The Republic of Letters

We Have Moved

2011-05-09T15:36:00.001-07:00

Our new home is News From: the Republic of Letters.

Issue 22 has been posted

PB's notebook will be my new blog of sorts as well as my newly created facebook account.

This will be the last post here.

If Words Could Kill

2010-12-17T15:20:00.000-08:00

www.foreignpolicyjournal.com

Ever since WikiLeaks became a household name this past summer, following the release of 77,000 secret U.S. documents relating to the ongoing occupation and destruction of Afghanistan, many American politicians and pundits have been calling for blood. Despite then-top military commander General Stanley McChrystal’s own admission in March of this year, the U.S. military in Afghanistan has “shot an amazing number of people” even though “none has ever proven to be a threat,” the ire resulting from the activities of WikiLeaks is directed at the whistle-blowers themselves, rather than at those actually implicated in war crimes as shown by the leaked documents.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange
In their eternal allegiance to government secrecy, aggressive imperialism, and American exceptionalism, numerous WikiLeaks’ critics have been outraged over the publication of U.S. government documents. While accusing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of everything from espionage to terrorism to treason (Assange isn’t a U.S. citizen), they hold him responsible for the deaths of both soldiers and civilians and have even publicly suggested and supported threats to assassinate him.

The U.S. State Department claimed that the release of classified cables would “at a minimum…place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals”, and Attorney General Eric Holder stated his belief that “national security of the United States has been put at risk. The lives of people who work for the American people have been put at risk. The American people themselves have been put at risk by these actions that I believe are arrogant, misguided and ultimately not helpful in any way.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has described these hysterical reactions to WikiLeaks release as “fairly significantly overwrought” due to the continuing slow and calculated release of over 251,000 previously secret and classified U.S. diplomatic cables (fewer than 1,500 cables have been released so far). Still, there are increasing calls not only for Assange’s indictment, but also explicitly for his murder.

On November 29, Fox News‘s Bill O’Reilly declared on air that those responsible for the leaked documents are “traitors in America” and that they “should be executed,” adding “or put in prison for life,” as a dismissive afterthought.

The next day, Bill Kristol, in a The Weekly Standard article entitled “Whack WikiLeaks,” urged the United States government to “neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators, wherever they are” and hoped for a glorious, unified bipartisan effort “to degrade, defeat, and destroy WikiLeaks.” One need only recall what Senator Lindsey Graham said in early November about “neutering” the Iranian government to get an idea of Kristol is talking about.

Sarah Palin chimed in on Facebook, writing that Assange “is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands” who should be “pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.” This very urgency was mentioned in a presidential debate in October 2008 by Palin campaign opponent Barack Obama, who made the following promise to Americans: “We will kill bin Laden; we will crush Al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority.” One can assume that Palin meant that the WikiLeaks founder should be hunted with a similar kind of lethal force ...

On the same day, another 2012 Republican presidential hopeful wished for the assassination of Assange. Former Arkansas governor and Fox News host Mike Huckabee, speaking at The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Library, told reporters, “Whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason, and I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty.” Huckabee, who was signing copies of his new children’s book, “Can’t Wait Till Christmas!” at the time, was presumably referring to U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, who is accused of providing WikiLeaks with the classified documents and is currently being held in intense solitary confinement the brig at the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia. Manning has been locked up in Quantico or five months now, after spending two months detained in a military jail in Kuwait. Manning, like Assange, has not been convicted of any crime. Kids, Christmas, and Capital Punishment. Thanks, Mike!

Fox News national security analyst Kathleen McFarland urged the United States to declare WikiLeaks a terrorist organization, kidnap Assange, and try him in a military tribunal for espionage. Furthermore, McFarland, who served in the Pentagon under the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations and is currently a “Distinguished Adviser” at the Iran-hating/Israel-advocating think tank The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, agreed with Huckabee that Manning should be charged and tried as a traitor for exposing American war crimes, criminal negligence, and diplomatic duplicity. “If he’s found guilty,” she wrote, “he should be executed.”

Also on November 30, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) – whose contradictory motto reads Securing America, Strengthening Israel – addressed the WikiLeaks release by musing whether the U.S. government would “try to hang Manning from the nearest tree?”

In a post on the right-wing website Red State on December 1, a commenter by the moniker “lexington_concord” fantasized about Julian Assange receiving the Abe Lincoln treatment. “Under the traditional rules of engagement he is thus subject to summary execution,” he writes, “and my preferred course of action would be for Assange to find a small caliber round in the back of his head.”

The following day, Washington Times columnist Jeffrey Kuhner published a vitriolic attack on Assange, whom he accused of being “an anti-American radical who wants to see the United States defeated by its Islamic fascist enemies.” Other goals Kuhner ascribed to Assange included the humiliation of America “on the world stage, to drain it of all moral and legal legitimacy – especially regarding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Kuhner wrote that Assange “is aiding and abetting terrorists in their war against America,” and suggested that the Obama administration “take care of the problem – effectively and permanently” by treating Assange as an “enemy combatant” and “the same way as other high-value terrorist targets.” It is no surprise, therefore, that Kuhner’s column was entitled “Assassinate Assange.”

Though it may seem strange that a Montreal native like Kuhner is disappointed that “America is no longer feared or respected,” he is not the only Canadian to harbor such violent visions of Assange’s murder. Tom Flanagan, a senior adviser to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, said plainly on the Canadian TV station CBC, “I think Assange should be assassinated, actually. I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something.”

Speaking with Chris Wallace on Fox News, former House Speaker and paid Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich said on December 5 that “Julian Assange is engaged in warfare. Information terrorism, which leads to people getting killed is terrorism. And Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism.” As such, Gingrich suggested, “He should be treated as an enemy combatant and WikiLeaks should be closed down permanently and decisively.” If recent history is any indication, as an enemy combatant Assange would most likely be either murdered in his own country by U.S. soldiers and air strikes or kidnapped, tortured, and indefinitely imprisoned in inhumane conditions without charge or trial.

LEAKING II

2010-12-15T08:33:00.000-08:00

One has to wonder how it feels to see one’s ineptitude or stupidity revealed in the world press. But if this whole episode is considered in the light of normal behavior, it is not what has been revealed but what still might be revealed that must frighten the good folks who govern us.

It’s like a Mob story. So, Sakvatore has snitched, says the Capo, so what’s next?

The importance of this or that leak is a matter of where you are and what you are hiding.

Take such juicy topics as the CIA budget for ‘covert actions’ in Pakistan. It would certainly be interest to read the memoranda (presidential and otherwise) that set out this ‘outsourcing’ of military action to our intelligence agency. Could that other shoe drop?

Or supposing that a-leak-to-come outlines all the links between Halliburton and the cabal headed by Dick Cheney?

The public (and even the government) absorbs the leaks we have already seen, but frantic must be those about which nothing is known. Yet. Imagine our embassy-bunker in Belgrade when the footloose Holebrook – de mortuis nil nisi bonum must prevail here – was acting as architect of a Balkan war that he so nobly later brought to Dayton and peace. Would there be indiscretions in the wrong hands about Austrians equipping the breakaway Slovenes? With weapons shipped via Portugal? Or is there a record of Elie Wiesel’s abortive ten limousine relief expedition to Sarajevo, subsequent to his visit to the CIA’s headquarters in Belgrade?

I am, of course, only speculating. But then so are those who anxiously await further revelations, and so is our government, which is doing all it can to prevent such information from being made public. Wikileaks differs from history only by its capacity to reveal documents for which historians have to wait decades, or even centuries. It is showing us history as it is being made and still hot stuff. The Dread factor is at work.

10.xii.10

2010-12-10T13:58:00.000-08:00

I remember first coming across Paul Scott’s ‘Raj Quartet’ in New City or Sneden’s landing back in the days when Mike Wallace was still a ferocious reporter and Burgess Meredith a semi-reired nice-guy actor. Everyone spoke well of Scott and – as I was an avid reader on matters Indian, from Louis Bromfield to Somerset Maugham, from the miraculously funny G. S. Desani to Narayan and Chaudhuri, not excluding Tagore of E.F. Forster – I too read him, and with pleasure.

More recently I watched the 14 episodes of Granada’s ‘Jewel in the Crown’, an account of the love-hatred relationship between the British and the Indians. Intermixed with newsreel footage from Movietone, it is focused on that very difficult task, understanding. To know a country, you have to understand it; the failure to do so (‘Only connect’, wrote Morgan Forster) cost European nations their colonies throughout the world. The films, which contain some marvelous character-parts by Eric Porter and Peggy Ashcroft, were an anatomy of that misunderstanding: seductive in their portrayal of a three-hundred-year-old cohabitation, rueful in the depiction of the disintegration of the India that had been

But what weighed principally in my mind was the role of memory in retaining both love and insult. It is something ingrained in all of us. A wife leaves citing three instances of brutality or disregard; every detail she can go through, and does, in detail. Ask her about the years of marital hapiness and its very every-dayness she cannot really recall. Grudges are lodged ,in the safety-box of the mind; the good is amorphous in its benevolence..

In nothing is this as true as in the relationship between colonizer and colonized.

ON LEAKING

2010-12-08T15:21:00.000-08:00

Curious, isn’t it, that leaks such as the Woodward/Bernstein ‘Deep Throat’ ‘revelations’ are the stuff of which heroes are made, and others, because they reveal the extraordinary ineptitude of our government (and our political appointee diplomats, that is big Party givers), should incur the righteous wrath of the government?

Leaking is, after all, a time-honored occupation in American life, and Wikileaks is no more than a platform. The IRS will actually PAY you to leak info on your neighbor’s hidden income. There’s many a politician who’d still be riding high with illegal nannies without leaks. But as politicians consider that the sky is no limit, the leak is a last line of defense. Would you not really like a leak inside Halliburton? inside Dick Cheney’s machinations? Without leaks, would Ollie North still be fixing things in Central America?

I am not a Conspiracy Theorist, so I won’t go so far as to say that the CIA sent two bimbos out to compromise Mr. Assange. Sweden is a country with very advanced views on sexual equality, and I am not surprised by the charge, as yet unproven.

But I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that the moves against him by the government, via Amazon, PayPal, Mastercard & so on, can hardly be viewed as innocent. The free and open Web is a menace to all governments and these are but the first moves by states to curb freedom of information. All politics is about concealing the real reason why a bridge must be built, a war waged, or public enquiry be avoided. Open discussion based on information is anathema to Big Government.

As the Republican leader has been reported to have said, if the Patriot Act can’t stop Wikileaks, we’ll change the Patriot Act so that we can! The worrying element in this is that not just our government can do this, but that obviously the political class around the world also can. By co-ordinating their actions they can bring down Wikileaks, and anyone who thinks that they would not be happy, too, to control the Web, lives in Cloud Cuckoo land. Big pharma attacks and closes down foreign competition, copyright-holders track down and extinguish downloads. That is the real world we live in now.

It happens that WWW, for all its weaknesses, is one of the greatest advances in Information since the Renaissance. To keep politicians’ and governments’ hands off it is the first battleground of the 21st century. We should all be girt for the fight. My cheque is on its way to Wikileaks: if I can find out how to pay it in.

Story-telling

2010-12-03T15:42:00.000-08:00

The trouble with the Past is that we have to invent it. If you’re a Cherokee (or a Creek or Seminole or any of the other Indian nations we have degraded and wiped out), your history needs to be re-staged by contemporaries dressed up in rags and tatters. The same would be true for the life of small-town America that was such a subject in my youth. Illustrated by Norman Rockwell and others, the foibles of the local dentist or the adventures of two boys and a dog – all of which pastoral fantasies were already in the middle decades of the last century memories of their creators’ own childhoods – no longer have any real existence beyond television or cinema re-creations. In my own youth, people would still say, ‘Now, old Joe was a real character!’, and relate to you what made Joe distinctive, or the event in which he was involved that forever defined him in the minds of his neighbors. It was called story-telling, and it too has vanished.

But Albert Payton Terhune (in a Pompton Lakes ‘comment’, a reader notes sadly that Terhune ‘gave pleasure to three or four generations of readers’), Marilynne Robinson, and for that matter Wright Morris, Edgar Lee Masters and many others are the ball of wool from which most of us can imaginatively recover the small-town America that was. It is probably as much a lie as Fennimore Cooper’s tales, but it survives because it takes the place of what once was. It is, therefore, very much a part of the way in which America defines itself. Ike and Harry knew that world, but Richard Nixon was probably a manga comic imposed on us. Foreigners are always fascinated by the fenceless yards of New England houses, and no one builds Keep Out walls like the French. In England, a man’s home is his castle. Americans have had more space. Murder takes place ‘on the road’, not where butlers roam and Poirot sniffs.

Back from my slumber

2010-12-02T15:47:00.000-08:00

A NOTE ABOUT TroL & TRL BOOKS

The Editor regret to inform subscribers, contributors to #22 and others that TroL itself is suspended for at least a few weeks more. The Editor is temporarily unable to perform his usual duties as other matters, of a personal nature, compel his entire attention.

THE IRISH QUESTION

Like much of Europe, where the air has turned bitterly cold and the general economy is in a state of crisis, Ireland is suffering. As in London, Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, Paris, Athens and Brussels, civil servants, students, farmers, unions are demonstrating with the usual folderol: overturned buses, burning cars, placards, breakings-and-entries and so on. The police is reacting firmly and the Euro-Wallahs are meeting hither and yon.

The sources of the trouble are, however, quite evident. Most of us know that we should not spend more than we earn or what we have in the bank, in investments, etc.. The European Union, like the United States, does not seem to recognize this odd little fact.

On the same day in which all the above hullaballoo was going on, the BBC showed us the spanking new headquarters of the EU’s Diplomatic Services, and through it walked the absurd figure of Lady A, a professional Nobody appointed to the post of Foreign Minister of the E.U.. Explaining how useful and necessary it was for the EU to have a Foreign Ministry was a little man from Malta, a little country most of us probably had not often thought of as a member of the Union. He said, with a shrug, that his country couldn’t afford to maintain too many embassies abroad. That is understandable, as Malta does not have a pool of experienced diplomats. Or a pool of much else. It is a lovely place, but its population is only slightly over 400,000.

If we turn our minds back to Eire, those of us who follow such things will remember that Ireland is the country that regularly coaxed enormous subventions for an agriculture largely based on pigs, whether or not those pigs existed except on paper – rather like the olive trees in Italy that turned out to be imaginary. Germans, who like their Schwein, had bought up much of Ireland’s old estates; international companies had stepped in with spanking headquarters to exploit cheap native labor, the banks had a heyday lending left, right and center, the government couldn’t do enough for its people, so it employed civil servants by the hundred thousands. And now that the vultures are hovering overhead, there are protests. The basic sales tax (a regressive tax if there ever has one) is to rise to 27%. Hell, I would protest myself.

All of Europe overspends, as we do. Households are perforce thrifty in bad times, but Lady A. is not a housewife. She can afford to be as profligate as are members of the European Parliament or any of Sepp Blatter’s buddies at FIFA or, for that matter, our own members of Congress, or any bank you care to name. The 89 Greeks who use a notorious rail line with 600 civil servant jobs attached to it, may now have to walk. Such is Austerity. But will the civil servants be disappeared? Will the endless meetings of our World Leaders be curtailed? Where will the Photo-Ops come from? What will all those colorful troops who parade for and are inspected by our leaders do in their spare time? Back and forth doth Hillary Clinton scurry making her pronouncements; the Vice of the Maltese Turtle must be heard in the land.

And British students protest at having to pay ten grand for Oxford and Cambridge, while paying forty Big Ones for a high school education at American universities too many to name?

So queries Candide.

24.xi.10

2010-11-24T16:26:00.000-08:00

ALARUMS IN THE EXTREME ORIENT

The last time I looked, that Far East – nothing like our own empty Far West – contained about three quarters of the world’s population. You would not be surprised, in what was Bombay and Peking or Colombo, in Jakarta, Hong Kong or Calcutta, to find yourself unable to move for the human press. In a restaurant I visited, the kitchen walls were hung with ducks drying; they served, they said, twenty thousand of them a day. Even given the sense of Japanese order, a square foot of pavement is honored if occupied; in Beizhing, if you took a car, eighty thousand bikes settled in front of you at every traffic light.

In those conditions, I take it that taking pot shots at a sparsely-populated island is good fun; it would relieve the tension. All the above places – everything East of Iran – have not had a moment of peace since at least a decade before their old colonial masters or their even more ancient imperial families, were removed from the scene. The wars fought in that vast territory have been among the most cruel mankind has ever endured, the longest-lasting and the most perilous to civilian populations. All of which I take to be consonant with extreme population pressures.

I don’t think, then, that it is insane, eccentric or racist, to point out that our tiny and rapidly- diminishing population of whites, is hardly likely to have any great influence on a part of the world that not only outnumbers us by a factor of about ten to one, but is also outgrowing us economically and entrepreneurially. For we are not talking here of a bunch of illiterate peasants; the populations of Asia are in fact part of our own DNA. Chess and mathematics are not ‘white’ inventions, though effective civil government and respect for the Law are. Nor so I believe that inventiveness is a ‘white’ trait. And it is becoming daily more evident that as entrepreneurs and capitalists, we are being outpaced by Asia.

So the idea that the Burmese government, the Sri Lankan, the North Korean, the Afghani and so on can and should accommodate themselves to that Johnny-come-lately ‘democracy’ strikes me as fatuous. We ourselves – in part due to our own large and miscegenated population – submit to constant weakening of the very stuff which once made us a proud nation. How can we expect to influence, shape or otherwise ‘interfere with governments which have vastly different problems from ours, whose populations (like those of the Indian sub-continent) required a bloody civil war and partition to come into independence? What experience do we have that could possibly be adapted to conditions in China or Afghanistan? These people do not even think as we do, much less act as we think they should. They neither can, nor should. The business of government is to keep any population in some sort of order, for anarchy is an even greater disaster than repression. This, Ireland, Greece and most of the European Union is beginning to understand. After all, soon enough, their demographics will soon rid them of those who dreamt up the Enlightenment.

Personally, I dread the Mass in any form. I suspect most governments and politicians do so too. But in Asia masses die, daily; and are replaced. Mao was a horror as vicious and corrupt as Hitler or Stalin, but the tasks faced by these governments today are not so very different from those that brought to power those totalitarianisms. Students riot in London and are not killed. That is good. If they riot in Asia they may well be killed, that is not good. I strongly believe in circumspection, and cultivate my own garden while I may.

