The Cigarette Smoking Blog

I Love Oscar Wilde, But I Wouldn’t Confuse Him With God

2012-01-31T13:14:00.001-05:00

Doesn’t this make you want to donate to the Bible Literacy Project?

The Cunning of Cordwainer Smith

2012-01-15T17:22:00.003-05:00

From the introduction to The Best of Cordwainer Smith, the author of “Scanners Live in Vain” and, in non-pseudonymous life, an East Asia scholar from Milwaukee named Paul Linebarger (1913-1966):

While in Korea, Linebarger masterminded the surrender of thousands of Chinese troops who considered it shameful to give up their arms. He drafted leaflets explaining how the soldiers could come forward waving their guns and shouting Chinese words like “love,” “virtue” and “humanity” — words that just happened, when pronounced in the right order, to sound like “I surrender” in English. He considered this seemingly cynical act to be the single most worthwhile thing he had done in his life.

Questions I Should Have Asked the Man Carrying Balloons Outside My Apartment Just Now

2012-01-14T19:54:00.001-05:00

“Have you covered your dozens of balloons with an industrial-sized white garbage bag because it’s snowing, or is that standard protocol? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to blow them up at your final destination? Why are the balloons pink and blue? Did someone have twins? Is that the uniform of your specific balloon-catering company or of the profession as a whole? Is ‘balloon caterer’ the proper term?” Now I’ll never know.

How to Increase a Jewish Mother’s Pain Tolerance

2012-01-14T19:53:00.000-05:00

No, that’s not the start of a joke, either for Commentary or for a Ron Paul newsletter. It’s an amusing fact from The Challenge of Pain, a book of popular medicine from 1982:

In a similar [pain-tolerance] experiment (Lambert et al., 1960), in which Jewish and Protestant women served as subjects, the Jewish, but not the Protestant, women increased their tolerance levels after they were told that their religious group tolerated pain more poorly than others.

So there you are. Say that Jewish women are worse at withstanding pain than women of other faiths, and voilà — stiff upper lip. Is it possible that an entire swath of Jewish-mother stereotypes began as a plot to produce this effect on a wide scale, only to backfire wildly?

Of course, the next paragraph in Challenge of Pain describes a 1952 study that found Jewish and Italian Americans do “tend to be vociferous in their complaints” relative to “Old Americans” (let the term be a reminder of the study’s vintage and the notions of its authors). That study drew this further distinction: “Jews tend to be concerned about the meaning and implications of the pain, while Italians usually express a desire for immediate pain relief.” That can be Plan B, then, if telling her it’s a shanda doesn’t work: talk with her about her pain’s meaning and implications. That almost always works on me, anyway.

Bob Hope Will Show You How to Drink

2012-01-14T13:18:00.000-05:00

“You trying to drown your troubles?”

“No, I’m just teaching them how to swim.”

— Critic’s Choice (1963)

How Many Times Must I Tell You: Never Bring a Sack of Gaboon Vipers on a Public Bus

2012-01-12T17:34:00.000-05:00

A man in Zimbabwe was arrested yesterday when, during a routine roadblock and police search, he was found to be carrying a sack of four Gaboon vipers on a bus. Mathew Aidini, 23, was bringing the snakes to Harare in order to sell them to what The Zimbabwean refers to as “an undisclosed Whiteman who owns a ‘snake garden.’” (“Undisclosed Whiteman” sounds like a name from the Plymouth Colony census roll, next to Praise-God Barebone and Restless Carver.)

This is not the first time the combination of public transportation and a sack of Gaboon vipers has come to an entirely predictable bad end. In 1983, a sixteen-year-old amateur herpetologist named Louis Morton broke the glass of a reptile-house display case at the National Zoo, stuffed two Gaboon vipers in a plastic grocery bag, and hopped on a bus with the bag slung over his shoulder. Now, as you might already know, venomous snakes can bite through flimsy plastic bags, and that’s exactly what happened to Morton. As soon as the poor teenager started screaming that he was about to die, the bus driver quickly rerouted herself to the D.C. Children’s Hospital, where antivenin was administered.

I’m a little disappointed in humanity that no-vipers-on-the-bus is a lesson we needed to learn more than once.

If You Give Oscar Wilde a Cookie, He Will Finally Join the Human Race

2012-01-12T14:14:00.001-05:00

He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead . . .

But the coat worn by Charles Thomas Wooldridge, the unnamed hangee of “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” was not scarlet — he was a cavalryman in the Royal Horse Guards, also known as “the Blues,” and you can guess what color their coats are. We know for certain that “the hangman with his gardener’s gloves” in the third-to-last stanza of Part I was James Billington, since gardener’s gloves were not exactly regulation hand-wear for executioners but they were a personal quirk of Billington’s. (Incidentally, Billington started out as an amateur hangman, practicing with dummies on a backyard gallows he built for himself, and ended his career after being required to hang a man he’d known personally from his local pub; all three of Billington’s sons followed him into the family business.) Wilde’s reference to “the dripping wall” in the Debtor’s Yard is accurate — the wall was in constant shade and so plagued by condensation and algae — but “the warders with their shoes of felt” could not possibly have “crept by each padlocked door,” because Reading Gaol’s padlocks were replaced with standard locks well before 1896.

This, dear reader, is the kind of literary analysis you get from a prison guard; clearly Anthony Stokes is a proponent of “close reading.” He is also a remarkable man, to have written a book about Wilde’s poem based on his expertise as a prison guard at (and amateur historian of) the real-life Reading Gaol. In addition to his line-by-line fact-checking of the “Ballad,” Stokes’s book The Pit of Shame: The Real Ballad of Reading Gaol includes a history of the prison’s founding, biographies of its executioners, profiles of such notable prisoners as serial child-killer Amelia Dyer and Easter Rising ringleader W.T. Cosgrave, and a description of prison conditions in the period when its most famous tenant served his two years of hard labor. For instance, prisoners had to wear something known as a “Scottish cap,” which has a downward sloping brim that covers the face and two slits for eye-holes, in order to prevent prisoners from recognizing one another’s faces after being released. The book is full of details of this kind.

Stokes must be something of an eccentric: To the third-to-last stanza of the poem —

In Reading Gaol by Reading town
     There is a pit of shame,
And in it lies a wretched man
     Eaten by teeth of flame,
In a burning winding-sheet he lies,
     And his grave has got no name.

— he gives this annotation:

Wilde would have appreciated the fact that today there is a small brass plaque on the prison wall at every grave listed in the records and at sites shown on old plans, bearing the name of the prisoner and the date of his execution.

These plaques were put up by Stokes himself; he also put one at Wilde’s old cell, C.3.3. (now C.2.3). Just imagine the conversation when he asked the warden for permission.

But anyway — about those cookies. Eighteen months into his two-year sentence, Wilde was having a rough time of it. His mother had just died; legal custody of his children had been given to his wife and her cousin, who weren’t likely to let Oscar see his boys again; the warden had denied him permission to mail De Profundis to Lord Alfred Douglas; and, in general, prison life was sending him into a deep depression. Then, in February 1897, a sweet-tempered Irishman named Thomas Martin was assigned guard duty in Wilde’s wing of the prison. (Stokes suspects this was the work of some benefactor of Wilde’s, since a relatively junior guard like Martin would not normally have been transferred to the long-term prisoners’ wing, generally considered the easiest gig in the prison and claimed by guards with enough seniority to choose their own assignments.) Martin would bring Prisoner C.3.3. (whom he called “The Poet”) ginger biscuits, hot beef tea, and copies of the Daily Chronicle. Wilde in turn would pass him notes:

My dear friend, what have I to write about except that if you had been an officer in Reading Prison a year ago my life would have been much happier. Everyone tells me I am looking better — and happier. That is because I have a good friend who gives me the Chronicle and promises me ginger biscuits.

Martin wrote a reply at the bottom of this note: “Your ungrateful I done more than promised.”

Included as an appendix to Pit of Shame is an essay by Theodore Dalrymple, who also wrote the foreword, in which Dalrymple contrasts Wilde’s humane maturity after his release with “the sheer callow, shalow, spoilt-child silliness” of his Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (e.g., “Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account fo the curious attractiveness of others”), which Wilde wrote the year before he was sent to prison. When I wrote my senior essay on Wilde’s conversion to Catholicism, I concentrated on suffering as the main catalyst of his turn to God and his abandonment of “callow, shallow, spoilt-child silliness.” But now I suspect that, although stripping tarry rope until his hands were bloody certainly knocked some sense into his aesthetic head, Wilde might have simply been embittered if not for the leavening of friendship that, thanks to luck or providence, he found in this guard.

As for Thomas Martin, he was fired the week of Wilde’s release for giving cookies to a boy who had been caught poaching and sent to prison because he couldn’t afford the fine. Stokes explains that “the young lad unknowingly had told the chief warder of his kindess, and for this Martin was dismissed.”

The Oxford Union: Playground of Power by David Walter: The Jokes Are Old, But They’re Still Funny

2012-01-10T09:52:00.000-05:00

This 200-page history of the Oxford Union preserves undergraduate wit with enormously greater permanence than it is in undergraduate wit’s nature to be preserved. Try telling a college student that a joke he made yesterday — for example, “The honourable gentlemen have turned their backs on their country and now have the effrontery to say they have their country behind them” (p. 38) — will be recorded in a book and chuckled at by a casual reader more than a century later. The average student believes some pretty outlandish things about what he is going to accomplish in his four years (write the Great American Novel or prove the Riemann hypothesis, usually), but he’s not likely to believe that.

But the book has an entire appendix called “The Wit of the Oxford Union,” which is just five pages of vintage jokes. For example, from the subsection on the 1930s and ’40s:

The Liberal Party is like a lobster, by nature blue, except when it gets into hot water, when it turns red.

As for the Ten Commandments, even Solomon in all is glory was not troubled by some of these.

In the 1970s and ’80s, the wit of the Oxford Union seems to have addressed itself exclusively to insults:

If the honorable gentleman did not have a moustache, he would be a barefaced liar.

The honorable opposer’s speech was very similar to Noah’s Ark; it drifted endlessly on the waters, found no solid ground, and was filled with all manner of strange things — with all of them in tedious duplicate.

I am told, Sir, that the City Council wanted to name a street after you, but they couldn’t find one narrow and twisting enough.

His suit always fits him like a glove; it sticks out in five places.

And:

I would remind honorable gentlemen that the bar is open during the honorable opposer’s speech.

You should feel free to use that one at the Rotary Club.

I picked up this book expecting to learn that student debating societies are the same wherever you go, and with a few exceptions that seems to be the lesson, at least comparing Oxford with the Yale Political Union (of which I am a former speaker; please, hold your applause). Both have had to confront the central problem of an undergraduate debating society, which is that everyone is ignorant and no one knows anything — which Yale dealt with by ignoring it and, if that became insupportable, not caring. Oxford did a bit of that, but they also employed the alternative tactic of saying to hell with it and debating resolutions like “The miniskirt does not go far enough.” They also debated poetry (“R, that late Tennyson is unworthy of him”) and history (“R, that Cromwell was a hero”), which subjects have nothing to do with the real world, meaning students are more competent to speak on them.

The presence of women is another dilemma both unions have shared (the YPU pondered this dilemma often), though I find it interesting that the half-measure of permitting women to sit in the gallery was more problematic for the Oxford Union than allowing them to speak and hold Union office. When the women were unable to answer back, the men were apt to do things like what young Kenneth Tynan did: declare that, unlike the speaker opposite, he was against trying to have it both ways, “since I know for a fact that there are at least forty-seven different ways of having it, not excluding the one on the grand piano.” Benazir Bhutto (president in 1977) would have put him in his place, I bet.

The YPU never actually debated “Resolved: This House deserves its doubtful reputation,” but like the Oxford Union, we knew we had one. “Doubtful reputation” in this case refers to careerism and self-importance, alas, not anything dangerous or sexy — though I was amused by the description on p.111 of one young Oxford Communist as “a man who needed a nurse, while she, poor lady, would need a chaperone.”

Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton, a True Hall-of-Famer of an Alcoholic Writer

2012-01-09T20:36:00.002-05:00

Everything I’ve read about Patrick Hamilton’s Slaves of Solitude singles it out for praise as a spot-on depiction of ordinary life in England during the Blitz, and for all I know it is. I don’t know much about the Blitz except what I got from watching Green for Danger, and that’s not much. But withdrawn and prickly female solitude is a subject I know a little better, and I can attest to the accuracy of Slaves of Solitude’s depiction of that.

Its insight into the female mind would be remarkable coming from any male author, but it’s all the more astonishing given that Patrick Hamilton inherited from his father a lifelong obsession with prostitutes, not just patronizing them but falling in love with them and trying to play their savior. The elder Hamilton’s first marriage was the result of such a rescue attempt — the poor woman eventually threw herself in front of a train — and Patrick had a long, mooning infatuation with a whore named Lily Connolly (which he described in the semi-autobiographical Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky). One does not expect the same mind that would transform an ignorant prostitute into a redeeming angel to also create a believable female protagonist, much less write a first-person novel from her perspective.

Also, Hamilton was drinking three bottles of whiskey a day by the time he started writing this book in the mid-1940s — no easy task under any circumstances, and certainly not under rationing. His brother estimated that with the money Patrick spent on black-market whiskey, he could have bought a house, and not a shabby one. (Please restrain your shock as I inform you that Patrick Hamilton died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1962, at the age of 58.) So Slaves of Solitude was a real accomplishment in more ways than one.

The book begins:

London, the crouching monster, like every other monster, has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own obscure, malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of trains and termini into the might congested lungs, held there for a number of hours, and then, in the evening, exhaled violently through the same channels.

The men and women imagine they are going into London and coming out again more or less of their own free will, but the crouching monster sees all and knows better.

There are a few more paragraphs of this wonderful stuff before we meet Miss Roach, whose first name we don’t learn until page 119, when it is revealed that “Miss Roach bore the unfortunate Christian name of Enid.” She is a 39-year-old spinster whose life outside of her job (reading manuscripts for a publisher in London) is dominated by a bullying resident of the boarding house where she stays, which bears the misleading name of the Rosamund Tea Rooms, a holdover from the building’s prior occupant. The proprietress “would have taken the sign down had not the golden letters been too far blistered and faded for anyone in his right mind to imagine that if he entered he would be likely to get tea.”

I say Mrs. Roach life is dominated by this fellow resident, Mr. Thwaites (“a big, tall man, anything between sixty and seventy . . . steady, self-absorbed, dreamy, almost somnambulistic . . . a trampler through the emotions of others”), but in truth she only ever encounters him at supper, the only time the boarding-house tenants are forced into each other’s company. But a few hours a day, even a few minutes, can grow to absurd proportions in the lives of the lonely. For them, a short exchange over rubbery chicken kiev might be the only human interaction they have all day. Mr. Thwaites’s torments are small-scale — referring to the Russians, whom he hates, as “your friends” when chatting with Miss Roach about the latest war developments, simply because she once made a mildly positive remark about the Soviets. But however petty its provocations, hatred of Mr. Thwaites is the only emotional reaction that the solitude-deadened Miss Roach feels.

And that is the real subject of the novel: how the reactions of lonely people differ from those of the relatively normal. A tendency to blow annoyance out of proportion is one way. A reliance on alcohol, especially when the threat of human intimacy comes in prospect, is another. Miss Roach’s romance with an American serviceman who offers to take her back to Pennsylvania and make her the “laundry queen of Wilkes Barre” depends on alcohol from start to finish — and what a finish! It was inevitable, obviously, but Hamilton pulls off a small miracle by depicting how even the most stalwart commitment to emotional detachment can’t keep Miss Roach from seeming, and being, rather pathetic.

The last thing I want to say about this book (other than that you should read it) is what I learned from it that I didn’t know before. (Hypersensitivity to irritation? The abuse of alcohol as a crutch? Already read it!) Halfway through the book — about the same time we learn our protagonist’s first name — Miss Roach’s German-born friend Vicki Kugelmann moves into the Rosamund Tea Rooms and, lo and behold, proceeds to befriend, disarm, and finally defeat the unbearable Mr. Thwaites. The remarkable thing is how easily this victory is accomplished — which of course makes Miss Roach wonder whether Mr. Thwaites was this vulnerable all along.

One possibility is that Miss Roach could have overthrown this tea-room tyrant any time she wanted, if only she could have mustered up the will. Another interpretation is that when an insular community gets in a rut, introducing a new character is the only way to get out of it — and that’s no testament to the new character’s positive qualities; she doesn’t have to be strong or singular, all she has to be is new.

Expect a post about the Gorse Trilogy sometime next week, when it arrives from Amazon; this is Hamilton’s treatment of a sociopath. In the meantime, this post by a band-member of St. Etienne (!) is the most interesting discussion of Patrick Hamilton I’ve read.

Thank You, My Antipodean Friend

2012-01-08T20:08:00.002-05:00

The Mild Colonial Boy, Esq., expected that I would enjoy this graphic, and the man was correct.

For the record, I do smoke like a woman.

I’m Giving Away Half the Books I Own (and I Feel Fine)

2012-01-08T11:30:00.004-05:00

Since the start of the new year, I’ve given away dozens of books from my library, for free, to people I know. First I put all the books I planned on keeping into three boxes, then I filled my bookcase at work with as many of the rest as I could fit and sent a memo advertising “FREE BOOKS: Take what you can carry!” Any time I met people for drinks this week, I brought along a book or two for each person — including the time I was invited to drinks with people I had never met before, one of whom asked whether, since I was giving away my possessions, they could assume I was planning a terrorist attack. No, just a New Year’s resolution to get out from under my book-avarice. I was starting to stare at my bookcase for twenty minutes at a time, not to pick out a book, but simply to bask in its musty alphabetical splendor. I'm not saying that admiring your own bookshelf is a bad thing to do; I just know it’s a spiritual hazard in my case.

To give you an idea of the magnitude of my divestment, my library used to fill ten crammed shelves in two bookcases, two bedside-table piles, four hip-high floor piles, and all the free space on my desks at home and at the office. I’ve got it down to five shelves and two floor-piles, not counting my bookshelf at work, which contains books that haven’t found new homes yet. I’m still holding on to the stacks I use to prop up the slats under my bed to keep it from sagging, but as soon as I order the replacement part from Ikea I’ll give those away too.

Filosofa’s Republic, the fabulously rare novel by Anthony Daniels, a.k.a. Theodore Dalrymple? Gone. Don’t Make No Waves, Don’t Back No Losers, the best book ever written about the Chicago Democratic machine? Gone. Pegler: Angry Man of the Press? Road to Oxiana? My Joseph de Maistre, my John Lukacs, my lovingly annotated Power Broker with its “shut up Caro you just don’t get NYC politics” marginalia? Gone, gone, gone, gone. No one has claimed my Daniel Patrick Moynihan collection yet, but it’s not long for this world, and if no one grabs Pospielovsky’s The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, then my friends have worse taste than I thought.

I never expected to decimate my collection like this. In fact, if you had asked my friends to make a list of things they thought me wildly unlikely ever to do, somewhere behind “climb Mount Everest” and “chuck it all in and open a knitting shop in Utica” — and not very far behind them, either — would be giving away books for free. I’m an anti-social magazine editor whose childhood dream was to be Librarian of Congress, for one thing. For another, I am not exactly famous for my generosity, or even my generosity of spirit — I swear, for years I thought that “to forget someone’s birthday” was just an idiomatic expression, because remembering birthdays wasn’t something anyone did in real life. It’s entirely possible that I have a reputation for being solipsistic — that’s something external to me, so I haven’t noticed.

Was it as hard as I thought it would be to part from nearly 50 percent of my collection? Actually, it was harder. For instance, I had not expected to wince, physically wince, when someone took away all my Patrick Leigh Fermor. I had not expected to come home after my book give-away and start pouring myself a drink and singing “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables.” I also hadn’t bargained on the paranoia: Giving away books, especially to coworkers, has made me extremely worried about what I might have written in them. I don’t think I fill the endpages of my books with doodles of torture implements, plot outlines for my first novel, or columns of me practicing what my signature would look like if I were married to Martin Amis, but who knows, I do funny things when I’m drunk.

But spiritual improvement is supposed to hurt, and there’s no doubt that I feel spiritually improved by having diminished my attachment to material possessions. And while I know that books are denigrated as gifts — because they’re pretentious and because they seem to impose an obligation on the recipient — I can’t help feeling that I’ve brightened a few days in my capacity as the Book Fairy of New York City, and that’s a nicer feeling than I ever got from gazing at my shelves.

So, readers who happen to be in the New York City area: If you wish to acquire a copy of Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, A Visit to Don Otavio, The Most of Malcolm Muggeridge, The Rise of the Meritocracy, Raymond Chandler Speaking, Thy Hand Great Anarch, Seeing Like a State, Ashenden, Hugh Kingsmill: A Biography, The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, or Monrovia Mon Amour, just drop me a line. You’ll be doing me a favor.

The Artful Albanian: You Should Never Listen to Anything Enver Hoxha Says

2011-12-06T21:18:00.001-05:00

La langue de bois, “the wooden tongue,” is a very useful French term for platitudinous windbaggery that combines the worst qualities of politician-speak and bureaucratese. This non-language is generally used when functionaries — up to and including heads of state — have soundbite-sized banalities they want to express and whole paragraphs to express them in, leaving us with something like “The nation’s people desire economic development, and those benchmarks are being met as rapidly as the fundamentals will allow, which is very rapidly, because the people’s desire is invincible and the fundamentals are stronger than ever.” The nouns and verbs are soothing, but the syntax is designed to repel any effort you might make at paying attention.

I was about to write that “langue de bois” is a term every political journalist should know, but then I figured that anyone professionally obliged to treat this kind of sentence seriously must already be feeling quite enough contempt for himself and for the English language, and forcing him to use a fancy foreign term would only serve to compound both. Then I thought a little more about this hypothetical reporter, caught between the two cardinal sins of langue de bois and macaronic pretension, which called up a mental picture of an anguished man sitting at a table with a pile of woodchips on one side and a bowl of macaroni on the other. Best to let that line of speculation wind itself right the hell down.

