicitor general, he sometimes has had to defend laws unpopular with Republicans, such as the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance act. The law's co-sponsor, Sen. Russell Feingold (D., Wis.), called Mr. Clement's performance "superb."

"He's a just-the-facts, just-the-law kind of guy," says former Deputy Attorney General James Comey, a Republican who in recent congressional testimony raised questions about Mr. Gonzales's judgment. "If he found himself as acting attorney general, he would do the right thing and let the chips fall where they may."...

Like other lawyers who gained prominence in the Bush administration , Mr. Clement belonged to the right-leaning Federalist Society and held clerkships under two pugnacious conservatives, U.S. Circuit Judge Laurence Silberman and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In 2000, he joined the phalanx of conservative lawyers who fought in the legal dispute that made George W. Bush president. After the election, Solicitor General Theodore Olson selected Mr. Clement as his deputy.`...

The Times and the Crumbling Linchpins

Is it sheer coincidence or the lattice of coincidence that the New York Times ran the same (in essence) story twice on Sunday? That would be the story about how story on how nice people can’t make a living any more, the ground-bass premise of (a) the business-page story of employees left behind in Newton, IA, after the demise of Maytag: (link) ; and (b) the story on the theater page about ordinary non-celebrity actors as they struggle to keep themselves supplied the smoke and mirrors needed to pretend that they actually have an income (link).

There are differences. The Iowa story focuses on Guy and Lisa Winchell, with a combined current income of $43 an hour, still trying to figure out the license number of the truck that is about to hit them. “The Winchells are still in their 40s,” the Times reports. And with a strained bonhomie: “They can retrain or start a business, choices promoted by city leaders in a campaign to “reinvent” Newton without its biggest employer.”

Oh, get serious:

But as they ponder their futures, the Winchells are uncertain about how to deal with a lower standard of living. “I’m not wanting to go waitress,” said Mrs. Winchell, who, at 41, drives a forklift and earns $19 an hour, “but I can do what I have to to make money.”

Mr. Winchell, 46, having earned $24 an hour as a skilled electrician, seems paralyzed by the disappearance of his employer. He imagines that there is work for electricians in central Iowa but he hasn’t looked. “Lisa is always on me because I’m so angry,” he said. “She says, ‘What would your mom have said?’ My mom would have said, ‘Worrying is not going to help.’”

The actor story follows the careers of five people. One of them actually topped out at $140,000 while he was touring in “The Lion King,” but all of them, spend most of their time piecing together sustenance out of different kinds of nothing. One big difference between the actors and the Iowans: the actors know they are broke, have always been broke, and have developed an impressive range of survival skills to keep their chins out of the water.

One has to wonder who is the audience for this sort of story—soon-to-be-unemployed industrial workers, or permanently marginal theatre folks? Seeing as how this is the Times, I suspect there are more of the latter than the former. But there might be a broader theme here: it might be that Times readers, like a lot of other folks, are finding themselves caught up in a world where a lot of the linchpins are crumbling, and a lot of people are wondering what it might be like to piece together a living the way the actors have always done.

And Did You Have a Good War?

Fritz Stern fled Germany with his parents and sister only in 1938, almost too late to escape the worst of Naziism and the concentration camps—which, in any event, devoured many of his relatives and friends. Returning as a visitor in the 1950s, he is dismayed at the Germans’ mute unwillingness to come to terms with their past. In one memorable encounter, he meets the historian Siegfried Kaehler. “True to his conservative-elistist views,” Stern recounts, Kaehler “had kept a certain distance from the Nazis, no doubt regretting their plebian character.” Stern and Kaehler discuss Hermann Lüdermann, once the governor of Upper Silesia, then after the war the first minister-president of Schleswig-Holstein.

“That scoundrel!” Kaehler said.

