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I have been a big fan of Gretchen Rubin ever since reading her slim biography of Winston Churchill and her somewhat less slim biography of John F. Kennedy. At present, I am about half way through her latest book: The Happiness Project, in which she chronicles a year spent thinking and trying ways to live a happier life. One thing which brought Rubin more happiness was starting a blog, also called the Happiness Project. Given that one of Rubin's principles of happiness could be paraphrased as the journey is more important than the destination (though the destination counts!), it is not surprising that one of the ways she found greater happiness was through her blog.

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Ronald Reagan had a great gift for reducing powerful ideas to shallow platitudes. So perhaps it is no surprise that, like some verbal reverse alchemist turning gold into lead, he could debase the Puritan fear of accountability to a stern deity to a bland notion of modern celebrity. When John Winthrop spoke of a City on a Hill, it was equal parts aspiration and admonition. Yes, he intended the Massachusetts Bay Colony to be an example of godliness to others, but he was also firmly persuaded that if the Colony abandoned the the path of righteousness, that God could make it an example of another sort after the fashion of, say, Sodom and Gomorrah. Reagan, in contrast, basically viewed the "City on a Hill" as a variation of the Magic Kingdom. Reagan's platitudes are just one of many ways in which modern America has watered down and caricatured the Puritans' high minded, if sometimes oppressive, ideals.

None of which is to do justice to the bitingly funny and deeply compassionate narrative of life in early America recounted by Sarah Vowell in the Wordy Shipmates. Vowell has a keen understanding both of how radically different the Puritan outlook was from our modern sensibilities and yet how deeply ingrained Puritan notions of their special place in the world are in modern America, with both comic and disastrous consequences. And in the end, some of the characters Vowell is most fond of are the rebels and misfits - Ann Hutchinson and Roger Williams -- who were forced out of the Massachusetts to Rhode Island, where they established a precedent for religious tolerance that has been a significant thread in American history ever since.

Contrary to today's secularists, Roger Williams was not concerned with limiting the state's power in matters of conscience because he was irreligious. Rather, he was, if anything, too religious, so scrupulous about his own salvation that at times he would refuse to pray even in the company of his wife and children less they tarnish the purity of his thoughts. Williams recognized, however, that the tyranny of the state in religious matters corrupts both religion and government. False doctrines can be imposed by force, but more importantly religion comes to serve secular ends.

No account of early New England would be complete without confronting the colonists' encounters with the Native Americans. Vowell acknowledges that the early epidemics that wiped out huge numbers of the native population were inevitable once initial contact was made between Indians and Europeans. However, she also observes that the subsequent genocide was not, and she vividly describes the incineration of virtually the entire Pequot tribe - men, women, and children - in one monstrous conflagration as a horrifying precedent for the centuries of massacres to come.

For any person willing to take a lighthearted look at early America, and its underside, the Wordy Shipmates is a volume not to be missed.

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Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The only universal experiences are pain and death. Those of
us who are lucky experience a minimum of the former and put off the
latter as long as possible. Sadly, our chances of escaping pain and
evading death are not solely determined by the caprices of an
indifferent nature but are also subject to the folly and more
significantly the cruelty of our own verminous little species. At the
outside, the Marquis de Sade was so convinced of the universality of
cruelty that he made it a principle that cruelty was not only the
shortest route to pleasure, power, fortune, and fame, but itself and
inherently sensual and gratifying exercise. Though in our sunnier
moments we may doubt the wisdom of the Good Marquis' observations, the
dismal history of the past century alone -- an unparalleled
century of mass murder, global conflict, and exquisite torture that
would make a medieval inquisitor blush -- is enough to bolster
the arguments of even the most faint-hearted pessimist. The recent
folly in Iraq, followed by the embrace of torture, secret prisons, and
extraordinary rendition, while it may be a peccadillo compared to the
monstrous crimes of the mid-century past, nevertheless should quiet
any Pollyanna who would exempt us from the general disease of human
cruelty. So is there a reason, as Monte Python so memorably put it,
to "always look on the bright side of life."

Zorba the Greek is an extraordinarily life-affirming story. It
also has an rich appreciation for human folly, cruelty, and
narrow-mindedness. Amidst frigid aristocrats, mad monks, brutish
villagers, and vain adventurers, Zorba stands like a rock of conjoined
masculine power and compassion. A former soldier, he has had his
fill of killing. (An inveterate serial romantic, he has certainly
not lost his interest in women.) As a mine boss, he is first to
share the danger of the miners; as a man, he is the first to stand
against the village on behalf of a persecuted woman. Along with his
backer, a mine owner tormented by a bookish vision of Eastern
mysticism, Zorba cheerfully runs one enterprise after another into the
ground with great gusto and joie de vivre, literally extracting every
ounce of pleasure from wine, women and song, for he is a master of the
Greek instrument the Santuri and is enthralled by dance. Even as the
shadow of the First World War looms, Zorba is undaunted. Better than
his bookish companion or the cloddish villagers, Zorba understands not
only pain and death but life, pleasure, and love. For this, he towers
above the Lilliputians who surround him.

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Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein


My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sex, Space, and Salvation

For ECD.

Jubal Harshaw is a grumpy old man who surrounds himself with beautiful women and an electric fence in an Edenic retreat in the Poconos in
Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. This is a good thing,
since he has an uncanny talent for irritating almost anybody, redeemed
by a keen wit and a nose for the sweet spot in a bargain. When there
is blood in the water, Harshaw smells it. The key clue, among quite a
few, that this balding contrarian is a stand in for author Heinlein
himself is that he largely makes his living by spontaneously dictating
short stories. Although his periodic pontifications on the nature and
history of almost anything gives the game away almost as easily.
Harshaw, among other roles, serves as the chorus expounding upon the
themes of sex, freedom, stories, and salvation that comprise the major
themes of the book. The book is technologically uninspired but
conceptually bold; the space motif liberates the author by allowing
him to imagine a radically asexual Apollonian immortal consciousness
from Mars with which to contrast short-lived, sex-crazed humanity.

The criticism of a classic, even in such a typically underrated genre
as science fiction, is not to be undertaken without trepidation. In
this case, Heinlein's magnum opus wears rather better than perhaps his
second best-known book, Starship Troopers, in which hyperactive
soldiers in futuristic body armor combat giant "bugs" for mastery of
the universe after taking control of the earth. Much science fiction,
and Heinlein's work is no exception, is rather glandular, driven by
the kind of testosterone soaked combination of lust and aggression
most typical of young men in late adolescence. The question is
whether there is anything more.

For all his vaunted conservatism in other matters, Heinlein's Stranger
in a Strange land is an unqualified endorsement of free love, at
least, ahem, so long as it takes place between men and women, in fact,
the more women the better. Big busted, round hipped, conventionally
sexy women, mind you, although there is the occasional deviation, such
as the carnival woman who is tattooed with religious imagery from head
to toe. She becomes one of the central female figures in the book, a
kind of sideshow earth mother who heads up the cult of Mars.

And why not, after all, since the carnival is also one of the central
themes of the book? Not the Mardi Gras, but the fairground sideshow.
The book is clear that it regards all organized religion as variations
on the sideshow, scams run for suckers. The twist is that the book's
hero, Michael Valentine Smith, may be expropriating religion's carny
methods to lead mankind to a higher truth. Smith, abandoned on Mars
as a baby and reared by Martians, possesses uncanny telekinetic
powers, bodily self control, and mental discipline beyond the wildest
aspirations of an Eastern mystic. In addition, the Martian culture he
comes from is one in which communitarianism is so advanced, indeed so
intrinsic, that notions of money and property do not exist and radical
self-sacrifice is as normal as self-preservation in our society. On
the parched surface of Mars, interdependence and intimacy is
symbolized through the sharing of water; offering a stranger a drink
makes him (or her) a lifelong blood-brother, or rather, water brother.

But the root of the power of the Man from Mars lies in a total
comprehension and mental assimilation of ideas and matter under the
rubric of "grokking". "Grok," which at least among the readers of
science fiction has passed into the common vocabulary, signifies
variously completely understanding an idea, experiencing a feeling,
assimilating an object. When the Man from Mars reads an
encyclopedia as part of his early education, he "groks" it by
simultaneously memorizing, understanding, and expounding upon it
within days. He "groks" objects so thoroughly that he can either move
or disintegrate them at will, thus making him an unusually difficult
target for those who wish him ill, to no avail since he is also able
to "grok" their intentions while they are well out of range.

In the end, it is no wonder that Stranger in a Strange Land became a
kind of "Hippie Bible" (See Wikipedia) when it came out in the
sixties: organized religion is revealed as a con game; free love is
the order of the day; property is a primitive evil; self-discipline
and self-sacrifice are the paramount values. For all its tang of
adolescent sexuality, Stranger in a Strange Land leaves one with the
sense that humans need to be more loving, giving, and tolerant toward
one another, because no one else is going to do it for us. In the
end, there are worse words to live by than Jubal Harshaw's favorite
toast, "To our noble selves, damned few of us left."