Communists were the undisputed masters of langue de bois — what is “People’s Democratic Republic” if not the tip of that iceberg? — so it’s no surprise that I encountered the term for the first time in Anthony Daniels’s Utopias Elsewhere, his travelogue of all the Communist autocracies still kicking around in 1989 that he could manage to visit: the PDRK, Romania, Vietnam, et cetera. (In Christopher Hitchens’s review of the book, he wrote rather scampishly that “Anthony Daniels employs the term langue de bois perhaps a hundred times, which is to say, woodenly.”) And if top prize for excellence in langue de bois must always be given to Kim Il Sung, Daniels gives a well-deserved runner-up laurel to Enver Hoxha of Albania — though whether he was most persuaded by Hoxha’s mastery of the art or the fact that Hoxha’s collected works run to a staggering 64 volumes, I couldn’t say.

Hoxha was a despicable human being, even as dictators go. On the one hand, he elevated Stalin-worship to new heights of repulsiveness by infusing it with an ardent sycophancy that was not at all feigned — he met Uncle Joe a grand total of five times, yet managed to turn those brief encounters into an entire memoir, With Stalin, in which more than one commentator has found traces of homoerotic fascination. On the other hand, Hoxha’s abject hero-worship was entirely compatible with a sickening paranoid egomania that made him the Eastern bloc’s least favorite dictator. He had a habit of abruptly breaking ties with every leader that ventured to underwrite Albania’s economy — first Yugoslavia, then Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, and finally China. Everyone with geopolitical reasons to want to like him ended up hating him.

In the Western edition of his memoirs, The Artful Albanian, ed. John Halliday, which I just finished, the timeline at the front of the book has a laconic entry sandwiched between “Albania leaves the Warsaw Pact de facto” and “Albania leaves the Warsaw Pact de jure”:

1967: Abolition of religion

In fact, Albania abolished religion more zealously than any other Communist dictatorship in Europe (and, given that I’ve already mentioned him, I must say that I wonder what Christopher Hitchens would think of the result). Part of it can be chalked up to Albania’s polygonal xenophobia, which encompasses foreign influences in every direction, but Hoxha’s paranoia was certainly a factor.

But what all of this is leading up to is my critical opinion of The Artful Albanian, which is that it manages to distill the parts of Hoxha’s prodigious output that are definitely not langue de bois, such as this anecdote about Tito in which Hoxha and the Yugoslav dictator are canoeing in a lake outside Belgrade. I should mention that Tito’s previous dog, Lux, saved his life by leaping on his master during a bomb raid and taking a shard of shrapnel that would have killed Tito and ended up killing Lux.

“The dog’s tired.” And Tito called to him, “Climb in!”

The dog scrambled into the boat, and since it was the size of a calf, the boat rocked a bit, but we came to no harm, except that when the dog shook himself the suit which I had for the Paris Peace Conference was soaked.

“We will dry it when we get back to villa,” said Tito.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said to him, giving the dog a hard look.

Still, Hoxha is the kind of sonuvabitch who would write in his memoirs that he, and only he, deserves credit for the deaths of the Albanian freedom-fighters usually considered victims of Kim Philby.

Therefore, even the following anecdote from 1942 (p. 57) is powerless to move my sympathy:

Almost stupefied by the thick fog of tobacco smoke we were obliged to take repeated breaks to rest in the other room where, besides drinking coffee, we continued to smoke tobacco.

The scene described is the trial of a party member who dared to think that the British might make a better ally than the Russians; after all the tobacco smoke, he ends up shot.

But King Zog still holds the Guinness World Record for most cigarettes smoked in a single day, so the allegiance of the Cigarette Smoking Blog is clear even before the gut-wrenching atrocities are considered.

‘Like Telling Someone That If He Doesn’t Get Some Sleep He’ll Become an Insomniac’

2011-11-27T22:19:00.001-05:00

Unlike some New Yorker writers (Dorothy Parker, we’re looking at you), Peter De Vries saved his best one-liners for his work: “The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.” “If there’s any one major cause for the spread of mass illiteracy, it’s the fact that everybody can read and write.” “If all the repressed women in the world were laid end to end, it’d be a damn good thing and a better world all around.” “No woman of breeding has nine children. It’s a contradiction in terms.” “She’s a great lay, but she needs an editor.”

This next one doesn’t show up on his quotes page, perhaps because it’s from his last novel (published in 1986) and his quote compilers went about their work chronologically. Our main character has just encountered an old flame at an A.A. meeting:

He remembered with a twinge how he had said to her, “If you don’t stop drinking you’ll become an alcoholic.” How idiotic his preachment sounded in memory. It was like telling someone that if he doesn’t get some sleep he’ll become an insomniac.

Speaking of taking De Vries chronologically, that’s not at all how I’m going about it. But I am on track to clear him out (minus a few hard-to-find titles) in the next few weeks, at which time I’ll write a proper profile, since long posts about obscure figures are becoming a bit of a tradition here.

‘They Were Fighting as to Who Should Be President of the Peace Society’

2011-11-27T17:45:00.001-05:00

From Radical Joe: A Life of Joseph Chamberlain, a reminiscence from his primary-school teacher:

At one time, they wanted to get up a ‘Peace Society.’ I was very much against it, as I felt sure it would stir up quarrels among them, and they were of course forbidden to fight. However, like men, I knew they would get tired of it if they had their own way. One afternoon I heard there had been trouble while I had been out, and I sent for the boys to interrogate the offenders. It was just as I had expected. They had been fighting as to who should be the President of the Peace Society, and, of course, Joseph Chamberlain was among them.

An adult Joe Chamberlain remembered the events perfectly:

I founded that Peace Society. It was to be a charitable society, and we had a fund of five pence half-penny to distribute, of which I contributed the largest share, for I remember my uncle gave me a fourpenny bit. The quarrel was as to what should be done with so large a sum. Eventually, after long consideration, it went to a crossing-sweeper near the school, and that was the end of the Peace Society.

And that little boy with the fourpenny bit grew up to start the Boer War. And now you know . . . the rest of the story.

‘Sometimes the Faithful Would Place a Few Gauloises Cigarettes in the Collection Basket’

2011-11-27T16:30:00.001-05:00

Father Rutler on the Church during World War II.

The Different Kinds of Mustaches John McPhee Has Seen

2011-11-27T12:57:00.001-05:00

A list compiled after being stumped by reference to an “equitable mustache” in Looking for a Ship and then turning to Google Books with mischievous intent. All of these are real.

amiable
equanimous
tetragrammatonic
guileless
competent
sincere
white
inquiring
drooping dihedral
ample
soothing
blonde
analgesic
aggressive
trapezoidal
odobene
walrus
storybook
Guinness Book
tousled
well-cared-for
wicked

On the Anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre, Remembering Its Strangest Casualty

2011-11-18T15:14:00.000-05:00

Shiva Naipaul is not as well known as his Nobel-laureate brother, but a devoted minority considers him the better writer, and I do not think there can be much question that he is the only Naipaul with a sense of humor visible to the human eye. He is also the more tragic of the two. Shiva died of a heart attack in 1985, when he was only 40—an important but not determinative data point in the argument over whether he was a bitter, lazy chain-smoking sot, as alleged by Paul Theroux, or the (admittedly whiskey-fond) “humorous, recalcitrant, and denunciatory” genius warmly remembered by Martin Amis. But we can leave that dispute to Britain’s men of letters. The more interesting tragedy of Shiva Naipaul’s life was the way his spirit was broken by the Jonestown massacre.

His first book was a comic novel, and so was his second. He never wrote one again. After the late ’70s, it was all Third World journalism and travel writing, apart from one more novel called Love and Death in a Hot Country which was not comic at all. After that bleak book came out in 1983, his wife’s father asked him in a letter whether he might not want to “reconsider a comic vein.” His reply was, “How can I? I have walked over the bodies at Jonestown.” As indeed he had: Naipaul arrived in Guyana less than two months after the incident, when coffins were still being flown out from the capital and native Indians were still laboring over an incineration pit, disposing of whatever remnants—shoes, mattresses, clothes, blankets—were left of the Peoples Temple. Naipaul wrote a book about it, Journey to Nowhere, but that didn’t seem to purge Jonestown from his mind. Friends who’d known him before November 1978 said he was never the same after it.

For most of the people who were traumatized by Jonestown, it was the idealism that got to them. This was the largest loss of civilian life in American history, apart from natural disasters (and, later, September 11), and it had been committed in the name of ideals that all right-thinking people of Naipaul’s generation embraced: racial equality, economic “cooperation,” worry about nuclear war, ministry to the poor and the outcast. When Jones claimed that he was decamping for Guyana because the Third World held greater promise for him than racist, fascist, capitalist America, he was not expressing a fringe opinion. As Naipaul sat down to write his book, he had before him the testimony of Timothy Stoen, who was in the middle of a custody battle with Jonestown when his 6-year-old son died on November 18 along with everyone else; but he also had before him effusive letters from 24-year-old Maria Katsaris to her skeptical father:

I just want to share my enthusiasm with your for what is going on here. I know you would love it. . . . It is hard to describe all the beauty of the jungle and all that is going on at the Project.

Her father was shot on the runway at Port Kaituma by the same gunmen who killed Congressman Leo Ryan and four of the others who had flown down to investigate. Mr. Katsaris lived; Maria died with a note next to her that read: “I Maria Katsaris leave all of the money in the Banco Union de Venezuela in Caracas to the Communist Party Soviet Union.”

But even allowing for the effect it must have had on Naipaul to stand ankle-deep in the mud of the main pavilion breathing in the cleaning crew’s disinfectant, it doesn’t seem possible that he would have been permanently disturbed by the revelation that bothered everyone else, that socialist ideals can end in misery and death. That was no revelation to him. His previous book, an African travelogue called North of South, was written to answer “my own concerns—or, if you prefer, obsessions. What do terms like ‘liberation,’ ‘revolution,’ ‘socialism,’ actually mean to the people—i.e., the masses—who experience them?” These are questions that a man looking to be disillusioned would ask, and because he went to Nyerere’s Tanzania to answer them, he got his wish.

Naipaul was no idealist—and in his opinion, neither were the men and women of Jonestown:

It has often been said that the Temple was reared on an idealism which, somehow, became perverted. It would, I think, be more correct to say that the Temple was reared on—or, better still, inherited—an idealism that had already gone wrong, that had already lost its way and been twisted out of shape in the promiscuous chaos of the sixties. Jim Jones was a beachcomber, picking up the flotsam and jetsam washed ashore from the sixties shipwrecks. The “idealism” on which he fed was not virginal but considerably shop-soiled, eaten up with inner decay.

There is probably no definite explanation why the events of Jonestown affected Naipaul so deeply. Maybe he was more of a true-believing socialist than his authorial persona suggested. Maybe it was the aftermath as much as the atrocity: Naipaul interviewed dozens of people for his book, and not only could no one agree on the most basic facts—Was it a cult or not? Was Jonestown beautiful or hellish to live in?—but no one, not even people who had been to the commune themselves, seemed any better for having survived to learn its lesson. Defectors found new cults to believe in; politicians denied that their vetting of the Temple had been too lax; those who thought Jonestown was gassed by the CIA (to prevent it from becoming an exemplary socialist paradise) could not be dissuaded. Maybe that’s why Naipaul didn’t pick up social realism when he put down comedy; if people are this impervious to new information, what difference could a book possibly make?

My own favorite of Shiva Naipaul’s books is the essay collection Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth, and since half of the pieces in it were written after Jonestown, I don’t think his spiritual crisis did anything to diminish his talent. Then again, I haven’t read his debut, Fireflies, the funny one that everybody loved. (Martin Amis: “The moment I finished his first novel, I felt delight in being alive at the same time as such a writer.”) It’s sitting on my desk now; maybe by the 34th anniversary, I will have revised my opinion. If I’m lucky, I will also have a better answer to the mystery of Naipaul’s midstream abandonment of the humor that had made his career.

Beet Risotto: Your Recommended Daily Allowance of Purple

2011-11-16T16:51:00.000-05:00

Beet risotto is a cultural incongruity, the equivalent of taking an old Russian baba to dinner at Olive Garden. They don’t grow a lot of arborio rice in the borschtophagous regions of Eastern Europe, and if you look up “beets” in the encyclopedia of Italian cuisine, the first thing it will tell you is that they are used “in dishes like insalata russa.” East is east and west is west, and the twain shall meet only occasionally when circumstances call for it.

Such circumstances include poverty: A third of a bag of arborio rice will make enough risotto to last a week, if you flavor the risotto with something you can stand to eat day after day, and it’s not like there are a ton of ingredients in the dish pictured above: rice, stock, wine, garlic, onions, more garlic, garlic powder, and three beets. The only extravagance involved is goat cheese (which suits the dish much better than the parmigiano-reggiano recommended in this recipe, which was otherwise the basis for my culture-clashing food adventure). Next time: beet tacos?

Westbrook Pegler: ‘My Interest in a Cure for Hangover Is Not Academic’

2011-11-15T11:21:00.000-05:00

From Pegler: Angry Man of the Press by Oliver Pilat:

He often wrote about the black horrors of his hangovers. Once he produced a column consisting of a single sentence repeated fifty times: “I will never again mix champagne, whiskey, and gin.”

In the late thirties, a New York distilling company issued some publicity to the effect that hangovers from blended whiskies were less severe than bonded whiskies. Two or three days later, they received a note from Pegler on his New Canaan, Connecticut, stationery reading: “My interest in a prophylaxis or cure for hangover is not academic and information on your marvelous discovery would be gratefully received.” An employee of the company passed the letter to a member of the [Heywood] Broun crowd which enjoyed a laugh at the columnist’s expense.

Roger Casement: The Gay Irish Humanitarian Who Was Hanged On a Comma

2011-11-15T00:29:00.000-05:00

An instinctive and often muddled supporter of underdogs, wherever they were, Sir Roger
Casement identified himself with the oppressed not out of reason but out of sensuality. He
was a very sensual man, tall, distinguished, rather quixotic, melancholy, whose urges were
homosexual, and whose life seemed to lead him unerringly down dark and terrible paths.
— Jan Morris

In the late 1920s, T. E. Lawrence contemplated writing a biography of Sir Roger Casement, with whom he had much in common — both were famous for speaking out on behalf of dark-skinned men treated badly by empires, and for having sex with them. Casement’s career was extraordinary even compared with Lawrence of Arabia’s: While serving as British consul in the Belgian Congo, he was instructed by the Foreign Office to prepare a report on any atrocities that King Leopold’s men might be committing. He returned in 1904 with tales of severed hands and ten-year-olds enslaved, and the Casement Report became a national sensation. From the rubber estates of the Congo to the rubber estates of Peru he went, and found a system equally inhumane — if anything worse, because the Putamayo Indians had a “docility of temperament in singular contrast with the vigorous savagery of the far abler African,” and because the company responsible was not Belgian but British. The great humanitarian “Congo Casement” was knighted in 1911.

Five years later, he was hanged for treason and thrown naked in a pit of lime, having been caught importing German arms to Ireland for the Easter Rising. He had also gone to German POW camps to recruit Irish detainees for the revolt, an effort warmly embraced by the Kaiser but which produced only three takers. Public pleas to have Casement’s death sentence commuted — from George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Conan Doyle, and G. K. Chesterton, among others — went nowhere, because word was quietly spread that any statement in praise of the defendant might later prove embarrassing: The British government had in its possession pornographic “Black Diaries,” which recorded Casement’s homosexual encounters in scandalous detail, including how much he paid for them, as well as other measurements. (To be fair, the “White Diaries” describe his expenses down to the last peseta in an equally meticulous fashion.)

It was the Black Diaries that undid T. E. Lawrence’s project. The British Home Office refused to let him see them, and in his opinion — which, on this subject, was more informed than the average man’s — Casement’s biography could not be written without them.

But where Lawrence of Arabia failed, Mario Vargas Llosa has persevered. His newest novel is a fictionalized account of Casement’s life. (It has not been released in English yet, but Graeme Wood of The Atlantic has written a review.) It is called The Dream of the Celt, from the title of a poem Casement wrote in 1898, while in the Congo. Casement had a bug in his brain about Ireland even then; his coworkers quickly learned not to engage him on the topic. His letters home were full of Irish stuff, and, as is traditional for those in the grip of Celtic mania, some of it was poetry — decent poetry, even. Consider this parody of Sir Henry Newbolt’s famous ode to Ireland (“Down thy valleys, Ireland, Ireland / Still thy spirit wanders mad”), which he wrote in a letter to a friend two days after the Newbolt poem first appeared, and which is not at all bad as verse:

Up thy chimneys, England, England
Up thy chimneys black and sad
Goes thy smoke-wrapped spirit, paling
Goes pale-aleing — feeling bad.

But the Congo problem was a more immediate concern than Irish independence, for one could not live in the Congo without being struck by the misery of its inhabitants, or the callousness of the rubber barons toward it. These were the Heart of Darkness years — in fact, Joseph Conrad and Casement met in 1890. (“Thinks, speaks well, most intelligent . . . a limpid personality” was Conrad’s impression.) Even before he was ordered to compile an official report, Casement had noted his concerns in dispatch after dispatch to the F.O.

In a funny twist for a man fated to be hanged on a comma, Casement’s Congo report was almost ruined by inept punctuation. Erring on the side of caution, his publisher decided that the public edition would omit the full names of all towns and tribes and all individuals except those who had given Casement specific permission to cite them. The effect on the reader was thereby much diminished:

N.N. and R. fought, and they killed several R. people and one R. man. O.O.O. took a man and sent him to L.L.L. to go and tell the white man to come and fight with Nkoko. The white man who fought with N.N. first was named Q.R.

But Casement’s facts were rendered into more striking language by Arthur Conan Doyle in Crime of the Congo, and by other authors, and the requisite outrage was eventually stirred — in 1908, King Leopold was forced to relinquish his personal fiefdom, by which time Casement was on his way to South America.

His Putamayo Report was equally celebrated but far less successful in the practical sense, since the worst culprits went unpunished and the system was not reformed. The main Peruvian tycoon, Julio Cesar Arana, became a senator and died in his bed at 88. Arana wrote to Casement when the latter was being held in the Tower of London on his treason charge, asking, with indignation still fresh, that Casement retract his “calumnious” charges and “confess before the human tribunal your guilt . . . regarding your dealings in the Putamayo business.”

However, Casement was invited by the British ambassador in Washington to discuss his Putamayo findings with the man whose business it was, according to the Monroe Doctrine: President William Howard Taft. An embassy staffer, writing years after the fact, described the juxtaposition:

President Taft was lured to dinner in the embassy and led away to a quiet corner where Casement was let loose on him. A queer picture they made — the tall Celt, haggard and livid from the Putumayo swamps, fixing with glittering black eyes the burly rubicund Anglo-Saxon. It was like a black snake fascinating a wombat.

But the wombat took no decisive action, and several committees of inquiry later, the system survived unchanged. (Which I expect Vargas Llosa will have a thing or two to say about, being from that part of the world.) Casement got his knighthood and retired to Ireland, where he began getting into trouble in earnest.

To clarify a misunderstood point: When Casement said he was “hanged on a comma,” he was complaining about his lawyer, not the law. Casement’s original intention was to stake his defense on a romantic speech (written for him by Shaw) claiming that Irishmen could hardly be disloyal to England, not being Englishmen to begin with. The comparison he drew was to the Czech hero Tomas Masaryk, who had been “loyal” to Austria insofar as he had served in the Reichsrat, but had begun organizing for Czechoslovak independence once war broke out, making him a traitor in one sense and a patriot in another. Britain lionized Masaryk; why not Casement?

But it was difficult enough to find a barrister willing to take Casement as a client at all, and finding one willing to argue the affirmative validity of treason during wartime was simply impossible. The man Casement settled upon, Serjeant Sullivan, insisted upon a different defense, the one about the comma. (The punctuation issue is too complicated to explain, but this summary is clear enough. The question is whether or not the treason statute specifies that the crime must be committed “in the realm,” which Casement’s crimes, having taken place in Germany, were not.) This defense went nowhere, as you would expect, prompting Casement to write, “God deliver from such antiquaries as these, to hang a man’s life upon a comma and throttle him with a semi-colon.” He was stripped of his knighthood and hanged.

I wrote a senior thesis on an Irish death-bed convert to Catholicism who scaled the heights of fame only to be brought down by a notorious court case in which his homosexuality played a leading role, but I always thought Oscar Wilde was the only one. In fact, Roger Casement might have more in common with Wilde than he does with T. E. Lawrence — Lawrence never had to live through total disgrace. But at least Casement came by his disgrace honestly. As his prosecutor put it in opening arguments, “He has played a desperate hazard, and he has lost it. Today, the forfeit is claimed.”

Quick Hits: Burns, Bedouins, Balfour, and the French Foreign Legion

2011-11-14T11:13:00.001-05:00

“Do you like buns?” Aye, till a’ the seas gang dry.

Ford Madox Ford on Daniel Defoe: “He may have died a mere Grub Street hack but he shall be a hard, angular pebble indeed for oblivion to swallow” (via Bibliographing).

H. W. Crocker III declares the French Foreign Legion one of the ten best thing about Catholicism: “It seems to me that as the product of a Catholic culture, showcasing a Catholic militarism by accepting men of all nations and backgrounds, devoted to one common goal, and by bestowing a sort of secular forgiveness of sins via its traditional offer of anonymity for recruits, it is a good reflection of the Catholic spirit.”

David Lynch: “I quit smoking in December. I’m really depressed about it. I love smoking, I love fire, I miss lighting cigarettes.”

