Does anyone have a nominee for the best use of limited and ordinary materials to create art? I've got a couple. One is Sarah Sze, an extraordinary young artist and sculptor raised in Boston who received a MacArthur "Genius" Award in 2003. Here is some of her stuff.
Ah, but now, a nominee of more Friday evening caprice!
Mark Greif, an editor of n+1, has written, in the new issue of the London Review of Books, a typically outstanding piece of rock criticism, in the guise of rock-history criticism. A long review of Richard Witts's "The Velvet Underground," part of a new series of compact pop-music bios, it goes beyond Witts's book, which he praises, to draw at some length an enlightening comparison between the VU and the Grateful Dead, who would seem, as he says, to be "the exact antithesis of the Velvet Underground."
The piece also charts the band's Andy Warhol-driven rise to fame and their subsequent success in "sneak[ing] away from Warhol without utterly alienating him." The piece took hold of me, though, with its description of the Long Fall phase, usually the best part of VH1's "Behind the Music," too:
Reed himself finally retired, leaving the remaining players to limp on without him; he moved back to Long Island, in Witts's words, 'weighed down by the total failure of the Velvets, to work as a typist for his father's accounting firm'.
...
The Velvets' self-destruction was a matter of personality clashes and departures. These would have been easy enough to overcome if the core band had really wanted to go on, or to be a different kind of band. What could not have been overcome was the anti-expansive drive of the Velvet Underground's themes, the feeling that their music really could only transpire in private, and in places that a fan base couldn't visit.
Upon its release, "Performance" was awarded the ultimate '60s accolade: "probably the heaviest movie ever made." So we learned from James Parker's Ideas column this past Sunday. If the stories about Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg's 1970 movie are to be believed, commented Parker, the "pioneeringly violent psychedelic gangster movie was made in an atmosphere that combined the airy libertinism of Swinging London at its swinging-est with the brimstone solemnity of a black mass."
Mick Jagger and friends in "Performance"
Speaking of heavy movies from the early '70s and black masses, over at actor-director Wiley Wiggins's blog today, we read that Mexican director Alejandro Jodorowsky's "The Holy Mountain" (1973) will be released next week in a new 35mm print. "For those of you not familiar with the film, I implore you to go see it and get your brains thoroughly scrambled," says Wiggins. "The film is not art, it's witchcraft. Crazy, ridiculous, scary, amazing witchcraft."
Sam Tanenhaus, whose New Republic essay on William F. Buckley I linked to earlier this week, offers a reading list for people interested in learning more about the rise of modern American conservatism.
Another example of a trend I have recently noticed: after a writer or scholar dies and is greeted by obits and tributes draped with laurels, a period deemed by a writer and editor to be just tasteful enough passes, and out comes the hit piece. See Terry Castle on Susan Sontag:
Over the years I laboured to hide my growing disillusion, especially during my last ill-fated visit to New York, when she regaled me -- for the umpteenth time -- about the siege of Sarajevo, the falling bombs, and how the pitiful Joan Baez had been too terrified to come out of her hotel room. Sontag flapped her arms and shook her big mannish hair -- inevitably described in the press as a 'mane' – contemptuously. That woman is a fake! She tried to fly back to California the next day! I was there for months. Through all of the bombardment, of course, Terry.
Once a French thinker hits the mark, of course, no one dares shut him or her up, or suggests such plebeian activities as editing or rewriting.
Baudrillard, though, may be the screw-up who endangered the brand. His published writings were so bad, and his publicity-hound manner so obvious, that the image of incomprehensibility and clownishness attached itself to the "respectful" profile drawn by his advocates and they couldn't rub it off.
Stiff hits, but there's more to come:
No one will read Jean Baudrillard in 50 years, once those who made money off his antics fade. As in show business, so in academe. No fraud survives his enablers.