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It is a shibboleth of the Right that anyone more liberal than Rush Limbaugh is a "traitor" to his country; the egregious Ann Coulter even wrote an entire book about liberal "Treason." The shrill rhetoric and exaggerated alarums over the bogeymen of the Left betray a deep-seated unease about American democracy, however. Modern American democracy is committed above all to the orderly transfer of power through stable institutions designed to express the will of the People. Secondarily, American democracy is committed to the proposition, familiar to every student who ever dipped into the Federalist Papers, that no one locus of power is ever to be trusted completely. A government of limited powers can best be preserved by encouraging each of the three branches of government to jealously guard its prerogatives and ensure that no other branch overstepped its authority.

In contrast, modern American conservatism, as repeatedly expressed in the eras of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush the Younger, is infatuated with the cult of the man on the white horse, the strong central executive who will put all to rights because he is not bound by the petty considerations of law or morals that bind lesser mortals. (See Bombing of Cambodia, Watergate, Iran-Contra, War on Terror.) The Party panders in the pursuit of power to the racaille of the American South, who have historically been the pillar of slavery, segregation, States Rights, Jim Crow, and the Southern Strategy and who now form the electoral core of the rump of the party of Lincoln, (Teddy) Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Rockefeller, but the Republican Party does not fundamentally believe in fulfilling the will of the people. Rather, theirs is the paternalism of the plantation owner and the corporate executive, the "Quality" who will ensure that the teeming swarthy masses do not threaten white privilege in America, endowed upon the white man by grace of God, the gun, and the smallpox. The alternative would be to recognize equality and welcome participation in the political process by all Americans. (Anyone who doubts the overtly exclusionary tendency of the contemporary, conservative American South need only review the disproportionately anti-Obama vote of white southerners compared to the overall vote in their own states and to whites in other parts of the country, or anecdotally the interview footage of white Southerners in Kentucky before the election.)

The first two chapters of Benjamin Wittes' Law and the Long War starkly illustrate this modern tendency in the modern politics of the Republican Party. Proceeding under a theory of the "unitary executive," the Bush Administration sought to consolidate the emergency powers it had assumed immediately after the crisis of 9/11 on a permanent "wartime" basis. In his first chapter, "The Law of September 10," Wittes seeks to show not only that there was some continuity between the anti-terrorism efforts of the Clinton and Bush Administrations, but also that there were some theoretical precedents dating from World War II (or earlier) for the Bush Administration's insistence that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Al Qaeda and the Taliban and that it needed no authorization from Congress to regulate its treatment of those captured in the wake of 9/11. In particular, Wittes points out that Guantanamo had been used prior to 9/11 for the indefinite preventive detention of HIV positive illegal immigrants, and that the Clinton administration had pioneered on a limited scale the practice of extraordinary rendition, or "outsourced torture," that later became a staple of the Bush Administration's "War on Terror." Wittes concedes that the Bush Administration was totally lacking in legal justification for its actions in only one area: its decision to disregard the jurisdiction of the FISA Court over the conduct of electronic surveillance.

Wittes explains the readiness of the Bush Administration to disregard legal and moral norms in pursuit of the so-called "War on Terror" precisely in terms of the Bush Administration's public insistence on casting the conflict almost entirely in wartime terms and its concomitant contempt for any argument that legal guidance or Congressional authority was relevant to prosecuting the conflict.

While Wittes' attempts to show legal continuity and at least theoretical justification for the Bush Administration's disregard of legal and moral norms in its prosecution of the so-called "War on Terror" seem a little strained, he is quite persuasive on the legislative and political dynamics that guided the Administration's actions. Wittes' formulation has almost the ring of a Greek tragedy. Persuaded in their hubris that any request for legislative authorization from the Congress would diminish the inherent power of the "unitary executive," the (Vice) President's men, particularly David Addington, strongly resisted any suggestion that they ask the Congress for legislation to regulate the custody of terror suspects and adjudication of their cases. Wittes identifies three important consequences of the Administration's arrogance. First, they failed to recognize that whatever small quantum of executive authority might be lost to the Congress, the authority of the executive is vastly magnified when bolstered by statute, as Justice Jackson long ago pointed out. Second, they failed to recognize that the supine Congress — Republican or Democrat — was ready to give them anything they requested. Third, they underestimated the willingness of the Supreme Court to step in and fill the vacuum left when the Administration bypassed the Congress, resulting in a series of highly embarrassing Supreme Court decisions that in fact undermined executive prerogative and enhanced the reach of the Court.

In Wittes' view, the normal dynamic of American democracy should be that the President proposes, the Congress legislates, the President executes, and the Courts, if necessary, adjudicate. The Bush Administration turned this dynamic on its head. The President, recognizing no limit on his authority, was brought up short by the Court, and then sought to control the damage by seeking legislation from the Congress to limit or overturn the Court's rulings. Such a course of action is not only woefully inefficient, but it drastically undermines the Administration's moral authority for any action it might take, particularly when the rebuke comes from a notoriously conservative Supreme Court. It is one thing to take action with the full endorsement of the nation's deliberative and legislative bodies; it is quite another to suffer public rebuke from the nation's highest court and then to be seen frantically manipulating a rubber-stamp Congress in order to proceed with a course of action that has been roundly condemned. Moreover, proceeding in such a manner is a course of action that, once the immediate fires had been extinguished, could only be undertaken by men with a fundamental contempt for representative democracy and a complete lack of concern for the damage they might do to our institutions and our freedom.

Just discovered Yale Law School's Avalon Project, a collection of major historical documents from ancient times through the twenty-first century. It looks as though it will repay a second, and third, look.

Public Affairs Blogger Thomas Nephew and Legal Affairs Blogger The Talking Dog are holding an extended online discussion of Benjamin Wittes' book Law and the Long War about the War on Terror and its deformation of United States law.

Corporate Irresponsibility: America's Newest Export by Lawrence E. Mitchell


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Corporate Irresponsibility was probably destined never to be a popular book from the day it was written in 2001. Not only did it run counter to American business orthodoxy, but it takes a self-consciously scholarly approach from the outset. Any book the first third of which is devoted to a Kantian analysis of the deontological justification of the corporate form is unlikely to garner a wide audience outside academia. This is a shame, because this book is a thoughtful exploration of deep rooted flaws in American corporate law and practice, flaws which are considerably more apparent now than when the book appeared. From the outset, Mitchell questions the fiction of corporate personhood, a creation of the Supreme Court in the late nineteenth century that endowed the corporation with the same legal rights as individual persons. Mitchell sees this as a tragic mistake. A corporation possessing all the legal rights of a person may incorrectly be thought to share the motivations, inhibitions, and interests of a natural person. In fact, however, the corporation, particularly in its American form, owes but one loyalty and possesses but one motivation, the maximization of short term profits and stock prices.

Mitchell questions the little examined assumption of American culture that short term profit and societal benefit are coterminous, formerly expressed in the notorious comment that what is good for General Motors is good for the country. (Not such a popular sentiment since the recent collapse of GM.) In fact, an exclusive focus on short term stock price not only blinds the corporation (and the people to run it) to such obvious externalities as pollution, but also even to the financial decisions that would be in the best interest of the corporation and its stockholders, much less employees, customers, and the public.

One example (mine, not Mitchell's) might be the Walt Disney Corporation's relentless pursuit of extension of the copyright term in order to protect its proprietary interest in Mickey Mouse. It has long been recognized, and is acknowledged in the United States Constitution, that copyright is an appropriate temporary measure to ensure that artists and writers are compensated for their work and encouraged to produce more of it. In general, however, works should pass into the public domain as soon as possible so that ideas will be widely disseminated and older works can inspire new ones. (Shakespeare might never have written a line if he had been subjected to a rigorous enforcement of today's copyright laws. The author of the ur-Hamlet would no doubt have sued!) An individual artist only needs to have an artificial monopoly on his creative work for the duration of his lifetime, or perhaps a little longer to provide for his children. This is consistent with the principle of limited copyright, and flesh and blood is likely to demand little more. Only the corporation, which exists in perpetuity, or until dissolution do us part, is likely to demand a perpetual copyright with no regard for the free flow of information or the general welfare, although it may cloak itself in the rights of the very artists it exploits through draconian distribution contracts. The corporation knows no conscience, only profit.

Under these circumstances, the incentives for corporate behavior (or misbehavior) make a real difference in light of the absence of the kind of restraint normally to be expected from individuals. Unfortunately, the corporation in its American form takes to extremes an emphasis on short term stock price and exclusive obligation to shareholders that exacerbates corporate asocial (or antisocial) tendencies. While there seems to be consensus that long-term planning is necessary for the long-term health of corporations, the insatiable demand of stockholders for short-term returns can clearly undermine the long-term health of the corporation. Obvious examples include such cost-cutting measures as slashing the research department and reductions-in-force of necessary personnel. On another level, the focus on short-term profit encourages America's takeover culture, in which companies that do not maximize their short-term stock price are susceptible to hostile takeover and leveraged buyouts that saddle them with massive debt. (The argument that performance is driven by takeover threats is, of course, tautological so long as performance is primarily measured in short-term returns.)