How so? I asked. He referred to Lüdermann’s womanizing. I objected: a man who had been once imprisoned and had then volunteered to join the conspiracy against Hitler, thereby risking his life and ending up for a second time in a concentration camp, didn’t seem to warrant the negative term. Kaehler responded unfazed. “We couldn’t all get entrance tickets to the concentration camps.”

--Fritz Stern, Five Germanys I Have Known 214 (paperback ed. 2007)

I hope to say more about this remarkable (but sadly uneven) book some day very soon.

Permanent President

I have nothing whatever useful to add to this line of inquiry but I do think it deserves the widest possible distribution (link).

Somebody Hold My Coat

I caught C-Span’s presentation of a Cato Institute talk by Glenn Greenwald on wireless wiretaps, etc., with commentary by Lee Casey (link). For those who aren’t acquainted with Greenwald, this is a fine introduction to a guy who I think is a national treasure—one of the most intelligent and effective critics of the Bush administration’s near-unprecedented abuses of power. Casey, is worth your time also; he offers about as effective a rebuttal as you are likely to get (Casey begins at about 42:00, declaring that he has “no desire to crush the testicles of children”).

I won’t trouble myself to undertake a comprehensive postmortem but I do want to zero in on a curious aspect of Casey’s response. Per Casey, Greenwald charges the Bush with “Manichaeanism”—defined by Casey as

the proposition that the world cannot be understood as black or white or good or evil but only in comforting shades of grey…

Casey adds that this cleavage

has been one of the left’s fundamental articles of faith throughout much of the postwar period and arguably, before--one can I think failrly characterize many if not most of the right-left disputes of the last half century as a battle over this very proposition’s validity.

Casey doesn’t seem to deny that Bush is a Manichaean; indeed, Casey’s only caution seems to be that Bush isn’t Manichaean enough. Of course I agree; I also think his charge is on the whole a fair cop against Greenwald, and I think he is more right than wrong in his characterization of modern political conflict.

But focus on “comforting,” as in “comforting shades of grey.” I suspect that right here we have a key to some of the fundamental discontinuities in world-view that make these debates so aggravating.

I’m a shades-of-grey guy myself—yes sir, mighty proud to say it; you can almost put that down in black and white. But “comforting”? Well, I suppose it is “comforting” in a sense to tell yourself that you’re trying to get things right, that you’re struggling for intellectual honesty, that you’re trying to be fair to all points of view. And I admit that thinking about shades of grey can put me to sleep at night—but I suspect this has less to do with “comfort” than with sheer exhaustion.

But in a more general sense, the point about “shades of grey” is precisely that they are not comforting. Wasn’t it Voltaire who said (and wasn’t it about Frederick the Great) that “I wish I was as certain of anything as he is of everything”--? I know about waffling liberals; I know the only things in the middle of the road are yellow lines and dead possums. I know there is nothing more exasperating than on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand. I dream of being a Manichaean; I’m no closer fulfilling that wish than I am to a Parisian vacation with Glen Close. Say that I find grey “comforting” and I say – Oh, I wish.

There’s a murky underside to this shades-of-grey disposition, of course. That is: I want to be recognized for my heroic sense of doubt—no, not recognized saluted and honored and cherished by a beleagured multitude. To have my world-view dismissed as `comforting—argh, somebody hold my coat!

The whole program is available at the Cato link above. It is due to be rebroadcast on C-Span Monday, August 26, 6:30 a.m. and next Saturday, September 1, at 4:30 p.m. (both est).

We Go Forth, and You Can Too

We’re off again, this time for just a couple of days, to help with the launching of a 17-year-old, on her way off to University in Britain. This is our third launching of a 17-year-old this season (all girls, as it happens). Proof enough that the next generation is well on its way. No wait, let me count here: that’s one, um, two and – eeuw, the next after the next generation. Now, that is depressing.