A New Week

2010-11-22T14:50:00.000-08:00

I am sure you will have been as delighted as I was to learn that la cuisine française, the French tradition of bang-up meals, convivial families around the table, the proper placing of cutlery and glass, has joined the Mediterranean diet and flamenco as a part of UNESCO’s ‘intangible world heritage’, the . . .er, less visible (say than the pyramids of Gaza or Stonehenge) part of what should be recognized as invaluable to our universal culture.

Over the years, I have had the pleasure of meeting many of the distinguished gentlemen who work at UNESCO. In fact, you bump into them pretty much everywhere. It is, after all, a pretty cushy job, and there are several posts available for each and every country, however uncultivated or unscientific it may be. Our own rep is Mr. David T. Killion; Kazakhstan’s is the mayor of Altana. Mr. Killion’s qualifications reflect his passion for legislative drafting in Congress; of our Kazakh, rather less is known. The Venezualan rep is Ms. Jennifer Josefina Gi y Laya, who is also the Bolivarian Minister for the People’s Power for Education.

These are largely working pols, God bless them. It is down below that the plums are distributed: the translation, the conferences, the working groups, the sub-contracts and arcane sub-divisions. One such was the acronymic group (French member, the appropriately named Yannick Vin) that met recently in Nairobi to deliberate.

Most of UNESCO’s sites are, as well know, as dead as those celebrated in Ozymandias:

‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
. . .boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

So, I fear, are these new, intangible ones. The last traditional French meal I ate (then with my French wife) was over a partage. The family property having been sold, what was left was to be redistributed, and argued over, at a crowded table. Such meals and such a cuisine are still to be found, but at a Parisian brasserie as lately as this summer, most diners watched the TV. How many French restaurants still have, by the Cashier, the boxes in which regular diners’ napkins were preserved from day to day?

Great efforts are made in Italy (and far fewer in places of catastrophic eating like Greece) to preserve the varieties of the Mediterranean diet, the ingredients simple and good. But it does require effort: to find or produce.

As for flamenco, the less said the better. The authentic stuff probably died at about the same time Garcia Lorca, an aficionado, was killed. Oh, there are still Sevillian ladies about to twirls their skirts and clack their castanets. But like most of my life, such expressions of culture as part of daily life are long gone and UNESCO cannot but despair.

Perhaps it should take up causes that can be salvaged? Paper bags in markets, books that don’t fall apart on reading, ocean liners, railways that go everywhere, marriage itself, thrift, respect?

Thoughts of the day

2010-11-19T15:00:00.000-08:00

I note with pleasure that Mr. Tsiolkas’ ( 'much-acclaimed’ seems to be the epithet of choice) novel, The Slap! has been nominated for one of the Bad Sex awards. He should certainly be awarded the prize, for the sex in the book is what debases what is otherwise a fair-to-good anatomy of Australian society. The plot is simple, its working-out consistently interesting: man at party slaps an obnoxious child, eight characters react differently to the ‘outrage’. Unfortunately, to find out their attitudes towards the incident, the hippy, the pc, the perp, etc., you have to wade through pages of tediously detailed sex amongst them.

From my limited experience, though I do have a number of friends in Australia, I do not believe this to be a national trait; I suspect it may be generational or, worse yet, personal to Mr. Tsiolkas, in which case he’s got a problem.

My view is that all explicit sex in fiction is boring in the extreme. It has been eschewed by every major writer since literature began. Anna Karenina did not exude, drip, sigh, exclaim, sweat, smell or otherwise pass on the intimate details of her unhappy affair.

I have always liked that article of the French Code which addresses the atteinte à la pudeur of minors: literally, an assault on their (supposedly) inherent modesty. We also badly need a prize for Immodesty: Lady Gaga, James Ellroy & Co.. For what we call today ‘celebrity’.

Commonplace Books

2010-11-17T13:52:00.000-08:00

There is much to cull from reading. Writers often kept Commonplace Books ,in which they recorded what they found striking or needing further explanation. There are a multitude of such things in Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia. He obviously notes everything down, as I have for years. He picks up on Jorge Luis Borges defending himself from accusations of kow-towing to the military regime’s by saying, No leo los diarios! I don’t read the papers! He recalls Cocteau with this cautionary tale: ‘There was once a chameleon whose owner, to keep it warm, put it on a gaudy Scottish plaid. The chameleon died of fatigue.’

You can pick this stuff up anywhere.

The departing British Prime Minister is reported to have said, ‘I don’t regard any sex as pleasant.’ But then Isaac Babel claimed that he had made love to the ‘understandably unbalanced wife of Yezhov [the Nasty who headed the old Soviet Secret Police] and almost everyone who slept with either of the Yezhovs was shot in early 1940.’

I think there is a lesson in those two statements, but I don’t know what it is. For those of you who wonder, there is the Lewis Carroll defense. Children some to those who know ‘the simple art of giving them their whole attention.’ That one happens to be true, and all too few do.

I close with a wonder from the excellent Juan Ribeyro: ‘a new President has been elected. He doesn’t smoke, drink, gamble or womanize.’ This is worrying: ‘It would terrify me to be governed by a man who was won a prize for virtue.’

Some Thoughts on the Day

2010-11-16T14:23:00.000-08:00

I had occasion today to correspond with a former student – he must now be thirty-something – who wished to go on to an MFA. Would I recommend him? I’ve done that for literally hundreds of students, who are a faithful bunch and after all have their way to make. But in this case, I growled, Writers Workshops and MFA problems are a plague and a pestilence. It is thanks to them that an excrescence like the New York’s Forty (or was is twenty) Young writers got cobbled together. They take up literary space, these people do; they chat, they tweet, they Face and above all they log-roll.

So I vented to the young man. I said that when I wound up in one, in Iowa, sixty years ago, it was because they laid on some money for me, which I lacked. I met a lifelong friend, Paul Engle was a generous prairie-fed maecenas, Robert Lowell shambled through poetry, the most talented boy in the program, Bob Shelley, killed himself, and Dylan Thomas blew through town, drunk, to get his teeth fixed. I was a lousy writer at 21 and Iowa didn’t do anything for me, or for anyone, at the time. It offered fellowship at a time when literature was taken seriously.

That is no longer the case. The joints proliferate the way literary festivals do, What can an MFA program offer but replicas of what the failed writers who staff them (or the occasional ‘name’) think is good writing? True writers know the art is unteachable. What a still-young writer needs is to write, to put stuff out, to get rejected; to read a lot; to learn what it is to tell a story that someone else will want to read; to know a lot, languages (plural) especially, so that his diet is not just stuff spawned from MFA programs; to see the real world and forget his own little special self.

Still, I will write his letter: the way he wrote his reply suggested he may know that already.

The University of Maryland and one other stateside institution, back a kind of ‘medical’ program offered by something called the Ibero-Americal University with its seat in Costa Rica. In this country where there is no real education or culture, such ‘universities’ spring up like hollyhocks. This is now quite common. Our universities are now just marketers, and the underdeveloped countries are the ‘huddled masses’ of the day: ripe for academic exploitation.

-----------------------------------------------

My London bookseller, John Sandoe, is usually very good to me. I patronize them because they have taste, because all writers should support independent booksellers, because they deserve our custom (at full price). I buy most of my books in England because I like well-produced books as objects, too, and America now binds in plastic, uses heavy paper, and is otherwise unattractive.

When I go into Sandoe’s, I let each of its staff pick a book I might like. They have batted at about .800, which is pretty high. Until this last time, when they passed off on me two novels that were complete disgraces. Both of them, of course, bore the usual accolades, Thomas Leverett’s The Exchange-Rate between Love and Money (which the Guardian found ‘dazzling) was simply unreadable. On the first page I was offered Frito, who’d ‘heard about this amazing thing love, had been trying to score for some years – He’d painted a target on every girl he met and shot himself out of a cannon at them, but none ever withstood the impact.’ Anyone who thinks that has anything to do with love is simply a smart-aleck. I did twenty pages of that one and then fled.

The second, Simon Mawrer’s The Glass Room (‘a thing of extraordinary beauty and symmetry’) had an unbearably turgid story line – a Jugendstil house – to which, as in those epitomies of history published by earnest divines in the nineteenth century, a set of ‘characters’ were marched through. There were Nazis and Jews and artists and women who smoked cigarettes in elongated holders, venal servants and nasty little communist bureaucrats. None with any life whatever.

That one I read all the way through. The author was so goddam earnest I would have felt it lacking in charity not to wave goodbye to him at the end.

Blog is up again

2010-11-15T15:38:00.000-08:00

Apologies to my readers. It was not a good summer and I was ill and uncommunicative.

Also it seemed the Blog needed re-thinking.

It is now more a journal of what goes through my mind that I think might be of interest to others.

IRELAND & THE TROUBLES

I re-read as I read, a lot. Last week five novels by William Trevor, who is by a long shot the best living writer in English. Fools of Fortune which alas I will finish today, made me reflect the Great War, the Spanish Civil War in the mid-‘Thirties, and the more recent dismemberment of Yugoslavia are cut of the same cloth. They can’t be extirpated from Irish, Spanish or Serb memories; injustices, follies, were committed during these events and there will forever be family connections to those acts and crimes. They will all have lost something valuable.

The big totalitarianisms of the past century, in contrast, were vast, impenetrable and anonymous. It was talk one heard, or other peoples’ memories. The fouler for that, but not so personal.

OF BURMA

My memory was jogged by hearing of the release of Aung San Suu Kyi. An old friends from my Sunday Times days, Mihir Bose, had made me read a little twentieth century Burmese history, in which his father – mysteriously killed in a plane flying to Japan – played a part. If I remember rightly, this fetching lady’s father was the head of Burma’s communist party, which thought it better to collaborate with the Japanese invader than submit to British rule.

The lady cannot, then, be said to spring full-blown from. Jove’s brow. There, too, there is a family history.

It is curious that in moments of euphoria, democracy and whatnot, all sense of history is lost. Does anyone remember anything?

FROM SUBLIME TO RIDICULOUS

Now there is to be a Library (or something) Prize for homosexual literature for the young. Will it be literature, which is just that, with no adjective preceding it?

WHY FOOLS RUSH AND THE SMART WAVER

It took some time to get the actual words our President used in the press conference after the recent election. Here is the gist of what interested me:

“There is a inherent danger in being in the White House and being in the bubble. I mean, folks didn’t have any complaints about my leadership style when I was running around Iowa for a year. And they got a pretty good look at me up close and personal, and they were able to lift the hood and kick the tires, and I think they understood that my story was theirs. I might have a funny name, I might have lived in some different places, but the values of hard work and responsibility and honesty and looking out for one another that had been instilled in them by their parents, those were the same values that I took from my mom and my grandparents.

“When you’re in this place, it is hard not to seem removed. Those letters that I read every night, some of them just break my heart. But nobody is filming me reading those letters. And so it’s hard, I think, for people to get a sense of, well, how is he taking in all this information?”

A President who can both think and feel can’t be all bad. I’ve known presidents and nabobs and big shots, and there’s a part of most people that wants power. But ultimately my observation is in accord with Lord Acton’s. Exercising power over others will kill you. You live by it, you die by it. It is the biggest bubble there is: when no one’s left who dares say, ‘I don’t think you should do that.’ Power deletes thought in those around you.

I thought it was a pretty remarkable thing to say to the nation.

THE WORLD CUP BLOG FROM TROL

2010-07-01T01:52:00.000-07:00

INTRODUCTION

Those who know this magazine and its Editor are aware that he has always been deeply involved in and written a great deal about Sports. Given the absolutely desperate level of writing about football (the world game, not the NFL which he also cherishes) as evinced by Sports Illustrated (the most ignorant), USA Today, ESPN, etc., this blog may also serve as a sort of corrective. It has been written day by day for a Polish newspaper and e-mailed to a few friends. Why deny it to others?

It is available here in reverse order: that is, the most recent report is also the first.

GOSSIP BEFORE ARMAGEDDON (July 1)

Should you think there are enough dictators about football, here's
fresh news for you:

1. The Paramount Chief (Sorry, President) of Nigeria, that excellent
footballer, has banned the entire Nigerian team from all competition
for two years. For dishonoring,the Nation! I truly love that, but do
not think that England is likelly to follow suit.

2. Ashley Cole, Chelsea and England fullback was so indiscreet to his
friends as to say that he 'hated England and its fans'. At least here
is a case of a player saying what he really thinks. I do not take it
for granted that athletes, in football or elsewhere, are intelligent.
They are bodies and minds hired for a decade and then replaced. The
new Italian team coach, Prandelli, was on holiday in Zanzibar during
the early stages of the World Cup. He took reading matter with him:
Jorge Luis Borges and Jean-Paul Sartre. That qualifies him in sporting
circles as a raging intellectual. In the US, that would be enough to
disbar him from public office.

But Ashley Cole? Well, most of the talk about him is about girls. Now, then, ex, current, future. All of them exceedingly boring. A good player on the way down.

3. Now that is certainly popular with the tabloids, so maybe it is not
so nutty to suggest that David Beckham should take Capello's place as
England's manager. Besides falling apart and faking injury during a
previous WC, the appointment of another cheat to a high position in
football would go down well in certain quarters. You could say Beckham fits. With Maradona, Henry, Zidane and company

4. Does anyone know the whereabouts or destinations of North Korea's
vanquished team? The last batch 'disappeared'. Or should that ve, 'were disappeared'?

5. I read in the Colombian press an urgent question: as Brazil is the
host nation in 2014, does that mean that South America will have only
four 'other' teams in consideration? Answer: So far, yes. Given the
number of football associations on that continent, S. America already
has the hghest proportion of participants.

6. Of the nineteen referees still in action (or available), few are
notable for their performances. Larrionda (Spain) and Rossetti (Italy)
have been tossed for egregious mistakes, though Rossetti was far less
at fault. But one other sent home was Swiss, Massimo Busacca. He
doesn't know why. No one does. There are suggestions that he was sent
home for daring to put the South African team out too soon.

7. Final Expectoration: by one C. Ronaldo, at or near the TV cameras.
They are not pleased with the Glamor Boy in Portugal. His predecessor,
Luis Figo, says the lad lacks respect for the team, the game and his
nation. The special one, Jose Mourinho, rushed to his aid, as he does
with all his players. If the team loses, Mourinho explained, I am to
blame; if it wins, the credit is theirs. More polish than spit there,
Joze!

.

MAGAZINE BUSINESS

2010-06-13T00:13:00.000-07:00

TYhe Editor is currently in Europe obsessing with the World Cup. Regular business with be restored in late August.

We expect to launch TRoL books in the Fall. The first list will be advertised here.

ISRAEL AND 'HUMANITARIAN' RELIEF

2010-05-31T12:23:00.000-07:00

Imagine, if you will, that along the Cote d'Azure of France some goodly portion of the Arab population of France -- perhaps rightly inflamed by the secular state's banning of the burkha -- has been running an enclave that includes Cannes. These French Palestinians, once citizens of France, have refused participation in the central (Israeli) government. They and metropolitan France have been at intermittent war for some years, especially since elections on the Enclave brought a more radically Islamic government to power. You may, and should, assume that there are rights and wrongs on both sides, and that the blockaded Enclave is suffering as a result of a French blockade.

Now imagine that five ships are organized to create a propaganda coup by friendly Islamic powers, not to speak of various do-goodies, and that these ships should -- despite endless warnings and alternative offers -- head straight for Cannes and are headed off by French troops (the famous paras) and in the resultant melee, ten allied Muslim men (mostly Turks) should be killed. Would France be condemned?

The parallel is fairly consistent with reality. I know of no tenet of international law that proscribes a sovereign state's defense of its own integrity. The blockade may be poor policy; it may even by some thought to be immoral, but it is certainly not illegal if a state of war exists between the Enclave and France. I have no doubt that there is suffering on both sides, but what state can tolerate being under constant attack? Who would support France if it failed to protect its own citizens?

Since its founding in 1947, Israel has fought many wars to preserve its integrity. It is a tiny country surrounded by hostile states. The Enclave's international 'support' has come only from other Islamic states: and from the academic Left and other elements of the old pro-Arab elements in the UK Foreign Office. Four ships were boarded safely, one was not. Those on board that fifth ship -- does it matter who fired first, when we know who first resisted the boarding? -- knew what the consequences of resistance would be. And resisted.

In a politically correct world, the ensuing brouhaha is predictable and no less wrong.

THE TRoL REVIEW OF OLD BOOKS

2010-05-21T07:16:00.000-07:00

Here is a new and untimely feature: taking a look at books that I would guess are not much looked at.

Matthew Josephson: The Politicos, 1938

Lately I've asked a cross-section of friends and correspondents to name US presidents between U.S. Grant and the turn of the twentieth century. The record of correct answers belongs to a gent who was raised in Brooklyn's public schools in a period when kids still got educated. He reeled off four names. Most people are lucky to get one or two -- though Polk is a popular nominee, perhaps because no one can remember a damned thing about him. Wrong, however: his merited oblivion is pre Civil War.

Here is the Rogues' Gallery:

Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley.

It is possible they have been erased from memory because all but one of them (Cleveland) were Big Business Republicans in what constitutes a period of our history -- that of the Robber Barons and the political Bosses -- that we would rather forget.

I re-read these books because I thought I discerned a certain relevance between the aftermath of the Civil War and our own post-1989 world, the connecting thread, in a word, being Greed. As a kid coming to America in 1939, that was not a word I associated with the United States. Generous, yes; Greedy, no. Well, , we've come a long way, Baby!

The chances are that Josephson was a bit of a Lefty. During the New Deal, this was no crime. He is not much a man of words, but of hard facts: how the Republicans struck unionists from the rolls; how it contrived to defeat Andrew Johnson, because he thought the question of Negro suffrage was amatter for the several states; how that block of votes led to a party seizing control of the state, while leaving enfranchised Negroes nothing and sustaining, for electoral purposes, a military occupation of the southern states; how offices were bought and sold; how the thirty years of Republican dominance was maintained by funds handed the party by the trusts in an equable quid pro quo; how petty officials, beneficiaries of party patronage were taxed at election time; how the federal budget was regularly robbed by the party and its patrons -- in other words, all the sordid details of corruption and influence-peddling.

I don't think any of us need to be told that hypocrisy is a much-practiced art -- for politicians, the very heart of the matter is how they will be perceived. Nothing new about that. As professors of cant, few can equal the great Massacusetts abolitionists. On behalf of their mills they could see that the industrial supremacy of the North would best be advanced by the destruction of the agricultural South, hence abolishing its slave-owning economy, in the name of 'freedom', was something that would greatly benefit their own growth. It was a clarion-call of patriotism that did the job, and for forty-odd years, Republicans were nicely able to run the country without the southern-based Democrats: in the name of the Union.

And? you may well ask.