A three-man, seven-camel team is traveling “in the footsteps of Thesiger” from Salalah, Oman, to Abu Dhabi. On Day One of the expedition, two of the men were thrown from their camels, resulting in a concussion and 13 stitches for team leader Adrian Hayes. Then Salalah was hit by a deadly cyclone that flooded towns and wadis, delaying the team’s departure. They’ve finally hit the road, though, and things are looking up: “Over a campsite fire and dining in true Bedouin style, Adrian was welcomed as guest of honour at the dinner. A goat was also sacrificed in Adrian’s honour.”

Balfour the bibliophile: “Nothing ever interfered with his reading. He always had several books on hand at once. The latest work on science might be found propped up on the mantelpiece of his bedroom to vary the process of dressing, and Lady Frances once declared that she suspected him of ‘making a raft of his sponge’ to support a French novel while he took his bath. It was seldom that some work by Edgar Wallace or P.G. Wodehouse was absent from his bedside after these authors rose to fame, and the table by his arm-chair was always heaped with books of history, or Memoirs. . . . Serious fiction was perhaps the only class of book upon which he was cautious of embarking. He never began a new novel until he was assured that it ended well. If no such assurance was forthcoming, he fell back upon Scott, Jane Austen, Kipling, and Stevenson.”

Never Have I Ever . . .

2011-11-11T18:03:00.001-05:00

. . . been asked by someone at a Catholic speed-dating event, “What year was Humanae Vitae published?” Congratulations to the author of this piece, who was only off by a year. She said 1967. The correct answer, of course, is “Let’s blow off this event and grab a drink next door.” (That’s not quite how Mr. CSB and I met, but it did start with a conversation about theology.)

Fan Noli, the Nietzschean Self-Ordained Orthodox Bishop Who Ruled Albania for Six Months

2011-11-09T22:35:00.002-05:00

The compliance specialist from Buffalo, N.Y., who became prime minister of Somalia has got nothing on this guy. From King Zog: Self-Made Monarch of Albania (p. 66):

The new regime in Tirana was a motley coalition of liberals, Kosovars, opposition beys, and mutineers, united by antipathy to Zogu. They had at their head, however, an extraordinary polymath: His Grace Fan S. Noli, Bishop of Durrës, leader of the Democratic Party, League of Nations delegate, Bachelor of Arts, biographer of Skanderbeg, translator of Stendhal, Maupassant, and Molière, liturgist, composer, and orator.

A stocky Tosk with a big beard jutting above his clerical collar, Bishop Noli had been an actor in Athens, a schoolmaster in Egypt, a lumberman in Buffalo, a canning-factory worker in New York, a cinema organist in Boston, and a student at Harvard before settling in Albania in 1921 at the age of thirty-nine. He was Orthodox purely in the confessional sense, and even that was questionable. Ordained a deacon by the Russian Orthodox archbishop of New York in 1908, Noli founded an Albanian Orthodox Church in the USA with himself as its sole priest. Privately, meanwhile, he claimed to be a Nietszchean and, at various times, labelled Christianity a capitalist instrument of enslavement and stated that the whole truth was in Omar Khayyam. He admitted subordinating religion to politics in the best Albanian tradition. His church was intended to promote national consciousness among Christian Tosks hitherto attached to Greek Orthodoxy. He translated the liturgy and made himself a bishop by persuading an assembly of Albanian-Americans to acclaim him as such in 1919. Despite his pioneering work, it was only with reluctance that the new native Albanian Orthodox Church accepted him. Some fanciful critics even alleged that he wore an artificial beard in order to look more episcopal.

During fourteen years in the USA, Noli had won pre-eminence within the Albanian community there, which numbered over twenty thousand. He went to London in 1913 to lobby for independence and campaigned for international recognition after the World War. It delighted foreigners to engage in intellectual discourse with an Albanian bishop. He was a complex man whose style was often self-mocking. Sometimes he sounded sure of his messianic significance; moments later, his tone might be flippantly cynical.

To which a loyal Zogist would respond: Sure, but did he ever get shot and then shoot back at his assassin?

A few pages before this passage, the biography quotes Rose Wilder Lane, which raised the question of what the heck a Midwestern libertarian is doing in Albania, writing first-hand descriptions of Zogu’s victory march. And, according to this intriguing blog post, Zog actually proposed to Miss Lane, which raises the stakes a bit. (Alas, she turned him down.) She seems to have spent time there. If you click through to that post, you can read her account of a traditional Albanian blood-feud.

‘A Love Interest Eliminates at Least Two Useful Suspects’

2011-11-09T21:56:00.000-05:00

Speaking of Raymond Chandler, I was propelled into a spiral of metaphor by this line in an essay of his:

Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective’s struggle to solve the problem. It stacks the cards, and in nine cases out of ten, it eliminates at least two useful suspects.

This seems relevant to the many young proponents of sleeping around who engage in serial romances because they are trying to find themselves. If self-discovery is a kind of murder mystery, then does introducing a love interest just eliminate two useful suspects?

I agree, that metaphor is about as user-friendly as a brutalist building. This is probably because I am unable to grasp what it is like to be interested in self-discovery, which makes me Elisha Cook Jr. in The Big Sleep (or The Killing for that matter): far less interested in who’s guilty than in getting the girl and, if possible, the loot.

But if you happen to be someone who thinks your identity is out there waiting to be collared like a murderer at a Nick Charles dinner party, then you might want to puzzle through the metaphor.

A Stylite on Every Smokestack

2011-11-09T21:54:00.001-05:00

If you’re like me, you skipped to the last page of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue to see how it ended. (Come on, it’s a philosophical treatise, not a whodunit.) (Well, in a sense maybe.) I remember being underwhelmed by the idea that we moderns are waiting “for another — and doubtless very different — St. Benedict,” but that was probably because I was an undergraduate and a religious studies major, and therefore inclined to take any reference to monasticism very literally.

So I was fascinated to learn that Alasdair MacIntyre’s misplaced faith in Benedictine monasticism predates him. Early in his career, Benjamin Disraeli palled around with an odd little movement called Young England — they favored reviving the tradition of being touched by the monarch to cure scrofula (the “King’s Evil”), that sort of thing. One of them, Lord John Manners, “toured Lancashire and decided that monasticism was the cure for Manchester.” This would have been in the 1840s.

Sterling Hayden: From Sea Captain to Hollywood Star and Back Again

2011-11-08T00:01:00.000-05:00

“To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.”

Long before I read his memoir, the first thing I ever knew about the actor Sterling Hayden was what my father told me when we watched Dr. Strangelove — that the man who played the screw-loose Commie-hating General Ripper had once been a Communist himself, had named names to HUAC, and afterwards felt so guilty about it that, as my father put it, “he went and lived on a boat in the middle of the Pacific for a few years.” Tortured actor caves in to the blacklisters and then seeks redemption on the lonely sea, like a modern-day Lord Jim. So I started keeping an eye out for the name Sterling Hayden.

The facts I picked up over the years painted a strange picture. He’d started off life as a sailor, an honest-to-God sea captain at 22 years old. Hollywood snatched him up from the docks for no better reason than because he was so damn beautiful. His first wife was Madeleine Carroll from The 39 Steps. He was the star of Marilyn Monroe’s first film, The Asphalt Jungle. He was a spy for the OSS in Yugoslavia during World War II. I even found a strange personal connection: When Hayden married his third wife (the one that lasted) she brought with her an 8-year-old son from a previous marriage. This was Scott McConnell, who is now the editor of The American Conservative. When I did an internship there, I would not have guessed I was working for Sterling Hayden’s stepson.

His agent used to say that “Sterling was born in the wrong century. He should have been a sea captain in the 1800s.” This is the sort of man he was: In the fifties, he divorced his second wife and got custody of their four kids, and he wanted to sail to Tahiti with them. His ex-wife got an injunction forbidding the trip by telling the court that the boat, the Wanderer, was antiquated, unsafe, and didn’t even have an emergency radio. Hayden could have gotten a radio, but if he’d wanted anyone to be able to reach him, he wouldn’t have bought an antique wooden schooner in the first place.

He defied the court order and sailed off in the Wanderer with his kids and his crew, though it’s not clear that bringing the children along was smart enough an idea to be worth the legal trouble. His memoir, also called Wanderer, mentions that the kids seem to be coping all right with the isolation of a long sea voyage, but they rarely appear in the text; perhaps they were always off experiencing picturesque isolation. When Hayden does quote them, this is what they sound like:

They come aft demanding you tell them a story. “No,” you say, with your bare feet braced on the bulwarks. “Not tonight. Ask me some other time.”

“Why, Daddy?” Gretchen asks, hands clasped behind her pajamas.

“Because I’m busy.”

“No, you’re not, Daddy. All you’re doing is sitting in that old chair with a drink.”

“That’s right. I’m busy thinking, you should try it sometime and find out how it feels.”

“Give me a glass of whiskey and I will.” She throws back her head and stomps up the deck toward the fo’c’sle.

Then again, this letter was waiting for him in Tahiti, along with a stack of fan letters along the same lines.

San Diego, 26 January 1959
Dear Mr. Hayden:

I am a male nurse and I would like to tell you how much we who work here at Mrs. Asher’s Rest Home laughed at something that happened yesterday. You see, we have had this elderly gentleman with us because for almost five months he refused to say a single word to a single soul. Yesterday he was reading in the papers about your wonderful trip to Tahiti. And all of a sudden he slapped me on the tail with his paper and roared out: “By God that bastard Hayden has the right idea.”

So maybe the trip was worth it — the world needs more reminders that you can always run away to sea. After all, sometimes you reach a point where you can’t just repent of your past, you have to annihilate it — and you should have options other than the French Foreign Legion.

I can’t think of another Hollywood star who became an honest-to-God sage in his final years, not an intellectual but a sage — then again, Hayden was also the only Hollywood “Communist” whose respect for the party could be traced to having watched Tito’s partisans get mutilated by the Ustashi. And there probably weren’t many who left the party because his comrades had no appreciation for the sea. (For more on Hayden’s rejection of Stalinism, see Scott McConnell’s New Criterion piece here; apparently they didn’t understand his beloved Thoreau either.)

I recommend watching Tom Synder’s interview with Hayden below — his discussion of alcoholism is very mature (“I’m past the point of talking about it lightly — if you’re an alcoholic, you’re an alcoholic, and I ain’t a recovered alcoholic”), and you get an impression of how magnetic he was. And what a throwback.

Visit Lovely Albania

2011-11-07T23:37:00.000-05:00

I am only fifty pages into this biography of King Zog of Albania (Europe’s only Muslim monarch), and it is already apparent that early-20th-century Albania was the least governable, least hospitable place that ever existed, with the possible —possible — exception of Somalia. Wealth is measured in guns; apart from the few crimes that a chieftain was empowered to punish (by confiscating a cow or burning down a house), the only method of enforcing law was by blood-feud; the country is so insular that there is no leavening of Europeanized elites. After World War I, the Italians managed to gain sovereignty over an island off the Albanian coast, Saseno — but there was no fresh water, so apart from a few fishermen’s families, no one could live there. (Wikipedia lists its current population as “uninhabited.”) Albania was apparently hostile to human beings, foreigners especially. All they have going for them is that their women are beautiful.

This story from page 25 caught my eye. The “prince” referred to is Wilhelm of Wied, a German nobleman chosen by the Great Powers in 1914 as a compromise candidate to be “king” “of” Albania. (Like Maximilian of Mexico, as depicted in this cartoon.) His reign lasted six months. The story comes near the end of his reign, when his minister of the interior, Essad Pasha Toptani, is fomenting a Muslim rebellion against him (despite being funded by the Serbs, who are Orthodox and hated by the Albanian Muslims; are the Balkans always like this?):

By the end of the month, even the Prince could not fail to see the treachery surrounding him. Toptani was implicated in a Muslim uprising which threatened Durrës itself. When Toptani refused to accept dismissal, Wilhelm set up two field guns in his palace garden and bombarded the ministerial residence next door till a white sheet fluttered from the bedroom window.

Quick Hits: Contraception, Belgianness, Myrna Loy Riding an Ostrich

2011-11-06T20:21:00.000-05:00

The singer of “Potverdekke, It’s Great to Be a Belgian,” John Makin, has died.

Owen Hatherley: “There’s a reason why nobody reads this book anymore — because Wiener’s central thesis was so resoundingly disproved. He predicts that in bringing back ‘market discipline,’ Thatcher will rejuvenate British industry and the ‘northern’ values it inculcated — instead, the industrial centres of Tyneside, Clydeside and Teeside, South Wales and the West Midlands, Greater Manchester and the West Riding all faced a cataclysm on such a scale that most have still not recovered.”

Fifty Books Project: “McCoy contends the relationship between Hamlet and his father’s ghost mirrors the Reformation-era compulsion for an obviated spiritual presence in the Catholic sacraments.”

Myrna Loy, 7, riding an ostrich (courtesy of My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck by Lightning).

Pictures of the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb.

From John T. Noonan’s Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists: “Using an argument which only an English writer would invoke, he [Herbert McCabe, an English Dominican] compared the complex of required acts to the complex of acts necessary to score in a game. Not every single act had to tend toward the goal: the player may be ‘occasionally making a move which is the opposite of the crucial—making a move which if invariably employed would make success impossible.’ On recule pour mieux sauter, both in games and in the preservation of the race, was McCabe’s suggestion.”

Quick Hits

2011-11-04T01:37:00.000-04:00

Aussie Mustaches Against Cancer: The Australian embassy throws a charity ’Stash Bash for “Movember.”

“If only F. Scott Fitzgerald had climbed onto the life raft of a brisket instead of into a bottle, his life would have gone much better.”

The most dangerous bar in the world is in Cincinnati? I am skeptical.

Is this a picture of Marine Le Pen lighting a cigarette with her iPhone?

Crisis magazine has been absolutely killing it in the last couple of weeks, and I assume the person we should thank is their new interim editor, John Zmirak. I envy his flair for catchy headlines (“On This Crock,” “Life Lessons from Joseph Stalin,” “Satanism: A Primer”).

The next time I blog about cooking, this will be the recipe I try: Almond-Crusted Blood Sausage. Or should I make Pot-Roast Chicken with Romesco Sauce? Either way, I need to buy a blender.

You Can Pay for This Camel by Visa, Mastercard, or Sheep

2011-11-04T01:36:00.000-04:00

In the 1950s, when it was clear that the British Empire was winding down and would take their country with it if they weren’t careful, the white Rhodesian government decided on a policy of not being South Africa. The reactionaries on their southern border had different pay scales for each race, but Rhodesia would have equal pay for equal work. Blacks could vote in Rhodesia, if they met the education or salary requirements. When journalist Denis Boyles went to Zimbabwe in the ’80s and asked a white old-timer what he’d thought of apartheid, the man said, “Whose apartheid? There’s apartheid in South Africa. We have never had apartheid here.” An all-white government and de facto segregation — sure. But the idea was to stay three ticks more progressive than South Africa, try to build up a black middle class, and pray that England would trust the white government’s good faith and leave them alone. “Equal rights for all civilized men” was the plan. For a number of reasons, it didn’t work.

Anthony Daniels (a.k.a. Theodore Dalrymple), who worked in a Rhodesian hospital in the ’70s, can think of at least one reason that equal pay failed to yield much of a black middle class:

The young black doctors who earned the same salary as we whites could not achieve the same standard of living for a very simple reason: they had an immense number of social obligations to fulfill. They were expected to provide for an ever expanding circle of family members (some of whom may have invested in their education) and people from their village, tribe, and province. An income that allowed a white to live like a lord because of a lack of such obligations scarcely raised a black above the level of his family. Mere equality of salary, therefore, was quite insufficient to procure for them the standard of living that they saw the whites had and that it was only human nature for them to desire—and believe themselves entitled to, on account of the superior talent that had allowed them to raise themselves above their fellows. In fact, a salary a thousand times as great would hardly have been sufficient to procure it: for their social obligations increased pari passu with their incomes.

As long as a black professional felt obliged to split his salary with his extended family, his standard of living would not improve. And without a black middle class that preferred stability to violent revolution, Rhodesia was bound to fall to black nationalism. Of all the problems facing Rhodesian politicians who wanted to preserve their country, this was one of the most urgent.

I bring up Daniels’s observation to introduce this story from a biography of Lord Delamere, the man who invented Kenya. Delamere is trying to buy camels from some tribesmen who are very particular about the form of their payment:

The Rendile, a Somali tribe driven far west at some distant date by fiercer clans, were reluctant to part with their camels at all, and would in no case exchange them directly for cloth. Sheep had to be traded for cloth, and then a suitable number of sheep exchanged for a camel. They would not hear of doing the deal in one.

When Delamere pressed for an explanation, the Rendile said that if a man received the quantity of cloth which would be paid for a camel, he would have a considerable surplus over his own wants and he would be forced to share this out among a large body of friends and relations. Thus he would have lost his camel and only retain about a sheep’s worth of cloth. But if sheep were bought separately from different men, and the owner of the camel received in payment a dozen ewes, no one would attempt to take his sheep.

For livestock came into quite a different category from trade goods in the native mind. They were wealth — with wives, the only real form of personal wealth — and were sacred, but luxuries such as cloth and beads were, so to speak, windfalls and, within limits, must be shared.

Pay a man in beads, cloth, or some other luxury — “so to speak, windfalls” — and he has to share with everyone, even if you were buying his own camel and no one else’s. But certain forms of wealth can be accumulated without any social penalty.

Obviously, Rhodesia was two thousand miles from the nearest Rendile tribesman, and I am not even sure that this principle could have had any real applications. (Paying black doctors in non-transferable perks like housing, club memberships, and discounts at the tailor’s?) But it’s worth thinking about the next time you try coming up with counterfactual scenarios where African colonialism survives to the present day. You know, at parties.

By the way, I mentioned Denis Boyles earlier — it was his book African Lives that got me beguiled by Rhodesia in the first place. I will always remember the Nadine Gordimer quotation he cites in that chapter: “One of the most stupid things whites ever did in Africa was to make the bar the first place where they would mix with blacks socially, and drinking the first pleasure to be openly shared by black and white. Almost without exception, the scattered incidents of violence that are occurring in the new state . . . happen in the vicinity of bars.”

‘I Like Bacon — I Just Want That On the Record’

2011-11-01T15:13:00.000-04:00

D.C. city councilman Harry Thomas Jr. knows where he stands. Ditto Jack Evans of Ward 2: “I don’t want to solve global warming … I just want bacon with my breakfast.” (These are the same comedians who swapped interpretations of the Nativity story on the City Council floor last Christmas.)

Wolcott Gibbs, Tragic New Yorker Virtuoso

2011-10-30T16:02:00.003-04:00

The saddest author bio for a magazine editor to encounter is one that says “So-and-so is working on a biography of X,” especially if X is the subject of the article the bio is attached to. The only way to deal with a byline like that is to smile and say, well, fella, I sure hope that works out for you. Because nine times out of ten, it doesn’t.

Thomas Vinciguerra was “writing a biography of Wolcott Gibbs,” a star of the early New Yorker but now mostly forgotten, when he wrote this piece for the Weekly Standard in 2008. For all I know he still is. But, the timidity of publishing houses being what it is, the only Wolcott Gibbs project Vinciguerra has managed to get released so far is the new anthology, Backward Ran Sentences. That may seem like a meager pay-off for having given Gibbs a furnished room in his brain for the last five years, rent free. On the other hand, Vinciguerra’s publisher did let him rack up 688 pages, which is plenty for a minor writer sixty years dead, so at least his long devotion was not thwarted at absolutely every turn.

In this case, I really do hope his original project works out for him, because a biography of Wolcott Gibbs is something I would read. As far as I can tell from Vinciguerra’s biographical introduction, Gibbs suffered from an amplified case of almost every vice we would expect in a New York writer of the Dorothy Parker era: not just a smoker but a chainsmoker, not just an alcoholic but one who tended to pass out and have to be carried, not just a cynic but a sincere misanthrope who once wrote “I wonder if there is something the matter with me that I can’t like anybody for long.” He had not one unhappy marriage but three, and his second marriage ended with his wife throwing herself out a 17-story window.

In addition to having all the usual writerly problems to an unusual degree, Gibbs also had unusual problems, like being an editor. Spending too much time fixing other people’s work has never done a man’s own writing any good, which is why the literary pantheon probably has fewer editors than dentists. Gibbs overcame this handicap to become a wonderfully precise and readable stylist. On the other hand, he mentioned more than once in his theatre reviews that “there has scarcely been a play that I couldn’t imagine having written myself, suitably stimulated,” which is a very sad thought for a reviewer, and sadder but more inevitable coming from a frustrated professional editor.

Gibbs was also a gifted parodist, and sad editors and sad parodists tend to be gnawed at by the same thought: being able to imitate a genius is not the same as being one. Gibbs was already inclined to rate his talent pretty low, as a depressive, and the fact that he was more admired for his parodies than just about anything else must have been discouraging to him. (The title of Vinciguerra’s book comes from a Gibbs parody, his profile of Henry Luce, which is written in Time magazine’s trademark inverted syntax: “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind . . . Where it will all end, knows God.”) This side of Gibbs reminds me of Peter Sellers, another depressed and much-married substance abuser with a dazzlingly versatile talent. Sellers personally suspected that his skill as a comic chameleon came from the fact that, underneath Inspector Clouseau and Dr. Strangelove, where a real person should have been, there was just a void. His friends wondered if there was a real Peter Sellers at all. I get the feeling Gibbs sometimes worried that, in his case, there was a void where there should have been a real author.

But that was just the depression talking. The man had talent, as you will see if you read this excerpt from one of his casual essays. The excerpt is twice as long as it should be, but the referee has decided to allow it on the grounds that half the length is justifiable to show Gibbs’s sparkling style, the other half to show the scope of his misanthropy, which was not a put-on for the sake of this particular piece:

In these perplexing days, when every man seems threatening to become my brother or better, almost my only comfort is in an anonymous English author, who, in 1841, wrote a little book called “Etiquette for Gentlemen: with Hints on the Art of Conversation,” published by Messrs. Tilt and Bogue of London. With his first sentences this nameless arbiter brings back to the world a forgotten order and security.