Anyone else remember James Hogue, a.k.a. Alexi Indris Santana? In 1988, when he was a "high school senior," Princeton University decided he was one of a handful of the most desirable students in America -- one of a select few the admissions office decided it just had to have. According to a documentary later made about his life, he claimed in his application to be an orphaned, self-educated farm hand in Utah. He would fall asleep at night reading philosophy by the campfire, or somesuch -- admissions office catnip!
At Princeton, he cruised onto the track team and charmed his way into the blue-blood Ivy Club. He got excellent grades, evidently.
It turns out that he was a con artist, 31 years old at the time of his arrest, with a long history of petty thefts and false identities, going for one more Gatsby-esque self-refashioning. After he was exposed, and served a short sentence for "theft by deception," he somehow landed a job at the Harvard Mineralogical Museum.
That didn't end well (missing gems, an arrest in Somerville). Later, the New Yorker profiled him, and there was that documentary, "Con Man."
The Web site for "Con Man" teases with the suggestion that Hogue "may, again, re-invent himself." Well, yes and no. His thefts seem to be getting bigger, but sadder, too. This time the max sentence is 10 years.
A reader has sent in a long and thoughtful response to my post about Andrew Delbanco's views on the purpose of a liberal education. The letter serves to support but also supplement my thoughts.
The reader agrees that "critical thinking," "a vestige of the time when the great worry was that everyone would think alike," does not make sense as an end in itself:
what critical thinking gets used for most purely, I think, is management consulting. Consultants are fantastically smart, contrarian, pragmatic team-workers with expertise that ranges across the disciplines. I respect them a lot, but I can't say they make an educational ideal (some do, some are just scary).
This is a micro-observation that fits with my general view, not expressed in my post, that higher education is in a crisis of direction partly because some will always see it as a launching pad for the higher pay-grade professions. Too many parents and therefore kids, probably, see college as pre-med, pre-law, pre-banking, etc.. Too much of this, and one walks around wondering if everything one sees is just a filling station -- or mirage? -- along the arduous road to the promised land of the Real World. That would be too bad.
Better by far, I think, would be a vision of the college campus like our reader's:
Freakishly smart, freakishly talented, freakishly responsive or interested or attentive or omnicompetent people brought into sustained collision with others like them and in the context of instruction that demonstrates the depth, rigor, care and freakishness of their own fields and those not their own. This is not, though, just my own take. At the beginning of "On Liberty," Mill quotes Wilhelm von Humboldt: "The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity." Humboldt was writing about government, not education, but I think he's right about both.
I think that Tuesday's Talkfest went reasonably well. I'm not sure that we'd want to start a message board to accompany the feature every week, though I was favorably impressed with the quality of the discussion we had.
Here's another trial balloon. A weekly or monthly feature on new books of interest to the Brainiac bloggers. (The feature will not necessarily be called "Brainiac's bedside table," nor will it necessarily survive its trial at all.) I'll go first, and we'll see what happens.
The following are titles published, or about to be published, in March.
Anna Akhmatova
"Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts," by Clive James (W.W. Norton). Clive James, a London-based man of letters who writes for the New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker, is frequently described as one of the great living critics, among the last of a dying breed that included Hazlitt and Edmund Wilson. This massive collection of essays about 20th century celebrities, intellectuals, tyrants, and writers, organized from A to Z (Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig), will not disappoint his fans. James isn't merely writing capsule biographies, here: His intent is to set the record straight about the villains of the past 100 years , the left-leaning intellectuals who admired them, and the stout-hearted liberals who denounced them even when it was unfashionable to do so. Among other things. I wish the winter was just starting, instead of ending, because this looks like just the thing to get me through a few months of cold weather.
PS: Slate is publishing an exclusive selection of essays adapted from "Cultural Amnesia." The first installment is on one of James's villains: Grigory Ordzhonokidze.
"Divagations," by Stéphane Mallarmé, translated by Barbara Johnson (Harvard). As the title suggests, this is a hodgepodge of texts: prose poems, anecdotes, short essays about the author's Symbolist contemporaries and antecedents collectively titled "volumes on my divan," music writing, news briefs (on "gold," "accusation," "magic," "safeguard"), lecture excerpts, catalog prefaces, you name it. It's only book of Mallarmé's prose published in his lifetime. The downside of James's magisterial book is that it constantly reminds you that you're a mere reader; Mallarmé's shambolic collection makes you feel like a fellow explorer.