Well, I seem to detect in all that more than a whiff of What is good for General Motors is good for America: especially if we bail out the former and set the lawyers loose on the enemy -- those bloody Asians who actually own our country: a form of conduct which can only benefit the Lawyer Empire based on Tort. Back in the happy days of good business government (not Halliburton but the railroads, the iron barons, the whiskey circle) someone thought up a good caper: take over what is now the Dominican Republic; the only constraint was the notion that it wasn't really worth (financially) taking over. Oh, I am perfectly sure that making BP pay to clean up its mess in the Gulf has nothing whatever to do with the oil interests that governed, and still govern, our policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to speak of Iran. Very sure.

Reading old books puts you in old places. I commend the practice.

Next: Felix Frankfurter.

THE SIMPLE ARITHMETIC OF VOTING

2010-05-08T06:50:00.000-07:00

There are some very simple facts about the recent UK elections that I think bear reflection; on this side of the Atlantic they are clearly not very well understood.

1. This is a 'hung' parliament, which means that no one party has a clear majority. Despite television's attempt to dumb us all down, UK voters were not choosing between three party leaders, Messrs Cameron, Brown and Clegg, but among 650 distinct parliamentary seats, most of them contested by between six and ten-plus candidates.

2. The final results were, in terms of seats: Conservatives: 306, Labor: 258, Liberal Democrats: 57, Others: 28.

3. In terms of popular votes, the results were: Conservatives: 36.1%, Labor: 29%, Liberal Democrats: 23%, Others: 11.9%.

4. Conclusion: A little over 1/3 of the popular vote is not a democratic mandate for a conservative government. Thus, two possibilities exist: (1) A coalition between one or more parties, or (2) a minority government which can be overthrown by any adverse vote.

5. If popular votes are what counts, then these offer tantalizing possibilities. Assuming that the 'Others', a host of nationalist parties, would split evenly (a big assumption), the two major coalitions possible would be: Conservative 36.1% + Liberal Democrats 23.0% + Others 6% would give Mr. Cameron the theoretical backing of 65.1% of votes cast. The alternative alliance would be: Labor 29% + Liberal Democrats 23% + Others 6%, or 58%. If politics were simple, that would suggest the first alternative would form the government, and in all probability, it will.

Buried in all this simple arithmetic is the main Liberal Democrat argument that the current first-past-the-post electoral system (winner takes all) is unfair. In this, they are absolutely correct. In fact, the Conservative 36.1% of the overall vote produced 47% of the seats; for their 29% of the vote, Labor got 39.6% of the seats; while for their 23% of the vote, the Liberal Democrats got only 8.7% of the seats.

Does this mean that it takes four times as many popular votes to elect a Liberal Democrat than a Conservative. NO! It just means that in a number of constituencies, a shift of a few hundred votes would have produced a far different result.

We are a first-past-the-post nation, and our system is every bit as inherently unfair as the UK system. But ours is a presidential system; the UK's is not. And God bless the UK system for that. The Prime Minister may have a cozy home at 10 Downing Street, but it has no swimming pool in the basement, its own tennis court, Air Force One and the kind of worship and importance we offer our president, worthy or not. When he goes to work, the PM is simply the chair of a cabinet meeting and the titular 'head' of his party. Unlike a president, he does not have to appear among the rowdies of the House or the Nodders of the Senate to advance his legislation.

One might think that Mr. Clegg's troops are the ones with the greatest grievance, and that is indeed so. That is why their part in any possible alliance rests on a 'reform' of the UK electoral system, so that the popular vote is better reflected in the distribution of representatives.

Here, another vital factor comes into play. Under the UK system, and most European systems of Proportional Representation, a government may fall when it is unable to obtain a vote of confidence on a critical piece of legislation, such as the Budget. The US government cannot fall. A president may fail to get his budget (or anything else) passed a dozen or more times; he and his legislators perforce have to work things out. That is because president and legislators have set terms of office, which is something Mr. Clegg would like to see, and I would not.

The UK's current system has its faults, but it also has many advantages: (1) it is very local and therefore responsive to the problems of each constituency; (2) it is fallible, and may readily be punished (by the dissolution of parliament) if its legislation is faulty or out of touch with public opinion -- how many times in the past year wished we could have a snap election and rid ourselves of certain noxious legislators? --; and (3) the absence of set terms means that election campaigns do not start the moment a legislator is elected, but are limited to thirty days, which essentially means that money has far less of a chance to influence the result.

The faults of PR are obvious. Italy, for instance, can be so unstable that as many as three governments may (and have) fall within a month. On the other hand, Italy's president is no monarch: as Messrs Sarkozy and Obama seem to think they are. The Italian president is trotted out to cut ribbons, inspect honor guards, and receive political leaders in search of forming a government -- functions performed ably, in the United Kingdom, by H.M. the Queen.

Could it be that democracy itself has its faults, and that it is, as was famously said, the worst possible form of government except for all the others?

LITERARY MAGAZ,INES

2010-05-01T19:13:00.000-07:00

http//thefastertimes.com/fiction/2010/04/27/a-new-literary-magazine-ranking

This is a quite nifty and intelligent attempt to do the impossible.

It started out as a ranking and then became a list. In the earlier version, TRoL managed to be in the fifth tier, which I guess you might call the Honorable Mentions. In the subsequent listing, we are still there.

The author's criteria for selection seem to me sound, at least in part, the question being 'If you were a writer, to whom should you try to flog your merchandise?' The objective of most writers being to get themselves published, notice and (possibly) paid, there are an awful number of variables in the mix, but this is an honest attempt to give advice.

Here are some thoughts on the subject:

1. I don't think Pushcart or O.Hara awards are a sound basis for scoring. I know I wince when I have to send copies to Pushcart, though their hearts are undoubtedly in the right place. At best, publication in Pushcarft (and yes, we have won some, I think), is a sign of competence: not of originality or significance. As for O. Hara, I pass. I know nothing about it.

2. The fundamental error is that the list of magazines is parochial. TRoL is an international magazine. We publish the best literature we can find. Oddly enough, it's been some time since America led in the field, so we have to find mss among the French, the Italians, the Poles, the Russians, the Latin Americans and so on. Most of the magazines listed are pretty monoglot.

3. There is a generational gap among magazines, which is related to circulation, location, gossip and trivia. TRoL is my ninth magazine, and when I look back over a sixty-year career in the field, I think I can safely say that the anthology (Saul Bellow & Keith Botsford: Editors, available from the Toby Press) of this magazine and its predecessors, is ample evidence of our quality. But we are probably not as up to date as some. We just do our work. We don't Facebook or Twitter.

4. There are also peculiarities to TRoL which go unacknowledged in such a listing. We are the ONLY magaz,ine I know of that will publish texts up to book-length; we are the ONLY magazine that consistently revisits, in the Archives section, literature that has been forgotten or unjustly neglected.

5. The purpose of the listing is weighted towards magazines to which writers should submit. We are committed to publishing a magazine in which the intelligent Reader, be he writer or not, can find a sense of discovery.

6. It needs also to be said that in the magazines listed, some are commercial, and most are subsidized. TRoL owes nothing to anyone. We don't have 'student' readers, or juries to select what gets published. We don't apply for grants. One old man does all the work and foots the bill. I guess that makes us, however estimable, relicts.

AFGHANISTAN, AGAIN

2010-04-29T05:27:00.000-07:00

The Italian bi-monthly LIMES, edited by Lucio Carracciolo, is perhaps the one absolutely indispensable geopolitical magazine in existence: well-informed, independent, clearly written by a world-wide array of expert scholars, and accompanied by excellent maps, it has -- despite its substantial sale -- only one serious defect: it is written in Italian, meaning that it is not as widely read as it deserves to be, in western intelligence circles.

Its current issue, on Afghanistan, raises some very interesting questions. I am quite sure that our 'authorities' know all about such questions; the problem is that we the citizens and voters, probably do not. Here, as a public service, I offer just one of many snippets in the issue: on the parlous question of Osama bin Laden.

To be completely transparent, let me state that I have been among the 'correspondents' of LIMES for at least the past twenty years.

The extract below is from an article by Margherita Paolini about Pakaf ( Pakistan/Afghanistan), in the author's words, the 'key' to the whole Afghan problem.

"The declared objective of the United States is, as a pre-condition for their political re-integration, to obtain from the Taliban a definitive guarantee that they have broken off their relations with Al-Qaeda. If this refers to the Zawahiri-bin Laden group of the second half of the 1990s, progressively reprived of its leadership from 2002 on and deprived of its political audience by decision of the ISI [the Pakistani intelligence agency] after 2004, there would be no problem. That Al-Qaeda belongs to a remote past. Just this last September [2009] Mullah Omar declared that the Taliban was willing to do so, and that the only remaining issue in its negotiations with the United States was the date by which foreign troops would leave the country, as in Iraq (the preferred model for Pakistan).

"If on the other hand the United States refers to the terrorist activities of other groups operating under the Al-Qaeda banner -- such as Paklistani groups -- and these other groups may not even be named, then the problem remains. The danger of such groups and their infiltration into the Pakistani government was clearly shown in the David Coleman Headley, alias Daud Gilani, affair. The son of a diplomat and at home in the right circles in the United States, Gilani was able to plan in detail the acknowledged attacks in Mumbai.

"In this context, the American challenge to terrorism, with its current intelligence strategy amd without an unconditional structural collaboration with the Pakistani government and the ISI, risk becoming as dangerous a pantomime as it was under Bush.

"The question as to whether Osama bin Laden is dead or alive is another oddity. It's not so much a matter of the videos and tape-recordings themselves, most of them quite obviously fake, but of their content, which in no way corresponds to Osama's known ideology: especially in regard to keeping the umma unified against its enemies, the United States, Israel and those nations in the Islamic world who betray Islamic principles. It was always a bin Laden priority not to exacerbate or broaden the religious divide between Sunni and Shia Islam. The exact opposite is what happen in Iraq with Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, whose true patrons are to be found among Sunni intengralist ideologues who consider Shiites heretics, a stance which coincided perfectly with Pakistani jihadism.

"Bin Laden was most probably liquidated in December-January 2001-2002 when Osama was residing in the secret hospital of the Binori madrasi in Karachi. The appropriate person, whom bin Laden trusted, was to hand: Omar Said Sheikh, who co-ordinated relations between Osama and the ISI (and who also turns up in the Bhutto assassination). This Omar was cited by the FBI as the man responsible for the killing of the American journalist Pearl; he was tried in Pakistan and condemned to death to take him out of American hands. The death-sentence was never carried out. In fact, Omar Said, safe in a military prison in Rawalpindi, was able to follow the Mumbai attacks and sought to precipitate a crisis between India and Pakistan with counterfeit telephone calls (using British sim cards) to isolate both the Pakistani president, Zardari and the Indian Foreign Minister Mukherjee. His objective, quickly frustrated, was to transfer Pakistani troops from the tribal areas to the Indian frontier.

"Sooner or later, Omar said will be freed if the lead terrorist in the trial of the Al-Qaeda Seven, the Pakistani Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, admits to being himself responsible for the murder of Pearl."

FLASH STUFF

2010-04-26T15:50:00.000-07:00

When I first got wind of something called 'flash fiction', I had to ask about to find out what it was. The Republic is a backward sort of place when it comes to what is fashionable in New York.

In case my readers are no more trendy than I, let me explain: flash fiction is a new fad designed for the dumb who write with their thumbs. Short, very short, even exiguous 'stories' a few lines long. They've sprouted like weeds, get distributed on the Net and sent to all and sundry like so much literary spam. I have been sent several score in the last week alone.

This would not matter had it not been brought to my attention that our Contributing Editor, James Wood, had written in praise of someone called Lydia Davis. I could not check this out, for I do not subscribe the The New Yorker. I used to, but my copies never arrived. Supposing the report to be true, and knowing James, I have to believe the woman has something going for her. And if she doesn't, it is also true that any critic can have his idiosyncrasies, and if you're as good a reader and as thoughtful a critic as Mr. Wood, so be it. After all, there are people who think Alberto Manguel is Hot Stuff.

Now it turns out that Harper's -- once a solid, even stollid magazine -- has published some FF. I read but one, so banal and inane I had to read its 40 words or so several times to see if it did not contain a coded message of great import. No, it didn't. It was what it appeared to be: boy, girl, two kids and the perfect life.

I think this form has great potentiality for porn. You read it here first. Flash Porn. I offer the first (though not to Harper's):

He didn't know where to put it. He tried a flower poet; it broke. The mare bolted. Then came Amanda.

I particularly like the double entendre in Amanda coming.

As any fifty pieces of this rubbish could be written in an hour and sent --for instance to the once rigorous Farrar, Strauss & Giroux -- let the Creative Imagination flow freely! There's nothing difficult about writing. Or flashing. Whether you open the mental, or the trouser zip.

Oh no! Not you, James!

REALITY CHECKS IN ARIZONA

2010-04-25T06:02:00.000-07:00

I don't often agree with TRoL Contributor Anis Shivani (See 'Huntsville') -- he belongs to a committed Left most sensible people have long seen as irrelevant, if not positively dangerous. But in the present ,nstance Shivani is dead right, and the fact that his posting is from Huffington should deter no one from reading him.

There is also one other thing we share. We are among the many people who are disillusioned, disappointed and disenchanted by the president for whom we all had some affection and many hopes. It's doubtful that we can reach the man in his present eminence. Nonetheless, the message must be impressed on him: that not A SINGLE ONE of his campaign promises -- from Guantanamo through health reform or Afghanistan -- HAS BEEN KEPT. Not one.

Maybe some of this is due to Republican obstructionism, maybe some of it due to the inherent inefficiency of our legislative branch, but the blame must fall squarely on Obama himself: a man of charm and intelligence, but just another standard politician making hay while the sun still shines.

When it comes to Arizona's new immigration policy, I urge you to read Shivani's post below.

IMMIGRATION A L'ARIZONA

2010-04-24T15:20:00.000-07:00

THE HUFFINGTON POST

'Obama and the Arizona Immigration Law'

Anis Shivani

Posted: April 24, 2010 01:57 PM

The key provision to worry about in this repressive legislation is the idea that anyone illegally present in the state of Arizona broke the law. Law enforcement is authorized to go after people who are suspected of committing this misdemeanor.

Yet in the Schumer/Graham immigration plan being touted by Obama, the central idea is to make undocumented immigrants accept that they "broke the law." What does this mean? Admit that they committed a misdemeanor? Or a felony? Forever after be branded as criminals, and lose certain rights or privileges attached to citizenship?

Obama never said a word in support of the humane Gutierrez legislation introduced in the House in December 2009. As expected, he got behind the far more punitive Schumer/Graham plan.

Arizona has only taken the (im)moral lead from the White House and taken it to its logical, extreme conclusion.

At no point in the last year and a half have Obama and his people tried to change the tone on immigration. Raids continue. Deportations are at record levels, despite the presumably far smaller flow of immigrants due to the depressed economy. The idea of criminality has become completely intertwined with immigration. The administration makes no attempt to sever the connection; instead, it emphasizes it at every turn.

Schumer/Graham want a biometric identity card for all Americans. Arizona is just trying to do it in a clumsy, manual, heavy-handed way. The idea is the same. Brown people are to be suspected from the get-go until they can clear their name.

The Arizona law is the natural outcome of caving in to xenophobia and exaggerated fears of terrorism at the federal level. Sure, Arizona is crazy, reprehensible, self-destructive. They'll bring ruin on their own economy, for one thing. But the feds are no less insane and "misguided," to use Obama's own language.

This is the price to pay for a year and a half of indifference to constitutional procedures. In an environment where the federal government continues to operate secret prisons, refuses to end the Guantanamo principle, and doesn't unequivocally separate itself from torture, why should the Arizona law be any surprise?

It's been Obama, far more than Bush, who has successfully implemented the idea at the practical level that local law enforcement is the appropriate agency to enforce immigration laws. Janet Napolitano, former Arizona governor, is firmly behind the idea. Yet they act surprised when Arizona formalizes the principle.

Instead of prospectively warning Arizona of having to face the full brunt of the law, Obama calmly announces that his administration will look into possible illegality. Sure, let things take their course, and meanwhile use the opportunity to tout your own criminalizing piece of legislation.

What "reform" can we expect at the federal level? It won't just be Arizona immigrants having to admit they broke the law. It will be all undocumented immigrants. It's okay if Obama presents it as "reform."

LITERARY SQUABBLES

2010-04-21T02:52:00.000-07:00

Friends send me links to the small wars insistently being waged on the many battlefields of literature. One such received yesterday revealed -- shock! horror! -- that the editor of Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR), one Ted Genoways (an old Immigration mis-hearing of Genovese?) had published his own work, that there are subsidies involved, and that he is grossly overpaid (any editor who is paid at all is overpaid is my opinion) because he is a buddy of higher-ups at the University of Virginia. The link was to a pleasant site belonging to the West Coast magazine Zyzzyva, http://Zyzzivaspeaks.blogspot.com/2008/09/ted-genoways-inserts-himself.html.

I can't say I'm a regular reader of the VQR, nor of its editor's poetry. To the specifics of the case I am therefore blind -- though aroused to hear that this editorial machinery is supported in the five-zero range by that illustrious university. Mr. G. may be a good poet or he may be a bad one; the principle is the same. Editors can do as they damned please. But is this editor the fons et origo of his journal? or has he a master, the university? If the latter, he can only do as he damned pleases if he doesn't offend his master.

Now, largely speaking, universities and university presses are gentle if reluctant masters. All sorts of universities have both magazines and presses, and if they were not intellectual softies, it's hard to beieve that their publications departments -- always expensive and hugely overstaffed -- would survive. Where in this hard world of ours would a real press exist, were it not in the cozy confines of the Academy? I consider it one of the great achievements of John Silber at Boston University to have stonewalled any attempt to create such a press, though he did pass over a couple of journals such as Agni. It is likely that having once been defrauded by the late William Phillips into acquiring what was left of the Partisan Review, he didn't wish to be bitten a second time. And Agni never had more than a modest subsidy -- nothing like the VQR.

What I find especially picturesque about VQR lies in the notion that literary magazines require editorial "staff time', peer reviews, or what the Kenyon Review 's editor sententiously calls an "Editorial Tree". How many editors does it take to 'edit' a poet?

I just don't see how anyone would be startled by the ambiguities of Mr. Genoway's publishing himself. All good editors who are also writers write in their magazines. It is an essential part of their functions. Readers and subscribers are entitled to know how qualified the editor is to pass judgment on what they are given to read. If he should happen to express a fancy for one of the current voltigeurs -- say a Paul Auster -- tant pis, too bad. The high wire is a tricky place for literary toddlers. It isn't as though literary log-rolling were anything new: the Scratch Principle works up and down the literary ladder. That's how writers plan their rise, while other writers plan their rivals' fall.