Marvellously reassuring, for instance, to a man who had thought all privacy lost in the brotherhood of man is his comment in the chapter called “Introductions”: “You should not introduce anybody, even at his own request, to another, unless you are quite sure the acquaintance will be agreeable to the latter. A person does himself no service with another when he obliges him to know people he would rather avoid.” You didn’t, in this happy society, have to meet dull people; in fact, it was rather hard to get to meet anybody at all. “If in the course of a walk in company with a friend, you happen to meet, or are joined by an acquaintance, do not commit the too common, but most flagrant error, of introducing such persons to one another.” It is pleasant to think of this fashionable trio as they strolled through the town, Mr. A. irritably involved in two unrelated conversations as he struggled to avoid the flagrant error of introducing Mr. B. to Mr. C.

The Master, however, goes even further. “Never introduce morning visitors, who happen to meet in your parlor without being acquainted, to one another,” he says. “If you should be so introduced, remember that the acquaintance afterwards goes for nothing; you have not the slightest right to expect that the other will again recognize you.” Here, of course, was the perfect escape from dismal fellowship: it seemed very unlikely that you’d ever be introduced to anybody, but even if you were it was presumably because of some flaw in your host’s breeding, and was much better ignored.

You can see why P.G. Wodehouse considered the New Yorker “the dullest bloody thing ever published . . . except for Wolcott Gibbs.”

Gibbs worked at the New Yorker right up until his death in 1958, but his output had been dwindling since the mid-1940s. Part of the reason was the magazine’s lurch toward seriousness and topicality (these were the days of the Hersey “Hiroshima” issue). “I had an idea humor was supposed to be against the rules around here,” Gibbs complained to E. B. White in 1947. “The moral climate is against it. Right at this moment there is a son of a bitch down the hall writing a thirty-two-part profile of Stalin.”

The last piece he ever wrote for the New Yorker, apart from his theatre column, was “A Fellow of Infinite Jest,” a story about a literary humorist’s wife and children commiserating over how poorly cast they are in the roles the humorist has forced upon them. The wife is not incompetent at balancing her checkbook, the daughter is not a vapid, gum-chewing teenybopper, the son is not a reactionary foil for his father’s progressive notions, but they feel bound to play these parts in order to provide their father with enough material to make his salary. They end up deciding to kill him for the insurance money.

This is where I’d be interested to hear Vinciguerra’s expert opinion. As a historian of the old New Yorker, Vinciguerra surely knows the story of Joseph Mitchell, who had a brilliant career at the magazine but came down with writer’s block in 1964, and from that day until his death in 1996 never published another word, despite coming into the office every day. I bet that Vinciguerra also knows the theory that Mitchell was ruined by his last project, Joe Gould’s Secret, a book about a Bowery bum named Joe Gould who claimed to be writing an “oral history of the United States,” which turned out to be completely imaginary. The theory is that Mitchell became fascinated (or tortured) by the idea that this fake writer could get all the perks of authorship without the hassle of writing anything.

Now, if “A Fellow of Infinite Jest” had been written at the start of Gibbs’s career, I wouldn’t necessarily interpret it as a farewell to humor writing or an obvious capstone like Joe Gould’s Secret. But around the time he wrote it, Gibbs was already starting to feel that he and the New Yorker were both winding down. “I seem to be wearing very thin as a writer and the theatre stuff I’m doing now would be embarrassing in the magazine we used to know.” For another thing, he had recently gotten a taste for warm, affectionate writing when he started a newspaper for his beloved home-away-from-home Fire Island — seemingly the only place where he was ever happy or relaxed — even having the paper take up civic causes like overfishing, dune protection, and the construction of more tennis courts. Very uncharacteristic behavior for a critic who was once compared to a boy who liked to tear the wings off flies, and possibly an indication that Gibbs was undergoing some kind of transformation. So maybe “A Fellow of Infinite Jest” really was Gibbs’s way of signing off. If Vinciguerra ever finishes his biography, I hope he can put together all the pieces of this final act.

In the meantime, demonstrate your interest to Bloomsbury Press and buy the book.

The Triumph of the Calorie

2011-10-27T19:48:00.004-04:00

History Today has a piece out called "American Pie: The Imperialism of the Calorie," the story of the statistical regimentation of food. It started with the invention of the calorimeter (pictured), which was an American invention, of course. The native cuisine of the U.S. has contributed so little to the world that, if you ignore Southern soul food, it can hardly be said to exist at all. So it’s somehow appropriate that we were the country to invent the calorimeter and then go about telling Greeks, Mexican Indians, and Masai tribesmen that, to be scientifically correct, they should replace whatever grain they were used to with calorifically superior wheat flour.

Alas, in this story we absolutely live up to our national reputation for being gastronomic boors. On the other hand, we also live up to our more endearing reputation for scientific exuberance. The man who invented the calorimeter, Wilbur Olin Atwater, set about his experiments like a kid with a brand new toy:

Atwater invited champion cyclist Nat Butler to establish ‘how far a man ought to ride a bicycle on one egg.’ Wesleyan’s football captain volunteered to take his French final inside the device, to determine the quantum of heat generated by an hour of cogitation. . . . The Women’s Christian Temperance Union campaigned against Atwater after an experiment in which a test subject subsisted for six days on a diet ‘largely composed of alcohol,’ confirming that liquor was a food.

You can probably guess which nationality considered the calorimeter une invention très mauvais (and, as a practitioner of what could charitably be called “intuitive” cooking, I agree):

In 1930, French novelist Georges Duhamel recognized that he had arrived at the ‘world of the future’ when his American host urged him to order oatmeal rather than potatoes because ‘it will give you two hundred more calories.’ To Duhamel, the incident illustrated a distinctively American application of science as a palliative, as an evasion of civilization’s duty to confront uncertainty and disorder . . .

I recommend the article. One word of caution, though: Don’t get tripped up on its references to the “spanersity” of the human diet, or what a “spanerse” panoply of American food customs researchers uncovered. I’d never heard of “spanersity,” and neither had Google, but the word kept coming up in the piece. Eventually I theorized that “spanersity” was some fancy new history synonym for diversity. “Diversity” implies division, you see, and that’s a very negative way to think about difference. “Spanersity” implies that you’ve got a lot of varieties that are part of one unified thing, they just span a very wide distance.

Then I came across reference to “inspanidual appetites” and realized that a far more likely explanation was that some editor did a replace-all in order to turn the HTML tag <div> into the related HTML tag <span>. So heads up, History Today editors. Proof your articles more carefully in the future.

Fatalism Will Prevail, If It’s Meant to Be!

2011-10-26T19:05:00.002-04:00

Fatalism is a distinct flavor of the conservative disposition, but the distinction between fatalism and plain-vanilla standpattism usually doesn’t matter, since they arrive at the same principle by different routes: We shouldn’t do anything we can’t predict all the consequences of, which in practice means we should do as little as possible.

Still, there’s a unique appeal to fatalism, especially the cheerful kind: “Consider the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap, and usually only live for about three years before being eaten by a predator or having their habitat displaced by a strip mall, and personally it doesn’t seem like much of a life to me, flitting around chasing bugs with no sense of higher purpose. But they do look very pretty, even if they have no concept of beauty.”

One of the all-time greats of Tory fatalism was the Victorian British prime minister Lord Salisbury, as seen very clearly in this passage from the biography/memoir his daughter wrote:

“I don’t understand what people mean when they talk of the burden of responsibility. I should understand if they spoke of the burden of decision—I feel it now, trying to make up my mind whether or no to take a greatcoat with me. I felt it in exactly the same way, but no more, when I am writing a despatch upon which peace or war may depend. Its degree depends upon the materials for decision that are available and not in the least upon the magnitude of the results which may follow.” Then, after a moment’s pause and in a lower tone, he added, “With the results I have nothing to do.”

I’m not sure why the U.S. never developed a native strain of political fatalism. Perhaps because our Irishmen are all Democrats.

What Phillip Blond Should Do Now

2011-10-25T23:37:00.000-04:00

I have no idea if the Sunday Telegraph’s allegations against Phillip Blond are true. For all I know, it’s some disgruntled employee who’s behind the stories that Blond is a high-living rock star who likes to take hot women on vacation to Sharm El Sheikh, that he “asked a fellow academic to give a Ukrainian woman he was pursuing £300 in cash,” and best of all, that he dropped half a grand on a chair covered with images of “women in bikinis and high heels sitting astride motorbikes” (thank you, Daily Mail) — all while his think tank ResPublica was so strapped for cash that paychecks weren’t getting sent and the landlord was changing the locks on the office doors. But then, I’m the sort of person who believes televangelists who say they only rented that hotel room because the hooker wanted to have her Bible-study lessons somewhere quiet.

And Phillip Blond getting caught indulging his taste for jet-set-class luxuries is like a televangelist getting caught with a prostitute. Is there a Red Tory equivalent of the classic fallen preacher’s defense, “Of course I’m drawn to sin, otherwise I wouldn’t need Christ’s redemption”? Surely there must be. If Christian ministers are acutely sensitive to temptation, maybe Phillip Blond is acutely sensitive to the perils of having massive amounts of cash.

An anonymous source told the Mirror that “Phillip was like a small-time guitarist who suddenly became a national rock star. He became drunk on his own success. He couldn’t stop spending money.” Assuming that’s true, here’s what Blond should say now.

I’ve always said that too much money is morally corrupting. I’ve said that society shouldn’t reward hedonism. I’ve said that self-gratification killed old-fashioned mutualism. And boy, did I know what I was talking about.

What happened was, I spent decades as a mild-mannered theology professor and then got famous all of a sudden. You might not know this, but Radical Orthodoxy is zero help when you’re trying to chat up women. When fame and fortune came upon me rather unexpectedly, I found myself jolted out of the community where I had built myself a cozy nest, forced to hobnob with politicians and Davos-goers instead of my old friends in the academic middle class. I became deracinated, and when a man loses his community, it’s only a matter of time before he loses his moral grounding. You might say I’m a self-referential metaphor on two legs.

And that’s not the only trap I fell into after warning British society to walk around. I talk a lot about economic subsidiarity, which I have a number of reasons for preferring, one being that global decision makers don’t have access to local knowledge yet must behave as if they do. And what has two thumbs and operates under considerable pressure to pretend like he has sage answers to questions beyond his small local expertise? This pundit. Global industries also tend to alienate profit from good honest work—pushing numbers around on a spreadsheet instead of seeing the visible fruits of your two hands’ labor like a noble carpenter, that sort of thing. And now that I’m a professional purveyor highly fashionable ideas to the intellectual-credibility-starved global elite, instead of someone who does real philosophicalwork, I definitely know what that’s like.

So I hereby disavow everything I ever said about social mobility being a good thing. To the fullest extent possible, property should bekept in the hands of the hereditary aristocracy, because they at least have been taught from birth how wealthy people should behave. No manor-born aristocrat ever boughta chair covered in naked women riding Harleys.

I agree with everything Fake Phillip Blond says here, with the possible exception of his assertion in the second graf that RadOx won’t help you pick up chicks.

Does the Insanity Defense Cover Drunkenness?

2011-10-24T21:38:00.001-04:00

If you are a Staffordshire bull terrier and your crime was committed in the U.K., then yes. "Diesel" mauled a ten-year-old boy earlier this summer, and according to something very silly called the Dangerous Dogs Act of 1991, he ought to have been put down. But Diesel was granted a reprieve because a man who practices something equally silly called canine psychology told the magistrate that Diesel only lashed out because he was drunk. His owner's uncle had poured a can of Stella Artois down the dog's throat because the animal looked parched to him. It was a hot day, and no one was thinking very clearly.

This sounds a bit like an insanity defense, which implies that the court believes dogs have sanity in the first place. This troubles my inner speciesist. In human-people law, drunkenness is a valid defense only if a person's drink was spiked without his knowledge. What if Diesel had broken into the liquor cabinet of his own accord? Would that constitute voluntary drunkenness? If it happens again, will Diesel have to attend an alcohol diversion program? Conducted by whom, the canine psychologist?

I don't doubt that alcohol was responsible for Diesel's behavior. If plants can be anaesthetized (and it's true that chloroform makes a plant temporarily stop reacting to painful stimuli), then what the hell, we'll say that dogs can get hammered. I'm just curious how far we plan to extend the concept.

This One Goes Out to All My Think-Tankers

2011-10-09T23:22:00.001-04:00

According to a ’70s-era anthology of National Lampoon that is in my possession, General Alexander Meigs Haig Jr. (Ret.) (Parody) is not very grateful to Herman Kahn for giving him a job at the Hudson Institute. He also needs black shoe polish. Read all about it in “GenerallySpeaking,” a very Seventies period piece (which, being from National Lampoon, does include some uncivilized language below thefold, some of it directed to Latin America, most of it aimed at the corpulent Herman Kahn).

Formerly I was a fellow who held the post of secretary of state. Upon my resignation (which shocked and saddened a nation), I did not cease to be a fellow. That is not the sort of fellow I am. No. I became a different sort of fellow. A fellow of the prestigious Hudson Institute.

Does this mean I gained three hundred pounds, acquired chronic curvature of the spine, and took to reading Bulgarian newspapers while eating huge unmanageable oil-soaked sandwiches at a tin desk overlooking the Hudson River like the other fellows I could name?

It does not. My spinal disks are still as neatly stacked as any soldier’s. I continue to work in a uniform and not unlaundered wool pajamas with pockets full of cooling Tiparillo ashes.

Yet there are many fellows of the type described to be found at the prestigious Hudson Institute. How a corporate client could entrust a ten-year economic-stability prognostication to a fellow with a tinkling mass of greasy squab bones in his beard or a monstrous load like Herman Kahn, whose belt still makes him look like a segmented insect when it’s let out to the last notch, I will not understand until I have had more time and money to study the question.

I have been running my brain in Washington on behalf of the prestigious Hudson Institute. I have been running it pretty hard, too. In much the same way a body consumes more and more calories the harder it works, a brain has got to consume more and more money in order to keep working at top efficiency. That is just one sample of the many very powerful thoughts I have had vis-à-vis the world while working here. Yes, it is pretty much axiomatic to a fellow who has given the matter the kind of particle-beam-power study I have that I need a huge big fat increase in my retainer.

Naturally, I have bound my conclusions up in a blue polyethylene presentation folder bearing the blazon of the prestigious Hudson Institute and forwarded them to Herman Kahn. A man of his girth and brainpower will doubtless recognize the super-irrefutable nature of my logic and saw me off another big presto log of cash retainer, suitable to the maintenance of my larger-than-average brain.

Naturally, there is not enough processed pulp on hand in the Western world for me to set down all the thoughts I have had since I have been working here. In fact, the ramifications of two of my thoughts alone, were they printed and bound and only ten copies distributed by conventional methods, would absorb Crown Zellerbach’s paper-milling capacity for two years. This extraordinary productivity alone justifies my request for an increased retainer. If not, then the inaccuracy of Herman Kahn’s Super Bowl prognostications (which cost me my whole retainer) should. If it were to become widely known that this megalo-brain had the fucking Dolphins winning by fourteen points, he would lose all his long-term overview credibility with the major corporate criminals of the world and get no more respect than that pontificating pile of Crisco, Orson Welles, and less money.

People have long been asking me, “General Alexander Meigs Haig Jr., just when are you going to run for president?” My answer is a simple one. I don’t think it would be fair to the president we have now for me to run while he is still in office. He was elected for four years, and despite the shame, disgust, and regret of the American people for the terrible mistake they made in electing this man and the enormous growing groundswell of my popularity, I think I should wait at least until the next election.

Let me tell you, the Dow Jones average would have to sink well below 950 before I would even begin to contemplate seizing the reins of power, declaring martial law, working out a feasible emergency powers act, and acceding to the will of the overwhelming majority of the people in namingmyself Supremo-for-life.

Incidentally, those of you readers with reasoning abilities anywhere beyond those of hand-held calculators will know that it is necessary for a man to be named Supremo-for-life. For example, pick any Spic nation -- say, Taco Rico. Now, the goddamn Supremos down there are always grabbing the reins of government or the joystick of authority or the paddle controls of the revenue and taxation bureau like a bunch of fat kids fighting over a bag of M&M’s in the back of a bus. Naturally, we could never allow such Iberian behavior in our great nation, so if -- and I’m only saying if -- it becomes necessary for me to snatch power I will do everything possible to ensure a similar event can never again occur, even if it means blowing a few national-security advisers and so forth out of the torpedo tubes to fool the enemy and my wife.

Leaving the preservation of democracy aside for the moment, let me now address the opic of my campaign fund or, if necessary, my coup d’etat fund. Contributions have not been coming in at the rate I expected, even with the employee contributions by checkoff from our defense contractors. Can it be that the people of the United States wish me to run for president in cheap shiny-elbowed suits? Do the American people really want their future leader to spend fifteen minutes punching codes into a little MCI code box every time he wants to make a long-distance call? Does this mighty democracy want its Supremo-to-be wasting valuable thinking time arguing with Mrs. Daugherty from Visa Card about how much he may or may not be over his credit limit this month? I have gone to the people, and the people have said, “No.” The American people (and as a general who has sent them to be killed in battle I think I know the American people better than you), the American people want to be able to say to Frogs and Spic and Russkies, “Our Supremo could buy and sell your Supremo twenty times over.” Or “Our Supremo has a solid-gold cabochon-encrusted Rolex watch, waterproof to six hundred feet, what kind of watch does your Supremohave?” Imagine the effect it will have on the morale of our people when they see me riding through the slums of Bombay scattering expensive pecan-loaded fruitcakes from Corsicana, Texas, amongst the starvelings of the Indian slums. What a crushing blow, too, to the pride of that left-leaning land’s governing grandmother.

Well, I think I’ve spelled things out in sufficiently large block letters for even dairy animals to get a sense of my meaning, but in close, I would like to remind you to send money or any spare thoughts you may have to me at the Hudson Institute. I also need some black shoe polish.

General Alexander Meigs Haig Jr.
Hudson Institute
Quaker Ridge Road
Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.

Dear General: I sure hope you are our nation’s next Supremo. I have enclosed

□ money
□ some thoughts
□ black shoe polish

to help you with your efforts. I understand this is illegal.

Name:
Address:
City:
State: Zip:

Surgical Anaesthesia as a Metaphor for Liberalism

2011-09-29T03:04:00.012-04:00

The invention of surgical anaesthesia is an incredibly gloomy story in which ordinary scientific squabbling over who gets credit for a discovery was raised to an abnormally high pitch, until practically everyone involved had met a tragic and in some cases rather gothic end.

One character turns to drugs, throws sulfuric acid at a whore on the streets of New York, and commits suicide by opening his femoral artery in his jail cell -- after self-administering a vial of chloroform he had smuggled in.

Our hero spends most of the mid-19th century trying to make money from his invention, but he can't so much as get credit for it thanks to the connivances of a monomaniacal nemesis, who ruins our hero's reputation, foments petty lawsuits against him, and robs him of a $100,000 reward that Congress had for decades told our hero he could expect to receive from them any day. And just when our hero finally gives up the fight -- having lost his patent, his practice, and his last dime -- our villain places a gloating article in a New York medical journal, claiming the invention of anaesthesia for himself. Our hero flies to New York, in order to convince the medical journal to print his rebuttal, but drops dead in the frenzy of writing it.

His nemesis falls victim to the curse soon thereafter: When he spies a monument erected to our hero, he falls into a four-day raving fit and is finally committed to a Massachusetts asylum, where he lives out his few remaining years.

It reminds me of a heist movie where everything goes wrong (except for the last act of the story where our hero and villain die, which is not a heist movie but the plot of Amadeus in bizarrely accurate detail): The prospect of a big pay-off drives everyone to extremes and some to insanity, and in a fit of greed and madness they pick each other off until one man, at most, is left standing.

Every heist movie has the same moral: Gold, in sufficient quantity, is guaranteed to drive ordinary men to hysteria. Which is where the metaphor for liberalism comes in. Is it possible that the prospect of abolishing pain is just as much an invitation to obsession and madness as the prospect of stealing a million dollars from a bank? The men in this story didn't just think they were developing a chemical that would facilitate surgery; they thought they were abolishing suffering. (Books on the anaesthesia controversy include such titles as Triumph over Pain, Victory over Pain, and 'We Have Conquered Pain'.) Maybe that delusion is where they went wrong, and where a certain type of politics goes wrong, too.

Our first test case is Horace Wells, the man who disfigured a whore in broad daylight and then killed himself after being arrested for it. He had two reasons to consider himself the inventor of anaesthesia, which he was not: He had shared a dental practice with the real inventor, our hero William Morton, several years before Morton came to prominence; and he had in his youth experimented with laughing gas in dental surgery, even giving a demonstration in Boston of its efficacy as an anaesthetic. The demonstration failed, which both embarrassed him and put an end to his experiments. (It is pictured in the cartoon above. The puking man is most definitely not anaesthetized.)

The author of this book on this story says that when Wells heard of Morton's invention, he progressed from "I could have invented that" to "I should have invented that," and finally to "I did invent that." Upon convincing himself of that conclusion, he moved to New York to start conducting experiments with chloroform, which he hoped would supplant Morton's ether, and to make friends with journalists who could push his claim.

I have mentioned that Wells became a drug addict. It is perhaps more important to explain that he developed his addiction through his experiments with chloroform -- he was using himself as a guinea pig to determine the right dosage, and the habit grew on him. Wells wasn't facing a surgeon's scalpel, but he had left his family behind in Connecticut, lost his livelihood, and, in his view, been robbed of the fame he deserved. Why shouldn't chloroform ease his pain as well as the pain of his patients?

It did, well enough, until the side-effects of his addiction led to his bizarre assault on a prostitute, landed him in prison, and drove him to suicide. (His farewell note was addressed to his wife: "My character, which I have ever prized above everything else, is gone. My dear, dear wife and child, how they will suffer. I cannot proceed. My brain is on fire.") And when he had settled on suicide, chloroform made it painless. The abolition of pain had unforeseen consequences.