To address the distortions that focusing on short-term stock price imposes on corporate behavior, a central reform that Mitchell proposes is to reduce the influence of stockholders on corporate governance. Ideally, Mitchell argues, one could largely eliminate it by making corporate boards self-perpetuating. The Yale Corporation, which governs Yale University, is largely run this way (although the alumni representative is elected). Shareholders would naturally, retain the power to invest or disinvest in the corporation so as to protect their investment, although on the investor side of the equation, Mitchell also proposes a variety of incentives to curb day trading and other short-term trading that distort the market rather than improving market efficiency. Mitchell's reform of corporate law would ideally act to encourage longterm planning by corporate boards and long-term investing by stockholders. Recognizing that it is unlikely that stockholders would ever completely relinquish the power to elect the board, Mitchell offers as a compromise elections that would occur not annually, but only after the board had served a term of several years. At the same time, Mitchell proposes to extend the amount of time between reports, rather than issuing them quarterly, to encourage a longer view on the part of investors. (However, one might question whether modifying behavior by withholding information is an effective or desirable strategy.) Although the book is not long, Mitchell does deal with a host of other issues, including the disgusting tendency toward self-dealing that has lately so outraged the public, as managers award themselves massive bonuses even as their companies go under. Mitchell outlines the problem as inherent in the wide scope given board members under the "business judgment rule," under which conflicts of interest on the part of board members can be excused if they are approved by a majority of the "non-interested" board members. Given the reciprocity that characterizes corporate boards, allowing the Courts to abdicate their oversight responsibility in the name of the business judgment rule is a recipe for institutionalizing conflict of interest. Mitchell endorses stricter legal oversight of boards to regulate their conduct, but fundamentally is more concerned with how corporations behave within society than with oversight of the personal conduct of board members.

A short review does not do justice to this dense but penetrating analysis of the tectonic flaws of America's corporate structure, an analysis that has proved as prescient as it is generally unheeded. Timely today, it would have been more timely reading for America's policymakers when it came out.

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Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir by Christopher Buckley


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Christopher Buckley's bittersweet memoir of his final year with his stylish mother and famously conservative father lends a human scale to a couple that so often appeared larger than life. Personally, I was never particularly enamoured of William F. Buckley, Jr.'s politics or even his books, despite being piqued by God and Man at Yale and amused on occasion by the capers of fictional CIA agent Blackford Oakes. However, from the time I was a small boy who loved big words, I was flattered to be compared favorably to the legendarily eloquent Buckley, for whom it was perfectly natural to toss off a word like "postprandial" when one intended to take a stroll after a lunch. (Despite his legendary command of the English language, it was apparently his third language.) In addition, although no sailor myself, I have always had an outsized admiration for anyone who could captain or navigate a wind-borne vessel. Ironically, I have not read Buckley's celebrated sailing books, but I have admired his exploits on the water based on second-hand accounts. Finally, anyone who is able to make a good living through his pen earns a certain amount of admiration from me. As Samuel Johnson famously said, "No one but a blockhead would write except for money."

There are few more difficult ways to grow up than as the son of a famous father and a socialite mother. Winston Churchill is perhaps the most notable example, having admired from afar his imperious, syphilitic father and fashionable, flirtatious mother -- reportedly a consort of no less than than the King of England. Christopher Buckley, similar in kind if not degree, seasons his admiration for his famous parents with a clear-eyed and painful acknowledgment of their many shortcomings public and private. Patricia Buckley, once one of New York's most celebrated hostesses, apparently frequently found it impossible to distinguish between truth and fiction on topics as diverse as her reasons for not finishing her college education at Vassar to visits from the Royal Family in her youth. Christopher's Buckley's relationship with his mother was often stormy, but his complex blend of admiration and antagonism toward his father is the potent cocktail that really fuels this story and carries it to its poignant conclusion. Bill Buckley's Olympian detachment from quotidian concerns resulted in over 90 books, thousands of pages of articles, hundreds of television appearances, and friends and acquaintances among the most celebrated persons of the day. Coupled with Buckley's steadfast convictions, conservative views, and Catholic certitude, Buckley's sense of himself could be alternately entrancing and insufferable. And his personal recklessness in his boat and in his car whether his family was aboard or not bespeaks a level of self-absorption that contrasts sharply with moments of familial generosity. Ultimately, of course, laboring as an author in the shadow of your more famous father, subject to criticism alternately enthusiastic and capriciously cruel, is a cross no son should have to bear, even if it is assumed voluntarily.

Christopher Buckley, despite the traces of bitterness that lace this confection, writes with wit, grace, and self-awareness of his attempt to reconcile himself to the complex emotional inheritance bequeathed to him by his parents. In doing so, he seems ultimately to come to terms with the repeated betrayals inflicted on him by his prevaricating mother. The wounds left by a half century of fighting and making up with his father require a slower reconciliation, brought about in part by his father's slow physical decline and the constant devotion it evoked. To his credit, the senior Buckley, whose unfailing mental acumen carried him through the completion of biographies of Goldwater and Reagan even as he succumbed to kidney failure, diabetes, skin cancer, and general physical enfeeblement, was mostly good-humored and gracious toward his son as he approached his end. In the end, the younger Buckley's vocation as a humorist and the elder Buckley's personal civility and generosity shine through the tangled emotions of this real life soap opera featuring one of America's first families.

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Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice by Paul Butler


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
As a former student of Professor Paul Butler, I was not surprised to find his book refreshing in its candor, raw in its emotion, and revolutionary in its outlook. At bottom, Professor Butler's analysis is grounded in the radical notion that the government should respect people's right to be secure in their persons and property, a right formerly enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. Even more fundamentally, he argues that we should re-embrace freedom in this country in ways that range from not incarcerating nonviolent offenders to decriminalizing drugs. Our prisons, he points out, have made our lives more dangerous by serving to indoctrinate nonviolent offenders in the ways of violent crime. Not only are we squandering lives that might otherwise be productive, but we are also creating a contempt for law not seen since Prohibition and extending police power in a manner not consistent with a free society.

Ironically, Butler points out that prosecutorial bullying coupled with the indiscriminate use of paid informants ("snitches") has radically undermined the rule of law. Indiscriminate prosecution leads to a fatalistic attitude in some communities that come to regard prosecution more as an inevitable misfortune than an avoidable sanction. Paid informants not only undermine community trust and generate false information, but they also allow some of the worst offenders to carry on a life of crime in the knowledge that the police will protect and excuse their paid informers.

As the book's title suggests, Butler derives a series of principles for approaching the problems of criminal justice that are derived from hip hop culture. No disrespect, but I am about as familiar with hip hop as I am with Russian folk dancing, which is to say, not very. Yet given the immediacy of a genre like hip hop on today's streets and among today's youth, it is all the more necessary to read books like Butler's that serve as a bridge to new ideas. Butler's ideas about selective noncooperation with the police may raise an eyebrow in some, but mostly they constitute standard advice for anyone on the wrong end of an inquiry by law enforcement: do not consent to a search, ask for a lawyer, say nothing more until you have one. Even Butler's signature advocacy of jury nullification in cases of non-violent drug offenses is hardly a notion that would shock James Madison.

Later in the book, Butler raises questions about the possible uses of technology in providing alternatives to mass incarceration. However, he does not attempt to answer them, much less address the broad implications of placing intrusive monitoring devices in the hands of the bullying police and prosecutors he so eloquently decries elsewhere. Such a discussion deserves at least a book of its own, preferably one that examines the commoditization of information technology as a counterweight to Big Brother.

Butler concludes the book with a series of suggestions for citizen action with which anyone who believes we can shape our culture by improving our environment should find themselves in immediate sympathy. While in some ways a pastiche of personal memoir, social analysis, legal primer, and citizen handbook, this book is a compelling read and a call to action for anyone who has ever had a moment's concern about crime or racial justice in America.

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I have just read the first of Cory Doctorow's short stories in Overclocked, which are available for download under a Creative Commons license. It has the virtues, among others, of a) being short, b) illustrating an important point about a fundamental freedom, c) alluding to George Orwell, d) relying on the common programming concept of recursion, and e) availing itself of an innovative legal structure for marketing and distribution purposes. All in all, it's "Science Fiction" in the best senses of both terms.

A minor postscript to Outliers is that it is the first Amazon Kindle book I have read, although I read it not on a Kindle but on an iPhone. All in all, it is delightful to have a book always at hand. The book was quite readable, and really my only reservation is that charts did not always reproduce well on the iPhone. In addition to Amazon, I am heartened to see that high quality e-books continue to be published by ereader and others.