PRESS

2010-04-13T14:19:00.000-07:00

A Mr. Dana Milbank, a columnist at the Washington Post, feels seriously aggrieved that the press was excluded from the meetings of the forty-odd heads of state meeting in Washington to discuss nuclear proliferation. Good grief! The boys and girls who so entertain us with questions when they are admitted, had to do without their sandwiches and peanuts?

I have attended press conferences and such events for decades: so puerile and provincial were the questions asked -- not to speak of the answers given -- that I made myself a rule: where the press goes (whether in their scores or their hundreds) there go not I. To admit the press to such occasions is to exclude diplomacy, which is a personal matter. I never felt I had any entitlement to information; I had to overhear gossip, to question friends, to move about in the shadows, to talk to assistants and assistants to assistants to get what I wanted. And what I wanted was not some handout, but a feel for the event and the people involved.

This whine from Mr. Milbank, on behalf of media to whom no one pays serious attention, is particularly absurd when the subject discussed is clearly one in which (a) high risk is involved. and (b) the President could be expected to discuss, openly, such intelligence information as he had. Kowtowing to our dim press and even dimmer television is one of our fatal mistakes. Good reporters are discreet and have long-standing relationships with people who move about in government circles. When both sides -- press and the state -- have built up relations of mutual respect, then reporting and governing both become better. All that a reporter needs to know is much more likely to come over a good dinner with a trusted source than from any number of press conferences.

The sad truth is that our reporters have largely become adversaries, and not very good ones at that. That is not how you get invited to the high table. For that, you have to be interesting in and of yourself, have decent manners, and know your place.

POLAND

2010-04-11T09:20:00.000-07:00

The few people who read The Republic Letters -- which in the current issue published Josez Czapski's account of Katyn -- will be able to view some (but not all) of the terrible ironies involved in the crash, at Smolensk, of a plane carrying Poland's president and much of its political leadership. My Google News, ever quick to be utterly superficial, headed its lead story with the headline that we needn't worry: the stock market would quickly recover. Well, that's nice to know.

Regardless of the lives and histories of the 97 people who died in the crash -- the political leadership in Poland is not that different from our own, consisting in equal portions of self-importance and a Faustian bargain with that elusive commodity, power -- that the crash should have taken place where and when it did is catastrophic. It re-awakens old wounds: the destruction of Poland's elites by the Soviet Union (precisely what the fatal flight was to commemorate); the criminal annihilation of Poland in 1939 by Hitler and Stalin; the miserable self-destruction of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, so ill-planned that it was doomed to failure; the utter failure of Poland's allies to meet their treaty obligations; the Soviet army encamped on the right bank of the Vistula watching Warsaw being razed to the ground; and the horrors of being so long -- from 1945 to 1989 -- relegated to a satrapy of Russia. Worst of all, the Polish tendency to hallow, internally, in its very soul, the worm of Doubt: are they the only people in Europe to be continually mocked by fate and by some inner failure?

As I wrote in a letter of condolence to my many Polish friends -- since Saul Bellow's death I have far more friends and equals in Poland than in the debased culture of the United States -- 'In Poland one does not "make" politics; one dies of it.

This is what Marek Bienczyk wrote back from Warsaw:

'The symbols flutter about us like recycled rags; it's hard not to think of them. On the other hand, I am enraged: not just a catastrophe, as you say, but yet another piece of Polish fatuity: the plane should never have tried to land in those conditions. But time pressed, the ceremony was to start in a half-hour, the pilot (perhaps urged on by the president) made his decision.

"The nation reacted y doing what it does best: candles lit, hymns, endless masses of people, priests on TV, debates: unde malum? Who's to blame? Forms of extreme masochism, the same old romantic resentment: what is bad shall be turned to good; we must be angelized, become living angels. It drives me crazy. Five minutes of thought, postpone the ceremony for three hours and not land. It was another Warsaw Uprising: doomed to failure,

"Yes, of course, I went out in the evening and lit my own candle."

NATIONAL ANTHEMS

2010-04-05T07:37:00.000-07:00

So I watched an unremarkable Opening Day game at Fenway.

By now I am innured to what happens to that most akward anthem every written, the Star Spangled Banner. Babes wreck it in halter tops (what would you expect from Miami?), rock-stars distort it for a few hundred thousand, and sometimes you still get it straight: from Marine bands, little kids, fresh-faced sopranos and the like. Most of this is pretty disgusting, but then our anthem is no great shakes anyway. If it brings tears to your eyes, it must be nostalgia. I mean, compared with the bersaglieri quick-stepping through the operatic Italian anthem, the Marseillaise (which has a residual meaning -- Get your guns out, Citizens!), the delicious harmonies of the Dutch or God Save the Queen, the words and music of our anthem are pretty stinky.

So awful in fact are they that they too have become part of the entertainment industry. They tell the poor guy or girl, go out there and do what you can with it. Well, last night, in the seventh inning, we got an old crock from Aerosmith, fresh from rehab and with a well-scrubbed daughter by his side, doing what he could with its rival, God Bless America, a treacle tart for which I have no appetite whatever. I can fairly report two things about Mr. Tyler's performance: drugs or no, he can neither sing nor speak English. Yekh! Those sprawling nasal vowels, those indeterminate high notes, those worn and abused vocal cords!

In the eighth inning we were treated to one Neil Diamond and his Slick Chestnut, Sweet Caroline. The man wouldn't excel accompanying a palm court orchestra at the Plaza or, for that matter, leaning on a piano somewhere South of Liberace. But he was utterly harmless and amiable: a little like the Sox and their owner.

The crowd seemed entranced; but then who ever said that Sox fans were a discriminating lot?

We are an odd lot, those of us who can remember that a certain solemnity came with our national anthems. Solemnity and respect. However wretched the blasted anthems are -- try the Argentine on for size, which goes on and on! -- I ask you to consider what would happen were any of our bimbos, or Mr. Tyler, to 'sing' the Marseillaise on Bastille Day! Come on, Citizens, reach for your guns!

PRIESTS AND PAEDOPHILIA

2010-04-03T19:53:00.000-07:00

I have no intention to open a debate on the Church and sexual abuse.

I would merely like to ask how many New York Times or Guardian readers or reporters have been employed in the care of deaf, destitute or orphaned children: as volunteers, in the name of charity?

When Italy became a state in 1870, one of the first acts of the new national regime was to abolish all church institutions -- whether astronomical observatories, orphanages or homes for Incurables. The result was a huge burden on the state and its tax-payers. What is astonishing is not that some priests failed in their duty of care, but that all religious institutions should be stigmatized for the errors of the few: as though such abuse did not exist in state instututions.

Selfless charity is a gift: that some abuse it is horrid and reprehensible. But it happens. Shall we have, perhaps, a bringing to account of those who operated the Gulag? Would we rather personally man institutes for deaf children? How many bed-pans have the pampered press emptied recently?

I particularly enjoy, however, the 'official' Jewish response to the sermon by Pope's preacher which compared the atacks on the Church to the Holocaust. There seems to be a gold standard for suffering out there: screw Rwandans, abused children in Eire, the citizens of Zimbabwe: only the Jewish extermination counts. It's incommensurable.

I beg to differ. All human suffering is and should be shared by all. It is all wrong. There are no world records in suffering or death.

DRUG QUEENS, OLLIE NORTH & AFGHANISTAN

2010-04-02T08:20:00.000-07:00

It was not at all reassuring to drop in on CNN last night and find that ageing figure of other splendid American external policies, Ollie North, interviewing the lady boss of the DEA -- The Drug Enforcement Agency -- in some picturesque landscape in a rural area of Helmand province in Afghanistan (from which my son returned after six months of harrowing duty.) It had been freshly 'reconquered' (and of course would soon enough return to its earlier status.)

The lady in question wore some sort of bulge about her middle, presumably bullet-proof, and, prompted by Ollie, managed to smile wanly as she said that her visit was made in the hope of 'interdicting' the opium crop in that part of the world.

Why?

For several thousand years opium, or its derivative, morphine (laudanum) has been the analgesic of choice. Like most other 'natural' drugs -- coca leaves, quinine, etc. -- opium will not harm you. Their chemical derivatives -- heroin, cocaine, atropine -- can and will kill you if you use them to excess. Nor is addiction to opium per se in any way harmful. It is a peaceful drug, and in my parents' house in London there was no social approbrium of any kind attached to its consumption: as Sherlock Holmes well knew, or Harold Acton, that remarkable historian, who died peacefully in his nineties after life-long use.

One would think that the United States, which invented Prohibition and its accompanying gang wars, would have learned something since the early 'Twenties. But not so. Nor has President Calderon in Mexico yet learned the lesson. Ban something, anything, and its price will go up; and if it is made scarce, the wrong sort of people will make more money. What has happened in Ciudad Juarez just across the border, is a direct result of the DEA's 'war on drugs'.

The end-buyer (oh, what a surprise!) is largely an American. A report in BOMB, that chi-chi mag in the Big Apple, details the platinum-haired art-dealers and others of the trendy set, passing the powder about with the hors d'oeuvres. It is sold right on school property. To the User, no harm comes -- one day his nose will rot, but he wasn't worth much to start with.

Before the DEA it was otherwise. Opium at least was available at a reasonable price in your local pharmacy, which kept a register, and sold no more to any addict than the quantity his addiction called for. We knew who smoked it, because we saw him at dinner parties: not zonked out, but fresh from writing, say, Kubla Khan.

The US Embassy in Bogota is the second largest in the world. We have so much diplomacy in Colombia? No. Because the DEA is there, living the life of Reilly. Meanwhile, the speedboats from Colombia drop off their commercial cocaine a few hundred meters from my beach. Our local drug sub-king, Edwin, owns the town I live in. His twelve-year-old son drives a car on the highway and on the beach in front of my house. Both are illegal of course, but no one will say boo to Edwin. He's just a local business-man. But he and the rest of them make their money straight from the DEA.

In Persia, opium was (and is) a source of poetry and pleasure; in New York, the only poetry lies in the money made by the dealers and the only pleasure lies in the swank of those platinum-haired twits as they snort. What was not a problem in my youth is now a Problem writ large. Who created it? the Prohibitionists.

GENOCIDE: ARMENIA & TURKEY

2010-03-12T05:47:00.000-08:00

Now that the poh-faced Swedes, along with their colleagues in the House Foreign Affairs Committee -- no doubt aroused by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose constituency contains a large and vocal Armenian contingent -- have delivered their marvelously self-satisfying verdict that , the events in Turkey during the Great War of 1914-1918, merit the word 'genocide', some little clarification would seem necessary. The word, a relatively new one, is much bandied about, but just how stable is our definition?

Over many years of teaching I would like to offer a strict definition which, if enshrined in international law, might serve some more useful purpose than labeling states or individuals responsible for acts which we all find deplorable, which do fit in under other sanctions of international law, such as war crimes, but should not be labeled genocide.

Here is the definition I favor:

Genocide is the systematic mass murder by a legitimate state of its own citizens, not for what they do but for what they are.

What fits?

First, and only so far, the German extinction of its Jewish population, whether accomplished within its borders or transported to other countries. The Hitler government in Germany was that of a legitimate state; the killing was massive; it was systematic and not sporadic, and Jews were its victims because they were Jews, something they could not avoid being.

What does not fit?

The undoubted crimes committed against Turkey's minority Armenians. This was sporadic, not systematic; it has not been proved to be enshrined in state legislation; the crimes can best be seen as acts of war and should be condemned as such -- as akin to the massacres on both sides during the Spanish Civil War or the conflicts in Rwanda.

The Pol Pot regime in Cambodia meets all the criteria save for one: theirs were the crimes of an illegitimate government.

Was the Soviet elimination of its Kulaks genocide? No. Though it often resulted in the death of its victims -- as the Gulag killed off its dissidents, real or imagined -- it was not conceived of as a mass killing.

More difficult is the case of non-German nationals, specifically Jews, who were indiscriminately slaughtered on the orders of the German government. It can be argued that Polish, French or Norwegian Jews were involved in acts of war (resistance) to German occupation. Their killing is certainly a war crime, but I would rather keep the definition of genocide as rigorous and restricted as possible, for only the clearest definition of such crimes against humanity can prevent their recurrence.

If this definition appeals to readers, I humbly request that they copy it on all available links so that it may be discussed widely. And may the Swedes and our beloved representatives come to grips a real, usable definition of the word.

RAY CHANDLER

2010-03-09T13:07:00.000-08:00

Chandler was always a classy writer, and his correspondence should be made required reading not just for writers' workshops but for various Nobel laureates of recent years, who strike me as utterly deprived of the common sense without which they are destined to the world of coteries.

In 1949 he wrote as follows:

I have always thought it one of the charms dealing with publishers that if you start talking about money, they retire coldly to their professional eminence, and if you start talking about literature, they immediately yank the dollar sign before your eyes.

I would remind younger readers that in 1949 publishers could still read and write.

NEWS, SORT OF

2010-02-22T21:02:00.000-08:00

TRoL #21 is now out. When our subscribers around the world receive their copies and the bookshops that carry the magazine have been suppplied, we expect to have under fifty copies left for new subscribers. I urge anyone interested in the magazine to e-mail us as soon as possible. We deliberately do not over-print copies. We ran out of #20 within the first week. The three copies in my possession are from subscribers who have moved without telling us.

If you click on our logo above, you will be sent directly to the magazine's main site. Copies will be mailed out to new subscribers or re-subscribers in order of receipt.

It is easier and quicker for payments to be made out directly in the Editor's name and sent to our accountant, Mr. Sidney Williams, at 29 Cunningham Rd, Wellesley MA 02481.:

********

You will note two new icons to the right, announcing the publication of the first two volumes of my autobiography; a third will follow by the summer.

I regret to say that copies are not available. This first edition was published for 'family and friends' in editions of 65 and 50 copies.

I have to admit that what was designed as a 'private' edition, due to take me as far as my twenty-first year, 1949, has now been circulated in so many xeroxes and has aroused so much interest, that bits and pieces have either been published or are about to be published abroad, and that my original aim of a private early life has been entirely subverted. I did not anticipate this. Clearly, however, the volume of letters I have received, including from people who do not know me at all, has touched a nerve. Without exception, those readers closest to me have urged that I not stop there, but continue -- I am currently at work on FRAGMENTS IV (1951-1953). And though I have lost all faith in publishers, I am now more or less compelled to submit it to them. At which point, I suppose copies will become available.

LUNACY & RESPECT: THE BECK CASE

2010-02-18T05:58:00.000-08:00

I have to admit I am not accustomed to see raving lunacy on my telly. Extremes, yes; but insanity? However yesterday afternoon, at the appointed hour, there was Mister Glenn Beck, a misplaced Isaiah to Tea Party America, literally foaming at the mouth. While I am accustomed to his rant, as I am to the general Fox/Murdoch bias, I cannot recall ever having seen such extreme, frothing-at-the-mouth disrespect of an American president.

There, behind the president, was Mr. Obama himself, explaining his policy on the stimulus package; nearer us, was Beck, his head obscuring the president -- at whom he gesticulated wildly and very personally. Did Obama really believe all the guff he was putting out? Was he a conscious liar or just an ordinary cheat? This went on for several minutes before, mercifully, we reached one of Fox's many breaks.

Now, when I came to America from Europe in 1939, one of the first things I learned was that an elected leader was, whatever one's own opinions or whether one had voted for him, entitled to some respect for his position as president. I had to learn this because in the British parliament, frontal attacks on the prime minister of the day are common; they are a part of the severity of debate in parliament. But even there, there are rules, and a Speaker to enforce them.

So far as I know, or until Mr. Beck unveils himself as a candidate for public office (alongside Madame Palin?), he is a private citizen. As such, he is entitled to have his opinion stated in public. That is free speech. But is he also entitled to incendiary opinions? to direct physical challenge to the President? Not, I think, in the crowded theater of our politics, in which crying 'Fire!' can lead to panic.

Is the majority of the country, which voted for Mr. Obama, a worthless bunch of dolts for so doing? Has anyone yet elected Mr. Beck?

I do not say this as one who believes that our president has divine right on his side, such as kings could claim to have; I say it as someone who believes that the man has a right, while in office, to our respect: because, for better or worse, he represents all of America. Many have been the presidents for whom I had scant respect, but I would not, ever, have thought of assaulting any of them phsyically: not even on a screen. If they were elected president, the people had spoken; and if he turned out to be a rotten president, the people was in a position to remove him.

Without that inherent respect for the office, whoever the incumbent, democracy quickly falls into mob rule. This Mr. Beck encouraged -- indeed lampooned. Awful as the 'left' channel is, it not show a desire to punch a president in the face, or impose its own talking heads on Obama's. That may be especially important when the president is the first black to hold the office and is also transparently -- whatever his failures -- a decent and intelligent human being. That does not merit to be dissed, for it is also as dangerous as crying 'Fire!' in a theater can be.

MURDEROUS TENURE: AMY BISHOP

2010-02-16T07:02:00.000-08:00

She may have been, she may be, a kook, have lactose problems, have shot her brother or not, the two hard facts are: that Prof. Bishop killed several of her colleagues and that she had been denied tenure. I am not much interested in the killing itself -- Amy Bishop is far from being unique in wanting to kill the departmental colleagues who refused her tenure -- but the whole question of tenure is one that sorely need re-thinking.

I take it as stipulated that tenure at the university level -- dreamt up decades ago to protect the market place of ideas and to protect a teacher's right to utter unpopular opinions -- has long been little more than a guarantee of lifetime employment for professors, regardless of the quality of their teaching, their research or their contribution to the education of the young. And I would further stipulate (from long experience in university teaching) that the first thought of the members of any departmental committee engaged in assessing a colleague's suitability for tenure is, how would granting tenure to X affect me. One might accept a brilliant young man or woman as an instructor or even an Assistant Professor -- such people don't take much of the budget -- but as a colleague for life?

The process is slow, it is laborious -- department, provost, president, trustees -- and much more likely to reflect mediocrity than to promote excellence. As we know from the electorate at large, like favors like: women will vote for women, minorities for minorities, and dullards for dullards. The last thing any university department wants is someone who will rock their cozy craft. A productive scholar is an implicit criticism of the unproductive; a reputation outside the department arouses envy.