"Beasts! A Pictorial Schedule of Traditional Hidden Creatures, from the Interest of 90 Modern Artisans," curated and designed by Jacob Covey (Fantagraphics). Another stroke of genius from the folks at Fantagraphics. Visual artists best known for their work in the spheres of comics, skateboarding graphics, rock posters, science fiction and fantasy illustration, children's books, commercial and fine art collaborate on a bestiary (an encyclopedia of "cryptozoology" or "fantastic zoology") to compete with some of my all-time favorites: T.H. White's "The Bestiary: A Book of Beasts," Jorge Luis Borges's "The Book of Imaginary Beings," "Barlowe's Guide to Extra-Terrestrials," and of course, the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons "Monster Manual." The mix of illustration styles is very effective; after all, myth has something to do with all of these spheres, right? I'm particularly charmed by Tom Gauld's Gorey-like Wizard's Shackle (a giant Scottish leech), Chris Silas Neal's pathetic teenage Werewolf and Jason's slacker-ish Minotaur, Justin B. Williams's oppressed Mimick Dog (a performing Egyptian primate), Eric Reynolds's almost 3-D Boa (a huge Italian parasite), Anders Nilsen's awe-inspiring Sianach (giant Scottish deer-demon), and Covey's own 100-eyed Argus.
The piece is about The Economist, and it ain't too kind. He does echo some of my own thoughts about the matter, but I hasten to say they aren't about The Economist so much as about its readers. Why is everyone always so proud to say they subscribe, or have read this or that article, or buy it all the time, etc.? It's like someone who donates to their PBS affiliate and carries their tote bag everywhere to tell everyone about it.
The magazine has a deep and an international take on the news of the world, and it is, being an English magazine, not Americentric. That's great, and particularly valuable now. The magazine is not, however, hiding in its pages the ticket to self-actualization and world harmony. And often -- shhh -- it's boring.
Fallows focuses on The Economist's reflection of what he considers two English flaws: class snobbery, and intellectual, well, snobbery, in the form of a simplistic style of argumentation: "Michael Kinsley, who once worked at The Economist, wrote that the standard Economist leader gives you the feeling that the writer started out knowing that three steps must be taken immediately -- and then tried to think what the steps should be."
Fallows also gets off some zingers at the country at large:
England is a perfectly nice little country, with many achievements to its credit. If you like to attend plays, want to read comic novels, hope to spare your skin the damaging effects of the sun, then England’s the place for you.
[Updated 7:10 p.m., to reflect correct original venue of Fallows's piece]
It's worth paying attention to a latecomer to the latest smattering of essays and reviews about Robert Lowell, whose Letters, edited by Saskia Hamilton, were published in hardcover in 2005 and in paperback this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (to be followed at some point by his correspondence with Elizabeth Bishop, hurray). I read all Lowelliana, greedily, as it comes. He and Yeats are duking it out for my favorite poet, but Lowell has the immediacy that comes from being closer to me (and us, presumably) in age and geography. I've seen a couple of his houses here and there in New England.
But I always read this stuff with a melancholy heart, because with Lowell, almost literally, went poetry's rightful place in culture. He was the last rock-star poet, the last who commanded large lecture halls and advances. Will such things ever come back? Not that they should matter, I suppose, to the true aesthete, but they do matter in our self-conception.
Christopher Benfey's piece about the Letters in Agni is perceptive and learned, and where else can you find the observation, by Lowell, that William Burroughs's work is "very real, but partially of psycho-pathic interest"?
I did not know "woe is me" made use of the dative case. But I was even more surprised, reading Jan's post, by Yagoda's flat statement that "This is he" is universally considered "fatally stuffy" these days.