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

My review

Wild Man : The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg by Tom Wells

My review

Via Andrew Sullivan.

is how Daniel Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea describes the effect of Darwin's theory of natural selection in almost every area of modern intellectual inquiry. Dennett sees Darwin as providing a revolutionary explanation of how the complexity of life can exist without positing a cosmic intelligence directing its development. In a running comparison with Turing and Von Neumann's discoveries in the area of artificial intelligence, Dennett describes evolution as an "algorithmic" process that operates much the way computer programming does: simple instructions can produce complex results.

Dennett defines an algorithm as having the following characteristics:

(1) substrate neutrality: The procedure for long devision works equally well with pencil or pen, paper or parchment, neon lights or skywriting, using any symbol system you like. The power of the procedure is due to its logical structure, not the causal powers of the materials used in the instantiation just so long as those causal powers permit the prescribed steps to be followed exactly.

(2) underlying mindlessness: Although the overall design of the procedure may be brilliant, or yield brilliant results, each constituent step, as well as the transition between steps, is utterly simple. How simple? Simple enough for a dutiful idiot to perform — or for a straightforward mechanical device to perform. The standard textbook analogy notes that algorithms are recipes of sorts, designed to be followed by novice cooks. A recipe book written for great chefs might include the phrase "Poach the fish in a suitable wine until almost done," but an algorithm for the same process might begin, "Choose a white wine that says 'dry' on the label; take a corkscrew and open the bottle; pour an inch of wine in the bottom of a pan; turn the burner under the pan on high; . . . " — a tedious breakdown of the process into dead simple steps, requiring no wise decisions or delicate judgments or intuitions on the part of the recipe-reader.

(3) guaranteed results: Whatever an algorithm does, it always does it, if it is executed without misstep. An algorithm is a foolproof recipe.

The mindless process of natural selection, by which selective pressures winnow out species from amongst the rich diversity of random mutation, is just such an algorithm — or group of algoriths — Dennett argues. As such, given millions of years to operate, it is perfectly capable of explaining the complexity of modern life, the existence of humanity, and the development of consciousness.

Such an explanation based on randomness and mindless algorithms dissolves in its elegant simplicity many traditional explanations of humanity's place in the universe, engendering quite a bit of hostility, hence the moniker universal acid.

India Knight makes a compelling case in the Times on why Salman Rushdie deserves his knighthood and why a free society should not be afraid to award it to him.

When I heard about the outrage over the knighthood, I went looking for a copy of Midnight's Children. Both Midnight's Children and the Satanic Verses were sold out at Borders, so I picked up a copy of the Moor's Last Sigh. Besides being tantalized by the title, I figured that it was my modest contribution to the Rushdie defense fund.

On a completely unrelated note, who knew that Rushdie was married to Padma Lakshmi, the host of television's Top Chef?

. . . and every Christian and every Muslim, too. Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus is a primer on the New Testament that aims to introduce the layman to the fundamentals of textual criticism. In addition to laying bare a number of ways in which Christian scribes altered the Biblical text to justify the Church's growing antisemitism in the early centuries after Christ, the book also contains fascinating discussions of the differences among the Gospels — particularly Mark and Luke — and the political and theological agendas of different scribes that led them to copy and miscopy the Bible in particular ways. (One minor point is that the rolling cadences of the Authorized Version were based on a Greek text that was corrupt and partly concocted.)

Equally fascinating is Ehrman's description of the methodology and labor that have been employed by Biblical scholars in hopes of recovering the lost "originals" of the New Testament manuscripts.

Jews and Muslims should take no solace in the discomfiture of the adherents of the New Testament, however. Ehrman suggests that the Hebrew scriptures suffer from fewer variants only because fewer manuscripts have survived, and he speculates that textual criticism of the Koran would reveal the same 'fingerprints' of human composition as the New Testament.

I just finished two vastly entertaining books by the irrepressible Christopher Hitchens: Why Orwell Matters and god is not Great. Of the two, the first was more instructive and the second more entertaining.

Why Orwell Matters tackles the question of why Orwell has worn so well when so many of his contemporaries are unreadable. Hitchens unflinchingly addresses both Orwell's legendary moral clarity and his moral lapses — mainly with respect to women and gays. Acknowledging the limitations of Orwell's early fictional efforts, in contrast to his lifelong mastery of the essay, Hitchens also shows how Orwell found his voice by the time he wrote Animal Farm and, in the shadow of impending death, 1984. Hitchens, a former Marxist, has a thorough mastery of the factional politics of Orwell's time on both the Right and the Left, and clearly delineates how Orwell, having been a forceful supporter of the war against Germany, made his name exposing the less apparent but equally monstrous evil of Stalinism at a time when many of his contemporaries were seeking to palliate it. On a minor note, I enjoyed the mention of Orwell's composing Coming Up for Air in Morocco, and the wicked skewering of French criticism and Claude Simon that comes as a coda to the book.

god is not Great, though it has a profounder subject, is in some ways a shallower book. A classic vituperative essay, it seeks not merely to show that religion is false but that it is wicked. Hitchens cites religion's laughable creation myths (and consequent enmity to science), its celebration of blood sacrifice, its genital mutilation, and its sexual repression as being among the qualities that have a poisonous influence on moral and civic life. In covering so much ground in several hundred pages, however, the book necessarily has a more general focus than, say, Hitchens' extended essay on Orwell.

David Halberstam, 73, Dies in Car Crash - New York Times

The Dean of Modern Journalism and one of the Vietnam War's most intrepid reporters is dead at 73 after being hit broadside in a car accident in Menlo Park, California. A reporter to the end, Mr. Halberstam was conducting research for a book when he died. We mourn for Mr. Halberstam and for the books he will never write and note the bitter irony of a death on America's streets of one who endured so many perils abroad.

Kurt Vonnegut, Writer of Classics of the American Counterculture, Dies at 84 - New York Times

Kurt Vonnegut, one of the more decent literary and political figures of the last half century, died tonight. So it goes.

Dave Winer thinks Jimmy Carter might have a point.

Muslim Wakeup! excerpts Paul Barrett's new book American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion.

eatbees blog Jimmy Carter vs. Israel Eatbees has a generally favorable take on Jimmy Carter's new book on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Andrew Sullivan, commenting on Jeffrey Goldberg's review in the Washington Post, has a less favorable view. Goldberg seems to feel that Carter is excessively biased in favor of the Palestinians, but he does not address the continuing loss of life and property on the Palestinian side of the Wall, only the deaths of Israelis by Palestinian suicide bombers. My only conclusion is that I am looking forward to reading the book.

Robert Fagles - Report - New York Times

Robert Fagles follows his celebrated translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey with a new translation of the Aeneid, becoming in the process one of the few people to translate all three epics. Remarkably, Fagles, who earned his doctorate in English literature, taught himself Greek and Latin. The Times' review has an interesting discussion of the subtle distinctions that Fagles attempted to capture between the poem's "public" voice and the private voice expressiong Aeneas' personal anguish.

I have just finished Bob Woodward's State of Denial. I can't quote from it, because I have already lent my copy to a friend. However, I can say it is a very clear explanation of how the Iraq War, a bad decision in the first place, went from bad to worse. Most of the outline should be known to any reader of the newspaper by now, but the details are quite telling. Perhaps most revealing for me was Woodward's account of Jay Garner's telling Donald Rumsfeld the United States had made three tragic mistakes: disbanding the Iraqi army, purging the government of mid-level Ba'ath party members, and refusing to meet with a provisional government. Garner's analysis, however, does not begin to capture the fundamental wrongheadedness of the prosecution of the war portrayed by Woodward, from the futile search for the Weapons of Mass Destruction that never were to the willful deafness to any kind of bad news.

Books: State of Denial - washingtonpost.com

Bob Woodward faces questions on his new book, State of Denial, which I am finding engrossing, if depressing.

I am reading the final chapters of 1812:Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow. Reading about the last stages of Napoleon's retreat in subzero termperatures, I have never been so attached to my nose as when reading how the noses and toes of Napoleon's soldiers broke off in the cold. Soldiers who did not freeze were in many cases burned alive in overcrowded huts, starved to death, murdered for their supplies, or, in some cases, killed in combat or picked off by the Cossacks. By the end of the march, Napoleon's 650,000 man Grande Armee had essentially ceased to exist.

Muriel Spark, Novelist Who Wrote 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,' Dies at 88 - New York Times

Muriel Spark, known for her finely polished, darkly comic prose and for the unforgettable Miss Jean Brodie, one of the funniest and most sinister characters in modern fiction, died Friday at a hospital in Florence, Italy. She was 88.

MoorishGirl reports that Randa Jarrar's first novel has been accepted for publication. Some of her shorter work is on the web.

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A good friend of mine remarked over dinner the other night that you have read everything you need to read if you have read Moby Dick and the Brothers Karamazov. Guess that means that I am halfway there.

Publishers Marketplace: Susan Henderson

Susan Henderson quizzed fifty writers about their personal tastes, and published the responses. I especially liked Daniel Gregory on Bob Dylan.