In the most recent case I can recall, a composer of genuine musicality, much loved by his students, much performed outside of the university's own concert halls, was denied tenure for fourteen years. The composers on his committee all, save one, knew their own talents were more modest; the candidate did not fit the kind of music which forms the current (outdated) orthodoxy of composition classes. The musicologist member thought the matter through and saw that more students were now studying to be composers than considering such arcanae as the manuscripts of seventeenth century Spaniards. The teachers of various instruments wondered whether a composer might upset the way in which they recruited profitable paying students from Taiwan, and so on down the line.

University departments are now, as the nation is, a set of interests. They are like Greek civil servants: better the country should flounder than take a cut in pay.

I don't offer this as a pretext for Professor Bishop's acts, nor is it necessarily so that she was unfairly denied tenure. I merely suggest that the criteria for the granting of tenure are so arbitrary and the results so obviously damaging to education, that perhaps the system out to be scrapped. Unless this is done, dumbing down, useless publications, PhD mills, plodders reading their one text year after year, our universities will continue to decline into the high schools they have become, the talent pool of our universities will fail to be steadily enriched, and the young faculty be forced to conform to the prevailing opinion of their seniors rather than infuse their students with the love of learning that is the only justification for the existence of universities.

WRITER BIOGRAPHIES: WILSON, HAMSUN, MAUGHAM

2010-02-14T04:23:00.000-08:00

I have before me three not very good biographies of writers. I read them because I am a writer and because lives are always interesting. Also because I have long been a foot-note, a mention, ot a contributor to the biographies of writers whose lives have crossed with mine.

The first, Lewis Dabney's remaindered Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (FSG), is a professional job, drably written, and Wilson happens to be one of my household gods -- as who could fail to be who actually read Edward Everett's Gettysburg Address? Wilson was a compulsive diarist and a far better stylist than Dabney, but his introspection was faulty; he looked outwards, not inwards, dabbling in autobiography via his fiction, which Dabney does not admire but I do. The second, Selena Hasting's The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (John Murray), about a writer who 'made it' with his books but not with his life was intended to be boffo stuff but is actually an avid study of a professionally selfish and priapic monster that fails even to inform us to what gender within the homosexual world he belonged. The third, Ingar Sletten Kolloen's Knut Hamsun Dreamer and Dissenter (Yale University Press), abridged and Englished by 'acclaimed (by whom?) translators Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik' makes a real hash (Yale should be ashamed of its editing) of a fascinating and quite mad writer.

What reduces all three of these biographies is, of course, the current mantra that human lives are driven by their sexuality -- a gross example of which was a much-praised work on poor Flaubert, a long masturbatory fantasy of the biographer's. In none of these books will you learn much about those with whom they had their amorous or amoral relationships -- for the good and simple reason that such matters are a closed book, one read, at best, only by one of the partners.
Wilson was a wencher, a plump, not overly attractive and overbearing non-lover of anyone but himself. His signal failure to connect derived from the unhappy fact that he was a Writer, and writers are unfit companions or spouses to all but their own fantasies. As Maugham romps with (or through) his various catamites and rival predators, while marrying and even procreating (once) for the sake of respectability, what you see is not what he or they felt, but how useful this patch, 'twixt the fleet and the urinal, was to his stated goal of making enough money to be able to flaunt it. As for Hamsun, so muddied is the tale told, that it is hard to imagine why any woman would even approach him, much less marry him. Power was his game, power and control, and as we should know from history, the lust for power is really a death-wish: real power, like celebrity, wipes out the self.

For writers, maybe alas! sex is the least interesting aspect of their lives, and not one of these biographers has very much to say about our art. They are clearly not writers themselves, so perforce they deal with the trade: how many kroner Hamsun or Maugham earned, how Wilson made his way up into the higher journalism. This part is quite riveting and shows, if that is needed today, just how craven and parasitical most publishers and critics are.

Of course, all three were public figures, and their public selves, their use of their childhoods, their families, their friends, make very good reading indeed. Wilson presided over the demise of those standards -- learning, style, languages, reading -- which put American letters on the map. As much a literary historian as a critic, his range and scholarship put our age to shame. Maugham was long the most-read writer of his day, and it was a lot better stuff than the Da Vinci fraud. Why was he so? Ms Hastings has her theories, which are largely WSM's theories -- that he acknowledged his second-ratedness. But there are few writers (and none among the books in college courses or workshops) better equipped to teach the young writer his craft. Ever acutely aware of the Reader, careful not to intrude, he is the absolute master of narrative and was (as all writers must learn) a compulsive listener, an eavesdropper of high quality. Hamsun, of whose many novels only a very few are translated into English, was not of much credit to himself, but was a self-made writer and a self-destroyer. It must be said that as a writer of the Right, the extreme right, he doesn't fit the mold. Hunger is not a novel one reads for pleasure, something that Maugham dispenses in tight little dollops. The Growth of the Soil, on the other hand, is touching in its agrarian innocence. That he was a convinced Nazi, a friend and follower of Quisling, bothers me not at all. So were many; many too were communists. The mob likes to be led by the nose, by fashion, by ambition. What does bother me is his reason for so being, which is a madman's view of a paradise lost. There is no paradise to be lost, and no new Caesar to lead us back there. And who plays Follow the Leader is responsible for the destruction the leader wreaks -- be he Hitler, Stalin, Murdoch or the latest Pop Star. Writers owe it to their art to have discernment. Hamsun alone paid the penalty.

Lives are the building blocks of history; who we are is every bit as important as what we do. Great literary biographies or autobiographies -- Tchaikovsky's, Paul Leautaud's journals,
Michelet, Berlioz, Benvenuto Cellini -- exist and illuminate: the place, the time, the art. They are a great literary form. In all these I mention, there is not a word about Sex. About which even the smartest of us knows nothing at all, there being nothing to be known.

E-BOOKS

2010-02-08T08:15:00.000-08:00

Left right and center I am urged to buy an e-book tablet of some sort, to download this or that, keep a traveling library, to dispose of physical books What books? I ask. I am not aware that Amazon is a particularly well-informed literary critic, no more than is Barnes & Ignoble suited to the task or, for that matter, most publishers. But I yielded to temptation, using someone else's passwords, and asked Kindle to kindly offer me the books I wished to read, books that I normally buy from John Sandoe. Perfectly current, ordinary books, such as John Banville's The Infinities, L.P. Hartley's The Brickfield, Indrisson's Hypothermia, Willaim Trevor's Love and Summer, Simon Mawer's The Glass Room, Nikolas Andreyev's A Month on the Fence, Victor Meyer-Schoenberger's Delete, etc.. Not one of which was available.

Not unsurprisingly, what was available was the equivalent of an Amazon/New York Times best-seller list. Do I detect a whiff of ordinary commercialism? Yes I do, and the lovely arteficial pricing quarrels between book publishers and Amazon Etc. prove it. E-books are no economy. $9.95 may be half the price of a hardbound edition, but it is exorbitant for something that costs Amazon nothing to produce and gives the writer very little back.

The truth of the matter is that the conventional book (with few exceptions) has steadily risen in price and diminished in quality (not only obviously of the content, but also of book-making), and I have been compelled to instruct my regular book-sellers not to send me any books that are perfect-bound, such books being unreadable on a flat surface and having spines that crack and break and pages that tumble out long before one has finished reading. Why should I pay $15 for a poorly-made object? Let's not even mention so-called scholarly books, which are nnow so priced that they are available only to the libraries that are forced to buy them.

These are of course not my only only objection to the e-book. In the case of a classic text, which edition will I receive? How about books in 'foreign', since all America purveys -- as though only English would do -- is of local production? Does Kindle offer you books from England, from Ireland, from Australia? Largely, no. It is as provincial as B&N. Can I fit an iBook or an e-Book in my pocket? Can I have one with me wherever I go? What about the world's Great Book Bazaar, those out-of-the way places where, for want of anything else, one can buy for next to nothing, books one might never otherwise see?

Above all, however, a decline to e-book myself because to do so is to deprive me of history. Its intent is to take me straight to the market: not, for instance, to the many writers of value whose early books are all on ABE second hand, not to the edition I want (e.g., the Clarendon Edition of John Aubrey's Brief Lives, but to the many subsequent editions as sorted out by the professorate) but to the newest, the latest. In keeping with technology of all kinds, e-books exist in a perpetual present tense. And once you've invested in the technology, you can be sure that that $9.95, already exorbitant, will soon rise to $13.95, then $15.95! And soon enough be obsolete.

I close by a curious experience. Among the Google ads was one from Book Collectors, a .com company which promised to make the cataloguing of your library ("I have 800 books," one testimonial read, when I have 18,000) dead easy and automatic. Well, in keeping with the presentism of Amazon & Co, you will not be surprised to learn that this service does indeed work: if your books happen to have a bar-code!

THE SUPREME COURT SPEAKS

2010-01-30T14:36:00.000-08:00

Constitutional law is one of my hobby-horses, so I naturally read with care both the majority and the minority (Stevens) arguments in the recent case which allows corporations, labor unions & other such bodies to support their particular ´causes´. The fundamental argument rests on that great American fetish, ´free speech´.

As we all know, there are certain exclusions from this amendment in the Bill of Rights, the most recent of which is sanctioned as ´hate speech´, which would seem to be a sort of extention to the prohibition of shouting out ´fire´in a crowded theater. I would guess that we all would defend virgorously our right to say what we want, to publish it and diffuse it, no matter how unattractive we may find it: as in some forms of pornography, obscenity, etc.

But if I follow Mr. Justice Stevens argument, which fairly represents my own opinion, the entire Bill of Rights assumes that these rights inhere in individuals. In you and me. It is quite clear to me that a corporation, in both the technical sense as in Alcoa or Exxon, and in the broader sense of any large body organized to a single purpose, such as most labor unions, is not an individual, for no individual within that organization cam wield that corporation´s power or express its opinion. Corporations do not have a license to drive a car; unfortunately, a corporation can´t be jailed, nor can it vote, get a grade in college or, to descend the scale, make love and procreate real heirs and heiresses. Corporations do not go out for lunch,. their executives do, for unseemly hours. They are not people at all, they are a persona sole. It is a fiction designed to limit liability, something that private comopanies have to assume. If you sue a limited company for a defective product, the individual directors are liable up to the pre-established limit of that liability. While those of you who have ever had to deal with a corporation know that no human being is every likely to talk to you or respond.

That being so, how can a corporation (and unions are of the same breed) be protected by the same right as an individual? No doubt Mr. Obama´s objection, with a beady eye drawn on Justice Alito (the Majority opinion was written by Roberts), is that corporations (a) by the nature of their wealth and (b) quite possibly against the desires of some or even a majority of their shareholders, can exert an excessive power at certain times -- e.g. in the last fortnight of the Massachusetts election. To me, that argument does not stand. We have individual billionaires (protected by the First Amendment) who can and do spend just as much. There, reform would mean weaning the public of its dependence on advertising and feeding it doses of education to enable it to spot phoneys all on its lonesome.

Stevens´ dissent should be read. There are defects in the law which the Supreme Court was reviewing, but these Congress could remedy. But as Stevens argues, the First Amendment´s guarantee of free speech is applicable only to individuals, and to say otherwise will certainly further limit the freedom of individual speech.

STATE OF THE DISUNION

2010-01-28T13:30:00.000-08:00

The man -- his smile, his rhetoric, his ease, his obvious superiority to the ruck -- is unfair to the Union of Snake-Oil Salesmen. Selling ice-boxes to Esquimaux (or whatever we´re supposed to call them in these days) is all in a day´s work for our pesident. That is because there are Esquimaux out there. He can sell his message to the public because we are there. But the great amphitheater he daced last night is a Great Void. True, you see the Hairy One (that´s what her name means in Italian) leaping up and down with applause, but trust me, she is just an Illusion. She is not there and she certainly is not listening to the Message, somewhere in her crafty little invisible head a machine goes round and round tallying what this elegant man is saying in terms of what it means to her Job. This will advance those desperate to have an Armenian genocide, for their cyber-votes are here; that will do well with the homosexual ¨community¨ which is also part of her constituency. Oh, I can use that one against him in November says a hoary senator from the Tea Party. Yum yum say those whose legislative wages are paid by lobbyists, that´s worth a few mill. Bingo! shout within their incorporeal selves the sales reps from states with defense industries. But don´t worry. None of them are really there. They live in Elsewhere, a marvelous country populated exclusively with professional politicians. It´s what Obama says there that speaks to such souls as they have left. For is Obama not, also, the President of the PPs, a class apart?

That there is nothing worse than democracy except every other form of government is an adage tested and true, but it is irrelevant to the State of Disunion address we heard last night. Once ´elected´these people no longer have anything to do with democracy, they are a Governing Class, a classical corporate oligarchy, which deals behind doors and lives on the Free Lunch. Bit by bit, day by day, they recede from reality, devoid of meaning and any importance save to themselves. Too bad, for it was a good speech and given by an almost good man, that is: he might be entirely good were he not one of them.

To such an audience, how can one give a good speech or sell a program? If Saint Francis of Assisi, a saint mostly known for walking around shoeless and talking to the birds, appeared before the joint houses of Congress, what he said would fall into the same abyss -- Now listen, Frank, we have to stick together on this thing or you won´t have a habit to wear next time you want to convert people to your Better Life! Because what counts in PP-Land is staying there and not being exiled to America. That would be worse than the Gulag. Have you ever seen an ex-politician? What a sorry figure he cuts! Belly up, the catfish eat him rather than the other way around. Lawdy me! says Frank. Please Massa. Out there it´s Hell.

Hell it is. Even on the level of substance, the remedies offered seem pretty hokey. Take money away from the Big Banks and they´ll find out some other way to take your money and put it into their own pockets. Does the Great Leader really believe that to correct the Education Deficit in America (seven years, I calculate, from the days when I was in the Eighth Grade in Balboa, California, reading books that now puzzle Juniors and Seniors in our colleges) what is needed is a further expansion of educational opportunity, via community colleges? There was a time when a high school diploma did indeed fit you for a decent working wage, and if our high schools could be brought back to their 1939 levels, that would be a mighty reform. Like elects like is a rule in education as in government: giving more money to the best teachers would be great, if it weren´t teachers who chose them.

Quousque tandem abutere patientia nostra? flung Cicero in the court-room. For how long are we to stay patient, eh? With the Afghanistan farce? With the health care joke? It would be no bad thing, for instance, to make sure that hospital in America were not places where we get sicker. They could start with the world-famous Massachusetts General, whose general filth is not far off that available in Somalia. But will that happen? One thing our president got right: he knows that we know what´s wrong with our disunion. That´s visible and palpable to million upon million of us. As it is visible and palpable that nothing that is said in PP-Land is real. You can´t sue them, it costs a fortune to join them, and whatever we do, so long as PPs exist, nothing, nada, will change.

BY WAY OF EXPLANATION

2010-01-26T14:02:00.000-08:00

Assiduous readers of my blog will have shaken their heads and thought I might be dead, remarrying, cavorting, washed out to sea from my house or. . . None of the above is true. The intermittencies they will have perceived have to do with a month spent in the archives at Yale and the Harry Ransom Center, a month in which, wherever I went or whatever I did, I froze. After my barefoot years at nine degrees north of the equator, the shoes I brought with me did not fit, etc. That is one reason.

Another is a certain Mr. Hogares, a furtive thirtyish semi-crackhead who loiters with a companion along the sea-front and, if he sees you duck into the loo for a quick one, will abstract your computer in no time at all. This little creep, I would have you know, had already stolen six other computers along my road in Cahuita. This, I am told, is standard practice among Costa Ricans: you are a foreigner, a gringo, and thus obviously rich and fair game. No matter that Mr. Hogares has been battered with baseball bats (how dare gringos attack a man in the exercise of his profession? even if that profession is thieving?) and hospitalized for two weeks, he needs his goodies.

This might seem curious to you, but the fact is that we all know him. We know where he lives, what he does for a living, his methodology. So do the police. So does our D.A., known as the Fiscal of Talamanca, a man who makes his living by releasing paedophiles, thieves, and other sundry criminals. But Costa Rica for some fifty years has been living in the ideal consitutional world dreamt up -- when this was a sleepy country and the rich were the abusers of the ¨rights of the people¨-- by the esteemed Jose Figueres. I met him long ago and a fine democrat he was too. But he was president of a backward little country that no one, and certainly the drug lords of Colombia and Mexico, cared much about.

Since Figueres, I fear, it has all been downhill, as it is with all places that are so democratic and fair that workers and criminals alike can do pretty much as they please.

The downhill slope, of course, goes quickly from equity and fine feelings, to corruption -- the one commmodity, besides natural beauty, bananas and coffee of which Costa Rica has a sufficiency. As you would expect -- God knows the United States has its share in the government and big business -- corruption is not a creation of Costa Rica´s people, who are largely honest, affable and hard-working, but filters down from On Top.

Add to that that my very own Talamanca is something like the Wild West of Costa Rica and that we have neither government nor justice here, and you will understand the intermittency caused by Mr. Hogares to my blog. Here we don´t let the police into the house, lest they case the joint; here drugs are sold from a caff on the main road in the plain sight of all, no doubt with a cut for the authorities in our county seat in Bribri; here our Sindaco gets himself elected by deliveries of sacks of rice to the indigenos who live in the mountains behind me; and here Colombian speed-boats drop their supplies a few hundred yards out from my beach. It may sound like hell, but in fact it´s a little forgotten paradise, and all I´m doing is explaining why I have not blogged as reguarly as I would like.

THE MASSACHUSETTS ELECTION

2010-01-21T05:51:00.000-08:00

That in the Peoples Republic of Massachusetts Ted Kennedy, that stalwart swain of Chappaquidick, should be replaced in the Senate by a former hunk and current red-neck follower of he fashionable Tea Party sort, might well cause consternation in many quarters, but his election is neither surprising nor undeserved. I cannot, however, bring myself to believe that Mr. Brown's election means that the Bay State has finally had enough -- if not too much -- of that family of bootleggers and bullies, a royalty that goes back to the jolly Boston rule of Honey Fitzgerald. Would that it were so, but I doubt it.

The unalterable fact is, however, that two things result from Tuesday's election: the first is that the voters of Massachusetts have repudiated the politically ultra-correct Special Interest party's sole spend-and-rule domination of their government; the second is that they will live to regret being represented in Washington for six long years by the senator from Fox News Glenn Beck Land. Add to this one further, and welcome fact: that at least they have been spared Martha Coakley. It was, I admit, good fun to see and hear Mr. Obama embracing yet another routine party hack and claiming for her a career of fearless struggle against Big Business and Special Interests. That is palpable nonsense. I was in Boston when she trampled on the civil rights of the Amirault family in pursuit of her divine right -- despite the courts and against all evidence -- to launch against them a Salem witch-hunt for the pleasure of the headlines it offered her. No, butter would not melt in her mouth; it would scald.