Our villain is the most interesting character in the story, as usual. Dr. Charles T. Jackson (pictured above) might be familiar to you as the man who famously sued Samuel Morse for allegedly stealing his idea for the telegraph. I assume that the Morse lawsuit was a real education for Jackson in how to steal a man's invention, because by the time he got around to claiming credit for ether, he was a real pro at it -- he scarcely put a foot wrong in his tussles with Morton. His most ingenious ploy was stealing the ledger from Morton's dental practice and then sending bills to all Morton's patients, even the ones that had already paid. Morton lost all his customers and gained a reputation for crookedness, which robbed him of his source of income as well as, of course, diminishing his credibility in the anaesthesia fight.

Jackson then scoured every medical journal he could find for articles on ether and visited the authors personally to convince them to press their claims in Congress, which had decided to give a $100,000 reward to the inventor of anaesthesia -- partly in compensation for voiding the patent on it in order to make anaesthesia available to army surgeons in the Mexican-American war. Morton had already filed his patent on ether at the time Congress invalidated it, but he didn't contest Congress's action, out of a sense of patriotic duty. (This came back to bite him later, when he tried to claim the congressional reward: If you invented ether, why didn't you sue us back in 1846?)

At one point, in 1849, Congress seemed ready to grant the $100,000 reward to Jackson, but Jackson made what he called a "fine gesture of renunciation" and told Congress that he didn't want the money, just the credit. In the end, his gesture raised more suspicions than it suppressed and ultimately undermined his claim, but it does suggest that his preoccupation with ether was less self-interested and more purely obsessive.

Jackson ended up an addict, too, but not to chloroform, just alcohol -- he was drunk when he saw the monument to Morton that pushed him over the edge. But the principle is the same: If a medicine kills pain, why not use it all the time?

Our hero Morton is more sympathetic than Jackson or Wells, but no less obsessive -- which is all the more surprising given that he was a very ordinary man, the furthest thing from a tortured genius you could imagine. But anaesthesia worked its alchemy on him, too -- even when every possibility of reward had been closed and he had settled into life as an impoverished gentleman farmer, with his pawned equipment and his house donated by a well-wisher, he was frantic to rebut Jackson's claim to the credit. He worked on his rebuttal with such a frenzy that it killed him. Surely that indicates something beyond the usual desire of a scientist to go down in history.

I certainly don't mean to say that the desire to ease pain is in and of itself pathological -- though it is entertaining to read the statements of the doctors who did feel that way at the time. A member of the French Academy of Sciences, when told of Morton's innovation, wrote that "the new method conflicts both with sound reason and with moral sensibility," and compared it to operating on "people dead drunk" and then to operating on corpses. The man who first gave chloroform to women during childbirth was a Scotsman, and his fellow Calvinists condemned him for violating Genesis 3:16 ("In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children"). Eventually the man, James Young Simpson, resorted to exegesis himself: "The word used in the Hebrew, and translated by 'sorrow' in the 16th verse . . . means 'toil, labor and trouble,' not 'physical pain.'"

What I do mean to say is this: A long time ago, James Poulos described liberalism as the idea that "the purpose of politics [is] to reveal and institutionalize the needlessness of human suffering." While it seems to me that liberals have given up on the perfectability of man, they still cling to the related idea that all suffering is needless. You can detect it in their rhetoric all the time -- if someone is suffering somewhere, there must be something we can do about it. I'm not yet sure what that means, but if the first men who ever felt that they had the abolition of pain within their grasp went utterly mad from the attraction, it must mean something.

Risotto with Meatballs and Not-So-Great Pumpkin

2011-09-27T20:52:00.000-04:00

The grocery store had two kinds of pumpkin: with jack-o-lantern face painted on, and without. I got one without, but even those were stocked next to bouquets of flowers on one side and candles on the other, which raises the question of whether the pumpkins were being sold as food or as decoration. "What the hell, I'm not going to die from eating a decorative pumpkin" was my ultimate conclusion. "And if I do, it'll be a medical mystery for everyone at the hospital. They can send my story to the guys who write House."

The recipe I used is here, though I threw in some unscripted cinnamon sticks, as you can see. (It was a good decision.) The only problem was that I overcooked the rice -- it devolved into mush, whereas if I'd taken it off the heat a little sooner, you'd be able to tell one grain from another. If anyone knows the secret of timing your risotto, don't be shy.

The Death of Manolete, the Death of Bullfighting

2011-09-27T20:11:00.006-04:00

Barcelona has held its last bullfight, so now seems like a good time to consider A Matador's Mistress (2008, dir. Menno Meyjes; original Spanish title Manolete).

How can it be that this film sank without a trace? I pay some attention to Adrien Brody's career, and I know for damn sure that many men pay rapt attention to Penelope Cruz's. The bullfighter Manolete is still a big, legendary deal in Spain, and Adrien Brody really does look uncannily like him. (Brody says that when he walked the Cordoba streets in costume, people would call out to him, "Manolete, good luck today!") But until last week, I'd never heard of this film.

I blame the title -- both the American (A Matador's Mistress) and the British (The Passion Within), which, I suppose, were thought necessary because Anglophones can't pronounce "MAN-oh-LETT-ay." But "A Matador's Mistress" sounds like something that should have a sweaty-looking Fabio on the poster, his pectorals busting out of a sequined jacket.

If they were going to insist on retitling the film for American release, they might at least have picked something with the word "death" in it, because that's what the movie is about. This is young Manolete's new manager, laying down the rules for his new prospect:

"No women."
"No women?"
"Because women make you love life."
"And that's bad?"
"In our line of work, yes."

And there's this line from Penelope Cruz, which was included in all the trailers:

"I'm just your mistress, death is your wife."

Which brings us back to the new bullfighting ban, because bullfighting has always courted extinction the way matadors court death. When your pastime is positively begging to be condemned as dangerous and irrational -- boxing is another good example, and come to think of it, so is smoking -- it's only a matter of time before the parliament of Catalonia bans your pastime. Nevertheless, danger sports keep springing up in one form or another, and they have always had their traditionalist defenders willing to praise something difficult to even justify -- perhaps because reactionaries, bullfighters, smokers, and boxers have something in common.

Unreasonable daredevilry, mental or physical, has its rewards. It cultivates agility, either of the kind displayed by Manolete or the kind displayed by defenders of irrational traditions (like Daniel Hannan here; apparently the MEP for south-east England loves euroskepticism and bullfighting). The bonds of brotherhood are always tightest among the unpopular and imperiled -- which is fine by me, because most of the time I'd rather have a brother than be a success. And there is usually some substance to the sport, or the tradition, that makes it attractive in the first place, apart from the allure of doom and danger. Bullfight is artful and symbolic, and beloved traditions usually are, too.

Manolete died in the arena, and bullfighting might be extinct by century's end. Both of those things are tragic, but neither one exactly bothers me. Something can be tragic and inevitable, or even tragic and appropriate.

P.S. Allow me to draw your attention to one particular shot: Adrien Brody holding Penelope Cruz's dachshund. It has been suggested that the woman in Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine had a ferrety character. Perhaps we can extrapolate from that.

When I'm in Your Neighborhood, You Better Duck

2011-09-26T20:03:00.002-04:00

That's not a very pretty picture. The Canadian gentleman who concocted the recipe -- duck quesadillas with cherry chipotle salsa and goat cheese -- has a much better one. But what my dish lacked in aesthetics, it made up for in amazing taste. This recipe is delicious, and even if you are a terrible cook, you should try it.

The recipe calls for rubbing spices only into the skin side of the duck, not the meat side. I was skeptical of half-measures, as usual, but it turned out fine.

The cherries were the real problem -- it turns out they have a season, and we are not close to being in it, which is why there were none for sale at Whole Foods, not for love or money. (I didn't actually offer love, but you don't really think it would have made a difference, do you?) Mr. CSB had a brilliant idea: use a can of maraschino cherries and a can of sour cherries, and they'll average out. He was absolutely right. The food processor, like love, covers a multitude of sins.

You Can Give Everybody Money, But You Can't Make Everybody Rich

2011-09-26T14:31:00.002-04:00

From "The Secret History of Soviet Fashion," a book review:

The Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli was invited to open the Dom Modelei in Moscow, and was bewildered by the outfits on display: 'I was of the opinion that the clothes of the working people should be simple and practical, but . . . I witnessed an orgy of chiffon, pleats and furbelows.'

Eschewing her own surrealist tendencies, she designed a capsule collection for Soviet women -- a simple black dress, a covetable red coat, lined in black, with large pockets and a matching beret. It was entirely suitable for mass production, but the authorities dismissed it as being far too ordinary for Soviet women and moaned that the big pockets would attract the attention of thieves on public transport.

Shoulda stuck with those Soviet fabrics, Elsa.

Fashion is conservative insofar as it's one place where hierarchy can never be abolished. So here's my question: Would that sentence be more interesting if I had written "beauty" instead of "fashion"?

Intoxicated Witnesses Are 'Better Than Their Reputation'

2011-09-26T13:43:00.000-04:00

Does being intoxicated make you a less reliable witness? Apparently not. Does this come up a lot? Apparently so: "According to law enforcement, many witnesses are intoxicated either at the time of the crime, the interview, or both." Whether you abhor sobriety or just hate eye-witness testimony, you can join me (who hates both about equally) in being glad that the journal Law and Human Behavior is asking the questions that matter.

The Maldives Are Quite Low to the Ground

2011-09-26T00:48:00.007-04:00

The set-up:

The average elevation above sea level is four feet. I'm told by someone who was present that the former British Foreign Office minister Jeremy Hanley was on an official visit to the Maldives and asked what the highest point of the archipelago was. The head of the Maldivian reception committee looked the imposingly built Tory up and down and said, 'It's you, Minister.'

That's from Landfalls by Tim Mackintosh-Smith, published in paperback earlier this year.

The punchline:

When the Maldives cabinet met underwater, it was not because the island nation had disappeared

And that is a real live, no-fooling BBC photo caption from last week.

They Had Theology, We Have Zoning

2011-09-22T13:26:00.002-04:00

In 1735, Anne Hutchinson and her husband started a home Bible-study group, which started small but grew to include about sixty people. This was noticed first by their neighbors, then by the state, neither of whom liked the idea of unlicensed preaching going on in a private home. (Also, she was a woman, a suspect characteristic if you are a Puritan.) She was hauled before a court, where the judges threw 1 Corinthians 14:34 at her: “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.” Hutchinson came back with the second chapter of Titus (“Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live . . . Then they can train the younger women”), but John Winthrop was unconvinced and her case was lost.

In 2010, Chuck and Stephanie Fromm started a home Bible-study group, which started small but grew to include about sixty people. This was noticed first by their neighbors, then by the state, neither of whom liked the idea of unlicensed preaching going on in a private home. (Also, they’re Christians, a suspect characteristic if you are a bureaucrat.) They were fined $300 when the code-enforcement officer threw municipal code 9.3-301 at them: “Religious, fraternal, and non-profit” organizations can’t operate in a residential area without a Conditional Use Permit (CUP), which needless to say costs money to obtain.

The Fromms came back with . . . in truth, I’m not sure what they’ll be able to come back with. Some other clause in the Capistrano city bylaws? It’s always a shame when your enemy gets to pick the battleground. Especially when he picks zoning regulations.

God go with you, Mr. and Mrs. Fromm. I sincerely hope you are not exiled to Rhode Island and scalped by Narragansett Indians.

Marriage Seasonality: Yet Another Way Modernity Is Failing You

2011-09-20T00:10:00.005-04:00

Weddings in Sweden used to be highly seasonal, with a big spike in December, and then they weren't anymore, according to a new paper based on statistics from 1680 to 1895. The change was due to "increasing work intensity over the year" relative to the old agricultural economy, and also "the privatization of marriage."

This is a Robert Putnam-esque metric I hadn't thought of using, but I can see how weddings' being spread out over the whole year might indicate, one, a very weak communal sense of the rhythm of the calendar and, two, weak community investment in everybody's weddings and marriages.

Sure enough, marriage seasonality in America is pretty low.

My Not Entirely Successful Rabbit-Stew Adventure

2011-09-19T22:09:00.008-04:00

I made a version of this recipe. Unfortunately, I am not as talented as the chefs who came up with it, so my stew was more of a learning experience. What I learned was this.

1. Don't undercook your rabbit. Mr. CSB tells me constantly that the whole point of a crockpot is that you can leave your stew on low heat for hours and hours, until the meat is falling-apart tender. But I have been slow to heed. My rabbit chunks were not very tender, because I did not cook them for long enough.

It might also be that the meat was butchered most inexpertly -- by which I mean that I had a three-pound headless rabbit and no idea what to do with it, so I hacked off all the edible-looking bits, some of which might have made my New England trapper ancestors laugh at the suggestion they should be eaten.

2. Crush your juniper berries, if you want to taste them at all. I only realized this when I cracked one between my teeth by accident and realized, "Ho, there's a new flavor."

3. A little rosemary goes a long way. So please, take it easy. I really should have known better, because I once stripped rosemary stalks for two hours straight when I worked at a French bakery, and for days my hands smelled of the stuff. Much as my apartment still smells right now.

4. Persevere, because the recipe is worth it. I had a hell of a time getting my hands on a rabbit -- I called four butchers before I found a place, Graham Avenue Meats and Deli in Williamsburg, but then the L train wasn't running, so I had to take the J/M/Z and walk north. What I didn't realize was that the J/M/Z was going to drop me in a part of town that's slightly dodgy. Not extremely so, but my flouncy-skirt-wearing hipster self was enough out of place that three cabs stopped to ask if I wanted to be picked up, including one driver who exclaimed, "Madam, your chariot has arrived!" That L train thing really put a kink in my travel plans -- on the way home, I took the G train. For non-New Yorkers: That means I was desperate.

But it's a lovely rustic dish -- the recipe linked above calls it "fragrant Alpine comfort food" -- and it made enough stew that I'll be eating it all week. Plus, it gave me something interesting to talk about with the guy at my liquor store. "I used to eat a lot of game in Guyana -- rabbit, deer, lots of things," he said. "But I would shoot it myself." He even gave me a helpful trick for not cracking your teeth on the bullet when you eat: shoot the animal in the head.

5. Use more garlic. This is Lesson #5 of every culinary experience, because there is no such thing as too much garlic.

Don't Go to Law School Unless You Want to Practice Law, They Said

2011-09-18T21:58:00.005-04:00

From an introduction to canon law by James Brundage (Medieval Canon Law, p. 67):

. . . by the end of the fourteenth century anyone who hoped to achieve high office in either ecclesiastical or civil society needed either powerful connections or a legal education and preferably both. Since legal training cultivated both verbal and reasoning skills, as well as recall of a vast battery of rules and procedures, lawyers as a group tended to be articulate and learned, their talents tempered by the requirements of a complex and demanding discipline.

Successful teachers and practitioners of the law, moreover, often accumulated sufficient wealth to be able to afford the luxuries not only of collecting books, but also of reading them and reflecting on them, while many achieved sufficient social status and influence to assure that their views were listenend to with respect.

It is scarcely surprising then, to discover that many of the leading fourteenth and fifteenth century humanists had trained as lawyers.

To which I say "Harrumph," and it echoes down the ages, apparently. ("The luxury of reading and reflecting upon books" -- editors might have that, if we didn't read and reflect on so much else.)

The Great McGinty (1940): Boss Sturges Brings 'Honest Graft' to Hollywood

2011-09-16T20:46:00.011-04:00

Preston Sturges, the playwright-turned-director, was a bit of an artiste. Even when he was a young kid just starting out, he tussled over creative decisions with the studio brass from his lowly perch in the script department. That is normal enough for a hired writer, but Sturges also took several successive pay cuts in order to climb the ladder from writer to writer-director to writer-director-producer, to better preserve his product's integrity.

It's funny that Sturges turned out this way, because "temperamental genius" was the exact opposite of what he always wanted to be. His real ambition was to be wildly popular and commercially successful -- in other words, to be a hack. It sounds like a strange desire for a writer, but it makes sense once you learn about his mother, whom he was determined to rebel against.

"They did everything they could to make me an artist," Sturges said, "but I didn't want to be an artist. I wanted to be a good businessman like my father." The primary "they" here is his mother, Mary Dempsey Sturges, a daffy bohemian who used to send him to school in a Greek chiton. (To school in Chicago.) She once served as a medium for Aleister Crowley, performing otherworldly transcription for his occult books. Her best friend was notorious decapitee Isadora Duncan, the dancer; the fateful scarf that broke Duncan's neck when it got caught in the tires of her car had been a gift from Mrs. Sturges. Before the fatal incident, the two women had gallivanted around Europe, often with Preston in tow, making sure to expose him to every bit of high culture in sight.

Mister Sturges Senior, on the other hand, was in stocks. It was he who obtained for Preston a position as a runner on Wall Street, which was where he met his first real-live machine politicians. In his memoir, Sturges swears that many of the ploys he depicts in The Great McGinty were lifted straight from their stories of Tammany Hall.

Mostly I believe him. When William Demarest promises to pay McGinty, a bum, two dollars for every repeat vote he can cast, that's very believable. So is the shakedown scene between McGinty, who has become a machine enforcer, and a businessman seeking a city contract for a bus franchise. ("Look here, I will not pay graft. Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute!" "You could call it 'advertising.'")

There's one especially tantalizing glint of realism in the film, which I hope I am right in detecting. (I warn you, though, my zero-hits search for "the great mcginty nyc mayor william j gaynor" suggests that I'm the first person on the Internet to think of it; bad sign.) In the film, McGinty is rewarded for his loyal service to the machine with a seat as an alderman. When the reform movement starts agitating for an end to corruption, the party boss decides to put up a so-called reform candidate he can portray as an honest man but still control behind the scenes; he picks McGinty, who wins. Then, as mayor, McGinty resists being controlled, turning out to be more of an honest man than anyone, including himself, expected him to be.

This is exactly the kind of story that would have stuck in Sturges's cynical mind if he'd ever heard it from a Tammany flunky: Oh, yeah, that "reform" mayor was one of our guys; the people looked like they wanted clean government, so we just went through our roster and picked the most honest-looking candidate we could find, and can you believe it, the people fell for it.

It's basically the story of Mayor William J. Gaynor, who was elected six years before Sturges started working on Wall Street.

Gaynor was a Tammany man who was chosen for the ticket thanks to the reputation for honesty he'd earned as a judge on the state supreme court. After being elected, he pulled a McGinty and turned on Tammany Hall, getting rid of graft and all that. He's also the only New York City mayor ever to have been shot by an assassin; the shooter was a former city employee -- a patronage appointee, needless to say -- who was upset that he had been replaced by a more qualified candidate from the civil-service rolls.

Tammany picks an honest-seeming man when it suits them, never figuring that he might actually be honest -- Gaynor and McGinty have the same story. Also, the timeline fits.

To get back to the movie: It's far from being the funniest movie in the Sturges canon, but I suppose we can come to the conclusion that Sturges himself would have wanted: that its defects were the fault of meddling studio producers. Out of Sturges's hearing, we might add that it was his first outing as a director, and perhaps he still had a few things to learn. He sold the McGinty script to Paramount for the low, low price of one dollar, in exchange for permission to direct it himself; I told you he took several pay cuts for the sake of greater control.

But if you're looking for a reason to see the film, think about how well-suited Preston Sturges was to make a film about machine politicians. Like him, they were cynical professionals, even professional cynics; it would be hard to say which was less tolerant of principled integrity, Tammany Hall or Hollywood. (And Sturges, like the corrupt pols, secretly relished the hackery his business required. It had a certain scrappiness.) Both Sturges and the bosses were abjectly democratic when forced to pander to the voters (or filmgoers) who were the source of all their power, but deeply contemptuous of the people when any Regular Joe tried to interfere with their chosen domains. You might call it aristocratic populism: I'm here to serve you, and if you leave me alone, I'll damn well do it.

Picture Enoch Powell Laughing, If You Can

2011-09-16T20:20:00.001-04:00

The first paragraph of the Enoch Powell biography that arrived in my mailbox last week is:

The truth about any controversial contemporary politician is many-sided. Particularly about Enoch Powell, whose provocative ideas and buttoned-up personality have attracted apocryphal stories as readily as Britain once attracted Commonwealth immigrants.

The book was published a full two years after the "Rivers of Blood" speech, so it can't have been out of ignorance that the author wrote a lede that says, essentially, "Enoch Powell attracts criticism like Britain attracts immigrants." Personally, I think it's hilarious. But I wonder if Enoch ever had second thoughts about his decision to cooperate with this particular biographer.

Five Ways to Make Your Own Fun When in Antarctica

2011-08-15T08:55:00.000-04:00

According to this article by Dr. Kanwal Vilku, the first Indian woman to set foot on that continent:

5. Have an anchor baby:

Some Americans actually try to have babies at their stations (they have four). I used to find this crazy. Then I learnt that they were pressing for Antarctic ‘citizenship’. The continent is very rich in minerals, and American settlers want to stake claim to the land.

4. Paint pictures using unconventional materials:

In the evenings, if it wasn’t my turn to run chores, I would sit in my room and paint. I used expired medicines and mixed them with wall paints for my work.

3. Think about the colds you’re not catching:

Nobody ever falls ill with fever or an infection there because of the absence of viruses and bacteria.

2. Have a cuppa, inside a glacier:

I was very keen to see the submerged Indian station Dakshin Gangotri before we returned. For a long time, it was inaccessible. But the day before we were heading back, the weather cleared. Though we had already given back the snow clothes assigned to us, I decided to go. A small group came along. We were freezing without the special clothes. One container was still above water then. With great difficulty, one of the doors was prised open. We went inside and made a cup of tea. In Antarctica, the rule is to leave everything just as it was. This is so that if anyone gets lost, s/he can find food and so on in the closest shelter. We, too, left the kettle and cups back in their place before leaving.

1. Overcome sex and age discrimination to become the first woman from your country to set foot in the Antarctic.

If you are not female, or if your country has already sent a woman to Antarctica, then I'd stick with the most traditional Antarctic pastime of all: penguin-watching (see 0:45).