The Complete List | TIME Magazine - ALL-TIME 100 Novels

Time Magazine picks the 100 best English language novels since 1923, when Time started publishing. (Ulysses was published in 1922, so it does not make the list.) The list may say more about Time than about the novels. (What is Judy Blume doing there?) However, it is quite entertaining to read the mini-reviews of the critics, and there are several intriguing titles previously unknown to me.

The Hand of Time

It has been 36 years since he published "Slaughterhouse-Five," his breakthrough novel about a time-and-space traveler named Billy Pilgrim, the planet Tralfamadore and the firebombing of Dresden by Allied forces during World War II.

Juvenile, simplistic . . . maybe, but you've still got to love Kurt Vonnegut.

Weekly book reviews and literary criticism from the Times Literary Supplement

British lawyer jokes, while attributing "lying, greed and trickiness"� to lawyers, do not portray them as a "pestilential affliction"�, worthy of mass drowning. British lawyers are seen as "funny in the way that golfers and salesmen are funny". Or Scotsmen, perhaps.

Powell's Books is 100% Blue.

What You Should Know About the Author of the NYT Bestseller, Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

We hear a fair amount about historical revisionism to justify national crimes in Japan and China. We hear less about the same thing here at home. Scary stuff.

Check out Poets.org, the site of the Academy of American Poets. I have only taken a quick glance, but the site includes biographies of poets, some poems, and a calendar of readings around the country.

Powells.com Interviews - John Irving

But we live in a prudish, stupid country. We live in a country virtually without a culture. And there isn't anything in the arts — film, painting, novels — that can be reviewed without the issue of good taste, so to speak, being brought to bear. Given the sexual explicitness of this novel, I can't imagine that half of the critics, the so-called good taste police, will resist calling it prurient or pornographic. But I don't think readers are going to balk at that.

It's not only a divided country because of Mr. Bush's war in Iraq; it's a divided country culturally, and this is an explicit and a dysfunctional novel. A lot of people will simply be turned away. Aren't we the only country in the world that could have been offended by that brief millisecond of Janet Jackson's breast? Aren't we the only country in the world that could engender a half-time show at a Super Bowl with an aging Beatle — my age! — because he couldn't possibly offend anyone? You're talking about a dog-stupid culture here.

Read the interview. To the end. You wouldn't want to miss the money quote on the Bush administration and gay marriage. In the meantime, Irving disses Joyce, compares himself to Ondaatje, and praises Vonnegut. (O.K., I admit I have not been able to put up with Vonnegut since I got out of high school.)

My one disappointment is that he did not discuss the World According to Garp, the first and best of his novels that I have read. I was on a college tour with a good friend, and we stopped at my friend's cousin's house in Exeter, where his cousin taught school. I threw myself on the couch and read Garp over the weekend, almost straight through. It had to be one of the most compelling books I had read.

ThinkExist.com Quotations

"No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools / no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class / no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life."

The Guardian has published multiple profiles of Shakespeare by modern playwrights and biographers. Gary Taylor nails him for me. Thanks to Andrew Sullivan.

Hunter S. Thompson Dies at 67 (washingtonpost.com)

Hunter S. Thompson, whose life and writing, vivid and quirky reflections of each other, made him one of the principal symbols of the American counterculture, shot and killed himself yesterday at his home near Aspen.

My roommate and I used to read HST in college as a diversion from our studies. Tonight I feel a little older and a little sadder than I did before. Not a surprising way for Thompson to bow out, but what a tragic waste.

It seems fortuitous that I finished Joyce's Ulysses on the day before Valentine's Day. Any comments are likely to be too little or too much, but I will make a couple of brief observations.

It is remarkable that Joyce wrote the book between 1914 and 1921, encompassing the years of the worst catastrophe in human history until that date, the First World War. Despite its obvious allusion to a great war (or post-war) poem, Ulysses has nothing to say about war. It has a great deal to say about life. Ulysses is a demanding novel, but it rewards patience.

The core of the story is the fractured relationships that knit the central characters together. Leopold Bloom's quasi estrangement from his unfaithful wife, dating tragically from the premature death of their little boy. Stephen Dedalus's estrangement from nearly everyone, owing in part to his hypertrophied intellect, and his rapprochement with Bloom. Gerty McDowell's flirtation with Bloom born in part of her isolation owing to her limp. If there is a single emotion that characterizes Ulysses for me, I would say that it is yearning.

Joyce has a preternatural power of observation and description, and no detail is beneath his notice, whether it is a dirty handkerchief, a visit to the restroom, or a forgotten key. One has the sense that Joyce has missed nothing, and that everything is related.

In fact, one could easily conclude that Joyce viewed himself as the Shakespeare of his day, an obvious inference from Joyce's recurrent references to and analyses of Shakespeare. Joyce undoubtedly had the encyclopedic vision, but he just as obviously lacked the common touch.

On minor note, I was struck by the fact that Morocco and the "Moorish" quality in Molly Bloom seem to represent the exotic sexuality of the East for Joyce (a very "orientalist" perspective). Ironically, Morocco also represents a country that is perilous for Jews (as perhaps Molly is for Poldy).

One thing that detracted from an otherwise magnificent novel for me was Joyce's periodic slurs toward African Americans and his adoption of minstrel show dialect at points in the novel.

Voltaire was deeply shocked, and his fundemental belief in nature's goodness was deeply shaken, by the earthquake in Lisbon in 1755, a disaster similar in kind, if not extent, to the devastation that has swept South Asia in the wake of the tsunami. In Candide, a parody of Leibniz's philosophy that we live in the best of all possible worlds and the work for which Voltaire is perhaps best remembered today, the Lisbon earthquake is one in a series of disasters that shake Candide's faith in the optimistic philosophy of his mentor, Dr. Pangloss:

Quand ils furent revenus un peu à eux, ils marchèrent vers Lisbonne; il leur restait quelque argent, avec lequel ils espéraient se sauver de la faim après avoir échappé à la tempête.

A peine ont-ils mis le pied dans la ville en pleurant la mort de leur bienfaiteur, qu'ils sentent la terre trembler sous leurs pas(1); la mer s'élève en bouillonnant dans le port, et brise les vaisseaux qui sont à l'ancre. Des tourbillons de flammes et de cendres couvrent les rues et les places publiques; les maisons s'écroulent, les toits sont renversés sur les fondements, et les fondements se dispersent; trente mille habitants de tout âge et de tout sexe sont écrasés sous des ruines, Le matelot disait en sifflant et en jurant: ‹‹ Il y aura quelque chose à gagner ici. — Quelle peut être la raison suffisante de ce phénomène? disait Pangloss. — Voici le dernier jour du monde!›› s'écriait Candide. Le matelot court incontinent au milieu des débris, affronte la mort pour trouver de l'argent, en trouve, s'en empare, s'enivre, et, ayant cuvé son vin, achète les faveurs de la première fille de bonne volonté qu'il rencontre sur les ruines des maisons détruites et au milieu des mourants et des morts. Pangloss le tirait cependant par la manche. ‹‹ Mon ami, lui disait-il, cela n'est pas bien, vous manquez à la raison universelle, vous prenez mal votre temps. — Tête et sang! répondit l'autre, je suis matelot et né à Batavia; j'ai marché quatre fois sur le crucifix dans quatre voyages au Japon; tu as bien trouvé ton homme avec ta raison universelle! ››

Voltaire, Candide, Ch. 5

When they had come to themselves a little, they made their way to Lisbon; they still had some money, with which they hoped to ease their hunger after having escaped the storm.

Hardly had they set foot in the town bewailing the death of their benefactor, when they felt the earth shake under their feet, the sea rose boiling about the port smashing the ships at anchor. Whirlwinds of flame and ash descended upon the streets and public places, roofs were overturned upon their foundations, and the foundations disintegrated, thirty thousand people of all age and sex were wiped out beneath the ruins, The sailor whistled and swore, "There is something to be gained here." — "What reason is sufficient to explain this phenomenon?" said Pangloss. "It's the last day of the world!" cried Candide. The sailor chased recklessly through the debris, risking death in order to find some money, found some, seized it, got drunk, bought the favors of the first willing young woman that he found among the ruined houses amidst the dying and the dead. Pangloss plucked him by the sleeve, "My friend," he said, "this is not good. You are not adhering to the universal law, you are not spending your time well." "By my head and blood!" replied the other, "I am a sailor born in Batavia, I trod on the crucifix four times in four voyages to Japan; you have really found your man with your universal law."

At such moments, one is simply thankful for not being swept up in the universal catastrophe.

Joyce thought he was the Shakespeare of the Irish. Obviously, however, he lacked the common touch.

After more than 15 years, I am reading Joyce's Ulysses for the second time. I have made it through a little more than the first hundred pages, and it is coming fairly easily so long as I do not try to force the pace. I have to pay close attention, or I lose track of the speaker or the subject. Joyce has a tremendous power of description; he can do with words what Picasso could do with a few lines on paper. The book is full of vivid sights, smells, and tastes. The associations between apparently disparate images and themes are dazzling. However, it is not an easy read.