Some good, therefore, will come of this election: the Democratic juggernaut, which has long thought governance was a mere matter of taxing the public to spend on behalf (qv. Governor Duval Patrick) of every special interest that could maintain the status quo. It is surely notable that the only party bastions that held up against Senator-Elect Brown were the most radical and privileged segments of Massachusetts, places like Barney Frank's Fall River or the Peoples Republics of Cambridge and Brookline. Where ordinary folk live there were too few to shore up the Coakley business-as-usual campaign.

True, she was a miserable candidate; true, she ran a miserable campaign. But were the sovereign people of Masschusetts wrong to discern that Coakley was entirely absorbed in the belief that the senate seat held by Teddy Kennedy was hers by right, and vox populi was not and should not be heard?

There is, however, a down side to Populist rule -- preferable as it is to Machine rule: populists do not want this or that, they don't know what they really want, nor have they the means, intellectual or otherwise, to determine good legislation from ill, they do know what they do not want, and that is to be told how to live their lives. It is ignorant not to recognize that the American health system is among the poorest and most corrupt in the developed world, but there are also many ways in which populism can and does defeat its own ends. The voting public is all too easily swayed by specious arguments, rigged polls, lobbyists and Money.

After all, as I pointed out immediately after the election of Barack Obama, his populist appeal, his rhetorical skills and even his good intentions, could not and should not conceal the fact that he came out of the Machine and still lives within it. What once seems wondrous, as we all know, often crumbles like stale biscuits; its appeal is magical, bewitching; its results tend to be drab and routine. Politics is not a love affair, but a dirty hard trade, which men and women take up for the power and privilege it affords. Beware, then, the Golden Tongue, and beware any promise of Change. The interests are entrenched, as they are in marriage. Fine words will not dislodge either insurers or drug companies or banks. Or, for that matter, politicians.

A Small Earthquake in Chile used to be what was thought the least interesting headline a newspaper could banner: yet that was what we have just seen in Masschussets and will see in Washington. Words are the nosegay the bride throws the aspirant maidens outside the church. So Mr. Brown caught one. Bravo! And then?

In Breve

2010-01-13T18:52:00.000-08:00

First the Good News. Fox's new pundit (from the Indian pandit or learned man, or woman), Sarah Palin's first appearance opposite a discountenanced and wary Bill O'Reilly -- let's give him credit for wondering how the devil she turned up -- setlles the matter once and for all: the 'fair and balanced' Murdoch network has now gone public as a home for Boobs and Folly. A nice confirmation of the Obvious. A 'news' service that hires a former candidate for the vice-presidency of the United States is in fact an enlarged Op-Ed Page for yet another loony of the right. Further good news is the thought that Palin will perforce learn a little geography and be launched into the Fox orbit where no fool fears to tread. She and Hannety (or is it Hannity?) make an ideal couple: were they otherwise without ties.

Roughly at the same time another enormity of Nature, a powerful earthquake, struck Haiti. I hope that everyone who reads this contributes, for Haiti is one of the world's marvels, a nation at roughly the same time as the United States, it has always been tormented by open warfare between black and mulatto, yet has also produced a remarkable culture (Roumains, Alexis) and a proud people. I feel privileged to have known many Haitians: an upstanding people whose prophet, Toussaint Louverture, was left to perish in a frigid prison in Joux by the selfsame 'revolutionaries' in France. To build his mountain fastness, the emperor Christophe had stone mounted by gangs of a hundred rolling logs uphill; the more perished in the task, the harder the remainder had to labor. Good times have been few. In Puerto Rico I knew some Duvalier acolytes and some opponents, exiled to the borough of Queens. A fine, a desperate people.

But America remains America, and the news had, until the earthequake, focused on the Great American Problem: Messrs Leno and O'Brien. I watched bemused, never having watched either of them. Just how important news are two performers whose every word is scripted beforehand? Just how are they worth their millions and their celebrity?

APOLOGIES?

2010-01-10T19:41:00.000-08:00

Truth need never repent.

This NOTE will be succinct: When a senator feels it necessary to apologize. that's a good reason to send him into retirement. What Senator Harry Reid said of then-candidate Barack Obama -- that he stood a good chance to make it to the presidency because he was light in color and didn't speak in Negro dialect -- was no more than a statement of obvious fact. His color and educated speech were an undeniable factor in his election: both for the things he was and the things he was not. What sane man would deny that? So what is this mania for public apology that drove Reid to un-state what he said in his book?

T0 append a little context, reflect on the Turkish gentleman who attempted t0 assassinate Jean-Paul II, Fresh out of his his two jail sentences, we hear that he is currently flogging his memoirs to TV and the movies. I doubt not of his success in this curious world. A crime can be detailed without any need for a public apology for 'inappropriate' language. So why not a sensible political observation?

HOMELAND SECURITY

2010-01-06T05:00:00.000-08:00

Recent events (Division of Nigerian Foreign Affairs) have alerted me to the ever greater perils of daily life. There I was trolling my way through my e-mail when I glanced at the advertisements which so grace the Google pages. And there were three ads for degree courses in Homeland Security at various 'universities' of the mail order sort.

Of course it is my view that we lost the War on Terror as of 9/11 (so much more euphonious than the European 11/9). Quite simply, the sheer cost of protecting each and every one of us from those whose ambition in life (and death) is to blow us up, is a major factor in bankrupting us, giving us a set of national jitters to go along with joblessness and failed health care and insistently greedy bankers, and generally causing a slowdown in national life. A million-strong new bureaucracy of 'security' experts -- recruited only God knows how -- is now enthroned with the power to interfere in our private lives such as would never have been admissible a mere twenty years ago. I mean, did you know that any one of these people can seize your computer? confiscate you hard drive? delve into your correspondence?

Bet you didn't! But it is paradigmatic of American life that there is no niche or want that will not be filled by the Academy. Forget qualifications for degree-by-email courses: not even basic literacy is required. Some early morning hours have been spent considering the sort of curriculum a new-minted professor of Homeland Security might introduce. Here are a few sensible suggestions.

HS 101: Psychological Profiling of Terrorists: perspiration levels, bodily exudations, beard-analysis, Oedipal conflicts, criminal shiftiness.

HS 102: Linguistic Analysis: Basic Muslim, Arab oaths, translating explosive tracts, the hermeutics of stuttering, Body Language.

HS 201: Adanced Visa Studies: Detecting Voids in multiple applications, Buzz Words, detecting altered (edited) documents, Consular Analysis.

You get the picture. Background reading (for candidates who are able to read) include Kafka, Conrad, the Quran, Sharpton, Halliburton (the company, not the pre-war explorer), Basic English for Dummies, Coriolanus, Koestler.

I know this is all exaggerated, but so is the eagerness of the Education Business to pick up on every opportunity to make a buck.

MEDIOCRITY

2010-01-02T04:46:00.000-08:00

Since I find myself wandering about in the snow under which my old haunts in Boston lie, and since this causes a problem -- should I venture forth to Barnes & Ignoble which lies a steeping hill below my room just to get a little paper cup of espresso, ever lukewarm and Starbuck's, a brand I usually pass by? -- I would rather, I think, pass on two reflections from the new year, derived from old friends in Academia.

Well, how are things? I ask an old friend, self-exiled from what was once Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe. He teaches to crowded classrooms in a local university and recalls for me the bad old days in his native land. 'What always struck me so forcibly,' he says, 'was what happened to my old friends. We were all young, then, and in firm agreement that we had a government of shits and we fought against it with the pawky means at our disposal. It was the most vociferous among them who began, year by year, to retrench. Aided and abetted by Common Sense, they had reached the age at which they really ought to leave the parental cramped apartment and enter Real Life. That meant they would need to have an apartment of their own in which to accommodate the young women they were about to marry. They would also need to have regular jobs and, if possible, escape the penury their Opposition to the regime enforced on them. It was amazing to me how firmly they moved towards "understanding" the government and its problems and how consistently they began the brown-nosing of those they had spent their lives excoriating! They had scorned, hated and despised X. Now they could not say enough good of him. People like me who still opposed the regime were first abandoned by them, then bit by bit began to be scorned, hated and despised as X once had been.'

But how does this relate to your daily life? I asked him. 'Academia,' he replied, is very much like one of those sorry East European states. There is a shuffle at the top and Professors X, Y and Z suddenly find themselves loving those they had very recently despised etc.. Brown-nosing has fresh territory to sniff.'

In short, when the mediocre triumph over their betters, sound minds consider their own advantage, their needs -- those apartments, those appointments, promotions and perquisites. Nothing new to that. I pass on as comment what is the way of the world.

At this selfsame university, which was once mine, I asked a crotchety old friend why it was the case that in Academia, a fraught eastern nation occupied by Soviet look-alikes -- boring people in suits, dull minds with dachas -- real talent was so often opposed and mediocrity so often rose to the top. 'Resentment,' my friend replied. 'There are three classes, here as elsewhere. There are the truly first-class, a second-class that wants only safety and survival, and a third class that has ambitions. Third-class people -- which a good university seeks to weed out -- wants to have what the first class has. While the middle plods on, this rabble seeks to undermine what the first class does.'

If you put Mediocrity in charge, as has happened at my old university, the Middle will plod on, the top will emigrate, and the rabble will rise. That too is the way of the world. And not just in Academia.

THE PENALIES OF 'SUCCESS'

2009-12-26T20:07:00.000-08:00

For the pocket-kandkerchief of readers who maybe panting to receive TRoL #20, I have news: there are no copies available, the entire run having been exhausted even before it arrived on these shores. Yep, it's sold out, like #3, and I haven't even a copy myself. The last time this happened, my Old Pal and co-founder, Mr. Bellow, against my more prudential will, airily ordered up a double, nay a triple print order for #4. We have an awful lot of #4s as a result.
There is a lesson to this. TRoL does not -- with a very few exceptions -- distribute to book stores such as Barnes & Ignoble. Why not? Because they take 60% of the cover price, pulp those that don't sell, and generally have no interest in anything but wiping out independent booksellers: certainly none in literature. We operate purely by subscriptions. Therefore, if anyone out there wants the magazine -- which is doubtful, as doubtful as the arrival of the US cavalry to save a beleaguered fort being betrayed by Richard Widmark -- we pray that you will subscribe. That way you will get #21 within weeks, which contains a whole book, Souvenirs of Starobielsk by Josef Czapski, on which Andrzej Wajda's new film is based. Plus other good stuff.

WHAT IS AND ISN'T GLOBAL

2009-12-23T07:42:00.000-08:00

You know what a globe is, a round thing often with pictures of countries, empires and waste spaces on it, a theater (Shakespeare's), and lately as common a word (nearly) as f**k. Janet Daley, the London Telegraph columnist and public scold, had this to say about it in relation to the Copenhagen codswollop. There, she said, when uttered by such as Gordon Brown, the very bright but over-ventilating UK prime minister, the word 'global' meant 'it's not my fault.' She went on to point out that the terrible word, 'bandied about with such ponderous self-importance' -- I ask, what else are politicians, if not self-important? Who else would consider them important? -- had 'political ramifications' and just saying 'global' was assumed 'to sweep away any consideration of what was once assumed to be the most basic principle of modern democracy: that elected national governments are responsible to their own people -- that the right to govern derives from the consent of the electorate.' With her piece came a picture reveatory of the new era of the non-smokey back room in which our 'leaders' reshuffle the pack and run our affairs for us. There were: a definitely utilitarian bunch of chairs, the remains of sandwiches, many empty glasses and a select tutti-frutti of our global bosses -- the ever thoughtful-looking Mr. Obama, the figure-racked head of Gordon Brown, a dumpy, gesturing Angela Merkel, a head-down-in-his-collar Nicolas Sarkozy, various flunkies (I thought I recognized the the worried brow of the ineffable Richard Holbrooke -- he who brought on the Great Balkan Crisis) and one or two insignficant 'other' leaders from who cares where. They were the important people, not us. And they looked world-weary.

I have views about 'global', and they start with a fundamental doubt: is anything really global? Is Ham?

Best always to start thinking with simple, homely things, right? Like ham. Is San Daniele a Jamon serrano? No. Is grana also reggiano? How's the parmesan in Botswana? If in the Tonkin Delta or Sarawak, les jeunes filles en fleur, the flowering maidens can marry at twelve or before, but not in Connecticut, and if homosexuals can marry each other in dear old Massachusetts but face the death penalty in Uganda, are our customs global? Should they be? The word 'discrimination' once implied a form of connoisseurship: you could tell a Hals from a daub. Well, I have an old-fashioned belief that nothing I give a good damn about is even remotely global. On the contrary. It is so local, so rooted in custom, tradition and individual taste that there are producers of some hams that are better than others, and to me 'global' means Kraft cheeses (God save us) and miscellaneous ham. It also means a new class of 'leaders' who think they detail -- at least for their brief (but handsomely-pensioned) moments of fame -- the secrets of the universe, their problems and their solutions. Yet the marital quarrels that might befall these leaders, of more import to them than melting icebergs and the water-level of picturesque Vanuatu, are personal, not global. To my knowledge, neither Machado de Assis nor I are in terrific demand as writers in Estonia or Singapore, not to speak of Djibouti. Is any cultivated person 'global'? or is he simply at home in diversty?

What is rightful war to some -- for all states or nations exist only because they provide security for their people -- is genocide to others. Kosovars, Kurds and even Gazans probably feel they have certain minimal entitlements, but so do Serbs, Turks and Israelis. Is the resolution of these 'internal' conflicts a global matter. Madame Carlo Ponti of the Global Punishment Corporation no doubt thinks so, but who thanks her for her demands that such-and-such should be done about Problem X? Is there such a thing as 'global' justice? Mayhap there could be, if we were all the same. But as we are not -- Hottentot and Huckabee alike -- global but particular, it is hard to see conflict resolution globally. If Pinochet is such a dreadful man, a goodly number of Chileans are perhaps happy that Mr. Allende is not running the show alongside Hugo Chavez. How about the people who are making literature or culture in general disappear? Are they any less global criminals than the inept Burmese generals who remember what what Aung Sung Kni's father had in mind for the road to Mandalay?

Your morals are not my morals and vice-versa. There is, as Madam Daley argues, no 'sacred' connotation to the word 'global', no more than there is anything secular and 'narrow' about how nations behave. They react, as nations, to the way we, individually, feel, and if China, India, Brazil and South Africa think it better to extract their people from extreme poverty by thinking of their people rather than 'globally', bully for them. Sorry, my generation knows all too well what happens when the Pure take over with their 'global' concerns and their 'global' solutions are writ into law.

THE BULWER-LYTTON PRIZE

2009-12-21T13:26:00.000-08:00

For some reason which escapes me, the good folk at San Jose State have held an annual contest since 1982 in which contestants are urged to compete with the worst possible opening sentence of an imagined novel. The contest is named after the hugely successful novelist-cum-philanthropist and Dickens' close friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton because he began a novel with "It was a dark and stormy night. . .", the which innocuous phrase precedes every attempt by Snoopy to write a novel. The reason must be, in that citadel of learning, that someone has nothing better to do.

I will be accused of humorlessness, but I beg to differ with the principle. On the following grounds: (A) It is no great task to find far worse first sentences than Bulwer-Lytton's in existing novels written today, where they flourish by the dozen. (B) For Snoopy, already a literate and ambitious dog, that opening sentence certainly has a meaning and a reason behind it -- dogs don't like such nights; they shiver, bark, howl and cower. (C) Bulwer-Lytton, like many another neglected Victorian from the great age of the novel, was a writer of some substance.

Okay, so it's all in good fun. We like spoofs. The underlying truth is, however, that there are very few people left who can read Bulwer-Lytton: his language is alien, difficult, and requires effort and attention -- as does Dickens'. There is, on the Net, a professorial quiz which proposes that the reader identify specific passages of Dickens (presumably good) and Bulwer-Lytton (presumably bad). It is a tricky test and a false one. Other passages in either author could reverse the verdict. This gradual effacementof the literature of the past, and its language, is something we might deplore rather than seek to parody. My Oxford Edition of Our Mutual Friend contains many pages of notes to explain Dickens' fascination with, for instance, the specific languages of trades now long lost, doll-makers, conveyancing clerks, water-men, Philistines of the day and such. On my shelves is a treasured dictionary, the Dictionnaire du monde rural, in which one can recover the implements used in threshing, winnowing and other rural pursuits. Every language loses a part of its lexicon every day. Danbury, Connecticut, was the hat capital of America; now the only head-cover we see is the baseball cap. The loss is constant, and the language is not replenished by the conjugation or declension of 'f**k', which seems to be as far as common parlance goes. What is a writer to do if the language he uses erodes even as he writes?

It was a dark and stormy night when the profs of San Jose State thought they knew what bad writing was. Far greater pollution is shown daily and climate change can't be blamed for the poverty of our current language.

THE EFFICIENCY OF AMERICA?

2009-12-19T15:50:00.000-08:00

So GM, with our millions, will close down Saab, whose cars are so far ahead of theirs -- in comfort, economy, efficiency and durability -- that there can be no real comparison. That's intelligent. The web news sites generally described Saabs as 'quirky'. By which I presume they mean that they were engineered to high standards and used better steel than any American car.

I don't know how you feel about our fabled business efficiency, but I have a distinct sense that it has long gone -- though I'm not sure that this is entirely the fault of American business. Surely it is (a) our general provincialism, (b) Homeland Security, and only then (c) our overpaid business executives.

Exempla: If you hire a car in Indianapolis, it costs $135 a week. I mean, that's what it actually costs. What you actually shell out is $381 for the same car for the same period. This is because of local and national fees, taxes and other hoo-ha. Checked out your air fares recently? How much are you paying to keep in existence all those worthy Transport flunkies who: damage the contents of your bags, question your lipstick, chuck your liquids, and ask you to spend an extra hour in the discomfort of airports? The quick answer is, a whole lot. Or perhaps you know why transfers of money within the same bank, from one branch to another, can take up to three weeks, when any terrorist anywhere can transfer it instantaneously from any part of the world to another? Here the culprit is the Government, whose concern about laundering drug money is far greater than its concern with the nose-sniffing that goes on at home. And then, of course, there is its concern that the money you might care to move could possibly be destined for those same terrorists. Or perhaps your pleasure lies in having uninterrupted use of your computer without having idiot messages from Hewlett-Packard telling you just how healthy your printer is, or having Microsoft turn it off in the middle of your sentence because, oops! it had to correct an error which Microsoft itself caused?