To respond to Evan's post, I don't think it's misleading to point to Lethem as a good model of how an artist might insert himself productively into the copyright debate. For two reasons: 1) If Lethem were an unsuccessful artist whose novels had never been optioned, then his gesture would be less meaningful; it would also be easier to dismiss as a publicity stunt. 2) He's not exactly throwing money into the street. If you read the whole option statement, he does require the filmmaker who options his novel to pay him royalties if the film actually gets produced, and he will collect those royalties for a few years after this hypothetical film appears.
So Lethem is protecting his intellectual rights, but he's not being hoggish about it. He's compromising, creating a win-win situation for himself and hypothetical future artists who might want to draw upon his work. This is -- to my mind -- what copyright was originally supposed to be about.
You know who I'd like to hear from in this discussion? Ex-Legal Affairs senior editor John Swansburg! What do you make of Lethem's option idea, John?
I've been reading the new book by Ben Yagoda, "When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse" (you can read the first chapter here, and his recent piece in the L.A. Times on the gender-neutral pronoun -- also covered in the book -- here). And in the chapter on pronouns, I came upon this:
[When I answer the phone], how should I respond? Standard English mandates that the verb be be followed by the subjective case, which would have me say something like "This is he." . . .
But in the current millennium, that kind of thing sounds fatally stuffy. This is obvious to songwriters, who have given us such works as Todd Rundgren's "Hello, It's Me" and (better yet) Crystal Gayle's "If Your Phone Doesn't Ring, It's Me"; to Shakespeare, who had Ophelia say, "Woe is me"; and to the writers of the King James Bible, who used the same statement three separate times, including Isaiah 6:5: "Then said I, Woe is me! For I am undone."
Woe, indeed. We are wandering in the grammatical wilderness when a college professor thinks that "Woe is me" is the unstuffy, 21st-century corruption of "Woe is I." It's not so: "Woe is me" is the original, genuine, and grammatically correct expression, and it has nothing to do with the predicate nominative. "This is he" vs. "This is him" is a different thing entirely.
Why "Woe is me"? Because Old English had a dative case (you may have met the dative in Latin class), the form used for the indirect object. In the sentence "I gave him the book," him is the indirect object; in Old English, it would have appeared in the dative case.
This is not arcane knowledge. The OED explains the use of woe "construed with a dative (or, later, its equivalent), with or without a verb of being or happening, in sentences expressing the incidence of distress, affliction, or grief." It has abundant examples of "woe unto me," "woe is me," "woe were us" and the like, from "Beowulf" to the late 19th century. There are no instances of "woe is I" or "woe is they."
So why the confusion? Well, it turns out the fog has been gathering for a while. But I'll leave the rest of this woeful tale for a later post -- or two.
I've just read an essay in the New York Review of Books by Andrew Delbanco, one of the most astute observers of education working today. The article is called "Scandals of Higher Education," but that's not really what it's about, though it would be hard to capture its subject in a pithy phrase because it is so wide-ranging: from race and class in admissions, to L'Affaire Larry Summers, to current lamentable pedagogical trends -- e.g., away from Socratic questioning that might earn a professor a bad student evaluation for being "unfair."
What I found most interesting, other than a thorough consideration of Walter Benn Michaels's "The Trouble with Diversity," is Delbanco's observation, almost stirring in its manner of delivery, that too little attention is now paid to the purpose of higher education. Just what is it all about, Delbanco wonders? Even Derek Bok, whose book he praises, leans on "Critical Thinking" as the ultimate end, which is in fact just a tool that can be wielded in valuable or useless ways. I could use critical thinking to rob a bank. Aren't we trying to forge leaders here? Even people with exemplary ideals and character? Or is that hopelessly old-fashioned? Sigh, I hope not.
The Globe piece mentions that the series is personal for the HBO documentary chief Sheila Nevins, who has been probably the most powerful person in documentary film and television for a decade or two. Her son, who is 26, has struggled with substance abuse over the years.
One of the short films is by Rory Kennedy (bio) and her filmmaking partner Liz Garbus. I interviewed Kennedy, who is Bobby's youngest, for the Globe Magazine last weekend. She's a fascinating person.