Meanwhile for entertainment while we are away, he’s a squib from the ever dependable Michael Quinion (link), except somehow he forgot to mention Tom Stoppard’s wonderful play, Albert’s Bridge:

GO FORTH When somebody says some job is like painting the Forth Bridge they mean it's never-ending. Although the famous railway bridge across the Firth of Forth north of Edinburgh was opened in 1890, recent research by the Oxford English Dictionary shows that the metaphor first appears in print only in 1955. But the symbolism of the endless task was around long before then. As early as 1894, it was reported in the Glasgow Herald: "The Forth bridge receives a new coat of paint every three years, and one-third is done each year, so that the painters are continually at work." In 1901, US papers commented "The Forth bridge is constantly being repainted" and the factette was repeated down the years until it was embedded in the public mind on both sides of the Atlantic. Now an expensive refit is using epoxy resin and polyurethane coverings in place of traditional paint (though still in the same rust-red colour). Last week, a BBC television programme reported that the finish is so much more resistant to the rain, gales, salt spray and ice that batter the bridge that when the refit ends in 2009, nobody will need to paint the bridge for 30 years. But how long will it take for the cliché to die?

And come to think of it, I remember hearing somewhere that the Eskimos really don’t have any more words for snow than we do.

Whaked 'er with a Double Helix, Yer Honor

Man linked to assault by DNA gets three life terms

--Palookaville Morning Afflatus, Friday, August 24, 2007

The Benefit of Bad Organization

The benefit of having your books badly organized is that you stumble on gems like this, which I found on a shelf full of Arden Shakespeares:

Annoyed with the world, I took a large studio in Hampstead. Here I resolved to live in utter aloofness, until the world should approach me on its knees, whining its apologies.

--John Collier, "Night Youth Paris and the Moon," 299, 299-303,

Fancies and Goodnights (NYRB 2003)

The Lazy, Loitering Rogue And the Last Voyage Home

My friend Joel believes he has identified an important fundamental principle of law.

In another context (don’t ask), Joel was pointing out that expenses of funeral and burial typically get first priority in probate. Want to get those bodies under the ground.

I responded by pointing out that admiralty law has a principle of last-in-time, first-in-right. Apparently we want to equip ship chandlers to supply the last voyage home.

Exactly, said Joel. The last voyage home.

Now this:

`Upon further consideration,' said he, `I thought I might say to him, "Good Charon, I have been correcting my works for a new edition. Allow me a little time that I may see how the public receives the alterations." But Charon would answer, "When you have seen the effect of these, you will be for making other alterations. There will be no end of such excuses; so, honest friend, please step into the boat."' But Mr. Hume said, `I might still urge, "Have a little patience, good Charon, I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of the public. If I live a few days longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition:" But Charon would then lose his temper and decency.—"You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years. Do you fancy I will grant you a lease for so long a term? Get into the boat this instant, you lazy loitering rogue!"'

--The last hours of David Hume, as recorded by
William Smellie, Literary and Characteristical Lives (1800), pp. 166-9

At least Charon can count on a first priority claim.

Thinking Outside the Tin

Went Googling for a recipe for a cornmeal yoghurt muffin and came up with a, um, recipe, for a cornmeal yoghurt honey body wrap. I'm thinking, I'm thinking...

But It Never Stayed Home Before

Thanks to Larry, who blames rent control:

Russia: Woman Sets Ex-Husband on Fire
By REUTERS
Published: August 24, 2007

A Moscow woman set fire to her ex-husband’s penis as he sat naked watching television and drinking vodka, the police said. It was not clear if the man would make a full recovery. The couple divorced three years ago but for financial reasons continued to share their small apartment.

Bridge, Anyone?

Count on the estimable Rick Perlstein to note the presence of a think tank in Minneapolis touting the virtues of privately owned bridges. Mr. and Mrs. Buce have decided to carry the logic one step further. Just to be on the safe side, on our trip to Seattle next month, we plan to bring our own bridge, and don't you grasshoppers even think of trying to get onto it.