I have long wondered -- my father and grandfather having both been entrepreneurs and lone wolves -- just what 'businessmen' actually do, apart from infighting, nattering at the coffee-vending machine, and generally gumming up the works for their companies. The answer is: they devise new ways to soak you: with inefficient machines, with hidden charges, with buying and selling the future of the people who actually do work. One example will serve. ATMs saved the banks vast sums previously spent on tellers (as e-mail saved similar sums on communication). Great. Only have you noticed that the charges for using those machines has now risen from zero to 2.5% or more; or if used aboard (where's that? they wonder) to 7%?

I can't resist one more example of our 'efficiency': how much of your time is spent listening to the endless 'options' of voice-mail before you, if lucky, get to talk to a human being? Our health care is a bit like that too. You wait a long time and get no satisfaction.

HISTORICAL MEMORY

2009-12-17T14:21:00.000-08:00

Good readers interested in history will be aware of the value of historical memory. That is, memories of the past with which there is a direct connection to the present, such as what your grandparents might tell you about what life was like when they were young. Without these testimonies the past fades until it is revived in what we call 'history'. Sometime, perhaps thirty years ago, the Times of London (then still a distinguished newspaper) asked its readers to submit authentic stories which they had heard, live, in their own lives. The idea behind the query was to find the person with the oldest historical memory, and as I recall, it was won by a grizzled Devonshire gentleman who had in his youth been dandled by his great-grandfather and told tales how his grandfather had served as a cabin-boy at Trafalgar (1805).

I was beaten out by a few years, for my historical memory goes back only to the Napoleonic kingdoms of Italy. My great-aunt Elisabetta Publicola-Santacroce was, on the only time I saw her in Rome after the war, a formidable old lady who lived in an ancient and spacious apartment just behind the Pantheon, on the Pozzo delle Cornacchie (Crow's Well). She stomped about with a heavy wooden tripod as support and told me tales of how enamored of Napoleon's French officers her grandmother had been in her youth, how 'liberating' they had been, how colorful, how unstuffy. Stendhal, who was then French consul in the Roman port of Civitavecchia, in his correspondence, confirms meeting members of that great-great-great-grandmother's stories.

None of which may be of great interest to others, but confirms the advice I give all young people: while you've got them, ask as many questions as you can from your Elders, for once they're gone, you are adrift in the history of others.

AMERICANA

2009-12-16T09:43:00.000-08:00

Dickens was received at the White House by President Tyler, who said he was glad he could come by, and hoped he would see him again, sometime. Was this the first observed instance of our ever-shortening attention span? One learns from reading. Living as we did under the banner of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity as discovered by Jefferson, Mrs. Trollope found 'mankind an unamalgamated mass of grating atoms.' A fictitious equality had 'poisoned the American political system.' Men 'attained power and fame by eternally uttering what they know to be untrue.' Which sounds to me a fair enough description of Congress.

For surely no man was ever elected by stating the unpleasant truth that Inequality is what is, and Equality is only what some people think should be. 'When monstrous institutions' do their best to change men's 'nature' they open them up to gratifying their every 'furious and beastly rage', said Dickens. That, too, should be plain. Turn up a little corner of liberty and the whole Magic Carpet flies off with you aboard. Not all our fantasies of what we can be are good, or even sane.

Some of the best things in Dickens lie in his excoriation of journalists. He was one. He knew what he was talking about. I have been one and I think I know what their game is. One part of the trade, as it was, is immortalized in Evelyn Waugh's wonderful Scoop. That little novel, intensely funny, and Black Mischief have to be among the most politically incorrect books still in print. How long before they are banned? At least in Massachusetts. The other part of that drink-sodden profession, its megalomaniacal side, its cant about objectivity and standards, is meat for the P.G. Wodehouse jaws. All I want to know is how is it that we have allowed the 'media' to govern our opinions? When I see Mme. Anampour's 'sincerity' advertising on CNN, I puke: no fact is too obvious for her to posture about her concerns with this and that cause, and that cause is supposed to give us 'grave concern'. Which is nonsense. Journalists don't stand for anything except their expense accounts. Whereas good reporters -- and Dickens and Defoe were marvelous ones when not preaching -- let us hear, let us see, and let us understand what is going on. The moment a journalist thinks he's something more than our eyes and ears and begins to think he is someone whose name we should remember, he's kidding himself and trying to fool us. You need both qualities -- self-deception and persuasiveness -- to become a celebrity. How to avoid that is not taught in schools of journalism. And though a sucker is born every minute, we don't have to join them.

I remember some delicious nights, all starting at 11 p.m., when Mike Wallace started his black-and-white inquisitions on TV. For about three weeks everyone I knew gathered about the box to see Mike, stuffed with facts and evidence, get the bastards. It was riveting, great fun, and one imagines with delectation O.J., Glenn Beck, Jim Baucus et alia being taken apart. Alas! Came the day when one phoney 'celebrity' (I seem to remember he was a glorified hairdresser) appeared on the show. At first he answered politely. But by Minute Ten, he began asking questions back, of Mike. He too had facts and evidence. Mike, with whom I used to play tennis regularly, never really recovered. Now that was journalism.

ON THE USE AND ABUSE OF MEMORY

2009-12-15T09:37:00.000-08:00

In its issue of November 20, the TLS carries a review of Delete by Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, that raises some very interesting questions about information. It appears that in 2003, researchers at Berkeley sought to estimate how much 'information' had been produced in the previous year. They came up with the figure of five exabytes, which equals 37,000 Libraries of Congress. Delete as you will, that information will continue to live -- for which much gratitude from those whose computers are stolen, fritzed, or screwed up by the excesses of Microsoft. If nothing is lost, you can be sure the FBI and dear old Homeland Security has a copy. Somewhere. Of your rages and kinks and curiosities. It is strongly suggested that you do not look up the ingredients of bombs or how to effect a transfer of money between Akron and Aden.

The author's view -- and I have not yet read the book -- is that we have forgotten the importance of forgetting. Which means that almost anyone can access whatever you have not forgotten, or forgotten thoroughly enough. If you wrote that scurrilous, angry letter to your boss telling him you know how much he pads his expenses, with whom he is currently dallying, and by what schemes he plans to conceal his insider trading, then thought better of it and deleted it, it's still out there somewhere. Has it ever occured to you not to do something because you knew it would come out and be used against you? Women who visit gynecologists always wear clean knickers; we who vent -- unless we are old enough not to care any more what anyone thinks -- might prefer for it not to be known that we had once been fired for a grammatical incorretion. Quelle honnte!

The author's second fear is that too much memory us a dead weight, weighing against change and action. There are and have been people who remember absolutely everything; there is no doubt they wish they didn't. Would you wish to remember the smell of a Mexican oyster that turned out to be bad, or how much toothpaste was left in the tube on May 13th, 1946? The Mayer-Schoenberger view is that we must learn to forget; that we should set 'term-limits' on the digital 'information' we create.

This second problem is the one I find disturbing. Whether or not we will eventully use given memory (photograph, text, etc.) is impossible to predict. As the reviewer says, 'the value of what we keep changes depending in part on what we lose' and 'what we consciously chose to delete may serve to distort the past as what we chose not to delete may distort the future.' I once asked a dear friend how it was that I could not remember much of what I had written or published, and often perforce had to read it all over again. His answer was straightforward: I had forgotten it because I had used it. Having no further direct use for it, off it went.

I think I prefer the sheer happenstance of life: those letters from people you may have known briefly fifty or sixty years ago who see your name somewhere and begin, invariably, with 'You probably won't remember me, but. . .' That 'but' counts.

FURTHER THOUGHTS ON DICKENS

2009-12-15T09:25:00.000-08:00

In the construction by Dickens of The Old Curiosity Shop and Barbary Rudge, as in Nicholas Nickelby, the spaciousness of the times made available for details that are today passed over as 'mere description' and skipped over by students eagerly seeking some underlying theory or psychological insight. Those details, in the age of print, were the Reader's senses: his sight, his smell, his absolute peculiarity. Dickens could and did invent characters by the hundreds. They delighted in and of themselves. Contained in a half-dozen sub-plots, they were no driving force to the plot. But when he needed them, there they were, ready to provide a vital refuge, a new twist. Literature was not then fast food. It was an expansive culture and believed firmly in reality. But also in humor and pathos. Dickens' Society for the Improvement of Everything we live in now.

THE LITERARY LIFE 1836 AND 2010

2009-12-14T11:45:00.000-08:00

In reading Mr Slater's lugubriously written but carefully informative biography of Charles Dickens and his 'breakout' year, 1836, I am compelled to report the following:

1. That in that year, Dickens published, sketched, contracted for and wrote: at least two novels, some thirty 'sketches' of up to 10,000 words each, innumerable press reports, an operetta or two, while managing also to fit in his own wedding.

2. That in that year, his readership, which was to grow and stay with him throughout his writing life, another thirty-six years, became firmly established. He was of course his own agent -- since that now-parasitical occupation did not then exist -- wrote his own contracts, and was pursued to do more. Much of his production was available in print within days, some within weeks, and only a very small part required that he should wait for a few months.

3. That in that year the sheer exuberant variety of his work, ranging across genres and having as its subject 'ordinary life and ordinary people' was such as to create a real presence for him, not to speak of an income, by the end of that twelvemonth, that enabled him to dispense with his taxing, nocturnal reporting work.

It is small wonder that anyone who writes for his living as I have done for sixty-plus years should be profoundly envious of such encouraged prodigality and Dickens' close relatinship with his readers. I acknowledge, of course, that writers come in all kinds. There is the minging producer of the occasional poem or story and the logomaniac. Occasional writing -- such as Dickens' many sketches -- barely figures in the writer's life today, there being but scant market for it. For Dickens, such writing was his training ground. Newspapers and magazines abounded and consumed such material as soon as it could be worthily created.

Dickens would have been able to portray his Nancy Pelosi (the hairy one, in Italian) and Harry Reid in the kind of writing which dwellt less on what they did as on which sub-species of humanity they belong t0, how they walked, how their lips furled, how they talked. In other words, vividly, as a part of life. Apparently no one does this any more, though the reason may be that no one but I would publish it. But I have failed miserably to persuade writers that this is where art begins.

Serial publication made it possible for Dickens not just to respond to his public but also to change his novels in the course of writing them: that is how the Pickwick Papers began, as sketched by 'Boz'. When, however, Mr. Bellow and I, in ANON, sought to get writers to send in their manuscripts chapter by chapter, free to change them at will thereafter, we received a fair number of replies detailing that what was possible for Dickens (and Dostoievsky, etc.) was impossible for them. We reckoned that they cowered before the Perfection Brigade and that the rough-and-ready was not for such refined artists as themselves.

As for periodical publication of any kind, or the existence of such magazines as TRoL, many took the position, and so stated it with vehemence, that 'all that' literary activity was a waste of our time and talents: a true writer was one with a cabin in the woods producing the undying.

As for seeing one's work in print, what was more or less standard in my youth -- six to nine months -- has now become years. After all, how could Harvard or Yale possibly take a flying leap on a text that hadn't been peer-reviewed by a dozen dullards? And what would the charming editors at publishing houses do with their time if the author claimed sole responsibility for his text? (Granted, in many cases this would have led to some pretty awful and illiterate texts!)

Dickens was writing in a blessed era of literature in which the written, printed word was as valuable as nourishment of the mind as food was for the nourishment of the body. Of the six shillings a week he earned when he was twelve, Dickens spent at least sixpence on periodicals. I make that to be 8.25 percent of his income. The average college graduate, we are told, reading ten years later, manages to get through 1.5 books a year. Assuming modestly that his income (after tax) is 40,000$ per annum, a similiar thirst for the printed word would cost him $3,350 p/a, not a raw thirty bucks. There are clearly not many readers today who share his passion.

I doubt it is for any single reason that writers are now worth nothing more than a single meal without drink per annum. More likely is that reading in general has been abandoned by our educational system,and by teachers who are themselves -- like much of the public -- barely literate. When our esteemed senators were presented with major legislation (stimulus, health care), we are informed that they could not possibly read several hundred pages in the given time. Part of their problem, no doubt, was that the bills were not written in English but in lawyerly legislatise; but another problem, and a more likely one, was that in their busy days of flying about and dining and conferring and plotting, they barely had time to read even a whole newspaper. Or the inclination.

I should of course add that in 1836, Dickens was twenty-four years old and almost totally unknown, and that in the year that followed he began to edit a magazine, one of many in which he had -- by both editing and writing -- a powerful hand.

TO DEMONSTRATE OR NOT TO DEMONSTRATE

2009-12-12T19:12:00.000-08:00

I have a very simple-minded view of demonstrations. From the singing of Boola-Boola in my youthful Yale days to the Mexican Wave, from marches for this or that right to the theatricals of PETA or the thuggery of anti-G7, 8 or whatever, I don't join in. For the good and simple reason that what I feel about the given pros or cons, in sport or elsewhere, of a particular cause, I cannot feel sure that the idiot next to me, behind me or in front of me, raising his fist and chanting back the slogans fed into his tiny mind by the organizer with his megaphone,for one instant shares my feeling, be it of outrage (at politicians) or adoration (of Chelsea F.C.). I am and always shall remain, a rump of One.

Demonstrations are to me exactly like the group of European ministers, all grinning at the good lunches they have enjoyed, lined up outside somewhere for the photographers: tailor's dummies all, but none so grinning or fatuous as Mr. Gordon Brown or Mme. Hillary Clinton. On my telly, these figures of fun and flatulence are always accompanied by an Imp, name of Sarkozy, who looks like the dwarf in Twin Peaks. There are many ills in today's world about which I have strong feelings -- Bernie Madoff and Exxon, Baucus and Bush, Cheney and the Modern Languages Association-- but my desire to tear them limb from limb is strictly my own affair. I don't join, and like Groucho Marx, I expect they are glad that I don't.

Of course, I like to think that my approach to the abuses of the day are more nuanced that the imbecile in front of me who rises at Fenway to block my view of a contest for seeing which I have paid good money, but it probably isn't. Chances are that I am not by nature a Joiner of anything. There probably is a reason why I am unable to join a Herd. But I think it is for those who enjoy being a part of the Herd to explain to me why they should choose to go out on a cold, rainy night in Copenhagen to protest about Climate Change. Did they not drive in and park their cars, or fly in from the outposts of Lower Dissent? Do they all eschew fast foods and go barefoot? Why aren't they, for instance, sampling the joys of Anglo-Saxon poetry or loooking after their kids, or learning how to make a souffle, or, in fact, doing something useful? Does their water run while they brush their teeth (if they do)? Can they stop the icebergs melting?

The Mob is an awful thing. Michelet, who got this straight from his uncle, who had dealings with the tricoteuses of the French Revolution, found it and them repulsive. The money wasted on policing such demonstrations of 'democratic', but subterraneously organized, protest would be better spent on. On what? On almost anything. Ridding the opera of debauched directors. Abolishing capital punishment. Private charity. Making a bonfire of collective vanities. Scanning the brains of those who buy Prada. Providing an architecture in which people can live and breathe. Buying fresh and refusing frozen. You name it: almost any cause is worth pursuing privately, starting with the reformation of the Self.

CRIME NOVELS AND STIEG LARSSON

2009-12-11T05:59:00.000-08:00

In the guest house I keep some four hundred carefully selected crime novels from many countries: from Idrisson in Ireland to Tabucchi (Italo-Lusitanian), from Vladimir Volkoff (emigre Russian) to the great Nicholas Freeling (Dutch), Andrea Camilleri (Italian), Ian Rankin (a Scot) and John Le Carre (true Brit like his forebears Graham Greene and Eric Ambler), Ray Chandler (expat Brit in Hollywood), and, of course, the Pleiade edition of the priapic Georges Simenon. These are what the French call noirs, the Italians call gialli, and that we used to call plain 'mysteries' but now categorize as 'procedurals', 'psychological', 'historical', and whodunits, etc.. Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd? asked Edmund Wilson about Mary Roberts Rhinehart. Answer, I do. And have written quite a few myself in my I.I. Magdalen persona. It strikes me that -- in the hands of a good writer -- such novels are the last reminder of the true narrative tradition in literature.

Americans rate highly in the international market, especially in Europe,where the brutish is highly esteemed, but apart from Chandler and Elmore Leonard (who started out re-inventing the language of crime) I stick with the avatars, the dirty or convoluted (Ellery Queen, Rhinehart) writers of the 'Thirties and 'Forties. The Scandinavians (Wastberg and Co.) have long been good at the task: their cops somewhat bumbling, their criminals at odds with their smug, suicidal cultures. Until he began to take himself seriously and fell off the roster by concentrating on political corectness, Henning Mankell, now vurtually unreadable, was a fine example. The few Japanese (Matsumoto) who get translated have been remarkable: an ant-like society seems especially troubled by murderers single, if not by murder collective.

Then along came Stieg Larsson, the bolshy Swede, whose Millennium trilogy has made him the world's second best-selling writer. The trilogy is a terrific read because his heroine, Lisbeth Salander is way off all charted behavior in the genre. Seemingly indestructible, she is a sexual fantasy of the author's, whose desirous panting (bisexuality, sado/masochism, bondage usw) is in tune with every kind of lefty 'cause' imaginable. Peep into his background, and the issue is clear: he and his lifelong, unmarried partner, were unsullied sixty-eighters with extreme views, to whom everything that Sweden's highly-structured, busybody and basically conservative socuety stood for was anathema. Unfortunately, Larsson, whose phenomenal success was accompanied by his untimely death at fifty, is pretty relentless in his espousal of the radical agenda. Besides the total flatness of his style (a business-like non-language that may be in part a reflection of his translator), his enormous skill in plotting is offset by the boring predictability of his social concerns, especially in the character of 'crusading' journalist Blomqvist, a man whose company at dinner I would do much to avoid. I can also do without husbands who encourage their wives to seek sexual partners elsewhere, hot scenes of torture, and a general encouragement to view as criminals not just those who commit murder but also those who guard society against such as 'fascists'. The tendency to preach within the crime genre should be eschewed.

POLITICS AND HEALTH CARE

2009-12-09T15:42:00.001-08:00

I have no intention of making an idiot of myself by joining in a health care 'debate' whose conclusion should be now be obvious to all. A handful of senatorial slurpers at the public trough, led by someone called Baucus, have determined that we, the public, should not have a single-pay system of health care.