I've always been fascinated by maps, gobes, satellite photos, and the like, and I don't think I'm alone. Have you tried Google Earth? Tell me it's not mesmerizing. When I was a kid I remember reading a complicated essay in a National Geographic atlas about the history of different map projections, and a complex rationale for why NG often chooses a somewhat unusual, perhaps even custom-made projection. This might be it!
Poking around Jonathan Lethem's Web site to research my last post, I came across, on his elliptical links page, a site devoted to strange, usually historical, maps. It's called, uh, Strange Maps. Many are fantastical or imagined maps. I don't know where the blogger is finding this stuff, but it's great stuff.
Here's a map that reflects a prediction that the world, whose exact shape is affected by its own rotation, will eventually spin itself into a tetrahedron:
Good piece of news to point out, Josh, but isn't it slightly misleading to view Lethem as a model? For one, he's highly successful and doesn't need the money. He has optioned, for money, both "Motherless Brooklyn" (to Ed Norton) and "The Fortress of Solitude," for which he sold film and theatrical rights separately, an unusual coup that he decided to achieve on his own. In literary fiction, few writers can afford to give away film rights. That's where the money is.
I commented enthusiastically, not too long ago, about Jonathan Lethem's essay in Harper's about: love and theft, contamination anxiety, the creative commons, the gift economy, the beauty of second use, and "usemonopoly." Now, Lethem is putting his thoughts on intellectual property into action.
Yesterday, the day his new novel, "You Don't Love Me Yet," was released, Lethem announced the You Don't Love Me Option at his website. On May 15th, he says, he'll give away a free option on the film rights to "You Don't Love Me Yet" to whichever filmmaker agrees to
release all ancillary rights to the film (and its source material, the novel), five years after the film's debut. In other words, after a waiting period during which those rights would still be restricted, anyone who cared to could make any number of other kinds of artwork based on the novel's story and characters, or the film's: a play, a television series, a comic book, a theme park ride, an opera -- or even a sequel film or novel featuring the same characters. For that matter, they can remake the film with another script and new actors. In my agreement with the filmmaker, those ancillary rights will be launched into the public domain.
Lethem, for his part, will release the same rights.
There's more to the bargain, but this is the part that interests me. Sure, this might be partly a publicity stunt -- but still, for a successful artist to willingly relax his intellectual property rights, in order to stimulate creativity, that's exciting territory. Hard to think of anyone else doing this, except for David Byrne and Brian Eno, who invited fans to download and remix their 1981 album "My Life In The Bush of Ghosts."
Now, I believe that this is the sort of thing the Framers of the Constitution had in mind when they saw fit to provide Congress with the power to secure intellectual property rights for artists. Copyright should provide incentive to living artists to be creative (i.e., they shouldn't have to worry that their work will be stolen), and also to future artists to be creative (i.e., because art, which so often grows out of someone else's previous art, can only do so when one has a legal right to copy, sample, remix, and re-use that art).
The Framers thought 14 years was a fair length of time for an artist to retain exclusive copyright; these days, copyright lasts almost 100 years. So Lethem is out-doing the Framers with his Five Year Plan.
And, in keeping with the trend, a pretty significant diamond theft, to the tune of around $28 million, from Antwerp's diamond district made news for an instant and then fell by the media wayside.
But it's pretty interesting. The guy had been a law-abiding customer for a year, though he had been using an assumed name and Argentine passport the entire time. It appears he planned the heist patiently over that period, intending to pull it off from day one, and then building enough trust to be allowed into the bank vault to tend to his safe deposit box. And others'. The stuff of movies.