Headline: 'Russian Shows Resolve'

2011-07-30T11:45:00.002-04:00

It's true, he did! Dmitry Bibikow of Harare, Zimbabwe, and originally of Voronezh, has been wheelchair-bound since a climbing accident, which is a problem because his apartment is on the fifth floor. The local council still hadn't installed a promised elevator after six years, so he built a winch-looking apparatus on his balcony (his climbing expertise coming in handy), which can get him up and down the outside of the building on a rope. The Daily Mail has pictures.

It's a perfectly fine human-interest story, but more interesting to me is the fact that a local man undertook to invent and then construct a rather complicated machine entirely on his own initiative, and the editors at the Zimbabwean thought their readers would be surprised to see so much "resolve" shown, not by a man who has lost use of half his limbs, but by a Russian.

The Dhofar Insurgency Produced At Least One Laugh

2011-07-28T18:39:00.004-04:00

One thing that any decent journalist would be ashamed to do -- and journalists can be shamed, though it's not easy -- is to lead off a column with an illuminating conversation had with a cab driver, especially a foreign-born cab driver from the place the journalist is writing about. "You know what would make a good quirky lede," my friend said, "is if somebody asked the cabbies how they feel about being drafted as experts." Well, I did once, but my Pakistani driver was not quite current on his American-journalism cliches, so the conversation never achieved lift-off and became rather awkward and confusing for both of us.

Which is why I was so pleased to read the following anecdote in the book Gen. Tony Jeapes wrote about the SAS's part in fighting Communists in Oman in the '70s -- as far as Western tropes go, this fellow has our number:

Shams had been told of a water-hole in a fertile wadi only an hour’s drive away from Oven and determined to visit it. Wherever you find water in Arabia, you find people, so he took some tins of corned beef and some tinned fruit as a gift. . . .

The head of the family sat under a tree and rose to greet Shams. He was an elderly man, already grey, dressed in a futa and shirt with an indigo cloak slung across one shoulder. They shook hands.

‘Salaam aleikum,’ began Shams, ‘Khayf haalak?’

‘Good afternoon,’ came the reply in perfect English. ‘Where have you come from? I do hope you did not come too far out of your way?’ He smiled knowingly at Shams’s speechless astonishment. ‘You are surprised to find someone like this,’ he gestured about him, ‘who speaks English. Well, let us sit down and have a cup of tea. An Englishman always drinks tea when he is at a loss for words, does he not?’ He called out to his wives in Jebeli.

The old man explained that he had, like so many others, gone into exile under Said Bin Taimur’s rule and had learnt English in the Gulf. He had travelled widely and prospered, but always he dreamt of the valley where he had been born, and he resolved to return one day. Now he had more than enough money to buy all the goats, camels and wives he needed, and he was as happy as the day was long. He saw few people, he said, but for several hours he and Shams discussed the affairs of Oman, the Gulf and the world, and Shams was amazed at the depth of knowledge the old man possessed of affairs outside his own little wadi.

It was a fascinating afternoon and Shams was reluctant to leave, but at last he rose to go and uncertainly handed over the tins of food. The old man took them, examined them for a moment and then looked up at Shams with a twinkle in his eye.

‘What, no beads?’ he said.

The book also notes that the SAS's best Arabists were all Scotsmen -- something to do with glottal stops and rolled R's coming easier to them.

'Mr. President, We Cannot Allow a Parmigiano-Reggiano Gap!'

2011-07-27T22:14:00.001-04:00

Here's something you might not know: If a cheese expert tells you that NASA once called him up to ask, "Why are the Russians sending parmigiano-reggiano into space with their cosmonauts?" all kinds of Cold War embellishments will leap to mind and you will have a very hard time getting rid of them. Scene: Cape Canaveral, 1975. A man (scrawny, about 35; taped-up glasses; his father never told him not to wear a tie with short sleeves) rushes into the office of a 50-something superior in military uniform and frantically slams a computer printout onto his desk. "Parmesan," says the military man, and picks up the red phone . . .

Which is not how it actually happened. NASA just called Max McCalman to ask about this parmigiano-reggiano thing, and McCalman explained its nutritional advantages and pointed them toward a whole-milk version of this traditionally skim-milk cheese, which would have those advantages to an even greater degree. Approximately five years later, I took a cheese class with McCalman and he told us about it. Still, nice win, Team USA.

And the Whole Sixth Form Agreed that It Was the Most Anglican Thing Anyone Had Ever Said

2011-07-27T10:16:00.004-04:00

I started reading Philip Mason's memoir because I wanted to hear his stories about the Indian Civil Service between 1928, when he joined it as an assistant magistrate, and independence. But before the book gets to Mason's India years, it leads off with a chapter on his schooldays, mostly portraits of the masters he knew at Stancliffe: the shy math teacher who married the vivacious gym instructor but lost her to some fatal disease within a year and was never the same, the headmaster who would chat with him for hours about Kipling but under no circumstances would let him read English Literature at Oxford because it was a subject for women, and so on.

And then he brings up Neville Gorton, the school's Anglican pastor, who also taught history (third from the left in the picture, laughing at the Archbishop of Canterbury's joke). Gorton later became Bishop of Coventry. I don't know how he managed to be promoted from public-school pastor to bishop, but presumably it was by enlivening his sermons with stupendously Anglican lines like this one, which Mason still remembered fifty years later:

"And so what Our Lord was really saying was, 'Peter, you are an absolute brick!'"

Christopher Robin Visits the Houses of Parliament

2011-04-14T12:11:00.001-04:00

In honor of Poem in Your Pocket Day, here is "When We Were Very Silly," a parody of A. A. Milne by J. B. Morton (a.k.a. the humor columnist "Beachcomber"). It describes a very healthy attitude toward politics.

There are Communists and Socialists and Conservatives and things,
There are cranks, and dupes, and forgers and their slimy underlings,
There’s a roaring man with a ruddy face, and another as quiet as a mouse —
But I gave a bun to the Premier when I went down to the House.

There’s a man who brays “Protection,” and a lady who curses drink,
And at least three hundred and forty-six who never knew how to think,
There’s one who cries the Millennium, and one with a permanent grouse,
But I gave a bun to the Premier when I went down to the House.

There’s a wretched, lonely Liberal, with a face as long as a flute,
And a man who spends his leisure hours in making a corner in jute,
There’s every shade of incompetence, and all humbug under the sun,
But whenever I go down to the House the Premier takes the bun.

"To give a bun" has no idiomatic meaning that I'm aware of, so I assume he means it literally — as Milne no doubt would have.

The Noida Sisters: Anomie à deux

2011-04-14T12:10:00.000-04:00

In Noida, a suburb of New Delhi, two sisters have been rescued after seven months of self-imprisonment in which neither left the house, even to get food. Both had doctorates. The elder of the two, Anuradha, 43, died shortly after being taken to the hospital:

"Anuradha's mouth was bleeding. She was shifted to the ICU but in spite of all efforts we were not able to resuscitate here. And, she breathed her last at 8:05 am," Dr Amit, Chief Medical Officer of Kailash Hospital where the sisters were admitted, said.

The immediate cause of the death of Anuradha (43) was a cardiac arrest, the hospital said. "Due to malnutrition there was a multi-organ failure. This led to the cardiac arrest. A post-mortem will be conducted," V V Joshi, hospital spokesperson, said.

"The condition of the younger sister Sonali (41) is stable but she is suffering from depression," he said.

. . . Anuradha and Sonali had apparently become disturbed after their father and mother passed away some years back and their younger brother left them. In the interim period, their pet dog also died after which they got into a state of depression, police said.

The papers are calling them the Noida Sisters, which is preferable to using their actual surname both for reasons of privacy and because Noida is short for "New Okhla Industrial Development Authority," which sounds like the sort of place I would set a fable of urban alienation, if I were a novelist of no great subtlety.

My Teenage Laziness Validated: Ten Years Was Not Too Long to Wait

2011-04-11T13:47:00.003-04:00

You probably thought that you had to wake up too early when you were a teenager. Everyone does. But the thing that made my bleary-eyed whimpering special — the difference between you and me — is that far from being mere whining, mine was, I now know, backed up by scientific fact. This study finding that pushing back a school's start time improves student performance (h/t Robin Hanson) used the test scores of Wake County (N.C) middle-schoolers between 1999 and 2006, of which I was one. Who knew that when I threw my alarm clock against a wall that one time, I was expressing an objective truth?

Or so I thought before I read that they disregarded the scores of magnet-school students, mine among them, because magnet schools tend to start early and, not at all relatedly, attract high-scoring students with their academic bells and whistles. Alas, I did not contribute to the store of human knowledge today.

The study explains, as a side note, why Wake County magnet schools have earlier start times on average, which I hadn't even known was the case. It has to do with their longer bus rides, what with needing to bring kids from the far-flung suburbs all the way downtown. My own bus ride was longer than an hour, so I wouldn't dispute the fact, but I do find the logic confusing:

Since buses serving magnet school must cover a larger geographic area, ride times tend to be longer for magnet school students. As a result, almost all magnet schools begin at the earliest start time. For example in 2004, nine out of ten magnet schools began at 7:45 or earlier compared with nine out of sixteen base schools. Students at magnet schools tend to have higher test scores, which may cause a spurious negative relationship between start times and test scores. Furthermore, since students can choose to apply to magnet schools, it is possible that they chose a magnet school partially based on start time. For these reasons, I exclude magnet schools from my sample. Five schools began a magnet program during the sample period. These schools are included in the sample prior to becoming a magnet school and excluded after.

Longest ride means earliest start? So that's why my bus pick-up was 6:00 a.m. for seven years. Which itself is why the phrase "neighborhood schools" always strikes a chord with me, because rather than wonder how many focus groups they had to run before settling on a phrase so perfectly and appealingly innocuous, I only remember the hours I wasted on the highways at an hour of the morning when, half the year, it was too dark to even read, harumph-harumph.

State Department Claims Douglas Kmiec Is Too Catholic for Malta

2011-04-09T14:33:00.005-04:00

Douglas Kmiec — early "Obamacon," author of the 2008 election book Can a Catholic Support Him?, and not unrelatedly, current ambassador to Malta — has been rebuked by the State Department for "spending too much time writing and speaking about subjects such as abortion and his religious beliefs."

The 41-page audit says Douglas Kmiec's "outside activities have detracted from his attention to core mission goals" in the Mediterranean island nation, such as promoting maritime security and American business. It acknowledges the wide respect for Kmiec in the conservative, Catholic country of Malta but notes that his articles distract him and his embassy officials by forcing them to carefully review his writing. They have upset administration officials in Washington too.

And if you're wondering whether his excellency would have gotten the same dressing-down if he'd been freelancing for Rolling Stone instead of Catholic Online, know that Kmiec himself attributes it to "hostility toward expressions of his religious faith" on the part of "some State Department officials."

This is a man who staked his political credibility on the Obama administration's warmth toward religion and religion-based arguments. Poor fellow, this probably stings a bit.

But if you must laugh at someone in this story, don't make it Kmiec. Laugh at the State Department official who thinks there is such a thing as being too Catholic for Malta, which is like being too hollow-legged for Moscow. And in fact, when the story ran on the Times of Malta's website, Maltese Catholics quickly filled the comments section with statements of support for Kmiec and his theological extracurriculars:

Ambassador Kmiec is doing a great job. If anything, his "outside activities" give more credibility to the man.

Continue doing your good work Mr Ambassador; most of us appreciate it.

Better rebuked by the state department than rebuked by God.

Mr Kmiec is charismatic, entwined with the local realities, excellent speaker and of good Christian faith.

[Etc.]

And:

I was under the impression that for the first time for many decades the US had managed to send us a representative of intellectual worth and serious intentions. Once again, shame on "the boys back home" and kudos to Ambassador Kmiec. May we get more people of his stuff from other countries as well. In the meantime Italy has changed her representative Trabalza who did almost nothing during his tenure of office with someone apparently superior both in intellectual quality and the willingness to seek bringing the two people together. (In actual fact I had always suspected Trabalza's qualities as compared to his home patronage since I was acquainted with his grandfather's history of Italian grammars published with the blessings of the Mussolini regime . . .

It's true — say what you like about Kmiec, at least none of his ancestors ever wrote a grammar textbook that was approved by fascists.

By the way, it's pronounced "keMECK," like "th'HECK?" and if you need help remembering, here's a mnemonic clerihew:

Obama sent Douglas Kmiec
To this one-hundred-square-mile speck.
Foggy Bottom thought he was plus catholique que le pape,
And they told him to stop.

Kingsley Amis Defines ‘Expert’

2011-04-05T13:18:00.000-04:00

From The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage:

Expert

If asked, and quite possibly without being asked, an expert in the year 1800 might have told you the tale that Shotover Hill near Oxford got its name from an exploit of the legendary Little John, who is supposed to have once shot an arrow over it, no doubt for a bet. An expert of early Victorian times might well have said that that was ‘unscientific’ and that Shotover is a corrupt form of Chateau Vert, presumably an erection of Norman times now demolished. By 1900 if not before it was established that neither ‘explanation’ held water, that Shotover comes from two Old English words and that the name of the topographical feature is Hillhill Hill, or is so paraphrasable. Thanks a lot.

Brookings Without Pity: ‘Americans’ Consumption of Education News’

2011-04-04T22:47:00.010-04:00

The political blogosphere tends to treat social science very, very nicely, even when social science is being ridiculous (e.g. “Heritability of eating bread in Danish and Finnish men and women,” which the National Affairs blog did not want you to miss). I suppose it’s because so many bloggers either suffer from English-major innumeracy — Stand back, lads, he knows statistics! — or are guild apprentices themselves. But a lot of these academic papers could use a good thwacking; where, I ask you, is the wonk equivalent of Television Without Pity?

My crankiness reserves are sufficient to the task, so herewith and henceforth I announce a semi-regular feature, Brookings Without Pity. For truly, when I read this headline asserting as verified fact that “Americans want more coverage of teacher performance and student achievement,” I entered into a struggle with the urge to mock it that I knew I could not win.

Jokes aside, we all owe the Brookings Institution and Messrs. West, Whitehurt, and Dionne (yes, E.J.) a debt of gratitude for shedding light on this important crisis, because far too few Americans are aware that our consumption of education-related news is in a shocking state. Consider this: “Parents of children 18 years or younger were more likely to rely on school publications (72 percent) than non parents (52 percent).”

Do you know what this means? Fifty-two percent of people with no children in school are nevertheless regular readers of school newsletters. How do they get hold of them? Do they read the newsletters of all the schools in town, or just the ones they attended? And why, why, do they do it? Nostalgia? Small-talk fodder? “Hey, Benny, did you see that article in the PS 157 Eagle’s Eye? I can’t believe Mrs. Fitzhugh is retiring!”

The authors believe . . . pardon me, Americans believe that education coverage should focus on the things that matter (“teacher performance,” “student academic achievement,” and “school curricula”) instead of, say, the education topics given the most coverage last year (“budget problems, school crime, and the H1N1 flu outbreak”). But before they can tell us what kind of education coverage we want, they need a clear picture of the education coverage we’re getting now. The media landscape, roughly, is this:

The most common sources of current education news were family and friends (75 percent), followed by daily newspapers (60 percent), school publications (56 percent), local television (54 percent), community groups (42 percent), national television (38 percent), Internet site (37 percent), radio (33 percent), school specialty publications (28 percent), school Facebook or MySpace sites (14 percent), electronic newsreaders (11 percent), cellphone texts (nine percent), and blogs (nine percent).

This sentence raises many questions. First of all, what sort of “current education news” is ever conveyed by text message? Texting was around when I was in high school, and the only news I remember being conveyed is “mrs k has a sub today, u shld defntly skip w us, krispy kreme run!!!” Don’t get me wrong, I think the limits of the medium could impose on school administrators a salutary brevity. But I still think 9 percent sounds a little high.

And doesn’t the popularity of national television run counter to their thesis? “Teacher performance” at the national level is meaningless, “student achievement” practically so. There’s an appealing surreality to the idea that Katie Couric will ever speak the words “Mrs. Titlow’s American history is a teach-to-the-test kind of class; I think she’s phoning it in. Film at 11.” But if we assume, rather credulously, that people really do want more coverage of teacher performance — and didn’t just tell the nice survey man what they thought he wanted to hear — they probably want it to be specific enough to be useful, or at least relevant.

And that’s the problem with this paper. Teacher performance and student achievement are important things — fine. But newspapers, TV, and, God help us, text messages are not well suited to conveying that kind of information. It’s too specific, and too personal — when I imagine a blog dedicated to exposing inadequate teachers, it strikes me as scurrilous. “Teacher performance” and “student achievement” are, depending on how zoomed-in the information is, either statistics or gossip. A parent who wants actionable information should consult the grapevine. Which, according to this helpful Brookings study, is what they are already doing, or 75 percent of them are. I just hope Brookings didn’t spend too much money finding that out.

Which I Suppose Makes Her a Homburgler

2011-04-04T22:41:00.004-04:00

When I tell Mr. CSB that he’s not allowed to wear his black homburg when we appear in public together — a rule he very intelligently ignores — is my objection that the homburg is inappropriate to this century, or am I worried that the hat is too attractive and other women will try to move in?

That’s unclear, but our dispute is longstanding — though not, as it turns out, very original. An earlier homburg-related domestic squabble, from Plain Tales from the Raj:

Wives who inherited their husband’s bearers [i.e., servants] were well advised to leave the running of the household alone. George Wood’s bearer, Mohammed Ishak, “fought an endless war” with his new memsahib.

“I decided that my husband’s grey homburg hat was rather nice for going out in the midday sun in, so I used to take it and push up the crown and turn down the brim, put it on my head and go out. In the evening Mohammed would rescue it from my room, knock in the crown, turn up the brim and put it back in the Major-sahib’s dressing room. And every day this went on. It was not my hat and he did not approve.”

Back in the present day, Mr. CSB and I have been watching Dollhouse, and after the first three episodes, he said to me, “Do you know has distressed me most? The fact that Olivia Williams has Red Label in her office. Red Label!” Which makes him exactly the sort of old-fashioned gentleman who can pull off a homburg in the year 2011, I think.

Literally Sexy Money

2011-03-31T11:06:00.002-04:00

From Shiva Naipaul’s travel essay about the Seychelles, “Fall from Innocence”:

He refers to a fifty-rupee note adorned with a group of emblematic coconut trees. When examined from a certain angle, the fronds patterned themselves into the letters S-E-X. (I was given a tie adorned with the same motif.)

(“He” is Jimmy Mancham, first president of the Seychelles, 1976–77.)

‘This,’ Mancham has written, ‘admirably suited the island of love image which Seychelles had acquired during the Second World War when travelers had turned up to find that much of the male population was absent and the women friendly.’ Under his guidance, the brothel-state was at hand.

See? Putting “SEX” on currency was part of his “brothel-state” development plan — which, to be fair, isn’t the silliest Third World development plan I’ve ever heard.

Having a dirty-minded president did produce some awkward diplomatic scenes. When Mancham met with Valery Giscard d’Estaing in the ’70s, they spoke of agriculture and trade, tourism and cultural exchange — and oh, yes, “it was agreed that a pornographic film (Goodbye Emmanuelle) should be shot in the Seychelles.” I suppose that if you’re going to be a champion of lechery, making it work for your country is better than saying to hell with it and turning into Silvio Berlusconi.

Sensitive Artists vs. Astronauts: I Would Not Greenlight That Pitch

2011-03-28T21:57:00.004-04:00

Back when science fiction needed to be justified as a pastime worthy of serious people, historian Robert Conquest did so passionately. Beginning in 1962, he edited several volumes of the sci-fi story anthology Spectrum with Kingsley Amis; he was a member of the British Interplanetary Society; and, I discovered when his New and Collected Poems (1988) came recently into my possession, he wrote light verse about it:

I. ‘SF’s no good,’ they bellow till we’re deaf.
‘But this looks good.’ — ‘Well, then it’s not SF.’

II. Space exploration is not yet emotionally permissible. . . . To find the advent of the space age premature, and therefore alien and repulsive, is the proper reaction of any sensitive man. (An intellectual, writing in Encounter.)

All systems Go! The countdown starts!
A universe attracts our arts.
Three . . . Two . . . But stop! He might get hurt
— That poor sod of an introvert.

III. These cardboard spacemen aren’t enough,
Nor alienate monsters, sketched in rough.
Character’s the essential stuff.

The truest fiction of our age
Spreads subtler psyches on the page:
Half-witted pimp, blind coprophage.

White Whines of the British Empire

2011-03-25T14:40:00.010-04:00

You might think that, for a servant of the British Empire in its heyday, life was a bowl of gulab jamun: there are servants and tiger-hunting, your license to behave eccentrically is basically unlimited, and your hotel’s transportation-request form has a check-box for elephant (“One hour’s notice should be given, for Elephant one and a half hour’s”; p. 59).

But for Radcliffe Sidebottom, Sir Penderel Moon, Alan Snelus, CMG, et al., life in India or Africa had its share of third-world first-world problems.

You might, for instance, find yourself forced to convict an intractably self-assured murderer:

The accused would invariably plead guilty. You asked him, “Did you kill this man?” He said, “Yes.” “Did you mean to kill him?” “Yes, of course. He was stealing from my palmyra tree.” Then you said, “Well, was he armed?” “Oh no, he wasn’t armed.” “Then why did you kill him?” “I killed him because he was stealing from my palmyra tree,” and you couldn’t get away from it.

Or have it suggested by the native population that those khakis do make your ass look big:

The African women in that area had a custom of wearing strings of beads round their waists which protruded underneath their cloth and gave them a sort of bustle appearance. Well, one of the chaps had a bottom that stuck out like that so he was known as Jigada, which is the name for these beads.

Knowing that so many people had got nicknames, I made enquiries about my own and I was rather sorry I did, because I was particularly corpulent at the time and my native name turned out to be Miliafu, which is “waterbelly.”