Fantasy Gets Realer

Last Sunday I was riffing on the idea of fantasy law faculties (link). I'd say this is pretty close.

The President and the Prime Minister

My friend Ivan flags me to an interesting Guardian piece (Lynn Olson) re: which Prime Minister does W remind you of? (link):

George Bush's favourite role model is, famously, Jesus, but Winston Churchill is close behind. The US president - who was yesterday again comparing the struggle in Iraq with the allies' efforts in the second world war - admires the wartime prime minister so much that he keeps what he calls "a stern-looking bust" of Churchill in the Oval Office. "He watches my every move," Bush jokes. These days, Churchill would probably not care for much of what he sees.

I thought a great deal about Churchill while working on my book Troublesome Young Men, a history of the small group of Conservative MPs who defied Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasing Hitler, forced Chamberlain to resign in May 1940, and helped make Churchill his successor. I thought my audience would be limited to second world war buffs, so was pleasantly surprised to hear the president has been reading my book. He hasn't let me know what he thinks, but it's a safe bet that he's identifying with the portrayal of Churchill, not Chamberlain. I think Bush's hero would be bemused; parallels do leap out - but between Bush and Chamberlain, not Bush and Churchill.

Like Bush, and unlike Churchill, Chamberlain came to office with almost no understanding of foreign affairs or experience in dealing with international leaders. None the less, he was convinced that he alone could bring Hitler and Mussolini to heel. He surrounded himself with like-minded advisers, and refused to heed anyone who told him otherwise. In the months leading up to war, Chamberlain and his men saw little need to build a strong coalition of European allies to confront Nazi Germany - ignoring appeals from Churchill and others to fashion a "grand alliance". ...

Interesting, but my recollection is that Churchill himself was remarkably restrained about the supposed follies of his predecessor. The one Churchill really hated, if memory serves, was Chamberlain's predecessor, Stanley Baldwin--he of the soothing, bedtime-story manner who succeeded in reassuring Britains that they should forget about the problems and all go for a nice walk in the country. On this view, Chamberlain probably needed to stall for time to let Britain get just a little bit ready (the pendant is that Joseph Goebbels, the #2/#3/#4 Nazi, apparently always believed that the Germans would have had a better chance of winning had Hitler started the war earlier).

Perils of Publishing (with Update)

My friend Sternwallow, who is very smart but not smart enough to stay out of the small-press publishing biz, offers an acerb insight into the current state of the market:

...the scary part to me is how people understand this in some areas, but not in others. Theoretically, product placement is a legit business; we know that the summer movies at the Cineplex are going to be the latest blockbuster, regular Hollywood fare. But we know that we can turn to our local art house for something better, or rent something satisfying from Netflix. We know that the stuff piled high at the ends of the shelves in supermarkets is probably crap; we can get beyond that to the fresh meats and produce we want, or patronize the farmer’s markets and fish trucks that are now becoming more popular.

But otherwise intelligent people still think that, because of its vastness, a big B&N Superstore must have all the books in the world available. They don’t, of course, they have only what they think (or publishers will pay to have them think) can sell. Again, this would be OK but where is that alternative channel? The independents have been run out of town. When you apply the commercial model to the world of ideas, it’s a bit scary. You may have the best book on how to solve the Iraqi crisis, or fix Social Security, or whatever. But if your publicist cannot get you on Jon Stuart or Oprah, and your publisher will not pay to have your books piled high inside the front doors of B&N, your ideas are dead.

Update: My friend Larry, another guy who knows what he is talking about, responds:

It's true, I suppose, but my feeling is that it was ever thus, and it used to be worse. Because the little independents didn't have anything, and didn't know where it was when they did. There are some powerful reasons for the success of the chains, and not all of them fit into conspiracy theories.

Meanwhile, retail book sales keep dropping, and I suspect they will continue to do so. If people are sufficiently retro to want to read, they'll do it online for free or via abebooks.com for $1 a book. And why shouldn't they?