A number of outlets are reporting today that New York City is on the verge of banning aluminum bats in high school baseball in favor of wood, as discussed here. Veteran New York Mets pitcher John Franco is firmly in favor of the ban, while Yankee Mike Mussina, who is on the board of Little League Baseball, opposes it. Mussina, like other opponents, cites the lack of data supporting the claim that a ball struck by a wooden bat is any safer (i.e. slower) than one hit with the sharp ping familiar to high school players and spectators everywhere. The New York Post's Kevin Kernan seems to agree:
Since records were kept beginning in the 1960s, tragically there have been eight fatalities in Little League Baseball from batted balls. Six of those resulted from balls hit by wood bats and two from balls hit by non-wood bats. Those two fatalities occurred in 1971 and 1973, prior to the 1993 implementation of today’s youth bat standards.
Kernan's piece points out that recently implemented rules governing metal bats have put a cap on their "bat performance factor" such that batted balls can only travel so fast. Perhaps, given these rules, Kernan is right. It's hard to argue with numbers.
But I will say that the aluminum bats I used in high school always seemed to me potentially lethal. They were light and had thin handles, so that you could whip the bat through the hitting zone, but the heads were heavy enough to generate serious inertia, like a hammer. When you are standing on the mound as a pitcher, you see just how close that batter actually is. Wooden bats, on the other hand, are much heavier and better balanced, and it never seemed to me that they could pose as much of a threat to the pitcher. Besides, the best players will eventually have to swing the wood in pro ball.
Here's something else that the blogosphere is buzzing about this week. I track a number of websites obsessed with crafts, gadgets, gizmos, hacking, tinkering, and so forth, and right now some of them are guiltily fascinated by newly revealed photos of items removed from Ted Kaczynski's Montana cabin as evidence. (Apparently the government plans to auction of some of these items -- seems macabre.)
Kaczynski's homemade pistol
How did this pseudo-event (an Adorno-ian term I like to apply to online happenings) get started? Last week, the excellent website Smoking Gun posted photos of these items, and noted that Kaczynski "has filed a legal appeal trying to halt the sale of what he claims is copyright material, including journals, correspondence, and versions of his loony manifesto."
Kaczynski's false-footprint shoes
There is also a mysterious CBS slideshow of the same photos.
In 1997, when he was scouring the ranks of talented younger conservatives to find a new editor for National Review, Buckley eliminated one prospect, his onetime protege David Brooks, a rising star at The Weekly Standard. In a memo to board members, Buckley reported that he had discussed Brooks with NR alum George Will: "I said that I thought it would be wrong for the next editor to be other than a believing Christian. He agreed and added that the next editor should not be a Canadian"--a possible reference to conservative writer David Frum.
Of course, David, I wouldn't mind a Brit someday editing my magazine, but never a ...
I wanted to direct attention to the reader forum regarding Jessica Winter's piece from Sunday's Ideas section on the zero waste movement. There are some thoughtful comments and a few decent one-liners. One comment in particular, from reader ichthyophagous -- would you care to step forward? -- seems particularly thought-provoking. The reader makes the claim, familiar from the debate over recycling that probably reached its peak in the '90s, that recycling programs are actually counterproductive, environmentally speaking, given the costs associated with operating the program. Then he or she notes, using a clever example, that our lifestyle desires are often out of step with what would be ideal from an environmental perspective. This is a comment often made by figures on the right, such as our president, who has been hesitant to force Americans to change their gas-guzzling ways, for example. But our reader gives it new life by pointing out that the changes required of a society attempting zero waste would get much costlier as we approach that goal:
Recycling programs are generally not worth their cost. It's more expensive to recycle waste materials than bury the stuff in landfills, partly because there is plenty of landfill space available, also because the cost of raw materials is not high enough. One of the biggest components of recycling cost is sending a truck around to collect the old newspaper, plastic jugs and so on from curbside. Another costly requirement is that different kinds of refuse have to be segregated: you can't just throw all plastic waste in a single bin. Participation rates in recycling programs have not improved over the years.
Perhaps part of the solution would be for all of us to live in huge superblocks with chutes in every cell. We (the elite who make the rules) could dictate that everything be made out of a few easily-recyclable materials. Instead of using many different kinds of plastics, we would use just two or three for every kind of product. Many other products could be simply outlawed as not important. This sounds like the recyclers' paradise. I have another name for it.