Or frighten the girl at the general store into thinking you are a sun-stricken lunatic:

I remember on my first local leave arriving at a big European store in Chingola where I wanted some chocolate very badly — but I was unaccustomed to speaking in English.

There was a great pile of chocolate behind this girl at her counter, and I approached her slowly and carefully and I chose my words with care. I said to her, “Do-you-have-any-chocolate?” and the unfortunate girl was extremely worried and said, “Oh, oh, yes, yes, yes! Take as much as you like!”

All excerpts from Plain Tales from the Raj (first one) and Tales from the Dark Continent (second and third ones), two oral histories of the late British Empire.

I don’t really mean to suggest that these stories constitute whining. But the interviews for these books were conducted in the 1970s, and I do think it’s funny that, forty years on, a man would note that he was sad the natives called him Fatty.

The closest thing to a British-colonial “white whine” I’ve come across is in a travel book by Robert Byron (this guy) — but however fussy his complaint might sound to some, my personal position is that his problem was perfectly serious and its gravity should not be minimized:

I dined alone in my room, assailed by the sensations of a first day at school, and experiencing that singular feature of Indian life, the difficulty of ever lighting a cigarette owing to the unceasing fans.

Monks vs. Astronauts: I Would Greenlight That Pitch

2011-03-25T14:39:00.003-04:00

“For a long time the Church and space exploration were pitted against one another.”

The Criminalization of Party Fouls in Sub-Saharan Africa

2011-03-24T13:28:00.001-04:00

If any of you have been wondering what the world is coming to, here is that to which it has come: Sloshing whiskey on the president of South Africa gets you hauled before a magistrate:

The man accused of spilling his drink on President Jacob Zuma during the Durban July last year admitted in the Durban Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday that he had done so, but said it was unintentional.

“The accused, Daryl Peense, admits that a small quantity of the whisky and water which he was drinking spilled from his glass,” said Peenses’ defence attorney, Jimmy Howse, reading from a sworn statement.

He said Peense was standing over a balcony when this happened.

“The accused was drunk at the time and his drink spilled accidentally. None of the drink spilt [on] the president.

“The accused didn’t intend to cause injury to the president nor to impair his bodily integrity in any way. There has been no complaint by the president,” said Howse, reading from the statement.

Howse said there was no physical contact and no harm was inflicted on the president.

“It is necessary for the alleged victim [Zuma] to at least complain and explain that his bodily integrity was violated. The president has not made any complaint of assault.”

“The accused was drunk at the time” was not, I don't think, necessary to specify.

Without wanting to diminish the importance of protocol, I am worried that Sub-Saharan Africa might be going to far in making party fouls prosecutable. (See also the Malawi fart ban.) How long before we see the headline “Mugabe Arrests Tsvangirai, Says Opposition Leader ‘Forced a Dance Party’”?

Fat-Cat Businessmen Don't Care If Hobo Convention Is Canceled

2011-03-24T09:24:00.002-04:00

The Chamber of Commerce in Britt, Iowa, is backing off its proposal to help out with the National Hobo Convention, which has been held annually in Britt for the last hundred years and organized by the Chamber for a number of those. Why? Because the budget proposal submitted by the hobo-convention organizing committee wasn’t rosy enough. If the committee can produce a budget that shows Hobo Days on track to become “self-sustaining,” the Chamber says, they’ll reconsider.

Now, if a committee of hobos submitted a budget to me, my first reaction would be pleasant astonishment, which I would try very sincerely to convey to them. I might for instance say that if America’s hobos have mastered basic accounting, then surely America is already winning the future even without high-speed trains for our hobos to ride. (Speaking of unsound budget proposals.) I would not quibble over return percentages.

Lack of corporate sponsorship has to be among the lamer reasons to cancel a hobo convention. Not that I can imagine any good reasons to cancel a hobo convention, come to think of it. Rain? No, they’re hobos. All the hotels in town are booked up? No, they’re hobos. Keynote-speaker hobo had to cancel due to family or work obligations? What family? What work?

You know what, Britt, Iowa? I will plan Hobo Days for you, free of charge. I don’t have a lot of time to devote, and the end result might be less than perfectly organized, but even if my efforts are universally condemned, being knocked for poor long-term planning by itinerant tramps is something I’m sure I could learn to live with.

Jim Tully, Hobo King of Hollywood

2011-03-24T09:22:00.004-04:00

He wasn’t technically the hobo king of Hollywood — the office of hobo king is an elective position that must be ratified by the annual National Hobo Convention in Britt, Iowa — but Tully went from being the rail-riding son of an Irish ditch-digger to being a Vanity Fair celebrity profiler and Charlie Chaplin’s press agent, which is probably more than could be said for King "Hobo Ben" Benson (reign 1940-45).

I tracked down Tully because Walter Winchell’s otherwise relentlessly acerbic and score-settling autobiography has nothing but nice things to say about him: “Dig up his books. Tully was a writer. . . . His murderous essay on Charlie Chaplin (then the top film star all over the globe) is a classic. Every word of it knocks you out.”

You be the judge:

While on location in Nevada for The Gold Rush, five hundred vagabonds greeted him. Selected to make the trek over Chilcoot Pass, they were blue with cold. “They are cheering for you, Charlie,” I said.

“I know.” His eyes were slightly disdainful under the battered derby. “How’d you like to be back among them?”

“It could be worse,” was my answer.

He shrugged his shoulders in his tight-fitting coat. “I’d rather be me than them.”

[. . .]

The talk drifted to children. He recalled his baby that died at birth. It had been called “The Little Mouse” by its mother, Mildred Harris, who was his first wife.

His eyes narrowed. “The undertaker put a little prop smile on its face.” He stopped a second. “You know, Jim, that kid never smiled.”

A reactionary Irishman, Tully despised celebrity socialists (like Chaplin) — according to him, none of them had any idea of work; it was simply that “they saw human misery as children and decided to remember it.”

But he was never blustery or indignant about it. Consider: It was common in his day for “job sharks” to tell hobos, for a fee, where they could find short-term employment — employment that, as often as not, turned out to be either sheer fiction or a scam where the foreman would lay men off right before payday and they wouldn’t get a dime.

Which makes the second line here, from his profile of Diego Rivera, another celebrity socialist, a hell of an understatement. He has just recounted the famous controversy over Rivera’s left-wing mural for Rockefeller Center, which featured Lenin and which Nelson Rockefeller eventually arranged to have smashed with hammers:

Mr. Rivera was called to the main office, like any other employee, and fired. His check for $14,000, the balance of his $21,000 contract, was paid him in full.

So there I was, reading Tully’s profile collection A Dozen and One and thinking that Winchell for once in his life had been right, when slap-bang on page 197 I realized I’d been had: Of the “dozen and one,” number eleven is Walter Winchell, who was apparently “an artist among journalists, a hornet with a soul.” Logrolling! So that explains it.

Tully’s Winchell profile tells an anecdote that Winchell’s autobiography also covers, one about a dinner party hosted by St. John Ervine, a playwright. Which is funny, because the three of them hated each other: Ervine had denigrated Tully in print as “the loudest of the ‘God damn’ school in American writing,” and Winchell had referred in his column to “St. Yawn Ervine.”

According to Tully, Winchell lifted a joke from him that night. This bit of dialogue led Winchell’s column the next day:

I asked Nathan why a certain politician took himself so seriously.

“Because,” was the instant reply, “he hasn’t yet learned the humor of being beaten.”

Winchell’s autobiography mentions no such joke-stealing.

But the important thing is that Jim Tully was a hobo who could write like Raymond Chandler, and his hobo memoir is here if you want to read it.

Why I Personally Would Welcome the Advent of Spring

2011-03-23T19:54:00.000-04:00

My instinct for making bad decisions is not infallible, but it was certainly in full operation when I bought my last jacket. My “Huggy Bear” coat (not pictured; imagine hobo-patchwork leather with furry cuffs and lapels) was retired when it developed several large rips and my sewing kit ran and hid under the bed at the prospect of having to punch through leather. So I popped down to Beacon’s Closet.

What look, exactly, was I shooting for when I purchased something very like the coat pictured here?

“I'm a private detective, but my underworld contacts are all confectioners and friendly kittens”? “I sell cotton candy — on the black market”? “Cinderella stars in [dun-dunk] Law & Order: Magic Kingdom”?

This is all by way of saying that I cannot retire this powder-blue travesty until spring arrives, and although it was 70 degrees on Saturday, today in New York it snowed, a trajectory to which I strongly object.

Eminent Theologian Vexed by Board Game

2011-03-23T16:24:00.000-04:00

The set-up: In 1927, the Greek government is commemorating the Battle of Navarino (1827) by treating an assortment of British and Russian guests, among others, to an all-night pleasure cruise, where they have furthermore provided — “with a hospitality, a largeness of heart, which deserves immortality in some Treasury of Golden Actions” — an open bar.

From The Station: Travels to the Holy Mountain of Greece by Robert Byron, who was not on the cruise but heard about it later:

One of our friends, who was an attaché at the Legation, had purchased, before leaving on this expedition, a game of snakes and ladders, and one which had been expanded into a landscape beset with witches and deadly nightshade.

A distinguished professor of theology, the greatest living exponent of the Orthodox view of the Filioque, had also been of the party. And it was, we were informed, piteous to behold him, in the guise of Little Snowdrop, counting up his dice and crashing the life’s edifice of his intellectual prestige upon an encounter with an ogre or a swallowing of poisoned berries. Obliged to return to the beginning again, he felt it as though Eastern Christendom had renounced the Patriarch in favour of the Pope.

In our opinion [and I should mention that the author was distantly related to Lord Byron and therefore sentimentally attached to the war this cruise was meant to commemorate], it would have been more fitting if in place of these floating gin-palaces and gambling-hells the occasion had been observed in the spirit of Remembrance. But that is because we were not there.

The Station is not a frivolous book, the above notwithstanding. His chapter on the monks’ autonomous (as in, Greece deals with them through its Foreign Office) system of government, “which has functioned uninterrupted over a longer course of years than any in existence,” is quite scholarly. And when he explains how, in 1913, Russian troops were sent to quell a flare-up of imiaslavie, the heretics withheld the keys to their vestments closet, a gun battle evolved from this minor impasse, and no one was killed — he does not introduce into the story any more black humor than is inherent in it.

And, because I like to provide this information whenever possible: Robert Byron's cigarette brand was Gold Flake.

The Blog Is Back (The Cigarette Smoking Never Stopped)

2011-03-23T13:13:00.000-04:00

You might have figured it out on your own from the way new content started appearing all of a sudden, but here’s fair warning: The Cigarette Smoking Blog is back. You can expect to see a lot of aggressively newsy posts, opinions that would embarrass my employer, cooking and home-ec tips, and of course, a sailing-memoir’s-worth of imaginative profanity.

Hang on a minute. Those are the things you won’t find at CSB 2.0. Topics in the queue right now include the monks of Mt. Athos, Louis Auchincloss, the hats of the British Raj, and hobos (two posts) — which is my way of saying that this will not be a venue for punditry. More like a Twitter account, except that after years of telling myself to put down the Internet and read a proper book, I’ve actually gotten into the habit, which makes me the doddering and slightly deaf grandmother of the Twitter clan: I just can’t keep pace with the conversation. So I’m doing this instead.

A great deal has happened around here since my last post.

I read many, many books — few of which I remember clearly, without the discipline of blogging about them.
I was subjected to a nasty and very public mess at the hands of a bitter ex — if you have one of your own, perhaps you can sympathize. Do you want to know the truth, the gritty details behind the C-SPAN rant? Well, are you able to transmit bourbon through an Internet connection? Develop that technology, or bring me a bottle, and I’ll tell you (off the record) the tragi-comic version of that tale to go along with his melodramatic one. Otherwise, keep watching CSB and decide for yourself if I really am the second coming of Stalin, or a slug that has taken human form, or whatever else it was he called me.
I turned 24 and, more recently, 25.
And . . . the director I consider the cinematic voice of my generation, Rian Johnson (Brick), made a new movie, The Brothers Bloom, which I saw more than twice?

Perhaps I exaggerated when I said a great deal had happened in my life. In any event, summer vacation at the “new and abusive school of criticism” is over, so smoke ’em if you got ’em. Just don’t expect high volume; I’ve still got a day job.

The College Widow: Not a Woman Who Married a College that Died

2009-12-16T19:25:00.003-05:00

Of course this fellow Canby — Yale class of 1899 — would end his description of the "college widow" with a cigarette:

For the college widow had a depth and richness of emotional experience never developed in American life of that day outside of a few metropolises, and seldom there. She began at sixteen or eighteen, as a ravishing beauty, the darling of freshmen; she passed on in the years of her first blooming from class to class of ardent youngsters, until, as her experience ripened, she acquired a taste, never to be satisfied by matrimony, for male admiration, abstracted from its consequences; and more subtly, for the heady stimulant of intimacy with men in their fresh and vigorous youth. By her thirties she had learned the art of eternal spring, and had become a connoisseur in the dangerous excitement of passion controlled at the breaking point, a mistress of every emotion, and an adept in the difficult task of sublimating love into friendship. The students lived out their brief college life and went on; she endured, and tradition with her, an enchantress in illusion and a specialist in the heart. Twenty, even thirty years might be her tether; when suddenly on a midnight, a shock of reality, or perhaps only boredom, ended it all; she was old -- but still charming and infinitely wise. To smoke a cigarette with her when cigarettes were still taboo for women, and drink her coffee and liqueur, was a lesson in civilization.

Via.

Tobacco Then and Now

2009-12-16T18:37:00.002-05:00

Via Division of Labour, this from the New York Times in 1909:

BERLIN - The Committee on Appropriations unanimously voiced today to report to the Reichstag a resolution appropriating $500,000 for the relief of tobacco workers who have been thrown out of work as a consequence of the reduced consumption of cigars and cigarettes under the operation of the new tax measures.

Would you transport this woman across state lines for immoral purposes?

2009-12-11T11:07:00.018-05:00

I do love the Mann Act. It's such a beautiful and ridiculous expression of moral panic -- like a Time cover-story, but, instead of an article, a federal law. It jumped the shark a little bit in 1986 when "immoral purposes" was redefined as "any sexual activity for which any person can [already] be charged with a criminal offense [which defeats the purpose a bit, doesn't it?]," but back when consensual sex could be considered white slavery, the Mann Act was really something else.

However, despite my love for the law that nailed him, I'm sad that Jack Johnson is not going to get a posthumous pardon recommendation from the Justice Department.

In Justice's defense, Johnson didn't just sleep with Belle Schreiber; he gave her several thousand dollars to start her own brothel in Chicago after she got fired by her Pittsburgh madam for robbing a customer. The feds may have been wrong to target Johnson, but they kinda had him cold.

Pass Huey!

2009-12-11T09:33:00.002-05:00

Peter Richardson's history of Ramparts magazine, A Bomb in Every Issue, taught me something I didn't know:

Like Pat Brown before him, Huey Newton was taking classes at San Francisco Law School; one of his instructors was Edwin Meese III, who would later serve as President Reagan's attorney general.

An unrelated anecdote from the same book, in retrospect, seems prescient:

While serving as assistant managing editor, Sol Stern ejected staff writer Jann Wenner from the building for smoking pot.

My third and final note from A Bomb in Every Issue is the most important, because this Ramparts-coined term is witty, timeless, and forgotten: The love-geometry that inevitably develops in any left-wing club is properly referred to as "armed snuggle."

Hoving Happened

2009-12-10T13:48:00.009-05:00

Let's all pray for the repose of the soul of Thomas Hoving, the former head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art who died today. I knew of him mostly as John Lindsay's first Parks Commissioner (from 1965-66), a job he evidently thought was a little like being a grand-scale cruise director. His "Hoving Happenings" included a Gay Nineties-themed party, a "Central Park a Go-Go" dance, meteor-watching, and kite-flying -- all of which was quite a change from the reign of his predecessor Robert Moses, who "enforced rules against wearing bathing suits or even halter tops and shorts shorter than midthigh."

Yes, he was one of those upper-crust types who romanticized sixties counterculture, and yes, he worked for John Lindsay, which is if anything more lame. Still, I can't help but like a man who responded to a subordinate's critical memo by writing "Crap!" at the top. He shot from the hip, but he was always ready to admit when one of his off-the-cuff statements was, upon reflection, "monumentally stupid" — sin boldly, repent boldly! As Michael Gross puts it in his obituary, "Even his enemies can agree that Hoving was never, ever boring." God rest his soul.

UPDATE: The NYT obituary is up.

Thanatos tastes good like a cigarette should!

2009-12-10T10:26:00.003-05:00

Hat-tip Dara:

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Cigarette pack warnings that remind smokers of the fatal consequences of their habit may actually make them smoke more as a way to cope with the inevitability of death, according to researchers.

More.

Hoover wasn't Mr. Intervention, he was Mr. Best Practices. There's a difference.

2009-12-10T09:51:00.003-05:00

Megan McArdle says we all need to chill out about administrative costs. She may well be right, but, since she raised the subject, I'll throw out my favorite statistics from Eugene Lyons' Herbert Hoover: A Biography:

The overhead for relief administration under Hoover rarely exceeded 3 percent. After his departure it came to consume 25 and in some places as high as 50 percent of the relief funds. Despite the launching of many new agencies, there were ten thousand fewer federal employees at the end of Hoover's term than at its start.

"Rarely exceeded 3 percent"—that's remarkable. (One trick he used was hiring independently wealthy do-gooders at $1-a-year salaries.) Please remember these statistics the next time a libertarian disavows Hoover, which tops my personal list of most annoying counterintuitive claims of the decade.

The Battle for Williamsburg: Are the Hipsters Losing?

2009-12-09T12:15:00.011-05:00

One of my hopes for this blog is that it will become a clearinghouse for all Hasid-on-hipster violence coming out of Williamsburg, eventually building to a coherent narrative about the undesirability of having hipster neighbors.

The best skirmish in this ongoing war came over the summer when a Greenpoint hipster alleged police brutality against Joel Witriol, New York's first Hasidic cop, who gave her a ticket for carrying her pet pug on the L train. Pets are only allowed on the subway if they are caged -- the rule isn't enforced with much zeal, but, in this case, the dog was making a special nuisance of itself by vomiting into the woman's totebag. A scuffle ensued when Witriol allegedly said "If you're going to act like a woman, I'm going to treat you like a woman" as he restrained and cuffed the girl for protesting the ticket, prompting a third-wave tirade from our pixie-coiffed protagonist. I remember reading at the time some linguist's speculation that Witriol was trying to say something more like, "If you act like a lady, I'll treat you like a lady," which ups the story's culture-clash quotient.

Alas, that incident did not provoke a highly choreographed street-rumble as I had hoped, but here's hoping this week's culture clash will. The city removed a fourteen-block bike lane in Williamsburg on Dec. 1, and three days later a band of hipsters repainted it at 3am with paint rollers and homemade stencils, only to be caught in the act by Hasidic vigilantes who turned them in to the police. Tell me that story doesn't have the makings!

Gothamist has the details, and, as is always the case with them, the jewels are in the comments:

"I'm pretty fed up with laws that support people's religious beliefs, whether it's abortion, gay marriage or bike lanes. Religion has got to get out of public policy."

"i'm confused about who we hate more in this story? hipsters, cops or religious fanatics? religious hipsters? religious cops? someone should track down a hipster cop, then i would know where to direct my hatred."

Maintaining a neighborhood's character is a serious thing, of course, and I hope the two sides can come to some understanding, but damn if I'm not glad to see a New York culture clash in which neither side is all that villainous.

I seen my misattributions and I corrected 'em.

2009-12-09T09:46:00.003-05:00

Dan Lynch writes of the recent Bruno conviction: "The real problem isn't Joe Bruno, who — in the immortal words of Boss Tweed — merely 'seen my opportunities and took 'em.'"

For the record, it was George Washington Plunkitt, he of Tammany Hall, who said that.

While we're at it, let me record for the public internets that it was Martin Lomasney, "the Mahatma" of Boston's Ward 8, who said, "Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink."

Bookblogging: Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 by Stephen Puleo

2009-12-07T17:40:00.004-05:00

Molasses is fundamentally surreal. You've got the expression "It's like pushing molasses up a sandy hill." You've got the Molasses Hat Gang described in Luc Sante's Low Life, which had the signature gambit of "walking into grocery stores, asking the keeper to fill a derby hat with molasses 'on a bet,' clapping the hat over the proprietor's head, and emptying the till." It won't freeze, it will ferment, and you still can't remember what molasses tastes like even though you've had this whole paragraph to think about it.

And then there's the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, in which twenty-one people were drowned by a fifteen-foot-high, 35 mph wave of molasses unleashed when a two million gallon vat busted. Much of that molasses was destined for use in munitions for World War I, so there was some speculation that bomb-throwing Italian anarchists were behind the busted tank -- they'd done that sort of thing before -- but it turned out to be a problem of engineering, not terrorism. Still, it's a funny story that isn't actually very funny. Unless you think about it. If the phrase "Great Molasses Flood" rings your bell, go for Puleo's odd little book.

Bookbag: Lane Kirkland: Champion of American Labor by Arch Puddington

2009-12-04T13:42:00.005-05:00

The scene: a meeting between Murray Weidenbaum, budget advisor to Reagan, and several labor leaders, including Frank Fitzsimmons of the Teamsters:

Then Weidenbaum twitted the trade unionists by asking if there were items in the budget that they would propose for spending reductions. Kirkland and Fraser had nothing special to offer, but the usually inarticulate Fitzsimmons had an immediate animated response. As Fraser recalled it, Fitzsimmons, his voice rising with genuine anger, blurted out, "I'll tell you one reduction you can make. You can get rid of the witness protection program. You're wasting millions of taxpayer dollars to support these stool pigeons and their families." Fraser later asked Kirkland what he was doing during the Teamster's diatribe. "I was looking at the floor," Kirkland said. To which Fraser replied, "I was looking at the ceiling."