My wife dislikes Joyce because she believes he is too self-aware of his own cleverness. More troubling is that she thinks I like him for the same reason.

MoorishGirl: Writing with Children

Writers who have children write, produce, the same way writers without children do. They find a spot, a closet, a room, and a writing tool, and they string words together on essentially borrowed time.

Randa Jarrar is matter of fact about finding time to write while raising children. Obviously, however, it is never as easy as it sounds, and it is a measure of her dedication, and accomplishment, that she can write about finishing a novel and baking cupcakes for her son's eighth birthday at the same time.

On my way back from West Virginia, a friend persuaded me that I need to read the Da Vinci Code. (I suppose that I had been a little put off by its runaway popularity, although I was amused by the gravity with which theologians had started issuing books refuting its "errors." Lighten up, people, it's a novel.) A friend has also just sent me a copy of Tahar Ben Jelloun's Le dernier ami.

This slightly unorthodox cookbook is based on the premise that to please the woman in your life, you should figure out what kind of women she is and cook her what she wants. Naturally, the book is ready to offer its assistance in figuring her out; hence the quiz above (which concludes that if I were a girl, I would be "Academic Girl"). The fact that the quiz is aimed at women, although the book is ostensibly aimed at men, suggests that there may be a lot of men receiving this book as a gift with a hint.

The New York Times > Books > 9/11 Report Is National Book Award Finalist

I was pleased to see that the 9/11 Report is a finalist for the National Book Award. So is Stephen Greenblatt's biography of Shakespeare, Will in the World, which I am reading now. A number of reviews are online.

The Elegant Variation: AS THOUGH WE NEEDED MORE REASONS TO HATE WAL-MART

The Elegant Variation points out that Wal Mart has stopped marketing one of the most notorious works of Anti-Semitism in the face of massive protests.

Caterina.net: Greenblatt Bio of Shakespeare

Caterina Fake on Greenblatt, Renaissance Studies, and arc welding.

The New York Times > Magazine > Shakespeare's Leap

Stephen Greenblatt gives us a glimpse into his new critical biography of Shakespeare. Greenblatt discusses how Shakespeare at once incited laughter at Shylock and made his audience self conscious about that laughter. In an England where all Jews had been expelled 300 years earlier and Jews were stock figures of malevolence, this was both an innovation and an accomplishment. As an antecedant to the play, Greenblatt cites the notorious execution of the Queen's physician, Ruy Lopez, born Jewish and condemned for treason. Greenblatt argues that in the fascination and repulsion that Shakespeare felt at the mob's reaction to Lopez's dying words, the Merchant of Venice was born.

The Associated Press

LONDON (AP) -- Archaeologists in northwestern England have found a burial site of six Viking men and women, complete with swords, spears, jewelry, fire-making materials and riding equipment, officials said Monday.

The sagas I read recently told quite a bit about Vikings serving in the Court's of various English kings (as well as raiding in England). It is therefore gratifying, but in a sense not surprising, to learn of the discovery of a Viking burial ground in England.

RPO -- Andrew Marvell : To his Coy Mistress

            21      But at my back I always hear
            22      Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
            23      And yonder all before us lie
            24      Deserts of vast eternity.

The Chal Roberts Story (washingtonpost.com)

Chal's article of Saturday illustrated a 93-year-old mind that works as well as anyone's, at any age. Those who know him, and the thousands of older Post readers who read his work so often, could only wish for many more decades of Chal. But the same friends and readers can only admire the qualities he brought to his decision, the same toughness and lack of sentimentality that have served us all so uniquely and so well.

For better or worse, toughness and lack of sentimentality are what we prize in our reporters. To be fair, the Post also lauds Roberts' "fairness, intelligence, and nuanced judgment."

72. Death be not proud, though some have called thee. John Donne. Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the 17th c.

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee	 
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,	 
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,	 
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.	 
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,	         5
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,	 
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,	 
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.	 
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,	 
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,	  10
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,	 
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;	 
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,	 
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

Roberts, however, faces his death with no hope of an afterlife, believing that the time he has in this life is all he will have.

Guest blogger Jim Hanas captures the wickedly funny tone of the late lamented Action in a biting comment on the mass production of writing:

[I]t still reminds me of a line from the doomed yet brilliant Fox series Action. At one point, a screenwriter who's been put through the wringer checks into the hospital for exhaustion. "Exhaustion?" scoffs soulless producer Peter Dragon. "You're just sitting there. Writing is the cure for exhaustion."

Jane Austen: A Love Story (washingtonpost.com) [BookSlut]

The Washington Post describes the latest Jane Austen fad. At least I was ahead of the curve. has always been my favorite.

I did not know until today that the Poetry Foundation is one of the world's largest literary foundations, thanks to a bequest of more than $100 million. I have been a subscriber to Poetry magazine for a bit more than a year now, and I received a letter from the president about the Foundation's plans with the latest issue.

The Washington Post gives a very favorable review to Dennis Ross's new book,

MoorishGirl: August 2004 Archives: Literature as Tourist Attraction

Edinburgh, riding the coattails of Burns, Scott, and Stevenson, (and J.K. Rowling) is bidding to be considered a "World City of Literature." Unfortunately, the city falls somewhat short of the sobriquet.

Beowulf is a poem that is doubly poignant. It is a poem of a lost people (Anglo-Saxons) in a lost language (Old English), about a doomed hero (Beowulf) of another lost people (the Geats). In that sense, the poem should appeal with double force to any Romantic.

Beowulf, son of Ecgtheow, spoke:
"Wise sir, do not grieve. It is always better
to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end.  Let whoever can
win glory before death.  When a warrior is gone,
that will be his best and only bulwark."

A. Dan. points out that the church in question below is actually far more recent than the Vikings, and in fact dates from about 1870, although many Icelandic churches are far older. The site nevertheless remains powerfully evocative.

þingvallakirkja, originally uploaded by A.Dan..

This is the baptismal font in þingvallakirkja, the church at þingvellir which is the place where the parliament was held in Iceland around the year 1000. The picture was taken on Good Friday 2004.

I was struck by this picture, which I found quite by accident, because it so neatly captures the moment when the Vikings embraced Christianity and acquired literacy — the moment when their most enduring monuments, the sagas, were recorded.

I have finished reading my selection of Icelandic sagas, and in keeping with my excursion into medieval literature and folklore, I have started Seamus Heaney's .

Heaney makes a fascinating point in the introduction. As an Irishman, he had always felt some resistance to translating an Anglo-Saxon poem into modern English; he did not feel that it sat well with his Celtic heritage. Heaney describes his epiphany regarding the interconnectedness of language as follows:

The place on the language map where the Usk and the uisce and the whiskey coincided was definitely a place where the spirit might find a loophole, an escape route from what John Montague has called "the partitioned intellect," away into some unpartitioned linguistic country, a region where one's language would not be a simple badge of ethnicity or a matter of cultural preference or official imposition, but an entry into further language. And I eventually came upon one of these loopholes in Beowulf itself.

For me the excitement of Heaney's translation is not just his acclaimed verse, but the continued interweaving of the strands of Irish myth and Norse folklore that I have been reading. One of the remarkable features of the Icelandic sagas is the amount of interaction that the Icelanders had with the British Isles, where they raided, traded, and pledged fealty to various English (and Irish) kings. Here, now, is an English poem recounting, in part, the adventures of the Geats, from England, and the Danes. The inspiration for this literary detour, and the point to which I mean ultimately to return, is the poetry of William Butler Yeats, so it fitting that I continue the journey under the guidance of another Irish poet.

The Correspondence of Queen Elizabeth I and King James VI An essay from my favorite professor at the University of Chicago.

"The Wrath of the Northmen": The Vikings and their Memory Another article by von Nolcken, with a fascinating contemporary Arab account of a Viking burial ceremony.

I recently read Egil's Saga, one of the best known and most extensive of , and one that sets the tone for many of the other sagas in the collection I am reading. I almost took a class with Christina von Nolcken when I was at the University of Chicago, so I was quite interested to find that she had an online essay on Egil: Egil Skallagrimsson and the Viking Ideal. A slightly oversimplified view of the sagas is that when they were not raiding Denmark or the British Isles, the Vikings were generally either engaged in killing each other or suing each other for wrongful death. One of the most interesting literary features of the sagas is that major characters such as Egil are not only explorers, plantation owners, and warriors, but also poets. Egil's speeches at significant moments are spoken in verse, and it is clear that the Vikings esteemed poetry very highly.

The New York Times > Books > Books of The Times | 'Resurrecting Empire': Those Who Ignore History Are Doomed to Hear About It

Rashid Khalidi is an angry man. He is angry at the Bush administration for ignoring experts on the history and politics of the Middle East. He is angry at the neoconservatives who filled the gap with their ignorance and "blind zealotry." He is angry at the decision to invade Iraq, and the grave consequences that resulted.