This post is a trial balloon. I think it would be cool, once a week, to highlight a brainy discussion happening online somewhere. Maybe at The Valve. Or Slate. Or Long Sunday. Or one of the many blogs dedicated to a particular field of study, the comments sections of which are crackling with un-tenured intellectual energy. Or even in an Ideas forum. Readers are invited to alert me to particularly witty, passionate, and incisive debates, powwows, and brouhahas.
PS: "Tuesday's Talkfest" is not necessarily the title of this feature, and this feature may or may not happen at all. Just a trial balloon.
The talkfest of the week, in my opinion, is happening between several blogs -- kinda like how issues used to be hashed out between several intellectual journals (Partisan Review, Commentary, Dissent). It was sparked by David Brooks's mournful NYT column (TimesSelect subscribers only) this past Sunday on the "Vanishing Neoliberal." And it was exacerbated by the news, mentioned by Brooks and reported on yesterday in the Times, that (a) The New Republic is under new management, and (b) from now on, the magazine -- whose liberal-hawkish/neoliberal stance on the US military action in Iraq has in recent years cost them readers -- will be "reliably left of center."
At The Plank, a New Republic staff blog, Jonathan Cohn says, yes, neoliberalism is dying and that's mostly a good thing. (Alas, the comments on Cohn's post are so far uninteresting.) Cohn links to a post by Ezra Klein, over at Tapped, the American Prospect's blog, in which Klein says, yes, neoliberalism is dying and it's about time. So does Tapped's Ben Adler. (The comments on Klein's post are marginally more interesting than those on Cohn's; the comments on Adler's post are quite thoughtful and worth reading.) But Mickey Kaus, at Slate, says no, neoliberalism is not dying, despite the fervent wishes of liberals tired of being beaten up by other liberals; he claims it's all part of TNR's effort to rebrand itself as a post-neoliberal magazine.
An interesting if not wholly original essay by V.S. Naipaul (is this an excerpt?) in the Guardian. It is about his origins as a writer, his techniques, and the ways he had to adapt his writing to the world as he experienced it. One of the most engaging passages, and one of Naipaul's defining characteristics, is that he doesn't claim any great kinship with his marginalized homeland:
I was born in 1932 on the other side of the Atlantic in the British colony of Trinidad, an outcrop of Venezuela and South America. It was a small island, essentially agricultural when I was born (like Venezuela, it had oil, which was beginning to be developed). It had a racially mixed population of perhaps half a million, with my own immigrant Asian Indian community (finely divided by religion, education, money, caste background) of about 150,000.
I had no great love for the place, no love for its colonial smallness. I saw myself as a castaway from the world's old civilisations, and I wished to be part of that bigger world as soon as possible. An academic scholarship in 1950, when I was 18, enabled me to leave. I went to England to do a university course with the ambition afterwards of being a writer. I never in any real sense went back.
Nevertheless, Naipaul went back to the colonized world when he wrote now famous nonfiction about India, a process he recounts in the second half of the essay. Worth a read.
This morning John heard a WBUR reporter jokingly refer to the plural of the Toyota Prius as "Prii," and he wondered: Could that Latin plural be right, or was this plural form just a misbegotten language hybrid, as it were?
Well, my Latin is minimal and creaky, but Miss Madge Mossman (R.I.P) equipped me with enough grammar for a Google search. And the first thing I found was the much-quoted misinformation provided by a Toyota spokesman back in 2004. "Prius is a Latin word meaning 'to go before,'" he explained. "Toyota chose this name because the Prius vehicle is the predecessor of cars to come."
But prius can't be a Latin infinitive; "to go before" would have to be a verb, like, say, precedere. Actually, prius is just the neuter form of prior, the comparative adjective, meaning "earlier, anterior, superior." As a noun, it would mean "earlier one" or "superior one." And its plural would be, if I read aright, not Prii but Prioria.