Origen and God-as-Samuel-L.-Jackson

2009-12-03T15:14:00.010-05:00

Thomas J. Bridges of theology blog An und für sich has turned up some interesting bits of Origen in a post called "The Word of God Was Messing With Us":

“This was to conceal the doctrine relating to the before-mentioned subjects in words forming a narrative that contained a record dealing with the visible creation” (PA [Peri Archon] IV.2.8).

“Consequently the Word of God has arranged for certain stumbling blocks, as it were, and hindrances and impossibilities to be inserted into the midst of the law and the history, in order that we may not be completely drawn away by the sheer attractiveness of the language…or else by never moving away from the letter to fail to learn anything of the more divine element” (PA IV.2.9).

“…whenever the Word found that things which had happened in history could be harmonised with these mystical events he used them, concealing from the multitude their deeper meaning…[T]he scripture wove into the story something which did not happen, occasionally something which could not happen, and occasionally something which might have happened but in fact did not” (PA IV.2.9).

These immediately reminded me of a post by Adam Kotsko from earlier this year that I saved it to my hard-drive, so much did I admire it. An excerpt, all bolding mine:

He didn’t submit to the cross because that would really fuck with our preconceptions. Right? God isn’t just willfully trying to screw with us because he would be mad if our expectations were too accurate, right? Seriously. It’s perverse, the way so many Christians fetishize Christ’s suffering as though it’s the key to everything. [...]

Look at things from the perspective of the oppressed. To them, is “the power of Emperors, legistlators, or Priests” a self-evidently desirable and good thing? Sure, it’s better to be powerless than not if you’re in the current system, but once you see an alternative to that entire structure in Christ, those power positions don’t seem very appealling. No one is going to follow Christ if he’s saying, “Just suffer for its own sake, because I’m God and I’m here to mess with your shit!” No — they follow Christ because of the joyfulness of his life, because of the unexpected abundance he brings along with him.

If the question is why God sometimes misleads us and lies to us, the answer very well might be "Because I'm God and I'm here to mess with your shit!" That's why Bridges's Origen excerpts are interesting—they make the case that sometimes God is being provocative for provocation's sake.

But, then again, I might be twisting the text to fit my favorite idea, that "Is this statement true or false?" is one of the least helpful questions a person can ask, certainly less helpful than whether the statement is interesting, or whether it's motivated by love.

Apostasy Done Right: The case of David Bazan

2009-12-02T20:22:00.006-05:00

I was pretty rough on apostates earlier, but I wouldn't want to give the impression that I think everyone who switches ideological sides needs to grow a beard, get false papers, and move to another country under an assumed identity. I put a lot of stock in team loyalty, but I also think it's possible to desert your former team with everyone's honor intact. And I think David Bazan has done it.

Bazan made it pretty big in the Christian rock world performing as the one-man band Pedro the Lion — he was the only Christian act I ever came across in my secular adolescence. The Pitchfork crowd liked him okay; the evangelical kids adored him. And he recently announced that he probably doesn't believe in God anymore. Moreover, he has serious concerns about where the evangelical movement has ended up: "The last 30 years of it have been hijacked; the boomer evangelicals, they were seduced in the most embarrassing and scandalous way into a social, political, and economical posture that is the antithesis of Jesus's teaching."

He admits that his latest album, Curse Your Branches, is about his loss of faith — a break-up album to God. The opening images from "Lost My Shape" aren't as obvious as some on the other tracks, but I think they're his most interesting lyrics on the subject:

You used to feel like a smoker
Shivering in the cold
Waiting outside the bar
Till the opener's over,

But now you feel like a drinker
Twenty days off the sauce
Down at the liquor store
Trying to call your sponsor.

And yet, as this magazine piece lovingly describes, nobody has disavowed anybody. He still performs at the Cornerstone festival, he still admits to caring about what happens to American evangelicalism, and his fans keep praying for him. The piece describes one touching scene from a recent show:

After Bazan plays a cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," reinstating the sacrilegious verses left out of the best-known versions, someone shouts, "How's your soul?" Bazan looks up from tuning his guitar and says, "My soul? Oh, it's fine." This elicits an "Amen, brother!" from the back of the tent.

The author of the magazine article asked Bazan outright how he threads the needle of being a doubter among the faithful without offending his former flock-mates:

[When talking to fans] Bazan doesn't usually get into the subtle barometric fluctuations in his relationship with Jesus, but that still leaves room for plenty of postshow theological talk. "This process feels necessary and natural for these people," he says. "They're in a precarious situation—maybe I am too. To maintain their particular posture, they have to figure out: Do they need to get distance from me, or is it just safe enough to listen to? I empathize as people are trying to gauge, 'Is this guy an atheist? Because I heard he was.'"

It's a "precarious situation," like he says, but it matters that both sides are trying. It also matters that Bazan couldn't run away from evangelicalism even if he tried, something I wish more apostates realized. If you were ever really part of something, it shaped you. If you were ever drawn to something, then at some level you always will be.

A Kass-bashing amuse-bouche

2009-12-02T18:00:00.007-05:00

I'll weigh in on the newly reincarnated President's Council on Bioethics sometime soon, but, basically, I'm for it. The old PCBE fell into a pattern of just spinning its wheels after the big stem-cell victory, and the White House's new mission statement points in the right direction.

Since a lot of the blame for what bothered me about the old Council rests with Leon Kass, here's a paragraph of him sounding insufferable in a Wunderkammer interview:

I’ve done a lot of things wrong in my life but I haven’t done any of them because they were forbidden. I’ve made a mistake about what I thought was good, but I never did anything save for thinking that it was good. I don’t know where this comes from. I’ve never really had contempt for the uneducated or for people who make a living by the sweat of their brow. It always seemed to me that a kind of goodness could be found there. I’ve always been suspicious of people who would cynically deny that they too would like to be good. The real question, I suppose, is what’s the standing of the cultivation of the intellect in relation to that kind of native goodness, and can you in fact indulge in study and grow intellectually without losing your moral bearings. I have to say I’ve tried.

I hope that has prepared you for the Kass-bashing post to come.

Labor is like a tweed jacket, and environmentalism is like a feather boa

2009-12-02T11:03:00.008-05:00

This article by Ann Friedman has been getting some play, but I can't quite figure its key paragraph:

After all, "special interest" issues do not exist in separate silos. Labor rights are tied to gay rights are tied to women's rights are tied to immigrants' rights. If what binds us together as progressives is our vision for a more just society, it is our commitment to all of these issues that will define us. There is already some recognition of this. At the AFL-CIO convention this fall, several speakers referenced the rights of LGBT workers. NAACP Chair Julian Bond gave a keynote address at the National Equality March for gay rights. This doesn't mean everyone must be an advocate for every single progressive issue. Each of us has a different metric for separating the political negotiables from the nonnegotiables. But I do expect the liberal coalition to understand that these issues are interconnected.

Not to be a snark, but isn't that exactly wrong? How about this instead: "Labor rights conflict with immigrants' rights conflict with gay rights conflict with women's rights, but the point of a political party is that it's okay for that to happen." You're supposed to be able to put together a team without pausing to check everyone's ideology for bugs.

I'm not saying there's no coherence to the left, just that it's less like a single premise variegatedly unpacked and more like a well-assembled outfit — when you say that a certain shirt-and-tie combo "goes together," you don't necessarily mean that they have colors in common.

Ann Friedman has said something that's obviously false if you take a moment to think about it; nevertheless, I assume she wanted to accomplish something by saying it. But what?

Shapur never killed a shrew

2009-12-01T11:00:00.006-05:00

Normblog's Writer's Choice book this week is Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, a topic about which I know nothing. However, I know a very little something about sexual politics in pre-modern Iran, a casual familiarity I picked up during my Zoroastrian phase.

Purity rituals aside, the ladies did all right under the Sasanians. (And even the purity rituals were all right, as constricting as they were, since there ain't no party like a menstrual hut party, etc.) Consider this bit from the Herbedestan:

5.1) Which of the two shall go forth to pursue religious studies, the woman or the householder?

5.2) If both take care of the possessions [i.e. if they can take care of the property single-handed], either one may go forth.

5.3) If the lord of the house (takes care of) the possessions, let the woman go forth.

No link; this passage (including the brackets, which are not mine) comes from an old college course packet. Also, apologies for the hyper-obscure pun in the title.

Apostasy Pieces: Don't be that guy

2009-12-01T09:19:00.009-05:00

So Little Green Footballs has disavowed the right. The best take is Matt Frost's—"I'm saddened and concerned by the debased state of concern trolling"—but I have a submission for second-best take. (No shame in losing to Mr. Frost.)

Ten words: If you write an apostasy piece, you have no honor. Exhibit A, Marty Beckerman:

Every day I wake up with the same thought: "I used to be such a goddamned idiot."

I am a former Republican. And I wasn't merely the libertarian, live-and-let-live, fun-at-parties kind of conservative whose primary concern is balancing the budget; I was a spiteful, narrow-minded, fire-breathing paranoid lunatic who questioned the patriotism and morality of my liberal fellow citizens. Recognizing the error of my ways has done wonders for my mental health but left me with constant, unremitting remorse; I really want to go back in time and kick my own ass.

Apostasy pieces are never about delivering your former comrades from the grip of dreadful error. They're about showing off how much more enlightened you are, using your misspent youth as a prop for credibility. I've read apostate tell-alls that I thought were true, but I've never read one that made me think I'd like, or trust, the author if I met him.

Sometimes it's hard to tell what loyalty demands of you. Whether to turn your klepto brother into the police, whether to make a play for your best friend's girl after they break up—these are tough questions. But if your old ideological compatriots ever did you a favor, ever took you into their circles or into their confidence, ever gave you a damn cake on your birthday, then you owe it to them not to write the hit piece. You owe them. That's a no-brainer.

UPDATE: If you're visiting from the American Scene and want background on this loyalty fight, check out these two posts, All Politics is Tribal and Loyalty Reconsidered. Nerds can check out I Love Justice, But I Love My Mother More.

"I should avoid transporters and replicators even if by doing so I inconvenience myself."

2009-12-01T08:15:00.001-05:00

Or so says Will over at PomoCon.

Everything is about shame, including the Amazon Kindle

2009-11-30T22:50:00.005-05:00

Katherine Eastland has pointed out a very good article on the Amazon Kindle by Stephen Marche, which reminds me that I wrote a little something on the subject for The American Conservative last month when this blog was still on hiatus. Enjoy it now, if you like:

There is no shame in owning a Kindle. Literally. Ink-and-paper books can be embarrassing. No one wants to be caught red-handed with The Debutante Divorcée. To get away with reading Gadamer in public would require dressing up like a college professor. And no one, not even a college professor, has enough credibility to read Finnegan’s Wake in broad daylight.

For $259, readers can finally have a little privacy. Books are delivered wirelessly, eliminating clerks from the equation—the Kindle Store will not roll its eyes at you for buying a lowbrow bestseller. And Kindle’s unchanging exterior won’t betray your reading material to the rest of the coffee shop. No wonder Harlequin romances are big sellers.

Kindle is the same size as a book, pages are the same gray as paper, and, for the limited number of titles available in digital format, a Kindle book is cheaper than a paperback. These are welcome developments. But when the old-fashioned codex goes, venerable reading traditions will go with it. What will be lost if readers make the switch to e-books?

Read on—Storm Thorgerson gets an out-of-left-field name-check!

A poem called "Short People" by one Jennifer L. Knox

2009-11-30T22:02:00.002-05:00

When Emperor Hirohito told the Japanese people it was time to surrender, he never used the word surrender. Instead, he talked about how everyone had done their best, tried so hard, etc. His speech was broadcast over loudspeakers hung outside on electrical poles. People had never heard Hirohito’s voice before—they thought the Emperor was God. He spoke in the highest level of formality—using words so antiquated, ordinary people couldn’t understand a thing he was saying. So imagine: suddenly, one day, a disembodied voice we think is God’s starts talking to people in the streets in booming Shakespeare-speak. “What the heck’s God saying?” the people ask. A man wearing big glasses translates: “He’s saying we all did a really great job…” he pauses, furrows his brow, “but I think He wants us to give up.” This is what most of Randy Newman’s songs are about.

Via the Awl.

"Sad Panda is actually pretty sad."

2009-11-30T21:24:00.014-05:00

The New York street act known as Sad Panda—a guy in a panda suit who earns tips from tourists for standing around glumly on Wall Street—is actually a 62-year-old Chinese man with a hard-luck story. He quit his restaurant job to go to China in order to make his mother's funeral arrangements, found he was too old to get hired anywhere when he got back to New York, and so became Sad Panda. His wife works seven days a week as a private nurse to make ends meet.

Gothamist has video, and don't skip the comments: "Thank God there's a real sad person behind those ears, and not some ironic hipster."

One commenter posted pictures of Sad Panda's alter-ego Spongebob (same sexagenarian, different suit) getting knocked over by hoodlums, then helped up by good Samaritans who "heard quiet sobbing from within the costume."

(This post is to honor Bulgaria's annual Bear's Day.)

Tip O'Neill was such a girl

2009-11-29T15:24:00.004-05:00

I don't mean it, of course, but you just try resisting the thought as you read the last line of this snippet from James A. Farrell's biography:

. . . He had even taken fifty pounds off his corpulent frame by attending Weight Watchers classes at Catholic University. He was the only man in the class, and most of the women didn't know he was a congressman. "Good for Thomas!" they said, when he had registered the loss of a few more pounds.

[...]

"Thank you very much for your letter of February 12," O'Neill wrote to one colleague. "I went off the Weight Watcher diet between Thanksgiving and Christmas and gained 18 pounds in two months. I have gone back on the diet this week and am attending my first Weight Watchers meeting tonight. I still have kept off 27 out of the 55 pounds I originally lost, but still feel disgusted with myself."

The Golden Age of Right-Wing Novelty Songs (is Obviously Over)

2009-11-28T11:27:00.009-05:00

Of embarrassing right-wing rap videos there will be no end, and the latest one is simply awful. But this was not always so. To prove that there was a time when novelty songs could be conservative and non-terrible, here are five favorites.

1. "Tea Partay" [video]

Oh, the summer of 2006, when men were men and a "tea party" was something friendly! The WASP establishment was already dead, but no one told these guys. And everybody loves a shout out to the Main Line.

2. "Don't Mess with the Mayor" [video]

The Medflies pay tribute to Mayor Eastwood. "Now when I want to see a movie, something hard and fast, / I just go down to Carmel and watch Clint kick some ass."

3. "Let Them Eat Rock" [video]

Wikipedia's description of the Upper Crust gets to the heart of the matter: "The members adopt the personas of 18th century aristocratic fops and sing songs from that perspective. They use titles of nobility, wear powdered wigs and period costumes, and maintain a snobbish attitude while performing live and on their albums."

4. "Ukelele Blues" [video]

Martin Mull sings about his life experience. From the spoken intro: "I was brought up on the deltas of Lake Erie in Cleveland, so you obviously have a whole delta blues there, although it was, I'd have to say, a little more middle class than down in the South, where I understand a lot of blues came from." From the lyrics: Woke up this afternoon, saw both cars were gone / And I felt so low down deep inside / I threw my drink across the lawn.

5. "Magical Misery Tour" [video]

In picking something from National Lampoon, I could have gone with "The Middle-Class Liberal Well-Intentioned Blues," or that unmentionable Joan Baez parody at the end of Radio Dinner, or even "Papa was a Running Dog Lackey of the Bourgeoisie," which is a Motown version of the Communist Manifesto. But I love that "Magical Misery Tour" skewers John Lennon's narcissism using, mostly, direct quotes from his interviews.

No Mercy!

2009-11-27T20:00:00.006-05:00

Nick catches an embarrassing slip-up:

OVERLY TECHNICAL CORRECTION OF THE DAY: The Chicago Tribune, writing about the soundtrack for An Education, praised its new songs "in the Mercy Beat" style. Which is great, except I have no idea what "Mercy Beat" is. Merseybeat is the style of music named after the River Mersey, which flows through Liverpool, whence most of the first wave of British invasion bands came.

The offending piece is here.

Bookblogging: The Headless Republic

2009-11-27T19:38:00.006-05:00

Of all the blogs I've ever liked, not one has ever posted any poetry. But these are special circumstances. First of all, I read Jesse Goldhammer's The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought, and I liked it. Moreover, I want Mr. Goldhammer, when he Googles his name, to know that I liked it, since I see from the back flap that he is currently employed at "one of the world's leading scenario-planning consulting firms." I'm sure he enjoys his work, but consulting is miles away from writing your PhD thesis on sacrificial violence in modern French thought. He may miss it.

I wish I could register my satisfaction with this 180-page labor of love by picking a fight with it, since that's how I usually show my respect, but Goldhammer didn't say anything that bothered me. Nor did he summarize his thesis in a single pull-able paragraph that might benefit the public internets. He could have, maybe with a sentence like this: Violence achieves real revolutionary results exactly to the extent that it can plausibly claim to fit some traditional narrative or ritual of violence. (Or maybe he did, with Michael Walzer's line that a monarchy "can survive a thousand assassinations but not one execution," which means the same thing.)

Without either a complaint or a pull-quote to fill a post with, I can only share a poem written by Robespierre a few months before his execution, which is the one passage in The Headless Republic that I marked:

The sole torment of the just, at his last hour,
And the only one that will tear me apart,
It is to see, while dying, the pale and somber desire
To distill shame and infamy on my brow,
To die for the people and yet be abhorred for it.

I'd add a comment, but of course I don't need to tell Mr. Goldhammer about martyrdom. He's the one wasting a PhD on consulting.

A woman is a woman, but a good Speaker of the House is a smoker

2009-11-26T12:05:00.003-05:00

From John A. Farrell's Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century:

When Whip Thomas Foley's wife and chief of staff, Heather, asked O'Neill to put out his cigar at a leadership meeting, O'Neill leveled her. "You know, we only tolerate you in these meetings," he said.

Thanksgiving is the perfect time to reduce the minimum wage. Wait, why are you laughing?

2009-11-25T14:13:00.008-05:00

Sean, who ReadsTheNews, draws a holiday lesson from this Forbes article about programmers who give away their software for free because they're in it for sheer love of the pixels. Sean:

The result is an off-beat story about interesting people doing important work. I love stories that show there is no one right way to live your life. As we get ready for Thanksgiving it's important to give thanks for an economy that both produces and supports people's infinitely varied creative urges, even in this case when that support is non-traditional.

Which reminds me, somewhat tangentially, of this paragraph from Edward Banfield's "The Zoning of Enterprise." The essay explains why putting a state-of-the-art IBM factory in the middle of 1960s Bed-Stuy ended up doing very little to help the residents of that distressed area, the reason being that IBM didn't offer the kind of workplace they wanted. What kind did they want? Banfield explains:

The kind of firm that could succeed in a place like Bedford-Stuyvesant . . . is in almost all respects the opposite of IBM. Such a firm pays low wages (below the minimum when possible), offers no job security (like the workers it employs, it is here today and gone tomorrow), its rest rooms are dirty, its foremen are rough, it does not trouble itself about the health and safety of its workers (they can take their chances or get out), and it does not ask them to learn skills, take responsibility, or contribute to factory morale (its investment is a short-term one). This is the only kind of firm that can profitably hire the lower-class worker. It is also the only kind of firm that the typical unemployed male will work for. If he comes to work one day and not the next, nobody cares. If he comes late and half-drunk, nobody cares (although he may be told to stay away until he is sober). Firms of this sort were once common in the cities. They were driven out by laws and ordinances intended to improve working conditions (or, if one prefers, to eliminate "unfair" competition with firms operation more nearly in the IBM manner).

Let's leave aside for the moment whether Banfield's picture of the Bed-Stuy work ethic is fair or not. It doesn't matter that much anyway. His description may not have applied to everyone in that troubled neighborhood, but it certainly applied to the ones IBM was trying to help: the chronically unemployed, the ones whose joblessness created all the social problems that kept the Ford Foundation up at night.

So what's wrong with Banfield's picture of old-fashioned factory life? It had its dangers, but weren't they just the price of working for an employer who didn't care if his workers showed up drunk once in a while? We've all called in "sick" when we just didn't feel like going to work, and our employers (who, let's not kid ourselves, always knew) held it against us not so much because our labor that day would have made any vital difference but because that's not the kind of attitude they want to encourage in their employees. But what if our employers didn't give a damn, so long as we showed up nine times out of ten?

In other words, what is being able to drink on the job worth to you?

Everyone accepts that work isn't the most important thing in life, but a culture that took that platitude seriously would allow for the kind of firm Banfield describes. No one knows which trade-offs between long-term career advancement and short-term happiness are worth it; best to let everyone do the math for himself.

Or, as Graydon Carter said to Eric "Drinky Crow" Kaplan when Kaplan told him he could make more money as a typist than SPY was offering him as a staff writer: "Yes, and you can make $15 an hour digging graves." You better believe SPY writers drank on the clock.

Self-Promotion: "Average Janes: To save feminism, get rid of the lady-blogs"

2009-11-24T16:41:00.001-05:00

I've got an article about women's blogs like XX Factor and Broadsheet in the current issue of Doublethink:

It’s possible to write interestingly about body image, sperm donation, or your foibles as a mother. Caitlin Flanagan and Virginia Postrel have done it, and one of these days Sandra Tsing-Loh might. The chance to offer a fresh take on these topics is probably what an author has in mind when she joins a women’s blog in the first place. After all, men have written great prose about fast cars. They have turned boxing, which is pretty dumb, into a metaphor for the human condition. It’s a stretch to take baseball as seriously as some writers do, and yet Bart Giamatti pulled it off beautifully. Why shouldn’t we give the same credit to women’s more mindless pursuits—even fashion and celebrity gossip?

No reason at all, yet women’s blogs never seem to pull it off.

I've already gotten some push-back on the piece:

I sort of agree with you that they aren't so good, but I'm just dubious that there's much more to it beyond "general interest group-blogs are lame," period.

There's some truth to that.