I met Rashid Khalidi briefly while I was a student at the University of Chicago. When I emerge from my current absorption in Norse sagas and Celtic mythology and turn my attention to the Arab World again, I intend to pick up a copy of his book.

More IMPAC News has recommendations for Moroccan books from five authors in three languages.

James Joyce's Amazing Chronicle

Guardian Unlimited Books | News | Overlong, overrated and unmoving: Roddy Doyle's verdict on James Joyce's Ulysses

As George Orwell would say, this begs the question of why so many people for so long have considered Joyce to be so good.

The New York Times > Books > Parlaying an Affinity for Austen Into an Unexpected Best Seller

Jane Austen has long been one of my favorite authors, so I suppose that I will need to take a look at this recent bestseller.

MoorishGirl

One critic even calls it [Joyce's Ulysses] a 'giant fart joke,' which made me feel somewhat better for having never managed to finish the tome. I've always been slow in 'getting' fart jokes.

Then again, fart jokes have a distinguished history in English literature. Chaucer's best known tale, the Miller's tale, is a fart joke, and Mark Twain wrote at least one example of the genre.

Andrew Sullivan on . A monk on the Isle of Wight gently — and repeatedly — leads author Tony Hendra back to spiritual understanding.

Reason: Ulysses Unbound: Why does a book so bad it "defecates on your bed" still have so many admirers?

An extended discussion of continuing interest in Joyce's Ulysses — highbrow, lowbrow, and everything in between. Thanks to MoorishGirl. (I've never been very good at fart jokes myself.)

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offers an incisive view of Winston Churchill's life, language, and career. The tone is generally broad minded and admiring, but Ms. Rubin takes care to note Churchill's faults, many of which were the obverse of his virtues. Perhaps no one with less singlemindedness of purpose could have saved Britain during World Ward II, but Churchill also often exhibited a striking unconcern for the feelings or desires of others. Rubin points out that Churchill rose to greatness because he was called upon to oppose Hitler; had the great opponent of his life been Gandhi we might remember him rather differently.

MoorishGirl: June 2004 Archives

As Dublin gears up for the 100th "Bloomsday" on June 16 (see below), MoorishGirl notes that Joyce's grandson Stephen is casting a pall over the festivities with his history of suing over copyright violations.

Top News Article | Reuters.com

DUBLIN (Reuters) - In the summer of 1924, Irish writer James Joyce sat alone in Paris, took out his notebook and gloomily wrote in it: "Today 16 of June 1924 twenty years after. Will anyone remember this date."

Two years had passed since Joyce had published his epic novel "Ulysses" and things were not going well.

Despite attracting a small core of devotees, the book had been denounced by the Irish as un-Christian filth, banned in Britain and burned by U.S. censors due to its "indecency."

To Joyce it seemed that June 16, 1904, the day on which the novel is set, was slipping unnoticed into history.

He need not have worried.

Next week, Dublin and the world will celebrate the 100th anniversary of what is now known universally as "Bloomsday" in honor of the central character of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom.

I owe my best friend an apology for ever suggesting that baking bread is not very interesting. Step by step, I am learning to make bread with . Tonight I baked my first sourdough loaf, after preparing the sourdough starter over the course of the past week. Beard's book is simple enough to be easy to follow but complete enough to address unexpected problems or questions. Among my ambitions are rye bread, whole wheat bread, and Moroccan loaves.

I finally got to see the video of tonight after my wife rented it for me. She thought the characters as portrayed in the movie were two-dimensional, except the young midshipman Lord Blakeney. Clearly, the real stars were the ships. I still look forward, perhaps more than ever, to reading which I haven't quite reached in Patrick O'Brian's series. From what I recall of , which admittedly I read years ago, the movie must owe most of its action to the Far Side of the World. Perhaps, though, I need to revisit Master and Commander?

washingtonpost.com: Author of Military History William Manchester Dies

William Manchester, 82, whose riveting books about men in military and political life made him one of the greatest popular historians of the 20th century, died June 1 at his home in Middletown, Conn.

His slow death, after two strokes, brought a poignant end to one of the most productive and scrupulous writers of best-selling tomes about outsized modern historical figures and contemporary culture.

Fueled by yogurt and brief naps in his office, the sinewy Mr. Manchester could withstand 50-hour writing sessions in his heyday. In recent years, he was grief-stricken by his inability to concentrate even on simple television programs, much less his final, three-volume project, a biography of Winston Churchill. He had to relinquish control of his career-capping work.

"Language for me came as easily as breathing for 50 years, and I can't do it anymore," he told the New York Times in 2001. "The feeling is indescribable."

The New York Times > Books > William Manchester, 82, Renowned Biographer, Dies

William Manchester, a biographer who used his novelist's eye to fashion meticulously researched portraits of power, among them Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Winston Churchill and, perhaps most famously, John F. Kennedy, died yesterday at his home in Middletown, Conn. He was 82.

I first started reading Joyce's 10 years ago when I was too sick to finish it. It seems like a momentous enterprise to take it up again. I'm thinking about reading Richard Ellman's biography of Joyce also, and then maybe rereading Ulysses.

Roger Straus Jr., 87; Founded Preeminent Publishing House (washingtonpost.com)

"Many people have accused me of being an elitist," Mr. Straus once said. "I'm guilty. I am an elitist. I like good books."

In a sense, it may be easy to become a book publisher when your mother is a Guggenheim. Still, based on the obituary in the Washington Post, it is apparent that Roger Straus stood for an older vision of publishing, in which profits were a way to publish great literature and not merely an end in themselves. His vision of publishing seems increasingly endangered as the world of publishing is absorbed into a handful of giant conglomerates, and almost Orwellian (vide 1984) universe where a few vast behemoths dominate the globe, each nominally at war with the other but all dedicated to the preservation of numbing control and uniformity. On a hopeful note, the Post points out that Farrar, Straus, and Giroux continues to publish books reputed to have literary merit despite having been acquired by large German publisher.

Yahoo! News - Tolkien House to Go on Sale in Britain

Tolkien is one of Oxford's best known 20th-century literary figures and was, along with "Narnia" creator C.S. Lewis, a member of the Inklings group, which met in the local Eagle and Child pub.

unbillable hours: On Woody Guthrie

Gene Santoro's is on my short list of books to read. The book chronicles the history of modern music, with Louis Armstrong and Woody Guthrie as central figures. TPB, Esq. at Unbillable Hours notes that another book on Woody Guthrie by Ed Cray is out.

Yahoo! News - New Study Shows Big Drop in Book Sales

A mid-twentieth century translation of a nineteenth century classic Russian novel is perhaps the last place one would expect to run across the N-word, much less in the following bizarre context:

A soldier on the march is as much shut in and borne along by his regiment as a sailor is by his ship. However far he goes, however strange, unknown and dangerous the regions to which he penetrates, all about him — just as the sailor sees the same decks, masts and rigging — he has always and everywhere the same comrades and ranks, the same sergeant-major Ivan Mitrich, the same regimental dog Nigger, and the same officers.

Tolstoy,
, tr. Rosemary Edmunds, p. 313. I found the name of the dog to be a minor but shocking revelation in its apparent casual equation of people of African descent with dogs, its casual use of a pejorative for people of African descent as the name of an Army unit's mascot. Although I have heard of such practices in this day and age, they do not generally go unremarked or unchallenged.

In one of the few other references to people of African descent in War and Peace, Natasha and Nikolai engage in an odd reminiscence about having encountered a possibly imaginary Black man at their house:

"And do you remember," Natasha asked with a pensive smile, how once, long, long ago, when we were quite little, Uncle called us into the study — that was in in the old house — and it was dark. We went in and all at once there stood . . . "
"A Negro," Nikolai finished for her with a smile of delight. "Of course I remember! To this day I don't know whether there really was a Negro, or if we only dreamt it, or were told about him."
'He had grey hair, remember, and white teeth, and he stood and stared at us . . . "
"Sonya, do you remember?" asked Nikolai.
"Yes, yes, I do remember something too," Sonya answered timidly.
"You know, I've often asked papa and mamma about that Negro," said Natasha, "and they declare there never was a Negro." But you see, you remember about it."
"Of course I do. I can see his teeth now."
"How strange it is! As though it were a dream! I like that."

It seems bizarre that Tolstoy would have introduced these two anomalous references into a 1400-page novel. One of his few other references to the African continent, in which he deplores Napoleon's barbaric slaughter of the Egyptians, does not suggest any particularly strong animus toward people of color. Id. p. 1402. Moreover, he does not comment at all on the American South, which at the time was the other great imperial slaveholding state, along with Russia. (Unlike the American South, however, the Russians did not, as far as I know, import people of color to be slaves.) Still, it is worth remembering that the elegant lives of Tolstoy's Princes and Counts are made possible by the subjugation of thousands of their fellow countryman. (Prince Andrei Bolkonsky is regarded as notably enlightened because he is one of the few aristocrats to liberate his serfs.) Although Tolstoy goes to some length to humanize serfs such as Platon Karayatev, throughout the novel one has the sense that Russian society is able to function only by assuming that the serfs are not fully human. And if the serfs in the novel seem to be not fully human, the Blacks seem even less so. Tolstoy's pair of anecdotes are symptomatic of how deeply ingrained in European (and American) society racial stereotypes have been for centuries, and suggest reasons why we have so much difficulty overcoming them even today.