Pleasant enough -- but as it happens, prioria is also medieval Latin for "priories." And while Prius drivers are a devout lot, they probably don't think of their cars as nunneries and monasteries. I'm guessing we'll settle down with the standard English plural; after all, we've got plenty of words weirder than Priuses.
In the summer of 2005, when Fantagraphics published "Modern Arf: Artists and Models," the first in a series of attractive and engaging books exploring -- with a scholar's thoroughness and a fanboy's passion -- the surprising ways in which comic books and strips have leaked into the wider culture, particularly high culture, Ideas got excited. So I interviewed Craig Yoe, cartoonist, designer, and Arf editor.
The second installment was also brilliant. I'm happy to report that Fantagraphics has just announced the forthcoming publication of the 3d installment of the series. It's titled "Arf Forum."
Among other things, one hears, the latest Arf volume will feature a section of historical images of people reading comics: "from a young Elvis reading 'Betty and Veronica' on his first tour to a boxer-clad Rock Hudson reading the Sunday funnies." When I get my hands on a copy, I'll let you know if it lives up to my inflated expectations.
I thought the culture piece of the weekend (outside the Globe, of course), was this takedown of a recent New Yorker article on the Poetry Foundation. The author, David Orr, a member of the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle, found Dana Goodyear's criticisms of the foundation in the New Yorker both misguided and self-contradictory. (The foundation, now wealthy thanks to a benefactor's massive gift, has been looking for ways to make poetry more central to America's cultural life. Goodyear found the efforts Babbitish.)
In a personal turn, Orr suggests that the New Yorker look at the mote in its own eye. There's something wrong, he says, when the magazine is publishing the poetry of a a well-connected young staff member -- one Dana Goodyear -- more often than that of almost any other living poet.
Over at Crooked Timber, Harry Brighouse gloats that CT was ahead of the Times Magazine's ethicist, Randy Cohen, in considering the question of whether online information or blog entries by applicants should be considered by admissions committees. Crooked Timber didn't weigh in in the original post, letting commenters take the mike away.
In the new post, Brighouse takes Cohen to task for saying, "You would not read someone’s old-fashioned pen-and-paper diary without consent; you should regard a blog similarly." I must agree that that is a misleading analogy. However confused bloggers may be, they obviously know that their thoughts as recorded are available on the Internet -- to everyone in the world, in theory. They should be more careful giving out their diaries, to extend the analogy. Whether admissions officials are right to carry out these kind of background checks and use the information gathered to make decisions, an issue Cohen took up, is perhaps more interesting. He tells an alumni interviewer to stay away from Googling his interview subjects and to judge applicants on the strength of the interview, as he is being asked to do. I would have to agree.
With a job applicant, the issue is more cloudy. If someone has a personal Web page, with thoughts on his employer, on the world, and (perhaps graphic) photos, and that site suggests a certain lack of professionalism, shouldn't the employer be within its rights to take that into account?
Over at the New Republic's Open University blog, U. Chicago English prof Richard Stern points out a "transfiguring expression of contemporary difficulties" in Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida." In Act 1, Scene 3, King Agamemnon complains to the leaders of the coalition of the willing (Greeks) about their inability to conquer Troy:
The ample proposition that hope makes/In all designs begun on earth below/Fails in the promis'd largeness: checks and disasters/Grow in the veins of actions highest rear'd,/As knots, by the conflux of meeting sap,/Infects the sound pine and diverts his grain/Tortive and errant from his course of growth.
In the comments section, a reader responds:
I don't know how instructive [Shakespeare] is in looking at current problems. He had a foot in Ptolemy's universe, which ultimately led to, I argue, a kind of quietism and hopelessness at the heart of his tragic vision.
As is so often the case in the blogosphere, the comment is more interesting than the original post. When, I beseech you? will Boston.com turn on the comments functions for its blogs. For, as the Bard put it, in "King Richard III":
Come, I have heard that fearful commenting/Is leaden servitor to dull delay;/Delay leads impotent and snail-paced beggary/Then fiery expedition be my wing,/Jove's Mercury, and herald for a king!