I take the following as obvious:
(1) Such a plan takes many years to work out in detail. I was alive and well when it was introduced into the unhealthy, underfed, and grudging population of the United Kingdom. Nearly sixty years later that population is far better off and far healthier. It is not I who would benefit from a US equivalent, but my grandchildren.
(2) There is no such thing as a perfect Health Plan. Any will have its problems and its failures.
(3) It is unlikely that any could conceivably be worse, more ill-managed, more inequitable and more spendthrift than that which the United States now 'enjoys'. I paid a private doctor a goodly retainer each year, but 95 percent of Americans -- not exactly the healthiest nation on earth -- couldn't possibly have afforded this sort of 'private' care.
(4) I have a vague recollection that a sensible single-pay government-run universal health care was what we voted for and were promised.
(5) Anyone with the slightest knowledge of such plans in more civilized places, from Taiwan to Poland, knows that they work. Fall ill from Lapland to Cahuita, Costa Rica (where I live), you will be taken care of without a question -- or a demand for pre-payment when you knock at death's door. In Costa Rica it costs a family $38 p/m for full coverage, including any and all medications. Of course, the local system us not as 'advanced' as that in McAllen, Texas, which has the highest per capita costs in the United States, for the good and simple reason that its doctors and hospitals manage to make sure a scratch on your knee will have you tested for diabetes. In Europe, such health care is part of a government package that includes FREE education for as far as a student can go, FREE medical care regardless of who you are, where, or what your income is. (It gets abused, yes, but the taxes paid for the service more than make up for the abusers), and many other sensible services, such as socially-engineered local and national transportation costs, support for culture and much else.
(6) The bill for this is high: a tax-rate that is something like 38-40 percent of income instead out the American 31-34 percent. It is a tax which -- when every child gets some 300-500$ of go-to-school equipment every year -- does not seem exorbitant.

Since all this is crystal clear to anyone who has traveled, read about or studied how these health plans work (which varies greatly from country to country) one wonders how Baucus and Company have come up with the kind leg of a donkey. I likewise it is worth considering just how powerless we are to get our legislators to do the obvious. Just as clear is a much older story: don't dream for an instant that you live in a democratic society in which access is equal to all and your legislators are reponsive to your desires. Congressional eavesdropping on the national mood is like the pit-patter of distant rain compared to the thunder of Tea Parties, Drug Companies and the likes of Glenn Beck.

It won't do for you to say, 'Throw the rascals out!', for others will follow the present batch.

Did someone mention campaign promises: Health care, a withdrawal from war, transparency, no income tax for those on Social Security, and Yadda-Yadda?

IDENTITY THEFT, ITALIAN JUSTICE AND THE TURNER PRIZE

2009-12-08T05:58:00.000-08:00

8.xii.09

First I hear from a contributor that some creep has been using his name and flogging his own writing as C.M.'s. Strictly speaking, there's only one posible defense against literary identity theft. If someone cares to use Joseph Conrad as his pseudonym he must, like Borges' Pierre Menard, write just like the original. The trouble with this story is that the thief in this case knew the man whose identity he was stealing, had in fact been a class-mate. Challenged, he said he just 'liked the name' and then said it was the name of a distant relative in Ireland. Nothing new about literary fraud. I gather blogs are wide open to intrusions of this kind. If another Keith Botsford wants to post here, what would the appropriate response be? One likes to think that one's style, turn of mind, peculiar curiosities, one's 'angle' is inimitable. But Pierre Menard simply wrote Don Quixote all over again, word for word. Such is the post-modern Fate

* *

The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. has introduced a new concept to history: a headline which reads 'A New Renaissance'. The re-birth of a re-birth? To think that once, many years ago, the Guardian was a true guardian of good writing.

* *

A brouhaha is stirring in the American depths over the conviction of Ms. Amanda Knox in an Italian court. The marvelously smug Hillary Rodham Clinton had to duck the issue, but not Maria Cantwell, one of our distinguished senators. It would seem the prevailing opinion in some circles that Italian courts are somehow inadequate to the task of trying persons who commit murder within their jurisdiction. Now, Italian courts may be all sorts of things: they can be slow, they favor eloquence over content among lawyers, they are certainly slow, they have quaint customs and wear funny hats, and the judiciary is highly politicized, but none of this indicates that they are incompetent. They are rather dogged and bureaucratic, but they also have some admirable traits which I should like to see adopted in our own: they are polite and civilized, they cannot hand out death sentences, appeals from their decisions are automatic, and the system under which individuals are brought forward for prosecution, via an examining magistrate who must weigh all the evidence before allowing a prosecution, strikes me as admirable. There are no 'elected' district attorneys with a political status to maintain, no jurisdictions (like Mississippi's) where lawyers can congregate to make a case for massive tort payments, and no lawyers who advertise for class-action suits to increase their billings.

* *

The Turner Prize has just been given to the painter Richard Wright for painting the walls of an 'architectural space' with gold-leaf that will disintegrate within months. After some years of winners who 'situate' themselves in the art world by lying in an unmade bed, 'install' themselves by running wideos, who exhibit here a brick there a brick or mummify animal parts in tanks, this year's prize has been hailed as a 'triumph'. If all the British Sunday papers, the heavyweights, so thunder, the public will follow. Some may wonder where the art involved in painting has gone. This is not to reflect on Mr. Wright's art, for I have only seen the wall in question on Google, but I do marvel at the unanimity of critics: do they all go to the same spa to get their brains washed by Saatchi, the Tate or the egregious lovers of the spurious in the New York Times?

Should Scientists Study History and Geography?

2009-12-07T05:39:00.000-08:00

One of the advantages of a national system of education is the kind of public debate that ensues when 'reforms' to the existing system are proposed. The current ministry of education in France has proposed that teaching history and geography in the last two years of the lycees, devoted to preparation for the famous bac which enables students to enter universities, be eliminated for those in the technical/scientific specialization. The protests, led by Alain Finkelkraut, have aroused the usual French passion for abstract debate.

In its simplest form, the question is, do scientists need these subjects for their professional goals, or would they be better off with more science and less history and geography? We have no comparable debate here: first because the curricula are determined locally by professional 'educationalists', and second because we have long ago eliminated geography in our school systems, and basically scant history. The result has been a nation with only the vaguest notion of geography in the broad sense -- that is, not merely where things are located but of the consequences of such locations. As mathematics and music are languages, almost all human activity involves mapping, from the templates of word-processing to the geography of the human mind.

I was wont to give my students at Boston University a blank map of the world. Three out of twenty managed to place France off the coast of Japan. That would not have happened thirty or forty years ago. Similarly, my eighth grade class in Balboa, California, in 1939 used the same European history textbook as is still used, only now at the Junior/Senior level at university: a net loss of seven years.

I don't think scientists need to know history and geography to be better scientists; I believe they need to know both in order to be better people. We need far more knowledge of the past in order to act prudently in the present and for the future; and our lack of knowledge of how geography and mapping work in our minds in relating one element to another is like not knowing how to co-ordinate hand and eye in hitting a ball.

Maasimo Rizzante: Non siamo gli ultimi (Effigie, Milano, 2009)

2009-12-06T08:07:00.000-08:00

In his excellent run-through of the principal themes of twentieth-century literature, Massimo Rizzante (see his text on Roberto Bolano in TRoL 20), a poet and connoisseur, wrote about TRoL as follows:

"In 1997, after fifty years of feverish activity as a writer, journalist, translator, historian and university professor, Keith Botsford, with his great friend Saul Bellow, founded 'News from the Republic of Letters'. This is a cosmopolitan review, entirely without advertising or sponsorship, with a few thousand readers. Part of its purpose, KB explained, was to give some hope to good young writers who found it difficult to publish their work. Saul Bellow spent a good deal of his time reading unpublished manuscripts and defined this task as 'both a duty and an Utopian act' in a world in which attentiveness to quality writing was ever more the province of a very small circle of readers. [. . .] I was at the time a young provincial European, imbued with a natural pessimism. When I met him, this seventy-year-old giant, a constant smoker and full of energy, said: 'You remember the early Christians? Today art survives in the catacombs, and it is in the catacombs that faith retains and strengthens its resolve and its hope to see once more the light of day.' One day, ten years ago, I asked Bellow if there existed any sure way with which to form Sensibility. He said he didn't, unless it might be through taking into oneself certain literary masterpieces as if they were consecrated hosts.

"It is perhaps partly the curiosity of a tourist who becomes an exegete, or an exegete who fancies tourism, someone who is not limited by -- he lacks the necessary time -- the possibilities and limitations of individuals, but who has the illusion that he is able to be, at any time or in any place, at home. As KB said, it was like Augustine's 'vain curiosity', the curiosity that led some to seek out, without any particular purpose, that which lies beyond his own existence, that is outside of himself. [. . .] Every time I open an issue, I am taken miles away from Literaturistan. Every literary review worthy of the name has the same desire to embrace Weltliteratur; it is a desire without limits and should stay such. Goethe defined it as a 'madness': a madness and a faith rising from the catacombs.

WRITERS & GATE-KEEPERS

2009-12-05T08:22:00.000-08:00

Our writers -- some young, some old, scattered all over the globe (because we will read manuscripts in most language -- are mostly concerned with literature. Publication is all-important for them; it is a way of displaying their wares and finding their readers. Like most magazines, we take and publish only a small percentage of the dozens of submissions we get monthly. The usual result for many is a form letter or card. We don't do that: except for those who ought to have known better when they submitted. As for instance, we don't do obscenity, porn or smilies.

The new, often young and untried, writer has his work cut out for him today. It was not always thus. When I started out publishing, neary fifty years ago now, the most common communication I got from editors was, 'Where's the manuscript? What are you working on next?' Agents recruited; publishers recruited. Both were more or less literate; both knew a good book from a bad. My agents in England -- Helga Greene, Deborah Rodgers, Pat Kavanagh -- were intelligent, polite and diligent. So were Candida Donadio and Harriet Wasserman in America.

Today, I make it that there are at least five levels of gate-keeping to be navigated before a book of 'literary' fiction makes its way to the public. First, the general negative response to 'literary' fiction, for if publishers don't want it, then agents don't want it either. This negative reaction has nothing whatever to do with whether the public wants the dreaded LF ('literary fiction'). Some do, some don't, and some might if they had access to it. Saul Bellow and I calculated that with a population of 300 million, a minority literature was still possible. The 'one in a thousand' still gave us a base of 30,000 potential readers. We thought we should be able to attract maybe five percent of those, or 1,500. And indeed TRoL did. So the market for LF existed, however small, and it seemed our job to attract it. Needless to say, the same should apply to publishers. Of course it does not, since the conglomerates which now dominate the business, in tandem with Barnes & Ignoble and the other chains, are only interested in Volume, and we are delgaditos, ever so meager, thin and appetiteful.

Therefore, taking our cherished Work in hand, we set forth to find agents, the Number 2 Gate-Keepers (Mine are long dead, clinically depressed, retired, or have jumped off the Golden Gate bridge.) Well, good luck to you. When I returned to fiction in 1990, I set forth in search of such, starting with the agents I had long worked with. Candida Donadio Associates, I found, had been taken over by a not very good crime writer whose view of LF was painfully expungatory; he didn't want it and he didn't think anyone else did. As is the norm these days, he did take up he better part of nine months to reach that decision, or so inform me. High hopes were placed in my old friend Herbie Gold's new agency, to be headed by the very able ex-editor of the Los Angeles Times book section. He took even longer, and much hand-wringing. God he loved it, God he wished he could. . .You know the line. After some dozens of these, I simply gave up the search for a agent.

Which in turn led to Gate-Keeper 3: that no commercial publisher will even look at a book that has not been submitted by an agent (preferably by el Tiburon, Mr. Wiley, 'owner' of Messrs. Bellow, Amis, Roth and countless backlists). There are exceptions. You may submit directly to publishers if you have done something suitably disgusting, if you have insider info on Michael Jackson or some other spurious celebrity, if you retire (or are fired from) public service, and so on. Random House will greet you with open arms, and so will many, if you can guarantee enough fame to get you on Fox for minimal payment, if you can splash out a few hundred thousand on PR, are buddies with Oprah, or have a specific lobby (Tea Party, Evangelical, etc.) as your target audience. Supposing you have none of the above, being no more then good at your trade (LF), then this Catch 22 will keep you unpublished.

Gate-Keeper 4 is the critical establishment, a dying breed. Writers get known by word-of-mouth, yes, but also by serious citical attention. Where would they get that today? With rare exceptions, the main 'reviewing' organs, the newspapers and magazines that take writing seriously, have never been of a very high quality. With the take-over of many magazines by the Academy, that dead hand has been instrumental in destroying literature, the truth being that professors love themselves and hate books. The middlebrow media, such as the New York Times or the weeklies, in America especially, remain closely tied to the commercial publishers who advertise in their pages. In what country would you have a 'service' such as Kirkus reviews to tell you what will sell and what you should cover: opinions delivered by housewives at piece-rates?

The final Gate-Keeper is the Public. I bow to them. All the previous Gate-Keepers have done their best to exclude literature; the public has been resistent, and is the final judge of the survival of this writer and the oblivion that awaits that one. The other Gate-Keepers have deprived them of choice. We labor to make it otherwise; as do others. I am not optimistic.

The New Language of Soldiering

2009-12-05T05:49:00.000-08:00

One of the most curious and familiar aspects of our language is its very American facility for creating euphemisms. The America I acquired, aged eleven, in 1939, still had garbage men; it had a bureaucracy known as Personnel that made hiring and firing official. That wasn't Human Resources any more than garbage men were sanitation engineers. In military terms, I suppose the most familiar of these euphemisms is 'collateral damage' which means killing people more or less by mischance (or incompetence) when you didn't really mean to.

Because there is a serving officer among my children, I tend to read more about war than I otherwise would have. And because I was once, briefly, in Afghanistan -- a country mythical to my childhood for the Khyber Pass and the brave men who fought against 'rebel' Afghans -- I also tend to follow the progress of our conflict in those parts. It was with those interests in mind that I read in my TLS (November 20) that NATO calls our troops there 'stability enablers'. Our boys are there not to kill Taliban (aka the 'Anti-Coalition Militia, ACM) and flush out the 6'4" Osama bin Laden, but to enable stability, something other countries have been trying to do since the 1840s, with a conspicuous lack of success. This process involves training Afghans to do what we currently seek to do, maintain security. This is known as 'leveraging local capacity.' According to the author of the book under review (Patrick Hennessey, The Junior Officers' Reading Club) he and his fellow officers were there 'to play with the Afghans and to teach them to use their rifles for the time when the real soldiers had blown up all the Talibaddies and could hand a peaceful, if not prosperous province (Helmand) with smiles and handshakes and flag-ceremonies.'

As Henessey points out, however, few soldiers really know who it is they are fighting. The ACM, the Talibaddies, could be al-Qaeda, foreign jihadists, disgruntled poppy farmers, co-opted villagers or adventurers out for a bit of fun. Then the clever word-merchants devised 'Tier One' and 'Tier Two' baddies: the ideologists and irreducibles, and the Opportunists who might be 'included' in future negotiations. The army's squaddies, who do the actual fighting (according to my son who returned in April from a six-month tour there, largely to survive), use ordinary language: the enemy consists of 'flip-flops'.

THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

2009-12-04T13:57:00.000-08:00

There have been many changes of format in what we call TroL over the years. When Saul Bellow and I began it, we thought of it as a tabloid for the intelligent reader. We put out twelve issues in that format, all of which we are in the process of archiving on line. Issues 13-17 represent the desire of the Toby Press to make it into a paperback book-like magazine, a format which I personally detest, for magazines are ephemera: to be read and discarded unless you happen to be, like me, a collector of such texts. Until we are properly archive, I hang on to my file copies.

After Saul’s death, I continued the magazine – it had always been paid for out of our pockets, and is now paid out of mine only – because I thought Saul would like it to go on, and Saul, despite constant letters from Philip Roth asking him why he ‘wasted his time’ putting out a magazine’, did want it to continue. The relationship between TroL and Toby was not a happy experience. Toby was, and is, a publishing house in Jerusalem, and very much a one-man band. Issues were greatly delayed; our capable editor/proofreader, Aloma Halter, left Toby; and Toby failed completely to market us at a distance.

I then took it back: only to find that our subscriptions had taken a ninety percent drop. Issue 18 was printed in Costa Rica, and 19 in the U.K., thanks to a loose association with a designer of genius, Ornan Rotem.

It was only then that I realized what was wrong without our policy.

The official name of the magazine is ‘News from the Republic of Letters’ and I had been laggard in paying attention to the word ‘News’. That idea – that we should be bringing a constant flow of new literature to our Citizens – derived from the first Republic of Letters, as edited by Pierre Bayle. It was his contention that any subscriber to the magazine could tuck it into his pocket or portmanteau and, whether in Dublin, Bologna or Warsaw, would be received as an enlightened colleague, one who brought ‘news’ and collected news from new sources.

That is why, with Issue 20 we changed our format yet again. We remain a tabloid but we have fewer pages and appear more often, making our magazine fresher and more relevant. We now will publish as we originally intended to do: whenever there is enough first-class material to fill an issue of 16 to 24 pages.

Number 20 will appear shortly, Issue 21 in January and so on. This means that writers don’t have to wait forever to see their work in print; that our comments (especially PB’s Notebook on the back page) will reflect more closely what is going on; and that our section on books (The Reader) will be far more up to date. I suspect the only subscribers who won’t like the new format are libraries; books are easier to handle.

Number 20, TRoL

2009-12-01T13:10:00.000-08:00

1.xii.09

With issue Number 20, TRoL will appear in a new, more slender format, but also more frequently. The magazine which Saul Bellow and I created some ten years ago has always been irregular, which is no doubt the despair of libraries; but we saw no point in binding ourselves to appearing with monotonous regularity when we could not guarantee that we had sufficient material of the kind we wanted. The title included -24the words 'News from', the idea being that we would constantly be bringing readers to see all sorts of texts they would not otherwise see.

That, in turn, was based on the seventeenth century Republic of Letters. Then, if you were a writer or scholar and were traveling, say, from Dublin to Bologna, by tucking the review under your arm, you were assured of a warm welcome wherever you went: you brought news with you and could gather fresh news from its citizens abroad. That remains of the essence. Which is why we have halved the magazine's size and will now appear when we have 16-24 pages of first class texts. As of writing, we can and will bring out four issues in the next few months.

We shall be fair to our subscribers: if you signed on for four, you will get six.

I hear many complaints that we are unobtainable in the local B&N, Borders and so on. Such indeed is the case, and there are reasons for it: it's a pointless exercise. First, because these supermarkets are among the chief culprits for the now well-advanced demise of literature in the market place. Second, they are not interested in selling such magazines as ours. Third, they pulp. Fourth, they often demand payment for placement. In fact, their view of literature dxtends as far as the required reading for the local college.

We are available at Gotham in New York, Seminary in Chicago, City Lights in San Francisco, John Sandoe in London, Casetti in Rome and a few other places.