^[1] Of course, it says volumes about Sonya's status as the poor relation to Nikolai and Natasha that she does not really remember this odd incident, and yet feels compelled to pretend that she does.

I have been looking forward for some time to Gene Santoro's new book,
, a sweeping account of modern music due out in May.

I released my first book — All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren — through Book Crossing today. I put a label and a bookmark in it and left in on a table at the Caribou Cafe on 17th and L, N.W. in Washington, D.C. When I came back at lunchtime, it was nowhere to be seen. Now I am just waiting to see whether whoever picked it up will make an entry on the Book Crossing site.

Flipping through PC Magazine, I came across Book Crossing. I was immediately enchanted, not only out of a love of literature but because it reminded me of watching one of my favorite childhood movies, Paddle to the Sea (based on the book by Holling C. Holling). On the bottom of a wood carving of an Indian in a model canoe, carefully ballasted, a boy carved, "Paddle to the Sea - Please put me back in the water." He then cast the canoe into the local river. The movie was about all the people who found the canoe on its journey to the sea, many of whom lovingly repainted and marked the canoe before they put it back into the water. I never knew how much was true, but I loved the movie. Book Crossing, which asks people to "release" books after marking them with an identifying label and number, has the same idea. People who find the book can log onto the Book Crossing web site and leave their comments about the book before giving the book to someone else or leaving it for a stranger to pick up.

"Pfuhl was one of those hopelessly, immutably conceited men, obstinately sure of themselves as only Germans are, because only Germans could base their self-confidence on an abstract idea — on science, that is, the supposed posession of absolute truth. A Frenchman's conceit springs from his belief that mentally and physically he is irresistably fascinating to both men and women. The Englishman's self-assurance comes from being a citizen of the best-organized kingdom in the world, and because as an Englishman he always knows what is the correct thing to do, and that everything he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly right. An Italian is conceited because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is conceited because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that it is possible to know anything completely. A conceited German is the worst of them all, the most stubborn and unattractive, because he imagines that he possesses the truth in science — a thing of his own invention but which for him is absolute truth." Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, tr. Rosemary Edmunds (Penguin, 1982), pp. 757-58.

Jeffrey Tayler holds forth on Bad Peace Corps Writing, and cites Tolstoy as one of his influences. I was particularly struck by Tayler's comment that it is never really possible to "go native," and that writers who claim to have done so invariably strike an inauthentic note. Such pretensions have the misfortune of blinding an author to what is most interesting about another culture — difference.

It has been a long time since I have read a novel with the emotional punch of War and Peace. Natasha Rostova is about to make the mistake of her young life by throwing herself away on the worthless (and married) Anatole Kuragin, and it is heartrending.

As I work my way through War and Peace, I am struck by the degree to which Russian novels were ignored during my formal education. I think I read one Russian Novel -- Turgenev's Father and Sons -- for a class during my entire time in high school, college, and graduate school. That novel I read for a history class, not a literature class. The omission of Russian literature from the curriculum seems even more surprising considering that at the time, the Soviet Union still posed the greatest single international political and military challenge to the United States.

A Samuel Johnson Trove Goes to Harvard's Library

"The collection holds the only known copy with untrimmed pages of the first edition of Dr. Johnson's 1755 dictionary, the first in the English language. It also contains corrected proofs of James Boswell's biography of Johnson as well as a number of letters exchanged between the two men. And it opens a window into Johnson's exclusive literary club of authors and scholars that included Boswell, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, and his friend the actor and producer David Garrick."

Although largely vanished from popular consciousness, the brilliant career of Samuel Johnson continues to fascination scholars of the eighteenth century -- a fascination reflected in Harvard's exultation over the acquisition of this collection. One thing the article does not explain, however, is why Lady Eccles chose Harvard. One would have thought, for instance, that an English university might have been more appropriate. Perhaps she wanted to help Harvard compensate for the fact that Yale has most of Boswell's papers.

My favorites!

It has taken me ten years to get around to reading Daniel Yergin's The Prize. I am sorry now that it took me so long, since it is easily one of the best histories of the twentieth century I have read. Among other gems, it offers:

• The story of how Standard Oil's kerosene empire was almost destroyed by Thomas Edison but saved by Henry Ford;
• How the son of a Jewish shell merchant in England became the head of one of the world's greatest business empires;
• How Winston Churchill defeated the German fleet in WW I by converting the British fleet from coal to oil;
• The decisive role of oil in WW II - from Rommel's tanks to Hitler's air force to the suicide voyage of the Japanese battleship Yamato;
• How the decline in American excess capacity led to a fundamental shift in the relations between the consuming and the producing countries; and much more.

Sir Wilfred Thesiger, Renowned Explorer and Writer, Dies at 93

"The heir to great 19th-century venturers like Livingstone, Stanley, Speke and Burton, Sir Wilfred was a restless, insatiable traveler throughout his life; he eventually won medals named for Livingstone, Burton and Lawrence of Arabia. He was also a man of private wealth, a misogynist and a romantic who hated the modern world and found nobility in the primitive life."

Ever since I read Arabian Sands, Thesiger has been an author I would have loved to meet. His influence continues to reverberate among travel writers. His writings form a backdrop to the journey of Jeffrey Tayler recounted in Glory in a Camel's Eye. Although Tayler seems more resigned to the encroachments of the modern age on nomadic life, he experiences nostalgia for the simplicity of Thesiger's life with his Bedouin companions.

Tribes with Flags is one the the most compelling and detailed books I have read about the modern Middle East. In classic travel book fashion, author Charles Glass knows everyone and goes everywhere -- or at least seems to. Along the way, he imparts snippets of history and untangles the complex web of family and religious allliances -- and betrayals -- that have turned modern Lebanon into a battleground. Glass's kidnapping by Hizbullah punctuates this memoir with an exciting conclusion, but the real reason to read the book is the journey beforehand.

Moorish Girl points to an article on the dearth of foreign literature translated into English.

Fool.com:

"My father used to tell me that I could trust someone who claimed they were not an expert but offered what knowledge they had, much more than I could trust someone that claimed to be an expert but never shared how they achieved their success."

The Crusades Through Arab Eyes is a riveting short history of the invasion of the Arab states by the crusaders from 1096 to 1291. The author's polished narrative is supplemented by liberal quotations from primary sources, and combines an eye for telling detail with a broad understanding of the conflicts among the Arabs, the Turks, the Byzantine Greeks, the Mongols, and the European invaders, for "Franj," who come across as crude barbarians notable only for their military prowess. The one clear hero of the book is Salah al-Din, or Saladin, who combines military genius with with unusual compassion toward the people and cities he conquers, in contrast to the usual pillaging. In addition, however, the book is a rich source of information about other historical themes as the rise and fall of the cult of the Assassins and the rise of the Mamluk rulers of Egypt.

A Seer's Blind Spots (washingtonpost.com)

"Somewhere along the way, however, amid all of the hero worship, the real man -- the idiosyncratic, squeaky-voiced, tubercular Englishman who dressed like a pauper, rolled his own cigarettes, chased after women and practiced a wobbly but sincere brand of socialism -- seems to have gotten lost, and perhaps the real writer has as well."

It is always disappointing to read that one's idol has feet of clay, and it is dismaying to read that George Orwell was unfaithful to his wife and had an anti-Semitic streak. (The article does not offer much detail in support of either charge, however.)

If Auden is right, Orwell is pardoned for writing well. Moreover, history has shown that the fundamental common sense and decency that radiate from his essays and books will continue to resonate long after his personal sins are forgot.

Neverthless, Glenn Frankel has done us -- and history -- a real service by reminding us that Orwell was, after all, a man, not a plaster saint.

"One of the reasons for the flowering of Andalus may have been the mixture of peoples, languages and cultures. At least five languages were used there. Two were colloquial, the distinctive Andalusian Arabic and the Romance dialect which was later to develop into Spanish; both of these were used in varying degrees by Muslims, Christians and Jews. There were also three written languages: classical Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew; Muslims used Arabic, Christians Latin, Jews both Arabic and Hebrew. Jews who wrote on philosophy or science used mainly Arabic, but poets used Hebrew in a new way. For almost the first time, poetry in Hebrew was used for other than liturgical purposes; under the patronage of wealthy and powerful Jews who played an important part in the life of courts and cities, poets adopted forms of Arabic poetry such as the qasida and muwashshah, and used them for secular as well as liturgical purposes." History of the Arab Peoples at 194.